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Jason Bahr/CNBC(WASHINGTON) -- Even though it is mathematically impossible for Sen. Ted Cruz to win the Republican presidential nomination outright, Carly Fiorina agreed to join him on his hypothetical ticket as his vice president.



As Donald Trumps chances of becoming the GOP nominee increase with each primary win, the benefits of her joining Cruz's ticket are not as obvious as they would be if he had a clear path to victory.



But it is still a path, senior fellow Philip Wallach of the Brookings Institution argues.



"Fiorina was teetering on the edge of political irrelevancy, and this puts her back in the spotlight, at least for a little while," Wallach told ABC News Thursday. "Theres also a non-trivial chance it could lead to her being vice president; betting markets still give Cruz an outside chance of getting the Republican nomination, and he and Fiorina would have a chance in the general election."



Aside from the difficult odds, Cruz is not an overwhelmingly popular person within his own party and so widely disliked that many of his congressional colleagues openly criticize him: Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., jokingly threatened to kill himself if Cruz were elected and former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio this week described Cruz as "Lucifer in the flesh.



As for the new Cruz-Fiorina team, the two are similar in some ways, Georgetown University associate professor Hans Noel said.



"Cruz is not popular with the Republican Party in Washington, but he is very popular with activists and may Republicans in the states. And Cruz is one of the partys best shots at not nominating Trump," Noel told ABC News of the 45-year-old Texas senator.



"Fiorina was often lumped in with [Ben] Carson and Trump as an outsider, but its better to say she is part of that more ideological wing of the party in the states. So they are playing similar strategies," he said.



And Cruzs popularity could change dramatically if the nomination swings his way, Wallach says.



"If Cruz wins the nomination, he becomes one of the partys most important figures, period," Wallach said. "I dont imagine all the bad relations between him and party leaders would instantly be healed, but he would definitely have a chance to reinvent himself as a unifying figure."



The Texas-born former Hewlett Packer CEO, 61, ran against Cruz earlier in this campaign before dropping out in February. She took a month out of the spotlight before rejoining the campaign trail by endorsing Cruz on March 9, which helped her re-enter the race full-time.



"Im not really sure what the downside is for Fiorina," Wallach said. "If this gambit fails, she may be done in Republican politics, but that may well have been true if she did nothing."

Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
If after-hours trading was anything to go by, the initial reaction of investors, following Intel's first quarter earnings release on April 19, was not good. After dropping about 3% following the announcement, Intel bounced back the next day as the Street eventually concluded it was content with the company beating analysts' expectations and improving revenues.

The problem Intel faces is all too familiar: a steadily declining PC market. CEO Brian Krzanich is attempting to compensate for this by transforming his company into a maker of chips for cloud-based data centers and the Internet of Things (IoT). That transformation was the impetus for Krzanich's announcement (also on April 19) that Intel will be paring its global work force by about 11%.

Thousands of lost jobs is certainly nothing to cheer about, but given Intel's new focus on non-PC markets, the cuts are a case of better late than never.

Image Source: Intel.

The harsh reality

In an effort to "accelerate its evolution from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices," Intel announced it will eliminate 12,000 positions. The plan is to complete the restructuring by mid-2017, though most of the affected employees will be contacted in the next two months.

According to Krzanich, Intel will shave an estimated $750 million in expenses in 2016 due to the job cuts, and achieve "annual run rate savings of $1.4 billion by mid-2017." The major overhaul of Intel's workforce will result in a one-time charge of $1.2 billion this quarter.

In a letter to employees, Krzanich acknowledged the difficult nature of the sweeping changes, but said a leaner Intel will "emerge as a more productive company with broader reach, and sharper execution." And it couldn't come at a better time: Expenses are rising, and as a recently released internal memo states, Intel is suffering from a lack of efficiencies and customer focus.

How bad is it? Intel carries the unenviable title of the worst performing tech stock in the Dow for 2016 so far, due to its 8% plus share price decline year-to-date. By contrast, rival Qualcomm's stock, thanks to its dominant position in mobile, is up more than 5% this year. And that's despite rumors circulating that Qualcomm could lose its LTE chip deal with Apple to, of all rivals, Intel.

What took so long?

Krzanich initiated Intel's transition into new markets, including cloud data centers and IoT, almost immediately following his appointment as CEO in May, 2013. The plan was a sound one, in that the inevitability of declining PC sales was clear for all to see, and new data from Gartner confirms it's getting worse, not better.

Worldwide, PC shipments dropped to 64.8 million in Q1 2016, the lowest number of units shipped since 2007. In addition to the decline in Intel's PC business, expenses are increasingly putting pressure on operating income, margins, and ultimately, earnings per share. Last quarter, overhead jumped 11% compared to the year-ago period. Rising to $5.5 billion and consequently squeezing margins to 59.3% -- 1.2 percentage points below 2015.

Thanks to a favorable tax rate, Intel was able to eke out EPS of $0.42 compared to $0.41 a year-ago, despite increasing revenue 7% to $13.7 billion on a GAAP basis (including one-time items). The estimated $750 million reduction in expenses this year, and the subsequent $1.4 billion by mid-2017, from the workforce reduction will be welcome savings as Intel continues its transition.

There's also the small matter of execution. Two weeks ago, an internal memo was obtained by The Oregonian written by the recently appointed president, Murthy Renduchintala -- hired away from Qualcomm -- detailing his concerns about his IoT teams. He sites a "lack of product/customer focus in execution that is creating schedule and competitiveness gaps in our products." The message was directed to Intel's senior managers, including Krzanich. A week later, Intel shared its restructuring plans.

Intel is in need of a jump-start to get back into investors' good graces -- growing IoT and improved data center sales haven't been enough. The sad truth for all those employees is that the job cuts are a necessary evil in order for Intel to complete its much-needed transition to cloud and IoT dominance.

A secret billion-dollar stock opportunity

The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat: There's a small company that's powering their brand-new gadgets and the coming revolution in technology. And we think its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early in-the-know investors! To be one of them, just click here.

The article Intel Corp.'s Pending Job Cuts Are Harsh, but Necessary originally appeared on Fool.com.

Copyright  1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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There are times when being mistaken for an actor is flattering, and then there's this story.

A New Yorker is currently living out the strangest week of his life after he was allegedly assaulted over the weekend for looking like "Transformers" actor Shia LaBeouf. After the story hit the news, the actor reached out to the injured man and apologized via voicemail.

Mario Licato, 26, spoke with Gothamist.com and told the news site that he was sucker-punched on Saturday when exiting a subway station.

The Brooklyn-based art director said he never saw his attacker, but according to an NYPD report the man yelled, "This is because you look like f-----g Shia LeBouf (sic)" before taking off on foot.

A photo posted by Mario Licato (@mariolicato) on Apr 24, 2016 at 7:28pm PDT

"I literally just saw a fist for a split second," Licato told the New York Daily News.

A couple who helped Licato at the scene confirmed the line about LaBeouf, reported Gothamist.

Licato was alerted to a voicemail from LaBeouf on Wednesday when the actor commented on an Instagram photo taken by Licato. The message read, "Left you a message on your work phone. Feel better G."

A photo posted by Mario Licato (@mariolicato) on Apr 27, 2016 at 6:12am PDT

Licato told Cosmpolitan.com that he listened to the voicemail and that the "Even Stevens" actor apologized for the assault in the voicemail and said, "I'm so sorry. But I get it. It's happened to me before."

LaBeouf then left his private phone number and urged Licato to call him back, saying: "I wish I was in New York. I'd come bring you soup," and, "We could chat. Let's giggle over this. Maybe there's a silver lining in all this."

Licato was knocked unconscious from the assault and fell down four steps before hitting the ground. He received a black eye and a cut above his brow, which is still healing. Licato's attacker was described as a "6-foot to 6-foot-3 white frat boy," according to the New York Daily News.

Licato described the experience as "really weird," and told the fashion website that with his black eye, he's been recognized on the street as "that guy."
Associated Press

Captain America: Civil War: For a decade, the summer-movie season has begun with a Marvel Comics adaptation. This year, Steve Rogers alter ego is in the spotlight, although the entire Avengers crew is on hand in this good guys vs. good guys battle that develops when world governments decide they wants some accountability from the costumed heroes. Surprisingly, the Captain is for freedom, while Tony (Iron Man) Stark is on the governments side. Unlike Batman v Superman, this one is getting great early reviews.

Louder Than Bombs: A war photographer (Isabelle Huppert) survived combat zones only to be killed in a car crash at home. Her husband (Gabriel Byrne) and sons (Jesse Eisenberg, Devin Druid) are struggling to deal with their loss as an exhibit of her photos is set to open. This marks the English-language debut of Norwegian director Joachim Trier.
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CAPE TRIBULATION, Australia  The bright-green ant wiggled and twisted between my fingers.

I cocked an eyebrow at our guide, Juan Walker, who had just snatched one of the ants from the dozens swarming on the bush in front of us, put it in his mouth, and crunched down.

He nodded his encouragement, so I chomped on it, releasing a surprisingly tasty tangy lime flavor.

That was only one of the tips Walker showed us during a day spent exploring how aboriginal tribes have thrived for centuries in the jungles facing the Coral Sea between Cairns and Cooktown.

More Information Getting there No direct flights go from the United States to Cairns. After flying into Sydney, you can take about a two-hour flight to Cairns, then a 2.5 hour drive (on the left side of the road) north to Cape Tribulation via the Captain Cook Highway. After crossing the Daintree River on a ferry, the road eventually turns to a mix of dirt and asphalt as you pass through the villages on the coast. See More Collapse

The ants, he said, helped protect aborigines from colds. Continuing to duck through the jungle, he pointed out pepper vine, the leaf of which can be used as an antiseptic, and wait-a-while palms, with leaves lined with hairs that protect whatever is carried in them  natures bubble wrap, he called it.

The way we see things is, the land is the basis for all life, and we just live among it. If you lose the land, then you lose everything, Walker, a member of the Kuku Yulanji tribe, said.

The indigenous tribes in Queensland have been trying to find a balance between maintaining their traditions and benefiting from travelers, as tourists discover the pristine beaches and warm waters on the remote northern coasts.

To explore this land after a week in busy Sydney, we flew to Cairns, then drove north past Mossman Gorge until we crossed the Daintree River. North of the river has traditionally been the home of the Kuku Yulanji, while south of the river is home of the Djabugay people.

The east coast of Australia was described by experts as something like a barometer  the further north into remote areas you go, the more likely it is that the indigenous people will be sticking to their traditional ways of life.

These tribes are in the middle, both geographically and culturally.

"They are walking in balance between the old and new," said Bruce Prideaux, a professor of tourism at Charles Darwin University in Cairns. Many tribes, particularly in southern Australia, have lost their languages and identity.

Tribes in Cape York and the Northern Territories are still living a traditional way of life, he added.

The trouble is, the place is exploding and growing, so were trying to keep our culture alive with the explosion of people to the region, Walker said. With the influx of people to the area, there are less areas we can access to do our tradition, and with that we lose more and more.

He said the tribe is also working to show its history with pride to tourists.

Now its a good chance for us to start businesses where we can access these places and show people our culture in a nice friendly manner, and they get respect for what we do, he said.

The biggest example of tribal success in the region is at Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Center, near Mossman Gorge. The cultural center highlights the history and traditions of the Djabugay people, which also sometimes use the name Tjapukai to describe their people.

Prideaux said Mossman Gorge - the biggest tourist attraction in the region  has helped the Djabugay tribe members maintain their identity. "It's sort of a success story," he said. "Mossman is probably the best example of what you can do." The tribe offers tours of the gorge and puts on exhibitions at the center.

Walking into the evening exhibition, were among the first to have our faces painted in traditional patterns. After a brief history from the tribal leader in traditional costume, we settle down to watch some native dances, culminating in an explosive fire ceremony.

The exhibition is educational and fun, but felt a little forced - as if Native Americans were trotted out to dance for our amusement. However, the proceeds from the show, which included an excellent meal, go to benefit the tribes welfare.

North of Mossman Gorge, Cape Tribulation is one of the tourist-supported villages hugging the land between the dirt road and the narrow beaches lining the coast. Most of the tourists stop at Mossman, but some  many backpacking college students  follow the road north to Cooktown.

The cape and the town were given their name by British explorer James Cook, whose ship ran aground near the cape as he explored the coastline.

We spent four days at the Cape Tribulation Beach House, enjoying one of the small but comfortable cabins fewer than 50 steps from the beach. With no cell service, and wifi in only the dining area, it was by far the most peaceful part of our three weeks in Australia.

The soft beach sand was the perfect perch for watching the sun rise, or for walking into the ocean to see rays and reef sharks darting by your feet and through the cypress trees lining the waters edge.

Standing knee-deep and seeing the fish swim by, it was easy to imagine taking aim with a spear and trying to kill your dinner, while other members of the tribe gathered figs and palms from the nearby jungle.

Walker said traditional ways are most often seen during big celebrations, such as weddings.

We practice as often as we can, and we get out in the bush all the time, but we have to pay taxes, have to work, he said. Were assimilated, but were holding on to our traditions.
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A North Texas man has been charged with capital murder in the death of his estranged wife originally thought to be a suicide, according to news reports.

RELATED: Crime is down in Texas, but some cities are seeing a spike in violent crime and murder: report

Fort Worth police arrested Rodolfo Montes Arellano, 31, on Tuesday in the death of 28-year-old Elizabeth Pule Arellano.

The woman's body was recovered from Lake Worth on April 16 after fishermen told police that they had seen a person falling from a bridge, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.

More for you NWS predicts isolated strong, severe storms possibly on Monday

Fire department rescue workers found the woman's body with a rope tied around her neck attached to a piece of concrete, Fort Worth homicide Sgt. Joe Loughman told the newspaper.

"We believe this was an attempt to conceal the body," Loughman told the newspaper.

RELATED: North Texas police looking for man in SWAT tactical gear in killing of fitness trainer at church

According to her obituary, Elizabeth Arellano had "strong faith in God and was always one to lend a hand. She had worked as a medical assistant for the past several years.

"Elizabeth was the glue that held her family together," according to the obituary. "She will forever be remembered for her natural beauty and bright smile."

A GoFundMe page to help her family pay funeral expenses has raised $11,755 as of Thursday morning.

RELATED: Report: Former Texas funeral home employee transported cocaine, marijuana with hearse

Rodolfo Arellano is currently being held in Mansfield City Jail on a $500,000 bond, according to online jail records.

jfechter@mySA.com

Twitter: @JFreports
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Mexican police found a tiger in the backyard of a man investigators believed died in a drug-related shooting, according to a news report.

RELATED: Someone tried to steal the tiger from Conroe animal shelter, police say

The El Paso Times reported that Chihuahua state police found the 18-month-old female tiger in the backyard of a home believed to be owned by Ivan Irandi Solis Moran, a 36-year-old man found fatally shot in the driver's seat of an SUV near the town of Saucillo.

Along with the tiger, investigators found two marijuana packages, pipes used to smoke crystal methamphetamine, a bulletproof vest, tactical clothing and two stolen all-terrain vehicles at the house in Pedro Meoqui, roughly 190 miles southwest of Big Bend National Park in Texas.

The cat has since been turned over to federal authorities in Mexico, the El Paso Times reported.

RELATED: Leaked photos purportedly show gun-toting female assassins for Mexican drug cartels

Scroll through the slideshow to see the exotic animals owned by alleged drug criminals in Mexico.
After Ted Cruz won the Texas GOP primary in March, he was effusive, declaring the moment a turning point in this election.

God bless the Lone Star State, our junior senator said. Tonight this campaign enters a new phase.

But when Cruz was stone-cold shut out of the delegate count in New York, Donald Trumps home state, he was dismissive.

Donald Trump won his home state, Cruz said with sarcasm. Truly a remarkable achievement.

Well, which is it, Ted? It cant be one way for you but another for The Donald.

Hes been branded Lyin Ted on the campaign trail, but a better fit might just be Double Standard Ted because he consistently holds the other GOP candidates to a standard that he never sets for himself.

When other candidates have been mathematically eliminated, Cruz has called on them to drop out. Hes changed his tune now that the math doesnt add up for him.

If youre here today, or at home watching on TV thinking about supporting Marco Rubio or John Kasich, I say to you, they are good men but they do not have a path for winning, Cruz said in March. Its mathematically impossible for them to win, so I say, Come and join us, we welcome you with open arms.

And then there was this:

I think any candidate, if you dont have a clear path to winning, it doesnt make sense to stay in the race, he said.

And also this from late March:

John Kasich has no path to win it. We are competing to win. Were not competing to stop Trump.

But now that Cruz has been mathematically eliminated from the race, hes off to Indiana with a Veep pick. The plan? To stop Trump. Right. The goal is to keep Trump from hitting that magical delegate marker, 1,237, and then head to a contested convention where Cruz has been locking up delegates for a second-ballot vote.

We are headed to a contested convention, Cruz recently said. At this point, nobody is getting to 1,237. Donald is going to talk all the time about other folks not getting to 1,237; hes not getting there, either. None of us are getting to 1,237.

But wait a minute  wasnt Cruz against such a scenario? Thats what he said in March.

A brokered convention is the pipe dream of the Washington establishment, he said. In my view, a brokered convention aint going to happen.

And then for good measure, he added, If you want to beat Donald, (the) way to do it is come together behind this campaign.

He also said if a brokered convention happened, we would have a manifest revolt on our hands all across this country.

Apparently, what Cruz really meant was a brokered convention would be a disaster  unless he emerged as the nominee. Then, it would be OK. He now seems to see a big difference between a brokered convention and a contested convention, even though its just semantics.

If youre fighting between the candidates who have earned the votes of the people, and its the delegates at the convention whove been elected to do that, thats the way the system works, he said.

Oh, right. The voters.

Cruz has made a big deal out of the fact that Trump has only won a plurality of GOP voters (though in contests Tuesday, he won clear majorities in five states). The majority of Republican voters, he has said, havent chosen The Donald. Maybe so. But even fewer have chosen The Cruz. He trails Trump by more than 3 million votes.

If this really is about the will of the voters, then shouldnt that matter? Apparently not.

Then again, Cruzs rhetoric never really has applied to Cruz. He lives off dissing the Washington establishment, even though he has impeccable establishment credentials: Princeton, Harvard Law, clerking on the U.S. Supreme Court, serving as Texas solicitor general, a spouse who works at Goldman Sachs. His greatest accomplishment in government is shutting it down, which is no accomplishment at all.

It must be painfully frustrating to be so close to something so coveted  the Republican nomination  and yet so far away. Mean what you say, and say what you mean. If Cruz held himself to the standard and metrics he has set for the other GOP candidates, hed come home to Texas.

jbrodesky@express-news.net
In 1974, when Communities Organized for Public Service burst onto the scene in San Antonio, religious leaders throughout the state took notice. Finally, a strategy for putting ones faith into action that produced results.

Not only did COPS teach ordinary citizens to act on their interests through their institutions, creating a powerful vehicle fueled by peoples stories, pains and aspirations, COPS would be the big bang that helped create the universe of the modern Industrial Areas Foundation, or IAF.

On Saturday, leaders will convene from across the state to celebrate the network of Texas IAF organizations that COPS inspired. They are Metro Alliance in San Antonio; Austin Interfaith; Dallas Area Interfaith; Border Interfaith and El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization; Valley Interfaith in the Rio Grande Valley; the Metropolitan Organization/Gulf Coast Leadership Council in Houston; ACT/AMOS in Fort Worth, Arlington and Mansfield; the Border Organization in Del Rio; and the West Texas Organizing Strategy in Lubbock.

We plan to honor the lives and legacies of the Texas IAFs founders and launch a political strategy to keep ordinary peoples voices relevant.

Texas IAF organizations are at the forefront of keeping politics from falling entirely into the hands of professionals and elites. This month, immigrant mothers living in blighted apartments of Dallas began rewriting their citys housing code to ensure dignified shelter for their children. Last week, interfaith clergy and elementary school parents in a once-marginalized colonia in the Rio Grande Valley broke ground for a new library  the creation of which required turning out 1,000 new voters.

Two weeks prior, a Lubbock bishop pointed out that when congressional representatives attack the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, they put at risk families that need greater protections from payday and auto title lenders.

All over Texas, local affiliates are continuing the work COPS/Metro started by teaching ordinary people how to act in extraordinary ways.

The organizations have big shoes to fill. In the 1980s, the Texas IAF was credited with doing the pragmatic politics necessary for passage of House Bill 72, comprehensive legislation that included school finance reform.

That same decade, when it became clear that local governments of the Rio Grande Valley alone could not fund basic water and wastewater infrastructure for colonias, the Texas IAF built the political power necessary to get $2 billion in state and federal funds invested along the Texas-Mexico border over two decades.

In 2007, when health care for children was under threat, the Texas IAF publicly confronted the lieutenant governor to push a bill out of committee and expand health care access to 127,000 kids.

Locally, organizations of the Texas IAF built the political will to establish award-winning labor market intermediaries such as Project Quest. Amid the Great Recession, the Texas IAF convinced the Legislature to invest $5 million to $10 million in workforce development projects.

The work of rebuilding community institutions is more important than ever. Redistricting has resulted in an increasingly polarized political climate in which competitive legislative races are few and far between.

Families have self-sorted not just by race and class but by worldview  making conversations between diverse neighbors more difficult. Parents are also working longer hours, leaving less time for their children and neighbors. The Texas IAF will redouble efforts to teach leaders and institutions to form public relationships, have conversations across dividing lines and fight for a common agenda.

The challenge before us is great and the race long. But the Texas IAF has a four-year plan to reshape the politics of Texas to build a better future for our children and grandchildren. This could be the second big bang.

Minerva Camarena-Skeith is a leader of St. Davids Episcopal Church in Austin. The Rev. John Ogletree is pastor of First Metropolitan Church in Houston. The Rev. Davis B. Price is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Lubbock.
Mansions in The Dominion may seem like hot commodities, but a look at the affluent communitys real estate shows some homes spending more time on the market than average.

Weve found 10 Dominion homes that just cant seem to sell  all these estates were listed between eight months and nearly two years ago.
It was well past midnight that I was driving home with my wife Kim and son Malachi after having spent the evening of the election doing analysis on CBC television and watching as the first Progressive Conservative government in 16 years was elected. Somewhere on that early morning drive as we talked about both the provincial results and the results in the Steinbach Constituency the only word that we could say was Wow!

In particular, the overwhelming support that we received in the Steinbach constituency really was impossible to put into words. Every election it just feels that the support cannot get any greater and we were speechless that it did again. The support that we as a family have received from residents of the Steinbach constituency extends far beyond an election or votes. Almost daily we are approached by residents who give us an encouraging word or who tell us that they are praying for us. Its impossible to express what a difference that makes to us.

There are far too many people to thank for the success of the election to put in this article. There are literally thousands of people who have supported the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party, either with their votes, their ideas or their donations since 1999. I am thankful for that support and glad that they have been rewarded with a government that they trust will make Manitoba better.

I also thought on election night about two of my predecessors who were not with us to celebrate winning government. Albert Driedger served as the MLA for the Steinbach Constituency during the 1990s and Jim Penner was the MLA from 1999-2003. Both of them helped to provide a foundation for the win that happened on election night and I am grateful to them both.

During the election I had the opportunity to speak with thousands of Manitobans. The overwhelming message that I heard from them was that they wanted change. They were concerned about the finances of the province and about the possibility of even higher taxes. They understood that the problems that the province is facing wont be solved overnight, just like they were not created overnight, but they wanted things to start moving in the right direction.

As a member of the new government I will continue to work hard for constituents to ensure that the priorities they have expressed are brought to the Legislature. I am optimistic about the future of Manitoba but also realistic that it will take work and determination, as a team, to achieve the changes that we want to see for our children and grandchildren. I look forward to doing that work together with you.

On behalf of my wife Kim and son Malachi, thank you so much for your incredible support and consistent encouragement.
Posted on 04/28/2016, 9:00 am, by mySteinbach

The Honourable Rona Ambrose, Leader of the Official Opposition in the House of Commons, along with Provencher Member of Parliament Ted Falk, toured WS Steel, a local manufacturer located in Steinbach Manitoba.

Along with a tour of the facility, Ms. Ambrose was able to get a firsthand look at the new CX-6 SMART Seeder being manufactured at WS Steel for CleanSeed Capital Group Ltd.

The SMART Seeder offers unrivaled levels of precision for modern no-till seeding and has already won many agricultural industry awards.

Here in Southeastern Manitoba, weve always been innovators as we looked for better ways to do things on the farm or in business, said MP Falk. That`s why I was pleased to show Rona Ambrose some of that innovative entrepreneurial spirit in action today. I had the privilege of seeing the first Smart Seeder come off the assembly line on April 5th and it only took one look at the finished product to realize the significant level of creativity, inventiveness, and hard work that went into this product.

The entrepreneurial spirit is definitely alive and well in Provencher, said Ms. Ambrose. Families and businesses have seized that spirit and are working hard to share in Manitobas potential. The Conservative Party will continue to press the current government to respect the private sector as the engine of the Canadian economy, and create the conditions for Manitoba businesses to thrive and create jobs.

With Rona Ambrose leading the way, the Conservative Party will continue to champion polices that promote innovation, encourage entrepreneurs and create jobs.
EASTON, Pa.  The Wall Street Journal this week wrote about a hiring trend that is bucking how convenience retail and other foodservice channels approach their workforce: hiring more full-timers.

At a time when many chains are shifting workers to part-time, writes the news source, Altoona, Pa.-based Sheetz Inc. is making a big bet on full-time hires, who now comprise 53% of the companys 17,000-person workforce. Leaders at Sheetz agree that staffing full-time employees behind the register results in better customer service, lower turnover rates and a more engaged workforceall of which, executives say, will lead to higher sales and profits.

Sheetz and other retailers acknowledge full-time employees tend to be more reliable and invested in their jobs, as well as more cost-effective in terms of saving time and resources on training. The news source notes that just 27% of full-time workers leave their jobs per year, versus 68.7% of part-timers, according to a Korn Ferry Hay Group report.

This is a moment where some employers at least are taking stock of whether theyve gone down the labor flexibility path a little too far, Susan Lambert, a University of Chicago professor who studies hourly work, told the Wall Street Journal. He research suggests that full-time employees are the glue that holds a business together because they are more likely to anticipate business needs, go the extra mile on the job and are overall more committed.

Stephanie Doliveira, vice president of human resources at Sheetz, noted that on employee surveys the full-timers tend to report more commitment and willingness to put in extra effort than part-timers, which leads to higher customer service. For Sheetz, retention of full-timers is strong, at less than a quarter of its workforce leaving each year, compared to 83% of part-timers who leave each year. Overall voluntary turnover at Sheetz has dropped two percentage points from 2015, saving $925,000 in recruiting and training, Doliveira told the news source.

Buffalo Wings & Rings CEO Nader Masadeh commented that full-time employees at the 50-unit restaurant chain ring up 6% higher sales per hour on average. The chain has doubled its full-time workforce since 2013, with about 37% of employees working full-time, and training costs have dropped 25%, he told the news source.

&pizza, a Washington, D.C.-based pizza chain, brought store growth to a halt to sort out high turnover among its part-time workforce, as well as address the low customer service ratings at new stores, according to CEO Michael Lastoria. Today, about 31% of &pizza staff is full-time, up from 15% in 2014, and the concept is planning to open seven new stores this year.

Store managers often need to adjust to having more full-time employees on board, notes the Wall Street Journal. Doliveira commented that there was an initial resistance from Sheetz store managers, who were used to having a pool of part-timers to call on when employees called out sick. Now, store managers are also planning shifts that accommodate more workers with vacation time. For Tammy Shepard, a salesperson at a Sheetz store in Statesville, N.C., moving to full-time gives her health insurance and a larger paycheck. It gives you a sense of security, which is a huge thing, she told the news source.

Get a Grip on Labor Costs

On April 11, NACS released the NACS State of the Industry Compensation Report of 2015 Data, which helps convenience store companies benchmark themselves in areas such as compensation levels, staff turnover and benefits. This years report compiles data from more than 80 c-store companies, representing nearly 12,000 stores across the country.

Here are several overall industry facts from this years Compensation Report:

Employer-sponsored insurance is the leading source of health insurance within the c-store industry, offered to 78% of hourly employees

The weighted mean of hourly sales associates is $9.44; $11.40 when including fringe benefits

The mean sales associate turnover is 93% and the mean foodservice associate turnover is 77%

To find more facts and figures from your specific region or firm size, purchase the NACS State of the Industry Compensation Report of 2015 Data.
By Don Quijones of Spain and Mexico, editor at Wolf Street. Originally published at Wolf Street

A new survey conducted by YouGov for the Bertelsmann Foundation showed that only 17% of Germans believe the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a good thing, down from 55% two years ago.

In the United States, only 18% support the deal compared to 53% in 2014.

Such low popularity ratings are an incredible feat for a trade agreement that until last year the public had barely even heard of, purposefully, even as it had been on the negotiation table for years, while the governments associated with it had expected to pass it with flying colors.

During his visit to Germany at the weekend, President Barack Obama tried to breathe life back into the deal, insisting that the majority of people still favor trade and still recognize, on balance, that its a good idea. While that may be so, TTIP, like the other alphabet-soup trade agreements, is not really about promoting trade; its about reconfiguring the legal apparatus and superstructures that govern national, regional, and global commerce, business and society, for the benefit of the worlds largest multinational corporations.

Obama could not have chosen a worse possible location to plug his sacred trade deal. Offering a quite visible contradiction to his rose-tinted interpretation of corporate-sponsored trade deals, tens of thousands marched against TTIP in the streets of Hanover on Saturday. Opposition to the trade agreement is also fierce among Germanys Mittelstand (small and medium-size companies), which represent over 90% of firms in the country. A 2014 Commerzbank study found that only 15% of Mittlestand companies believe TTIP would be a good thing for their business.

Germanys not alone. Across the old continent, public opposition to TTIP is swelling. Just in the past week three vital developments took place that spell even more trouble for the transatlantic corporatocracy.

1. Incompatible with Democracy.

The first blow came from UN human rights expert Alfred de Zayas, who in a hearing with the Council of Europes legal affairs and human rights committee on April 19 warned that the private or semi-private settlement of disputes between investors and states, at the core of these trade agreements, is incompatible with democracy, the rule of law and human rights.









De Zayas pronouncement comes hot on the heels of a hammer-blow ruling last February by Germanys Association of Judges that not only is there no legal basis for an international investment court, but it would have no jurisdiction in any European country. As we reported at the time, the growing opposition to the idea of an Investment Court System (ICS) leaves the Commissions trade representatives stuck in no mans land:

Having as good as abandoned the deeply unpopular Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) and bet all its horses on ICS, it now has to find a third way that not only placates European policy makers who oppose ISDS but also appeases the demands of its negotiating partners and the corporate behemoths that have been pushing for this deal. And that is not going to be easy.

To make matters worse, a Freedom of Information request in the UK just led to the release of a 2013 risk assessment report commissioned by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills that shows that a TTIP agreement would pose lots of risk and no benefit to the British economy. Ultimately, we conclude that an EU-US investment treaty that does contain ISDS is likely to have few or no benefits to the UK, while having meaningful economic and political costs, the report said.

This weekend the city of Barcelona played host to the first summit of European Cities Against TTIP. The event was attended by representatives of over 40 major European cities opposed to the trade agreement, including Vienna, Seville, Birmingham, Cologne and (irony of ironies) Brussels itself.

In the last year, more than 1,300 European municipalities have declared themselves TTIP-free zones. On the other side of the Atlantic, over 100 U.S. cities have declared their opposition to TTIPs sister agreement for the Pacific region, the TPP, including New York, Seattle, and Miami.

In Europe, resistance to TTIP is not just growing at the municipal and regional level. The next month could see the election of the continents first openly anti-TTIP national government. In Austria, the EU Member State that was already most opposed to TTIP (according to the latest Eurobarometer survey, December 2015), voters just put into the presidential runoff vote two candidates who vehemently oppose the deal.

The biggest blow to the transatlantic corporatocracy took place last Wednesday, when a Dutch district court overturned an award of more than $50 billion to former shareholders of the defunct oil company Yukos that Moscow was ordered to pay by a Hague-based arbitration panel in 2014. It was by far the largest award damages in the history of investment treaty arbitration.

The irony is that the original Yukos trial was an open-and-shut case of shareholder expropriation, albeit one with serious geopolitical connotations. In 2003, the Russian authorities arrested Yukoss chairman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, on charges of embezzlement, tax evasion, and money laundering and sold off his company piece by piece over the next several years. Much of it ended up as part of Rosneft, now the worlds largest publicly traded oil company.

The court in the appeals trial said that the panel of arbiters that had made the original award had lacked jurisdiction to do so, since although Russia had signed the international Energy Charter Treaty, it had not ratified it and so was not bound by it. According to Jeff Sullivan, a partner and expert on energy arbitration at the law firm Allen & Overy in London, Wednesdays ruling was a significant victory for Russia.

Certainly the decision of the Dutch court will impact on the ability of Yukos shareholders to enforce the arbitration award in various countries around the world, Mr. Sullivan said. The ruling also raises further questions about the role and jurisdiction of investor arbitrators in international trade law. Given that it is they who would be the front-line enforcers of trade agreements, this could be very bad news for TTIPs architects whose dreams appear to be in the process of unraveling.

You know things are bad when even the firmest believers begin questioning their faith. Thats whats happening in the EU, which faces a constellation of threats and challenges. Now even the staunchest Eurocrats are beginning to express doubts  amid fears of further escape referendums. Read Its Gotten So Bad in Europe, Even Eurocrats Begin to Worry
Yves here. Ive reframed this recap of a talk by Yanis Varoufakis at NYU as a challenge to neoliberalism, not a challenge to economics, since its theme is the tension between modern economics (and indeed many forms of capitalism) and democracy.

There are some points he made that he made that I quibble with. He says he was shocked when he learned, early in his negotiations with the Wolfgang Schauble, that his counterparts took the position that the will of the Greek people counted for very little. I know some readers may take umbrage, but this was a fundamental failure on behalf of the Syriza side, not just Varoufakis, of what they were up against. In fact, the Eurozone treaties that Greece has signed had the government explicitly ceding certain aspects of national sovereignity to the Eurozone. In addition, as we pointed out at the time, the ECB had the power to bring the Greek economy to its knees by cutting off liquidity support to the Greek banks, and if anything, was predisposed to do so. From the ECBs perspective, it had already stretched the rules of its supposedly temporary liquidity facilities to the breaking point.

Mind you, Im not saying the Trokia position was right or sound. Varoufakis clearly had the better economic argument. But he didnt begin to have the runway to persuade his opponents, and he thought the threat of a Grexit gave him far more bargaining leverage than he had. But Varoufakis past writings showed he was firmly convinced that this path would do Greece great harm, and Syriza didnt have public support for that course of action either. Greece did have some bargaining chips, in that the Eurocrats were keen to have Greece improve tax collections and the operations of government generally, but it was clear given how the negotiations were framed that the two sides would remain at loggerheads, eventually giving the Troika what it though was an adequate excuse to use brute force.

A second point Varoufakis made where I beg to differ is, as reported by Lynn Parramore, It is the brute force of the state that ensures compliance with the rules of capitalism. In fact, it is the hidden coercion of the market that forces compliance, which is why neoliberals fetishize markets. A major focus of the Robert Heilbroner book, Behind the Veil of Economics, is the contrast between the source of discipline under feudalism versus under capitalism. Heilbroner argues it was the bailiff and the lash, that lord would incarcerate and beat serf who didnt pull their weight. But the lord had obligations to his serfs too, so this relationship was not as one-sided as it might seem. By contrast, Heilbroner argues that the power structure under capitalism is far less obvious:

This negative form of power contrasts sharply with with that of the privileged elites in precapitalist social formations. In these imperial kingdoms or feudal holdings, disciplinary power is exercised by the direct use or display of coercive power. The social power of capital is of a different kind.The capitalist may deny others access to his resources, but he may not force them to work with him. Clearly, such power requires circumstances that make the withholding of access of critical consequence. These circumstances can only arise if the general populace is unable to secure a living unless it can gain access to privately owned resources or wealth The organization of production is generally regarded as a wholly economic activity, ignoring the political function served by the wage-labor relationships in lieu of baliffs and senechals. In a like fashion, the discharge of political authority is regarded as essentially separable from the operation of the economic realm, ignoring the provision of the legal, military, and material contributions without which the private sphere could not function properly or even exist. In this way, the presence of the two realms, each responsible for part of the activities necessary for the maintenance of the social formation, not only gives capitalism a structure entirely different from that of any precapitalist society, but also establishes the basis for a problem that uniquely preoccupies capitalism, namely, the appropriate role of the state vis-a-vis the sphere of production and distribution.

Shorter Heilbroner: capitalism requires that non-capitalists sell their labor as a condition of survival. The capitalist can exert power by denying access to work, hence income, hence survival. The state has brute force when capitalists control resources (recall that a lot of what is now private, such as common pasturelands, were once communal property) and in modern times, when social safety nets are weak. This is not a given under capitalism, but it is certainly the preferred order among Western elites.

By Lynn Parramore. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

Yanis Varoufakis first meeting with the Troika of Greeces creditors revealed what he believes is a perilous disdain among top economic decision-makers for the democratic process. The then-Finance Minister arrived armed with tables and graphs to make what he believed was a self-evident case that the austerity program imposed on Athens was untenable and unsustainable, and would therefore not produce desirable results for Greece or for its creditors. As the representative of a leftist government elected on a promise to restructure the austerity program, Varoufakis was aware of the need for a moderate tone to alleviate fears that he was a wild-eyed radical, and he readily acknowledged the need for continuity with terms agreed by the previous Greek administration. But he hoped to persuade the Troika to balance those obligations with the desire of the Greek electorate for a sustainable plan that offered them more than permanent penury.

According to Varoufakis, Wolfgang Schauble, the formidable German finance minister, abruptly interrupted his presentation, declaring, Elections cannot be allowed to change the economic policies applied to Greece.

For Varoufakis, the encounter with Schauble signaled that neoliberal economic managers no longer even pretended to support the principle of democracy. As a result, he argued, Greece was facing dogmatic enforcement of an austerity program whose effects would likely preclude it recovering sufficiently to repay its debts. And more broadly, the future of European capitalism was in growing jeopardy amid rising electoral discontent.

Speaking Monday at New York Citys New School on the future of capitalism and democracy, Varoufakis distinguished between ancient Athenian democracy  which gave equal weight to the views expressed by (admittedly only male) citizens regardless of the wealth they possessed  and its modern form. The latter, he said, had historically been shaped by systems of economic inequality. The Magna Carta, he noted, negotiated the rights of the barons to prevent the king from poaching their serfs  a social contract between lords and the monarch.

Eventually, those lords were replaced by merchants and industrialists, and later still, organized labor demanded its own say. The modern state emerged as a mechanism for regulation class conflict, he said. That is liberal democracy.

The assumption that capitalism is innately linked to liberal democracy is of recent vintage, Varoufakis contended. He noted that classical economic thinkers  Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Schumpeter  all focused on the process of the commoditization of everything, including human beings, a notion that he suggested did not bode well for democratic practices. The ideological cover for this concept, today, was the illusion of apolitical, ahistorical, mathematized economics.

Economists see themselves as scientists who have no need for history  after all, arent past scientific models full of errors? But economics is not a science, Varoufakis explained. Unlike in physics, where the latest textbook offers knowledge more advanced than its predecessors did, economists seem to have a knack for ignoring past truths, a phenomenon particularly apparent in treatments of capitalism.

Todays economic models not only cant deal with democracy, but they have become embedded in economic behavior, influencing economic actors, policy makers, and elected officials. He warned that policies derived from the impulse of orthodox economics to reduce human beings into elastic, mechanized inputs threatened capitalisms future: It destroys human creativity and freedom, which (among other things) generates new ideas and technologies that drive productivity and creates profits for capital.

Paradoxes abound: the more capitalism succeeds in commodifying human beings, the worse things become for capitalism  powerless and poor, their buying power is degraded, and with it, aggregate demand.

And the failure to respond to human need expressed through democratic politics  as he experienced in his dealings with the Troika  threatens to spur citizen rebellions against the system.

Varoufakis cited economist Kenneth Arrow  whose impossibility theorem (also known as social-choice theory) shows the impossibility of fully determining a common will while using a set of fair and democratic procedures to argue that democracy, messy it may be, remains the best path. Edicts from technocrats, no matter how smart and well-meaning, will not reflect the interests of the people. Democracy is dialectic, explained Varoufakis, a system for people who are not sure about what they think. They are not sure about what is good for society. They argue, debate, and take from each others positions to modify their own.

But capitalism hasnt always worked well with democracy. Just as the notion of hell was essential to achieving obedience to the tenets of Christianity in the middle ages, quipped Varoufakis, so it is the brute force of the state that ensures compliance with the rules of capitalism.

The United States Constitution, he argued, was designed to keep the poor away from the levers of power, while legitimizing the system through their participation. Democracy was to be used in name in order to be breached in substance, he said, and served to keep capitalism out of crisis without having to really give the poor much power.

Crises came anyway. The Great Depression sufficiently shocked elites into creating the Bretton Woods system, an international financial system predicated on an imperial American role that, together with the Marshall Plan, laid the foundation of postwar capitalist expansion. But the golden era of capitalism didnt last. As U.S. hegemony declined, cracks in the system appeared and widened. Global financial markets became imbalanced and storms of mounting amplitude followed. Eventually, deregulation and financialization turned corporations like GM into financial companies that produce a few cars on the side. The Great Recession, as Varoufakis saw it, has signaled citizens that their economies are not functioning, and neither are their political systems.

The world we live in is rudderless, in a slow-burning recession, he said, referring what some have called secular stagnation. Varoufakis rejected further lending to Greece if the current austerity program cannot be modified or reversed. Continued austerity makes it impossible for Greece to grow, which means that paying off new debts would only be possible through further austerity and cuts in public budgets, which will drive the economy deeper into recession. For Varoufakis, this counterproductive policy ignores lessons from Europes recovery after World War II, including forgiving German debt in 1953.

The Eurozone remains dominated by policies that make debt repayment, rather than growth, the central focus of policy makers. For Varoufakis, this underscores the bankrupt nature of much current economic thinking, ignoring alternative analyses of the crisis and alternative ideas for addressing it, including both debt relief and fiscal stimulus rather than austerity.

Varoufakis argued that blocking of sensible economic policy feeds the electoral success of new, left parties in Greece and Spain, but also the rise of authoritarian right-wing movements in a worrisome echo of the 1930s. This polarization also can be seen in the United States, with the electoral success of Bernie Sanders but also Donald Trump. And if decision-making power continues to moves into democracy-free zones such as the European Union or private corporations, the more polarized the political future appears, with attendant opportunities and risks.

In a burst of pop culture flair, Varoufakis predicted that when machines have passed the Turing Test, when you can no longer tell if the person on the phone is a human or a computer, and when 3-D printers can spit out whatever object you need, the logic of capitalism will break down. At this stage, he warned, humanity will face a juncture. Either we end up with a Star Trek-like utopia where we harness technology and use its wealth-producing capacity for the common good, or we get The Matrix, a dystopia in which the miserable masses have their energy sucked out of them by unseen forces and are fed illusions to keep them quiet. Eventually even the elites will become servants to the machine.

The antidote to that outcome, Varoufakis argued, is a robust democracy in the Athenian vein, one that reflects the voices of and serves all the people, whether they have money or not.

*Varoufakiss new book, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europes Crisis and Americas Future was released on April 12.
Naples Airport Authority Operations Manager, Raul Estrada, left, walks away from a baggage conveyor belt as patrons board for a flight to New Jersey from Elite Airways' terminal April 28, 2016 at Naples Municipal Airport in Naples, Fla. The newly-operated airline company managed less than 20 percent of its load level during the first month of commercial flights. Tomorrow they have 21 passengers leaving on a flight. (Corey Perrine/Staff)

By Joseph Cranney of the Naples Daily News

A new batch of flights to the Midwest and additional nonstop flights to New Jersey are planned for Elite Airways, which experienced passenger loads of less than 20 percent in March at Naples Municipal Airport.

John Pearsall, Elite Airways president, said the new flights will begin this fall, although he declined to say how many flights or what Midwest destinations will be added. Elite will suspend its connecting service to Vero Beach indefinitely in June.

Pearsall announced the airline will add nonstop flights to Newark, N.J., on Mondays and Fridays and discontinue Saturday trips, which now fly to Newark with a morning departure and afternoon arrival.

Pearsall's comments came after monthly totals from March were released showing Elite's planes arriving and taking off from Naples at less than 20 percent capacity, or around 10-12 passengers per flight. Those numbers were skewed because passengers in connecting cities had booked flights before Elite's service out of Naples was announced in February, Pearsall said. For the nonstop flights to Newark, without a connection, load factors have been higher.

From April 1 to April 18, overall load factors were about 30 percent. For the nonstop flights to Newark on the first two Saturdays in April, the planes were at more than 98 percent capacity.

For July and August, Elite will only fly in and out of Naples on Mondays and Fridays to Portland, Maine, with connecting flights in Melbourne. Pearsall said service has done "very well" and he expects it to continue year-round.

"They're off to a good start," Jim Rideoutte told fellow Naples Airport Authority commissioners recently.

Airport critics have questioned the local demand for flights to Newark since Elite's deal for the city's first commercial flights since 2007 was announced last fall. The deal was signed by Ted Soliday, the former airport director, without first receiving approval from the NAA board.

Even some supporters of the Elite deal were concerned that the flights out of Naples were getting off to a late start when the first flight took off on Feb. 27, toward the end of tourist season. The start was held up by the Transportation Security Administration, which took several months to install its services.

But Pearsall said he was "pleased" with the load factors from March.

"They were actually greater than we thought they would be," Pearsall said. "We understand it's somewhat seasonal on some of the markets."

Rideoutte, who was chairman of the board when the Elite deal was authorized, has been a vocal proponent of the commercial flights. He says he bases his position on the results of a survey last year that showed nearly 80 percent of respondents were in favor of commercialization.

Naples Airport Watch, the local airport watchdog group, has criticized the survey for being misleading when it asked, among other questions, if residents favored the airport offering flights to international hubs like Atlanta, Charlotte and Miami.

Larry Schultz, a co-founder of the group, said the Elite deal isn't representative of what the survey respondents wanted.

"It just doesn't look like it's a viable commercial service for the community," he said. "It may be, ultimately, and it's just a start up issue. But it's not the type of commercial service the board portrayed in the survey."

Pearsall said the decision to expand service to the Midwest was based on "listening to our people of Naples."

The switch from Saturday flights to Newark to Monday and Friday flights was also based on feedback from customers who wanted to spend a full weekend in the Northeast, Pearsall said. He said the Saturday flights will be discontinued on June 25.

Chris Rozansky, the new director of the airport, said he has received positive feedback from customers on the commercial flights, especially the nonstop service. Customers said the flights are like "having your own aircraft," Rozansky said.

"I do think it offers a convenience factor," he said. "If you want to go to the Newark/New York City market, you park for free and walk up to the terminal."
Margie Whitmarsh of Marco Island eats lunch at Bella Maria Cafe on Fifth Avenue South in Naples on Wednesday, April 27, 2016. The last day of business for the cafe is Friday. "It is a nice setting, too bad we are going to lose it," Whitmarsh says. "We will find them wherever they go, we hope." (Dorothy Edwards/Staff)

By Tim Aten of the Naples Daily News

A professional demolition crew circled the 400 block of Fifth Avenue South on Wednesday to survey what lies ahead in tearing down more than a half dozen storefronts on the iconic strip of downtown Naples.

A construction barrier will be erected Monday along the sidewalk on the north side of the street as well as around the businesses bookended by Cafe Luna and Kohr's Family Frozen Custard, said Jim Messina, who owns Judd & Associates, a demolition and excavating firm that has operated for more than 20 years in Naples.

Weeks of preliminary demolition work will be undertaken before any heavy machinery moves in to raze the 50-year-old structures, Messina said.

"All we can do at this point is start removing all the hazardous materials inside the businesses," he said, referring to items such as light bulbs, paint buckets and air conditioning units.

In addition to Cafe Luna and Kohr's, business units targeted for demolition include Avenue Wine Cafe, Bella Maria Cafe and a few real estate offices. All were set to close or already closed this week ahead of the Saturday expiration of their leases.

Cafe Luna closed Sunday and moved equipment and furniture to its future location on the southeast corner of Airport-Pulling and Vanderbilt Beach roads. Co-owner Ed Barsamian was on site Wednesday to oversee the last remnants of his 8-year-old restaurant, whose moon-centric name is already gone from the top of the building.

"This location, this whole block is irreplaceable. I could never find a patio on Fifth Avenue with 100 seats," Barsamian said. "You know, it's really sad that we're not here. Everybody's sad  me, my staff, all of our guests that came by over the weekend. It's a major door closing, but we opened up Liberty Plaza, we're opening in Naples Walk. We're going to have two great restaurants and we're looking forward to further growth, better days ahead and whatever happens here happens."

The redeveloped Fifth Avenue block on the corner of Fifth Street South will have retail businesses on its ground floor, but is not expected to have any restaurants, according to owner Phil McCabe. The three-story building is planned to have upscale residential condominiums above the retail strip and a proposed parking garage below.

Friday is the last day for Avenue Wine Cafe, as well as Bella Maria Cafe, a restaurant with international flavors, particularly from Spain and Chile. The Iribarren family plans to reopen the nearly 12-year-old restaurant, probably with the same name, concept and menu, this fall in Naples.

"We still have a couple of locations we are looking at about a mile away," said Franco Iribarren, who co-owns Bella Maria with his parents, Maria and Carlos. "I think we have done a pretty good job to have been here that long and seeing restaurants come and go and we're here."

Mike and Margie Whitmarsh, the owners of Niagara Label Co. of Buffalo, New York, would agree. On Wednesday, the couple sat at Bella Maria enjoying lunch, a place they visit on average weekly during the five months that they seasonally stay on Marco Island.

"This is our favorite little place for lunch," Margie Whitmarsh said. "The pot roast sandwich is to die for."

The couple promised to locate and frequent the new Bella Maria's when they return next season.

"It's really a nice setting and it's too bad we're going to lose it," Mike Whitmarsh said. "You're going to lose a lot of the character, I think, in my opinion. It's going to change everything."

Next door, Wednesday was the last day for Kohr's custard shop, which replaced Abbott's Frozen Custard in that corner spot just two years ago. Hundreds of people a day stopped in to sample peanut butter chocolate custard, and butter pecan and mint chocolate chip ice cream, said Carolina Araujo, a 13-year employee of Kohr Family Frozen Custard and manager of the Naples store only since November.

"It's sad. We don't want to close our business," Araujo said, doubting that Kohr will relocate in Naples, leaving the only other Florida location in Madiera Beach.

Aadvisor Rentals, which operated nearby for seven or eight years, will close its Naples office after business Friday before reopening May 5 at a new location next to Kilwins on Fifth Avenue South.

"It's been a great spot for us, but we are real excited about our new location, which we think will be even better," said Aadvisor spokesman Tom Wentworth.

Eventually, a four- or five-man demolition crew will show up with Bobcat and Mustang excavators and loaders to tear down a small stretch of Naples history. One of the tough parts of the job will be to raze the western wall of the vacated Cafe Luna without disturbing the abutting eastern wall of Paddy Murphy's Irish Bar, which will remain in operation.

But Judd's Jim Messina isn't worried about that. He expertly handled a similar demolition project on Fifth when doing excavation work ahead of McCabe's Inn on Fifth expansion a few years ago.

"We are very good at what we do and we will surgically remove that wall," he said.
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WASHINGTON  Oh, puhleeze, no!

The Trumpster is going to run a totally chauvinistic campaign against Hillary Clinton.

It's going to be, "She wouldn't be here if she weren't a woman" and "She just wants to be the first woman president."

After the voters of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island and Connecticut voted for Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, he said, "I think the only card she has is the woman's card."

Ever gallant, Trump continued, "She has got nothing else going. Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she would get 5 percent of the vote."

Clinton then responded.

Well, she said, "if fighting for women's health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in. ... We want America to be in the future business."

Not content with past gratuitous insults against Clinton, Trump added: "And the beautiful thing is women don't like her, OK?"

Oh, and do they like him? Seven out of 10 women say they have an unfavorable opinion of Trump.

We knew Trump adviser Paul Manafort's wink-wink-nod-nod assurance that Trump would soon switch to "presidential mode" would not happen. Indeed, Trump quickly assured the world that he had no intention of "toning it down."

Clearly, Trump and Clinton already have each other in their sights for the fall campaign. It's going to be as painful as we feared.

With Clinton's latest post having been secretary of state, we've been waiting to see how Trump will attack her on that front. We found out the day after Tuesday's primaries.

Outlining his foreign policy, Trump displayed a panoply of contradictions and vacuousness. He promised his foreign policy would be popular with all Americans, simple and focused on one factor  America, first above all else. Then he said the United States has not put Israel's interests first and foremost.

He said, "The power of weaponry is the single biggest problem we have in the world." He wants to modernize America's nuclear weapons stockpile and promote its edge in cyberwarfare. Oh, yes, and 3-D printing.

He doesn't want to defend other countries unless they appreciate what we do, pay for their defense and not tie us up in alliances that restrict America's ability to make its own decisions. But he wants us to stand by the agreements we have made.

He will deal with the national debt by not wasting one dollar. He wants to beef up the military but doesn't say how he will pay for it, since Congress has steadily been cutting the defense budget. He wants to end "the theft of American jobs." He does not say how.

While Trump says he is the "only one who knows how to fix" America's problems, he offers no details. He pledges to get rid of the Islamic State group  quickly, but won't tell us how, in order to avoid tipping them off. He vows to get rid of the Iran deal signed with six countries to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, but says Iran absolutely must not be permitted to get nuclear weapons. How? We don't know.

We have to stop China from becoming the new economic powerhouse, he warns, but also says we have to sign deals with China that benefit us more than China. If not, we simply walk away from the table. Ditto Russia.

Ah, now we're in territory Clinton knows well. But that debate is complicated and will show Trump up as a know-nothing on how the world works.

So much easier to swipe at Clinton as being a woman unqualified to be president. Says Trump, "Watching her on television ... she just gives me a headache."

Trump has been successful in knocking out his rivals by exaggerating a personal trait and demeaning them for it. John Kasich has "disgusting" eating habits. Ted Cruz is a "liar." Jeb Bush had "no energy." It was "Little Marco." He didn't like Carly Fiorina's face. A bully, he dissed everyone in the race.

Now he's going after Clinton. For being just a woman in pantsuits.

For a man who insists the United States must be less predictable in foreign policy, Trump is oh, so, predictable.
Kim Bassos-Hull, a senior biologist at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, shares her research about rays, sharks and dolphins via a PowerPoint presentation to a crowd of interested people of all ages inside an auditorium at the Rookery Bay Reserve in Naples. Ashley Collins/Staff

SHARE People walk inside the Rookery Bay Reserve in Naples to enjoy a lecture presented by Kim Bassos-Hull, a senior biologist at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, who unveiled last week the secret world of rays, dolphins and sharks and her research off Florida's southwest coast. Ashley Collins/Staff After the presentation, Kim Bassos-Hull, center, a senior biologist at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, answers guests' questions regarding her research on rays, sharks and dolphins. Ashley Collins/Staff

By Ashley Collins of the Naples Daily News

The secret world of rays, bottlenose dolphins and sharks was unveiled last week by Kim Bassos-Hull, a senior biologist at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota. Her presentation was part of the visiting scientist lecture series hosted by the Rookery Bay Natural Estuarine Research Reserve in Naples.

After spending years researching dolphins, rays and sharks along Florida's west coast, Hull hasn't gotten the opportunity to study marine life off Collier County's coast, but she hopes to change that soon.

Officials from both facilities are in early discussions to conduct research of rays at the reserve, Hull said after the presentation on Thursday, April 21.

"If you look at where the ray is right now, this area is a gap, Sarasota is a gap. It's natural that we both want to fill in this gap and this whole Gulf-wide network," Hull said. "Plus, they're occasionally catching rays in their shark set nets, so we talked about maybe sharing some data and collecting some genetic samples."

Renee Wilson, communications coordinator at the Rookery Bay Reserve, said they hope to install acoustic stations in reserve waters in order to monitor a specific type of ray called the sawfish.

"In the near future, we will be able to pick up data in the reserve of any sawfish they've [laboratory] tagged. We're hoping to fill some gaps in collective knowledge," Wilson said.

Hull has plenty of experience tagging, or marking, rays in order to study them long-term.

In an auditorium filled with aquatic enthusiasts of all ages, Hull explained how tagging rays works.

"As far as when we go to study them we see them from the boat and we catch them. We can catch little guys with a net, and bigger guys we do put the seine net around and we have divers go in the water pretty quickly to get them. They have to be really careful. Then we bring them up on the boat, unless they're too large," Hull said. "We tag them, we take a series of measurements, we take weights and we look at spars or any shark bites. We take photographs and we do photo ID with them."

This process allows researchers to keep track of individual rays throughout their lifetime.

Hull began her career studying dolphins in 1990 with the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program started by the laboratory. Since 1970, researchers at the Mote Marine Laboratory have studied the dolphin population from Tampa Bay all the way to the Charlotte Harbor.

"We are the longest-running study of dolphins anywhere in the world. We focus on the southwest coast of Florida doing dolphin monitoring and rescues. And we have a big international conservation program where we do conservation training with international colleagues," Hull said. "Our research doesn't go this far south, but that may change in the future."

Hull said dolphin research is necessary because it helps people understand how dolphin populations work, especially during times when their natural ecosystems are threatened.

In 2010, huge amounts of oil accidentally spilled into the ocean as a result of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

"We were a reference population. We've been doing this a really long time. We know what a typical dolphin population looks like and then when the oil spill happened they were able to use our population as a reference to look at the health of the dolphins in areas that were oil-impacted," she said.

In 2009, Hull led a research project studying spotted eagle ray biology and behavior off the coasts of Florida, Mexico and Cuba. Recently, the research has included tagging and tracking of manta and devil rays.

Hull hopes to get more communities aware and actively involved in the well-being of marine creatures.

To learn more about the Rookery Bay Reserve, call office staff at 239-530-5940 or visit www.rookerybay.org. The Rookery Bay Reserve is located at 300 Tower Road in Naples.
Peter Atkinson, director of the Donahue Academy's production of "Romeo and Juliet," gives instruction to Isabella Crum, playing Juliet.

SHARE The cast of the Donahue Academy's production of "Romeo and Juliet" rehearse a musical num-ber. The cast of the Donahue Academy's production of "Romeo and Juliet" pose during a rehearsal break. The cast of the Donahue Academy's production of "Romeo and Juliet" rehearse a musical num-ber. David Shnaider/Citizen Contributor

By Patricia Sette, Citizen Contributor

It is spring in Ave Maria and it seems that everyone's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of Shakespeare. At the Henkels Academic Building on the campus of Ave Maria University (AMU), the Shakespeare in Performance troupe recently finished 10 performances of "The Winter's Tale," a tragicomedy.

And now at Rhodora J. Academy, a K-12 private Catholic school a short distance from the university, the finishing touches are being put on "Romeo and Juliet," which will be performed by the high school's seniors and juniors on May 6, 7 and 8.

Since 2012, AMU's Shakespeare in Performance troupe has been stunning audiences with the high caliber of their performances under the direction of Travis Curtright, who chairs the university's Humanities Department. Peter Atkinson, a former actor with that troupe, who graduated AMU in 2015, will be directing the "Romeo and Juliet" production at Donahue where he now teaches.

The play about the star-crossed lovers is the culmination of an elective course offered to the academy's juniors and seniors, whose youth and inexperience initially caused Atkinson to consider having them perform only a few scenes.

"But then I met the kids," Atkinson said, and quickly decided they could handle an entire play.

When it comes to staging, Atkinson is following the tradition carried on by the Shakespeare in Performance troupe, bypassing a stage in favor of a space which allows far more intimacy and connection between actors and audience. Whereas the AMU troupe performs in an ordinary classroom, the Donahue classrooms are too small to accommodate a play, so Romeo and Juliet will be performed in a 40-foot by 30-foot rectangular performance space, created by PVC pipe and black curtains, which will allow the cast to interact closely with the audience seated along the periphery.

Interspersed throughout the play will be contemporary music, which required the creation of the first pop music band at Donahue Academy. When asked about the challenges of having high school students perform an entire Shakespearean tragedy, Atkinson said, "If it weren't for this particular group of kids, I could not do this. When I began, we started off discussing the difference between poetry and prose. Now they argue with me about scansion and metrical stress. We've gone from zero to 60 in a just a few months."

Although he has been involved with acting since age seven, Atkinson said he's never directed before. "It's made me really appreciate what Dr. Curtright does. Now I'm on the other side. As an actor, I had to be the moldable clay in the hands of the director; as the director, I'm the one molding the clay."

"I've been buying costumes; we needed 70 of them. I've edited text, and of course, there's the directing. This has been the hardest year of my life, but the kids have loved it."

What are his expectations for his students? "My highest compliment is, 'You're watchable.' And by that I mean by more than their relatives." He thinks for a moment, and sums up, "This entire experience has been amazing. It's been very beautiful to teach them. They have so much power when they just trust themselves and the feelings they bring to their characters. I think they'll be great."

Performances of "Romeo and Juliet" are free, and will be held at Donahue Academy on Friday, May 6, at 7 p.m., Saturday, May 7, at 1:30 and 7 p.m. and Sunday, May 8, at 1:30 and 7 p.m. Seats can be reserved through the "student life" section of the Rhodora J. Donahue Academy website.

- - -

More news and information about Ave Maria can be found at The Ave Herald (www.aveherald.com) which Patricia publishes along with her husband, David Shnaider.
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By Terri Schlichenmeyer

"A Burglar's Guide to the City"

By Geoff Manaugh

c. 2016, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

$16/$26 Canada; 296 pages

The back door was unlocked when you got home last night. It was locked when you left the house; you remember checking it. And though you're trying not to panic, things have been slightly moved and it's very, very unsettling  so don't read "A Burglar's Guide to the City" by Geoff Manaugh. It'll just make you feel worse.

The house under construction down the street is going to be a nice one; plenty of big windows, fancy landscaping. You've noticed many expensive details. Burglars have noticed, too. And they "understand architecture," says Manaugh, "better than the rest of us.

They know that sliding doors are easy to remove and that a C-note spent at a hardware store can get them inside pretty much any building. They know that doors and windows aren't the only way into your house. But, says Manaugh, it's not just that burglars steal things, "it's how they move that's so consistently interesting." They'll cut through walls, hide in suitcases or appliances, sleuth out floor plans, wiggle through doggy-doors or up garbage chutes, down chimneys or sewers, and sneak through roofs. They're patient. They'll study a building until they find a way in. They'll study your habits and your schedule. They'll wait until they know your building better than you do.

Call the police? Sure, they've got equipment that can see in the dark and through walls. They know how to set traps. But as quickly as they devise ways to thwart criminals, criminals try to be one step ahead.

Buy a security system? Sure, but alarms will only slow a burglar down. Ultimately, when it comes to burglary, "  you just might not be able to do much about it."

Oh, my. It's been a long time since I've read a book more fascinating or more dang creepy than "A Burglar's Guide to the City."

But here's the surprise: This isn't a true crime book. Sure, there are crimes described here. Author Geoff Manaugh discusses burglary throughout history and he writes of boneheaded, bungling burglars. Those great stories mostly serve to highlight the reason for this book, though, which is that the buildings in which we live and work have an influence on the way burglars operate. Cities, Manaugh says, are almost built with thieves in mind; in fact, he offers a challenge: look closely at any random building you've driven past many times. How would you get inside?

Try it. You'll be shocked.

And yet  don't think that this is a book of instruction. Manaugh cautions that, even if you're genius at breaking-and-entering, officials are usually smarter. He also goes on to explain how homeowners can lessen the chances of a burglary, why B&E guys aren't interested in your expensive door locks, and why you should smile pretty when entering a casino.

This book had me stuck to my sofa. It's lively, informative, oh-so-fun to read, and a must-have for anyone with real-estate. If that sounds like your kind of book, then "A Burglar's Guide to the City" will be a steal.

"True Reagan: What Made Ronald Reagan Great and Why It Matters"

By James Rosebush

c. 2016, Center Street

$27/$32.50 Canada; 288 pages

What is the measure of a man? What motivates him? What makes him do what he does? Is it his background, or his forward look to the future? When it comes to great men of history, those are interesting questions to ponder  and in 'True Reagan," author James Rosebush draws his conclusions.

Born well more than a century ago to a poor family, Ronald Reagan was influenced by both his parents but mostly by his mother. She was a minister whose generosity extended to anyone in need, and she expected her children to behave similarly.

That's just one thing that Rosebush believes shaped the man Reagan was  although there's really no way of knowing for sure because Reagan "never revealed his secret to achieving success  " He was not someone who talked about himself and he never overtly called attention to his own feelings.

Rosebush says one gets another hint of the man through oratory: Reagan was a renowned storyteller  a talent he got from his father  and he often used humor to communicate to his listeners. He also liberally used quotes from other famous men in speeches he wrote, which "added power and import" to them. People who paid close attention to Reagan's public words could easily determine that his core beliefs in God and humanity polished the person he was and the president he became.

Personally, Rosebush says, both the Reagans were intensely private people who ran their lives much like a Hollywood "studio system" and they "tightly controlled" what the public saw of them. They didn't put on airs and there was nothing terribly scandalous about them because there were "no major demons to unleash."

Reagan, says Rosebush, believed in the heroism of everyday people and was quick to laud it, both publicly and privately. He had a still, unshakable faith that he didn't make a show of possessing; at least once, in fact, he eschewed a church service so as not to disrupt it. And he was humble. In his presidential diaries, "Reagan never once used the word legacy."

The name of our 40th president has been on many lips this election season. "True Reagan" may explain why.

Before you find that why, however, there's a lot of repetition to wade through. Author James Rosebush was Reagan's deputy assistant, a role that gave him a ringside seat to the man he says was an enigma. Sadly, though, because Reagan was reticent in many respects and because there were unknowns, Rosebush seems able to offer just the same basic hypotheses, but in different words.

And yet, there are tiny surprises inside this book. Rosebush occasionally uses his own experiences in the White House to reveal the quietest of peeks into Reagan's thoughts. Those anecdotes are interesting but again, because Reagan was so private, they consist of much conjecture.

I liked this book well enough but its raison d'etre is thin; therefore, I don't think I'd recommend it for anyone but fierce politicos and die-hard Reaganites. For them, "True Reagan" would be good at any measure.

The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. She has been reading since she was 3 years old and never goes anywhere without a book. Terri lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 11,000 books.
By Michael Braun, The News-Press

The will of slain Estero Dr. Teresa Sievers has been recorded for probate at the Lee County Clerk of Court office.

A notice of confidential information also filed on April 20 lists the will as containing Social Security numbers and the names of the doctor's two children.The will, along with the death certificate, were filed at the clerk's office April 20. Neither document are open under public records laws.

The doctor's husband, Mark Sievers, 48, is accused of orchestrating the killing of his wife. Two Missouri men have been charged in the killing  his childhood friend 47-year-old Curtis Wayne Wright Jr. and 25-year-old Jimmy Rodgers. Although Wright signed a 25-year plea deal in exchange for testifying against his friend, Sievers has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree homicide and conspiracy to commit second-degree homicide.

RELATED STORIES:
Golden Gate High School senior Maira Diaz-Bautista, left, walks with her mentor Joan Toren during the Take Stock in Children Graduation at Bower Chapel in Moorings Park on Wednesday, April 27, 2016. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff)

SHARE Lorenzo Walker Technical High School senior Maggie Moxam, left, and her mentor Sally Shields laugh together during the Take Stock in Children Graduation at Bower Chapel in Moorings Park on Wednesday, April 27, 2016. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) High School seniors and their mentors before the Take Stock in Children Graduation at Bower Chapel in Moorings Park on Wednesday, April 27, 2016. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) Palmetto Ridge High School senior Jaheem Washington, left, and his mentor Bill Bak talk together before the Take Stock in Children Graduation at Bower Chapel in Moorings Park on Wednesday, April 27, 2016. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) Golden Gate High School senior Reyna Andrade talks with her mentor Nancy Blackburn, right, before the Take Stock in Children Graduation at Bower Chapel in Moorings Park on Wednesday, April 27, 2016. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff)

By Alexandra Glorioso of the Naples Daily News

When Maggie Moxam was in the eighth grade, two major life events happened: Her father was diagnosed with prostate cancer and she was accepted into the elite college preparation and mentor program called Take Stock in Children.

"It was the really bad and then the really good," the 18-year-old said.

Her father, Howard Moxam, nodded in agreement.

"I was so grateful for the program. ... I didn't know if I would be around for too many years to help her with school."

On Wednesday evening, his daughter, a Lorenzo Walker Technical High School senior, and 34 other students graduated from the Collier County program, operated in partnership with the Education Foundation of Collier County  Champions for Learning.

Each of the students, who hail from Golden Gate High School (18), Lorenzo Walker Technical High (four), Barron Collier High (one), Gulf Coast High (one), Naples High (four), Palmetto Ridge High (four) and Lely High (three), will receive a two-year scholarship to a Florida state college.

For those scholarships, they have participated in a weekly one-on-one mentor program and mandatory college prep workshops, where they studied for the ACT and SAT, wrote applications and made schedules to meet deadlines.

The students were all identified for their financial needs and academic potential. They each had to apply for the program, writing essays about their life goals and interviewing with the admissions committee before they were accepted.

Maggie Moxam will attend Florida Gulf Coast University and major in nursing.

She already plans to attend Nova Southeastern University after she completes her undergraduate studies to train to be a nurse practitioner.

"That's thanks to the program," she said. "They have everything mapped out, step by step."

Maggie Moxam meets her mentor, Sally Shields-Costello, a retired Fordham University professor of social work, on Thursdays at her high school. Rules say they aren't allowed to meet outside school until she graduates, but they already are planning dorm-room shopping trips before college.

Howard Moxam is originally from Cuba and deeply religious. After a time of agony, he decided to not pursue treatment for his cancer.

"I took a huge leap of faith and decided to trust God," he said.

The middle of three girls, Maggie Moxam, said she can feel overlooked at home, so she turned to Shields-Costello for guidance during the turbulent time.

"She's of the Christian belief, so she got it. She told me that we had to trust in God's plan and that she and her husband were praying for him," she said.

The student and her mentor linked arms as they stood in one of two lines full of pairs, waiting to walk into Bower Church's sanctuary as a golden evening light reflected on Moorings Park's lake outside.

In her heels, Maggie Moxam was quite a few inches taller than her mentor. A curled piece of dark hair swung over her shoulder as they cuddled into each other, shifting arm in arm, and adjusted for a photo.

Like many of the couples, they couldn't look more different, but their comfort suggested this would be a vain observation. Shields-Costello said Moxam was her third student, "and the best," she added with a laugh.
An example of a Florida panther. (iStock)

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By Daily News Staff

Hikers in Hendry County discovered the remains of an endangered Florida panther that had been killed in a fight with another panther.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission picked up the 4-year-old male panther Thursday in the Okaloacoochee Slough Wildlife Management Area.

The panther was the third wildcat to be found dead this week. Two other panthers were killed on roads in Estero and Hendry County.

Roadkill panthers have reached 17 so far this year. Thursday's panther brings the overall 2016 death toll to 20, nine of which have been found this month alone. That compares to 42 overall deaths in 2015, of which 30 were roadkills.

A growing panther population is running out of room to roam in Southwest Florida, prompting debate about how best to manage them.

Biologists gain valuable information by examining panther remains. To report an injured or dead panther, call the FWC Wildlife Alert Hotline at 888-404-FWCC (3922).
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Collier County commissioners were effusive Tuesday about an estimated $250 million project that would bring an 18-story condominium, 11-story hotel and retail complex to East Naples land that a county agency now owns.

Commissioner Tim Nance called it "transformational" and "bold."

Commissioner Penny Taylor said she is "very excited about this project" and it could lead to a renaissance in the area, just east of the Naples city limits.

Commissioner Donna Fiala called it courageous and said the area has long been run down and is "ready for redevelopment."

Commissioners were more hands off for now about a RaceTrac proposal to build a 16-pump gas mega-station and 24-hour convenience store across the highway, east of the U.S. 41 and Davis Boulevard intersection.

Now, it will be up to residents throughout the area, along with other government agencies, to air their views.

Up in the air

We choose the word "air" purposely. One of the first concerns is air space. It warrants the attention of the Naples Airport Authority, which already is getting involved, and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials.

How many times do we hear about people moving to an area around an airport who later complain about aircraft and noise?

The high-rise project site is within air traffic patterns for small aircraft that would use either runway at Naples Municipal Airport, confirmed new executive director Christopher Rozansky, who emphasized the airport wants to sort through this process with developers and county leaders.

While jets have more of a straight-line descent or takeoff from the airport, smaller airplanes may make turns within a half-mile of the runway end, he said. That could put smaller aircraft over the general area where these project towers would go.

Tuesday's commission vote starts the initial 120-day period for certain steps, including discussions about building heights with airport officials. A meeting with developers is set within two weeks, Rozansky said.

It can't just be Naples airport leadership weighing in.

"The FAA will conduct an air space analysis," he said, noting these can take up to 90 days but can be completed as quickly as 30 days.

A Naples Airport Authority board discussion about the project at a public meeting seems prudent. If the project moves forward next year, citizens will have other public meeting opportunities, including a rezoning hearing and comprehensive plan change that would be necessary for these tall towers on the 5.3-acre site.

"We are concerned about that," Rozansky said of the building height rezoning change the project would need to exceed what's now allowed in that area.

Are today's neighbors as enthusiastic about the compatibility of this project and its promise as commissioners are? Nobody showed up to speak Tuesday. For or against the project, we urge neighbors to get involved.

City Council meeting

Another facet of the agreement is that developers must oppose annexation into Naples' city limits in the future.

We believe the commission and City Council are overdue for a face-to-face sit-down. This clause that could block the required contiguous land necessary for annexation to the east, if the city or property owners ever want that in the future, might be a good topic. So would Naples-area traffic that was a major issue in the recent city election.

RaceTrac

While commissioners moved forward on one project that would require modifying county development rules, they backed off deciding on their own whether to change a rule in order to allow the RaceTrac so close to a current gas station. The proposed high-rise and RaceTrac projects are across U.S. 41 East from one another.

Commissioners sent the RaceTrac issue to their hearing examiner, who would hold a public meeting before commissioners decide at another public meeting. Again, we urge neighbors to get involved throughout the process.

County leaders are redoing four long-range growth plans, but this unincorporated area isn't covered by those. These two projects offer a great opportunity, however, for neighbors to air their views about the community's future.
Misrepresentations on mortgage applications have inched up nationwide for the first time since July, thanks in part to trends in the energy and agricultural sectors which are creating pressure in the South, according to First American Financial Corp.

The Santa Ana, Calif.-based title insurer's Loan Application Defect Index increased 1.3% from the previous month in March to 76, the first monthly increase since July. The figure nonetheless remained 2.6% down from a year ago.

"While February 2016 is now the new low point for the index, it's too early to know if the increase in misrepresentation and fraud risk in March is the beginning of a long-term upward trend or a short-term adjustment," First American chief economist Mark Fleming said in a news release Thursday. Fleming cited increases in risk among Federal Housing Administration, Veterans Administration and United States Department of Agriculture loans as contributing factors, since conventional loans had no month-over-month change.

The defect index for refinance transactions was up 1.5% from February, and the defect index for purchase transactions was 1.2% higher month-over-month. Compared to last year though, the indexes were down 5.7% and 3.4%, respectively.

On a state level, North Dakota had the highest year-over-year increase in defect frequency at 19.6%, followed by Kentucky, Utah, Missouri and the District of Columbia. The metropolitan area with the highest year-over-year jump was Louisville, Ky.

Conversely, Michigan was the state with the biggest year-over-year drop in defect frequency with a 15.5% decline, followed by West Virginia, Alabama, New Mexico, Oregon and Mississippi. Similarly, Detroit had the biggest decrease of any metropolitan area at negative 19.4%.

First American's report continued to look at emerging issues across the South that are contributing to higher levels of misrepresentation and fraud risk, after focusing on the impacts of the downturn in energy prices in Texas and the high concentration of condominiums in Florida. In particular, the report noted that Oklahoma and South Carolina are emerging as riskier markets.

Misrepresentation and fraud risk is up in Oklahoma by 8.4% year-over-year and in South Carolina by 7.4%. Similarly, the major metro areas of Tulsa, Okla., and Charleston, S.C., have seen their risk increase by more than 10% from 2015. While Oklahoma can attribute its higher risk in part to the weakness in the energy sector, the two states have a factor in common: agriculture.

"Agricultural commodities, such as corn, rice, cotton and wheat, have all suffered significant price declines in the last few years," said Fleming. "As in the energy sector, slowing global economic growth has triggered a decline in demand for agricultural commodities relative to supply. In addition, strong demand for U.S. bonds has increased the strength of the U.S. dollar and made agricultural exports more expensive abroad."

Falling prices for agricultural goods is likely to create economic distress, which in turn could increase the incentive for loan application misrepresentation or fraud, Fleming added.
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc (R) and his Chinese guest (Photo: VNA)



Vietnam persistently pursues a foreign policy of independence, self-reliance, peace, multilateralisation and diversification of relations, while attaching much importance to consolidating and enhancing friendship and relations, as well as comprehensive collaboration with China, the Prime Minister said.

Prime Minister Phuc said the cooperation between Guizhou province and Vietnamese localities across fields of economics, trade and investment, has not been on par with two sides potentials, hence it should be strengthened in the time ahead.

He asked Guizhou province to boost imports from Vietnam, especially agro-forestry-fishery products, encourage its enterprises to invest in Vietnam, as well as facilitate business activities of Vietnamese companies in the province.

For his part, Chen Miner underscored that the result-oriented relations between Vietnam and China will give momentum to strengthen Vietnam-Guizhou collaboration.

He said education cooperation with Vietnam as Guizhous top priority, adding that the province will continue to offer scholarships and create favourable conditions for Vietnamese students to study in the province.

Four universities in Guizhou province have set up relations with Vietnamese universities, helping promote two sides collaboration in the field, he added.

Expressing his delights over the rapid trade growth between Vietnam and Guizhou, Chen Miner said that the province will speed up the construction of a highway connecting Kunming and Nanning provinces in the coming time to enhance comprehensive cooperation between Vietnam and the Chinese province./.
Secretary Peng Qinghua and Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong (Source:VNA)



Talking to Secretary of the Party Committee of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China, Peng Qinghua during a reception in Hanoi, the Party General Secretary also laid stress on Guangxis significant role in Vietnam - China ties.

He suggested Guangxi and Vietnamese localities focus efforts on effectively realising common perceptions reached by the two countries leaders and further improve the efficiency of their collaboration across all areas.

The Party official of Guangxi briefed his host about the development of ties between Guangxi and Vietnams border localities, affirming that the authorities and people of the Guangxi Zhuang region wished to strengthen economic connectivity and practical partnership with Vietnams border provinces, thus building a borderline of peace, friendship, stability and prosperity between the two countries.

During a reception for the Chinese guest earlier, head of the Party Central Committees Organisation Commission Pham Minh Chinh called for stronger links between Vietnamese localities and Guangxi across the fields of economy, trade, investment, infrastructure connectivity, cultural exchange and tourism./.
During his two-day visit to Finland, the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, General Petr Pavel met with the President of Finland, Mr Sauli Niinisto, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Timo Soini, Finnish Minister of Defence, Dr. Jussi Niinisto and Chief of Defence, General Jarmo Lindberg. Discussions focused on regional security and NATO-Finnish military cooperation and interoperability.

Finnish cooperation with NATO is based on the country's long-standing policy of military non-alignment and firm national political consensus. Cooperation has been reinforced over the years since Finland joined NATOs Partnership for Peace programme in 1994, most recently in 2014 when Finland became one of NATO's Enhanced Opportunity Partners at the Summit in Wales.

General Pavel and the Finnish political and military leaders exchanged views on the security developments in the Baltic region, NATO and Finnish Defence Forces adaptation to the changed security environment and practical aspects of military cooperation between NATO and Finland. The discussions concluded with the General highlighting NATO's preparations in the run up to the Warsaw Summit in July. The Chairman was "impressed with the level of adaptation on the part of the Finnish Defence Forces" and commended General Lindberg for "Finland's active partnership with NATO, as evidenced through participation in NATO-led missions and operations, the NATO Response Force, training and exercises, trust funds, cyber defence and other activities that contribute to greater interoperability and security."

As part of his visit, the Chairman visited the Gulf of Finland Coast Guard District Command Centre and received briefings by the Finnish Border Guard and Navy on Maritime Authorities Cooperation and Common Maritime Surveillance Picture.

General Pavel also delivered an address to the Finnish National Defence Course Association on NATO on the way to Warsaw" and responded to questions from the audience of Finnish senior civilian and military leaders.
The only way of cutting off the constant stream of idiots and imbeciles and feeble-minded persons who help to fill our prisons and workhouses, reformatories, and asylums is to prevent those who are known to be mentally defective from producing offspring. Undoubtedly the best way of doing this is to place these defectives under control. Even if this were a hardship to the individual it would be necessary for the sake of protecting the race.



Breeding "perfect" children

Hailed as a discovery, not a theory

(NaturalNews) It was a goal of Adolf Hitler, and it is a term that today's researchers don't really like to use, but the effort to scientifically create a sort of "master race" or super-human  still exists today and, as it turns out, Britain is taking the lead.As reported by, the idea of breeding the best with the best so as to weed out the inferior was an idea that was being entertained in England at the turn of the 20th century. A May 1912 edition of the magazine actually reported the following:Hitler, of course, took this notion to the extreme, murdering millions he deemed inferior to the "Master Aryan Race" as an insurance policy against creating citizens who were mentally or physically, as they were once thought to be.In the early 20th century methods of encouraging and fomenting the eugenics mission were simplistic and crude. The "right" people were bribed to have larger families, while the weakest were sterilized. Today, however, advances in in-vitro fertilization (IVF) technology already allow science to screen embryos for inherited diseases like cystic fibrosis. Soon, however, parents will have the ability to check their prospective offspring for any number of traits, from hair color to character, giving them the ability  allegedly  to pick the "perfect" child."The era of designer babies, long portrayed by dystopian novelists and screenwriters, is fast arriving,"reported. "According to Hank Greely, a Stanford professor in law and biosciences, the next couple of generations may be the last to accept pot luck with procreation. Doing so, he adds, may soon be seen as downright irresponsible."And based upon how certain issues are propagandized today, you can easily see that happening: Before the Obama era, for instance, cops were good; working hard and making a great living were positive things; and freedom of expression included all sides of an argument.In Greely's forthcoming book,, he outlines a brave new world where mothers are given a menu of sorts that contains various biological options. But even he won't use the word () that describes what he is envisioning. Greely, and nearly all involved in these new biotech developments, avoid use of the word, pretending that history has not made a full circle.notes that the word was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a polymath who developed fingerprinting and many of the modern statistical research techniques. He began with a theory  a hunch, really  and it was that so many great men come from the same families because genius is hereditary.Intrigued by the arguments about evolution by his cousin Charles Darwin, Galton began to wonder if advances in healthcare and welfare had soured the national gene pool by allowing more sick and infirmed to survive and disabled people to not only live longer but also reproduce. Off he went to collect his data, only to return with his theory of eugenics "This was hailed not as a theory but as a discovery  a new science of human life, with laws as immutable as Newton's,"noted. "A race of gifted men could be created, he said, 'as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins.'"There is much more  read the full report here In January, we reported that research on eugenics technology is also taking place, big time, in the U.S., here
Fraudster deceived many while taking bicycle rides, reading and staying at expensive hotels

Ordering investigation of 'rogue employee' commendable



(NaturalNews) While EPA staff members working with the agency's top climate expert , John C. Beale, believed that Beale was involved in undercover CIA operations that often necessitated his absence from work, the reality was that Beale was making the entire story up. He never worked with the CIA at all; instead of heading to Pakistan or helping a CIA replacement who had been captured and tortured  as Beale told his EPA colleagues was the case  the reality is that he was often lounging around his home participating in various hobbies."Why did I do this? Greed - simple greed - and I'm ashamed of that greed," Beale said in court, where he was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison on the grounds of defrauding the government. Additionally, he'll be paying $1.3 million in restitution and forfeiture to the government.He pleaded guilty to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits over the course of 10 years. EPA Assistant Inspector General, Patrick Sullivan, noted that Beale's crime was one "of massive proportions."Prosecutors called it "offensive" to those who truly do engage in dangerous work for the CIA.In an NBC video, Sullivan provided details. He explained that Beale  who ultimately earned over $200,000 annually  started out by telling people that he was working on undercover CIA assignments . No one questioned this or looked into the matter, trusting that a top climate change expert would have no reason to lie about something so serious. This went on for years, all while he was really living the high life at the expense of the U.S. government and taxpayers.Sullivan says in the video regarding Beale, that, "by his own admission to us, he said he was riding his bicycle, he was reading books and working around his house." Sullivan also noted that Beale enjoyed traveling around the world first class while staying at posh hotels. "Mr. Beale was very adept at being deceptive and he fooled a lot of people. In 1994, he began to spin the web that he was a CIA operative. He started out with his family and friends and slowly it morphed into the workplace."It was also reported that he would head to his Cape Cod vacation home where he'd relax when he should have been at work at the EPA. In addition, he had the audacity to bill tax payers for 33 flights taken during an eight-year period for personal reasons, including trips to California and London. Between the flights, stays in fancy hotels, limo rides and pricey meals, the cost to taxpayers exceeded $266,000.EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, to whom Beale reported directly, learned that Beale had remained on the payroll for 18 months after his retirement party  a party he threw for himself while still collecting a salary and still weaving his web of lies. This prompted McCarthy to order an investigation that led to his criminal charges and subsequent sentences.Although some people have criticized McCarthy for not recognizing that something was wrong sooner  after all, they worked together for several years and she never noticed anything was unusual  there are those who support her. "I commend the EPA administrator ... for taking steps to shine a light on the actions of this rogue employee, and her actions helped uncover these crimes," said Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Boxer is also the chair of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee.Before Beale chose to live a life of deceit and fraud, he was responsible for helping to rewrite the Clean Air Act in 1990. Beale also helped lead climate change conferences and was involved with negotiating carbon emissions agreements in China and India.
The overuse and misuse of antibiotics

Going back to nature to address the problem

(NaturalNews) Although antibiotics have helped humanity prevent bacterial infections in the short-term, their overuse and misuse have spurred major health problems in the long-term . Many infections have evolved resistance to antibiotics, giving rise to the dawn of superbugs . As a result, some scientists are turning to nature to address the problem of global antibiotic resistance. According to a new study published online in the journal, willow herb extracts could serve as an antidote in therapies against multi-drug resistant bacteria.Antibiotic resistance is a major concern among health professionals, and poses an existential threat to the public at large. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. This led to the introduction of antibiotics, which helped reduce the number of deaths from infection. Unfortunately, the overuse of antibiotics fostered the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Many strains of bacteria are becoming resistant to even the most potent antibiotics, triggering deadly infections. These infections account for nearly 23,000 deaths in the U.S. alone.The World Health Organization (WHO) has noted that several common infections that plague humanity are fueled by antibiotic resistance, including urinary tract infections, pneumonia and bloodstream infections. According to the WHO's website, "A high percentage of hospital-acquired infections are caused by highly resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) or multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria." Antimicrobial resistance could be even more deadly than cancer by 2050, reports theBacteria are excellent at adapting to their environment. Usually brought about by genetic mutations, antibiotic resistance is accelerated by the over-prescription of antibiotics. They are also pumped into animals on factory farms in order to producer leaner meat.reported that 80 percent of all antibiotics are given to livestock in the United States.With regard to the overuse of antibiotics on factory farms, Malaysian medic Dr. S. Subramaniam recently advised, "We should take cognizance of the fact that there is high usage of antibiotics in agriculture and evidence that resistance that emerged from agriculture use can be transferred to man and may cause treatment failure of clinically significant infections."In addressing the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, nature may have the answer. A common herb known as the willow herb could help mitigate antibiotic use and ease the severity of side-effects in treatments against multi-drug resistant microorganisms. In particular, a recent study suggests that an extract of willow herb, in combination with conventional antimicrobials, can help increase the effectiveness of treatments against specific pathogens.The Willow herbs belong to the orderand have long been prized for their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties . They've been known to ease problems associated with the prostate gland and urinary tract. New tests verify that common antibiotics, in conjunction with great willow herb extracts, may be used to help treat bacterial and fungal infections.The research was conducted in Romania, where scientists from the National Institute of Chemical-Pharmaceutical R&D, ICCF-Bucharest, tested herb extracts in combination with antimicrobials. The researchers then screened the extracts, which were chock full of phenolic acids and flavonoids, for their antibacterial effect against specific bacterial and fungal strains. The team observed a significant syngergistic effect that warranted further investigation.The authors of the study suggest that willow herb extracts could help reduce antibiotic doses, thereby decelerating antibacterial resistance among micro-organisms. Some bacterial and fungal infections can be better treated with willow herb extract than with therapies consisting of antibiotics alone."These results could be useful for the area of herbal medicines and as potential candidates in managing microbial resistance, but also for physicians and pharmacists using combined antibacterial therapy," the authors of the study concluded.
Phony success rates

Faked data

Widening vaccine scandal

(NaturalNews) In case you hadn't heard, there is something going on at the Harvard University campus that isn't supposed to happen: There is a widening outbreak of mumps, and all the students who have contracted the disease thus far had already been vaccinated for the disease.As reported by, the most recent mumps outbreak began with a whimper in February, after two students were confirmed to have developed the disease. But within a few weeks, the number grew to 16, then 30, and now there are about 40 students with confirmed cases of mumps.Dr. Paul J. Barreira, director of the Massachusetts university's health services, told the student newspaper that the rise in cases is disconcerting."I'm actually more concerned now than I was during any time of the outbreak," Barreira told . "I'm desperate to get students to take seriously that they shouldn't be infecting one another."What's more, it doesn't appear as though Harvard and local medical officials think the outbreak will be controlled anytime soon, as Barreira warned that the school's May 26 commencement may be affected."If there's a spike this week, that means those students expose others, so now we're looking at a potential serious interruption to commencement for students," Barreira told the student newspaper. "Students will get infected and then go into isolation."None of what is happening at Harvard  and the school's panicked response to it  is surprising, though no doubt millions of Americans hearing about the story are scratching their heads in confusion. Why? Because vaccines, we have had drummed into our heads for years by Big Pharma and government drug pushers Only they don't, quite obviously. Maybe it's because vaccines  especially the MMR (mumps, measles and rubella) vaccines  really don't deliver as promised."The CDC claims the mumps vaccine is 76 to 95 percent effective, but they offer no scientific evidence whatsoever to support that claim. To date, there has never been a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled study published on the mumps vaccine in humans. The so-called 'scientific' evidence supporting these vaccines is purely imaginary," wrote Mike Adams, the Health Ranger and editor ofThat claim was borne out a few years later, when he reported that two Merck scientists who filed a False Claims Act complaint in 2010  a complaint which has just now been unsealed  accused vaccine manufacturer Merck of knowingly falsifying its mumps vaccine test data, spiking blood samples with animal antibodies, selling a vaccine that actuallymumps and measles outbreaks, and ripping off governments and consumers who bought the vaccine thinking it was "95% effective."As per the former Merck virologists, Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, the company engaged in the following misconduct:-- Merck knowingly falsified its mumps vaccine test results to fabricate a "95% efficacy rate."-- In order to do this, Merckin order to artificially inflate the appearance of immune system antibodies.And, as reported byIn January 2015, Adams reported further that the court documents filed by the Merck virologists revealed additional shocking information, namely:
Hero dog who rescued seven people trapped under the earthquake rubble in Ecuador has died.

Dayko, according to several reports, has suffered massive coronary myocardial infarction and acute respiratory failure due to exhaustion and severe heat.

He died, even after veterinarians tried to save his life after he collapsed.

The labrador was part of the rescue team who saved lives of people who were left under the debris when Ecuador was hit by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that left the country devastated.

"We regret to inform you that today the [fire service] is in mourning because [we] just lost Dayko who participated in the work of searching in Pedernales. This four legged friend gave his life in the line of duty. Thank you Dayko for your heroic efforts in Pedernales and in various emergencies where you were present," the City ofIbarra Fire Department said, in a Facebook post.



In addition,photos of the four-year-old hero dog was posted on social media as tribute to his heroism.

According to Huffingtonpost, Dayko received a massive sendoff, with a funeral attended by dozens of firefighters and other rescue workers as well as his fellow rescue dogs.

More than 2,000 people were injured and at least 654 people have been killed, in the quake on April 16.

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.

Rescue/Disaster dogs, just like Dayko have long been used for rescue operation because of their instinct and ablity to sniff human scent. According to United States Search and Rescue Task Force, "a disaster dog is trained to find human scent in very unnatural environments, including collapsed structures and areas effected by tornadoes, earthquakes and other disasters. This dog is trained to work on unstable surfaces, in small, confined spaces and other settings not usually found in the wilderness."
Life literally begins with fireworks.

Scientists from Northwestern University in Chicago confirm there's a spark of light when sperm meets an egg.

According to the article published in the website of the Northwestern University, the group activated the egg by injecting a sperm enzyme into the egg that triggers calcium to increase within the egg and zinc to be released from the egg.

"As the zinc is released from the egg, it binds to small molecule probes, which emit light in fluorescence microscopy experiments. Thus the rapid zinc release can be followed as a flash of light that appears as a spark," the article on the website reads.

Although the phenomenon has already been witnessed in mice, this marks the first time zinc sparks have been documented in a human egg. Science Alerts reported that they used new fluorescent sensor that's able to track the movements of zinc in live cells.

The researchers call it "remarkable" and "breathtaking."

But more than the spectacle, the study is seen as a great help in the field of ovarian biology. Through the discovery, doctors may be able to choose the best eggs to transfer during in vitro fertilization (IVF).

First author Francesca Duncan, who made the human zinc spark discovery said it is a conserved phenomenon which will help doctors identify a "good egg."

The researchers noticed that some of the eggs burn brighter than others, showing that they are more likely to produce a healthy baby.

"This means if you can look at the zinc spark at the time of fertilization, you will know immediately which eggs are the good ones to transfer in in vitro fertilization (IVF). It's a way of sorting egg quality in a way we've never been able to assess before," Teresa Woodruff, one of the study's two senior authors and an expert in ovarian biology at Northwestern University remarks.

Telegraph notes that at present around half of fertilized eggs do not develop well and most experts workout the cases by relying on observing videos of the egg while developing and checking for genetic mutations via invasive procedure which can damage the tiny egg.

But with this discovery, detection of healthier eggs will be easier.

"This is an important discovery because it may give us a non-invasive and easily visible way to assess the health of an egg and eventually an embryo before implantation," said co-author Dr. Eve Feinberg, a physician at Fertility Centers of Illinois (FCI) and soon to be medical director of Northwestern Medicine's Fertility and Reproductive Medicine division.

The research study was published in the newest issue of Scientific Report.
Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia are the countries prone to high levels of PSI or unhealthy levels of toxic air or haze. This is due to forest burning to make way for palm oil industries. According to authorities, one major contributor of haze and air pollution is the palm oil production in the Asian region. But lately, a drop in oil production means that the authorities are firm and serious about fighting air pollution in the region.

Indonesian Prime Minister Joko Widodo is not against palm oil production being one of the top industries in the country. He believes however that to curb the problem when it comes to toxic haze, they should put a halt on making new plantations, and instead regulate and properly develop existing plantations so as to produce greater numbers of palm oil and at the same time become less hazardous to the environment.

Even today, the haze in Kalimantan is still considered toxic, prompting civic groups to declare a state of emergency according to the Asia Foundation. According to the foundation, the clearing of forests to make way for palm oil plantations are one of the main causes of agricultural fires which will then cause toxic haze. Last January this year, Joko Widodo also established Indonesia's first Peatland Restoration Agency. The aim of the agency is to restore two million hectares of land by 2019. They will also limit burning of forests to prevent further air pollution.

In a report by Indonesian Investments, Riset Perkebunan Nusantara, a research firm, expects a 4.2 percent palm oil production drop in 2016. "The firm further adds that in 2015 Indonesia had a total of 11.3 million hectares of palm oil plantation, consisting of plantations owned by the state (750,000 hectares), plantations owned by the private sector (5.97 million hectares) and plantations owned by smallholders (4.58 million hectares). The palm oil sector is one of Indonesia's key foreign exchange earners. Indonesia is the world's largest producer and exporter of palm oil, followed by Malaysia."

The Malaysian government is also firm in the fight against air pollution. The government plans to amend the Environmental Protection Act, according to Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar, of the Natural Resources and Environment Minister.

Reuters quoted Jaafar in a conference when he said that under the amendment "It will not matter if the land is owned by smallholders or plantation giants, as long as there is a substantial fire the government will take control of the land."

Although these measures will definitely result to lower palm oil production, both countries are firm to curb toxic haze and they are willing to sacrifice the gains of the plantations to be able to alleviate air pollution.

The air pollution in the region have reached hazardous levels alarming the government not just in Indonesia and Malaysia but also the neighboring countries and various world environmental organizations.
If there's one thing Russian officials are careful of, that is not to displease their President, Vladimir Putin. But the recently cancelled launched of a Russian unmanned aircraft angered the leader who then asked for a shake-up with the Russian space agency to limit the "glitches" which caused the delay in their space programs.

Last April 27, the Russian cosmodome was scheduled for lift-off, President Putin was on site to witness the launch, but it was cancelled due to technical problems. Obviously, the strict leader wasn't pleased with the news.

Telegraph said "The Soyuz 2.1a rocket decked with a Russian flag and carrying three satellites failed to lift off at 02:01 GMT from the launchpad, around 5,600 kilometres (3,500 miles) east of Moscow."

In a report by BBC, they said that the Soyuz launch in Vostochny space port, for their Cosmodrome, about 5,500km (3,500 miles) east of Moscow, was cancelled minutes before the lift-off. Officials said it was due to mechanical failure.

Officials blamed a mechanical failure, and the launch was rescheduled for Thursday. BBC quoted the President saying "The fact is there is a large number of hitches," Putin is expected to stay there until the reschedule launch this Thursday.

The project has been delayed for some time now, four members of the agency was already arrested. The president said "If their guilt is proven, they will have to change their warm beds at home for plank-beds in prison."

It is said that the President scolded space chief, according to the Telegraph. In a press conference, Putin said "Despite all its failings, Russia remains the world leader in the number of space launches...But the fact that we're encountering a large number of failures is bad. There must be a timely and professional reaction." Clearly, the annoyed leader expressed his disappointed towards his chief due to the

Roscosmos spokesman Igor Burenkov told a radio station that it was technical malfunction and that the spacecraft was fine. According to some experts the delays was caused by many factors, it is a new and it is better to deal with disappointments now than after the lift-off.

Vadim Lukashevich told Telegraph that aside from technical glitch, Putin's presence could have caused the delay as well. "The military and everyone who launches rockets have a concept of 'visit effect'. When top authorities come, there is nervousness and greater possibility of error."

While in a report by Reuters, they said that the technical problems experience by the Russian agency is worrisome for both Russia and the U.S. because NASA have entrusted Roscosmos to fly their astronauts to the International Space Station.

However, despite the setback, Putin is decided to make resurrect the Russian space programs. They hold the record for sending the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. He said in a press conference "We have a lot of work in front of us, and it's daunting. But, beyond all doubt, this is ... a very serious step forward in the development of Russia's space exploration."
The assistance will be provided through an ongoing USD4 million New Zealand Government funded project in the province Building resilience to disaster and climate risks of the people in Ben Tre, implemented by Oxfam in Vietnam. The emergency relief responds to urgent needs of 15 most affected communes in Binh Dai, Ba Tri, and Thanh Phu districts.

Photo: Phuong Dung

Photo: Phuong Dung



Photo: Phuong Dung



Accordingly, up to 6,000 cow and goat farmers will receive cash grants, to buy food and water supplies for their animals, which they are dependent on for their livelihoods.

We recognise the serious impact that the drought and saltwater intrusion is having on communities in southern and central region. This assistance is a modest, but practical contribution to the communities we are already working with through our existing project, and is an example of New Zealands ongoing commitment to supporting vulnerable communities across Vietnam, said New Zealand Ambassador to Vietnam, Haike Manning.

New Zealand will continue sharing its experience and working closely with our partners, such as Oxfam, to assist local communities to deal with drought and saltwater intrusion and the effects of climate change in the Mekong Delta region.

In addition, Oxfam is working in collaboration with the Ben Tre province to provide safe drinking water to more than 6,000 local citizens.

According to Oxfam Country Director Babeth Lefur, the drought and saltwater intrusion has made hundreds of thousands of families more serious, while most of them are already living under poverty line. Oxfam also commits to implement this emergency response at the highest responsibility and efficiency./.



Nine out of thirteen Mekong Delta provinces are facing one of the worst droughts the region has seen in ninety years. Trigged by El Nino, the drought is having significant impact by limiting agricultural production, straining livelihoods, and exacerbating food insecurity among poor and vulnerable communities in the region. For Ben Tre province alone, some 164 communes have been in the historical effected list. It was among the first provinces declaring drought and saltwater intrusion disaster status and requesting support from the central government.
The water crisis in Flint, Michigan seems far from over, but at least there is some hope as President Barack Obama announced a visit to the city and the Senate reached a deal on grants and loans for better water infrastructure.

The Detroit Free Press reported that the White House has confirmed Obama's visit to Flint next Wednesday, May 4, to listen firsthand to the residents about the public health crisis stemming from their lead-contaminated water. The president will also address their concerns and deliver a message to the community.

Obama's visit is a response to a letter to the president by an 8-year-old Flint child named Amariyanna Copeny. The White House released her letter, where she told the Chief Executive that she is affected by the water crisis and that she has traveled to Washington DC to listen to congressional hearings about their pressing problem.

Copeny, also known as "Little Miss Flint," also wrote that she has been actively marching and speaking out on the crisis being faced by her city and its people, particularly her fellow children.

Mari Copeny's letter to president by Detroit Free Press

While she did not get to meet Obama during her trip to the capital, the president responded to her letter on April 25, saying that while presidents may be busy, the most important people are still the citizens.

Through the letter, the young girl became the first person to know of Obama's visit.

"I want to make sure people like you and your family are receiving the help you need and deserve," he wrote.

He added that letters from children like her give him optimism for the future and that he hopes to meet her during his visit next week.

This will be Obama's first visit to Flint after the crisis reached national spotlight.

MLive reported that the city broke through national stories after high blood lead levels were discovered in some Flint children after the city tapped its water source from the Flint River in April 2014 to save money. State regulators did not require the river water to be treated and the lead from aging pipes and plumbing contaminated the water supply.

At present, the city reconnected to the Detroit water system but officials said the water still has lead levels higher than federal standards.

Obama declared a federal emergency on January 16, freeing up $5 million in federal aid.

The crisis has also recently pushed the Senate to reach a bipartisan agreement to authorize $100 million for grants and loans to replace the contaminated pipes in Flint and other cities with similar emergencies, ABCNews reported.

Democratic Senators Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters of Michigan and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. formed the deal that would also give $70 million nationwide in credit subsidies for loans for better water infrastructure and $50 million for lead prevention programs.

This is the second time in two months that the Senate has reached a deal.

In a statement, Peters said the people of Flint are "in dire need of assistance," with Stabenow adding that they are "not giving up until it gets done."
A "Cats in Space" themed LED lightsaber battle is scheduled to take over St. James Park in San Jose on Saturday.

Toronto event producers Newmindspace, who threw a bubble-blowing party in San Francisco's Dolores Park in 2015, have been throwing lightsaber battles internationally for years, including one last December in San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza.

Newmindspace's battles used to have a Star Wars theme until Lucasfilm came calling; post-settlement with the Bay Area company and they're now called "space battles" and can't technically refer to the fighting weapon as a lightsaber.

For $10 participants will be reserved lighted stick, with a portion of the proceeds donated to Make-A-Wish Foundation.
California fire investigators on Thursday released a report saying that negligence by Pacific Gas and Electric was to blame for starting the Sierra wildfire last year that destroyed 71,000 acres, killed two people and did more than a billion dollars in damage.

The report shows that the blaze began after PG&E crews did not properly prune a pine tree that later leaned onto a PG&E power line, triggering the blaze.

PG&E sent out a statement addressing the findings:

First and foremost, our thoughts and prayers continue to be with the victims and the communities who suffered losses as a result of the Butte fire. We are committed to doing the right thing for them and to promptly resolving their claims. We have already begun to address many claims.

We want to thank CAL FIRE and all first responders for their bravery and commitment in responding to this major fire. We cooperated fully with CAL FIREs investigation of the fire and we appreciate the thoroughness of its report.

Based on our preliminary review, we accept the reports finding that a tree made contact with a power line, but we do not believe it is clear what caused the tree to fail or that vegetation management practices fell short.

Effective vegetation management is critically important to fire safety and we want to reassure all of our customers and their families that we are unequivocally committed to their safety. We monitor approximately 50 million trees a year and we trim or remove more than one million trees annually.

Our vegetation management program is among the very best in the industry and was expanded in 2014 in response to Californias historic drought to include special air and foot patrols, funding for lookout towers and cameras for early fire detection and funding for fire fuel reduction and emergency access projects and public education.

Despite these efforts, we recognize the hardships that this terrible fire caused and we are committed to helping our friends and neighbors recover.

The Sept. 9, 2015 Butte blaze was the seventh most destructive wildfire in California history. The flames scorched 900 structures and took 22 days to knock down.

State officials now want PG&E to pay $90 million to help pay the costs of enlisting nearly 5,000 firefighters to battle the blaze.

PG&E has said that officials repeatedly checked the tree before and it was not identified as at risk before the fire. The pine tree was on private land off Butte mountain road near the town of Jackson in Amador County.

The investigation cites the utility giant and two contract tree trimming companies, ACRT Inc. and Trees Inc., for violating the states health and safety codes. The report specifically cites a decision made in the year before the fire, to cut two at-risk trees in the area around the tree that later triggered the fire.

The prior trimming left the lone tree prone to failure from wind gusts. The investigation found the company and its crew missed warning signs in at least two prior inspections, thus violating state codes.
A San Jose high school is making a bold statement in the midst of a nationwide debate over gender rights.

Lincoln High School is changing some of its restrooms to be usable by any gender. District and campus officials said the change is part of a goal of taking a stand for what it calls "inclusive culture."

Two all-gender restrooms were installed on campus this week. The idea of setting up the gender-neutral restrooms, in addition to the usual gender-specific facilities, came from a school-wide student recommendation.

"Because so many students have been complaining about not feeling safe when they go to the restroom," student Israel Diaz said. "They're not sure which restroom to use and now we're able to go to whichever restroom we feel most comfortable."

The head of youth support group Silicon Valley Faces agrees.

"I think it's a big step for an administration to say 'Yes, we're going to move in that direction,'" said Pat Mitchell, Silicon Valley Faces executive director.

South Bay Congressman Mike Honda contacted Washington, D.C. and anticipates the campus' decision will resonate nationally.

"You know the governor of North Carolina should have waited until he talked with these students," Honda said.

Diaz also thinks the campus change will have a national impact.

"It could have an impact on other schools so that they see that it's been positive feedback from the rest of the Lincoln students," he said. "So they'll see that we're very happy."
Chicago Police announced Wednesday that they arrested more than 70 people in two massive raids on the North and West Sides since Friday.

The "vice and narcotics enforcement operations" targeted three specific street gangs, police said, with 20 arrests on the North Side and 50 on the city's West Side. Police said the intent of the operations were to go after drug sales, the primary source of street gang revenue.

At a press conference Wednesday, police said the gangs were selling fentanyl-laced heroin.

"We targeted those locations due to community complaints and information from the alderman's office," said Commander Tom Waldera of the Bureau of Narcotics. "It resulted in over 50 arrests. Of those, half were within a thousand feet of a public school which is an enhanced charge we like to make sure we include in our operations."

"It is so, so bad out here," said Daryl Lobb, a West Side resident who has lived in his neighborhood for more than ten years. "I mean, where you're afraid to walk down the streets."

Police are now planning what are called "wraparound missions" to keep the gangs from coming back.

"Officers from different parts of the city will work together with the community and make sure these bad actors don't come back and understand what's been done and how we want to make a positive change in these areas," said Commander Sean Loughran.

The arrests are designed to send a message.

"Of these 50 arrests, 46 of these guys are convicted felons, so we are getting the right guys. We are not getting the low level guys or the guys that are occasionally using or buying," said Commander Anthony Riccio of the Bureau of Organized Crime.

"We're getting the guys that are hard core street gang members. 46 convicted felons, almost all street gang members, so we're getting the right guys when we have these missions," Riccio added.

Officers also detailed the "Strategic Subject List," or SSL, which is the Department's algorithm to determine an individual's likelihood to be a victim of or to cause gun violence in Chicago, based on several factors including previous police contact, affiliations with gang members, and more.
A suburban Cincinnati man charged with murder in his wife's shooting death is a former suburban Chicago police officer.

Elk Grove Village Police Chief Stephen Schmidt says 57-year-old Jeffrey Hawkins resigned in 1999 when the department started investigating a complaint that he used unnecessary force during an arrest.

Police said Hawkins surrendered to officers at his Colerain Township home after the call Monday morning. He had told authorities his wife, 59-year-old Jo Ann Hawkins, cleaned out their bank account on Saturday  his birthday  and refused to talk to him Monday before he shot her multiple times with a .40-caliber handgun.

Asked by the dispatcher if he was still armed, he replied: "It's (the gun) on the sink. I'm not a threat to anybody. I'm a former police officer."

Hawkins identifies himself on social media as a public safety and security professional who received police training in Chicago.

His composure cracked after the dispatcher asked him what exactly had happened. He said he had called police Saturday when money was taken from their account while he was away. His wife wouldn't explain, he said.

"She just kept saying, 'Talk to my lawyer.' And I don't know, it just happened," he said, choking up. The dispatcher urged him to stay calm.

"God forgive me," he said, then said he heard sirens.

Hawkins was charged with murder. A Hamilton County judge set $3 million bond on Tuesday, pending grand jury action next week. A phone message was left for his attorney.

Hawkins was with Elk Grove Village police from 1990 to 1999. A spokeswoman for Chicago's Field Museum says he worked as a security officer there from 1999 to 2003.

The village issued a statement saying that the department hasn't had contact with Hawkins since he resigned.
A man was charged Wednesday with seven felony counts in connection with the shooting of a police officer Monday afternoon.

Rafael Martir-Ubiles, 25, of the 2400 block of S St Louis Ave, has been charged with:

One felony count of Aggravated Battery to a Peace Officer

One felony count of Unlawful Possession of a Firearm by Street Gang Member on Person

One felony count of Reckless Conduct causing Great Bodily Harm

Two felony counts Resisting/Obstructing a Peace Officer

One felony count of Aggravated Assault with a weapon to a Peace Officer

One felony count of Aggravated Unlawful Possession of a Loaded Firearm with out a FOID card

The officer was shot and another officer injured in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood on Monday shortly before 4:30 p.m., police said.

The officer was shot in the shoulder during a foot pursuit of an armed man near the 2300 block of South Trumbull Avenue. A second officer suffered a minor cut to his hand, according to Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson.

A Chicago police officer was shot and another officer was injured while chasing an armed suspect in Chicagos Little Village neighborhood Monday afternoon, authorities said. Katie Kim and Trina Orlando report.

Johnson said both officers were on routine patrol when they saw three people who appeared to be doing something suspicious. As they approached the group, one man fled the scene.

At some point during the foot chase, an officer was shot. The suspect was hit with a Taser by that officer's partner and taken into custody, Johnson said.

The officer shot did not suffer life-threatening injuries.

"This is an example of officers being proactive, doing what we want them to do, the right way, and this happens to them," Johnson said. "But again, that just illustrates that we have too many guns out here on the streets of Chicago."

The other two suspects fled the scene and remain at large.

This marks the fifth time this year that a Chicago police officer has been shot in the line of duty. That's up from zero at this time last year.
Three students involved in a fight at a Delaware school in which a teenager died have been suspended, according to a school official.

New Castle County Vo-Tech School District spokeswoman Kathy Demarest says the girls have been out of Howard High School of Technology since the assault last week. Sixteen-year-old Amy Joyner-Francis was killed in the confrontation.

Students who knew about the fight said they believe it was sparked by a dispute over a boy.

Joyner-Francis's brother, Anthony Joyner, said in a statement released by police that the family is "very hurt from this loss" and "appreciate the outpouring of love."

But, he added, people are spreading false rumors, including some about purported internet fundraising accounts.

"We are seeing many sick people out in the world who want to gain money and social fame off my family's loss of Amy. We want everyone who is truly concerned for us not to fall victim to the scams going on out around the Internet," Anthony Joyner said. "I am the only one on social media, any other family (her mother, father, or brothers) do not have accounts. She does not have a sister as someone is claiming to be. All others will be fake. We have not set up and will not set up any fundraisers or go fund me accounts, they are fake pages and accounts are spreading hateful lies, so please do not lose your money or entertain the lies of these cruel people."

He said anyone interested in making a donation can do so in his sister's name to the Congo Funeral Home, Wilmington.

"Thank you all for your love and support to my family in this time," Anthony Joyner said.

The girls' removal from the school was first reported by The News Journal.

Wilmington Police Chief Bobby Cummings says charges will be filed in the case, possibly by the end of the week.

School officials are hosting parent meetings this week to help address concerns and explain what counseling services are available at the school.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage is apologizing and vowing to cut back on public appearances after clashing with two student protesters Tuesday at the University of Maine's Farmington campus and them "idiots."

LePage spoke at a building dedication for former President Theo Kalikow on campus, but abruptly stormed out of the ceremony just a few sentences into his speech when two student protesters held up posters in the back of the audience.

"We did try to stay in the back because our goal was not to disrespect the event," said Ally Hammond, who held up a sign that read "LePage, Maine's Shame."

Video from the event shows LePage pause, then say, "I'm done," and walk away from the podium. He can be heard saying he's "not in the mood" as he walks out, and yell to the protesters, "Thank you, you idiots  in the back with the signs."

The students said they were shocked by LePage's response, but not sorry.

"He's faced severe criticism in the past, and all we did was hold up two signs," said Nick Bray. "He had an obnoxious reaction to it."

In a statement released Wednesday afternoon by his press secretary, LePage apologized to school officials and Kalikow but not to the students.

"First and foremost, I apologize to President Foster and especially to Theodora Kalikow for the sequence of events on Tuesday," LePage said in the statement. "I am accustomed to daily attacks and ridicule from protestors [sic], but most people are not. Neither Theo, nor the people who were gathered to honor her, deserved for this heartfelt occasion to be disrespected by smug and self-serving protestors [sic]. If they wish to protest me, that's fine: we all have the right to express our freedom of speech. But this event was not about me. I was sickened by the lack of respect displayed by two protestors [sic] holding up demeaning signs  including one with Theo's name on it."

The sign the governor called "demeaning" actually praised Kalikow for her record on the environment. Bray's sign was an "Environmental Report Card," giving Kalikow an A+ and LePage an F.

"I wanted to remind him that he's on a campus that supports the environment," said Bray, who said he actually feels "honored" to have been called an idiot by the governor.

LePage said he would not be making as many public speeches in the future.

"For more than five years, the media has flocked to events where I have been asked to speak, not to cover any good news about the events, but to disparage me over issues totally unrelated to the events," LePage said. "Since I am such a distraction to the media, I will no longer attend some of these public events."

This is LePage's second abrupt exit this week. He was criticized Monday for holding a Blue Ribbon Commission meeting in private, when it should have been open to the public.

The attorney general called it illegal, and the next day, LePage told a radio station he was quitting the commission, blaming the controversy on the media.

"The press takes seven seconds of what I say, and make a s---show out of it," said LePage. "I'm tired of it."
A Connecticut high school social studies teacher chosen as the National Teacher of the Year said she was surrounded by poverty, drugs and violence as a child but imagined other possibilities for her life with help from educators.

Jahana Hayes teaches at John F. Kennedy High School in Waterbury.

The honor by the Council of Chief State School Officers was announced on Thursday and Hayes will be recognized by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony on Tuesday.

The 44-year-old Hayes grew up in a Waterbury housing project and became a teenage mother while still in high school. She said the influence of her own teachers taught her that a school's job sometimes overlaps with the job of parents, and she wants her students to know there are no dead ends.

Jahana Hayes of Waterbury teaches Social Studies at Kennedy High

Hayes was named Connecticut Teacher of the Year in October and was honored at an awards ceremony in November at the Bushnell in Hartford.

She has been an educator for 13 years, with the most recent 11 years in Waterbury.

I am honored to be the 2016 National Teacher of the Year, Hayes said in a statement. In the course of the next year, I hope to stoke a national conversation about education that is inclusive of everyone. I want to engage people who have not traditionally been part of the conversation to join in this important effort to prepare well-rounded students for success in life.

Hayes is the fourth Connecticut educator to be named National Teacher of the Year.

Greenwich teacher Tony Mullin was the 2009 National Teacher of the Year.

LeRoy E. Hay, an English teacher at Manchester High School, was named National Teacher of the Year in 1983 and while Dorothy Hamilton, a social studies teacher at Milford High School had the honor in 1953.
The top two Republicans in the Connecticut General Assembly say Donald Trump's soaring popularity and landslide victory in the Connecticut Presidential Primary need to be embraced by voters across Connecticut.

While both Rep. Themis Klarides and Sen. Len Fasano said they didn't like everything the businessman GOP presidential frontrunner has said, his popularity among GOP voters in Connecticut can't be denied after he won the state by thirty points on Tuesday night.

In terms of the language thats being used by Donald Trump to talk about the politics, government, hes a cathartic voice" said Sen. Fasano the Minority Leader in the State Senate who supported Gov. John Kasich in the GOP primary.

"So those voters are rewarding him for speaking for them because those voices have been muted by our system that we have of political correctness.

Trump won across all education and income levels in Tuesday's vote according to NBC News exit polls.

As Republicans in Connecticut try to win control of the State House and Senate this fall, they say they need to embrace what Trump is selling to capture the support of GOP voters who are participating in the process as a direct result of Trump's campaign.

Sen. Tony Hwang who supported Kasich, now says there are lessons to be learned from Trump.

He has captured a sense of frustration and energy level that has been remarkable in any election cycle and I think it is incumbent upon us in any election cycle to understand that it exists and that we need harness it, capture it, and represent that.

Rep. Themis Klarides, the top Republican in the House of Representatives said the party needs to accept and figure out a way to capitalize on Trump's support, even with his comments about women and the notion of having Mexico build a border wall to keep out illegal immigrants from the United States.

I think people are ready for somebody who is out of the box and is not your typical politician," Rep. Klarides said.

The Connecticut Democratic Party attempted to capitalize on the Trump win, saying his policies, rhetoric, and ideas are bad for Connecticut and not what voters want.

In a statement, the Connecticut Democratic Party's Executive Director, Alynn Woischke said the Connecticut GOP "is no longer the party of reasoned debate and moderation, but has fully transformed into the party of Trump."
Nearly 100 soldiers were formally welcomed home Wednesday after successfully completing their missions during months of deployment.

The ceremony was a chance for Connecticut to thank the soldiers for everything they do. Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman spoke and medals were handed out, as the service members and their families were honored.

The 143rd Regional Support Group based in Middletown spent nearly nine months deployed overseas to Afghanistan. The 35 soldiers commanded a diverse, multi-coalition organization of 500 soldiers and civilians and were responsible for base protection.

Normally units get up to two years to prepare for deployment, but this unit had only a month and rose to the occasion.

They literally had to leave their families and their jobs their school on short notice and answer the nations call, Col. John Wiltse, Commander of the 143rd Regional Support Group said.

The 192nd Military Police Battalion out of Niantic spent about 10 months at Guantanamo Bay. The 55 soldiers were deployed in support of detainee operations.

Its difficult because were going from a new normal down there with all active duty soldiers to coming back to civilian life and just getting out of the sense that we can actually sit down and relax, 1st Lt. Matthew Kuchta of the 192nd Military Police Battalion said.

Several awards were given out including the National Defense Service Medal and the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal. Many honored said while they are glad to be home, they would not hesitate to answer the call and serve their country again.

I enjoyed every minute of it. It was hot and the food was so-so, but it was great, 1ST Lt. Mark Soltau said. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
A Farmington principal is on leave pending a review after her brother, who lives in her Middletown home and has volunteered at her school, was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.

Alfred St. Hilaire, 38, of Middletown, was arrested on April 19 and charged with possessing child pornography. He pleaded not guilty and he is due back in court on May 10.

He is the brother of East Farms Principal Renee St. Hilaire and he lives with her, according to a statement from the schools.

Police said they have no information that would connect the possession of child pornography charge against Alfred St. Hilaire to his sister.

Supt. Kathleen Greider said in a statement that the Farmington school district has been working closely with law enforcement authorities in Middletown and Farmington to review the matter because Principal St. Hilaires brother lives in her home and has been a volunteer at East Farms on occasion as a volunteer, but did not work with students.

When officers went to the St. Hilaires house, they asked Alfred St. Hilaire if he downloaded anything illegal to his computer and he asked police if they were referring to child pornography, according to the arrest warrant application. According to court documents, police found more than 100 files.

Then he said he did know that some of the items he downloaded were child pornography and it is not legal to have it, but did not understand what the big deal was because they are just models, the court documents state.

The school also released a statement from Farmington Police Chief Melanson that states, The Farmington Police Department has been in contact with investigators involved with the investigation and subsequent arrest of Alfred St. Hilaire. We have been reassured that at this point, they have no information which connects the charge of possession of child pornography of Alfred St. Hilaire to Principal Renee St. Hilaire or the Farmington School District.

Supt. Greiders statement says that this is a difficult time for Principal St. Hilaire and her family, and we offer our emotional support to her as she is out pending completion of our review.
Police arrested several people during a drug investigation in Hartford on Wednesday night and seized the drug concoction Sizzurp. They also seized guns, crack cocaine, PCP and marijuana.

Detectives from the Hartford Police Department's Vice and Narcotics Unit were conducting an undercover drug investigation in the area of Main, Nelson, Westland and Sanford streets after reports of drug deals and gunshots when they made the arrests.

Police initially arrested eight people and learned they were using 10 Stanford St. as a stash house for illegal guns and narcotics, so authorities searched an apartment on the first floor and found a loaded 9-milimeter handgun, 5 grams of crack cocaine, more than an ounce of liquid PCP, several bags of packaged PCP, $3,362 in U.S. currency and a bottle of syrup, or Sizzurp. The concoction is also sold as purple drank, according to the DEA.

This is a very dangerous product," Dr. Chris Carroll, of Connecticut Childrens Medical Center, said. "Because its so sweet, children can overdose on this very quickly and can quickly get into a lot more trouble than they think, to the point where they stop breathing or they drop their blood pressure or they even die from this drug.

Seven people were arrested during the investigation.

During the initial arrests, police found $1,998 in cash, more than an ounce of crack cocaine, two ounces of marijuana and heroin.

Doctors say they've already had cases of children taking Sizzurp and encourage parents to lock up their medications or properly dispose of them.

Doctors say they've already had cases of children taking Sizzurp and encourage parents to lock up their medications or properly dispose of them.

Arrests:

Police charged Jeri Collins, 35, with criminal possession of a firearm, possession of narcotics, possession with intent to sell narcotics, possession of a hallucinogenic, possession with intent to sell a hallucinogenic and interfering with search warrant.

James Williams, 26, of Hartford, was charged with possession of narcotics, possession with intent to sell narcotics, possession of a hallucinogenic, possession with intent to sell a hallucinogenic and interfering with search warrant.

Alexsondra Williams, 42, of Hartford, was charged with criminal possession of firearm, possession of narcotics, possession with intent to sell narcotics, possession of a hallucinogenic and possession with intent to sell hallucinogenic.

James White, 52, of Hartford, was charged with possession of narcotics, possession with intent to sell narcotics, possession of hallucinogenic and possession with intent to sell hallucinogenic.

Lishawn Williams, 34, of Manchester, was charged with interfering with a search warrant; Charles Jackson, 26, of Manchester, was charged with interfering with a search warrant; Jack Williams, 38, of Manchester, is charged with interfering with a search warrant; and Franchist Cofield, 32, of New Britain, has been charged with possession of narcotics, possession with intent to sell narcotics and possession of controlled substance.

Ciara Ortiz, 22, of Hartford, has been charged with possession of narcotics; David Fairley, 40, of Hartford, was charged with possession of narcotics, possession of a controlled substance, possession with intent to sell narcotics and operation under suspension; and Rose Gilhooly, 18, of Windsor Locks, was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia.

John Kehoe, 33, was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia. Its not clear where he is from.

Todd Joiner, 27, was charged with possession of a controlled substance; Pedro Santiago, 28, of Hartford, was charged with possession of a controlled substance; and Hawan McCray, 35, of East Hartford, was charged with possession of a controlled substance.
Multiple sources in the Connecticut House of Representatives told NBC Connecticut on Wednesday that early budget plans included cobbling a budget plan together by Wednesday night to have ready for members to vote on today.

It's unclear what the budget would look like, or whether it would fully close a $932 million budget shortfall projected for the 2017 fiscal year.

When reached just before entering the House chamber, Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey said, (We're) discussing the package that weve put together as Democrats with our members and we expect to have some information out for you all after weve shared that with our members.

It's been made clear by Sharkey and other Democratic leaders that the governor's budget, which slashed spending across the board but in balance, was not acceptable to rank-and-file Democrats in the House.

Sharkey said priorities, like reinstating education funds to some towns, restoring funds for hospitals, and keeping cities and towns whole, are elements they want to include in their own spending proposal.

Weve done what we said we were going to do, which is to put together a package that reflects the budget, reflects the realities that we are faced with and establishes what we as Democrats believe in in contrast to the governor and the Republican package.

Gov. Dannel Malloy has said he will not accept, and therefore veto, any budget that raises taxes, borrows money even from the state's rainy day savings fund, or didn't go through any kind of negotiation with his administration.

Sen. Len Fasano, the top Senate Republican, said he expects a budget as the result of a backroom deal, because that's been the norm in the General Assembly recently.

Theyre going to run it tomorrow in the House. I havent seen one word of it. You havent seen one word of it. I would suggest their members havent seen one word of it," Fasano said.

Republicans released their budget proposal on Monday which was in balance, and Sharkey said it included ideas he liked.
There is an outbreak of mumps at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, according to the state Department of Public Health, and they are urging residents to check their vaccination records and to be aware of the symptoms of mumps.

There are eight confirmed cases at Sacred Heart University and the Department of Public Health and the Fairfield Health Department have been working with the Sacred Heart University Wellness Center to investigate the outbreak.

One other confirmed case has been identified at a separate Connecticut university after spending time with ill students from SHU.

With the end of the school semester approaching, and students dispersing to other locations for the summer, it is important for Connecticut residents to take steps to protect themselves against this highly contagious respiratory disease, Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Raul Pino said in a statement. The best protection against mumps is to get vaccinated. In a school setting, it is especially important to wash your hands often and avoid sharing items, such as cups and utensils. If you develop symptoms of mumps, stay home and contact your medical provider for advice.

A note on the Sacred Heart University website the cases were detected on March 22 and the students have recovered.

Nine probable cases with symptoms consistent with mumps and close contact with laboratory-confirmed cases have also been identified.

Mumps is a highly contagious respiratory disease that is spread through indirect or direct contact with an infected persons nose or throat droplets, such as when an infected person coughs or sneezes. It is best known for the puffy cheeks and swollen jaw that it causes because of inflammation of the salivary glands under the ears on one or both sides. Other common symptoms include fever, headache, muscle aches, fatigue and loss of appetite. Some people who get mumps have very mild or no symptoms, and often they do not know they have the disease. Most people with mumps recover completely in a few weeks. However, mumps can occasionally cause severe complications, especially in adults. Those can include encephalitis, meningitis, deafness, and inflammation of the testicles, ovaries or breasts. Rarely, inflammation of the testicles can lead to decreased fertility or sterility in males.

People with mumps can spread the infection for up to two days before and five days after symptoms develop, so those infected can spread the disease before they feel sick. Symptoms typically appear 16 to 18 days after infection, but this period can range from 12 to 25 days after infection.

Mumps is a highly contagious respiratory disease that is spread through indirect or direct contact, such as when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

Symptoms include puffy cheeks and swollen jaw because of inflammation of the salivary glands under the ears on one or both sides.

Other common symptoms include fever, headache, muscle aches, fatigue and loss of appetite.

Some people who get mumps have very mild or no symptoms, and often they do not know they have the disease. Most people with mumps recover completely in a few weeks, but mumps can occasionally cause severe complications, especially in adults.
Community leaders in New Haven are trying to garner support for an all-boys school geared toward African American and Latino students.

The New Haven school district would need approval at the state level, but both Mayor Toni Harp and auperintendent Garth Harries have expressed an interest in the idea.

Rev. Boise Kimber, the pastor at the First Cavalry Baptist Church, said this type of school would help at-risk youth in New Haven reach their full potential in the classroom.

They can become more focused in a stabilized environment, more disciplined, in reference to how they dress how they look how they perceive each other, Rev. Kimber said.

Rev. Kimber and other community leaders want to model New Havens all-boys school after the Eagle Academy Foundation for inner city students in New York and New Jersey.

They saw the need of helping and trying to save African American boys and Latino boys, Kimber said.

Harries told NBC Connecticut he likes the idea of launching an all-boys school, citing his own education. He also points out minority students make up 80 percent of the district.

It fits for us in New Haven with a long history of portfolio schools that have themes and focal points, he said. It fits with a long history of orienting on the human development and the social, emotional learning of students. We know that boys and girls learn differently in different contexts.

New Haven parent Kimberly Nelson said she has her doubts about this proposal.

I dont want them to do it, she said, They just cant. The kids need to stay together. Boys need to be in schools with females and females need to be in school with guys.

There are still many questions that need to be answered, like what would the schools grade structure be, Harries said. He added the district is not in the position to open a new school, but would like refocus an existing one.
Police are investigating a Windsor Locks preschool after parents reported that their children were injured, police said.

Three different parents have told police about an incident involving their children being injuraed at the New England Preschool Academy sometime in April.

The owner of the preschool, Cathy DelGreco, said the incident does involve one of her teachers and that the woman was not allowed to come back pending the outcome of the investigation. DelGreco said while the woman was teacher, she was not a preschool teacher.

DelGreco said the one parent called on Friday and another on Saturday about an incident involving two children. DelGreco said she called into the Department of Children and Families on Saturday.

The Office of Early Childhood Advocate received a complaint about the incident. While it is not clear what took place at the preschool, the OEC said in a statement the complaint involved "allegations of abuse or neglect".

OEC said the agency collaborates with the Department of Children and Families to investigate such allegations.

The DCF is working with Windsor Locks police on the investigation and it did not have any comment.
A worker at an Amtrak facility in Groton was rushed to the hospital after being shocked while working on Wednesday.

Chief Joe Winski, of the Poquonnock Bridge Fire Department, said a maintenance worker at the Amtrak Midway Maintenance Of Way Base facility was working in the overhead above a grid ceiling in a building and received an electrical shock and Amtrak personnel transported him privately to the hospital.

The injuries not life threatening but the fire marshal is still investigating, Winski said.
Yale University said Wednesday it has decided to keep the name of a residential college named for John C. Calhoun, a 19th-century alumnus and ardent supporter of slavery, but will eliminate the title "master" for faculty members.

"Ours is a nation that often refuses to face its own history of slavery and racism. Yale is part of that history," said Yale President Peter Salovey. "We cannot erase American history, but we can confront it, teach it and learn from it."

Controversy has surrounded the name of Calhoun College for decades, but it received new attention in the fall as protesters on campuses around the country called for universities to address the legacies of historical figures, such as Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey.

A petition circulated on campus last year demanding Yale change the college's name. The Black Student Alliance condemned Wednesday's announcement on Facebook, saying, "the decision to keep the name of Calhoun College, is a regression" that "only diminishes our ability to combat the heinous nature of slavery and racism."

Calhoun, a former vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, also served as secretary of state, U.S. senator in South Carolina and U.S. representative, according to the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian.

He graduated from Yale College in 1804 and attended Litchfield Law School, according to the U.S. historian's office. Calhoun was a controversial figure because of his support for slavery.

Salovey said opinion was split among students and alumni on the Calhoun name and, in the end, it was decided it was not a matter of public opinion. He said eliminating the name Calhoun would reduce the likelihood that slavery would be taught. He said the university also will be addressing Calhoun's legacy in other ways, including a work of art to be commissioned and placed on the grounds of Calhoun College.

One of two new residential colleges under construction will be named for Anna Pauline Murray, a civil rights activist who received a doctorate in law from Yale in 1965, the university announced. The other will be named after founding father Benjamin Franklin, a 1753 recipient of an honorary degree from Yale. The two new colleges are part of an expansion plan for Yale's undergraduate student body.

Yale also said it would eliminate the title "master" for faculty members who serve as residential college leaders, changing the name to "head of college."

The Black Student Alliance said "the choice to name one of the two new residential colleges after Anna Pauline Murray is a step in the right direction" and that gropu members "feel similarly about the decision to shift from the title of 'Master' to 'Head of College.'"
Two men were shot inside their apartment Thursday morning, Dallas police say.[[377440741,R]]

Before 7 a.m., two men entered the apartment in the 5200 Block of Preakness Lane and opened fire, police said.

Officers arrived to find two men suffering from gunshot wounds. Both were taken to nearby hospitals.

The gunmen ran away before officers arrived.

The shooting remains under investigation.
Officials say a Dallas-bound American Airlines flight returned to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport shortly after takeoff after a bird strike left a large dent on the jetliner's nose.

Sea-Tac Airport officials said that the flight with 150 passengers landed safely back in Seattle Wednesday afternoon. A photo of the damaged aircraft showed the large indentation nearly centered on the plane's nose.

American airlines apologized to passengers and said it was evaluating the aircraft.

A spokesman for the Port of Seattle, which operates the airport, says it's unclear what type of bird it was. Brian DeRoy said Thursday that bird samples are being sent to the Smithsonian Institution for analysis.
The father-in-law of slain North Texas fitness instructor Missy Bevers dropped off an apparently blood-stained shirt at a dry-cleaning business four days after the killing, according to a search warrant filed Wednesday.

Bevers, 45, died April 18 after she was attacked inside the Creekside Church of Christ in Midlothian. The mother of three had arrived at the church around 4 a.m. to prepare for her early-morning Camp Gladiator fitness class.

On April 22, Randy Bevers, 64, brought a white XXL women's long-sleeved shirt to the Dry Clean Super Center of Midlothian, according to the search warrant.

He allegedly told an employee the clothing had animal blood on it. Missy Bevers' sister-in-law later told NBC 5 the blood was from a dog fight that broke out in her kitchen.

Midlothian police say Missy Bevers father-in-law dropped off a shirt at a dry cleaning business that appeared to have blood stains on it, according to a search warrant filed Wednesday.

The employee contacted police to report the encounter and told them it looked as though someone had tried to clean the shirt before dropping it off, the search warrant says.

According to the warrant, the shirt may contain DNA evidence that could help with the investigation into Missy Bevers' death.

"We promised early on to follow every lead in this case, and this recent action reflects just that," Midlothian police said late Wednesday in response to the warrant affidavit. "If we feel we have information that is important for the public to know, we will release it as promptly as possible."

Midlothian police released surveillance video Friday afternoon showing a person of interest in the Missy Bevers case walking through a church on Monday morning, shortly before the married mother of three was killed.

Sister-in-Law Says Blood Was From Dog Fight

Kristi Stout, Missy Bevers' sister-in-law, told NBC 5 that her father, Randy Bevers, had to separate dogs that began fighting in her kitchen last week.

Stout said one of the dogs  a 13-year-old Chihuahua that belonged to her step-mother, Vikki Bevers  died in the fight.

"Carrying the dog from the house to the veterinarian clinic, it was bloody. So, therefore, blood on the shirt," said Randy Bevers.

His son, Brandon Bevers, joined him at the Midlothian Police Department to speak with investigators about the shirt, which the two called a "non-issue."

"I wanted to make sure that we get over here and put this fire out pretty quick, Brandon Bevers said. "This is such a non-issue that we wanted to address is fast."

Investigation Into Missy Bevers Killing

Several video clips released by Midlothian police show a person of interest  dressed in tactical gear  walking through different parts of the church just before Missy Bevers was killed.

Police believe Missy Bevers had only just entered the church when she ran into the person, whose identity remains unknown.

Midlothian police said they're investigating new leads with the help of the Arlington Police Department, ATF, FBI and the Texas Rangers.

Midlothian police say Missy Bevers father-in-law dropped off a shirt at a dry cleaning business that appeared to have blood stains on it, according to a search warrant filed Wednesday.

Kristi Stout said Friday a fund had been established for Missy Bevers' daughters. Donations to the Bevers Children Fund can be made at any Citizens National Bank of Texas location.

Oak Farms Dairy has offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and grand jury indictment of the person or people responsible.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the department's tip line at 972-775-7624. Tipsters may be eligible for a cash reward and can also remain anonymous by contacting Ellis County Crime Stoppers at 972-937-PAYS (7297).
The news that the Hawaiian Falls waterpark in White Settlement was closing came as a shock to the 150 employees who signed up to work there this summer, and to people who already bought a season pass.

But even though the park may end up opening this summer, it doesn't mean everything's fixed.

The city said it ended its operations agreement with Hawaiian Falls because the park was late with the rent.

City manager Jim Ryan told us, "They were supposed to pay us $600,000 last October and another $300,000 this April."

Hawaiian Falls has been operating the park since its opening in 2013. However, the park is built on city land.

Hawaiian Falls told us they planned to pay the rent that's owed, but the company wanted to defer payments.

The company had already hired 150 employees for this season. Workers like 16-year-old Hunter Breton, who wanted to be a lifeguard.

Breton said she paid $265 for training and a uniform.

"I am pretty disappointed and I was looking forward to it," said Breton. "That's a lot of money for my parents to spend."

Breton can apply for work at other Hawaiian Falls parks, but the closet one is about 40 miles away. If she doesn't, Hawaiian Falls says it will work to refund her money.

Season pass holders can't get a refund but they can use their passes at the other parks, the nearest ones being Roanoke or Mansfield.

The city of White Settlement says its water park won't stay closed forever. The city is working to reopen the park sometime this summer with the city now operating it.

"We will open. We have to open up legally and safely. We have to get all of these rides inspected," Ryan told us. "We will catch up but we have to have the backing of our citizens and understanding that we did this to preserve city funds city money taxpayer dollars."

We talked with Hawaiian falls which told us:
One of the first two women to graduate from the U.S. Army Ranger School is set to break another barrier, becoming the first female officer in the Army's infantry.

Capt. Kristen Griest had her request to transfer from military police to infantry approved Monday, and she will be the first woman to hold that position, a spokesman at Fort Benning confirmed to NBC. The Connecticut native is expected to graduate from a captain's course Thursday, according to the Army Times, which first reported the news.

Her transfer comes five months after Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened all combat positions to women. Army and Marine Corps generals told senators earlier this year that it will take several years to fully integrate women into combat roles, but some branches have started recruiting women for those roles, The Associated Press reported.

And the Army announced on April 15 that it approved 22 women's requests to transfer as 2nd lieutenants into its infantry and armor branches. Those transfers would go through after training and standards requirements are met, according to an Army news release.

Griest rose to national prominence when she and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver graduated from the notoriously rigorous Ranger school, an elite unit that prides itself on "intestinal fortitude," with a grueling, weekslong training course that spits out many who enter it.

When she graduated, Griest said her successful completion of the elite program shows that women "can deal with the same stresses and training that men can."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's claim that Hillary Clinton is playing "the woman's card" drew intense backlash Wednesday, from the Democratic front-runner herself as well as tens of thousands of critics on social media.

"If fighting for women's health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the 'woman card,' then deal me in," Clinton said in Philadelphia as she celebrated wins in four out of five of Tuesday's Democratic primaries.

Trump had leveled the "woman's card" accusation Tuesday after his own five-state primary sweep.

"She's got nothing else going," Trump told supporters in New York. "And, frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote." He added in an immediate contradiction that "the beautiful thing is women don't like her."

Trump's remarks prompted social media hashtags like #dealmein and #womancard, the latter ranking among the top 10 global trending topics on Twitter Wednesday, with more than 45,000 tweets by late afternoon.

Voters also circulated video of Mary Pat Christie, the wife of Trump backer and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who stood behind Trump during his victory speech Tuesday and looked as though she was rolling her eyes as he made those comments.

The exchange highlights Trump's perilous standing among female voters who could help propel Clinton to the White House.

An anti-Trump super PAC, backed by Republican donors, last month launched an ad in which unnamed women read aloud quotes Trump has proffered about females. "Bimbo. Dog. Fat Pig," the ad begins, with later references to Trump critiquing "flat-chested" women and referring to "a young and beautiful piece of a--" and a woman "dropping to your knees."

In March, Trump distributed via social media an unflattering image of Heidi Cruz, Trump rival Ted Cruz's wife, prompting the Texas senator to assert that "strong women scare Donald."

Cruz, who's aiming to topple Trump at the Republicans' July convention in Cleveland, implicitly emphasized the front-runner's turbulent relationships with women Wednesday as he tapped former candidate Carly Fiorina as his would-be running mate, praising her as someone who has "over and over ... shattered glass ceilings."

Four years ago, 11 out of 13 general election swing states went to the nominee who won among women. Of those 11, President Barack Obama, with 55 percent of the female vote nationally, won nine; Republican Mitt Romney won just two.

If Clinton manages an even wider advantage among women than Obama, Democrats say she may get a boost in states like Pennsylvania and Colorado, casting them out of Trump's reach while allowing her to compete in GOP-leaning territory like Georgia and North Carolina.

As for Trump's claim that women "don't like" Clinton, he's wrong at the very least about Democratic primary voters. Exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and television networks in 25 states this year show Clinton won 62 percent of female voters over Bernie Sanders' 36 percent.

In a recent AP-GfK poll of the general population, women weren't significantly more likely than men to have an unfavorable opinion of either Trump or Clinton. Women, however, were more likely than men to say they definitely would not vote for Trump in a general election, 66 percent to 60 percent. About half of men and women said they would definitely not vote for Clinton.

Among Republicans only, primary exit polls have shown Trump facing a gender gap his last remaining rivals do not have. In the 25 states polled, Trump won 36 percent women and 44 percent of men. Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich both demonstrated consistent support across genders.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says he would support legislation for a so called "bathroom bill," like the one that recently passed in North Carolina.

The bill requires a person to use the public restroom corresponding to their sex on their birth certificate.

"This is not about equal rights. I am totally in favor of equal rights. I'm not prejudiced against anyone, but I don't want a man for any reason going into a woman's restroom or woman's locker room," said Patrick.

NBC 5 political reporter Julie Fine asked him, "What do you say, then, to transgender people who say that violates their rights?"

"I say that common sense, common decency, says that men should stay out of ladies' rooms, and I don't think it violates your rights," Patrick said. "And you could argue if you want, the overwhelming majority of the population  more than half  are female in America. How about their rights? Do you not have a right, and I don't want to put you in the middle of the story, but does a woman not have a right to be able to walk into a bathroom and feel comfortable?"

"And the way these ordinances are written, any man could walk into the bathroom if that's the way they feel that day," Patrick added.

Since North Carolina passed the legislation, the state has lost almost $40 million in revenue. Companies have called for it to be repealed, and protests continue.

This battle could come to Texas, if a state lawmaker proposes similar legislation.

Equality Texas, the state's largest LGBT lobbying organization has already spoken out against the petition.

Chairman Steve Rudner sent a statement to NBC 5, which reads, in part:

"Texans know which restroom to use; they don't need any help from the Texas Legislature. Transgender Texans have been using restrooms matching their gender identity for years. Equality Texas knows that any policies proposed as 'gender policing' are just new laws searching for a problem."

"We should all care about public safety, public privacy, and the facts:
The dog that killed a 3-day-old Mira Mesa boy has been euthanized at the owner's request, County of San Diego Department of Animal Services said Wednesday.

"The owners of the dog Polo came to the Department of Animal Services this morning and relinquished the dog for euthanasia," said Dan DeSousa, the deputy director of the department, in a statement. "The dog was euthanized at the owners request and this closes the Departments role in this incident."

Polo was with his owners and their newborn, Sebastian Caban, in a bed on April 21 when the baby's mother suddenly coughed, according to an autopsy report.

The dog bit the baby in the head in what the San Diego County Medical Examiners Office has called an accident.

Polo was under quarantine and in the custody of the Department of Animal Services until the family made the decision.

On Tuesady, the San Diego Humane Society sent a letter to its volunteers confirming that Polo had been adopted by the owners six months ago.

The agency explained that there was no sign of trouble with the 2-year-old American Staffordshire Terrier.

There was not a fragment of aggression seen in this dog before tragedy struck, said Gary Weitzman, DVM, MPH, CAWA, President and CEO of the San Diego Humane Society.

"The first question we asked was whether we had seen any signs of aggression in this dog before adopting him out. That answer is no," Weitzman said.

"His records tell of a happy, social dog who enjoyed going on walks and playing with other dogs," he added.

He added that the agency sends its thoughts to the family of the baby.

"What happened was tragic and I cant even begin to fathom the pain this family is suffering," Weitzman said.

Shortly after the incident, the couple made two unsuccessful 911 calls, SDPD officials confirmed.

They ended up driving the newborn to Rady Childrens Hospital where medical staff pronounced him dead.
The family of a 16-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome who committed suicide because he was bullied at his school has filed a lawsuit.

The family of Kennedy LeRoy announced the lawsuit more than 10 months after the boy killed himself in his bedroom on June 12, leaving a note saying he hoped his suicide would prevent others.

"There's just not enough therapy to fix us," said his father, Chris.

Kaelyn Leroy, his sister, is deeply saddened.

"It just blows my mind that he had so much time left and that it got cut so short," she said.

Before his death, Kennedy left behind a powerful note, a message to the boy who allegedly bullied him and all other bullies about the possible deadly consequences of their actions.

Kennedy's family has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the Chino Valley Unified School District, accusing school administrators of failing to protect him from who they said was a relentless bully who made fun of Kennedy's sexuality.

The parents of the alleged bully are also named in the lawsuit. They did not respond for comment.

Sagi Schwartzberg, a family attorney, said school officials should have removed the bully from Kennedy's class.

"If they would have done more, I believe Kennedy would be alive today," Schwartzberg said.

But an attorney for the school district said Kennedy and the other boy signed a no contact contract, barring them from interacting with each other and school officials conducted a "thorough investigation and acted reasonably and appropriately."

Ayala graduate Sierra Phelps said she tried to commit suicide in high school partly because of the stress caused by school bullies.

She's part of Kennedy's Voice pushing school board members to adopt stricter bullying policies.

She said bullies need to be expelled.

"I think since they're the ones doing the harm they are the ones who should have the consequences in place," she said.
A top Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department official forwarded emails with jokes containing derogatory stereotypes of Muslims, blacks, Latinos, women and others from his work account during his previous job with the Burbank Police Department, it was reported Wednesday.

Tom Angel, Sheriff Jim McDonnell's chief of staff, sent the emails in 2012 and 2013 when he was the No. 2 police official in Burbank, hired to reform a department reeling from allegations of police brutality, racism and sexual

harassment, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing city records.

"I took my Biology exam last Friday," said one of the forwarded emails obtained under the state's public records law, according to the newspaper.

"I was asked to name two things commonly found in cells. Apparently 'Blacks' and 'Mexicans' were NOT the correct answers."

Another email listed 20 reasons "Muslim Terrorists are so quick to commit suicide," including "Towels for hats," "Constant wailing from some idiot in a tower" and "You can't wash off the smell of donkey."

Angel told The Times he did not mean to demean anyone and said it was unfortunate his work emails could be obtained under the state's records laws.

Asked about the "Biology exam" email making light of high incarceration rates

in some minority communities, he described himself as Mexican.

"I apologize if I offended anybody, but the intent was not for the public to have seen these jokes," he told the newspaper.

McDonnell told The Times he was disappointed by the emails but he had no immediate plans to discipline Angel even though "it's a shame the whole

thing happened at all."

After viewing the emails at the request of The Times, local Muslim civil rights advocates criticized Angel, saying the messages perpetuate dangerous biases that all Muslims are terrorists.

In a meeting with McDonnell and Angel on Monday, Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, sought assurances that

sheriff's officials are not unfairly targeting Muslim communities. Angel should

be disciplined and the Sheriff's Department should meet with community groups and hold cultural awareness seminars for its staff, Al-Marayati said, according to The Times.
A Los Angeles Unified School District police officer was taken into federal custody Wednesday after being charged with the attempted sex trafficking of a minor.

Mauricio Edgardo Estrada, who has been placed on administrative leave by the school district, surrendered to authorities after he was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Estrada, 28, responded to a Craigslist advertisement promising sex with a minor on April 20, prosecutors allege. He allegedly exchanged emails and text messages with an undercover agent whom he believed to be a 15-year-old girl, and agreed to pay $150 for sex.

An attorney representing Estrada could not immediately be reached for comment.

The two-count indictment charges him with attempted sex trafficking of a child and use of the Internet to induce a minor to engage in criminal sexual activity.

He faces a minimum of 10 years in federal prison if convicted.

"It's deeply troubling when those sworn to protect our kids are accused of an act that violates every tenet of the oath they pledged to uphold," said Joseph Macias, special agent in charge for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigation unit in Los Angeles.

"The reality is that the defendants in child exploitation cases come from all walks of life and access to children is all too often the common denominator."

When he arrived at a gas station in Artesia to meet the supposed girl, Estrada had $150 in his possession and condoms, the indictment alleges. He was taken into custody by sheriff's personnel and subsequently released from county jail after posting bond.

Estrada has been employed by the school district since December 2013, according to a statement issued by School Police Chief Steven Zipperman, who said the allegations do not involve a student or any of the district's campuses.

Estrada was placed on administrative leave after his arrest, and an internal investigation is ongoing, according to the statement.

"The entire L.A. Unified family is deeply disappointed by these serious allegations as they do not reflect the professionalism, ethics and character of the men and women of the Los Angeles School Police Department," Zipperman said.
A 69-year-old North Hills man already facing a murder count in the shooting death of his gay son has been charged with fatally stabbing his 68-year-old wife, prosecutors said Thursday.

Shehada Khalil Issa is set to be arraigned May 17 in a San Fernando courtroom on the two murder charges, which include the special circumstance allegation of multiple murders, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.

Prosecutors will decide later whether to seek the death penalty against him.

On the morning of March 29, police were called to the family home in the 15000 block of Rayen Street and found Issa's adult son, Amir Issa, outside and his wife, Rabihah Shibi Issa, inside a bathroom.

The felony complaint says Issa gunned down his son with a shotgun. His wife had been stabbed, and police believe her killing took place that day or a few days earlier.

Los Angeles Police Department Detective John Doerbecker told the Los Angeles Times earlier this month that Issa's anger over his son's sexuality was believed to be a contributing factor in the shooting, but not the underlying motivation for the killing.

Doerbecker said detectives were working on the theory that "dad killed mom and then killed his son to cover it up."

Issa is being held without bail. If convicted, prosecutors said he faces the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The brother of one of the San Bernardino terror attack shooters was among three people arrested Thursday morning after warrants were served in a Southern California marriage fraud investigation.

All three of the individuals arrested Thursday in Ontario and Corona have family connections to gunman Syed Rizwan Farook, who died along with his wife in a shootout with police after the Dec. 2 mass shooting. The shooters killed 14 people at a holiday party earlier that day in San Bernardino.

The warrants were served Wednesday in connection with a five-count indictment that charges the three with making false statements to obtain immigration benefits for one of the defendants.

The marriage fraud case stemmed from the terror attack investigation and led to the arrests of Mariya Chernykh, 26, of Ontario; her sister, 31-year-old Tatiana Farook, of Corona; and Syed Raheel Farook, the 31-year-old husband of Tatiana Farook and brother to Syed Rizwan Farook.

All three pleaded not guilty in court Thursday afternoon.

Syed Raheel Farook was released on a $25,000 bond. His wife Tatiana was released on a $35,000 bond. A $50,000 bond was expected to be posted for Chernykh.

An immigration hold has been placed on Chernykh, so her release will not be immediate.

Outside court, their attorneys, Ron Cordova and Dyke Huish, were vocal about about separating the case from the terror attack.

Chernyhk is married to Enrique Marquez Jr., who is awaiting trial on charges of conspiring with Rizwan Farook in 2011 and 2012 to provide material support to terrorists. He has pleaded not guilty.

When he was indicted on those charges last year, Marquez also was charged with entering into a sham marriage with Chernykh in November 2014. He falsely signed an immigration form and falsely declared he was living with her so she could obtain legal residence status in the United States, according to authorities.

In one exchange of messages, Marquez and Chernykh discussed their anxiety about their upcoming immigration interview because of their lack of contact with each other, according to the most recent indictment. Marquez said he was worried about being imprisoned for fraud, the indictment says.

Tatiana Farook and Syed Raheel Farook are accused of taking staged family photos of Marquez and Chernykh, establishing a joint checking account for them and creating a back-dated lease to give the illusion that they shared a home.

Rizwan Farook, 28, and wife Tashfeen Malik, 27, opened fire Dec. 2 at a social services center in San Bernardino, killing 14 people and wounding more than 20 others. They fled the scene but died hours later in a shootout with police.

U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker released a statement Thursday applauding the arrests.

"This is the latest step in the comprehensive investigation into the horrific attacks in San Bernardino last year that took the lives of 14 innocent Americans and deeply affected so many more," said U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker. "As I have said previously, we owe the victims, and the entire community of San Bernardino, a thorough investigation that uncovers all criminal activity surrounding these events.

"Today's arrests open a new phase in the process of bringing to justice all individuals who allegedly committed crimes that were uncovered during our exhaustive investigation. The charges also reflect the importance we place on statements made to law enforcement officials during a terrorism investigation. Those who lie to or conceal material information from law enforcement officers investigating terrorist acts will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

The FBI conducted another search in February at a Corona home connected to Raheel Farook. Authorities did not confirm the property searched Thursday was the same location searched in February.

Late last month, federal authorities said they successfully used a mysterious technique without Apple Inc.'s help to hack into the iPhone used by a gunman in a mass shooting in California, effectively ending a pitched court battle between the Obama administration and one of the world's leading technology companies.
Two brothers have been arrested on suspicion of murder in connection with the deaths of their parents, whose bodies were found in their San Jose home over the weekend near what sources said was a scrawled message apologizing for a "clumsy" killing.

Police on Thursday announced the arrests of Hasib Bin Golamrabbi, 22, and his 17-year-old brother, who attends Evergreen High School.

"Needless to say," Evergreen Islamic Center spokesman Faisal Yazadi said,"this is one of those tragedies nobody ever wants to be in. All we can do is pray."

Golamrabbi had been missing until he was taken into custody Wednesday night. NBC Bay Area was the first to report, through sources, that Golamrabbi had been found near Tracy in the Central Valley. Jail records show Golamrabbi was booked Thursday morning and held without bail.

The younger son  who was in school Monday and whom police initially said was not a suspect  was booked into juvenile hall. NBC Bay Area is not naming him because he is a minor.

They have not yet been charged by the district attorney.

The brothers' parents, 59-year-old Golam and 57-year-old Shamima Rabbi, both natives of Bangladesh, were found shot to death Sunday afternoon inside their Lucas Court home.

Board members at the mosque where the couple attends said the Rabbi's bodies were released Wednesday afternoon to relatives and the funeral is being planned for Friday at the Five Pillars Farm Cemetery in Livermore.

Police did not provide evidence or a motive in announcing the arrests but said "there are no outstanding suspects." Sources told NBC Bay Area the parents did not approve of the older son's sexual orientation. Cousin Nafees Hasan said his family had never discussed that matter, but if it were true, the "family wouldn't have accepted that." He added the parents were very strict about gender orientation.

Sources who witnessed the crime scene before police arrived told NBC Bay Area chilling messages were written on the floor and wall near the bodies, including one that read: "Sorry my first killing was clumsy."

Another, longer message, allegedly ended, "I cant be like you, telling a lie. I cant love someone without telling them."

San Jose police have not confirmed the validity of the messages, and it is unclear who wrote them.

Efforts to reach the brothers or find out if they had attorneys were unsuccessful. A cousin thought they might be looking into public defenders. When reached Thursday morning, several neighbors and mosque members said they knew nothing of the arrests until notified by NBC Bay Area.

"I cant believe it," said mosque board member and family friend Hasan Rahim, who described both sons as "taciturn." While the father was very friendly, Rahim said, the boys were "not very communicative," Rahim said.

As for the older son's sexual orientation, Rahim had never heard the father, with whom he was friends, talk about it. And even if it were true, Rahim is of the belief that the Silicon Valley Bangladeshi community is more tolerant of homosexuality, which is forbidden in Bangladesh.

"Live and let live, Hasan said. The Pope said it most famously, Who am I to judge. "
An American Airlines flight that was heading to Miami from Boston was diverted to South Carolina for a disruptive passenger, officials said.

AA flight 1006 was diverted to Charleston International Airport around 3 p.m. Wednesday. The flight had left Boston around 1:30 p.m. and had been scheduled to arrive around 4:30 p.m.

The disruptive passenger was taken off the plane in Charleston and the plane continued on its trip to Miami.

Officials at the airport in Charleston said the FBI is investigating the incident and the passenger was taken to a nearby hospital for evaluation.

The details of the disruption were unknown.

Check back with NBC 6 for updates.
Former Miami-Dade Mayor and police director Carlos Alvarez made his first appearance in court Thursday after spending the night behind bars on a battery charge.

Wearing handcuffs and an orange jail jumpsuit, Alvarez, 63, was given a $1,500 bond during the hearing. He was also ordered to stay away from the alleged victim, longtime girlfriend Evelyn Fernandez, and was prohibited from possessing firearms.

Alvarez responded that he doesn't have any firearms. His attorney requested that Fernandez stay away from Alvarez.

Alvarez walked out of jail and was greeted by his daughter.

"My side hasn't been told. Obviously people want to know what went on, I was a public figure for many years, my side has not been told to anybody," Alvarez told reporters after his release. "I'll have my day in court, obviously I'm not going to discuss the case here, in the media and in the public."

Alvarez turned himself in to police Wednesday following the alleged incident that occurred this past Saturday. According to police, Alvarez and Fernandez, who have been in a relationship for more than a decade, were arguing over a pet cat he wanted her to return to him.

The two started arguing, and Alvarez grabbed Fernandez by both arms, pinned her against a wall and spat at her, the report said. Police said the woman's injuries were consistent with her statement.

Fernandez, a police officer, told NBC 6 she is battling cancer and undergoing chemotherapy and didn't want to talk on camera.

"I have nothing to hide, I did nothing wrong," Alvarez said Thursday. "The events occurred where I live, I was approached, let's leave it at that."

Alvarez was voted out of office in a recall election in 2011 during his second term. He was elected mayor in 2004.

NBC 6 has learned this isn't the first time police responded the former mayor's home. In 2014, police were called to a domestic disturbance about two people fighting, and that a mother and her daughter had barricaded themselves while Alvarez made threats to hit them.

Unlike this week's incident, Fernandez decided not to make a statement in 2014 and said she was never battered. No charges were filed in that case.

Fernandez said Alvarez started acting erratic when he started bodybuilding in 2013.
A Jacksonville firefighter is facing charges after authorities say he had sex with an underage girl against her will in Broward County.

Ladarius Lane-Berry, 25, was arrested Wednesday on charges of sexual assault and traveling to meet after luring a child, according to an arrest report.

He was being held on $17,500 bond Thursday, Broward jail records showed. It's unknown if he's hired an attorney.

A spokesman for Jacksonville Fire Rescue said Lane-Berry was placed on administrative paid leave.

According to the report, the girl told police she met Lane-Berry a year ago through a friend request on Facebook when she was 16 years old. She told him she was 16 and he said he was 24, the report said.

The teen said they exchanged text messages and had conversations about meeting up when he was in South Florida, the report said. The conversations were sexual in nature, with Lane-Berry asking the teen if she was a virgin and telling her how much she will love sex for the first time, the report said.

According to the report, the teen said she met up with Lane-Berry in May 2015, when he picked her up in front of her school in a blue Camaro. He told her to get in the back and lay down, then tried to have sex with her but she refused, the report said. She then got out of the car.

In March, Lane-Berry asked to hang out with the teen at the beach and he again picked her up at school, the report said. While they were in his car, he kept trying to grab her before he parked in the parking lot of a Waffle House, the report said.

They got into the back seat and Lane-Berry had sex with her even though she told him several times to stop and was crying, the report said. The teen said after the incident she got a text message from Lane-Berry that said "sorry," the report said. The girl went to Davie Police to report the incident, the report said.

Lane-Berry once again sent a message to the teen that he wanted to see her, the report said. When he showed up at the address in Davie where he thought she would be waiting, Lane-Berry was taken into custody by police, the report said.

Police said Lane-Berry is from South Florida and graduated from Boyd Anderson High School in 2208.
A Miami Police officer fatally shot a man who they say stabbed a woman and her 2-year-old daughter with a knife in Little Havana early Thursday.

The incident happened around 2 a.m. in the area of Northwest Seventh Avenue and Second Street.

According to police, the officer was on patrol when he encountered the knife-wielding man involved in a dispute with a bloodied woman screaming for help.

The officer opened fire, killing him. The woman was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital's Ryder Trauma Center where she later died. She was later identified as 46-year-old Joenny Maribel Medina Feliz.

According to police, the victim's 18 and 2-year-old daughters were present just before an officer arrived. The two-year-old child suffered a stab wound to the chest and was taken to Ryder Trauma Center where she underwent emergency surgery.

The 18-year-old daughter wasn't harmed. Police are working to determine the relationship between the suspect and woman.

Miami Police Chief Rodolfo Llanes said in a press conference that the officer involved in the shooting is understandably "shaken" after the incident. He has been identified as Officer Juan Herrera.

As the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigates the shooting, the involved officer will be administratively reassigned.

Ortiz says Herrera is an 11-year veteran of the force, and is calling him a hero who stopped the situation from becoming much worse.

The deceased suspect has been identified as 37-year-old Kendar del Rosario.
Before Miami-Dade Police begin implementing body cameras starting next week, they allowed cameras into headquarters to demonstrate how the newly acquired cameras work.

The Miami-Dade Commission gave the green light to the police department in March after endorsing the plan less than a year ago.

"Why body cameras? Because it captures evidence where evidence did not exist before," said Juan Perez, Director of MDPD.

MDPD will join other local police agencies including Miami Police and Miami Beach Police in outfitting their road patrol officers with body cameras. It will cost about $5 million to equip 1,200 officers.

"We will first deploy cameras in the Midwest District, then the Northside District, then the Southside District, until all seven police districts are covered. Then we'll focus on the airport and Port of Miami," Perez said.

The cameras will attach either to the officer's shirt in the middle or on the pocket, and the wide angle lens will capture everything in view and the microphone will capture audio as well.

"No longer will we rely on a five-second video clip captured from somebody's cellphone that captures the back-end of an accident, where you see an officer using force. We will have this video from beginning to end," Perez explained.

The Miami-Dade Commission unanimously voted to fund the cameras, but Commissioner Barbara Jordan brought up a concern. The cameras, she noted, don't come on automatically, they have on-off buttons.

Perez said officers will be required to turn on their cameras ahead of every interaction with the public.

"Cameras do not capture the full story, but it does capture part of the story and that will be able to help us as we move forward," Perez said.

A newly-created web page has also been established to provide information and transparency on the use of the body cameras for the public and media.
As Bayfront Park in downtown Miami gets ready to host the annual Mercedes-Benz Corporate Run, drivers can expect lots of road closures.

The 5K run is slated to begin at 6:45 p.m. at 301 Biscayne Boulevard, and it's expected to draw more than 27,000 walkers and runners for what's being called Florida's largest office party. More than 850 companies are participating.

Drivers should be aware of the following road closures:

Biscayne Blvd. northbound lanes from Chopin Plaza to NE 5th St will be closed approximately 2PM to 11PM. All North bound traffic will be re-routed to the south bound lanes of Biscayne Blvd. at Chopin Plaza.

Biscayne Blvd. from Chopin plaza south to Biscayne Blvd Way will be closed approximately 6:45PM to 7:15PM.

Biscayne Blvd. Way from Biscayne Blvd to SE 3rd St. will be closed approximately 6:45PM to 7:20PM.

SE 3rd Ave. from Biscayne Blvd. Way to SE 2nd St. will be closed approximately 6:45PM to 7:30PM.

SE 2nd St. from SE 3rd Ave. to North River Drive will be closed approximately 6:45PM to 7:40PM.

North River Drive from SW 2nd St. to NW 5th St. will be closed approximately 6:45PM to 7:50PM.

NW 5th St. from North River Drive to NW 3rd Ct. will be closed approximately 6:45PM to 8:00PM.

NW 3rd Ct. from NW 5th St. to NW 3rd St. will be closed approximately 6:45PM to 8:10PM.

NW 3rd St. from NW 3rd Ct. to North Miami Ave. will be closed approximately 6:45PM to 8:20M.

North Miami Ave. from NW 3rd St. to NE 2nd St. will be closed from approximately 6:45PM to 8:30PM.

NE 2nd St. from North Miami Ave. to NE 2nd Ave. will be closed from approximately 6:45PM to 8:40 PM.

NE 2nd Ave. from NE 2nd St. to NE 4th St. will be closed from approximately 6:45PM to 8:50PM.

NE 4th St. from NE 2nd Ave. to Biscayne Blvd northbound lanes will be closed approximately 6:45PM to 9:00PM.

If you're lucky enough to be north of Northeast Fourth Street west of the Miami River or south of Biscayne Boulevard, not to worry! You won't be affected by the road closures.

For more information, visit Mercedez-Benz Corporate Run on the web.
A red-faced JetBlue pilot failed a breath test for alcohol after flying an aircraft from Florida to John F. Kennedy Airport with 151 passengers aboard last year, according to court papers unsealed Wednesday.

Dennis Murphy, Jr., was randomly selected for the test on April 21, 2015, after his flight from Orlando touched down at JFK Airport.

A breathalyzer revealed that Murphy had a blood alcohol content of 0.11 percent, according to the criminal complaint filed in federal court in Brooklyn.

He was given a second test 15 minutes later and registered a 0.091 reading.

JetBue stripped Murphy of his uniform and identification that day, the complaint states. He had been employed by JetBlue for less than four months.

"During the walk to the onsite testing office at JFK Airport, Murphy's face was red and he was chewing gum rapidly," according to the complaint.

Murphy later suggested that his blood-alcohol reading was caused by the gum he was chewing, the complaint states.

Murphy's co-pilot said he "observed Murphy drinking an unknown beverage" before and during two flights that day, the complaint states.

A blood-alcohol content of .10 percent or higher for the operator of a common carrier is considered under the influence of alcohol, according to the complaint.

Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit pilots from flying within eight hours of consuming alcohol or if they have an alcohol concentration of .04 percent blood-alcohol content or higher.

Nationwide, 10 pilots violated the FAA alcohol regulations last year, according to the agency.

JetBlue has a zero tolerance drug and alcohol policy. Following last years incident, the crew member was removed from duty and is no longer employed at JetBlue, the airline responded in a statement.

Murphy was scheduled for an arraignment on Wednesday in Brooklyn's federal court. The name of his attorney wasn't immediately available.
Minnie Mouse is the latest costumed character to be busted for allegedly being a bit too greedy with photo-snapping tourists in Times Square.

Reyna Perez, dressed as the Disney rodent, demanded a $20 tip after having her photo taken with two girls, according to a criminal complaint released Thursday. The girls' mother told police that she gave $6 to Perez and then her daughters gave another $12 to her.

Perez said "That's not enough," the woman told police.

Perez was charged Wednesday with misdemeanor counts of aggressive begging in a public place and disorderly conduct, the complain states.

She was released on her own recognizance and scheduled to appear May 6 in Midtown Community Court.

A Legal Aid Society lawyer representing Perez didn't respond to a message requesting a comment about the charges.

City Council members voted earlier this month to allow the Transportation Department to draft new rules for costumed characters and topless women in body paint who solicit tips for photographs in Times Square. People have complained that the costumed characters have been too aggressive in asking for money.

Several characters have been arrested for aggressive solicitation.
The head of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said that Newark doesn't have the legal authority to reach an agreement with Uber to let drivers pick up passengers at the Newark Liberty International Airport.

Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Chairman John Degnan said Thursday that the agency is negotiating with the city over the deal outlined Wednesday that gives Newark $10 million over a decade.

The agency told The Associated Press last week that it had concerns about the deal.

Democratic Newark Mayor Ras Baraka says that the Port Authority doesn't have the authority to get involved. Degnan is a Republican appointed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Baraka said Wednesday his goal was to protect the safety of Uber riders and require the company pay "its fair share."
Police are searching for the man who allegedly stole coffee machines worth thousands of dollars from a Long Island store.

The man stole two DeLonghi PrimaDonna espresso and cappuccino makers from a Bed Bath & Beyond in Huntington Station back in January, police say.

The two stolen machines have a combined value of $7,000.

Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 800-220-TIPS.
A Brooklyn man with autism went missing briefly while on a group trip to Prospect Park, authorities said.

Michael Yam, 24, was found safe at Henry and Middagh streets in Brooklyn Heights at about 8:30 a.m. Thursday, according to the NYPD. He was taken to Methodist Hospital for observation.

Yam was on a field trip to Prospect Park with his group home and disappeared near the LeFrak Center at about 1 p.m. Wednesday.

A group home worker went back to a van and discovered that Yam was not with the rest of the group.

Harbor patrols and K-9 units searched the park and scuba teams were set to comb the Prospect Park Lake Thursday morning.

Yam didn't have a history of running away or wandering off, police said.
UPDATE: Destiny Dawson has been found safe, police say.

A Brooklyn woman went to pick up Chinese food a week ago and never returned, police and her boyfriend say.

Destiny Dawson, 21, walked out of her apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant last Wednesday evening to get Chinese food for dinner.

Seven days later, Dawson still hasnt been seen. Her boyfriend, who wouldnt give his name, said hes uneasy about her disappearance.

It dont feel right. It aint settling right. I dont know what to say, he said.

He said he has no idea what happened to her, but that she has run away multiple times in the past, both as an adult and a child. If she did run away on her own this time, he's unsure why.

I thought it was an accident at first, he said. I kind of still think its an accident. But I dont really feel like that anymore. I feel like she just up and left.

Police sources say theres no evidence that Dawsons disappearance is suspicious, but theyre investigating and say that the focus right now is on locating her.

In the meantime, her boyfriend hopes that she is with family or somewhere else safe.

I hope that shes with somebody that she knows, he said.

Dawson was last seen wearing a gray sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, blue Nike running shoes and a blue Polo cap. She has bleached blond hair with braids.

Anyone with information about her disappearance is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 800-577-TIPS.
Aides to Mayor Bill de Blasio have been subpoenaed by state and federal prosecutors amid investigations into his campaign fundraising operation, his administration said.

City Hall received subpoenas from the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan and from the Manhattan district attorney's office, mayoral counsel Maya Wiley said Wednesday.

A statement issued by Wiley said de Blasio had not been "personally served," but it didn't reveal the recipients of the subpoenas. But sources familiar with the case say that those who received subpoenas included the mayor's director of intergovernmental affairs, Emma Wolfe.

The subpoenas are seeking documents and information related to the mayor's failed effort to help Democrats win the statehouse in 2014.

On Thursday, de Blasio said that he wasn't concerned with the investigation.

"I feel fine because everything we've done is legal and appropriate," he said.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office declined to comment, as did Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance.

The subpoenas come as a series of loosely related public corruption investigations coordinated by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara have trained a spotlight on de Blasio's administration. Some parts of the multifaceted probe concern fundraising.

De Blasio's team has been accused of circumventing the $10,000 dollar donation limit to individual candidates by arranging for much larger donations to be funneled through some obscure upstate Democratic committees, where the limit is more than $100,000.

The state official who referred the accusation to the Manhattan District Attorney is Risa Sugarman, named by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to investigate election-related misconduct. Some election officials say it's curious that Sugarman chose to pursue de Blasio's fundraising as a criminal case while ignoring more than 1,000 other cases in which committees fail to follow the rules.

"The concern is that there's no consistent policy or stated standard on what cases get prosecuted or what cases are ignored," said Douglas Kellner of the New York State Board of Elections.

De Blasio has called the Board of Elections report outrageous.

Prosecutors also are looking into the fundraising activities of businessmen with ties to the mayor. Other investigations concern some high-ranking NYPD officials and the union representing city jail guards.
A woman was pistol-whipped in what appeared to be an attempted robbery Thursday afternoon in Brooklyn, police said.

The victim, whose name wasn't disclosed by police, was taken to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center. Information about her injuries wasn't available.

Neighbors said the woman might have been targeted because she operates a jewelry business out of her home.

The incident happened at about 1:25 p.m. at the intersection of Dumont and Montauk avenues in the East New York neighborhood, police said.

No arrest has been made.
The U.S. blamed the Syrian government Thursday for an airstrike on an Aleppo hospital that killed more than a dozen doctors and patients, NBC News reported.

Two of the eight doctors working at the Al Quds hospital were killed in rebel-held Aleppo, the Doctors Without Borders medical charity reported.

Secretary of State John Kerry blasted Bashar Assad for what he called a deliberate strike on a known medical facility and called on his Russian allies to reign in the air attacks. Assad did not immediately respond, but his Russian ally insisted they were not responsible for the deadly attack.

The hospital specializes in treating children. Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, said it was "outraged" by the incident.

Syria's Civil Defense rescue service in Aleppo told NBC News 30 people had been killed in the attack, including a nurse and her whole family.
After appearing at West Chester University on Monday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump managed to stir up controversy on his way out of town with a tweet describing nearby Downingtown as "so sad!"[[377412251,C]]

Downingtown Mayor Josh Maxwell took offense and responded with a string of tweets condemning Trump and his negative portrayal of the town.



The candidate's tweet featured a photo of an abandoned Downingtown paper mill, with Trump lamenting about Downingtown's once "vibrant" industrial past.[[377480241,C]]

Maxwell, a Democrat, rebuked Trump's assertions with a tweet of his own. He accused the Republican front-runner of being uninformed, and explained that discussions had already begun about revitalizing that area prior to Trump's visit.[[377480811, C]][[218989091,C]]



Amidst recieving "hundreds" of angry messages from Trump supporters, Maxwell fired back by drawing a comparison between the abandoned mill and one of Trump's own ventures:[[377481921,C]]



Later, Maxwell summed up the situation with one last statement.[[377482661,C]][[377405761,C]]



After posting the Downingtown tweet, Trump's twitter stream went back to focusing on primary elections and ultimately thanking Pennsylvania for his win in the state.
New Castle County Police charged a man with the murder of a woman inside a town home in Delaware earlier this week.

Brian Goodwin, of New Castle, faces first-degree murder charges in the shooting death of 22 year-old Lauren Steed inside a unit of the Saddlebrook Townhomes in New Castle Monday.

Investigators found that Goodwin and the victim were alone inside the residence when he shot and killed Steed, said police. He did not call the police until late afternoon the following day, launching a standoff that lasted about two hours as negotiators convinced Goodwin to surrender.

Police took Goodwin into custody unharmed.

A judge sent Goodwin to county jail without bail. Goodwin is also charged with possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. It wasn't immediately clear if he has an attorney.
Until recently, Merle had never set a paw on solid ground, never felt the kind stroke of a human hand and never tasted a dog treat.

The mild-mannered mastiff mix was bred to become a South Korean dinner entree.

But he was spared that fate by the Humane Society International, which recently rescued Merle and more than 250 other canines from a dog-meat farm in Wonju. Merle was among the first to arrive at St. Hubert's Animal Welfare Center in Madison, New Jersey.

The center expects to receive about 120 of the rescued dogs, which will be available for adoption.

"We've had huskies, golden retriever, spitz, a variety of dogs from this farm," said Heather Cammisa, president at St. Hubert's.

Cammisa cautions anyone wanting to adopt one of the rescued dogs to keep in mind that they have spent their entire lives in cages. They will require training, understanding and love, she said.

The dogs are being rescued 11 weeks before South Korea celebrates Bok Nai, when large quantities of dog-meat "boshintang" stew are consumed.

Most South Koreans don't eat dog meat on a regular basis and young Koreans are particularly turning away from the practice. However, dog stew is widely popular during Bok Nai and served at thousands of restaurants specializing in the recipe.

"In our experience, many dog-meat farmers are keen to leave this business behind them, and come under increasing pressure from their children to end dog breeding and killing," Humane Society campaign manager Andrew Plumbly said in a news release.

The Wonju farmer is one such individual. He contacted the Humane Society last year and asked for help to get out of the dog-meat business, Plumbly said.

The rescued dogs and puppies are being flown to shelters in the U.S. and Canada and will be available for adoption.

The Wonju farm is the fifth dog-meat farm that the international charity has helped close down.
The owners of a New Jersey pet store are facing animal cruelty charges that accuse them of transporting 67 puppies in small, filthy cages with inadequate access to food and water.

Vincent LoSacco, 50, owner of Just Pups in Paramus, and his brother Leonard LoSacco, 51, left the puppies in a near-freezing van on April 4 parked behind their store, said Acting Bergen County Prosecutor Gurbir Grewal in announcing the charges Wednesday.

Paramus police officers spotted the van at about 3 a.m. and rescued the puppies. The temperature inside the van was measured at 38 degrees, Grewal said.

When officers approached the van, they heard dogs whining and smelled an odor of urine and feces coming from the vehicle.

They opened an unlocked door, saw the dogs covered in feces and called animal control. Fifteen dogs needed medical attention.

The LoSacco brothers were each charged with 134 counts of animal cruelty.

Investigators determined that Leonard LoSacco had driven the van from Missouri where he had picked up the puppies. The trip lasted several days.

Vincent LoSacco denied police accusations that the puppies were cruelly treated. The van was insulated and the crates inside were large, he said. The temperature was taken while the door had been open for a while, he argued. The puppies were fed three times a day during the trip, he added.

He attributed the filthy condition of some of the puppies to the way the van was towed to a veterinarian hospital, as ordered by police.

In late February, Vincent LoSacco was charged with 267 counts of animal cruelty for alleged poor conditions at the East Brunswick outpost of the store. The location later had its business license revoked by the town.

Reached after those charges were filed, LoSacco said they were baseless and that an officer who issued him the summons has a personal vendetta against him. He later posted a video to Facebook saying he had been unfairly targeted.
There was a time when Joseph Hill-Coles saw only a cell or a cemetery in his future.



Born addicted to crack cocaine to a mother who battled drug addiction, Hill-Coles entered foster care when he was 3. For eight years, he bounced among what he described as more foster homes than he could count, before finally being adopted at age 10. Eventually, though, Hill-Coles fell prey to the streets, selling drugs and getting kicked out of schools until his adoptive mom finally had enough and kicked him out. As a teen, he wound up homeless.



"At age 17, I was arrested and locked up as an adult for a year and a half," Hill-Coles said in City Council chambers Thursday, where he was one of more than a dozen speakers at a joint committee hearing on youth homelessness. "Once released, it became all about survival. I house hopped until I wore out my welcome and then spent a couple months living on the streets. Selling drugs just to be able to have money to eat, I slept in LOVE Park, in abandoned buildings, and eventually found myself in and out of adult shelters."



Hill-Coles, 22, is one among what is estimated to be hundreds -- maybe even thousands -- of teens and young adults who experience homelessness on the streets of Philadelphia.



[[332597872, C]]

The staggering numbers caught the eyes of freshmen council members Helen Gym, who heads the Committee on Children and Youth, and Allan Domb, who heads the Committee on Housing Neighborhood Development and the Homeless, and the pair earlier this year decided to join forces and form a joint committee to solve the problem.

"Since 2009, we have seen an alarming increase of over 70 percent in the number of youth experiencing homelessness in our city," Gym said. "These young people face enormous challenges and for too long they have been overlooked by policymakers. It's time for us to bring them to the table to seek solutions."



The hearing, attended by about 120 people, was the first public platform centered on combating youth homelessness. Advocates called for the formation of an inter-agency council to address the problem and more funding for emergency, transitional and permanent supportive housing specifically for youth. In addition to Gym and Domb, council members Jannie Blackwell, Derek Green, Al Taubenberger and Cindy Bass were in attendance.



[[332575322, C]]

The issue is one that crosses party lines in the city. Taubenberger, the only Republican in attendance at the hearing, said afterward that youth homelessness is a major problem requiring urgent action. "You can't have a generation of young people sleeping on the subway and trains. It's something we can't ignore," he said.



The three-hour hearing opened with a three-minute clip from Faces of Homeless Youth, an in-depth report by NBC10 published and aired late last year that explored youth homelessness through the eyes of young people who are currently or who have been homeless. Hill-Coles, along with more than a dozen other young people, were profiled in the report.



City Office of Supportive Housing Director Liz Hersh told council members that a cost-analysis by her office showed that $3.5 million in additional funding could help establish 300 to 400 additional emergency beds for youth. She said the office had not investigated, however, how much it would cost annually to maintain those beds if they were added.



Hersh said that in one of the most recent homeless youth counts, only 11 percent of homeless young people located in Philadelphia were staying in shelters.



"I don't think shelters are the right place for young people," Hersh said during the hearing. "They need to be in permanent supportive or transitional housing."



Currently in the city, Hersh said, there are 109 emergency beds altogether for kids and young adults ages 3 through 24, 223 transitional housing beds for youth, and 56 permanent supportive beds.



[[332568092, C]]



Of the emergency beds, only 76 are designated specially for teens and adolescents, according to John Ducoff, executive director of Covenant House Pennsylvania. Of those, 51 are located at Covenant House's crisis shelter in Germantown and receive no city funding, Ducoff testified.

Domb called the number of beds dedicated to teens and adolescents "unacceptable" in a city of 1.5 million that is considered to be the most impoverished large city in the United States. In Philadelphia, the poverty rate was about 26 percent in 2013, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts report.



Ducoff went on to say that Covenant House, the only shelter in the city that specially serves 18- to 21-year-olds, turned away 546 kids in need of shelter last year alone due to a lack of space. He said that his organization determined that 75 more beds would help to close the gap in the number of youth they can serve at a cost of $2.4 million, adding that the estimated cost included wrap-around services, supervision and other help necessary for each additional young adult.



"If you don't step up now, they'll be the next generation of chronically homeless adults, in jail, or dead," Ducoff said.



The age range that Covenant House serves is one of the most vulnerable, advocates said, because it covers the gap when kids age out of the child welfare and foster care systems and are most likely to become homeless if they haven't formed networks and developed the skills needed to support themselves.



[[332581252, C]]



Gary Williams, the deputy commissioner for children and youth at the city Department of Human Services, said that in fiscal year 2015, 235 youth between 18 and 21 aged out of foster care without having "reached permanency," or found a stable place to live. This year through March 31 alone, another 176 young people aged out, Williams testified.



He said that a recent study showed that foster-care youth are more likely than their counterparts who have not been in the child welfare system to become homeless, and that more than half of homeless youth surveyed had been involved in the foster-care system. Foster-care children are also apt to spend more time homeless, he said, with the average stint of homelessness for a former foster child being two years and three months, while the average for non-foster-care children sitting at one year and seven months.



Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth are particularly vulnerable to homelessness, Nellie Fitzpatrick, who heads the city's Office of LGBT Affairs, said.



Fitzpatrick said that while young people who identify as LGBT make up about 5 percent to 7 percent of the youth population overall, they make up between 32 percent and 40 percent of the homeless youth population.



Kemar Jewel was in that group.



Now 24, Jewel testified about being kicked out of his home when he was 16 and having to "couch surf" and live on the streets. He described experiencing repeated instances of physical and sexual abuse while he was homeless, and being forced to sell his body to eat.

"All that happened because I had nowhere safe to go," Jewel, who is now a college graduate and a professional dancer, said.



[[364280061, C]]

Against what seemed like all odds, Hill-Coles and Jewel both made it out of homelessness. Hill-Coles, who was profiled in NBC10's Faces of Homeless Youth, an in-depth report on the issue published and aired late last year, has his own apartment now, a job with an organization that greens vacant lots, and a clear path to a bright future. He told the committee that he shared his story because he wants to ensure that other homeless young people enjoy the same opportunities to get back on track and success that he has.



"I was many things before Covenant House, but I have chosen not to let those things in my past define me," Hill-Coles said. "The staff helped to shape me into the man before you today. My commitment back is to help shape the lives of youth so they don't end up on the streets like I did. I am a success. I am a leader. I am wanted. I am supported and cared for. I am loved."

Watch Joseph share his story here, and learn more about youth homelessness in Faces of Homeless Youth here.
On any given night, hundreds of teenagers and young adults are homeless on the streets of Philadelphia.

Philadelphia City Council on Thursday will hold a hearing specially on youth homelessness. The hearing is the first of its kind focusing on the issue after the Joint Committees on Children and Youth and Housing, Neighborhood Development and the Homeless passed a resolution earlier this year to hold hearings on the matter.

Councilwoman Helen Gym and Councilman Allan Domb head up the committees, respectively, and joined forces in the fight against youth homelessness in January when both participated in the annual homeless count.

The NBC10 Digital Team spent more than two months meeting young people throughout Philadelphia who live on the streets and in the citys only crisis shelter serving only them. Its a silent epidemic. NBC10s Vince Lattanzio shares some of their stories.

NBC10 explored the problem of youth homelessness in Philadelphia in depth late last year in Faces of Homeless Youth, an extensive television and web-based report that follows the stories of several teens and young adults who have experienced homelessness. NBC10 reporters Vince Lattanzio and Morgan Zalot spent time on the streets with kids who are homeless and in Covenant House Pennsylvania, the only crisis shelter in Philadelphia that serves homeless youth between the ages of 18 and 21 exclusively.

No one wants to be homeless, but breaking the cycle of homelessness is a vertical climb. Still, its possible. MORE STORIES: Faces of Homeless Youth

As a result of NBC10's reporting, tens of thousands of dollars in donations and volunteer hours poured into Covenant House, the organization's executive director, John Ducoff, said after the story aired. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., also called on Congress to approve $42 million in new funding for youth homelessness on the heels of Faces of Homeless Youth. Congress eventually approved that amount.

You can watch the livestream of the City Council hearing on youth homelessness right here on NBC10.com or on the NBC10 app at 1 p.m.
A Philadelphia police officer has been arrested for allegedly breaking into a girlfriend's apartment and taking an item from the home, the police department said in a statement Thursday.

Alex McAdams, 28, has been suspended from duty for 30 days with intent to dismiss, police said.

The four-year veteran of the department allegedly broke into a girlfriend's home while off-duty in the early morning of March 5, police said. He allegedly removed a screen from a window, broke the window, entered the apartment, and then took a personal item, police said.

He then allegedly chased the woman from the apartment.

McAdams turned himself in to police Thursday to face charges of burglary, criminal trespass, theft, and criminal mischief.

He had been assigned to the 15th District.
Friends and family are mourning a teen boy who died after he was struck by a vehicle in Delaware.

Tyler Spahn, 14, and three other teens were crossing the northbound lanes of Rt. 13 (N. DuPont Highway) in New Castle, Delaware around 2:55 p.m. Wednesday. Police say the teens were not using a marked crosswalk and were about 1/4 mile south of the pedestrian footbridge which crosses all lanes of Rt. 13.

As Spahn walked across the roadway he was struck by a 1999 Toyota Camry, police said. Spahn was vaulted into the windshield and then thrown to the ground, according to investigators. The other three teens managed to get across and were not injured.

Spahn was taken to the Christiana Hospital Trauma Center where he was pronounced dead. The driver, who remained at the scene, was not injured in the crash. Police continue to investigate.

Spahn attended George Read Middle School. Counselors will be available for students at the school Thursday.
Temple University put students on alert after a student returned to his off-campus fraternity house to find a man rummaging through the kitchen.

The armed suspect -- a "butt of a gun" showing from his pocket -- greeted the unidentified student when he walked into his home along W Diamond Street, near 17th Street, around 2 a.m. Thursday, the victim told Philadelphia Police.

The student, who said he was studying all day, told investigators the guy demanded money but when he told him he had none, the burglar demanded the student's backpack instead so the student handed it over. The suspect then fled in an unknown direction with the student's headphones and books.

Temple sent out an alert around 2:45 a.m. that urged students to avoid the area -- which is a couple block north of campus -- as police investigated. [[377390791, C]]

No word yet on a suspect description. It appeared he entered the fraternity house -- it wasn't clear which fraternity uses the home -- through an unlocked backdoor.




A Montgomery County man who opened fire on another worshipper in a packed church during Sunday service has been charged with manslaughter.

Mark T. Storms, 46, of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, was charged Thursday with voluntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment in the death of 27-year-old Robert E. Braxton III.

Storms shot Braxton inside Keystone Fellowship Church, a non-denominational church on Stump Road in North Wales, on Sunday morning, prosecutors said. The shooting happened in the church's sanctuary, which was filled with hundreds of worshippers for an 11 a.m. service. Witnesses told NBC10 churchgoers hid under pews as the altercation played out.

Witnesses remember Braxton arriving at church irritated and cursing at an usher in the back of the church, court documents show. Church staff members tried to quiet Braxton, but he refused before heading to a pew that was reserved for two other church members, according to prosecutors.

A church member sitting behind Braxton tapped him on the shoulder to let him know the seats were reserved. Another couple put down two Bibles to save their spots before walking away. Braxton retorted the tap and starting yelling "Don't f------ touch me!" an affidavit reads.

An assistant pastor and ushers came over to try and calm Braxton, but he continued to yell, records show.

In interviews with police, witnesses watched Storms walk over to Braxton, show him a badge and motion to a handgun under his shirt. The badge, police said, was for his concealed carry permit. Braxton exchanged words with Storms before punching him in the jaw. Storms then pulled out his gun and fired two shots, according to witnesses.

What church members remember between Storms showing the badge and the shooting varied.

A female witness told police Braxton said "F--- you and your fake badge, get the f--- out of here" to Storms when he showed off the gold marker.

Another church member, a man, told investigators Storms brandished his gun, to which, Braxton replied, "That's not a real gun."

One person said Braxton lunged at Storms before the shooting. Another recalled hearing Braxton ask Storms "What are you going to do, shoot me?" before punching him, court documents show.

Storms, in an interview with police, said he opened fire on Braxton because he felt his "person was in great danger" and that he was worried other people in the church, including the elderly and children, were going to be hurt.

Storms told police he showed off the concealed carry badge with hopes of defusing the situation. He said, according to court documents, he had done that in the past and that man "walked away."

Following the shooting, Braxton was taken to Abington-Lansdale Hospital where he died. An autopsy showed a bullet hit him in the right side of his chest and right arm.

Kevin Steele, Montgomery County district attorney, said his office decided to file charges after an intensive investigation and interviews with 50 witnesses.

Storms will be arraigned Thursday afternoon. It's not clear if he has retained an attorney.
Philadelphia police apologized Thursday afternoon for their middle-of-the-night raid earlier in the day at the wrong southwest Philly home, guns drawn.

Ronik Jardine was one of those rousted from her bed by SWAT members armed with rifles and other assault gear.

Jardine, 48, is disabled after being shot in the head by an ex-boyfriend and says police didn't care about that, even after she told them she was handicapped.

"He [the officer] said, 'Go down the steps! Go down the steps now!'" Jardine said she almost fell down the steps.

Police said none of the people in the house were connected to the suspects they're trying to find. Officials are planning a news conference Thursday to talk about what went wrong.
Former Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams, who took over as the head of the LAPD following the 1992 riots, has died, according to the Philadelphia Police Department.

Williams was 72. The Philadelphia Police Department confirmed his death via its Twitter account. Details regarding a cause of death were not immediately available.

Williams became the LAPD's first black police chief about a month after the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial, in which four white officers were acquitted. The verdict sparked a riot that lasted for six days and brought U.S. military presence to patrol LA streets.

Williams took over for Chief Daryl Gates and continued in the position until 1997.

Williams previously served as Philadelphia's police chief.

Refresh this page for updates.
A San Diego man who videotaped his confrontation with a plain-clothes San Diego County Sheriff's Detective was bound over for trial Thursday on charges that carry a maximum penalty of 5 years behind bars.

Robert Branch faces reckless driving, resisting arrest and attempting to pepper spray an officer charges following the altercation that happened in Del Cerro on May 4, 2015.

Prosecutors say Branch was speeding and driving erratically when he almost struck the detectives car.

The detective, Paul Ward, testified that Branch wore a tactical vest, and was non-compliant during the traffic stop. Ward said he used a sort of chokehold commonly used by law enforcement to calm a suspect down.

Ward identified himself, showed his badge and asked for Branch's license and registration, prosecutors argued.

Branch argued the detective, who has since retired from the department, used excessive force in the traffic stop.

He videotaped the incident and shared it with the media. He also filed an excessive force lawsuit against the county, which is on hold until the allegations against him are resolved.

After several weeks of witness testimony and evidence, a San Diego judge ruled there was sufficient evidence to hold Branch on all charges.

An arraignment is scheduled for May 12.

If convicted of all charges, Branch could face a maximum penalty of 5 years, 90 days.
A proposed plan put forward by attorney Cory Briggs and former city councilwoman Donna Frye to build a new stadium in San Diego could be headed to the November ballot.

100,845 signatures were submitted Wednesday afternoon to the County Registrar of Voters for the Citizens Plan Coalition to transform the current Qualcomm Stadium site.

The group includes the League of Women Voters San Diego and the League of Conservation Voters San Diego.

The Citizens Plan is not to be confused with the plan put forth by the San Diego Chargers.

Attorney Cory Briggs says the Citizens Plan is much bigger than just a stadium in either downtown or Mission Valley and argues it isnt harmful or incompatible with what the Chargers want.

Their proposed ballot measure focuses on protecting the waterfront, increasing the hotel tax rate and encourages expansion of San Diego State University onto the Qualcomm Stadium Site.

The Chargers, who are now gathering the 67,000 signatures needed to get their plan on the ballot, are hoping for a new stadium in downtown.

But the Citizens Plan outlines the Chargers can have a downtown stadium, if the team foots the bill.

City Attorney Jan Goldsmith says the County Registrar of Voters will screen the signatures submitted for the petition and determine if there are enough to get the plan on the November ballot. The process takes up to 30 days.
After the tragic death of 3-day-old baby mauled by the family dog in Mira Mesa, one dog trainer is offering tips on how to prepare your pet for life with a new baby.

San Diego-based dog trainer Jessica Koester said there are several ways to train your dog before a new baby joins the household, including carrying a doll or something similar to get the pet accustomed to seeing you carrying a baby in your arms.

She said preparations should start when youre three to six months pregnant, giving families enough time to stop bad habits and teach positive behaviors.

Koester  who trained her own 4-year-old rescue dog, Uriel  is also the mother of a newborn son. She said its crucial for her to keep firm boundaries between her Border Collie and her baby.

Newborns are unpredictable and you really do need to keep in mind your dog is an animal," she told NBC 7.

Last week, a San Diego family was faced with a horrifying experience when their dog, Polo, was in bed with his owners and their newborn son, Sebastian Caban.

Officials said the babys mother sneezed, startling Polo, and the dog reacted by biting baby Sebastian on the head, killing him. The family had trouble getting through to 911, waiting for more than three minutes to speak with a dispatcher.

We all love to cuddle with dogs but if I want to cuddle, I make sure the baby is in a safe location, said Koester.

The dog trainer has set up dog fences and other strict boundaries in her home, creating a play pen for her pups. She said she will keep her dogs separate from her son until he turns five.

At that age since they can communicate, you can ask the child to follow directions [in their interactions with pets], she added.

Koesters dogs are allowed near her baby but within reason  and, again, with strict boundaries. Uriel is allowed into the newborns nursery but he has his own mat to on which to lie down. When hes in the nursery, hes tethered to the furniture by a leash as a precaution and as another way to set limits.

Just like you respect your boyfriend or girlfriends personal space, you need to respect your dog's personal space and we need to make sure the dog respects baby space and vice versa, Koester explained.

That respect for personal space can be taught through training long before the baby comes home by allowing the dog to sniff around baby items and toys so that by the time baby arrives, the noises baby makes are no big deal to the dog.

If I teach my dog when the baby cries and you come near but I say I want you to go away, I might throw the food behind the dog to get the dog to stay a certain distance away. So that it becomes background noise to them over time," Koester explained.

The dog involved in baby Sebastians deadly attack was euthanized Wednesday at the request of its owners, the San Diego County Department of Animal Services confirmed.

Polo, a 2-year-old American Staffordshire Terrier, had been adopted from a shelter by the family six months ago and showed no signs of aggressive behavior, the agency said.
Several witnesses described a "trail of blood" and a horrific scene inside a Chula Vista condo that resulted in the death of a man in August 2015.

The testimony was part of a pretrial hearing for Saul Jonathan Orozco who was 19 years old when he was arrested in the stabbing death of his friend Carlos Guitierrez. Orozco has pleaded not guilty to one charge of murder.

Guitierrez, was chased down and stabbed to death on August 4 in the Casa Lago Condominium complex, witnesses told Chula Vista Police.

His attacker followed him, straddled him and stabbed him to death, investigators told NBC 7.

Michael Kennedy was inside his home when he heard two men fighting.

When he looked outside, Kennedy said he saw two men struggling, with their hands on an object. One of the men was bloody, he said.

Kennedy grabbed a bat and followed the men into a nearby condo.

"I saw the defendant on top of the other guy stabbing him multiple times," Kennedy said, using both of his hands in a downward motion to describe what he saw.

The men were fighting over a kitchen knife similar to a 9-inch slicer, Kennedy said.

"I've spent time in Iraq and I've seen blood but nothing like that before," Kennedy said.

NBC 7

After the attack, when the defendant came out of the condo, almost a dozen neighbors surrounded him, neighbor Nathan Schmid testified, including one man who held a gun.

Schmid also heard a loud commotion and saw two people in a fistfight in the bushes of the complex.

"We followed the trail of blood to see if we could help," Schmid testified.

He found Giutierrez pleeding profusely from his head, he said.

"The gentleman said 'I'm bleeding. Please call the cops,'" he testified.

Prosecutors say Orozco attempted to flee from the scene after the incident occurred but was caught by police about a quarter of a mile away.

A teen accused of fatally stabbing another man in the South Bay pleaded not guilty on Friday. NBC 7s Vanessa Herrera reports.

The victim and the defendant were friends and were hanging out with others before the incident, one of the friends testified Wednesday.

Carlos Armando Barrios recalled that Orozco was acting so odd, Guitierrez asked him to leave.

"He began throwing rocks from the patio at us," he testified.

"He didn't seem like Saul he was acting different it wasn't the Saul I knew," he added.

Barrios and a friend left Orozco alone with Guitierrez. Later, when he saw police cars at the complex, he testified that he was concerned something may have happened between the two men.

After Wednesday's hearing, new charges of torture and an allegation of causing great bodily injury were added to the charges Orozco faces. He's expected back in court in June.

The Casa Lago complex is located near the Otay Lakes Reservoir and the Olympic Training Center in the Eastlake community of Chula Vista.
A San Diego man is slowly recovering overseas after being attacked by a shark while surfing in Bali last week, his family confirms.

Ryan Boarman  an avid traveler, surfer and graduate of Monte Vista High School and California State University Long Beach (CSULB)  was surfing with friends in the waters off Bali around 7 a.m. on April 24 when, suddenly, he felt extreme pain shooting through his arm.

According to his family, Boarman was attacked by a shark, the creature biting through his right arm near his elbow, tearing through muscle all the way to the bone.

Despite tremendous blood loss from the bite, Boarman managed to ride a wave onto shore where he then collapsed. His friends and bystanders pulled him from the water and he was rushed to a local hospital.

Boarmans family said the surfer underwent hours of emergency surgery and doctors were able to save his arm. Now, his family is trying to get Boarman to Singapore so he can get more advanced medical care.

Loved ones have launched a GoFundMe page to cover the costs and, as of 11 a.m. Thursday, had raised more than $17,300. The page says all funds will be used to get Boarman to Singapore and for medical expenses not covered by insurance.

Any unused funds will be donated to ocean conservation charities  a cause Boarman is passionate about.

NBC 7 spoke with Boarmans brother-in-law, Kevin Cradic, who said the family is anxious to get him to Singapore. At this point, Boarman is not well enough to travel back to San Diego, which is why theyre seeking treatment for him in Singapore.

They hope to transfer him there by 3 p.m. Thursday. Cradic said Boarmans father is on his way overseas to reunite with his son within the next few hours.

Cradic said Boarman is in stable condition but still in a lot of pain. Further treatment will give the family a better idea of whether or not Boarman will regain full use of his arm.

Cradic said Boarman was surfing in a river mouth in semi-murky water at the time of the shark attack. He saw the six-foot shark for a brief moment after it bit him, as it swam away from him.

When he got to the shore, Cradic said Boarman told friends it was a good ride, right before he passed out.

He lives for the ocean,Cradic told NBC 7. Hes a very strong swimmer. I speculate that his strength with swimming is what made him get on that board and get back to shore, and saved his life with how much blood he lost.

According to loved ones, Boarman has been surfing since childhood  a hobby he grew to love while growing up in Riverside, California. When the family moved to San Diego, Boarman began surfing every day. He has surfed all over the world, including Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, Vietnam, Portugal and Indonesia.

Cradic said he has no doubt Boarman will get back in the water to surf as soon as he has fully recovered.

Boarman has a degree in Geography with an emphasis in GIS Mapping from Cal State Long Beach and works as a field biologist on wildlife conservation projects. Hes also a certified master diver.
Dozens of students at San Diego State University (SDSU) gathered around President Elliot Hirshmans car Wednesday evening to protest his response to controversial posters placed around campus.

The posters reportedly named specific Muslim students at SDSU as terrorists and terrorist sympathizers.

Students are now calling for President Hirshman to address their concerns.

A statement was emailed out to students by President Hirshman and Vice President Eric Rivera regarding the incident. But students say President Hirshman did not condemn the actions.

A copy of the statement was posted on Twitter by The Daily Aztec, SDSU's independent student newspaper.

It read, in part, First, we recognize and fully support the rights of all parties to voice their positions on political issues, whether supportive or critical. We also understand that when parties adopt a specific political position they become responsible for their actions and these actions may produce criticism.

The Daily Aztec

President Hirshman did step out of the car to speak to the student protestors.

When NBC 7 San Diego reached out to SDSU for reaction to the protest, Chief Communications Officer Greg Block said the university did not have a statement.
A mom and dad who were late boarding a cruise in the Bahamas flailed their arms and sobbed on a pier as the ship bound for New York City left port with their kids on board, according to reports.

The dramatic scene was captured on camera and posted to YouTube by a passenger.

"Apparently, she has her kids on the boat and shes not on there. Theres a guy there, too," passenger Scott Thomas, who shot the video, says as the mom breaks down in the distance. "That right there is not cool."

The 4,090-passenger Norwegian Breakaway stopped in the Bahamas capital of Nassau on April 21 as part of a week-long cruise that began in New York City, The New York Post reported.

Passengers who decided to spend the day in Nassau were told they had to be back on board by 5:30 p.m., but the unidentified woman didnt make it in time and her husband went to look for her.

They both ended up stuck on the pier as the massive ship pulled away. The captain of the ship apparently waited an extra half hour for the mom to show up.

"That is someone that has missed the boat," Thomas is heard saying in the YouTube video.

Footage shows the dad sobbing as the mom flails her arms and falls to her knees.

"How come her kids are on and not her?" another passenger is heard saying in the background.

According to the Post, the parents had a boy around 9 years old and a girl around 12 years old on the ship. The kids stayed with other family members on board after departing without their parents.

The family was ultimately reunited in New York City three days later, on April 24.
Italian police have arrested four people in a foreign fighter investigation, including a Moroccan-born man living in Italy who had received Islamic State orders to carry out attacks on Rome during Holy Year, prosecutors said Thursday.

Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli told reporters that investigators intercepted the communication from within Islamic State territory ordering attacks in Italy, "with particular attention to the city of Rome" and focusing on the Holy Year pilgrimage now underway.

There was no indication any attacks were imminent and Romanelli said authorities acted quickly to close the investigation, arresting four people and issuing arrest warrants for two others believed to be in Islamic State territory.

"This is a new profile, because it was not a generic indication, but an indication given to a specific person who was invited to act within the territory of the Italian state," Romanelli said.

Authorities arrested the Morroccan-born man, identified as Abderrahim Moutahrrick, and his wife, Salma Bencharki, who allegedly were planning on traveling from their home in Lecco, north of Milan, to Islamic State territory with their children ages 2 and 4. Romanelli said Moutahrrick had taken Italian citizenship and was an accomplished boxer.

Another Moroccan man who was planning to travel with them, identified as Abderrahmane Khachia, 23, was arrested in the northern city of Varese, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors also issued arrest warrants for an Italian-Moroccan couple who left to join Islamic State last year with three small children. Romanelli said that man, identified as Mohamed Koraichi, had become an Islamic State fighter and had communicated the orders to carry out attacks in Italy while making arrangements for the other family to join Islamic State.

The fourth arrest was of Koraichi's sister, prosecutors said.
Two Smithsonian museums are remembering Prince with additions to their displays.

The Purple One's "Yellow Cloud" electric guitar will be on special display at the National Museum of American History through Sept. 5.

And the National Portrait Gallery is showcasing a photograph of the artist as part of an "In Memoriam" exhibit on the first floor. The black-and-white portrait, taken in 1993 by American photographer Lynn Goldsmith, will be on display until May 31.

The multi-talented, multi-genre superstar, known for hits like "When Doves Cry" and "Kiss," died April 21 at his Paisley Park residence in Minnesota. He was 57 years old.

"He's part of being an American to many," Eric Jentsch, deputy chair of the American history museum's division of culture and the arts, told Smithsonian magazine. "It's not just about Prince as a performer, it's also about how Prince and his work have become part of our American culture."

The yellow custom-made guitar was designed by Prince, but built by Minneapolis-based firm Knut-Koupee Enterprises, Inc. in 1989. According to the museum, it was used during Prince's "Diamonds and Pearls" era. His 13th studio album included chart-topping singles like "Cream" and "Diamonds and Pearls."

The new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opens this fall, plans to a host a number of relics including a tambourine, rare photos and footage from concerts and a Platinum record award plaque.
What to Know The Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse was targeted between April 15 and April 16, police said.

Lighthouse caretakers discovered the damage, which included destroyed pickets and shattered windows.

Authorities are investigating a break-in and vandalism at a historic lighthouse off the coast of Annapolis, Maryland.

The Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse was targeted between April 15 and April 16, Maryland Natural Resources Police said.

Officers responded April 17 after lighthouse caretakers discovered the damage, which included destroyed pickets, shattered windows and fire extinguishers that had been set off, The Capital reported.

The iconic Maryland landmark, which was built in 1825, sits in the Chesapeake Bay off South River.

Annapolis Mayor Michael Pantelides said he was appalled to hear about the damage to the lighthouse. The city has offered to help police with the case.

Police spokeswoman Candy Thomson says officials hope witnesses come forward since the vandals had to reach the lighthouse by boat.

The suspects could face fines and jail time.
A man found dead inside a Greenbelt, Maryland, home was shot in the head, police said Thursday.

A man called 911 at 6 p.m. Wednesday, hours after he heard a gunshot come from a home on the 6900 block of Hanover Parkway. Police say they don't know why the man waited to report the shooting.

When officers arrived, they looked through a glass door and saw 43-year-old Charles Damon Hall of Greenbelt lying on the floor. The officers forced their way into the home and determined Hall was dead.

Police say Hall had been shot once in the head. No arrests have been made at this time.

"We're talking to anybody and everybody to get as much information at we can," said George Mathew with the Greenbelt Police Department.

Police do not believe the homicide was random.
UPDATE: Sex assault charges were dropped against Bishop Michael Turner on Sept. 28, 2016; the Prince George's State Attorney's Office said the victim no longer wanted to proceed with case.

ORIGINAL STORY: A 22-year-old woman says the prominent bishop of a Baptist church in Prince George's County repeatedly stalked, harassed and made unwarranted sexual advances toward her at the church.

Bishop Michael C. Turner Sr., the senior pastor at The Miracle Center of Faith Missionary Baptist Church in Capitol Heights, Maryland, has been charged with second-degree assault, fourth-degree sex offense and harassment, according to court documents obtained by News4's Jackie Bensen.

The woman said during the four weeks in February and March that she worked at the church, Turner, 61, repeatedly assaulted and harassed her in his private office, the copy room and the elevator.

"On many occasions he would repeatedly touch me all over my body with his hands, press on my body with his body and his private parts...kiss me on my forehead, and hold me captive in his office and copier room," the woman said in a written statement to police.

She said she was frightened to tell anyone because she was afraid of him and afraid of losing her job.

"I told him to stop and to leave me alone," the woman testified.

She eventually asked others who worked at the church to come into work early so she would not have to be alone with Turner, but he found out and became angry, she told police.

"I am devastated that my supervisor and church leader, Bishop Turner, would do these things to me. Despite my protests, his behavior continued over several weeks and got worse," she said.

She also detailed an incident in which she said Turner forced her on the couch in his office, locked the door and got on top of her. She said she was able to escape the office and ran outside, but Turner drove around the parking lot looking for her.

Turner was arrested Tuesday and released on a $10,000 bond.

According to the church's website, Turner has been a pastor in the D.C. area for 40 years and was ordained at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in D.C.

He was promoted to bishop about two months ago, Bensen reports.

Turner's church has not returned News4's request for comment.
The Potomac Yard area of Alexandria is returning to normal Thursday morning after police say a man they believed was barricaded inside a home was found not to be inside.

Police entered the home on East Reed Avenue Thursday morning and found the suspect was not inside. The situation began nearly eight hours earlier when a man inside the home fired a shot at a family member.

Police believed the man was still inside the home, and worked for hours to make contact. Loud noises were heard in the area as officers used flash-bang technology Thursday morning in an effort to reach the suspect.

Police announced they were breaking down the scene just before 6:30 a.m.

UPDATE: Residents in area of E Reed may hear loud noises, those are being produced by APD Special Operations Team.  Alexandria Police (@AlexandriaVAPD) April 28, 2016

Stay with News4 on-air and online for more on this developing story.
A German shepherd helped firefighters find his owners' two young children as flames ripped through the family's central Florida home, authorities said.

The dog, named Maxx, helped crews navigate through thick smoke to find the 4-year-old boy and 2-year-old girl Monday night in their burning home in the Orlando suburb of Longwood, according to the Seminole County Sheriff's Office.

Moments earlier, neighbors who saw the fire spreading called 911, broke windows and helped rescue the children's mother, Margo Feaser, a 12-year veteran of the sheriff's office who currently serves as an auto theft investigator.

Firefighters then were able to rescue Feaser's husband and the two children, with Maxx's help.

Seminole County Sheriff's Office

Family members were hospitalized and their conditions ranged from serious to critical. Maxx was treated for smoke inhalation and is said to be doing well.

A GoFundMe page has been established to help the family's medical, veterinary, and other housing expenses as they work to recover from the effects of the fire. As of Wednesday morning, more than $11,000 had been raised to help the Feaser family.

[NATL] Unbelievable Animal Stories: Dog Befriends Abandoned Baby Giraffe

In addition to her role with the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, Feaser served three years in the U.S. Army and is a member of the Army National Guard. Her husband is also a military veteran.
The San Francisco public defender on Tuesday released a number of racist and homophobic text messages sent by a San Francisco police officer mired in the latest scandal rocking the San Francisco Police Department.

Jeff Adachi said that the bigoted messages exchanged between three San Francisco police officers may affect at least 207 criminal cases, including three murder cases.

Adachi released text messages from former SFPD officer Jason Lai after his office received them from SFPD on Friday in connection to a robbery case Lai was investigating.

Two other current SFPD officers  Curtis Liu and Keith Ybaretta  were also named by prosecutors as being involved in the texting scandal. Adachi said that his office didnt have their messages. San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon that their messages were equally reprehensible.

"Its time for officers to speak up when their colleagues exhibit this kind of bigotry," Adachi said. "It is corroding community trust and making it harder for good officers to do their jobs."

The messages, which are rampant with racial and sexual slurs, criticize African Americans, Latinos, Indians and the LGBT community, Adachi said.

According to Adachi, Lai compares black people to "barbarians" and "a pack of wild animals on the loose." Adachi's statement said that he used a Cantonese slang for blacks, writing: "Bunch of hock gwais shooting each other. Too bad none of them died. One less to worry about."

Another text read: "I hate that beaner, but I think the n-- is worse."

Another one reads: "Indian ppl are disgusting," while a third message says: "Burn down walgreens and kill the bums."

"It is chilling how casually former officer Lai dehumanizes the citizens he was sworn to serve, Adachi said. "He wished violence upon the very people he was being paid to protect and none of his colleagues turned him in."

This is the second texting scandal to mire the city's police department in recent years  the first one involving five officers who sent racist and homophobic texts between 2011 and 2012, was revealed during a police corruption trial.

Suhr said that his department had provided the text messages to the Public Defender's office after accessing cell phone records during the murder investigation.

"The department acted immediately by suspending these officers and recommending them to the Police Commission for disciplinary action," Suhr said.

Suhr said that four police officers were involved in this particular text messaging scandal, and three of them were behind the texts released Tuesday. All three voluntarily left the department, and a fourth one is currently appearing before the Police Commission.

"There is no room in the SFPD for anyone who holds this kind of discriminatory views, no tolerance ... Anytime an officer presents him or herself this way they will be gone," Suhr said.

When asked by a reporter if he was going to resign, Suhr said no.

"I plan to move the department forward," he said. "We're better than this ...99.9 percent of this police department is feeling the same way I am, betrayed by people who wear the same uniform."

CNN was able to obtain some of the text messages before they were released by the Public Defender's office.

Lais attorney Dan Nobles told CNN that the texts were not reflective of who he is" and that "there is no evidence he carried out any of those sentiments as an officer."

"He was well liked and well loved on his beat,"he said.

The text messages were revealed after police investigated a rape accusation against Lai, who was charged last month with two misdemeanor counts of unlawful possession of criminal history information and four misdemeanor counts of misuse of confidential Department of Motor Vehicles information.

Lai is currently free on bail.

"It would be naive to believe these officers bigotry was reserved solely for text messages," Adachi said. "It is a window into the biases they harbored. It likely influenced who they stopped, who they searched, who they arrested, and how they testified in criminal trials."

When asked about disciplinary action against the officers, Suhr said there was no discipline more severe than being separated from the department.

Suhr said that the entire police department would undergo bias training with help from the Department of Justice by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, activists are holding an ongoing hunger strike and are calling for Suhr to be fired. Suhr in response has said he has no intention of leaving the police department.

Read the texts:
Rhode Island State Police have arrested two people accused of getting into an altercation at a Donald Trump rally in Warwick Monday.

Josh Sandin, 19, of Warwick, and Alexander Carrion, 22, of Providence, were both charged with Simple Assault and Disorderly Conduct.

Police say Carrion pushed through a crowd of Trump supporters and spit in Sandin's face.

The two began to push and shove each other and were eventually pulled apart by bystanders.

The two were arraigned Wednesday and were both released on $1,000 personal recognizance bail.

They are both due back in court May 9. It is not clear if either has an attorney.

Over the weekend police arrested a man accused of threatening to bomb a Trump rally in Connecticut.
Three people were injured Wednesday evening when a vehicle crashed into a barbershop in Boston's Mattapan neighborhood.

Police confirm the injuries are not considered life-threatening.

An SUV slammed into Primo's Barber Shop on Morton Street around 7:30 p.m.

According to fire officials, a building inspector is responding.

The driver remained on the scene. No charges have been filed.
Authorities are on the scene of a large brush fire in Boston.

The blaze, in the Fens, is at the rear of 59 Fenway, right by the park.

Massachusetts State Police said Park Drive at Boylston, the Fenway at Agassiz and Queensbury at Jersey Street are closed as firefighters continue to battle the blaze.

Boston Fire and Boston Police are asking people to avoid the area until the fire is brought under control.
A man who told police in Burlington, Vermont that he was a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan distanced himself from the hate group Wednesday during an appearance in criminal court.

William Schenk, 22, of North Carolina, pleaded no contest to distributing KKK fliers to two women of color in Burlington last fall. One of the recipients of the fliers was black and one was Hispanic, according to investigators.

Schenk had argued he was just exercising his free speech rights by spreading fliers. Burlington Police said last year Schenk told them he was trying to increase the KKK's numbers in Vermont.

Initially, Schenk entered a not guilty plea and had been jailed pending the outcome of the case. Wednesday, he changed the plea to no contest on two counts of disorderly conduct.

Schenk was sentenced to 120 days, which he had already served. But after his release from the custody of Vermont, he was taken into custody by authorities from New York, where he was wanted on unrelated charges.

Before his release, Schenk said in court he does not want to be a Klansman any longer, and that he has grown closer to his Mormon faith in his time behind bars.

One of the recipients of the KKK fliers, Jocellyn Harvey, told the judge finding the flier at her Burlington home created a great deal of anxiety and fear, because the imagery on the paper of a horse-mounted Klansman holding a burning cross is associated with decades of racial intimidation and violence.

"To feel like someone targeted me because, or partially because, I was a few shades darker than them, at a home where I live and that I pay for, was deeply disturbing," Harvey told the court.

"I would like to apologize to the victims," Schenk said in court. "If I caused any fear, I apologize."

Chittenden County State's Attorney T.J. Donovan discounted Schenk's free speech claims, arguing Schenk targeted the women specifically because of their race and that no white people received fliers. Donovan told reporters the case is an important reminder that hatred and harassment are unacceptable in Vermont.

"Whether it's on the issue of race, ethnicity, religion, or gender, we will not tolerate this," Donovan said. "This is a crime in the state of Vermont. And we will continue to prosecute you, for those folks that continue to try to threaten, harass and hurt people because of the color of their skin."

The Burlington Free Press reported that Schenk plans to appeal the sentence.

WPTZ-TV contributed to this report.
A Springfield, Massachusetts, man has been acquitted of charges that he raped a 15-year-old girl at the facility for troubled teens where he once worked.

Alphonso Cintron sank to the floor, rose, clenched his fists, thanked the heavens and turned to smile at his mother after the verdict was read Wednesday in Hampshire Superior Court.

Prosecutors said the 35-year-old Cintron raped the girl in 2009 while he was night supervisor at the Grove, a now-closed residential program in Northampton.

The girl, now 22, took the stand at trial to describe sexual encounters with two staff members. But her roommate at the facility testified that while the woman mentioned a sexual relationship with another staffer, she never said anything about Cintron.

Cintron had been held in jail for 19 months awaiting trial.
A Brooklyn, New York, man has been sentenced to serve more than two decades in prison for trafficking crack cocaine and heroin throughout the Lewiston, Maine, area.

James Winbrone was sentenced to 21 years behind bars Wednesday in federal court in Portland. The 32-year-old was found guilty of drug possession and distribution charges in September 2015.

Prosecutors say Winbrone faced an enhanced sentence due to his position of leadership in the trafficking ring and for his role in "an act of violence" involving a customer who owed a drug debt.

Winbrone's indictment states that he was part of the drug conspiracy at least from April 2014 to October 2014.

A wire-tap investigation of the drug ring led police to Winbrone's Bartlett Street apartment, where cocaine and heroin was seized by officers.
Police in Westford, Massachusetts, have arrested a man accused of pulling out a gun on a man who was out on a driving lesson with his teen brother during an alleged road rage incident.

Westford Police say Hans-Peter Schlueter pulled a gun on a 16-year-old boy who was taking a lesson with his 25-year-old brother on Route 110.

Schlueter, who was driving a Patriot Lock and Key company van, allegedly pulled over in a parking lot and began yelling at the two for driving too slowly.

The older brother decided to call the company that owned the vehicle Schlueter was driving, and went over to get the license plate number for the manager. When he got to the truck, he says Schlueter pulled out a gun, cocked it back and pointed at him.

"I was numb," the victim said. "It was just fight or flight."

In court Thursday, Schuelter admitted to pulling the gun on the man. He also told the judge it was done out of self defense, even sticking with his side of the story while in handcuffs, heading to jail.

"I did nothing wrong," he said. "I protected myself."

"I wouldn't understand why he would do it out of self defense," the victim said. "There wasn't even a conversation that was initiated."

For the teen who was learning to drive, getting his license may take longer - he doesn't plan to get behind the wheel anytime soon.

Schlueter was ordered to hand over all of his firearms and was held on $1,500 cash bail, which the victim was told he posted.

He's due back in court in May.
A person was killed Thursday afternoon when a train struck an SUV in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Police confirm there was one fatality in the crash. They did not say whether the victim was the driver of the vehicle.

State police assisted in the response after being called to the scene by Great Barrington Police just after 12:45 p.m.

Necn affiliate WWLP reported that Maple Avenue was closed in the area after the crash.

Check back as this story develops.
Police have arrested a man they say approached two teenage girls and made sexual remarks to them in the woods behind a Massachusetts high school.

The girls, both 16, were walking along a trail behind Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough Wednesday. They were not harmed, but police set out to find the suspect.

Around 7 p.m., police announced that 33-year-old Yaicha Maus of Northborough had been arrested on "a number of charges."

Maus will be arraigned Thursday at Westborough District Court. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney.
Though dry and cool air continues to feed into New England from a slow-moving dome of Canadian high pressure, or fair weather, showers aren't that far away - rain drops over Pennsylvania will nudge north, and may deliver a Southern Connecticut sprinkle or light shower this evening.

[CLICK HERE FOR INTERACTIVE MAPS AND RADAR]

Otherwise, the biggest impact for New England will be increasing clouds from late morning onward that will dim the sunshine as highs reach 60 inland and 50s with a sea breeze at the coast.

Another cool night is expected tonight, with low temperatures cold enough for frost in Central and Northern New England, as well as sheltered Southern New England valleys. Though a similar day is expected Friday, clouds will bubble up a bit more and a stronger onshore wind will mean cooler temperatures both at the coast, near 50, and inland, in the 50s, with temperatures rising back up by about 5-6 degrees Saturday under similar sky cover.

[CLICK HERE FOR WEATHER ALERTS]

We've been carefully watching a somewhat unsettled pattern expected for next week, with particular attention paid to when the first chance of widespread showers arrives: and the trend is faster.

In other words, it looks like showers may arrive as soon as Sunday midday through afternoon, at least in scattered form, before ramping up to a steady rain Sunday night and lasting as showers into part of Monday.

As you might expect, this has an impact on temperatures, and as a generally unsettled week sets in next week, daily high temperatures will be highly dependent upon the amount of sunshine seen, with 50s on cloudier days and 60s when the sun breaks out.
Green Pastures Christian Bookshop in Dereham has won a national award for providing boxes of books to 21 local schools.

Green Pastures Christian Bookshop in Dereham has won a national award for providing boxes of books to 21 local schools.

Painting and biblical feasting in Overstrand There will be opportunities to improve your painting skills and indulge in some biblical feasting next month at the Pleasaunce in Overstrand in North Norfolk. Read more

National award for Dereham Christian bookshop The Green Pastures Christian bookshop in Dereham has won a national award for providing boxes of Christian books to 21 local schools. Read more

Norma's care home jigsaw challenge complete A resident at Norwich-based care home Corton House has completed an incredible 70 jigsaw puzzles in celebration of the homes 70th anniversary this year. Read more

Norwich charity's appeal to support Palestinian students A Norwich educational charity, set up in memory of a Norwich Anglican priest, to support students from a Palestinian refugee camp, is inviting people to support its Christmas appeal  to be launched on November 29. Read more

Norfolk drug and alcohol charity pays tribute to its founder Andy Sexton, CEO of the Matthew Project, introduces a series of tributes from the charity to its founder, Peter Farley. Read more

Cliff look alike at Cromer Church breakfast Cliff Richard tribute performer Will Chandler will be the speaker at a special Mens Breakfast at Cromer Parish Hall next month, and all men are welcome to come along. Read more

Heartsease Lane Methodist church to close As part of a reorganisation of the Norwich Methodist Circuit, Heartsease Lane Methodist Church will be closing towards the end of the year. Read more

Free Julian of Norwich reflection and prayer day The Friends of Julian of Norwich present a free Quiet Half-Day with Robert Fruehwirth, author and former Priest Director of the Julian Centre, on Saturday November 12, 10.30am-2pm. Read more

What it means for us to repent Nigel Fox believes that now is the time for a tide of repentance, and shares his thoughts about what that actually means for our society. Read more

Christmas card shop opens in Norwich church Thousands of Christmas cards from around 30 local Norfolk charities have gone on sale today (October 19) at the Original Norwich Charity Christmas Card Shop inside St Peter Mancroft church in Norwich city centre. Read more

Revelation Christian Resource Centre and Cafe Revelation in Norwich is a Christian resource centre, offering a bookshop, a meeting place and a welcoming refuge for refreshment open to visitors of any faith or none. Read more

Farewell as Yarmouth church leader moves on Captain Marie Burr, the Salvation Army leader in Great Yarmouth, has paid tribute to everyone at the church and charity after she left her post at the end of last month to move to a new role. Read more

Norwich Cathedral chorister in BBC final Norwich Cathedral chorister Alice Platten has her sights set on being crowned BBC Young Chorister of the Year after reaching the final stages of the prestigious nationwide competition. Read more

Norwich to hear pastor, Policeman and tramp tale Essex Baptist Pastor Dave McDowell has been a Policeman, fed orphans in India and lived under a boat as a tramp. He will tell his remarkable story at the October dinner of Norwich FGB on Wednesday October 26. Read more

Pioneer UK leader speaks at Sheringham church Ness Wilson, national leader of the Pioneer network of churches, was the main speaker at a day of teaching and worship held at Lighthouse Community Church in Sheringham on 12 October, to be followed up by Word and Worship sessions at October half term. Read more

Norwich event to give tips on bouncing forwards St Stephens in Norwich will be hosting an evening in October with Patrick Regan OBE, as he explores themes from his book Bouncing Forwards. Read more

Youth for Christ lights a fire in north Breckland North Breckland Youth for Christ will be putting on a mini residential camp this year to coincide with Bonfire Night. Read more


S Norfolk Filling Station tastes Gods goodness S Norfolk Filling Station tastes Gods goodness

Network Norfolk contributor Kevin Gotts attended the second meeting of the Christian Filling Station in Yare Valley with guest speaker Dave Elverson on April 21 and described the experience as having a Great Taste.

Great Taste seems to be the phrase to describe some very fine coffees enjoyed these days. And Great Taste helps describe Yare Valley Filling Stations second meeting on Thursday, April 21. Not only was fresh coffee and homemade cakes served, there was the ambience of the new School Hall in Alpington and an inspirational talk including taste by guest speaker Dave Elverson.



Dave, a local leadership and culture change consultant, began with his amazing miraculous healing four years ago from being paralysed from the neck down. He then embarked on finding out more of being able to live a full life as promised in his little book the Holy Bible.



He went on to expand three points  Eat, Drink and Repeat. To eat was translated as tasting that the Lord is good and wants his children  believers of Jesus Christ, to know that there is much more to experience here on earth before the promise of eternal life in heaven.



To drink, he described as to drink in how God chooses to work through individuals mentioned throughout the Bible and called on the audience to dare to dream. Joy is released. His example was taking an apple, which with pips has the potential to grow into an orchard. In his latest book, Creating a Culture of Overflow Dave stated, Vision is so important: people having a vision and purpose is motivational and brings people alive.



Repeat was taking the principle of stewardship, where a Christian believer will embrace an experience and replicate it for the benefit of others. He illustrated this with an account of some healings of leg problems at a Norwich church. The persons healed which Dave asked them to confirm, encouraged others and began praying for others with leg problems.



Dave then invited those in the school hall with leg problems to identify themselves and those nearby to pray for healing. Two guests confirmed feeling much better. The invitation extended to those with back problems and one lady demonstrated a massive improvement, being able to bend and touch her toes  the first time for many years. By the end of the evening, three others spoke of healing including a man who called in to collect a guest and asked for prayer for his back.



Dave with his wife Holly also leads a Global Legacy hub, part of the Bethel Church network in the East of England, and is gearing up to launch Kingdom Life Church in the summer. Dave and Holly graduated from the leadership development course of Bethel Church in Redding, California a couple of years ago and he is now passionate about seeing everyone living life to the full as Jesus said he came to bring.



Yare Valley Filling Station is the fourth Filling Station in Norfolk and part of a network of 81 Filling Stations around the world. Using monthly mid-week evening celebration meetings held in non-church venues Filling Stations offer high quality speakers and teachers, contemporary sung worship and powerful, accessible prayer ministry. Their meetings are designed to be overtly spiritual but presented in a manner that those outside the church would feel comfortable.



Yare Valley Filling Stations next meeting is on Thursday, May 19 at Alpington and Bergh Apton Primary School, Wheel Road, Alpington, NR14 7NH with guest speaker Richard Fothergill, Director Filling Station. They meet on the third Thursday of each month at 7.30pm.



Photo: Photograph by Kevin Gotts GotPix.co.uk
Thus far, in my journey to interview the leaders of every major Linux distribution, Ive talked with the people behind Ubuntu, elementary, Fedora and openSUSE. This time around, I talk with Martin Wimpressthe man behind Ubuntu MATE.

I asked very few questions in this interview primarily because Martin is, quite possibly, the longest-winded leader of any Linux distro on the planetbut in a very good way. I found his answers truly interesting and uniquely different than the other interviews in this series.

This is a lengthy read. I know. But if youre interested in what can happen when one person decides to make his own Linux distribution, as a hobby for personal reasons, I recommend taking the time to ingest it all.

Martin Wimpress

Bryan: Lets start out with a softball. In as few words as humanly possible, what is Ubuntu MATE?

Martin: Ubuntu MATE is a stable, easy-to-use operating system with a configurable desktop environment. It is ideal for those who want the most out of their computers and prefer a traditional desktop metaphor. With modest hardware requirements, it is suitable for modern workstations, single board computers (such as as the Raspberry Pi) and older hardware alike. Ubuntu MATE makes modern computers fast and older computers usable.

Bryan: What is it about MATE that makes it the best desktop environment for what youre trying to do? Why not, say, GNOME, LXDE, XFCE, etc.?

Martin: I would never say MATE is the best desktop environment. As Linux users, we are spoilt for choice with regards to how we interact with our computers, consequently the Linux desktop is pretty much a 'horses for courses' affair. There is a desktop environment to suit just about every personal preference. Some people prefer MATE.

The main reason why MATE is the best desktop environment for what Im trying to do is because I love my wife and I also love Linux and Open Source. To understand that, heres some back story.

Ive been a full-time Linux user since 1995. I migrated my whole family from Windows to Linux in 2006 when Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 was released. My family, with the exception of my father-in-law, are not really interested in technology or computers. Computers are merely tools they need to use to get stuff done. The stuff they most need to do is get online to browse the web, read email, organize photos and create the occasional document or spreadsheet. And print, they really love printing. They found the, then, GNOME2 user interface was intuitive and easy to use, and I didnt have endless support calls about viruses or other Windows-related foibles. Everyone was happy, all the way to Ubuntu 10.04.

Enter GNOME3 and Unity. My family are not in the slightest bit interested in relearning how to use a computer. These new desktop metaphors were out-right rejected by those closest to me. While trying to organize baby photos using GNOME3, my wife had stern words with me; there might have been swearing.

Thinking on my feet, I uninstalled GNOME3 and installed MATE on her Arch Linux laptop. The reaction to the contemporary Linux desktops was similar from other family members. I was in significant danger of my family rejecting Linux and looking elsewhere.

I was an Arch Linux user by this time and happily using GNOME3, but I created a custom Arch Linux image with MATE to install on my familys computers. They had their familiar desktop environment back, but the MATE builds on Arch were incomplete and somewhat buggy at that time. I started contributing upstream to fix MATE issues, which ultimately led to me becoming a core member of the MATE team and an Arch Linux TU maintaining MATE Desktop. This helped improve MATE, and wedded bliss was restored. Win!

Sadly, Arch Linux is an attention whore. Trying to keep multiple Arch Linux computers ticking over from a distance was a burden. Some family members didnt take to Arch Linux and stopped using their computers altogether. Not good. There were even rumors of Apple Macs. I was facing the same problem. My family might reject Linux. Around that time, I was interviewed about the MATE Desktop on the Ubuntu Podcast, in which we discussed why MATE wasnt available for Ubuntu. A couple of weeks later Alan Pope sent me an email with a link to a prototype .iso image hed prepared of MATE running on an Ubuntu 14.04 base. It was a rough draft, but a glimpse of what might be, and it got my attention. Alan and I took a day off work and met as his house for a one-day sprint, and because I love my wife, Ubuntu MATE was born.

Ubuntu MATE was created, primarily, to meet the needs of my family and to ensure Ubuntu MATE worked properly. I use it on all my computers every day. Even at work. Consequently, if you have any computing requirement in common with my family, my friends or me, then Ubuntu MATE can do it, and the tools to do it are either pre-installed or are one click away in the Ubuntu MATE Software Boutique. The Software Boutique is a 'less is more' approach applied to the App Store concept.

The main reason why MATE is the best desktop environment for what Im trying to do is because I love my wife and I also love Linux and Open Source.

Ubuntu MATE also has a hardware partnership with Entroware, so weve been improving the out-of-box experience, too. This has resulted in the creation of Ubuntu MATE Welcome, which is not your average 'Welcome' screen that is typically just a collection of bland links. Ubuntu MATE Welcome is a virtual 'Martin' (although it is more a virtual 'Luke' now, as he has done most of the development of late) that introduces the user to Ubuntu MATE and guides them through getting connected, getting installed and completing post-install configuration. It actually does useful things, and each thing is simply explained with a button that can be clicked to do said thing.

I also believe that computing has to be accessible to all. And thanks to MATEs GNOME2 heritage, we have just about the best accessibility integration available. Ubuntu MATE has been tested, and endorsed, by members of the Accessible Computing Foundation for use by blind or visually impaired individuals. Im also active in my local Raspberry Pi community, and Ubuntu MATE is also available for the Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3, bringing a 'real boy' desktop experience to a $35 computer, which is just about within reach of most people around the world.

The reason MATE can comfortably run on a relatively low-powered computer is because since the fork from GNOME2, the MATE team has removed legacy compatibility libraries and obsolete code. MATE is therefore a much lighter desktop environment than GNOME2 ever was. The MATE team has also worked hard aligning MATE with modern technologies, such as dconf/gsettings, gstreamer 1.x, systemd, GTK3, etc to keep it relevant while preserving the user experience that Sun Microsystems, RedHat and others invested so much time, effort and money into refining.

MATE Desktop is tried and tested, has modest hardware requirements and is highly configurable, making it an ideal foundation upon which to build a modern desktop operating system that respects the classic desktop interface. Ubuntu MATE is for people. For everyone. MATE makes this possible because its traditional desktop metaphor means that anyone who has encountered a computer sometime in the last 20 years already knows how to use it.

Bryan: That is, quite possibly, the best reason I have ever heard to build your own Linux distro. Now that Ubuntu MATE has grown tremendously in popularityfrom a very personal project to hovering around the 15th spot on DistroWatchhas your involvement with, and approach to, the project changed?

Martin: DistroWatch is a very poor metric for gauging popularity. Yet somehow DistroWatch is something people new to Linux know about, in the same way turtle hatchlings know to head for the ocean, and most people new to Linux start their journey with Distrowatch. It is, therefore, an important route to discovery, and it is very pleasing to see Ubuntu MATE ascend to a respectable position in the year since weve been listed.

In general, my role hasnt changed. Im project coordinator, casual developer, voice for the project and chief executive minion. But what has changed is how I do the work.

At the outset, I was building MATE Desktop packages for Ubuntu in a PPA. This was no good. I went to the X2Go Gathering in Essen, Germany (at the Linux Hotel no less!) in October 2014 so I could meet Mike Gabriel, the Debian developer leading the MATE packaging effort. We drank beer, ate pizza, drank mate (fist bump) and then worked out how we could maintain MATE Desktop in Debian so it met the needs of both Debian and Ubuntu. Im now member of the Debian pkg-mate team and have done the majority of the MATE 1.10 and MATE 1.12 packaging work, with Mike providing peer review and sponsoring the uploads to the Debian archive. MATE Desktop packages are synced to Ubuntu unchanged. With the exception of artwork, default settings and Ubuntu MATE Welcome, everything that makes up Ubuntu MATE is actually built in Debian. Two birds, one stone. Score! Or something?

While we were an unofficial Ubuntu 'remix' we needed an iso build system. Surprisingly most of my effort for the Ubuntu MATE 14.10 release was actually making the build system and taming EFI and SecureBoot. That was a massive waste of time. Gaining access to the official Ubuntu build infrastructure was my main motivation for seeking official Ubuntu flavor status. It pleases me greatly. I now have access to a great build system and a team of people who maintain it.

I had been feeling quite isolated as an independent 'remix,' but that soon faded. Ubuntu MATE is now very much a part of the Ubuntu family, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Ubuntu developers carry out essential work on Ubuntu MATE (and the other official flavors) when something significant changes. Also, when the switch to systemd was approaching, I was contacted to discuss the implications for Ubuntu MATE, given access to the 'new stuff' along with testing and QA assistance. Im invited to regular meetings with the Ubuntu Community Council to check how the project is progressing and what assistance I might require.

Ubuntu MATE now benefits from a QA process, and Ive made contributions to many aspects of Ubuntu, mostly to support better Ubuntu MATE integration, all of which have been peer reviewed by Ubuntu developers. Ive been made to feel very welcome and received assistance from about 20 Canonical staff along the way. I would strongly advocate that projects building on Ubuntu, that are not currently official flavors, request official status and start working toward becoming official. You really have no idea how much resource, expertise and assistance youre missing out on that will absolutely improve the quality of your project. I stand firmly on the shoulders of the Ubuntu giants, and the view from up here is pretty great.

Although Ubuntu MATE was started as a personal project, it became clear very early on that people liked the idea. So, I decided to really go for it and really promote Ubuntu MATE. After all, only my pride was at stake. I engage with the Ubuntu MATE community, in all the places it resides, every day. And by engage, I mean have a conversation. Each morning, I catch up on the goings on in the various social networks, answer questions I can as I go and +1 stuff. I try to post some sort of project information to the social networks every day or so to keep people informed. Ive also watched every single Ubuntu MATE YouTube video, even those that arent in English, and replied in the comments for a good number. Some of the best feedback and ideas for improving Ubuntu MATE have come from watching YouTube reviews. By 'meeting' with the community in the many places it can be found, I get a really good feel for what people want from Ubuntu MATE. Talking with the community is the part of the project I enjoy the most and devote the most time to.

What absolutely hasnt changed is that the Ubuntu MATE community provides all the artwork and design, which is good because I suck at that kind of thing. If I gave Ubuntu MATE a voice, then the community absolutely gave Ubuntu MATE its character and identity.

Bryan: How much time and energy does it take to be a project coordinator, casual developer, voice for the project and chief executive minion for Ubuntu MATE? Thats a lot of (rather heavy) hats.

Martin: I start and finish my day catching up on the social networks and forums. That consistently takes about two hours a day. It turns out community building is harder work than I anticipated.

Project coordination can be broken down into lots of small tasks, such as discussions with other developers, updating project tasks, following up with users who are testing new features, working with translators or the artwork team, etc. This takes between four and eight hours per week, consisting of many tasks that may only take a few minutes to complete each. Most communication is via IRC, Telegram, Google+ and Twitter. I rarely use email.
Digital transformation has become a top-of-mind initiative for CIOs and business leaders for almost all companies in all verticals. Its no wonder, as a recent ZK Research study found that digital organizations are 26 percent more profitable than their digitally immature peers.

Another interesting data point is that by 2019, 65 percent of workers will use a mobile device first for business purposes. Going digital means shifting to a mobile-first strategy.

Becoming a mobile-first organization is more than just building a bunch of standalone mobile applications that customers or workers can use. The process of switching between applications on a desktop is inconvenient, but most users manage. On a mobile device, having to constantly flip between applications while trying to remember data or cut and paste data is inefficient and can make users less productive.

That is particularly true for communications applications, as users are constantly switching between Facebook, short messaging service (SMS), the dialer, chat and business applications.

Communications functions needed

A better solution would be to either integrate more communications functions in the applications customers and workers use or to build application functionality directly into a communications tool.

Historically, using premises-based communications development platforms can be a long, expensive process because racks of infrastructure need to be procured, installed and maintained to deliver the required functionality. This is one reason why communications-enabled applications are still in their infancy.

The past few years have seen the rise of the communications platform as a service (CPaaS) market that enables developers to access collaboration functions such as SMS, multimedia messaging service (MMS), speech recognition, authentication, telephony, video and other functions from the cloud.

Initially this market was driven by startups such as Twilio, Nexmo, Plivo and Tropo (acquired by Cisco) but has recently seen many more established UC vendors, including Genbands Kandy, Avaya Zang and RingCentral Connect, throw their hats into the ring. The ability to easily embed these collaboration functions into web-based and mobile applications can reduce costs and create new ways of interacting with customers, and it is key to transitioning to a digital business model.

For example, Box uses Twilio to build two-factor authentication (2FA) into its product. Box is one of the premier content-sharing portals and lets customers store content online, so users can access, manage and share it from anywhere. To add a layer of security to the files, Box built a 2FA solution on Twilio SMS that confirms the user is who he says he is before logging in.

Another interesting example is how KLM Royal Dutch Airlines uses Nexmo to communicate with its customers through Facebook Messenger and WeChat. Through the integration, KLM customers can get flight updates, check in for a flight and communicate with KLM support.

In both cases, the similarity is that the users experience has been greatly improved because he can remain in a single application rather than constantly switching between siloed applications.

CPaaS enables developers to easily create communications-integrated applications via a cloud platform. This opens the door to large software companies, corporate developers and the tens of thousands of small ISVs out there today. The market for CPaaS is still in its infancy, but it is key to digital transformation, and, as Donald Trump likes to say, Its going to be huge.
Alan Rickman's last film Eye in the Sky explores the ethics of drone strikes in modern warfare

Eye in the Sky (15)

Running time 1hr 42min

Rating ****

I FINALLY caught this gem of a film at the wonderful Regal Picturehouse in Henley. It is on general release now and due for a second short run at Screen One in Newburys Corn Exchange, in the latter part of May. Catch it then if you missed it this month.

The Eye in the Sky is an unmanned US drone plane that keeps watch on a shabby house ina poor rebel-controlled suburb of Nairobi, Kenya, where visiting key Al-Shabaab terror suspects are expected.

A 24-style surveillance operation, set on capturing the visitors, is controlled from a UK army baseby Colonel Katherine Powell, played by Helen Mirren, who herself answers to Lt Gen Frank Benson (Alan Rickman, in his final screen role). The General is located in Whitehall, surrounded by the politicians and civil servants charged with making the ultimate strategic decisions.

At a US military base, two newly-qualified drone pilots work what would seem a routine 12-hour shift.

In Nairobi, eyes on the ground are provided by a Somali agent and it is through his findings  at great personal risk  that priorities change. Now it is imperative that the conspirators are neutralised immediately, but that is not straightforward  there is a problem.

Over a perfectly-paced 102 minutes, the drama plays out with never a wasted shot or line, constantly ratcheting up the tension, but always convincingly, as the main protagonists wrestle with the dilemma. Scenes point up the sometimes absurd contrast between the mundane routine of daily life and the peril lurking behind it. Rickmans character is initially tripped up by a minor domestic buying decision, just as he is due at COBRA; in Nairobi a woman is berated by the occupying Muslim militia for revealing her wrists in public and at home the Foreign Secretary is temporarily disabled in the most basic way.

Yes, this is a thriller and it does thrill, but at its core it is a claustrophobic drama about how good people behave under extreme moral pressure, in the mode of Twelve Angry Men.

Great credit must go to veteran TV screenwriter Guy Hibbert (Prime Suspect, Omagh) and director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, A Reasonable Man) for creating and maintaining just the right atmosphere. The main cast members are, of course, impeccable and the film is a fitting tribute to Rickman, to whom it is dedicated.

But for me, it is some of the supporting roles that add most, not least the portrayals of ordinary people caught up in the crossfire.

One of Rickmans closing lines, in this film and in his career, sums it all up and will pierce you to the core. Go find out...
Bishop's Green works forced pedestrians into oncoming traffic

Telecoms giant BT has been fined more than 3,000 by West Berkshire Council after it failed to build a temporary footpath, forcing pedestrians to walk out into oncoming traffic.

BT Open Reach was given approval by the council to carry out the works at Bishops Green in August last year and part of the conditions attached to the project was for the construction of a pedestrian footpath.

However, West Berkshire Magistrates Court heard on April 21 how workmen employed by BT to do the work between August 12 and August 25 instead put up a sign asking pedestrians to step into the road.

The court heard how on August 24 a member of the council visited the site to find that nobody was working there and a footpath allowing pedestrians to safely pass by had not been implemented.

Instead, a sign had been placed asking pedestrians to step on to Ecchinswell Road into the path of oncoming traffic.

Prosecuting, Sarah Clarke of West Berkshire Councils legal services, said: The purpose [of the condition] is so that street works are carried out in a safe way. Asking pedestrians to walk into the road presented a risk to pedestrians.

Council spokesperson Martin Dunscombe said: Bringing a prosecution is something we only consider as a last resort when all other options to resolve the problem have failed.

In this case, we had spoken to BT with repeated requests for improvement at other sites which they failed to heed, so in this case we felt compelled to prosecute the company.

The council works hard to ensure roadworks are done as quickly and safely as possible and I hope this reassures residents that we will not hesitate in prosecuting companies where they fail to adhere to the conditions of their work permits.

Accepting a guilty plea, the firm was ordered to pay a total of 3,100, comprising a 1,000 fine, costs to West Berkshire Council of 2,000 and a 100 victim surcharge.
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

A mix of clouds and sun this morning followed by cloudy and windy conditions this afternoon. High 76F. Winds S at 20 to 30 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy this evening with showers after midnight. Low 61F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
A major British medical organization has urged Britains eight million smokers to switch to electronic cigarettes, as their best hope of managing to stop smoking.

The government-backed report, published by the Royal College of Physicians, summarizes the studies carried out so far on e-cigarettes and concludes that the benefits of vaping far outweigh the potential risks. According to the report, e-cigarettes are helping more people than they are harming them and the devices are 20 times less harmful than conventional cigarettes.

The authors of the report estimate that if every British smoker replaced normal smoking with vaping, about 75,000 lives could be saved each year. They have called for e-cigarettes to be prescribed on the NHS as soon as they have become regulated.

Officially referred to as electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), e-cigarettes deliver nicotine to the user, without delivering the carcinogens that are found in cigarette smoke. They now far outrank other smoking aids such as nicotine patches or gum and have become the number one quitting aid in Britain.

This is the first genuinely new way of helping people stop smoking that has come along in decades. E-cigarettes have the potential to help half or more of all smokers get off cigarettes. Thats a huge health benefit, bigger than just about any medical intervention. John Britton, U.K Center for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies, University of Nottingham. Leader of the committee.

This conclusion is expected to be controversial in the United States, where experts are divided in their opinion over the risks versus benefits of using the devices. Some view e-cigarettes as the best chance in generations for 40 million American smokers to quit, while others have focused on the potential harmful effects such as the potential for extending smoking habits, the devices acting as a gateway to traditional cigarettes and the long-term health effects the vapor could turn out to have.

Smoking remains the biggest cause of preventable death in the US, with smoking-related illness accounting for more than 480,000 deaths every year. Now a multibillion dollar industry, the popularity of e-cigarettes has spread more quickly than the government has been able to regulate them.

The current report has looked at e-cigarette research over the last ten years, including studies for and against their use. It found that e-cigarettes are only 5% as damaging to health as traditional cigarettes, a conclusion that some American experts are saying has been overlooked in the rush to condemn the devices.

The reports authors write: The emergence of e-cigarettes has generated a massive opportunity for a consumer as well as a health care-led revolution in the way that nicotine is used in society.

As the technology becomes more advanced, they say, so the vision of a society that is free from tobacco smoking, and the harm that smoking causes, becomes more realistic.
WFN Zika-Info-Service: World Federation of Neurology establishes Work Group on Zika virus to support international efforts - Lack of neurological resources in countries most concerned by the virus

"The Zika virus is more and more showing its ugly face, and the international community increasingly realises the dimensions of this problem. Neurological expertise is crucial to deal with the consequences of what proves to be a devastating epidemic", says Prof Raad Shakir (London), President of the World Federation of Neurology (WFN): "The WFN is therefore joining forces with all organisations and agencies, and in particular with WHO efforts, to cope with this serious situation. A new WFN Work Group on Zika virus has just been established which will contribute the neurological angle and expertise to the coordinated global response to help affected countries and health care providers deal with the crisis."

Neurological Zika complications: More than microcephaly - larger groups at risks

The neurologists' contribution is particularly relevant because there is growing concern and evidence about the increasing number of neurological complications involved in the spread of the Zika virus. While a large percentage of persons with Zika virus disease are either asymptomatic or show a mild course, with fever, skin rash, conjunctivitis, muscle and joint pain and headache, which does not need major medical intervention, possible neurological consequences can be devastating.

"The latest evidence suggests a clear association of the virus with a congenital syndrome of brain mal-development and an increased incidence of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) and other neurological conditions, such as myelitis and meningoencephalitis," says Prof John England (Louisiana State University, New Orleans) who chairs the new WFN Work Group on the neurological complications of Zika virus. "While a lot of public attention has been drawn to microcephaly, which has already affected thousands of babies in Brazil and French Polynesia, this dramatic condition is only one of several documented birth abnormalities associated with Zika infection during pregnancy. Other grave outcomes include fetal death, placental insufficiency, fetal growth retardation, and injury to the central nervous system which will lead to many more complications which we will only see in the long term."

Zika virus infection can also cause major complications in adults. "13 countries and territories have reported an increase in the incidence of GBS in conjunction with the wave of Zika virus outbreak", Prof England reports. "GBS leads to paralysis due to immunological effects of the virus on the peripheral nervous system. The morbidity is high and approximately 25 to 30 percent of affected individuals require respiratory support with ventilators." Latest research from Recife, Brazil, just presented at the ongoing meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, associates Zika virus infections also with Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM), another autoimmune disorder that attacks the brain's myelin similar to MS.

"So there are a lot more risks involved in Zika infections than pregnancy complications and microcephaly. The risk group is broader than originally thought and the modes of transmission go beyond mosquito bites, it is now known that they include also sexual contacts," Prof England stresses.

Zika virus is now most prevalent in the northern region of South America, and in Central America. As of 20 April 2016, Zika virus transmission was documented in a total of 66 countries or territories, 42 countries are experiencing a first outbreak of Zika virus since 2015, with no previous evidence of circulation, and with ongoing transmission by mosquitos. Eight countries have now reported evidence of person-to-person transmission of Zika virus.

Prof England: "Of great concern is the fact that the geographical distribution of the virus has steadily and rapidly expanded. There is great concern that the virus outbreak will continue to spread to other countries and territories. It has already reached the Caribbean countries and may spread to the southern United States and other countries where the virus mosquito vector (Aedes aegypti) thrives.

Lack of resources in neurological care

Apart from many aspects of the epidemic and its neurological complications that still need to be answered by research, the appropriate care of Zika victims is a particular challenge, according to WFN President Prof Shakir: "The resources available for neurological diagnosis and therapy and access to neurological care are very unevenly distributed globally, as the WHO Atlas shows." The number of neurologists per 100,000 inhabitants is significantly lower in low-income versus high-income regions (0.03/100,000 versus 2,96/100,000). Brazil, for example, has 1.66 neurologists per 100,000 inhabitants.

"In many areas particularly hit by Zika virus there is a clear lack of neurological resources, a shortage of neurologists, in particular also child neurologists, a lack of neurophysiological testing possibilities, and scarce intensive care facilities," says Prof Shakir: "If we do not overcome these problems there shall be more unnecessary deaths which would not have happened if the affected individuals would have lived in less deprived parts of the world." Prof England adds: "Management for the Zika virus infection is already straining health systems in affected regions, and there is a serous lack of financial resources available,"

Broad expertise and geographic distribution

The WFN Work Group on Zika virus represents a broad range of specialized neurological expertise, it includes child neurologists, specialists for infections in neurology as well as experts on GBS and other neuro-immunological diseases. The 18 members of the group represent several regions of the world, including most affected countries such as Brazil, Honduras, Mexico or Columbia.

Members of the Work Group will, in the course of the next months, contribute to important upcoming meetings devoted partly or entirely to the current developments, such as the International Child Neurology Congress (May 2-5 in Amsterdam), or a meeting of 7 Central American countries, to promote research and prevention (May 5-6 in Honduras). Zika virus will also be high on the agenda of the World Health Assembly on 28 May.

"It will be very important that we are also involved in the work on the ground. Of course, increased surveillance, enhanced mosquito control, development of reliable diagnostic tests, and vaccine development are priorities right now. We will also need to find answers to most urgent questions such as: how prevalence is developing as the virus spreads; if there are specific risk factors influencing the development of neurological symptoms; why Zika virus appears to have such a strong association with GBS and potentially other immune-mediated diseases of the nervous system", Prof England states. "There are many questions that still need further research and further data, and many of these questions will become even more relevant with a view to the upcoming Olympics with thousands of athletes and visitors travelling to Brazil. Collaborative interdisciplinary research on Zika infection and its neurological complications is being organised, but funding is severely lacking at this stage. As an important first step to enhance research collaboration and provide for transparent data sharing, the Neurovirus Emerging in the Americas Study (NEAS, www.neasstudy.org) is being organized. The situation is rapidly evolving; therefore, all information is subject to modification as we learn more about this emerging crisis."
A group including scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has been awarded a grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health to study the role of microRNAs in a range of physiological activities, including memory, sleep, synapse function and movement.

Ron Davis, chair of TSRI's Department of Neuroscience, will be a principal investigator of the new five-year study with David Van Vactor of Harvard University, Leslie Griffith of Brandeis University and Dennis Wall of Stanford University.

Genetics & Genomics eBook Compilation of the top interviews, articles, and news in the last year. Download a copy today

"This new collaboration with some of the best scientists at some of the best universities in the world has the potential to bring us a wealth of new and potentially groundbreaking knowledge about microRNAs," Davis said. "Because microRNAs are so critical for normal development and physiology, they are a potentially rich source of therapeutic targets. Our new collaboration will help us exploit that potential."

Scripps Florida will receive approximately $2 million for the project over the next five years.

MicroRNAs, as their name suggests, are tiny bits of genetic material. Instead of being translated into proteins like many RNAs, microRNAs act to regulate gene expression -- acting like a dimmer switch on a light.

In humans there are almost 2,000 distinct microRNAs, which collectively regulate somewhere between 30 and 80 percent of human genes.

Despite their ubiquity, their importance has become evident only in the last decade or so, and details are still emerging. Davis noted a host of critical questions remain: How complex is the microRNA regulatory landscape for neural circuits mediating essential behaviors? To what extent are microRNA mechanisms used in the brain? Do they regulate distinct sets of target genes in different cell types and/or developmental stages?

The new collaborative study will use Drosophila, the common fruit fly, which is a widely recognized substitute for human memory studies, to help answer some of these questions.
Mumbai: Women's rights activist Trupti Desai, who led a successful campaign for womens entry into the Shani Shingapur temple in Maharashtra, will hold a peaceful protest at Haji Ali dargah on Thursday evening.



The Bumata Brigade leader said, "We along with few Muslim women will hold a peaceful protest outside the dargah (Haji Ali). We will not enter the inner sanctum of the temple but decided to go where men and women are allowed to enter."



She said, "It is believed that your wishes come true at Haji Ali dargah. We will also wish for equal treatment for women at the dargah."



Recently, a local Shiv Sena leader Arafat Shaik stoked a controversy by saying that Desai would be hit with "slippers" if she tried to enter the Haji Ali Dargah but the gender equality campaigner said that she will go ahead with the plan on April 28.



Shaina NC, BJP, Spokesperson, said, "We will request Haji Ali dargah authorities to allow women to pray at par with men."







Currently women are not allowed into the inner sanctum of the dargah. Haji Rafat Hussain, AIMIM leader, said, "We will not tolerate if she (Trupti Desai) challenges the rights of Muslims."



Recently, Desai entered and offered prayers at the Shani Shingnapur temple and Tribakeshwar temple in Maharashtra.
AgustaWestland reportedly paid middleman Christian Michel 6 Million for two years after the AW-101 helicopters deal was signed with the Indian government.Sources say Michel was paid from 2010-2012 to monitor and manage Indian media and ensure there was no bad publicity.In 2010 AgustaWestland signed a Rs 3,546 crore contract to supply 12 AW-101 helicopters to the IAF.On February 4, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) sent a letter to Interpol seeking extradition of Michel in connection with the chopper scam.Christian is believed to be the key middleman in the chopper scam and he was recently tracked down in Dubai. The extradition request was sent after both ED and CBI got a Red Corner Notice issued against him.The scam, which came in to limelight in 2013, revealed that several Indian politicians and military officials were 'accused' of accepting bribes from AgustaWestland to secure the bid for $610 million deal of AW-101 helicopters for VVIP duties.Christian is facing charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, illegal gratification and abuse of official position for allegedly acting as a middleman to influence the decision to purchase the VVIP choppers.The Rs 3600 crore deal was scrapped by the government in 2013.
In a bizarre order, the Bihar government has fixed cooking timings in rural areas to avoid incidents of accidental fire. The government's disaster management department's advisory issued on Monday said that people need to cook either before 9 AM or after 6 PM.The department said that cooking fire often leads to major fire outbreaks in villages. According to the advisory those violating the order will also be prosecuted under the law. Even puja and havan cannot be conducted during the daytime.Defending the order, Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Prem Chand Gupta said, "It is done to control the fire. This is for the good of the people. The main question is fire needs to be controlled from spreading."Bharatiya Janata Party MP Rajiv Pratap Rudy hit out at the Bihar government for even trying to tell the people when to conduct puja and havan. He said, "Is Nitish Kumar trying to hint something else by this? By saying that you cannot do puja after a certain time, is it trying to control a large community?"
Bengaluru: A CID Superintendent of Police (SP) accused of blackmailing and extorting money has filed a case under the SC/ST Act against her superior officer. Both the officers are women.



The case has been filed against CID DIG Sonia Narang by CID SP Madhura Veena.



Veena had reportedly raided a four star hotel Orchid Ramada on March 3 near Cunningham road in Bengaluru. The raid was under the pretext of busting a prostitution racket being run in the hotel.



Veena along with 11 police landed in the hotel around 2:30 in the afternoon. Police had allegedly no search warrant and the officers went straight to room number 306.



In room 306, two girls had booked the room through an online booking site. Police reportedly did not find any evidence when they entered the room but the SP then allegedly asked for Rs 5 lakh bribe from the hotel. She threatened that a false case would be lodged against them if they refused to pay.



The hotel reportedly offered Rs 25000. But the police then told the hotel that it is a raid by a SP level officer and Rs 25000 was unacceptable.



The SP left behind 2 Deputy SPs at 5:45 PM. The two officers allegedly struck a deal with the hotel in room 308 at 8:25 PM for Rs 2 lakh.



CID DIG Sonia Narang after going through the CCTV footage and other documents found a prima facie case confirming the hotel's allegations. The hotel management then lodged a complaint with state DGP Omprakash who ordered a probe into the incident after discussing it with CID DGP Kishore Chandra.



A report has also been submitted to Kishore Chandra by Sonia Narang.
The government has banned import of dogs for breeding or any other commercial activity in India. However, imports will still be allowed for internal security by the defence and police force.The import is also allowed for specific purposes such as pet dog with valid pet book and relevant records/documents in the name of importer; dogs imported by the R&D organisations for conducting research with the recommendation of Committee for the Purpose of Control And Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA).Welcoming the ban on import of dogs for breeding or any other commercial activity, animal rights bodies on Wednesday hoped that government complements this decision by implementing rules to regulate pet shops and breeders.Humane Society International India and People for Animals claimed that the lack of ban was earlier resulting in overpopulation of street dogs in India and had led to breed dogs suffering due to difference in climatic condition.A large number of dogs that are not suitable for the country's tropical climate such as St Bernards, Siberian Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes and others were being imported by breeders in India."We commend DGFT for this historic ban which will prevent the suffering of thousands of dogs. Our shelters are inundated with cases of abandoned imported breed dogs which are usually due to poor understanding of the breed's requirement."We now hope that the government complements this decision by enacting the Pet Shop and Breeder regulations as recommended by the Law Commission of India," said Gauri Maulekhi, HSI India consultant and PFA Trustee, in a statement.HSI said that in 2015, the Law Commission had published a report on the 'Need to Regulate Pet Shops and Dog Breeding and Aquarium Fish Breeding' recommending that the central government regulate the trade in pet shops and dog and aquarium fish breeding practices.It also recommended the government to take cognizance of the issue. The pet shop, dog breeding and aquarium fish breeding rules are pending notification with the government, the statement said.DGFT in its notification also said that the import of dogs is allowed only for the specific purposes such as pet dog with valid pet book and relevant records or documents in the name of importer or those imported by R and D organisations for conducting research with the recommendation of committee for the Purpose of Control And Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA).(With PTI inputs)
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday hailed the successful launch of PSLV-C33 carrying 7th navigation satellite IRNSS-1G to complete the landmark mission for a regional navigational system.



He said the navigation satellite will be known as 'Navic'. "In space science, our scientists have achieved many accomplishments. The world will know it as Navic," Modi said.



"First and foremost I want to congratulate all ISRO scientists and the entire team. I also congratulate the people of India," Modi said.



Underlining that through space science lives of people can be transformed, he noted that India has launched seven such navigation satellites which have been successful.







"With this successful launch, we will determine our own paths powered by our technology. This is a great gift to people from scientists," the Prime Minister said.



"Our efforts will help not only India but we can help fellow SAARC nations as well," he said. Modi said the benefits from this new technology will benefit people of the country, particularly the fisherfolk.



"This is example of 'Make in India, Made in India and Made for Indians. 125 crore Indians have got a new Navic," he said.



(With inputs from PTI)
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Students' Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, along with other students started their hunger strike on Wednesday night demanding revocation of punitive action against them by the varsity.



The students said they rejected the findings and recommendations of the high-level inquiry committee that probed the February 9 event on campus against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised. They are out on bail now.



"We have been maintaining right from the beginning that we have no faith in the probe committee. We are all sitting on hunger strike against the arbitrary punishments given to us. The inquiry was a sham and students have rejected it in our general body meeting. We will not abide by the punishment given to us," JNUSU General Secretary Rama Naga said.



The students took out a march late night from Ganga Dhaba to administration block against the action.



While Kanhaiya has been slapped with a penalty of Rs 10,000 on grounds of "indiscipline and misconduct", Umar, Anirban and Kashmiri student Mujeeb Gatoo have been rusticated for varied durations.



Fourteen students have been imposed financial penalty, hostel facilities of two students have been withdrawn and university has declared the campus out of bounds for two former students.







ABVP member Saurabh Sharma, who was complainant in the case lodged over the event, has also been slapped with a penalty of Rs 10,000 for blocking traffic. Five members of ABVP have been sitting on hunger strike since Tuesday, alleging that the university is "criminalising" patriotism.



The university officials, however, maintained that the decision has been taken after thorough investigation by a five-member probe panel and are in accordance with varsity norms.
Beed: Tragedy struck early on a 2015 December morning for the Burkul family in Kasari village of drought-hit Marathwada.



Bandu Sahibrao Burkul left as always to milk the buffaloes but did not return. His wife Sobhabai's went out to look for him and found him hanging from a neem tree. Burkul's death left her to fend for herself and her three children alone.



"My father had gone to get milk," says her son Subham, breaking down as the memory of that day overwhelmed him.



Their father had taken two loans of Rs 50,000 each from a bank and a private finance company for his farm and home. For two years the monsoon failed, ruining his cotton crop and turning his maize plants into cattle fodder.



Barely 11-years-old, and a bright student, Subham is struggling to assume the role of a bread earner. There is no way Sobhabai can bear the expenses of the three children by herself. In another painful separation, Subham's uncle sent him and his brother Suhas to a charitable school in Pune.



"I have no idea how we will survive. When he was here, he took care of everything," says Sobhabai.



Her daughter Sheetal studies in class 9 and has always been among the top three in her class. She is conscious that the assistance of Rs 1 lakh by the state government will not last for long.



In any case, the rules say Rs 70,000 have to be kept in a fixed deposit for five years.



As the months rolled by with no sign of rain, Maharashtra's Marathwada region, already known as the drought capital, turned into a suicide capital.



More than 1430 farmers have committed suicide since January 1, 2015, leaving more than 3500 children at the mercy of fate. It is a different thing that even if you add up all their debts, it will only be a fraction of what a big corporate defaulter owes a PSU bank.







At a charitable school in Aurangabad more than 200 children whose fathers committed suicide are from drought-hit areas of Marathwada. Among them Ganesh Bhagwat Tunde, who has just entered into his teens, had to deal with the trauma of seeing his father commit suicide by hanging.



"My father had taken a loan for my sister's marriage. We had two acres of land but the cotton crop failed " says Ganesh. Unable to pay back the money, his father killed himself a month after his sister's wedding and the boy ended up at the charitable school.



Two other boys, Vitthal and Gnyandeo, who are not yet 10 years of age, are at the same school with their sisters. Gyandeo's mother abandoned him and his six-month-old sister after their father committed suicide four years ago.



"We had to study, so we came here," his friend Vitthal speaks for both of them.



Vaibhavi Dnyaneswar Suryavansi, who is in the same school with her three sisters, remembers the date her father gave up on his life - November 28, 2015.



"My father committed suicide, I want to tell others not to do that. Because if they do, their families are robbed of happiness forever," says Vaibhavi.



The mood at the school is gloomy. In the background one can hear the strains of a ditty about a child's search for his mother's letter. When the new session begins in 2016, the school expects more children from suicide-hit families.



"There is a need to bring out children from the environment of despair in their families," says school principal Shyam Kanke.



While the children try to build their lives at the Aurangabad school, their families in drought-hit villages struggle.



Says Mudrukbai from Kasari village, " Even when my husband was alive, it was difficult. Now it is even more so. It is good that my son is away. At least he will study." Their land did not yield even two sacks of bajra in early 2016 and the family does not have a ration card.



In Marathwada, farmers who commit suicide are mostly in their thirties. Their wives have to raise the family on their own, an impossible task during times of drought.



District authorities argue that suicide rates have come down in 2016. But the improvement that they claim is not perceptible.



The system still extends no respite for the poor farmers who fight a losing battle against the vagaries of nature. For the farming community there is a drought of justice in Marathwada.




Washington: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been invited to address a joint meeting of the US Congress on June 8 during his visit, Speaker of the US House of Representative Paul Ryan said on Thursday.



"The friendship between the United States and India is a pillar of stability in an important region of the world," Ryan told reporters during his weekly press conference.



"This address presents a special opportunity to hear from the elected leader of the world's most populous democracy on how our two nations can work together to promote our shared values and to increase prosperity. We look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi to the US Capitol on June 8," he said.



Modi, who was invited by President Barack Obama for a bilateral visit when he was here for the nuclear summit, will be the fifth prime minister of India to address a joint meeting of Congress, and the first since 2005.



Earlier, Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh (July 19, 2005), Atal Bihari Vajpayee (September 14, 2000), P V Narasimha Rao (May 18, 1994) and Rajiv Gandhi (July 13, 1985) addressed the joint meeting of the US Congress.



The tradition of foreign leaders and dignitaries addressing Congress began with the Marquis de Lafayette of France, who spoke in the House chamber on December 10, 1824.



Ronak D Desai, a Fellow at New America and an Affiliate at the Belfer Center's India and South Asia Program at Harvard University, said, "an invitation to Prime Minister Modi to address a Joint Meeting of Congress is significant, given past US policy towards Modi during his time as Chief Minister of Gujarat."



Modi's visit is likely to be the last official meeting between the two leaders during President Obama's final year in office.
It's hotter these days inside Parliament than out there in the Delhi sun - Dr Subramanian Swamy is back in the highest law-making body of the country after a gap of 17 years.



He has returned to his favourite place in style. This time, nominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party to the Rajya Sabha. The ruling party finally rewarded him with an MP post for his untiring attack on its top political rivals, the Gandhis.



On his very first day, Swamys statement on Sonia Gandhi led to a huge furore, forcing the Deputy Chairman to adjourn the House and expunge the remark from the records.



Undeterred, Swamy attacked them again on Thursday. By now, there are enough indications that his blistering attack on the Gandhis will continue, come what may.



Known as Indias Gadfly, Swamy was one of the very few leaders who was not afraid of taking the name of Sonia Gandhi and her family during the UPA rule between 2004 to 2014. He also took on her son-in-law Robert Vadra, calling him a land grabber.



The BJP denied him a Lok Sabha ticket from New Delhi in 2014. Expectedly, Swamy was upset. But, he did not make his disenchantment with the BJP public. He maintained his close relationship with the RSS top brass and relentlessly pursued the National Herald case. He proudly claims that he made Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi appear before a court and take bail.



A Delhi-born Tamil Iyer, Subramanian Swamy has always been a controversial figure in Indian politics. After completing his PhD from Harvard University at the age of just 24, he returned to India to take up a teaching job at IIT Delhi in the late 1960s. His activist nature cost him his IIT job. He fought and won that case in the 1990s, returned to IIT and resigned on the same day. He is still fighting a case with the IIT over his dues. In the 1970s, he was made a Rajya Sabha member by the Jana Sangh, the previous avatar of the BJP.



A bitter critic of Indira Gandhi, he escaped from India during the Emergency Days in the second half of 1970s. His daring return to Rajya Sabha to demand obituary of democracy is the stuff of legends. He slipped through security again after that disguising himself as a Sikh taxi driver.



Later, Swamy became a supporter of Indira Gandhi in the 1980s. He claims he met the then Chinese President Deng Xiaoping to normalise Sino-India ties which had soured after the 1962 IndiaChina war. Swamy was also a close friend of young prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and reportedly advised him on various issues. In the late 1990s, when the VP Singh-led BJP-backed government collapsed, Swamy played a key role in installing Chandrashekhar as the next Prime Minister after securing support from Rajiv Gandhi. Swamy was rewarded with the key Law and Commerce portfolio in that government.



He also had a good rapport with Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and was heading a Commission under him. Swamy, who had filed corruption cases against Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa after she lost power in 1996, surprised everyone by forging an alliance with her in 1998. He won the Lok Sabha election from Madurai with her help.



Angry over not being made a minister at the Centre, he organised the famous tea party between the newly elected Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Jayalalithaa. It led to the collapse of AB Vajpayee led NDA by just one vote in 1999.



After that Swamy once again turned against both Sonia and Jaya ending his friendship with them both.



In an exhaustive profile of Swamy for Caravan magazine Samanth Subramanian wrote: Swamys political career is rife with contradictions. Some of his admirers have been drawn to his championing of economic liberalisation, but they have also been dismayed by his stated allegiance to the Hindu right and his views on Muslims; most infamously, in a bizarre op-ed in DNA last summer, Swamy suggested that Indias Muslims not be permitted to vote unless they acknowledge their Hindu ancestry.



He possesses a reputation as an intellectualas an early and credentialled advocate of economic liberalisation, and even as the draughtsman of the blueprint for Manmohan Singhs economic reforms in 1991. But this reputation has had to coexist with his fondness for airing theories that even his friends call kooky, and with the habits of a hectoring public persona



Samanth Subramanian added: "Swamy has repeatedly found allies in people whom he has previously attacked without relent  common enough in politics, but surprising for somebody often called inflexible and uncompromising. He is intelligent and incorruptible  descriptions almost reflexively assigned to him even by his most bitter critics  and yet, in a country that yearns constantly for intelligent and incorruptible politicians, Swamy has only ever been the man outside the window, thumping loudly on the glass and hollering to be let in."



Now that he is back, everyday fireworks are likely to be a norm in Parliament in the next six years.


If there is any doubt on who calls the shots in Pakistan - Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif or Chief of Army Staff Raheel Sharif - this incident dispels it.



Pakistan Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry, on his return from New Delhi on Tuesday after meeting his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar, was made to brief general Sharif first before meeting his prime minister, sources told CNN-News18



And this was how it happened - midway to Islamabad, Chaudhry was informed that his flight was being diverted to Lahore where General Sharif was camping. He landed in Lahore at 9.38pm and was driven straight to brief the army chief on his discussions in India.



It was one full day later that Chaudhry met PM Nawaz Sharif and briefed about his India visit - a clear indication on who decides foreign policy in Pakistan.







During the foreign secretary-level talks in Delhi, India had asked Pakistan to stop being in denial on terror while seeking action on the 26/11 and Pathankot attacks.



Jaishankar told his Pakistani counterpart that terror groups cannot be allowed to operate with impunity and also denied India's involvement in the insurgency in Pakistan's Balochistan. He demanded consular access for former naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, who was arrested in Pakistan on charges of espionage.



But Pakistan maintained that Kashmir remained a core issue and stressed on the Samjhauta Express blasts probe, saying India has not shared any investigation report.






New Delhi: Parliament once again witnessed pandemonium over the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal. The Rajya Sabha saw high drama on Thursday when Opposition leaders raised slogans and refused to let Bharatiya Janata Party MP Subramanian Swamy speak.



Calling him the new gift of the BJP, the Congress accused Swamy of making objectionable statements in the House. "This new gift of BJP will not allow Parliament to function. It is his (Subramanian Swamy's) second day in Parliament and his words have been expunged twice. How many times will you expunge his remarks," asked Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha and Congress MP Ghulam Nabi Azad.



Coming down heavily on the BJP MP, Azad said Swamy does not know the difference between street language and parliamentary words. "He does not allow his hair to grey so that he can learn and mature."







Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairperson PJ Kurien also reprimanded Swamy for his remarks. Calling his statements provocative, Kurien said that nothing Swamy said would go on record.



"I will take action against you. Subramanian Swamy, you are unnecessarily provoking. I will have to take action against you. You are provoking," Kurien said.



Observing that what Swamy said would not go on record, he said, "What has been expunged should not be reported by media."



Not missing any opportunity, Swamy also took a dig at Congress MPs and said that they knew Italian Constitution better than the Indian one.



Swamy, who took oath in Rajya Sabha on April 26, created uproar in the House by his remarks on the AgustaWestland scam.
The Congress on Wednesday alleged a "witch-hunt without any proof" on the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper scam after the government dragged in the name of its party president Sonia Gandhi.



The party also alleged there was a deal between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Italian counterpart Matteo Renzi to implicate Sonia in the case in which officials of AgustaWestland's parent company Finmeccanica were convicted by an Italian court of giving bribes to Indians.



Senior Congress leader and Sonia Gandhi's political advisor Ahmed Patel told CNN-News18 the allegations were baseless and challenged Bharatiya Janata Party leaders like Subramanian Swamy to come out with evidence if they have any.



Patel, whose name as also come up because of the initials 'AP'mentioned in a note by middleman James Christian Michel, said he never met or talked to Agusta officials.







Other Congress leaders, and middleman Michel, indicated that PM Modi struck a deal with PM Renzi at the UNGA in September and offered to free two Italian marines, facing murder charges in India, in exchange of evidence linking Sonia to the Rs 3600 crore deal.



Later, the External Affairs Ministry clarified that there was no such meeting.



In the morning, the Congress president dared the BJP saying, "I have nothing to hide. Let them take my name...where are the proofs. They are lying. They are part of a strategy of character assassination which we have known these people indulge in."



BJP Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy took Congress president Sonia Gandhi's name during a discussion but after a huge uproar and protest by Congress MPs, his remarks were expunged from the records.



Outside, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar claimed that the Gandhi family is involved in the chopper scam. "It is clear that Gandhi family is involved in AgustaWestland deal. Truth should come out. It involved so many VIPs, let me put it before Parliament first," he said.



Government sources said AgustaWestland and Finmeccanica will soon be blacklisted, while former Defence Minister AK Antony pointed out that they were already blacklisted during UPA rule.



"All that is happening is game of sensationalism and the truth is suffering," said Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi. "Barring one reference, there has been no mention of Sonia and Manmohan Singh".
With four phases of polling over in West Bengal, all eyes are now on the Bhowanipore constituency of south Kolkata where Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is the candidate.



For the Trinamool Congress chief, it is a battle for survival and she is leaving no stone unturned. If the emphatic victory of 2011 revolved around the 'Maa, Mati, Maanush' plank, it is just about holding the fort in 2016. The stakes as well as the challenges are high in the wake of big-ticket corruption in the state, law-and -order breakdown and unemployment.



What makes it crucial for the West Bengal Chief Minister is a three-cornered contest in her constituency, with Chandra Bose of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Deepa Dasmunsi of the Congress pitted against her.







However, Trinamool Congress leaders and workers believe that her contenders don't stand a chance, and the reason behind their confidence is the fact that Mamata bagged an impressive 78% of the total votes in 2011.



"Mamatadi and our Trinamool Congress will win a comfortable majority in Bengal. And in Bhowanipore, BJP and Congress will be far behind slugging it out for the second spot," said TMC spokesperson Derek O'Brien.



TMC may have already declared victory, but it certainly won't be a walkover for Mamata. Her first challenger is BJP's Chandra Kumar Bose. Though a greenhorn in politics, he has Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's legacy and has run a successful campaign for de-classification of the Netaji files.



"Mamata Banerjee has created a facade. She is certainly a mass leader. But unfortunately, the commitment that she had made during the 2011 elections which brought her to power, she has miserably failed to keep them. She's not a person for governance," said Bose.



Meanwhile, the real fight appears to be between the two ladies - Mamata and Deepa Dasmunsi. Armed with the backing of Left Parties, Deepa is ready to stage an upset.



"We saw in the Narada sting operation well known faces, Trinamool leaders taking bribes. We take tea and biscuits every morning. And the TMC leaders take bribes," said Deepa.



By posting high profile candidates like Deepa Dasmunsi and Chandra Bose against Mamata Banerjee in Bhowanipore, the opposition parties have made it clear that they are not ready to give the Trinamool supremo a walkover in these elections. The battle is clearly one of perception, with a confident Trinamool Congress feeling that the impact from slur campaigns is only temporary.
New Delhi: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "silence" on AgustaWestland chopper deal and wondered why CBI raids have not been conducted against Congress leaders in connection with the case.



"Why is the PM silent on Agusta? First BJP spared Vadra, now protecting entire Congress top brass in Augusta?," the Delhi Chief Minister said on twitter, referring to Congress Chief Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law Robert Vadra.



He also tweeted, "Shudn't those named in Italy court order be immediately arrested n interrogated? CBI raid had been conducted at me, but why there is no raid at Congress persons (sic)."



In December 2015, CBI had raided the office of Kejriwal's Principal Secretary Rajendra Kumar in connection with an alleged corruption case. Kejriwal had then accused the PM of getting CBI raid conducted at Delhi Secretariat.



The controversial deal to buy VVIP choppers and the alleged bribes paid in clinching it have triggered a political storm after an Italian court cited handwritten references to Sonia Gandhi, her political secretary Ahmed Patel and former Air Chief SP Tyagi by a middleman in a judgement that convicted the helicopter company's chief executive.


Helsinki: In a move to speed its entry into digital health products, Nokia says it plans to acquire the French consumer electronics company Withings SA, in a 170 million-euro ($191 million) deal.



The Finland-based telecom networks provider says growing global interest in the health sector is of "strategic importance" to Nokia, which has a strong technology unit that controls a vast portfolio of patents.



Nokia, once the world's leading cellphone maker, sold off its mapping services last year after shedding its ailing handsets division to Microsoft. Last year, it bought the French company Alcatel-Lucent in a 15.6 billion-euro deal to become a leading global networks provider.



Nokia Technologies said Tuesday that the cash deal is expected to close in the third-quarter subject to regulatory approvals.
Peshawar: An armed policeman stood guard outside the 300-year-old Sikh temple, known as a gurudwara, in northwest Pakistan. He kept a watchful eye on everyone who passed him on the narrow street, looking for a suspicious gesture, or a bulge beneath the clothes that hints at a hidden gun or a bomb.



Earlier in April, the gurudwara in Peshawar's crowded Old City opened its doors to worshippers for the first time in 73 years. The reopening was celebrated by Pakistan's tiny Sikh minority, but security is a constant concern.



On Friday, a Sikh leader and provincial lawmaker was shot and killed outside his home in a remote area in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province, some 140 kilometers from Peshawar. The murder of Sardar Suran Singh devastated the Sikh community and heightened their fears of terror attacks.



It also added to human rights activists' despair over rising violence against religious minorities in Pakistan. "It is tragic, but this is the trend in Pakistan right now. It is increasingly intolerant," said Zohra Yusuf, chairwoman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).



The Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting of Sardar Suran Singh, but police disputed their claim, blaming the shooting on political rivalry and saying they had arrested the culprit. There was no response from the Taliban, who often make unsubstantiated claims.



Peshawar is a deeply conservative city at the foot of the mountainous Khyber Pass once a popular route for traders and tourists travelling to nearby Afghanistan, now the focus of an extremist insurgency.



Terrorists attacked Peshawar schools, killing children as they studied, bombed buses of government workers and attacked Christians in their churches.



The newly-opened gurudwara has a 24-hour Sikh Security detail as well as police guards, but their Muslim neighbors believe an attack is inevitable.



"Security is very necessary for the people who want to come here for prayers without any fear," said Gurpal Singh, security chief for Peshawar's Sikh community.



Gohar Iqbal, a bookseller who works at a busy stall opposite the temple was certain the building would be targeted by militants.



"We are worrying because of the children if something happens," he said, gesturing to the white cement building that houses a girls' high school, which abuts the gurudwara.
United Nations: An Indian-flagged cargo ship has been blacklisted by the UN Security Council for transporting crude oil illicitly exported from Libya.



The UN Security Council's committee concerning Libya yesterday added the vessel 'Distya Ameya' to its sanctions list that includes names of individuals and entities subject to assets freeze, travel ban and other measures relating to attempts to illicitly export crude oil from Libya.



The listing makes the vessel prohibited to load, transport or discharge and enters ports.



The designation is valid till July 26 unless terminated earlier by the Sanctions Committee.



The vessel, whose flag state is India, "may have been sold recently to an unknown buyer and the vessel's name may have changed to Kassos," said the Libya sanctions committee.



"The vessel Distya Ameya was listed pursuant to the resolution as transporting crude oil illicitly exported from Libya, based on information received from the Government of Libya," the committee said in its reason for the listing.



As of April 26, the vessel was north of Al-Bayda, Libya, heading for Malta.



A senior Indian official told PTI that the ship is on a time-charter agreement for a UAE-based company.



Being an Indian-flagged ship, the owner of the ship is registered in India but is doing work for a UAE-based company.



The official said India is already in touch with the ship and has told it to talk to the UAE entity about the UN decision and see how to address the issue.



The official made it clear that the ship is not working for or on behalf of neither the Indian government nor the oil it is transporting is for India or from an Indian entity.



Libya's National Oil Corporation had said in a press release last week that it had notified the Libyan authorities of an attempt by the parallel administration in Beyda to export oil illicitly from Libya.



Tripoli-based NOC's chairman Mustafa Sanalla said in the release its subsidiary Agoco in the east was instructed by a Beyda official to load the 'Distya Ameya' at the port of Marsael-Hariga but the Libyan authorities took the necessary steps to stop the vessel from loading.



Agoco had been instructed to load 650,000 barrels of oilon April 21-23 at Marsael-Harigafor DSA Consultancy FZC, a company registered in Sharjah, UAE.



Through the Libyan mission to the UN, the Libyan government notified the UN Security Council's Libya sanctions committee that the attempted export breached UNSC resolutions.



The vessel arrived at Marsaal-Harigaon the night of April 21 but was not cleared to load and remained at anchor.
With a dramatic change coming in how Central Virginia Community College handles non-credit courses, members of the schools local board and staff spent some time during Wednesday nights board meeting discussing a possible Catch-22.

Earlier this spring, Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed a pair of bills passed by the General Assembly, creating what his office is calling the nations first pay-for-performance workforce training program. The bipartisan bills were carried by Del. Kathy Byron, R-Bedford County, and Frank Ruff, R-Mecklenburg County.

Non-credit courses include classes shorter than a typical semester schedule  say a

12-week welding course, a class to learn how to draw blood or get a commercial drivers

license.

Up until this legislation, students taking non-credit courses in Virginia typically havent been eligible for state subsidies or federal aid, unlike students in degree programs. Community colleges have to pass on the cost of the course to students.

The new plan will give grants to community colleges to subsidize part of the cost of providing non-credit courses that lead to high-

demand credentials, begining in July.

Ruth Hendrick, vice president of workforce solutions and community education at Central Virginia Community College, has expressed excitement about the opportunities the legislation could provide for students and CVCC.

In response to questions from members of the local board though, she pointed to a riddle the school will need to solve.

For CVCC to get part of the subsidy, students who have completed the classes have to submit proof theyve earned a credential. Leaders already know it can be tricky to get students to show up credential in hand if they arent in class anymore and have moved on with their lives.

The General Assembly wanted us to have some skin in the game, Hendrick said. This is putting our money where our mouth is, saying we will be successful in providing the appropriate training so students can earn the credential. That piece of getting it back from them, thats the clincher.

She told board members CVCC tried bribing students to come back and turn over documentation of their credentials for a pilot program study, and even that didnt work very well.

Board member Steven Troxel suggested it might be better if the law was written such that students were financially on the hook for proving theyd earned the credential. He also asked if it were possible to get students to sign waivers allowing CVCC to get information directly from testing organizations.

Hendrick said it is possible in some circumstances. She also said results from the pilot study suggest the most effective strategy is for instructors continually to emphasize the importance of bringing back the credential once it is earned.
Red Hulk, Ronin, and more: 10 Heroes and Villains whose secret identities were hidden from readers

There's a longstanding superhero tradition of hiding the identity of certain characters even from readers
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.
Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine has said that the decision of the Ukrainian government to increase gas price for households is important and essential.

This is an important step on the way of reimbursing expenses in the energy sector, Deputy Head of Delegation Thomas Frellesen told Interfax-Ukraine.

The tariff increase is among Ukraine's liabilities under the International Monetary Fund (IMF) program and today it is vitally important to cooperate with the IMF for the sake of stability of the Ukrainian economy, he said.

He noted that the government decision would help to remove corruption, stop ineffectively using energy and unblock EU and international donors' support.

The tariffs based on expenses reimbursement would help to attract investment in the Ukrainian energy sector, he said. It is important for the government to protect vulnerable population, he added.
Opportunities missed

The Minister of Finance recently announced that he had asked the IMF and World Bank for assistance and they are already here providing this. This triggered a wave of responses that generally have tended to be negative. Of course those of us who would have been alive the last time the IMF and World Bank offered advice and assistance would have very painful memories of that experience. The country paid a high price for access to foreign currency to sure up its weak Balance of Payments position.

What is the Minister really after? Certainly we will all agree that these are difficult times. The Minister is attempting fiscal consolidation. He is looking for expenditure items to cut. He indicated that he wants an examination of our taxation system to provide recommendations to augmenting revenue and non-energy growth. In particular he wants advice to determine an appropriate oil and gas fiscal regime in the current environment of low oil prices and declining production in our oil and gas fields. The tight rope the Minister must walk is to develop a fiscal regime that accrue the highest revenue for the Government, while at the same time ensuring that exploration, drilling and production are expanded by offering sufficient incentives to oil companies. The Minister also wants to review the foreign exchange regime operations in the present economic context; the operation and management of the Heritage and Stabilization Fund (looking at disaggregating the two functions); expenditures on social programmes with a focus to enhancing efficiency, effectiveness and rationalization of the various programmes.

How did the Minister go about getting these reviews with their accompanying recommendations? He could have utilise local expertise but chose instead to request external assistance. Why? Was there no expertise around to address some of the issues that were exercising the Ministers mind? It is important in these conditions to give the benefit of the doubt to the Minister. After all, his is a very difficult task. It is quite possible given the issues that he wanted addressed, in addition to the explanations given, the Minister wanted to get an unbiased assessment. As such external advisors would not be affected by local conditions. Indeed, if expenditure and the local tax system have to be reviewed it is best to get expertise that in no way will be affected by the changes. It is also possible that the Minister may not be of the view that the requisite combinations of skills needed for the nature of the reviews exist in the country. It could be there is lack of experience in his view or quite simply, he lacks confidence in the so called experts who reside here. There is also the possibility that given the nature of some of the measures that need to be administered, the Minister thinks it may be best if these recommendations come from an external source. Whatever his rationale, he has turned to external advice to address some of the problems identified earlier.

Why should we be concerned about this approach? This country is small with limited human resources. Strategically we should be positioning ourselves to train resources that we could utilize. India during the tsunami of 2004 decided it needed no external help. It was a matter of pride, self confidence in her abilities and most importantly a signal to her people that they had grown up and were capable to meeting existential challenges head-on.

While no one questions the ability of IMF and World Bank staff, those of us who would have done our doctoral work with these people wonder since when have they become better than we. Among our people exist very capable sons and daughters, Ewart Williams, Dr Terrence Farrell, Dr Shelton Nichols, Dr Godfrey Martin, Dr Juliet Melville, Dr Euric Bobb, Dr Vanus James, Dr Ralph Henry, Dr Dhanayshar Mahabir and Dr Patrick Watson. Then there are those who, it is felt, are being sidelined deliberately in our country such as Dr Reshma Mahabir. After 50 years of independence, like India this was the perfect opportunity to signal to our people that we had come of age to tackle difficulties on our own with the buffers that we have, to instill pride and summon the patriotic spirit to find solutions and implement them. This is a missed opportunity for home grown solutions.
Oils curse on the environment

The environmental price of oil production, transportation and use can be seen all over the world.

Apart from carbon dioxide and methane gas pollution to our atmosphere, there are such impacts as disturbances to land and marine life. Our own environmentalists and fishermen have complained about the disruption oil exploration causes. Seismic waves used to find possible oil reserves have been known to disorient whales leading to mass beachings in some countries. Smaller fish will flee or avoid the area making fishermens livelihood more difficult.

The world only seems to take notice when an oil spill has come from a tanker out at sea or when there is an explosion on an oil rig. But oil spills happen all the time. Here in TT we have the recent example of oils hurt on the environment in the form of the Petrotrin oil spill in La Brea in December 2013. For that Petrotrin was fined $20 million  a paltry sum in relation to the damage such spills cause to animals and the livelihood of surrounding communities.

Yet, as the Rainforest Foundation notes, oil spills and accidents occur even in the best maintained oil fields and pipelines leaching thousands of gallons of crude oil into waterways. For instance, an average of 800 spills per year was reported between 2006 and 2009 while 13 million barrels of oil may have been spilled in the Niger Delta since oil exploration started in 1958. So wrote, Gavin Bridge and Phillipe Le Billion, authors of the book, Oil.

Sensitive ecosystems such as swamps are quite vulnerable as they are often close to the sea where oil exploration takes place.

Then there are the many rainforests of the world where oil exploration and production has wreaked havoc on human, animal and plant life. Trees are levelled to make way for roads; toxic chemicals from the extraction process end up in the soil and waterways of the forests; carbon dioxide emission from oil extraction increases the likelihood of forest fires and drought.

In 2011, a court in Ecuador awarded US$19 billion to Ecuadorean farmers in their lawsuit against oil giant Chevron. The farmers had accused Chevron of polluting the Amazon rain forest with its oil exploration activities.

That figure was reduced to $9.5 billion by the court.

It should be noted that countries have measures in place to help mitigate damage to the environment from all stages of oil production.

Indeed, the Environmental Management Authority of TT (EMA) is the main body charged with treating with such matters.

The authority has stated that, activities carried out by the oil and gas sector are subject to all applicable legal mechanisms and typically require a Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC). The current low oil prices are for many environmentalists a blessing. Apart from possibly now forcing countries to seek cleaner, renewable forms of energy, the low oil price has led some companies to abandon new oil extraction projects. In December 2014, Chevron announced it would put on hold its plans to seek approval for deep water drilling in the Arctic waters near Canada, because of economic uncertainty in the industry. From drilling and refining to pipeline leaks during transportation to oil spills from tankers, the environmental cost of oil seems to outweigh economic and infrastructural benefits it brought or should have brought to the nations who rely on it.

In fact communities close to where oil drilling and related activities occur, see little prosperity from oil exploration. They tend to be poorer, and among the least developed regions of the country.

All of this has been noted by Prof Terry Karl of Stanford University, who has published writings on the politics of oil-exporting countries.

In an article for Stanfords Centre on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, she writes, the consequences of oil-led development tend to be negative, and that oil dependent countries tend to have often devastating economic, health and environmental consequences. Given all of this, it seems that all nations should be strengthening their efforts to move away from oil and gas and toward more sustainable, renewable forms of energy.

It is comforting to note that the EMA is already taking steps toward this end. As statement from the authority notes that the EMA continues to pursue opportunities to promote research, enhanced local capability and projects aimed at developing alternative energy sources in TT .
'He Had the Chance to Go in

and Save the Children'
Indonesia introduces free visa regime for Ukrainians arriving for less than 30 days, apart from journalists

A decree of the head of state of Indonesia foreseeing a visa free regime for Ukrainian citizens who arrive to the country for the period of less than 30 days has taken effect, the consulate department of Ukraine's Foreign Ministry has reported.

The decree of Indonesia President of March 2, 2016 entered into force. Ukrainian diplomats said that visas are required only for journalist activities.

Ukrainian citizens are to show their passports at least six months of validity from the moment of arrival to Indonesia, return tickets of tickets to another country.

"Border services have the right to confirm the purpose of travel," the department said.
Seems like Google have plans to integrate its Android play store to their own Chromebook application base. Google are apparently preparing to bring their gigantic android application store to its desktop operating system the "Chrome OS".

However, this might not seem new to a majority of the Chrome users since a lot of android apps have successfully run on Chromebooks. But there are huge numbers of applications still waiting to be ported to the Chrome OS. For now, users on the desktop platform of Google have to live with the limited applications developed for the desktop environment.

According to Ars Technica, some Chromebook users are feeling signs of Google's play store arriving to their devices. Some users are even too hopeful and claim it to be a real-game changer for their desktop operating system due to the limited volume of applications in their native app store. The hints of the shift have apparently been discovered in the source code of Google's desktop operating system which now seems to contain a file pointing to opt in a mechanism that could accept android applications. A line read "Choose from over a million apps and games on Google Play to install and use on your Chromebook". Some users also reported the option for them to enable android applications to run on their Chromebooks which would briefly flash up on their screens which was too quick to be even clicked on for agreements.

Late last year, Google had to refute a report that it was planning to merge the Chrome and Android operating systems. At the time, the firm wrote: "While we've been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there's no plan to phase out Chrome OS." Meanwhile Google themselves are yet to confirm on all these developments and it would be pretty much evident if such a statement had to be out from the Mountain View search giants.
Harry Wu, an ex-political prisoner who spent his whole life disclosing atrocities in China's brutal prison labor camp system died at 79.

During a vacation in Honduras, he died Tuesday morning, said Ann Noonan, the administrator with his Laogai Human Rights Organization, but it is not known why he died, his son Harrison and ex-wife China Lee were on their way to retrieve his remains from the Central American nation.

"He was a real hero," Noonan said. "Harry's work will continue, it will not stop."

He had been born in a wealthy Shanghai family whose property got confiscated after the 1949 civil war victory of Mao Zedong's communists. Having studied geology at the university, he got into trouble with the officials when he criticised the Soviet Union that was China's ally at the time.

He got sentenced in 1960, when he was 23, to China's prison camp system or Laogao, that translates to "reform through labor."

At Laogao, intellectuals and political prisoners faced long sentences and brutality, leading to millions of deaths. Wu was shifted to 12 different camps, and underwent harsh work regimens in the farms, coal mines, and work sites, experiencing beatings, torture, and near starvation.

He was set free in 1979 after Mao's death. In 1985, he moved to the US and taught, wrote and founded the Laogai Research Foundation, even as he moved intermittently to China to research the labour system.

He assumed U.S. citizenship but again got arrested when he visited China in 1995. He got another 15 years for espionage. Though he got deported to the U.S. he continued to document Chinese human rights abuses, frequently speaking before Congress and at academic events.

The Laogai Museum was established in 2008 to "preserve the memory of the laogai's many victims and serve to educate the public about the atrocities committed by China's communist regime," according to the Wahington DC foundation's website.

The Laogai has since been removed, though a weaker version known as Laojiao, or "reform through education" remains.

Wu's books on his experiences include "The Chinese Gulag," ''Bitter Winds," and "Troublemaker."

Various other issues that he championed included international labor rights, religious freedom, opposition to the death penalty, forced organ harvesting, and China's population control policies.
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The State Employment Service has suspended a decision of Kyiv city employment center that voided a labor permit in Ukraine for Canadian citizen, journalist and TV host Savik Shuster until the circumstances of his case are clarified.

The State Employment Service wrote on its Facebook page on Thursday that the decision was made after Shuster sent an application to the authority.

"When Kyiv city employment center signed decree No. 54, the authority acted within its powers as prescribed in Ukrainian law. I want to say that the employment service is not an old archaic structure anymore. We're being reformed and we are always open. I have received an application from Shuster. Our reaction has been to suspend the decision made in the decree until the circumstances are clarified. Thus, today labor permit for Canadian citizen Shuster No. 43388 is valid until the circumstances are clarified," Head of the central office of the State Employment Service Serhiy Kravchenko said.

Earlier Kyiv city employment center in decree No. 54 of April 25, 2016 invalidated labor permit No. 43388 for Shuster in Savik Shuster Studio LLC on the post of director general. The center's decision rests on the submission of allegedly untrue data that Shuster has no record of convictions. On April 22, the State Employment Service received a letter from the State Fiscal Service that a criminal case was opened against Shuster placed on the pre-trial investigation register on October 5, 2015.
Mumbai:

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan today hailed the Centres Make in India programme, terming it as the most important initiative by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that is generating jobs in the country.

Make in India is perhaps the single most important initiative by our honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which propels companies in India and abroad to make it in our own country and our own land, thereby creating job opportunities, skill enhancement, the actor told reporters.

Shah Rukh Khan, 50, was speaking at the launch of BJP leader Shaina NCs coffee table book, Movers and Makers which is a tribute to Make in India. The Fan star said the introduction of new technological enhancement through Make in India will be beneficial for several generations. For me, the biggest turn on is the introduction of new technology, which I believe is going to create a new era for our generation and generations to come, he said.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis termed the book as the best documentation of the seven-day event, Make in India Week, held in Mumbai in February this year and said he became nostalgic while reading the book.

While going through the book I became a little nostalgic because those seven days for us were very challenging and encouraging as well. I feel this documentation of the events is very important because after the event is over new people come to us. This is the best thing we can present them. This coffee table book, if presented to a new investor, he understands the strength of Maharashtra and what it stands for, he said.

Shaina said several people worked hard for the event which was not just an initiative but a vision. We must realise the amount of people who have put together this mammoth project called the Make in India Week and under that we had a Magnetic Maharashtra stall which was visited by lakhs of people. This is not just about MOUs but about the vision, she said. State Industries Minister Subhash Desai and MoS for Industries and Mining Pravin Pote Patil were also present at the event.

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New Delhi:

To rev up the fight for women's equality in places of worship,Bhumata Brigade president Trupti Desai will hold peaceful protests rally outside Haji Ali Dargah today.

According to Desai Mumbai police has permitted only 100 people to be part of the protest. We will have a peaceful protest outside the dargah. We will not enter the inner sanctum of the temple but will go till where men and women are allowed to enter, said Desai. It is believed that whatever you ask for at Haji Ali dargah comes true, and we shall ask for equal treatment for women, she said.

With Trupti other activists will also take part in the rally. As Haji Ali dargah does not allow women to enter into the sanctum sanctorum. To oppose this discrimination against women Desai and other activists will hold a peaceful protest.

Earlier Desai had also launched with other women a forum Haji Ali for All to campaign for womens entry to the shrine.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has asked the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) to check Deputy Ecology and Natural Resources Minister Viktor Kantsurak.

The prime minister said that he does not intend to restrict ministers in appointing the staff at their ministries, as they are politically responsible for this. He asked ministers to thoroughly select candidates and not appoint discredited candidates.

"Those who are not guilty need to be protected. Those who are guilty should be punished. I think that anti-corruption authorities settle this matter quickly," Groysman said.

Kantsurak during the rule of disgraced former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was director of the preserve department of the Ecology and Natural Resources Ministry headed by Mykola Zlochevsky and Eduard Stavytsky.

Kantsurak in 2011 was a member of the tender committee to purchase satellite images of the Ukrainian territory from Austroplan Austrian Engineering GmbH for UAH 49.38 million. Kharkiv National Academy of Urban Economy offered UAH 250,000 for these images at the tender.

The NABU is investigating this tender.
Washington:

The Taliban must face the consequences for calling off peace talks with the Afghan government, the US said today as it once again asked Pakistan to go after terrorists that threaten its neighbours.

Unfortunately, the Taliban have refused to come to the table, so it is our view that they should face the consequences of that decision, Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Olson told members of the House Foreign Relations Committee during a hearing.

Weve long expressed our concerns to the Pakistanis about their reluctance to go after terrorists that threaten their neighbours with the same degree of assiduousness that they go after their own terrorists. We think that they are at a moment of needing to make a very strategic and fundamental choice, Olson said when asked what Pakistan is doing to bring the Taliban to the negotiation table.

Their (Pakistans) stated policy, which we agree with, is not to discriminate among terrorist groups. We believe there is considerable room for improvement in the application of that policy on the ground and we believe in particular that Pakistan has not taken as vigorous action against groups that threaten its neighbours as it has against those that threaten it domestically, he noted.

So Pakistan has also been very helpful in the reconciliation process, but I do believe that there is a strategic choice right now. With the Taliban having refused to come to the table, it seems to us that it is time to address more robustly the question of groups that threaten Afghanistan, Olson said.

The US, he said, has pressed the Pakistan government on its commitment not to discriminate among terrorist groups.

We believe across regions there must be zero tolerance for safe havens, he said. Americas relationship with Pakistan, a growing country with more than 190 million people, a nuclear arsenal, terrorism challenges and a key role to play in the region, will remain a critical one, he said.

In Pakistan, we see the government in a concerted and difficult fight against terror groups that threaten Pakistanis. But unfortunately, Pakistan does not take equivalent steps against groups that threaten its neighbours, Olson said.

Our core initiatives in Pakistan, include promoting economic growth, countering terrorism, fostering regional stability and promoting the consolidation of democratic institutions. Let me emphasise, we have repeatedly and frankly underscored with most senior leaders of Pakistan that the Haqqani Network must be part of their wider counterterrorism operations in order to keep their commitment not to discriminate between terrorist organisations, Olson said.

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Patna:

In an attempt to beat the heat Bihar government has come up with a bizarre idea of banning people from cooking. During summers and in last two weeks more than 66 people and 1,200 animals have been killed due to fire in the area.



According to a report in NDTV, the cooking will not be allowed in villages from 9 am and 6 pm during the summer and those who violate the order can be jailed for up to two years.



Religious functions involving fire have also been banned, the report said.



Nitish Kumar government has also explained logic behind such order. They said heavy winds are picking up sparks from cooking fires and igniting straw huts. Recently, more than 300 huts were gutted into fire in Begusarai district.



"The point is that hundreds of lives are at risk. The order has only been given after a detailed survey on just how the fires started. The jail term is based on a law on disaster management," says Vyasji, the Bihar government official in charge of handling disasters.



This would be a challenge for many to follow the bizarre guidelines.

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New Delhi:

Subramanian Swamy, who triggered huge protests from Congress yesterday over his attempts to drag Sonia Gandhi in the AgustaWestland helicopter row, today again made some controversial remarks in Rajya Sabha which the Chair immediately expunged and warned him of action for unnecessarily provoking members on the other side.



Expunging Swamys reference to the Constitution of another country that triggered vociferous protests from Congress members, Deputy Chairman P J Kurien also ordered media not to report the remarks.



Trouble broke out after Chaudhary Munavver Saleem (SP) in a Zero Hour mention referred to Swamy being part of the movement in 1970s to protect the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).



Swamy got up to clarify saying he had no objection to minority education institutions but the Constitution prohibits the State from financing them.



He was countered on this by the opposition to which he responded by dragging the name of another country, a reference that led to agitated Congress members rushing into the Well.



Kurien said he was expunging the reference to the Constitution of another country but that did not satisfy the Congress members who continued to shout slogans against Swamy.



The BJP MP, who took oath only on Monday, insisted that since his name has been taken by another member, he has a right to reply and again went on to refer to the country, drawing sharp rebuke from the Chair.



I will take action against you. Subramanian Swamy you are unnecessarily provoking. I will have to take action against you... you are provoking, Kurien said.



Observing that what Swamy said would not go on record, he said what has been expunged should not be reported by media.



Congress members sought action against Swamy with Jairam Ramesh saying he was needling and provoking by bringing in reference to another country. This is deliberate.



With Congress members continuing to protest, Kurien asked them to return to their seats and said it was a deliberate attempt to subvert the Zero Hour.



Asked by the Chair what the problem was when the remarks have been expunged, Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said the problem is the new gift of BJP. Problem is not on this side.



He said Swamy is just two days old in the House and his remarks have already been expunged twice. There are 365 days in a year, how many times are you going to expunge his words, he asked the Chair.



Azad said Swamy does not know the difference between street language and parliamentary words. He does not allow his hair to grey so he can learn and mature.



As Kurien asked Congress members resume their seats, they wanted the Chair to ask Swamy to take his seat first. You cannot direct me like that. You are shouting on nothing. I have expunged (the remarks) then and there. It cannot be reported, it cannot come on TV channels, Kurien said.



With the protests continuing, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi twice went up to Swamy to convey something.



Kurien then called Naqvi to his chair and spoke to him about the continued pandemonium. Naqvi then went up to Swamy who then resumed his seat. Azad also went up to the agitating party members and prevailed upon them to resume their places.



As Congress members returned to their seats, Swamy was up on his feet again. Kurien asked him to resume his seat. You sit down now. Come and meet me in Chamber later.



Earlier soon after new member Navjot Singh Sindhu took oath and listed papers laid, Swamy again tried to raise the VVIP helicopter deal but Congress members shouted him down.



I am not going to mention that ladys name, Swamy said in apparent reference to him yesterday dragging Sonia Gandhi.



When Kurien asked Swamy under what rule was he raising the issue, Swamy said he wanted to raise a matter of public importance under rule 167.



Kurien then told the BJP MP that Rule 167 is for discussion in House, the procedure for which is that once notice is given, the Chairman decides whether to allow a discussion on the matter raised.



If Chairman selects the notice, the member is informed, he said asking Swamy to contact the office of the Chairman on fate of his notice.



Order was then restored and Zero Hour taken up.



Saleem in his Zero Hour mention sought continuation of minority status of AMU and said this should be decided on the floor of Parliament rather than in courts.



Earlier during their protest against Swamy, Congress members shouted CIA Agent to counter him while the BJP member shot back chanting ISI, ISI.



Amid protests from Congress, Kurien said shouting in Well will not produce results.



When Anand Sharma (Cong) asked how Swamy was allowed to speak on a pre-approved Zero Hour mention by another member, Kurien said if a members name is mentioned, he has a right to explain his position.



Azad however said his party had no objection to the clarification but what Swamy said was totally out of context. Naqvi countered Azads use of words against Swamy, saying we have been headmasters of the school they (Congress) go to.

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Port Moresby:

With focus on developing strong relations with Pacific Island nations, President Pranab Mukherjee today arrived in the capital of Papua New Guinea here on the first ever visit by an Indian head of state since the establishment of diplomatic ties in 1975.

Mukherjee arrived here this morning on the first leg of his two-nation visit and was given a warm welcome. He was received by Deputy Prime Minister of PNG Leo Dion. The President inspected a guard of honour as a 21-gun salute was accorded to him.

The visit of the President is seen as a diplomatic move to counter Chinas growing influence in the Pacific Island nations.

Before his departure from India, his Press Secretary Venu Rajamony had said the visit was a natural extension of Indias Look East policy.

India is looking to enter the health market of the island nation. Ahead of his visit here, the Indian government had approved the signing of an agreement between the two countries, seeking cooperation in the field of healthcare and medical sciences.

The pact will encourage cooperation between the Health Ministries of both the nations through joint initiatives in the sector.

The visit is likely to give push to Indian pharmaceutical companies to set up businesses in the Pacific nation after the local government withdrew a ban in January.

With a population of 7.38 million, diseases like HIV and AIDS are listed as quite rampant in this Pacific nation.

The life expectancy in the country is also less because of high cost of medical care. Mukherjee, on April 30, will travel to New Zealand as part of the second leg of his tour.

India and New Zealand will explore prospects for cooperation in agriculture, dairy, food processing, education and skill development as well as high technology during the visit.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key had visited India in 2011 and its Governor General in 2008, 2009 and 2011. The last high-level visit from India to New Zealand was by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1986.

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Seoul:

North Korea today tried and failed in what appeared to be its second attempt in two weeks to test a powerful, new medium-range ballistic missile, South Koreas defence ministry said.

A ministry official said the North had fired what was believed to be a Musudan missile at around 6:40 AM (0310 IST) from Wonsan on the east coast, but it plunged back to earth seconds after launch.

It is believed to have failed, the official told AFP. There had been widespread intelligence reports in recent days that the North was preparing for another flight test of its Musudan missile, which is believed to be capable of striking US bases on the Pacific island of Guam.

North Korea initially tried to test a Musudan on April 15 the birthday of founding leader Kim Il-Sungbut the exercise ended in what the Pentagon described as fiery, catastrophic failure, with the missile apparently exploding just after take-off.

The failed tests come as the country is gearing up for a rare and much-hyped ruling party congress next month, at which Kim Jong-Un is expected to take credit for pushing the countrys nuclear weapons programme to new heights.

There is growing concern that Pyongyang is preparing to conduct a fifth nuclear test in the run-up to the event which opens May 6.

Pyongyang has hailed a series of achievements in recent months, including miniaturising a nuclear warhead to fit on a missile, developing a warhead that can withstand atmospheric re-entry and building a solid-fuel missile engine.

Last Saturday, it successfully tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) and was sharply criticised by the UN Security Council. Existing UN resolutions forbid North Korea from the use of any ballistic missile-related technology. The Musudan is believed to have an estimated range of anywhere between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres.

The lower range covers the whole of South Korea and Japan, while the upper range would include US military bases on Guam. The missile has never been successfully flight-tested.

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Washington:

Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump today hinted at seeking help from India and others to address the problem of what he described as a semi-unstable nuclear-armed Pakistan.



Trumps remarks came during a town-hall in Indianapolis in response to a question on how he would deal with countries like Pakistan which has sometimes double dealt with the US.



Weve given them (Pakistan) money and theyve double dealt us, the interviewer said.



Yes, but the problem with Pakistan, where they have nuclear weaponswhich is a real problem, Trump said.



The single biggest problem we have is nuclear weapons, you know, countries with them. And its not only a country, you have nine countries right now with nuclear weapons.



But Pakistan is semi-unstable. We dont want to see total instability. Its not that much, relatively speaking. We have a little bit of a good relationship. I think Id try and keep it, said Trump.



It is very much against my grain to say that, but a countryand thats always the country, I think, you know, we give them money and we help them out, but if we dont, I think that would go on the other side of the ledger and that could really be a disaster, Trump said, without explaining what that disaster would be.



At the same time, if you look at India and some of the others, maybe theyll be helping us out, because were going to look at it. We have many, many countries that we give a lot of money to and we get absolutely nothing in return and thats going to stop fast, Trump said.



Trumps remarks came on a day when lawmakers questioned the rationale of the Obama administration to give billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan without desired results.



Despite giving Pakistan enormous amounts of counter terror assistance over the years, over USD 25 billion since 9/11, terrorist organisations continue to operate with impunity in Pakistan. Pakistan has used terror as a tool of statecraft and terrorist proxy groups for the Pakistani military have carried out fatal attacks inside India, Congressman Matt Salmon said during a Congressional hearing.



State Department has request USD 742.2 million in aid to Pakistan for 2016-2017 including USD 472.4 million in civilian assistance and USD 269.8 million in security assistance.



Pakistan is a nation of 180 million people with a history of terrorist activities, roughly 100 nuclear weapons and a very confused body politic, said Congressman Brad Sherman.



We need to offer to Pakistan those weapon systems well-crafted to go after terrorists and not crafted for a war with India, he said.

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New Delhi:

India has asked the UK to deport Vijay Mallya, whose Kingfisher Airlines has been accused of defaulting bank loans of over Rs 9,400 crore, citing the revocation of his passport and a non-bailable warrant against him. External Affairs Ministry also emphasised that India will continue pursuing Mallyas deportation matter with the UK authorities.

Four days after MEA revoked the liquor barons passport, ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said, The ministry has written to the High Commission of the UK in Delhi requesting the deportation of Vijay Mallya so that his presence can be secured for investigations against him under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002.

He further said that Indian High Commission in the UK will also be issuing a similar note verbale to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Mallyas passport was revoked last week in view of these (PMLA) investigations and non-bailable warrant issued by the Special Judge, Mumbai. We will continue to pursue this matter with UK authorities, Swarup added.

ED has approached the MEA seeking initiation of deportation proceedings against Mallya, charged with money laundering in the Rs 900 crore IDBI loan fraud case.

Mallya, who had left India on March 2 for the UK, can approach the British authorities to grant him permission to continue his stay in that country or challenge the revocation of his passport.

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New Delhi :

The Government in Rajya Sabha today refused to budge from its stance on levying one per cent excise duty on non-silver jewellery saying luxury items cannot be kept out of tax ambit for perpetuity, prompting a walk-out by members of the Congress and SP.

Tearing into the opposition charge that imposition of the levy was killing the trade, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley refuted the allegations saying when items of common use were being taxed, how could luxury items be kept out.

Asserting that there was absolutely no harassment of artisans, Jaitley said corporate jewellers with upto Rs 12 crore turnover last year came under its ambit and upto Rs 6 crore turnover in a fiscal later are exempt from it.

Clearances up to Rs 6 crore in a financial year (if clearances during preceding year were less than Rs 12 crore), are exempt from this duty, Jaitley said, adding thus small jewellers and artisans are not covered within the ambit of this levy.

Replying to a calling attention on the issue, the Minister said when there is excise duty on items like soap, toothpaste, razor, pencil, ink, fruit juices and baby food, why should the luxury items be exempted from it.

Opposition members had earlier charged the government of killing the traditional jewellery trade and promoting the big brands by imposing the levy. The jewellers have been on a nationwide strike for over 40 days to protest the levy.

Jaitley said even imitation jewellery attracted 6 per cent excise duty and added that when things used by common people were taxed how can luxury items be out of its ambit for so long.

He said the opposition should understand that it is a complex subject and when taxes are levied on items like steel, cement and clothes, luxury items cannot be out of its purview.

We have to decide on which items we will impose excise duty and if there is any structured trade, they do not get the right to resort to agitation against tax, he said and challenged the opposition that if they were so concerned about it, they should get the 5 per cent VAT removed in Kerala.

Each state imposes VAT on gold and in Kerala it is as high as 5 per cent and if you (opposition) are so much concerned then get it removed from Kerala, he said.

Dismissing charges that excise duty has hit hard small artisans, the Minister said the trade has not developed such that annual turnovers of small jewellers has crossed Rs 6 crore and stressed that this is implemented on big chains.

Jaitley said the UPA government had imposed taxes on jewellery in 2005 but had recalled it in 2009 in the face of stiff opposition. It again imposed it in 2012 but recalled the same again.

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Patna:

The Bihar government has cancelled the lease of P & M Mall, citys first mall, owned by noted film-maker Prakash Jha, on the ground of violation of lease conditions.

Industries minister Jai Kumar Singh said that Bihar Industrial Area Development Authority (BIADA) has cancelled land lease of the mall because of violation of lease conditions.

Located in Patliputra Industrial area of the city, P & M Mall was inaugurated by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in 2011.

The mall having an area of about 58,300 sq feet houses states first multiplex besides shopping complex and exclusive showrooms of multinational brands.

The Industries minister said that after a review of land allocation by BIADA, it was found that around 100 allotees including P & M Mall have not fulfilled the conditions of the lease and hence these lease have been terminated.

Regarding P & M Mall, Singh said that it grossly violated the laid down condition to pay a circle rate of 10 per cent to the state government on land sub leased to other parties.

As per BIADA estimate, an amount of Rs 2.60 crore is due to the state government on account of circle rate payment out of sub lease but the Mall has submitted only Rs 40 lakh, he added.

Cancellation of lease of P & M Mall would be a big setback for the film-maker who had unsuccessfully contested last Lok Sabha election on JD(U) ticket from Bettiah.

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London:

The Islamic State (ISIS) has released a document detailing how slain British extremist Mohammed Emwazi fled the UK and passed through six countries to reach Syria and become the dreaded Jihadi John.

Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists have released a document which reveals the details of Mohammed Emwazis route from Britain to Syria to join the terrorist group in Raqqa.

Emwazi, dubbed Jihadi John after he murdered Western hostages, posed as a migrant to leave the UK.

The Times quotes ISIS monthly magazine Dar al-Islam as saying that Emwazi and another unnamed individual opted for a migrant route to leave the UK in the summer of 2012 and were smuggled out in the back of lorry to avoid checks and made their way across the English Channel.

Emwazi was able to make the journey despite being on terrorism watch-lists.

The 27-year-old was killed in a US-led drone strike last year. His unnamed companion said they travelled through six countries to reach the ISIS stronghold in Raqqa.

He mocked UK intelligence services for not capturing him, and complained about mosquitoes along the way.

The account, which uses Emwazis assumed name Abu Muharib al-Muhajir, runs to almost 8,000 words, the newspaper reports.

As Emwazi was known to British intelligence, he did not want to risk flying out of France. The duo got to Brussels in Belgium and bought flights to Albania without fear that British services are alerted.

The pair travelled on British passports but also carried two fake French passports and 30,000 euros in cash.

They shaved their beards in Brussels, where they had breakfast in a cafe in a Muslim area.

Emwazi went on to appear in a video in August 2014 in which he beheaded US journalist James Foley.

He emerged again in other videos, including those in which the US reporter Steven Sotloff and the British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning were murdered.

He was later identified as a Kuwaiti-born computer programming graduate from London.

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The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has asked Ukraine's high qualification commission of judges to apply disciplinary action to judges of the district administrative court in Kyiv because of their decision to void the liquidation of bank Soyuz, the regulator has reported on its website.

"The court ruling [voiding the liquidation of the bank] does not contain justified conclusions regarding proofs of the lawful decision of the NBU. The court did not take into account the conclusions of the higher administrative court in similar cases," the NBU said.

Additionally, Kyiv's court of appeals on April 26 did not uphold a claim of the NBU and Individuals' Deposit Guarantee Fund.

The NBU intends to file a counterclaim.

The central bank also will appeal to the high qualification commission of judges regarding violations by the court of appeals.

The NBU said that the court on March 21, 2016 opened a case under a claim of S.Diadechko against the NBU, Deposit Guarantee Fund asking to declare invalid and revoke a resolution on voiding the bank Soyuz's license and its liquidation.

The court hearing was scheduled for March 24 and postponed for March 28.

The district administrative court of Kyiv on March 28 decided to uphold the claims. The court said that at the moment of issuing a decision to liquidate the bank, neither bank nor its officials were punished by administrative or criminal courts for money laundering.

The NBU believes that the absence of convictions in criminal cases does not constitute evidence of the absence of violations in financial monitoring laws by banks.
Washington:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been invited to address a joint meeting of the US Congress on June 8 during his visit, Speaker of the US House of Representative Paul Ryan said today.

The friendship between the United States and India is a pillar of stability in an important region of the world, Ryan told reporters during his weekly press conference.

This address presents a special opportunity to hear from the elected leader of the worlds most populous democracy on how our two nations can work together to promote our shared values and to increase prosperity. We look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi to the US Capitol on June 8, he said.

Modi, who was invited by President Barack Obama for a bilateral visit when he was here for the nuclear summit, will be the fifth prime minister of India to address a joint meeting of Congress, and the first since 2005.

Earlier, Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh (July 19, 2005), Atal Bihari Vajpayee (September 14, 2000), P V Narasimha Rao (May 18, 1994) and Rajiv Gandhi (July 13, 1985) addressed the joint meeting of the US Congress.

The tradition of foreign leaders and dignitaries addressing Congress began with the Marquis de Lafayette of France, who spoke in the House chamber on December 10, 1824.

Ronak D Desai, a Fellow at New America and an Affiliate at the Belfer Centers India and South Asia Program at Harvard University, said, an invitation to Prime Minister Modi to address a Joint Meeting of Congress is significant, given past US policy towards Modi during his time as Chief Minister of Gujarat.

Modis visit is likely to be the last official meeting between the two leaders during President Obamas final year in office.

Top American lawmakers welcomed the decision of Ryan to invite Modi to address joint meeting if the US Congress.

I applaud Speaker Ryan for inviting Prime Minister Modi to address a Joint Meeting of Congress, and I look forward to welcoming the Prime Minister to the Capitol. This address will serve as a sign of the deep and important relationship between the US and India, said Ed Royce, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Our partnership in areas such as defence, nuclear power, renewable energy and space exploration is very strong, thanks to our many shared values. I look forward to hearing from Prime Minister Modi about how we can continue working together to promote peace and prosperity, Royce said.

I look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi to Washington in June, where his address to a Joint Session of Congress will explore how our two nations can work together to further our shared values and interests, said Tulsi Gabbard, the first ever Hindu lawmaker elected to the US Congress.

As the worlds oldest and largest democracies, the US and India have many shared values and objectives. Since Prime Minister Modi was first elected in 2014, he has made active engagement with the US a priority on many levels including exploring mutually beneficial economic opportunities, stronger government-to-government relations, and enhanced security engagements, she said.

Earlier this month, Gabbard, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, wrote to Ryan encouraging him to invite Modi to address the Congress.

Im pleased that Speaker Ryan has granted my request, said Congressman Ami Bera, the only Indian-American in the current Congress.

India is a key partner of the US, and this will be an opportunity for members of Congress to learn more about the challenges and opportunities facing our two nations, he said.

Last week, Bera and Royce along with two other lawmakers had urged Ryan to invite Modi to address a joint session of Congress.

Earlier today, Ryan told reporters that Modi would be the leader to address a joint meeting of the Congress after he became the Speaker of the US House of Representatives.

This will be the first joint meeting of this speakership. We certainly look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi in the United States Capitol this summer, I believe its June 8th, Ryan said.

India is the most populace democracy and soon its going to be the most populace country. The friendship between our nations is a pillar of stability in a very, very important region. This address presents a special opportunity for us to deepen our ties with our ally, India, he said.

It is a chance to hear from the prime minister on how we can work together to promote our shared values and to increase prosperity, Ryan said.

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Tinsukia:

At least 11 persons, including a woman and a child, were injured in a blast allegedly triggered by ULFA militants in Tinsukia town in upper Assam tonight, police said.

A hand grenade kept in a dustbin exploded at Debipukhuri Pachali area in the centre of the town with a deafening sound at 7.30 PM, Tinsukia district SP Mukdhajyoti Mahanta said.

The injured were admitted to Tinsukia Civil Hospital from where four seriously injured were sent to the Assam Medical College Hospital in neighbouring Dibrugarh district, Mahanta said.

The area has been cordoned off and investigations are on.

Early this morning, a hand grenade exploded at Duijan near here adjacent to a CRPF camp but no one was injured.

Who carried out the explosions was yet to be ascertained, police said, adding ULFA militants from outside the district were suspected to have been behind it.

Yesterday a hardcore ULFA militant, self-styled Sergeant Major Rongmon Asom alias Mecuri, was killed in an encounter with army in Tinsukia district.

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Ukrainian and Belarusian aviation authorities have reached an agreement to increase frequency of flights on the Kyiv-Minsk route to 11 flights a day for each side.

The press service of Ukraine's State Aviation Service reported that the consent letter was sent to the aviation department of Belarus on April 26.

The sides earlier lifted restrictions on the number of assigned airlines on all routes between the two countries.
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry was positive about the decision of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe that maintains independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within internationally recognized borders.

"We assess the decision of the Committee of Ministers as one more confirmation of support of the Council of Europe the efforts of Ukraine to oppose Russian aggression and evidence of readiness to ensure monitoring of the situation in human rights and illegally occupied Autonomous Republic of Crimea and city of Sevastopol in accordance to international and legal standards," a ministry's press service said on Thursday.

The ministry stressed that such approach completely meets Ukraine's stance on necessity to making a respective assessment of the situation exclusively through conventional and standard monitoring mechanisms of UN, Council of Europe and OSCE.

On April 27, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe at its sitting approved the 12th decision over Ukraine since Russian aggression occurred. The document condemns illegal annexation by the Russian Federation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol.

"The Committee of Ministers expressed their deep concern at the deterioration of the human rights situation on the Crimean peninsula, including the denial of freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of religion and belief, and the repression against persons belonging to minorities, in particular the Crimean Tatars and the Mejlis as their self-governing body; deeply deplored, in this context, that the Mejlis has been qualified as an 'extremist organization', and its activities prohibited, by the so-called 'Highest Court of Crimea'; called for full compliance with international human rights standards and for the investigation of all pending cases of human rights violations," reads a document following the committee's 12th meeting.

Besides, the ministers reiterated their call for full and unrestricted access to the territories which are beyond the control of the Ukrainian authorities, including on the Crimean Peninsula, to all human rights bodies of the Council of Europe, in order that they can carry out their monitoring activities unimpeded and in accordance with their mandates.

"We continue to encourage the reform efforts undertaken by the Ukrainian authorities, based, inter alia, upon advice by the Venice Commission and support from the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, and aiming at strengthening the implementation of Council of Europe standards in the country concerning the constitutional framework, the functioning of democratic institutions, the rule of law and the effective protection of human rights," says the document.

The Committee of Ministers also welcomed the adoption by the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko of the National Human Rights Strategy followed by the adoption by the Government of Ukraine of the National Action Plan for Human Rights in Ukraine prepared in co-operation with the Council of Europe and other relevant international organizations, and reiterated its readiness to assist in their implementation, as well as to participate in evaluation of the progress achieved.
Westinghouse expands capacity of plant in Sweden's Vasteras for growing supplies to Ukraine

Westinghouse Electric Company has announced the expansion of its nuclear fuel factory, situated in Vasteras, Sweden, in response to growing demand for nuclear fuel supply diversification for VVER-1000 reactors in Ukraine and other European countries.

"The investment finances additional production facilities, fuel engineering work, as well as the procurement of additional process and assembly equipment for manufacturing the fuel," Westinghouse said in a press release on Thursday.

The company did not disclose the cost of the project. The company told Interfax-Ukraine that this is a multi-million investment if it is measured in U.S. dollars.

The new facilities were officially inaugurated by Westinghouse senior vice president for Nuclear Fuel and Components Manufacturing Jose Emeterio Gutierrez in the presence of representatives of the Ukrainian Embassy in Sweden.

"The growing demand for nuclear fuel underscores the importance of uninterrupted availability of low-carbon energy sources at an affordable price," Gutierrez said.

Westinghouse said that in 2016 Westinghouse will deliver five reloads to the Yuzhnoukrainsk and Zaporizhia nuclear power plants. In December 2014 Westinghouse and Energoatom, Ukraine's nuclear power plant operator, completed a fuel supply contract extension for its VVER-1000 reactors.

The company said that numerous inspections in Ukraine have demonstrated that Westinghouse fuel performs safely and efficiently and to specification in Energoatoms reactors.
Inkerman Trade House LLC (Kyiv), a Ukrainian division of Inkerman International, seeks to boost sparkling wine sales by 2.8 times in 2016, to 2.2 million bottles.

"We seek to boost production of sparkling wine from 800,000 bottles last year to 2.2 million bottles. We think that these ambitious goals are realizable: demand on our products is high," Director General of Inkerman Trade House Hanna Horkun said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

She said that the company purchased some wine materials in Moldova for production of sparkling wine, as these materials were not present on the Ukrainian market.

"We have four types of sparkling wine and with plans to produce 2.2 million bottles it was not easy to find high-quality materials. I think that we bought all high-quality materials Ukraine had and bought additional good wine materials in Moldova, which, unfortunately, were not present on the Ukrainian market," she said.

Inkerman Trade House in 2015 sold 864,500 decaliters of still wine and 123,580 decaliters of sparkling wine. Sales of sparkling wine increased by 52% compared to 2014.

The company's share of the Ukrainian wine-making market has increased from 12.7% in 2013 to 16% in 2016. This is linked to the absence of Crimean wine and the increase in the price of imported wine.

Horkun said that before 2014 all production facilities of Inkerman International were located in Crimea. After the annexation of the peninsula, Inkerman International AB (Sweden) registered subsidiary Inkerman Trade House headquartered in Kyiv and transferred bottling of still wine to Tavria Cognac House in Nova Kakhovka in Kherson region. Sparkling wine initially was bottled in Odesa at the facilities of Odesavynprom.

"Under Ukrainian legislation we do not have a chance to cooperate with our own Crimean asset where shareholders invested over EUR 40 million. Over 2,000 our employees remain in Crimea. It is clear that we are responsible for our company, investment of shareholders and employees," she said.

The winery in Crimea is neither a contractor nor asset in ownership in Ukraine. It is a separate structural unit of the holding. The Crimean plant continues operation and selling its products in Crimea, Russia and China.

Shareholders in Inkerman International AB are HTT BWH Holding Ltd (Finland, 40%), Eksen Investments Limited (Cyprus, 40%) and Board Chairman Valeriy Shamotiy manages Eksen's shares and Lorimer Ventures Limited (Cyprus, 20%) and U.S. Horizon Capital manages Lorimer's shares.
Autumn Driscoll / Hearst Connecticut Media

Thanks to the tuition charged by its community colleges, Connecticut placed in the top half of a diagnosis on college affordability in the 50 states, but was dragged down by the expense of its public and private four-year institutions.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University ranked Connecticut 21st in the study, second in the Northeast behind 10th-place New Jersey; with Alaska, Wyoming, Hawaii and California leading the nation. New Hampshire trailed the nation as the least affordable state to attend college, followed by Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
/ H John Voorhees III

DANBURY - Federal legislation to support community colleges that offer job training programs was introduced Thursday by U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty and congressional colleagues, according to a release.

The bill, which would provide federal support to community colleges that provide job training services such as apprenticeship programs, is meant to encourage more partnerships with industries and employers, the release said.
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BETHEL  Eversource will hold a public open house next week to discuss its proposal for a new electric transmission line in the area.

The company hopes to install a new 3.4-mile transmission line on an existing right-of-way, crossing through Bethel, Danbury and Brookfield.
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The state House of Representatives this week overwhelmingly approved a bill that would prevent employers from inquiring about an applicants criminal history on a job application.

The bill, known as Ban the Box, would prohibit most employers from adding a box on their job applications asking candidates about their prior arrests, criminal charges or convictions.

Employers such as school districts and law-enforcement agencies, which are required by law to check every applicants criminal background, would be exempt.

The bill, introduced by the Public Employees Committee, was approved Tuesday and now heads to the Senate.

In a testimony before a House committee earlier this year, a Connecticut resident said removing the criminal history box would give ex-offenders a fair chance to prove in an interview they have been rehabilitated.

Upon release, every application I filled out shook me to the core, having to mark down the crime I had committed, which I already served time for, Dan Varley wrote in his testimony. At what point do we, as a society, stop punishing people for their mistake?

Research shows most employers are reluctant to hire applicants with criminal records. A study conducted in New York City by the National Institute of Justice found a criminal record reduced the likelihood of a callback or job offer by nearly 50 percent.

The original bill proposed banning employers from inquiring about a candidates criminal history until a conditional job offer was made. That bill had strong support from such groups as the Connecticut Association for Human Services and the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut as well as several state agencies, including the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities and the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.

Providing the opportunity to have an interview would allow candidates to be evaluated on their current merits, not past mistakes, Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services Commissioner Miriam Delphin-Rittmon wrote to lawmakers in support of the bill.

Employment is a valuable part of the recovery process and is often a tool that assists recovery, she said. Through the employment process, individuals find a positive purpose and meaning in their lives.

However, after several business groups opposed the original bill because of security concerns, the House narrowed the proposed ban to exclude the interview process.

Eric Gjede, an assistant counsel at the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, said the amended bill is a good balance between the interests of job applicants and those of employers.

It does give people who are looking for a second chance in their life the opportunity to get their foot in the door and make a case for themselves, he said. But at the same time, it provides a protection for employers so they can provide a safe workplace for their employees and their customers.

Bob McVeigh, past president of the Connecticut Alarm & Systems Integrators Association, said he was pleased lawmakers changed the bill so his industry can properly vet candidates to do security-system installations, which often take place in peoples homes.

In our industry, the public wants us to do a background check, he said. This is basically saying we cant have it on the job application, which is fine.

noliveira@newstimes.com, 203-731-3411, @olivnelson
The government of Moldova has introduced protective quotas and duties on livestock products and cement produced in Ukraine, according to the newsmaker.md portal.

According to the resolution of the Moldovan government dated April 27, imports of the said products will be limited with quotas, while goods imported in excess of the restrictions will be applied protective duties.

Import quotas on Ukrainian milk and cream will be 1,000 tonnes, dairy products (kefir, yogurt, sour cream) 1,000 tonnes, butter, ice cream, cheese and curd 750 tonnes. Quotas for meat products (sausages, canned meat) will be 250 tonnes, for cement 500 tonnes.

The quotas will be granted on the principle "first come - first served." All Ukrainian products, imported in excess of the quotas, will be applied customs duties: for milk and cream in the amount of 10%, other dairy products 15%, butter and cheese from 15% to 20% plus EUR500/tonne. Meat products will be subject to a duty of 15% and cement 10%. Duties on imports of milk and milk powder will not apply to local manufacturers.

Duties will be valid until late 2016.
NEW MILFORD  After representing her town at the local level for 14 years, Town Councilwoman Mary Jane Lundgren wants to represent it in Hartford.

Lundgren, 68, announced her candidacy for the General Assemblys 67th District this week. She is running as a Democrat.

State Rep. Cecilia Buck-Taylor, a Republican, announced in January that she would not be seeking a third two-year term. The district covers most of New Milford.

I grew up in New Milford. I love this town, Lundgren said. I want to make sure everyone has the same advantages I had and my family had.

Lundgren has contemplated running for state office for a while, but held off while she worked as a nurse in the intensive care unit at New Milford Hospital. When she recently retired after 45 years, she knew the timing was right.

Im ready to do this, she said.

If elected, Lundgren wants to draw businesses to New Milford by completing the towns bike trail and riverfront projects. She said these projects will attract tourists, which will increase the towns revenue without having to raise property taxes or add to the developmental sprawl along Route 7.

Shes heard of other towns having success with similar tourism projects, and hopes New Milfords downtown can also benefit.

Shes also concerned about the drug problem in town and across the state. According to the Office of the Medical Examiner, twice as many Connecticut residents died of heroin overdoses in 2015 than three years earlier. She said making sure people have the right education and resources will reduce this number.

Lundgren also hopes the state can improve per-pupil spending on education.

She hopes to accomplish this by fighting for items in the budget and proposing legislation.

Its a matter of getting on the right committees, she said. ... I can bring the resources into the town.

Lundgren said she has always wanted to help people. She received her registered nursing certification from the Roosevelt Hospital School of Nursing in New York City after graduating from New Milford High School.

She went back to school once her daughter started kindergarten and earned a bachelors degree in psychology from Western Connecticut State University in 1995. She then earned her masters degree from the University of Connecticuts School of Social Work.

Through the social work program, Lundgren had two internships that focused on lobbying, writing bills and connecting people with their representatives.

The experience inspired her to jump into politics, she said.

Lundgren said she is a good candidate because she knows the town and has the needed experience and educational background to bring about change.

Lundgren is also a member of the New Milford Substance Abuse Prevention Council, The Aging Commission, Housing Partnership, Affordable Housing Inc., and The Northville Residents Association. She also belongs to the National Association of Social Workers, and a nurses professional union.

New Milford will be electing a new state representative and a new state senator this year. Republican state Sen. Clark Chapin announced last fall that he wont be seeking re-election either.

kkoerting@newstimes.com; 203-731-3345; @kkoerting
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DANBURY  Six inmates stood outside the Federal Correctional Institution on Thursday, anxiously awaiting the prisons newest residents.

The two arrivals seemed even happier than the women assembled to greet them, wagging their tails and licking the faces of their new companions.

It was the first day of a new dog training program at the prisons minimum-security womens camp.

The dogs were brought by Tails of Courage, a national dog rescue organization based in Danbury. They will be matched with inmates training to become dog handlers.

Each dog will stay with an inmate at all times until it is can be adopted.

These dogs are going to have attention 24/7, said Lynne Kelly, the facilitys executive assistant and camp administrator. Were hoping to give them some skills that make them more adoptable.

The launching of the program was one of several activities held at the facility in the past few days to mark National Reentry Week, a new initiative by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The activities included a job fair, a seminar on how to start a business, presentations about programs available to offenders on supervised release and panel discussions on existing and new re-entry services.

Basically, (inmates) have a network of services once theyre released from our custody, Kelly said.

National Reentry Week events are being held in all 50 states. The U.S. Attorneys Office in Connecticut said the events are part of an ongoing effort to make our criminal justice system fairer, more efficient and more effective at reducing recidivism and helping formerly incarcerated individuals contribute to their communities.

A major part of this commitment is assisting those who have served time in prison transition to being productive and law-abiding members of society, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut Deirdre Daly said in a statement. Too often, returning citizens face impregnable barriers as they compete for jobs, seek to attain stable housing and support their families.

Through the new dog training program, Tails of Justice, two inmates already certified to handle dogs will each train two other inmates to raise a dog. The second inmate will be a back-up handler when the primary handler is eating or showering.

After the inmates are done training, they will receive the same certification from the U.S. Department of Labor and will begin training other prisoners.

Kelly hopes the certification can help inmates find jobs in animal shelters, dog grooming facilities and similar businesses.

This partly helps them do their time because they have the emotional connection to the animal, Kelly said. It helps them get through the day and it also gives them a marketable skill to find employment.

One of the two certified trainers currently incarcerated at the Danbury prison is Linda Watkins, 55, who did a similar program while incarcerated in West Virginia. That program taught inmates to train service and therapy dogs.

When I came here, I didnt have a lot of patience, she said. And being in that program, I learned to have patience. Ive become calmer and I actually want to help other people.

Watkins, who also took a veterinarian technicians course while in prison, hopes her new skills will help her find a job when she is released.

Kerry Seaman, the other certified dog trainer, was in a similar program that was given in the Danbury prison until last year. She said that program, which trained inmates to raise bomb-sniffing dogs, changed her experience behind bars, which she hopes to pass on to other prisoners.

That program helped me get through my time here, she said. For me, getting this program started is to be able to leave something for the other ladies who come behind me... Its almost like a second chance for the dog as well as a second chance for us.

noliveira@newstimes.com, 203-731-3411, @olivnelson
Q: How do you divide the equity if two partners have money to invest, and the third has the idea and will put in the work?

A: This is a huge foundational issue that can make or break your company, as it will affect every aspect of the business and will have consequences for the entire life span of the venture. Therefore, it is important that you set yourself up for success.

The person who has the idea and is going to do the work should be the majority owner of the business with the money partners getting a small minor share. Too many founders make the mistake of giving away too much ownership, control, influence and power to the money partners.

While they should be super grateful for the offer of an investment, it is important to remember that the blood, sweat and tears, the long hours, the stress and the grind is for the founder to carry, for the most part, alone.

Related: How to Split Equity Without Giving Away the Company

That said, the money partners are super important and are major reason why your business will succeed if you dont have access to your own money. Just make sure that the terms and conditions are in the startups best interest. The money partners will not be running the business and they will have other careers and businesses to focus on besides yours. When the going gets tough, most investors will not be arm in arm with you solving and fixing the problems. Those that do are golden so try to seek them out.

The founder should be adequately taken care of with majority equity ownership percentage, stock options and a parachute should his/her employment be terminated down the road.

It is also very important that the investor is adequately compensated for their trust and belief in you. In many cases you can get a convertible loan or straight debt financing instead of giving away too much equity, as these are usually more attractive from a tax perspective to the investor.

The question of valuation and percentage ownership for the business partners is always a thorny and uncomfortable subject. Get a valuation formula or mechanism agreed to and in place up front before you take their check in order to avoid downstream problems.

Related: The ABCs of Equity Financing

Many businesses fail because the partners cannot agree on the value of the business and the ownership percentages. Most of the time this is because the founder thinks that their idea is the next billion dollar unicorn, blinding them to the reality that almost every business fails.

If your business is pre-revenue and pre-profitability it can easily be argued that the business is worth zero. So dont kill a potential financing opportunity because the investor wants to value your "idea" at $ 500,000 or $ 2 Million. Be grateful that you are one of the few that actually get financed as most start-ups never do.

Do not make the mistake of trying to own a large piece of a small pie when owning a smaller chunk of a bigger more viable business would be better for you, your partners and the company.

Try to avoid investors who are looking to control you through the legal documents. Beware of agreements that force you to give up board seats, veto rights, anti-dilution rights and approval rights. Instead you want partners that believe in you, who trust you and most importantly who empower you and support you. We call this friendly money.

You want partners who add significant value by rolling up their sleeves, working in the trenches, providing mentorship, expertise, and/or connections. These folks are called "smart money."

If you can get both friendly and smart money then accept the investment with gratitude and run hand in hand with your new money partner towards success.

Related: The Trick to Splitting Startup Equity Among Key Players

Related:

How to Fairly Divide Equity Between a Co-Founder and Investor

What Silicon Valley Can Learn From Indian Entrepreneurs

How to Have a Successful Co-Founder Relationship



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
15:17 28.04.2016 Interfax-Ukraine to host press conference 'Energoatom's Artificial Collapse. Planned Sabotage or Unconscious Madness?'

1 min read

On Thursday, April 28, at 12.30, the press centre of the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency will host a press conference by Chairman of the Ukrainian Energy Assembly, former minister of fuel and energy of Ukraine (1999, 2005-2006.) Ivan Plachkov, entitled "Energoatom's Artificial Collapse. Planned Sabotage or Unconscious Madness?" (8/5a Reitarska Street). Accreditation by phone: (067) 691 6784 (Lilia Klochko).
OTTAWA, April 28, 2016 /CNW Telbec/ - The Honourable Catherine McKenna, Minister of Environment and Climate Change and Minister responsible for Parks Canada, today issued the following statement as she concluded successful bilateral meetings in Ottawa, Ontario, with Sally Jewell, United States Secretary of the Interior.

"Today, I was pleased to meet with U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell. Following an urban hike on the Trans Canada Trail along the shore of the Ottawa River, we discussed opportunities for collaboration on protected areas and wildlife issues.

Canada and the U.S. have a strong record of collaboration on matters of environmental importance, including the recent signing of the Paris Climate Accord. We also share a history of leadership in the creation of protected areas and work together on wildlife management issues.

This year we are celebrating 100 years of collaboration under the Migratory Birds Convention. Our two nations have also committed to working together on a vision for migratory bird conservation for the next 100 years.

A key topic of discussion was identifying ways to work more closely together with the U.S. National Park Service to share tools and best practices and create opportunities for more Indigenous engagement in the management of protected areas. It is clear from today's meetings that Secretary Jewell and I are both deeply committed to the importance of making national parks and protected areas more accessible, so that every person has opportunity to experience nature and learn about the environment.

I can say with certainty that we will build upon the history of collaboration between our two countries to increase our efforts to preserve and expand the system of protected areas on both sides of the border. These areas play a critical role in conserving nature, contribute to the recovery of species-at-risk, and help us mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

A commitment to wildlife conservation and protected areas binds our two nations. Through the unwavering spirit of cooperation that defines this relationship, we can achieve our mutual goals for wildlife and protected areas."

SOURCE Parks Canada

Image with caption: "The Honourable Catherine McKenna, Minister of Environment and Climate Change and Minister responsible for Parks Canada with Sally Jewell, United States Secretary of the Interior, and Bruce Heyman, the United States Ambassador to Canada. (CNW Group/Parks Canada)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160428_C5650_PHOTO_EN_677785.jpg

For further information: Caitlin Workman, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, 819-938-9436; Media Relations, Parks Canada Agency, 855-862-1812, [email protected]
MONTREAL, April 27, 2016 /CNW Telbec/ - "Increasingly, gender parity and Canadian screen content is a much-discussed topic in the media, on social media and in conversations between industry colleagues. And justifiably so.

"Gender parity is a priority for both Telefilm Canada and the Canada Media Fund (CMF). It's also a personal preoccupation for us as two women working in the Canadian audiovisual sector who head up teams comprised 70 per cent of women with over 50 per cent of managers also being women.

"We've partnered together on several occasions to support the role of women in Canadian media, in terms of promotion (St. John's International Women's Film Festival); professional development (Women in Film & Television); and research (Women in View2 x More and Much Ado About Women in the Screen Industries in Canada). We've also ensured that women have their rightful place in international markets by featuring their talent at events such as the Cannes Film Festival, Kidscreen, the Berlin International Film Festival, MIPTV and the Bogota Audiovisual Market, to name a few.

"Since last fall, gender parity has been the subject of Carolle Brabant's ongoing one-on-one consultations with women filmmakers across the country. The topic was also raised as part of the CMF's cross-country consultation in fall 2015; the CMF is reviewing a number of options provided by the industry on this issue.

"It's important for Telefilm and the CMF that any proposed course of action take into account all aspects of this complex issue and end in concrete results. As leaders of national cultural funding agencies that develop and promote Canadian feature film, television and digital media, we assure that input from the industry we receive will lead to action.

"We have committed Telefilm and the CMF to finding viable and lasting solutions to the question of gender parity in the audiovisual industry and that these solutions be implemented in a timely manner.

"Finally, we would like to thank the stakeholders who have provided us with a diversity of ideas on how to address this important issue. We are inspired by the positivity to finding solutions to this challenge."

SOURCE Telefilm Canada

Image with caption: "Logo: Canada Media Fund (CNW Group/Telefilm Canada)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160427_C3291_PHOTO_EN_676787.jpg

For further information: Media enquiries: Douglas Chow, Head of Public Relations, Telefilm Canada, (514) 283-0838 ext. 2048 or 1-800-567-0890, [email protected]; Andre Ferreira, Communications Manager, Canada Media Fund, (416) 554-2768, [email protected]
GATINEAU, QC, April 28, 2016 /CNW/ - Canadians come together each year on this day to pay tribute to family, friends and colleagues who have been killed or injured, or have suffered illness due to a work-related incident. I offer my sincere condolences on behalf of the Government of Canada to all who have been affected by these tragedies and to those whose lives have been altered following an incident at work.

While it is difficult to believe, on average, almost three workers across Canada die every day as a result of workplace incidents. Every year, thousands more suffer injury or illness because of their working conditions. Every workplace injury or death is one too many.

These tragedies remind us that there is still much work to be done in the field of workplace health and safety in Canada. They also reaffirm the need for government, employers, unions and employees to work together to ensure all workers return home in good health at the end of the day. Together we can build a culture of health and safety at workplaces across Canada. Better health and safety happens through diligent, deliberate actions supported by workers and employers.

Today, we lower our flags to honour our loved ones. At 11:00 a.m., please take a moment of silence to reflect on those we have lost, as well as the thousands of Canadians currently living with the outcome of a workplace accident.

They will never be forgotten.

Associated Links

National Day of Mourning

Workplace health and safety

Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety

Follow us on Twitter

SOURCE Employment and Social Development Canada

For further information: John O'Leary, Director of Communications, Office of the Honourable MaryAnn Mihychuk, P.C., M.P., Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour, 819-654-5611; Media Relations Office, Employment and Social Development Canada, 819-994-5559, [email protected]
TORONTO, April 28, 2016 /CNW/ - We're all smiles at The Children's Wish Foundation  Canada's largest wish granting charity that puts smiles on the faces of children with life-threatening illnesses.

Our More Wishes, More Wonders Major Giving Campaign to raise $10-million by 2021 surpassed a key milestone target in March by which time leadership volunteers coast to coast raised over $3-million in donations and pledges.

In October 2015, Children's Wish launched its More Wishes, More Wonders Major Giving Campaign to expand wish granting efforts to include children with serious genetic and neurological diagnoses. Volunteer leaders across Canada have engaged as Provincial Chairs and are joining together to make their own contributions and to involve like-minded philanthropists within and outside the Children's Wish family.

"It has been encouraging to see peers across the country step forward to do something to help these deserving children," said Dave Lacey, National Campaign Chair at The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada.

Thanks to these committed leaders, Children's Wish has surpassed this key milestone. In fact, this campaign marks the largest single-pledge donation in the history of Children's Wish: a $1-million pledge over four years from The Slaight Family Foundation.

The More Wishes, More Wonders Major Giving Campaign is funding heartfelt wishes for children like Katherine Simpson, who has complex genetic diagnoses and is fully dependent on oxygen and a ventilator. Five year-old Katherine's wish was to go to Disney World with her parents; something her mom explains, they never thought would be possible.

"It was one of those things for us that money couldn't buy," she said. "There was no way we ever could have taken her without the help of Children's Wish."

The impact of a wish is so powerful that it can be life-changing for the child and their family. After returning from their Disney trip, her family said that Katherine had learned how to smile!

"Katherine doesn't show her excitement too often," explained her dad. "We said before we left that the trip would be worth every bit of everybody's effort if she smiled once, and she lit up!"

Katherine and her family's wonderful experience highlights the urgent need to bring joy and relief to children with life-threatening and significantly complex medical conditions. Each special wish granted impacts about 100 people including parents, grandparents, teachers, classmates, business and community groups and the medical community.

Dave Lacey asks existing and potential donors, volunteers and supporters to help The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada reach its 2021 major giving fundraising target of $10-million.

"As a father, when I heard how much little Katherine smiled on her Disney wish, it served as a great reminder of our campaign objectives," he said. "We're inviting leaders and philanthropists coast to coast to join and contribute to the campaign to ensure no eligible child is denied a wish."

Click on this short video to hear a heart-warming Wish story from the campaign:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-FEBK8IKuw

About The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada:

The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada is the largest all Canadian wish granting charity dedicated to granting wishes to Canadian children between the ages of 3 and 17 who are diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. For more than 30 years, Children's Wish has worked tirelessly to grant heartfelt wishes to nearly 25,000 children and their families.

This year, Children's Wish is enjoying the largest wish granting year yet, and expects to grant nearly 1,500 new wishes across the country with the help of volunteers and generous donors; that is approximately three wishes each and every day, all year long. Each wish is the child's most heartfelt wish, and carefully structured to meet the particular needs of the child and their family.

Already this year, we are experiencing unprecedented increases of wish referrals through our strong medical community relationships for our wishes granted to children with life-threatening illnesses. Now more than ever, we are encouraging Canadians to donate and support The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada to help us continue to grant the next most heartfelt wish. Children's Wish is a national charity with chapters in every province and territory.

Visit www.childrenswish.ca/morewishesmorewonderscampaign for more information and to donate.

SOURCE The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada

Video with caption: "VIDEO: Katherine's Story". Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-FEBK8IKuw

Image with caption: "Katherine Simpson, 5 (CNW Group/The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160428_C4059_PHOTO_EN_677746.jpg

For further information: Lorelei Wilkinson, National Senior Manager, Major Giving, The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada | National Office, T: 647-725-6122 | [email protected]; Dave Lacey, National Chair, More Wishes, More Wonders Campaign, The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada, T: 416-510-5656 | [email protected]
TORONTO, April 27, 2016 /CNW/ - National Service Dogs (NSD) and Wounded Warriors Canada (WWC) are proud to introduce NSD Ortona. At just 12 weeks he is already showing the temperament, trainability and personality sought in PTSD and Autism Service Dogs. Ortona began puppy classes with NSD's trainers at 8 weeks and next week he will be flying to Edmonton where he will be matched with his new NSD Puppy Raiser, Capt. Donna Riguidel. For the next sixteen months the Riguidel family will be teaching him all of his basic obedience skills and socializing him to the different environments he will encounter in his working life. Paired with a serving member of the Canadian Armed Forces, Ortona will be included in all dog-safe activities on the base, like a furry new recruit, and will serve as a service dog ambassador to both uniformed and civilian members.

Celebrating 20 years of service to families across Canada, National Service Dogs is proud to be the only Assistance Dog International (ADI) Accredited Training Centre in Canada providing PTSD Service Dogs to ill and injured Canadian Veterans and First Responders.

Phil Ralph, National Program Director for Wounded Warriors Canada, commented, "We are proud of our partnership with National Service Dogs. As an ADI accredited training centre, we recognize the importance of ensuring our ill and injured Veterans and First Responders receive a service dog that is trained to provincial standards. We look forward to watching Ortona grow and, eventually, providing a life-changing service to an ill and injured Veteran or First Responder."

According to NSD Executive Director, Danielle Forbes, "National Service Dogs has always embraced a spirit of innovation and collaboration and is proud to partner with Wounded Warriors Canada on the expansion of this rapidly emerging area of service dog work. It is a very exciting time within the service dog field and together with Wounded Warriors Canada we are empowering veterans and expanding their potential through the life-changing power of Certified Service Dogs."

At eighteen months of age Ortona will return to NSD's Ontario Training Centre to begin his advanced service dog training and from there will be matched with a client and his journey will begin in earnest. Each NSD certified service dog represents a 10 year commitment for National Service Dogs, encompassing the initial dog training as well as in-depth client training, annual client follow ups and regular re-certification testing. Each National Service Dog is valued at $30,000, but provided at no charge to approved clients. This is made possible through national funding partners like Wounded Warriors Canada.

All of Ortona's adventures will be detailed and shared online through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. These accounts will be live at the beginning of June and will be shared with the media and the public at a media event on the base in early June.

NSD Ortona and his support team are available for interviews and photo opportunities.

Background Information:

NSD Ortona was sponsored and named by Wounded Warriors Canada and is part of NSD's "O" litter of puppies born on February 8, 2016. He is a Labrador mix. National Service Dogs (CRA# 898029228 RR0001  accredited by Imagine Canada) and Wounded Warriors Canada (CRA# 82808-2727-RR0001) are both registered Canadian charities.

What's In A Name??

The Battle of Ortona, Italy, Dec 20-28 1943

For the Canadians, Ortona was the bloodiest battle of the Italian Campaign to date. Canadian and German troops clash daily, in bitter, house-to-house fighting. Snipers, booby traps and land mines were a constant threat as every building gained brought about a terrible cost in blood. The capture of Ortona, known to those who fought it as the "Italian Stalingrad", is considered among Canada's greatest victories during the war.

SOURCE Wounded Warriors Canada

Image with caption: "NSD Ortona (CNW Group/Wounded Warriors Canada)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160427_C6751_PHOTO_EN_676010.jpg

For further information: National Service Dogs, Danielle Forbes, 519 239 9808, [email protected], www.nsd.on.ca; Wounded Warriors Canada, Scott Maxwell, 1-888-706-4808, [email protected], www.woundedwarriors.ca
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has said that an open sitting of the UN Security Council will take place in New York on April 28 in the light of the worsening of the security situation in Donbas and Russia's failure to implement Minsk Agreements.

"On April 28, at 22.00 Kyiv time, an open sitting of the UN Security Council, initiated by Permanent Office of Ukraine at the UN on behalf of me, will take place in New York. The reason is worsening of the security situation in Donbas and Russia's failure to implement Minsk Agreements," the head of state wrote on Facebook on Wednesday evening.

Poroshenko also reported that he has instructed Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine Vadym Prystaiko "to inform international community about criminal deeds of the occupants in Donbas and Crimea, namely a ban of Mejlis of Crimean Tatar People in Crimea."
The lawyer for the Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko has not ruled out that his client has indeed received the documentation necessary for her repatriation.

"I took, as early as April 7, the statement from Nadia Savchenko that she agrees to her transfer to serve time in Ukraine. According to the procedure, she was to receive documents for filling out," Mark Feygin told Interfax by telephone on Wednesday.

He said his colleague, Nikolai Polozov, will visit Savchenko in jail in Novocherkassk, this Friday and help her fill out the papers.

The transfer procedure will take several months, he added. "It is a longer journey than a pardon, which could happen in one day, and we would insist precisely on a pardon," the lawyer said.

Savchenko's sister Vira said in a televised interview, on Wednesday, that the head of the Novocherkassk jail had issued documents for Nadia to fill out in order to be extradited to Ukraine.

On March 22, 2016, the Donetsk Court of the Rostov region found Ukrainian servicewoman, Nadia Savchenko, guilty of killing Russian journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin, by a group of people by a previous concert on hatred and enmity motives, and sentenced her to 22 years in a penal colony. The court also found her guilty of attempted murder and illegally crossing the Russian border.
Gideon Azubuike Wokocha, a paramount ruler in Okposi Community, Ogba/Ndoni/Egbema Local Government Area, (ONELGA) Rivers State, has spoken...

Gideon Azubuike Wokocha, a paramount ruler in Okposi Community, Ogba/Ndoni/Egbema Local Government Area, (ONELGA) Rivers State, has spoken on the recent spate of insecurity in the state.Speaking during an interview session with reporters, he accused Minister of transport, Rotimi Amaechi, of giving N110million to kidnappers during his time as Governor.He said, ''I dont think the problem is grassroots leadership failure because leaders are flesh and blood too and there is need for them to be alive. I personally wrote to the present Commissioner of Police; telling him what is happening here. They even acknowledged receipt of my letter but they didnt respond to my call to discourse the way forward. Up till now, I have not heard from any of them. The community leaders are doing their best but they have to stay alive to do that.''When the cult groups were initiating new members at their respective camps, security agents could not go there. That is why I was surprised when Ameachi said he had gadgets where he detects the places the bad boys are; that the gadgets were destroyed by the current governor. I wanted to ask him where were the gadgets when his serving Commissioner of Power was kidnapped and spent over one week inside the bush and paid a ransom of N110 million?''Where were the gadgets when APC were doing rally under Ameachi at Rima with all the big people in APC including Senator Wilson Ake, Commissioner of Police, the Chairman of a Local Government, and yet, these bad boys sent a word a cross to the Ameachi led team to give them N20 million if the rally must hold in that community? At the end, they sent somebody with N7 million to the bush. When the cultists found out the money were not complete they seized the messenger until Ameachi completed the money. Where were the gadgets when this happened? Was Ameachi not the governor then?
A former Minister of state for Education, Senator Iyabo Anisulowo was on Wednesday kidnapped by armed men alongside her security aide ...

Anisulowo, who was a Senator between 2003 and 2007, represented Ogun West Senatorial District at the National Assembly was reportedly abducted while she was returning from her farm.The victim reportedly celebrated her 70th birthday, some weeks back in Ilaro, the headquarters of Yewaland and was being rumoured to be nursing ambition of governorship in 2019. Confirming the incident , the Ogun State Police Public Relations Officer, Muyiwa Adejobi, said the Command got a report that Anisulowo was kidnapped this evening by armed men.He said, Yes. We have the report that the senator was kidnapped this evening by some armed men. The State commissioner of police, CP Abdulmajid Ali , has despatched teams to the area, Ilaro, for the rescue operation.We want to assure the Public particularly her relations and those concerned that we will rescue her unhurt soon and the perpetrators will be apprehended. We have embarked on scientific investigation on the kidnap case. And we are optimistic that the Senator will be rescued very soon.
The Federal Government has again re-amended the charges preferred against the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, before the Code of Cond...

The Federal Government has again re-amended the charges preferred against the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, before the Code of Conduct Tribunal.There have been two amendments of the original 13 counts which now brings the counts against the Senate President to 16.The first amendment which brought in additional two counts was made on April 18, 2016 while the latest made on April 27, 2016, added one fresh count.The fresh amendment came up after the CCT chairman dismissed Saraki's application seeking his disqualification.The first amendment added two charges which, include allegation that Saraki continued to receive salary and emoluments as Governor of Kwara State after the expiration of his tenure and at the same time, from the Federal Government as a senator between June 2011 and October 2013.The offence is said to be contrary to section 6(a) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act. CAP. C15, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004 and as incorporated under paragraph 2(a), Part I of the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution.It is said to be punishable under section 23(2) of the code of conduct bureau and tribunal act as incorporated under paragraph 18, Part I of the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution.The other additional charge is that Saraki failed to declare to the Code of Conduct Bureau on assumption of office as Governor of Kwara State in 2003, his leasehold interest leasehold in the property at 42, Remi Fani Kayode Street, Ikeja, Lagos.He was said to have acquired the property in December 12, 1996 through his company, Skyview Properties Limited from First Finance trust Limited.The offence is said to be contrary to section 15(1)(2) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act, CAP. C15, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004 and as incorporated under paragraph 11(1) and (2), Part I o the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution.It is said to be punishable under section 23(2) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act as incorporated under paragraph 18, Part I of the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution.
The Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, Thursday, pleaded not guilty to an amended 16-count criminal charge the Federal Government ente...

The Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, Thursday, pleaded not guilty to an amended 16-count criminal charge the Federal Government entered against him before the Code of Conduct Tribunal, CCT, sitting in Abuja.Saraki was re-arraigned on a day the tribunal chairman, Justice Danladi Umar, refused to disqualify himself from presiding over the trial. In a ruling, Justice Umar, dismissed the motion Saraki filed through his lawyer, Mr. Raphael Oluyede, asking him to hands-off the case on the ground that he was likely to be biased against the defendant.Meanwhile, barely an hour after the ruling was delivered, Saraki, served the CCT with a copy of an appeal he has lodged against it before the Abuja Division of the Court of Appeal.
Enugu State Governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, on Wednesday evening met behind closed doors with President Muhammadu Buhari to brief him on th...

Enugu State Governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, on Wednesday evening met behind closed doors with President Muhammadu Buhari to brief him on the herdsmen attack at Ukpabi Nimbo.Ugwuanyi left a meeting of the Nigeria Governors Forum which was holding inside the old Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja midway to meet Buhari inside his official residence at about 10pm.At the end of the meeting, the governor told journalists that there was no truth in some reports suggesting that he was blocked from speaking with Buhari on the incident.At no point did I call Mr. President, or anyone in the Presidency for that matter. There was no need,  he said.The governor however expressed delight that Buhari had ordered security chiefs to fish out the culprits.I am happy that the President has directed the Chief of Defence Staff and the IGP to fish out the culprits and then safeguard the people.That is the demand of the state and that is what I am expected to do as a governor, to safeguard lives and property, he said.
President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday said that it was a matter of great concern to him that nearly two-thirds of states of the federati...

He made the remark while speaking at a closed door meeting with members of the Nigeria Governor Forum at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.Buhari, in a statement by the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said that he was very disturbed by the hardship which state government workers across the country and their families were facing due to the non-payment of salaries.To ameliorate the hardship being faced by affected workers, the President said that the Federal Government will strive to make more funds available to the states by expediting action on refunds due to them for the maintenance of federal roads and other expenses incurred on behalf of the Federal Government.He also said that he will establish an inter-ministerial committee to study a Fiscal Restructuring Plan for the Federation which was presented to him by the governors.The President said that the committee will review the plan to improve the finances of state governments and make recommendations on how proposals in the plan should be dealt with by the Presidency, the Federal Executive Council and the National Assembly through legislation.President Buhari urged the governors, however, to understand that while he was ready to do all within his powers to help the states overcome their current financial challenges, the Federal Government also has funding problems of its own to contend with.You all know the problems we have found ourselves in. You have to bear with us, he told them.The Chairman of the Governors Forum, Governor Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara State and the Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State, who chaired the committee that worked on the Fiscal Restructuring Plan, asked the Federal Government to do more to help the states financially.The governors told the President that while they had resolved to take other measures to boost their internally-generated revenue, the implementation of the Fiscal Restructuring Plan will help them to deal with their funding problems on short, medium and long-term bases.They said that if the plan was adopted and implemented by the Federal Government, states of the federation will become more financially empowered to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities.Speaking with State House correspondents at the end of the meeting, Yari called for amendment of the sharing formula in order to increase federal revenue to state governments.According to him, it was impossible for state governments to save for raining day with the current 26% allocation to states and 52% to the Federal Government.On the allegation that the Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun blamed state governments for their current financial crisis due to their inability to save, Yari said: The states are only taking 26 per cent whereas the federal government is taking 52 per cent and you are asking us to save?Anyway, I doubt if the Minister made that statement or it is coming from the media. The truth remains that the states are taking 26 per cent and the federal government 52 per cent, what are they doing with the money?We are not sovereign so how can we save? We are dealing with our different states economy which we are trying our best to fix. Most times, we are busy shouting that what is suppose to be given to us has not been given. For the past three years, we have been asking them to show usif the excess crude has been used judiciously or not.So, the question of saving or not does not arise, he added.Noting that the meeting is about the economy, he said that the governors passed state-by-state demands to the federal government.He said: You will agree with me that states are the landlords, we own the landand the people, so therefore the economy of this country lies in the state. Everything comes from the state, the oil, agricultural produce, mining and people are in the states while the federal government is in Abuja.So therefore if any state has any issues and is known to Mr President, I doubt very much if he will be able to sleep with his two eyes closed.We are closer to the people and have many challenges in the states. Today we have received support from the Federal Government in terms of bailout, restructured our debts, given us 15% of the Excess Crude Account for development.All these are temporal measures. Each state has a programme right from short to mid and long term which we presented to Mr. President and he graciously accepted and he plans to put a committee in place that would look at the matter starting with short term.For the short term we are looking at a situation whereby our refunds that are hanging since 2005 right from Obasanjos exit of the Paris club, some of the monies that were not paid so that the states that are having difficulties can get money from there.Loan restructuring, bailout and ECA, we are asking for 18 months moratorium before we can start paying, so that we would able to strategize.To develop IGR is not overnight, it is a long term programme that one has to plan for. And also our workforce have increased and there is nothing we can do about it because people are getting their daily bread from there and we cannot say we are going to cut salaries and wages.We have to find a solution otherwise we would keep going back and forth because you will not achieve anything as oil been sold for $100 per barrel is now selling for $28 and $31.So therefore we have devised a plan for short term, medium term and long term. These are part of short term.As part of the medium term programme, we are looking at the revenue mobilization formula in ensuring that resources which were due for the past 10 years to states will be made available to them after the National Assemblys approval.While the agriculture and mining will be a long term programme.The committee that will be set up will have the Vice President, Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola will be in that committee because he headed similar committee on revenue formula at the Nigeria Governors Forum in 2012/2013.At the same time, some states have committed their resources to some federal government projects like roads and airports, there is a committee that was set up to look into that, we are urging the committee to hasten and complete up their work and present their report to Mr. President so that states can get relief, he said.Stressing that the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) demand for increased minimum wage is justifiable, he urged the workers to exercise patience because of the present economic problem.He said: Well, they are right because we agree that what they are being paid is toosmall. But they must understand the situation the country is because where we are deriving our resources from is now lower by 60 percent.So how do we do the magic? But we are going to do our best, he stated.I
Retired Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao expressed shock on Thursday at President Benigno Aquinos claim that Islamic militants planned to kidnap him, and said the alleged plot should not have been made public.Aquino released a statement Wednesday saying Abu Sayyaf, a notorious kidnap-for-ransom gang that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group and beheaded a Canadian hostage this week, had planned to abduct Pacquiao or his children.Pacquiao I was alarmed when he announced the Abu Sayyaf wanted to kidnap me. Im surprised because all Filipinos are my friends. I love them, especially the Muslims, Pacquiao said at his residence in Manila. Pacquiao said he had responded to Aquinos statement by taking security measures to protect himself as well as his wife and five children, who are in his hometown of General Santos.We added security for my family and me, he said. General Santos is in the conflict-wracked southern Philippine region of Mindanao, where an array of Islamic militant groups are based and a separatist insurgency has claimed tens of thousands of lives since the 1970s. The Abu Sayyafs main stronghold is about 400 kilometres (250 miles) away from General Santos. Pacquiao was in Manila, more than 1,000 kilometres north of General Santos, as part of his campaign to win a Senate seat in next months national elections. Pacquiao said he was bewildered by Aquinos statement, having not been informed before the president went public with the alleged plot.If it came from an intelligence report, it should have been kept secret and need not be announced. And why just now? We have to study this, said Pacquiao, whose unprecedented eight world titles have made him one of the Philippines richest men. Aquino made the announcement after the severed head of Canadian John Ridsdel was dumped in the streets of Jolo island, an Abu Sayyaf stronghold.The group, which is believed to have only a few hundred armed followers, is believed to be holding more than 20 other foreigners captive, including 18 Indonesian and Malaysian sailors abducted over the past month. Aquino also said the militants had threatened to kill him and planned to kidnap his sister, who is a popular television personality, in an effort to gain Islamic State favour and funding. Pacquiao said he had good relations with Muslims in the southern Philippines, and did not know why he might be a target.I dont believe our Muslim brothers (would) do that, he said. We support them, we give them livelihood, so I dont know where that came from. Pacquiao, an evangelical Christian, said he was not scared for his own safety and would continue hitting the campaign trail, where he attracts huge, chaotic crowds. I live my life like every day is the last so I have no fear. God is with me, he said.Presidential spokesman Herminio Coloma declined to comment directly on Pacquiaos complaints he had not been informed about the alleged kidnapping plot before Aquinos public announcement. (The) government has taken, and continues to take, all necessary measures to ensure the safety of our citizens and thwart acts of terror, intimidation and destabilisation against them, Coloma told AFP in a text message.
Nigerian Navy has declared one Charles Ekpemefumor wanted over the hijack of MT MAXIMUS Ship. In a release signed by Nigerian Navy Dir...

Nigerian Navy has declared one Charles Ekpemefumor wanted over the hijack of MT MAXIMUS Ship.In a release signed by Nigerian Navy Director of Information Commodore Christian Ezekobe, it was revealed that one Charles Ekpemefumor aka Charles Parker or Captain Charles Agaba is the mastermind of the hijack attack on the MT MAXIMUS.He was alleged to be responsible for the leasing of mother ship MT DEJIKUN used for the hijack from one Mr. Mustapha Kenny Gani through a third party called Mr. Steve Paul.In view of his involvement in the pirate attack and hijacking of MT MAXIMUS, a letter of invitation was sent to him on 15 April 2016 to enable him come for questioning on the allegation. Several attempts have been made to ensure his compliance but all efforts proved abortive.Continuing, Ezekobe said you would recalled that MT MAXIMUS with 18 crew members and carrying 4,368.203MT of Gas Oil was hijacked on 11 February 2016 by a group of suspected pirates off Cote dIvoire waters. Consequently, the Nigerian Navy deployed for rescue operations.The vessel was eventually rescued on 19 February 2016 within Sao Tome waters 320 nautical miles (nm) off the Nigerian coast. During the rescue operation, 6 pirates were arrested, while one of them was killed. Some items were recovered from the pirates including weapons and mobile telephones. Mr Charles Ekpemefumor Alias Charles Parker is hereby declared wanted by the Naval Headquarters in other to unravel the circumstances of the hijack of MT MAXIMUS. Therefore, any person who sights him should report immediately to any naval formation, military or security agencies for prompt action, Ezekobe concluded.
About two hundred soldiers who fought in the AU Peace-keeping operation in Guinea Bissau in 2015 say they have been denied six months allo...

File Photo: Nigerian soldiers

About two hundred soldiers who fought in the AU Peace-keeping operation in Guinea Bissau in 2015 say they have been denied six months allowances.Some of the affected soldiers of 158 Task Force Battalion situated in Gubio Local Government Area of Borno state told journalists in Yola , Adamawa state, that the failure by military authority to pay the allowances is already generating tension in the affected battalion.A soldier among the affected soldiers said they were in Yola purposely to express their displeasure to the press so that those concerned will release their outstanding allowances.He lamented the fact that men committed to fighting Boko Haram have been starved of their allowances despite their sacrifices, adding that the development is also affecting the fight against insurgency.
The Mejlis, a self-governing body of the Crimean Tatars, and the Kurultai (the national assembly) from April 2016 has been working in the emergency mode, the head of the Mejlis and MP Refat Chubarov has reported.

"As soon as a threat of the Mejlis could be banned and declared an extremist organization, Mejlis members made the relevant decisions that were to take force from the moment when this illicit decision was made by the Russian occupation court. On February 19 Mejlis members made a decision on the emergency regime of the operation of Kurultai delegates, Mejlis and its members and other authorities in the self-government system of the Crimean Tatars if invincible obstacles for their free operation appear on the territory of Crimea," Chubarov said at a briefing in Kyiv.

He said that as a representative of the Mejlis he on Tuesday, April 26, after the unlawful decision of the Russian occupation court and acting in line with the Mejlis decision of February 19, issued a decree to introduce the emergency regime for operation of national self-government authorities of the Crimean Tatars in the conditions of temporary occupation of Crimea by Russia.

Chubarov said that since April 26, operation of the Mejlis, its members of and other authorities selected by the Kurultai and until the Mejlis makes another decision is organized by the Mejlis chairman.

"The central office of the Mejlis is Kyiv city," Chubarov said.

A specialized meeting consisted of Mijlis Chairman, Leader of the Crimean Tatars Mustafa Jemilev (with consent of Mejlis members who are permanently living in Ukraine's mainland) is to coordinate operation of the Mejlis in the emergency period.
The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) is to deploy medical doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other medical professionals to Internally ...

The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) is to deploy medical doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other medical professionals to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps nationwide.The Director General of NYSC, Brig-Gen. Sule Kazaure, made this known Thursday while flagging-off the NYSC intervention programme at Damare IDPs camp in Yola.Kazaure said that the deployment of NYSC to the camps was part of the schemes contribution to governments efforts in assisting the IDPs.This programme, which is designed to bring succour to the inmates in this centre, is also intended to compliment governments efforts towards provision of the welfare needs of members of IDPs nationwide.The scheme, therefore, will deploy the services of corps professionals such as medical doctors, nurses, pharmacist, etc to the centre to assist Federal Government in the provision of medical and other sundry needs of the IDPs.Specifically corps members will be participating in medical outreaches, environmental sanitation, educational intervention and general awareness creation on healthy living, he said.Kazaure also said that the scheme would use the opportunity provided by the programme to distribute food items and other materials to the IDPs.He said that the flag-off of the intervention programme was his major official assignment outside Abuja and this was an indication of the importance the NYSC attached to the plight of the IDPs.Kazaure urged other wealthy Nigerians and corporate organisations to assist government in rehabilitating IDPs in the country.He commended the military, NEMA, Red Cross, NGOs and various faith based organisations for their contributions to welfare of IDPs.I want to thank you all, especially, the corps members who despite all odds are currently serving in the state, Kazaure said.The leader of IDPs in Damare camp, Mallam Modu Gana, lauded the intervention programme of the NYSC which he said was timely.Gov. Muhammadu Jibrilla of Adamawa and the State Coordinator of NEMA, Mr Saad Bello, also lauded NYSC for the gesture, which they said, reflected one of the objectives of the scheme.
A Federal High Court in Abuja heard Wednesday how former Chief of Defence Staff, Alex Badeh allegedly deployed public funds to acquire N3...

A Federal High Court in Abuja heard Wednesday how former Chief of Defence Staff, Alex Badeh allegedly deployed public funds to acquire N320million house in Abuja for his 28-year old last son, Kam.A retired Air Commodore, Aliyu Yishau, who said he served as former Director of Finance and Account of the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) while Badeh was the Chief of Air Staff (between September 2012 and December 2013), made this disclosure at the resumption of proceedings in the trial of Badeh and a firm, Iyalikam Nigeria Limited.Badeh and the firm were arraigned on March 7 this year on a 10-count charge of breach of trust and corruption for allegedly diverting about N3.97bn from NAFs account.Yishau, the first prosecution witness, who was cross-examined by Badehs lawyer, Akin Olujinmi (SAN), said the N320m house was the second of such property acquired in Wuse 2, Abuja by the former Chief of Defence Staff for his children.He said the first located at No: 19 Kumasi Crescent, Wuse II, Abuja was bought for Badehs first son, Alex Badeh (Jnr) at N260m, with N60m spent to renovate it, while N90m was expended in furnishing the property.Yishau said the second house, which was bought at N320m for Badehs last son is located adjacent to the one bought for Badehs first son.When asked how he came about the information, the witness said he paid for the houses from the N558.2m taken monthly by Badeh from NAFs funds.He said once he converted the N558.2m to United States dollars and takes it to Badeh in his house, the ex-Chief of Defence Staff will direct him to make payment from it.The witness said whenever Badeh directed him to make payments, he always takes the cash from Badehs house to his (witness) house, from where he hands the cash to one Engineer Husseini Salau.I collected the money from the 1st defendants (Badehs) resident. I take it to my house and ask them to come and collect it. I took the money to his house and he asked me to remove the equivalent of N260m to pay for the house. I deducted the N260m equivalent from the normal monthly N558.2m I take to him.He (the 1st defendant always authorises the deduction for payment whenever I take the monthly money to him. I did not give the house renovation job to Engr Salau. I paid N60m for the renovation of the house based on the instruction of my boss, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, the witness said.He said he could not recall how many times he paid the money for the renovation. But admitted that the money was not paid at once.The witness said he was not aware that Alex Badeh jr was just a tenant in the property at No: 19 Kumasi Crescent and that he did not see the tenancy agreement between Engr. Salau and Alex Badeh jr.He admitted earlier telling the court, in his evidence-in-chief, that Engr. Salau and Alex Badeh jr located the house at No 19 Kumasie Crescent, Wuse 2.He said it will not be correct to say Engr. Salau marketed the house to him.He confirmed that he paid N90m for furniture for the house.On how he made payment for the furniture at No:19 Kumasi Crescent, the witness said When I received instruction from my boss, I directed my office at the Nigerian Air Force headquarters to liaise with Alex Badeh jr and effect the payment of the N90m.On whether it was right for him to have made the payments, Yishau said he was acting on instructions from his boss.In my statement to the EFCC, I said the 1st defendant has two properties in Wuse 2 that cost N260m and N320m. The house that cost N320m is the house adjacent to No 19 Kumasi Crescent, which was purchased from Honourable Bature.That was the one purchased for the last son of the 1st defendant, by name Kam. I cannot remember the address, but can identify it, the witness said.On whether he is a certified accountant, the witness said he worked as an Accountant for the Air Force for 25 years, but that he is not a certified Accountant.Further hearing in the case has been adjourned to May 9 at 11 am.
The Federal Government Wednesday queried the moral right of the Senate President in calling on the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribu...

The Federal Government Wednesday queried the moral right of the Senate President in calling on the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), Danladi Umar to disqualify himself from his (Sarakis) trial for false asset declaration.Lead prosecution lawyer, Rotimi Jacobs said it was laughable that Saraki, who is currently being tried, will chose to hold on to office as a Senator and Senator President, but demand that Umar, who was merely investigated and had since been freed, to vacate office.This motion is absurd. The defendant (Saraki), who has been charged to court, is still performing his statutory duty as a senator, but he is saying that the Constitution guarantees him presumption of innocence.He is saying that he remains a senator. He is saying that he will continue to be Senate President and he will continue to perform his duties. But he is saying that your lordship (Umar), who was merely investigated, should not be allowed to enjoy the presumption of innocence and that your lordship should not be allowed to continue to perform his duties.Your lordship has not been charged before any court. No charge has been filed against your lordship. That is the absurdity in their motion. This application is only filed to achieve one purpose; to embarrass the tribunal, Jacobs said while responding to a motion by Saraki, asking the tribunal Chairman to disqualify himself from the trial on the ground that he was investigated for bribery allegation.Jacobs said the motion was filed to malign the tribunal chairman, adding that the investigation of the bribery allegation had been concluded and the person found to be culpable had since last year been charged to court by the EFCC.If investigation has been concluded and someone is already facing trial, will the defendant be right to say that the tribunal chairman is involved in on-going investigation. He cannot be right. The investigation has been concluded since March 2015.This is stated in our counter-affidavit which was never challenged. That is what led to the charge he referred to. The person on trial is the only one recommend for prosecution.The letter did not recommend your lordship for prosecution. That is not what the letter says. The letter clearly stated with overwhelming evidence the person to be prosecuted. We should fear God, we are counsel, Jacobs said.He noted that contrary to Sarakis claim, the EFCC was not a party to the case, but that it was the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) that issued him (Jacobs) the fiat to prosecute the defendant.He insisted that the case was filed through the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) and not the EFCC as claimed by Oluyede.He said by virtue of section 349(7), of Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015, Sarakis lawyer, Ajibola Oluyede could not have validly file the motion without the consent of the lead defence lawyer, Kanu Agabi (SAN) who was still in the case.He reminded the tribunal that the issue of who filed the charges against Saraki, had been argued by Agabi in a motion challenging the tribunals jurisdiction.Jacobs said the issue had become part of the subjects of appeal filed by Agabi against the tribunals ruling and urged the judge not to make findings on it in order not to run foul of usurping the duties of the appeal court.Earlier, Oluyede, while moving the motion, insisted that Umar must disqualify himself from the trial. He argued that the June 24, 2014 letter by the then EFCC chairman, Mr. Ibrahim Lamorde and which was dated addressed to the then AGF, Bello Adoke, did not exonerate him of the bribery allegation.Oluyede contended that the then AGF had directed the EFCC to proceed to prosecute the tribunal chairman and the other suspects. He added that the other report of investigation issued in March 2015 did not also clear the tribunal chairman.Oluyede said it would require the AGF office to issue another letter overriding the earlier directive to the EFCC to go ahead with the prosecution of Umar and his co-suspect, before the tribunal chairman could be said to have been cleared.He insisted that in as much as there was no fresh letter by the AGF expressly stating that Umar had been cleared of the allegation, the legitimacy of the proceedings (Sarakis trial) is in question.On claim by Jacobs that Agabi was not part of the motion, Oluyede noted that Paragraph 15 of the further affidavit confirms that it was, in fact the lead counsel, Agabi,that advised the defendant to bring this application before the tribunal in the interest of justice.The submission of counsel, no matter how esteem that counsel is, does not and is not allowed to be considered as constituting evidence.Even if it was true that the lead counsel was not aware or did not even consent or approve it for reasons of conflict, it is immaterial because any counsel that is briefed by a party to a proceeding is entitled to act in accordance to the instruction of his client, Oluyede said.Before Oluyede moved the motion, Agabi excused himself from the proceedings.He appealed to parties in the case, including the tribunal members to allow peace to reign.As against the claim by Oluyede, Agabi, before exiting the proceedings, admitted that he only became aware of the motion after Oluyede had filed it. Agabi said he had no problem with the motion, being moved on behalf of the defence team.Shortly after Oluyede moved his motion, Umar said he has been cleared of the allegation by both the EFCC and the AGF.He recalled that upon a petition filed against him before the House of Representatives over the bribery allegation, the AGF (Malami) appeared before a committee of the House and told the members of the committee that he (Umar) had been cleared.Umar said, A group called Anti-Corruption Network wrote a petition against me at the House of Representatives.The House committee invited me and I went there three times but the petitioner did not come. The committee asked me what I think should be done and I said, if it were to be court, when the person who filed a case refuses to come, the court will strike it out. But the chairman said, lets give them another time.Why did he not strike it out and decided to continue to wait for the petitioner? I went there just because of the respect I have for the institution. I am a law abiding citizen. That is why I went there three times, abandoning all my works here.They invited the AGF. He went with a copy of the letter of EFCC and he said by virtue of that letter, nobody could compel him to prosecute me on the basis of that letter, which stated that the allegation was based on mere suspicion.On the basis of that, he (the AGF) said he will not prosecute me. As the chief law officer, he decides who to prosecute and when to stop to prosecute anybody.The tribunal will rule Thursday on the motion.
The Deputy Dean, Student Affairs of University of Lagos (UNILAG), Dr Karo Ogbinaka has accused the suspended students union (ULSU) of...

The Deputy Dean, Student Affairs of University of Lagos (UNILAG), Dr Karo Ogbinaka has accused the suspended students union (ULSU) of working for their own selfish interests rather than that of the institution or its students.This is coming as Lagos lawyer, Ebun Adegboruwa, wrote the university on behalf of the union, seeking reversal of the suspension and withdrawal of the undertaking the students have to sign before Friday or be taken to court.Speaking to The Nation in his office yesterday, Ogbinaka said most of the ULSU leaders were under investigation for defaulting in various ways in the institution.It is obvious that they are fighting some selfish and fraudulent interests because the demands they tendered to management just two days before the protest were based on trivial issues, not light or water or even higher cost of living. As a matter of fact, the President, Muhammed Olaniyan sent a very disrespectful message to the Vice Chancellor (Prof Rahamon Bello) just after the protest, making direct insults at him.He said all the Students Union leaders clamoured for in their meeting, was the need for a new bus, a renovated school gate and to force the VC to hold a town hall meeting with students, which he believed, were trivial issues.On the issue of power and water, he said the management already informed ULSU that they had the intention to buy four generators to power the institution and regulate its supply due to power challenge in the country. However, contrary to the ULSUs claim, only two have arrived because the university does not want all generators to get worn out at the same time.Ogbinaka said the indemnity form the students were made to fill was legitimate, assuring that the UNILAG management would not do anything to jeopardise the future of their students.However, Adegboruwa in a letter addressed to the vice chancellor and dated April 27, 2016, said the students, having been admitted and paid fees, already had a contract with the university and need not be made to sign an undertaking to be readmitted.The lawyer also noted that suspending the union and asking the students to relate to the management through their faculty representatives was not in the general interest of the institution.The lawyer therefore urged the university to suspend the signing of the forms, lift ban on the Students Union and dialogue with its leaders, postpone the first semester examinations due to start May 9 by one month, absorb students representatives into the council, the senate and congregation of the university.He concluded saying: Since the resumption for all students is already fixed for May 2, 2016, we expect your kind response to, and confirmation of the issues above mentioned, on or before April 29, 2016, failing which we shall proceed to execute our clients (ULSU and students) further instruction to apply to issue out a writ of summons from the court, for the determination of the said issues. Please treat as urgent and important.Some students, who spoke with The Nation on the forms yesterday, claimed it was unwarranted, and they were signing under duress.A final year philosophy student, Valentine, said: I have signed the form. I am on my way to submit it at my faculty. But I think its a very stupid form. The conditions stipulated for us to agree on are very unrelated to what happened on campus that day. Its as if they are saying we are all cultists. And the banning of ULSU is just rude. Something that was just restored. I think its just a show of power by the University management, just like every powerful institution in Nigeria. But I am in my final year and I dont want anything to jeopardise that so I signed and thank God I wont be here to experience the consequences of signing the form later. Its my younger brother, who is just in 100-Level that I pity.Some other students are however, hopeful about the restoration of the Unilag Students Union (ULSU).Final year mass communication student, Charles said: I havent even printed the form. I am waiting to see if our union can do something to help us out. I know they are working hard to restore ULSU. Besides, as far as we (him and his three friends) are concerned, ULSU isnt proscribed. Because they only told us through the website that ULSU had been suspended but we havent seen any official notice to that effect. ULSU wasnt inaugurated through a website so that one is unofficial. In any case, I am waiting to see what happens by Thursday before I sign.Anita in Psychology department said: I have given the form to my parents to sign but as far as I am concerned, I signed it under duress. Because I dont have a choice and we cant even enter the school comfortably without the stupid form.
The Management at of the University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT) is set to reopen the institution after a students' protest disrupted ac...

The Management at of the University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT) is set to reopen the institution after a students' protest disrupted academic activities. A student was reportedly shot dead during the ugly incident.The new resumption date was announced via a statement on the institutions page. See statement below:RE: FIRST SEMESTER EXAMINATIONS OF 2015/2016 SESSIONFollowing Senates approval, the University Management wishes to inform all Returning Students that the Registration Portal will be open for two (2) weeks, from Tuesday, 3rd to Monday, 16th May, 2016. This is to enable the students concerned to conclude their registration for the 2015/2016 session.The students concerned are to pay their School Charges at the designated Banks (outside the University environment). However, for the UniPort-Choba (U & C) Microfinance Bank, students concerned are to use the Branch at the College of Continuing Education, University of Port Harcourt, Nkpolu Orowurukwo, Port Harcourt.Thank you.Dorcas D. Otto [Mrs.]
Kyiv says its positions in Donbas came under militants' fire 29 times over past 24 hours

Militants have opened fire on the Ukrainian Armed Forces positions in Donbas, 29 times over the past 24 hours, using weapons banned by the Minsk Agreements on a number of occasions, the press center of the headquarters of Kyiv's army operation in Eastern Ukraine said on its Facebook account on Thursday.

According to the press center, the militants opened fire 29 times, including "20 instances of shelling, recorded between 6:00 p.m. and midnight."

Militants fired 120mm and 82mm mortars, grenade launchers and small arms at Ukrainian military positions near Maryinka several times, it said.

Positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the vicinity of Luhanske, and Zaitseve, came under fire as well.

Militants also shelled Ukrainian positions in the vicinity of Shyrokyne and Novotroitske, near the city of Mariupol, the press center said.
NEWARK -- At Shawn Custis's trial on charges of attacking a woman in a 2013 home invasion in Millburn, the defense is looking to raise questions about the police investigation in light of "nanny-cam" footage showing a township detective uttering racial slurs about the African-American suspect in the case.

But in recent posts on NJ.com, many commenters have said the officer's racial epithets should have no bearing on the allegations against Custis.

Custis, 45, of Newark, who is African-American, is facing attempted murder and related charges in connection with the June 21, 2013 incident. Prosecutors have alleged Custis can be seen in the "nanny-cam" video severely beating the victim in front of her 3-year-old daughter before fleeing the residence.

After jurors had reviewed that portion of the video, additional footage came to light of when township police were at the scene. In that footage, Millburn Detective Collin McMillan, who is white, can be heard uttering racial slurs, including when he referred to the suspect as a "monkey."

When the trial resumes on Monday, the jury is expected to review those portions of the video and hear testimony from McMillan.

Many NJ.com commenters, however, argued the portion of the video depicting the attack remains at the center of the case and the portions involving the racial slurs are irrelevant.

As jtd771 put it, "There's video tape evidence showing the crime and the perpetrator. Whatever the cop said is irrelevant to this trial and should be matter for the agency's internal affairs division."

lithium78 said: "The racist comment has no bearing on the case at all since the case is determining whether the accused invaded a woman's home, beat her, and threw her down the stairs. The end."

"No one has said the officer was right in his verbal slurs, we are just saying this should not affect the woman's case against the man who brutally beat her in front of her child," according to verytired52.

But ArtB suggested the detective's comments could undermine the "nanny-cam" investigation:

"Any person who views law enforcement as a skilled professional occupation ought to be deeply shocked by this. Beside other things, the detective's impulsive outburst tends to undermine the painstaking work on the case that was diligently performed by many of his colleagues."

Other commenters echoed those sentiments about McMillan's comments being wrong.

"He used the derogatory term "monkey" as a racial slur and what's bothersome about that is, when he equates that to a Black man, when he sees my law abiding young son who just began driving make a right turn without using his signal will he see a monster or a monkey or just a young man???? Will he lump him in with this guy or will he treat him fairly?" asked ThisGeminiLady.

rabiya said: "Even though this man is wrong without a doubt and will be punished for it. That officer is suppose to be a professional and not allow his personal bias turn into outwatd anger, and he needs to reprimanded for his unethical behavior. He probably treats all black people in this manner even the law abiding ones. Its a problem. We can do without that in policing"

Carl Hargrove-Ali added, "It shouldn't have any bearing on this case but we should all expect our sworn public servants to do right by the jobs we pay them to do.....just go over in your mind...would any of you because you don't like Black people be satisfied with just any Black man suffering because they look all the same to you or some other racist reason"

What do you think about these issues? Tell us in the comments below.

Bill Wichert may be reached at bwichert@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillWichertNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
TRENTON -- The state has revoked the license of a north Jersey anesthesiologist who is facing trial in June for submitting $1.5 million in phony Medicare claims, acting Attorney General Robert Lougy announced Thursday.

Amgad Hessein, 59, of Belmar also must pay a $130,000 fine and reimburse the state $308,750 for its investigative and legal costs, Lougy said, citing an order by the state Board of Medical Examiners, New Jersey's physician disciplinary board.

Hessein operated Advanced Pain Management Specialists with offices in Newark, Union, Belleville and South Orange. His license has been suspended since his indictment in 2011, Lougy's announcement said.

"Doctors who put their patients in peril through incompetence or negligence are a stain on their profession and have no place in the practice of medicine," according to Lougy's statement.

Patrick Toscano of Caldwell, Hessein's attorney, said he has appealed the board's decision to revoke his client's medical license.

"The criminal prosecution is pending in Union County, and that trial is scheduled to begin in June. We are ready to proceed," Toscano wrote in an email. "We can say with virtual certitude that Dr. Hessein never, at any time in his career, charged for any services rendered to any patient that he did not fully and adequately perform."

Hessein and his brother, Ashraf Sami, concocted a "scheme of overbilling, upcoding and submitting fraudulent claims for treatments not rendered," according to a 2011 statement from the Union County Prosecutor's Office.

At that time, authorities said Hessein and his brother falsified $52 million in false billings and netted about $5 million. Mark Spivey, the prosecutor's spokesman, clarified Thursday Hessein's indictment is based on $1.5 million in fraudulent claims.

The state board also cited Hessein for indiscriminately prescribing addictive painkillers, providing steroid injections without medical justification and allowing unlicensed employees to provide treatment, Lougy's announcement said.

Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.
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The Medical Society is questioning a policy Horizon expects all its member physicians to follow that requires they explain the insurance company's new OMNIA tiered network of plans. In this 2013 file photo, Steven Ghanny, a pediatric endocrinologist meets with a 16-year-old patient at the Joseph M. Sanzari Children's Hospital at Hackensack University Medical Center. (William Perlman | The Star-Ledger)

TRENTON -- New Jersey's oldest physician organization has lashed out against Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, the state's largest health insurance company, for requiring doctors to explain how patients enrolled in discount plans can save more money by using a preferred network of doctors.

If doctors don't discuss "the cost sharing implications" of using "Tier 1 or 2" doctors and hospitals with their patients who are enrolled in Horizon's OMNIA plans, they "may be subject to consequences, up to and including termination from Horizon BCBSNJ's networks," according to a newsletter Horizon sent doctors last month.

Doctors also must note in the patient's medical file this discussion has taken place, according to the newsletter article on the "OMNIA Tier Awareness Policy" obtained by NJ Advance Media.

The policy does not dictate that doctors base referrals based on cost, nor does it require doctors steer patients to tier 1 hospitals or doctors.

But Larry Downs, the executive director of the Medical Society of New Jersey, a physician lobbying group critical of OMNIA, said this was "especially troublesome if the physician believes a physician who is not in tier 1 is in the best interest of the patient."

"It's highly unusual and offensive an insurer will dictate to a physician the contents of their medical records and mandate conversations with patients," Downs said. Doctors "are not compensated to be insurance counselors."

Horizon spokesman Tom Wilson said doctors have always been expected to discuss treatment in the context of insurance coverage with their patients. Using out-of-network medical providers is one example, he said.

Wilson pointed to UnitedHealthcare's requirement published on its website that physicians must explain to their patients the added costs associated with using out-of-network benefits. Patients are also required to sign a form documenting this conversation. Physicians who do not comply could face penalties that include termination from the network, according to the policy.

"All health insurers require their in-network physicians to help patients understand the financial implications of their choices," Wilson said.

"The Medical Society's sudden opposition to having doctors play a role in protecting patients from surprise medical bills is further proof that they are out of step with both consumer needs and the physicians they claim to speak for, the overwhelming majority of whom help their patients make informed choices every day," Wilson said.

Horizon has never terminated a contract with a physician for not having these discussions, Wilson noted.

OMNIA has stirred controversy since Horizon announced it in the fall as a way to control the climbing costs of healthcare. The plans offer consumers lower premiums and co-pays if they use "tier 1' hospitals and doctors -- a preferred network of providers selected by Horizon based on a confidential assessment of their services and value. The tier 1 players also have agreed they would accept less reimbursement in exchange for an uptick in patient volume.

Some "tier 2" hospitals have filed court challenges to compel Horizon to disclose its criteria for selecting "tier 1" providers, and to force their way into the top tier. With Horizon insuring 3.8 million people in a state of nearly 9 million, tier 2 hospitals -- many of which are located in cities and serve a large number of low-income and uninsured people -- fear for their future viability.

Sales of OMNIA were brisk in its debut in the fall, with 234,000 signing up, Horizon says.

Linda Schwimmer, president and CEO of the New Jersey Health Care Care Quality Institute, said she did not object to conversations about cost entering the discussion about medical care. But she questioned how far Horizon should go in dictating the content of the conversation or enforcing the policy.

"I think the role of the doctor and patient is changing and they both are now more part of the payment system, with more of the cost is coming directly from the patient," Schwimmer said. "So they need to be educated and given the information."

"Horizon should have the tools on its website and a phone line for both providers and its members so that they can easily figure it what's what," she added.

Downs said the Medical Society intends to bring the matter to the attention of the state Department of Banking and Insurance, which regulates Horizon.

Banking and Insurance department spokesman Marshall McKnight declined to discuss Horizon's policy, or any matter that involves OMNIA, because of ongoing litigation involving the Christie administration.

A group of hospitals has appealed the department's decision that allowed Horizon to sell OMNIA without verifying whether there were an adequate number of tier 1 hospitals. The Medical Society filed a "friend of the court" brief supporting the hospitals' case.

Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.
JERSEY CITY -- New details are emerging in the case of the Jersey City teen who died this afternoon from injuries sustained during a shooting yesterday.

Hudson County Prosecutor Esther Suarez's office confirmed tonight that the victim was Rondell J. Rush, 17, of Jersey City. Rush was a Dickinson High School student, according to his neighbors.

"He was a good kid," said Fulton Avenue resident Evans Hazelwood, 53. "He did his thing, you know what I'm saying, but he was trying to get his life together."

Rush, who was shot in the head, is the county's eight homicide in 2016.

Gene Rubino, acting chief of investigations for the Hudson County Prosecutor's office, said that Jersey City police officers came upon a group of people moving a wounded Rush into a car on Fulton Avenue near Martin Luther King Drive yesterday at about 5 p.m. Officers, who had not witnessed the shooting, ordered them to stop, but the vehicle left, and was stopped about four blocks away outside of Sacred Heart Church on Martin Luther King Drive, Rubino said.

At that point, Rush was taken by ambulance to Jersey City Medical Center-Barnabas Health. He was pronounced dead today at 1:38 p.m. Rubino said a post-mortem report is pending.

Soon after Rush was declared dead, a distraught man identified by Fulton Avenue residents as the victim's father declined to speak to reporters.

Residents of the block were divided when asked to describe the neighborhood.

"This neighborhood is very good," Hazelwood said. "You got drugs and whatever, but on this block, you don't get gunshots."

Jorge Figueroa, 43, who lives two doors down from the victim's home, called that "bull."

"Typical hood," he said as he worked on a car outside his home. "Shootings happen every day. I plan to get the hell out of here."

No arrests have been made and Rubino declined to discuss a possible motive. He said the group of people who were transporting Rush before being stopped by police were attempting to bring him to the hospital. It is not clear what their relationship to the victim is, Rubino said.

Ali Yousef, 25, who works at a fried-chicken joint across the street from Sacred Heart Church, witnessed police stopping the car that had Rush inside.

Yousef, of Bayonne, said today the idea of a shooting near where he works doesn't frighten him.

"I've worked here a long time," he said, as he talked to reporters from behind bulletproof material. "I've seen a lot."

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
JERSEY CITY -- A tug-of-war between two blue-collar unions derailed the city's effort to formalize an agreement with the Teamsters union to represent about 70 new city workers who had transferred over from the now-dissolved Jersey City Incinerator Authority.

Administration officials hoped the City Council last night would give its stamp of approval to the agreement allowing Teamsters Local 641 to represent the ex-JCIA workers, but the administration pulled the measure at the last minute after some council members expressed hesitancy about voting on it.

The fight pits the Teamsters against the Jersey City Public Employees Local 245, which represents 150 city workers and wants to have the former JCIA workers as its own members.

The clash now moves to the Public Employment Relations Commission, which will ultimately decide whether the 70 city employees join Local 245 or the Teamsters. James Kilkenny, who represents the Teamsters, blasted Local 245 for convincing the council to skip formalizing the city's agreement with the Teamsters.

"I've never heard of another union brother upset that another union has a better contract," Kilkenny said. "Shame on them."

A clause in Local 245's contract with the city gives it exclusive rights to represent all workers in the city Department of Public Works, making the city's deal with the Teamsters a violation of that contract, said Local 245 President Santos DellaMonica.

"By voting yes on this you'll be breaking our contract, which was ratified by you folks," DellMonica told council member last night before the administration withdrew the measure. "Bringing in a fourth union is not the answer."

DellMonica lobbied council members before the meeting to kill the measure. He said the former-JCIA workers are better paid than longtime city workers despite having similar duties.

The city's move to have the Teamsters represent the ex-JCIA workers is an about-face from its strategy when it absorbed workers from the now-dissolved Jersey City Parking Authority. Both the JCIA and the JCPA were autonomous city agencies.

The parking workers, who at the JCPA were represented by the Production Workers Union Local 148, became members of Jersey City Public Employees Local 246 when the city absorbed them after the JCPA was disbanded. When Local 148 objected to PERC, city attorneys argued successfully that it would be "inefficient" for PERC to force Jersey City to negotiate with a separate union instead of having Local 246 absorb the JCPA workers.

"The city of Jersey City already negotiates with several unions that represent some of the former employees of the Jersey City Parking Authority," attorneys argued to PERC in September. "Requiring Jersey City to exert additional resources to negotiate with other unions it has no obligation to would 'promote neither efficiency nor economy.'"

Paul Tamburelli, president of the union representing city supervisors, alleged to the council last night that the reason the city argued against working with the Local 148 but has decided to deal with the Teamsters is because Mayor Steve Fulop wants the Teamsters' support when he runs for governor next year as expected. City spokeswoman Jennifer Morrill called that an "irresponsible accusation."

"Just because someone says something doesn't mean it is true and background entirely refutes that accusation with facts," Morrill said.

Kilkenny also disputed Tamburelli's claim, saying if Fulop was acting only to please the Teamsters, the city wouldn't have dissolved the JCIA at all. After the dissolution, Kilkenny said, JCIA workers who belong to the Teamsters made significant financial concessions when they moved to the city payroll.

"If this were politics, the JCIA would be open," he said.

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has initiated the creation of a working group to draft a bill that would help to settle the issue of returning crime assets of former officials of the times of disgraced former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The press service of the Cabinet of Ministers reported that on Tuesday a meeting headed by Groysman to discuss the state of investigation into crimes and returning corrupted assets of former Yanukovych's officials was held.

"At the meeting it was decided to create a working group from representatives of responsible agencies to draw up a single bill that would help to settle the issue of returning crime assets of former high-ranking officials of Yanukovych's times," the press service said.

The prime minister urged Ukraine's Justice Ministry to take active part in drafting the bill.

"I think that everyone understands that in the period of President Viktor Yanukovych we had lost large funds belonging to the state. All these assets were illegally embezzled by the regime Now these assets have been arrested, and a legal mechanism for returning them to the national budget should be designed," Groysman said.

He said that the returned funds will be sent to provide for the needs of the Armed Forces, Ukrainian citizens and settle other urgent issues in the country.

"The main thing is to ensure inevitability of punishment. If you stole, this would be returned to the state for sure. Each must understand that," he said.

Meeting participants pointed out the necessity of drawing up amendments to legislation to help returning stolen assets to the national budget and use them. The amendments are to meet European standards and a positive conclusion of the EU Council should be received.
BAYONNE -- A school budget hearing originally expected to take place last night has been postponed until next Thursday, according to school board secretary Gary Maita.

The hearing to address the budget, which was approved by the county superintendent later than expected, will take place at 8 p.m. in the board's Anna J. Herbert Meeting Room at 669 Ave. A.

The proposed school budget totals roughly $129 million and would come with a school tax increase of 2.78 percent or about $1.7 million, board Business Administrator Leo Smith said last month.

That would amount to a $97 annual increase for the average Bayonne home, according to Bayonne Chief Financial Officer Terrence Malloy.

Last night, Brian Buckley, who is the acting board Business Administrator while Smith is out on sick leave, told The Jersey Journal that the figure for the tax increase hasn't changed.

Smith has said this year's proposed increase will help pay for "health benefits, salaries, capital improvements, technology" and "across the board increase(s) in the cost of doing business."

The Bayonne school district has been reported to be one of the most underfunded districts in the state, spending $15,344 per student in the 2012-13 school year when the state average for spending per pupil was $18,891.

Smith has reiterated that point in talking about the difficulty of putting the budget together.

"We got (an increase of) about $495,000 this year for state aid...if (the state) funded us properly, we'd have no problem," he said, adding that the district is underfunded by tens of millions of dollars.

Smith has said the state provided about $53.5 million in aid for the 2015-2016 school year and about $54.0 million in aid for 2016-2017, amounting to an overall increase of $491,774 -- a figure that was confirmed by David Saenz Jr., the deputy press secretary of the state Department of Education.

Under the state's school funding formula, Bayonne has a 20 percent state aid growth cap, which made the district eligible to receive as much as $10.2 million in increased aid, according to Saenz.

A resident's property tax in Bayonne pays school, municipal, county and open space taxes, which last year made up about 41, 42, 16 and 0.2 percent of total property taxes paid, respectively, city Chief Financial Officer Terrence Malloy said. The exact breakdown of that mix changes from year to year.

Meanwhile, on the city side of things, the $135.5 million municipal budget that was introduced on March 16 was projected to come with a 2.64 percent tax increase. That increase would amount to $121 for the average household.

In the wake of a $15 million revenue hole unexpectedly opening up in the budget, Bayonne Mayor Jimmy Davis has expressed confidence that the city will find other revenue sources to fill the hole before the end of June, when officials are aiming to have the budget adopted by.

"We will make up this difference. It will not turn into a tax increase on the people because of the $15 million," Davis said.

The mayor said most of the money has already been made up for, and that once all the items are mapped out, he plans to release more information.

Hypothetically, if the hole isn't filled at all, Malloy has said that would result in a municipal tax increase of $855 for the average city household, which is seven times the originally projected increase.

Jonathan Lin may be reached at jlin@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @jlin_jj. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
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Jersey City will host a fourth community meeting on May 4 to discuss the Jackson Hill Redevelopment Plan for Monticello Avenue, pictured above, and Martin Luther King Drive.

(Journal file photo)

Jersey City residents and business owners will have another chance to weigh in on the city's new Jackson Hill Redevelopment Plan next week.

The city is seeking feedback on the document, which guides any new development along Monticello Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive. The public meeting will take place Wednesday, May 4 at 6 p.m. at the Bethune Center at 140 MLK Drive.

Stakeholders and representatives from the city will be available to take public comments and questions during the meeting -- the fourth of its kind.

A draft of the plan is available online at www.jerseycitynj.gov/jacksonhill. For a paper copy of the plan, contact the Division of Planning at 201-547-5010.
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Fabian Lalvay, 25, of Newark, is charged assault by auto for driving drunk and hitting a bicyclist.

KEARNY -- A Newark man has been charged with assault by auto after driving drunk and hitting a bicyclist this week, officials said.

At around 10 p.m. on Tuesday night, Fabian Lalvay was driving on Schuyler Avenue near Harrison Avenue when he hit a 36-year-old Harrison man from behind, Kearny Police Sgt. Patrick Sawyer said.

During his first court appearance yesterday afternoon, Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor John Wojtal said the victim was "unresponsive" when police arrived at the scene.

Authorities said Lalvay was highly intoxicated at the time of the crash and attempted to flee the scene after hitting the victim, but was unsuccessful. However, Sawyer was not able to provide Lalvay's blood alcohol level.

Sawyer said the victim was not riding in the middle of the street and was traveling along the curb when Lalvay hit him. The Harrison man has since been released from the hospital, Sawyer said.

Lalvay was additionally charged with endangering an injured person for leaving the victim "physically helpless" in the street after the crash.

Bail was set for Lalvay through a Spanish speaking interpreter at $20,000 with a 10 percent cash option. As a condition of his bail, Lalvay -- a resident of Ecuador -- must surrender his travel documents.
Flipped dump turck fire closes NJ Turnpike

A Bronx, N.Y. man is charged with selling commercial driver's licenses without testing. (Robert Sciarrino | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

NEWARK -- The online advertisement may have been in broken English but its intent was perfectly clear: "Mike" was offering commercial driver's licenses for cash, with no knowledge test nor road test needed.

"Get your drivers license no road test no paper test," said the ad on a northern New Jersey Craigslist site, a complaint says. "YES REAL LICENSE FROM MOTOR VEHICLE YES WE MEET IN PERSON AT DMV."

But "Mike," Mahmoud Odetallah, 26, of Bronx, N.Y., was unaware that the $1,000 he allegedly took earlier this year from someone looking to buy a license came from an undercover informant, the complaint says.

Odetallah was arrested Wednesday by FBI special agents and charged Thursday with one count of wire fraud, according to the office of U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman.

According to the complaint, Odetallah advertised commercial driver's licenses for cash between August and February.

Commercial licenses require drivers to pass standard written knowledge tests as well as road tests to ensure they have the advanced skills needed to drive commercial trucks.

The cooperating witness recorded telephone calls and a meeting where the planned purchase of a license would take place, the complaint says.

After paying $1,000 and handing over his passport, Odetallah allegedly left the meeting near the North Bergen motor vehicle commission facility and did not return with the license, it says.

About three weeks later, Odetallah allegedly sent the witness a text message demanding an additional $1,000, it says.

The wire fraud charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, Fishman's office said.

The FBI is asking that if anyone has information about the alleged scheme, call its office at 973-792-3000.

Tim Darragh may be reached at tdarragh@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @timdarragh. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
JERSEY CITY -- A controversial measure that would require some private employers to provide minimum 30-hour workweeks to building-service workers cleared a procedural hurdle tonight.

The City Council voted 6-2-1 to advance the ordinance, which a councilman and a free-enterprise group today said will lead to workers losing their jobs.

Council President Rolando Lavarro, who is behind the measure, tonight said it will help reverse a trend of employers providing only part-time jobs with no health benefits to their workers. The ordinance would require that janitors, maids, doormen and other building-service workers receive a minimum of 30 hours a week from their bosses.

"In this country, in Jersey City, good jobs are hard to come by and they're getting more and more scarce," he said.

Councilman Rich Boggiano voted against the measure along with Councilman Michael Yun. Councilwoman-at-large Joyce Watterman abstained. Boggiano said the measure should have been pulled for consideration.

If adopted, the move would lead to employers laying off some workers to pay to increase the hours of others, he said.

"It's a confusing ordinance," he said.

Business groups oppose the move, as does Americans for Prosperity, the free enterprise advocacy group backed by billionaires Charles and David Koch. The group slammed Jersey City in a statement this morning for having "gone too far this time."

"For the sake of New Jersey families we need to get past this kind of divisive politics which pits honest employers against their workers," said the group's state director Erica Jedyna. "We need to move beyond the false promise that another government mandate is all it takes to guarantee someone happiness, a high-paying job or a living wage."

Mayor Steve Fulop, who backs Lavarro's ordinance, mocked Americans for Prosperity on Twitter.

"I couldn't think of a more out of touch organization for working families than 'Americans For Prosperity,'" he said.

JC is booming despite policies that "Americans for Prosperity" opposes. Good social policy+good economic policy isn't one OR other choice  Steven Fulop (@StevenFulop) April 27, 2016

The ordinance would apply only to employees working in commercial buildings larger than 150,000 square feet -- revised up from 100,000 square feet at tonight's meeting -- and in residential buildings with 50 or more units.

It is backed by 32BJ, a labor union representing property service workers who would benefit from its passage. Kevin Brown, the union's state director, urged the council to adopt the measure, saying it is "troubling" that workers cannot find full-time work.

"Government needs to protect working men and women," Brown said. "Many people work part time not because they choose to but because they're forced to."

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
VALENTINA'S TRATTORIA ITALIANA

200 Tilton Road Northfield

(609) 380-2466 valentinasnj.com







THE VIBE: Valentina's might be tucked away in a Northfield strip mall, but walking in feels just like getting a hug from Nonna. Warm and inviting, and all about family, this BYOB restaurant delivers authentic Italian fare with lots of heart.



STANDOUT DISHES: Meatballs with ricotta, burrata salad with prosciutto and tomatoes, homemade tagliolini with shrimp and pumpkin, braciole with gnocchi

FRANK CROONING in the background, the smell of garlic in the air and a plate of honest-to-goodness beef braciole surrounded by nibs of homemade gnocchi -- have I died and gone to heaven?



Nope, just a strip mall in Northfield. But this particular strip mall is home to Valentina's Trattoria Italiana, an authentic Italian restaurant with a Neapolitan-born chef who means business.



Rosaria Conti, the longtime executive chef at Girasole in Atlantic City, was approached last year by friend and business associate Paula Giordano with the offer to open her own place. Conti jumped at the chance and Valentina's, a decidedly family affair -- with her kids, nieces and nephews at the front and back of the house -- is the happy result.



The restaurant, at the location of the former Formica Bros. Bakery, is simply lovely, with design elements that include large mirrors, a faux copper ceiling, chandeliers, rustic wood trim and exposed brick. There is a gorgeous wood-fired oven surrounded by stacked wood -- a promise of good pizza to come. The easy proximity to a liquor store next door makes this BYOB a great value and convenient for the forgetful.



We adored the complimentary spread of olive oil-drizzled fresh ricotta, spiked with bits of fresh rosemary, although the accompanying basket of underachieving Italian bread didn't do it justice.



Valentina's menu reads like an Italian fairy tale, with the promise of happily ever after at the end of every section. While tempted, we skipped the daily selection of cured salamis and Italian cheeses (three for $13) and ordered one of the six bruschetta options ($3 to $5), with toppings including goat cheese and pesto, and truffled mushrooms and smoked prosciutto. Ours, with its foundation of roasted bits of eggplant crowned with a layer of smoky scamorza ($4), was divine.



Our favorite starter was the meatballs ($8), a dish that goes back to the chef's days at Girasole. Actor Al Pacino tasted Giordano's meatballs in A.C. and called them "the best in the world." Michael Corleone knew what he was talking about. Although the recipe is a family secret, the tender rounds of finely ground beef were prepared southern Italian style, spiked with raisins and burnished with a fresh tomato sauce and a dollop of creamy ricotta. Another winner was the house-made burrata salad ($13), a study in contrasts, with the richness of the cheese the ideal foil to slightly bitter arugula, all brightened with the snap of toasted almonds and the candied sweetness of cherry tomatoes. Rosettes of salty prosciutto completed this gorgeous dish.



All of the pasta is homemade; we could tell immediately from our tangled nest of toothsome tagliolini ($18) topped with roasted pumpkin nibs and sauteed shrimp in garlicky white wine sauce. The table next to ours was oohing and ahhing over what looked like lasagna Bolognese ($15), on the list for our next visit.





Sous chef Sergio Villagomez puts a pizza in the wood-fired brick oven at Valentina's Trattoria Italiana in Northfield.

Wood-fired pizzas, like the pastas, spotlight the kitchen's ability to transform flour and water into a vehicle for stellar ingredients and sauce. We tried the most excellent puttanesca ($12), a slightly chewy crust topped with hand-pulled mozzarella, capers, Italian black olives, anchovies and chili flakes. Offered in red or white, the pizzas include toppings such as broccoli rabe ($15), truffle cream and a fried egg ($16), and spicy soppressata ($16). Add buffalo mozzarella for $2.

Now, let's talk braciole. The chef is clearly channeling her roots -- she's a butcher's daughter, after all -- with this mouthwatering roll of flank steak stuffed with garlic, Parmesan and herbs, slow simmered in a flavorful red gravy and surrounded by feather-light potato gnocchi ($23) -- altogether the stuff of a Lidia Bastianich master class. Veal Milanese ($24) and chicken roulade, with prosciutto, provolone and fresh herbs ($21) are a few other main course options.

We managed to squeeze in dessert, an outstanding slice of lemon ricotta cheesecake ($4) baked in-house.

Do yourself a favor and the next time you're Down the Shore, put the ocean to your back and head a few miles inland to experience Valentina's for the kind of simple, rustic cooking that conjures southern Italian food at its best.

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TRENTON -- A state appeals court has upheld the case of a Trenton man who pleaded guilty to dealing heroin in a school zone in the city three years ago.

Jerome "Righteous" Roberts was arrested in the summer of 2013 on three heroin dealing charges when a Mercer County Prosecutor's Office drug task force searched his Division Street home with a warrant.

Jerome Roberts

Officers found $28,500 worth of heroin. The appeals decision says detectives watched him make a sale to a confidential informant.

Roberts accepted a plea deal in early 2015 on the school zone charge for a seven-year prison term, with three and a half years without parole.

On appeal, Roberts argued that the affidavit that led to the search warrant lacked information to create probable cause that drugs would be found in his home.

And he argued was that prosecutors failed to properly notify him that his sentence would be an extended one, due to his prior criminal convictions, and his sentence term should now be reduced.

The appeals panel was not swayed on either argument, writing Thursday that Roberts was well aware of what he was agreeing to when he took the plea.

Roberts, once labeled a Bloods gang leader in Trenton, has criminal convictions from two, high-profile cases in Mercer County.

In 2007, Roberts pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in the 2001 murder of rival drug dealer Robert Priester.

He admitted to conspiring to hire two Monmouth County men to shoot Priester, who was sitting in a parked car in Ewing.

While free on bail on murder charges, Roberts was arrested in the summer of 2005 in ''Operation Capital City," a state racketeering investigation of drug dealing in the Trenton area by street gangs. That case netted him a four-year prison term.

Roberts, now 45, is currently in a state prison halfway house in Camden and is eligible for parole in January 2017.

Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@kevintshea. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
UPDATE: Authorities say pot sales at Weedman's Joint led to investigation

TRENTON -- Ed "NJ Weedman" Forchion was among 10 people arrested Wednesday during a police raid on his East State Street restaurant and the adjacent "cannabis church'' he runs across from City Hall.

A swarm of police in tactical gear sealed off the restaurant, NJ Weedman's Joint, and the Liberty Bell Temple next door around 3:30 p.m. They arrested people inside for outstanding warrants and marijuana charges.

Forchion, 51, who opened the restaurant and sanctuary last year, faces 10 charges of marijuana possession and distribution, as well as distribution of drug paraphernalia, maintaining a narcotics nuisance, and for having booby traps in a manufacturing or distribution facility.

His bail information was not available. Authorities were not immediately available Thursday to elaborate on in the investigation that led to the raid.

Evan Nison, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said Forchion's arrest was an example of widespread frustration with marijuana laws spilling into direct action.

"Until places like this can operate in a legal, regulated way, it's hard not to understand the frustration people have for marijuana laws,'' Nison said. "These laws are broken, and they're not getting fixed."

Of the nine others arrested, two were charged with drug possession. The remainder were charged with outstanding warrants, according to police records.

Tomas Geronmino, 27, was charged with three counts of marijuana distribution, one count of marijuana possession and an outstanding Trenton warrant.

Shawn Hurley, 45, was charged with one count of drug possession.

Trenton residents Nhuygel Green, 52; Gregory Peterson, 20; Philippe Dume, 28; Alfonso Clark, 35; Brian Jones, 46; Roderick McKinney, 39, and Timothy Williams, 27 each were arrested and charged with outstanding warrants.

Police shut down a portion of East State Street during the incident and a Trenton Fire Department ladder truck was called in so investigators could access a roof.

Trenton police said Wednesday they were working with the Mercer County Narcotics Task Force on the operation.

Following several complaints Forchion made on social media an in news accounts that city police were harassing him and his customers, Forchion last month filed a lawsuit against Trenton police.

Forchion had said until police started visiting him last month and in late February, he'd been operating the restaurant and temple without incident and growing a community "peaceful potheads."

Forchion had said he suspects that his marijuana views - and the known fact that he smokes at the location - have caused the police to unfairly target him.

"The police are creating the problem, I am not creating the problem," he said.

Keith Brown may be reached at kbrown@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @KBrownTrenton. Find The Times of Trenton on Facebook.
HIGHLAND PARK -- The borough has never been afraid to take a stand for progressive values, even if it meant making a little noise, said Darcie Cimarusti, president of the Highland Park Board of Education.

Which is why Cimarusti and other officials and experts were not afraid to say that the state has not gone nearly far enough in addressing transgender and gender diverse equality with statewide policy.

So, the Highland Park Board of Education plans on taking its own action, and is scheduled to vote early next month on a new policy that officials and experts say could be the most dynamic in New Jersey in addressing transgender equality.

"In Highland Park, we pride ourselves on our diversity ... a place where we want everyone to feel welcomed, and to be themselves," Cimarusti said.

Earlier this year, the BOE created a committee made up of existing BOE members, mental health experts, and the school superintendent, to create a policy addressing gender identity in its schools.

Stephanie Sasso, a clinical psychologist in the borough who was on the committee, said the policy would protect "the rights of gender diverse students more strongly than most districts, (and) possibly any district."

The BOE used the Princeton school district's current gender diverse policy, and a California school district's policy as a model, and then adopted its own version -- which Sasso believes is even more comprehensive.

Sasso, who specializes in treating gender diverse individuals, said the policy would implement a support plan for gender diverse students in the school district. It would also prohibit discrimination, address privacy concerns, and affirm the particular pronoun as to which a gender diverse student wished to be identified. Transgender students would also be allowed to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity.

The New Jersey Department of Education said in a statement on Wednesday that it currently did not have a statewide policy specifically gender identity issues, and that it remained the duty of individual school districts to "review their policies, and use current events as teachable moments for the school community."

David Saenz, a spokesman for the state DOE, also said he was not aware of any future plan to review or change state education policy for gender diverse issues.

But Sasso believes there needs to be a uniform, statewide policy addressing what she said are dire concerns.

"These kids are at an extremely high risk of suicide and other mental health problems, substance abuse and physical violence," Sasso said.

And, she cited research that she said showed an "LGBT-affirming school environment is good for everyone," not just LGBT students.

Citing a study conducted by the Family Acceptance Project, Sasso said an "LGBT-affirming school environment is good for everyone," not just for the LGBT students. The study showed that all students in this type of educational environment are "less likely to drop out, less likely to experience depression" and more likely to have higher self-esteem and to succeed in higher education.

Sasso said she understood the concerns of some, but believes apprehension is due to a lack of exposure to gender diverse individuals.

"Once people know a transgender person, it really sinks in on a deeper level that this person really is a female or a male, and that it's not someone pretending to be something (they're not)," she said.

Cimarusti said Highland Park "has students that are transgender, parents that are transgender, and we went to make sure our schools are a welcoming place."

As to why the borough hadn't taken steps earlier, Highland Park BOE member Michelle McFadden-DiNicola said there was "no shame in admitting that we are human; and we fall short of perfection sometimes."

"But, once we understand that there is a need, I believe that our BOE and school community do try our best to meet those needs."

The issue over transgender bathrooms has sparked a fervent debate across the country, and has fueled protests in many states.

Most notably, the issue has been front-and-center in North Carolina where earlier this year a contentious law was enacted known as the "bathroom bill" which requires individuals to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificates rather than those corresponding to their gender identity.

Cimarusti called the law "just ridiculous."

But regardless of the current fervor, Sasso said the good news was that transgender people are feeling more comfortable in coming out, and being themselves. That growing exposure, she added, would only lead to more acceptance in the future.

Spencer Kent may be reached at skent@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerMKent. Find the Find NJ.com on Facebook.
FREEHOLD -- Andrew Dembia sat at a brown folding table off to the side in the municipal building here as speaker after speaker took shots at his company, New Jersey Natural Gas.

Dembia was given the first opportunity to speak, and then sat at the table for more than two hours, expressionless, as a hodgepodge of residents, politicians and advocacy group representatives voiced their concerns with NJNG's proposed 24-percent rate hike.

At times, things got personal.

"I don't know how you two can sit over there and look at yourselves in the mirror knowing what you're doing to people," Chesterfield resident Dawn Sheridan said, addressing Dembia and his partner. "This is unethical and unmoral."

Seemingly unfazed by the direct attack, Dembia scribbled a couple notes on his legal pad, and then continued to stare straight ahead at the podium, listening intently to the next speaker.

In November, New Jersey Natural Gas filed a petition with the state Board of Public Utilities (BPU) seeking a 24-percent rate hike, or a $21.69 increase in an average customer's monthly bill. The company says it has spent approximately $806 million improving its infrastructure from 2008 through 2015, and has reinforced steel and cast iron mains damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

"To assure the continued integrity of the natural gas distribution and transmission system, and to continue to safely and reliably deliver natural gas to customers, it is imperative that the company's base rates support the company's ability to finance its capital programs and its day to day operations," Dembia said in his opening remarks.

But, for many senior citizens who are on a fixed income, the 24-percent rate hike is just too much, they said. That's why groups like the AARP are challenging the proposed increase.

"We cannot afford this," said Howell resident Barbara Dixel. "Seniors are struggling. We did not get a Medicare increase. We have to choose between paying for our basic services of keeping us alive, eating, or not paying something or a medical bill, and having to pay a utility bill. Something doesn't get paid every month, and that's terrible."

Beatrice Humphris traveled from Toms River to attend the hearing. She stepped up to the podium and showed the crowd her latest NJNG bill, which had a $25,000 give-away promotion on the envelope.

"Now that's wonderful," Humphris said, "but that's $25,000 the gas company could be using instead of giving it away.

"I found that very annoying," she continued, as some of those in attendance clapped. "They're spending our money for things that are not necessary. I object."

At the start of the meeting, several local leaders took the time to enter into the record resolutions opposing the rate hike.

Belmar mayor Matt Doherty speaks at the podium. A press conference was held at Federici's Italian Restaurant in Belmar on Wednesday, April 13, 2016, to speak out against a proposed New Jersey Natural Gas rate hike. (Russ DeSantis | For NJ Advance Media)

One of them was Mayor Matt Doherty of Belmar, who represents a group of mayors in Monmouth and Ocean counties who are against the rate increase. He said the increase would have a devastating impact on the residents in communities NJNG services, some of which are still recovering from Hurricane Sandy.

"To think about how tone deaf you must be to your customers to request a 24-percent increase when you're giving yourselves that type of increase in compensation over two years," said Doherty, referring to the recent increase in executive compensation among the top five executives at New Jersey Resources, the parent company of NJNG.

Monmouth County Freeholder John Curley said the Board of Chosen Freeholders does not believe the rate increase is justified.

"I urge the Board of Public Utilities to take the responsibility and realize that people are moving and exiting this state in vast amounts because they cannot afford to stay here," Curley said. "... I request that we put a stop to price gauging by utilities."

Not everyone in the crowd spoke out against NJNG.

Union Beach Councilman Charles Cocuzza, whose borough took a hit during Hurricane Sandy, commended NJNG for its repair work following the storm.

"While no one likes to pay more," Cocuzza said, "I do understand the need for New Jersey Natural Gas to be able to continue to improve its system so that our residents and businesses have natural gas service they have come to expect and deserve."

Alex Napoliello may be reached at anapoliello@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexnapoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
A Soyuz-2.1a launch vehicle carrying three satellites blasted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome on Thursday, an Interfax correspondent reported from the site.

It is the inaugural launch from the new Russian cosmodrome, built in the Amur region.

The launch was initially expected to take place at 5:01 a.m. on Wednesday, but it was postponed for 24 hours due to technical reasons.

The satellites Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218, lifted by a Soyuz-2.1a launch vehicle, which blasted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, have been placed into an interim orbit, an Interfax correspondent reported.

The next launch from the Vostochny cosmodrome is scheduled for 2017, head of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) Igor Komarov told journalists.

"The next launch is scheduled for 2017. We are planning that two launches from the Vostochny cosmodrome will take place in the first half of next year. We expect that there will be six launches [annually] starting from 2018," Komarov said.

The Kanopus and Meteor satellites will be launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome in 2017, he said.
pollice.JPG

Driving in New Jersey can cost you plenty.

(Star-Ledger file photo)

New Jersey traffic courts, the most democratic places on earth. Young and old. Rich and poor. Citizens and immigrants. The reckless and the meek. People of all races.

Call it the disgruntled mosaic.

We've all been there. If you haven't, chances are your day is coming. Or, perhaps, you just checked "guilty" and mailed in the fine.

If you're a speeder, radar will find you.

If you aren't, a taillight might burn out.

Or you might forget to put the new insurance card in the glove compartment.

Or you might have an air freshener hanging from your rearview mirror. That's a violation of New Jersey Statute 39:3-74 - Obstruction of Windshield for Vision -- which carries a $54 fine and court costs, usually $30.

In my most recent trip to traffic court, the woman in line behind me was charged with exactly that. Her obstruction was a dangling pine tree.

Me? I was there for not using my blinker to turn around after I missed the emergency room entrance to Jersey Shore Medical Center. I explained to the cop that I had an elderly relative in there, alone. Twenty-five minutes later, I left with a ticket, cursing this "police state" we live in.

The National Motorist Association says this about New Jersey:

The state most likely to find its way into your wallet ... with its toll roads, roadblocks, and speed traps, New Jersey has left almost no stone unturned when it comes to extracting cash from motorists.

Popular Mechanics also rates New Jersey as the worst state to drive in.

Want evidence? The numbers below come from various state agencies, including the Administrative Office of the Courts and the Motor Vehicle Commission, as well as the legislative office of Assemblyman Declan O'Scanlon (R-Monmouth), the New Jersey driver's best advocate in government.

So buckle up - or should I say "Click it or ticket" -- because you're about to be rear-ended.

In a state with 6.7 million licensed drivers, 2.4 million traffic tickets were issued in 2015.

It was 2.8 million the previous year, but thanks to the shuttering of red light cameras, led by O'Scanlon, 400,000 of us were spared an $85 ticket.

Last year the state collected - wait for it - $405,611,768 in traffic fines. That's almost a half-billion dollars, more than twice what the state got in casino tax revenues ($196 million).

And these numbers don't include DUI tickets, which go into the criminal fine ledger.

MORE: Recent Mark Di Ionno columns

But that's just the beginning.

"Bad drivers" paid Motor Vehicle Commission surcharges that totaled another $122,459,875 in 2015. Add that to the fines, and New Jersey's ticket revenue grows to $628,071,643 - or about $100 million more than the state made through the gas tax. Add to this the $5.5 million we're charged in motor vehicle fees and, well, in New Jersey, driving isn't a privilege. It's a big, fat hidden tax.

"This isn't about safety," O'Scanlon said. "We could write 75 percent less tickets and not jeopardize safety. This is a tax by bad luck by being in the wrong place in the wrong time."

Then come the insurance rate hikes. Geico raises premiums 69 percent for drivers with two moving violations at less than 15 mph. Esurance jacks up rates 35 percent for one speeding ticket at more than 15 mph over the limit. Other major insurers hit you with increases between 12 percent and 35 percent.

That's on top of the $1,270 yearly premium the average New Jersey driver pays for car insurance.

In New Jersey, driving isn't a privilege. It's an insurance company cash cow.

"This is a regressive tax," O'Scanlon said. "It hurts people who can afford it the least. I have constituents who say they've had to choose between paying rent and paying tickets. What happens next? They have to get to work, so they drive with a suspended license or without insurance and the hole just gets deeper."

There are also costs that can't be measured in dollars and cents, the largest being a growing public animosity toward police who walk the thin blue line between enforcement and extortion. They - not local mayors or councils - are the face of the municipal revenue grab.

"This is a big issue with us," said Bob Fox, president of the state Fraternal Order of Police. "All these tickets ... who suffers? The public. Who gets blamed? The police.

"We got rid of quotas (by law several years ago), but there's other ways they pressure us to write tickets," Fox said. "It can cost you a promotion, or even your job."

Fox said part of the problem is body and car cameras.

"We can no longer use our discretion," he said. "Maybe we want to let you off with a warning, but now (the) town says, 'Why didn't you give the guy a ticket?'

"My guys tell me, 'They've turned us into robots.' "

O'Scanlon - who introduced a bill eight months ago to outlaw "end-around quotas" - says cops are given incentives like preferential shifts to enforce "artificially low" speed limits that are "unfair, irrational and arbitrary."

He's working on a bill to have speed limits set by traffic engineers, "not bureaucrats."

"The safest speed limit is the one driven by the 85th percentile," he said. "If a road is posted at 25, and most people are safely driving 40, that 25 mph limit is artificially low. It's there to generate revenue."

Speed traps are only part of the problem. There are also the dragnets, such as the annual "Click it or ticket" blitz.

Montgomery Township, for instance, regularly holds an inspection sticker check on Route 206 (as if traffic wasn't bad enough). Cars are slowed to a crawl by officers in the road who look at your windshield and either let you pass (valid sticker) or wave you into a parking lot (expired sticker).

Either way, you're stuck. In traffic, or with a fine.

There's a certain "show us your papers" mentality about this that runs counter to a free society. And the cops hate it as much as we do.

"It turns us into meter maids with guns," said one Morris County officer.

He asked not to be identified because he's still on the job, writing tickets.

Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.
NEWARK -- A federal grand jury Wednesday returned an indictment against a New York real estate executive accused of running a Ponzi scheme.

Alisa Adler, 55, was charged with one count of wire fraud, adding to a wire fraud charge already lodged against her in federal court last year.

According to the indictment, Adler, who operated ASG Real Estate Services Group in New York, sought out investors interested in growing their wealth through real estate.

From 2009 through 2012, Adler took about $740,000 from three investors, including one in New Jersey who put $500,000 in her business, the indictment says.

But rather than use the money for real estate, Adler allegedly used most of the funds for her personal benefit, the indictment says. She also used funds from later investors to repay earlier investors, it said.

Adler's attorney, Jacob Laufer, did not immediately return a message seeking comment about the indictment.

When she was first charged in 2015, prosecutors said Adler used the investors' funds in part for her personal bills, meals and entertainment.

The wire fraud charges stem from a transfer of funds from a bank account in New Jersey to Adler's bank in New York and an email Adler allegedly sent to the New Jersey investor about her uses of the investment money, the indictment says.

Each wire fraud count carries a maximum potential penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or twice the amount of the loss caused by the offense.

Tim Darragh may be reached at tdarragh@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @timdarragh. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
When I first heard that Ted Cruz was making a big announcement at 4 p.m., I expected he would announce he was dropping out of the race for president.

On Tuesday, Cruz recorded four last-place finishes in five contests.

Cruz is getting desperate. He is down more than 400 delegates to Trump. The only way he can restore any semblance of legitimacy to his campaign is to win in California on June 7, the same day as the New Jersey primary.

To that end, the Texas senator named former Silicon Valley executive Carly Fiorina as his vice-presidential pick Wednesday.

That's pretty funny.

Ted's known for his filibustering skills.

But when it comes to filibustering, no politician alive can beat Fiorina. Virtually every word out of her mouth is a filibuster.

I seem to be the only one that noticed, but during those debates last year Fiorina made absolutely no sense. She would just talk as if she could talk long enough so that no other candidate got a chance to speak.

I wrote about that after a debate last year. I am repeating the column below for your reading pleasure.

If you read my writings, then you know I am not the biggest fan of Chris Christie. But our governor did one thing during that Wednesday debate that I admired:

He told Carly Fiorina to shut up.

Someone had to. She interrupted so many times that she seemed to think she was the moderator, not just one of 11 participants.

This woman should not be running for the White House. Instead she should take another shot at a Senate seat.

Then she could do what she does best: Filibuster.

That debate was long enough without having to listen to her interrupting other candidates to interject arrant nonsense into the conversation.

And even when Fiorina was asked a direct question, she would refuse to answer it and turn instead to mouthing meaningless cliches.

Worse, she actually interrupted others who were making real points so she could blather on in platitudes.

The exchange with Donald Trump and Rand Paul was a perfect example. There was a real issue at hand, the question of whether a constitutional amendment would be needed to reverse the practice of birthright citizenship.

Trump pointed out that the only way to find out is to pass a law banning birthright citizenship crafted so it meets the approval of the Supreme Court.

That is unarguable. But Fiorina argued against it - invoking the sort of argument you'd expect from someone trying to run out the clock before she was forced to make a real decision.

Worse, the question was not even addressed to her. It was addressed to Rand Paul.

Here's the exchange after Trump finished speaking on why he believes birthright citizenship should be banned. Jake Tapper tried to direct the follow-up up Rand Paul but Fiorina jumped in, not to answer the question but to duck it (my insights in parentheses):

FIORINA: First let me say, We have just spent a good bit of time discussing, as Republicans, how to solve this problem. I would ask your audience at home to ask a very basic question. Why have Democrats not solved this problem?

(This is ridiculous. The Democrats have not solved the problem of birthright citizenship for the obvious reason: They're in favor of birthright citizenship.)

President Obama campaigned in 2007 and 2008 on solving the immigration problem. (Note the change of subject; if she had wanted to talk about immigration in general, that time had passed. This segment was about the specific issue of birthright citizenship.)

He entered Washington with majorities in the House and the Senate. He could have chosen to do anything to solve this pro -- this problem. Instead, he chose to do nothing.

Why? because the Democrats don't want this issue solved

(Huh? First she asks why the Democrats have not solved the problem. Then after some meaningless blather, she points out the obvious: The Democrats don't want to solve it.)

TAPPER: Please. (What he meant was "Please shut up!" but he was too polite to say it.)

FIORINA: ...the truth is, you can't just wave your hands and say "the 14th Amendment is gonna go away." It will take an extremely arduous vote in Congress, followed by two-thirds of the states, and if that doesn't work to amend the Constitution, then it is a long, arduous process in court.

(This shows a complete lack of understanding of the legislative and judicial process. She's got it exactly backwards. Quite obviously, the "long, arduous process in court" would come before the try for an amendment. You don't even know if you need an amendment until the court decides on the meaning of the 14th Amendment.)

And meanwhile, what will continue to go on is what has gone on for 25 years. With all due respect, Mr. Trump, we've been talking about illegal immigration for 25 years. San Francisco has been a sanctuary city since 1989. There are 300 of them.

(The first comprehensive immigration reform with an amnesty was passed not 25 years ago but 29 years ago, in 1986. It failed, yet she clearly favors repeating the mistake. But again this has nothing to do with the issue, which is birthright citizenship.)

And meanwhile, what has happened? Nothing. The border remains insecure. The legal immigration system remains broken. Look, we know what it takes to secure a border. We've heard a lot of great ideas here. Money, manpower, technology...

TAPPER : Thank you, Ms. Fiorina. (Translation: "Would you please, please stop yammering on like a broken record?")

FIORINA: ...mostly, apparently, leadership...

TAPPER: Thank you. ("SHUT UP!")

FIORINA: ...the kind of leadership that understands how to get results.

(This doesn't make sense. "Leadership" cannot understand anything.)

TAPPER: Thank you, Ms. Fiorina (for finally shutting the hell up and letting someone else get a word in edgewise.) Mr. Trump, I want to give you the chance to respond ...

Reread this passage and you will see that Fiorina stopped the debate dead in its tracks and yammered on for minutes without even telling us whether she favors birthright citizenship.

The question then went back to Trump, who was again interrupted by another filibuster from Fiorina too tedious to repeat.

Finally the question got to its intended recipient, Rand Paul. He gave what Fiorina did not give during the entire three hours of the debate:

An intelligent answer:

TAPPER: Senator Paul, I want to bring you in. Where -- where do you stand on the issue of birthright citizenship?

PAUL: Well, I hate to say it, but Donald Trump has a bit of a point here.

The case that was decided around 1900 was, people had a green card, were here legally, and they said that their children were citizens. There's never been a direct Supreme Court case on people who were here illegally, whether or not their kids are citizens.

So it hasn't really been completely adjudicated. The 14th Amendment says that "those who are here and under the jurisdiction." The original author of the -- of the 14th Amendment said on the Senate floor that this was applying to slaves, and did not specifically apply to others.

Exactly. So what was Fiorina's filibuster about?

It was about her trying to let us in on the fact that she has absolutely no ideas in her head. Her rantings on foreign policy were equally idiotic and could be just as easily shown to consist of cliches rather than intelligent insights.

This was painfully obvious to me. And I mean "painfully." After 40 years of covering politics, I start getting headaches when I have to listen to a politician string cliches together without the slightest indication of any intelligent thought.

I find myself thinking: Either she's stupid - or she thinks the rest of us are stupid.

In Carly's case, I think we've got a twofer.
By Matthew Hale

Over 30 years ago political economist Bruce Yandle described how Baptists and bootleggers both gained from local government prohibitions on selling alcohol on Sunday.

Baptists liked the ban because they had an accomplishment to talk about to the flock. The bootleggers liked it because they could charge a premium to the flock for their post services cocktail. The local governments implementing the prohibition were happy because they managed to satisfy the demands of two very different constituencies.

Yandle also argued that if local government really wanted to "solve" the problem of drinking on Sunday, then charging a special Sunday tax would have probably been more effective than an outright ban and had the added benefit of filling the local government coffers with additional tax revenue.

Recently, the city of Newark has been having a high-tech version of the Baptist/bootlegger conversation with new-tech "bootleggers" airbnb and Uber and the "Baptist" hotels and taxi companies. How these discussions have played tells us a lot about the two companies, the markets they serve and the politics in Newark.

The differences between the two negotiations are stark, even if the outcomes are similar.

Under the agreement with Airbnb, the city will receive a 6 percent tax on all Airbnb rentals and limit the number of units that can be rented out. According to published reports, Newark expects this will add an additional $750,000 per year to its coffers.

Airbnb called the agreement a "smart and fair way to regulate online home rentals." Even New Jersey's restaurant and hotel association, which represents traditional hotels, had to agree that this was a sensible agreement. The negotiations were by all accounts quite civil.

Under the agreement with Uber, the ride-hailing company will pay a $10 million license fee to operate at Newark Liberty International Airport for the next 10 years. It will also provide insurance, background checks and drug testing for drivers.

Unlike Airbnb, however, before the deal was reached, the negotiations were highly public and quite nasty. The taxi drivers (Baptists) are still not happy, saying the agreement does nothing to even the playing field.

The differences in the bootlegger and Baptist responses to Newark's regulation attempts might be because Uber is being asked to regulate and monitor its drivers and cars in a way not asked of the hosts and rooms offered by Airbnb. The differences might also be because the Baptists in the Airbnb case are not as threatened by the bootleggers. Hotels can offer services like restaurants, conference rooms, gyms and maid service that Airbnb can't.

Uber cars and taxis are essentially the same thing and differentiation on services are more difficult to tease out. All of these factors help explain why we saw vitriol with Uber and hugs and kisses with Airbnb.

The other important difference in the agreements is that while the Airbnb agreement is likely to lead to long-term stability, there is a decent possibility that the Uber fights this time around will come back up.

This is because the Uber agreement has a 10-year time limit, and because the Uber agreement conveniently ignores adjustments to Uber's dynamic surge-pricing model. This model means the same car trip can cost three or four times as much when demand is high and is the primary competitive advantage bootlegger Uber has of the Baptist taxi.

Just as a Sunday tax on alcohol might have been more effective than a ban; if Newark officials were truly interested in "solving" the Uber/taxi inequalities, they would have tried to address this issue. Someday they may have to.

However, at the end of the day, the main similarity between the agreements may be even more telling. In both cases, the city government of Newark won. Newark will get close to $20 million in new revenue over the next 10 years.

In addition, Newark got two private companies to largely pay for the implementation costs of collecting that revenue. That is clearly a big win for Newark city government. The Airbnb negotiations for sure and maybe eventually the one with Uber can be models that other jurisdictions around the country can copy.

Newark a leader? Wow, that is an accomplishment.

Matthew Hale is an associate professor and director of the Master's in Public Administration program at Seton Hall University.

Follow NJ.com Opinion on Twitter@NJ_Opinion. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
On Tuesday afternoon, as I was awaiting the results of those five primary elections held that day, I decided to go to Manasquan to take my dog for a run.

Dozens of fishermen were lining the inlet. The bluefish were running, some of the biggest blues I've ever seen. I pulled out my i-phone and took a picture of a couple of flopping around near the rocks.

They reminded me of something, but I couldn't think quite what.

After I got home and started watching the election results it suddenly came to me:

Ted Cruz and John Kasich.

I suspect the announcement Monday by the Texas senator and the Ohio governor that they were teaming up to stop Donald Trump will go down in history as one of the biggest blunders ever.

This wasn't a strategy; it was a suicide pact.

Sure enough, the elections results Tuesday showed both were blown out of the water and left on land gasping for breath.

Beach Betty checks out a couple of bluefish landed at the Manasquan Inlet on Tuesday.

By day's end Cruz trailed Trump by more than 400 delegates and Kasich trailed by more than 800. It's mathematically impossible for either to win a first-ballot victory.

Stick a fork in these fish. They're done.

As for our governor, he's just getting started.

Chris Christie took a lot of grief from the pundits back in February when he became the first major Republican to back Trump. But now that decision is looking quite prescient.

Someone is going to have to represent the Donald's interests in the surrender negotiations with Republican Party leaders as they realize Trump's their only option. And no one is better situated than Christie to be that someone, according to one GOP insider here in Jersey.

That's Dick Kamin, a former assemblyman from Morris County who's working with the Trump campaign in the run-up to our June 7 primary.

Kamin notes that as head of the Republican Governors Association in 2014, Christie spent a year getting to know every GOP governor in the country. He then spent the next year campaigning for president.

"He spent two years building quite a network and I know he's putting that into play for the cause," said Kamin. "Most governors control their delegation in terms of going to Cleveland and to have Christie give them a call is a good sign."

The content of such a call is not hard to guess: No funny business. Let's get this thing over with.

Depending on how the remaining primaries go, Trump could come to Cleveland a bit below that 1,237-vote majority needed for a first-ballot win. At that point, there would be all sorts of rules challenges and other inside moves that the stop-Trump crowd could employ to force a contested convention.

And at that point. someone would need to convince a sufficient number of the 200 or so party officials who serve as unbound delegates that nominating Trump offers the only way to avoid chaos. Kamin said Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have been laying the groundwork for that move.

"Newt's been saying how it's gonna play out," he said. "He's been saying, 'Here's how you bring the party together.'"

The leaders might not like it, but they don't have much say in the matter. Their dreams of substituting a Mitt Romney or a Paul Ryan for Trump were dashed long ago.

And when it comes to the general election, Trump is uniquely suited to take on the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, Kamin said.

"Trump's the only candidate who's going to be able to attack her and have it be expected," said Kamin.

The first major New Jersey Republican to endorse Trump agrees. That's state Sen. Mike Doherty, who was backing Trump even back when Christie was in the running.

Doherty said that after Trump's big speech Wednesday on foreign policy he expects the Donald to attack Clinton for her past endorsement of our failed adventures in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

"Hillary has bought into the globalist agenda and the neoconservative view of the world," Doherty said. "Trump has utterly rejected it. Hillary is going to be left defending something the American people are throwing over the side."

On energy, Clinton will be vulnerable because of her stated intention to curb coal-mining, he said.

"The way to get Americans back to work is to take advantage of our cheap energy," he said. "If you listen to Hillary and Barack Obama, they want to take our home-field advantage of cheap energy and stop using it."

Who will win that tussle remains to be seen. But if it's Trump, then Christie will be the No. 1 ally of the new president. He'll likely have his pick of positions in the Trump administration.

As for Cruz and Kasich, it's time for some merciful soul to come along and throw them back in the water.

They're clearly not keepers.
One Ukrainian serviceman has been injured in the area of Kyiv's army operation in southeastern Ukraine over the past 24 hours, and no Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, Ukrainian presidential administration spokesman Oleksandr Motuzianyk has said.

"No Ukrainian servicemen have been killed as a result of fighting over the past 24 hours, but one of our soldiers has been injured. It happened near Maryinka," he said at a press briefing in Kyiv on Thursday.
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Lawyer of Nadia Savchenko, who was convicted for 22 years of imprisonment in Russia, Nikolai Polozov plans on Friday to register a package of the documents to handle her client to Motherland.

"Under the Extradition Convention, the Justice Ministry of the requesting (Ukraine) side sends to the requested side (Russia) a package of documents. The requested side is obliged to find out from the person to be extradited if he/she agrees to be extradited, that is, whether there is nothing that may threaten her/him there. She (Savchenko) must fill in these documents. Tomorrow I'll fly to Rostov to visit her and we'll fill in all the documents and will give her," Polozov told the journalists in Astrakhan on Thursday.

He expressed a hope that "the procedure will be expedited."

"The whole procedure takes minimally a half a year in a regular routine. When Savchenko will sign these documents, they will be handled to Justice Ministry, which, in turn, will send them to the court (in Russia) where she is currently located. This currently is detention facility No. 3 in Novocherkassk. The court then makes a decision. The court must receive from Ukraine recognition of verdict," Polozov added.
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin has held a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi during his visit to the People's Republic of China.

"China confirmed its support of territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine. Both parties agreed that the strategic relations between Ukraine and China do not depend on the third parties," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry's press service said in a statement issued on Wednesday.

The two foreign ministers finalized a schedule of the upcoming bilateral contacts, including the preparation for a regular sitting of the Chinese-Ukrainian Intergovernmental Cooperation Commission.

"The parties agreed on practical steps for liberalization of the visa regime between the two countries," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said without elaborating.

The status and prospects of joint infrastructure projects were also discussed during the meeting.

"The Chinese foreign minister voiced the support of Ukraine's participation in the 'One Belt, One Road' initiative," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said.

The sides also agreed on the need to reform the United Nations Security Council to make it more efficient in current conditions.
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.
Today

Partly cloudy. High 83F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening followed by increasing clouds with showers developing after midnight. Low around 75F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.

Tomorrow

Partly to mostly cloudy skies with scattered thunderstorms in the morning. Potential for severe thunderstorms. High 81F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
Ukraine and China will begin intergovernmental consultations on the liberalization of the visa regime between the two countries in May.

The corresponding agreement was reached after the talks between Chinese and Ukrainian foreign ministers, Wang Yi and Pavlo Klimkin, on the sidelines of the 5th meeting of foreign affairs ministers of Member States and Observers of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, which was held in Beijing on Wednesday, Chinese Ambassador to Ukraine Zhang Xiyun said at the second national forum on the support of export in Kyiv on Thursday.

"Yesterday, the two ministers [of foreign affairs] of Ukraine and China agreed to start the dialogue on the liberalization of the visa regime [between the countries]. The consultations on the liberalization of the visa regime will start on May 10," he said.

According to the Chinese ambassador, since the beginning of 2016, a simplified visa regime for foreign citizens, including Ukrainians, has been already effective in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing.
WASHINGTON  Iowa and Nebraska senators have a fresh batch of questions for the Obama administration over its handling of Eswin Mejia, who police say caused a fatal crash that killed a Council Bluffs woman in Omaha earlier this year.

This time, their inquiries are focused on Mejias 2013 detention and release as an unaccompanied minor.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldana has said that Mejia was picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol near Nogales, Arizona, in May 2013 after entering the country without inspection. He was 16 and had no criminal record in the U.S.

He was released to his brother in Tennessee. Both relocated to the Omaha area in early 2014. Police and prosecutors say Mejia was street racing when he caused the Jan. 31 wreck that killed 21-year-old Sarah Root. ICE declined requests from local law enforcement to detain him after the crash. He disappeared after being released on bail.

Roots father, Scott Root, will testify at a House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Oversight hearing titled Criminal Aliens Released by the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday. The hearing will start at 8:30 a.m. Central Standard Time.

Saldana will also testify at the hearing.

Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst of Iowa, along with Sens. Ben Sasse and Deb Fischer of Nebraska, wrote Wednesday to Sylvia Burwell, secretary of Health and Human Services.

The four senators, all Republicans, expressed concern that Mejia had been released to a sponsor who was reportedly also in the country illegally.

We would appreciate a better understanding of what happened in light of the fact that Mejia, now almost 20 years old, has since been charged with a crime resulting in the death of a U.S. citizen, absconded from authorities, and remains a fugitive at large, they wrote.

The letter included a laundry list of questions about the exact details of Mejias 2013 release.

We would like to know what information your department had on Mejias sponsor before releasing Mejia into his custody, they wrote in the letter.

They asked for a response by May 11.
Roman Bezsmertny, Ukraine's representative in the political subgroup of the Trilateral Contact Group dealing with the crisis in Donbas in the Minsk format, informed the other parties on Thursday that he had quit the negotiations, the Yevropeiska Pravda (European Truth) online publication reported on Thursday.

"I have decided for myself and informed all those concerned, from the people responsible for the process' technological support to the president, that I have finished this stage in my life," Bezsmertny said.

Bezsmertny said new representative of Ukraine, Olha Aivazovska, has been included in the subgroup to replace him. "Everything is currently concentrated on elections, in which she is a specialist," he said.

Bezsmertny had represented Ukraine in the Trilateral Contact Group's political subgroup until recently.

Aivazovska has specialized in monitoring election processes in Ukraine since 2001. In 2006, she became a co-founder of the OPORA Civic Network, an all-Ukrainian NGO. It was reported in early April that the Ukrainian delegation to the political subgroup had invited Aivazovska to discuss modalities of elections in certain districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
This article was originally published on the Huffington Post on April 25, 2016. By David A. Dean Public pensions are wildly underfunded in many political jurisdictions across this country. The pension crisis in Illinois is perhaps the most dramatic: Illinois municipal bonds are treated as junk by the markets for good reason. How and indeed whether Illinois successfully undertakes pension reform and puts its financial house in order is important for Illinois, but also for the other States and localities with underfunded pension obligations, because Illinois is, in a sense, the canary in the coal mine. And one issue that has already been key in Illinois - and will be elsewhere - is whether the state courts support or defeat statutory efforts at pension reform. So far, the Illinois courts are a model of what courts elsewhere should not do.

In 1892, the modern public trust doctrine was born when the United States Supreme Court in Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois held that the public trust doctrine - a doctrine that holds that the government has a duty to future electorates and future generations and thus cannot alienate key public resources - prohibited the Illinois legislature from selling three million acres of Lake Michigan lakebed and shoreline to a railroad company. The United States Supreme Court essentially undid an imprudent and almost certainly corrupt legislative giveaway of complete and exclusive control of what since has become the very heart of the Chicago metropolitan area.

Fast forward one hundred and twenty plus years, and consider, by contrast, the Illinois Supreme Courts recent decisions regarding public pension reform, which invalidate State and City of Chicago efforts to modestly lessen the staggering pension crisis they face. In 1970, Illinois adopted a new state constitution that contains a provision stating that public pensions cannot be diminished. Reading this provision in a highly literal, absolutist manner, the Illinois Supreme Court seemed to hold that any modifications to pension terms and benefits for past or current employees were therefore prohibited by the Illinois constitution. Quite possibly, the result is going to be that, because of an imprudent choice of wording made in 1970, wording that opened up the possibility that pension liabilities would come to consume state and localities budgets, already-inadequate state services for the most vulnerable people in Illinois, disabled and poor kids, will be cut. And already understaffed public agencies of all sorts will continue to freeze hiring or be forced to cut payrolls. The states financial ability to pay for education, disability services, health care and the like is, of course, very different from a tangible public resource like Lake Michigan, but that financial ability also could be considered part of the public trust - part of what one poorly-thought-out act of lawmaking in 1970 should not be allowed to undermine almost a half century later.

It might be argued that the Illinois Supreme Court had to defer to what the State Constitution says because the State Constitution is the final word in the law, above everything else (except the federal Constitution). But if a group of land developers today somehow got together the political power to push through a state constitutional amendment to sell Lake Michigan, or if a group of libertarian activists pushed through an amendment that could be read as prohibiting any property tax increases no matter the public need for more money, one would hope that the Illinois Supreme Court would at least view those amendments with suspicion. Faced with such amendments, one would hope that the Illinois Supreme Court would try to interpret them in the way that made them as consistent as possible with the idea of a public trust. Likewise, in the pension context, the Illinois Court could and should have recognized that public trust concerns should guide its interpretation.

In this case of the 1970 pension provision, the wording was open-ended enough that the Illinois Supreme Court could have defensibly interpreted the provision to allow the very modest pension reforms embodied in recent state legislation. Diminish can be understood in a variety of ways. The Court could have and should have been guided by public trust concerns in coming to a constitutional interpretation that would have both protected overwhelmingly the interests of past and current public employees and helped ensure that Illinois would meet its obligations to all its current citizens.

It is possible that, in the wake of the Illinois Supreme Courts decision, there will be a new constitutional amendment to undo the 1970 provision. Or perhaps the State Legislature will enact new taxes large enough to cover at least some of the unfunded pension liabilities. But that will take time, and in the meantime, there are localities in Illinois simply not paying their bills to private agencies that provide critical services, and there are individuals and families at risk of losing services they desperately need. As the New York Times recently reported, Chicago State, a local college that serves predominantly African-American students from low-income households, may soon close for lack of State funds. If the Illinois Supreme Court had heeded the wisdom of the United States Supreme Courts 1892 decision in Illinois Central Railroad, Illinois would already be on the path to ensuring that its citizens today receive and will receive the services that, by all rights, they should be able to expect.
On Thursday, April 28, at 14.00, the press centre of the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency will host a press conference ''Report of Former First Deputy Health Minister Oleksandra Pavlenko: My work at the Ministry", during which Pavlenko is to report to media on her work achievements while in office (8/5a Reitarska Street). Admission requires press accreditation.
Jiang Jianqing (left), chairman of ICBC, and Hu Hao, board secretary of ICBC, during a news conference in Hong Kong. The credit card launch is part of the lender's global expansion plan.[Photo/Agencies]

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd launched its first credit card in the United States on Tuesday, hoping to target Chinese people living and working in the country and to promote tourism between the two nations.

The new card will be offered by two networks, UnionPay and Visa. The purpose of working with Visa Inc is to offer newcomers to the US with limited credit history to be able to get a credit card and "acclimate to the culture of the US", a statement released by the bank said.

ICBC will offer two card levels for both network brands, with the "Preferred" customers earning 1 percent cash back on their spending and "Premier" customers getting VIP benefits and accelerated cash back.

"This is a milestone for ICBC's international expansion, significant to ICBC's credit card footprint and its rising status globally," said Wang Xiquan, senior executive vice-president of ICBC.

"The issuance of the ICBC credit card in the US is ICBC's major commitment to boosting China-US economic exchange and to serving local customers."

Cai Jianbo, CEO of UnionPay International, said in an interview prior to the launch that Chinese customers who work or live in the US will find the new card useful for its familiarity, as will Americans who travel for business to China and countries near it.

The credit card also was launched as part of cooperation between the China National Tourism Administration office in New York and ICBC for the 2016 China-US Tourism Year.

"We hope that there are more and more exchanges between the two countries, and from UnionPay's perspective, we're hoping to be able to, through our networks, provide more safe and secure payment options to travelers," Cai said.
Qinglongqiao Railway Station is a century-old station on the Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway in Beijing. The Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway was the first railway designed, funded and built by Chinese people alone.

With construction beginning in 1908, the station was designed by famous Chinese railroad engineer Zhan Tianyou (1861-1919). Zhan, known as the "Father of China's Railroad," designed a railway that would zigzag upwards by switching back the line near the Qinglongqiao Railway Station to overcome the steep gradient.

The track maintenance division which oversaw the Qinglongqiao section boasted a zero-error record in the past century and witnessed the rapid expansion of the railway network in China. China now has the world's biggest high speed railway network at a stunning 19,000 km; this is longer than all of world's high-speed lines put together.

A view of the Qinglongqiao Railway Station. [Photo by Zheng Liang/ China.org.cn]
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Brazilian restaurant chain Tropeiro, which has a venue in Nottingham city centre, has closed.

In a brief statement on its website, the business said: "We are sorry to inform you that Tropeiro has ceased trading and is no longer taking bookings".

A Facebook post on the Tropeiro Nottingham Restaurant page on Thursday last week also said: "It is with much regret that Tropeiro is no longer open for business".

Earlier the same day it had been promoting its food and venue for bookings.

A number of followers on the page expressed their disappointment with the news.

Andy Bullock said: "I knew this was coming as soon as all these meat BBQ/smokehouse type places started popping up all over the place.

"Had some great and some poor experiences in Tropeiro.

"It was great in its early days, but things seemed to go downhill."

He added: "With all the meat-based competition, Tropeiro either needed to up their game or lower their prices to survive."

A number of other posters also expressed their disappointment with emoticons.

Tropeiro opened at the old Hard Rock Cafe venue, in King Street, in April 2011.

The chain, owned by Cheshire-based Camboriu Restaurants Ltd, also had restaurants in Chester, Glasgow and Sheffield.

According to Company Check, Camboriu Restaurants owed 930,000 in liabilities.
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As elections approach, sometimes rumors arise. We would like to state the facts about the financing of the Lake Maloney hiking and biking trail. There is no funding for our trails from city, county or state coffers. The grant approved by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission is funded from the federal government. Lincoln County Commissioners were kind enough to take ownership of the trail so the grant could be funded. Lake Maloney Property Owners organization is not an eligible government recipient of the funds. So the county commissioners were willing to serve that function. The trail was 20 percent funded by local donations, which was a requirement of the grant. Our committee would like to give a big thanks to all donors and especially the Lincoln County Commissioners. This trail will provide a safe route for bikers and walkers to exercise. Previously they had to use the very narrow, dangerous county road. Construction will be completed by late fall.
The Wests Tigers have snapped a six-game losing streak after beating the Rabbitohs 30-22 on Thursday night but it has come at the cost of a shoulder injury to star fullback James Tedesco.

Tedesco had a hand in everything in the first 40 minutes where he scored one try and set up another for Jordan Rankin, but the prospective Origin representative failed to return after half-time.

On top of Tedesco's second-half absence, the Tigers also had to deal with the late withdrawal of five-eighth Mitchell Moses who strained his quad in the warm-up.

The Tigers' win  their first in 45 days  comes just five days after they were embarrassed 60-6 in the nation's capital by the Raiders.

"We brought all of the pressure on ourselves from a performance that was absolutely not good enough last week," Tigers coach Jason Taylor said.

"We can take that pressure straight away with a win and that's what we did. But it was in such a great fashion.

"I'm really excited about the way we won that game. It was a tough performance, we wanted to be tougher and that was a really strong win in the circumstances and there were plenty going against us."

Draw Widget - Round 9 - Rabbitohs vs Wests Tigers



The Rabbitohs only had themselves to blame for their fourth straight loss after giving up 20 points in the first 20 minutes of proceedings.

Tedesco was first to score in the fourth minute when Adam Reynolds' attempt to knock back a Luke Brooks grubber was pounced on by the Tigers fullback who scored just milliseconds before the Rabbitohs halfback was able to ground it himself.

Tedesco provided the second try for his side in the 11th minute when his nifty cut-out ball hit Rankin on the chest, allowing for the winger to cross in the corner.

Brooks' attempt to find good field territory with a last-tackle kick five minutes later was left to bounce by Rabbitohs skipper Greg Inglis, and bounced straight back to Brooks who was left to run into open space to score.

The Tigers ensured a 20-point lead after as many minutes when Kevin Naiqama swooped on Robbie Farah's grubber despite having plenty of Rabbitohs defenders in the vicinity.

South Sydney finally posted points in the 36th minute when the Tigers temporarily turned into their own worst enemy.

Rankin looked to have a Reynolds bomb covered but Tim Simona's contact on Aaron Gray saw the Rabbitohs winger collide into his Tigers counterpart. It left the ball free to be collected by Souths centre Kirisome Auva'a who scored out wide.

With Tedesco sidelined at the start of the second half South Sydney immediately took advantage when David Nofoaluma's failure to catch a towering Reynolds bomb in the 44th minute left Bryson Goodwin to pick it up and score.

The Rabbitohs were back at it again five minutes later when poor Tigers defence allowed Inglis to feed the ball out to an unmarked Dane Nielsen.

The Tigers refused to park the bus though as another Brooks grubber provided his side their first try in over half hour through Rankin again in the 53rd minute.

Farah's attacking raid on the blind side 10 minutes later came up trumps for the Tigers when his cut-out pass to Nofoaluma all but secured his side the win.

The Rabbitohs pegged the deficit back to eight in the 73rd minute when quick hands down the short side from Damien Cook and Chris Grevsmuhl put Goodwin over for his second try, but it was to no avail by game's end.

Wests Tigers 30 (Jordan Rankin 2, James Tedesco, Kevin Naiqama, Luke Brooks, David Nofoaluma tries; Jordan Rankin 2 goals) defeated South Sydney Rabbitohs 22 (Bryson Goodwin 2, Kirisome Auva'a, Dane Nielsen tries; Adam Reynolds 3 goals) at ANZ Stadium. Crowd: 11,229. Half-time: Wests Tigers 20-6. Injuries: James Tedesco (Wests Tigers)  shoulder; Sam Burgess (Rabbitohs)  ankle.
By Professor Gong Weibin, director of the Social Administration Research Center, China National School of Administration, comics drawn by Chi Ying

On April 25, Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a visit to Xiaogang, a village in Fengyang County, Chuzhou, Anhui Province. He walked in the wheat fields and visited farmers' homes. Standing in a courtyard named, "the farm in the past", Xi listened to the farmers' account of how 18 villagers signed a contract of household responsibility with red hand-prints, which heralded the land contract reform in rural areas in 1978.

Xi called for villagers to emulate reforms to abide by and stick to the Party's basic theory for a hundred years. Consistent reforms and opening up would write a new chapter for the country's development.

History illuminates a road to the future. Xiaogang village is a pioneering example of reforms, as well a witness to rural developments.

We are closer to the dream of national rejuvenation, however there is still a long way to go. To promote economic development through structural reform of supply-side, citizens would face numerous difficulties that must be tackled.

Xi's visit demonstrates his determination for reforms, highlighting governments' care for citizens, and to cohere for new developments. Reform and opening up would not pause.

Adhering to serving the people, and opening up a new realm to let millions of people share in remarkable achievements would be the path to China's success story.
Thousands of craft beer enthusiasts from across the world will make a pilgrimage this weekend to Munster, when the Dark Lord returns for his annual appearance.

Three Floyds will host Dark Lord Day from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, giving fans from far and wide their once-a-year chance to get their hands on the highly coveted Dark Lord beer. Beer Advocate describes it as a demonic Russian-style imperial stout brewed with coffee, Mexican vanilla and Indian sugar that defies description.

Locals might want to steer clear of Calumet Avenue south of Main Street in Munster because of all the traffic that comes with more than 10,000 visitors. Theyll rock out to heavy metal bands and trade hard-to-find craft beers all day, even if it rains like last year.

2016 is special. Three Floyds, which is consistently ranked among the best craft breweries in the world, is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

This years Dark Lord Day will feature several barrel-aged variants of the molasses-ey Dark Lord stout, as well as the metal bands Lord Mantis, Barrier, Plague Bringer, Municipal Waste, EyeHateGod and Skeletonwitch.

Three Floyds President Nick Floyd will debut a 3 Floyds Alpha King comic he created with 100 Bullets writer Brian Azzarello and Lobo illustrator Simon Bisley. Theyll all be on hand to sign posters and copies of the comic book, which creates a backstory for the acclaimed craft brewerys flagship beer and will be distributed to comic book stores nationwide.

If you dont already have a ticket, youre not going. Three Floyds sold out of Dark Lord Day tickets in less than a week in March, despite raising the ticket price from $30 to $200, though its now more inclusive to cover beer and food so attendees dont need to bring cash. The coveted ticket cant be transferred to prevent them from getting on the resale market, so the name on the ticket must match the name on your ID.

Very little parking is available in the area about the industrial park where Three Floyds is based, and the brewery is encouraging festivalgoers to take Uber, a taxi, or a shuttle from Chicago or the hotel where theyre staying.

Other local craft breweries are hoping to capitalize off all the beer lovers coming to town. Flossmoor Station Restaurant and Brewery in Flossmoor is doing a bottle release of its BADiscoWagon Sour series No. 1 and No. 2, which was aged for 6 months in a Woodford Reserve Bourbon Barrel, at 5 p.m. Friday. 18th Street Brewing in Hammond is having its Barrel Massacre Friday afternoon to release bottles its barrel aged over the course of the year.

We will also have draft barrel aged beers of our own and featured guest drafts from FFF and SunKing Brewings Kings Reserve line of beers, Creative Director Joey Potts said.
CROWN POINT  Prosecutors allege that a suspected serial killer used the same pair of gloves to clean up crime scenes.

A swab taken from the outside of the gloves was consistent with the DNA profile of Afrikka Hardy and included a mixture of DNA from two other people, according to court records.

The information about the DNA evidence was included in Lake County Criminal Judge Samuel Cappas findings of fact and conclusion of law when he recently ruled that Darren Vann will be tried during one jury trial on charges accusing him of strangling to death Hardy and Anith Jones.

Vann has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder. The Lake County prosecutors office is seeking the death penalty against him.

He is scheduled to stand trial July 25.

In court last week, Cappas briefly indicated that he denied the defenses motion to separate the cases, which would have required two jury trials.

Vanns attorneys argued in their motion to sever the cases, because he could be convicted in one of the homicides based on evidence from the other homicide, based on the complexity of the evidence. They also argued the states theories as to the motives in the homicides were distinct.

In Cappas findings, it states the investigation into Vann produced overlapping evidence such as the statements he made to police and DNA found on a brown cord that is consistent with the DNA profiles for Hardy and Jones.

A swab taken from Vanns shoe also indicated there was a mixture of at least three people. According to court records, one of the profiles is consistent with Jones DNA profile.

The ruling also states that there wasnt enough reasoning to indicate that the evidence was so complex it would confuse jurors.

Cappas determined the alleged acts were of similar conduct and a series of acts connected together or constituted parts of a single scheme or plan, according to court records.

Among the similarities are that Hardy and Jones used backpage.com while working as prostitutes. The women also were killed within 10 days of each other in low-income areas, were paid to have sex, were strangled with a brown cord and had their cellphone stolen from them, according to court records.

Hardy, 19, had arranged to meet Vann at a Hammond motel room, according to court records. She was found strangled to death Oct. 17, 2014, inside the motel.

When Hammond detectives questioned Vann, he allegedly confessed to killing Hardy along with six other women, which included Jones, 35, of Merrillville. Her body was found in an abandoned home in Gary.

In a separate capital case, Vann faces murder charges in the homicides of Teaira Batey, Kristine Williams, Tracy L. Martin, Sonya Billingsley and Tanya Gatlin. He also has two other pending criminal cases in front of Cappas.

His next court hearing is scheduled for May 20.
EAST CHICAGO  A 29-year-old man is accused of molesting two girls last year at a home in East Chicago, according to court records.

Darrell L. McGee, of East Chicago, was charged this week with four counts of child molesting. A warrant was issued for his arrest.

The girls, who are 13 and 14 years old, told detectives that McGee touched them inappropriately, which escalated to forcing them to have sex with him, according to the affidavit. The girls told police he forced them to do sexually explicit things to themselves and each other.

McGee told detectives the girls were making false allegations against him. According to the affidavit, he said he had come in close contact with the girls while teaching them how to fight and how to get away from someone who was trying to harm them.
CROWN POINT  A Gary resident pleaded guilty Thursday to fatally shooting another man during a robbery.

Marcus A. Flanagan, 21, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of David Alexander Jr., 32, of Hammond. He could face 30 to 45 years in prison. He had previously faced a charge of murder.

Flanagan admitted to being with a group, which included Marvel Harper Jr. and Dontrel D. Hughes, on Dec. 16, 2012, in the 5600 block of Alice Avenue in Hammond. According to the plea agreement, a woman in the group called Alexander to buy drugs from him, but the group already had made plans to rob him.

When Alexander arrived at the Hammond home early the next day, the group beat and robbed him. Alexander at some point was able to break away from the group.

Flanagan admitted that he then fired shots at Alexander with one of the shots hitting Alexander in the head, according to the agreement.

He later died at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Illinois. The Cook County medical examiners office determined Alexander died from a gunshot wound to the head.

Flanagan admitted in the plea agreement that he fired the fatal shot that killed Alexander. When Judge Pro Tem Judge Thomas Vanes asked Flanagan how he pleaded to the charge of voluntary manslaughter, Flanagan answered, guilty.

He also pleaded guilty to aggravated battery, a Class B felony, in a separate shooting that happened Dec. 14, 2012, in the 6200 block of Monroe in Hammond.

According to the plea agreement, Flanagan and a co-defendant got out of a car and shot at a group of people. A man who was in the group was shot in the back, which later required him to undergo surgery on his intestine.

Flanagans sentence for the aggravated battery is expected to be served concurrently with the sentence imposed for the voluntary manslaughter charge.

Harper, 25, was a co-defendant in both cases. He pleaded guilty in 2013 to attempted robbery and aggravated battery for his role in the incidents. He is serving a 40-year prison term.

Hughes, 22, pleaded guilty in 2013 to attempted robbery and false informing for his role in Alexanders homicide. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Jonathan M. Lira, 22, was charged in the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting. Additional charges against him are still pending.

Flanagan had two other cases pending, which are expected to be dismissed during the June 17 sentencing hearing in front of Lake County Criminal Judge Samuel Cappas.
GARY  Two men shot at police officers attempting to serve one of them with several felony warrants Tuesday night in the city's Miller section, an official said.

No one was wounded in the shooting about 9 p.m. in the 5800 block of Hemlock Avenue, police said.

The Multi-Agency Gang Unit was at the Lakeshore Dunes Apartments when officers spotted the 27-year-old Chicago man wanted on warrants walk out of a building with a second man and get into a vehicle, Lt. Dawn Westerfield said.

Officers approached the vehicle, identified themselves as police and were met with gunfire from the passenger, she said.

Officers returned fire and retreated for cover. Police saw the 27-year-old run back into the building and up a staircase, which was visible through the windows, Westerfield said.

The Gary Police Department SWAT team responded and found the second man, later identified as a 28-year-old from Gary, hiding under a vehicle, she said. He was placed in a police car.

A SWAT team member persuaded the 27-year-old to exit the building and surrender, but the 28-year-old escaped from the police car during those negotiations and ran off, she said. Officers used a K-9 to track the man, but he was not located.

While police were searching for the man, a vehicle nearly hit a Lake County sheriff's officer in the 300 block of Lake Street. Police stopped the vehicle and took one person into custody on an unrelated warrant, Westerfield said.
PORTAGE  While few residents took advantage of having a one-on-one conversation with Police Chief Troy Williams on Thursday morning, Williams said he wasnt disappointed with the turnout.

I wanted to make myself available to people at a relaxed setting, Williams said sipping on a cup of coffee at Starbucks. I think we have a really great relationship with the community to begin with.

Four residents attended the first event, which Williams said hell host again, but possibly at a different time of the day or location.

One woman, who didnt want to be identified, wanted to tell Williams, who was joined by Capt. Mike Candiano and Capt. Lisa Duncan, of problems in her neighborhood.

Williams and the officers listened, telling her theyd step up patrols and check into the problems.

Other visitors like Tyler Rosenbaum and Stefani Trajceski said they just wanted to stop by and have a cup of coffee.

It gave Williams a chance to update residents on the progress of the new police station, which, he said should be completed in June or July and will host a public open house.
GARY  Officials said foul play was suspected Wednesday after workers placing road signs near Cline and Fifth avenues found a mans body.

Police responded about 12:15 p.m. to the ramp from northbound Cline Avenue to eastbound U.S. 20 and located the body about 20 feet from the road at the bottom of an embankment, officials said.

Because of the embankment, passing motorists likely could not have seen the body, Gary police Lt. Dawn Westerfield said.

It appeared the body could have been there for quite some time, Lake County sheriff's department spokesman Mark Back said.

The mans identity had not been determined as of Wednesday afternoon.

A Lake County coroners office release said the body was male, but listed no race and said the cause and manner of death were pending further investigation.

The body was found near two locations where, earlier this year, police found 26-year-old Fernando Verduzco, of Chicago, stabbed to death inside a car and a 26-year-old Bridgeview, Illinois, man whose throat had been slashed.

The Bridgeview man, who survived the brutal attack, was taken to a hospital after he was spotted trying to waive down cars near Cline and Chicago avenues. Verduzcos body was found in the backseat of a car at the Ivanhoe Nature Preserve in the 200 block of Hobart Street, which is east of Cline Avenue and north of Fifth Avenue.

Police said Fernando Verduzcos uncle, Carlos Verduzco, 40, of Laredo, Texas, went missing after the three were involved in a transaction gone bad Jan. 31. Police previously said they had no evidence to suggest the transaction was drug- or gambling-related.

Verduzco family members and police held a news conference in early February asking people to come forward with information about the mans disappearance.

Anyone with information about the body found Tuesday is asked to call Gary police Detective Sgt. Justen Illyes at (219) 755-3855. To remain anonymous, call (866) CRIME-GP.
After 39 successful years of servicing the Northwest Indiana community through her involvement in Meals on Wheels, art enthusiast and theater appreciator Sue DeGan, of Merrillville, plans to focus on some of her other passions as a new retiree.

DeGan has been involved with Meals on Wheels since 1977 when she supervised the program out of First United Methodist Church in Crown Point. For the past 10 years, DeGan managed the Merrillville delivery route calendars for Meals on Wheels of Northwest Indiana, which now operates primarily out of its location in Merrillville. Her job was to schedule volunteers for up to six delivery routes at a time, five days a week.

Up until recently, DeGan remained active on delivery routes by filling in when volunteers cancelled. She would drive every route at least once a month to ensure that houses were delivered to in a logical order, making the volunteers jobs easier.

DeGan also enjoyed training new volunteers by having them shadow her on delivery routes.

Volunteers get as much out of the experience as clients do, DeGan said. And people do get attached to clients. I get attached to the volunteers  theyre nice people.

Volunteer Manager Joan Vith enjoyed working with DeGan for several years and says she was great at keeping in touch with and visiting clients.

Sue is very active, Vith said. Im sure she will continue making plans in her retirement. Calendar prep always interrupted her busy social life, she laughed.

Outside of her work with the nonprofit, DeGan stays busy traveling to and from Chicago, her favorite place in the world besides the Indiana Dunes. She especially enjoys visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is a member of the Northwest Indiana chapter of Community Associates.

DeGans passion for the arts extends to the theater, and she regularly attends shows at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, the Goodman Theater, the Courte Theatre of the University of Chicago, and Chicago Street Theatre in Valparaiso.

In her retirement, DeGan plans to spend time with her family, which consists of her daughter, two sons, eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Her family has also dedicated time to Meals on Wheels in the past, as they would accompany DeGan on delivery routes when they came to visit her.

DeGans hope for the future is that people will continue to volunteer their time to Meals on Wheels.

If someone has time to give, even one day a month or more, theyre going to get more enjoyment out of it than they realize, DeGan said.

Founded in 1977, Meals on Wheels of Northwest Indiana is a nonprofit serving Lake County. Meals on Wheels delivers meals to those in need five days a week using community volunteers. Funding for meals is provided by individuals receiving meals, private foundations, grants and donations. More information about Meals on Wheels can be found at www.mownwi.org
KANDAL, April 28, 2016 -- Cambodian Minister of Mines and Energy Suy Sem speaks during the inauguration ceremony of a China-funded power transmission system in southern Kandal province, Cambodia, April 28, 2016. A China-funded power transmission system in the length of 100 km was inaugurated here on Thursday after four years of construction, officials said. (Xinhua/Sovannara)
GARY  The first time Gov. Mike Pence met Sen. Earline Rogers, she told him she was a retired teacher and was looking forward to sharing her opinions about education with him, he said.

Rogers, D-Gary, has been widely viewed as an education leader in Indiana in her nearly 34 years at the Statehouse, he said.

"Sen. Earline Rogers was a teacher to me in every sense of the word," Pence said.

Pence on Tuesday presented Rogers with the Sagamore of the Wabash, the highest honor Indiana's governor bestows.

Rogers announced in January she would retire and not seek re-election this fall to the Senate seat she's held since 1990. She previously served eight years in the House and two years on the Gary City Council.

When Pence first ran for office, his focus was on education. But prekindergarten education was not on his radar, he said.

"It didn't take too long after I arrived to hear from Sen. Earline Rogers about the fact that Indiana needed to consider crossing the threshold to open doors of equality to early childhood education in our state, particularly for disadvantaged children," he said.

A short time later, Pence accepted Rogers' invitation to visit Gary to observe a prekindergarten education program.

"I'll always believe that the best pre-K program anywhere is a prosperous family that can provide a child with enrichment in the home that every child deserves," he said. "The reality is, and not just in this community but in communities across the state of Indiana, is that many kids don't have the opportunity for that enrichment."

Pence said Rogers taught him there's a correlation between children who start out behind in kindergarten and later drop out of school.

"She said, 'What you don't understand is that this is more than just looking after kids younger than kindergarten. This is about catching up and making sure kids have the foundation that they might not otherwise be getting at home."

By Pence's second year in office, they were able to start a pilot program in five counties, including Lake, to provide funding for prekindergarten education. He pledged Tuesday to build on what he and Rogers started.

Pence said he was presenting Rogers with the award for her many years of public service.

Rogers said her career has been "quite a journey" and thanked her family members. She also thanked her fellow lawmakers attending the ceremony, including Reps. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, Hal Slager, R-Schererville, and Bill Fine, R-Munster.
LAPORTE  An 80-year-old man died following a two-vehicle crash Tuesday morning on Ind. 2 at County Road 450 East, police said.

Andrew Bladecki, of LaPorte, was taken by medical helicopter to Memorial Hospital in South Bend, where he was later pronounced dead.

LaPorte County sheriff's officers responded about 10:15 a.m. to the crash involving a tanker semitruck and a red 2002 Ford F-150 pickup.

David Jones, 62, of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, was driving the semitruck north on 450 East and crossing Ind. 2 when he pulled into the path of the westbound Ford F-150, police said.

Kankakee Township firefighters extricated the pickup driver, who was unconscious, police said. Memorial Med Flight landed on Ind. 2 just west of the crash site and took the driver to the South Bend hospital.

The semi, which was hauling milk, was struck on the right side and sustained a rupture to the fuel tank, police said.
WANATAH  Kankakee Valley REMC's Operation Round Up awarded more than $5,000 to two local organizations that help keep their communities safe.

Kouts Police Department received a grant of $2,537 for the implementation of a Child Find ID Program. Through this program, identification cards will be made available to children, elderly and the disabled in the community for location and emergency purposes.

The cards would have basic information, along with a photo, address, medical needs and phone number. In the event of an Amber or Silver Alert, the cards would be accessed to provide important information to the police.

Police Chief James Smith said they hope to roll out the program around June 1 after school lets out. He said the Child ID maker is mobile, so they can bring it to events like the Pork Roast or let the fire department use it. He also said other agencies like the Hebron Police Department may ask to use it.

"It's going to help different parts of the community," he said.

Operation Round Up also awarded the Morgan Township Volunteer Fire Department a $3,000 grant to purchase a grain rescue tube. Morgan Township and surrounding communities are approximately 80-85% agriculturally based. This includes many on-farm and local grain facilities. With the newly purchased equipment, the local fire department would be able to do a proper and safe rescue if a grain entrapment should occur. The Morgan Township Volunteer Fire Department has 20 members that respond to not only township incidents, but also provide mutual aid and auto aid for surrounding fire departments.

Safety is our number one priority at Kankakee Valley REMC," said communications/marketing director Amanda Steeb. "Working together with our local first responders and law enforcement strengthens the commitment we all share of keeping our community residents safe. We enjoy the opportunity to partner with an organization that mirrors our commitment to the community.

The Operation Round Up organization is funded by Kankakee Valley REMC members who participate each month by rounding up their electric bill, contributing an average of $6 per year. A few cents from each members bill adds up to a significant amount of assistance to organizations in the community. To date, the fund has given back over a million dollars to nonprofits in the community.

Kankakee Valley REMC, located in Wanatah, is a member-owned rural electric cooperative serving members throughout Starke, Pulaski, Porter, Lake, Marshall, St. Joseph and LaPorte County. For more information visit www.kvremc.com.
Graduating students were recognized and active participants were honored at the Purdue University Northwest Honors College awards banquet April 24.

All proceeds went to the Humane Society Calumet Area.

Every year Honors has a beneficiary, and students decide what group will benefit," said John Rowan, dean of the Honors College. This year was a particularly great partnership."

With the Humane Society celebrating its 75th anniversary, CEO Rachel Delaney presented a copy of the 75th anniversary Friends in Calumet South Shore Line poster as a thank you to the Honors College.

The Honors College has done a lot for the Humane Society, Delaney said. They helped with the donation drive, they had students and volunteers contribute at the facility. They are so important to what we do and have had a tremendous impact.

Speeches were given by PNW Chancellor Thomas Keon as well as Jessi Van Kley and Ray Kunnen, the Honors College presidents from both the Hammond and Westville campuses, respectively. Students from both campuses were recognized as award winners were announced in various categories.

Van Kley, senior English student, was not only recognized for graduating, but was also inducted to the Honors College Hall of Fame and presented with an award.

Its pretty exciting. It doesnt happen every year so its a little more prestigious, Van Kley said. Being surrounded by all these people pulling 3.9 GPAs and studying abroad, it means a lot to me.

Juan Juarez, freshman engineering student, was awarded the Most Outstanding Participant plaque and said he believes being involved on campus is important.

I think its a really big honor to recognize people who participate. Even at my old high school, it was really hard to find a way to get involved, Juarez said. In college, Ive been really dedicated to getting involved, so Im really happy to be recognized.

Rowan, who spent most of the night introducing the award winners, was presented with an award of his own for providing 10 Years of Excellent Service as dean of the Honors College.

I love these students. I consider myself the luckiest person in the world to do what I do, which is to help these people achieve their dreams, Rowan said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke out Thursday and defended his actions for the first time since news broke about City Hall being subpoenaed by federal and state prosecutors investigating his fundraising and political activities. NY1's Grace Rauh filed the following report.

As federal and state prosecutors drop subpoenas on top aides and City Hall, Mayor Bill de Blasio insists his team has done nothing wrong.

"We hold ourselves to the highest standard of integrity. Everything we have done from the beginning is legal and appropriate," de Blasio said. "There's an investigation going on. We are going to fully cooperate with that investigation. We look forward to the speedy conclusion of it. But we will fully cooperate."

De Blasio said little else as reporters trailed him. But he did add that he is feeling fine about the subpoenas, saying once again that his team followed the law.

Prosecutors are investigating the mayor's fundraising activities on behalf of himself and his nonprofit group, as well as his efforts in support of state Senate Democrats. Now, those closest to the mayor are being drawn in.

Emma Wolfe, the mayor's top political aide at City Hall, was subpoenaed, a source said.



"She is a highly regarded public servant whose integrity should not be questioned," said Karen Hinton, the mayor's press secretary.



A consulting firm founded by one of the mayor's top advisers, Jonathan Rosen, was also subpoenaed, according to a source. An NY1 investigative report last year took a close look at the firm, BerlinRosen.



Rosen said in a statement, "We're proud of the work we do for our clients. We have acted appropriately and in accordance with the law at all times."



A person familiar with the matter says the mayor's campaign fundraiser, Ross Offinger, was subpoenaed as well.

The mayor was not personally subpoenaed, but City Hall was. The mayor's spokeswoman says she does not know how many subpoenas were issued and to whom they were directed.



"We are about getting the people's business done, and we are continuing to work just as hard as we always have on those issues, whether it is affordable housing or education. We're working just like we do every day," Hinton said.



That may be the line from City Hall right now, but until this investigation is resolved, the mayor will likely find it dogging him every step of the way.


A controversial plan to build a futuristic park atop a pier in the Hudson River has cleared a key hurdle. Construction is now set to begin within months. NY1's Rocco Vertuccio has the story.



The Hudson River waterfront is getting a new public park that will be built over the water.

After some uncertainty, the Pier 55 project can now move forward. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has given the project its final green light despite some opposition.

"We consider ourselves to be stewards of the Hudson River, we're educators of the Hudson River, and we always knew that this project would meet all regulatory criteria," said Madelyn Wils, the Hudson River Park Trust president and CEO.

There will be an almost three-acre park built on pilings in the water where the old Pier 54 was located near West 13th Street.

The Hudson River Park Trust, media mogul Barry Diller, and his partner  fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg  are expected to pay for most of the $160 million project. The city will put up $17 million.

The park is slated to include grassy hills, wooded walking paths, an open air stage, and a separate area for large events. Many of the arts, cultural, and educational events are expected to be free.

"I think that the Diller-von Furstenberg foundation is doing a wonderful thing," one woman said. "I think we need more parks down here for people."

The project's approval is a defeat for the City Club of New York. The civic group sued to block the project because of the possible impact on fisheries and the bottom of the bay, and concerns that boaters will lose access to the water.

Earlier this month, a Manhattan judge dismissed the suit. Those who oppose it also say the project was pushed through will little public input.

"I would say there's a strong argument that money talks and that principles are secondary," said Rob Buchanan of the City Club of New York. "It's very concerning."

Opponents plan to appeal the judge's ruling and challenge the state's environmental permits and possibly the Army Corps of Engineers' permits.

Meanwhile, the trust plans to begin construction as early as the summer. It won't stop unless it receives a court order.
Q. Mr. Ramadan, tell me a bit about the opening exhibitions at Bait Muzna.

A. Mr. Ramadan: There are two events, plus performances, lectures and film screenings. The first is For the Love of Liquid Air, which is focused on the worlds ecological crisis. We have chosen films that reflect different societies relations to water, but also to the air, because these two elements somehow reflect on each other and share a lot of interesting dimensions.

The second is Posterlogia, a project based on what does not exist in Omani film. Historically in Oman, only about 22 professional films have been produced. We thought, What is preventing filmmakers and photographers from progressing on the film front? Though the technological knowledge is solid here, the history of cinema here is relatively new. So how do we stimulate new thinking? We gave artists, filmmakers and cinematographers the challenge to think of a film that does not exist and invited them to produce a poster for that film. So it is the reverse process of film production, where you use a scene from a film for a poster.

Q. There are also plans for a film festival in October.

A. Mr. Ramadan: The Bait Muzna International Art Film Festival will have an open call where art filmmakers can send films for selection. Our aim is to show at different venues in Muscat, maybe even across Oman. It will number about 40 or 50 films and they will include everything from short films to documentaries done by artists. The public will have chance to talk directly to those filmmakers and question their films, their concept and so on.

Q. What do you think could be the centers role in the region?

A. Mr. Ramadan: We very much want to be an inspirational institution  to get artists to think of film and cinematography and photography. We would like to call it an informative platform, one that allows them to be free, to experiment in a nonrestrictive way. We want to have an institution that is not an exhibition space only but a knowledge-producing institution.

We also have an educational program for curatorial studies. Almost no Omani curators exist, so we need a curatorial program to share knowledge and help them create networks with international curators so they can start to take Omani artists abroad.
The 44 minutes raced by (with the exception of Henry and Paige drinking beer at the Beemans house, and Henry commenting on a period-defining Brooke Shields ad for Calvin Klein jeans). Martha had bolted at the end of last weeks episode, and Gabriel warned Philip and Elizabeth that if she again threatened to expose them they might have to  well, you know.

The Soviets  which is to say Philip, Elizabeth, Hans and the anonymous woman at the call center, who contributed by giving Philip borscht  were up against the entire apparatus of the F.B.I.s Washington office, and of course they prevailed. The F.B.I. had determined that Clark was a false identity, had ransacked Clark and Marthas love nest and had even gotten a head start by wiretapping her parents phone, which led them to the Woodley Park neighborhood. But they never got a glimpse of her.

It was Elizabeth who got to Martha first, and that was frightening if you were on Team Martha. (You were worried from the moment Elizabeth said on the phone, Im close.) The sight of someone other than Philip was sure to be upsetting, possibly triggering Gabriels kill order; as Elizabeth slowly approached, you couldnt help wondering whether she was pushing for a violent conclusion. (Though that wouldnt really fit with the Elizabeth weve seen this season, a discrepancy in plotting and characterization thats been a slight but nagging problem in recent weeks.) When Martha predictably started to freak out, Elizabeth lunged, and it was hard to see exactly what she did  from Marthas gasping reaction, it could have been a shiv in the back. But it was just a hard punch to the kidney, and Elizabeth got Martha back to the safe house to prepare for her long trip.

The counterpoint F.B.I. scenes had their own poignancy, as Agent Gaad contemplated the end of his career and jumped on one final grenade in defense of Stan Beeman, who had angered a deputy attorney general by refusing to blackmail Oleg for information about Martha. Im in charge of F.B.I. counterintelligence, Gaad said, and my secretary married a K.G.B. officer. He and Stan were stumped  did she do it for money, or sex, or was she just that unhappy? With all of its resources, the F.B.I. is always behind the Soviets when it comes to exploiting the mysteries of the heart.

Those mysteries were on stark display in the episodes closing shots, as Elizabeth  who had counseled Philip to stay at the safe house and keep Martha calm  sat alone at home and stared at herself in the mirror. Philip, meanwhile, lay fully clothed in bed next to his other wife, staring at the ceiling as she stared at the wall. Pretty much like any other affair coming to an end, except for the treason and dead bodies.
Away in another part of a room  converted for the evening with fuchsia peonies and anemones and pale candles from the museums eighth floor cafe into an intimate dining hall  the actress Sally Field is deep in conversation with the museums director, Adam Weinberg. And Tommy Tune, the performer for whom the adjective ageless might as well have been coined, is chatting with Deeda Blair, whose significance as a figure on the neurobiological research scene is sometimes overshadowed by her perennially elegant appearance on the New York social one.

And Maria Giulia Prezioso Maramotti, the American retail director for Max Mara, the firm founded by her grandfather, is causing her mothers eyebrows to arch in consternation as she shows a new acquaintance the tattoo inside her left wrist and explains its significance.

Im obsessed with the blues, says Ms. Maramotti, whose company sponsored the evening and  unusually for an Italian company at a time when industrialists in Italy are under intense pressure to support their own cultural heritage  provides significant underwriting to this museum of American art.

Written in blue cursive, Ms. Maramottis new tattoo is the single word Crossroads, a reference to the Mississippi intersection where, according to legend, the bluesman Robert Johnson sold the devil his soul. Well, we all make our own deals.
Thirteen Democrats appeared on the ballot Tuesday in Baltimores mayoral primary elections. When the smoke cleared, Catherine Pugh, a 66-year-old state senator, had emerged as the winner, with 36.8 percent of the vote. Given the overwhelming Democratic vote in Baltimore, shes all but guaranteed to be the citys next mayor.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a story for the magazine about the race, a pivotal moment for the future of Baltimore. In a city already suffering from rampant poverty, failing schools, hypersegregation and insufficient transportation, the past year has been particularly bad. Last April, a 25-year-old black man named Freddie Gray died of spinal injuries sustained while in police custody. His death sparked outrage, property-damaging protests and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blakes decision not to stand for re-election. With 344 murders, 2015 was also the deadliest year per capita in the citys history. The city is in such need of radical change that each mayoral candidate campaigned on being the only leader who could provide it. Its worth stating here then that Pugh is almost certainly not that agent of change.

Pugh edged out her nearest competitor, the former Mayor Sheila Dixon, by 2.3 points. This happened, in part, because Pugh is not the former Mayor Sheila Dixon  who began her mayorship in 2007, as the first woman to hold the office, and ended it in 2010, after being convicted of embezzling funds intended for the citys poor. Pugh lost the election that ensued, to Rawlings-Blake. This year, she spent $1.1 million over the course of her campaign, picking up votes from those who had resolved not to give Dixon a second chance. (She most likely picked up more over the past month, as Nick Mosby dropped out of the race and endorsed her, and a dozen Baltimore lawmakers later endorsed her en masse.) And although Pugh has been installed in the citys political class since 1999, many of Baltimores young grass-roots activists cast votes for her instead of for DeRay Mckesson, a 30-year-old civil rights activist who has reached national fame over the last two years protesting police brutality. Mckesson has been the de facto face of the Black Lives Matter movement, but he has lived in the city only sporadically since leaving for nearby Catonsville, Md., in sixth grade, and boasts no legislative experience. He garnered 2.5 percent of the vote.

Pugh is firmly of the Baltimore establishment, and her platform was among the races least surprising. But Dixon already had her turn, and so this was Pughs. In this election, as in many local elections, that was enough.
HEFEI, April 28, 2016 -- Chinese President Xi Jinping(Gesturing) presides over a symposium on rural reform in Xiaogang Village of Fengyang County, east China's Anhui Province, April 25, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

BEIJING, April 28 -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for more efforts to advance rural reform to ensure a solid agricultural foundation and the well-being of farmers.

Xi made the remarks when he presided over a symposium on rural reform in Xiaogang Village of Fengyang County in east China's Anhui Province.

Addressing the symposium with local officials on Monday in Xiaogang Village, a major cradle of China's rural reform, Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said that work related to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers is at the top of the CPC's agenda.

The core of deepening rural reform is upholding and improving the basic rural operation system, sticking to collective ownership of rural land, adhering to the fundamental status of household management in agriculture, and insisting on keeping land-contracted relationships stable, said Xi.

Xi called for greater efforts to implement a pilot scheme to allow contracted rural land-use rights, noting that the separation of contract rights and operation rights is a major innovation in rural reform.

The key to the scheme is to respect the wishes of farmers, safeguard farmers' rights and interests and ensure grain production capacity, Xi said.

Xi stressed that developing modern agriculture, increasing farmers' income and building a new socialist countryside are the three major tasks in boosting rural development.

A modern agricultural industrial system, production system, management system and a group of skilled farmers should be fostered, Xi added.

Xi urged CPC officials at all levels to make more efforts to help farmers solve problems and increase their income as well as maintain rural stability.
Robert J. Cooper, whose unusual elderflower liqueur, St-Germain, introduced in 2007, was so completely embraced by the cocktail community that it became known as bartenders ketchup, died on Monday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 39.

His death was confirmed by Robyn Greene, the senior vice president for marketing and innovation at the Cooper Spirits Company, who said the cause was not immediately known.

Mr. Cooper was a scion of the family that owns Charles Jacquin et Cie, an old cordials and liqueurs house based in Philadelphia. By his account, his father, Norton J. Cooper, gave him the cold shoulder when he suggested creating an elderflower liqueur like the ones he had encountered in bars in London.

The younger Mr. Cooper persisted, however, going so far as to leave the family business to pursue his dream.
A new policy over bathroom choice has thrust the retailer Target into the center of a nationwide debate over gender identity, civil rights and privacy.

Last week, Target announced on its website that it would allow transgender employees and customers to choose the restroom and fitting room that corresponded with their gender identities. About a month earlier, North Carolina passed a law restricting bathroom access to transgender people, a bill that set off a national debate that has even extended to the presidential campaign.

The companys announcement  the most prominent position taken by a national retailer  was greeted by cheers from supporters of transgender rights. It has since also made Target the intense focus of conservative activists, lawmakers and consumers, who oppose the companys stance, highlighting the potential risks when a company takes a position on a hotly debated social issue.

Some groups have used Targets announcement as a rallying cry, arguing that Targets policy threatens the publics safety. An online petition started by one group, the American Family Association, calling for a boycott of Target stores, has been signed by more than 900,000 people. On Tuesday, the City Council in Oxford, Ala., passed an ordinance forbidding people to use a bathroom that does not match the gender assigned to them at birth. Target has a store in the city.
The office of Mayor Bill de Blasio has received subpoenas from federal and state prosecutors in connection with a series of overlapping investigations into his fund-raising activities, the counsel to the mayor said on Wednesday.

The subpoenas came from Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, and from the Manhattan district attorneys office.

City Hall has been subpoenaed, the counsel, Maya Wiley, said in a statement. We are fully cooperating with the investigation. The mayor has not been personally served.

The subpoenas went to at least one of Mr. de Blasios top aides, Emma Wolfe, according to a person familiar with the matter, and to Ross A. Offinger, his campaign finance director, according to another person familiar with the matter. It was not clear when they were received.
The Army Corps of Engineers has cleared the way for the creation of a 2.4-acre park on a pier in the Hudson River, with construction planned to begin as soon as this summer, officials said on Wednesday.

The project, which is expected to cost $130 million, has been led and is being financed in large part by the billionaire Barry Diller. It would replace a deteriorating pier at West 13th Street in Hudson River Park; the plans call for a pier over the water that has enough room for a park with performance spaces and wooded walking paths with rolling hills.

The project was announced almost two years ago, but it had to be approved by multiple agencies, including the Corps of Engineers, which had to modify an existing permit for the reconstruction of the pier, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which issued its permit last month. The City Club of New York, a civic organization, sued to block the project until a new environmental review had been conducted and the Legislature had approved the project, but a judge in Manhattan dismissed its lawsuit earlier this month.

Hudson River Park runs along the West Side of Manhattan from 59th Street to Battery Place. On Wednesday, in a statement announcing the Corps decision, Madelyn Wils, the president and chief executive of the trust that runs the park, said that the group was excited to be in a position to start construction.
Mr. Abeloves conduct flew in the face of the public concerns about potential conflicts of interest that arise when local district attorneys investigate local police officers  concerns that led to the executive order, the complaint says. Mr. Abeloves attempted five-day end run around Executive Order 147 reinforces and exacerbates these public concerns, the complaint says.

Through a spokesman, Mr. Abelove declined to comment on Wednesday.

Mr. Schneidermans special investigations and prosecutions unit, which he assigned to handle episodes in which civilians die in encounters with the police, has looked into several such cases since the executive order was issued, said Eric Soufer, a spokesman for the attorney general, who added that the local authorities have generally been cooperative. Only four cases were determined to involve civilians who were not armed and dangerous, prompting Mr. Schneiderman to intervene. Of those, three are still open investigations  one in Yonkers, one in Putnam County and one in the Bronx  and one has been closed. The closed case examined the death of Raynette Turner, a woman who died while in the custody of the Mount Vernon police. Mr. Schneidermans office found in March that the police were not responsible for her death.

According to the authorities, the shooting in Troy unfolded in the early hours of April 17, when Sgt. Randy French pulled over Edson Thevenin, 37, on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Mr. Thevenin fled in his vehicle, leading to a brief chase. The authorities said that when two police cruisers caught up to Mr. Thevenin, his car struck and pinned Sergeant French against his cruiser, prompting Sergeant French to open fire. He fired eight times; the police have declined to say how many times Mr. Thevenin was shot. Sergeant French was treated for minor leg injuries.

Jurisdictional questions were murky almost from the start: Mr. Schneidermans office sent investigators to the scene, but they were rebuffed by the local authorities, Mr. Soufer said. The next day, Mr. Abelove announced that one of Mr. Schneidermans investigators had told him the attorney general would not be investigating, only to be contradicted by the attorney generals office, which said it would review whether to take over the case. Mr. Schneidermans office followed up a day later with a letter to Mr. Abelove requesting the case files.

The lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Albany, says the attorney generals office told Mr. Abelove at least three times that Mr. Schneiderman was interested in the case.
Mr. Juarezs lawyer, Michael J. Croce, has argued his confession was coerced and should not be allowed into evidence. Detectives took him into custody around 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 11, 2013, near the restaurant where he worked in the West Village and interviewed him until just before 5 a.m. the next day. That interview was not recorded and the only accounting of it was a memorandum prepared by the detectives, based on their notes, days later, Mr. Croce said.

That memorandum was read in court on Tuesday by a detective, Evelin Gutierrez. It said Mr. Juarez denied killing Anjelica and blamed his sister Balvina Juarez Ramirez, who is now dead but at the time was the girls guardian. Mr. Juarez told detectives he had helped his sister dispose of the body. He also admitted he had had sexual intercourse with the girl, but said he did not know how she had died, Detective Gutierrez said.

Two hours later, Ms. Mourges, the prosecutor, arrived and began a new interview of Mr. Juarez, along with the lead investigator, Detective Robert Dewhurst, and Detective Carlos Vazquez, who acted as a Spanish interpreter.

At times Mr. Juarez seemed confused. He initially said he did not want to talk, but when he was shown the waiver to his right to silence that he had signed earlier in the morning, he agreed to answer questions.

He said he was living in the Bronx in 1991 but would sometimes stay at his sisters apartment in Queens on the weekends because it was closer to his job at the time. One night, he said, he got in late after work, while the house slept, and encountered Anjelica as she was coming out of the bathroom. He was drunk, he said.

Mr. Juarez said he led the girl to a spare bedroom and molested her, but denied he had intercourse with her. Told his story was unbelievable, he said he had smothered her with a throw pillow. You had the pillow in your hand and pushed it to her face? Ms. Mourges asked. In my hand, yes, he answered.

Then he said he woke his sister and asked for help. It was her idea, he said, to put the childs body in a cooler and leave it in a distant park. He described folding Anjelica in half, putting her in a garbage bag and tying it with a cord. He said they put cans of sodas on top of her. Then they took a cab to Upper Manhattan, carried the cooler into some woods off the Henry Hudson Parkway, and left it, he said.
Despite decades of fervent student protests that reached a peak last fall, the president of Yale announced on Wednesday that the university would keep the name of a residential college honoring the 19th-century politician and white supremacist John C. Calhoun.

The president, Peter Salovey, also said the university would name its two new residential colleges for Anna Pauline Murray and Benjamin Franklin. The selection of Ms. Murray, a legal scholar and civil rights activist who graduated from Yale Law School in 1965, represents the first time the school has honored either an African-American or a woman with the naming of a college.

Many students were perplexed by the selection of Franklin, who received an honorary degree from Yale. Franklin, like many other founding fathers, was once a slaveholder himself before he became involved in the abolitionist movement. Mr. Salovey explained that Franklin was a personal hero and role model of Charles B. Johnson, a businessman and Yale alumnus who donated $250 million to pay for the new buildings  the largest gift in the schools history  and who suggested the honor.

In a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Salovey said that while Mr. Johnsons gift was not contingent upon naming the college after Franklin, I really want you to remember this is the largest single gift ever given to Yale.
This unilateral approach makes for good television, but this is the real world, in which other nations have agendas, too. Mr. Trump says he is going to be working very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence. But how will he gain cooperation for his unpredictable war on the Islamic State while enforcing a pause that prevents Muslims from entering this country, and forcing those living here to register themselves?

How does one apply leverage on China necessary to rein in North Korea, while slapping a trade-killing tariff on Chinese imports? Its correct that many of our NATO allies arent paying their agreed-upon share of its costs  but what happens to the United States overseas bases if we walk?

While trumpeting Americas role in winning World War II and the Cold War, Mr. Trump simultaneously pronounced that America First, the 1930s isolationist theme that he quoted without attribution, will be the major and overriding theme of my administration. He did not bother to square that with his vow not to hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative. He condemned nation building, but said he aims to build regional stability, without explaining the difference.

Mr. Trump decried a shrinking American military and the deterioration of the nuclear arsenal. But he did not say how he would further build up the military  which has a budget this year of nearly $600 billion  while cutting government spending, which he also wants to do. And he seems to be ignorant of the sweeping $1 trillion effort to revitalize the nuclear force that is already underway.

Mr. Trump repeatedly states outright falsehoods, often based on wrong assumptions. Hes been refuted before on his claim that the Islamic State is making millions of dollars a week by selling Libyan oil. There is zero evidence of that. The nuclear deal with the United States and other major powers has not made Iran a great power, nor has Tehran violated the conditions of that pact, as Mr. Trump has said.
Hamburg  TRAVELING through the chilly landscape around the arctic city of Murmansk, Russia, it quickly becomes clear that this barren region is, in fact, a strategic centerpiece in President Vladimir V. Putins vast armory. The overland road from the Norwegian border passes by miles and miles of double-row fences of ice-crowned barbed wire, warning signs and surveillance cameras. Many of the gray, silent settlements along the way appear to be less towns than military installations, with soldiers in long, thick coats trotting through the streets.

But to grasp the full military import of this place, the Kola Peninsula  Russias northwestern-most territory  you would have to look down on it with thermal imaging from high above. Instead of ice, you would see a long stretch of land bathing in the relatively warm waters of the Gulf Stream. The Kola Peninsula is a gigantic marine pier, guaranteeing Russias naval fleet access to the Atlantic and offering a hub for operations in an area of the world that might well become the next crisis zone between Russia and NATO: the North Pole.

The area around the pole is not yet divided up among its adjacent states. Its waters  and potentially rich natural resources  are claimed by Russia, as well as by three NATO members: America, Denmark (via Greenland) and Canada. Many of these claims overlap.

Its not a purely lawless region: The United Nations Law of the Sea includes rules for settling such claims, largely based on how far the continental shelf of the respective country extends below the sea. These rules are supported by the White House, but they have yet to be ratified by the United States Congress, because Republicans are reluctant to leave the decision over Americas economic borders to a United Nations body.
Durham, N.C.  ON Monday, Judge Thomas D. Schroeder of Federal District Court in Winston-Salem, N.C., upheld legislation passed in 2013 that imposed far-reaching restrictions on voting across this state, including strict voter-identification requirements. Judge Schroeder justified his decision by claiming that robust turnout in 2014 proved that the law did not suppress the black vote. But in reality, his ruling defended the worst attack on voting rights since the 19th century.

That attack began almost immediately after a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, which weakened Section 5 of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Section 5 required federal pre-approval of changes to voting laws in places with a history of discrimination, including parts of North Carolina. Within hours of that ruling, lawmakers in Raleigh filed H.B. 589, proposing some of the toughest voting rules in the country. Referring to Shelby, one sponsor expressed his relief that curtailing voting protections could move forward now that the headache of the Voting Rights Act had been removed. The Legislature passed the bill, and it was signed into law by Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican.

The law eliminated voting rules that had enabled North Carolina to have the fourth best per capita voter turnout in the country. In 2012, 70 percent of black voters used early voting  and cast ballots at a slightly higher percentage than whites. Although black voters made up about 20 percent of the electorate, they made up 41 percent of voters who used same-day registration.

The North Carolina Legislature set out to change those figures and suppress minority votes. Its many impediments to voting all disproportionately affect African-American and Latino voters. None of their attacks would have survived pre-clearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. A Republican official defended the law this way: If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.
Photo taken on April 28, 2016 shows the launch of the Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket with three small satellites -- Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 from the newly built Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Far Eastern Amur region. [Photo: Xinhua]

Russia's newest spaceport, the Vostochny, or Eastern Cosmodrome, is officially operational, launching its first rocket this Thursday after a last-minute delay a day earlier.

A Soyuz rocket carrying three satellites has been successfully launched from the facility, which is located in the Amur region, just north of the border with China in the Russian Far East.

Igor Komarov is CEO of Russian state-run space firm Roscosmos.

"The ground facilities of Vostochny cosmodrome played a significant role today. As such, today is the day that the cosmodrome is put into official use. Ground facilities work well. I believe all systems work well. The Soyuz-2.1A rocket completed its 1,860th launch as usual, and fulfilled its mission. Now we will wait for the Volga propeller to boost equipment, which was developed by students, to orbit."

Russian President Vladimir Putin was on-hand for the launch, hailing it as a significant step forward in Russia's space program.

Construction of the new spaceport started in 2012, with costs estimated as high as 6-billion US dollars.

The new Cosmodrome has the capacity to launch rockets large enough to carry major payloads, including manned missions.

Moscow is hoping the new facility will ease its dependence on the use of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

While facility is Russian-operated, the Russian government has to lease it from the Kazakh government for 115-million US dollars a year.
A voice on the video could be heard saying Taser, Taser. A moment later, there was a single gunshot, and a voice saying: Oh, I shot him. Im sorry.

Mr. Harris, who was black, was unarmed. Mr. Bates is white.

The defense called Mr. Harriss death an excusable homicide and argued that methamphetamine in his system and his cardiac health caused his death, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Batess lawyer, Clark O. Brewster, said an appeal would be filed.

The shooting prompted several investigations, which revealed that Mr. Bates, a close friend of Sheriff Stanley Glanz and a volunteer reserve deputy since 2008, had donated thousands of dollars in cash, vehicles and equipment. Also discovered was a 2009 memo that questioned Mr. Batess qualifications.

Sheriff Glanz defended the program. He told The Tulsa World that Mr. Bates was an old friend who made an error.
Horace Ward was his high school valedictorian, graduated with honors from Morehouse College in Atlanta in only three years and earned a masters degree from Atlanta University. But when he applied to the University of Georgias law school in 1951, he was reflexively rejected because of his race, his qualifications notwithstanding.

With the support of Thurgood Marshall and others, Mr. Ward later sued, challenging the universitys policy of racial exclusion. The suit was eventually dismissed as moot  by then he had gone to another law school, outside Georgia  but it laid the groundwork for the universitys desegregation a decade later.

After graduating from Northwestern Universitys law school in 1959, he was named Georgias first black federal judge in 1979. His swearing-in took place in the same courtroom where his lawsuit seeking admission to the university had been thrown out.

Judge Ward, 88, died on Saturday in Atlanta. His death was confirmed by the University of Georgia, which awarded him an honorary law degree two years ago. Sharon Lane, his former legal assistant, said the cause was heart failure.
SOUTH

Tennessee: Law Gives Counselors Religious Exemption

Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill Wednesday that allows mental health counselors to refuse to treat patients based on the therapists religious or personal beliefs. The American Counseling Association called the legislation an unprecedented attack on the counseling profession and said Tennessee was the only state to ever pass such a law. Opponents say the legislation is part of a wave of bills around the nation that legalizes discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Supporters say it protects the rights of therapists. The bill does not allow counselors to turn away people who are in imminent danger of harming themselves or others. It requires them to refer patients to other therapists if they decline to treat them.

(AP)

MIDWEST

Missouri: Religious Exemptions Bill Fails to Advance

A measure to amend the State Constitution to give legal protections to people who refuse service to same-sex couples because of sincere religious belief was defeated in a House committee on Wednesday, making it unlikely that lawmakers will take up the bill before the end of their session in mid-May. Three Republicans joined three Democrats to vote against the bill, resulting in a split vote that effectively killed it. The measure would still have required approval by the House before it would have been placed on the ballot for a statewide referendum in November. Opponents and legal scholars said it was overly broad and would effectively make prosecuting hate crimes impossible. Todd Richardson, the House speaker, said in a statement that he was disappointed by the vote but that he remained committed to fighting for the religious freedoms of all Missourians.

JULIE BOSMAN

Wisconsin: Conservative Justice to Retire

Justice David Prosser of the State Supreme Court announced Wednesday that he planned to retire this summer after nearly 18 years on the court. He did not give a reason. Justice Prosser, 73, one of five conservative-leaning justices who control the court, made headlines in 2011 when he placed his hands around the throat of a liberal-leaning justice, Ann Walsh Bradley, during an argument over the timing of the release of a divided Supreme Court decision upholding Gov. Scott Walkers signature law restricting public workers collective bargaining rights. Mr. Walker, a Republican, has the power to appoint a successor to finish the justices term, which ends in 2021.

(AP)

NORTHWEST

Washington: Judge Says Trash Rule Violates Privacy

An environmental effort in Seattle to stop residents from tossing food scraps and other compost into the trash was ruled unconstitutional on Wednesday by a judge who said sanitation workers collectors poking through peoples garbage violates privacy rights. Judge Beth M. Andrus of King County Superior Court voided enforcement of the city ordinance. The rule went into effect early last year, and it required trash collectors to tag garbage cans that contain more than 10 percent compostable material with education information. Lawyers for a group of homeowners who sued the city said it made garbage collectors snoop through trash like police detectives. Judge Andrus wrote that trash collectors search of garbage is a disturbance of peoples private affairs.

(AP)
Reeling from their losses in Tuesdays Democratic and Republican primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas abruptly reordered their campaigns on Wednesday, aiming to preserve some small hope that the race might yet turn in their favor.

Mr. Cruz named a running mate, Carly Fiorina, to help bring down Donald J. Trump, the Republican favorite, and both spoke of Mr. Trump in the language of relentless opposition, casting him as a sinister figure who must not be allowed to become president.

On the Democratic side, Mr. Sanders said he would scale back his upstart bid for the White House and lay off hundreds of campaign workers, a measure seemingly intended to extend the life of his candidacy but not to prepare for a general election.

In an interview, Mr. Sanders acknowledged in the strongest terms yet that Hillary Clintons delegate lead might have closed off his path to the nomination, and he was less combative toward his partys front-runner in his moment of apparent defeat, taking a tone of cold realism, if not quite resignation.
Fifty years after the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when Mao Zedong and the Communist Party called on young people to beat, smash, loot and burn in a rebellion against authority and tradition that left millions dead, Chinese today are living with the psychic consequences of that tumultuous decade, says Tomas Plankers, a psychoanalyst at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt.

For unlike in Germany after World War II or Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, free public debate is impossible. The party that unleashed the Cultural Revolution continues to rule China, leaving many people with buried personal and intergenerational trauma, and an inner totalitarian object, said Dr. Plankers, who with Western and Chinese colleagues conducted a multiyear research project in the 1990s on the psychological legacy of those years. One result of that research is his edited volume, Landscapes of the Chinese Soul: The Enduring Presence of the Cultural Revolution. In an interview, he discussed his findings.

Q. Its been half a century since the Cultural Revolution began. Many of the perpetrators are elderly or have died. Is it really still important?

Image Dr. Tomas Plankers Credit... Dr. Tomas Plankers

A. Indeed, the topic really could disappear from individual memory and public discourse. Which doesnt change the fact that it will carry on in the unconscious. These are themes that arent tied to time. It has been well demonstrated with the Holocaust in Germany that the psychic consequences dont stop with one generation. They go into the second, third, fourth. They stay around somewhere in the culture.
Harry Wu, who was brutalized for 19 years in Communist Chinese prison labor camps and who had ever since then refused to let the world overlook human rights violations in his former homeland, died on Tuesday in Honduras, where he was vacationing. He was 79.

His death was confirmed by Ann Noonan, administrator of the Laogai Research Foundation in Washington, which Mr. Wu founded in 1992.

Mr. Wu, the son of a wealthy Roman Catholic family from Shanghai, was arrested in 1960 when he was 23 and just short of graduating from college. He was accused of criticizing the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of being insufficiently supportive of Mao Zedongs regime.

He later wrote that he had not initially been told why he was imprisoned, but that eventually a guard opened my file and said, You are a counterrevolutionary rightist and you are sentenced to life.
BERLIN  Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday replaced the chief of Germanys foreign intelligence service. The move caught many by surprise as Europe faces growing pressure from Islamist terrorism and as the chancellor looks ahead to a general election next year.

Peter Altmaier, Ms. Merkels chief of staff, said the decision to replace the spy chief, Gerhard Schindler, was a response to the challenges the intelligence agency faced, including new security threats and reforms being considered by a parliamentary oversight committee.

The committee was formed after revelations by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, that Washington had tapped the chancellors personal cellphone in 2013. Last year, agents in Mr. Schindlers agency told the committee that they had carried out searches at the behest of the National Security Agency, without questioning whether they were in compliance with German law.
NUREMBERG, Germany  If the urgent challenge for Germany last year was sheltering the hundreds of thousands of people who descended on the country almost at once seeking asylum, then this years task is to integrate them.

But before that can happen, there is sifting to do. Lots of it.

More than a million migrants have arrived in Germany, but the government emphasizes that far fewer will stay. So far, only 660,000 have permission to remain, officials said. And the federal government has urged Germanys 16 states to double last years total of almost 60,000 deportations.

To whittle down the numbers, the authorities are halting family reunifications for two years and rejecting tens of thousands of applicants from the Balkans, Algeria and Morocco, arguing that these countries are not at war.

The task of deciding who will stay and who will go has fallen to officials like Frank-Jurgen Weise, 64, who has led Germanys sprawling federal employment agency, based here in Nuremberg, since 2004.
GENEVA  The United Nations special envoy for Syria closed two weeks of talks with warring parties on Thursday without setting a date for the next round, and he urged Russia and the United States to revitalize a collapsing cease-fire.

After briefing the United Nations Security Council by video link from Geneva late Wednesday night, the envoy, Staffan de Mistura, told reporters that he hoped to reconvene the indirect negotiations he has been mediating in Geneva sometime in May. But he made it clear that global powers first needed to revive the cessation of hostilities they negotiated at the end of February.

The truce sharply reduced hostilities in March and allowed aid groups to deliver humanitarian supplies to starving civilians in besieged areas. But United Nations officials say the Syrian government has stalled aid deliveries in recent weeks, and Mr. de Mistura acknowledged that an escalation in fighting had left the truce barely alive.

Much the same could be said of the indirect talks he conducted in an effort to broker a political solution to Syrias five-year-old civil war. Mr. de Mistura opened a third round of discussions with government and opposition negotiators two weeks ago, stating his intention to focus on the terms of a political transition.
The cost of the entire project remains undisclosed. That, we try not to really talk too much about, Ms. Hollander said.

The performances of Fly by Night are free, but seats must be reserved online, and theres a waiting list.

The illuminated birds may be visible from other nearby vantage points, like the Williamsburg Bridge or the Farragut public housing complex in Fort Greene, but not in any predictable way. This was made apparent on Saturday when one cluster of pigeons headed for Downtown Brooklyn.

Keep an eye on that piece! Mr. Riley called out from the Baylander. I want to make sure they come back here and dont end up going to somebody elses coop.

The pigeons are trained only to return eventually to the ship, not to fly specific patterns; their choreography is entirely their own.

After about half an hour, Mr. Riley laid down his flag, the lights went on inside the coops, and as the lilting dancehall reggae song Pigeon Rock, by Sister Nancy, played over loudspeakers, the birds returned home, though a few stragglers tarried, forming points of light on nearby rooftops.

Soon, there was a silhouette in every coop window, and Mr. Riley declared the practice a success. The birds seemed to fly pretty well, he said. Usually, people want their birds to fly in tight bundles. Some guys dont like it when one bird will fly off by itself. But I like that  some pigeons doing their own thing, acting of their own free will.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said Thursday China will never allow war or chaos on the Korean peninsula as he urges talks on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue at an Asian regional security meeting.

Commenting on a number of regional security issues, the president called for strengthened security cooperation and dialogue among regional governments and the establishment of an Asian community of common destiny.

The Chinese President was addressing a Foreign Ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, or CICA.

The two-day meeting in Beijing has taken place this Wednesday and Thursday.

Speaking to a room full of foreign dignitaries, Xi Jinping has touched on a number of hot-button issues in Asia right now, including the tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

"As a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China has implemented relevant Security Council resolutions fully and faithfully. As a close neighbor, we will never allow war or chaos on the Korean peninsula, as this serves nobody's interests. We hope that various parties will exercise restraint, avoid mutual provocation and escalation of tension and make a joint effort to bring the nuclear issue back to the track of dialogue and negotiations as early as possible and walk towards peace and security in northeast Asia."

North Korea has insisted it needs to continue developing its nuclear weapons program as a deterrent to a possible invasion by the United States and South Korea.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has also touched on the territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

"China is committed to maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea. We firmly stand by our sovereignty, our rights and interests in the South China Sea. But we also remain committed to resolving disputes peacefully through friendly consultations with the countries directly concerned. We will continue to work with ASEAN countries to make the South China Sea a sea of peace, friendship and co-operation."

The Chinese President says peace and economic prosperity are priorities for everyone in Asia.

Touching on existing security issues and terrorism, Xi Jinping is calling for more regional cooperation, saying he'd like to see the creation of what he calls an "Asian community of common destiny."

Meanwhile, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, as the host this year's event, has chaired a roundtable discussion about the status of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia itself.

"CICA's non-governmental forum and the sixth think tank forum will encourage all sides to actively discuss how to establish a new Asian security structure on the level of non-governmental project under track-two diplomacy, or nongovernmental and unofficial diplomacy. At the center of this, we will hold practical discussions on how to establish the hot issues coordination mechanism, how to implement anti-terrorism and law enforcement cooperation, and how to jointly guarantee the safety of the One Road One Belt project."

The Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia was first established in 1992 following the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

It was set up as a way to keep lines of communication open among the newly-formed governments in the former Soviet sphere and other countries in Asia.

Today, it has 26 member states, including China, Russia and India.

Other countries, including the US and Japan, along with a number of international organizations, attend the meetings as observers.

China last hosted the CICA leaders' summit in 2014.
TWO brawny construction workers perch on a plank dangerously suspended hundreds of feet off the ground in Men of Steel, a print that hangs in an exhibition at New York Universitys Grey Art Gallery. The men are heroic figures intent on their task  bolting a horizontal beam to a column.

In a nearby display case, there is a greeting card illustrated with a snowy woodland scene called Peaceful Valley, depicting deer standing stock-still between gnarled trees.

Both etchings are by Samuel L. Margolies, who is best known for his New York cityscapes from the 1930s. And looking at them together  one a dynamic composition with pointed political undertones done by the artist at the peak of his powers, the other static, unconvincing and entirely tame  might be puzzling for some.

For me, its almost painful.

Im the artists granddaughter. I didnt know my grandfather well  he was estranged from the family and died in 1974, when I was 16  but Ive spent a good part of the last two years piecing together his life and, in the process, trying to understand how an artist whose work hung in the Whitney Museum of American Art alongside Edward Hoppers could also have been capable of such, well, schlock.
Four days after the elaborate release of Lemonade, an intensely personal album about infidelity, self-worth and forgiveness, Beyonce debuted many of her new songs live on Wednesday at Marlins Park in Miami. The concert was the opening night of her 41-date Formation world tour, which runs until August.

Beyonce drew largely from her most recent albums for the two-hour set, mixing the hurt and anger of songs from Lemonade  Sorry, Hold Up, Dont Hurt Yourself  with more euphoric numbers from her 2013 self-titled release. Deeper throwback numbers included Baby Boy, Naughty`` Girl and, from Destinys Child, bits of Survivor and Bootylicious.

The show also featured a partial singalong to Purple Rain by Prince, who died last week at 57, and wove in musical cues from the catalog of Beyonces husband, Jay Z, whose role in Lemonade has been a source of speculation and gossip since its release. (The album was initially available exclusively on Tidal, the streaming service he owns.)

I want to dedicate this song to my beautiful husband, Beyonce said before closing the show with Halo, a ballad from 2008. I love you so much. (Jay Z, while present at the show, did not appear onstage.) She added, Prince, thank you for your beautiful music.
Maybe youve been waiting for Ricky Gervais to write and direct a completely conventional comedy, the kind that begins with slow-motion nighttime pans of the New York skyline and ends with the nebbishy hero and his nerdy love interest walking off toward the horizon. In that extremely unlikely event, youll want to check out Special Correspondents, available Friday around the world on Netflix.

There is now a sufficient sample size to conclude that there are two Ricky Gervaises: the caustic, ruthlessly funny one of The Office, Extras (at times) and the Golden Globes; and the stickily sentimental one of Derek, The Invention of Lying and Special Correspondents. Everything that works when hes being mean  the mix of bluster and tentativeness, the blissfully pure narcissism  turns flat and dully sentimental when he tries to be nice.

He may have been starting out at a disadvantage  the new film, an uneasy combination of rom-com and bromance, is an adaptation of the 2009 feature Envoyes Tres Speciaux, and based on a French comedy are not the most auspicious words in the English language. He stars as Ian Finch, a milquetoast sound engineer for a radio network, alongside Eric Bana as Frank Bonneville, a swaggering reporter.

It doesnt help that Mr. Gervaiss ideas about journalism and celebrity seem either radically outdated or simply wrongheaded, beginning with the idea that theres such a thing as a swaggering radio reporter. Frank is the type of imaginary journalist who gets to crime scenes by monitoring the police scanner kept for him under the bar at his local pub and then talks his way in by pretending to be a detective. When trouble breaks out in Ecuador, Frank and Ian are dispatched, but Ian accidentally throws away their plane tickets, passports and cash.
OTTAWA  The Canadian plane maker Bombardier said on Thursday that Delta Air Lines had agreed to buy 75 of its new CSeries airliners, a deal that could bring stability to Bombardiers attempts to challenge Boeing and Airbus directly.

Based on list price, Bombardier said the Delta order, for the CS100 aircraft, was worth about $5.6 billion. Like automobile buyers, however, airlines generally do not pay the posted price, and Delta is known as a canny negotiator. Delta has taken options for an additional 50 aircraft beyond the 75.

Stumbles within Bombardier, combined with particularly aggressive competition from its larger rivals, had led many analysts to question Bombardiers decision to try leveraging its success in the market for small regional jets by building an airplane that could compete directly with the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320.

The support from a major airline, after a recent letter of intent from Air Canada to buy 45 of the CSeries planes, may begin to dispel speculation that Bombardier may have to abandon the project. The development of the CSeries has created a financial drain for the company, which struggled to find buyers.
LONDON  Deutsche Bank said on Thursday that its profit fell 58 percent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, because of challenging conditions in the financial markets at the beginning of the year and its decision to exit some businesses.

The bank, which is Germanys largest, is in the midst of an overhaul. John Cryan, who joined the lender as co-chief executive in July, seeks to simplify the company and improve its returns.

In October, Mr. Cryan announced plans to eliminate as many as 35,000 jobs through internal cuts, shutter its operations in 10 countries and cut the number of its investment banking customers in half.

For the three months ended March 31, Deutsche Bank reported a profit of 236 million euros, or about $268 million, compared with a profit of 559 million, or $634 million, in the first quarter of 2015.
LONDON  The European tourism company TUI Group said on Thursday that it had agreed to sell Hotelbeds Group to the private equity firm Cinven and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for 1.19 billion euros, or about $1.3 billion.

Hotelbeds, TUIs wholesale hotel-room booking business, was not considered part of its core business and had been operated separately. It provides hotel bookings to travel agencies and tour operators in more than 120 countries.

In the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, Hotelbeds had revenue of 1.06 billion.

This is a very successful transaction  a good deal for the future of Hotelbeds and for TUI Group shareholders as well as our continued growth in our core tourism business, Friedrich Joussen, the TUI chief executive, said in a news release.

TUI said that it would use the proceeds from the sale for growth opportunities in its core business and to strengthen its balance sheet.
Its so easy to substitute or add apps that its not even clear Googles agreements with manufacturers would be deemed tying arrangements. I dont think they meet the requirement, said Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert at the University of Iowa College of Law. Theres almost no limit to your ability to add additional apps or to delete the Google app and substitute a different one.

Of course, theres obviously an advantage to being the default app, or else Google wouldnt be paying Apple such a large sum. On the other hand, anyone can change if theyre unhappy, Professor Hovenkamp said.

Nor do manufacturers have to preinstall any Google apps on devices using Android, which is an open source system, available free. Amazons Fire was an Android mobile device with a built-in Amazon shopping app, but it didnt come with Google Play or Search preinstalled. Fire was deemed a flop, in part because it lacked popular Google apps like Gmail and Maps.

Even if Google is found to be using a tying arrangement, thats not necessarily illegal or bad for consumers. Scott Hemphill, an antitrust professor at New York University School of Law, said tying arrangements are common across a wide array of products and industries. No one complains because they dont have a choice of transmission manufacturers in their cars, Professor Hemphill said.

These same issues were raised last year in a class-action suit in a Federal District Court in California.

The two named plaintiffs both bought Android phones, one in Louisville, Ky., the other in Des Moines, Iowa, and complained that they hadnt realized they came with Google search already installed. Judge Beth Labson Freeman of Federal District Court struggled to find any evidence that either had suffered any harm.
Mr. Wallace singled out CNN as a notable offender. Would he include Fox in that group? Absolutely, he replied.

And asked if Foxs right-leaning commentators, who often support the Republican nominee in presidential years, would rally around a Trump candidacy, Mr. Wallace laughed. Thatll test it, wont it? he said. I dont know. Itll be interesting to see.

Mr. Wallace, 68, is a registered Democrat  in order to vote in local Washington elections, he explains  and he spent decades as a correspondent on NBC and ABC before joining Fox in 2003. The move to Fox prompted him to review what he calls his unexamined assumptions about traditional network news.

If theres a story on same-sex marriage, its like this is a celebration of a new civil right, Mr. Wallace said. Im not saying I disagree with that. What Im saying is there are two sides to the story, and I dont think, generally speaking, the broadcast networks will portray both sides evenly.

Wry and punchy on-air, Mr. Wallace has long had a rebellious streak. Bill Clinton accused him in an interview of having a little smirk on your face; Newt Gingrich goaded a crowd into mocking him at a 2011 debate; President Obamas refusal to appear on his show prompted Mr. Wallace to describe his administration as crybabies. (Mr. Obama ended his drought this month, in an interview that lured millions of viewers.)

In the Fox studio in Washington on Sunday, Mr. Wallace could not resist making mischief. After grilling Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Mr. Wallace reassured her during a commercial break that the segment had gone fine.
WASHINGTON  Potentially giving congressional Republicans new ammunition in their crusade against the Internal Revenue Service, the agency on Thursday said that annual unpaid taxes had increased to nearly half a trillion dollars.

In its latest analysis of what is commonly called the tax gap, the I.R.S. said there were average unpaid annual taxes of $458 billion for 2008 to 2010, a slight increase from $450 billion in 2006, the last year for which an analysis was conducted.

The agency said the increase resulted largely from new, more precise estimates and represented no significant change in the amount of the tax gap or the rate of compliance.

Still, the I.R.S. has been under pressure from congressional Republicans who have simultaneously cut its budget and excoriated the agency for operational deficiencies. But while Republicans could criticize the lack of any reduction in the tax gap, they also could face questions about their own aggressive efforts to slash the agencys budget and staff.
Id like to be for cinema what William Shakespeare was for theater, Marx for politics, and Freud for psychology, the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder is quoted as having said in the Danish director Christian Braad Thomsens documentary study, Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands.

Fassbinder, who died in 1982 at 37, was an extreme workhorse whose stupendous output  more than 60 films and two television series, not to mention plays  was accomplished with little sleep and an indifference to his physical well-being. Copious drugs and alcohol were consumed to keep up the pace. Mr. Thomsen, who directed this reverent tribute, met Fassbinder in 1969 at the Berlin International Film Festival, where his early movie Love Is Colder Than Death was booed. Fassbinder, unruffled, dismissed the Berlin critics as provincials and remarked, At least they reacted. Over the coming years, Mr. Thomsen interviewed the director and became a close friend.

The access to Fassbinder that the relationship provided was a boon to the film, but a disadvantage as well because the close-up view results in a patchy portrait rather than a coherent biography. The documentary assumes a familiarity with Fassbinders movies that few American viewers possess. There is no film-by-film analysis of his major works, which include The Marriage of Maria Braun and Berlin Alexanderplatz, or the connection from one to the next.

What is emphasized is Fassbinders obsession with family. The film examines him through a Freudian lens, paying special attention to his mother, Lilo Pempeit, who appeared in many of his films and whose voice is heard in audio interviews. After World War II, Fassbinder was brought up in Munich by an ever-changing group of adults who lived in a house in which he enjoyed almost unlimited freedom. As his career developed, his filmmaking colleagues and troupe of actors became a surrogate family.
A bus has caught fire on the FuzhouYinchuan Expressway in Northwest Chinas Shaanxi on April 28, 2016. Eight were confirmed killed, and five more were injured.

The fire is now ceased and traffic resumed. Police suspect the bus was hijacked and set on fire by someone deliberately, but has denied that its a terrorist attack. Further investigation is underway.
On their show, Mr. Key and Mr. Peele turned code switching into an aesthetic principle, most famously in their sketches involving President Obama (brilliantly channeled by Mr. Peele) and his Anger Translator, Luther (Mr. Key). In Keanu, once Rell and Clarence start hanging with Cheddars group, they swap their everyday speech (good English) for tougher, rougher talk and haphazard grammar. They drop their final gs, sprinkle on the aints and vamp like gangbangers. Its a metamorphosis that sounds like conceptual gold, as Mr. Key and Mr. Peele  drawing from the comedy of masquerade and playing with racially coded speech and behavior  turn a pair of amusing milquetoasts who happen to be black into black stereotypes right out of central casting.

Rell and Clarence are performing thuggery, at least at first, walking the bad-man walk and talking the talk while frantically looking for the exit. And despite the sluggish passages and hum of unease, its fun watching these performers play with cliches amid a guest visit from Anna Faris and the sight of Clarences minivans becoming a safe space for gangsta sharing and caring. (The director is Peter Atencio, another Key & Peele veteran.) But as the genre machinery chugs along, the bang-bang begins to overwhelm the movie, and the underlying critique gives way to a what-me-worry shrug. Keanu may be Rell and Clarences power animal. But hes no match for Liam Neesons, the character whom Mr. Key and Mr. Peele named in honor of the Hollywood hepcat who explodes minds and bodies both.

Keanu is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bang bang, bleep bleep. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
The story of a mathematical partnership is told in the film The Man Who Knew Infinity, written and directed by Matthew Brown. It looks at the early 20th-century collaboration between Srinivasa Ramanujan (Mr. Patel), a shipping clerk who was in truth a mathematical genius, and G. H. Hardy, a lecturer at Trinity College at Cambridge University.

In this scene, Mr. Ramanujan, who lives in India and has been invited to Cambridge by Mr. Hardy, is discussing his proofs with the professor, who says they have not been up to par. During an interview in New York, Mr. Brown discussed the scene and his film. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

Q. What is at the core of this scene and the film?

A. This is a story of two very different men. Ramanujan believed that for him, an equation had no meaning unless it expressed a thought of God. For G. H. Hardy, he was an atheist who was all about rigor and proof. Whats fascinating to me about this scene is that its the moment where these two confront one another about their philosophical differences.

What was exciting for you shooting this scene?

We had so many interior scenes behind desks and in classrooms. This is one of the few scenes we got outside and we were able to incorporate some Steadicam and movement to what is some heavy, serious dialogue. Trinity College allowed us to shoot on their campus, which is the first time theyve allowed that to happen.
The injury becomes the justification for one of those fraught family reunions filled with awkward silences, furious eruptions and hushed huddles. Caleb and Camille have faded, becoming art-history footnotes, but their hold on their children remains. Thats the story, at any rate, though it takes time to buy that any of these folks are related, partly because the more famous actors overwhelm their roles. In their early scenes together, the recessive Mr. Bateman (hes an actor against which other actors bounce) and the industrious Ms. Kidman (you can see her working even when she goes blank) come across as two people whove just met. Its especially implausible that their quirky yet bland characters could have sprung from the loins of an extraterrestrial like Mr. Walken.

Everything shifts in a dinner scene when the family relations emerge with geometric clarity: the charming, domineering father whos oblivious to the nervously accommodating mother and the exasperated, haplessly stuck adult children. Mr. Batemans direction of the actors is especially sensitive in this and other tricky scenes, showing a delicacy with emotional textures that isnt always matched by the story, especially when Annie and Baxter speak in therapeutic cliches. Thankfully, most of these spill out late after the story has jumped around in time, toggling between the present and flashbacks to Caleb and Camilles happenings (Jason Butler Harner and Kathryn Hahn play the younger versions). Those scenes expose the dangers of their performances but also the thrill. The tragedy isnt that Caleb and Camille cant tell the difference between art and life, but that they could make only one seem important.

The Family Fang is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Adult language. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.
We first meet the young, married Ramanujan in a temple in Madras (now Chennai) in India, scrawling mathematical notations like a man possessed. Despite the skepticism of his British boss (a haughty Stephen Fry, barely seen), Ramanujan contacts Hardy (Jeremy Irons) at Trinity with his ideas. And soon he leaves his wife and mother for England. Initially resistant to proofs, he eventually delivers the goods  which yield, among other things, discoveries in the partition of numbers  defying Cambridge bigots and warming the heart of the clinical, atheistic Hardy, as well as those of the scholars Bertrand Russell (Jeremy Northam) and J. E. Littlewood (Toby Jones).

Tidy production values are present (Cambridge locations lend verisimilitude), as is a convenient historical omission (specifically, the real Mr. Ramanujans marriage to a 10-year-old girl when he was 21). Mr. Irons handily hits the emotional beats, as does Mr. Patel, as Ramanujan confronts incipient tuberculosis. But perhaps Mr. Patel is now ready to try his hand at a sinner, not a saint.
You may need to adjust your definition of normal after seeing Transfixed. In this tender documentary, the loving couple at its center seems fairly ordinary  theyre dealing with money woes, weight gain, an impending marriage  until you step back and see that their other struggles also make them unique.

Martine Stonehouse and John Gelmon both have Aspergers syndrome and met at events organized by an autism center in Toronto. They soon fell in love. To Johns surprise, Martine revealed that she was born as a man but has long lived as, and felt as if she were, a woman. John, who identifies as straight, doesnt want to marry Martine until she has genital reassignment surgery.

While the film looks at their daily trials  John is also dealing with Tourettes syndrome, and Martine is battling obesity  the majority of Transfixed follows Martine as she prepares for the operation, and as she experiences problems before and after the procedure.

Somewhere in Hollywood, a studio executive is probably already looking at this tale with an eye on adapting it for a quirky comedy or a faux-provocative romance. But this documentary is compelling enough without adding false drama. These are just two people trying to overcome their obstacles and lead simple lives.
He arrived through a back entrance, heading to the fourth floor for a prearranged event  on time, it might have been noted.

But for Mayor Bill de Blasio, matters of punctuality seem almost trivial now, with a swirling series of investigations by state and federal prosecutors being conducted into his fund-raising efforts.

The inquiries have turned even the most routine appearances on his schedule into a dramatic event. On Thursday, the Democratic mayor briefly took part in a call-in for those with immigration questions, at a City University of New York building in Midtown Manhattan.

As Mr. de Blasio answered the phones, he sat behind a huge banner bearing the logo of the events main sponsor, The Daily News, whose front pages have for days been dominated by unfavorable headlines for his administration. (Crime Time for Blaz, one read.)
Both of those analyses point to a huge gap between how Westerners have understood the experience of Afghan womanhood, and how Afghan women see themselves. In fact, the self-image of a great many Afghan women doesnt match the victimhood awarded them by Western aid workers. They see themselves instead as brave, capable and strong. Islam is important to them, as is their honor. They want more freedoms, of course, but they want to be active participants in their own liberation and set their own pace for the struggle.

Ms. Abirafeh contends that Afghan women have always been conscious of their suffering, but take offense at the idea that they need foreigners to intervene on their behalf. The writer and lawyer Rafia Zakaria argues that imperial interventions are unable to produce the ground-level moral shifts that must occur within Afghanistan to make its women safe.

Shortly before the attack on Reza Gul, an Afghan filmmaker named Sahraa Karimi spoke in Karachi. She said development workers grew rich on womens empowerment projects and minority interest projects while many female Afghan intellectuals left the country in a debilitating brain drain. It is just too hard for them to endure the dangerous working conditions and suffocating social environments outside Afghanistans fortified Western compounds. Yet she insisted that other Afghan women are now able to speak out for themselves, with the help of supportive international organizations. Workshops and training have enabled them to tell their own stories of their suffering, on their own terms, instead of having Westerners speak on their behalf.

I must confess that I, too, have made the mistake of seeing Afghan women through a narrow prism. In 1996, alarmed by news of their status under the Taliban, I wrote a short story that focused on their burqas and their enforced imprisonment in the home. In the final twist I revealed that I was actually talking about a future that might unfold in Pakistan if we ignored the plight of our Afghan sisters. I look back now and wonder how I had written that story without ever having met a real Afghan woman.

That didnt happen until 2013, when I traveled to Konya, Turkey, for a conference on the poetry and life of the Sufi mystic Rumi. Our delegation included two young Afghan women. One, gentle and reserved, was the director of a cultural house in northern Afghanistan and the editor of its monthly magazine. She was studying Dari literature at a university, had done extensive research on Rumi, and had compiled youth poetry written in the Dari language. The second woman was a fiery and outspoken poet who wrote for a feminist newspaper and managed a radio station.
It is plainly illegal for foreigners to contribute to American political campaigns. But reform groups are warning that the ban would be gravely undermined by a little-noticed bill advanced Thursday by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee.

It would alter the current tax code provision that, while permitting the identity of donors to 501(c) social welfare groups to be kept firmly secret from the public, requires that the donors be privately identified to Internal Revenue Service officials responsible for enforcing the law. Politically oriented groups claiming dubious exemptions as social welfare nonprofits have proliferated in recent elections, allowing donors  including publicity-shy campaign backers  to work from the shadows.

Under the proposal, the I.R.S. would no longer be told the identities of contributors to these nonprofits. Watchdog groups warn in a letter to the House that this would open the door wide for secret, unaccountable money from foreign governments, foreign corporations and foreign individuals to be illegally laundered into federal elections. The letter, signed by the Brennan Center for Justice, the Campaign Legal Center, Democracy 21 and five other groups, stressed that the disclosure requirement is one of the few ways of guarding against foreigners influencing American elections.
For decades, many exiles refused to set foot on Cuba while the Castros were in power. Increasingly, though, their children want to explore their roots and play a constructive role in a homeland that loomed large during their upbringing but was relatively inaccessible until recently.

Taking advantage of newly relaxed travel restrictions, a handful of young Cuban-Americans decided to start a program, called Cuba One, modeled loosely on the birthright trips that pay for young Jews to travel to Israel.

They want to help bridge the divide between Cubans on and off the island. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they tend not to have clearly defined views of how the islands political and economic systems should change  or how quickly. But they want to do more than watch from a distance as the era of rule by Fidel and Raul Castro draws to a close. When Cuban-Americans think about Cuba, its important that they have a tangible relationship with the island and its people, said Giancarlo Sopo, one of the founders. There is much more to that country than a pair of brothers; there are 11 million people with dreams and aspirations.

Mr. Sopos late father, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs, the failed 1961 invasion, refused to return to Cuba. Mr. Sopo, who was born in Miami, went once as a child, to see a dying relative. Inspired by the thaw between the two governments, he flew to Cuba last year for the first time as an adult.
CEMAGI, Bali  It was the Maoist insurgents who drove Chino and Elizabeth Roncoroni to Bali. They had become experts on Nepali and Tibetan art after living in Kathmandu for the better part of four decades, and made a very comfortable living dealing in artifacts and antiques. But as Nepal modernized, they tired of the political instability, pollution and crime.

They had arrived in Asia on the hippie trail in the late 60s. Now, in a new century and with the freedom to move anywhere, they considered their former vacation haunt as the location for their new home.

We decided now Kathmandu is over, Mr. Roncoroni said. It was difficult to live. So we said why dont we go and live in Bali? And we just shifted. They moved in 2009.

They designed an expansive seaside home, the Konaditya Estate, on Balis west coast. The villa is a 20-minute drive north of Seminyak, Balis most fashionable neighborhood, thronged with ex-models and the idle rich in high season. Konaditya, by contrast, lies down a country lane that drifts through quiet villages and between emerald rice paddies before arriving at the estates unmarked turn.
LONDON Apr.27 (People's Daily Online) The painting collection of National Gallery in London 'The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up (1839) by J.M.W Turner' will feature on the Bank of Englands new 20 bank note.

The announcement and unveiling of the design was made by the Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney during a ceremony held at Turner Contemporary in Margate.

The image on the new note is based on the famous painting of HMS Temeraire, a veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar and saviour of Nelsons flagship HMS Victory, being towed to its final resting place by a steam tug. Turner, who called the painting his Darling, couldnt bring himself to sell it, but left it instead to the nation upon his death.

The work has long been a favourite of the National Gallerys many visitors and was voted the Greatest Painting in Britain in a national poll conducted by BBC Radio 4's Today programme in 2005. The Fighting Temeraire was also the focal point of a scene from the 2012 James Bond film, Skyfall, where Daniel Craigs 007 meets his new quartermaster Q (Ben Wishaw) in front of the painting on a visit to the National Gallery.

The new 20 note will also feature a self-portrait of Turner (from Tate Britain), his signature and a quote, Light is therefore colour. Deputy Director and Curator of British painting at the National Gallery, Dr Susan Foister, assisted the Bank of England in finding the source of this quote and also in locating his signature.

The new bank note will enter circulation in 2020.

National Gallery Director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi said: Every time you pull out a 20-pound note from your pocket, purse or cash machine, you will be reminded of the nations best-loved picture in the National Gallery and a masterpiece by one of Britains greatest painters.(Bai Tianxing)
Horses snooze in their stalls. Fish take their 40 winks floating in place. Dogs can doze anywhere, anytime. And even the lowly worm nods off now and then.

All animals, most scientists agree, engage in some form of sleep.

But the stages of sleep that characterize human slumber had until now been documented only in mammals and birds.

A team of researchers in Germany announced in a report published on Thursday, however, that they had found evidence of similar sleep stages in a lizard: specifically, the bearded dragon, or Pogona vitticeps, a reptile native to Australia and popular with pet owners.

Recordings from electrodes implanted in the lizards brains showed patterns of electrical activity that resembled what is known as slow-wave sleep and another pattern resembling rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, a stage of deep slumber associated with brain activity similar to that of waking.
The police on Thursday shot and wounded a costumed 25-year-old man after a standoff at a Baltimore television station, where the man said that he was carrying a bomb and demanded that a message be broadcast. The police opened fire on the man, officials said, because he refused to comply with the instructions of officers.

A Baltimore police spokesman, T. J. Smith, said that investigators ultimately concluded that the man had not possessed a bomb. Instead, they said he had been carrying a mock device that included a motherboard and candy bars that were connected by wires and wrapped in foil.

The appearance of it was to be an actual, explosive-type device, Mr. Smith said at an evening news conference.

The police did not immediately identify the man, who was being treated at a hospital and was believed to be from Howard County, Md., near Baltimore. Mr. Smith said the mans condition was serious, but stable and that he was expected to survive.
A young woman was viciously stabbed to death, her body found in 1969 not far from the notorious murders by Charles Mansons band of followers. For decades, the circumstances led people to wonder about the woman known only as Jane Doe 59: Was she another victim of the cultlike group?

The Los Angeles police this week revealed her identity as Reet Jurvetson, a 19-year-old from Montreal, while leaving open, if only narrowly, the possibility that Mr. Manson played a part in her death.

Ms. Jurvetson had recently moved to Los Angeles when her body was found by a passer-by in the brush off Mulholland Drive near Laurel Canyon on Nov. 16, 1969. She had been stabbed more than 150 times.

The style of the killing along with the timing and location of the discovery  about five miles down the road from the mansion where actress Sharon Tate and four others met their end at the hands of the Manson family a few months before  led to speculation that the cases were connected.
Capt. Kristen Griest was among the first women to ever graduate from the Armys elite Ranger school, and after Thursday, she will become the first woman able to lead an infantry unit into combat.



Her graduation from the Maneuver Captains Career Course at Fort Benning, Ga., qualifies her for duty as an infantry officer after being approved for infantry duty earlier this week. She is joining a branch of the Army that had long been considered the last bastion of traditionally male combat roles, and with the move, the Army has crossed another barrier in its promise to consider women for all roles without exception.

Shes going to go on and serve the rest of her career, however long it may be, as an infantry officer, Lt. Col. Jerry Pionk, an Army spokesman, said on Thursday. Her road is far from done; it is just more in line with what she feels her aspirations are.
Mr. Riley and Mr. Wilson buttoned their shirt collars snug against their necks (to keep bugs from falling in), slipped on thick neoprene gloves, laced up their snake-proof boots and turned on the big black lights they each carried.

Scorpions glow under black lights. The glow comes from a substance found inside a hard-and-thin coating on the scorpions exoskeleton. Scientists are not sure what purpose it serves. Some say it is to confuse prey; others believe it is to protect scorpions from sunlight.

There are 1,800 types of scorpions in every place on the planet except for the Arctic, and more than 50 species in the Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the state. At no more than three inches long, bark scorpions are the smallest, most common and most dangerous  the only one of them considered to be life-threatening, said Keith Boesen, director of the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, housed at the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy in Tucson.

On average, the center and its counterpart in Phoenix log 12,000 reports of scorpion stings each year, though many more go unreported because people treat them at home. Children, older adults and those who are infirm are particularly vulnerable and should seek immediate help if they get stung, Dr. Boesen said. Deaths are rare  there was one in 2013 and another some 10 years earlier, he said.

Still, pain and discomfort from a scorpions sting are inevitable and the reactions can range from scary to bizarre.
YORK, Pa.  Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, has never met Charles Kress, but he desperately needs him.

Mr. Kress, 62, will vote for a Democrat this November for the White House, he said, no matter what. He is also planning to vote for Mr. Toomeys re-election. Sometimes you have to keep in office the ones who make the deals, Mr. Kress said as he watered the flowers in front of Yorks Unitarian church.

Republican senators like Mr. Toomey who are running in swing states  about six, and enough to tip the balance of power in the Senate  need voters who would reject Donald J. Trump to nonetheless pull the levers for the partys other candidates in November. In some districts, House Republicans will need them, too.

Mr. Trumps convincing sweep of the primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island on Tuesday did little to assuage concerns about his standing with swing voters in November. His victory speech included a bracing broadside against Hillary Clintons playing the woman card. And he continues to trail his opponents, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, among Republican women.
BEIJING  China took a major step on Thursday in President Xi Jinpings drive to impose greater control and limit Western influences on Chinese society, as it passed a new law restricting the work of foreign organizations and their local partners, mainly through police supervision.

More than 7,000 foreign nongovernment groups will be affected, according to state news reports.

Foreign groups working across Chinese civil society  on issues including the environment, philanthropy and cultural exchanges, and possibly even in education and business  will now have to find an official Chinese sponsor and must register with the police. This also applies to groups from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

Those organizations that do not receive official approval will be forced to stop operating in the country. Many groups will probably curtail or eliminate programs deemed politically sensitive, such as training lawyers, in order to remain.

Groups that may have a hard time getting approval include those promoting workers rights, ethnic equality and religious freedoms.
SEOUL, South Korea  North Korea failed to launch two intermediate-range ballistic missiles on Thursday, the South Korean Defense Ministry said, adding to a string of unsuccessful weapons tests in the past two weeks.

In the first attempted launch, the powerful Musudan missile crashed into the sea seconds after ignition. Hours after that attempt, North Korea fired another missile of the same type, but that test also failed, the ministry said.

Thursdays attempts bring the total failures in launching the Musudan  one of the Norths most powerful missiles deployed or under development  to three in the past two weeks, according to South Korean officials.

Image The leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, in October 2015. Mr. Kim ordered his military to conduct more tests of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Credit... Wong Maye-E/Associated Press

The successive failures are a potential embarrassment for North Koreas leader, Kim Jong-un, just days before a rare congress of his ruling Workers Party, the Norths biggest political meeting in decades.
LONDON  For travelers returning to London from distant places struggling for bare-bones survival, the portals of passport control sometimes resemble what a British writer likened to the looking glass in Lewis Carrolls fable of Alice.

Out there  in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere  wars rage, drought crisps the land, democracy strains against despotism.

And, in consequence of such upheaval, a procession unparalleled in modern times of war-zone refugees and other migrants seeking new homes in Europe challenges a political and social order that traces its roots to 17th-century notions of governance and sovereignty.

Here, though, it seems as if the sole prism through which issues are squeezed is a referendum on June 23 on British membership in the European Union  a yes-no decision thrown into even starker relief by President Obama, whose visit to London last week was centered on support for Prime Minister David Camerons commitment to remaining in the bloc.
Who is he?

Born in Norwich, England, in 1967, Edward Michael Balls grew up in Nottingham before attending Oxford to study economics and philosophy. He also attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. From 2011 to 2015, he was shadow chancellor, the oppositions spokesman on financial and economic issues. During that time, he was also a member of Parliament, but he lost his seat in last years election.

How is the day observed?

Celebrated primarily in Britain, and mostly on Twitter, it often starts even before April 28, with people on Twitter counting the number of days until Ed Balls Day as if it were Christmas. When the day finally comes, users repost his original tweet, adding Happy Ed Balls Day or hashtags like #NeverForget.

Other politicians have been known to celebrate Ed Balls Day, although his wife, Yvette Cooper, who is also a lawmaker, almost forgot to do so last year.
UK Foreign Secretary arrives in Colombia for visit to highlight support for the countrys peace process and fight against narcotics

LONDON Apr.27 (People's Daily Online) UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond is visiting Colombia on the first stop of a tour of Latin America that will include Cuba and Mexico.

The UK has been committed to supporting the peace process since official talks began between the Colombian Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) three years ago. This year the UK has contributed 4.2m to a UN fund, and a further 1.1m to an EU fund, to prepare and implement a peace deal.

In Bogota, the Foreign Secretary will hold high-level talks with President Santos and meet with the Minister for Defence and the Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs. He will visit the National Reintegration Agency to meet with former combatants who have demobilised and re-joined civilian life. Mr Hammond will also open a new British Council centre in Salitre and attend a Shakespeare-themed classroom event to mark the 400th anniversary of the playwrights death.

In Cartagena, Mr Hammond will visit the Colombian Naval Base to see firsthand UK-Colombia cooperation on counter-narcotics.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said:

The UK is a strong supporter of the Colombian peace process and will continue to back efforts underway to reach a sustainable agreement and lasting peace for the Colombian people.

Since 2015 we have committed over 9 million to post-conflict projects in Colombia, drawing on our own experience in Northern Ireland. This builds on our diplomatic efforts in the UN Security Council for a UN mission that will verify an eventual ceasefire.

Our support extends further to areas of shared prosperity and bilateral trade. This year, we will contribute 1 million to Prosperity Fund programmes which promote Colombias economic development and 20 million on science and innovation through the Newton Caldas Fund over five years.
LONDON  A dispute over accusations of anti-Semitism within the ranks of Britains Labour Party escalated on Thursday as the party suspended Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London, over remarks suggesting that Hitler had at one point supported Zionism.

Mr. Livingstone is an ideological ally of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who on Wednesday took action against one of his lawmakers, Naseem Shah, in a separate dispute over comments on Facebook about Israel.

A well-known personality who has often defended Mr. Corbyn, Mr. Livingstone is not a member of Parliament but leads the international policy commission of Labours National Executive Committee, its governing body. His suspension comes as a blow to Mr. Corbyn, who has been accused of failing to root out anti-Semitism within the party. The left wing of the Labour Party, to which both Mr. Corbyn and Mr. Livingstone belong, has long been critical of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians  something its members argue should not be confused with anti-Semitism.

The latest dispute occurred in the aftermath of Wednesdays decision to suspend Ms. Shah, pending an investigation, after it emerged that in 2014, before entering Parliament, she had endorsed a Facebook post displaying a graphic that showed Israels outline superimposed on a map of the United States. The map was under the headline, Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict  relocate Israel into United States, with the comment, Problem solved.
LONDON  It was one of the most celebrated Twitter posts in British political memory, one that has been retweeted tens of thousands of times, spawned an unofficial national holiday and inspired tributes in everything from verse to baked goods.

Ed Balls was a member of Parliament and a leader of the opposition Labour Party five years ago, on April 28, 2011, and as many busy people do, he was multitasking: checking the Internet on his BlackBerry while shopping for groceries. At the suggestion of an aide, he tried to look up a recent article about himself, without realizing that in typing his name into a search field, he had somehow put Ed Balls into the body of a tweet.

And then, apparently when he put the BlackBerry back in his pocket, that message went out to the world, a two-word non sequitur and Twitter fail for the ages.

Needless to say, the message swiftly went viral, as people started sharing it and genially mocking the politician for tweeting his own name. It went so viral, in fact, that for Britons, April 28 has become Ed Balls Day.
BEIRUT, Lebanon  Syrias divided city of Aleppo plunged back into the kind of all-out war not seen in months on Thursday, witnesses and health workers said, as they reeled from government airstrikes that demolished a hospital in the insurgent-held side and from retaliatory mortar assaults by rebels on the government-held side.

At least 27 people, including three children and six staff members, were reported killed in the strike on the hospital, which turned it into a smoking pile of rubble on Wednesday night, and 20 were reported killed in airstrikes on Thursday. At least 14 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the mortar attacks on government-controlled areas, said officials at a hospital where casualties were streaming in throughout the day on Thursday.

The deadly destruction in Aleppo punctuated a drastic escalation in fighting over the past week that has shattered a partial truce in a war that has consumed Syria for more than five years.

The escalation also threatened to derail renewed attempts at peace talks in Geneva by the United Nations, and could disrupt or stop humanitarian aid to besieged parts of the country, affecting millions of people, relief officials said.
BAGHDAD  In an unannounced visit shrouded in secrecy, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. came to Iraq on Thursday for the first time in almost five years, hoping to help a weak prime minister and bolster the military campaign against the Islamic State.

The intense security and clandestine nature of the trip reflected the challenges Iraq still faces 13 years after the United States-led invasion. Mr. Biden arrived for the visit, which was under discussion for months, at a moment when the countrys political leadership is mired in yet another crisis.

Mr. Biden planned to urge the Iraqis to put the good of their nation above sectarian, regional or personal interests as the country confronts a constellation of threats: militarily, from the extremists of the Islamic State; economically, from low oil prices; and politically, from the stalemate between Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and Parliament over Mr. Abadis efforts to reconstitute his cabinet.

After arriving at the American Embassy by helicopter, Mr. Biden was driven to the nearby Government Palace to meet Mr. Abadi.
With tens of thousands of protesters marching in the streets of Baghdad to demand changes in government, Iraqs Shiite prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, appeared before Parliament this week hoping to speed the process by introducing a slate of new ministers. He was greeted by lawmakers who tossed water bottles at him, banged on tables and chanted for his ouster.

This session is illegal! one of them shouted.

Leaving his squabbling opponents behind, Mr. Abadi moved to another meeting room, where supportive lawmakers declared a quorum and approved several new ministers  technocrats, not party apparatchiks  as a step to end sectarian politics and the corruption and patronage that support it.

But, like so much else in the Iraqi government, the effort fell short, with only a handful of new ministers installed and several major ministries, including oil, foreign and finance, remaining in limbo. A new session of Parliament on Thursday was canceled.

Almost two years after the Islamic State swept through northern Iraq, forcing the Obama administration to re-engage in a conflict it had celebrated as complete, Iraqs political system is barely functioning, as the chaotic scenes in Parliament this week demonstrated.
Until this March, when Mr. Fairchild left An American in Paris and his role as the G.I. Jerry Mulligan, to rejoin City Ballet full time, he was performing on Broadway up to eight times a week. The role earned him a Tony nomination (the musical received 12 and won in four categories) and several other awards for outstanding actor in a musical. And he became accustomed to being stopped in the street for his autograph and greeted at the stage doors by gaggles of screaming fans.

While American Rhapsody repeats the winning Gershwin-Wheeldon-Fairchild combination (and its City Ballet performances will be conducted by Rob Fisher, the music director of An American in Paris), it was not conceived as a way to capitalize on the Broadway success, said Peter Martins, the companys ballet master in chief. It was Mr. Wheeldon who had suggested Rhapsody in Blue, he said when asked if City Ballet had thought this could be a way to attract audiences who might not otherwise attend the ballet. I didnt think about that at all, Mr. Martins said, although that would be nice.

In a telephone conversation from Stockholm, Mr. Wheeldon, who was City Ballets resident choreographer from 2001 to 2008, said: I was really just having a love affair with Gershwins music. I dont think I was ready to let go.

Its not entirely unknown for ballet-makers to cross over to Broadway: George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins are the most illustrious examples. (In his biography of Balanchine, Bernard Taper notes that it was Balanchine who asked for the Playbill credit to read choreography by, rather than dances by.)

Still, Mr. Wheeldon pointed out, the fortunes of choreography had been variable on Broadway. Of course there was a wonderful era of dance, he said, but it sort of went away when the megamusicals, like Les Miserables, Miss Saigon and Phantom of the Opera came in. Twyla Tharp was the only trailblazer in between. But now shows like American in Paris and On the Town have shown there is a real appetite for serious dance.
NEW HAVEN  After a decade of planning, eight years of renovation and a 16-month closure, the Yale Center for British Art  one of the half-dozen or so masterpieces designed by the Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn during the last 15 years of his life  reopens to the public on May 11. And for those who have loved this award-winning museum since it first opened in 1977, showcasing Paul Mellons superb collection of British art, the good news is that you can barely see the difference.

Much of the woodwork has been refinished to give it renewed warmth. The aging fabric that covered the exhibition walls has been exchanged for new white Belgian linen. Nearly invisible sprinkler lines have been applied to the crossbeams of the roof, and synthetic carpeting, added during an earlier remodel, has been replaced by undyed wool carpets in the color and texture specified by Kahn.

The masters voice also remains audible in other ways. In converting the Long Gallery on the fourth floor from a series of blocked-off units to a single gorgeous stretch of salon-style exhibition space, the renovating architects were following one of Kahns original working drawings. And when it came time to remodel the pogos  those movable walls inside the galleries  the architects found a drawing from February 1974, just a month before Kahn died, where it was clear he intended the pogos to be lifted off the ground so they appeared to float.

If youre not an idiot and you just look, the building tells you what to do with it, said Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, a 1953 Kahn building across the street that went through its own renovation process about a decade ago.
Parker Millsap

THE VERY LAST DAY

Parker Millsap scrapes up his guitar strings like theyve done him wrong  hits them hard and draws a big, broad, melancholy sound out of them. His second album, The Very Last Day (Okrahoma/Thirty Tigers), begins with Hades Pleads, a flamboyant, hard-country song that sounds like a bar fight spilling over into church. By the third song, Morning Blues, hes settled in a bit, pulling his strings until they make melancholy teardrops. Mr. Millsap sings with spiritual fervor verging on rage  his voice ecstatic and volcanic all at once. Even his most tender songs, like Jealous Sum, feel as if they might shatter under the tension. But no matter how much Mr. Millsap tries to contain his urges inside a lovely melody, hes almost always hitting those guitar strings, as if encouraging them to feel something even close to what he is.
Christine Baranski (Diane Lockhart)

SCENE After learning that Alicia (Julianna Margulies) is having an affair with Will (Josh Charles), the other name partner in her law firm, Diane confronts him on the roof of their office building in this Season 3 episode and orders him to break it off.

I think it was the quintessence of Diane, who could wield authority with a kind of centeredness and strength and integrity. In that scene you really see her lock eyes with him and really let him have it. Its not condescending, its as equals, but she levels him. And the argument is on her side. I thought it represented the best of who Diane was and why I loved playing that character so much. Because I dont think we see those kinds of women represented in television or movies.
Luckily for all, reviewers get to return to a restaurant before they render a verdict.

The first meal I had at Tillies, a farm-to-table restaurant that opened in Short Hills in November, included items I would happily eat again, like mashed root vegetables beneath a buttery short rib; a winy foie gras sandwiched between golden brioche; and a simple but irresistible sundae. Other dishes, however, did not quite justify the hoopla that surrounded the restaurants opening.

A second visit changed my mind. A juicy filet of Long Island sea trout was as hearty as it is rare to find on restaurant menus, and a beurre blanc with bits of grapefruit lime and fresh tarragon lifted a scallop entree into the memorable category. If Wirt Cook, the executive chef and a co-owner, were to argue that the quality of ingredients justified the restaurants prices, which hover in the $30 range, I would take the deal. Scallops, for example, are priced similarly at other restaurants Ive visited, but I think Mr. Cooks are better.

Other items that tipped the balance in Tillies favor were the plain, white dinner rolls, so soft and buttery you wished you could rest your weary head upon them, and a deliciously grainy cornbread sweetened with honey. Baked in house, the breads were served with a cold, sweet butter that tasted freshly churned.

Image The menus offerings include Maine mussels with smoked trout. Credit... Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times

A pork belly, which Mr. Cook cures and smokes over fruit-flavored wood for six to eight hours, was popular at my table. Its one of his signature dishes, said Karen Cook, the restaurants co-owner and pastry chef and Mr. Cooks wife. The Maine mussels, however, stole its thunder. Thanks to bits of smoked trout, the broth around the mussels was as heady and gripping as that in any well-seasoned bouillabaisse. Only the accompanying slivers of rye toast struck the wrong note; a more absorbent bread, a baguette, perhaps, would have been better for sopping up the broth.
(Global Times) 10:08, April 28, 2016

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

During this year's annul spring meetings of the World Bank (WB) Group and the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the WB signed a co-financing framework agreement to jointly fund major infrastructure projects in regions including Central Asia and South Asia. The AIIB in 2016 is anticipated to approve $1.2 billion in loans, with joint projects with WB and Asian Development Bank (ADB) accounting for a sizable share.

Jin Liqun, president of the AIIB, noted that the AIIB would only invest in projects that meet its standards of "financially sustainable, environmentally friendly and socially acceptable," and that those projects won't exclude non-AIIB members such as the US.

This indicates China is endeavoring to fulfill its commitments to the AIIB that make the new international multilateral mechanism "lean, clean and green." It is estimated that the global demand for infrastructure investment can amount to more than $90 trillion over the next 15 years. This means the annual investment in infrastructure has to rise to $6 trillion from the current $2.5-3 trillion. Investment in Asia will make up the lion's share. Nearly 1.6 billion people now are plagued by electricity shortages in South Asia.

The AIIB defines infrastructure in a broader sense. Besides basic facilities and installations, it will also invest in such areas as health and education. As Zia Qureshi, senior fellow at Brookings Institute said, the AIIB supports an "infrastructure for a sustainable future."

As global powers, both China and the US should bear responsibilities for promoting international development. Regrettably, the US is not only sharply reducing its input in facilitating others' development, but also has misgivings about China, if not hostility.

Unpleasant episodes such as the South China Sea disputes shouldn't seriously distract policymakers from cooperation. Former commander of the US Pacific Command Samuel J. Locklear III once said the biggest long-term security threat in the Asia-Pacific region is climate change. People in this region will suffer from a worsening climate and have to face myriad climate-related development challenges.

The entangled relationship between development and security problems has increasingly become a conundrum that governments need to tackle. More than half of the population of Kazakhstan are young, and youth unemployment creates the soil for the spread of religious extremism. Without a legitimate and stable income, numerous Afghans secure a living by joining the Taliban or planting poppies. The most effective weapons to deal with terrorism and extremism are trade and job opportunities rather than missiles and drones.

Undoubtedly, both China and the US have to think seriously about how to build a global development partnership that will benefit both as well as the whole world. The "Belt and Road" initiative has offered a rare change that deserves Washington's support.

In March last year, US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a speech titled "An Enduring Vision for Central Asia" at the Brookings Institute. He said "We don't see China's involvement in Central Asia in zero-sum terms. Its development of infrastructure in Central Asia can be fully complementary to our own efforts." More than 20 countries that the "Belt and Road" initiative covers either have US troops stationed on their territory or have military alliances with the US. Over 10 of the US non-NATO allies are in the region. As the initiative expands, many of its projects will also involve NATO countries, since it covers 13 out of the 28 NATO members.

The US has also promoted some regional development cooperation projects, such as the New Silk Roadinitiative envisioned in 2011, Indo-Pacific Economic Corridor, US-Asia Pacific Comprehensive Energy Partnership and the Lower Mekong Initiative and so on. Obviously, China and the US have many of their goals overlapping and need to tap the potential for cooperation.

China has taken the initiative in Africa. It invited the US to jointly finance the $12 billion Inga 3 dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is also considering offering support for the plan to power Africa proposed by the Obama administration. Washington needs to acknowledge the significant role China plays in international economic growth and development, responding to Beijing's initiative in a wiser way. The cooperation between the AIIB and WB on infrastructure offers people hope.

The author is a research fellow at the Charhar Institute and an adjunct fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @GTopinion
When she tired of her rented five-story walk-up in Manhattan, Ava Volandes spent two years hunting for a one-bedroom co-op to buy. In 2002, she bought a one-bedroom in a postwar tower on East 17th Street near Gramercy Park for around $350,000.

A few years later, she met Alex Tavantzis, an actor who primarily uses his stage name, Alex Tavis. She knew his second cousin. They married in 2008.

Mr. Tavis moved into her place. He then rented out his alcove studio in a co-op building on West 34th Street, which he and his parents had bought in 2004 for $210,000, before selling it two and a half years ago for $393,000.

The couple, now in their 40s, had two sons. They gave the children the bedroom and created a makeshift bedroom for themselves in the living room.
On icy nights this winter, bare-chested men could sometimes be spied clustered by Antons Dumplings, a food cart on the corner of West Third Street and Avenue of the Americas. The 26-year-old chef, Anton Yelyashkevich, had promised free dumplings to anyone who dared eat them shirtless, in the style of Vladimir Putin commandeering a horse across Siberia.

Mr. Yelyashkevich was born in Minsk, Belarus, and moved to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, at age 6. He studied graphic design at art school and has turned his cart into a Constructivist arrangement of rectangles, with the white, red and black color scheme of a Soviet propaganda poster. (The cart is, in a way, revolutionary: Engineered by MOVE Systems, it runs on solar power and compressed natural gas.)

His dumplings are small but robust, and liberally spilled into their paper trays. I counted around a dozen in each of my $5 orders. (You get twice as many for $9.) They are made by hand, albeit not by Mr. Yelyashkevich himself; he tinkered with a recipe for five years, then gave it to what he calls one of the top-tier dumpling factories in Brooklyn.

He preferred not to reveal the name. Theyre all really secretive and cutthroat, he said.

A point of pride in Russian pelmeni is the delicacy of the skins, which here are thin without sacrificing sturdiness, strong enough to survive a bout in boiling water and a quick press and scrape over the carts flattop grill. Inside may be a meld of ground beef and pork with a tease of onion, called Siberian after pelmenis first makers, peasants and hunters who buried their dumplings in snowbanks and then cooked them in melted snow.
(Global Times) 10:24, April 28, 2016

Hu Sheng-cheng, academician of Academia Sinica and Taiwan "president-elect" Tsai Ing-wen's mentor, told the Liberty Times that Tsai would not mention the 1992 Consensus in her inaugural speech, but her wording would be acceptable to the Chinese mainland, the US and Japan. It's said Tsai would put forward that the new government would continue to promote the peace, stability and development of cross-Straits relations based on the historical facts of the 1992 cross-Straits meeting, the consensus of seeking common ground while reserving differences, and the current "ROC constitutional system." Most analysts believe Hu was not spreading a groundless rumor.

It seems that Tsai is determined to advance her ambiguity over the core issue of cross-Straits ties. She backs away from the current stance of the KMT government, while not directly jumping on the springboard of Taiwan independence. Since the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is pro-independence, it's widely believed the party would gear up to promote "Taiwan independence" rather than detaching from it after the inaugural speech is delivered. The prospects for future cross-Straits ties are pessimistic and the inaugural speech may herald the beginning.

The key problem lies in the DPP's refusal to give up its pro-independence stance. Careful wording in Tsai's inaugural speech reflects the DPP's tactics: giving the mainland no reason to react strongly and within Washington's permission. At the same time, Taiwan independence can be slowly promoted.

The DPP may reverse the trend of peace across the Straits, but at the same time, it has to bear the consequences that Taiwan's peaceful development will be interrupted. Without the 1992 Consensus serving as the foundation, most official cross-Straits exchanges will be cut off as well as economic cooperation. Wrangling between the mainland and Taiwan will be rekindled on the international stage. With a trust deficit, a minor friction can easily lead to a major crisis. Unless the DPP stops advocating "cultural independence" and desinicization, cross-Straits ties will go through a frozen period under DPP's governance.

Tsai may soften her tone, but refuse to compromise over the core issue. She has been ready to snub the 1992 Consensus and rebuild the relationship with the mainland based on DPP's dogma. The Taiwan question will not be solved in haste. It's a competition of stamina and determination. The DPP must be shown that any step toward independence will lead to a painful price.
Wine is big business everywhere. What countries or regions come to mind when you think in terms of $4.8 billion netted from grapes, grape juice and wine? For me, Napa Valley, Sonoma Valley, Willamette Valley, Champagne, Bordeaux and Rhone regions, and other such famous wine regions throughout the world come to mind.

If you are like me, I was more than a little taken aback when I learned this huge figure belonged to the wine industry in New York State, contributing $408 million annually in state and local taxes. New York ranks third in the U.S. in terms of grape production after California and Washington. Wine production in New York began in the Hudson River Valley during the 17th century. Brotherhood Winery there is the nations oldest continually operating winery.

So, if all this wine is being produced, why dont we hear more about it? Most wine shoppers are familiar with the jug wines from New York, mostly whites, and with some of the sweet Kosher Concord wines. For what the jug wines are designed to do, provide an inexpensive drinkable wine, they actually do a good job. If you want a Kosher wine, the concord wines from New York also work well.

But that is not whole story. Many higher quality dinner wines are also produced in New York State, having won awards in numerous competitions and received high scores in trade magazines. If you have been in the dark like me, you may be clueless as to just what types of wines come from New York. The wines produced include a wide variety such as Riesling, Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon plus sparkling wines based on these grapes. The climate is generally cool, so cooler weather varieties are more common. Terroir varies, but much of the soil is glacial. Think German or Bordeaux wines to generate a comparison.

High quality wines produced in New York State are not well known, at least around here. Why? Most of these wines are sold in the state of New York in small tasting rooms located within the wineries, thus their wine doesnt reach other markets. Unlike some of the really large California wine producers, such as Robert Mondovi to name one, much if not most of the grape and wine industry in New York is a collection of small family businesses.

Again, why? The Fine Winery Act of 1976 eased the process of opening a farm winery. Then 2011 Fine Winery Law allowed each farm winery to operate up to 5 tasting rooms as a single entity, requiring only one license instead of separate licenses as before. It also streamlined the process for shipping wine directly to customers (think Internet). Thus, much of the sales of wines from these farm wineries are direct and do not go through the major distributors. The distributors are responsible for placing the wines in stores, so without that element, there is less exposure.

If you are looking for a really nice wine, do a little shopping and try to find a New York State wine for your special dinner. You will most likely be pleased.

Just keep in mind that no matter what wine you prefer, always remember wine is about food, fun and friends. The choice of how you put those together is up to you; no one can say you are wrong. After all, good wine is meant to be enjoyed; how that is achieved is a personal preference. Wine is an experience, not a test.

Take a little time to experiment with wine and food. I promise you will enjoy yourself. Until we get together again, enjoy your week. I look forward to talking with you again soon. Have a question or particular topic you want to know more about? Just email me at 4uglutenfree@gmail.com .

Dr. Jacquelyn P. Horne writes a weekly for the Opelika-Auburn News.
A changing Chinese military strategy and planned troop reductions in the People's Liberation Army are having an impact on the number and type of students military academies will be recruiting and training.

Recruitment of students needed to bolster China's combat capability will be increased, even as the overall number of military school students will be reduced, officials said at a military school recruitment conference in Beijing that ended on Tuesday.

Compared with last year, 24 percent fewer students will be admitted to studies related to the army, including the infantry and artillery, while logistic and support departments will see their recruits fall by 45 percent, said a news release from the Central Military Commission's Training Management Department.

In comparison, students studying in aviation, missile and maritime fields will increase by 14 percent. The number of recruits in sectors where there is an urgent need, such as space intelligence, radar and drones, will rise by 16 percent, the release said.

The changes were announced in line with ongoing military reforms and were made after rounds of negotiations with the army, navy, air force, rocket force, regional military commands and military academies, PLA Daily reported, citing an unidentified officer from the department's Training Establishment Bureau.

The department has pledged to intensify supervision of military schools' admissions, the officer said, adding that officers and applicants' parents will be invited to monitor the admission process.

It also plans to revise the regulations on military schools' recruitment and students at such schools, PLA Daily said.

A researcher in the Human Resources Department at the PLA Xi'an Political Academy said the military reform will lead to an adjustment in the proportion of each PLA service and corresponding changes to the military's training systems.

As the PLA moves to implement President Xi Jinping's order for a troop reduction of 300,000, it is natural for the military to reduce the number of new officers, said the researcher, who asked not to be identified.

However, it must address the shortage of officers who have a deep knowledge of joint combat operations and advanced equipment, he said.

"We have developed and deployed many cutting-edge weapons, including some that are the best in the world, but there are not enough soldiers to use many of those advanced weapons," he said.

"In some cases, soldiers lack knowledge and expertise to make the best use of their equipment."
On Saturday, my 15-year-old son, Malcolm, called and asked if I could pick him and his girlfriend up at Seal Beach.

Im in Temecula, I reminded him. With Grandma.

Lets just ignore that he completely forgot I was out of town (sigh) and move on to the true subject of the essay: how he actually got home.

I suggested he call his father, but he said, No, Ill figure it out.

It turns out that he did, indeed, figure it out. He took the bus home.

I couldnt quite believe it, even though Ive been encouraging him to take the bus for a couple of years now. Hes offered many excuses: Its scary. Only weirdos ride the bus. Id rather you pick me up, etc. etc.

But Saturday, something shifted, and he decided to give public transportation a try. It wasnt necessarily ideal. We live about six miles from Seal Beach, and a trip that takes 15 minutes by car took him close to an hour and involved two buses. But the point is, he made it home safely (thanks to his girlfriends use of a handy transit app) and I can only imagine that it felt empowering, though Im sure Malcolm would be hard-pressed to admit it.

Public transportation can be a Shangri-La for teens and parents. It provides the freedom of movement teenagers desire without all the parental worry about whether theyre out wrecking the car.

Unfortunately, I never rode the bus growing up in Las Vegas, in part because the citys bus system isnt very user-friendly or far-reaching (at least it wasnt at the time), and also, most likely, because my mother was worried about it. But a few friends shared stories of their first bus rides with something close to nostalgia, and the nostalgia didnt come from the amazing experience of riding a bus, but from that memory of freedom.

My sister and her family live in New York City, and Ive already begun to envy her kids. When theyre old enough, they will have the run of the city. The subway system is so comprehensive theyll be able to go all sorts of places with their friends on their own.

I know some parents worry about the safety of riding the subway with a bunch of strangers or running into shady characters on the bus, but I worry more about my kids driving on the freeways. Driving is dangerous, especially for teenagers. According to the California Office of Traffic Safety, in 2014, traffic fatalities in the state rose 26.4 percent for teenagers, from 72 deaths in 2013 to 91. Males made up the bulk of these fatalities at almost 77 percent.

More teenagers than ever are putting off getting their drivers license. A 2016 study conducted by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute revealed that only 24.5 percent of 16-year-olds had a license in 2014, a 47 percent drop from 1983. In fact, the study showed that the number of people of all ages with a drivers license has declined.

An earlier study by the same group asked adults ages 18-39 why they didnt have a drivers license. The three top reasons: too busy or not enough time to get a drivers license (37 percent), owning and maintaining a vehicle is too expensive (32 percent) and able to get transportation from others (31 percent).

I think there are other factors at play. Its more fun to be home than it used to be. Thanks to technology, teenagers can communicate with their friends from the comfort of their room, and they dont have to tie up the family phone to do it. Also, kids are more pampered and protected than they once were, so Im guessing parents are more hesitant about having their kids begin to drive. I know I am.

But independence and freedom are important, so why not celebrate the bus, the bike and other methods of transportation until kids and parents are ready for a drivers license?

In Orange County, you can purchase a Youth Summer Pass from the Orange County Transportation Authority that gives teenagers 30 days of bus rides for a mere $20. Sales start May 27, and passes are available at Vons, Ralphs, Northgate Market and the OCTA Store (600 S. Main St., Orange) and online at octa.net.

So, consider trading your parental taxi services for a bus pass this summer, and let kids figure out how to get around on their own.

Contact the writer: Heather Skyler is the editor of OC Family magazine. Write to her at hskyler@ocregister.com.
I find it laughable that mayoral candidate Gang Chen is threatening the City Council with a recall over the failed veterans cemetery land swap idea. Mr. Chens email claim that the council is continuing to ignore the will of Irvine people is exaggerated at best. Beth Krom described it correctly, as a segment of the population.

That segment has decided to buy into the northern end of the city without knowing anything about the history of that area. Mr. Chen has declared having a cemetery near their homes a serious concern. All I see is buyers remorse. This issue has been in the news for almost 20 years  since MCAS El Toro shut down. In preparing to become a candidate for mayor, Mr. Chen evidently failed to bone up on the background of the city he wants to lead. The base was a big deal. The Marines who were stationed there came from all over the country and fought in many wars.

Irvine has now become an international city. The majority of its citizens appreciate the quality of life it gives them. Im sorry Mr. Chens segment feels they own the place and can disrespect the past. But its good that Mr. Chen got himself involved with this issue as it tells me as a voter that he is in bed with special interest groups in Irvine and handles disagreements by threatening tactics. Not a nice combination for starting your political life.

Rosemary LaBonte

Irvine

A not so special relationship

Obama is warning the United Kingdom, one of our oldest and closest allies, about repercussions between our nations should the U.K. leave the EU. Secretary of State John Kerry told international bankers that they need not fear retaliation from the U.S. for dealing with Iran, our self-proclaimed enemy. Is this the change that Obama told us to hope for? Its very scary when we threaten our cultural and economic allies and reward an avowed enemy that calls for our deaths.

Lloyd Schwengel

Brea

  

What right does our president have to meddle in another countrys election, much less our kindred ally, the United Kingdom? To tell the British prime minister that, if the U.K. doesnt stay in the EU, our economic ties will suffer when Obama cant even effectively govern his own country is the height of pompous, sanctimonious audacity.

The election cant come soon enough.

Stan Jones

Irvine
QUITO, Ecuador  Chinas government has sent four plane loads of aid worth over $9 million to tens of thousands left homeless by this months powerful earthquake in Ecuador

Ecuadors Defense and Foreign Ministers on Wednesday welcomed the arrival of the Air China cargo planes carrying 10,000 foldable beds, 5,400 tents and other supplies.

China is Ecuadors biggest creditor and last year alone lent the struggling oil-producing nation $7.5 billion.

Before, China and Ecuador were perfect strangers, but now our relation has strengthened in cultural, social and political areas, Foreign Minister Guillaume Long said at Quitos airport surrounded by bright red Chinese flags and accompanied by Chinas Ambassador to the South American nation. The Ecuadorean people will remember this show of generosity from the people and government of China.

The U.S. in contrast says it has provided $2.6 million in humanitarian assistance, including an airlift of 80 tons of supplies as well as the deployment of a team of disaster-response experts to hard-hit areas.

Also on Wednesday the government raised its death toll from the 7.8 magnitude quake, saying that 659 people had been killed and 29,000 left homeless.
ISTANBUL  Airstrikes on rebel-held areas in the Syrian city of Aleppo destroyed a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders, the aid group said Thursday, killing at least 14 patients and staff in the latest attacks that have all but unraveled a cease-fire accord.

It was not immediately clear who carried out the air attack. The Syrian air force and allied fighters have been waging missions in the area against rebels factions opposing the government of President Bashar Assad.

The overnight raids  including a direct hit on Aleppos al-Quds hospital  killed at least 27 people, rights monitors and rescue volunteers said. At least 14 patients and medical personnel were killed at the hospital, Doctors Without Borders said on its Twitter account.

The group, also known by the French name Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, said at least three doctors, including one of the last pediatricians in the city, were among the dead.

The Quds hospital was well known locally and hit by direct airstrike late Wednesday, said a tweet from the organization said.

There was no immediate response from Assads government. But Syrian state TV on Thursday said 14 people had been killed in the government-held area of Aleppo. It was unclear whether this a reference to a separate attack.

Earlier Thursday, the government-run network had said four people were killed by rebel shelling on government-held neighborhoods.

The city, Syrias largest and once a sprawling commercial center, has been divided between rebel and government-controlled sections since 2012.

In recent months, rebels have been encircled by troops and fighters loyal to Assad. Russia has also lent support to the embattled leader, sending troops and aircraft to pound rebel fighters.

In February, the United States and Russia agreed to enforce a truce between the two sides in order to kickstart peace talks in Geneva. But those talks, between the Syrian government and representatives of the opposition, have largely broken down.

On Thursday, the United nations Special Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, called on the United States and Russia to intervene to save the cease-fire.

But the chief Syrian opposition negotiator, Mohammed Alloush, blamed the government for the airstrikes. He told the Associated Press that the latest violence shows the environment is not conducive to any political action.

The 5-year-old conflict, which started as a pro-democracy uprising, has claimed some 400,000 lives and sent millions fleeing for safety. There has also been a rise in attacks on hospitals and medical personnel, rights groups have said.

The Aleppo hospital had an ER, an intensive-care unit and operating theater, Doctors Without Borders said.

In Geneva, a statement by the International Committee of the Red Cross called the hospital attack unacceptable and pushed the city closer to the brink of humanitarian disaster, but did not place specific responsibility for the airstrike.

We urge all the parties to spare the civilians, said Marianne Gasser, head of the ICRC mission in Syria. Dont attack hospitals, dont use weapons that cause widespread damage.

In October, U.S. Special Forces strafed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, killing at least 42 patients, medical staffers and caretakers. President Obama apologized for the airstrike, which the U.S. military described as a mistake during missions to drive out Taliban fighters. But Doctors Without Borders has pressed for a full international investigation and possible war crimes charges.



The Washington Posts Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.

syria-1stld-writethru



Keywords: Syria, Aleppo, MSF, doctors without borders, syrian rebels, syrian ceasefire, russia, assad, isis, nusra
A newly-built road winds through a walnut plantation in Tiangang village, Angezhuang township, Yixian county, Hebei province, on April 27, 2016. [Photo by Wu Yan/chinadaily.com.cn]

Just two years ago, there was neither road nor trees where a walnut plantation now grows in Tiangang village, Angezhuang township, Yixian county, Hebei province, a mountainous area about 150 km away from the center of Beijing.

"We planted walnut trees in the spring of 2013 using poverty relief funds earmarked by the government," said Yu Changzhi, Party secretary of Tiangang village. Today the plantation has expanded to 500 mu (33.3 hectares) with more than 35,000 walnut trees.

"The village has very favorable natural conditions with a lake and a river nearby", said Yu. The village also uses the funds to build and renovate roads totaling 5,000 meters and build a 1,500-meter-long diversion canal, good infrastructure for supporting the plantation.

A villager cleans a diversion canal in a walnut plantation in Tiangang village, Angezhuang township, Yixian county, Hebei province, on April 27, 2016. [Photo by Wu Yan/chinadaily.com.cn]

According to the village's development plan, the walnut trees will be able to produce 200 kg of walnuts per mu in 2017. The whole plantation is expected to produce 2 million yuan ($308,200) worth of walnuts. In addition, the income from an orchid cultivation base which is also under development in the plantation, so that the village will be able to climb out of poverty by 2020.

"If a village wants to eliminate poverty and become rich, it has to develop its own industry first," said Yu.

The Thirteenth Five-year Plan has set the goal to relieve people from poverty in rural areas across the country by 2020.

The photo shows Chen Dianying, a 71-year-old native farmer and a member of a poverty-stricken household, in Taidi village, Niugang town, Yixian county, Hebei province, on April 27, 2016. [Photo by Wu Yan/chinadaily.com.cn]

"I see a promising future and I am motivated to work in the plantation," said 71-year-old Chen Dianying, a native farmer and a member of a poverty-stricken household, in Taidi village, Niugang town, Yixian county.

Similar to Tiangang village, Taidi village built its own plantation but has chosen to grow apples due to its unique natural conditions.

Chen Dianying works at an apple plantation in Taidi village, Niugang town, Yixian county, Hebei province, on April 27, 2016. [Photo by Wu Yan/chinadaily.com.cn]

He has been employed to do farming work on the plantation for three years, after transferring the usage rights of his land to a villager-run rural cooperative to build the plantation and became a shareholder. This model has become a widely-adopted development model among Hebei's poverty-stricken villages.

"I can earn money and also look after my sick wife," said Chen.

He now earns thousands of yuan more from the work and dividends on the land shares every year, besides allowances offered by the government, enough to support his family.

Villages and their residents are not alone in benefiting from the plantation.

A view of a modern agricultural plantation in Xiahuanghao, Lianggezhuang township, Yixian county, Hebei province, on April 27, 2016. [Photo by Kou Jiaxiang / Provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Some companies have taken over the role of villager-run rural cooperatives in some villages. Villagers transferred their land to a company and got shares in exchange, while the company is in charge of managing the plantation and giving out dividends.

"The merits of the plantation dwarf its shortcomings," said Wang Hongwei, manager of Hebei Lvzenong plantation company, "though the company invests a large amount of money and the production cycle is long, it can get government subsidies and sustained returns."

The company manages a modern agricultural plantation which plans to cover 13,000 mu of area involving five villages in Lianggezhuang township, Yixian county. It has already planted 500 mu of cherry trees and 2,500 mu of apple trees with an estimated prime revenue of more than 3 million yuan.

A view of a modern agricultural plantation in Xiahuanghao, Lianggezhuang township, Yixian county, Hebei province, on April 27, 2016. [Photo by Kou Jiaxiang provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Wang said that the company plans to initiate deep-processing factories in the plantation and chicken and pig farms are also in operation to build a circular economy. The plantation is expected to be upgraded into a tourist destination in several years.

"The rural market is now surging", said Wang, "the company hopes to earn money from the market. But the most important point is that villagers will never face poverty again."
LOS ANGELES  Somebody let the air out of the Dodgers offense.

Since scoring 21 runs in three games at mile-high Coors Field over the weekend, the Dodgers bats have been deflated in three consecutive losses at home to the Miami Marlins.

Justin Nicolino was hanging his hat in the New Orleans Zephyrs locker room to start this week. But the left-hander was called up from Triple-A and made his 2016 debut by combining with the Marlins bullpen on a two-hit shutout and a 2-0 victory Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium.

It is the first shutout of the Dodgers this season, their first three-game losing streak of the year and guarantees the Marlins first series win here since July of 2010.

Theres ebbs and flows, Dodgers catcher A.J. Ellis said. Coming off the high of a weekend in Colorado, especially that comeback win in the last game, you hope thered be a little more carryover.

The Dodgers scored five runs in the ninth inning to win that series finale in Colorado. It has taken them three games of this four-game series to match that one-inning total. Against Marlins pitching, the Dodgers are batting .160 (15 for 94) including 0 for 13 with runners in scoring position  and Miami ace Jose Fernandez is scheduled to pitch Thursday.

I think early we swung the bats okay, hit the ball hard, didnt really have anything to show for it. And at that point, he (Nicolino) really settled in, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. You could see guys pressing a little bit. There was some hard contact out there.

But when theyre not falling, you start looking at your last three, four games. Some guys start looking at their average and thinking they need to get a hit. And when you feel like you need a hit, they get tougher. I think the guys are coming out of the strike zone a little more than were used to.

It is not strictly a Miami vice. The Dodgers have produced three runs or fewer in seven of their past eight games not played at altitude.

I just think individually some guys are trying to do a little too much. But if you look at guys baseball cards, these guys have been productive for a long time, Roberts said. There was some hard contact, a ball hit to the wall, a couple line outs. We just didnt really have anything to show for it.

Give this guy credit. He threw the ball well and shut us out.

Nicolinos travel from New Orleans was probably fraught with more peril than his trips through the Dodgers lineup Wednesday.

He retired 18 of the 21 batters he faced in the first six innings, a stroll interrupted only by a one-out single by Corey Seager in the second inning and walks in the third and fourth. Only Seager made it past first base, advancing to second on a ground out before he was stranded there.

Justin Turner led off the seventh inning with the Dodgers second hit of the night but was erased on a double-play grounder and the Dodgers didnt get another runner past first until the eighth inning.

The lanky Nicolino (who went 5-4 in 12 starts for the Marlins last season) was hardly overpowering. He struck out just two (one on a two-strike foul bunt). But 12 of the 22 outs he recorded came on ground balls.

You didnt see too many things over the heart of the plate, Ellis said. He used both sides, had a good changeup he mixed in. He stayed out of the middle of the plate and thats a recipe for success.

It took a village to finish what Nicolino started.

After he retired the first batter in the eighth, the Marlins went through four more pitchers to get two more outs. Three consecutive walks (each by a different reliever) loaded the bases before they could  and led to the ejections of reliever David Phelps and Manager Don Mattingly when they questioned home plate umpire Todd Tichenors strike zone. Tichenor called 12 of 15 pitches balls during the sequence that loaded the bases.

But Yasiel Puig struck out with the bases loaded and Adrian Gonzalez flew out

There wasnt a whole lot of offense to be found on another chilly night at Dodger Stadium. The Marlins got all they would need in the first inning against Dodgers starter Scott Kazmir when four of their first five batters had hits.

The four singles produced two runs and it looked like Kazmir might be heading for another rocky outing. He came in with a 9.69 ERA in his previous four starts but turned things around after the Marlins four-hit cluster. Kazmir retired the next six and 12 of the next 14 after the back-to-back RBI singles by Giancarlo Stanton and Marcell Ozuna.

Contact the writer: bplunkett@ocregister.com
A Lexus rolled off the end of the Balboa Island Ferry in the Newport Harbor on Tuesday, with the vehicle ending up submerged in 15 feet of water.

The ferry was approaching the Newport Peninsula at about 5 p.m. when the car rolled, said Orange County Sheriff Harbormaster Mark Alsobrook. The Coast Guard is investigating the case, Alsobrook said.

The sole occupant of the Lexus was able to get out of the vehicle before it hit the water. Alsobrook said the Coast Guard brought in a salvage team to retrieve the car, and the ferry was up and running by Wednesdays commute.

Its not the first time a vehicle has found itself in trouble on the ferry, which transports people and their vehicles from the Balboa Peninsula to Balboa Island.

Last June, a black Toyota Prius dangled inches over Newport Harbor after crashing through a barrier on the ferry. The ferry captain told Harbor Patrol the vehicle had gone through the front barrier of the ferry and was at risk of falling into the channel.

The responding deputy wrapped a chain around the Prius and connected it to a Ford Expedition parked behind it to keep it from sliding into the water. The ferry then backed into the slip on Balboa Island, where a tow truck pulled the endangered vehicle back onto the ferry. No one was injured.

In 2012, a family of Taiwanese tourists ended up the ocean when their minivan fell off the ferry after being rammed from behind by a black Mercedes. Boaters and ferry workers rushed to rescue two young children and their parents before the vehicle sank in about 15 feet of water. The driver of the Mercedes told authorities the accelerator stuck.

In 1989, a malfunctioning accelerator was blamed for an accident that sent a car skidding across the ferry and into Newport Bay. No one was hurt, and the driver and passenger were able to free themselves from the car before it sank.

Contact the writer: lconnelly@ocregister.com
Year after year, crime statistics consistently rank Laguna Woods among the five safest cities in California.

And Laguna Woods Village, a gated community thats home to about 18,000 people aged 55 and over, is even safer.

Suspected transgressions in the community are usually solved before police even arrive.

We get calls from individuals who say they are missing a purse or another item, said Orange County Sheriffs Department Lt. Ken Burmood, chief of police services for Laguna Woods. Security employees help them retrace their steps and almost always locate the items.

Yet officials plan to spend millions of dollars on a high-tech security system  citing a study that labeled the village vulnerable.

It will bring us into the 21st Century, said John Luebbe, director of the Golden Rain Foundation, the communitys powerful homeowners association.

Three weeks ago, the Golden Rain Foundation embarked on a $1.5 million pilot program  the complete overhaul of two major entry points. New bells and whistles at Gates 5 and 6 will include barrier arms, radio frequency identification readers, license plate recognition and high-definition cameras.

Supporters claim it will preempt misdeeds more serious than petty thefts  and, as a bonus, reduce parking issues created by visitors overstaying their welcome.

But some residents deem the whole thing overkill.

What are we trying to be  the safest city in the world? Al Steinberg, 84, noted. Its completely unnecessary, and far too expensive for what were going to get.

A fix looking for a problem?

More than 20,000 vehicles a day go in and out of the community, cut into quadrants at the intersection of El Toro Road and Moulton Parkway. Each of the 13 main gates is staffed by two ambassadors  gregarious denizens who take the minimum-wage job largely for its social component.

Ambassadors are well suited for cheerfully greeting guests and verifying their status  be they friends dropping by or pizza deliverers. But gate guards also are charged with checking that cars a lane or two over bear residential windshield stickers  no easy task when closer vehicles block the view.

We have gate runners who just drive right past us in the residents lane, said David Houldsworth, 74, a retired Nottingham, England, police officer and self-dubbed humble gate ambassador.

Luebbe pointed to a survey, conducted last week at Gate 3, indicating that about one-third of drivers attempting to enter via the residential lane lacked proper credentials.

Its not the ambassadors fault they miss cars, he said. They cant possibly check every car.

In 2014, GRF paid $40,000 for an evaluation conducted by Irvine-based environmental impact consultant Urban Crossroads and Anaheim-based installer California Gate & Entry Systems. After concluding that Laguna Woods Village is porous from a security standpoint, the report offered a host of recommendations  most of which will be tried out in the pilot program now underway.

Those suggestions have failed to impress dissenters, who claim they received little information about specifics until after the pilot program was a done deal.

What problem are we trying to solve? said resident Bevan Strom, 78. That has not been answered to my satisfaction.

It was an arbitrary decision, said Bill Margolis, 74. We werent included in the process.

His wife Sue Margolis, 73, observed, The few crimes that do occur are usually committed by people invited here  family members, caregivers, contractors.

Burmood confirmed that most thefts inside the gates involve people who have knowledge of and access to the property.

Developed in the early 1960s, the secluded retirement community accounts for 90 percent of its citys four square miles.

Laguna Woods as a whole counted 117 thefts and two robberies in 2015. But the vast majority of those crimes happened outside the gates near public shopping areas, according to Burmood.

Friendly gate ambassadors

Regardless, when it comes to fortifying their environs, many residents are all in  including ambassador Houldsworth and his Gate 1 coworker Judy Schreiber.

I know we dont have a high crime rate like Londons, but a better security system will prevent a lot of little problems, Houldsworth said.

He particularly likes the introduction of mechanical arms.

They provide a physical and psychological barrier for criminals, Houldsworth said.

The colleagues  by coincidence, both British  chuckle about occasional encounters with rudeness.

People honk their horns because they want us to hurry up, Schreiber said. If someone curses, I say, We dont use that kind of language  were grownups, arent we?

But such incidents are not the norm, she said.

Most folks like us, Schreiber said. You should see this place at Christmas. They bring us all kinds of food and goodies.

Ambassadors will not be replaced by computers, Luebbe said. They are still needed to process visitors.

The first stage of the security project, which also features new gate houses and landscaping, should be completed by August, Luebbe said.

If everything goes well, the rest of the program could be rolled out at the end of the year, he said.

An expansion encompassing the remaining 11 entrances, Luebbe said, would run between $50,000 and $100,000 per gate  a relative deal compared to the debuts tab, which included the software system.

Additionally, some of the gate houses will need replacement due to termite damage, Luebbe said. The structures slated for Gates 5 and 6 tallied $764,000.

Most of the costs will be covered from GRFs $30 million in reserves, Luebbe said. Residents pay about $600 per month in homeowners fees for street maintenance, some utilities and amenities such as the clubhouses and swimming pools.

The improved gate system will drive up home values, said Chuck Holland, information technology director for Laguna Woods. Money spent is money reinvested into the community.

Norma Benner, 84, said she appreciates not only the beefed up security but also the enhanced regulation of nonresidents who take up parking spaces and use laundry rooms, craft workshops , fitness centers and other amenities.

Benner and other citizens blame parking problems on the Saddleback College Emeritus Institute, which holds classes available to the public at Clubhouse 4.

We open up to the outside world, Benner said. People come for classes and stay all day.

Marilyn Coleman, 83, who enjoys taking Saddleback art classes, rolls her eyes about oft-stated annoyance over the colleges presence.

Thats the real issue with some people who want this fancy security system, she said. But its an awfully expensive way to just manage parking.

Despite the grumblings, ambassador Schreiber predicts that residents will quickly adapt to the new system and even come to prefer it. Regardless, she expects bumps along the road to Gate 1.

Its visitors who will be the problem, she said. Theyll choose the residents lane, get stuck at the arm and back up traffic. Well have to manually lift the arm and tell them to pull over so we can screen them. People dont read signs.

As for the naysayers, Schreiber concluded, Old people are very stubborn and dont like change. I can say that, because I am one. But well all get into the groove.

Contact the writer: sgoulding@ocregister.com
LOS ANGELES  The identification of a 19-year-old Canadian woman found savagely stabbed to death in Los Angeles in 1969 has brought some closure to her last living immediate relative but also resurrected decades-old speculation that her murder is connected to the Manson family killings.

Los Angeles police revealed Wednesday that they at last had identified the young woman as Reet Jurvetson of Montreal, described by her sister and a friend as full of life and longing for adventure.

Jurvetsons body was found Nov. 16, 1969, by a birdwatcher in dense brush off iconic Mulholland Drive, about 6 miles from the site of the Manson family killings of pregnant actress Sharon Tate, the wife of director Roman Polanski, and four others.

Jurvetson had been stabbed 150 times, wasnt carrying identification and eventually became known as Jane Doe No. 59.

Police made the identification, first reported by People magazine, using DNA after Jurvetsons sister recognized a photo of the young womans body posted online. The confirmation came in December.

After all these years, we are faced with hard facts, Anne Jurvetson said in a statement released Wednesday through police. My little sister was savagely killed.  I am horrified to think of how terribly frightened and alone she must have felt as she died.

Anne Jurvetson, 73, described the sad, helpless kind of feeling of not learning what had become of her sister until 46 years after her death  to always question, to never know, to imagine scenarios, all the while still hoping and dreaming that one day there would be an answer.

Though she now knows her sisters fate, Anne Jurvetson said she still has a lot to come to terms with and is hopeful that media attention on the case leads to the killer or killers.

Los Angeles police Detective Luis Rivera said investigators interviewed Charles Manson, 81, a few months ago about the Jurvetson killing, but it turned up no new information.

Though detectives have not found any concrete link between the stabbing of Jurvetson and the Manson family killings, they havent ruled it out, Rivera said.

He pointed out that Reet Jurvetson was stabbed like most other Manson victims and that her body was found near the site of some of the Tate killings in the same three-month period.

We dont rule anything out, Rivera said. Everything is on the table until proven otherwise.

Manson was arrested a month before Jurvetsons killing, but some of his followers were still free.

Rivera said detectives are trying to track down their best lead, a man known as either John or the names French pronunciation, Jean.

Reet Jurvetson met the man in Toronto before flying to Los Angeles to see him the summer of 1969, he said.

Police hope renewed media attention will generate tips leading to the man and other witnesses.

The challenge is the fact that we have people that might know but are no longer around or have forgotten, Rivera said. The longer you wait, the more things decay.

Tate was killed in her home, along with four others, on Aug. 9, 1969, three months before Reet Jurvetsons killing. Like Jurvetson, all but one of the victims had been stabbed repeatedly to death.

Anne Jurvetson said her free-spirited and naive sister went to Los Angeles after becoming smitten with John.

She said her sister sent her family a postcard saying she had found an apartment and was happy, but they never heard from her again.

Her parents never reported her missing because they thought that she was just living her life somewhere, Anne Jurvetson said.
CAMP PENDLETON  Gunnery Sgt. Chris Willingham was in Finland when he got the news that the dog he had trained and loved for years had stepped on a bomb in Afghanistan and lost her left front leg in the blast.

Lucca, an 8-year-old German shepherd was deployed on a mission with her new handler, Cpl. Juan Rodriguez, and the two were leading a U.S. Army Special Forces patrol in the Helmand Province in March 2012.

Lucca alerted Rodriguez to one bomb and ran to find others. Thats when a second bomb went off, blasting the dog into the air. Severely injured, Lucca made a valiant attempt to get back to Rodriguez.

It was the end of a sterling military career for Lucca, one of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force Camp Pendleton War Dogs. Later in the year, Rodriguez escorted Lucca on a plane to Helsinki, where Willingham was on embassy duty and waiting to get his dog back.

Four years later, on April 5, Willingham was there when when Lucca was awarded the Dickin Medal, considered the animal equivalent of the United Kingdoms Victoria Cross and the highest honor an animal can receive for military service. The medal was presented at Wellington Barracks near Buckingham Palace.

The organization cited Lucca for her record of 400 successful missions protecting the lives of thousands of troops during her six years of service. No soldiers or Marines died on her patrols.

Luccas conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty makes her a hugely deserving recipient of the Peoples Dispensary for Sick Animals Dickin Medal, said the charity director general, Jan McLoughlin, who presented the medal. Her ability and determination to seek out arms and explosives preserved human life amid some of the worlds fiercest military conflicts.

Briefly back at Camp Pendleton after the ceremony before deploying again to the Middle East, Willingham sat in his office at the Military Working Dog Platoon War Dog kennels and talked about Luccas service and how the recognition and publicity have brought greater understanding of the importance of military dogs.

There have been countless lives saved because of them, said Willingham, 36, who has served in the Marine Corps for 18 years. People have tried to replicate their work with technology but at the end of the day, you wont beat a well-trained dog team.

Military officials say dogs are the best line of defense for Coalition Forces in the Middle East fighting insurgents with improvised explosive devices.

Making a hero dog team

Lucca and Willingham became a team on April 23, 2006, when the 2-year-old became part of the 1st Marines military working dog platoon. Like all dogs in the Department of Defense, Lucca was trained at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

She had the most expression in her face Ive ever seen, Willingham recalled. You could see her eyebrows move. You could see her processing information. In 10 years, I think shes barked maybe 10 times. Shes a professional.

Willingham worked on bonding. He took long walks, worked obedience, groomed her and played with her. The Kong toy was her paycheck, he said.

Once our bond started, we were tough to beat, he said.

Lucca was trained to detect arms, ammunition, and explosives. She worked off-leash with voice and directional commands.

Like the dogs, handlers must be highly qualified. All are military police first and volunteer for the job. Marines are selected for their solid judgment, an ability to work independently and solid communication.

Most military dogs are are German shepherds, Belgian Malanois and labradors. They are trained in patrol, drug detection, as combat trackers and, like Lucca, as specialized search dogs.

Training pays off

The two deployed to Iraq for the first time on April 23, 2007 and were attached to an Army patrol. It was during the march on Baghdad in the deadliest year for Marines.

Their mission was to find and clear explosives along the Tigris River, south of Baghdad.

She searched and gave signs there was an IED, Willingham said. It was extremely validating to think of all of the hours of training and to think she found the IED where the Army patrol was heading through.

Then just down the road, Lucca indicated another find. This time it was a car rigged with explosives.

When you take a dog into combat deployment, you find the depth of the bond because your life is in their abilities and their life is in your communication, he said.

Separation and reunion

Despite being separated from Lucca in 2012 when he was sent to Finland, Willinghams thoughts never left his dog.

He spoke to Rodriguez shortly after the blast and thanked him for saving Lucca.

Rodriguez recalled this week that after the second bomb went off, he heard Lucca scream. He saw her fighting to get up through the smoke and ran to her along the path she had cleared.

Even though youve trained, when the moment happens it takes a different toll on you, he said. I grabbed her and put the tourniquet on and then carried her back to a safe zone in the tree line.

Lucca was flown to the Kandahar Province for treatment by Army veterinarians, who removed her leg. She was evacuated and sent to Camp Pendleton. Within 10 days of her injury, Lucca was up and walking as a tripod.

The best thing is Lucca still had the same spirit, Willingham said.

Rodriguez stayed with her through her surgery and recovery at Camp Pendleton. But he knew Willingham had planned to adopt Lucca when she retired.

So the two made plans for Lucca to join her former handler in Finland. Even the U.S. Ambassador there helped arrange her transport.

In what became an international media event, Rodriguez and Lucca flew out of Chicagos OHare Airport at specially selected Gate K9 on American Airlines.

It was our final mission, Rodriguez said. It was bittersweet. But it was genuine from the heart that I was able to bring Lucca to Chris. They had been waiting a long time. It was never a doubt in my mind, shed be with Chris.

Willingham, his wife, and two young children were waiting at the airport in Helsinki.

Willingham was nervous. What if Lucca didnt recognize him?

He got down on one knee to be at her eye level.

I could see them come out, he recalled. I called her name and she just lost her mind and came running to me. She jumped on me and licked my face.

Lucca lives with the Willinghams in Vista. Shes adjusted to retirement and makes appearances at local schools and community events. She also mentors the familys golden retriever pup.

Shes watching over the family now that Willingham has deployed for at least seven months to the Middle East.

While Willingham and others at Camp Pendleton are extremely proud of Luccas medal, it wont stay there. It will be placed in the Military War Dog display at the Marine Corps Museum at Quantico, Va.

This platoon has a great legacy behind it, he said. Lucca is not above it. She is just part of the legacy of all the military working dog programs.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2254 or eritchie@ocregister.com or Twitter:@lagunaini
The purple haze is clearing over medical marijuana in Costa Mesa. Last week the City Council voted unanimously to put a measure on the November 8 ballot to regularize medical marijuana dispensaries. It would compete with two other measures submitted by citizens, one limiting the number of dispensaries to four, the other to eight. If all three remain on the ballot and pass, according to California law, the one with the most votes would be enacted.

The citys measure does not limit the number of dispensaries, but would confine them by geography. As the Register reported, the measure allows manufacturing and includes location restrictions (above South Coast Plaza and west of Harbor Boulevard) and a tax component.

From the polling Ive seen in our county, medical marijuana is something people want, said Mayor Pro Tem Jim Righeimer at the April 20 council meeting. He said he was concerned about keeping the dispensaries away from residential areas. And he pointed out the citys initiative would allow the council to adjust dispensary laws to take into account regulations the state is working on for 2017. He explained that, similar to alcohol sales, when the state passes the rules, ours will dovetail with them.

All these are state and local reactions to the passage almost 20 years ago of Proposition 215, the Medical Marijuana Initiative. It mandated state action that only now has been prompted by voter activism. The Legislature in particular has shirked its duties under Prop. 215.

As with all marijuana matters in California these days, the citys action is complicated by another state initiative, this one also slated for the November ballot, that could legalize recreational marijuana, as already has been done in such states as Colorado and Washington.

Along with Costa Mesa resident Harold Weitzberg, who spoke at the council meeting, we dont think the territorial restrictions are necessary. After all, people over age 21 can buy even Bacardi 151 rum (75.5 percent alcohol) at local grocery and liquor stores. But the city is right not to impose limits on the number of dispensaries. More competition is better.
A proposal to establish the first written policy on textbook assignments at Cal State Fullerton is drawing mixed reviews on campus.

The schools Academic Senate could vote on the proposed rules as soon as today, dictating how course materials are vetted and chosen, even when textbooks are written by department leaders.

The possible vote comes after Alain Bourget, an associate math professor at Cal State Fullerton, was formally reprimanded for assigning two textbooks that were cheaper and, in his view, better than a text co-authored by the chairman and vice chairman of his department. A series of stories in the Register about Bourget and the controversy sparked a national discussion on academic freedom and textbook economics.

The proposed rules arent being universally panned. Even faculty and students who offered criticisms also mentioned elements of the rules they like.

But some faculty members were critical of the basic nature of the proposal, saying the school will continue to effectively give department leaders the upper hand in text selection over lower-level faculty and lecturers  those who often are teaching the courses.

And at least one student who said hes otherwise in favor of the measure believes the rules might not protect students from overpaying for books.

If a department establishes a policy that favors a textbook that is too expensive, that can be an issue, said Joseph Valencia, a senior art history major and board chairman of Associated Students Inc., in an email.

But Valencia also said this: The University Policy Statement makes sense. It outlines that regardless of circumstance, our campus should have policies and procedures in place for the selection of instructional materials.

One faculty member noted that a provision in the proposed rules excludes faculty authors from the book-selection process, yet offers no protection for teachers who, like Bourget, make choices against the financial interests of their bosses.

There should be a mechanism for dissenters, said Alexandro Gradilla, an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano studies and member of the Academic Senate.

If youre the lone voice (among) 20 people  what protects your rights? How can we guarantee protections?

The proposed policy makes clear that in most cases faculty members have the right to use their preferred teaching materials. But it also notes that there will be instances  such as courses with multiple sections taught by different instructors  where a common required text would be more appropriate.

That last provision mirrors advice issued by the American Association of University Professors, which Cal State Fullerton officials used as a model when drafting the proposed rules.

I think people should just order the books they want, said Kristi Kanel, a professor in the department of human services. But I understand in some cases  why you would need a standard textbook.

Under the proposed policy, departments that require a common textbook for specific courses, such as mathematics, would have to create rules outlining who can take part in the book-selection process. Departments also would have to create a way in which faculty can express their concerns about specific books, among other considerations.

The policy also would require regular reviews of textbooks, at least once every five years or whenever a new edition comes out, to ensure that books remain current. And textbook selection would factor in economics, including book costs vs. the use of free, open-source materials whenever possible.

Kathryn Dickson, a biology professor and vice chairwoman of the biological science department who chairs the committee that wrote the draft proposal, said the rules codify practices that have been in place at the university. The difference, she said, is that the rules could be set down as clear, written guidelines that would be centrally available to all interested parties.

Contact the writer: lleung@ocregister.com
KRNJACA, Serbia  She has wide brown eyes, rosy cheeks and thick black hair. Her name is Serbia Merkel al-Mustafa.

Serbia for the country where she was born just a few days ago, Merkel for the leader of Germany, where her Syrian refugee parents want to go in their desperate attempt to escape the war at home.

The al-Mustafa family is among hundreds of refugees stuck in Serbia after Austria and several Balkan nations shut their borders to migrants this winter. But the route that saw one million people reach Western Europe last year seems to be picking up in pace once again  and the family of four has high hopes of reaching their dream location soon.

Inshallah, we will be in Germany one day, Jaafar, the proud father, said Thursday as he caressed his tiny daughters cheeks inside a cramped room with bunk beds at a drab refugee camp near Belgrade, the Serbian capital.

We walked across mountains, nearly drowned in the rough seas, Jaafar said, holding the baby as mother Rasmyah tenderly watched after leaving a Belgrade maternity hospital just a day before. Nothing will stop us now.

Serbia Merkel is just one of many who have been born during the largest exodus into Europe since World War II. And she is not the only one named after Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, for her welcoming policies toward migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

But since the closure of the Balkan migration route and a European Union deal with Turkey to deport some migrants back there, things have gone sour for the migrants. Thousands have been stuck in Greece, many camping in appalling conditions on the border with Macedonia, and thousands more have been forced to turn to human traffickers.

Jaafar al-Mustafa, a 27-year-old who walks with a metal cane, thinks Macedonian police let them into the country from Greece because they felt pity for the family that also included 20 month-old Sarah and his heavily pregnant wife, 23-year-old Rasmyah.

We have walked most of the way to Serbia, he said. My wife started getting pains while walking. Lucky we made it to here before she started giving birth.

The migrants stuck in Serbia, including many children, are trying to figure out how to proceed deeper into Europe. Most hope to cross into Hungary and then Austria, despite those governments tough stances toward refugees.

Among those is Diaa Alaf, 23, a Syrian who left Aleppo four months ago and is traveling with her 15-month-old daughter. She hopes to reach Austria, where her parents are already established. Smugglers took her from the squalid camp at Idomeni, on Greeces northern border, through Macedonia to the Serbian camp along with two other families, 22 people in all, each paying 310 euros ($350).

We came into Serbia in a group with smugglers, Alaf said. Now we heard we can go with smugglers to Hungary, but also we are hearing the Hungarians are letting in families with children, around 30 people per day.

Their journey could face further obstacles, with Hungarian police saying they are arresting about 130 migrants a day for crossing the border illegally.

I just want this horror to end, Alaf said.
SAN DIEGO  Three endangered Sumatran tiger cubs have made their debut at San Diego Zoo Safari Park.

Visitors got their first glimpses Tuesday of Nelson, Cathy and Debbie as the 3-month-old cubs romped and munched on plants in their habitat.

The trio was born in late January to Joanne, a Sumatran tiger thats a popular attraction at the zoo. Zookeepers say Joanne is a doting mother.

They say Nelson, the male, is the largest and calmest of the three cubs. His sister Cathy is the most vocal, and Debbie is the most adventurous.

Fewer than 350 Sumatran tigers are thought to exist in the wild. They are found only on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Lawmakers accused Valeant Pharmaceuticals of gouging patients to reward Wall Street investors at a hearing Wednesday focused on the embattled drugmakers pricing tactics.

The tough words from Senate Republicans and Democrats came as billionaire hedge fund manager William Ackman defended the companys business model and its outgoing CEO expressed regrets for its most egregious price increases.

As the hearing opened, lawmakers on the Senate Aging Committee laid into the Canadian drugmakers approach to buying older, niche drugs and increasing prices.

Valeants monopoly model operates at the expense of real people, said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in her opening statement.

Berna Heyman, a patient with a rare genetic disorder called Wilsons Disease, testified that the co-pay on her medication increased from $700 per year to more than $10,000. The 30-year-old drug, Syprine, was acquired by Valeant in 2010 and has seen its price increase more than 3,000 percent.

Collins said documents reviewed by her staff show Valeant already has recouped the purchase costs of four drugs subject to drastic price hikes, including Syprine.

Ranking Democrat Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, said executives with ties to Wall Street have driven the adoption of Valeants price-hiking business model.

The notion that we can sit idly by while smart people on Wall Street can do ledger entries to create another layer of profit in the health care sector to benefit multimillionaires on the backs of patients and ultimately taxpayers cant continue, McCaskill said.

The committee questioned Valeants outgoing CEO, J. Michael Pearson, its former chief financial officer, Howard Schiller, and Ackman, whose hedge fund holds a large stake in Valeant and controls two seats on its board of directors.

Valeants stock surged under Pearsons leadership, fueled by a strategy of gobbling up smaller companies and raising prices on niche drugs  bypassing the huge research and development investments typical of the drug industry. Valeant raised net prices on its portfolio of U.S. drugs by 41.3 percent between October 2014 and October 2015, according to research by Sector and Sovereign Research analyst Richard Evans.

Ackman told lawmakers this low-cost and disciplined business model made Valeant a smarter investment than its peers.

A number of observers have suggested that the more a pharmaceutical company spends on R&D, the better for society. We do not believe this to be true, said Ackman, who is founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital. Ackman, whose hedge fund controls $12 billion, went on to say that Valeants strategy can do more for innovation in pharma by acquiring other drug companies than by developing its own drugs.

He added that certain drastic price hikes  including those that first attracted congressional scrutiny  were mistakes that have caused great reputational damage.

Pearson also expressed regrets for the price hikes, specifically raising prices on two life-saving heart drugs by more than 300 percent and 700 percent, respectively.

Valeant was too aggressive and I, as its leader, was too aggressive, he told lawmakers. I regret pursuing transactions where a central premise was a planned increase in the prices of the medicines.

Pearsons comments come shortly before he is due to be replaced as Valeant CEO, and may not win much sympathy from Senate lawmakers.

Valeant announced Monday that it would replace Pearson as CEO early next month with Joseph Papa, CEO of generic drugmaker Perrigo Co.

In recent months, Valeant has been swamped by a host of problems including three ongoing federal probes of its accounting and pricing practices, massive debt and the threat of default on agreements with creditors and bondholders.

The intense scrutiny of the Laval, Quebec-based company has triggered repeated sell-offs of Valeant shares, which have lost nearly 90 percent of their value since peaking last August.
CYUPS posts a notice that a plan of implementing reforms is under discussion.

China Youth University of Political Studies (CYUPS) is currently busy preparing for new undergraduate admissions, according to information on its official website.

Established in December 1985 by the Communist Youth League, CYUPS offers regular higher education programs and provides special training courses for youth leaders.

The staff at the Admission Office of CYUPS took part in the Consultation about Undergraduate Admissions of 2016 on April 23, 2016.

In addition, the admissions office is making a report on its admission plan for each province, as well as making final revisions to its admissions brochure, which will be issued soon.

CYUPS posted a notice on its website on the morning of April 22 that a plan of implementing more ambitious reforms was under discussion at the university.

A rumor that undergraduate admissions will be suspended has been circulating online in recent days. However, the teachers and students at CYUPS said in an interview with People's Daily Online that no official information has been released yet.
LISBON, Portugal  Police in Cape Verde captured Wednesday a soldier suspected of killing 11 people at a military barracks in the West African island nation, an official at Cape Verdes Defense Ministry said.

The suspect was arrested after a 24-hour manhunt, spokeswoman Edna Pinto told The Associated Press by telephone. She had no other details.

State broadcaster Radio Cabo Verde said the suspect was captured in the Paiol neighborhood of Praia, the capital of the former Portuguese colony. The broadcaster and other local media identified him as 22-year-old Manuel Antonio Silva Ribeiro.

The government previously said a disgruntled soldier who had gone missing was suspected of gunning down eight soldiers and three civilians, including two Spaniards, on Tuesday. It said in a statement that personal motives inspired the attack, ruling out an attempted coup or any connection with violence associated with drug trafficking that has recently plagued the archipelago.

The bodies were at a morgue in the capital Praia for autopsies, Radio Cabo Verde said.

The government decreed two days of national mourning from Wednesday, when national flags will fly at half-mast.

The Cape Verde archipelago, some 370 miles off Senegal, is made up of 10 islands. Around 500,000 people live there.
San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farooks brother, the brothers Russian wife and her sister were arrested Thursday morning on federal charges of conspiracy, marriage fraud and making false statements, the U.S. Attorneys Office announced.

The arrests of Syed Raheel Farook, 31, of Corona; Tatiana Farook, 31, of Corona; and Mariya Chernykh, 26, of Ontario, arent directly related to the terrorist attack, but rather stem from the investigation into the shooters family.

Chernykh is married to Enrique Marquez Jr., 24, of Riverside, who authorities say illegally purchased two assault rifles used by his friend and former neighbor Rizwan Farook in the Dec. 2 massacre. Marquez has been charged with conspiring to support terrorists, lying about the firearm purchase and participating in a sham marriage.

This weeks indictment alleges that Raheel and Tatiana Farook took part in the sham by witnessing the Marquez-Chernykh wedding in November 2014, then helping maintain the illusion that the two were living as a married couple  up to the day before the shooting.

Court documents say Marquez admitted he was paid $200 a month to marry Chernykh so she could get immigration benefits. The FBI previously interviewed Chernykh at the Ontario home of a man she described as her ex-boyfriend, who is also the father of her child.

Weve made a solemn commitment to the people of San Bernardino  all those affected by the Dec. 2 (terrorist) acts  that we will turn over every stone to identify those involved or engaged in some form of criminal activity related to the acts of Dec. 2, and the indictments today reflect the work weve been doing to honor that commitment, Central District U.S. Attorney Eileen Decker said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Attorneys for the defendants could not immediately be reached for comment.

All three are scheduled to be arraigned Thursday afternoon in federal court in downtown Riverside.

Marquez, who is named as an uncharged co-conspirator in the new indictment, remains in jail. On Thursday morning, a man who answered the door at Marquezs Riverside home declined to comment about the arrest of Marquezs wife.

The Farook family used to live next door to Marquezs family in Riverside. The boys all went to the same high school before Marquez transferred to a continuation high school. Marquez told federal investigators that Rizwan Farook converted him to Islam soon after they met.

Authorities dont believe Marquez played a role in the Dec. 2 shootings, but say Marquez and Rizwan Farook made plans which they never carried out to attack Riverside City College and the 91 freeway. Prior to Thursday, Marquez was the only person arrested as a result of the San Bernardino investigation.

Decker, the U.S. attorney, would not comment Thursday about whether federal investigators found anything on the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook and if that factored into Thursdays arrests, citing an ongoing investigation. The FBI and Apple battled fiercely in court over whether Apple could be forced to help the FBI unlock the phone, but the cases ended a month ago when the FBI was able to get in with the help of an unidentified third party.

THE INDICTMENT

The five-count indictment returned Wednesday by a federal grand jury alleges Raheel Farook and the two Russian women conspired to make false statements on immigration documents, which carries a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison.

Additionally, Chernykh is charged with fraud and misuse of visas, permits and other documents; perjury; and two counts of making false statements to federal agents. The four charges carry a combined maximum possible sentence of 25 years in prison, the U.S. Attorneys Office said.

Raheel and Tatiana Farook, married since late 2013, live on Forum Way in Corona along with their 1-year-old baby and Raheels parents.

The alleged marriage arrangement between Chernykh and Marquez included signing immigration documents that they lived at the same address on Forum Way when they did not, the government says. Chernykh also claimed she lived there in interviews with FBI agents, the indictment says.

Other alleged acts outlined in this weeks indictment include:

 Tatiana Farook warning her sister Chernykh on Dec. 25, 2014, not to post photos of Chernykh with the father of her child on a social website.

 A Nov. 5, 2015, social media statement from Marquez that he was involved in terrorist plots and might go to prison for fraud.

 Chernykh and Tatiana Farook purchasing a $50 wedding ring for Marquez in Riverside on Dec. 1, 2015, the day before the San Bernardino attack.

 Signings of immigration forms and affidavits that variously asserted Chernykh was married to Marquez and that Syed Raheel Farook was giving financial support to Chernykh.

 Chernykh signing immigration forms declaring she was married to Marquez and seeking resident status in the United States because of her marriage.

 A record of some of the $200 payments from Chernykh to Marquez.

Raheel and Tatiana Farook also took staged family pictures of Marquez and Chernykh, establishing a joint checking account for Marquez and Chernykh, and creating a back-dated lease for Marquez and Chernykh to create the illusion that they shared a marital residence with Syed Raheel Farook and Tatiana Farook, the U. S. Attorneys office said.

CORONA NEIGHBORHOOD

On Dec. 2, Syed Rizwan Farook, who grew up in Inland Southern California, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, who moved from Pakistan to marry Farook in 2014, killed 14 people and wounded 22 others in the terrorist attack at the Inland Regional Center.

Authorities immediately began scrutinizing his family: parents Syed and Rafia Farook, both from Pakistan, who had four children  sons Syed Raheel and Syed Rizwan, who went by their middle names, and daughters Eba and Saira.

After the parents divorced, the father moved in with Raheel and Tatiana Farook in Corona, while the mother moved in with Rizwan and Malik in Redlands. Both couples had babies. After the shooting, the mother moved to Corona with the rest of the family.

Raheel is a U.S. Navy veteran whose military record includes medals from fighting in the war on terrorism. In the past, neighbors have described Raheel as a clean-cut, personable loan officer. In high school in 2002, Raheel organized an event to resolve conflict and address racism.

In February, federal agents executed a search warrant at Raheel Farooks home. Investigators took a computer tower, large envelopes and bags, and made no arrests. At the time, FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said the affidavit in support of the warrant was sealed by the court.

On Thursday morning, the neighborhood surrounding the Corona townhome was calm and quiet, with a handful of coffee-toting neighbors entering their cars en route to work. As word spread about the warrants, news media began to arrive.

Neighbor Stacy Mozer said hes gotten to know the Farooks since the Dec. 2 attack, and described the family as friendly people. He went over to the Farooks house shortly after 9 a.m. Thursday to talk and see if he could help them in some way.

Raheel Farook has told Mozer he didnt know anything about his brothers plans and that he himself was not involved in the attack.

Theyre great people. Nice people. Friendly, Mozer said. Good, good, good people.

This story is developing. Check back for updates.

Staff writers Richard K. De Atley, Anne Millerbernd, Joe Nelson, Beatriz Valenzuela, Suzanne Hurt and Patrick ONeill contributed to this report.
Hikaru Dorodango, which translates to shiny dumpling, is a relaxing Japanese art that involves crafting shiny spheres from dirt. That might sound super simple, but it actually takes years to perfect and several hours to manipulate the dirt. Its all worth it in the end though, because, in the hands of a true master, the end results are nothing short of mind-blowing.

To make a shiny Dorodango, you start by packing mud into your hand and squeezing out all the moisture. You then press into into the shape of a sphere and spend the next two hours rubbing on more layers of increasingly finer dry dirt. Once this is complete, you pack the dumpling in a plastic bag for three or four hours and later polish it with a cloth and varnish until it shines.

The craft is widely taught in schools across Japan, thanks to the efforts of Professor Fumio Kayo, a a psychologist who researches childrens play at Kyoto University of Education. He first came across the glistening dorodango balls at a nursery school in Kyoto in 1999, where the teacher showed him how they are created. He became fascinated with the idea of making mud shine and started practicing the technique himself. It was tougher than it looked, but through trial and error, Kayo managed to perfect the art and also make it more accessible. After hundreds of failed experiments, he devised a simple method that could be followed by adults and children alike.

For Kayo, the art of Hikaru Dorodango became not only a fascinating hobby, but also a way to study developmental psychology. Professor Kayo found that young children were often enthralled by dorodango-making and were willing to spend several hours kneading mud and polishing it. They also became attached to their dorodango balls even if they were not perfectly round or if they did not shine. He feels that making shiny mud balls is a good way of searching for the essence of childrens play.

But while children may enjoy making shiny balls out of dirt, the most impressive Hikaru Dorodango creations are made by experienced adults. American artist Bruce Gardner, for example, is an accomplished dorodango sculptor who spends hours carefully crafting new shiny balls to add to his collection. Once I read about it, I had to do it myself, he said. I was out doing it the next day. It took me 30 tries, maybe a little bit more  I was very persistent and kept at it solid for probably a month. I always want to experiment with different soils and theres always a chance Ill get better at it. Its very relaxing and its so easy to get sucked into a flow state.

As for the feedback he gets from people who see what hes capable of creating out of dirt, Gardner says: The responses are amazing  either they get it right away and think its the most amazing thing theyve ever heard of, or they think its just completely absurd and a waste of time.

Sources: Web-Japan, This Is Colossal, Obscura Magazine
In a nation ravaged by war, where children have little to no access to quality literature, a school teacher is trying his best to make a difference. Saber Hosseini, who teaches children in the city of Bamiyan, central Afghanistan, has converted his bicycle into a mobile library which he rides to remote villages.

I came up with the idea for this project six months ago. I talked about it to friends in literary circles, who donated money and got some of their friends abroad to donate as well. I started alone with 200 storybooks for kids, and started riding to remote villages throughout Bamiyan province. Soon, I recruited more volunteers  now there are 20 of us, and we have a collection of about 6,000 books. Most of these books are imported from Iran.

Hosseini revealed that he chose to use bicycles for his mobile library project for a number of reasons. Many of volunteers simply cannot afford cars and most of the villages in his province are only accessible by bike. But there was also a symbolic meaning to his choice. The Taliban used bicycles in their bomb attacks  so I wanted to replace violence with culture, he said, speaking to The Observers.

Saber loads his cycle with books every weekend and rides to remote villages, most of which dont even have schools. Many of those children are old enough for the third or fourth grade, he told Business Insider. But in fact, they have not learned to read or write at all. This should not be happening. He keeps track of all the books he has left behind, so that he can bring new ones for the kids the next time around.

We work as a sort of library  every week, we bring kids new books and take back the old ones to distribute to children in other villages. Some of the adults have even taken to borrowing our more advanced books. At first, I chose very simple books, but now most of the older kids are able to read more serious books  for example, weve got simplified versions of books by Victor Hugo, Jack London, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Samad Behrangi, and Ferdowsi.

Hosseini does more than just distribute books to children  he also stops to talk to them about a topics such as peace, tolerance, and why they should stay away from drugs. One time, I talked to children in a village about guns, using the slogan say no to guns and yes to books, he recalled. The next time I went to their village, the kids had gathered up all of their plastic toy guns and handed them over to me  but they had one condition: they wanted their village to be the first in the next round of book deliveries so they could get first pick. It was the most joyful moment of my life!

Sadly, Hosseini is forced to work with a limited budget and cannot always afford to get the kinds of books that the children request  mainly comics about Batman that theyve seen on TV. There are other dangers associated with his work too  he sometimes receives phone threats warning him to only distribute religious books or face dire consequences. His wife, also a teacher, has not been spared either  a student once warned her that some of his relatives in the Taliban were planning to kill her.

Despite these difficulties, we want to keep going, Hosseini said. These kids live such stressful lives  they live in a society that is full of death and violence, and they often face violence from their parents at home, too. So we want to keep delivering a bit of joy and calm in their lives through books.
A college professor in China has been suspended after giving his students a rather controversial test during their final exam. In a bid to prepare them for real life, he asked his students to gulp down glasses of baijiu, a Chinese liquor, grading them based on how much they were able consume.

Youre all going to do sales jobs after graduation, drinking baijiu is the thing you must learn! Gu Ming told the students of his Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) class at Guizhou Anshun Vocational Institute. He had poured the alcohol into dozens of plastic cups and laid them out on the desk in his office, asking his students to drink up.

Those who ganbeied (finished) a full glass of liquor get a full 100 mark for their exam, half glass gets 90 marks, and a sip gets 60, one of Gu Mings students later posted on Chinese social media website Weibo. Those who do not drink at all will fail.

It sounds like the easiest exam ever, but it was actually quite difficult  baijiu is a rather potent beverage made from grain, with an alcohol content of 40 to 60 percent. But Gu Ming apparently decided to give it to his students anyway, because it happens to be the beverage of choice in the Chinese business world.

Photographs uploaded to social media showed that most of the students passed the test with flying colors, having managed to down their glasses of baijiu. Several students were later reported to have been found in an inebriated state on campus. If the test was intended to be a joke, the institutes deputy director Fu Guisheng did not see the humor in it, suspending Gu Ming over the issue.

The incident also did not go down well with others outside the institute  it sparked an intense online debate with many lashing out against the professor. Only a few sympathized with him, stating that he was trying to help his students.

via ECNS
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China's Jinggangshan University recently provoked a controversy on the Internet after it was exposed as urging its students to work for a film crew for free, and even threatening to record them as skipping classes if they refused.

The university denied the claims on Tuesday, saying that the students were allowed to choose not to participate, and that a refusal to work was not considered skipping class.

A post complaining about the work.

According to the information disclosed on the online bulletin board of the college, the students were forced to work about 12 hours each day, and some students suffered from allergies while working with the dusty costumes.

An employee with the university tried to downplay the news, explaining that while it was true some male students were asked to work for the crew, it was a part of their social practice requirement. Also, it was a higher authority who asked the university to help with the filming in the first place.

The employee added that since the film is about the hard life of Chinas Red Army during the Long March, the dirty costumes were required by the plot, and students who had allergies could apply not to participate in the filming.

The university also issued a statement saying that it has reached an agreement with the producers. Those students working for the crew will be given a subsidy of 30 yuan each day as well as a life insurance policy.
The fifth foreign ministers meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) is being held in Beijing on April 27 and 28. Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend and address the opening ceremony. Focusing on "promoting security through dialogue," the meeting will map out the agenda of CICA for the next two years.

In May 2014, as CICAs rotating president, China successfully held the Shanghai Summit and proposed a new vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security in Asia. During the two-year presidency, China has encouraged and fostered the implementation of the consensus reached at the Shanghai Summit, as well as continuously enhancing the institutional capability of CICA.

As a result, the international influence of CICA has gradually expanded. All member states have agreed to extend China's presidency to 2018, which shows their recognition of China's efforts.

Especially since Asia became a major driving force for global economic growth, the international community has attached high importance to regional security. Nowadays, peace and mutually beneficial cooperation are the order of the day in Asia, and disputes are settled through negotiation and consultation throughout the region. People have noticed that, despite being faced with challenges, security cooperation in Asia is gradually improving.

However, the general security pattern in Asia is still challenged by problems left over by history, such as territorial disputes and geopolitical games. For quite some time, certain countries outside the region have been fanning up threats as an excuse to strengthen military alliances and undermine regional stability. In addition, non-traditional security challenges in areas such as finance, energy, food, and cyberspace have also emerged in Asia.

All in all, there is still work to be done on the overall project of security in Asia. The truth is that some unhealthy tendencies are still alive in the region, such as the Cold War mentality, a tendency toward confrontation and looking for imaginary enemies. Of course, history has already revealed the ultimate negative outcomes of all these habits. Nevertheless, it's clear that security in Asia is still in the stage of "out with the old, in with the new."

For that reason, the Asia security concept proposed by China during the CICA Shanghai Summit has a lot of promise. At its core, the concept is a vision of security for all and by all. The pursuit of common security acknowledges a new reality of interwoven interests. Disputes can be resolved peacefully when cooperation is guaranteed, which also enhances mutual trust and long-term stability in the relationships between all parties.

CICA is the regional security forum with the widest coverage and most member states in Asia. With increasing demand for security cooperation, CICA has a bright future, ripe for development. In the mean time, China stands ready to help implement the pursuit of common security and push for forward progress throughout Asia.
The Nebraska German Students Convention was held at Gretna High School in Gretna on April 16, with 16 schools and more than 200 students in attendance.

The day consisted of competitions and seminars showcasing German. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Nebraska German Convention, which has been held every year since 1976. Marissa Wanamaker of Lincoln High School was honored by the American Association of Teachers of German for her students consistently high scores on the National German Exam.

Student results for the day are as follows:

Knowledge Bowl, level 1: first Westside Middle School, second Millard Central Middle School

Knowledge Bowl, level 2: first Millard North High; second Westside High

Knowledge Bowl, level 3: first Gretna High; second Omaha South High

Advanced Quiz Bowl (Pass Auf): first Bellevue East; second Millard North High, third Gretna High

In the skit competition, Gretna High placed first, Bellevue West was second

In Level 1 Spelling, Ben Hall from Russell Middle School was first; second was Mira Yarkova from Westside High.

In Level 2 Spelling, first place went to Haidyn Sosalla-Bahr from Millard North High; second was Brandon Lambrecht from Bellevue East; third was Justin Solheim from Westside High.

In Level 3 Spelling, the winner was Ransom Sumpter and second was Cassie Brayton, both from Lincoln East; third was Haley Petri from Westside High.

In Level 4 Spelling, first place went to Jacob Mikkelson from Bellevue West; second was Lydia James and third was Kenneth Erickson, both from Westside High.

Directed Dialogue is a series of questions which the student has to answer.

Level 1: First was Theo Jansen and second was Claire Benson, both from Westside Middle; third was Nathan Renard from Lincoln East.

Level 2: First was Shreya Yadav and second was Gracie Fagan, both from Millard North High; third place was Katarina Wilson from Westside High.

Level 3: First was Ransom Sumpter from Lincoln East; second was Sam Sweeney from Westside High; third was Khristina Polivanov from Gretna High.

Level 4: First was Michael Stage and second was Lexi Polivanov, both from Gretna High; third was Luciano Hallett from Bellevue West.

In Beginning Poetry, Mira Yarkova from Westside High took first; second was Macy Glinsmann from Millard Central Middle; third was Michelle Keiser from Millard North High.

In Advanced Poetry, the winner was Gabrielle Linder from Bellevue East. Nathan Lachner from Papillion-LaVista South won second place.

Shirt Design: First place was Westside Middle; second place was Lincoln Southeast and third place was Millard West.

Poster: First place in the high school category was Anne Watts from Skutt Catholic High School; Samantha Steele from Millard Central Middle took first place in the middle school category, followed by Jane Knudson and Minna Glover from Westside Middle who took second place.

Artwork: the winner in the high school category was Molly Davis and second was Alexa Jones and Sydney Dickerson, all of Millard West; third was Faith Werner from Bellevue East. Middle school winners were: Julia Benson and Vivian Le from Westside Middle.

The winning theme display was by Tesa Weddle, Katie Carlson, Luciano Hallett, Alexa Carroll, Jillian Hussman, Alex Robertson, Torie Walenz, Cassie Black, Hayley Schroeder, Hunter McNabb, Ian Saunders, Mackenzie Wade, Matthew Colwell, Melissa Irish and Miranda Bowser of Bellevue West.

In the cake competition, there were four categories. The winning Sachertorte was baked by Ashley Novak and Ashley Clark from Russell Middle School.

The Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte winners were Haley Petri, Vivian Jacobitz, and Amelia Coulter from Westside High.

The winning Apfelkuchen was baked by Abby Schreiber from Westside Middle.

The Linzertorte was won by Rebecca Rockefeller from Lincoln Southeast.

The Promotional Video/PowerPoint Competition was won by Heather Schumacher from Skutt Catholic High School.

Level 1 and Level 2 video skits were won by Gretna High School.

Music video: First place was Colin Green and Austin Rousseau from Lincoln Southeast; second place was Nathan Novak, Erika Cornett, Ayrianna Lane, Anna Allen, Tori Winter, Khristina Polivanov, and Hunter Horseman from Gretna; third place Connor Jolley, Sheng-Jie Lim and Anirudh Patchipulusu from Millard North High.

Instrumental Music winner was a duet by Michael Stage of Gretna and Madeleine Jacobitz from Westside High; second place was Miranda Kuzela from Papillion-LaVista South; third place was Maya Abo-Dominguez from Lincoln High.

Vocal Music winner was Sammy Burchell of Lincoln East. Second place was awarded to Belle Kendle, also of Lincoln East; and in third place was Ivy Banks from Millard North.
Omaha Public Schools said it will review and possibly revise its severe-weather procedures after parents at Castelar Elementary were told they couldnt take shelter inside the school during a tornado warning at dismissal time Wednesday.

OPS spokeswoman Monique Farmer said the inconvenient timing of the severe weather  tornado sirens began sounding right around the 4:05 p.m. dismissal for elementary schools  prompted questions about how schools should respond.

Schools took different tacks.

At Fullerton Elementary, parents and two passing buses with high schoolers were ushered into the school to take shelter.

At Castelar, Principal Adriana Vargas reportedly told parents they would have to wait out the storm in their vehicles.

That riled parents such as Jennifer Lang, who walks several blocks to pick up her kids at Castelar, at 18th and Martha Streets. She and a group of about two dozen parents huddled outside the school entrance during the storm.

To me, thats the wrong call, to leave over 20 parents outside when theres an active tornado warning and a confirmed tornado on the ground, Lang said Thursday. Thats putting parents lives in danger.

Lang said she understood security concerns but said staff know most of the parents at Castelar and recognize those who walk to school each day.

Id like to see a plan put in place for parents who are there to pick up their kids if that happens, she said. They should at least let you in the front door so youre in some sort of shelter.

Paul Johnson, director of the Douglas County Emergency Management Agency, said schools are not necessarily required to act as public shelters.

Farmer said student safety is always paramount. She said Vargas and other principals at crowded schools had concerns about letting more people in when space was tight inside storm shelters.

The districts current storm guidelines dont address what to do about parents or others gathered outside a school in severe weather. Schools do conduct storm drills with students and staff in the spring and fall.

Farmer said a committee of officials, including school safety and transportation representatives, will meet in coming weeks to walk through different scenarios. Their goal will be to provide clearer guidelines to schools and parents.

The committee will discuss what to do if a storm strikes at dismissal or drop-off time and will make recommendations for parents who want to pick up their children and leave during a storm warning.

Other measures OPS might consider are making robocalls to parents warning them not to drive to school for pickup and figuring out how to man school doors that automatically lock.

We need to step through these specific kinds of situations we could run into if we have an active warning during dismissal, like we had yesterday, Farmer said.

Those are actions the district needs to take, Lang said Thursday.

Thats what I wanted to hear, she said. It is a serious matter.

Contact the writer: 402-444-1210, erin.duffy@owh.com

* * *

More storm coverage
Time up for Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah? Unlikely even as lobbying continues

Bengaluru

oi-Vicky

Bengaluru, Apr 28: There has been hectic lobbying by the Congress in Karnataka to bag the post of Chief Minister with some reports suggesting that the high command is unhappy with Siddaramaiah.

While the lobbying has been hectic by the likes of S M Krishna, Dr G Parameshwar and Mallikarjuna Kharge, the high command is however undecided on whether to effect the change or not.

The Congress is the midst of problems in New Delhi with fresh allegations on the AgustaWestland chopper deal. If they attempt to replace Siddaramaiah at this moment, there is bound to be major trouble and he will walk out with at least 20 MLAs.

Speculations galore

What has led to the speculation is the meeting between Krishna and Sonia Gandhi in New Delhi. Some Congress leaders in the state feel that he had met with Sonia Gandhi to discuss the issue of Chief Ministership.

Another cause for the speculation emerged when Sonia Gandhi reportedly did not meet with Siddaramaiah during his visit to Delhi on April 23. Some rebel MLAs also held a meeting which led to further speculation.

While the High Command has made its displeasure felt about the recent controversies surrounding Siddaramaiah, sources say that no immediate decision would be taken. Asking Siddaramaiah to step down at this juncture could add to the troubles of the Congress.

He will not step down that easily and realistically has the staunch support of at least 20 MLAs. While it is claimed that he has the support of nearly 45, sources say that many are fence sitters and swing where the tide is stronger.

Lobbying

Even before the High Command has decided on anything there is some hectic lobbying on for the post of CM. While the Mallikarjuna Kharge faction felt that he should be made the CM, the Congress is unlikely to relieve him of his responsibilities in New Delhi.

Further the names of S M Krishna and G Parameshwar, the Home Minister of the state are doing the rounds. Both camps are making pitches before the high command.

However the high command is undecided and feels that it would not be a good idea to meddle especially when there are nearly two years remaining for the elections. The high command is expected to make a change as 2018 is nearing when the state goes to polls.

OneIndia News
Tamil Nadu: Check the list of special trains operating from Chennai this Diwali

Shades of DMK promises in Congress manifesto for TN polls

Chennai

oi-PTI

Chennai, Apr 28: Echoing many poll promises made by its key ally DMK, Congress on Wednesday released its manifesto, saying it would implement prohibition, end corruption and set up a Lokayukta, if the combine is voted to power, in the May 16 Assembly polls.

Congress said it would provide good governance by ending corruption and assured prohibition. The party said it would set up a Lokayukta and take steps to bring fishermen under Scheduled Tribes category.

[Special Coverage: Assembly Elections 2016]

Waiver of loans taken by farmers from cooperative and nationalised banks was among the highlights of the manifesto. All such promises have been made by DMK in its recently released manifesto.

Seeking votes to unseat the "atrocious" AIADMK government, the national party promised a comprehensive agriculture, education and industrial policies.

It said backlog vacancies of Scheduled Castes and Tribes will be filled by holding a special examination.

The manifesto was released here today by Tamil Nadu Congress Committee president E V K S Elangovan in the presence of party leaders, including national general secretary and State incharge, Mukul Wasnik.

PTI

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Story first published: Thursday, April 28, 2016, 11:06 [IST]
Rahul-Buddha bonhomie: How conveniently Congress has forgotten Sainbari murders

Feature

oi-Shubham

By Shubham

The coming together of Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and former West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee on a stage in Park Circus Maidan in Kolkata on Wednesday (April 27) was termed by the CPI(M) top brass as a unprecedented event in the country's politics.

Assembly Polls 2016 Coverage; List of 53 seats going to polls on April 30

On the occasion, Rahul Gandhi expressed fear about the future of democracy in a state where a three-year-old was heckled allegedly by Trinamool Congress (TMC)-backed goons.

This marriage on the stage in Kolkata was seen by the state leaders of the Left and the Congress as a master stroke in this high-stake battle with the ruling TMC. But one bereaved family in Burdwan town, about 101 kilometres from the state capital, may have felt an excruciating pain seeing the two leaders together. [Congress is talking about CM, deputy CM; it has zero seat in next phase]

The family is of the Sains.

CPI(M) cadres were accused of killing members of a family which was observing a family function

On March 17, 1970, the Sain family in Burdwan was attacked during a six-month-old child's naming ceremony and many members of the family besides an outsider were killed, allegedly by CPI(M) supporters. Two other witnesses were killed later. Two top leaders of the CPI(M)---one of whom also became a minister in the Left Front government later---were accused in the incident.

The family, which was attacked, was known to be a supporter of the Congress and the Left supporters were said to be angry over the failure of the second United Front (UF) government of which their parties were a part. [Why ABP Group is hell-bent to defeat Mamata Banerjee]

The chief minister of the second UF government, Ajoy Mukherjee, had tendered his resignation a day earlier, and the CPI(M) was cornered in the state politics. Observers say the Sainbari massacre was the result of the culture of a violent party polarisation that Bengal has witnessed over the years. Even the then prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, had visited the bereaved family after the incident. [In Roopa Ganguly, BJP has found a 'rich-man's Mamata]

Today, Rahul Gandhi is showing sympathy for a 3-year-old; did he feel how that family in Sainbari will feel seeing him on the same stage with the Left?

Fast-forwarding by 46 years, the grandson of Indira Gandhi---Rahul---is speaking about heckling of a three-year-old kid while sharing the stage with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, whose government had onboard one of the CPI(M) leaders accused in the 1970 bloodbath.

In 1970, the frustrated Left cadres did not hestitate to put even the six-month-old kid into the fire (though he was saved) after losing power. In 2016, those frustrated cadres are no less determined to use the instance of manhandling of another child to gain public sympathy. On either occasions, children have been made part of the ugly power politics that the Left has indulged in.

Both Congress and Left know that this election is about their own survival more than Mamata's defeat

The Buddhadebs and Rahuls have forgotten the incident conveniently because today, both's parties are fighting a battle for their survival. The mathematical calculations that began with the sharing of seats between the two parties turned into a chemistry on Wednesday and buried the last remaining vestiges of ideology.

The 'proletariats' have joined hands with the 'burgeoisie' without any qualms for unless they survive, all their hollow political talks will have no relevance whatsoever.

In a desperate zeal to defeat Mamata Banerjee, both the Left and Congress have proved that they have little regard for the common man irrespective of what they say from the decked-up stages. This exercise of forging an electoral tie-up speaks volume about these two parties' surrendering the ideals of democracy while fighting an election and shamelessly betraying the faith of those who fought throughout their life for the ideals of either of these two old parties.
Efforts to boost Skill Development and Entrepreneurship

Feature

oi-Lisa

By Lisa

The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minster Mr. Narendra Modi has given its ex-post facto approval for signing the Memorandum of Understanding between the Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship (MSDE), National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and Wadhwani Operating Foundation (WOF) for cooperation in the fields of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.

Under the MoU, Wadhwani operating Foundation commits a minimum of USD 30 million and maximum of 40 Million contribution in value of services to be provided in support of mutually agreed Skill and Entrepreneurship Development initiatives but subject to a maximum of 10% (ten percent) of the total new spending of the Government of India in each of these identified and mutually agreed schemes and initiatives over a period of three years.

Benefits of MoU:

This MoU will assist facilitating and supporting Skill Development initiatives in the country through Multi-skill Institutes and Skill Universities along with promotion and creation of an eco-system for skill development.

Additionally, the MoU is expected to contribute significantly to Entrepreneurship Education & Training through an open source; thereby, assisting in enterprise and job creation.

Salient features of MoU:

1. Facilitate and Support Integration of skilling at School and Higher Education level:

MSDE through NSDC and WOF would provide support to the initiative of Centre and State Government to integrate skilling in schools and institutions of higher education in a more organized and structured manner and on a bigger scale by pooling of resources and setting up of State Programme Management Units (SPMU) at the State level or below, as required.

2. Skill Development through Multi-skill Institutes and Skill Universities:

MSDE will set up Multi-skill Institutes and Skill Universities with the help of Sector Skill Councils and NSDC. WOF funding would be utilised on initiatives on programme design, institute design, curriculum design and development, faculty development, etc. The Parties shall setup a joint committee to review the progress on development of this initiative.

3. Provide Entrepreneurship Education & Training:

Expand WOF's existing Entrepreneurship Education program in Universities and Colleges, to a significant order from the existing magnitude, over the next three years. This would include areas like providing access to entrepreneurship content, pedagogy and best practices delivered through ICT based e-content in appropriate delivery modes by qualified and trained Entrepreneurship Educators and facilitated by local faculty. This would be facilitated through a few Central Hubs along with many regional centres each for designing, facilitating, monitoring and evaluation.

4. Promote Skill Development and Job Fulfilment:

This will be done in any other areas identified by the parties during the term of this MoU through an ecosystem consisting of a vibrant policy, financial ecosystem and industry-academia -training providers.

The Parties and representatives of other stakeholders will set up a National Project Implementation Committee (NPIC) which shall review the setting up and working of SPMU on a periodic basis.

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Story first published: Thursday, April 28, 2016, 17:13 [IST]
How come Chinese passenger pays 278 Euros in tax for an old iPhone when transferring at Frankfurt airport?

(File photo)

The tax bill issued by the German customs posted by the Chinese passenger. (Photo from Weibo)

"I will never transfer flights in Germany again. For an iPhone, which I bought in China and had already used for over a year, I paid 278 Euros in tax!" This was the rant an angry Chinese passenger posted on Weibo on April 26. The post was soon shared over 10,000 times, and many people said they had had similar experiences.

An official at the Chinese consulate in Frankfurt told a reporter from Global Times that this regulation has existed for a long time in E.U. member countries; it is standard to tax the belongings of people entering the country. The regulation doesn't target tourists, but foreigners with long-term residence in E.U. countries. And in fact, the reporter later found out that the outraged passenger was not a tourist, but an overseas student in Spain.

According to the regulation, when foreigners with long-term residence in E.U. countries enter Germany, the total value of the traveler's personal belongings should not be greater than 430 Euros, excepting a certain amount of cigarettes, wine and medicine. If the total value is higher than 430 Euros, the passenger must declare the extra belongings and pay a corresponding tax. German Customs assured the Chinese consulate in Frankfurt that the regulation doesn't target any specific country.

A German lawyer told the Global Times reporter that the customs department at the Frankfurt airport is especially strict; they perform more random examinations and have particularly harsh punishments. That is why so many people have experienced the same frustrating predicament.

According to local media in Frankfurt, the Frankfurt airport receive an average of 60 million passengers per year, and the total value of confiscated articles in Frankfurt customs amounted to 4.95 billion Euros last year.
Islam is true solution for India and rest of the world: Hizb ut Tahrir

Feature

oi-Vicky

By Vicky

Over the past couple of months there have been various reports that suggest that members of the Hizb ut Tahrir is planning on launching attacks in India from Bangladesh.

While these were based on intelligence intercepts, the HuT was quick to deny the allegations and says that it is not a terrorist outfit.

Like the ISIS, even the HuT has spoken about declaration of a Caliphate. The HuT however clarifies that unlike the ISIS they are not resorting to violent means.

The Caliphate is certainly the wish of majority of the Muslims says Osman Bakhach Director of the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir (Beirut Lebanon).

In this extensive interview with OneIndia, Bakhach says that they believe Islam is the true solution for the people of India and for all the other countries.

Why is that many want to brand the Hizb ut Tahrir a terrorist organisation?

This is a good question: Considering the fact that for over 60 years since the establishment of Hizb ut Tahrir in 1953 we have only engaged in a strictly political & intellectual discourse, it is very difficult to explain why some biased media outlets are intent on promoting malicious propaganda about us.

One thing that comes to the mind is that we call for the liberation of mankind from the yoke of both colonial imperialism (manifested in the western hegemony over the global Order) and the corrupt secular civilization (the other side of the imperial coin) which has only resulted in endless miseries across the globe and we have consistently presented the Islamic solution to these challenges and this obviously does not suit the vested interests of the corrupt elite leadership & Capitalist thugs that rule the world, and because they cannot counter our arguments the easy way out for them is to use the 'Terrorism' label.

It effectively means that they define terrorism as the rejection of their slavery!

Does the HuT feel that the Caliphate can be declared? If yes then why does it become so necessary to declare one?

The Islamic State or the Caliphate is an essential part of the Islamic tenets & practices and was originally established by the Prophet of Islam, Mohammad and continued after his death for over 1300 years under the leadership of his successors who were called Caliphs , until 1924 .

There are several evidences in the Holy Quran and the Hadith which establish the importance of this issue.

Scholars over the centuries have unanimously agreed on the importance of the subject and its necessity and its benefits.

India had a close relationship with the caliphate as well, in 1924 at the time when the Caliphate was being abolished in Turkey, the Muslim scholars of India along with the Freedom fighters such as Gandhi undertook a national campaign called the Khilafat Movement all over the subcontinent to support the Caliphate.

The return of the Caliphate is a yearning carried by the Muslims globally and it reflects the natural aspirations of Muslims who want to live the Islamic way of life.

The geopolitical order imposed by the western colonial powers totally contradicts the Islamic way of life, and does not reflect the popular will.

It has been imposed only through the heavy handed rule of the military boots as can be observed has been the case with most of the Muslim world.

Having said this, the declaration of the establishment of a Caliphate must meet the essential requirements of a state. i.e. it is not a mere announcement without the corresponding realities to justify it.

What are your thoughts on the ISIS?

ISIS is one of the militant organisations competing for ground control in Syria & Iraq. We have repeatedly declared that their announcement of the Caliphate is invalid, as it does not meet the Islamic requirements.

The Caliphate state is meant to be a state of Justice and Mercy to which all people look up to, and not a state spreading terror and destruction.

The HuT too has been branded radical. Do you agree?

This terminology is dual edged; unless and until a neutral universal definition is agreed to, it is senseless to use the colonial dictionary as "The yardstick" to assess and judge people and organizations.

For example, The USA so far has refused to apologize for her colonial crimes not only against the native Red Indians, but also against the Japanese and Vietnamese peoples , to name few of the victims.

However why doesn't anyone call the American policy as "Radical" or "inhuman"?

Regarding HuT, we only present our intellectual & political thoughts leaving the freedom to people to either accept or reject them.

There have been reports that suggest that the HuT is growing stronger in Bangladesh. Is this true?

Over the years there has been an overwhelming support among the Muslims globally for the reestablishment of the Caliphate.

There have been several surveys and polls which reflect the sentiments of the Muslims on this issue.

Hizb ut Tahrir has increasingly received lot of support and motivation from the Muslims across the Muslim world and this is the case with Bangladesh as well.

Do you believe the Caliphate is the wish of all Muslims?

Certainly it is the wish of the majority of the Muslims. There are several gauges which represent the sentiment of the Muslims globally.

Well known organisations such as PEW Institute and the WorldPublicOpinion.org have time and again surveyed various Muslim countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan and Indonesia and have come with reports which clearly indicate the majority support for the implementation of Islamic Shariah.

Is the HuT keen on implementing an Islamic state? Is this really possible?

To implement the Islamic Sharia is not a matter of choice for any Muslim. In Islam, unlike Christianity or Capitalism, separation of Church and State is not possible.

The concept of Secularism was born in the western European society due to peculiar circumstances which does not match the reality of Islam or Muslim society.

Whereas it may be very normal for western nations to adopt secular capitalism as the ideological bedrock of the society, it is as much normal for Muslims to live according to the Islamic way of life.

If you mean by your question that the western colonial powers are hell bent on preventing the rise of the Islamic Caliphate, then indeed this is a struggle for liberation, hence the name of the party: The Liberation Party (HuT).

Many western politicians and leaders have openly expressed their commitment to prevent the rise of the Caliphate; this will not deter us from working tirelessly to liberate our nation from the colonial order.

The HuT was accused of anti-Semitism. Is this charge levelled because the organization is opposed to Israel?

Islam does not discriminate against people based on their nationality/ethnicity or religious background.

Islam, while rejecting the false beliefs of non-Muslims, yet Islam offers them full protection and the right to live with dignity among Muslims.

The Islamic history is a testament to this fact. Hundreds of thousands of Jews chose Istanbul, the Capital of the Caliphate to be their land of refuge from the Spanish Inquisition and they were welcomed and supported by the Caliph in settling in the cities.

It is important to note that Islam does not accept aggression and oppression, it teaches that aggressors and evil doers must be resisted and punished.

It is a well-known fact that the State of Israel has been built after occupying Muslim lands and driving the Muslim inhabitants out of their lands, thanks to the colonial Order, this is the reason why Muslims have every right to liberate their lands.

History is witness to the fact that Jews lived among Muslims both in Palestine and elsewhere in the Muslim world without being harassed.

It is sad that some hot headed Zionist leaders fell prey to the colonial policies and accepted to play pivotal role in the aggression against Muslims through the establishment of Israel.

What are your views on India?

India much like any other country globally that implements Capitalism has a large population living in poverty and hardships.

It suffers from Economic problems, social problems and political problems. At the same time people in India suffer from ethnic inequality and lack of social cohesion and harmony, and this is similar to the case of the Capitalist countries globally which includes USA and the European countries.

We believe Islam is the true solution for the people of India and for all the other countries of the world so that the people are relieved from the sufferings which we mentioned above.

The ISIS has mocked the HuT recently about the manner in which you function. They feel that intellectual discussions alone will not help achieve the cause. What are your thoughts on the same?

Our methodology is an imitation of the work of the Prophet Mohammad who worked day and night to bring the intellectual & political change he called for.

The prophet did not engage in any act of violence, although he and his followers were subject to brutal crackdown by their opponents in Mecca.

Our vision is that the State must reflect the convictions of the people. People should be ready to sacrifice to rebuild the society and state; this cannot happen at the barrel of a gun, instead it must emanate from their inner beliefs and conviction.

Regarding ISIS, and similar groups, we maintain that they have misunderstood the methodology of the prophet.

You hear incidents of violent deaths and terrorist attacks almost every day. Has the world become a more dangerous place?

Due to the endless crimes perpetuated by the colonial powers, there are always bound to be some reactions.

It is fairly easy to describe the IRA fighters as terrorists while overlooking the brutal British occupation.

The same applies in the case of Palestinians fighting Israeli brutalities, or the south African fighting the British. No one would dare label the Americans as terrorists, simply because in the law of jungle prevailing nowadays, "might makes right".

Do you think the world was a safer place when Saddam Hussein was alive?

Saddam was a brutal dictator not much different from the other dictators in the Muslim world, by degree but not in kind.

It was perhaps his poor luck that the USA wanted to demonstrate its global superiority at his demise, bypassing any and all criteria of justice or human rights.

Madeleine Albright infamous reply sums it all up when she coldly justified the murder of 500,000 Iraqi children, who, in her world view, were no more than collateral damage who had to be sacrificed at the American imperial altar.

So in brief the world is not and cannot be safe under the hegemony of the Secular Imperial Order, and the long record of endless wars and economic miseries are a clear evidence to this fact.

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Story first published: Thursday, April 28, 2016, 14:29 [IST]
Second International Yoga Day will be a Mega Event

Feature

oi-Lisa

By Lisa

Yoga which is about self acceptance and self discovery is 5,000 year old legacy from India. Yoga it is said integrates mind, body and soul. With the efforts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who himself is a yoga enthusiast, the United Nations (UN) decided to celebrate 21st of June each year as Yoga Day.

I congratulate each & every person who practiced Yoga today & made the 1st #YogaDay a success. http://t.co/kYbGHoyTXm  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 21, 2015

Last year the first International Yoga Day was celebrated with great enthusiasm world over. The proposal to celebrate International Yoga Day had received support from 175 nations, including USA, Canada and China co-sponsored the resolution. This is the highest number of co-sponsors ever for any UNGA Resolution of such nature.

Last year the main event on held on Rajpath in Delhi where thousands of colourful mats were laid. PM Modi himself had led thousands in the mass yoga event. PM had done stretches, bends and breathing exercises with 35,000 school children, bureaucrats and army men.

35,985 people belonging to 84 nations joined the #YogaDay programme at Rajpath. 2 world records have been set. Yoga truly unites. June 21, 2015

Continuing from last year's celebrations for Yoga the Government plans to organise massive event to celebrate the Second International Yoga Day on 21 June, 2016. Ministry of AYUSH will conduct following activities to celebrate the Second International Day of Yoga.

Mass Yoga demonstration following a Common Yoga Protocol on 21st June, 2016. A two-day International Conference on "Yoga for Body & Beyond". An International Yoga Fest, as Curtain Raiser to International Day of Yoga during 20-22 April, 2016 at Delhi which has already been organised. Mass Media Campaign through radio TV, digital cinema and social media. Mobilisation of School Children for performing Yoga on 21st June, 2016. Various Yoga organisations to provide technical support to States and UTs in Yoga training. Yoga organisations to organise camps at various centers. States and UTs requested to organise Mass Yoga demonstration at State, District, Block and Panchayat level. All Ministries and Departments advised to organise Mass Yoga demonstration in their offices or premises. Mobilisation of NCC, NSS, Bharat Scouts & Guides, NYKS and other organisations for organisation of Mass Yoga Demonstration and other events on the occasion. Mass Yoga Demonstration to be organised abroad through Indian Missions. Central Council for Yoga & Naturopathy to organise one month training session in Common Yoga Protocol in each district through Yoga Institutions, NGOs, District Administration, etc. culminating in organisation of Mass Yoga Demonstration on 21th June 2016.

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Story first published: Thursday, April 28, 2016, 16:16 [IST]
Muslim man donates his land for temple in UP

10,126 acres of defence land encroached: Parrikar

India

oi-Oneindia

By OneIndia Defence Bureau

Bengaluru, April 28: The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is ensuring that the armed forces have the best war fighting machines, but they seems to be finding it tough in tackling the growing menace of land-grabbing.

According to Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, MoD approximately 10,126 acres of defence land is currently under encroachment. MoD owns a total of 17,57,055.54 acres land across India.

Citing inputs from the land management agencies under MoD, Parrikar says the encroachment is around 0.58% of the total land holding of MoD. He says there are no centralised records on land grabbing complaints maintained by his ministry.

Whenever an encroachment issue is brought to the notice of MoD, Parrikar says action against is taken under the Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants) Act, 1971 and Cantonment Act 2006.

The minister said following the prevention, detection and removal of encroachment missions, defence land, recorded as illegally occupied or encroached has reduced by approximately 2,512.83 acres in the last three years.

In order to ensure the proper utilisation of defence land, MoD is undertaking periodic Defence Land Audit. A committee has also been constituted to suggest ways to optimise use of defence land, Parrikar informed the Upper House.

Directorate General Defence Estates (DGDE) under MoD maintains a data bank of defence land across the country.

Here's the State-wise list of total area of land owned by MoD (in acres): Andaman & Nicobar Islands 8,166.39 Andhra Pradesh & Telangana 39,735.03 Arunachal Pradesh 4,787.39 Assam 25,493.31 Bihar 11,925.44 Chandigarh 176.25 Chhattisgarh 1,582.41 Dadara & Nagar Haveli 0 Daman & Diu 196.00 Delhi 11,628.55 Goa 3,025.58 Gujarat 24,807.00 Haryana 37,211.36 Himachal Pradesh 8,096.65 Jammu and Kashmir 22,338.51 Jharkhand 7,713.62 Karnataka 33,124.71 Kerala 5,279.40 Lakshadweep 39.85 Madhya Pradesh 2,31,073.96 Maharashtra 1,38,802.10 Manipur 1,294.41 Meghalaya 4,029.40 Mizoram 0.21 Nagaland 551.28 Odisha 18,015.72 Pudducherry 0.38 Punjab 78,329.18 Rajasthan 8,21,186.68 Sikkim 3,078.07 Tamil Nadu 21,233.46 Tripura 2,679.51 Uttar Pradesh 1,23,309.97 Uttrakhand 27,168.07 West Bengal 40,955.70

Recent land grab incident in Bengaluru

The MoD had recently issued a statement on behalf of the Indian Air Force (IAF) in Bengaluru in connection with a land-grab incident.

MoD had said that the land mafia attempted to disturb the construction of a boundary wall. After the terror strike on Pathankot Air Force Station, security across all IAF bases has been tightened. MoD had said that around nine acres of land belonging to AFS Jalahalli had been encroached.

OneIndia News
Things are about to get unreal for real estate investors in Coimbatore: watch out for opportunities in Coimbat

40 cities to be selected in second round of smart city proj: Govt

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Apr 28: Forty cities will be selected for the second phase of the Smart City Mission, which is likely to be announced by June, Rajya Sabha was told today.

The first batch of 20 cities, including Bhubaneshwar, Pune, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bhopal and NDMC area of Delhi, were selected for Narendra Modi government's flagship smart city project in January.

"It is expected that the results of the next phase will be announced by May/June," Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said in written reply. Assured water and power supply, sanitation and solid waste management systems, efficient urban mobility and public transportation, IT connectivity, e-governance and citizen participation are some of the highlights of the smart city project.

Under the Smart City Mission, 100 cities across the country will be developed as smart cities by 2019-20 with the Union government providing financial support to the extent of Rs 48,000 crore over five years--on an average Rs 100 crore per city per year for five years.

An equal amount will be contributed by the state/urban local body and the balance funds would be mobilised through various sources such as public private partnership and municipal bonds.

Around 54 cities, including Varanasi, Nagpur, Muzaffarpur, Ghaziabad, Agra, Kanpur, Kota and Gandhinagar will compete to find a place in the second list of 40 cities for the smart city projects.

PTI
AgustaWestland: CBI, ED has money trail from abroad on its radar

India

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, Apr 28: The financial trail in the Agusta Westland deal is extremely important for both the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

CBI sources tell OneIndia that most of the evidence that they have on hand regarding the alleged corruption in the supply of 12 choppers is India based.

The CBI is also revisiting its questioning of former Air Chief S P Tyagi who has been named in the FIR along with 12 others on March 14 2013.

The probe into the Indian links to the case is almost complete and once we are able to get the evidence from abroad, we will be able to join the dots and close our investigation, the officer also informed.

Chopper scam: Govt to seek CBI report, blacklist AgustaWestland

The money trail:

The CBI had found that a sum of 20 million euros had been passed on as bribe to facilitate the deal. This is alleged to have been passed on through Guido Ralph Haschke who is an alleged middleman.

When the CBI had questioned Tyagi, he is alleged to have to told the sleuths that he had met with Haschke at a farmhouse in Delhi.

It was also found by the CBI that Tyagi's cousins were alleged to have been present at the meetings. There were at least 5 such meetings which allegedly led to the deal being swung in favour of AgustaWestland, CBI officials had also found.

The CBI says based on the questioning of Tyagi and his cousins, a team had gathered evidence before paying a visit to Italy in 2013.

During the visit to Italy, the CBI team questioned Haschke. He is alleged to have told the CBI that about the meetings. After further evidence was collected the CBI managed to find that the money trail in India was passed on through several companies.

Seeking help abroad:

The CBI meanwhile has sought help from various other countries where some of the persons connected to this deal are based. We need to establish the money trail from foreign countries connected to this deal, CBI officials say. The ED too is waiting for these details.

A key nation in this probe would be the United Kingdom. The CBI proposes to seek the extradition of a middleman James Christian Michel. We have sent out letters rogatory to these nations and are awaiting their response.

The government too wants the CBI and the ED to probe beyond India in a bid to get a clear picture about the money trail which would help establish the corruption in this deal.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Thursday, April 28, 2016, 9:16 [IST]
Bihar's bizarre rule for summer; No cooking till 6 pm or face jail

India

oi-Pallavi

Patna, April 28: Bihar administration has come up with a unique, but bizarre solution for the scorching summer and the burning huts. Bihar has recorded a total incident of 66 deaths due to fire. 1200 animals were also killed in the past 2 weeks. Hence, the state government has come up with a bizarre solution- no cooking till 6 pm.

It has been instructed to villagers that there should not be any cooking between 9 am and 6 pm during the summers and those who violate the rule will be jailed for 2 years.

Religious funnctions have also been banned. According to the Nitish Kumar government, heavy winds are picking up sparks from cooking fire and igniting straw huts. The latest incident took place in the Begusarai district two days ago where over 300 huts were gutted.

Vyasji, the Bihar government official in charge of handling disasters said, "The point is that hundreds of lives are at risk. The order has only been given after a detailed survey on just how the fires started. The jail term is based on a law on disaster management."

A villager who had lost his house in this flame said, "It sounds fine but I wonder how many people will follow it. There are practical difficulties. But yes... I did lose my home in a fire and it started from someone's cooking."

Policemen, however, say that enforcing such an order is difficult, but law and order situation may force villagers to follow the same. Till now, 100 deaths have been recorded in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha put together.

OneIndia News
Bihar: Girls protest after being asked to remove Hijab during exam

Bihar: When asked to take off hijab to check for bluetooth device, Muslim student leaves exam centre

Central team roped in as dengue cases in Bihar rise to over 5000

Bihar's Gopalganj by-poll to see a tough fight between BJP and RJD

Bihar govt raises DA by 6 per cent for workers

India

oi-PTI

Patna, April28: Bihar government on Thursday, April 28 hiked the Dearness Allowance (DA) of its employees and pensioners by 6 per cent to 125 per cent with retrospective effect from January 1, 2016.

Brajesh Mehrotra, Principal Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, informed that a decision in this regard was taken at a Cabinet meeting presided over by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

With the latest hike, the DA of the state government employees and pensioners has jumped to 125 per cent. The DA hike will put an additional burden of Rs 842 crore on the state exchequer, he told reporters here.

Among other decisions, the state government approved a proposal to strengthen Excise Intelligence Bureau (EIB) in order to effectively enforce total prohibition which had come in place with effect from April 5 last, Mehrotra said.

For strengthening the EIB, the Bihar government has approved proposal to create one post each of Deputy Excise Commissioner and Assistant Excise Commissioner, he said.

Besides, two posts of Excise Inspector and five posts of Assistant Excise Inspector will also be created, he added. Further, the state cabinet has given in-principle approval for Bihar Disaster Reduction Roadmap 2015-30, he said.

It is being drafted on the basis of outcome of the third United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction held in Sendai, Japan from March 14-18 last year, in which India alongwith 131 countries participated.

He also informed that a sum of Rs 112.84 crore has been sanctioned the state government for construction of skill development training centres at 534 blocks.

PTI
Prashant Kishor claims Nitish Kumar in touch with BJP says don't be surprised if he joins hands with it again

BJP questions TMC, CPM's silence on chopper deal

India

oi-PTI

Kolkata, April 28: Questioning the silence of CPI(M) and TMC over the VVIP chopper deal, BJP national secretary Siddharth Nath Singh on Thursday, April 28 asked both parties to reveal their stand on corruption.

"The TMC and CPI(M) are silent regarding the Agusta Westland deal. Why are they silent on the issue of corruption of Congress? This proves their double standards," Singh said here.

He also took a dig at former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya for holding the hand of Congress Vice-president Rahul Gandhi at a rally in the city yesterday. "The hand of Congress resembles nothing but corruption.

What would Bhattacharya say regarding his party's earlier criticism and stand on 2G and CWG scams? Has he forgotten that? What is the present stand of Mr Bhattacharya regarding the Agusta Westland deal?" Singh asked.

PTI
Pakistan should continue to take credible action against terror: India

After Dolkun Isa, another Chinese dissident Lu Jinghua denied visa

India

oi-Jagriti

New Delhi, Apr 28: India has denied visa to another exiled Chinese dissident Lu Jinghua, who was supposed to attend a meeting in India.

The cancellation of visa of Lu has been reported after government cancelled the visa of Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa.

Lu Jinghua, a well-known Tiananmen Square activist, was coming to Dharamsala to attend meeting of dissidents and exiles from April 28-May 1. The conference is being organised by the US-based Initiatives for China.

Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa was also supposed to attend the same conference.

Lu was intimated about visa cancellation when she was about to board an Air India flight from New York, reported the India Today.

Dolkun Isa upset over Indian move: Know all about Ughyur dissident leader

She too had earlier received an e-mail confirmation for an electronic visa.

"At the airport, the Air India staff told me simply that I couldn't board as my visa was cancelled...The staff did not tell me why, they kept me waiting at the counter for a long time and were having a heated conversation with each other in Hindi."

OneIndia News
With AQI of 259, Delhi's air on day before Diwali least polluted in 7 years

Delhi LG and CM greet people on Diwali, ask people to be mindful of pollution

F-16: US feeds Pak the delusion of being India's military equal

India

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, Apr 28: India sees hope in the statements made by top lawmakers in the United States of America who have warned against the sale of F-16s to Pakistan.

Congressman Mat Salmon said that many including him question the judgement of the Obama administration to sell the F-16s to Pakistan as they felt it would ultimately be used against India.

India had raised this issue when the decision to sell the F-16s to Pakistan was taken. However the Obama administration did not pay heed to the concerns and decided to go ahead with the sale.

Will the words of Salmon ensure a change in decision? India hopes it does change the decision, but says it does not have its hope too high up.

Warning from a former Pakistan diplomat

Last year, a former Pakistani ambassador to the US, Hussain Haqqani too had warned about the sale of F-16s to his country.

He had suggested that the US must tell Pakistan that their ambition of rivalling India is akin to Belgium trying to rival France or Germany.

Haqqani had felt that unless Pakistan changes its world view and its compulsive competition with its much larger neighbour, American weapons would end up being used to fight or menace India.

By aiding around 40 billion US dollars to Pakistan since 1950, the US has fed Pakistan the delusion of being India's regional military equal, Haqqani had also said.

The US policy since the 1950s has only nurtured Pakistan's military and making it dream about a parity with India. Instead the US policy towards Pakistan should be one that supports aspirations of the people for a better standard of living, he had also noted.

OneIndia News

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Thursday, April 28, 2016, 12:40 [IST]
Top legislators debate over whether or not nation should allow the use of dead tiger bodies

During a panel discussion about the revised draft of the Wild Animal Protection Law, deputies of the National Peoples Congress (NPC), Chinas parliament, debated whether wild animals should be available for use in various industries, and if so in what capacity. Some held that the utilizing wild animals in any capacity would upset the public, but others believed that resources like the bodies of dead animals ought to be utilized.

Deputy Yan Xiaopei proposed eliminating the regulations related to wild animal resource utilization given that they contradict the intention of the law, which is to protect wild animals. Deputy Fu Ying seconded Yans opinion, adding that the current provisions are rarely taken advantage of anyway.

As for the commercial use of protected wild animals, Deputy Chen Zhu advised caution on issue, especially for high-profile species like tigers.

The South China Tiger is almost gone, and the Siberian Tiger is on the edge of extinction. It would send a negative message if we allow tigers to be used for food or drug production, Chen explained.

Chen added that people nowadays have a wide variety of food sources, and the medical value of tiger bones is very limited. Natural products that do have pharmaceutical usage, such as bear gall and musk, can be produced synthetically.

Other NPC deputies voiced different opinions. Deputy Li Fei held that dead tigers should be put to use. I visited a feline breeding base once. The maintenance fees for dead tiger bodies is several million a year, he argued.

Li pointed out that a large number of foreign animal advocates are pharmaceutical companies. Driven by political and commercial gain, they are trying to curb the development of traditional Chinese medicine.

Asked about using dead tiger bodies, local forestry authorities insisted that the bodies cannot be used, and that doing so may pose a threat to the safety of living tigers. Deputy Cong Bin suggested a compromise  that only the bodies of tigers that died of natural causes be used for traditional Chinese medicine. However, judicial authorities would still reserve the right to intervene.

Two other deputies expressed the opinion that the law should strike a balance between pragmatism and tough regulation when it comes to wild animal resources.
For Indian Mujahideen, Karnataka was stock house for explosives

India

oi-Vicky

Bengaluru, Apr 28: The Indian Mujahideen which carried out a series of blasts in India dumped all its ammunition in Karnataka.

At a time when a go ahead was given for a blast, the explosives was collected from Karnataka and transported to city where the blasts were to take place.

The entire stockpile of explosives would be first delivered at either Mangalore or Kundapur in Karnataka.

It would be stocked up around 20 days before the blasts. A team of the Indian Mujahideen would then pick up the explosives and transport it to the target city ten days prior to the blasts, the Maharashtra ATS which has been questioning ZainulAbdeen has learnt.

The Indian Mujahideen explosives trail: Maharashtra ATS has answers in Abdeen

ZainulAbdeen was arrested by the Maharashtra ATS two days back. He was detained in Saudi Arabia following a complaint by India and later sent to India where he was formally arrested.

Karnataka the stock house:

For the Indian Mujahideen, Karnataka was the stock house for the explosives. The first ever pile of explosives that were used by the Indian Mujahideen was from Karnataka.

They had managed to source ammonium nitrate in large quantities which were later used for the blasts.

Waqas a Pakistani national who was part of the Indian Mujahideen was tasked with the job of delivering the explosives. He would meet with the operatives either at Mangalore or Kundapur. These locations were chosen as the IM had created safe houses.

Moreover the ammonium nitrate which was a constant feature in the Indian Mujahideen bombs was sourced from a quarry in Kundapur.

Waqas was tasked with delivering the rest of the materials used to prepare the bombs such as the IEDs. The material would be stocked up in a safe house.

Once Yasin Bhatkal who was the chief of the IM would instruct the operatives, the explosives would be transported to the target city, Abdeen also told his interrogators in Mumbai.

OneIndia News
Why the probe into the Ahmedabad serial blasts was one of the most challenging

Indian Mujahideen split over money not ideology, probe reveals

India

oi-Vicky

Bengaluru, April 28: The Indian Mujahideen split over money and not ideology investigators have learnt. There was a huge split in the Indian Mujahideen back in 2013 and this was due to money and not ideology, investigators probing Zainulabdeen have learnt.

Abdeen was arrested by the Maharashtra ATS in connection with the 13/7 Mumbai serial blasts. The result of this split witnessed the Ansar-ut-Tawhid being formed.

The AuT is a wing of the ISIS which recruits Indians into the outfit. The split was engineered by Yasin Bhatkal who is currently in jail.

For carrying out a series of blasts which killed over 300 people he felt that the payment given to him was not sufficient.

However, Bhatkal had managed to convince the rest such as Sultan Armar the head of the AuT that the IM leadership was drifting away from its core ideology.

Money mattered and hence the split:

It was after the blasts at Dilksukhnagar the Yasin Bhatkal decided to once again bring up this issue relating to money with one of the founders of the IM, Riyaz Bhatkal. He asked Riyaz Bhatkal why he and his men were being given a paltry sum despite carrying out so many successful attacks and doing all the hardwork.

The issue had been raised several times by Yasin in the past especially after every successful attack, but Riyaz always brushed it aside.

However, after the blasts at Dilsukhnagar in Hyderabad, Yasin decided that he would have a face to face meeting with Riyaz and rake up this issue. However Yasin was arrested at the Nepal border.

Sultan Armar however felt that the ideology of the IM was drifting. He also felt that Riyaz was under the control of the ISI and was leading a luxurious life in Karachi.

Sultan decided along with his brother Shafi that they would join an international group and hence chose the ISIS where they felt that the money would be good. This led to the big IM split and the creation of the Ansar ut Tawhid.

OneIndia News
JNU has become a den of organised sex racket, claim teachers

India

oi-Jagriti

New Delhi, Apr 28: The Jawahar Lal Nehru University (JNU), known for imparting quality education in the country, has become 'a den of organised sex racket'. This has been claimed by a group of teachers, led by Amita Singh, professor at the Centre for Law and Governance.

According to a report in The Wire, hostel messes in JNU campus have sex workers as employees who not only lure JNU girls into their organized racket but also pollute the boys. These kind of activities are being encouraged by some teachers also.

The university administration was informed about this practice in a prepared a 200-page document compiled last year.

"Over one thousand boys and girls (sic) students have been fined from Rs 2000/- to Rs 5000/- for consuming alcohol, for indulging in immoral activities in their hostels. On a casual glance at the gates of the hostel one can see hundreds of empty alcohol bottles. Sex workers have been openly employed in hostel messes, where they not only lure JNU girls into their organized racket but also pollute the boys. How come big and high brand cars are moving around the hostels particularly in the night hours. Some security staff is (sic) also involved in this racket. Freshers are particularly inducted in this ring of vice by luring through money, sex, drugs and alcohol, so that they become tied up with the cause of foreign agencies," the report quoted the text of the dossier.

Afzal Guru row: JNU orders release of fellowships, degree

"I plan to tell the JNU teachers' association to propose a complete ban on alcohol and motorcycles on campus. We need to strictly adhere to the JNU manual. In the manual, girls are not permitted to enter boys' hostels. But no one follows it here. In a hostel raid, occasionally conducted by wardens, at least 40-50 boys are always fined for sheltering outsiders. In the same raids, so many girls are found to be present in the hostel rooms meant only for boys. Who knows where these girls are from? That is why I proposed to the present vice-chancellor to install CCTV cameras in hostels. I told him that unless you sanitise the hostels, the university cannot be run properly," Hari Ram Mishra, assistant professor in the Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies and a part of this group was quoted as saying by The Wire.

These allegations have been rubbished by students and other staff, claiming them baseless.

OneIndia News
Maharashtra FDA seizes cigarettes worth Rs 273 crore

India

oi-PTI

Mumbai, April 6: The Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has seized cigarettes worth Rs 273 crore from several parts of the state for alleged violation of the Centre's new rule on the size of health warnings on packets.

FDA joint commissioner Harish Baijal said the seizures happened on Monday in a series of coordinated raids across Maharashtra.

As per directives issued by the Union Health Ministry, 85 per cent display area of the cigarette packet should be covered with health warning consisting of picture and text.

On the seized cigarette packs, FDA found the pictorial warnings covered only 45 per cent of the surface area. "There was information about the old packets still in circulation in various parts of the state," Baijal said.

PTI
Diwali 2022: Major sites to be illuminated in Mumbai between Oct 22-29

Mumbai: Gathering of 5 or more, loud speakers, illegal processions banned for a fortnight from Nov 1

Amitabh Bachchan reveals he had to get stitches after he cut a vein on his leg

Fire breaks out at industrial estate in Mumbai, no one hurt

Mamta Kulkarni's husband Vicky Goswami, an international drug kingpin: Reports

India

oi-Preeti

Mumbai, April 28: Former Bollywood actress Mamata Kulkarni has embroiled herself into a major controversy as her husband Vicky Goswami has emerged to be an international drug lord.

According to media reports, Thane police has confirmed that Goswami is involved international drug racket, after investigating a massive drug overhaul this month. [Who is Vicky Goswami?]

He is wanted by the United States' Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for drug offences, as 18.5 tonne of Ephedrine and 2.5 tonne of acetic anhydride worth Rs 2,500 crore has been seized in the international market.

[Mamta Kulkarni, husband Vicky Goswami detained in Kenya]

DEA has joined hands with the Thane police, after huge amounts of drugs were found from Solapur factory.

US Drug Enforcement Agency officials also visited Thane police commissioner's office on Wednesday, April 27. So far, eight people including a NIgerian national have been arrested in connection with the case.

Media reported that Goswami, who is presently in Kenya, will soon be extradited. Othe rhigh profile masterminds who have been arrested are-- Manoj Jain - director of Avon Lifesciences Limited office in Solapur MIDC, Punit Shringi, manager of the unit, and Pradeep Singh Gill, transporter of drugs in various states. Jian had reportedly met Vicky several times in Kenya.

Meanwhile, Thane police is also probing the role of Mamta in the alleged drug cartel scandal. A news report published in TOI said while quoting a Thane police officer, "As Vicky cannot leave Kenya because of an Interpol notice against him, he asked Mamta to meet clients in Dubai, Singapore, South Africa and the US."

Vicky also used Mamta's name in carrying out bank transactions and drug business deals in Maharashtra.

In 2014, Mamta, alongwith her husband was detained by Kenya police on the charges of drug trafficking in Kenya.

Goswani had earlier been imprisoned in Dubai for drug-related offences, but was later released on the grounds of good conduct.

Goswani was jailed in 1997 for trafficking about 11.5 tonne of Mandrax and was sentenced to 25 years of life imprisonment in UAE. He was released on November 15, 2012.

In 2012, Mamta had married 52-year-old Vicky while he was serving his sentence in a Dubai jail.

[Mamata Kulkarni converts to Islam]

As per reports, Mamta converted to Islam after getting married to Goswami and shifted to Nairobi with him. Before this Mamata lead an anonymous life in Dubai for sometime.

OneIndia News
PM Modi did not meet Italian PM at UN: Government

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

New Delhi, April 27: There was no meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Italian counterpart Matteo Renzi during the UN General Assembly session last year, the external affairs ministry said on Wednesday.

"There was no meeting between Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister Renzi of Italy as part of PM's bilateral meetings at the UNGA in September 2015," ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup said.

Swarup's response came after James Christian Michel, the alleged middleman in AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal, told The Hindu newspaper that Modi and Renzi had a brush-by meeting during which India offered to help settle the Italian marines' case in return for some evidence to implicate the Congress's Gandhi family in the chopper deal.

Michel said that "it seemed to have been made clear" that he was accused of being a conduit.

In his statement on Wednesday, Swarup said that as far as Michel was concerned, various law enforcement authorities of India were proceeding against him in cases relating to the Prevention of Corruption Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

"An open ended non-bailable arrest warrant has been issued by the special judge of the CBI against him on September 24, 2015," the spokesperson said.

"Upon a CBI request, a Red Corner notice against him has been issued by the Interpol Headquarters on 25.11.2015. A request for provisional arrest for the purpose of extradition was made to the UK authorities on January 4, 2016 by the CBI."

Swarup also said that the Enforcement Directorate, another autonomous agency to handle private money laundering and foreign exchange irregularities, has also separately sent a Red Corner notice seeking the arrest and a request for Michel's extradition from Britain on February 29, 2016.

IANS
Why Paris attacks are deep-rooted in France's internal security issues

French police likely to question Indian ISIS recruit in connection to Paris attacks

Paris terror attack: French team in Kerala to quiz IS operative

News flash: 11 people injured after a blast outside a shop in Tinsukia, Assam

India

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Bengaluru, Apr 28: A petrol pump will be set up in Police lines (Dehradun) will be named after police horse Shaktiman, says SSP Dehradun Sadanand Date.

Get all the latest news updates of the day:

11:00 pm: 11 people injured after a blast outside a shop in Tinsukia (Assam), five in critical condition.

9:36 pm: PM Narendra Modi to address joint session of US Congress on June 8.

8:58 pm: Mumbai: Bhumata Brigade activist Trupti Desai, who was on her way to CM residence, stopped by Police.

8:38 pm: We will go and sit before CM's residence, and see what is his response. He has not fulfilled his responsibility: Trupti Desai.

8:10 pm: Kerala CM Oommen Chandy sues CPI(M) veteran V S Achutanandan for levelling corruption charges against him and some cabinet ministers.

7:47 pm: Encounter between security forces and militant begins in Lolab area of Kupwara district (J&K).

7.30 pm: IPL Governing Council meeting to be held in Delhi on April 29.

7.25 pm: President Pranab Mukherjee lays wreath at Bomana War Cemetery in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

7.13 pm: Today is the first day of our movement, so we'll go till the point women are allowed and offer prayers, says Activist Trupti Desai at HajiAli.

7.00 pm: Activist Trupti Desai and other members of Bhumata Brigade outside Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai.

6.52 pm: We haven't acted in haste, matter subjudice in court since 2012. We are demanding equal right for women, says Trupti Desai.

6.30 pm: SP Tyagi might have met Gerosa at my daughter's wedding in 2008, says Cousin of ex-IAF chief SP Tyagi on Agusta Westland row.

6.25 pm: Bodies of 4 youths who went missing on January 14th, recovered from a canal in Doraha (Ludhiana).

6.00 pm: PM Narendra Modi's wax statue unveiled at Madame Tussaud's Museum in London.

5.45 pm: Rajya Sabha adjourned till 11AM on Friday, April 28.

5.30 pm: 13 cases of cutaneous anthrax reported from Panasaputtu village in Hukumpeta (Visakhapatnam).

5.29 pm: Police doesn't allow Trupti Desai to get down from her car at the main entrance of Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai.

5.25 pm: There is no notice of privilege against HRD Minister Smriti Irani,news is wrong, says PJ Kurien,RS Deputy Chairman.

5.24 pm: People outside Haji Ali Dargah demand equal access for men and women, extend their support to Trupti Desai in Mumbai.

5.23 pm: Extradition request for Lalit Modi is yet to be received by MEA from concerned law enforcement agencies in India, says VK Singh, MoS, MEA.

5.22 pm: A petrol pump will be set up in Police lines (Dehradun) will be named after police horse Shaktiman, says SSP Dehradun Sadanand Date.

4.53 pm: Delhi: Youth Congress workers protest against Central Govt, Police use water cannons to disperse the protesters.

4.40 pm: Ideas were exchanged on how to take relationship forward including on logical follow up to Pak JIT's visit & ongoing Pathankot probe, says MEA.

4.39 pm: Both sides have described the meeting as frank but constructive, says MEA on Indo-Pak Foreign Secretaries' meeting on sidelines of Heart of Asia.

4.37 pm: BJP candidate Sreesanth files his nomination from Thiruvananthapuram assembly seat in Kerala.

4.23 pm: Our High Commission in UK will also be issuing a similar note verbale to UK foreign and commonwealth office, says Vikas Swarup, MEA.

4.22 pm: Dolkun Isa didn't mention in his visa application that he was coming to attend a conference in India, says Vikas Swarup,MEA.

4.21 pm: CBI & ED vigorously pursuing all aspects, including the arrests/extradition of Carlo Gerosa,Guido Haschke Ralph & Christian Michel James, says MoD.

4.19 pm: Will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case, says MoD on Agusta Westland.

4.14 pm: As of today the ministry has written to High Commission of UK requesting deportation of Vijay Mallya, says MEA.

4.13 pm: AgustaWestland issue: Indian defence ministry issues statement, says the govt has taken effective action to bring out the truth in the case.

3.50 pm: The dagger was gifted by Saudi King to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954: Taj Hasan, Special CP, Crime (Delhi Police).

3.49 pm: Security tightened in Sherbagh, Anantnang (J&K) after grenade attack on police post, no injuries reported.

3.45 pm: A 30-year old scientist at Indian Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa (Delhi) allegedly commits suicide at her residence in premises.

3.30 pm: Bihar assembly speaker Vijay Kumar Chaudhary gets threat letter, police register case in Patna

3.00 pm: Security tightened in Sherbagh, Anantnang (J&K) after grenade attack on police post, no injuries reported.

2.44 pm: Excise duty of 1% is not on small jewellry traders, its only on the bigger players.No politics should be played-Arun Jaitley in RS.

2.00 pm: It's not that there is corruption only in India. it's there in every country. Change must come from within, says PK Mishra.

1.47 pm: We'll abide by court's order.I only objected to her decision of holding protest(Haji Ali) before that, says Haji Arafat Shaikh,Shiv Sena on Trupti.

1.38 pm: Dedicating this to Indian sailors & fishermen' courage of exploring the unexplored, it will be known as 'NAVIC'-PM

1.37 pm: Supreme Court reserves order on whether AIPMT or NEET will be conducted this year for admission in MBBS and MD.

1.35 pm: One dead and three injured after a building collapsed in Khari Baoli area of Delhi's Lahori Gate.

1.24 pm: Indian sailors used to determine their paths observing position of stars & speed of moon & sun.Now technology will help great deal in this, says PM.

1.23 pm: This is a precious gift given by Indian scientists to the people of nation, says PM Narendra Modi.

1.22 pm: We will determine our own paths powered by our technology with this successful launch. Its a great gift to people, says PM.

1.16 pm: In space science, our scientists have achieved many accomplishments. Through space science lives of people can be transformed, says PM Modi.

12.45 pm: PM Narendra Modi observes the progress of ISRO's launch of IRNSS-1G.

12.30 pm: I am quite sure that after the Pakistan's terror attack in Pathankot, there is a considerable stress that has been caused, says VK Singh in RS.

12.08 pm: Will answer everything in the Parliament: Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar says on AgustaWestland issue

Will answer everything in the Parliament: Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on #AgustaWestland issue pic.twitter.com/F4QCQRjYzR  ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

11.35 am: Jairam Ramesh accuses Subramanian Swamy of making objectionable statements in the house.

11.18 am: Kerala Government will approach the Central government to declare the state as drought affected with the consent of ECI.



11.00 am: Fire in Mumbai Fort area, fire in Harish Chambers building. 4 fire tenders are on the spot. Fire under control.

10.54 am: Supreme Court to hear a plea next week seeking registration of FIR against persons who were bribed in Augusta Westland chopper deal.

10.47 am: Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge,Jyotiraditya Scindia and Rajiv Satav have given adjournment notice in Lok Sabha.

10.08 am: Kuldeep Bishnoi, HJC party leader reaches 10 Janpath to meet Sonia Gandhi.

9.50 am: Congress gives a notice on AgustaWestland in Rajya Sabha under rule 267.

9.37 am: Fire continues to rage at Biomax Fuels in Visakhapatnam, 40 fire tenders still at the spot

Fire continues to rage at Biomax Fuels in Visakhapatnam, 40 fire tenders still at the spot. pic.twitter.com/k317Scw93p  ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

9.19 am: FIR registered in racial abuse case in Bengaluru, complaint against auto driver who allegedly argued with a girl asking for double fare.

8.43 am: One civilian dead after cops open fire at Baghpat (UP). Two policemen suspended.

8.00 am: Barricades set up around Haji Ali Dargah (Mumbai), Trupti Desai and Bhumata Brigade to hold a peaceful protest there

Barricades set up around Haji Ali Dargah (Mumbai), Trupti Desai & Bhumata Brigade to hold a peaceful protest there. pic.twitter.com/9pgekuWFAj  ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

OneIndia News
In UP 166 criminals killed in encounters in past five years: Yogi

This UP village lights up on Diwali, for the first time ever!

UP to constitute education tribunal

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Lucknow, April 28: Uttar Pradesh has decided to establish an education tribunal to resolve service related disputes, an official said on Thursday.

The legal department gave its green signal after going through a proposed draft prepared by secondary education department.

This will be followed by presenting the proposal to the cabinet in May, the official informed.

After the cabinet ratifies it, the bill would be moved in the next session of the state assembly.

The tribunal will be responsible for hearing and settling disputes of teachers and employees of the basic and government aided secondary education schools.

Once approved by the legislature, the tribunal would function both at divisional and state levels, Jitendra Kumar, principal secretary secondary (Education), said.

Officials believed that once such a body comes into being, thousands of cases pertaining to disputes and other issues of teachers and staff would be settled here and would in turn bring down huge backlogs in various courts.



IANS
What is the problem in changing names of transgenders, asks HC

Any person can now be tried under Domestic Violence Act: SC

Male peacocks shake feathers to attract females

International

oi-PTI

Toronto, Apr 28: As male peacocks shake their long feathers in courtship, the iridescent eyespots remain nearly stationary and captivate females, according to a new study.

Courtship displays can signal the relative physical quality of males vying for females. A male peacock, for example, entices peahens by raising and vibrating his long train feathers, said Roslyn Dakin from the University of British Columbia in Canada.

The vibrations both make the feathers rattle and make the brightly coloured eyespots appear to hover motionless against an oscillating iridescent background.

Males with eyespots that are the most iridescent win most of the matings. Researchers used high-speed video to analyse the "train-rattling" movements of vibrating train and tail feathers in 14 adult peacocks, and measured the vibrations of individual feathers in the lab.

They found that displaying peacocks vibrate their feathers at or near resonance, giving the train the greatest vibrational amplitude and suggesting that these courtship displays may be energetically efficient. Scanning electron microscopy then showed how the eyespots stay so still during displays.

Dakin and colleagues found that eyespot barbs are locked together with microhooks much like those on flight feathers. This gives each eyespot greater density than the surrounding loose barbs, keeping it essentially in place as the loose barbs shimmer in the background.

The findings showed that the longer the train feathers, the faster the males shook their feathers during courtship displays, requiring more muscular effort.

This suggests that the dynamics of feather vibrations could also signal male muscle power to choosy females. "Charles Darwin observed that peacocks vibrate their feathers during courtship, but it took this multidisciplinary team of scientists to characterise the dynamics of this behaviour," said Suzanne Kane, a co-author of the study. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

PTI
Pak to use F-16 jets against India: US lawmakers

International

oi-PTI

Washington, Apr 28: Top US lawmakers have expressed concerns over the Obama Administration's decision to sell eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, saying the aircraft could be used against India and not in combating terrorism.

They have also urged the Obama Administration to review its decision in this regard. "Many members of Congress, including me, seriously question the judgement and timing of such a sale.

Additionally, Indo-Pak tensions remain elevated and some question whether the F-16s could ultimately be used against India or other regional powers, rather than the terrorists as Pakistan as asserted," Congressman Matt Salmon said during a Congressional hearing yesterday.

Salmon was joined by several other lawmakers during the Congressional hearing on Afghanistan and Pakistan convened by the Subcommittee on Asia and Pacific of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wherein the Obama Administration was represented by the Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Olson.

"We've got to be concerned what military assistance and whether the F-16s constitute the least expensive, most efficient way for the Pakistani air force to go after the terrorists and the least disruptive weapon system to the balance of power between India and Pakistan," Congressman Brad Sherman said.

"We need to offer to Pakistan those weapon systems well- crafted to go after terrorists and not crafted for a war with India," Sherman said. The US Senate has currently put a hold on the decision of the Obama Administration to give eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan at an estimated cost of USD700 million.

Salmon asked Olson to clarify the underlying purpose and timing of the intended sale and how is it in the best interest of the United States.

"Despite giving Pakistan enormous amounts of counter-terror assistance over the years, over USD25 billion since 9/11, terrorist organizations continue to operate with impunity in Pakistan.

"Pakistan has used terror as a tool of statecraft and terrorist proxy groups, for the Pakistani military have carried out fatal attacks inside India," he alleged. The subcommittee chairperson, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen too expressed concerns over sale of F-16 to Pakistan. "I think that we need to leverage our military sales to Pakistan in order to get some more cooperation within the region.

PTI
Pakistani Sikhs open temple after 73 years, risking attacks

International

oi-PTI

Peshawar, Apr 27: An armed policeman stood guard outside the 300-year-old Sikh temple, known as a gurdwara, in northwest Pakistan.

He kept a watchful eye on everyone who passed him on the narrow street, looking for a suspicious gesture, or a bulge beneath the clothes that hints at a hidden gun or a bomb. Earlier this month, the gurdwara in Peshawar's crowded Old City opened its doors to worshippers for the first time in 73 years.

The reopening was celebrated by Pakistan's tiny Sikh minority, but security is a constant concern. On Friday, a Sikh leader and provincial lawmaker was shot and killed outside his home in a remote area in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province, some 140 kilometers from Peshawar. The murder of Sardar Suran Singh devastated the Sikh community and heightened their fears of militant attacks.

It also added to human rights activists' despair over rising violence against religious minorities in Pakistan. "It is tragic, but this is the trend in Pakistan right now. It is increasingly intolerant," said Zohra Yusuf, chairwoman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting of Sardar Suran Singh, but police disputed their claim, blaming the shooting on political rivalry and saying they had arrested the culprit. There was no response from the Taliban, who often make unsubstantiated claims. Peshawar is a deeply conservative city at the foot of the mountainous Khyber Pass once a popular route for traders and tourists travelling to nearby Afghanistan, now the focus of an extremist insurgency.

Militants have attacked Peshawar schools, killing children as they studied, bombed buses of government workers and attacked Christians in their churches. The newly-opened gurdwara has a 24-hour Sikh Security detail as well as police guards, but their Muslim neighbors believe an attack is inevitable.

"Security is very necessary ... for the people who want to come here for prayers without any fear," said Gurpal Singh, security chief for Peshawar's Sikh community. Gohar Iqbal, a bookseller who works at a busy stall opposite the temple was certain the building would be targeted by militants. "We are worrying because of the children if something happens," he said, gesturing to the white cement building that houses a girls' high school, which abuts the gurdwara.

AP
When Pranab told Rajdeep not to interrupt and raise his voice

Prez Pranab Mukherjee arrives in Papua New Guinea

International

oi-PTI

Port Moresby (PNG), April 28: With a focus on developing strong relations with Pacific Island nations, President Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday, April 28 arrived in the capital of Papua New Guinea here, the first ever visit by an Indian head of state since India established diplomatic ties with the country in 1975.

Mukherjee arrived here this morning on the first leg of his two-nation visit and was given a warm welcome.

He was received by Deputy Prime Minister of PNG Leo Dion. The President inspected a guard of honour as a 21-gun salute was accorded to him. The visit of the President is seen as a diplomatic move to counter China's growing influence in the Pacific Island nations.

Before his departure from India, his Press Secretary Venu Rajamony had said the visit was a natural extension of India's 'Look East' policy.

India is looking to enter the health market of the island nation. Ahead of his visit here, the Indian government had approved the signing of an agreement between the two countries, seeking cooperation in the field of healthcare and medical sciences.

The pact will encourage cooperation between the Health Ministries of both the nations through joint initiatives in the sector.

The visit is likely to give push to Indian pharmaceutical companies to set up businesses in the Pacific nation after the local government withdrew a ban in January. With a population of 7.38 million, diseases like HIV and AIDS are listed as quite rampant in this Pacific nation.

The life expectancy in the country is also less because of high cost of medical care. Mukherjee, on April 30, will travel to New Zealand as part of the second leg of his tour.

India and New Zealand will explore prospects for cooperation in agriculture, dairy, food processing, education and skill development as well as high technology during the visit.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key had visited India in 2011 and its Governor General in 2008, 2009 and 2011. The last high-level visit from India to New Zealand was by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1986.

PTI
A dream, a call and some courage: How a 15-year-old stopped her marriage

West Bengal Phase 5 polls: Bhawanipur to witness star-studded electoral battle

Kolkata

oi-PTI

Kolkata, Apr 28: The prestigious Bhawanipur constituency in the city is set to witness a star-studded fight where Trinamool Congress chairperson and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is challenged by two heavyweights in her own backyard.

Former Union Minister Deepa Dasmunshi is contesting as a Congress candidate while Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's grand nephew Chandra Kumar Bose is fielded by BJP from the seat.

[Top contest of West Bengal polls 2016: Mamata vs Deepa vs Chandra Bose in Bhabanipur]

Apart from them, BSP, SUCI(C) and six independents are also in the fray.

Bhawanipore constituency, under which Mamata Banerjee's Kalighat residence falls, has been a stronghold of TMC since its inception in 2011, after delimitation. [Special Coverage: Assembly Elections 2016]

The constituency which has 202655 voters is home to a sizeable number of Gujaratis, Sikhs, Biharis, Marwaris and other communities living alongside Bengalis.

TMC General Secretary and Banerjee's trusted lieutenant, Subrata Bakshi had won the seat in 2011 when the party fought the election in alliance with Congress by nearly 50,000 votes defeating his nearest CPI-M rival Narayan Prasad Jain.

Within a few months Bakshi had vacated the seat to pave the way for Mamata Banerjee, who was an MP, to get elected to the state Assembly.

Banerjee had won the bypoll with a margin of 54,000 votes defeating her nearest CPI(M) rival Nandini Mukherjee.

Bakshi later won the Kolkata South Lok Sabha seat vacated by Banerjee. Bhawanipore, which takes the pride of having Banerjee as the MLA, has never disappointed TMC except 2014 Lok Sabha polls when BJP had managed to get a slender lead from this Assembly segment under Kolkata South Lok Sabha constituency.

During the Lok Sabha polls, BJPs Kolkata South candidate and current Tripura Governor Tathagata Roy came second to Bakshi, but took a lead in the Bhawanipore Assembly segment.

Banerjee in spite of her hectic schedule as Chief Minister and TMC supremo has focused on her constituency.

"In other constituencies, the fight may be of winning or losing. But in Bhawanipore the fight is to increase the margin than last time, because we'll know that didi will win in this seat," party leader Firhad Hakim said.

Hakim refuted the claim that the alliance between CPI-M and Congress had made the fight tougher in Bhawanipore.

"Why only CPI(M) and Congress, BJP can also join them. People will vote for development and TMC will win," he said.

Deepa Dasmunshi, the alliance candidate and wife of ailing Congress leader P R Dasmunsi, felt that people would vote against corruption and lawlessness.

"People are fed up with the corruption and lawlessness of TMC. People want peace and democracy to be established in Bengal and it will start from the Bhawnipore constituency," Dasmunshi, fondly called 'Boudi', said.

"Five years back people had voted in favour of TMC with lot of hopes. It has not only failed, but has also betrayed the masses under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee," she said.

Dasmunshi, a bete noire of Mamata, told PTI, "TMC had betrayed Congress after coming to power in Bengal in 2011. People in 2016 will give TMC a befitting reply for betraying people and Congress."

Top CPI-M leaders, Mohammed Salim, CPI-M state secretary Surya Kanta Mishra and others held joint rallies and roadshows along with top Congress leaders in the prestigious constituency.

On the other hand, a political greenhorn who is pitted against battle-hardened adversaries, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's grand-nephew Chandra Kumar Bose feels it is not a fight between personalities but a fight between principles, development and neglect.

"It is a fight between the BJP's agenda of development and the Trinamool's misgovernance, corruption, lawlessness and neglect. And I am confident of winning in Bhawanipore. In 2014 only BJP had taken a lead from this segment," Bose said.

Asked if he is worried about the alliance, Bose said, "Not at all. It's an unholy alliance to fool the people of Bengal. They are fighting against each other in Kerala and are fighting together in Bengal,".

PTI
With AQI of 259, Delhi's air on day before Diwali least polluted in 7 years

Delhi LG and CM greet people on Diwali, ask people to be mindful of pollution

AgustaWestland: Why getting Michel 'the media fix it man' is important

New Delhi

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, Apr 28: For the Central Bureau of Investigation, pursuing, James Christian Michel is extremely crucial in a bid to find out who in India had received kickbacks to facilitate the deal.

Michel believed to be in the UK was allegedly paid a sum of Rs 330 crore by AgustaWestland to manage various aspects which also included managing the media in India.

Agusta probe will be brought to logical conclusion: Rudy

The CBI had got a red corner notice issued against Michel. We are planning on seeking his extradition or at least looking to question him. Michel's main job was to give feedback on the media activities relating to the deal to AgustaWestland. His meetings with some media persons are under our scanner, the CBI official also added.

Pursuing Michel

Michel was a middleman hired by AgustaWestland. His main job was to keep an eye on the media in India and report the narrative regarding the deal to AgustaWestland.

He is an important player in this case, the CBI says. We have some evidence on him which includes the reports he sent out and also the meetings he held with some people in the media, officials also add.

An amount of Rs 330 crore was paid to him for managing various services. He received these amounts in part payments at United Kingdom, the British Virgin Islands and also Tunisia.

In addition to his links with the media, the CBI has also found that he had several assets (benami) in India. A bungalow in Delhi and a luxury car is what the CBI has found and officials say that he had purchased this in a benami name.

We are on the trail to find out more such assets in India, the CBI officer also informed.

While his meetings with several persons are under the scanner, the CBI has learnt that it was through his company Global Services FZE all his activities were managed.

Through this company he managed to keep an eye on the media reports where this deal was concerned. If there was any negative press on the deal, Michel was meant to fix it, the CBI officials also say.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Thursday, April 28, 2016, 10:05 [IST]
On 4th April a real estate businessmen of Chennai Stephen approached police with a robbery complaint. He said miscreants broke into his house and robbed 40 sovereigns of jewellery. police picked up three suspects on suspicion. Toto their much shock the suspects spilled the beans about three murders in which Stephen was allegedly involved in. During investigation police found out Stephen committed those murders with the help of lethal cyanide injections.
Explained: Why has a public health emergency been declared in Puducherry's Karaikal

Puducherry polls: AINRC's first list of 21 candidates includes CM Rangasamy

Puducherry

oi-PTI

Puducherry, Apr 28: The ruling AINRC on Wednesday announced that it will contest the May 16 Assembly elections in the Union Territory on its own and released its first list of 21 candidates, including Chief Minister N Rangasamy.

Releasing the list at a press conference, AINRC founder Rangasamy said he was confident that people would vote again for his party as his government had lived upto their expectations.

[Special Coverage: Assembly Elections 2016]

"I am absolutely confident that the people would renew their mandate to continue our schemes and welfare measures," he said.

Rangasamy, who led his party to power on its maiden foray in the elections in 2011 after breaking away from Congress, would contest from Indira Nagar constituency which he had vacated after winning from Kadirkamam.

The chief minister had been silent on his party's poll strategy amid speculations that AINRC would revive its alliance with AIADMK forged for the 2011 elections.

However, AIADMK supremo Jayalalithaa slammed Rangasamy in her rally here on April 25, accusing him of "serious breach of trust when he buried the ethics of alliance" in 2011, putting at rest speculations about possible revival of the tie-up.

She was referring to AINRC forming the government on its own with the support of an independent MLA and dumping AIADMK.

The polls would witness a multi-cornered contest with the presence of AINRC, Congress-DMK combine, AIADMK and People's Welfare Alliance.

The first list of AINRC nominees includes the names of Theni C Jayakumar and P R N Tirumurugan, who quit the Congress and joined the ruling party earlier in the day, for Villianoor and Karaikal North constituencies, which they represent in the outgoing assembly.

Both Jayakumar and Tirumurugan had been distancing themselves from Congress for the last couple of years and were denied tickets by the party for the coming polls.

Three ministers of Rangasamy's six-member cabinet - P R Siva (Tirunallar), N G Panneerselvam (Oulgaret) and T Thiagarajan (Bahoor), have been renominated in their respective constituencies while Tourism Minister P Rajavelu's name is not in the first list.

Priyanka, daughter of Agriculture Minister M Chandrakasu, will contest from Neduncadu (Reserved) seat in Karaikal as he has opted out citing health grounds.

Other prominent names in the first list are Assembly Speaker V Sabapathy and Deputy Speaker T P R Selvam, who will seek re-election from Ariyankuppan and Mannadipet.

Rangasamy said the candidates for the remaining nine seats would be announced tomorrow. April 29 is the last date for filing nominations.

PTI
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The achievements of the Governor Ifeanyi Okowa-led administration have been traced to the leadership synergy between the governor and James Ibori.

Former executive assistant to Okowa on communications Fred Latimore Oghenesivbe made the assertion while responding to questions during a phone-in radio program.

Oghenesivbe, a member of the Nigeria Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) and International Communication Association (ICA), noted that Deltans trusted and still appreciate the synergy of both leaders, especially in sustaining progressive political structures and pointing the way forward in institutionalising the fundamentals of good governance through credible choice of leaders.

According to him, the enviable and watertight relationship between the governor and Ibori has grown stronger in terms of mutual political cross fertilisation of socio-economic ideas, moderation and restructuring of political structures, strategic team work in peace building, positive external political relations and steady partnership in advancing the prosperity, progress and unity of the people of Delta State.

Read also: Okowa swears in SSG

He stressed that both leaders are always on the same page on issues relating to the overall development of the state, which is why the Okowa administration has been adjudged the best in mutual consultation, all inclusiveness and holistically pragmatic in modern public administration techniques and good governance initiative.

He said: We are blessed in Delta State, the finger of God directs our affairs and this unending love of Christ in Delta, through the fervent prayers of Saints, has made it possible for our past leaders to work in synergy for the good of all.

Governor Okowa and Chief Ibori have certain leadership attributes which over the years grew into a strong bond; they are promise keepers, they adhere to and practice the principles of equity, justice and good conscience.

The astute leaders are proactive in dealing with issues of governance, jointly built political structures with other senatorial leaders that have consistently stood the test of time, and above all, both are committed to the socio-economic and prosperity advancement of the state and citizens.

The leaders worked together directly and indirectly during the first tenure to ensure that the lofty development ideas encapsulated in the SMART agenda of the first tenure came to fruition. We are sure of a stronger and more result-oriented synergy between the duo in the second tenure and beyond.

Deltans love Okowa and Ibori partnership because of its numerous socio-economic gains in terms of relevance of Delta in national politics, peace building, equitable distribution of dividends of democracy, crisis resolution, political alignment and realignment, passion for the huge success of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the polls and other positive factors too numerous to mention here.
Lagos State governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Jimi Agbaje has blasted the former vice chairman of his party, Bode George, for insinuations that he has defected to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

In a statement issued by his director of media and publicity, Felix Oboagwina, Agbaje said: People should please tell Bode George to shut up and leave PDP if he lacks any value to add to the party, instead of being a dog in the manger hampering the progress of the party in Lagos state.

Agbaje described the news about the purported defection as misinformation that should be discountenanced adding that he had never been a member of APC and talks of his returning to the ruling party had never crossed his mind.

That false narrative is the product of a sick mind. Or how else do you describe someone who just sits down to concoct fiction and markets it as reality? He should tell the world where he got the news being spreading round. These shameless party leaders have 2023 in mind. The game-plan is mischievously simple: Give the dog a bad name and chase it away from the party. By 2023, this mudslinging will have scared off credible people from the party, which will leave the whole field to them to continue to corner party resources, he said.

Agbaje further boasted that he is too big to sneak out of one party into another one and dismissed the rumour as the antics of detractors bent on soiling his name and destabilising the party while adding that the outburst finally unveiled the secret hand of Esau that had propelled antagonists to embark on a smear campaign against him after the 2019 governorship election he unexpectedly lost to APCs Babajide Sanwoolu.

The former governorship candidate blamed the false narrative on the same set of self-styled party leaders who, he said, on the eve of the governorship election, went to declare for a rival candidate.

These are people who feel that they want to continue business as usual within PDP, he said. All their interest revolves upon sharing campaign and election funds without giving any thought to how to elevate the partys chances at the polls or adding value to the process.

To Agbaje, as long as the PDP national headquarters continued to pamper the alleged divisive characters and pander to their whims, so long would the party continue to fail in elections in Lagos state.
File Photo

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has said the country is ready for the 5G bandwidth network for faster and efficient internet services.

This is as the commission said it will soon audit the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to determine their level of compliance with the regulation on the registration of Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards.

The commissions Executive Commissioner for Stakeholder Management, Mr. Sunday Dare, said this in Abuja at an interactive session with newsmen.

He said the NCC had been preparing the country for it by bringing together critical stakeholders to examine the legal, regulatory and technology issues, apart from developing a roadmap.

We have opened up consultations on spectrum for drones, etc. We are proactively leading discussions on the development of new technologies. This does not mean that we are going to discard the 2G, 3G or 4G. Each one of these levels of technologies has its benefits and the fact remains that you have to move from one level to the other, Dare said.

On the audit of the MNOs, Dare said it was during a similar exercise in August 2015 that the regulatory body found that 5.2 million SIM cards were not properly registered by MTN Nigeria Communications Limited.

This, according to him, led to the imposition of N1.04tn fine on the mobile operator, before it was eventually reduced to N330bn. MTN completed the payment of the fine on May 24. According to him, the exercise was not to make money for the government but to ensure that prescribed processes were complied with.

Speaking on broadband penetration, the NCC official said Nigeria has met the 30 percent milestone and has publicly released the data for everyone to interrogate.

Those who say we have not are citing old reports from the ITU. They forget that NCC provides the data that ITU uses. We are the custodians of data, and we have specialised methods of measuring. Based on empirical data, we have met and surpassed the target, he noted.
Newly married couple, Regina Daniels and Ned Nwoko, were drunk in love as the love bird were both spotted all romantic while hanging out with family and loved ones during the Eid-Fitri celebration.

A viral photo shows the 60-year-old billionaire carrying the teen actress on his back while onlookers who were mostly family members, cheering them up as they show love and affection to each other.

The duo who only got married traditionally last week has kept social media gossips talking with their show of love and affection.
Komfie Manalo, Opalesque Asia:

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abes efforts to attract hedge funds and other asset managers into Tokyos old financial district is facing serious challenges that is frustrating local players, Bloomberg reported.

Take the case of Heiwa Real Estate Co., a small developer but which has a big plan to lure investors back to Japan by building two skyscrapers near citys stock exchange as part of the Tokyo Global Financial Center redevelopment. The buildings, constructed within one of Abes strategic zones with lighter regulations, are not attracting their desired customers though.

Tomoharu Nakao, a managing officer at Heiwa, told Bloomberg, "To tell the truth, its making me depressed. But we just have to keep going."

Heiwa plans to launch the two buildings in 2020, constructed within Abes National Strategic Special Zone, which is designed to revive the nations financial industry with a relaxed approval rules on building construction permit, as well as lighter regulations on building size, allowing landlords like Heiwa to offer lower rents.

However, lower rent is not enough with several banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Barclays which have been cutting their operations in Japan, while the number of hedge funds has not changed the last four years even if Singapore and Hong......................

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The 2016 presidential campaign drags on and on. As we grit our teeth at the prospect of six more months of Donald Trump tweets, it's useful to look back on the past 12 months and consider what we've learned about Republicans.



1. Each of their candidates is deeply flawed. In April of 2015, according to an CNN/ORC poll, the ranking of Republican presidential candidates was former Florida governor Jeb Bush (17 percent), Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (12 percent), Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (11 percent), Florida Senator Marco Rubio (11 percent), former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (9 percent), Texas Senator Ted Cruz (7 percent), followed by surgeon Ben Carson (4 percent) and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (4 percent). At the time, pollster Nate Silver observed that most of these candidates had approval ratings that are "net-negative," unfavorability ratings greater than favorable.

Even though Donald Trump subsequently emerged as the GOP frontrunner, he is not popular; as of April 19th he had 8.7 million primary votes, 37.9 percent of the GOP total. Throughout the primary there has been a persistent minority of Republicans who said they would not vote for Trump if he became the GOP nominee; in New York these were 24 percent, in Pennsylvania 22 percent.

2. Republicans have lots of money but don't spend it effectively. Of the remaining GOP candidates, Kasich has raised the least, $29 million; Trump has raised $51m; and Cruz has raised $142m. (Jeb Bush raised $150m.) $25m has been spent on the "#nevertrump" movement.

The Hill reported that Trump doesn't plan to spend his own funds in the general election but so far Republican donors haven't show interest in supporting him: "'Trump has insulted most of the contributors and fundraisers in the country,' said Mel Sembler, a former Republican National Committee (RNC) finance chairman."

Meanwhile there are rumors that the notorious Koch brothers, said to have raised $889 million for the 2016 election, have no plans to support Trump. Politico reported the Koch brothers plan to spend millions on "issue-based attacks on Hillary Clinton and other Democrats" and a multi-state get-out-the-vote organization.

3. The GOP has given up hope of increasing their share of the nonwhite vote. At one time, sensible Republican leaders talked about broadening their base beyond white (non-Hispanic) voters. Last year, Washington Post political columnist Chris Cilliza pointed out that over the past three decades the white vote, in a presidential election, has shrunk from near 90 percent to 72 percent (in 2012). Meanwhile, the white content of the Republican Party has stayed around 90 percent as the white percentage of the Democratic Party has shrunk to 56 percent. Cilliza noted, "If the [2016] GOP nominee wins the same share of the white vote as Mitt Romney won in 1012 (59 percent), her or she would need to win 30 percent of the nonwhite vote" [But] Romney won only 17 percent of nonwhite voters in 2012."

Donald Trump is not popular with nonwhite voters. The Los Angeles Times reported: "In a potential matchup against Clinton, only one in five nonwhite voters sided with Trump."

4. Republicans face a daunting electoral challenge. After Obama's 2012 victory (332 Obama vs. 206 Romney), 538's Nate Silver observed that Romney would have had to win the overall vote by 3 percent to carry the electoral college -- instead Obama won by 3.8 percent.

Going into the 2016 presidential election, it's generally conceded that Democrats control 240 electoral votes with 270 needed for victory.

The 11 swing states are Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia (137 votes). In 2012, Obama won 7 of these.

4 of these states have rapidly growing Hispanic populations. For example, there are 4.8 million Hispanics in Florida (22 percent of the population), further tilting the state in the Democrat's favor. As another example, there are 1.1 million Hispanics in Colorado (20 percent of the population). If both Colorado and Florida are carried by the Democrats, that would give their candidate 278 electoral votes.

5. Republicans have cornered anger but not a compelling focus. Donald Trump insists on making this election about Barack Obama, but the President has positive ratings. Trump claims the economy is doing poorly but it isn't -- about 14 million jobs have been added under Obama. Trump's opposed to raising the minimum wage but 75 percent of voters want this.

Trump's signature issue is immigration: he wants to deport 14 million undocumented immigrants and build a wall between Mexico and the US. However, Pew Research reports that 74 percent of Americans feel there should be a way for undocumented immigrants to stay in the US and 59 percent of voters oppose building a wall.

Over the past 12 months we've learned that while Republicans are angry, they do not have their act together. Unless there is a radical change in American politics, Democrats should prevail in the 2016 presidential election.
This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Reprinted from Alternet





This month, two front line human rights defenders in occupied Palestine, Palestine Center for Human Rights (PCHR) founder Raji Sourani and Al Haq founder Shawan Jabarin, embarked on a speaking tour in New York City and Washington DC. Following their appearance at Columbia University, where they spoke at an event organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights, I met Sourani and Jabarin at a private event in Washington DC. The two had come to town for a series of meetings in Congress, including with one of the most knowledgable foreign policy staffers.

Sourani and Jabarin's first meeting took place at the Senate Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations in the office of Tim Rieser, a longtime aide to Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy. Considered a champion of human rights inside Congress, Rieser is the brains behind the so-called Leahy Law which restricts US arms sales to serial human rights-abusing nations. In March, Leahy joined 10 members of Congress in signing a letter demanding the Obama administration investigate Israel and the Egyptian military junta for "gross violations of human rights." According to a DC based human rights activist who escorted Sourani and Jabarin to Rieser's office, the two had hoped to gain a sense of whether the Leahy Law would be enforced, but received only informal recommendations.

A meeting with Democratic Rep. John Lewis followed the gathering with Reiser. The DC-based activist told me that Lewis held court with Sourani and Jabarin for over an hour, far longer than expected and posed for photos with the men, lending the presence of a living symbol of the civil rights movement to their cause. He left the two with copies of his 2013 graphic novel, March, on the famous march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. "They came out of Lewis's office feeling great," the activist said.

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Global Enterprise Mobility Market to Exhibit 24.7% CAGR during 2015-2022, Boosted by Demand for Operational Efficiency in Enterprises

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In its latest report, Transparency Market Research studies the growth trajectory exhibited by the global enterprise mobility market and the factors compelling organizations to adopt these advanced solutions. The report is titled Enterprise Mobility Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2022, and is available on the companys website for sale.Mobility is regarded as an important element for business organizations to enjoy uninterrupted operations. Earlier desk phones or wired telephones used to be the most common mode of communication in organizations. However, the advent of sophisticated wireless devices helping people stay connected online or with one another at any time of the day from anywhere, has revolutionized the paradigm of mobility for enterprises worldwide. Enterprise mobility has, therefore, emerged as the most viable solution for businesses, helping them cope with the demands of a competitive business environment.Avail a Sample Research Study on Wireless Microphone MarketEnterprise mobility refers to the trend promoting a shift in work culture, allowing employees to work from outside office premises by using cloud services and mobile devices. With the introduction of the latest technologies, enterprise mobility has become indispensable for organizations regardless of their size or specialization. This is a sophisticated solution enabling businesses to stay connected with their clients and employees irrespective of their location. With an increasing number of companies from around the world seeking enterprise mobility solutions to leverage the latest wireless technologies, the market for enterprise mobility is anticipated to exhibit robust growth.According to the findings of the TMR report, the global enterprise mobility market, which in 2014 stood at US$86.36 bn, is anticipated to reach a valuation of US$510.39 bn by the end of 2022. If the figures hold true, the global market for enterprise mobility will exhibit an incredible CAGR of 24.7% between 2015 and 2022.Browse Market Research report atWith organizations around the world increasingly demanding better operational speed and efficiency, the global market for enterprise mobility is poised to expand exponentially. Enterprise mobility solutions are usually customized as per the distinct requirement of enterprises to keep the complex web of their activities and assets running without any disruptions.Based on device, the global enterprise mobility market is segmented into laptops, tablets, and smartphones. In 2014, laptops emerged in the market as the most preferred device. However, the demand for smartphones is also anticipated to increase substantially during the reports forecast period. In terms of software, the global enterprise market is segmented into mobile application management, mobile device management, telecom expense management, mobile message management, and content and enterprise email management. Of these, mobile device management emerged as the most widely used software.Browse Research Article :Based on application, the market is segmented into BFSI, education and government, IT and telecommunications, hospitality and retail, automotive and manufacturing, media, life sciences, and healthcare. In 2014, the IT and telecommunications segment accounted for the largest share in the market.Regionally, North America led the global market for enterprise mobility. Growth in the region is mainly facilitated by the emergence of a mobile user workforce across multiple industry domains.The report provides an executive-level blueprint of the global enterprise mobility market, presenting insights into the factors impacting the markets growth trajectory and growth exhibited by the various market segments.To provide a holistic overview of the markets competitive landscape, it profiles some of the leading companies operating therein. The market for enterprise mobility is fragmented in nature, with the presence of several companies. The majority of these enterprises are focusing on expanding their businesses by catering to the varying demands of consumers. Some of the most prominent companies profiled in the report are Symantec Corporation, MobileIron, SOTI, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Alcatel Lucent S.A., Avaya Inc., Citrix Systems Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., AirWatch LLC, Aruba Inc., Meru Networks, and others.Enterprise Mobility Market Analysis, by DeviceSmartphonesLaptopsTabletsEnterprise Mobility Market Analysis, by Software TypeMobile Device ManagementMobile Application ManagementEnterprise Email and Content ManagementOthersEnterprise Mobility Market Analysis, by Security SolutionMobile Data SecurityMobile Device SecurityNetwork SecurityMobile ID SecurityEnterprise Mobility Market Analysis, by End-use ApplicationIT and TelecommunicationBFSIGovernment and EducationHospitality and RetailManufacturing and AutomotiveOthersEnterprise Mobility Market by GeographyNorth AmericaU.S.Rest of North AmericaEuropeEU7CISRest of EuropeAsia-PacificJapanChinaAustralasiaRest of Asia PacificMiddle East and Africa (MEA)GCC CountriesNorth AfricaSouth AfricaRest of MEALatin AmericaBrazilRest of Latin AmericaTransparency 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:
Ritesh Handa joins Wooqer as President - Operations, Finance & Corporate Development

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Wooqer today announced that Ritesh Handa has joined the company as President - Operations, Finance & Corporate Development, reporting to Wooqer Founder and CEO, Vishal Purohit. Ritesh comes to Wooqer from a leading Indian publisher Pearson Education India. With a proven track record of over 15 years, he has worked with Microsoft, GE and Rockwell Automation.He is a passionate finance and operations senior executive with diversified business and management experience. He will be responsible for thought leadership by executing business strategies and operating plans.We are fortunate to have incredible depth and breadth of talent across Wooqers executive team. Ritesh is hands-down the best operations executive Ive ever worked with. said Vishal Purohit, Wooqer Founder and CEO.Prior to joining Pearson Education, Ritesh was associated with Core Objects in the capacity of VP & Director Finance. He was responsible for preparing monthly forecasts, annual and long-range financial plans at a country level resulting in financial plans that aligns with business/corporate objectives.He holds Master in Business Administration from Faculty of Management Studies - Delhi and is also a Chartered Accountant from Deloitte.About WooqerWooqer is pioneering end user computing with an easy-to-use, do-It-yourself cloud based toolset that enables faster, cheaper and smarter execution. Wooqer makes non-technology common man a programmer! That helps balance enterprise governance needs with team needs to simplify day-to-day work. Wooqer leads the space between the core systems for a business (dominated by software, hardware and services vendors) and consumer platforms (like Google, Facebook & others).Founded by Vishal Purohit and backed by Indian business veterans like Mr. Harsh Mariwala, Chairman-Marico & BS Nagesh, Founder-TRRAIN as well as Silicon Valley legends like Michael Marks and Jim Davidson. Wooqer is among the most valuable B2B software companies in India by iSpirit Index for two consecutive years. Harvard Business Review has developed a business case on Wooqer now being taught in over 10 universities globally.With Aditya Birla Group, Tata Group, Mahindra Group, HDFC, Adidas, Levis, Marks & Spencers and 150 more customers, Wooqer has global presence in India, UK, US, China and UAE. Today, retail runs on Wooqer and soon every business in India! For more information, visitWooqerSandHill, Menlo Park, CA, USAFor Media QueriesContact: Anubhuti LalchandaniEmail simplify@wooqer.comMobile: 7337898992
Global Synthetic Graphite Industry 2016 Enhancing Market Size(Billions), Potential Market Investors, Shares & Upcoming Projects

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The global study on the market for Synthetic Graphite has been evaluated for stakeholders by consulting data gathered via secondary as well as primary research. The study starts by covering the definition, classification, specification, and industry chain evaluation of the global market for Synthetic Graphite. The major segments such as the parent segments and sub-segments leading the market and their expected state by the end of the forecast horizon form a key part of this study.The regional segmentation of the market also throws light on the top regions leading the market at present and their expected state by the end of the forecast horizon. The current state of the market for Synthetic Graphite and its anticipated growth all through the forecast horizon have been covered under this section of the report. The report is a detailed study of components such as the major trends in the market, the competitive evaluation, key regions, and future development prospects.The report also provides company profiles in its competitive landscape section and presents the top strategies and financial status of the major market players. In addition, company profiles, key products, SWOT analysis, import and export, and product specifications of the chief players are also covered under this part of the report. Information on the top players dominating the market and their business strategies have also been presented under this part of the report.The study also provides the major opportunities and industry news within the global Synthetic Graphite market. Porters five forces analysis also forms a key part of this study. The challenges faced by the major players dominant in the market have been presented, coupled with the countermeasures they took in order to handle these challenges for gaining a better foothold in the global Synthetic Graphite market.Browse Complete Report with TOC @QYresearchreports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYReseachReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.QYResearchReports1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-618-1030Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
Anxiety Disorders and Depression Treatment Market to Exhibit 1.25% CAGR in View of Unimpressive Drug Pipeline

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According to the World Health Organization (WHO), depression and anxiety disorders, including stress-related psychiatric conditions, would rival cardiovascular diseases by 2020 as the major health disorder with the highest disease burden globally. Antidepressants and anxiolytics are the medications used to treat various types of depression and anxiety disorders and prevent them from recurring. Anxiety is a natural reaction to stress, trauma and fear, which can be experienced by everyone at times. However, when this condition becomes severe, it might challenge an individuals capability to lead a normal life. Similarly, depression is a state of low mood and aversion to daily activities that can affect an individuals feelings, thoughts, sense of well-being and behavior.Get a Free Sample Report:Various researches reveal that anxiety disorders and depression are the major risk factors for suicide among humans. Over 90% of individuals who commit suicide have some sort of diagnosable mental illness. It has also been reported that depression and anxiety disorders are more prevalent in developed economies such as the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., and Italy due to the high levels of work-associated stress, personal relationships, societal factors, environmental factors as well as genetic aspects prevalent in these geographies.Presently, the global anxiety disorders & depression treatment market is on a decline due to patent expiry of major antidepressants, weak pipeline of novel drugs and increasing number of generic drug variants. However, driving factors such as increasing prevalence of anxiety disorders and depression and rising geriatric population prone to psychiatric disorders are expected to offset the declining growth of the market in the near future.The anxiety disorders and depression treatment market has been segmented based on drug classes most commonly used for the treatment and prevention of psychiatric disorders. Based on drug classes, the market has been segmented into selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), tetracyclic antidepressants (TeCA), monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), benzodiazepines, atypical antipsychotics, anticonvulsants and beta blockers. SNRIs accounted for the largest share of the depression treatment market in 2013.However, the segment is expected to witness a decline in revenue during the forecast period. Patent expirations of leading branded formulations such as Cymbalta and Effexor XR coupled with growing influx of generic formulations are some of the major factors expected to affect the growth of the segment. Similarly, SSRIs accounted for the largest share of the anxiety disorders treatment market in 2013. However, the market for SSRIs is expected to decline due to patent expirations, growing prevalence of treatment-resistant psychiatric disorders and high adoption rate of generic drugs.North America is the largest market for anxiety disorders and depression treatment drugs due the presence of large patient population suffering from various types of anxiety disorders and depression. However, the anxiety disorders and depression treatment market in the U.S. is currently saturated, as several antidepressant drugs are available on prescription for the same indication. Hence, the future growth of the market would depend on introduction of efficacious drugs for new indications.Moreover, loss of patent exclusivity, market maturity, generic infiltration and shortened drug lifecycles are the additional factors that contribute to the decline in market growth in the region. Asia Pacific is expected to witness an appreciable growth due to multiple factors such as high prevalence of psychiatric disorders and rapid economic growth in countries such as China, Japan and Australia. Additionally, positive marketing approval for innovative medicines is likely to drive the market in the near future.Currently, the market is highly fragmented and competitive in nature due to the involvement of both large and small pharmaceutical companies. AstraZeneca plc, Eli Lilly and Company, Forest Laboratories, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline plc, H. Lundbeck A/S, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co., Inc., Pfizer, Inc. and Sanofi S.A. are major companies operating in the anxiety disorders and depression treatment market. Majority of the market players are focusing on expanding distribution network as well as expanding geographical presence, as Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America are developing regions with an increasing prevalence of various types of anxiety disorders and depression and improving economic conditions.Browse Full Research Report: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.Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Increasing Incidence of Obesity and Rising Occurrence of Chronic Diseases Globally to Boost Urinalysis Market

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A new market research report by Transparency Market Research, titled Urinalysis Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2023, provides a comprehensive evaluation of the market for urinalysis and helps identify the prime trends shaping the markets development. The report also encapsulates valuable insights into the key technological developments seen within the market as well as a competitive analysis of the market. The study also helps readers identify and understand the top parent segments and sub-segments of the market and the expected state of these segments by the end of the forecast horizon.Browse Full Report :As per the report, the increasing prevalence of obesity and a wide variety of chronic diseases such as hypertension and diabetes is amongst the prime factors fuelling the growth of the market for urinalysis. Furthermore, the proliferation of numerous technologically advanced products in the market is also impacting the market positively. On the other hand, as stated in the report, a number of strict regulatory laws globally sometimes bring about a delay in the introduction of new products, thus restraining the growth of the market. In addition, within emerging countries, the adoption rate of fully automated solutions is low, which may also have a negative impact on the growth of the market.In terms of method, the market is segmented into microscopic examination, urine test strip, and others. By test type, the report segments the market into biochemical urinalysis and sediment urinalysis. The segment of sediment urinalysis is further segmented into flowcytometric urinalysis and microscopic urinalysis. By application, the report segments the market into disease diagnosis and pregnancy test. The segment of disease diagnosis is further segmented into kidney infections, urinary tract infections, diabetes, kidney stones, hypertension, and others including jaundice, hepatitis, and cirrhosis.By instrument, the report segments the market into consumables and disposables. The segment of consumables is further segmented into reagents and dipsticks. The segment of disposables is further segmented into automated urine sediment analyzers, biochemical urine analyzers, and point-of-care devices. On the basis of end use, the market is segmented into diagnostic laboratories, hospitals and clinics, research laboratories, medical institutions, and home care settings.Request A Sample Of This Report:Geographically, the report segments the market into Europe, Asia Pacific, North America, and Rest of the World (RoW). Amongst these, North America dominates the market and is trailed by Europe. This is due to the rising number of initiatives taken by the governments in this region and the increasing occurrence of chronic diseases. On the other hand, Asia Pacific is also predicted to rise exponentially in forthcoming years owing to the enhancement of healthcare facilities and the growing technological advancements in medical devices within this region.As stated in the report, the chief players in the market are ACON Laboratories, Inc., Bio-Rad, Labomed, Inc., Siemens Healthcare, Urit Medical, and Teco Diagnostics, among others.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.Contact us:Mr. Sudip STransparency Market Research90 State Street,Suite 700,AlbanyNY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free 866-552-3453Email:A sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Bisphenol A (BPA) Industry to 2020  Market Outlook, Industry Trends: Grand View Research, Inc.

http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/bisphenol-a-bpa-market

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The global market for Bisphenol A (BPA) is expected to reach USD 20.03 billion by 2020, according to a new study by Grand View Research, Inc. BPA is largely used for the production of polycarbonates and growing demand of polycarbonates in consumer goods and medical devices is expected to be a key driver for the market. In addition, the growing construction industry and growing BPA demand in automobile industry are expected to further augment market growth. However, health hazards associated with the use of BPA resulting in regulatory pressure is expected to be a key challenge for the industry over the next six years.Polycarbonate was the largest application segment accounting for 5,083.5 kilo tons of BPA demand in 2013; followed by epoxy resin applications, with market volume estimated at 1,414.7 kilo tons in 2013. Superior performance of epoxy resins, in terms of thermal stability, corrosion protection and mechanical strength for industrial applications is expected to reflect in BPA demand; as a key monomer for these resins.Browse full research report on Global Bisphenol A (BPA) Market:Further key findings from the study suggest: The global demand for BPA was 7,000.9 Kilo tons in 2013 and is expected to reach 9,618.7 Kilo tons by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 4.7% from 2014 to 2020. Asia Pacific was largest regional market for BPA with 54% of market share and revenue of USD 7.00 billion in 2013. This was owing to the presence of large number of end-user industries coupled with low labor, raw material and operating cost in the region. In addition, many conglomerates have shifted their base to Asia Pacific on account of the aforementioned reasons. North America and Europe are expected to witness below average growth, at an estimated CAGR of 4.5% and 4.3% respectively from 2014 to 2020. Governments of Canada and European Union have banned the use of polycarbonates derived products resulting in decreased demand for BPA. The global BPA market is somewhat fragmented with top four companies accounting for less than 45% of the market in 2013. Key companies in the market include Bayer Material Sciences, Dow Chemicals, SABIC Innovative Plastics and Mitsui Chemicals among others.For the purpose of this study, Grand View Research has segmented the global BPA market on the basis of application, product and region: BPA Applications Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2012 - 2020) Polycarbonates Epoxy resins Others (Unsaturated polyester resins, flame retardants, polyacrylate, polysulfone resins, polyetherimide, etc.) BPA Regional Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2012 - 2020) North America Europe Rest of Asia RoWGrand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.Sherry JamesCorporate Sales Specialist, USAGrand View Research, IncWeb:
Global Head-Up Displays Market 2016 illuminated by new report

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Global Head-Up Displays Market 2016The study Global Head-Up Displays Market 2016 is a detailed report scrutinizing statistical data related to the global market. This report also presents Global Production, Sales, Revenue, Import, Export and Consumption. The global Head-Up Displays (HUDs) industry 2016 report has Forecasted Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) in % value for particular period, that will help user to take decision based on futuristic chart.The Global Head-Up Displays (HUDs) Market 2016 focuses on global major leading industry players providing information such as company profiles, specification, contact information, capacity, product price, profit, capacity, Production, Supply, Sales, cost, revenue and Demand Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth research report on Head-Up Displays (HUDs).Market predictions along with the statistical nuances presented in the report render an insightful view of the Head-Up Displays (HUDs) market.To Read Complete Report:This report covers every aspect of the global market, starting from the basic market information and advancing further to various significant criteria, based on which, the Head Up Displays (HUDs) market is segmented. Report also includes key players in global HUDs market. The market size is estimated in terms of revenue (US$) and production volume in this report.The global Head-Up Displays (HUDs) market provides a basic overview of the industry including Definition, Specifications, Classification, Applications, Industry Chain Structure, Industry Regional Overview, Industry Policy Analysis, Structure Analysis, Raw Material Suppliers, Price Analysis, Equipment Suppliers, Price Analysis, Labor Cost, Manufacturing Cost and Other Costs.Download Sample Report:The Head Up Displays (HUDs) market analysis is provided for the international markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status. Production is separated by regions, technology and applications, equipment, client survey, marketing channels, industry development trend and proposals, Analysis cover upstream raw materials and downstream raw material is also carried out.Furthermore, the factors on which the companies compete in the market have been evaluated in the report. The report offers a close summary of the key segments within the market. The competitive framework of the Head Up Displays in terms of the global Head-Up Displays (HUDs) industry has been evaluated in the report. The top companies and their overall share and share with respect to the global market have been included in the report.In conclusion, it is a deep research report on global Head Up Displays(HUDs) market 2016.To Read More:About Us:QYResearch Group is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. QYResearch Group also carries the capability to assist you with your customized market research requirements including in-depth market surveys, primary interviews, competitive landscaping, and company profiles. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics. QYResearch Group is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air.Contact US: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 FREEEmail: sales (@) qyresearchgroup (dot) com
Global Electric Toothbrush Market 2016 illuminated by new report

Electric Toothbrush Market

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http://goo.gl/m94UwN

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Global Electric Toothbrush Market 2016The study Global Electric Toothbrush Market 2016 is a detailed report scrutinizing statistical data related to the global market. This report also presents Global Production, Sales, Revenue, Import, Export and Consumption. The global Electric Toothbrush industry 2016 report has Forecasted Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) in % value for particular period, that will help user to take decision based on futuristic chart.The Global Electric Toothbrush Market 2016 focuses on global major leading industry players providing information such as company profiles, specification, contact information, capacity, product price, profit, capacity, Production, Supply, Sales, cost, revenue and Demand Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth research report on Electric Toothbrush.Market predictions along with the statistical nuances presented in the report render an insightful view of the Electric Toothbrush market.To Read Complete Report:This report covers every aspect of the global market, starting from the basic market information and advancing further to various significant criteria, based on which, the Electric Toothbrush market is segmented. Report also includes key players in global Electric Toothbrush market. The market size is estimated in terms of revenue (US$) and production volume in this report.The global Electric Toothbrush industry provides a basic overview of the industry including Definition, Specifications, Classification, Applications, Industry Chain Structure, Industry Regional Overview, Industry Policy Analysis, Structure Analysis, Raw Material Suppliers, Price Analysis, Equipment Suppliers, Price Analysis, Labor Cost, Manufacturing Cost and Other Costs.Download Sample Report:The Electric Toothbrush market analysis is provided for the international markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status. Production is separated by regions, technology and applications, equipment, client survey, marketing channels, industry development trend and proposals, Analysis cover upstream raw materials and downstream raw material is also carried out.Furthermore, the factors on which the companies compete in the market have been evaluated in the report. The report offers a close summary of the key segments within the market. The competitive framework of the Electric Toothbrush in terms of the global Electric Toothbrush industry has been evaluated in the report. The top companies and their overall share and share with respect to the global market have been included in the report.In conclusion, it is a deep research report on global Electric Toothbrush market 2016.To Read More:About Us:QYResearch Group is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. QYResearch Group also carries the capability to assist you with your customized market research requirements including in-depth market surveys, primary interviews, competitive landscaping, and company profiles. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics. QYResearch Group is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air.Contact US: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 FREEEmail: sales (@) qyresearchgroup (dot) com
Surfactant Market Research Report to 2022: Grand View Research, Inc.

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In 2014, the global surfactant market was worth USD 25.60 billion. Development of detergents market predominantly in Latin America and Asia Pacific as a result of rising disposable income levels is likely to drive market growth. Moreover, growing oilfield chemicals demand on account of speedily growing E&P activities in China and North America is also expected to drive the global surfactants market.Surfactants are used to diminish surface tension between a solid and a liquid or between two liquids in the form of emulsifiers, wetting agents, foaming agents, detergents or dispersants. They are used in numerous end-use industries for instance cosmetics, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. Constant progress in these sectors is projected to assist the major industry participants.Browse to access In-depth research report on Global Surfactant Market with detailed charts and figures:Anioinic surfactants was the largest product type which accounted for over 45% of the market in 2014. Increasing demand for linear alkyl benzene in cleaners and detergents on account of profitable characteristics of products led to the high market share. Amphoteric surfactant type is projected to witness the highest growth rate, at an estimated CAGR of 4.9% from 2015 to 2022. Amphoteric surfactants are extensively being used worldwide owing to their various properties such as conditioning, bio degradability, foaming & foam stabilization and detergency.Surfactant application accounted for the highest market share of over 40% in 2014. Growing product demand in detergents, household cleaners and soaps accounted for the huge demand in home care segment. Personal care application is forecasted to witness the highest growth rate, at an anticipated CAGR of 5.0% from 2015 to 2022. The growing demand for new innovative products such as anti-aging creams and make-up is expected to drive the demand for personal care application.Asia Pacific accounted for over 30% of the global surfactant market in 2014.Increasing demand for home care and personal care products along with rising awareness about bio-based products is projected to provide an upper hand over other regions in the near future.BASF - Cognis was the leading company in 2014 contributing over 30%of the total market share of global surfactants market. Other major companies in the market include Akzo Nobel, Kao, Stephan, Rhodia, Clariant, Evonik, Croda and Huntsman. The major industry participants in global surfactants market are developing new innovative products. In addition, some of the key strategies of the industry participants include joint ventures, mergers & acquisitions along with efficient marketing strategies. Media platforms are projected to be utilized on a large scale for product promotion and differentiation.Request for free sample of this research report:Grand View Research has segmented the global surfactants market on the basis of product, application and region:Global Surfactants Product Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; Revenues, USD Million, 2012  2022) Cationic surfactant Nonionic surfactanto Fatty Al Ethoxylates (AE)o Alkyl Phenol Ethoxylates (NPE)o Others Anionic surfactanto Linear Alkyl Benzeneo FAI Ether Sulfateso Sulfosuccinateso Others Amphoteric surfactant Other SurfactantsGlobal Surfactants Application Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; Revenues, USD Million, 2012  2022) Home Care Personal Care Industrial & Institutional Cleaners Food Processing Oilfield Chemicals Agricultural Chemicals Textiles Emulsion Polymerization (Plastics) Paints & Coatings Construction Other Applications OthersGlobal Surfactants Regional Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; Revenues, USD Million, 2012  2022) North America Europe Asia Pacific RoWGrand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.Corporate Sales Specialist, USAGrand View Research, IncPhone: 1-415-349-0058
Beautex launches a new product BLOCKFFLY - LA RETE FLY, a pleated insect screen from Italy.

http://beautex.in/

Blockffly is a pleated insect screen, a revolutionary concept, a world - class Italian technology, an innovative and state-of-the-art mechanism especially designed for doors and windows. It is a 100% European product with a zero bottom system with lateral & vertical sliding movements with a 4-mm track at floor level. This high value system provides for a smooth and pleasant sliding movement. Featuring special qualities such as certifications for Class 2 wind resistance, energy savings and acoustic insulation against background noise. They come in 13 different colours and in special metalized and anti-pollen versions. They are also easy to disassemble and wash. Their overall dimensions are only 22 mm! Unlike spring-operated insect screens, pleated insect scre-ens always work, even after long periods of inactivity, as they have no mechanisms or boxes.Beautex has over 5 decades experience in building material products like Windows & Doors, Wood Flooring and Cladding. With Blockffly being added to the list, Beautex lives up to its commitment of constantly offering new and unique products to its customers, allowing the company to grow and make a name for itself all over India and in international market.With this Indo  Italian venture, Beautex aims to offer the best home and office protection systems. All the projects are certified, and represent original furnishing solutions. Beautex brands are a true guarantee for protection, functionality and style, with an excellent quality-price ratio. Beautex products are sold throughout the country by its branches pan India, with the support and assistance of highly qualified technical managers and best customer care service.Environmental protection is rooted in Beautex mission, as all the choices made in the product selection are weighed in terms of respect for the local and global environment.Website -Beautex Industries Pvt. LimitedBeautex House1/1, Old Anand Nagar,Off Western Express Highway,Reliance Energy Lane,Santacruz East,Mumbai  400055Maharashtra (INDIA)Contact: 022-26119000/9820080880
Indonesia Power Market 2016 Share, Size, Review, Trends, Growth & Analysis 2025

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Indonesia Power Market Outlook to 2030 : Indonesia Power provides an detailed overview of Indonesia Power scenario.This report on Indonesia Power also includes an review of trial numbers as well as their (Indonesia Power) average enrollment in uppermost/top countries which are conducted worldwide.Indonesia Power report also covers disease clinical trials by country (G7 & E7), sponsor type, region, trial, research, review, Size status as well as end points status.Get Sample Copy of Report Here :The report covers detailed analysis and forecast of important market dynamics of Indonesia Power industry including market drivers and restraints. It also evaluates future growth & demand opportunities for its stake holders. The report throws light on upstream and downstream markets of Indonesia Power industry. The report provides detailed analysis of production price, production capacity, production volume, production value, production cost or profit margin and supply & demand analysis/forecast.Scope of Indonesia Power Report:-1. This report includes a snapshot of all over the world clinical trials and reviews landscape on Indonesia Power scenario.2. Report on Indonesia Power also provides high level data related to the Global clinical research by country (G7 & E7), sponsor type, region, trial, review, size status as well as end points status on Indonesia Power scenario3. Report reviews top companies involved in Indonesia Power as well as provides e all trials (Trial title, Phase, Research and Status) pertaining to the company on Indonesia Power scenario.4. This report provides all the unaccomplished trials on Indonesia Power scenario (Withdrawn, Terminated) with reason for unaccomplishment on Indonesia Power.About Us:Market 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 Us:Joel JohnDeerfield Beach, Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803Web: Market Research StoreEmail: sales@marketresearchstore.com
Jaagar Paanyacha initiative by IBN Lokmat focused on water conservation, to felicitate 11 Samaritans

Water Conclave

Mumbai, Thursday, 28th April: As severe drought conditions prevail at the moment in India, the state of Maharashtra is facing one of the biggest water crisis in recent decades. The water scarcity has caused a law and order problem in the parched Marathwada region, threatening to convert into a social conflict. Jaagar Paanyacha - awakening for water conclave by IBN Lokmat will bring top leaders, visionaries, authorities and celebrities on a common platform for a whole day session to share their thoughts on the states water crisis, governments current initiatives and future plan of action.In such crisis, IBN Lokmat is felicitating 11 Samaritans who have toiled and moiled for water conservation and made a difference with their thoughts and actions. Right from cutting down on large personal expenses, stopping growing crops which require substantive quantities of water, or even water irrigation projects. These efforts will be felicitated in presence of Maharashtra Chief Minister, Devendra Phadnavis on Friday, 29th April at Sahyadri Guest House, Malabar Hill in Mumbai.The conclave will also have top dignitaries - Mr. Rajendra Singh, Mr. Satyajit Batkal, Dr. Vikas Amte, Mr. Suresh Khanapurkar, Mr. Popatrao Pawar, Mr. Raju Shetty, Mr. Datta Sawant, Mr. Madhav Kotasthane, Mr. Tukaram Mundhe and Mr. Jayant Patil; who will share their thoughts on water conservation for the betterment and upliftment of Maharashtra. The Jaagar Paanyacha initiative by IBN Lokmat is in association with JMJ Machine Tools & Sarita Water Tanks.******************************IBN LokmatAbhishek RoyMSL Office Pune
Global Agricultural Drones Market to Rise to US$ 3.69 bn by 2022

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MarketResearchReports.Biz presents this most up-to-date research on " Agricultural Drones: Market Shares, Strategy, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2016 to 2022 "A detailed overview of the global market for agricultural drones has been given in a recent market research report added to the portfolio of MarketResearchReports.biz. The report, titled Agricultural Drones: Market Shares, Strategy, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2016 to 2022, states that the market is poised to expand at a significant pace over the period from 2016 to 2022 as the global population becomes more receptive towards the concept of precision farming. The use of imaging cameras on stable flying objects has demonstrated several benefits in the field of agriculture in the past few years, allowing farmers to better control and isolate agricultural areas for purposes such as spraying fertilizers or pesticides crop fields and standing crops.The report states that the global market for agricultural drones will rise from a valuation of US$494 mn to US$ 3.69 bn by 2022.Agricultural drones make use of automated processes to allow a more flexible and better visualization of farming activities, and ultimately make farming more productive.The report states that the global agricultural drone market has reached a level of maturity and these systems are now at the forefront of farming modernization. Farmers across the globe are becoming more receptive towards technologically advanced equipment such as drones, and are increasingly reaping the benefits of better visualization of farms.Technological advancements and innovations are occurring at a rapid pace and agricultural cameras are also evolving rapidly. Several agricultural drones in the market come with features such as targeted video, specialized video, and agricultural spraying systems.View Press Release Report at :The rising use of agricultural drones hints at a data-driven future for the agriculture sector. The integration of highly effective and inexpensive sensors, intelligent software, and cloud computing features in drone systems holds immense potential in transforming the agriculture sector, making it more potent and capable of feeding the ever-rising global population.The field of agriculture drones has also witnessed a huge rise in venture investments in the past few years.From a geographic viewpoint, the global agricultural drones market is currently dominated by the U.S., which accounts for 73% of the global expenditure on research, development, test, and emulation in the field of smart drones. Japan is also significantly contributing to the research and development of drones and accounts for a major share in the global agricultural drone market.For Sample Copy, click here:The report presents a detailed overview of the competitive landscape of the global agricultural drone market and includes detailed business profiles, details regarding product portfolio, and other details pertaining to some of the major vendors operating in the market.Major vendors in the global agricultural drones market include AgEagle, BlueSKy, Denel Dynamics, Finmeccanica, Google, Gryphon, GoPro, Safran Morpho, Yahama, RUAG Aerospace, 3D Robotics, Boeing, Yamaha, AeroVironment, and DJI.MarketResearchReports.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 research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Mr. NachiketState Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA: Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Website:E : sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Industrial Robotics Market Outlook and Forecast up to 2020: Grand View Research, Inc.

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The global industrial robotics Industry was estimated at USD 25.68 billion in 2013 and is expected to reach USD 40.00 billion by 2020 owing to increased number of deployments in the manufacturing sector to simplify complexities and enhance productivity. Industrial robots are being increasingly used to simplify business activities including marketing, designing, selling, building, installing, maintaining and operating.An increased emphasis has been laid on productivity index to sustain in the competitive environment of the manufacturing sector and achieve quality results is expected to drive the industrial robotics market. Increasing labor costs coupled with growing demand from automotive industry is anticipated to be a key driving factor in the industry.Manual labor has eventually replaced with self-programming robots owing to the job efficiency and cost-effectiveness on account of their ability to sense environmental changes through integration of sophisticated sensors. Growing measures concerning safety rights of laborers are also expected to augment growth in the market.Application of robots in non-automotive industries namely chemicals, food & beverages, electronics, and electricals have resulted in the development of new opportunities and prospects over the past few years. Increasing installation costs and lack of skilled labor are expected to pose a challenge for the companies.Browse full research report on Global Industrial Robotics Market:In 2013, automotive robots contributed to the highest market share by volume. The market is projected to gain prominence over the forecast period on account of technological advancements and integration of artificial intelligence. Increasing demand from heavy machinery and food processing industries are also expected to have a positive impact on growth over the coming years.Asia Pacific accounted for the largest market in 2013 on account of substantial investments by organizations to expand globally. Countries including Korea, Japan, and China have experienced significant growth owing to supportive government programs involving tax incentivisation, investments in skill management, and R&D funding while Singapore, Taiwan, and India are anticipated to have a high potential for growth.Rising production capacities in North America coupled with the modernization of factories are expected to result in an increasing number of robotic installations. Significant investment in robotics by automotive industry players in Europe is projected to augment demand over the forecast period.Read detailed report or request for sample of this research report:The industrial robotics market encompasses numerous Japanese suppliers namely Denso, Motoman and Fanuc. Europe comprises of specialized industrial robotics establishments including Kuka and Comau along with prominent corporations including BAE and ABB Systems.New entrants are expected to emphasize on a particular application and find ways to diversify to cope with high capital cost. Initiatives including Blue Competence sustainability initiative by Anlagenbaue.V. (VDMA) and VerbandDeutscherMaschinen, which aims at achieving environmental sustainability through technological modernization, is expected to propel growth in the coming years.Grand View Research has segmented the global industrial robotics market on the basis of application and region:Industrial Robotics Application Outlook (Volume, Thousand Units & Revenue, USD Billion; 2012  2020) Automotive Electrical/Electronics Metal/Heavy Machinery Chemical, Rubber & Plastics Food OthersIndustrial Robotics Regional Outlook (Volume, Thousand Units & Revenue, USD Billion; 2012  2020) North America Europe Asia Pacific RoWGrand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.Sherry JamesCorporate Sales Specialist, USAGrand View Research, IncWeb:
Specialty Polymers Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2015  2023

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Specialty polymers area class of polymersthat exhibit specialized properties. These properties differentiate them from conventional polymers.Specialty polymersare employed ina wide range of applications. Specialty polymers are classified under specialty chemicals. These polymers are usually manufactured in small quantities and are priced at premium. Specialty polymers can be classified into thermoplastic polymers, biodegradable polymers, polymer composites, liquid crystal polymers, electroluminescent polymers, and conducting polymers. Specialty polymers are used in various industries such as automotive, electronics, cosmetics, medical, and construction.These polymers, especially thermoplastic polymers, are good insulators, and offer high heat resistance and flame resistance properties.Thus, they are used inthe manufacture of various electrical components such as sockets and switches. Thermoplastic specialty polymers can also be usedto manufacture bullet-proof glass. Biodegradable polymers are used widely in medical and agriculture fields.These polymers can be used in the manufacture of films, blow molded bottles, and as coatings on paper. Biodegradable specialty polymers are useful for controlled drug delivery in the medical industry, as these are biocompatible and biodegradable.Thus, specialty polymers exhibit various properties.This makes specialty polymers suitable for usage in a wide range of end-user industries.Download And Get FREE Sample PDF File Of Specialty polymers :Conducting polymers, a class of specialized polymer have the ability to conduct heat better than other type ofpolymers. These polymers are used in applications requiring high heat conductivity. Electroluminescent polymers emit light in response to a strong electric field or electric current.These polymers can be used in LED devices (including flat panel display for PC, television, and mobiles)and color pixels in ink jet printing. Liquid crystal specialty polymers exist as liquid crystals under suitable conditions of temperature, concentration, and pressure. Liquid crystal polymer, also called Kevlar, is used in the manufacture of protective clothing and body armor. The cost of specialty polymers is high; however,these are preferred due to its unique properties and wide range of applications.The specialty polymers market is anticipated to expandat a healthy CAGR during the forecast period. Asia Pacific is projected to be the fastest growing market for specialty polymers during the forecast period. Expansion in automotive and electrical industries in India and China coupled with growth in infrastructure activities is likely to drive the specialty polymers market in Asia Pacific. Rise in economy and increase in per capita income are some of the key factors that trigger the growth of the specialty polymers market in the region. Increasing need for specialized polymers with high endurance limit, corrosion resistance, electrical insulation, resistance to wear, and thermal stability can act as a major diver for the growth of the specialty polymers market.However, high instability in the prices of raw materials required for the manufacture of specialty polymers is expected to be one of the major restraining factors for the specialty polymers market. In spite of higher raw material prices, the promising benefits gained through specialty polymers in various end-user and allied industries is expected to moderate the effect of restraint. Overall, the specialty polymers market is anticipated to experience significant growth in the near future due to the increase in the number of applications.Some of the major companies operating in the global specialty polymers market include Evonik Industries, Ashland Inc., Clariant, Solvay Group, BASF SE, Specialty Polymers, Inc., PolyOne Corporation, AmeriLux International, LLC, The Dow Chemical Company, 3M,Alpek S.A.B. de C.V., A.Schulman, Inc., Arkema Group, Koninklijke DSM N.V., and Croda International Plc.Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.90 State Street, Suite 700New York
Abbotsfords Professional and Reliable Mechanical Repair Shop

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Abbotsford automotive is the perfect destiny for all general mechanical repairs of vehicles, major and minor services of vehicles in Abbotsford. Our staff members are fully experienced and skilled persons in all aspects of repair services. Our mechanics use latest equipment and technologies. Our garage is licensed vehicle tester to issue roadworthy certificate for all makes and models of vehicles. Quality workshop with the latest automotive diagnostic and computer technology. We have trustworthy mechanics that professionally and honestly inspect and assess your vehicle to VicRoads Standards in our workshop for all your RWC needs in Melbourne. We offer our full range of repair services from mechanical servicing to auto electrical servicing and repairs, LPG conversions and service, transmission repairs, fuel injection, body painting and computer diagnostics and testing and more.Brake and Clutch Repairs:Brake and clutches are mainly useful to control the sped of the vehicle. If both are got repair then Abbotsford automotive is the perfect destiny for brake and clutch repairs services.Fuel Pump:The electric fuel pump is the heart of every electronic fuel injection system. A fuel pump that doesn't meet the OE minimum fuel flow or pressure requirements for your car can cause drivability and emissions problems. Weak fuel pumps can causes to repair or replacement service. We provide the best solutions for fuel pump repair services.Differential and Starter Motor Repairs:Starter motors are an important part of your car is starting and charging system. They are designed to initially crank your engine when you first start by engaging with a gear on the flywheel of the engine so that the engine can fire. We offer the best starter motor repairs and replacement services for all makes and models of vehicles.Belts and Hoses Repairs:We can help repair and maintain your car engine belts and hoses including radiator hoses, power steering hoses and engine timing belts. Our qualified technicians diagnose and repair issues related to vehicle belts and hoses.Exhaust systems and mufflers:Never neglect repairs of mufflers and cars exhaust repairs. We provide the best repair services for muffler and exhaust repairs by our experts and professionals.We provide our wide range of services for more repairs of vehicles. To hire or professionals for your mechanical repairs please visitContact Details:Abbotsford Automotive3 Duke stAbbotsfordVictoria306703 9428 5197Abbotsford automotive is the perfect destiny for all general mechanical repairs of vehicles, major and minor services of vehicles in Abbotsford.3 Duke stAbbotsfordVictoria306703 9428 5197
Asia Pacific to Rise Rapidly in Global Breast Imaging Market due to Medical Tourism

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Breast cancer is one of the topmost developing cancer types in women across the world. As the incidence of breast cancer keep aggravating, there is an urgent concern amongst both medical practitioners and patients to innovate devices and technologies that can detect it before it proves to be fatal. According to the WHO, increasing urbanization and poor lifestyle choices are the main reasons for the growing number of breast cancer cases across the world. Though there are a few preventive measures, early detection is the best possible way to increase the survival chances of the patient and enable the patient to live a near-normal life again.Breast cancer refers to a malignant tumor that starts in the cells of breast. The malignant tumor starts invading surrounding tissues or spreads to distant areas of body. While breast cancer is common among women, men can also get affected. When diagnosed early, the survival chances of patients are high. The treatment methods such as chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery to be administered depend on the stage of cancer.Get a Free Sample Report:The global breast imaging market is developing at a rapid pace on account of high incidence of breast cancer across the globe. Women over 40 years of age are more susceptible to breast cancer, therefore, the rise in the geriatric population base is expected to fuel the growth of the breast imaging market significantly in the coming years.The research report provides a comparative analysis of the global breast imaging market, including qualitative as well as quantitative evaluation of each segment of this market. The study also assesses the market dynamics and prevalent trends such as the growth drivers, limitations, and prospects influencing the current performance and the future status of this industry.The report points out that the growing prevalence of breast cancer and aging demographics have boosted the growth of the global breast imaging technologies market. A number of initiatives taken by governments and private organizations to spread awareness about breast cancer have also augmented the market growth. However, stringent regulatory approval procedures and the lack of reimbursement coverage will play spoilsport in the growth of the market during the forecast horizon. Lack of awareness about breast cancer, especially across the developing economies will also hamper the market growth. The overall market has a huge opportunity to grow with the development of improved technologies with reduced radiation exposure. The report further analyzes the impact of Porters five forces on the growth of the market during the forecast period.On the basis of technology, the report segments the global breast imaging technologies market into tomosynthesis, breast ultrasound, mammography, breast MRI, nuclear imaging, and others including breast thermography, and bioelectric imaging. Mammography utilizes low-intensity X-rays to develop two-dimensional images of breast tissues. In 2012, the demand for mammography was the highest, followed by breast MRI. In the U.S. alone, around 44 million women undergo mammography every year. During the forecast horizon, tomosynthesis is estimated to register a CAGR of 18.1% and nuclear imaging is also expected to witness significant growth.The report studies the breast imaging technologies market across four key regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. In 2012, North America dominated the entire market and held 32.6% of the market. The rapid growth of the market in North America can be attributed to the highly developed healthcare infrastructure. Though North America is currently the undisputed leader in the market, during the forecast horizon, Asia Pacific is expected to register a significant growth. Rapidly developing medical tourism market and improving healthcare infrastructure will propel the growth of the market in Asia Pacific.Describing the competitive landscape, the report profiles some of the key players in the global breast imaging technologies market such as FUJIFILM SonoSite Inc., Hologic Inc., Aurora Imaging Technologies Inc., Dilon Technologies Inc., SonoCine Inc., Philips Healthcare, GE Healthcare Ltd., and Siemens Healthcare Corp. It provides insightful information about the key players including their product segmentation, recent developments, and business strategies. The U.S.-based Hologic Inc. dominated the overall market in 2013. A number of strategic partnerships and agreements, and new product launches have contributed towards the companys growth in the market.Global Breast Imaging Technologies Market has been segmented as:Key segments of the breast imaging market based on technology:-Mammography-Breast Ultrasound-Breast MRI-Tomosynthesis-Nuclear Imaging-OthersMajor geographies analyzed under this research report are:-Europe-North America-Asia-Pacific-Rest of the WorldBrowse Full Global Breast Imaging Market Report With Complete TOC @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.Contact Us90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
ParaBlu Unveils BluVault for Servers Secure Server Backup on the cloud

ParaBlu?s BluVault for Servers enables secure server backup on the cloud while ensuring complete control and privacy remain with t

Burlingame, CA  Apr. 26, 2016 -- Parablu, Inc., a leader in enterprise Cloud Security, today unveiled BluVault for Servers a secure cloud based server backup solution for enterprises. The new offering adds to ParaBlus growing portfolio of enterprise cloud security solutions that puts security and control right back to where it belongs  the IT organization of the Enterprise.ParaBlus BluVault for Servers, a secure and scalable server backup solution for todays agile enterprise needs, intelligently backs up databases and server files while utilizing optimal storage, CPU bandwidth and network bandwidth.BluVault for Servers combined with BluKrypt, a CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker), enables unparalleled control over security and privacy of data. Be it physical or virtual servers ParaBlu make it easy for enterprise servers to be backed up to target storage of enterprises choice, such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer and Google Drive. With BluVault for Servers, ParaBlu makes it easier and more profitable for partner ecosystem as well. Another addition to ParaBlus enterprise cloud security solutions that enhances partners in their cloud migration initiatives as well, while delivering a comprehensive solution for enterprises to securely embrace the cloud.The ParaBlus BluVault for Servers enables a unique experience for enterprises, including:1. A user friendly interface lets easy setup of backups and saves hours of IT time.2. Support for Files  Linux and Windows3. Support for Databases including Oracle, MS SQL Server, Mongo4. Centralized policy management and monitoring portal provides complete visibility.5. BluVault for Servers supports initial Full backup and Incremental backup method.6. Customizable backup scripts enable inclusion of additional intelligence.7. A scalable architecture with the ability to work seamlessly across multiple offices across the globe.For more information on BluVault for Server Backup please visit ParaBlu websiteAnanda Rao Ladi, Executive Vice President-Engineering and Support, ParaBlu, said:A solution built with security and privacy in mind, BluVault for Servers integrated with BluKrypt (ParaBlus CASB), empowers IT security professionals with the confidence to backup the business critical server data in the cloud, helping their employees work faster, boost revenue and stay secure.Vishnu Panda, Vice President-Sales, ParaBlu, said:Our solution eliminates the need to use traditional disks & tapes, and makes cloud a viable choice for server backup. Enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud offerings as they seek to improve agility and flexibility and at the same time meet their security and privacy needs. That is where our offering strives to deliver a robust enterprise class solution to help enterprises overcoming their cloud adoption and data protection concerns. Our partners also now have one more offering which will help them in enhancing their Cloud Migration & Cloud Security GTM initiatives and we intend to see our partners succeed in the marketplace with our offerings.About ParaBluParaBlu is an award winning provider of CASB-enabled data management solution which helps enterprises feel secure taking their business to the cloud. ParaBlus Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) enables easy adoption of the cloud. Enterprise business assets can be stored in the cloud while preserving privacy, security and confidentiality of data. To learn more about ParaBlu, visitParablu Inc1342 Rollins Road,Burlingame,CA 94010-2410USA
Polyether Ether Ketone (PEEK) Market Size, Company Share To 2020: Grand View Research, Inc.

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Global Polyether Ether Ketone (PEEK) Market is expected to reach USD 765.7 million by 2020; according to a new study by Grand View Research, Inc. Shift towards reducing overall weight of automobiles by substituting metals with high performance plastics is expected to drive the global PEEK market over the forecast period. Stringent regulations particularly in the U.S. and Europe to minimize fuel consumption by improving fuel efficiency have prompted PEEK adoption across the automotive industry. Superior performance features have also contributed towards its increasing penetration across medical, food, semiconductors, aerospace and industrial sectors. High price of PEEK compared to other plastics is expected to remain a key challenge for market participants.Browse full research report on Global Polyether Ether Ketone (PEEK) Market:Glass filled emerged as the leading PEEK product and accounted for 47.6% of total market volume in 2013. Glass filled PEEK is widely used across electrical & electronics and industrial applications. Growth of electrical & electronics industry in Asia Pacific is expected to fuel this segment over the forecast period. Carbon filled PEEK is expected to witness the highest growth of 8.8% from 2014 to 2020 on account of its increasing application base across clinical and aerospace industries.Read detailed report or request for sample of this research report:Further key findings from the study suggest: Global PEEK market demand was 4,320 tons in 2013 and is expected to reach 7,562.7 tons by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 8.4% from 2014 to 2020. PEEK is majorly used for industrial applications which accounted for 27.6% of total market volume 2013. Stringent environment regulations for packaging are expected to drive PEEK demand for industrial applications. In additon, rapid industrialization rates in Asian and Latin American countries are also expected to have a positive impact on the market growth over the forecast period. Automotive is expected to witness the highest growth of 8.9% from 2014 to 2020. Strong shift in trend towards replacing metals with high performance plastics in the U.S. and Europe is expected to drive the segment growth over the forecast period. Medical and aerospace application segments are also expected to witness significant growth. Currently, PEEK is majorly used as an efficient product for spinal surgeries in medical industry. In aerospace industry, PEEK is used as a raw material for new generation passenger aircrafts. Europe emerged as a leading regional market and accounted for 55.6% in 2013. Favorable regulatory scenario coupled with presence of major PEEK manufacturers is expected to drive the regional market over the forecast period. Asia Pacific is expected to witness the highest growth of 15.0% from 2014 to 2020. Positive outlook on regional automotive industry is expected to drive the regional market over the forecast period. Global PEEK market is highly consolidated and is dominated by leading MNCs. Major industry participants include Victrex Plc., Solvay Specialty Polymers, LIC and Panjin Zhongrun High Performance Polymers Co. Ltd. Other companies operating in the global PEEK market include Jida Evonik High Performance Polymers (Changchun) Co. Ltd, Zyex Ltd, A. Schulman AG, Caledonian Ferguson Timpson Ltd, Quadrant EPP Surlon India Ltd and J.K. Overseas.Browse more reports of this category by Grand View Research:For the purpose of this study, Grand View Research has segmented the PEEK market on the basis of product, application and region:Global Polyether Ether Ketone (PEEK) Product Outlook (Volume, Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2012  2020) Unfilled Carbon filled Glass filledGlobal Polyether Ether Ketone (PEEK) Application Outlook (Volume, Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2012  2020) Medical Automotive Aerospace Industrial Electrical & ElectronicsGlobal Polyether Ether Ketone (PEEK) Regional Outlook (Volume, Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2012  2020) North Americao U.S.o Canada Europeo Germanyo Italy Asia Pacifico Chinao Japano India Middle East & Africa Central & South AmericaGrand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.Sherry JamesCorporate Sales Specialist, USAGrand View Research, IncPhone: 1-415-349-0058Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519
The Cards and Payments Industry in Poland: Emerging Trends and Opportunities to 2019 Detailed Research Report By MarketResearchReports.biz

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MarketResearchReports.Biz announces addition of new report  The Cards and Payments Industry in Poland: Emerging Trends and Opportunities to 2019  to its database.DescriptionTimetric's 'The Cards and Payments Industry in Poland: Emerging Trends and Opportunities to 2019' report provides detailed analysis of market trends in Poland's cards and payments industry. It provides values and volumes for a number of key performance indicators in the industry, including check payments, credit transfers, direct debits, payment cards and cash transactions during the review period (2010-2014).The report also analyzes various payment card markets operating in the industry and provides detailed information on the number of cards in circulation, and transaction values and volumes during the review period and over the forecast period (2015-2019). It also offers information on the country's competitive landscape, including market shares of issuers and schemes.The report brings together Timetric's research, modeling, and analysis expertise to allow banks and card issuers to identify segment dynamics and competitive advantages. The report also covers detailed regulatory policies, recent changes in regulatory structure and profiles of card issuers operating in the country.SummaryTimetric's 'The Cards and Payments Industry in Poland: Emerging Trends and Opportunities to 2019' report provides top-level market analysis, information and insights into Poland's cards and payments industry, including:Current and forecast values for each market in Poland's cards and payments industry, including debit card, credit and charge cards. It also includes detailed analysis of the prepaid card market.Detailed insights into payment instruments including credit transfers, cash transactions, checks, direct debits and payment cards. It also, includes an overview of the country's key alternative payment instruments.E-commerce market analysis and online payment types.Analysis of various market drivers and regulations governing Poland's cards and payments industry.Detailed analysis of strategies adopted by banks and other institutions to market debit, credit and charge cards.Comprehensive analysis of consumer attitudes and buying preferences for cards.The competitive landscape of Poland's cards and payments industry.ScopeThis report provides a comprehensive analysis of Poland's cards and payments industry.It provides current values for Poland's cards and payments industry for 2014, and forecast figures to 2019.It details the different demographic, economic, infrastructural and business drivers affecting Poland's cards and payments industry.It outlines the current regulatory framework in the industry.It details marketing strategies used by various banks and other institutions.It profiles major banks in Poland's cards and payments industry.Download Sample Copy of This Report at:Reasons To BuyMake strategic business decisions, using top-level historic and forecast market data, related to Poland's cards and payments industry and each market within it.Understand the key market trends and growth opportunities in Poland's cards and payments industry.Assess the competitive dynamics in Poland's cards and payments industry.Gain insights into marketing strategies used for various card types in Poland.Gain insights into key regulations governing Poland's cards and payments industry.Key HighlightsPoland was one of Europe's early adopters of contactless technology, and consumers are among the highest users of contactless payments, behind the UK and France. Contactless is seen as an area of huge potential in Poland, especially by Visa, which sees the advance of contactless as highly successful. Visa is heavily promoting contactless payment cards in Poland, and growth has been so impressive that Poland is now Visa's largest contactless market in Europe. Use of contactless cards is dependent on infrastructure being in place, investment in which is starting to bring results. There were 10,000 terminals that could accept contactless cards in 2011, and according to Visa Europe, 354,000 terminals supported contactless payments as of March 2015.Banks are launching a range of new products to capitalize on the growing popularity of contactless mobile payments (m-payments). In April 2015, Bank BPH, in partnership with MasterCard, T-Mobile and Orange, introduced contactless m-payments for credit cardholders, allowing them to make contactless payments of up to US$15.9 (PLN50). In January 2015 nine Polish banks - ING Bank ?l?ski, mBank, Bank Millennium, Raiffeisen Polbank, Getin Bank, Bank Polskiej Spo?dzielczo?ci, Bank SMART and Eurobank - announced plans to commercially launch Visa cloud-based contactless m-payment services by the end of 2015.Banks in Poland are moving slowly towards the low-cost banking model to reduce overheads associated with traditional branch banking. Poland's first digital bank, Alior Sync, was launched by Alior Bank in June 2012. The bank targets active internet users, and offers banking services through Facebook and other social networking sites. The bank also developed apps to encourage online and mobile banking. Similarly, Citibank launched a virtual branch for Polish consumers in September 2010. The growth of online banking model could pose a real challenge to traditional banks, if operators can turn the low-cost model into a money-saving option for consumers.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 Gas Generator Sets Market 2016 -Industry Research, Size, Share, Analysis & Growth

Gas Generator Sets market

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A market study based on the "Gas Generator Sets market" across the globe, recently added to the repository of QY Market research, is titled Global Gas Generator Sets Market 2016. The research report analyzes the historical as well as present performance of the global Gas Generator Sets market, and makes predictions on the future status of Gas Generator Sets market on the basis of this analysis.The report studies the market for Gas Generator Sets across the globe taking the existing industry chain, the import and export statistics in Gas Generator Sets market & dynamics of demand and supply of Gas Generator Sets into consideration.Request For Report Sample Here:The ' Gas Generator Sets 'research study covers each and every aspect of the Gas Generator Sets market globally, which starts from the definition of the Gas Generator Sets market and develops towards Gas Generator Sets market segmentations. Further, every segment of the Gas Generator Sets market is classified and analyzed on the basis of product types, application, and the end-use industries of the Gas Generator Sets market. The geographical segmentation of the Gas Generator Sets market has also been covered at length in this report.The competitive landscape of the global market for Gas Generator Sets is determined by evaluating the various market participants, production capacity, Gas Generator Sets market's production chain, and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Gas Generator Sets market worldwide.Do Inquiry About This Report Here:The global Gas Generator Sets market 2016 is also analyzed on the basis of product pricing, Gas Generator Sets production volume, data regarding demand and Gas Generator Sets supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. Various methodical tools such as investment returns, feasibility, and market attractiveness analysis has been used in the research to present a comprehensive study of the market for Gas Generator Sets across the globe.About Chem Report StoreChem Report Store, we have market research reports from competent publishers. Our Research Specialists have thorough knowledge about offerings from different publishers and different reports on respective industries. They will help you refine search parameters and get desired results at your doorstep. Here you can review the complete range of available reports, review the scope of study and methodology of reports. Apart from the published market research reports, we also provide customized study on any topic to meet the varied requirements of our clients.Contact us:3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442, USAUSA Tel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No.1-855-465-4651
Photography, Art and Culture: An Insight into Germanys Refugee World

http://www.gosee.de/news/events/nach-der-wende-jetzt-die-welle-the-arrival-of-the-refugees-ingermany-

www.pielmedia.blogspot.de;

www.herbert-piel.de;

http://www.ilford.com

Herbert Piel documents the arrival of Asylum Seekers to Germanys Reception Facilities: Arrival  Refugees in Rhineland-Palatinate  Exhibitions in Trier, Mainz, Berlin, Edenkoben and KoblenzRenowned reportage photographer Herbert Piel, has announced a series of private viewings and public exhibitions that portray the arrival of asylum seekers to the reception facilities in Rhineland-Palatinate.Piel worked in co-operation with the Directorate General for Cultural Heritage and the development agency for the state on the project.Piel was asked by Development Agency for Rhineland-Palatinate to document the arrival as he had already visiting many of the conflict areas previously.Piels experience, understanding, and knowledge were extremely important in ensuring that this project was handled with the utmost sensitivity.The reportage not only shows the arrival of the refugees but also the work of the many governmental and voluntary workers. Piel worked in collaboration with the many reception facilities to gain access to the refugees to create a true and accurate picture of the plight of the asylum seekers.Piel captures the touching image of the many thousands of people living in the cramped reception facilities. These images portray children learning and playing; seemingly relaxed adults; and skeptical teenagers, with a hopeful look in their eye.The chaotic situation at the cramped facilities has rarely been seen before. However, it does seem unimportant and loses its relevance when looking into some of the childrens eyes.To use the words of Herbert Piel:Let us not forget  no human being leaves his family, his friends, his home by choice. And even it it seems so at the moment that the German welcome culture could not withstand Europes reality  one should not be mistaken. Every task and every project earlier or later meets resistance. And nobody said: This will be easy. She merely said: We will make it. And the world is watching. Made in Germany 2.0.ILFORD is honoredHerbert Piel uses ILFORD media for his social work: All prints were made on the paper awarded by TIPA as best photo paper 2016  ILFORD Galerie Gold Fibre Gloss.Photo Caption (Herbert Piel): We will make it!  And the World is watching  Made in Germany 2.01) Finger print2, 3, 4) Reception Facilities5) Moving6) Border Line7,8,9) ChildrenFor Publication: Contact and Infoein-gosee-blick-hinter-die-kulissen-von-herbert-piel-made-in-germany-2-0-33099/cat; http://info@herbert-piel.de;About ILFORDEstablished in 1879, ILFORD is one of the oldest photographic brands in the industry. With a history that spans over 135 years, ILFORD has been synonymous with professional quality from traditional analogue film and paper to providing inkjet paper for todays photo quality printers. The ILFORD brand is owned as a joint venture between Chugai Photo Chemicals and CR Kennedy & Company.Sheldon S. NazareAm Schulberg 650858 Koln+49 (0) 151 125 80 888
Global Ink Market 2016: Industry Analysis, Size, Share and Growth Forecasts 2021

Ink

http://www.intenseresearch.com/market-analysis/global-and-china-ink-market-industry-analysis-size.html

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The Report Titled 'Global and Chinese Ink Market, 2016-2021 Industry Research Report' is a efficient and comprehensive study on the Present state of the global Ink Market with a focus on the Chinese industry. The report provides key census on the market status of the Ink Manufacturers and is a valuable source of instruction and direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.Browse Complete Report Here @Firstly, the report provides a basic analysis of the market including its definition, applications and manufacturing technology. Then, the report analyse the international and Chinese major industry players in detail. In this part, the report presents the company profile, product blueprint, scope, production cost, and 2011-2016 market shares for each company. Through the demographic analysis, the report illustrate the global and Chinese total market of Ink industry including scope, manufacturing, manufacturing cost, value/profit, supply/demand and Chinese import/export. The total market is further divided by company, by country region, and by application/type for the competitive landscape analysis.The report then estimates 2016-2021 industry growth of Ink industry. Analysis of upstream raw materials, downstream requirement, and current market gesture is also carried out. In the end, the report makes some important proposals for a new project of Ink Industry before figure out its feasibility. Overall, the report provides an in-depth insight of 2016-2021 global and Chinese Ink market covering all important parameters.Get Free Sample Report of Ink Market:Table Of Content Of Ink Market:Chapter One Introduction of Ink Industry1.1 Brief Introduction of Ink1.2 Development of Ink Industry1.3 Status of Ink IndustryChapter Two Manufacturing Technology of Ink2.1 Development of Ink Manufacturing Technology2.2 Analysis of Ink Manufacturing Technology2.3 Trends of Ink 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 InformationAbout Intense ResearchIntense 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.Contact Us: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:
Without an effective site optimization approach, attracting people to your site can be a difficult endeavor. According to statistics, Google receives around 3.5 billion queries per day. Every website vies for the top spot, but only the best-optimized sites make it to the first page of search results. Your site must rank on the first page in order to get much-needed visitors. That takes us to the significance of SEO 
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The worldwide drug of abuse testing market (DOA) is expected to value at $3.9 billion in 2020. Two main drivers leading to growth of drug of abuse market are a significant increase in the use of illicit drugs and rising need for drug testing at organizational level. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.3% during 2015 to 2020. North America, the largest market by size in the drugs of abuse testing, is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.8% during 2015 to 2020.Explore detailed TOC and Scope of the report:Several countries in America and Europe are using drug screening tests at various organizational levels, such as on the spot drug/alcohol screening, pre-employment screening, post incident drug/alcohol screening and abstinence monitoring. Government regulations in these countries are also supporting the growth of drugs abuse testing market, mainly through practice of drug testing at workplace. The number of strategic collaborations, mergers and acquisitions in the drug of abuse testing market is increasing globally for enhancing the quality, performance and portfolio of products.Enquiry Before Purchase:A major factor leading to the rise of drug of abuse testing has been the increased use of illicit drugs. The use of illicit drugs is rising every year globally and has become a big concern for countries including the U.S., the U.K. Japan, Germany, India and China. A major key challenge faced by the drug of abuse testing market is the failure to spot designer drugs such as LSD, Rohypnol and ecstasy.Drug of abuse testing market can be segmented into two categories based on type of tests; laboratory based drugs of abuse tests and onsite drugs of abuse tests. The North American laboratory as well as onsite testing market has increased with more than 5.0% CAGR over the period 2011 to 2014, with onsite market standing at double the size of the laboratory testing market. The most common samples used for onsite testing are urine, saliva and hair. Nowadays, commercially available onsite drugs of abuse screening test kits are usually designed for urine and saliva specimens.With North America being the largest region for drug of abuse testing, Europe comes second. In Europe, onsite testing had a market size of $346.1 million in 2014 and it is expected to grow at a faster rate than laboratory testing market during the period 2015 to 2020.The major companies operating in the drug of abuse testing market include Roche Holding Limited, Quest Diagnostics, Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, Alere, Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Randox laboratories, Psychemedics Corporation, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Sonic Healthcare and Thermo Fisher Scientific.Request For Report Sample:Drug of Abuse Testing Market segmentationDrug of Abuse Testing Market by type of tests Onsite Laboratory OthersDrug of Abuse Testing Market by Sample Urine Hair Saliva OthersGeographical SegmentationDrug of Abuse Testing Market by Region North Americao The U.S. Europeo Germanyo Franceo The U.K. Asia Pacifico Indiao Chinao Japan
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...
For its fifth year, the Feast Portland food and drink festival will add new events, a roster of chefs from across the globe and a refreshed line-up of main events, classes and dinners.

"One of things we always say is we're not competitive externally, we're competitive with ourselves," said festival co-founder Mike Thelin. "Our goal is to continue to best ourselves ... This is our no-rerun year. Everything is going to be new and fun"

Feast 2016's biggest addition to the menu is a handful of new "fun-size" events -- described as bigger than the dinners but smaller than the marquees -- which will include a reprise of the Franklin Barbecue-Stumptown Coffee event that sold out in less than 10 minutes last year; a fried chicken and sides picnic with Tommy Habetz (Pizza Jerk), Gabe Rucker (Le Pigeon, Little Bird) and Matt Jennings (Townsman, Boston); a cocktail party with bartenders Jeffrey Morgenthaler (Clyde Common, Pepe Le Moko) and Jim Meehan (formerly PDT, NYC); and a night themed around pasta.

The inaugural marquee event, Sandwich Invitational, will also jump the river to the Rose Quarter Commons, the plaza connecting the Moda Center and the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, from downtown's Director Park, making it the festival's first major event on the east side of the city, and bringing with it a throwback-retro vibe.

"Director Park is an amazing public space, but it was evident last year we outgrew it," Thelin said. "We wanted a bigger space with more amenities and activations. Sandwich Invitational is going to feel totally different this year."

The popular Friday Night Market will also get a fresh take this year, switching from an Asian-themed evening to one centered around Latin America.

The trendy dinner series line-up will see a new crop of table settings, including a Japan-themed dinner with Ivan Orkin (Ivan Ramen), Ryan Roadhouse (Nodoguro) and Naomi Pomeroy (Beast, Expatriate); an Israeli dinner with Jenn Louis (Lincoln, Sunshine Tavern), Alon Shaya (Shaya, New Orleans) and Michael Shemtov (Butcher & Bee, Nashville); a Filipino dinner with Carlo Lamagna (Clyde Common) and Alvin Cailan (Egg Slut) and more.

New visiting chefs to the line-up this year include Jessica Koslow (Sqirl, LA), Edouardo Jordan (Salare, Seattle), Tom Douglas (Tom Douglas restaurants, Seattle) and Johnny Clark and Beverly Kim (Parachute, Chicago).

Over the past four years, Feast Portland has donated nearly $250,000 to charities across the country, including Share our Strength and Partners for a Hunger Free Oregon. This year, all donations will be kept in-state and given to Partners for a Hunger Free Oregon.

"Oregon is at a place right now that we didn't feel right sending funds out of state," Thelin said. "There's a huge economic boom in Oregon, but the levels of homelessness and childhood hunger haven't seen as much improvement."

Feast Portland 2016 will run from Sept. 15 - 18. The full line-up and schedule of events will go live on May 19. Tickets will go on sale the following day.

-- Samantha Bakall

sbakall@oregonian.com

Follow @sambakall
Firehouse

Sam Rodriguez, senior managing director at developer Mill Creek Residential's Portland office, confirmed the company will likely demolish a Pearl District firehouse.

(City of Portland)

A developer is planning a 12-story apartment building at the site of a former Pearl District firehouse built in 1913, city documents show.

Sam Rodriguez, senior managing director at developer Mill Creek Residential's Portland office, confirmed the company will likely demolish the firehouse, replacing it with market-rate apartments, basement parking and ground-floor retail. The site is along the north side of Northwest Glisan Street between Interstate 405 and Northwest 14th Avenue.

"We'll explore all the options," Rodriguez said. "But we can't guarantee that we'll be able to save the building."

The restaurant Touche occupies the building now. The site is also home to the restaurant Hawaiian Time.

Mill Creek hopes to start construction in May of next year and finish the building by early 2019, Rodriguez said. The firm will also consider reusing brick from the firehouse and rebuilding its facade.

"It seems to me that if there's anything to be saved, it's that facade," Rodriguez said. "The rest of it has been modified and remodified so many times." The old fire door, for instance, is gone, he added.

Some in the Pearl District - including the operators of Touche - are concerned about losing the historic firehouse, one of few left in Portland.

Touche posted a document on Twitter urging Pearl District residents to write letters to the city in an effort to save the building.

"Density and building diversity should not be an either/or proposition," the document reads. "We can have increased density AND retain significant historic structures."

The building is on the city's historic resource inventory, but that doesn't prohibit demolition. Representatives from the neighborhood, Mill Creek and the city met April 20 to discuss the project, Rodriguez said.

"We told them that we were looking at multiple options but demolition was definitely a strong one," Rodriguez said.

Mill Creek has agreed to buy the building but hasn't yet closed the sale. Rodriguez declined to reveal the terms.

The Portland Tribune first reported on the potential demolition.

-- Luke Hammill

lhammill@oregonian.com

503-294-4029

@lucashammill
Authorities are investigating an officer-involved shooting that occurred late Wednesday in Gresham.

A police spokesman said early Thursday that there are no outstanding suspects in the shooting. The lone suspect, a man, is in custody, the spokesman said.

Police initially responded to Southeast 188th Avenue and East Burnside Street shortly before 11 p.m. on the report of a traffic crash, said Gresham police spokesman John Rasmussen. The crash appeared to be a hit-and-run, in which the driver hit a wrought-iron fence, Rasmussen said.

Officers confronted the man who they think is the driver in the nearby 18900 block of Northeast Couch Street, Rasmussen said.

Officers were then involved in a shooting, he said. He couldn't provide information about who was hit, how many shots were fired or who fired the shots. He said he didn't know of any fatalities.

The Multnomah County Major Crimes Team is leading the investigation into the shooting, Rasmussen said.

A GMC Envoy SUV sat off the roadway in front of the Barberry Village apartment complex on 188th Avenue early Thursday morning. The apartment complex is near the Rockwood/East 188th Avenue MAX Station.

This report will be updated when more information becomes available.

-- Jim Ryan

jryan@oregonian.com

503-221-8005; @Jimryan015
SASAKI PIKACHU YAMAUCHI

Japanese star pitcher Kazuhiro Sasaki, left, receives a stuffed toy 'Pikachu' , the most famous cartoon character in the world, from then-Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi during a press conference in Japan in 1999. The Mariners announced this week that Nintendo is selling its majority stake in the franchise. (AP Photo/Kyodo News)

(AP)

When you think Nintendo, names like Mario, Pikachu and Link come to mind. It's not often that you'll think Ichiro Suzuki, Kazuhiro Sasaki or Ken Griffey, Jr.

All of those men played for the Seattle Mariners at varying moments when the House of Mario owned a majority stake in the team. Soon that won't be the case.

The Associated Press is reporting that Nintendo is selling all but 10 percent of its shares in the Mariners and that CEO Howard Lincoln is stepping down.

Lincoln was CEO of Nintendo of America when company president Hiroshi Yamauchi bought a 55 percent majority stake in the team in 1993. Oddly enough, Yamauchi never once attended a Mariners game, even when the team played friendlies in Japan.

When Yamauchi died in 2013, it was widely believed that the company would offload its shares in the franchise.

Aside from the loss of a particularly difficult video game-related question that consistently appears during trivia nights, the move really only means the above image is likely to go unrepeated in the near future.

--Eder Campuzano

503.221.4344

@edercampuzano

ecampuzano@oregonian.com
MM5brownkillen.JPG

Gov. Kate Brown discusses her vision for the next two years if elected to serve out former Gov. John Kitzhaber's term.

(Dave Killen/Staff)

Kate Brown wasn't supposed to be running for election to the state's top position just yet. Up until 15 months ago, she planned on serving out her second term as secretary of state before aiming for the governorship in 2018, likely as one of a few well-qualified Democrats vying for the job.

That plan was upended by former Gov. John Kitzhaber's resignation amid a criminal investigation last year. As Oregon's second-in-command, Brown ascended to the top post -- lacking both the mandate and preparation she would have hoped for, she said this week to The Oregonian/OregonLive editorial board. While she gracefully stepped in, the absence of both are evident in her administration, which has too often gone along for the ride, with a costs-be-damned Democratic majority in the Legislature at the wheel.

Oregonian editorials

reflect the collective opinion of The Oregonian/OregonLive 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.

Just weeks after taking over, she quickly signed a poorly conceived clean-fuels bill despite opposition from Republican legislators who said the higher gas prices would mean they could not also support a gas tax for desperately needed transportation fixes. Brown did try to walk back the clean-fuels bill months later and sought to broker a compromise that would raise money for a transportation package, but the effort failed. She did not even try to take up transportation funding in the 2016 session. She has yet to veto a single piece of legislation despite the many rushed bills that have arrived on her desk, including a minimum-wage bill so flawed that legislators almost immediately began talking of fixes they will seek.

Despite our disappointment with her lackluster leadership so far, Brown still remains far and away the most qualified among Democratic candidates -- and Independent ones as well -- seeking to serve the final two years of Kitzhaber's term. She has acted decisively in the face of troubling failures at the Department of Human Services to act on abuse allegations, replacing top administrators and sending the message that such contemptible dithering won't be tolerated. She has kept up pressure for a water-sharing agreement in Klamath Basin. And she has eloquently articulated the need for transparency and accountability in government and in schools -- even though, unfortunately, her actions often contradict that concern.

In fact, the most serious challenger to Brown comes not from her Democratic rivals, but from her own record to date. With a few months left before the general election, she has a chance to show voters how, if elected, a mandate and time to prepare will lead to better results than they have seen so far.

- The Oregonian/OregonLive editorial board
baby.JPG

(Jamie Francis/Staff)

By Richard Katz

Medical providers have felt the increasing administrative burden imposed by an innumerable number and variety of payors. We have shared our concerns with executives of our region's major health plans, but our concerns and solutions have been met either with a lack of understanding or apathy.

The recent guest column from Andy Davidson, Mylia Christensen, Greg Van Pelt and Abby Sears ("Oregon's health care data overload") is a welcome, though latent, acknowledgment of the fact that medical providers are inundated with data collection, managed-care prior authorization and utilization review procedures, compliance reporting and all manner of administrative labor that increases the cost of care and reduces efficiency.

Medical communities exist to serve patients, but are regulated by many private insurers, each trying to monitor and assure quality of care and efficacy of utilization. The most sensible solution is to let medical providers develop the common systems that will serve all payors.

Northwest providers have been working to implement a "value agenda" as espoused by Harvard professors Michael E. Porter and Thomas H. Lee, M.D., in their article "The Strategy That Will Fix Healthcare" (Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2013). Their contention is that medical providers must lead the way. This makes sense, as any community's providers are the hub of care delivery, regardless of reimbursement source. Implicit is that payor solutions create the administrative burden that Davidson, Christensen, Van Pelt and Sears have shared with The Oregonian/OregonLive's readers.

For substantive change, providers should determine the correct quality measures and utilization guidelines and permit the multitude of payors to access common metrics, reports and controls that providers can offer to engage in care management. This approach fosters collaboration rather than providers attempting to meet each health plan's ever-changing rule-making. To continue to permit private health plans and insurers to disparately direct and monitor providers has created the rise in administration costs and hindered performance, limited outcomes and decreased the value of healthcare dollars. To maintain the status quo will only perpetuate the problem.

Medical providers in the Northwest have developed and collected quality and utilization management measures for many years now and facilitated their widespread use through an online platform that connects 350 independent clinics in the Northwest and 2,500 nationally (see careconnections.com) into a common outcome-improvement platform. This online platform was built with payors in mind and features the capability for insurers to log on and access patient clinical metrics for review and care management using standardized processes that employ consistent measures of function and pain for each unique patient.

The triple-aim goals of a better patient experience, improved population health and ultimately more affordable care are not simply the province of any one insurer. These are entire community goals, and as medical providers we can be the leaders in benefiting the entire insurance community, too.

We hope the payor community will join us in revolutionizing healthcare by following our leadership rather than imposing more administrative burdens on an already overburdened medical community.

*

Richard Katz is director of contracting and business development for Therapeutic Associates/CareConnections and is executive director of the Northwest Rehab Alliance.
1supcourt.JPG

(The Associated Press)

By Francis Wilkinson

Campaigning for her mother in Maryland last week, Chelsea Clinton said the Supreme Court could issue a "definitive" ruling on gun control in the near future. Clinton didn't define "definitive," let alone "gun control." But with a vacancy on the court following the death of Antonin Scalia, it seems more than plausible that Clinton the Younger was referring to overturning the landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Scalia was the author of Heller, the 2008 ruling that established an individual right to gun possession. Scalia's death -- despite the still uncertain prospects of replacing him -- has raised a question about Heller's durability.

Heller was decided by a 5-4 majority. The dissent, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, was not meek. Stevens basically accused Scalia of throwing out two centuries of legal precedent and reading Scalia's own preferences into the Second Amendment. Scalia, he wrote, all but dismissed the amendment's highly inconvenient preamble placing gun rights within the context of a "well-regulated militia."

Without identifying any language in the text that even mentions civilian uses of firearms, the Court proceeds to "find" its preferred reading in what is at best an ambiguous text, and then concludes that its reading is not foreclosed by the preamble. Perhaps the Court's approach to the text is acceptable advocacy, but it is surely an unusual approach for judges to follow.

In other words, Scalia, Ye Olde and Venerable Originaliste, was making it up.

The respected conservative appellate court justice Richard Posner later piled on, writing in the New Republic that Scalia's opinion was "questionable in both method and result, and it is evidence that the Supreme Court, in deciding constitutional cases, exercises a freewheeling discretion strongly flavored with ideology."

Given that four justices vigorously dissented from Heller, that the ruling overturned established court views on the Second Amendment and that Posner, one of the sharpest (if unreliably) conservative pens in the judiciary, dismissed its "pretense of engaging in originalist interpretation," you'd think gun-control organizations might be preparing for war against Heller -- especially with the prospect of adding a fifth anti-Heller vote to the court.

Nope.

"Heller is a very limited ruling that does little more than guarantee the right to have a handgun in the home for self-defense. The modern gun control movement is okay with that," e-mailed UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, author of "Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America."

Adam Skaggs, senior counsel for Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun regulation group founded by Bloomberg LP founder Michael Bloomberg, echoed Winkler. "We do not see Heller as an impediment to the common-sense gun-violence-prevention laws that we support," he e-mailed. "We view Heller as settled law, we support the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners and we are not seeking to have Heller overturned."

Heller simply hasn't been a big impediment to gun regulation. A series of Supreme Court moves after Heller made it clear that Scalia's majority found much regulation perfectly acceptable. And there was never any risk of the court adopting the gun movement's more exotic premises, such as the notion that gun rights are "God-given," a view handed down by National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre in his colorful sermons.

Yet Heller could end up being overturned anyway. Strategic litigation is commonplace in the U.S. If gun-regulation activists don't pursue it, others outside the fold could. The Heller suit itself was advanced over the resistance of the NRA, which feared the Supreme Court would use it to affirm that gun rights are indeed attached to militia duty.

If Congress remains politically incapacitated on guns -- hardly unlikely given the disproportionate power of gun-friendly rural states in the Senate -- the court could end up revisiting Heller. Disparities between the respective gun laws of red states and blue states have been growing. That conflict, or elements of it, could land at the Supreme Court. If Scalia's seat, and perhaps even that of another conservative, is filled by a Democratic president, the outcome could be very different from the outcome in Heller.

Successful nations eventually figure out ways to stop underwriting failure. The U.S. may continue to allow 100,000 citizens to be killed or injured each year by guns. But not forever. Sooner or later, an increasingly cosmopolitan U.S. will free itself from the extreme gun-rights movement, and the inertia of mass death. A change might be instigated by politicians. It might be instigated by judges. Heller could be the basis of increased gun regulation, or it could be swept aside in favor of a more restrictive ruling. Either is possible. And given the extravagant tragedy of the status quo, either is more likely than no change at all.

Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg View. For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com.

(c) 2016, Bloomberg View
By Megan McArdle

"In one year," wrote Warren Meyer in 2015, "I literally spent more personal time on compliance with a single regulatory issue -- implementing increasingly detailed and draconian procedures so I could prove to the State of California that my employees were not working over their 30-minute lunch breaks -- than I did thinking about expanding the business or getting new contracts."

Meyer is the owner of a company that runs campgrounds and other recreational facilities on public lands under contract from the government. It doesn't seem like regulatory compliance should be eating up so much of his time; he is not producing toxic chemicals, operating a nuclear facility, or engaged in risky financial transactions that might have the side effect of sending our economy into a tailspin. He's just renting people places to pitch a tent or park an RV, or selling them sundries. Nonetheless, the government keeps piling on the micromanagement lest some employee, somewhere, miss a lunch break.

I know what you're going to say: employees should have lunch breaks! My answer is "Yes, but...." Yes, but putting the government in charge of ensuring that they get them, and forcing companies to document their compliance, has real costs. They add up.

An economy with but one regulation -- employees must be allowed a 30-minute lunch break, and each company has to document that it has been taken -- would probably not find this much of a drag on growth. But multiply those regulations by thousands, by millions, and you start to have a problem.

A new working paper from the Mercatus Center attempts to document the cumulative cost of all these regulations. It finds that the growth of regulation between 1977 and 2012 has shaved about 0.8 percent off the rate of growth, costing the nation a total of $4 trillion worth of GDP.

Stories like Meyer's are the tangible face of the economic theory. As is the fact that in the annual small business survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, taxes and government red tape are far and away the biggest issues that business owners cite as their most important problems. Forty-three percent of those surveyed cited one of the two as their top issue.

That matters, and not just because of business owners' headaches. The burden of regulation is not distributed symmetrically. It falls heaviest on firms that deal with dangerous substances, yes. But it also falls most heavily on smaller businesses, which cannot afford staffs of pricey compliance specialists to make sure that their desk chairs meet the new California workplace seating requirements. This may help explain why the number of firms is falling, and markets are consolidating.

Even within those businesses, the burden will tend to be disproportionately concentrated. Employment conditions are heavily regulated, so firms that employ a lot of workers to get a given level of output will have more regulatory overhead. And firms that employ a lot of low-wage labor get hit from every direction: businesses like fast food and retail tend to have thin profit margins, so they don't have a lot of room to absorb the extra cost, and they also can't really cut wages to reflect the higher cost of labor, because they're already operating at or close to the statutory minimums. A consulting firm that has five employees, on the other hand, will probably have a higher compliance cost per employee, but also much more room in pricing and profit margins to absorb that cost.

How much does this matter? Well, if you want to camp at Meyer's rec sites, but can't afford to pay Hilton prices to do so, it probably matters to you a lot. But it also matters to the rest of us, because when you add that burden up, it potentially has big effects:

--Regulations can knock the lowest-skilled workers out of the labor force, at which point they'll struggle to get a better job. It's fashionable to say that these are terrible jobs anyway: hard labor and they don't pay enough, so who cares? But those jobs are where people learn the basics of work: showing up on time, being nice to the customer, attending to every detail, and so forth. The regulatory burden is effectively a cost wedge between the amount you pay your worker, and the amount it costs you to employ them; the bigger that wedge, the more likely it is that some people simply won't be able to find employment. The result is a great human capital loss to the economy, and the devastation of unemployment.

--Small businesses are vital to the economy. They're sort of like the engine oil that lubricates the economy, because a lot of things aren't profitable at a larger scale. For example, a few years back, I interviewed the owner of a wire basket maker in Baltimore, who was making racks for a car manufacturer to store their parts in on the assembly line. These were a cog in a great industrial enterprise, but he was turning them out in tiny batches -- six at a time, or a dozen. That sort of job simply wouldn't be profitable for a major manufacturer, because the cost of retooling a big assembly line, and the bureaucratic controls needed to run a large firm, would eat all the profit margin. An owner-operator of a smaller business has a lot more flexibility, and the cushion provided by that flexibility is absolutely necessary.

--Regulations can make it unprofitable for small businesses to grow. Let's say your firm has room to scale, and might even become a big business someday. That's great! But now we run into the problem of small business carveouts. A lot of laws, including Obamacare, have them, so that politicians can claim their policy won't affect small firms. The problem is that when you hit one of the thresholds, there is an absurdly high marginal cost to hiring the next employee, or taking in the next dollar of revenue. That can retard growth, which is not something the U.S. can currently spare

All of these costs have to be carefully weighed against the benefits of regulations -- and not just on a regulation-by-regulation basis, as is currently done, if such cost-benefit analysis is done at all. Each hour of a firm's time that is sucked up by compliance is an hour that is not spent growing the firm, improving the product, better serving the customer. And as the number of the hours so spent increases, and the number of precious hours spent on growth and operations shrinks, each added hour we take is more costly to both the business and to the rest of us. With labor markets lackluster and growth underwhelming, that's a cost that none of us can well afford.

Megan McArdle is a Bloomberg View columnist writing on economics, business and public policy.

For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view.

(c) 2016, Bloomberg View
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Thursday 28 April 2016 9:59am

Central government agencies on both sides of the Tasman have scored poorly in a University of Otago study of e-government responsiveness published online by Government Information Quarterly, the top-ranked journal in the field.

Professor Robin Gauld, Director of the Centre for Health Systems in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, says the longitudinal study  carried out in 2006, 2008 and 2013  involved sending an email to 790 Australian and 115 New Zealand, national, state and local government agencies asking their location and opening hours.

They then graded the responses, giving A to agencies that did more than answer the two questions, and a B to ones which simply gave their hours and location. Those that only answered one question received a C and those which gave an inadequate answer or failed to answer at all were ranked D.

Professor Gauld says, Over time we have found the Australian federal agencies have had a woeful performance. However, they have improved from a median ranking of D to a C during that time, but state-level agencies have slipped from a C to a D, he says.

The New Zealand performance has also dropped at central government level, going from a B median to a C over the same period. If you want to find responsiveness then local government is where you should go. New Zealand agencies have scored a consistent B median throughout the study with Australian agencies scoring a B in the 2013 round of responses  which was the first time we included Australian local government in the study.

Professor Gauld says government agencies are increasingly encouraging people to use e-government services for things like applying for passports or doing tax returns and so forth.

If you are going to invest in services via e-mail or online portals and websites then those services should be responsive. Our study shows the quality of response  in other words, whether you actually get an answer to your questions, and whether you get accurate answers to your questions  has gone down over time.

Professor Gauld says the agencies need to ask themselves what is going on.

We speculate it might be people are just getting more and more emails these days and prioritising them. But having said that, if the Government is investing tax money in these services, then as a member of the public you would expect a response to your queries.

If agencies have this form of contact on their website, then they need to think how are they are supporting it to ensure peoples enquiries are answered.

For further information contact:

Professor Robin Gauld

Department of Preventive and Social Medicine

University of Otago

Phone: 479 8632

Email: robin.gauld@otago.ac.nz
Professor Angela Wanhalla

Raised in a house full of books and aware of her whakapapa, lecturer Angela Wanhalla knew she'd follow a history path.

"Dad was always interested in history and I knew where I came from, so history became part of the trajectory."

Of Ngai Tahu descent (Taumutu and Otakou), Angela grew up in the small Canterbury town of Rolleston.

While the subject history was dead certain, Angela took time to fine-tune her specific fields of interest. For her first degree - a BA(Hons) from the University of Canterbury - she took papers in Maori history, education, sociology and anthropology, before choosing feminist history for her honours project and MA.

Today, Angela specialises in the histories of cultural encounter in New Zealand's colonial past, with a focus on the history of interracial relationships and intermarriage in New Zealand. Her book, In/Visible Sight: The Mixed Descent Families of Southern New Zealand, based on her PhD, explores the history of interracial marriage between 1830 and 1940 in a community based at the Taieri Native Reserve.

With postdoctoral studies under her belt (she researched intermarriage in the Canadian prairies at the University of Saskatchewan), Angela's teaching focus at Otago is comparative indigenous histories. This includes teaching papers that introduce students to New Zealand history from a comparative perspective, and take a biographical approach to Maori history.

Dry facts it's not - history is about people's interaction with the world around them, she says.

"It's about reviving and reconstructing communities and looking at personal experiences."
Griffin Leonard

Politics and Philosophy

The University of Otago was a logical choice for Griffin Leonard, a PhD student in Peace and Conflict Studies.

Griffin grew up in Dunedin and university was even closer to home than his high school. Otago has a great reputation, offered the Politics and Philosophy courses he was interested in and many of his friends were also studying here.

Griffin sees his tertiary studies as a great opportunity for community involvement through the universitys clubs and societies.

Although he is geographically distanced from his Te Arawa iwi, his Maori heritage is an important connection for him and his parents. He shares their strong philosophies and values and became actively involved in social justice issues at high school, particularly through youth leadership forums.

When he was in the sixth form he organised a concert at the University of Otago for Amnesty International, to raise awareness of child soldiers in conflicts around the world. He was invited to attend the organisations annual meeting in Auckland the following year.

In his first year at Otago, Griffin was selected to attend an aspiring leaders forum in Wellington.

He says it was an amazing experience being surrounded by like-minded individuals and meeting national politicians who put party politics aside to focus on young people and share their views on leadership.

Griffin says one of his core reasons for being at Otago is to keep his study options open, but he sees his future in diplomacy and conflict resolution and has faith his studies will lead to a constructive job in this competitive field.

Were very lucky to have the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Otago and I feel fortunate to be able to do postgraduate study here, he says.
LANSING (AP)  The Republican-controlled Senate approved two bills Wednesday that would make it illegal to pay someone to distribute or sell fetal tissue in Michigan, despite Democrats' claims that such measures are unnecessary.

The measures now go to the House for consideration.

It's already illegal to be paid for selling or transferring fetuses and fetal tissue in the state, but Republicans say the measure was needed in the wake of undercover video filmed by an anti-abortion group that purported to show Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of aborted fetal body parts. Planned Parenthood has denied allegations that it is profiting from selling fetal issue.

Democrats called the bills  which were approved 26-10 along party lines  unnecessary and politically motivated due to Republican bill sponsor Sen. Phil Pavlov ramping up his bid for a U.S. House seat.

Pavlov, of St. Clair, told reporters and lawmakers that the legislation sends a strong message that "baby parts are not for sale in Michigan." He also denied Democrats' allegations that the bills were a way to rally the base and added, "It really draws the distinction that Michigan law isn't going to allow fetal tissue to be sold, period."

Democrats offered up amendments that failed to get enough votes, and said that the legislation could hamper stem cell research by stopping employers from paying workers to transport fetal tissue to research facilities. It is legal to donate fetal tissue and other human organs.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 23 other states have some kind of law prohibiting the sale of fetuses or fetal tissue. California and Illinois permit reimbursement for removing, storing and transporting fetal tissue for research.

Warren Democratic Sen. Steven Bieda said he doesn't think any lawmakers believe someone should profit from selling body parts and said the legislations' scope is "far too broad and far too vague."

Bieda added, "I want to reiterate: This is already illegal."
The Midland Board of Realtors gave its top honor  Realtor of the Year  to Rick Loose of Ayre/Rhinehart Realtors at its annual awards luncheon at the Midland Holiday Inn.

Loose has been a member of the Board of Realtors (MBOR) since May of 2001 and currently serves as the 2016 president, having also served a prior presidential term in 2008. In addition, Loose has served on several MBOR committees and as a MBOR director or officer since 2006.

His recent community involvement includes chair of the Midland Housing Commission, Midland Area Chamber of Commerce Leadership Midland Steering Committee, United Way campaign volunteer, Open Door facilities task force member; 10+ gallon blood donor and Habitat for Humanity volunteer. He is a Leadership Midland program graduate and has obtained the Realtor designations of CRS and EPro.

Loose is an active member of both the Michigan and National Realtor Associations, currently serving as the Michigan Realtor Federal Political Coordinator for John Moolenaar and previously serving as the Michigan Realtor District 4 Director from 2010-2014 when he was term limited. He has attended most Michigan Realtor functions since 2006.

Named 2015 Rookie of the Year was Jeremy Hoover of Modern Realty. Hoover joined the Midland Board of Realtors in July 2015 and currently serves on the 2016 MBOR Member/Social Committee. His community involvement includes donation of website design, hosting, guidance and maintenance to Clare/Gladwin United Way Auction and Bay City Food Co-op among others and he has contributed to the Flint Water Fund, Girl Scouts, Greater Midland Community Center, Humane Society, Friends of the Library and Salvation Army. Hoover is also a member of both the Michigan and National Realtor Associations.

Receiving the 2015 MBOR Good Neighbor Award was Linda Barth of Coldwell Banker Professionals. Barth joined the Midland Board of Realtors in May 1976. She has been active in the Midland community for more years than I can count with her recent community involvement including organizations like Mid-Michigan Action Agency, Walk for Warmth, Midland Area Homes and St Johns Lutheran Church. Barth has served three terms as MBOR president and has served on most MBOR committees. Barth is also a member of both the Michigan and National Realtor Associations.

Tom Watson of Peterson & Watson received the MBOR Shining Star Award for his continual willingness to assist the real estate industry above and beyond normal expectations.

The following 2015 MBOR membership awards were also recognized;

5 years - Nita Draves, Coldwell Banker Professionals; Denise Fladeboe, Century 21 Signature; Bryan Gardner, Ayre/Rhinehart Realtors; Matt Killinger, Ayre/Rhinehart Realtors; Shelley Koop, Century 21 Signature; Mark Rapanos, Century 21 Signature; Jill VanderZouwen, Park Place Homes

10 years - Michelle Hill, Ayre/Rhinehart Realtors; Angela Mira, Park Place Homes; Dave Rapanos, Century 21 Signature; Dan Reimer, RE/MAX of Midland

15 years - Christina Quider, Ayre/Rhinehart Realtors

20 years - Jan Belville, Coldwell Banker Professionals; Bruce Owens, Coldwell Banker Professionals

25 years - Linda Bennett Dice, Ayre/Rhinehart Realtors; Dana Maier, Coldwell Banker Professionals

30 years - Julie Ortiz, Ayre/Rhinehart Realtors; Todd Bennett, Todd Bennett Real Estate

35 years - Carol Park, Park Place Homes
A local student was honored this year in the Michigan Mathematics Prize Competition sponsored by the Michigan Section of the Mathematics Association of America.

Stephen Odonnell, of Freeland, who attends H.H. Dow High School, received an honorable mention.
The following list includes recent reports from the Midland County Sheriffs Office and the Midland Police Department.

Wednesday, April 27

3:47 a.m.  Police made arrests for drunken driving and child endangerment in the 4000 block of Wellness Drive.

Tuesday, April 26

3:28 a.m.  A 20-year-old man was arrested in Jerome Township for a conditional bond violation.

9:13 a.m.  A deputy assisted the health department while staff posted a condemnation notice on a Lee Township home that was the site of a methamphetamine lab.

10:31 a.m.  Police investigated a driver license violation in the 1700 block of North Saginaw Road.

7:01 p.m.  A 14-year-old boy was taken to the Midland County Juvenile Care Center after a domestic assault in the Village of Sanford.

7:48 p.m. A Lee Township man, 21, reported he was contacted by a person he does not know through Facebook who told him he had won a truck but had to pay an $800 delivery fee. The man was told to block the person from his account.

10:08 p.m.  A motorist was arrested at Buttles and State streets for driving on a suspended license.
Volunteer Airmen donned moulage simulating what could occur if a natural disaster struck Misawa Air Base, Japan, as part of an emergency management exercise, April 26 and 27.



"We had a simulated 8.2 magnitude earthquake which forced the reactions of all agencies available to respond," said Lt. Col. Kevin Lord, 35th Fighter Wing inspector general. "This scenario allowed us to practice varying forms of self-aid buddy care and emergency recovery, all in response to a natural disaster."



This was a unique opportunity for Misawa to exercise a specific scenario, as opposed to more typical operational readiness exercises which focus on the generation of aircraft and the 35th FW's ability to mobilize and respond quickly to contingency operations.



"Throughout the year, Misawa AB is tested on numerous scenarios ranging from simulated mass-casualty accidents, to aircraft crashes," said Lord. "Being prepared for anything is what keeps the 35th FW able to efficiently respond to anything."



In particular, this exercise tested the capabilities of emergency responders including support units like the 35th Civil Engineer Squadron and 35th Security Forces Squadron, enabling them to exercise taking control of a potentially dangerous situation and ensuring base safety is maintained. Responding to feigned power outages, downed power lines and even simulated fires, more than 500 35th CES personnel alone were called to action.



To enhance Misawa's ability to account for injuries during a natural disaster, simulated or real, the 35th Medical Group has also taken steps to ensure they are able to house a large number of victims.



"When patients exceed normal capacity, the expansion bay will be utilized to care for injured patients," said Capt. An Phan, 35th Medical Support Squadron Medical Readiness Flight commander.



Because this simulated earthquake was larger than previous ones, a secondary aftershock was simulated during the afternoon of the same day, bringing even more injured personnel into the scenario and the expansion bay.



In cases where the 35th MDG expansion bay fills to capacity, Misawa AB also becomes a hub as wounded and injured individuals are air-evacuated to facilities at Yokota AB, Japan, and Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam, Hawaii.



Although this instance was a simulated natural disaster, it isn't the first time Misawa has had to respond an earthquake - in March 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami struck the Tohoku-region of Japan, leading Misawa Airmen into action to help their Japanese neighbors.



"Similar to what Misawa AB did during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, our main priority is to take care of the base and local community," Lord said. "It only benefits to practice response efforts with the Japanese colleagues we work with."



In line with the recent series of earthquakes that have affected the Kumamoto prefecture in the Kyushu-region of Japan, these exercises help to further the ability of U.S. service members stationed in Japan to respond in a supportive role.



"Earthquakes are a very real possibility in Japan, so to practice coordination with everyone only helps to strengthen our capabilities and our relationship with the Japanese partners we work with," added Lord.
CAMP ZAMA, Japan (April 27) - Dr. Christine Altendorf and Command Sgt. Maj. Timothy D. Hockenberry, director and command sergeant major of Installation Management Command - Pacific, respectively, visited Camp Zama April 22 during a tour of installations and received an overview of how USAG Japan operates on a day-to-day basis.

Altendorf and Hockenberry briefly visited the installation back in July 2015 for a change of command ceremony; however, Altendorf said she was barely able to "touch the surface" during that visit.

After spending time at U.S. Army Garrison Okinawa, Altendorf and Hockenberry visited Kure installation before reaching Camp Zama.

Col. William B. Johnson, commander of U.S. Army Garrison Japan, said this tour allowed him to show Altendorf and Hockenberry some critical capabilities that the garrison supports and what mission units here, particularly at Sagami General Depot installation, can provide in terms of readiness for war time contingencies, disaster relief and any number of other potential Army missions in the Pacific region.

Altendorf and Hockenberry first toured the newly constructed housing on the Sagamihara Family Housing Area installation, then conducted a round table discussion with USAG Japan's directors and senior leaders.

After presenting the Soldiers and USAG Japan employees with awards for their "excellent achievements," Altendorf and Hockenberry toured the 403rd Army Field Support Brigade, Logistics Readiness Center-Honshu, at SGD installation, to see their daily operations.

Altendorf said this visit wasn't just her seeing what IMCOM does for IMCOM, instead she was able to meet the people that IMCOM supports.

"I was able to really see the importance of IMCOM but even more so, the value of us having to work very closely with the mission component that we support," she said.

Making sure IMCOM in valuable and is there to support the mission component- by being collaborative with its own organizations, but with the other Army components and also with the local communities that surround IMCOM- Pacific's installations is what is most important, said Altendorf.

"Everybody works with everybody else as a team to get things done," she said.

Altendorf and Hockenberry also had an opportunity to meet with several Local National Employees from 403rd AFSB, LRC-Honshu on SGD.

"I am so impressed because the bulk of our staff are Local Nationals," said Altendorf, and the skills that the Local National workforce has- and the pride that they bring to work every day is amazing.

There is a great partnership that the US and Japan share, that allows for the US to have such support for Soldiers and Families, she said.

"Their skills are impeccable, their work is impeccable," said Altendorf. "We are really blessed to have workforce of such a high caliber. The Local National workforce is amazing!"

Altendorf said she was also impressed by the leadership during her visit.

"Really looking at the relationships that are in place, I have strong garrison commanders right now," said Altendorf. "They have done a great job."

IMCOM was separated in Nov. 2015 from the Army's Assistant Chief of Staff for Installation Management (ACSIM), now with its own three-star commander. It shows the importance of IMCOM from the Army, said Altendorf. The mission side can focus on the things to keep the Soldiers ready, and IMCOM can make sure Soldier and Family services are taken care of.

"We are definitely needed by the mission side- it's good for them to be able to look to us to support their needs- we will help the mission side with their readiness," she said.

Hockenberry, also impressed by the tour, said he was able to get better appreciation for what all USAG Japan has under their control.

"It was truly unique and different," he said.

"It adds more of a complexity to what we do as a garrison," said Hockenberry, "and how distance everything is from one another.

"You can look at it on a map, but until you actually get here- and get on a boat... get on a train... get on a bus- you really don't put that into a real good perspective."

There are several different mission commands at USAG Japan; however, they all support one another, while working for different people, said Hockenberry. This tour allowed for IMCOM leadership to get a better understanding of the "mission side," and how the garrisons can better support that mission.

Hockenberry said this tour provided him with an "eye-opening" experience, to see how the Japanese workforce helps USAG Japan complete their mission.

"If we didn't have the professional force helping us we would not be able to do what we do on a daily basis," he said.

Johnson said this visit gave IMCOM-Pacific's senior leaders an enhanced appreciation of how vast, important and capable the Army's mission is in Japan.
MARINE CORPS AIR STATION FUTENMA, OKINAWA, Japan  When the morning dew begins to dampen the grass fields in between runways, there are some Marines already at work. The sound of clanging metal rings through the air as they inventory their tools. Sleepy-eyed, these aircraft maintainers sweep the flight line for debris and obstruction, quietly carrying out a profession responsible for the success of missions and preservation of life.

For the next 12-14 hours, these Marines will conduct maintenance and checks. They are masters of minutia in an occupation where a loose nut is much more than a matter of calling roadside assistance; its a matter of life and death.

Its nerve racking to know this bird is going to fly, and you just told the pilot, You can go fly, and you will come back safe, said Kansas City, Mo., native Lance Cpl. Aubrey Cogswell, an aircraft maintainer with Medium Attack Helicopter Squadron 167, currently with Marine Aircraft Group 36, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, III Marine Expeditionary Force as part of the unit deployment program.

Aircraft maintainers are the oil of a squadron. Without them everything would come grinding to a halt.

If your car broke down, you pull over to the side of the road, said Capt. Jack Waldron, a UH-1Y Huey pilot with HMLA 167. With these helicopters, everything has to work or it falls out of the sky.

Consequently, the maintainers, most of whom are 18-24 years of age, routinely work 14-16 hour shifts, six days a week. In the civilian world, these Marines would be considered college kids, but here they hold the lives of pilots and air crew members in their prematurely calloused hands.

Waldron, from Jacksonville, N.C., said the maintainers are somberly aware of the importance of their mission.

With 15,319 hours without mishap, the pilots of HMLA 167 have nothing but respect for their maintainers, and they harped on the importance of their hard work and dedication.

Every time Ive seen a fatality of an aircraft, the maintainers hit it the hardest, said Waldron. Theyre always asking, What did I miss? And more times than not, its nothing.

After spending over 28,000 hours on more than 8,000 maintenance actions, these Marines didnt miss a thing. HMLA 167 is scheduled to fly back to Marine Corps Air Station New River, N.C., in the coming months with all birds intact.

I cant do my job -- I cant do anything that I do -- without the blood sweat and tears of these guys, said Waldron. They kick ass.
Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, Pacific (SOCPAC) Rear Admiral Colin J. Kilrain concluded his four-day visit to both the Maldives and Sri Lanka, from April 20-23. During his visit, RADM Kilrain discussed the future role both the Maldives and Sri Lankan security forces could play in humanitarian assistance, responding to natural disasters, and increased security cooperation operations.

The United States remains committed to strengthening maritime security relationships to ensure free and safe navigation in the Indian Oceans vital shipping lanes, said U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka and Maldives Atul Keshap.

RADM Kilrains Male visit to the Maldives National Defence Force coincided with the organizations 124th anniversary. He then arrived in Colombo on Bak Full Moon Poya and met with his Sri Lankan Navy and Air Force counterparts the following day.
NORMAL  There's nothing unusual about seeing a bunch of coffee mugs in a coffee shop  unless the mugs are handmade and being given away for free by the artist who created them.

That's what is happening at The Coffee House & Deli in Normal, where George Barreca spent Wednesday's lunch hour setting out about 200 mugs he made.

The idea behind it is to build community and encourage the gift economy through generosity, said Barreca, a graduate student in fine arts at Illinois State University.

Years from now, if Barreca's dream comes true, two strangers will recognize they are drinking out of the same basic coffee mug  a mug made by Barreca  and start a conversation about how that happened.

Meanwhile, he is satisfied to share his work and increase social interaction.

He is hoping to make a map of where the mugs travel. And how will he know where his mugs go? Each one has a small piece of paper asking the recipient to post a photo of themselves on the Instagram social media site, including the mug and its serial number.

You might call it a mug shot.

He hadn't even finished setting up the display on Wednesday before people were asking about them.

Among them was Lukas Cartmell of Geneva, a junior in organizational leadership at ISU, who was in The Coffee House working on a end-of-semester presentation.

Cartmell asked Barreca, Can't I give you any money?

No, they're free, Barreca replied.

That's so cool, Cartmell said. Me and my fiance collect coffee mugs.

But students weren't the only ones getting in on the free mugs.

Kathy Brooks, a retired Lexington teacher who now lives in Normal, meets friends at The Coffee House every day.

When we were here this morning, we heard about the cups, so we came back, she said.

Brooks and her two friends posed for a photo, holding their mugs, so they could follow instructions and post it.

Barreca is originally from the Philadelphia area, where he got his bachelor's degree in fine arts at Arcadia University.

He calls his project Build  a reference not only to building community and building generosity, but also to the process he used to build the mugs.

Barreca didn't keep track of how long it took to make the mugs, simply saying, I really enjoyed it.

The mugs are made of brick clay, using an extrusion process  the way building bricks are made  followed by firing and glazing to make them suitable for use as well as dishwasher- and microwave-safe.

He chose to have 200 mugs as part of his public display because that's roughly equivalent to the number of individual bricks a bricklayer can lay in a day, according to Barreca.

It's a way to tie together art and the work day, said Barreca, who was wearing blue jeans and brown work books as he and a friend stacked the mugs.

Barreca chose The Coffee House for the first public display because it's a locally-owned business with a focus on supporting local art, he said.

His goal is to continue the project, giving away 200 mugs twice a year, even after he is out of school. People can keep the mug for themselves, give it to someone else or pay it forward with a different gift, he said.

I want to generate generosity through reciprocity, Barreca said.
New openings

Keanu

98 min.; R (violence, language throughout, drug use, sexuality/nudity)

When their kitten is catnapped, two non-streetwise cousins impersonate ruthless killers to get the pet back.

Mother's Day

118 min.; PG-13 (language, suggestive material)

Three generations of mothers/daughters come together in the week leading up to Mother's Day.

Ratchet & Clank

94 min.; 2-D/3-D; PG (action, rude humor)

Two unlikely heroes embark on a mission to stop an evil alien on a planet-destroying crusade.

Ongoing

Barbershop: The Next Cut

112 min.; PG-13 (sexual material, language)

The crew at Calvin's Barbershop come together to bring some much-needed change to their worsening neighborhood.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

151 min.; 2-D/3-D; PG-13 (intense violence/action throughout, sensuality)

Fearing the actions of Superman are left unchecked, Batman takes on the man of steel.

The Boss

99 min.; R (sexual content, language, drug use)

A convicted titan of industry emerges from jail ready to re-brand herself as America's sweetheart.

Criminal

113 min.; R (strong violence and language throughout)

The memories of a deceased CIA agent are implanted into a dangerous convict.

Eye in the Sky

102 min.; R (violent images, language)

A military officer in command of an operation to capture terrorists in Kenya becomes embroiled in an international dispute.

God's Not Dead 2

121 min.; PG (thematic elements)

A high school teacher who answers a student's question about Jesus in the classroom faces censure.

The Huntsman: Winter's War

114 min.; 2-D/3-D; PG-13 (fantasy action violence, sensuality)

Members of the Huntsmen army combat Queen Ravenna's wicked intentions.

The Jungle Book

105 min.; 2-D/3-D; PG (scary action, peril)

An orphan boy is raised in the jungle with the help of a pack of wolves, a bear and a black panther.

Zootopia

108 min.; 2-D/3-D; PG (thematic elements, rude humor, action)

A fugitive con artist fox and a rookie bunny cop work together to uncover a conspiracy.

At the Normal

Chimes at Midnight

115 min.; unrated

Orson Welles' 1965 film version, with the director as Falstaff. (April 28, 30)

My Golden Days

123 min.; subtitled; R (strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language)

A man reflects on his adolescent years, from his mother's madness to his loss of innocence. (April 29, 30)

Friday

91 min.; R (pervasive strong language, drug use, brutal fight)

Two friends try to get the $200 they owe a drug dealer by 10 p.m. on an eventful Friday night. (April 30)

The Rules of the Game

110 min.; subtitled; unrated

Jean Renoir's 1939 classic set during a weekend party at a rustic French chateau at the dawn of World War II. (May 3)
School's out

Shock-rock pioneer Alice Cooper is welcoming us to his nightmare again, this time via a concert timed to end school days at the Peoria Civic Center, starting at 8 p.m. Wednesday, in the PCC Theater. Tickets are priced from $49.50 to $74.50. Interestingly, the show comes just a couple weeks prior to Rob Zombie's May 18 return to Bloomington's U.S. Cellular Coliseum, where the two performed in tandem in 2010.

Thumb fun

Time to turn green with, no, not envy. It's the weekend for the annual Friends of the Fell Arboretum Plant Sale, from 8 to 11 a.m. Saturday between Illinois State Universitys School Street parking deck and Centennial East, located at School and Beaufort streets in Normal. The event will take place rain or shine. Plants, heirloom tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, eggplants, native perennials and flowering annuals will be available for sale. All this, and a guided tour of Fell Arboretum itself at 11 a.m.

Blue & gray

Time to suit up again for the Delavan Community Historical Society's annual Delavan Civil War Days, returning Saturday (9 am.-10 p.m.) and Sunday (9 a.m.-4 p.m.) to Lake Park in town. Featured will be battle scenarios from 1863, a parade, demonstrations, live music, military/civilian encampments, a Saturday night Civil War ball, guest speakers and more. Admission is free; a full schedule is at www.battledelavan.com.
BLOOMINGTON  David Letterman may have cornered the Top 10 countdown market during his long late-night tenure.

But he didn't own it.

And now that he's retired, countdowns have fallen on lean times.

Hence, our request submitted to maestro Alastair Willis, preparing for his final movement this weekend as music director of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra: at 7:30 p.m. Friday in the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts, and same time Saturday in the U of I at Springfield's Sangamon Auditorium.

If David Letterman could do it all those years, then Alastair Willis has more than earned his own shot at a 10-best list after four seasons directing the Illinois Symphony Orchestra.

Bringing it all to a head will be a program boasting a direct link to his pre-ISO musical heritage.

Guest performers on Zhao Lin's "Duo for Sheng and Cello" will be sheng player Wu Tong and cellist Mike Block, both members of Yo-Yo Ma's acclaimed Silk Road Ensemble, for which Willis is on call when, as he once described it, a particularly complex piece of music requires the hand of a conductor.

Rounding out the program: Borodins "In the Steppes of Central Asia" and an all-time Willis favorite, Mussorgskys "Pictures at an Exhibition."

"It was a very difficult decision to make," Willis, 45, admitted earlier this season of the announcement made last summer that his fourth ISO season would be his final.

"But there comes a time when it's right to move on, and I felt that the time for me would be the end of this season."

All told, "four years was a wonderful amount of time to spend with the orchestra, and I'm proud and delighted with the way it's grown ... I'm leaving it in a way where things are much better than they were when I first arrived."

Now, in time-honored David Letterman fashion, from bottom to top, is the list of Alastair Willis' Top 10 ISO memories:

10. "Every concert! Ive loved every program weve presented."

9. "The various Lincoln sights in Central Illinois. Ive loved showing our guests the Lincoln museum, home, New Salem and other historical sights. (Ive been through the museum and home at least seven times and always learned something new!)

8. "Our recent education performances with Magic Circle Mimes spectacular version of "Peter and the Wolf" which delighted not only three sold-out performances, but also our ISO musicians, who performed in more ways than just playing their instruments!"

7. "The Silk Road journey that we began together, including soloists Joe Gramley, Wu Man, Sandeep Das, Mike Block and Wu Tong, as well as composers Dimitri Yanov-Yanovsky and Colin Jacobsen."

6. "Our Lincoln Train concert (May 2015) for two reasons: the amazing people who came from all over to sing in our volunteer chorus and be part of our performance, and for filling both halls!"

5. "John Bruce Yeh, clarinetist. All our soloists have been unique, stellar and brilliant, and it would be so unfair to pick one as my favorite. However, Johns Mozart Clarinet Concerto performances (March 2013) were especially meaningful to me."

4. "Our sponsors! Corporate, foundations, government agencies and individuals  there are lots of you, and without you, there would be no Top 10! Thank you for your continued generosity."

3. "Everyone who has played their part in transforming the institution over my four years  board, staff, musicians, audience  everyone! It is extremely gratifying knowing the ISO is in better shape now than when I arrived."

2. "Our audiences! You! Ive loved conducting for you. Your warmth, support and love of our music and the musicians has meant the world to me."

1. "The musicians. Each and every one of them. For their musicality. Their dedication traveling miles and miles to play for us. Their energy. Their openness. Their desire. The list is endless! Its been my privilege and honor to collaborate with them. They have touched me very much, and I know they will continue to delight Central Illinois with their music for years to come."
SPRINGFIELD  An Illinois Supreme Court ruling has united two groups that often are at odds when it comes to legislation pending at the Statehouse.

The Illinois Municipal League and the Associated Fire Fighters of Illinois, the states largest firefighters union, are backing a bill they say would shield local governments and public safety employees from being sued over the way they prioritize services.

In these unusual times at the state Capitol, I think this is a good example where divergent interests can come together in support of something that really is common sense, said Pat Devaney, president of the Associated Fire Fighters.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. James Clayborne, D-Belleville, would codify the public duty rule that the Supreme Court struck down in January. The longstanding rule held that units of government and their employees have a duty to protect the well-being of the community as a whole rather than that of individual people.

The Supreme Courts decision came in a case involving the 2008 death of Coretta Coleman in unincorporated Will County.

Coleman, 58, called 911 because she was having difficulty breathing. There was a series of delays and miscommunication among emergency personnel, and by the time Colemans husband arrived home and let paramedics in, more than 40 minutes had passed. She was found unresponsive inside and was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Colemans family sued the East Joliet and Orland fire protection districts, Will County, and their employees who were involved in the response.

Citing the public duty rule, lower courts ruled in favor of the defendants. But the high court overruled them in a 4-3 decision, abolishing the rule it had established in previous decisions.

Obviously, if the legislature determines that the public policy requires it, it may codify the public duty rule, but we defer to the legislature in determining public policy, Justice Thomas Kilbride wrote in the majority opinion.

Thats precisely what the Municipal League and the firefighters union are urging the General Assembly to do.

In the Coleman case, the court decided to abandon the public duty rule and to abandon the public safety employees who the rule supports and defends, said Brad Cole, the Municipal Leagues executive director, calling it a dangerous decision.

For example, Cole said, it could expose local governments and their employees to lawsuits resulting from how they decide to prioritize numerous calls for help at the same time.

Devaney said the ruling could lead to a cottage industry of frivolous lawsuits aiming to capitalize on the suffering of others.

While there hasnt been a flurry of new lawsuits since the ruling, supporters noted the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association opposes the measure.

Perry Browder, president of that association, said the proposed legislation is overly broad and could block an important check on how public safety agencies operate.

We certainly dont want to encourage frivolous lawsuits, Browder said. But at the same time, we dont want to encourage reckless conduct or intentional disregard (by public safety employees) because that harms the public, harms our citizens and puts people at risk.
The water supply in many U.S. schools is found to contain high lead or copper content. Among them are a third of Detroit, Michigan's elementary schools, with 19 out of the 62 schools tested in the city found to contain high levels of lead or copper in the kitchens and drinking water fountains,

Detroit's municipal water supply conforms to the standard implemented by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. Marc Edwards, a professor of Virginia Tech, who also aided in revealing Flint's water supply crisis, said the dangerous effects of lead "is irreversible" and can result to more harm if left untreated, the Associated Press reported via ABC News.

Detroit's Defense

Michelle Zdrodowski, Detroit's spokeswoman, described the high levels of lead or copper in the city as alarming but they don't consider it as excessive or dangerous. To solve the issue, Detroit will provide comprehensive plans (shared with the Detroit Health Department) to alleviate the water contamination.

Lead is a toxicant that can give children intellectual disabilities and nervous system damage, the World Health Organization stated. Long-term effects in adults include increased likelihood of acquiring kidney damage and high-blood pressure. For pregnant women, high levels of lead exposure can cause minor fetus malformations, stillbirth, miscarriage, premature birth and low birth weight.

Federal law exempts nine of every 10 U.S. schools and day care centers from lead contamination testing. This is because the schools' water condition already undergoes testing conducted by municipal suppliers.

Detroit is different because it has old buildings and some of its pipes and water fixtures contain lead parts. Schools in the city, however, have low funds to take on testing costs.

Other Schools With High Lead Content

Aside from Michigan schools, high levels of lead were also found in schools in Boston and D.C. Thirty-eight public schools in Boston were tested, with many contaminated fountains taken down due to their lead content, according to RT.

The Boston school district informed parents of the issue, and provided bottled water to students as well as recommendations for places where children can undergo testing for lead poisoning. According to the school district, it will improve the plumbing in the schools so the fountains can have uncontaminated water again.

High lead content were found in the water supply of three D.C. elementary schools, the Washington Post reported. Water sources in the schools have been shut down due to lead contamination, even those which were recently renovated.

The Department of General Services, or DGS, tests every water fountain every year for lead content. The agency's staff shuts off the main water supply if the water sources aren't at par with DGS' standards, and will then set up a filter or change the pipes. Afterwards, they will conduct a retest.
The number of teenagers smoking traditional cigarettes has decreased in recent years. Recent reports found that the continuing popularity of electronic cigarettes or vapes has enticed more and more young people.

According to recent federal information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, about 5 percent of middle school students used e-cigarettes in 2015. Sixteen percent of high school students used e-cigarettes last year, which is a 13 percent increase from 2014, as per the New York Times.

Long-Term Effects

E-cigarettes, which were launched in the mid-2000s, still contain nicotine, although not the toxic tar of traditional cigarettes. Although that lowers any health risks in is users, experts believe that the device's nicotine component can still have harmful effects.

CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden said nicotine is addictive and can have long-term damage to the brain's development if used as early as the adolescence stage. Past research found that teenagers using e-cigarettes are more susceptible to use traditional cigarette smoking later on, Tech Times reported.

The American Academy of Pediatrics said restrictions on tobacco merchandise and e-cigarettes can prevent as much as 223,000 premature deaths. They also believe that the new ruling will reduce lung cancer-related deaths by 50,000.

Ads Entice E-Cigarette Smokers

Middle and high school students are vulnerable to advertisements promoting e-cigarettes. Patricia Folan, director of the Center for Tobacco Control at Northwell Health, said ads featuring e-cigarettes should be regulated and limited, WebMD wrote.

The study, headed by Dr. Tushar Singh from the CDC's Office of Smoking and Health, found that the number of middle school children who use e-cigarettes tripled in size when they are exposed to these ads. The same cannot be said when it comes to people who didn't see the ads.

The U.S. federal government regulated television ads about traditional cigarette use in 1971. E-cigarettes, however, don't have the same treatment. Folan and her team suggested for extensive efforts to control and prevent tobacco use to limit the youth's contact to e-cigarettes and ads about them.

Dr. Ron Marino, Winthrop-University Hospital's associate chair of pediatrics, said the e-cigarette industry goes to great lengths to entice young people into using their products early on, WebMD added. It will be difficult to attract people to use e-cigarettes if they are already adults.

Specific School Environments Have A Hand

A study from the University of Colorado Denver found that specific school environments encourage young people to indulge in e-cigarettes, EurekAlert reported. This means that schools with a large percentage of e-cigarette teenage users are more likely to entice their peers into their ways. One of the reasons behind this trend is some students think that e-cigarettes are not that harmful compared to traditional ones.

What do you think about this issue? Would you let your child use an e-cigarette in lieu of tobacco? Share your thoughts below!
Suicide rates in the United States have dramatically increased, reaching its highest level after 30 years, according to studies. As there are various groups of people who are engaging in self-slaughtering, it was found that majority of suicide victims are young girls.

Suicides Becomes More Common In Women

Suicide rates for women from 45 to 64 years old increased by 63 percent over the duration of the study, while the most abrupt increase in men in the same age group was observed, with a 43 percent growth. The study, published by the National Center for Health Statistics, noted that suicide rates in the U.S. increased by 24 percent between 1999 and 2014.

In 2014, 150 young girls who committed suicide were recorded, which tripled in numbers from 1999's count of 50. The statistician and author of the report, Sally Curtin, revealed that the said rate is something to be worried about as it evidently increases.

The Problems White Americans Are Suffering

According to the New York Times, the evidence of the examination revealed the problems white Americans have been going through the past decades. The dilemma of being less educated has been affecting these people that made them want to opt for suicide.

They are trying to kill themselves by drug overdosing, liver disease and alcohol poisoning. These have been documented to be done mostly by those persons who attained a high school education or less.

The Decrease And Increase Of Suicide Rates

There were antidepressants emerged in the late 1980s that made suicide rates decreased, said Dr. Maria Oguendo, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University Medical Center and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association. Oguendo added that it worked effectively and carried fewer side effects, NPR reported.

In fact, that time, there were smaller amounts of prescribed antidepressants and reported suicides in other countries. "It was really very remarkable, and somehow that trend toward decreasing suicide rates abruptly stopped in 1999," Dr. Oguendo explained.

Suicide One Of The Main Costs Of Death

There are about 42,000 people in the United States who is committing suicide yearly, as per Ironton Tribune, via Maine News Online. That makes suicide became the 10th leading cause of the death in the country, as analyzed by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

What can you say about the rising suicide rates in the U.S.? Share us your thoughts. Write your comments below.
Culture and puberty come together in the Sts'ailes summer puberty camps for boys and girls in Canada. Adolescents learn about the Sts'ailes tradition as a way to cope with the changes that puberty brings.

Sts'ailes is a reserve that is a two-hour drive from Vancouver. The reserve is surrounded by the Coast Range mountains. According to the Sts'ailes Healing Retreat Centre website, the Sts'ailes community is made up of 564 indivuals.

Up to 30 adolescents from 11 to 16 attend the summer puberty camps, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) said. The girls' camp is called Natural Changes and the boys' camp is called the Warrior camp.

The Sts'ailes Puberty Camps

The elders said that these camps mix in culture with health as the adolescents learn traditional skills such as cedar weaving and hunting. This helps them "deal with the pressures and angst of puberty," according to CBC. "Everything we did came with a teaching," camp attendee Hailee Leon said.

CBC reported that the reserve receives $4,000 from the provincial government every summer. Camp organizers try trimming down the costs through deer hunting and berry gathering.

Sts'ailes puberty camps make it okay to be an awkward teenagerhttps://t.co/fcQ9iu10A0 - great idea! pic.twitter.com/ezfVcGJ9xm  Kirsten Morozov (@TLkirsten) April 23, 2016

What Is Puberty?

"Puberty is the period of sexual maturation and achievement of fertility," Dr. Melissa Conrad Stoppler wrote in Medicine.net. Stoppler added that puberty also affects a person's psychosocial and emotional development.

While the exact beginning of puberty is different for everyone, puberty usually occurs earlier in girls. Girls experience puberty between the ages of 10 to 14 while it occurs between the ages of 12 and 16 for boys.

For some African-American girls, puberty begins at about age 9. Stoppler said that nowadays, adolescent girls begin puberty earlier than ever. Nutritional and other environmental influences are seen as possible causes of early puberty.

Physical Changes in Puberty

The first change girls experience during puberty is usually the development of their breasts, the National Health Service (NHS) said. Pubic hair and hair on legs and arms also starts to grow.

As puberty continues, girls experience menstrual flow. Girls also grow underarm hair and some even grow hair by their upper lip. Acne, growth spurt, weight gain also happens to girls during puberty.

In Sts'ailes spiritual beliefs, menstruation is a woman's "power time," CBC reported. The duration of the period is called moon time, a sacred time for a woman.

For boys, the first sign of puberty is the enlargement of their testicles, according to the NHS. The scrotum becomes darker eventually.

Boys may also have "wet dreams." Wet dreams are involuntary ejaculations of semen while sleeping. The voice also "breaks" and becomes deeper. Acne, growth spurt and development of muscles also occur in boys.

Still, Sts'ailes elders admit that their beliefs do not hold all the answers. Nurses help adolescents answer their questions about puberty.
Sixteen-year-old Charlie Randall has completed her 10,000 feet tandem skydive to raise money for Dyslexia Action, a dyslexia charity organization. Randall, a student from Tinagel, Cornwall in England, also suffers from dyslexia.

Randall raised 625.80, well over her initial target of 500, which is the amount determined by Dyslexia Action. Two weeks ago, Camelford & Delabole Post reported that Randall had already raised 530.80.

In her Just Giving page detailing her tandem skydive plan, Randall said that she was raising the money for Dyslexia Action so unlike her, other young people with dyslexia can be diagnosed earlier and get proper support.

Dyslexia Action

"I would just like to say a massive thank you for the very generous sponsorship money that everyone has donated to this amazing charity," Randall said, as per the Cornish Guardian. Randall added that she had the best time of her life during the skydive and that she enjoyed raising the money for Dyslexia Action.

The charity provides free advice, offers dyslexia and specific learning difficulty testing, providing specialist help and recommending learning resources for those with dyslexia, according to Dyslexia Action's website. It also provides support for educators.

Charlie had a different view of #Cornwall on Saturday as she skydived for @DyslexiaAction, raising 610! Well done! pic.twitter.com/7708KWyTZG  Truro&PenwithCollege (@Truro_Penwith) April 25, 2016

Dealing With Dyslexia

The Mayo Clinic defined dyslexia as a learning disorder that makes it hard for a person to read. This is because when a person has dyslexia, he or she has difficulty identifying speech sounds and learning how the sounds relate to letters and words.

Dyslexia is a common learning disability in children. It is also called specific reading disability, according to the Mayo Clinic. It is a lifelong disability.

According to the National Health Service (NHS), educational and specialist interventions for dyslexia are effective if started when the child is still young. Apparently, most educational interventions zero in on the ability to identify and process word sounds.

These educational interventions are commonly called phonics. Parents are advised to read to their child while making it fun. It is also suggested to let the child spend some time silently reading on his or her own.

What can you say about Charlie's noble effort? Or maybe you have some dyslexia tips you can share! Write your comments below.
Most Americans do not exclusively depend on doctors and medications when experiencing health problems. A new study, published in the Journal of Religion and Health, found that almost 90 percent of Americans continue to believe in the power of prayer for healing.

The new study investigated the prevalence and religious predictors of healing prayer use among adults. It surveyed 1,714 random Americans and concluded that prayer for healing is one of the most commonly used forms of medical treatment among the respondents.

Prayer As A Form Of Medical Treatment

The study found that nearly nine out of 10 Americans have relied in prayer for healing when they or their loved ones experienced health problems. Turns out, 80 percent of them disclosed that they prayed for their own healing, while almost 90 percent claimed that they prayed for the healing of others.

Almost a third of those who prayed for their own healing admitted that they do so often. Meanwhile, more than half of those who prayed for the healing of others said that they do so regularly.

The study also discovered that over 50 percent of the respondents have joined in prayer groups to help themselves or others heal from health problems. Moreover, over a quarter of the respondents also admitted that they have practiced laying their hands on another person as a sign of relaying spiritual blessings.

Healing Prayer Lives On

Study author Jeff Levin, a professor of epidemiology and population health at Baylor University, told CNN that he was fascinated with the results. He said that he did not expect that a huge portion of the American population would still rely on prayer for healing.

"A lot of people may not be institutionally religious in the same ways they have been, but as far as their own private practices and beliefs, they are still very engaged," Levin said. "It still remains a very spiritually involved country one way or the other."

Levin, however, clarified that the study did not examine whether prayer can actually help in healing. He said that further research is needed to cover the matter.

Do you believe in the power of prayer for healing? Does it really help? Leave some comments below.
Workers in America would soon receive increased pay under the new overtime pay regulation that the Labor Department will impose. While this might benefit parents who are trying to make ends meet for their families, some argue that it could hurt school kids in the long run.

Under the proposed overtime pay regulation, workers earning $50,440 a year will now be eligible to receive payment for their extra hours. This has been increased from a previous labor law that only allowed overtime payments for those earning less than $23,660 full time.

Restaurant workers, store managers or support staff who work 50 to 60 hours a week, as opposed to the regular 40 hours a week, did not used to get overtime pay since their yearly salary is beyond the cutoff. However, the new directive changes all of this once it is imposed and five million American workers should benefit from it.

Overtime Pay Regulation Is Great For Hard-Working Americans

"[The] proposed regulation is a critical first step toward ensuring that hard-working Americans are compensated fairly and have a chance to get ahead," per the notice from the U.S. Department of Labor. The proposal has been in the White House since 2014 and its effectivity date is nearing.

Gawker reports that it could be implemented beginning summer. Business owners and companies have been given enough time to adapt to the changes.

Obama unveils regulation expanding overtime pay to nearly 5 million salaried workers: http://t.co/Df5BSyc4au pic.twitter.com/F1X6ey0Xrk  The Hill (@thehill) June 30, 2015

Overtime Pay Regulation And Its Impact On Education

However, while the proposal has good intentions, many companies and establishments might not be able to afford the shift even with the time given. USA Today reports that schools and programs for children might see a decline in services because there might not be enough funds to support overtime pay regulation.

While teachers are exempted from this under the Fair Labor Standards Act, staff members in schools who do administrative and operational work, such as finance, data and building management, will be forced to strictly watch their work hours on the time clock if the budget is tight. Some of these employees are driven to help kids even after working hours.

What can happen now is that they might be asked by school administrators to not exceed the usual 40-hours work week so they won't have to charge for overtime. This change comes in light of existing budget cuts already being made in public schools.

What's your take on the overtime pay regulation and do you think the government should make additional exemptions for certain institutions?
In U.S. colleges, the population of Latino men have increased over the past few years. From 2005 to 2014, it gradually spurt from 718,500 to 1.26 million Latino students enrolling to college which makes it a 75% increase. Though it increased significantly, Latino men in college are still overrepresented by Latino women.

Students of color -- mainly Hispanic -- is now making a big percentage of college students in U.S., which grows over the years. Because of this, advocacy organizations and colleges are finding ways to improve the quality of education that these students are getting since they also play a big role in the future success of the nation's economy.

Project MALES

Associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Victor Saenz, has led a program to help address these issues in the Latino community. Called Project MALES, the mentorship program and research initiative aims to resolve issues that Latino men have with regard to school and college success.

This project includes mentoring of Latino boys with the help of Latino graduate and undergraduate students. According to Saenz, there is a lack in scholarships being offered to Latino students because of the demographic imperative and this has likely has influenced them to attend low-resourced schools with inexperienced educators.

Another reason he pointed out is that there are only few Hispanic educators available. An article published in National Journal that was posted by The Atlantic has explained that teacher diversity is very important. It is best to teach Latino students with Latino teachers because of the cultural background they share and they also understand how these students learn best.

Latino Students Sharing Experiences

Austin student, Brenda Carrillo who is currently in her senior years believed that sharing her experiences as a pioneering Hispanic descent student have helped young Latinos and Latinas succeed in high schools. They are encouraged and inspired to pursue higher education because of the mentoring program.

William Serrata, president of El Paso Community College who made programs to prepare high school students by taking some early college courses while in high school. He emphasized that the idea is to give those disadvantaged students some head start to experience what it is to be in college taking college courses while they are still getting the assistance of their high school teachers.

Because of this, the number of Latino boys increased in enrolling to college. Serrata also pointed out that Hispanic educators in high school should adapt the sense of ownership of K-12 teachers in teaching the young students. This can greatly help the children succeed.
Silicon Valley's leaders and tech titans Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are urging Congress to ensure funding for K-12 Computer Science education in public schools. The CEOs of Apple, Facebook and Amazon have formed the Computer Science Education Coalition with other bipartisan groups to push their agenda. They want Congress to come up with $250 million to fund school districts that will help kids learn to code.

Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are joined by philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, Walmart CEO Doug McMillion, California Governor Jerry Brown and 26 other governors across the state in their efforts. There are also educators and school board members in the coalition and some have already pledged their support via Code.Org. The full list of 5,800 supporters of the group is found in the CSE Coalition website.

Microsoft, Google, Zuckerberg, Bezos and others have collectively committed $48 million to fund K-12 computer science education...  The Doyle Group (@TheDoyleGroup) April 26, 2016

You, Too, Can Support Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg And Jeff Bezos

However, the coalition acknowledges that the money they have raised is not enough. "Despite this groundswell, three-quarters of U.S. schools do not offer meaningful computer science courses," the coalition stated in the press release. "This bipartisan issue can be addressed without growing the Federal budget."

Mark Zuckerberg is also urging the American public to join in their cause by signing an online petition. "As our world gets more connected, it's more important than ever that we teach our children to code," said on his Facebook account.

Why K-12 Computer Education Funding Matters

The group underscores that computer science education is not just limited to learning and developing technology as it has economic implications too, per Phys.Org. Additionally, coders can help the government in matters of national security.

Thus, computer education should be given priority as future coders should be competitive and on top of their game. That can only happen with getting the best education.

"The breadth of support shows that computer science isn't just a tech problem anymore, it's an America problem," said Hadi Partovi of Code Org, via Tech Crunch. Partovi also said the money will be used for training teachers in public schools so that more students will get the opportunity to learn coding.

What do you think of this drive? Would you support the coalition? Let us know in the comments!
Chrissy Teigen's parenting is in question! How dare they? When the supermodel couldn't stand it anymore, Chrissy Teigen slammed all haters for attributing to her the "bad mom" moniker after going out with husband John Legend 10 days after giving birth to baby Luna Simone. As if being a new mom isn't stressful enough!

Chrissy Teigen had to deal with a lot of criticisms from a throng of followers on Instagram. Many of Chrissy Teigen's fans, and some haters most likely, felt that it was wrong for her to leave a 10-day-old baby in the care of a nanny while she and John Legend went to The Nice Guy in Hollywood for dinner. Maybe the nanny was a trusted one, right?

However, despite the possibility of having a trustworthy highly-paid nanny around, Chrissy Teigen didn't escape being the subject of Internet haters. Maybe Chrissy Teigen found a relative or a BFF to watch Baby Luna while she was dining with John Legend.

Huffington Post said that Chrissy Teigen didn't take long to respond. The "Lip Sync Battle" host quickly tweeted a quirky response, "I went to dinner. People are pissed. Good morning!"

I went to dinner. People are pissed. Good morning! pic.twitter.com/oQ54mtet8c  christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) April 24, 2016



Still there were some persistent online users who simply can't see anything good about Chrissy Teigen's parenting style. One user even asked, "How's baby Luna?" Totally irked, the supermodel responded with a stinging, "I I dunno I can't find her."

i dunno i can't find her https://t.co/fEj8rFHEMI  christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) April 24, 2016

According to Stuff, while there are those people who chastised Chrissy Teigen's parenting style, there were also those who defended Chrissy Teigen. They said Chrissy was in the right to spend some quality time with John Legend.

Chrissy Teigen's parenting style may not look right for many but a little more consideration for the new mom might be proper. There's no perfect mother out there anyway.
After all the social media frenzy about Jay Z cheating on Beyonce with Rachel Roy, thanks to "Lemonade" album, Queen B's unofficial biographer claims that the album was not about Jay Z cheating on Bey. He said it was something else.

J. Randy Taraborrelli, who wrote "Becoming Beyonce: The Untold Story," an unofficial biography of Beyonce Knowles. Having spent considerable time studying the life of Beyonce, he gave a statement saying that the "Lemonade" album was not about the supposed infidelity of Jay Z.

US Magazine said that the lyrics of the songs on the "Lemonade" album must not be interpreted literally and thought of as the circumstances surrounding the 8-year marriage of Beyonce and Jay Z. He went on saying that Beyonce might have drawn inspiration for the "Lemonade" album from the relationship of her father and mother, which as many of the Beyhive know ended awry.

She also said that it might also have something to do with Beyonce's previous relationships, especially that with her first boyfriend. Sad to say, her first love cheated on her, which might have caused some pain that can be hard to forget.

According to Taraborrelli, Beyonce is not the type of person who would be sharing her private life to the world. If she's having marital problems, she wouldn't be sitting down and writing songs.

While Taraborrelli debunked the speculation that "Lemonade" denotes Jay Z's cheating, many are still pointing fingers at Rachel Roy, the fashion designer, as "Becky" in the album. "Becky" is the alleged other woman in the album.

I respect love, marriages, families and strength. What shouldn't be tolerated by anyone, no matter what, is bullying, of any kind.  Rachel Roy (@Rachel_Roy) April 24, 2016

People said that Rachel Roy was also quick to deny that she was the "other woman" of Jay Z. Her Instagram post, which was already deleted, was meant to be fun and was merely misunderstood.
K-12 schools and colleges each have their own merits. In the same way K-12 schools and colleges differ in their difficulties. A question is posed, however, if K-12 schools should in fact follow the governance model applied to colleges.

Education Week cites proponents of the issue in reasoning that colleges have the better model. Compared to K-12 schools, colleges are driven by market signals. This goes hand in hand with the fact that colleges have less government-regulated policies in comparison to K-12 schools. This nature of governance supposedly gives colleges the edge over K-12 schools on the matter of results generated.

Every student deserves a school that believes in them and widens their horizons. #WhatSchoolCanBe pic.twitter.com/twcmjVBTOY  US Dept of Education (@usedgov) April 24, 2016

The education cite, however, points out that creating a cause-and-effect relationship between higher education results and smaller government intervention may be flawed logic. These two factors are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

It certainly does not present a hard case of being an advantage over K-12 schools. The media outlet also points out that role-wise, K-12 schools and colleges need very different support from the government. An example given is the role of instilling values versus the role of encouraging knowledge through research and further learning.

The former belongs to the K-12 schools while the latter belongs to colleges. Education Week qualifies that no hard or fast rule can be used to define a black and white difference between these learning institutions.

Let's make #FreeCommunityCollege a reality for every student willing to work for it  https://t.co/6gGrkbsdgw pic.twitter.com/764f1DQj0u  The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 25, 2016

Forbes quotes former US president John F. Kennedy as a reminder of what education should be about. "Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities," former President John F. Kennedy once said. "Because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation."

As two integral parts of the education system, this the aim toward which K-12 schools and colleges should both work. The difference in their governance notwithstanding, K-12 schools and colleges should maintain a focus on this single ultimate goal.
New York City's "Gifted and Talented" admissions test has long been controversial. Even though its stated purpose is to support the educational needs of exceptional students, it usually amounts to school segregation in practice, where it becomes beneficial to students that have educational advantages to start with.

For a long time, the statistics on school segregation by race and poverty in New York has been discouraging. The reason? Children who mostly relied on public schools for a better shot in life are now struggling in their education.

Despite the tremendous efforts for more equitable funding in New York, the relationship between segregated education and unequal school success remains prominently overt. Thus, many experts believed that school segregation and New York's "Gifted and Talented" admissions test should be eliminated.

What Is New York City's "Gifted And Talented" Admissions Test?

Based on its TestPrep-Online definition, the New York City's "Gifted and Talented" (G&T) admissions test determines a student's eligibility for admission into the gifted and talented schools and programs in the city. The NYC G&T admission test is comprised mainly of the verbal questions taken from the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT) and nonverbal questions taken from the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT).

School Segregation In New York

The state of New York has the most segregated schools in the United States. New York City is also home to the largest and one of the most segregated public school systems in the nation, as per the study titled, "New York State's Extreme School Segregation."

In spite of the efforts of New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) to resolve the issues in G&T segregation by making the admission tests more difficult, experts said better or more testing are not the solutions. According to Quartz, G&T segregation only worsen the racial disparities in New York City, citing this year's majority percentage of G&T students in the city's elementary programs are White and Asian and only a small percentage are Black and Latinos.

Why G&T Segregation In Schools Is Not A Good Idea?

The main reason that G&T programs exist in certain schools across New York City schools is to diversify schools by attracting middle-class parents to the public school system, New York Times notes. Unfortunately, research shows that banking on middle-class parents as key stimuli for urban school reform is not a good idea since it can ostracize low-income families and develop school segregations.

Researchers also suggest that more G&T admission testing is not a solution too. But the biggest problem in New York City is the reliability of a single G&T test score that is linked more to student's socioeconomic status than the actual intelligence.

Experts also stressed that it is tough to determine Black and Latino gifted learners by solely using test scores. The difficulty is due to the fact that low-income kids begin their education with fewer academic skills than children of high socioeconomic status.

How To Address School Segregation Issues

Reforming the admissions criteria does not solve these school segregation issues either. But the best solution for a more equitable G&T education is a radical reform in gifted education by totally eradicating separate G&T programs.

Since there is no special curriculum or instruction required in G&T programs, New York City's approach to gifted education is based on separation. Thus, another solution can be a change in teaching methods, which is considered vital in gifted education.

Meanwhile, four new gifted and talented programs in New York City will not reportedly use tests to assess potential students. According to DNA Info, South Bronx's District 7, Crotona Park's District 12, Bedford-Stuyvesant's District 16 and Ocean Hill/Brownsville's District 23 will admit students based on several factors including demonstrated academic performance, attendance and behaviors like sharp curiosity, motivation and being a fast learner, which are deemed indicators in gifted programs success.

So, is New York City's "Gifted and Talented" admissions test really a bad idea? Sound off below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
Family vacations would be more fun if it is spent in the usual places like renting cabins in the woods or just going to the beach. Although those things are still fun and relaxing, taking your family to places where they would discover new things would be even more exciting. Here are 3 travel destinations that have mysterious things for you and the whole family to witness.

These places have mysterious things in them that even experts in the field of archeology and natural science can't explain their existence. We think it would be fun to discover them and have your family experience some of the world's untold wonders.

1. Yonaguni Monument in Japan: We would only recommend this if you and your family have been trained to do some diving underwater. This so-called underwater monument that is shaped like a pyramid can be found in Japan. What's fascinating about it is that not even experts have any idea on how they were formed. They only have theories like it could be due to a natural rock formation. Others argue that it could be man-made because it was impossible that steps and stairs were formed so intricately without the help of manpower.

2. The Codex Gigas in Stockholm: This is known as "The Devil's Bible" and it is currently kept at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm. According to legends, a monk wrote this back in the 12th century, whose words and orders came from the devil himself. But the truth is, no one really knows how it was published and if the stories behind its creation were real.

A photo posted by Kenny Smith (@yungbasquiatboi) on Apr 1, 2016 at 8:13pm PDT

3. The Antikythera Shipwreck in Greece: An item was found in this area that was named as the "first computer" because it looks like one, only it is shaped like a clock. Scientists back in those days were said to use it to predict the formation of the stars.

What do you think about these travel destinations? Share us your thoughts in the comments section below.
An Apple employee has been found dead inside a conference room in the company's headquarters at Cupertino, California. The Apple headquarters where the incident occurred can be found east of North De Anza Boulevard and south of Interstate Highway 280.

Santa Clara County officials responded to a call about the tragic incident around 8:30 a.m., KTVU reports. Investigators stated that there are currently no suspects in connection with the Apple employee found dead. They also assured the public that this is an isolated incident and that is not a threat to anyone on Apple's campus and headquarters.

TMZ reports that the Apple employee might have committed suicide based on the dispatch call from the police. A spokesperson for the Santa Clara County sheriff told TMZ that the Apple employee found dead was a Hispanic male. The cops also described that the dead body found in a conference room at the Apple headquarters had a gun.

Apple seems to be involved in a lot of negative and controversial headlines lately. Aside from the Apple employee found dead in the company's headquarters, Apple also dropped in its quarterly revenue for the first time in more than 10 years, BBC News reports.

"The company is battling perceptions that its latest iPhones aren't dramatically different from previous models, as overall smartphone sales are slowing around the world," KUTV shares. Apple's stock went down by more than 7 percent overnight which has crushed its value by more than $40 billion, according to TMZ. This recent news about the Apple employee found dead in the company's headquarters might make things even worse for Apple's stock.
A team of British scientists have discovered a subglacial lake in the Antarctic region that has been sealed off for millions of years. Believed to be slightly smaller than Lake Vostok, the experts conject that life forms could have been living on this site in prehistoric times. So, what lies beneath the lake?

The discovery is part of a research published in the Geology journal. The scientists said that hidden life could have eventually evolved while the remote lake remained buried in ice.

Lake Vostok Life Discovery In 2012

Back in 2012, another team of scientists from Russia uncovered Lake Vostok near their station and deduced evidence that pointed to Lake Vostok life forms. However, the scientists didn't receive much support from their discovery as their drilling process was determined to have contaminated the lake's waters. The Russians then devised a new technique and proceeded to drill on the site in 2015.

Lake Vostok breakthrough: Russian scientists drill 'clean' hole into subglacial basin http://t.co/hQNjYZTRGV pic.twitter.com/td42fUprtQ  RT (@RT_com) January 25, 2015

While this was going on, a team of American scientists started working on Lake Whillans in the Antarctic in 2013 and made sure that their drilling technique underwent a sterilization process. The scientists discovered microbial life forms of about 4,000 species and published their report in the Nature Journal.

Discovery reports that with the kind of ecosystem in these sites, Lake Vostok life might have fed on the bacteria and mineral from the ice. Thus, the British scientists proceeded their probe on Antarctica in the hopes of finding proof of hidden life. This time, they ventured into the remote and sealed off lakes that the Russian and American teams haven't worked on.

Lake Whillans in west Antarctica. In this lake, half a mile beneath the ice, life thrives!http://t.co/3OBc7VZ2MM pic.twitter.com/NO8E5YqCsn  EarthSky (@earthskyscience) October 11, 2014

Lake Vostok Life Further Probing Needed

The newly-discovered lake is from the "last un-researched part of Antarctica," said scientist Bryn Hubbard via New Scientist. They learned of its existence using satellite imagery. The British team is also going to study the lake's biological makeup to further underscore if it was possible for species and unique Lake Vostok life forms to have evolved.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been plagued with several divorce rumors for quite some time already. Now, new reports are claiming that the "Maleficent" actress has already been suffering the effects if the couple's marriage troubles.

Angelina Jolie suffers eating disorder because of Brad Pitt

News about Angelina Jolie suffering from anorexia is nothing new to the internet and tabloids. The "Salt" actress has been reportedly losing so much weight amid divorce rumors.

Previous reports claimed that Brad Pitt has already grown tired of Angelina Jolie for not eating and taking care of herself well. In fact, it has been reported that "The Big Short" actor warned his wife he will leave if Angelina Jolie cannot change his unhealthy lifestyle.

Other news claimed that Angelina Jolie has cancer. Though no official statement about the "Gia" actress' health has been made public as of yet, the weight of Brad Pitt's wife has come under fire more than one occasion.

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie divorcing due to actress' deteriorating health

After 11 years of marriage, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are reportedly splitting due to the "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" star's ailing health. National Enquirer previously reported that Angelina Jolie has been suffering from paranoia, severe headaches, anorexia and cancer.

Aside from that, there are news that claimed Angelina Jolie might be having problems with her hormones. To recall, the "By The Sea" actress had her ovaries removed to prevent cancer and started hormone replacement therapy.

While several news outlets think that the "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" stars will soon head to a divorce, both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie has kept mum about it. Fans are hopeful that Angelina Jolie could get her act together - especially on her health - so she could live happily with Brad Pitt.

Do you think Angelina Jolie is suffering from anorexia and cancer? If you were Brad Pitt, what would you tell Angelina Jolie? Share to us your thoughts in the comment section below.

For more updates, follow me on Twitter @iamheadturner
"Captain America: Civil War" brought a new addition to its team of superheroes as Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) recruits Spider Man (Tom Holland) to be part of Team Iron Man. In the latest trailer released for "Captain America: Civil War," Spider Man is seen taking Captain America's (Chris Evans) shield, positioning himself on Iron Man's side saying, "Hello Everyone!"

According to Screen Rant, Joe Russo, co-director of "Captain America: Civil War" said that Tony Stark believes that Spider Man is "the greatest living non-lethal weapon." Since the fight is more or less between friends who have fought the same battles for a long time, Iron Man must also want to prevent things from going out of bounds.

Team Iron Man & Team Captain America Sides In 'Civil War' REVEALED! RT TEAM CAPTAIN AMERICA

FAV TEAM IRON MAN pic.twitter.com/9gCzzcQKAv  Cap: Civil War (@Cap_CivilWar) August 7, 2015

"Look, there's a certain narcissism to the character and Tony doesn't want to lose this fight, and at the same time I think he also sees Spider-Man as the greatest living non-lethal weapon," said Russo during an interview about "Captain America: Civil War." This explains why Iron Man created his own team against Captain America, yet at the same time, chose a superhero who can be considered as one with a "heart."

Russo explained further the decision of Iron Man in choosing Spider Man to be a part of Team Iron Man as something to do with Tony Stark's desire to "capture a bunch of people who you don't necessarily want to hurt." For Iron Man, no one else comes close to a superhero possessing such an attribute than Spider Man.

While Russo's revelation may come as a "Captain America: Civil War" spoiler, he also didn't reveal all the details. One thing noticeable with the "Captain America: Civil War" teaser trailer was the funny Spider Man costume, which according to Movie Web, initially disappointed Tom Holland.

BREAKING New #CaptainAmericaCivilWar Tv Spot. Spider-man vs Winter Soldier pic.twitter.com/OpC4lKpC1L  Cap: Civil War (@Cap_CivilWar) April 26, 2016

He must have thought that he would be using Tobey Maguire's Spider Man costume, which unfortunately didn't happen in "Captain America: Civil War." Who would like to wear a Spider Man costume with outrageous mechanical eyes anyways?

Oh well, aside from Spider Man, Ant Man (Paul Rudd) will also be in "Captain America: Civil War," but he'll be joining Team Cap. Other heroes to watch out for are Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Sebastian Stan as Bucky, Frank Grillo as Crossbone and Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye.

"Captain America: Civil War" will release on May 6, 2016. For the rest of the year, Marvel fans will have a lot more. "Spider Man: Homecoming" is one of them.

So there's definitely more to look forward to from our favorite Marvel superheroes. Stay on top with Marvel news by following Parent Herald on Facebook and Twitter!
Plastic surgery has gone to such great heights that unexpected body parts can now be restructured. In fact, the American College of Obstetrician and Gynecologists (ACOG) saw a great increase in the number of teens undergoing Labiaplasty.

What Is Labiaplasty?

Sometimes called "vaginal rejuvenation", Labiaplasty is a surgical procedure that trims or shapes the labia minora or the inner lips of the vagina. The surgery is usually requested for cosmetic purposes, made mostly by older women or women who recently gave birth according to Parenting.com.

While most teens request for the procedure for cosmetic reasons, there are those that actually feel physical discomfort from the rapid changes brought by puberty.

"Adolescents, under the influence of pubertal hormones, undergo rapid transformation and growth of their breasts and genital tissues," the ACOG committee said. "At the time of puberty, the labia minora enlarge and grow to adult size. The normal labia minora can have marked variation in size, shape, and appearance."

Labiaplasty Trending Among Teens

Although the American Society of Plastic Surgeons has not kept records of the number of Labiaplasty in teens, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery states that 400 girls aged 18 and below underwent the procedure in 2015, New York Mag reports. That's 80 percent increase from 2014's cases of 222. While the number of cases may appear modest, the data has not included the procedures done by gynaecologists.

The cause of the rising popularity of Labiaplasty among teens is still unknown. ACOG speculates that this may be brought by the increased awareness of the surgery itself. They also think that the growing number of teens shaving and waxing their pubic hair may have also played a role. There are also ideal images of vulva circulating online, making them question their own asymmetry.

ACOG Sets New Guidelines For Labiaplasty

The increasing cases of Labiaplasty among teens have prompted ACOG to set guidelines on how doctors should discuss the procedure with their young patients. "Variety in the shape, size, appearance and symmetry of labia can have particularly distressing psychological effects on young women," said Dr. Julie Strickland, the chair of ACOG's Adolescent Health Care Committee and lead author of the paper. "It's one more body part that women are insecure about and it's our job, as ob-gyns, to reassure our young patients," Dr. Stickland said per Vocativ.

While they don't restrict the teens to undergo Labiaplasty, they would like to encourage the patients to wait until growth and development are complete. More so, the committee warns of possible effects like numbness, pain, scarring or decreases sexual sensation. The committee is also suggesting nonsurgical alternatives to decrease discomfort; use of supportive garments, a certain arrangement of labia minor during exercise and form-fitting clothes.

Do you think Labiaplasty is good for teens? Let us know what you think by leaving your comments below. Check out other trends in teens in the video below.
About a dozen students at Harvard University have been isolated following a mumps outbreak that has affected 40 members of the educational community since February. The move was done after the viral infection continued spreading in the university.

ABC News reported that the increase in the number of infected individuals was still noted even though many of them were vaccinated for mumps. Since the outbreak was disclosed last Feb. 29, the disease continued to infect individuals at Harvard.

"This is really happening in congregate settings where people are in dormitories," Cambridge Public Health Department spokesperson Susan Feinberg said. "College campuses are the perfect storm, because students are sharing all kind so things, they're in close contact and going to parties."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that mumps can be passed through saliva or mucus. ABC News also explained that people who got vaccinated for mumps may still acquire it.

Most commons symptoms of mumps are muscle pain, fever, fatigue, and swollen glands. It was added in te same report that in serious cases, it could lead to inflammation of the ovaries or meningitis.

According to CNN, Harvard University has asked its students to stop spreading the infection to others. University's health services director Paul Barreira said the school worries about the rise in the cases of mumps.

"I'm actually more concerned now than I was during any time of the outbreak," Barreira was quoted by CNN as saying. "I'm desperate to get students to take seriously that they shouldn't be infecting one another."

He explained that this outbreak could affect the upcoming commencement of the students this May 26. Barreira said that a continuous increase in the number of students infected may "seriously interrupt" the commencement exercises.

In an interview with the university's newspaper, The Crimson, the health services director said that students who tested positive for the viral illness were isolated for about five days. They were either kept inside their own homes or at the Harvard Inn where some of the students stay.
Unlike Prince Harry, who made a little boy sad by admitting he will never be king, Prince George is getting ready to become a monarch. The Duke and Duchess Of Cambridge, Prince William and Kate Middleton, have a little king in their hands with Prince George.

People reports that Prince George, who is barely three years old, has taken well to his life in the limelight with Kate Middleton, Prince William, Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth.This shone through when Prince George showed aplomb in his meeting with US President Barack Obama and the first lady Michelle Obama.

Prince George thanks @BarackObama for his rocking horse, given to him when he was born pic.twitter.com/xXIF8QeQvz  Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) April 22, 2016

Although Prince George was in his monogrammed robe and pyjamas, the little prince stood with self-assurance before President Obama. Time reports that the robe-and-pyjamas ensemble that Prince George wore to his meeting with President Barack Obama has sold out. Just like Kate Middleton, Prince George has become a trendsetter of sorts.

Prince George also shows confidence before the media and has no problem smiling before the cameras. In fact, Prince George is camera-friendly. The new stamps featuring Prince George and being released to honor Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday is projected to become a bestseller.

The stamp shows Prince George with Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles and Prince William. Prince George is also a highlight in the new portrait of Queen Elizabeth recently created by Annie Leibovitz.

Queen Elizabeth was shown surrounded by with her youngest grandchildren and all the royal's great-grandchildren. While Prince George stood among his royal relatives, the little prince was a clear standout.

..and here's a close up of the first in a series of three official photographs released today to mark #Queenat90 pic.twitter.com/i9kqsYzmDk  The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) April 20, 2016



Certainly fame is not a normal burden for a child as young as Prince George to bear. It is not even an easy burden for adults. Luckily Kate Middleton and Prince William are ever on hand to protect Prince George and Princess Charlotte's childhood.

The fact that Kate Middleton and Prince William try to raise Prince George and Princess Charlotte in as normal a household as they can manage should help. This cultivated balance may be part of the charm that Prince George exudes.
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Editors: James Harvey & Alex Jaffe

Release Date: April 27, 2016

How the hell does one describe Bartkira? The simplest definition is often the best: a collaborative campaign comprised of over 700 artists across the globe, brought together to reinterpret all six volumes of Katsuhiro Otomos manga opus, Akira, through the characters and set pieces of Matt Groenings landmark animated sitcom, The Simpsons. This endeavor, by its very nature, prompts half-cocked eyebrows and bewildered expressions from even the most savvy Japanese comic enthusiasts; its a product so cockamamie that it seems all but certain to succeed by its sheer absurdity.

With four of the six volumes fully reimagined, key selections from the projects free online archive have been collected as a special hardcover dubbed Bartkira: Nuclear Edition. The proceeds of the volume are split between two charities: The OISCA Coastal Forest Restoration Project in Miyagi Prefecture (home of Akira creator Otomo), and Save the Children (Simpsons co-creator Sam Simons charity of choice). The book itself is a triumphant work of postmodernist mash-up culture, a lovingly curated art project designed to foster creativity within the global comic community, and an homage to two of the most monolithic properties of the late 20th century.



Bartkira Interior Art by Cameron Stewart

Much in the way that the characters and locations of The Simpsons seamlessly exist alongside the scenarios and existential perils of Akiras Neo-Tokyo, a surprising aura of quiet wisdom permeates the quirk of Bartkiras appeal. This juxtaposition of sentiments is beautifully summarized in David Surmans foreword, accrediting its conception to the mercurial online art culture of the early 21st centurya time signifying great uncertainty, the blurring of mediums, the shrinking and expanding aperture of tastes and taboos. More importantly, this culture redrew the line between art and homage. These conditions also resemble the radical reinvention of Japans own cultural identity in the mid-70s, when industrial economic stability and political dissent became the aesthetic backdrop of Otomos sequential masterwork.

Bartkiras ulterior objective is audacious, siphoning the raw, irreverent potential of the Internet to close the gap between comic industry veterans and anxious newcomers, allowing them to concentrate their combined talent into one project. That goal not only shares a reverence for Akiras legacy, but inspires future generations to commit themselves to the creation and, most importantly, the completion of new projects that may serve as the spiritual torchbearers of Akiras precedent. What took Otomo eight years to conceive and accomplish, the collective Bartkira community has re-imagined in nearly half the time. Who knows what profound new creations a fraction of these artists will imagine? The spirit of Akira is alive and well in the year 2016.



Bartkira Interior Art by Walder Johan

The books reinterpretations of the original manga toe the line between playful self-reference and an anarchic sense of gallows humor. Marigold Bartlett exemplifies this contrast, featuring a mass exodus of citizens fleeing the ruins of Neo-Springfield, frenzied by the psychic backlash of Ralph Wiggums (in the role of Akira) grief. The survivors clamor for salvation and refuge outside the doors of Lisa Simpsons Buddhist temple compound, an inspired mash-up of Lady Kiyokos monastery from the original manga and Reverend Lovejoys First Church of Springfield. Lisas fatalistic catch phrase of Embrace Nothingness (from the 1991 Simpsons arcade game) stretches across the churchs announcement board, bolstering the scenes existential gravitas to such madness and dread that it rivals the grim severity of Otomos original.

As much as Bartkira relishes its tongue-in-cheek take on Akiras tropes, it knows when to pull back on the jokes. Walder Johans contributions are a perfect example of this restraint; his yawning, nuclear devastation of Neo-Springfield is almost entirely absent of the Easter egg iconography present throughout the rest of the book.



Bartkira Interior Art by Marigold Bartlett

Bartkira stands as a testament to the dogged ambition that Akiras narrative embodies, the resiliency of the human spirit when faced with seemingly insurmountable despair. And the source material has certainly inspired similar acts of full-blooded homage: Bwanas Capsules Pride remixes the Akira motion pictures original score into a frenetic EDM-infused mixtape; a gallery exhibition of 42 artists paid tribute to Otomos work earlier this year in Paris; and rumblings have emerged of a possible Akira-related TV series from none other than Katsuhiro Otomo himself. The commercial release of Bartkira: Nuclear Edition is not just a well-curated art project, but one of many indications of the mass resurgence of Otomos magnum opus in the public eye, and its fixture in the zeitgeist of 21st-century pop culture.

Bartkira: Nuclear Edition is available to order at Floating World Comics.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Azerbaijani AGBank Chingiz Asadullayev increased his stake in the share capital of the bank from 23.27 percent to 31.68 percent, according to the bank's website.

Changes in the stakes of other shareholders also took place, the bank said.

The share of the International Finance Corporation decreased from 17.5 percent to 4.28 percent, the share of company 'Kazimir Partners' - from 10 percent to 2.45 percent, the share of Farzulla Yusifov - from 17.767 percent to 5.79 percent.

In addition, Grigory Marchenko, who recently entered the AGBank Supervisory Board has acquired a 8.3 percent stake of the bank.

The total number of shareholders of the bank has increased from 64 to 85, of which 84 are minorities with a total hold of the bank's equity of 68.32 percent.

A general meeting of shareholders of Azerbaijani AGBank took place April 2016 and Afqan Jalilov was appointed acting chairman of the bank. Azer Movsumov, former chairman of the bank's board, has been elected member of AGBank's Supervisory Board.



The new staff of the bank's Supervisory Board is as follows: Chingiz Assadulayev (chairman), members - Farzulla Yusifov, Grigory Marchenko, Azer Movsumov, representative of the International Finance Corporation.



The bank's executive board also includes Tokay Ali-zade (deputy chairman), members - Sakina Khalafova, Elnur Musayev.



The composition of the bank's Audit Committee was also changed.

The shareholders also reconsidered the issue of increasing the authorized capital. An extraordinary meeting was held on March 4, where a decision was made to increase the bank's capital. As a result, the capital increased from 77.2 million manats to 102.2 million manats.



AGBank has been operating in Azerbaijan since 1992. Among the shareholders are the International Finance Corporation, Kazimir Partners company, as well as physical entities Chingiz Asadullayev and Farzulla Yusifov.
Comcast's NBCUniversal said on Thursday that it will buy DreamWorks Animation for $41 per share. Shares of DreamWorks soared 24 percent in early trading Thursday, hitting a fresh 52-week intraday high. Comcast shares were flat after the announcement. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2016. Comcast is the parent company NBCUniversal and CNBC.

DreamWorks was a Pixar competitor that was never quite able to match the stardom that Steve Jobs was able to bring to the brand. Steve Jobs was the majority shareholder of Pixar when the company was sold to Disney back in 2006 for $7.4 billion.

About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously on Wednesday to require law enforcement authorities to get a search warrant before asking technology companies such as Apple, Microsoft and others to hand over old emails. The bill's prospects in the Senate remain unclear, though the 419-0 vote in the House was likely to put pressure on the upper chamber to approve it.

Under the Email Privacy Act, which updates a decades-old law, authorities would have to get a warrant to access emails or other digital communications more than 180 days old. At present, agencies such as the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission only need a subpoena to seek such data from a service provider.

Supporters of the legislation say it is needed to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Technology companies and privacy advocates say that statute was written before the rise of the Internet and so is outdated.

The issue of law enforcement access to private electronic communications has been at the center of an international debate. Earlier this month we posted a report titled "Microsoft Sues over the Right to Inform Customers that the Government is spying on their emails." For more on this story, read the full Reuters report here.

About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments.
According to the latest preliminary release from IDC, vendors shipped a total of 334.9 million smartphones worldwide in the first quarter of 2016 (1Q16), up slightly from the 334.3 million units in 1Q15, marking the smallest year-over-year growth on record. The minimal growth this quarter is primarily attributed to strong smartphone saturation in developed markets, as well as a year-over-year decline from both Apple and Samsung, the two market leaders. Apple's iPhone business suffered most in Mainland China at the very same time that two unknown local smartphone vendors came rushing into the Chinese market to overtake Lenovo and Xiaomi. The sheer number of local vendors may be an issue over time and something to keep an eye on going forward.

IDC notes that Apple's saw its' first-ever year-over-year decline in Q1 as volumes slipped to 51.2 million units, down 16.3% from last year. Despite the plethora of new features found on the newer "S" models, current iPhone 6/6 Plus owners may feel that a 6S upgrade may not be warranted at the moment.

The report further noted that Apple also announced the new iPhone SE, which looks to challenge similarly priced Android options in numerous emerging markets where Apple has traditionally been seen as too expensive. The SE features all the power of the 6S in a compact form factor that looks to equally target those who desire smaller phones as well. However, at US$399, the SE still faces equally powerful lower-priced devices from competitors, particularly within India and China. As Apple CEO Cook mentioned on the company's earnings call, the SE will begin having an impact on iPhone shipments in the second quarter of 2016.

Samsung remained the leader in the worldwide smartphone market despite a year-over-year decline of 0.6% in shipments. Despite the slight decline, the new Galaxy S7 and S7 edge sold vigorously in the month of March and was helped by numerous enticing carrier promotions to help push volume. The S7 also brought the reintroduction of a microSD card slot in combination with waterproofing, which looks to have paid off for the Korean giant as early sales look healthy. Within emerging markets, Samsung has performed well with its more affordable J-series as it looks to capture both budget conscious consumers and first-time buyers.

Huawei's continued domestic dominance, combined with a growing presence outside of China, enabled it to capture the number 3 position worldwide in 1Q16. Shipment volume for Huawei climbed from 17.4 million units in 1Q15 to 27.5 million this quarter for year-over-year growth of 58.4%. Huawei's two-pronged approach with a focus on both premium and entry-level devices proved successful in China as well as in many developed European markets. The recent launch of the P9 smartphone featuring Leica optics provided an additional weapon with which to combat Apple and Samsung. Premium devices like the P9, Mate Series, and Nexus 6, along with entry level devices from its Honor brand, should help Huawei gain further traction worldwide.

The Biggest Surprise: The biggest change to the market, however, was the addition of lesser-known Chinese brands OPPO and Vivo, which pushed out previous fourth and fifth place players Lenovo and Xiaomi, respectively.

As the China market matures, the appetite for smartphones has slowed dramatically as the explosion of uptake has passed its peak. In 2013, China's year-over-year shipment growth was 62.5%; by 2015, it had dropped to 2.5%. Conversely, the average selling price (ASP) for a smartphone in China rose from US$207 in 2013 to US$257 in 2015.

About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments.
In this weeks episode of The Story of God (airing May 1), Morgan Freeman explores the concept of evil. As with previous topics, apocalypse and creation, their is no perfect word for evil in the Asian languages of Buddhism. However, as with those concepts, when we tease them out, exploring their etymological and historical roots, we see that even in English and associated languages, these words can mean much more than we commonly take them to mean.

Getting beyond the superficial, we find that religions around the world  people around the world  faced similar problems and often came up with similar solutions in terms of myths or ideas about the nature of the person and the world. This isnt to overlook the differences. In fact it was the differences and the unique insights of both Kant and early Buddhism that drew me to my line of study. But their is a danger, often couched in Orientalism, of overstating the differences and potential incommensurability of religious/philosophical systems.

For instance, can a Christian talk about original sin in terms of primal desire that we all have?

Tune in Sunday to see for yourself.

Moving on to India, Freeman asks his Hindu guide, In Christianity youve got the Devil and youve got God, youve got good, youve got evil. You dont seem to have that going on in Hinduism. She responds, In Hinduism theres no dichotomy between good and evil. The same person can become good and evil There is always, in the end, a hope; the hope that even the evil can be liberated.

Freemans reaction:  evil is just a spirit that needs to find peace. Cool.

He then takes us to one of my favorite religions to teach: Zoroastrianism. Freeman gives an origin date of 3500 years ago, though the exact origins are murky; some traditionalists dating the founder, Zarathustra (or Zoroaster in Greek), to 7500 B.C.E. Others think his life was somewhere between 1400 and 900 B.C.E. and today the most common date given by historians is around 630 B.C.E. (see Van Voorst, World RELG for a wonderful chapter on the religion).

Central to Zoroastrian belief is a dualism, two competing forces personified in a good God, Ahura Mazda, and a devil-like figure, Angra Mainyu. It could be that these are simply common human ideas, perhaps existing well before Zoroaster ever lived. Van Voorst notes that they exist in Hindu sources, and Biblical scholars will point to early Jewish ideas along the same lines. Or it could be that Zoroaster coined these ideas and that they were then borrowed by other religions, East and West. Author Mary Boyce takes this latter view, suggesting that, Zoroastrianism has probably had more influence on human life, directly and indirectly, than any other single faith.

On the side of a Zoroastrian influence on the East, particularly Buddhism, a major proponent is Jayarava Attwood, a scholar and blogger in England. You can read a blog post of his (Who Were the Artharvans?) and a journal article on the topic: Possible Iranian Origins for the Sakyas and Aspects of Buddhism.

In Zoroastrianism as we know it today out of this dualism arises the motto: Good thoughts, Good words, Good deeds. The idea being that in order to defeat evil, one must guard ones mind first and foremost, but then also ones speech and action. I think most Buddhists will smile in recognition of that idea.

Freeman then takes us to New Zealand, where a researcher shows us that children, when convinced that there is an invisible princess watching them, act significantly more ethically (in this case not cheating in a game) than children who believe they are alone. Its good enough research, I think. And it shows that children around the age of 5 can benefit from being lied to in the short run. However, Im not so sure how it relates to the rest of us.

Finally we travel again to Sarnath, India, home of a large Tibetan Buddhist population and the Vajravidya Monastery. But the Buddhism segment in this episode is over before it even starts, all 2 minutes of it. Freeman tells us, Buddhist believe that the urge to do evil stems from ignorance about how our minds work.

What more can we say about the concept of evil in Buddhism? Its fair to repeat the old wisdom that there is no word for evil in Buddhism. But then we might explore a bit further. In a wonderful book, the popular secular Buddhist Stephen Batchelor does just this: Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil. In it he writes:

The devil is a way of talking about that which blocks ones path in life, frustrates ones aspirations, makes one feel stuck, hemmed in, obstructed. While the Hebrew Satan means adversary, the Greek diabolos means one who throws something across the path. In India, Buddha called the devil Mara, which in Pali and Sanskrit means the killer.

He continues:

Only when Buddha was able to experience the desires and fears that threatened to overwhelm him as nothing but impersonal and ephemeral conditions of mind and body, did they lose their power to mesmerize him. Instead of perceiving them as forces of an avenging army intent on his destruction, he recognized that they were no more solid than brittle, unfired pots that crumble on being struck by a well-aimed stone. As soon as Buddha stopped compulsively identifying the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arose within him as me or mine, Mara could no longer influence him.

In Pali, the closest word to evil we find is papa, which is often used in conjunction with punna, meaning good or meritorious. As in the Hinduism discussed above, these were/are not absolute categories. A mostly good person could do evil/papa, deeds and vice versa. The point is to recognize the two propensities in oneself and eliminate the evil. Combined with the doctrine of karma (kamma in Pali), you also must recognize that your good and evil deeds will have an effect on your future. Some Buddhists have been known to keep literal accounting books, measuring up good and bad deeds for the day or year. Others, mostly those influenced by modernism, see both in mostly or strictly psychological terms.

And, quite interestingly, in Buddhism one is taught not only to give up evil deeds, but also good ones in the sense of those that could or would go in your accounting diary. The goal, we find out, is simply spontaneous goodness. In discussing the notion a perfected being, or arahant, in early Buddhism, Bhikkhu Analayo writes:

What arahants have gone beyond is the accumulation of karma. They have transcended the generation of good (punna) and of its opposite evil (papa). But the same cannot be said of wholesomeness (kusala). In fact, by eradicating all unwholesome (akusala) states of mind, arahants become the highest embodiment of wholesomeness (kusala). So much is this the case that, as indicated in the Samanamandika Sutta, they are spontaneously virtuous and do not even identify with their virtue.

Stay in touch with American Buddhist Perspectives on Facebook:
Today involved a lot of driving. A lot. We hit the road at 5:45 AM, leaving our hotel at Petra. We had to reach the border crossing between Israel and Jordan by about 10 AM, because that crossing was closing early today. (Its the tail end of the Passover holiday.)

We arrived at the King Hussein Bridge (also famous as the Allenby Bridge, named after the great British general who figures in Lawrence of Arabia) on time, but things were more than a little chaotic, and it took us quite a while to get through both Jordanian and Israeli security. (Im not surprised. Sometimes things go well and easily here. Sometimes, unaccountably, they dont.)

We had a quite good buffet lunch in Jericho, in the occupied West Bank (at a Palestinian tourist center cleverly called Temptation, after the nearby Mount of Temptation, the traditional site where Jesus was tempted by the Devil for forty days and forty nights).

Then we headed up into the Judean hills toward Jerusalem. We tried to avoid Jerusalem holiday traffic by going slightly around the city to the north, but our plotting was to no avail. We were still snared in a bad suburban traffic jam.

Finally, though, we got down onto the fertile coastal plain of Israel and reached our hotel in Tel Aviv.

Here, we met the rest of our group. There will be a flotilla of three buses, each of them furnished with an Israeli Palestinian guide  the laws here require a licensed Israeli guide  and an LDS commentator. (Im one of the latter, of course. The other two are Brent Top, the dean of Religious Education at BYU, and Jack Welch, the founder of FARMS and the editor of BYU Studies.) Well be traveling in a pack, meeting at sites, and so forth.

Festivities begin tomorrow in earnest. Now I need to sing for my supper.

Posted from Tel Aviv, Israel
vs. Dr. Peter Kwasniewski

Peter Kwasniewski [You Tube image / Creative Commons license]

***

This is a combination of two related exchanges on my Facebook page with Dr. Peter Kwasniewski: Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College, and contributor to the reactionary sites, One Vader Five and Rorate Caeli. I engaged in very lengthy dialogue with him regarding the reform of the liturgy, in February 2014 (see Part I / Part II). His words will be in blue.

*****

It would be better to read Bp. Athanasius Schneiders excellent and moderate critique of AL [Amoris Laetitia] [link to the article]

Is he the new Cardinal Burke now: the darling of the radical Catholic reactionaries and legitimate mainstream traditionalists? You guys always latch onto a favorite bishop. Schneider appears to be that now, in light of Burkes descent into decadent neo-Catholicism . . .

Oh, so its a problem when everyone rallies around a certain bishop who stands out from the crowd, like, say, St. Athanasius?

I guess that is your answer. Thank you. Hes the new Burke . . .

Hes just a faithful, orthodox, and courageous bishop, preaching the truth in season and out of season. Thats what makes him a rallying point.

So there is just one left? Or are there a few more still kicking around? Or is Hilary White correct, and no good ones are left at all?

I think its what one usually sees in the annals of Church history  a wide range of bishops, some outspoken, some orthodox but softspoken, some orthodox but cowardly, some heterodox but unwilling to come out with it, and some openly heterodox. And I happen to think we are in a situation very much like the Arian crisis, when, as you know, there were not exactly a lot of bishops standing up in defense of the truth.

Sorry, Dave, there are more ways to be heretical than just to contradict explicitly the provisions of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed. Would that things were that simple.

Yes there are. My disagreement with your analogy of today to the Arian crisis stands nonetheless. I dont see anything remotely near what happened in the Arian crisis, with bishops outwardly denying that Jesus is the Son of God. To make such a direct comparison, is, I think, utterly unwarranted.

So if the majority of Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence and are pro-contraception, this isnt a major crisis? Wait I can hear it coming you will deny that these things are true. Or youll say they pale in comparison to denying the divinity of Christ. Im not so sure they do. Everything is connected with everything else, and what has happened to Eucharistic doctrine and moral doctrine reflects a general crisis of faith in the very person and mission of Christ.

Who said there wasnt a crisis? I believe with my mentor Fr. Hardon that it is the greatest crisis in the Church ever. We were talking specifically about the bishops. All I said was that they dont seem to me to be as bad as in the times of the Arian crisis, where we had rank Christological heresy.

You switched the topic from the bishops to laypeople and their views on the Eucharist and contraception. We would mostly agree about that. So now were talking about two different things at the same time.

But I thought we didnt have enough in common (as fellow orthodox Catholics) to talk at all? [see one of his comments below] Glad you are back . . .

Okay. My point would be that the crisis among the laity is causally connected to the abdication of spiritual authority and clear teaching among the bishops. And I would add that there is sad evidence that many bishops do not even hold the faith that you and I hold.

I agree that bishops and priests have failed in their duty to teach (and to teach reasons why we believe what we do: my field).

But the causes of ignorance, laxity, and immorality go far beyond just them, and also each individual has responsibility to get off their butts and learn the faith, with all the marvelous resources we now have in order to do so: more and easier to access than ever.

If folks remain spiritual babes (as St. Paul talks about) then they will simply nod at priests and bishops and be spoon-fed and bottle-fed rather than actually break open a theology book, just as they learn anything else in college or at work or the school of hard knocks.

You write articles, and I do, which teach people, and they can learn from them. You and I arent bishops. So there are ways to learn the faith besides priests and bishops, too.

*****

RESOURCES FOR CONFUSED OR TROUBLED FOLKS include Scriptures, Fathers, Doctors, and the clear, precise articulations of the Faith taught in modern papal encyclicals like Casti Connubii. [take-off of my collection: Pope Francis Defended: Resources for Confused or Troubled Folks]

Cute. Do folks ever get teachings of the Bible wrong, and get confused about that, Peter? If so, does this have any bearing on the trustworthiness and orthodoxy of Holy Scripture?

Of course not. Im being tongue in cheek. The fact is, there is a lot of Pope Franciss teaching that is much less clear than Scripture, which is ironic, given that his job is to clarify it when needed.

But you grant my point by conceding: if even Holy Scripture, inspired by God Himself is confusing to many people, why should we expect any less from mere human, non-inspired documents?

And why would any logical thinker hold that such confusion must be because of the document and not also possibly (among other things) shortcomings or biases of various sorts in the readers?

Wait a minute so the churchs leaders are supposed to be confusing to their people? This is a bit absurd. Why were the earlier papal documents of, say, Leo XIII and Pius XI and Pius XII, so much clearer? Were they over simplifying matters, or were they just clearer thinkers and better at shepherding?

Moreover: any document that makes itself readily susceptible to the deviations of such men as Kasper is already shown to be imperfect in itself. Which, of course, does not exclude defects in the readers  I never said it did.

We are to believe that everyone always understands every jot and tittle of, say, St. Thomas Aquinas? And his Summa Theologica was actually written for beginners in theology.

I deny that Amoris Laetitia is confusing at all, let alone scandalously so. Its a nuanced, thoughtful, somewhat complex document, but not inherently confusing.

Pope Francis prose is certainly more understandable to the average person than Pope St. John Paul IIs highly complex philosophically influenced prose. Traditionalists and reactionaries were moaning and groaning about that, then shut up for eight years with Pope Benedict; now were back to the same old same old.

Again, Vatican II (like the Bible itself) was distorted by the liberals, even though it is perfectly orthodox. Or do you deny that, too? Or it is, but is relentlessly ambiguous etc.?

We dont have enough in common to continue this conversation. If you dont think Amoris Laetitia is a confusing and problematic document, then enjoy your vacation on Mars.

I thought it was just starting to get interesting and constructive, but if you must go, feel free . . . We have plenty in common, assuming you accept the inspiration of Scripture and the magisterial status of Vatican II, and like St. Thomas Aquinas, Pope St. John Paul II, etc. Plenty in common there.

But I guess liking Pope Francis and what he writes and teaches is a dealbreaker, huh?

Theres already been oceans of ink spilled on this question, and I dont feel that a Facebook conversation is going to be the place where we solve it all. As to the magisterial status of Vatican II, like the council itself said in the Nota praevia to Luman Gentium, the doctrinal assertions have as much authority as they ought to have, using the usual tools of interpretation. To put it simply, where Vatican II teaches in continuity with the tradition, I have no problem with it at all. Are there bits that I have trouble with? Sure  but we see Ratzinger himself warning us against making it into a super-council that trumps everything else. It is one piece in a great big tradition, and whether it fits nicely in place or not is a difficult question.

*****

[related comments of mine in the same thread to someone else]

I think the Kasper paradigm was rejected by not being adopted in Amoris Laetitia, just as the Supreme Court ejects a lower ruling by deciding not to deal with it at all.

The very fact that the discussion basically centers around a footnote in a non-dogmatic Apostolic Exhortation shows us what we are here dealing with. Nothing has changed, except perhaps in a pastoral sense: an attempt to be more sensitive to difficult marital situations.

The same stuff is said about Vatican II all the time, as I note more than once in my post. I dont buy it. Liberals will always distort things. That will happen as long as they are around and havent died out yet. Give it 15-20 years and theyll be mostly dead and well be liberated from their sublime wisdom and faith.

I think Vatican II is quite clear and glorious. I think the same about the Bible, which has been distorted by kooks and liberals lo these past 3000+ years. No one knows that better than the apologist. I see how it is done all the time, even by atheists, who ludicrously fancy themselves experts on Holy Writ.

*****

[someone else objected to someone calling radical Catholic reactionaries Pharisees]

If it is a false description, it would be dangerous; if it is accurate it would not be. Calling fellow Catholics neo-Catholics (Chris Ferrara, Steve Skojec) or not Catholics at all / Novusordoists (Hilary White) isnt good for their souls, either.

Its saying that we are no longer Catholics, as the term is historically understood. Its a mere masquerade and pretense. This is what I supposedly am (according to the reactionaries): not a real, bona fide orthodox Catholic. Granted, calling someone a Pharisee is usually a slur, yet St. Paul called himself one three times, and Jesus followed pharisaical traditions and told His disciples to follow their teachings, too.

I think its true that many Catholics hold positions that are not compatible with the faith. This has happened with greater and greater frequency ever since the rise of Modernism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hence, neo-Catholic, while not particularly polite, points to a definite phenomenon and a tremendous problem.

I could see how it would accurately apply to a liberal modernist. The problem is that it is insultingly applied to orthodox Catholics like myself.

*****

Meta Description: Exchange about whether the Church is headed for destruction due to internal decay, or hanging on, as it always has.

Meta Keywords: Pope Francis, Catholic Church, Church history, Arian crisis, bad bishops, theological liberalism, liberal bishops, Peter Kwasniewski, Amoris Laetitia
Patna: In yet another example of bureaucracy gone wild in Bihar, the state government on Wednesday cancelled the lease of Patna's only true mall  the P&M Mall developed by noted film-maker Prakash Jha  throwing the livelihoods of more than 5,000 employees of the posh shopping complex in danger.

The mall was developed by Jha when he reached an agreement with Bihar Industrial Area Development Authority (BIADA) following the formation of the pragmatic NDA government in Bihar in 2006. It has since become the most popular area for both young and old to spend their money, grab a bite from a choice of many, and enjoy shopping or watch a movie in an air-conditioned environment.

As reported, the mall's lease was cancelled after it failed to pay the lease fee totaling more than Rs. 2.5 crore.

Mall General Manager V. Mishra, accusing the BIADA of resorting to arm-twisting tactics, said that it raised the lease fee by several fold without proper agreement or discussion.

"We have paid Rs. 40 lakh as per the assessment of the use of land but BIADA came up with a much higher number that are not only untenable but also unreasonable," he said adding if the government insisted on canceling the lease, the mall association would approach the proper court for relief from this 'government-sponsored tyranny'.

Insiders believe that the Nitish government had cancelled the lease to settle political score from Jha after the latter, once a close friend of Nitish Kumar, fell out of the Chief Minister's grace following the disintegration of the NDA government in Bihar and the formation of a new Nitish government in association with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Congress.
Gold Trader Pleads Not Guilty To Helping Iran Evade U.S. Sanctions

04/28/16

Source: RFE/RL

A Turkish gold trader pleaded not guilty to charges that he conspired to conduct hundreds of millions of dollars in financial transactions to help the Iranian government evade U.S. sanctions. Reza Zarrab, a dual citizen of Turkey and his native Iran, entered the plea at a hearing before Judge Richard Berman in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. He was arrested last month in Miami.





Zarrab, 33, was charged in an indictment last month along with one of his employees, Kamelia Jamshidy, and Hossein Najafzadeh, a senior officer at a unit of Bank Mellat in Iran. The other two defendants, both Iranian, remain at large.

Prosecutors said that from 2010 to 2015, the trio helped Iranian individuals and entities, including Bank Mellat, one of the largest banks in Iran, evade U.S. sanctions by conducting financial transactions through companies in Turkey and in the United Arab Emirates owned and operated by Zarrab.

The indictment charges Zarrab, Jamshidy, 29, and Najafzadeh, 65, with engaging in conspiracies to defraud the United States, to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to commit bank fraud and to commit money laundering.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AP

Copyright (c) 2016 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org
Human Rights Groups Condemn Journalists' Prison Sentences in Iran

04/28/16

By Edward Yeranian, VOA

CAIRO- U.S. human rights groups are condemning the sentences imposed by an Iranian court on four journalists who were arrested late last year. The four were accused of paving the way for U.S. infiltration of the country.The Iranian judiciary has handed down sentences of five to 10 years in prison to the journalists who were arrested last November in the period leading up to parliamentary elections.



For the imprisoned journalists

By Mana Neyestani



Afarin Chitsaz, Ehsan Mazandarani, Saman Safarzai and Davoud Asadi were convicted Tuesday of harming national security and spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic.

Heavy sentences

A lawyer who represents three of the four journalists, Mohammad Alizadeh Tabatabai, told VOAs Persian service that they were given heavy sentences.

He says that Davoud Asadi was given 10 years in prison and that Ehsan Mazandarani, who heads the Farhikhtegan newspaper, was given seven years. Afarin Chitsaz, a columnist for the government-owned Iran Dailynewspaper who is also an actress, and Saman Safarzai, a columnist for the Andishey-e Puya magazine who is also known as Ehsun Sarfarzai, were handed five-year sentences, the lawyer added.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) denounced the sentences, saying they were part of a tale of repression [being carried out] in Iran since the first of January. RSF indicated that a fifth journalist, Issa Saharkhiz, was also sentenced, but the term was not revealed. Saharkhiz is reportedly recovering in a Tehran hospital from a heart attack suffered while on a hunger strike.

Judiciary spokesman Mehdi Mohseni told Iranian state TV that the judicial system was just doing its job, and that the sentences were not final.





Detained Iranian journalists: Issa Saharkhiz (top left), Saman Safarzayi (bottom left) Afarin Chitsaz (center) & Ehssn Mazandarani



Related Story: Journalists in Iran Slapped with Long Prison Sentences







Inside power struggle

Iran analyst Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute tells VOA that the journalists were arrested due to the ongoing power struggle inside Iran involving hardliners, including the Revolutionary Guards, and the more moderate forces supporting President Hassan Rouhani.

It doesnt make sense in any other way, but to look at whats happening in the context of a power struggle thats happening as we speak, and its a power struggle thats going to get nastier and nastier as weeks and months go by, because theres a succession crisis unfolding in Iran, because everyone is preparing for the day [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei leaves this world, said Vatanka.

Vatanka adds that Ayatollah Khamenei has given a blank check to the hardliners, including the Revolutionary Guards, to single out and punish those who damage the regime.

Reporters Without Borders says 32 journalists are being detained in Iran and that Tehran is one of five major persecutors of the press in the world.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 28

Trend:

Starting from April 27 evening until 04:00 (GMT + 4 hours) on April 28, Armenian armed forces fired at settlements, as well as Azerbaijani army's positions in the country's Terter and Aghdam districts, Azerbaijani defense ministry told Trend Apr.28.

Armenian military was using 60, 82 and 120-millimeter mortars, as well as 122-millimeter D-30 howitzers. Azerbaijani armed forces inflicted strikes only on Armenia's military facilities.

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.
Public Outcry in Iran Over Plan for Increased Morality Police Prompts Review

04/28/16

Source: International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran



A group of undercover morality police officers in Tehran



Deploying 7,000 undercover morality police in Tehran contradicts the principle of the presumption of innocence, Iranian lawyer Ali Rambod told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

We should move towards interpreting laws on the basis of innocent until proven guilty, he said. It appears this principle has been overlooked in regards to the undercover police force.

There is an incorrect assumption that people are somehow walking time-bombs that are about to commit crimes at any moment, added the Tehran-based lawyer. Implementing this plan would create a sense of insecurity and mistrust among the public.

The announcement of the formation of a special force to bring moral security to the capital was first made by Tehrans police chief Hossein Sajedinia on April 18, 2016.

Irans notorious morality police, a branch of the security forces co-directed by the Revolutionary Guards and the Interior Ministry, routinely subject Iranian men and especially women to harassment and arrests for alleged inappropriate public behavior.

In the past two years, the police have monitored four different offenses: sound pollution (loud music), dangerous driving on highways, harassment of women, and removing the hijab in the car, said Sajedinia. These were the main things we dealt with.

Following the public outcry over the plan, Sajedinia described the 7,000 undercover agents as members of the police force who will assist their colleagues on their time off (in civilian clothes), during an interview that aired on Iranian state television on April 20, 2016.

Five days later, the acting Interior Minister Hosseinali Amiri said that the government had decided to review the plan.

It is very important for the Interior Ministry to make sure these kinds of plans take peoples concerns into consideration and prevent any potential abuse, he said on April 25, 2016. Therefore, it has been decided that this plan will be sent for review to the National Security Council and the National Social Council.





cartoon by Keyvan Varessi, Ghanoon daily





The plan has been met with widespread pubic criticism, especially via social media in Iran and abroad. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has also publicly questioned the intentions of those who support the move.

Some wake up in the morning and think about how to secretly control people. Others want to do it openly. Do we have the right to do that? asked Rouhani during a cabinet session on April 20, 2016.

Individuals or Institutions cant just arbitrarily try to control the people, he added. You cannot limit the peoples freedoms with directives and unilateral initiatives by some agencies.

The plans estimated financial cost has been heavily criticized in the Iranian news media. The undercover agents would cost roughly 70 billion rials (about $2.3 million USD) per year just for one hour of work per day based on the national minimum wage, reported the reformist Etemad newspaper on April 23, 2016. The plan was also criticized by Irans Vice President for Women and Family Affairs Shahindokht Mowlaverdi.

I fear that if this plan is carried out, it would be reduced to confronting those who are improperly dressed and become a nuisance to women rather than protecting them from molesters, said Mowlaverdi via a post on her Telegram page that was quoted by the reformist Azad News Agency (ANA) on April 22, 2016.

The plan has also been criticized from within Tehrans security establishment. There has been no coordination with the government for implementing this plan, said Mohsen Nasj Hamadani, Tehran Provinces deputy official in charge of police and security, on April 22, 2016. Tehrans provincial administration has some issues with it, which we better clarify before it is wrongly implemented.

We should not expect such a plan to succeed without coordination with other state security organs, he added. It would be better if our colleagues in the police force do the necessary coordination with relevant agencies so that everyone can work together to promote virtue and prevent vice.







An immoral incident!

cartoon by Ehsan Ganji, Ghanoon daily





On the other hand, a number of Friday Prayer leaders have defended the proposed move in their sermons.

It is expected from the honorable and decent people of Iran, particularly those in Tehran Province, to observe the Islamic hijab. To make sure of this, the police force is deploying thousands of undercover agents who will promote virtue and prevent vice in a very respectful and calculated manner, said Tehrans Friday Prayer leader Mohammad Ali Movahedi Kermani on April 23, 2016.

I believe those who do not observe the hijab properly want to insult the state. I have seen them and felt embarrassed, he added. The police should undoubtedly confront those who openly commit sin, otherwise they would be sinners themselves.

Hardliners in Iran frequently complain that officials are not doing enough to preserve their ideals of public morality; they are especially preoccupied with the way women wear the state-mandated hijab.

Ahmad Alamolhoda, the ultra-conservative Friday Prayer leader of Mashhad, Irans second largest city, also dismissed Rouhanis criticism that the undercover police force would undermine the peoples freedoms and privacy.

How would the [undercover police force] be interfering in peoples public or private lives? If the police catch a thief, is that considered interference in peoples lives? If they arrest a murderer, is that interference in peoples privacy, too? said Alamolhoda on April 23, 2016.

Tehran-based lawyer Ali Rambod told the Campaign that the morality police do in fact undermine Iranian citizens constitutional rights.

Lets assume that some people commit crimes. We have laws on how to confront them. Legislators have been very specific on how to pursue those who do not observe the hijab or play loud music and so forth. Specific conditions must be met to bring punishment. Law enforcement agents can report a crime to judicial authorities and then pursue it based on orders issued directly by judicial officials... Law enforcement is not everybodys job, he said.

It will cause a lot of legal controversy if we use some people as so-called undercover police without proper qualifications or clarification of their responsibilities while giving them great power to determine and deal with certain crimes, added Rambod. As a lawyer, I dont think this plan would be in the public interest.

Rambod also told the Campaign that Iranian law grants citizens the right to request identification to determine the authority of anyone claiming to be an undercover agent.

We are not like some Eastern European countries of yesteryear that had their secret police, he said. Our law enforcement officials must operate with clear identities and responsibilities.

Bahman Keshavarz, the former chairman of Irans Bar Association, also criticized the plan from a legal perspective on April 19, 2016.

It is for a judge or a judicial official to determine whether someone has violated the law on the hijab... What is proper or improper can be very different and contradictory depending on ones viewpoint, he said.





A satire about the undercover morality police

(source: Ghanoon)
Hadi Heidari, creator of controversial "Blindfold" cartoon, finishes serving sentence

04/28/16

Source: Radio Zamaneh

Iranian cartoonist Hadi Heidari was released from prison on Tuesday April 26 after serving his sentence.





Hadi Heidari





The Fararo website reports that Heidari was arrested for the "Blindfold" cartoon, which was published in the Shargh daily three years ago.

The publication of the cartoon led to a three-month shutdown of the Shargh daily, during which the Revolutionary Guards filed a suit against Heidari for drawing the piece.

The cartoon showed a lineup of people, each tying a black blindfold on the next person in line. The cartoon has no caption and has garnered several different interpretations.







The Blindfolded Men by Hadi Heidari





In September of 2013, several MPs maintained that the cartoon was intentionally released during the week of Holy Defence, which is the term used in Iran to refer to the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. They maintained that the blindfolds reflect the black headband worn by Iranian soldiers and that the cartoon suggests the soldiers went to war blindly.

One hundred and twenty MPs then called for Heidari's prosecution for insulting the "soldiers of the sacred defence". Heidari was charged with "Propaganda against the regime through the publication of cartoons" and sentenced to one year in prison.

Heidari is an award-winning cartoonist who has done work for several reformist newspapers such as Shargh, Norooz and Neshat.
Minister intervenes in plot to block winning Isfahan candidate

04/28/16

Source: Radio Zamaneh

Iran's interior minister has written to the head of the country's three branches of government to say the Guardian Council's cancellation of the votes obtained by parliamentary candidate Minoo Khaleghi's is "an error" that needs to be examined by Parliament.



Minoo Khaleghi



Seda va Sima reported on Tuesday April 26 that Mahmoud Rahmani Fazli said it is not within the council's jurisdiction to cancel an individual's votes after the ballots have been approved. He added: "The credentials of this individual must be issued, and then Parliament will decide on it."

Khaleghi won the third-highest number of votes in Isfahan, which sends five candidates to Parliament. However, after the vote count was approved, the Guardian Council announced that it was canceling Khaleghi's votes. Some unofficial reports indicate that she is being penalized for "not complying with Islamic codes of behaviour in her travels abroad".

Meanwhile, MP Ali Motahari has said that the Ministry of the Interior must issue Khaelghi her credentials to take her seat in the next Parliament or else Parliament will impeach the interior minister.

Khaleghi is a reformist candidate, and conservative factions in Isfahan appear to be behind the push to keep her out of Parliament.
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With most antivirus, its not hard to identify the software's country of origin. Webroot is all-American, at least by origin. Bitdefender comes from Romania. While Kaspersky is a global corporation, it originated in Russia. Emsisoft, by contrast, is a citizen of the world. The staff that creates and maintains Emsisoft Anti-Malware is distributed all over the world, from the US to the wilds of Canada to New Zealand and beyond.

Regardless of its homeland, Emsisoft earned good scores in our malware protection and ransomware protection tests, though it didnt fare well defending against dangerous and fraudulent websites. The management console, which offers comprehensive remote management, is now much easier to set up. Emsisoft is a good choice for the right customer, though not up to the standards of our Editors' Choice antivirus products.

How Much Does Emsisoft Anti-Malware Cost?

Just under $40 per year is the most common price for standalone antivirus protection. More than a quarter of the products I follow are in that price range, among them Bitdefender, Malwarebytes, and Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus. Emsisoft used to cost the same years ago, but more recently it goes for just $29.99. You can get three Emsisoft licenses for $49.99 per year, or five for $69.99.

At $59.99 per year for a single license, Norton AntiVirus Plus costs quite a bit more, though it does include spam filtering, password management, online backup, and other bonus features. McAfee looks expensive, with that same $59.99 per year subscription, but that one subscription lets you install it on every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household.

Getting Started With Emsisoft

As with many modern security products, you begin your Emsisoft adventure by creating an online profile. From the profile you can start a 30-day free trial or enter your license code. When you launch the Emsisoft installer, it downloads the latest version of product.

During the installation you get an interesting choice for security management. You can opt for totally local, totally remote, or a combination of the two. All-remote management is typically a business style, but you might choose it for a relative whos not good at leaving things alone. All local is, of course, the most secure, because theres no chance of some cyber-ninja breaking into your management console. Most users will stick with the default, allowing both local and remote configuration.

Presuming you do include remote configuration, the installer guides you to create an online workspace. Workspace names must be unique system-wide, for security reasons. The system warns if the name youve typed is already in use. In a fit of GoT nostalgia I decided to name my workspace Braavos. While typing in the name, I learned that B, Br, and Bra are already in use as workspace names.

Once the main window comes up, you'll notice that the Protection panel briefly displays a No Protection warning. Just give it a few seconds to finish installing, updating, and configuring its components.

Four big panels dominate the main window's light-colored background: Protection, Scan & Clean, Logs, and Settings. A left-rail menu effectively duplicates the effect of clicking the panels; the one youll use most is the Overview icon that brings you back to the main screen. Emsisoft's combination of greens, blues, and whites gives it a pleasant appearance, quite different from the tough-looking slate-gray tones found in some competitors.

Scan Choices

Right in the Scan & Clean panel, without ever leaving the Overview page, you can click links to run a quick scan, a malware scan, or a custom scan. Clicking the panel itself brings up a page with clear descriptions of each scan. The quick scan scans only active programs, looking for traces of malware. The malware scan looks in "all places that malware typically infects."

What about the familiar full scan of your entire computer, seen in most other antivirus utilities? To get that, you choose a custom scan. By default, it scans the entire C: drive, which is probably what you want. The custom scan page includes several settings to configure just how the scan proceeds, but they come preconfigured for the best protection. Don't change them unless you know what you're doing.

A full custom scan of a standard clean test system took 69 minutes, just slightly more than the current average of 64 minutes. A repeat full scan finished in 24 minutes. That improvement on the subsequent scan suggests that the initial scan performed some optimization steps, perhaps marking known safe programs so they neednt be scanned again. Other products take optimization even further. Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition, for example, went from 58 minutes for its first scan down to just one minute on a repeat scan. To be fair, Emsisoft emphasizes the malware scan, which took four minutes, and the quick scan, which finished in less than 30 seconds.

I do recommend a full scan immediately after installing a new antivirus, to clear out any malware that may have taken up residence while you were without protection. Emsisoft does schedule a weekly full scan, but its not active until you open the schedule and enable that planned scan. You can also schedule other scans on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

There's one more scan you should consider. Clicking Emergency Kit Maker on the scan page gets you the option to create your own self-contained Emsisoft Emergency Kit. This is a standalone executable that you can save on a removable drive and use to scan other computers, perhaps ones so badly infested by malware that you can't install the full antivirus. This isn't a bootable rescue system like you get with Kaspersky or Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, but it can be a useful tool.

No Help From the Labs

Independent antivirus testing labs around the world have as their goal evaluating security products and reporting on how well they perform their essential tasks. I follow four such labs, and I'm impressed by any product that shows up in results from all four. Among these are Kaspersky, McAfee, and Norton. Alas, Emsisoft is at the other end of the spectrum. It used to have a toehold in the lab results realm, appearing in a single report. However, it doesnt show up in the latest results from any of the four.

For those products evaluated by at least two labs, I use an algorithm that normalizes lab tests to a 10-point scale and produces an aggregate score. With results from all four labs and an aggregate score of 9.9, Kaspersky Anti-Virus is clearly the darling of the labs. AVG and Bitdefender come very close, with 9.8 points, but in both cases the score comes from just three labs.

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

Mixed Malware Protection Scores

When I get no help from the labs, my own hands-on malware protection testing becomes vitally important. To start the basic protection test, I simply open a folder containing a collection of malware that I gathered, curated, and analyzed myself. For many products, the minimal access that occurs when Windows Explorer checks the file's name, size, and creation date for display is enough to trigger an on-access scan. For others, the trigger involves copying samples to a new location.

Like Cylance, McAfee AntiVirus Plus, and a few others, Emsisoft waits until a process launches to check it for malware. That means a bit more work for me, as I must launch every single sample. Fortunately, Emsisoft caught all but a small number of the samples immediately at launch. Each such detection resulted in a slide-in notification from the antivirus, along with a Windows error message explaining that the file contained a virus. A couple of items managed to launch but got caught later.

Like Malwarebytes and McAfee, Emsisoft detected 100% of the samples. Malwarebytes completely blocked all the malware from installing anything significant and thereby earns the maximum, 10 points. In a few cases, Emsisoft halted the malware installation mid-way and left some executable files on the test system, which pulled its overall score down to 9.7. Thats still better than almost all recently tested products.

Because gathering and analyzing a new selection of malware takes a long time, I cant refresh the collection often. For a look at how each antivirus handles up-to-the-minute malware, I use a feed of recent malware-hosting URLs generously supplied by MRG-Effitas(Opens in a new window), a London-based security testing firm.

As I go down the list, launching each URL, I usually find many that are already defunct, even though they're just a few days old. For those still viable, I note whether the antivirus blocks access to the URL, eliminates the malware payload, or simply fails to react. When I have sufficient data points, I run the numbers.

Emsisoft boasts two distinct defenses in this realm. The browser-independent Web Protection checks URLs against a local blacklist thats updated every 15 minutes and prevents all access by any browser or other program, sliding in a notification so youll know what happened. The Browser Security extension (for Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers) checks unknown URLs with Emsisoft online and diverts dangerous access attempts to an explanatory page.

Emsisoft's blog posts point out that Browser Security never sends the URLs you visit to the cloud for checking. Rather, it sends a hash of the domain, for comparison with hashes of known dangerous domains. There's no possibility of Emsisoft or its employees gathering a history of your web browsing.

Working my way through the URLs, I went a long time before seeing Emsisoft handle a malware download, because most of its detections occurred earlier in the process. When it did eliminate a malware download, it reported the event using the now-familiar slide-in notification, while the browser displayed a message that the download failed because a virus was detected.

Emsisoft blocked 70% of the malware-hosting URLs and eliminated another 7% during the download process, for a total of 77%. Thats a big drop since its last review, where it blocked 33% at the URL level and another 60% during download, for a 93% total. Very few recent products have scored lower than 77%.

Its true that the list of URLs involved is different every time, since theyre always the newest. You might think that bad luck handed Emsisoft an extra-tough bunch. However, I had this product and Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition up on the rack for testing at the same time, and Bitdefender defended against 100% of these URLs. Tested with its own set of new dangerous URLs, McAfee also scored 100%, while Bitdefender, G Data, and Sophos managed 99%.

I can only characterize Emsisofts scores in my hands-on malware protection testing as mixed. In the basic malware protection test, it made the top five. But in the malicious URL blocking test, it landed in the bottom five.

Imperfect Phishing Protection

The perpetrators of phishing websites don't need any malware coding skills. They dont try to steal login credentials. Rather, they rely on inattentive netizens to simply hand over their passwords. Phishing sites mimic financial sites, shopping sites, and even dating sites, displaying a realistic login page. If you enter your username and password, the fraudster owns your account. These sites get taken down quickly, but the criminals just pop up another one.

To test phishing protection, I start by gathering hundreds of reported fraudulent URLs, making sure to include both verified frauds and those too new to have been analyzed. I launch each simultaneously in a browser protected by the antivirus under test, and in instances of Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge protected only by their built-in antiphishing filters. Only verified phishing sites that load properly in all four browsers count toward the totals.

Here again Emsisoft brings two layers of protection to bear. The browser-independent Web Protection component blocks all access to phishing sites that are on its blacklist. And the browser extension diverts unwary users to a warning page.

Last time I ran this test, Emsisoft detected 85% of the verified phishing frauds. Thats not greatalmost half the current products scored higher. This time around Emsisofts score comes in at 55%, a very poor score.

After conversing with my Emsisoft contact, I began to develop a theory. While the Browser Security extension can block a known phishing site whether its secured with HTTPS or not, Emsisoft does not attempt to check the content of HTTPS pages. My contact cited a scholarly paper indicating that doing so can actually reduce security. Since phishing pages are so ephemeral, a truly effective defense requires real-time checking of page content. In addition, the number of HTTPS URLs in my collected phishing and malware-hosting test URLs has been steadily growing. The dangerous URLs run about one in eight, but more than half of the phishing URLs I collect use HTTPS. Its possible this trend contributed to Emsisofts low score.

F-Secure and McAfee both detect 100% of the verified frauds in their latest tests, respectively. Bitdefender, Norton, and Webroot almost make it to the top, each scoring 99%. These products do check unknown pages for signs of phishing, and the results suggest that this includes checking secure HTTPS pages.

When I write about how you can learn to detect phishing frauds, I always mention that if the HTTPS lock is missing, the site is probably a fake. It seems perfectly natural to me that fraudsters would make a point of securing their sites, to make them look legit. I will continue to recommend products that help users avoid all fraudulent sites, even these extra-tricky ones.

Behavior-Based Ransomware Protection

Malware coders are always working on new attacks, new hiding techniques, and new ways to sleaze past antivirus protection. If they manage to slip through a Trojan or a botnet that your antivirus misses, that's not good, but very likely an update will wipe out the problem within a few days. But if the zero-day attack involves ransomware, you're up the creek. Your files are already encrypted, and removing the ransomware won't bring them back. That's why many antivirus tools now include an extra layer of protection against ransomware.

Emsisoft's ransomware protection isn't separate from its general-purpose Behavior Blocker. Fortunately, Emsisoft doesn't couple behavioral protection with the regular real-time protection of the File Guard component the way Trend Micro, Avira Antivirus Pro, and a few others do. I had no trouble turning off File Guard while leaving ransomware protection active. Turning off real-time protection serves to simulate a zero-day attack that gets past ordinary real-time protection.

This tool's ransomware protection focuses on the widespread problem of file-encrypting ransomware. After cutting off my test virtual machine from the network, I launched almost a dozen real-world encrypting ransomware samples. Emsisoft detected and blocked all of them, identifying them as suspicious or dangerous based on behavior.

The ransomware style that encrypts your whole disk is much less common. Indeed, Emsisoft didn't stop my one disk-encrypting ransomware sample from bricking the test system. Fortunately, it was a virtual machine; reverting to an earlier snapshot restored it to full functionality.

As a further test, I configured a couple of the encrypting ransomware samples to launch at startup and rebooted the test system. Some ransomware detection systems are slow out the gate, allowing ransomware attacks before theyve fully fired up their protection. Not Emsisoft. It visibly got ahead of the threats, wiping them out just as it did when I launched them directly. Emsisoft also detected and blocked my very simple hand-coded ransomware simulator.

For another view of ransomware protection, I use KnowBe4's RanSim ransomware simulator(Opens in a new window), which simulates 10 common ransomware behaviors along with two harmless encryption behaviors. I don't zing products that fail the test, since its simulations are not truly ransomware, but passing is a good thing. Emsisoft wanted to quarantine the installer and the simulation launcher module; I had to rescue those two programs. After that, the simulator worked fine.

Emsisoft blocked all 10 of the simulated ransomware attacks. It also blocked one of two innocuous encryption-related scenarios, but that's not so bad. If it blocked your encryption program in the real world, you could just release the file from quarantine.

Overall, Emsisoft behavioral detection proved very effective against file-encrypting ransomware. It didn't stop a disk-encrypting sample, but remember, this sample along with all the others was quarantined by the real-time File Guard component. I had to turn off File Guard before I could even run this test.

Management Console Remote Control

Emsisoft's Management Console offers very though remote management. This feature is especially useful for those installing Emsisoft protection across a business, but it's completely available to home users.

Remember that workspace you created back at install time? Thats where you go to engage remote management. To start, you log into the My Emsisoft online portal, the same place you registered your license. Note that each login requires entry of a security code sent to the email address associated with your account. Once youve logged in, you have full access to your workspace. Theres none of the confusing license-transfer business that I reported in my last review when the Management Console was new.

Many antivirus products offer some degree of remote access. Webroot lets you view and control quite a bit, as does Sophos Home Premium. With Emsisoft, you control the applications full range of settings. If you can do it locally, you can do it remotely. You can even access the local user interface remotely, so everything you learned about that interface carries over. Launch a scan? View files in quarantine? Change settings? No problem!

For a home user, this complete remote management can be a big selling point. Now you can install antivirus for your aging relatives and take care of their security problems without driving across town. You can even lock local access to settings, disable confusing notifications, or hide such things as the purchase and renewal buttons. For the right user, this is fantastic.

Good for the Right User

Emsisoft Anti-Malware has received good lab test scores in the past, but it doesnt appear in any of the latest test reports. It earned a very good score in our hands-on malware protection test, and its behavior-based protection fended off all our encrypting ransomware samples. However, it didnt do well at all when challenged to defend against dangerous or fraudulent websites. The management console offers total control over remote installations, which is a great feature if youre the familys security chief. But in terms of basic antivirus protection there are better choices.

In the crowded field of antivirus protection, some products do stand out. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and Kaspersky Anti-Virus lead the field in test results from independent labs. McAfee AntiVirus Plus protects every device in your household. With its journal-and-rollback handling of unknown files Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus can even roll back ransomware activity. These four have all earned Editors' Choice recognitions as top commercial antivirus products. They all cost more than Emsisoft, but they're worth the the extra money.

Emsisoft Anti-Malware 3.5 (Opens in a new window) See It $29.95 at Emsisoft (Opens in a new window) Per Year, Starts at $29.99 Pros Excellent score in our malware protection test

Behavioral detection successfully blocked ransomware

Management console allows full remote management

Browser-independent blocking of dangerous sites View More Cons No scores from independent labs

Poor protection against dangerous and fraudulent websites in testing The Bottom Line Emsisoft Anti-Malware handles the basic tasks of malware protection, including ransomware, though it doesnt score well in some of our tests. Comprehensive remote management will be attractive to tech-savvy users.
HPs new Chromebook 13 offers some of the latest technologies that the company is also putting in its top-line Windows PCs.

The new laptop is just 12.9 millimeters thick with an all-aluminum chassis. It has a 13.3-inch display that shows images at a 32001800 resolution. That is the highest-resolution screen ever in Chromebooks, an improvement from the 25601700 pixel display on Googles Chromebook Pixel.

The Chromebook 13 weighs 2.86 pounds and is the first with Intels 6th-generation (Skylake) Core M processor, which focuses more on battery life than performance. HP claims the Chromebook 13 delivers 11.5 hours of battery life.

The laptop has 802.11ac dual-band wireless, 16GB of memory, 32GB of storage, a webcam, an SD card reader and integrated Intel HD 515 graphics. Like Googles higher-end Chromebook Pixel, the Chromebook 13 also has two USB-C ports for charging and connecting peripherals.

The Chromebook 13 has another unique feature: the Elite USB-C dock, which will provide expanded connectivity to ethernet, external displays and other peripherals.

The Chromebook 13 will ship this month with a starting price of $499. It is expensive compared to entry-level Chromebooks from Acer, Lenovo and Asus priced under $250, but youre paying for the luxurious features.

Chromebooks are popular, low-cost computers for those who do most of their computing on the web. Google is positioning Chromebooks as an alternative to Windows PCs. With Chromebook 13, HP has answered Googles call to upgrade the ecosystem with more sophisticated and powerful machines.

Others are catching up. Acer last week introduced the Chromebook 14 for Work, which is the first with Intels faster Skylake-based Core i series processors.

There are still questions, though, on whether the high-end features are needed in Chromebooks, which are devices in which the wireless network speed matters more than the processor performance. Most buyers opt for low-end Chromebooks that have entry-level Celeron or Pentium processors, up to 4GB of RAM, and minimal storage.

With the Chromebook 13, users will be able to view higher-resolution streaming movies, enjoy improved Google Hangout experiences and run multiple browser sessions. Google is also loading richer web applications that require more processor performance.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 28

Trend:

A resident of the Agdam district of Azerbaijan were killed, 8 people injured as a result the shelling of Armenian Armed Forces, the head of the executive power of Azerbaijan's Aghdam district Ragub Mammadov told Trend Apr.28.

According to the report, the victim is a resident of the Chemenli village of Azerbaijan's Agdam district Famil Mustafayev, who has been wounded in the shelling of Armenian troops and taken to the hospital, after which he died.

Among the seven injured, two are in serious condition, they are - a resident of the Chemenli village Ali Huseynov, born in 1966 and a resident of the Efendili village Elnur Mammadov, born in 1945. It is noted that one of the wounded got concussion.

All the wounded were hospitalized.
If youve begun limiting your Netflix viewing because your home is one of the minority of users laboring under a Comcast data cap, good news: Comcast said late Tuesday that it has raised the cap to a terabytes worth of data per month.

The bad news? You cant help but think that Comcast will soon be extending data caps nationwide.

In a blog post, Comcast said that the company had experimented with offers, listened to feedback, and learned a lot. In 2012, Comcast ditched its 250GB/mo data cap. Since then, though, it launched trials in Florida and elsewhere imposing a 300GB/mo capthen charged $30 per month extra to eliminate it. Raising the cap, Comcast said, was in response to customer demand.

As the world changes and the Internet evolves, so do we, Marcien Jenckes, executive vice president of consumer services at Comcast Cable, said in a blog post. Thats why we are making a major change to our Internet data trials and moving to a terabyte data plan in all of our trial markets.

Why this matters: The caps, the surcharges, and the impact of self-metered streaming on media-hungry families helped spur a Wall Street Journal story where Comcast officials were quoted as actively considering substantially increasing its broadband data caps. Comcasts move is obviously in reaction to that. The Journals story reported that Comcasts data caps currently cover 14% of its residential broadband customers or 2.8 million homes, mostly in the South. What the Journal didnt report, however, was how many of those households have access to a second broadband optionone of the reasons Comcasts proposed deal with Time Warner Cable was defeated

A terabyte is good, right?

Most customers consume 60GB of data per month, Comcast said. What Comcast called super users, who go beyond that limit, can still download 700 hours of HD video per month or 60,000 high-res photos That amount will drop considerably if 4K video is factored in, to about 143 hours at 7GB/hour, as measured by CordCuttersNews. (Thats about 4.7 hours of 4K video per day, by CCNs bandwidth estimates.) If youre a Comcast customer, you can check your data usage on its Web site.

But god help you if you go beyond that limit: Comcast will charge you an additional $50 per month for unlimited data, or a $10 charge for each additional 50GB chunk of data.

Comcast wouldnt confirm whether it will extend the terabyte data cap nationwide. Its blog post implies that those caps are coming, however. Were currently evaluating our plans to roll this out in other markets, well keep listeningand well be open to making further changes in the future to deliver the best high-speed data service to our customers, Jenckes wrote.

If Comcast does impose a nationwide data cap, however, it would potentially be at odds with the conditions imposed by the FCC on Charters $55 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, which contains a key provision: Charter is forbidden to impose data caps for seven years. Neil Smit, the president and chief executive officer of Comcast Cable, declined to comment directly.

Smit did imply, though, that he expects your cable bill to continue rising. I think theres pricing opportunity going forward as we continue to add value, Smit said.

Broadband is becoming critical to Comcast

Comcast reported first-quarter earnings on Wednesday, and the companys financials reveal just how critical high-speed Internet services are for the company. Comcasts Cable Communications business contributed $12.2 billion, or 65 percent of the $18.8 billion the company recorded for the quarter. Of that amount, $3.3 billionor 18 percent overallflows directly from broadband subscriptions. For some perspective, consider that all of NBCUniversalincluding NBC, the Universal Studios film studio, and its related theme parks, totaled $6.2 billion in revenue.

High-speed Internet continues to be the largest contributor to overall cable revenue growth, Michael Cavanagh, the companys chief financial officer, told investors.

Comcast said it is also working hard to ensure that its customers have access to high-speed broadband. Currently, 77 percent of Comcasts residential customers receive speeds of 50Mbps or greater, the company said. Smit also told analysts that the company continues to monitor 5G, which competitors like Verizon see as a last-mile, fixed antenna alternative to cable broadband.
Microsoft has partnered with a San Francisco-based company to encode information on synthetic DNA to test its potential as a new medium for data storage.

Twist Bioscience will provide Microsoft with 10 million DNA strands for the purpose of encoding digital data. In other words, Microsoft is trying to figure out how the same molecules that make up humans genetic code can be used to encode digital information.

While a commercial product is still years away, initial tests have shown that its possible to encode and recover 100 percent of digital data from synthetic DNA, said Doug Carmean, a Microsoft partner architect, in a statement.

Using DNA could allow massive amounts of data to be stored in a tiny physical footprint. Twist claims a gram of DNA could store almost a trillion gigabytes of data.

Finding new ways to store information is increasingly important as people generate more and more data in their daily lives, and as millions of connected IoT sensors start to come online.

Its also important for Microsoft, which operates one of the biggest public cloud platforms. Finding more efficient ways to store data could reduce its costs, and DNA-based storage has the potential to last longer than existing media.

Today, the vast majority of digital data is stored on media that has a finite shelf life and periodically needs to be re-encoded. DNA is a promising storage media, as it has a known shelf life of several thousand years, offers a permanent storage format and can be read for continuously decreasing costs, said Twist CEO Emily Leproust in a statement.

It remains to be seen what the results of the collaboration will be, but its a further step towards making DNA-based computers a practical reality.
A Murrieta nonprofit organization that brings art instruction to at-risk children is hosting a festival Saturday at Murrieta Town Square as a fundraiser and a way to bring more art to the community.

The inaugural Wishbone Festival runs from 1-7 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free.

The festival will feature art activities and demonstrations; bounce houses and games; food, beer and wine; raffles for gift baskets; and live music from, among others, Cole Criske from The Voice.

Local restaurants offering food include Bluewater Grill in Temecula, and Murrieta eateries R.J.s Sizzlin Steer and The Mill. More than a dozen artists will be on hand providing art demonstrations, live painting and art sales.

Each time somebody buys a piece of art they get a souvenir wishbone, said Christalyn Brooks, the festivals founder and organizer.

The festival will benefit for Brooks nonprofit organization MAD Hands, which provides arts education, art activities and art supplies to almost 200 children, mostly ages 12-18, who are either at-risk, special needs or child trafficking victims at facilities in Temecula, Murrieta, Los Angeles County, Orange County, Texas and Cambodia.

The acronym MAD stands for Make A Difference.

Several local vendors at the Wishbone Festival and area businesses are donating items to the festival or a portion of their sales to MAD Hands. Local artists Patti Paulsen and Jesse Mendivil, for example, will each donate or auction off a painting to benefit the organization.

The child-trafficking victims, Brooks said, have food and shelter but theres often no art on the walls. Her nonprofit group gives the kids an opportunity to express themselves and make art that they can keep. Creating art serves as therapy as well, she said.

It becomes a mirror of their inner self a lot of the times, Brooks said.

Her curriculum not only teaches the kids art techniques, but also about famous artists throughout history.

I focus on the psychology of the artists and what the artists pursued to create, Brooks said, adding. We try to infuse as much personal therapy as possible.

Brooks also hopes the Wishbone Festival will serve as a bridge for art enthusiasts and artists in Murrieta who would like to start some kind of a local arts council.

Brooks is an artist and also the founder of a related business, M.A.D. Studio Public Art & Gallery, which teaches art to children with autism and other special needs.

M.A.D. Studio currently has 17 branches nationwide, with 15 in California (six of them in the Inland Empire) and two in Texas. Each M.A.D. Studio branch is individually owned and run by different artists who share ideas with each other.

Brooks is now focusing her efforts on building new M.A.D. studios in other cities and growing the program.

Im more focused on building the structure for all the owners, she said.

Contact the writer: community@pressenterprise.com
The Corona neighborhood where the brother of Dec. 2 terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook lived was shaken again Thursday morning, April 28.

The brother, Navy veteran Syed Rahel Farook, his wife and her sister were all arrested on federal charges of conspiracy, marriage fraud and making false statements, a U.S. Attorneys Office news release stated. In February, federal agents descended on the home with warrants and removed some items but made no arrests until Thursday.

A blue Honda Civic and a white Toyota SUV that have been seen at the home in the past remained parked in the driveway Thursday morning. All was quiet after 8 a.m., but neighbors remained rattled.

Garrett Spencer said the Gallery townhouse communitys residents have seemed more tense since the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino.

On Thursday, he walked down the street just before 10 a.m., cell phone in hand, to see the journalists whod gathered outside the Farook house after learning the news on TV and hearing a helicopter circling overhead.

I was like, again? said Spencer, 46, who works from home and has lived there a year and a half.

Immediately after the attack, his wife took their two kids to stay at her parents nearby house for two nights after law enforcement descended on the quiet neighborhood.

Spencer has never spoken with any of the Farooks, but has waved back to Raheel Farook and his father and said they seem like nice people. They keep to themselves, he said.

He said hes been concerned about any possible involvement by the family because he has two young children.

Its a big deal, Spencer said. It wasnt small potatoes.

As neighbor Dane Adams, who live two doors down from Farook, prepared to leave for work shortly after 9:30 a.m., he said hed be surprised if Farook turned out to be involved in the attack.

I was just trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. To me, they seem so normal, so average, to be having this kind of trouble with the FBI, he said.

Neighbor Stacy Mozer went to the Farooks house shortly after 9 a.m. Thursday to talk and see if he could help them in some way. The 55-year-old printer said hes gotten to know them since Dec. 2.

Theyre great people. Nice people. Friendly, he said, standing on Forum Way outside the Farooks home. Good, good, good people.

Raheel Farook lives there with his wife, a 1-year-old baby, his father and mother. Mozer confirmed theyre all still living there.

Raheel Farook has told Mozer he didnt know anything about his brothers plans and that he himself was not involved in the attack.

Hes an ex-Marine, Mozer said. He served his country.

Farook told Mozer there was nothing he could do but wait and see what federal officials were going to do.

He said, What can you do? You just have to roll with it,' Mozer said.

Adams said he and his wife, Brittani, were shocked to learn Farook had been arrested without them hearing or seeing anything Thursday morning.

Im a little bit stunned, said Adams, 24. I thought this was over.

Throughout the morning, curious neighbors took walks past the house and TV news trucks.

After Raheel Farooks connection to the San Bernardino terrorists came to light, neighbors have said theyre glad no violence hit their subdivision that day.

She said the Farooks seem to have holed up in the house since Dec. 2. But other neighbors have talked with them or at least seen them outside. Spencer said hes seen the elder Farook walking the baby outside in a stroller.

They come and go like everybody else, Spencer said.

Alex Gomez, a 20-year-old communications major at Fullerton College, wondered whether the wives of Farook and Marquez were arrested after something was found on Rizwan Farooks locked iPhone.

Thats pretty crazy, he said. You never think its going to be your neighborhood. Its a little shocking.

Meanwhile, in the Riverside neighborhood where Enrique Marquez lived, some neighbors werent surprised that his wife had been arrested.

Ive been waiting for the other shoe to drop, said Robert Roberson, 68, who lives down the street from the Marquez home.

He appreciates that peace and tranquility have returned to the neighborhood where he has lived for 30 years. The violence so close to home has caused him to be more vigilant.

You never know whos living next to you, he said.

Phyllis Hoops, 80, who lives a few houses from the Marquez home, was stunned when told Marquezs wife had been arrested.

Oh my gosh, Hoops said. Its very shocking. Its scary not knowing how many people were involved in the Dec. 2 terrorist attack.

She said shes glad authorities are still investigating to find out if others are connected to the shooting.

In Ontario, the small complex of condominiums in the 2900 block of Plum Drive where Mariya Chernykh, wife of Enrique Marquez, reportedly lived was quiet Thursday morning. Marquez faces trial on charges of conspiring with Syed Rizwan Farook in 2011 and 2012 to provide material support to terrorists, including two of the guns used in the Dec. 2 assault that killed 14 and wounded 22.

Shortly after 9 a.m., no federal officials or law enforcement personnel were seen in the neighborhood. Many of the residents there declined to comment or answer questions.

Staff writers Stephen Wall, Ali Tadayon and Doug Saunders contributed to this report.

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Eastvale will begin working to change its election system so city council members are elected from geographic areas instead of from anywhere in the city.

The Eastvale City Council voted 3-0 Wednesday night, April 27, to begin changing the citys election system from at large to by district. Councilman Adam Rush was absent.

Under an accelerated plan adopted by the council, National Demographics Corp., the company hired by the city to study the citys population, will prepare draft plans for the change that will be posted to Eastvales website May 5. The first of three public hearings on draft maps will be May 11.

Council members made it clear that their decision was made under the threat of a potentially costly lawsuit that most likely would be filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The Latino civil rights group challenged the citys at-large system of elections under the California Voting Rights Act, arguing that it deprived Latino voters of the opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

Eastvale council members have rejected that depiction of the city and its politics.

Were a homogenous community, Councilman Clint Lorimore said at Wednesdays meeting. This is not going to be helpful.

Eastvale incorporated in 2010. Census figures show that 40 percent of the population is Latino, but no Latino has been elected to the five-member council.

Attorney Betsy Martin told the council she was not aware of any defendant defeating a lawsuit under the Act.

Martin added that the city could spend hundreds of thousands  even millions  of dollars battling a lawsuit only to lose and be saddled with attorneys costs for the plaintiffs.

The Los Angeles County city of Palmdale in 2015 agreed to pay an estimated $4.5 million, plus interest, to lawyers representing three minority plaintiffs who sued under the Act.

Other Inland cities grappling with the issue include Yucaipa, Hemet, Banning, Corona and Wildomar.

Council members werent the only ones expressing displeasure about the challenge.

This really frustrates me, community activist Richard Dickie Simmons said.

Simmons said he was contemplating a run for a council seat but, because he lives near councilman Adam Rush, he most likely would be in the same district.

I wont run against him, Simmons said. Where are my rights?

He described the threat of litigation as extortion, and advised council members against being rushed into a hasty decision.

Resident Josh Lee said he was opposed because dividing the city into districts would create an unhealthy competition.
City officials will meet with Corona voters over the next three weeks to discuss maps that could affect local elections for decades to come.

The city is considering a switch to district elections to ensure minority voters are fairly represented. In such an election, council members are chosen from geographic districts. Today, Coronas leaders are selected from anywhere in the city.

A city-hired consultant has drawn up three maps, each of which splits Corona into five districts of roughly 30,000 residents. Residents will have a chance to suggest changes at four upcoming community meetings. The first is at 8 a.m. Thursday, April 28, at the Corona Public Librarys Community Room, located at 650 S. Main St. The next meetings will be at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday, May 14, at the new Circle City Center, located at 365 N. Main St. The final discussion is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Monday, May 16, at the library.

Another meeting was held April 18 at the library.

Once residents have a chance to suggest changes, City Council will choose one map for the November ballot. If voters choose district elections, candidates must live in the zone for which they are running. District elections would not begin until 2018.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9644, poneill@pressenterprise.com, @PE_PatrickO
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is bringing his campaign to California and has picked the OC Fair & Event Center in Costa Mesa for a kickoff rally Thursday night.

The 7 p.m. event comes as Trump gears up for Californias June 7 primary, which could determine whether he reaches the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the GOP nomination in advance of the Republican National Convention in July.

Both backers and foes of the polarizing billionaire are expected at the 8,200-seat Pacific Amphitheatre, where the rally will take place.

Ive never gotten this involved in politics before, but I think we need to shake up the whole system, and thats what Trump is going to do, said Mission Viejos Werner Raes, a retired police officer who reserved tickets for himself and his wife on Trumps campaign website.

Ive never been to a rally, but I want to do everything I can to support him, he said. When the cameras roll, I want them to show thousands of people.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas  Trumps closest contender  has been laying the groundwork for his California campaign for more than eight months. By contrast, Trump has just begun gearing up his effort here.

The O.C. rally is part of a California swing that includes a luncheon speech Friday at the state GOP convention in Burlingame.

It was roughly two weeks ago that Trump hired veteran California GOP strategist Tim Clark to lead his state campaign. About the same time, he confirmed his attendance at the state Republican Party gathering, the last of the three remaining Republican presidential candidates to do so.

TEMECULA: Donald Trump supporters, protesters rally; no violence

Aliso Viejos Mary Young said she was named last week as Orange and Los Angeles County co-chairman for the Trump campaign and is rounding up volunteers and preparing to open an Orange County campaign office.

A pro-Trump super PAC, Great America PAC, advised donors Monday that it would conduct polls in the states 53 congressional districts to determine where to focus efforts most effectively.

In California, Republican presidential candidates are awarded three delegates for each congressional district they win.

Wednesdays announcement of the Trump rally came a day after the Anaheim City Council declined to approve, on a 3-2 vote, a proposed resolution condemning Trumps divisive rhetoric in the presidential race. The council meeting was preceded by a clash outside between an estimated 50 pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators.

Five people were pepper-sprayed during an altercation among members of the crowd. Three were treated at the scene and two didnt require treatment, Anaheim police Sgt. Daron Wyatt said. Police were working to find the sprayer, he said.

The Democratic Party of Orange County and Orange County Young Democrats are planning a demonstration at the Thursday event, writing on Facebook, We in Orange County do not agree with his bigoted and misogynistic ways and we will not stand quietly as he brings these views into our county!

The party asked that attendees protest peacefully.

Anti-Trump Republicans have raised the possibility of nominating someone else at the convention, if Trump has the most delegates but fails to reach the required 1,237 majority. If he falls short of that threshold, it would allow voting to proceed past the first ballot and delegates no longer would be obliged to back their original candidate.

That possibility has increased the urgency for the Trump campaign to reach the majority ahead of the convention. Californias 172 delegates  the most of any state  are a key prize.

County GOP Chairman Fred Whitaker said the party here was not involved in planning todays rally.

Unlike other campaigns, they havent called us to ask for assistance, Whitaker said. They run things their own way. They have their own event planners.

Asked if he was proud to have Trump appearing in his county, Whitaker said, Its significant that he chose Orange County. He said hell be traveling to Burlingame this evening for the GOP convention and will be unable to attend the Trump rally.

Reservations are required to attend the event and can be made on Trumps website, donaldjtrump.com. Doors are scheduled to open at 4 p.m.

Orange County Sheriffs Department Capt. Jeff Hallock said the department is preparing to deploy more than 20 deputies in and around the venue.

Well have another group of deputies prepared to respond on immediate request, he said. The additional deputies will be fulfilling their normal day-to-day duties unless an emergency situation arises at the fairgrounds.

We can double our numbers in a matter of minutes, Hallock said.

Staff writers Chris Haire and Alyssa Duranty contributed to this story.
In most places across the U.S., the upcoming wildfire season isnt expected to be as bad as it was in 2015, the nations top wildland firefighting official said Wednesday  but that good-news forecast doesnt apply to drought-stricken Southern California and other parts of the West.

A record 15,800 square miles, or about 10,200,000 acres, burned in 2015.

So where we anticipate the severity of the fire season will not be at the same level as last year, we still expect to have some areas that will be really active, U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell told The Associated Press.

Tidwell discussed the fire outlook four days before the federal government issues its wildfire outlook for the summer season. The Southwest, Alaska and Montana are all vulnerable, Tidwell said. Wildfires have already broken out in Alaska after a warm winter with below-average precipitation.

California  and to a greater extent Southern California and the Inland Empire, where the fire season is year-round  are at greater risk because of the years-long drought. The El Nino weather system brought near-average snowfall to the states northern mountains but largely skirted the southern half of the state.

Dense stands of trees in the Inland forests compete for a limited water supply while being besieged by bark beetles that kill trees by boring in and sucking out the nutrients, said San Bernardino County Fire Department spokeswoman Tracey Martinez.

Those trees, lacking significant moisture, burn more easily. Trees tend to die from the top down, Martinez said, increasing the likelihood that flames will jump from treetop to treetop faster than firefighters can keep up.

We have a lot of overgrowth and a lot of flashy fuels such as grasses, tree limbs and pine needles, Martinez said, which are the kindling for a larger fire.

Those fires can be abetted by Santa Ana winds that blow hard and dry out potential fuel for the flames.

Southern California also has the most urbanized mountain communities in the country, Martinez added. The Inland Empire is home to part or all of the San Bernardino, Cleveland and Angeles national forests.

She also noted that deserts are not immune from wildfires, citing the blaze that burned 1,400 acres this month along the Colorado River on San Bernardino Countys eastern border. And the 2003 Old Fire burned a path 30 miles wide out of the San Bernardino Mountains into San Bernardino and Highland.

Cal Fire San Bernardino Unit Capt. Liz Brown, during a training exercise this week in Lytle Creek, said the thick, dry brush and chaparral that fueled the Old Fire has returned.

But now were experiencing the longest sustained drought weve seen in years, Brown said. Therefore, the fuels are thicker, drier and are susceptible to flare-up with the slightest ignition point.

Tidwell said state and federal agencies need to thin forests to a more natural state to prevent fires and make them easier to fight. Some researchers, including UC Riverside professor Richard Minnich, say decades of over-aggressive firefighting have left forests dense with living and dead trees and more prone to deadly mega-fires.

STEEP WILDFIRE COSTS

Slightly more than half of the land burned by wildfires last year was in Alaska, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, which coordinates firefighting nationwide. Washington and Oregon accounted for 18 percent. California accounted for almost 9 percent.

The Forest Service, the nations primary firefighting agency, spent a record $1.72 billion on firefighting in 2015.

The overall bill for wildfires, including prevention programs and the cost of putting crews, equipment and aircraft on fire lines, is consuming a growing share of the Forest Service budget. That has forced cuts in forestry research, campground and trail maintenance and other areas, Tidwell said.

The Obama administration has been pressing Congress to pay the cost of fighting the worst fires from natural disaster funds, rather than the Forest Service budget. Tidwell said the largest 1 or 2 percent of wildfires account for about 30 percent of the costs.

Congress has not agreed to the change, but it did approve an additional $520 million for fighting fires this season, Tidwell said.

He said climate change is making wildfires worse, heating up the air, drying out forests and extending the wildfire season by an average of 78 days since 1998.

A growing number of homes at the forests edge, which firefighters call the wildland-urban interface, also drives up costs by forcing managers to concentrate crews and equipment to protect communities, he said.

Staff writer Brian Rokos and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Contact the writer: brokos@pressenterprise.com or 951-368-9569

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There will be . . . no blood.

No plucked eyeballs. No severed heads or split skulls. But Stacy Fraser insists her modern staging of Gaetano Donizettis Italian opera, Don Pasquale, at Cal State San Bernardino is inspired by Quentin Tarantino.

Inspired, specifically, by his epic two-part bloodbath, Kill Bill.

Ideas come to me at the strangest and most unpredictable times, said Fraser, a professor of music and a Riverside resident.

The main female character in the opera, Norina, is a clever woman, manipulating the men around her.

Norina is usually played in a coquettish sort of way, but I thought we could really bring out the feminist and strong qualities she has, Fraser said. I just started picturing her in the yellow suit of Uma Thurman with a sword.

A concept was born.

Don Pasquale tells the tale of the title character, an old bachelor who seeks out a bride in order to teach his young nephew, Ernesto, a lesson. Ernesto has refused a marriage arranged for him by Don Pasquale. Ernesto is in love with Norina. Don Pasquale doesnt know this and he announces that Norina is his bride to be. Conflict and comedy ensue.

Only in Frasers version there are lots of swords and martial arts combat.

I was part of the original adaptation of Don Pasquale set in the Wild West, Fraser said, referring to a San Diego production she was in 14 years ago. The director, she said, had Norina do her whole aria with a gun. I thought it could be fun to do it with swords.

Other characters besides Uma Thurmans Beatrix Kiddo crept into the production as well.

There is a scene where Norina and Don Pasquale discuss martial arts in the same way that Beatrix and her master, Pai Mei, do in Kill Bill. Lucy Lius O-Ren Ishii character shows up as the notary in the opera. And the Crazy 88 gang takes the stage as a dance chorus.

The staged fights will be done with prop swords.

Maybe next time, when I have the budget for a full-time fight director, we can use real swords, Fraser said. If I had a huge budget I could go really over the top. If I were king of the forest, I would have stunt people and all kinds of those sorts of things.

Including blood.

But for now, its cartoon violence. And there are other cartoon elements as well. The poster for the show features the actors as Japanese anime characters. There is a point in the opera where their images will be projected on the scrim of the stage.

Fraser said shes even hoping for a blessing from the master himself.

Tarantino is aware were doing the show, she said. Her costume designer, Jacqueline Saint Anne knows Tarantino. She made a point of telling him. He was delighted. He apparently said, Lots of black suits.

Fraser has not had the confidence yet to invite the director to attend a performance.

We have a rehearsal this afternoon, she said on Wednesday, April 27, and if its looking good, I may.

If she does and he accepts, she said, shell be floored.

Wouldnt that be something?

Contact the writer: mmuckenfuss@pressenterprise.com or 951-368-9595
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Armenia is playing with fire by violating the ceasefire, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, TV channel TRT Haber reported Apr. 28.

He said that the recent developments on the contact line of the troops once again demonstrated Azerbaijani army's superiority over the Armenian army.

Armenia is gripped by panic and fear, Erdogan 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.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
The longtime girlfriend of gangster James Whitey Bulger has been sentenced to an additional 21 months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating whether other people helped Bulger while he was a fugitive.

Catherine Greig already is serving an eight-year prison term for helping Bulger evade capture during the couples 16 years on the run together. They were captured in Santa Monica, California, in 2011.

On Thursday, federal prosecutors asked the judge to add a little over three years to her prison time for her conviction on a criminal contempt charge. Greigs lawyer asked for leniency and said she should not get any more than six months.

The 86-year-old Bulger is serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2013 for his role in 11 murders.
Its not news that San Bernardino and Riverside counties suffer from an acute shortage of judges. After years without remedy, its good to see a recommendation to do something about the situation  even if it looks as though it will be a slow process.

A state judicial panel sent a report this month to California Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye, proposing the redistribution of vacant judgeships from counties that are overstaffed to counties that need them.

This may seem a rather obvious thing to do. But if it takes the Commission on the Future of Californias Court System to figure it out, so be it. Were all for putting the commissions common-sense proposal into action.

Nowhere is the need for more judges greater than the Inland Empire. The most recent state Judicial Needs Assessment Report, from 2014, said San Bernardino County was short by 57 judges and Riverside County by 51.

In 2015, state Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside, authored a bill to spend $5 million to fund 12 new judgeships. His bill passed, but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it, stating in his veto message: I am aware that the need for judges in many courts is acute  Riverside and San Bernardino are two clear examples. However, before funding any new positions, I intend to work with the Judicial Council to develop a more system-wide approach to balance the workload and the distribution of judgeships around the state.

So give Gov. Brown credit for the idea to redistribute judgeships, and the commission credit for figuring out how to do it.

But it wont be a quick fix. The judicial assessment report says the Judicial Council should sponsor state legislation authorizing the council to reallocate vacant judgeships, and suggests methodology to accomplish that.

No sitting judge in County A would be told to pack up his or her robes and report to County B. Only when a judgeship comes vacant in a county deemed overstaffed  such as Alameda or Santa Clara  could that open position be transferred to San Bernardino or Riverside.

Still, it will ease the problem. And clearly, the governor wont fund new judgeships until this process is implemented. We urge the Judicial Council to act quickly on its commissions recommendations, and Sacramento to pass the enabling legislation. And then, find the means to provide the Inland Empire more new judgeships beyond the ones that might be redistributed.
Gunnery Sgt. Chris Willingham was in Finland when he got the news that the dog he had trained and loved for years had stepped on a bomb in Afghanistan and lost her left front leg in the blast.

Lucca, an 8-year-old German shepherd was deployed on a mission with her new handler, Cpl. Juan Rodriguez, and the two were leading a U.S. Army Special Forces patrol in the Helmand Province in March 2012.

Lucca alerted Rodriguez to one bomb and ran to find others. Thats when a second bomb went off, blasting the dog into the air. Severely injured, Lucca made a valiant attempt to get back to Rodriguez.

It was the end of a sterling military career for Lucca, one of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force Camp Pendleton War Dogs. Later in the year, Rodriguez escorted Lucca on a plane to Helsinki, where Willingham was on embassy duty and waiting to get his dog back.

Four years later, on April 5, Willingham was there when when Lucca was awarded the Dickin Medal, considered the animal equivalent of the United Kingdoms Victoria Cross and the highest honor an animal can receive for military service. The medal was presented at Wellington Barracks near Buckingham Palace.

The organization cited Lucca for her record of 400 successful missions protecting the lives of thousands of troops during her six years of service. No soldiers or Marines died on her patrols.

Luccas conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty makes her a hugely deserving recipient of the Peoples Dispensary for Sick Animals Dickin Medal, said the charity director general, Jan McLoughlin, who presented the medal. Her ability and determination to seek out arms and explosives preserved human life amid some of the worlds fiercest military conflicts.

Briefly back at Camp Pendleton after the ceremony before deploying again to the Middle East, Willingham sat in his office at the War Dog kennels and talked about Luccas service and how the recognition and publicity have brought greater understanding of the importance of military dogs.

There have been countless lives saved because of them, said Willingham, 36, who has served in the Marine Corps for 18 years. People have tried to replicate their work with technology but at the end of the day, you wont beat a well-trained dog team.

Military officials say dogs are the best line of defense for Coalition Forces in the Middle East fighting insurgents with improvised explosive devices.

Making a hero dog team

Lucca and Willingham became a team on April 23, 2006, when the 2-year-old became part of the 1st Marines military working dog platoon. Like all dogs in the Department of Defense, Lucca was trained at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

She had the most expression in her face Ive ever seen, Willingham recalled. You could see her eyebrows move. You could see her processing information. In 10 years, I think shes barked maybe 10 times. Shes a professional.

Willingham worked on bonding. He took long walks, worked obedience, groomed her and played with her. The Kong toy was her paycheck, he said.

Once our bond started, we were tough to beat, he said.

Lucca was trained to detect arms, ammunition, and explosives. She worked off-leash with voice and directional commands.

Like the dogs, handlers must be highly qualified. All are military police first and volunteer for the job. Marines are selected for their solid judgment, an ability to work independently and solid communication.

Most military dogs are are German shepherds, Belgian Malanois and labradors. They are trained in patrol, drug detection, as combat trackers and, like Lucca, as specialized search dogs.

Training pays off

The two deployed to Iraq for the first time on April 23, 2007 and were attached to an Army patrol. It was during the march on Baghdad in the deadliest year for Marines.

Their mission was to find and clear explosives along the Tigris River, south of Baghdad.

She searched and gave signs there was an IED, Willingham said. It was extremely validating to think of all of the hours of training and to think she found the IED where the Army patrol was heading through.

Then just down the road, Lucca indicated another find. This time it was a car rigged with explosives.

When you take a dog into combat deployment, you find the depth of the bond because your life is in their abilities and their life is in your communication, he said.

Separation and reunion

Despite being separated from Lucca in 2012 when he was sent to Finland, Willinghams thoughts never left his dog.

He spoke to Rodriguez shortly after the blast and thanked him for saving Lucca.

Rodriguez recalled this week that after the second bomb went off, he heard Lucca scream. He saw her fighting to get up through the smoke and ran to her along the path she had cleared.

Even though youve trained, when the moment happens it takes a different toll on you, he said. I grabbed her and put the tourniquet on and then carried her back to a safe zone in the tree line.

Lucca was flown to the Kandahar Province for treatment by Army veterinarians, who removed her leg. She was evacuated and sent to Camp Pendleton. Within 10 days of her injury, Lucca was up and walking as a tripod.

The best thing is Lucca still had the same spirit, Willingham said.

Rodriguez stayed with her through her surgery and recovery at Camp Pendleton. But he knew Willingham had planned to adopt Lucca when she retired.

So the two made plans for Lucca to join her former handler in Finland. Even the U.S. Ambassador there helped arrange her transport.

In what became an international media event, Rodriguez and Lucca flew out of Chicagos OHare Airport at specially selected Gate K9 on American Airlines.

It was our final mission, Rodriguez said. It was bittersweet. But it was genuine from the heart that I was able to bring Lucca to Chris. They had been waiting a long time. It was never a doubt in my mind, shed be with Chris.

Willingham, his wife, and two young children were waiting at the airport in Helsinki.

Willingham was nervous. What if Lucca didnt recognize him?

He got down on one knee to be at her eye level.

I could see them come out, he recalled. I called her name and she just lost her mind and came running to me. She jumped on me and licked my face.

Lucca lives with the Willinghams in Vista. Shes adjusted to retirement and makes appearances at local schools and community events. She also mentors the familys golden retriever pup.

Shes watching over the family now that Willingham has deployed for at least seven months to the Middle East.

While Willingham and others at Camp Pendleton are extremely proud of Luccas medal, it wont stay there. It will be placed in the Military War Dog display at the Marine Corps Museum at Quantico, VA.

This platoon has a great legacy behind it, he said. Lucca is not above it. She is just part of the legacy of all the military working dog programs.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2254 or eritchie@ocregister.com or Twitter:@lagunaini
When Jim Brulte became California Republican Party chairman in 2013, the state GOP was mired in debt and Democrats held a supermajority in the legislature.

Today, the party is debt-free and Democrats no longer hold the two-thirds majority needed to raise taxes. And the three Republican presidential hopefuls will be in Burlingame this weekend for the California GOP convention, which comes about a month before whats turned into a critically important June 7 primary in California in the race for the Republican nomination.

Jim Brulte has done a terrific job of fixing the state partys finances and recruiting good candidates, said Jack Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College.

Hes helped develop a strong bench of future candidates that reflect their constituencies. Look at the Orange County Board of Supervisors  three Asian-Americans, two of whom are women. He really gets what the party needs to do in order to be competitive in a changing California.

Brulte, who represented the Inland Empire in the Assembly and state Senate in the 1990s and early 2000s, cant run again for party chairman due to term limits; he was re-elected in 2015.

But that may change. Theres an effort underway to change the rules to allow Brulte to run for a third two-year term.

Brulte, 60, said hed be willing to run again if the rules are changed. But he warned the GOP still has a long way to go in its quest for influence in the Golden State.

When I ran for chairman, I told people I wouldnt be the happy talk guy, Brulte said Wednesday, April 27. We have to recognize the party has been in decline for 35 years  its not going to turn on a dime and regain the status it had in one, two, three, four or even five election cycles.

In recent years, the percentage of California voters registered as Republicans has fallen from 35 percent in October 1999 to 28 percent in January of this year. Democrats continue to make up the plurality of registered voters, while the number of unaffiliated voters has risen.

Democrats hold all statewide elected offices and control the legislature and 39 of the states 53 congressional seats. And Californias 55 electoral votes havent gone to a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.

Democrats see further opportunity in this years GOP presidential field.

California Democratic Party spokesman Michael Soller said in an email that Democratic voter registration is getting a huge boost thanks to GOP presidential frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

The California Democratic Party will be working hard to make sure the groundswell of voter interest in the June 7 election boosts Democratic candidates from the top of the ticket to local races who share our partys commitment to inclusion and shared prosperity, he said.

But California Republicans also hope to build on recent momentum.

They broke the Democratic legislative supermajority in 2014, and Republicans used their newfound majority on the South Coast Air Quality Management District to oust the districts executive director in March in a push for a more business-friendly approach.

The upcoming primary, which could determine whether Trump gets the delegates he needs to avoid a contested Republican National Convention this summer, has sparked excitement among Republicans, Brulte said.

You run into people on the street who typically never talk politics talking about the presidential primary, he said.

PASSIONATELY NEUTRAL

Brulte said his priority as chairman has been to get Republican presidential contenders to appear at the state partys conventions. He noted that in prior years, Rick Perry, Chris Christie, Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee  all GOP presidential candidates at some point  came to California to address conventions.

He said he convinced the party board of directors to move the convention from late February/early March to late April with the hope of attracting presidential candidates if Californias primary became relevant. It has, and now Trump, Cruz and John Kasich all are scheduled to speak at this weekends convention.

Trump will address a Friday lunch, Kasich a Friday dinner banquet and Cruz will speak at a Saturday lunch banquet. The order was based on when each candidate accepted his invitation, Brulte said.

Brulte declined to comment on the campaigns.

The candidates run their campaigns as they see fit, he said. The voters of California get to decide who to support and having me pontificate isnt necessary.

He added: Our job is to be neutral and I am passionately neutral and thats what the delegates expect of me. And Im confident that when the primary is over, Republicans will come together to beat (likely Democratic presidential nominee) Hillary Clinton.

One of Brultes challenges is growing the party in a state friendly to Democrats at a time when the national GOP is split between a more moderate establishment and a staunchly conservative and uncompromising tea party movement.

That schism was visible in 2014, when tea party favorite and Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly finished third in the primary, yet refused to back moderate Republican Neel Kashkari. Kashkari went on to lose in November to Gov. Jerry Brown.

Brulte has the unenviable task of convincing his fellow Republicans that they need to moderate their platform if they want to win statewide, said Shaun Bowler, a UC Riverside political science professor.

I think so far people have generally taken the view that they would rather stick to their views and lose. Brulte was for a long time a very right-wing, very conservative official at the statewide level. So if anyone can get that message across it will be him.

Traditionally, Riverside and San Bernardino counties have been among the most conservative parts of California, which gave the conservative movement a hero in Ronald Reagan. And GOP-registered voters still outnumber Democrats in Riverside County.

But there are signs the Inland Empire is becoming more moderate. Democrats have won a series of contested local races in 2012, from Raul Ruizs upset of incumbent Republican congresswoman Mary Bono in 2012 to Pete Aguilar succeeding retiring Republican Gary Miller in a competitive race two years ago for a San Bernardino County congressional seat.

Like a lot of regions in the state, the Inland Empire is seeing the same kind of demographic shifts that weve seen in other places, Brulte said. Demographics dont have to be destiny. But the failure of Republicans for decades to recognize and react to the changing demographics of the state has put us at risk for a long time.

TWO MORE YEARS?

An email to party delegates signed by Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes, state Senate Republican Leader Jean Fuller and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield praised Brultes leadership in making the case for doing away with Brultes two-term limit.

In the last three years  the party has gone from nearly 1.3 million dollars in debt to having a surplus, the party is vibrant with fulltime, year round staff, and we have picked up seats in the state legislature, the email read.

The building fund has been strengthened and a new, updated headquarters was purchased, data is being properly collected, stored and maintained within the party, and volunteers are being properly trained all across the state.

Ventura County GOP Chairman Mike Osborn, who heads the state GOPs County Chairmans Association, said he expects the two-term limit to be eliminated during this weekends convention. I think Jims done an excellent job, he said. I think he has a really good plan for the future.

Brulte deflected the praise. No one accomplishes anything by themselves, he said. The chairman of the party doesnt deserve credit for everything good that happens or blame for everything bad that happens.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9547 or jhorseman@pressenterprise.com
Last August, close to 100 people packed a room at the Menifee campus of Mt. San Jacinto College for a public meeting on the Holland Road overcrossing project to voice concerns and register opinions.

Those people, and their neighbors, will have the opportunity over the next four weeks to review data on the impacts of the proposed project and offer their feedback.

The City of Menifee announced this week that it was soliciting public comment on a state-mandated document called a Draft Initial Study with Proposed Mitigated Negative Declaration for the Holland Road Overcrossing project. The public comment period lasts through May 24.

Printed copies of the Initial Study will be available for review at Menifee City Hall, 29714 Haun Road; Paloma Valley Library, 31375 Bradley Road; and Sun City Library, 26982 Cherry Hills Blvd. It can also be viewed on the web at http://ca-menifee2.civicplus.com/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/1944.

The $20 million project would construct a four-lane bridge over I-215, providing a badly needed third principal bridge between the citys east and west sides, giving drivers alternatives to the heavily traveled corridors at Newport and Scott roads.

The project extends from Haun Road to Hanover Lane and the bridge itself will span I-215 and Antelope Road.

At the August meeting residents, many from the neighborhoods off Holland Road east of I-215, expressed concerns about noise, safety and privacy. The meeting lasted a little over an hour.

During this public comment period community members can submit comments or questions to Senior Civil Engineer Carlos Geronimo by mail at 29714 Haun Road, Menifee, CA 92586. They can also be emailed to cgeronimo@cityofmenifee.us.
A late-morning bank robbery attempt on Wednesday, April 27, sparked hours of ground and air searches in the Murrieta and Temecula areas, police said.

The attempted holdup was reported about 11 a.m. near Murrieta Hot Springs and Winchester roads, said Riverside County Sheriffs Deputy Mike Vasquez. No money was taken, and no one was hurt.

Sheriffs officials havent said which of three banks in the area was targeted, but about 3:30 p.m. a teller confirmed that it was the Wells Fargo branch at 38995 Sky Canyon Drive, which is just outside the Murrieta and Temecula city borders.

On Wednesday afternoon, deputies were looking for a suspicious person near Great Oak High School, at 32555 Deer Hollow Drive in Temecula. Vasquez wasnt sure if the search was related. The two locations are about 10 miles apart.

The high school was locked down for about 30 minutes  between 2:30 and 3 p.m.  while deputies cordoned off the area during that search, said Laura Boss, spokeswoman for Temecula Valley Unified School District.

They obviously didnt want students walking through their perimeter, Boss said.
A school bus full of students crashed into a car in Temecula on Thursday morning, April 28, according to the California Highway Patrol incident log.

The crash was reported about 7:10 a.m., when the bus was said to have been carrying about 50 students along Nicholas Road near the Santa Gertrudis Creek Trail.

Nobody was injured in the crash, according to the logs.
Researcher Chao Wang wants to pull a little bit of X-Men power into real life.

Im a super fan of Wolverine, said Wang, 32, a UC Riverside professor of chemistry. He can self-heal from any type of damage.

So can some of the materials Wang has created in his lab. For the past five years, the Chinese native has been making synthetic skin that can repair itself when cut or damaged. More recently, he has infused the material with tiny metal particles to make the skin capable of conducting electricity.

Wang said he envisions a time several decades from now, when such material might be used to cover an artificial limb and be connected to a persons nervous system, allowing them to actually feel their hand, arm or leg once more. The same material can be used to create artificial muscle, which could be used inside the prosthetic device. And, if either the muscle or skin were scraped or scratched or sliced, they would heal in much the same fashion as real skin.

Its trying to bring science fiction into the real world, Wang said of his research.

Wang is one member of a team of scientists whose work was published earlier this week in Nature Chemistry. That paper detailed a super stretchy self-repairing material developed in the chemical engineering lab of Zhenan Bao at Stanford University. Wang was working in Baos lab as a post-doctoral student before coming to UCR last fall. Hes continuing to work on such materials in his lab in Riverside.

Were trying to make polymers that are self-healing at room temperature, Wang said, showing off some semi-transparent gel-like materials mounted on glass slides in his lab. As he spoke, his lab assistant Yue Cao, a post-doctoral student, cut a small slab of the stuff in half with a razor blade.

The first such materials began to appear in 1990, Wang said. Originally, they employed a strategy that involved imbedding those materials with capsules. If the material was damaged, the capsules would break and healing agents would be released to repair a cut or a tear.

The problem, Wang said, was the ability of material to correct such problems was limited to one instance. Once the capsules broke, they no longer had any function.

The materials hes working with now are able to repeatedly self repair. Thats because the organic molecular chains have a strong attraction, leading them to re-establish their links after being separated.

The first such polymer was introduced in 2000, Wang said. The first version that could repair itself at room temperature was created in 2008.

Its very new stuff, he said.

Even so, some such materials already have made their way into commercial products. LG introduced a self-healing coating on its flex phone in 2013. Wang said Nissan is working on self-healing paint that would eliminate the anxiety of that first scratch on someones new car.

Such products, he said, are just the beginning.

In the future, I believe there will be more and more self-healing products come to market, he said.

These could be anything from computer screens to loudspeakers to transoceanic electrical cables.

Were going to make self-healing at much harsher temperatures like minus-30 to minus-40 degrees Centigrade and underwater, Wang said.

And then theres the artificial muscle.

Wang makes it clear that hes not talking about substituting his material for actual human muscle  at least not yet. What hes looking at are industrial applications. By infusing the polymers hes making with metal ions and exposing it to electrical current, he can make the stretchy material contract.

He thinks the stuff has potential use in the next generation of robots

Artificial muscle can be used for softer robotics, he said.

But not for people, at least not right now.

We are not going to replace human skin or human muscle, he said. How do you make it biologically compatible? How do you connect the artificial skin to the neurons? I think that will be a possibility down the line in maybe 30 to 50 years.

Until then  when Wolverines abilities might not seem quite so fantastic  consumers will have to be satisfied with self-healing phones, or wet suits or robots.

The possibilities, Wang said, as he watched the two pieces of material Cao had cut minutes earlier rejoining on the lab table, are only beginning to be realized.

I think its cool stuff, he said.

Contact the writer: mmuckenfuss@pressenterprise.com or 951-368-9595
The family ties of one of the slain shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist massacre sent the dead mans brother, the brothers Russian wife and her sister to federal court Thursday, April 28 as they faced charges of setting up a sham marriage aimed at keeping the sister in the United States.

Syed Raheel Farook, 31, of Corona; Tatiana Farook, 31, of Corona; and Mariya Chernykh, 26, of Ontario, all pleaded not guilty during an appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge David Bristow in federal court in Riverside.

The Farooks posted bail  $25,000 for him, $35,000 for her, secured by equity from his mothers house  and left the courthouse Thursday evening. Chernykhs boyfriend, who is the father of her child, arrived in court late Thursday afternoon to tell the judge he would post her $50,000 bond.

RELATED& Marriage fraud suspects appear in federal court

One defense attorney called it a stumbled-upon prosecution.

But Central District U.S. Attorney Eileen Decker said the arrests showed that investigators were committed to following all leads related to the attack.

Weve made a solemn commitment to the people of San Bernardino  all those affected by the Dec. 2 (terrorist) acts  that we will turn over every stone to identify those involved or engaged in some form of criminal activity related to the acts of Dec. 2, and the indictments today reflect the work weve been doing to honor that commitment, Decker said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Chernykh is married to Enrique Marquez Jr., 24, of Riverside, a family friend of the Farooks accused of supplying guns and explosives used in the San Bernardino attack. Marquez has been charged with conspiring to support terrorists, lying about the firearm purchase and participating in a sham marriage.

This weeks indictment alleges that Raheel and Tatiana Farook took part in the sham by witnessing the Marquez-Chernykh wedding in November 2014, then helping maintain the illusion that the two were living as a married couple  up to the day before the shooting.

Court documents say Marquez admitted he was paid $200 a month to marry Chernykh.

She entered the country July 2, 2009, under a three-month visa  long overstayed by 2014. The marriage allowed her to apply for permanent residence.

Chernykh kept claiming to federal agents that she and Marquez had lived in Corona with the Farooks. But in reality, he lived in Riverside with his parents, and she lived in Ontario with a man who fathered her child, prosecutors said.

Marquez, who is named as an uncharged co-conspirator in the new indictment, remains in jail. On Thursday morning, a man who answered the door at Marquezs Riverside home declined to comment about the arrest of Marquezs wife.

THE CHARGES

All three defendants arrested Thursday are charged with conspiracy that included lying about the marriage to federal agents and in legal documents. The conspiracy charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Chernykh faces four additional charges: of perjury, filing false document and making false statement to federal agent. Those carry an additional possible sentence of up to 25 years.

The next court appearance for all three, a status conference, was scheduled for June 6 in federal court in Los Angeles. Trial was set for June 21, but such dates set so early are typically postponed.

Chernykh also faces a second legal issue: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lodged a detainer hold against her. After she is released on bail, she is supposed to report to ICE for a bail hearing.

After the ICE hearing, U.S. District Judge David T. Bristow said, she must get an electronic ankle bracelet to track her movements.

Her attorney, David Kaloyanides, said in court that Chernykh has applied for asylum. He didnt elaborate.

NOT CONNECTED TO MASSACRE

Syed Raheel Farook is the brother of Syed Rizwan Farook, who with wife Tashfeen Malik opened fire on a gathering of Rizwans co-workers at the Inland Regional Center on Dec. 2, killing 14 and wounding 22.

The Islamic State-inspired attack was the worst domestic act of terrorism since 9/11. The Redlands couple died a few hours later in a shootout with police.

Defense attorneys for Raheel and Tatiana Farook said outside court there was a sense of relief for the Farook family that the government did not charge them with crimes directly related to the attack.

This case is not about the tragedy of December, said Dyke Huish, representing Tatiana Farook. He said the Farook family had suffered much for the horrible, horrible acts of another family member.

Neither of the Farooks attorneys wanted to address whether the indictment means the government isnt pursuing any Dec. 2-related charges against their clients.

I think you can make your assumptions on that, Huish said, based on the narrow scope  marriage and immigration  of the indictment.

Ronald M. Cordova, who represents Syed Raheel Farook, also wouldnt address that question You can make your own conclusions.

I dont think its selective prosecution, Cordova said. I think this is stumbled-upon prosecution.

During the bail arguments, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Robinson told Bristow that while the government believed that the three defendants were flight risks, the government did not consider them a danger to the public if they were released.

By 6 p.m., Raheel and Tatiana Farook had posted bail and appeared outside the courthouse on 12th Street. They left with their attorneys without commenting.

Rafia Farook also waded through a media scrum outside court while leaving without comment.

Apple and the FBI were engaged in a high-profile court fight earlier this year over whether Apple could be forced to help the FBI hack into Farooks iPhone. The case ended a month ago when the FBI found someone else to get into the phone.

Decker, the U.S. Attorney, would not comment Thursday about whether federal investigators found anything on the phone and if that factored into Thursdays arrests, citing an ongoing investigation.

Staff writers Gail Wesson, Joe Nelson, Anne Millerbernd, Doug Saunders and Beatriz Valenzuela, and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

RELATED

Why killers brother and two Russian sisters were arrested today

Live coverage, updates of marriage fraud arrests

Corona neighbors of Farooks brother rattled after arrests

Shooters friend was paid to marry Russian wife, affidavit shows

Complete coverage of the San Bernardino shooting, aftermath
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

Trend:

Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry has revealed another false statement of Armenia regarding the clashes along the line of contact between the troops of Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Hikmat Hajiyev, spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry, told Trend April 28 that Yerevan's statement about the damage done to civilian population and facilities in the occupied Azerbaijani territories, controlled by Armenia, is a lie.

"There are no civilians in those areas," said Hajiyev.

He said that as a result of the ethnic cleansing carried out by Armenia against the Azerbaijanis in the occupied territories, there are no civilians in the territories controlled by Armenia.

"We share the concern of the US Department of State and the Russian Foreign Ministry over the escalation of situation on the line of contact between the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops," Hajiyev said. "Starting from Apr. 27 evening until 04:00 (GMT + 4) on Apr. 28, the Armenian armed forces were firing at settlements, as well as the Azerbaijani army's positions in Azerbaijan's Terter and Aghdam districts."

"As a result of Armenia's grossly violating the international humanitarian law, a resident of Azerbaijan's Aghdam district was killed, eight people were injured," he added. "A lot of Azerbaijani public facilities and property suffered considerable damage."

"The intentional use of cluster munitions by the Armenian troops against the Azerbaijani civilians densely residing along the line of contact, has no military purpose, but is aimed against civilians," he added.

Hajiyev also said the Armenian armed forces' attempts to exterminate the civilians using inhumane methods are a part of the systematic policy of terror against Azerbaijan carried out by Armenia at the state level.

"Azerbaijan has warned international community about new provocations being prepared by Armenia," he said. "Armenia will be fully responsible for the response actions of the Azerbaijani armed forces taken to ensure the safety of civilians along the line of contact."

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.
A man believed to be an Apple employee has been found dead at their Cupertino, California headquarters, according to the Santa Clara County Sheriff.

The Santa Clara County Fire Department confirmed that they were called to the scene for a man with a wound to his head, but were then told to stand down. Audio form the Santa Clara County Sheriffs dispatch indicate that a gun was found near his body.

Sheriff spokesperson confirms person found dead in conference room was #Apple employee. No one else involved. pic.twitter.com/rLic0WGTo7  Matt Keller (@MattKellerABC7) April 27, 2016

There are mixed reports coming in about how many people were involved. Although ABCs Matt Keller tweeted that no one else was involved, NBC reported that audio from the Santa Clara County Sheriffs dispatch indicate that a woman who had sustained an injury to the head, possibly from a gun was escorted out of the building by security  two minutes before the dispatch talked about the dead body found in the conference room.

However, the spokesperson for the sheriffs office said during a media conference: Further investigation determine that there was no other individuals involved. We believe this is an isolated incident and that nobody else on campus or in the public is at risk.

Apple have so far declined to comment.

Source: Billboard / NBC.



Photo: ChinaFotoPress / Getty.
Were throwing together a mini-festival at Sydneys Metro Theatre on May 21, with A+ acts like Sophie Lowe, Polographia & more helping us raise money for Youth Off The Streets. Its gunna be a fucking great night, with all donations on the night going towards youth homelessness, and youre all invited. RSVP HERE to help us give back.

But  fuck  youve saved a lot of money in the process, an extra sick day for work and a whole lot of dignity that wouldve been lost balls deep in mud/shitty remnants.

That in itself is enough to raise your appropriately priced schooner to, especially when you can add a whole mix of affordable acts to be seen over the coming months to fill the void.

Enter the mini-festival  a coupla acts all rolled out in one destination for a fuck-off good time of live music and late-night hotline blings.

Heres whats coming to a venue near you, all under $50 dollary-doos:





PEDESTRIAN HELP

Close to our hearts is the mini festival were holding for yall on May 21, to help raise funds for Youth Off The Streets. if youre looking to give back, heres your chance, and you can have a banger of a night while your at it by partying to over seven different A+ Aussie acts all night long. (Oh, weve given #CasinoMike a big F-U for this one andll be kicking it til 3am).

LINEUP:

Amateur Dance



AUSTRALIA

Collarbones

DZ Deathrays (DJ set)

Gill Bates

GG Magree

LUEN

Wax Witches

Pearls

Polographia

ROOF



Sophie Lowe

PRICE:

FREE (donations at entry warmly welcomed, all going to Youth Off The Streets).

DATE & LOCATION:

May 21

Metro Theatre, Sydney, NSW.



TICKETS:



RSVP HERE.





RED BULL SOUND SELECT



Photo: Methyl Ethel / Facebook.

Add this to your calendar ASAP  cause its tomorrow friggin night and youll want to change your plans immediately to attend. The good guys at Red Bull throw together Australias fave emerging artists once a month for this spesh event, and this weeks a bloody doozy.

LINEUP:

Methyl Ethel

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever

FLOWERTRUCK

PRICE:

$3 with RSVP / $10 at door.

DATE & LOCATION:

April 29

Chippendale Hotel, Chippendale, NSW.

TICKETS:

RSVP HERE.

THE EQUINOX TOUR

Ya up for an all-Australia tour de force of home-grown heavy music? This will be the first time Northlane and In Hearts Wake have shared the stage since their appearance at UNIFY in 2015, and, with two extra acts on the lineup as well, youll surely have a severe headache from all the jerkin like an animate gherkin by the nights end.

LINEUP:

Northlane + In Hearts Awake

Hands Like Houses

Ocean Grove

PRICE:

From $49.90.

DATES & LOCATIONS:

June 10

Metro City, Northbridge, WA.

June 11

Thebarton Theatre, Torrensville, SA.

June 12

Festival Hall, Melbourne, VIC.

June 17

The Tivoli, Brisbane, QLD.

June 18

Big Top Luna Park, Sydney, NSW.

TICKETS:

Buy HERE.

ONE DAY SUNDAYS



Photo: Facebook / One Day.

Yknow when you stay in Friday & Saturday night and get so overwhelmed with your togetherness that ya burst out of the house on Sunday ready to really mess shit up? Yeah. This ones good for that.

LINEUP:

(SYDNEY)

DJ Adit (Horrowshow)



DJ Nick Lupi (Spit Syndicate)



DJ Tieklz



DJ Moto

Peter Gunz (Club Joint Allstars)

Franco (Halfway Crooks)

+ a live mural painting by Georgia Hill.

(PERTH)

DJ Adit (Horrowshow)

DJ Nick Lupi (Spit Syndicate)

Klean Kicks

Dupa

Veeness

Paul Ray Charles

PRICE:

Sydney from $15 & Perth from $10.

DATES & LOCATIONS:

May 1

Factory Theatre, Marrickville, NSW.

May 29

Rousemount Hotel, Perth, WA.



TICKETS:

Sydney HERE & Perth HERE.





SOUNDSCAPE FEST



Photo: Facebook / Soundscape Fest.



The local scenes best ~up and coming~ bands, DJs and producers come together for this baby to provide errythang from folk to techno at one of Sydneys most frorthed-over venues. You can also kick on to The Vic around the corner beforehand/afterwards, so theres that.

LINEUP:

Roland Tings

Sons of the East



World Champion



Winston Surfshirt



Borneo



The Kava Kings



Two Age



Mount Zamia



The Suins



Locus Cadre



The Realmers



Strange Associates



THIS DJs



Ando & Carbs

Mannx



Cripps



K-Rex



Louke

PRICE:

From $40.

DATE & LOCATION:

June 4

Factory Theatre, Marrickville, NSW.

TICKETS:

Buy

HERE.



SOFAR SOUNDS



Photo: Supplied / Livia Giacomini.

Hosting gigs in 200 unique locations around the world, Sofar Sounds has welcomed to the stage major acts like Scarlett Johansson, Bastille, The Preatures and more. The only catch? The lineup and specific location is hush-hush right up until you enter through the doors, cause sometimes its not all about a headliner, yknow?

LINEUP:

Secret  TBA.

PRICE:

FREE ($10 donations greatly appreciated).

DATES & LOCATIONS:

May 9

Secret location, Brisbane, QLD

May 19

Secret location, Perth, WA

May 24

Secret location, Brisbane, QLD

May 26

Secret location, Surry Hills, NSW

May 28

Secret location, Melbourne, VIC

TICKETS:

Go into the ballot HERE.

VIVID MUSIC



Photo: Facebook / KLP.



What a time to be alive if youre in Sydney from May 27-Jun 18. Theres over 89 music events thatll go down over the three-week period, plenty of which are available at a millennial-friendly cost.

LINEUP:

Whether its Vera Blue for $20, Kuka & Rachael Archibald for $15, KLP for $12 or even the BJORK DIGITAL Exhibition for FREEEEE, youre going to have get a music-filled bang for your buck thatll make you wonder what that unsanitary Splendour nonsense is even about.

PRICE:

From free to reasonable.

DATES & LOCATIONS:

May 27-Jun 18

Sydney.

TICKETS:

Buy HERE.

Even if ya went to all seven of the above, you still wouldnt have spent as much as you wouldve at Splendour (that bites your money trubs) In The Ass.





RSVP for our ripper PEDESTRIAN HELP event on May 21 HERE.

Photo: Instagram / One Day.
Orrstown - Carlisle man helps 9-11 - Coy[3].jpg

(Provided photo)

Climbing 72 flights of stairs is nothing to sneeze at, let alone climbing them in full firefighter gear.

But that's exactly what Carlisle resident Andrew Dormida and several other activists did as part of the second annual New York City Firefighter Stair Climb fundraiser.

Dormida is an Army Reservist and firefighter for Carlisle Fire and Rescue Service Company 45. He organized several fellow firefighters from the area to join Team Red, White and Blue for the second annual New York City Firefighter Stair Climb.

Dormida and the three members of his team raised a total of $1,800 for the fundraiser, which will go toward survivors with post traumatic stress disorder, as well as medical treatment and medication for people injured in the attacks.

"You feel compelled to give back, to show your appreciation and your commitment to continuing their legacy of helping people who need it," Dormida said in a press release. "That's how we honor their memory."

Each of the climbers in the fundraiser was assigned the name of someone who died during the attacks.
Details added (first version posted at 11:55)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

Trend:

Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry has revealed another false statement of Armenia regarding the clashes along the line of contact between the troops of Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Hikmat Hajiyev, spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry, told Trend April 28 that Yerevan's statement about the damage done to civilian population and facilities in the occupied Azerbaijani territories, controlled by Armenia, is a lie.

"There are no civilians in those areas," said Hajiyev.

He said that as a result of the ethnic cleansing carried out by Armenia against the Azerbaijanis in the occupied territories, there are no civilians in the territories controlled by Armenia.

"We share the concern of the US Department of State and the Russian Foreign Ministry over the escalation of situation on the line of contact between the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops," Hajiyev said. "Starting from Apr. 27 evening until 04:00 (GMT + 4) on Apr. 28, the Armenian armed forces were firing at settlements, as well as the Azerbaijani army's positions in Azerbaijan's Terter and Aghdam districts."

"As a result of Armenia's grossly violating the international humanitarian law, a resident of Azerbaijan's Aghdam district was killed, eight people were injured," he added. "A lot of Azerbaijani public facilities and property suffered considerable damage."

"The intentional use of cluster munitions by the Armenian troops against the Azerbaijani civilians densely residing along the line of contact, has no military purpose, but is aimed against civilians," he added.

Hajiyev also said the Armenian armed forces' attempts to exterminate the civilians using inhumane methods are a part of the systematic policy of terror against Azerbaijan carried out by Armenia at the state level.

"Azerbaijan has warned international community about new provocations being prepared by Armenia," he said. "Armenia will be fully responsible for the response actions of the Azerbaijani armed forces taken to ensure the safety of civilians along the line of contact."

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.
It hasn't been a good week in court for Bill Cosby.

On either coast.

While the Pennsylvania Superior Court denied the entertainer's appeal to have his criminal charges dismissed, a judge in California refused his attempt to have one of the numerous lawsuits filed against him dismissed, as well.

And at the same time in New York, a judge ruled against Cosby's efforts to force a magazine to provide access to their unedited interviews with six women who are suing him.

The Pennsylvania case

More than 50 women have accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them, but only one has led to criminal charges since many of these allegations fall outside of the statute of limitations.

And those charges are coming out of nearby Montgomery County.

Cosby is scheduled for a preliminary hearing at 9:30 a.m. May 24 at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown on allegations that he sexually assaulted former Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his Elkins Park home in 2005.

He is facing three counts of aggravated indecent assault.

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele filed the charges against Cosby late last year, but Cosby's attorneys went to the court saying Steele was prohibited from prosecuting Cosby based upon a promise made by his predecessor.

Back in 2005, former District Attorney Bruce Castor said he would not pursue charges against Cosby, allowing the comedian to testify without fear of prosecution in a lawsuit filed by Constand, according to testimony from a hearing in February.

But Judge Steven T. O'Neill agreed with Steele that Castor had left the door open for future prosecution should the need arise.

Cosby appealed the judge's decision to the state Superior Court, which on Monday ruled it would not hear his appeal, sending the case back to county court.

Cosby denies the allegations against him.

The California case

One of the lawsuits against Cosby was filed by Judy Huth, who claims the comedian sexually assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion in 1974 when she was 15 years old.

Cosby asked the court to throw out this suit, but late last week, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig Karlan denied Cosby's motion, allowing the suit to proceed, NBC 4 of New York is reporting.

"The decision is a vindication of our position that this lawsuit should be permitted to proceed to trial and should not be dismissed," said Huth's attorney, Gloria Allred. "We did not believe that there was a valid basis for denying Ms. Huth her day in court. We are very happy that the court agreed and we will continue to vigorously fight for a just result for our client."

In the suit, Huth says she suffered psychological damage and mental anguish through her life, but it was only recently that she learned this was "caused by the sexual abuse perpetrated by Cosby."

The 2014 suit is claiming sexual battery and emotional distress.

The New York case

Do you remember that cover of New York Magazine? Even if you're not a subscriber, it was all over the news.

Black and white, 35 women, dressed in black, sitting on stools.

All Cosby accusers, telling their stories - spanning decades -- on the pages inside.

Cosby's lawyers were trying to compel the publisher, New York Media, to provide unedited interviews with six of the women who are pursuing lawsuits against him, Reuters is reporting.

But U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe in Manhattan ruled against these efforts, saying Cosby's subpoena request "bordered on frivolous" and was "wildly inconsistent" with New York's press shield laws, calling it "a fishing expedition."
A cop shot and killed a dog as it tried to attack him in Columbia Thursday morning, according to police.

An officer responded to the report of two aggressive dogs running at large in the 100 block of South Fifth Street at about 10 a.m.

The caller told emergency dispatch he tried to get out of his vehicle several times, but the dogs chased him back into it, police said.

When a cop arrived, the dogs charged at him as he approached, police said.

The cop tried to run, but the dogs closed in on him, according to a press release from the Columbia Police Department. The officer pulled his gun and fired as one of the dogs lunged at him, according to police.

The dog that lunged at the cop was struck and both unidentified K9s retreated after the gun was fired, police said.

Several officers arrived and canvased the area.

The dog that was shot was found on a portion the 100 block of South Third Street. Its owner took it to a veterinarian for treatment, but the dog, which suffered several gunshot wounds, died.

The surviving dog returned and tried to approach the first responding officer shortly after he fired his gun, police said. However, it ran through a break in a fence a few yards away from the cop, police said.

Police are investigating whether the owner violated the Pennsylvania Dog Law.
Here's what you may have missed in police and court-related stories from around the midstate on Wednesday.

Investigation widens into 'adoptive parents' of student impostor in Harrisburg

Harrisburg couple conspired in straw purchase of rifle, feds say

Feds charge 14 with running 7-county drug ring

York County district judge pleads no contest to abusing powers of office, indecent assault charge dismissed

Cops look for person who shined laser at medical helicopter

DNA evidence helps West York police find man charged in 2011 rape

Pedestrian died of injuries after being struck by vehicle in Steelton

Police looking for man who took $1,000 worth of baby formula from Target
Police are searching for a 39-year-old man who reportedly assaulted an unidentified person in Middletown early Friday morning, according to a Fox43 report.

David T. Thompson, who could be armed and dangerous, assaulted the victim on Spring Street at about 5 a.m. on Friday, the report said.

Since the assault, Thompson has taunted witnesses and the victim, who required medical attention, police said. Thompson has threatened to kill them and burn down their homes, according to the report.

Thompson is described as a black male, about 5 feet 9 inches tall, 230 pounds with tattoos on both arms and a short hair cut.

He could be driving a Green 1994 Cadillac Seville with a black hood and spray paint on the sides. The vehicle's Pennsylvania registration is: HPM5740.

Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Thompson is asked to contact the Middletown Police Department.
Trump Putin.jpg

GOP frontrunner Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin just can't quit each other.

After the billionaire real estate mogul gave a foreign policy speech in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, compliments started flying from Moscow's Red Square.

Trump is "a brighter person, talented without a doubt," Putin said, according to CNN.

The ever-humble Trump quickly took the compliment: "I like him because he called me a genius. He said Trump is the real leader."

With the high favor shared between the two men, the GOP candidate said he hopes a Trump presidency would bring improved relations between the U.S. and Russia.

"I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia, from a position of strength only, is possible," Trump said, according to CNN.

However, Trump said the U.S. should be willing to walk away from negotiations if Russia is too demanding, the network reported.

(Got that Putin? Trump isn't into the needy type.)

In December, Putin was quoted as saying Trump is an "outstanding and talented personality" and "the absolute leader of the presidential race," according to CNN.

Trump responded to that compliment through a statement, CNN reported:

"It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond. I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect."
kids in a classroom shutterstock art

(Shutterstock)

By Stephen Herzenberg

The best way for Pennsylvania to grow its economy and expand opportunity for individuals is to invest in a well-educated workforce. Most Pennsylvanians get this and support investing in education.

Stephen Herzenberg

They understand that spending more money on education is a good thing, as long as the money is well used.

Some Harrisburg voices, however, including the Commonwealth Foundation, say that Pennsylvania already invests more than enough in our schools and students.

They suggest a high state ranking for investing in education, even in our global, knowledge-based economy, is a bad thing.

Perhaps they would also have argued against investment in rail and waterways that shipped Pittsburgh's steel and Philadelphia's auto parts to Detroit a century ago.

In the next few months and years in Pennsylvania, no issue is more important than lawmakers' getting clear that investing in education IS a good thing - as they did in Massachusetts under Republican Governor William Weld two decades ago.

When you add up local plus state spending, the gaps in educational spending across the 50 states are eye-popping.

The top 10 states spend two to three times what the bottom 10 spend.

Some of this gap reflects a higher cost-of-living in high-spending states.

Another factor is that wages for private sector college-educated professionals are higher in high-spending states.

To attract and retain great teachers and school nurses, public schools in top 10 states spend more.

But a huge part of the gap is that high-spending states such as Massachusetts and New Jersey value education more. Those in the middle and especially the bottom - such as Mississippi - not so much.

Think of it this way: high-spending states want a Cadillac education for children in all communities. States in the middle accept a Chevy.

States in the bottom are OK with a Yugo (one of the 50 worst cars ever), especially for low-income schools least able to raise funds locally and most dependent on state support.

That brings us back to Pennsylvania.

In the richest districts, Pennsylvania is a relatively high-spending state - 11th in the nation.

This reflects the fact that high-income communities, many of them outside Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, want a great education for their kids and can afford to pay for it.

In middle-class districts, Pennsylvania falls down the spending ranks a little. In the poorest districts, many of them rural, Pennsylvania falls to the middle of the pack - 23rd place.

That's well below what all our neighboring states, including West Virginia, spend on their poorest districts.

The main reason Pennsylvania ranks near the top for funding schools in rich areas but in the middle for funding poorer schools is the low level of state support for K-12 education.

This low support also means that Pennsylvania has the biggest gap in funding of any state between rich and poor schools.

Rich Pennsylvania districts spend one-third more on their students than poor Pennsylvania districts.

The state's abdication of funding responsibility to localities perpetuates Cadillac schools in rich areas, Chevy's for much of the middle, and Yugo's for the lowest-income districts.

The Commonwealth Foundation is fine with that inequity. Lawmakers and their constituents in lower-income areas, including Pennsylvania's rural "T", should not be.

In fact, as the number of good-paying rural manufacturing jobs declines, more robust investment in pre-K to 12 education should be the top policy priority of rural lawmakers.

The question of how much to invest in education is at the heart of recent budget battles in Pennsylvania.

Does Pennsylvania want to look like Massachusetts, the top-ranking state for educational achievement?

Massachusetts' moved to the top thanks partly to increases in state spending under then Gov. William Weld, who said "A good education in a safe environment is the magic wand that brings opportunity...It's up to us to make sure that wand is waved over every cradle..."

Or is it more important to hold the line on revenues, an approach common in southern states such as Alabama?

Another Republican Governor, Robert Bentley, described the outcome of this approach, in his recent state of the state speech, "Too many Alabamians are under-educated, under-trained...and unable to break the cycle of poverty and the cycle of dependence."

If we take follow Alabama's path, Pennsylvanian's next generation will have lower incomes and less opportunity. Count on it.

Instead, let's take the better path and expand access to high-quality education, strengthening the state's economy and creating more economic opportunity for all Pennsylvania residents.

Stephen Herzenberg is the Executive Director of Keystone Research Center, a left-leaning and policy think tank in Harrisburg.
DEHART DAM.jpg

By Josh First

When people at a government agency want to do something likely controversial with the citizenry, they announce their plans on a Friday afternoon, or during some other busy time when our attention is focused elsewhere.

Josh First (PennLive file)

That way they get to do what they want with a minimum of intervention or questioning.

This is happening right now with Capital Region Water, the public agency charged with managing Harrisburg's main water source, the 8,000-acre DeHart Dam watershed, which is located eight miles north of the city in Clark's Valley.

Until recently, Capital Region Water was briefly accepting public comments on its decision to unnecessarily "protect" the already publicly owned and fully protected DeHart Dam watershed.

The water company's comment period lasted literally just a few weeks, in the middle of one of the most contested American primary election seasons in history, and right before taxes are due.

Public attention has been rightly focused on political candidates and filing their IRS tax returns, not on watershed land management.

The company's public process appears designed to exclude as much of the public as possible, and so it has been shoehorned into one of the nation's busiest times in public policy debate, and then quickly shut off.

You call this an opportunity for public comment? It's not. It is window dressing. It is a show.

It is not real. The water company is not going to act on any of the contrary comments it receives.

How do we know that? Because huge issues were raised about this action last summer, and Capital Region Water brushed them aside.

The water company provided about one day of comment for every 380 acres of the watershed.

Think about how much effort and thought most homeowners put into managing just their quarter acre home lot. If it's publicly owned, shouldn't we be taking longer?

As we have seen before with Capital Region Water, its staffers and board members do not care about public needs or interests.

What the owners -- the taxpayers -- of DeHart want is irrelevant.

The elite insiders who run the water company as a private playground continue to make obscure decisions in dark rooms that do not square with the public interest.

For example, the firm's awful decision to place a conservation easement on DeHart could be called the environmental crime of the century around here, but it fits in with all of Harrisburg's other official malfeasance and incompetence we have endured.

Conservation easements are great for private land that can be developed into home sites.

But they make no sense for public land, which is by definition already protected in the public interest. Central Pennsylvania is awash in farmers lined up over hill and around the river to protect their farms, but they wait for years for scarce public money.

The millions going into this boondoggle project is utterly wasted; it could be used to protect a couple dozen vulnerable, scenic farms around Dauphin County.

Why is CRW doing this? Turns out, millions of dollars in valuable old-growth timber have been cut on the DeHart property, but we the citizens have nothing to show for it.

But CRW doesn't know where the money is. The last timber contractor declared bankruptcy and skipped town, owing who knows how much money to us citizens.

No one followed up on this story.

Somewhere, there are tell-tale political contributions that would shed light on who has the most to gain from this. But don't count on the political establishment to investigate that. It has too much to lose.

Josh First, a businessman, writes from Harrisburg.
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Baku, Azerbaijan, April 28



By Aygun Badalova - Trend:



France's National Assembly on April 28 adopted the resolution regarding the lift of the EU sanctions against Russia with relation to the Ukrainian crisis, with 55 MPs voting in favor and 44 against it.



French senator Nathalie Goulet called this a "very interesting strategy of the Armenian Lobby in the French Parliament."



Francois Rochebloine, one of the worst enemies of the international law and legitimate rights of Azerbaijan on Nagorno-Karabakh, presented in France's National Assembly a resolution to lift the sanctions against Russia, Goulet told Trend.



Francois Rochebloine, a member of the New Center party, earlier told RIA Novosti that the vote was called at Member of the center-right Republicans party Thierry Mariani's request on the grounds that sanctions were harmful for both countries.



"Asking for lifting of the sanctions is a confession of the connection between all illegal occupations in the region," Goulet said. "The link with Nagorno-Karabakh occupation is obvious."



Goulet added that Francois Rochebloine's support for the sanctions lifting is not surprising, considering that he supports the occupation of Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh region by Armenia.



The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.



The 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.
Lawrence (Lori) Christiansen was sentenced this week after admitting guilt for charges related to the distribution of heroin and methamphetamine.

The states case against Lars Christensen, who was also facing charges of two counts of Misconduct Involving a Controlled Substance in the 2nd and 3rd degrees, was dismissed in February.

Federal and local authorities arrested Lars and his brother Lawrence Christensen in January after receiving and handling a package containing 25 grams of heroin and 36 grams of methamphetamine addressed to their mother, Neva Christiansen, from the post office.

According to the criminal complaint, Lars told police he didnt know what was in the package but knew it was probably illegal. Lars admitted to being in possession of the package, the complaint states.

It was after police arrested Lawrence and Lars and placed them in a holding cell that Lawrence told police his brother didnt have anything to do with the charges against them

Lawrence appeared before Superior Court Judge Carey Tuesday, April 26. Some factors the judge considered were that the crimes were of a criminal commercial enterprise and that the drugs were transported into the state. He also weighed mitigating factors including the fact that this case was Lawrences first offense.

District Attorney James Scott presented the case against Lawrence and told the court that while its common to impose lighter sentences on young and first time offenders, Lawrence didnt fit that model.

you have a 63 year old guy whos not addicted to drugs who just wants a good way to make money and he knows theres lots of kids in Petersburg and young people that will use methamphetamine and heroin, Scott said. So he sets up a plan to import it under his 86 year old mothers name so he doesnt get caught. I think most people would say well that guy you gotta throw him in jail.

Scott argued that Lawrence tried to tie the noose around his mothers neck in an effort to assault his character and added that its possible some imprudent law enforcement officers could have used that to arrest Neva.

Lawrences defense attorney Eve Soutiere said Lawrence early on admitted his own guilt and that he never tried to use his mother to potentially get out of trouble. Judge Carey summed up what he thought about the claim.

If anybody in this town ever thought that Neva Christiansen was importing heroin and methamphetamine theyd be committed to a mental institution, Carey said.

Soutiere addressed mitigating circumstances and asked that Lawrence be sentenced with one year to serve with two years on top of that suspended because of the small quantity of drugs and because hes doesnt have a criminal history.

Second and I think more importantly is Mr. Christiansens complete lack of criminal history, Soutiere said. Hes almost 64 years old. He has no prior criminal history. This case kind of presents a defense attorney with a conundrum.

Scott and judge Carey disputed the claim that Lawrence obtained a small amount of drugs.

I am constantly dealing with young people in this town whose lives are being disrupted by heroinits epidemic and were talking about kids from so called good families too, Carey said. It runs the gamut and the harm in this community from the importation of heroin and methamphetamine is never minor.

Scott conceded that Lawrences lack of criminal record was remarkable and Carey echoed that comment and it played into his sentencing.

Judge Carey gave Lawrence and opportunity to speak and he said that he responded poorly to financial and personal problems.

I stepped into a realm I should not have stepped into and without really truly thinking about the damage it can do to other people, Lawrence said. I want to put the world of methamphetamine and heroin in the rear view mirror and not having anything more to do with it, and I can now see how wrong I was and how sorry I am for what I did.

In his sentencing remarks Carey added the case presented interesting issues because of the characteristic of the community, Lawrence and his original co-defendant Lars.

Lars is known in this community of having a long-standing substantial drug problem and Ive never heard of this defendant, Lawrence Christiansen, ever having any involvement, Carey said.

Scott earlier in the hearing spoke to the fact that he received three calls from Petersburg residents angry that the state dismissed the case against Lars. Lars has prior criminal history and if he had been found guilty of these felony charges he would have faced significant time in prison.

I know that the fraternal bonds, family bonds are strong, Carey said. Thats just my observation and it does provide possibly one explanation for what went down but Im here because Mr. Christiansen (Lori) has come forward. He did accept responsibility.

Carey gave credit to Lawrence for accepting responsibility quickly and the fact that he has no criminal history but he did express condemnation of how the crime happened.

The fact that this package was supposedly addressed to Neva is appalling and I echo Mr. Scotts comments on that, Carey said. It brings into question the family bonds Im talking about because no person should ever have done that.

Carey sentenced Lawrence to four years in jail with two and a half years suspended and three years probation, less than Scott argued for but more than the defense. While on probation, Lawrence is also banned from having contact with Lars because he is a prior felon.
By Pete Thomas

Authorities in South Africas Kruger National Park are investigating a hit-and-run incident in which a cheetah was struck and left to die on a park road.



A photo of the dead animal was posted Wednesday by Ralf Kalwa to the Road Ecology Facebook page, in which Kalwa described the cheetah as one of 3 siblings.



Times Live reports that the carcass of the sub-adult female cheetah was discovered a day earlier by a park ranger, and that the animal had been dead for hours.



There were no witnesses at the scene and the ranger alerted all the gates in that vicinity to be on the lookout for a damaged vehicle, SANParks spokesman Isaac Phaala said.

Rumors implied that a government minister might have struck the cheetah.



William Mabasa, another SANParks spokesman, said there were no ministers in the park at the time. On Thursday Mabasa's statement regarding the incident was posted on the park's Facebook page:

"These kind of things pains us as officials when people come to the park but do not want to behave responsibly by following the rules of the park, because that is where the answer to all these things that are reported every other day. "Our law enforcement officers can only do much because they cannot be everywhere to police every vehicle that is in the park from the time they come in until they go out. We call upon anyone who knows as to who the culprit is to contact me and give me information that can help us to apprehend them. "The story of the minister is not true because there was no minister in Skukuza yesterday or anytime this week, and there is no one in the OPS room who has that information. "This to us is a very serious matter, speculations do not help us at all to get to the culprit. I included my number here for anyone with information to call directly, 0828073919."

Despite strict rules regarding speed and proximity to animals, animals in South Africas largest wilderness reserve are sometimes hit by vehicles.

Times Live reports that in 2012 the driver of a delivery truck was fined heavily after striking a herd of impala  killing seven of the animals  while passing another vehicle at high speed.



The driver, a contract employee, was banned from entering the park for five years.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Seba Aghayeva - Trend:

France should suppress its local authorities' attempts of cooperation with the unrecognized regime in Nagorno-Karabakh, Jean-Francois Mancel, member of the French National Assembly, president of the Association of Friends of Azerbaijan in France, told Trend Apr. 28.

"Relations between Azerbaijan and France have always been at a high level regardless of which political forces are in power in France," he said.

The two countries had such high level of relations during Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency as well, and these relations continue today when Francois Hollande is France's president, added Mancel.

"There is a good legal framework between the two countries, and the political, economic and humanitarian relations between them continue to develop successfully," he said.

Meanwhile, it is not a secret that there is a very strong Armenian lobby consisting of around 600,000 people in France, added Mancel.

According to him, representatives of the Armenian lobby are quite active and seriously affect the French politics by resorting to electoral blackmail in this issue.

"Analyzing the situation, we will see that the French cities and local authorities that have signed agreements on cooperation with the settlements in the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan and providing support to the separatist regime there, are the cities of historical Armenian emigration," said Mancel.

He added that the local authorities of those French cities are mostly subjected to the Armenian influence due to the large number of voters of Armenian origin.

"Of course, a man is free in his thoughts, but if he is holding a leading position, all his actions should be within the legal framework and should not contradict the legislation," noted Mancel.

"Under the French law, the local authorities should not cooperate with unrecognized entities," said the politician. "As part of my activity in the National Assembly of France, I sent a request in 2015 to the country's minister of internal affairs to clarify the situation regarding the "charters on cooperation" signed between local authorities of certain French cities and settlements of the separatist entity created in the occupied Azerbaijani territories."

"The French interior minister clarified the government's stance and provisions of the law, according to which France doesn't recognize the regime in the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan," said Mancel.

According to Mancel, the minister said France has no relations with the people who call themselves "leaders", and any signed documents on cooperation between local authorities of French cities and the settlements in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh territory have no legal force.

Mancel said this official stance of the French government was included in a circular signed by the country's foreign and interior ministers July 2, 2015, and sent to all the regions for the French mayors to get familiarized with it.

"France has good relations with both countries - Azerbaijan and Armenia. France is a co-chairing country of the OSCE Minsk Group and has international commitments, but such an illegal activity of its local authorities is contrary to the country's stance on the conflict," he added.

"I admit that the French politics has some shortcomings, mistakes. This is a result of the Armenian lobby's influence on the French politicians," he further said.

Mancel added that France should take a more active stance in resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, use its influence on Armenia, force it to negotiate, demand it to fulfil the UN Security Council's resolutions, and first of all, to withdraw from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.
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.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

Trend:

Armenian armed units, stationed in Azerbaijan's occupied lands, continued the aggression and once again shelled the territories populated by civilians and the positions of the Azerbaijani armed forces along the frontline, thereby grossly violating the international humanitarian law, reads a message from the Azerbaijani Prosecutor General's Office, issued Apr. 28.

Armenian armed forces shelled the Aghdam and Terter districts from Azerbaijan's occupied territories on Apr. 27-28 using artillery and large-caliber weapons, and staged a provocation to deliberately kill civilians and destroy the property owned by citizens.

As a result, Famil Mustafayev, a resident of Chamanli village of the Aghdam district was killed, while 6 residents of the Chamanli, Garadaghli and Afetli villages were wounded.

The health condition of one of the wounded is critical.

Dozens of houses, a secondary school and other social facilities were destroyed, while private farms and property of the population were seriously damaged in the mentioned settlements, as well as in the villages of Gapanli, Hasangaya, Gaziyan and Gaynag of Azerbaijan's Terter district.

The prosecutor's offices in the Aghdam and Terter districts have initiated criminal cases upon the abovementioned facts.

An investigation is underway.

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, April 28

Trend:

The delegation headed by Azerbaijani Minister of Defense Industry Yaver Jamalov on April 26-27 paid a visit to Pakistan to participate in the 6th session of Azerbaijan-Pakistan Intergovernmental Commission on economic cooperation, The News reported.

During the visit Azerbaijan's minister was received by Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain and Pakistani Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif.

At a meeting with the prime minister Nawaq Sharif Jamalov said Azerbaijan was keen to explore new opportunities to import defense products and raw material from Pakistan. He extended invitation for Pakistan's participation in the International Defense Exhibition being organised by Azerbaijan in September, with special reference to the JF-17 Thunder.

President Mamnoon Hussain sought greater cooperation between Pakistan and Azerbaijan in energy, defense and communication sectors for the mutual benefit of the two friendly countries. He said the two countries should make coordinated efforts to increase the bilateral trade.

Mamnoon added that the current trade volume between the two countries was below potential and emphasised the need to enhance it through joint efforts. He hoped that the 6th session of the Azerbaijani-Pakistani Intergovernmental Commission would be helpful in enhancing bilateral trade.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

Trend:

Holding the 7th Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) in Baku was very important, as Azerbaijan got an opportunity to show the world its multicultural and tolerant identity and its successful model of peaceful coexistence of different religions and ethnic groups.

The Forum, held in the Azerbaijani capital on Apr. 25-27, was in the limelight of expert discussions held by the Baku International Policy and Security Network think tank.

The participants of the discussions, moderated by Elkhan Alasgarov, PhD, head of the Baku Network's expert council, were Tamerlan Vahabov, a politics and international relations expert, Sevil Mikayilova, editor-in-chief of Azernews newspaper, and Aynur Gasimova, deputy editor-in-chief of the Trend Agency.

The experts said it is very important that the Forum has taken place in Azerbaijan, which is a Muslim country, and it is a very good moment to show the world that a Muslim country can be tolerant and embrace the principles and values of coexistence.

During the discussions, it was noted that being a Muslim majority country, Azerbaijan is a home to a big Jewish community, to Catholics, Protestants and members of the Russian Orthodox church.

Recalling that 2016 was announced the Year of Multiculturalism in Azerbaijan, the experts said multiculturalism is a state policy in the country, what has made Baku an ideal place for holding the 7th UNAOC Global Forum.

The participants of the discussions noted that the Forum brought together a lot of prominent politicians and experts from all over the world, who had an opportunity to discuss very pressing and important topics and challenges.

They also expressed hope that the Forum will send a very important message to the world about stopping conflicts, violence and terror.

http://bakunetwork.com

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After leaving Philadelphia , Willie L. Williams took charge of the Los Angeles Police Department. NICK UT / Associated Press Read more

Willie L. Williams, 72, an Overbrook native who became the first African American to head the Philadelphia and Los Angeles Police Departments and a major figure in law enforcement in the 1990s, died Tuesday night at his home in Fayetteville, Ga.

Mr. Williams' sister-in-law Pat Odoms said pancreatic cancer was the cause.

Mr. Williams, who began his career in 1964 as a Fairmount Park guard, was appointed Philadelphia's police commissioner in 1988 and served for four years. He earned widespread praise for improving police-community relations, increasing diversity in the upper ranks, and decentralizing the department.

In 1992, he was recruited to become the chief of Los Angeles' 8,000-officer department - the second largest in the United States, and plagued at the time by brutality, racism, and mismanagement. Just weeks before Mr. Williams took over, riots erupted after four police officers were acquitted of excessive force in the violent arrest of Rodney King.

Mr. Williams left the LAPD in 1997 after clashing with other city officials. He later became federal security director at Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport, the nation's busiest airport.

Police Commissioner Richard Ross, who met Mr. Williams as a rookie officer in 1989, said he "paved the way for a lot of people who served alongside him, people who were my predecessors," including Commissioners Richard Neal and Sylvester M. Johnson.

"There were young officers who realized that as a result of his achievements, it was possible for us to do [something] similar," Ross said.

Former Mayor W. Wilson Goode Sr., who appointed Mr. Williams, said Wednesday that he was "a humble man, a very intelligent and streetwise man who had tremendous interpersonal skills."

"He occupies a very, very special place in the history of this city, and will go down in history, in my book, as one of the best police commissioners this city has ever seen," Goode said.

Willie Lawrence Williams was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 1, 1943. The son of a carpenter who also worked as a meat-packer, he was the oldest of seven children raised in the Overbrook section.

As a child, Mr. Williams helped out at a grocery store, and had a paper route delivering the Daily News and the Evening Bulletin. He graduated from Overbook High School, and later earned an associate's degree in business administration from the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science.

On Feb. 10, 1964, Mr. Williams became a Fairmount Park guard. After the park police were merged with the city's police department, Mr. Williams quickly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming deputy commissioner and a protege of Commissioner Kevin M. Tucker.

In 1988, at Tucker's recommendation, Goode appointed Mr. Williams to lead the department when Tucker took an executive position at PNC Bank.

The appointment was met with enthusiasm from senior officials as well as the rank and file. Goode said Wednesday that he had worked with Tucker for several years to prepare more black officers to be ready for the top job, and that Mr. Williams was "perfect" for the role when the time came.

During Mr. Williams' tenure, he established mini-police stations in neighborhoods to decentralize the department, and doubled the number of black officers with the rank of captain or inspector. He also worked to fortify police-community relations, which had become strained by instances of excessive force in the 1980s.

Mr. Williams learned the importance of such relationships while working in the 22nd District in North Philadelphia, he said in a 1991 interview. "I walked up to Ridge and Columbia, and went into each store and introduced myself. I talked to the people and got to know them," he said. "That's when I learned that you have got to get out and meet with people."

Former Mayor Ed Rendell said Wednesday that he retained Mr. Williams as commissioner after being elected in 1992 because of Mr. Williams' strong reputation across the city.

Mr. Williams "bridged a gap that was omnipresent for years and years, [with] minority communities thinking the police were not their friends," Rendell said.

Rendell said Mr. Williams' bond with African American communities was evident after the riots in 1992 following the King verdict. As violence erupted in cities across the country, Rendell asked Philadelphia clergy to remind residents that such brutality had not occurred under Mr. Williams' leadership.

"That day and that night, when most cities burned, we had less violence" than the same date a year earlier, Rendell said. "I attribute that all to the relationship that Commissioner Williams had with the African American community."

Just a few weeks after those riots, Mr. Williams left Philadelphia to become chief of the LAPD. He had accepted the position before the riots, but navigating the aftermath became a central pillar of his administration in Los Angeles.

He managed to increase the size of the department, and implemented some community policing initiatives similar to those he achieved in Philadelphia.

But another constant of his tenure was discord with other city officials.

He frequently clashed with the City Council and with Mayor Richard Riordan, who took office a year after Mr. Williams. In 1997, after five years as chief, Mr. Williams accepted a $375,000 severance package to retire before the end of his contract, which the city's civilian Police Commission had declined to renew.

In 2002, Mr. Williams was appointed to oversee security at Atlanta's airport. Odoms, his sister-in-law, said he had retired several years ago and was living in Fayetteville, outside Atlanta, with Evelina, his wife of 49 years.

In 1996, Mr. Williams published a book, Taking Back Our Streets: Fighting Crime in America, with coauthor Bruce B. Henderson.

He served as president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives in 1991-92.

Even after he moved from the city, Mr. Williams maintained his tie with Philadelphia: One of his three children, Willie Williams III, is a lieutenant on Mayor Kenney's security detail.

In an interview Wednesday, the younger Williams described his father as a calm, thoughtful man who taught him to view policing as a service rather than a job.

"He was just a constant, steady force," he said.

John McNesby, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, said Wednesday that the younger Williams "had a very good teacher in his father."

"There are highly respected bosses out there," McNesby said, "and Willie Williams was one of them."

In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Williams is survived by a daughter, Lisa; another son, Eric; two brothers; two sisters; his mother, Helen S.; and nieces, nephews, and grandchildren, Odoms said.

Funeral services were being arranged Wednesday.

cpalmer@phillynews.com

215-854-2817@cs_palmer
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

Trend:

Armenian armed forces are targeting civilian population of Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani defense ministry told Trend Apr. 28.

Starting from April 27 evening until 04:00 (GMT + 4 hours) on April 28, Armenian armed forces fired at settlements in Azerbaijan's Terter and Aghdam districts using large-caliber mortars and D-30 howitzers, according to the ministry.

"Azerbaijani armed forces carried out retaliatory strikes only on Armenia's military facilities," the defense ministry said. "The situation on the contact line between Armenian and Azerbaijani armies is stable, and Azerbaijani armed forces fully control the operational situation."

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. 28

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

Malta's Foreign Minister George Vella will visit Azerbaijan Apr. 29, said Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry.

Vella is expected to meet with Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov during his visit. The sides will discuss the prospects for bilateral cooperation.

Trade turnover between Malta and Azerbaijan amounted to $142 million in 2015, and almost the entire amount accounted for the exports to Malta, according to Azerbaijan's State Customs Committee.

Azerbaijan's trade turnover with Malta totaled almost $13.3 million in the first quarter of 2016, which is almost twice more than in January-March 2015.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

Trend:

Ali Hasanov, the Azerbaijani president's aide for public and political affairs, expressed regret regarding idleness of international organizations in connection with the latest developments on the contact line of the country's and Armenian troops.

The OSCE Minsk Group, which is directly involved in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict's settlement, as well as this group's member states didn't express any attitude regarding the heavy shelling of Azerbaijani settlements by Armenian armed forces and the civilians killed as a result of it, Hasanov told Trend Apr. 28.

Starting from April 27 evening until 04:00 (GMT + 4 hours) on April 28, Armenian armed forces opened fire at settlements, as well as Azerbaijani army's positions in the country's Terter and Aghdam districts. Armenian military was using 60, 82 and 120-millimeter mortars, as well as 122-millimeter D-30 howitzers.

One resident of Azerbaijan's Aghdam district was killed, and eight people got injured as a result of shelling.

An adequate response of the Azerbaijani armed forces on consistent provocations of the Armenian army in early April and as a result of this, the liberation of some territories under occupation, caused a rapid response of most international organizations and individual countries, Hasanov 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.

There were calls to suspend military operations and restore the ceasefire in all appeals and statements, said Hasanov.

The silence of these structures in the current situation gives grounds to say that the international organizations, especially the OSCE Minsk Group, directed all efforts at ensuring the safety of the separatist regime in Azerbaijan's occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region and war criminals who are this regime's leaders, as well as preserving the status quo in the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Hasanov said.

"I think that double standards are applied against Azerbaijan in the most blatant form," he said. "Disrespect is demonstrated to the people of Azerbaijan, international law and the principles of justice."

Hasanov went on to add that the international community, the OSCE and other organizations should take decisive measures in order to put an end to these actions by Armenia against Azerbaijani civilians.

Azerbaijan isn't going to tolerate regular provocations by Armenian leadership and the armed forces of this country, as well as the destruction of settlements, killing of civilians, said Hasanov.

If the international community continues to remain silent, Azerbaijan will have to take decisive measures to protect the civilian population and put an end to provocations, he said. From now on, the responsibility for this situation will lie directly on Armenia and those who turn a blind eye to its provocations, Hasanov said.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 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.
Residents of the Ashaghi-Atuj community of Guba district gathered to celebrate the completion of a project to improve the heating system at the local school. They were joined by the representatives of the local Executive Committee and municipality, officials from the Ministry of Economy, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The project was implemented by the East-West Management Institute (EWMI) under the Socio-Economic Development Activity (SEDA) co-financed by the governments of the United States and Azerbaijan.

The school was built in 1990 and has relied on outdated heating systems, including electric ovens and wood stoves for years, exposing children to toxic fumes and fire hazards. This affected the students' health, their attentiveness to lessons, and their winter attendance.

With support from EWMI/SEDA, the community residents worked with their local and regional governments to construct a separate boiler room and install 37 radiators, which now provide a safe and warm classroom environment to 340 children and nearly 40 teachers.

To date, EWMI/SEDA has provided more than $1.4 million in funding for 69 projects in 61 communities benefiting more than 94,000 people around Azerbaijan. EWMI/SEDA promotes fuller participation of citizens, civil society organizations and local and central government officials to advance socio-economic development. The project is funded by USAID and implemented with support from the Ministry of Economy and the Council for State Support to Non-Governmental Organizations and with assistance from a local non-governmental organization, UMID.
SRAM's 12-speed Eagle proves that a one-by drivetrain can match or better the range of a multiple-chainring transmission, which in turn, has doused any hopes that the front derailleur's smoldering embers will ever be rekindled. Eagle was a must for the Chicago-based parts maker, because its premier XX1 ensemble could not match the range of Shimano's sharp-shifting two-by drivetrains, and descriptors like "virtually," "similar to," or "nearly," are not the vocabulary of a winning team. The addition of a 50-tooth cog to its 10 by 42, eleven-speed cassette provides a 500-percent gearing spread, which exceeds Shimano XTR and XT's ranges and thus, should silence all doubters, even the staunchest two-by holdouts in Germany. That twelfth cog, however, may have consequences that reach beyond range and MSRP.

SRAM's Eagle 12-speed

Shimano will be forced to respond, at least with a larger cassette cog, and we anticipate they will also jump to 12-speed as well. Shimano will offer a 46-tooth option and, because their present cassette design restricts their smallest cog to an 11-tooth, barring a new driver design, there is nowhere for Shimano to go except for up. Shimano fans who do not want to wait for the next iteration of XTR can jump ahead of Japan and purchase OneUp's Shark kit, which updates the cassette to a 10 by 50 to equal the range of SRAM's Eagle, and it updates the rear mech with a longer cage in order to handle the extra chain and new cog diameters.



The bottom line is that Eagle is destined for success, and in a short time, we will get used to seeing larger cassette cogs, just as we have learned to ignore wheel diameters and boost-width forks. That said, the acceptance of Eagle will also mark the time when the industry walked away from two hard fought improvements - both of which had profound effects upon the dual-suspension trail bikes we have recently come to know and love.

OneUp's 50t Shark kit for Shimano.

The second loss is more difficult to explain, but it begins with a guy named Bob Girvin, a pioneer suspension designer who patented the forward pivot location of a bicycle's swingarm near the top of a 34-tooth chainring. One quarter century later, nobody has found a better location. Chain tension and the angle that the chain pulls from affects the suspension and how the suspension feels under pedaling loads. Girvin's compromise was to stabilize the drivetrain when it was in the middle option of the triple-cranksets everyone used back then. Girvin knew that shifting to the larger or smaller chainrings would adversely affect the suspension's kinematics, which is a problem that also gives present suspension designers headaches.

Bob Girvin's pivot location plays well with one-by drivetrains.

Eagle has only been released at present to a handful of media, racers and OEM customers for evaluation, but all reports have been quite positive. And, in spite of the expected pushback from potential customers who have grown weary of SRAM and Shimano's the cog-of-the-month competition, those who have time on the group have unanimously applauded SRAM for extending the lower gearing range to accommodate fitness levels that fall below professional athletes, without sacrificing top-end speed.Less advertised, but perhaps more important, is the fact that improved frame geometry, advanced suspension and wider, grippier tires have made today's mountain bikes far more capable climbers, especially in technical situations, where the rider's legs and lungs have become the only limitations to topping ascents once deemed impossible. I am sure that Eagle will be embraced by the sport's strongest athletes when they begin to push those boundaries.The first victim is the mid-cage rear derailleur. The long-cage rear derailleur was a product of the industrys adherence to the triple crankset and the huge amount of chain take-up that it created for the rear derailleur. Riders hated them because the low-hanging cage reduced chain control and made the derailleur susceptible to damage. Switching to two-by drivetrains and later, SRAM's introduction of XX1, made it possible to reduce the length of the cage and the mid-cage derailleur finally became the industry standard. With the debut of SRAM's Eagle and Shimano's extended-range XT and XTR come some of the longest rear-derailleur jockey cages in the history of the sport.By accident or by design, SRAM's XX1 and its derivative one-by-eleven drivetrains stabilized the relationship between the chain and the rear suspension by fixing the size of the chainring almost exactly where Girvin placed it and the XX1 cassette encouraged the rider to keep the chain in the most neutral range of angles in relation to the rear suspension. Shimano's present close-ratio two-by cranksets also maintain that relationship. It can be argued that, in the past three or four years since the relationship between the drivetrain and the rear suspension has been stabilized, almost every long-travel bike made has been a good performer. The trend toward huge cassette cogs may unfortunately reverse that problem by exaggerating the chain angles, and could play havoc with the suspension kinematics once more. In support of Eagle, the angular chain component only occurs when it is shifted into the largest cogs, but those are also the moments when power output, control and grip are highlighted most.It will be interesting to see how all of this ends up. Suspension designers will be able to tweak their kinematics to compensate for the changes, if needed, and rear derailleurs are pretty robust these days. I find it questionable, however, that after working so long to attain a stabilized drivetrain and instigate the mid-cage rear derailleur standard, that we would throw away both without a care just to widen the bike's transmission ratios. Its worth considering.
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As the crow flies, the Panama Canal measures about 60 kilometers from ocean to ocean. It is not a single waterway connecting the global sea levels of the Atlantic and Pacific. Rather, ships entering either side use a set of locks to reach Gatun Lake, which sits 26 meters above sea level in the middle of Panama. Ships are then lowered back to sea level on the opposite side.

Kenneth Phillips, the curator for aerospace science at the California Science Center, told me he never expected to visit Panama. He said ET-94 was actually not the first shuttle tank to traverse the canalNASA sent a few to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California when the agency was making preparations to launch shuttles from the West Coast before the Challenger accident in 1986. Those were ultimately shipped through the canal again for launches at Kennedy Space Center.

"Before coming here, I didn't have a clear picture of how the lock system operates," Phillips said. "It's a fascinating civil engineering project. And this is the best combination of civil engineering and aerospace engineering coming together."

The history of the Panama Canal is messy and fraught with international involvement. The U.S. State Department begins the story in 1850, when America and Great Britain signed a treaty to build a canal through Nicaragua. That effort never came to fruition, and in 1880, the French attempted the feat in Panamathen a province of Colombia. The effort was stopped after 20,000 workers died from tropical diseases and construction accidents.

In 1902, the U.S. negotiated a new canal project in Panama, but Colombia disputed the arrangement's financial terms. President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched warships to both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of Panama, and the country declared independence from Colombia in 1903.

Colombian troops were unable to stop the new U.S.-Panamanian alliance, and the U.S. bought the canal land for $10 million plus an annual payment of $250,000. The U.S. also agreed to guarantee Panama's independence. Despite periods of tension throughout the twentieth century, America maintained ownership of the canal until handing it back to Panama on December 31, 1999.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.28

Trend:

After that the director of the Institute of History of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), MP Yagub Mahmudov uttered the idea at a meeting of the Presidium of ANAS that "the history of Derbend, Borchali should be studied again" in the Armenian press was launched a campaign against the Azerbaijani historian.

Various Armenian mass media spread the information saying that, the Institute of History of ANAS makes territorial claims against Russia and Georgia. In so doing the Armenians make insults, posting on their websites sheep image next to the name of the Institute of History of ANAS.

"Against the background of the name of the Institute of History the Armenians have placed the image of sheep. This confirms that the Armenians are not engaged in science. Instead of to accept the historical facts, they are exposing these pictures and show the low level of their science and culture," Yagub Mahmudov said.

"At a meeting of the Presidium of ANAS, I spoke about the actual problems of Azerbaijan history and, in particular, I have repeatedly emphasized that Azerbaijani state admits the internationally recognized territories of other states. And the Azerbaijani nation is the owner of its internationally recognized territory," he added.

Every nation has its own history. Azerbaijanis as a nation have settled in different areas, said Mahmudov, adding that in particular, they historically live in the Russian Federation - in Derbend and its surroundings, in Georgia - in Borchali region.

"Russia is our northern neighbor and we do not have any territorial claims against this state. And we do not have any territorial claims against Georgia," said the statement. "However, Armenians are trying to drive a wedge in our relationship with Russia and Georgia."

In Russia, live many Azerbaijanis, therefore, it is natural that when writing the history of our people we talk about our scientists, poets, doctors living in this country, according to Mahmudov.

"Unlike Armenians, we have - a great nation, we are 60 million, and our compatriots live in many countries, giving the world many prominent and influential personalities," he said. "For example, the world science luminary Lotfi Zadeh lives in the United States, so we enter his name in our history. No matter in which country of the world Azerbaijanis lived, we will write their history."

However, the country under the name of Armenia has never existed in history, said Yagub Mahmudov.

"Armenians deny the fact that Armenian state was created on ancient Azerbaijani lands - on the territory of the former Iravan khanate. And these lands never belonged to Armenians. Historically, these lands have always been ours," said the statement.

The essence of my speech at the meeting of the Presidium of ANAS was the fact that we, as the people of Azerbaijan, not making territorial claims to anybody, should study our history, according Mahmudov.

The Armenian falsifiers, seeking to sow discord in the relations of Azerbaijan with Russia and Georgia, have resorted to the lies traditional for them, he added.

"Armenian historians and ruling circles are well aware of the fact that the Armenians were moved to our lands," said Mahmudov.

He pointed out that until the 1827-1828 years Armenians did not live in the South Caucasus. They were resettled on the territory of Iravan khanate by the Russian Empire.

"On May 29, 1918 under strong external pressure, Azerbaijan was forced to cede Iravan and the surrounding lands- an area of 9000 square kilometers to Armenians. We granted Armenians the opportunity to self-determination on our own territory, recognized them this right, which allowed them to establish their own state," said the statement.

"So let Armenian historians leave the epithet "sheep" for themselves. And let them objectively examine the history, then they will be obliged to recognize the fact that up to May 29, 1918 in this area has never existed Armenian state," Mahmudov added.

"Armenians created their state in our lands, in the territory of Iravan khanate. Let them answer me, we gave them an area of 9000 square kilometers, our ancient city of Iravan, then what are they doing now in the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan - in Karabakh?" asked Mahmudov.

Armenian troops must get out of Karabakh. At one time we gave the Armenians 9000 square kilometers of our territory, after which they seized Zangazur as well, he said.

"Therefore I, as director of the Institute of History demand from them to clear off from the occupied Azerbaijani lands, and to abandon their attempts to falsify history," Mahmudov said.

"We have written the history of Iravan, Nakhchivan and Karabakh," he said. "If they can, let them refute at least one fact. But they will not be able to do this."

Armenians have no right to lay claim to any territory, he said adding that in ancient times they lived on the Balkan Peninsula.

"Over the centuries they lived in those or other foreign lands, and now, after they have created for themselves a state in the Azerbaijani territory, they want to seize other our lands," said the statement.

Today the Armenians put forward territorial claims to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, said Mahmudov, adding that everywhere they stir up trouble.

"But Armenian historians should deal with education of its people. At one time we sheltered Armenians in our lands; they lived at our expense, making millions for them, and so let them now to become more sensible, to go on the right path, to restore normal relations with the Azerbaijani people, the Turkic world," said the statement.

"But unfortunately, instead of it they are busy with slander and provocation," said Mahmudov. "We have always helped them, and shared a crust of bread with them, but they chose to unite with certain external forces against the Azerbaijani people."

"I repeat again, the Armenians should try to improve relations with the Azerbaijani people, to abandon claims to Karabakh, to remove their troops from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, to stop demanding the land from Turkey and Georgia. Only then we will be able to accept friendship from them," Mahmudov concluded.
April, 30 , 2016, 12:00 - 15:00

American Center

Azerbaijan University of Languages, 2nd floor

134, Rashid Behbudov str.

The EducationUSA Alumni Fair will be held with support of the U.S. Embassy in Baku and the American Councils for International Education. The fair is an opportunity for anyone interested in studying abroad to learn about opportunities at U.S. universities. The students and their parents will get to meet with U.S.-educated alumni and U.S. Embassy staff to ask them questions about studying abroad. The event will last from 12:00 until 15:00.

More than 20 universities and various scholarship programs will be represented and both Azerbaijani and American alumni of U.S. universities will represent their schools and be available to talk about their universities and provide them with materials and brochures.

For additional information about the fair, contact Ramila Verdiyeva or Leyla Hamidova.

Caspian Business Center

40, J. Jabbarl str.

Tel/fax: (994 12) 436-75-29; 436-75-30

E-mail: [email protected]
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By Luciana Lopez

NEW YORK (Reuters)  U.S. Democrat Hillary Clinton is the only presidential contender scheduled to attend a reception next week organized by a leading political association of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as she seeks to consolidate her support from minority voters.

The Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies Leadership Network, a nonpartisan group that seeks to get Asian Americans elected to political office, said on Wednesday that it had invited all presidential hopefuls to the event in Washington, but Clinton was the only one to accept.

The campaigns of Clintons Democratic rival Bernie Sanders and Republican hopeful Ted Cruz did not commit, and the campaign of Republican front-runner Donald Trump campaign responded that he was unlikely to attend, Floyd Mori, president and chief executive of the leadership network said.

Republican John Kasichs campaign did not respond.

Minority voters have provided a boost to Clinton as she fends off a challenge from Vermont Senator Sanders for the Democratic nomination for the Nov. 8 presidential election. African Americans helped her notch key wins in states such as South Carolina and this week in Maryland.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are a smaller group, making up about 5.6 percent of the population, according to U.S. Census data. But in recent years they have been among the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the United States.

We are a vote that is becoming increasingly powerful, said Rep. Judy Chu, a Democrat in Congress representing California, who will introduce Clinton at the event. In this election we are the swing vote in the swing states, Chu said, pointing to Virginia and Nevada.

Still, challenges remain in building the Asian Americans electorate into a political force, Mori said.

We are not as good at registering Asian Americans (to vote) as a lot of other populations, he said. We need to do better.

(Editing by Richard Valdmanis, Toni Reinhold)
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The group Bend the Arc: Jewish Partnership for Justice is taking action to pressure Google into dumping Trump by ending their sponsorship of the Republican convention.

The organization Bend the Arc: Jewish Partnership for Justice is co-sponsoring a plane that will fly over Googles campus and the Bay Area with a banner that will read, GOOGLE: DONT BE EVIL! #DUMPTRUMP

American Jews and other communities of faith will not stand by silently while political candidates use bigoted, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric, said Jason Kimelman-Block, Director of Bend the Arc Jewish Action. Google and other leading corporations should be opposing this hatred and extremism, not endorsing it. We join Americans across the country in calling for Google to drop its sponsorship of the Republican National Convention for as long as the partys leading presidential candidate continues to promote hate on the campaign trail.

Corporations are under increasing pressure from concerned citizens and consumers to not donate or sponsor the Republican convention if Donald Trump is the partys nominee. Businesses can no longer get away with funding a platform for individuals like Donald Trump, who spread hatred and bigotry against Muslims, immigrants, women, and the disabled.

Any company that supports a Republican convention that is headlined by Trump will pay a heavy price, and as the actions of Bend The Arc Jewish Action demonstrate the cost will be more than financial. There is a moral argument to be made against supporting any company that donates to the Republican convention. Donald Trump is spreading hatred, and any company which associates with Trump should be viewed as endorsing his hate speech.

The pressure is on Google to do the right thing. They have a choice to make. Google can either take a stand against hatred and bigotry, or they can endorse and support it by sponsoring the Republican convention.

Image: RadioTimes.com
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LOUISVILLE, Ky. (Reuters)  Former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear on Wednesday accused his successor Matt Bevin of threatening lawmakers and said such actions may be the target of a federal investigation.

Beshears remarks, made at a press conference in the state capital of Frankfort, are the latest in a burgeoning political war between the two politicians. Beshear, a Democrat, accused Bevin, a Republican, of threatening cancellation of road projects in Democratic lawmakers districts unless they switched parties.

He demanded that Democratic legislators switch parties and threatened to cancel road projects in their districts if they didnt comply, Beshear said of Bevin, according to a transcript of his speech. When they refused, he said he would destroy them.

I understand that the FBI may be looking into that kind of conduct, he added, according to the transcript.

Beshears spokesman, Dan Hassert, confirmed the former governors comments.

David Habich, a spokesman for the FBIs Louisville office, said he could not disclose whether Bevin is being investigated.

Bevin is currently in Europe on an economic development trip. Jessica Ditto, Bevins communications director, said in a statement that Beshear was trying to protect himself by throwing out baseless accusations.

Last week, Bevin called for a probe into how Beshears administration awarded state contracts and solicited campaign contributions. Bevins accusations came shortly before a former Beshear official pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges.

On Wednesday, Beshear said Bevin was the one using intimidation, accusing the governor of threatening the jobs of state employees if they did not accuse the previous administration of wrongdoing.

Kentuckys House of Representatives has been in Democratic control since 1921, but the party only has a 53-47 edge. Two members did switch after Bevin won election in November.

The hostilities began before Bevin took office in December after the term-limited Beshear appointed his wife to an unpaid seat on the state horse park commission during his final days in office. Meanwhile, the former governor has launched a campaign against Bevins healthcare initiatives.

In addition, Beshears son serves as the states attorney general and has sued Bevin over cuts he ordered in higher education funding.

Beshear on Wednesday said he hopes his successor stops with the accusations and moves forward with leading the state.

But if he wants a food fight, you know which hes had so far, then Im going answer any unfounded allegations that he keeps throwing out there, Beshear said.
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Donald Trumps threat to build a wall is backfiring on the Republican Party as Hispanics are registering to vote in bigger than ever numbers for the purpose of voting against Trump in November.

The Hill reported:

Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Elected and Appointed Officials, projects 13.1 million Hispanics will vote nationwide in 2016, compared to 11.2 million in 2012 and 9.7 million in 2008. Many of those new Hispanic voters are also expected to vote against Trump if he is the Republican nominee, something that appears much more likely after the front-runners sweeping primary victories Tuesday in five East Coast states. A whopping 80 percent of respondents in a poll of registered Hispanic voters in Colorado and Nevada said Trumps views on immigration made them less likely to vote for Republicans in November. In Florida, that number was 68 percent.

Many of these new voters are in California and Texas, but there are also registration spikes being reported in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada. There is also speculation that increased Hispanic voter registration could put Arizona into play in the fall.

Donald Trumps threat to build a wall between the US and Mexico has had the opposite effect of what Trump intended. The plan to build the wall has motivated millions of Hispanic Americans to register to vote so that they can cast their ballots against Trump this fall. Donald Trumps wall is wildly popular with his supporters in the Republican Party, but it is a losing position with voters in the general election. Trump is turning off the voters that his party needs if they are going to win back the White House.

In other words, the only wall that Trump is successfully constructing is a barrier between Republican and victory.
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Bernie Sanders may be second in the Democratic primary, but he is number one regarding Senate popularity. For the second year in a row, Sen. Sanders has been voted the most popular Senator in the United States.

Morning Consult surveyed 62,000 people across all 50 states to find out how they felt about their Senators. The winner with an 80% approval rating among Vermont residents was Sen. Bernie Sanders. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine was second with a 79% approval ratings. Sanders actually saw his approval rating in Vermont dip by three points from his 2015 high of 83%, but back to back wins in 2015 and 2016 prove that the Senators popularity is no fluke.

Here is the entire top 10 list of most popular Senators from Morning Consult:

1) Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

2) Susan Collins (R-Maine)

3) John Hoeven (R-N.D.)

4) Angus King (I-Maine)

5) Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)

6) Thomas Carper (D-Del.)

7) Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)

8) John Barrasso (R-Wyo.)

9) Al Franken (D-Minn.)

10) Chris Coons (D-Del.)

There is a common trend in the top 10. Small state Senators are more popular than large state Senators. This could be because residents of smaller states have more individual contact with their Senators than those who live in more populous states.

Bernie Sanders is not going to win the Democratic nomination, but his presidential campaign has been nothing but a raging success. He has taken his popularity in Vermont national. Bernie Sanders is the most powerful figure on the left not named Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. The political revolution is not over for Sanders his supporters.

The most popular Senator in the United States now has a national movement of millions behind him who are fighting to transform America.
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House Republicans have followed orders given to them by the Koch brothers and advanced a bill that would keep Koch political contributions a secret.

In a letter to the members of the House Ways and Means Committee, the Kochs made their views clear:

On behalf of Koch Companies Public Sector, I urge you to support the Preventing IRS Abuse and Protecting Free Speech Act, legislation that would prohibit the Secretary of the Treasury from requiring that the identity of contributors to 501(c) organizations be included in annual returns. We share the belief held by Congressman Peter Roskam, Speaker Paul Ryan, Chairman Kevin Brady and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell  all stalwart defenders of free speech rights for all Americans regardless of ones political beliefs  that guaranteeing First Amendment protections is of critical importance to our country. The targeting of non-profit organizations by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to limit free speech under this Administration is well documented. From the IRS subjecting donors of nonprofit organizations to the gift tax, to the direct targeting of conservative non-profit organizations based solely on their beliefs, this legislation could not be more pertinent.

House Ways and Means Republicans did what they were told, and advanced the bill on a 22-15 party line vote.

The Koch Industries letter is a perfect example of the sort of corruption that has been caused by Citizens United. The Koch Industries letter is a message from the Koch brothers telling the House Republicans that they bought and paid for with dark money contributions how to vote.

House Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Rep. Carl Levin (D-MI) said during his opening statement on the markup of the bill, The Republicans have thus far prevented the IRS from issuing regulations on political spending by 501(c)(4) organizations. It is no secret as to why they are working to keep donors a secret  the three largest spenders from 2012  representing fully 51% of the total  include Karl Roves Crossroads GPS spent $71 million; Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers, spent $36 million; and the American Future Fund, also the Koch brothers, spent $25 million. What this bill does, to put it simply, is to solidify the secrecy around the role of big money in campaigns.

It is unlikely that this bill HR 5053 a.k.a. The Koch Corruption Protection Act will make it out of the Senate. If it managed to pass the Senate, President Obama would veto it as soon as it hit his desk.

The Koch brothers are working hard to make sure that their attempted purchase of the federal government remains hidden from the American people. The idea that rich people have a fundamental right to hijack our electoral system is undemocratic.

The passage of this bill through committee is a sad day for democracy and a big reminder of why the American people must fight to get rid of Citizens United.
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* The following is an opinion column by R Muse *

It is interesting to listen to the religious right and most Republicans, complain bitterly about and condemn Islamic theocracies as overbearing and harsh proponents of dictating morality according to Sharia Law. However, for all their complaints and criticisms of Islam, religious Republicans have tried, in vain, to regulate morality in America on myriad levels and on numerous topics. Now, a cultist religion in Utah has taken a step the Mullahs in harsh Islamic societies would marvel at solely because they are doing it in a secular nation.

Late last week a Utah representative introduced a Mormon resolution officially declaring pornography a public health crisis. That obviously did not have the desired effect and so late last week the same Mormon lawmaker proclaimed that the Internet violates a persons First Amendment rights because it forces pornography on people who dont want to view it.

Seriously, the Mormon actually said those words out loud; and he wasnt embarrassed or joking. Now, because the Utah Mormons dont have the authority to shut down the Internet or imprison people who use it, they passed a law making pornography illegal with hefty fines and 30 days in jail for anyone caught by law enforcement viewing it in its mildest form. No, this isnt a joke or a new law imposed in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is the Mormon state that downloads more pornography than any other state. It makes one suspicious of just what those magic underwear wearing folks in Utah are really doing behind closed doors.

So heres the Mormon thinking on the Internet as a thing and Internet porn as a violation of Utah Mormons First Amendment rights. The character pushing to regulate morality, Todd Weiler (R) said, Someone may have the First Amendment right, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, to view pornography. But what about my First Amendment right not to view it? No joke, Mr. Weiler actually said that and it went out over the airwaves.

Okay cult-boy, heres the deal about how to beat that unconstitutional Internet and the pornography you claim the nasty Internet is forcing you to look at. If youre so worried about having to view pornography, or are unable to tear yourself away from it when you click on a link, then just do what tens-of-millions of non-Mormons do; dont click on the links and you wont have to look at it. And, if you dont like the Internet, disconnect the wire to your modem or do what sane people would do and turn that Devils device off and voila! No more unconstitutional Internet for you and yours. Also, what nearly anyone who has ever used the unconstitutional Internet likely knows, you have to physically maneuver to any site, especially a pornography site, and then click on a link to view it.

Maybe if Mr. Weiler went to a college not named for a Mormon cultist demigod, Brigham Young, he would have a rudimentary understanding of the First Amendment. The First Amendment specifically bans any laws, especially religious cult-driven laws, which prohibit any Americans ability to exercise free speech. However, it does not, and cannot, ban a person from NOT viewing anothers act of free speech.

As Alex Zielinski writing for health over at Think Progress noted, Weilers assertion is tantamount to saying the First Amendment protects a pro-choice advocates right to never encounter anti-abortion protesters; something the Supreme Court has already ruled on. Pro-choice advocates DO have to encounter and tolerate anti-abortion protestors simply because they are exercising their First Amendment right of free speech. What Weiler and Utah Mormons are complaining is that he, or his goofy religion, cannot control how other Utah Mormons browse the Internet; that is what he considers is a violation of his First Amendment rights.

Still not satisfied with an official Mormon legislatures condemnation of pornography as a public health crisis, Utah Mormons passed legislation the Mormon governor with two first names, Gary Herbert, signed into law making viewing pornography a crime punishable by fines and a 30-day jail sentence. And these Mormons are not kidding either.

According to the Sheriff of Utah County, Jim Tracy, there will be a concerted religious morality police effort to bring the people exercising their constitutional right to look at what they want on the Internet to swift religious justice; at Utah taxpayers expense. Tracy said,

I want to assure the good citizens of Utah that the brave men and women of law enforcement will be out in full force, tracking down porn offenders, and bringing them to justice. I can promise you this, those who we find breaking any porn laws will be seeing jail bars; and pay a healthy fine to boot.

While some Americans may think this abominable morality law is a serious violation of personal or privacy rights, a Mormon anti-pornography group, the Utah Coalition Against Pornography posted on Facebook that the resolution signing marks a time to celebrate and recognize this historic moment. These freaks of nature have it all figured out and have set out different levels of porn-watching violations to send people to jail, and prison, over.

For example, Missionary style pornography will result in a fine and 30 days in jail, while pornography that involves any kind of homogayness (sic) thats sodomy or Devil worshipping will result in long-term prison sentences. Law enforcement will also be working closely with local ISPs and the NSA to monitor those who search out porn on the internet. We will win the war on porn and masturbation.

According to another Mormon anti-masturbation group; It is great what the state of Utah has done today in fighting the war on self-rape in this country. The rest of America needs to get with the times, vote for Ted Cruz, and make masturbation illegal once and for all. It is important to remember that our Lord and Savior loves each and every one of us, unless we masturbate of course, then well burn in Hell for eternity.

There is not much to comment on about these sad, sick, twisted morality-enforcing Mormons and their religious war on porn and masturbation; at least there is not much that could be printable. However, one can offer a suggestion; maybe if Mormons double-up on the magic underwear and/or disconnect from the unconstitutional Internet forthwith they can avoid being First Amendment violated. As one who follows politics closely, especially the influence of religion in conservative politics, this has to be the most Sharia-type law thus far and not-unlike what one imagines Puritanical theocracy looks like.

It is doubtless that this truly bizarre imposition of religion on peoples personal lives will be wiped out of existence by the judicial system. But what should terrify every American is that it occurred at all, much less became an event to celebrate; especially in a secular nation with a secular Constitution that Utah Mormons, like their evangelical cohorts, refuse to recognize as valid and certainly do not follow.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.28

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Russia can resume the import of agricultural products from Turkey, the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock of Turkey told Trend Apr.28.

However, the ministry didn't specify the time of resuming the import of Turkish agricultural products to Russia.

Ankara and Moscow discussed this issue Apr.27 during the visit of a delegation from Turkey's Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock to Russia.

Relations between Russia and Turkey deteriorated after the incident with Russian SU-24 bomber.

Following the incident, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to take measures for ensuring the national security and special economic measures against Turkey.

As part of these measures, Russia banned the import of some food and agricultural products from Turkey.

The trade turnover between the two countries stood at $2.7 billion in January-February of 2016, or 61.5 percent less than in the same period in 2015, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
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Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:

The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) sold $32.4 million to 14 banks through the auction held by the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA), SOFAZ's message said Apr. 28.

Meanwhile, the CBA obtained $10 million at the auction.

SOFAZ offered $50 million for sale through the auction, according to the message.

SOFAZ will continue selling foreign currency through auctions in 2016.

The foreign currency is sold as part of SOFAZ's 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.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Anvar_Mammadov
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr.28

By Orkhan Guluzade - Trend:

Azerbaijan and Turkey have a great potential to increase the bilateral trade turnover to $15 billion, Turkey's Economy Minister Mustafa Elitas said in an exclusive interview with Trend Apr.28.

"The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Turkey increased eight times and stood at $5.1 billion in 2002-2014, but it slightly dropped due to the global financial crisis in 2015 as compared to the previous years," said the minister.

Turkey's export to Azerbaijan stood at $1.9 billion in 2015, while the country's import from Azerbaijan totalled $1.6 billion.

Elitas pointed out that Turkey primarily exports iron and steel products, various finished products, electronics, furniture, plastic products to Azerbaijan.

"Natural gas accounts for 85 percent of Turkey's import from Azerbaijan," said the minister.

Aside from the natural gas, Turkey imports non-ferrous metals, chemical industry products, plastic products from Azerbaijan, he added.

"Azerbaijan's important role in the region, the high-level relations between Baku and Ankara make it possible to even more develop the economic and trade relations between our countries," said Elitas.

The minister believes that one of the most important missions of Turkish companies is to contribute to the development of Azerbaijan's economy.

"Turkey's investments in Azerbaijan reached $7.5 billion by late 2014, while the volume of investments made by Azerbaijan in Turkey's economy stand at $4.2 billion," said Elitas.

These figures show the level of relations between the two countries, according to the Turkish minister.

"But Baku and Ankara should even more develop the bilateral relations," he added.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @o_quluzade
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

The Azerbaijan Deposit Insurance Fund (ADIF) has paid the compensations worth 23.9 million Azerbaijani manats to clients of the bankrupt Bank of Azerbaijan, a statement posted on ADIF's website said Apr. 28.

The official exchange rate is 1.5056 AZN/USD as of April 28.

The applications have been received from Bank of Azerbaijan's insured depositors since January 29, 2016.

The amount of the insured deposits in Bank of Azerbaijan is 24.2 million manats. The payments are made in the branches of Muganbank and Rabitabank, assigned as agent banks.

At the same time, more than 871,000 manats have been paid to Ganja Bank's clients since Feb. 4. In general, the amount of insured deposits in Ganja Bank is 1.5 million manats.

The payments to Ganja Bank's depositors are made in the branches of Rabitabank, Unibank and Kapital Bank.

ADIF has also started paying compensations to Texnikabank's depositors since February 12.

More than 116.5 million manats have been paid to the bank's clients recently.

The payments to Texnikabank's depositors are made in the branches of Muganbank, Rabitabank, Unibank and Kapital Bank.

The fund returns up to 30,000 manats for each insured deposit.
A Rochester man pleaded guilty to a gross misdemeanor sexual conduct charge Wednesday, the day his trial was supposed to begin.

Jon Gary Schutz, 38, entered a Norgaard plea of guilty to fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct; in exchange, a felony count of third-degree criminal sexual conduct is expected to be dismissed at sentencing, which is set for June 27.

With a Norgaard plea, the defendant doesn't insist he's innocent, just that he has no memory of what happened  typically due to intoxication.

The investigation began in October 2014, when a woman reported she'd been sexually assaulted a few days earlier. She told officers she and another woman had gone to a bar that night, then to the other woman's home. The alleged victim said she was given an alcoholic drink, then noticed her mouth felt dry; shortly after, she began to vomit.

The woman believed she'd been drugged, reports say, because her reaction was inconsistent with the amount of alcohol she'd had. Her friend helped her onto the couch, gave her some water and covered her up.

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Sometime later, the complaint says, she woke to find Schutz with his hand on her breast; he then pulled down the victim's pants and began to assault her.

When the woman sat up, Schutz ran to the bedroom, where the victim heard her friend ask Schutz what he was doing, adding, "I saw you do everything," and "three times so far I busted you doing that..."

Schutz said he'd been sleepwalking, court documents say, and claimed not to know what the woman was talking about.

The next day, her friend texted the victim, allegedly saying Schutz "wants to apologize, but he won't."

A third woman told law enforcement that the female witness confirmed the incident to her, adding that the victim's friend "saw Schutz on top of (the victim) several times throughout the night and that he was naked," reports say.

The witness initially tried to make the third woman believe the contact was consensual, the complaint says, but later admitted the victim was passed out.
HAYFIELD  An Olmsted County deputy was the officer who fired at a suspect Wednesday afternoon in Hayfield, authorities said this morning.

The deputy  who has not been identified, even by gender  fired his service weapon while attempting to arrest the man, who was wanted on a federal arrest warrant from South Dakota.

The incident began about 3:50 p.m., as members of law enforcement watched what they believed to be the suspect's car. A man walked out of a residence and toward the vehicle, according to a news release from the Dodge County Sheriff's Office.

As officers moved in, the man got into the car and attempted to drive away, but crashed his vehicle into an apartment building in the 100 block of First Avenue Northeast.

That's when the Olmsted County deputy fired his gun. The man got out of the car and tried to run, but was caught quickly.

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The deputy has more than four years of law enforcement service, the majority of it with Olmsted County, said Capt. Scott Behrns. He's been a member of the Southeast Minnesota Violent Crimes Task Force for about a year, and also serves on the Rochester/Olmsted County Emergency Response Unit.

"He's a highly trained officer," Behrns said today.

The deputy suffered minor injuries after possibly being struck by the suspect's car; he was taken to a Rochester hospital, where he was treated and released.

Following standard procedure after involvement in a critical incident, the deputy been placed on administrative leave pending the results of the investigation by the Dodge County Sheriff's Office, Behrns said.

The officer's identity will be released by Dodge County.

"It should be strongly noted that placing the deputy on administrative leave does not determine a finding of guilt or innocence," he said. "We're very supportive of the officer, given the limited information we have."

Officers from the U.S. Marshal's Office, Olmsted County Sheriff's Office, the Southeast Minnesota Violent Crimes Task Force and Dodge County Sheriff's Office all responded.

The 37-year-old suspect was wanted for failing to register as a sex offender, but has a long history of violent crime, Behrns said.

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"The suspect has a history of assault and weapons possession, and had recently made threats against law enforcement claiming he would not be arrested without a fight," Rose said.

The man was taken to Steele County Jail, where he's being held on suspicion of felony assault related to Wednesday's confrontation, as well as the extradition warrant from South Dakota. He is expected to be formally charged Friday in Dodge County District Court.

Dodge County Emergency Management assisted the displaced residents of the apartment building, which sustained significant structural damage.

Two law enforcement vehicles and one civilian vehicle also were damaged.

"Considering what happened, it's very fortunate no citizens were injured," Behrns said.

Local authorities were involved from the start of the incident, he said, because of a tip about the suspect that came in to the Olmsted County Sheriff's Office.

It was initially believed the man was in Rochester; further investigation moved the hunt to Dodge County.

The U.S. Marshals were involved, Behrns said, "because they hunt high-profile violent offenders."
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 28

By Aygun Badalova - Trend:

OPEC remains relevant to the rebalancing of the oil market, the analysts of the US JP Morgan bank believe.

"However, it remains seemingly hobbled by its inability to update historic quota allocations. Those members who hold quotas in excess of current output appear unwilling to cede their rights in order to put OPEC on a sustainable footing," analysts said in a report, obtained by Trend.

They believe, that Initiatives, such as the Doha producer negotiations could in time achieve both an equitable split of the burden of managing supply and involve producers within and outside of OPEC, thereby achieving two of the key requirements that they think are necessary for success.

The last meeting of oil producers in Doha ended without reaching any agreement. The talks on oil output freeze collapsed after Saudi Arabia surprised the group by reasserting a demand that Iran also agrees to cap its oil production.

JP Morgan's analysts believe that despite reports of renewed efforts to restart these negotiations, nothing concrete to emerge in advance of the OPEC meeting on 2 June.

OPEC's total oil output was 32.25 million barrels a day in March 2016, which is by 15,000 barrels more than in February, according to OPEC's recent report. The official quota for the OPEC oil output is 30 million barrels per day.

JP Morgan's analysts expect OPEC oil production to further rise reaching 32.9 million barrels per day in 2016 and 33 million barrels per day in 2017, with Saudi Arabia's oil output to be at 10.3 million barrels per day in both years.
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.

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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

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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.

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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
SPRING VALLEY  Neal Hinners pulled the tarp from three dusty deep fryers Monday evening, uncovering the last question before the 51st annual Spring Valley Sportsmens Club Smelt Feed on Friday  would the fryers work after being dormant for a year?

The fryers will be used to deep fry up to 310 pounds of smelt, but there's always that question, said Hinners, the club's president.

Enter Matt Ramaker, club vice president and expert on making furnaces, air conditioners and deep fryers work. He didn't hesitate as he produced a long-necked lighter. Poof. Blue flames burned in one, two and finally, three pilot lights. The two men filled three vats with water and soon all three were steaming.

They were ready.

Neither worried about getting workers. "We've done it so many years that it kind of comes together on its own," Hinners said. "Believe it or not, we don't line up workers. They just show up."

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"Never have," Ramaker said.

"Never have," Hinners said.

That's right. The word goes around about time and place and workers just show up. This year, they will also get a hand from the local high school trap-shooting club because it uses the club's range southeast of Spring Valley.

Nor was there a question that the piece de resistance of the night  the smelt  would taste great, because Peter Kofoot arrived to assured the two that he was also ready. He and his wife, Jolene, will drive to Susie Q Fish Market in Two Rivers, Wis., onWednesday, pick up the smelt on Thursday and be back for the feed.

Then, he will work his magic with the breading.

All three get almost conspiratorial grins when talking about the breading.

In distant history, when the smelt feed was just beginning, Eldon Grabau came up with the breading recipe. "Eldon gave it to me, and I had to be sworn to secrecy," Kofoot said.

"It's still that way," Hinners said. "Everybody can ask all they want, they ain't going to learn a thing."

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Just in case Kofoot falls through the ice when ice fishing, he has written down the recipe and also told a few others, but that's about it. Secrecy is paramount.

Getting smelt was once done by going to Duluth. In fact, groups in other cities once went to the North Shore of Lake Superior and netted smelt themselves back in the 1960s and 1970s when the smelt ran heavy. Now, there are fewer of the tasty fish so they have to buy them, Hinners said.

The Spring Valley group once went to Duluth, but one year, the harbor was iced in and the smelting boat couldn't go out. They decided on the Wisconsin market and have stayed with it.

The feed itself raises about $1,500 for the club and its programs, including teaching youths firearms safety, Hinners said. They serve smelt rain or shine. In fact, rain helps, he said. When it's wet out, farmers can't plow or sow fields so they might stop in for plate or two of smelt.

The day itself will be long for all the volunteers, the fryers and Kofoot, who has to mix all the breading.

Hinners doesn't mind. "We all have a good time," he said.
It looks like there will be another bank on Civic Center Drive in the near future.

On Monday, La Crosse-based Coulee Bankfiled a site development plan to use the Family Service Rochester building at 1110 Sixth St. NW on Civic Center Drive by Barlow Plaza .

There has been buzz about Coulee's interest in the building, since Family Service Rochester announced a $1.3 million building of a larger office center at the end of 2015. The nonprofit is expected to move to its new home at 4600 18th Avenue NW this summer.

Representatives from Coulee Bank were not available to discuss their plans, so details still are unclear. However, the development plan filed by Widseth Smith Nolting consulting labels the building as "Coulee Bank -- Rochester Facility."

Assuming the Wisconsin bank does intend on opening a branch on that busy section, it will be returning the building to its former use. Home Federal Savings Bankused that site as a branch for many years.

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In 2003, Home Federal built a new, larger complex at 1016 Civic Center Drive NW, across the intersection from its former branch. Family Service Rochester then took over the Sixth Street Northwest building.

The excitement about Mayo Clinic's Destination Medical Centerinitiative has attracted a lot of interest from financial institutions in the region. Coulee has been active here in the past couple years and operates an office at 3240 East River Road.

Other banks which have opened offices or branches here in recent years include West Bank , Bremer Bank, Manufacturers Bank & Trust Co. and Bell Mortgage .  Jeff Kiger
ST. PAUL  Gov. Mark Dayton says he'd like to restore voting rights for people convicted of felonies, but he can't.

It's been a regular topic at the Legislature for years. Minnesota law bans felons from voting until they've served out probation or parole.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed an executive order last week restoring felons' voting rights in that state.

But Dayton told reporters Wednesday that legal counsel has told him he doesn't have that unilateral authority in Minnesota.

Such a change would affect an estimated 74,000 released felons. The Democratic-majority Senate approved a quicker restoration this week, but it faces unlikely odds in the Republican-controlled House.
RED WING  Prince has returned to the rock face of Barn Bluff in Red Wing.

At the request of a Red Wing City Council member, Joe Gibart and Brian Paton hiked the iconic bluff overlooking downtown at 1 a.m. this morning to repaint Prince's symbol on the rock. It's the latest move in a growing controversy that's inflamed local passions following the city's decision to cover Gibart and Paton's initial tribute with what's been derisively called "the black blob."

The duo finished their work around 4 a.m., then waited in the rain for sunrise. Gibart's Facebook post about the deed was shared more than 750 times within two hours.

"As soon as I got done, I sat back and smoked a big, fat cigar," Gibart said. "Now that we have a council member who has openly said he wants it painted, I think it'll be accepted better  especially after all the negative comments (the city) got last time."

The second Prince memorial was set in motion shortly after about 250 people attended a showing of "Purple Rain" held at the historic Sheldon Theatre in downtown Red Wing. After the film, Red Wing City Council member Dan Munson made a "frustrated" Facebook post requesting that someone repaint Barn Bluff in Prince's honor.

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That message was quickly relayed to Gibart, who "didn't waste a second" in getting to work. He included the number "16" in his work this time in recognition of the Class of 2016, which has been a popular, legal painting throughout the decades.

"Would someone just repaint the bluff, and if it offends you don't look at it or do what has been done for YEARS (and) go paint something else," Munson wrote, according to a screenshot that the Post-Bulletin received. "Just be respectful."

While Gibart spoke openly about "fighting city hall" with his artwork, Munson's directive might not be particularly well received by city officials. It goes against current city policy, which is to cover or remove anything on Barn Bluff that generates a complaint.

Gibart and Paton's initial painting of Prince's symbol was done hours after Minnesota's rock legend died last week. It was covered by city officials Monday afternoon at a cost of $305.50, according to Public Works Director Rick Moskwa. The black paint used to cover the Prince symbol sparked a backlash from residents.

A public meeting has been scheduled for 6 p.m. May 12 at the Red Wing Public Library to discuss a new master plan at Barn Bluff. The meeting will likely include a lengthy discussion about painting the rock face.

"The City of Red Wing has spoken," said Bill Hanisch, owner of Hanisch Bakery and one of the city's biggest critics on the Barn Bluff issue.

Munson's Facebook post went on to encourage citizens to get involved in the election process.

"There are three seats and the mayor up for election this fall," Munson wrote. "Candidate filing opens May 17. This is your chance to step up in a way more than a Facebook post. Please feel free to share this."

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After the city painted over Barn Bluff on Monday, Historic Pottery Place Mall co-owner Susan Jasko used a projector to shine a Prince symbol on the exterior of her building's brick facade on Tuesday. She plans to do so throughout the week in protest of the city policy.

"We just want to make sure that people realize that the people of Red Wing truly love and respect Prince, and we were all really disappointed with the actions of the city council," said Jasko, who is a huge fan of Prince's music.

"It's tradition. It's not that someone went up and defaced a rock that's never been touched. This has been going on for 50-plus years."
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:

Azerbaijan supplied 1.15 billion cubic meters of gas to Turkey in January-February of 2016 versus 1.11 billion cubic meters in January-February of 2015, said the report posted on the website of Turkey's Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA).

Azerbaijan supplied 6.17 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2015 compared to 6.07 billion cubic meters in 2014.

Turkey imported 9.36 billion cubic meters of gas in January-February of 2016, some 7.29 billion cubic meters of which were imported via pipelines, and 2.07 billion cubic meters accounted for the import of the liquefied natural gas (LNG), said the report.

Azerbaijan's share in Turkey's total gas import was 12.3 percent in January 2016.

Turkey imports gas from Azerbaijan via the South Caucasus gas pipeline (Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum). The country has a contract for purchasing 6.6 billion cubic meters of gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz gas and condensate field per year.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
MINNEAPOLIS  Prescription drugs were discovered with Prince when he was found dead in his Paisley Park home in suburban Minneapolis, several news organizations reported.

ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN, citing unidentified law enforcement sources, reported that prescription painkillers were found on the 57-year-old musician and in his home. The Star Tribune, also citing unnamed sources, reported that prescription pills were found but that it wasn't clear whether they had been prescribed to Prince.

Prince died April 21. An autopsy has been performed, but results weren't expected for three to four weeks.

The music megastar's death came less than a week after reports that his plane made an emergency landing in Moline, Ill., as he returned after performing in Atlanta. TMZ, citing unidentified sources, reported that Prince was treated for an overdose of the painkiller Percocet.

Airport and public safety officials in Moline have refused to confirm that the plane that made an emergency landing in Moline was Prince's aircraft, and heavily redacted incident reports released to the Associated Press under a public information request did not identify the person who was treated. Prince's representatives have not responded to AP's request for comment on the reports.

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Carver County Deputy Sheriff Jason Kamerud declined to comment today on the reports of drugs found at Paisley Park, and told AP that he strongly disputed reports by several media outlets that investigators had asked the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for help in the case.

"We have not asked them for help, or asked them to be a part of the investigation," Kamerud said. "We might contact them to help us, but that hasn't happened. We don't have the medical examiner's report yet. We don't know to what extent pharmaceuticals could be a part of this."

Leo Hawkins, a DEA spokesman in Chicago, said he had no comment.

Prince's death came two weeks after he canceled concerts in Atlanta, saying he wasn't feeling well. He played a pair of makeup shows April 14 in that city. Prince was scheduled to perform two shows in St. Louis but canceled them shortly before his death due to health concerns.

Longtime friend and collaborator Sheila E. has told the AP that Prince had physical issues from performing, citing hip and knee problems that she said came from years of jumping off risers and stage speakers in heels.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Apr. 28

By Huseyn Hasanov- Trend:

President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov invited representatives of the business circles of Qatar to participate in the construction project of Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) transnational gas pipeline, the Turkmen government said in a message Apr. 28.

The proposal was announced during the meeting of Turkmen president in Ashgabat with Head of the Qatar Olympic Committee Sheikh Joaan Bin Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani.

Berdimuhamedov said that a new energy main line is designed to ensure long-term supply of natural gas to major countries of South-East Asia, contribute to solve economic problems of the region, important social and humanitarian issues.

The main document for the TAPI, called the Ashgabat Interstate Agreement, was signed in 2010.

The groundbreaking ceremony for TAPI's Turkmen section was held in mid-December of 2015.

The pipeline's length can reach 1,814 kilometers, including 214 kilometers running through Turkmenistan, 774 kilometers - Afghanistan and 826 kilometers - Pakistan.

The State Concern 'Turkmengaz', which is the leader of the consortium TAPI Pipeline Company Limited, as well as Afghan gas Enterprise (Afghanistan), Inter State Gas Systems (Private) Limited (Pakistan) and Gail Limited (India), which entered this consortium in December 2015 as shareholders, achieved their first investment agreement worth $200 million Apr. 7.

It is expected that the first payments will be spent on development work. All this will allow carrying out studies to assess the location of the future route, environmental risks and help to identify the final amount of funds needed for the project.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:

Russia exported 4.59 billion cubic meters of gas to Turkey in January-February of 2016 versus 5.15 billion cubic meters in the same period of 2015, said the report posted on the website of Turkey's Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA).

Russia supplied 26.78 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Turkey in 2015 versus 27 billion cubic meters in 2014.

Turkey imported 9.36 billion cubic meters of gas in January-February of 2016, some 7.29 billion cubic meters of which were imported via pipelines, and 2.07 billion cubic meters accounted for the import of the liquefied natural gas (LNG), said the report.

Russia's share in Turkey's total gas import was 49 percent in January-February 2016, according to the report.

Turkey imports gas from Azerbaijan via the South Caucasus gas pipeline (Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum). The country has a contract for purchasing 6.6 billion cubic meters of gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz gas and condensate field per year.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:

Iran exported 1.54 billion cubic meters of gas to Turkey in January-February 2016, as compared to 1.5 billion cubic meters exported in the same period of 2015, according to a report posted on the website of Turkey's Energy Market Regulatory Authority.

Iran exported 7.83 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Turkey in 2015, as compared to 8.93 billion cubic meters in 2014.

The report said that in January-February 2016, Turkey imported 9.36 billion cubic meters of gas, of which 7.29 billion cubic meters were imported via pipelines, while 2.07 billion cubic meters of the imported gas accounted for the liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Iran accounted for 16.5 percent of Turkey's total gas import in January-February 2016.

Turkey imports gas from Azerbaijan via the South Caucasus Pipeline (Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum). The country has a contract to purchase 6.6 billion cubic meters of gas per year from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz gas and condensate field.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Elena Kosolapova - Trend:

Net profit of Kazakhstan's oil company KazMunaiGas Exploration Production (KMG EP) totaled 0.9 billion Kazakh tenges ($3 million) in the first quarter of 2016 compared with 1.6 billion tenges ($9 million) in the same period of 2015, said the company Apr. 28.

"The year on year decline in net profit is largely due to a decrease in the share of results of associate and joint ventures and an increase in income taxes, which was partially offset by the reduction of taxes other than on income," explained the company.

Income taxes include an increase worth 3.8 billion tenges in deferred taxes, according to KMG EP.

The company's revenue was 121 billion tenges ($341 million) in the first quarter of 2016, which is up by 4 percent compared to the same period in 2015. This is the result of a 92-percent increase in the tenge - US dollar exchange rate, which offset a 37-percent Brent price decrease and a lower share of export volumes.

Net cash flows from KMG EP's operating activities for the first quarter of 2016 was 31 billion tenges ($87 million), against 27 billion tenges ($148 million) in the same period in 2015.

The company's production expenses were 55 billion tenges ($154 million) in the first quarter of 2016, which is by 6 percent less than in the first quarter of 2015. This was mainly due to an 11-percent reduction in employee benefit expenses compared to the same period in 2015.

KMG EP is in the top-3 of oil producers in Kazakhstan, according to the results of 2015.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @E_Kosolapova
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Apr. 28

By Huseyn Hasanov - Trend:

Turkmenistan and the European Union (EU) have expressed readiness to further consolidate the efforts for cooperation in the energy sphere, Turkmenistan's Foreign Ministry said Apr.28.

The bilateral cooperation issues were discussed during the meeting with the EU delegation led by Christopher Jones, deputy director general in the Directorate-General for Energy of the European Commission.

The EU is one of the promising partners for Turkmenistan in the energy security sphere.

The project for constructing a gas pipeline along the bottom of the Caspian Sea to the coast of Azerbaijan is one of the possible options for delivering the Turkmen gas to the European market.

Turkmenistan and the EU have been holding talks on this issue since 2011.
ST. PAUL  Rochester Sen. Carla Nelson called on Senate leaders on Thursday to take steps to avoid last-minute lawmaking.

"The public has seen enough of these last-minute shenanigans where there's some perceived leverage so we wait until the last minute, then pump out these huge compromises and people find out what's in them after the gavel drops. We don't have to live that way," she said.

The Rochester Republicans is sponsoring a bipartisan bill that would establish a fourth committee deadline for large budget bills. That deadline would require those proposals to be posted one week before the end of session. Nelson said the goal is to make sure lawmakers and the public know what is in these bills before it's time to vote.

Nelson said there has long been talk at the Legislature of doing away with the tradition of passing massive bills in the final minutes of session that have been negotiated behind closed doors, but these attempts have failed to advance.

"It's time we act on this. It's a much needed government reform. Nobody benefits when we make laws behind closed doors in the last minutes," Nelson said.

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Sen. Susan Kent, DFL-Woodbury, joined Nelson at the news conference and said she supports this effort.

"Caucus members want to avoid what happened last session when members of the Legislature and the public were frustrated by the way the bills came together last minute," Kent said.

Nelson noted that her bill has the backing of the Purple Caucus, a group of DFL and Republican senators seeking to advance bipartisan proposals. The Purple Caucus accounts for roughly 30 percent of the Senate's membership. She said she is optimistic that the support of the Purple Caucus, along with media coverage, can help give her bill the momentum it needs to pass.

She added, "I believe that we will not change until the public demands it"
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Fatih Karimov - Trend:

Iran exported 224.1 million liters of diesel to Afghanistan and Central Asian countries in the last fiscal year (ended March 20), IRNA news agency reported Apr. 28.

Nasser Sajjadi, managing-director of National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company, said that in the last fiscal year 5 million liters of diesel was being exported to global markets on a daily basis.

Alongside with Central Asia and Afghanistan, which were Iran's top diesel importers, the Islamic Republic also exported the fuel to other markets including South East Asia.

Iran eyes to export 15 million cubic meters of diesel per day during the current fiscal year, Sajjadi said. He added that the country's daily diesel export stood at 9.2 million liters from March 20 to April 24.

The NIOPDC earlier announced that it is seeking new markets for exports of extra oil products.

Iran used to feed its power plants with diesel and fuel oil but later replaced them with gas, which caused the country to save liquid fuel, including diesel.

Iran stopped diesel imports in 1998, but then became a net diesel importer in 2005 until early 2015.
Tehran, Iran, April 27

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

The Middle East Association is going to dispatch a large delegation to Iran with the hope to help British companies find new opportunities of cooperation in a variety of fields.

The delegations will include teams from major economic companies to cultural and scientific centers, Open Iran Group CEO Siamak Goudarzi told Trend April 27.

Goudarzi, whose team of legal and business consultants have assisted many international companies to expand into Iran, further said British companies are very strong in their will to start business with Iran in the post-sanctions era despite minor banking problems that still remain from the sanctions time.

The delegation will include 30 teams, ranging from oil and gas companies to the department store group House of Frazer, to Nottingham University, Berlitz English Language School, Wimbledon School Of English, Hockley International, the British Law Society and other law firms, business management companies, as well as IT and software companies, he said.

"The delegation will also include companies working in the areas of agricultural services and export, production of fertilizers and pesticides, etc."

On the Iranian side, many entities are waiting to hold meetings with the British visitors, including educational centers such as the Ministry of Science, Kharazmi University of Tehran, the Azad University, the University of Kashan, and Tehran Institute of Technology.

Regarding the energy sector, he said Britain's Shell and BP are waiting for the Iran Petroleum Contract (IPC) to be finalized so that they can sign deals with Iranian partners.

Recently, Lord Lamont, UK's trade envoy to Iran and chairman of the British Iranian Chamber of Commerce, said British car manufacturers are interested in establishing trade ties with Iran.

He also announced that UK Export Finance (UKEF) has allocated a fund for insuring related business deals with Iran.

He added that oil giants Shell and British Petroleum are ready to invest in Iran and take part in Iranian projects.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Fatih Karimov - Trend:

South Korean President Park Geun-hye is scheduled to travel to Iran on May 1, heading a big trade delegation.

A 236-member trade delegation of businessmen and entrepreneurs will accompany Geun-hye in her three-day visit, IRNA news agency reported Apr. 28.

The business delegation, which is the largest ever, includes representatives from 38 big companies including Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor as well as heads of 146 medium and small companies and institutions.

It is expected that during the visit, the two countries will sign contracts worth $13 to $17 billion for cooperation in various fields including the construction of hospitals, dams, railways and power plants as well as petrochemical, crude oil, infrastructure and industrial projects.

Park is set to meet with her Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, on May 2, the first meeting between the leaders of the two countries since the two sides established diplomatic relations in 1962.

Iran-South Korea trade turnover stood at $6.1 billion in 2015. The figure was $17.4 in 2011, Before Western countries imposed sanctions against Iran.

The sanctions removed last January following a nuclear deal signed between Tehran and the six world powers last year.

South Korea plans to increase its oil imports from Iran to 285,000 barrels per day in 2016 from 115,000 in last year.
The Reading Center is a 65-year-old nonprofit that fills a niche badly needed in our state to help those struggling with reading. The center needs a new building to complete its expansion plans to reach more students and train more teachers with the skills to teach the most challenged readers.

In a building with more capacity, with planned investments in technology, The Reading Center will reach more of the one-in-five students struggling with reading.

Every two years, the Minnesota Legislature chooses the capital projects deserving of state funding. The center has partnered with Olmsted County to finance half the cost of a new $3 million building. This is a good state investment.

In the last four years, this organization, with an annual budget of less than $1 million, has reached students and teachers in 45 Minnesota counties and nine states. Since its founding, it has served more than 9,000 students and 1,700 teachers.

The center's mission is to teach people to read. The consequences of not doing so are tragic. In Minnesota, more than 40 percent of children don't read at a basic level. Poor literacy leads to poverty, unemployment and jail, increasing government costs for education, social service and public safety.

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Encourage your elected officials to support the center's bonding proposal. For information, or to reach out for help, contact us at www.thereadingcenter.org.

Nicole Blegen

Reading Center Board chairwoman

Rochester
Ten Somali Minnesotans (a/k/a Minnesota men, as they are called in the headlines) were charged with seeking to join ISIS in April 2015. The case is of national interest and obvious importance. In the Weekly Standard articles The threat from Minnesota men' and Judging the Minnesota men' I tried to persuade readers that attention must be paid.

The cases open a window onto the evolving security threat facing the United States. It lies at the intersection of Islam and immigration. Developments in social media amplify the threat. The Democrat/media complex obscures and minimizes it.

Six of the ten Minnesota men have pleaded guilty; one of the ten is deceased or at large. Most recently, on Monday, Hamza Ahmed pleaded guilty to one count of supporting a foreign terrorist organization. Sentencing of the six men is pending a report from the German social scientist I wrote about in the second of the two Weekly Standard articles.

Three of the Minnesota men are scheduled to proceed to trial on May 9 before Judge Michael Davis. On Tuesday I attended the pretrial hearing. Judge Davis heard argument on a few issues of evidence and trial protocol that concealed the drama of these cases.

The government has a strong case. Thus the guilty pleas entered so far. The strength of the case can be seen in part in the FBI affidavits filed in support of the charges against the ten men. One of the Minnesota men in the circle of the ten defendants turned and became a confidential source for the FBI. In early 2015 he wore a wire and recorded conversations that will be used against those proceeding to trial.

In one of his pretrial rulings Judge Davis rejected the defense of combatant immunity that had been raised by defendants in connection with the charge of conspiracy to commit murder outside the United States, one of the two charges against them. Defendants had sought the dismissal of the charge, arguing that since the ISIS engages in combat, its members should have combatant immunity.

The doctrine of combatant immunity protects soldiers from being prosecuted for lawful acts committed during war. Judge Davis has held it doesnt apply because the group is a designated terrorist organization and the men are charged in the context of terrorist activities. MPRs Mukhtar Ibrahim reported on Judge Daviss ruling on this point here.

The defendants seek to present themselves as motivated by concern over the fate of their Muslim brothers in Syria. The sought to defend others. Their intentions were supposedly beneficent. Whats jihad got to do with it?

Judge Davis hammered his ruling home with defense attorney Bruce Nestor at the pretrial hearing. Im shutting the door on this, he stated. He emphasized: This is not a political trial. He urged counsel to read the Eighth Circuit decision affirming his handling of the Omar case.

Hes not going to give defendants room to roam on this point. He pointed to the door and threatened to throw Nestor out of court if he failed to comply with his ruling. He even extracted a pledge from Nestor to abide by his order.

The filings in the case are like the tip of an iceberg. More than ninety percent of the case is submerged in investigative materials that have been turned over by the government to defense counsel but have not been made public. The case is full of loose threads, such as the pathetic state of security at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Another such loose thread is the possible Mexican connection for travel and money. Reading the FBI affidavits, I have been unable to figure out if it had a genuine basis in the case or was a fabrication of the FBIs confidential source. One of the defendants spoke of bringing the jihad back to the United States by reverse engineering their travel to Syria.

In one of the prosectors memos filed earlier this month in advance of the hearing, the Mexican connection appears: [T]he idea to drive to California, obtain fake passports, then cross into Mexico to then fly into Istanbul in April of 2015 was borne, in part, out of [Hamza] Ahmeds and his three November 8th travel companions [sic] failure to accomplish the goal of the conspiracy by flying from the US out of JFK using their own [comma omitted] real passports.

Where did the Minnesota men acquire the resources to fund false documents and terrorist travel? Inquiring minds want to know. There is more reason than one to hope that the remaining cases proceed to trial.
The New York Times reports that Minnesota TSA manager says he was told to target Somali Americans. Let me say at the outset I find the story incomprehensible. The TSA manager referred to in the headline was allegedly asked to do something that he declined to do. Nothing happened. To borrow the title of the Bob Dylan song, nothing was delivered.

The term profiling is thrown around without definition. The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport lies in the background. As the story is written, it is difficult to understand the genesis of the controversy. The Times leaves the congressional hearing out of which it arises to the bottom of the story. The Star Tribune follows up with more local handwringing. Disparage the controversy at the risk of being called Islamophobic.

Times reporter Ron Nixon opens the story this way:

A Transportation Security Administration manager here said he was instructed by his supervisor to provide the names of Somali-American leaders visiting the agencys local office so they could be screened against national security databases for terrorist ties, a disclosure that quickly drew accusations of racial profiling. In a midyear performance evaluation, David McMahon, the supervisor of Andrew Rhoades, an assistant federal security director, wrote that he had advised Mr. Rhoades to check potential visitors to the agencys offices with the field intelligence officer to determine if we want them in our office space or meet elsewhere. Mr. McMahon, a deputy federal security director, wrote that he reminded employee [sic] that with our current world affairs that we need to be mindful of those we interact with. Mr. Rhoades, who works with Somalis in the Twin Cities area, said he considered the remarks racial profiling and reported the incident to the T.S.A.s Office of the Chief Counsel and the Department of Homeland Securitys Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. He has also contacted members of the Minnesota congressional delegation and the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency that protects federal employees from reprisal. I have never been asked to give the names of anyone else who visited the office to the intelligence officer, Mr. Rhoades said. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties said Tuesday that it had opened an investigation into the allegations. In a statement, the T.S.A., an agency in the Department of Homeland Security, said it did not tolerate racial profiling. We are reviewing this complaint and will take appropriate action if there is evidence that any T.S.A. officer acted inappropriately, the agency said. However, it would be unfair and irresponsible to infer or conclude that profiling is a common T.S.A. practice based upon a single interaction between one employee and his supervisor.

This will ring a bell for Power Line readers:

Officials said they have hosted Somali elders at the airport to explain how the agency carries out its mission and attended community meetings to resolve grievances. T.S.A. officials say they have also recruited Somalis as screeners and for other jobs. And the agency has assigned people like Mr. Rhoades to help address problems like people having trouble getting on a flight, or those who feel they have been singled out for extra screening. Somali leaders give the agency credit for its outreach, but they say the instructions by a T.S.A. manager to pass on the names of those seeking redress at the agencys offices to an intelligence officer is a setback. Why would you want to check the terror watch list for people who are coming to your office to seek help? said Sheikh Saad Musse Roble, president of the World Peace Organization in Minneapolis, who has spoken at the White House and serves on several local law enforcement task forces to counter violent extremism, including one led by the United States attorney for Minnesota, Andrew M. Luger. You are assuming that they have done something wrong.

The Somali presence throughout MSP lends a black humor to the security theater to which passengers are subjected. The Times omits to note that one of the ten Minnesota men who has pleaded guilty to charges of seeking to join ISIS recently worked on the tarmac at MSP for two contractors over a period of nine months. One of the contractors he worked for de-iced planes. This particular Minnesota man loved rocket-propelled grenades; he dreamed of using them to shoot planes out of the sky on their path into or out of MSP.

The information emerged at a December hearing in the case of the Minnesota men. I wrote about it on Power Line and in in the Weekly Standard Judging the Minnesota men. I dont think it has been disclosed to readers of the Times.

We are still awaiting the TSA Office of Civil Rights response to my FOIA request for basic information regarding the tour of security at the airport provided to Somali elders (as the Times call them), most recently this past February. TSA is dragging its feet producing information about the tour.

I specifically asked the Office of Civil Rights about background checks on tour participants. Readers may recall that a local Somali imam and member of the defense team for one of the Minnesota men was removed from the most recent tour shortly before he was to participate, I think for reasons that in retrospect have proved good and sufficient.

The OCR told me: We cannot comment on individual cases due to privacy concerns. However, the Department of Homeland Security does not at any time nor for any reason bar a participant from an event based on protected First Amendment activity [contrary to the disinvited defense team member/imams allegation]. If an event takes place at a secure facility, a security or background check may be run on an individual before he or she is allowed to enter a secure location. TSA advised all those Somali elders participating in the tour that they were required to submit necessary information for security vetting.

Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison makes a cameo appearance in the Times article. He unloads the usual deep thoughts of a race hustler: The Somali-American community, and all Minnesotans, deserve to know if T.S.A. officials are engaging in racial, ethnic or religious profiling.
Yale University President Peter Salovey solemnly addressed the Yale community by email in the early evening hours last night. He had a portentous announcement. Among other things, Yale has reached a decision on whether to retain the title master to refer to the teachers taking up the mantle at Yales residential colleges. You can feel the brain cells sloughing off as you read the deliberation that went into taking the long way around to arrive at the wrong conclusion in the current fashion. Its the tribute that knowledge pays to ignorance.

Thats not quite the way the New York Times reports the matter in Yale defies calls to rename Calhoun College or Inside Higher Ed in Yale keeps name for college that honors a slavery apologist. But it seems to me the most notable aspect of President Saloveys announcement.

President Salovey addresses this issue as the first of three before the university: (a) the title of master in the residential colleges, (b) the name of Calhoun College, and (c) the names for Yales two new residential colleges. These decisions, he explains, are the product of extensive consultation involving students, faculty, alumni, administrators, and the fellows of the Yale Corporation.

He prefaces the big decisions with some background: In October 2014, I first wrote to solicit your advice on naming the new colleges, which will welcome students in 2017. Addressing the freshman class last fall, in the midst of conversations about understanding our nations history of slavery, Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway and I talked about memorials on our own campus, in particular Calhoun College. Established in 1932, the colleges name commemorates John C. Calhoun, a Yale Class of 1804 graduate, statesman, and political theorist, who, while serving as a member of the House of Representatives, senator, and vice president of the United States, was a prominent advocate for and defender of the repugnant institution of slavery.

Its good of President Salovey to let us know he finds the institution of chattel slavery repugnant. We might otherwise have suspected he was a closet sympathizer.

One can infer that the master issue came last: Our communitys engagement with the issues related to residential college names led us also to examine the title of master, the honorific designation for the head of each college. The title is rooted in ancient and medieval traditions of learning, but it is also associated with the ownership of slaves. I think this decision reflects the exhaustion that had set in at this point:

The term master, when used to describe the role in the residential colleges, will be changed to head of college. The use of master as a title at Yale is a legacy of the college systems at Oxford and Cambridge. The term derives from the Latin magister, meaning chief, head, director, teacher, and it appears in the titles of university degrees (master of arts, master of science, and others) and in many aspects of the larger culture (master craftsman, master builder). Some members of our community argued that discarding the term master would interject into an ancient collegiate tradition a racial narrative that has never been associated with its use in the academy. Others maintained that regardless of its history of use in the academy, the titleespecially when applied to an authority figurecarries a painful and unwelcome connotation that can be difficult or impossible for some students and residential college staff to ignore. Among the many comments considered on this matter, the thoughts and recommendations of the current Council of Masters, the twelve heads of the existing residential colleges, were especially salient. The council deliberated at length, informed by a multitude of discussions with students, staff, faculty, and fellows, as well as by reflections submitted to an online site open to all members of each residential college community. The council also monitored similar discussions at other colleges and universities, although its members were determined to arrive at their recommendations bearing in mind Yales distinctive traditions and culture. The council found that making a recommendation to change the title was far from simple. People held a wide range of views, not as strongly correlated as some might have predicted with circumstances of age, race, or position in the college community. Nothing about the term itself is intrinsically tied to Yales history prior to 1930, or to the relationships that students of each generation have formed or will form with the individuals who lead their colleges. Moreover, a decision to stop using the term master does not compromise the study of larger historical issues. In short, the reasons to change the title of master proved more compelling than the reasons to keep it, and the current masters themselves no longer felt it appropriate to be addressed in that manner. Not incidental to the discussion was the task of finding an alternative title that speaks to the definition and responsibilities of the office. In this respect, head of college is the most logical and straightforward choice. In its favor is that archival records show that head and headship were placeholders for the title in the original planning documents. Heads of college may be addressed as professor, doctor, or Mr. or Ms., as applicable or as they prefer.

The name of Calhoun College survives, but the university will administer justice to Calhoun in another form:

Many alumni and current students of Calhoun College believe passionately that the name constitutes present honor paid to an egregious defender of slavery, and it is an offensive and oppressive reminder of racial subordination that should be removed. I share many of these convictions, but disagree with the conclusion. To ensure that our community acquires a deeper, more consistent, and more explicit understanding of our institutions past, Yale will begin an interactive history project, starting with an examination of the legacy of John C. Calhoun. The project will rely for its implementation on our scholars, students, and staff. We will create a dynamic digital platform to illuminate the lesser-known people, events, and narratives behind the familiar facades we see as we walk through the campus. This project will evolve over time, elucidating those aspects of our campuss history about which we can be proud, but also those that we find troubling. We will also hold a juried competition, open to the entire Yale community, to select a work of art that will be displayed permanently on the grounds of Calhoun College. In this competition, I will ask entrants to propose works that respond to the realities and consequences of Calhouns life. I will encourage the jury to give the widest possible consideration to different creative approaches. A member of Yales artistic community will serve as chair of the jury, which will include student, faculty, staff, and alumni representatives. These efforts join with the ongoing work of the Committee on Art in Public Places, which is assessing artistic representations across our campus and making recommendations for ways that art can help us to engage with and understand our past.

Well, master that, if I may say so.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Umid Niayesh - Trend:

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani says that only parliament can make a decision on qualification of the elected MPs.

According to the Iranian constitution once a person is elected as MP, his/her accreditation should be investigated by the parliament, said Rouhani, adding that no other entity has the right to intervene in the issue, IRNA news agency reported Apr. 28.

The Iranian president's statement comes amid disputes over the Guardian Council's barring a newly elected female MP from entering the next parliament.

Minou Khaleghi, a reformist politician who was elected in February as a new member of the parliament from Isfahan city, was disqualified by the Guardian Council after the election.

However, before the election, she was qualified to run, meaning that the powerful Council, which vets all the candidates, approved her candidacy.

But the conservative entity later changed its decision nullifying the votes cast for her, even though the election officials endorsed the results in Isfahan and found no major discrepancies in the counting process.

The Guardian Council didn't give a reason for ruling Khaleghi out, but there are rumors that she was disqualified because of an alleged photo of her without wearing hijab (Islamic veil), or shaking hands with a stranger man, which would be illegal under Iran's Islamic laws.

Meanwhile, the Guardian Council's decision has raised serious criticism among Iranian politicians.

Iranian conservative MP Ali Motahari has asked for impeachment of the interior minister, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, for not defending the "rights of the nation and yielding to an illegal practice."

Motahari also said it was up to the parliament, not the Guardian Council, to endorse a member once they are elected.
The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, says the ministry will make culture and tourism the bedrock of the Nigerias economy.

The minister made this known on Wednesday night at the gala night of the 2016 National Summit on Culture and Tourism in Abuja.

In this summit, we have brought together all the people that can make the culture and tourism industry work.

We have stakeholders from both the public and private sectors that are well grounded in culture and tourism.

What we want to do is to let the world know that the culture and tourism portfolio is as attractive as Ministry of Petroleum Resources, he said.

The minister advised members of staff of the ministry and its agencies not to feel rejected given the current government establishments structure.

He gave assurance that the sector would be made money spinner for government and the pride of among government establishments for public and civil servants.

Earlier in a welcome address, Ayotunde Adesugba, the Permanent Secretary of the ministry said that the gathering would design ways culture and tourism would impact on other sectors.

The summit will highlight the critical sectors of culture and tourism with a view to create job opportunities and improve other sectors like agriculture, transport and manufacturing.

Culture and tourism have become dominant sectors in many countries around the world and the drivers of their economies.

Nigeria must take the advantages of its rich, diverse and abundant culture and tourism potentials, she said.

Adesugba thanked participants and delegates to the conference and urged them to contribute their best to make culture and tourism the bedrocks of the Nigerian economy.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the gala night featured performances by the National Dance Troupe which showcased the nations diverse and rich cultural heritage in dances.

There was also an exhibition of artefacts, artistic and intellectual works which were inspected by the minister. (NAN)
Researched by Vinayak Bhardwaj

With the outbreak of zika virus disease in South America, attention turned away from the worlds most deadly mosquito-borne disease: malaria.

While its no longer the leading cause of death among children in sub-Saharan Africa, malaria still accounts for 10% of child deaths. In raising awareness, organisations in this field therefore often focus on malarias impact on young children, who are more vulnerable to the disease.

Earlier this year, the science news website Science Daily bulletin introduced a report on a new malaria treatment strategy by claiming that one child dies from malaria every 30 seconds in Africa.

Shortly afterwards, the leader of the US Presidents Malaria Initiative, rear admiral Tim Zeiner, claimed in an article that in Africa, a child dies every minute because of [malaria].

Following that, the African Leaders Malaria Alliance, a coalition of 49 African heads of state and governments, was quoted as saying an African child still dies every two minutes from [malaria]. The statistic is also listed on their official malaria fact-sheet.

So which time interval is it?

WHO website contains transcription error

Professor Sanjeev Krishna of the Institute for Infection and Immunity at St Georges University in London, whose study was cited in the Science Daily article, told Africa Check: [This is a] well-accepted statistic Visit the WHO website on malaria [where] you can verify [it] independently.

Zeiner from the US Presidents Malaria Initiative did not get back to us. The African Leaders Malaria Alliance said that their figure was calculated from a statistic listed on the World Health Organisations website which said: In 2015, about 305,000 African children died before their fifth birthdays.

The director of ALMA, Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, told Africa Check: With 525,600 minutes in a year, this works out on average to one child every two minutes.

But the WHOs 2015 malaria report has a different figure. It stated that on estimate a total of 305,000 children under 5 died worldwide of malaria last year, with 292,000 of those deaths occurring in Africa.

Estimated number of malaria deaths in children under 5 in 2015 (WHO) Region Number of deaths Africa 292,000 Americas 100 Eastern Mediterranean 2,200 European 0 South-East Asia 10,000 Western Pacific 1,500

Africa Check contacted the lead author of the world malaria report, Dr Richard Cibulskis. He said the figure of 305,000 deaths must have been a transcription error, adding that the number on the WHO website appears to refer to the global total rather than [deaths of] African children.

(Note: We asked the WHO whether they will correct the error on their website, but have not yet heard back from them.)

True extent of malaria difficult to calculate

The WHO malaria report focuses on children under the age of 5 because this age group accounted for an estimated three-quarters of the worlds malaria deaths in 2015.

Deaths were calculated using two methods. In countries where the quality of death certificates is acceptable, that data was used. However, in countries where this isnt the case and the number of malaria deaths is high, the data came from verbal autopsies.

A verbal autopsy is typically conducted by a trained interviewer using a questionnaire to collect information about the signs and symptoms of someone who died from a person familiar with the deceased.

The WHO malaria report is considered the best source of data on deaths due to malaria by the principal investigator of the Malaria Clinical Research Group at the University of Cape Town. But professor Karen Barnes said that sourcing data from different health authorities introduces variation.

This is because not all countries record malaria deaths in the same way  it is sometimes misclassified and thus not recorded correctly, the deputy director of the malaria programme in South Africas national health department, Dr Eunice Misiani, told Africa Check.

The true extent of malarias impact on Africa is therefore difficult to calculate, but available data may not be too far wrong as some factors increase and other factors decrease notification, which may balance each other out to some extent, Barnes said.

So how often does an African child die of malaria?

Due to the variation in data from across the continent, the WHO estimates the highest and lowest number of deaths that can be attributed to malaria.

Number of malaria deaths in children under 5 in Africa Middle estimate 292,000 Lowest estimate 212,000 Highest estimate 384,000

Using this data we can calculate how often, on average, an African child died of malaria in 2015. This works out to just under every 2 minutes when using the middle estimate.

Middle estimate 1 min 48 sec Lowest estimate 2 min 28 sec Highest estimate 1 min 22 sec



Conclusion: Claim that an African child dies of malaria every 30 seconds is incorrect

Despite the significant progress made in eradicating malaria  with the total number of malaria deaths dropping from an estimated 764,000 in 2000 to 395,000 in 2015  African children under 5 continue to make up the majority of deaths.

However, it is certainly not once every 30 seconds, as claimed in the Science Daily Bulletin. Similarly, the figure used by the leader of the US Presidents Malaria Initiative of a childs death every minute is incorrect, even if one uses the lowest possible estimate.

The African Leaders Malaria Alliances figure of a death every 2 minutes falls within the latest estimates that the World Health Organisation calculated, which ranges from every minute and 22 seconds to every 2 minutes and 28 seconds.

This article originally appeared on Africa Check and we have their permission to republish.
The Code of Conduct Tribunal in Abuja has dismissed an application filed by the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, asking the chairman of the tribunal, Danladi Umar, to disqualify himself from Mr. Sarakis ongoing trial.

Mr. Saraki is accused of making false declaration of assets, and is being tried at the tribunal.

One of Mr. Sarakis counsel, Rapheal Olueyede, had on April 20 applied for the disqualification of Mr. Umar, accusing the judge of being biased and having a case of bribery against his name.

Mr. Oluyede was almost thrown out of the tribunal after the application led to a heated exchange between him and Justice Umar.

Mr. Umar described the application as utter rubbish and dismissed it immediately.

He however allowed Mr. Oluyede to make the same application on Wednesday and stated that the tribunal would rule on the application Thursday.

On Thursday, Mr. Umar held that the Attorney Generals office had the legal prerogative to institute a suit against anyone found to have a case of fraud.

He also held that it was within the powers of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, to investigate him.

Mr. Umar said since no case was found against him, his trial could not have been ordered by the Attorney General.

He therefore said it was a matter of undue intimidation on the part of the defence to have come up with its application.

The tribunal holds that the application of counsel to the accused lacks merit and is hereby dismissed in its entirety, Mr. Umar held.
The legal team of the Senate president, Bukola Saraki, has said they will explore options available to them after the chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, Danladi Umar, on Thursday refused to disqualify himself from the corruption trial of Mr. Saraki.

Raphael Oluyede, Mr. Sarakis lawyer who filed the application, did not clearly explain whether Mr. Saraki would appeal the ruling.

We have options regarding the ruling and we will explore our options, Mr. Oluyede told journalists shortly after the ruling.

Mr. Oluyedes application argued that Mr. Umar was not qualified to handle the case as he had a bribery case against his name.

The judge dismissed the motion, saying it was an undue intimidation by the defence team.

Meanwhile, another counsel representing Mr. Saraki at the trial, Paul Usoro, has asked the tribunal to compel the prosecution to explain why it was amending the charge against Mr. Saraki.

The amended part of the charge reads:

That you on or about, September 16, 2013 within the jurisdiction of this honourable tribunal did make a false declaration in the asset declaration form for public officers who you filled and submitted to the Code of Conduct Bureau upon assumption of office as the governor of kwara state in the year 2003 as governor of Kwara state by your failure to declare your leasehold interest in number 42, Remi Fani-kayode street Ikeja, Lagos which you acquired through your company, Skyview Properties Limited from First Finance Trust Ltd. on December 12, 1996 and you thereby committed an offence contrary to section 15(1)(2) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act. CAP. C15, laws of the federation of Nigeria, 2004 and as incorporated under paragraph 11(1)(2),I fifth schedule to the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) and punishable under section 23(2) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act as incorporated under paragraph 18, Part I of the fifth schedule to the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended).

That you between June 2011 and October 2013, within the jurisdiction of this honorable tribunal, did receive monthly salaries or emoluments as governor of Kwara state and at the same time, from the federal government as a senator of the federal republic of Nigeria and you thereby committed an offence contrary to section 6(a) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act. CAP. C15, laws of the federation of Nigeria, 2004 and as incorporated under paragraph 2(a), Part I of the, fifth schedule to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) and punishable under section 23(2) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal act as incorporated under paragraph 18, Part I of the fifth schedule to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended).

Mr. Usoro told the tribunal that based on Section 216 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, the prosecution had a legal obligation to explain its reasons for the amendment of the charge.

The prosecution counsel, Rotimi Jacobs, however said there was no need for such explanations, saying Section 216 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act allowed the prosecution to amend the charges against an accused person, and explain same to him at any time before the end of the trial.

In his ruling, Mr. Umar held that the prosecution has no need for any formal explanation to the defence counsel and dismissed the application by Mr. Usoro.

The tribunal has gone on a short recess.
The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, has pleaded not guilty to three new corruption charges, added to the initial 13-count charge filed against him by the Code of Conduct Bureau.

The CCB had on April 18 added two charges to the suit against Mr. Saraki and increased it by an additional charge on Wednesday April, 27.

Mr. Saraki was first charged in September 2015 for alleged false and anticipatory declaration of assets.

His trial led to a fresh claim that the senate president is the owner of a Lagos home  a detail not mentioned in the initial charge.

After Mr. Sarakis plea, one of his lawyers, Paul Usoro, told the tribunal that they would need time to make proper arrangements for their defence.

Earlier, Mr. Usoro had asked the tribunal to compel the prosecution to explain why it was amending the charge against Mr. Saraki.

The amended part of the charge reads:

That you on or about, September 16, 2013 within the jurisdiction of this honourable tribunal did make a false declaration in the asset declaration form for public officers who you filled and submitted to the Code of Conduct Bureau upon assumption of office as the governor of kwara state in the year 2003 as governor of Kwara state by your failure to declare your leasehold interest in number 42, Remi Fani-kayode street Ikeja, Lagos which you acquired through your company, Skyview Properties Limited from First Finance Trust Ltd. on December 12, 1996 and you thereby committed an offence contrary to section 15(1)(2) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act. CAP. C15, laws of the federation of Nigeria, 2004 and as incorporated under paragraph 11(1)(2),I fifth schedule to the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) and punishable under section 23(2) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act as incorporated under paragraph 18, Part I of the fifth schedule to the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended).

That you between June 2011 and October 2013, within the jurisdiction of this honorable tribunal, did receive monthly salaries or emoluments as governor of Kwara state and at the same time, from the federal government as a senator of the federal republic of Nigeria and you thereby committed an offence contrary to section 6(a) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act. CAP. C15, laws of the federation of Nigeria, 2004 and as incorporated under paragraph 2(a), Part I of the, fifth schedule to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) and punishable under section 23(2) of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal act as incorporated under paragraph 18, Part I of the fifth schedule to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended).

Mr. Usoro told the tribunal that based on Section 216 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, the prosecution had a legal obligation to explain its reasons for the amendment of the charge.

The prosecution counsel, Rotimi Jacobs, however said there was no need for such explanations, saying Section 216 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act allowed the prosecution to amend the charges against an accused person, and explain same to him at any time before the end of the trial.

In his ruling, Mr. Umar held that the prosecution has no need for any formal explanation to the defence counsel and dismissed the application by Mr. Usoro.
The Senate president, Bukola Saraki, has appealed the ruling of the Code of Conduct Tribunal striking his application to disqualify the tribunal chairman, Danladi Umar, from presiding over the case.

A legal representative of Mr. Saraki, Raphael Oluyede, had on April 20 filed an application demanding the disqualification of the CCT chairman for alleged bias and intimidation.

In that application, Mr. Oluyede alleged that Mr. Umar exhibited obvious traits of bias in his previous rulings and that the tribunal chairman was himself under investigation by the EFCC.

In view of this, the lawyer argued, Mr. Umar should therefore not chair the trial.

Counsel to the prosecution, Rotimi Jacobs, submitted that the application should be dismissed, saying it was ironical for Mr. Saraki to still be occupying his seat as Senate president and then ask Mr. Umar to disqualify himself on the grounds of an unfounded allegation.

After listening to both counsel, the tribunal chairman dismissed the application, stating that it was within the constitutional powers of the EFCC to investigate him.

Mr. Umar further said he was however not charged because the commission found no reason to institute a charge against him.

He said the commission would have charged him, through the office of the Attorney General of the Federation, if there was such case against him.

The tribunal holds that the application of counsel to the accused lacks merit and is hereby dismissed in its entirety, Mr. Umar stated.

Mr. Oluyede immediately stepped out of tribunal after Mr. Umar dismissed the application.

However, in the fresh notice of appeal, Mr. Oluyede said Mr. Umar erred in law when he concluded that the application filed on behalf of his client lacked merit.

Mr. Oluyede said in the appeal that it was the submission of his client that Mr. Umar had assumed himself a judge in his own matter and that the ruling so given was an abuse of the office of the AGF.

According to the appeal, it was a complete negation of law to assume that the office of the AGF had no powers of investigation and that the AGFs office could not instruct the EFCC to prosecute.

Mr. Sarakis counsel therefore prayed the Court of Appeal to set aside the ruling by the tribunal.

Addressing journalists after the ruling, a chieftain of Arewa Consultative Forum, Joseph Waku, described Mr. Umars decision as a test for Nigerias democracy.

Mr. Waku also described the trial as biased, adding that the attitude of Mr. Umar makes his judgement on the matter predictable.

In as much as we are against corruption, let the legal process take its due cognizance. It is the last hope of the common man.

Only God knows where we are going with this kind of biased trial, Mr. Waku stated.

The trial is adjourned till May 10.
Seven members of the National Assembly Service Commission have rejected the appointment of Mohammed Sani-Omolori as the Clerk to the National Assembly, backing Benedict Efeturi instead.

Messrs Sani-Omolori and Efeturi are Clerk to the House of Representatives and Deputy Clerk to the National Assembly respectively.

Mr. Sani-Omoloris appointment was announced through a letter by the chairman of the Commission, Adamu Fika, last Wednesday.

But the Senate President and Chairman of the National Assembly, Bukola Saraki, in a letter to Mr. Fika argued Mr. Efeturi should have been considered for the position since he (Efeturi) is currently the deputy clerk.

However, in a memorandum, he submitted to the 440th meeting of the Commission held on April 20, Mr. Fika explained that Mr. Efeturi was not appointed to the position because he would proceed on retirement leave on August 2.

He said in conformity with the regulations of public service, no officer who has less than six months to retire would act in a higher office.

Mr. Benedict Efeturi, who presently acts as Deputy Clerk to National Assembly, will also proceed on his three months terminal leave on 2nd August, 2016 days before the end of the current Clerks terminal leave, he said.

In a dramatic twist Thursday, the seven commissioners rejected Mr. Sani-Omoloris appointment in a letter to Mr. Fika.

They said the appointment was made unilaterally by Mr. Fika.

In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by PREMIUM TIMES, they recalled that in November 2014, Mr. Fika had unilaterally appointed Mr. Sani-Omolori as Deputy Clerk before the appointment was reversed following opposition of the commissioners who wrote the then Senate President, David Mark.

Then, Mr. Efeturi was appointed Deputy Clerk as the most suitable candidate, they said.

The letter reads in part: As it were history has repeated itself. From the foregoing it would appear that you have become overwhelmed by the personal interest to the detriment of the Commissions integrity.

Note also that at the 403rd meeting of the Commission, held on the 20th and 21st November 2014, eight (8) Commissioners voted in favour of the memo presented by the Senior Staff of Committee for the appointment of Mr. Ben Efeturi as Deputy Clerk to the National Assembly, one (1) Commissioner abstained and non-voted against it. At the next meeting the minutes were adopted and extract to that effect and appointment letter issued. Till date that appointment has not been challenged nor nullified in any form and remains valid. Please find attached minutes of the meeting, memo presented by the Senior Staff Committee and a copy of the extract.

By that appointment, the issue of seniority between Ben Efeturi and Sani Omolori has since been laid to rest. We make bold to say that any letter emanating from you (Dr. Adamu Fika) at this time is an individual effort on your part without the consent of the Commission and has not followed due process.

We the under signed Commissioners disassociate ourselves from the letter appointing Mohammed Sani  Omolori as the Acting Clerk to the National Assembly and affirm that Ben Efeturi is the rightful person to assume that office based on seniority.

Although you are Chairman of the Commission, you are not the Commission. For the above reasons, we cease to have confidence in your leadership and Chairmanship of the Commission.

The commissioners who signed the letter were Abubakar Rufai (North West), Idi Ningi (North East), Joseph Oru (South South), Paul Oweh (South South), Stephen Yapwi (North Central), Oluwafemilola Lamuye (South West) and Abel Chukwu (South East).

The Commission consists of 13 members, including 12 commissioners and a chairman.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 27

By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:

The close cooperation between Iran and Russia is contributing to elimination of terrorism in the region, said Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehqan.

Calling for further cooperation between Tehran and Moscow, Dehqan said the cooperation between Iran and Russia helps restoring stability and security in the region, Mehr news agency reported Apr. 28.

Dehqan made the remarks at a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu in Moscow.

The Iranian minister is in Moscow to attend the 2016 Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS), which kicked off on Apr. 27.

Fighting terrorism in the region and across the world is among the main topics to be discussed during the conference.


A defiant Peoples Democratic Party on Thursday assigned the position of its national chairman to the Northeast geopolitical zone, ignoring threats of mass defection by some of its chieftains who insisted the position be zoned to the Southwest region.

The decision was reached at the partys 70th National Executive Council meeting held on Thursday at its national secretariat in Abuja.

The decision, which was made by the partys zoning committee led by Akwa Ibom States Emmanuel Udom, has now cleared the way for Ali-Modu Sheriff, the national chairman of the party, to contest for a full term at the partys national convention next month.

The newly adopted zoning arrangements as contained in a statement signed by Olisa Metuh, the partys spokesman, are as follows:

i. National Chairman  North-East

ii. Deputy National Chairman  South-South

iii. National Secretary  South-West

iv. Deputy National Secretary  North-Central

v. National Legal Adviser  North-West

vi. Deputy National Legal Adviser  South-South

vii. National Treasurer  South-South

viii. Deputy National Treasurer  North-West

ix. National Financial Secretary  North-Central

x. Deputy National Financial Sec.  South-East

xi. National Woman Leader  North-West

xii. Deputy National Woman Leader  South-South

xiii. National Auditor  South-West

xiv. Deputy National Auditor  North-East

xv. National Publicity Secretary  South-West

xvi. Deputy National Publicity Sec.  North-Central

xvii. National Organizing Secretary  South-East

xviii. Deputy National Organizing Sec.  North-Central

xix. National Youth Leader  South- East

xix. Deputy National Youth Leader  North-West

Mr. Sheriff, appointed in February to complete the tenure of Adamu Muazu, has been pushing to hold on to the position amid opposition from mainly southwest PDP leaders.

Thursdays decision highlights the unwavering influence of the partys governors caucus, which has remained Mr. Sheriffs most supportive bloc within the party.

The partys Board of Trustees, which took a hard stance against him before today, gave a backhanded support to the decision.

Walid Jibrin, the BoT chairman, was present at the meeting, although several other members were not.

The partys national secretary, Wale Oladipo, told PREMIUM TIMES that some of the absent members sent in a letters and apologies.

The BoT is part of NEC and some of the BoT members that didnt attend sent in letters to explain and apologise, Mrs. Maina Waziri is one of them, Mr. Oladipo said.

Mr. Jibrin, a senator, urged all aggrieved members of the party to eschew their discontentment in order not to leave the party fractured.

Many of us who are founding members of the PDP will not leave the PDP and the PDP will never die. We will continue to be in PDP whatever mistake is there we might be there to correct it and make our contribution.

Leaving PDP is not the answer, I will like to appeal to everyone who intends to leave the PDP to stop that. We must unite and all work together in order to build PDP. PDP is within a very good marking and I do not think I see anything wrong with PDP, Mr. Jibrin said.

Every party has its own problems and we should use our own problems positively. Im sure soon the whole problem in PDP will be resolved.

Doyin Okupe, a former presidential aide, said the party had entered the road to perdition with the decision.

Mr. Okupe, who has become one of the most vociferous voices against Mr. Sheriff in recent weeks, had said he and other party leaders from the southwest agreed to defect if the southwest is denied the chairmanship position.

The PDP has now entered the road to perdition with the appointment of someone whos only known public image is that hes a Boko Haram sponsor, Mr. Okupe said. This is shameful, and I hope all Nigerians, especially loyal members of the party, reject this unfortunate development.

Mr. Okupe also added that the decision of the PDPs NEC, which is the partys highest decision-marking organ, to circumvent the zoning arrangement of the party in order to impose Mr. Sheriff on the members is another slippery slope that the party is unlikely to escape.

This leaders of the party in NEC decided to ignore the zoning arrangement of the party so that they could impose Mr. Sheriff on all members, this is a very dangerous cliff that the PDP can never escape, Mr. Okupe said. It is over for the party.

But Mr. Oladipo said all those threatening defection are only exercising their right to free speech, as he did not expect them to leave the party because doing so is not an easy decision.

Were in a democracy and they have the right to talk anything they want, but I can tell you confidently that they have no intention of leaving the PDP, Mr. Oladipo said. Its easier said than done.
The World Bank Access to Information Committee has asked for more time to decide on a request by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), Lagos, on how the recovered Abacha loot was spent.

Olukayode Majekodunmi, the Deputy Director of SERAP, said in a statement on Thursday that the World bank had requested additional time to respond to SERAPS request.

The statement said SERAP received a letter dated April 27 form the World Bank requesting for additional time on the issue.

The letter read in part:In response to your appeal under Case Number AI3982-A, this is to inform you that your appeal remains under consideration by the Access to Information Committee in accordance with the World Banks Access to Information Policy.

The Access to Information Committee makes its best efforts to reach a decision on appeals within 45 working days of receiving an appeal.

In this case, the Access to Information Committee needs additional time to reach a decision. We appreciate your patience.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that SERAP had in an appeal dated Feb. 5 objected to the decision not to reveal important portions of how the Abacha loot was spent.

SERAP said the decision was a serious violation of the Access to Information Policy as it amounts to improper or unreasonable restriction of access to information.

The group requested the disclosure of specific information and evidence on:List of the 23 projects allegedly completed with the loot.

Location of the 8 health centers built with the recovered Abacha loot reviewed by the World Bank.

How the $50m Abacha loot received before 2005 kept in the special account was spent.

Location of schools which benefited from the N24.25 billion Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme.

Location of the 13 road projects completed with the recovered loot, including the names of the three largest roads and bridge in each of the six geo-political zones.

(NAN)
The Enugu State Police Command on Thursday dismissed as false and unfounded rumours of alleged invasion of Umuchigbo Abakpa Nike community by herdsmen.

This is contained in a press statement signed by the commands spokesman, Ebere Amarizu.

It said that the rumours were engineered by those wishing to cause disaffection in the state.

The attention of the Enugu State Command of the Nigeria Police Force has been drawn to the rumours making the round that some violent herdsmen have invaded Umuchigbo Abakpa Nike.

The rumour has it that the community and others closed to it have been deserted, but the command wishes to make it clear that this is not only false but baseless and unfounded, the statement said.

It advised members of the public particularly residents and people of the state to go about their normal pursuits without fear while rumour peddlers are warned to desist forthwith.

The statement stressed that the command in conjunction with other law enforcement agencies had fortified security along Umuchigbo axis to prevent any breach of the peace.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that rumours had it that Umuchigbo Abakpa Nike community had allegedly received threats of invasion from suspected herdsmen two days after the invasion of Nimbo community.

The residents were said to be agitated, after similar threat by suspected herdsmen manifested in an attack on Nimbo community on April 23 which left scores dead and several people injured. (NAN)
Members of the South East caucus of the Nigerian Senate have called for an emergency summit of South-East and South-South political and traditional leaders as a platform to proffer coordinated response to the menace of marauding herdsmen.

They also accused President Muhammadu Buhari of negligence and refusal to give even a cursory routine condemnation after attacks allegedly by Fulani herdsmen.

This was contained in a statement, Thursday, signed by Eyinnaya Abaribe, a Senator representing Abia State.

The call for summit came in the wake of a deadly attack on Monday on Nimbo, a community in Enugu State, blamed on herdsmen.

Mr. Buhari on Wednesday condemned the attack, and asked security agencies to respond to the spreading menace. The president has been widely criticised for not responding quickly to previous attacks.

Rising from its meeting in Abuja, the South East Senators warned of imminent danger and possible attack on the unity of Nigeria should the Federal Government fail to urgently address the Enugu massacres by the marauding Fulani herdsmen.

According to their statement, the Senators not only condemned the attack, which left over 50 persons dead and scores driven out of their homes, they also called for a summit of South East and South South State Governors, members of National and State Houses of Assembly, Socio-Cultural associations, traditional rulers and major stakeholders immediately.

The emergency summit, according to the lawmakers, is to review and evaluate what they described as a very scary situation and proffer a coordinated response that would ensure the security of lives and properties of their people.

The attitude of Mr. Buhari towards the attacks allegedly perpetrated by Fulani herdsmen necessitated the call for emergency summit, the caucus said.

The summit has become urgently necessary against the background of the ominous silence and apparent indifference of the presidency over the killings in Enugu, some areas in Delta state and so many other zones in recent time even when there was obvious intelligence reports.

We can no longer sit and watch while our people are daily slaughtered like fowls without even attracting the cursory routine condemnation by the Presidency.

We are even more appalled that despite the alarm raised by the Uzo Uwani Communities of an imminent attack by the Fulani herdsmen and the associated vague assurances by the Chairman of Fulani community in Enugu that such attack will not happen, yet the security agencies failed to prevent the attack that happened two days after the alarm.

It is disheartening what is happening and somebody has to take responsibility. That somebody has to be the institution of the Presidency of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, said the caucus.
The trial of the chairman of Daar Communications Plc, owners of Ray Power and AIT, Raymond Dokpesi, was on Thursday stalled following the absence of the prosecution counsel, Rotimi Jacobs.

Mr. Dokpesi is standing trial at a Federal High Court on Abuja on a six-count charge of fraud.

He is accused of illegally receiving N2.1 billion from the office of the former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki.

The money, originally meant for purchase of arms for fight against Boko Haram, was allegedly spent for the 2015 elections.

Mr. Jacobs, who is also the lead prosecutor in the ongoing trial of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, had written the defense counsel, Wole Olanikpekun, to inform him that he had another matter at the Supreme Court.

He also asked the court to adjourn the hearing.

The trial Judge, James Tsoho subsequently adjourned the matter to June 15.
Enrico Monfrini, a Swiss attorney hired by former President Olusegun Obasanjo to help track Sani Abachas loot stashed away in Switzerland, has dismissed reports that he operated firms in offshore tax havens while being contracted by different countries to repatriate funds from tax havens.

Mr. Monfrini was responding to a PREMIUM TIMES story that exposed his connection to over 178 firms in offshore tax havens as contained in the Panama Papers leak.

The private documents, obtained from a Panama-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca, revealed the financial dealings of many high profile personalities around the world.

In an email to PREMIUM TIMES, Mr. Monfrini said he stopped operating firms in offshore tax havens for years, and that he complied with all legal requirements throughout the period he was involved in the business.

My activity in respect of those companies has stopped for years or even decades, Mr. Monfrini said. The activities of financial intermediaries are strictly regulated in Switzerland since 2000.

Mr. Monfrini said he immediately registered as a financial intermediary in Switzerland after the service was legalised in that country in 2000 until 2014 when he decided to discontinue his interest.

Since the entry into force of the Swiss anti-money laundering law in 2000, I have been a registered financial intermediary, until the end of 2014, Mr. Monfrini said.

Mr. Monfrini further stated that offshore firms are designed to disguise the identities of their primary beneficiaries.

Indeed, so-called offshore companies are regularly used to bring together partners in a joint venture, for estate or tax planning purposes, or, more generally, to protect the privacy of their owners. In many aspects, such entities may play the same role as a trust would, a legal concept with which the common law public may be more acquainted with, Mr. Monfrini said. Nearly all Geneva business law firms are registered financial intermediaries or have partners who are.

Mr. Monfrini, therefore, absolved himself of any wrongdoing, saying he always kept the highest ethical standards in the course of serving as an intermediary for offshore business owners.

As a registered financial intermediary, I was subjected to regular audits of my files and of the measures I took to prevent the abuse of offshore companies for money laundering purposes, and have never been reprieved, Mr. Monfrini said. I have always kept the highest ethical standards and have strictly respected applicable laws and regulations.
The Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF, on Thursday condemned Mondays attack on Ukpabi Nimbo Community in Enugu State, describing it as most unfortunate and barbaric.

The ACF in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Muhammad Ibrahim, commiserated with the government and people of Enugu state over this unfortunate ugly incident.

It called on security agencies to unmask the perpetrators of the heinous attacks, so as to end current dangerous generalisation of Fulani herdsmen as responsible for the attacks.

Nigeria cannot afford to graduate from Boko Haram insurgency to an unwarranted attack by unknown gunmen alleged to be Fulani herdsmen.

The traditional Fulani nomads have coexisted peacefully with their host communities and have been grazing their cattle for decades all over Nigeria without any such attacks.

ACF is therefore disturbed and seriously concerned with this recent development.

It therefore calls upon the security agencies to do a thorough investigation into the identities of the suspected gunmen in order to stop this dangerous generalization of labelling certain tribe or people of certain faith as responsible for these attacks.

This will cause mistrust and likely incite people of different tribes and faith who have lived together peacefully for decades.

Criminals hiding under whatever guise and committing heinous crimes against innocent people and the state should be treated as such and in accordance with the law, it stated.

The ACF commended the recent directive of President Muhammadu Buhari to security chiefs, to secure affected communities, arrest and bring the perpetrators to justice.

(NAN)
Joseph Waku, a special rapporteur appointed by the Arewa Consultative Forum to monitor the ongoing trial of Senate president, Bukola Saraki, at the Code of Conduct Tribunal, has expressed a lack of confidence in the tribunal.

Mr. Waku, who served as a senator from Benue State between 1999 and 2003, said he suspected that the judgement would be teleguided.

Mr. Waku, a former vice president of ACF, said this on Thursday while speaking with reporters at the tribunal.

Mr. Waku said the organisation sent him to go and monitor the proceeding inside the tribunal and report back to it.

I was mandated by the Arewa Consultative Forum to come here as an observer and watch the procedures and go back to report what I have found, Mr. Waku said.

So, my observations here today are those things that I have witnessed and I have to go back to the mother organisation to report my findings, my witnesses, what I have seen and the way I have looked at it.

Mr. Waku further warned that Mr. Sarakis alleged false assets declaration trial signifies a trying period for Nigeria.

My observation is that something premeditated is going on in this country. The judiciary is on trial, the country is on trial, the justices are on trial and we are watching to see, because similar cases have gone on before and we know how they ended.

I think that Nigeria is again moving through a trying period of the judicial process and I make bold to advise that the prosecution witness does not have prerogative of knowledge but from the look of things, there is already teleguided judgement that one expects to see in future and that may not be good for this country, Mr. Waku said.

Mr. Waku said what he witnessed may not augur well for the country, adding that all parties involved should respect the judicial process.

It will not be good for the judicial process, it is not going to be good for democracy and it will not be in the best interest of the Change that we are looking for.

In as much as we are against corruption, let the legal process take its due cognizance that it is the last hope of the ordinary and common persons. That is my observation, Mr. Waku said.

ACF is a political and cultural association of leaders in Northern Nigeria.

Mr. Wakus comment is coming barely a few hours after Mr. Sarakis bid to disqualify the tribunal chairman, Danladi Umar, failed.
President Muhammadu Buhari said Thursday in Abuja that it was a matter of great concern to him that nearly two-thirds of states of the federation are still having difficulties with salary payments despite the bail-out funds provided to them by the federal government.

Speaking at a meeting with members of the Nigeria Governors Forum at the Presidential Villa, Mr. Buhari said he was very disturbed by the hardship which state government workers across the country and their families were facing due to the non-payment of salaries.

To ameliorate the hardship being faced by affected workers, the president said the federal government would strive to make more funds available to the states by expediting action on refunds due to them for the maintenance of federal roads and other expenses incurred on behalf of the federal government.

Mr. Buhari also said he would establish an inter-ministerial committee to study a Fiscal Restructuring Plan for the federation which was presented to him by the governors.

The president said the committee would review the plan to improve the finances of state governments and make recommendations on how proposals in the plan should be dealt with by the Presidency, the Federal Executive Council and the National Assembly through legislation.

Mr. Buhari therefore urged the governors to understand that while he was ready to do all within his powers to help the states overcome their current financial challenges, the federal government also has funding problems of its own to contend with.

You all know the problems we have found ourselves in. You have to bear with us, he told the governors.

Also speaking, Governors Abdulaziz Yari and Nasir El-Rufai of Zamfara and Kaduna States respectively, who chaired the committee that worked on the Fiscal Restructuring Plan, asked the federal government to do more to help the states financially.

The governors told the president that while they had resolved to take other measures to boost their internally-generated revenue, the implementation of the Fiscal Restructuring Plan would help them to deal with their funding problems on short, medium and long-term bases.

They said if the plan was adopted and implemented by the federal government, states of the federation would become more financially empowered to fulfil their constitutional responsibilities.
Nigerian Senators on Thursday argued about the nationality of menacing herdsmen allegedly killing in many states, with many lawmakers dismissing claims that they are from neighbouring countries and are not Nigerians.

The senators were considering a motion on the recent attack on a community in Enugu where dozens were killed.

The Chief Whip of the Nigerian Senate, Olusola Adeyeye, has called for a restructuring of the countrys federalism to allow decentralised police system as a way of tackling the ongoing herdsmen violence.

Mr. Adeyeye, an All Progressives Congress Senator from Osun State, said local and state governments should have police force independent of the federally controlled force issuing orders from Abuja.

This was part of the Senators contribution to debate that followed a motion by Chukwuka Utazi (PDP-Enugu North) on recent killings by suspected herdsmen.

Parts of Mr. Utazis constituency was attacked on Monday allegedly by Fulani herdsmen, resulting in deaths of citizens and destruction of properties.

Mr. Adedeye said local governments need to become actual government in its own rights and not appendages of state government to do its local work.

Also speaking, Isa Misau (APC-Bauchi State) said the rampaging herdsmen were not Fulani as they came from neighbouring countries to attack soft targets.

But the Senate Leader, Ali Ndume, said he could not believe the herdsmen were from Mali, adding that the Nigerian Government has a responsibility to ensure security and welfare of citizens.

He said the country had to take serious and major steps towards solving these senseless killings.

Adding to the debate, Ben Bruce, from Bayelsa State, expressed fear that there could be reprisals, warning against a time when things could go awry and out of control.

As a panacea to the herdsmen-famers clash, Emmanuel Paulker, from Delta State, encouraged the creation of ranches.

Those who own cattle should have their own ranches, Mr. Paulker said.

The Minority Leader, Godswill Akpabio, representing Akwa Ibom, disputed the claim the rampaging herdsmen are from neighbouring countries, such as Mali and Niger.

Dismissing the claim as political statement, Mr. Akpabio said 95 per cent of them are Nigerians.

Harping on Mr. Adeyeyes point, he called for empowerment local vigilante groups.

In its resolutions, the Senate condoled with Enugu State and observed one-minute silence in honour of citizens killed.

The Senate resolved to send a delegation to be led by Mr. Ndume to console with the people and make on-the-spot assessment.

It also asked the Police to take urgent step to bring the culprits to book.

Additionally, it said its relevant Committees would meet to find lasting solutions to the crisis.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:

Iranians are getting ready to cast votes in parliamentary run-off elections to be held Apr. 29.

According to the elections headquarters, 136 nominees are running for 68 seats in Iran's 290-seat parliament, IRNA reported Apr. 28.

The candidates are competing to secure seats for 55 constituencies in which no candidate achieved a clear majority during the February general elections.

About 17 million voters are eligible to go to the ballot boxes for the run-off elections across the country.

There will be no run-off vote in the capital, Tehran, as the candidates close to President Hassan Rouhani gained all the 30 seats in February.
The Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has directed all hospitals in the state to treat persons with gunshot wounds and accident victims before demanding police reports.

The duty to save lives is primary, and must come ahead of formal reports to the police, the governor was quoted as saying in a statement by his spokesman, Samuel Aruwan.

Lives must be saved first, before the formalities of demanding police reports from victims.

After saving lives, hospitals and other agencies can start making inquiries regarding how the gunshot wounds and other injuries were sustained.

We consider it a gross abdication of responsibility if any hospital leaves injured patients unattended because of the absence of Police Reports.

What is important is saving lives. There is no reason for an innocent citizen who has survived armed robbery and needs treatment for a gunshot wound to be denied the medical attention he requires.

The hospitals can comply with reporting requirements to the police after providing the care the patient needs.

Mr. El-Rufai said the decision was reached at the state security council meeting.

This is the unanimous resolution of the Kaduna State Security Council. As governor, I have communicated this decision to the Kaduna State Ministry of Health and Human Services and other concerned agencies operating in the state.

A moment of trauma is not the time to put paper before lives. All our healthcare agencies have been advised that it will amount to criminal neglect to deny or delay critical care to such patients, he added.

The meeting of the Kaduna State Security Council which endorsed the resolution was attended by representatives of the Army, Police, Air Force, Navy, SSS, Civil Defence, FRSC, NDLEA and the Customs service.

Also present at the meeting were Shehu Idris, the chairman of the Kaduna State Council of Emirs and Chiefs; Emir of Birnin Gwari, Zubairu Jibril II; and Kpop Gwong, Paul Wyom.
The police in Rivers State have arrested a man named Mitchell Tamuno, alleged to be a kidnap kingpin.

The police command, according to information it posted, Thursday, on Facebook, said Mr. Tamuno who is from Abam, Okirika Local Government Area, was arrested on Wednesday around 4a.m, alongside five other members of his gang.

The police said Tamuno and his gang have confessed to kidnapping a 14-year-old girl, Charity Ikirigo, of Federal Government College, Abuloma, on April 18.

The girl was later rescued by the Anti-Kidnapping Squad in the state.

They gang also confessed to being behind several kidnappings in Abuloma and Okirika, the police said.

The police said it also raided a hideout at Azuboko Ama, off Abuloma Road in Port Harcourt, around 5a.m on Monday, and arrested another suspected kidnapper, Iyalla Appolos.

The police described Mr. Appolos as a dangerous kidnapper who led a seven-man kidnapping gang that operated around Abuloma and its environs.

He was arrested on the basis of confession of another kingpin in detention, the police said. Two AK 47 rifles, one hundred and seventy rounds of 7.62 live ammunition and four magazines were recovered from him.
The family of the kidnapped former Nigerian Minister, Iyabo Anisulowo, on Thursday said her captors were yet to contact them 24 hours after she was abducted.

The victims younger brother, Kola Popoola, told journalists on Thursday that the ex-minister was returning from her farm in Igbogila in Yewa North local government when she was seized by the kidnappers.

Governor Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun State assured the minister would be rescued alive.

Mr. Amosun, who led heads of security agencies in the state, including the commissioner of police, director of State Security Service, and commandant, 35 Artillery Brigade, Abeokuta, to Mrs. Anishulowos farm at Sawon community in Yewa-North Council Area, which is about 100 metres to the scene of the abduction, said that security officials had already been detailed to ensure a speedy rescue of the victim.

The government is already interfacing with security officials and I can assure you that everyone here is involved including the local farmers, hunters and vigilante service. We will rescue her alive and bring her back safely and I believe that in a matter of hours, we will have cause to thank God over this incident, the governor said.

We are ready for the abductors and they will regret what they have done. Ogun state will never be a comfort zone for criminals, he said.

The Assistant Inspector General (AIG) of Police in charge of Zone 2 which comprises Lagos and Ogun commands, Bala Hassan, described the development as unfortunate.

Mr. Hassan, who recalled the arrest of the kidnappers of school children at Ikorodu in Lagos state, assured that Mrs. Anisulowos kidnappers would suffer the same fate.

The husband of the victim, Aderemi Anisulowo, expressed satisfaction at the timely response of the state government over the incident.

The driver of the kidnapped former minister, Wasiu Afonja,  said they were returning from the farm unbeknown that the kidnappers had laid siege for them around the bush.

Mr. Afonja said four men suddenly attacked the jeep in which he, Mrs. Anisulowo, as well as two other people were traveling in, and pulled him and the two other occupants from the car and drove Mrs. Anisulowo away in the vehicle.
ATLANTIC CITY  Bail bondsmen questioned who will be monitoring those freed on warrants under the state's new bail system.

Bail reform and the Speedy Trial Act that both begin Jan. 1, are meant to make sure poorer defendants don't stay in jail for years unable to make bail while waiting for their case to go through the courts.

There are currently no time limits for when a defendant has to be indicted, and then go to trial, Atlantic County Prosecutor Jim McClain explained at the forum held at the Stanley Holmes Community Center on Wednesday night.

The Speedy Trial Act changes that, requiring a grand jury hear the case within 90 or the inmate will be freed on his or her own recognizance. A trial then must be held within six months.

"That may seem like a long time, but in the criminal justice system, that's light speed," McClain said.

Under the new bail system, much of the monetary part is taken out and instead there is a risk assessment, which will decide who needs bail, and -- in more violent cases -- who isn't entitled to any bail.

The system means more summonses will be issued on smaller crimes with less warrants, McClain explained. And those who are arrested on warrants must be seen before a judge within 48 hours.

As a result, there will be a lawyer on call 24 hours, and the courts will go to a six-day week.

"From a police department and victim standpoint, we're hoping this will eliminate people from committing multiple violent offenses and consistently getting bailed out," Atlantic City Police Chief Henry White said.

All departments will have to go to the LiveScan system, which puts fingerprints into a computer system and basically does a background check to show if there are other offenses.

The matrix that calculates risk is similar to one instituted in the juvenile justice system about four years ago, as a way to address that there was a disproportionate number of minorities in detention centers, said Atlantic City Councilman Kaleem Shabazz, who put together the forum.

"It's worked, " he said.

When asked if it made the system racially balanced, he replied: "It made it race neutral."

Bondmen, however, want to know who's going to make sure those released on smaller crimes show up for court.

While Gov. Chris Christie is privatizing many areas that were state run, this is the opposite of that, bail bondsmen said.

"We're the ones now who monitor (those on bail) and do weekly checks, said Shawn Wilson, of Budget Bail Bonds in Bridgeton, who came to Wednesday's meeting.

"As bondsmen, we have a financial investment," explained Jimmy Anderson, of Bail Out Now in Absecon.

Bails often start small, at just $250 or $500, but goes up when defendants fail to appear, Wilson said.

McClain said he was not sure where bail bondsmen would fall under the new system, since that is private enterprise.

Johnnie Jones was arrested nearly 30 years ago, after police found drugs in his home while he was at work.

He was eventually cleared, he said, but was held three months until he could make bail. Under the new system, he would have been free after 90 days because he hadn't been indicted.

But he still wasn't sold.

"The system was crooked then, and it's crooked now," he said. "This smells of (Gov.) Christie, and I don't trust him."

Shabazz said Wednesday's forum is the first of several that will be held on the topic.
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Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 27

By Farhad Daneshvar, Dalga Khatinoglu - Trend:

Iran has drafted an investment package for developing tourism sector which includes 1500 projects worth at $30 billion, head of Iran's tourism organization told Trend. "Iran plans to attract 20 million tourists to the country over the next 10 years," the head of Iranian Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization Massoud Soltanifar said in an interview with Trend April 26 on the sidelines of the 7th Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations in Baku.

The plan envisages $25-$30 billion in revenue per year, Massoud Soltanifar added. Calling on the domestic and international investors to cooperate with the government for developing Iran's tourism sector, he vowed support for Azerbaijani entrepreneurs to invest in Iran.

Elaborating on the measures taken to draw the attention of tourists to the country, he said Iranian government has facilitated visa regime and launched projects for the construction of new hotels. "Several projects for constructing hotels in historical and religious cities are underway," he added. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has suggested that Iran's international tourism receipts in 2013 amounted to $1.294 million.



Meanwhile, the World Bank reported that 4.96 million tourists arrived in Iran in 2014. The World Bank statistics indicate 1.175 billion inbound tourists across the globe in 2014 with an expenditure of $1.426 trillion.
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.




Baku, Azerbaijan, April 28

By Elmira Tariverdiyeva - Trend:

The stakes in Armenia's nuclear gamble on aging Metsamor nuclear plant are high for the whole region, says an article published by The Huffington Post.

"Armenia was supposed to have a new nuclear power plant this year that would replace one that National Geographic suggested a few years ago was the most dangerous in the world," the article said. "We're well in to 2016, and not only is the new plant not operational - work on it hasn't even begun."

According to the article, the problem is the $5-billion cost, a staggering amount for Armenia, one of the poorest countries in the former Soviet Union.

The Metsamor plant is located in an active seismic zone - and many Armenian nuclear officials feared a catastrophe if the next temblor involved a direct hit on Metsamor, the article said.

According to the article, desperate for electricity, Armenia reopened the Metsamor plant - the first time in history that a shuttered nuclear facility had been restarted.

"But the global financial meltdown that struck in 2008 made it difficult to obtain financing from countries besides Russia, many of whose economies were in the doldrums for years after the crisis," the author wrote.

According to the article, so Armenia continues to make due with the Metsamor plant.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has inspected the facility, and declared it safe. But other experts are skeptical, the article said.

"The big worry is that the plant has no containment building - a steel or concrete shell that would prevent radiation from escaping during an accident," the author wrote.

The author wrote that an accident at Metsamor would devastate the capital of Yerevan, only 20 miles away and home to a third of Armenia's population.

"In addition, radiation would envelop Turkey, whose border is only 10 miles from the nuclear facility, and Armenian neighbors Georgia and Iran," the author wrote.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

French tourists stopped visiting Turkey that caused serious damage to the country's tourism sphere, Turkey's Culture and Tourism Minister Mahir Unal said, Turkish Haber7 newspaper reported Apr. 28.

France's President Francois Hollande said earlier that an armed confrontation may begin between Turkey and Russia, Unal noted adding that this statement contributed to the fact that the number of foreign tourists arriving in Turkey has decreased.

Relations between Russia and Turkey deteriorated after the incident with Russian SU-24 bomber. Following the incident, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to take measures for ensuring the national security and special economic measures against Turkey.

The number of hotel reservations in Turkey has dropped by 13.4 percent in the first quarter of 2016, compared to the same period in 2015, said the message from the country's Touristic Hotels and Investors Association (TUROB).

A total of 57.6 percent of hotels were reserved in Turkey in the first quarter of 2015.

The country's revenues from tourism totaled $31.5 billion in 2015, or 8.3 percent less than in 2014.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
DUBAI, UAE, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

H.H. Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum welcomes airlines to the new Concourse D

The 60 major international airlines operating out of the new Concourse D at Dubai International were given a royal reception yesterday when His Highness Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Chairman of Dubai Airports, welcomed representatives at an official opening ceremony organised by Dubai Airports.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360684 )



(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360685 )



Sheikh Ahmed interacted with airline representatives and toured the new facility as part of the event, which follows the successful opening of Concourse D on February 24 earlier this year.

"These airlines play an important role in making Dubai one of the most connected cities in the world. We highly value our airline partners and mutual customers - the hundreds of thousands of passengers that pass through our airport every day, which is why we have invested US$ 1.2 billion in the development of a state of the art Concourse D and major upgrades to Terminal 1," Sheikh Ahmed said.

He added, "As many as 60 airlines operate out of Concourse D, operating 350 flights every day to 90 destinations around the world. Considering the large and diverse customer base to which the new facility caters, the range of products, services, retail and food and beverage offerings, were chosen after careful consideration and in line with a detailed commercial strategy. We wanted to put the customer at the heart of that design and ensure that the whole passenger layout, including the design of retail and dining areas, was created from the traveller's perspective."

Concourse D features an exciting line-up of world-renowned brands being introduced for the first time - including casual dining concept The Kitchen by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, the first Pret a Manger in a Middle Eastern airport, as well as Butlers Chocolate Cafe. Featuring a total of 21 food concessions, Concourse D is also home to CNN Travellers Cafe for news junkies, as well as Masale: The Taste of India, in addition to scores of other popular brands already operating at DXB's other terminals.

The new concourse offers plenty of comfortable seating spaces and wellbeing concepts such as Be Relax and 'SnoozeCubes' which provide a convenient way to rest between flights. It also features a total of nine lounges spread over 6,926m2, including five airline lounges, a new Al Majlis lounge, two Dubai International Hotel lounges and a Marhaba VIP lounge.

Click here to download b roll footage of the event.

SOURCE Dubai Airports
TOKYO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Dr. Vivek Ahuja, George Phillips and Stephen Schmidt Join the Growing Organization

ArisGlobal, a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions for life sciences, today announced key new leaders have joined the Safety and Pharmacovigilance team to bring a wealth of insight to a growing business. This will bolster the company's safety business unit with unparalleled pharmacovigilance knowledge.

George Phillips joined ArisGlobal in the position of Vice President - Safety. George has over 30 years' experience in pharmacovigilance. George worked for UCB Inc. where he held the position of Vice President, Digital Safety Surveillance. George has held various positions within pharmacovigilance with Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Parke-Davis and Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals. George is a registered pharmacist and received his B.S. and Pharm.D. Degrees from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

ArisGlobal has created the National Competent Authorities (NCA) to address the needs of health authorities. Dr. Vivek Ahuja will lead this initiative as the Vice President - Global Pharmacovigilance. Dr. Ahuja was Director, Research and Development at PATH India. He co-authored the Pharmacovigilance Program of India (Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India). Dr. Ahuja is a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) from Government Medical College, Chandigarh, India and an MD from All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.

Stephen Schmidt has joined as the Product Manager - Safety. Before joining ArisGlobal, Stephen was a Senior Safety Systems Analyst within the Medical Safety department at Alcon. Stephen served as the Divisional E2B Coordinator, Business Functional Lead, Validation Team Lead, System Support and Subject Matter Expert for Safety Systems. Stephen's career in the pharmaceutical/medical device industry began in 1996.

"ArisGlobal has been a leader in Safety and Pharmacovigilance for years," noted Sonia Veluchamy, Managing Director, "but the introduction of this leadership and knowledge will position ArisGlobal for exciting new growth and industry insight. This is a bold new step into our increasingly bright future."

About ArisGlobal

ArisGlobal's (http://www.arisglobal.com) innovative cloud-based solutions facilitate global drug development and regulatory compliance within the Life Sciences and Healthcare industries. Its cloud platform supports the entire product life cycle including Clinical Development, Regulatory Affairs, Pharmacovigilance and Medical Communications. Hundreds of drug and device manufacturers, CROs and regulatory agencies leverage ArisGlobal's advanced technology solutions to make better and more informed decisions, facilitate compliance, reduce risk and improve operational efficiency. Headquartered in the United States, ArisGlobal has regional offices in Europe, India and Japan.

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

Director, Product Marketing

ArisGlobal LLC

Mobile: +1-609-360-4082

ngillen@arisglobal.com

http://www.arisglobal.com

Twitter / Linkedin

SOURCE ArisGlobal
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- "Bakers without Borders" by the International Council for Cultural Centers  Bread Houses Network from Bulgaria is amongst ten global grassroots projects receiving this year's Intercultural Innovation Award (IIA).

"Bakers without Borders" is an interactive, non-competitive board game which presents real cultural anthropology in an accessible way for people of all ages and backgrounds. Players unite in community bread-making events, mixed with artistic activities. They go through creative brainstorming sessions on social problems and social entrepreneurship, experiencing the transformative exchange of personal stories or dreams linked to cultures around the world.

"Having first experienced Bakers without Borders as a player, I believe that the involvement of different groups in community bread-making is a valuable and intriguing way to connect people," said Zdrava Vodenicharova, project coordinator at the Bread Houses Network. "We are honored that our innovative way of achieving positive and sustainable change is acknowledged by the IIA."

The Intercultural Innovation Award, a partnership between UNAOC and the BMW Group, supports grassroots initiatives that promote intercultural dialogue and understanding, thereby contributing to peace, cultural diversity and more inclusive societies. Close to 1000 applications were received from more than 120 countries, from which ten awardees were selected across five continents. This underlines the award's importance and commitment to the worldwide promotion of intercultural diversity and understanding.

The award was presented at a dedicated ceremony on 26 April during the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), chaired by H.E. Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, United Nations High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, and Mr. Bill McAndrews, Vice President BMW Group Communications Strategy, Corporate and Market Communications.

In addition to monetary support, Bakers without Borders will receive mentoring from UNAOC and BMW Group to help their projects expand and replicate in other contexts. This includes the opportunity to participate in training activities and workshops, as well as to become part of the exclusive "Intercultural Leaders" network. Project support is customized based on the individual and specific needs of award recipients.

In case of enquiries please contact:

Milena Pighi, BMW Group, Spokesperson BMW Group Corporate Social Responsibility

Telephone: +49-89-382-66563, Fax: +49-89-382-24418, Milena.PA.Pighi@bmw.de

Alessandro Girola, UNAOC, Programming Coordinator

Telephone: +1- 929-274-6217, Fax: +1-929-274-6233, alessandrog@unops.org

Internet: www.press.bmw.de

E-mail: presse@bmw.de

Related Links

http://www.unaoc.org



SOURCE United Nations Alliance of Civilizations
VANCOUVER, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Capstone Mining Corp. ("Capstone") (TSX: CS) today announced the voting results from its 2016 Annual General Meeting held Wednesday, April 27, 2016 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

A total of 246,256,131 common shares were voted at the meeting, representing 63.65% of the votes attached to all outstanding common shares. Shareholders voted in favour of all items of business before the meeting, including the election of all director nominees listed in the information circular for the meeting as follows:

Director % of Votes in Favour % of Votes Withheld Lawrence I. Bell 65.17 34.83 George L. Brack 65.06 34.94 Chantal Gosselin 99.68 0.32 Soon Jin Kwon 99.75 0.25 Kalidas V. Madhavpeddi 99.33 0.67 Dale C. Peniuk 65.55 34.45 Darren M. Pylot 99.73 0.27 Richard N. Zimmer 99.68 0.32

The resolution to set the number of directors at eight was approved by 79.69% of the votes cast for the resolution. Deloitte LLP, Chartered Professional Accountants were reappointed Capstone's auditors for the ensuing year.

Detailed voting results for the 2016 Annual General Meeting are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

About Capstone Mining Corp.

Capstone Mining Corp. is a Canadian base metals mining company, focused on copper. We are committed to the responsible development of our assets and the environments in which we operate. Our three producing mines are the Pinto Valley copper mine located in Arizona, US, the Cozamin copper-silver mine in Zacatecas State, Mexico and the Minto copper mine in Yukon, Canada. In addition, Capstone has two development projects; the large scale 70% owned copper-iron Santo Domingo project in Region III, Chile, in partnership with Korea Resources Corporation, and the 100% owned Kutcho copper-zinc project in British Columbia, Canada, as well as exploration properties in Chile and US. Capstone's strategy is to continue to extend the lives of our current mines with mineral resource and reserve expansions, maintain the optionality on the Santo Domingo development project, prudently progress the exploration portfolio and grow through acquisitions in politically stable, mining-friendly regions. We will pace our growth with our financial capacity, to retain, as a priority, sufficient financial flexibility to meet the requirements of our existing operations and our committed development projects, while maintaining an adequate cushion to deal with market volatility and operating risks inherent in the mining industry. Our headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and we are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Further information is available at www.capstonemining.com.

Cindy Burnett, VP, Investor Relations and Communications, +1-604-637-8157, cburnett@capstonemining.com

Related Links

http://www.capstonemining.com



SOURCE Capstone Mining Corp.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 28

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Turkey's military base began to operate in Qatar, said Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

He made the remarks during his visit to Qatar, Turkish TRT Haber news channel reported Apr. 28.

The relations between Turkey and Qatar will be expanded in all spheres, said Davutoglu.

Turkey's Ambassador to Qatar Ahmet Demirok said earlier that Ankara intends to open its military base in Qatar.

The base will be used to station approximately 3,000 troops, as well as air and naval units, special operations forces, and military trainers, said Demirok.

The base will be opened as part of a "multi-purpose" mission to confront "common enemies" signed in 2014.

The military base will be used primarily for joint training exercises.

"The agreement also paves the way for Qatar to open its own military base in Turkey," added Demirok.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
DUBLIN, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Financial Assessment and Credit Risk Analysis of the Forest Chemical Industry in China 2016" report to their offering.

This report analyzes the financial assessment and credit risk of forest chemical industry. It will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of this industry from the following aspects: development scale, operating benefit, related policies and industry analysis of major regions and provinces,as well as make scientific predictions on the future development forest chemical industry.

The Aim of this report

- To provide readers with comprehensive & in- depth understanding of financial situation and credit risk on China's forest chemical industry;

- To understand the position of the forest chemical industry in China;

- To Gain information on the major forest chemical produced regions;

- To predict the future of China's forest chemical industry will be;

- To find out the region be worth for investment and the investment risks of forest chemical industry in China;

- To reveal opportunities in the Chinese forest chemical industry.

Scope of Investigation

- Development analysis (Industry scale, Industry cost, etc.)

- Operation situation (Debt paying ability, operation ability, etc.)

- Major areas (major regions and top 5 provinces)

- Future forecast

- Commercial opportunity

Key Topics Covered:

1 Overview and policy of forest chemical industry in China

1.1 Overview of forest chemical industry

1.2 Policy of forest chemical industry

2 Development scale of China's forest chemical industry

2.1 Industry scale analysis of forest chemical industry in 2011-2015

2.2 Industry cost analysis of forest chemical industry in 2011-2015

3 Operating benefit analysis of forest chemical industry

3.1 Debt paying ability analysis of forest chemical industry in 2011-2015

3.2 Profitability analysis of forest chemical industry in 2011-2015

3.3 Operation ability analysis forest chemical industry in 2011-2015

4 Forest chemical industry analysis in major regions

4.1 East China

4.2 Central China

4.5 South China

5 Forest chemical industry analysis in Top 5 provinces

6 Future forecast of forest chemical industry in China6.1 Investment prospects6.2 Investment risk analysis6.3 Investment advices

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/8pkc73/financial

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

Related Links

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SOURCE Research and Markets
AMSTERDAM, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Although progress is reportedly being made towards settlement of claims on behalf of Volkswagen diesel consumers located in the United States including, at the choice of the consumer either to have the car bought back by Volkswagen or, alternatively "fixed" at Volkswagen's cost, plus the payment of "substantial compensation" to each affected car owner, CLEAN Foundation has contacted Volkswagen AG's management proposing a meeting to discuss a resolution of worldwide claims within the upcoming weeks.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160428/361096LOGO )



CLEAN is supported by Global Justice Network (GJN), a renowned worldwide network of attorneys who specialize in consumer compensation claims and who's members are playing prominent roles in US litigation, and by Corpocon Legal B.V., a global operating Mass Claims Expertise firm.

CLEAN Foundation represents thousands of claimants from numerous countries in more than 14 EU countries ,China, India and many more.

CLEAN Foundation represents duped consumers at NO cost to them. This guarantees our commitment in finding a serious framework for final settlement.

Although Volkswagen, in 2015, offered its U.S. and Canadian customers a goodwill package valued at USD $1000.00 and has confirmed that acceptance of the goodwill package will not affect a consumer's right to compensation for damages, Volkswagen has, to date, not offered any compensation to its non-North American based customers. Around 580,000 affected diesel cars were sold in the U.S.A.; the balance of the affected 11 million cars were sold outside the U.S. CLEAN is worried that Volkswage fails to respond to the EU claims.

Pursuant to the law of the Netherlands, if a settlement agreed to by the parties through the efforts of CLEAN Foundation is approved by the Court, the settlement will apply to all affected persons unless they opt out ("WCAM" procedure). This would essentially convert an agreed settlement into a Court ordered opt-out settlement with a truly worldwide impact, providing Volkswagen "global peace" or final resolution of the huge controversy.

More information on: http://www.cleanvw.org

SOURCE CLEAN Foundation Netherlands
BERLIN, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Applications in English from industry, trade and commerce accepted until 30 June

The German Energy Agency (dena) is seeking outstanding energy efficiency projects for the Energy Efficiency Award. Companies from industry, trade and commerce can apply for this international award until 30 June 2016. You can find all the information you need to enter for free at http://www.EnergyEfficiencyAward.de.

The Energy Efficiency Award 2016 offers prize money totalling 30,000 euros. The competition aims to publicise efficiency strategies across different sectors and motivate other companies to implement similar projects.

This is already the tenth time that dena has organised the competition. Thanks to all the projects implemented to date, total energy savings of around 8 TWh annually have been made. This amount of energy is equivalent to the contribution made by nuclear energy to the German energy mix last December.

This year, for the first time, dena is awarding a recognition prize to competition entries that rely on digital solutions as part of their energy efficiency strategy, and have been able to achieve increased energy efficiency in this way.

An expert panel consisting of representatives from politics, business, science and the media will assess the entries according to the criteria of energy saving, relevance to climate change, cost-effectiveness and transferability. The shortlist of up to 15 nominated companies will be published on 30 September 2016. The award ceremony will take place at the dena Congress in Berlin on 22 November 2016.

dena is offering the Energy Efficiency Award 2016 as part of its 'Initiative EnergieEffizienz' ('Energy Efficiency Campaign'). This international competition is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), and has been made possible with the support of our premium partners Danfoss GmbH and DZ BANK AG.

dena has assembled all the information on the international competition at: http://www.EnergyEfficiencyAward.de.

Press contact:

Deutsche Energie-Agentur GmbH (dena), German Energy Agency, Tom Raulien, Chausseestrasse 128 a, 10115 Berlin, Germany

Tel.: +49(0)30-72-61-65-641, Fax: +49(0)30-72-61-65-699, E-mail: raulien@dena.de , Internet: http://www.dena.de

SOURCE Deutsche Energie-Agentur GmbH (dena)
LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Some things can only happen in a hostel, and Hostelworld have set out to prove it by inviting hotel guests to a skinny dip - will they be up for it?

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360790 )

To celebrate the return of Hostelworld's previously banned 'Skinny Dip' advert, which sees a group of travellers who have just met in a hostel take part in a spontaneous skinny dip in a Mexican sink hole, the world's leading hostel accommodation platform has infiltrated a hotel to encourage guests to ditch their clothes, as well as their inhibitions, and emulate the adventure it's safe to say this level of spontaneity would never happen in a hotel environment.

The one man mission to bring the skinny dip to fruition in a hotel sees guests being approached in the hotel lobby, in the bar and even in the lift. Our hero even leads by example and starts to strip!

Despite being confronted with confused, slightly concerned faces and a torrent of 'nos', he remains undeterred.

So watch the action unfold and have that age-old question answered would you like to skinny dip with me later? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZtUALOehdw

Otto Rosenberger, Hostelworld CMO, said: "Hostels are amazingly social places, there are things that happen in hostels that just couldn't happen anywhere else. When you check in at a hostel you never quite know who you might meet and what travel adventures you will embark on together. This is what makes the hostel travel experience so unique and memorable."

About Hostelworld:

Hostelworld Group is the leading global hostel-booking platform with Hostelworld, Hostelbookers and Hostels.com in its portfolio operating in 19 different languages. Connecting young travellers with hostels around the world, Hostelworld has over 8 million reviews across 33,000 properties in more than 170 countries.

Hostelworld's customers aren't your average tourists; they crave experiences not souvenirs and want to be in the heart of the action. They want to Meet The World, and it's the social nature of hostels that facilitates their travel adventures.

The Hostelworld Group went public in November 2015, listing on the main London and Dublin stock exchanges. Headquartered in Dublin, Hostelworld has offices around the world in London, Shanghai, Sydney and Seoul, and was recently awarded as a Best Workplace for 2016 by the Great Place To Work Institute.

SOURCE Hostelworld
"Leading New ICT, Enabling Digital Transformation"

HANNOVER, Germany, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei, a leading global Information and Communications (ICT) solutions provider, has successfully showcased a number of innovative Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing products and solutions at Hannover MESSE 2016, which began on April 25 and ends on April 29.

Collaborating with customers and partners under the theme of "Leading New ICT, Enabling Digital Transformation", Huawei's inaugural participation at Hannover MESSE 2016 focuses on several key projects enabling, and driving forward, the ongoing fourth industrial, and Internet-of-Things, revolution.

Committed to continuously developing partnerships which foster open ecosystem development and innovation, the solutions being showcased focus on transforming enterprise ICT systems through cloud-computing, high-performance computing and software-defined networking solutions promoting agility and openness.

Key projects being demonstrated at Hannover MESSE 2016 include:

Road safety -- Working with ESI Group (ESI), Huawei is showcasing a car crash simulation solution based on its high-performance computing (HPC) technology. Modelled on an ESI virtual reality solution, Huawei's HPC simulation provides customers with equivalent digital equipment room layouts to those found in real car crash environments. Leveraging 3D technologies, designers can keep improving virtual prototypes during product R&D to reduce physical prototype hardware requirements. These dramatically reduce design costs and shorten product development cycles when designing and developing new cars

Working with ESI Group (ESI), Huawei is showcasing a car crash simulation solution based on its high-performance computing (HPC) technology. Modelled on an ESI virtual reality solution, Huawei's HPC simulation provides customers with equivalent digital equipment room layouts to those found in real car crash environments. Leveraging 3D technologies, designers can keep improving virtual prototypes during product R&D to reduce physical prototype hardware requirements. These dramatically reduce design costs and shorten product development cycles when designing and developing new cars Agriculture -- In collaboration with its partner Fraunhofer, Huawei is demonstrating a jointly-developed solution for HOLMER Maschinenbau GmbH, a leading German agricultural machinery manufacturer. The solution consists of more than 200 sensors collecting operating data generated by HOLMER's agricultural machinery in real time. The 'big data' is uploaded through Huawei industrial routers to the cloud for analysis on the data to improve the operating efficiency of HOLMER's agricultural machinery

In collaboration with its partner Fraunhofer, Huawei is demonstrating a jointly-developed solution for HOLMER Maschinenbau GmbH, a leading German agricultural machinery manufacturer. The solution consists of more than 200 sensors collecting operating data generated by HOLMER's agricultural machinery in real time. The 'big data' is uploaded through Huawei industrial routers to the cloud for analysis on the data to improve the operating efficiency of HOLMER's agricultural machinery Energy -- Huawei is showcasing a number of solutions for the energy industry, including an oilfield analytics solution based on SAP HANA, an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) solution, and a gas pipeline monitoring solution

Huawei is showcasing a number of solutions for the energy industry, including an oilfield analytics solution based on SAP HANA, an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) solution, and a gas pipeline monitoring solution Predictive maintenance -- Huawei is also exhibiting a predictive maintenance solution for elevators. The solution collects the real-time operating data of elevators, and uploads the data through Huawei industrial routers in real time to the control center to improve the O&M efficiency and safety of elevators through the identification of faults prior to their happening

"Pioneering a new era in ICT innovation, we're working to ensure our customers are able to quickly reap the rewards of the fourth industrial revolution by developing solutions providing real benefits for enterprises across multiple industries," said Karabet Krikorian, Head of WEU IoT & Industry 4.0 Solution Innovation, WEU Solutions Management, Huawei. "We work with nearly a thousand partners across Western Europe to jointly develop solutions based on the key principle of openness to ensure full integration and easy deployment. Hannover MESSE 2016 has been a great opportunity to bring these experiences to life."

More information about Huawei products and solutions at Hannover MESSE 2016 is available at http://enterprise.huawei.com/topic/2016hannovermesse



Related Links

http://enterprise.huawei.com



SOURCE Huawei
Innovation leader recognized for product design, community/educational partnerships and contributions to the growth of manufacturing in Central Massachusetts

CHARLTON, Massachusetts, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Incom, the world's largest supplier of glass and polymer fused fiber optic solutions, received the Worcester Business Journal's Product and Design Innovation Manufacturing Excellence Award for commercialization of Large Area Picosecond Photodetectors (LAPPD). President/CEO, Michael A. Detarando, accepted the award on behalf of Incom at the 2016 Manufacturing Summit on April 26. Detarando also participated in the Summit's "Collaboration, Connectivity and Partnerships" panel, moderated by Peter Russo of the Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150531/219636LOGO

"It's an honor to be recognized by the Worcester Business Journal, our partners and the community for advanced manufacturing design and innovation," said Detarando. "Incom is committed to combining the most progressive components with unparalleled technology expertise to empower customers, researchers and instrument makers with solutions that advance product development and user experience."

Incom earned the award for LAPPD research, development and commercialization.

A photo detector is a scientific instrument used for measuring the time of arrival and position of photons, and other relativistic particles. At 400 cm2, LAPPD is the world's largest micro channel plate (MCP) based photo detector with unprecedented imaging capabilities of interest to the high-energy physics, medical, defense and aerospace industries.

LAPPDs measure, characterize and record the behavioral changes of light by tracking the world's fastest moving particlea photonin a way that no other commercially available product can. Fundamental particles that can't be seen can now be studied and understood based on how they interact with, and affect, light. Advances that LAPPDs enable include:

High-energy physics research, measuring energy produced from particle collisions.

Life saving early detection capabilities through positron emission topography, mass spectrometers and medical imaging, to quickly and accurately identify body anomalies.

Detection of radioactive materials for scientific and medical applications.

For more information, contact pr@incomusa.com

About Incom, Inc.

Incom is the world's largest supplier of glass and polymer fused fiber optic solutions that enable innovation in the medical, scientific, display and defense industries. Combining the most progressive components with unparalleled technology expertise, Incom empowers customers, researchers and instrument makers with fiber optic solutions that advance product development and user experience. @IncomUSA | Facebook: Incom, Inc. | LinkedIn: Incom, Inc. www.incomusa.com

Related Links

http://www.incomusa.com



SOURCE Incom, Inc.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- "Unistream" from Israel received the 2nd prize at this year's Intercultural Innovation Award (IIA) Ceremony for their educational and entrepreneurial program, "Educating Tomorrow's Leaders Today".

"Our program empowers youth from underprivileged communities all throughout Israel to build and run their own startups," said Hen Ben Saadon, Director of Development and Business Relationships at Unistream. "We are honored to receive the IIA, acknowledging our unique approach to develop youth leadership in closing socio-economic and cultural gaps."

Unistream received the award for their innovative program that encourages dialogue and understanding between Jews, Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs. It equips underprivileged teens from diverse, marginalized populations with a practical toolbox of business skills, networking experience and the ability to successfully interface with members of other groups. The program focuses on resource scarce communities who typically lack opportunities to interact and builds on the rationale that socio-economic mobility is a peace builder.

The Intercultural Innovation Award, a partnership between UNAOC and the BMW Group, supports grassroots initiatives that promote intercultural dialogue and understanding, thereby contributing to peace, cultural diversity and more inclusive societies. Close to 1000 applications were received from more than 120 countries, from which ten awardees were selected across five continents. This underlines the award's importance and commitment to the worldwide promotion of intercultural diversity and understanding.

The award was presented at a dedicated ceremony on 26 April during the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), chaired by H.E. Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, United Nations High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, and Mr. Bill McAndrews, Vice President BMW Group Communications Strategy, Corporate and Market Communications.

In addition to monetary support, Unistream will receive mentoring from UNAOC and BMW Group to help their projects expand and replicate in other contexts. This includes the opportunity to participate in training activities and workshops, as well as to become part of the exclusive "Intercultural Leaders" network. Project support is customized based on the individual and specific needs of award recipients.

In case of enquiries please contact:

Milena Pighi, BMW Group, Spokesperson BMW Group Corporate Social Responsibility

Telephone: +49-89-382-66563, Fax: +49-89-382-24418, Milena.PA.Pighi@bmw.de

Alessandro Girola, UNAOC, Programming Coordinator

Telephone: +1- 929-274-6217, Fax: +1-929-274-6233, alessandrog@unops.org

Internet: www.press.bmw.de

E-mail: presse@bmw.de

Related Links

http://www.unaoc.org



SOURCE United Nations Alliance of Civilizations
LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

MindLink Software (MindLink), developer of secure Chat Enabled Collaboration (CEC) tools for businesses, today announces two major partnerships with

NeWay Technologies, an Israeli consulting and management services firm, and CWSI, a leading Mobile IT Integrator in the UK and Ireland.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160413/354760LOGO )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160413/354761 )



Enterprise Messaging and Chat is a hot topic for most businesses today. Being able to expand rapidly and service new, core market is one of MindLink's key focus areas in 2016. NeWay and CWSI are both experienced, high calibre partners with extensive knowledge in Mobile IT and Microsoft technologies and have a substantial reach within their core markets of Israel and Ireland respectively.

Neway and CWSI have joined the MindLink resellers program offering its secure enterprise messaging platform to clients & prospects in their home markets.

Greg Finnigan, Channel Director comments: "We are very excited to be bringing secure messaging applications to firms in Israel and Ireland via our new partnerships. Our firms have the goal to connect people and knowledge and create a collaborative enterprise, whilst putting major emphasis on data security, privacy and compliance".

NeWay, based in Israel, specialises in IT projects in Microsoft environments and was selected Microsoft Best Partner in Israel and worldwide in previous years.

"The heritage of both our firms and our close ties with Microsoft makes offering chat enabled collaboration solutions to Lync & Skype for Business clients a natural extension to our business offering." remarks Shmulik Barr, CEO NeWay Technologies.

CWSI, based in Ireland, bridges the gap between mobile and IT and specialises in Mobile IT, EMM/ MDM and delivery of Enterprise Mobility Solutions.

"We're very excited about the promise both our companies are committed to fulfilling through this partnership," explains Ronan Murphy, CEO, CWSI. "It is especially advantageous for financial services and government entities requiring highest data security and compliance whilst enabling collaboration on mobile devices."

About MindLink

MindLink is a highly secure Chat Enabled Collaboration (CEC) platform for enterprises. Its messaging & collaboration app encourages employees to stay actively connected, reduce Email usage and build a more agile and responsive business.

MindLink offers all modern collaboration features - presence, instant messaging, group chat as well as file sharing & archiving, combined with mobility, data security, regulatory compliance and advanced integrations to provide relevant content to users. On top of that, MindLink also connects to UC platforms such as Microsoft Lync & Skype for Business.

Think of MindLink as a secure alternative to WhatsApp designed for corporate use.

Sign up for free: http://www.mindlinksoft.com

About Neway

Since 2004, NeWay aspires to focus its experience, knowledge and expertise in providing innovative and creative solutions to complex IT and computer-related challenges. We manage complex projects in a variety of vertical markets including; Hi-tech, Communications, software and Internet, Banking & Government.

With offices and professional service personnel in Israel & the US, we manage and execute complicated projects creatively and flexibly, integrating advanced technological solutions and a range of methodologies that best meet each specific requirement. We successfully combine field-proven experience and vast knowledge of Microsoft technologies with a highly trained professional team.

NeWay Technologies is a Microsoft Gold Partner with communication, cloud platform & cloud productivity competencies. The company integrates the most advanced technologies and solutions available by Microsoft, among customers of all sizes, as well as other 3rd party software and hardware solutions.

About CWSI

CWSI, a Deloitte Fast 50 company is a dedicated Mobile IT integrator and leader in enterprise mobile security, in Ireland and the UK. The company enables mobile workers to move freely, securely and focus on what matters. The company provides innovative solutions in the areas of mobile IT, including Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), Enterprise File Share and Sync (EFSS) and the delivery of Secure mobility solutions and policies.

With a specialist knowledge of Mobile IT and a network agnostic position in the market that allows CWSI to work with multiple carriers and operating systems. CWSI also provides solutions, managed services and integration services to many of Ireland's and the UK's best known enterprises and institutions. The company has offices in Dublin and London. http://www.cwsi.ie

Media Contact:

MindLink

Annekathrin Hase

Annekathrin.hase@mindlinksoft.com

+44(0)20-3582-1487



SOURCE MindLink Software Ltd.
DUBLIN, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Drivy, a French car rental startup, has raised USD 35 million for European expansion. Currently operating in France, Germany and Spain, Drivy plans to add to the 36,000 cars on its system by offering its services in other European cities such as London. The startup is also reportedly considering markets in Italy, Poland, Portugal and the Netherlands. The global car rental market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.32% by 2019, according to a report from Research and Markets, but Drivy's latest round of fundraising could result in a higher growth.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO )



Although the average rental length on the Drivy platform is around three days, the company is seeing an increasing demand for single-day and half-day rentals. In an effort to make the rental process as simple as possible, the startup developed the Drivy Open system, which enables customers to open a locked vehicle through use of an app.

The global commercial telematics market is set to grow at a CAGR of 27.39% by 2020, as forecast in a recent report, and the Drivy Open system could stimulate further growth. Similarly, the Europe automotive smart keys market is expected to be worth USD 5.6 billion by 2020, but industry adoption of Drivy's technology could result in a greater market value.

Cathay Innovation and Nokia Growth Partners led the latest fundraising round, which saw the participation of previous investors Bpifrance Ecotechnologies Fund, Via-ID and Index Ventures. Drivy has now raised a total of EUR 47 million over four investment rounds.

For further information on this topic, and a full list of all related documentation, please visit the Automotive Leasing and Rental section at http://www.researchandmarkets.com/rm/OHNQ.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/-airbnb-for-cars-startup-drivy-gets-35-million-to-expand

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.





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
Two Turkish soldiers were martyred and 10 PKK terrorists were killed in four separate counter-terrorism operations in two southeast Turkish provinces since Wednesday, the Turkish military and unnamed security sources said Thursday, Anadolu Agency reported.

Two Turkish soldiers were critically wounded in clashes with PKK terrorists Thursday and later succumbed to injuries at the hospital, local security sources said.

According to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on speaking with the media, the soldiers died in Sirnak province's Gazipasa and Cumhuriyet neighborhoods.

Also in Sirnak province, six PKK terrorists were killed in clashes Wednesday, which increased the total number of terrorists killed in the area to 813 since operations there began, the Turkish General Staff said in a statement posted on its official website Thursday.

Four PKK terrorists were also killed in Mardin province's Nusaybin district, increasing the number of terrorists killed in the area to 674, the statement said.

Turkey's southeast has been the scene of significant military operations since late 2015, as the police and army seek to clear PKK terrorists from urban areas.

The PKK -- seen as a terrorist organization also by the U.S. and the EU -- resumed its 30-year armed campaign against the Turkish state in July 2015.
DELHI, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

World's Largest Solar Developer and World-Leading Indian EPC contractor to begin construction in Madhya Pradesh and Telangana in Q3-Q4 2016

SkyPower, the largest and one of the most successful developers of utility-scale solar energy projects in the world, and Sterling and Wilson, world-leading and top Indian solar engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) company, are pleased to announce the signing of agreements today for the EPC and operation and maintenance (O&M) of SkyPower's recently awarded 350 MW (AC) solar projects to be built in India. Construction of the seven 50 MW projects, 150 MW in Madhya Pradesh and 200 MW in Telangana, are to commence in Q3-Q4 of 2016.

Sterling and Wilson, an award-winning EPC contractor, has installed nearly 1 GW of solar energy projects in India alone, and continues to lead the industry as more than 3,500 of its highly skilled workforce build international solar operations across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and has already commissioned nearly 150 MW in solar farms across Africa and Southeast Asia.

"SkyPower continues to lead by example and by action. The signing of these EPC and O&M agreements with Sterling and Wilson is an important milestone toward the timely execution of our awarded projects and fulfillment of our commitment to generating a brighter future for India through developing clean solar power," said SkyPower's President and Chief Executive Officer Kerry Adler.

"Sterling and Wilson is proud to be selected to execute SkyPower's projects in India. SkyPower's world-class construction and O&M requirements and standards are stringent, and our selection is a testament to Sterling and Wilson's capabilities and stellar reputation in India and abroad," said Bikesh Ogra, President, Solar & Electrical Division, Sterling and Wilson.

Said Sri Manu Shrivastava, Principal Secretary, New and Renewable Energy Department, Government of Madhya Pradesh: "MP Government and MPNRED would extend all cooperation for timely execution of SkyPower projects in the state. We are extremely happy to learn of progress on the project. Almost 1,500 MW of projects have been installed in the state in 2015-16, and execution of SkyPower projects would further supplement the achievements of Madhya Pradesh in the field of renewable energy."

SkyPower's continued commitment to develop, finance and build solar photovoltaic projects in India represents a significant amount of the Government of India's 100 GW solar target for 2022. SkyPower is proud to be a part of this exemplary program.

About SkyPower

http://www.skypower.com

SkyPower is the largest and one of the most successful developers and owners of utility-scale solar energy projects in the world. With roots dating back more than a dozen years, SkyPower's global team possesses a vast track record of over 900 years of combined experience in power and large infrastructure projects.

The experienced and accomplished SkyPower team has built, assembled and acquired an extensive pipeline of over 25 GW worldwide - 9 GW of which were recently announced in bilateral agreements, and other contract awards, to be built in the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia over the next five years.

SkyPower's over 30 utility-scale solar Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) and Contracts in aggregate represent well in excess of US $80 billion worth of long-term renewable energy sales to leading utilities and governments around the world.

SkyPower is majority owned by CIM Group, a U.S.-based real estate and infrastructure investment firm founded in 1994 that has systematically and successfully invested in dynamic and densely populated communities throughout North America.

About Sterling and Wilson

Sterling and Wilson, which began its operations in 1927 as Wilson Electric Works, is a group company of the 150 year old US$ 2.5 billion business conglomerate - Shapoorji Pallonji Group, and is one of India's leading MEP services provider.

Sterling and Wilson's range of offerings cover Turnkey MEP projects, Electrical, HVAC, DG sets from 10kVA to 3300 kVA, manufacturing of HT/LT Panels, Public Health Engineering and Fire Fighting, Security systems, Mechanical EPC, EPC Contracting, Distributed Power & Co-generation, Data Centre EPC, Turnkey EPC for solar power projects, Operation & Maintenance and International Operations.

Today Sterling and Wilson, has evolved as India's leading MEP (Mechanical, Electrical & Public Health Engineering) Services Company. Some of the iconic projects accomplished by Sterling and Wilson are First International Financial Centre (FIFC), Terminal 3- Indira Gandhi International Airport, Lulu International Mall, Buddh International Circuit, Ford India, to name a few.

Sterling and Wilson is India's largest Solar EPC in terms of number of projects that are spread across the country. Sterling and Wilson was awarded the "Energize" Indian Power Sector Award for "Excellence in Solar EPC" for the year 2012-13, as evaluated by Ernst & Young and presented by CNBC-TV 18. Sterling and Wilson is also recognized as India's top solar EPC player and ranked globally 19th by IHS Solar Research's report in 2014 for Global PV integrators market share (IHS is a world leader in solar market research & analysis).

Internationally, the company along with its parent SPCL, is presently developing a pipeline of solar and MEP projects across India, Middle-east, Central Asia, East Asia and Africa. Visit us at http://www.sterlingandwilson.com

For media inquiries please contact: Hando Kang, Vice President, International Public Affairs, Hando.kang@skypower.com, +1-647-205-0619; Maria Vorobieva, Director, International Public Affairs, mariav@skypower.com, +1-647-965-7187; Shamini Selvaratnam, Director, International Public Affairs and Communications, shaminis@skypower.com, +1-647-625-0997

SOURCE SkyPower
PUNE, India, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

DeepResearchReports.com adds 2016 global spline shaft industry research with other worldwide and regional spline shaft reports available in the machines & equipment section of its online business intelligence library.

Complete report on the Spline Shaft market spread across 159 pages, profiling 14 companies and supported with 281 tables and figures is now available at

http://www.deepresearchreports.com/184062.html .

The "2016 Market Research Report on Global Spline Shaft Industry" is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Spline Shaft market with a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Spline Shaft market analysis is provided for the international markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status. Development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures. This report also 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. Few key manufacturers included in this report are Haydon Kerk, THK, M/S Malkar Industries, Otake Kouki Co., Mitsubishi Fuso, Bajrang Gears, Asia Rubber and Plastics, Ah-Sung Engineering, Asuper Precision Manufacturing, Jiangyin Yongxing, Shanghai Baoliang , Weifang Wannuo, Renqiu Shuangfeng and Yuhuan Leihe Machinery.

The report focuses on global major leading industry players of Spline Shaft market providing information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity production, price, cost, production value and contact information. Upstream raw materials and equipment and downstream demand analysis is also carried out. The Spline Shaft market development trends and marketing channels are analyzed. Finally the feasibility of new investment projects are assessed and overall research conclusions offered.

With 281 tables and figures to support the Spline Shaft market analysis, this research 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.

Some of the tables and figures provided in Global Spline Shaft Market Report 2016 research report include:

Figure Marketing Channels of Spline Shaft

Table Traders or Distributors with Contact Information of Spline Shaft by Regions

Table Ex-work Price, Channel Price and End Buyer Price of Spline Shaft (USD/MT)

Table Regional Import, Export, and Trade of Spline Shaft (K MT)

Order a copy of Global Spline Shaft Market Report 2016 research report at http://www.deepresearchreports.com/contacts/purchase.php?name=184062 .

Another research titled "2015 Market Research Report on United States Spline Shaft Industry" is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the United States Spline Shaft industry with a focus on the global market. This report also states import/export consumption, supply and demand figures, cost, price, revenue and gross margins.

The report then analyzes the United States Spline Shaft market size (volume and value), and the sales segment market is also discussed by product type, application and region. The major Spline Shaft market is analyzed, data including: market size, import and export, sale segment market by product type and application. Then we forecast the 2015-2020 market size of Spline Shaft.

With 160 tables and figures on the market, this research profiles companies like Haydon Kerk, THK, M/S Malkar Industries, Otake Kouki Co., Mitsubishi Fuso, Bajrang Gears, Asia Rubber and Plastics, Ah-Sung Engineering, Asuper Precision Manufacturing and Yuhuan Leihe Machinery. Read more at http://www.deepresearchreports.com/138823.html .

Explore more reports on the Machines & Equipment market at http://www.deepresearchreports.com/cat/machines-equipment-market-research.html .

About Us:

Deep Research Reports is digital database of syndicated market reports for global and China industries. These reports offer competitive intelligence data for companies in varied market segments and for decision makers at multiple levels in these organizations. We provide 24/7 online and offline support to our customers.

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+ 1 888 391 5441

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SOURCE Deep Research Reports
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Coexist Initiative from Kenya received the 4th prize at this year's Intercultural Innovation Award (IIA) Ceremony for their "Girls Education Promotion Program."

"Any girl who is able to finish school is a reward to the world," says Wanjala Wafula, founder and CEO of the Coexist Initiative. "We are grateful that the IIA has acknowledged our efforts to involve men and boys in breaking down the social and cultural impediments to girls' education."

The organization has established itself as a pioneer in promoting gender transformation and advancing human rights, by encouraging men and boys to be champions for girls' education. Rather than narrowly defining or sidelining the role of men in gender equality, the Coexist Initiative engages men, boys and communities to address complex socio-cultural barriers such as customs of male dominance and the traditional roles of women.

The Intercultural Innovation Award, a partnership between UNAOC and the BMW Group, supports grassroots initiatives that promote intercultural dialogue and understanding, thereby contributing to peace, cultural diversity and more inclusive societies. Close to 1000 applications were received from more than 120 countries, from which ten awardees were selected across five continents. This underlines the award's importance and commitment to the worldwide promotion of intercultural diversity and understanding.

The award was presented at a dedicated ceremony on 26 April during the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), chaired by H.E. Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, United Nations High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, and Mr. Bill McAndrews, Vice President BMW Group Communications Strategy, Corporate and Market Communications

In addition to monetary support, the Coexist Initiative will receive mentoring from UNAOC and BMW Group to help their projects expand and replicate in other contexts. This includes the opportunity to participate in training activities and workshops, as well as to become part of the exclusive "Intercultural Leaders" network. Project support is customized based on the individual and specific needs of award recipients.

In case of enquiries please contact:

Milena Pighi, BMW Group, Spokesperson BMW Group Corporate Social Responsibility

Telephone: +49-89-382-66563, Fax: +49-89-382-24418, Milena.PA.Pighi@bmw.de

Alessandro Girola, UNAOC, Programming Coordinator

Telephone: +1- 929-274-6217, Fax: +1-929-274-6233, alessandrog@unops.org

Internet: www.press.bmw.de

E-mail: presse@bmw.de

Related Links

http://www.unaoc.org



SOURCE United Nations Alliance of Civilizations
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The communications platform "On Our Radar" from the United Kingdom is amongst ten global grassroots organizations receiving this year's Intercultural Innovation Award (IIA).

"The voices of people on the ground are crucial in informing meaningful action", says Libby Powell, founder and CEO of On Our Radar. "We have developed set up simple, replicable systems for unheard communities and hope that we can expand our reach with the support of the IIA."

On Our Radar was awarded for their innovative "From the Margins to the Front Page" communications platform. Trained community reporters use SMS to share news and perspectives with stakeholders working in governance, media, research, development and public services. In Sierra Leone, Ebola-affected communities used the platform to develop social media stories and features for global press about what they were experiencing. At the heart of the approach is a focus on tightening the dialogue, collaboration, and sharing of information between various sectors of society as a way of promoting insight and cultural awareness.

The Intercultural Innovation Award, a partnership between UNAOC and the BMW Group, supports grassroots initiatives that promote intercultural dialogue and understanding, thereby contributing to peace, cultural diversity and more inclusive societies. Close to 1000 applications were received from more than 120 countries, from which ten awardees were selected across five continents. This underlines the award's importance and commitment to the worldwide promotion of intercultural diversity and understanding.

The award was presented at a dedicated ceremony on 26 April during the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), chaired by H.E. Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, United Nations High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, and Mr. Bill McAndrews, Vice President BMW Group Communications Strategy, Corporate and Market Communications.

In addition to monetary support, On Our Radar will receive mentoring from UNAOC and BMW Group to help their projects expand and replicate in other contexts. Project support is customized based on the individual and specific needs of award recipients.

In case of enquiries please contact:

Milena Pighi, BMW Group, Spokesperson BMW Group Corporate Social Responsibility

Telephone: +49-89-382-66563, Fax: +49-89-382-24418, Milena.PA.Pighi@bmw.de

Alessandro Girola, UNAOC, Programming Coordinator

Telephone: +1- 929-274-6217, Fax: +1-929-274-6233, alessandrog@unops.org

Internet: www.press.bmw.de

E-mail: presse@bmw.de

Related Links

http://www.unaoc.org



SOURCE United Nations Alliance of Civilizations
Dan Ruff, Wyndham Hotel Group's president and managing director for EMEA, explained: "Oman's unrivalled natural beauty spans spectacular mountains to beautiful coastal regions, attracting many types of travellers with 12 million expected in 2020. It's clear there's a demand for the international quality of accommodation that only our brands can offer. The signing of these two hotels is a real milestone for Wyndham Hotel Group as they join the existing Ramada Qurum Beach presenting even more choices to Muscat's business and leisure visitors."

Providing accommodation options for all types of traveller, the two hotels will address both the mid and upper-midscale market. The signing of the Ramada Encore Muscat Al Ghubra marks the planned construction of 200 stylish rooms with 173 standard rooms and 27 suites, addressing the need for style and functionality for value-conscious guests. Boasting state-of-the-art business facilities and a wealth of leisure amenities including a fitness centre, roof top pool and cafe, all-day dining restaurant and coffee lounge, the hotel will not only be the first Ramada Encore to open in Oman, but will become the largest of its kind across the Middle East & Africa.

Immediately adjacent, the Ramada Hotel & Suites Muscat Al Ghubra will offer contemporary accommodation across 90 high-end suites and share its leisure facilities with those at the Ramada Encore. Breakout spaces and a coffee lounge measuring over 100 square metres will accompany three meeting rooms, with high speed internet access available to guests throughout the hotel. The conversion of the current residential building is due to begin in 2017, with both properties to open their doors simultaneously at the end of 2018.

Sheikh Mohammed Al Khalili, Chairman of the Al Khaleel Group added, "I am truly honoured to partner with Wyndham Hotel Group as the world's largest hotel group and the industry leader. This project will contribute to the social-economic development of the Sultanate and allow us to provide jobs to Omanis, which will also generate a positive impact on local businesses."

All Ramada hotels in the region participate in Wyndham Rewards, the simple-to-use, revolutionary loyalty programme from Wyndham Hotel Group that offers members a generous points earning structure along with a flat, free-night redemption rate in 72 countries across the world  the first of its kind for a major hotel rewards programme. To learn more or to join for free, guests should visit www.wyndhamrewards.com.

About Wyndham Hotel Group

Wyndham Hotel Group is the world's largest hotel company based on number of hotels and is one of three hospitality business units of Wyndham Worldwide (NYSE: WYN). As both a leading hotel brand franchisor and hotel management services provider, the company's global portfolio consists of nearly 8,000 properties and approximately 679,100 rooms in 73 countries under the following brands: Dolce Hotels and Resorts, Wyndham Grand, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, Wyndham Garden Hotels, TRYP by Wyndham, Wingate by Wyndham, Hawthorn Suites by Wyndham, Microtel Inn & Suites by Wyndham, Ramada, Baymont Inn & Suites, Days Inn, Super 8, Howard Johnson, Travelodge and Knights Inn. Wyndham Rewards, the company's guest loyalty program, offers more than 45 million members the opportunity to earn and redeem points at thousands of hotels across the world. For more information, visit www.wyndhamworldwide.com.

About Ramada

Part of Wyndham Hotel Group, Ramada is a global chain of nearly 840 midscale and upscale hotels. Most properties offer a wide-array of services and amenities, including but not limited to high-speed wireless Internet access, on-site restaurants, lounges, room service, concierge service, meeting and banquet facilities and business centers. Properties also offer travelers the opportunity to earn and redeem points through Wyndham Rewards, the brand's guest loyalty program, which can be joined for free at www.wyndhamrewards.com. Each Ramada hotel is independently owned and operated, except for certain Ramada hotels outside of the U.S. which are managed by an affiliate. Ramada Worldwide Inc. is a subsidiary of Wyndham Hotel Group, LLC and parent company Wyndham Worldwide Corporation (NYSE: WYN). Reservations and information are available by visiting www.ramada.com.

Wyndham Hotel Group is the world's largest hotel company based on number of hotels, encompassing nearly 8,000 properties and approximately 679,100 rooms in 73 countries. Additional information is available at www.wyndhamworldwide.com. For more information about hotel franchising opportunities visit www.whgdevelopment.com.

About Ramada Encore

Ramada Encore offers modern and ergonomically designed accommodations that feature stylish wooden floors in all guest rooms, innovative bathroom pods featuring walk-in power showers and vibrant social spaces. For more information, visit www.ramada-encore.com.

Related Links

http://www.wyndhamworldwide.com



SOURCE Wyndham Hotel Group
BOGOTA, Colombia, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The 140 foundations, family offices and charities of Divest-Invest Philanthropy were awarded the 2016 Nelson Mandela-Graca Machel Innovation Award for Brave Philanthropy on Thursday by CIVICUS, an international civil society alliance based in South Africa. The foundations, collectively representing more than $12 billion in assets, were honored as part of International Civil Society Week 2016 for their path-breaking commitment to divest from fossil fuels and invest in climate solutions.

This year's Brave Philanthropy award marks a new category for the Nelson Mandela-Graca Machel Innovation Awards, which were created at the 2004 CIVICUS World Assembly to promote grassroots development and governance in the world.

"We added a Brave Philanthropy category to our Nelson Mandela-Graca Machel Innovation Awards because we wanted to celebrate examples of donors taking risks, of supporting unpopular causes, of pushing themselves and others to deliver better outcomes," said Dhananjayan "Danny" Sriskandarajah, Secretary General of CIVICUS. "Divest-Invest is a fantastic example of donors walking the talk on something that should be mission-critical to everyone."

The award was accepted by Dr. Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund, on behalf of the 140 foundations at a ceremony hosted by CIVICUS and the National Directive Council of the Colombian Confederation in Bogota, Colombia. Wallace Global Fund has played a key role in the funding, organizing and growth of the global Divest-Invest movement, and has the led the campaign in the philanthropic sector.

"If you own fossil fuels, you own climate change," said Dr. Dorsey. "Climate change will impact the mission of every foundation. We should heed the demands of the global climate justice movement calling on investors to withdraw their funds from fossil fuels. We receive charitable tax-status because we serve the social good, and our investments should as well. Philanthropy isn't just any investor."

Divest-Invest Philanthropy was launched in January 2014 by the Wallace Global Fund to support the wider divestment movement, pushing churches, cities, universities, pension funds, insurers and other institutional investors to invest morally in a time of climate change. Today, institutions and individuals pledging some form of divestment control assets of more than $3.4 trillion.

Divest-Invest Philanthropy has since attracted pledges from foundations such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, the Velux Foundations, the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, the Mary Robinson Foundation and Trust Africa. Signatories agree to drop existing investments in the top 200 fossil fuel companies and invest at least 5 percent of their portfolios into climate solutions, such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean technology and clean energy access, within a five-year period.

The director of Divest-Invest Philanthropy, Clara Vondrich, explained what animates members: "Climate change is the ultimate 'threat multiplier,' a fuel fanning flames of war, refugees, hunger and poverty  ultimately threatening arts, culture, education and human progress. Our members understand the silo between philanthropic investments and grantmaking is not acceptable in a time of climate change. We hope this award inspires the rest of the philanthropic sector to join us."

The recognition of Divest-Invest for Brave Philanthropy coincides with the ratification of the historic Paris Agreement on climate change that was agreed to in December during COP21. At the United Nations signing ceremony in New York on April 22, 175 countriesincluding the United States and Chinabound themselves to achieving a decarbonized global economy by mid-century.

"The global divest-invest movement was a primary driver of success at the climate talks in Paris last December, where the world's governments agreed to ambitious action to be carbon-free by mid-century," said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC. "But governments cannot do it alone; the private and nonprofit sectors also have a critical role to play in shifting markets and accelerating the transition to clean and safe energy. This is business as urgent."

The Divest-Invest movement is already catalyzing changes in financial markets. At every level, investors are beginning to assess climate risk in their investment portfolios. It is increasingly clear that moving your investments is both the prudent thing to do, as well as ethical. "The demand for fossil-free investment options among investors is growing," said Thomas Van Dyck, Managing Director-Financial Advisor of RBC Wealth Management's SRI Wealth Management Group. "It is the job of the financial sector to keep up with demand and provide new and innovative financial vehicles for a cleaner, more sustainable planet."

Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson said that civil society has a special duty of care to the disenfranchised: "As the world transitions, let us keep climate justice and clean energy access foremost in our minds. We ought not perpetuate the same imbalances of power in the new energy economy that defined the old. The future must work for the many, not just the few."

A movement of grassroots activists using levers of finance to support social change contributed to successful, democratic transition in South Africa. "It is happening again today, led by students and faith, people of conscience are calling on their institutions to move their money to accelerate change," said Dr. Dorsey, who began her work in the human rights field as an anti-Apartheid activist and lived in South Africa during the country's historic transition. "There is a beautiful symmetry for today's climate movement to receive this recognition named after Mandela and Machel, supported by Archbishop Tutu and awarded by a South Africa-based global civil society organization."

For a full list of Divest-Invest Philanthropy signatories, please visit http://divestinvest.org/philanthropy/signatories/. For more information on the Nelson Mandela-Graca Machel Innovation Awards, please visit http://www.youcanbethechange.com/awards.

Divest-Invest Philanthropy

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SOURCE Divest-Invest Philanthropy

Related Links

http://divestinvest.org/philanthropy


WASHINGTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- AARP The Magazine is offering women head-to-toe beauty and style tips in a digital beauty and fashion edition for women 50, 60 and 70-plus. The Beauty & Style Issue is a digital magazine available to anyone who registers on AARP.org, and readers can have an enhanced experience  complete with moving images and sound effects  by reading, watching and listening to the magazine's content through the AARP Publications App for iPad.

Christie Brinkley for AARP The Magazine

The special digital Beauty & Style issue is filled with celebrity trends, insider fashion tips, original articles and more. Available online and on your personal tablet, you can bring the magazine everywhere you go  with access to exclusive skin, hair, makeup, and style tips, including features by award-winning beauty and style editor Lois Joy Johnson and makeup guru Bobbi Brown.

"AARP knows that beauty and style are ageless, and that is why we created this special digital issue," said AARP Beauty & Style Editor Lois Joy Johnson. "Readers can swipe through the magazine and find inspirational advice, step-by-step tutorials, and beauty and style solutions  helping to inspire women 50-plus to embrace their age."

The easy-to-navigate digital magazine is filled with information from top industry experts, including Beauty and Style cover girl Christie Brinkley, who shares the secrets that keep her looking and feeling great at 61.

What You'll Find Inside:

Expert Beauty and Style Advice: Readers will also find advice from beauty and style experts with years of experience helping women look and dress their best.

Fresh and Flawless Makeup: Bobbi Brown offers seven tips to a fabulous face and readers can watch video tutorials of experts creating fresh makeup looks.

Tips, Tricks and Trends: Creating captivating eyes, choosing clothes that accentuate your shape, and keeping your hair sexy are just a few pieces of advice that our Beauty & Style contributors offer.

Strike a Pose: Learn how to photograph fabulously at 50-plus from world-renowned beauty and fashion photographer Michael Waring who says it all starts with a smile.

Dress for Style Success: Update your style with tips from models 50-plus  from finding the right jeans to adding in the perfect accessories, while disrupting old stereotypes about what women should wear at certain ages.

The Beauty & Style issue is the first of three interactive digital magazines that AARP is creating. AARP will publish two other digital publications; one focusing on money and retirement and the other on health.

AARP The Magazine's Beauty & Style Issue is available in the AARP Publications App for iPad. For more information, visit www.aarp.org/beauty

About AARP

AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, with a membership of nearly 38 million that helps people turn their goals and dreams into 'Real Possibilities' by changing the way America defines aging. With staffed offices in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, AARP works to strengthen communities and promote the issues that matter most to families such as healthcare security, financial security and personal fulfillment. AARP also advocates for individuals in the marketplace by selecting products and services of high quality and value to carry the AARP name. As a trusted source for news and information, AARP produces the world's largest circulation magazine, AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin. AARP does not endorse candidates for public office or make contributions to political campaigns or candidates. To learn more, visit www.aarp.org or follow @aarp and our CEO @JoAnn_Jenkins on Twitter.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160428/361303

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20070209/NYF043LOGO

SOURCE AARP

Related Links

http://www.aarp.org


DALLAS, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Academic Partnerships (AP) today announced that it has appointed Carl Sparks as its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Sparks is the former president and CEO of Travelocity, a global pioneer of online innovation that transformed the travel industry.

Sparks joins rapidly growing AP as the company is solidifying its global leadership as an online service provider of technology-aided learning for non-profit universities. AP helps faculty members convert degree programs into an online format, recruits qualified students for those programs and helps retain students through successful graduation.

"Carl has been a friend of AP for more than a year, and we are proud to have him assume leadership of our organization. His exceptional background and experience that combines technology, marketing and innovation will immediately benefit AP partner universities as they seek to rapidly expand their market share," said Randy Best, founder of Academic Partnerships. "I am looking forward to supporting Carl as he takes AP to the next level and maximizes its potential."

Prior to running Travelocity, Sparks served as chief marketing officer of Expedia, general manager of Hotels.com North America, and president of the online retailer Gilt.com.

"I am a huge believer in higher education as a transformative force that changes peoples' lives and societies as a whole. As I look at AP's impact of helping partner universities reach more students than ever before by providing high-quality post-secondary education, I am truly proud of our social commitment to access and affordability," Sparks said. "I look forward to being part of a transformation in an industry that embraces innovation for all the right societal reasons."

Best will remain Chairman of Academic Partnerships. In addition to his CEO role, Sparks will also join the AP board of directors.

About Academic Partnerships

Academic Partnerships is a leading online service provider for higher education globally. The company assists universities in converting their on-campus degree programs into an online format, recruits qualified students for those programs, and supports enrolled students through graduation. Serving public and private not-for-profit universities in the United States and top international institutions, Academic Partnerships is guided by the principle that the opportunities presented through technology-aided learning make higher education more accessible and achievable. The company was founded by a social entrepreneur, Randy Best, who has spent nearly 20 years developing innovative learning solutions to improve education. For more information, please visit www.academicpartnerships.com.

Media Contact:

Dan Smith

(214) 210-7331

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150731/252647LOGO

SOURCE Academic Partnerships

Related Links

http://www.academicpartnerships.com


FRAMINGHAM, Mass., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Rave Mobile Safety, trusted creator of innovative public safety data and communication software, today announced the fourth annual Emergency Communications & Response Summit will take place on Tuesday, May 10th at the Omni Parker House Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m., ET. The public safety community and select media are invited to attend the Summit. Featured speakers will focus on the integration of technology into operational procedures to enhance preparedness and major incident response, based on personal experiences with such major events.

WHAT: Rave Mobile Safety's fourth annual Emergency Communications & Response Summit, supported by the Industry Council for Emergency Response Technologies (iCERT) and Platinum Sponsor Motorola Solutions, will feature William Evans, commissioner of Boston Police; Charles Ramsey, former commissioner of Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia Police Departments; Maureen Will, director of Newtown (Conn.) Emergency Communications Center; and Benjamin Cazenoves, a survivor of the terrorist attacks at the Bataclan Concert Hall in Paris, where 90 people were murdered in November of last year.



WHO: Opening & Keynote Remarks: To be delivered by Commissioner Evans and former Commissioner Ramsey. Benjamin Cazenoves will also deliver a special keynote address prior to the panel discussions. Cazenoves has become a passionate advocate for public safety since surviving the attacks in Paris.





Panel: Responding to the Active Shooter Incident: In 2015, there were 294 mass shootings in the U.S. Recent events clearly show that active shooter and terrorist attacks are a real threat and a global problem. This high-level panel, features Benjamin Cazenoves, Commissioner William Evans, Director Maureen Will, Eric Goralnick, M.D., medical director of emergency preparedness, Brigham & Women's Hospital and Warren Bamford, vice president of global security, National Grid. The panelists will discuss procedures, training and technology they leverage to enhance response to active shooters, acts of terror and other emergencies.





Panel: Addressing the Opioid & Synthetic Drug Epidemics: Opioid-overdose deaths between 2002 and 2013 have nearly quadrupled, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Effectively responding to overdose victims creates a variety of challenges for first responders, while communities struggle with the overall social and human impact. This expert panel, featuring Mark Escott, M.D., M.P.H., Montgomery (Tex.) Public Health Authority, Timothy Smith, executive director, Ottawa County (Mich.) Central Dispatch Authority, Michael E. Botieri, chief of police, Plymouth, Mass. and Joseph L. O'Hare, III, NREMT-P, deputy superintendent, Boston Emergency Medical Services, will report from the front lines on innovative programs for combating this wave of overdoses.





Closing Remarks: Will be made by Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor, Karyn Polito.



WHERE: The Omni Parker House Hotel, located at 60 School Street, Boston, Mass. 02108



WHEN: Tuesday, May 10, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m. ET

For more information and to register, please visit: www.ravemobilesafety.com/summit.

Media interviews can be arranged with select speakers. Members of the media interested in attending should please contact [email protected].

About Rave Mobile Safety

Rave Mobile Safety, the most trusted safety software partner, provides innovative communication software for better emergency preparedness and faster response. Used by leading education institutes, enterprises and state and local public safety agencies, the award-winning portfolio of Rave Alert, Rave Guardian, Eyewitness, Rave Panic Button, Smart911 and SmartPrepare protects millions of individuals. Rave Mobile Safety is headquartered in Framingham, Mass. For more information, please visit http://www.ravemobilesafety.com.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140305/NE77464LOGO

SOURCE Rave Mobile Safety

Related Links

http://ravemobilesafety.com


China's shortage of blood supply fuels a blood black market. (Photo : Getty Images)

Two decades after the HIV contamination scandal, China sees another rise in the human blood black market amid a nationwide shortage of donors.



Citing the Shandong Satellite Television, the South China Morning Post said that the country is seeing the reemergence of the problem in illegal blood trade fueled by the shortage of blood donors in China.



Advertisement

Apparently, the mainland is well below the World Health Organization's (WHO) recommended number of donors for each country, which should be about 1 to 3 percent of the Chinese population.



Blood Crisis



In February, the shortage of blood hit 50 of the 70 major cities in China and resulted in 80 percent of scheduled surgeries to be postponed.



In a report published in February last year, Reuters recalled China's history when it comes to blood donation.



During the 1980s and the 1990s, farmers were urged to sell their blood and plasma to hospitals.



At the time, the country was struck by the HIV contamination scandal where tens of thousands of people were diagnosed with the immunodeficiency disease due to the unsanitary practices done while handling blood.



In 2011, the blood donors were pushed away by a scandal involving a woman who claimed to work for the Red Cross Society of China. She tarnished the good name of the organization by posting pictures of her lavish lifestyle, making potential blood donors rethink and even back out from ever donating their blood.



Blood Black Market



Jiangsu Province is one of the worst struck provinces of the blood shortage in China.



There, people are already turning to illegal blood traders who make them pay as much as 1,000 yuan or about $154 per 200cc of blood.



"I can find a donor as long as you tell me the blood type of the patient a day in advance," a blood trader in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, who declined to give his name told the Global Times.



According to Guangzhou Blood Center deputy chief Wang Chuanxi, 200cc of blood only costs 210 yuan in hospitals based on national standards with additional fees for blood processing and storage.



Plus, according to the country's Law on Blood Donation, arrangements for a person to sell his or her blood is illegal.



The law states that only family members, friends, relatives and colleagues are encouraged to donate blood for the patient for mutual aid.



However, Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital medical practitioner Dr. Fan Rong said that the law failed to pinpoint "what constitutes blood donation for mutual aid."



"As the current law does not specify what constitutes blood donation for mutual aid, it is necessary to update the law to define how the relationship between donor and patient should be determined," he told the Global Times.






DUBLIN, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Adapt Pharma, Limited (www.adaptpharma.com), today announced Smith Medical Partners, LLC (www.smpspecialty.com), as their distribution partner for their previously announced program to offer a free carton of NARCAN (Naloxone HCl) Nasal Spray to every high school in the United States. This announcement follows the Adapt Pharma grant awarded to the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) to fund their educational efforts to increase awareness of opioid-related risks among students, educators, families and communities.

Adapt Pharma

NARCAN Nasal Spray is the first and only FDA-approved naloxone nasal spray for the emergency treatment of opioid-, fentanyl- and heroin-related overdose. It is now available as a ready-to-use, needle-free, 4 mg concentrated dose of naloxone in a single spray. As the first and only FDA-approved naloxone nasal spray, NARCAN Nasal Spray provides a ready-to-use alternative to currently available opioid overdose emergency treatments. NARCAN Nasal Spray is not a substitute for emergency medical care. Please see Indications and Important Safety Information below.

To find out more information about how your state and local school district can participate in the NARCAN Nasal Spray High School Program and to obtain a free carton for your local school, please visit: http://www.narcannasalspray.com/how-to-get-nns/partnerships/ or call 1-844-4NARCAN (462-7226).

"The team at Smith Medical Partners is excited to partner with Adapt Pharma as its distribution partner to support its offer of a free carton of NARCAN Nasal Spray for each high school. We strive to provide the highest quality support to our customers to help them care for their communities," said Robert Rash, Vice President, Smith Medical Partners. "For years, we have made available some of the most important and impactful emergency response tools, such as the EpiPen by Mylan. For schools especially, providing access to these medications can have an impact on the entire community and potentially prevent harmful or fatal situations."

Opioid abuse and overdose is a national epidemic. A 2013 national survey on drug use and health showed that there were 2.2 million adolescents aged 12 to 17 who were current illicit drug users.1

"Our distribution partnership with Smith Medical Partners is a key milestone in implementing high school access to a medication that can make an impact when seconds may count," said Mike Kelly, President, U.S. Operations, Adapt Pharma. "This device will equip those in our communities families, friends, caregivers and school nurses  with a tool they can rely on without need for medical training or expertise."

For questions regarding NARCAN distribution, please call 1-844-4NARCAN (462-7226).

To read the terms and conditions and participate in the NARCAN Nasal Spray High School Program, fill out the certification form available online.

ABOUT NARCAN (naloxone HCl) NASAL SPRAY

NARCAN Nasal Spray is indicated for the emergency treatment of known or suspected opioid overdose, as manifested by respiratory and/or central nervous system depression.

NARCAN Nasal Spray is intended for immediate administration as emergency therapy in settings where opioids may be present.

NARCAN Nasal Spray is not a substitute for emergency medical care. Always seek emergency medical assistance in the event of a suspected, potentially life-threatening opioid emergency after administration of the first dose of NARCAN nasal spray.

If the desired response is not obtained after 2 or 3 minutes, administer an additional dose of NARCAN Nasal Spray using a new NARCAN Nasal Spray. If the patient responds to NARCAN Nasal Spray and relapses back into respiratory depression before emergency assistance arrives, administer an additional dose and continue surveillance of the patient. If there is still no response and additional doses are available, administer additional doses of NARCAN Nasal Spray every 2 to 3 minutes using a new NARCAN Nasal Spray with each dose until emergency medical assistance arrives. Additional supportive and/or resuscitative measures may be helpful while awaiting emergency medical assistance.

Please see Indications and Important Safety Information below.

Please see full prescribing information for NARCAN Nasal Spray, available at http://www.NARCANnasalspray.com/pdf/NARCAN-Prescribing-Information.pdf

AVAILABILITY OF NARCAN NASAL SPRAY

NARCAN Nasal Spray was made available in February of 2016.

Qualifying group purchasers may source NARCAN Nasal Spray directly from wholesalers and distributors. To place a pre-order immediately or for assistance in sourcing NARCAN Nasal Spray please contact Adapt Pharma's dedicated Customer Service Team at 844-4-NARCAN (844-462-7226) or email [email protected].

NARCAN NASAL SPRAY INDICATIONS AND IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION

Indications

NARCAN (naloxone hydrochloride) Nasal Spray is an opioid antagonist indicated for the emergency treatment of known or suspected opioid overdose, as manifested by respiratory and/or central nervous system depression. NARCAN Nasal Spray is intended for immediate administration as emergency therapy in settings where opioids may be present.

NARCAN Nasal Spray is not a substitute for emergency medical care.

Important Safety Information

NARCAN Nasal Spray is contraindicated in patients known to be hypersensitive to naloxone hydrochloride.

Seek emergency medical assistance immediately after initial use, keeping the patient under continued surveillance.

Risk of Recurrent Respiratory and CNS Depression: Due to the duration of action of naloxone relative to the opioid, keep the patient under continued surveillance and administer repeat doses of naloxone using a new nasal spray with each dose, as necessary, while awaiting emergency medical assistance.

Risk of Limited Efficacy with Partial Agonists or Mixed Agonists/Antagonists: Reversal of respiratory depression caused by partial agonists or mixed agonists/antagonists, such as buprenorphine and pentazocine, may be incomplete. Larger or repeat doses may be required.

Precipitation of Severe Opioid Withdrawal: Use in patients who are opioid dependent may precipitate opioid withdrawal characterized by body aches, diarrhea, increased heart rate (tachycardia), fever, runny nose, sneezing, goose bumps (piloerection), sweating, yawning, nausea or vomiting, nervousness, restlessness or irritability, shivering or trembling, abdominal cramps, weakness, and increased blood pressure. In neonates, opioid withdrawal may be life-threatening if not recognized and properly treated and may be characterized by convulsions, excessive crying, and hyperactive reflexes. Monitor for the development of opioid withdrawal.

Risk of Cardiovascular (CV) Effects: Abrupt postoperative reversal of opioid depression may result in adverse CV effects. These events have primarily occurred in patients who had pre-existing CV disorders or received other drugs that may have similar adverse CV effects. Monitor these patients closely in an appropriate healthcare setting after use of naloxone hydrochloride.

The following adverse reactions were observed in a NARCAN Nasal Spray clinical study: increased blood pressure, musculoskeletal pain, headache, nasal dryness, nasal edema, nasal congestion, and nasal inflammation.

See Instructions for Use and full prescribing information in the use of this product, available here: http://www.narcannasalspray.com/pdf/NARCAN-Prescribing-Information.pdf.

Additional information, including full prescribing information for NARCAN Nasal Spray, and important safety information and instructions for use, is also available at www.NARCANNasalSpray.com.

To report SUSPECTED ADVERSE REACTIONS, contact Adapt Pharma, Inc. at 1-844-4NARCAN (1-844-462-7226) or FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088 or www.fda.gov/medwatch.

ABOUT ADAPT PHARMA

Adapt Pharma is a privately-held pharmaceutical company committed to positively impacting the lives of patients. Adapt Pharma's strategy is to identify, evaluate, selectively acquire and enhance the value of late stage development, and FDA approved, pharmaceutical products. Adapt Pharma's company headquarters is in Dublin, Ireland and its U.S. headquarters is in Radnor, Pennsylvania. For more information, please visit www.adaptpharma.com.

For Media Inquiries

Thom Duddy, Adapt Pharma

Executive Director, Communications

Mobile: 484-532-5470

Email: [email protected]

1 King, R., Embrey, ML. Adopted June 2015. National Association of School Nurses, Naloxone Use in the School Setting: The Role of the School Nurse. Accessed March 16, 2016. https://www.nasn.org/PolicyAdvocacy/PositionPapersandReports/NASNPositionStatementsFullView/tabid/462/ArticleId/854/Naloxone-Use-in-the-School-Setting-The-Role-of-the-School-Nurse-Adopted-June-2015.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160410/353440LOGO

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160410/353441LOGO

SOURCE Adapt Pharma

Related Links

http://adaptpharma.com


DENVER, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today AdCellerant announced the release of their new software tool, proposals.marketing, to all current media partners. The proposal generation tool allows media sales representatives to better understand the correct advertising products to sell to small and medium sized businesses. Using a few inputs, including industry, market, goals, and target audience, the software builds a custom digital advertising proposal that outlines suggested media spend by advertising channel.

"We are thrilled to offer our partners an easy way to build accurate proposals in just minutes," said Shelby Carlson, AdCellerant Co-Founder and SVP of Sales. "Instead of guessing how much a client should spend on digital advertising, this tool generates a proposal based on client goals, target audience and desired share-of-voice in the marketplace. In turn, sellers can deliver a fully white-labeled proposal with detailed campaign architecture to clients in just minutes. The speed to market this tool brings is a big distinction point."

John Chamberlin, Senior VP of Operations & Co-Founder, mentioned, "This tool offers a lot of advantages for clients as well. If a small or medium sized business wants to own 100% share of voice for their particular industry in their market, proposals.marketing will allow them to understand exactly how much investment they need to put toward each digital advertising channel."

AdCellerant built proposals.marketing using a number of industry forecasting tools including Demand Side Platforms, Think With Google and other forecasting integrations. This tool also allows for media partners to include their owned and operated inventory. Additionally, media partners can use the tool to track sales activity, including pipeline revenue by individual sales representative, market or division and total footprint.

About AdCellerant

AdCellerant is an Ad Technology and Digital Marketing Services company that specializes in executing integrated digital advertising campaigns for businesses on behalf of local media companies. AdCellerant partners with local media companies to help train sales teams, sell creative marketing, and execute reports in order to create a dynamic, compounding digital revenue stream.

Contact: Brock Berry, CEO & Founder, [email protected]

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com

SOURCE AdCellerant
NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Africa Mobility : Infrastructure Spend on the Rise



African infrastructure spend is climbing rapidly and is the driving force behind growth across the continent. The study looks at the major infrastructure projects in 10 of Africa's fastest growing countries. The scope includes rail, maritime, aviation, and road related investments. Mobility in Africa is at a nascent stage, with road and maritime infrastructure being more advanced than air and rail. With new investments and foreign trade increasing, African governments have invested heavily in upgrading transportation hubs and bettering safety standards, yet many of these projects fail due to differing priorities among countries. New technological advancements such as eHailing and app-based platforms such as Uber are slow to be implemented.



Key Takeaways



Mobility Market: Key Takeaways, Africa, 2015



Governments in Africa need to address concerns relating to corruption and delays. Many investment projects are never completed, and in many cases, do not commence due to corruption and maladministration.

African governments are gradually starting to work together to develop needed infrastructure, yet many of these projects fail due to differing priorities among countries.



Africa can expect to experience an increase in intra-connectivity as large infrastructure projects reach completion.



Urban light rail projects and supporting infrastructure are growing in popularity as means to reducing urban congestion. A number of African cities are constructing such networks.



Infrastructure investment will enable regional integration and enhance trade capabilities between partners.



Enhanced infrastructure has a direct impact on economic growth as well as passenger and commercial vehicle sales and use.



Due to the relatively low level of transport infrastructure development, new technological advancements such as eHailing and app-based platforms such as Uber are slow to be implemented. Uber is only operational in 3 major South African cities.



Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03803134-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

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Stock Symbol: AEM (NYSE and TSX)

(All amounts expressed in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted)

TORONTO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Agnico Eagle Mines Limited (NYSE:AEM, TSX:AEM) ("Agnico Eagle" or the "Company") today reported quarterly net income of $27.8 million, or $0.13 per share, for the first quarter of 2016. This result includes unrealized gains on financial instruments of $9.6 million ($0.04 per share), non-cash foreign currency translation gains on deferred tax liabilities of $8.0 million ($0.04 per share), non-cash foreign currency translation losses of $6.8 million ($0.03 per share), non-cash stock option expense of $5.9 million ($0.03 per share), non-recurring losses of $1.9 million ($0.01 per share) and various mark-to-market and other adjustment losses of $0.9 million (nil per share). Excluding these items would result in adjusted net income of $25.7 million or $0.12 per share for the first quarter of 2016. In the first quarter of 2015, the Company reported net income of $28.7 million or $0.13 per share.

First quarter 2016 cash provided by operating activities was $145.7 million ($167.5 million before changes in non-cash components of working capital). This compares to cash provided by operating activities of $143.5 million in the first quarter of 2015 ($176.8 million before changes in non-cash components of working capital). The decrease in cash provided by operating activities before changes in working capital during the current period was largely due to higher exploration and corporate development expenditures (up 70%, period over period) which were partially offset by higher sales volumes.

"The year is off to a good start with a more constructive gold price environment and continued strong operating performance from all of our mines. As a result of the strong operating results, we now expect to meet the top end of our production guidance for 2016," said Sean Boyd, Agnico Eagle's Chief Executive Officer. "At current margins, Agnico Eagle is generating sufficient cash flow to support its expanded exploration and development activities and potentially pay down additional debt," added Mr. Boyd.

First Quarter 2016 highlights include:

Quarterly gold production  Payable gold production 1 in the first quarter of 2016 was 411,336 ounces of gold at total cash costs 2 per ounce on a by-product basis of $573 and all-in sustaining costs per ounce 3 ("AISC") on a by-product basis of $797





 Payable gold production in the first quarter of 2016 was 411,336 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of and all-in sustaining costs per ounce ("AISC") on a by-product basis of Strong operational performance at Mexican operations - In the first quarter of 2016, payable gold production was 87,899 ounces at the Company's Mexican mines. Silver production was a new quarterly record of 752,000 ounces. Total cash costs per ounce of gold on a by-product basis averaged $364





- In the first quarter of 2016, payable gold production was 87,899 ounces at the Company's Mexican mines. Silver production was a new quarterly record of 752,000 ounces. Total cash costs per ounce of gold on a by-product basis averaged 2016 production now expected to reach high end of the guidance range  Production for 2016 is now expected to meet the high end of the guidance range of approximately 1.525 to 1.565 million ounces of gold with total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of between $590 to $630 and AISC of approximately $850 to $890 per ounce





 Production for 2016 is now expected to meet the high end of the guidance range of approximately 1.525 to 1.565 million ounces of gold with total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of between and AISC of approximately per ounce Continued strong operating performance enhances financial flexibility - In the first quarter of 2016, $55 million was repaid under the Company's credit facility and net debt was reduced by approximately $89 million to $923 million at March 31 , 2016. For the sixth consecutive quarter, the Company has reduced net debt





- In the first quarter of 2016, was repaid under the Company's credit facility and net debt was reduced by approximately to at , 2016. For the sixth consecutive quarter, the Company has reduced net debt Amaruq Project, Nunavut  Further drilling refines the geometry of the Whale Tail Ore Shoot and IVR deposit  Drilling resumed in January and results show that the Whale Tail Ore shoot is larger in the central area than previously interpreted and confirms that the IVR deposit extends to the East and to a depth of 230 metres





 Drilling resumed in January and results show that the Whale Tail Ore shoot is larger in the central area than previously interpreted and confirms that the IVR deposit extends to the East and to a depth of 230 metres Drilling at Barsele, in Sweden , extends the mineralization at depth and suggests the potential for a Goldex type deposit  Highlights include: 2.01 grams per tonne ("g/t") gold (capped) over an estimated true width of 84.0 metres at a depth of approximately 310 metres in the Skirasen zone





 Highlights include: 2.01 grams per tonne ("g/t") gold (capped) over an estimated true width of 84.0 metres at a depth of approximately 310 metres in the Skirasen zone A quarterly dividend of $0.08 per share was declared

________________________________ 1 Payable production of a mineral means the quantity of mineral produced during a period contained in products that are sold by the Company whether such products are shipped during the period or held as inventory at the end of the period. 2 Total cash costs per ounce is a Non-GAAP measure. For a reconciliation to production costs, see "Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Performance Measures" below. Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced is presented on both a by-product basis (deducting by-product metal revenues from production costs) and co-product basis (before by-product metal revenues). Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a by-product basis is calculated by adjusting production costs as recorded in the consolidated statements of income (loss) for by-product revenues, unsold concentrate inventory production costs, smelting, refining and marketing charges and other adjustments, and then dividing by the number of ounces of gold produced. Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a co-product basis is calculated in the same manner as total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a by-product basis except that no adjustment for by-product metal revenues is made. See "Note Regarding Certain Measures of Performance". For information about the Company's total cash costs per ounce on a co-product basis please see "Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Performance Measures". 3 All-in-sustaining costs per ounce is a Non-GAAP measure and is used to show the full cost of gold production from current operations. For a reconciliation to production costs, see "Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Performance Measures below. The Company calculates all-in sustaining costs per ounce of gold produced as the aggregate of total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis, sustaining capital expenditures (including capitalized exploration), general and administrative expenses (including stock option expense) and reclamation expenses divided by the amount of gold produced. All-in sustaining costs per ounce of gold produced on a co-product basis is calculated in the same manner as all-in sustaining costs per ounce of gold produced on a by-product basis except that no adjustment for by-product metal revenues is made. For information about the Company's AISC on a co-product basis please see "Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Performance Measures". The Company's methodology for calculating all-in sustaining costs per ounce may not be similar to the methodology used by other producers that disclose all-in sustaining costs per ounce. See "Note Regarding Certain Measures of Performance". The Company may change the methodology it uses to calculate all-in sustaining costs per ounce in the future, including in response to the adoption of formal industry guidance regarding this measure by the World Gold Council.

First Quarter Financial and Production Highlights - Higher Gold Production and Lower Production Costs

In the first quarter of 2016, strong operational performance continued at the Company's mines, which led to payable gold production of 411,336 ounces compared to 404,210 ounces in the first quarter of 2015. The higher level of production in the 2016 period was primarily due to higher grades and better recoveries at LaRonde, increased throughput at Goldex and Kittila and higher grades at Canadian Malartic. A detailed description of the production and cost performance of each mine is set out below.

Total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis for the first quarter of 2016 were lower at $573 compared to $588 per ounce for the first quarter 2015. Total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis in the first quarter of 2016 were positively affected by higher production levels at LaRonde, Goldex, Canadian Malartic and La India compared to the first quarter of 2015, as well as weaker local currencies (the Canadian dollar was 9% lower and the Mexican peso was 17% lower when compared to the first quarter of 2015).

AISC for the first quarter of 2016 were $797 per ounce on a by-product basis compared to $804 in the first quarter of 2015. The lower AISC is primarily due to lower total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis compared to the first quarter of 2015.

Cash Position Remains Strong and Debt Levels Reduced

Cash and cash equivalents and short term investments increased to $168.0 million at March 31, 2016 from the December 31, 2015 balance of $131.6 million. The outstanding balance on the Company's $1.2 billion credit facility was reduced from $265 million at December 31, 2015 to $210 million at March 31, 2016, resulting in current availability under the Company's credit lines of approximately $990 million, not including the $300 million accordion facility.

Total capital expenditures (including sustaining) made by the Company in the first quarter of 2016 were $100.7 million, including $16.0 million at Pinos Altos, $15.2 million at Goldex, $15.1 million at Meliadine, $14.3 million at LaRonde, $14.1 million at Kittila, $11.5 million at Meadowbank, $10.5 million at Canadian Malartic, $1.7 million at La India and $1.3 million at Creston Mascota.

Sustaining capital expenditures made by the Company in the first quarter of 2016 were $66.3 million, including $14.3 million at LaRonde, $11.7 million at Kittila, $11.5 million at Meadowbank, $10.8 million at Pinos Altos, $10.0 million at Canadian Malartic, $5.0 million at Goldex, $1.7 million at La India and $1.3 million at Creston Mascota.

Dividend Record and Payment Dates for the Second Quarter of 2016

Agnico Eagle's Board of Directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.08 per common share, payable on June 15, 2016 to shareholders of record as of June 1, 2016. Agnico Eagle has declared a cash dividend every year since 1983.

Other Expected Dividend and Record Dates for 2016

Record Date Payment Date September 1 September 15 December 1 December 15

Dividend Reinvestment Plan

Please see the following link for information on the Company's dividend reinvestment plan: Dividend Reinvestment Plan

First Quarter 2016 Results Conference Call and Webcast Tomorrow

Agnico Eagle's senior management will host a conference call on Friday, April 29, 2016 at 8:30 AM (E.D.T.) to discuss the Company's financial and operating results.

Via Webcast:

A live audio webcast of the conference call will be available on the Company's website at www.agnicoeagle.com.

Via Telephone:

For those preferring to listen by telephone, please dial 416-260-0113 or toll-free 1-800-524-8950. To ensure your participation, please call approximately five minutes prior to the scheduled start of the call.

Replay archive:

Please dial 1-647-436-0148 or toll-free 1-888-203-1112, access code 531498.

The conference call replay will expire on May 30, 2016. The webcast, along with presentation slides, will be archived for 180 days on the Company's website.

Annual and Special Meeting

The Company will host its Annual and Special Meeting ("AGM") on Friday, April 29, 2016 at 11:00 am (E.D.T). The AGM will be held at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel (Dominion Ballroom) - 123 Queen Street West, Toronto, ON.

During the AGM, management will provide an overview of the Company's activities. For those unable to attend in person, the alternatives to participate are listed below.

Via Webcast:

A live audio webcast of the AGM will be available on the Company's website at www.agnicoeagle.com.

Via Telephone:

For those preferring to listen by telephone, please dial 1-416-260-0113 or toll-free 1-800-524-8950. To ensure your participation, please call approximately five minutes prior to the scheduled start of the AGM.

Replay archive:

Please dial 1-647-436-0148 or toll-free 1-888-203-1112, access code 5039640.

The conference call replay will expire on May 30, 2016. The webcast, along with presentation slides, will be archived for 180 days on the Company's website.

NORTHERN BUSINESS OPERATING REVIEW

ABITIBI REGION, QUEBEC

Agnico Eagle is currently Quebec's largest gold producer with a 100% interest in three mines (LaRonde, Goldex and Lapa) and a 50% interest in the Canadian Malartic mine. These mines are located within 50 kilometres of each other, which provides operating synergies and allows for the sharing of technical expertise.

LaRonde Mine  Strong Operational Performance Driven by Increased Tonnage from the High-grade Mining Area (293 Pyramid)

The 100% owned LaRonde mine in northwestern Quebec achieved commercial production in 1988.

The LaRonde mill processed an average of 6,348 tonnes per day ("tpd") in the first quarter of 2016, compared with an average of 6,203 tpd in the corresponding period of 2015. Minesite costs per tonne4 were approximately C$103 in the first quarter of 2016, lower than the C$104 per tonne experienced in the first quarter of 2015. The decreased costs in the 2016 period were primarily due to strong performance from the underground mine resulting in higher throughput levels in the processing facility.

LaRonde's total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis were $529 in the first quarter of 2016 on payable production of 75,337 ounces of gold. This compares with the first quarter of 2015 when total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis were $703 on production of 58,893 ounces of gold. The decrease in total cash costs per ounce in the 2016 period was largely due to higher production (due to higher throughput levels, higher gold grades from the lower mine area and improved recoveries from the CIP circuit).

During the first quarter of 2016, ramp development reached a depth of three kilometres which will allow access to the higher grade ore as mining continues into the deeper portions of the mine.

Studies are progressing to assess the potential to extend the mineral reserve base and carry out mining activities between the 311 and 371 levels at LaRonde. At present, the mineral reserve base extends to the 311 level, which is 3.1 kilometres below the surface. An infill drill program is continuing from the 311 to the 371 levels with a focus on the western portion of the deposit. Infill drilling will also be carried out on the eastern portion of the deposit as underground development extends into that area.

During the quarter, the Company continued with an internal scoping study to evaluate the potential to develop and mine Bousquet Zone 5 on the adjoining Bousquet property. Previous property owners had partly exploited Bousquet Zone 5 by open pit and underground. The Company is evaluating the potential to initially mine Bousquet Zone 5 from a depth of 90 to 330 metres below surface using underground ramp access. The mining method is likely to be similar to that employed at Goldex and processing could utilize excess capacity from the Lapa circuit at LaRonde.

Dewatering of the old pit is underway and a certificate of authorization from the Quebec government to permit collection of a bulk sample is expected to be issued before the end of the second quarter of 2016. An internal technical study is expected to be completed by the end of 2016.

___________________________ 4 Minesite costs per tonne is a non-GAAP measure. For a reconciliation of this measure to production costs as reported in the financial statements, see "Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Performance Measures  Reconciliation of Production Costs to Minesite Costs per Tonne by Mine" below. See also "Note Regarding Certain Measures of Performance".

Canadian Malartic Mine  Record Quarterly Mill Performance During the Winter Season

In June 2014, Agnico Eagle and Yamana Gold Inc. ("Yamana") acquired all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Osisko Mining Corporation ("Osisko") and created the Canadian Malartic General Partnership (the "Partnership") that now owns and operates the Canadian Malartic mine in northwestern Quebec through a joint management committee. Each of Agnico Eagle and Yamana has an indirect 50% ownership interest in the Partnership.

During the first quarter of 2016, the Canadian Malartic mill (on a 100% basis) processed an average of 52,314 tpd, compared with an average of 51,988 tpd in the corresponding period of 2015. This represents a record quarter during the winter season.

Minesite costs per tonne were approximately C$24 (C$21.26 excluding royalties) compared to the C$23 (C$20.16 excluding royalties) per tonne experienced in the first quarter of 2015. In the 2016 period costs were higher primarily due to lower capitalized stripping. The average stripping ratio in the first quarter of 2016 was 2.01 to 1.0.

For the first quarter of 2016, Agnico Eagle's 50% share of production at the Canadian Malartic mine was 73,613 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $557. This compares with the first quarter of 2015 when total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis were $632 on production of 67,893 ounces of gold. Production was higher in the 2016 period primarily due to higher throughput levels and higher gold grades. Costs in the 2016 period were lower due to lower costs for fuel and explosives and favourable foreign exchange rates.

In February 2016, the Partnership announced that throughput levels for 2016 were forecast to be 53,000 tpd. Any increase in throughput above this 53,000 tpd level remains contingent upon updating the existing operating permits.

Permitting activities for the Barnat Extension and deviation of Highway 117 are continuing. Having received answers to two series of questions, in April 2016, the Ministry of Sustainable Development, Environment and the Fight Against Climate Change (Quebec) accepted the Environmental Impact Assessment ("EIA") for the Barnat Extension as admissible. This was the trigger for the public hearings process to start and the first step was the release of the EIA to the public. This will be followed with a public presentation of the project in May and subsequent public hearings in June.

During the quarter, drilling continued on the Odyssey North and South Zones and to date, 18 holes totaling 18,581 metres have been completed. Data from these holes are currently being compiled and integrated into the existing database. In 2016, approximately 60,000 metres of drilling has been proposed to infill and expand the known mineralized zones on the Odyssey property. The 2016 budget is C$8.0 million (on a 100% basis).

Update of Activities on the Canadian Malartic Corporation Exploration Projects

Canadian Malartic Corporation ("CMC"), a company in which each of Agnico Eagle and Yamana hold an indirect 50% interest, is exploring, among other things, a portfolio of properties in the Kirkland Lake area of Ontario and the Pandora property in the Abitibi region of Quebec.

In the Kirkland Lake area, target generation studies are ongoing on the Upper Canada, Upper Beaver and Amalgamated Kirkland properties. Additional exploration work may be carried out after the data review is completed.

Lapa  Optimization of Historical Mining Areas Leads to Increased Underground Tonnage

The 100% owned Lapa mine in northwestern Quebec achieved commercial production in May 2009.

The Lapa circuit, located at the LaRonde mill, processed an average of 1,763 tpd in the first quarter of 2016. This compares with an average of 1,690 tpd in the first quarter of 2015. The higher throughput in the 2016 period was due to the recovery of residual ore from old production areas in the mine and additional feed from stockpiles.

Minesite costs per tonne were C$121 in the first quarter of 2016, compared to the C$119 realized in the first quarter of 2015. Costs in the 2016 period were higher due to the processing of stockpiled ore compared to the same period in 2015.

Payable production in the first quarter of 2015 was 21,709 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $668. This compares with the first quarter of 2015, when production was 25,920 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $568. In the 2016 period, production was lower and costs were higher due to lower gold grades and recoveries, partially offset by favourable foreign exchange rates.

At Lapa, 2016 is the last full year of production based on the current life of mine plan. In the remainder of 2016, production is expected to exhibit a decline with full year expected to total 60,000 ounces of gold, as February 2016 guidance. Additional exploration drilling in the Zulapa 7 Up and 7 East Zones is underway which, if successful, could potentially extend the mine life.

Goldex  Continued Strong Underground Performance Leads to Increased Mill Throughput in the First Quarter of 2016

The 100% owned Goldex mine in northwestern Quebec began operation in 2008 but mining operations in the original Goldex Extension Zone ("GEZ") orebody were suspended in October 2011. In July 2012, the M and E satellite zones were approved for development. Mining operations at GEZ remain suspended. Mining operations on the M and E satellite zones commenced in September 2013.

The Goldex mill processed an average of 6,991 tpd in the first quarter of 2016. This compares with an average of 6,294 tpd in the first quarter of 2015. The higher throughput in the 2016 period was due to continued strong underground performance (mining and ore hoisting) compared to the 2015 period.

Minesite costs per tonne were approximately C$34 in the first quarter of 2016, the same as the C$34 per tonne experienced in the first quarter of 2015.

Payable gold production in the first quarter of 2016 was 32,340 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $506. This compares with the first quarter of 2015, when production was 29,250 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $541. The decrease in total cash costs in the 2016 period was largely a result of increased production (due to higher throughput levels and higher grades from the M zone) and favourable foreign exchange rates.

Development of the Deep 1 Zone remains on time and on budget. Work on the electrical substations commenced in March 2016 and the installation of the initial components of the underground conveyor system are underway.

In January 2014, Agnico Eagle acquired the Akasaba West gold-copper deposit from Alexandria Minerals Corporation. Located less than 30 kilometres from Goldex, the Akasaba West deposit could potentially create flexibility and synergies for the Company's operations in the Abitibi region by using extra milling capacity at both Goldex and LaRonde, while reducing overall costs. The Akasaba West deposit currently hosts a mineral reserve of approximately 141,000 ounces of gold (4.8 million tonnes of ore grading 0.92 g/t gold and 0.52% copper).

Following the submission of the environmental assessment for the Akasaba West deposit to the provincial government in August and to the federal government in September 2015, questions were received from both sets of regulators. Responses to provincial government questions were submitted in February and responses to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency were submitted in March 2016. Supplementary questions are expected from both levels of government in the second quarter of 2016. If public hearings are required they would likely take place in the first quarter of 2017.

FINLAND AND SWEDEN

Agnico Eagle's Kittila mine in Finland is the largest primary gold producer in Europe and hosts the Company's largest mineral reserves. Exploration activities continue to expand the mineral resources and studies are underway to evaluate the potential to cost-effectively increase production.

Kittila  Underground Access Ramp to the Sisar Zone Now Underway

The 100% owned Kittila mine in northern Finland achieved commercial production in 2009.

The Kittila mill processed an average of 4,749 tpd in the first quarter of 2016, compared to 3,836 tpd in the first quarter of 2015. The higher throughput in the 2016 period is a reflection of the ongoing optimization of the overall mill capacity.

Minesite costs per tonne at Kittila were approximately 72 in the first quarter of 2016, compared to 77 in the first quarter of 2015. Minesite costs per tonne decreased in the first quarter of 2016 due to the increased throughput when compared with the 2015 period.

First quarter 2016 payable gold production at Kittila was 48,127 ounces at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $726. In the first quarter of 2015, the mine produced 44,654 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $681. The higher production in the 2016 period is related to the increased mill capacity partially offset by lower than expected grades compared to the 2015 period. Total cash costs per ounce increased in the first quarter of 2016 primarily due to higher contractor costs which were partially offset by lower energy costs.

The Kittila mine and mill has shown potential to operate in excess of 4,000 tpd and efforts are ongoing to assess the optimal throughput rate. Studies are also underway to optimize underground mining rates and fully integrate the upper and lower Rimpi zones and the newly discovered Sisar Zone in a new Kittila mine plan. Unit costs are expected to improve once steady state operations are achieved.

Drilling is ongoing to infill and extend the mineralization in the Sisar Zone. Numerous holes have been completed and assay results are pending. In addition, underground ramp construction began in March to access the upper portion of the Sisar Zone, which is located approximately 200 metres from existing underground infrastructure.

Barsele Project  Drilling Extends the Central and Skirasen Zones and Suggests the Potential for a Goldex Type Deposit

In June 2015, Agnico Eagle acquired a 55% interest in the Barsele project in Vasterbotten County, northern Sweden from Orex Minerals (Orex Minerals subsequently transferred its interest in the project to Barsele Minerals Corp.). The Company can earn an additional 15% interest in the project through the completion of a pre-feasibility study. The exploration program is being operated by Agnico Eagle. This is the first release of drill results on the property by Agnico Eagle since the acquisition of its interest in the 28,600-hectare property.

The Barsele project is located at the intersection of the western end of the Proterozoic "Skellefte Trend," a prolific volcanogenic massive sulphide deposit belt with the "Gold Line" in northern Sweden. The Barsele property is known to contain intrusive-hosted gold mineralization (the Central, Avan and Skirasen zones) which appears to be similar to the Goldex deposit and gold-rich volcanogenic massive sulphide mineralization (the Norra Zone) which appears to be similar to the LaRonde deposit.

The Avan, Central and Skirasen zones extend over a strike length of 2.6 kilometres within a highly fractured granodiorite that ranges in width from 200 to 500 metres over a strike length of more than eight kilometres. Gold occurs as native metal and is generally associated with arsenopyrite, with low base metal content.

Drilling from October 2015 to early March 2016 (23 holes totalling 13,300 metres) focused on the Skirasen and Central zones.

Recent intercepts and drill hole coordinates from this program are set out below and the drill hole pierce points are also shown on the Barsele composite longitudinal section. All intercepts reported for the Barsele project show capped grades over estimated true widths, based on a preliminary geological interpretation that is being updated as new information becomes available with further drilling.

Recent exploration drill results from the Barsele project

Drill hole Location From (metres) To (metres) Depth of midpoint below surface (metres) Estimated true width (metres) Gold grade (g/t) (uncapped) Gold grade (g/t) (capped)* CNT15-007 Central Zone 437.0 449.0 310 9.0 12.37 3.28 CNT15-009 Central Zone 106.0 168.0 90 46.5 1.12 1.12 and

383.0 432.0 300 36.8 1.15 1.15 CNT15-010 Central Zone 223.0 252.0 230 21.8 1.59 1.59 and

494.0 589.0 515 71.2 0.88 0.88 CNT15-013 Central Zone 473.5 492.0 370 13.9 3.00 3.00 and

519.2 526.0 400 5.1 5.02 5.02 CNT15-015 Central Zone 23.0 34.0 20 8.2 8.06 6.74 CNT15-016 Skirasen Zone 270.0 277.0 215 5.2 5.06 5.06 and

339.0 451.0 310 84.0 2.07 2.01 CNT15-017 Central Zone 623.0 632.0 540 6.8 1.72 1.72 SKI15-001 Skirasen Zone 323.0 384.0 260 45.8 1.94 1.61 and

405.0 434.0 310 21.8 1.42 1.42 SKI16-001 Skirasen Zone 101.0 108.0 75 5.2 4.85 4.85 and

120.0 140.0 95 15.0 3.92 3.23 and

276.0 312.1 210 27.1 3.06 2.40 SKI16-005 Skirasen Zone 193.0 213.0 170 15.0 1.19 1.19 and

399.0 504.0 370 78.8 1.25 1.25 and

593.0 609.0 485 12.0 1.86 1.86

*Holes at Barsele use a capping factor of 20 g/t gold.

Barsele project exploration drill collar coordinates of selected holes



Drill collar coordinates* Drill hole ID UTM North UTM East Elevation (metres above sea level) Azimuth Dip (degrees) Length (metres) CNT15-007 7214686 618733 321 360 -53 725 CNT15-009 7214671 618829 317 360 -57 701 CNT15-010 7215040 618808 291 180 -70 655 CNT15-013 7214613 619033 306 333 -55 597 CNT15-015 7214601 619133 296 360 -52 523 CNT15-016 7214525 619127 302 360 -55 664 CNT15-017 7214895 618859 293 290 -60 902 SKI15-001 7214598 619125 296 040 -48 580 SKI16-001 7214515 619222 300 040 -50 557 SKI16-005 7214516 619221 300 360 -57 645

* Coordinate System Sweref 99

Barsele Project - Composite Longitudinal Section

Recent drilling has connected the Central Zone with the Skirasen Zone. The combined Central-Skirasen Zone has a strike length of approximately 1,400 metres, extends from surface to a depth of at least 540 metres and ranges in width from ten to 150 metres. Mineralization remains open at depth and along strike.

Results include hole CNT15-016 that intersected the Skirasen Zone with two intercepts: 5.06 g/t gold over 5.2 metres at 215 metres depth, and 2.01 g/t gold over 84.0 metres at 310 metres depth. Almost 300 metres away at the southeast extent of the zone, hole SKI16-001 intersected the zone with three intercepts: 4.85 g/t gold over 5.2 metres at 75 metres depth, 3.23 g/t gold over 15.0 metres at 95 metres depth and 2.40 g/t gold over 27.1 metres at 210 metres depth. The deepest intercept to date in the Skirasen Zone is hole SKI16-005 that intersected 1.86 g/t gold over 12.0 metres at 485 metres depth, as well as two shallower intercepts.

Recent drilling has extended the depth of the Central Zone to 540 metres. Highlights include hole CNT15-015 that intersected 6.74 g/t gold over 8.2 metres at 20 metres depth. Hole CNT15-013 intersected 3.00 g/t gold over 13.9 metres at 370 metres depth and 5.02 g/t gold over 5.1 metres at 400 metres depth. Hole CNT15-007 intersected 3.28 g/t gold over 9.0 metres at 310 metres depth.

In 2016, the Company plans to spend approximately $4.9 million on exploration to further evaluate the mineral potential of the property. This planned expenditure includes 19,000 metres of diamond drilling, a Titan-24 induced polarization geophysical survey, till sampling and hyperspectral core scanning. A basic environmental assessment will be done, as well as ongoing community relations programs to engage the various stakeholders in the region. Drilling is expected to resume in late April after spring breakup.

NUNAVUT REGION

Agnico Eagle has identified Nunavut as a politically attractive and stable jurisdiction with enormous geological potential. With the Company's largest producing mine (Meadowbank), two significant development assets (Meliadine and Amaruq) and other exploration projects, Nunavut has the potential to be a strategic operating platform with the ability to generate strong production and cash flows over several decades.

Meadowbank  Reviewing Further Opportunities to Potentially Extend the Minelife Through Year-End 2018

The 100% owned Meadowbank mine in Nunavut, northern Canada, achieved commercial production in March 2010.

The Meadowbank mill processed an average of 10,390 tpd in the first quarter of 2016, compared to 11,006 tpd in the first quarter of 2015. Period-over-period mill throughput was lower due to replacement of belts on the conveyor system feeding the SAG mill, an unscheduled shutdown of the secondary crushing circuit for maintenance in February and larger portion of ore from the Vault pit which has a higher hardness factor.

Minesite costs per tonne were C$77 in the first quarter of 2016 compared to C$71 per tonne in the first quarter of 2015. The increase in costs per tonne was primarily due to lower throughput that resulted from the unscheduled shutdown.

Payable production in the first quarter of 2016 was 72,311 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $788. This compares with the first quarter of 2015 when 88,523 ounces of gold were produced at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $655. The lower production and higher costs in the 2016 period compared to the 2015 period are primarily due to lower throughput levels and the processing of lower grade ore (down 14% period-over-period).

Studies are currently underway to investigate additional opportunities to extend production at Meadowbank through year-end 2018. Potential opportunities include the development of the Phaser pit, which is located to the southwest of the Vault pit, and an additional pushback to access additional ore in the E3 pit at the Portage deposit.

Amaruq Project  Exploration Access Road Construction and Permitting

The Company is actively exploring the Amaruq deposit (see below) with the goal of potentially developing the deposit as a satellite operation to Meadowbank.

On March 14, 2016, the Company received confirmation from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans that it was fully permitted to complete the construction of bridges, bridge abutments, embedded culverts and drainage culverts along the Amaruq Exploration Access Road. This concluded the permitting of the Amaruq Exploration Access Road and the Company now has all of the required permits, leases and authorizations to complete both the winter and summer construction of the road.

Construction of the Amaruq Exploration Access Road commenced in the first quarter of 2016. Road construction is ongoing with nine kilometres completed to date of the expected total length of 62 kilometres.

An application for an amendment to the Amaruq Exploration Type B Water License was submitted on March 31, 2016 to allow for the development of an exploration ramp and portal and the mining of a bulk sample. The permit approval process for the exploration ramp is expected to take approximately nine months.

In order to mine the Whale Tail deposit, amendments are needed to the Meadowbank Project Certificate and Type A water license. The amendments are expected to be submitted by the end of June 2016.

Amaruq Project  Improved Understanding of Whale Tail Ore Shoot and IVR Deposit

Agnico Eagle has a 100% interest in the Amaruq project. The large property consists of 116,717 hectares, located approximately 50 kilometres northwest of the Meadowbank mine. The most recent drill results from the Amaruq project were reported in the Company news release dated October 28, 2015. The inferred mineral resource estimate as of December 31, 2015 is 3.3 million ounces gold (16.9 million tonnes grading 6.05 g/t gold).

The 2016 drill program began at the end of January. Drilling to the end of March has totalled 18,836 metres (84 holes) using up to eight rigs, part of an initial 75,000-metre drill program. The goals of the 2016 exploration program are to infill and expand the known mineral resource areas and to test other favourable targets with a focus on delineating a second source of open pit ore.

Selected drill results and hole coordinates are set out in the tables below. Drill hole collars are also shown on the Amaruq Project Local Geology Map. All intercepts reported for the Amaruq project show capped grades over estimated true widths, based on a preliminary geological interpretation that is being updated as new information becomes available with further drilling.

Recent exploration drill results from the Whale Tail (WT) deposit and the V Zone, Amaruq project

Drill hole Location From (metres) To (metres) Depth of midpoint below surface (metres) Estimated true width (metres) Gold grade (g/t) (uncapped) Gold grade (g/t) (capped)* AMQ16-560 IVR Zone 276.7 283.5 230 6.3 38.3 6.2 including

276.7 280.5 230 3.5 66.1 8.7 AMQ16-570 WT Shoot 327.0 382.0 288 47.6 5.9 5.9 including

327.0 333.1 267 4.3 8.1 8.1 and including

354.0 378.0 297 20.8 9.3 9.3 AMQ16-601 WT Shoot 289.0 326.1 252 32.0 8.8 8.8 including

289.0 293.3 238 3.7 17.1 17.1 and including

303.0 326.1 258 20.0 10.8 10.8 AMQ16-605 IVR Zone 35.0 45.3 35 9.7 7.2 5.9 AMQ16-643 IVR Zone 91.3 108.4 98 16.1 42.9 11.0 including

92.0 97.5 94 5.2 36.4 21.6 AMQ16-654 IVR Zone 65.5 78.0 69 12.1 22.7 4.1 including

74.3 78.0 73 3.6 72.2 9.4

*Holes at Whale Tail deposit use a capping factor of 40 to 80 g/t gold. Holes at IVR Zone use a capping factor of 40 g/t gold.

Amaruq project exploration drill collar coordinates of selected holes



Drill collar coordinates* Drill hole ID UTM North UTM East Elevation (metres above sea level) Azimuth Dip (degrees) Length (metres) AMQ16-560 7256055 607123 153 323 -55 318 AMQ16-570 7255683 606741 153 144 -56 410 AMQ16-601 7255544 606559 153 144 -55 360 AMQ16-605 7256151 606616 164 322 -60 246 AMQ16-643 7256320 606986 157 323 -80 249 AMQ16-654 7256320 606909 156 315 -75 144

* Coordinate System UTM Nad 83 zone 14

Amaruq Project - Local Geology Map

Two of the reported holes were drilled toward the southeast to increase the confidence in the true thickness and configuration of the Whale Tail ore shoot, which plunges about 30 degrees to the east from surface to at least 430 metres depth. The shoot appears to be thicker than previously interpreted in the Central area. Hole AMQ16-601 intersected 8.8 g/t gold over 32.0 metres, including 17.1 g/t gold over 3.7 metres at 238 metres depth and 10.8 g/t gold over 20.0 metres at 258 metres depth. Approximately 230 metres to the northeast, hole AMQ16-570 intersected 5.9 g/t gold over 47.6 metres, including 8.1 g/t gold over 4.3 metres at 267 metres depth and 9.3 g/t gold over 20.8 metres at 297 metres depth.

A grouping of three drill holes investigated the widest horizon in the IVR Zone, which continues to yield high grades. Hole AMQ16-643 intersected 11.0 g/t gold over 16.1 metres at 98 metres depth, including 21.6 g/t gold over 5.2 metres. Approximately 80 metres to the west, hole AMQ16-654 intersected 4.1 g/t gold over 12.1 metres at 69 metres depth, including 9.4 g/t gold over 3.6 metres. Approximately 340 metres farther to the southwest, hole AMQ16-605 intersected 5.9 g/t gold over 9.7 metres at 35 metres depth.

Hole AMQ16-560 was drilled in the area between the east end of Whale Tail and the southern part of IVR. The hole intersected what is believed to be the southernmost IVR Zone, and returned 6.2 g/t gold over 6.3 metres at 230 metres depth, including 8.7 g/t gold over 3.5 metres. This intersection has extended the depth of the IVR Zone by almost 100 metres, to 230 metres. Additional drilling is planned to further investigate the potential intersection of the IVR Zone and the Whale Tail deposit.

Drilling is ongoing with nine rigs on the property. An updated Amaruq mineral resource is expected in the second half of 2016.

Meliadine  Type A Water License Permit Expected by the End of the Second Quarter of 2016

The Meliadine project was acquired in July 2010 and is the Company's largest advanced exploration/development project based on mineral reserves and mineral resources. The Company has a 100% interest in the 111,757 hectare property, which is linked to the town of Rankin Inlet in Nunavut by a 25 kilometre all-weather access road.

The capital budget for 2016 is $96 million, with activities focused on further underground development (approximately 3,700 metres), detailed engineering and procurement, construction of essential surface infrastructure and the acquisition of a used camp facility. The goal of the 2016 capital program is to ensure that the project remains on track for a potential 2020 production start-up, which is approximately a one year delay from previous expectations.

In the first quarter of 2016, approximately 1,103 metres of underground development was completed. Of this total, 442 metres of development were completed in March, making it the best month since the beginning of the project.

On April 15, 2016, the Nunavut Water Board issued the Meliadine Project Type A Water Licence to the Federal Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada for approval. The standard approval timeframe for the minister is 45 days. Approval of the licence is therefore expected by the end of May 2016. The Type A Water Licence would allow for the construction and operation of the Meliadine project.

Internal studies are continuing to evaluate the potential to extract additional gold from the Tiriganiaq and Wesmeg/Normeg deposits, which could potentially extend the mine life, increase annual production and improve project economics and the after-tax internal rate of return. These studies are expected to be completed by the end of 2016.

The timing of future capital expenditures at the Meliadine project beyond 2016 and the determination of whether to build a mine at Meliadine are subject to approval by Agnico Eagle's Board of Directors, which will be based on, among other things, prevailing market conditions and outcomes of the various plans being evaluated.

SOUTHERN BUSINESS OPERATING REVIEW

Agnico Eagle's Southern Business operations are focused in Mexico. These operations have been the source of growing precious metals production (gold and silver), stable operating costs and strong free cash flow since 2009. In the first quarter of 2016, the Mexican operations had record quarterly silver production of approximately 752,000 ounces.

Pinos Altos  Shaft on Schedule for full Commissioning in the second quarter of 2016

The 100% owned Pinos Altos mine in northern Mexico achieved commercial production in November 2009.

The Pinos Altos mill processed 4,932 tpd in the first quarter of 2016 compared to 5,661 tpd processed in the first quarter of 2015. Mill throughput in the 2016 period was negatively affected by clay encountered in the Cerro Colorado underground ore and freezing weather conditions. During the first quarter of 2016, approximately 53,200 tonnes of ore were stacked on the leach pad at Pinos Altos, compared to 74,300 tonnes in the comparable 2015 period.

Minesite costs per tonne at Pinos Altos were $50 in the first quarter of 2016, higher than the $46 in the first quarter of 2015. The difference in minesite costs per tonne was largely attributable to lower thoughput levels and variations in the proportion of heap leach ore to milled ore and open pit ore to underground ore, currency variations and routine fluctuations in the waste to ore stripping ratio in the open pits.

Payable production in the first quarter of 2016 was 48,117 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $343. This compares with production of 50,106 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $357 in the first quarter of 2015. Lower production in 2016 is largely due to lower tonnage processed over the comparable period in 2015. The decrease in the year over year total cash costs per ounce is largely due to favourable foreign exchange rates compared to the prior year period.

The Pinos Altos shaft was commissioned for moving mine personnel and materials in the first quarter of 2016. The ore handling system is on schedule to be commissioned in the second quarter of 2016. When the shaft is fully commissioned, it will allow better matching of the mill capacity with the future mining capacity at Pinos Altos once the open pit mining operation begins to wind down as planned.

Creston Mascota Deposit at Pinos Altos  Exploration Commences on the Madrono Property Which Hosts Historical Gold-Silver Prospects

The Creston Mascota deposit at Pinos Altos has been operating as a satellite operation to the Pinos Altos mine since late 2010.

Approximately 516,200 tonnes of ore were stacked on the Creston Mascota leach pad during the first quarter of 2016, compared to approximately 527,000 tonnes stacked in the first quarter of 2015. In the 2016 period, fewer tonnes were stacked due to freezing weather conditions encountered in January. Minesite costs per tonne at Creston Mascota were $12 in the first quarter of 2016, compared to $11 in the first quarter of 2015. Costs in the 2016 period were slightly higher due to the freezing conditions encountered early in the quarter.

Payable gold production at Creston Mascota in the first quarter of 2016 was 11,551 ounces at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $460. This compares to 12,448 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $444 during the first quarter of 2015. Production was lower in the 2016 period due to fewer tonnes stacked and lower grades compared to the 2015 period. Lower production in the 2016 period resulted in higher cash costs, which were partially offset by favourable foreign exchange rates compared to the 2015 period.

Rough earthworks are nearing completion on the Phase 4 heap leach pad at Creston Mascota. Installation of the clay under layer and synthetic liner is expected to commence in the second quarter of 2016.

During the first quarter of 2016, an agreement was signed that allows access to the 51-hectare Madrono property for exploration and mining. The Madrono property is located in an area with good access and infrastructure between Pinos Altos and Creston Mascota, includes at least three gold-silver veins: Madrono, Santa Martha and La Curva. Previous mining in this area included small-scale bonanza production from underground mine development on three levels in the 1930s. Mapping, surface sampling and exploration planning for Madrono is underway.

Exploration and infill drilling continues at the Bravo satellite target and around the Creston Mascota pit to increase the confidence in the block model and look for additional growth opportunities.

La India  Additional Ore Tonnes Encountered Outside the Block Model

The La India mine property in Sonora, Mexico, located approximately 70 kilometres from the Company's Pinos Altos mine, was acquired in November 2011 through the purchase of Grayd Resources, which held a 56,000 hectare land position in the Mulatos Gold belt. Commissioning of the mine commenced ahead of schedule in the third quarter of 2013 and commercial production was declared as of February 1, 2014.

Approximately 1,396,300 tonnes of ore were stacked on the La India leach pad during the first quarter of 2016, compared to approximately 1,378,500 tonnes stacked in the first quarter of 2015. Minesite costs per tonne at La India were $8 in the first quarter of 2016, compared to $9 in the first quarter of 2015. Tonnes stacked in the 2016 period were higher due to the mining of additional lower grade ore tonnes previously identified as waste in the block model. Costs were lower in the 2016 period primarily due to lower fuel consumption and less waste mined.

Payable gold production at La India in the first quarter of 2016 was 28,231 ounces at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $360. Production in the first quarter of 2015 was 26,523 ounces of gold at total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis of $418. Production was higher in the 2016 period due to higher tonnage stacked and faster percolation rates from the new lifts on the phase 2 heap leach pad. Total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis in the 2016 period were favourably impacted by higher production volumes (for both gold and silver) and favourable foreign exchange rates.

A land access agreement was signed in January 2016, allowing access for exploration and potential future mining on the El Realito claims. Surface sampling and target generation are underway at El Realito and favourable targets will then be drill-tested. Step-out drilling is also planned at the El Cochi and La India Este areas adjacent to the La India mine. An initial drill program is planned at the Kilometre 15 area which is located east and contiguous with the El Realito property.

El Barqueno - Recent Drill Program Expands Known Deposits and Tests Other Target Areas

Agnico Eagle acquired its 100% interest in the El Barqueno project in November 2014 with the acquisition of Cayden Resources Inc. The 32,840-hectare property is in the Guachinango gold-silver mining district of Jalisco State in west-central, Mexico, approximately 150 kilometres west of the state capital of Guadalajara. As of December 31, 2015, the El Barqueno project has an inferred mineral resource of 19.7 million tonnes grading 0.96 g/t gold and 5.78 g/t silver (containing 608,000 ounces of gold and 3.7 million ounces of silver) at the Azteca-Zapoteca, Angostura and Pena de Oro zones. This news release summarizes the results of exploration and in-fill drilling programs completed on the project to the end of March 2016.

The El Barqueno project contains a number of known mineralized zones and several prospects. From January through March 2016, 156 holes (27,523 metres) were drilled using 14 drill rigs in order to complete infill drilling on the Azteca-Zapoteca Zone and to explore for additional mineralized structures and extensions of the other known zones. The Azteca-Zapoteca infill work represents 90% of the drilling completed to date in 2016. There are currently six drill rigs operating on the project testing other targets including Zapote-Mixteca, San Diego, Olmeca, Huichol and Tarasca.

El Barqueno Project  Local Geology Map

Gold and silver grades of recent intercepts from the Azteca-Zapoteca and Angostura Zones are set out in the table below and the drill collars are located in the accompanying table as well as on the project geology map. All intercepts reported for the El Barqueno project show uncapped grades over estimated true widths, based on a preliminary geological interpretation that will be updated as new information becomes available with further drilling.

Selected recent exploration drill results from the El Barqueno project

Drill Hole Zone From (metres) To (metres) Depth of midpoint below surface (metres) Estimated true width (metres) Gold grade (g/t) (uncapped)* Silver grade (g/t) (uncapped) AZP16-212 Azteca-Zapoteca 90.0 98.0 62 4.8 1.63 8.8 AZP16-219 Azteca-Zapoteca 27.0 50.0 34 9.2 4.07 14.3 AZP16-243 Azteca-Zapoteca 46.0 53.0 38 5.6 22.39 24.3 and

63.0 71.0 52 6.4 1.07 2.9 AZP16-260 Azteca-Zapoteca 89.0 118.0 89 14.5 1.16 6.8 AZP16-272 Azteca-Zapoteca 166.0 176.0 136 4.0 1.07 3.2 AZP16-282 Azteca-Zapoteca 43.0 49.0 40 4.0 1.96 3.8 AZP16-294 Azteca-Zapoteca 41.0 49.0 42 6.4 1.66 3.2 AZP16-297 Azteca-Zapoteca 45.0 53.0 49 7.9 4.40 11.3 AZP16-300 Azteca-Zapoteca 13.0 22.0 12 7.2 6.93 12.2 AZP16-322 Azteca-Zapoteca 130.0 145.0 134 12.0 7.31 53.1 BRQ15-239 Angostura 153.0 162.0 161 8.3 0.33 83.4 BRQ15-245 Angostura 164.0 176.0 140 10.9 1.52 19.1 BRQ15-285 Angostura 316.0 322.0 192 5.5 0.69 24.4 BRQ15-288 Angostura 188.0 199.0 172 9.7 1.28 11.8

* Cut-off grade of 0.4 g/t gold; only intervals longer than 2.8 metres estimated true width were included

El Barqueno project exploration drill hole collar coordinates



Drill Hole Collar Coordinates* Drill Hole ID UTM North UTM East Elevation (metres above sea level) Azimuth Dip (degrees) Length (metres) (degrees) AZP16-212 555141 2279906 1,274 155 -60 172 AZP16-219 554248 2279658 1,257 335 -50 219 AZP16-243 554725 2279768 1,288 155 -60 108 AZP16-260 554953 2279847 1,286 155 -80 146 AZP16-272 554155 2279566 1,278 335 -50 336 AZP16-282 554531 2279724 1,285 155 -65 110 AZP16-294 554883 2279898 1,288 335 -80 70 AZP16-297 554438 2279816 1,248 335 -50 70 AZP16-300 555163 2279871 1,254 155 -45 61 AZP16-322 554239 2279765 1,234 335 -50 171 BRQ15-239 553971 2280155 1,175 335 -50 276 BRQ-15-245 553880 2280173 1,241 335 -50 265 BRQ-15-285 554164 2280106 1,214 335 -50 452 BRQ-15-288 554026 2280126 1,172 335 -50 421

* Coordinate System UTM WGS84 13N Zone

Azteca-Zapoteca Zone

To date, the Azteca-Zapoteca Zone has been defined over more than 1.4 kilometres of strike length along a northeasterly direction and has been intersected as deep as 300 metres. The Zone remains open at depth and along strike to the southwest. More than half of the exploration drilling and all the infill drilling planned for this year is completed.

The steeply north-dipping Azteca structure and moderately south-dipping Zapoteca structure appear to coalesce at a depth of 100-150 metres below surface into a near-vertical structure with generally higher grades.

The current results show higher grades in the shallow areas around and beneath former pits that were mined in the 1980s. Examples include hole AZP16-243 that yielded 22.39 g/t gold and 24.3 g/t silver over 5.6 metres at 38 metres depth, as well as hole AZP16-300 that intersected 6.93 g/t gold and 12.2 g/t silver over 7.2 metres at 12 metres depth. The gold grade tends to become progressively lower at depth, such as hole AZP16-260 that intersected 1.16 g/t gold and 6.8 g/t silver over 14.5 metres at 89 metres depth and hole AZP16-272 that intersected 1.07 g/t gold and 3.2 g/t silver over 4.0 metres at 136 metres depth. An exception of a higher grade intercept at depth is hole AZP16-322 that intersected 7.31 g/t gold and 53.1 g/t silver over 12.0 metres at 134 metres depth. This could represent a feeder structure with depth potential, however, additional drilling will be required to evaluate the full extent of the mineralization.

Additional drilling is planned along strike to the southwest as well as in the footwall to the Zapoteca structure. The Company believes there is excellent potential for parallel mineralized structures between the Azteca-Zapoteca and Angostura mineral resource areas and two drills are currently testing this area as a follow-up to the recent detailed mapping and sampling completed in this area.

Angostura Zone

The Angostura Zone lies approximately 800 metres northwest of the Azteca-Zapoteca Zone. Angostura is defined over a strike length of more than 1,000 metres, and appears to plunge shallowly to the southwest. The structure is open along strike and at depth.

Recent results include hole BRQ15-245 that intersected 1.52 g/t gold and 19.1 g/t silver over 10.9 metres at 140 metres depth. Approximately 150 metres to the west, hole BRQ15-288 intersected 1.28 g/t gold and 11.8 g/t silver over 9.7 metres at 172 metres depth.

Drilling to date suggests Angostura could become part of a multi-pit operation along with a larger deposit at Azteca-Zapoteca. Additional drilling is planned along strike to the northeast and southwest searching for other potential shallowly-plunging shoots as well as testing the potential for parallel mineralized structures.

Additional Work

Drill permits have been received to test the northeastern strike extension as well as several mineralized areas identified from mapping to the north and east of the Pena de Oro Zone, in what is now referred to as the Pena Blanca area.

Approximately 25,000 metres of additional drilling is expected to be completed by the end of 2016 at the El Barqueno project, principally at the Azteca-Zapoteca, Angostura, Pena de Oro, Pena Blanca, Zapote-Mixteca, San Diego, Olmeca, Huichol and Tarasca prospects. Exploration expenditures in 2016 are expected to total approximately $16 million.

In addition to the drilling activities, studies are underway to evaluate potential development scenarios for the project. It is currently envisioned that the project's gold-silver deposits could potentially be developed into a series of open pits utilizing heap leach processing, similar to the Creston Mascota deposit at Pinos Altos and the La India mines.

About Agnico Eagle

Agnico Eagle is a senior Canadian gold mining company that has produced precious metals since 1957. Its eight mines are located in Canada, Finland and Mexico, with exploration and development activities in each of these countries as well as in the United States and Sweden. The Company and its shareholders have full exposure to gold prices due to its long-standing policy of no forward gold sales. Agnico Eagle has declared a cash dividend every year since 1983.

Note Regarding Certain Measures of Performance

This news release discloses certain measures, including ''total cash costs per ounce'', "all-in sustaining costs per ounce", ''minesite costs per tonne'' and "adjusted net income" that are not recognized measures under IFRS. These data may not be comparable to data reported by other gold producers. For a reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable financial information reported in the consolidated financial statements prepared in accordance with IFRS and for an explanation of how management uses these measures, other than adjusted net income, see "Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Performance Measures" below. The total cash costs per ounce of gold produced is reported on both a by-product basis (deducting by-product metal revenues from production costs) and co-product basis (before by-product metal revenues). The total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a by-product basis is calculated by adjusting production costs as recorded in the consolidated statements of income for by-product revenues, unsold concentrate inventory production costs, smelting, refining and marketing charges and other adjustments, and then dividing by the number of ounces of gold produced. The total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a co-product basis is calculated in the same manner as the total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a by-product basis except that no adjustment is made for by-product metal revenues. Accordingly, the calculation of total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a co-product basis does not reflect a reduction in production costs or smelting, refining and marketing charges associated with the production and sale of by-product metals. The total cash costs per ounce of gold produced is intended to provide information about the cash-generating capabilities of the Company's mining operations. Management also uses these measures to monitor the performance of the Company's mining operations. As market prices for gold are quoted on a per ounce basis, using the total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a by-product basis measure allows management to assess a mine's cash-generating capabilities at various gold prices. All-in sustaining costs per ounce is used to show the full cost of gold production from current operations. The Company calculates all-in sustaining costs per ounce of gold produced on a by-product basis as the aggregate of total cash costs per ounce on a by-product basis, sustaining capital expenditures (including capitalized exploration), general and administrative expenses (including stock options) and reclamation expenses divided by the amount of gold produced. The all-in sustaining costs per ounce of gold produced on a co-product basis is calculated in the same manner as the all-in sustaining costs per ounce of gold produced on a by-product basis, except that the total cash costs per ounce on a co-product basis is used, meaning no adjustment is made for by-product metal revenues. The Company's methodology for calculating all-in sustaining costs per ounce may differ from to the methodology used by other producers that disclose all-in sustaining costs per ounce. The Company may change the methodology it uses to calculate all-in sustaining costs per ounce in the future, including in response to the adoption of formal industry guidance regarding this measure by the World Gold Council. Management is aware that these per ounce measures of performance can be affected by fluctuations in exchange rates and, in the case of total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a by-product basis, by-product metal prices. Management compensates for these inherent limitations by using these measures in conjunction with minesite costs per tonne (discussed below) as well as other data prepared in accordance with IFRS.

Management also performs sensitivity analyses in order to quantify the effects of fluctuating exchange rates and metal prices. This news release also contains information as to estimated future total cash costs per ounce, all-in sustaining costs per ounce and minesite costs per tonne. The estimates are based upon the total cash costs per ounce, all-in sustaining costs per ounce and minesite costs per tonne that the Company expects to incur to mine gold at its mines and projects and, consistent with the reconciliation of these actual costs referred to above, do not include production costs attributable to accretion expense and other asset retirement costs, which will vary over time as each project is developed and mined. It is therefore not practicable to reconcile these forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable IFRS measure.

Forward-Looking Statements

The information in this news release has been prepared as at April 28, 2016. Certain statements contained in this news release constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and "forward-looking information" under the provisions of Canadian provincial securities laws and are referred to herein as "forward-looking statements". When used in this news release, the words "anticipate", "could", "estimate", "expect", "forecast", "planned", "potential", "will" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements include, without limitation: the Company's forward-looking production guidance, including estimated ore grades, project timelines, drilling results, metal production, life of mine estimates, production, total cash costs per ounce, all-in sustaining costs per ounce, minesite costs per tonne and cash flows; the estimated timing and conclusions of technical reports and other studies; the methods by which ore will be extracted or processed; statements concerning expansion projects, recovery rates, mill throughput, optimization and projected exploration expenditures, including costs and other estimates upon which such projections are based; statements regarding timing and amounts of capital expenditures and other assumptions; estimates of future mineral reserves, mineral resources, mineral production, optimization efforts and sales; estimates of mine life; estimates of future mining costs, total cash costs per ounce, all-in sustaining costs per ounce, minesite costs per tonne and other expenses; estimates of future capital expenditures and other cash needs, and expectations as to the funding thereof; statements as to the projected development of certain ore deposits, including estimates of exploration, development and production and other capital costs and estimates of the timing of such exploration, development and production or decisions with respect to such exploration, development and production; estimates of mineral reserves and mineral resources, and statements and information regarding anticipated future exploration; the anticipated timing of events with respect to the Company's mine sites and statements and information regarding the sufficiency of the Company's cash resources and other statements and information regarding anticipated trends with respect to the Company's operations, exploration and the funding thereof. Such statements and information reflect the Company's views as at the date of this news release and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions, and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements and information. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of factors and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by Agnico Eagle as of the date of such statements, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. The material factors and assumptions used in the preparation of the forward looking statements contained herein, which may prove to be incorrect, include, but are not limited to, the assumptions set forth herein and in management's discussion and analysis ("MD&A") and the Company's Annual Information Form ("AIF") for the year ended December 31, 2015 filed with Canadian securities regulators and that are included in its Annual Report on Form 40-F for the year ended December 31, 2015 ("Form 40-F") filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") as well as: that there are no significant disruptions affecting operations; that production, permitting, development and expansion at each of Agnico Eagle's properties proceeds on a basis consistent with current expectations and plans; that the relevant metal prices, exchange rates and prices for key mining and construction supplies will be consistent with Agnico Eagle's expectations; that Agnico Eagle's current estimates of mineral reserves, mineral resources, mineral grades and metal recovery are accurate; that there are no material delays in the timing for completion of ongoing growth projects; that the Company's current plans to optimize production are successful; and that there are no material variations in the current tax and regulatory environment. Many factors, known and unknown, could cause the actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward looking statements. Such risks include, but are not limited to: the volatility of prices of gold and other metals; uncertainty of mineral reserves, mineral resources, mineral grades and mineral recovery estimates; uncertainty of future production, project development, capital expenditures and other costs; exchange rate fluctuations; financing of additional capital requirements; cost of exploration and development programs; mining risks; community protests; risks associated with foreign operations; governmental and environmental regulation; the volatility of the Company's stock price; and risks associated with the Company's currency, fuel and by-product metal derivative strategies. For a more detailed discussion of such risks and other factors that may affect the Company's ability to achieve the expectations set forth in the forward-looking statements contained in this news release, see the AIF and MD&A filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and included in the Form 40-F filed on EDGAR at www.sec.gov, as well as the Company's other filings with the Canadian securities regulators and the SEC. Other than as required by law, the Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements.

Notes to Investors Regarding the Use of Mineral Resources

Cautionary Note to Investors Concerning Estimates of Measured and Indicated Mineral Resources

This news release uses the terms "measured mineral resources" and "indicated mineral resources". Investors are advised that while those terms are recognized and required by Canadian regulations, the SEC does not recognize them. Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of mineral deposits in these categories will ever be converted into mineral reserves.

Cautionary Note to Investors Concerning Estimates of Inferred Mineral Resources

This news release also uses the term "inferred mineral resources". Investors are advised that while this term is recognized and required by Canadian regulations, the SEC does not recognize it. "Inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence, and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of 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 pre-feasibility studies, except in rare cases. Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of an inferred mineral resource exists, or is economically or legally mineable.

Scientific and Technical Data

The scientific and technical information contained in this news release relating to Quebec operations has been approved by Christian Provencher, Eng., Vice-President, Canada; relating to Nunavut operations has been approved by Dominique Girard, Eng., Vice-President Technical Services and Nunavut Operations; relating to the Kittila operations has been approved by Francis Brunet, Eng., Corporate Director Mining; relating to Southern Business operations has been approved by Tim Haldane, P.Eng., Senior Vice-President, Operations  USA and Latin America; and relating to exploration has been approved by Alain Blackburn, Eng., Senior Vice-President, Exploration and Guy Gosselin, Eng., Vice-President, Exploration. Each of them is a "Qualified Person" for the purposes of National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (''NI 43-101'').

The scientific and technical information relating to Agnico Eagle's mineral reserves and mineral resources contained herein (other than the Canadian Malartic mine) has been approved by Daniel Doucet, Eng., Senior Corporate Director, Reserve Development; and relating to mineral reserves and mineral resources at the Canadian Malartic mine contained herein has been approved by Donald Gervais, P.Geo., Director of Technical Services at CMC. Each of them is a "Qualified Person" for the purposes of NI 43-101.

Cautionary Note To U.S. Investors - The SEC permits U.S. mining companies, in their filings with the SEC, to disclose only those mineral deposits that a company can economically and legally extract or produce. Agnico Eagle reports mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates in accordance with the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum Best Practice Guidelines for Exploration and for Estimation of Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves, in accordance with NI 43-101. These standards are similar to those used by the SEC's Industry Guide No. 7, as interpreted by Staff at the SEC ("Guide 7"). However, the definitions in NI 43-101 differ in certain respects from those under Guide 7. Accordingly, mineral reserve information contained herein may not be comparable to similar information disclosed by U.S. companies. Under the requirements of the SEC, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve" unless the determination has been made that the mineralization could be economically and legally produced or extracted at the time the reserve determination is made. A "final" or "bankable" feasibility study is required to meet the requirements to designate mineral reserves under Industry Guide 7. Agnico Eagle uses certain terms in this news release, such as "measured", "indicated", "inferred", and "resources" that the SEC guidelines strictly prohibit U.S. registered companies from including in their filings with the SEC.

In prior periods, mineral reserves and mineral resources for all properties were typically estimated using historic three-year average metals prices and foreign exchange rates in accordance with the SEC guidelines. These guidelines require the use of prices that reflect current economic conditions at the time of mineral reserve determination, which the Staff of the SEC has interpreted to mean historic three-year average prices. Given the current lower commodity price environment, Agnico Eagle has decided to use price assumptions that are below the three-year averages. The assumptions used for the mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates at all mines and advanced projects as of December 31, 2015 (other than the Canadian Malartic mine), reported by the Company on February 10, 2016, were $1,100 per ounce gold, $16.00 per ounce silver, $0.90 per pound zinc, $2.50 per pound copper, and US$/C$, Euro/US$ and US$/MXP exchange rates for all mines and projects other than the Lapa, Meadowbank and Creston Mascota mines and Santo Nino open pit at Pinos Altos of 1.16, 1.20 and 14.00, respectively. Due to shorter mine life, the assumptions used for the mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates at the shorter-life mines (the Lapa, Meadowbank and Creston Mascota mines and Santo Nino open pit) as of December 31, 2015, reported by the Company on February 10, 2016, included the same metal price assumptions, and US$/C$ and US$/MXP exchange rates of 1.30 and 16.00, respectively.

The assumptions used for the mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates at the Canadian Malartic mine as of December 31, 2015, reported by the Company on February 10, 2016, were $1,150 per ounce gold, a cut-off grade between 0.30 g/t and 0.33 g/t gold (depending on the deposit) and a US$/C$ exchange rate of 1.24.

NI 43-101 requires mining companies to disclose mineral reserves and mineral resources using the subcategories of "proven mineral reserves", "probable mineral reserves", "measured mineral resources", "indicated mineral resources" and "inferred mineral resources". Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability.

A mineral reserve is the economically mineable part of a measured and/or indicated mineral resource. It includes diluting materials and allowances for losses, which may occur when the material is mined or extracted and is defined by studies at pre-feasibility or feasibility level as appropriate that include application of modifying factors. Such studies demonstrate that, at the time of reporting, extraction could reasonably be justified.

Modifying factors are considerations used to convert mineral resources to mineral reserves. These include, but are not restricted to, mining, processing, metallurgical, infrastructure, economic, marketing, legal, environmental, social and governmental factors.

A proven mineral reserve is the economically mineable part of a measured mineral resource. A proven mineral reserve implies a high degree of confidence in the modifying factors. A probable mineral reserve is the economically mineable part of an indicated and, in some circumstances, a measured mineral resource. The confidence in the modifying factors applying to a probable mineral reserve is lower than that applying to a proven mineral reserve.

A mineral resource is a concentration or occurrence of solid material of economic interest in or on the Earth's crust in such form, grade or quality and quantity that there are reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction. The location, quantity, grade or quality, continuity and other geological characteristics of a mineral resource are known, estimated or interpreted from specific geological evidence and knowledge, including sampling.

A measured mineral resource is that part of a mineral resource for which quantity, grade or quality, densities, shape and physical characteristics are estimated with confidence sufficient to allow the application of modifying factors to support detailed mine planning and final evaluation of the economic viability of the deposit. Geological evidence is derived from detailed and reliable exploration, sampling and testing and is sufficient to confirm geological and grade or quality continuity between points of observation. An indicated mineral resource is that part of a mineral resource for which quantity, grade or quality, densities, shape and physical characteristics are estimated with sufficient confidence to allow the application of modifying factors in sufficient detail to support mine planning and evaluation of the economic viability of the deposit. Geological evidence is derived from adequately detailed and reliable exploration, sampling and testing and is sufficient to assume geological and grade or quality continuity between points of observation. An inferred mineral resource is that part of a mineral resource for which quantity and grade or quality are estimated on the basis of limited geological evidence and sampling. Geological evidence is sufficient to imply but not verify geological and grade or quality continuity.

Investors are cautioned not to assume that part or all of an inferred mineral resource exists, or is economically or legally mineable.

A feasibility study is a comprehensive technical and economic study of the selected development option for a mineral project that includes appropriately detailed assessments of applicable modifying factors together with any other relevant operational factors and detailed financial analysis that are necessary to demonstrate, at the time of reporting, that extraction is reasonably justified (economically mineable). The results of the study may reasonably serve as the basis for a final decision by a proponent or financial institution to proceed with, or finance, the development of the project. The confidence level of the study will be higher than that of a pre-feasibility study.

AGNICO EAGLE MINES LIMITED SUMMARY OF OPERATIONS KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (thousands of United States dollars, except where noted) (Unaudited)









Three Months Ended

March 31,



2016



2015 Operating margin(i)by mine:









Northern Business











LaRonde mine $ 48,055

$ 30,015

Lapa mine

10,806



14,687

Goldex mine

22,184



19,253

Meadowbank mine

33,329



46,577

Canadian Malartic mine(ii)

41,740



34,718

Kittila mine

24,086



27,415 Southern Business











Pinos Altos mine

35,820



34,652

Creston Mascota deposit at Pinos Altos

8,989



8,409

La India mine

21,549



20,590 Total operating margin(i)

246,558



236,316 Amortization of property, plant and mine development

145,631



135,897 Exploration, corporate and other

73,730



43,706 Income before income and mining taxes

27,197



56,713 Income and mining taxes (recovery) expense

(591)



27,970 Net income for the period $ 27,788

$ 28,743 Net income per share  basic (US$) $ 0.13

$ 0.13 Net income per share  diluted (US$) $ 0.13

$ 0.13 Cash flows:









Cash provided by operating activities $ 145,704

$ 143,455 Cash used in investing activities $ (107,595)

$ (53,892) Cash used in financing activities $ (1,588)

$ (123,182) Realized prices (US$):









Gold (per ounce) $ 1,192

$ 1,202 Silver (per ounce) $ 15.09

$ 17.02 Zinc (per tonne) $ 1,540

$ 2,072 Copper (per tonne) $ 4,297

$ 5,056 Payable production(iii):









Gold (ounces):











Northern Business













LaRonde mine

75,337



58,893



Lapa mine

21,709



25,920



Goldex mine

32,340



29,250



Meadowbank mine

72,311



88,523



Canadian Malartic mine(ii)

73,613



67,893



Kittila mine

48,127



44,654

Southern Business













Pinos Altos mine

48,117



50,106



Creston Mascota deposit at Pinos Altos

11,551



12,448



La India mine

28,231



26,523 Total gold (ounces)

411,336



404,210 Silver (thousands of ounces):











Northern Business













LaRonde mine

247



198



Lapa mine

3



1



Meadowbank mine

43



96



Canadian Malartic mine(ii)

77



72



Kittila mine

3



2

Southern Business













Pinos Altos mine

587



562



Creston Mascota deposit at Pinos Altos

48



32



La India mine

117



69 Total silver (thousands of ounces)

1,125



1,032 Zinc (tonnes)

614



936 Copper (tonnes)

1,154



1,167























Payable metal sold:









Gold (ounces):











Northern Business













LaRonde mine

75,257



60,943



Lapa mine

19,836



23,497



Goldex mine

31,955



27,907



Meadowbank mine

71,589



84,780



Canadian Malartic mine(ii)(iv)

65,085



59,261



Kittila mine

50,725



48,982

Southern Business













Pinos Altos mine

43,224



41,433



Creston Mascota deposit at Pinos Altos

11,845



11,399



La India mine

26,165



26,898 Total gold (ounces)

395,681



385,100 Silver (thousands of ounces):











Northern Business













LaRonde mine

232



205



Lapa mine

1



-



Meadowbank mine

43



98



Canadian Malartic mine(ii)(iv)

73



54



Kittila mine

3



2

Southern Business













Pinos Altos mine

530



446



Creston Mascota deposit at Pinos Altos

48



20



La India mine

86



63 Total silver (thousands of ounces):

1,016



888 Zinc (tonnes)

605



1,264 Copper (tonnes)

1,156



1,160











Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced - co-product basis (US$)(v):









Northern Business











LaRonde mine $ 670

$ 892

Lapa mine

668



568

Goldex mine

506



542

Meadowbank mine

797



674

Canadian Malartic mine(ii)

572



649

Kittila mine

727



682 Southern Business











Pinos Altos mine

530



548

Creston Mascota deposit at Pinos Altos

527



488

La India mine

424



461 Weighted average total cash costs per ounce of gold produced $ 631

$ 651











Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced - by-product basis (US$)(v):









Northern Business











LaRonde mine $ 529

$ 703

Lapa mine

668



568

Goldex mine

506



541

Meadowbank mine

788



655

Canadian Malartic mine(ii)

557



632

Kittila mine

726



681 Southern Business











Pinos Altos mine

343



357

Creston Mascota deposit at Pinos Altos

460



444

La India mine

360



418 Weighted average total cash costs per ounce of gold produced $ 573

$ 588

Notes:



(i) Operating margin is calculated as revenues from mining operations less production costs.



(ii) On June 16, 2014, Agnico Eagle and Yamana jointly acquired 100.0% of Osisko by way of a statutory plan of arrangement (the "Arrangement"). As a result of the Arrangement, Agnico Eagle and Yamana each indirectly own 50.0% of CMC and the Partnership, which now holds the Canadian Malartic mine. The information set out in this table reflects the Company's 50.0% interest in the Canadian Malartic mine.



(iii) Payable production (a nonGAAP non-financial performance measure) is the quantity of mineral produced during a period contained in products that are or will be sold by the Company, whether such products are sold during the period or held as inventories at the end of the period.



(iv) The Canadian Malartic mine's payable metal sold excludes the 5.0% net smelter royalty transferred to Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd., pursuant to the Arrangement.



(v) Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced is not a recognized measure under IFRS and this data may not be comparable to data reported by other gold producers. Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced is reported on both a byproduct basis (deducting byproduct metal revenues from production costs) and coproduct basis (before byproduct metal revenues). Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a byproduct basis is calculated by adjusting production costs as recorded in the interim condensed consolidated statements of income for byproduct metal revenues, unsold concentrate inventory production costs, smelting, refining and marketing charges and other adjustments, and then dividing by the number of ounces of gold produced. Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a coproduct basis is calculated in the same manner as total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a byproduct basis except that no adjustment for byproduct metal revenues is made. The calculation of total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a coproduct basis does not reflect a reduction in production costs or smelting, refining and marketing charges associated with the production and sale of byproduct metals. The Company believes that these generally accepted industry measures provide a realistic indication of operating performance and provide useful comparison points between periods. Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced is intended to provide information about the cash generating capabilities of the Company's mining operations. Management also uses these measures to monitor the performance of the Company's mining operations. As market prices for gold are quoted on a per ounce basis, using the total cash costs per ounce of gold produced on a byproduct basis measure allows management to assess a mine's cash generating capabilities at various gold prices. Management is aware that these per ounce measures of performance can be affected by fluctuations in exchange rates and, in the case of total cash costs of gold produced on a byproduct basis, byproduct metal prices. Management compensates for these inherent limitations by using these measures in conjunction with minesite costs per tonne as well as other data prepared in accordance with IFRS. Management also performs sensitivity analyses in order to quantify the effects of fluctuating metal prices and exchange rates.

AGNICO EAGLE MINES LIMITED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (thousands of United States dollars, except share amounts, IFRS basis) (Unaudited)









As at

March 31,

As at

December 31,

2016

2015











ASSETS









Current assets:











Cash and cash equivalents $ 162,746

$ 124,150

Short-term investments

5,209



7,444

Restricted cash

675



685

Trade receivables

5,641



7,714

Inventories

435,447



461,976

Income taxes recoverable

4,878



817

Available-for-sale securities

66,350



31,863

Fair value of derivative financial instruments

4,520



87

Other current assets

186,850



194,689 Total current assets

872,316



829,425 Non-current assets:











Restricted cash

791



741

Goodwill

696,809



696,809

Property, plant and mine development

5,069,152



5,088,967

Other assets

77,496



67,238 Total assets $ 6,716,564

$ 6,683,180 LIABILITIES AND EQUITY









Current liabilities:











Accounts payable and accrued liabilities $ 202,158

$ 243,786

Reclamation provision

6,795



6,245

Interest payable

22,107



14,526

Income taxes payable

5,189



14,852

Finance lease obligations

8,567



9,589

Current portion of long-term debt

15,419



14,451

Fair value of derivative financial instruments

1,709



8,073 Total current liabilities

261,944



311,522 Non-current liabilities:











Long-term debt

1,064,750



1,118,187

Reclamation provision

311,069



276,299

Deferred income and mining tax liabilities

789,437



802,114

Other liabilities

34,250



34,038 Total liabilities

2,461,450



2,542,160 EQUITY











Common shares:













Outstanding - 221,281,167common shares issued, less 802,915













shares held in trust

4,799,138



4,707,940

Stock options

203,582



216,232

Contributed surplus

37,254



37,254

Deficit

(813,517)



(823,734)

Accumulated other comprehensive income

28,657



3,328 Total equity

4,255,114



4,141,020 Total liabilities and equity $ 6,716,564

$ 6,683,180

AGNICO EAGLE MINES LIMITED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF INCOME (thousands of United States dollars, except per share amounts, IFRS basis) (Unaudited)



Three Months Ended

March 31,

2016

2015







REVENUES





Revenues from mining operations $ 490,531

$ 483,596







COSTS, EXPENSES AND OTHER INCOME





Production (i) 243,973

247,280 Exploration and corporate development 28,385

16,651 Amortization of property, plant and mine development 145,631

135,897 General and administrative 24,823

25,221 Impairment loss on available-for-sale securities -

685 Finance costs 17,801

19,712 (Gain) loss on derivative financial instruments (9,621)

8,576 Gain on sale of available-for-sale securities (119)

(21,049) Environmental remediation 5,093

429 Foreign currency translation loss (gain) 6,770

(11,690) Other expenses 598

5,171 Income before income and mining taxes 27,197

56,713 Income and mining taxes (recovery) expense (591)

27,970 Net income for the period $ 27,788

$ 28,743







Net income per share - basic $ 0.13

$ 0.13 Net income per share - diluted $ 0.13

$ 0.13







Weighted average number of common shares outstanding (in thousands):





Basic 219,681

214,566 Diluted 221,906

215,692

















Note:





(i) Exclusive of amortization, which is shown separately.

AGNICO EAGLE MINES LIMITED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS (thousands of United States dollars, IFRS basis) (Unaudited)





Three Months Ended

March 31,

2016

2015











OPERATING ACTIVITIES









Net income for the period $ 27,788

$ 28,743 Add (deduct) items not affecting cash:











Amortization of property, plant and mine development

145,631



135,897

Deferred income and mining taxes

(16,986)



19,300

Gain on sale of available-for-sale securities

(119)



(21,049)

Stock-based compensation

9,786



11,718

Impairment loss on available-for-sale securities

-



685

Foreign currency translation loss (gain)

6,770



(11,690)

Other

(4,159)



13,536 Adjustment for settlement of reclamation provision

(1,232)



(302) Changes in non-cash working capital balances:











Trade receivables

2,073



(1,484)

Income taxes

(13,724)



(24,063)

Inventories

24,611



10,412

Other current assets

4,020



(4,837)

Accounts payable and accrued liabilities

(46,336)



(20,582)

Interest payable

7,581



7,171 Cash provided by operating activities

145,704



143,455











INVESTING ACTIVITIES









Additions to property, plant and mine development

(100,694)



(82,887) Acquisitions, net of cash and cash equivalents acquired

-



(7,000) Net sales (purchases) of short-term investments

2,235



(101) Net proceeds from sale of available-for-sale securities and other investments

299



37,668 Purchase of available-for-sale securities and other investments

(9,445)



(5,275) Decrease in restricted cash

10



3,703 Cash used in investing activities

(107,595)



(53,892)











FINANCING ACTIVITIES









Dividends paid

(14,846)



(14,775) Repayment of finance lease obligations

(2,514)



(8,405) Proceeds from long-term debt

75,000



- Repayment of long-term debt

(130,000)



(100,000) Repurchase of common shares for stock-based compensation plans

(14,895)



(10,642) Proceeds on exercise of stock options

64,424



8,223 Common shares issued

21,243



2,417 Cash used in financing activities

(1,588)



(123,182) Effect of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents

2,075



(5,912) Net increase (decrease) in cash and cash equivalents during the period

38,596



(39,531) Cash and cash equivalents, beginning of period

124,150



177,537 Cash and cash equivalents, end of period $ 162,746

$ 138,006











SUPPLEMENTAL CASH FLOW INFORMATION









Interest paid $ 8,880

$ 11,081











Income and mining taxes paid $ 53,317

$ 37,947

AGNICO EAGLE MINES LIMITED RECONCILIATION OF NON-GAAP FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE MEASURES (thousands of United States dollars, except where noted) (Unaudited)











Total Production Costs by Mine











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended

March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 (thousands of United States dollars)









LaRonde mine $ 45,854

$ 45,865 Lapa mine

12,784



13,985 Goldex mine

15,732



14,866 Meadowbank mine

52,210



57,096 Canadian Malartic mine(i)

40,814



41,186 Kittila mine

36,027



31,999 Pinos Altos mine

23,856



24,212 Creston Mascota deposit at Pinos Altos

5,781



5,606 La India mine

10,915



12,465 Production costs per the interim condensed consolidated statements of income $ 243,973

$ 247,280











Reconciliation of Production Costs to Total Cash Costs per Ounce of Gold Produced(ii)by Mine and Reconciliation of Production Costs to Minesite Costs per Tonne(iii)by Mine











LaRonde Mine - Total Cash Costs per Ounce of Gold Produced(ii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 45,854

$ 45,865 Adjustments:











Inventory and other adjustments(iv)

4,619



6,678 Cash operating costs (co-product basis) $ 50,473

$ 52,543

By-product metal revenues

(10,646)



(11,134) Cash operating costs (by-product basis) $ 39,827

$ 41,409 Gold production (ounces)

75,337



58,893 Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced ($ per ounce)(ii):











Co-product basis $ 670

$ 892

By-product basis $ 529

$ 703











LaRonde Mine - Minesite Costs per Tonne(iii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 45,854

$ 45,865 Inventory and other adjustments(v)

(2,357)



866 Minesite operating costs $ 43,497

$ 46,731 Minesite operating costs (thousands of C$) C$ 59,228

C$ 57,789 Tonnes of ore milled (thousands of tonnes)

577



558 Minesite costs per tonne (C$)(iii) C$ 103

C$ 104











Lapa Mine - Total Cash Costs per Ounce of Gold Produced(ii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 12,784

$ 13,985 Adjustments:











Inventory and other adjustments(iv)

1,727



749 Cash operating costs (co-product basis) $ 14,511

$ 14,734

By-product metal revenues

(13)



(17) Cash operating costs (by-product basis) $ 14,498

$ 14,717 Gold production (ounces)

21,709



25,920 Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced ($ per ounce)(ii):











Co-product basis $ 668

$ 568

By-product basis $ 668

$ 568











Lapa Mine - Minesite Costs per Tonne(iii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 12,784

$ 13,985 Inventory and other adjustments(v)

1,559



548 Minesite operating costs $ 14,343

$ 14,533 Minesite operating costs (thousands of C$) C$ 19,481

C$ 18,077 Tonnes of ore milled (thousands of tonnes)

161



152 Minesite costs per tonne (C$)(iii) C$ 121

C$ 119











Goldex Mine - Total Cash Costs per Ounce of Gold Produced(ii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 15,732

$ 14,866 Adjustments:











Inventory and other adjustments(iv)

624



973 Cash operating costs (co-product basis) $ 16,356

$ 15,839

By-product metal revenues

(6)



(7) Cash operating costs (by-product basis) $ 16,350

$ 15,832 Gold production (ounces)

32,340



29,250 Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced ($ per ounce)(ii):











Co-product basis $ 506

$ 542

By-product basis $ 506

$ 541



































Goldex Mine - Minesite Costs per Tonne(iii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 15,732

$ 14,866 Inventory and other adjustments(v)

351



761 Minesite operating costs $ 16,083

$ 15,627 Minesite operating costs (thousands of C$) C$ 21,706

C$ 19,317 Tonnes of ore milled (thousands of tonnes)

636



566 Minesite costs per tonne (C$)(iii) C$ 34

C$ 34











Meadowbank Mine - Total Cash Costs per Ounce of Gold Produced(ii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 52,210

$ 57,096 Adjustments:











Inventory and other adjustments(iv)

5,446



2,541 Cash operating costs (co-product basis) $ 57,656

$ 59,637

By-product metal revenues

(659)



(1,689) Cash operating costs (by-product basis) $ 56,997

$ 57,948 Gold production (ounces)

72,311



88,523 Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced ($ per ounce)(ii):











Co-product basis $ 797

$ 674

By-product basis $ 788

$ 655











Meadowbank Mine - Minesite Costs per Tonne(iii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 52,210

$ 57,096 Inventory and other adjustments(v)

2,758



1,694 Minesite operating costs $ 54,968

$ 58,790 Minesite operating costs (thousands of C$) C$ 73,058

C$ 70,627 Tonnes of ore milled (thousands of tonnes)

946



990 Minesite costs per tonne (C$)(iii) C$ 77

C$ 71











Canadian Malartic Mine - Total Cash Costs per Ounce of Gold Produced(i)(ii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 40,814

$ 41,186 Adjustments:











Inventory and other adjustments(iv)

1,309



2,851 Cash operating costs (co-product basis) $ 42,123

$ 44,037

By-product metal revenues

(1,095)



(1,142) Cash operating costs (by-product basis) $ 41,028

$ 42,895 Gold production (ounces)

73,613



67,893 Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced ($ per ounce)(ii):











Co-product basis $ 572

$ 649

By-product basis $ 557

$ 632











Canadian Malartic Mine - Minesite Costs per Tonne(i)(iii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 40,814

$ 41,186 Inventory and other adjustments(v)

1,076



2,605 Minesite operating costs $ 41,890

$ 43,791 Minesite operating costs (thousands of C$) C$ 57,545

C$ 54,320 Tonnes of ore milled (thousands of tonnes)

2,380



2,339 Minesite costs per tonne (C$)(iii) C$ 24

C$ 23











Kittila Mine - Total Cash Costs per Ounce of Gold Produced(ii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 36,027

$ 31,999 Adjustments:











Inventory and other adjustments(iv)

(1,024)



(1,543) Cash operating costs (co-product basis) $ 35,003

$ 30,456

By-product metal revenues

(47)



(35) Cash operating costs (by-product basis) $ 34,956

$ 30,421 Gold production (ounces)

48,127



44,654 Total cash costs per ounce of gold produced ($ per ounce)(ii):











Co-product basis $ 727

$ 682

By-product basis $ 726

$ 681











Kittila Mine - Minesite Costs per Tonne(iii)











Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended (thousands of United States dollars, except as noted) March 31, 2016

March 31, 2015 Production costs $ 36,027

$ 31,999 Inventory and other adjustments(v)

(1,19
SEGUIN, Texas, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Alamo Group Inc. (NYSE: ALG) today announced that it will release financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2016 after the market closes on Wednesday, May 4, 2016. The Company will host a conference call to discuss the results on Thursday, May 5, 2016 at 4:00 p.m. ET.

Individuals wishing to participate in the conference call should dial 800-499-4035 (domestic) or 416-204-9269 (internationally). For interested individuals unable to join the call, a replay will be available until Thursday, May 12, 2016 by dialing 888-203-1112 (domestic) or 719-457-0820 (internationally), passcode 9698455.

The live broadcast of Alamo Group Inc.'s quarterly conference call will be available online at the Company's website, www.alamo-group.com (under "Investor Relations/Events & Presentations") on Thursday, May 5, 2016, beginning at 4:00 p.m. ET. The online replay will follow shortly after the call ends and will be archived on the Company's website for 60 days.

About Alamo Group

Alamo Group is a leader in the design, manufacture, distribution and service of high quality equipment for infrastructure maintenance, agriculture and other applications. Our products include truck and tractor mounted mowing and other vegetation maintenance equipment, street sweepers, snow removal equipment, excavators, vacuum trucks, other industrial equipment, agricultural implements and related after-market parts and services. The Company, founded in 1969, has approximately 3,100 employees and operates 24 plants in North America, Europe, Australia and Brazil as of March 31, 2016. The corporate offices of Alamo Group Inc. are located in Seguin, Texas and the headquarters for the Company's European operations are located in Salford Priors, England.

This release contains forward-looking statements that are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which may cause the Company's actual results in future periods to differ materially from forecasted results. Among those factors which could cause actual results to differ materially are the following: market demand, competition, weather, seasonality, currency-related issues, and other risk factors listed from time to time in the Company's SEC reports. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update the information contained herein, which speaks only as of this date.

SOURCE Alamo Group Inc.

Related Links

http://www.alamo-group.com


OAKVILLE, ON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp. ("APUC") (TSX: AQN) today announced plans to release 2016 first quarter financial results on Thursday, May 12, 2016 after market close. APUC will hold an earnings conference call at 10:00 a.m. eastern time on Friday, May 13, 2016, hosted by Chief Executive Officer, Ian Robertson and Chief Financial Officer, David Bronicheski.

Conference call details are as follows:

Date: Friday, May 13, 2016

Start Time: 10:00 a.m. eastern time

Phone Number: Toll free within North America: 1-888-243-4451 or International: 1-412-542-4135

Conference Access: please ask to join the Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp. conference call

Presentation Access: http://services.choruscall.com/links/aqn160513

For those unable to attend the live call, a digital recording will be available for replay two hours after the call by dialing 1-855-669-9658 or 1-412-317-0088, access code 10084758 from Friday, May 13, 2016 until May 27, 2016.

About Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp.

APUC is a $5 billion North American diversified generation, transmission and distribution utility. The distribution business group provides rate regulated water, electricity and natural gas utility services to over 560,000 customers in the United States. The generation business group owns a portfolio of North American based contracted wind, solar, hydroelectric and natural gas powered generating facilities representing more than 1,100 MW of installed capacity. The transmission business group invests in rate regulated electric transmission and natural gas pipeline systems in the United States and Canada. APUC delivers continuing growth through an expanding pipeline of renewable energy development projects, organic growth within its regulated distribution and transmission businesses, and the pursuit of accretive acquisitions. Common shares, preferred shares, and Instalment Receipts are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbols AQN, AQN.PR.A, AQN.PR.D, and AQN.IR.

Visit APUC at www.AlgonquinPowerandUtilities.com and follow us on Twitter @AQN_Utilities.

SOURCE Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp.

Related Links

http://www.algonquinpower.com


DETROIT, April 14, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Ally Financial today announced the opening of its new office space located at 500 Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit. The building, named Ally Detroit Center, will be occupied by more than 1,500 Ally employees and third party contractors on 13 floors. The new space will unite Ally's southeast Michigan-based employees in one modern and collaborative work environment that reflects the city of Detroit. Each floor in Ally Detroit Center was designed in the style of a distinct neighborhood, with furniture, fixtures and art installations that reflect the style of each area of the city.

PDF - http://origin-qps.onstreammedia.com/origin/multivu_archive/ENR/355330-ally-adc-fact-sheet.pdf

"Ally Detroit Center is a unique and creative space that was designed to pay homage to our long history in Detroit and inspire the collaboration and innovation that will shape our future as a part of this vibrant city," said Jeffrey Brown, Ally chief executive officer. "We are excited about the evolution of the city, thanks in large part to the efforts of Mayor Mike Duggan and Dan Gilbert. Detroit has become one of America's most vibrant cities with a strong business district, creative and innovative talent base, and a strong connection to culture and community. Ally is pleased to be a part of this city and its revitalization."

Ally's CEO Jeffrey Brown, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, Bedrock Detroit's CEO Jim Ketai and Detroit Water Ice Factory founder and author Mitch Albom joined together to officially cut the ribbon on Ally Detroit Center and welcome Ally to its new Detroit headquarters. During the event, the names and corresponding neighborhoods of each of the 13 floors were unveiled: Foxtown, Rivertown, Greektown, Lafayette Park, Corktown, Downtown, Cultural Center, Mexicantown, Indian Village, New Center, Belle Isle, Eastern Market and Woodbridge. The design concept was developed by Detroit-based design firm SmithGroup JJR.

Giving Back: Ally's 313 Pledge

To further celebrate Ally's commitment to Detroit, the company also announced a community promotion with local business Detroit Water Ice Factory called "The 313 Pledge". Through the pledge, Ally will donate $3.13 for every Detroit Water Ice sold through April 30. Proceeds will go to S.A.Y. Detroit, a nonprofit organization that aims to improve the lives of Detroit's neediest citizens by providing shelter, food, medical care, volunteer efforts and education.

"We are pleased to welcome Ally and its employees to the Downtown district and excited to launch The 313 Pledge together to invite the community to join our efforts to give back to the city we all call home," said Mitch Albom, founder of Detroit Water Ice Factory and celebrated author of Tuesdays with Morrie.

About Ally Detroit Center

Built in 1993, Ally Detroit Center is known as Detroit and Michigan's tallest office building. The skyscraper, designed by noted architects John Burgee and Philip Johnson, is a recognizable fixture in the Detroit skyline with its Flemish-inspired neo-gothic spires.

Approximately 350 Ally employees are moving into Ally Detroit Center this month. Ally expects the majority of the 1,500 team members (employees and contract professionals) to be moved in by November 2016.

Ally's office space is designed around a contemporary workplace ideology, promoting collaboration, adaptive mobility and informal social interaction. Approximately 18 percent of usable work area on each floor is dedicated to informal collaboration space, including a "playground" space where each of the distinct Detroit neighborhoods comes to life in murals and furnishings. Adjustable Herman Miller workstations are used throughout the office, enabling employees to sit or stand throughout the day and contributing to a healthier workplace.

About Ally Financial Inc.

Ally Financial Inc. (NYSE: ALLY) is a leading U.S. financial services company. Ally's automotive services business offers a full spectrum of financial products and services, including new and used vehicle inventory and consumer financing, leasing, vehicle service contracts, commercial loans and vehicle remarketing services, as well as a variety of insurance offerings, including inventory insurance, insurance consultative services for dealers and other ancillary products. Ally Bank, the company's direct banking subsidiary and member FDIC, offers an array of deposit products, including certificates of deposit, savings accounts, money market accounts, IRA deposit products and interest checking. Ally's Corporate Finance unit provides financing to middle-market companies across a broad range of industries.

With approximately $158.6 billion in assets as of Dec. 31, 2015, Ally operates as a financial holding company. For more information, visit the Ally media site at http://media.ally.com or follow Ally on Twitter: @Ally.

Contacts:

Gina Proia

[email protected]

646-781-2692

Sari Martin

[email protected]

646-781-2539

347-882-1178 mobile

SOURCE Ally Financial

Related Links

http://media.ally.com


BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 7, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

In the wake of renewed fighting in the Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh and other territories occupied by Armenia, Azerbaijan has launched a White House petition, calling for the "Obama Administration to establish justice and prevent a great catastrophe" (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/establish-justice-and-prevent-great-catastrophe).

The petition, submitted by the President of the Association for Civil Society Development in Azerbaijan Elkhan Suleymanov, notes that Resolution 2085 passed in January by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) "stresses the fact of the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and other territories of Azerbaijan by the Armenian state" and "requests the immediate withdrawal of Armenia's armed forces from the occupied region."

The petition further states that the OSCE Minsk Group, the mediators consisting of the United States, Russia and France, "has made no progress toward the liberation of our occupied territories," and urges "the Administration to support PACE Resolution 2085, to assist in the liberation of the Azerbaijani territories occupied by Armenia and the prevention of a humanitarian catastrophe in the region."

The petition warns that the "current state of the Sarsang reservoir, located in the occupied Azerbaijani territories, could result in a humanitarian disaster." The unmaintained dam has created an artificial environmental crisis to the once-productive agricultural regions of Azerbaijan that lie downstream. In its January resolution, PACE accused Armenia of "environmental aggression" and "deliberately depriving" Azerbaijanis of water flowing from the Sarsang reservoir.

The Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding provinces were occupied by Armenia during the post-Soviet power vacuum, resulting in about 30,000 deaths and nearly one million refugees and internally displaced people. In addition to PACE, many other international bodies, including the United Nations, European Parliament and the OSCE have called for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Armenian troops from the territories.

The long-simmering hostilities escalated dramatically over the weekend, with artillery strikes and helicopter sorties leaving dozens dead. The fighting came fresh on the heels of President Barack Obama's nuclear summit in Washington, in which he praised Azerbaijan as a "critical partner" for its efforts to reduce or eliminate nuclear weapons in the world.

In order to receive a response from the White House, the petition requires 100,000 signatures in 30 days.

SOURCE Azerbaijan Monitor
ITASCA, Ill., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (NYSE: AJG) today reported its financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2016. A printer-friendly format of this earnings release, "Supplemental Quarterly Data" and "CFO Commentary," which includes certain estimates relating to 2016 results, are available at ajg.com/IR. For a description of the non-GAAP measures used to report financial results in this earnings release and information regarding their most comparable GAAP measures, please see "Information Regarding Non-GAAP Measures" beginning on page 7.

"We had an outstanding start to the year, building off last year's momentum. Our global team is energized and well positioned for 2016," said J. Patrick Gallagher, Jr., Chairman, President and CEO. "In the first quarter, our combined Brokerage and Risk Management segments posted 11% growth in adjusted revenues, of which 4.8% was total organic growth, adjusted EBITDAC increased 15% and our adjusted EBITDAC margin improved 91 basis points. Total company adjusted net earnings per share grew 26%."

Our Brokerage segment had an excellent quarter. Adjusted total revenues increased 12%, of which 4.8% was total organic growth, adjusted EBITDAC increased 16% and we improved our adjusted EBITDAC margin 79 basis points.

Our Risk Management segment had a strong quarter. Total organic revenues increased 4.7%, adjusted EBITDAC increased 9%, we improved our adjusted EBITDAC margin 103 basis points and we exceeded our 17% EBITDAC margin target.

Our clean energy investments had a solid quarter. We expect 2016 net after tax earnings from our clean energy investments to increase by about 15% over 2015.

First quarter integration charges were $0.06 per share, in line with our forecast. We continue to expect full year 2016 integration charges to be less than half of the 2015 level.

per share, in line with our forecast. We continue to expect full year 2016 integration charges to be less than half of the 2015 level. In our historically smallest quarter of activity, we completed 8 acquisitions with annualized revenues of $30 million with a weighted average purchase price of 7.0x EBITDAC. Further, we repurchased shares in the quarter to fully offset shares issued for tax-free exchange mergers in the first quarter.

"The current domestic rate environment is rational and we are seeing some early signs of cycle-bottoming in select geographies outside the U.S. We believe the P&C insurance marketplace is favorable for our clients and is allowing our producers to demonstrate our expertise and value-added service. Integration of our larger deals remains on track and should be largely complete by year end and our bolt-on merger strategy continues to add value for shareholders. Lastly, our culture is thriving, demonstrated by being selected as a World's Most Ethical Company for the fifth year in a row by the Ethisphere Institute. We are hitting on all cylinders around the world and successfully executing our strategies."

(1 of 11)

The following table provides information that management believes is helpful when comparing first quarter 2016 revenues, EBITDAC and diluted net earnings per share with the same period in 2015. In addition, this table provides reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures for adjusted revenues, adjusted EBITDAC and adjusted diluted net earnings per share. A reconciliation of EBITDAC is provided on page 9.

Quarter Ended March 31

















Diluted Net







Revenues



EBITDAC



Earnings Per Share

Segment

1st Q 16 1st Q 15 Chg

1st Q 16 1st Q 15 Chg

1st Q 16 1st Q 15



































(in millions)



(in millions)





































Brokerage, as adjusted

$ 823.3 $ 732.5 12%

$ 191.2 $ 164.3 16%

$ 0.40 $ 0.36



Gains on book sales

2.2 0.9



2.2 0.9



0.01 -



Acquisition integration

- -



(14.2) (20.8)



(0.06) (0.08)



Workforce & lease termination

- -



(1.6) (8.5)



- (0.03)



Acquisition related adjustments

- -



(0.8) -



- (0.03)



Levelized foreign currency translation

- 17.7



- 2.6



- -





























Brokerage, as reported

825.5 751.1



176.8 138.5



0.35 0.22





























Risk Management, as adjusted

179.3 174.7 3%

31.5 28.9 9%

0.09 0.09



Workforce & lease termination

- -



(0.5) (0.2)



(0.01) -



Levelized foreign currency translation

- 2.5



- 0.9



- -





























Risk Management, as reported

179.3 177.2



31.0 29.6



0.08 0.09





























Total Brokerage & Risk

























Management, as reported

$ 1,004.8 $ 928.3



$ 207.8 $ 168.1



0.43 0.31





























Corporate, as adjusted

















(0.15) (0.18)



Impact of 2015 litigation settlement

















(0.02) -

Corporate, as reported

















(0.17) (0.18)





























Total Company, as reported

















$ 0.26 $ 0.13





























Total Brokerage & Risk

























Management, as adjusted

$ 1,002.6 $ 907.2 11%

$ 222.7 $ 193.2 15%

$ 0.49 $ 0.45 9%



























Total Company, as adjusted

















$ 0.34 $ 0.27 26%

(2 of 11)

Brokerage Segment First Quarter Highlights - The following tables provide information that management believes is helpful when comparing certain 2016 financial information with the same period in 2015 (in millions).

Organic Revenues (non-GAAP)

1st Q 16

1st Q 15









Base Commissions and Fees







Commissions as reported

$ 566.0

$ 519.7 Fees as reported

159.1

146.1 Less commissions and fees from acquisitions

(50.4)

- Less non-owned portion of consolidated entities

(11.9)

(8.4) Less disposed of operations

-

(0.3) Levelized foreign currency translation

-

(16.4)









Organic base commissions and fees

$ 662.8

$ 640.7









Organic change in base commissions and fees

3.5%













Supplemental Commissions







Supplemental commissions as reported

$ 32.9

$ 26.9 Less supplemental commissions from acquisitions

(1.0)

- Levelized foreign currency translation

-

(0.7)









Organic supplemental commissions

$ 31.9

$ 26.2









Organic change in supplemental commissions

21.8%













Contingent Commissions







Contingent commissions as reported

$ 55.2

$ 44.5 Less contingent commissions from acquisitions

(4.5)

- Levelized foreign currency translation

-

(0.3)









Organic contingent commissions

$ 50.7

$ 44.2









Organic change in contingent commissions

14.7%













Total organic change

4.8%





Acquisition Activity





1st Q 16

1st Q 15









Number of acquisitions closed *

8

11 Estimated annualized revenues acquired (in millions)

$ 30.0

$ 33.6





* Gallagher repurchased 527,000 shares in the first quarter of 2016 to fully offset shares issued for tax-free exchange mergers in the quarter. Gallagher also repurchased 237,000 shares in the first quarter of 2016 in contemplation of closing tax-free exchange mergers that will occur in the second quarter of 2016.

(3 of 11)

Brokerage Segment First Quarter Highlights (continued)

Adjusted Compensation Expense and Ratio (non-GAAP)

1st Q 16

1st Q 15









Reported amounts

$ 492.9

$ 460.3









Acquisition integration (1)

(4.6)

(11.6) Workforce and lease termination related charges

(1.3)

(8.5) Acquisition related adjustments

(0.8)

- Levelized foreign currency translation

-

(11.1)









Adjusted amounts

$ 486.2

$ 429.1









Adjusted ratios using adjusted revenues on page 2 * 59.1%

58.6%





* Adjusted first quarter compensation ratio was 0.5 pts higher compared to the same period in 2015. This ratio was primarily impacted by increased employee benefits of 0.3 pts. All other items were essentially consistent with the prior year.

Adjusted Operating Expense and Ratio (non-GAAP)

1st Q 16

1st Q 15









Reported amounts

$ 155.8

$ 152.3









Acquisition integration (1)

(9.6)

(9.2) Workforce and lease termination related charges

(0.3)

- Levelized foreign currency translation

-

(4.0)









Adjusted amounts

$ 145.9

$ 139.1









Adjusted ratios using adjusted revenues on page 2 * 17.7%

19.0%





* Adjusted first quarter operating expense ratio was 1.3 pts lower than the same period in 2015. This ratio was primarily impacted by savings in technology expenses of 0.7 pts and business insurance of 0.4 pts.

Adjusted EBITDAC (non-GAAP)

1st Q 16

1st Q 15









Total EBITDAC - see page 9 for computation

$ 176.8

$ 138.5









Gains from books of business sales

(2.2)

(0.9) Acquisition integration (1)

14.2

20.8 Acquisition related adjustments

0.8

- Workforce and lease termination related charges

1.6

8.5 Levelized foreign currency translation

-

(2.6)









Adjusted EBITDAC

$ 191.2

$ 164.3









Adjusted EBITDAC change

16.4%

52.3%









Adjusted EBITDAC margin

23.2%

22.4%





(1) Acquisition integration costs consist mostly of IT system conversion costs, professional fees, branding and compensation related to acquisitions.

(4 of 11)

Risk Management Segment First Quarter Highlights - The following tables provide information that management believes is helpful when comparing certain 2016 financial information with the same period in 2015 (in millions):

Organic Revenues (non-GAAP)

1st Q 16

1st Q 15









Fees

$ 177.3

$ 173.8 International performance bonus fees

1.8

3.3









Fees as reported

179.1

177.1









Less fees from acquisitions

(1.7)

- Less client run-off

-

(5.1) Levelized foreign currency translation

-

(2.5)









Organic fees

$ 177.4

$ 169.5









Organic change in fees

4.7%





Adjusted Compensation Expense and Ratio (non-GAAP)

1st Q 16

1st Q 15









Reported amounts

$ 105.5

$ 106.9









Workforce and lease termination related charges

(0.5)

(0.2) Levelized foreign currency translation

-

(1.2)









Adjusted amounts

$ 105.0

$ 105.5









Adjusted ratios using adjusted revenues on page 2 * 58.6%

60.4%





* Adjusted first quarter compensation ratio was 1.8 pts lower than the same period in 2015. Excluding the impact of the products discussed below, the adjusted first quarter 2016 compensation expense ratio would have been 0.4 pts lower than the same period in 2015. All other items were essentially consistent with the prior year.

Adjusted Operating Expense and Ratio (non-GAAP)

1st Q 16

1st Q 15









Reported amounts

$ 42.8

$ 40.7









Levelized foreign currency translation

-

(0.4)









Adjusted amounts

$ 42.8

$ 40.3









Adjusted ratios using adjusted revenues on page 2 * 23.9%

23.1%





* Adjusted first quarter operating expense ratio was 0.8 pts higher than the same period in 2015. A number of products we offer are primarily outsourced, the cost of which only flows through operating expense. These revenues grew faster than our other revenues and accordingly, impacted the operating expense ratio by 0.9 pts in the quarter. Excluding the impact of these products, all other items were essentially consistent with the prior year.

Adjusted EBITDAC (non-GAAP)

1st Q 16

1st Q 15









Total EBITDAC - see page 9 for computation

$ 31.0

$ 29.6









Workforce and lease termination related charges

0.5

0.2 Levelized foreign currency translation

-

(0.9)









Adjusted EBITDAC

$ 31.5

$ 28.9









Adjusted EBITDAC change

9.0%

19.7%









Adjusted EBITDAC margin

17.6%

16.5%

(5 of 11)

Corporate Segment First Quarter Highlights - The following table provides information that management believes is helpful when comparing 2016 operating results for the Corporate segment with the same period in 2015 (in millions):









2016









2015







Pretax

Income

Net

Pretax

Income

Net



Earnings

Tax

Earnings

Earnings

Tax

Earnings



(Loss)

Benefit

(Loss)

(Loss)

Benefit

(Loss)

























1st Quarter























Interest and banking costs

$ (26.3)

$ 10.5

$ (15.8)

$ (26.3)

$ 10.5

$ (15.8) Clean energy related (1)

(33.9)

31.2

(2.7)

(23.3)

17.8

(5.5) Acquisition costs

(1.7)

0.3

(1.4)

(1.7)

0.2

(1.5) Corporate

(8.6)

2.3

(6.3)

(9.0)

2.1

(6.9)

























Adjusted 1st quarter

$ (70.5)

$ 44.3

(26.2)

$ (60.3)

$ 30.6

(29.7)

























Litigation settlement (2)









(3.7)









- Reported 1st quarter









$ (29.9)









$ (29.7)





(1) Pretax earnings for the first quarter are presented net of amounts attributable to noncontrolling interests of $6.9 million in 2016 and $6.6 million in 2015. (2) During the third quarter of 2015, Gallagher settled litigation against certain former U.K. executives and their advisors for a pretax gain of $31.0 million ($22.3 million net of costs and taxes). Incremental expenses that arose in connection with this matter will result in after-tax charges of up to $4.5 million per quarter through June 30, 2017.

Debt, interest and banking - At March 31, 2016, Gallagher had $2,125.0 million of borrowings from private placements, $305.0 million of short-term borrowings under its line of credit facility and $96.2 million outstanding under a two year revolving loan facility that provides funding for premium finance receivables, which are fully collateralized by the underlying premiums held by insurance carriers and as such are excluded from our debt covenant computations.

On April 8, 2016, Gallagher entered into an $800.0 million unsecured revolving credit facility, expiring in April 2021, with a group of fifteen financial institutions led by Bank of Montreal. At Gallagher's request, the facility can increase to $1.1 billion upon satisfaction of certain conditions. This facility replaces a $600.0 million unsecured revolving credit facility that was due to expire in 2018.

Clean energy - Forward looking information previously provided herein is now available in the "CFO Commentary", which is available at ajg.com/IR.

Acquisition costs - Consists mostly of external professional fees and other due diligence costs related to acquisitions.

Corporate - Consists of overhead allocations mostly related to corporate staff compensation.

Income Taxes

Gallagher allocates the provision for income taxes to its Brokerage and Risk Management segments using the local country statutory rates. Gallagher's consolidated effective tax rate for the quarters ended March 31, 2016 and 2015 was (3.9)% and (4.9)%, respectively, which was lower than the statutory rate due to the amount of IRC Section 45 tax credits earned.

At-the-market equity program - Gallagher has an at-the-market equity program under which up to $15.6 million of its common stock remaining in the program may be sold through Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC as sales agent. During first quarter 2016, Gallagher did not sell any shares of its common stock under the program.

Balance Sheet Reclassifications

In first quarter 2016, Gallagher adopted new accounting guidance related to the presentation of both debt issuance costs and income taxes in the consolidated balance sheet as of March 31, 2016. The new debt issuance costs guidance requires such costs to be presented in the balance sheet as a direct deduction from the associated debt liability. The new income tax guidance requires that deferred tax assets and liabilities be classified as noncurrent on the balance sheet rather than being separated into current and noncurrent components. The new guidance has been applied on a retrospective basis. Accordingly, Gallagher reclassified debt issuance costs of $3.3 million included in Other noncurrent assets to Corporate related borrowings - noncurrent in its consolidated balance sheet as of December 31, 2015. In addition, Gallagher reclassified the current deferred taxes to noncurrent in its consolidated balance sheet as of December 31, 2015, which increased Noncurrent deferred income taxes by $122.1 million and increased Other noncurrent liabilities by $4.6 million.

(6 of 11)

Webcast Conference Call

Gallagher will host a webcast conference call on Friday, April 29, 2016 at 9:00 a.m. ET/8:00 a.m. CT. To listen to this call, please go to ajg.com/IR. The call will be available for replay at such website for one week.

About Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.

Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., an international insurance brokerage and risk management services firm, is headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, has operations in 31 countries and offers client-service capabilities in more than 150 countries around the world through a network of correspondent brokers and consultants.

Cautionary Information

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this press release, the words "anticipates," "believes," "contemplates," "see," "should," "could," "will," "estimates," "expects," "intends," "plans" and variations thereof and similar expressions, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Examples of forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding (i) the amount of, and potential uses for, investment returns generated by Gallagher's clean energy investments; (ii) our corporate income tax rate; (iii) anticipated future results or performance of any segment or the Company as a whole; (iv) the premium rate environment; (v) the economic environment; and (vi) anticipated acquisition integration costs.

Gallagher's actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. Readers are therefore cautioned against relying on any of the forward-looking statements, which are neither statements of historical fact nor guarantees or assurances of future performance. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements include the following:

Risks and uncertainties related to Gallagher's clean energy investments, including uncertainties related to political and regulatory risks, such as potential actions by Congress or challenges by the IRS eliminating or reducing the availability of tax credits under IRC Section 45 retroactively and/or going forward; the ability to maintain and find co-investors; the potential for divergent business objectives by co-investors and other stakeholders; plant operational risks, including supply-chain risks; utilities' future use of, or demand for, coal; the market price of coal; the costs of moving a clean coal plant; intellectual property litigation risks; and environmental risks - all of which could impact (i) and (ii) above; and

Changes in worldwide and national economic conditions, changes in premium rates and in insurance markets generally, changes in the insurance brokerage industry's competitive landscape and the uncertainties and challenges inherent in the acquisition integration process - all of which could impact (iii) - (vi) above.

Please refer to Gallagher's filings with the SEC, including Item 1A, "Risk Factors," of its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015 for a more detailed discussion of these and other factors that could impact its forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statement made by Gallagher in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by applicable law, Gallagher does not undertake to update the information included herein or the corresponding earnings release posted on Gallagher's website.

Information Regarding Non-GAAP Measures

In addition to reporting financial results in accordance with GAAP, this press release provides information regarding EBITDAC, EBITDAC margin, adjusted EBITDAC, adjusted EBITDAC margin, diluted net earnings per share (as adjusted) for the Brokerage and Risk Management segments, adjusted revenues, adjusted compensation and operating expenses, adjusted compensation expense ratio, adjusted operating expense ratio and organic revenue measures for each operating segment. These measures are not in accordance with, or an alternative to, the GAAP information provided in this press release. Gallagher's management believes that these presentations provide useful information to management, analysts and investors regarding financial and business trends relating to Gallagher's results of operations and financial condition. Gallagher's industry peers may provide similar supplemental non-GAAP information with respect to one or more of these measures, although they may not use the same or comparable terminology and may not make identical adjustments. The non-GAAP information provided by Gallagher should be used in addition to, but not as a substitute for, the GAAP information provided. Certain reclassifications have been made to the prior year amounts reported in this press release in order to conform them to the current year presentation.

Adjusted presentation - Gallagher believes that the adjusted presentations of the current and prior year information, presented in this earnings release, provide stockholders and other interested persons with useful information regarding certain financial metrics of Gallagher that may assist such persons in analyzing Gallagher's operating results as they develop a future earnings outlook for Gallagher. The after-tax amounts related to the adjustments were computed using the normalized effective tax rate for each respective period.

(7 of 11)

Adjusted revenues and expenses - Gallagher defines these measures as revenues, compensation expense and operating expense, respectively, each adjusted to exclude net gains realized from sales of books of business, acquisition integration costs, claim portfolio transfer ramp up costs, client run-off/bankruptcy impact, workforce related charges, lease termination related charges, acquisition related adjustments and the impact of foreign currency translation, as applicable. Acquisition related adjustments include impairment charges, change in estimated acquisition earnout payables adjustments, impacts of acquisition valuation true-ups and acquisition related compensation charges. Integration costs include costs related to transactions not expected to occur on an ongoing basis in the future once we fully assimilate the applicable acquisition. These costs are typically associated with redundant workforce, extra lease space, duplicate services and external costs incurred to assimilate the acquisition with our IT related systems.

- Gallagher defines these measures as revenues, compensation expense and operating expense, respectively, each adjusted to exclude net gains realized from sales of books of business, acquisition integration costs, claim portfolio transfer ramp up costs, client run-off/bankruptcy impact, workforce related charges, lease termination related charges, acquisition related adjustments and the impact of foreign currency translation, as applicable. Acquisition related adjustments include impairment charges, change in estimated acquisition earnout payables adjustments, impacts of acquisition valuation true-ups and acquisition related compensation charges. Integration costs include costs related to transactions not expected to occur on an ongoing basis in the future once we fully assimilate the applicable acquisition. These costs are typically associated with redundant workforce, extra lease space, duplicate services and external costs incurred to assimilate the acquisition with our IT related systems. Adjusted ratios - Adjusted compensation expense ratio and adjusted operating expense ratio are defined as adjusted compensation expense and adjusted operating expense, respectively, each divided by adjusted revenues.

Earnings Measures - Gallagher believes that each of EBITDAC, EBITDAC margin, adjusted EBITDAC, adjusted EBITDAC margin and diluted net earnings per share (as adjusted) for the Brokerage and Risk Management segments, as defined below, provides a meaningful representation of its operating performance. Gallagher considers EBITDAC and EBITDAC margin as a way to measure financial performance on an ongoing basis. Adjusted EBITDAC, adjusted EBITDAC margin and diluted net earnings per share (as adjusted) for the Brokerage and Risk Management segments are presented to improve the comparability of our results between periods by eliminating the impact of the items that have a high degree of variability.

EBITDAC - Gallagher defines this measure as net earnings before interest, income taxes, depreciation, amortization and the change in estimated acquisition earnout payables.

- Gallagher defines this measure as net earnings before interest, income taxes, depreciation, amortization and the change in estimated acquisition earnout payables. EBITDAC margin - Gallagher defines this measure as EBITDAC divided by total revenues.

- Gallagher defines this measure as EBITDAC divided by total revenues. Adjusted EBITDAC - Gallagher defines this measure as EBITDAC adjusted to exclude net gains realized from sales of books of business, acquisition integration costs, client run-off/bankruptcy impact, workforce related charges, lease termination related charges, claim portfolio transfer ramp up costs, acquisition related adjustments and the period-over-period impact of foreign currency translation, as applicable.

- Gallagher defines this measure as EBITDAC adjusted to exclude net gains realized from sales of books of business, acquisition integration costs, client run-off/bankruptcy impact, workforce related charges, lease termination related charges, claim portfolio transfer ramp up costs, acquisition related adjustments and the period-over-period impact of foreign currency translation, as applicable. A djusted EBITDAC margin - Gallagher defines this measure as adjusted EBITDAC divided by total adjusted revenues (defined above).

- Gallagher defines this measure as adjusted EBITDAC divided by total adjusted revenues (defined above). Diluted net earnings per share (as adjusted) for the Brokerage and Risk Management segments - Gallagher defines this measure as net earnings adjusted to exclude the after-tax impact of net gains realized from sales of books of business, acquisition integration costs, client run-off/bankruptcy impact, claim portfolio transfer ramp up fees/costs, the impact of foreign currency translation, workforce related charges, lease termination related charges and acquisition related adjustments divided by diluted weighted average shares outstanding.

- Gallagher defines this measure as net earnings adjusted to exclude the after-tax impact of net gains realized from sales of books of business, acquisition integration costs, client run-off/bankruptcy impact, claim portfolio transfer ramp up fees/costs, the impact of foreign currency translation, workforce related charges, lease termination related charges and acquisition related adjustments divided by diluted weighted average shares outstanding. Organic Revenues - For the Brokerage segment, organic change in base commission and fee revenues excludes the first twelve months of net commission and fee revenues generated from acquisitions accounted for as purchases and the net commission and fee revenues related to operations disposed of in each year presented. These commissions and fees are excluded from organic revenues in order to help interested persons analyze the revenue growth associated with the operations that were a part of Gallagher in both the current and prior year. In addition, change in base commission and fee organic growth excludes the impact of supplemental commission and contingent commission revenues and the period-over-period impact of foreign currency translation. The amounts excluded with respect to foreign currency translation are calculated by applying current year foreign exchange rates to the same periods in the prior year. For the Risk Management segment, organic change in fee revenues excludes the first twelve months of fee revenues generated from acquisitions accounted for as purchases and the fee revenues related to operations disposed of in each year presented. In addition, change in organic growth excludes the impact of run-off of the New South Wales Workers' Compensation Scheme and other closed down operations and the period-over-period impact of foreign currency translation to improve the comparability of our results between periods by eliminating the impact of the items that have a high degree of variability or are due to the limited-time nature of these revenue sources.

These revenue items are excluded from organic revenues in order to determine a comparable measurement of revenue growth that is associated with the revenue sources that are expected to continue in the current year and beyond. Gallagher has historically viewed organic revenue growth as an important indicator when assessing and evaluating the performance of its Brokerage and Risk Management segments. Gallagher also believes that using this measure allows readers of our financial statements to measure, analyze and compare the growth from its Brokerage and Risk Management segments in a meaningful and consistent manner.

Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Information Presented to GAAP Measures - This press release includes tabular reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures, as follows: for EBITDAC (on page 9), for adjusted revenues, adjusted EBITDAC and adjusted diluted net earnings per share (on page 2), for organic revenue measures (on pages 3 and 5, respectively, for the Brokerage and Risk Management segments), for adjusted compensation and operating expenses and adjusted EBITDAC margin (on pages 4 and 5, respectively, for the Brokerage and Risk Management segments). Reported compensation and operating expense ratios can be found in the "Supplemental Quarterly Data" available at ajg.com/IR.

(8 of 11)

Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Reported Statement of Earnings and EBITDAC - 1st Qtr Ended March 31, (Unaudited - in millions except per share, percentage and workforce data)













1st Q Ended

1st Q Ended Brokerage Segment

Mar 31, 2016

Mar 31, 2015









Commissions

$ 566.0

$ 519.7 Fees

159.1

146.1 Supplemental commissions

32.9

26.9 Contingent commissions

55.2

44.5 Investment income and gains realized on books of business sales

12.3

13.9

Revenues

825.5

751.1









Compensation

492.9

460.3 Operating

155.8

152.3 Depreciation

14.0

12.9 Amortization

58.9

54.0 Change in estimated acquisition earnout payables

3.9

10.6

Expenses

725.5

690.1









Earnings before income taxes

100.0

61.0 Provision for income taxes

34.1

20.4









Net earnings

65.9

40.6 Net earnings attributable to noncontrolling interests

4.5

3.9









Net earnings attributable to controlling interests

$ 61.4

$ 36.7









EBITDAC







Net earnings

$ 65.9

$ 40.6 Provision for income taxes

34.1

20.4 Depreciation

14.0

12.9 Amortization

58.9

54.0 Change in estimated acquisition earnout payables

3.9

10.6









EBITDAC

$ 176.8

$ 138.5























1st Q Ended

1st Q Ended Risk Management Segment

Mar 31, 2016

Mar 31, 2015









Fees

$ 179.1

$ 177.1 Investment income

0.2

0.1

Revenues

179.3

177.2









Compensation

105.5

106.9 Operating

42.8

40.7 Depreciation

6.6

5.3 Amortization

0.4

0.7 Change in estimated acquisition earnout payables

-

-

Expenses

155.3

153.6









Earnings before income taxes

24.0

23.6 Provision for income taxes

9.0

8.7









Net earnings

15.0

14.9 Net earnings attributable to noncontrolling interests

-

-









Net earnings attributable to controlling interests

$ 15.0

$ 14.9









EBITDAC







Net earnings

$ 15.0

$ 14.9 Provision for income taxes

9.0

8.7 Depreciation

6.6

5.3 Amortization

0.4

0.7 Change in estimated acquisition earnout payables

-

-









EBITDAC

$ 31.0

$ 29.6























1st Q Ended

1st Q Ended Corporate Segment

Mar 31, 2016

Mar 31, 2015









Revenues from consolidated clean coal facilities

$ 282.0

$ 289.5 Royalty income from clean coal licenses

13.1

14.7 Loss from unconsolidated clean coal facilities

(0.3)

(0.3) Other net revenues

0.8

(0.9)

Revenues

295.6

303.0









Cost of revenues from consolidated clean coal facilities

304.4

309.3 Compensation

23.7

8.0 Operating

5.9

10.5 Interest

25.8

25.6 Depreciation

4.1

3.3

Expenses

363.9

356.7









Loss before income taxes

(68.3)

(53.7) Benefit for income taxes

(45.3)

(30.6)









Net loss

(23.0)

(23.1) Net earnings attributable to noncontrolling interests

6.9

6.6









Net loss attributable to controlling interests

$ (29.9)

$ (29.7)









EBITDAC







Net loss

$ (23.0)

$ (23.1) Benefit for income taxes

(45.3)

(30.6) Interest

25.8

25.6 Depreciation

4.1

3.3









EBITDAC

$ (38.4)

$ (24.8)



See "Information Regarding Non-GAAP Measures" on page 7 of 11 and other information to first quarter 2016 earnings release on page 11 of 11.

(9 of 11)

Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Reported Statement of Earnings and EBITDAC - 1st Qtr Ended March 31, (Unaudited - in millions except share and per share data)

















1st Q Ended

1st Q Ended Total Company

Mar 31, 2016

Mar 31, 2015











Commissions

$ 566.0

$ 519.7 Fees

338.2

323.2 Supplemental commissions

32.9

26.9 Contingent commissions

55.2

44.5 Investment income and gains realized on books of business sales

12.5

14.0 Revenues from clean coal activities

294.8

303.9 Other net revenues - Corporate

0.8

(0.9)

Revenues

1,300.4

1,231.3











Compensation

622.1

575.2 Operating

204.5

203.5 Cost of revenues from clean coal activities

304.4

309.3 Interest

25.8

25.6 Depreciation

24.7

21.5 Amortization

59.3

54.7 Change in estimated acquisition earnout payables

3.9

10.6

Expenses

1,244.7

1,200.4











Earnings before income taxes

55.7

30.9 Benefit for income taxes

(2.2)

(1.5)











Net earnings

57.9

32.4 Net earnings attributable to noncontrolling interests

11.4

10.5











Net earnings attributable to controlling interests

$ 46.5

$ 21.9











Diluted net earnings per share

$ 0.26

$ 0.13











Dividends declared per share

$ 0.38

$ 0.37











EBITDAC







Net earnings

$ 57.9

$ 32.4 Benefit for income taxes

(2.2)

(1.5) Interest

25.8

25.6 Depreciation

24.7

21.5 Amortization

59.3

54.7 Change in estimated acquisition earnout payables

3.9

10.6











EBITDAC

$ 169.4

$ 143.3



































Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Consolidated Balance Sheet (Unaudited - in millions except per share data)

















Mar 31, 2016

Dec 31, 2015











Cash and cash equivalents

$ 425.4

$ 480.4 Restricted cash

1,303.5

1,412.1 Premiums and fees receivable

1,706.8

1,734.0 Other current assets

503.8

587.2













Total current assets

3,939.5

4,213.7











Fixed assets - net

218.2

202.7 Deferred income taxes (includes tax credit carryforwards of $372.9 in 2016 and $341.6 in 2015)

660.6

643.5 Other noncurrent assets

528.0

488.9 Goodwill - net

3,693.4

3,662.9 Amortizable intangible assets - net

1,672.9

1,698.8













Total assets

$ 10,712.6

$ 10,910.5











Premiums payable to insurance and reinsurance companies

$ 2,722.9

$ 2,877.1 Accrued compensation and other accrued liabilities

728.8

812.7 Unearned fees

70.5

61.3 Other current liabilities

49.0

54.0 Premium financing borrowings

96.2

137.0 Corporate related borrowings - current

355.0

245.0













Total current liabilities

4,022.4

4,187.1











Corporate related borrowings - noncurrent

2,071.8

2,071.7 Other noncurrent liabilities

966.1

963.5













Total liabilities

7,060.3

7,222.3











Stockholders' equity:







Common stock - issued and outstanding

177.1

176.9 Capital in excess of par value

3,202.0

3,209.4 Retained earnings

753.4

774.5 Accumulated other comprehensive loss

(535.4)

(522.5)











Total controlling interests stockholders' equity

3,597.1

3,638.3 Noncontrolling interests

55.2

49.9













Total stockholders' equity

3,652.3

3,688.2













Total liabilities and stockholders' equity

$ 10,712.6

$ 10,910.5



See "Information Regarding Non-GAAP Measures" on page 7 of 11 and other information to first quarter 2016 earnings release on page 11 of 11.

(10 of 11)

Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Other Information (Unaudited - data is rounded where indicated)





















1st Q Ended

4th Q Ended

1st Q Ended OTHER INFORMATION

Mar 31, 2016

Dec 31, 2015

Mar 31, 2015















Basic weighted average shares outstanding (000s)

177,038

176,810

165,574 Diluted weighted average shares outstanding (000s)

177,615

177,551

166,777















Number of common shares outstanding at end of period (000s)

177,129

176,947

166,657















Workforce at end of period (includes acquisitions):













Brokerage

15,849

15,920

15,118

Risk Management

5,130

5,185

5,046

Total Company

21,492

21,537

20,567

Contact: Marsha Akin

Director - Investor Relations

630-285-3501 or [email protected]

(11 of 11)

SOURCE Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.

Related Links

http://www.ajg.com


A villager sits alone on a dried-up riverbed in Gulang County on July 15, 2009 in Gansu Province, northwest China. (Photo : Getty Images)

Signs of a bleak future without water appear in a city in Chinas northwestern province of Gansu as the El Nino phenomenon continues to haunt the rest of Southeast Asia.



According to Market Place, the city of Lintao in Gansu is experiencing the combined effects of the drought and waves of urban development as the city's underground water supply dwindles into alarmingly low levels.



Advertisement

Parched City



Located along a tributary of the Yellow River, Lintao should ideally be abundant with water resources.



But the real situation in the city is far from ideal as its residents need to wake up early in the morning to fetch buckets of water in the highly urbanized area.



Yang Shufang, who lives in a luxury condominium complex in Lintao, is just one of the nearly 200,000 people in the city who has to fetch enough water for her cooking and drinking.



"Right after Chinese New Year, water stopped coming out of the tap. Now we have to stand in line each morning at the front gate of our complex with our buckets and wait for water to be delivered," she told the website.



While Lintao is just one city, experts expressed their fears that it may be a warning of worse times to come.



"Four hundred Chinese cities now face a water shortage. One hundred and ten cities face a severe water shortage. This is a very serious problem," explained Liu Changming, a retired hydrologist in the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Science.



Liu further noted that while China caters over 20 percent of the world's entire population, it only has 7 percent of the world's fresh water supply.



Because of this, Liu proposed to Chinese leaders to intensify their efforts in solving the problem, which even ex-Premier Wen Jiabao dubbed as "a threat to the survival of the Chinese nation."



El Nino in Southeast Asia



China has been exerting efforts in alleviating the effects of the drought in some of its counties, particularly along the Mekong River.



However, this does little to ease the devastation that has already cost Southeast Asia some of its major crop producers like Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, India and Laos.



A report from the South China Morning Post had even featured photos of the dried-out farmlands in these countries, some of which are already being sold.



According to the Southeast Asia Globe, the severe drought had already caused massive shortages of food and water.



"It's one of the most severe, perhaps one of the three most severe, El Nino events recorded," Sanny Jegillos, a UNDP Bangkok hub senior adviser on disaster risk reduction, explained. "But the effects vary from one country to another. Some countries have better water management, therefore those are not as badly affected as others, but some have actually been impacted since 2014."






WELLESLEY, Mass., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Babson College Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Dr. Sadie Burton-Goss and Babson College Vice President of Programming and Community Outreach Jane C. Edmonds have been named two of Boston's most influential minorities who are shaping the region.



Each have been honored by Get Konnected! as part of the organization's latest recognitions, including GK100, a list that showcases local minorities in academia, business, health care, and philanthropy, and GK50, which names the '50 Legends and Pioneers' of their fields in Boston.



Sadie Burton-Goss, who drives Babson's mission to continuously create and sustain a culture of inclusion, was named to the GK100.



Jane C. Edmonds was named one of the GK50, recognizing her for being a pioneer in business, breaking barriers, opening doors, and serving as a mentor and role model for the generations who have followed her.



Babson College is committed to building a diverse, multicultural, and inclusive community of highly talented students, faculty, and staff characterized by respect, understanding and appreciation of the uniqueness and value of all people. For more information, visit http://bit.ly/1pJYdji



About Get Konnected!



Launched in March 2008, Get Konnected! is the brainchild of PR maven and multicultural marketing pioneer, Colette Phillips, President and CEO of Colette Phillips Communications, Inc. and creator of Kaleidoscope, Boston's first comprehensive multicultural resource directory. Get Konnected! is Boston's first and only urban professional and business networking event that brings together urban and international professionals, business executives, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and corporate leaders for the purpose of networking. A first-of- its-kind event provides Greater Boston's corporate community a venue where Get Konnected! provides Boston's private and public sectors a venue where their employees of color can connect, network, and interface with other professionals.



About Babson College



Babson College is the educator, convener, and thought leader for Entrepreneurship of All Kinds(r). 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(r) as the most positive force on the planet for generating sustainable economic and social value. Visit www.babson.edu.



Media Contact: Michael Chmura, 781-239-4549, [email protected]

SOURCE Babson College

Related Links

http://www.babson.edu


NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Biometric sensors integrate physical traits of the human body with digital technology in order to provide biometric security. Semiconductor devices like biometric security systems contain algorithms and template database in order to match live biometric samples with the already stored samples in the database. Face metrics, fingerprints, and vein structures in hands among others are some of the physical traits used to prepare desired templates. Increasing concerns of privacy and security along with growing demand for smart gadgets with biometric security systems are some of the major driving factors for the market. A biometric sensor is a transducer that converts a biometric treat such as voice, face, and fingerprint etc. of a person into an electrical signal. Sensors generally measure temperature, pressure, light, electrical capacity, and speed. Biometric sensors are lightweight and compact in design. Furthermore, they can be installed in devices very conveniently. Some key attributes of biometric sensors include fast verification and identification. Biometric sensors are a breakthrough technology, which weed out various security-related issues from different domains.



Factors such as increasing emphasis on better security and safety, application of fingerprint scan, facial scan, hand scan, and voice scan are expected to see positive growth during the forecast period from 2015 to 2023. Increasing emergence of mobile and online financial transactions, biometric security solutions have found a huge opportunity in the financial sector. Biometric sensors technology can be used in a wide number of applications such as automotive, consumer electronics, commercial centers, and hospitality industries. In the sectors where safety, privacy, and security are of primary concern, biometric sensors are expected to find opportunities in applications such as making transactions and operations.



Biometric and fingerprint sensors have become a standard feature in consumer electronic products. Sensing the consumer preference for security and privacy, the key manufacturers of smartphones and other gadgets have started offering fingerprint sensors as a part of certain products. The demand for biometric security technology is on the rise due to the fact that the users of smartphones and other smart gadgets have become more familiar and comfortable with using tools such as fingerprint identification for gaining access. Growing demand for tablets, smartwatches, wearable devices, and other consumer electronic products is acting as one of the major drivers for this market. Furthermore, some of the factors acting as restraining factors for the market include limitation of application in different geographical regions due to cultural barriers and lack of standardization in the process of implementation and development of technical standards. However, graphene enable sensors are the future of the biometric sensors market.



Based on type, the market is segmented into capacitive sensors, optical sensors, thermal sensors, ultrasound sensors, and electric field sensors (eField). In terms of application, the market is segmented into voice scan, finger scan, hand scan, facial scan, iris scan, vein scan, and others. Furthermore, by end use, the market is segmented into consumer electronics, commercial centers and buildings, defense and security, medical and research labs, banking and financial services sector among others.



Geographically, the global biometric sensors market is categorized into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World (RoW). The scope of the report offers an insight into biometric sensors market in these regions based on revenue (USD million) and volume (million units).



The report also includes competitive profiling of leading players in the industry and their market share to aid in strategic decision making. The market attractiveness analysis and company market share analysis included in the report provide insight into market dynamics, industry competition and strategies adopted by market leaders.



The report also breaks down and reviews the various factors impacting the market growth, which can be appropriately described as market drivers, restraints, and opportunities. These factors help to determine the various existing trends and their impact on the market growth. Overall, taking into consideration the various factors affecting the biometric sensors market, the report includes a holistic analysis of the global biometric sensor market, and provides an estimate of growth for the period 2015 to 2023.



Some of the leading players in the biometric sensors market are CrossMatch Technologies, Inc. (U.S.), Fulcrum Biometrics (U.S.), Infineon Technologies AG (Germany), 3M (U.S.), ZKTeco Inc (China), NEC Corporation (Japan), Safran (France), Precise Biometrics Ab (Sweden), Suprema Inc. (South Korea) and IDEX ASA (Norway) among others.

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03588418-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


NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, Bloomberg Philanthropies released the results of a poll that examined the attitudes of voters toward the Clean Power Plan (CPP) in four key states: Florida, Michigan, Missouri, and Wisconsin. In each of these states, attorneys general have sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to block the CPP from being enacted. However, the polling found widespread support for the CPP and concretely showed that attorneys general Brad Schimel (WI), Pam Bondi (FL), Bill Schuette (MI), and Chris Koster (MO) are out of step with their constituents. Additionally, the poll found that the majority of voters in Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin, and a plurality of Missouri voters, were more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who also supported the plan.

Composed of a sample size of 801 registered voters in each respective state, the poll revealed that, despite lawsuits filed against the EPA, the majority of constituents in the four states favor government action on climate change and strongly support the CPP.

Voters who support the Clean Power Plan in states suing to block the plan:

73 percent in Florida ;

; 72 percent in Michigan ;

; 68 percent in Wisconsin ;

; 64 percent in Missouri.

Voters in states who are more likely to vote for a Presidential Candidate in support of the CPP:

58 percent in Florida ;

; 52 percent in Michigan ;

; 50 percent in Wisconsin ;

; 49 percent in Missouri .

The poll was conducted just days before the historic signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change by representatives of 175 nations at the United Nations in New York, and after a divided U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halted the CPP, the U.S. Government's signature plan to place the nation's first-ever limits on carbon pollution from power plants. Implementation of the CPP will help the U.S. meet its Paris Agreement pledge and enable further state and local action on climate change  including strengthening the market for cleaner, more renewable sources of energy (like solar and wind) and improving air quality and public health. Simultaneously, it will create jobs and spur economic growth.

The poll also underscores the strong legal endorsement of the CPP by over fifty cities, the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors in an amicus brief filed in the Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday, April 1. Writing in support of the CPP, the cities argued that "cities' efforts to adapt to a changing climate and to mitigate its causes are highly sensitive to national policies like the Clean Power Plan, which shape national markets, steer state action, and have the largest impact on nationwide emissions. Cities working to shoulder the burdens of adaptation would, therefore, face an ever-harder  and ever more expensive  task in the absence of the Clean Power Plan." Notably, the brief was signed by twenty-three local governments within states that have joined the lawsuit against the EPA, including:

Florida

Coral Gables

Cutler Bay

Miami

Miami Beach

Orlando

Pinecrest

West Palm Beach

Michigan

Ann Arbor

Grand Rapids

Wisconsin

Madison

Washburn

Antha Williams, Environment Program Lead, Bloomberg Philanthropies: "Bloomberg Philanthropies believes in climate action from the bottom up, and the Clean Power Plan is a critical tool for state and local leaders to plan for a clean energy future. Since 2011, our founder Mike Bloomberg has pledged over $100 million to support the transition away from coal and towards more renewable electricity, beginning with local action by community groups and city officials and including the engagement of both businesses and regulators. We are not surprised to see that the majority of residents in these four states want the CPP enacted now."

The research was conducted by Forward Intelligence, a growing market research and technology company headquartered in Washington, D.C. Forward Intelligence works with Fortune 500 companies, industry trade groups and non-profit organizations.

About Bloomberg Philanthropies

Bloomberg Philanthropies works in over 120 countries around the world to ensure better, longer lives for the greatest number of people. The organization focuses on five key areas for creating lasting change: Arts, Education, Environment, Government Innovation and Public Health. Bloomberg Philanthropies encompasses all of Michael R. Bloomberg's charitable activities, including his foundation and his personal giving. In 2015, Bloomberg Philanthropies distributed over half a billion dollars. For more information, please visit bloomberg.org or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter @BloombergDotOrg.

Media Contact:

Rebecca Carriero

Bloomberg Philanthropies

[email protected]

+1 212 205 0182

SOURCE Bloomberg Philanthropies

Related Links

http://www.bloomberg.org


SHANGHAI, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Boeing [NYSE: BA] and China Eastern Airlines today finalized an order for 15 787-9 Dreamliners. The order, valued at nearly $4 billion at current list prices, strengthens China Eastern's expanding long-haul fleet.

"We are very happy to introduce the new 787 Dreamliners into our long-haul fleet," said China Eastern Airlines Chairman Liu Shaoyong. "The addition of these next-generation, fuel-efficient airplanes will play a key role in supporting China Eastern's strategy for international expansion, and enable us to realize profits in point-to-point routes across the Pacific Ocean, and between China and Europe."

China Eastern plans to operate the new 787-9s on routes between China, North America and Europe, bolstering its competitiveness in the international long-haul market.

With growing air traffic demand, the carrier plans to increase frequencies on existing routes from Shanghai to Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Toronto, as well as their newly launched destination, Chicago. The routes are currently operated by the airline's flagship 777-300ER airplane.

"China Eastern has been a long-standing Boeing customer and we are honored that the passenger-preferred 787 Dreamliner will join their world-class fleet," said Ihssane Mounir, senior vice president, Northeast Asia Sales, Boeing Commercial Airplanes. "The combination of both the 777-300ER and 787-9 will provide the airline with market-leading economics as well as flexibility that will contribute significantly to their success operating long-haul flights to North America."

The 787 family has proven to be an unmatched market opener, with more than 100 new nonstop routes already in service or announced, as well as an effective tool to increase frequency profitably, often in conjunction with the 777.

For China Eastern, operating both the 777 and 787 will allow the airline to continue growing its international presence with more capacity and cargo payload on key existing frequencies, while also providing the flexibility for further expansion in high-growth markets.

The 787-9 complements and extends the super-efficient 787 family. With the fuselage stretched by 20 feet (6 meters) over the 787-8, the 787-9 can fly more passengers and more cargo farther yet with the same exceptional environmental performance  20 percent less fuel use and 20 percent fewer emissions than the airplanes they replace.

Headquartered in Shanghai, China Eastern Airlines is one of the three major airlines in mainland China. Flying a fleet of over 560 long-haul and short-haul airplanes with an average age of less than seven years, China Eastern serves nearly 100 million travelers annually and ranks the 7th largest carriers in the world in terms of passenger transportation volume.

More than 60 customers from six continents of the world have placed orders for more than 1,100 787s, making the 787 the fastest selling twin-aisle airplane in Boeing history. With this order, the 787 Dreamliner will have nearly 100 orders and commitments from Chinese customers.

Contact:

Wang Yukui

Boeing China Communications

+86 10 5925 5588

[email protected]

SOURCE Boeing

Related Links

http://www.boeing.com


NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Brazil Bronze is known for creating safe, beautiful tans. But more than that, we would like to educate sun lovers everywhere about sun safety as well as the importance of creating a safe tan.

May is Melanoma month. We felt it fitting to spread the word about MRAMelanoma Research Alliance, the largest private funder of Melanoma Research. For the whole month of May, Brazil Bronze Soho at 580 Broadway suite 501, NYC, and Brazil Bronze UES at 41 East 57th Street Suite #400 NYC will have a Raffle event called "Smart Girls Fake it" to help Support MRA.

Purchase a raffle ticket for $5 and you will receive a pretty Brazil Bronze Smart Girls Fake It tote bag. $3 from each raffle sold will be donated to MRA.

But that's not it, you will also be part of a raffle for an amazing Brazil Bronze Gift Basket worth $750.

Included in our gift basket

A 3 pack of specialty spray tans for Brazil Bronze Soho, A 3 pack of specialty tans for Brazil Bronze UES, Brazil Bronze Spray Mist, Tansxl Spray Mist, Brazil Bronze Glow Stretcher, Brazil Bronze Glow, Potion Tan Extender, Brazil Bronze Perfection Temporary Tan, Brazil Bronze Line Filler, Brazil Bronze, Dermabrasion Soap (Tan Remover), Brazil Bronze SPF 30, Sunkissed Organic Shower Gel, Sunkissed Organic Body Butter, Sunkissed Organic Body Scrub.

The Raffle Drawing will take place in Brazil Bronze Soho on Wednesday June 1st at 2pm. Brazil Bronze Soho 580 Broadway Suite 501 New York, NY 10012.

In addition, Brazil Bronze will donate $5 for every Brazil Bronze Original Spray Tan Solution sold in 2016.

Help us spread the word. Purchase 1 or more raffle tickets and proudly post a picture of yourself wearing your tote bag or post a picture of just the bag (whatever you choose) with the hashtags.

#BrazilBronze

#SmartGirlsFakeIt

#MelanomaResearchAlliance

About Brazil Bronze

Brazil Bronze is the pioneer of spray tanning and has been offering spray tans since 2002. Brazil Bronze also supplies some of the most luxurious salons and spas globally with The highest quality organic spray tan solutions, take home products, equipment and spray tanning certification.

Brazil Bronze has been praised by the press over the years. Awarded best-of-the-best spray tan category in Allure magazine numerous times and called "The Perfect Tan" by Vogue magazine. www.brazilbronze.com

About MRAMelanoma Research Alliance

The Melanoma Research Alliance (MRA) is the largest private funder of melanoma research. Since its founding in 2007, MRA has committed nearly $68 million in funding to advance our understanding of this disease. For more information on MRA go to www.curemelanoma.org

Please visit our website for more information about Brazil Bronze and MRA in our Sun Safety Link at www.BrazilBronze.com

NOTE TO EDITORS: Editors please contact Bridget Bergin for a complimentary spray tan.

Press Contact

Bridget Bergin

Owner: Brazil Bronze Soho

[email protected]

Direct: 732-703-0197

SOURCE Brazil Bronze

Related Links

http://www.brazilbronze.com


NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Brixmor Property Group Inc. (NYSE: BRX) ("Brixmor" or the "Company") announced today that certain selling stockholders (the "Selling Stockholders") affiliated with Blackstone Real Estate Partners have commenced a secondary offering of 20,000,000 shares of Brixmor's common stock.

Brixmor is not offering any shares of common stock in the offering and will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares in this offering. In addition, none of Brixmor's officers or directors is selling any shares of common stock in the offering.

Barclays Capital Inc. is serving as sole underwriter for the offering.

The offering of these securities is being made pursuant to an effective shelf registration statement. This offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. A copy of the prospectus, when available, may be obtained from: Barclays Capital Inc., Attention: c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, email: [email protected], phone: (888) 603-5847.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

Connect With Brixmor

For additional information, please visit www.brixmor.com;

Follow Brixmor on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Brixmor;

Find Brixmor on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/brixmor.

About Brixmor Property Group

Brixmor owns and operates the nation's largest wholly owned portfolio of grocery-anchored community and neighborhood shopping centers, with 518 properties aggregating approximately 87 million square feet of gross leasable area located primarily across the top 50 U.S. metro markets. Brixmor leverages its national footprint, local market knowledge and operational expertise to support the growth of its retail tenants. The Company is focused on maximizing the value of its portfolio through strategic leasing and anchor space repositioning / redevelopment initiatives. Headquartered in New York City, the Company is the largest landlord to The TJX Companies and The Kroger Company.

Safe Harbor Language

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 include, but are not limited to, statements related to the Company's expectations regarding the performance of its business, its financial results, its liquidity and capital resources and other non-historical statements. You can identify these forward-looking statements by the use of words such as "outlook," "believes," "expects," "potential," "continues," "may," "will," "should," "seeks," "approximately," "projects," "predicts," "intends," "plans," "estimates," "anticipates" or the negative version of these words or other comparable words. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those described under the section entitled "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015, as such factors may be updated from time to time in our periodic filings with the SEC, which are accessible on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Accordingly, there are or will be important factors that could cause actual outcomes or results to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. These factors should not be construed as exhaustive and should be read in conjunction with the other cautionary statements that are included in this release and in the Company's filings with the SEC. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or review any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as required by law.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110928/NY76014LOGO

SOURCE Brixmor Property Group Inc.

Related Links

http://www.brixmor.com


VANCOUVER, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Capstone Mining Corp. ("Capstone") (TSX: CS) today announced the voting results from its 2016 Annual General Meeting held Wednesday, April 27, 2016 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

A total of 246,256,131 common shares were voted at the meeting, representing 63.65% of the votes attached to all outstanding common shares. Shareholders voted in favour of all items of business before the meeting, including the election of all director nominees listed in the information circular for the meeting as follows:

Director % of Votes in Favour % of Votes Withheld Lawrence I. Bell 65.17 34.83 George L. Brack 65.06 34.94 Chantal Gosselin 99.68 0.32 Soon Jin Kwon 99.75 0.25 Kalidas V. Madhavpeddi 99.33 0.67 Dale C. Peniuk 65.55 34.45 Darren M. Pylot 99.73 0.27 Richard N. Zimmer 99.68 0.32

The resolution to set the number of directors at eight was approved by 79.69% of the votes cast for the resolution. Deloitte LLP, Chartered Professional Accountants were reappointed Capstone's auditors for the ensuing year.

Detailed voting results for the 2016 Annual General Meeting are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

About Capstone Mining Corp.

Capstone Mining Corp. is a Canadian base metals mining company, focused on copper. We are committed to the responsible development of our assets and the environments in which we operate. Our three producing mines are the Pinto Valley copper mine located in Arizona, US, the Cozamin copper-silver mine in Zacatecas State, Mexico and the Minto copper mine in Yukon, Canada. In addition, Capstone has two development projects; the large scale 70% owned copper-iron Santo Domingo project in Region III, Chile, in partnership with Korea Resources Corporation, and the 100% owned Kutcho copper-zinc project in British Columbia, Canada, as well as exploration properties in Chile and US. Capstone's strategy is to continue to extend the lives of our current mines with mineral resource and reserve expansions, maintain the optionality on the Santo Domingo development project, prudently progress the exploration portfolio and grow through acquisitions in politically stable, mining-friendly regions. We will pace our growth with our financial capacity, to retain, as a priority, sufficient financial flexibility to meet the requirements of our existing operations and our committed development projects, while maintaining an adequate cushion to deal with market volatility and operating risks inherent in the mining industry. Our headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and we are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Further information is available at www.capstonemining.com.

Cindy Burnett, VP, Investor Relations and Communications, +1-604-637-8157, [email protected]

SOURCE Capstone Mining Corp.

Related Links

http://www.capstonemining.com


VANCOUVER, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Capstone Mining Corp. ("Capstone") (TSX: CS) today announced the voting results from its 2016 Annual General Meeting held Wednesday, April 27, 2016 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

A total of 246,256,131 common shares were voted at the meeting, representing 63.65% of the votes attached to all outstanding common shares. Shareholders voted in favour of all items of business before the meeting, including the election of all director nominees listed in the information circular for the meeting as follows:

Director % of Votes in Favour % of Votes Withheld Lawrence I. Bell 65.17 34.83 George L. Brack 65.06 34.94 Chantal Gosselin 99.68 0.32 Soon Jin Kwon 99.75 0.25 Kalidas V. Madhavpeddi 99.33 0.67 Dale C. Peniuk 65.55 34.45 Darren M. Pylot 99.73 0.27 Richard N. Zimmer 99.68 0.32

The resolution to set the number of directors at eight was approved by 79.69% of the votes cast for the resolution. Deloitte LLP, Chartered Professional Accountants were reappointed Capstone's auditors for the ensuing year.

Detailed voting results for the 2016 Annual General Meeting are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

About Capstone Mining Corp.

Capstone Mining Corp. is a Canadian base metals mining company, focused on copper. We are committed to the responsible development of our assets and the environments in which we operate. Our three producing mines are the Pinto Valley copper mine located in Arizona, US, the Cozamin copper-silver mine in Zacatecas State, Mexico and the Minto copper mine in Yukon, Canada. In addition, Capstone has two development projects; the large scale 70% owned copper-iron Santo Domingo project in Region III, Chile, in partnership with Korea Resources Corporation, and the 100% owned Kutcho copper-zinc project in British Columbia, Canada, as well as exploration properties in Chile and US. Capstone's strategy is to continue to extend the lives of our current mines with mineral resource and reserve expansions, maintain the optionality on the Santo Domingo development project, prudently progress the exploration portfolio and grow through acquisitions in politically stable, mining-friendly regions. We will pace our growth with our financial capacity, to retain, as a priority, sufficient financial flexibility to meet the requirements of our existing operations and our committed development projects, while maintaining an adequate cushion to deal with market volatility and operating risks inherent in the mining industry. Our headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and we are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Further information is available at www.capstonemining.com.

SOURCE Capstone Mining Corp.

Related Links

www.capstonemining.com


INDIANAPOLIS, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Top leaders of the AFL-CIO, the United Steelworkers (USW), U.S. Senators, a state legislator and a gubernatorial candidate are joining workers from Carrier Corp. for a march and rally at the Indiana State Capitol to protest the company's announcement to move its manufacturing plant of 1,400 workers to Mexico.

The event will give voice to the urgency of rewriting trade rules and the tragic cost of unfair trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on workers, families, and communities.

WHO -- Members of USW Local 1999; U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-IN); AFL-CIO Pres. Richard Trumka; USW International Vice Pres. Fred Redmond; USW Dist. 7 Director Mike Millsap; Indiana AFL-CIO Pres. Brett Voorhies; Indiana State Representative Karlee Macer (D-92nd); Indiana Gubernatorial Candidate John Gregg; USW Local 1999 Pres. Chuck Jones; USW Local 1999 Member Eric Cottonham.

WHAT  Rally & march at the Indiana State Capitol to protest the Carrier Corp. move of 1,400 manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

WHERE  South steps of the Indiana State Capitol, 200 W. Washington St., Indianapolis, IN. The march then proceeds East on W. Washington; North on N. Meridian; around Monument Circle; West on W. Market and returns to the Capitol Lawn

WHEN  Friday, Apr. 29, 12:00 Noon. The 30-minute march starts at 1:45 pm.

*** ATTN Assignment Editors & Political Correspondents***

Hillary R. Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Democratic candidates for U.S. President in the May 3 Indiana primary, have both been invited to participate in the rally after contacting USW Local 1999 representing the Carrier workers.

A press riser & PA system multbox are available, plus photo and interview opps. A USW workers' banner and large American flags will be carried with a wood coffin to be nailed shut that displays a Carrier brand furnace product. For more: http://usw.org/act/campaigns/carrier.

Contact: Gary Hubbard (USW) 202-256-8125; [email protected]

Haylee Brannon (AFL-CIO) 317-529-9839; [email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20080131/DC12982LOGO

SOURCE United Steelworkers (USW)

Related Links

http://www.usw.org


CHICAGO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) today announced that it has launched a new website, CBOE Livevol Data Shop, which offers clients a full suite of uniquely customizable market data sets.

The new CBOE Livevol Data Shop, available at datashop.cboe.com, provides users with direct and immediate access to a comprehensive set of market intelligence for options, equities, indexes and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The user-friendly website provides access to detailed calculations, including implied volatilities and Greeks (delta, vega, gamma and theta of options), as well as tick and trade data for nearly every underlying U.S. equity and option from 2004 to the present.

"The main differentiator with the new Data Shop website is that it offers clients unique customization of data sets," said Catherine Clay, Vice President, Business Development, CBOE Livevol. "Clients no longer have to purchase data or subscribe to data sets on a one-size-fits-all basis."

Instead, clients can choose the exact data set needed, Clay said. The data is downloadable from the self-service site, which is designed to serve both institutional and retail customers, as well as researchers and academics. Subscriptions are available on a daily, monthly or annual basis.

"We're making sure the end customers are getting what they want, when and how they want it," Clay said.

CBOE Livevol provides traders with cutting-edge tools, data and custom analytics services. CBOE Livevol offers a wide spectrum of technology and data solutions, including a consolidated feed, real-time programmable analysis and scanning, historical files and back testing, real-time decision support, flat files, XML web services and other web components.

Additional information on CBOE Livevol and its products can be found at www.livevol.com.

About CBOE:

Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the largest U.S. options exchange and creator of listed options, continues to set the bar for options and volatility trading through product innovation, trading technology and investor education. CBOE Holdings offers equity, index and ETP options, including proprietary products, such as options and futures on the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX Index) and S&P 500 options (SPX), the most active U.S. index option. Other products engineered by CBOE include equity options, security index options, Weeklys options, FLEX options, and benchmark products such as the CBOE S&P 500 BuyWrite Index (BXM). CBOE Holdings is home to the world-renowned Options Institute, Livevol options analytics and data tools, and www.cboe.com, the go-to place for options and volatility trading resources.



CBOE-OE

CBOE, Chicago Board Options Exchange, Execute Success, FLEX, Livevol, CBOE Volatility Index and VIX are registered trademarks, and BuyWriteSM, BXMSM, WeeklysSM and The Options InstituteSM are service marks of Chicago Board Options Exchange, Incorporated (CBOE). Standard & Poor's, S&P and S&P 500 are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services, LLC and have been licensed for use by CBOE. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

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SOURCE Chicago Board Options Exchange

Related Links

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Chinese car lovers get their SUV fix with the latest models on display at the Beijing Auto Show. (Photo : Twitter)

Sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and electric cars are expected to be the crowd drawers for the 2016 Beijing Auto Show, which opened on Monday.



Major Chinese car manufacturer Great Wall Motors is set to unveil its Haval H7 SUV. The company's earlier H6 model, which was also introduced during the auto show, is considered as one of the biggest sellers in the Chinese SUV market for the past few years.



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International brands including Ford, Honda, Mercedes, General Motors and Volkswagen are also expected to reveal their new SUV models.



Several of the anticipated models, such as Volkswagen's T-Prime Concept GTE, are concept cars meant to showcase new technologies, such as plug-in hybrids, that are yet to be included in public mass-production models, CNBC reported.



The Chinese SUV market has experienced a significant amount of growth in recent years, with sales increasing by 52 percent in 2015. Prices have also steadily decreased, mainly due to domestic car makers releasing budget models in an effort to get a larger share of the market, though foreign brands still have a firm hold.



However, new emission regulations are expected to affect the SUV market significantly. China's government has announced its intent to enact tighter car emission standards in an effort to curb air pollution. The new rules are expected to cut the allowed emissions by half.



China has also encouraged the growth of the electric vehicle market in recent years as a cleaner alternative to gasoline-powered vehicles.



Both local and foreign manufacturers will also be showcasing their latest electric concepts during the auto show, with 147 models confirmed to be on display, the Global Times reported.



Local company Guangzhou Automobile Group will debut its GS4 electric SUV, while Internet streaming provider Le Holdings is set to present its LeSEE electric concept.



The Beijing Auto Show, which is held every two years, runs until May 4.


WASHINGTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Senior executives from Cengage Learning today joined the nation's top business and higher education leaders for the 2016 Global STEM Talent Summit hosted by STEMconnector. The event focused on the growing need for skilled workers in science, technology, engineering and math and the role of business in supporting the pipeline of STEM talent.

Representing Cengage at the event were Chief Technology Officer George Moore, Chief People Officer and General Counsel Ken Carson, and Chief Communications Officer Sandi Kirshner. Moore participated in a panel, "Career-Focused Experiential Learning: An Unlock for STEM 2.0" and discussed how technology can empower students to master STEM-specific skills. In addition, panelists discussed the importance of inspiring young people in STEM careers and how to make more opportunities accessible to learners in those fields. Moore noted that Cengage Learning currently is recruiting for 150 positions, many of them in engineering and technology.

"Employment opportunities in STEM are expected to increase steadily in the coming yearsincluding at Cengage Learning. Today's students need access to high quality education and training to be competitive and workforce-ready," said Moore. "At Cengage Learning, we are meeting this need by building products and services that help students develop the critical thinking and trade-specific skills necessary for success in STEM careers."

With more than 200 participants from 25 companies, the Global STEM Talent Summit convened perspectives across industries to share best practices for supporting the advancement of STEM talent. To view the full program agenda, please visit: http://globalsummit.stemconnector.org/. Live stream video of the event will be available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc-OxEx8kbE.

About Cengage Learning

Cengage Learning is a leading educational content, technology, and services company for the higher education and K-12, professional, library and workforce development markets worldwide. The company provides superior content, personalized services and course-driven digital solutions that accelerate student engagement and transform the learning experience. Cengage Learning is headquartered in Boston, MA with an office hub located in San Francisco, CA. Cengage Learning employees reside in nearly 40 different countries with company sales in more than 125 countries around the world. www.cengage.com.

About STEMconnector

STEMconnector is a consortium of companies, associations, societies, policy organizations, government entities, universities and academic institutions concerned with STEM education and the future of human capital. With several products and services, STEMconnector is both a resource and a service, designed to link "all things STEM." STEMconnector's network includes organizations at the global, national, state and local levels. STEMconnector focuses on the STEM workforce and jobs, with a particular emphasis on diversity and women. Our work spans the entire pipeline (Kindergarten to Jobs) and how STEM education experiences translate into careers.

Media Contact :

Madeline Struebing

Cengage Learning

617.289.7813

[email protected]

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SOURCE Cengage Learning

Related Links

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CALGARY, April 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Cenovus Energy Inc. (TSX: CVE) (NYSE: CVE) announced that at its annual meeting of shareholders held on April 27, 2016, each of the 11 nominees proposed as Directors and listed in its Management Information Circular dated March 4, 2016 were elected as Directors. The detailed results of the vote are set out below.







Nominee Votes for Votes withheld

Number Percent Number Percent Patrick D. Daniel 577,252,024 96.34 21,929,460 3.66 Ian W. Delaney 576,409,420 96.20 22,772,246 3.80 Brian C. Ferguson 596,358,353 99.53 2,825,385 0.47 Michael A. Grandin 594,074,706 99.15 5,106,733 0.85 Steven F. Leer 596,295,883 99.52 2,885,833 0.48 Richard J. Marcogliese 596,618,025 99.57 2,565,713 0.43 Valerie A.A. Nielsen 595,952,538 99.46 3,228,901 0.54 Charles M. Rampacek 595,222,921 99.34 3,958,745 0.66 Colin Taylor 577,325,219 96.35 21,858,519 3.65 Wayne G. Thomson 594,273,928 99.18 4,907,512 0.82 Rhonda I. Zygocki 596,490,383 99.55 2,693,355 0.45

Cenovus welcomes Richard J. Marcogliese and Rhonda I. Zygocki as new members of its Board of Directors. Mr. Marcogliese and Ms. Zygocki have each had long careers with large integrated oil and natural gas companies, giving them strong experience in the areas of resource development and production as well as refining. Mr. Marcogliese has been involved in the U.S. refining industry for more than 40 years, including more than 25 years with Exxon Mobil Corp. He is currently the Principal of iRefine LLC, a privately owned petroleum refining consulting company. He is also Executive Advisor of Pilko & Associates, a private chemical and energy advisory company. Ms. Zygocki spent 34 years with Chevron Corp. in a variety of senior management and executive leadership positions. She most recently served as Executive Vice-President, Policy and Planning at Chevron for four years until her retirement in February 2015. Currently, she is a senior advisor with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a research and policy development organization based in Washington, D.C.

Cenovus would like to extend its sincere thanks and best wishes to Ralph Cunningham who has retired from the Board of Directors after serving as a Director since Cenovus's inception in 2009.

Cenovus Energy Inc.

Cenovus Energy Inc. is a Canadian integrated oil company. It is committed to applying fresh, progressive thinking to safely and responsibly unlock energy resources the world needs. Operations include oil sands projects in northern Alberta which use specialized methods to drill and pump the oil to the surface and established natural gas and oil production in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The company also has 50% ownership in two U.S. refineries. Cenovus shares trade under the symbol CVE and are listed on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges. The company's enterprise value is approximately $18 billion. For more information, visit cenovus.com.

Find Cenovus on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram.

SOURCE Cenovus Energy Inc.
CH2M named KC Yost, a 40-year industry veteran who recently joined the firm after 18 years at Wood Group Mustang, to lead this new group. Yost is recognized as a pipeline and facilities technical authority and expert regarding the design and construction of pipelines. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in 29 states and is experienced in program, project, and construction management; due diligence and feasibility studies; route selection, piping and facility design; estimating; hydraulic analysis; contract and material specifications; code compliance audits and evaluations; and permit acquisitions. He has worked on a variety of gas and liquid hydrocarbon pipeline projects ranging from one to more than 1,000 miles (1.6 km to 1609 km) throughout the Americas.

"CH2M is taking the long-term view when it comes to meeting our client needs," said Chip Mitchell, President of CH2M's Energy & Industrial business segment. "The need for major oil and gas pipeline infrastructure remains significant throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico. We're building this team in Houston now, with established connections across our vast network of talent, to help our clients quickly respond as the market strengthens."

CH2M provides midstream and pipeline operating companies with immediate access to project managers, engineers, designers, mappers, and integrity management experts. In addition to the firm's pipeline capabilities, CH2M brings leading expertise in environmental, oil and gas refining, petrochemical, and water resource management to provide comprehensive services to clients for projects throughout North America, South America, and the Middle East.

About CH2M

CH2M is the leading professional services firm delivering sustainable solutions to clients working on the world's most complex challenges. CH2Mers make a positive difference providing consulting, design, engineering and management solutions for vital infrastructure and resources serving diverse public- and private-sector clients. With $5.4 billion in revenue and ~24,000 people, the firm has offices in 50 countries and four business groups: water; environment & nuclear; transportation; and energy & industrial. Known for managing global events such as the Olympic Games, CH2M ranks among Ethisphere's World's Most Ethical Companies; number-one in environmental consulting and program management by Engineering News-Record; and among sustainability leaders by independent analyst Verdantix. CH2M in 2016 was selected to receive the World Environment Center's Gold Medal Award for International Corporate Achievement in Sustainable Development, and in 2015, received the Stockholm International Water Institute's highest Industry Water Award for pioneering water conservation and reuse technologies. To learn more about the CH2M difference, connect with the firm at www.ch2m.com; linkedin.com/company/ch2m; twitter.com/ch2m; facebook.com/ch2mhill; and search for jobs at ch2m.com/careers.

Contact: Stephen Ludwig

Energy & Industrial

+1.720.286.0149

[email protected]

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SOURCE CH2M

Related Links

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NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Dicamba is an aromatic acid herbicide developed by Velsicol Chemical Corporation in 1961, with the features of strong weed killing effect, quick control effect and lower dosage. Dicamba is mainly used on gramineous crops, such as wheat, corn, rice and sorghum, etc.



With the long-term application, the resistance of glyphosate has become more and more serious. Thanks to the good control effect, dicamba has been recommended to mix with glyphosate or other herbicides (e.g. 2,4-D, MCPA, etc.), to decrease the weed's resistivity and increase the weeding effect. The demand of dicamba has witnessed a rapid growth in recent years.



Driving by the development of dicamba-tolerant genetically modified crops, "Dicamba" has become one of the hottest key word in global agrochemical industry since 2012, and the dicamba industry has attracted a lot of enterprises' attention to the development. Many enterprises want to enter the dicamba industry and some dicamba producers set out to expand the dicamba capacity.



In middle of 2014, BASF announced that invest USD 270 million to produce 50 percent more dicamba product. In middle of 2015, Monsanto plan to build a dicamba project with the total investment over USD 1 billion.



In China market, Jiangsu Changqing has launched a project of 2,000t/a of dicamba in the end of 2014 and plans to expand it to 4,000t/a; Yangnong Chemical has expanded the dicamba capacity to 6,500t/a in early of 2015. What's more, there are more than 23 enterprises have registered dicamba technical in ICAMA, and more than five enterprises having the dicamba project plan with detailed capacity.



Chinese dicamba has played an important role in the global dicamba market and become the biggest dicamba supplier globally, over 30% of the global dicamba product has been produced in China, and the rate will increase in the future years.



Thanks to the strong demand in global market, the output of dicamba in H1 2015 has reached the whole year of 2014 in China. We can say that-- genetically modified crops influenced the global dicamba demand, and Chinese dicamba influenced the global dicamba supply. Chinese dicamba industry is remarkable.



China Dicamba Market Report 2015 Edition is a professional and trusted study on the current state of the Chinese dicamba industry. With more than 80 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 who are interested in the market. It helps them full understand the current China dicamba market. The report provides trusted data and analysis for the following aspects:



1. Registration of dicamba in China and 20 oversea countries includes China, Belgium, Germany, Nederland, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, Argentina, Bolivia, Columbia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and S. Africa. The detailed information includes registrant and product specification.

2. Dicamba synthesis routes and production process. The chemical principles for different routes are list and the advantages and disadvantages for each routes analyzed in this chapter. Dicamba patent information, one of producer's detail dicamba production process and unit consumption are also provided.

3. Key raw material supply situation, the detailed supply situation and key producers introduction are provided.

4. Global dicamba market and Chinese dicamba supply situation, the detailed supply situation, key producers' introduction and their production data are provided. The potential projects and the detailed planned construction site, investment and project progress are introduced.

5. Price of dicamba in 2009-July 2015, the detailed price data are list and the influence factors are analyzed.

6. Export situation of dicamba, includes export volume in 2008-2014, major technical and formulation exporters and their major oversea market, the detailed dicamba technical flow in 2013 are provided.

7. Profile of the dicamba producers, includes company introduction, major pesticides product in each company, company financial data, pesticides and dicamba production and sales data and information.



Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03762686-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

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CHICAGO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, WE Day, a series of worldwide educational events celebrating young people making a difference in local and global communities, along with National Title Sponsor Allstate, bring together world-renowned presenters, speakers and performers to celebrate 15,000 Illinois students and educators from over 400 schools. Students attending have earned their way to WE Day by taking action on issues such as bullying, hunger and homelessness.

Taking the WE Day Illinois stage will be inspiring speakers and performers, including Ciara, Martin Luther King III, Jordan Smith, Paula Abdul, Nico & Vinz, J.R. Martinez, Monique Coleman, Becca Tobin, Kardinal Offishall, Spencer West, international activists and WE Day co-founders Craig and Marc Kielburger, and more.

WE Day streams live today starting at 9 a.m. CST at www.weday.com/watch; photos available at www.weday.com/illinois-epk by 4 p.m. CST

Illinois youth have earned their tickets to WE Day by taking action on local and global social issues through WE Schools, a year-round service learning program, which provides a free menu of hands-on, student-led campaigns designed to enhance a school's existing social initiatives or to spark new ones. WE Schools helps young people turn the day's inspiration into sustained service action and together, WE Day and WE Schools are a blueprint for building the next generation of change-makers.

Allstate Chairman and CEO, Tom Wilson, national Co-Chair of WE Day, will deliver a message of youth empowerment to the audience. "Throughout history, youth have taken action to create positive social change. Young people can lead the way and restore hope in our communities  they've got the solutions. WE Schools makes that happen. WE Day celebrates their success."

Young people across Illinois are creating remarkable change through the WE Schools program. For example, students at William H. Taft High School in Chicago collected food items for the needy in their community. This past fall, students trick-or-treated at Halloween for non-perishable food items for a local food pantry. To continue making an impact, the students also teamed up with New Hope Community Food Pantry to collect and distribute food items in their neighborhoods, and they will continue to support community members with upcoming brown-bag lunch and school supply programs.

Former U.S. Secretary of Education and WE Day Illinois Co-Chair, Arne Duncan, will take the WE Day stage to reinforce the educational outcomes of service learning and to honor the school districts, teachers and youth in attendance. "We can't do enough to celebrate kids who are providing unbelievable leadership and service. Young people have an incredible opportunity to drive the change we need and this is a tremendous group of young people. WE Day is a way to help them, listen to them, and most of all to learn from them."

WE Day Illinois will energize the crowd through a day of powerful educational speeches, inspirational moments and empowering performances, including:

Human rights advocate and eldest son of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , Martin Luther King III , inspires the audience with a motivating and empower message.

, , inspires the audience with a motivating and empower message. Spoken word artists, Jamila Woods and youth from Louder Than a Bomb inspire the crowd with a powerful spoken word piece, highlighting the importance of a young person's voice.

and youth from inspire the crowd with a powerful spoken word piece, highlighting the importance of a young person's voice. Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter and record producer, Ciara, gets the crowd on their feet to a medley of her chart-topping hits. She will be joined by multi-award winning, non-profit, dance & music theater company, Endure Dance Company.

Making WE Day a true community celebration, local young people with inspiring personal stories will join the lineup on stage, including Raven Smith, age 17, from Morgan Park High School. Determined to change the recent national headlines about violence in Chicago, Raven created "Straight From The Go," an apparel line with a positive message. Through her brand, Raven showcases Chicago as a world-class city with caring and generous citizens who are dedicated to making a difference. WE Day will also highlight tremendous local youth leaders supported by Chicago Scholars, Mikva Youth Challenge, local schools and organizations, including ChiArts, Chicago Citizens for Change, Peacemakers Program, Soul Children of Chicago and Young Chicago Authors.

WE Day provides youth with a platform to learn about some of today's most pressing issues while celebrating this generation's shift from me to wetoward acting with intention, leading with compassion and believing in the power of community. WE Schools has engaged over 600 schools and community groups across the state, including the 400-plus in attendance at WE Day Illinois. More than half of the students in attendance come from Chicago Public Schools, and over 76 percent are from low income communities.

In the 2014-2015 school year,

83 percent of Illinois educators participating in WE Schools have identified leadership opportunities for their students as a result of the WE Schools program

educators participating in WE Schools have identified leadership opportunities for their students as a result of the WE Schools program 84 percent of educators said their students saw themselves as part of a broader community

71 percent of educators said the program encouraged previously disengaged youth to become more engaged

A global movement of 2.3 million young people strong, youth involved with WE Day and WE Schools have raised $62 million for more than 2,500 local and global organizations, volunteered 19.9 million hours for local and global causes and collected over 7.6 million pounds of food.

"We believe that, if given the right tools, today's youth can conquer anything they put their minds to. Annually, 200,000 students coast to coast and around the globe from over 10,000 schools earn their tickets to WE Day by creating tangible benefits for their communities," said WE Day co-founder Craig Kielburger. "By bringing together thousands of young change-makers today, students across Illinois will know they're not alone and that collectively, they are making their voices heard."

WE Day is supported by Illinois by Co-Chairs Tom Wilson, Chairman and CEO, Allstate; Arne Duncan, former U.S. Secretary of Education; Common, award-winning hip-hop artist, actor and founder of the Common Ground Foundation; Alex Gourlay, president, Walgreen; and Jade Greear, WE Day Illinois Youth Co-Chair.

WE Day is free to the thousands of students and teachers in attendance at WE Day Illinois, thanks to the generous support of National Title Sponsor Allstate, a company that empowers future generations with the strength, confidence and skills to rise up as leaders and realize their potentialand to show the world that good starts young.

About WE Day

www.weday.com

About the WE Day Movement

WE Day is the movement of our timea movement of young people leading local and global change. WE Day celebrates and inspires this generation's shift from me to wetowards acting with intention, leading with compassion, and a belief in the power of community. WE Day is one of the world's largest registered non-profit initiatives on social media, with more than five million followers. This year alone over 200,000 young people will come together in 14 stadium gatherings across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. to take part in this unprecedented educational initiative.

More than a one-day event, WE Day is connected to a yearlong free educational program, WE Schools, which provides educational resources and campaigns to help young people turn the day's inspiration into sustained action. WE Day and WE Schools are cause-inclusive, empowering young people to find their passion and create the change they want to see. Together, WE Day and WE Schools are a blueprint for building the next generation of global change-makers. For more information, please visit www.we.org.

About Allstate

www.Allstate.com/GoodStartsYoung

Camila Ossa

Specialist PR & Publicity, WE Day

+1-416-885-5522

[email protected]

Sarah Evans

Manager PR & Publicity, WE Day

+1-647-462-0654

[email protected]

SOURCE WE Day

Related Links

http://www.weday.com


HONG KONG, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Comba Telecom Systems Holdings Limited ("Comba Telecom" or "the Group", Hong Kong stock code: 2342), a global leading wireless solutions provider, has announced the results of litigation brought against it by Commscope Holding Company Inc. ("Commscope") and its subsidiary Andrew LLC ("Andrew") in Brazil. The courts have ruled in favor of Comba Telecom and rejected the RET ("Remote Electrical Tilt") antenna technology patent infringement lawsuit.

In this civil case, the court-appointed technical expert examined both Andrew's Brazilian patents and Comba Telecom's antennas and concluded that the technologies used in the antennas are markedly different from those claimed in those patents. The 8th Trial Court of the State Court of Sao Paulo also stressed the findings of an invalidity lawsuit filed by Comba Telecom before the Federal Courts in Rio de Janeiro, in which Andrew's patents were declared to be null and void for multiple and independent reasons. Based on this evidence, the court subsequently ruled for the rejection of the lawsuit because it had no legal basis.

Mr. Simon Yeung, President of Comba Telecom Systems International Limited said, "We are pleased with the ruling of the Brazilian courts. This is a vindication of the company's stance on intellectual property rights, and we will vigorously defend ourselves from any spurious legal proceedings brought against the Group now and in the future.

We are a firm supporter of fair competition and the company has taken numerous steps to address this issue; these steps includes the successful application for the cancellation of certain Commscope/Andrew patents in Brazil and China, and other similar ongoing cases in the US and China. In fact, Andrew's RET patents have already been revoked by the European Patent Office upon application by other antenna vendors."

Mr. Yeung concluded, "We have invested considerable resources in R&D to develop and deliver the best and most efficient technologies for our customers and hold hundreds of patents around the world. Operating on these principles has enabled Comba Telecom to become one of the world's top-tier vendor of base station antennas and wireless solutions, and this latest win will encourage us to continue innovating and leading the field on a global basis."

About Comba Telecom Systems Holdings Limited

As one of the leading wireless solution providers in the world, Comba Telecom is primarily engaged in the R&D and manufacturing of wireless products including RRU, antennas and base station subsystems and wireless transmission and access systems. The Group also provides complete turnkey solutions and services to its global customers. Headquartered in Hong Kong, Comba Telecom's global operations include manufacturing bases in mainland China, R&D centers in China and the USA and more than 40 offices worldwide. Comba Telecom has been included into several indexes including MSCI China Small Cap Index, Hang Seng Composite Index (Information Technology Industry Index, MidCap & SmallCap Index and SmallCap Index), Hang Seng Global Composite Index, Hang Seng Internet & Information Technology Index, as well as Hang Seng Corporate Sustainability Benchmark Index. For further information, please visit: www.comba-telecom.com.

SOURCE Comba Telecom Ltd
GLENVIEW, Ill., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Combined Insurance, a leading provider of individual supplemental accident, disability, health, and life insurance products, and a Chubb company, sponsored the American Cancer Society's Walk & Roll Chicago event on Saturday, April 23 at Soldier Field. The company also had strong employee participation at the event with more than 20 volunteers in attendance.

This was the latest example of how Combined Insurance and its employees are making a difference by supporting the American Cancer Society. Last October, employees volunteered and raised more than $10,000 at the American Cancer Society's Making Strides Against Breast Cancer event. The company continues to follow one of its corporate values of being socially responsible by giving back to the communitya legacy which was started by the company's founder, W. Clement Stonea huge philanthroper himself who donated $275 million during his lifetime.

"We are incredibly honored to be a sponsor of this year's Walk & Roll Chicago event for the American Cancer Society," said Melanie Lundberg, Assistant Vice President, Talent Management & Corporate Communications at Combined Insurance. "We continue to support the American Cancer Society and their fight for cures against cancer. We realize that cancer touches all of our liveswhether we have a friend, a family member, or have been personally afflicted. It means a lot to us at Combined Insurance that our employees are so engaged and that we can give back in a meaningful way to this important cause."

More than 4,000 walkers, runners, skaters, cyclists, and volunteers came together to honor cancer survivors, raise awareness about reducing cancer risk, and raise money to support lifesaving research and the programs and services of the American Cancer Society. This year, the Walk & Roll celebrates its 45th anniversary. Started in Chicago in 1971 as a bike-a-thon, the event is a unique "party with a purpose" that brings the community together in the fight against cancer.

"What makes Walk & Roll such a great event for our community is the unique, family-friendly atmosphere and positivity seen across the thousands of participants, supporters, and volunteers," said Jessie Urban, Senior Community Manager, Special Events, at the American Cancer Society. We are grateful for all of our sponsors, including Combined Insurance, for helping us raise critical funds to find cures to fight cancer and save more lives."

Combined Insurance, which offers Cancer Care Protector supplemental insurance to consumers, has a tradition of success in the insurance industry dating back more than 90 years. Founded in 1922 by W. Clement Stone, the company honors his commitment of giving back with volunteer efforts and donations to charitable organizations throughout the year with special focus on veteran and health-focused charities. Combined Insurance was recognized for the second consecutive year as the number one Military Friendly Employer in the nation by G.I. Jobs magazine.

For more information about Combined Insurance, visit www.combinedinsurance.com.

About Combined Insurance

Combined Insurance Company of America (Chicago, IL) is a leading provider of individual supplemental accident, disability, health and life insurance products and a Chubb company. With a tradition of more than 90 years of success, Combined Insurance is one of Ward's Top 50 Performing Life-Health Insurance Companies. Combined Insurance is committed to making the world of supplemental insurance easy to understand. For more information about Combined Insurance products, career opportunities or to contact a local sales agent, call 1-800-490-1322 or visit www.combinedinsurance.com.

Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CombinedIns

Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CombinedInsuranceUnitedStates

Connect with us on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/combined-insurance

View our videos on YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/CombinedInsuranceUSA

Follow us on Instagram: www.instagram.com/combinedinsurance

Read more on our blog, Supplementally Speaking: www.combinedinsurance.com/blog

In New York, life, accident & sickness and disability insurance policies issued by Combined Life Insurance Company of New York (Latham, NY). Combined Insurance Company of America is not licensed and does not solicit business in New York.

About the New Chubb

Chubb is the world's largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance company. With operations in 54 countries, Chubb provides commercial and personal property and casualty insurance, personal accident and supplemental health insurance, reinsurance and life insurance to a diverse group of clients. The company is distinguished by its extensive product and service offerings, broad distribution capabilities, exceptional financial strength, underwriting excellence, superior claims handling expertise and local operations globally. Parent company Chubb Limited is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: CB) and is a component of the S&P 500 index. Chubb maintains executive offices in Zurich, New York, London and other locations, and employs approximately 31,000 people worldwide. Additional information can be found at: www.new.chubb.com.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160126/325926LOGO

SOURCE Combined Insurance
PUNE, India, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new market research report, "Connected Mining Market by System and Solution (Connected Asset, Connected Logistic, Connected Control System, Safety and Security, and Remote Management Solution), by Method (Surface and Underground Mining), by Service, and by Region - Global Forecast to 2020", published by MarketsandMarkets, the market size is expected to grow from USD 3.84 Billion in 2015 to USD 9.98 Billion by 2020, at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.0% during the forecast period.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )

Browse 124 market data Tables and 43 Figures spread through 170 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Connected Mining Market"

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/connected-mining-market-210875078.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.

The major drivers of this market include better cost efficiency, increased ICT spending, and volatile commodity prices. Furthermore, more than 200 smart city projects across the globe provide huge opportunities for connected mining vendors, service providers, platform providers, and consulting companies.

Evolution of smart connected mines and accelerating market for system integrators open major opportunities for the connected mining vendors and solution providers

The market size for connected mining segment has considerably grown over the past few years on the account of evolving mining industry and the emergence of technologies such as Industrial Internet of Things, data analytics, and remote metering have further augmented the opportunity areas for this market. The advancement in surface and underground mining systems, solutions, and services coupled with the increasing integration of IoT with such solutions has led to significant investment in smart mining projects globally. The increasing opportunity for system integrators will also act as an opportunity for the Connected Mining Market.

Operational Data Processing & Analytics and Connected Logistics are expected to be the most promising solutions during the forecast period

The Connected Mining Market has been segmented into systems & solutions, services, methods, and regions. Operational Data Processing & Analytics and Connected Logistics solution segment is projected to grow with a high growth rate; hence, will present good market opportunity during the forecast period. System integration and consulting services holds a major share in the connected mining services segment. The increasing demand for system integrators to install, manage, and maintain various connected platforms act as a major driving factor for growth of system integrators.

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Currently, North America holds the maximum market share in the Connected Mining Market.

North America is expected to have the largest market share and would dominate the Connected Mining Market from 2015 to 2020, with growing number of mining projects, increasing need for mineral ores, and strict government mandates. Latin America and the Middle East & Africa (MEA) offers potential growth opportunities due to the developing large-scale mining projects, new economic and political reforms of the region, increasing mineral prices, and employment opportunities.

The major vendors covered in the Connected Mining Market for this study include ABB Group, SAP SE, Cisco System, Inc., Rockwell Automation, Hexagon AB, and Trimble Navigation Limited.

MarketsandMarkets segments the Connected Mining Market on the basis of Systems and Solutions- operational data processing and analytics, connected assets, connected logistics, connected control systems, connected safety and security system, and remote management solution and Services- system consulting, system integration, and support & maintenance, and Geography. A detailed analysis of the regions has been done to provide insights into the potential future business opportunities in different regions.

Browse Related Reports:-

Internet of Things (IoT) in Energy Market by Systems & Solutions (Predictive Asset Maintenance, Connected Logistics, Security, Energy Analytics, IoT Platform, Energy Management), by Application (Oil & Gas, Mining), by Services & by Regions - Global Forecast to 2020

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/iot-energy-market-251659593.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.

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SOURCE MarketsandMarkets
"VentureClash looks to attract the best early-stage companies here in Connecticut, around the country and throughout the world," said Matt McCooe, CEO of Connecticut Innovations. "We will support companies with corporate, university, nonprofit and state resources to help high-growth enterprises succeed in Connecticut."

Awards

The top award for the challenge will be a $1.5 million investment. The second-place winner will receive a $1 million investment, and four runners-up will each receive a $500,000 investment. Mentoring, grants and other assistance will also be provided to winners.

During the semifinalist round, applicants will also receive the benefit of going through VentureCamp, a four-week development and orientation program run by The Refinery, a leading Connecticut-based accelerator.

Application

The VentureClash challenge launches the first-round application on April 28, 2016. Companies will have until June 30, 2016, to submit the first-round application. After two rounds of judging, approximately 10 companies will be invited to Yale University on October 20, 2016, to compete in person for investment awards. Judges will include subject matter and investor experts from athenahealth, Canaan Partners, Greycroft Partners, Oak HC/FT, Kepha Partners, Magellan Health and Webster Bank.

Partners

To strengthen the initiative, VentureClash has identified several partners that will assist with customer connections, potential customer pilots, judging, mentoring and acceleration services. The 2016 VentureClash strategic partners include: The Hartford, The Jackson Laboratory, Magellan Health, Webster Bank, and Yale. VentureClash is also working closely with The Connecticut Department of Community and Economic Development (DECD) on program development and implementation.

Eligibility

To be eligible to apply, a company must meet the following requirements:

Have been in business for at least 12 months

Have paying customers or customers who are actively testing the applicant's product

Companies must be willing to establish a Connecticut presence, which applies to domestic and international applicants

presence, which applies to domestic and international applicants Companies must be focused in digital health or fintech

"We created VentureClash to help companies working in two very dynamic industries that are well-supported in our state so that we could help accelerate their growth," said Glendowlyn Thames, director of Small Business Innovation and CTNext. "At the finals event in October, we'll bring together the strongest applicants for pitches and networking with venture capital firms, partners and others."

For more information on qualifications, requirements, guidelines and application, visit www.ventureclash.com.

About VentureClash

VentureClash is Connecticut Innovations' global investment challenge focused on early-stage companies. The challenge identifies high-potential companies in digital health and fintech that will receive investments from a $5 million award pool and the support of resources around Connecticut.

About Connecticut Innovations Inc.

Connecticut Innovations (CI) is the leading source of financing and ongoing support for Connecticut's innovative, growing companies. To maximize the growth potential of each business, CI tailors its solutions and often combines its funds with resources from other financial leaders to provide venture capital and strategic support for early-stage technology companies; flexible loans for established companies with new innovations; grants that support innovation and collaboration; and connections to its well-established network of partners and professionals. For more information on CI, please visit www.ctinnovations.com.

Contact: Lauren Carmody

Director of Public Relations

Phone: (860) 258-7829

Email: [email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/361016

SOURCE Connecticut Innovations Inc.

Related Links

http://ctinnovations.com


CHICAGO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Consumers eat an average of 3.7 sandwiches per week, which has remained stable over the past few years. However, consumers are now eating a wider variety of sandwiches and sourcing them from a greater variety of locations as they look for new, unique foods, according to the 2016 Sandwich Consumer Trend Report. While burgers are still consumed most often of all sandwich varieties measured, other varietiesincluding deli salad, breakfast, flatbread and ethnic sandwichesare gaining on burgers.

"Sandwiches provide an ideal platform for consumers to experiment with new flavors," explains Kelly Weikel, director of consumer insights at Technomic. "To gain share, operators and suppliers must meet growing demand for innovative, better-for-you options."

Key takeaways from the report include:

- The rise of all-day breakfast is creating new opportunities for breakfast sandwiches; 27% of consumers say they are buying breakfast sandwiches outside of typical breakfast hours more often now than they were a year ago.

- Consumers increasingly demand mini sandwiches that they can eat as a snack (37%, up from 31% in 2012).

- Chain restaurants may benefit from differentiating sandwich offerings; 36% of consumers overall and 47% of millennials think that chain restaurants all offer very similar sandwiches.

Using actionable data from more than 1,500 consumers, as well as Technomic's exclusive Digital Resource Library, Knowledge Center and MenuMonitor databases, the 2016 Sandwich Consumer Trend Report serves as a guide for foodservice operators and suppliers to understand consumer attitudes toward sandwiches and identify key areas of opportunity.

Technomic publishes a complete library of Consumer Trend Reports. To learn more, please visit Technomic.com/ctr or contact one of the individuals listed below.

Contacts:

Press Inquiries and Report Details: Kelly Weikel, (312) 506-3830, or [email protected]

Purchasing Details: Patrick Noone, (312) 506-3852, or [email protected]

About Technomic

Only Technomic, a Winsight company, delivers a 360-degree view of the food industry. We impact growth and profitability for our clients by providing consumer-grounded vision and channel-relevant strategic insights. Our services range from major research studies and management consulting solutions to online databases and simple fact-finding assignments. Our clients include food manufacturers and distributors, restaurants and retailers, other foodservice organizations, and various institutions aligned with the food industry. Visit us at technomic.com.

About Winsight, LLC

Winsight, LLC is a business-to-business media and information services company specializing in the convenience-retailing, restaurant and noncommercial foodservice industries. Winsight has an extensive media portfolio including four publications, CSP, Restaurant Business, FoodService Director and Convenience Store Products, a suite of digital products including websites, e-newsletters (Restaurant Business Daily and CSP Daily News) and webinars, plus video products, mobile and tablet apps, custom marketing solutions and the convenience-retailer intelligence tool, CSPedia. The Winsight Events group produces six exclusive, large-scale executive-level conferencesRestaurant Leadership Conference, FARE Conference, Outlook Leadership, Convenience Retailing University, FSTEC and MenuDirectionsin addition to more than 12 major EduNetworking conferences and advisory meetings. Winsight recently acquired Technomic, Inc., a food industry provider of primary and secondary market information and advisory services. Winsight is a recognized leader in the markets it serves.

For more information on Winsight and its brands, go to WinsightMedia.com.

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SOURCE Technomic

Related Links

http://www.technomic.com


A sign on a farm trailer reading 'Food grows where water flows,' hangs over dry, cracked mud at the edge of a farm April 16, 2009 near Buttonwillow, California. (Photo : Getty Images/David McNew)

In a bid to cut down electricity consumption, Venezuela's government has ordered public workers to work only on Mondays and Tuesdays until the El Nino phenomenon is over.







"There will be no work in the public sector on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, except for fundamental and necessary tasks," BBC quoted Vice President Aristobulo Isturiz as saying. Around 20 percent of the country's workforce or 2.6 million public sector employees were reportedly affected by this drastic measure to save electricity and that it will most likely last until the end of May and it remains unclear if the employees will be paid on the 3-day a week leave or not.



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The power shortage is the result of the drought conditions on the nation's main source of electricity, Guri's hydroelectric dam, which is caused by the El Nino phenomenon. The dam provides around 66 percent of energy needs in the country.



The government has already adopted different measures to manage the energy crisis, including a four-hour daily power outage on eight regions in the country. Earlier this week, the government put the clocks forward by half an hour to reduce demand for electricity in the early night.



Apart from that, primary and high schools would now be closed to students on Fridays. According to previous reports, President Nicolas Maduro expressed that they are managing the situation in the best possible way, but stressed: "We are requesting international help, technical and financial aid to help revert the situation."



The power shortages raised discontent among citizen, who is already suffering shortages of medicines and basic goods. Businessmen and critics, on the other hand, say that the energy and shortages of basic good are outcomes of the inefficient running of the energy system and economic mismanagement.



As a result, the opposition leaders are now on the move to hold a referendum to remove president Maduro from office this year, as they wish to elect a new government that would get them out of the chaos. The electoral authorities already gave them the approval to seek 195,000 signatures as an initial step, Euro News reported.



Check out the video below for more information:






LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Revenue up 12% to 92m

EBITDA up 24% to 7.1m

Accelerated revenue and EBITDA growth forecast for year to 31st January, 2017

Damovo[1], a leading enterprise communications solutions and services provider, has today reported 92 million in revenue and underlying profitability growth of 24% in its first full-year results since it was acquired by Oakley Capital Private Equity II ("Oakley") in January 2015. The company is on track with its 'buy and build' strategy to grow annual revenues to 200 million and become a leading unified communications (UC) provider in Europe within two to four years.

Preliminary unaudited results for the full year include:

Revenue of 92m  up 12% year-on-year

EBITDA[2] of 7.1m  up 24% year-on-year

103m in new business wins - best year in company's history

> 10% organic growth contributed 8.5m to top line revenue

Growth across all key categories, with UC, WiFi and global managed communications solutions performing most strongly

Expansion in all markets, with Germany and Benelux delivering strongest revenue growth

"We finished our first year since the acquisition with very positive momentum," says Glen Williams, chief executive officer of Damovo. "This is a strong group-wide performance with excellent results in every area of the business. The figures reflect our progress in turning around a business that previously suffered from under-investment. Our strategy of investing for growth to build a high-performance business development environment and an engaged employee culture is bearing fruit."

In August 2015, Damovo acquired the unified communications operations of Centre de Telecommunications et Teleinformatiques Luxembourgeois ("CTTL"), signalling its entry into the Luxembourg market. It also set up a trading entity in Austria. These new ventures add to Damovo's existing operational presence in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Poland and Ireland, as well as its Global Services business, which has a worldwide presence.

Going for growth

With a focus on organic growth in key markets, Damovo's new product introductions, cross-selling and top partner accreditations have allowed it to achieve major milestones in the past year. These include winning its largest managed services contract to date in Germany, and developing its strongest sales pipeline ever, worth in excess of 200 million.

Williams comments: "We invested heavily in our sales team to capitalise on a growing market and the requirements of our current and potential customers to invest in unified communications and WiFi technologies, as well as the growing need for integrated global communications solutions. We see tremendous opportunities to build on our leadership in these key growth areas, as businesses seek to increase collaboration and productivity, while reducing travel and other costs.

"Our Damovo Global Services business has also benefitted from its focus on system integration partners who need our unique ability to reduce and control the costs of managing voice and data systems across diverse international locations.

"Our growth is built on rock solid customer satisfaction, which resulted in an impressive 95% customer retention rate in the 12-month period."

Business simplification

"We have been particularly pleased that we delivered double-digit revenue growth, with no overall increase in our operational costs, and this has resulted in underlying profitability growth of 24%," continues Williams.

"We achieved this by prioritising business simplification; allowing us to streamline and align operations across our three core regions  Central Europe (DACH[3] and Poland); Benelux[4]; and Global and Ireland. We have invested in management and information technology to drive efficiencies and create a platform for sustainable growth: we appointed group operations and commercial directors; established efficient group-wide CRM and ERP systems; and developed very strong relationships with key technology partners including Cisco, Avaya and Mitel. This included being the first company in the world to be awarded the Mitel Platinum Integrator Partner status."

Current year plan to accelerate growth to push revenue to well in excess of 100m

"These are exciting times in Damovo," says Williams. "Three months into this financial year, we are on track to achieve our ambitious current year revenue growth plan and our EBITDA growth target of more than 20%.

"We have built a dynamic and well trained team, created a high-performance environment and streamlined our business. And, while we operate in a highly competitive landscape, we believe that we have strong advantages in serving large enterprises in Europe and across the globe. We are well on track for our plan of building one of Europe's leading unified communications companies, both organically and through highly selective acquisitions.

"This year will see us concentrate on business transformation as we aim to capitalise on the systems investments we made last year. We will also prioritise customer satisfaction as we launch a major 'Voice of the Customer' programme, designed to develop service leadership by understanding customer needs and prioritising innovative service enhancements. We will also see the benefits of our new 24x7 multilingual network operations and support centre opened in Poland last month."

Bright future

"The future looks very bright indeed," concludes Williams. "Macro-economic conditions are relatively favourable, however our sector and competitive value proposition - rock solid technology, highest technical accreditation, on-time delivery and market leading managed services - position us to grow at rates well in excess of wider economic predictions."

About Damovo

Damovo delivers technology-enabled business efficiencies to enterprises around the world. Our customers benefit from our 40 years of experience, expertise and ecosystem of industry partners. Through our consultative approach (understand, deliver and improve) we work with our customers to explore how technology can support their business objectives now and into the future.

Our solutions portfolio includes unified communications and collaboration, enterprise networks, contact centres and global IT managed services.

Damovo has regional offices across Europe and a global capability spanning over 100 countries. Whatever the sector and wherever the geography, we give our 2,000 customers the tools they need to accomplish continuous business improvement.

In January 2015, Damovo was acquired by Oakley Capital, along with Matthew Riley who is the Executive Chairman.

Explore more at www.damovo.com

About Oakley Capital Private Equity II

Oakley Capital Private Equity II is an unlisted mid-market private equity fund with the aim of providing investors with significant long term capital appreciation. The Fund's investment strategy is to focus on buy-out opportunities in industries with the potential for growth, consolidation and performance improvement. The Fund seeks to invest in companies with scale in their industry subsectors, thereby creating a sustainable earnings stream which should command a premium on exit.

[1] Registered as Damoco Holdco Limited

[2] EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, and also excludes non-trading holding company costs

[3] DACH refers to D  Deutsch (German), A  Osterreich (Austria), CH  Schweiz (Switzerland)

[4] Benelux refers to Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg

Media contact:

Eoin McGinley

Comit PR

Tel: +353-1-215-7675

Mob: +353-86-193-3443

Email: [email protected]

www.comit.ie

SOURCE Damovo

Related Links

http://www.damovo.com


DENVER, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Datavail, a leading provider of remote database administration services, and Big Footprint, a search-centric marketing agency, announced the honor of winning "Best Results" at the 2016 Business Marketing Association Gold Key Awards. The recognition took place at the annual Gold Key Awards gala Friday, April 22nd, at the Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum with over 300 B2B marketers in attendance.

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This is the third time in four years Big Footprint has won this award. In addition, they also won the Gold Key Award for Total B2B Campaigns - $250K+, the entry for which they won Best Results.

Big Footprint and Datavail received the "Best Results" honor by achieving an mROI of 3,560% on an integrated campaign that included SEO, PPC, CRO, content, and social. By providing a comprehensive, search-centric lead generation strategy focusing on driving monthly recurring revenue from Datavail's industry-leading database management services, Datavail saw a 40% increase in PPC and SEO leads and a 69% increase in Organic Traffic.

Robin Caputo, Datavail's Chief Marketing Officer, said, "Big Footprint has been a valuable partner in the growth of our inbound marketing strategy. Their programs have driven direct, measurable ROI, helping Datavail to attain our goals."

"The entire Big Footprint team is very proud of the results we've driven in this combined effort with Datavail. We are grateful for this recognition from our peers in the B2B space," said Nick Yorchak, Founder of Big Footprint.

The Gold Key Awards is recognized as Colorado's most prestigious competition dedicated solely to business-to-business marketing communications. This year's program received nearly 200 submissions from some of the state's top B2B businesses and agencies. A panel of six independent judges representing agency and corporate marketing professionals across the country scored entries in more than 65 categories.

About Datavail

Datavail Corporation is the largest pure-play provider of remote database administration (DBA) services in North America, offering 247 managed database services, database design, architecture, and staffing. The company specializes in Oracle, Oracle E-Business Suite, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB, DB2, and SharePoint, and provides flexible onsite/offsite, onshore/offshore service delivery options to meet each customer's unique business needs. Founded in 2007, Datavail is based in Broomfield, Colo. and supports enterprise clients located worldwide. For more information, visit www.datavail.com.

About Big Footprint

With the intense competition for eyeballs online today, it's not enough anymore to simply build a digital presence. You have to draw people to it. Big Footprint makes your presence known. A Denver-based search-centric marketing agency, Big Footprint is led by a team of seasoned experts specializing in various aspects of the search spectrum. Founded in 2009, we partner with B2B & B2C marketers, agencies, and web developers to augment the online marketing campaigns you're creating or have already launched. We architect and execute digital marketing programs through the science of search. The effect is both powerful and profitable. We will help you make more money.

CONTACT

Nick Yorchak

Email

303-549-6259

SOURCE Big Footprint

Related Links

http://www.bigfootprintdigital.com


PUNE, India, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The 2016 global DBS report segments the deep brain stimulation market by application and divides into four broad segments covering Parkinson's Disease, Dystonia, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Epilepsy. Increasing prevalence of neurological disorders is one of the critical factors driving the growth of this (DBS) deep brain stimulation market globally.

Complete report on deep brain stimulation market spread across 61 pages, analyzing 3 major companies and providing 36 data exhibits is now available at http://www.sandlerresearch.org/pressrelease/global-deep-brain-stimulation-market-2016-2020.html.

In this industry research report, the analysts have estimated factors such as the emergence of hybrid neuroprosthetic devices will contribute to the growth of the deep brain stimulation market until the end of 2020. Manufacturers are increasingly focusing on combining neuroprosthetic technologies with pharmacological and electrical neuromodulation therapies for the brain, brainstem, and spinal cord to improve the recovery of motor functions. This device is known as a hybrid neuroprosthetic device which includes a catheter implanted in the brain tissue and a subcutaneously placed drug reservoir, which can be periodically refilled.

A micro-computer is fixed closer to these components, which analyzes the electrophysical data and controls the reservoir. This combination of two technologies can result in much efficient and effective treatment of neurological disease, thereby impelling deep brain stimulation market growth over the predicted period. With more than 450 million people worldwide affected by neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer disease, brain injuries, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease (PD), strokes, peripheral neuropathy, and paralysis, the deep brain stimulation market has a positive outlook in the coming years. For instance, PD is a progressive neurological disorder that affects the central nervous system resulting in muscle stiffness and slow movement. Although PD cannot be cured completely with medicines, DBS is preferred as it can be used to improve motor symptoms.

The analysts forecast global deep brain stimulation market to grow at a CAGR of 10.59% during the period 2016-2020.Most DBS systems have received CE mark in Europe and then received approval in the US. Frequent approvals by regulatory services boost the market growth. The rise in the number of products seeking approval may help the market grow at a rapid pace during the forecast period.

During 2015, PD dominated the global deep brain stimulation market and accounted for more than 76% of the market share. DBS system is implanted in patients whose PD symptoms like tremor, rigidity and stiffness cannot be treated with the help of medicines. In such cases, MRI scanning is done to identify the diseased area in the brain so the physicians can implant the electrodes that stimulate motor neuron. According to the Parkinson's disease Foundation, close to 10 million people have PD around the world which is expected to drive this market until the end of 2020.

Key players in the global deep brain stimulation market: Boston Scientific Corp., Medtronic plc, and St. Jude Medical Inc. Other prominent vendors in the market are: Adaptive Neuromodulation, Aleva Neurotherapeutics, Beijing Pins Medical, NeuroPace, and NeuroSigma. Order a copy of Global Deep Brain Stimulation Market 2016-2020 report @ http://www.sandlerresearch.org/purchase?rname=53663.

Another related report is Global Neurostimulation Devices Market 2015-2019, which forecasts the worldwide neurostimulation devices market to grow at a CAGR of 5.37% over the period 2014-2019. Available pharmacological treatment for conditions such as chronic pain, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, and depression are not sufficient for all patients at all stages of treatment. More than 100 million people suffer from these conditions in the US alone. Though drug therapy, physiotherapy, and surgeries are effective treatment options, they are not suitable for all patients. Browse complete report @ http://www.sandlerresearch.org/global-neurostimulation-devices-market-2015-2019.html.

Explore other new reports on Medical Device Market @ http://www.sandlerresearch.org/market-research/medical-device.

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SOURCE Sandler Research
WASHINGTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Next year's Defense spending bill passed out of the House Armed Services Committee with many pro-worker provisions endorsed by the American Federation of Government Employees, including an amendment to reverse steep cuts in travel expenses for civilian employees who spend months away from home supporting our warfighters.

Lawmakers debating next year's Defense spending bill approved a provision that would reverse steep cuts in travel expenses for civilian employees who spend months away from home supporting our warfighters. This was one of many pro-worker amendments endorsed by the American Federation of Government Employees that were passed out of the House Armed Services Committee during debate of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. AFGE represents 270,000 civilian workers in the Department of Defense.

"Nearly all of the amendments we supported on behalf of the 270,000 civilian employees AFGE represents in the Department of Defense were included in the spending bill that passed out of the House Armed Services Committee," AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. said.

"AFGE will work to retain these provisions as this bill moves through the congressional process, and we will fight to remove any language that would undermine the critical jobs that civil service workers perform on behalf of the American people," Cox said.

President Cox thanked the following members of Congress for standing up for federal workers: Rep. Rob Bishop (Utah), Del. Madeleine Bordallo (Guam), Rep. Tammy Duckworth (Illinois), Rep. Walter Jones (North Carolina), Rep. Ruben Gallego (Arizona), Rep. Rick Larsen (Washington), Rep. Beto O'Rourke (Texas), Rep. Mike Rogers (Alabama), Rep. Austin Scott (Georgia), Rep. Mark Takai (Hawaii), and Rep. Timothy Walz (Minnesota).

One anti-worker provision that was included in the bill would defund the Defense Commissary Agency by converting it to a non-appropriated fund (NAF) entity. This change would force the commissaries to raise prices on military families and slash pay and benefits for commissary workers.

"Many of the commissary's workers are veterans or spouses of service members. Slashing the modest pay and benefits of future commissary workers is an unconscionable proposal that AFGE will continue to fight as the spending bill advances in Congress," Cox said.

Following are some of the AFGE-backed provisions included in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that cleared the House Armed Services Committee:

Reverse steep cuts in per diem rates for employees who travel away from home for longer than 30 days at a time;

Extend the cap on service contract spending to deter DoD from shifting work from the civilian workforce to contractors;

Establish guidelines for converting non-military essential work from civilians or contractors to military personnel;

Require DoD to use the easy-to-review Army checklist for complying with existing laws and rules on contracting;

Require DoD and the military services to report on skill gaps created as a result of mandatory headquarters cuts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) positions as well as in depots and arsenals;

Provide DoD industrial facilities with direct hiring authority for two years;

Allow DoD industrial facilities to transfer employees who were hired competitively for term and temporary positions to permanent positions that are open to both internal and external applicants if they have already worked at least two years;

Ensure continued use of the current Title 10 definition for commercial items for core depot maintenance;

Allow arsenals to charge variable labor rates to make their pricing more competitive;

Request a report on the role of DoD depots in maintaining the C-130;

Require DoD to identify critical defense items sole sourced to foreign entities and develop a plan for bringing that work back to U.S. arsenals and depots.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the largest federal employee union, representing 670,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia.

For the latest AFGE news and information, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

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SOURCE American Federation of Government Employees

Related Links

http://www.afge.org


Kenichiro "Ken" Ito will serve as chairman of DENSO's North American Board of Directors and chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of DENSO International America, Inc., DENSO's North American corporate headquarters. Located in Southfield, Michigan, Ito will oversee all North American group companies and affiliates. He will be responsible for strengthening our One DENSO approach to business and the DENSO brand in North America. Previously, he served as executive director of the Corporate Planning, Finance & Accounting Division and Business Innovation Department at DENSO Corporation in Japan. Ito will assume the position from Sadahiro "Sam" Usui who will serve as CEO of DENSO International Europe B.V.

Hisaaki Sato will serve as president and chief operating officer of DENSO International America, Inc., responsible for overseeing all aspects of business related to OEM customers for DENSO in the Americas. Previously, he served as executive director of Global Sales & Business Development, Global Business Planning, Chubu Sales and Hiroshima Sales divisions at DENSO Corporation. Sato will assume the position from Kazumasa "Kaz" Kimura who will serve as executive director of Global Sales & Business Development, Global Business Planning, Chubu Sales and Hiroshima Sales divisions.

Satoshi "Scott" Inukai will be promoted to senior director of Global DENSO. Inukai will serve as chief manufacturing officer (CMO) of DENSO International America, Inc., responsible for overseeing all aspects of manufacturing in North America in addition to the lead of North America Production Innovation Center.

About DENSO Corporation:

DENSO Corp., headquartered in Kariya, Aichi prefecture, Japan, is a leading global automotive supplier of advanced technology, systems and components in the areas of thermal, powertrain control, electronics and information and safety. Its customers include all the world's major carmakers. Worldwide, the company has more than 200 subsidiaries and affiliates in 38 countries and regions (including Japan) and employs more than 150,000 people. Consolidated global sales for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016, totaled US$40.2 billion. Last fiscal year, DENSO spent 8.8 percent of its global consolidated sales on research and development. DENSO common stock is traded on the Tokyo and Nagoya stock exchanges. For more information, go to www.globaldenso.com, or visit our media website at www.globaldenso.com/en/newsreleases/media-center/

About DENSO in North America:

In North America, DENSO employs more than 22,000 people at 30 consolidated companies and affiliates. Of these, 25 are manufacturing facilities located in the United States, Canada and Mexico. In the United States alone, DENSO employs more than 14,000 people in California, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Arkansas. DENSO's North American consolidated sales totaled US$9.9 billion for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016. For more information, go to www.densocorp-na.com.

Connect with us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/DENSOinNorthAmerica

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SOURCE DENSO Corporation

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Owner/Operator Kelley Millikin spent most of his career in business to business sales and account management prior to becoming an entrepreneur. Having lived in Ohio for 23 years, he decided to make his passion into a career and go into the barbecue business full time. "I knew Dickey's was the right concept because of the exceptional growth rate and the quality of the product," Millikin says. "This franchise appeals to my natural love of barbecue, but as a potential business owner I chose Dickey's for the operations efficiency and quality." The specific locations for the new stores have not been determined as of yet, but they will be located in Central Ohio, in the Columbus area.

"We are proud to bring Texas-style barbecue to the Midwest, and have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our guests in that region," says Roland Dickey, Jr., CEO of Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc. "The Dickey family congratulates new Owner/Operator Kelley Millikin on his development agreement and we look forward to our brand's expansion in Ohio."

To learn more about franchising with Dickeys, visit www.dickeys.com/franchise or call 866-340-6188.

To find the Dickey's Barbecue Pit nearest you, click here. Find Dickey's on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

About Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc.

Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc., the nation's largest barbecue chain was founded in 1941 by Travis Dickey with the goal of authentic slow smoked barbecue. Today, all meats are still slow smoked on-site in each restaurant living up to the company tagline, "We Speak Barbecue." The Dallas-based family-run barbecue franchise offers a quality selection of signature meats, home style sides, tangy barbecue sauce and free kids' meals every Sunday. The fast-casual concept has expanded to 550 locations in 43 states. Dickey's was recognized for the third year by Nation's Restaurant News as a "Top 10 Growth Chain" and by Technomic as the "Fastest-growing restaurant chain in the country." For more information, visit www.dickeys.com or for barbecue franchise opportunities call 866.340.6188.

Media Contact:

Kimberly Harms / Michelle George

[email protected] / [email protected]

972.248.9899

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SOURCE Dickey's Barbecue

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FISHKILL, N.Y., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Hudson Valley Fertility, a leading infertility and reproductive health practice in the Hudson Valley of New York State, is pleased to announce that Dr. Hyacinth Nicole Browne will join the practice. Dr. Browne will see patients at their new office at 380 Route 202 in Somers. The new office will help improve access to reproductive care in Westchester, Putnam and Western Connecticut.

Dr. Browne graduated with honors from Dartmouth College and completed medical school at Yale University. She completed a residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Yale New Haven Hospital, followed by fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the National Institutes of Health. Prior to joining Hudson Valley Fertility, Dr Browne served as Medical Director of a private IVF and reproductive practice. She has years of experience in reproductive medicine, and is the recipient of numerous scientific and clinical awards. She also has been noted to have excellent online patient reviews, as a testament to the compassionate and personalized medical care that she gives to her patients.

According to Dr. Daniel Levine, Medical Director of Hudson Valley Fertility, "We are thrilled to have Dr. Browne become part of our family. Dr. Browne brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, compassion and sensitivity to the practice of reproductive medicine. She will be a key part of our mission to help couples struggling with infertility to achieve their dream of having a child and building a family."

Hudson Valley Fertility, with offices in Fishkill and Somers, is the only medical practice in the region offering comprehensive, advanced infertility treatment and reproductive health services, as well as educational and support services for patients. Hudson Valley Fertility specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of infertility and reproductive disorders, and offers a full range of treatment options, from simple drug therapies to In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and Assisted Reproductive Technologies. The practice offers the highest standards of personalized and affordable reproductive care for Dutchess, Putnam, Ulster, Rockland, Westchester, Orange, and Sullivan counties as well as Western Connecticut, Northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

For an appointment or additional information, please call Hudson Valley Fertility at 845-765-0125, email at [email protected] or on the web at www.hudsonvalleyfertility.com.

CONTACT:

Melissa Vega

Tel: 845-765-0125

[email protected]

SOURCE Hudson Valley Fertility

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INAUGURAL AWARD RECOGNIZES ENTREPRENEURIAL INNOVATION

PLYMOUTH, Minn., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Monteris Medical today announced that Mark Torchia, Associate Professor of Surgery in the College of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Manitoba and Richard Tyc, P.Eng., the Company's Vice President of Technology and Advanced Development, received the inaugural Governor General's Innovation Award in recognition of AutoLITT, a technology that they co-developed. This technology gave rise to Monteris Medical's NeuroBlate System, a laser thermotherapy device that enables minimally invasive robotic treatment of a variety of neurosurgery indications. The NeuroBlate System is currently being used in more than 35 hospitals throughout the United States and Canada.

The Governor General's Innovation Awards celebrate outstanding Canadian individuals, teams and organizations who contribute to Canada's success, shape the country's future and inspire the next generation of creators and trailblazers. Award recipients were identified through a two-stage merit-based selection process managed by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. The award will be conferred on Dr. Torchia and Mr. Tyc at a ceremony taking place at Rideau Hall, Ottawa and presented by His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada.

"We are honored to receive the inaugural Governor General's Innovation Award for our minimally invasive alternative for brain surgery, designed to improve the care and outcomes of patients with a variety of brain disorders," said Dr. Torchia. "We hope that our progress in medical devices will inspire others in Canada and around the world to develop the next generation of transformative technologies."

Dr. Torchia and Mr. Tyc developed AutoLITT as a minimally invasive alternative to open brain surgery that could allow surgeons to effectively target brain lesions while minimizing patients' pain and recovery time. Although laser-based methods were already in use for neurological conditions at the time they began their work, these approaches did not give surgeons adequate control to precisely target specific brain lesions. In 1990, while working at St. Boniface General Hospital in Winnipeg, Dr. Torchia developed the first NeuroBlate prototype. Mr. Tyc joined him in 1999 to advance and commercialize the technology. Together, they founded Monteris Medical, Inc.

"On behalf of Dr. Torchia and all of my incredibly talented and determined colleagues at Monteris, we are excited to receive this award next month and genuinely appreciate the recognition," said Mr. Tyc. "The growing application of NeuroBlate among neurosurgeons demonstrates that our work is helping to address an important unmet need. The road from conception to commercialization is substantial but our journey is not over. Even as we receive this award for our achievement, Monteris remains committed to optimizing the use of this technology to further improve patient outcomes."

The NeuroBlate System combines magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer visualization to allow surgeons to remotely destroy and coagulate lesions at multiple locations in the brain, at the surface or deep inside, with the aid of sophisticated computer software. During a procedure, a surgeon makes a small hole in the skull, approximately as wide as a pencil, and precisely guides a laser probe via an MRI compatible robotic driver to apply controlled amounts of heat until the targeted tissue is destroyed.

In traditional brain operations, MRI is used after the surgery to determine if the lesion had been removed. With NeuroBlate, however, MRI visualization is used throughout the procedure, which enables real-time surgical decision-making. NeuroBlate also allows surgeons to reach tumors that are difficult to access with standard surgery or were previously considered inoperable.

About the Governor General's Innovation Awards

Established in 2015 and awarded for the first time in 2016, the Governor General's Innovation Awards are designed to inspire Canadians to be entrepreneurial innovators and to foster an active culture of innovation that has meaningful impact on Canadians' lives. The awards are under the aegis of the Office of the Secretary of the Governor General of Canada, in collaboration with the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation, and the Rideau Hall Foundation. Each year, up to six award winners will be identified through a two-stage merit-based selection process that is managed by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. The Awards' Advisory Committee comprises highly accomplished Canadians from all sectors of Canadian society. The Awards program operates on an annual cycle, with an awards ceremony held each spring.

For more information on the Governor General's Innovation Awards, please visit https://innovation.gg.ca/en/.

About the NeuroBlate System

The NeuroBlate System is Health Canada-licensed and FDA-cleared to ablate, necrotize or coagulate soft tissue encountered in the discipline of neurosurgery through the application of laser thermotherapy. NeuroBlate is a tool (as opposed to a "treatment") and is not intended to treat any specific disease. Physicians should use their clinical judgment and experience when deciding whether to use NeuroBlate.

Full prescribing information for the NeuroBlate System is available at www.monteris.com.

About Monteris

Monteris Medical is a privately held company developing innovative MRI-guided, laser-based brain lesion therapy. Monteris Medical markets the NeuroBlate System, a neurosurgical ablation device providing controlled therapy for brain lesions. The company also offers the Monteris Mini-Bolt, the only cranial bolt system that enables a robotic interface for protected and precise therapy delivery, as well as the AtamA Stabilization System for MRI-guided neurosurgical procedures requiring head fixation.

For more information on Monteris Medical please visit www.monteris.com.

SOURCE Monteris Medical

Related Links

http://www.monteris.com


BEIJING, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The three-day 2016 ASU-GSV Summit came to a successful end in San Diego, California on April 20. EduStars Chinese Educational Delegation, with an in-depth participation in the Summit, made its debut on behalf of the education industry in China. Initiated by TAL Education, EduStars Delegation was comprised of CEOs and executives of 26 well-known Chinese educational science and technology enterprises.

ASU-GSV Summit is a premier global conference on educational science and technology. During the Summit, EduStars Delegation successfully held symposiums on the difference between and the opportunities of the Chinese and American education markets, a wine party, and a matchmaking event for participating enterprises. Presentations and speeches were also given at the GSV Summit.

Cheng Junxia, CEO of Qiaowen Edu, participated in the matchmaking event where she had one-on-one meetings with a number of American companies including TeachMe, Tiggly and Speakaboos. She was deeply impressed by the emphasis her American counterparts put on philosophy. When introducing a product to her, they would first explain their educational philosophies, while the products are designed on the basis of actual needs. "Hopefully, through international communication, we can bring better products to the children in China," she said.

Zhang Hua, CEO of YouthMBA College, focused more on the content of educational products. He was impressed by the importance American companies place on student assessments. Assessments and evaluations were the most talked-about topics in his own company. Zhang Hua said, "We issue challenges to students after live lessons each week, and students can upload their work which is done offline. In this sense, a sound assessment system is critical. Things are far from perfect. We will work to make improvements."

Chinese entrepreneurs greatly benefited from participating in the ASU-GSV Summit. It has been an inspiring and thought-provoking experience in terms of company operation, management, educational philosophy, products, and the future trends in the education industry. What's more important, they become more confident in the education industry of China. Chen Xiangyu, CEO of Each Baby, commented after the Summit, "At ASU-GSV Summit we heard voices from the world, but the world has also come to realize that China is already a force to be reckoned with and the Chinese education market, online education market in particular, is of unlimited potential in the future."

Zhang Kailei, founder of Wenba, said "I'm really glad to know that the best place for education entrepreneurship on this planet is in China rather than America. I want to root for Wenba and cheer ourselves on."

ASU-GSV Summit, while bringing inspiration to all participants in the three day event, has reminded those working in the Chinese education industry of the responsibilities on their shoulders. Zhang Yang, CEO of Shunshun, wrote in his WeChat moments, "From 8:00 in the morning when Jim Collins delivered his speech until now, I have been at meetings with talented people from all sectors. The key words are brain-racking, sleepy, but eager for more! We are still too weak and our understanding of the world too limited. I am humbled and I want to learn and practice with more humility...together with two generations of brilliant young people in this industry, I hope we can make it, bringing benefits to customers, consultants, companies, and the industry, and make some small changes that count."

After listening to the analysis made by EduStars on the Chinese education market, Noelle Millholt, CEO of Speakaboos, a start-up company focusing on English education for children, started to think about steps to prepare for entering into the Chinese market such as employing local staff in China, looking for Chinese partners, and translating products into Chinese, and so on. He said that, "The Chinese market will be the strategic focus of our company in the future."

Josh Daniels from Knewton participated in the seminar themed "American Enterprises Entering into Chinese Market" held by EduStars. After the event, he exclaimed that, "It's the first time to see a delegation from China at the ASU-GSV Summit, through which, I learned how enterprises at different stages of development view the Chinese market, and how to deal with all sorts of challenges after entering into the Chinese market. We have greatly benefited from what the Chinese enterprises have said about the Chinese market."

This journey to America is the first time for Chinese educational science and technology enterprises, as a whole, to communicate and brainstorm with American enterprises on issues such as Chinese and American education markets and the educational trends of the future.

As a platform connecting educational enterprises and for the improvement of the industry, EduStars has realized the following three major objectives: first, the summit has enabled Chinese educational science and technology enterprises to exchange with world leading companies and opened their horizons to advanced educational concepts and products of the international educational industry; second, Chinese educational science and technology enterprises have displayed to the world their current achievements on educational science and technology, laying the foundation for opportunities to enter into foreign markets and develop international cooperation; third, the Chinese enterprises have talked about the nature of education with their American counterparts and explored the possibility of reshaping education through technological innovation.

Hu Guozhi, joint founder of Changingedu, said with heartfelt sincerity after the Summit, "Future is in my mind, shall we walk hand-in-hand towards it, leaving the past behind?"

EduStars Delegation comprises listed companies including TAL Education, ATA, LANXUM Internet Education, iFLy TEK and Talkweb, and emerging enterprises such as Changingedu, Shunshun, Xuebajun, EEOA, Liulishuo, VIPKID, SchoolPal, Each Baby, Kaomanfen, Flight Education, Babytree, and FIRST LEAP, as well as media outlets such as Phoenix Media and Mustard.

The ASU-GSV Summit is the biggest and most-attended conference on educational science and technology in the world. Since 2010, the Summit has attracted up to 10,000 participants including business leaders, education professionals, philanthropists, and policy makers. Former attendees include Bill Gates, Condoleezza Rice (former Secretary of State), Salman Khan (founder of Khan Academy), and Jim Collins (author of Built to Last).

Overview of EduStars:

As a leading membership-based learning network founded by TAL Education Group ("TAL"), EduStars is committed to providing entrepreneurs who hope to "drive education progress with technology and Internet" with a platform for incubation, training, cooperation, and helping the vast number of entrepreneurs realize their business dreams with its global vision and resources.

EduStars has held three sessions so far, attracting a total of 1,800 education programs, and gathering 108 brilliant CEOs from start-ups. EduStars enjoys a great reputation among both members and industrial peers for its rich and practical courses and a colorful array of activities.

EduStars has always emphasized cross-sector elements when inviting tutors and designing courses. Elites from various industries have been invited to share their vision and insight in EduStars Entrepreneur Camp, including Yu Minhong, Chairman of XDF, XuXin, President of Capital Today, Li Feng, Founder of Frees Fund, Liu Chengmin, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent, Fang Sanwen, CEO of Snowball, Wang Huainan, CEO of Babytree, Yu Kai, President of Baidu Institute of Deep Learning, and LuoZhenyu, Founder of Luogic Show. A series of services concerning incubation, training, and investment are also provided for free.

Themes and courses of each camp are highly relevant to the latest industrial trends, which are set on remodeling learning, enhancing reputation, winning in the future, and gaining momentum. The courses cover diversified topics. For example, there are in-depth reports focusing on industrial perspective such as the widely circulated Report of Online Education Industry of China, Initial Exploration of Educational Markets in US, Japan, and South Korea which focuses on foreign markets and typical case studies of overseas markets, as well as deep interpretation from the angles of capital markets, financing strategies, business models, reputation building, and vertical communities.

EduStars has attracted members with very diversified backgrounds including industry veterans like Juren Education and Huatu.com, newcomers like Yuantiku.com and Shunshun, as well as key players from the Internet industry like Guokr and Taobao Education.

At present, EduStars is recruiting members for its 4th session who are from more diversified backgrounds. They include Vanke Education, the crossover real estate player, Zuoyebang, backed by BAT "Internet corps," Knewton, which is an overseas adaptive learning platform, kuailexue.com, which is now entering public schools, and Nami Box. There have been 31 confirmed members on the list.

Contact person of TAL Education Group Chen Xi +86-158-0166-7028 [email protected]

SOURCE EduStars
LONG BEACH, Calif., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Epson America, Inc., regional headquarters of Seiko Epson Corporation (TSE: 6724, "Epson"), today announced that John Lang, president and CEO will retire effective June 30, 2016. As part of a planned succession, Keith Kratzberg, currently senior vice president, will assume the role of president and chief executive officer as of July 1, 2016.

Lang joined Epson America in 1987 and has served as president and CEO for the past 14 years. In this role, he has been the driving force behind the company's strategic direction and consistently strong operational performance. He led the company through a period of unprecedented change in technology, markets and customers. Under his leadership, Epson significantly grew a wide-range of businesses in over 20 countries in North and Latin America and the Caribbean. Lang was also instrumental in dramatically expanding Epson's strategic focus from a consumer and small business printer manufacturer to a market leader in businesses as diverse as robotics, textile printing, augmented reality display technology, and point of sale solutions. Under Lang, Epson America has grown its branded market share to a number one or two position in virtually all of the categories it competes in and has grown the company's operations to more than 2,000 employees in North and Latin America with revenues in excess of $2.5 billion.

"Since I began at Epson almost three decades ago, I have been extremely fortunate to have worked with an incredible team of professionals across the Americas, at our Seiko Epson headquarters and around the world," said Lang. "Together we have helped bring innovative, reliable and easy-to-use technology solutions that enrich all aspects of our customers' lives  from business to the home. It has been an honor to be part of a company that has set a high bar for integrity, quality and collaboration."

Keith Kratzberg joined Epson in 1996 and has held positions of increasing responsibility in product development, marketing, sales, strategy, and general management. Since 2011, he has held the position of senior vice president, Sales & Marketing, most recently successfully expanding his management and oversight to the Latin America region of Epson America. Kratzberg has been responsible for driving innovation and market leadership across Epson's wide range of consumer and commercial imaging products, 3LCD projectors and point-of-service solutions.

"With over 20 years at Epson America, and 11 years as a member of our senior management team, Keith's extensive experience in overseeing all aspects of the business combined with his consistent track record of driving revenue growth makes him the ideal person to lead Epson America's next phase of growth," said Lang. "Keith's experience at Epson and market knowledge will ensure a seamless transition."

"I am very excited to step into this role and look forward to further enhancing Epson America's position as a market leader," said Kratzberg. "I'm honored to have been affiliated with the management, employees, partners, and customers of Epson under John Lang's leadership and look forward to continuing to grow and develop his legacy of leadership, innovation and partnership. Moreover, I appreciate the support Seiko Epson has shown me in this transition and look forward to continuing the growth of the Epson brand in the Americas."

About Epson

Epson is a global technology leader dedicated to connecting people, things and information with its original efficient, compact and precision technologies. With a lineup that ranges from inkjet printers and digital printing systems to 3LCD projectors, smart glasses, sensing systems and industrial robots, the company is focused on driving innovations and exceeding customer expectations in inkjet, visual communications, wearables and robotics.

Led by the Japan-based Seiko Epson Corporation, the Epson Group comprises more than 67,000 employees in 90 companies around the world, and is proud of its contributions to the communities in which it operates and its ongoing efforts to reduce environmental impacts.

Epson America, Inc., based in Long Beach, Calif., is Epson's regional headquarters for the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. To learn more about Epson, please visit: epson.com. You may also connect with Epson America on Facebook (facebook.com/Epson), Twitter (twitter.com/EpsonAmerica), YouTube (youtube.com/EpsonAmerica), and Instagram (instagram.com/EpsonAmerica).

EPSON is a registered trademark and EPSON Exceed Your Vision is a registered logomark of Seiko Epson Corporation. Copyright 2016 Epson America, Inc.

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SOURCE Epson America, Inc.

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Valuable Treasures Special Exhibition Held In Nanjing Museum (Photo : Getty Images)

For permitting the Thaihot Group, a property developer, to use the hall of the Nanjing Museum to launch the sales of the companys villas, the museums curator is in hot water. The event featured actor Jackie Chan who helped sell 88 Chinese-style villas.



The action star helped promote the luxury housing project of Thaihot Group in Nanjing by being part of the events formal tea-drinking ceremony, playing a Chinese zither and watching a performance of a Chinese opera at the press conference.



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The project is under construction near the Confucius Temple. The first batch of 14 villas are priced between 30 million and 50 million yuan, reported The South China Morning Post. The average price of the villas is 65,000 yuan per square meter, which makes the project the costliest villa in the city.



Since the Nanjing Museum is a historic site, it is required by law to report to regulators its plan to host a press conference. The curator also breached regulations since it staged a commercial event not related to the museums role to protect culture, said municipal cultural authorities.



However, Thaihot said that by holding the event at the museum, it helped highlight the projects close links with the cultural history of Nanjing. CRIEnglish reported that the event was held at the museums Chaotian Temple on Sunday with about 500 attendees. The press conference lasted for about one hour.






NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EyeLock LLC, a market leader of iris-based identity authentication solutions, today announced that it was the recipient of the 2016 Edison Silver Award in the Consumer Electronics & Information Technology- Security Solutions for innovative design and technology. The award was given at the black-tie Edison Awards Gala held at New York's historic Capitale ballroom on April 21, 2016.

The company received the prestigious award for its Iris Identity Authentication for the Internet of Things (IoT). EyeLock IoT brings iris identity authentication and user protection to an easily embeddable and widely deployable OEM configuration. The technology is easily integrated across existing and emerging IoT lifestyle devices and consumer endpoints  smartphones, laptops, wearables, appliances, even vehicles and bank ATMs  with biometric security surpassed only by DNA-matching.

The Edison Awards recognize and honor the most innovative products, services and companies from around the world. The Edison Awards are named after Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) whose extraordinary new product development methods garnered him 1,093 U.S. patents and made him a household name.

"Our judges recognized EyeLock IoT as a true innovator out of the many products in its category," said Frank Bonafilia, executive director of the Edison Awards.

"The Edison Awards prides itself on identifying innovation globally across all markets. More than 7,500 companies, products and services were vetted to find the few hundred accepted nominations this year. Of those, only 134 were chosen as Edison Awards Finalists. We are excited that EyeLock is among the few thought-leaders defining the future of their space selected this year!" said Steve Herring, Senior Nominations Manager of the Edison Awards.

Originally established in 1987 by the American Marketing Association, but an independent organization since 2008, the Edison Awards have recognized and honored some of the most innovative products and business leaders in the world and is among the most prestigious accolades honoring excellence in new product and service development, marketing, design and innovation.

The nominees for the 2016 Edison Awards were judged by a panel of over 3,000 leading business executives, including past award winners, academics, and leaders in the fields product development, design, engineering, science, and medicine.

"We are honored to receive this prestigious innovation award from the Edison Awards committee," said Anthony Antolino, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer. "This acknowledgment is a testament to the extraordinary talent at EyeLock and capability of our technology," he said.

EyeLock's technology provides an unprecedented level of convenience and security with unmatched biometric accuracy, making it the most proven way to authenticate identity aside from DNA. EyeLock's proprietary iris authentication technology looks at more than 240 unique iris characteristics, and is one of the only companies in the world to utilize dual-eye authentication.

Contact:

Anthony Antolino

P: 914-619-5548

E: [email protected]

About EyeLock

EyeLock LLC is an acknowledged leader in advanced iris authentication for the Internet of Things (IoT), providing the highest level of security with EyeLock ID technology. Iris authentication is highly secure because no two irises are alike and the iris is the most accurate human identifier other than DNA. The company's significant IP portfolio, including more than 75 patents and patents pending, and proprietary technology enables the convenient and secure authentication of individuals across physical and logical environments. EyeLock's solutions have been integrated and embedded across consumer and enterprise products and platforms, eliminating the need for PINs and passwords. Corporations across the Fortune 500 recognize the level of security EyeLock provides due in part to its extremely low false acceptance rate, ease of use, and scalability. As a sponsor member of the Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a safer and more secure digital presence for consumers, EyeLock is dedicated to advancing digital privacy and next generation security.

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com

SOURCE EyeLock

Related Links

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WASHINGTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed Senate Bill 1556, which prevents counselors and therapists from being forced to counsel in a manner that conflicts with their orthodox religious beliefs provided they refer to another counselor or therapist.

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins released the following statement:

"Tennessee lawmakers are right in acting to protect the ability of therapists and counselors to continue serving in their helping profession in a manner that does not conflict with their religious beliefs. America has a long and storied history of respecting Americans' freedom to believe and actually live their lives according to those beliefs. It was this tolerance and understanding that led the first Congress and the American people to enshrine religious freedom in our Constitution.

"Senate Bill 1556 is an important first step in preserving this fundamental freedom for those who do not agree with the Left's radical ideology. Tennessee joins North Carolina and Mississippi in the growing list of states refusing to criminalize people whose beliefs about sexuality and marriage are at odds with President Obama's extreme political and social agenda.

"The response from the Left to this modest bill once again reveals the absolute intolerance of those seeking to redefine human relationships and sexuality. It is clear that their goal is not access to services, it's forcing all Americans to accept their system of beliefs or face government imposed penalties. They believe that a therapist or counselor who can't in good conscience violate their deeply held beliefs should not be allowed to continue to serve. They believe that counseling students like Julea Ward should be forced to violate their conscience or be blocked from practicing.

"Many therapists and counselors are motivated to serve by sincerely held religious beliefs, they and everyone else are entitled to First Amendment protections," concluded Perkins.

SOURCE Family Research Council

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CARROLLTON, Texas, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- FASTSIGNS International, Inc., the leader in signs, graphics and visual communications, announced today it is the Bronze winner of the 2016 Canadian Franchise (CFA) Awards of Excellence in Franchising in the Traditional  Mature/Established franchise systems category. The award was presented to FASTSIGNS International on April 18, 2016 during a Gala Awards Presentation at the 25th annual CFA National Convention in Ottawa, Ontario. The company was also honored as a recipient of the Franchisees' Choice designation for the fourth year in a row.

Considered the pinnacle of franchise achievement in Canada, CFA Awards of Excellence in Franchising are given annually to franchise systems that have demonstrated the strongest, most mutually-rewarding relationships with their franchisees, based on the results of a comprehensive survey of franchisors and franchisees administrated by third-party firm, Portage Group.

"We are truly honored to receive this award from the Canadian Franchise Association and proud to be recognized as a leading sign, graphic and visual communication franchise system in Canada," said Catherine Monson, CEO of FASTSIGNS International, Inc. "We are continuing to grow at an aggressive rate, and understand that having highly satisfied, successful franchisees is key to FASTSIGNS International's future growth in Canada and around the globe."

This year, nearly 60 CFA member franchise systems participated in the survey and more franchisees completed the survey than ever before. Participating franchise systems were assessed on their performance in key areas, including franchisee relations, leadership, business planning, marketing, training and support, ongoing operations and communications.

"The CFA Awards of Excellence in Franchising truly set a benchmark for franchisors in Canada and we are pleased to recognize FASTSIGNS for their commitment to excellence in franchising," says Lorraine McLachlan, CFA president and CEO. "A solid relationship between franchisor and franchisee is vital to the system's success and FASTSIGNS International's results show that they offer outstanding support to their franchisees."

Open exclusively to CFA members who have been franchising for three years or more, the CFA Awards of Excellence in Franchising competition includes four categories to enable franchise systems to be rated against their peers. Entries are separated into Traditional Franchises (i.e. those with bricks and mortar locations) and Non-Traditional Franchises (i.e. mobile, home-based, etc.), then grouped based on the length of time they have been operating (three to 10 years and 11+ years).

Franchise systems with the highest scores in each category are recognized with Bronze, Silver and Gold CFA Awards of Excellence. The prestigious CFA Award of Excellence in Franchise Grand Prize is awarded to one of the four Gold category winners. For more information about the CFA Awards of Excellence in Franchising or the Franchisees' Choice designation and a list of winners, visit www.awardsprogram.ca.

In addition to the above recognition, FASTSIGNS International has received acknowledgement by the Franchise Research Institute and Franchise Business Review for global satisfaction from its franchisees. The fast-growing FASTSIGNS brand currently has over 600 locations worldwide in nine countries, and is looking to expand with additional new, Co-Brand and Conversion centers. Due to the ongoing need for visual communications and digital signage technology, the company expects to open another 45 to 50 locations in 2016, including 5 to 7 in Canada, as well as finalize master franchise agreements in two new countries.

For information about the FASTSIGNS franchise opportunity, contact Mark Jameson ([email protected] or 214-346-5679) or download an eBook that explores the FASTSIGNS franchise opportunity at http://amzn.to/1FrnDJu.

About FASTSIGNS

FASTSIGNS International, Inc. is the worldwide franchisor for the more than 600 FASTSIGNS sign, graphic and visual communications centers in nine countries including the US (and Puerto Rico), Canada, England, Mexico, the Caribbean, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Australia (where centers operate as SIGNWAVE). The largest sign franchise in North America, the independently owned and operated FASTSIGNS centers provide comprehensive visual communications solutions to help customers of all sizes  across all industries  meet their business objectives and increase their business visibility through the use of signs, graphics, printing, promotional products and related marketing services. The Franchise Research Institute has named FASTSIGNS a top sign and graphics franchise and has awarded the company certification as a 2015 World-Class Franchise for four consecutive years. FASTSIGNS was also recognized by USA Today, Military Times magazine, G.I. Jobs magazine and Franchise Business Review as one of the top franchises for military veterans. For more information about FASTSIGNS franchise programs, contact Mark Jameson ([email protected] or 214-346-5679) or visit http://www.fastsigns.com/

About the Canadian Franchise Association

The Canadian Franchise Association (CFA) is the recognized authority on franchising in Canada. With almost 600 corporate members nation-wide, representing many of Canada's best-known brands, CFA is the indispensable resource for the franchise community and advocates on behalf of franchisors and franchisees in Canada to enhance and protect the franchise business model. CFA promotes excellence in franchising and educates Canadians about franchising, specific franchise opportunities and proper due diligence through its many events, programs, publications, and websites (www.cfa.ca and www.LookforaFranchise.ca).

CONTACT:

Rachel Tabacnic

Fish Consulting

954-893-9150

[email protected]

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SOURCE FASTSIGNS International, Inc.

Related Links

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BOCA RATON, Fla., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University and Providence College has found that vivid language intended to assure potential whistleblowers they will be protected from retaliation is instead likely to evoke fear and make them less likely to report misconduct.

"When you start listing all the protections that you're giving them you start raising their awareness of the risks and dangers," said James Wainberg, Ph.D., a professor of accounting at FAU's College of Business and co-author of the study with Stephen Perreault, Ph.D., assistant professor at Providence College School of Business. "It serves to raise their level of anxiety and has the opposite of its intended effect. All the protections are really a list of the things that can go wrong."

It's the first study to demonstrate that promoting explicit whistleblower protections can have the unintended consequence of actually inhibiting reporting of misconduct by intensifying the perceived risk of retaliation.

The researchers surveyed a group of students in a university graduate auditing course. The results suggest that explicitly raising the specter of retaliation, even to reassure potential whistleblowers they will be protected from it, increases perceptions of risk on average by about 25 percent over what it would be otherwise.

"That's really counterintuitive," said Wainberg, who's also researching the impact of financial incentives for whistleblowers. "You really should be getting people to feel at ease and interested in calling."

Whistleblowing has grown in recent years, thanks in large part to Congress' enactment in 2002 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which protects whistleblowers who report violations of securities laws, and the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which significantly increased the protections available to whistleblowers in the financial services industry.

A 2014 Global Fraud Study by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that whistleblower tips are by far the most common fraud detection method, accounting for more than 42 percent of all cases. That's more than twice the rate of any other detection method. The study also found that employees account for nearly half of all tips that led to the discovery of fraud.

The study was published in the current issue of the American Accounting Association journal Behavioral Research in Accounting. The results of Wainberg and Perreault's work should encourage the corporate world to rethink the increasing use of explicit anti-retaliation reminders in reporting systems. Rather than describing explicit protections offered from retaliation, they wrote, organizations could instead more explicitly describe the organization's commitment to good corporate governance and ethical behavior.

"There's still a lot of research to be done in this area to look for what is really best practices in this regard," Wainberg said. "Even though I'm all for these protections, listing all of them out may not be the best way to go."

About Florida Atlantic University

Florida Atlantic University, established in 1961, officially opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, the University, with an annual economic impact of $6.3 billion, serves more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students at sites throughout its six-county service region in southeast Florida. FAU's world-class teaching and research faculty serves students through 10 colleges: the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, the College of Business, the College for Design and Social Inquiry, the College of Education, the College of Engineering and Computer Science, the Graduate College, the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, the Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing and the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. FAU is ranked as a High Research Activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The University is placing special focus on the rapid development of critical areas that form the basis of its strategic plan: Healthy aging, biotech, coastal and marine issues, neuroscience, regenerative medicine, informatics, lifespan and the environment. These areas provide opportunities for faculty and students to build upon FAU's existing strengths in research and scholarship. For more information, visit www.fau.edu.

Media Contact: Jim Hellegaard, 561-319-2233, [email protected]

This news release was issued on behalf of Newswise(TM). For more information, visit http://www.newswise.com.

SOURCE Florida Atlantic University

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LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Report Details

The global market for floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) can be divided into two distinct areas: the LNG FPSOs (Liquefied Natural Gas Floating Production Storage and Offloading Vessel) and FSRUs (Floating Storage and Regasification Units). This report addresses both of these markets, quantifying the opportunity for growth expected over the next ten years. Traditionally, LNG facilities have been built onshore. Rising construction costs, times, and a reluctance to commit to long term facilities have resulted in increasing use of FLNG units as an alternative.



The oil price collapse in 2014 and into early 2015 has considerably impacted investment in FLNG. This report includes in-depth analysis and forecasting of the oil price, discusses the link between the price of oil and of LNG, and discusses other driving factors that will determine the price of LNG in the coming decade. All these factors are incorporated into visiongain's FLNG CAPEX forecasts. Visiongain values the global FLNG market at $6.19 billion in 2015.



Floating regasification vessels, in operation since 2005, allow for flexible transportation of LNG. Three companies, Excelerate Energy, Golar LNG and Hoegh LNG have taken the majority of ownership of floating regasification vessels thus far, though several more have started to enter the market. There are currently 21 units operational in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and Southeast Asia. Floating regasification vessels will be particularly useful in areas where there are, at present, major gas shortfalls (e.g. Egypt, India, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea, and Bangladesh). The introduction of further floating regasification vessels will continue throughout the world, however, since they are less expensive per mmtpa (million metric tonnes per annum) of capacity, are built to deadline, and are faster to build than onshore facilities. They can be used as well for short periods (under 5 years) or long periods (over 5 years) and can be leased or owned, whereas onshore terminals are constructed for decades of use.



Floating liquefaction has been proposed as an economical solution to monetising stranded and associated gas. As of March 2015, there are no floating liquefaction vessels in operation, though the Exmar and Pacific Rubiales vessel will commence operation off the northern coast of Columbia in mid-2015. Petronas' first vessel is also due to become commercially operational in late 2015 off the coast of Malaysia. Generating the most attention in the FLNG market is Shell's Prelude, the most expensive FLNG vessel to date, due to come online by 2017 for use off the west coast of Australia. These three vessels represent the wide range of capacity floating liquefaction vessels can have; the Shell vessel is of the large variety, producing over 3 mmtpa of LNG. The Petronas vessel is of the medium-sized variety, and will produce 1-2 mmtpa, whereas the Exmar/Pacific Rubiales vessel will produce just .5 mmtpa. Despite only three liquefaction vessels in production there are a number of conceptual designs at different stages of project development due to come online throughout the forecast period. This report includes an expert interview with one of the companies driving new LNG FPSO design. Visiongain anticipates a handful of final investment decisions (FID) will be taken over the next three years. The technical intricacies of constructing FLNG production facilities will ensure a build time of between three and five years depending on the design.



Why you should buy The Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) Market 2015-2025

What is the future of the FLNG market? How will the great uncertainties in the LNG market impact spending on FLNG? How has the oil price collapse in 2014 impacted CAPEX on FLNG vessels? Who are the major companies involved in the market, and what is their market share? Visiongain's comprehensive analysis contains highly quantitative conte

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SARASOTA, Fla., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Florida EB-5 Regional Center and Spoleto Brazil announce its partnership to provide an initial $25 million EB-5 investment opportunity within the restaurant industry. With two existing established Spoleto USA locations in Orlando, at the University of Central Florida and the Florida Mall, the partnership aims to grow the brand to 25 new locations throughout the Orlando metro area and 100 locations throughout the State of Florida.

The Florida EB-5 Regional Center will offer up to 50 units of Membership Interests in EB-5 Spoleto Investors, L.P. for investors qualified to participate in the Employment Based Fifth Preference Immigrant Visa Program (the "EB-5 Program"). The Company has been formed for the sole purpose of making a loan to finance a portion of the costs of developing, constructing and operating of 25 new Spoleto USA restaurants in Central Florida. The Loan will be in the maximum amount of $25 million. The Project will be owned and controlled by affiliates of Spoleto Florida LLC.

The Florida EB-5 Regional Center, LLC has been approved as a designated EB-5 regional center for the State of Florida by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The EB-5 model was created in 1990 by Congress and developed under USCIS, a division of the United States Department of Homeland Security, to stimulate the U.S. economy through job creation and capital investment by foreign investors. Under the EB-5 program, foreign entrepreneurs and their immediate family have a pathway to citizenship by making an investment in a commercial enterprise in the U.S, by creating a minimum of 10 local jobs for each $500,000 of investment within a designated Targeted Employment Area.

Grupo Trigo, a Brazilian entity, founders Mario Chady and Eduardo Ourivio continue their 24-year tradition of providing superior culinary experiences to customers in Brazil through their management of more than 360 Spoleto restaurants, 124 Domino's Pizza restaurants (as that brand's master franchisor in Brazil), 100 Koni Store restaurants, 8 GoKoni locations, and a new casual dining concept named Gurume.

Grupo Trigo has also expanded into Mexico with 6 Spoleto restaurants and to Costa Rica with 2 Spoleto restaurants.

Grupo Trigo intends to continue this trend of growth by introducing the United States to the quality and delight that is Spoleto USA. In order to achieve the level of market penetration and economies of scale necessary to compete in a new region, Grupo Trigo is seeking EB-5 investors to join in, to Follow Spoleto to the U.S.A. The Project will benefit from the vision and experience of Grupo Trigo through its oversight of Spoleto USA, LLC, and Spoleto Florida LLC.

Spoleto USA concept combines the speed of fast-casual service with the sophistication of an Italian restaurant and gourmet-quality food. A choice of 30 authentic Italian-inspired toppings gives the customer the chance to create meals that inspire their palate. Customers can craft a pasta dish, flatbread or salad and interact, talk and laugh with the chefs of the restaurant to experiment with a variety of fresh ingredients in an open kitchen. Customers can choose to indulge in richer ingredients like meats and cheeses, as well as a full complement of fresh vegetables, whole grains and fruits. Spoleto USA has made it its mission to use ingredients in their simplest, most natural form, depending on daily deliveries of seasonal produce from locally owned farms. Spoleto sources produce that is nutrient-rich and organic when possible.

The name  Spoleto | My Italian Kitchen  captures the entire restaurant concept for each Spoleto location. Named in tribute to an ancient Italian city, which reflects Spoleto's commitment to providing the sophistication of an Italian restaurant with gourmet-quality food. Spoleto invites dining patrons to transform the restaurant's kitchen into their own. At Spoleto, the customer becomes the chef and directs the preparation of their meal. Each customer can choose from six types of pasta, or flatbread, or four types of salad greens.

Spoleto prepares each meal in full site of the patron utilizing the best ingredients available. Signature ingredients like Truffle Infused Mushrooms, caramelized onions, roasted garlic, and salad dressings are all made in-house. Dishes are served on real porcelain plates and wood platters, not disposable paper products destined for a landfill.

The Fast Food Restaurants industry in the US is engaged in a prolonged transition away from anonymous and unhealthy products and toward higher quality, locally sourced, and ethically conscious menu items. While the convenience and low price offered by industry participants will likely remain popular indefinitely, consumer preferences are redefining what Americans think of when they think of "fast food." Restaurants are offering an unprecedented level of choice to consumers along with healthier options.

Leading the Spoleto USA team, Mr. John Velasquez, is an experienced restaurant executive in the United States and internationally. Before becoming President of Spoleto, USA, John worked in International Development and Business Strategy for Domino's Pizza in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Mr. Carlos Oliveira, Spoleto USA Financial Manager is a graduate in Economics of Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He began working for Grupo Trigo in October 2009. Following his position as coordinator of financial planning in 2013, he was transferred to Orlando in 2014 to become Financial Manager of Spoleto USA.

Mr. Rodolfo Dana, Chief Financial Officer of Grupo Trigo, is responsible for the financial, IT and Legal facets of the Group. Mr. Dana joined Grupo Trigo as Financial Planning Manager in 2011 and became the CFO in 2013. Prior to joining Grupo Trigo, Mr. Dana worked at BroadSpan Capital, an independent investment banking firm that specializes in Latin America and Caribe, providing advisory for cross border mergers, acquisitions, financial restructuring and capital raising. Previously, Rodolfo worked at Icatu Harford, the Brazilian insurance arm of The Hartford Group. Mr. Dana is a CFA charterholder, and holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from PUC-RJ and a Specialization in Corporate Law from FGV-RJ.

For EB-5 investment opportunity information: Visit www.SpoletoEB5.com

For EB-5 program and project information: Visit www.FLEB5.com

Email contact: [email protected] or [email protected]

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com

SOURCE Florida EB-5 Regional Center

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FREMONT, Calif., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ValGenesis, Inc., the market leader in Enterprise Validation Lifecycle Management Solutions (VLMS) today announced that a prominent world provider of products and services for sufferers of chronic kidney failure has selected ValGenesis Validation Lifecycle management System to manage their corporate validation process. The global medical device manufacturer had been seeking a software solution to manage their validation processes electronically. Upon completion of their evaluation, they determined that ValGenesis VLMS would significantly improve their current validation process in terms of increased efficiency, reduction in validation lifecycle times, improvement in regulatory compliance as well as providing a holistic view of validation projects across multiple global manufacturing sites.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360977LOGO

The flexibility of ValGenesis's automated workflow, form designer and process designer platform will make Validation, Risk and Change management processes easier while significantly reducing the time it takes to accomplish these tasks. Furthermore, the flexibility, web services and scalability tools built into the core solution of ValGenesis software will easily integrate with other software applications such as ERP, LIMS, MES, Document Management Systems, Quality Management Systems and Assets Management Systems, etc.

"ValGenesis has proven its value to all types of Life Science companies, as this particular client is a global expert in dialysis products and solutions as well as a renowned provider in the renal patient care services. We at ValGenesis are delighted to partner with a unique global leading device and services provider, opening yet another arena in the Life Science industry," commented Narayan Raj, Vice President of ValGenesis Inc. "ValGenesis is becoming a de-facto standard for global life science companies, as it allows them to manage their validation process electronically, reduce the validation cycle time, enable standardization, and enforce consistency and compliance in the corporate validation process."

About ValGenesis

ValGenesis, Inc. is the creator of an innovative software platform serving as the foundation for managing compliance-based validation activities in Life Sciences companies. ValGenesis, Inc. provides the first enterprise application to manage the corporate validation lifecycle process. As the only system for managing validation execution and approval 100% electronically, ValGenesis was selected by an industry peer review committee to receive the Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) New Innovative Technology Award. The solution is fully compliant with U.S. FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and Annex 11 requirements. For more information, visit www.valgenesis.com

Media Contact:

Nancy DeFilippis

Email

510-445-0505 x1025

SOURCE ValGenesis Inc

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TORONTO, April 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -

Who: Foresters, an international financial services provider committed to the well-being of families, is offering assistance to its members affected by flooding in Texas.



What: Eligible members experiencing significant personal hardship as a result of the flooding can receive grants to help with immediate needs.





Members who are directly affected by the flooding can contact Foresters toll-free at 800 828 1540 between the hours of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST, Monday to Friday, or e-mail Foresters at [email protected].

About Foresters

For 140 years, Foresters, an international financial services provider, has fulfilled its purpose to enhance family well-being for its members and the communities where they live. A fraternal benefit society, Foresters offers quality life insurance and investment products, unique member benefits and inspiring community activities. Foresters shares its financial strength with more than one million members in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit foresters.com and facebook.com/foresters.

Foresters Financial and Foresters are trade names and trademarks of The Independent Order of Foresters (a fraternal benefit society, 789 Don Mills Road, Toronto, Canada M3C 1T9) and its subsidiaries. 413245D US (01/16)

SOURCE Foresters

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Mitnick will deliver a keynote address for an expected 11,000 attendees of UBM America's East Coast advanced manufacturing event held June 14-16 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City. The event features seven co-located Expos covering the entire range of industry verticals, including medtech powerhouse event MD&M East.

From Most Wanted Black Hat to White Hat

Once one of the FBI's Most Wanted for hacking into 40 major corporations just for the challenge, Kevin is now a trusted security consultant to the Fortune 500 and governments worldwide. As CEO and chief "white hat" hacker at one of the most advanced boutique security firms in the world, he and The Global Ghost Team now maintain a 100 percent successful track record of being able to penetrate the security of any system they are paid to hack into using a combination of technical exploits and social engineering.

The Art of Deception: How Hackers and Con Artists Manipulate You and What You Can Do About It

During his keynote address on June 16, Kevin will demonstrate how easily you can fall victim to a motivated hacker with malicious intent. People are the weakest security link. They can be manipulated into unknowingly helping hackers break into their organization's devices  think about the potential impact and damage to manufacturing operations! Kevin will perform his "live technology magic show" of the latest social engineering techniques. You'll learn how to detect manipulation and take steps to protect yourself and your organization by thinking defensively.

"As one of the world's most respected authorities on cyber security, Kevin Mitnick is the perfect addition to the event's already stellar keynote lineup," said Stephen Corrick, senior vice president and portfolio director of UBM Americas' Advanced Manufacturing group. "Security breaches dominate the headlines, and we don't want the next feature story to be about one of our community's own. As remotely controlled devices  from mobile health to factory equipment  become the new standard, we want to help arm organizations against cyber threats."

Previously Announced Keynote Speakers include Astronaut and Former CEO

Each morning of the event will open with a thought-provoking keynote address by one of the industry's biggest thinkers. For the first time, the keynote presentations will be open to Expo pass holders across all industries. The full keynote schedule is as follows:

Day 1, Inspirational ( Tuesday, June 14 ) : Dr. Leroy Chiao - Astronaut and Pioneer in Commercial Spaceflight

: Dr. - Astronaut and Pioneer in Commercial Spaceflight Day 2, Aspirational ( Wednesday, June 15 ) : Martin McCourt - Former CEO of Dyson

: Martin McCourt - Former CEO of Dyson Day 3, Technical ( Thursday, June 16 ) : Kevin Mitnick  The World's Most Famous Hacker

Keynote presentations will take place at the start of each day of the event, June 14-16, 9:00-9:45am.

To request a Media Pass to attend keynotes along all seven co-located events, visit: https://newyork.am.ubm.com/2016/registrations/media

Beyond access to the keynote presentations, attendees will have the chance to meet with top suppliers, demo cutting edge innovations, and build relationships with other professionals across the community. From complimentary content on the Expo floor, to exclusive educational opportunities across conference tracks, the event will cover the industry's most trending topics.

To learn more about the seven co-located advanced manufacturing Expos happening June 14-16 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, NY, please visit:

About Advanced Manufacturing Expos & Conferences

UBM's Advanced Manufacturing portfolio is the leading B-to-B event producer, publisher, and digital media business for the world's $3 trillion advanced, technology-based manufacturing industry. Our print and electronic products deliver trusted information to the advanced manufacturing market and leverage our proprietary 1.3 million name database to connect suppliers with buyers and purchase influencers. We produce more than 50 events and conferences in a dozen countries, connecting manufacturing professionals from around the globe. The Advanced Manufacturing portfolio is organized by UBM Americas, a part of UBM plc (UBM.L), an Events First marketing and communication services business. For more information, visit ubmamericas.com.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360908

SOURCE UBM Americas
A model stands by a KIA vehicle at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition on April 25, 2016 in Beijing, China. (Photo : Getty Images/VCG/VCG )

There is no doubt that the United States and Europe are far ahead in technology related to self-driving car development, but China is trying to catch up with them with a controlling structure that may put the country ahead in the race.



It is expected that this year China may unveil a draft roadmap for highway-ready, self-driving cars in the ensuing three to five years and autonomous vehicles for driving in urban areas by 2025. The draft will define the technical standards, counting a common language for all such cars to communicate with one another; infrastructure as well as regulatory guidelines, Reuters reported.



Advertisement

According to Li Keqiang, an automotive engineering professor at Tsinghua University, who chairs the committee drafting the plan, the draft roadmap will introduce a unified framework, which would be different from a melange of state laws as well as standards prevailing in the United States. The committee is supported by the dominant Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.



Recently, a former safety chief for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, David Strickland, said in Beijing that in the absence of such coordination, the patchwork of state laws and standards may restrain the progress of self driving car development in the United States. On the other hand, the top-down approach of China may see the country surpass the U.S. and Europe, where the auto manufacturers themselves decide on the industry standards.



China's top-down approach could see it overtake the U.S. and Europe, where automakers have generally been left to agree among themselves on industry standards. A push for self-driving and electric cars also fits with Beijing's shift to an economy driven by high-tech and consumer industries rather than heavy industry and low-end manufacturing, AFP reported.



Chinese carmakers have already demonstrated the progress made by them in developing self-driving vehicles at the recently held Beijing International Automotive Exhibition, which offered a picture of the emerging trends in the largest auto market globally. According to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, China is currently placed number on for electric models having sold an estimated 247, 000 "zero emission" cars last year.



Currently, just about one percent of cars in China are electric. However, authorities are promoting electric cars as a possible solution to the air pollution health crisis plaguing the country. In fact, the central government offers 55,000 yuan ($8,500) subsidy to buyers for each electric car and these vehicles have been exempted from traffic restrictions.



Watch the video "China to take on Google with its self-driving cars" below:






LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Summary

With a neutral stance during times of war and a reputation for being a peace loving nation, Switzerland has traditionally assigned only modest amounts of its budget to defense. With no major threat from any nation and people voting against the procurement of military equipment and increasing the military budget, the country is expected to register lower military budget growth rates, on par with historical numbers. In 2013, thegovernment increased its defense budget expenditure by 9.4% compared to the previous year, based on a planned equipment procurement program. The growth was triggered by the country's need to invest in military equipment and devices based on new age cutting-edge technologies, replacing outdated equipment. However, in 2014 the people voted against the procurement of fighter jets from Sweden, which resulted in a decline in military expenditure. Moreover, the Ministry of Defence announced in 2014 that, following the vote, the army budget for 2015 will be slashed and this resulted in a decline by 7.1% in 2015. Consequently, military expenditure is forecast to increase steadily, to US$5.2 billion in 2020, at a CAGR of 1.38%.



Key Findings

- Over the historic period, defense expenditure registered a decline of 0.96%, decreasing from US$5.1 billion in 2011 to US$4.9 billion in 2015



- Military expenditure, valued at US$5billion in 2016, is expected to increase to US$5.2billion by 2020, registering a CAGR of 1.38% over the forecast period



- Military expenditure will be driven by the procurement of better defense systems and participation in peace keeping and conflict resolution operations



- The Defense Ministry is expected to procure UAV's, multi-role aircraft MRO, and cyber security



Synopsis

Strategic Defense Intelligence's Swiss Defense Industry - Market Attractiveness, Competitive Landscape and Forecasts to 2020report offers detailed analysis with market size forecasts for 2016-2020. The factors that influence demand, key market trends, and challenges faced by industry participants are also covered.



In particular, it provides an in-depth analysis of the following:



- Defense industry market size from 2016-2020, including highlights of the demand drivers and growth stimulators. A snapshot of the country's expenditure and modernization patterns are provided



- Budget allocation and key challenges: insights into procurement schedules formulated within the country and a breakdown of the defense budget with respect to the army, navy, and air force. The key challenges faced by defense market participants within the country are also detailed



- Porter's five forces analysis: study the market characteristics by determining the bargaining power of suppliers, buyers, threat of substitution, intensity of rivalry, and barriers to entry



- Import and export dynamics: review the prevalent trends in the country's imports and exports over the last five years



- Market opportunities: identify the top five defense investment opportunities from 2015 to 2025



- Competitive landscape and strategic insights: including an overview of leading players, key alliances, strategic initiatives, and a brief financial analysis



Reasons To Buy

- Identify and track the global defense market and make regional comparisons to effectively target new revenue streams



- Understand the importance of being led by the defense ministries in the military procurement market and define your strategies with insight on what your customers really want by analyzing recent orders, technical specifications, and the country's expected investment pattern during 2016-2020



- Make correct business decisions based on a detailed analysis of the industry from 2016-2020, which includes the total competitive landscape of the sector with detailed profiles of the top domestic and foreign defense manufacturers along with information about their products, alliances, recent contract wins, and financial analysis



- Determine prospective investment areas by gaining an in-depth understanding of the industry in terms of market opportunities



- Channelize resources by identifying various military requirements that are expected to generate revenues across different sectors during 2016-2020

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Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

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For more information:

Sarah Smith

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Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

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The GS8 is powered by GAC Motor's second-generation Ti-POWER320T engine which features a low-inertia E-Turbo turbocharger, GCCS combustion control that increases power by 22 percent while lowering gas consumption by 15 percent, and a DCV VT double-span variable valve timing.

The new SUV is also equipped with i-4WD, the on-demand four-wheel drive system manufactured by global auto parts supplier Borg-Warner Automotive. Drivers can easily switch between different gear ranges  2WD/AUTO/4WD LOCK  via a center console to help with performance over rough terrains and improve safety at high speed and on rainy or snowy days, while remaining more fuel-efficient compared with 4WD.

Both the exterior and interior design of the GS8 demonstrate GAC's long-held conviction for auto making  "Brave in Exploitation." The design is led by world-famous, award-winning designer Zhang Fan who previously worked with Mercedes-Benz. Inspired by Chinese and western culture, he and his team make the new SUV a perfect representative of both reserve and strength.

With its square front face and straight bodyline, the impressive GS8 inherits GAC Motor's iconic grille design  the "Flying Dynamics" inspired by grand, sculptural light and shadow. Perfectly blended with the grille area are the matrix-structured headlights, each comprised of four LED light modules, while the U-shaped taillights share the same geometric silhouette for a deep, multi-layered lighting effect.

As for the interior, the simple and elegant arrangement and quality materials jointly shape the center console and door panel in a fine and luxury style. The two areas are linked through camphorwood-grained boards and gold metallic decorative lines that provide an overall reddish-brown and beige color scheme and a warm and natural atmosphere that is both comfortable and safe.

"The GS8, released right after our other two high-end models, the GA8 and GM8, illustrates the strong R&D capability and quality assurance system of GAC Motor in the new era of the Ti-POWER engine," said Wu Song, General Manager of GAC Motor.

The unveiling of the GS8 in Beijing also welcomed the visit of Rod Alberts, director of the North American International Auto Show and executive director of Detroit Auto Dealers Association. "The GS8 is superior in quality  I cannot see any differences between it and cars made in the U.S. I hope GAC Motor can soon sell their products in the U.S. I can't wait for a drive," said Alberts.

Targeting the mid and high-end markets, GAC Motor has overturned the stereotypical images of Chinese car brands with strong advantages in quality, performance, design and the ability to deliver continuous technological innovations.

Over the past eight years, GAC Motor has created the GAC production system (GPS) to meet fast changing market demands and established international supply chain systems in Europe, America, Japan and South Korea. The assembly line allows vehicle production to be completed in 57 seconds.

The company's Cross Platform Modular Architecture (CPMA) strategy has streamlined the period of complete vehicle development from 36-48 months to 25-28 months and the overall sharing rate of CPMA has reached nearly 80 percent.

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.

E-mail address: [email protected]; [email protected]

Facebook, Twitter: GAC Motor

Instagram: gac_motor

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SOURCE GAC Motor
WYOMISSING, Pa., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- With the recent retirement of Steve Matsick, Glen-Gery president since 1996, the company presented Steve with a scholarship in his name for students of architecture at The Pennsylvania State University.

"The $25,000 scholarship, named 'The Steve Matsick  Glen-Gery Scholarship for the Department of Architecture' will fund a five-year scholarship in Steve's honor for architecture students. It will help alleviate the financial burden that so many students face today and allow them to focus more of their time and energy on their studies. The scholarship is a fitting tribute that recognizes his 35-year career at Glen-Gery," said Doug Rende, President, Glen-Gery.

Over the many years of Glen-Gery's affiliation, the company has supplied Penn State's University Park campus, as well as many of the University's commonwealth campuses, with millions of brick for various building projects. "This continuing corporate commitment supports our shared belief that scholarships are necessary not only to help our students, but also so that the department can attract the best and brightest. This scholarship demonstrates Glen-Gery's investment in the architects of tomorrow," stated Mehrdad Hadighi, Department Head of Architecture, Stuckman Chair of Integrative Design, The Pennsylvania State University.

About Glen-Gery

With over 125 years of industry expertise, Glen-Gery is a share-leading manufacturer of brick and stone products and distributor of in-house manufactured and sourced exterior/interior building products to the residential and commercial channels in the U.S. and Canadian markets. With 10 manufacturing plants and 10 company owned distribution locations supporting builders, remodelers, contractors, architects, designers and end-users, Glen-Gery is a key operating company within Ibstock PLC, UK.

About Penn State

Supporters like Glen-Gery are invaluable partners in fulfilling the University's land-grant mission of education, research and service. Private gifts from alumni, friends and corporate partners enrich the experiences of students both in and out of the classroom, expand the research and teaching capacity of our faculty, enhance the University's ability to recruit and retain top students and faculty and help to ensure that students from every economic background have access to a Penn State education. The University's colleges and campuses are now enlisting the support of alumni and friends to advance a range of unit-specific initiatives.

Contact

Glen-Gery Corporation

1166 Spring Street

PO Box 7001

Wyomissing, PA 19610

(610) 374-4011

www.glengery.com

[email protected]

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SOURCE Glen-Gery

Related Links

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LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Prabhat Vira has been appointed President of Tungsten Network Finance, the supply chain finance arm of the Tungsten Network business. Bringing more than 30 years of global banking experience to the team, his appointment further strengthens Tungsten Network as it implements its ambitious growth strategy to become the world's most trusted business transaction platform.

Vira has held senior positions in banking businesses across the world including roles in London, New York, Amsterdam, Singapore and India. He arrives from HSBC where he served as the Global Head of Strategic Transformation and Regional Head North America for HSBC's Trade & Receivables Finance business, responsible for transforming their business, building sustainable programs and securing new revenue streams. Prior to that, he headed up RBS and Citizen Bank's transaction banking business for the Americas, leading, motivating and energizing a team of 380 trade finance and payments specialists across the Americas.

As President of Tungsten Network Finance, Vira is working closely with Richard Hurwitz, the CEO of Tungsten Corporation, to develop a radical "100 day plan" which will shape his strategy for the business. He will lead Tungsten Network's supply chain and receivables finance offering and will build on the launch of the Early Payment service that enables suppliers to, at the click of a button, get approved invoices paid early.

Prabhat Vira said: "I am extremely excited to be joining Tungsten Network at such a significant time for the business. I have substantial experience in building financial operations across the world and pioneering change throughout organizations. Within the myriad of alternative funding options on the market, we have an amazing opportunity to leverage technology and analytics to position Tungsten Network at the forefront of the industry. Our Early Payment service, in particular, offers unparalleled easy-to-use flexibility for suppliers and my mission is to enable more companies to realize its potential for maximizing cash flow."

Richard Hurwitz, CEO, commented: "Digital transformations are changing how businesses operate and opening up innovative new ways to secure finance. Tungsten Network is driving such change and Prabhat's arrival provides us with the experience and leadership to accelerate adoption of our distinctive financing offerings."

Tungsten Network is a global e-invoicing provider, increasing efficiencies in the invoicing process and delivering cost savings. In addition, it offers early payment as a form of alternative finance, helping to maintain a solid financial supply chain.

Notes to editors

About Tungsten Corporation plc

Tungsten Corporation (LSE: TUNG) aims to be the world's most trusted business transaction network by using data intelligently to strengthen the global supply chain.

Tungsten Network is a secure e-invoicing platform that brings businesses and their suppliers closer together with unique technology that revolutionises invoice processing, maximises efficiency and improves cashflow management. The Tungsten Network also provides users with real-time spend analysis through analytics, and offers access to Early Payment, a form of alternative finance for businesses.

Tungsten Network serves 56% of the Fortune 500 and 67% of the FTSE 100. It enables suppliers to submit tax compliant e-invoices in 47 countries, and last year processed transactions worth over $187bn for organisations such as Alliance Data, Aviva, Cargill, Deutsche Lufthansa, General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Henkel, IBM, Kellogg's and the US Federal Government.

Contact

Speed Communications

Kerry Grove +44(0)117-906-4517 / +44(0)7872-811735

Lizy Kidwell +44(0)117-906-4571 / +44(0)7527331796

[email protected]



SOURCE Tungsten Corporation
The WHO SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands annual campaign was launched in 2009 to demonstrate that hand hygiene is one of the most important and first steps healthcare workers can take to reduce HAIs and enhance patient safety. This campaign also serves as a platform to demonstrate the world's commitment to hand hygiene in healthcare.

"The 2016 campaign focuses on safe surgical care and aims to improve hand hygiene practices hospital-wide, and in particular in all surgical services through the patient journey - from patient admission to operating room, surgical wards and including outpatient surgery," said Professor Didier Pittet, M.D., director, infection control programme, University of Geneva Hospitals and Faculty of Medicine and Lead Advisor, WHO Challenge Clean Care is Safer Care Programme. "We hope that hospitals and healthcare facilities from around the world will join together on May 5th to highlight the important role hand hygiene plays in keeping healthcare workers and patients safe."

"This year WHO is focused on the important role hand hygiene plays in surgical care,'" said Jim Arbogast, Ph.D., GOJO vice president of hygiene sciences and public health advancements. "At GOJO, the safety of all healthcare workers and patients is top of mind. Because of this, we focus on bringing hand hygiene solutions to the surgical care market that help improve hand hygiene effectiveness, compliance and ultimately help reduce infections."

To raise awareness for effective hand hygiene and the initiative facilitated by WHO, GOJO is encouraging hospitals to register and join more than 18,000 hospitals worldwide in supporting the WHO's efforts, as well as providing more than 30,000 units of PURELL Advanced Hand Sanitizer and hand hygiene materials to hospitals across the globe.

This year GOJO has also partnered with the CDC Foundation to provide unbranded hand hygiene educational materials and tools for patients, healthcare providers and caregivers in U.S. healthcare facilities, such as hospitals, nursing homes and other ambulatory care locations through the Clean Hands Count Campaign.

In addition, GOJO has sponsored the Canadian Patient Safety Institute's (CPSI) STOP! Clean Your Hands Day Program, which coincides with the WHO global initiative. Canadian Healthcare facilities can get more information at www.handhygiene.ca and view educational tools and resources to assist in promoting optimal hand hygiene practices.

PURELL Advanced Hand Sanitizer has been a critical solution to many hospitals across the world in helping to prevent the spread of infections in healthcare settings. Studies have consistently demonstrated the importance of using PURELL Instant Hand Sanitizer in healthcare settings where infection rates in long-term care facilities were reduced by 30 percent2 and a 36 percent reduction in a hospital setting.3

About GOJO

GOJO Industries is the inventor of PURELL Advanced Instant Hand Sanitizer and the leading global producer and marketer of skin health and hygiene solutions for away-from-home settings. The broad GOJO product portfolio includes hand cleaning, handwashing, hand sanitizing and skin care formulas under the GOJO, PURELL and PROVON brand names. GOJO formulations use the latest advances in the science of skin care and sustainability. GOJO is known for state-of-the-art dispensing systems, engineered with attention to design, sustainability and functionality. GOJO programs promote healthy behaviors for hand hygiene, skin care and compliance in critical environments. GOJO is a privately held corporation headquartered in Akron, Ohio, with operations in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Japan and Brazil.

1 Pittet D, Allegranzi, B, Storr, S, Bagheri N, Dziekan G, Leotsako A, Donaldson, L. Infection control as a major World Health Organization priority for developing countries. Journal of Hospital Infection. 2008, 68: 285-292.

2 Fendler EJ, Ali Y, Hammond BS. Lyons MK, Kelly MB, Vowell NA, The impact of alcohol hand sanitizer on infection control in an extended care facility. Am J Infect Control. 2002, 30:226-233.

3 Hilburn J. Texas Society of Infection Control Practitioners; Fendler EJ, Groziak PA, Hammond BS, The Use of Alcohol Hand Sanitizer as an Effective Infection Control Strategy in an Acute Care Facility. Am J Infect Control. 2002 Jun; 30(4): 226-33.

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SOURCE GOJO Industries

Related Links

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WASHINGTON and CANTON, Ohio, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Thousands of American companies that do business in Europe directly or online with European customers will need to start reckoning with data privacy regulations enacted this month by the European Union (EU) that are due to go into full effect in just two years, according to the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, Inc. (IAITAM).

IAITAM CEO Dr. Barbara Rembiesa said: "These are sweeping changes to how personal and coprorate data is to be handled and they have far-reaching implications for many aspects of U.S. businesses, particularly in terms of how information security is addressed. The days are long past when U.S. businesses could worry only about complying with laws and rules in this country. Companies that fail to start planning now to deal with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements are going to be in for a real shock."

IAITAM identified the top five impacts the new EU regulations will have on any organization:

1. Data breaches. "A breach of security leading to the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorized disclosure of, or access to, personal data transmitted, stored or otherwise processed"  The changes the GDPR makes to the definition of a data breach are significant. Simply stated, if an organization experiences a data breach, it must now be reported within 72 hours of the company becoming aware of the breach. Up until this point, a data breach typically is only announced in the U.S. when word of the breach is leaked to the public or media.

2. Data Protection Officer requirement. "The Controller or Processor shall designate a Data Protection Officer"  The EU has determined that an individual is necessary at each company doing business in Europe to ensure that data privacy and data control are maintained at a high standard. These Data Protection Officers (DPO) are to be "designated on the basis of professional qualities and, in particular, expert knowledge of data protection law and practices and ability to fulfill its tasks."

3. Consent of those providing data. "The data controller bears the burden of proof for the data subject's consent to the processing of their data for specified purposes. Any written request for consent must be presented in a manner which is clearly distinguishable from other matters. Consent will not serve as a legal basis for processing when there is a significant imbalance between the position of the data subject and the controller."  This aspect of the GDPR requires active acceptance of the terms and conditions by the end-user. Consequently, mere "use" by the end-user will no longer be sufficient acceptance of the terms and conditions.

4. Special handling of data related to Europeans. "Any transfer of personal data to a third country or to an international organization may only take place if, subject to the provisions of this Regulation, the conditions laid down in this Chapter are complied with by the controller or processor, including for onward transfers of personal data from the third country or an international organization to another third country or to another international organization"  This provision was created within the GDPR to specifically protect EU citizen's data once it's moved outside the EU. Any organization that is international in scope and handles personal information of EU citizens such as phone numbers, addresses or any other identifying information will be subject to the GDPR. Also, any organization that received the information "third-hand" will also be subject to the regulation.

5. Potential for hefty fines and court penalties. "For infringements of this Regulation, in particular for infringements which are not subject to administrative fines, Member States shall lay down the rules on penalties applicable to such infringements and shall take all measures necessary to ensure that they are implemented. Such penalties shall be effective, proportionate and dissuasive."  An effective policy is an enforced policy. Subject to what would be referred to as a "tort" in the United States, an organization will be fined by the Member States to ensure that the damage to an individual is made whole in addition to penalties and fines meant to deter any additional infractions. This type of enforcement can become increasingly potent and result in monetary penalties reaching into the billions.

Rembiesa said: "What is important to take away here is that any organization that processes or handles data from EU citizens must become familiar with this legislation and fully understand the impact it will have on daily business processes. Between the sweeping scope of the GDPR and the penalty structure, this is a piece of legislation that should be treated seriously and with an eye to what it will take ensure full compliance."

IAITAM also recommended the following resources for those wishing to learn more:

The European Union General Data Protection Regulation Portal - http://www.eugdpr.org

The International Association of Privacy Professionals: Top 10 Operational Impacts of the GDPR - https://iapp.org/resources/article/top-10-operational-impacts-of-the-gdpr

Squire-Patton-Boggs: EU National Data Protection Regulators Raise Privacy Shield Concerns - http://www.iptechblog.com/2016/04/eu-national-data-protection-regulators-raise-privacy-shield-concerns/

ABOUT IAITAM

The International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, Inc. (IAITAM) is the professional association for individuals and organizations involved in any aspect of IT Asset Management, Software Asset Management (SAM), Hardware Asset Management, Mobile Asset Management, IT Asset Disposition and the lifecycle processes supporting IT Asset Management in organizations of every size and industry across the globe. IAITAM certifications are the only IT Asset Management certifications that are recognized worldwide. For more information, visit www.iaitam.org, or the IAITAM mobile app on Google Play or the iTunes App Store.

SOURCE International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers

Related Links

http://www.iaitam.org


SILICON SLOPES, Utah, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Global SaaS Partner Relationship Management (PRM) technology leader Impartner today announced that the number of clients honored recently by CRN Magazine has climbed by nearly 50 percent or more in every category. This year, 10 customers earned a total of 36 5-Star Partner Programs Awards for 2016, nearly twice as many as 2015, with 23 executives selected as Channel Chiefs, up from 14 last year. Six of those included in the magazine's list of 50 Most Influential Channel Chiefs of 2016, double the number from 2015.

"This dramatic increase in the number of awards received by our customers further validates how Impartner and PRM technology significantly contributes to business success across the channel," said Dave R Taylor, Impartner chief marketing officer. "As these companies and executives are proving, partner programs are much more than just an information repository and a communications channel. With the help of a powerful PRM, they've turned their partners into organizations that are critical and predictable contributors to the bottom line and a key competitive differentiator. We congratulate our customers on this prestigious recognition and look forward to watching their programs continue to succeed in the years ahead."

5-Star Ratings

Impartner customers who won 5-star ratings for their partner programs include A10 Networks, Asigra, Commvault, Fortinet, Ixia, NetApp and Pivot3, honored as Software Vendors; A10 Networks, Asigra, Fortinet, NetApp, Pivot3, Quantum and Tegile, as Systems Vendors; A10 Networks, Commvault, Fortinet and Ixia as Security Vendors; A10 Networks, Asigra, Commvault, Fortinet, Ixia, NetApp and Tegile as Cloud Vendors; A10 Networks, Asigra, Commvault, NetApp, Pivot3, Quantum and Tegile as Storage Vendors; A10 Networks, Fortinet and Ixia as Networking Vendors, and Xerox as a Peripherals Vendor. The 5-Star Partner Program rating recognizes an elite subset of Partner Program Guide vendors who offer solution providers the best partnering elements in their channel programs.

Channel Chiefs

Eran Ferajun of Asigra; Ralph Nimbergood of Commvault; Joe Sykora of Fortinet; Nigel Edwards of HGST; Bill Lipsin of NetApp, and John Corley of Xerox were named to the 50 Most Influential Channel Chiefs of 2016, which represents the "cream of the IT channel cropleaders who drive the channel agenda and evangelize the importance of channel partnerships." Other Impartner customers named Channel Chiefs include Kirsten Lee Young, A10 Networks; Mike Crest, Arcserve; Molly Rector, DataDirect Networks; Jon Bove and Claire Trimble, Fortinet; Patricia Watkins, Internap; Lori Cornmesser, Ixia; Nancy Reynolds, LogRhythm; Scott Strubel, NetApp; Nader Soudah, NexGen Storage; Drew Jenkins, OnRamp; Andrew Brinck and Brad Painter, Quantum; Elizabeth King, SGI; Carmen Sorice III, Sungard Availability Services; Charles Bass, Tegile Systems, and Darren Cassidy, Xerox.

About Impartner

With nearly two decades of experience in accelerating indirect sales, Impartner delivers the industry's most advanced SaaS-based Partner Relationship Management solution, helping companies worldwide manage their partner relationships and accelerate revenue and profitability through indirect sales channels. The largest pure-play PRM vendor in the world, Impartner provides the industry's only out-of-the-box solution that can deploy an enterprise-class Partner Portal in as few as 30 days, using the company's highly engineered, three-step Velocity onboarding process. For more information on Impartner, which is based in Utah's tech hotbed, the Silicon Slopes, visit www.impartner.com, or in the United States call +1 801 501 7000, for EMEA general call +33 1 40 90 31 20, for London call +44 0 20 3283 4465, and for LATAM call +1 954 364 7883.

Follow Impartner on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Media Contact:

Kerry Desberg

Impartner

425-231-9529

[email protected]

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SOURCE Impartner

Related Links

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MONMOUTH JUNCTION, New Jersey, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Incessant Technologies, an NIIT Technologies company delivering a wide range of enterprise BPM and CRM services to its client base, today announced a strengthened alliance with Pegasystems Inc. as a Systems Integrator Partner. Incessant leverages the unified Pega 7 platform and CRM applications to help global organizations realize their digital integration efforts.

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Pegasystems develops strategic applications for marketing, sales, service, and operations. Pega's applications streamline critical business operations, connect enterprises to their customers seamlessly in real-time across channels, and adapt to meet rapidly changing requirements. Available in the cloud or on-premises, Pega's applications are built on its unified Pega 7 platform, which uses visual tools to easily extend and change applications to meet clients' strategic business needs.

As a Pegasystems partner for more than eight years, Incessant has built a dedicated Pega practice and continues to invest heavily in Pega certification of its resources. The team's experience, competency, and Pega certifications allow Incessant to engage with clients on Pega-based projects using an industry leading Diamond Resource Model. This model results in a higher number of seasoned resources at the mid-levels and a smaller number of junior resources on projects, ensuring clients have the right team on the Pega implementation. It also warrants a higher level of expertise than a traditional Pyramid Model, which is typically junior resource heavy. Incessant's deep understanding of digital technologies helps to deliver successful iBPM implementations for leading organizations globally.

"For close to a decade, Incessant Technologies has been a valued Pegasystems partner that has brought significant Pega CRM and BPM expertise and geographic coverage to clients. They certify their developers at the highest levels of Pega certification, which directly contributes to their ability to help joint clients achieve their digital transformation goals," said Ken Nicolson, Vice President of Global Alliances, Pegasystems Inc.

"The strengthening of Incessant's alliance with Pega is a testament to our organization's commitment, exceptional Pega BPM and CRM expertise, and outstanding delivery capabilities demonstrated through the years. This Systems Integrator alliance with Pega helps us continue to deliver next generation innovative solutions to our customers for a successful digital transformation journey," said, Jayadev Pulaparty, Director of Technology, Incessant Technologies.

About Incessant Technologies

Incessant Technologies, an NIIT Technologies company, is a leader in Digital Integration and the agile delivery of enterprise iBPM solutions. With proven expertise in designing and building cutting-edge solutions involving iBPM, CRM, Case Management, API Management, Middleware and DevOps, Incessant has developed innovative go-to-market solutions leveraging partnerships with leading platform providers like Pegasystems, Appian, Akana, CA and Adobe. With a focus on Financial Services, Insurance, Travel & Transportation, Media, Manufacturing and Public sector, Incessant empowers organizations to exceed business outcomes.

For media queries please contact:

Pallavi Bahuguna Gupta

Corporate Communications For NIIT Technologies Ltd.

+91-120-7119039

[email protected]



Rolly Arora

Head - Marketing

Incessant Technologies

[email protected]



For investor/analyst queries please contact:

Abhinandan Singh Head - Investor Relations & Special Projects NIIT Technologies Ltd.

+91-22-40103212

[email protected]



For more information, please visit http://www.incessanttechnologies.com or email us on [email protected]

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Incessant Technologies Pvt Ltd
SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in consulting, technology and next-generation services, today announced an expanded relationship with Microsoft Corp., a global leader in platform and productivity solutions, in driving industry-led solutions, to simplify and automate migration to Microsoft products and to accelerate Microsoft Azure-based and other digital transformations for clients. Infosys has committed to scale its team of dedicated Azure consultants to 5,000.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130122/589162 )



Many organizations wanting to migrate to the cloud select Azure as an open, hyperscale, enterprise-grade cloud platform. Together, Microsoft and Infosys address a range of migration and implementation scenarios to bring the benefits of cloud to clients quickly and easily. Infosys world-class learning and education center continuously renews the skills of thousands of engineers, helping to drive innovation and automation in all engagements with Microsoft. For example, Infosys provides DevOps and testing automation support to Microsoft.

This enhanced alliance builds on Infosys' longstanding relationship with Microsoft as a Global Managed Alliance Partner. Infosys brings the productivity benefits of Microsoft products to its global client base, and is also a provider of technology and business process services to Microsoft. Earlier this year, the two companies announced a similar collaboration in supporting healthcare organizations in their digital transformation. In the banking industry, Infosys' core banking product, Finacle suite, has been available on Azure for the past year.

Collaboration highlights:

Infosys will provide a broad range of offerings to accelerate the adoption of Azure, Analytics and SQL Server 2016. Clients will be able to leverage solutions such as the Healthcare Analytics Suite along with migrations of a wide range of technologies including Mainframe and Linux

Infosys will expand the availability of its products on Azure, in addition to Finacle, to clients

In order to assist Microsoft clients, Infosys, along with Microsoft, will build design tools, solution frameworks and accelerators to simplify and automate a significant part of the effort required by clients to migrate and manage their implementations on to Microsoft products

Infosys will build a global capacity of more than 5,000 consultants skilled on Azure within the next few years, alongside a broad range of tools and solutions designed to accelerate the delivery of services that will drive legacy transformation, workload migration and analytics services

The two companies will establish a global Azure Innovation Center - an ecosystem to proliferate the development of innovative solutions and offerings to help our enterprise clients utilize the power of the Microsoft cloud platform. The center will utilize the best of design thinking to enable Infosys architects to incubate, differentiate, adopt and showcase the impact of emerging technologies

Microsoft and Infosys will work to enable clients on cloud transformation journeys to utilize capabilities across Azure, Microsoft Dynamics and Cortana Analytics suite

Quotes:

Judson Althoff, President - Microsoft North America

"Enterprises today are on a journey of digitization - reinventing business processes and adapting to new business models to build a competitive advantage. We are working closely with Infosys in North America and other markets around the globe to help our customers in their digital transformation journey. We are excited about the accelerated Infosys investment in building a global pool of resources together with a range of industry applications. Our efforts will allow both companies to meet the explosive demand of a new generation of solutions powered by Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics."

Sandeep Dadlani, President and Global Head, Alliances, Infosys

"Microsoft products, especially Microsoft Azure, are proving to be among the most compelling enterprise-grade solutions for cloud. Our longstanding relationship with Microsoft and decades of co-development for our mutual clients gives us the knowledge and insight to help clients migrate and take advantage of the platforms Microsoft offers."

About Infosys

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. 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
ROCHELLE PARK, N.J., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EY today announced that CEO Linda Magnusson-Rosario of INSYS Group is a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2016 Award in New Jersey. The awards program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and extraordinary success in areas such as innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. Ms. Magnusson-Rosario was selected as a finalist by a panel of independent judges. Award winners will be announced at a special gala on June 23 at the Hyatt Regency, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

"I'm very excited to have made it to the state finals for this award," said Ms. Magnusson-Rosario, "and I'm looking forward to the face-to-face meetings and networking events that are planned for the next phase."

Now in its 30th year, the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year program has expanded to recognize business leaders in more than 60 countries throughout the world.

Regional winners are eligible for consideration for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year National program. Winners in several national categories, as well as the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner, will be announced at the National Awards gala in November 2016.

Founded and produced by EY, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards are nationally sponsored by SAP America, Merrill Corporation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. In New Jersey, sponsors also include PNC, DLA Piper, Morgan Lewis, Pine Hill Group, Cresa, Empire Valuation Consultants, SolomonEdwards Group and NJBIZ.

About INSYS Group

INSYS Group is a business and IT consulting firm that delivers business outcomes with speed and confidence. Whether improving operational effectiveness or expanding into new markets, INSYS Group is here to help. No matter how complex your challenges, INSYS Group has the capabilities and experience to deliver the solutions you need to move forward. With deep industry knowledge, meaningful insights and the broadest range of expertise, Fortune 500 companies trust INSYS to help them bridge the gap between the data they have and the knowledge they need. For more information, please visit www.insys.com.

About EY

EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services it delivers help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. EY develops outstanding leaders who team to deliver on their promises to all stakeholders. In so doing, EY plays a critical role in building a better working world for its people, for its clients and for the community at large. For more information, please visit www.ey.com.

SOURCE INSYS Group

Related Links

http://www.insys.com


Xian'er, the Robot Monk (Photo : YouTube)

The world going crazy over smartphone and other high-tech devices does not mean that spirituality has no more place in the hearts and lives of people.



To disprove that, a Buddhist temple outside Beijing developed Xian'er, a monk robot that could recite mantras and explain the basics of Buddhism. The two-foot-high robot, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), has a shaved head and wears a saffron robe like traditional Buddhist monks, reported The Guardian.



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A touchscreen on the chest of the robot monk, found at the 500-year-old Longquan Temple, provides answers to 20 simple questions about the Buddhist faith and daily life at the temple.



Among the questions is What is the meaning of life? Xianer replied, My master says the meaning of life is to help more people finally leave behind bitterness and gain happiness, quoted CNET.



Explaining the concept behind Xianer, Master Xianfian, the creator and a real monk, said, Science and Buddhism are not opposing nor contradicting, and can be combined and mutually compatible, quoted Reuters.



He developed the robot monk with AI experts at a Chinese university and a technology firm. Since then, Xianer has joined several robot fairs in China, although most of the time the robot is in deep meditation on an office shelf in the temple. Xianfian drew the robot monk as a cartoon from a concept in his head in 2011 when he joined Longquan.



If the robot became a reality, it is because of the support also of Master Xuechang, head of Longquan and president of the Buddhist Association of China. Besides being a monk, Xuecheng is also a digital communication enthusiast.



He explained, Buddhists should not only seek enlightenment through daily learning, meditation and cultivation to gain positive energy from Buddhist doctrine. They should also contribute more to society, by transforming their own gains, kindness, compassion and wisdom to others through the internet and new media.






BIELEFELD, Germany, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Global initiative successful, itelligence AG achieves Partner Center of Expertise recertification from SAP for its high level of customer support

itelligence AG, a global SAP partner and multiple award winner, has achieved Partner Center of Expertise (Partner COE) recertification from SAP. The aim of SAP's demanding certification process is a uniformly high level of service and support for users of SAP solutions across the world as part of software maintenance. Every two years, value-added resellers that are SAP partners must undergo a complex audit as part of the recertification process.

itelligence AG's high quality of service receives support authorization for SAP Hybris Commerce for the first time

The certification process consists of a strict evaluation of the overall support system, including employees, support processes and infrastructure. Through this certification SAP confirms that itelligence AG fulfills all the necessary requirements to offer customers service of the highest quality - in both technical and organizational terms. The Partner COE certification is a prerequisite for value-added resellers to offer maintenance and support services (SAP Standard Support or SAP Enterprise Support) for the different areas of the SAP software landscape. In addition to the SAP Business All-in-One solution, analytics solutions from SAP, the SAP HANA platform and SAP mobile solutions, this year the scope of the certification was extended to include support authorization for the SAP Hybris Commerce solution. This certification recognizes itelligence AG for high-quality service and support in the area of the leading omnichannel solutions for e-commerce.

Partner COE certification follows a global approach - certification in 19 countries

itelligence AG has developed a global service and support strategy in cooperation with SAP. The aim of this strategy and delivery model is to support managed-services customers across the world in an optimum manner. This year, the itelligence offices in Turkey and Ukraine have joined this global approach, for a total of itelligence agencies in 19 countries certified for the next two years.

Lars Janitz, Executive Vice President, Head of Global Managed Services, itelligence AG, stressed the importance of certification for itelligence's global strategy: "The recertification is an important component of our efforts to expand and for the consistent development of our local and global managed-services business. itelligence is one of the most important of SAP's partners in managed services, having won the SAP Pinnacle Award in 2015 as Cloud Value-Added Reseller of the Year. The recertification proves that we have laid the foundation to provide optimal support to our customers in the area of service and support."

During the process, itelligence has also strengthened international cooperation between the various locations. For example, while Germany is currently the central delivery unit for the e-commerce solution SAP Hybris Commerce, the unit in Turkey is taking over support for mobile solutions in many countries. Numerous other collaborations between other sites have emerged.

Strict guidelines

As part of the Partner COE certification, SAP has significantly intensified testing of the tools and processes and reduced tolerances. In addition, for the first time SAP undertook an audit of itelligence's global ticket tool directly in the system, and employees were certified according to a revised policy.

More awards

Since January 2016, itelligence has also been a member of the Run SAP partner program. As a participant in this program, itelligence has, among other points, intensified its use of SAP Solution Manager to optimize its support still further. In addition, itelligence AG has been successfully recertified in the areas of application management, hosting, cloud and operations services for SAP HANA on each respective global level. These certificates prove the highest competence in dealing with customers on a global scale.

itelligence AG

itelligence is one of the leading international full-service providers of solutions in support of SAP solutions, employing more than 5,000 highly qualified employees in 23 countries. As a frequently awarded SAP partner, among others global value-added reseller, itelligence is SAP-certified in cloud services, an SAP-certified provider of hosting services for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and an SAP platinum partner. itelligence realizes large projects in the SAP solution-based environment for customers worldwide. The company's services in support of SAP solutions range from consulting and licensing to application management services and hosting services to proprietary industry-specific SAP solutions. In 2015, itelligence generated total sales of EUR 696.2 million.

SAP, SAP HANA, Hybris 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.



Public Relations:

Silvia Dicke

Tel: +49(0)521-91448-107

Fax: +49(0)521-91445-201

[email protected]



itelligence AG

Konigsbreede 1

33605 Bielefeld

http://blog.itelligence.de/

http://www.itelligence.de



SOURCE itelligence AG
CHARLESTON, W.Va., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Sen. Jeff Kessler said today that the barrage of negative advertisements launched against him by Jim Justice, his opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination for governor, when Justice has failed to pay his own property taxes and fines, shows weakness in Justice's campaign.

"My experience in politics tells me that, when a candidate goes negative like that, it means he is in a freefall or is falling behind in the election," Kessler said. "It is ironic that a guy who cannot pay his own taxes or debts on time wants to raise the issue of taxes in the campaign."

The Charleston Gazette-Mail recently published a story that companies owned by Justice owed cash-strapped counties $3.9 million in unpaid property taxes. In March, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph reported a county had seized the mining property of a Justice-owned company for unpaid taxes. Also, in February, a federal judge held a Justice-owned company in contempt for unpaid debt, according to press accounts.

Justice's latest advertisements are critical of Kessler for stating the obvious that the state of West Virginia is in a deficit position and that he supports a cigarette tax increase to help fill the budget hole.

"If Jim Justice truly believes we can fix our budget without an increase in revenue, he has joined with the radical right, who advocate closing schools and firing thousands of teachers and other public employees," Kessler said. "These are the same types of politicians who want to eliminate the Promise Scholarship and leave the Public Employees Insurance Agency unfunded. There is no way to balance next year's budget without additional revenue. If a candidate for governor tells you he can do that, he is lying."

Kessler is in a David-versus-Goliath match with Justice, who has diverted millions of dollars in resources to winning the Governor's Mansion rather than paying his taxes and other debts.

SOURCE Sen. Jeff Kessler
MORRISTOWN, N.J., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L) today filed an electric rate plan with the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) that supports and builds on the significant service reliability and customer service improvements made by the utility in recent years. This rate request is expected to benefit customers by sustaining ongoing tree trimming, inspections of lines, poles and substations, and maintenance for newly installed equipment that enhances and modernizes the electric system.

Since 2012, JCP&L has invested more than $612 million in service-related enhancement projects, provided field staff with tablets and smart phones to support faster power restoration, partnered with IBEW Local 102 and 400 for major storm response, and updated online and mobile technologies to provide more timely information to customers. These recent investments helped JCP&L achieve its best service reliability record in more than a decade last year, including a 33 percent reduction in system outage duration and a 19 percent improvement in customer restoration times. In addition, the utility's tree trimming and vegetation management programs have reduced tree-related outages more than 38 percent.

"While JCP&L's rates have remained stable and even declined over the past decade, the cost of providing reliable electric service has increased," said Jim Fakult, president of JCP&L. "It's our job to provide dependable electricity to our growing customer base for their homes, businesses and communities, and this rate plan will help us deliver on this commitment."

Even with the proposed increase, JCP&L would continue to offer the lowest residential electric rates among New Jersey's four regulated electric distribution companies. The company's rate request totals $142 million. If approved, it would result in a 6 percent overall rate increase for the average JCP&L residential customer using 650 kilowatt hours per month  a monthly increase of $5.58.

The filing was made in compliance with a BPU order issued last year in the company's 2012 rate case. The public is invited to comment on the filing through the BPU's public comment process, and JCP&L will participate in public meetings about the plan. The company has requested that the new rates be effective on January 31, 2017.

JCP&L, a FirstEnergy Corp. (NYSE: FE) subsidiary, serves 1.1 million New Jersey customers in the counties of Burlington, Essex, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren. Follow JCP&L on Twitter @JCP_L, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/JCPandL or online at www.jcp-l.com.

Forward-Looking Statements: This news release includes forward-looking statements based on information currently available to management. Such statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. These statements include declarations regarding management's intents, beliefs and current expectations. These statements typically contain, but are not limited to, the terms "anticipate," "potential," "expect," "forecast," "target," "will," "intend," "believe," "project," "estimate," "plan" and similar words. Forward-looking statements involve estimates, assumptions, known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, which may include the following: the speed and nature of increased competition in the electric utility industry, in general, and the retail sales market in particular; the ability to experience growth in the Regulated Distribution and Regulated Transmission segments and to successfully implement our sales strategy for the Competitive Energy Services segment; the accomplishment of our regulatory and operational goals in connection with our transmission investment plan, including, but not limited to, the proposed transmission asset transfer to Mid-Atlantic Interstate Transmission, LLC, and the effectiveness of our strategy to reflect a more regulated business profile; changes in assumptions regarding economic conditions within our territories, assessment of the reliability of our transmission system, or the availability of capital or other resources supporting identified transmission investment opportunities; the impact of the regulatory process on the pending matters at the federal level and in the various states in which we do business including, but not limited to, matters related to rates and the Electric Security Plan IV (ESP IV) in Ohio, specifically related to a complaint filed at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) against FirstEnergy Solutions Corp., The Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, Ohio Edison Company, and The Toledo Edison Company that request FERC review the Electric Security Plan IV Purchase Power Agreement (ESP IV PPA) under Section 205 of the Federal Power Act, and other future complaints or challenges that could impact the ESP IV and the ESP IV PPA; the impact of the federal regulatory process on FERC-regulated entities and transactions, in particular FERC regulation of wholesale energy and capacity markets, including PJM Interconnection, L.L.C. (PJM) markets and FERC-jurisdictional wholesale transactions; FERC regulation of cost-of-service rates, including FERC Opinion No. 531's revised Return on Equity methodology for FERC-jurisdictional wholesale generation and transmission utility service; and FERC's compliance and enforcement activity, including compliance and enforcement activity related to North American Electric Reliability Corporation's mandatory reliability standards; the uncertainties of various cost recovery and cost allocation issues resulting from American Transmission Systems, Incorporated's realignment into PJM; economic or weather conditions affecting future sales and margins such as a polar vortex or other significant weather events, and all associated regulatory events or actions; changing energy, capacity and commodity market prices including, but not limited to, coal, natural gas and oil prices, and their availability and impact on margins and asset valuations; the continued ability of our regulated utilities to recover their costs; costs being higher than anticipated and the success of our policies to control costs and to mitigate low energy, capacity and market prices; other legislative and regulatory changes, and revised environmental requirements, including, but not limited to, the effects of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan, Coal Combustion Residuals regulations, Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and Mercury and Air Toxics Standards programs, including our estimated costs of compliance, Clean Water Act (CWA) waste water effluent limitations for power plants, and CWA 316(b) water intake regulation; the uncertainty of the timing and amounts of the capital expenditures that may arise in connection with any litigation, including New Source Review litigation, or potential regulatory initiatives or rulemakings (including that such initiatives or rulemakings could result in our decision to deactivate or idle certain generating units); the uncertainties associated with the deactivation of certain older regulated and competitive fossil units, including the impact on vendor commitments and as it relates to the reliability of the transmission grid, the timing thereof; the impact of other future changes to the operational status or availability of our generating units and any capacity performance charges associated with unit unavailability; adverse regulatory or legal decisions and outcomes with respect to our nuclear operations (including, but not limited to, the revocation or non-renewal of necessary licenses, approvals or operating permits by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or as a result of the incident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant); issues arising from the indications of cracking in the shield building at Davis-Besse; the risks and uncertainties associated with litigation, arbitration, mediation and like proceedings, including, but not limited to, any such proceedings related to vendor commitments; the impact of labor disruptions by our unionized workforce; replacement power costs being higher than anticipated or not fully hedged; the ability to comply with applicable state and federal reliability standards and energy efficiency and peak demand reduction mandates; changes in customers' demand for power, including, but not limited to, changes resulting from the implementation of state and federal energy efficiency and peak demand reduction mandates; the ability to accomplish or realize anticipated benefits from strategic and financial goals, including, but not limited to, the ability to continue to reduce costs and to successfully execute our financial plans designed to improve our credit metrics and strengthen our balance sheet through, among other actions, our cash flow improvement plan and other proposed capital raising initiatives; our ability to improve electric commodity margins and the impact of, among other factors, the increased cost of fuel and fuel transportation on such margins; changing market conditions that could affect the measurement of certain liabilities and the value of assets held in our Nuclear Decommissioning Trusts, pension trusts and other trust funds, and cause us and/or our subsidiaries to make additional contributions sooner, or in amounts that are larger than currently anticipated; the impact of changes to material accounting policies; the ability to access the public securities and other capital and credit markets in accordance with our financial plans, the cost of such capital and overall condition of the capital and credit markets affecting us and our subsidiaries; actions that may be taken by credit rating agencies that could negatively affect us and/or our subsidiaries' access to financing, increase the costs thereof, and increase requirements to post additional collateral to support outstanding commodity positions, letters of credit and other financial guarantees; changes in national and regional economic conditions affecting us, our subsidiaries and/or our major industrial and commercial customers, and other counterparties with which we do business, including fuel suppliers; the impact of any changes in tax laws or regulations or adverse tax audit results or rulings; issues concerning the stability of domestic and foreign financial institutions and counterparties with which we do business; the risks associated with cyber-attacks and other disruptions to our information technology system that may compromise our generation, transmission and/or distribution services and data security breaches of sensitive data, intellectual property and proprietary or personally identifiable information regarding our business, employees, shareholders, customers, suppliers, business partners and other individuals in our data centers and on our networks; and the risks and other factors discussed from time to time in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and other similar factors. The foregoing factors should not be construed as exhaustive and should be read in conjunction with the other cautionary statements and risks that are included in our filings with the SEC, including but not limited to the most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and any subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for management to predict all such factors, nor assess the impact of any such factor on FirstEnergy's business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. FirstEnergy expressly disclaims any current intention to update, except as required by law, any forward-looking statements contained herein as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

www.firstenergycorp.com

SOURCE FirstEnergy Corp.

Related Links

http://www.firstenergycorp.com


NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The blood testing market in China reached 275 million dollars, according to Kalorama Information and The Freedonia Group in a recent report. The estimate includes typing, immunoassays and nucleic acid testing. The healthcare research firm said that China had made progress in developing blood collection stations and in improving testing at the provincial level. The finding was made in Kalorama Information's report, Blood Testing Market in China, which utilized information from The Freedonia Group's Beijing office.

The global blood industry represents a diverse assortment of companies, groups and organizations that have evolved over time to provide for the safe collection, testing, storage and delivery of human blood, synthetic blood and blood products for transfusion. The identification of the HIV virus in the mid 1980s led to the 1996 introduction of the first test kit to screen blood for antigens to HIV-1 (the virus that is responsible for the vast majority of U.S. AIDS cases). Three years later, Ortho Pharmaceuticals introduced the first fully automated blood and plasma screening system. China's blood donation drives were challenged in the 1990s when the number of AIDS cases in a central province exploded after unlicensed blood-bank operators used improper methods to collect blood from the region's impoverished farmers. Things have improved since then, though. Many Chinese are incentivized to donate blood through employment, use of healthcare services or even college exams. And the hospital system can limit services to those who donate or to a limited number of times per year.

"Blood banking and testing for blood banking in China has been an evolving process due to insufficient blood banking infrastructure and aversion to blood donation in traditional Chinese culture," said Bruce Carlson, Publisher of Kalorama Information. "While blood donation rates have increased in China, and the blood banking process has become more sophisticated, there are challenges."

Blood centers in China are independent from hospitals. Provincial and regional blood centers are similar in terms of facilities and staffing. Provincial blood centers are located in provincial capitals, while regional blood centers are located in other large cities than provincial capitals. County blood centers (center blood bank) are located in county/smaller cities which provincial and regional blood centers do not cover. Qingdao Blood Center (QDBC) is an example of one of the regional centers. It was established in August 1993, which was a partly government-sponsored Institutional Organization directly under Qingdao Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission. QDBC comprises a staff of 234, the majority specialized technical personnel, including 34 at a senior and 121 at an intermediate-level, 4 doctoral students, and 36 post-graduate master students.

Nucleic-acid testing (NAT) has played an important role as the most advanced technology for directly detecting infections in blood. Today, NAT has been adopted in countries around the world, including in the U.S., Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and many countries in Europe and Asia. Commonly used NAT assays detect HIV-1 RNA, HCV RNA, HBV DNA, and West Nile Virus (WNV) RNA. In 2015, China mandated testing using molecular instruments.

"Our research found that considerable progress has been made and that the major provincial blood centers have NAT testing equipment," Carlson said. "There are opportunities for test makers at other levels of the blood banking system in China, and our report details these."

Through the foreseeable future, China will continue to offer one of the fastest growing markets for IVD products, including blood banking tests, even for western-style lab instrumentation and advanced tests outside of the scope of recent public healthcare network expansion. Leading IVD companies have all established themselves in China and are seeking long-term market growth in the country, with significant investments necessary to gain market share and develop products for the domestic market and for international distribution.

The report, Blood Testing in China, provides provincial-level data on blood stations by size, as well as current information on donations and donors in China. The report can be obtained at http://www.kaloramainformation.com/redirect.asp?progid=88637&productid=10018429.

About Kalorama Information

Kalorama Information, a division of MarketResearch.com, supplies the latest in independent medical market research in diagnostics, biotech, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and healthcare; as well as a full range of custom research services. Reports can be purchased through Kalorama's and are also available on www.marketresearch.com and www.profound.com.

We routinely assist the media with healthcare topics. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and our blog at www.kaloramainformation.com.

Contact:

Bruce Carlson

(212) 807-2622

[email protected]

www.KaloramaInformation.com

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SOURCE Kalorama Information
HOUSTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- As previously disclosed, Key Energy Services, Inc. (NYSE:KEG) has been cooperating with investigations by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission into possible violations by Key of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ("FCPA").

Key has been informed by the Department of Justice that the Department has closed its investigation and that it has decided to decline prosecution of the Company.

In addition, Key has been engaged in negotiations with the staff of the Division of Enforcement of the SEC in an effort to reach a resolution of the staff's investigation related to these same matters. Key has reached an agreement in principle with the staff on the terms of a proposed offer of settlement, which must be presented to the Commission for approval. While there is no assurance that the offer of settlement will be accepted by the Commission, Key is optimistic that the proposed resolution will become final in the second quarter of 2016. In connection with the offer of settlement, Key has accrued a liability in the amount of $5 million.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements as to matters that are not of historic fact are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on Key's current expectations, estimates and projections about Key, its industry, its management's beliefs and certain assumptions made by management, and include statements regarding future oil and natural gas prices, anticipated cost savings from our cost saving initiatives, available liquidity and steps to enhance our liquidity, estimated capital expenditures, future operational and activity expectations, and anticipated financial performance. No assurance can be given that such expectations, estimates or projections will prove to have been correct. Whenever possible, these "forward-looking statements" are identified by words such as "expects," "believes," "anticipates" and similar phrases.

Readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict, including, but not limited to: risks that Key will be unable to achieve its financial, capital expenditure and operational projections, including quarterly and annual projections of revenue and/or operating income and risks that Key's expectations regarding future activity levels, customer demand, and pricing stability may not materialize (whether for Key as a whole or for geographic regions and/or business segments individually); risks that fundamentals in the U.S. oil and gas markets may not yield anticipated future growth in Key's businesses, or could further deteriorate or worsen from the recent market declines, and/or that Key could experience further unexpected declines in activity and demand for its rig service, fluid management service, coiled tubing service, and fishing and rental service businesses; risks relating to Key's ability to implement technological developments and enhancements; risks relating to compliance with environmental, health and safety laws and regulations, as well as actions by governmental and regulatory authorities; risks relating to compliance with the FCPA and anti-corruption laws, including risks related to increased costs in connection with FCPA investigations; risks regarding the timing or conclusion of the FCPA investigations, including the risk of fines or penalties imposed by government agencies for violations of the FCPA; risks affecting Key's international operations, including risks affecting Key's ability to execute its plans to withdraw from its international markets outside North America; risks that Key may be unable to achieve the benefits expected from acquisition and disposition transactions, and risks associated with integration of the acquired operations into Key's operations; risks, in responding to changing or declining market conditions, that Key may not be able to reduce, and could even experience increases in, the costs of labor, fuel, equipment and supplies employed and used in Key's businesses; risks relating to changes in the demand for or the price of oil and natural gas; risks that Key may not be able to execute its capital expenditure program and/or that any such capital expenditure investments, if made, will not generate adequate returns; risks relating to Key's ability to satisfy listing requirements for its equity securities; risks that Key may not have sufficient liquidity and may not be successful in achieving steps to enhance its liquidity profile; risks relating to Key's ability to comply with covenants under its current credit facilities rendering the liquidity provided by those facilities unavailable and resulting in an event of default; and other risks affecting Key's ability to maintain or improve operations, including its ability to maintain prices for services under market pricing pressures, weather risks, and the impact of potential increases in general and administrative expenses.

Because such statements involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are outside of Key's control, Key's actual results and performance may differ materially from the results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Given these risks and uncertainties, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. Other important risk factors that may affect Key's business, results of operations and financial position are discussed in its most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K, recent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, recent Current Reports on Form 8-K and in other Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Unless otherwise required by law, Key also disclaims any obligation to update its view of any such risks or uncertainties or to announce publicly the result of any revisions to the forward-looking statements made here. However, readers should review carefully reports and documents that Key files periodically with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

About Key Energy Services

Key Energy Services is the largest onshore, rig-based well servicing contractor based on the number of rigs owned. Key provides a complete range of well intervention services and has operations in all major onshore oil and gas producing regions of the continental United States and internationally in Mexico and Russia.

Contact:

West Gotcher, Investor Relations

713-757-5539

SOURCE Key Energy Services, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.keyenergy.com


MANILA, Philippines, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Kindermusik International, the world's leader in music and movement education, today announced the signing of a master franchise agreement in the Philippines.

"We're incredibly excited to expand the presence of Kindermusik in the Philippines," said Scott Kinsey, President and Chief Executive Officer of Kindermusik International. "The brand's rich history and industry leadership provide a solid foundation for Kindermusik's continued growth."

Managing Kindermusik's expansion in the Philippines is 15 year veteran, Jeannie Castillo, Director and Owner of Kindermusik Philippines. Castillo's award-winning Kindermusik studio operation has served thousands of families in the country, making it the largest single Kindermusik program for children newborn to age seven in the world.

"I am tremendously grateful to the Filipino families for their love and support over the years," Castillo said. "I've had the pleasure of experiencing, first-hand, the powerful effect music has on the development of young children. Our Kindermusik students grow up to be extremely bright, confident, creative, and well-spoken as a result. I'm thrilled for the opportunity to broaden the reach of Kindermusik in our country and to continue touching the lives of even more children through music."

With plans for growth, Kindermusik is looking for qualified franchisees and business partners with in-depth knowledge in early childhood, business, or education interested in bringing Kindermusik to select countries throughout the world. To inquire regarding business opportunities, please email [email protected].

About Kindermusik International



Kindermusik International Inc. is the world's leading provider of music and movement programs for young children, enjoyed by millions of families in 73 countries since 1978. Kindermusik provides educators, children and families resources to help build a strong foundation for a lifetime love of learning. Kindermusik offers a full spectrum of developmentally appropriate classes for children ages newborn to seven, featuring engaging music and movement activities that promote school readiness and stimulate development in every area of the young brain. For additional information, visit Kindermusik International at www.kindermusik.com.

PRLog ID: www.prlog.org/12553899

SOURCE Kindermusik International

Related Links

https://www.kindermusik.com


PHILADELPHIA, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Lannett Company, Inc. (NYSE: LCI) today announced that it will report financial results for its fiscal 2016 third quarter on Tuesday, May 3, 2016 after the market closes. Lannett management will host a conference call that same afternoon at 4:30 p.m. Eastern (1:30 p.m. Pacific) to review the company's performance and answer questions.

The conference call will be available to interested parties by dialing 888-771-4371 from the U.S. or Canada, or 847-585-4405 from international locations, passcode 42449989. The call will be broadcast via the Internet at www.lannett.com. Listeners are encouraged to visit the website at least 10 minutes prior to the start of the scheduled presentation to register, download and install any necessary audio software. A playback of the call will be archived and accessible on the same website for at least three months.

About Lannett Company, Inc.:

Lannett Company, founded in 1942, develops, manufactures, packages, markets and distributes generic pharmaceutical products for a wide range of medical indications. For more information, visit the company's website at www.lannett.com.

Contact: Robert Jaffe

Robert Jaffe Co., LLC

(424) 288-4098

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SOURCE Lannett Company

Related Links

http://www.lannett.com


AUSTIN, Texas, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Jurisdictions looking to replace aging voting systems with the latest technology will welcome today's news. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has granted certification of the latest release of the Verity Voting system from election technology pioneer Hart InterCivic. Verity is the first all-new election technology platform to achieve EAC certification in years; its forward-thinking design is based on more than a decade of election technology experience. This new release adds electronic voting to the Verity family, whose paper ballot technology already set new standards for ease of use and trust.

Hart's Verity Voting system supports the entire election cycle for all voting types - whether paper or electronic - in one versatile platform.

"The Verity family is growing," said Phillip Braithwaite, President and CEO of Hart InterCivic. "With this new release, jurisdictions now have the power to run any type of election on one modern, integrated platform that provides unmatched versatility and efficiency. This latest release builds on Hart's promise to continually expand and improve upon Verity. We have a history of innovation, and this second EAC certification  close on the heels of our first release  demonstrates our strong commitment to meeting our customers' needs."

The latest version of Verity adds Verity Touch, which is the only all-new direct-recording electronic (DRE) device on the market that complies with current federal guidelines. Verity Touch offers the best voting experience, based on AIGA/EAC "Design for Democracy" ballots, and new levels of efficiency for election administrators. Verity Touch is especially appealing for counties considering Early Voting or Vote Centers, since it can easily manage many ballot styles in one location. Unique to Hart's system is its innovative centralized management of up to 12 connected Touch devices, greatly simplifying election administration.

The newest release of Verity also includes Verity Print, an on-demand ballot printer in a compact, portable case. Verity Print is used to print ballots as needed, saving on the guesswork and waste of pre-printing ballots.

The new Verity AutoBallot option integrates electronic poll books with electronic or paper-based voting. By automatically selecting the proper ballot style based on the check-in process, AutoBallot ensures accuracy and speeds up the voting process, to reduce long lines at the polling place.

Verity Voting's first release was certified by the EAC in May 2015 and is already in use in six states, with combined voter registration of more than 1.5 million. Existing Verity users and new customers will benefit not only from the new products in the Verity family, but also from a host of other enhancements, such as faster ballot production and new recount and reporting features.

Hart expects to announce several new Verity commitments within weeks, Braithwaite reported from the company's Austin headquarters. He added, "Verity is taking off. We are working quickly to change the election landscape by providing modern, flexible options that will serve voters for years to come."

For more information on the Verity Voting system, please visit www.hartintercivic.com/verityoverview.

About Hart InterCivic, Inc.

Austin-based Hart InterCivic is a full service election solutions innovator, partnering with state and local governments to deliver secure, accurate and reliable elections. Working side-by-side with election professionals for more than 100 years, Hart is committed to helping advance democracy one election at a time. The Hart mission fuels passionate customer focus and a continuous drive for technological innovation. The company's new Verity Voting system makes voting more straightforward, equitable and accessibleand makes managing elections more transparent, more efficient and easier.

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SOURCE Hart InterCivic, Inc.

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CARTHAGE, Mo., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

1Q EPS was $.63 , a first quarter record and 26% improvement versus 1Q 2015

, a first quarter record and 26% improvement versus 1Q 2015 1Q sales were $938 million , a 3% decrease versus 1Q 2015 due to commodity deflation and divestitures

, a 3% decrease versus 1Q 2015 due to commodity deflation and divestitures EBIT margin improved to 13.5%, a 190 basis point gain over 1Q last year

Raising EPS guidance; anticipate record continuing ops EPS of $2.40 - 2.60 on sales of $3.9 - 4.1 billion

Diversified manufacturer Leggett & Platt reported earnings of $.63 per share, a first quarter record. The EPS improvement (versus $.50 in 2015) reflects higher unit volume, a tax-related benefit ($.04) from the adoption of a new accounting standard regarding stock-based compensation, and non-recurrence of last year's impairment charge ($.02) in the now-divested Steel Tubing business unit.

Sales from continuing operations were $938 million, a decline of 3% versus 1Q 2015 as a result of late-2015 divestitures. Unit volume grew 4%, and acquisitions added 1% to sales; however, these gains were offset by raw material-related price deflation and currency rate changes.

EBIT margin improved 190 basis points versus first quarter last year, from 11.6% to 13.5%, as a result of higher unit volume, efficiency improvements, and continued portfolio management.

CEO Comments

President and CEO Karl G. Glassman commented, "We are very pleased with our start to 2016. During the first quarter we generated volume gains and improved margins, strong cash flow from operations, and record first quarter EPS. For the full year, we expect to achieve similar results: strong EBIT margin, significantly improved operating cash flow, and record EPS.

"Overall unit volume grew 4% during the quarter, despite short-term demand softness in certain of our residential end markets. We continue to benefit from ongoing content gains and new program awards in our Automotive business, the bedding market's shift to Comfort Core springs, and demand strength in our Adjustable Bed unit.

"Our primary financial goal is to achieve Total Shareholder Return (TSR1) that ranks in the top third of the S&P 500 over rolling three-year periods. For the three years that began January 1, 2014, we have so far (over the last 28 months) generated TSR of 25% annually; that performance ranks within the top 10 percent of the S&P 500.

"We are achieving these results while maintaining our strong financial base. We ended the quarter with over $300 million available through our commercial paper program. Net debt to net capital was 37%, comfortably within our 30% - 40% target range. At quarter end, the company's debt was 1.6 times its trailing 12-month adjusted2 EBITDA."

Dividends, and Stock Repurchases

In February, Leggett & Platt's Board of Directors declared a $.32 first quarter dividend, one cent higher than last year's first quarter dividend. Thus, 2016 marks the 45th consecutive annual dividend increase for the company, with a compound annual growth rate of 13%. Leggett & Platt is proud of its dividend record and plans to continue it.

At yesterday's closing share price of $48.59, the indicated annual dividend of $1.28 per share generates a dividend yield of 2.6%, one of the higher dividend yields among the 50 stocks of the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats.

During the first quarter the company purchased 2.5 million shares of its stock at an average price of $43.75, and issued 1.1 million shares through employee benefit plans and option exercises. The number of shares outstanding declined to 134.2 million, a 2.6% reduction over the last 12 months.

Increasing 2016 Continuing Operations EPS Guidance to $2.40 - $2.60

With strong first quarter earnings, the company is raising EPS guidance by $.10. For 2016, EPS from continuing operations is now expected to be $2.40 to $2.60. The new accounting standard for stock-based compensation resulted in a tax-related first quarter EPS benefit of $.04, but is expected to have a much smaller impact on each of the remaining quarters of 2016. Accordingly, this guidance assumes a 27% full-year effective tax rate.

Sales guidance is unchanged at $3.9-$4.1 billion, which equates to overall growth between zero and 5%. This guidance assumes unit volume growth in the mid-to-high single digits, reflecting strong demand in many of the company's product categories and improvement in the majority of its end markets. As partial offsets to the volume growth, sales guidance includes an approximate 2% reduction from commodity deflation, and a 2% decrease from late 2015 divestitures, net of small acquisitions.

Based upon this guidance, 2016 EBIT margin should be equivalent to, or slightly above, 2015's adjusted EBIT margin of 12.9%. The benefit to margin from higher unit volume should be partially offset by non-recurrence of the 2015 pricing lag.

Discontinued operations EPS for 2016 is forecast at $.15 due to the benefit the company receives, as plaintiff, from settlement of a longstanding antitrust claim. This cash settlement should generate $25 million of after-tax income in the second quarter. The bulk of the benefit ($21 million) is associated with discontinued operations, and specifically attributable to Leggett's former Prime Foam Products business (which was sold in 2007).

Cash from operations is expected to be approximately $500 million in 2016, which includes the $25 million of antitrust settlement proceeds. Capital expenditures should be roughly $130 million, and dividend payments should approximate $175 million. The company's target for dividend payout is 5060% of net earnings; however, actual payout was higher for several years prior to 2015, and as a result dividend growth was modest. But with recent growth in annual earnings, the company is now within its target payout range, and has flexibility to consider future dividend growth that more closely aligns with EPS growth.

The company's top priorities for use of cash are organic growth, dividends, and strategic acquisitions. After funding those priorities, if there is still cash available, the company generally intends to repurchase its stock (rather than repay debt early or stockpile cash). Management has standing authorization from the Board of Directors to buy up to 10 million shares each year; however, no specific repurchase commitment or timetable has been established. The company expects to repurchase 4-5 million shares in 2016, and issue about 2 million shares, primarily for employee benefit plans.

SEGMENT RESULTS  First Quarter 2016 (versus the same period in 2015)

Residential Furnishings  Total sales decreased $25 million, or 5%. Same location sales decreased 5%; unit volume increased 2%, but was more than offset by raw material-related price decreases and currency impacts. EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) decreased $4 million, with the benefit from overall higher unit volume more than offset by a FIFO inventory impact and lower unit volume in stronger-margin businesses.

Commercial Products  Total sales increased $21 million, or 15%. Same location sales grew 7%, primarily from unit volume growth in Adjustable Bed and Fashion Bed. EBIT increased $6 million due to higher sales, operational improvements, and a $2 million gain on sale of a building.

Industrial Materials  Total sales decreased $62 million, or 28%. Same location sales decreased due to steel-related price deflation and lower Drawn Wire volume. Divestiture of the Steel Tubing business in December 2015 reduced sales by $25 million. EBIT increased $12 million, with the impact from lower volume more than offset by cost and efficiency improvements, and non-recurrence of last year's $6 million impairment charge in the Steel Tubing business unit.

Specialized Products  Total sales increased $21 million, or 9%. Same location sales increased 10%, with volume gains across the segment partially offset by currency impacts (-2%). EBIT increased $7 million primarily due to increased volumes.

Slides and Conference Call

A set of slides containing summary financial information is available from the Investor Relations section of Leggett's website at www.leggett.com. Management will host a conference call at 7:30 a.m. Central (8:30 a.m. Eastern) on Friday, April 29. The webcast can be accessed (live or replay) from Leggett's website. The dial-in number is (201) 689-8341; there is no passcode.

Second quarter results will be released after the market closes on Thursday, July 28, with a conference call the next morning.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Visit Leggett's website at www.leggett.com.

COMPANY DESCRIPTION: At Leggett & Platt (NYSE: LEG), we create innovative products that enhance people's lives, generate exceptional returns for our shareholders, and provide sought-after jobs in communities around the world. L&P is a 133 year-old diversified manufacturer that designs and produces engineered products found in most homes and automobiles. The company is comprised of 17 business units, 20,000 employee-partners, and 130 manufacturing facilities located in 19 countries.

Leggett & Platt is the leading U.S. manufacturer of: a) components for home furniture and bedding; b) carpet cushion; c) adjustable bed bases; d) work furniture and components; e) high-carbon drawn steel wire; f) automotive seat support & lumbar systems; and g) bedding machinery.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: Statements in this release that are not historical in nature are "forward-looking." These statements involve uncertainties and risks, including the company's ability to improve operations and realize cost savings, price and product competition from foreign and domestic competitors, changes in demand for the company's products, cost and availability of raw materials and labor, fuel and energy costs, future growth of acquired companies, general economic conditions, possible goodwill or other asset impairment, foreign currency fluctuation, litigation risks, and other factors described in the company's Form 10-K. Any forward-looking statement reflects only the company's beliefs when the statement is made. Actual results could differ materially from expectations, and the company undertakes no duty to update these statements.

CONTACT: Investor Relations, (417) 358-8131 or [email protected]

David M. DeSonier, Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Investor Relations

Susan R. McCoy, Vice President of Investor Relations

1 TSR = (Change in Stock Price + Dividends) / Beginning Stock Price; assumes dividends are reinvested.

2 To aid understanding of underlying operational profitability, adjusted EBITDA excludes a foam litigation expense accrual of $6m pretax in 2015, and a non-cash pension buyout charge of $12m pretax in 2015.

LEGGETT & PLATT



RESULTS OF OPERATIONS 1

FIRST QUARTER (In millions, except per share data)

2016

2015

Change Net sales (from continuing operations)

$ 938.4

$ 966.2

(3%) Cost of goods sold

704.8

748.4



Gross profit

233.6

217.8

7% Selling & administrative expenses

105.1

97.5

8% Amortization

5.1

5.2



Other expense (income), net

(3.7)

3.4



Earnings before interest and taxes

127.1

111.7

14% Net interest expense

8.4

9.7



Earnings before income taxes

118.7

102.0



Income taxes

27.7

28.7



Net earnings from continuing operations

91.0

73.3



Discontinued operations, net of tax

0.1

(0.5)



Net earnings

91.1

72.8



Less net income from non-controlling interest

(1.6)

(1.1)



Net earnings attributable to L&P

$ 89.5

$ 71.7

25% Earnings per diluted share











From continuing operations

$0.63

$0.50

26% From discontinued operations

$0.00

($0.00)



Net earnings per diluted share

$0.63

$0.50

26% Shares outstanding











Common stock (at end of period)

134.2

137.8

(2.6%) Basic (average for period)

139.1

141.9



Diluted (average for period)

141.2

143.8

(1.8%)













CASH FLOW

FIRST QUARTER (In millions)

2016

2015

Change Net earnings

$ 91.1

$ 72.8



Depreciation and amortization

28.3

29.6



Working capital decrease (increase)

(26.7)

(94.3)



Impairments

0.0

5.9



Other operating activity

18.6

18.1



Net Cash from Operating Activity

$ 111.3

$ 32.1

247% Additions to PP&E

(27.7)

(21.7)



Purchase of companies, net of cash

(16.4)

(12.2)



Proceeds from asset sales

2.3

6.3



Dividends paid

(43.5)

(42.7)



Repurchase of common stock, net

(105.4)

(60.4)



Additions (payments) to debt, net

80.8

30.7



Other

(4.4)

(2.7)



Increase (Decr.) in Cash & Equiv.

$ (3.0)

$ (70.6)

















FINANCIAL POSITION

31-Mar (In millions)

2016

2015

Change Cash and equivalents

$ 250.2

$ 262.2



Receivables

531.3

532.0



Inventories

522.1

506.0



Held for sale

5.7

30.0



Other current assets

32.6

78.8



Total current assets

1,341.9

1,409.0

(5%) Net fixed assets

554.7

523.1



Held for sale

20.0

35.9



Goodwill and other assets

1,107.8

1,130.6



TOTAL ASSETS

$ 3,024.4

$ 3,098.6

(2%) Trade accounts payable

$ 332.1

$ 357.5



Current debt maturities

3.5

202.2



Held for sale

2.7

11.3



Other current liabilities

341.7

382.1



Total current liabilities

680.0

953.1

(29%) Long term debt

1,032.0

793.4

30% Deferred taxes and other liabilities

221.2

235.7



Equity

1,091.2

1,116.4

(2%) Total Capitalization

2,344.4

2,145.5

9% TOTAL LIABILITIES & EQUITY

$ 3,024.4

$ 3,098.6

(2%)















LEGGETT & PLATT



SEGMENT RESULTS1

FIRST QUARTER (In millions)

2016

2015

Change External Sales











Residential Furnishings

$ 481.4

$ 506.0

(4.9%) Commercial Products

141.3

123.5

14.4% Industrial Materials

77.1

117.7

(34.5%) Specialized Products

238.6

219.0

8.9% Total

$ 938.4

$ 966.2

(2.9%)













Total Sales (External + Inter-Segment)











Residential Furnishings

$ 488.9

$ 513.6

(4.8%) Commercial Products

161.5

141.0

14.5% Industrial Materials

157.2

219.2

(28.3%) Specialized Products

249.0

228.5

9.0% Total

$ 1,056.6

$ 1,102.3

(4.1%)













EBIT











Residential Furnishings

$ 47.7

$ 52.1

(8%) Commercial Products

13.8

8.0

73% Industrial Materials

20.1

8.0

151% Specialized Products

46.3

39.3

18% Intersegment eliminations and other

(0.8)

(0.7)

(14%) Change in LIFO reserve

0.0

5.0

(100%) Total

$ 127.1

$ 111.7

14%













EBIT Margin 2









Basis Pts Residential Furnishings

9.8%

10.1%

(30) Commercial Products

8.5%

5.7%

280 Industrial Materials

12.8%

3.6%

920 Specialized Products

18.6%

17.2%

140 Overall from Continuing Operations

13.5%

11.6%

190

LAST SIX QUARTERS

2014

2015

2016 Selected Figures

4Q

1Q

2Q

3Q

4Q

1Q Net Sales ($ million)

953

966

997

1009

945

938 Sales Growth (vs. prior year)

11%

10%

4%

1%

(1%)

(3%) Adjusted EBIT 3

90

112

121

142

130

127 Cash from Operations ($ million)

166

32

95

130

102

111

























Adjusted EBIT Margin3

9.5%

11.6%

12.1%

14.0%

13.8%

13.5% Adjusted EPS - continuing operations (diluted)3

$0.41

$0.50

$0.53

$0.67

$0.64

$0.63 Adjusted EBITDA (trailing twelve months) 4

503

529

545

579

617

632 (Long term debt + current maturities) / Adj. EBITDA4 1.9

1.9

1.9

1.7

1.5

1.6

























Net Debt to Net Capitalization























Long term debt

762

793

827

985

942

1032 Current debt maturities

202

202

202

3

3

4 Less cash and equivalents

(333)

(262)

(275)

(251)

(253)

(250) Net Debt

631

733

754

737

692

785 Total capitalization

2143

2146

2175

2311

2263

2344 Current debt maturities

202

202

202

3

3

4 Less cash and equivalents

(333)

(262)

(275)

(251)

(253)

(250) Net Capitalization

2012

2086

2102

2063

2013

2098 Long Term Debt to Total Capitalization

35%

37%

38%

43%

42%

44% Net Debt to Net Capital

31%

35%

36%

36%

34%

37% Management uses Net Debt to Net Capital to track leverage trends across time periods with variable levels of cash.

























Same Location Sales (vs. prior year)

4Q

1Q

2Q

3Q

4Q

1Q Residential Furnishings

9%

9%

2%

(2%)

(3%)

(5%) Commercial Products

24%

17%

18%

15%

(1%)

7% Industrial Materials

9%

12%

(4%)

(10%)

(16%)

(19%) Specialized Products

6%

6%

0%

5%

7%

10% Overall from Continuing Operations

6%

6%

(1%)

(1%)

(2%)

(1%)



























1Segment information the 4Q 2015 move of the logistics operations from Residential Furnishings to Industrial Materials. 2Segment margins calculated on Total Sales. Overall company margin calculated on External Sales. 3Excludes litigation accruals of $22m pretax ($.09/share) in 4Q'14, $1.5m pretax (< $.01/share) in 2Q'15, and $4m pretax ($.02/share) in 4Q'15; excludes $12m pretax ($.05/share) one-time noncash pension buyout charge in 4Q'15. 4EBITDA based on trailing twelve months. Excludes items in Footnote 3.

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SOURCE Leggett & Platt

Related Links

http://www.leggett.com


Total revenue was $2.051 billion for the first quarter 2016, compared to $2.030 billion on a pro forma basis, for the first quarter 2015, excluding the results from the company's Venezuelan subsidiary's operations that was deconsolidated as of September 30, 2015.

In the first quarter 2016, the company generated net income of $124 million, basic earnings per share of $0.35 and diluted earnings per share of $0.34. Included in basic and diluted earnings per share was Income Tax Expense of $94 million, $85 million of which was non-cash, primarily due to utilization of the company's U.S. federal net operating losses. For the first quarter 2015, net income was $122 million and basic and diluted earnings per share were $0.35.

Financial Results

Metric ($ in millions) First

Quarter

2016 First

Quarter

2015 Pro

Forma(1)(2) Core Network Services Revenue $1,947 $1,904 Wholesale Voice Services Revenue $104 $126 Total Revenue $2,051 $2,030 Network Access Costs $694 $720 Network Access Margin 66.2% 64.5% Network Related Expenses (NRE) (3) $331 $349 Selling, General and Administrative Expenses (SG&A)(3) $316 $341 Non-cash Compensation Expense $47 $31 Adjusted EBITDA(4) $710 $620 Adjusted EBITDA Margin(4) 34.6% 30.5% Capital Expenditures $297 $251 Unlevered Cash Flow(4) $324 $188 Free Cash Flow(4) $213 $42 Net Income $124 $122 Net Income per Common Share-Basic $0.35 $0.35 Weighted Average Shares Outstanding (in thousands)- Basic 356,785 346,874





(1) References to "pro forma" figures represent the results adjusted to exclude the company's Venezuelan subsidiary's operations except for Net Income, Net Income per Common Share-Basic and Weighted Average Shares Outstanding (in thousands)- Basic. (2) The reported first quarter 2015 results have been adjusted to reflect changes made to customer assignments between the wholesale and enterprise channels as of the beginning of 2016. (3) Excludes non-cash compensation expense. (4) See schedule of non-GAAP metrics for definitions and reconciliation to GAAP measures.

Revenue

Core Network Services (CNS) Revenue ($ in millions) First

Quarter

2016 First

Quarter

2015 Pro

Forma(1)(2) Percent Change, Constant

Currency North America $1,601 $1,534 4% Wholesale $434 $438 (1%) Enterprise $1,167 $1,096 6%







EMEA $191 $207 (5%) Wholesale $65 $71 (5%) Enterprise $107 $110 -% UK Government $19 $26 (22%)







Latin America $155 $163 8% Wholesale $39 $44 -% Enterprise $116 $119 10%







Total CNS Revenue $1,947 $1,904 4% Wholesale $538 $553 (1%) Enterprise $1,409 $1,351 6%





(1) References to "pro forma" figures represent the results adjusted to exclude the company's Venezuelan subsidiary's operations. (2) The reported first quarter 2015 results have been adjusted to reflect changes made to customer assignments between the wholesale and enterprise channels as of the beginning of 2016.

CNS Revenue

CNS Revenue was $1.947 billion in the first quarter 2016, increasing 3.6 percent year-over-year on a pro forma and constant currency basis.

Adjusted EBITDA

For the first quarter 2016, Adjusted EBITDA was $710 million. For the first quarter 2015, Adjusted EBITDA on a pro forma basis was $620 million, which excluded the results from the operations of the company's Venezuelan subsidiary.

Adjusted EBITDA margins expanded to 34.6 percent in the first quarter 2016 from 30.5 percent on a pro forma basis in the first quarter 2015.

Capital Market Transactions and Liquidity

After the close of the quarter, on April 21, 2016, the company fully redeemed $775 million aggregate principal amount of Level 3 Financing, Inc.'s 7% Senior Notes due 2020. To fund the redemption of these notes, Level 3 Financing used the net proceeds from the issuance of its 5.25% Senior Notes due 2026, along with cash on hand, to pay for principal, accrued interest, applicable premiums and transaction fees and expenses.

The company will incur a loss on extinguishment and modification of debt before taxes as a result of this transaction and related redemption of $40 million, or approximately $0.11 in basic earnings per share in the second quarter 2016.

As of March 31, 2016, the company had cash and cash equivalents of $1.004 billion.

2016 Business Outlook

"With our continued focus on profitable revenue growth and strong Adjusted EBITDA results in the first quarter 2016, we are increasing our outlook for full year 2016 Adjusted EBITDA growth," said Sunit Patel, executive vice president and CFO of Level 3.

"We now expect full year 2016 Adjusted EBITDA growth of 10 to 12 percent, compared to our previous outlook of 9 to 12 percent. In addition, we continue to expect to generate Free Cash Flow of $1.0 to $1.1 billion."

The company has also updated full year 2016 outlook measures for interest expense and non-cash compensation expense.

Metrics Old Outlook New Outlook Adjusted EBITDA(1) YoY growth of 9% to 12% YoY growth of 10% to 12% Free Cash Flow $1.0 to $1.1 billion No Change GAAP Interest Expense $570 million $555 million Cash Interest Expense $520 million $510 million Capital Expenditures 15% of Total Revenue No Change Depreciation and amortization $1.230 billion No Change Cash Income Tax $40 million No Change Non-cash Compensation Expense $130 million $170 million Full Year Income Tax Rate ~30% No Change





(1) From a starting point of $2.592 billion, which is adjusted to exclude Adjusted EBITDA from the company's Venezuela subsidiary.

Conference Call and Website Information

Level 3 will hold a conference call to discuss the company's First Quarter Results today at 10 a.m. ET. The call will be broadcast live on Level 3's Investor Relations website at http://investors.level3.com. Additional information regarding First Quarter Results, including the presentation management will review on the conference call, will be available on Level 3's Investor Relations website. If you are unable to join the call via the Web, the call can be accessed live at +1 877-283-5145 (U.S. Domestic) or +1 312-281-1200 (International). Questions should be sent to [email protected].

For additional information, please call +1 720-888-2518.

About Level 3 Communications

Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NYSE: LVLT) is a Fortune 500 company that provides local, national and global communications services to enterprise, government and carrier customers. Level 3's comprehensive portfolio of secure, managed solutions includes fiber and infrastructure solutions; IP-based voice and data communications; wide-area Ethernet services; video and content distribution; data center and cloud-based solutions. Level 3 serves customers in more than 500 markets in over 60 countries across a global services platform anchored by owned fiber networks on three continents and connected by extensive undersea facilities. For more information, please visit www.level3.com or get to know us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

 Level 3 Communications, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Level 3, Level 3 Communications, Level (3) and the Level 3 Logo are either registered service marks or service marks of Level 3 Communications, LLC and/or one of its Affiliates in the United States and elsewhere. Any other service names, product names, company names or logos included herein are the trademarks or service marks of their respective owners. Level 3 services are provided by subsidiaries of Level 3 Communications, Inc.

Forward-Looking Statement

Some statements made in this press release are forward-looking in nature and are based on management's current expectations or beliefs. These forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of performance and are subject to a number of uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside Level 3's control, which could cause actual events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the statements. Important factors that could prevent Level 3 from achieving its stated goals include, but are not limited to, the company's ability to: successfully integrate the tw telecom acquisition; manage risks associated with continued uncertainty in the global economy; increase revenue from its services to realize its targets for financial and operating performance; maintain and increase traffic on its network; develop and maintain effective business support systems; manage system and network failures or disruptions; avert the breach of its network and computer system security measures; develop new services that meet customer demands and generate acceptable margins; manage the future expansion or adaptation of its network to remain competitive; defend intellectual property and proprietary rights; manage continued or accelerated decreases in market pricing for communications services; obtain capacity for its network from other providers and interconnect its network with other networks on favorable terms; attract and retain qualified management and other personnel; successfully integrate future acquisitions; effectively manage political, legal, regulatory, foreign currency and other risks it is exposed to due to its substantial international operations; mitigate its exposure to contingent liabilities; and meet all of the terms and conditions of its debt obligations. Additional information concerning these and other important factors can be found within Level 3's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Statements in this press release should be evaluated in light of these important factors. Level 3 is under no obligation to, and expressly disclaims any such obligation to, update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

Contact Information

Level 3 Communications:

Non-GAAP Metrics

Pursuant to Regulation G, the company is hereby providing definitions of non-GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures.

The following describes and reconciles those financial measures as reported under accounting principles generally accepted in the United States (GAAP) with those financial measures as adjusted by the items detailed below and presented in the accompanying news release. These calculations are not prepared in accordance with GAAP and should not be viewed as alternatives to GAAP. In keeping with its historical financial reporting practices, the company believes that the supplemental presentation of these calculations provides meaningful non-GAAP financial measures to help investors understand and compare business trends among different reporting periods on a consistent basis.

In addition, measures referred to in the accompanying news release as being calculated "on a constant currency basis" or "in constant currency terms" are non-GAAP metrics intended to present the relevant information assuming a constant exchange rate between the two periods being compared. Such metrics are calculated by applying the currency exchange rates used in the preparation of the prior period financial results to the subsequent period results.

Core Network Services Revenue includes revenue from colocation and datacenter services, transport and fiber, IP and data services, and voice services (local and enterprise).

Network Access Costs includes leased capacity, right-of-way costs, access charges, satellite transponder lease costs and other third party costs directly attributable to providing access to customer locations from the Level 3 network, but excludes Network Related Expenses, and depreciation and amortization. Network Access Costs do not include any employee expenses or impairment expenses; these expenses are allocated to Network Related Expenses or Selling, General and Administrative Expenses.

Network Related Expenses includes certain expenses associated with the delivery of services to customers and the operation and maintenance of the Level 3 network, such as facility rent, utilities, maintenance and other costs, each related to the operation of its communications network, as well as salaries, wages and related benefits (including non-cash stock-based compensation expenses) associated with personnel who are responsible for the delivery of services, operation and maintenance of its communications network, and accretion expense on asset retirement obligations, but excludes depreciation and amortization.

Network Access Margin ($) is defined as total Revenue less Network Access Costs from the Consolidated Statements of Operations, and excludes Network Related Expenses.

Network Access Margin (%) is defined as Network Access Margin ($) divided by total Revenue. Management believes that network access margin is a relevant metric to provide to investors, as it is a metric that management uses to measure the margin available to the company after it pays third party network services costs; in essence, a measure of the efficiency of the company's network.

Adjusted EBITDA is defined as net income (loss) from the Consolidated Statements of Operations before income tax (expense) benefit, total other income (expense), non-cash impairment charges, depreciation and amortization and non-cash stock compensation expense.

Adjusted EBITDA Margin is defined as Adjusted EBITDA divided by total revenue.

Adjusted EBITDA Metric Q1 2016 (as reported) (in millions)



Net Income $ 124

Income Tax Expense 94

Total Other Expense 144

Depreciation and Amortization 301

Non-Cash Stock Compensation 47

Adjusted EBITDA $ 710





Total Revenue $ 2,051

Adjusted EBITDA Margin 34.6 %

Adjusted EBITDA Metric Q1 2015 (pro forma)1 (in millions)



Net Income $ 109

Income Tax Expense 5

Total Other Expense 189

Depreciation and Amortization 286

Non-Cash Stock Compensation 31

Adjusted EBITDA $ 620





Total Revenue $ 2,030

Adjusted EBITDA Margin 30.5 %



1Represents the consolidated results pro forma to exclude the Company's Venezuelan subsidiary's operations that was deconsolidated as of September 30, 2015.

Adjusted EBITDA Metric Q1 2015 (as reported) (in millions)



Net Income $ 122

Income Tax Expense 5

Total Other Expense 189

Depreciation and Amortization 288

Non-Cash Stock Compensation 31

Adjusted EBITDA $ 635





Total Revenue $ 2,053

Adjusted EBITDA Margin 30.9 %

Management believes that Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin are relevant and useful metrics to provide to investors, as they are an important part of the company's internal reporting and are key measures used by Management to evaluate profitability and operating performance of the company and to make resource allocation decisions. Management believes such measures are especially important in a capital-intensive industry such as telecommunications. Management also uses Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin to compare the company's performance to that of its competitors and to eliminate certain non-cash and non-operating items in order to consistently measure from period to period its ability to fund capital expenditures, fund growth, service debt and determine bonuses. Adjusted EBITDA excludes non-cash impairment charges and non-cash stock compensation expense because of the non-cash nature of these items. Adjusted EBITDA also excludes interest income, interest expense and income taxes because these items are associated with the company's capitalization and tax structures. Adjusted EBITDA also excludes depreciation and amortization expense because these non-cash expenses primarily reflect the impact of historical capital investments, as opposed to the cash impacts of capital expenditures made in recent periods, which may be evaluated through cash flow measures. Adjusted EBITDA excludes the gain (or loss) on extinguishment and modification of debt and other, net because these items are not related to the primary operations of the company.

There are limitations to using Adjusted EBITDA as a financial measure, including the difficulty associated with comparing companies that use similar performance measures whose calculations may differ from the company's calculations. Additionally, this financial measure does not include certain significant items such as interest income, interest expense, income taxes, depreciation and amortization, non-cash impairment charges, non-cash stock compensation expense, the gain (or loss) on extinguishment and modification of debt and net other income (expense). Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin should not be considered a substitute for other measures of financial performance reported in accordance with GAAP.

Unlevered Cash Flow is defined as net cash provided by (used in) operating activities less capital expenditures, plus cash interest paid and less interest income all as disclosed in the Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows or the Consolidated Statements of Operations. Management believes that Unlevered Cash Flow is a relevant metric to provide to investors, as it is an indicator of the operational strength and performance of the company and, measured over time, provides management and investors with a sense of the underlying business' growth pattern and ability to generate cash. Unlevered Cash Flow excludes cash used for acquisitions and debt service and the impact of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents balances.

There are material limitations to using Unlevered Cash Flow to measure the company's cash performance as it excludes certain material items such as payments on and repurchases of long-term debt, interest income, cash interest expense and cash used to fund acquisitions. Comparisons of Level 3's Unlevered Cash Flow to that of some of its competitors may be of limited usefulness since Level 3 does not currently pay a significant amount of income taxes due to net operating losses, and therefore, generates higher cash flow than a comparable business that does pay income taxes. Additionally, this financial measure is subject to variability quarter over quarter as a result of the timing of payments related to accounts receivable and accounts payable and capital expenditures. Unlevered Cash Flow should not be used as a substitute for net change in cash and cash equivalents in the Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows.

Free Cash Flow is defined as net cash provided by (used in) operating activities less capital expenditures as disclosed in the Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows. Management believes that Free Cash Flow is a relevant metric to provide to investors, as it is an indicator of the company's ability to generate cash to service its debt. Free Cash Flow excludes cash used for acquisitions, principal repayments and the impact of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents balances.

There are material limitations to using Free Cash Flow to measure the company's performance as it excludes certain material items such as principal payments on and repurchases of long-term debt and cash used to fund acquisitions. Comparisons of Level 3's Free Cash Flow to that of some of its competitors may be of limited usefulness since Level 3 does not currently pay a significant amount of income taxes due to net operating losses, and therefore, generates higher cash flow than a comparable business that does pay income taxes. Additionally, this financial measure is subject to variability quarter over quarter as a result of the timing of payments related to interest expense, accounts receivable and accounts payable and capital expenditures. Free Cash Flow should not be used as a substitute for net change in cash and cash equivalents on the Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows.

Unlevered Cash Flow and Free Cash Flow





Three Months Ended March 31, 2016 (as reported) Unlevered



($ in millions) Cash Flow

Free Cash Flow







Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities $ 510



$ 510

Capital Expenditures (297)



(297)

Cash Interest Paid 112



N/A

Interest Income (1)



N/A

Total $ 324



$ 213

















Unlevered Cash Flow and Free Cash Flow





Three Months Ended March 31, 2015 (pro forma)1 Unlevered



($ in millions) Cash Flow

Free Cash Flow







Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities $ 293



$ 293

Capital Expenditures (251)



(251)

Cash Interest Paid 147



N/A

Interest Income (1)



N/A

Total $ 188



$ 42





1Represents the consolidated results pro forma to exclude the Company's Venezuelan subsidiary's operations that was deconsolidated as of September 30, 2015.





Unlevered Cash Flow and Free Cash Flow





Three Months Ended March 31, 2015 (as reported) Unlevered



($ in millions) Cash Flow

Free Cash Flow







Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities $ 305



$ 305

Capital Expenditures (254)



(254)

Cash Interest Paid 147



N/A

Interest Income (1)



N/A

Total $ 197



$ 51





LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES Consolidated Statements of Income (unaudited)

















Three Months Ended (dollars in millions, except per share data) March 31, 2016 December 31, 2015 March 31, 2015







Revenue $ 2,051 $ 2,053 $ 2,053







Costs and Expenses





Network access costs 694 708 723 Network related expenses 338 344 356 Depreciation and amortization 301 294 288 Selling, general and administrative expenses 356 369 370 Total costs and expenses 1,689 1,715 1,737







Operating Income 362 338 316







Other Income (Expense):





Interest income 1  1 Interest expense (135) (152) (180) Loss on modification and extinguishment of debt  (55)  Other, net (10) 3 (10) Total other expense (144) (204) (189)







Income Before Income Taxes 218 134 127







Income Tax (Expense) Benefit (94) 3,189 (5)







Net Income $ 124 $ 3,323 $ 122







Basic Earnings per Common Share:





Net Income per Share $ 0.35 $ 9.33 $ 0.35 Weighted-Average Shares Outstanding (in thousands) 356,785 356,274 346,874







Diluted Earnings per Common Share:





Net Income per Share $ 0.34 $ 9.24 $ 0.35 Weighted-Average Shares Outstanding (in thousands) 360,339 359,712 350,832



LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES Consolidated Balance Sheets (unaudited)









March 31, December 31, March 31, (dollars in millions) 2016 2015 2015







Assets













Current Assets:





Cash and cash equivalents $ 1,004 $ 854 $ 1,114 Restricted cash and securities 837 8 7 Receivables, less allowances for doubtful accounts 807 757 743 Other 141 111 151 Total Current Assets 2,789 1,730 2,015







Property, Plant and Equipment, net 9,974 9,878 9,744 Restricted Cash and Securities 41 42 19 Goodwill 7,746 7,749 7,740 Other Intangibles, net 1,074 1,127 1,298 Deferred Tax Assets 3,365 3,441 284 Other Assets 50 50 55 Total Assets $ 25,039 $ 24,017 $ 21,155







Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity













Current Liabilities:





Accounts payable $ 680 $ 629 $ 629 Current portion of long-term debt 781 15 503 Accrued payroll and employee benefits 146 218 177 Accrued interest 131 108 187 Current portion of deferred revenue 283 267 300 Other 166 179 148 Total Current Liabilities 2,187 1,416 1,944







Long-Term Debt, less current portion 10,870 10,866 10,849 Deferred Revenue, less current portion 1,012 977 895 Other Liabilities 628 632 750 Total Liabilities 14,697 13,891 14,438







Stockholders' Equity 10,342 10,126 6,717 Total Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity $ 25,039 $ 24,017 $ 21,155



LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows (unaudited)









Three Months Ended

March 31, December 31, March 31, (dollars in millions) 2016 2015 2015







Cash Flows from Operating Activities:





Net income $ 124 $ 3,323 $ 122 Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash provided by operating activities:





Depreciation and amortization 301 294 288 Non-cash compensation expense attributable to stock awards 47 49 31 Loss on modification and extinguishment of debt  55  Accretion of debt discount and amortization of debt issuance costs 5 6 7 Accrued interest on long-term debt, net 23 (29) 22 Deferred income taxes 85 (3,207) (10) Gain on sale of property, plant and equipment and other assets   (1) Other, net (9) 3 21 Changes in working capital items:





Receivables (44) 43 (23) Other current assets (35) 10 (19) Payables 48 5 (24) Deferred revenue 46 29 8 Other current liabilities (81) (25) (117) Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities 510 556 305







Cash Flows from Investing Activities:





Capital expenditures (297) (330) (254) Change in restricted cash and securities, net (828) 2 1 Proceeds from sale of property, plant and equipment and other assets  1 1 Net Cash Used in Investing Activities (1,125) (327) (252)







Cash Flows from Financing Activities:





Long-term debt borrowings, net of issuance costs 765 885 492 Payments on and repurchases of long-term debt and capital leases (1) (949) (2) Net Cash Provided by (Used in) Financing Activities 764 (64) 490







Effect of Exchange Rates on Cash and Cash Equivalents 1 (2) (9)







Net Change in Cash and Cash Equivalents 150 163 534







Cash and Cash Equivalents at Beginning of Period 854 691 580







Cash and Cash Equivalents at End of Period $ 1,004 $ 854 $ 1,114







Supplemental Disclosure of Cash Flow Information:





Cash interest paid $ 112 $ 173 $ 147

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140908/144115

SOURCE Level 3 Communications, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.level3.com


Lenovo is offering a new discount on Moto X Pure Edition (2015) after announcing the launch of a new handset on June 9. (Photo : YouTube/ Phones Amazing)

Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanquing has confirmed that the latest Moto phone will be launched on June 9. He, however, did not specify whether the new handset will be Moto G4 or Moto X 2016.



It has been almost a year since Lenovo has launched a new handset and, hence, the announcement comes as a welcome surprise for fans. However, the model to be launched continues to be a mystery. The next-gen Moto G as well as Moto X has been in the new for a while now. Lenovo also has plans to launch the entry level Moto E this summer. Hence, speculations are rife that any of these three handsets may see the light of the day on June 9, Inferse reported.



Advertisement

Meanwhile, there is scarce information regarding the specs of the Moto G. However, it is confirmed that the handset will be released in two models. The vanilla Moto G4 will be a smaller device compared to the Moto G Plus. It is expected that the Moto G4 will sport a 5-inch display.



On the other hand, the Moto G Plus is expected to incorporate a fingerprint scanner that is likely to be embedded in a physical home button just below the front display. It is expected that this Moto G model will offer stiff competition to other budget Chinese smartphones like the Honor or the LeEco, which also feature a fingerprint scanner. Meanwhile, popular tipster @svleaks published a purported image purported of the Moto G4.



Details pertaining to the Moto X are also equally scarce. However, a leaked shot of the purported smartphone displayed a handset with the Moto logo with a fingerprint scanner enabled physical home button at the top left corner just below the display. In addition, the Moto X is likely to sport a 5.5-inch display with a Quad HD resolution, a USB Type-C connector in addition to a front-facing flash.



In addition, the Moto X 2016 is rumored to run with Android 6.0 Marshmallow and the handset is likely to boast a 21-megapixel rear snapper and 5-megapixel front camera for selfies. The other speculated specs and features of the handset include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset, 3GB of RAM, a modest 3630 mAh battery unit, The Bitbag reported



With the news of a new Moto phone launch, Lenovo has started offering a new discount on Moto X Pure. Now, a Moto X Pure Edition handset can be availed for $349.99 at the Jonathan Alder. Originally, the phone carried a price tag of $399.99.



Watch the video on Motorola Moto X (2016) speculated specs, features, release date and price below:






INDIANAPOLIS, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) will attend the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2016 Health Care Conference on May 11, 2016. David Ricks, Lilly senior vice president and president of Lilly Bio-Medicines, will participate in a fireside chat at 8:00 a.m., Pacific Daylight Time.

A live audio webcast will be available on the "Webcasts & Presentations" section of Lilly's investor website at http://investor.lilly.com/events.cfm. A replay of the fireside chat will be available for approximately 90 days.

About Eli Lilly and Company

Lilly is a global healthcare leader that unites caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We were founded more than a century ago by a man committed to creating high-quality medicines that meet real needs, and today we remain true to that mission in all our work. Across the globe, Lilly employees work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. To learn more about Lilly, please visit us at www.lilly.com and newsroom.lilly.com/social-channels. F-LLY

Refer to:

Molly McCully; [email protected]; 317-478-5423 (Media)

Philip Johnson; [email protected]; 317-655-6874 (Investors)

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20031219/LLYLOGO

SOURCE Eli Lilly and Company

Related Links

http://www.lilly.com


Lockton's Morocco operations officially opened at a launch party in Casablanca attended by senior market executives, clients and members of Lockton's executive management including Lockton Middle East and North Africa Chairman Wael Khatib, Lockton, Inc. President and CEO John Lumelleau, and Chief Operating Officer Glenn Spencer.

"Clients across the region value the unique expertise and experience that we offer," said John Lumelleau, Lockton, Inc. President and CEO. "This expansion in Casablanca is an exciting opportunity for the entire Lockton organization."

Salah El Kadiri will lead the Lockton operation in Morocco and West Africa, supporting regional and multinational clients with operations in the region. He has been an executive director in Lockton's Middle East and North Africa operations in Dubai for the past seven years.

Wael Khatib, Senior Partner & Chairman of Lockton (MENA) said, "The new Casablanca operation is part of Lockton's continued efforts to enhance our regional capabilities for clients. We are committed to personalized engagement and the drive to see our clients succeed."

Khatib added, "Salah El Kadiri started his career in Casablanca and is a well-known and respected professional in Morocco and the international market. I look forward to continue working with him and his team who I am confident will create a positive impact on the clients we serve."

Said Ibrahimi, CEO of Casablanca Finance City (CFC) Authority, said, "We are proud to welcome in CFC the world's largest privately owned, independent insurance brokerage firm. Lockton is the first international Lloyd's broker to join our business ecosystem, reinforcing CFC's positioning as a Pan-African reinsurance hub."

Salah El Kadiri commented, "It is a privilege to be part of the Lockton team and witness the rapid growth the business has achieved in the region. I look forward to serving our Lockton Casablanca clients and building on the remarkable track record for clients in the region."

Lockton will continue its expansion plans in countries across the MENA region. Lockton currently has operations in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Jordan.

About Lockton

More than 5,600 professionals at Lockton provide 48,000 clients around the world with risk management, insurance, and employee benefits consulting 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."

About Casablanca Finance City Authority :

Casablanca Finance City Authority (CFCA), a public-private limited company established in 2010, has been legally empowered to develop and manage the Casablanca Finance City (CFC) status. Casablanca is a regional economic and financial hub, hence a preferred gateway to the African continent, particularly to North, West and Central African countries.

Site Web : Casablancafinancecity.com

Twitter : @casafinancecity

LinkedIn : Casablanca Finance City

Photo- http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160413/355090

Logo- http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090415/CG99351LOGO

SOURCE Lockton

Related Links

http://www.lockton.com


PHOENIX, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Thomas and Shannon Puckett met in the Army and Arizona National Guard. Married 13 years, they have a large family of 6 children; 5 biological, one adopted, two have special needs.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360961

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360962



Their 8-year-old daughter Alysa was diagnosed with infantile epilepsy at 2 months old. Aly is now 8 years old and still has daily seizures. She is non-verbal, non-communicative, non-ambulatory and developmentally 3 months old. Her epilepsy has led to multiple severe complex medical conditions including cerebral palsy, g-tube feedings and respiratory complications. Alysa depends on her family for her every need around the clock.

Due to Alysa's weakened immune system and respiratory complications, she is sick often. Mom, Shannon, retired from the military to be a full time caregiver and has learned to manage most of Aly's illnesses at home, where she is most comfortable. Her husband, Thomas is currently deployed to Kosovo and will return the end of the year. Their insurance has covered equipment and hospital care making it possible to treat Aly from home with guidance from her doctors.

Their request came to Advocates for Individuals with Disabilities  Foundation (AID.org) through Facebook after learning of a custom wheelchair a friend in the disabled community had received. Shannon wrote, "We thank you for all that you are doing within the disability community! We have seen your good works first hand, and it is such a blessing."

The Puckett family requested a safe hospital bed for Aly at home. "Right now we get creative and use pillows, noodles, blankets, anything to keep her propped up and comfortable. None of it works, and now that she is getting bigger, we worry she is no longer safe in her bed."

Video of Aly reacting to her new bed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx9IGEHKoxA

"The Puckett family inspires us all. They are truly civil rights champions," says Jennifer Rogers, spokesperson for AID.org. Rogers interviewed the family and learned they have adopted a daughter from Bulgaria, and are in the process of adopting 2 boys from China, both with medical needs; one with hydrocephalus and the other with spina bifida.

To schedule interviews please Email.

About Advocates for Individuals with Disabilities  Foundation

Advocates for Individuals with Disabilities and their Charitable Foundation (AID.org), formed January 2016, serve to advance equal rights and opportunity as well as remove barriers for people with disabilities of all types. By taking affirmative action towards commercial and business locations that are not ADA compliant they are quickly bringing about a wave of compliance. The AID Foundation is also a growing resource for any individual with a disability looking to receive help with various issues relating to their disability or compelling needs.

Jennifer Rogers

Advocates for Individuals with Disabilities  Foundation

(623) 207-8537

Email

SOURCE Advocates for Individuals with Disabilities
"This exhibition provides a bridge between the past and the future. What makes it so special is that we have rare examples that are hundreds of years old," says Associate Curator of Korean Art, Hyonjeong Kim Han. "We present a multifaceted approach here, exploring historical, artistic, and technical themes, as well as the conservation of Korean lacquers."

Highlights among these heirlooms include delightfully elaborate keepsake boxes from the early 1500s to the mid 1600s, a selection of 18th-century luxury tables, and a rare late-Joseon dynasty reading desk.

"There are few traditional artisans still practicing this technique in Korea," continues Han. "But contemporary artists have revived the tradition of mother-of-pearl to express change and constancy. It allows them to be in harmony with their culture, while still connecting to a contemporary conversation about art."

The exhibition places multiple mother-of-pearl works from today's Korea directly into dialogue with the past. Enormous "pebbles" by Hwang Samyong, which required roughly 250 hours each to complete, exude a witty simplicity glossed with luxury. Seven wall panels completely patterned with mother-of-pearl by Kim Yousun are infused with impressionistic energy and light, recalling Van Gogh's luminous swirls. Multimedia artist Lee Leenam will also debut a new video work featuring a 16th-century painting from the Asian Art Museum's collection as its background.

"The Asian Art Museum was the first museum in America to have a dedicated Korean art curator and gallery, so we have always been a leader in finding innovative ways to present Korean art and culture outside of Asia," says Asian Art Museum Director Jay Xu. "This exhibition furthers the museum's commitment to sparking conversations about what's next, in San Francisco and around the globe."

EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION

Mother-of-Pearl Lacquerware from Korea is organized by the Asian Art Museum and is made possible with the generous support of the Koret Foundation and Korea Foundation.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM

The Asian Art MuseumChong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture is one of San Francisco's premier arts institutions and home to a world-renowned collection of more than 18,000 Asian art treasures spanning 6,000 years of history. Through rich art experiences, centered on historic and contemporary artworks, the Asian Art Museum unlocks the past for visitors, bringing it to life while serving as a catalyst for new art, new creativity and new thinking.

Information: 415.581.3500 or www.asianart.org

Location: 200 Larkin Street, San Francisco, California 94102 U.S.A.

PRESS CONTACTS:

Tim Hallman

415.581.3711

[email protected]

Zac Rose

415.581.3560

[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360857

SOURCE Asian Art Museum

Related Links

http://www.asianart.org


The office reflects msg's expansion into Canada and is the company's first Innovation Lab. The Lab will allow companies to prototype, design, and test innovations, including but not limited to IoT, in an environment that offers collaboration, funding mechanisms, and business and technical consulting. Some of these offerings hinge on the platform and proven methodology of msg's partner, HYVE, who has helped a wide range of world-renowned consumer brands reach innovative solutions to market challenges. Additional partners, working in the insurance space, will also play a role in the Innovation Lab, bringing many perspectives and ideas for financial services.

The office and the Lab will be led by Head of Insurance Innovation and Executive Vice President of msg global solutions Canada, Sven Roehl. "Designed as a catalyst for transforming ideas into marketable products and services, the Innovation Lab aims to develop customized and innovative solutions for financial services companies," said Roehl. "Existing customers will have the first opportunity to participate. But we see this and future labs as a big draw for any company that would like to develop ideas in an incubator setting with input from insurance subject matter experts and access to business and technology consulting."

The office will also develop business in the Canadian market, manage msg group activities for digital insurance, and support sales of msg global services and solutions in North America.

"We built a reputation on helping insurers manage finance and risk," said msg global solutions' CEO Bernhard Lang. "In the past five years we've added the user experience, e-commerce, and omni-channel piece with SAP Hybris. Now adding this approach to sustainable innovation management, we can help insurers put all the pieces together and be most competitive."

"2015 was a year of growth," notes Lang. "This is a further step in our strong growth pattern. We are putting in place systems and environments that give us future-focused ways to answer the challenges of our customers. Collaboration and co-innovation are only the beginning, and our Toronto office will be a model for this and much more."

With its Canadian office, msg global solutions currently count 19 entities in 15 countries around the globe.

About msg global solutions

msg global solutions is a product- and solutions-based systems integrator that serves the financial services/insurer/reinsurer markets in all lines of business, in all regions of the world. Our expert teams employ a complete selection of consulting services and software products to help large and mid-size clients succeed with a range of business and IT strategies, including digital transformation. Operating from 19 global offices and growing, msg global solutions' market presence covers the major insurance markets worldwide with domain and solution expertise.

msg global solutions is part of msg, an independent, international group of companies with autonomous regional companies and subsidiaries and over 5,500 employees worldwide.

To learn more about msg global solutions, visit: www.msg-global.com

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360542

SOURCE msg global solutions

Related Links

http://www.msg-global.com


WASHINGTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will commemorate the many contributions of retired mathematician Katherine Johnson to America's space program during a building dedication ceremony at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, May 5 -- the 55th anniversary of Alan Shepard's historic rocket launch and splash down, which Johnson helped make possible. The ceremony will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website.

At the agency's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, the new Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility will formally be dedicated to the venerated mathematician and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. Delivering the keynote at Thursday's event will be Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the book Hidden Figures, which chronicles the many achievements of Johnson's 33-year NASA career, as well as those of other African-American NASA mathematicians.

U.S. media are invited to the ceremony, as well as a preceding and brief news conference with the 97-year-old Johnson. All media interested in covering this event must contact Kathy Barnstorff at 757-864-9886 or [email protected], by 5 p.m. Wednesday, May 4. Media must arrive at the Langley gate located at 2 Langley Blvd. no later than 1 p.m. the day of the event.

Johnson worked at Langley from 1953 until her retirement in 1986, beginning as a research mathematician -- part of a pool of women hired to perform mathematical equations and calculations by hand for engineers. She quickly distinguished herself and was permanently assigned to the branch that would later calculate the launch windows for NASA's first Project Mercury flights.

Notable accomplishments include her computation, by hand, of the launch window and trajectory for Alan Shepard's maiden space voyage aboard Freedom 7 in 1961, and verification, also by hand, of calculations made by the first computers for John Glenn's history-making orbit around the Earth in 1962. She also calculated the trajectory for the historic Apollo 11 first moon landing flight in 1969.

For NASA TV streaming video, schedule and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

For more about Katherine Johnson, go to:

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/katherine-johnson-the-girl-who-loved-to-count

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO

SOURCE NASA

Related Links

http://www.nasa.gov


TORONTO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - New Gold Inc. ("New Gold") (TSX:NGD) (NYSE MKT:NGD) today announces the voting results from the election of its Board of Directors at New Gold's Annual General Meeting of Shareholders (the "Meeting") held on April 27, 2016 in Toronto, Ontario. The director nominees listed in the Management Information Circular dated March 4, 2016 were elected as directors of New Gold at the Meeting. Detailed results of the vote are set out below.

Director Nominee Votes For % Votes For Withheld % Withheld David Emerson 290,331,263 99.23% 2,247,003 0.77% James Estey 291,291,403 99.56% 1,286,863 0.44% Robert Gallagher 291,014,143 99.47% 1,564,123 0.53% Vahan Kololian 290,783,027 99.39% 1,795,239 0.61% Martyn Konig 291,327,690 99.57% 1,250,576 0.43% Randall Oliphant 289,999,343 99.12% 2,578,923 0.88% Ian Pearce 291,424,755 99.61% 1,153,511 0.39% Kay Priestly 291,900,366 99.77% 677,900 0.23% Raymond Threlkeld 291,130,144 99.51% 1,448,122 0.49%

Percentages are based on votes cast for or withheld from voting.

The results of the other matters considered at the Meeting are disclosed in the Report of Voting Results filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com on April 28, 2016.

ABOUT NEW GOLD INC.

New Gold is an intermediate gold mining company. The company has a portfolio of four producing assets and two significant development projects. The New Afton Mine in Canada, the Mesquite Mine in the United States, the Peak Mines in Australia and the Cerro San Pedro Mine in Mexico, provide the company with its current production base. In addition, New Gold owns 100% of the Rainy River and Blackwater projects, both in Canada, as well as a 4% gold stream on the El Morro project located in Chile. New Gold's objective is to be the leading intermediate gold producer, focused on the environment and social responsibility. For further information on the company, please visit www.newgold.com.

SOURCE New Gold Inc.

Related Links

www.newgold.com


Featuring an easy-to-read, patent-pending hexagon interface, the thermostat connects with most conventionally-wired home comfort systems. The YORK Thermostat 280 app for iOS and Android allows the homeowner to remotely control the system's heating or cooling. If connectivity is lost or the temperature in the home exceeds pre-set limits, a push notification is sent to the homeowner's mobile device.

In addition to real-time notifications and alerts, the thermostat provides homeowners with a quick heat and quick cool feature for short-term, high-capacity heating or cooling to reach set points more quickly. Pre-set modes provide quick access to alternate settings, and a convenient proximity sensor, which detects motion from one to six feet away, allows homeowners to make changes quickly, without waiting for the thermostat to start up.

The thermostat has the ability to communicate with home comfort contractors and automatically receives the latest software update via over-the-air updates when connected to Wi-Fi.

"This new touch-screen thermostat from Johnson Controls equips homeowners with the ultimate in control and convenience, wherever they are," said Liz Haggerty, vice president and general manager, Johnson Controls Unitary Products Group. "They can expect nothing but the best performance, efficiency, reliability and a home that is consistently comfortable."

Designed, engineered and assembled in North America, the new thermostats are available from YORK contractors nationwide. YORK Certified Comfort Expert contractors back every installation with a 100 percent Satisfaction Money Back Guarantee, the best assurance in the business.

To celebrate the launch of the new touch-screen thermostat, Johnson Controls is offering a chance to win a grand prize of one of five new YORK touch-screen thermostats along with a $150 Visa gift card for installation. One of 10 YORK-branded portable cell phone battery chargers will also be awarded each week until the promotion ends on June 20. Interested participants are asked to post a photo of themselves with a YORK logo on either the Johnson Controls Twitter page or the YORK Twitter page, using the hashtag #MeAndMyYORK. For complete contest details and official rules, visit www.YORK.com/MeAndMyYORK.

To learn more about the YORK touch-screen thermostat, or to find a local YORK contractor, visit www.YORK.com/for-your-home/thermostats-and-controls.

YORK products from Johnson Controls include energy-efficient, residential central air conditioners, heat pumps, furnaces and accessories, and innovative light-commercial, packaged heating and cooling systems marketed through a national distribution network and delivered to home- and building-owners through qualified YORK heating and cooling contractors. For more information about YORK, visit www.YORK.com or follow us on YouTube and @YorkHVAC on Twitter.

About Johnson Controls

Johnson Controls is a global diversified technology and industrial leader serving customers in more than 150 countries. Our 150,000 employees create quality products, services and solutions to optimize energy and operational efficiencies of buildings; lead-acid automotive batteries and advanced batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles; and seating components and systems for automobiles. Our commitment to sustainability dates back to our roots in 1885, with the invention of the first electric room thermostat. Through our growth strategies and by increasing market share we are committed to delivering value to shareholders and making our customers successful. In 2016, Corporate Responsibility Magazine recognized Johnson Controls as the #17 company in its annual "100 Best Corporate Citizens" list. For additional information, please visit http://www.johnsoncontrols.com or follow us @johnsoncontrols on Twitter.

About Johnson Controls' Building Efficiency

Johnson Controls' Building Efficiency has an unmatched portfolio of HVACR products and solutions to create more comfortable, safe and efficient buildings. Operating in more than 150 countries through a strong network of distribution channels, Building Efficiency's breadth of offerings help building owners, operators, engineers and consultants impact the full lifecycle of a building. Its market leadership is established through trusted brands such as YORK, Sabroe and Metasys as well as its smart building integration capabilities and energy financing solutions. For more information, visit www.johnsoncontrols.com or follow @JCI_BEnews.

CONTACT:

Kari Pfisterer

Senior Global Public Relations Manager

Building Efficiency, Johnson Controls

Work + 1 414 524 4017

Mobile + 1 414 305 1863

[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360971

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SOURCE Johnson Controls

Related Links

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TAMPA, Fla., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Nicopure Labs, LLC, a leading U.S. e-liquid manufacturer, welcomes today's UK Royal College of Physicians report "Nicotine Without Smoke: Tobacco Harm Reduction."

In response to the report, Jeff Stamler, Nicopure Labs CEO and co-founder, said, "Tobacco harm reduction can only be achieved if public health organizations and governments are completely transparent and proactive with respect to comparative risks of nicotine containing products. Our UK subsidiary and our European customers now have access to reliable guidance from the Royal College of Physicians regarding our products' potential role in reducing the death and disease toll from cigarettes."

This new, 200-page report by the most prominent physicians organization in the UK addresses controversies and misunderstanding surrounding vaping products and other non-tobacco sources of nicotine.

Patricia Kovacevic, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer, summarized the report's key areas: "The Royal College of Physicians findings are clear: 1. E-cigarettes are not a gateway to smoking. 2. Their use does not result in normalization of smoking. 3. Among smokers, e-cigarette use is likely to lead to quit attempts and eventually successful smoking cessation. 4. Possibility of long-term harm cannot be entirely dismissed but it is likely to be very small, and substantially smaller than that arising from smoking. These findings should weigh heavily here, in the U.S., against the FDA's decision to issue a deeming rule that may decimate the vaping industry."

Read the Royal College of Physicians press release here: https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/press

About Nicopure Labs, LLC

Operating since 2009, Tampa-based Nicopure Labs, LLC is a leading e-liquid and vaporizer device manufacturer with operations in the U.S. and Europe. Nicopure Labs has recently upgraded its 100,000 sq. ft. manufacturing and distribution operations in Gainesville, Florida. Distributing to over 90 countries worldwide, Nicopure Labs has also expanded its presence with the recent addition of a European headquarters in the Netherlands and offices in England.

For more information about Nicopure Labs and their premium American-made e-liquids, or their innovative line of devices, please visit for company information or www.halocigs.com for distributor or reseller information.

Contact: Jessica Wyland, Email, 888-270-2449

SOURCE Nicopure Labs, LLC

Related Links

http://www.nicopure.com


FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS This release includes 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, that are subject to risks and uncertainties. The forward looking statements, which address the Company's expected business and financial performance, among other matters, contain words such as "believe," "expect," "estimate," "anticipate," "optimistic," "intend," "plan," "aim," "will," "may," "should," "could," "would," "likely," and similar expressions. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they are made. There is no assurance that the expected events, trends or results will actually occur. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward looking statements, whether as a result of new information or future events or for any other reason. The Company's actual results could differ materially from those expressed or forecast in any forward looking statements as a result of a variety of assumptions and factors. These factors include, but are not limited to, the following: (i) failure to comply with laws or regulations, including fraudulent activity, corruption, and bribery; (ii) the outcome of ongoing corruption investigations and any new facts or information that may arise in relation to the "Lava Jato Operation"; (iii) the effectiveness of the Company's risk management policies and procedures, including operational risk; and (iv) litigation, such as class actions or proceedings brought by governmental and regulatory agencies. A description of other factors can be found in the Company's Annual Report on Form 20 F for the year ended December 31, 2014, and the Company's other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Iran's supreme leader and president accused the United States of hostility and bad faith Wednesday saying the implementation of its nuclear deal with world powers was not being honoured.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei echoed other officials in Tehran who allege that Washington is creating hurdles for European financial institutions, more than three months after the agreement came into force.

With nuclear-related sanctions lifted, US and European diplomats have said there is no bar on non-American banks doing business with Iran. But it is not happening in reality, Khamenei said.

"On paper they say that foreign banks can do business with Iran but, in practice, they are fomenting Iranophobia to prevent relations.

"The United States creates disruptions and then asks us afterwards: 'Why are you suspicious'?" Khamenei told workers in the capital.

European officials have told AFP their bankers fear they could face fines or even criminal cases against their US subsidiaries if they rush back to Tehran.

At a separate event, President Hassan Rouhani criticised a decision by the US Supreme Court last week to make $2 billion of frozen Iranian assets available to American victims of terror attacks.

US officials blame Tehran for attacks including the bombing of a US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.

Tehran threatened on Monday to take action in the International Court of Justice against the US if the $2 billion belonging to Iran's Central Bank is "diverted" to 1,000 Americans affected by the ruling.

"This is a totally illegal action and contrary to international rules and immunity of central banks," Rouhani said, calling it "a violation and open hostility by the United States against the Iranian people".

The US court verdict comes despite hopes for better relations between Tehran and Washington, foes since the Islamic revolution of 1979 ended the rule of the US-backed Shah.

That tumult was followed by students' storming the US embassy and a 444-day hostage crisis.

More than two years of talks led to the nuclear agreement between Iran and major powers led by the United States and it involved the first open direct negotiations between Washington and Tehran since the revolution.

But it has not heralded a thaw on other issues.

US sanctions still exist to punish Tehran for its ballistic missile programme and what Washington says is its sponsorship of "terrorist groups" in the Middle East.

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PROVO, Utah, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE: NUS) today announced first-quarter results above guidance, with revenue of $471.8 million, compared to $543.3 million in the prior-year period. Revenue was negatively impacted approximately 5 percent by foreign currency fluctuations. Earnings per share for the quarter were $0.06, or $0.42 excluding a non-cash charge associated with a recent Japan customs ruling. This compares to earnings per share in the prior-year period of $0.60. The company also announced that it is raising its guidance for the year.

"Our first-quarter performance was in line with our expectations and we are optimistic about the impact of upcoming product launches, which began in April and will continue in the second quarter," said Truman Hunt, president and chief executive officer. "We are seeing an enthusiastic response to the introductions of ageLOC Youth and ageLOC Me, and we anticipate that these product launches will drive core business improvement throughout the remainder of 2016."

Regional Results

The company's regional revenue results for the three-month periods ended March 31 are presented in the following table.





2016

2015

%

Change

Constant

Currency

% Change

















Greater China

$ 158,711

$ 187,367

(15.3%)

(11.7%) North Asia

151,209

172,066

(12.1%)

(8.9%) Americas

65,748

79,872

(17.7%)

(11.0%) South Asia/Pacific

63,578

70,817

(10.2%)

(2.6%) EMEA

32,585

33,210

(1.9%)

1.4%

















Total

$ 471,831

$ 543,332

(13.2%)

(8.7%)

The company's regional actives and sales leader statistics are presented in the following table.



2016

2015

% Increase (Decrease)



Actives

Sales

Leaders

Actives

Sales

Leaders

Actives

Sales

Leaders

























Greater China

219,000

21,698

235,000

22,533

(6.8%)

(3.7%) North Asia

353,000

15,820

386,000

16,984

(8.5%)

(6.9%) Americas

164,000

6,901

177,000

7,164

(7.3%)

(3.7%) South Asia/Pacific

110,000

6,772

120,000

7,060

(8.3%)

(4.1%) EMEA

112,000

3,768

110,000

3,811

1.8%

(1.1%)

























Total

958,000

54,959

1,028,000

57,552

(6.8%)

(4.5%)



















































"Actives" are persons who purchased products directly from the company during the previous three months. "Sales Leaders" are independent distributors, and sales employees and independent marketers in China, who achieve certain qualification requirements.

Operational Performance

The company's operating margin was 1.7 percent, or 8.4 percent when excluding charges related to the Japan customs ruling, compared to 12.6 percent in the prior year. While the company has appealed the Japan customs ruling, a non-cash charge of $31.4 million, the full amount disputed, was recorded in the quarter. Gross margin for the quarter was 70.8 percent, or 77.4 percent when excluding the customs expense, compared to 80.7 percent in the prior year. Both gross and operating margins were also negatively impacted by foreign currency fluctuations and lower revenue. Selling expenses, as a percent of revenue, were 41.5 percent, compared to 43.1 percent in the first quarter of 2015. General and administrative expenses, as a percent of revenue, were 27.6 percent, compared to 25.0 percent in the prior-year period. Foreign currency fluctuations were the primary reason for a loss of $2.9 million reported in other income/expense. The company's effective income tax rate for the quarter was 37.3 percent, compared to 35.7 percent in the prior year. Dividend payments during the quarter were $19.8 million and the company repurchased $20.0 million, or approximately 1 percent of its shares outstanding.

Outlook

"We are in the early stages of a new product cycle and are looking forward to the continued roll out of ageLOC Me and ageLOC Youth in the second quarter, with additional product events scheduled in the back-half of the year," said Hunt. "In the second quarter, we have limited-time offers of ageLOC Me in Greater China and ageLOC Youth in South Asia, and we introduce ageLOC Me on a full-time basis in Japan," concluded Hunt.

"We expect constant-currency revenue growth of 6 to 8 percent in the second quarter and are raising our revenue guidance for the year to $2.16 to $2.20 billion, assuming a negative foreign currency impact of 4 to 5 percent," said Ritch Wood, chief financial officer. "We project second-quarter revenue of $560 to $580 million, assuming a negative foreign currency impact of approximately 4 percent. We project second-quarter earnings per share of $0.75 to $0.79, and full-year earnings per share of $2.29 to $2.49, or $2.65 to $2.85 when excluding the $0.36 per share non-cash Japan customs charge."

The Nu Skin management team will host a conference call with the investment community on April 28 at 5 p.m. (EDT). Those wishing to access the webcast, as well as the financial information presented during the call, can visit the Investor Relations page on the company's website at ir.nuskin.com. A replay of the webcast will be available at the same URL through May 13, 2016.

About Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc.

Founded more than 30 years ago, Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. develops and distributes innovative consumer products, offering a comprehensive line of premium-quality beauty and wellness solutions in more than 50 markets worldwide. The company builds upon its scientific expertise in both skin care and nutrition to continually develop innovative product brands that include the Nu Skin personal care brand, the Pharmanex nutrition brand, and most recently, the ageLOC anti-aging brand. Since its introduction in 2008, the ageLOC brand has generated more than $5 billion in sales, and built a loyal following for such products as the ageLOC Youth nutritional supplement, the ageLOC Me customized skin care system, as well as the ageLOC TR90 weight management and body shaping system. Nu Skin sells its products through a global network of sales leaders. As a long-standing member of direct selling associations globally, Nu Skin is committed to the industry's consumer guidelines that protect and support those who sell and purchase its products through the direct selling channel. Nu Skin is also traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "NUS." More information is available at nuskin.com.

Please Note: 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, that represent the company's current expectations and beliefs. All statements other than statements of historical fact are "forward-looking statements" for purposes of federal and state securities laws and include, but are not limited to, statements of management's expectations regarding the company's performance, growth, initiatives, new product introductions, sales force and consumers; projections regarding revenue, earnings per share, foreign currency fluctuations, and other financial items; statements of belief; and statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. In some cases, you can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as "believe," "expect," "project," "anticipate," "estimate," "intend," "plan," "targets," "likely," "will," "would," "could," "may," "might," the negative of these words and other similar words.

The forward-looking statements and related assumptions involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to differ materially from any forward-looking statements or views expressed herein. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the following:

any failure of current or planned initiatives or products to generate interest among our sales force and customers and generate sponsoring and selling activities on a sustained basis;

risk of foreign currency fluctuations and the currency translation impact on the company's business associated with these fluctuations;

risk that direct selling laws and regulations in any of our markets, including the United States and China , may be modified, interpreted or enforced in a manner that results in negative changes to our business model or negatively impacts our revenue, sales force or business, including through the interruption of sales activities, loss of licenses, imposition of fines, or any other adverse actions or events;

risks related to accurately predicting, delivering or maintaining sufficient quantities of products to support our planned initiatives or launch strategies, and increased risk of inventory write-offs if we over-forecast demand for a product or change our planned initiatives or launch strategies;

regulatory risks associated with the company's products, which could require the company to modify its claims or inhibit the company's ability to import or continue selling a product in a market if it is determined to be a medical device or if it is unable to register the product in a timely manner under applicable regulatory requirements;

adverse publicity related to the company's business, products, industry or any legal actions or complaints by the company's sales force or others;

risk that litigation, investigations or other legal matters could result in settlements, assessments or damages that significantly affect financial results;

unpredictable economic conditions and events globally;

any prospective or retrospective increases in duties on the company's products imported into the company's markets outside of the United States and any adverse results of tax audits or unfavorable changes to tax laws in the company's various markets; and

continued competitive pressures in the company's markets.

The company's financial performance and the forward-looking statements contained herein are further qualified by a detailed discussion of associated risks set forth in the documents filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements set forth the company's beliefs as of the date that such information was first provided and the company assumes no duty to update the forward-looking statements contained in this release to reflect any change except as required by law.

NU SKIN ENTERPRISES, INC. Consolidated Statements of Income (Unaudited) For the First Quarters Ended March 31, 2016 and 2015 (in thousands, except per share amounts)









2016

2015







Revenue $ 471,831

$ 543,332







Cost of sales 137,869

105,055







Gross profit 333,962

438,277







Operating expenses:





Selling expenses 195,559

234,005 General and administrative expenses 130,254

135,626 Total operating expenses 325,813

369,631







Operating income 8,149

68,646







Other income (expense), net (2,863)

(12,268) Income before provision for income taxes 5,286

56,378 Provision for income taxes 1,970

20,096







Net income $ 3,316

$ 36,282







Net income per share:





Basic $ 0.06

$ 0.62 Diluted $ 0.06

$ 0.60







Weighted average common shares outstanding:





Basic 55,955

58,991 Diluted 56,411

60,261

NU SKIN ENTERPRISES, INC. Consolidated Balance Sheets (Unaudited) (in thousands)









March 31, 2016

December 31, 2015 ASSETS





Current assets:





Cash and cash equivalents $ 250,087

$ 289,354 Current investments 14,972

14,371 Accounts receivable 31,985

35,464 Inventories, net 275,281

265,256 Prepaid expenses and other 169,833

101,947

742,158

706,392







Property and equipment, net 453,648

454,537 Goodwill 114,954

112,446 Other intangible assets, net 69,424

67,009 Other assets 131,289

165,459 Total assets $ 1,511,473

$ 1,505,843







LIABILITIES AND STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY





Current liabilities:





Accounts payable $ 34,084

$ 28,832 Accrued expenses 319,282

310,916 Current portion of long-term debt 94,697

67,849

448,063

407,597







Long-term debt 168,377

181,745 Other liabilities 93,602

90,880 Total liabilities 710,042

680,222







Stockholders' equity:





Class A common stock 91

91 Additional paid-in capital 419,804

419,921 Treasury stock, at cost (1,028,629)

(1,017,063) Accumulated other comprehensive loss (67,250)

(71,269) Retained earnings 1,477,415

1,493,941

801,431

825,621 Total liabilities and stockholders' equity $ 1,511,473

$ 1,505,843

NU SKIN ENTERPRISES, INC. Reconciliation of GAAP Gross Profit to Gross Profit Excluding Japan Customs Expense (in thousands)















Quarter Ended March 31,





2016

2015













Revenue as reported

$ 471,831

$ 543,332













GAAP gross profit as reported

$ 333,962

$ 438,277













Japan customs expense

31,355















Gross profit excluding Japan customs expense

$ 365,317

$ 438,277













Gross profit as a percent of revenue excluding Japan customs expense

77.4%

















GAAP gross profit as a % of revenue

70.8%

80.7%



















NU SKIN ENTERPRISES, INC. Reconciliation of GAAP Operating Income to Operating Income Excluding Japan Customs Expense (in thousands)















Quarter Ended March 31,





2016

2015













Revenue as reported

$ 471,831

$ 543,332













GAAP operating income as reported

$ 8,149

$ 68,646













Japan customs expense

31,355















Operating income excluding Japan customs expense

$ 39,504

$ 68,646













Operating income as a percent of revenue excluding Japan customs expense

8.4%

















GAAP operating income as a % of revenue

1.7%

12.6%

























NU SKIN ENTERPRISES, INC. Reconciliation of GAAP Diluted Earnings Per Share to Diluted Earnings Per Share Excluding Japan Customs Expense (in thousands)















Quarter Ended March 31,





2016

2015













GAAP net income as reported

$ 3,316

$ 36,282













Japan customs expense

31,355















Tax effect of Japan customs expense

(11,257)















Net income excluding Japan customs expense

$ 23,414

$ 36,282













Diluted earnings per share excluding Japan customs expense

$ 0.42

















GAAP diluted earnings per share

$ 0.06

$ 0.60

























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SOURCE Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc.

Related Links

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LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- "Growing demand for power is expected to drive the pad-mounted transformer market at 5.21%"

Investments in power transmission & distribution network for upgradation and expansion is expected to drive pad-mounted transformer market at a rate of 5.21% from 2015 to 2020. Developing countries are investing in expanding their power grid network to provide electricity to rural areas and to industries to increase growth. Developed countries are investing in upgrading their power grid networks to smart grids which will allow them to manage their power supply more efficiently.



"Three phase pad-mounted transformer and dry-type pad mounted transformer are the segments with highest growth in pad-mounted transformer market"

Globally, the three phase pad-mounted transformer segment is estimated to grow at the highest rate, by phase. In terms of insulation type, dry-type pad-mounted transformer is estimated to grow at the highest rate in the pad-mounted transformer market.



"Asia Pacific to lead the global pad-mounted transformer market in terms of growth rate"

Among regions, Asia Pacific has led the market with the fastest growth rate as well as maximum market share among all other regions. Asia Pacific is followed by Middle East & Africa in terms of growth rate.

The data have been collected through several primary and secondary sources. A comprehensive discussion guide was sent to several experts in the field of pad-mounted transformers for the verification of the market findings.



- 40% of the participants belonged to the Tier 1 companies, 35% to Tier 2, and 25% to tier 3

- 20% of the participants belonged to C level category, 40% to Managerial Level and 40% to other designations respectively

- Maximum participation was from Asia Pacific region followed by Europe and North America. Asia Pacific contributed 40%, followed by Europe at 20% and North America at 15%



Companies Profiled:

ABB Ltd. (Switzerland), Crompton Greaves Ltd. (India), Eaton Corporation Plc. (Ireland), ERMCO (U.S.), GE (U.S.), Federal Pacific (U.S.), Hitachi Ltd. (Japan), Moloney Electric Inc. (Canada), Olsun Electrics (U.S.), Pacific Crest Transformers (U.S.), Pearl Electric Co. Ltd. (China), Schneider Electric Co. (France), Siemens AG (Germany), Vantran Industries Inc. (U.S.), and Wenzhou Rockwell Transformers Co. (China).



Reasons to Buy the Report: From an insight perspective, this research report has focused on various levels of analysisindustry analysis (industry trends, and Porters analysis), market share analysis of top players, supply chain analysis, and company profiles, which together comprise and discuss the basic views on the competitive landscape, usage patterns, emerging- and high-growth segments of the pad-mounted transformer market, high-growth countries and their respective regulatory policies, government initiatives, drivers, restraints, and opportunities.



The report will enrich both established firms as well as new entrants/smaller firms to gauge the pulse of the market, which in turn will help the firms in garnering a greater market, share. Firms purchasing the report could use any one or combination of the below mentioned five strategies (market penetration, product development/innovation, market development, market diversification, and competitive assessment) for strengthening their market share.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

Product Analysis and development: Detailed insights on upcoming technologies, research and development activities, and new product launches in the pad-mounted transformer market. Usage pattern/ penetration rate (in-depth trend analysis) of pad-mounted transformer (segment wise) and purchasing data

Market Development: Comprehensive information about lucrative emerging markets. The report analyzes the markets for pad-mounted transformers across geographies, exploit new distribution channels, and new clientele base

Market Diversification: Exhaustive information about new products, untapped regions, recent developments, and investments decisions in the pad-mounted transformers market. Detailed description regarding the related and unrelated diversification pertaining to this market

Competitive Assessment: In-depth assessment of market shares, company share analysis of the key players forecasted till 2020. Develop business strategies and manufacturing capabilities of leading players enhance the bottom line of the companies in the pad-mounted transformers market.

Product/ Brand Perception Analysis: Comprehensive study of customers perception and behavior through our inbuilt social connect tool (digital marketing language) checking the vitality and tonality of blogs.



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/3567490/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

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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

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PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- April 25, 2016 in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 600 local business owners attended the APEC Cross-Border E-Commerce (CBET) Workshop, for an introduction of the e-commerce industry. Eager citizens from the Pacific Island nation with only 2% internet penetration and a government that is moving quickly to change that, witnessed industry experts from Google, DHgate.com, ABAC China, eCargo, and WeCash give presentations. The event was initiated by the government of Papua New Guinea and DHgate.com, with the hopes of starting a conversation about spurring economic growth through e-commerce.

'APEC CBET PAPUA NEW GUINEA WORKSHOP'

Industry experts representing the entire cross-border e-commerce ecosystem, including: platform operation, online marketing, cross-border payment, trust and safety, international logistics, customer service, and internet finance introduced their role in the industry value chain.

The audiences' eyes lit up when a 26 year old Chinese entrepreneur described his personal cross-border e-commerce success story. He explained how his business started as a team of 4 people, and just a year and a half later, has over 100 employees, his own factory, and customer support centers in the US and the UK.

Workshop organizers planned to end the workshop with a 20 min Q+A session, but the audience had so many questions, it was extended to over an hour long before moderators cut it off. It then took the speakers another whole hour to leave the conference room because of the amount of people who stayed to ask more questions. Multiple members of the audience commented that they wished the workshop lasted multiple days instead of just one.

'THE GREAT POTENTIAL FOR GROWTH'

According to a report for APEC by the USC Marshall School of Business, "The case study of Papua New Guinea provides a thought experiment on how to develop a mature e-commerce ecosystem from a blank slate in the shortest possible amount of time." Specifically if they outline "the path an economy can take to facilitate the development of cross-border e-commerce by benchmarking the successes and avoiding the mistakes made by other economies in APEC." The government of Papua New Guinea currently plans to upgrade it's existing internet cables, as well as add more this year, in order to increase usage among the population.

'APEC CROSS-BORDER E-COMMERCE TRAINING'

APEC CBET Workshops introduce small businesses to e-commerce, and have been regularly held throughout the APEC region since 2013. CBET workshops have educated SMEs from Mainland China, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, the USA, Canada, and now Papua New Guinea. DHgate.com CEO Diane Wang said, "The feedback of every workshop has always been positive, it has become very apparent to me that we are truly doing something effective and meaningful. Expect plenty of more workshops in the future."

'ABOUT DHgate.com'

DHgate.com is the oldest and the biggest transactional cross border B2B e-commerce marketplace in China. We provide global buyers with quality products at competitive prices. Founded in 2004, DHgate.com has approximately 10 million buyers from 230 countries and regions, with 1.2 million sellers offering 33 million products. DHgate.com is an all-in-one platform with integrated services for logistics, cross border payments, internet financing, etc. Visit http://www.dhgate.com. For more information please e-mail [email protected] or call +86-10-8202-8870 x2398.

SOURCE DHgate.com

Related Links

http://www.dhgate.com


DUBLIN, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Perrigo Company plc ("Perrigo" or the "Company") (NYSE: PRGO; TASE), a leading global provider of Quality Affordable Healthcare Products, today announced that Mr. Sharon Kochan, Perrigo's Executive Vice President and General Manager, International, will have expanded responsibilities that will now include providing leadership and strategic direction to the Company's Branded Consumer Healthcare ("BCH") segment following the resignation of Mr. Marc Coucke, who previously served as Executive Vice President and General Manager of the BCH segment.

Mr. Kochan was named Perrigo's Executive Vice President and General Manager, International in August 2012. He served as Executive Vice President, General Manager of Rx Pharmaceuticals from March 2007 to August 2012 and as Senior Vice President of Business Development and Strategy from March 2005 to March 2007. Prior to joining Perrigo, Mr. Kochan was Vice President, Business Development of Agis Industries (1983) Ltd. from July 2001 until the acquisition of Agis by the Company in March 2005. Mr. Kochan holds a B.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering, cum laude, from Tel-Aviv University, and a M.Sc. degree in Management Science - Operations Research from Columbia University in the City of New York.

Perrigo's Chief Executive Officer John T. Hendrickson noted, "Sharon's background and ability to drive individuals and organizations to peak performance made my decision to appoint him to lead the BCH team a clear one. Perrigo is well-positioned for a great future, and the BCH team and business are important parts of that future. Perrigo is committed to the long-term prospects for the segment, and I am confident that we have the right team in place to lead and support this growing business during this transition. Aligned with the actions that we are taking to drive improved performance in the BCH segment, we have accepted the resignation of Marc Coucke. The Board and management team wish Marc well in his future endeavors."

Mr. Kochan commented, "I have had the opportunity to get to know the BCH business, including many of its capable leaders and employees, in my current role as Head of International, and I am truly honored to lead such a great business with its impressive pool of talent. Given BCH's expansive distribution platform, strong portfolio of OTC brands, and the entrepreneurial spirit of its employees, I am confident that the business is well-positioned for success and I am very pleased to be a part of that promising future."

About Perrigo

Perrigo Company plc, a top five global over-the-counter (OTC) consumer goods and pharmaceutical company, offers consumers and customers high quality products at affordable prices. From its beginnings in 1887 as a packager of generic home remedies, Perrigo, headquartered in Ireland, has grown to become the world's largest manufacturer of OTC products and supplier of infant formulas for the store brand market. The Company is also a leading provider of branded OTC products, generic extended topical prescription products and receives royalties from Multiple Sclerosis drug Tysabri. Perrigo provides "Quality Affordable Healthcare Products" across a wide variety of product categories and geographies primarily in North America, Europe, and Australia, as well as other key markets including Israel and China. Visit Perrigo online at (http://www.perrigo.com).

Forward-looking statements

Certain statements in this press release are forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or the Company's future financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements of the Company or its industry to be materially different from those expressed or implied by any forward-looking statements. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "may," "will," "could," "would," "should," "expect," "plan," "anticipate," "intend," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "potential" or other comparable terminology. The Company has based these forward-looking statements on its current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While the Company believes these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward-looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's control, including the timing, amount and cost of share repurchases, and the ability to execute and achieve the desired benefits of announced initiatives. These and other important factors, including those discussed under "Risk Factors" in the Company's Form 10-KT for the six-month period ended December 31, 2015, as well as the Company's subsequent filings with the SEC, may cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements in this press release are made only as of the date hereof, and unless otherwise required by applicable securities laws, 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.

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SOURCE Perrigo Company plc

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BEIJING, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Phoenix New Media Limited ("Phoenix New Media" or the "Company") (NYSE: FENG), a leading new media company in China, today announced that it filed its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015 (the "2015 20-F") with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 28, 2016. The 2015 20-F can be accessed on the Company's investor relations website at http://ir.ifeng.com. The Company will provide a hard copy of its audited consolidated financial statements contained in the 2015 20-F, free of charge, to its shareholders and ADS holders upon request. Requests can be directed to Matthew Zhao, Phoenix New Media Limited, Sinolight Plaza, No.4 Qiyang Road, Wangjing, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100102, People's Republic of China.

About Phoenix New Media Limited

Phoenix New Media Limited (NYSE: FENG) is a leading new media company providing premium content on an integrated platform across Internet, mobile and TV channels in China. Having originated from a leading global Chinese language TV network based in Hong Kong, Phoenix TV, the Company enables consumers to access professional news and other quality information and share user-generated content on the Internet and through their mobile devices. Phoenix New Media's platform includes its ifeng.com channel, consisting of its ifeng.com website and web-based game platform, its video channel, comprised of its dedicated video vertical and mobile video services, and its mobile channel, including its mobile Internet website, mobile applications and mobile value-added services.

For investor and media inquiries please contact:

Phoenix New Media Limited

Matthew Zhao

Email: [email protected]

ICR, Inc.

In Beijing, China: Charles Eveslage

In New York City: Vera Tang

Tel: +1 (646) 277-1215

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Phoenix New Media Limited

Related Links

http://ir.ifeng.com


WATERLOO, Ontario, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Asimina Arvanitaki has been named the inaugural Stavros Niarchos Foundation Aristarchus Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute. An $8 million investment, shared equally between the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and Perimeter Institute, will support pioneering research into the universe at its most fundamental level, as well as foster research and training ties between Perimeter Institute and Greece.

"Asimina is an exceptional physicist," says Neil Turok, Perimeter Institute's Director. "Her ideas bridge theory and experiment in new and creative ways. Hers is a rare talent, needed now more than ever, when the field is on the threshold of revolutionary advances. Thanks to this new investment from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Asimina will have opportunities to pursue breakthrough discoveries."

Arvanitaki joined Perimeter Institute in 2014, after earning an undergraduate degree from the University of Athens and a graduate degree from Stanford University. Before starting at Perimeter, she was a research associate at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. Arvanitaki has described her research as broad and interdisciplinary, testing theories that are beyond the Standard Model, including supersymmetry, dark matter, and extra dimensions.

"The Stavros Niarchos Foundation has given us the opportunity to pursue some of the big questions in physics, and we will do our best to help find the answers," says Arvanitaki, who becomes the first woman to hold a research chair at Perimeter. "This will also help us strengthen research and training ties to Greece, where there is a lot of untapped potential. I am proud to be recognized by an organization that has contributed so much to Greece and the world."

While much of the field of particle physics is concerned with the "high-energy frontier," which requires huge colliders to smash particles, Arvanitaki's research focuses on tests at the so-called "precision frontier." These tests seek to probe new physics with high-precision measurements that reveal tiny deviations using experiments that are, in some cases, small enough to fit on a table top.

Using technologies and techniques from other fields of physics, Arvanitaki designs novel experiments that can provide insights into the nature of dark matter, particle interactions, and other deep questions. The new investment will enable collaboration between Arvanitaki and her research colleagues, the hiring of a research team, and more.

"Asimina's work is on the cutting edge of scientific research and carries profound implications for us all," said Eva Polyzogopoulou, Coordinator of the Education program area at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. "As a Foundation, we recognize the importance of pure research and the need to support it. But Asimina's work is also significant in ways that transcend science and research. As a young scientist, she will be a great inspiration to the youth in her native Greece, who are pursuing their dreams amidst the current crisis. Furthermore, Asimina's appointment is a manifestation of one of Perimeter's most defining characteristics, namely its commitment towards attracting young scientists just entering their peak years of research productivity, and providing them with the proper environment and resources that would allow them to flourish and make new and innovative scientific contributions."

The Chair is named after Aristarchus, an ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer who proposed the first-known model placing the sun at the center of the solar system.

For more information, read the article appearing on Perimeter's website (to be live by 2pm EDT on April 28): http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/node/99742

ABOUT THE STAVROS NIARCHOS FOUNDATION

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (www.SNF.org) is one of the world's leading private international philanthropic organizations, making grants in the areas of arts and culture, education, health and sports, and social welfare. The Foundation funds organizations and projects that are expected to achieve a broad, lasting and positive impact for society at large, focusing on vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly, and also exhibit strong leadership and sound management. The Foundation also seeks actively to support projects that facilitate the formation of public-private partnerships as an effective means for serving public welfare.

Since 1996, the SNF has made grant commitments of $1.8 billion / 1.5 billion, through 3,438 grants to nonprofit organizations in 111 nations around the world.

ABOUT PERIMETER INSTITUTE

Perimeter Institute is the world's largest research hub devoted to theoretical physics. The independent Institute was founded in 1999 to foster breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding of our universe, from the smallest particles to the entire cosmos. Research at Perimeter is motivated by the understanding that fundamental science advances human knowledge and catalyzes innovation, and that today's theoretical physics is tomorrow's technology. Located in the Region of Waterloo, the not-for-profit Institute is a unique public-private endeavour, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada, that enables cutting-edge research, trains the next generation of scientific pioneers, and shares the power of physics through award-winning educational outreach and public engagement.

SOURCE The Stavros Niarchos Foundation

Related Links

http://www.SNF.org


SAN ANTONIO, April 4, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Pioneer Energy Services (NYSE: PES) today announced that it will release its first quarter 2016 financial results before the market opens on Friday, April 29. In conjunction with the release, Pioneer has scheduled a conference call that will be broadcast live over the Internet the same day starting at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time (10:00 a.m. Central Time). Investors may participate in the call either by phone or audio webcast.

By Phone: Dial 412-902-0003 approximately 10 minutes before the call and ask for the Pioneer Energy Services call. A telephone replay will be available through May 5 by dialing 201-612-7415 and using the access code 13634011.



By Webcast: Log onto Pioneer's main home page at www.pioneeres.com. The audio webcast can be accessed from the Investor Relations section under "Events & Presentations." A replay will be available shortly after the call.





For more information, please contact Donna Washburn at Dennard-Lascar Associates at [email protected] or 713-529-6600.

About Pioneer

Pioneer provides contract land drilling services to oil and gas operators in Texas, North Dakota, and Appalachian regions and internationally in Colombia through its Drilling Services Segment. Pioneer also provides well, wireline, and coiled tubing services to producers in the U.S. Gulf Coast, offshore Gulf of Mexico, Mid-Continent and Rocky Mountain regions through its Production Services Segment.

Contacts: Daniel Petro, CFA

Director of Corporate Development & IR

Pioneer Energy Services Corp.

(210) 828-7689





Lisa Elliott / [email protected]

Anne Pearson / [email protected]

Dennard-Lascar Associates / (713) 529-6600

SOURCE Pioneer Energy Services

Related Links

http://www.pioneeres.com


EAST HARTFORD, Conn., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Pratt & Whitney's PurePower Geared Turbofan engine will power Bombardier's largest C Series aircraft order based on an agreement signed by Delta Air Lines for 125 aircraft. The order consists of 75 firm aircraft with options for up to 50 more as well as a 15-year services agreement. Pratt & Whitney's PurePower Geared Turbofan engine is the sole-source engine provider for Bombardier's C Series aircraft. Pratt & Whitney is a United Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX) company.

"Bombardier champions sustainable and leading edge technology and that is why we chose Pratt & Whitney to power our game-changing C Series aircraft family which together received a strong endorsement from the Delta Air Lines order today," said Fred Cromer, president, Bombardier Commercial Aircraft. "The C Series aircraft is revolutionizing the single-aisle aircraft market and the Pratt & Whitney engine is a big factor and important partner in this success and we look forward to this continued support to our C Series customers."

"Today's historic deal is fantastic for the North American aviation industry, and we send our congratulations to Bombardier and Delta and know that the Pratt & Whitney PurePower engine will deliver unmatched value in terms of fuel burn, noise and emissions," said Rick Deurloo, senior vice president, Sales & Marketing, Commercial Engines, Pratt & Whitney. "Customers continue to believe in the ingenuity of our engine technology  recognizing it represents one of the most compelling stories in aviation history. This engine is more than just a means to power an aircraft; it defines an age in sustainable aviation technology."

The PurePower engine family has completed more than 58,000 cycles and 35,000 hours of testing.

Bombardier is a manufacturer of both planes and trains and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada. News and information are available at bombardier.com or on Twitter @Bombardier.

Pratt & Whitney is a world leader in the design, manufacture and service of aircraft engines and auxiliary power units. United Technologies Corp., based in Farmington, Connecticut, provides high-technology systems and services to the building and aerospace industries. To learn more about UTC, visit its website at www.utc.com, or follow the company on Twitter: @UTC.

This press release contains forward-looking statements concerning future business opportunities. Actual results may differ materially from those projected as a result of certain risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to changes in levels of demand in the aerospace industry, in levels of air travel, and in the number of aircraft to be built; challenges in the design, development, production and support of advanced technologies; as well as other risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those detailed from time to time in United Technologies Corp.'s Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

For more information about Pratt & Whitney, visit www.pw.utc.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/prattandwhitney

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/prattandwhitney

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/prattandwhitney1925

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pratt-&-whitney

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dependableengines/

Sara Banda Alice Straight Pratt & Whitney Pratt & Whitney +1 (860) 565-4031 office +1 (860) 565-2344 office +1 (860) 202-8644 mobile +1 (860) 830-6187 mobile [email protected] [email protected]

SOURCE Pratt & Whitney

Related Links

http://www.pratt-whitney.com


BIRMINGHAM, Ala., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ProAssurance Corporation (NYSE: PRA) announced today that, despite strong underlying fundamentals in its insurance operations, we expect to report net income of between $0.35 and $0.37 per diluted share and operating earnings of between $0.45 and $0.47 per diluted share when we release final first quarter results on May 9, 2016. We anticipate net earned premium in the quarter of approximately $177 million and a consolidated combined ratio of approximately 94.5%.

In spite of our strong underwriting performance, our investment result is below expectations. We expect our investment result to decline by approximately $7.0 million compared to the first quarter of last year. Net income from our core investment portfolio is expected to be approximately $2.0 million lower than the prior year's quarter, while our equity in earnings of unconsolidated subsidiaries is expected to be lower by approximately $5.5 million. The decline in the return on these investments is the combined impact of lower returns from several alternative investments as well as an increase in the amount of amortization of tax credit investments.

We also expect net income for the quarter to be affected by realized investment losses, which we expect to be approximately $8.5 million in the quarter, compared to net realized investment gains of $4.8 million in the first quarter of 2015. We expect to recognize impairments of approximately $10.0 million, mostly within the energy space.

ProAssurance Chairman and Chief Executive Officer W. Stancil Starnes noted, "Although we do not forecast earnings, we understand our results will fall below expectations in the investment community. That said, there are a number of positive trends in the quarter that tell us we are on the right path operationally. We remain solidly profitable, our Specialty P&C segment is retaining business despite intense competition in a stable loss environment, we saw gains in our cross-selling initiatives in the quarter, and our Workers' Compensation segment continues to provide growth, as does our Lloyd's segment."

As background, our total energy related exposures are $200 million at March 31, 2016, or approximately 5% of invested assets. This includes $144 million of energy-related bonds (approximately $24 million below investment grade), a $24 million investment in a mid-stream focused energy infrastructure limited partnership, which was impaired by $3.1 million in the quarter, and $31 million of energy related, dividend-paying blue chip shares and MLPs.

Announcement of Final First Quarter Results and Conference Call Information

ProAssurance will release final first quarter 2016 results, as previously announced, prior to the opening of trading on Monday, May 9, 2016. Management will be discussing the results and the Company's strategic direction during a conference call scheduled for 11:00 a.m. ET that same day. Investors may dial (888) 317-6016 (toll free) or (412) 317-6016. The call will be webcast on the investor relations section of our website, Investor.ProAssurance.com.

A replay will be available by telephone through June 9, 2016 at (877) 344-7529 or (412) 317-0088, using access code 10084047. The replay will also be available for one year on our website, Investor.ProAssurance.com. We will also make the replay and other information about ProAssurance available on a free subscription basis through a link on the ProAssurance website, Investor.ProAssurance.com or through Apple's iTunes.

Investors may follow @PRA_Investors on Twitter to be notified of the latest financial news about ProAssurance.

Caution Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Statements in this news release that are not historical fact or that convey our view of future business, events or trends are specifically identified as forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based upon our estimates and anticipation of future events and highlight certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to vary materially from our expected results. We expressly claim the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, for any forward-looking statements in this news release. Forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this news release. Except as required by law or regulation, we do not undertake and specifically decline any obligation to publicly release the result of any revisions that may be made to any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of such statements or to reflect the occurrence of anticipated or unanticipated events.

Forward-looking statements are generally identified by words such as, but not limited to, "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "hope," "hopeful," "intend," "likely," "may," "optimistic," "possible," "potential," "preliminary," "project," "should," "will," and other analogous expressions. When we address topics such as liquidity and capital requirements, the value of our investments, return on equity, financial ratios, net income, premiums, losses and loss reserves, premium rates and retention of current business, competition and market conditions, the expansion of product lines, the development or acquisition of business, the availability of acceptable reinsurance, actions by regulators and rating agencies, court actions, legislative actions, payment or performance of obligations under indebtedness, payment of dividends, and other similar matters, we are making forward-looking statements.

These forward-looking statements are subject to significant risks, assumptions and uncertainties, including, among other things, the following factors that could affect the actual outcome of future events:

changes in general economic conditions, including the impact of inflation or deflation and unemployment;

our ability to maintain our dividend payments;

regulatory, legislative and judicial actions or decisions that could affect our business plans or operations;

the enactment or repeal of tort reforms;

formation or dissolution of state-sponsored insurance entities providing coverages now offered by ProAssurance which could remove or add sizable numbers of insureds from or to the private insurance market;

changes in the interest rate environment;

changes in U.S. laws or government regulations regarding financial markets or market activity that may affect the U.S. economy and our business;

changes in the ability of the U.S. government to meet its obligations that may affect the U.S. economy and our business;

performance of financial markets affecting the fair value of our investments or making it difficult to determine the value of our investments;

changes in requirements or accounting policies and practices that may be adopted by our regulatory agencies, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, or the New York Stock Exchange and that may affect our business;

changes in laws or government regulations affecting the financial services industry, the property and casualty insurance industry or particular insurance lines underwritten by our subsidiaries;

the effect on our insureds, particularly the insurance needs of our insureds, and our loss costs, of changes in the healthcare delivery system, including changes attributable to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act;

consolidation of our insureds into or under larger entities which may be insured by competitors, or may not have a risk profile that meets our underwriting criteria or which may not use external providers for insuring or otherwise managing substantial portions of their liability risk;

uncertainties inherent in the estimate of our loss and loss adjustment expense reserve and reinsurance recoverable;

changes in the availability, cost, quality, or collectability of insurance/reinsurance;

the results of litigation, including pre- or post-trial motions, trials and/or appeals we undertake;

effects on our claims costs from mass tort litigation that are different from that anticipated by us;

allegations of bad faith which may arise from our handling of any particular claim, including failure to settle;

loss or consolidation of independent agents, agencies, brokers, or brokerage firms;

changes in our organization, compensation and benefit plans;

changes in the business or competitive environment may limit the effectiveness of our business strategy and impact our revenues;

our ability to retain and recruit senior management;

the availability, integrity and security of our technology infrastructure or that of our third-party providers of technology infrastructure, including any susceptibility to cyber-attacks which might result in a loss of information or operating capability;

the impact of a catastrophic event, as it relates to both our operations and our insured risks;

the impact of acts of terrorism and acts of war;

the effects of terrorism-related insurance legislation and laws;

assessments from guaranty funds;

our ability to achieve continued growth through expansion into new markets or through acquisitions or business combinations;

changes to the ratings assigned by rating agencies to our insurance subsidiaries, individually or as a group;

provisions in our charter documents, Delaware law and state insurance laws may impede attempts to replace or remove management or may impede a takeover;

law and state insurance laws may impede attempts to replace or remove management or may impede a takeover; state insurance restrictions may prohibit assets held by our insurance subsidiaries, including cash and investment securities, from being used for general corporate purposes;

taxing authorities can take exception to our tax positions and cause us to incur significant amounts of legal and accounting costs and, if our defense is not successful, additional tax costs, including interest and penalties; and

expected benefits from completed and proposed acquisitions may not be achieved or may be delayed longer than expected due to business disruption; loss of customers, employees or key agents; increased operating costs or inability to achieve cost savings; and assumption of greater than expected liabilities, among other reasons.

Additional risks that could arise from our membership in the Lloyd's of London market (Lloyd's) and our participation in Lloyd's Syndicate 1729 (Syndicate 1729) include, but are not limited to, the following:

members of Lloyd's are subject to levies by the Council of Lloyd's based on a percentage of the member's underwriting capacity, currently a maximum of 3%, but can be increased by Lloyd's;

Syndicate operating results can be affected by decisions made by the Council of Lloyd's over which the management of Syndicate 1729 has little ability to control, such as a decision to not approve the business plan of Syndicate 1729, or a decision to increase the capital required to continue operations, and by our obligation to pay levies to Lloyd's;

Lloyd's insurance and reinsurance relationships and distribution channels could be disrupted or Lloyd's trading licenses could be revoked making it more difficult for Syndicate 1729 to distribute and market its products;

rating agencies could downgrade their ratings of Lloyd's as a whole; and

Syndicate 1729 operations are dependent on a small, specialized management team and the loss of their services could adversely affect the Syndicate's business. The inability to identify, hire and retain other highly qualified personnel in the future, could adversely affect the quality and profitability of Syndicate 1729's business.



Our results may differ materially from those we expect and discuss in any forward-looking statements. The principal risk factors that may cause these differences are described in "Item 1A, Risk Factors" in our Form 10-K and other documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, such as our current reports on Form 8-K, and our regular reports on Form 10-Q. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements, which are based upon conditions existing only as of the date made, and advise readers that these factors could affect our financial performance and could cause actual results for future periods to differ materially from any opinions or statements expressed with respect to future periods in any current statements. Except as required by law or regulations, we do not undertake and specifically decline any obligation to publicly release the result of any revisions that may be made to any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of such statements or to reflect the occurrence of anticipated or unanticipated events.

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SOURCE ProAssurance Corporation

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http://www.proassurance.com


CHICAGO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Thursday, April 28 on Fox's daytime talk show The Real, hosts have a #ThrowbackThursday and "go to prom." On top of their hilarious back-in-the-day prom stories, they also decide to help prom dreams come true for one lucky high school.

Prom Dress and Fashion designer Mac Duggal, who has been in the fashion industry for over 30 years, got wind of how The Real was helping seniors at Washington Prep High School and decided to do something major. He went into his warehouse and picked out over 200 of his favorite prom dresses and sent them to the senior girls to pick out their favorite for their upcoming prom.

"I just wanted to put a smile on these young girl's faces and make sure their prom dreams came true," Mac explains as to why he chose to donate these dresses. "I put my heart and my soul into my work and I love giving back to the community. That's why when I found out what The Real was doing to help the students at Washington Prep High School, I just wanted to help".

"I am so humbled by your generosity of donating prom dresses to my students at Washington Preparatory High School. You have given my students an opportunity that many were contemplating on experiencing. Our students are from an impoverished area and we are so very thankful for your gracious gift. Tears of joy were shed today. Thank you a million times. God bless." Ms. Dechele Byrd, Principal Washington Preparatory High School, Los Angeles, California

About Mac Duggal, LLC

The Mac Duggal brand is positioned at the high end of the women's special occasion dress market driven by artistic, modern and luxurious design with couture-inspired fit and sizing. The Mac Duggal brand spans the globe and includes North America, Europe, the United Kingdom, Dubai, Russia, Japan, Canada and South America. See more at MacDuggal.com.

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SOURCE Mac Duggal

Related Links

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In a meeting with Bahraini King Hamad bin Issa Al-Khalifa, the head of Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church Pope Tawadros II expressed his happiness over the king's first visit to Saint Mark Cathedral in Cairo's Abbasiya district.

In an official statement by the church, the pope said that he is pleased with the positive relationship shared by Egypt and Bahrain on both the leadership and national levels.

"We carry kind memories of Bahrain [relayed by Egyptians in that country], as well as our Coptic sons who tell us about the generosity of the kingdom," the pope said.

He added that he valued Bahrain's easing of regulations for the construction of churches in the country.

This is the first-ever meeting between the head of the Coptic Church and King Al-Khalifa.

The king, who arrived Cairo on Tuesday for a two-day visit, attended with President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi the signing of 11 memorandums of understanding in different fields during a joint business forum held in Cairo.

The visit aimed at boosting "strong historical ties" between Egypt and Bahrain and addressing recent regional and internal developments.

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"PSEG Long Island collaborates regularly with new diverse suppliers that are best suited to help us achieve our company objectives and strong commitments to our customers, our communities and the State," said David Daly, PSEG Long Island president and COO. "The diversity fair was created to expand and advance our current pool of diverse suppliers through education and mentoring."

Today's event provided a unique opportunity for representatives from New York State Minority and Women's Business Enterprises (MWBE) to learn more about doing business with PSEG Long Island, meet one-on-one with state representatives to better understand the objectives of New York State's supplier diversity development efforts and an opportunity to meet other suppliers currently working with PSEG Long Island. PSEG Long Island's Supplier Diversity Program achieved record results in 2015, with more than $31.5 million of business directed at minority and women's companies.

Daly continued, "As we increase our investments making our infrastructure more reliable and resilient, we are also creating jobs and business opportunities for a diverse group of suppliers. Building a supplier list that represents our diverse customer base helps us accomplish more as partners than we could on our own."

"Doyle Security Services has enjoyed a great partnership-relationship with PSEG Long Island," said Mario Doyle, president of Doyle Security Services. "The team at PSEG Long Island has continually looked for ways to support our firm's growth."

Approximately, 300 people, representing more than 250 companies attended today's fair and participated in the workshops and networking sessions. Involvement of this magnitude will support PSEG Long Island's commitment to build on its robust list of diverse suppliers. From 2014 to 2015, the utility was able to increase its partnerships with 58 diverse suppliers to 123.

The event was co-sponsored by PSEG Long Island partners, the New York & New Jersey Minority Supplier Development Council, Inc., Division of Minority and Women's Business Development - Empire State Development Corp., Women Presidents' Educational Organization, and the Nassau County office of Minority Affairs. These organizations are committed to assisting small, minority, and women-owned businesses develop relationships with companies throughout the region.

PSEG Long Island operates the Long Island Power Authority's transmission and distribution system under a 12-year contract. PSEG Long Island is a subsidiary of Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated (NYSE: PEG), a publicly traded diversified energy company with annual revenues of approximately $10.4 billion.

Contact: Media Relations Hotline

516.229.7248

[email protected]

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SOURCE PSEG Long Island

Related Links

http://www.psegliny.com


HARRISBURG, Pa., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Pennsylvania's 14 Welcome Centers, which are managed by PennDOT, will conduct special programs and promotions to mark National Travel and Tourism Week from May 1-7.

"Pennsylvania Welcome Centers serve as attractive gateways to our visitors, and their staffs will work with local visitors bureaus and other tourism industry members to help promote this special week," said PennDOT Secretary Leslie S. Richards. "The events will spotlight local attractions and demonstrate why tourism is one of Pennsylvania's top industries."

In many cases, Welcome Centers provide the first impression of Pennsylvania to out-of-state visitors. Each Welcome Center is a complete travel resource center for motorists, offering many free tourism services, such as lodging and restaurant reservations. In 2015, Pennsylvania Welcome Centers served more than 3.3 million customers and assisted over 17,000 travelers with lodging reservations.

"During National Travel and Tourism Week, Welcome Centers spotlight attractions from the most popular to 'hidden gems' that make Pennsylvania such a great place to visit and explore," said Richards. "From Trolley Museum displays in Greene County to Smokey the Bear in Fulton County, Welcome Center visitors will be able to learn more about tourism hot spots across Pennsylvania."

In addition, Richards noted that visitors will also have the opportunity to receive free promotional items from state tourism partners and to learn about various products made in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania's Welcome Centers are open 24 hours a day, and tourism staff is available at most locations from 7 AM to 7 PM, seven days a week, including most holidays.

Pennsylvania's 14 Welcome Centers are at key border locations, including:

I-90 West, one-half mile past the Pennsylvania / New York border in North East , Erie County ;

/ border in , ; I-80 East, about one-half mile past the Pennsylvania / Ohio border in West Middlesex , Mercer County ;

/ border in , ; I-70 East, about five miles from the Pennsylvania / West Virginia border in Claysville , Washington County ;

/ border in , ; I-79 North, about five miles past the Pennsylvania / West Virginia border in Mount Morris , Greene County ;

/ border in , ; I-70 West, about one-half mile past the Pennsylvania / Maryland border in Warfordsburg , Fulton County ;

/ border in , ; I-81 North, about one-half mile past the Pennsylvania / Maryland border in State Line , Franklin County ;

/ border in , ; I-83 North, about two-and-a-half miles from the Pennsylvania / Maryland border in Shrewsbury , York County ;

/ border in , ; I-95 North, one-half mile from the Pennsylvania / Delaware border in Linwood , Delaware County ;

/ border in , ; I-78 East, about one-half mile from the Pennsylvania / New Jersey border in Easton , Northampton County ;

/ border in , ; I-81 South in Great Bend , Susquehanna County ;

, ; I-84 off Exit 11 in Matamoras , Pike County ;

, ; Route 15 South, seven miles past Pennsylvania / New York border in Tioga , Tioga County ;

/ border in , ; I-80 West off Exit 310 in Delaware Water Gap , Monroe County ; and

, ; and I-276 West on PA Turnpike, Milepost 328.4, King of Prussia , Montgomery County .

The Welcome Center features and National Travel and Tourism Week are additional ways that visitors are encouraged to "Pursue Your Happiness." The new state slogan, unveiled in March by the Pennsylvania Tourism Office and Pennsylvania Tourism Partnership, captures the spirit of the Keystone State, echoing the famous call to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" that began with our nation's Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776.

For more information on Pennsylvania's Welcome Centers visit the "Travel In PA" section of www.penndot.gov. Additional information on tourism and travel in the state is available at www.visitPA.com.

MEDIA CONTACT: Rich Kirkpatrick or Erin Waters-Trasatt, 717-783-8800.

SOURCE Pennsylvania Department of Transportation

Related Links

http://www.state.pa.us


DENVER, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Pulse Beverage Corporation ("Pulse") (OTCQX: PLSB), makers of Natural Cabana Lemonade/Limeade, and Coconut Waters and PULSE Heart & Body Health functional beverages, announced today that King Kullen Supermarkets is now offering Natural Cabana Lemonade/Limeade in four flavors at all 35 stores on Long Island, New York. They also have placement in 5 Wild by Nature locations. In 1930 Michael J. Cullen opened the doors to America's first supermarket, King Kullen Grocery Company, which is recognized by the Smithsonian Institute as America's First Supermarket.

Paddy Sheya, VP and National Sales Manager of Pulse, said, "We are excited to be in the coldbox produce section at such a well-known supermarket chain as King Kullen. Long Island has 7.5 million residents that have not yet had the opportunity to purchase our lemonades and limeades. We expect this listing to be very successful for both King Kullen and Pulse due to the sales volume expected and the inexpensive shipping route from our Virginia co-packer to Long Island. This is a major retailer in the Northeast with a large consumer base. Due to our rapid expansion in the Northeast we are reviewing options to contract a co-packer closer to our customers to meet our estimated sales volume in that area."

About The Pulse Beverage Corporation

Pulse Beverage Corporation is an emerging beverage company that offers natural beverage brands that are great tasting, good-for-you, refreshing, and low-calorie. Combining all-natural ingredients, essential vitamins and minerals, Pulse's line of beverages provides consumers with high-quality, healthy alternatives at a reasonable price.

For more information, please visit: www.pulsebeverage.com or email [email protected].

Follow Pulse Beverage on Twitter at https://twitter.com/drinkpulsebev .

Become a Pulse Beverage Facebook Fan at https://www.facebook.com/PulseBeverageCorporation .

Forward-Looking Statements http:/ir.pulsebeverage.com/forward-looking- statements

Contact:

Tom Nelson

[email protected]

1-480-326-8577

SOURCE The Pulse Beverage Corporation

Related Links

http://www.pulsebeverages.com


HOUSTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Quanta Services, Inc. (NYSE:PWR) announced today that it will release first quarter 2016 results on Thursday, May 5, 2016, before the market opens. In conjunction with the press release, Quanta has scheduled a conference call which will be broadcast live over the Internet on Thursday, May 5, 2016, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time.

What: Quanta Services First Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call When: Thursday, May 5, 2016  9:00 a.m. Eastern time How: Live via phone  By dialing (785) 830-7977 and providing the conference ID 3631450 or asking for the Quanta Services First Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call at least 10 minutes prior to the start time.

Live over the Internet  by logging on to the website at the following address: www.quantaservices.com

For those who cannot listen to the live call, an archive of the webcast will be available shortly after the call on the company's website at www.quantaservices.com and also through the Quanta Services Investor Relations App. For more information, please contact Kip Rupp at Quanta Services at (713) 341-7260.

About Quanta Services

Quanta Services is a leading specialized contracting services company, delivering infrastructure solutions for the electric power and oil and gas industries. Quanta's comprehensive services include designing, installing, repairing and maintaining energy infrastructure. With operations throughout the United States, Canada and Australia and in select other international markets, Quanta has the manpower, resources and expertise to safely complete projects that are local, regional, national or international in scope. For more information, visit www.quantaservices.com.

Contact: Kip Rupp, CFA

Quanta Services, Inc.

(713) 341-7260

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110810/MM50805LOGO

SOURCE Quanta Services, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.quantaservices.com


PHILADELPHIA and NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- IAOP  (the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals) has once again named consultancy firm Quint Wellington Redwood on the World's Best Outsourcing Advisors list. An independent, international panel of judges awarded Quint the highest possible scores in the categories Customer References, Awards & Certifications and Programs for Innovation. IAOP is the global, standard-setting association for outsourcing professionals and has more than 120,000 members and affiliates worldwide.

Hat trick

Netherlands-based Quint has achieved top scores in 2014, 2015 and 2016  and is a World's Best Outsourcing Advisor for the third year in succession, rating ahead of many major players. As Quint has been named on the IAOP list five times in a row, the consultancy firm is now also listed as one of the Super Stars of the Global Outsourcing 100 in the category "sustained excellence".

Evaluation

The Customer References category carries the most weight in the total evaluation of a company. Quint achieved the maximum score here. In the Awards & Certifications category too, Quint was awarded the highest possible score of 8, significantly higher than the market average. This indicates that every year Quint receives widely acknowledged, competitive and public recognition for the quality of its services and the results achieved through them for clients. With another maximum score of 8 for Programs for Innovation, again considerably higher than the market average, Quint demonstrates consistent service provision, methods and specific skills in the area of continuous innovation. With this hat trick, for the third consecutive year Quint is a World's Best Outsourcing Advisor, now with the designation of proven "sustained excellence".

Top ratings three years running

"It's wonderful that Quint has been named a World's Best Outsourcing Advisor for the third time in a row. Achieving such a position is hard enough, staying there is even harder. But we've managed to do it," said Alex van den Bergh, Sourcing Advisory Lead at Quint. "On this list, we are in the company of a number of highly competent, established names for whom we have a great deal of respect. It is to our credit that we are that little bit better, particularly in the areas of delivery quality and customer satisfaction."

"Buyers understand there are hundreds of qualified service providers and advisors out there, but what they really need to understand now is what makes each one exceptional," said IAOP CEO, Debi Hamill. "The Global Outsourcing 100 and World's Best Advisors lists have done just that. We're proud to recognize Quint Wellington Redwood for being among the highest rated companies in customer references, company awards and certifications, and programs for innovation."

Publication

The 2016 Global Outsourcing 100 and The World's Best Outsourcing Advisors lists showcasing the best companies in each of the five judging categories premiere in a special advertising section of the 2nd Quarter 2016 FORTUNE 500 issue of FORTUNE magazine. The newsstand on-sale date of this issue is 6 June 2016. The service provider and advisor lists with showcased judging categories, as well as other lists of accomplishments are also published on IAOP's website, http://www.IAOP.org, at this time.

About IAOP

IAOP is the go-to association leading the way to improve outsourcing outcomes by bringing together customers, providers and advisors in a collaborative, knowledge-based environment that promotes professional development, recognition, certification and excellence. With over 120,000 members and affiliates worldwide, IAOP is not only on top of the latest trends but in front of them. Through its expansive global chapter network, premier training and certification programs, knowledge center, member community and more, IAOP helps members learn, grow and succeed. For more information and how you can become involved, visit www.IAOP.org.

About Quint Wellington Redwood

Quint Wellington Redwood (Quint for short) is a leading, independent consultancy firm. Since 1992, Quint has focused entirely on resolving business and IT-related organizational challenges with the aim of optimizing the performance and competency of IT and Operations. Providing services in more than 49 countries across four continents, Quint concentrates in particular on strategy, Lean & Agile transformations, sourcing advisory, governance implementations, and service & information management. Quint Academy is one of the world's largest IT training organizations. Worldwide, over 30,000 professionals choose Quint Academy every year. For more information, visit www.quintgroup.com.

SOURCE Quint Wellington Redwood

Related Links

http://www.quintgroup.com


POINT PLEASANT, N.J., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Gerard's Wine and Spirits, a premier destination for fine wines and beers on the Jersey shore is excited to announce that 50 Cent will be at their store on May 13 from 5:00 to 7:00pm for a bottle signing of EFFEN Vodka. 50 Cent is a spokesperson for the Dutch vodka brand. Gerard's will offer VIP packages for the event which you can purchase in advance at www.finewineonline.com/50

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360849

EFFEN Vodkas are available in a range of flavors including Black Cherry, Dutch Raspberry, and Cucumber. The vodkas are produced in Northern Holland and the brand's name "effen" translates to "smooth" in English. 50 Cent has been working with the brand for the last several months.

"We are excited that 50 Cent is coming to the store to sign bottles and promote the vodka," says Joe Stephens, President of Gerard's Wine and Spirits. "This is a great opportunity for those in our community to come out, visit the store and meet a celebrity. As we get closer to the event more information will be released, so those interested should keep watch on our website and Facebook page for more information."

About Gerard's Wine and Spirits

Gerard's Wine and Spirits is a family run business operated by father and son, Joe and Joe Jr. Joe Jr brings the passion while Joe Sr. brings the guidance, knowledge and experience of more than 30 years in the industry. Together they have grown an educated staff not only in wine, but in other areas as well. The store is known as having the best wine and craft beer selection at the Jersey Shore. They are a past winner of the Asbury Park Press for Best of the Best Liquor Store. Gerard's is known for the best prices, best selection, and best service in Point Pleasant and the Ocean and Monmouth County areas.

Since 1956, Gerard's Wine and Spirits has established itself as the premier destination for fine wines and beers on the Jersey shore. With their online launch, the store is able to ship their products across the country. Gerard's is known for their selection and exceptional customer services. For more information, visit FineWineOnline.com.

Contact Information

Gerards Wine and Spirits

2310 Bridge Avenue

Point Pleasant, NJ 08742

732-892-6161

www.finewineonline.com

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com

SOURCE Gerard's Wine and Spirits

Related Links

http://www.finewineonline.com


SAN DIEGO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Regen BioPharma, Inc. (OTCBB: RGBP) and (PINK: RGBP) has entered into a non-exclusive license agreement with Pan Am Cancer Treatment Center in Tijuana, Mexico to test HemaXellerate in a first-in-human proof of concept study. Up to 10 patients with chemotherapy-induced aplastic anemia will be treated with HemaXellerate, and outcomes will be measured at one, three and six months. This study was initiated by Dr. Julio Selva Pallares, Professor of Clinical Hematology at the Autonomous University of Baja California and Director of its hematology transfusion unit.

"We were delighted that Dr. Pallares initiated this trial and that Regen could support him. We hope that HemaXellerate will benefit these patients," said Dr. David Koos, CEO of Regen BioPharma. "As an investigator-initiated trial, the license does not have a financial component. The first-in-human study, however, is very valuable to our research."

HemaXellerate is comprised of cells extracted from the patient's own fat tissue and processed using a proprietary method to induce a biological response in the patient that heals damaged bone marrow and restores the body's ability to generate healthy blood cells. The FDA recently cleared Regen to perform phase I clinical trials in the U.S. using HemaXellerate for patients battling aplastic anemia.

"It is very exciting to have our first clinical stage product licensed for a proof of concept study so quickly. Our HemaXellerate program is advancing, and we anticipate the other autologous cell therapies for which we are seeking FDA IND clearance, dCellVax and tCellVax, to follow a similar path," said Harry Lander, Ph.D., MBA, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Regen.

The license granted to Pan Am Cancer Treatment Center grants only the right to test HemaXellerate in a human proof of concept study. The license granted does not permit Pan Am Cancer Treatment Center to market the therapy or provide the therapy to any party other than in connection with their study.

About Regen BioPharma, Inc.

Regen BioPharma Inc. is a publicly traded biotechnology company (OTCBB: RGBP), (OTC PINK: RGBP) and (OTC PINK: RGBPP). The Company seeks to identify undervalued regenerative medicine applications in the immunotherapy and stem cell space. The Company is focused on rapidly advancing these technologies through pre-clinical and Phase I/ II clinical trials. Currently the Company is centering on gene silencing therapy for treating cancer, telomeres and small molecule therapies, along with developing stem cell treatments for aplastic anemia.

Disclaimer: This news release may contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted or quantified. Future events and actual results could differ materially from those set forth in, contemplated by, or underlying the forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties to which forward looking statements are subject include, but are not limited to, the effect of government regulation, competition and other material risks.

http://www.regenbiopharma.com and http://www.regenbiopharmainc.com

Twitter: Regen BioPharma News: https://twitter.com/RegenBioPharm

Contact:

Regen BioPharma Inc.

David R. Koos, PhD

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

+1-619-702-1404 Phone

+1-619-330-2328 Fax

[email protected]



The Dorsee Company

Debra Dorsee

+1-(858)-229-6082

[email protected]



SOURCE Regen BioPharma Inc.
DUBLIN, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Drivy, a French car rental startup, has raised USD 35 million for European expansion. Currently operating in France, Germany and Spain, Drivy plans to add to the 36,000 cars on its system by offering its services in other European cities such as London. The startup is also reportedly considering markets in Italy, Poland, Portugal and the Netherlands. The global car rental market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.32% by 2019, according to a report from Research and Markets, but Drivy's latest round of fundraising could result in a higher growth.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO )



Although the average rental length on the Drivy platform is around three days, the company is seeing an increasing demand for single-day and half-day rentals. In an effort to make the rental process as simple as possible, the startup developed the Drivy Open system, which enables customers to open a locked vehicle through use of an app.

The global commercial telematics market is set to grow at a CAGR of 27.39% by 2020, as forecast in a recent report, and the Drivy Open system could stimulate further growth. Similarly, the Europe automotive smart keys market is expected to be worth USD 5.6 billion by 2020, but industry adoption of Drivy's technology could result in a greater market value.

Cathay Innovation and Nokia Growth Partners led the latest fundraising round, which saw the participation of previous investors Bpifrance Ecotechnologies Fund, Via-ID and Index Ventures. Drivy has now raised a total of EUR 47 million over four investment rounds.

For further information on this topic, and a full list of all related documentation, please visit the Automotive Leasing and Rental section at http://www.researchandmarkets.com/rm/OHNQ.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/-airbnb-for-cars-startup-drivy-gets-35-million-to-expand

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.





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

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SOURCE Research and Markets
Sedki Sobhi also underlined Wednesday that the army is working hard to ensure basic commodities are provided to citizens in need

Egypt's defence minister, Sedki Sobhi, said Wednesday that the country's armed forces support the "political leadership in all its decisions," according to the Facebook page of army spokesperson Mohamed Samir.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and the government have faced a wave of criticism and protests after the announcement earlier this month of a maritime border agreement with Saudi Arabia that places the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir  long under Egyptian control  within Saudi territorial waters.

Sobhi, whose statements came on the sidelines of a visit to second field army forces, also pointed to "painstaking efforts to support the fundamentals of overall prosperity."

The army chief stressed the armed forces will work hard on providing basic commodities for citizens pursuant to directives of El-Sisi, which came in a recent speech.

Search Keywords:

Short link:


ALPHARETTA, Ga., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Alpharetta-based Rountree Group Integrated Communications has added Kasasa , a financial technology client, to its client roster. The firm is assisting Kasasa with integrated communications campaigns in several markets across the United States.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360913LOGO

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Kasasa is an award-winning financial technology and marketing services company that provides branded retail banking products and services to community financial institutions.

"We wanted a team that had a successful track record of strategizing and executing integrated communications campaigns across the country," said Keith Brannan, chief marketing officer for Kasasa. "Rountree Group has a firm handle on how we work with our clients to ensure they are successful, and will be a great ambassador of our brand."

"The financial technology industry has experienced substantial growth recently, and Kasasa is a leading brand in the industry," said Rountree Group President Don Rountree. "We value the opportunity and look forward to working with Kasasa to grow its brand across the country."

About Rountree Group Integrated Communications

Rountree Group is one of the South's leading independent integrated communications firms that provides corporate counsel, business-to-business communications services and marketing communications. In business for 32 years, Rountree Group has won more than 160 industry awards for a variety of communication programs for small to publically traded companies. Rountree Group is an owner of IPREX, a consortium of communication agencies with more than 125 offices worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.rountreegroup.com or call 770-645-4545.

About Kasasa

Kasasa, formerly BancVue, is the innovative leader in branded, community-powered banking products proven to drive profit and growth for community financial institutions. With unprecedented access to training, compliance, research, support resources and customized consulting, Kasasa's flagship suite provides a research-based strategy leveraging the power of a branded relationship platform. Kasasa is making community financial institutions the topic of conversation for happy consumers nationwide. For more information, please visit https://www.kasasa.com/, or visit them on Twitter @Kasasa, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Rountree Group, Inc.

2300 Lakeview Parkway

Suite 700

Alpharetta, GA 30009

Tel: 770-645-4545

Fax: 770-645-0147

www.rountreegroup.com

CONTACT:

Trey Newstedt

Email

770-645-4545

SOURCE Rountree Group Integrated Communications

Related Links

http://rountreegroup.com


CHICAGO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Ryerson Holding Corporation (NYSE: RYI), a leading distributor and processor of metals, announced today that it is delaying by one hour the start time of its conference call to discuss first quarter 2016 results to accommodate scheduling conflicts with interested parties in the metals industry. The updated call time is Friday, May 6 at 11 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

The live online broadcast will be available on the company's investor relations website, ir.ryerson.com. Ryerson will report earnings after the market closes on Thursday, May 5.

Ryerson Holding Corporation's First Quarter 2016 Conference Call Details

DATE: Friday, May 6, 2016 TIME: 11:00 a.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m. CDT DIAL-IN: 877-741-4242 (U.S., Canada) / 719-325-4825 (International) CONFERENCE ID: 7622543

An online replay of the call will be posted on the investor relations website, ir.ryerson.com, and remain available for 90 days.

Ryerson is a leading processor and distributor of metals, with operations in the United States, Canada, Mexico and China. Founded in 1842, Ryerson employs approximately 3,500 employees in approximately 100 locations. Visit Ryerson at www.ryerson.com.

SOURCE Ryerson Holding Corporation

Related Links

http://www.ryerson.com


NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The women in Smith et al. v. Merck & Co., Inc., 3:13-cv-02970 (D.N.J.), a $250 million gender bias class action, scored another victory on Wednesday, when Judge Michael A. Shipp of the U.S. District Court in New Jersey conditionally certified a class of current and former female sales representatives challenging discrimination at the pharmaceutical giant. The ruling paves the way for thousands of women across the country to join the lawsuit.

Judge Shipp's ruling concluded that "[t]he information submitted by Plaintiffs shows that the sales representatives had similar responsibilities; that named plaintiffs were paid less than some allegedly similarly situated males; and that compensation decisions, although based in part on input from some direct managers, were finalized by a central, common office." The Court also cited statistical evidence submitted by the Plaintiffs, which demonstrated that female sales representatives earned on average 1.4% less per year than male sales representatives in the same roles. Based on this evidence, the Court concluded that the lawsuit should go forward as a collective action.

According to David Sanford, Chairman of Sanford Heisler, LLP and co-lead counsel for the Plaintiffs --- "The Court's message was clear: Many women at Merck may have suffered discrimination in pay. In the ongoing fight for pay equity, this is an important step forward."

"We are very pleased with the Court's decision," said Deborah Marcuse of Feinstein Doyle Payne & Kravec, LLC, co-lead counsel for the Plaintiffs. "The Court's decision means that thousands of Merck sales representatives across the country will have an opportunity to participate in this lawsuit and challenge Merck's discriminatory policies. This decision sends a strong message to female Merck sales representatives everywhere that they are not alone."

Equal pay for women has been an increasingly important issue, from corporate boardrooms to the media to the presidential campaign trail. "The Court's decision is part of a national movement towards equal pay for women," said Senior Litigation Counsel Russell Kornblith at Sanford Heisler, a member of the plaintiffs' legal team. "Sanford Heisler is proud to be a leader in the fight for gender pay equity in the courts," he added. The firm is also currently litigating pay equity cases against Forest Laboratories and consulting giant KPMG, among others.

In addition to challenging unequal, centralized pay decisions in their suit against Merck & Co., Inc., the Plaintiffs also allege that Merck systematically discriminates against female sales representatives, and pregnant women in particular, in promotions and other terms and conditions of employment. The Plaintiffs plan to seek class certification of their systemic gender discrimination claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in the coming months.

Plaintiffs and the class are represented by David Sanford, Andrew Melzer, Russell Kornblith, and David Tracey of Sanford Heisler, LLP and by Deborah Marcuse of Feinstein Doyle Payne & Kravec, LLC. Mr. Sanford and Ms. Marcuse are also co-lead counsel in the firms' gender discrimination class action against Forest Laboratories, currently being litigated in the Southern District of New York. Conditional certification in that case was granted in August 2015.

About Sanford Heisler LLP

Sanford Heisler, LLP is a national public interest class-action litigation law firm, which has offices in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, and San Diego. Sanford Heisler is committed to protecting the rights of individuals in employment discrimination, wage and hour, qui tam, and other civil rights matters. The firm has extensive experience in complex class action litigation, having successfully represented thousands of individuals in major class action cases in the United States. The firm also represents select individual clients such as executives, lawyers in employment disputes, and whistleblowers. The firm has recovered over $1 billion for its clients. For more information, visit www.sanfordheisler.com or contact Sanford Heisler at (646) 402-5650. For the latest news visit our newsroom at http://www.sanfordheisler.com/media-room/news-archive/ or follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sanfordheisler

For more information, contact Jamie Moss, newsPRos, 201-493-1027, [email protected].

SOURCE Sanford Heisler LLP

Related Links

http://www.sanfordheisler.com


BETHESDA, Md., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In response to increased demand for local information security training, SANS Institute today announced its return to Colorado. SANS Rocky Mountain 2016, taking place July 11  16 in downtown Denver, will feature a number of security, digital forensics and security management courses. Attendees wishing to test their skills and go head-to-head with other InfoSec professionals will have the opportunity to participate in SANS' popular NetWars Tournament.

Included among the courses offered at SANS Rocky Mountain is the FOR408: Window Forensic Analysis course. FOR408 focuses on building in-depth digital forensics knowledge of the Microsoft Windows operating systems.

When describing his experience taking the FOR408 course at a recent training event, Thomas Farley, with Raytheon, adds "The methods taught and the tools introduced will be very beneficial to me as an analyst performing examinations. The topics are informative and relevant and a great guide that leads to productivity."

The new FOR578: Cyber Threat Intelligence course will also be offered at the Rocky Mountain training event. This course will train security professionals and teams to detect, scope, and select resilient courses of action in response to intrusions and data breaches.

Bonus evening sessions will also be offered covering some of the hottest topics in information security. Session titles included are Open Source Threat Model for Prioritized Defense, Offensive Countermeasures, Active Defenses, and Internet Tough Guys, Quality not Quantity: Continuous Monitoring's Deadliest Events and more.

For a complete list of courses, bonus evening discussions, or to register for SANS Rocky Mountain, please visit: www.sans.org/u/h5y

About SANS Institute

The SANS Institute was established in 1989 as a cooperative research and education organization. SANS is the most trusted and, by far, the largest provider of cyber security training and certification to professionals at governments and commercial institutions world-wide. Renowned SANS instructors teach over 50 different courses at more than 200 live cyber security training events as well as online. GIAC, an affiliate of the SANS Institute, validates employee qualifications via 30 hands-on, technical certifications in information security. The SANS Technology Institute, a regionally accredited independent subsidiary, offers master's degrees in cyber security. SANS offers a myriad of free resources to the InfoSec community including consensus projects, research reports, and newsletters; it also operates the Internet's early warning system--the Internet Storm Center. At the heart of SANS are the many security practitioners, representing varied global organizations from corporations to universities, working together to help the entire information security community. (www.SANS.org)

SOURCE SANS Institute

Related Links

http://www.sans.org


WASHINGTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On day five of National Small Business Week, Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet from the U.S. Small Business Administration will hold a small business conversation in Phoenix, Arizona with two Shark Tank contestants who are also U.S. military veterans.

The "armchair discussion" with Contreras-Sweet and veteran entrepreneurs Angela Cody-Rouget and Eli Crane is set for Thursday, May 5, 10:30 a.m. MST, at the Arizona Biltmore McArthur Ballroom. The event is open to the public and will also be live streamed at www.sba.gov/nsbw. To register for this free event click here.

Information on many of the programs available to active duty service members, veterans, and military spouses offered by SBA's Office of Veterans Business Development (OVBD) will also be shared. The conversation will cover topics ranging from making the transition from military life to entrepreneurship and best practices for establishing a successful small business, to developing a solid business plan, small business marketing, and accessing capital.

Angela Cody-Rouget is the founder and CEO of MajorMom, a professional organizer service. She served in the U.S. Air Force for 13 years, thriving in an orderly environment.

In 2009, after working solo for a few years, Cody-Rouget started the business, getting a jump start from the SBA's Emerging Leaders Initiative and the Veteran Women Igniting the Spirt of Entrepreneurship (V-WISE) program. V-WISE is an entrepreneurship training course designed for women veterans, active duty women service members and female partners/spouses of active duty service members. Cody-Rouget participated in a February 2016 episode of Shark Tank. MajorMom currently employs 32 "Liberators" (professional organizers) serving clients in Arizona and Colorado.

Eli Crane, a former Navy Seal, is the owner of Arizona-based Bottle Breacher, which crafts bottle openers made from dummy ammunition. The bottle openers are sold as promotional products and novelty gifts. Crane and his wife Jen started Bottle Breacher in a one-car garage. The Cranes were also featured contestants on a 2014 episode of Shark Tank. As their business grows, they continue to focus on investing in and hiring veterans.

Each year SBA helps more than 200,000 veterans, service-disabled veterans, National Guard and Reserve service members, and military spouses start and grow their small businesses. Veteran business development assistance is available in each state at SBA District Offices and at Veteran Business Outreach Centers located throughout the U.S.

To learn more about additional opportunities for veterans available through the SBA, visit www.sba.gov/vets.

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/nsbw.

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.

Contact: Carol Chastang (202) 205-6987

Internet Address: http://www.sba.gov/news

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook & Blogs

Release Number: 16-39

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WASHINGTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The U.S. Small Business Administration today released its annual Small Business Procurement Scorecards, which provide an assessment of each federal agency's annual small business contracting achievement against its goal using a grade of A+ through F. The federal government received an "A" on the government-wide scorecard for 2015, reflecting significant efforts by federal agencies toward meeting their 23 percent statutory goal.

The federal government also reached its small business federal contracting goal for the third consecutive year, awarding 25.75 percent in federal contracts to small businesses totaling $90.7 billion. The 25.75 percent of contracts awarded to small businesses represent the highest ever percentage of contracts awarded to small businesses by the federal government.

"I'm very happy to report that the federal government exceeded our 23 percent small business prime contracting goal for the third year in a row, with the federal government receiving an "A" for its contracting achievements. These accomplishments wouldn't be possible without the help of the agency Office Small Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU) directors and senior leaders throughout the federal government," said John Shoraka, Associate Administrator for Government Contracting and Business Development. "This year's scorecard also includes several historic firsts. For the first time in history, the U.S. government met its Congressionally-mandated goal of awarding 5 percent of eligible federal contracts to women-owned small businesses. Thanks to the President's continued leadership and a team effort among all federal agencies, we were able to break records and expand contracting opportunities for women-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned and small disadvantaged businesses.

"Next week kicks off National Small Business Week. When federal agencies, which together make up the largest consumer of goods and services in the world, commit to shopping small and expanding access to federal contracts, it makes a huge difference for small business owners all across the country. That's why we're announcing our small business contracting scorecard this week. This report card is our way to recognize those agencies who lead by example. We want to encourage every part of the federal government to do business with small enterprises in the communities where we live and work."

Last month, the SBA announced at a press conference that for the first time in history, the federal government has met the 5 percent goal for contracting with women-owned small businesses and record achievements for service disabled veteran-owned and small disadvantaged businesses. More information about these contracting figures can be found here.

Five agencies' grades increased from FY 2014, 16 agencies' grades stayed the same and 3 agencies' grades decreased. The agency breakdown is as follows:

3 agencies received an "A + "

" 18 agencies received an "A"

3 agencies received a "B"

0 agencies received a "C"

0 agencies received a "D"

0 agencies received a "F"

Three agencies are noteworthy of recognition for their small business performance during FY2015. The following agencies received a grade of A+ on their Scorecard:

General Services Administration ;

U.S. Department of Transportation ; and

U. S. Small Business Administration

About the Scorecard

The annual Scorecard is an assessment tool to (1) measure how well federal agencies reach their small business and socio-economic prime contracting and subcontracting goals, (2) provide accurate and transparent contracting data and (3) report agency-specific progress. The prime and subcontracting component goals include goals for small businesses, small businesses owned by women, small disadvantaged businesses, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, and small businesses located in Historically Underutilized Business Zones (HUBZones).

Every year, the SBA works with each agency to set their prime and subcontracting goals and their grades are based on the agreed upon goals. Each federal agency has a different small business contracting goal, determined annually in consultation with SBA. SBA ensures that the sum total of all of the goals exceeds the 23 percent target established by law.

Each agency's overall grade will show an A+ for agencies that meet or exceed 120 percent of their goals, an A for those between 100 percent and 119 percent, a B for 90 to 99 percent, a C for 80 to 89 percent, a D for 70 to 79 percent and an F for less than 70 percent. An agency's overall grade was comprised of three quantitative measures: prime contracts (80 percent), subcontracts (10 percent) and its progress plan for meeting goals (10 percent).

The individual agency scorecards released today by SBA, as well as a detailed explanation of the scorecard methodology, is available online: https://www.sba.gov/contracting/finding-government-customers/see-agency-small-business-scorecards.

Performance in four out of five of the small business prime contracting and socio-economic categories showed significant improvement, with increases in performance against statutory goals. The contract goal achievements by dollars and percentages for all categories are as follows:

Government-wide Small Business

Goaling Summary Report 2015 Goal 2015 % 2015 $ 2014 % 2014 $ Small Business 23.00% 25.75% $90.7 B 24.99% $91.7 B Small Disadvantaged Business 5.00% 10.06% $35.4 B 9.46% $34.7 B Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business 3.00% 3.93% $13.8 B 3.68% $13.5 B Women Owned Small Business 5.00% 5.05% $17.8 B 4.68% $17.2 B HUBZone 3.00% 1.82% $6.42 B 1.82% $6.97 B

The SBA has worked with federal agencies to expand opportunities for small businesses to compete for and win federal contracts.

Additionally, since SBA started the current small business procurement scorecard methodology in FY 2009, six agencies have received a grade of "A+" or "A" seven fiscal years in a row (FY 2009 through FY 2015): the Departments of Agriculture, Homeland Security, Interior, Labor, Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency. SBA applauds the consistency of these six agencies in awarding contracts to small businesses.

While each federal agency is responsible for ensuring the quality of its own contracting data, SBA conducts additional analyses to help agencies identify potential data anomalies. As part of its ongoing data quality efforts, the SBA is working with federal agency procurement staff to provide tools to facilitate review of data, implement improvements to procurement systems and conduct training to improve accuracy.

The overall federal small business prime contracting performance released today by the SBA, as well as a detailed explanation of the calculations, is available online at http://go.usa.gov/Nxxd.

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.

Contact: Tiffani S. Clements (202) 401-0035

Internet Address: http://www.sba.gov/news

Release Number: 16-37

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CAYCE, S.C., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SCANA Corporation (NYSE: SCG) announced that the Company's 2016 Annual Meeting of Shareholders was held today in Columbia, South Carolina, with Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer Kevin B. Marsh presiding.

During the business portion of the meeting, shareholders re-elected the following Class II Directors to SCANA's Board  Gregory E. Aliff, Sharon A. Decker, Kevin B. Marsh, and James M. Micali. Terms of the Class II Directors will expire at the Annual Meeting in 2019 (except James M. Micali, whose term will expire at the 2017 Annual Meeting as a result of his reaching the mandatory retirement age).

In other business, shareholders approved the following - the appointment of Deloitte & Touche LLP as SCANA's independent registered public accounting firm to audit the Company's 2016 financial statements, an amendment to the Director Compensation and Deferral Plan to set an annual limit of 10,000 shares on the number of shares that may be issued to any individual participant under the plan each year, and an amendment to the Director Compensation and Deferral Plan increasing by 150,000 the number of shares that may be reserved under the plan. Board-proposed amendments to declassify the Board of Directors and provide for the annual election of all directors did not receive the votes required to amend the Articles of Incorporation.

Immediately following the Annual Meeting, SCANA's Board of Directors met and declared the regular quarterly dividend of 57  cents per share on the Company's common stock for the quarter ending June 30, 2016. The dividend is payable July 1, 2016 to shareholders of record at the close of business on June 10, 2016.

SCANA Corporation, headquartered in Cayce, SC, is an energy-based holding company principally engaged, through subsidiaries, in electric and natural gas utility operations and other energy-related businesses. Information about SCANA is available on the company's website at www.scana.com.

Media Contact: Analyst Contacts:

Eric Boomhower Bryant Potter Susan Wright (803) 217-7701 (803) 217-6919 (803) 217-4436

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CINCINNATI and DURHAM, N.C., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Schulman IRB, the industry-leading central IRB in customer service and technology, is proud to be a platinum partner of the 2016 MAGI East Clinical Research Conference. The conference will be held from May 1-4 at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, Massachusetts.

"The MAGI East Conference is one of the most well-known conferences in the clinical research industry. We are looking forward to engaging in this year's sessions and workshops, as well as networking with some of the most respected professionals in our space," said Robann Cunningham, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Schulman.

Three members of Schulman's team will speak at various sessions throughout the conference. Eli Alford, COO, will speak at a special topics track on practical negotiation techniques. Schulman's Institutional Official and Vice President of Compliance and Board Operations, Rebecca Ballard, will host "Human Subjects Protection Jeopardy." And Rebecca Rogers, IRB Chair, will discuss the complex challenges unique to oncology research.

In addition to these three speakers, Schulman will also be sponsoring the Zenith reception on Monday, May 2 from 5:30 PM-7:00 PM.

To learn more about the event, visit http://www.magiworld.org/events/2016E/.

About Schulman IRB

Schulman IRB has been a leader in the protection of human research participants in the U.S., Puerto Rico and Canada since 1983. Schulman offers thorough, timely IRB review services  including dedicated review capabilities for all phases of research across all therapeutic areas  to clinical trial sponsors, CROs, investigators and institutions. Schulman also provides global consulting services through its joint venture partner Provision Research Compliance Services, offering comprehensive solutions to maximize the protection of human subjects and improve overall quality standards for clinical studies and data integrity. Fully accredited by the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP), Schulman has an unparalleled clean audit history with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

For more information, please visit http://www.sairb.com or follow @SchulmanIRB on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

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SAUSALITO, Calif., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Serena & Lily, the California-based lifestyle and home decor brand, announced the opening of its flagship, Serena & Lily Design Shop at the restored Kemper-Gunn House in Westport, CT, on April 29, 2016. The store will be more than 3,100 square feet of product on display in a full living environment.

Serena & Lily Westport Design Shop

Utilizing three stories of a classic Queen Anne Victorian home in a showhouse-style layout, the store is a completely new concept for the brand. A walk through the house will give visitors an immersive brand experience, showing how the product can be interpreted in a home setting, while maintaining the fresh, coastal aesthetic Serena & Lily is known for. The company's breadth of product - from bedding, bath, furniture, fabric, rugs, lighting, decor, nursery, and art  seen in actual settings for the dining room, living room and bedroom.

Built in 1889, the Kemper-Gunn House is a historic landmark in the town of Westport. The house was slated for demolition to make room for a new development, but after years of campaigning from local preservationists, the house was picked up and moved in November 2014 to 35 Elm Street, where it sits today.

"We were drawn to Westport and this particular location because we saw an opportunity to bring our brand to a quintessential East Coast town in the most idyllic of showcases  a historic mansion in the center of town," said Serena Dugan, Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer. "It's a dream opportunity and project."

Serena & Lily has worked to preserve the original charm and character of the house, from the elaborate detailing in the exterior facade to saving the interior trim, hardware, hand-carved staircase, and stained glass windows.

KEY FEATURES

A swatch wall featuring more than 300 original Serena & Lily textile designs.

Rotating art displays featuring more than 150 original works by Serena and new and established artists.

Design Advisors on-site to offer inspiring solutions that incorporate Serena & Lily's product range. The service is free and customers are encouraged to bring in photos of their projects.

Open to interior designers for private appointments, client meetings and presentations.

35 Elm Street, Westport, CT. 06880

Phone: (203) 635-8000

Email: [email protected]

Hours: Mon-Sat 10am-6pm; Sun 11am-5pm

For more information: http://www.serenaandlily.com/LP-stores.html

ABOUT SERENA & LILY

Lifestyle brand Serena & Lily brings a creative spirit to the everyday with its inspired approach to home, design, and art. The Sausalito-based company was founded in 2003 when Serena Dugan, an independent artist and textile designer, met Lily Kanter, an accomplished executive-turned-entrepreneur. Today, Serena's original textiles continue to anchor Serena & Lily, while a commitment to inspirational living is reflected in all that the brand puts forth, from innovative retail experiences to furniture, bedding, decor, nursery and art. The company's four retail locations in East Hampton, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Westport reflect the individual spirit of their locations, giving each store a unique flavor, while allowing customers to experience Serena & Lily products in a variety of settings. To shop the website or for more information, please visit www.serenaandlily.com.

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"I am happy to announce the attendance of Captain Mark Kelly and Captain Scott Kelly at this year's Shaklee Live 2016 event in Orlando, Florida," stated Roger Barnett, Shaklee CEO and Chairman. "These astronauts are friends in addition to aviators and American heroes who personify leadership and courage. It will be a great honor to welcome them as our Keynote Speakers at this year's event."

Shaklee and NASA have been working together for more than two decades since NASA tapped Shaklee as a partner to help every astronaut return to earth safely by providing a solution to address General Re-entry Syndrome (GRS) which includes symptoms of vertigo, fatigue, gastrointestinal discomfort, disequilibrium and general debilitation occurring during reentry to earth's atmosphere and immediately after landing. Shaklee scientists specifically designed AstroAde, a special rehydration product in conjunction with NASA scientists, to combat this unique set of challenges facing the shuttle astronauts. Shaklee products have been on every NASA mission since 1993.

Most recently Commander Mark Kelly took Shaklee Vitalizer, a daily vitamin, on space shuttle Endeavour. Vitalizer provides everyday nutrition for life, with a comprehensive spectrum of clinically supported vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phytonutrients, omega-3 fatty acids, probiotics, and more in one convenient Vita-Strip. Vitalizer supports heart, bone, joint, immune, digestive, brain and vision health, and physical energy. With formulas customized for men, women and adults over 50, Vitalizer is available to consumers in the United States.

"Having just returned to Planet Earth after a year in Space, I can say first-hand it is one of the most arduous physical experiences the human body can endure," explained Captain Scott Kelly. "NASA scientists and my medical team helped me come up with a daily regimen to ensure I maintained my health. I'm looking forward to sharing some stories and lessons with the Shaklee family in Orlando."

Shaklee and the Kellys also share a commitment to environmental sustainability, recognizing that a healthy individual and a healthy planet go hand-in-hand. To learn more about Shaklee's commitment to environmental sustainability visit http://www.shaklee.com/us/en/about.html#sustainability

"One thing we've come to understand is that we need to take better care of our planet. We love that Shaklee as a company is really focused on the environment," explained Captain Mark Kelly.

Captain Scott Kelly

Veteran astronaut Captain Scott Kelly has enjoyed an illustrious career with NASA. Along with his identical twin brother, fellow astronaut Mark Kelly (who will be on Earth), Scott was selected to participate in a yearlong experiment aboard the International Space Station designed to test the effects of extended space travel on the human body. The data NASA plans to collect from Scott and Mark after this expedition would greatly determine the plausibility of interplanetary space travel, including future trips to the moon, asteroids and ultimately Mars. On stage, Scott speaks on the themes of teamwork, crisis management, accountability, and leadership.

Captain Mark Kelly

Retired NASA astronaut, Captain Mark Kelly was Commander of the space shuttle Endeavor. In addition, he is a prostate cancer survivor and retired U.S. Navy Captain. Using examples from his career along with the assassination attempt on his wife, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, Mark speaks on what it means to be a leader, the importance of planning, thinking ahead, being bold, and responding quickly. Mark is currently undergoing NASA's first "twin study" with his twin brother Scott who is on the International Space Station for one full calendar year. The study will show the effects of space on the human body compared to here on earth as NASA continues to plan for longer manned space missions.

Captains Scott and Mark Kelly

Being identical twins is rare, but both being astronauts is something else entirely. A former U.S. Navy Captain, Mark Kelly was aboard the last planned flight of space shuttle Endeavor, and was part of many other missions in the 1990s and 2000s. His brother Scott Kelly recently concluded his historical year in space mission aboard the International Space Station. While addressing a number of topics dealing with leadership, communication, innovation and teamwork, the Kelly brothers also speak on the importance of space exploration, lessons learned and how this mission will directly impact our pursuit of one day putting a man on Mars.

About Shaklee

Since its inception, the Pleasanton, California-based Shaklee Corporation has combined breakthrough scientific research with pure, safe, and proven ingredients to develop the world's most cutting-edge and life-enhancing health products. Founded by Dr. Forrest C. Shaklee, who developed the first multivitamin in the U.S. 100 years ago, the company has become a leading health and wellness company with a long history of pioneering advances in nutritional science. Shaklee has over 120 published studies, abstracts and presentations many of which are published in peer-reviewed journals that support our products, ingredients and perspective. Shaklee is one of the most well-established names in the nutritional supplement and direct selling industries with over 1.2 million members worldwide in Canada, Japan, China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Mexico and the U.S.

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The ministry of foreign affairs says it is working to determine the identity of the killed Egyptians; the UN has condemned killing of both Egyptian and Libyan nationals

At least 12 Egyptians were killed in the central town of Bani Walid in western Libya in the past 24 hours in a fight with the families of local human traffickers, the Egyptian ministry of foreign affairs confirmed on Wednesday.

According to Libyan sources, the victims were murdered by the families of three human traffickers who were killed earlier in a fight with 30 Egyptian migrants.

Egypt's foreign ministry spokesperson Ahmed Abou-Zeid said on Wednesday that 12 to 16 Egyptians were killed in confrontations with human traffickers.

The spokesperson told CBC TV channel on Wednesday evening the ministry is trying to determine the identity of the victims.

Meanwhile, also on Wednesday evening, the United Nations' Libya envoy condemned the killing of 12 Egyptians and three Libyan nationals.

"I strongly deplore these terrible killings and call on those with authority on the ground in Bani Walid to ensure that the incidents are investigated and to prevent any further killings," Martin Kobler said in a statement.

In 2015, the Egyptian government issued a warning to Egyptian citizens to avoid travel to Libya after the Islamic State militant group killed 20 Egyptian migrant workers near Derna.

The warning was renewed later that year and remains in effect, as the security situation remains dangerous in the country.

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptian workers have seeked employment in oil-rich Libya in the past five decades. Many have left Libya following the outbreak of civil war in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution which ousted Muammar Ghadafi and the subsequent Nato intervention.

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LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Smart structures play a growing role in the aerospace industry in four different areas: monitoring of composites, suppression of structural vibration, noise suppression, and surface morphing. A related area is the use of photovoltaics in aircraft of various types. This report identifies where the commercial opportunities are for smart structures in civil and general aviation, military aircraft, helicopters, UAVs and spacecraft. It examines where the money will be made in smart structures for aircraft at all levels of the value chain; we examine the market potential for the smart structures themselves, the related smart materials and SHM/HUMS systems and smart aircraft skins, as well as the implications of the trend towards smart structures for the aircraft builders and airlines.



The report profiles both the R&D and commercialization projects for smart structures in the aerospace industry, including those sponsored by governmental agencies such as the EU, DARPA and NASA and those run by the major aerospace companies. The report also discusses how smart structures are enabling the aerospace industry to move away from manual monitoring and repair procedures and the ways that firms in the smart structure space are overcoming the strong reluctance of aerospace industry to abandon manual processes for aircraft maintenance. In particular, the report examines how smart technologies can monitor the operation of the aircraft, improve its functioning, reducing its maintenance, and extend its life cycle. In addition, this n-tech report includes granular ten-year forecasts for the smart materials, components and subsystems used for smart structure deployment in the aerospace industry. In addition, we provide detailed profiles of key companies in the aerospace smart structures space analyzing their product/market strategies they have devised for this market.



This report is part of n-tech's ongoing research program on smart materials. n-tech has already published many reports on smart materials including a recent report on smart structures in the construction industry. Other topics covered by n-tech's smart materials reports include smart windows, smart coatings, smart surfaces, self-healing materials, multifunctional coatings and surfaces, color-shifting materials and several other topics.

Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/3795757/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

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For more information:

Sarah Smith

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Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Contact-free continuous patient monitoring (CFCM) technology allows a facility to effectively monitor every patient bed, and constantly monitor a patient's status without having to connect cables, leads and sensors to the individual. CFCM utilizes a sensor placed under the patient's mattress or within a chair and leverages analytics to continuously measure vital signs, without needing to touch the patient. This provides a very simple user interface for the caregiver and less intrusiveness for the patient and their family, all while constantly monitoring the patient and ensuring their safety. Continuous analytics report changes in the status of vital signs, which provide clinicians with data indicating the development of adverse conditions long before they become serious. CFCM has been clinically proven to reduce mortality, patient falls, re-hospitalizations, Code Blue events, alarm fatigue, pressure ulcers and length of stay.

A new whitepaper from Frost & Sullivan, Finding Top-Line Opportunities in a Bottom-Line Healthcare Market (http://frost.ly/bp), determines CFCM smart solutions can create significant new revenues for hospitals in three ways: reducing length of stay to open capacity for new admissions, securing additional reimbursement by meeting value-based payer program goals, and helping to identify and properly code conditions, which could generate additional reimbursement, especially for sepsis, cardiac arrhythmias and respiratory distress.

"Nearly one-third of U.S. hospitals have negative operating profit margins and many are seeing low single digit revenue growth," said Frost & Sullivan's Transformational Health North America Director, Charlie Whelan. "Hospital executives are searching actively for opportunities to improve patient outcomes and patient satisfaction as well as create incremental revenue and deliver staff efficiency gains."

In recent years there have been numerous clinical outcomes and economic studies published in peer reviewed journals on the clinical and financial benefits of implementing continuous monitoring in hospitals. However, this is the first time a study has been completed that analyzes how CFCM technology can impact the revenue of healthcare organizations.

The Frost & Sullivan financial modeling indicates a hypothetical "average" U.S. hospital with 200 beds that adopts CFCM could generate more than $2 million in additional revenue, save more than $1.5 million and add approximately $2 million to its bottom line annually. This is in addition to clinical outcome benefits, such as reducing pressure ulcers, falls and life-threatening conditions. The model also shows operating margins increased significantly in the scenario from 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent.

"Hospitals are too busy and financially strapped to adopt new technologies that only deliver benefits to one department or aspect of the hospital's operations. They require proven solutions offering both clinical and financial improvements," added Whelan. "This analysis presents a clear financial case for CFCM. As hospitals begin to realize the revenue generation opportunities that CFCM provides, we can expect to see an increase in interest and adoption of these solutions across the market."

Whelan will join representatives from Brigham & Women's Partners, Physician-Patient Alliance for Health and Safety and patient-care advocates in a non-CME educational symposium on continuous monitoring in Washington, D.C. on May 2, 2016. The symposium is held concurrently with the American Hospital Association Annual Meeting. The event will stream live at 10:45 a.m. EDT.



To watch the event, please visit: http://frost.ly/bn.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants.

Our "Growth Partnership" supports clients by addressing these opportunities and incorporating two key elements driving visionary innovation: The Integrated Value Proposition and The Partnership Infrastructure.

The Integrated Value Proposition provides support to our clients throughout all phases of their journey to visionary innovation including: research, analysis, strategy, vision, innovation and implementation.

provides support to our clients throughout all phases of their journey to visionary innovation including: research, analysis, strategy, vision, innovation and implementation. The Partnership Infrastructure is entirely unique as it constructs the foundation upon which visionary innovation becomes possible. This includes our 360 degree research, comprehensive industry coverage, career best practices as well as our global footprint of more than 40 offices.

For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Is your organization prepared for the next profound wave of industry convergence, disruptive technologies, increasing competitive intensity, Mega Trends, breakthrough best practices, changing customer dynamics and emerging economies?

Contact:



Kayla Belcher

Corporate Communications  North America

P: 210.247.2450

F: 210.348.1003

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"The Global STEM Talent Summit is a major industry-led step in seeking to solve the STEM talent gap that exists in the U.S. and in many other parts of the world," said Dr. Heidi Kleinbach-Sauter, senior vice president of R&D, PepsiCo and chairwoman of the Global STEM Talent Summit. "It is now critical for the private sector to convene and create an actionable plan to develop at scale solutions to future proof economic growth."

The day-long event served as a platform for discussion, sharing best practices in STEM talent development strategies, networking and taking collective action to drive scale and speed in helping to solve for the STEM shortfall. Together with its 25 strategic partners, STEMconnector will outline a three-year strategic roadmap that aims to drive sustainable impact and deliver tangible solutions to diminish the STEM talent gap in the US.

"Business leaders have set the tone by ramping up investments and engagement in STEM education in order to prepare the next generation of skilled talent necessary to drive innovation and economic growth," said Edie Fraser, CEO, STEMconnector. "Now we need to shift our focus of turning investments in education into a sustainable, long-term talent pool."

In a panel session on global talent development with Johnson & Johnson, Deloitte, Pinnacle Group, DLR Group and moderated by Financial Times editor Sam Fleming, Michael Norris, CEO Healthcare, Sodexo North America noted the critical importance of attending to the basics. "If we are serious about developing a diverse pipeline of STEM talent we need to begin with the essentials. Think about it, four of the country's five largest public school systems are broke. One in five kids in the country are at risk of hunger and far too many parents see their child's walk to school as potentially life threatening. I'm convinced that if we can take care of the basics, we can attract a broader swath of STEM talent."

Over the past decade, growth in STEM jobs was three times greater than that of non-STEM jobs, according to Texas State University. Developing and retaining high-skilled STEM workers is crucial for employers. At the 2016 Global STEM Talent Summit, employers shared professional short and long- term STEM talent development models and best practices for training their employees and retaining high-skilled STEM talent.

Multiple industries, each with their own unique challenges, were represented at the event. According to The World Health Organization the world is short by more than seven million doctors, nurses, and others who administer care, and this will grow to 12.9 million healthcare workers by 2035. Symantec noted that six million cybersecurity jobs will be created by 2019, and 1.5 million of those jobs will go unfilled by 2024.

The 2016 STEMconnector strategic partners include Apollo Education Group, APCO Worldwide, AT&T, BAE Systems, BP, Burning Glass, Carnival Corporation, Cengage Learning, Centene Corporation, Cigna, Dassault Systems, Deloitte, FedEx, Gallup, Honeywell, Hope Street Group, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Monsanto, Monster, PepsiCo, Smiths Group, Sodexo, Tata Consultancy Services, and Walmart.

Announcing the 100 CEO Leaders in STEM

At the Global STEM Talent Summit STEMconnector also released 100 CEO Leaders in STEM, a publication that highlights the exceptional leaders contributing to the advancement of STEM careers around the world. The publication showcases the commitment, initiatives and values of 100 CEOs actively working towards a strong talent pipeline, and their companies. Excerpts include:

"The formula for innovation and growth in today's digital economy begins and ends with a workforce that has the right skills.businesses that fail to invest the time and resources to train, attract and retain the best talent will be left behind." Randall L Stephenson, Chairman and CEO, AT&T

"The technological reality is a call to companies to think boldly and pragmatically to solve complex problems. It's doubling our investment in innovation in the next three years so we can help companies shape next-generation capabilities and solutions." Cathy Engelbert, CEO, Deloitte LLP

"Careers in STEM industries offer better compensation and more career advancement opportunities.Everyone benefits when our girls and young women can make full use of their abilities and supporting STEM Mentoring is a clear win-win." Lorna Donatone, CEO of Sodexo School Worldwide and President of Sodexo North America.

Sodexo delivers more than 100 services across North America that enhance organizational performance, contribute to local communities and improve quality of life. The global Fortune 500 company is a leader in delivering sustainable, integrated facilities management and foodservice operations.

Learn more about the company at its corporate blog, Sodexo Insights.

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SOURCE Sodexo

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GAITHERSBURG, Md., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Keeping an eye on small children bent on exploring examining rooms loaded with tantalizing no-nos is a challenge for parents who need to focus on their own health issues during medical appointments. Sodexo, world leader in Quality of Life Services, saw an opportunity to improve service members' and their families' experience by sponsoring the Armed Services YMCA's Teddy's Child Watch program.

Sodexo Supports Military Families Through Teddy's Child Watch Program Sponsorship

Teddy's Child Watch provides child-friendly hospital waiting rooms at Blanchfield Community Hospital at Ft. Campbell, Ky., and at the Naval Hospital, Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton, Calif. Each room is built for kids and staffed by trained adults, many of whom are volunteers. Now, military members and their spouses being treated at these facilities can focus on their own well-being while taking advantage of low or no-cost child watch thanks to Sodexo's support.

"As we celebrate April as the Month of the Military Child, Sodexo remains focused on how our service members' health and well-being affects their ability to care for their families and fulfill their many responsibilities. By sponsoring safe, high-quality child watch during medical visits, they can take care of themselves, their children and their mission," said David Scanlan, CEO, Government, Sodexo North America.

"We are excited about Sodexo's sponsorship of the Teddy's Child Watch program at Ft. Campbell and Camp Pendleton," said William French, President | CEO, Armed Services YMCA. "Because of Sodexo, families at those locations will be better able to attend medical appointments and focus on their own health needs."

The company provides food services at eight Army Medical Command (MEDCOM) Medical Treatment Facilities as well as maintenance at Naval Medical Center San Diego. As the No. 1 food and facilities service provider to the United States Government and its agencies at locations around the world, Sodexo is proud to serve the U.S. Marine Corps, the Air Force, the Navy Facility Operations, Defense Commissaries and Federal Civilian Agencies as well as Guam's Public Schools. Through its understanding of each agency and military branch's culture and environment, the company provides all staff, employees and tenants with a better Quality of Life. The Teddy's Child Watch program reflects this commitment to our military members and their families.

Sodexo delivers more than 100 services across North America that enhance organizational performance, contribute to local communities and improve quality of life. The global Fortune 500 company is a leader in delivering sustainable, integrated facilities management and foodservice operations.

Learn more at Sodexo Insights, visit Sodexo on Facebook and follow on Twitter @SodexoUSA

About Armed Services YMCA

Each year, the Armed Services YMCA serves more than half a million junior enlisted active duty soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and their family members from 200 locations in 18 states. Whether providing respite child care for parents in need, summer camps for kids, or assisting with emergency needs, the Armed Services YMCA is a non-profit with a mission: Make Military Life Easier. To learn more about the Armed Services YMCA visit asymca.org, on Facebook, and follow on Twitter.

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SOURCE Sodexo

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SAN DIEGO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Sotera Wireless, a leader in the drive to make healthcare safer through continuous multiparameter patient monitoring, today previewed its clinical presentations the 12th International Conference On Rapid Response Systems and Medical Emergency Teams being held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Center on May 2 and May 3, 2016.

Among the featured events is an educational session sponsored by Sotera "Surveillance Monitoring Using the ViSi Mobile Monitoring System," which will take place on May 2 from 1300 to 1315 local time in Room 104. Dr. Ben Kanter, Sotera chief medical officer and a nationally recognized physician leader in the use of health information technology, will lead the discussion along with Gary Manning, Sotera vice president, sales and market development. Dr. Kanter will highlight how hospitals are using the ViSi Mobile System to reduce failure-to-rescue situations and adverse events among non-ICU patients. In addition, he will discuss benefits derived from the system's advanced interoperability capabilities and analytics.

"It is a privilege to speak at the 2016 IRRS Conference," said Manning. "This clinician community is dedicated to improving worldwide patient safety through early detection of patient deterioration in the hospital setting. We value their insight and have applied it in our drive to provide technology that enhances the effect of the rapid response system."

Dr. Kanter will also present in a general session on May 2 from 1600 to 1615 local time in Room 103. The abstract "Multiparameter Alarm Management and Distribution on the General Care Unit" describes a study exploring whether continuous multi-parameter physiological monitoring could be used to better track patient deterioration and trigger rapid response without causing significant alarm fatigue or alarm issues. The study, conducted at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston Salem, N. C., employed an integrated system comprised of the ViSi Mobile System, electronic health record, clinical communication and collaboration tools, and cutting edge mobile technology to manage alarm distribution.

The ViSi Mobile System will be highlighted in an additional session "Response to Patient Deterioration in the Afferent Limb: Effectiveness of Continuous Vital Sign Monitoring" to be held on May 2 from 1645 to 1700 local time in Room 2. Presenters Koh Mei Jiao and Wei Ling Ling of National University Hospital, Singapore, will discuss a study evaluating the utility of the ViSi Mobile System and the efficacy of vital sign parameters in the detection of serious complications. Rosemary Kennedy, Sotera chief nursing officer, served as the primary study author.

The ViSi Mobile System is a wireless, wearable platform that continuously monitors all patient vital signs and communicates data to clinicians. The system aligns with evidence demonstrating that the highest-specificity indicator for at-risk patients is a combination of heart rate, respiratory rate, systolic blood pressure and change in mental status. The ViSi Mobile System measures heart rate, respiration rate, and continuous non-invasive blood pressure (cNIBP), along with SpO 2 , pulse rate, and skin temperature.

About Sotera Wireless

Sotera Wireless, Inc. is a San Diego-based healthcare technology company dedicated to a new generation of comprehensive vital signs monitoring. Sotera's mission is to improve patient safety by empowering clinicians to detect early signs of deterioration in virtually any care setting and enable early intervention and rapid response, all without limiting the patient's freedom of movement. More information on the company or its ViSi Mobile System can be obtained at soterawireless.com or by sending an email to [email protected].

For more information on the ViSi Mobile System stay connected via:

ViSi Mobile on Facebook

ViSi Mobile on Twitter

ViSi Mobile on YouTube

Sotera Wireless on LinkedIn

Sotera and ViSi Mobile are registered trademarks of Sotera Wireless, Inc.

SOURCE Sotera Wireless

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DENVER, April 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SquareTwo Financial Corporation ("SquareTwo" or "the Company") today announced that it has commenced an offer to exchange up to $188.5 million of new term loans due 2019 (the "Term Loans") and up to $101.5 million of a new series of preferred stock (the "Preferred Stock") for any and all of its outstanding 11.625% senior second lien notes due 2017 (the "2017 Notes") (the "Exchange Offer"). SquareTwo is also soliciting consents for the removal of certain covenants and events of default from the indenture governing the 2017 Notes.

Holders who elect to exchange their 2017 Notes will receive, for each $1,000 principal amount of 2017 Notes, $650 principal amount of Term Loans, including $30 principal amount relating to the delivery of consents, and $350 initial liquidation preference of the Preferred Stock. Holders who validly tender 2017 Notes and provide consents no later than 11:59 p.m., New York City time on May 10, 2016 (unless extended by SquareTwo), will receive the additional $30 principal amount of the Term Loans. Holders who validly tender 2017 Notes and provide consents after such time will not receive the additional $30 principal amount of the Term Loans.

The Exchange Offer is scheduled to expire at 11:59 p.m., New York City time on May 24, 2016, unless extended by SquareTwo. The complete terms and conditions of the Exchange Offer are set forth in the offering memorandum and consent solicitation statement (the "Offering Memorandum") and related letter of transmittal that are being sent to holders of the 2017 Notes.

The completion of the Exchange Offer is subject to the conditions described in the Offering Memorandum, including there being validly tendered at least 70% of the aggregate principal amount of outstanding 2017 Notes. Holders of more than 75% in aggregate principal amount of the 2017 Notes have entered into an agreement with the Company that outlines certain obligations and commitments related to a proposed recapitalization of the Company, including participation in the Exchange Offer. Subject to applicable law and as agreed with certain of such holders, SquareTwo may waive the conditions applicable to the Exchange Offer or extend, terminate or otherwise amend the Exchange Offer.

Copies of the Offering Memorandum and letter of transmittal may be obtained from D.F. King & Co., Inc., the exchange and information agent for the Exchange Offer, toll free at (866) 406-2287, (212) 269-5550 (banks and brokerage firms) or e-mail at [email protected].

This press release is neither an offer to purchase nor a solicitation to buy any securities, nor is it a solicitation for acceptance of the Exchange Offer or the consents. The Company is making the Exchange Offer only by, and pursuant to the terms of, the Offering Memorandum and related letter of transmittal. The Exchange Offer is not being made in any jurisdiction in which the making or acceptance thereof would not be in compliance with the securities, blue sky or other laws of such jurisdiction. This press release is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer, solicitation or sale in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale is unlawful. The exchange offer is being made pursuant to an exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act") contained in Section 3(a)(9) of the Securities Act. The Company has not filed, and does not expect to file, a registration statement under the Securities Act or any other federal or state securities laws with respect to the Preferred Stock.

About SquareTwo Financial

SquareTwo Financial is a leader in the distressed asset purchasing industry. SquareTwo's primary business is the acquisition, management and collection of charged-off consumer and commercial accounts receivable that are purchased from financial institutions, finance and leasing companies, and other issuers in the United States (U.S.) and Canada. Our business model leverages our analytic expertise, technology platform, and in the U.S., a unique combination of SquareTwo-owned call centers operating under the d/b/a name Fresh View Solutions ("Fresh View") and a network of regional law offices, also referred to as "branch offices," exclusively dedicated to SquareTwo.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including the anticipated expiration and settlement of the Exchange Offer for the 2017 Notes and other information and statements that are not historical fact. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. These risks and uncertainties include the satisfaction or waiver of the conditions to the Exchange Offer, as well as other factors detailed in the Offering Memorandum and in SquareTwo's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this release. The Company expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to disseminate any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statement contained herein to reflect any change in SquareTwo's expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except to the extent required by the federal securities laws.

SOURCE SquareTwo Financial Corporation
PITTSBURGH, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The United Steelworkers (USW) today said that on Wed., April 27, 2016, the union reached tentative agreement on a new contract with ArcelorMittal USA on behalf of nearly 14,000 workers at 15 of the company's U.S. locations. Subject to a vote by the membership, the proposed agreement would expire on Sept. 1, 2018.

"After almost a year of difficult bargaining that continued eight months past the expiration of our previous contract, our committee's hard work and dedication have resulted in a tentative agreement with ArcelorMittal," said USW International President Leo W. Gerard. "Our members' unwavering solidarity throughout the bargaining process in the face of management's persistent demands for major cutbacks has been rewarded."

USW District 1 Director David McCall, who chairs the union's negotiations with ArcelorMittal, praised the leadership and membership at all of the facilities for standing together and resisting management's attempts to divide them.

"Early in the process, we committed to our members and retirees that we would not allow the company to use a temporary downturn in our industry as an excuse to reverse decades of collective bargaining progress," McCall said. "Thanks to the solidarity of USW members within and between all of our locals, we have negotiated a fair agreement that preserves our wages, benefits and other contractual protections without lowering the standard of living for current or future retirees."

USW District 7 Director Mike Millsap, secretary of the ArcelorMittal committee, added that local union leaders and activists gained valuable experience throughout the long, drawn-out bargaining process.

"For ten months, our brothers and sisters marched in the streets, rallied at their plant gates and delivered our message to management every step of the way," Millsap said. "Rather than allow the company to divide and conquer, our committee shared information to keep everyone informed, and our local union activists and leaders truly held everyone together."

In the coming weeks, the USW will schedule meetings to present the proposed new contract to members at each location and deliver a summary with mail-in ballots and instructions for the ratification vote.

The USW represents 850,000 men and women employed in metals, mining, pulp and paper, rubber, chemicals, glass, auto supply and the energy-producing industries, along with a growing number of workers in public sector and service occupations.

More information, contact: Tony Montana  (412)-562-2592; [email protected]

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SOURCE United Steelworkers (USW)

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WASHINGTON and NEW YORK and LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Kyle Peters, an Industry Analyst with The Freedonia Group, was a moderator at the Ceramic & Glass Application session at the Ceramics Expo in Cleveland, Ohio yesterday. His presentation, Examining Next Generation Refractories, is now available for download.

Download this presentation to learn more: http://hubs.ly/H02QwQ00

This presentation addresses the questions:

What factors will contribute to  or detract from  refractory sales?

Will the importance of advanced ceramic refractories offer a competitive advantage?

What problems lie ahead, and how will the refractories industry respond to them?

Demand for refractories in the US is expected to rise 3.3% per year through 2019, reaching $3.1 billion. Volume increases will be much more sluggish, as improvements in refractory designs enable less material to be used per ton of output. The Freedonia Group's report, Refractories, analyzes the refractory industry and presents historical demand data and includes forecasts by refractory form, material and market.

To learn more about the refractories industry, visit our website: http://www.freedoniagroup.com/DocumentDetails.aspx?ReferrerId=RF-CXPO&StudyID=3295

About The Freedonia Group

The Freedonia Group, a division of MarketResearch.com, is a leading international industrial market research company that publishes more than 400 research studies annually and offers custom research solutions. Since 1985 we have provided research to customers ranging in size from global conglomerates to one-person consulting firms. More than 90% of the industrial companies in the Fortune 500 use Freedonia Group research to help with their strategic planning. Reports can be purchased at www.freedoniagroup.com and are also available on www.marketresearch.com and www.profound.com

Press Contact:

Caitlin Stewart

+1.240.747.3086

[email protected]

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SOURCE The Freedonia Group

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BRYAN, Ohio, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The L.E. Smith Company is pleased to announce two key changes to its leadership team. Both announcements are congruent with L.E. Smith's current success, and its goals for future growth and expansion.

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Effective April 14th, 2016, Mari Ivan was promoted to Chief Operating Officer. Mari joined the L.E. Smith team in July of 2014 as the Director of Technology and Client Services. In this position, Mari was successful in elevating the client service experience through standardized, sustainable, operating procedures, and technology solutions. Mari is also a seasoned pro in value-added revenue growth, continuous improvement, strategic planning, execution, and technology. Prior to L.E. Smith, Mari was the Senior Managing Director of NRP Financial, and Principal of Trivium Consultants. Mari's experience and background have created a strong foundation in preparing her for her new role as Chief Operating Officer with The L.E. Smith Company.

Effective April 25th, 2016, Kevin Bock joined the L.E. Smith Company as Director of HR and Fabrication. Kevin brings with him over 35 years of successful business leadership experience. This includes serving as the COO/CFO of Northern Steel Transport, the COO of Alex Product Corp, and The Vice President of Administration for ITW Tomco. Kevin has a history of maximizing operational efficiencies, and improving financial results through systems development, resource development, and employee engagement. Kevin's arrival and leadership will be pivotal in the midst of L.E. Smith's current success and growth.

The L.E. Smith Company is a third generation, family-owned, premium quality surface fabricator and distributor. With over six decades of service to the construction, cabinetry, millwork and retail industries, L.E. Smith consistently brings clients trend-forward, high-quality products, and shares proven business techniques that enable clients to differentiate themselves from fierce competition. Committed to lean manufacturing and forestry conservation, L.E. Smith integrates KAIZEN throughout its business practices and has worked to receive and maintain FSC certification. More L.E. Smith information is available at www.lesmith.com.

Contact:

Amy Miller

Director of Business Development

The L.E. Smith Company

888-537-6484

Email

Read more news from The L.E. Smith Company.

SOURCE The L.E. Smith Company

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WARWICK, R.I., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The Reversal Clinic, the United States' largest vasectomy reversal clinic, is expanding with a new location in Rhode Island.

As a spokesperson for The Reversal Clinic noted, the most accessible and the largest provider of microsurgical vasovasostomy, or vasectomy reversal, in the country is scheduled to open the new clinic in Warwick on May 16, 2016. The clinic will be equipped with new state-of-the-art medical equipment including a Zeiss operating microscope and titanium microsurgical instruments.

In addition to the new location, The Reversal Clinic is also pleased to welcome a new physician to its staff. Dr. Keith Baldwin has just joined the team of talented people at The Reversal Clinic.

"I feel very thankful to be joining the Reversal Clinic, because I know that Dr. David Wilson and I share the same values," Baldwin said, adding that he is inspired by Wilson's vision for The Reversal Clinic to be the highest quality provider of microsurgical vasectomy reversal in North America at the lowest price.

"Coming from the world of rushed 15 minute appointments, I am looking forward to being fully available to one to two patients a day from the beginning to the end of their visit with us in Rhode Island. But as a parent myself, I am most excited about being a part of a team that helps bring the joy and blessing of children back into the homes of those who desire it."

Dr. Andrew Leone, a board certified academic Urologist trained at Brown University, said Dr. Baldwin will be an outstanding addition to The Reversal Clinic.

"He is an extremely talented technical surgeon who is committed to compassionate care of his patients. Dr. Baldwin's patients often form long lasting bonds with him that outlast the surgical aspects of their care," Dr. Leone said.

About The Reversal Clinic:

The Reversal Clinic is the most accessible and the largest provider of excellent micro-surgical vasovasostomies (vasectomy reversals) in the U.S. Their unique process provides excellent outcomes for their patients, often allowing them to continue growing their families after vasectomy surgery. For more information, please visit https://www.thereversalclinic.com/

The Reversal Clinic

315 Commonwealth Avenue

Warwick, RI 02886

Contact:

David Wilson

[email protected]

(401) 821-0891

SOURCE The Reversal Clinic

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The incident came one week after a low-ranking policeman shot and killed a street vendor after a dispute over the price of a cup of tea

Egypts interior minister, Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar, decided early Thursday to suspend and refer a police officer to prosecution for shooting a microbus driver in Cairos Al-Nozha neighbourhood.

In an official statement, the ministry said police officer Ahmed Samir Nasar, who works at the ministrys general directorate for information and documentation. shot an unnamed microbus driver in the thigh after a verbal dispute that escalated to a fight due to the drivers obstruction of the road.

The ministry added that a number of microbus drivers colleagues intervened to support their friend, therefore assaulting the police officer and injuring him in a way that led him to use his weapon and open fire.

The injured microbus driver was transferred to hospital.

Earlier Wednesday, Al-Ahram Arabic news website reported that a quarrel took place between Nasar and the microbus driver and his assistant over the fare at the microbus stop, where the driver and his colleague assaulted the officer, leading Nasar to use his weapon.

The latest shooting incident comes only a week after a low-ranking policeman shot dead a street vendor over the price of a cup of tea in New Cairo.

He was referred to criminal court by the prosecution Wednesday on a murder charge.

In February, another low-ranking policeman killed a driver in the working class Cairo district of El-Darb El-Ahmar following a dispute over a fare.

He was sentenced to life in prison Saturday, one of the harshest sentences issued to a policeman convicted of similar violent crimes.

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi stressed last week during a meeting with the interior minister and his aides the importance of holding accountable those who commit wrongdoings, whether policemen or citizens, and to prosecute them according to the law.

The interior ministry said such incidents are isolated and that they have drafted legislative amendments that would regulate the performance of the security services, stressing that they would apply to the entire police force, not only low-ranking policemen.

The amendments have been referred to parliament but have not yet been voted on.

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BETHESDA, Md., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Ted Cruz has many extremist policy positions  many that are particularly harmful to women. So little wonder that Cruz picked Carly Fiorina as his fake-runningmate. Professor Victor Williams, who is a GOP "write-in" candidate intent on disqualifying Cruz, commented on Fiorina's selection.

"It will not work. Even the talented Carly Fiorina can not explain away Cruz's many extremist, anti-women policy positions."

"Adding the Texas-born Fiorina to the mix does not cure the Canadian-born Rafael Edward Cruz's constitutional ineligibility for the presidency." www.VictorWilliamsforPresident.com.

Personal Disclosure: Victor Williams' High Regard for Carly Fiorina (nee Cara Carleton Sneed).

Despite her present political dalliance with the ineligible Ted Cruz, Victor Williams retains a high personal regard for Carly Fiorina (nee Cara Carleton Sneed).

While a first-year law student at University of California-Hastings in San Francisco, Williams had the honor of clerking (externing) for Ms. Fiorini's father, the great Ninth Circuit- U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Joseph T. Sneed, III (1920- 2008).

Although Joe Sneed preferred that his clerks be "natural-born" from Texas, the judge made an exception for the Arkansas-born Williams. It was sufficient that Williams' mother (Juanita Jonas) had been born in Tyler, Texas  and that Williams acknowledged, during his interview, that Tyler remained the "Rose Capitol of the World."

In summer 1988, Williams provided research help on what became Sneed's Footprints on the Rocks of the Mountain (1997). Williams knew Joseph Sneed to be one of finest law teachers, legal scholars, law school deans, and federal judges ever to serve this nation.

Above any of that, Judge Sneed was a very proud father.

But Carly Fiorina Cannot Help: Cruz is an Extremist Ideologue Who Would Make All Choice a Crime

Carly Fiorina can not explain why Senator Cruz tried to shut down the government.

Fiorina can not explain why, during Ted Cruz's personally-created-debt-crisis, Senator Cruz tried to stop Social Security, Veterans, Medicare/Medicaid, Treasury bond servicing, national defense, and even homeland security payments.

Fiorina can not explain away the fact that Ted Cruz would force a teenage girl who was raped to carry the rape-pregnancy to term. Cruz would force the raped young woman to deliver the rapist's child  then Cruz would give the rapist paternal rights.

Democrats Will Spend Many Millions to Disqualify Ted "Canadian" Cruz from the Fall Election Ballots

Article II, Section 1 allows only a "natural born [American] Citizen" to be President. The Commander-in-Chief must be born on the American soil. Texas-born Fiorina will not be able to magically make the Canadian-born Cruz eligible.

But perhaps that is Fiorina's long game  just wait for litigious Democrats to successfully remove Ted Cruz from the fall election ballots. Then, by default, Carly Fiorina would become the GOP Nominee. Judge Joseph Sneed's clever daughter.

www.VictorWilliamsforPresident.com. Victor Williams is a Washington, D.C. attorney, long-time law professor, prolific author, and 2014 founder of www.disruptivejustice.org.

Media Contact:

Prof. Victor Williams

301-951-9045

SOURCE Professor Victor Williams

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LIVONIA, Mich., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Tower International, Inc. (NYSE: TOWR), a leading global manufacturer of engineered automotive structural metal components and assemblies, today announced first quarter 2016 results, updated its outlook for full year 2016, provided a preliminary outlook for 2017, and discussed developments regarding Tower's businesses in Europe, Brazil, and China.

Revenue for the first quarter was $511 million . At constant exchange rates, revenue was $523 million , up 5% from $497 million in the first quarter of 2015.

. At constant exchange rates, revenue was , up 5% from in the first quarter of 2015. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $46.2 million , compared with $48.1 million a year ago. The decline was more than explained by the planned and anticipated up-front expenses associated with the major new business awarded to Tower North America in 2015.

, compared with a year ago. The decline was more than explained by the planned and anticipated up-front expenses associated with the major new business awarded to Tower North America in 2015. Net income was $8.4 million , compared with $14 million last year. As detailed below, this year's first quarter included certain items that adversely impacted results by $5.2 million . Excluding these items and comparable items in the first quarter of 2015, diluted adjusted earnings were 63 cents per share, compared with 82 cents a year ago. The decline was more than explained by the previously disclosed resumption this year of accrued U.S. income taxes.

, compared with last year. As detailed below, this year's first quarter included certain items that adversely impacted results by . Excluding these items and comparable items in the first quarter of 2015, diluted adjusted earnings were per share, compared with a year ago. The decline was more than explained by the previously disclosed resumption this year of accrued U.S. income taxes. The Company has completed its evaluation of Tower Europe and has decided to retain the business. Tower Europe is a strong and competitive business, the European industry is recovering, and potentially significant new business opportunities have recently arisen with multiple customers, further bolstering the long-term outlook. There is no further intention to sell this business.

Tower's remaining businesses in Brazil and China are no longer considered to be core and were declared in April as held for sale. In the Company's next quarterly report, these businesses will be accounted for as discontinued operations. Projected 2016 financial results for these combined businesses included revenue of about $100 million (less than 5% of total Tower), with adjusted EBITDA of $3 million and an adjusted net loss of about 10 cents per TOWR share.

and are no longer considered to be core and were declared in April as held for sale. In the Company's next quarterly report, these businesses will be accounted for as discontinued operations. Projected 2016 financial results for these combined businesses included revenue of about (less than 5% of total Tower), with adjusted EBITDA of and an adjusted net loss of about per TOWR share. The outlook for full year 2016 earnings from continuing operations is being raised from $3.00 to $3.20 per share. Anticipated free cash flow (including customer tooling) is being increased by $10 million (to $20 million ).

per share. Anticipated free cash flow (including customer tooling) is being increased by (to ). The preliminary directional outlook for continuing operations in 2017 includes a 10% increase from projected 2016 in adjusted EBITDA (to $225 million ), a 16% increase in diluted adjusted earnings per share (to $3.70 ), adjusted EBITDA margin increasing to 11%, and strong free cash flow of $70 million . The anticipated improvements in 2017 largely reflect a reduction in the up-front costs and cash outflows associated with launch of the new revenue coming on board this year.

"Sometimes, the best deals are the ones you decide not to do," said President and CEO Mark Malcolm. "Following 23 consecutive quarters of meeting or beating the earnings consensus, Tower's businesses in Europe and North America are now poised to deliver record results, including double-digit earnings growth and strong free cash flow."

Tower to Host Conference Call Today at 1 p.m. EDT

Tower will discuss its first quarter 2016 results and other related matters in a conference call at 1 p.m. EDT today. Participants may listen to the audio portion of the conference call either through a live audio webcast on the Company's website or by telephone. The slide presentation and webcast can be accessed via the investor relations portion of Tower's website www.towerinternational.com. To dial into the conference call, domestic callers should dial (866) 393-4576, international callers should dial (706) 679-1462. An audio recording of the call will be available approximately two hours after the completion of the call. To access this recording, please dial (855) 859-2056 (domestic) or (404) 537-3406 (international) and reference Conference I.D. #98915756. A webcast replay will also be available and may be accessed via Tower's website.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

This press release includes the following non-GAAP financial measures: "adjusted EBITDA", "adjusted EBITDA margin", "adjusted earnings per share", "adjusted free cash flow", and "free cash flow". We define adjusted EBITDA as net income/(loss) before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, restructuring items and other adjustments described in the reconciliations provided in this presentation. Adjusted EBITDA margin represents adjusted EBITDA divided by revenues. Adjusted earnings per share exclude certain income and expense items described in the reconciliation provided in this press release. Free cash flow is defined as cash provided by operating activities less cash disbursed for purchases of property, plant and equipment. Adjusted free cash flow is free cash flow excluding cash received or disbursed for customer tooling. We use adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted earnings per share, adjusted free cash flow and free cash flow as supplements to information provided in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles ("GAAP") in evaluating our business and they are included in this press release because they are principal factors upon which our management assesses performance. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP are set forth below. The non-GAAP measures presented above are not measures of performance under GAAP. These measures should not be considered as alternatives for the most directly comparable financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP. Other companies in our industry may define these non-GAAP measures differently than we do and, as a result, these non-GAAP measures may not be comparable to similarly titled measures used by other companies in our industry; and certain of our non-GAAP financial measures exclude financial information that some may consider important in evaluating our performance. Given the inherent uncertainty regarding special items and other expense in any future period, a reconciliation of forward-looking financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP is not feasible. The magnitude of these items, however, may be significant.

Forward-Looking Statements and Risk Factors

This press release contains statements which constitute forward-looking statements, within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to statements regarding the Company's projected adjusted EBITDA and diluted adjusted earnings per share, earnings per share from continuing operations and free cash flows, statements regarding the projected financial results for Tower's business in Brazil and China, and statements regarding new business opportunities and the Company's future business outlook. The forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as "anticipate," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "project," "target," and other similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release and are based upon management's current expectations and beliefs concerning future developments and their potential effects on us. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. The following important factors, as well as risk factors described in our reports filed with the SEC, could cause our actual results to differ materially from estimates or expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements:

global automobile production volumes;

the financial condition of our customers and suppliers;

our ability to make scheduled payments of principal or interest on our indebtedness and comply with the covenants and restrictions contained in the instruments governing our indebtedness;

our ability to refinance our indebtedness;

risks associated with our non-U.S. operations, including foreign exchange risks and economic uncertainty in some regions;

any increase in the expense and funding requirements of our pension and other postretirement benefits;

our customers' ability to obtain equity and debt financing for their businesses;

our dependence on our largest customers;

pricing pressure from our customers;

work stoppages or other labor issues affecting us or our customers or suppliers;

our ability to integrate acquired businesses;

risks associated with business divestitures; and

costs or liabilities relating to environmental and safety regulations.

We do not assume any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking statements contained in this press release.

Contact:

Derek Fiebig

Executive Director, Investor & External Relations

(248) 675-6457

[email protected]

TOWER INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS (Amounts in thousands, except share and per share amounts - unaudited)























Three Months Ended March 31,



2016

2015









Revenues

$ 511,496

$ 496,628 Cost of sales

453,597

440,138 Gross profit

57,899

56,490 Selling, general, and administrative expenses

33,908

31,532 Amortization expense

116

- Restructuring and asset impairment charges, net

823

1,031 Operating income

23,052

23,927 Interest expense

7,631

7,850 Interest income

242

125 Other expense

3,576

- Income before provision for income taxes and equity in profit of joint

venture

12,087

16,202 Provision for income taxes

3,703

2,099 Equity in profit of joint venture, net of tax

-

94 Income from continuing operations

8,384

14,197 Income / (loss) from discontinued operations, net of tax

-

(76) Net income

8,384

14,121 Less: Net income attributable to the noncontrolling interests

6

80 Net income attributable to Tower International, Inc.

$ 8,378

$ 14,041









Weighted average basic shares outstanding

21,126,462

21,050,230 Weighted average diluted shares outstanding

21,444,570

21,360,492









Basic income per share attributable to Tower International, Inc.:







Income per share from continuing operations

$ 0.40

$ 0.67 Income / (loss) per share from discontinued operations

-

- Income per share

0.40

0.67









Diluted income per share attributable to Tower International, Inc.:







Income per share from continuing operations

$ 0.39

$ 0.66 Income / (loss) per share from discontinued operations

-

- Income per share

0.39

0.66









Dividends declared per share

$ 0.10

-

TOWER INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (Amounts in thousands, except share data - unaudited)













March 31,

December 31,



2016

2015









ASSETS







Cash and cash equivalents

$ 74,797

$ 142,640 Accounts receivable, net of allowance of $973 and $1,287

288,641

250,933 Inventories

76,455

70,633 Prepaid tooling, notes receivable, and other

78,117

71,487 Total current assets

518,010

535,693









Property, plant, and equipment, net

495,162

473,159 Goodwill

61,820

59,340 Investment in joint venture

7,705

7,711 Deferred tax asset

128,406

127,633 Other assets, net

12,449

11,961 Total assets

$ 1,223,552

$ 1,215,497









LIABILITIES AND EQUITY







Short-term debt and current maturities of capital lease obligations

$ 40,992

$ 30,378 Accounts payable

314,493

297,665 Accrued liabilities

127,507

107,911 Total current liabilities

482,992

435,954









Long-term debt, net of current maturities

362,408

412,218 Obligations under capital leases, net of current maturities

6,018

5,984 Deferred tax liability

6,145

6,167 Pension liability

63,475

65,621 Other non-current liabilities

83,381

82,834 Total non-current liabilities

521,427

572,824 Total liabilities

1,004,419

1,008,778



















Stockholders' equity:







Tower International, Inc.'s stockholders' equity







Common stock

$ 221

$ 220 Additional paid in capital

338,393

337,864 Treasury stock

(16,689)

(16,067) Accumulated deficit

(37,763)

(44,030) Accumulated other comprehensive loss

(72,109)

(80,492) Total Tower International, Inc.'s stockholders' equity

212,053

197,495 Noncontrolling interests in subsidiaries

7,080

9,224 Total stockholders' equity

219,133

206,719









Total liabilities and stockholders' equity

$ 1,223,552

$ 1,215,497

TOWER INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS (Amounts in thousands - unaudited)













Three Months Ended March 31,



2016

2015









OPERATING ACTIVITIES:







Net income

$ 8,384

$ 14,121 Less: Income from discontinued operations, net of tax

-

(76) Income from continuing operations

8,384

14,197









Adjustments required to reconcile income from continuing operations to net cash provided by continuing operating activities:







Deferred income tax provision

$ 2,996

$ 167 Depreciation and amortization

18,537

19,908 Non-cash share-based compensation

529

959 Pension income, net of contributions

(2,147)

(3,750) Change in working capital and other operating items

(24,257)

(38,275) Net cash provided by / (used in) continuing operating activities

$ 4,042

$ (6,794)









INVESTING ACTIVITIES:







Cash disbursed for purchases of property, plant, and equipment, net

$ (26,114)

$ (9,562) Net cash used in continuing investing activities

$ (26,114)

$ (9,562)









FINANCING ACTIVITIES:







Proceeds from borrowings

$ 146,327

$ 30,464 Repayments of borrowings

(139,143)

(56,845) Repayments on Term Loan Credit Facility

(50,000)

- Proceeds from termination of cross currency swaps

-

32,377 Dividend payment to Tower shareholders

(2,111)

- Proceeds from stock options exercised

-

112 Purchase of treasury stock

(622)

(6,530) Noncontrolling interest dividends and other activity

(2,164)

- Net cash used in continuing financing activities

$ (47,713)

$ (422)









Discontinued operations:







Net cash from discontinued operating activities

$ -

$ 9,431 Net cash from discontinued investing activities

-

(4,484) Net cash from discontinued financing activities

-

(2,800) Net cash from discontinued operations

$ -

$ 2,147









Effect of exchange rate changes on continuing cash and cash equivalents

$ 1,942

$ (3,201)









NET CHANGE IN CASH AND CASH EQUIVALENTS

$ (67,843)

$ (17,832)









CASH AND CASH EQUIVALENTS:







Beginning of period

$ 142,640

$ 148,561









End of period

$ 74,797

$ 130,729

TOWER INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES SEGMENT DATA AND NON-GAAP FINANCIAL MEASURE RECONCILIATIONS (Amounts in thousands - unaudited)





















































Segment Data

Three Months Ended March 31,



2016

2015



Revenues

Adjusted

EBITDA

Revenues

Adjusted

EBITDA International

$ 173,099

$ 11,891

$ 189,740

$ 14,145 Americas

338,397

34,311

306,888

33,925 Consolidated

$ 511,496

$ 46,202

$ 496,628

$ 48,070



































Adjusted EBITDA Reconciliation

Three Months Ended March 31,











2016

2015







Adjusted EBITDA

$ 46,202

$ 48,070







Restructuring and asset impairment charges, net

(823)

(1,031)







Depreciation and amortization

(18,537)

(19,908)







Acquisition costs and other

(116)

(89)







Long-term compensation expense

(3,674)

(3,115)







Interest expense, net

(7,389)

(7,725)







European divestiture expenses

(3,576)

-







Provision for income taxes

(3,703)

(2,099)







Equity in profit of joint venture, net of tax

-

94







Income / (loss) from discontinued operations, net of tax

-

(76)







Net income attributable to noncontrolling interests

(6)

(80)







Net income attributable to Tower International, Inc.

$ 8,378

$ 14,041

























Adjusted Free Cash Flow Reconciliation

Three Months Ended March 31,











2016

2015







Net cash provided by / (used in) continuing operating activities

$ 4,042

$ (6,794)







Cash disbursed for purchases of PP&E

(26,114)

(9,562)







Free cash flow

(22,072)

(16,356)







Less: Cash received / (disbursed) for customer-owned tooling

(10,049)

(10,113)







Adjusted free cash flow

$ (12,023)

$ (6,243)





























































Net Debt Reconciliation

March 31,

December 31,











2016

2015







Short-term debt and current maturities of capital lease obligations

$ 40,992

$ 30,378







Long-term debt, net of current maturities

370,233

421,180







Debt issue costs

(7,825)

(8,962)







Obligations under capital leases, net of current maturities

6,018

5,984







Total debt

409,418

448,580







Less: Cash and cash equivalents

(74,797)

(142,640)







Net debt

$ 334,621

$ 305,940









TOWER INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CERTAIN ITEMS INCLUDED IN NET INCOME (Amounts in thousands, except per share amounts - unaudited)





















After tax

Before tax



Three Months Ended

Three Months Ended



March 31,

March 31,



2016

2015

2016

2015

















Income / (expense) items included in net income















Selling, general, and administrative expenses















One-time CEO compensation awards

$ (647)

$ (933)

$ (951)

$ (933) Restructuring and asset impairment charges, net















One-time restructuring actions

-

(166)

-

(197) Interest expense















Mark-to-market gain / (loss) on derivative financial instruments (1,650)

(1,904)

(2,426)

(1,904) Acceleration of the amortization of debt issue costs and OID

(503)

(440)

(740)

(440) Other expense















European divestiture expenses

(2,432)

-

(3,576)

- Discontinued operations















Income / (loss) from discontinued operations

-

(76)

-

(76) Noncontrolling interests















Net income attributable to noncontrolling interests

-

9

-

9 Total items included in net income

$ (5,232)

$ (3,510)

























Net income attributable to Tower International, Inc.

$ 8,378

$ 14,041

























Memo: Average shares outstanding (in thousands)















Basic

21,126

21,050







Diluted

21,445

21,360

























Income per common share (GAAP)















Basic

$ 0.40

$ 0.67







Diluted

0.39

0.66

























Diluted adjusted earnings per share (non-GAAP) *

$ 0.63

$ 0.82

























* Excludes the certain items shown above.



































SOURCE Tower International, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.towerinternational.com


KETTLE MORAINE, Wis., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Andrea G. Barthwell, MD, DFASAM, will present the workshop "Progress, Not PerfectionPrinciples of Process Driven Care" at the UK and European Symposium on Addictive Disorders (UKESAD) on May 3 in London, England. UKESAD connects practitioners, academics and researchers with the latest advancements and best practices in treating addictive disorders, offering a robust lineup of collaborative and experiential programming.

Dr. Barthwell, a highly-regarded expert on the prevention and treatment of substance use disorders, will highlight ways clinicians can succeed in an environment of shrinking resources and shifting prioritiesa topic that resonates with clinicians throughout the world. Demonstrating practical applications of her extensive knowledge of the field and experience in creating best-in-class clinical programs, Dr. Barthwell will help participants deepen their clinical knowledge and find greater success through a set of proven methodologies.

Dr. Barthwell will also discuss her holistic strategy which serves as the basis for the program at The Manor, a luxury treatment center in Wisconsin, USA.

Process is at the heart of the program at The Manor, where Dr. Barthwell is the Chief Medical Officer. The Manor's residential treatment program is based on thirty years of studying the marriage between evidence-and experience-based therapies, setting a new standard in clinically luxurious care.

Dr. Barthwell currently serves on the Board of the Institute on Global Drug Policy and the Board of the International Council of Alcoholism and Addictions. Dr. Barthwell previously served as Deputy Director for Demand Reduction in the U.S. White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. She is also a former member of the UKESAD Board of Directors, and her past presentations have focused on adolescent development, the pharmacology of marijuana and drug demand reduction policy.

ABOUT THE MANOR

The Manor, an exclusive residential treatment center nestled in Wisconsin's peaceful Kettle Moraine, offers clinical care as luxurious as the five-star accommodations. Holistic in scope and carefully tailored to specific lifestyle demands, The Manor provides individualized addiction treatment that helps guests chart a course towards long-term recovery and the life they truly desire. This approach focuses on five domains of treatment intended to deliver outcomes of physical health, mental soundness, emotional maturity, spiritual resilience and social awareness. Though the true luxury is in the care, The Manor offers guests exceptional amenities and accommodations suited for their comfort and wellness.

SOURCE The Manor

Related Links

http://discoverthemanor.com


Before a packed audience of students, faculty and staff members and guests, Ban spoke of his childhood as a refugee during the outbreak of the Korean War, and how he saw the United Nations come in and serve as a lifeline for the Korean people.

"So many still see the United Nations flag as a beacon of hope," Ban said, adding that he strives daily to provide for others what the United Nations did for him. He urged the students present to find ways to be of service to others.

"Whatever profession you may choose, do something good for others," he said. "Let us reach out to the vulnerable and the excluded people. Let us fulfill our duty as a global citizen to leave no one behind."

Under Ban's leadership since 2007, the United Nations has sponsored major programs addressing climate change, violence against women, humanitarian efforts in Darfur and Myanmar, LGBT rights, and extremism and terrorism.

"Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon seeks solutions to complex global problems and leads initiatives that help some of the world's most vulnerable populations," said LMU President Timothy Law Snyder, Ph.D. "He has advanced many of the Catholic, Jesuit and Marymount values we embrace at Loyola Marymount University, and we are proud to present him with an honorary degree. The Secretary-General embodies global imagination by advocating for meaningful, transformative social change in ways previously unexplored."

Congresswoman Maxine Waters also addressed the gathering.

For a video of the ceremony, click here.

This event was co-sponsored by the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and Asia Media International at LMU.

About Loyola Marymount University

Located between the Pacific Ocean and downtown Los Angeles, Loyola Marymount University is ranked third in "Best Regional Universities/West" by U.S. News & World Report. Founded in 1911, LMU is the largest Jesuit, Catholic university in the Southwest, with more than 6,000 undergraduate students and more than 3,000 graduate and law students. A comprehensive university, LMU offers 57 undergraduate majors and 51 minor programs, along with 43 master's degree programs, one education doctorate, one juris doctorate, one doctorate of juridical science and 13 credential/authorization programs. LMU news and events are found at: www.lmu.edu/news.

Celeste Durant| Director, Communications and Media | Loyola Marymount University | 1 LMU Drive | University Hall, Suite 2800 | Los Angeles, CA 90045 | Media Line: 310.258.INFO | Office: 310.338.7708| Fax 310.338.3022

Need an expert for your story? Visit www.lmu.edu/experts to find the right faculty or staff member. For more LMU news and events, go to www.lmu.edu/news.

Contact:

Celeste Durant

Director, Communications and Media

310.338.7708

[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160406/352493

SOURCE Loyola Marymount University

Related Links

http://www.lmu.edu


WASHINGTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Providing aid and bolstering development in a region that has been a perennial conflict zone since 1948 is both demanding and rewarding. United Palestinian Appeal (UPA) has managed to do just that with a small dedicated staff and supporters since their founding in 1978 by a group of successful Palestinian-American professionals in New York. Focus Washington's Chuck Conconi sat down with UPA's Executive Director Saleem Zaru to learn more about the organization and its operations.

Zaru discussed the challenges of working under the constant state of emergency, noting that providing relief often consumes a great deal of time and funding, as opposed to being able to focus on development. One of the founding principles of UPA was to contribute to socioeconomic and cultural development in Palestine, but immediate needs to provide food aid, medical care (including psychological care for trauma victims) and basic needs like clothing and hygiene products sometimes take precedence.

In spite of the ongoing violence and emergency situations, UPA has made remarkable inroads in anticipating and instituting programs that help Palestinians become more independent so their situations do not perpetuate reliance on charity. Whether through micro-finance programs that launch small entrepreneurial start-ups, scholarships that advance education to better position Palestinians for employment, or partnerships programs like the Embracing Life campaign which is bringing Cleft Lip and Palate surgical and nursing training to West Bank and Gaza in conjunction with the Craniofacial Center at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

When asked about how programs like UPA can address extremism, Zaru stated that giving someone the opportunity to put food on their table and support their family creates hope, and hope is the best way to fight the lure of extremism.

Zaru's dream for UPA is that they would go out of business because there is no more need and Palestinians live under normal conditions. Until that time comes, UPA will continue delivering hope to the people in Palestine and the refugee camps.

To see the full interview, visit Focus Washington at: http://www.focuswashington.com/2016/04/28/united-palestinian-appeal-delivering-hope/

To learn more about United Palestinian Appeal, visit their website at: http://helpupa.org/

About MSLGROUP

MSLGROUP is Publicis Groupe's strategic communications and engagement group, advisors in all aspects of communication strategy: from consumer PR to financial communications, from public affairs to reputation management and from crisis communications to experiential marketing and events. With more than 3,000 people across close to 100 offices worldwide, MSLGROUP is also the largest PR network in Europe, fast-growing China and India. The group offers strategic planning and counsel, insight-guided thinking and big, compelling ideas  followed by thorough execution.

www.mslgroup.com | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube | Slideshare | Pinterest

About Publicis Groupe

Publicis Groupe [Euronext Paris FR0000130577, CAC 40] is a global leader in marketing, communication, and business transformation. In a world marked by increased convergence and consumer empowerment, Publicis Groupe offers a full range of services and skills: digital, technology & consulting with Publicis.Sapient (SapientNitro, Sapient Global Markets, Sapient Government Services, Razorfish Global, DigitasLBi, Rosetta) - the world's largest most forward-thinking digitally centered platform focused exclusively on digital transformation in an always-on world - as well as creative networks such as BBH, Leo Burnett, Publicis Worldwide, Saatchi & Saatchi, public affairs, corporate communications and events with MSLGROUP, ad tech solutions with VivaKi, media strategy, planning and buying through Starcom MediaVest Group and ZenithOptimedia, healthcare communications, with Publicis Healthcare Communications Group (PHCG), and finally, brand asset production with Prodigious. Present in 108 countries, the Groupe employs more than 76,000 professionals.

www.publicisgroupe.com | Twitter: @PublicisGroupe | Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicisgroupe | LinkedIn: Publicis Groupe | http://www.youtube.com/user/PublicisGroupe | Viva la Difference

SOURCE Focus Washington
IRVINE, Calif. and SILICON VALLEY, Calif., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Ten-X , the nation's leading online real estate marketplace, has released its latest Ten-X Commercial Real Estate (CRE) Nowcast. The pricing index, which combines Google Trends data, Ten-X's proprietary transaction data and investor surveys to forecast CRE pricing trends in real time, reveals that commercial valuations increased by 0.6 percent (56 basis points) month-over-month in April, a 7.0-percent increase from one year ago  back above its year-end 2015 level.

"Even though the April all-sector increase is significantly stronger than the prior month's slight gain of 0.2 percent, this still is the slowest annual growth rate from pricing for the cycle," said Ten-X Chief Economist Peter Muoio. "April's uptick in growth was seen across all major CRE sectors except hotel, where that segment's fundamentals, as well as its pricing, continue dwindling. Meanwhile, the apartment sector displays the strongest pricing trends with a 1.8-percent gain in April."

The Ten-X Hotel Nowcast dipped 1 percent from March to April, marking its sixth consecutive monthly decline. Hotels are now up just 0.5 percent year over year. As hotel fundamentals and pricing keep steadily worsening, so did occupancies in Q1, as supply exceeded demand for the first time this cycle. Sagging Google search trends and lower pricing on the Ten-X platform also are contributing to the continued hotel decline.

Meanwhile, other CRE sectors prosper. The apartment sector is the industry's strongest, continuing to display the most promising pricing trends, as the Ten-X Apartment Nowcast shows a 1.8-percent gain in April. Despite its performance, though, the apartment nowcast is up just 8.9 percent year over year, marking its lowest reading since March 2015. Apartment investors remain more cautious on cap rates than in past months, even while Google search trends and pricing on the Ten-X platform remain strong. After three straight monthly declines, the Ten-X Office Nowcast reversed course in April, gaining 0.7 percent. It's just 2.2-percent higher than a year ago, though, its lowest level of the cycle. The April Office Nowcast was lifted by stronger pricing on the Ten-X platform, improved investor outlooks and stronger Google search terms.

The retail and industrial nowcasts both saw gains in April. The Ten-X Retail Nowcast continued its steady gains with a 0.9 percent April increase, up 9.4 percent from a year ago. Retail was lifted by higher investor expectations while online search trends dragged. Industrial saw a more modest 0.4 percent April gain, though it still remains a healthy 16.4 percent higher than a year ago  the strongest reading of any of the five CRE segments. Investors continue with strong industrial expectations, and Google search trends remain supportive of pricing.

April Nowcast Results: All price indexes are based at 100 from January 2011

Sector Nowcast Index Month-Over-Month %

Change Year-Over-Year

% Change Office 163.7 +0.7% +2.2% Apartment 192.1 +1.8% +8.9% Retail 170.5 +0.9% +9.4% Industrial 164.7 +0.4% +16.4% Hotel 195.6 -1.0% +0.5% All Property Types 177.3 +0.6% +7.0%

About the Ten-X CRE Nowcast:

The Ten-X CRE Nowcast (formerly the Auction.com CRE Nowcast) is a price index covering the entire U.S. commercial market, including individual price trends for each major market sector office, apartments, retail, industrial and hotels. It is based on data modeling developed by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, who defines "nowcasting" as "contemporaneous forecasting"  the ability to predict what is happening as it occurs. Ten-X applies Varian's theories by combining publicly available and anonymous Google Trends data with its own proprietary transactional data to create a model for accurately predicting current commercial real estate activity. This data is supplemented with "real human" input through the company's partnership with Situs and their Real Estate Research Report (RERC).

Ten-X issues its CRE Nowcast monthly after combining transactional data, related online search activity indicating purchase intent and investor survey results. The company runs multiple versions of the Nowcast model and layers in additional variables every day to improve its accuracy in predicting pricing trends across CRE sectors in key U.S. markets. Future iterations will include regional, local and individual asset-based price indicators. By analyzing current market conditions as opposed to only historical data, Ten-X is able to provide more relevant and timely insight to real estate investors, economists and government entities alike.

About Ten-X

Ten-X is the nation's leading online real estate marketplace and the parent to Ten-X Homes, Ten-X Commercial and Auction.com. To date, the company has sold 200,000+ residential and commercial properties totaling more than $37 billion. Leveraging desktop and mobile technology, Ten-X allows people to safely and easily complete real estate transactions entirely online. Ten-X is headquartered in Irvine and Silicon Valley, Calif., and has offices in key markets nationwide. Investors in the company include Google Capital and Stone Point Capital. For more information, visit Ten-X.com.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160106/319955LOGO

SOURCE Ten-X

Related Links

https://www.ten-x.com


LEXINGTON, Ky., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Valvoline  the petroleum industry's first U.S. trademarked motor oil brand now celebrating its 150th anniversary  today announced a large internal team, along with strong lead and supporting partners, will construct two, custom Stock-Full class trucks to compete in the 49th SCORE Baja 1000, scheduled for Nov. 16-20 of this year.

This marks Valvoline's inaugural endeavor as an owner in this racing league.

Lead partner in this venture is worldwide engine manufacturer Cummins. Since 1996, Valvoline and Cummins have had an exclusive arrangement, with the Cummins' logo appearing on product packaging for a number of Valvoline's Premium Blue portfolio of products. The two companies' extensive research and development relationship helps to produce the highest-performing product-engine combinations on the street today.

Additional Baja build partners include BILSTEIN, the world leader in monotube gas pressure shock absorbers, and ATS Diesel Performance, a worldwide manufacturer of diesel truck performance products. All partner companies have been integral in providing assets and expertise to the build.

"This endeavor is truly a collaboration of an extended, and valued, partner network," said Jamal Muashsher, Valvoline's director of marketing for global brands. "Several Valvoline employees wanted to demonstrate our hands-on expertise by showing that we not only work at Valvoline, but also embody the spirit of the brand and understand how to get under the hood and create a competition vehicle."

This year's Baja race will be a loop covering 800  1,000 miles, starting and ending in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. Two main trucks and two chase trucks  rotating drivers and navigators  are needed to complete the average 28-52 hour race.

Drivers invited to navigate the custom-made vehicles will be Network A and Formula Drift Drivers Chris Forsberg and Ryan Tuerck.

"In celebrating our 150th anniversary, we looked at Valvoline racers from our past and present to help us form a list of athletes to align with for this race. Certainly, Ryan and Chris were at the top," added Muashsher. "It meant a lot to us that the drivers invited to helm our one-of-a-kind trucks speak to the evolution of Valvoline over the past 15 decades."

Valvoline has been part of racing since the sports' inception. When the first-ever organized car race in North America was held in Chicago, Illinois, in 1895, the Valvoline lubricated, two-cylinder, one-and-three-quarter horsepower car won first place. And from this point forward, Valvoline would cement itself in racing culture. In 1965, the brand continued to position itself in racing legend when it introduced the world's first racing oil. The product's innovative competition benefits propelled it to become, and remain to this day, the best-selling racing oil of all time. Today, Valvoline teams race in numerous high-performance series worldwide.

The entire build will be highlighted in a digital series that will be exclusive on TeamValvoline.com this fall.

Visit Valvoline's recently launched TeamValvoline.com website for updates, auto-related content, videos and more  or follow the brand's Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages for up-to-date information.

ABOUT VALVOLINE:

Valvoline is a leading worldwide producer and distributor of premium-branded automotive, commercial and industrial lubricants, and automotive chemicals. It ranks as the #2 quick-lube chain and #3 passenger car motor oil brand in the United States. The brand operates and franchises nearly 1,050 Valvoline Instant Oil ChangeSM centers in the United States. It also markets ValvolineTM lubricants and automotive chemicals; MaxLifeTM lubricants created for higher-mileage engines, SynPowerTM synthetic motor oil; and ZerexTM antifreeze. Key customers include: retail auto parts stores and mass merchandisers who sell to consumers; installers, such as car dealers, repair shops and quick lubes; commercial fleets; and distributors. For more information, please visit Valvoline.com.

Trademark, Ashland or its subsidiaries, registered in various countries

Federal trademark registration

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SOURCE Valvoline

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Voya is the presenting sponsor of the prestigious National Teacher of the Year program, which recognizes excellence in the classroom, highlights the important positive impact that skilled teachers can have on the lives of their students, amplifies teachers' voices and empowers them to participate in policy discussions at the state and national levels. This year marks Voya's 12 th year supporting the National Teacher of the Year program, run by the Council of Chief State School Officers.

"Voya has a long history of supporting children's education and financial literacy. We are proud to support programs like National Teacher of the Year that shine a spotlight on some of the best teachers in the nation," said Carolyn Johnson, president of Annuities and Tax-Exempt Markets, Voya Financial. "Jahana's success teaching and motivating her students through community service is an inspiration. Voya would like to congratulate her and all of the 2016 State Teachers of the Year."

Hayes is known for uniquely connecting education with community involvement to help students improve their community, while also strengthening their character. She has done this by creating volunteer opportunities with organizations like Habitat for Humanity and by organizing community events that address obstacles her students face in their personal lives. Hayes' approach has been so successful that today she is developing a service-learning curriculum for her school district. As the 2016 National Teacher of the Year, she will spend the next year traveling the nation to represent educators and advocate on behalf of teachers and students.

Supporting programs like National Teacher of the Year furthers Voya's mission and vision, which is to help all Americans  including teachers  become financially and emotionally ready for their retirement. Through its charitable giving arm, Voya Foundation, the company is committed to programs that help young people stay in school, graduate on time and become prepared to enter the 21st-century workforce. At the core of Voya Foundation is the belief that education is the key to healthy communities, which in turn fosters the sustainability and growth of the economy.

In addition to Hayes, the finalists for the 2016 National Teacher of the Year are:

Nathan Gibbs-Bowing, a social studies teacher at Lincoln High School in Tacoma, WA ,

, Daniel Jocz , a social studies teacher at Downtown Magnets High School in Los Angeles, CA and

, a social studies teacher at Downtown Magnets High School in and Shawn Sheehan , a specialized education algebra teacher at Norman High School in Norman, OK.

Learn more about Voya's support of the National Teacher of the Year program here.

About Voya Financial

Voya Financial, Inc. (NYSE: VOYA), helps Americans plan, invest and protect their savings  to get ready to retire better. Serving the financial needs of approximately 13 million individual and institutional customers in the United States, Voya is a Fortune 500 company that had $11 billion in revenue in 2015. The company had $452 billion in total assets under management and administration as of Dec. 31, 2015. With a clear mission to make a secure financial future possible  one person, one family, one institution at a time  Voya's vision is to be America's Retirement Company. The company is equally committed to conducting business in a way that is socially, environmentally, economically and ethically responsible  Voya has been recognized as one of the 2016 World's Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute, and as one of the Top Green Companies in the U.S., by Newsweek magazine. For more information, visit voya.com. Follow Voya Financial on Facebook and Twitter @Voya.

About Voya Foundation

Voya Foundation's mission is to improve the quality of life in communities where Voya Financial operates and its employees and customers live. Voya Foundation provides grants and establishes signature partnerships in the areas of financial literacy and children's education and fosters employee engagement to deepen our positive impact on the community. For more information, visit www.voyafoundation.com.

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SOURCE Voya Financial, Inc.

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NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- VTech today highlights its newest collection of products at the TTPM Spring Showcase, further expanding its award-winning lines and bolstering its range of educational, innovative toys. The engaging new products are part of VTech's celebrated Baby, Infant and Preschool lines, the award-winning Go! Go! Smart lines and the unique Baby Amaze line.

"We're excited to display our latest collection at the TTPM Spring Showcase," said William To, President, VTech Electronics North America. "These new products are a reflection of VTech's continued commitment to developing innovative, educational products that enrich children's development and make learning fun."

Details on the new products on display can be found at www.VTechKids.com. Highlights include:

Crinkle & Roar Lion : Shake, explore and sing with the Crinkle & Roar Lion. Press the colorful shape buttons on the lion's side to learn shapes, colors and letters. Shake the adorable lion to activate the motion sensor and hear him roar and play other cheerful sounds. Little ones will love the crinkly feet, ribbon tags and textured ring. The lion also includes a baby-safe mirror to build self-awareness. It's the perfect take-along toy and can be attached to carriers, strollers and more. (Ages birth +, MSRP $14.99 )

: Shake, explore and sing with the Crinkle & Roar Lion. Press the colorful shape buttons on the lion's side to learn shapes, colors and letters. Shake the adorable lion to activate the motion sensor and hear him roar and play other cheerful sounds. Little ones will love the crinkly feet, ribbon tags and textured ring. The lion also includes a baby-safe mirror to build self-awareness. It's the perfect take-along toy and can be attached to carriers, strollers and more. (Ages birth +, MSRP ) Go! Go! Smart Animals Doggie Playhouse : Have a howling good time at the Go! Go! Smart Animals Doggie Playhouse. Place Danny the SmartPoint  Labrador on the SmartPoint location on the swing or in the dog house to hear different phrases, music or fun sound effects. Then explore the dog house and build motor skills by sliding the spinning beads, pushing the dog on the swing and searching for buried treasure! When the dog is ready to eat, flip down the wall to use the food bowl. Inspire the imagination and build an entire world by connecting to other Go! Go! Smart Animals  , Go! Go! Smart Wheels  and Go! Go! Smart Friends  playsets (sold separately). (Ages 1-5 years, MSRP $14.99 )

: Have a howling good time at the Go! Go! Smart Animals Doggie Playhouse. Place Danny the SmartPoint Labrador on the SmartPoint location on the swing or in the dog house to hear different phrases, music or fun sound effects. Then explore the dog house and build motor skills by sliding the spinning beads, pushing the dog on the swing and searching for buried treasure! When the dog is ready to eat, flip down the wall to use the food bowl. Inspire the imagination and build an entire world by connecting to other Go! Go! Smart Animals , Go! Go! Smart Wheels and Go! Go! Smart Friends playsets (sold separately). (Ages 1-5 years, MSRP ) Go! Go! Smart Wheels Vehicle Assortment : Children can cruise into the learning zone with new Go! Go! Smart Wheels vehicles. These electronic play vehicles are perfectly sized for little hands and entertain children with a light-up button that activates music and sounds. Little ones will also learn about different letters and vehicle names through pretend play. The vehicles respond to SmartPoint locations with different phrases and sound effects on all Go! Go! Smart Wheels playsets. A new motorcycle, jet, forklift and garbage truck join a line-up that includes a school bus, SUV, taxi, car, van, truck, ambulance, fire truck, police car, tow truck, helicopter, cement mixer, tractor, race cars, ATV, convertible, bulldozer, airplane and dump truck. (Ages 1-5 years, MSRP $7.99 each)

: Children can cruise into the learning zone with new Go! Go! Smart Wheels vehicles. These electronic play vehicles are perfectly sized for little hands and entertain children with a light-up button that activates music and sounds. Little ones will also learn about different letters and vehicle names through pretend play. The vehicles respond to SmartPoint locations with different phrases and sound effects on all Go! Go! Smart Wheels playsets. A new motorcycle, jet, forklift and garbage truck join a line-up that includes a school bus, SUV, taxi, car, van, truck, ambulance, fire truck, police car, tow truck, helicopter, cement mixer, tractor, race cars, ATV, convertible, bulldozer, airplane and dump truck. (Ages 1-5 years, MSRP each) Go! Go! Smart Friends Character Assortment : Perfectly sized for little hands, each item includes both a character and MagicPoint accessory! Children can press a light-up button on these chunky, colorful figures to hear the characters come to life with an introduction, things they like to do and sing-along songs. The figures can also be placed on their included MagicPoint accessory or on other MagicPoint locations on Go! Go! Smart Friends playsets (each sold separately) to experience the characters' unique personalities, fun phrases, motion, lights and more. New Go! Go! Smart Friends include Farmer Joe & his Farming Set, Police Officer Wayne & his Patrol Set, Firefighter Aiden & his Fire Rescue Set, Doctor Brian & his Medical Rescue Set and Nurse Amy & her Patient Care Set. (Ages 1-5 years, MSRP $9.99 each)

: Perfectly sized for little hands, each item includes both a character and MagicPoint accessory! Children can press a light-up button on these chunky, colorful figures to hear the characters come to life with an introduction, things they like to do and sing-along songs. The figures can also be placed on their included MagicPoint accessory or on other MagicPoint locations on Go! Go! Smart Friends playsets (each sold separately) to experience the characters' unique personalities, fun phrases, motion, lights and more. New Go! Go! Smart Friends include Farmer Joe & his Farming Set, Police Officer Wayne & his Patrol Set, Firefighter Aiden & his Fire Rescue Set, Doctor Brian & his Medical Rescue Set and Nurse Amy & her Patient Care Set. (Ages 1-5 years, MSRP each) Baby Amaze 3-in-1 Care & Learn Stroller: When little ones place their baby doll in the 3-in-1 stroller, its smart sensor recognizes movement and plays fun sounds and melodies. Transform the stroller into a high chair where children can hear baby care reminders that introduce nurturing concepts and healthy habits, while they pretend to feed their doll. Turn the high chair into a bassinet and the doll falls asleep listening to more than 20 classic nursery rhymes and lullabies. The 3-in-1 Care & Learn Stroller also has keys that introduce numbers, counting, letters, colors, places and animals, as well as plays piano sounds in music mode. With three different ways to play, this stroller is packed with fun! (Ages 2-5 years, MSRP $44.99 )

About VTech

VTech is a world leader in age-appropriate and developmental stage-based electronic learning products for children. As a pioneer in the learning toy category, VTech develops high-quality, innovative educational products that enrich children's development and make learning fun. With a rich, more than 35 year history, VTech has not only established itself as a learning authority but also consistently remains at the forefront of innovation with multiple award-winning products. The company also has a broad range of award-winning infant and preschool products available in 24 different languages worldwide, with more than 100 new products introduced every year. VTech was awarded a prestigious 2015 Toy of The Year (TOTY) Award for its Go! Go! Smart Animals Zoo Explorers Playset. In order to further strengthen VTech's position as a learning authority, the company's Expert Panel, with esteemed experts in reading, language arts, science, math, and child development, consult on new product introductions.

VTech Electronics North America, LLC is based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. VTech Electronics Limited is headquartered in Hong Kong with distribution globally.



For more information on VTech's additional product lines, visit www.VTechKids.com, www.facebook.com/VTechtoys on Facebook or follow @VTechToys on Twitter.

Media Contact:

Nicole Centinaro

Coyne Public Relations

973-588-2000

[email protected]

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SOURCE VTech

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AUSTIN, Texas, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Financing technology leader Vyze is pleased to introduce Keith Nealon as the company's new chief executive officer. In his new role, Nealon will draw on twenty years of experience with high-growth public and private technology companies to help scale Vyze as the company continues to simplify the financing experience at point of sale for both retailers and manufacturers.

"Keith is a versatile leader, having demonstrated success in management, sales, marketing, and technology roles," said Vyze's chief marketing officer Doug Filak. "His experience and expertise will be instrumental in building new relationships across the industry and expanding our capabilities."

"We couldn't be more excited to have an experienced leader like Keith charting the course of Vyze's growth," added Austin Ventures General Partner Chris Pacitti, a Vyze board member. "He brings a wealth of experience in growing technology businesses and taking innovative companies like Vyze to the next level."

Formerly NewComLink, Vyze introduced its new brand last week after enhancing its offerings and securing several new strategic partnerships, which provide businesses with more ways to attract and retain customers by delivering financing solutions for all customer segments.

"The retail consumer financing market is over $200B in size but is in need of an upgrade. Despite the market size, retailers and manufacturers cannot serve their customers adequately with today's lending options," explained Nealon. "With 73 percent of sales associates reticent to offer financing, 28 percent of all consumers afraid to apply for financing, and just 47 percent of consumers approved for primary financing, there's tremendous opportunity to deliver more value to our customers."

"I'm eager to expand Vyze's footprint to provide businesses with a technology platform that delivers a meaningful impact on revenue and customer loyalty, while simultaneously delivering a more satisfying experiences for their customers," he added.

Prior to joining Vyze, Nealon served as the president and chief revenue officer for Adaptive Insights, leading sales, channel and professional services teams. In the United States, Nealon has also held executive leadership positions at both public and private companies, including ShoreTel, Eloqua and Conductor. Previously, in Europe, he also served as chief executive officer of Nebula Technologies (later acquired by Unicorn Worldwide Holdings).

Nealon currently sits on advisory boards of several leading SaaS companies, including Smartling, dotLoop (recently acquired by Zillow) and Axonista.

About Vyze

Vyze is a leading cloud-based financial technology company for businesses. By combining technology, a comprehensive lending supply, and support under one roof, Vyze is able to deliver businesses simpler, more satisfying financing experiences for their customers, wherever and whenever they shop.

For more information, contact:

Ian Toner

720-726-5460

[email protected]

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SOURCE Vyze
NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Wynnefield Capital, Inc. and its affiliates (collectively, "Wynnefield"), long-term stockholders of Omega Protein Corp. (NYSE: OME) ("Omega" or the "Company") with an approximate 7.9% ownership interest (as of April 28, 2016), today made the following statement following the filing of a Schedule 13D/A with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC").

Nelson Obus, Wynnefield's President, said, "For nearly 9 months, Wynnefield has attempted to constructively engage with Omega Protein over what Wynnefield believes is the Company's misallocation of approximately $168 million into the Human Nutrition business, while foregoing significant opportunities to modernize and grow their core Animal Nutrition business. The Company's own financial reports over the past 4 years demonstrate that Omega has squandered almost $7.00 a share of stockholder free cash flow in the failed attempt to enter the human nutrition business.

"Shareholders should be seriously concerned as well over the opportunity cost resulting from the misallocation of approximately $168 million of capital. We believe this money could and should have been used to make improvements within Omega's core high margin Animal Nutrition business, or returned to shareholders via dividends or share buy backs.

"The current Board of Directors has refused to even entertain a discussion regarding their poor business judgement or hear fresh independent views on maximizing shareholder returns. Our attempt at a dialogue was met with non-responsiveness on the part of Omega."

Mr. Obus continued, "Accordingly, Wynnefield has submitted a slate of three highly qualified and independent Board nominees for election at the Company's Annual Meeting, as a last resort to preserve Omega's capital and protect the interests of all stockholders. Wynnefield and Omega entered into settlement discussions, which were terminated by Omega's failure to respond. As indicated in our recently filed 13D/A, we are fully committed to pursuing the nominations of Michael Christodolou, David Clarke and James Sherbert, Jr. to Omega's Board. These three nominees are committed to protecting all interests, pressing Omega's Board to preserve and redirect capital, improving corporate governance practices and to evaluating reasonable alternative business strategies, which we believe will lead to the creation of stockholder value.

"Indeed, in keeping with its anti-shareholder bias, Omega's Board unilaterally amended and restated its Bylaws for the sole purpose of entrenching the Board and Management, by placing additional burdens on the ability of shareholders to nominate and elect directors of their choosing, including by giving the current Board the ability to delay or reschedule the Company's Annual Meeting, which the Board has yet to set."

Wynnefield believes that this delay is an attempt by Omega to "window dress" their first quarter results to show positive EBITDA in its misadventure in Human Nutrition, to try and convince shareholders that the cavalry has arrived. This will allow Omega to spin these results as "successes" in the upcoming proxy fight. This should come as no surprise given the year over year increasing losses and write-offs generated by the Human Nutrition segment.

In fact, two of the four forays in their Human Nutrition space - In Con - which was intended to produce fish oil pure enough for human nutrition and Wisconsin Specialty Protein - a $60 million spend to create profitless overcapacity in the whey products business can, in our view, only be described as abject failures. Meanwhile there are no indications that EBITDA margins in their other Human Nutrition acquisitions Cyvex and Bioriginal Food and Science have come even close to the historical margins the Company obtains in its Animal Nutrition segment.

We also believe the Board is delaying the Annual Meeting in order to give it more time before announcing the results of its so-called "strategic review"  even though more than 7 months have elapsed since it announced the formation of its Strategic Review Committee. Omega's shareholders are entitled to have the opportunity to choose between the Board's nominees and Wynnefield's candidates. We call on the company to immediately fix a record date and announce the date of the Annual Meeting.

A summary of Wynnefield's analysis of Omega's capital misallocation and critique of its governance deficiencies, as well as biographical information of each of Wynnefield's proposed nominees, is contained on Schedule 13D/A (Amendment No. 3, as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 1, 2016), which can be found at: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1053650/000114420416085133/v432871_sc13da.htm

Additional Information and Where to Find It

Wynnefield Partners Small Cap Value, L.P.; Wynnefield Partners Small Cap Value, L.P. I; Wynnefield Small Cap Value Offshore Fund, Ltd.; Wynnefield Capital, Inc. Profit Sharing & Money Purchase Plan; Wynnefield Capital Management, LLC; Wynnefield Capital, Inc.; Joshua H. Landes; and Nelson Obus (collectively, "Wynnefield") together with Michael N. Christodolou, David H. Clarke and James L. Sherbert, Jr are participants in the solicitation of proxies from stockholders in connection with the 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders (the "Annual Meeting") of Omega Protein Corporation (the "Company"). Wynnefield intends to file a proxy statement (the "2016 Proxy Statement") with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") in connection with the solicitation of proxies for the Annual Meeting unless it withdraws its nominations.

Wynnefield may be deemed to beneficially own 1,752,636 shares of the Company's common stock, representing approximately 7.9% of the Company's outstanding common stock. None of the other participants own any shares of the Company's common stock. Additional information regarding such participants, including their direct or indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, will be included in the 2016 Proxy Statement and other relevant documents to be filed with the SEC in connection with the Annual Meeting.

Promptly after any filing of its definitive 2016 Proxy Statement with the SEC, Wynnefield intends to mail the definitive 2016 Proxy Statement and an accompanying proxy card to some or all stockholders pursuant to applicable SEC rules. STOCKHOLDERS ARE URGED TO READ THE 2016 PROXY STATEMENT (INCLUDING ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS THERETO) AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS THAT THE COMPANY WILL FILE WITH THE SEC WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. Stockholders may obtain, free of charge, copies of the definitive 2016 Proxy Statement and any other documents filed by Wynnefield with respect to the Company with the SEC in connection with the Annual Meeting at the SEC's website (http://www.sec.gov).

Media:

Mark Semer or Daniel Yunger

Kekst

[email protected] / [email protected]

212.521.4800

SOURCE Wynnefield Capital
Unauthorised protests Monday against the deal to recognise Saudi sovereignty over the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir were met with arrests and tear gas

Several Giza prosecutions referred Wednesday 109 people to misdemeanour court Saturday following their arrest for participation in 25 April protests against the Egyptian-Saudi deal to redraw their shared maritime borders.

Of the 109 referred to court, 48 were released Wednesday pending trial.

A Qasr El-Nil prosecution ordered the detention of 30 additional protesters and released 38 others.

According to the prosecution, the defendants face charges of illegally protesting, attempting to overthrow the government, rioting, disturbing public peace, and disrupting traffic.

In Alexandria, the prosecution ordered the detention of 13 protesters. In Fayoum, south of Cairo, two were released on bail of EGP 1000 each.

A number of demonstrations were held Monday to protest a recent government decision to acknowledge Saudi Arabia's sovereignty over the two Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir. Police fired teargas to disperse the protests.

This was the second wave of demonstrations against the controversial deal after several thousand, including activists and politicians, rallied earlier this month in what some described as the largest protests since President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi became president in 2014.

Egypt's interior ministry had warned ahead of Monday's protests that it would show no tolerance for attempts to undermine the country's security, urging people not to respond to "calls inciting chaos." President El-Sisi urged citizens a day earlier to defend the state and its institutions from "forces of evil," and to protect the country's stability.

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Related Egyptian journalists march in Cairo to file complaint against interior minister

The head of Egypt's press syndicate Yehia Qalash said on Thursday that violations by police against journalists while covering protests will not be tolerated, calling for those responsible to be held accountable.

In a press conference held at the press syndicate, Qalash said that the violations that took place on 25 April were sad and unacceptable, especially as they come at a time when the syndicate is trying to put an end to media chaos through legislations to ensure freedom not only for journalists, but for every Egyptian.

Dozens of journalists had organised a stand on the staircase of the syndicate on Tuesday to protest the police violations against reporters during their coverage of Monday's protests over the government recent deal acknowledging Saudi sovereignty over the two Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir.

"It is a shame that the year the syndicate celebrates its diamond jubilee, this happens without accountability or punishment for those responsible for this disgraceful act," the head of the syndicate said.

The press conference was held to hear the testimonies of journalists who were detained by police during their coverage of protests.

The syndicate's board and the journalists headed to the prosecutor's office to file urgent complaints against interior minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar and the head of Cairo's Security Directorate over "police violations."

Until Thursday two journalists remained in detention following their arrest the day before.

Syndicate secretary Gamal Abdel-Raheem said on Tuesday that the journalists were assaulted during their work and not allowed to enter the syndicate headquarters, adding that those inside the syndicate building were subjected to assault by thugs.

The syndicate said that dozens of its members were barred from entering the syndicate building, a planned focal point for the protests, even after showing security personnel their press IDs in a "precedent that has not taken place in years," as security forces had sealed off the surrounding streets.

The journalists chanted "write on the walls of the prison cell that the jailing of journalists is a shame."

They also held up banners expressing support for jailed colleagues Mahmoud Abu Zeid Shawkan, Ahmed Sebei, and Ibrahim El-Darawy.

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Aligarh, April 24 : One person was shot dead when two groups of students clashed in the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) here, police said on Sunday.

A dozen students were injured in the violence that began on Saturday and continued into early Sunday. Police sources said one student was seriously wounded and warded in a Delhi hospital.

University property, including vehicles, were set on fire in the free for all, a police officer said. The proctor's office was partially burnt.

The trouble began on Saturday when an unidentified person fired at a student from Moradabad near the Mumtaz Hall, some students said.

Two persons suffered bullet wounds, one of them died later.

A group of students went to the proctor's office to lodge a complaint. This triggered violent clashes which continued through the night.

The Rapid Action Force (RAF) and police reinforcements were deployed in the campus. University authorities said on Sunday that the situation was now under control.

A university official identified the person who died as Rahat Abrar, an expelled student.

A seriously injured student had been admitted to the Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi. "I think the cause of the clash is regionalism," said one official.
Seoul, April 24 : South Korea on Sunday strongly denounced North Korea's launch of a ballistic missile from a submarine in what Seoul said was a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

Seoul's foreign ministry said South Korea strongly condemned North Korea's test-firing of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) on Saturday in eastern waters off the coastal town of Sinpo, Xinhua news agency reported.

Regardless of whether it had succeeded or not, the launch was in a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions, and the test-firing came in less than 10 days after the UN urged Pyongyang to exercise restraint following the launch of a Musudan ballistic missile on April 15, the ministry said.

South Korea has repeatedly warned of stronger and sterner response to North Korea's provocations, Seoul will step up efforts to encourage the international community to put more pressure and sanctions on Pyongyang while faithfully implementing the existing UN Security Council resolutions, the ministry said.

The statement came hours after North Korea reported successful launch of a ballistic missile from a submarine. The test was guided by top North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

North Korea-style SLBM met all technical thresholds to carry out an underwater attack operation that targets South Korea and the US. It marked the second time since May 9, 2015 that Pyongyang announced its successful test of an SLBM.
Cairo's Qasr El-Nil prosecution has referred 102 people to misdemeanor court over their participation in 25 April protests against the government's recent agreement acknowledging Saudi sovereignty over two Red Sea islands under Egyptian control.

According to the prosecution, the defendants face charges of illegally protesting, attempting to overthrow the government, rioting, inciting against state institutions, disturbing public peace and disrupting traffic.

The trial for the protesters is set for Saturday.

Fourteen minors were also referred by prosecution to juvenile court.

A number of demonstrations were held Monday to protest the recent Red Sea island deal, with police firing teargas to disperse the crowds.

This was the second wave of demonstrations against the controversial deal, after several thousand people, including activists and politicians, rallied earlier this month in what some described as the largest protests since President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi took office in 2014.

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New Delhi, April 26 : Hailing the Indian government's decision to include a panic button for the safety of women and satellite-based GPS in all mobile handsets from next year, the country's leading smartphone manufacturers on Tuesday said it is feasible to roll out these features within the proposed timeline.

According to Atul Jain, COO, smart electronics business at LeEco India, this is a welcome step not only for the safety of women but also for every citizen who may be in distress and it is feasible for the manufacturers to re-configure the upcoming devices with panic button.

"I think it is possible for manufacturers to have a panic button for new phones that are going to be launched in the next year," Jain told IANS.

If you have a mobile phone, you can either press numeric key '5' or '9' to invoke emergency call.

"Alternately, for smartphones, the government said that you can either have an icon which, as soon as you press, will go into a particular control centre or you can have a three-time press on the on-off button that will send the message to a particular centre," he said.

According to Jain, the control centres where all the distress calls will go need to be set up in a structured way for quick and timely responses.

In a statement, Karbonn Mobiles said that the decision by Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad is a step towards harnessing the full potential of mobile devices which could be a potent tool in ensuring women's safety.

"Karbonn Mobiles has already been working on developing a mobile SOS app for women which we would be unrolling for Karbonn customers over the next few months," the smartphone maker said.

Prasad said on Monday that he had "taken a decision that from January 1, 2017, no cell phone can be sold without a provision for panic button, and from January 1, 2018, mobile sets should also have Global Positioning System inbuilt".

An official notification added: "With effect from January 1, 2018, no mobile phone handset manufacturing company shall sell the new mobile phone handset in India without the facility of identifying the location through satellite-based GPS."

According to Jain, installing the GPS system will definitely lead to certain cost hike which will depend from manufacturer to manufacturer.

"At LeEco, we have been saying this since last year that the era of making profits from smartphone devices is over. This move is another step in that direction which will lead to further squeeze in the manufacturing margin," Jain told IANS.

"India is a very price-sensitive market. The market is also super-competitive which means your own margins will come down," he said, adding that this notification is a message to companies that they will have to look for avenues other than devices for revenues.

The Indian Cellular Association also welcomed the notification to build a penetrating mobile Information technology architecture to enhance the safety of women.

"We are extremely thankful to officials who worked on this tirelessly. The final result is simple and this mobile solution will be understood by all," its national president Pankaj Mohindroo said in a statement.

In March this year, the government had proposed that people will have to just dial "112" for emergency help from police, ambulance or the fire department.

The telecom watchdog had proposed that all existing emergency numbers -- such as 100, 101, 102 and 108 -- be retained as secondary numbers, which would then be re-routed to the single emergency number 112.

The notification did not specify which agency would connect the number, but sources in the ministry said the decision will be taken soon.
Mumbai, April 27 : Superstar Shah Rukh Khan says he was "so happy" to see actor Manoj Bajpayee, who was promoting his upcoming reality-based film "Traffic" here.

The "Chennai Express" star paid a surprise visit to Manoj, who "thanked" SRK for "dropping by".

"Thanks for dropping by Shah Rukh Khan quite a surprise for the media present there. God bless you," Manoj tweeted on Tuesday night.

The 50-year-old superstar replied by saying: "Was so happy to see you my man."

"Traffic" is an emotional thriller based on a road trip from Mumbai to Pune. The story revolves around transportation of a heart for a heart transplant case, chasing a strict deadline. During the mission, the characters face numerous difficulties and traffic being one of them.

Directed by late Rajesh Pillai, produced by Deepak Dhar of Endemol India and presented by Foxstar Studios, "Traffic" also stars Jimmy Sheirgill, Divya Dutta and Sachin Khedekar.
Vijayawada, April 27 : Another MLA of the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) joined the ruling TDP in Andhra Pradesh on Wednesday even as leader of opposition Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy is visiting Delhi to mobilise support for his 'save democracy' campaign.

G. Ravi Kumar, a legislator from Addanki in Prakasam district, joined the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in the presence of party president and Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu here.

Ravi Kumar is the 14th legislator from the lone opposition party to defect to the TDP.

The YSRCP received another blow as senior leader and former minister M.V. Mysoora Reddy also resigned from the party over "Jagan's style of functioning".

Meanwhile, Jaganmohan, son of former chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in Delhi on Wednesday and complained that the TDP was "resorting to undemocratic practices" in Andhra Pradesh.

He told reporters that "Naidu is buying MLAs for Rs.20 crore to Rs.30 crore".

On Tuesday, Jagan also met Communist Party of India-Marxist general secretary Sitaram Yechuri and Janata Dal United leader Sharad Yadav and called on Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

Releasing a booklet titled 'Emperor of corruption', Jagan alleged that during the last two years, Naidu was involved in 31 scams involving Rs.1.34 lakh crore. He said the booklet had all the details of the scams, which included certain government orders.

He sought a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) into all the scams.

Last week, Jagan had complained to Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan against Naidu.

The leader of opposition said he will lodge a complaint with the president, the prime minister and the Election Commission on the issue.

The YSRCP bagged 67 seats in the 175-member Andhra Pradesh assembly in the 2014 elections to become the lone opposition party.
Canberra, April 28 : A woman who gave birth on a Jetstar flight has named her son after the airline, the media reported on Thursday.

Australia's Fairfax Media said woman, Saw Ler Htu, gave birth during the flight from Singapore to Myanmar, with the help of the crew and three doctors on board the flight, and as way of thanks, named her child Saw Jet Star.

Jetstar, a subsidiary of Australia's national airline Qantas, allows pregnant women to fly up until the end of their 40th week of the pregnancy for flights shorter than four hours, but passengers were surprised when a woman went into labor midway through the flight, Xinhua news agency reported.

The airline took to social media to announce the news overnight, and praised the crew for their quick thinking, which helped "ensure the safe delivery of our youngest ever passenger on a flight".

"The happy arrival of baby Jet Star was met with a round of applause from other passengers on the plane, so we're sure it's not a moment they'll ever forget either," the statement said.

"The baby boy weighed six pounds, seven ounces and is the first baby to be delivered on a Jetstar Asia flight."

The airline said it would also be contributing $750 worth of baby supplies to the family.
Islamabad, April 28 : Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry said that there was no breakthrough in talks with his Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar on his recent trip to New Delhi.

The foreign secretary, who was in Delhi on Tuesday to attend the Heart of Asia Senior Officials' meeting, held talks with his Indian counterpart on bilateral issues, including resumption of the peace dialogue, Dawn online reported on Thursday.

It was expected that the talks might lead to progress towards the start of the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue which was agreed by the two countries in December last year.

"I would not say there is a breakthrough, but we conveyed our concerns forthrightly," Chaudhry said at a media briefing here on Wednesday.

He said he had stressed the need for a "structured, sustained and result-oriented comprehensive dialogue process", resolving the Kashmir dispute and conducting a fair trial in the 2007 Samjhauta Express attack case.

He also expressed concern over the involvement of alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, in subversive activities in Pakistan and said "such acts undermine efforts for normalisation".

He said the Indian foreign secretary did not indicate any date for his visit to Pakistan for discussing a timetable of the comprehensive dialogue.

The two secretaries were to meet in mid-January in Islamabad, but the sitting had to be postponed because of the Pathankot attack. The two countries have not so far been able to reschedule the meeting.

"Pakistan is ready for dialogue, whenever India agrees to it," Chaudhry said.
Toronto, April 28 : As male peacocks shake their long feathers in courtship, the iridescent eyespot remains nearly stationary and captivates females, new research has found.

The iridescent eyespot effectively hypnotises the female, leaving her powerless to resist the male's attentions.

A male peacock, for example, entices peahens by raising and vibrating his long train feathers.

The vibrations both make the feathers rattle and make the brightly coloured eyespots appear to hover motionless against an oscillating iridescent background.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, showed that displaying peacocks vibrate their feathers at or near resonance, giving the train the greatest vibrational amplitude and suggesting that these courtship displays may be energetically efficient.

The courtship displays signals the relative physical quality of males vying for females.

Males with eyespots that are the most iridescent win most of the matings.

The eyespot barbs are locked together with microhooks much like those on flight feathers.

This gives each eyespot greater density than the surrounding loose barbs, keeping it essentially in place as the loose barbs shimmer in the background.

In addition, the longer the train feathers, the faster the males shook their feathers during courtship displays, requiring more muscular effort.

This suggests that the dynamics of feather vibrations could also signal male muscle power to choosy females.

"Charles Darwin observed that peacocks vibrate their feathers during courtship, but it took this multidisciplinary team of scientists to characterise the dynamics of this behaviour," said one of the researchers Suzanne Kane from the University of British Columbia in Canada.

For results, the researchers used high-speed video to analyse the "train-rattling" movements of vibrating train and tail feathers in 14 adult peacocks, and measured the vibrations of individual feathers in the lab.
Lucknow, April 28 : With growing incidents of rioting within jail premises in the state, the security of five prisons, including Lucknow jail, has been handed over to the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC), an official said on Thursday.

The jails which would now be under 24x7 security cover of the PAC are Lucknow, Agra Central, Naini, Muzaffarnagar and Gorakhpur.

PAC personnel would report to the district administration and police officials.

Additional Director General (ADG) Prisons D.S. Chauhan said the new security arrangement was part of the "centralised security system" which has been set in motion for state prisons.

All entry points in these prisons would be manned by PAC personnel, something which hitherto was in the hands of jail staff.

This was necessitated after a series of violent incidents rocked jails in Varanasi and Deoria.
New York, April 28 : Get ready to say good morning to Twitter in classroom soon as the micro-blogging can help teachers engage students in a more efficient way and better prepare them to take on New-Age challenges, researchers reveal.

Twitter, if used properly, can produce better outcomes among middle school students and enhance the way children learn in the 21st century.

"Our work adds a critical lens to the role of open social networking tools such as Twitter in the context of adolescents' learning and raises new questions about the potential for social media as a lever for increasing the personalisation of education," explained Penny Bishop, professor and director of the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education at University of Vermont.

Lead researcher Ryan Becker used his middle school science classes to conduct the research in conjunction with co-author Bishop.

Becker found that 95 percent of his students agreed or strongly agreed that Twitter enabled them to follow real science in real time as it develops around the world.

Particularly motivating was the ability to interact via Twitter with leading organisations like the US space agency NASA and science-related programmes.

The findings highlight the potential of Twitter as a means to personalise learning and to expand secondary students' encounters with science professionals and organisations.

The study revealed that 93 percent of students surveyed think Twitter enabled them to interact and share perspectives with a global audience outside the classroom.

"When I have something important to share about science that I like, as many as 52 people (Twitter followers) can see what I tweet instantly," said one student.

Another student said they use Twitter for academic support by tweeting with other students about concepts, assignments and projects.

Ninety-one percent said Twitter helped them make connections between science and their own lives and interests.

"Twitter has made me think about things that I like and had me think about the science related to them," added another student.

Others said Twitter helped them learn about science in new ways that related to their everyday lives.

Additionally, 81 percent of students agreed that Twitter helped them think creatively about new ways to communicate science.

Twitter is also an extremely powerful assessment tool, according to Becker, who recommends displaying tweets on an electronic "smart" board so students and teachers can assess and discuss them together.

Teachers can also ask students to tweet examples of specific scientific concepts like the students in Becker's class who tweeted personal examples of Newton's First Law.

Teachers can also have students respond to scientific poll questions and share instant results with their class.

Students continued to tweet outside of class making certain topics a constant conversation.

The 140-character limit also forces students to distill down major concepts like "what is chemistry," Becker noted in a paper forthcoming in Middle School Journal.
New Delhi, April 28 : BJP president Amit Shah on Thursday hit out at Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and asked her to clarify who were the beneficiaries of the VVIP chopper scam.

"It has been established by an Italian court that kickbacks were given. Rather than saying she (Sonia) is not afraid of anyone, she should clarify who received the kickbacks," Shah told reporters.

"I just want to ask who was in the power then? It was UPA and they are responsible. They should bring out the truth before the nation."

"When the National Herald (case) took place, then you say that 'we are not afraid of anybody', when the VVIP chopper scam takes place, then you say that 'we are not afraid of anybody'," he said.

"She might not be afraid of anyone but we the leaders of the BJP are afraid of the Constitution, democracy and public modesty," Shah added.

He said the Congress was a unique party whose corruption deals were coming out even two years after it was ousted from power.

"When the Congress was in power, its corruption deals were coming out every day. This is still going on even after two years of losing power."

Shah's remarks came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a meeting with senior ministers over the scam.

The meeting was attended by Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Parliamentary Affairs Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu and his junior Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi in parliament shortly before both houses met for the day.

Sources told IANS that the prime minister discussed the government's further strategy over the issue in parliament and outside.

He asked the members to corner the Congress aggressively over the scam.

Naidu, who also attended the meeting, said the government was pursuing the case with all seriousness.

"Why is the Congress accusing the ruling dispensation of the deal which was not even signed in its tenure?" he told reporters outside parliament.

A combative Congress on Wednesday dismissed the bribery charges in the chopper scam.

The party, in turn, accused the Modi government of trying to help the Italian firm which had been blacklisted by the UPA government.

A Milan court sent Finmeccanica's former CEO Giuseppe Orsi and AgustaWestland ex-head Bruno Spagnolini to jail for false accounting and corruption in the sale of 12 VVIP choppers to India.

The court ruling refers to Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, her secretary Ahmad Patel and also former Indian Air Force chief S.P. Tyagi.
Colombo, April 28 : At least 21 Indian fishermen were arrested by the Sri Lankan Navy on Thursday for poaching in the island nation's waters.

At least three Indian fishing boats were also seized. The fishermen were handed over to police, Xinhua news agency reported.
Dozens of Egyptian journalists staged a march from the press syndicate in downtown Cairo to the nearby prosecutor-generals office to file a complaint against the interior minister and the head of the capital's security directorate.

The marchers, holding up cameras and slogans mostly calling for the release of detained journalists, protested against the police after a number of reporters were arrested on Monday, which saw limited protests in different parts of the country.

The protests, which were over the recently declared Egyptian-Saudi island agreement, were all promptly dispersed by police in Cairo amid heavy security presence, with rallies supporting the deal and celebrating Sinai Liberation Day allowed to take place.

Egypt's press syndicate has repeatedly condemned the arrest of journalists and others on Monday.

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Shillong, April 28 : In a dramatic U-turn, Meghalaya's independent legislator, Rophul S. Marak, on Thursday said he won't contest the by-election to the Tura Lok Sabha seat on May 16.

On Tuesday night, Marak quit the post of Parliamentary Secretary to contest the by-poll which followed the demise of former Lok Sabha Speaker Purno A. Sangma on March 4.

Marak told IANS that he decided not to contest the by-election after many people, his family included, advised him not to. He spoke on telephone from Williamnagar, the district headquarters of East Garo Hills.

The independent legislator said he had decided to extend his support to Congress candidate Dikkanchi D. Shira, wife of Chief Minister Mukul Sangma, in the by-poll.

"I have been asked to support Dikkanchi and to campaign extensively for her in my (Siju-Rongara assembly) constituency to ensure her victory," he said.

Asked whether he will withdraw his resignation paper as Parliamentary Secretary, Marak said: "I have submitted my papers to the chief minister, but he is yet to accept it. Therefore, I am still the Parliamentary Secretary."

Marak had said he quit as Parliamentary Secretary saying he was "fed up with the Congress government".

On Wednesday, Congress candidate Shira and NPP nominee Conrad K. Sangma, youngest son of the late Purno. A. Sangma, filed their nomination papers.
Beirut, April 28 : A top Islamic State (IS) operative was killed in a military raid in a town bordering Syria, authorities said on Thursday.

The IS operative, Nayef Shaalan, was killed in an operation in the border town of Arsal, Xinhua news agency quoted the army as saying.

One of Shaalan's bodyguards was killed and another arrested in the operation.

Lebanon has been battling extremists near the border with Syria since August 2014, when the IS and Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front briefly overran the border town.
New York, April 28 : Porn can play a positive role in promoting safer sex by encouraging condom use among men, suggests new research.

Men who view more sexually explicit pornography where condoms were used were less likely to have anal sex without a condom themselves, the findings showed.

The findings, published online in the journal PLOS One, showed no evidence of a public health problem stemming from watching most internet-based sexually explicit media.

"Actually one type of pornography was associated with higher rates of condom use -- men who viewed more pornography containing condom use engaged in fewer condomless anal sex encounters," said one of the researchers Eric Schrimshaw, associate professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in the US.

"Even those who took part in compulsive pornography viewing were not more likely to engage in condomless anal sex," Schrimshaw noted.

However, watching pornography containing condomless anal sex was associated with more condomless anal sex behaviour.

Results were based on an online survey of 265 men who have sex with men and who had viewed sexually explicit media in the past three months.

Participants were recruited via ads on Craigslist and Facebook and asked about the amount, compulsivity, and proportion of condomless anal sex and anal sex with condoms.

Eligible men for the survey were at least 18 years of age and resided within 50 miles of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore or Washington, D.C.

"Our finding that viewing pornography that contains condom use is associated with fewer condomless anal sex encounters suggests that pornography may have a potentially important protective function by encouraging men to use condoms," the authors noted.
London, April 28 : A combination of airstrikes on Islamic State (IS)-controlled oil fields, recapture of held territory and destruction of cash storage sites containing up to $800 million, may have financially weakened the terror group, latest military figures showed.

Britain's defence ministry officials claimed they saw signs that the IS is increasingly resorting to arbitrary fines, extortion and gangsterism to make up a shortfall in income, The Guardian reported on Thursday.

Speaking about the campaign for the first time, Air Vice Marshal Edward Stringer, senior British civil servant in charge of undermining IS finances, said: "What we are now seeing is that they are running short of cash and they are looking for more imaginative ways to do things."

The gangsterism was tarnishing the IS brand, he claimed.

In Baghdad, the deputy US commander for operations and intelligence, Major Genreal Peter E Gersten, said up to $800 million held in IS storage facilities were blown up by coalition airstrikes.

The number of foreign fighters joining the extremists was down by 8 percent, he claimed.

The defence ministry is reluctant to give an estimate of IS's annual income.

However, retrieved spreadsheets showed that its natural resource revenues in the six months to February 2015 amounted to $290 million, about 70 percent of which came from the giant al-Omar oilfield in Deir ez-Zor, previously run by Royal Dutch Shell.

Since then, there were 1,216 strikes on oil infrastructure targets and tankers, reducing production by 25 percent and cutting revenue by 10 percent.

Aside from oil production, IS's tax base is eroding as it cedes territory. Last year, the group lost 14 percent of its land, and a further 8 percent in the past three months. The population under IS control has declined from 9 million to 6 million.

The squeeze has led to pay cuts for foreign fighters. The Pentagon claimed this week that the number of such individuals entering IS territory had plummeted by 90 percent in the past year.
Seoul, April 28 : South Korea on Thursday denounced North Korea's missile launch as a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

Seoul's foreign ministry said it strongly condemns the yet another ballistic missile launch by Pyongyang in defiance of repeated warnings from the international community, Xinhua news agency reported.

The statement called the launch a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions and a provocative act threatening peace and stability in Northeast Asia and the world.

Seoul will push to encourage actions at UN Security Council in close consultations with major countries, while seeking to make the international community put more pressures and sanctions on Pyongyang, the statement said.

The statement urged North Korea to stop further provocations such as another nuclear test that will speed up self-destruction of the regime in so far as the country pursues the advancement in nuclear and missile programmes.

The statement came after Pyongyang launched a Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile on Thursday. If confirmed, it would be the second test-firing of the missile following the launch on April 15.

The Thursday launch appeared to have failed as the projectile was believed to have crashed several seconds after liftoff, Seoul's defence ministry said.

The first test-launch also failed as the missile exploded in mid-air.
Patna, April 28 : If the authorities' advice is taken as an edict, meals will not be cooked and 'havans' for religious rituals not conducted between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. during dry summer months in rural Bihar where most people live under thatched roofs.

The advisory has been issued to minimise the risk of fires, which are common in the plains of Bihar during the hot summer days and annually take a heavy toll both on humans and property.

Should violation of the advisory by any villager result in a blaze, the state disaster management department officials have warned of strict action against concerned officials.

The advisory and warning of strict action have been issued on Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's orders, the disaster management officials said.

There is also a potent threat of legal action under the National Disaster Management Act, 2005, that includes a jail sentence between one and two years and/or fine if violation of the safety guidelines results in conflagration.

More than 65 people, among them women and children, have been burnt alive in blazes in Bihar in the past two weeks.

Over 100 head of cattle also have perished and thousands of houses, belonging to the poorest of the poor, destroyed in these fires.

Annually hundreds of families are rendered homeless and forced to seek shelter under trees or tents made of plastic sheets and rags as the heat wave sweeps the flat lands of the state.

In Gopalganj district, authorities have banned the age-old practice of burning crop residue/stubble in agricultural fields, and decided to rope in 70,000 volunteers for firefighting operations.

Gopalganj District Magistrate Rahul Kumar said: "We have launched an awareness campaign using audio-visual clips and distributing pamphlets. We have urged people not to burn anything during daytime, when westerly winds blow. And also not to perform any religious rituals like 'havan' during the day as flying sparks could lead to fire."

Officials said fire accidents are on the rise as the maximum temperature has gone up to 42 to 44 degrees Celsius in the last 10 days.

Early this week, fearing raging blazes, some residents in over a dozen villages in Bagaha in West Champaran district asked villagers not to use firewood or kerosene stoves for cooking after 9 a.m., a district official said.
New Delhi, April 28 : The Ministry of External Affairs has written to the British High Commission seeking the extradition of liquor baron Vijay Mallya, ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said on Thursday.

The move comes days after the ministry revoked the diplomatic passport of Mallya after he failed to turn up for a probe into a Rs.9,000 crore default of loans from Indian banks.

Mallya is currently in Britain.
New Delhi, April 28 : The talks between the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan were merely a courtesy meeting -- and not an "official dialogue" -- where they discussed certain matters, Minister of State for External Affairs V.K. Singh said on Thursday.

The minister, responding to a question in the Rajya Sabha, said: "I would first of all clarify that there was no official dialogue between our foreign secretary and Pakistan's foreign secretary."

"The Pakistan foreign secretary was here to attend the Heart of Asia Conference and as an etiquette, there were some talks. But it should not be taken as official dialogue," he told the Rajya Sabha.

The minister also said that when Pakistan sent a Joint Investigation Team to India to probe the Pathankot airbase terror attack, it was for the first time that the neighbouring country showed "positive attitude".

"When the Joint Investigation Team came, it was a cooperative attitude from Pakistan for the first time," he said.

Singh, however, added that during the "informal" meeting between Indian Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar and his Pakistani counterpart Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry, India asked about the visit of a National Investigation Agency (NIA) team to Pakistan with regard to the Pathankot probe.

He said it was conveyed to the Pakistani side that "they have to look into our NIA visiting Pakistan. He has to go back and take a formal view and convey to us".

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) member Majid Memon expressed apprehension that Pakistan "may change" the evidence gathered here, and asked if India has a record of the information provided.

"Their JIT and our NIA had a dialogue at the professional level. Our method of enquiry and theirs is almost the same. They were given only the records we have," said Singh.

Congress leader Anand Sharma, meanwhile, asked about the meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in Ufa, Russia, and asked what understanding was reached between them there that prompted Modi to visit Pakistan on Sharif's birthday on December 25 last year.

"At Ufa, centrality of terrorism emanating from Pakistan or areas controlled by Pakistan was stressed... But after the terror attack in Pathankot, there is considerable stress that has been caused," he added.

Jaishankar and Chaudhary met here on Tuesday on the sidelines of the Heart of Asia Conference officials meeting.
New Delhi, April 28 : The defence ministry said on Thursday the primary issue in the AgustaWestland chopper deal is corruption and it will "leave no stone unturned" to bring out the truth.

The statement, the first official comment from the defence ministry on the issue, also said investigation agencies are pursuing all aspects, including the arrests and extradition of "foreign nationals" Carlo Gerosa, Guido Haschke Ralph and Christian Michel James. All three are alleged to be middlemen in the deal.

A day after Congress accused the government of trying to help blacklisted AgustaWestland and asked why it had not acted against the firm, the statement said "questions have been raised on certain trivial technicalities, which appear to be intended to distract attention from the core issue of corruption".

"Publicly available information on the procurement of AgustaWestland helicopters clearly shows that the core issue in the matter is corruption."

"The present government has taken effective action to bring out the truth and will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case. The time taken is largely because some of the key perpetrators of this misdeed are outside the country," it said.

A Italian court has found that AgustaWestland bribed Indian officials to bag the $530 million contract for the supply of 12 AW101 choppers.

The Indian government, however, cancelled the deal in 2013 when a controversy over the deal emerged with the arrest by Italian authorities of Giuseppe Orsi , CEO of Agusta's parent organisation Finmeccanica.
New Delhi, April 28 : Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal asked the Central Information Commission (CIC) on Thursday why it was not making public the educational qualification of Prime Minister Narednra Modi.

In a letter to the CIC, Kejriwal said: "I have no problem if information related to me is made public. But I have come to know that you have refused to put the degrees of Modi in the public domain."

On March 18, the CIC had asked the chief minister if information related to him could be made public.

"The people of this country want to know the truth. Why are you not releasing the documents related to Modi's educational qualifications? This is wrong."

The chief minister asked the central panel to show "courage" and make the documents public.

"I am okay with my information being made available to the public. But show some courage by doing the same for the prime minister."
The Egyptian cabinet announced on Thursday that daylight savings time will return to Egypt starting 7 July until the end of October.

Daylight savings time, which had for years seen clocks put forward one hour in the summer, was canceled last April in a decision by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.

The system was scrapped following a public poll that showed a majority did not support applying daylight savings time in Egypt.

First implemented in the country in 1988, the system was introduced as a power-saving measure prolonging daylight hours.

It was abolished in April 2011 after the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak, with the government arguing at the time that the practice was ineffective at curbing power usage.

The system was temporarily revived in May 2014 in order to ease consumption after the country saw rolling power blackouts.

In the summer of that year, Egypt changed the clock four times, first applying daylight savings time, and then suspending it during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan to shorten the daily dawn-to-dusk fast.

Egypt is normally two hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)  meaning it was three hours ahead when daylight saving time was applied.

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New Delhi, April 28 : Actor-filmmaker Farhan Akhtar, who brought the life of Milkha Singh to the silver screen with "Bhaag Milkha Bhaag", on Thursday extended his support to the legendary Indian athlete, saying he is "completely entitled" to have his opinion.

Farhan also condemned the media for taking Milkha's views on superstar Salman Khan's appointment as India's goodwill ambassador at the Rio Olympics out of context. He said Milkha didn't "say anything against the actor".

When asked about the controversy, Farhan said: "It is genuinely not for me to decide. It is for the Indian member committee to decide who they want to sign as an ambassador. If they feel it's the best decision then I am no one to say anything. But I must say one thing which is I feel that how it (comment) transpired. I feel what Milkha Singh ji said and how it was put out, I think it was very unfortunate".

The "Dil Dhadakne Do" star added: "He didn't say anything against the actor but said that if he had been asked to finalise, he would have opted for a sportsman in that personal space. And I think he was completely entitled to his opinion. He never said what came (out) in press. I think there is certain introspection that media needs to do because it creates unnecessary controversy. Because nobody said anything that mala fides other person".

Salman's appointment has sparked off a debate on whether he should be the goodwill ambassador for India at the Rio Olympics or not. Many sportspersons including Milkha have come forward to criticise the decision, while Bollywood stars Kirron Kher and filmmaker Sooraj Barjatya have backed Salman.

Salman's father Salim Khan has also tried to defend his son's appointment.

Farhan added: "I think he was out on a public forum and he was asked his opinion on how he felt on an actor being ambassador of Olympic contingent and he, as honestly as he has always been, shared his views. He said it was unfortunate and also said that he doesn't have anything against any actor and I cant say whether its a right choice or wrong choice".

The actor was in the national capital with star Anil Kapoor for the announcement of the 17the edition of the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) awards. The four-day cinematic celebration will be held in Spain from June 23.
New Delhi, April 28 : A new drive was rolled out on Thursday in which 100 toilets in schools and anganwadis (rural child health centres) in four Indian states will be made usable in a bid to woo students, especially girls who drop out due to lack of proper toilets.

The initiative has been undertaken by leading global hygiene product maker Kimberley-Clark which has joined hands with Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) India for the project in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra.

The initiative, "Toilets Change Lives", aims to improve sanitation standards in India and also to strengthen Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitious Swachh Bharat Campaign.

According to Achal Agarwal, president Kimberley-Clark, Asia-Pacific region, "Sanitation is inherently linked to the nature of our business and in response to global sanitation crisis, we developed multi-country program 'Toilets Change Lives' to provide access to sanitation" across Latin America, Africa and India.

"In India, since much progress is being made by Swachh Bharat Campaign in building new toilets, we decided to address the lacuna of dysfunctional or unusable toilets," Agarwal told this correspondent.

She said the focus will be on school toilets as it impacts attendance of children and quality of education apart from affecting their families.

With 600 million people having no access to toilets, India's open-defecation problem needs political will, bureaucratic commitment and corporate support. Studies have shown that dysfunctional, unusable or even missing toilets have impacted students and their attendance in schools.

Lack of toilets in schools where millions of children spend most of their time during the day paints a sorry picture of the hygiene standards. Studies show that four out of 10 schools run without usable toilets in India.

India also has the dubious distinction of having highest number of children dying due to diarrhoea. What is worse is that 23 percent of girls drop out from school after attaining puberty.

Studies show that the girl drop-out rate can be brought down to 11 percent by just building clean toilets in schools.

Meenakshi Batra, chief executive of CAF India, told IANS the "maintenance of toilets and generating awareness among students, parents, community representatives and teachers are equally important components which will help in long term sustainability of the programme".

CAF India is a member of CAF Global Alliance with a network spanning 100 countries. Its mission is to promote and support strategic giving for a more equitable and sustainable society She said Kimberley Clark's effort was laudable and such initiatives highlight how socially responsible organisations are willing to go the extra mile to address gaps in the sanitation infrastructure.

Providing clean and efficient toilets in schools across India is a mammoth task considering the sheer numbers involved and "Toilets Change Lives" is just a small step in the direction of turning around the situation.

Under this initiative, simple things like fixing a door latch for privacy, attaching soap dispensers in wash basins or replacing broken commodes to more fundamental interventions like paving the floor to prevent slips and falls, changing the water pipes that bring the water to the basins, removing water clogging, repairing flushing systems or regular cleaning of septic tanks will be undertaken.

The global hygiene product maker took the first step in building toilets in 2014 when it constructed household toilets in Karjat, Maharashtra.

It is also a co-founder and key member of the Toilet Board Coalition, which is working towards building a self-sustaining demand-based sanitation model in Odisha in partnership with sanitation social entrepreneurs E-Kutir and Svadha.

(Kavita Bajeli-Datt is a Delhi-based freelance journalist. She can be contacted at kavita.bajeli@gmail.com)
Mumbai, April 28 : The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) wants to allow peer-to-peer lending, a popular concept in developed countries where the borrower and the credit-seeker are matched on a platform for negotiating unsecured loans.

Peer-to-peer lending is a form of crowd-funding where an online platform matches the lenders with the borrowers for unsecured loans. Both the borrower and the lender can either be an individual or corporate entity. The platform gets a fee for its services from both parties.

"The Reserve Bank of India has today (Thursday) placed on its website the consultation paper on peer-to-peer lending, for seeking comments, views from all interested parties and general public," the central bank said in a statement on Thursday, calling for responses by May 31.

"There are many variants of peer-to-peer lending platforms in terms of the nature and extent of services provided by them. Global regulatory practices also vary. At present, there is no clear regulatory framework in India governing the functioning of the peer-to-peer lending platforms."

The paper outlines the pros and cons of regulating the sector and proposes a suitable framework for regulating this activity, which includes minimum capital, permitted activity, governance requirements, fair practices code for customer dealing and data security.
New Delhi, April 28 : Kuldeep Bishnoi's Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC) on Thursday formally merged with the Congress to fight, its leadership said, against the "communal BJP".

The merger, which took place in the presence of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi, will strengthen the party in Haryana, Congress general secretary Shakeel Ahmed told the media at Parliament House here.

Kuldeep Bishnoi's late father Bhajan Lal, Haryana's former chief minister and one-time strongman of the Congress, floated the Haryana Janhit Congress in 2007 after he broke away from the Congress.

"The Manohar Lal Khattar government's functioning in the state has turned many towards the Congress," Ahmed said.

Speaking on the occasion, HJC leader Kuldeep Bishnoi said his party had merged with the Congress to fight the communal forces in the state.

"We want to eradicate communal forces like the Bharatiya Janata Party from the state," he said.

Former Congress chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda said the merger shows that the Congress was gaining in strength and will return to power in Haryana.
New Delhi, April 28 : India, Iran and Afghanistan held the first round of trilateral consultations on Afghanistan here on Wednesday, a senior government official said on Thursday.

"The first round of director general/joint secretary-level India-Iran-Afghanistan trilateral consultations on Afghanistan was held in New Delhi on April 27," external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said in his weekly media briefing here.

"During the consultations, the Afghan delegation gave a briefing on the status of efforts on peace and reconciliation following which the three delegations discussed various dimensions of the current situation," he said.

According to Swarup, both the Indian and Iranian delegations extended support to the efforts of the Afghan government for peace, stability and prosperity in that country and "to preserve the gains of the past 15 years".

"The delegations also had a fruitful exchange of views on mutual cooperation and strengthening economic and commercial cooperation among the three countries, including by promoting regional connectivity such as through Chabahar port (in Iran)," he said.

"In this regard they also agreed to explore avenues for attracting investments from other countries in the region and beyond."

The spokesperson also said that the Iranian delegation has offered to host the next round of consultations in Tehran.

Both India and Afghanistan are participating in the development of the Chabahar port in Iran as a regional connectivity hub.

India and Iran are also working to make Afghanistan a vital link between central and south Asia.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to make a bilateral visit to Iran in the first half of this year.
New Delhi, April 28 : The Supreme Court on Thursday said students aspiring for admission to under-graduate medical courses will have to appear in the National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) as it declined pleas for exemption by Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

A bench of Justice Anil R. Dave, Justice Shiva Kirti Singh and Justice A.K. Goel gave its nod to two-phase holding of the NEET by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on May 1 and July 24, the declaration of results on August 17 this year, and counselling and admissions later.

The court also made it clear that by its April 11 order, recalling its July 18, 2013 order, the December 21, 2010 notification making NEET mandatory for admission in undergraduate and post graduate courses stood restored.

Stating that "NEET shall be held", the bench in its order said: "We further clarify that notwithstanding any order passed by any court earlier with regard to not holding NEET, this order shall operate. Therefore, no further order is required to be passed at this stage."

Noting the submission by the states and others who were not party to the proceedings that "it would not be proper to hold NEET", the court said: "We do not agree with the a submission for the reason that the said judgment (July 18, 2013) has already been recalled on April 11, 2016 and therefore, the notifications dated December 21, 2010 are in operation as on today."

By its July 18, 2013 order, the apex court in a split verdict of 2-1 had held that NEET was flawed both procedurally and substantially. While then Chief Justice Altamas Kabir and Justice Vikramajit Sen (since both retired) had junked the NEET, Justice Dave disagreed with the majority view.

Appearing for one of the parties seeking to be heard, senior counsel Rajeev Dhavan said: "I can't say that the dissenting judge was pushing his case" and the recall of does not mean that it has been set aside.

The April 11 order was passed by the five judge constitution bench of Justice Dave, Justice Goel, Justice A.K. Sikri, Justice R.K. Agrawal, and Justice R. Banumathi.

The CBSE had divided it into NEET-I and NEET-II, which Additional Solicitor General Pinki Anand informing the court that about 6.5 lakh students would be taking entrance exam in NEET-I and another 2.5 lakh in NEET-II.

"We don't agree with the submission" that it was "not proper to hold NEET", said the bench, declining plea by three states that they have their own statutory regime for holding their separate entrance examinations.

However, the order passed on Thursday today made it clear that not accepting of the plea by Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh would not affect their petitions challenging the 2010 notification of NEET.

Similarly the court rejected the plea by the associations of private medical colleges from Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh that they be allowed to admit students on the basis of exams conducted by them. The CMC Vellore too urged the court it may be allowed to admit students' in undergraduate medical courses on the strength of entrance test conducted by it.

Senior counsel P.P.Rao, L. Nagashwar Rao and Harin Rawal appearing for the Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana respectively, argued that the medical admissions in their states were done on the basis of qualifying or entrance examinations conducted as per their statutory regime.

They told the court that their their regime had the sanction of article 371(d) of the constitution and had received the president's assent, and contended that unless the court hold their statutory regime as void, they could not be asked to follow the NEET route for admission in undergraduate and post graduate medical courses.

Appearing for Tamil Nadu, Nagashwar Rao said that since 2007, the admission in medical course in the state were on the basis of the qualifying marks obtained by the aspirants. He said that if NEET was thrust on them suddenly at this stage, they many not succeed in the competitions at all as all India competition requires a lot of preparation.
Guwahati, April 28 : The Gauhati High Court on Thursday rejected the anticipatory bail plea of Assam Congress leader Pranjit Choudhury, who is missing and reportedly on the run for more than three weeks after being booked for cheating, rape and forcible abortion.

Assam Police had earlier served two notices and conducted searches at Choudhury's residences in Guwahati and Kamalpur to look for him.

A woman filed a police complaint against Choudhury -- one of the general secretaries of the Assam Pradesh Congress Committee -- that he was sexually exploiting her after promising to marry her.

She also alleged that Choudhury had forced her to undergo an abortion before ditching her recently.

Police have registered a case under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code against Choudhury on charges of cheating, rape and forcible abortion.

Choudhury contested the just concluded assembly election from Kamalpur constituency as a Congress candidate.

"The court gave a patient hearing to our appeal and rejected the bail plea of Choudhury. His counsel expressed reservation over the rape charge, saying the woman was aged 23 years and the sexual intimacy was consensual. However, we submitted to the court that it was inducement," public prosecutor B.S. Sinha told IANS on Thursday.

"After hearing both sides, the court rejected Choudhury's bail application," he said.

The issue has snowballed into a major political controversy, with the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party accusing the ruling Congress of protecting Choudhury.

"He was given shelter by leaders of the ruling party and so police have failed to catch him," said Assam BJP leader Prashanta Phukan.
Mumbai, April 28 : Actress Richa Chadha, who will soon be seen in Omung Kumar's biopic "Sarbjit", says real life interests her more than a film.

"Sarbjit" is based on the life of Indian farmer Sarabjit Singh, who strayed into Pakistan, was convicted of terrorism and spying in Pakistan and sentenced to death.

"I am more interested in real life than a film. Therefore, when a film is made from real life incidents that seems to be more exciting for me. I am lucky to have that opportunity to portray a real life character as Sarabjit's wife," she said at the launch of the song "Tung lak" from "Sarbjit" on Thursday.

"Sukhpreet Kaur (Sarabjit's wife) isn't a famous character. Although, I did not have to learn the body language, mannerism for the role as Randeep (Hooda) had to. However, mentally, I had to prepare myself a lot. I take a lot of interest in preparing such kind of roles but as an actor, I would love to portray both, real character or fictional," she added.

Unlike her character Nagma Khatun in "Gangs of Wasseypur", Richa says her character in "Sarbjit" is a subdued wife. "The only similarity is that, in both the films the characters are ageing as the film proceeds. While my role in 'Gangs of Wasseypur' is a fiery, outspoken and a loud woman, here, I am a silent housewife whose husband isn't present at home. She has to take the entire responsibility of her in-laws and her child. Sukhpreet is lively at first and gradually changes when she faces tragedy in her life."

Besides, Richa, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan will be seen essaying the role of Sarabjit's sister Dalbir Kaur in the film and Randeep Hooda as Sarabjit.

The film is set to release on May 20.
Damascus, April 28 : The Syrian army on Thursday denied reports about an air strike on a rebel-held hospital in the country's northern city of Aleppo that left 17 people killed.

Citing a military source, Syrian national TV said the reports were aimed "to help the rebels cover their crimes against the innocent people of Aleppo".

Earlier in the day, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the army shelled a hospital in Al-Sukary neighbourhood of Aleppo, Xinhua news agency reported.

The charity Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) said 17 people, three doctors and 14 patients, were killed in an air strike on its hospital in Aleppo.

MSF sources blamed the Syrian government or Russian war planes for the attack, but there was no official comment.

Meanwhile, Syrian media said the rebels have shelled several residential areas in Aleppo on Thursday, killing 14 people.

The upsurge in violence comes amid reports that the Syrian army, backed by Russian air power, is gearing up for a major offensive in Aleppo.

The escalation has threatened to derail the UN-brokered peace talks, which resumed last month.

On Wednesday, the UN envoy to Syria urged the US and Russia to intervene "at the highest level" to save the talks.

"MSF-supported hospital in Aleppo destroyed, at least 14 patients and staff killed, toll expected to rise," MSF tweeted on Thursday.

It said the hospital was well known locally and had been hit by a direct air strike on Wednesday.

"We condemn the destruction of the Al-Quds hospital, depriving people of essential healthcare," the charity added.

An activist at the scene, Zuhair, said the buildings around the hospital were also hit.

"It was an air strike by two rockets, heavy rockets from [a] Russian air strike," he said.

The civil defence agency, which is staffed by volunteers, said the hospital and surrounding buildings were hit by four consecutive air strikes.

Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said among the killed was the city's last paediatrician Mohammed Wasim Moaz, 36.
Kolkata, April 28 : Campaigning ended on Thursday for the fifth phase of the West Bengal assembly elections involving 53 seats in three districts where balloting will take place on April 30.

With big rallies, road shows, street corner meetings and last minute door-to-door contact with voters, canvassing reached a peak over the past couple of days, before coming to an end at 6 p.m. on Thursday.

Of the constituencies in this phase, 31 are in South 24 Parganas, 18 in Hooghly and 4 in Kolkata South.

Nearly 1.24 crore (1,23,97,832) voters across 14,642 polling stations, including 77 auxiliary booths, are eligible to decide the fate of 349 candidates -- 43 of them female. The Election Commission will use 16,838 EVMs and 1,024 VVPATs.

In this phase, Chunchura in Hooghly district is the largest constituency electorate-wise, and Kultali in South 24 Parganas district the biggest in terms of area. Kulpi constituency in the same district has the least number of electors.

Star campaigners who hit the canvassing trail for this phase included BJP's national president Amit Shah, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, party vice presdient Rahul Gandhi, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and CPI-M state secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra.

Rahul Gandhi and former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya campaigned jointly in favour of the newly formed Congress and Left Front alliance.

All eyes will be on south Kolkata's Bhabanipur, where Mamata Banerjee -- seeking re-election -- is facing a challenge from Left Front-backed Congress nominee Deepa Dasmunshi and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's grandnephew Chandra Kumar Bose of the BJP.

Among other major candidates are ministers Arup Biswas and Manish Gupta -- both from Trinamool -- and CPI-M nominees Rabin Deb and Sujan Chakraborty.

State ministers Firhad Hakim, Subrata Mukherjee, the city's mayor Shovan Chatterjee and Trinamool candidate Iqbal Ahmed, who are accused of taking bribes as shown in the Narada sting operation, are also in the fray.

Another star candidate is Abdur Rezzak Mollah, a prominent minister during the Left Front regime, who is contesting on a Trinamool ticket from Bhangore in South 24 Parganas.

Of the 349 candidates in the fray, 43 are crorepatis while the average assets of the candidates are Rs.70.78 lakh.

In addition, 67 have criminal cases against them and 39 have declared serious criminal offences like murder and rape against their name.
Egypts prosecutor-general is sending a request for information on the cases from UK and US officials

Egypt's top prosecutor Nabil Sadek ordered on Thursday an investigation into the deaths of two Egyptians who died under suspicious circumstances earlier this month in the United States and the UK.

The prosecutor-general ordered investigations into the deaths of Mohamed Mahmoud Rushdie in Indiana, who was found dead in a dumpster, and British-Egyptian Adel Habib, who died earlier this week in a garage blaze in London.

Habibs death is being investigating by British Metropolitan police and is unexplained at this stage in the investigation, according to a statement by the British embassy in Cairo.

Rushdie, who had gone missing on 20 April before his body was discovered, was found bearing signs of torture.

Egypts prosecutor-general ordered his offices International Cooperation Department to prepare a request for information on the cases from UK and US officials.

According to a statement issued by the Egyptian foreign ministry on Thursday evening, the General Egyptian Consulate in Chicago is following Rushdies case.

The consul has met with Indiana investigators to receive the latest updates about the crime.

The foreign ministrys spokesperson said that the ministry summoned the head of the Consular Section at the US embassy in Cairo to stress the importance of uncovering the truth and finding those responsible.

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New Delhi, April 28 : The government on Thursday for the first time publicly commented on its revocation of visa to Germany-based dissident Chinese Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa, saying he "suppressed" facts while applying.

"Look, our visa policy is very clear. If a bonafide applicant obtains visa based on furnishing correct information, and after following due process, there would be no cause for any revocation," external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said in his weekly media briefing here.

"In the specific case of Dolkun Isa, let me clarify the situation since there seems to be a number of misconceptions on this matter," he said.

"Isa applied for a tourist visa under the electronic travel authorisation system. He was accordingly granted a visa."

Swarup said that after obtaining the visa, Isa publicly stated that he was coming to India to attend a conference, "a fact that was suppressed in the visa form, something that a tourist visa does not permit".

Isa was to attend the four-day World Uyghur Congress (WUC) scheduled to start on Thursday in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, but it was cancelled earlier this week.

Many saw India's revocation of the visa as bowing to Chinese pressure.

China also confirmed on Tuesday that it had approached the Indian side through diplomatic channels against Isa's visit to Dharamsala for the World Uyghur Congress that was being organised by the US-based Initiatives for China.

Swarup said it also came to the notice of the Indian authorities that Isa was a subject of an Interpol Red Corner notice.

"It was in that situation that his visa was cancelled," the external affairs ministry spokesman stated.

"I would caution against meanings being read either in the visa being given to Isa or its subsequent cancellation."

The spokesperson said that India was a democratic society "conscious of its responsibilities and those would remain the guiding factors in such matters".

The conference in Dharamsala was supposed to see ethnic and religious communities in China as well as scholars and activists meet and openly discuss and exchange ideas, promote peaceful dialogue, and reinforce bonds between disparate communities.
Kolkata, April 28 : Two people were apprehended and gold worth over Rs.64 lakh seized from them on Thursday from near the Bangladesh border in West Bengal's North 24 Parganas district, the BSF said.

The duo -- Babu Mandal and Biswanath Mondal -- was held by troopers of the BSF's 76 battalion, from near the Bithari border outpost area.

"A special team intercepted a vehicle in which the two were travelling. From their possession, we recovered 12 pieces of gold weighing 2.25 kg and valued at Rs.64.44 lakh," said a Border Security Force spokesperson.

The duo has been handed over to police along with the seized gold.

The BSF said that in another operation, troopers seized 100 kg of ganja on Tuesday from near the Baliasisa border outpost in Nadia district.
New Delhi, April 28 : The Congress on Thursday said the BJP just wanted to "keep the pot boiling" on AgustaWestland chopper deal to deflect public attention from the central government's inaction.

"You (Bharatiya Janata Party) just want to keep the pot boiling to divert public attention," Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi told the media here.

"Repeating it (the issue) will not make it serious in nature," Singhvi added.

He said the Milan court in Italy just made a reference to the names of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and others.

The matter should have been investigated by now, he said, adding that the charge that Congress leaders received kickbacks in the deal was untrue.

Earlier, dismissing the bribery charge in the VVIP chopper deal, Congress leader Sachin Pilot told the media in Kolkata that the BJP-led central government was using the issue to divert public attention from its failures in the last two years.
Kolkata, April 28 : With four of the Trinamool Congress leaders "caught" accepting "illegal money" in the purported Narada sting operation contesting the fifth phase of assembly polls on Saturday, it is seemingly a litmus test for West Bengal's ruling party which has been battling corruption charges levelled by the opposition.

One of the most crucial phases which is to decide the fate of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, the fifth stage has in fray, state ministers and party heavyweights Firhad Hakim, Subrata Mukherjee, city mayor Sovon Chatterjee and Iqbal Ahmed - four of those allegedly seen in the footage.

The sting operation purportedly showed over a dozen Trinamool leaders including MPs, state ministers and former ministers accepting bundles of cash in return for doling out favours to a fictitious company. Released barely weeks before the staggered assembly polls began, it set afire the already charged-up political atmosphere in the state, though all those shown in the video footage have vehemently denied any wrongdoing on their part.

Contesting from Kolkata Port constituency, state urban development minister Hakim was described in the sting as a "tough negotiator, who was not interested in peanuts and took nothing less than Rs.5 lakh".

State Panchayat Minister Mukherjee and Chatterjee - defending Ballygunge and Behala East respectively - are also alleged to have taken Rs. 5 lakh each.

Ahmed, re-contesting from Hogghly's Khanakul and described in the sting as the "go to man" is also alleged to have received Rs. 5 lakh.

Having initially dismissed the sting as "doctored" and a "political conspiracy", the subsequent flip-flops and damaging comments by several leaders including Banerjee has only intensified the opposition attack against the Trinamool with some seeing the changing stands as an indication of acceptance of the allegations.

If party MP Saugata Roy addressing a public meet, admitted of being "saddened and ashamed" over his name getting involved in the scandal, Banerjee publicly claimed she would have given "a thought to changing the candidates" caught in the tapes, had the videotapes been released before the announcement of her party's candidate list for the assembly polls.

Her Wednesday's comments "slap me if I have committed mistakes, I won't mind. But I'm hurt when called a thief", are being seen some as an indication of her nervousness over the issue.

"With each passing day, she is making comments which are damaging and are indicative of her nervousness. The sting issue is expected to play a crucial role in this phase as it involves a fair section of urban voters," said political analyst A.K. Jana.

Incidentally, just a day before 53 constituencies spread across the districts of South 24 Parganas, Kolkata and Hooghly go for the polls, the Calcutta High Court on Friday will hear a public interest litigations seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the matter.

The court has also indicated the tapes may be sent for a forensic test to ascertain their authenticity. Despite calling them as "doctored" and "manufactured" the Trinamool has refrained from agreeing to the opposition's collective demand for scientific examination of the videotapes.
New Delhi, April 28 : Days after the NSCN (Reformation) extended its ceasefire with the Indian government, one of its senior leaders has stressed the urgent need for unity among all NSCN factions for solving the Naga problem.

Stating that once there was a golden era for Nagas when there was just one political group, Imlongnukshi Chang, supervisor of the NSCN (Reformation) Ceasefire Supervisory Board, said: "It was the NNC (Naga National Council). Now with so many groups, if the Nagas want a peaceful solution, they have to get united."

Chang, who was here to hold the ceasefire extension meeting with home ministry officials, said there was a need for the Nagas to understand that there will be no end to the Naga problem until all the factions do away with their ideological differences.

"If Nagas desire to settle for an honourable and acceptable solution based on the political and historical rights of the Nagas, all of us need to come together instead of having individual thoughts," Chang told IANS.

Speaking on the differences among the Nagas, the former NSCN (Khaplang) leader said every Naga should understand there was no space for conflicts, which Khaplang has been wedded to after abrogating the ceasefire.

"India is a great country advocating for peace and non-violence in international platforms. So the question does not arise for us to follow the path of violence," said Chang, who quit the Khaplang group in early 2015 after the latter abrogated the 14-year-old ceasefire with New Delhi.

Chang belongs to NSCN (Reformation), which was the only faction to publicly support the Naga Peace Accord inked between the NSCN (Isak-Muivah) and the central government on August 3, 2015.

No other faction has supported the accord, citing lack of consensus over the peace accord.

The NSCN is now split into four factions, one led by Isak Swu and Thuingleng Muivah, another by S.S. Khaplang, a third by Nokpao Konyak and the fourth by Wangtin Naga.
New Delhi, April 28 : India on Thursday said the recent 90-minute talks with Pakistan was just a "courtesy" meeting between foreign secretaries of the two countries, during which New Delhi insisted that a team of Indian investigators probing the January Pathankot terror attack be allowed to visit that country.

"I would first of all clarify that there was no official dialogue between our foreign secretary and Pakistan's foreign secretary," Minister of State for External Affairs V.K. Singh said in parliament.

He said Pakistan Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry was here to attend a conference on Afghanistan peace and development and "as an etiquette, there were some talks" between him and Indian Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar.

"But, it should not be taken as official dialogue," Singh told the Rajya Sabha.

The minister's reply was surprising because India had described the April 26 talks, which continued for some 90 minutes between Chaudhry and Jaishankar, as a bilateral meeting that was expected to lead to progress towards the start of the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue.

The minister was replying to Congress leader Anand Sharma who asked the government to clarify whether Pakistan had agreed to allow an Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA) team to visit that country for probe into the attack on the Indian Air Force (IAF) base at Pathankot.

India blamed the suicide attack, which left seven people dead, on militants who had crossed over into India from the border with Pakistan. A team of Pakistan investigators was in March allowed to visit Pathankot as part of its probe. This sparked bitter criticism by the Congress-led opposition of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government.

Singh said the issue was raised with Pakistan and "they have to look into our NIA visiting Pakistan".

"So far as we are concerned, (we have) conveyed formally to Pakistan foreign ministry that the terms of reference of the (probe team) visit are broadly agreed to with the proviso that they would be on the basis of reciprocity and followed in accordance with the extant legal provisions."

Singh said that the Pakistan government has "to take a formal view and convey to us".

The issue of visit of Pakistan investigators to Pathankot was also raised in the Lok Sabha with opposition members lamenting that Islamabad did not respond in the right spirit to India's gesture.

Congress member Jyotiraditya Scinda accused the government of going soft on Pakistan.

"The visiting team also comprised an ISI officer," he said, adding diplomacy with Pakistan should not be handled with "emotive yardstick".

"We should negotiate with Pakistan from the position of strength."

But there was no response from the government.

In Pakistan, Chaudhry said his talks with Jaishankar may not have produced a breakthrough. "But we conveyed our concerns (about Kashmir and India's alleged involvement in Balochistan trouble) forthrightly," the Pakistan foreign secretary said in Islamabad on Wednesday.

"Pakistan is ready for dialogue, whenever India agrees to it," Chaudhry said.
Bhubaneswar, April 28 : The India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Thursday sounded a severe heat wave warning in coastal Odisha for the next 3-4 days.

Odisha continued to reel under the scorching sun on Thursday, and the government confirmed the death of nine people due to sunstroke.

It said it has received unconfirmed reports of 119 deaths so far due to heat stroke.

The maximum temperature was recorded above 43 degrees Celsius at 10 places, and above 40 degrees at 18 places.

Sonepur and Talcher recorded a maximum temperature of 45.4 degrees, while the state capital boiled at 45.3 degrees, the IMD said.

Bhubaneswar wore a deserted look throughout the day as people preferred to remain indoors to save themselves from the blistering heat wave.

Bhubaneswar Met department director Sarat Chandra Sahu said coastal Odisha would continue to experience increase in temperature in the coming days.

He also predicted light rainfall in interior parts of the state.

Meanwhile, the special relief commissioner's office said the state government has received reports of 119 deaths due to sunstroke, while it has confirmed only nine.

"Of the total case, 50 have been inquired into and nine deaths have been confirmed due to heat stroke. The rest 69 cases are under inquiry," it said.
New Delhi, April 28 : Power shortage in India during the last financial year was at 2.1 percent, thus recording the lowest level in a single year, parliament was informed on Thursday.

"During 2015-16, the energy shortage was 2.1 percent, which is the lowest ever in a single year," Power Minister Piyush Goyal said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.

The minister also said that India is currently importing power only from Bhutan, which has a surplus from hydroelectric power stations commissioned in that country with India's assistance During the last financial year, about 5 billion units (BU) of energy was imported from Bhutan, Goyal said.

In reply to another question, he said that during the 12th Plan period, a target of 88,537 MW was fixed for capacity addition, that excludes 30,000 MW from renewal energy sources. Against this, cumulative capacity addition of 84,990.7 MW has been achieved as on March 31, 2016.
Shillong, April 28 : The Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA), an insurgent group in the western part of Meghalaya, has been recruiting children forcibly, according to a militant who surrendered on Thursday.

"Many children have been forcibly recruited in the GNLA and were later imparted guerrilla warfare in our training camp at Durama," Krewingbirth S. Sangma told journalists after he surrendered before Meghalaya Police chief Rajiv Mehta.

Sangma, an expert in bomb-making and wanted for kidnappings and ambushes of security forces, came to the Meghalaya Police headquarters along with four others militants.

"There are more than 15 to 20 children in the camp and are being used by Sohan Shira (the 'military wing chief' of the GNLA) to carry out different activities for the outfit," he said.

In the past, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCP) had directed the union and Meghalaya governments to take action to ensure that children are given their rights to life, education and health services.

"It has come to our notice that the GNLA has been recruiting children and more than a hundred of them are at its camps in the jungles in the Garo Hills," the NCPCR said in its communication to the Meghalaya government.

Inspector General of Police (Operations) G.H.P.Raju said children were being recruited, and "brainwashed with money and mobile phones".

"Most of these children, who are mostly school dropouts, are being used as informers by the GNLA on movement of security forces and other activities," Raju told IANS.

Earlier, Sangma along with other four GNLA rebels -- Rakseng Ch. Marak alias Geloram, Jambil Ch. Momin alias Jamindar, Walban R. Marak alias Bawil and Tarzan Ch. Sangma alias Ruby -- surrendered and deposited a huge cache of arms and ammunition.

"This surrender was due to the police's anti-insurgent operations in Garo Hills and also due to the important role played by church leaders. We hope more and more surrenders take place as it is high time peace is given a chance," Mehta told journalists.

The rebels deposited AK-56 rifles, carbines, G-3 rifles, grenades, magazines, and ammunition of various calibre.

The GNLA, which claims to be fighting for a separate 'Garoland' in western Meghalaya, is headed by police officer-turned-rogue Champion R. Sangma, who is lodged in the Shillong jail after being arrested from near the India-Bangladesh border in 2012.
Hyderabad, April 28 : Heat wave claimed 15 more lives in Telangana on Thursday, taking the toll to 137 this season, officials said.

The deaths were reported from various parts of the state during last 24 hours.

Heat wave conditions continued in the state, though there was fall in maximum temperature at few places.

Hanamkonda was the hottest place in the state on Thursday with maximum temperature of 44.1 degrees Celsius, while Nalgonda recorded 43.8 and Bhadrachalam and Ramagundam 43.6 degrees.

The maximum temperature in Hyderabad was 41.9 degrees. In all other towns, it was above 42 degrees.

According to Hyderabad Meteorological Centre, the maximum temperature may rise again after three to four days. The heat wave conditions may continue till the onset of monsoon.

Meanwhile, the officials in disaster management department said the death toll had gone up to 137. Medak accounted for highest number of deaths (34), followed by Mahabubnagar (30) and Nalgonda (26).

Ten people died in Ranga Reddy district, nine in Adilabad, eight in Nizamabad and seven in Khammam district. No deaths have been reported so far from Warangal and Hyderabad.

Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has called a meeting of district collectors in Hyderabad on Friday to review the drought situation. The meeting will also discuss the situation created by the heat wave.

Congress leader Mohammed Ali Shabbir has demanded the government to declare drought emergency in view of the aserious' situation prevailing in the state.
Up to 30 Egyptian migrants were reportedly killed by human traffickers in Libya

Egypt's Prime Minister Sherif Ismail told journalists on Thursday that the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was following closely the murder of up to 30 Egyptian migrants in Libya.

The ministry announced on Wednesday that 12 to 16 Egyptian migrants were killed in a fight with human traffickers in the city of Bani Walid in Libya.

According to Libyan sources, a group of Egyptian migrants had killed a number of human traffickers near Bani Walid over a dispute. The 30 migrants were later arrested at a security checkpoint and were detained in the city.

The Egyptians were reportedly attacked while in detention by associates of the human traffickers.

The number of victims killed is not yet clear, as Libyan, UN and Egyptian officials have given differing estimates ranging from 16 to 30.

In 2015, the Egyptian government issued a warning to Egyptian citizens to avoid travel to Libya after the Islamic State militant group killed 20 Egyptian workers near Derna.

The warning was renewed later that year and remains in effect, as the security situation in the country is still unstable.

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Gandhinagar, April 28 : The Gujarat High Court on Thursday granted permanent bail to three close aides of Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) convenor Hardik Patel in a sedition case.

The court granted bail to Dinesh Bambhania, Chirag Patel and Ketan Patel on the condition of not leaving Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar for the next six months.

A lower court in Ahmedabad had rejected the bail pleas of Dinesh, Chirag and Ketan despite their written assurance to the court that they would not be involved in any sort of activities related to the ongoing pro-quota agitation of Patidars.

Challenging the lower court's order, the pro-quota leaders had filed their bail application before the Gujarat High Court.

On October 21, 2015, the police had arrested Dinesh and Chirag from the Gujarat High Court complex. Later on the same day, the police also nabbed Ketan on similar sedition charges.

The Ahmedabad Crime Branch (ACB) had registered a case against Hardik and his associates under IPC sections 124(A) (sedition), 121 (A) (conspiracy to wage war against the government) and 120 (b) (criminal conspiracy) for their role in the violent stir in which 11 people lost their lives including a police constable.

In another sedition case registered in Surat, a local court there granted bail to Chirag Patel and Vipul Desai on Rs.25,000 bonds.

Advocate of Patel and Desai argued in the court that there were inadequate evidence against Chirag but admitted to the court, as both belong to Surat they would be present before the investigation agencies whenever required in the case.

Meanwhile, jailed PAAS convener Hardik Patel was also presented before a local court in Surat in connection with one of the two sedition cases against him on Thursday.

According to sources, the 22-year-old pro-quota leader was taken to the court complex amid tight security.
Vijayawada, April 28 : Two more legislators of YSR Congress party on Thursday joined ruling Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in Andhra Pradesh even as leader of opposition Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy met the Chief Election Commissioner, seeking disqualification of the defectors.

Dealing a big blow to the lone opposition party, two members joined the TDP, with Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, who is also the TDP president, welcoming them into the party.

K. Sarveswara Rao, a legislator from Araku constituency in Visakhapatnam district, joined the ruling party. Former legislator G. Babji and dozens of other local public representatives of YSRCP also switched loyalties at a programme held in Araku, where Naidu himself was present along with some of his cabinet colleagues from the district.

Earlier in the day, B. Rajasekhar Reddy, a legislator from Srisailam in Kurnool district, joined TDP in Vijayawada.

With this the number of YSRCP legislators who defected to TDP has gone up to 16. Three MLAs have switched loyalties in two days.

YSRCP's strength in 176-member assembly has come down from 67 to 51.

The defection continued even as Jagan continued to camp in Delhi to mobilize support for his 'save democracy' campaign. He met central ministers and leaders of various parties and accused Naidu of buying each legislator for Rs.20 crore to Rs.30 crore. He claimed that Naidu is using ill-gotten money to buy MLAs.

Jagan called on Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi on Thursday, demanding that all the legislators who defected to TDP be disqualified.

The leader of opposition alleged that Speaker Kodela Sivaprasad Rao was not disqualifying the MLAs despite repeated petitions by the party.

Jagan said he would also launch legal battle for disqualification of the MLAs.

TDP leaders on Thursday hit back at Jagan for the allegations that Naidu is involved in many scams. Finance Minister Y. Ramakrishnudu wanted to know why Jagan was silent when his father Y. S. Rajasekhar Reddy engineered defection in opposition parties through his operation 'Akarsh'.

The TDP, which is a partner in BJP-led NDA central government, downplayed the booklet released by him in Delhi about scams allegedly involving TDP chief. In the booklet titled 'Emperor of Corruption', Jagan alleged corruption deals to the tune of Rs.1.34 lakh crore in the two-year rule of Naidu.

Naidu's son N. Lokesh challenged Jagan to prove the allegations, while TDP spokesperson P. Anuradha found fault with Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for giving appointments to Jagan.

"How could you give appointment to a person against him 12 charge sheets have been filed and who spent 16 months in jail," asked Anuradha.
New Delhi : Milan (Italy), 28 April (IANS/AKI) Police arrested four people in northern Italy on Thursday on charges of seeking to join the IS including one who received orders to stage attacks in Italy, authorities said.

Investigators named the man as 27-year-old Abderrahim Moutaharrik, a 27-year-old Italian boxer of Moroccan origins, who lived in the province of Lecco, near Milan, and said targets included the Italian capital.

Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli said investigators intercepted a communication from within IS territory ordering attacks in Italy "with particular attention to the city of Rome" and the Catholic Jubilee of Mercy Holy Year currently under way at the Vatican.

"Rome was seen by IS as a symbolic place for Christian pilgrimage," Romanelli said.

Moutaharrik was also planning to target the Israeli embassy in Rome and was allegedly in contact with an Albanian in Italy to obtain weapons for the attack, according to wiretapped phone conversations, investigators said.

He was arrested with his wife, 26-year-old Salma Bencharki, and the couple planned to take their children, aged 2 and 4, to IS territory, according to investigators.

Also arrested on international terrorism charges were 24-year-old Wafa Koraichi, who was detained in the northern town of Baveno, and Abderrrahmane Khachia, a 23-year-old Moroccan detained in Brunello near the northern city of Varese.

Prosecutors also issued arrest warrants for an Italian-Moroccan couple who left Italy to join IS last year with their three small children. They were named as Mohammed Koraichi and his Italian wife, Alice Brignoli, who converted to Islam.

Wafa is Mohammed Koraichi's sister, police said.

Mohammed Koraichi had incited Moutaharrik to carry out attacks, according to prosecutors. The suspects communicated on WhatsApp and often sent pre-recorded audio clips to one another on the messaging service, Romanelli said.

The arrested suspects "had very bad intentions and were "urged to consider the possibility of carrying out attacks or violent acts also in Italy," Interior Minister Angelino Alfano told the Canale5 TV channel.

"They had contacts in Syria," Alfano later told Italy's SkyNews24.
Al-asharah (Syria), April 28 : IS militants executed an allegedly homosexual man in eastern Syria by pushing him off a hospital roof, a monitoring group reported on Thursday.

The unnamed man was hurled to his death from the roof of a hospital in the town of al-Ashara in Syria's eastern Deir Ezzor province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

The man, who came from the city of al-Mayadin, was accused by IS of being a 'sodomite', reported the Britain-based watchdog, which receives its information from activists and doctors inside Syria.

In Deir Ezzor and other territory under its control, IS metes out savage 'Islamic' punishments including hurling alleged homosexuals off buildings to their deaths, beheading alleged spies and mutilating alleged thieves.
BKV Advertising Agency Designs New Website for Original Pet Fencing Brand BKV carefully curated creative assets to tell the Invisible Fence story, showcasing the brands commitment to pets wellbeing and instilling confidence in their owners.

After winning the business in January 2015, Atlanta-based advertising agency BKV was tasked with inventing a new web experience for industry-leading pet fencing brand Invisible Fence. Recognized for more than 40 years as the original creators of electronic pet fencing, Invisible Fence Brand sought the expertise of direct and digital advertising agency BKV to design a new site that would not only communicate their promise to change the way people live with their pets, but also provide a user-friendly interface with intuitive navigation.

Over the 10-month project timeframe, BKV designed an entirely new website which featured simplified navigation, as well as expansive, emotionally driven photography, and warm, wag-worthy copy. The process started with a discovery phase, in which the agency provided extensive audits and recommendations in the areas of content strategy, user experience (UX), search engine optimization (SEO) and brand voice, as well as functional and technological requirements.

We held to a redesign mantra, reflects Todd Chambers, Vice President and Creative Director at BKV. Reduce. Resolve. Remind. Relax. This helped to keep all the stakeholders aligned, accountable and unified  and made sure that every element of the site stayed true to our vision.

BKV carefully curated creative assets to tell the Invisible Fence story, showcasing the brands commitment to pets wellbeing and instilling confidence in their owners.

The new website also offers an easy search function for customers to find their nearest dealer.

Were thrilled with the direction and execution of our new site, says Jeromy Welch, Digital Marketing Specialist for Invisible Fence Brand. Only days after the site went live, were already seeing an increase in conversions.

The agency debuted the new site design internally at the annual Invisible Fence Brand dealers convention in Orlando, Florida in December 2015. The website officially launched on March 1, 2016.

About BKV

BKV is an Atlanta-based full-service direct and digital advertising agency that specializes in using data-driven strategies that make brands work harder. BKVs client portfolio includes local, national and global brands. The agency provides digital and traditional media services, as well as creative, web development, email marketing, CRM, SEO, social media, digital PR, direct mail, DRTV, database management, analytics and data modeling. For more information, visit http://www.bkv.com.

About Invisible Fence Brand

Invisible Fence Brand is the original electronic pet containment system and offers a comprehensive family of containment, avoidance, and access products to keep pets out of harm's way and prevent unwanted behaviors throughout both the home and yard. Owned by Radio Systems Corporation in Knoxville, Tennessee, Invisible Fence Brand solutions are sold nationwide by professional, authorized dealers who provide Perfect Start Pet training and custom installation that have safely contained over 3 million pets. Invisible Fence has taken pet care beyond the home and started the Project Breathe program, which has donated more than 10,000 pet oxygen masks to fire departments and first responders. For more information on Invisible Fence or to find a local dealer, visit http://www.invisiblefence.com.
Prescription Hope is extending an invitation to those affected by a health insurance co-operative bankruptcy to receive their prescription medications through Americas fastest-growing pharmacy program. Through Prescription Hopes proprietary process, individuals can receive over 1,500 FDA-approved prescription medications from over 180 American pharmaceutical companies for $35 per month, per medication, without the traditional barriers of insurance.

The bankruptcy of health insurance co-ops is the most recent example of difficulties Americans face when trying to access their prescription medications, said Douglas K. Pierce, President and Chief Executive Officer of Prescription Hope. We work to bridge the gap that insurance can often leave behind, connecting Americans with the medications they need at a price they can afford.

In 2016, over 800,000 individuals lost access to affordable health insurance when over half of Americas insurance co-ops went bankrupt. The largest bankruptcy was Health Republic Insurance of New York, forcing over 150,000 individuals to seek new health insurance. Other major co-operatives to go bankrupt include CoOpportunity Health serving Iowa and Nebraska, Louisiana Health Cooperative, and Nevada Health CO-OP. As a result, many were forced into other insurance programs or discount cards, which may increase out-of-pocket costs for routine prescription medications.

Research from the Centers for Disease Control shows once Americans lose access to their prescription medications, they begin taking risks with their health, ultimately driving up the cost of their care. Although one in five people rely on three or more monthly prescription medications, those who cannot afford all of their medicines may be skipping dosages, splitting medicines, or sharing them with others.

Nobody should be forced into deciding between paying their bills and affording their prescription medications, said Pierce. Through our program, individuals do not: our program allows individuals to control their costs by fixing prescription medication costs at $35 per month, per medication.

As opposed to discount drug cards or mail-order pharmacy programs, each medication received through Prescription Hope costs only $35 per month. More importantly, Prescription Hope works alongside any coverage an individual may have. There is no limit to the number of prescribed medications an individual can receive through Prescription Hope.

When an individual joins Prescription Hope, the highly-skilled team begins working on their behalf to obtain each of their prescription medications for the set monthly cost of $35 per month, per medication. Prescription Hope works hand-in-hand with Americas major pharmaceutical manufacturers and their pharmacy to secure prescriptions, track medication shipments, manage refills on time, maintain up-to-date records, and renew prescription medications every year. Individuals and families earning less than $100,000 per year often qualify for Prescription Hope.

With over a decade of experience, our dedicated team has served thousands of people across the country, saving them millions off the retail costs of their medications, Pierce said. I personally welcome those 800,000 individuals who lost their health insurance access to experience a new level of hope for their personal care through Prescription Hope.

For more information about Prescription Hope, or to apply to receive prescription medications for $35 per month, per medication, visit http://www.prescriptionhope.com or call 1-877-296-HOPE (4673).

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About Prescription Hope: Prescription Hope, Inc. is the nations fastest growing pharmacy program, serving thousands of Americans with access to over 1,500 FDA-approved prescription medications for $35 per month, per medication. Prescription Hope is not a mail order pharmacy or discount drug card. Instead, Prescription Hope obtains prescription medications for those who cannot afford them. There are no other costs, fees, or charges associated with the medication or our services. For more information, please visit http://www.prescriptionhope.com.
Egypts FM said that Turkish officials should 'look to their own political position' after his Turkish counterpart said that Egypt was fragile under Sisis rule

The Egyptian foreign ministry has slammed recent comments by Turkeys FM about Egypt being fragile under President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi's leadership, saying that such statements reflect the psychological state of Turkish officials since Egypts 30 June revolution of 2013.

Egypt's foreign ministry spokesperson Ahmed Abu Zeid told MENA that Turkish officials should look after their political positions in their own country, whose relations with the rest of the world are suffering from "isolation" and "hollow slogans."

Turkish FM Mevlut Cavusoglu said during a visit to Abu Dhabi on Wednesday that the Arab world, Africa and Palestine needed Egypt to be a strong force in the region, and that the county is in a very fragile state under President El-Sisi's administration.

Relations between Egypt and Turkey have been tense since the ouster of Egypt's Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, an ally of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in July 2013.

The Turkish president has repeatedly called for Morsi's release from detention.

Morsi is currently standing trial in four separate cases.

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As the GOP primary season draws to a close Trump voters are on the edge of their seats. The question is whether or not Trump will reach the 1237 delegates before the convention.

Write In Trump for Prez has launched a campaign to help influence those unbound delegates. The campaign seeks 1,000,000 Trump voters to pledge a write in vote for Trump in November if the GOP steals the nomination from him.

According to John Czerw, founder of the campaign, "It is our belief that since Trump has the most votes and delegates by a wide margin he should be the nominee. If the Republican party does otherwise it will be committing suicide. The current goal of Write In Trump For Prez is to avoid such a fiasco. Failing that we will be there with resources for a write in campaign since the Republican Party will have turned their back on us."

The Write In Trump For Prez campaign will communicate results of the campaign with the GOP establishment to hold them accountable.

For more information and the PLEDGE visit http://www.writeintrumpforprez.com
Get to know m. e. The Metro-East. I live here. I love it. Because where better to strike up a conversation with someone than on a bench? We need to learn to put down the phones and have more conversations

The Get to know m.e.- The Metro-East. I live here. I love it. campaign is an initiative that began in June of last year to bring the Metro-East community together. The Metro-East includes the eastern suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. This area has grown substantially due to greater job opportunities, so the mission of the campaign is to provide a platform for this ever growing community to get to know their neighbors.

The campaign staple is a uniquely designed, bright blue, steel bench that is imprinted with the campaign slogan, Get to know m.e.- The Metro-East. I live here. I love it., these benches were manufactured by, UltraSite a PlayCore company, which is actually located within the Metro-East in Red Bud, IL. This was a great partnership, not only did it cut out shipping expenses, but it further demonstrated the theme of getting to know your neighbors.

Because where better to strike up a conversation with someone than on a bench? We need to learn to put down the phones and have more conversations  Carol Bartle, Get to know m.e., Project Manager

This campaign was a huge success in 2015 raising $16,000 dollars in scholarships given to local students and donating a total of 40 benches throughout the community. The team is kicking this year off strong with 10 benches in the works and hopes of gaining more bench sponsorships as the year progresses. The campaign also has very high expectations in beating their scholarship funds given last year!

The Get to know m. e. campaign just announced they will be hosting a contest at the Art on the Square Festival in May where they will be giving away one of these benches. The bench will then be donated in the winners name to the location of their choice. Make sure to visit the campaign booth at the art festival for your chance to win!

About UltraSite

UltraSite a PlayCore company, has been manufacturing high-quality commercial grade outdoor recreation products including a variety of Site Furnishings, Park Amenities, Picnic Tables, Park Benches, and Outdoor Fitness Equipment for over 15 years. Learn more at http://www.ultra-site.com.

About PlayCore

PlayCore helps build stronger communities around the world by advancing play through research, education, and partnerships. The company infuses this learning into its complete family of brands. PlayCore combines best in class planning and education programs with the most comprehensive array of recreation products available to create play solutions that match the unique needs of the each community they serve. Learn more at http://www.playcore.com
"Cloudamize is clearly in the right place at the right time.

Cloudamize, a leader in cloud infrastructure analytics and cost optimization, today announced that it has raised $1 million in additional funding led by MissionOG with participation from existing investors including DreamIt Ventures. The investment will be used to expand sales and marketing efforts as well as accelerate product development. In addition, the company plans to make a number of strategic hires to continue scaling growth.

With the close of this round of funding, Jonathan Palmer, a seasoned fintech executive and director of Heartland Payment Systems, will join the companys board of directors. Jons impressive career includes 22 years at Fidelity Bank in Philadelphia, where he rose to the level of Vice Chairman, and 15 years in entrepreneurial pursuits as CEO and investor in young companies such as Lucid Security, Wellspring Resources, Vital Processing Services and FSV Payment Systems. "I am very excited to join the board of Cloudamize, said Palmer. As someone who has been a part of much of the evolution of the IT industry, for me the promise and potential of the cloud cannot be overstated. Cloud computing has reached the tipping point for mainstream adoption even in security sensitive industries such as financial services where I have dedicated much of my career. Cloudamize is clearly in the right place at the right time.

Cloudamize is the industrys most comprehensive infrastructure analytics platform supporting the entire journey to the cloud. Cloudamize supports all three major public clouds: AWS, Azure and the Google Cloud Platform, and helps customers assess, plan and manage their cloud deployments for maximum value. With Cloudamize, customers have experienced on average a 48% reduction in cost while accelerating migration planning time by 65%. The Cloudamize platform is employed by many of the top system integrators and managed services providers in the industry.

This round of financing comes amid a number of recent moves by the company including the announcement of a partnership with Google and the appointment of software industry veteran Bob Moul as CEO. I am very pleased to have the strong support of our existing institutional investors in this round as well as the addition of several influential executives including Jon Palmer, said Moul. The financial backing and deep board experience gives us the ability to fully focus on the immediate opportunities in front of us and lays the groundwork to continue to rapidly scale the company.

About CloudamIze

Proudly located in Philadelphia, Cloudamize is an analytics software company that helps companies get the most out of their investments in cloud computing. Our SaaS-based analytics platform helps our customers and partners make confident, data-driven decisions at each stage of the cloud journey  from assessing options, to planning migrations, to managing cloud deployments for maximum value. With Cloudamize, companies have experienced significant monthly savings on their cloud deployments, while simultaneously increasing performance. To maximize the value of your cloud, please visit: http://www.cloudamize.com
As a company built entirely to help small businesses thrive in the digital age, were proud to celebrate National Small Business Week 2016 by offering a fun contest that is very relevant to a diversity of businesses nationwide.

Automational, a new sales and marketing technology platform that is 100 percent tailored for small business, today announced details for its inaugural Small Business Week Contest, named Small Business  Smart Marketing.

From May 2-5, 2016, small businesses from across the United States can enter the contest by simply by submitting an online entry with two to three sentences on how marketing technology could enable the growth of their business. On May 6, three businesses will be randomly selected, each winning a free six month Automational subscription, a one-hour marketing consultation with the Automational marketing team, and four custom designed email templates.

As a company built entirely to help small businesses thrive in the digital age, were proud to celebrate National Small Business Week 2016 by offering a fun contest that is very relevant to a diversity of businesses nationwide, said Automational VP of Marketing, Nate Kristy. We look forward to paying tribute to the businesses at the backbone of our economy this year, and for many Small Business Weeks to come.

Complete contest rules and regulations, and full details on the entry process and prizes are below and also available at http://www.automational.com/small-business-smart-marketing-contest/. Companies can also join in on discussions of importance to small business during National Small Business Week by following @automational on Twitter and using the #SmallBizSmartMktg hashtag.

Automational National Small Business Week Contest 2016

Who: The contest is open only to legal residents of the fifty (50) United States (including the District of Columbia), and to those residents eighteen (18) years of age or older as of the entry date. Winners must own an operational business with 2-50 employees and a functional website.

What: Small Business  Smart Marketing, Automationals inaugural National Small Business Week contest

When: Entry Dates: May 2-5, 2016

Winners Drawn & Notified: May 6, 2016

How to Register: Contestants must complete the online entry form at, http://www.automational.com/small-business-smart-marketing-contest/. Entries must include name, company name, phone number, email address and a short explanation of how marketing technology could enable their businesss growth. All participating contestants submitting an entry agree to the contest rules outlined within this page. To qualify to win, a participant must provide all requested information accurately. In the event that the online entry does not contain all necessary and accurate information, the participant will be disqualified from the contest. One entry per email address. Duplicate email entries and automated entries will be removed from consideration.

Rules & Regulations: Official rules and regulations available here: http://www.automational.com/small-business-smart-marketing-contest/

Contact: Jennifer Blackburn; Jennifer(at)arpr(dot)co

About Automational

Automational is a sales and marketing technology that is 100% tailored for small business, empowering small business owners and employees to unleash their potential as a smart marketer. Leveraging the power of ClickDimensions enterprise-grade technology within a platform designed specifically for SMBs, Automational helps automate sales processes and marketing campaigns that strategically engage existing customers, qualify prospects, organize data and nurture leads, ultimately driving more sales with greater efficiency.

With Automational, small business owners and employees can continue to do what they do best  run their businesses  while finding comfort in knowing that no sales opportunities are falling through the cracks or passing them by. To learn more, visit Automational.com and follow @Automational on Twitter.
The McFarland Animal Shelter experiences temperature swings from freezing cold in the winter to up to 112F in the summer. The shelter consists of 24 kennels surrounded by a chain link fence and has concrete slabs which serve as flooring. It is located in a small, rural, low-income area where the adoption rate is very low. The staff must rely on non-profit rescue groups to find good adoptive homes for these animals. Big Fogg Misting Systems installs professional grade, high quality misters so the shelter would receive quality equipment and have less repairs and fewer replacements than with other misting system vendors. Big Fogg was also contracted by the Pasadena Humane Society to install misters at its facility.

Mr. Watkins used GOFUNDME.COM to raise the $9,900 necessary to install the Big Fogg professional grade misters to keep the canines comfortable during the summer months. Hundreds of donors pledged funds to ensure the animals would be kept cool and thus far theyve raised $10,075 total!

The shelter is ran by two animal control officers, Alvie Baker and Denise Raymond, who also have a passion for animals! They work closely with non-profit rescue groups from Southern California to Canada. These groups ensure that the pets are relocated to good homes that will provide for the needs of the animals and take good care of them. Once a rescue group has agreed to take an animal, funds for transportation are then raised by a non-profit group, No Paws Left Behind, which is led by a McFarland Animal shelter volunteer, Teresa Walker.

Last week alone a citizen found nine, abandoned, two-week old puppies. Since the shelter is not set-up to accommodate small animals, one of the officers transported the puppies, immediately, to a rescue group in Southern California. Last year, the McFarland Animal Shelter which has limited funding, was able to relocate over 500 animals to rescue groups due to the officers dedication  both on and off duty  along with assistance from non-profit rescue groups, volunteers, and donors  such as Scott Watkins!

Scott Watkins is a Realtor from Washington who loves dogs and has a heart for ensuring that dogs who are brought to animal shelters are taken care of and adopted back into society. In fact, his Keller Williams Real Estate team is named Dog-Gone Good Real Estate and his business helps to fund his canine philanthropic endeavors. Scott currently donates to dog rescue groups in Washington, a shelter in Oregon, 3 RIVERS HUMANE SOCIETY, and three animal shelters in California: McFarland, Wasco, and Delano.

He formed a close relationship with the McFarland Animal Shelter when he adopted a dog from it named Charlie Cigar.

According to Watkins, Charlie Cigar arrived at the shelter dirty, full of ticks and fleas, undernourished, and extremely ill. The shelter used to be a 100% kill shelter due to lack of funding, thus Charlie Cigar was on the list to be put down the following day. Three female volunteers saw that he was something special and they used their own personal funds to house, clean, feed, and re-vitalize Charlie Cigar.

Mr. Watkins found Charlie Cigar through their websites and adopted him, and now they have a very special bond. Scott continued to nurse Charlie Cigar back to health and reunited him with the three women who saved his life including a local 5th grade elementary school teacher, Eve Henderson, by bringing him to her class and surprising her and her students! The surprise visit was captured in a poignant and emotional video which is posted on YouTube.

Scott Watkins strongly believes in the principle  Dont shop, Adopt! He lives out this principle by caring for  what he calls  his children. He owns four pets  three dogs who were saved from shelters and one cat.

The McFarland Animal Shelter is now a 99% SAVE shelter  thanks to donors, non- profits, and volunteers, but still lacks the funding to adopt out the animals directly from their own location. They do not have the staffing to accept families at the shelter, but hope to someday!

This Thursday, March 24th and Friday, March 25th, 2016 are the expected install dates for the Big Fogg misters at the McFarland Animal Shelter  just in time for the coming hot summer months!

About McFarland Animal Shelter

McFarlands animal shelter is located in a rural, low-income area. It staffs two animal control officers and does not process adoptions at its location but allows non-profit rescue groups to help get its animal adopted out.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/McFarland-Animal-Shelter-209972619070791

About Big Fogg Misting Systems

Bigg Fogg Misting Systems enjoys being able to help animals and pets remain cool and comfortable during the hot summer months, so contact them if your local shelter needs a professional grade misting system installed!

For more information about Big Fogg Misting Systems and its equipment or to schedule a consult, contact:

Christopher Miehl, CEO & President

Phone#: 888-853-1728

BigFogg.com

OFFICES IN TEMECULA, CA & AUSTIN, TX

Address: 42095 Zevo Drive Unit A-2 Temecula, CA 92590

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Bigfoggsystems

URL: http://www.bigfogg.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Big-Fogg-Inc-109434241813/

SOURCE: TruNorth Marketing & Consulting
Tutors International Parents usually want the broadest, most inspiring education for their children.

In March, Hackney Council expressed its concern [1] that as many as 1000 boys from orthodox Jewish families were attending illegal faith schools in the borough. The Department of Education is now working alongside OFSTED in investigating these unregistered institutions, which teach a narrow, religious curriculum to attending pupils, with as little as 2 hours per week of secular education. This echoes similar concerns, earlier this year, of home-educated children being exposed to religious extremism [2]. At the time, education minister Nicky Morgan proposed regulation reforms in order to protect children flying under the radar of authorities.

Adam Caller, independent education consultant and founder of Tutors International, issued a statement this week [3], voicing his continued support for better visibility of all forms of schooling  whether its homeschooling or faith schools set up to allow pupils to follow an independent curriculum.

There is little difference between a (legally) unregistered home schooled pupil and one of the 1000-or-so boys at an illegal London faith school. Both can follow any curriculum their parents desire; both can be educated in unsuitable buildings; both are under the radar of their local council, and therefore, the general wellbeing of those children is less visible.

Mr Caller pointed out that while many parents who choose to educate their children at home do so to cherry-pick subjects and themes from a range of curricula, clients of Tutors International unfailingly are broad-minded when it comes to their childrens education. He comments, While the parents who come to us for private tuition could be particular about following a severely non-secular program, or vice-versa, and avoid any religious education at all, what weve found is that, actually, parents usually want the broadest, most inspiring education for their children.

Mr Caller also warns that measuring the point at which non-traditional education models become illegal could be potentially problematic:

"Home education in the UK is legal and highly flexible, which is why there has been such a boom in families choosing to educate their own children at home, the majority with great success. However, if a family  or group of families  decide to educate multiple siblings together, would that then make it an unregistered school and, therefore, automatically illegal? The definitions are currently very blurry, and would need careful thought before any new regulations were put in place. I believe that all education should be registered, for the safety and wellbeing of students, but these details need to be addressed before moving forward."

For more information about the tutoring and education services offered by Tutors International, visit tutors-international.com. For more information about Adam Caller, visit http://www.adamcaller.com.

END

References

[1] Officials hunting 1,000 London boys in illegal schools http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35928801 Chris Cook. BBC News. March 2016

[2] Nicky Morgan orders review on home schooling amid fears of children having minds poisoned by radicalised parents http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/nicky-morgan-orders-review-on-home-schooling-amid-fears-children-having-minds-poisoned-by-a6779886.html Tom McTague. The Independent. December 2015.

[3] Are children 'lost' in lack of regulated schooling? http://adamcaller.com/2016/04/are-children-lost-in-lack-of-regulated-schooling/, adamcaller.com. 25 April

About Tutors International

Tutors International is a worldwide organization providing experienced private tutors to work with children of all ages and nationalities. Tutors are available for full-time tutoring positions, for major support and tutoring outside school hours, or for home-schooling. Tutors International provide a bespoke service to find the right tutor that suits the child's needs and aspirations, and if a live-in tutor is required, it is essential that the assigned tutor is the right match for the family and fits in the environment.

Tutors International was founded by Adam Caller who has tutored students of all ages. He has received specialist training in dyslexia and Attention Deficit Disorder and is very sensitive to children's educational difficulties. He has now turned this expertise to recruiting, training and placing other tutors to help families.
In many parts of the world, contamination from human waste is a major cause of death and principal determinant of childhood mortality. This is particularly true in underdeveloped parts of Africa where clean sources of food and water are scarce.

A lecture at the University of New Englands campus in Tangier, Morocco, will examine this global health issue and consider how it compares to other major challenges facing the world today. The lecture, titled Health and Sanitation in Africa, will be delivered by Colby College Professor of History James L.A. Webb Jr.

Presented by the University of New England Tangier Forum for Global Studies, the lecture will take place in the auditorium at UNEs campus in Tangier, on Thursday, April 28 at 7 PM local time (2 PM EST). The event will include a public reception in the academic lounge immediately following the lecture.

Webb teaches courses in world history, ecological history and global health history at Colby College. In the fall of 2015, he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and is now holding the Sanofi Chair in Public Health at the Centre Virchow-Villerme at the Universite de Paris (Descartes).

In addition, Webb is the founding editor of the Ohio University Press series Perspectives on Global Health. He has published several books on global health, including Humanitys Burden: A Global History of Malaria (Cambridge, 2009) and The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa (Cambridge, 2014). He is currently working on a book titled The Guts of the Matter: Intestinal Diseases, Biomedicine and Global Public Health.

In addition to engaging a multicultural audience of thinkers at UNEs campus in Tangier, this lecture will be livestreamed to students and faculty at UNEs two Maine campuses and to viewers around the world.

About the Tangier Forum for Global Studies

Capitalizing on the millennial legacy of Tangier as a border city open to new ideas, the University of New England Tangier Forum for Global Studies is designed to encourage discussion and critical examination of the burning issues facing the global community in the 21st century. American, Moroccan, and scholars from around the world give lectures and conduct seminars to shed light on histories and cultures that are critical to our knowledge. All events are open to the public and streamed live around the globe. The forums motto is New Ideas for a Better Planet.

About the University of New England

The University of New England (UNE) is the largest private university in Maine, USA. It offers dozens of undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs and is home to Maines only medical and dental schools. With coastal campuses in Portland and Biddeford, Maine, and Tangier, Morocco, UNE attracts internationally recognized scholars in the sciences, health, medicine and the humanities. It belongs to a select group of academic institutions with a comprehensive health education mission including programs in medicine, pharmacy, dental medicine, nursing and an array of allied health professions.
PDF Reducer logo Prior conversion of image-formats to the PDF-format before compression is no longer needed. A real productivity booster!

ORPALIS is pleased to announce the release of a new major-version of the popular PDF compression software, the PDF Reducer. New features and highly improved performances of the engine are now available.

New features and improved functionalities of PDF Reducer version 3



Speed performance of the size-reducing engine

ORPALISs constant R&D work always results in innovations. In the case of PDF Reducer v.3, one of these innovations can be seen in the dramatically increased speed of the size-reducing engine. PDF Reducer version 3 is now 100% faster than PDF Reducer 2.0.

Quality of the output documents

Documents are not only being downsized to a minimum size twice as fast but the output documents now have an even better reading quality.

The number of supported file-formats in input mode

The Professional Edition of PDF Reducer version 3 (PDF Reducer Pro, Desktop and Server) now allows nearly 100 file formats in input mode. Among them: raster images formats such as TIFF, JPEG, PNG, JPEG 2000 and RAW camera formats. Prior conversion of image-formats to the PDF-format before compression is no longer needed. A real productivity booster!

The automatic color detection feature

The automatic color detection feature has been enhanced in terms of both accuracy and speed.

Automatic color detection allows users to scan batches of any kind of documents (black/white, greyscale or colored) under the color-scan mode. It automatically detects the original color-type of each document (black/white, greyscale or coloured) thus allowing re-encoding it under its best fitted bits-per-pixel (bpp) encoding. This provides the best quality for the smallest possible file size.

A new archiving-oriented feature

An important part of ORPALISs product-developing culture is to always listen to its users requests. So starting with PDF Reducer v.3, the compressed (output) PDF files now retain the date of the original input file. This is an important requirement for document-archiving purposes.

Minor bugs have been corrected.

A new, dedicated Website

With the release of PDF Reducer version 3, a new website has been launched.

ORPALIS PDF Reducer is used by millions of people worldwide at work, at school and at home. Users can now find everything needed (like information on all features, free download, FAQ, sales details and contact, version history, support) regarding the innovative ORPALIS PDF Reducer, in a single point: its dedicated website, located at http://pdfreducer.orpalis.com/.

The French version of the website will be available before the end of the year.

About ORPALIS

ORPALIS is specialized in automating large-scale document-based processes, providing document imaging and document-management toolkits as well as software tools for the general public. ORPALIS is creator, developer and owner of the comprehensive document imaging toolkit series released under the brand "GdPicture", now a worldwide known and respected leader in the imaging technologies industry. More than 12,000 developers based in over 70 countries have included GdPicture components in their applications. In 2011 ORPALIS releases PaperScan, marking the beginning of a new line of products meant for end-users. PDF Reducer is launched in 2013. In 2015 a most powerful universal HTML5 viewer and document management kit called DocuVieware is made available to the public. The same year, a software tool for converting scanned documents to the searchable PDF/OCR format, the ORPALIS PDF OCR, is launched.

http://www.orpalis.com / http://www.gdpicture.com / http://www.docuvieware.com

Contact information

http://pdfreducer.orpalis.com/contact/
Purple Deck Media Adopts the N-Mark We are pleased to have Purple Deck Media join the Forum and contribute their innovation, creativity and drive to the NFC ecosystem.

NFC (Near Field Communication) is on its way to changing digital engagement forever. With its short-range wireless technology, it allows consumers around the world to make transactions, exchange digital content, and connect electronic devices simply and effortlessly with a touch. Purple Deck Media is enthused to announce that they have joined the NFC Forum. Recently, the company has adopted the N-Mark to further improve the recognition and acceptance of NFCs wireless interaction between consumer technology, mobile devices, personal computers, and NFC compatible tags. Purple Deck Media is unlike any other business with their use of NFC. They are a software company that is now managing NFC through the cloud. This allows them to easily work with, and change, their NFC tags. An automatic flow of analytical data is also collected and recorded with the reach of both the NFC tag and batch tags.

NFC technology complements todays contactless technologies. In a world of interactivity, the power of Purple Deck Media augments all marketing verticals and tools to achieve solutions in areas such as: data assembly and exchange, access control, health care, loyalty and coupons, transportation, payments, consumer knowledge, and so much more. NFC devices are able to operate in three modes: tag reader/writer, peer-to-peer, and card emulation. These modes allow consumers to bridge the virtual with the physical world, connect devices through physical proximity, and connect their devices to a common infrastructure.

The N-Mark was developed by the NFC Forum as a global symbol for NFC technology. It allows consumers to easily identify where their NFC-enabled devices can be used. The N-Mark can be used by anyone as long as the tag or device meets the applicable NFC Forum technical specifications, as described on the N-Mark Trademark License Agreement. By following each procedure, regulation, and recommendation stated throughout the agreement, one can maintain the integrity of the N-Mark. This will help reinforce consumer recognition and guarantee that the N-Mark increases value and acknowledgment among brands.

The NFC Forum is a non-profit industry association whose membership draws from all parts of the NFC ecosystem. Working within the framework of the NFC Forum, member organizations share development, application, and marketing expertise to develop the best possible solutions for advancing the use of Near Field Communication, enhancing the lives of consumers worldwide and advancing members business objectives. Currently, the Forums 140+ member companies are working to develop new specifications for a modular NFC device architecture, and procedures for interoperable data exchange and self-regulating device service distribution, device detection, and device capability.

Following the announcement of Purple Deck Medias membership into the NFC Forum, Executive Director of the NFC Forum Paula Hunter stated that, We are pleased to have Purple Deck Media join the Forum and contribute their innovation, creativity and drive to the NFC ecosystem . We know they will be a good addition to the NFC Forum and Im looking forward to spending time with the Purple Deck Media team at our upcoming members meeting this June in Dallas.

Purple Deck Media COO Nathan Neil also stated that, We are honored as a company to take the next step in our NFC journey. We are very excited and privileged to have the opportunity to help educate consumers as to the benefits of NFC and awareness of the N-Mark.
TruShield Security Solutions, Inc., a global cyber security company providing continuous security monitoring solutions, has announced a new annual scholarship. The TruShield Cybersecurity Scholarship is designed to recognize Northern Virginia high-school and college student who have an interest in, are studying and are pursuing a future in the cybersecurity industry.

We are delighted to announce this scholarship, which reflects the importance of cybersecurity education, says Adley Francois, co-founder of TruShield.

There are two essay-writing contests, one for college-level students and another for high-school students, which are both based on cybersecurity and allow the students to put a creative spin on each topic.

Three winners will be chosen from each group, with first-prize being $500 to go towards college tuition and expenses. Second-prize is a Kindle Fire HD, and third prize is a $50 Amazon gift card. All winning essays will also be posted on TruShields website.

All students who attend a public, private, or charter school or who are home schooled in the counties of Loudoun, Prince William, Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria City are eligible for consideration. The completed application and essay must be received by TruShield no later than May 15, 2016. While there is no separate application required for the scholarship, applicants should highlight their current STEM activities in a brief bio about themselves.

For more information, please contact Carmorra Witchard at 703-584-4376, email essays(at)trushieldinc(dot)com, or visit http://www.trushieldinc.com/college-scholarship.

About TruShield: TruShield Security Solutions, Inc. (http://www.trushieldinc.com) is a global provider of concierge cyber security solutions. Founded in 2008 by a group of cyber security experts with backgrounds in Finance, the Federal Government, E-Commerce, Healthcare and Legal industries, TruShields mission is to enable organizations fo all sizes to access advanced threat detection and mitigation capabilities at costs within their reach. TruShield offers a comprehensive suite of Managed Security Solutions and Professional Services aimed at solving complex cyber security problems with practical solutions that are proven to work in the real world, at organizations across a variety of industries, and any size. TruShields program-oriented approach utilizes the most current threat intelligence to prevent, detect, contain and eradicate threats on our clients networks 24 hours a day.
The United Nations special envoy on Syria, Staffan de Mistura, will visit Moscow next week and plans to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, RIA news agency quoted a Russian foreign ministry source as saying on Thursday.

The agency said de Mistura would discuss prospects for the resumption of peace talks in Geneva on Syria.

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Professional Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) is now accepting applications for Creative Computing, a new program designed for all educators to introduce computation in the classroom in an engaging and playful way. The program will run from August 8-11 at Harvard University.

This institute explores innovative approaches to computing education and is designed for all educators interested in designing classroom learning experiences that support using computation as an expressive medium. Participants will individually and collaboratively develop strategies that can be used to support young learners as computational creatorsencouraging student learning through designing, personalizing, connecting, and reflecting.

Many young people interact with computers as consumersplaying games or watching videosrather than as designers. Computation is an incredibly powerful medium for personal expression, creative thinking, and problem solving. With an increased necessity for students to be literate in computing, teachers and schools play a critical role in promoting the development of computational literacy inside and outside the subject of computer science.

To explore how educators can help students learn how to code, the Creative Computing institute will use Scratchan authoring environment that engages learners in computer programming through the creation of animations, games, art, and more. Launched in 2007, Scratch is used by millions of people (mostly ages 8 through 18) around the world, and more than 14 million projects have been created and shared through the Scratch online community.

Creative Computing is chaired by Karen Brennan, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Many of Brennan's research and teaching activities focus on constructionist approaches to designing learning environments. Before joining HGSE, Brennan completed her Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where she was a member of the team that developed the Scratch programming environment.

Creative Computing, offered through Professional Education at HGSE from August 8-11, is open to educators with or without prior computer science or coding experience. The program is open to both Individuals and teams.

To learn more, please visit http://www.gse.harvard.edu/ppe/cc. For further information, you may contact ppe(at)gse(dot)harvard(dot)edu or call 800-545-1849.
These festive dishes were a big hit last year with Tony Romas fans, so were excited to bring them back to the menu as a tribute to one of the greatest worldwide celebrations  Cinco de Mayo.

Romacorp, Inc., parent company of Tony Romas, is cooking up a fiesta for Cinco de Mayo and bringing back two fan favorites  Tony Romas Original Baby Back Ribs smothered in Tequila BBQ Sauce and the zesty Nacho Burger. Adding a south-of-the-border flare to two of Tony Romas classic menu items, the Tequila BBQ Baby Back Ribs and Nacho Burger are available at participating U.S. locations from May 1  5.

These festive dishes were a big hit last year with Tony Romas fans, so were excited to bring them back to the menu as a tribute to one of the greatest worldwide celebrations  Cinco de Mayo, said Jim Rogers, Chief Marketing Officer for Romacorp, Inc. So grab your amigos and follow your cravings for great times and the worlds best ribs at Tony Romas Cinco de Mayo party.

Tony Romas world famous Baby Back Ribs are the star of the party, lathered with a special BBQ sauce infused with tequila, created by Tony Romas Chef Bob Gallagher just for this special occasion. The baby back ribs are served with a side of French fries and coleslaw. The Nacho Burger comes to life with a fiesta of flavors from the zesty salsa, tortilla strips, cheddar cheese, jalapenos, and avocado. Both fan favorites add a flavorful twist to the Tony Romas experience.

Go all out this Cinco de Mayo and top off your mouthwatering entree with Tony Romas signature and refreshing Classic Romarita made with Sauza Gold tequila, said Chef Bob Gallagher, Senior Vice President of Culinary for Romacorp, Inc. One sip and you just might feel like youre in sunny Mexico  its the perfect way to celebrate any occasion with friends and family.

About Romacorp, Inc.

Romacorp, Inc. is the parent company of Tony Romas restaurants, the worlds largest casual dining concept specializing in ribs. Headquartered in Orlando, Florida, Romacorp, Inc. has more than 150 restaurant locations in more than 30 countries and is one of the most globally recognizable names in the industry. The first Tony Romas restaurant opened more than 40 years ago in North Miami, Florida. For more information about Romacorp, Inc. and Tony Romas, visit http://www.tonyromas.com.
Cabinet Secretary Hon Fred Matiangi This will be the main education and ICT summit held under the patronage of the ministry in 2016.

AfricanBrains is proud to announce the 6th Innovation Africa Summit and is delighted to confirm official patronage from the Government of Kenya. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has enthusiastically endorsed the summit to take place from 20th to 22nd September 2016 at the Safari Park Hotel, Nairobi, Kenya.

In his patronage letter addressed to John Glassey, MD of AfricanBrains, Cabinet Secretary Hon Fred Matiangi stated, "This will be the main education and ICT summit held under the patronage of the ministry in 2016."

He added, "We are delighted that Africa's number one high-level forum for education, ICT and innovation will be taking place in Kenya this year. On behalf of the Government we will be working closely with AfricanBrains to ensure an event of the quality that is the continent's largest annual gathering of ministers for education, higher education, ICT and science & technology.

Hon Fred Matiangi continued, "The summit is of great importance to the Government of Kenya. Innovation Africa's unique status comes from its meetings-based format allowing for productive face-to-face engagement between government, civil society and industry partners. The summit has Cabinet approval and as well as our own high level involvement from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology we will also be actively encouraging strong participation from the Ministry of ICT, Teachers Services Commission (Kenya), the leading universities and the many Kenyan technical colleges."

AfricanBrains is working closely with Cabinet Secretary, Hon Fred Matiangi to maximize the ministerial attendance at Innovation Africa 2016 and deliver high-level, pre-scheduled meetings to participating partners and delegates. In 2016, participants will have the choice of booking meetings in advance of the event with ministers of basic & higher education, ICT, science & technology together with special government agencies for education, universities and technical colleges.

For more information on Innovation Africa 2016 please visit:

http://www.innovation-africa.com/2016

To register your interest in attending either as a delegate or as a sponsor please visit:

http://www.innovation-africa.com/2016/register

To view video highlights from previous summits please visit:

http://www.innovation-africa.com/2016/videos

#ENDS
The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) ASAPS is excited to partner with Anzu and several leading hospitals to create this unique residency collaboration network, stated Daniel C. Mills, MD, President, American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), a world leader in Aesthetic Surgery Education and Anzu, developers of the AnzuMedical Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration Platform, today announced a joint initiative to create a Nationwide Plastic Surgery Collaborative Residency Network. The platform is scheduled to launch in July 2016 and will be a combined effort between ASAPS, Anzu, and multiple premier plastic surgery resident programs at leading hospitals.

ASAPS is currently utilizing a customized version of the AnzuMedical Knowledge Sharing & Collaboration Platform called RADAR (Readily Available Digital Aesthetic Resource) as an educational tool available to its members. The platform accesses knowledge and provides a host of collaboration capabilities, all designed to improve patient outcomes through information access and sharing between physicians.

ASAPS is excited to partner with Anzu and several leading hospitals to create this unique residency collaboration network, stated Daniel C. Mills, MD, President, American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. The primary mission of our organization is to educate our members. Early on, we recognized that technology must play an integral part in the learning process. The goal of this particular project is to leverage technology to the fullest extent possible and build a network of residency programs that can share their unique arsenals of knowledge with each other for maximum benefit. Its a unique concept in terms of its mass-collaborative nature that we know will provide a much richer learning experience for all residents in training.

We look forward to working with ASAPS and Anzu to launch this powerful educational resource to our plastic surgery residents, said Jeffrey M. Kenkel MD, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Plastic Surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. I have seen many knowledge sharing tools and resources over the years. This combines the best functionality of those with insightful and useful features not available anywhere else.

Anzus goal is to revolutionize residency training and education by enabling collaborative knowledge sharing between institutions and residents, regardless of whether they come from small or large programs, said Barry Fernando, MD, CEO of Anzu. Most institutions and residency programs exist and operate in siloed environments. We are providing a daily use product for residents that will change how they learn, and ideally lead to better clinical decision making and ultimately better patient outcomes.

Key Features: ASAPS Nationwide Residency Education & Collaboration Network:



An independent Content Management System (CMS) for each residency program.

A networking system for all participating programs which will allow collaborative exchange of information between institutions.

An HTML-based webpage builder for residents to generate/share multi-media notes for study.

A virtual Journal Club - a technological version of an established institutional product.

Powerful search engine with specialty specific tagging and filters even search inside videos.

Multi-platform cloud based access.

Ability to bookmark specific points inside of videos (including YouTube or Vimeo).

Access to Compendiums which are expert-generated folders of information on techniques, problem management etc.

In addition, the residency programs will have full access to ASAPS comprehensive world class multi-media library of aesthetic surgery.

Additional AnzuMedical Features

 Role-based Access

 Community Publishing

 Community Knowledge Sharing

 Video Streaming

 Discussion Boards

 Mobile Responsive Web

 Desktop Responsive Web

 Social Networking

About ASAPS

The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), is recognized as the worlds leading organization devoted entirely to aesthetic plastic surgery and cosmetic medicine of the face and body. ASAPS is comprised of over 2,600 Plastic Surgeons; active members are certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery (USA) or by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and have extensive training in the complete spectrum of surgical and non-surgical aesthetic procedures. International active members are certified by equivalent boards of their respective countries. All members worldwide adhere to a strict Code of Ethics and must meet stringent membership requirements.

About Anzu

Anzu was established in 2010 to create a knowledge exchange platform for healthcare organizations and medical community members including physicians, educators, residents in training and medical industry. The AnzuMedicalTM platform provides a myriad of innovative product features and a Case Based Learning SystemTM that can be used for both education and training purposes, and industry advertising. For more information about AnzuMedicalTM, email: Info(at)anzumedical(dot)com or visit http://www.anzumedical.com.

###

Anzu is a registered trademark.

Media Contact

TopSpin Communications

Joe Waldygo

P: 480-363-8774

E: joe(at)topspinpr(dot)com

American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS)

Leigh Hope Fountain

Director of Public Relations

P: 562.799.2356

F: 212.921.0011

E: leigh(at)surgery(dot)org
Once again, MWH has contributed at the highest sponsorship level for the 2nd annual Women in Construction, Engineering and Related Services (WICERS) Conference held in Atlanta, Georgia. As an award level sponsor, MWH is promoting the conference goals of supporting women in construction and engineering.

Goals for WICERS include helping women explore, expand and enhance their professional experiences and networks, increase technical knowledge, discover industry trends and innovations, and accelerate their career path.

WICERS 2016 will emphasize the importance and value of relationships, resources and partnerships for women who work in construction, engineering and related services. The Honorable Kasim Reed, Mayor of the City of Atlanta, will be the keynote speaker at this years awards luncheon event.

Its rare when you have an opportunity to attend a conference with presentations of this quality, great networking opportunities and the ability to have fun at the same time, said Becky Hachenburg, vice-president at MWH. At MWH, we believe in the goals and purpose of WICERS and we are proud to support this important event.

As validation of the success of MWH in serving the Great City of Atlanta, the company is proud to have achieved a 42% participation of S/M/WBE over the life of the consent order program. This translates to more than $100 million in qualitative economic value generated. Additionally, through Mayor Reeds leadership, our partnership has resulted in over $13 billion in both direct and indirect economic development moving forward.

MWH support of the WICERS Conference aligns with the companys global gender diversity initiative. MWH is committed to actively encouraging diversity through its people and activities. Our clients win when we embrace diversity and inclusivity as we develop far greater ideas to solving problems, said Hachenburg.

MWH Global is dedicated to Building a Better World. As specialists in water and natural resources, MWH employees use innovative ideas and technology to help solve complex infrastructure and environmental challenges. This work is built on a nearly 200-year history during which MWH has delivered services from initial planning and design through construction, start-up and operations. Today, MWH employs approximately 7,000 experts including engineers, consultants and construction professionals. For more information, visit mwhglobal.com.
Applegate Insulation says millions will be invested into the 65,000 square foot cellulose insulation manufacturing facility, located near Phoenix. "This is our second new facility in a year, and thats a big deal in this industry."  Applegate CEO, Terry Applegate.

Applegate Insulation, the world's largest family-owned manufacturer of cellulose insulation products, announced today it will be opening a new production facility in Casa Grande, Arizona in June of 2016.

The plant will operate as Applegate of Arizona, LLC, opening the doors of the Southwestern U.S. market to the Webberville, Michigan based manufacturer of eco-friendly insulation and erosion control products.

"The Southwest has been an underserved market for years," says Applegate Insulation National Sales Manager, Richard Applegate. He continued, The people here know us, they know our products and theyve been asking us how they can get Applegate Cellulose Insulation in Arizona, California and New Mexico. With this plant, in a couple of months they can.

Applegate Insulation says millions will be invested into the 65,000 square foot facility, located near Phoenix. Applegate is exactly the kind of business we like to see moving into our community, says Timothy Kanavel, Program Manager for Pinal County, Arizona. They are making a significant investment returning to service a building that has spent the last 5 years unoccupied, putting local contractors to work during the renovation and are donating a private road to the county that will allow other nearby businesses an additional point of access, added Kanavel.

Applegates new Casa Grande facility will manufacture cellulose insulation made from recycled fibers and generate up to 30 full-time jobs at full production. Across all cellulose insulation operations, Applegate is expected to recycle more than 2 million tons of fiber each month, which would otherwise go to landfills.

With customers in more than 20 countries, U.S. based Applegate has seven facilities strategically located across the U.S. and recently opened its first manufacturing facility in Canada.

Applegate attributes its continued growth to the hard-working Gators, a nickname for Applegate employees, and the superior performance of its products. The manufacturer says its products are typically lower in dust, cleaner and plug less frequently than its competitors products. This helps the insulation contractor work more efficiently and with fewer interruptions, while dramatically improving the customer experience.

"This is our second new facility in a year, and thats a big deal in this industry," says Applegate CEO, Terry Applegate. Without the continuous efforts of our product development folks, the support provided by our incredible sales team, and the can-do attitude of our production staff, we wouldnt be here today.

Applegate is will be filling several positions in operations and customer service at the new facility and encourages interested parties to call 1-800-627-7536 for additional information.

About Applegate Insulation:

Established in 1978, Aaron and his son Terry Applegate began producing insulation out of a small facility in Okemos, Michigan. Today, Applegate (headquartered in Webberville, Michigan), is the largest family owned cellulose insulation producer in the world, and supplies a variety of high-performance recycled insulation products throughout the United States.

In addition to its cellulose insulation products, Applegate manufactures a suite of eco-friendly products including: Cotton Armor, a thermal/acoustic insulation blanket, board and wrap product for the construction and OEM markets, Paper Shavings, a cellulose bedding product designed for horses and all other animals, MastaSorb, cotton and cellulose-based industrial absorbents, and a full line of cellulose mulches, wood mulches and tackifiers to the international landscaping, hydroseeding and erosion control community.

Applegate currently operates facilities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Georgia, Louisiana, Colorado and Ontario. For additional information regarding Applegate Insulation please visit http://www.applegateinsulation.com or call 800-627-7536.

About Pinal County:

Pinal County, formed in February 1875, comprises 5,376 square miles and is home to over 410,000 residents. Located in the very heart of the Sun Corridor, Pinal County has a very diverse economy with copper mining and tourism to the east, and manufacturing, distribution and agriculture in the western lower valley desert area. The central to western area of the county is home to hundreds of family, corporate and university based farms supporting various types of agricultural products while Manufacturing and major distribution firms are centered along Pinal Countys main traffic corridors of Interstate 10, Interstate 8 and US Route 60.
"Wig Outlet will allow our clients to discover the best of both worldsthe thrill of a great deal and the confidence in finding high quality product, in style, and right at your fingertips!"

Wigs.com is excited to launch WigOutlet.com, the premier destination for top wig brands at up to 70% off. Powered by The Wig Experts at Wigs.com, clients can shop with the security of knowing that they are buying quality items from a trusted and reputable company.

With Wig Outlet, clients can discover products from top brands like Raquel Welch, Jon Renau, Ellen Wille, Sherri Shepherd, Luxhair and Christie Brinkley at greatly discounted prices. From manufacturer surplus and overstock items to discontinued, open box and close out products, you can shop with the confidence of knowing that your purchase is backed by the Wig Outlet guarantee.

This means that all open box items are put through a rigorous quality control process to ensure the integrity of the product. Items are inspected to meet the highest standard of quality assurance, meaning that all items are free of imperfections, wear and tear, alterations and fragrance. Items are then restyled, repackaged and washed as needed.

We are so excited to launch WigOutlet.com! said Carliz Sotelo Teague, CEO & Founder of Beauty & Hair. We wanted to provide a high quality clearinghouse for all Wigs.com merchandise. Adding new inventory every day, you will find great styles that have been discontinued, or clearance items at amazing discounts. Our licensed professionals inspect each wig to ensure they are the same quality our clients have come to expect, with the added benefit of exceptional deals!
2016 Sales Performance Management Guide The footprint of SPM is broadening from just compensating sales reps to driving a more holistic approach and helps enterprises improve the organization, direction, and motivation of sales teams

OpenSymmetry, a trusted leader and global advisor that provides consulting services for Incentive Compensation Management and Sales Performance Management for HR, Sales, and Finance, would like to announce the release of the 2016 SPM Vendor Guide, as well as the sponsorship of many SPM conferences starting the second week of May.

The 2016 SPM Vendor Guide is an informative resource that provides organizations an introduction to the leading suppliers of the Sales Performance Management (SPM) systems and solutions.

The goal of the vendor guide is to help organizations evaluate all options available as it relates to SPM technology selection. The footprint of SPM is broadening from just compensating sales reps to driving a more holistic approach and helps enterprises improve the organization, direction, and motivation of sales teams. Our goal is to provide business leaders the resources and solutions they need to improve team morale so sustained improvements in growth and profitability is achievable, said Mark Ryberg, Senior Director Strategy Services at OpenSymmetry.

For over 11 years weve supplied organizations with the tools and best practices required to evaluate which vendor fits best to solve organizational challenges. Mark adds. It is great to see the amount of value this guide and our Strategy Services team brings to organizations who are trying to really dive deep into their current state capability and what actions can be applied to move them to a thriving future state.

To download the full resource, click here.

The release of the 2016 SPM Vendor Guide comes at a busy time for OpenSymmetry as they prepare for various SPM vendor conference across the entire month of May. Join OpenSymmetry at any of the upcoming SPM conferences to learn how your organizations can accelerate performance across multiple domains with the right planning, deploying, and management strategy.

Stop by at OpenSymmetrys booth during CallidusCloud C3 Connections - May 9-11 in Las Vegas, NV, IBM Vision  May 9-12 in Orlando, FL, Anaplan Hub  May 10-12 in San Francisco, CA, eReward Compensation Showcase  May 12 in London, England, and Xactly CompCloud - May 18-20 in San Francisco.

About OpenSymmetry

OpenSymmetry is a trusted leader and global advisor that delivers Sales, HR and Finance solutions to drive accelerated business performance. With a leading success rate across more than 20 industries worldwide, you can count on OpenSymmetry to deliver the comprehensive solutions you need for a proven path to rapid results. From customized, proven solutions to seamless implementation, testing, training and managed services, OpenSymmetry has the proven track record and expertise you can count on to move you quickly from Strategy-to-Success.

Founded in 2004, OpenSymmetry is headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in London, Chennai and Pune. Clients range from SMB to Fortune 500 companies across various industries. For more information, please visit http://www.opensymmetry.com.
QuickSTAT has seen a marked growth in clinical trial shipments to and from Latin American countries. To accommodate this growth, QuickSTAT has been making significant investments to enhance logistics capabilities in the region.

As part of an ongoing global expansion plan, QuickSTAT has made significant investments in recruiting top industry experts, and expanding its LATAM network and logistics capabilities. Enhancements have been made to its IT Platform, which provides industry-leading tools for clients to manage their clinical trial projects.

The expansion will provide unmatched clinical trial logistics services for the pharmaceutical and biotech companies conducting clinical trials in the region.

Since 2008, Latin America has been one of the fastest growing pharmaceutical markets in the world, driven by generic drugs manufactured by local companies and biosimilars manufactured both by multinational and local pharmaceutical companies.

QuickSTAT has seen a marked growth in clinical trial and clinical trial supply shipments shipments to and from Latin American countries. To accommodate this growth, QuickSTAT has been making significant investments to enhance logistics capabilities in the region. Highlights include:



Highly Experienced Clinical Trial Logistics Team in LATAM--Top industry specialists have been added to the global QuickSTAT team, each with over 20 years of experience developing clinical trial logistics solutions in LATAM for investigators, CROs, Pharmaceutical and Biotech companies. These specialists have designed customized supply chain solutions for all phases of research and drug development.

Additional Regional Offices --QuickSTAT has opened two additional operational and customer support offices dedicated to serve the region in Buenos Aires, Argentina and in Miami, Florida. Specially trained customer service and operations teams, fluent in the local language, provide 24/7 transportation and logistics services, as well as in-transit storage for patient-clinical specimens, API, vaccines and investigational drugs, utilizing GDP principles and best practices.

Regional Regulatory Support --Regulatory requirements continue to be one of the main challenges for the transport of pharmaceuticals throughout the region. To help clients navigate through this ever-changing and complex regulatory environment, QuickSTAT provides brokerage services, as well as regulatory support for import and export of biologics, samples, kits, drugs, medical devices and supplies related to clinical trials to and from LATAM, US, Europe and throughout the world.

Close Relationship with Local Regulatory Agencies--Strong relationships have been developed and maintained with the principal regulatory agencies such as Anvisa, ANMAT, Cofepris, Digemid, and Unimed, which allows QuickSTAT to provide up-to-the-minute information to their clients on regulatory changes in the region.

Enhancements to Technology Platform and Online Client Tools--Upgrades have been made to QuickOnlineRX, an advanced IT tool designed specifically for clinical trials, to help clients manage their clinical supply chain. Due to its robust capabilities and ease of use, 85% of clients utilize QuickOnlineRX to monitor supply chain activity, obtain real-time shipment information and check temperature integrity throughout transit.

Our investment in an increased global footprint in Latin America, the recruitment of top industry specialists, along with our market-leading IT platform demonstrates our commitment to the Life Science community in the region. We are very excited about the enhanced solutions and tools we can provide  says Dominique Brown, COO, QuickSTAT.

About QuickSTAT

For over 35 years, QuickSTAT has managed multinational biopharmaceutical clinical trial logistics for all phases of research and drug development, for all temperature ranges and life science products. QuickSTAT specializes in time and temperature shipping of clinical research samples, biologics, investigational drugs, clinical trial supplies, vaccines and dangerous goods, helping to bring important new drugs and medical protocols to market faster.
It is extremely toxic to aquatic animals," said Alexandra Scranton, Director of Science and Research at Women's Voices for the Earth. "Which makes it all the more unnerving when we know that this chemical is ending up in our Great Lakes.

National womens health organization, Womens Voices for the Earth (WVE), and Michigan Clean Water Action, released a detailed review of the hazards posed by the chemical, Galaxolide, a synthetic musk commonly found in scented household cleaning products, that has also been found in the Great Lakes. The analysis identifies Galaxolide as a threat to the environment and human health.

To determine its hazard level, WVE commissioned a GreenScreen for Safer Chemicals assessment of Galaxolide. GreenScreen is an internationally recognized tool for comparing and assessing the hazards of chemicals in order to identify those of high concern and evaluate safer alternatives.

Galaxolide was assigned a score of Benchmark 1  a grade appointed to chemicals of highest concern whose use should be avoided. Specifically, Galaxolide received Benchmark 1 status due to its highly persistent, bioaccumulative and aquatic toxicity properties. [1]

This means that Galaxolide doesnt break down easily in the environment, it lingers and builds up in the bodies of animals and people, said Alexandra Scranton, Director of Science and Research at Womens Voices for the Earth. It is extremely toxic to aquatic animals. Which makes it all the more unnerving when we know that this chemical is ending up in our Great Lakes.

One study found Galaxolide in 81% of water samples from Great Lakes tributaries that run through urban areas, while another on Lake Michigan detected Galaxolide in 92% of water samples, even detecting airborne concentrations of the chemical in the air above the lake. [2][3] A study on Lake Erie and Lake Ontario found that accumulating levels of Galaxolide in the lake sediment are doubling every eight to sixteen years. [4]

Supporting a diverse and delicate ecosystem for over 35,000 species of plants and animals, including nearly 180 species of fish, the Great Lakes is one of the most significant ecosystems on Earth, said Nic Clark, State Director of Michigan Clean Water Action. This basin makes up over twenty percent of the worlds surface freshwater  nearly 40 million people rely on the lakes for drinking water. We cannot ignore the risk the pollutant, Galaxolide, is having on this invaluable resource.

Along with environmental concern, Galaxolide raises red flags for human health risks, said Scranton of WVE. It may interfere with hormones and other chemical signals in the body which can result in developmental, reproductive, metabolic, brain, and behavior problems.

Emerging science also indicates that Galaxolide may break down the bodys natural defenses against other toxic chemical exposure.[5] This new science is concerning as several studies have shown that Galaxolide exposure is ubiquitous in humans. One study found Galaxolide in the blood plasma of 91% of the study participants. Those participants that used scented lotions and perfumes had significantly higher levels of Galaxolide than those that did not.[6] Another study focused on new mothers detected Galaxolide present in 97% of breast milk samples.[7]

These are alarming numbers and only confirm how persistent and widespread this chemical is in our everyday environment, said Scranton.

Even low dose exposures to hormone disrupting chemicals can be harmful to human health, said Kathleen Schuler, co-director of the Healthy Legacy Coalition and Healthy Kids & Families Program Director at Conservation Minnesota. Household products we use every day shouldnt contain chemicals that disrupt hormones or lead to lasting environmental harm, and we strongly encourage any company using this chemical to voluntarily phase out Galaxolide.

Galaxolide pollution is not going to go away, instead it will only get worse over time if companies continue to use it," said WVE's Executive Director, Erin Switalski. "There is a clear opportunity for manufacturers using this fragrance chemical to stem the tide of chemical pollution in the Great Lakes by eliminating synthetic musks like Galaxolide from their products.

[1] Green Screen for Safer Chemicals (26 April 2016). "GreenScreen Assessment of Galaxolide" http://www.womensvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1222-05-5-HHCB-aka-Galaxolide-GS-546-v-1-2-Certified-April-2015-3.pdf. GreenScreen Assessment of Galaxolide. Retrieved 26 April 2016.

[2] Baldwin AK, Corsi SR, DeCicco LA, Lenaker PL, Lutz MA, Sullivan DJ and Richards KD. (2016) Organic contaminants in Great Lakes tributaries: Prevalence and potential aquatic toxicity. Science of the Total Environment. 554-555, 42-52. 2016.

[3] Peck AM and Hornbuckle KC. (2004) Synthetic Musk Fragrances in Lake Michigan. Environmental Science and Technology. Vol. 38, No.2, pp. 367-372. 2004.

[4] Peck AM, Linebaugh EK, Hornbuckle KC. (2006) Synthetic musk fragrances in Lake Erie and Lake Ontario sediment cores. Environmental Science and Technology. Vol.40, No. 18, pp:5629-35. September 15 2006.

[5] Luckenbach, T. et.al. (2005) Nitromusk and polycyclic musk compounds as long-term inhibitors of cellular xenobiotic defense systems mediated by multidrug transporters. Environmental Health Perspectives. Vol 113. Number 1. January 2005.

[6] Hutter H. et.al. (2009) Synthetic musks in blood of healthy young adults: Relationship to cosmetics use. Science of the Total Environment. Vol. 47, pp: 4821-4825. 2009.

[7] Reiner JL, Wong CM, Arcaro KF and Kannan K. (2007) Synthetic Musk Fragrances in Human Milk from the United States. Environmental Science and Technology. Vol. 41, No. 11, pp: 3815-3820. 2007.
The Iraqi authorities have shut down the Al-Jazeera channel's Baghdad office, accusing Qatar's state-funded TV network of inciting violence and sectarianism.

Iraq's Communications and Media Commission (CMC) sent the Al-Jazeera Media Network a letter informing it of a March 24 decision to withdraw the bureau's licence and close its office for one year.

The letter cited "your continuing violations and offences and persistent media discourse instigating violence and sectarianism."

In a statement issued Wednesday, the Doha-based news network, one of the largest in the region, said that it had not violated regulations or deviated from professional and objective coverage.

Al-Jazeera has repeatedly come under fire from the Iraqi authorities for coverage perceived as too friendly to the Islamic State militants group and hostile to the country's Shiite majority.

The network's foreign staff were already unable to enter Iraq because the authorities had made it difficult for them to obtain visas, the network's Iraqi bureau chief Walid Ibrahim told AFP.

The CMC's decision contradicts the Iraqi government's "commitment to guarantee freedom of expression", Al-Jazeera said.

Ziad Ajili, from the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, condemned the move, saying that the CMC does not have direct authority to close media offices in Iraq.

Iraqi leaders have accused Gulf monarchies of not doing enough to fight IS militants and in some cases of directly supporting them.

Qatar is accused by many in Iraq of having intentionally sponsored hardline Sunni groups to counter the expanding influence of Iran and Shia Islam in the region.

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Emblation Limited, a global leader in the design and development of medical microwave technology, has been named Innovator of the Year, during the annual Business Insider Made in Scotland Awards, sponsored by The Royal Bank of Scotland. The ceremony was held at RBS Global Headquarters in Edinburgh on Thursday 21st April.

The Innovator of the Year award recognises the ground-breaking work Emblation has carried out in the field of microwave ablation, an emerging technology in the fight against cancer.

Having developed the smallest and safest medical microwave system available globally to-date, Emblation were approached by the worlds largest medical technology company to design a bespoke system for their next generation of tumour ablation products.

The technology is now in use worldwide, with thousands of treatments being carried out every month.

Securing the design, development and manufacturing of these products in Scotland was described as an inspiring story by the Business Insider & RBS Made in Scotland panel of judges.

Safety is critical in all medical devices, but reducing the size and weight of medical microwave systems is significant  it allows the potential for cancer treatments to be more accessible than ever before, said Gary Beale, Emblation CEO and co-founder.

This award is a fantastic achievement and a symbol of the hard work, dedication and innovation that allows our company to break new ground  but its just the start for Emblation. Our platform technology has applications across medical fields including cardiology, dermatology and general surgery, and the Research team at Emblation has a number of technologies under development that will have a huge impact on healthcare globally in the coming years.

The Business Insider Made in Scotland awards celebrates the achievements of the most pioneering organisations within the Scottish industry. The event highlights the most innovative products and services, from a diverse range of sectors, which are designed and manufactured in Scotland.

About Emblation Limited- http://www.emblationmicrowave.com

Emblation is a global leader in microwave technology with a strong focus on medical devices. Established in the USA in 2007, the company relocated to Scotland the following year to continue research into novel microwave based medical products.

Emblation Limited has since manufactured and launched a range of innovative microwave systems for a number of global organisations, meeting the fundamental need for compact, lightweight and portable generators for medical applications. All of Emblations microwave generators are built with a number of unique features  allowing for some of the safest and most advanced systems available today.

The team is led by some of the worlds foremost medical microwave experts, with a wealth of experience in the design, development and manufacture of microwave applications for a range of medical fields. Emblation is certified to EN ISO13485 and ISO90001 standards, and is committed to providing next generation solutions for todays medical conditions.

For further information please contact Jonathan Williamson: jonathan.williamson(at)emblation(dot)com
PCG Load Board

PCG provides truckers with freight bill factoring, and has now integrated with load board services, also known as freight boards. PCGs load board is an online matching system that allow shippers and freight brokers to post loads immediately. This systems allows shippers and carriers to find each other and enter into agreements to move freight.

The load board extension to the PCG website is the ultimate truck load board search for independent truckers and fleets. There are endless amounts of available loads posted by truck load carriers, freight brokers and direct shippers every day. PCGs truck load board is constantly being update to help clients find the most recent loads available. Whether youre a new trucker or an experienced trucker, PCGs load board will help clients find loads quickly and effectively.

The load board that PCG provides is free to all freight factoring clients. If a PCG client does not know how to access the load board, contact a PCG representative for a unique username and password. New truckers coming into the transportation industry begin business by looking for loads online. PCGs load board helps these truckers find loads quickly and effectively. PCG understands that new truckers often have tight budgets, that is why we offer a free load boards to all current freight factoring clients, to loads anywhere across the country and save some money for the rest of their business expenses. If you are not a PCG freight factoring client and would like more information, fill out a contact form for immediate assistance.
Our employees see a plan that works for them with features that would be expected in a company of greater size.

Robbins Gioia is proud to announce that Lisa Bebbs, Senior Benefits Specialist, Human Resources, will be recognized as a 2016 PLANSPONSOR Best in Class 401(k) Plan recipient. In recognition of this outstanding achievement, she and RGs HR benefits team will be honored at the 2016 PLANSPONSOR National Conference being held on June 1517 at the Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel. RG is one of only 26 firms honored with the Best in Class 401(k) designation.

RGs 401(k) plan will be featured in the May edition of PLANSPONSOR Magazines cover story, honored at an invitation-only dinner hosted by the editors of PLANSPONSOR, and be a participant in a panel, Best in Class Design, happening on the first day of the June DC annual conference.

With the help of Robbins Gioia leadership, HR has advocated for many changes in plan design in recent years, explains Bebbs. We have sought to provide best in class educational services and that really has made an impact. RG is in good company, as many fine firms are among the 2016 honorees.

Winners of the 2016 Best in Class 401(k) Plans designation were selected from more than 4,500 plans responding to PLANSPONSORs Defined Contribution (DC) Survey. 401(k) plans were evaluated and scored on more than 30 criteria related to plan design, oversight/governance, and participant outcomes.

It is quite an honor and we here at RG are proud of the work Lisa and our benefits team have done to make this happen, says Ben Harrison, Chief Financial Officer. Achieving this level of professional recognition is difficult in an industry as continuously evolving as that of employer-sponsored retirement plans. Our employees see a plan that works for them with features that would be expected in a company of greater size. RG is among the best in the industry.

About Robbins Gioia

For 35 years, Robbins Gioias (RG) skilled and knowledgeable professionals have used proven methodologies, time-tested tools, and independent perspectives to help customers in government and clients in industry. Headquartered in Alexandria, VA, RG implements innovative, customized solutions to help customers and clients achieve mission-critical business goals. Visit us online at http://www.robbinsgioia.com.
Linda Baxter Lasco We are extremely excited to welcome Linda to the team and look forward to quilters utilizing this new column.

AccuQuilt now has a monthly blog column called Ask Linda, featuring award-winning quilter Linda Baxter Lasco who will help quilters address common problems with their quilt-making techniques.

Lascos monthly column aims to assist quilters of all skill levels whether they are beginners or more advanced quilters. They can submit their questions to content(at)accuquilt(dot)com.

Suzan Ellis, Content Marketing Director at AccuQuilt says, We are extremely excited to welcome Linda to the team and look forward to quilters utilizing this new column.

Lascos past and present roles in the quilting world include teacher, lecturer, judge, and quilt shop staff member. She also completed stints as program chair for both the Artful Hands Quilt Guild and the Rhododendron Needlers Quilt Guild, in Mansfield and Walpole, Massachusetts, respectively.

Additionally, while working as a senior editor at the American Quilters Society for nine years, Lasco edited many books and stand-alone patterns. She also wrote a quilting book, "Red, White & Quilted", published in 2014.

About AccuQuiltBetter Cuts Make Better Quilts

Headquartered in Omaha, Neb., AccuQuilt offers quilters, fabric crafters and retailers a premiere line of fabric cutters, dies, quilting patterns and other quilt and fabric cutting solutions that help quilters quickly and accurately cut shapes for quilting and fabric crafts. AccuQuilt also offers quilters a wide variety of rich educational resources to enhance their quilting experiences. Cutting with AccuQuilt cutters is a natural evolution of fabric cutting methods. First scissorsthen rotaryfinallyAccuQuilt for fast, easy, accurate fabric cutting. For more information, visit http://www.accuquilt.com or call 888.258.7913.

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This initiative is a collaborative market development effort intended to facilitate the introduction and proliferation of grid-interactive, behind-the-meter storage (BTMS) technologies through electric utility load management, demand response and community storage programs. Energy and environmental stakeholders are uniting around community storage to solve the electric industrys energy storage challenges. Community Storage refers to the spectrum of utility-sponsored programs that aggregate electric storage resources available throughout the community, such as water heaters and electric vehicles, to improve the efficiency of electric energy services for consumers. Community Storage programs offer the industry the practical steps to rapidly increase the amount of energy storage available.

Like Community Solar, Community Storage enables consumers and utilities to share the system-wide benefits of energy storage, both in large and small communities. These advantages include environmental consideration, lower costs, and grid optimization. Such programs maximize the value of distributed energy resources, many of which are already available to participate in energy storage programs through simple retrofits and program design.

Vaughn Thermal Corporation, through its support of the electric utility industry, is focused on providing the grid-enabled ETS (Electric Thermal Storage) water heating technology and program expertise that will form the foundation of the nations Community Storage infrastructure. With 50 million electric water heaters currently residing in homes and businesses and over 4 million electric water heaters being installed annually, the nations electric utilities have the immediate opportunity to upgrade and aggregate these units for the purpose of providing economical energy storage for grid optimization and renewable energy integration. Vaughn Thermal Corporation welcomes the opportunity to provide technology and program expertise for Community Storage programs across the country. said Steven Koep, National Utility Sales Manager at Vaughn Thermal Corp., adding The Vaughn V-Grid ETS water heater is an extremely versatile and technologically advanced water heating appliance that can assist in our transition to a low-carbon energy future while providing years of efficient and dependable service to consumers and utilities alike.

About Vaughn Thermal Corporation - Vaughn Thermal Corporation, Salisbury, MA, is a leading manufacturer of long-lasting, high-efficiency water heaters. Vaughn also produces electronic controls for load-management, renewable storage and DR utility programs across the country.

Press and Product Contact: Steven Koep, 715-248-7752, skoep(at)vaughncorp(dot)com
Past and current traumas have a ripple effect over decades in the lives of individuals. - John Fusco, Psy.D, Gateway Treatment Centers

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month in May, Gateway Alcohol & Drug Treatment Centers will offer a f ree continuing education (CEU) webinar for healthcare professionals.

The webinar, Dual Recovery from Trauma and Addiction, will give participants the opportunity to earn one CEU and learn how to identify signs of trauma-infused personalities and how and when to intervene.

The Webinar presenter is John Fusco, Psy.D., M.Div., a Licensed Clinical Psychologist at Gateway Treatment Centers. John trains and supervises psychology students to provide diagnostic testing, biofeedback and individual, group and family psychotherapy in an inpatient addictions program for adolescents and adults with mental health related issues.

Past and current traumas have a ripple effect over decades in the lives of individuals, Fusco said. These traumas account for much if not most of a persons difficulties in living, anxiety, depression as well as inefficient and ineffective coping strategies, including the use of substances of addiction.

The webinar will be offered on two occasions: Wednesday, May 18 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. and Tuesday, May 24 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. Participants can receive one CEU IAODAPCA, NAADAC, Illinois: LCPC, LPC, LCSW, LSW, Nursing, Psychologist

Registration in advance is required at Recovergatway.org/training and space is limited.

The trauma infused personality is a syndrome of troubling thoughts, feelings and behaviors which go down to the marrow of a persons psychological bones. It impacts almost everything about a persons relationships, view of self and view of the world, Fusco said.

Other areas to be discussed include coping mechanisms, stages of recovery and appropriate interventions for each stage.

Reporters and Editors, for more information, please call Leslie Colman, Director of Marketing, at (630) 776-7525.

About Gateway Alcohol & Drug Treatment Centers

Gateway Alcohol & Drug Treatment Centers provide substance abuse treatment services for teens and adults at drug treatment centers throughout Illinois and the St. Louis Metro East. Gateway's outpatient and inpatient treatment centers are licensed by the state of Illinois and accredited by The Joint Commission. Each year, Gateway's professional clinicians help thousands of individual's successfully complete treatment. Learn more about Gateway's free, confidential consultation, call (877) 505-4673.
Photo by Jim Newberry John Grabski's example of standing defiantly against cancer is an encouragement to cancer patients who may feel alone, defeated and ready to give in to their diagnosis.

Free Verse Films has launched a crowd funding campaign via Indiegogo for the new feature documentary, Rock Vs. Cancer. The film will tell the inspiring story of John Grabski III, a musician with terminal cancer who spent his last days recording a rock album with legendary music producer Steve Albini. The filmmakers are looking to raise $200,000 for the project. You can watch the pitch trailer here.

The mission of the film is to help those with cancer, especially young adults. All proceeds from Rock Vs. Cancer will be split evenly between Sands Cancer Center in upstate NY where John received treatment during his illness and Stupid Cancer, the largest charity that comprehensively addresses young adult cancer through advocacy, research, support, outreach, awareness, mobile health and social media.

The filmmakers further explain why the movie is being made on their Indiegogo campaign page ...

"John Grabski's example of standing defiantly against cancer is an encouragement to cancer patients who may feel alone, defeated and ready to give in to their diagnosis. In sharing John's story, we hope to encourage others to confront their disease head-on. John's story and his rock album serve as a reminder that putting life on hold isn't an option ... life keeps on going whether you want it to or not, so seize the day and make the most of your time here on earth."

Based in Chicago, Steve Albini of Electrical Audio Studios is best known for his work with Nirvana, PJ Harvey, the Pixies, and Bush. On the close to 2,000 albums he's worked on, he prefers to be known as recording engineer rather than producer and refuses to take royalties from the bands he works with. Steve also plays music himself and is part of the rock band Shellac. He cites John's album "Teeth: The Strain," which chronicles the musician's 5 year relationship with the disease, as one of the most meaningful projects he's ever worked on and says of John, "I hope when I die I go like John, embroiled in the middle of things, surrounded by people I love, doing the things that matter most."

Rock Vs. Cancer is an in-depth look at John's final days as he made his way to Chicago to record with Steve, fulfilling his life-long dream. Through insurmountable odds, John left behind a hate letter to cancer and a love letter to life, assembled within the construct of a 30-minute rock & roll LP. Rock critic Everett True describes John's album "The Strain" as, in essence, "The finest grunge Ive heard in many a decade."

Those interested in supporting the film can donate to Rock Vs. Cancer via Indiegogo through May 20th.
Sierra College student, Sebastian Romanet, on right, demonstrates virtual reality at a SACVR meetup. Sierra College students, industry partners and community members are eager to learn about the latest Virtual Reality technology.

At the Sacramento Virtual Reality (SACVR) meetup being hosted by Sierra College on Friday, May 6, attendees will be able to see cutting-edge virtual reality (VR) technology before it goes mainstream. The meeting will be held at 6 PM in the cafeteria at the Rocklin campus, located at 5000 Rocklin Rd, Rocklin CA. At this free event, participants will see demonstrations of the newest equipment and hardware for developing and enjoying virtual reality. Go online to the SACVR Meetup to RSVP.

SACVR is organized by Brian Bullard, a local VR developer featured on the Oculus Store; Sebastian Romanet, a Sierra College mechatronics student and Unity developer; and Matt Carrell, a patented VR hardware inventor and creator of the Stompz foot controller. The organizers encourage those who are curious about virtual reality to come to the meetup to learn more. "We can teach you how to develop and get involved so you can catch the VR wave as its breaking, said Carrell.

Carrell explained that the meeting on May 6 will be sponsored by local VR companies, Talaris Technologies and FoundryVR. There will be plenty of VR demos and new prototypes to check out, said Carrell. This is the next great technological revolution and SACVR wants to help people develop their own virtual reality experiences.

According to Carol Pepper-Kittredge, Director, Center for Applied Competitive Technologies (CACT), Sierra College, over 90 people attended the previous Sacramento Virtual Reality Meetup held on campus. Sierra College students, industry partners and community members are eager to learn about the latest technology and to connect with local VR leaders, said Pepper-Kittredge. Previous meet-ups have encouraged collaboration and sharing of ideas. Come to this event at our Rocklin campus to see what it is all about and experience virtual reality.

To attend, RSVP to SACVR Meetup.

About Sierra College CACT

Sierra College Center for Applied Competitive Technologies (CACT) is focused on Advanced Manufacturing training and development, and is funded through the Workforce and Economic Development program of the California Community College Chancellors Office. Since 1992, the Sierra College CACT has provided customized training for organizations, manufacturers and technology companies throughout Northern California. Through the Sierra STEM Collaborative, Sierra College works with college faculty as well as middle and high schools to promote STEM Education and careers. Additional information is available at the Sierra College Training website or contact Carol Pepper-Kittredge at 916-660-7801 or cpepper-kittredge(at)sierracollege(dot)edu.

About Sierra College

Sierra College District is celebrating its 80th Anniversary in 2016, and the Nevada County Campus in Grass Valley is celebrating 20 years. Sierra College serves 3200 square miles of Northern CA with campuses in Roseville, Rocklin, Grass Valley, and Truckee. With approximately 125 degree and certificate programs, Sierra College is ranked first in Northern California (Sacramento north) for transfers to four year Universities, offers career/technical training, and classes for upgrading job skills. Sierra graduates can be found in businesses and industries throughout the region. More information at the Sierra College website.
Home builders are constantly striving to find unique and creative ways to grow their relationships with local real estate agents, and Essex Homes has done just that. Working with this Carolina home builder, mRELEVANCE recently launched a creative agent promotion called Essex Expedition. This year-long real estate campaign was designed to strengthen working relationships with local agents while introducing them to Essex Homes communities throughout Columbia, South Carolina.

The creative for this promotion is based on the concept of a passport. When travelers visit foreign countries, they collect stamps from their various ports of call. To give the promotion a unique safari feel, mRELEVANCE built all of the graphics around the idea of a passport. When agents visit an Essex community during an Essex Expedition event, they get a sought-after stamp in their passport. mRELEVANCE Managing Partner Carol Morgan chimes in, People love travel and they love exotic destinations. Incorporating the passport ties everything together  the surprise grand prize trip, the events and the stamps.

Beginning in April, Essex Homes kicked off bi-weekly events held the first and third Wednesday of each month at a featured community. The first event jump started the promotion by providing a welcoming atmosphere for real estate agents to learn more about Essex Homes.

Agents are invited to an Essex Expedition luncheon at a model home where they are treated to a delicious lunch, visit and tour the model home, and socialize and network with other local real estate agents. Agents can earn a stamp on their Essex Expedition passport at each Essex Homes community they visit. Attendees are encouraged to attend several events throughout the year to be entered into the Essex Expedition grand prize drawing, which features a surprise getaway for the lucky winner!

Having a positive relationship with local real estate agents is important. In many markets, co-op agents account for anywhere between 50 to 80 percent of new home sales. Cultivating these relationships boosts sales and enhances brand. Real estate agents often make the best raving fans for builders. In fact, one strategy that Essex Homes implements helps to make it easy for this group to be raving fans. The private Essex Homes Key Club group on Facebook keeps agents updated with everything Essex has going on, including all future dates and locations for Essex Expedition events. By providing agents with the latest information in a special forum just for them, this creates a special relationship between the builder and the real estate agents.

The Essex Expedition is promoted to agents in a variety of ways: email, news releases, a series of blog posts, Facebook advertising and social media updates. All of this content promotes agent interaction and encourages participation in the events.

For more information on creating an interactive program for Realtors, contact Marketing RELEVANCE at http://www.mRELEVANCE.com.

About Marketing RELEVANCE: mRELEVANCE, LLC creates relevant marketing and communications that reach audiences with focused and strategic messages. Through technology and creative content, messages are delivered to target markets to encourage customer action and interaction.

With offices in Atlanta and Chicago, mRELEVANCE can connect your company with buyers and build relevant relationships nationwide. For more information, visit http://www.MarketingRELEVANCE.com, Like us on Facebook at http://www.Facebook.com/mRELEVANCE, Follow us on Twitter at @mRELEVANCE or call 770-383-3360 or 847-259-7312.
Illinois Blower, Inc. employee Ken Kapus boards Centegra Health System's Mobile Health Unit for an on-site physical. Our corporate health program is a way we can make it easier for our community members to conveniently access the care they need.

Illinois Blower, Inc. took advantage of Centegra Health Systems corporate wellness program Tuesday to encourage its employees to stay ahead of illnesses and disease. Employees received onsite preventive medical exams and lab tests, all at their place of employment.

We realize it is tough for our employees to find time to visit a doctor and stay on top of their health, said Kelly Jorgenson, human resources director at Illinois Blower, Inc. This program brings a doctor right to our employees. In addition, as a business, our medical premiums have been dramatically rising, which increases the cost to employees and to our organization. This program will reduce medical expenses for everyone.

Centegra brought its mobile health unit to Illinois Blower, Inc. with Centegra Physician Cares Dr. Jonathan Huang, who gave each employee who elected to participate a physical and discussed the results of blood tests performed onsite a week earlier.

Centegra is all about community-based health, said Matt Carlen, vice president of Centegra Physician Care. Our corporate health program is yet another way we can make it easier for our community members to conveniently access the care they need.

For more information about this Centegra corporate health program, call Denise Daleo at 815-788-5864.

Centegra Health System is committed to meeting the health care needs of the residents of greater McHenry County and to making services available in multiple and convenient locations, including hospitals in McHenry and Woodstock, Immediate and Physician Care Centers, Centegra Sage Cancer Center, Health Bridge Fitness Centers and the widely anticipated Centegra HospitalHuntley slated for opening in 2016.
A Turkish court on Thursday sentenced two prominent Turkish journalists to two years behind bars for illustrating their columns with a controversial cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, a lawyer said.

"The two journalists were sentenced to two years each in jail," said Bulent Utku, the lawyer of Cumhuriyet daily columnists Hikmet Cetinkaya and Ceyda Karan. "But we will appeal the ruling at the appeals court," he told AFP.

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This integration will seamlessly embed SIGNiXs Independent E-Signature solution into Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, or On-Premise, to provide a digital customer life-cycle experience. Our goal is to provide the ability for businesses to quickly and easily send out documents for electronic signatures from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, regardless of whether you use Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM On-Premise.

SIGNiX, the leading provider of cloud-based Independent E-Signature solutions, announced today that it has partnered with xRM, a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Gold Partner with more than a decade of experience in providing application hosting, to integrate its digital signature technology into the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform.

The integration will seamlessly embed SIGNiXs Independent E-Signature solution into Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM On-Premise, and will provide a comprehensive customer life-cycle experience, where CRM users can track prospects, manage clients and close deals without ever leaving the program.

Our goal is to provide the ability for businesses to quickly and easily send out documents for electronic signatures from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, regardless of whether you use Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM On-Premise. Signing a document will be as simple as tracking a phone call, making an appointment or doing any other typical CRM activity, said Patrick McLean, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of xRM. SIGNiXs commitment to the integration project, their support and their flexibility as a business partner have helped to move this effort along smoothly and quickly.

Through the partnership, users will be able to sign contracts, agreements, waivers and other documents safely and securely.

SIGNiXs Independent E-Signatures permanently embed the legal evidence of an e-signature into a signed document using public-key infrastructure. Because a signatures cryptographic evidence is forever embedded into the document, it will remain forever valid and discoverable in court. SIGNiXs Independent E-Signatures are also supported by comprehensive, detailed audit trails, identity authentication and tamper-evident technology, which significantly improves security over wet ink signatures and reduces the risk of fraud.

SIGNiX and xRMs integrated technology will be available to the marketplace in two distinct ways: Direct clients, or companies looking for a CRM tool with native e-signature capabilities, will be able to purchase the integrated software package from xRM. SIGNiX and xRM will also make the unique capabilities of the integration available as an add-on feature for resale by other Microsoft partners around the world.

xRM is among the most prominent Microsoft partners in the nation, having been the first North American company to host the Microsoft Dynamics CRM application in the cloud, said Jay Jumper, CEO of SIGNiX. Working with xRM to bring Independent E-Signatures to a CRM platform as ubiquitous as Microsoft opens the door for countless organizations to better manage client relationships. Were thrilled to call xRM a partner.

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About SIGNiX:

SIGNiX, the most trusted name in Independent E-Signatures, makes signing documents online safe and secure with comprehensive legal evidence permanently embedded in each document to eliminate any dependence upon SIGNiX. The companys cloud-based service uses patented technology to give businesses and organizations the most secure and legally defensible e-signatures available at a fraction of the cost of wet ink signatures. SIGNiXs products help the worlds leading companies become more efficient, decrease risk and boost profits. For more information, visit https://www.signix.com. You can also follow SIGNiX on Twitter @signixsolutions, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

About xRM:

xRM is a Microsoft Partner with Gold competency in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The firm offers customers of all sizes unparalleled choice and flexibility when it comes to Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation and training services. In additional to being one of the largest resellers of CRM Online, xRM also offer a partner hosted model of Microsoft Dynamics CRM that allows us to serve customers starting with one user. All xRM customers receive complimentary access to the Success Portal (a free library of over 600 CRM videos). From presales to go-live support, xRM is your single source for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Jeff is perfect for us and we are perfect for him. With our shared values and his tactical expertise, we will become legendary.

IDR, Inc. announced Jeff Holmes has been named Chief Operations Officer, a newly appointed role for the organization. As COO, Holmes will assume responsibility for day-to-day operatio8ns; taking the companys growth plan and incorporating actionable plans for the organization to exceed its goals. His vision aligns with Founder and CEO, Eric French, who he will report directly to.

We needed an operational genius who could take our bold vision of becoming an industry leader and turn it into a scalable and repeatable play book. Jeff is perfect for us and we are perfect for him. With our shared values and his tactical expertise, we will become legendary, said French.

The staffing and recruiting industry is familiar territory to Holmes. He has spent well over a decade analyzing and building best-in-class talent acquisition strategies for some of the worlds top companies, across multiple industries.

Prior to this appointment, Holmes had spent just over 10 years with Allegis Group. The past 6 years had been specifically focused leading MSP operations at Allegis Global Solutions; where his responsibilities included managing a book of business that oversaw $200M in outsourced staffing budgets for clients in the hospitality, scientific, healthcare, and manufacturing industries. Holmes provided consultation and guidance to these clients on labor market trends, analyses, and best-in-class processes to help them maximize their staffing budgets, and ensure they were engaging talent in the most effective ways for their business. Prior to his time at AGS, Holmes led all talent acquisition efforts for MarketSource, an Allegis Group Company, managing all internal, and external focused recruiting teams.

Companies are tired of staffing vendors who only worry about their bottom line. Our industry, and our clients are moving away from the mindset that they will accept mediocrity in how staffing firms provide talent. Talent consulting is the only way we will succeed this ever changing market. Our clients seek a partner to help them navigate this landscape and show them how to attract and retain talent. IDR has always had the vision to make a difference in the industry; I was brought on to help guide that vision, said Holmes.

About IDR, Inc.

IDR, Inc. has been providing companies with high-quality IT talent since 1998. Founded and headquartered in Atlanta, GA, IDR has grown organically and now also serves the Nashville and Dallas markets. Supporting their clients, growing their candidates careers and providing their employees with a rewarding and fun work environment are all key objectives in reaching their ultimate goal: To be the BEST IT staffing company the world has ever seen. IDR is a proud winner of the Inavero Best of Staffing Award in Client and Talent satisfaction for a third consecutive year. Over 12,000 staffing firms in the U.S. are eligible for this award, but fewer than 2% receive one.

For more information on IDR, visit http://www.idr-inc.com or call 770.671.0040.
In an economic climate where talent is a scarce and essential resource for every companys success, Human Resources (HR) leaders play a pivotal role in attracting and retaining the human capital that fuels growth. NELSONtalks Business: Sacramento offers these leaders the opportunity to learn from industry experts as they provide insights and resources for local Sacramento professionals to help lead the evolution of their companies HR and employment strategies. Attendees will network with local colleagues as they learn about the latest economic, HR and employment trends that help companies rapidly adjust to market conditions and drive innovation, playing an important role in strengthening the local Sacramento area economy.

Sessions structured around timely updates crucial for todays informed HR and business professionals will include:



The Importance of Data-Driven HR Strategies

David Bernstein, Vice President of eQuests Big Data for HR/Predictive Analytics division

With data increasingly being used to inform every facet of business decision making, its imperative that Human Resource professionals capitalize on the opportunities this data provides. In this interactive session, David will share the importance of a data-first mindset, the state of data-driven decision making in HR, and how you can translate results and findings into actions and programs. Hell invite audience participation and review case studies examining how real companies could benefit from a data-centric approach to talent acquisition, workforce planning and more.

Anti-Discrimination & Anti-Harassment: New Regulations for California Employers

William Hays Weissman, shareholder at Littler Mendelson

On April, 2016, California employers were once again faced with new burdens regarding their obligations to address discrimination, including new requirements for harassment policies and investigations. Come learn about the latest legal developments in discrimination, harassment, and retaliation and what steps you should take now to ensure compliance and reduce the risks of lawsuits.

The State of the Economy

Dr. Robert Eyler, Professor of Economics at Sonoma State University and President of Economic Forensics and Analytics, Inc.

The financial, retail, and labor markets are key indicators of economic health and trajectory. Dr. Robert Eyler discusses the state of these markets, how the California economy fits into the national and global picture, and what these updates mean for your business. Roberts rare ability to break down highly detailed economic concepts and make them engaging for a general audience yet informative for other subject matter experts and always receives an excellent rating from Nelson event attendees.

Event details:



Date/Time: Thursday, May 19, 8:00 a.m.  12:00 p.m. (breakfast included)

Location: Sheraton Grand Sacramento Hotel, 1230 J St., Sacramento, CA 95814

Accrediation: Attendees have the opportunity to earn up to 3 HRCI, 3 CPE and 1 MCLE credits

Contact: Julie Hormaechea, Marketing & Events Manager, Nelson

o Phone: 707.939.4026

o Email: jhormaechea(at)nelsonjobs(dot)com

Every year, the Nelson team far exceeds my expectations with these events, said Elizabeth Drummond, lead human resources representative with DST and previous NELSONtalks attendee. The extremely insightful, knowledgeable presenters made their topics interesting and fun while sharing extremely pertinent information and tips Ive been able to apply in my role throughout the year. Being able to earn continuing education credits was also a welcome bonus. Im looking forward to this years NELSONtalks event even more!

Dont miss out on this unique opportunity to learn from nationally recognized professionals right here in Sacramento. Join your colleagues in paving the way for 21st-century HR and business strategies that will help foster your companys success by reserving your spot now!

For more information and to RSVP, please visit http://www.nelsonjobs.com/nelsontalks-sac
Venture Construction Group of Florida (VCGFL) sponsored the 9th Annual Treasure Coast Bike Fest Jan 30-31, 2016. The two-day event kicked off at Memorial Park in Stuart and featured live music, a bike parade, tattoo contest, a Salute Our Military celebration, food and merchandise vendors, and more. Over 3,000 individuals attended this years event. All proceeds benefit ARC of Martin County.

We are grateful for our local community, riders, participants, and the local business community and sponsors like Venture Construction Group of Florida for supporting these events. Proceeds from these events really aid us in service delivery. We are fortunate to be able to assist and support more than 500 children and adults and their families each month, says Keith Muniz, President and CEO of the ARC of Martin County.

The ARCs mission is to empower children and adults with Intellectual and Developmental disabilities (I/DD) to achieve their fullest potential through residential, vocational, educational, behavioral and other healthcare services. Through intensive educational and vocational skill training, the ARC of Martin County provides support and assistance that empowers people with disabilities to overcome their challenges, thus giving them greater opportunities to live and work and ultimately become more active citizens within their community.

We are happy to spread awareness for ARC through fun events such as this years bike fest. It is an honor to have companies like Venture Construction Group of Florida recognize the importance of our organization and how it helps children and adults with disabilities, says Tracy Howse, Director of Community Development at ARC.

Founded in 1998, Venture Construction Group of Florida has helped thousands of homeowners, commercial property owners, and property management companies with residential and commercial construction, renovations, insurance restoration, storm damage repairs, and 24/7 emergency services throughout Florida including Miami-Dade County, Palm Beach County, Martin County, Hillsborough County, Treasure Coast.

Giving back to local charities is a part of our mission, says Stephen Shanton, founder and president of Venture Construction Group of Florida.

About Venture Construction Group of Florida

Venture Construction Group of Florida is a leader in residential and commercial construction, renovations, insurance restoration, storm damage repairs, and 24/7 emergency services throughout the state of Florida. We are a full-service general contractor and assist residential and commercial property owners with all of your construction and restoration needs. Operational excellence is our mission in every project we undertake, and we pride ourselves on providing exceptional customer service. Venture Construction Group of Florida is proud to be an exclusive certified National Storm Damage Center preferred contractor, a certified contractor with the National Insurance Restoration Council, and a member of the United Association of Storm Restoration Contractors. Founded in 1998, Venture Construction Group of Florida services commercial and residential properties throughout the state. For more information call 866-459-8351 or visit us online at http://www.vcgfl.com.

About ARC of Martin County

ARC (Advocates for the Rights of the Challenged), is a 501(c)(3) non-for-profit organization dedicated to empowering children and adults with developmental disabilities to achieve their fullest potential through residential, vocational, educational, behavioral and other healthcare services. ARC provides support and assistance to children and adults with a variety of challenges, including: intellectual disabilities, autism, Downs syndrome, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, epilepsy, and other related developmental disabilities. Through a full spectrum of programs and medical technology, we assist with education, skill training, community involvement, physical and behavioral therapy, and developing self-sufficiency for each and every individual. Learn more at http://www.arcmc.org/ or call us at 772.283.2525.

Media Inquiries:

Vera Anderson

Elev8 Consulting Group

Ph: 386.243.5388

Web: http://www.elev8cg.com

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Martin Cramer, CCIM has been awarded the Certified Commercial Investment Member (CCIM) designation by the CCIM Institute. The designation was awarded during the Institutes Midyear business meetings April 5th in Chicago.

Martin Cramer was among the 149 commercial real estate professionals who earned the designation by passing the CCIM Institutes Comprehensive Examination, the final element in the designation process. This new group of CCIM designees hails from 38 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and several provinces in Canada.

The CCIM program is at the forefront of providing in depth training of commercial professionals and the knowledge I obtained will greatly benefit my clients by allowing me to utilize the tools and resources only the CCIM Institute provides.

The CCIM designation is awarded to commercial real estate professionals upon successful completion of an advanced analytical curriculum and presentation of a portfolio of qualifying industry experience. The curriculum addresses financial analysis, market analysis, user decision analysis, and investment analysis  the cornerstones of commercial investment real estate. CCIMs are recognized experts in commercial real estate brokerage, leasing, asset management, valuation, and investment analysis.

Learn more about the CCIM Institutes education and designation program at http://www.ccim.com.

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About the CCIM Institute

Since 1969, the Chicago-based CCIM Institute has conferred the Certified Commercial Investment Member (CCIM) designation to commercial real estate and allied professionals through an extensive curriculum of 160 classroom hours and professional experiential requirements. The CCIM curriculum was redesigned in 2010 to reflect changing student demographics and real estate brokerage services, growth in international markets, new technologies, and new delivery models. The core curriculum addresses financial analysis, market analysis, user decision analysis, investment analysis, and negotiationthe cornerstones of commercial investment real estate.

An affiliate of the National Association of Realtors, the CCIM Institute also offers the powerful technology tool STDB, an online site analysis and demographics resource, and the Ward Center for Real Estate Studies, which provides timely education and training to keep commercial real estate practitioners current in an ever-changing market environment.

Currently, there are nearly 10,000 CCIMs in 1,000 U.S. markets and 31 additional countries, with another 3,000+ practitioners pursuing the designation, making the institute the governing body of one of the largest commercial real estate networks in the world. Visit http://www.ccim.com for more information.
Attorney Mark Chinn The strong sentiment of the group was that the Mississippi Religious Freedom Act would not withstand Constitutional attack, although there was dissent to this opinion. Past News Releases RSS Attorney Mark Chinn Offers Branding...

Attorney Mark Chinn Secures...

Attorney Mark Chinn recently moderated the Second Annual Family Law Panel, hosted by MC Laws Family Law Society at Mississippi College School of Law in Jackson, on the effect of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage on the practice of family law. Discussion was also had on the impact of the Mississippi Religious Freedom Act on the obligation of judges, court personnel and others to comply with the Supreme Court decision.

Panel members and members of the audience all commented that the Supreme Courts decision in Obergefell v. Hodges*(wherein the U.S. Supreme Court declared that same-sex marriage is legal nationwide) basically turns upside down traditional laws on the impact of sexual preference on marriage, custody, fault in divorce, adoption and equitable distribution, said Chinn, who focuses solely on family law. For example, homosexual relationships have never been regarded in Mississippi as adultery, but rather as cruelty.

After Obergefell v. Hodges, added Chinn, most panel and audience members believed homosexual relationships would now constitute adultery. Discussion at the panel also focused on the interesting question of whether or not judges could opt out of enforcing the Obergefell decision on the basis of the Mississippi Religious Freedom Act, which promises that the state government will not punish people who refuse to provide services to people because of a religious opposition to same-sex marriage, extramarital sex or transgender people. The consensus of the approximately 120 practicing attorneys and law students in attendance was that when public officials are sworn into office they must enforce the law whether they agree with it or not; however, it was observed that there was no specific requirement in the Mississippi law requiring public officials, such as judges, to enforce the law.

The strong sentiment of the group was that the Mississippi Religious Freedom Act would not withstand Constitutional attack, although there was dissent to this opinion, said Chinn, who for eight consecutive years has been selected as a Mid-South Super Lawyer. I also pointed out to the group that while they were filing in for the discussion it was reported that the City of Los Angeles had resolved to boycott both Mississippi and North Carolina for passage of Religious Freedom Acts.

*Obergefell v. Hodges: Case No. 14556/Supreme Court of the United States

About Chinn & Associates, PC

Chinn & Associates practices solely in the field of family law. Mark Chinn has received the Top Ten Attorney Award from the National Academy of Family Law Attorneys, has been selected as a Premier 100 Trial Attorney by the American Academy of Trial Attorneys and is listed among the Best Law Firms in Mississippi by U.S. News & World Report. Chinn is the author of three books on family law published by the American Bar Association. For more information, please call (601) 366-4410, or visit http://www.chinnlaw.com. The law office is located at 4316 Old Canton Road, Suite 200, Jackson, MS 39211. You may download the free chinnandassociates app in your app store.

About the NALA

The NALA offers small and medium-sized businesses effective ways to reach customers through new media. As a single-agency source, the NALA helps businesses flourish in their local community. The NALAs mission is to promote a business relevant and newsworthy events and achievements, both online and through traditional media. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361.
Weve been aggressive in our growth during the past three years, and its incredibly rewarding to see that hard work pay off. Were going to leverage this momentum to make online advertising even easier for our customers.

The Boston Business Journal recently recognized WordStream, Inc., a provider of online advertising products and services, as one of the fastest-growing companies in Massachusetts and the Greater Boston metropolitan area as part of the publications Fast 50 awards.

WordStream was recognized as the eighth-fastest growing company in the Bay State for the preceding three-year period. WordStream achieved 500% growth in revenue between 2012 and 2015, and has expanded steadily as an organization to keep pace with this aggressive growth.

One of my favorite parts of my job is accepting awards that recognize the hard work that everyone puts in to help WordStream grow, said Ralph Folz, Chief Executive Officer of WordStream. Weve been aggressive in our growth during the past three years, and its incredibly rewarding to see that hard work pay off. Were going to leverage this momentum to make online advertising even easier for our customers.

During the past 12 months, WordStream has embarked on a number of exciting new initiatives to help drive this impressive growth. The companys AdWords Performance Grader, a free software tool that evaluates the strength of advertisers AdWords account according to 10 key metrics, was redesigned to provide users with a more streamlined, intuitive, and responsive experience.

In addition, the company implemented support for Facebook Ads into its WordStream Advisor software platform, a cloud-based online advertising management solution. WordStream also released its Social Ads offering as a standalone product, helping more small to medium sized businesses grow through the power of social advertising.

Im so excited about the projects weve been working on over the past year, said WordStream Founder Larry Kim. Weve been working closely with our partners at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and Im thrilled to see our products and services helping so many businesses get more bang out of their marketing budgets.

The Boston Business Journals recognition of WordStreams growth is not the first accolade the company has earned thanks to its impressive growth trajectory. WordStream has been featured on Inc. magazines Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US for three consecutive years, and the company has also been recognized for its commitment to employee satisfaction and work environment, being named to the BBJs Best Places to Work list two years in a row.

About WordStream

WordStream, Inc. provides software and services that help marketers get the maximum results from their online marketing efforts. WordStream's easy-to-use software allows for more effective paid search and social campaigns with the 20-Minute Work Week, a customized workflow that guides marketers through steps that can greatly improve their AdWords, Bing, Yahoo, and Facebook campaigns, plus tools for call tracking, keyword optimization, and more. WordStream also offers an award-winning free PPC tool, the AdWords Performance Grader, which evaluates users' Google AdWords accounts and provides valuable tips for improvement. WordStream is a Google Premier Partner.

Media Contact:

Laura Taylor

VP Acquisition & Experience Design

WordStream, Inc.

617-849-6124

ltaylor(at)wordstream.com
Brandon Bir, a coffee sourcing and education manager for Columbus, Ohio coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea, has earned Coffee Buyer Level 1 certification from the Specialty Coffee Association of America. He is one of the first 31 graduates of the new SCAA Coffee Buyer Pathway.

Brandon is a vital member of our innovation team, and were tremendously proud of him! said Greg Ubert, founder and president. This certification demonstrates his understanding of coffee, the green coffee market and the logistics of purchasing as well as customer service, cupping and brewing.

To prepare for Level 1 certification, Bir completed courses on the foundations of coffee, green coffee market principles and dynamics, coffee production and inventory control, and coffee purchasing strategies. He then passed a comprehensive written exam to achieve certification.

This certification furthers my understanding of our industry and proper purchasing strategies, Bir said. I will use this certification to better understand the needs of farmers trying to export coffee, and the logistics of what makes importation possible.

As Coffee Sourcing Manager, Bir travels the globe to form relationships with coffee growers, cooperative managers, exporters and Q graders. In the past two years, he has traveled more than 50,000 miles to visit coffee-growing countries.

He also holds Level 1 and 2 certification from the Specialty Tea Institute and recently traveled to China to source new loose-leaf teas.

Through Crimson Cups Seven Steps to Success program, Bir also works with independent coffee houses, restaurants, food service operations and colleges and universities that serve Crimson Cup beverages.

The Seven Steps form the basis of Crimson Cups coffee shop franchise alternative program, which has helped more than 250 independent coffee shops in 29 states start and maintain successful businesses. Based on Uberts book, Seven Steps to Success in the Specialty Coffee Industry, the program teaches prospective coffee house owners and their staff everything they need to run a profitable coffee house or cafe.

About Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea

Columbus, Ohio coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea is Roast magazines 2016 Macro Roaster of the Year. Since 1991, Crimson Cup has roasted sustainably sourced specialty and craft coffee in small batches. The company also teaches entrepreneurs to run successful coffee houses through its coffee franchise alternative program, which includes a coffee shop business plan. Crimson Cup coffee is available through a community of more than 350 independent coffee houses, grocers, college and universities, restaurants and food service operations across 29 states, Guam and Bangladesh, as well as the companys own Crimson Cup Coffee Houses. To learn more, visit crimsoncup.com.
Mosquitos, more specifically the mosquito-borne Zika Virus disease, have been in the news a lot lately. Mosquitos have been around for millions of years and are one of the most irritating pests. Massey Services, the nations fifth largest pest prevention company, offers these tips to lessen the bites and keep you protected from mosquito-borne illnesses.



Focus mosquito abatement efforts outside the home; prevent mosquitoes from entering by having tightly closed doors as well as windows and screens that are properly fitted

Mosquito larvae can develop and become adults in a matter of days; drain standing water often from the places it collects around your home (bird bath, unfiltered pools) to eliminate breeding habitats

If there are excessive amounts of water outside your home, request professional help to apply a larvicide to reduce the mosquito population

Clear leaves and debris from gutters and drains to prevent the accumulation of stagnant water.

Avoid working or playing outdoors at dawn or dusk when mosquitoes are most active. If you must be outside at these times, wear long sleeves and long pants.

Mosquitos can bite through thin clothing; use insect repellant with DEET, applying it not only to skin but clothing, as well.

Mosquito abatement is a process that targets mosquitos where they live and breed, such as uncontrollable standing water, said Massey Services Vice President of Quality Assurance Adam Jones. It provides a barrier of protection around your home that is inspected and treated monthly to minimize mosquito populations all year.

There are 13 species of mosquitos which are capable of transmitting diseases. A professional pest management company can provide proper control and elimination services through a customized mosquito abatement program.

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About Massey Services:

Based in Orlando, Florida, Massey Services is the nations fifth largest pest prevention company and the largest privately held family-owned company in the industry. Celebrating 31 years of profitable growth, Massey Services and its subsidiary organizations employ approximately 1,860 team members and operate 1,700 vehicles that provide residential and commercial pest prevention, termite protection, landscape and irrigation services to over 488,000 customers from Service Centers throughout Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina and Oklahoma. For more information about Massey Services, please visit http://www.masseyservices.com.
Hyundai Translead Today the transportation industry continues to address the need for qualified candidates at all levels and Women In Trucking continues looking to help solve industry problems and provide secure futures to a new generation of women transportation.

The Women In Trucking Association (WIT) is pleased to announce the high level support of Hyundai Translead as a Silver Level Partner. This commitment is one of the highest levels of sponsorship a company can contribute to the organization, going beyond a corporate membership in not only providing funding, but in contributing leadership to move the goals of the association forward.

Theresa Payne Brown, Deputy General Manager of National Account Sales serves on the WIT Advisory Committee. Hyundai Translead is again pleased to continue our support of Women In Trucking for 2016, said Brown. Today the transportation industry continues to address the need for qualified candidates at all levels and Women In Trucking continues looking to help solve industry problems and provide secure futures to a new generation of women in the transportation industry.

Theresas involvement at the advisory level has brought a new perspective to the leadership team, said Ellen Voie, President/CEO of Women In Trucking Association. Her insight as a woman who has been selling trailers in a very male dominated industry is invaluable and her experience has given us greater insight into the challenges she has addressed in her nontraditional career.

Women In Trucking is actively promoting the opportunities that were once considered men only positions and equally important, recognizing success stories and achievements of todays women, Brown said. We are proud to be a partner in that process.

Hyundai Translead is a leading manufacturer of dry and refrigerated van trailers, domestic containers, container chassis, and converter dollies for the North American transportation industry. Established in 1989, Hyundai Translead is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Company Korea and is headquartered in San Diego, CA. The company operates three state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities located in Tijuana, Mexico.

Women In Trucking Association, Inc. is a nonprofit association established to encourage the employment of women in the trucking industry, promote their accomplishments and minimize obstacles faced by women working in the trucking industry. Membership is not limited to women, as 17 percent of its members are men who support the mission. Women In Trucking is supported by its members and the generosity of Gold Level Partners: Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems, Daimler Trucks North America, BMO Transportation Finance, Great Dane, J.B. Hunt Transport, Ryder System, Inc., U.S. Xpress, and Walmart. Follow WIT on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. For more information, visit http://www.womenintrucking.org
Signing a free trade agreement with Qatar is a major goal for Turkey, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Thursday.

Davutoglu, on an official visit to the Gulf nation, made the comment in a speech at a business forum. He also said that Turkish defence companies were in talks with Qatari counterparts as part of a drive to increase cooperation between the countries.

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Cognizin Citicoline is one of three finalists for NutraIngredients Ingredient of the Year at VitaFoods 2016.

Nominated in the Healthy Ageing category, Cognizin is being considered for this prestigious honor due to its scientific merit, efficacy, innovation, and safety. The Healthy Ageing division can include everything from antioxidants, lipids, proteins, and botanicals. NutraIngredients will choose a winner that is best at winning over formulators with an ingredient that can differentiate healthy ageing products typically aimed at ever-so-demanding Baby Boomers.

The 2016 NutraIngredients Awards will take place on Wednesday, May 11, at the Starling Hotel in Geneva, Switzerland.

This is not the first time Cognizin has been recognized. In 2011, the ingredient was honored by Frost & Sullivan with the Product Differentiation Excellence award in the cognitive health ingredients category. Cognizin also won the NutrAward for best innovative ingredient at Nutracon 2004.

Cognizin Citicoline can be found in several products available in Europe. Agave Farmaceutici produces Assonal with Cognizin, a supplement meant to support conduction of nerves and protect neurons from free radicals. Bionops Laboratory offers Biomacula with Cognizin, a daily supplement that supports eye health. FB Health offers Vivifast with Cognizin for optimal cognitive health.

For more information about the Cognizin Citicoline nomination, http://www.nutraingredients-awards.com/award-categories/finalists/.

Citicoline is a compound that promotes the production of phosphatidylcholine (phospholipids), important for brain function. Phospholipids make up approximately 30% of brain tissue, aid neural communication and provide essential protection for neurons. Clinical research has shown that citicoline has multiple applications and is able to improve various aspects of the brains physiological activity.*

Cognizin Citicoline is a branded form of citicoline, an essential substance for brain health. Citicoline works to enhance communication between neurons, maintain normal levels of acetylcholine, protect neural structures, and enhance health brain activity and energy.*

About Cognizin

Cognizin Citicoline, manufactured by Kyowa Hakko Bio Co., Ltd., is a clinically studied and patented form of Citicoline, a natural substance found in every cell of the body and especially vital to brain health.* Citicoline is a potent brain-health nutrient. A proprietary form of citicoline, Cognizin has been clinically studied to support mental energy, focus, attention and recall. Cognizin is manufactured through a patented fermentation process to yield high quality and high purity. Cognizin is also highly stable, GRAS, ultra-pure and allergen-free. For more information on Cognizin, visit http://www.cognizin.com

*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

About Kyowa Hakko Europe

Kyowa Hakko Europe and Kyowa Hakko Bio Italia are the Central-North and South European sales office for Kyowa Hakko Bio Co., Ltd., an international health ingredients manufacturer and world leader in the development, manufacturing and marketing of pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals and food products. For more information, visit Kyowa Hakko Europe GmbH at http://www.kyowa.eu or email at bio-chemicals(at)kyowa(dot)de
Nature's Classroom Students The experience was awesome! Our students had a wonderful time."

Its an exciting time for Natures Classroom at Pilgrim Hills Camp! Kiira Olszko has been named new Program Director for the Web of Life Field (WOLF) School Natures Classroom program in Brinkhaven, OH, a youth education program emphasizing team building and experience-based learning in an outdoor setting. The news comes after Pilgrim Hills Camps new management by United Camps, Conferences and Retreats (UCCR), a long established non-profit camp and retreat management organization.

Olszko has been on staff at Pilgrim Hills Nature's Classroom since 2010, working as a Summer Camp Staffer, Instructor and then Assistant Director. Her appointment as Program Director is a natural and fitting progression, and already her passion for the program, the outdoors and youth education is inspiring renewed excitement throughout the Natures Classroom experience.

"Natures Classroom was well organized and a great use of time! gushed Susan White, a teacher at East Elementary in Athens, OH. The experience was awesome! Our students had a wonderful time."

As Director, Olszko works closely with teachers as they choose from a variety of group-oriented activities, such as Team Building, Natural Science, Social Studies, Creative Arts, and Math. Olszko then adapts the programs to best fit the needs and interests of a given group, ensuring an educational and enjoyable experience for the students and program participants. Olszko is now hard at work to enrich the programs offered by Natures Classroom even more, creating new activities for the Activity Guide.

Refreshing the Natures Classroom experience even further is UCCRs expertise in managing and operating Pilgrim Hills Camp. UCCR was created over 40 years ago so that nonprofit organizations could enjoy beautiful sites for their camping and retreat experiences, and they currently manage properties throughout the United States. Their mission of "creating partnerships to provide positive life-changing experiences" is two-fold: fully supporting programs such as Natures Classroom while they are enjoying the camp facilities; and providing excellence in the stewardship of the properties with which they have been entrusted. The partnership has given Natures Classroom renewed confidence that their facility has a steward who cares, while allowing Natures Classroom to put their focus where it matters most: into their educational programs and the students they serve.

Initially founded in 1973, Natures Classroom has been operating at Pilgrim Hills Camp since 1980. Located in Brinkhaven, OH, approximately 1.5 hours northeast of Columbus, Pilgrim Hills Camp boasts 375 acres of rich woodlands, meadows, streams, trails, and a lake. The locale is the perfect setting for Natures Classroom, which provides customizable programs designed to give students a hands-on experience in the outdoors while supporting classroom curriculum, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and Ohios Learning Standards. Natures Classroom programs range from single day field trips to 3-5 day/night residential camp experiences, and are supported by Pilgrim Hills Camps spectacular facilities, which include cabin lodging, family-style dining for groups up to 200, and a variety of recreational options.

To learn more about Natures Classroom visit http://www.wolfschool.org/natures-classroom. Ready to sign-up your group? Email Kiira Olszko at NaturesClassroom(at)uccr(dot)org or call 614-813-7801.

Pilgrim Hills Camp is owned by the Ohio Conference of the United Church of Christ.
Saulsbury Industries celebrated the grand opening of its new office in La Porte, Texas, today. As part of Saulsburys ongoing Gulf Coast strategy, the office will accommodate engineers, designers and support personnel, in addition to the shop and laydown area for the construction services group.

Located in the heart of the Houston Ship Channel, the La Porte office will allow for continued company growth, providing both local talent and an expanded regional footprint, not only in the Houston Ship Channel but also along the Gulf Coast.

The new facility allows Saulsbury Industries to strengthen our commitment to the Gulf Coast and our client base by having access to a needed workforce and in turn producing a faster response time, stated Rick Graves, Chief Executive Officer.

Family-owned Saulsbury Industries is a full-service Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) contractor headquartered in Odessa, Texas, that provides engineering, general construction, electrical & instrumentation, and maintenance services to heavy industrial markets.
The music which you hear on Great Sacred Music was created by composers from many different faiths and backgrounds.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact:

Curtis Brothers

919.556.5178

curtis(at)TheClassicalStation(dot)org

WCPE FM Presents Great Sacred Music

TheClassicalStation.org Offers Commentaries on Great Sacred Music

TheClassicalStation.org announces weekly commentaries during Great Sacred Music. Host Rob Kennedy programs a mix of sacred choral and organ music for the program which airs each Sunday from 8 a.m. until 11 a.m.

"The music which you hear on Great Sacred Music was created by composers from many different faiths and backgrounds," says Kennedy. "Whether written only a few years ago or back in the Middle Ages, it resonates with 21st century listeners just as it did when it was first performed."

Here are the commentators for May 2016:

Sunday, May 1 - Father Marius Joseph Walter, St. Dominic's Parish, Westfield, New York, offers a commentary on his 1997 composition "Variations on Salva fest dies".

Sunday, May 8 - Pastor Bruce Benson, host of Sing for Joy, offers a meditation on Franz Biebl's "Ave Maria" for Mothers Day.

Sunday, May 15 - The Reverend Brad Beale, St. Thomas Anglican Church, Belleville, Ontario offers a commentary on Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G major played by his organist Matthieu Latreille.

Sunday, May 22 - Adrian Archer, Minister of Music of Christ Church Cathedral, Nassau, Bahamas, offers a meditation on John Rutter's "The Lord bless you and keep you".

Sunday, May 29 - William Weisser, retired organist of Edenton Street United Methodist Church, Raleigh, North Carolina, will offer a meditation of Harold Friedell's anthem "Draw us in the Spirit's tether".

WCPEs live broadcast of Great Classical Music, 24 Hours A Day can be accessed around the globe in several ways: on-line streaming in multiple formats, including IPv6; local cable television systems; and traditional radio broadcasting. A complete list of the ways WCPE is available with instructions for cable and satellite reception can be found at http://www.TheClassicalStation.org

About WCPE:

WCPE broadcasts on a variety of FM frequencies in Eastern North Carolina and is heard throughout Eastern and Central North Carolina and Southern Virginia from its transmitting tower in Wake Forest, NC and other repeater stations. A live feed is also available on the Internet at http://www.theclassicalstation.org, cable systems, affiliate radio stations and via satellite. WCPE is a non-commercial, listener-supported station that plays classical music exclusively. WCPE is owned and operated by the Educational Information Corporation, a North Carolina non-profit broadcasting organization. The Corporation was formed in 1973 and began operating WCPE in July of 1978. The Corporation holds a federal 501 (C)(3) Public Charity Exemption Certificate and the corresponding certificate from the State of North Carolina.

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One way to ignore solid evidence is to dismiss research because, it can be made to say anything. This is unfortunately true. But we toss the baby out with the bathwater when we ignore all studies because some are fatally flawed.

A new, single-page brief provides tips for identifying higher-quality studies and otherwise making better use of education policy research.

When readers heed basic cautions, research can provide valuable guidance that helps them learn from past experiences rather than reinventing the wheel by repeatedly re-introducing policies and practices that have failed in the past, said Holly Yettick, PhD, director of the Education Week Research Center and author of the brief.

Yettick briskly walks through some of the key issues that readers of education research should understand. These topics include:



Peer review

The importance of prioritizing research reviews over standalone studies

P values and statistical significance

Effect sizes

Research in real-world situations

Find Holly Yetticks brief on the NEPC website at:

http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/reading-research

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu

This policy brief was made possible in part by the support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice (greatlakescenter.org).

Find Documents:

Press Release: http://nepc.info/node/7968

NEPC Publication: http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/reading-research
Dr. Barbara Browne

April, 28, 2016  Magee Rehabilitation Hospital physician Barbara Browne, M.D. has been named a Top Doc in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation by Philadelphia Magazine.

Philadelphia Magazines annual Top Doctors list is developed in conjunction with Castle Connolly Medical, Ltd. by randomly surveying physicians and medical leadership across the country. These select individuals nominate outstanding physicians in a variety of specialties and subspecialties to whom they would send members of their family. From these nominated physicians, the Top Doctors are selected based on a range of criteria, including professional qualifications, professional reputation, experience, and disciplinary history.

Dr. Barbara Browne is the Medical Director of Magee Rehabilitations Stroke and Geriatrics Program. She is board certified in both Internal Medicine and Physical Medicine and is renowned as an expert in the areas of stroke, geriatrics, and spinal cord injury rehabilitation. Dr. Browne has published abstracts in medical journals and conducted numerous clinical lectures on stroke rehabilitation to both consumer and professional audiences. This is her sixth year as one of Philadelphia Magazines Top Doctors.

For more information on Dr. Browne, as well as a full listing of Magee Rehabilitations specialties and services, please visit MageeRehab.org.

About Magee Rehabilitation Hospital

Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, a founding member of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundations NeuroRecovery Network, is the Philadelphia regions original provider of physical and cognitive rehabilitation. The not-for-profit hospital provides nationally-recognized lifetime rehabilitation and wellness programs for individuals with spinal cord injury, brain injury, stroke, orthopedic joint replacement, amputation, pain management, and work injury. Since 1978, Magee has partnered with Thomas Jefferson University Hospital to form The Regional Spinal Cord Injury Center of the Delaware Valley, one of only 14 federally designated model systems of care in the country.

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Monogramonline Inc. has been well regarded for their extensive and exclusive personalized gift giving designs. The company has come a long way since it was established in 1989. In a decade, the company entered the customized and personal gift market, and their selling point is their unique way of personalizing your gift giving to ensure the recipient receives something special.

Monogram personal gifts, are designed for every occasion. However, at a recent press conference more information about the weddings and the charm thats surrounds the special day of their clients. The companys managing director added that Monogramonline is currently offering 25% of bridal party gifts. She assured that the company is aimed at increasing sales, while maintaining focus on customer service and satisfaction.

The Marketing Director added that all their personalized groomsmen gifts will have the stated discount of 25%, for a limited time. He stated that the company intends to launch more promotional offers on products listed on their website, including gifts for other occasions. It must be noted that Monogramonline Inc. is a family oriented company, and their website, which was launched in 2011, has been designed for ease of use. The company leadership indicates that placing your order will be easier than ever on the website. Even those customers who dont consider themselves computer saavy will experience how easy the site is to use.

When asked about special offers on bridesmaid custom gifts, Monogramonlines Leaderhship advised to stop by the website to take advantage of the ongoing sales in different departments. The Marketing Director assured the press that Monogramonline will continue to focus on customer service, and they intend to invest in offering a world class experience for every customer, client or buyer, everytime.

About Monogramonline Inc

Monogramonline Inc. is a specialized company offering personalized gifts and monograms. The company was established in 1989, when it worked as a complete manufacturer of wholesale products, but soon it ventured in new markets. Currently, they have their own official website  Monogramonline.com  which offers a complete range of products for all occasions and people of all ages, with an assurance of easy ordering and fast shipping. Their website also boasts of great offers, which are declared on their website from time to time.

Media Contact Details-

Monogramonline Inc.

575 Underhill Blvd

Syosset, NY 11791

Phone: +1 856-320-3210

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OneClick is a great solution for True Religions lease and contract management needs..."

Lucernex, a leading provider of cloud based Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) has announced today that True Religion, a premium denim and denim-related sportswear brand, has chosen Lucernexs software solution for smaller emerging companies.

True Religion has been a major player in the fashion industry since 2002. With Lucerenex OneClick, True Religion will be utilizing a preconfigured cloud based solution to proactively manage their leases and contracts for all retail locations. This unique solution allows True Religion and any other OneClick clients to quickly implement the solution and start paying rent in as little as two weeks.

OneClick is a great solution for True Religions lease and contract management needs, and our team looks forward to supporting this great brand as it continues to grow, stated Mike Nuzum, Chairman at Lucernex. We have watched many clients grow into large organizations, eventually needing complete real estate lifecycle management solutions. OneClick is the perfect stepping stone for the transition to a full IWMS software solution.

About Lucernex

Lucernex provides cloud based Integrated Workplace Management Solutions (IWMS) to both emerging and enterprise companies around the globe. Our analytics, market planning, site selection, contract management, project management, facility management and maintenance management solutions are used by our valued customers everyday and helps them drive revenue, reduce costs, ensure compliance and mitigate risk. For more information please visit us at http://www.lucernex.com

About True Religion Apparel, Inc.

True Religion Apparel, Inc. is a premium denim and denim-related sportswear brand known for its quality craftsmanship and bold style designed to stand out. The Company designs, manufactures and distributes True Religion products, including its True Religion jeans, sportswear and licensed accessories. The specialty denim fits, washes and treatments are all designed with amplified details to stand out. True Religion products may be found in the Companys branded retail and outlets stores, as well as contemporary department stores and boutiques. For more information, please visit http://www.truereligion.com.
RealtyTech Goes Local with new Agent Website and IDX features

RealtyTech Inc. has just released integrated features on their Real Estate Agent and Office websites and Agent and Broker IDX solutions designed to optimize for an Agent's specific local market.

"With over a million websites and IDX agent solutions on the internet it is difficult for an average agent to rank highly on Google and get traffic to their websites unless they actively market their website to a specific or a few specific sub-markets," says RealtyTech CEO Richard Uzelac. "We have long advocated for agents to narrow the focus of their marketing efforts both online and offline. These new widgets and integrated products allow the savvy agent, team or brokerage to put a stake in the sand and claim a market online."

With a very open and extensible customization interface, agents can show up on the major search engines for their Farms and other areas of expertise. RealtyTech has a strong support program to teach agents how to best exploit these opportunities.

About RealtyTech Inc.

RealtyTech Inc. is a Thousand Oaks, CA based Company that gives real estate professionals and companies the tools necessary to stand out and succeed in todays online marketplace combined with solution minded, live California-based customer service. We have over 15 years of online real estate marketing expertise and have spent over 10 years of that experience offering Agent and Office websites, IDX Home Searches and Internet Marketing.

For more information, please call (877) 832-4428 or visit http://www.RealtyTech.com
Made In New York Jazz Competition Montenegro 2016 This collaboration and two new locations gives extra exposure to the artists participating in the competition and proves, yet again, how important jazz is to our world.

Made In New York Jazz Competition is an innovative, online competition that culminates with live performances at the top jazz gathering in New York City this May 21st. Due to the success of the event, the competition is expanding by introducing two additional locations for live concerts. The new locations will be in Sveti Stefan, Montenegro June 3rd and Podgorica, Montenegro on June 5th.

The expansion to European locations will enhance the competition greatly by allowing more musicians from around the world to share their talents at the live concerts. Just as in New York City, the concerts will feature, both established jazz masters as well as winners and participants from the competition.

Made In New York Jazz Competition Founder, Misha Brovkin said, This collaboration and two new locations gives extra exposure to the artists participating in the competition and proves, yet again, how important jazz is to our world.

The competition is unique in that it is held entirely online with submissions entered for a myriad of categories that run the gamut in the style of jazz. The entrants are judged and the winners receive a cash prize, the opportunity to perform live in New York City, Sveti Stefan or Podgorica as well as receive an enormous amount of exposure within the community on an international level.

The Made In New York Jazz festival in Montenegro is powered by Capital Plaza.

This collaboration has been made possible with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Montenegro as well as the partnership formed between the competition and Rabbit Records, which is represented by the Montenegro renowned artist and composer, Vladimir Maras.

Brovkin said, This is just the beginning of a long road and we couldnt be more excited.

For more information, visit the competition website: http://madeinnyjazz.com/festival/
Israel on Thursday reiterated its opposition to a planned French peace conference, calling instead for direct and unconditional negotiations with the Palestinians.

"The best way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct, bilateral negotiations," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement.

"Israel is ready to begin them immediately without preconditions. Any other diplomatic initiative distances the Palestinians from direct negotiations."

The statement comes after French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced Paris would organise a ministerial meeting on May 30, ahead of a potential peace conference.

The proposal has been welcomed by the Palestinians, who suspended a planned UN resolution condemning Israeli illegal settlements to focus on the bid.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas encouraged support for the French proposal on a recent tour of Europe.

But Israel has consistently argued that peace can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the two sides, rather than international forums.

The last serious attempt at peace negotiations broke down two years ago.

The May 30 meeting will include representatives from 20 countries, plus the European Union and the United Nations, but not the Israelis or Palestinians.

Paris is currently preparing invitations for the event, diplomatic sources said.

If successful, the meeting would lead to an international conference later this year in the presence of both Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

Israel has not explicitly ruled out involvement in the conference.

The French attempt comes at a time of high tensions as the wave of repression by Israeli occupation forces has killed 203 Palestinians and 28 Israelis since last October,.

Peace talks have been frozen since a US-brokered initiative collapsed in April 2014, after a year of intense shuttle diplomacy by US Secretary of State John Kerry.

*The story was edited by Ahram Online.

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Ret. Officer Jess Gilman Joins T3 Motion Sales Team Jess' knowledge of patrol-based applications for T3 Motion tactical technology is tremendous...He brings real world experience to T3 Motion customers.

T3 Motion, Inc. (OTC: TTTM), the global leader in the design and delivery of electric vehicles and tactical technology to the law enforcement, military, and security markets, announced the hiring of Law Enforcement professional, Ret. Officer Jess Gilman, as Director of Sales/Western Region.

Jess began his 28-year law enforcement career with the Baldwin Park Police Department, where he honed his investigative skills. Two years later, he joined the Costa Mesa Police Department. At CMPD, Jess worked various assignments including Patrol, The South Coast Plaza Substation and DARE. He specialized in School Safety as a School Resource Officer. Jess taught Crisis Response for Schools on behalf of the Orange County Department of Education. In 2007, Mr. Gilman was selected by his peers as The California School Resource Officer of the Year for his work with students.

We are excited to announce Jess Gilmans role with the T3 Motion team, said Noel Cherowbrier, C.E.O. of T3 Motion, Inc. With Jess background with School Resource Officer programs, he brings real world experience to T3 Motion customers, especially those in the Campus Safety sector. His experience in retail center policing is also a strong synergy for us with our electric stand-up patrol vehicles, the T3 Patroller and T3 Vision. His knowledge of patrol-based applications for T3 Motion tactical technology is tremendous and he has been a valuable asset since coming aboard.

About T3 Motion, Inc.:

T3 Motion, Inc. (OTC: TTTM) was founded in 2006 in Costa Mesa, CA and has become the leader in clean energy, all-electric patrol vehicles for the Law Enforcement, Military, and Security markets. T3 Motions revolutionary patented T3 Patroller was the first electric multi-shift vehicle designed for professional applications with interchangeable batteries. Deployed at airports, military facilities, retail centers, campuses, business districts, and other high-profile locations, the T3 Patroller has quickly become the choice of public safety agencies around the world. T3 Motion, Inc. now also offers customers the T3 Vision, a smaller all-electric patrol vehicle with interchangeable batteries ideal for interior patrols. For more information, visit http://www.t3motion.com, email sales(at)t3motion.com, or call (714) 255-0200.

Safe Harbor" Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Statements in this press release regarding T3 Motions business, which are not historical facts, are "forward-looking statements" that are not guarantees of future performance. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, among others, factors associated with market conditions and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions related to the proposed public offering. For additional information concerning these and other factors that may cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see "Risk Factors" in the Companys Registration Statement filed on Form S-1, as amended, and in periodic reports the Company files from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Digital marketing agency Noble Studios recently partnered with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to help save Belizes endangered reef. Noble worked as the backend developer tying in third-party components to create a seamless experience for both WWF and its audience.

This campaign aligned with the Noble teams core values, one of which is to work on projects with purpose. The campaign raises awareness and hopefully influences protection of the Belize barrier reef, which is on the List of World Heritage in Danger. The campaign mentions together, we can protect the site from harmful industrial activities.

According to WWF, tourism, fishing and research around the reef account for 15 percent of the countrys GDP, while coastal construction has contributed to the damaging of Belizes coral and mangroves.

The campaign lets people directly email Dean Barrow, Prime Minister of Belize and reads, in part, I encourage you to secure the long-term protection of Belizes reef as a positive legacy of your leadership for Belizeans and the world.

Were tremendously excited to be a part of this campaign, which really connects with issues that we, as a company, are concerned about, said Noble Studios CEO and co-founder Jarrod Lopiccolo. WWF is a solid organization doing important work, so we jumped on the opportunity to partner with them on this campaign to protect the natural resources of Belize.

The campaign, which has a goal of sending at least 150,000 emails to the prime minister, launched April 6. It can be found at https://makeyourmark.panda.org/belize.

About Noble Studios

Noble Studios is a digital marketing agency specializing in web, mobile and social media. Since 2003, the company has completed work for international brands such as Autodesk, Enphase Energy, Easton, Google, Haws Corporation, Newport Beach & Co., Santa Monica Travel and Tourism, University of California, and more. In 2013, 2014 and 2015, Inc. magazine recognized Noble Studios on its annual Inc. 500|5000 list of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. In 2014, Noble Studios was recognized as Nevadas Small Business of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration. Noble Studios also is an approved Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP). Follow Noble Studios on Facebook, Twitter, Think Tank Blog and LinkedIn.
Chronic heavy alcohol consumption may lead to an increase in the rate of nicotine metabolism, which could be one contributing factor to the poor smoking cessation rates in smokers addicted to alcohol

For smokers who are addicted to alcohol, chronic alcohol abuse may increase the rate of nicotine metabolism and contribute to poor smoking cessation rates. When smokers stop drinking the nicotine metabolism rates decline significantly, according to a study conducted by an international research team led by Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI). The research was a collaboration of scientists from Roswell Park; the University of California, San Francisco; and the Medical University of Silesia and Center of Addiction Treatment in Poland.

The information, published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, may inform future smoking cessation interventions among heavy alcohol users.

Our study showed that chronic heavy alcohol consumption may lead to an increase in the rate of nicotine metabolism, which could be one contributing factor to the poor smoking cessation rates in smokers addicted to alcohol, says senior author, Maciej Goniewicz, PhD, PharmD, Assistant Professor of Oncology in the Department of Health Behavior at Roswell Park. It is an important finding since a faster rate of nicotine metabolism was previously found to be associated with smoking more cigarettes per day, greater nicotine withdrawal symptoms and decreased efficacy of nicotine replacement therapy for smoking cessation. Importantly, we also found that when smokers stopped drinking, their nicotine metabolism slowed down.

The study was conducted from September 2011 to May 2012 at the Center for Addiction Treatment, an inpatient program providing treatment for alcohol dependence in Parzymiechy, Poland. A total of 318 participants were screened for eligibility, and 270 consented to participate in the study. Nicotine biomarkers were assessed in 22 participants selected randomly among male smokers from that group. The data collection occurred after cessation of alcohol consumption at three time points: baseline, week four and week seven. The results suggest that a normalization of nicotine metabolism occurred by week four of abstinence from alcohol.

Understanding changes in nicotine metabolism associated with chronic alcohol abuse and recovery during alcohol abstinence could have important implications for understanding smoking behavior and improving smoking cessation interventions for current and former heavy alcohol drinkers, adds paper co-author Neal Benowitz, MD, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. This could have implications for the timing or choice of smoking cessation treatments in recovering alcoholics.

This research was funded by grants from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland (award no. N404 145539), National Institute on Drug Abuse (project nos. R01DA002277 and P30DA012393) and National Cancer Institute (project no. R25CA113710).

The study, Cessation of alcohol consumption decreases rate of nicotine metabolism in male alcohol-dependent smokers, is available online at sciencedirect.com.

One of the studys authors, Andrzej Sobczak of the Medical University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland, received personal fees from the Smoking Institute in Poznan, Poland, and nonfinancial support from Chic Group LTD, outside of this submitted work. Dr. Goniewicz received a research grant from Pfizer Inc., and Dr. Benowitz serves as a paid consultant to pharmaceutical companies that market or are developing smoking cessation medications. He also has been a paid expert witness in litigation against tobacco companies. All other authors have nothing to disclose.

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The mission of Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) is to understand, prevent and cure cancer. Founded in 1898, RPCI is one of the first cancer centers in the country to be named a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center and remains the only facility with this designation in Upstate New York. The Institute is a member of the prestigious National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an alliance of the nations leading cancer centers; maintains affiliate sites; and is a partner in national and international collaborative programs. For more information, visit http://www.roswellpark.org, call 1-877-ASK-RPCI (1-877-275-7724) or email askrpci(at)roswellpark(dot)org. Follow Roswell Park on Facebook and Twitter.
Bill Howe Employees, Jason and Gilbert, Celebrate 10 Years in Local San Diego Plumbing Company They are family and the very heart of our organization.

For over 35 years, Bill Howe has been one of the leading San Diego plumbing companies offering the highest trained specialists and providing quality services at affordable rates. Since 1980, they have been operating on the mission to retain happy and healthy employees, provide the best services at affordable rates, and give back to the community.

The Bill Howe Family of Companies has over 25 San Diego plumbers who have been with the company for ten or more years, and is dedicated to retaining quality employees. In April, two more employees, Jason Bolas and Gilbert Baca, will celebrate their tenth anniversary with the company.

Gilbert Baca began as a laborer, and after being promoted to his own truck as a drain technician, he was offered the chance to attend the San Diego Plumbing-Heating-Cooling-Contractors Journeyman Program. He completed the four-year academy earning his Journeymans License.

Jason Bolas is one of Bill Howe Family of Companies best and specializes in tankless water heater installation and repair, and water treatment. He has also brought in many family members including his sisters, Elizabeth and Sarah, his brother, R.J., and several nieces and nephews. There are currently 8 Bolas family members working for the company, many of whom have been in service for many years.

As a family-owned business, we want to create the best environment for our team and consider each of them as part of our family, said Tina Howe Vice President of the Bill Howe Family of Companies. We truly have the best employees and are proud to offer them great benefits, a thriving career, advanced education, and value them as the most integral part of the Bill Howe brand.

The Bill Howe Family of Companies has over 65 San Diego plumbers, and over 150 employees across all three divisions in Plumbing, Restoration & Flood, and Heating & Air. More than 10 percent have been with the company for ten years or longer, and over 40 percent of the company has been part of the team for more than 5 years. Bill Howe says, They are family and the very heart of our organization.

For more information about the Bill Howe Family of Companies, visit http://www.billhowe.com, or to speak with Bill or Tina Howe regarding this announcement, contact Bill Howe Marketing Director, Julie Riddle at Julie@billhowe.com.

About Bill Howe Family of Companies

Bill Howe Family of Companies is comprised of Bill Howe Plumbing, Inc.; Bill Howe Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc.; Bill Howe Restoration & Flood Services, Inc. The family-owned and operated company began in 1980 with the plumbing division and has grown into San Diego Countys largest low-cost one-stop-shop for service, repairs and installation, offering both residential and commercial services. 9085 Aero Drive, Suite B, San Diego CA 92123. Call 1-800-BILL-HOWE because We Know Howe!

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We love PixStori. Its a great way to capture peoples emotional memories. says Leslie Reynolds, President of the Kingston Trio Legacy Project.

Visitors to the GRAMMY Museum at L.A. LIVE will be invited to install and use PixStori, the free iOS app from Talking Pictures, LLC, as they tour The Kingston Trio and the Folk Revival. The exhibit, curated by the Woody Guthrie Center, the GRAMMY Museum, and the Kingston Trio Legacy Project, runs from April 26 to Fall, 2016.

The PixStori app gives visitors and museums a new kind of exhibit engagement through social media. PixStori combines a photograph with an audio commentary and a text caption. Visitors will be able to download and install the app instantly on-site via an SMS text message to their iPhone or iPad. They can take photos as they go through the exhibit--from displays to selfies putting themselves and their friends into the exhibit. In the moment or anytime later, they use the app to record an audio comment, response, story, or memory prompted by the exhibit photo. Combined in a sharable PixStori, these talking pictures can then be uploaded to a special Kingston Trio PixStori web portal, via a one-click Kingston Trio ShareLink installed with the app.

We love PixStori. Its a great way to capture peoples emotional memories for our archive. says Leslie Reynolds, President of the Kingston Trio Legacy Project. Many organizations are now using PixStori ShareLinks to create collections on dedicated PixStori Portal websites, either as public sites or as in-house curating websites. Branded PixStori Portals and ShareLinks for the app are provided free on request for any project or organization, augmenting the standard PixStori options for sharing by email, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

PixStori is a new App recently launched by Talking Pictures, LLC, a startup based in Buffalo and New York City. Managing Partner Mike Haller is a documentary filmmaker and successful IT entrepreneur; CTO Charlie Sands leads a media technology development group in NYC; co-founder Michael Frisch is a leading oral historian who has been introducing Pixstori on four continents in invited presentations on oral history in the new digital environment.

The PixStori App is available as a free download from Apples App Store and will be available for Android later in 2016. Send requests for the free Web Portal and Sharelink options to info(at)pixstori(dot)com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pixstori

Instagram: https://instagram.com/pixstori
Monica S. Betancourt, a licensed real estate agent in the Pinecrest/Palmetto Bay market in Miami, has joined the prestigious Haute Residence Real Estate Network.

The Haute Residence Real Estate Network of Hauteresidence.com, affiliated with luxury lifestyle publication Haute Living, is proud to recognize Monica S. Betancourt as a prominent real estate professional and the networks newest partner.

Designed as a partnership-driven luxury real estate portal, Haute Residence connects its affluent readers with top real estate professionals, while offering the latest in real estate news, showcasing the worlds most extraordinary residences on the market and sharing expert advice from its knowledgeable and experienced real estate partners.

The invitation-only luxury real estate network, which partners with just one agent in every market, unites a distinguished collective of leading real estate agents and brokers and highlights the most extravagant properties in leading markets around the globe for affluent buyers, sellers, and real estate enthusiasts.

HauteResidence.com has grown to be the number one news source for luxury listings, high-end residential developments, celebrity real estate, and more.

Access all of this information and more by visiting: http://www.hauteresidence.com

About Monica S. Betancourt:

Monica S. Betancourt heads a group of talented Realtors who are dedicated to understanding and exceeding the expectations of their luxury real estate customers. Every member of The Monica Betancourt Group stays informed on market trends and the latest data in order to better inform customers and expertly negotiate on their behalf for optimal results. Betancourts business originates mostly from referrals, affirming the high rate of her clients satisfaction.

As part of EWM Realty International and Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, she is uniquely positioned to be your local connection in the global market. Betancourt will help homebuyers find their paradise and discover the art of fine living.

To learn more, visit Monica S. Betancourts Haute Residence profile: http://www.hauteresidence.com/member/monica-s-betancour
This is not a fad, there is serious money behind these attacks, and theyll continue until the hotel industry can adjust - PandaLabs Technical Director Luis Corrons

PandaLabs, the laboratory of Panda Security, has released The Hotel Hijackers, a whitepaper detailing a growing trend of cyber-attacks against the hospitality industry. PandaLabs research reveals 2015 as setting a precedent in attacks in this sector, and details how major chains like Trump, Hilton and Starwood were affected. The whitepaper can be downloaded here.

According to the data, hotels present a perfect target for cyber-criminals, since there is endless information turning over on a day-to-day basis, from personal identity data to credit card information. The Hotel Hijackers, cites that by the end of 2015, most of the hotels, regardless of their size had been victims of cyber crimes. Several hotel chains are detailed as victims in the report with the following breaches revealed:



Hard Rock Las Vegas: 173,000 credit cards stolen in a seven-month span

Hyatt Hotels: 249 hotels spanning 54 countries attacked by an infection to their point-of-sale (POS) terminals

Rosen Hotels & Resorts: Had infected POS systems for 1.5 years before realizing it

Money will always be the top motivation for cyber criminals, attackers see the millions of rooms as customer information that can be turned into millions of dollars, said PandaLabs technical director and lead researcher, Luis Corrons. This is not a fad, there is serious money behind these attacks, and theyll continue until the hotel industry can adjust.

PandaLabs detected and neutralized more than 84 million new malware samples throughout 2015 and continues to provide groundbreaking research on top trends affecting the security industry. Last May, PandaLabs discovered and published Operation Oil Tanker: The Phantom Menace, a compelling report that detailed the targeted attack on the oil tanker industry. Pandas Adaptive Defense 360 is the product, among others, that lead PandaLabs to these discoveries. The advanced security product monitors and classifies all of a companys software to discover and stop all malware in the system.

Adaptive Defense 360 is the recommended first line of defense to those in the hospitality industry to protect against advanced threats and targeted attacks. The innovative product guarantees data confidentiality, privacy of information, business reputation, and legacy.

To read the full report click here: The Hotel Hijackers

About Panda Security

Founded in 1990, Panda Security is the world's leading cloud-based security solutions company. Based in Spain, the company has a direct presence in over 80 countries, products translated into more than 23 languages and millions of users worldwide. Its mission is to simplify the complexity by creating new and better solutions to safeguard the digital life of its users. http://www.pandasecurity.com/usa/
AARP today announced the winners of its fifth Health Innovation@50+ LivePitch event held yesterday, Wednesday, April 27 at Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, CA. Ten startup health tech companies focused on caregiving pitched their businesses and Penrose Senior Care Auditors was chosen as Judges Choice. SingFit was voted as Consumers Choice by the 400+ audience. The full event streaming video, as well as highlights, will be posted on the website which also includes more information on companies and content, at http://health50.org/.

We were very impressed with our finalists this year, and how their businesses will improve the lives of caregivers and those they care for, said Jody Holtzman, senior vice president, Enterprise Strategy and Innovation, AARP. Of a great set of companies, Penrose Senior Care Auditors stood out and was recognized by our industry expert judges. SingFit resonated the most with the 400+ people who joined us yesterday. We are now excited to work with all the finalists to support their businesses as they make critical impacts in the 50 and over health technology sector.

Judges Choice Penrose Senior Care Auditors of Dallas, TX provides the first and only tech/app-enabled senior care auditing solution, called Penrose Check-Ins, to ensure seniors are okay while providing families peace-of-mind. During the Penrose Care-Check, an auditor visits the senior and using the app, assesses 150 items related to their well being and reports back to the family. @penrosecheckin

Consumers Choice SingFit of Los Angeles, CA combines a growing body of scientific research on the health benefits of prescribed singing with a proprietary music platform in order to mass distribute the benefits of music as medicine. Focused on dementia care and healthy aging, its debut product SingFit PRIME is the winner of the USC Keck School of Medicine Body Computing Prize. @MusicalHealthT

AARPs Health Innovation@50+ LivePitch is a one day pitch competition for emerging startups in the healthy living space with a focus on caregiving. The event included speaking sessions on caregiving, and a keynote with Nancy LeaMond, chief advocacy and engagement officer, AARP. Ten companies then presented their business focus on stage before a panel of industry leader judges and an audience filled with actual intended end users of these solutions, i.e. AARP members and consumers.

Previous AARP Health Innovation@50+ LivePitch events have been held in Boston, Las Vegas and New Orleans, with last years event in Miami showcasing technology innovation across Florida. Press interested in speaking with AARP executives, the winners, or any of the finalists about AARP Health Innovation@50+ LivePitch may contact Laura Beck, laurabeck@adeointeractive.com. The AARP Health Innovation @50+ LivePitch event is produced with support by Adeo InterActive.

About AARP:

AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, with a membership of nearly 38 million, that helps people turn their goals and dreams into Real Possibilities, strengthens communities and fights for the issues that matter most to families such as healthcare, employment and income security, retirement planning, affordable utilities and protection from financial abuse. We advocate for individuals in the marketplace by selecting products and services of high quality and value to carry the AARP name as well as help our members obtain discounts on a wide range of products, travel, and services. A trusted source for lifestyle tips, news and educational information, AARP produces AARP The Magazine, the world's largest circulation magazine; AARP Bulletin; http://www.aarp.org; AARP TV & Radio; AARP Books; and AARP en Espanol, a Spanish-language website addressing the interests and needs of Hispanics. AARP does not endorse candidates for public office or make contributions to political campaigns or candidates. The AARP Foundation is an affiliated charity that provides security, protection, and empowerment to older persons in need with support from thousands of volunteers, donors, and sponsors. AARP has staffed offices in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Learn more at http://www.aarp.org.

Real Possibilities is a trademark of AARP.
Grand Valley BMX 2015 Mile High Nationals

For the second time in nine months, riders from around the globe will converge on Grand Junction, Colorado for the USA BMX Mile High Nationals and North American Supercross Series. One of only two U.S. stops that offered the all important Olympic qualifying points twice within the year.

Olympic Silver medalist Sam Willoughby (Australia) will look to repeat as he was the winner in 2015. Two-time Olympic Gold Medalist Maris Strombergs (Latvia) will try and make sure that doesnt happen. US Olympian, Alise Post (Minnesota) will look to repeat in the womens pro class. All three riders are favorites to make the Olympic team for their countries. In addition many other riders will be competing for Olympic points as they compete in the North American Supercross Series. American riders will also be trying to qualify for the United States Olympic Trials Last Chance Qualifier. Grand Junction is the third and final stop for qualifying points.

The 3-day national event will get underway Friday, April 29 with racing beginning at 2:30 PM. Action will begin with the pros and they will run every hour and half with semi or main events beginning at 6:30. Amateur racing will be throughout the day beginning around 3:00 PM.

Saturday racing will kick off at 12:30 PM with the pros and they will again run every hour and a half. Amateur racing will begin around 1:00 PM. Sunday racing will begin at 8:00 AM.

The Mile High National is expected to draw around 1,000 entries from 15 states and several countries. Riders from Japan, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia have already visited the track. The 2015 Mile High Nationals had an economic impact of over $775,000 in Mesa County. This year, the event is expected to be even larger. With amateur riders competing Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the three-day national event, the Mesa County Fairgrounds will be filled with BMX racers ranging from as young as two-years-old to riders competing in the 61 and over class. Grand Junction locals will be competing in almost every age category and many are hoping to be in contention for a national age group title at the end of the year.

There is no admission charge for the event and parking is $10. Grand Valley BMX operates weekly at the Fairgrounds with racing every Sunday and on Tuesday evenings during the summer. The track is one of the top tracks in the United States and annually draws thousands of riders into Mesa County.

For more information on Grand Valley BMX visit grandvalleybmx.com. To find more information on USA BMX or the Mile High Nationals, visit usabmx.com.
Wells Fargo President and COO Tim Sloan, 2016 Leader of the Year (center), with Gerry Morton, Greater Los Angeles Area Council President and Board Chair (left), and Chuck Keathley, Scout Executive/CEO "The selection of Tim for this honor is fitting given his exemplary business leadership at one of the nation's largest financial institutions, which makes community building a priority." - Gerry Morton, GLAAC President and Board Chair

The Boy Scouts of Americas Greater Los Angeles Area Council (GLAAC) raised nearly $300,000 at its 9th annual Business Leaders Breakfast held April 27th that was attended by nearly 500 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. Timothy (Tim) J. Sloan, Wells Fargos President and Chief Operating Officer, was recognized as 2016s Leader of the Year at an event that recognizes exceptional efforts by area business leaders to improve the lives of youth in communities across Southern California.

The event was highlighted by hearing the story of how Ryan Gonzalez, a 15-year-old Scout from San Marino Troop #355, saved the life of FBI agent Tim Dixon by performing the Heimlich maneuver to clear his airway. For his heroic efforts on February 27, 2016, Gonzalez was given the Lifesaving Action Award.

The selection of Tim for this honor is fitting given his exemplary business leadership at one of the nations largest financial institutions, which makes community building a priority, said Gerry Morton, GLAAC President and Board Chair. Tims business credentials are impeccable and yet with all of his responsibilities leading Wells Fargo hes found time over the years to support the Boy Scouts organization.

Sloan is responsible for the operations of Wells Fargo's four main business groups: Community Banking, Consumer Lending, Wealth and Investment Management and Wholesale Banking. A 28-year veteran of Wells Fargo & Company, hes served as the chief financial officer and was responsible for the financial management functions.

I understand the positive impact that Scouting has had on our family, our Scout Troop and the youth in our community, said Sloan. One of my proudest accomplishments in Scouting was leading two treks to Philmont and surviving. (Philmont Scout Ranch is the Boy Scouts largest national High Adventure Base of rugged mountain wilderness in the Sangre de Cristo range of the Rocky Mountains in northern New Mexico.)

The long-time resident of San Marino became involved with the Boy Scouts in 1999 when his sons were growing up. He served as Assistant Scoutmaster for Troop #355 in San Marino. He is now the proud father of two Eagle Scouts.

Sloan also served on the Board of the Boy Scouts of America, San Gabriel Valley Area Council in 2005 and 2006, and was an important part of the Endowment and Investment Committee.

Sloans strong community commitment extends to his service on the Board of Overseers of the Huntington Library, and membership in the University of Michigans Ross School of Business Advisory Board. He is a trustee of Ohio Wesleyan University and the City of Hope. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of California Resources Corporation and recently became a Trustee at Caltech.

Co-Chairs for the 2016 event were Mike Birkholm and Thomas McDonald. The pair note the L.A. business community is returning to support the Boys Scouts in a significant way. Organizations sponsoring the 2016 Business Leaders Breakfast include:

 Kennedy Wilson (presenting)

 Colony Capital (presenting)

 Eastdil Secured (presenting)

 The Gill Corporation

 Wells Fargo & Company/Tim Sloan

 A.C. Martin

 Price Waterhouse Cooper

 Payden & Rygel

 Carpenters Union

 Davis Bacon Material Handling

 Creative Future/Warner Brothers

 Metro/MetroLink/Amtrak

 Northrup Grumman

 Guardian Group, Inc.

 EU Capital Advisors

 The TCW Group

 Century Hill Realty

 Deloitte

 Dentons

 Green Hasson Janks

 Illig Construction/Tilden Coil

 John H. Kedeshian

 Meshulam Financial

About The Boy Scouts of America, Greater Los Angeles Area Council

The Greater Los Angeles Area Council (GLAAC) started in 1915 and has served millions of youth since its inception. Currently, GLAAC annually serves more than 26,000 youths across greater Los Angeles, delivering quality programs each year via 10,700 trained adult volunteers. With a focus on character development, Scouts are trained to be the leaders of tomorrow.

The GLAAC continues to grow and seek ways to inspire success in the lives of youth through activities ranging from camping to rocketry. Merit Badge Days have taken youth into the construction site of the tallest building west of the Mississippi, in front of judges at mock court, and into financial literacy sessions. In 2014, more than 12,500 Merit Badges were awarded to Scouts for successfully completing service projects such as food drives to fight hunger and Eagle projects in their local communities. Scouts also continue to stand as role models of good citizenship at civic events and parades, including the Rose Parade.

BLBscouts.org

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Turkey's military returned fire on Islamic State (IS) group positions in northern Syria on Thursday, killing 11 members of the militant group, military sources said.

The military returned fire after its artillery near the border town of Karkamis was hit by mortars, the sources said. Seven militants firing mortars were killed and four more were killed in a vehicle, the sources said.

Karkamis is just across the border from the IS group-controlled Syrian town of Jarablus. It is also about 100 km (62 miles) east of the Turkish border town of Kilis, which has been frequently hit by rocket fire from IS group-controlled Syrian territory in recent months, killing civilians.

Turkey has repeatedly fired back at IS positions from its border with Syria, but has said it needs greater support from Western allies, citing the difficulty of hitting moving targets with howitzers.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying this week that the United States would deploy a rocket launcher system near the stretch of border that has come under attack.

A senior US military official has confirmed the matter was under discussion but declined to comment further.

In the latest attack on Kilis, one person was killed and 26 injured when rockets pounded the town on Sunday.

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figshare logo Not only will this significantly enrich the Figshare user experience and improve content discovery, but it will offer additional context and insight into the sharing and reuse of research outputs - advancing a new era of data level metrics.

Figshare, an online digital repository for academic research, today announced that research outputs deposited on its platform that have received attention online will display Altmetric Badges. The attention data for datasets, videos, images, code and other alternative research outputs will be presented within the Figshare platform, and users will be able to access a collated record of all of the comments, shares and discussion relating to an item with a single click.

The attention data for individual research outputs is gathered by Altmetric in real-time from thousands of non-traditional sources including public policy documents, mainstream news and social media, online reference managers, post-publication peer-review forums, and other online forums such as F1000 and Wikipedia.

Mark Hahnel, Founder of Figshare said:

There are currently over 6,000 citations of research outputs deposited on Figshare, but citations are a notoriously slow indicator of impact. Altmetric data gives immediate feedback on attention from non-traditional sources. Not only will this significantly enrich the Figshare user experience and improve content discovery, but it will offer additional context and insight into the sharing and reuse of research outputs - advancing a new era of data level metrics.

Both Figshare and Altmetric are part of the Digital Science stable which also includes ReadCube, Overleaf and Symplectic amongst others. Daniel Hook, Managing Director of Digital Science said:

This is a great example of how our portfolio companies are working together to maximise the benefits of their technologies for researchers. Encouraging further exploration of research metrics is central to everything Altmetric does, and this collaboration with Figshare surfaces the online engagement and discussion surrounding alternative outputs on a scale weve not seen before.

Digital Science is continually working to ensure our tools are interoperable with widely-adopted platforms and tools.

Altmetric Badges are live on Figshare now, visit figshare.com to find out more.

About Figshare

Figshare is a web-based platform to help academic institutions manage, disseminate and measure the public attention of all their research outputs. The light-touch and user-friendly approach focuses on four key areas: research data management, reporting and statistics, research data dissemination and administrative control. Figshare works with institutions in North America and internationally to help them meet key funder recommendations and to provide world-leading tools to support an open culture of data sharing and collaboration. For more information, visit http://figshare.com and follow @figshare on Twitter.

About Altmetric

Altmetric was founded in 2011. Its mission is to track and analyze the online activity around scholarly literature. Altmetric is the trusted altmetrics provider for some of the worlds biggest publishers, funders and institutions, delivering real-time attention data in an accessible and reliable format. Altmetric is supported by Digital Science, which is operated by the global media company Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Follow on Twitter @altmetric.

About Digital Science

Digital Science is a technology company serving the needs of scientific and research communities, at the laboratory bench or in a research setting. It invests in and incubates scientific software companies that simplify the research cycle, making more time for discovery. Its portfolio companies include a host of leading and admired brands including Altmetric, BioRAFT, Figshare, Labguru, Overleaf, ReadCube, Symplectic and UberResearch. It is operated by global media company, the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

Visit http://www.digital-science.com and follow @digitalsci on Twitter.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a leading technology policy think tank, today in a new report urged U.S. policymakers to take decisive steps to ensure the United States continues to be a world leader in high-performance computing. Otherwise, it risks being surpassed by China, Japan, and the European Union at the expense of its economic competitiveness and national security.

From efficiently designing next-generation products, to empowering scientific discovery, to ensuring the nations security, high-performance computing undergirds Americas defense and industrial competitiveness, said Stephen Ezell, ITIF vice president for global innovation policy and coauthor of the new report. The U.S. is home to three of the five fastest supercomputers in the world, but China is home to the global frontrunner and plans to launch an even faster supercomputer this year. Japan and the EU have also introduced concerted national programs to achieve high-performance computing leadership. While America is still the world leader, other nations are gaining on us, so the U.S. cannot afford to rest on its laurels. It is important for policymakers to build on efforts the Obama administration has undertaken to ensure the U.S. does not get out paced.

High-performance computingusing supercomputers and massively parallel processing techniques to solve complex computational problems through modeling, simulation, and data analysisis critical to scientific leadership and national security, the report explains. Commercial innovators also leverage high-performance computing to achieve breakthroughs in a wide range of applications, including in manufacturing, life sciences, chemical engineering, electronics, and energy. The report details new areas of potential discovery for manufacturing and industrial applications, as well as health-care and scientific research.

Yet the report shows how competition for global leadership in this area is intensifying. For example, while the United States today is home to 199 of the worlds 500 most powerful supercomputers, this number is down 14 percent from the previous year and represents the fewest number of supercomputers the United States has placed in the Top 500 since the lists inception in 1993. This drop is occurring while other nations are simultaneously building up their own national strategies to strengthen their high-performance computing ecosystems with the goal of edging out the United States.

Recognizing the heightening competition, President Barack Obama announced the U.S. National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) in July 2015. To build on this program, ITIF offers the following policy recommendations:

-Congress should hold hearings on the NSCI and the intensifying race for global high-performance computing leadership.

-Congress should authorize and appropriate funding levels for the NSCI as requested in the Obama administrations FY 2017 budget.

-Congress and the administration should reform export control regulations to match the reality of current high-performance computing systems.

-The administration should continue to make technology transfer and commercialization activities a priority focus of Americas network of national laboratories.

-The administration should emphasize high-performance computing in federal worker training and retraining programs and in relevant Manufacturing Extension Partnership engagements.

This isnt just about making sure U.S. vendors are competitive, said ITIF President Robert D. Atkinson, coauthor of the report. This is about building a robust U.S. high-performance computing ecosystem focused on adoption and use, not just production. This will entail broadening knowledge and training and encouraging government agencies to use supercomputers for specific purposes like defense, renewable energy, weather forecasting, and more. Federal R&D investment in frontier technologies has been a catalyst for U.S. development of world-leading technology industries, and it will continue to be critical for leadership in high-performance computing as well.

Read the report.
Sarah's Candies store at Chicago OHare International Airport. Were excited to launch the new store to engage all five senses of passengers and enhance their overall travel experience, stated Imberman. The hope is that you will smell the chocolate aroma in the air as you are walking to your gate."

Something sweet is coming to Chicago OHare International Airport. Sarahs Candies, a confectionery airport concessionaire with homemade local delights, will celebrate its official grand opening on Monday.

Sarahs Candies is unique in that all the locally made products are sourced from women-owned local businesses, including founder Sarah Levy Imberman herself.

As a woman who started my company from nothing in my moms kitchen and who remembers how tough it was in the beginning to sell my products locally and make a name for myself, I wanted to support other women entrepreneurs, commented Imberman. Being born and raised in Chicago, keeping the products and vendors in my hometown was also important to me to support the community and economy.

The new store, located in Terminal 2, features the finest handmade chocolate candies Chicago has to offer. It offers Imbermans own award-winning sweets as well as her handpicked homegrown favorites such as Veruca Chocolates, Amys Candy Bar, Whimsical Candy, and Sulpice Chocolat. There is also a separate section for snacks with all-natural ingredients for the more health conscious traveler.

Were excited to launch the new store to engage all five senses of passengers and enhance their overall travel experience, stated Imberman. The hope is that you will smell the chocolate aroma in the air as you are walking to your gate. Then you will be captured by the colorful packages of all the candy.

The grand opening event will include a ribbon-cutting, cooking demonstration, product sampling, prize giveaways, and a live guitarist, along with a sneak peak at the second edition of Imbermans cookbook, Sweetness: Delicious Baked Treats for Every Occasion, hitting shelves June 2016.

In 2004, Chicago native Imbermans passion became her profession when she launched Sarahs Pastries & Candies out of her moms kitchen. Soon after, she opened her pastry shop near Chicagos Magnificent Mile. In 2011, she competed on the Food Network Challenge and won the shows $10,000 prize for her 3-feet tall dinosaur-shaped cake, complete with a moving head and tail and a habitat of dry ice for extra effect. She expanded her business beyond pastry and entered the airport food concession space in recent years, when she rebranded her company S. Levy Foods.

The store is a licensed partner with leading North American travel retailer Hudson Group. Our partnership with Sarahs Candies further defines our commitment to Chicago OHare International Airport to bring the best brands the city of Chicago has to offer," commented Hudson Group President & CEO Joe DiDomizio. The quality of Sarahs Candies as well as the fine selection of the other confectionery brands only reinforces our goal to be 'The Travelers Best Friend.'

Sweeten up your next Chicago airport travel experience and stop by!

About S. Levy Foods:

Award-winning pastry chef Sarah Levy Imberman expanded her business beyond pastry and entered the airport food concession space in August 2012, when she rebranded her company S. Levy Foods, a certified ACDBE (Airport Concession Disadvantaged Business Enterprise). Sarahs passion for food thrives as she helps to bring real food (which reflect the local market) to airports. Sarah has since grown to operating restaurants in five airports--John F. Kennedy, Sacramento, Phoenix Sky Harbor, San Diego, and Los Angeles--and is a proud joint-venture partner of SSP America. Sarah is thrilled to bring back her Sarahs Candies brand through her partnership with Hudson Group at Chicago OHare International Airport--Terminal 2.

About Hudson Group:

Hudson Group, the largest travel retailer in North America, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of international travel retailer Dufry AG (DUFN) of Basel, Switzerland. Hudson Group operates over 973 Hudson, Hudson News, Hudson Booksellers, cafes, specialty retail and duty free shops in 83 airports and transportation terminals in the United States and Canada. Dufry operates over 1,700 stores in more than 60 countries and 240 airports and transportation terminals around the world.
House Buyers of America is pleased to announce that, once again, the company has achieved an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau (BBB).

We couldnt be happier about our continued, sustained A+ rating with the BBB, said company CEO, Nick Ron. This top rating proves that we are committed to serving the industry in a way that is fair and ethical to our customers, contractors, employees and tradespeople.

Achieving an A+ rating means that the company has been successful in meeting a very strict criteria, that includes: building trust, honesty and transparency in advertising and all other aspects of business; honoring promises and responding promptly to disputes; having privacy safeguards and embodying integrity. Some other factors considered for the rating were the number of complaints filed against the company and the length of time for which the company has been in business.

House Buyers of America has been a BBB member since 2001 and has had glowing reviews from its customers over the past 15 years. Ron explains, Our goal isnt simply to be fair and ethical and create happy customers, our goal is to create raving fans who will tell run out and tell all of their friends and family about the tremendous service they received from us. Our goal isnt just to meet our customer expectations, it is to greatly surpass their expectations at every turn.

While there are other home buying companies that offer cash for houses, House Buyers of America is the undisputed industry leader. Backed by a large team of dedicated contractors to renovate houses bought in As Is condition, coupled with capital and experience in volume buying, the company is able to offer a higher cash price than their competitors. This well- established company has more than a decade of experience under its belt and enjoys an outstanding reputation.

We significantly reduce the stress associated with the traditional house selling process, the CEO points out. When two or more siblings inherit a home, or if a landlord wants to sell a rental property, for example, that home can turn into a burden for the seller. The cost of renovating it so it will be in top marketing condition could require taking out a loan. The market itself has ups and downs, and that possible 6-12 month wait for a sale, plus the 6 percent Realtor commission means you could wind up with negative equity on your home. Who wants that? House Buyers of America offers cash for those looking to sell their home As Is  quickly. We provide the means for sellers to move on with their lives, and we do it with the best possible customer service, as evidenced by our ongoing A+ rating.

To learn more about how you can quickly sell your home for cash in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, DC, please visit housebuyersofamerica.com/about_house_buyers_of_america/.

About House Buyers of America

House Buyers of America is a residential real estate investment company headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia. By using House Buyers of America, home owners no longer have to pay real estate commissions, deal with real estate agents, or fix up their properties. The company offers a guaranteed, fast and hassle-free sale to people who want to sell their house without paying a 6 percent real estate commission. House Buyers of America buys each property As Is and renovates the house if necessary, so sellers do not need to waste their time or money readying their property for sale.

Contact Details:

House Buyers of America, Inc.

14420 Albemarle Point Place, Suite 150

Chantilly, VA 20151

Phone: 1-855-659-3289

Source: House Buyers of America, Inc.

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Brother Robert Schieler, FSC As Superior General, he has set forth a compelling vision of Lasallian education worldwide, emphasizing the increasingly important role that higher education has in achieving that vision."

Manhattan College will celebrate its 174th undergraduate Commencement on Sunday, May 22 at 1 p.m. At the Commencement ceremony, Brother Robert Schieler, FSC, Superior General of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, will deliver the keynote address to the Colleges graduates and receive an honorary doctorate.

We're honored that Br. Robert will be here to help celebrate the accomplishments of the class of 2016, said Brennan O'Donnell, president of Manhattan College. As Superior General, he has set forth a compelling vision of Lasallian education worldwide, emphasizing the increasingly important role that higher education has in achieving that vision. We look forward to hearing what promises to be an inspiring address.

A native of Philadelphia, Pa., Br. Robert was elected Superior General in May 2014 at the 45th general chapter in Rome. He is the 27th successor of Saint John Baptist de La Salle, the Institutes founder, leading the largest order of religious Brothers in the Church dedicated to education.

Prior to being elected to this top leadership post based at the Brothers Generalate in Rome, Br. Robert served for seven years as General Councilor for the Lasallian Region that includes the United States and Canada, now called the Lasallian Region of North America (RELAN).

Br. Robert was elected as general councilor in 2007 after serving as provincial of the former Baltimore province from 2001-2007. Before becoming provincial, Br. Robert was the director of education for the United States-Toronto region. He also served as executive secretary for the former regional education board and College Presidents Association. Prior to these roles, he served for seven years as assistant provincial and director of education for the Baltimore province.

A missionary to the Philippines for 11 years, Br. Robert has served in a variety of administrative positions from assistant principal to superintendent of schools. He currently serves on the board of Bethlehem University, a Lasallian institution. He is a graduate of La Salle College (now University) in Philadelphia, where he has also served on the board of trustees.

Br. Robert was first introduced to the Christian Brothers as a student at West Catholic Boys High School (now West Catholic Preparatory High School) in Philadelphia. He joined the order in 1968 and made his final profession in 1979. He holds masters degrees in European history from the University of Notre Dame and in Asian studies from the University of the Philippines, as well as a doctorate in educational administration from the University of Pennsylvania.

Manhattan College will award approximately 750 undergraduates with degrees in 40 major fields of study from its school of Liberal Arts, Business, Education and Health, Engineering, and Science on May 22. The Manhattan College website has complete information on Commencement 2016, including a schedule of events.
McKinney, TX Dentist, Dr. Bryce Gates, To Visit the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry

Dr. Bryce Gates is a respected dentist in McKinney, TX, who regularly places dental implants and offers other cutting-edge treatments at his practice, Custom Dental. On April 29, 2016, Dr. Gates and Dr. Mathew Hookom will speak to students attending the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry about their dental experiences and other business topics that most dental students are not equipped with.

Drs. Gates and Hookom will teach students at the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry how to take care of a variety of critical business needs. This information will help students who eventually plan to open their own practices. Drs. Gates and Hookom will both talk about how they opened their own dental practices and the unique challenges they faced. Subjects such as handling negotiations, leadership and tax strategies will also be discussed during the meeting. Dr. Gates is a highly experienced dentist in McKinney, TX, who started his own state-of-the-art practice, Custom Dental, one year after graduation. He now offers many different treatments at his practice, including dental implants, sedation and periodontal laser therapy, or the LANAP protocol.

Patients who have lost teeth from injuries, old age or gum disease may find that implants are an attractive tooth replacement option. While several alternatives are available, implants have been shown to have a variety of unique benefits including the ability to stimulate the bone of the jaw and prevent degradation. Implants are also very durable and are known to last for many years as long as they are placed properly and given adequate care. Patients who opt to receive dental implants as a replacement for one or more lost teeth are typically pleased with how natural their implants look and how comfortable they are after the recovery period.

Dr. Gates looks forward to addressing students at the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry and as a trusted dentist in McKinney, TX, he also invites patients with missing teeth to receive dental implants at his practice by calling (469) 452-2033 to schedule an appointment.

About the Doctor

Dr. Bryce Gates is a general dentist offering personalized dental care to patients in McKinney, TX. Dr. Gates believes that a patients treatment begins with actively listening to each patient and completing a thorough examination. Dr. Gates and his entire team take pride in offering the latest advancements in dentistry and dental technology to ensure they provide the highest level of care to each patient. Dr. Gates is experienced in a variety of areas in dentistry including cosmetic dentistry, implant dentistry, restorative dentistry as well as surgical treatments and conscious sedation. To learn more about Dr. Gates or the services he offers, please visit his website at http://www.thedentistofmckinney.com or call his office at (469) 452-2033 to schedule an appointment.
EFSOL now in Singapore Singapore is a key pivot-point and a launching-pad...

Usman Siddiqui, the Managing Director of Equitable Financial Solutions (EFSOL), a Australian Islamic finance company, headquartered in Sydney, is today pleased to announce the establishment of the companys Singapore office at 6 Battery Road. The Singapore branch, which is registered as EFSOL Asset Management, will play a key role in the Companys regional strategy, positioning it at the forefront of a wave of expansion that will likely make it Australia's fastest growing Islamic finance company. This day marks a significant milestone in the development of the company, as we continue to grow organically and undertake foreign expansion, said Usman.

John Isaacs who is the Director responsible for compliance and operations said, We see Singapore as a key pivot-point and a launching-pad into the rest of the region and were confident this regional presence will become a crucial part of the business in its own right.

EFSOL also announced the offering of its investment scheme, the EFSOL Income Fund, registered under the Monetary Authority of Singapore as a restricted Collective Investment Scheme. The Income Fund was established as a vehicle to facilitate investments into the region and represents a significant opportunity for regional investors to capitalise on our profitability, shared Hisham Fakhir, Director of Funds Management.

The new office which will be spearheaded by a Head of ASEAN Relationships and a team of three, will support the nascent Islamic market of Singapore.

This expansion forms part of our long-term strategy to continue to raise funds from diverse geographic locations, added Hisham. By diversifying our funding sources, we are in fact further de-risking our asset portfolio in Australia.

EFSOL was established in 2011 with the commitment to ethical and innovative financial services that are also inherently Shariah-compliant. The company has established a strong reputation in the industry by offering client-centric lending and investment products. The companys visionary leaders and committed management team have continued to successfully deliver outstanding customer service coupled with innovative products.
(L-R): Evan Dix and Stetson law May Valedictorian Darnesha Carter prepare for moot court.

Stetson law school ranks No. 20 among the nations most diverse law schools, according to the spring 2016 issue of preLaw.

The article, The most diverse law schools, by Rebecca Larsen, examines the definition of diversity and what makes a diverse law school. A study referenced in the article by Texas A&M University School of Laws director of program development Jack Manhire lists Stetson among the top 20 law schools by the countrys diversity. Manhire looked at how well student bodies represent the target population of law school applicants, using data from the American Bar Association and U.S. Census Bureau for his study.

Stetson law is home to diverse student organizations, interscholastic activities and competitions. Among the 2015 entering J.D. class at Stetson are 27.7 percent minority and 54.6 percent female students. Students range in age from 20-57 and represent 25 states and 83 colleges and universities. More than half of all new J.D. students in the class receive scholarships.

Learn more by visiting stetson.edu/law/admissions.

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About Stetson University College of Law

Stetson University College of Law, Florida's first law school, has prepared lawyers and leaders since 1900. Today, Stetson leads the nation in blending legal doctrine with practical training, evidenced by its top-ranked programs in advocacy and legal writing. Through our academically rigorous curriculum and commitment to social responsibility, Stetson lawyers are ethical advocates ready to succeed in the legal profession.
We are proud and excited to be participating once again at Knowledge 16

Navvia, a leader in Business Process Management (BPM), will be attending and sponsoring the Knowledge 16 conference at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center May 15-20, 2016. This will be Navvia's 8th year in a row supporting the leading ITSM event, which has grown each and every year. Navvia is widely used for defining, designing and documenting processes for any area of the business, but is used extensively for the ITSM market. During the conference, Navvia will be demonstrating their latest process design templates built specifically for ServiceNow at booth #1529 of the ExpoNow hall.

David Mainville, founder and CEO of Navvia says "Knowledge 16 is expected to be another amazing event for us. The attendees are focused on solving real business problems through effective use of technology being presented at the event. We look forward to helping attendees and their organizations learn how Navvia's Process Designer can improve the value in the ServiceNow investment they have made or will be making.

In addition to the new enhanced ServiceNow templates, Navvias very own Dave Gagen, Principal Consultant, will be delivering the 1-day workshop A Practical Approach to Configuration Management as part of the pre-con training offered at Knowledge16.

About Navvia

Navvia has been helping the Fortune 1000 take the complexity out of IT service management for more than 15 years. Navvia offers a suite of process design tools, templates and training designed to lower your implementation costs, while offering a full range of ITSM consulting services for when you need a little help.
Rap for Solar Contest "All you need to do to win a free solar energy system is create an original rap song."

SolTerra, a leading solar installer in Western Washington, is donating a 24-panel solar energy system to a deserving community member. To be selected for the free solar energy - create an original rap song!

Many people and organizations want to offset their carbon emissions by switching to solar power, so SolTerra is stepping up to help, says Brian Heather, President of SolTerra. As a Pacific Northwest company, the future of our environment and our communities are important to us, and we want to try to help make solar available for everyone, Heather added.

SolTerra is based in Seattle and has been designing and installing solar electrical systems, living walls and green roofs since 2008. In addition, the company designs and builds sustainable, mixed-use, LEED Platinum apartments in the Pacific Northwest. SolTerra wants to demonstrate that sustainable living is within reach for everyone.

Heres how the giveaway works. A deserving community member, either a non-profit or a family, just needs to create a Rap for Solar video (less than 1-minute) about why they deserve a solar energy system. Send the video or a link, with their name, organization and address to rapforsolar(at)solterra.com by Tuesday, May 31st. Well post the finalists on social media for fans to vote for their favorite. Well install the new solar energy system this summer!

For more details  and to watch an example of an original rap, check out SolTerras solar teams version!

A few quick facts according to the Solar Energy Industries Association: In 2015:



A new solar project was installed every 2-minutes.

The solar industry has supplied 40% of all new 2015 electric generating capacity  more than any other energy technology.

More than 800,000 homes and business have switched to solar power in the U.S.

About SolTerra

Since 2008, SolTerra has been installing solar electrical systems, living walls and green roofs in the Pacific Northwest. In addition, the company designs and builds sustainable, mixed-use, LEED Platinum apartments. SolTerra wants to demonstrate that sustainable living is within reach for everyone. Solar power, eco-roofs, living walls and other unique features, bring high performance and energy efficiency into all of its projects. SolTerra owns, designs, builds, and manages its properties, with its own developers, architects, contractors and property managers. The company has offices in Portland and Seattle.
Sudanese police fired tear gas Thursday as clashes broke out during a protest at Khartoum University over the killing of a student by security forces, an AFP correspondent reported.

About 1,000 students staged a fresh demonstration at the campus on the banks of the Blue Nile in central Khartoum, the scene of regular protests.

Demonstrators were protesting the killing of a student on Wednesday when angry students clashed with security forces at a university in the capital's twin city of Omdurman.

The student was shot dead during clashes outside the campus, President Omar al-Bashir's National Congress Party said.

On Thursday, heavy clashes erupted between students and riot police in front of Khartoum University, the AFP reporter said.

"Killing of student means revolution! Killing of student means killing nation!" chanted hundreds of students as they clashed with riot police, who chased protesters down nearby streets.

Similar protests were also staged by students in a university in Port Sudan, east of the capital.

Sudanese students have held several protests over the past few days in Khartoum and Ahliya University in Omdurman, where the student was killed.

Police also used tear gas on Tuesday when students demonstrated in Khartoum University against what they said was a plan to sell off buildings belonging to the institution.

The government has denied the charge.

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Candis Cayne

Trailblazing transgender actress Candis Cayne joins longtime LGBTQ ally, author, fashion and lifestyle expert Lawrence Zarian, as host of Lambda Legals annual West Coast Liberty Awards, which celebrates those working towards the organizations vision of equality. They will lead the starstudded ceremony at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel on Thursday, June 2, 2016 in Beverly Hills, California.

Cayne is known as the first transgender actress to star on network television with her breakthrough role in ABCs Dirty Sexy Money in 2007, and is more recently known for the docuseries I am Cait, as well as her recurring role on CBSs hit Elementary. Cayne was a presenter at the 2013 West Coast Liberty Awards and has been a strong supporter of Lambda Legal and the LGBT community; working closely with various organizations, including GLAAD. Cayne was recognized for her advocacy with the HRC Visibility Award in 2015.

As a proud supporter of the work that Lambda Legal has been doing on the front lines of the LGBTQ fight for equality, I am thrilled to be a part of the action and host this years West Coast Liberty Awards, says Cayne.

Zarian is one of the most sought after on-camera lifestyle & fashion experts in the television industry today. He has more than 15 years of on-air experience and is the author of the highly successful fashion Bible, Lawrence Zarians 10 Commandments for a Perfect Wardrobe. Zarian frequently appears as Fashion Guy on Live with Kelly & Michael, in addition to Steve Harvey, Rachael Ray, ABCs Live at The Academy Awards, Inside Edition, EXTRA, and KTLA Morning News. Zarian also conducts standing room only seminars throughout the country and hosts in store shopping events nationally with retailers such as Bloomingdales and Macy's.

As a longstanding LGBT ally, showing our united support for equality is more important than ever. I feel privileged to be able to host the West Coast Liberty Awards, says Zarian.

Following last years event, Lambda Legal, saw the successful conclusion of their #IDO campaign which attracted Alist celebrity support including Oscar winner Julianne Moore, who was featured in a moving PSA, along with Ava DuVernay, Dan Bucatinsky, Mark Ruffalo, Kristen Bell, Aisha Tyler, Brad Goreski and more. And, in the year since the 2015 West Coast Liberty Awards, Lambda Legal secured a landmark marriage equality victory from the US Supreme Court. This victory, decades in the making, was immediately met with resistance and retaliatory attempts by antigay opponents to hang on to outright discrimination. Most recently, in cooperation with the ACLU and Equality North Carolina, Lambda Legal filed suit against Governor Pat McCrory and the state of North Carolina to defeat a discriminatory law and to make clear that we are committed in our fight for justice. http://www.lambdalegal.org/wcla
Cordova Industrial Park Auction This is, in my opinion, the best laid out industrial park Ive seen. It is convenient to everything. It has become a safe and secure area home for many local, national and international headquarters - John Roebuck

The remaining tracts of the Cordova Industrial Park, a popular location for many successful Memphis area businesses, will go to public Auction. John Roebuck Auctions Co. of Memphis, TN will conduct the Auction on Thursday, May 26th at 11:07AM CST.

John Roebuck, Principal Auctioneer for the event, advises that there are only 17 tracts left for sale. The tracts range from one acre to thirty acres. Roebuck offers the tracts at Auction where the bidder can choose which lots they want that will fit their needs.

After the lots are all sold that day, the opportunity to buy into this all Industrial zoned and developed locale with no city taxes is over, warns Roebuck .

He adds, This is, in my opinion, the best laid out industrial park Ive seen. It is convenient to everything. It has become a safe and secure area home for many local, national and international headquarters.

Roebuck mentioned that for years that company owners have asked him about building opportunities in East Shelby County. He feels that the timing and location couldnt be better for any business owner looking to relocate or a savvy investor. Included among the properties is Tract #17 which has 3 buildings already set up for an office, mechanic shop and storage with a 5 acre fenced equipment yard. The Auction will be held in the office building.

John Roebuck has auctioned similar properties for the past forty years, but considers this the Cadillac of them all. It is all about location, location, location. You can go to the website and view a video of the property.

Feel free to call John Roebuck at 901-486-0839 for more information.
Dickinson Wright PLLC is pleased to announce that Attorney Christine Pirik has joined the firms Columbus office as Of Counsel.

Prior to joining Dickinson Wright, Ms. Pirik spent 31 years in public service, including seven years as Chief of Staff at the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and Ohio Power Siting Board. She also served for 9 years as Deputy Legal Director for the agencies. In addition, she was the Chief of Gas and Power Siting and Chief of Telecommunications in the Legal Department. Chris has extensive experience in utility regulation and has been involved in most of the major energy and public utility regulatory issues Ohio has faced in the last decades.

While at the PUCO, Ms. Pirik served as co-chair of the technology group for the National Association of Regulatory Utilities Commissioners (NARUC), Staff Subcommittee on Telecommunications and later served as a member of the NARUC Executive Directors Subcommittee.

Chris will help serve the Firms growing energy client base, and will bring her experience as a regulator to bear on behalf of the Firms private sector clients.

Harlan Robins, Dickinson Wrights Columbus office partner-in-charge, expressed his excitement that Ms. Pirik is joining the Firm, now up to 23 attorneys locally. With our continued growth, we identified a strategic need for an energy and public utilities lawyer with a deep knowledge of Ohio law. We found that in Chris, who of course also brings a network of relationships across the various energy sectors.

Ms. Pirik received her B.A. from Otterbein College and her J.D. from Capital University Law School.

About Dickinson Wright PLLC

Dickinson Wright PLLC is a general practice business law firm with more than 400 attorneys among more than 40 practice areas. Headquartered in Detroit and founded in 1878, the firm has fifteen offices, including six in Michigan (Detroit, Troy, Ann Arbor, Lansing, Grand Rapids, and Saginaw) and eight other domestic offices in Columbus, Ohio; Lexington, Ky.; Nashville, Tenn. (2); Las Vegas, Nev.; Phoenix, Ariz.; Reno, Nev.; and Washington, D.C. The firms Canada office is located in Toronto.

The firm offers clients a distinctive combination of superb client service and exceptional quality. Dickinson Wright lawyers are known for delivering commercially-oriented advice on sophisticated transactions and have a remarkable record of wins in high-stakes litigation. Dickinson Wright lawyers are regularly cited by Chambers, Best Lawyers, Super Lawyers, and other leading independent law firm evaluating organizations.
We were overwhelmed by the response to last years show and this upcoming event is going to be even bigger.

North America's largest touring off-road show returns to Canada April 30-May 1 when 4 Wheel Parts stages its second annual Truck & Jeep Fest at Edmonton's EXPO Centre at Northlands. Fresh off the heels of the grand reopening of the Calgary retail store, 4 Wheel Parts boasts 7 Canadian locations and the upcoming Truck & Jeep Fest will bring everything off-road to enthusiasts in the Calgary-Edmonton Corridor.

The free event will be a destination for customers seeking specialty pricing, an opportunity to engage with leading vendors and aftermarket industry experts and exclusive on-site product demonstrations. The 100,000 sq. ft. EXPO Centre will feature over $500,000 of on-site inventory and the latest in truck, Jeep and 4x4 products including interior and exterior parts and accessories.

Giveaways and hourly promotional pricing will give off-roaders a chance for significant savings on purchases of popular 4x4 products while the industrys most knowledgeable professionals will be on-site to supply professional advice as well as install and service scheduling at discounted rates.

Terry Harvey, 4 Wheel Parts Director of Canadian Operations, elaborated on the Truck & Jeep Fests second sojourn to Edmonton and what it means to the province of Alberta. Truck & Jeep Fest is rapidly becoming the premier event here in Edmonton for off-road enthusiasts, he said. We were overwhelmed by the response to last years show and this upcoming event is going to be even bigger. This is an exciting opportunity for fans to discover and enjoy some of the industrys most advanced products and high quality vehicle builds while taking advantage of tremendous show-only pricing right here in our own backyard.

As the fourth stop of the 2016 traveling show, Truck & Jeep Fest was previously held in San Mateo, California; Honolulu, Hawaii and Puyallup, Washington. Future locations scheduled are Dallas, Texas; Ontario, California; Denver, Colorado; Orlando, Florida and Columbiana, Ohio.

4 Wheel Parts Edmontons Truck & Jeep Fest hours are Saturday, April 30 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday May 1 the event is open to the public from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

About 4 Wheel Parts 4 Wheel Parts is the global leader in truck, Jeep, SUV and off-road performance products. With 74 locations across the U.S. and Canada and growing, 4 Wheel Parts Service Centers install all the products they sell. Maintaining the nations largest inventory of off-road tires, ARB air lockers, lift kits and accessories, 4 Wheel Parts serves customers across the country and around the globe. Life is Better Off-Road. Visit them at 4wheelparts.com or call toll-free 877-474-4821.
Natalie Esposito Capano of Aretsky Law Group to Present Law Day in New Jersey Schools Taking part in Law Day observances offers me a way to share my knowledge and give back to my community.

New Jerseys Aretsky Law Group attorney, Natalie Esposito Capano, will share her legal expertise with elementary and middle school students at Brookside School in Allendale, NJ, as well as with Justice Studies college students at Montclair State University. The events will take place in observance of this years 2016 Law Day on May 2, 2016 at each of the schools and will focus on this years theme celebrating the 50th year of Miranda Rights.

Although not a federal holiday, May 1 has been proclaimed Law Day every year since 1958from President Eisenhower to President Obama. Each year the American Bar Association chooses a different Law Day theme. This years theme is Miranda: More than Words. It was chosen because June 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of Miranda v. Arizona, the case in which the Miranda warning is based.

Brookside School in Allendale, New Jersey will combine several sections of its 4th grade elementary school students as well as its 7th grade middle school Social Studies class for Ms. Capanos discussion and presentation. The focus of her presentation will be Mirandahow it relates to criminal justice and individual rights as well as the history and evolution of the law and why a commemoration and celebration of Law Day is important to our society as a whole. Coordination for a local police officer to accompany her to the grade school is in the works for a show-and-tell discussion of Miranda and lawful arrests from the point of view of law enforcement.

Ms. Capano feels it is important to show the students how the law is useful, why there are legal rules to understand and follow, and how society all shares in the US system of justice. She stated, "We have a unique high-level system with legal rules that have evolved over time. Its a system that affects and trickles down to everyone. It offers us rights, freedoms and security like no other nation."

When asked why she volunteered to spend her time speaking to the youngsters, Capano responded, "Nothing is more important than our kids and their education. I am honored to speak to the students and provide information which will not only help my own children but also bring value to all children in our district. Taking part in Law Day observances offers me a way to share my knowledge and give back to my community."

Ms. Capano will also address university students in the Justice Studies program at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey. Here, the subject of Ms. Capanos presentation will also be Miranda and its effects on law enforcement. However, the focus will be on case law and the U.S. Constitution.

When Eric Aretsky, founding partner of Aretsky Law Group, P.C., was asked to comment on these Law Day observances, he said that he is excited to have a team member at the firm participating in the local schools. He went on to explain, "We are proud to offer Natalies time away from work to offer a way to freely share her legal knowledge with the students. Law Day is a time for us to think about how important the rule of law and respect for the law are in a democratic society. This years theme, Miranda, is especially relevant. It has been invaluable in making people aware of the rights given to them in the constitution."

About the Speaker: Natalie Esposito Capano


Retirement on the horizon The sooner you take control of your retirement tax situation, the more advantageous the opportunity will be.

Jeremy Keating of Capital Income Advisors (CIA) has added a new installment to his The Retirement Formula: The Retirees Guide to What You Dont Know retirement advisory program, this one focusing on taxes in retirement. Keating says that once an individual retires, their primary income source changes and with it, the way they get taxed on their income can potentially change.

By understanding the tax changes in store for them, pre-retirees can plan ahead to protect their nest eggs and income streams by adopting available tax exemption opportunities in order to keep money in their pockets while remaining IRS compliant.

According to Keating, once a person retires, a lot can change in their tax life. Some changes will make life easier and less expensive during the golden years, while others will add some headaches and costs that retirees did not expect. By addressing those changes ahead of time, individuals can better prepare themselves financially for the inevitability of their new tax situation as a retiree.

The sooner you take control of your retirement tax situation, the more advantageous the opportunity will be, Keating says. No one looks forward to retiring so that they can spend their latter years struggling with taxes.

After leaving the workforce and no longer drawing a paycheck, retirees can celebrate the fact that they are no longer subjected to paying Social Security and Medicaid taxes. However, since Social Security now becomes a part of their income stream in retirement, in many cases, they pay taxes on that income.

In fact, as much as 85 percent of a persons Social Security benefits could be subject to federal income taxes, depending on the individuals filing status and income. According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), at least part of an individuals Social Security benefits are subject to taxes if their combined income (half their Social Security benefit plus all other incomeincluding tax-exempt interest) is at least:



$0 if they are married filing separately and lived with your spouse at all during the year.

$25,000 if they are single, head of household, qualifying widow(er), or married filing separately and did not live with your spouse at all during the year.

$32,000 if they are married filing jointly.

The 2014 Kiplinger Retirement Report notes that Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington state and Wyoming have rules exempting at least some Social Security, pension, investment income, or IRA withdrawals from state income taxes after retirementand there is the possibility for lower state income tax rates once an individual reaches the traditional retirement age (which is 66 for people born between 1943 - 1954) gradually rising to 67 for those born in 1960 or later. However, if the children and grandchildren live in Illinois, moving to another state may not be an option for many retirees.

Just like the taxes you paid on your earned income when you were working, you can expect to pay taxes on your retirement income, Keating says.

In addition, once a person leaves the workforce and stops drawing a paycheck, they are no longer eligible to contribute to a qualified tax-deferred retirement plan such as a 401(k) or IRA. For much of a persons working life, any money contributed to a tax-deductible retirement plan reduced their taxable income (and total tax burden), and the money in those plans are also compounded tax-deferred.

Not only do you lose the ability to contribute once you stop working, but with traditional qualified retirement plans, you start facing required minimum distributions once you reach age 70, Keating says. Those mandatory distributions become larger portions of your account balance over time, and as they get bigger, those distributions could force you to pay taxes on them as declared income, money you otherwise wouldnt necessarily need to withdraw or spend.

Further complicating matters, if the retiree received a traditional paycheck during their working life, their employer withheld taxes based on their income while they were working. After retirement, the responsibility falls on the retiree. The withholding rules are strict, and making sure taxes are paid on time remains a requirement to avoid penalties.

According to the IRS, a tax payment is timely if enough is paid through withholding or via sufficient estimated tax payments, four times a year, to cover the taxes or placed in a safe harbor for the year. Most 401(k) distributions are subject to mandatory withholdings if they are not directly rolled over to other qualified plans, and the retiree can have taxes withheld from their pension or annuity payment, Social Security benefits, or IRA distributions as well.

Understanding the tax changes that take effect once an individual retires can help them make arrangements ahead of time to protect their nest egg from unnecessary taxes, but this takes planning. An experienced retirement planner can guide pre-retirees and retirees through the many options available to maximize ones retirement income stream, minimize their tax burden, and get down to the business of enjoying retirement.

To learn more, visit the Capital Income Advisors' website, email jkeating(at)capitalincomeadvisors(dot)com, or call (800) 875-1986.

About Capital Income Advisors:

The primary focus at Capital Income Advisors is retirement planning. Jeremy Keating and the CIA team of advisors treat their clients as they would treat members of their own family. CIA strives to help create sound retirement income strategies for men and women in or nearing retirement, thereby instilling confidence that their retirement income will last as long as they do.

Capital Income Advisors serve all of Northern and Southern California, all across Texas including, Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Midland, and the New York Tri State area. CIA offers retirement income strategies, wealth accumulation, asset protection, annuities, life insurance, tax minimization strategies, long-term care, IRA and 401(k) rollovers.

Securities offered through Securities America, Inc., Member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services offered through Securities America Advisors, Inc. and Arbor Point Advisors LLC. Capital Income Advisors, Securities America, Inc., and Arbor Point Advisors LLC are separate entities. Securities America and its representatives do not provide tax or legal advice; therefore it is important to coordinate with your tax or legal advisor regarding your specific situation.

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Claremont Psychologist Dr. Antoinette Brunasso I'm excited to be involved in and serving the Claremont community

Dr. Antoinette Brunasso, licensed clinical psychologist, has opened a new branch of her private practice in the small town of Claremont, CA. Located about a half-hour east of Los Angeles, the new Claremont Psychologist counseling & therapy office will be a companion to her already established Glendale practice.

I'm excited to be involved in and serving the Claremont community, especially since my husband and his family have lived in and been an active part of the community for over 30 years," says Brunasso. "That made the decision of expanding to Claremont very easy for me. Claremont gives my practice the opportunity to grow and support more families in this journey of life. My hope is to add a place where those from Claremont and the surrounding cities will be able to receive compassionate support in the challenges they face individually, within their relationships, and within their families.

Dr. Brunasso opened her first practice in Glendale back in October 2015. In the six months since, she has successfully treated clients in couples and marital conflict, as well as individuals and groups suffering from personal loss and depression. Her practices provides individual, group, and marriage counseling / couples therapy services. The new Claremont therapist office will also serve, La Verne, Upland, Glendora, San Dimas, Pomona, Montclair, Rancho Cucamonga and surrounding areas.

The Claremont office will allow me to assist more people who are striving to create a more solid sense of self, and to help them be the person they want to be. Brunasso adds: Much of my work is about helping others create a more solid sense of self. When one has the ability to know oneself, understand what makes him or herself reactive, and tolerate pain for growth, that person is able to cope and live through many of lifes challenges.

Nestled in the Claremonts historic Village, Dr. Brunassos practice sits among the many antique homes and offices, along with prestigious academies, that characterize the town. Residents often joke of Claremont being the city of trees and Ph.Ds. Harvey Mudd and Claremont-McKenna are just a couple of the revered institutions in the area.

Dr. Brunasso has provided individual support, couples therapy, crisis group counseling, family counseling / therapy, and loss and grief therapy for six years. She earned her doctorate from the California School of Professional Psychology in 2012. Since then, shes worked with the staff of the Ronald McDonald House, Alliant International University, and now as a regular lecturer at the University of Southern California.

Dr. Brunassos new office is at 419 Yale Ave., Ste. 7, Claremont, CA 91711. Those closer to Los Angeles can visit her other office at 3436 N. Verdugo Rd., Ste. 102, Glendale, CA 91208. Prospective clients can schedule appointments by phone at 626-470-7792, by e-mail at antoinette(at)drbrunasso(dot)com or contact form on her website DrBrunasso.com.

DR. BRUNASOS WEBSITE CAN BE SEEN HERE: http://www.drbrunasso.com

About Dr. Brunasso: Dr. Antoinette Brunasso is a licensed clinical psychologist (License ID: PSY27466) who specializes in grief counseling and therapy for depression. Dr. Brunasso provides individual therapy; group counseling, including marriage counseling and family counseling; and individual therapy from her offices in Glendale and Claremont, California. Dr. Brunasso earned her doctorate from the California School of Professional Psychology in 2012 and is a member of the faculty at the University of Southern California.
Drone Insurance Quote Being an eyewitness to the birth a new aviation industry is very exciting.

ZANETTE Aviation, a leading broker of aviation insurance, has announced an important step in its leadership in the drone insurance industry; ZANETTE Aviation is proud to announce a new area of service, namely drone insurance. The launch of a dedicated website at http://zanettedroneinsurance.com/, with a focus specific on UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) often called Drones and UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) insurance issues and needs. Drones are being used increasingly in industries as diverse as agriculture and surveying with an according rise in risk exposure.

"Being an eyewitness to the birth a new aviation industry is very exciting," explained Chris Zanette, owner of ZANETTE Insurance. "Drone issues are so important that we are launching a microsite specific to the segment, and populating it with unique content on drones, UAS, and UAV insurance issues. Plus the technology is just plain fun and exciting."

More information on Drone Insurance -

To view the new drone insurance website visit http://zanettedroneinsurance.com/. In addition, persons more familiar with ZANETTE aviation directly can go to the drone-specific page on that corporate website at http://zanetteaviation.com/drone/. The website is a more "deep dive" into the issues of drone insurance, but in either case, interested parties are urged to not only peruse the available information but also reach out to a ZANETTE aviation insurance specialist to discuss their specific needs.

A New Website for a New Industry: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The aviation industry has a long history of innovation. Starting with the first Wright brothers flight in 1903, aviation has been an industry noticeable for rapid improvements. The 1930 invention of the jet engine is but one example. Modern drones are the next step in the evolution of aviation; today's relatively modest commercial drones will no doubt be replaced by drones with capabilities that today's aviation enthusiasts can hardly imagine. With a new expansion, however, comes risk, and with risk, comes the need for insurance.

With drones expanding rapidly into different industrial sectors such as agriculture, aero photography, and even videography from the air, it takes disciplined knowledge, experience, and imagination to chart out possible risks. The new website is a first step towards putting some of this information on the Internet; ZANETTE aviation's experienced staff combines this Internet information with a unique one-on-one approach to help identify risks and write the most effective insurance policies for this new industry segment.

About ZANETTE AVIATION

ZANETTE Aviation Insurance brings decades of experience writing policies for the top-rated aviation insurance companies in the business. Whether a person is in the market for aircraft insurance of any type, commercial airplane insurance or private airplane insurance, or specific policies such as helicopter insurance, DRONE (UAS / UAV) insurance or even a airplane charter jet company seeking coverage, ZANETTE can help. The company's friendly agents are among the best brokers in the USA, experienced giving affordable aircraft insurance quotes at the best rates available for corporate or business uses, or just private airplane insurance.

Tel. 650-593-3030

Web. http://ZANETTEaviation.com
Drug Rehabilitation and Alcohol Treatment Center Supporting education is a very important for everyone at Sunshine Coast, and the Centre has multiple initiatives going on this front.

Sunshine Coast Health Centre, considered one of the best drug rehab and alcohol treatment programs in British Columbia, is pleased to announce a new scholarship opportunity open to any student at the high school, undergraduate, or graduate level in British Columbia for the 2016-2017 school year, who is or will be enrolled in a counselling, psychology, medical/nursing, or similar relevant program. The available award is denominated at $1000; it would go towards tuition payment for 2016/2017 semester.

"Supporting education is a very important for everyone at Sunshine Coast, and the Centre has multiple initiatives going on this front," explained Casey Jordan, Chief Marketing Officer. "What better way to help than by removing some degree of financial strain from a students life, and directly supporting an individual with a scholarship? In this manner the Centre wishes to help further the studies of a student who is interested in working in addictions and mental health in Canada, which has become more in demand in recent years."

Full details regarding the Sunshine Coast Health Centre Scholarship for 2016/2017 school year can be found at the Centre Web site, at the following page: https://www.sunshinecoasthealthcentre.ca/scholarships/. Those interested in the Centre's drug rehab and/or alcohol treatment programs should visit the home page at https://www.sunshinecoasthealthcentre.ca/ Note that the Centre uses the 'logotherapy' approach poineered by Viktor Frankl, as opposed to the 12-step methodology. In addition, the Centre is open to men only, although it draws from the Western Provinces of Canada as well as all of Canada for those struggling with addiction.

Scholarship Details for Canadian Students

The Web page given above contains a link to a fillable PDF application, found in the section titled Begin Your Application. This is where any interested student should begin the process of making an application. Please download and complete it. The application deadline is July 1, 2016. All essays must be submitted no later than that date. Winner will be announced on August 15, 2016.

Any school or interested party looking for further information on the scholarship can contact Casey Jordan directly at 1.866.487.9010 ext. 218.

About Sunshine Coast Health Centre

Sunshine Coast Health Centre is a 36 bed drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility exclusively designed for men, officially opened on the 15th of March, 2014. The Centre has a philosophy of care that goes beyond just addiction to include personal transformation based on three key therapeutic principles: interpersonal relatedness, self definition (autonomy & competence), and intrinsic motivation. The Centre offers both drug rehabilitation and alcohol treatment near Vancouver, BC, but serving patients across Canada, particularly British Columbia and Alberta and cities such as Calgary, Edmonton and Red Deer. Sunshine Coast Health Centre uses a form of drug rehabilitation based on the methodology of Viktor Frankl, namely 'Meaning Centreed Therapy'.

Website. http://www.sunshinecoasthealthcentre.ca
Mr. Tumurcuoglu adds, Crowdsourcing becomes a major weapon to upkeep work done on our clients. Online reputation management (ORM) is an ongoing process and ORM services have to be prepared for post intervention support.

An online reputation management company, Internet Reputation Services (IRS), has partnered up with i2V of Montreal, Quebec to create version 2.0 of their crowdsourcing software. Herman Tumurcuoglu is the founder of IRS with just over twenty years experience in the digital world. He is noticing a shift towards the need for crowd sourcing in search engine optimization (SEO). Algorithm updates have made many traditional SEO techniques less effective and the need for crowdsourcing increased dramatically since. You are seeing, across the board, correlation between traditional SEO metrics and rankings breaking down. User interaction with content is becoming a primary factor in SEO. What this means for a search marketer is the need to spend money on content and promotion to get more traction in search engine result pages.

Julie Kelechian who heads the operations said: Our team is very diligent and discrete with each file. Mostly customers call us to help remove or suppress something in Google search results. Another service we offer is to repair Google autocomplete suggestions, which might lead to reputation problems. This crowd sourcing application will make us leaders in the space. For those not familiar with Google autocomplete, it is when a search is conducted in Googles search bar but before someone finishes typing a query, there are different suggestions available. This is based on past searches for the same query and the order of suggestions are from most popular picks to the least popular.

Digital markets have known for quite some time that after getting rid of the negative suggestions under Google autocomplete, a continuous search for positive terms is required to keep away the negative terms. A negative suggestion may come back if ongoing search activity is not continued. Mr. Tumurcuoglu adds, Crowdsourcing becomes a major weapon to upkeep work done on our clients. Online reputation management (ORM) is an ongoing process and ORM services have to be prepared for post intervention support. A crowdsourcing tool helps ORM clients upkeep their brand image.

About Internet Reputation Services

IRS offers services for customers who need to get past a negative result on Google. Their main service is to suppress information on Google. Be it a negative news article, a report or a review, Internet Reputation Services can help with cleaning up their images on the search engine result page. The company represents entrepreneurs, corporations, brands and even politicians.

They are highly experienced consultants helping customers and public relations agencies. The company is expanding internationally and looking to partner with SEO firms, reputation management firms and public relation companies.

About i2V

I2V has been offering their clients with IT solutions since 2004. Anything from Magento implementation, mobile and tablet integration and search engine marketing, i2v has got you covered. The cofounders, Mike Dimirjian and Vahe Zambakdjian, have over 30 years of IT experience combined. They have a deeper understanding of business processes. Not only do they have strong analytical skills to dissect and understand the requirements from clients but they also have the knowledge of where an industry and markets are headed to give more custom solutions to their clients needs.
Libya's new unity government announced Thursday plans to establish a joint military command to drive the Islamic State (IS) militant group out of the North African country.

Its presidential council called on "all military forces" in Libya to await instructions after "a joint command" has been formed and not to launch any unilateral offensive on the IS stronghold of Sirte, 450 kilometres (280 miles) east of Tripoli.

Martin Kobler, the UN special envoy for Libya, said in a tweet: "I welcome the initiative of #Libya Presidency Council to appoint a military joint leadership for operations" against IS group.

The council fears that separate operations in Sirte could spark clashes between the multitude of different fighting forces in Libya and play into the militants' hands.

IS group has transformed Sirte into a training camp for Libyan and foreign militants since overrunning slain dictator Moamer Kadhafi's hometown on the Mediterranean last June.

With its port and airport, there are growing fears that IS may use Sirte as a staging post for attacks on European soil.

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The Atlanta-based law firm of Hill, Kertscher & Wharton, LLP recently defeated all six patent infringement claims filed against their client in a federal district court in California. (KINGLITE HOLDINGS INC., v. MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD, MSI COMPUTER CORP., Giga-Byte Technology Co., Ltd. and G.B.T., Inc., American Megatrends, Inc., Case No. 2:15-cv-09612, Judge James Selna).

HKWs clients were originally accused of infringement of 25 patents, most of which relate to operations of the BIOS, the system which boots the operating system of a computer or other embedded system. Three of the patents were dropped from the case, and the Court opted to break the remaining claims into phases of six patents each. The number of asserted patents makes this one of the largest pending patent assertions in the United States.

The Court invalidated one of the six patents on the basis that the patent claimed an abstract concept (security/authentication) pursuant to the Supreme Courts 2014 decision in Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Intl, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014). Kinglite dismissed with prejudice two other patents in response to a tentative opinion addressing their potential invalidity under the Federal Circuits decision in In re Nuitjen, 500 F.3d 1346, 1353 (Fed. Cir. 2007), holding that patent claims encompassing transitory signals are invalid. After Plaintiffs experts were deposed on the infringement issues relating to the other three patents, the Plaintiff agreed to a consent judgment of non-infringement on all remaining patents. Accordingly, the Court entered final judgment on Phase 1 in favor of the defendants.

Separately, HKW successfully petitioned the United States Patent and Trademark Office to institute Inter Partes Review proceedings which may result in the cancellation of the claims of as many as fourteen of the Kinglite asserted patents based on newly-identified prior art.

HKW co-founding partner, Steven G. Hill, believes the disposition of these claims provides a window into the future. This case highlights the strengthening resolve of the computer industry to resist patent trolls by vigorously defending unfounded claims in litigation, while also pursuing invalidation of the patents in the Patent Office, said Hill. Our firm is pleased to be able to play a leadership role in this important effort.

The HKW team recently filed a motion seeking attorneys fees for successfully defending against the first six Kinglite patents, a decision on which is anticipated in May.

About Hill, Kertscher & Wharton, LLP: Nationally recognized for its work on behalf of businesses and individuals, the AV Rated law firm of Hill, Kertscher & Wharton, LLP provides top tier legal representation in intellectual property and business litigation, corporate law, and employment matters. The firm has added four attorneys to their expanding practice in the past 18 months and continues to be a leader in technology and unfair competition litigation, including cases involving patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets.
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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday condemned the bombing of a hospital in Syria's northern city of Aleppo and said attacks that target civilians are "inexcusable" violations of humanitarian law.

"There must be accountability for these crimes," Ban said in a statement.

The city's last remaining pediatrician and three children were among the 20 people killed in the air strike overnight on the Al-Quds hospital, which was supported by Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

Ban called on the warring sides to "immediately renew their commitment" to a ceasefire that had been in force since late February.

He encouraged the international powers backing Syria's peace process, in particular the United States and Russia, to "ensure credible investigations of incidents such as the attack on Al-Quds hospital."

"Instead of bombing civilian areas, all Syrian parties must renew their focus on a political process," he added.

UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien separately appealed to world powers to revive the ceasefire and put an end to the "massive human suffering" in Syria.

"We must all be ashamed this is happening on our watch," O'Brien told the Security Council during a meeting on the appalling humanitarian crisis stemming from the five-year war.

Five Security Council members -- Egypt, Japan, New Zealand, Spain and Uruguay -- are drafting a new resolution condemning attacks on hospitals in war zones such as Syria, but also Yemen, Afghanistan and South Sudan.

The draft resolution is expected to come up for a vote next week in a move that will send "a very strong message about this issue," said New Zealand's Ambassador Gerard van Bohemen.

"We are trying to shine a spotlight on this issue because it's clearly a fundamental problem in the way in which modern warfare is being conducted in these horrible situations," said Bohemen.

More than 270,000 people have been killed in Syria and millions forced from their homes since the conflict erupted in 2011.

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UN chief Ban Ki-moon hit out Thursday at what he called "increasingly restrictive" refugee policies in Europe as the continent faces its worst migrant crisis in decades.

Ban also said he was "alarmed by the growing xenophobia here" and elsewhere in Europe, in a speech to the Austrian parliament.

"I am concerned that European countries are now adopting increasingly-restrictive immigration and refugee policies," Ban told lawmakers.

"Such policies negatively affect the obligation of member states under international humanitarian law and European law. Divisiveness and marginalisation hurt individuals and undermine security."

His comments came a day after the Austrian parliament adopted one of Europe's toughest asylum laws, as the country's centrist government struggles to halt the surging far-right whose candidate won the first round of presidential polls on April 24.

The hotly-disputed legislation allows the government to declare a "state of emergency" if migrant numbers suddenly rise and reject most asylum seekers at the border, including those from war-torn countries like Syria.

If the mechanism is triggered, border authorities will only grant access to refugees facing safety threats in a neighbouring transit country or whose relatives are already in Austria.

Some groups including minors and pregnant women will be exempt from the rule.

The measures are similar to tough laws introduced by Hungary's rightwing government last year.

The UN's refugee agency warned on Wednesday that the legislation "removes a centrepiece of refugee protection".

But Austria insisted it had no other choice as long as "so many other European Union members fail to do their part" to stop the influx.

More than a million people, primarily from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, landed in Europe last year, triggering the continent's worst migration crisis since the aftermath of World War II.

Wedged between Europe's two main refugee routes -- the Balkans and Italy -- Austria received around 90,000 asylum requests in 2015, the second-highest in the bloc on a per capita basis after Sweden.

The influx has boosted support for the far-right Freedom Party, whose presidential candidate made it into a May 22 runoff.

The party is also leading polls ahead of scheduled general elections in 2018.

In a bid to stop the populist resurgence, Austria has erected border fences, introduced an annual cap on asylum-seekers, and pressured other countries along the Balkan trail to close their frontiers, effectively shutting the route to migrants.

It has also restricted existing asylum laws by imposing limits on the length of asylum granted to migrants and making it harder for their families to join them.

"I fully appreciate the enormity of the challenges but I trust that Austria will continue to contribute toward the EU's efforts to forge a truly cooperative approach to addressing the (migration) issues," Ban said.

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Protesters clashed with police in Paris and western France on Thursday as workers and students across the country made a new push for the withdrawal of a hotly contested labour bill.

Demonstrations as well as work stoppages, notably in the aviation and public transport sectors, are planned across France in the latest actions in a protest wave that began two months ago.

Opponents to the reform, billed as an effort to lower France's stubborn 10 percent unemployment, say it will threaten cherished workers' rights and deepen job insecurity for young people.

Clashes broke out in the western city of Nantes, with police firing tear gas at protesters throwing stones, paint and smoke bombs.

In Paris, police said scuffles pitting more than 100 masked youths against security forces left one policeman injured.

In the northern port of Le Havre, hundreds of strikers, mainly dockworkers, blocked all the main access routes into the city with barricades of burning tyres, the BFMTV rolling news channel reported.

Meanwhile civil aviation authorities said passengers at Paris's Orly could expect one in five flights to be cancelled, while delays were expected at Charles de Gaulle airport.

The unions and student organisations plan to pile on the pressure with further protests on Sunday to mark the May Day labour holiday, as well as next Tuesday, when parliament begins debating the bill.

Christophe Sirugue, the Socialist lawmaker who is present the bill to parliament after it was reviewed in committee, said Thursday that several points still needed "clarification" during the debate but that he expected the bill to pass.

Among the remaining issues are measures to make it easier to lay off workers in lean times, and whether employers should still be allowed to shed workers if conditions are depressed in their overseas operations and not just in France.

Another is a proposed surtax on short-term contracts aimed at getting employers to hire more people on permanent contracts, Sirugue told business reporters.

Protests against the reform kicked off on March 9, culminating in massive demonstrations on March 31 that brought 390,000 people onto the streets, according to an official count. Organisers put the number at 1.2 million.

The protests spawned a new youth-led movement called "Nuit Debout" (Up All Night), which has seen advocates of a broad spectrum of causes gather in city squares at night for the past four weeks to demand change, though attendance has been dwindling in recent days.

With little more than a year left in his mandate, France's deeply unpopular President Francois Hollande has been banking on the labour reform as a standout initiative with which to defend his record.

But in the face of the protests his Socialist government has watered down the labour reforms -- only to anger bosses while failing to assuage workers.

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News

World news

Ukraine Marked the 30th Anniversary of the Chernobyl Disaster

In the presence of Petro Poroshenko, Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources Ostap Semerak, Director of the State Specialized Enterprise Chornobyl NPP Ihor Hramtokin and President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Suma Chakrabarti signed the Third Amendment to the Grant Agreement between the Government of Ukraine and State Specialized Enterprise Chornobyl NPP as Recipient and EBRD

AUTHOR: publics.bg



 http://www.president.gov.ua



We are deeply grateful to the international community, especially the EBRD, Japan as a G7 Presidency, to the United States and other G7 countries, as well as to the European Union, for your valuable and timely help. This is an important act of solidarity with Ukraine, which inspires confidence that jointly we will overcome the consequences of the Chornobyl disaster, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said during the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on April 26.

In the presence of Petro Poroshenko, Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources Ostap Semerak, Director of the State Specialized Enterprise Chornobyl NPP Ihor Hramtokin and President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Suma Chakrabarti signed the Third Amendment to the Grant Agreement between the Government of Ukraine and State Specialized Enterprise Chornobyl NPP as Recipient and EBRD.

This is a right investment in a right case  making our world a safer place, the Head of State noted, as reported by the official website of the Ukrainian Presidency.

The European Commission has announced it will support the fund for Chernobyl NPP with EUR 45 m.

Because of the incident which occurred in the early hours of April 26, 1986, 31 cleanup workers died and thousands more deaths have since been linked to the catastrophy. Following a steam explosion at Chernobyl NPPs reactor 4 radiation poured unhindered from it for 10 days. More than 250,000 people had to be displaced. A 30-km exclusion zone still surrounds the reactor, BBC reported.
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Andrea Portes is the author of two YA novels, Anatomy of a Misfit (HarperTeen, 2014) and most recently, The Fall of Butterflies (HarperTeen, May), as well as two adult novels, including Hick (Unbridled Books, 2007), which was made into a movie in 2011 starring Blake Lively, Alec Baldwin, and Eddie Redmayne. Anatomy has also been optioned for film, by Paramount Pictures. Portes recently sold a new YA spy series, Liberty (optioned by 20th Century Fox) and a middle grade series, Henry & Eva, to Kristen Pettit at HarperCollins (Im basically married to Kristen Pettit, Portes joked). PW caught up with the writer at her home in Los Angeles, while she was in between trips.

Your YA novels are both humorous and tragic. Why the mix?

I have a bit of a gallows sense of humor. My grandfather was a World War II pilot and he would say the most dry, hilarious things. Id like to think that I got my humor from him.

And when I was growing up things werent very good for my family. We had to move from place to place and back and forth. Our childhood was the worst. It was really hard. You cant imagine how insane this life was. And that laid the foundation for looking at the world in a certain way. You can either laugh about things or cry about them or maybe both, but I almost dont have enough patience for sorrow. I can only stay in that place for so long. A lot of the humor in my books is a way of coping, and there is heart there and beautiful things, too, but I acknowledge that there is tragedy.

I heard that The Fall of Butterflies, for example, was based on your time at Bryn Mawr, and Anatomy of a Misfit was based on your experiences in high school. What was it like to go back and transform your memories into a novel?

Butterflies is set up in a high school prep school, but its based on my college experience; a girl from a farm in Nebraska goes to Bryn Mawr, with literally no money and thrift-store clothes. Id play it off because that was the look. Even if Id wanted to be snobby with L.L. Bean clothes I couldnt have. When I got there I was kind of adopted by this person from the old Manhattan elite social world. I dont know why I was adopted by this person. The character Remy from Butterflies was an amalgamation of this person and another friend from L.A. It was very glamorous to be friends with these people, it felt like almost being famous and that they were almost famous. But then, they were heavily into drugs, and as time went by, the cracks in their world and their lives began to show. And as life has continued on, years and years later, Ive really been able to see how all the addiction took quite a toll.

Then, in Anatomy, the villainous girl in the book, Becky, is based on a real person. Obviously thats not her real name. But she Facebook-friended me after the book came out. She had no idea that Becky was her. And the place where Anika, my protagonist works, is based on where I worked in high school. I worked at a Runza Hut. We had to wear hilarious outfits. Kelly green shorts and lemon yellow polo shirts, and banana yellow LA Gears, which were these high-top sneakers that youd wear with chunky socks.

The character of Logan from Anatomy was based on someone you knew in real life, wasnt he?

Dylan (the person on which Logan is based) was my ex-boyfriend. I broke up with him for stupid reasons. In real life, what happened, was that his father killed his daughter, his son, his wife, and then drove to get his other son at military school  and it haunted me. It was strange that it happened in Nebraska. But at the time  in the 1980s  it wasnt like it is today. It was this thing that got swept under the rug. People didnt talk about it.

For Anatomy, I knew that I had to tell Dylans story because it never left me. And then it was just time  I was ready to tell it. I had to tell this story as YA because YA was the way the story wanted to be told. It was very cathartic to write it  it was hard, too. There were a lot of tears. Even when I was selling the novel to Paramount it was hard. People Im friends with on Facebook from high school have written me because of Anatomy and told stories abut Dylan. It felt like everybody in my high school starting talking about him. It almost became this opportunity for all of us to acknowledge what happened, when we hadnt when it actually happened.

Im really glad that I can honor this person.

Youre from a small town in Nebraska and so is Anika, your protagonist in Anatomy of a Misfit. And Willa from The Fall of Butterflies is from Iowa. Will all your characters be influenced by your Midwestern heritage?

No. For instance, in my upcoming spy series, Liberty, the protagonist is raised in Berkeley and her parents are Berkeley hippies. And my second novel [for adults], Bury This (Soft Skull Press, 2013) takes place in Michigan. Im not going to keep making everybody from the Midwest. For Hick and for Anatomy and Fall I felt like I had to start there. They were so close to home in the way that they were autobiographical.

Anika gives a speech at the end of Anatomy. Its part cheesy and also awesome in that classic high school movie way. Was this you writing your fantasy high school movie speech?

Its really what I wished Id said, but I didnt ever do anything like that. The very next day after graduating from high school I left Nebraska and went to New York City to be with my sister because she was living there. So I never got to do a big speech like that. But the nice thing is that when you write, you get to do things you wish youd done.

Before you started writing YA, you were writing for an adult audience. Do you see these two efforts as very different than one another?

Obviously there are differences, but the most consistent thing and the most important thing is being honest. The world is so dishonest about so many things in so many ways and its manipulative, that when youre truthful and honest, it rings out like a bell. And that is true if youre 11 or 16 or 35.

Speaking of different audiences, youre also working on a middle grade series, Henry & Eva. Whats behind your desire to write for even younger readers?

I know! Ive written adult literary fiction and then YA and now Im writing middle grade for the Harry Potter crowd. Its a bit goofy and supernatural and the series is very much like Lemony Snicket.

When I was little we lived in South America for a while, in Rio de Janeiro. It was in this place that seemed like a castle. In my memory it was a cold, dark castle, with my brother and me shivering in the corner all the time. But Im sure it was probably just a big house. That was the inspiration for Henry & Eva.

Several of your books have been optioned for film, and Variety reported that youre setting up Henry & Eva to be a movie franchise. How have you managed to be so successful at this?

I live in L.A. and Ive lived here for a long time  since 1990. I came here off and on since I was 17. A lot of the people I know are now movie producers or agents. Also in L.A., you kind of cant swing a dead cat without running into a movie producer, and theyre always looking for books to option. Its a lot easier to sell something thats been a book because it already has a stamp of approval, as opposed to just a script.

I feel really grateful and really lucky to be able to go around and sell things here. You also dont know if something will get made. If it sells, great, but if it gets made, like Hick, which was turned into an independent film, its even better.

The Fall of Butterflies by Andrea Portes. HarperTeen, $17.99 May ISBN 978-0-06-231367-6
Hitting bookshelves this week are a picture book about a wild child seeking his place, a middle grade novel in which a teen spends a summer getting to know his familys history, and the next installment of a high fantasy YA series.

The Rose and the Dagger by Renee Ahdieh. Putnam, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-399-17162-8. The second volume in the Wrath and the Dawn series continues the YA reimagining of The 1,001 Nights.

Rules of the House by Mac Barnett, illus. by Matt Myers. Disney-Hyperion, $17.99; ISBN 978-1-4231-8516-1. Barnett focuses his inimitable blend of energy and fiendish imagination in this picture book about childrens fascination with rules.

The Blood Between Us by Zac Brewer. HarperCollins/Tegen, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-06-230791-0. Two siblings, orphaned and separated by their own rivalry, come back together years later to try and solve the mystery surrounding their parents deaths.

Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts by Susan Cain. Dial, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-8037-4060-0. A middle grade adaptation of Cains bestselling adult book on introversion.

The Crown by Kiera Cass. HarperTeen, $19.99; ISBN 978-0-06-239217-6. The romance-fueled YA series comes to its conclusion, in its fifth and final volume set 20 years after the first.

It Aint So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.99; ISBN 978-0-544-61231-0. The author of the adult memoir Funny in Farsi makes her childrens book debut in this middle grade novel set in the 1970s about a young Iranian immigrant adjusting to life in America while the political climate shifts in the wake of the Iranian Revolution.

Lily and Dunkin by Donna Gephart. Delacorte, $16.99; ISBN 978-0-553-53674-4. In this middle grade novel, Gephart juxtaposes the efforts of two eighth-graders  one struggling with gender dysphoria, one with mental illness  to establish new identities for themselves.

The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood. Roaring Brook, $17.99; ISBN 978-1-6267-2373-3. This debut YA summer romance includes a time travel element.

Frannie and Tru by Karen Hattrup. HarperTeen, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-06-241020-7. This contemporary YA novel, a debut, confronts racial privilege and sexual orientation.

Ask Me How I Got Here by Christine Heppermann. Greenwillow, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-06-238795-0. In a series of poems written over several months, Addie, a sophomore and cross-country runner, narrates the turbulent journey that begins with her crush on a student named Nick, includes her unplanned pregnancy and subsequent abortion, and examines the feelings that subsequently engulf her. The book earned a starred review from PW.

Time Stoppers by Carrie Jones. Bloomsbury, $16.99; ISBN 978-1-61963-861-7. A middle grade fantasy series launches in which two unlikely kids overcome adversity with mythical helpmates.

Whisper to Me by Nick Lake. Bloomsbury, $17.99; ISBN 978-1-61963-456-5. Part romance, part crime story, part meditation on mental illness, Lakes YA mystery novel covers a lot of ground.

Gator Dad by Brian Lies. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-544-53433-9. Lies (Bats at the Beach) urges readers to squeeze the day as he follows an alligator familys at-home silliness.

A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas. Bloomsbury, $18.99; ISBN 978-1-61963-446-6. Maas broadens the world she created in A Court of Thorns and Roses in this second novel, in which a new enemy threatens both the seven Fae Courts and the mortal world her heroine left behind.

The Unexpected Everything by Morgan Matson. Simon & Schuster, $17.99; ISBN 978-1-4814-0454-9. In this YA novel, teen Andie Walkers plan to spend the summer at a young scholars program at Johns Hopkins is upended when her father, a U.S. congressman, becomes engulfed in scandal.

Wishing Day by Lauren Myracle, illus. by Julie McLaughlin. HarperCollins/Tegen, $16.99; ISBN 978-0-06-234206-5. After a tragedy, when budding writer Natasha turns 13, she makes three wishes under a willow tree and feels a hint of magic in the air.

Unrivaled by Alyson Noel. HarperCollins/Tegen, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-06-232452-8. Noel (the Immortals series) sets this first book in her contemporary realistic YA Beautiful Idols series in the glitzy, elitist, and seamy Los Angeles nightclub scene.

Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois by Amy Novesky, illus. by Isabelle Arsenault. Abrams, $18.95; ISBN 978-1-4197-1881-6. Novesky details the creative and passionate life of artist Louise Bourgeois alongside Arsenaults mixed-media collages that feature textile patterns and spider-web designs.

Moone Boy: The Fish Detective by Chris ODowd and Nick V. Murphy. Feiwel and Friends, $14.99; ISBN 978-1-2500-5947-5. Actor ODowd translates his BBC television show in this second volume in his humorous illustrated middle grade series.

The Blobfish Book by Jessica Olien. HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-06-239415-6. Slotting somewhere between Melanie Watts Chester books and Mystery Science Theater 3000, Oliens spoof of dry, nonfictional picture books follows a pink blobfish eager for its moment in the spotlight.

Curiosity House: The Screaming Statue by Lauren Oliver and H.C. Chester. HarperCollins, $16.99; ISBN 978-0-06227084-9. In this second book in the Curiosity House series, four children band together to avenge their friends death and solve a greater mystery.

If You Ever Want to Bring a Piano to the Beach, Dont! by Elise Parsley. Little, Brown, $16.99; ISBN 978-0-316-37659-4. Following up If You Ever Want to Bring an Alligator to School, Dont!, protagonist Magnolia struggles with bringing necessities to the beach.

The Fall of Butterflies by Andrea Portes. HarperTeen, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-06-231367-6. Sixteen-year-old Willa Parker, a small-town girl and native Iowan, reluctantly heads east to a fancy New England boarding school, where she meets Remy Taft, an infamous student from a famous family, who adopts Willa like shes a wide-eyed puppy.

As Brave As You by Jason Reynolds. S&S/Atheneum, $16.99; ISBN 978-1-4814-1590-3. YA author Reynolds offers his first middle grade novel, which follows a curious boy from Brooklyns summer in the Virginia countryside, as he gets to know his blind grandfather.

If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo. Flatiron Books, $17.99; ISBN 978-1-250-07840-7. In this YA debut, Amanda seeks to find her true self despite adversity as she completes her transition to female. The book earned a starred review from PW.

Hensel and Gretel: Ninja Chicks by Corey Rosen Schwartz and Rebecca J. Gomez, illus. by Dan Santat. Putnam, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-399-17626-5. This fractured fairy tale from the Caldecott Medalist contains plenty of martial arts mayhem.

There Is a Tribe of Kids by Lane Smith. Roaring Brook, $18.99; ISBN 978-1-6267-2056-5. In this picture book, a child moves along groups of animals as he tries to find where he belongs. The book earned a starred review from PW.

You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen by Carole Boston Weatherford, illus. by Jeffery Boston Weatherford. S&S/Atheneum, $16.99; ISBN 978-1-4814-4938-0. Weatherfords 40-plus free-verse poems create a composite portrait of the first African-American military pilots, and the rampant racial prejudice that these military heroes battled throughout the war. The book earned a starred review from PW.

For more childrens and YA titles on sale throughout the month of May, check out PWs full On-Sale Calendar.
This week, a childrens author has a room named in her honor; two author-illustrators show kids that going to work is pretty fun; an author signs books at a local haunt; and an author celebrates in good company.

A Room of Her Own

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt recently inaugurated its Lois Lowry conference room in the publishers New York City offices with Lowry (second from l.) in attendance. Lowry and HMH employees celebrated the author and her many books; Lowry has been publishing with Houghton Mifflin since 1977.

What a Day!

Sophie Blackall and John Bemelmans Marciano presented during Penguin Random Houses Take Our Children to Work Day activities on April 28. Speaking to a group of around 50 kids  sons and daughters of the publishers employees  the two talked about their new series, The Witches of Benevento, and gave a drawing presentation.

A Local Girl

YA author Siobhan Vivian signed copies of The Last Boy and Girl in the World (Simon & Schuster) at the cocktail bar The Livermore in Pittsburgh on April 26. Vivian, who lives in Pittsburgh, kicks off her national tour for the novel with events in New Jersey and at Books of Wonder in Manhattan on April 28. The tour concludes on May 14 at BookCon.

A Big Time Launch

Author Jennifer Brody celebrated the release of her YA novel The 13th Continuum at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles on April 20, where she signed books and met with attendees, including several celebrities. Here, Brody (l.) displays her novel with actress Challen Cates (Nickelodeons Big Time Rush).
New children's bookstore to open in California. Amazon expands pickup locations, on campus and off. And a Massachusetts bookstore faces protestors.

Amazon Opening Pickup Location Near UConn: Just days after Barnes & Noble was predicted to become the official campus retailer for the University of Connecticut (see below), Amazon announced that it will open a 4,000 sq. ft. staffed pickup location next to the UConn Storrs campus this summer. Earlier this week the e-tailer said that it would add a 2,500 sq. ft. pickup location at the University of California at Long Beach.

UConn Picks B&N: As anticipated, on Wednesday the board of trustees at the University of Connecticut made Barnes & Noble the official operator of its stores.

Bel & Bunnas to Open Next Month: Clare McNeil is opening an 823-sq. ft. bookstore in Lafayette, Calif., former home to Storyteller Bookstore, which closed in 2015. The store, which is partially funded by a private investor, will be open by memorial Day weekend and carry books for ages 0 to 18.

Protestors Picket Porter Square Books: The Cambridge, Mass., bookstore held an event with Jean Trounstine, author of Boy with a Knife: A Story of Murder, Remorse, and a Prisoners Fight for Justice (Ig Publishing), about murderer Karter Kane Reed, who killed Jason Robinson in a classroom at Dartmouth High School in South Dartmouth, Mass., and was sentenced as an adult. Robinsons sister, Shauna, was among the protestors who objected to Trounstines glorification of Reed.
Nigeria and France on Thursday signed an agreement on closer military cooperation, including intelligence sharing, to strengthen the fight against Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region.

Nigerian Defence Minister Mansur Dan Ali said the agreement was evidence of a "growing partnership" between Abuja and Paris, as he met his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian in the capital.

The two countries have been working more closely since a summit in Paris in December 2014, particularly in the area of military intelligence on the Islamist militants.

France has provided Nigeria with satellite images and surveillance footage from Rafale fighter jets based in Chad's capital, N'Djamena, which have flown over the main conflict area.

Nigeria's neighbours, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, are all former French colonies where Paris continues to have influence and its support is vital, Dan Ali acknowledged.

Le Drian said France was primarily concerned with "the common fight against terrorism and particularly against Boko Haram".

Maritime security is also a key factor in cooperation, he added, with incidences of piracy in the Gulf of Guinea off Nigeria's oil-rich south increasing in recent months.

The two minister signed a letter of intent outlining the main points of bilateral military cooperation after a high-level joint defence committee of Nigeria and French officials.

Both armies signed an operational cooperation document detailing 28 areas to be tackled before the end of the year, including training against improvised explosives and combat rescue.

Cross-border military exercises and joint maritime operations with other countries are also included.

A regional security summit is scheduled to take place in Abuja on May 14 with French President Francois Hollande in attendance, as well as representatives from Britain and the United States.

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As a number of booksellers know first hand in urban areas from New York City to San Francisco, rents have begun soaring. A new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance by Olivia LaVecchia and Stacy Mitchell examines the problem.

In Affordable Space: How Rising Commercial Rents Are Threatening Independent Businesses, and What Cities Are Doing About It, American Booksellers Association president Betsy Burton, owner of The Kings English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, is quoted as saying, The rents have come to be the most critical issue in the survival of locally owned businesses." According to the report, the problem isnt limited to affluent areas, but places like the Bronx which have seen large jumps in evictions of small businesses and increases in chains.

National chains, LaVecchia told Bookselling This Week, actually pay less than indies because they have a credit rating that allows property owners to get better terms on their mortgage.

Another part of the threat to indies is the movement toward walkable cities, which has made downtown areas more desirable. In some places, communities are taking down older buildings and replacing them with ones more suited to chains.

Among possible solutions, the reports suggests protecting established commercial districts and promoting building ownership among small businesses. In Seattle, for example, Mayor Ed Murray will convene an advisory committee to examine commercial affordability in the city.

Even without rising commercial rents and a changing built environment, the report concludes, strengthening its independent business sector is in a citys best interests.
Readerlink Distribution Services has signed an agreement to acquire the retail book distribution business of ANconnect. ANconnect is part of the Anderson Companies and distributes books to Walmart and Sams Club. The purchase is set to close April 29 at which point Readerlink will take over book distribution responsibility to about 3,600 Walmarts and 644 Sams Clubs.

Following the completion of the deal, certain management team members of ANconnect will join Readerlink. In addition, physical book merchandising services for stores previously supplied by ANconnect will continue to be provided by Anderson Merchandisers, an affiliate of ANconnect.

The purchase also includes ANconnects Winder, Georgia and Denton, Texas distribution centers and Readerlink said it will be hiring substantially all workers in those facilities.

"We believe that ANconnects dedicated associates and world-class retail partners distinguish them as an industry leader, said Dennis E. Abboud, president and CEO of Readerlink in a statement.. This transaction provides us with additional scale, assets and resources to continue our long-standing, proven commitment to customer service and to help us and our retail partners succeed in a dynamic and evolving book market.
Mathematician Michele Audin, author of the wonderful new novel One Hundred Twenty-One Days, is a member of the Oulipo, the very selective group of writers who apply constraints to their works, and whose notable members include Italo Calvino (whose Invisible Cities is designed like a sine wave) and Georges Perec (whose A Void does not contain the letter "e"). Audin, whose novel depicts mathematicians in wartime using a variety of documents, gives us an inside look at the society--using Oulipian constraints.

Before.

Authors. Calvino, who I discovered when I was twenty in reading Invisible Cities; Perec, whose Life A Users Manual I bought at random, just because it was a big book (and because bookstores have display tables), but then I hastened to read everything he wrote; Garreta, whose Sphinx I read as soon as it came out; Benabou, whose name I learned in Life A Users Manual and whose Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books I then read; Mathews, at first because he was friends with Perec; Queneau of course; and Roubaud.

But also a group. I read collective works, such as La Litterature potentielle (part of which appears in English as Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature).

And a culture. A myth? Sometimes I find myself writing a poem all in a or imagining a novel with a complicated structure. After all, Im a mathematician.

The Exceptional Event.

And then, one day, the Oulipo becomes a reality for me: it invites me to a meeting.

Why? I sent a book I wrote to Jacques Roubaud titled Remembering Sofia Kovalevskaya in which I included mathematics and history, but also literary pastiches; he had spoken about it at a meeting, so I get invited to the next one. I accept, of course.

I am terribly awestruck, but immediately find myself at ease.

Let me tell you about it. The meeting takes place at a friends house (a friend from the Oulipo). They are all there. Not Queneau, or Perec, or Calvino, unfortunately (this is December 2008). But Garreta, Roubaud, and many others, whose names I know, and others I dont know, but which I learn with astonishment and delight. The group is friendly, warm. The discussion is fascinating and effervescent (some cant help making puns for every remark). The wine is delicious and the foie gras excellent. The meeting is serious, but also joyful and funny. I feel like Ive found my intellectual family. And then its over. We say au revoir to each other out on the sidewalk.

As I leave them, I store up my memories of this exceptional event.

I read the books of Michelle Grangaud and all the other authors I met, Paul Fournel, Frederic Forte, Jacques Jouet, Herve Le Tellier, Ian Monk, and Olivier Salon.

One day I will write I remember the day I went to an Oulipo meeting.

Co-option.

Ah, but not just one meeting. Six months later, I receive a message from President Paul Fournel, who suggests I come back. Forever. I try my hardest to not rush into it, but I end up responding Yes I will yes.

I dont know it yet, but Im soon going to learn that co-options can only occur when the members are unanimous. And declaring yourself as a candidate forbids you from being co-opted (fortunately, I hadnt even imagined I could be one!).

So, starting in July 2009, I participate, every month, in this exceptional event.

The Meeting, from A to Z.

The meeting starts at six oclock. Today its at As house. For ten minutes, B, C, and D (including me), who are always early, wait in front of the door. Once everyone has entered and settled in, the President draws up the agenda, noting the names of those present and those excused (but only among the living Oulipians, the others are definitively excused for reason of death), including E and F who dont come very often. We help ourselves to pre-dinner drinks. As in a family, we share our news with each other (illnesses, joys, deaths). G makes a play on words. We quiet down while the President signs Oulipians up for the Creation section: the rule says that, if no one signs up for this section, the meeting is cancelled. In March 2016, were up to the 665th meeting, and this has never happened H and I, who are always late, arrive. J doesnt drink alcohol, K prefers root beer, everyone has a glass in hand. The meeting begins. L is the one presenting a creation. Tradition requires that we continually interrupt the presentation to complain about the presenters never-ending sentences. A discussion follows. The ambiance is truly familial (which, as in all families, includes arguments, which are generally short). The next sections are called Rumination (in which we propose ideas, such as new constraints) and Scholarship. M speaks modestly about a new research discovery (for a biography about one of the founders). N found new anticipatory plagiarists (Oulipians before the creation of the Oulipo). There is discussion of a novel whose author we might invite to a meeting. We move to the table and the disorder intensifies. Especially since O is telling a joke about Belgians (again). P, who takes notes for the meeting minutes, protests. Everyone likes their meat rare. Q tastes the wine. R talks about the release of a new book (this is the Publications section). S tosses the salad for a long time (we never toss the salad so much, according to T). We discuss the website, oulipo.net. The puns burst forth. We pass on the Actions section. This concerns preparing for the Oulipos public interventions, in the form of readings here or there or collective works. U and V smoke by the window. W, who doesnt like cheese, joins them. During dessert, we pick the date for the next meeting (one a month, twelve times a year, thats the rule). X offers to host, which pleases everyone: the food will be really good. We talk about the next guests of honor. Y and Z, who live in the north of Paris, call a taxi. The others keep talking before heading for the metro.

After.

Thats once a month. The rest of the time, its work. What have I done in the Oulipo? Ive taken part in several collective works, notably Winter Journeys, but also Le Petit Oulipo (for children) and the Abecedaire provisoirement definitif (Provisionally Definitive Abecedary). Ive written articles and presented at conferences. Ive given public readings. Ive learned a lot, about tons of literary subjects. For example, classic verse (Racine!), thanks to Valerie Beaudouin, and the circumflex, thanks to Bernard Cerquiglini. But Ive also written books, including One Hundred Twenty-One Days, for whose form I used an Oulipian idea connected to troubadour poetry; La formule de Stokes, roman, (Stokes Formula: A Novel) inspired by the form of Michelle Grangauds two poetic calendars; and Mademoiselle Haas, in which I used several ideas, one of which came to me in reading the French translation of Fricciones by Pablo Martin Sanchez (a young Oulipian from Spain). Concerning troubadour poetry, I reflected on mathematical questions with Ian Monkwhat a pleasure to talk about mathematics and poetry with a real poet! We used these ideas to write some nonines.

I still have tons of ideas, and Im sure the next meeting will help me discover even more!
Illinois lawmakers were busy last week shaking their fists over a tax revenue miscalculation the state tax collector says needs to be paid back by local governments and schools.

We hope that some of these representatives of the people also are busy during this weeks recess drafting legislation that will not further pile on local taxpayers because of the estimated $168 million the Illinois Department of Revenue overpaid local government entities.

Though the state made the mistake in doling out personal property tax replacement money, it expects local governments and school districts to pay the price.

Its not as though it would be easy for recipients to spot a mistake. Were told locals generally dont know how much money theyre going to get until they get it. Absent a formula they can check, these locals have no way of knowing when the states number crunchers make a mistake.

This one was a doozy. Some 6,500 local government entities are said to be affected (or more than 90 percent of the Land of Lincolns estimated 7,000-plus government bodies).

In the Quad-Cities area, that amounts to $4.6 million the Department of Revenue wants back from Quad-Cities area school district, counties and cities. Those on the hook for the most, and the total they are expected to pay back include:

-- Rock Island School District: $584,000

-- Moline School District: $597,000

-- City of Moline: $301,000

-- City of Rock Island: $333,000

-- Rock Island County: $300,208

-- East Moline Elementary School District: $276,464

-- United Township High School: $270,141

-- City of East Moline: $168,351

== Mercer County School District: $101,807

The tax collector has said the state probably wont ask for the money all at once.

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.

The fairest thing to do may be to forgive a large chunk of them; and thats what we hope lawmakers casting about for a solution are considering. After all, the money the state says it is owed is a drop in the bucket to what our deadbeat state owes others in the public and private sectors.

Indeed, even as East Moline is expected to repay $168,000 from the personal property replacement tax fund, Mayor John Thodos says, the state owes his city $500,000 in sewer and water fees for East Moline Correctional Center.

Just when I thought the state couldnt come up with any more surprises, this happens, he said. Its amazing. I dont know if this is a tragedy or a comedy.

Also feeling the pain are schools across the state, and here in Rock Island County, where they are readying to again ask voters to create a 1 percent sales tax to help pay for capital improvements districts cannot afford.

School districts across the Quad-Cities (and across the state) have seen significant drops in general aid even as costs to meet the education demands of lawmakers continue to skyrocket. Those lawmakers are mulling a fairer school aid formula. But though support is growing, the odds of an education funding overhaul that could bring more money to schools are especially long.

And this new debt created by the states tax accountants will further complicate planing and budgeting for local districts still waiting for state lawmakers and the governor to agree on that budget in time for the new school year to begin in August.

And, dont forget, a new fiscal year begins in July, so its conceivable that Illinois wont have a budget for any of state government for two fiscal years at the same time.

Someone should have to pay for such incompetence; someone besides taxpayers.
WASHINGTON -- Conservatives should be delighted that Harriet Tubman's 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, we've 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. I'm glad that Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew made a bolder and more meaningful choice.

It matters who's 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 Constitution's promise of freedom and justice to all Americans.

Critics who polluted social media with invective following Lew's announcement seemed to look past Tubman's deeds and focus on her identity. Yes, she was a black woman. If anyone can't deal with that fact, and doesn't want to use the new bills when they finally come out, feel free to send them to me.

Tubman was born into slavery on Maryland's 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 can't say -- I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

But that was just the beginning of Tubman's 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 women's suffrage. She died in 1913, frail yet still unbowed, having lived one of the greatest of American lives.

Is it political correctness or 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 nation's 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, we'd 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 only be described 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 hadn't, the young nation might not have survived the War of 1812. I say let's put him on the $2 bill, if anybody can find one.
DAVENPORT -- With "The Wonderful World of Oz" exhibit opening June 12, many visitors will be off to see the wizard this summer at Davenport's Figge Art Museum.

Drawn from the largest collection of Oz memorabilia in the world -- more than 100,000 items, owned by Willard Carroll and Tom Wilhite -- the 110 pieces coming to the Figge include the finest known copy of the first edition of L. Frank Baums 1900 book; original sketches, costumes and props from the 1939 movie; and Oz spinoffs such as puppets, toys and posters from related movies.

Highlights include the hourglass the Wicked Witch used to show Dorothy how much time she had left, an original Munchkin costume for one of the Lollipop Guild trio, and Judy Garland's screen-test dress.

Mr. Wilhite's great-uncle worked for E.P. Adler of Davenport-based Lee Enterprises and was close to V.O. Figge, then executive vice president of Davenport Bank. Mr. Wilhite, an Iowa native, spent many summers in Davenport as a child.

"There's a lot of interest in it. There's no business like show business," said Tim Schiffer, Figge executive director, of the exhibit. "As a story, it's a national fairy tale. The amount of interest in the show bears this out."

Related special events will include:

-- Saturday, June 11: A gala Oz-themed fundraiser at the Figge, attended by Mr. Carroll and Mr. Wilhite. Guests will tour the exhibit and are encouraged to come in costume. The $125-per-person admission will include an open bar, dinner and live auction, with proceeds going to the museum's education outreach.

-- Sunday, June 12: Mr. Carroll, an Emmy-winning producer, will give a talk exploring Oz's "indelible impact on every aspect of popular culture," according to the Figge.

-- Thursday, July 21: Paula Amad, cinematic-arts chair at the University of Iowa, will talk about the influence "The Wizard of Oz" has had on filmmaking.

-- Thursday, Aug. 11: John Fricke -- noted Oz and Judy Garland historian, Emmy-winning producer, and author of a book on the collection -- will discuss facts, fictions and secrets behind the making of the MGM film.

-- Saturday, Aug. 13: Mr. Fricke will host screenings of the movie at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. at the Adler Theatre. They will be rare 35-mm presentations, using one of very few prints made in 1998 by Warner Bros. and Technicolor. "This print is completely beautiful," and much different from typical versions, Mr. Schiffer said.

While the movie admission will be $3, the Figge is offering free admission through the entire exhibit and related events until Sept. 25. That's being made possible through sponsors Bechtel Trusts and the John Deere Classic, the director said.

Mr. Fricke's 2013 hardcover book, "The Wonderful World of Oz: An Illustrated History of the American Classic," will be on sale at the museum store.

"John knows so much about both Garland and Oz that he has been featured all this month on TCM talking about her, because Judy has been the star of the month," Davenport-based film and media consultant Doug Miller said.

Mr. Fricke and Mr. Miller know each other because of Mr. Fricke's appearances in Davenport in the 1980s as the host for the Miss Iowa Pageant. Mr. Miller was on the pageant board at the time. "He is excited to be coming back to the area because this is where he started out," Mr. Miller said.

When "The Wizard of Oz" premiered 77 years ago, it wasn't at the RKO Orpheum, the 1931 movie palace later converted to the Adler Theatre. It opened at The Capitol Theatre on West 3rd Street, Mr. Miller said.
The United Nations urged North Korea on Thursday to stop "any further provocative actions" after the Asian state test-fired what appeared to be two intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

"These types of actions by the DPRK (North Korea) are extremely troubling," said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

Both missile tests on Thursday failed, a South Korean official said, in a setback for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the run-up to next week's ruling party congress.

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SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP)  Illinois business leaders say they want the state to invest more money in early education to meet the demands of a growing job market centered on math and science.

Business leaders said Wednesday they support Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner's plan to increase preschool funding to about $393 million, an increase of $75 million from last year. Illinois risks losing federal money for early education programs without a budget. This year's should have taken effect July 1.

Supporters say investing in early education would boost student math and science skills and strengthen the state's workforce later on. They predict 37,000 science and technology jobs in Illinois by 2020.

A National Assessment of Educational Progress report shows only 32 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math and 26 percent in science.
Family and friends attended the highway-naming dedication ceremony Wednesday at the Presbyterian Church in New Windsor. The Illinois General Assembly voted in January to designate the portion of Illinois 17 from the Henry/Mercer County Line to Viola as the CPL Bryant J. Luxmore Memorial Highway. Cpl. Luxmore, who grew up in New Windsor, was killed by small-arms enemy fire June 10, 2012, while serving in Afghanistan. Also, pictured are Brock and Melissa Luxmore and Brenda Luxmore.
MOLINE -- A Western Illinois University-Quad-Cities professor on Wednesday said she doesn't know what to tell students wondering if they should transfer out of state because of the uncertainty over the Illinois budget.

"We don't really know what to tell them about the future of Western Illinois University," said Rebecca Newgent. "We don't know what to tell our families, either, about whether we're going to have a job come the fall."

Dr. Newgent, a professor in the department of counselor education at WIU-QC, spoke Wednesday at an event hosted by state Rep. Mike Smiddy, D-Hillsdale, about higher education funding. Third level education has been a victim of the 10-month long budget impasse in Springfield, although there was some relief this week when the state approved $600 million in emergency funding for colleges and universities.

That money represented just 27.8 percent of the funding appropriated for colleges and universities in the previous budget year.

Rep. Smiddy said he wants more of the compromise shown in passing the college "stopgap" bill to increase funding for higher education and prevent more cuts.

"We need to ensure that these institutions stay open -- not just through the end of this year but through next year as well," he said.

Gov. Rauner also has said he wants more money for higher education. But Rep. Smiddy said he was disappointed by comments by House Minority Leader Jim Durkin, R-Western Springs, who said he made a commitment to work with Democrats only to get money for social service programs and wasn't sure the legislature could "get anything else done on higher ed."

"We had a compromise. We compromised to get a stopgap budget, and then it was pulled out from under us," Rep. Smiddy said. "We need to stop worrying about what's going to happen in November and start worrying about what's happening right now to our communities."

The budget impasse has caused uncertainty over grants promised to students and layoffs at colleges and universities across Illinois. Dr. Newgent said morale at WIU-QC is low.

"A lot of it is because we don't know what's going to happen," she said. "It's hard to come into work and be positive and energetic when you're worried that you're going to get a layoff notice next week or next month.

"We just don't know what the future is."
Press release submitted by Henry and Stark County Health Departments

The Henry and Stark County Health Departments staff reminds area residents Blood Profiles are available at clinics held Monday through Friday starting at 7 a.m. at the Health Department's Main Office, Rt. 78 South, Kewanee; and at 8 a.m. at their Colona Office 103 1st St., Colona.

The fasting blood profile clinics offer area residents the opportunity to receive a variety of indepth profiles like the Chem Screen/CBC basic blood profile, a Thyroid Panel, and the PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) test. These tests are available without a physician's order.

Insurances, such as Medicare, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and Mutual Medical, can be billed with a physician's order.

The basic blood profile offers 39 different blood results including a total cholesterol, triglyceride, high and low density lipoprotein (HDL and LDL), and red and white blood cell count results. The PSA, for males age 50 and over, is a blood test to be used as a screening tool by physicians and should only be used in conjunction with a doctor's physical exam. The Thyroid panel gives indicatives of thyroid functioning by giving T3/T4/CFT4 and TSH results.These and other fasting blood profiles can be obtained by appointment at their Kewanee and Colona office locations.

Fasting is required for the basic blood profile. Therefore, participants should not eat or drink anything other than water for 8-12 hours prior to the blood draw. Test results will be sent by mail to participants and their physicians.

Please note, appointments which are necessary, may be made by contacting the Health Department at (309) 852-5272. For more information visit our website at www.henrystarkhealth.com or Find us on Facebook at Henry and Stark County Health Departments or Follow Us on Twitter.
The reported failures come ahead of a major North Korean ruling party meeting next week at which leader Kim Jong Un is believed to want to place his stamp more forcefully on a government he inherited after his dictator father's death in late 2011.

The launches were believed to be the second and third attempted tests of a Musudan, a new intermediate-range missile that could one day be capable of reaching far-off U.S. military bases in Asia and the Pacific.

On Thursday morning, a projectile fired from a North Korean northeastern coastal town crashed a few seconds after liftoff, a South Korean Defense Ministry official said, requesting anonymity because of office rules. It wasn't immediately known whether it crashed on land or into the sea. Then, in the evening, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that the North fired another Musudan missile near Wonsan but that launch also presumably failed. There were no other details.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) confirmed that North Korea attempted two missile launches that did not pose a threat to North America. It did not provide details in a brief statement.

South Korea's Foreign Ministry called the launches a provocation and said it will try to increase international pressure on North Korea.

The launch attempts come amid North Korean anger over annual South Korean-U.S. military drills that it calls a rehearsal for an invasion. The North has fired many missiles and artillery shells into the sea in recent months in an apparent protest against the drills, which end Saturday.

Earlier this week, South Korean media reported that North Korea had placed a Musudan missile on standby for an impending launch. The reports said the missile was one of two Musudan missiles North Korea had earlier deployed in the northeast.

South Korean and U.S. officials said there was a North Korean missile launch on April 15, the birthday of the North's late founder, but they have not officially confirmed it was a Musudan. U.S. officials said that launch ended in failure.

Musudan missiles have a potential range of about 3,500 kilometers (2,180 miles), which would put U.S. military bases in Guam within their striking distance. North Korea is also pushing to develop a nuclear-armed long-range missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, but South Korea believes it does not yet possess such a missile.

Before this month's suspected launches, North Korea had never flight-tested a Musudan missile, though one was displayed during a military parade in 2010 in Pyongyang.

There is speculation in South Korea that North Korea will soon conduct a fifth nuclear test. The North carried out a fourth atomic test in January and a long-range rocket launch in February, earning worldwide condemnation and tougher U.N. sanctions.

In New York, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said "these types of actions by the DPRK are extremely troubling and we would yet again encourage the DPRK to cease any further provocations and return to compliance with its full international obligations."

South Korean President Park Geun-hye said Thursday there were unspecified signs that a fifth test was "imminent." She warned another nuclear test would result in North Korea suffering harsher sanctions.
Most people know some version of the tale of the frog in the pot of water who was enjoying his swim so much he didn't notice the increase in the temperature until it got so hot he couldn't jump out, and his goose was cooked, so to speak.

Well, wake up, America. Look around, before it's too late. We are the frog in the pot. While we focus on our own comforts, we are blinded to the increased control of government on our lives and the elimination of God from the public square.

Gradually our freedoms are being eroded, until one day we will wonder whatever happened to freedom of religion; freedom of speech; freedom of the press; the right to assemble peaceably; the right to keep and to bear arms -- all those guarantees firmly fixed in our constitution.

"What can we do?" you ask. Jump out of the pot! Now! Get on our knees and repent for ourselves and our nation! Cry out for mercy to the Lord God who made us! "Shout it aloud, do not hold back. Raise your voice like a trumpet." (Isaiah 58:1a)

Thursday, May 5, is the 65th annual National Day of Prayer. Seize the opportunity to pray for America with other concerned citizens at:

-- 12:15-12:45 p.m., 2nd floor council Chambers, Moline City Hall, (elevator available) and Milan Municipal Building;

-- Noon to 1 p.m., East Moline City Hall, Rock Island County Courthouse southeast lawn, Coal Valley Municipal Park.

America needs our prayers!

Dori Duncan,

Moline
Meng Brings NASA Astronaut To Queens On October 17, U.S. Rep. Grace Meng (D-Queens) brought NASA astronaut Dr. Jonny Kim to Queens where he met and spoke with students at Francis...

Celebrating Columbus The Federation of Italian-American Organizations of Queens (FIAO) held their annual Columbus Day parade in Astoria, on Saturday, October 8, during Italian Heritage Month. The...

Russo-Elling Mourned More than 300 first responders lined up on Thursday night to honor FDNY EMT Lt. Alison Russo-Elling, as her body was placed into a waiting...
The president also told union leaders during a celebration of Internation Workers Day he wants 'made in Egypt' held up worldwide

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi announced on Thursday at a Labour Day celebration that EGP 100 million from the Long Live Egypt Fund (Tahya Misr) would be allocated to the manpower ministrys emergency fund in order to support workers in ailing sectors such as tourism.

El-Sisi also stressed the importance of Egypt establishing a competitive industrial base that would enable the country to increase exports to African and global markets.

"We want to hold high the slogan of 'made in Egypt' everywhere around the world," El-Sisi told trade union leaders at an event organised by the Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions at Masa hotel in Cairo.

Egypts tourism sector, which employs around 4 million people, has taken a heavy hit since the deadly October 2015 crash of Russian plane in Sinai, which killed 224 people. The IS group claimed responsibilty for downing the plane. The Egyptian government has not yet released its final findings report.

The sector saw some revenues of $500 million in the first quarter of 2016, down from $1.5 billion a year earlier.

The charitable fund Long Live Egypt was established by El-Sisi in 2014 with the aim of supporting Egypt's economy and development, and is run by a committee he appointed.

The president had announced in February that the fund has raised around EGP 4.7 billion since its establishment.

El-Sisi urged the swift ratification of labour-related laws that would affect the production process.

The president cited technology and electronic industries as important venues for exports.

Egypt's exports to non-Arab African countries amounted to $260 million out of a total $9 billion during the first half of the current fiscal year 2015/16, according to the latest data from the central bank.

A number of state officials and dignitaries attended the event including Premier Sherif Ismail and manpower minister Mohamed Saefaan.

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For any aspiring entrepreneurs, Basson said to make sure you have a product or idea that retailers want to sell and consumers want to buy.

1 hour ago
The regional government published a tender notice in the Official Journal of the European Union in December 2013 for five 3kV dc 110m-long trains capable of accommodating up to 180 passengers.

In addition to Stadler, two Polish suppliers, Pesa and Newag submitted bids and the department subsequently confirmed last August that it had chosen Pesa as preferred supplier.

However, following a legal dispute over the requirements of the contract, Stadler has now been provisionally awarded the contract, pending an appeal against the region's latest decision.
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On May 26 and 27, President Barack Obama will join with other leaders from the Group of 7 industrialized nations at a summit hosted by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Ise-shima in Japan's Mie Prefecture.

The assembled world leaders will discuss topics including the global economy and trade, foreign policy issues, climate change and energy, development, quality infrastructure investment, health and women's issues.

At the conclusion of that visit, his last to Japan as a sitting president, Obama will have an opportunity to do something no other American president has ever done: visit the first and last cities to suffer atomic bombings.

The prospect that the president might visit Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki has long been debated within U.S. Asia policy circles and is attracting substantial attention and generating great hope in the Japanese media. Advocates argue that it will help build greater momentum in U.S.-Japan ties and draw stark contrasts between non-nuclear Japan and North Korea's illegal nuclear program.

Opponents, meanwhile, worry it might be interpreted as an apology that could stir up feelings of anti-Americanism or even calls for compensation inside Japan. As I recently had the opportunity to visit both Hiroshima (in January 2016) and Nagasaki (in April 2016), I believe that the president should go.

Below are five considerations that have shaped my thinking.

First, no one should argue that an American president could not visit any city where substantial civilian casualties had occurred simply because it might be seen as an apology. American presidents have already visited numerous Japanese cities that experienced firebombing campaigns during World War II resulting in substantial numbers of civilian deaths.

World War II was conducted as a total war in an era prior to the existence of either precision-guided munitions or strong international norms against causing civilian casualties in armed conflict.

Many of Japan's major defense industrial sites were located within or adjacent to major cities, and as a consequence large numbers of Japanese cities were targeted with high explosive, fragmentation and incendiary bombs, often killing large numbers of civilians in the process. Yet no one would argue that Tokyo or other cities where the civilian death toll was substantial should be off-limits to an American president.

Second, as Secretary of State John Kerry's visit to Hiroshima has shown, a visit can be accomplished without being interpreted as an apology, and indeed many Japanese are emphatic that, as strongly as they want President Obama to go, they are not looking for him to issue an apology.

If Obama doesn't visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki, he will miss a historic opportunity that his successors are unlikely to grasp any time soon.

Indeed, for most Japanese, our apologies to each other for the horrors of war have come in how we have treated each other the past 70 years. Indeed, many Japanese regard their neighbors' quests for apologies for past Japanese behavior as politicized or illegitimate and this would make it difficult for them to turn around and demand an apology from the United States (apart from the fact that one would not be forthcoming).

Third, a visit by President Obama to either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or best of all both, would present an opportunity to invite Prime Minister Abe to Honolulu to lay a wreath at the site of the USS Arizona, at rest on the bottom of Pearl Harbor where it sank after a Japanese sneak attack on the morning of December 7, 1941.

Opening the way for a Japanese leader to pay respects to the 2,403 Americans who died defending their country that fateful morning nearly over 70 years ago would be a fitting rejoinder to an American president's visit to Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki.

Fourth, President Obama has not shied away during his presidency from reaching out to America's adversaries and taking risks to shake up U.S. foreign policy. He has shown his willingness to authorize bold steps, including killing Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki; reaching out to improve relations with Venezuela and Cuba; and signing a controversial deal to freeze Iran's nuclear program.

A presidential visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is less controversial than these steps and would likely be seen by a leading ally of the United States as a highly symbolic gesture of friendship and healing.

Finally, if President Obama does not go to the two cities, he will miss a historic opportunity that his successors are unlikely to be able to grasp any time soon: Given the possible controversy a visit could generate, no incoming president is likely to make such a trip, meaning it could be yearsat the earliestuntil the next such opportunity could come up.

The trip would be far more meaningful if it could be accompanied by a meeting with the survivors, who could share their personal stories of war and remembrance. Yet, the youngest survivors of those two fateful days in August 1945 are today 71 years of age, and most are much older; there will be fewer and fewer hibakushas (or atomic bomb survivors) alive with every passing year.

In light of the above considerations, the time for such a visit, if it is ever to occur, is clearly upon us now.

Scott W. Harold is the associate director of the RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy, a political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation, and a member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School faculty.

This commentary originally appeared on Newsweek on April 28, 2016. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
A few days before President Francois Hollandes visit to Cairo last week, the French ambassador invited me to meet with Hollande, as part of a small group of Egyptian writers and politicians.

The purpose of the meeting, ambassador Andre Parant said, was to discuss the political and economic situation and explore ways to strengthen ties between Egypt and France. Parant made a point of inviting a diverse group of independent thinkers, perhaps to ensure that the meeting was not reflective of any one political and ideological view.



The meeting, which lasted about an hour, was attended on the French side by the minister of culture, the director of the Arab World Institute in Paris, and several parliamentarians.

The conversation turned to the current situation in Egypt, the political, economic, and cultural challenges facing the country, and potential avenues of cooperation with France. I focused in my intervention on the development of French-Egyptian economic relations, observing that Hollandes visit offered little on two of the most vital issuesthe return of French tourists to Egypt and increasing foreign investment in areas that could create jobs for the youth.

President Hollande commented that he was working assiduously to encourage French tourism in Egypt, but that this depended on Egypts progress in securing airports and tourist facilities. As for investment, he said that a meeting that same morning with the French-Egyptian Chamber of Commerce was fruitful and he would pursue the issue further upon his return to France.

Attendees also discussed how to combat terrorism without sacrificing constitutional and human rights gains, the turmoil in the Arab region, and cooperation in higher education. Hollande expressed Frances commitment to support Egyptian efforts in economic development, counterterrorism, and the building of constitutional institutions.

I left the meeting thinking that we had conveyed a realistic picture of the nature of the challenges facing Egypt and the need for deeper cooperation between the two countries to address them. So I was shocked when, a few days later, everyone at the meeting came under severe media scrutiny, accused of urging France to cut economic ties with Egypt, scale down commercial cooperation, and bar French tourism.

In fact, during the meeting with Hollande, we discussed ways to develop and encourage investment cooperation and overcome the tourism crisis. It is true that some attendees also raised concerns over the political situation, democracy, and human rights, but this was part of a frank conversation in which attendees expressed divergent views, and there was absolutely no incitement against the state, attempts to to leverage Western support, or conspiring to destroy national institutions as was later reported in the media.

So why was the meeting the focus of so much attention and criticism when it was neither held in secret, nor as it the only meeting Hollande had during his visit? In fact he also met with other writers and intellectuals, as well as with investors, MPs, and officials.

The answer, I think, is that such accusations of treasonous conduct are not new. They are revived whenever state agencies need a hook on which to hang their mismanagement and failure to resolve the Egyptian peoples problems. The state-owned media ignores the public's worries and problems pertaining to the grinding economic crisis, price hikes, as well as political and popular resentment over the islands of Tiran and Sanafir.

Instead, they point the finger at statements and blog posts (some of which were unfortunate) about a conversation with a guest of Egypt, as if such a thing could conceivably lead to a breaking of French-Egyptian ties, change the course of bilateral economic cooperation, or undermine our national security.

The suspicions and charges of treason leveled over the past few years at any person who dares to object to state policies and practices, or even express reservations, is no longer acceptable. In fact, its a sure-fire way of destroying society and its institutions, deepening the divisions within it, and weakening its ability to deal with challenges and risks. A state is not made strong only by its defensive and combat capacities, but by its internal cohesion, tolerance of diverse views, and belief that difference does not equal treason.



The insistence on one opinion and the states dominance of the public sphere only furthers social divisions. It turns young people who wish to participate and forge the future either to despair and frustration or to violence, having found all avenues for peaceful dialogue and protest closed.

*The writer holds a PhD in financial law from the London School of Economics. He is former deputy prime minister, former chairman of the Egyptian Financial Supervisory Authority and former chairman of the General Authority for Investment.



This article was published in Arabic in El-Shorouq newspaper on Monday, 25 April.

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Is medical research worth spending taxpayers' money on? Does spending public money mean that private pharmaceutical and life sciences companies are more likely to keep their wallets closed? These are just two of the most commonly asked questions about public spending on medical research.

In fact, medical research is both a public and private-sector activity. Government agencies, donor-supported charities and for-profit private companies each fund various medical research activities, sometimes in completely different ways. It is a complex ecosystem. For example, a university medical research group may receive funding from one or more medical research charities, as well as from the taxpayer. However, a private company may licence and develop a technology, fund or co-fund clinical trials.

Regardless of who provides the funding, medical research is highly beneficial to the whole of society. Health care is improved and scientific knowledge advanced, of course, but the economy also benefits  from additional investment, jobs and income, as new health technologies are researched, developed and commercialised.

Quite rightly, the financial benefits of public funding can often be sidelined by the public good argument. Public spending that not only provides positive social benefits, but also pays for itself by increasing national income by more than the amount spent, is rare. However, medical research is one area where public spending translates into just such economic benefits, alongside the wider health and scientific gains.

A recent study by RAND Europe and our partners at Kings College London, the Office of Health Economics and the University of York has provided evidence that public funding of medical research in the UK is money well spent. The study explored the medical research expenditure by government, charities and pharmaceutical companies in the UK between 1982 and 2012. It found that public and charity spending stimulates the private sector to spend more on R&D, not less. Each pound of public funding in medical research leads to an additional 99 pence investment in medical research from the private sector.

The almost pound-for-pound spending match by the private sector highlights the huge potential of public spending on medical research to benefit the UK economy. By spending more on investment in R&D, private industry creates more jobs in the UK, more income and, as a result, more tax revenue.

The results of our study, combined with evidence from numerous other studies that show the economic impact of private R&D spending, (as summarised in previous research), imply that, over time, public investment in medical research more than pays for itself in terms of economic impact alone. This is even before the health and scientific benefits are taken into account, which are usually the main reasons for the research in the first place.

However, the converse is also true: Our research implies that cutting public spending on medical research can be expected to damage the economy by more than the amount of money initially saved. That is in addition to the loss of potential health gains and scientific knowledge.

Governments and other funders of medical research, who commit billions of pounds to medical research each year, can further justify such investments, beyond the health gains and scientific advances that result, by highlighting the economic benefits they bring.

Jon Sussex is chief economist at RAND Europe and co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research, a collaboration between RAND Europe and the Institute of Public Health at the University of Cambridge.

Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
As the United States celebrated the first anniversary of its Arctic Council chairmanship on April 24, it had an opportunity to look back on several achievements, including the creation of the Arctic Coast Guard Forum last October. Through this organization, Arctic nations  including the United States and Russia  will collaborate and exercise together in areas such as search and rescue and emergency preparedness.

This development in Arctic safety and security is especially remarkable considering the recent resurgence of tensions between Russia and its neighbors. Russia's grab of Crimea and its use of military force to destabilize Eastern Ukraine have shed an ominous light on its recent efforts to expand its military infrastructure and presence in the Arctic region. The illegal annexation of Crimea also illuminated Russia's willingness to contest international law and reshape the interpretation of legal boundaries to fit its interests, raising questions about whether Russia might do the same with respect to its continental shelf claim around the North Pole. Recent tensions driven by a stronger Russian and NATO presence in the Baltic region also appear to have spilled over into the Arctic.

How much longer can the Arctic maintain its peaceful status?

The U.S. Arctic Council chairmanship, succeeding Canada's, has had to function in the context of this tension and uncertainty to construct policy that promotes the best interests of those in the Arctic region. Now in its 20th year, the Arctic Council has evolved to become the most prominent forum for Arctic cooperation on safety, environment and other areas of mutual concern (excluding defense) for the eight Arctic countries and six indigenous peoples organizations. Twelve entities also participate as observers on the council. Prior to the creation of the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, other notable achievements included two binding agreements on search and rescue (2011) and oil pollution preparedness and response (2013). Beyond any particular agreement or decision, the Arctic Council has also served more generally to promote cooperation, rather than competition, in the region.

The U.S. chairmanship has taken the wise  and so far effective  step of maintaining the council's ability to promote cooperation in the Arctic, regardless of geopolitical tensions elsewhere. Far from giving a blank check to Russia for its actions in eastern Europe, this stance recognizes that Arctic issues go well beyond political, military and economic matters to also encompass environmental and safety issues; the well-being of indigenous communities; and scientific research on the extent and future impact of climate change  all areas where cooperation not only creates shared benefits but is also the only possible approach given the challenges of operating in a polar environment.

As a matter of fact, the United States and Russia have a long history of cooperating with each other in the Arctic. In addition to working together in the Arctic Council since the organization's inception in 1996, the United States and Russia have cooperated on other Arctic activities and agreements for decades prior. In fact, one of the warmer points in these countries' relationship during the Cold War was on Arctic affairs. During this time, the United States and Russia were both signatories to the Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, for example, even as both countries used their Arctic territory to build up military capability.

Enduring cooperation in the Arctic is best understood when considering the conditions in which humans  whether indigenous communities, merchant navy crews or members of the military or homeland forces  operate there. The Arctic is a remote region that is difficult to access, dangerous to navigate and arduous to exploit. Cooperation is much cheaper than competition. The challenges to the relatively few present in the region make working together, practically speaking, a necessity.

All Arctic nations stand to gain more from cooperation than competition.

While the United States and its Arctic neighbors have several important stakes in the region  first nations' cultures to celebrate, energy resources and fisheries to exploit, maritime routes to transit, northern approaches to defend  there is also recognition that the Arctic, through the council and other such opportunities for collaboration, represents an open line of dialogue with Russia. Having a safe space to engage with Russia in the context of a relationship that is otherwise fraught with tension is a rare and valuable commodity. It is difficult to estimate a country's intent when it is closed off from the rest of the world. The sort of diplomatic and political interactions that have been maintained in the Arctic area provide precisely such an opportunity.

The United States also recognizes that the Arctic is not Ukraine. It is highly important strategically for Russia, but unless a threat materializes close to the Russian northern coast, Arctic nations are not in Russia's near abroad. Russia does not have to fear losing its influence in the Arctic region  instead, it is exercising influence through its inclusion in Arctic governance institutions. Russia so far has benefited from the existing legal order in the Arctic and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and stands little to gain, at this point, from upsetting that order. While a dramatic Arctic thaw may fundamentally change this situation in the medium to long-term, few believe anymore that a race for resources in the Arctic will happen soon. As waterways remain treacherous to navigate and hydrocarbons reserves still prove difficult and hazardous to exploit, the Arctic environment, at least in one regard, has not changed: All Arctic nations, including Russia, still stand to gain more from cooperation than competition.

While the United States cannot ignore Russia's growing capabilities in the Arctic  despite economic challenges, Russia's military infrastructure in its Arctic region has been growing over the past few years  this situation should not fundamentally question the United States' approach of engaging Russia in the Arctic Council and maintaining cooperation where it can be maintained, and where the two countries  as well as other Arctic nations  have shared interest.

As it embarks on a second year of chairmanship and prepares to pass the baton to a Finnish chairmanship in 2017, the United States should continue with its policy of engagement with Russia within Arctic institutions, which is not only the best but also the only way to keep building on a track record of successful agreements that make the Arctic safer for all. In doing so, the United States and Russia will continue to invest in an open line of dialogue that will only become more important if tensions persist elsewhere and as international interest in the Arctic grows.

Stephanie Pezard is a political scientist and Abbie Tingstad is a physical scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

This commentary originally appeared on U.S. News & World Report on April 27, 2016. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
HBO Latin America is giving free access to HBO Go for a month, during which the premieres of a number of series including Game of Thrones will be aired.





Starting yesterday (27 April), HBO Go LATAM will be subscription free in a promotion drawing on the worldwide expectation of the premiere of Game of Thrones sixth season.In addition, HBO Go will offer for free the premieres of Silicon Valley, Veep and El Negocio, as well as the preview of Penny Dreadfuls third season. Viewers will also have access to extra material and pilot episodes of these series.All the programming will be available for subscribers of HBO/MAX channels, HBOMAX.tv and HBO On Demand.Through this move, HBO aims to promote the recently-launched video-on-demand (VOD) platform, which is available as a standalone service in Colombia and Mexico , and as a TV everywhere service in the rest of the region.
The top 25 pay-TV networks in Latin America are available for seven in ten subscribers across the region, reveals Dataxis TV Tracker.





This figure includes broadcasting through analogue, digital and HD signals as well as TV everywhere platforms.The new online tool also revealed that HD channels represent a third of the total offer, but that they are unevenly distributed across the region Analysing the offer in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela, Dataxis TV Tracker estimates the potential reach of each signal, updating the information quarter-on-quarter, according to availability, on prices plans and packages.According to the company, the tool offers information about 662 channels, belonging to 170 media groups, enabling it to easily and dynamically estimate the number of subscribers that each channel has in the region and country.
Rosneft files defamation suit over privatisation allegations

MOSCOW, April 28 (RAPSI)  Russias oil giant Rosneft filed a lawsuit with the Moscow Commercial Court, accusing RBC Media holding journalists of libel over allegations concerning the company's privatisation, according to court records.

RBC journalists Timofey Dzyadko, Lyudmila Podobedova, and Maxim Tovkailo, alongside BisnessPress company, RBC newspaper publisher, has been named co-defendants in a case.

The lawsuit was brought after an article about Rosneft privatization headlined 'Rosneft requests authorities to protect it from BP' had been published on the website of the newspaper on April 11.

Rosneft claims that "information contained in the article published on RBC website is misleading." "It is a baseless fantasy on the part of journalists, or their so-called undisclosed sources, the company said in the press-release.

Rosneft sought a retraction of the allegations reproduced by a number of other Russian outlets.

A statement of Rosneft denying the allegations was later published, but without a full retraction of the article, according to Mikhail Leontyev, Rosneft spokesman.

The company does not pursue a claim for damages so far, according to Leontyev.

He added that the journalists referred to the disputed article after Rosneft had filed a denial notice which looked rather suspicious.

RIA news agency reported earlier in April, citing Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev that White&Case law firm had been chosen as legal advisers for the privatisation of Rosneft.
Russia considers launching probe into Su-24 pilot's murder in Syria - report

Context Turkish police confirm arrest of alleged murderer of Russian pilot

MOSCOW, April 28 (RAPSI)  The Russian Investigative Committee considers launching a probe into the murder of lieutenant-colonel Oleg Peshkov, a pilot of a Su-24 jet downed by Turkish warplanes near the border with Turkey, Kommersant newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing undisclosed sources in the Investigative Committee and Chief Military Prosecutors Office.

According to Kommersant, the incident, which occurred on November 24, 2015, was initially investigated by officers of the military police and the command of the Russian military base in Syria.

The plane was allegedly downed by an air-to-air missile fired by a Turkish F-16C fighter. Two pilots managed to eject from the plane. Peshkov was killed by ground fire from militants when parachuting, his navigator survived. Another serviceman, marine Alexander Pozynich, was killed during the rescue mission.

Alparslan Celic, a fighter from a Turkish-backed Turkmen brigade in Syria, publicly admitted killing Russian pilot.

Investigators from Moscow were not authorised to search for Celic at that time, and the inquiry was wrapped up. An attempt was made on the life of a serviceman, but due to impossibility to identify and detect a person to be held accused or suspect, the case was dropped, Kommersant quotes its sources as having said.

Celic and his associates were arrested on March 30 by the Turkish police in a restaurant in the city of Izmir suspicion of the illegal possession of firearms.

At the moment, Russia's Investigative Committee considers launching a probe into the murder of Russian servicemen in Syria, including Peshkov, under Article 12 of the Russian Criminal Code permitting investigators to prosecute foreigners committing crimes against interests of Russia or Russian citizens abroad, according to Kommersant.

In the framework of such a probe the Investigative Committee may forward a request with regard to Celik to the Turkish Prosecutors Office and seek his prosecution in Turkey.

Meanwhile, Celik retracted his admittance of killing the pilot and sent a letter to Maria Zakharova, the official spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, asking to start a dialog with him. However, Zakharova refused to react on the basis of some unofficial communications published on social networks. She said that Russia is interested in Celiks clear statements with regard to the murder of the pilot and details of the incident based on proof.
Moscow police arrest suspects in $7.7 mln embezzlement

MOSCOW, April 28 (RAPSI)  Moscow police have arrested seven individuals suspected of nearly 500 million rubles ($7.7 million) under the pretense of providing brokerage service, RIA Novosti reported on Thursday.

According to the police, suspects have embezzled money from at least 3,000 Russian nationals and foreigners offering them to handle civil transactions at the international exchange market.

Cell phones, flash drives, bank cards, computers, laptops and documents material to investigation have been seized during searches conducted in Moscow, Moscow Region and Vladimir Region.

The men could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
Man suspected of stealing rare violins arrested in Moscow

MOSCOW, April 28 (RAPSI)  Moscow police officers have arrested a 30-years old man from the Eastern Europe who is suspected of stealing art objects, RIA Novosti reported on Thursday.

According to Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk, a victim of the crime, 83-years old man, turned to police on April 17 and told officers that several valuable items were missing from his apartment. Stolen objects included three paintings, one of them was created by famous artist N.N. Dubovsky, and two hand-made violins created in 1721 and 1736 respectively as well as a violin bow dated as far as 17th century.

Allegedly the crime suspect knew the victim and visited him several time beforehand.

Currently art objects are undergoing expertise for their evaluation.
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.
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(Beijing)  China had a record number of scams last year as regulators struggle to catch up with changes the Internet has brought to the financial industry, officials said at an inter-ministerial meeting to address the issue.

The number of cases of what the government calls "illegal fundraising" rose by more than 70 percent last year from a year earlier, Yang Yuzhu, who heads an interagency body tasked with tackling the problem, said at the meeting on April 27 that was attended by representatives of 14 ministries and commissions.

The people who attended the meeting, which was open to the media, did not say how many cases of fraud authorities handled last year. The government is vague about what constitutes illegal fundraising, but more reports of scams and Ponzi schemes, which see money from new investors used to pay old ones, have appeared in the news in recent years.

The amounts of money involved in the frauds last year rose by more than half in 2015 and the number of cases involving over 100 million yuan increased by 44 percent year-on-year, Yang said.

As the number and scope of problems grows, courts are short of judges with financial knowledge, said Jiang Yongyi, a judge on the Supreme People's Court. The country's judicial system handled fewer cases involving financial scams last year than they did in 2014, Jiang said.

New forms of fraud have posed a challenge for regulators, prompting Zhang Xiaojin, an official at the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the country's top prosecutor's office, to say illegal fundraising is usually done "under the cover of financial innovation."

Prosecutors need more training so they can tell the difference between scams and financial innovations, Zhang said.

The Internet has also made it difficult for regulators to limit the scope of fraud, Yang said. Late last year, the government closed Ezubo, a peer-to-peer lending website that investigators said swindled 900,000 small investors out of more than 50 billion yuan through a Ponzi scheme.

Officials at the meeting said they will use new technologies to strengthen the monitoring of the financial sector and encourage government bodies to share information. They also pledged to start a campaign in May to educate the public about risks related to scammers.

The central government put more focus on fraud after unraveling a string of financial crimes. The governments of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen recently temporarily halted the opening of firms whose name suggests they provide financial services, people close to the matter said.

And in a document sent to various officials on April 13, the government said it will tighten rules covering ads for Internet finance products. Content such as promises of high returns, celebrity endorsements and false information are banned in Net finance companies' ads.

(Rewritten by Chen Na)
By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 04/28/2016



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Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade.
Whether it was an accident or a one-time mistake you made that sent you to prison, your record is more likely tarnished forever. For some, starting a new life after prison could be a hard thing, such as finding a secure and safe home. Can you buy or rent a home if you have a criminal record?

According to REALTOR Mag, around 650,000 Americans being released out of prison every year and that's how many people need a second chance in getting a home and start anew. With this, the Department of Housing and Urban Development earlier this month released guidelines to help landlords and sellers create a non-discriminatory policy for people with criminal records who want to rent or buy a property.

The RealEstateRama report said that implementing a blanket ban on renting or selling to anyone with a criminal record is a discrimination act and therefore a violation of the Fair Housing Act. By putting the measure in place, Americans returning to the community would have a better chance of getting a stable home for them and their families.

The government's guidance recommendations such as considerations of whether the infraction was committed a long time ago, whether it was minor, and whether the person undertook rehabilitation, REALTOR Mag reported.

HUD, together with the Department of Justice, this week also announced a $1.75 million budget for Public Housing Authorities (PHA) and nonprofit legal organizations for the project that would help juveniles with a criminal record find jobs and housing, FOX 43 reported. The Juvenile Reentry Assistance Program (JRAP) is funded through the Second Chance Act funds of the DOJ.

FOX 43 quoted HUD Secretary Julian Castro and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch saying, "Reconnecting young people who've paid their debt to society to decent jobs and housing allows them to turn the page and become active, productive members of their communities. These grants offer a helping hand to those who deserve a second chance so they have a real opportunity to reach their full potential.
Pevely, MO based Heizer Defense recently announced the release of their first semi-automatic pistol for their product line: the Heizer Defense PKO-45.

Heres what they told us about it.

Heizer Defense PKO-45

Heizer Defense, known for their innovative line of powerful pocket pistols, is pleased to add their first semi-automatic pistol to the product line, the PKO-45. Heizer will introduce the PKO-45 to the public at the upcoming Concealed Carry Expo in Atlanta, GA from April 29-May 1. Heizer Defense is a Live-Fire Shooting Range sponsor for the show, which will allow consumers to test-fire the PKO-45 at the expo's mobile shooting range. The PKO-45 or Pocket 45, is the slimmest semi-auto .45ACP on the market at just 0.8 wide and approximately 25 ounces. The PKO-45 is made with 100% US Aerospace grade stainless steel. There are no plastic or mimed parts on the PKO-45. It boasts a revolutionary fixed-barrel-under-the-guide-rod configuration, resulting in less recoil felt by the operator. The PKO-45 also features a snag-free design, internal hammer/single action, and a front strap safety with an additional thumb ambi-safety. It has 5+1 capacity with a flush magazine, and 7+1 capacity with the extended magazine. This new pistol will be available for purchase in September 2016.

Heizer Defense describes themselves as a high technology, state of the art firearm company based in Pevely, Missouri, a company that has been in the manufacturing business for over 50 years. They say, We will never release a product without being fully tested and certified.

Heizer Defense is an affiliate company to Heizer Aerospace, which manufactures fracture-critical components for aerospace companies, NASA and the military. Established in 1962, Heizer Defense Engineers apply this same military technology to create high quality firearms.

If you would like to learn more about Heizer Defense, click right here to go to their website. You can connect with them on Facebook here, Twitter here, and You Tube right here.
University of Georgia students and faculty gathered in Tate Plaza on Thursday afternoon to mourn the four students who died in a car crash Wednesday night. Close to 100 people gathered in the plaza to pray for the dead, as well as a fifth student still in critical condition at Athens Regional Medical Center.

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Close to 100 students and faculty members gathered in Tate Plaza Thursday afternoon to pray for the four University of Georgia students who died as a result of a car accident in Oconee County the night before, as well as a fifth student still in critical condition at Athens Regional Medical Center.
Keith Drake, 58, a Tate Center building services supervisor lowers the flags outside of the Tate Student Center to half-mast per Governor Deal's request on Thursday following the car accident ending in the deaths of four UGA students.
Around 200 students gathered in the Young Life Center on Baxter Street around midnight Wednesday to pray after the deaths of four University of Georgia students in a car crash. A fifth person is still in critical condition.
The idea of allowing guns on college campuses has returned to the Georgia General Assembly.

Rep. Mandi Ballinger (R-Canton) introduced a House Bill Tuesday that looks to allow permit holders to carry guns on state college campuses.
Pakistans distance from Athens makes it easy to look at the events in Lahore as a far off occurrence, but the human impact of these events knows no borders. Annam Rizwan, a fourth year risk management and insurance major originally from Karachi, Pakistan, is the president of the Pakistani Student Association at the University of Georgia.
Several University of Georgia athletes and coaches across the school's different sports shared their condolences for the four students who were killed and a fifth who remains in critical condition after a car accident on Wednesday night.
SHARE Artwork by Eloise Larson

By Adam Mankoski

Though artist Eloise Larson has painted in oil for most of her career, in her current show, Form, at the Siskiyou Arts Museum, she has prints, digital editions and large renditions of photographs, along with oil paintings. The medium of oil has taught her to let an image appear as loose dripping layers are applied to the painting surface. This also happened in the printmaking and photographic processes as she worked toward the Form exhibit.

What do you find intriguing about the human form?

Painting the human form is like being directly inserted into the present moment depicted in the painting. Instead of listening to words about the moment, I am in the moment with the person in the picture. We share it completely.

How did you and Sara Beaty collaborate on this show?

This is our first show together in, hopefully, a series of shows. We began with the idea of expressing equanimity using the term, Oddly Neutral. Oddly neutral because it is knowing you are in the middle, even though there are no opposite sides to gauge your location from. Due to Sarahs remote location, we worked together in phone and email conversations. We did meet in December in Fairbanks, Alaska, to review our work, firm our direction and choose the title, Form.

How does your work complement each others'?

Sarahs s 3-D clouds, icebergs, arctic houses and designs seem to ground my conceptual approach to reality and give the viewer a place to stand. She transforms earthy, muted grays, blues and browns that from the landscape she lives in to her work. I place the phenomena of existence within that environment.

Give me some details about your upcoming class.

Someone once asked me, What is your purpose in life? My answer came from a place of clarity, changed my lifes focus and moved me in a new direction. My intent is to share this with others, naturally and simply, through painting and writing. Neither having experience or not having experience in either process makes any difference in participation. Starting with painting I enable students to find their marks and colors of expression as they paint. Eventually, we transfer that experience to words by writing a simple form poem. This work may eventually be shared in an evening event at SAM.

What is on your easel right now?

Presently, I am just finishing a series of intaglio prints about looking closely. Often we turn away quickly, in self-preservation, and try not to see what is in front of us. So, these images are either hard to see or hard to look at, challenging the viewer to find a way to see them. I am also just starting a series of wood cuts about the life of a dead mother mouse I photographed I Macys parking lot. The idea is that every moment is For the Time Being, even death. No moment hinders another moment.

go now 

See "Form" through June 4 at the Siskiyou Arts Museum, 5824 Dunsmuir Ave., Dunsmuir. For more details about "Form" and class dates and times, visit siskiyouartsmuseum.org.
FILE - In this June 24, 2015, file photo, Yvonne Boggs holds a flier seeking information on her daughter, Charlotte Trego, who has been missing for more than a year, in Chillicothe, Ohio. The Investigation Discovery network says it will air its first-ever serialized drama later this spring. The six-part docu-series, "The Vanishing Women," will focus on six women who have gone missing or been found dead in Chillicothe, Ohio, over the past few years. Missing women Trego and Wanda Lemons haven't been seen by loved ones since 2014. It will debut June 6, ID announced on Thursday, March 31, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Welsh-Huggins, File)

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By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer

NEW YORK (AP)  Conscious of the success of long-form crime mysteries like "Serial" on NPR and HBO's "The Jinx," the Investigation Discovery network says it will air its first-ever serialized drama later this spring.

The six-part docu-series, "The Vanishing Women," will focus on six women who have gone missing or have been found dead in Chillicothe, Ohio, over the past few years. It will debut June 6, ID announced Thursday.

ID's focus on crime and mystery stories made the network a nearly instant success upon its launch in 2008, particularly among older women. Lately the HBO and NPR projects, as well as Netflix's "Making a Murderer," have attracted followers to the genre with innovative storytelling techniques.

"All of this has shone a klieg light on the world of mystery and suspense and true stories and crime," said Henry Schleiff, network president. "There's never been a better time to be a leader of this business."

ID shows are traditionally closed-ended  the mysteries are solved at the end  so "The Vanishing Women" will be something new.

"We don't know where the story ends," he said.

The six women died or went missing in the city of about 22,000 people an hour south of Columbus, where heroin use has been a problem. Some residents have worried about a serial killer, although police suggest the women's troubled histories played a role in their fates.

The two missing women  Charlotte Trego and Wanda Lemons  haven't been seen by loved ones since 2014. Schleiff said he hoped the attention created by the series helps to solve their cases. ID has teamed with the families and law enforcement to bring the individual stories to life.

In a similar vein, Schleiff said ID's series about missing persons, "Disappeared," will be back for a new season on April 11. The series has been on hiatus for two years.
Kathryn Havens and her daughter, Amanda, sit Wednesday in a Shasta County courtroom as they await their case to be heard.

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By Jim Schultz of the Redding Record Searchlight

Looks like there will be more delays in an elder-abuse case in which a Redding woman and her daughter are suspected of neglecting a 90-year-old relative.

Kathryn Havens, 57, and her daughter, Amanda, 34, were in Shasta County Superior Court on Wednesday to confirm their preliminary hearing will start on Thursday. That hearing will determine whether enough evidence exists to hold them over for trial.

They were arrested nearly a year ago in the death of Dorothy Jean Havens, Kathryn's mother and Amanda's grandmother. They've been sitting in Shasta County jail ever since.

But the attorneys said Wthat the hearing may be delayed. They are due back in court Thursday afternoon to determine whether the hearing will move forward. They expressed skepticism because the preliminary hearing is expected to be a lengthy one and may need to be moved to a different courtroom to handle it.

Still, attorneys won't determine until then how it all plays out.

The mother and daughter were arrested May 15 after Redding police officers and others said 90-year-old Dorothy Jean Havens died from apparent neglect.

Kathryn Havens is charged with murder and related crimes in the death of her mother, while her daughter is charged with elder abuse.

Police were called May 14 to the Havens' Tidmore Lane home on a possible elder abuse call involving Dorothy Havens, who was taken to Mercy Medical Center because she was having difficulty breathing.

Firefighters, however, told police they suspected neglect as a factor of the elderly woman's poor medical state.

During their investigation, police said, they learned that Dorothy Havens had been in her bed since November 2014 and was suffering from numerous bedsores and had feces all over her body. Her open wounds also had fly larvae in them, police have said.

According to a police investigative report, Kathryn Havens admitted she and her daughter were "selfishly living off" their relative's Social Security income and had been told by a doctor at least a year earlier that she needed full-time home care.

"(Kathryn Havens ) stated that due to needing Medicaid to get this full-time care, it was really never pursued," the police report stated. "She indicated the reason it was not pursued is that it was her understanding that Medicaid would come in and actually take" the house.

In addition to murder, Kathryn Havens is charged with inflicting injury on an elder adult, a felony, and two special enhancements alleging great bodily injury and elder abuse causing death.

Amanda Havens is charged with the same elder abuse felony as her mother, as well as the two special enhancements.

Kathryn Havens remains in Shasta County Jail in lieu of $1 million, while Amanda Havens remains there in lieu of $500,000 bail.
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Three Red Bluff men and a Butte County man face sex-related charges after police say the men performed various sex acts on a 14-year-old boy from Gerber.

Thomas Christopher Seagraves, 21, Michael Flowerdew, 20, Bryan Morrison, 19, all of Red Bluff, and Alexander Chance Isaacson, 19, of Gridley, were arrested April 19, a little over a month after police started their investigation, said Sgt. Aaron Murray with the Red Bluff Police Department.

School Resource Officer Heidi Thomas began an investigation into suspicious circumstances between the boy and Seagraves in March, Murray said. He declined to elaborate on the nature of those circumstances or the nature of the contacts between the boy and those men because he said he's gotten different stories.

Officers investigated and served search warrants to cell companies and Facebook. They reviewed 26,000 messages over an eight-month span, Murray said.

Then, on April 19, officers served two search warrants at two homes in Red Bluff, one in Tehama County and one in Butte County, Murray said.

That is when they arrested all four suspects on suspicion of oral copulation with a minor, he said. Flowerdew, Morrison and Isaacson also were arrested on suspicion of contacting a minor with the intention of sex, Murray said.

In addition, Flowerdew was arrested on suspicion of penetrating a minor with a foreign object and contacting a minor with the intention of sex, Murray said.

The other three suspects were arrested on suspicion of sodomy with a minor, and Seagraves was arrested for investigation of transporting a minor to a location for sex, Murray said.

Seagraves' bail is set at $1.35 million, according to the Tehama County Jail website. Flowerdew's bail was set at $155,000, Murray said. He and Morrison, whose bail was set at $215,000, were not listed on the jail's website.

Isaacson's bail was set at $505,000, according to the jail's website.

The men have different court dates and are at different stages of their proceedings, according to the Tehama County District Attorney's Office.
Princes bodyguard carried his unconscious body down the steps of his private jet after it made an emergency landing in Moline, Ill., six days before the superstar collapsed and died at Paisley Park in Chanhassen, Minn.

During the middle-of-the-night stop on the taxiway of Quad City International Airport, paramedics from the local fire department, responding to a call of an unresponsive passenger on Princes flight, worked to revive the music icon before speeding him to the hospital, according to fire and ambulance records released Wednesday by the city of Moline.

The heavily redacted document shows that emergency responders arrived at 1:24 a.m. April 15 and cleared the scene by 2:16 a.m. The records contain almost no detail about what the responders did.

Several sources with direct knowledge of the death investigation, however, have told the Star Tribune that paramedics gave Prince a shot of the opioid antidote Narcan, and that Prince had overdosed on an opioid.

Princes plane was en route to Minneapolis from Atlanta, where he had played two concerts in one night, when it made the emergency landing.

The records listed paramedic Justin Frederiksen as a secondary caregiver. Reached by phone Wednesday, Frederiksen said he had no comment on it.

Paramedic Austin Rands, listed as the primary caregiver, could not immediately be reached for comment.

According to the seven-minute air traffic control recording of the emergency landing, controllers were initially confused about the nature of the emergency beyond the fact that there was an unresponsive passenger aboard. The pilot then clarified that the passenger was a man but did not identify him.

Prince died six days later at Paisley Park. Sources have told the Star Tribune that they are investigating the role opioids may have played in his death. Authorities have said that Prince was alone when he died and that neither foul play nor suicide are suspected.

The Carver County sheriffs office has said a cause of death likely wont be made public for weeks, until it receives reports from the medical examiner and toxicology results.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Princes sister, Tyka Nelson, filed a motion in Carver County District Court to have a special administrator appointed to gather and protect the musicians assets. The document indicated that Prince does not have a will.

After a telephone conference call Wednesday, District Judge Kevin Eide ordered that Bremer Trust, National Association be formally appointed as special administrator for Princes estate. The special administrator has the authority to manage and supervise Princes assets and determine the identity of his heirs. The appointment will last up to six months, or until another petition is filed to administer the estate and a personal representative is appointed.

A hearing on the matter is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. May 2 in Carver County District Court.

MINNEAPOLIS  Emma Nelson and Dan Browning contributed.

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Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 122 Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, anger management student, in "Dark Phoenix." The film, the latest in the "X-Men" franchise, costars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jessica Chastain. Read the review. (Twentieth Century Fox)
A place often reserved for trolls and unfortunate memes, the internet sometimes can get its shit together and do some good. Meet Joey, a lost dog, who, through the magic of Reddit, finally made his way home.

Matus Turek, 29, of suburban Lisle was hiking earlier this month in Starved Rock State Park with Joey, a 7-year-old miniature pinscher, when his family's dog wandered off. Turek panickedly called his brother, Gabriel Turek, 24, who lives in Portland, Ore. "I just felt helpless," Gabriel Turek said. "I was up all night thinking about how I could find a way to find him."

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Matus Turek had no luck searching for Joey in person, but on the other side of the country, his brother had more success posting about the dog on the /r/Chicago subreddit. Gabriel Turek posted around midnight the same night Joey went missing in the hopes that by morning somebody would be able to help find him. He was right. Overnight, his Reddit inbox flooded with messages from people offering support.

While running around in the middle of his day shift as a pizza cook, Gabriel Turek received a message from Reddit user "dasbiscuits," aka Tyler Gibson, IRL. Gibson, 28, of Ukranian Village, had seen Turek's post on /r/Chicago and decided, as a former resident of a city near Starved Rock, to share it on his Facebook. "If you lose a dog, that would be the best place to do it," Gibson said. "People go nuts trying to find them."

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Within a few hours, Gibson's Facebook post had been shared more than 300 times, with Starved Rock park-goers and employees reaching out and saying they'd spotted Joey running around.

"If we're not out looking for a lost kid, we're out looking for a lost dog," said Don Petre, Starved Rock's site assistant superintendent. "Now with the internet, people find things they wouldn't have been able to otherwise."

While the interwebs were working their magic, Matus Turek had returned to Starved Rock the next morning in search of Joeybut to no avail. Having given up, Matus Turek was more than an hour away from the park when his brother called, equipped with Gibson's social media findings.

Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. >

Matus Turek immediately turned his car around.

After spending a few hours on the hunt for Joeyclues were still pouring in from FacebookMatus Turek found the little guy hiding in a bush. Joey, obviously antsy to get home after a wild night alone in the wilderness, leapt out at Matus Turek as soon as he saw him.

"We really didn't think we would see him again," Gabriel Turek said. "I have never felt that relieved in my entire life."

Now, Gabriel Turek and Gibson still remain Facebook friends, because how can you unfriend the guy who helped find your lost dog?

"Somehow, all these people came together to help a stranger across the country," Gabriel Turek said of the digital search party. "I'm just so extremely thankful."

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Finding Joey, to Gabriel Turek, was an example of the internet not just being a place where teenagers and middle-aged men angrily yell at each other from their mom's basements.

"You always hear about stories like this, but you don't ever think they actually happen," he said. "The internet is such a weird place."
A chat with Arianna Huffington, NFL Draft specials and more things to do in Chicago on Thursday, April 28.

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NFL Draft Picks

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The Gage

24 S. Michigan Ave. 312-372-4243

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The Loop bar gets in on Draft Town festivities through Sunday with food and drink specials including $7-$14 limited release draft beers and the Ditka vs. God sandwich ($21), an open-faced hoagie featuring bratwurst, Polish sausage and knackwurst topped with spicy mustard, bell peppers and onion rings. 11 a.m.-11 p.m.

Celebrate the James Beard Awards with Carrie Nahabedian

Mariano's

1500 N. Clybourn Ave. 312-475-9661

Watch the James Beard-winning chef from Naha and Brindille cook sea scallops with rhubarb and caramelized Belgian endive, and try some of her dish along with other bites and drinks. 6-8 p.m. $20. Tickets: eventbrite.com

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The Real McCoy rum

Real McCoy Rum Dinner and Seminar

The Butcher's Tap

3553 N. Southport Ave. 773-325-0123

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Emmy-winning director and writer Bailey Pryor hosts a tasting of his bourbon barrel-aged rum and cocktails paired with four courses from chef Sean Currie. Attendees take home a copy of Pryor's documentary "The Real McCoy" about rum runner Bill McCoy. 7 p.m. $45. Tickets: thebutcherstap.com

Juice Pants Release Party

Monk's Pub

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205 W. Lake St. 312-357-6665

Try Maplewood Brewery & Distillery's New England-style IPA along with its other beers including Creepy Ginger Belgian-style strong ale and Fat Pug oatmeal milk stout ($7 each). 4 p.m. No cover.

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Arianna Huffington, author of "The Sleep Revolution." (Peter Yang / HANDOUT)

Arianna Huffington: 'The Sleep Revolution'

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Francis W. Parker School

2233 N. Clark St. 312-494-9509

The editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post discusses her book about the importance of getting a good night's sleep with Chicago Humanities Festival associate artistic director Alison Cuddy. 6-7 p.m. $10-$15. Tickets: tickets.chicagohumanities.org

HAPPY HOUR OF THE DAY

BBQ Joint (1967 N. Halsted St. 312-460-3200) offers $4 bottles of Carta Blanca or Lone Star, $5-$6 margaritas and half-price street corn fundido from 4-6 p.m.
The airlines had pledged the trademarks as collateral with banks at the time of taking loans from them

After a failed attempt to sell Kingfisher House, erstwhile headquarters of Vijay Mallya's defunct carrier, lenders will auction the trademarks of the airline, including for 'Kingfisher' logo and once-famous 'Fly the Good Times' tagline on April 30.

The reserve price for the trademarks, which also include Flying Models, Fly the Good Times, Funliner, Fly Kingfisher, Flying Bird device, has been kept at Rs 366 crore (Rs 3.66 billion).

The airlines had pledged the trademarks as collateral with banks at the time of taking loans from them.

In its annual report for 2012-13, KFA said at its peak it was the largest airline in India, with a five-star rating from Skytrax.

A valuation report from Grant Thornton put its brand value at $550 million on resumption of operations. The airline's brand had been registered separately from the Kingfisher beer trademark.

The online auction is being conducted by SBICAP Trustee Company, subsidiary of SBI Caps, on behalf of lenders.

According to the experts, the auction is unlikely to generate any interest from bidders as the value of brand has deteriorated.

"KFA brand value has deteriorated in last few years. In this case the owner has been the ambassador of the brand and the way Vijaya Mallya has been behaving, there are some negative connotations which are being associated with the brand. I don't think the auction is going to generate too much interest," N Chandramouli, CEO, TRA, a brand intelligence and data insights company said.

"If at all, it could see some interest from players who are from other sectors and want to enter the aviation industry."

Last month, lenders made a unsuccessful attempt to auction Kingfisher House.

The auction failed as none of the bidders came forward due to high reserve prices of Rs 150 crore (Rs 1.5 billion).

The property has a built-up area of over 17,000 sq ft in Vile Parle area near domestic airport in Mumbai.

Lenders had taken over Kingfisher House in February last year in a bid to recover part of their dues totalling over Rs 9,000 crore (Rs 90 billion), which includes unpaid loans and accrued interest.
Over the last two years, despite an amnesty scheme, only about Rs 2,500 crore of taxes have been recovered, says A V Rajwade.



Investors in mutual funds in India were recently asked to sign declarations relating to Fatca, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of the US.



This Act is one indication of how tax authorities in most countries are trying to tighten tax collection, from both individuals and companies.

Fatca predates the recent publication of the so-called Panama Papers, which has made tax avoidance/evasion headline news globally.

In India, the first decision of the Narendra Modi government was to appoint a committee to investigate allegations of Indians illegally transferring moneys abroad to avoid taxes.

Over the last two years, despite an amnesty scheme, only about Rs 2,500 crore of taxes have been recovered.

By one estimate that I have seen, developing countries lose tax on around $1 trillion of income, which is being laundered and kept in tax havens each year, the accumulated amount being $20 trillion to $30 trillion!

It is as well to start with a couple of perspectives. At one time, it was thought that "earned income", say salaries, should be taxed lower and "unearned income", like capital gains, taxed higher.

In recent decades, this principle has been overturned, with long-term capital gains attracting far lower taxes than earned income. (I recall Warren Buffet, the great investor, once saying that there was something wrong in a system where his average tax rate was lower than that of his salaried secretary!)

Surely, this is one of the causes underlying the growing income inequalities in most countries.

The second point is that courts have generally made a distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion.

The former is arranging your financial affairs in such a way as to minimise the tax burden to the extent possible; the latter means not paying taxes through generation of unaccounted money (in India, perhaps the two sectors most responsible for unaccounted money are the real estate business and election expenses).

To be sure, the dividing line between the two is thin and has become a political issue in the US.

One example: corporate tax in the US is levied only on the profits of foreign subsidiaries brought into the US.

No wonder, blue-chip US companies like Apple, Walmart and General Electric are keeping something like $2 trillion abroad.

Another example is the wide variation in corporate tax rates and laws between the US and Europe that allows companies to undertake tax arbitrage between different locations.

For instance, the corporate tax rate in the US is 39 per cent. In contrast, the average tax rate in eight European countries is 25 per cent, and that in Ireland is as low as 12.5 per cent.

This difference has prompted many mergers and acquisitions between US and European companies, their only economic justification being to save on taxes.

The US tax authorities have recently cracked down on such mergers and acquisitions.

There is even talk of a "tax war" between the US and Europe on the issue.

The UK tax regulations have a General Anti-Abuse Rule specifying the kind of tax avoidance arrangements that is considered "abusive": The principle is that any scheme, which has no business or commercial rationale beyond tax avoidance, represents an abuse of the laws and is therefore illegal.

Coming back to the Panama Papers, what has been published are the cases handled by only one law firm in Panama, and that too, not the largest.

The Panama list may only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg: after all, Panama is only one of the "flags of convenience".

Again, law firms are "wholesalers" of trusts and companies, which they keep "in stock": there are small and large retailers like banks, which market them as part of wealth management services to the ultimate beneficiaries.

As we have seen, there are several Indian names in the papers that have been published.

The list seems to include the elite in every field, from politics to business to celebrities to... As the Reserve Bank of India Governor has pointed out, it would be unfair to infer that every name on the list has done some illegal activity. (A lurking suspicion, however, remains: If everything is above board, why go through Panama lawyers to establish companies and trusts in tax havens?

Surely the appearance of chastity is as important as chastity?) There have already been some political repercussions of the publication: The Iceland Prime Minister has been forced to resign; so has Spain's industry minister; and the British Prime Minister was required to publish his tax returns.

The author is chairman, A V Rajwade & Co Pvt Ltd.
The company markets itself to young commuters in the shadow of the ongoing tournament, but is caught on the wrong foot as its campaign comes under fire on social media

In India, there is hardly any marketer who would not want to target the age group of 19- to 35-year-olds, but for e-commerce companies, they are even more precious as they are the fabled repeat users that brands vie for.

But where do you get hold of them?

At pubs, sporting events and restaurants.

And that is where Ola is trying to find them too.

The company, however, has stumbled in its efforts.

Its ad, which compared a young woman shopper with an Ola Micro, screened during the Indian Premier League was branded sexist and the brand was battered down by angry mobs on social media.

The company had to hastily pull the ad off air and apologise.

I think in this case Ola misjudged the customer.

"The youth are today far more connected and opinionated than ever before.

"I think Ola got their metaphors mixed up in the current campaign.

"When marketing to the youth, you can be fun, you can be irreverent, you can be whacky but you cannot be disparaging or even patronising.

"It is the tonality of the communication and the thought process that can easily become repulsive.

"Then it is neither funny nor fun, said Sandeep Goyal, chairman, Mogae Media.

But will this misstep keep the young away from the brand? Not really.

The cab-aggregator has adopted what it calls a three-pronged approach to keep the brand aligned to the young.

It recently partnered with Hard Rock Cafe across five cities, especially those outlets that are telecasting the IPL on large screens.

The ongoing campaign convinces pub goers to call an Ola after they have had a few drinks.

The Bengaluru-based company also decided to cash in on the IPL craze by giving out tickets for the matches and IPL merchandise to customers.

Customers need to open the app and along with the cabs they will see something call a match-day cab.

"If they are lucky, they may get a taxi with free tickets to the match, said Raghuvesh Sarup, chief marketing officer, Ola.

Sarup explained that this was their way to increase customer engagement with the existing user base.

On non-match days, or cheer days, we can give our customers free merchandise, memorabilia or access to pubs showcasing these matches, said Sarup.

He, however, refused to divulge the number of tickets on offer.

The effort to push Ola through IPL started with the latest edition of the tournament.

We have seen a significant uptake in customers, he added.

Using discounts and freebies is the oldest trick in the book for e-commerce companies and experts say that deal hunters are never loyal to the brand.

While that may be true, Sarup insisted that the current engagement offers more than free rides. He explains that the app is sticky and makes customers want to ride again and also with the launch of the Micro service, the bait will be too hard to resist.

They are fanning a need.

"They are expanding existing niches. Ola started out with an offering that was centred round a timely and hassle-free cab ride.

"So, the central proposition was about the cab.

"Now, their focus has shifted from affluent corporate customers to a much younger audience with propositions around cab sharing, bus shuttles, bike cabs, and now affordable mass ride, said Goyal.

Ola, however, argues that their focus was always on the young customer.

We have been true to our user profile, which is between 20 and 30, said Sarup.

It is not as if the company is seeking out the young customer now, he implies.

To tap the high spender in the same age group, Ola is a partner for the ongoing India Restaurant Week as well.

The company offers a 'certain number of free rides' to those who have reserved their seats at the festival.

But this time it is pushing Ola Prime, a brand that rivals Uber Black, with free Wifi and a luxury sedan.

All of these partnerships and efforts are what marketers call a 360-degree approach, said Goyal, but do such initiatives lose steam when a brand is battered down by angry users on social media?

Goyal warns that social media shouldnt be used to judge the impact of a campaign.

To be honest, these days outrages are easy to kick up. One tweet can ignite a controversy. And if you are a visible brand like Ola, it is easy to target you.

The outrage takes very little time to gain momentum, and in a matter of hours you can have a full blown controversy on social media, he said.

But like all things that light up in a flash, such controversies are also quick to burn out, or so Ola must hope.



Ola Cabs, which started out in 2010, has raised over $1 billion of funds.



It was valued at over $5 billion in September 2015. It has 350,000 drivers



It launched Ola Micro, its cheapest service, to rival Ubers UberGo in March 2016

Image: Actress Gul Panag with an Ola cab. Photograph: Kind courtesy, Ola
As Infosys kick-starts its three-day annual thought leadership summit Confluence, starting Wednesday in San Francisco, chief executive officer and managing director Vishal Sikka has reached out to the company's 194,000 employees saying that they cannot only be partners in the value creation at the company, but also share the value and get rewarded though a new mechanism.

In an internal e-mail to employees, Sikka said, FY17 is going to be a crucial year for the company.

The transformation journey will be driven by the number of initiatives the company has identified to pursue further during the year.

As we do these things, we will all share in the value creation and the reward. We have already started the restricted stock units (RSUs), or options, grant programme, which I announced on April 15, and this is just the beginning, said Sikka.

Krish (Human Resource Head Krishnamurthy Shankar) and our leadership team are thinking about a new way for Infoscions to participate in and benefit from the value they help create above and beyond our expected work.

"They are looking at this from multiple perspectives, and will update you on this soon, he added.

Apart from the usual salary benefits, traditionally Indian IT services companies also reward their employees with bonus, which is linked to the performance of the company vis-a-vis the individual performance.

Apart from this, offering RSUs has been one way of attracting and retaining key employees, even though these are mostly confined to the senior management.

Infosys, earlier this month, got its boards nod to offer 24 million shares as RSUs, which it aims to dole out to selected middle to senior management employees.

The scheme would be rolled out in April-June quarter of FY17 and would run for the next four-five years.

In his e-mail to employees, Sikka, who recently got an extension to lead the company until March 31, 2021, also spelt out the top five priorities of the company for FY17.

He said scaling and monetising of innovations and purposeful reshaping of costs through increased automation, reducing subcontracting costs and changing onsite-offshore role ratio would be of prime focus.

Without these measures, the company wont be able to get ahead with the downward pricing pressure that the company is witnessing now.

We must bring precision to the things we decide to do and be unforgiving in the things we decide not to do.

We must bring massive automation to enable innovation.

If a human has done it once, it should never be done by a human again, he wrote in the mail. This must be our aspiration.

In the quarter and year ended March 31, 2016, pricing cut (by clients) did not make much of a dent in Infosyss operating profit margin, which saw an improvement of 60 basis points at 25.5 per cent.

However, that was primarily driven by reduction in expenses towards subcontractors, improved utilisation and favourable currency.

The other priorities for the year would be, Sikka said, focusing on 'business hotspots such as consulting, BPO, Finacle & Edge; continuing with various strategic initiatives such as artificial intelligence, platform, design services and education and onsite marketing experience using communication and digital.

SIKKAS TO-DO LIST IN FY17

Hiring must match automation & software adoption

Enable skills-matching that is clear & precise, real-time & frictionless

Improving onsite role ratios

Reducing subcontractor costs

Rethinking of the global delivery model with a virtual one

Maximising utilisation and eradicating bench

FIVE PRIORITIES IN FY17

Scaling and monetising innovation

Purposeful reshaping of costs

Focus on business hotspots (such as consulting, BPO, Finacle, Edge)

Strategic initiatives (such as artificial intelligence, platform, marketplaces etc)

Onsite experience, communication, digital

Image: Vishal Sikka. Photograph: Kind courtesy, Infosys
As China begins rejuvenation of its military power, there is an urgent need for transformation of the Indian military, says Lieutenant General Anil Chait (retd).

Throughout Chinese history, political power has always been founded on control of the military.

President Xi Jinping's appearance in battle dress, with insignia on April 19, highlights his more direct role in military affairs.

Xi, with the new title of commander-in-chief of the joint operations command centre on his collars, asked the officers to follow trends in military revolution.

He asked them 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, courageous and capable of winning wars,' driven by information technology, Xinhua quoted Xi as saying.

Xi has overseen reorganisation of the People's Liberation Army's command structure into theatre commands aimed at better integrating of the different services. Coordination between services has traditionally been regarded as a weak point.

He also ordered a 300,000-person reduction in forces, balancing it with joint operations.

The notion of the 'Chinese Dream' by Xi, has been built around the 'rejuvenation' of the Chinese nation, with military power as an important component for its revival.

The strategy involving military campaign in the war zone is to be operationalised under the strategic guidance of a designated Central Military Commission member.

A series of synchronised battles/engagements under a unified command are expected to be fought for political capitulation of adversary, as the military end-state.

The PLA over a period of time has been transitioning itself, to undertake integrated joint operations across the services, through a networked 'system' which is flat, short and horizontal, besides being functional at all levels, across domains and depths at all times.

Are we prepared?

While the threat that India faces colloquially is referred as two fronts, but the envelope it covers is 360 degrees, considering the continental cum maritime context of India.

Lethality, in virtual cum physical plane involves physical, informational and cognitive domains.

Proactive doctrine against Pakistan and coping with China's conventional and asymmetric capability, demands joint integrated operations under structured and fast politico-military decision making ability with sophisticated crisis management procedures.

Scope also involves dealing with asymmetric hybrid threats, periodic transgressions extending to limited localised operations under a nuclear backdrop.

War fighting for meeting the above has to be based on the tenets of joint-ness employing all elements of power since the window for fighting is extremely small and control of escalation in a 360 degree battle space against a nuclear backdrop, a major challenge.

Needed reforms and higher directions of war

The central feature of modern warfare has to be the creation of desired 'effects' through joint application of calibrated efforts at the locus of engagement.

It simply cannot be achieved under the present higher decision making architecture which suffers from lack of continuity, temporary charge, short tenures, lack of exposure and lastly conflict of interest between the services.

We need urgent reforms in the form of a leader who as permanent chairman, Chiefs of Staffs Committee or Chief of Defence Staff and is made responsible and accountable, to coalesce activity of all, for unity of effort.

Success demands synergistic and synchronised application of power, across the designated battle space through crafting of strategy by one single strategic cum operational commander and not through an amalgam of distributed stovepipe efforts.

At the apex, interagency architectures under the National Security Advisor joint in nature, combines these means. However hard power in the form of military, continues to be disaggregated, especially when battle space is the very same for all stake holders.

Inability to vest appropriate authority under Integrated Defence Staff and absence of designated command and control structure for a joint military perspective, in the form of Chief of Defence Staff or permanent chairman, Chief of Staff Committee, is therefore a crying reform which is most needed.

This requires immediate implementation if we want to develop a joint vision which can initiate adaptive planning process.

Optimised contingency military planning and development of holistic capabilities 'in-sync' with the requirement will accrue under conditions of austerity in the process. This will be in step with the risk management process.

Joint-ness under such an authority will also ensure optimised force structures, acquisitions, joint training and logistics.

Such a structure, supported by regulations, inserted in the allocation/transaction of business rules will allow strategic military decision making process to evaluate options and choose the most cost effective one, instead of forcing the political decision makers for dealing with the only one recommended after in house compromises.

The need for reform is therefore urgent for transformation of the Indian military.

Only then can it punch above its weight for deterring threats, existential or those under formulation, proactively and aggressively, in sync with the doctrine.

Lieutenant General Anil Chait (retd) served as chief of the Integrated Defence Staff; he was also Central Army Commander.
'At one of the UK's best known museums, one of our greatest sculptures had been placed next to a public toilet.'

'This perception that art antiquities are better looked after in the West is one created by the cultural elite of our country.'

IMAGE: Tourists at the historic Taj Mahal. Photograph: Vijay Mathur/Reuters

Acclaimed historian Dr Gautam Sengupta teaches history at Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan.

As director general of the Archaeological Survey of India he launched several initiatives to restore India's ancient monuments.

In a candid interview, Dr Sengupta tells Rashme Sehgal how India's archaeological and historical inheritance needs to be preserved and maintained and also made accessible to the millions who are deprived of its grandeur.

Why has the government failed to consistently press for the return of rare Indian antiquities including the Kohinoor diamond?

I am unfamiliar with the history of the Kohinoor or about the claims and counter claims made on this diamond.

But there is a part of our very important patrimony has been across different museums in the West and in other parts of the world.

As Indians, we have a legitimate claim on this patrimony. There are international rules and conventions which govern the movement of these goods and how they reached outside the country.

It is very important to understand these laws. As a signatory to the UNESCO convention, we cannot claim objects that travelled outside India in pre-Independence days.

But as Indians, we have a moral and ethical stand on this matter. These objects are part of our heritage and they belong to us.

Do you agree with some art historians who believe that such Indian antiquities should remain in foreign museums that, according to them, provide better upkeep of these aretfacts?

This is a matter of perception. I do not think they are better looked after in museums outside the country. In 1995 I had an opportunity to visit one of the UK's best known museums. One of our greatest sculptures had been placed next to a public toilet. Not all Western museums are extraordinarily sensitive to Indian objects. Foreign museums may have better maintenance technology, but that is not the last word on all our problems.

The most important consideration is the context in which an art object has been created. The more remote the art object is from its original context, the more it loses its relevance.

When you enter a temple in southern India, the images are placed in a dimly lit interior. But that is so within a context; they represent a life cycle.

Rites and rituals are performed, songs are sung, prasad is distributed, everything forms a context for the image. When this (antiquity) is lifted out of this context, then the art work gets stripped of its larger relevance.

A better equipped museum adds to a visitor's sense of excitement, but a discerning visitor realises that when a piece of antiquity has been lifted from its original context, you tend to commodify it.

This perception that art antiquities are better looked after in the West is one created by the cultural elite of our country. Some bureaucrats and members of the political class think that museums in Europe and the US set high standards.

There is nothing like an international standard. By thinking like this, we are only encouraging commodification.

Has the Archaeological Survey of India prepared any kind of list on the outflow of Indian art treasures that have been taken away in an illegal manner?

The ASI has catalogued 5,000 nationally protected sites under its care. We do due diligence to ensure that the outflow of our treasures remains controlled.

The Antiquities and Art Treasure Act 1972 was to have been amended and updated. Has that been done and, if so, how effective has the amended Act proved?

Since its inception, it has been said that this Act needs to be revisited. In 2010, we had formed a committee chaired by the distinguished art historian Professor R N Mishra. The committee came up with a set or recommendations.

Some of the collectors who were members of the committee, and who had the tacit approval of the political class, spoke about how increasing investment in modern and contemporary art was not matched by India's older artefacts.

The ASI had a different approach. We pointed out that ancient art objects were non-replicable. One should not compare modern Indian art with the market for ancient Indian art.

We are opposed to the movement of antiquities. We maintained there should be a registration of all antiquities to which one of the participants said that, 'ASI was creating a Kafkaesque regime.'

The report was submitted, but it did not find acceptance. A new committee has been set up in which, very strangely, the ASI has not been given representation.

What steps can to be taken to counter the problems of urbanisation, mass encroachment and vandalism that seem to threaten many heritage sites across the country?

Several ASI monuments are indeed under a serious threat. The rapidity with which structures are coming up around our monuments is a matter of concern.

Unless this becomes a matter of concern for our politicians and leaders, no amount of intervention from the ASI can help.

The issue of forcible acquisition of land, going to court, the issue of claims and counter claims are all areas which no government organisation can handle by itself. We need a more genuine concern from people that our monuments must be saved.

The ASI requires a very large army of archaeologists, restorers, carpenters, conservationists who all work together on our ancient monuments in a committed manner. The ASI's future depends on how effectively we train young graduates into professionals.

At present we are giving 8,000 students a pittance of a stipend of Rs 1,500 a month. This will hardly attract the best talent.

You headed the ASI for many years. What kind of interventions did you introduce during your tenure?

We tried to train manpower through a series of workshops. Several monuments during my tenure were given World Heritage Status.

We formulated a National Conservation Policy which will look at what extent to which we can conserve monuments because there is a thin line between conservation and restoration.

A larger framework was prepared during my tenure which I understand has been adopted by the government.

How much does the running of our cultural institutes by bureaucrats hamper its functioning?

I have observed that there is a sense of contempt towards professionals. It is as though the government believes they can do without professionals.

In India, the scientific community is given a great deal of respect and that gives them a great of leverage.

But when it comes to institutions like ASI, the government believes any one can run it without any professional input.

Why does the ASI give the impression of being a stodgy, out-of-date, institution which is out of sync with modern times?

Institutes do not evolve logically; they function in bits and starts, from external stimuli. The ministry of culture has control over everything. They can dictate the terms. Unless there is a change of outlook, the problem will persist.

What steps should be taken to make the ASI a more engaging institution?

There is a perception that has been created by people who think that organisations like ASI have outlived their utility. The government believes the work of the ASI can be done by some NGO-like organisation run by people who are close to politicians.

A lack of interest from the government is sometimes a good sign. It allows professionals to be left alone and allowed to perform.

We have a new dispensation in power today. Let us see their approach.
After her successful campaigns to break bar on entry of women in some Hindu temples, Bhumata Brigade chief Trupti Desai on Thursday took her movement for gender equality to the famous Haji Ali dargah in Mumbai but stopped short of going into the shrine, avoiding a showdown with the protesters who had gathered to block her.

Desai, who reached near the entry of the causeway leading to the dargah situated on an islet off Worli coast in south Mumbai with fellow activists, left the spot after a few minutes as the protesters gathered around them to thwart their attempt.

IMAGE: Bhumata Brigade chief Trupti Desai addresses a mediapersons at Haji Ali dargah. Photograph: Sahil Salvi.

Before heading to the spot, she told media that she was leading a "peaceful agitation" to assert women's right to go up to the core area (Mazaar) of the dargah.

She, however, made it clear that she had no intention to hurt religious sentiments of anyone but was only trying to make sure that women are given equal rights to pray in all places of worship.

She said that she had also written to Bollywood celebrities like Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan seeking their support for the gender equality movement.

Expecting a face-off between the campaigners and the protesters, including those from the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and the Samajwadi Party, police had barricaded the entire area.

Some supporters of the campaign also turned up there pledging support for the agitation.

Desai had recently successfully led campaigns to break bar on women at the sanctum sanctorum of Shani Shingnapur and Trimbakeshwar temples in Maharashtra.

IMAGE: Police tighten up the security near Haji Ali dargah. Photograph: Sahil Salvi.

Earlier, a local AIMIM leader had threatened that he and his supporters would not allow Desai to enter the sanctum sanctorum of the renowned dargah and they would smear her face with black ink if she does so.

A local Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat Shaikh accused Desai of playing politics.

Meanwhile, state Revenue Minister Eknath Khadse of the Bharatiya Janata Party told PTI that the government will respect the high court verdict that women should not be discriminated against at places of worship.

The Maharashtra government had in February this year favoured the entry of women into the Haji Ali dargah.

The state government had then said before the Bombay high court that unless the dargah board is able to prove that ban is part of their religious practice with reference to Quran, women should be allowed to enter the sanctum sanctorum of Haji Ali.

The dargah Board had said that the sanctum sanctorum of the dargah houses the grave of a male saint and in Islam it is sin for women to touch a male saint, and hence, women are barred from touching the tomb.

Asked why she is staging protest when the matter is sub-judice, she said "its not a question of being in a hurry. The matter is pending in the court since 2012. If women can be allowed to enter other places of worship, the same should be done in Haji Ali too."

Desai, whose previous campaigns were centred around Hindu temples, said her agitation for right to equality for women at places of worship in not linked to any religion.

"It's not about any religion. I am doing this for gender equality. Rules should the same for both men and women."

IMAGE: Protesters shout slogans against Bhumata Brigade chief Trupti Desai. Photograph: Sahil Salvi.



Referring to protests at Haji Ali against her campaign, the Bhumata Brigade chief asked "What is the Home Minister doing? He should ensure my safety and facilitate my entry into the shrine."

In a related development, a civil petition was filed in a Mumbai Court seeking a ban on the entry of Desai into the inner chamber of the iconic shrine dedicated to a 15th century saint.

The petition, filed by activist Hemant Patil, also contended that she cannot stage a protest in the area around the dargah as it falls in a silence zone.

Counsel for the petitioner Wajid Khan argued that Desai should be governed by Muslim laws which do not allow women to enter the sanctum sanctorum of a shrine.

The court posted the matter for arguments on June 15.
The Supreme Court on Thursday said it will hear next week a PIL seeking registration of an FIR against political leaders, including Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in connection with the AgustaWestland Chopper case.

A bench comprising Chief Justice T S Thakur and justices R Banumathi and U U Lalit ordered listing of the PIL when advocate M L Sharma said that it is an urgent matter which should be heard at the earliest.

The Central Bureau of Investigation CBI had in 2013 registered a case in connection with alleged bribes paid by the firm to Indians to clinch the deal for 12 helicopters to ferry VVIPs including the President and prime minister.

An Italian court has reportedly cited handwritten references to Gandhi, her political secretary Ahmed Patel and former Air Chief S P Tyagi by a middleman in a judgment that convicted the helicopter companys chief executive.
United States Consul General in Kolkata Craig L Hall on Thursday said the US government is very clear that Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of India. Craig said this during a meeting with Chief Minister Kalikho Pul while referring to the oft repeated claims of China over Arunachal Pradesh territory, an official release said.

Through Craig, Pul also asked the US government to help rectify Google Maps wherein China has indicated Arunachal and some parts of Assam as a part of its territory.

Craig said India's Act East Policy could be strengthened if road connectivity in the region is developed well, as Arunachal is located in a strategically important position having international borders with China, Myanmar and Bhutan, it said.

Private companies of the US are looking for ways, though difficult it seems, for more connectivity in the region so that pace of developmental activities can be accelerated, he said.

"In fact, the US government is working with the Indian counterpart to promote business relations with NE India," he said, adding that the state has potential in hydro-power and tourism sectors.

He put forward his opinion to the chief minister for global tendering of the hydro-power and infrastructure developments projects of the state, so that the advertisement could be sent to the companies in the US, the release said.

Seeking US support in developing road connectivity and harnessing hydropower of the state, the chief minister said Western investors should feel free to invest in Arunachal.

The chief minister also sought the help of the US for capacity building, particularly in training, support and equipment for dealing with natural disasters. Pul further sought the assistance of the United States in getting loans from Asian Development Bank and other institutions for various development projects in the state, the release added.
The Nitish Kumar government is leaving no stone unturned to plug the loopholes in the implementation liquor ban. M I Khan reports.

Bihar has sought Centre's help to check smuggling of liquor by air passengers at the two airports in the state, officials said on Thursday.

The state has imposed a complete ban on manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol including Indian Made Foreign Liquor in the state from April 5. The government led by Nitish Kumar is not in a mood to tolerate any violation of the ban in the state.

"The state government has requested the Union ministry of civil aviation to check smuggling of liquor into Bihar. It is keen to make provisions for scanning check in baggage of all incoming passengers at Patna and Gaya airports and to check for illicit liquor being smuggled into the state," said an official in chief minister office.

Bihar Chief Mecretary Anjani Kumar Singh in his letter to the ministry of civil aviation said that provisions may be made for scanning of check in baggage that comes out at Patna and Gaya airports so that the local Central Industrial Security Force personnel is able to detect any illicit liquor being brought to the state through the air route.

The state government is also willing to extend infrastructure facilities like baggage x-ray screening machines at airports to enable the CISF to speedily scan incoming cabin baggage or cargo.

The government wanted that the two airports in the state to put up a notice board at their exit points wherein passengers were suitably warned that carrying liquor into the state was an offence.

According to officials, the police have been asked to strictly check entry of liquor from neighbouring states like Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and neighbouring country, Nepal into Bihar.

The police headquarters has directed police officials near border areas to ensure round the clock checking and action to stop likely entry of liquor into the state.

Patna zone IG (police) N H Khan said that special orders had been issued to superintendent of police of districts bordering Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh.

"I have directed SPs to maintain strict vigil to ensure that liquor not smuggled from neighbouring districts of Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh," said Khan.

Khan said if police officials found negligence in implementing prohibition would be punished.

Nitish Kumar has repeatedly said that there will be no compromise to take action against those found violating the ban.

More than 900 people have been arrested since the ban came into effect for violation of excise law.

A senior police official told Rediff.com that two cases -- an FIR against ruling Congress MLA Vinay Verma, who was caught in a sting operation purportedly offering liquor to his guests and arrest of seven businessmen from Gujarat, who were later sent to jail after found consuming liquor in a posh hotel in Patna -- are clear proof of seriousness to enforce prohibition.

Nitish is upbeat after crime graph is showing decline in Bihar following the ban.

Crime rates have dropped by 27 percent and road accidents by 33 percent in state after the ban came into effect.
A dozen laser walls have been made operational along the India-Pakistan International Border in Punjab to plug the porous riverine and treacherous terrain and keep an effective vigil against intruders and terrorists exploiting the frontier areas to cross over.

While eight infra-red and laser beam intrusion detection systems are up and working along as many vulnerable and sensitive areas of the international border in Punjab, four more will be operationalised in the next few days, a senior Border Security Force official said.

The laser walls or fence are being monitored by the Border Security Force which guards the Indo-Pak IB in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat.

The decision to install these laser walls was taken by BSF two years ago keeping in mind the vulnerability of the border in these areas as barbed wire fencing could not be installed in many infiltration prone areas due to treacherous terrain or marshy riverine topography.

After the Pathankot terror attack, where it was suspected that terrorists crossed over from Pakistan by breaching the IB from Bamiyal area in Punjab, the Union home ministry and BSF have sped up the deployment and activation of these walls along the long and winding border.

A total of 45 such laser walls will be installed in these areas along the international border in Punjab and Jammu, a blueprint prepared revealed.

According to the blueprint, BSF along with a team of technical experts will be conducting a pilot project for deploying technological solutions for effective border guarding at two sensitive riverine stretches in Jammu sector which entails deployment of smart sensors to pick up suspected movements along IB.

The laser walls have started working and their functioning is being monitored. Preliminary results in detecting illegal movements are encouraging, the official said.

He said sensors were being monitored through a satellite-based signal command system and armed with night and fog operability tools.

Apart from these, four other pilot projects of similar kind in stretches of 30-40 kilometres of IB in Jammu and Gujarat and one in West Bengal along Indo-Bangla border have been approved by the home ministry to secure Indian borders effectively.

Work on them will begin by next month, he said.

After the Pathankot incident, BSF had deployed an additional battalion (about 1,000 men) in Punjab sector even as it has increased the number of its ambush operations and patrol in the area.

BSF is also considering deploying at least four more battalions in Punjab and Jammu border areas as a second-tier of defence after withdrawing these units from the Line of Control.
With an aggressive Opposition and unyielding government, important legislation could be the biggest casualty, as details of the helicopter contract surface.

Aditi Phadnis, Archis Mohan & Kavita Chowdhury report.

A war that threatens to kill the legislative agenda of the budget session of Parliament and possibly the coming monsoon session has broken out between the government and the Opposition, with the Congress alleging that the government is out to fix it.

With Congress president Sonia Gandhi the target of corruption charges in the AgustaWestland helicopter deal and fresh revelations in the Aircel Maxis inquiry that mire the family of former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, the Congress is militant, the government unyielding and the biggest casualty, important legislation, including the Goods and Services Tax Constitution Amendment Bill.



This (Parliament) session is gone, conceded government leaders. The argument over the imposition of Presidents rule in Uttarakhand along with updates in the helicopter deal from London, in which more names are expected to come out, will likely drive this session off the rails and will have its reverberations in the monsoon session as well.



Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy put the cat among the pigeons when he rose to say Sonia Gandhi in the Rajya Sabha. The rest of his sentence was expunged. The House erupted in frenzy and had to be adjourned twice and eventually until 2 pm. They did discuss drought in the afternoon, but it was under a non-voting motion.



Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told a meeting of the consultative committee on non-performing assets that the Joint Committee on Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code has submitted its report and it is likely to be taken up in the ongoing session. Sources said the committee has accommodated all amendments moved by opposition members and submitted its report without any dissenting notes. This, and the raging debate on NPAs and willful default of bank loans by industrialists like Vijay Mallya, might make the government as well as the Congress to allow discussion and passage of the Bill.



The Congress was primed from the morning as Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday convened a truncated Congress Working Committee meeting at her residence where she wiped her eyes as she tried to articulate her feelings at the way she was being targeted by the government.



Her daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who is likely to play a bigger and more visible political role, was present throughout the strategy session also attended by former Defence Minister A K Antony who had instituted the inquiry into the AgustaWestland deal and cancelled the contract.



Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad first raised the AgustaWestland issue in the House, citing a news report in The Hindu, demanding to know if any meeting had occurred between the Indian and the Italian prime ministers and a deal struck whereby Italian marines would be freed in exchange for incriminating information against the Gandhis. Leader of the House and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley rejected outright the charges and said the investigation is at an advanced stage and while it was clear that bribes had been given, the taker of the bribe has to be established.



Later, a combative Sonia Gandhi told the media, I am not afraid. This is typical of the character assassination kind of politics that they (the Bharatiya Janata Party) indulge in.

Antony described as criminal negligence the two-year delay by the National Democratic Alliance government on the investigation against AgustaWestland. Antony demanded to know the compulsions under which the Modi government allowed a blacklisted company (it was blacklisted in July 2014) to take part in the governments hyped Make In India programme, with permission to bid for defence business in India as partners or sub-contractors, despite objections raised by the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate.

Demanding answers from the Modi government, Antony asked, Why did the Foreign Investment Promotion Board approve a proposal from Indian Rotorcraft Limited, a joint venture between AgustaWestland and Tata? He added, Why did the Modi government permit AgustaWestland to bid for 100 naval utility helicopters in April 2015?



Without mincing his words, Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said, Is it not a fact that Air Chief Marshal SP Tyagi (who is a central figure in the deal) has been part of the Vivekananda International Foundation? He asked the government to come clean on the connection between Tyagi, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Nripendra Mishra, principal secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.



Taking the attack to the BJP camp, the Congress raised questions about BJP Chief Ministers Raman Singh and Vasundhara Raje, who have both been indicted by the Comptroller Auditor General reports for purchase of AgustaWestland helicopters, allegedly causing loss to the exchequer.



Congressmen ensured that they attacked the government, not just within Parliament but outside, for the political conspiracy against the partys leader. But the BJP was not backing down either. Several Lok Sabha MPs have given notices for discussion on the helicopter deal that Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar will reply to.



In the Lok Sabha BJP MP Nishikant Dubey raised the Aircel Maxis issue and asked the government to clarify the exact legal nature of the investments made by the family of former Finance Minister P Chidambaram. Later, at a press conference, Skill Development Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy was fielded to say the government must look at the benami empire established all over the world by the family of P Chidambaram.



It is highly unlikely that any bills will be passed by the Rajya Sabha, where the government is in a minority, in the remainder of the session. Only financial business like passing ministry-related grants is on the Lok Sabhas agenda, the House having already passed bills on biotechnology and the composition of the Sikh Gurudwara Prabandhak Committe.

In the Rajya Sabha, only issues relating to emergencies like drought and farmer suicides are likely to be permitted. It remains to be seen whether the Congress makes an exception for the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code in the Upper House.

Later in the day, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup also denied that any meeting took place between the Italian and Indian PMs on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2015. He said various law enforcement agencies of India are moving against James Christian Michel in cases relating to the Prevention of Corruption Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act.



The chopper story so far



On April 7, 2016, an Italian appeals court sentenced former Finmeccanica Chief Executive Giuseppe Orsi to fourand-a-half years in prison for corruption and falsifying invoices. This overturned a lower court ruling holding Orsi guilty only of false invoices. Orsi was on trial for alleged bribes in a 560-million ($638 million) contract awarded to Finmeccanica unit AgustaWestland in 2010 to supply helicopters to India.



Bruno Spagnolini, former head of AgustaWestland, was sentenced to four years in jail. The court also ordered the two executives to pay 7.5 million ($8.5 million), a sum related to the amounts deemed to have been allegedly paid in bribes. Both Orsi and Spagnolini are going to appeal in Italys Supreme Court. Italian public prosecutor Eugenio Fusco had accused Orsi and Spagnolini of paying tens of millions of euros to Indian officials, including a former air force chief, through intermediaries.

Both were acquitted of the corruption accusations. Judge Luisa Bovitutti said the conviction concerned invoices dating to 2009 and 2010 and the acquittal on corruption charges was made because there was no case to answer.

The India story



AgustaWestland was chosen to supply 12 helicopters to the government to replace the Soviet-built Mi8s, whose working life ran out in 2014. Negotiations began in 2000 and because the specifications were so precise only the Eurocopter qualified.



Brajesh Mishra, the then principal secretary to the prime minister, said this was to be avoided, and the specifications were lowered to make the deal more competitive. This left just two big players in the field, AgustaWestland and Sikorsky.



In 2010, after field trials showed AgustaWestland had the better aircraft, Sikorsky complained it had not been briefed on certain concessions and the trials had been unfair. It followed this up with a legal notice to the ministry of defence.



The Italian public prosecutor produced documents they found at the residence of Guido Ralph Haschke, a middleman who contacted another facilitator, Christian Michel, who is said to have had contacts in the Indian government and is a defence middleman. The note has headings AF, which prosecutors said stood for air force, BUR for bureaucrats, POL for politicians and Fam for family members of the former Indian air force chief of staff, SP Tyagi. Prosecutors allege the family members-three brothers who are the cousins of the former air chief-shared the money among themselves and the chief.



Staff qualitative requirements for the VVIP choppers were frozen in 2003, much before I assumed office of chief of air staff and the IAF did not change any requirements after that, Tyagi has said. His service records reveal he never had anything to do with procurement.



The last point of procurement-related decision in the IAF is the deputy chief of air staff. Tyagi has never held this office. Below this are six other officers. He has never held any of those appointments either.



But the papers also revealed other facts. Under POL the note lists Euro 3 million for AP. Prosecutors said in court they believed the initials referred to Ahmed Patel, political adviser to Congress President Sonia Gandhi.



Italian prosecutors alleged that Indias anti-corruption watchdogs also were on the list of those who received payoffs. The lists heading CVC, they said, referred to the Central Vigilance Commission and Auditor Gen to the Comptroller and Auditor General.



In its FIR, the CBI -- to which the matter was referred when former Defence Minister AK Antony cancelled the order -- said the IAF had throughout opposed lowering the altitude requirement but when Tyagi took it agreed to reduce it.



Tyagis three relatives, Rajiv, Sanjeev and Sandeep Tyagi, were paid via fake companies. Guido Haschke managed to send Euro 5.6 million through the Mohali-based IDS Infotech and Chandigarh-based Aeromatrix Info Solutions to India and kept the remaining amount of about Euro 24.30 million received from AgustaWestland with themselves in the account of IDS Tunisia, says the CBI FIR.



Orsi has denied hiring Haschke and Michel to influence the helicopter deal, saying it was not necessary. The AgustaWestland 101 was the helicopter the Indians wanted, he said in court.

The latest update



The Italian court order relies on the old evidence that mentions, but does not name, Sonia Gandhi or Manmohan Singh as recipients of bribes. As the CBI awaits the English translation of the order, the alleged clincher is a letter dated March 15, 2008, from Michel to Peter Hulet, then India region sales and liaison head of AgustaWestland. It reads: Dear Peter, since Mrs Gandhi is the driving force behind the VIP, she will no longer fly with MI8  Mrs Gandhi and her closest advisers are the aim of the high commissioner, senior advisor Prime Minister Manmohan Singh obviously the main figure, then theres Ahmed Patel secretary.



BJP Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy has named Sonia Gandhi on the floor of the House as a beneficiary from corruption. Congress Spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said if anybody needed to answer questions on the matter it was the Modi government.



He said the United Progressive Alliance government had included an integrity clause according to which the contract for purchase of helicopters from AgustaWestland was cancelled, the guarantee forfeited and process initiated for recovery of money. Surjewala said the money was recovered and not a single rupee loss was caused to the government of India. He said the UPA government had also ordered a CBI inquiry as well as initiated the process of blacklisting AgustaWestland.



As the government changed in May 2014, Modiji proceeded to cancel the process of blacklisting AgustaWestland. Why did Modiji not blacklist AgustaWestland? Surjewala asked.
'This man has aged, but does not know the difference between words spoken on the streets from those of spoken in Parliament.'

'He does not allow his hair to turn gray, so he hasn't learned or matured.'

Rashme Sehgal reports on how Subramanian Swamy has riled the Congress yet again.

The Congress' attempts to corner the Bharatiya Janata Party over the imposition of President's rule in Uttarakhand has hit the Subramanian Swamy obstacle in the Rajya Sabha.

Making his debut as a nominated member of the Upper House, Dr Swamy on Wednesday, April 27, made fresh allegations against Congress President Sonia Gandhi, naming her as a beneficiary in the AgustaWestland chopper deal.

A Court of Appeal in Milan, Italy -- equivalent to an Indian high court -- convicted two Italian business executives for graft in the chopper deal and also named former Indian Air Force chief S P Tyagi and three of his cousins for accepting bribes.

The court cited documents that described Sonia Gandhi as having been the 'driving force' behind the deal.

Other Congress politicians named are then prime minister Manmohan Singh, President Pranab Mukherjee, then Union minister M Veerappa Moily and senior Congress leaders Ahmed Patel and Oscar Fernandes.

On Wednesday, Dr Swamy's allegations about Sonia Gandhi were met with vigorous protests from the Congress benches and led Deputy Chairman P J Kurien to immediately expunge the remarks from the record.

On Thursday as well, Dr Swamy insisted on making a reference to the Congress president, which was promptly expunged.

'It is only his second day in Parliament,' Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad remarked. 'In two days you have expunged his remarks twice. There are 365 days in a year. How many times you are going to expunge his words?'

'This man has aged, but does not know the difference between words spoken on the streets from those of spoken in Parliament. He does not allow his hair to turn gray, so he hasn't learned or matured,' Azad added.

Deputy Chairman Kurien warned Dr Swamy not to subvert Zero Hour to which Azad remarked, 'The problem is not us. The problem is this new gift of the BJP (referring to Dr Swamy) which will not allow us to function.'

'Where is the proof? (of her involvement)?' Sonia had asked on Wednesday. 'It's a part of their strategy of character assassination. The allegation is completely baseless.'

'You (the BJP) have been in power for two years -- finish the inquiry; the truth will be out. We have nothing to hide. Let them take my name, I am not afraid,' the Congress president declared.

India had terminated the Rs 3,726 crore (Rs 37.26 billion) VVIP chopper deal with AgustaWestland International Limited on the grounds of a breach of the pre-contract integrity pact.

While the deal was signed in 2010 by then prime minister Manmohan Singh, it was cancelled in February 2014 after the Italian government highlighted that its executives had paid bribes to the tune of Rs 226 crore (Rs 2.26 billion) to Indians.

This led the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government to ban both AgustaWestland and its parent company Finmecannica from doing any business in India in February 2014.

The Congress pointed out that after coming to power, the BJP modified this blacklisting and allowed AgustaWestland and Finmecannica to participate in government contracts. The Italian companies were even given a Foreign Investment Promotion Board licence to produce helicopters on a joint venture basis.

Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia asserted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited AgustaWestland and Finmecannica to his Make In India summit in New York last year.

Since the Italians had revealed that IAF officers had also received kickbacks worth Rs 360 crore (Rs 3.6 billion), the Central Bureau of Investigation registered a case against Air Chief Marshal Tyagi (retd) and 12 others including three of his cousins.

In the same month, the defence ministry had frozen the payments and decided to scrap the contract for supply of 12 AW101 three-engine helicopters for VVIP use.

Congress leader Randeep Surjewala pointed out that the UPA government had started proceedings for encashment of securities/bank guarantees and recovered Rs 2,068 crore (Rs 20.68 billion) against payment of Rs 1,620 crore (Rs 16.20 billion) -- more than India paid for the choppers.

"But soon after assuming office, the Modi government sought an opinion from the attorney general on Finmeccanica and AgustaWestland. They were cleared despite objections from the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate to become part of Make in India programme," Surjewala said.

The Congress's top coterie is now on the offensive. Ahmed Patel, who is also Sonia's political secretary, declared, 'Hang me if there is an iota of evidence (against us). We unequivocally reject their allegations.'

In a series of tweets, Ahmed Patel said, 'Those uncorroborated notes which are part of the judgment annexure have been in the public domain for two years. Why did the BJP government fail to verify it? They have been in power for two years; why are they crying foul now?'

'The Modi government is indulging in a cover up conspiracy to hide its sinister role in helping and promoting a banned corrupt company (AgustaWestland) and its parent company (Finmecannica),' Former defence minister A K Antony told the media.

'What is the most intriguing part of this conspiracy is the undisclosed reason on the part of the Modi government in permitting this blacklisted company to get clearances from the Foreign Investment Promotion board and permit its entry as partner or subcontractor for various Indian corporate houses,' Antony added.

The UPA government, Surjewala said, was willing to set up a Joint Parliamentary Committee when the issue first came up, but the then leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, current Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, shot the idea down.

While the Congress government debarred any commercial transaction with Finmeccanica and initiated the blacklisting process, Surjewala emphasised the Modi government had permitted a blacklisted company to get FIPB clearances.

But the BJP has seized the initiative on the controversy. Both Dr Swamy and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar challenged the Congress to show the UPA government's order blacklisting AgustaWestland.

Countering the Congress charge that Modi had met his Italian counterpart in September last year and offered to free the two Italian marines (arrested for allegedly killing two Indian fishermen) in return for information on the 'Gandhi family,' Jaitley replied that 'no such meeting had been held,' insisting such an allegation was 'false and untrue in entirety.'

'All I want to ask her is that those who gave bribes are in jail in Italy, then where are those who received the kickbacks?' BJP President Amit Shah asked Sonia Gandhi.

'When the National Herald corruption case happened, you said you did not fear anybody. When the AgustaWestland case occurs, you say you do not fear anybody. I want to tell her (Sonia) that we in the BJP are afraid of the Constitution, rules and public norms,' Shah said.

'I think she should come out of this mindset about whether she fears anybody or not and make it clear before the people that when it has been proven by an Italian court that bribes were given, then who received the money. Who are responsible?' Shah asked.

It is obvious that the Modi government wants the Congress and the Gandhis to be on the backfoot. Their strategy is to discredit both by showing how they are embroiled in one scandal after another.

IMAGE: Congress MPs protest in the well of the Rajya Sabha in New Delhi. Photograph: PTI/TV grab
A former senator of Pakistan's Awami National Party has been named as one of the suspects involved in the assassination of prominent Sikh lawmaker Sardar Soran Singh, who was gunned down by contract killers allegedly hired by his miffed Hindu rival after he failed to secure a ticket for polls.

Former senator Amarjeet Malhotra has been included in the list of suspects involved in the killing of Singh, 52, who was the Special Assistant to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister on minority affairs.

Senator Amarjeet Malhotra belongs to Tehsil Barikot of Swat District and has political affiliations with the ANP. Main accused Baldev Kumar, who is in custody, also belongs to Tehsil Barikot.

Singh was shot dead on April 22 by contract killers allegedly hired by his miffed Hindu rival Baldev after he failed to secure a ticket for elections in 2013. Baldev, a Swat district councilor and minority leader of Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, hired contract killers by promising them Rs one million, the police had said.

He was miffed after being overlooked for the ticket which was given to Singh who was comparatively new entrant to the PTI.

Pakistani Taliban had claimed responsibility for the murder.
The Indian government has come under fresh criticism after barring another Chinese exile -- Tiananmen Square activist Lu Jinghua -- from boarding a flight to attend a meeting in Dharamsala.

Lu Jinghua, a well-known Tiananmen activist, was scheduled to attend the April 28 meeting of dissidents and exiles in Dharamsala -- the same meeting that Uighur exile Dolkun Isa had planned to attend before his electronic visa was revoked by India, which cited a red corner notice issued by Interpol in his name.

Indias move to grant the visa was seen as a retaliatory measure after China blocked the listing of Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar as an international terrorist at the UN.

Isa had claimed that pressure from China appeared to be the cause for India cancelling the visa.

According to geopolitical observers, the Chinese government considers Isa a terrorist and used its influence to get a red notice issued against him by Interpol.

The ministry of external affairs distanced themselves from the decision, claiming that the home ministry was the agency involved in the process.
Congress on Thursday raised the Pathankot terror attack issue in the Lok Sabha and advised the Narendra Modi government to negotiate with Pakistan from a position of strength and not emotions.

Just before the House was to take up Question Hour, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan allowed Jyotiraditya Scindia of the Congress to raise the issue with a rider that it would not be politicised.

Amid opposition by treasury benches, Scindia recalled that the Joint Investigation Team from Pakistan had a member from the Inter-Services Intelligence.

Quoting a Pakistani media report, he said the JIT told the government there that a drama was staged to malign Pakistan and the Indian authorities did not cooperate with the team.

Referring to the remarks of Pakistan high commissioner to India Abdul Basit that the investigation into the attack does not include reciprocity, he said the government should negotiate with Pakistan from a position of strength and not emotions.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu urged the Speaker to expunge Scindias remarks against the government.

When Scindia kept on speaking even after the House took up Question Hour, Speaker quipped that you never listen... that is why I dont allow you.

Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti, who was responding to a question on Ganga rejuvenation, said it is sad that more than Ganga, the Congress thinks of Pakistan.
The Abbottabad hideout of Osama bin Laden was under Inter-Services Intelligence control and a Pakistan Army doctor treated the most dreaded terrorist in the world before he was killed in a daring raid by United States commandos in 2011, according to a new book.

In fact, the doctor Amir Aziz, of the rank of major, who lived in a compound near bin Ladens hideout in Abbottabad, was rewarded by the Central Intelligence Agency with a share of the $25 million bounty the US had put up because a DNA sample had conclusively proved the Al Qaeda leaders identity.

In his latest book, The Killing of Osama bin Laden, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims that ISI got hold of bin Laden in 2006 after paying bribes to some of the tribal leaders. At the time he was said to be very ill.

Early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the ISI had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army, to move nearby to provide treatment, Hersh claims, basing his account on a conversation he had with an unidentified retired Pakistan Army official.

And all this while the Pakistani leadership in particular the army chief and ISI boss repeatedly told the US that they did not know the whereabouts of bin Laden.

Its understood in Washington that elements of the ISI believe that maintaining a relationship with the Taliban leadership inside Afghanistan is essential to national security. The ISIs strategic aim is to balance Indian influence in Kabul.

The Taliban is also seen in Pakistan as a source of jihadist shock troops who would back Pakistan against India in a confrontation over Kashmir, Hersh said in his book that hit stores early this month.

The Pakistanis also know that their trump card against aggression from India is a strong relationship with the United States. They will never cut their person-to-person ties with us, a senior retired army official is quoted as saying.

Hersh claims that the CIA came to know about bin Ladens hideout from a senior Pakistani intelligence official who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US.

The said official is now living near Washington along with his family.

Hersh said his information collected from US intelligence and other sources was vetted by former ISI head Asad Durrani. When your version comes out -- if you do it -- people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful, Durrani told Hersh.

For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what youve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode, he said.

As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by people in the strategic community who would know that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Ladens presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US betrayed promises left then army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and ISI chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha exposed, Hersh said.

The US journalist quotes a retired Pakistani general that the ISI kept bin Laden at Abbottabad because of its proximity to military installations so that he could be kept under constant surveillance.

The bin Laden compound was less than two miles from the Pakistan Military Academy, and a Pakistani army combat battalion headquarters was another mile or so away. Abbottabad is less than 15 minutes by helicopter from Tarbela Ghazi, an important base for ISI covert operations and the facility where those who guard Pakistans nuclear weapons arsenal are trained, he wrote.

Ghazi is why the ISI put bin Laden in Abbottabad in the first place, the retired official said, to keep him under constant supervision.

According to Hersh, the retired Pakistani official told him that Pasha offered the Americans a blunt explanation of the reason Pakistan kept bin Ladens capture a secret, and why it was imperative for the ISIs role to remain secret.

We needed a hostage to keep tabs on Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Pasha said, according to the retired official.

The ISI was using bin Laden as leverage against Taliban and Al Qaeda activities inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. They let the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership know that if they ran operations that clashed with the interests of the ISI, they would turn bin Laden over to the US. So if it became known that the Pakistanis had worked with us to get bin Laden at Abbottabad, there would be hell to pay, Hersh wrote.

Hersh claimed that Kayani and Pasha agreed to cooperate secretly with the US only after receiving assurances that they would get a free hand in Afghanistan and there would be more flow of military aid from the US.

Pasha told us at a meeting in April that he could not risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know hes there. Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about the mission, the retired official is quoted as saying.

He and Kayani had to tell the whole story to the directors of the air defence command and a few local commanders. Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control, the retired official said.

Otherwise, they would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder, he said.
Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy on Thursday filed a defamation case in a local court against Communist Party of India-Marxist veteran V S Achutanandan, seeking Rs 1 lakh compensation, for levelling baseless allegations against him.

Chandy also filed a complaint against the opposition leader before the Chief Electoral officer, seeking an enquiry under Section 171 (G) and 188 of the IPC for giving false statements during the campaign for the May 16 assembly election.

The chief minister's complaint is for violation of model code of conduct for the guidance of political parties and candidates, promulgated by the Election Commission of India.

In the suit filed before the First Additional District court in Thiruvananthapuram, Chandy said the defamatory statement before television channels and other media was "fabricated for the sole purpose of maligning plaintiff (Chandy) and the reputation he enjoys among the people of his constituency and as well as around the world and to devastate his stature and position in the party".

Chandy, who is contesting as the Congress-United Democratic Front candidate from Puthupally, said the defamatory statement was 'scandalous, libellous and showers sarcasm and contempt on the plaintiff'.

The chief minister said he has been in active politics for the last five decades and has over the years acquired an 'impeccable reputation' among the public.

Achutanandan, the CPI-M-Left Democratic Front candidate from Malampuzha, had alleged that there were 136 cases before the Supreme Court against 18 cabinet ministers and 31 against the CM.

"This statement was a fabricated story and unverified allegation, baseless, concocted and defamatory," Chandy said in his complaint.

He had sought an apology from 93-year-old Achuthanandan for levelling 'blatant and false' charges against him and some of his cabinet colleagues during campaigning or face legal proceedings.

This had fallen on deaf ears and so the case had been filed, Chandy said.

The chief minister sought an injunction restraining Achutanandan from making defamatory statements against him.
Narendra Modi will be the first leader to address a joint session of the United States Congress during US House of Representative Speaker Paul Ryan's tenure.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been invited to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress on June 8 during his visit to Washington, DC.

'The friendship between the United States and India is a pillar of stability in an important region of the world,' Speaker of the US House of Representative Paul Ryan told the media at his weekly press conference on Thursday, April 28.

'Today, I invited Prime Minister Modi of India to address a joint meeting of Congress when he visits Washington this summer,' Ryan said.

'India is the most populous democracy, and soon it is going to be the most populous country,' Ryan, who is almost 20 years younger than Modi, said. 'The friendship between our nations is a pillar of stability in a very, very important region.'

'This address presents a special opportunity to hear from the elected leader of the world's most populous democracy on how our two nations can work together to promote our shared values and to increase prosperity. We look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi to the US Capitol on June 8,' Ryan said.

Modi, who was invited by President Barack Obama for a visit to the US when he was in Washington for the Nuclear Security Summit on March 31, will be the fifth Indian prime minister to address a joint meeting of Congress, and the first since 2005.

Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh (July 19, 2005), Atal Bihari Vajpayee (September 14, 2000), P V Narasimha Rao (May 18, 1994) and Rajiv Gandhi (July 13, 1985) addressed the joint meeting of the US Congress.

The tradition of foreign leaders and dignitaries addressing Congress began with the Marquis de Lafayette of France who spoke in the House chamber on December 10, 1824.

"An invitation to Prime Minister Modi to address a joint meeting of Congress is significant, given past US policy towards Modi during his time as chief minister of Gujarat," Ronak D Desai, a Fellow at New America and an affiliate at the Belfer Centre's India and South Asia Programme at Harvard University, said.

Modi's visit to Washington is likely to be the last official meeting between the two leaders during President Obama's final year in office.

American lawmakers welcomed Ryan's decision to invite Modi to address the joint meeting of the US Congress.

'I applaud Speaker Ryan for inviting Prime Minister Modi to address a joint meeting of Congress, and I look forward to welcoming the prime minister to the Capitol,' said US Congressman Ed Royce, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. 'This address will serve as a sign of the deep and important relationship between the US and India.'

'Our partnership in areas such as defence, nuclear power, renewable energy and space exploration is very strong, thanks to our many shared values. I look forward to hearing from Prime Minister Modi about how we can continue working together to promote peace and prosperity,' Royce said.

'I look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi to Washington in June where his address to a joint session of Congress will explore how our two nations can work together to further our shared values and interests,' said US Representative Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu lawmaker elected to Congress.

'Since Prime Minister Modi was first elected in 2014, he has made active engagement with the US a priority on many levels including exploring mutually beneficial economic opportunities, stronger government-to-government relations, and enhanced security engagements,' she said.

Earlier this month, Gabbard, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, wrote to Ryan encouraging him to invite Modi to address Congress.

'I'm pleased that Speaker Ryan has granted my request,' said US Congressman Dr Amerish 'Ami' Bera, the only Indian-American in Congress.

Last week, Dr Bera and Royce along with two other lawmakers had urged Ryan to invite Modi to address a joint session of Congress.

Ryan told reporters Modi would be the first leader to address a joint meeting of Congress after he was elected Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
A Pakistan government spokesman says the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists -- which unearthed the Panama Papers containing details of offshore companies -- has admitted that it had erroneously included the name of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif while publishing details of persons who control offshore companies based on documents leaked from law firm Mossack Foncesca.

According to an official statement issue by the Pakistan government spokesperson on Wednesday, the issue of Panama Papers became a subject of debate in Pakistan as the name of prime minister was wrongly included by the ICIJ and subsequently reported by the media.

The ICIJ on its website has now acknowledged the error and removed all data from its website carrying the name of Sharif as the original Panama Papers never contained his name.

Earlier, ICIJ has claimed that the Pakistan PM's family floated 4 offshore companies to park money in Panama. Sharif himself does not control any offshore company and in fact its his children who do, said ICIJ.

Offering himself and his family for accountability, Sharif had earlier said that he will step down if the probe commission finds him guilty of corruption. He further said he will approach the Chief Justice of Pakistan regarding the formation of a commission to investigate the allegations.

I hereby announce to write to the Chief Justice, asking him to lead the judicial commission, which will investigate revelations made in the Panama Papers, he had said.
Over hundred dead, hundreds more being treated for sun strokes. Almost 30 crore people across India are facing the brunt of the summer heat and shortage of drinking water.



The mercury has soared past the forties in many parts of the country. Adding to the woes, the availability of water in 91 major reservoirs is lower by 11 million cubic meters at present.



While the Union government blames consecutive droughts in the last two years for the water woes and the meteorological department predicts hotter days ahead, the average Indian longs for some respite.



Here's how bad the situation is today:





Girls cover themselves during a hot summer day in Gurgaon on Wednesday. Photograph: PTI

Completely dried up river bed of Krishna river during hot summer in Sangli, Maharashtra. Photograph: PTI

People fetch water from a roadside pit due to acute shortage in supply during hot summer in Bhopal. Photograph: PTI

A farmer herds his cattle in a parched field on a hot summer day in Ranchi. Photograph: PTI

Tourists splash water on their faces to get relief from the heat at Mehtab Bagh behind Taj Mahal in Agra. Photograph: PTI

Cracked soil at Manjara Dam is seen in Osmanabad. Photograph: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

A woman bathes at a roadside municipal tap in a slum area on a hot summer day on the outskirts of Kolkata. Photograph: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

Young girls cover their faces to protect from scorching heat on a hot day in Bikaner, Rajasthan. Photograph: PTI
The Aam Aadmi Party government's odd-even proposal has brought new flavour to the ongoing second part of the budget session of Parliament with several Bharatiya Janata Party lawmakers resorting to new modes of transport, including cycle and horse, to vent their ire.

Rider of the storm: We are performing a constitutional duty," said Sharma while seated atop the white horse. Photograph: PTI

BJP Member of Parliament Ram Prasad Sharma must have drawn chuckles when he came to Parliament on a horse on Wednesday. Sharma was protesting the odd-even traffic rule in Delhi.

When asked, Sarma said that he had an even number vehicle and could not afford to buy another odd one to travel on odd days, and hence, the horse.

Oh wait, was Sharmas horse allowed inside the complex? No, Delhi police stopped Sharma near Rail Bhavan and did not allow the horse to proceed towards Parliament.

Lets see which other lawmakers have chosen absurb ways to get to Parliament:

Arjun Ram Meghwal, BJP

One Direction: "Some say I should stop wearing a safa as I look illiterate, but over the years people know I am literate and so I continue to wear it, Meghwal says. Photo courtesy: Facebook page of Arjun Ram Meghwal

As Meghwal, 61, a two-time BJP MP from Bikaner manoeuvred his way through rush-hour Delhi traffic to reach Parliament, he draws astonished looks from onlookers, but he smiles and acknowledges them.

Meghwal has been receiving mixed reactions for his novel effort from party colleagues and parliamentarians. But he remains unfazed and continues to cycle from his bungalow everyday to the Parliament and back, even though the distance is not more than a kilometre.

We are representatives of the public, so we should look like them. I have decided that I will cycle for public connect in the walled area of Bikaner city, when I go back to my constituency, the MP had told Rediff.com in this interview.

Ranjeet Ranjan, Congress



Motorcycle Mama: Ranjeet Ranjan makes a stylish entrance on her orange Harley Davidson. Photograph: Subhav Shukla/PTI.

Congress MP and Pappu Yadavs wife Ranjeet Ranjan made a statement and made one on Womens Day in March this year, when she rode a bike to Parliament.

Ranjan, 39, and a lawmaker from Bihar's Supaul, cut a dashing figure in a blue salwar kameez and dark sunglasses with a white helmet strapped on securely and drew much attention as she roared into Parliament on an orange Harley Davidson.

The grand entry caused much confusion and nervousness for the security persons, since all vehicles that enter Parliament need a sticker that indicate they are cleared for the area. But Ranjan's bike was missing it and was stopped briefly. It was only after the office of Speaker Sumitra Mahajan gave its sanction for her motorcycle that she was allowed to enter.

Manoj Tiwari, BJP MP

Phew! "Majboori forced me to take this step as I was left with no other option," says Tiwari.

Tiwari on Wednesday turned up on a cycle in wake of the odd-even rule, and advised other fellow parliamentarians to follow the same.

"I am following the odd-even rule. My car is even numbered, and since today is an odd day, I have come like this. I am not saying that this should become a tradition, but those who are interested can come like this," Tiwari told media persons.

"I have come as I was left with no other option. I use a cycle sometimes, and Parliamentarians should use it," he added.

Indira Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, former prime ministers

Clash of the Titans: Former prime ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee (left) and Indira Gandhi.

Mrs Gandhi called upon the nation to use less diesel or kerosene or petrol because the crude prices had gone up as much as by five times, during the oil crisis.

On November 12, 1973, she turned up at Parliament in a horse-driven carriage which the President used on ceremonial occasions, causing major headlines the next day.

Not to be left behind, Atal Bihari Vajpayee arrived on a bullock cart the very next day, with a towel tied around his head for effect, armed with a whip and clicking his tongue, completing the rustic look. Of course, he drove the cart himself!

As if to upstage them both, joint founder of the Swatantra Party Piloo Modi turned up on an elephant the following day, causing much brouhaha!

Renuka Choudhary, Congress

Choudhary caused a storm in the House when she attempted to drive a tractor to Parliament in November 2000. Choudhary tried to drive the tractor to the Parliament building to highlight the plight of farmers in Andhra Pradesh.

She was stopped by police who said her vehicle was not authorised to enter.

When Choudhary's colleague, the late Buta Singh asked Lok Sabha member said that the "erring" policemen be punished, former prime minister Chandrashekhar said: "Will a member be allowed to enter Parliament in a tank?"

Bhagwant Mann, Aam Aadmi Party

Like peas in a pod: AAP MPs Bhagwant Mann and Sadhu Singh sitting in an MP Special DTC bus at Parliament in New Delhi on Monday. Photograph: Photograph: Subhav Shukla/PTI

The Delhi Transport Corporations special shuttle service launched by the Delhi government to ferry MPs to Parliament during the course of the odd-even scheme found few takers, and one of them was Mann with colleague Sadhu Singh.

MPs have not been given exemption under the odd-even scheme, the second phase of which started on April 15 and will end on April 30. The violation of the car-rationing scheme attracts a penalty of Rs 2,000.

Mann, picked up another BJP MP from another part of the city, and later took a DTC bus back home.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday took his place alongside other world leaders at Madame Tussauds in London.

The Indian leaders new wax figure arrived at the Baker Street attraction fresh from Delhi, where Modi had a private viewing with his likeness last week.

The figure is featured in the famous attractions popular World Leaders enclosure alongside present day leaders Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Francoise Holland, as well as political heavyweights of the past including Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

Modi was closely involved in the creation of his figure and was delighted with the final results, declaring that the Madame Tussauds team are exceptional at what they do.

General Manager of Madame Tussauds London, Edward Fuller, said, We are delighted that Mr Modi was able to see this very figure in India last week, and to welcome him to Madame Tussauds London today.

Its wonderful that our visitors now have the chance to get up close to this influential leader, who is the source of so much public interest.

Its not every day you get to stand alongside the statesmen and women shaping our world and we think guests will relish the chance to rub shoulders with Mr Modi.

Modis figure is dressed in his signature Kurta in cream with jacket and he is featured in a traditional pose making a namaste gesture.

Londons figure is one of four created of the statesman, with the other three taking up residence at Madame Tussauds attractions in Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok.

Each figure took a team of talented artists four months and cost 150,000 (Rs 1.45 crore) to create.

Image: Artists put the finishing touches on new wax figure of Narendra Modi as it joins world leaders figures at Madame Tussauds in London. Photograph: Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images
Did the CPI-M and Congress' shrill campaign against 'tainted' officers prompt the Election Commission to respond with alacrity?

Payal Mohanka finds out.

In an unprecedented move, close to 70 heads have rolled in the midst of the ongoing assembly elections in West Bengal.

The Election Commission has found officers from the IAS, IPS and the state civil services ranging from district magistrates, commissioner of police, officers in charge of police stations, block divisional officers, guilty of a bias towards the ruling Trinamool Congress party.

Before Kolkata went to the polls on April 30, the fifth phase, the Election Commission removed five police officers in Kolkata and its neighbouring district of South 24 Parganas on April 26.

Is officialdom in West Bengal working for the ruling party or safeguarding the interests of the people?

Allegations of politicisation of the bureaucracy have disturbed a section of upright officers.

Even the chief secretary, the senior-most bureaucrat in the state, was hauled up by the Election Commission for replying to a letter addressed to the chief minister. The Commission had show caused Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for violating the Model Code of Conduct.

"The content of the letter was 100 per cent political and not administrative," says a senior officer, speaking on condition that he would not be identified by name for this report.

"The chief secretary had no business to reply, He was rightly pulled up by the EC. The bureaucracy is being seen to be aligned to the chief minister. Public perception of over-faithful officers is giving the services a bad name."

An undesirable trend, without a doubt. But is this a new phenomenon?

In the late 1960s and early 1970s then prime minister Indira Gandhi was accused of politicising the bureaucracy. A senior officer quotes her famous expression, 'committed bureaucracy'. It was believed that an indifferent or neutral bureaucracy could not exist. It needed to be committed to the development goals of the government in power.

"What is happening in Bengal today may be unprecedented as the EC is transferring officials on a massive scale, but we are all familiar with overzealous bureaucrats toeing the line of the government. This is a pan India phenomenon," points out a bureaucrat, citing the examples of Punjab and Tamil Nadu in the last elections.

When new governments were sworn in, both states witnessed large-scale changes in the bureaucracy as the new government did not have confidence in the existing bureaucrats.

"I don't think bureaucrats are that politicised. I have been at the receiving end of this in 2014," says a bureaucrat who was transferred during the 2014 Lok Sabha election.

"I don't think I was overly aligned to any party and neither did the ruling party instruct me to do anything," the bureaucrat adds, "but I was still pulled out of my post and sent on election duty in Uttar Pradesh. It is often a matter of perception."

Is it just perception? Why has the Election Commission in a never before fashion initiated transfers on a massive scale in the midst of the current election process?

Is it because for the first time the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Congress have come together in an electoral alliance and their united shrill campaign against 'tainted' officers prompted the Election Commission to respond with alacrity?

"After the third phase of the elections in Bengal," says a political observer, "the CPI-M and Congress together asked for the removal of the chief electoral officer. This was a poor reflection on the EC itself. To save its credibility the EC had to act. This resulted in an unprecedented rolling of heads while the election process is still on in the state."

Will the Election Commission achieve anything by removing close to 70 officers from their posts?

The electoral exercise starts three months before the polls. There are thousands of polling officers and electoral officers in each district. Some bureaucrats feel the Election Commission is over-reacting. Granted it wants its image to remain unsullied, but removing senior officers will not achieve much.

However, there is unanimity on the fact that a sharp signal is being sent out to every polling officer in the districts: No one is above the law and officers have to be neutral to ensure free and fair elections in the state.

It is also being pointed out that transfers by themselves are not a deterrent. Offenders need to be penalised or demoted. A bureaucrat removed during the 2014 Lok Sabha election has been transferred during these elections too following complaints of bias towards the ruling party. Larger electoral reforms are needed to deal with 'habitual offenders.'

The election machinery is bracing itself for polls in the last two phases of elections on April 30 and May 5.

Once the elections are over, the power of posting returns to the state. Will Bengal witness an absurd drama as the system ensures the return of 'loyal' officers who had been transferred out by the Election Commission? These officers would once again embark on a journey of sworn allegiance to the ruling party.

IMAGE: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on a road show in Bhawanipore constituency from where she is contesting the assembly election. Photograph: Swapan Mahapatra/PTI Photo
IMAGE: Deceptively calm, Panoor village is where the most political murders take place in Kerala. Photographs: Sreeram Selvaraj for Rediff.com

'They don't just kill their enemies, they chop off limbs, sever heads.'

'How can anyone kill a teacher in front of small children and a son in front of his parents?'

Shobha Warrier/Rediff.com visits Kannur, the Marxist bastion in Kerala, which has witnessed more political murders than any other part of India.

Panoor, a small municipality in Kannur, is unknown outside Kerala, but within Kerala, it is often described as a most dangerous place, a place where political enemies are brutally murdered.

Many still remember how K T Jayakrishnan, a Bharatiya Jana Yuva Morcha leader, was hacked to death in front of his students inside a school classroom, near Panoor in 2000. Jayakrishnan was murdered in retaliation for an attempt to kill Marxist leader P Jayarajan a year earlier.

Many people ask if I am going to Panoor to buy crude bombs. It is said the maximum number of crude bombs made in Kerala are manufactured in Panoor.

This is not what you expect from an area that boasts a literacy rate of 82 per cent!

***

Kannur has given birth to giants in India's Communist movement: A K Gopalan, E K Nayanar, Azhikodan Raghavan. Many in Kannur are members of the Communist Party of India-Marxist.

Seventy per cent of the panchayats are governed by the Left Democratic Front and when you travel to this district especially during elections, you only see red flags and posters of Pinarayi Vijayan, who is tipped to be become Kerala's next chief minister, everywhere.

The Marxists, who have dominated Kannur's villages for several years, ensure that no one from any other political party enters such villages. No comrade is permitted to switch political sides. These villages in Kannur are described as 'party villages' and the maximum number of such villages are located in Panoor.

***

As I walk into the CPI-M office in Panoor, I recall what B R P Bhaskar, the veteran political commentator, told me a few weeks ago. "When someone deserts the party, we see an attempt to kill him. The Communist parties dissuade people from leaving by killing deserters."

There are only four or five people at the CPI-M office. On the wall are many photographs of party members allegedly killed by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh activists; rakhtha saakshikal or the martyrs.

I ask the Marxist functionary sitting behind a desk with a smirk on his face if he will help me visit a 'party village.' Even before the phrase 'party village' leaves my lips, he snaps at me.

"What do you mean by party village? You media people have spread the news everywhere that we don't allow other party people to enter or work in our villages. Who gave you this false information? We allow everyone irrespective of their party to live in our villages."

Taken aback, I persist. "I just want to go to the villages where political murders have taken place, where the RSS and Marxists kill each other," I say.

"It is the RSS that killed our people," he roars. "We were the victims of their violence. Even when they killed four of our party people one by one, we didn't retaliate. Like true Gandhians, we only demonstrated. How long can we behave like Gandhians and demonstrate?"

"That's why we also attacked them. They even killed our party member, a school teacher in front of his students. Do you expect us to keep quiet?" he asks.

As I leave the CPI-M office, I ask a man at a shop nearby why so many murders occur in Panoor. He looks around to make sure that no one is listening. "It is sad that our village is no longer peaceful," he says. "I blame both the RSS and Marxists for the murders though most of the violence was started by the Marxists."

***

At a tailoring shop, a small crowd gathers around me, animatedly discussing the political murders in Panoor. "It is a shame that Panoor has such a bad reputation," one man tells me. "Murders, crude bombs. We feel ashamed. We feel the Marxists and RSS are equally responsible for these murders."

"They don't just kill their enemies, they chop off limbs, sever heads. Sometimes we wonder whether they are human beings," he adds. "How can anyone kill a teacher in front of small children and a son in front of his parents? This is cruel and heartless."

Who will win the election in this constituency, I ask. "The Marxists will not win," they tell me, a statement that is almost heresy in Panoor. "The Independent with UDF (United Democratic Front) support will win. He has done a lot of development in this area."

"We should punish all those who indulge in violence. Both the Marxists and BJP are goonda parties!"

***

IMAGE: Pinarayi village, home to chief minister aspirant Pinarayi Vijayan, plastered with CPI-M posters.

Pinarayi village is well known in these parts because of Pinarayi Vijayan, the CPI-M leader likely to become Kerala's next chief minister if the Marxists win the May 16 assembly election.

The village junction looks as if it has been dipped in red with posters of a smiling Vijayan everywhere. Vijayan rarely smiles and there appears to be a conscious effort to dispel his grim image.

At 2 in the afternoon, I spot men in spotless white dhotis and shirts discussing politics in the unbearable heat.

Do you think the LDF (the CPI-M-led Left Democratic Front) will win, I ask as a conversation opener.

"Of course, the LDF will win and Pinarayi will be the next chief minister," they tell me. "We are really proud of our leader. He has made our village famous all over the world."

What will the village gain if Vijayan becomes chief minister?

"Look at the bad condition of our roads now. This will become the highway to Kannur airport. When he was the electricity minister, he did so many things for our village."

What if V S Achuthanandan, the former Marxist chief minister and bitter Vijayan rival, becomes CM?

"We will be disappointed, but we have to obey whatever the MLAs and the (CPI-M) Politburo decides. But we are sure that Pinarayi will be the next chief minister!"

Are all the people in this village Marxists?

"95 per cent of the villagers are Marxists. There are some dissidents. You can't help it!"

***

Pinarayi Vijayan's home, widely criticised as one not befitting a Marxist leader, is located in Pinarayi.

It is indeed a huge, very un-proletarian, house, but in Kerala people like to build palatial bungalows.

His wife opens the door. I introduce myself and seek an interview. "Please come in," Mrs Vijayan says, apologising for the mess the drawing room is in. She is in the process of changing the curtains. Unlike her husband, she is jovial and funny, and readers will read my interview with her in a couple of days.

***

Peralassery, 12 kilometres from Kannur town, is an iconic village for the state's Marxists. Perhaps we can call it the temple town for the Marxists. It is where the legendary Communist leader A K Gopalan was born.

AKG died in 1977, but he lives on in the village in the form of the AKG school, the AKG library, the AKG hospital... it is as if almost every building in the village is named after him.

Pinarayi Vijayan's election campaign office is located in the village.

Like Pinarayi village, you only see the colour red everywhere. In the centre of the village is Vijayan's election office. The man in charge of the campaign is K K Ragesh, a Rajya Sabha MP. A couple of party members are reading the newspapers and the office is not a hub of activity.

"All our party work is done at the lowest level, not like the Congress where everything works from the high command level," says Ragesh. "From here, we assign duties to party members at the booth level. They do all the campaigning, distribution of posters, etc."

***

I ask the young boy at the fruit shop next to Vijayan's campaign office who will win the assembly election. He looks at me puzzled. "Do you have any doubt?" he says, "We will come to power and Pinarayi will be the chief minister."

We?! The boy is not even old enough to vote.
Disclaimer

This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.
Burma: Drop Charges Against Former Activist Monk

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 26 April 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Burma: Drop Charges Against Former Activist Monk, 26 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5721ca134.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Burmese authorities should dismiss politically motivated immigration charges against a prominent former activist monk and release him from detention, Human Rights Watch said today. U Gambira, also known by his lay name Nyi Nyi Lwin, faces up to five years in prison if convicted by a court in Mandalay for allegedly leaving Burma illegally in October 2013.

U Gambira came to the world's notice as a leader of the Buddhist monk-led popular protests in 2007 against the military junta. He was defrocked after his arrest that year and was imprisoned until freed in a general amnesty in 2012. The authorities arrested him in Mandalay in January under section 13(a) of the Burma Immigration (Emergency Provisions) Act of 1947, which concerns illegal entry by foreigners. The court has repeatedly denied him bail despite acknowledging his mental disability connected to his previous five-year incarceration.

"Burmese authorities should drop this trumped-up case against U Gambira, who is being targeted for his prominent role in opposing military dictatorship," said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director. "U Gambira suffered terribly under the military junta and he should not have to suffer further by spending even one more day in prison."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is broadly recognized as reflecting customary international law, states in article 13 that, "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

The September 2007 protests involved thousands of monks, nuns, and their lay supporters calling for the then military junta, the State and Peace Development Council (SPDC), to pursue economic and social reforms. After weeks of peaceful street assemblies, the authorities attacked protesters and arrested hundreds of monks and their supporters. A Human Rights Watch investigation found that army and police units killed at least 21 people in the crackdown; the United Nations later documented 31 deaths. The government has never adequately investigated the violence and no government officials or security forces personnel were ever punished for those abuses.

Following his arrest in November 2007, U Gambira was held in several prisons and subjected to physical and pysocological torture, including regular beatings. He was released in a general amnesty in 2012, but did not rejoin the Buddhist monkhood. Over the past two years, he has been seeking psycosocial therapy in Thailand for mental trauma that he suffered during his time in prison.

"U Gambira's case reeks of the ugly political prosecutions of discarded military juntas," Robertson said. "The new government should be finding ways to assist former political prisoners, not jailing them for dubious charges."

Copyright notice:  Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Egypt: Fearing Protests, Police Arrest Hundreds

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 27 April 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Egypt: Fearing Protests, Police Arrest Hundreds, 27 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5721ca644.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Egyptian security forces arrested at least 382 people in the days leading up to and during the dispersal of mostly peaceful protests on April 25, 2016. The protests followed a rare mass demonstration against President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo on April 15.

Police arrested lawyers and numerous activists, and temporarily held at least 33 journalists, according to witnesses and media reports, who also said that police stopped people riding public transportation or walking in the street, made warrantless inspections of their mobile phones, and arrested them if they found anti-government images.

"Egypt's effective zero-tolerance policy for protests leaves people with no outlet to peacefully express their grievances, and protesting can mean years in prison," said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East director. "The authorities should release all those held solely for peaceful expression, and parliament should amend the repressive law on public assembly."

Police arrested at least 286 people on April 25, according to the Front for the Defense of Egyptian Protesters, an independent group of lawyers and activists. The large majority of the arrests, which spanned seven governorates, occurred in the greater Cairo area, the group said.

Authorities did not allow those arrested to have defense lawyers present during questioning by agents of the Interior Ministry's National Security Agency in the Agouza and Dokki police stations, where many of those arrested in the capital were taken, said Freedom for the Brave, an activist group that documents cases alongside lawyers.

One lawyer who was at the Dokki Police Station told Human Rights Watch that police fired teargas at lawyers waiting outside the station at about 10 p.m. on April 25, after the station chief had yelled at them to leave.

Authorities transferred many of those arrested on April 25 to the Red Mountain Central Security Forces camp outside Cairo, the Front for the Defense of Egyptian Protesters said. One human rights lawyer said she believed 140 people were being held at the camp. Central Security Forces camps are not lawful places of detention, and witnesses have previously told Human Rights Watch that the authorities have used them for enforced disappearances and torture.

The protests, which police dispersed in some cases with teargas, occurred despite a series of pre-emptive arrests that began during the night of April 21, when police detained at least 96 people, many at their homes or downtown Cairo cafes, according to the Front.

Prosecutors in multiple governorates, including Cairo and Alexandria, opened at least 11 investigations into whether to bring charges against those arrested in the pre-April 25 sweep, the Heliopolis Center for Political Development and Human Rights said. The investigations remain open.

The allegations against those arrested included incitement to use force to overturn the government, incitement to attack police stations, membership in a terrorist group, promoting terrorist crimes and thoughts through the Internet, publishing false news through social media to disturb stability and security, and incitement to demonstrate without permission.

Law 107 of 2013 on the Right to Public Meetings, Processions and Peaceful Demonstrations, passed following the military's removal of Mohamed Morsy, Egypt's first freely elected president, effectively bans opposition protests and allows the Interior Ministry to disperse gatherings at will. Those convicted can face up to five years in prison for breaking the law. Since its passage, courts have sentenced hundreds of people for protesting illegally.

The recent events followed a rare anti-government demonstration on April 15, which protesters called the "Friday of Land." Hundreds of people gathered at the national Journalists Syndicate headquarters in Cairo to protest abuses committed under President al-Sisi's administration and al-Sisi's recent decision to cede two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia.

Though the security forces did not disperse the protest with force, police detained at least 25 people from the vicinity of the syndicate that day and opened investigations, according to the Front. The investigations remain open.

A friend of one of the detainees told Human Rights Watch that they were first held in windowless cells in Cairo's Qasr al-Nil Police Station, where they had to rely on visitors to bring them food and water, since the police did not provide either, before the authorities transferred them to Tora Prison on April 22.

A week after the April 15 demonstration, amid public discussion of protests planned for April 25, the independent newspaper al-Shorouk reported that al-Sisi had held a meeting at which he stated he would not tolerate more protests. The presidency quickly denied the report.

But the day before the protests, the Interior Ministry warned that it would "confront with the utmost decisiveness and resolution any acts that could infringe public security. It will use all force to deal with any attempt to assault vital, important facilities or harm police facilities and utilities."

On April 25, a national holiday marking the withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, security forces blocked roads leading to the Journalists Syndicate, refused to allow syndicate members inside, and permitted only pro-government demonstrators to enter the area to celebrate the holiday, multiple syndicate members said in accounts published on social media.

Mahmoud Kamel, a member of the syndicate's board, described the April 25 events as a "black day for journalism and journalists," according to al-Shorouk. Police detained at least 33 journalists throughout the day, eventually releasing all but two, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

At least six foreign journalists were among those detained, including four from France, one from Denmark, and one from Norway. Orla Guerin, a BBC correspondent, wrote on Twitter that supporters of al-Sisi beat a member of her crew as police watched and failed to intervene.

Elsewhere in Cairo, security forces stopped pedestrians, ordered them to open their mobile phones, and inspected their social media accounts, including Facebook, for "inciting pictures" or "anti-government publications," witnesses told Masrawy, an independent website. Police arrested some of those they stopped, the witnesses said.

In addition to journalists, the authorities conducted apparently pre-emptive arrests of lawyers and human rights defenders, Human Rights Watch said.

At about 4 a.m. on April 25, police arrested Ahmed Abdullah, the chairman of the board of trustees of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, at his home in Fifth Settlement, a Cairo suburb. Most of the allegations against him were similar to those leveled against others arrested in the previous day's sweep, according to a statement by the commission. Police also accused Abdullah of broadcasting false news likely to disturb general security and of distributing publications calling for the overthrow of the government and the changing of the constitution, the commission said.

On April 23, a prominent human rights lawyer, Malek Adly, wrote on Facebook that the Supreme State Security Prosecution had issued a warrant for his arrest. He later confirmed to Human Rights Watch that the warrant was issued for charges including establishing a group to overturn the government, calling for obstructing the president from performing his duties, inciting demonstrations and "leadership of Muslim Brotherhood elements." Adly has not yet been arrested.

Police arrested one lawyer, Haitham Mohammedein, on April 21, and at least four lawyers on April 25 and the days preceding the demonstration. Mohammedein remains in custody. His brother told Human Rights Watch that he had been arrested on a warrant issued by the State Security Prosecution accusing him of belonging to a terrorist group. The authorities were holding Mohammedein and others in a Central Security Forces Camp in Giza governorate known as Camp 10.5 Kilometers, his brother said.

"Egyptian authorities are trying to stifle any public discussion of al-Sisi's policies," Houry said. "It seems that the only public demonstrations al-Sisi will allow are the ones that support him."

Copyright notice:  Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Syria: Civilian Deaths Rising as Attacks Resume

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 27 April 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Syria: Civilian Deaths Rising as Attacks Resume, 27 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5721cc604.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Apparently unlawful attacks by government and armed groups around Aleppo in Syria have killed at least 89 civilians since April 22, 2016. Despite the rising casualties, Western leaders meeting in Hannover, Germany, on April 25 missed an opportunity to focus on the need to protect civilians in Syria.

Fighting has intensified in Syria in the last week as negotiations between the warring parties in Geneva stumbled. Human Rights Watch received information about the new deaths in attacks that did not appear to be targeting any military objective.

"With the civilian death toll rising and hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country, key powers need to be focused on protecting civilians in all parts of Syria," said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East director. "There are decisive measures that key powers, particularly those on the Security Council, can take to deter abusive parties and improve protection for civilians."

Syrian Civil Defense, a group of search and rescue volunteers operating inside opposition-held Aleppo and other parts of the country, reported that government airstrikes have killed at least 89 civilians and injured 135 in Aleppo since April 22. One of the deadliest attacks occurred on April 24, when government airstrikes hit a market place in the Sakhour neighborhood of Aleppo at noon killing a reported 17 civilians, according to media activists who documented the aftermath of the attack.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a local monitoring group, put the number of deaths at 60, including 10 women and 7 children, between April 22 and 24.

The Geneva peace talks have all but temporarily collapsed as the opposition, High Negotiations Committee. suspended its participation partly in protest of the renewed violence in Syria. Casualty figures had decreased since the cessation of hostilities was announced on February 26, but violence has escalated in the past two weeks.

On April 24, US President Barack Obama urged warring parties in Syria to return to peace talks and "reinstate" a ceasefire and announced the next day that the United States would send an additional 250 special forces troops to Syria to support local militias in the fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Human Rights Watch has urged the United Nations Security Council to suspend all military sales and assistance, including technical training and services, to all forces credibly implicated in serious violations in Syria; adopt targeted sanctions on commanders from all sides whose fighters are shown to be implicated in the most serious abuses or who are themselves responsible for serious abuses; and commit to a credible process to ensure criminal accountability for crimes by all sides. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly called on the Security Council to give the International Criminal Court a mandate in Syria.

"There was no military target or rebel group headquarters close by to the market," said Bahaa al-Halabi, a media activist who was at the site of the bombing in Sakhour. "We saw children and old people under the destruction of the buildings."

Photographs reviewed by Human Rights Watch showed rescue workers pulling bodies from the rubble of buildings and rushing bloodied civilians to ambulances. Video footage posted on Youtube by Syria Civil Defense showed fires among the twisted metal of destroyed buildings and destroyed vegetable carts, and strewn fruits and vegetables on the streets in what appeared to be a market.

Armed groups opposed to the government have also shelled government-held parts of Aleppo. The government news agency SANA reported that armed groups shelling the Aleppo neighborhoods of al-Izza, al-Zahraa, Sulaymaniyah, and Bab al-Faraj killed at least 20 civilians since April 22. Attacks were particularly intense on April 25, when SANA reported that armed groups' shelling killed 16 people and injured 86. Photographs from the destruction showed scorched cars and a blood soaked street.

Security Council Resolution 2254, adopted on December 18, 2015, explicitly called on all parties to the conflict in Syria to "immediately cease any attacks against civilians and civilian objects as such, including attacks against medical facilities and personnel, and any indiscriminate use of weapons, including through shelling and aerial bombardment."

Deliberate or reckless attacks against civilians and civilian structures committed with criminal intent are war crimes. The laws of war require that the parties to a conflict take constant care during military operations to spare the civilian population and to "take all feasible precautions" to avoid or minimize the incidental loss of civilian life and damage to civilian objects.

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Austria: Drastic, Unjustified Measures against Asylum Seekers

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 27 April 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Austria: Drastic, Unjustified Measures against Asylum Seekers, 27 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5721cccd118.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

The law approved today by the National Council of the Austrian parliament is a blow to the rights of asylum seekers, Human Rights Watch said today. The law, which is expected to pass quickly and unchallenged in the parliament's upper chamber, allows the federal government to declare a state of emergency and drastically curtail the right to seek asylum at Austria's borders.

"These measures constitute a legal wall to asylum just as despicable as a razor-wire fence," said Judith Sunderland, acting deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "Austria should be working with other European Union countries to make sure people have a fair chance to get the protection they need, not taking unilateral decisions to pass asylum seekers around like hot potatoes."

The law will allow the government, with the approval of the Main Committee in parliament, to declare "special measures for the maintenance of public order and the safeguarding of internal security" in the event of significant arrivals of migrants and asylum seekers at Austria's borders. The law, however, fails to define exactly what could trigger and justify the imposition of these special measures.

The key feature of the package of special measures is a fast-track admissibility procedure for asylum seekers at Austrian land borders. Austrian police officers will examine applications solely for the purposes of determining whether individuals can be returned to the neighboring country from which they came. Only people who argue successfully that their lives would be in danger or that they face a real risk of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment in a neighboring country, or who have a nuclear family member already in Austria, will be allowed to formally apply for asylum. Appeals against returns will only be possible after the return has taken place. The law increases the amount of time people can be detained pending return from five to 14 days.

The government and parliament moved forward with these plans despite strong criticism from the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR and nongovernmental organizations. Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, called the measures "highly problematic," and had urged Austria not to move away from its obligations under international and EU law.

This harsh border regime will effectively block access for most asylum seekers to a fair and efficient procedure in Austria, and deny them the right to an effective remedy, Human Rights Watch said. Insofar as the measures are geared towards declaring almost all applications inadmissible and detaining almost every asylum seeker pending their forced return to a neighboring country, the law risks instituting blanket, automatic detention without due attention to particularly vulnerable asylum seekers.

The law is grounded in the flawed premise of the Dublin Regulation - that all EU countries share common asylum standards and procedures - but seeks to bypass the minimal procedural guarantees that must accompany the return of an asylum seeker to the first EU country of arrival (a general rule under the regulation). All of Austria's neighbors are bound by the Dublin Regulation, including Switzerland, even though it is not an EU member state.

The law marks a further hardening of Austria's asylum policies. In mid-February, Austria instituted a daily cap of 80 asylum applications at its borders, a move European Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos called "plainly incompatible" with EU law. Since January, Austria has periodically introduced border controls in what would normally be the Schengen free movement area, citing concerns about the influx of migrants and asylum seekers. On Monday, April 25, it re-imposed checks on its border with Hungary and is currently building physical barriers to enable more border control at the Brenner Pass, on its border with Italy, amid predictions of an increase in boat migration across the central Mediterranean from North Africa to Italy in the coming months.

Austria is one of a handful of countries that have not made any places available for the implementation of an EU plan decided in September 2015 to relocate 106,000 Syrian, Iraqi, and Eritrean asylum seekers from Italy and Greece. Austria has resettled 1,395 refugees from Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq since it agreed in July 2015 to an EU resettlement scheme obligating it to resettle 1,900 refugees from other regions of the world.

Austria received almost 90,000 new asylum applications in 2015, a threefold increase over the previous year. Migration and refugee issues have featured prominently in the presidential election campaign, in which Norbert Hofer, the candidate for the far-right Freedom Party, won the most votes in the first round of voting on April 24. The run-off vote will be held in late May.

"Rolling back refugee rights is bad politics and even worse policy," Sunderland said. "The Austrian government should live up to its responsibilities instead of hiding behind closed borders and abusive laws."

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Tunisia: Uphold Rights While Fighting Terrorism

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 28 April 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Tunisia: Uphold Rights While Fighting Terrorism, 28 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5721cd184.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Fighting terrorism and respecting human rights are two sides of the same coin, 46 national and international human rights organizations said today in an open letter addressed to all Tunisians and titled "No to Terrorism, Yes to Human Rights." Three of the organizations are the Tunisian recipients of the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. Two others represent the families of Tunisian politicians Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, assassinated in 2013 by extremist Islamists. Five Tunisian celebrities, including actors, a filmmaker, a rapper, and a star athlete, affirmed this view in a video also released today.

The organizations stressed the need to combat all terrorist acts and to prosecute perpetrators, instigators, and planners of those acts. They recognized the government's duty to protect the rights of all persons, including the right to life.

At the same time, they urged the government to keep in mind that abusing rights undermines counterterrorism efforts in numerous ways:

-Violating human rights facilitates efforts by terrorists to destroy social peace;

-Abusing human rights fans grievances, offering excuses to those who carry out violent acts and those who seek to recruit them;

-Abusive counterterrorist laws inevitably claim innocent, law-abiding citizens among their victims;

-Guaranteeing fair trials, far from being "soft" on terrorism, means protecting the innocent as well as punishing the guilty;

-Extracting confessions from terrorist suspects through torture is forbidden under any circumstances by international and Tunisian law and often produces false leads, wasting the security services' time and resources;

-Abusive practices alienate potential informants who could help the security forces prevent terrorist acts.

Tunisia experienced several deadly attacks by Islamist extremists in 2015 and 2016 that left dozens of people dead and injured. On March 7, 2016, gunmen conducted a coordinated attack at the military and National Guard barracks in Ben Guerdane, a town bordering Libya, which led to the death of 18 people, including seven civilians. On March 18, 2015, two gunmen attacked the Bardo Museum, adjacent to Tunisia's parliament, killing 21 foreign tourists and one Tunisian security agent. On June 26, a gunman rampaged through a beach resort in Sousse, killing 38 foreign tourists. On November 24, a suicide attack on a bus killed 12 presidential guards and wounded 20 others, including four civilians.

The 2015 counterterrorism law, which replaced the 2003 counterterrorism law enacted by the government of ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, provides security forces with broad monitoring and surveillance powers, extends incommunicado detention from six days to up to 15 for terrorism suspects, and permits courts to close hearings to the public and allow the identities of witnesses to be withheld from defendants, measures that hinder fair trial guarantees for suspects.

Tunisian and international human rights organizations also received accounts from several people who said they had suffered abuses during counterterrorism operations. They interviewed Alaeddine Slim, a Tunisian filmmaker who told them he spent 33 days in jail in November and December 2015, after counterterrorist forces raided his home over what he described as a baseless accusation. Slim said that the counterterrorist forces found no evidence of terrorist activities in his house, and in the end the prosecutors only charged him with cannabis possession.

The organizations also interviewed and reviewed court documents about Nader Aloui, a young unemployed Tunisian who told them that he was detained over terrorism-related accusations for 14 months. He said he was repeatedly beaten and abused in detention, before an investigative judge finally dropped charges against him for lack of evidence.

Houssam Hamdi, a Tunisian who frequently travels internationally, told the organizations that counterterrorist police told him he was banned from travelling because they had "a file on (him)." Hamdi was unable to learn the basis for the ban, and the lack of written notification left him with no formal recourse to challenge it.

The organizations created a Facebook page and a Twitter account on which they will post special drawings offered by a group of Tunisian cartoonists to support the "No to Terrorism, Yes to Human Rights" campaign, and also articles, interviews, pictures, soundtracks, videos, and other material relevant to the campaign.

List of signatory organizations

Tunisian groups:

Union Generale Tunisienne du Travail (Tunisian General Labour Union) Ligue Tunisienne des Droits de l'Homme (Tunisian Human Rights League) Ordre National des Avocats de Tunisie (National Bar Association) Forum Tunisien pour les Droits Economiques et Sociaux (Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights) Syndicat National des Journalistes Tunisiens (Union of Tunisian Journalists) Association des Magistrats Tunisiens (Association of Tunisian Judges) Organisation Contre la Torture en Tunisie (Tunisian Organization Against Torture) Association Tunisienne des Femmes Democrates (Tunisian Association of Democratic Women) Al Bawsala Association citoyennete et Libertes (Association Citizenship and Freedoms) Association Horizons El Kef Pour Le Developpement Integral Association Nawaat Association Scientifique pour les Etudes sur la Population, la Migration et la Sante (ASPOMIS) Association Tunisienne de Defense des Libertes Individuelles Fondation Belaid Contre la Violence (Belaid's Foundation Against Violence) Fondation Mohamed Brahmi Fondation Mohamed Belmufti pour la justice et les libertes CeTuMA (Centre de Tunis pour la Migration et l'Asile) Coalition pour les Femmes de Tunisie Comite pour le Respect des Libertes et des Droits de l'Homme en Tunisie (Committee for respect of Freedoms and Human Rights in Tunisia) Coordination Nationale Independante pour la Justice Transitionnelle Federation Tunisienne pour une Citoyennete des deux Rives Free Sight Association Groupe Tawhida Ben Cheikh Irtikaa L'Organisation Tunisienne de la Justice Sociale et de la Solidarite Labo Democratique (Democratic Labo) L'association Amal pour l'environnement Metlaoui Bassin Minier (Amal Association for the Environment in the Mining Basin) L'Association des Femmes Tunisiennes pour la Recherche sur le Developpement (Association of Tunisian Women for research on development) L'Association Femme et Citoyennete (Association Women and Citizenship) L'Association Tunisienne de Defense du Droit a la Sante (Tunisian Association for the Defense of the Right to Health) Ligue des Electrices Tunisiennes Mourakiboun (Observers) Observatoire National sur l'Independance de la magistrature (National Observatory on Independence of Justice) Reseau Doustourna Thala Solidaire UTOPIA Tunisie Zanoobya

International groups:

Reseau Euro-Mediterraneen des Droits humains (Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network) Organisation Mondiale Contre la Torture (International Organisation Against torture) Federation Internationale des Droits de l'Homme (International Human Rights Federation) Human Rights Watch Oxfam Article 19 International Alert The Carter Center

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Egypt: Children Reported Tortured, 'Disappeared'

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 21 April 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Egypt: Children Reported Tortured, 'Disappeared', 21 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5721cdd94.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Egyptian security forces allegedly tortured a group of 20 people, eight of them children, in February 2016, after an arrest sweep in Alexandria, Human Rights Watch said today. Relatives and lawyers said the authorities refused to acknowledge holding them or to tell their families their whereabouts for more than a week and tortured them to make them confess to crimes or provide the names of other suspects.

Human Rights Watch spoke to family members and lawyers of three boys, ages 16 and 17, and three young men, ages 18 to 21, detained during the sweep for demonstrating without permission, committing vandalism and arson, and joining a banned organization. Although relatives said that all the arrests occurred on February 4 and 5, the Interior Ministry's National Security Agency claimed in reports submitted to the prosecutor that the arrests were on February 12, the day before the detainees first appeared before a prosecutor. Egyptian law requires warrants for arrests and for prosecutors to see any detainee within 24 hours of arrest.

"Some Egyptian officials have disappeared children and apparently tortured them, then faked arrest records to cover it up," said Zama Coursen-Neff, children's rights director at Human Rights Watch. "The authorities have turned a blind eye to the reports of abuse and refused to investigate."

Six of the detainees described to relatives how they were tortured and subjected to other ill-treatment at the Security Directorate, according to their relatives. The mistreatment included being punched and given electric shocks in the genitals, having their arms tied and being suspended from their arms, being handcuffed in painful positions for long periods, having water thrown on them, and being forced to sleep on the floor in the cold. The arrests occurred after a reported arson attack on a garage and a traffic police vehicle in the early morning of February 4, in Alexandria's al-Asafra neighborhood, for which some of the detainees were charged. Other crimes allegedly committed by detainees occurred at various other times.

The arrests fit a wider pattern of abuse and violations by officers of the Interior Ministry's National Security Agency. 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 defense lawyers raise them. Between December 1, 2015, and March 31, 2016, the independent Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms documented 204 cases of enforced disappearance by Egyptian security services.

Family members told Human Rights Watch that they went each day to the prosecutor's office in Alexandria but first learned of the detainees' whereabouts on February 13, when they spotted them being taken to the office in cars. Before then, National Security officers held the detainees on the fourth floor of the Alexandria Security Directorate, an administrative building that is not an official detention site, and tortured them, the detainees told their families.

In one case, men in plain clothes who identified themselves as National Security forces arrested N., 16, on February 4, while he was sleeping in his bed at home and did not allow him to put on his shoes before taking him away barefoot, a relative told Human Rights Watch. When the family finally saw him, a week later, a relative said, "I tried to hug him, he couldn't stand my hand on his back, it was so sore."

Human Rights Watch obtained the names of the 20 detainees.

"They were electrocuted," said a lawyer representing several of those arrested, including two children. "They were suspended from their wrists, not allowed to sleep, and stripped of their clothes."

The lawyer said the children told the prosecutor what happened, but that the prosecutor did not order any investigations, because by the time they appeared, there were no substantial marks left on the victims' bodies.

Security forces arrested three more people in the same case in the days following the initial arrest sweep. Of these 23 detainees, officials released five detainees, including two children, without charge after they appeared on February 13. Judges released another nine in separate hearings on bail of 5,000 Egyptian pounds (US$560) each in March, and another five people, including one child, on bail on April 19. A lawyer said that four people remain in detention.

In addition to the arrests and disappearances on February 4 and 5, local media, activists, and rights groups reported the enforced disappearances of more than 25 other people, including children, in Alexandria in March and April, and allegations that some of the detainees were taken to the Security Directorate and a National Security building in Alexandria and tortured. The family of a detainee who was arrested in another case, and a former defense lawyer from Alexandria, separately told Human Rights Watch that detainees had been held and tortured on the fourth floor of the Alexandria Security Directorate.

Egypt's 2014 constitution prohibits torture and coercion, as well as arrest without a judicial order, and provides that all detainees "shall be immediately enabled to contact [their] relatives and lawyer, and shall be brought before the investigation authority within 24 hours" of arrest. The constitution and Egypt's Child Law of 1996, as revised in 2008, define a child as anyone under 18 and require providing any detained child with legal assistance and detention "in appropriate locations separate from [] adults."

Egypt has also pledged to uphold international laws that protect children's rights and prohibit, without exception, torture and enforced disappearances, defined as a state's refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of a person's liberty by state agents or concealment of the person's fate or whereabouts. Torture is defined as state agents deliberately inflicting severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, on a person for a specific purpose such as extracting information or a confession. Egypt is required to investigate credible allegations of torture and other crimes and prosecute those responsible.

Human Rights Watch, Egyptian human rights groups, and the National Council for Human Rights have all documented enforced disappearances and torture of detainees, including children, and virtual impunity for the security services responsible.

"Egypt's security services are disappearing and torturing children on flimsy suspicion of property crimes or even just taking part in protests," Coursen-Neff said. "Egyptian families deserve safety for their children and accountability for the security officials who've cruelly abused them."

Disappearances and Torture of Children

Human Rights Watch interviewed relatives of six of the detainees who said the detainees told them how security officers tortured and ill-treated them at the Security Directorate. They said the ill-treatment included being punched and given electric shocks in the genitals, having their arms tied and being suspended from them, being handcuffed in painful positions for long periods, having water thrown on them, and being forced to sleep on the floor in the cold. The average temperature in Alexandria in February is around 13 degrees Celsius (55 degrees Fahrenheit).

A relative of two brothers, 16 and 18, told Human Rights Watch that they "were in the same clothes for the whole ten days of their disappearance, so when I got to see them [on February 13] they were in miserable shape."

The lawyers and relatives said that officials from the National Security agency told the prosecutor that one group of the detainees was accused of vandalizing an ATM and committing acts of arson, and another was accused of participating in illegal protests and "joining a banned organization," an apparent reference to the Muslim Brotherhood.

N.

N., a 16-year-old who was in the third year of preparatory school - the equivalent of grade 9 - was in bed sleeping when more than a dozen men in plain clothes arrested him at 8 a.m. on February 4, a relative said.

Human Rights Watch spoke with two of his relatives on February 10, when N.'s whereabouts were still unknown, and on February 13, when he first appeared in court. The authorities did not present a search warrant or state the reason for the arrest, but identified themselves as National Security officers "on their way out the door, after they took him and searched his room and took his mobile [phone], two USB drives, and a scarf that had 'Palestine' written on it," a relative said.

"They took some empty bottles, a tube, and a container with some benzene that we used for household cleaning that we kept outside in the stairway," possibly as evidence that N. had thrown Molotov cocktails, an issue about which he was subsequently interrogated. "They didn't even let him put his shoes on, they took him away barefoot."

N.'s relative said the family searched for him, filed complaints, and requested help from state officials, without result, similar to the process described by the families of other missing detainees:

We started asking in all the police stations where he was. We sent a telegraph to the prosecutor general in Alexandria, and filled out a complaint at the police station. It was almost twenty people who'd been arrested the same day, and all the families filled out separate complaints plus one joint complaint. [N.'s] father went to Muntazah Second Police Station, but they denied they had him, and they even kept his father there for two hours before they let him go.

We asked for [N.] in other police stations, but they said the same. Then a few families went to the head of the public prosecution section in Alexandria, but he denied that he knew anything about the arrests. He promised to visit some detention places to see if he could find them.

Each day, relatives of the missing detainees went to the court complex in the Manshiyya neighborhood in hopes that they would be able to see the detainees if they were transported to the prosecutor's office there. On February 13, "we saw a lot of police and soldiers were there, and the kids were brought in different cars to be sent to the prosecutor," N.'s relative said.

The family asked three lawyers to take N.'s case but they refused "because they thought it was too risky." A fourth lawyer agreed, his relative said. The lawyer declined to speak with Human Rights Watch out of concern for his security.

The prosecutor allowed the lawyer to attend N.'s questioning, and the lawyer told the family that the police report claimed that N. was arrested on the street on February 12, the relative said. Human Rights Watch was unable to obtain a copy of N.'s police report, but relatives and lawyers for other children and adults charged in the same case, interviewed separately, all said that police had submitted reports with the same false arrest date. His lawyer told the family that N. was accused of vandalizing an ATM and taking part in a group that tried to set a police vehicle on fire.

N.'s relative said he was eventually able to speak to his family for about five minutes, and said that security officials had tortured him on the fourth floor of the Alexandria Security Directorate:

There were bruises around his neck. When I tried to hug him, he couldn't stand my hand on his back, it was so sore. He was always rubbing his eyes. I asked why, he said they were blindfolded all the time in detention. He lost a lot of weight.

The relative said that after being questioned by the prosecutor, N. was transferred to the Muntazah police station, where he was detained in a cell with adults for three days before the prosecutor ordered his continued pretrial detention for another 15 days and he was moved to a cell for children in the same police station.

N. described the cell as 2 meters by 1.5 meters with 15 people in it, his relative said: "They can't sleep properly or even sit down. I wanted to give him a bottle of water but he said he doesn't want food because there's no bathroom [in the cell]." He was released on bail on March 10.

I. and M.

Two brothers, I. and M., ages 16 and 18, were arrested in the same case and subjected to enforced disappearance, torture, and other ill-treatment, a relative said in a phone call with Human Rights Watch on March 30. At the Alexandria Security Directorate, the brothers told their family:

They were hung from their wrists, electrocuted, hit in sensitive places, had water poured on them, and were stripped down to their boxers. They were sleeping on the floor, and were in the same clothes for the whole period of ten days' disappearance, so when I got to see them, they were in miserable shape. They were tortured to obtain confessions or at least to name other people.

The younger brother, I., said he was detained for two days at the Muntazah police station, then transferred to a National Security office in the Smouha neighborhood, and then taken to the fourth floor of the Security Directorate, his relative said. "He didn't know what to tell them, or what he was being charged with," the relative said. "They were threatening that they would bring his mother and sister and arrest them and beat them."

The brothers were both arrested in the early morning of February 5, at the younger brother's workplace, where he was working the night shift, 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. The family last heard from I. in a 1 a.m. phone call, when I. said he would return home at the end of his shift. When he did not return, a relative went to visit his workplace at 7 a.m. I.'s employer told the relative that men in civilian clothes had arrested him, his older brother M., and another friend who were both visiting him at work and put them a police car waiting outside. Police at the Montazah station denied having the brothers in custody, as did other police stations and Interior Ministry offices, the relative said.

That night, a group of 30 police officers, men in plain clothes, some wearing balaclavas, and a man who identified himself as a National Security officer searched the brothers' home without showing a warrant, the relative said. "They broke the metal door downstairs," the relative said. "The only reason they didn't break the house door was because I woke up and was waiting for them to come up. When I asked about [I. and M.] they said they didn't know about them."

I. was released without charge on February 13; M. remains in Borg al-Arab Prison, near Alexandria.

The relative said that I., but not M., had previously been arrested three times, the first when he was 14, in each case on similar charges of protesting without permission, blocking roads, and joining a banned organization. After being detained for 20 days in February 2014, I. was released with a disciplinary action as a minor. In May 2014, police arrested him and a judge sentenced him to several years in jail for charges similar to those in the current case, a relative said, but he was acquitted upon appeal and released after 10 months in jail, in January 2015. He was arrested again in November 2015, detained for 45 days, and then released shortly before plainclothes officers forcibly disappeared him on February 4. "The day he was disappeared was the final court hearing of the [November] case," his relative said. Judges acquitted him in that case at a hearing on February 24, even though he was not in court.

A. and E.

Security forces including green-uniformed soldiers, black-uniformed Central Security Forces, police, and men in civilian clothes arrested A., 17, and his brother E., 20, at their home in Alexandria's al-Asafra neighborhood on February 4, a relative told Human Rights Watch. "They destroyed things in the house, went to the kids' room and shut the door, then came out with the boys tied up with a rope and took them without saying where they were going," the relative said. "But the police report claims they were arrested in a tuk-tuk [a three-wheeled taxi] and had Molotovs on them." They were subsequently charged with acts of vandalism and arson, the relative said.

The relative said that the brothers disappeared after their arrest and that no authorities would acknowledge that they were in detention or their whereabouts until the two appeared at the prosecutor's office on February 13, when E. had bruises on his face. The brothers were then detained together at the Montazah police station for several days.

On the night of February 13, the relative said, "The boys managed to get a cell phone at the police station and called us, crying, saying they had been accused in a serious case." They said they had been on the fourth floor of the Alexandria Security Directorate, where their arms had been handcuffed painfully behind their backs and their legs chained. E. was transferred to Borg al-Arab Prison, and A. remained at the police station in a cell with other children. They were both released on bail on April 19.

Both had been enrolled in secondary school, "but the school dismissed them for long absences," the relative said on March 18. "It took three days for us to get a permission from the prosecution to deliver school books and materials to them in prison, and [a family member] spent the last 10 days trying to get the proper papers to have them registered in school again."

The relative and the family's lawyer, interviewed separately, said that a judge, without explanation, rejected their appeal to release the youths. "The kids told the prosecutor they were subject to enforced disappearance and torture but the prosecutor didn't order an investigation into that," the lawyer said.

M.

M., a 21-year-old business student, was arrested at his home at 7 a.m. on February 4, by men who refused to identify themselves and who did not present a warrant, said a relative who spoke to Human Rights Watch on February 18 and again on March 18. M. also told his family he had been detained and tortured on the fourth floor of the Alexandria Security Directorate. M.'s relative said his family also complained to the prosecutor that he had been disappeared, and that the prosecutor responded by promising to search for him, but that they heard nothing until he appeared at the prosecutor's office on February 13. His relative was later able to speak briefly with M., who described what happened to detainees at the Security Directorate building, the relative said:

When I first saw him I was shocked by his condition. He had to be supported to stand up. They had kept him on the bare floor, and they threw water on him. He said he had been electrocuted, and that they blindfolded and whipped the detainees and said they were recording their confessions.

M. is accused of vandalizing the same ATM machine as in the other cases, setting a garage on fire in the al-Asafra neighborhood, and setting a bus station on fire in the Montazah neighborhood, a lawyer familiar with his case said. "There is another police report on the ATM machine that accused different people of doing it, but the prosecutor just relied on the state security investigations file."

After the hearing at the prosecutor's office, M. was detained for five days at the Montazah police station, then transferred to Borg al-Arab Prison. A judge ordered him released on bail of 5,000 Egyptian pounds (US$560) on March 7, and the Interior Ministry transferred him from the prison to a National Security agency building in Ibees, an area in Alexandria, where officials "beat and kicked him" before releasing him on March 10, his relative said.

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Mexico: Response to Torture Video Falls Short

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 21 April 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Mexico: Response to Torture Video Falls Short, 21 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5721ce374.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

The Mexican defense minister did the right thing when he apologized for a case of torture caught on tape, but the government should recognize that such abuse is widespread and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice, Human Rights Watch said today.

On April 16, 2016, the defense secretary, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, addressing thousands of members of the Armed Forces, publicly apologized for the acts of torture committed by soldiers against a woman in Guerrero state in January 2015. The speech came days after a video showing federal police officers and soldiers repeatedly placing a plastic bag over the woman's head and threatening to kill her went viral on social media.

While General Cienfuegos called on all members of the military to respect human rights, he also insisted this was an "isolated" incident and that "bad members" of the Armed Forces "tarnish the honorable performance of thousands of women and men wearing military uniforms."

"The defense minister was right to apologize for the torture episode, but he undercut the message by insisting it was an isolated incident, when in fact it's a much broader problem," said Daniel Wilkinson, Americas managing director at Human Rights Watch. "The takeaway for the troops could easily be that the real mistake wasn't committing the abuse but being caught on tape."

Torture is a chronic problem in Mexico, practiced by members of the armed forces and police at the federal, state, and municipal levels. Human Rights Watch has documented scores of cases of torture in recent years, including beatings, asphyxiation with plastic bags, waterboarding, electric shocks, sexual torture, and death threats.

The United Nations special rapporteur on torture said in a report published in March 2015, that "torture is generalized" in Mexico. He found that torture is most frequently used while victims are being held arbitrarily, often incommunicado at military bases or other illegal detention sites, before they are brought before a judicial authority. According to the special rapporteur, judges still occasionally admit evidence obtained through torture, despite the constitutional prohibition on such evidence.

In 2014, the Federal Attorney General's Office received more than 2,400 complaints alleging torture, more than double the 1,165 in 2013. In 2015, the National Human Rights Commission received 49 complaints of torture, while it had received a total of 136 between 2000 and 2014.

Impunity for torture is the norm. The government has reported only five convictions for torture between 2005 and 2013, according to the UN special rapporteur.

After the special rapporteur's report was made public, the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto publicly denounced him, and it has repeatedly questioned his finding that torture was a generalized problem in Mexico.

In the case of the tortured woman in Guerrero, General Cienfuegos said that the soldiers are being investigated by military courts for military crimes, and the civilian justice system is investigating the "crimes against civilians." The criminal investigation by the civilian justice system also includes the federal police officers allegedly involved in the incident, news accounts said. The Attorney General's Office has issued arrest warrants for three police officers, including two who have already been detained, according to Mexican press reports.

"If Mexico is to make progress in curbing torture, it will need to recognize the scope of the problem," Wilkinson said. "All allegations of torture need to be thoroughly investigated, not just the ones that go viral."

Copyright notice:  Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Uganda: 5 Years On, No Justice for 'Walk to Work' Killings

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 21 April 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Uganda: 5 Years On, No Justice for 'Walk to Work' Killings, 21 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5721ce854.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Opposition political activists called on the public to 'walk to work' to protest escalating food and fuel prices in the wake of the 2011 elections. The government contended that the action constituted unlawful assembly and sent police and military to obstruct protests in several towns. Government forces killed at least nine bystanders  six in Kampala, two in Gulu, and one, a child, in Masaka.

"Members of Uganda's military and police have committed serious crimes, particularly during politically charged demonstrations, confident they wouldn't be punished," said Maria Burnett, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. "Ugandan law guarantees the right to free assembly, speech, and association, but security forces disregard these basic freedoms, and the victims of their abuses and their families never see justice."

Security forces responded to people walking to work with brutality, beating and arbitrarily arresting protesters and even bystanders in several towns, and firing live ammunition. Human Rights Watch investigated the abuses in 2011, interviewing more than 60 people including victims and their relatives, witnesses, medical staff, representatives of independent organizations, police, military, and journalists.

Despite some comments from state officials to the contrary, none of the nine victims of extrajudicial killings were involved in rioting. Human Rights Watch also found no evidence that the protesters had guns or other potentially lethal weapons.

In response to the nine killings, police made arrests only for the fatal shooting of 2-year-old Julian Abigail Nalwanga in Masaka on April 21, after significant media attention. A member of a Local Defence Unit allegedly shot and killed Nalwanga, who was inside her home during the protests in Masaka that day.

A few days later, Inspector General of Police Kale Kayihura visited her family, paraded two suspects before the media, heard testimony from members of the community and promised the alleged killers would face justice before military courts. A general court martial later heard evidence from both sides and final submissions in April 2012, but there has been no ruling. One defendant was released at that time and the second was released on bail in December 2015, after almost 4 years on remand.

The child's mother told Human Rights Watch recently: "Whenever I think of the manner in which my child was killed, I feel sick. The killer was released, he is back working, he moves freely in town, as if what he did was not bad."

The family also filed a complaint to the Uganda Human Rights Commission, which can only award compensation for human rights violations. Rulings are against the Attorney General rather than the person who committed or was responsible for the abuse. Those who ordered or carried out the crime face no punishment. On November 21, 2013, the commission ordered the government to pay 30 million Ugandan shillings (US$8,500) for a violation of the right to life. The government has yet to pay.

"The lack of justice for the 'Walk to Work' killings has sadly come to illustrate the Ugandan government's disregard for basic rights during public assemblies," Burnett said. "When security forces abuse protesters, police and government officials publicly promise justice, but it's all show and no action. As time passes, victims are forgotten."

The two killings in Gulu  of Dan "Musa" Wasaga and Charles Odur  were particularly deplorable because both occurred far from the protest and the victims were shot in the back, Human Rights Watch said. The military carried out a preliminary investigation at the time, and determined that soldiers were responsible but did not identify which individual members of the military shot the men.

The brother of one victim told Human Rights Watch: "We want justice but we lack the capacity to seek it and we do not know where to start anymore. Our interest is not only compensation from the government, there is no amount of money that equals the life that was taken away. My brother had his responsibilities, he had children to educate, he had wives to take care of, he was still a young man and he had a bright future ahead of him."

Violence spiked on April 28 and 29, when the media captured footage of plain-clothes security and uniformed police officers violently arresting the opposition leader, Dr. Kizza Besigye. The following day, residents of some Kampala districts responded by burning debris in streets and throwing stones at security agents. Eighty-four injured people were taken to Kampala's Mulago Hospital, 64 with bullet wounds. Police said they arrested about 360 people from Kampala and Mbale, in eastern Uganda, where protests also occurred.

At the time, there was widespread criticism of the security force actions and there were calls for restraint from independent groups, the Uganda Human Rights Commission, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Uganda's Interreligious Council. One hundred and five Ugandan and international nongovernmental organizations and unions wrote to President Yoweri Museveni in June 2011 to urge the government to promptly set up a transparent process to investigate human rights abuses during the April protests.

Since then, new police tactics appear to involve unlawfully preventing virtually any protest at all, Human Rights Watch said. In the period before February 2016 election campaigns, police repeatedly denied opposition leaders' requests to hold peaceful public rallies and used teargas against people gathered to hear opposition candidates. Since February 19, the day before the Electoral Commission declared President Museveni the winner of a new term, police held Dr. Besigye, the main opposition presidential candidate, at his home for at least 44 days against his will. In that period, police arbitrarily arrested and detained him nearly every time he attempted to leave, but never brought any charges.

The government of Uganda should conduct an independent, impartial investigation aided by international experts into the actions of soldiers and police in April 2011 and other killings and beatings during protests, Human Rights Watch said. It should make a commitment to conduct criminal investigations of each incident within a specific time frame, prosecute those against whom there is sufficient evidence in accordance with international fair trial standards, and ensure fair compensation to victims.

Furthermore, the government should ensure that fundamental rights such as the rights to freedom of assembly and expression are fully protected and can be exercised without risk of censure. Any regulation or restrictions on the exercise of these rights should comply with international law, and be strictly necessary and proportionate.

Human Rights Watch urged donors to the Ugandan government to press the government to respect Ugandans' rights to assembly and expression and to urge officials to substantially amend the Public Order Management law in line with international human rights law. Donors should offer international expertise to conduct credible, independent investigations into the April 2011 killings, among other killings during protests and rallies in Uganda.

"If the Ugandan government wants to avoid a repeat of the April 2011 violence, stopping people from assembling is no solution," Burnett said. "The solution is to respect international law and allow all Ugandans to criticize the government without fear of reprisals."

List of Fatalities During 'Walk to Work' in April 2011

People shot and killed in Gulu on April 14, 2011:

Dan "Musa" Wasaga, Layibi Charles Odur, near Workers Road

People shot and killed in Masaka on April 21, 2011:

Julian Nalwanga, Kitaka Zone in Nyendo-Ssenyange division, Masaka-Nyendo

People shot and killed in and around Kampala on April 29, 2011:
Iraqi Kurdistan: Christian Demonstration Blocked

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 22 April 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Iraqi Kurdistan: Christian Demonstration Blocked, 22 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5721cf454.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Kurdish security forces on April 13, 2016, blocked roads to prevent Christian Iraqi families from reaching the regional capital, Erbil, to hold a protest. The Christians had planned to demonstrate against what they say is encroachment on their land by Kurds.

Eight Christian Iraqis told Human Rights Watch that in the Nahle Valley and other areas of northern Iraq with significant populations of Assyrians and other Christians, some Kurdish neighbors had encroached on Christian-owned land. They said that although they have property deeds, neither court orders nor recourse to officials succeeded in removing structures that Kurdish neighbors had built on their land.

"A peaceful public protest is an activity that the authorities should protect, not prevent, especially not by prohibiting travel based on their religion," said Joe Stork, deputy director for the Middle East.

On April 13, the Asayish, the political police of the Kurdish Regional Government, set up roadblocks at the exit of Nahle Valley, 10 kilometers north of the city of Akkre, and checkpoints throughout the region prevented Christians from reaching Erbil, including those not intending to protest, several Christians said.

Emmanuel Khoshaba, leader of the Assyrian Patriotic Party, told Human Rights Watch that he and fellow Assyrians had intended to peacefully protest on April 13, in front of the Kurdish regional parliament in Erbil. Khoshaba said that the impetus for the protest was the expansion by a Kurd, a few days earlier, of a structure he had previously built on land belonging to Assyrians in the Nahle Valley. Appeals to officials provided no redress, Khoshaba said.

Mikhael Benjamin, head of the non-governmental Nineveh Center for Research and Development, in the Nahle Valley, said that the Asayish erected a checkpoint on the morning of April 13 behind the last Christian village and that officers there told him that "no Christian" was allowed out. Benjamin said that taxi drivers and others who needed to leave for work but did not intend to go to the protest, were also blocked.

Peter Odisho, another Assyrian from Nahle Valley, told Human Rights Watch that he wanted to go to the protest but that the Asayish roadblock prevented him. Odisho confirmed that no Christians were allowed past the roadblock. Shmael Nanno said Asayish forces prevented him and members of other Assyrian families from leaving Nahle Valley to make their way to Erbil for the protest.

Kurdish authorities also prevented Christians from other areas from reaching Erbil. Evelyn Anouya, a former representative of the Assyrian minority in the Nineveh provincial council, told Human Rights Watch that she had cancelled her plan to go from Dohuk to attend the protest when she learned that all checkpoints into Erbil had orders not to allow Christians through.

William Benjamin, who was in Erbil at the time, said that an Assyrian acquaintance was trying to drive from Dohuk to Erbil airport to catch a flight that morning, but that Asayish at the main Erbil checkpoint kept him for four hours under orders not to allow Christians into Erbil.

Paul Malik Khoshaba, a village elder from Nahle Valley, told Human Rights Watch that he had calls from Christians who were stopped as they traveled from Kirkuk to Erbil, based on their religion, as well as from other Christians elsewhere in the region who said they were stopped as they tried to reach Erbil.

Emmanuel Khoshaba said that the Christians from the Ainkawa neighborhood of Erbil, where he was at the time, also received messages from officials telling them not to go to the protest, although there were no roadblocks. Nevertheless, a few Christians were able to protest in front of parliament. Galeta Shaba, a Christian politician, handed a letter addressed to President Masoud Barzani with a set of demands to Jafar Aminki, the deputy speaker of parliament, asking for resolution of the encroachments within 72 hours. Wahida Yaqu Hormuz, a member of the Kurdish parliament from Zakho and head of the Chaldean, Assyrian, and Syriac bloc, told Human Rights Watch that in 2010 the Kurdish Regional Government's Council of Ministers had promised to look into the matter of encroachment on Assyrian land and compensation for the damaged parties, but that nothing had happened.

The spark that caused the Christians' anger, they said was yet another encroachment on their land, despite police orders to vacate existing encroachments.

Benjamin said that a Kurd from a neighboring village in Nahle Valley had started building a house on communal agricultural land belonging to the Assyrian villages of Hizani, Zule, and Upper and Lower Khalilani. Benjamin and fellow villagers protested to the governor, agricultural department, and the police, and the police ordered the Kurdish neighbor to stop, Benjamin said. However, the Kurdish neighbor, who works for a senior leader of the president's clan, continued building his house, four Assyrians said, adding a roof in the middle of the night in early April.

A village elder, Paul Khoshaba, said that there had been 42 encroachments by Kurds on Assyrian land in the valley, and that promises by President Barzani made to him three years ago to remove them had not been kept.

William Benjamin, an Assyrian student in Erbil, said that over 50 cases of Kurdish encroachment on Assyrian land had been registered in his native town of Sarsink, adding that despite promises in 2001 by the highest Kurdish authorities to solve the problem in Sarsink, no action was taken.

In the April 13 letter to President Barzani, representatives of the Assyrian National Party, the Democratic House of Two Rivers Party, the Warka Democratic List, the National Federation of the Two Rivers, and the Sons of the Two Rivers Entity, all Christian political groups, wrote that "the file of encroachments taking place on the villages and lands of our people in all of the governorates of Dohuk and Erbil is becoming larger day by day."

Human Rights Watch obtained official documents dating to 1992 and 1994 ordering an end to Kurdish encroachments on Christian land in Kashkawa and Rabitki, two villages in Nahle Valley. Paul Khashaba, Shmael Nanno and Mikhael Benjamin said those encroachments continue.

In a 2009 report on "The status of Christians in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq," the Kurdish Regional Government stated that it "has never had a policy of taking lands or properties of Christians, and believes that land disputes between individuals must be resolved through the courts of law."

The report says that Nimrud Baito, tourism minister and leader of the Assyrian Patriotic Party at the time, had strongly denied that there was politically motivated Kurdish appropriation of Christian land, though he acknowledges some "encroachments and crimes, just like anywhere else."

Both Baito, in this report, and Hormuz, the parliament member who spoke to Human Rights Watch, referred to Fishkhabor, a village on the border with Syria, as a successful case of the regional government returning Assyrian lands to their original owners by what both referred to as a special committee in Dohuk tasked with such land disputes. Hormuz said the committee's work was not successful in other areas, however.

Baito did not return requests for comment. Dr. Dindar Zebari, the deputy director of the regional government's Foreign Relations Department, said that Mazin Sa'id, the mayor of Akkre, had received a delegation of Christians and ordered the Kurdish party to stop the infraction and to stay away from these Christian villages in Nahle Valley. Dr. Zebari said that the case was now on the desk of the interior minister, that a committee of the Dohuk provincial council and the Agriculture Ministry was following up the issue, and that the outcome of this individual case would be a matter for the courts.

Regarding the blocking of protests, Dr. Zebari said that the Kurdish Region in Iraq was in a critical security situation. He said that the mayor of Akkre had advised the Christian protesters to await official action before deciding to demonstrate, and that a single case did not warrant a demonstration in the capital, Erbil, with its sensitive security situation.

Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iraq is a party, guarantees the right to freedom of assembly, and Article 26 prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion. Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to own property and that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of it. Article 2 of the Covenant guarantees the right to a remedy.

Article 14 of Iraq's constitution guarantees equality before the law without discrimination based on religion. President Barzani, in May 2015, signed the Law on Protecting the Rights of Components [of Society] in Kurdistan - Iraq, or the minority rights law. Paragraph 5 of Article 3 provides full equality to all minorities in ending encroachments on their traditional areas, lifting them and returning the status quo ante.

Copyright notice:  Copyright, Human Rights Watch
Freedom of the Press 2016 - Turkey

Publisher Freedom House Publication Date 26 April 2016 Cite as Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2016 - Turkey, 26 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57220d9a24.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

2016 Scores

Press Freedom Status: Not Free

Legal Environment: 26 / 30 (2) (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Political Environment: 30 / 40 (3) (0 = best, 40 = worst)

Economic Environment: 15 / 30 (1) (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Press Freedom Score: 71 / 100 (6) (0 = best, 100 = worst)

Quick Facts

Population: 78,215,000

Net Freedom Status: Partly Free

Freedom in the World Status: Partly Free

Internet Penetration Rate: 51.0%

Media freedom in Turkey deteriorated at an alarming rate in 2015. The government, controlled by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP), aggressively used the penal code, criminal defamation legislation, and the country's antiterrorism law to punish critical reporting, and journalists faced growing violence, harassment, and intimidation from both state and nonstate actors during the year. The country held two parliamentary elections  one in June, after which the winning parties failed to form a coalition government, and another in November, in which the AKP secured a majority of seats. The elections, as well as volatility stemming from the Syrian conflict and the Turkish government's renewed clashes with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militant group, contributed to a sharply polarized climate and greater political pressures on the media. The authorities continued to use financial and administrative leverage over media owners to influence coverage and silence dissent.

Key Developments

Authorities prosecuted a number of prominent journalists on terrorism-related charges, including the editor in chief and the Ankara bureau chief of the Cumhuriyet daily, who were arrested in connection with the paper's coverage of alleged weapons shipments to Syria by Turkish intelligence services.

Changes to regulations for journalistic accreditation brought the process under increased government control, allowing further room for arbitrary and discriminatory decisions.

There were several instances of acute violence toward the media: Crowds attacked the offices of the Hurriyet newspaper twice in September, and three journalists were killed during the year in connection with their work.

The placement of outlets owned by Koza Ipek Holding under government trusteeship resulted in dozens of dismissals and changes in the outlets' editorial lines, effectively making them more friendly toward the government.

Legal Environment: 26 / 30 (2)

Constitutional guarantees of press freedom and freedom of expression are only partially upheld in practice. They are undermined by provisions in the penal code, the criminal procedure code, and the harsh, broadly worded antiterrorism law that essentially leave punishment of normal journalistic activity to the discretion of prosecutors and judges. Constitutional protections are also subverted by hostile public rhetoric against critical journalists and outlets from Erdogan and other government officials, which is often echoed in the progovernment press.

A 2004 press law replaced prison sentences with fines for violations of its provisions, but elements of the penal code and several other restrictive laws have led to the imprisonment of dozens of journalists and writers in recent years. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), there were 14 reporters behind bars in Turkey as of December 1, 2015. Figures compiled by the independent Turkish press agency Bianet were higher, showing 31 journalists in prison at the end of the year.

Article 301 of the penal code, which prescribes prison terms of six months to two years for "denigration of the Turkish nation," can be used to punish journalists who discuss the division of Cyprus, criticize the security forces, or state that genocide was committed against the Armenians beginning in 1915. While a set of 2008 amendments to the article were largely cosmetic, the maximum prison sentence was reduced from three years to two, and a requirement that the Ministry of Justice would have to approve use of Article 301 significantly curbed its application in practice. Very few of those prosecuted under Article 301 receive convictions, but the trials are time-consuming and expensive, and the law exerts a chilling effect on speech. Article 216 of the penal code, which bans incitement of hatred or violence based on ethnicity, class, or religion and carries a prison term of up to three years, has also been used against journalists and other commentators.

Turkey's antiterrorism law, officially called the Law on the Fight against Terrorism, and related provisions in the penal code rely on broad language and vague definitions, allowing room for application against a wide range of activities. Article 314 of the penal code, pertaining to membership in an armed organization, is regularly used against members of the media, particularly Kurds and those associated with the political left. Other articles as well as the antiterrorism law penalize "making terrorist propaganda" and the publication of the statements of illegal groups. The Fourth Judicial Reform package, passed in 2013, slightly alleviated the antiterrorism law's limitations on publishing such statements, clarifying that publication would only be a crime if the statement constituted coercion, violence, or genuine threats. Nevertheless, both the law and related sections of the penal code remain highly restrictive, and have been widely criticized by media and human rights groups. The European Court of Human Rights has found in multiple rulings that specific provisions of the antiterrorism law amount to censorship and violations of free expression.

Media face addition restrictions in the 2014 Law Amending the Law on State Intelligence Services and the National Intelligence Organization, which granted the National Intelligence Organization (MIT) much greater powers, including the ability to access any personal data without a court order. It also gave MIT personnel immunity for legal violations committed in the course of their work, and criminalized reporting on or acquiring information about the body. Media workers can face up to nine years in prison for publishing information from leaked intelligence material. Amendments made in 2014 to Law No. 5651, commonly known as the Internet Law of Turkey, expanded the power of the Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB) to order the blocking of websites, allowing it to do so on vaguely defined grounds and without prior court approval, though a court must uphold the order within 48 hours for a block to remain in place.

In August 2015, the office of the Istanbul chief public prosecutor filed an indictment against 18 journalists from nine local outlets, accusing them of "making terrorist propaganda" and seeking a sentence of seven and a half years for each individual. The news outlets had published a photograph of a member of the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), a banned left-wing terrorist group, holding a local prosecutor hostage during an attack in March. An initial hearing took place in November, but the status of the case was unclear at year's end. Separately, Cumhuriyet editor in chief Can Dundar and the paper's Ankara bureau chief, Erdem Gul, were arrested in November on charges of espionage, divulging state secrets, and assisting a terrorist group. The charges stemmed from the newspaper's publication of information about the MIT allegedly supplying weapons to Islamist militants in Syria, and followed a criminal complaint filed by Erdogan in June. Dundar and Gul were accused of supporting a "parallel state" composed of the followers of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, and Erdogan publicly issued verbal threats against the newspaper after it published the information in question.

Defamation is a criminal offense and often results in high fines and prison terms, which have a chilling effect on journalistic work. Insulting the president is a separate offense outlined in the penal code. Prominent officials, including Erdogan, frequently initiate defamation and insult cases against journalists, cartoonists, artists, and academics. Among dozens of cases during 2015, prominent journalist Hasan Cemal was under investigation in September for allegedly insulting the president in articles he authored for the T24 news portal. In June, a court in Ankara convicted Bulent Kenes, editor in chief of the English-language paper Today's Zaman, of insulting Erdogan in a post on his personal Twitter account in July 2014, when Erdogan was prime minister. The court gave Kenes a sentence of 21 months in prison, suspended for five years. In November, an Istanbul court held the first hearing in the case of Cumhuriyet reporter Canan Coskun, who was accused of insulting several members of the judiciary in an article about corrupt real-estate transactions. The case was ongoing at year's end; if convicted, Coskun could face a cumulative punishment of 23 years and four months in prison.

Journalists do not generally receive fair treatment in the judicial system, and the courts' handling of media-related cases in 2015 showed a lack of impartiality and independence. In October, an Ankara court issued a temporary ban on coverage of investigations into a bomb attack in the city that resulted in dozens of casualties. Local and international media criticized the move, which prohibited coverage on print, broadcast, and online platforms, and many continued their reporting despite the ban.

Turkey adopted a freedom of information law in 2003. However, state secrets that may harm national security, economic interests, state investigations, or intelligence activity, or that "violate the private life of the individual," are exempt from requests. In practice, access to official information remains challenging.

The Supreme Council of Radio and Television (RTUK), whose members are elected by the parliament, has the authority to sanction broadcasters if they are not in compliance with the law or the council's expansive broadcasting principles. The body is frequently subject to political pressure, and its board is currently dominated by members affiliated with the AKP. According to Bianet, between January 7 and November 18, 2015, RTUK issued 69 warnings and 168 fines to television channels, and 4 warnings and 4 fines to radio stations. Print outlets can be closed if they violate laws restricting media freedom.

A discriminatory accreditation system enforced by the Directorate General of Press and Information (BYEGM), a body under the control of the prime minister's office, is used to screen out critical journalists, restricting access to the offices of the president and cabinet ministers. Amendments published in the official gazette in August 2015 changed the structure and procedures surrounding accreditation. The new regulations granted the deputy prime minister overseeing the BYEGM the power to issue permanent press cards, and altered the composition of the BYEGM's Press Card Commission, increasing its membership from 13 to 15 but decreasing the number of seats for media representatives from 8 to 5. Local journalists' organizations criticized the move, which was made without meaningful consultation with the media, for further reducing the impartiality of the accreditation process. The Turkish Journalists' Association (TGC) and Turkish Journalists' Union (TGS) withdrew from the Press Card Commission as a result. According to the TGS, only 1.5 percent of journalists belong to a union.

Political Environment: 30 / 40 (3)

In addition to punitive measures applied by law, systematic political pressure from the executive branch led to the firing of journalists and media workers for critical reporting on the Erdogan government throughout 2015. According to Bianet, at least 348 journalists, columnists, and media workers were dismissed or forced to quit during the year. Leaked documents and wiretaps, particularly in 2013 and 2014, have revealed the extent of government efforts to create a loyal media, and shown Erdogan and other prominent officials exerting editorial pressure through direct instructions, admonishments for undesirable content, and financial incentives.

In the polarized political climate before general elections in June and November 2015, the state broadcaster, Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), and the semiofficial news agency, Anadolu Agency (AA), provided increasingly partisan coverage and gave a disproportionate amount of airtime to the AKP and Erdogan, as did several private television channels. In April, TRT refused to air a television advertisement for the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) on the grounds that the material directly criticized the AKP.

Media outlets are sometimes denied access to events and information for political reasons. Critical outlets are regularly denied access to the AKP's party congress and meetings, and the government prevents certain journalists from attending press conferences or accompanying officials on foreign visits.

Censorship of content occurs both offline and online. Sensitive topics include Kurdish issues, the Armenian genocide, and subjects deemed offensive to or critical of Islam or the Turkish state. Enforcement of the relevant laws is arbitrary and unpredictable, and many publications on such subjects are available. In January 2015, officials temporarily blocked the distribution of Cumhuriyet after it became known that the newspaper had printed a selection of material from the latest edition of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, known for its caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. Although security forces allowed distribution to proceed after inspecting the newspaper's content, a Diyarbakr court ordered the blocking of several websites featuring the Charlie Hebdo cover, which depicted the prophet.

In September, the weekly magazine Nokta published a satirical image of a smiling Erdogan standing in front of the coffin of a soldier  a reference to the president's recent comments about the martyrdom of troops who are killed by the PKK. Acting on the orders of an Istanbul prosecutor, security forces raided the Nokta offices and confiscated copies of the edition in question. In October, after Nokta published the alleged minutes of an AKP meeting following the June elections, an Ankara court ordered that access to its website be blocked. Access to the site was temporarily blocked again in November, by order of an Istanbul court, after Nokta published an article describing a negative outlook for Turkey following the year's second elections. The court also ordered that the print issue carrying the article be removed from circulation, and the magazine's chief and news editors were arrested, facing accusations of inciting an armed insurrection against the state. They were released in December, pending trial.

Censorship of content published on online news and social-media platforms continued. In July, amid ongoing Turkish military operations against Islamist and Kurdish groups in Syria and Iraq, TIB imposed a ban on dozens of Kurdish and left-wing websites and social-media accounts. Access to social-media platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, was temporarily blocked on several occasions during the year, including after the Istanbul courthouse hostage crisis in March and a terrorist bombing in Suruc in July. According to the independent organization Engelli Web, the total number of websites blocked in Turkey  including for apolitical reasons like copyright infringement  surpassed 100,000 by year's end.

Fear of legal reprisals or loss of employment in a concentrated media market has led to widespread self-censorship. There is nevertheless critical reporting, and some journalists do attempt to cover sensitive political, religious, and social issues. The media environment is diverse but strikingly polarized, with most outlets representing distinct political and social viewpoints and reporting news from predetermined angles. The high rate of dismissals has led many prominent commentators to write for smaller online outlets that are less susceptible to political pressure. However, their audiences are also considerably smaller.

Both local and foreign journalists were subject to increased harassment, intimidation, and arrest while covering newsworthy events during 2015; retaliatory violence against the media also escalated. According to Bianet, 64 journalists and 4 outlets faced some form of attack in 2015, while 38 journalists and 21 media outlets were subjected to threats. In September, in an apparent case of arbitrary search and detention, security forces raided the Diyarbakr offices of several Kurdish entities, including the newspaper Azadiya Welat and the Dicle News Agency (DIHA), and temporarily detained at least 32 individuals, among them journalists. Local media reported that security forces did not present search warrants, mistreated the detainees, and temporarily confiscated their phones and identification documents.

Three journalists for the U.S. outlet Vice News were detained in August while reporting on clashes between the PKK and Turkish security forces in the southeast of the country; they were charged with "assisting a terrorist organization." Following an international outcry, two of them  British citizens Jake Hanrahan and Philip Pendlebury  were released and deported, while their colleague and fixer, Iraqi journalist Mohammed Rasool, remained in detention at year's end. Frederike Geerdink, a Dutch freelance reporter, was detained in September while reporting on a Kurdish activist group and deported. Geerdink had been indicted in February for "making terrorist propaganda" for the PKK and its alleged urban branch, the Union of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK), but was acquitted in April.

In September, the Istanbul office of the Hurriyet newspaper was attacked twice by violent protesters; both attacks followed hostile rhetoric against the daily by Erdogan, and an AKP legislator accompanied the crowd during the first incident. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu spoke out against the attacks a week after they took place, and a police presence was provided for the safety of the newspaper and its staff. Also in September, Ahmet Hakan, a Hurriyet columnist and host for the private broadcaster CNN Turk, was brutally assaulted by four men. A police investigation was ongoing at year's end.

According to CPJ, three journalists  all Syrians  were killed in Turkey in connection with their work during 2015. Naji Jerf, editor in chief of the monthly Hentah and a documentary filmmaker who had extensively covered the Islamic State (IS) militant group, was shot dead in Gaziantep in December. Fares Hamadi and Ibrahim Abd al-Qader were murdered in Urfa in October; both worked for the news platform Eye on the Homeland, and al-Qader was also a member of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, a group of activists and reporters focused on conditions in the IS-controlled city of Raqqa, Syria.

Economic Environment: 15 / 30 (1)

The most recent government statistics show approximately 3,000 newspapers operating in Turkey, including 180 with a national reach. However, only 18 percent of all newspapers are dailies. Independent domestic and foreign print media are able to carry diverse views, including criticism of the government and its policies, though Turkish print outlets contain a high proportion of columns and opinion articles as opposed to pure news. Broadcast media are also numerous, with hundreds of private television channels, including those available via cable and satellite, and more than 1,000 commercial radio stations. State television and radio outlets provide some content in minority languages. The introduction of Kurdish-language stations in recent years marked a major step forward for freedom of expression, although critics say that the broadcasts are too tightly restricted and their quality is poor. An Armenian-language radio outlet, Nor Radio, began broadcasting over the internet in 2009.

An estimated 51 percent of the population accessed the internet in 2014. Online outlets are increasingly popular as venues for critical journalism, particularly by reporters who have been dismissed or forced to resign from traditional outlets for political reasons. Major online news portals include T24, P24, Diken, and Bianet. Although a number of these platforms consistently provide independent reporting, they have limited financial resources. Internet service providers can face high fines for noncompliance with blocking orders. After the October 2015 bombing in Ankara, internet users reported exceptionally slow connectivity and problems accessing some social-media websites.

Media ownership remains concentrated in the hands of a few large, private holding companies that earn the majority of their revenue from nonmedia assets, particularly in construction, energy, mining, and financial services. The centralization of public procurement decisions within the prime minister's office under AKP rule has led to increasing use of economic leverage to influence the content of media outlets owned by these companies. The prime minister's office controls the Privatization High Council (OIB), the Housing Development Administration (TOKI), and the Defense Industry Executive Committee, which together account for tens of billions of dollars in procurement contracts per year. In one of the most flagrant examples of the use of economic leverage to shape media ownership, wiretap recordings leaked in 2013 indicated that the government dictated which holding companies would purchase the Sabah-ATV media group in exchange for a multibillion-dollar contract to build Istanbul's third airport. The Savings Deposit and Insurance Fund (TMSF) has also been used to transfer media assets to friendly entities, as in 2013, when Ethem Sancak, a Turkish businessman with close ties to Erdogan, bought three media outlets previously owned by the Cukurova Group from TMSF.

The government has also used various forms of financial pressure to punish criticism. In May 2015, the Energy Ministry ordered that Dogan Holding  a conglomerate that owns several print and broadcast outlets, including Hurriyet  be temporarily barred from receiving any government tenders, reinstating the remaining 237 days of a one-year ban that had been issued in 2009 but overturned in court. The move was made amid increasing tensions between Hurriyet and Erdogan that included public denunciations of the newspaper and its staff by the president. An Ankara court invalidated the renewal of the penalty in June, and in July Dogan Holding reported that the ban had been lifted.

Several major media outlets were brought under de facto government control in 2015. In October, acting on the request of the city's chief public prosecutor, an Ankara court ordered that Koza Ipek Holding and its companies  which include the dailies Bugun and Millet, Kanalturk Radio, and the television channels Bugun TV and Kanalturk  be placed under the control of government-appointed trustees as part of an investigation into the conglomerate's alleged ties to Gulen and associated financial misdeeds. Shortly after the ruling, police and the new trustees forcibly entered the Koza Ipek headquarters in Ankara, interrupting the operations of the media outlets housed within. Dozens of journalists were subsequently dismissed, and the affected outlets began to produce content more favorable to the government. The takeover, which occurred shortly before the November elections, was denounced internationally as an arbitrary seizure of the conglomerate's management and a violation of media freedom.

Separately in October, the leading satellite television provider, Digiturk, removed seven channels  Bugun TV, Kanalturk, and five channels owned by the Samanyolu Broadcasting Group or Feza Publications, both of which were also believed to be linked to Gulen  from its service, citing a notice from the chief public prosecutor of Ankara that the channels were under criminal investigation. Similar moves were made by other satellite, cable, and online television service providers, including the state-owned satellite distribution platform Turksat.

Copyright notice:  Freedom House, Inc.  All Rights Reserved
Freedom of the Press 2016 - Tanzania

Publisher Freedom House Publication Date 26 April 2016 Cite as Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2016 - Tanzania, 26 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57220d9b15.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

2016 Scores

Press Freedom Status: Partly Free

Legal Environment: 18 / 30 (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Political Environment: 22 / 40 (1) (0 = best, 40 = worst)

Economic Environment: 15 / 30 (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Press Freedom Score: 55 / 100 (1) (0 = best, 100 = worst)

Quick Facts

Population: 52,291,000

Freedom in the World Status: Partly Free

Internet Penetration Rate: 4.9%

A wide range of restrictive laws allow authorities to exert pressure on journalists in Tanzania, and the risk of prosecution encourages self-censorship. The media landscape is diverse, but deeply polarized along political lines. Control of the media is mostly concentrated in the hands of a few proprietors, including the government, which reportedly withholds advertising contracts from critical outlets.

Key Developments:

In the spring, the government adopted two laws  the Statistics Act and the Cybercrimes Act  that were widely viewed as tools to rein in critical reporting ahead of October's general elections.

In June, the government issued guidelines for online content providers mandating, among other things, that they provide a right of reply to aggrieved parties, and edit controversial user comments and online discussions.

The media landscape became increasingly polarized during the election campaign.

It remained to be seen whether John Magufuli of the long-ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party  the winner of the October presidential election  would take action to reform Tanzania's restrictive media laws.

Legal Environment: 18 / 30

The constitution provides for freedom of speech, but numerous laws encourage self-censorship and limit the ability of the media to function effectively. The most notorious and widely enforced of these laws is the 1976 Newspaper Registration Act, which empowers authorities to ban publications "in the interest of peace and good order." In January 2015, authorities used the act to suspend publication of the weekly East African newspaper, alleging that its license had lapsed. The suspension remained in place throughout the year. Another restrictive law, the National Security Act, allows the government to take action against any piece of journalism that touches on information it considers classified.

Two pieces of legislation restricting press freedom in Tanzania became law in 2015. In March, parliament passed the Statistics Act, which imposes criminal penalties  including prison terms and high fines  for the publication of any statistical information without prior authorization from the National Bureau of Statistics, and for publishing "false" statistics. In April, parliament passed the Cybercrimes Act, which provides for prison terms and fines for several online activities, including the publication of false information and insulting or inflammatory rhetoric. Rights advocates pointed out the great potential for authorities to abuse the law to persecute government critics. At least three people were charged under the Cybercrimes Act in October 2015, including a university student over a Facebook post alleging that Tanzania's top military commander had been hospitalized.

A long-discussed Media Services Bill, which would replace the 1976 Tanzania News Agency Act and the restrictive Newspaper Registration Act, was again put on hold in mid-2015 after pressure from civil society and media advocates. Critics noted that the bill as currently drafted would worsen the climate for free expression in the country, placing onerous and unnecessary regulations on media outlets.

Libel is a criminal offense that carries heavy fines, and officials have also used civil libel suits to weaken cash-strapped media houses.

Tanzania does not have a law guaranteeing access to information. A draft access to information bill was submitted to parliament in 2015, but was withdrawn in June pending further consultation with media and civil society groups. Critics noted substantial deficiencies in the draft, including that information obtained through its procedures could not be for "public use" and that the publication of such information would be a criminal offense subject to jail time. Meanwhile, a number of current Tanzanian laws, such as the Civil Service Act and the Public Leadership Code of Ethics Act, block access to information by placing legal restrictions on the ability of public officials to provide certain information to the media.

The 2003 Tanzania Communications Regulatory Act established the framework for the regulation of Tanzania's broadcast and electronic media. It established the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA), a nominally independent agency, which is charged with issuing broadcast licenses and legal monitoring, and can close stations at will. There is concern that the TCRA may be subject to government influence. The board chairman and vice chairman are both appointed by the president, while the director general and four board members are chosen by the communications minister. The independent Media Council of Tanzania (MCT) was established by media groups in 1995 as an alternative to government regulation.

Legal conditions for the press in the semiautonomous Zanzibar archipelago remain more restrictive than on the mainland. There, the private media generally avoid criticizing the leadership, as implicating Zanzibar lawmakers in criminal activities can result in a minimum fine of approximately $200 or three years' imprisonment, according to the semiautonomous region's defamation laws. The laws are rarely used to imprison journalists, but authorities have revoked journalists' permits as a means of silencing criticism.

Political Environment: 22 / 40 (1)

Media outlets in Tanzania express a wide range of views. However, the media landscape is polarized along political lines, and partisanship among outlets intensified during the run-up to the October 2015 elections. Journalists in Tanzania often encounter pressure from editors and media owners seeking to protect their political interests.

There is no prior censorship by national authorities. However, in June 2015, authorities promulgated new guidelines for blogs and other online content providers in advance of the elections. Under the rules, online media are required to register with the TCRA, take steps to ensure balanced election coverage, edit controversial user comments and online discussions, and give the right to reply to aggrieved parties and candidates.

The increasing number of restrictive laws and content restrictions  including broadly worded provisions within the Statistics Act and the Cybercrimes Act  has put pressure on journalists to practice self-censorship to avoid running afoul of the law.

In Zanzibar, authorities still largely control the content of the national radio and television broadcasts that the islands receive. There have been reports that such broadcasts are aired on a delay, in order to permit censorship by Zanzibari officials. The state-owned Zanzibar Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) largely reports along progovernment lines. Cable television and private local radio stations are given more leeway than mainland media; articles from mainland dailies criticizing the Zanzibari government are often read on the air. Opposition politicians have access to state media outlets.

Physical attacks and threats against journalists in Tanzania decreased during 2015. However, there were isolated reports of minor incidents during the election campaign period. In July, a CCM party official blocked several journalists from covering a party meeting in Kyela, and assaulted one who complained about the exclusion. In September, ruling party officials again barred certain reporters from accessing CCM presidential candidate Magufuli due to their past critical coverage of the party.

Economic Environment: 15 / 30

There are numerous media outlets in Tanzania, including dozens of daily and weekly newspapers. According to the TCRA, there are more than 100 licensed radio stations and 26 licensed television stations; only a small percentage of the population has access to television due to high costs. Internet penetration in Tanzania continues to increase but remains low, at just below 5 percent in 2014. Social-media outlets and online forums have grown in popularity in recent years. Foreign media content is freely available in Tanzania.

In Zanzibar, 3 cable television stations and 20 local, private radio stations compete with the ZBC. The government publishes the only daily newspaper, Zanzibar Leo. The majority of Zanzibaris depend on newspapers from the mainland. Residents can also receive private broadcasts from the mainland.

Private individuals and companies, the government, and nongovernmental organizations are the main media owners, but control is concentrated in the hands of a few proprietors. A handful of radio stations have national reach, including state-run Radio Tanzania and privately owned Radio One, Radio Free Africa, Radio Uhuru, and the youth-oriented Cloud FM. Some national radio stations are seen as sympathetic to the ruling CCM, while others favor the opposition.

The government reportedly continues to withhold advertising from critical newspapers and websites, especially those that favor the opposition. Private firms that are keen to remain on good terms with the government allegedly follow suit, making it difficult for critical media outlets to remain financially viable.

Copyright notice:  Freedom House, Inc.  All Rights Reserved
Freedom of the Press 2016 - Mexico

Publisher Freedom House Publication Date 26 April 2016 Cite as Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2016 - Mexico, 26 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57220d9f15.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

2016 Scores

Press Freedom Status: Not Free

Legal Environment: 19 / 30 (1) (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Political Environment: 31 / 40 (0 = best, 40 = worst)

Economic Environment: 14 / 30 (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Press Freedom Score: 64 / 100 (1) (0 = best, 100 = worst)

Quick Facts

Population: 127,017,000

Net Freedom Status: Partly Free

Freedom in the World Status: Partly Free

Internet Penetration Rate: 44.4%

Mexico is one of the world's most dangerous places for journalists and media workers, and press freedom faces persistent threats. Journalists and media outlets frequently face harassment, intimidation, and physical attacks, and self-censorship remains widespread in areas heavily affected by drug-related violence. The Federal Telecommunications and Broadcasting Act, known as the "Ley Telecom," signed by President Enrique Pena Nieto in July 2014, continued to draw criticism for threatening freedom of expression.

Key Developments

At least four reporters were killed in connection with their work in 2015, and the facilities of media organizations were repeatedly attacked with gunfire and explosives.

A team of investigative reporters were fired by their employer in March, just months after they published information about an apparent conflict of interest in which the president's wife purchased a luxurious residence from a favored government contractor.

The websites of several media outlets and press freedom organizations were temporarily disabled by cyberattacks during the year, and at least one journalist faced a smear campaign on social media in response to her reporting.

Legal Environment: 19 / 30 (1)

Freedom of expression is established in Articles 6 and 7 of the constitution, and there are a number of legal mechanisms designed to ensure journalists' safety and freedom to operate. However, despite legislation in 2013 that facilitated the transfer of crimes against journalists to the federal prosecutorial system, impunity for these crimes remained the norm in 2015, as federal officials have proven unwilling or unable to halt or punish the growing tally of murders. The Office of the Special Prosecutor for Crimes against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) has been hesitant to assert its jurisdiction over such crimes without state officials' approval. Many governmental officials dismiss potential journalism-related motives for attacks and threats with questionable haste, often invoking journalists' personal lives as motives for their deaths despite evidence to the contrary. In light of the scale of ongoing impunity, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ranked Mexico eighth in the world in its 2015 Global Impunity Index.

Mexico decriminalized defamation at the federal level in 2007, and a number of states have eliminated their own criminal defamation statutes, including the state of Mexico  the country's most populous  in 2012. Nevertheless, criminal defamation laws remain on the books in 12 of the 32 states, and both criminal and civil codes continue to be used to intimidate journalists.

Mexico passed a Freedom of Information Law in 2002, and a 2007 amendment to Article 6 of the constitution stated that all levels of government would be required to make their information public. However, information can be temporarily withheld if it is deemed to be in the public interest to do so, and accessing information is often a time-consuming and difficult process in practice.

The Federal Telecommunications and Broadcasting Act, known as the "Ley Telecom," signed by President Enrique Pena Nieto in July 2014, continued to draw criticism for threatening freedom of expression. Although it facilitated greater competition among television stations and telecommunications providers, some of its provisions gave the government expanded powers of surveillance without judicial oversight.

Under the law's provisions, the government may require internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile providers to store user data for at least two years, and to provide detailed communication records to security agencies (including police, intelligence, and military agencies) without a judicial warrant. Such records could theoretically enable authorities to identify or monitor whistle-blowers, journalists' sources, and individuals engaging in political expression. In addition, Article 190 of the Ley Telecom authorizes the "appropriate authority" within the Mexican government to request the suspension of telecommunications service in order to "halt the commission of crimes." Civil society groups have expressed concern that authorities could abuse the provisions to limit expression at critical moments.

Criticism intensified when the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT), a regulatory agency created by the Ley Telecom, published implementing regulations for the law in December 2015. Press freedom watchdog group Article 19 noted that the guidelines expanded governmental surveillance capacity even further, yet failed to include an oversight system. Meanwhile, reports during the year on Mexican government contracts with domestic private security vendors and the Italian surveillance company Hacking Team suggested that governmental surveillance is widespread at both the federal and state level.

These developments prompted a coalition of civil society organizations to challenge the constitutionality of the Ley Telecom. Although a federal court denied the coalition's argument that the law violates constitutionally protected human and privacy rights, an appeals court accepted the case and forwarded it to the Supreme Court of Justice for review in August 2015. A final decision was still pending at year's end.

The competition components of the Ley Telecom, building on related constitutional amendments adopted in 2013, empower the IFT to force concessions from telecommunications firms and television networks that are designated as dominant in their respective markets. For example, the dominant players would be obliged to grant smaller competitors access to their infrastructure and distribution systems. Advocates for community radio stations, which tend to serve politically and economically marginalized communities and are regularly targeted for closure over illegal broadcasting, initially characterized the law as a regression. In May 2015, however, advocates welcomed the licensing of several community stations.

Anyone can become a journalist and practice journalism in Mexico. Professional licenses are not required, and the duration of journalists' careers depends on contextual factors such as the state of the industry, the financial health of individual media outlets, and aggression by state or nonstate actors.

A number of press freedom organizations and journalists' associations operate in Mexico, but they have faced increased intimidation in recent years. In February 2015, three of Article 19's websites were struck by cyberattacks that put them offline for an entire week. In June, the offices of the media monitoring group National Center of Social Communication (CENCOS) were robbed and ransacked.

Political Environment: 31 / 40

Media outlets and their employees face pressure from a variety of actors interested in manipulating or obstructing news content, including owners with political or business agendas, major advertisers seeking positive or neutral coverage, government officials, and criminal organizations.

Public officials and private actors used harassment and economic constraints to manipulate the media environment during 2015. An especially egregious episode occurred in March, when MVS, an independent radio station, fired all members of Aristegui Noticias, a team of investigative journalists known for deeply researched reports on a variety of matters of public interest. The company accused members of the investigative team of using the MVS brand without permission to publicize a new website, Mexicoleaks, that encourages whistle-blowers to anonymously provide data on government wrongdoing. The dismissals took place just months after the team published a report about a luxurious residence in Mexico City that Pena Nieto's wife had acquired from an important government contractor, triggering a major scandal over the apparent conflict of interest. Citizens, journalists, and media organizations voiced suspicions about the role of governmental pressure in MVS's decision. Edison Lanza, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights' special rapporteur for freedom of expression, said the firings suggested "a subtle form of censoring a critical voice."

The authorities do not engage in official censorship or formally block online content, but media outlets have suffered from cyberattacks of unclear origin. Lydia Cacho, a well-known critical journalist who in September 2015 received a new round of death threats, decried the hacking and temporary shutdown of a website while she was giving a live online interview. Additional online outlets were felled by cyberattacks in 2015. The Aristegui Noticias website experienced a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in April. Centronline.mx, La Jornada de Oriente, and Diario Cambio in Puebla, as well as AVC Noticias in Veracruz, were subjected to similar forms of attack.

When employment-based or technological censorship is not enough, more coercive methods have been used against journalists. Drug-trafficking organizations, frequently in cooperation with authorities in their areas, have created what the Washington Post called an "institutionalized system of cartel censorship" imposed on media organizations, particularly along the U.S.-Mexico border. For media editors in regions of high cartel influence, survival can require accepting explicit criminal demands regarding content and practicing self-censorship. In February 2015, alleged cartel members kidnapped Enrique Juarez Torres, editor of the newspaper El Manana, from his offices in Matamoros and threatened to kill him if he continued to run stories on violence related to drug trafficking.

The prevalence of threats  and impunity for perpetrators  have caused self-censorship to deepen and spread, including to areas that had not been considered hotspots for drug-related violence, such as the state of Zacatecas and municipalities surrounding Mexico City. Since 2010, at least three newspapers have published editorials indicating that they would avoid coverage likely to provoke further attacks or threats from organized crime. According to an early 2015 survey by the MEPI Foundation, a Mexican nonprofit that promotes investigative journalism, eight out of 10 respondents living in regions of high-intensity drug trafficking said they knew that local media would not report on crime in their area.

A combination of criminal and political violence, frequently reflecting collusion between criminal organizations and state officials, has been on dramatic display over the last decade. According to CPJ, at least 36 journalists and four media workers have been killed in connection with their work since 1992, including four murders in 2015. Other organizations cite much higher figures: The governmental National Commission on Human Rights reported 107 reporters killed from 2000 to November 2015, while Article 19 logged seven murders of journalists in 2015.

The largest number of attacks in 2015 took place in the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca. Journalist Jose Moises Sanchez was kidnapped in Veracruz in January and found decapitated and dismembered several weeks later. Sanchez was the founder and director of the newspaper La Union; the paper regularly criticized authorities for their failure to respond to local criminal activity, prompting death threats from the mayor of the town of Medellin. In July, Veracruz activist and journalist Ruben Espinosa, who had reported receiving numerous threats, was killed at an apartment in Mexico City. In Oaxaca, Armando Saldana and Filadelfo Sanchez Sarmiento were murdered in May and July, respectively. Sanchez was known for coverage of local corruption, while Saldana antagonized criminal gangs with his reporting. In a crime not included in CPJ's tally, a community radio director in Oaxaca, Abel Bautista Raymundo, was killed in April, illustrating the frequent harassment and lack of protection for journalists in this sector.

As in previous years, officials often disregarded apparent links between such crimes and the victims' status as media workers. For example, Veracruz authorities characterized Jose Sanchez as a taxi driver rather than a journalist, and the federal attorney general's office offered the same justification for nonintervention in the case. Mexico City officials were similarly quick to blame Espinosa's death on his supposed presence at a party that featured prostitutes and drug use. As of year's end, at least one suspect had been arrested in the Saldana case; in the Espinosa case, several arrests were made, but press freedom advocates assailed the investigation for failing to clarify numerous outstanding questions about the incident.

In addition to murders, hundreds of nonfatal attacks on journalists and press outlets occur in Mexico every year, with many allegedly perpetrated by corrupt or abusive government officials. Article 19 registered 397 attacks of various forms, while Periodistasenriesgo.com, a website that tracks incidents of violence against journalists, recorded 90 incidents of aggression. The facilities of several media organizations were attacked in 2015. In January, unknown assailants threw explosive devices at the offices of El Heraldo de Cordoba in Veracruz. Another armed attack against a Veracruz newspaper took place in August, when gunmen fired on the offices of Presente, a weekly magazine based in Poza Rica. In both February and March, armed groups threw grenades at Televisa facilities in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, in the context of ongoing battles between gangs and the police. Overall, 23 of the 90 attacks recorded by Periodistasenriesgo.com took place in Veracruz; Mexico City was second with 14 incidents, followed by Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Puebla.

Some attacks on journalists are reputational. Cacho, for example, faced a social-media smear campaign accusing her of accepting money from politicians after she ran a story about blogger and human rights defender Pedro Canche. Press advocates note that female journalists have often been victimized in distinct ways, including through the use of sexual threats and violence.

Journalists face significant obstacles when attempting to receive protection through the official federal governmental mechanism to protect journalists and human rights defenders, created in 2012. Low levels of funding and political will, bureaucratic rivalries, and lack of training are among the challenges that affect the federal government's ability to protect journalists. Journalists and human rights defenders who sought risk assessment and protection measures reportedly faced delays and inadequate safeguards, although some did benefit from the program during 2015, and the backlog of cases has been reduced. Nonetheless, ongoing problems were highlighted in an independent study conducted in 2015 by Espacio OSC, a coalition of civil society organizations.

Economic Environment: 14 / 30

Mexico is home to a large number of media outlets. Mexico City alone features approximately 30 print newspapers, along with dozens of magazines. Each of the 32 states has multiple newspapers, and the number of online news outlets is growing rapidly. However, the quantity of media publications does not signal robust diversity within the sector. Low rates of internet penetration in rural areas impede the growth of online readership, and print publications have very limited circulation, restricted mostly to urban areas. In much of the country, the main sources of information are the oligopolistic broadcast media.

Two networks  Televisa and TV Azteca  control most of the television market. In March 2014, the IFT designated Televisa, which controls about 70 percent of the free-to-air television market and is also the largest cable and satellite television operator, as the dominant player in its industry, meaning it would have to share infrastructure with competitors.

A key step toward the intended diversification of broadcast media was the issuance of two new television licenses. In March 2015, the IFT announced that two media companies previously focused on radio and newspapers, Grupo Radio Centro and Cadena Tres, had submitted winning bids for the licenses, though neither company was considered a serious rival to Televisa or TV Azteca in the short term. Moreover, regulators subsequently rescinded Grupo Radio Centro's bid due to noncompliance with financial requirements and announced that a new process would be carried out in 2016.

The IFT in March 2014 designated billionaire Carlos Slim's America Movil group as the dominant player in telecommunications, prompting similar steps to increase competition in that industry. America Movil at the time controlled about 80 percent of the fixed-line telecommunications market and 70 percent of the mobile market. High costs and lack of investment have limited access to telecommunications services to date.

According to the International Telecommunication Union, only 44 percent of the population accessed the internet in 2014, but 82 percent of individuals had a mobile telephone. Regional disparities are substantial, with much higher internet penetration rates in Nuevo Leon, Mexico City, and Baja California, and very low rates in Chiapas and Oaxaca.

Concentration of official advertising is high. Televisa and TV Azteca get 25 percent of the total sum of federal resources allocated for official advertising, estimated at about $400 million. A 2015 report produced by a consortium of media watchdogs characterized the discriminatory use of public advertising funds as "subtle censorship." Many studies have found that media outlets slant their coverage to gain more favorable government ad contracts.

Individuals or business entities can legally establish and operate private media outlets, but it is difficult to find sustainable business models while maintaining journalistic independence. For example, La Union, the print and online newspaper of slain reporter Jose Sanchez, was supported by Sanchez's work as a taxi driver. In general, journalists often work without the protection of contracts, have few or no benefits, and are paid abysmally low wages, leaving them vulnerable to attack and exploitation.

Bribery of journalists is considered a widespread phenomenon, but it is not well documented. Such bribery seems to be particularly common in the context of arrangements established between candidates and media outlets during electoral periods. As described in a 2015 feature on the high-profile website Animal Politico, organized crime groups also force journalists to accept bribes, and some even have their own public affairs officers to manage such relationships.

Copyright notice:  Freedom House, Inc.  All Rights Reserved
Freedom of the Press 2016 - Macedonia

Publisher Freedom House Publication Date 26 April 2016 Cite as Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2016 - Macedonia, 26 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57220da14.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

2016 Scores

Press Freedom Status: Not Free

Legal Environment: 19 / 30 (1) (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Political Environment: 24 / 30 (3) (0 = best, 40 = worst)

Economic Environment: 19 / 30 (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Press Freedom Score: 62 / 100 (4) (0 = best, 100 = worst)

Quick Facts

Population: 2,070,100

Freedom in the World Status: Partly Free

Internet Penetration Rate: 68.1%

Status change explanation: Macedonia's status declined from Partly Free to Not Free due to revelations indicating large-scale and illegal government wiretapping of journalists, corrupt ties between officials and media owners, and an increase in threats and attacks on media workers.

Macedonia's media landscape is deeply polarized along political lines. Self-censorship among journalists is common, due primarily to pressure from media owners with particular business or political interests and, more recently, concerns about surveillance. Journalists are poorly paid and face threats and harassment for engaging in investigative or critical reporting.

Key Developments

In February 2015, opposition leader Zoran Zaev alleged that the government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski oversaw a massive wiretapping operation that targeted more than 100 journalists, along with thousands of other parties. The findings of a European Commission-backed investigation provided support for Zaev's claims.

Zaev also released a series of recorded conversations suggesting that government officials had a role in decisions on content at public and some private media outlets.

Numerous journalists received threats or suffered physical attacks during the year.

Legal Environment: 19 / 30 (1)

The Macedonian constitution includes basic protections for freedom of the press and freedom of expression, but the authorities do not uphold them impartially. The use of criminal laws to restrict journalistic activity drew international attention in 2013, when Nova Makedonija reporter Tomislav Kezarovski was convicted on dubious charges of revealing the identity of a protected witness in a murder case; the charges were linked to an article he had written about police corruption. Kezarovski received a prison sentence of four and a half years, but was transferred to house arrest after a short period behind bars. In January 2015, an appeals court reduced his sentence to two years and ordered that he serve the remaining four months in prison. Kezarovski was consequently transferred back to prison, but days later he was granted conditional release following domestic and international pressure.

Although defamation was removed from the penal code in 2012, a parallel change to the civil defamation law authorized large fines for reporters, editors, and media owners. Many defamation suits are dropped or settled out of court, often because defendants yield to the threat of crippling financial penalties. While courts have ruled in favor of journalists in a number of recent defamation suits, the Association of Journalists of Macedonia (ZNM) has noted that courts frequently consider defamation allegations in which the plaintiffs have failed to produce any evidence for their complaint, sometimes postponing preliminary hearings multiple times to allow the accusers to gather material. The association also reports that defendants are sometimes not promptly informed when cases are filed against them.

The law on open access to public information is unevenly and selectively enforced, with officials delaying responses and shunning independent or critical media outlets.

Enforcement of media regulations is weak, and the licensing process is subject to undue political and economic influence. Under 2013 media laws, a government-dominated media regulator, the Agency for Audio and Audiovisual Media Services, is empowered to impose heavy fines and revoke broadcast licenses for content that threatens vaguely defined interests such as "public order" and "health or morals." Amendments to the laws, adopted in 2014, exempted online outlets from regulation, minimized the obligations of print media, allowed the ZNM to nominate one of the regulator's seven council members, and inserted language to ensure that all future content rules comply with standards set by the European Court of Human Rights. Critics of the original laws said the changes, passed under international pressure, were inadequate.

In February 2015, Zaev, head of the opposition Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), announced that he had obtained evidence that the government had engaged in illegal wiretapping of up to 20,000 Macedonian citizens, including more than 100 journalists. He subsequently released a series of audio recordings that not only suggested the existence of such a wiretapping campaign, but also appeared to reveal government officials issuing directives regarding content at several media outlets, including Sitel, a private, progovernment television station with national reach, and the public television network, Macedonian Television (MTV). Zaev also claimed to possess wiretap recordings of journalists' conversations, but did not release them publicly, instead inviting the affected reporters to pick up transcripts at the SDSM's headquarters. In what was viewed as an attempt to discourage reporting on the recordings' content, the public prosecutor's office in February issued a statement suggesting that it was illegal to publish material that could become evidence in criminal court proceedings, an apparent reference to existing charges against Zaev, who faced allegations of plotting a coup. A report prepared by independent experts and released by the European Commission in June supported Zaev's claims that the security services had carried out the wiretapping campaign at the government's request.EEs to review the materials at h but did not release them publically, inviting the affected parties to review the materials at h [Refworld note: As published on FH website as at 28 April 2016.]

The Macedonian Association of Journalists (MAN) is affiliated with the government, while the ZNM is more aligned with the opposition. The ZNM documents media freedom violations more rigorously than its counterpart, but it has been silent on some issues involving pressure against media workers at progovernment outlets. In 2014, the parliament amended the Law on Audio and Audiovisual Media Services to give one of the ZNM's two seats on the board of the public broadcaster to the MAN. The Media Ethics Council, a self-regulatory body, was established in 2014 to hear complaints about the media; frequently the cases it receives are filed by journalists against other journalists.

Members of the Trade Union of Macedonian Journalists and Media Workers (SSNM) have faced dismissal and other forms of pressure from officials and employers. Macedonia's media laws do not recognize bloggers and citizen journalists as professional journalists.

Political Environment: 24 / 40 (3)

The Macedonian media landscape is heavily polarized. Most private media outlets are tied to political or business interests that influence their content, and state-owned media tend to support government positions. The government continued to exercise undue political influence over the content of public outlets and control over their supervisory bodies during 2015. The public broadcaster, Macedonian Radio and Television (MRT), mostly ignored the wiretapping scandal, while the recordings themselves appeared to reveal direct government influence over the broadcaster's reporting. The recordings also suggested a government role in the programming decisions of at least one private television outlet, and in determining the content of several newspapers.

Many private outlets are owned by businesspeople who use their media holdings as tools to promote commercial interests or curry favor with the government. Such outlets are often reluctant to pursue stories that would reflect poorly on Gruevski's administration. For example, many outlets did not cover a series of teachers' strikes during 2015, or omitted key details, such as the teachers' grievances and demands, from their reporting. Moreover, as early elections in 2016 grew more likely, the most prominent private television outlets escalated progovernment reporting and criticism of the opposition.

Journalists have reported high rates of self-censorship, as they experience pressure not to publicize information that could harm their employers' business interests. The problem was exacerbated in 2015 by the wiretapping scandal, which revealed how closely many media figures were being monitored.

Journalists faced increased levels of physical violence and harassment in 2015. Borjan Jovanovski, a prominent critical journalist for Nova TV, received a death threat in April. The sender used the name of a long-dead nationalist figure associated with the ruling party, suggesting a political motive. In May, Branko Trickovski, a columnist for the opposition paper Sloboden Pecat, received death threats after he posted remarks on Facebook that were critical of police officers who participated in an operation against insurgents in an ethnic Albanian area of Kumanovo; eight officers were killed during the clash. Trickovski's vehicle was set on fire that month. Around the same time, the car of well-known political journalist Saso Ordanoski was also set ablaze. Separately in May, Sase Ivanovski, the owner of the news website Maktel, was banned from a club for members of parliament after questioning Gruevski on the subject of his personal wealth. Days later, Ivanovski was beaten by two unidentified assailants in Skopje. Ivanovski was physically attacked again in July, this time by the deputy prime minister for economic affairs, Vladimir Pesevski, after he approached Pesevski on the street and questioned him about the wiretapping program. And in June, a Macedonian police officer attacked an Austrian journalist and attempted to confiscate her equipment as she sought to report on the movement of refugees at the border with Greece.

Economic Environment: 19 / 30

Macedonia has a large number of broadcast and print outlets for its population, but progovernment media  including the public MRT and several private television stations and newspapers  hold a dominant position in the market. A small number of outlets, such as Telma TV, 24 Vesti, Sloboden Pecat, and Fokus, carry more balanced or critical coverage. Broadcast outlets run by members of Macedonia's ethnic Albanian minority, some of which provide content in both Albanian and Macedonian, often produce news that is more objective than their Macedonian-language counterparts; observers have suggested that this is because they are somewhat removed from the political wrangling between the two main parties, which are composed primarily of ethnic Macedonians.

Ownership transparency is undermined by the use of proxies and silent partners. Foreign investment in the media is largely limited to Serbian companies. A Serbian-owned media group has a virtual monopoly on newspaper printing and distribution, and its owner has ties to high-level security officials.

Foreign media content is not restricted. Access to the internet is constrained only by cost and infrastructural obstacles, with around 68 percent of the population accessing the medium in 2014. Use of social media continues to increase, and news sites and blogs have expanded, but most news content originates in traditional media.

The government has faced criticism for its liberal use of promotional advertising, which increases the media's financial dependence and favors progovernment outlets. The government is one of the country's largest advertisers, and the ruling party benefits from deep pricing discounts from friendly outlets, particularly during election campaigns. In the summer of 2015, the government issued a moratorium on official advertising amid the growing political crisis; however, the measure did not extend to all public institutions or to allied private institutions, allowing the government to retain an indirect influence over the media through advertising contracts. The state also subsidizes content production for national television broadcasters under amendments to the media law adopted in 2014, creating another mechanism for the dispersal of official funds to friendly media. Many media outlets rely on financial support from private owners' other businesses.

Journalists face low salaries, a lack of job security, and poor working conditions, leaving them more vulnerable to editorial pressure from owners.

Copyright notice:  Freedom House, Inc.  All Rights Reserved
Freedom of the Press 2016 - France

Publisher Freedom House Publication Date 26 April 2016 Cite as Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2016 - France, 26 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57220da327.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

2016 Scores

Press Freedom Status: Free

Legal Environment: 6 / 30 (1) (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Political Environment: 15 / 40 (4) (0 = best, 40 = worst)

Economic Environment: 7 / 30 (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Press Freedom Score: 28 / 100 (5) (0 = best, 100 = worst)

Quick Facts

Population: 64,346,720

Net Freedom Status: Free

Freedom in the World Status: Free

Internet Penetration Rate: 83.8%

France has a strong tradition of independent journalism and a generally free media environment. However, defamation cases and new security laws have raised concerns about the legal framework for the media in recent years, and the terrorist attacks of 2015 represented a dramatic escalation in violence against journalists.

Key Developments

On January 7, 2015, two gunmen affiliated with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula stormed the offices of the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people.

Following the attack, the government pushed through legislation allowing mass surveillance of personal communications with little judicial oversight, and authorities arrested 54 people for hate speech or for allegedly defending terrorism.

A high-profile defamation case ended with the acquittal of the respected newspaper Le Monde and its journalists.

After a major terrorist attack in Paris in November, the government declared a state of emergency and secured the authority to block internet communications that would enable terrorist acts.

Legal Environment: 6 / 30 (1)

The constitution and governing institutions in France support an open media environment, although certain laws limit aspects of press freedom and freedom of expression in practice. The penal code punishes efforts to justify war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as incitement to discrimination and violence. Holocaust denial is a crime under the 1990 Gayssot Act.

Strict defamation laws impose fines on those found guilty. In 2013, a provision of the press code that mandated a 45,000 ($50,000) fine for insulting the president was repealed after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found that it violated freedom of expression. However, the repeal did not affect a provision  which remained in place in 2015  that applies the same penalty to defamation of public officials.

Defamation laws are often used to pressure journalists, although prominent cases were decided in favor of free expression in 2015. In April, the ECHR found that a defamation verdict against lawyer Olivier Morice, the publication director of Le Monde, and a Le Monde journalist had violated the European Convention on Human Rights. The three had been found guilty of defamation in 2008 after excerpts from a letter Morice had submitted to the justice minister, about two judges overseeing a case, were printed in an article in Le Monde. France was required to pay 33,670 ($37,400) in damages and expenses under the ECHR ruling. Later in the year, Le Figaro journalist Ivan Rioufol was acquitted of charges brought in 2013 by the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, which accused him of making defamatory comments on a radio program in late 2012.

A high-profile defamation case that arose in 2014 involved President Francois Hollande's chief of staff, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, and former prime minister Francois Fillon. Two Le Monde journalists, Gerard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, alleged in a book that Fillon had encouraged Jouyet to expedite an investigation into former president Nicolas Sarkozy  who was accused of misappropriating party funds  in order to derail Sarkozy's campaign for the 2017 presidential election. Both Fillon and Jouyet denied the allegations until Le Monde printed excerpts from a recorded conversation between the two men. Fillon filed libel complaints against Jouyet, the journalists, and the paper itself. Fillon also sued the journalists in an attempt to obtain access to the recording that substantiated the report, despite regulations designed to protect journalists' sources. In July 2015, Le Monde, its journalists, and Jouyet were acquitted of all charges.

The Law on Guidelines and Programming for the Performance of Internal Security allows websites suspected of containing child pornography to be blocked without a court order. It also allows police to install or remove spyware under judicial oversight. A 2013 programming law gives extensive rights to government agencies to monitor the internet and phone usage of French citizens in real time. The law requires no judicial supervision and provides for broad grounds on which to justify surveillance of an individual.

A counterterrorism law adopted in 2014 came under fire for ambiguous provisions that could limit free speech, especially online. It removed the criminal offenses of publicly inciting or "glorifying terrorism" (apologie du terrorisme) from the 1881 press law and added them to the criminal code; accordingly, those broadly defined crimes can be punished with up to seven years in prison and a 100,000 ($110,000) fine if committed online. When committed offline, the offenses are subject to five years in prison and a 75,000 ($83,000) fine. The law also empowers the authorities to ask internet service providers to block sites for glorifying terrorism, and allows the police to use online monitoring and surveillance to detect violators. In the first use of the law, five websites accused of condoning terrorism were blocked in March 2015.

In the aftermath of the January 2015 terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, the government pushed through an intelligence bill that was widely criticized by press freedom groups for giving the authorities greater power to carry out intrusive surveillance without a court order, including mass surveillance of mobile phones and personal internet data. The legislation was adopted by the parliament in May and approved by the Constitutional Council in July. In October, the rights group Legal Press Association appealed the law to the ECHR, whose decision was pending at year's end.

Separately, in a January crackdown shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attack, authorities arrested 54 people for hate speech or for allegedly defending terrorism. Among those detained was controversial French comedian Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, who had posted a comment to Facebook that allegedly sympathized with Amedy Coulibaly, the terrorist gunman behind an attack on a kosher market in Paris on January 9. In a separate case in November, the ECHR rejected Dieudonne's claim that France had violated his right to freedom of expression when it fined him for a 2008 performance in which he invited a notorious Holocaust denier on stage to receive a prize from an actor dressed as a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp.

On November 13, 2015, Paris suffered a large-scale terrorist attack by the Islamic State (IS) militant group that resulted in the deaths of 130 people. The government imposed a 12-day state of emergency, and the National Assembly then adopted legislation extending it for three months, with a provision authorizing the government to block internet communications that enable terrorist acts, among other emergency powers. At the same time, the National Assembly eliminated a provision from the 1955 law on states of emergency that had allowed the government to impose media controls and authorize searches of media offices without a court order during an emergency.

Although existing laws guarantee access to information, access rights hinge on the protection of a third party's reputation, and requests for information are sometimes denied. In October 2015, an online consultation site was opened to receive public comments on an impending "Digital Republic" bill that includes proposals for guaranteed internet connections for poor families, an open-data policy that would make official documents more accessible online, net neutrality safeguards, and the right to "digital death" of personal data once the person in question dies.

France's regulatory body for electronic media, the High Audiovisual Council (CSA), was granted greater independence under a 2013 law. The president of France appoints the president of the council.

Political Environment: 15 / 40 (4)

France's media are robust and express a wide range of opinions, largely without restriction. However, economic pressures on the industry and from media owners have encouraged some self-censorship in recent years, and the events of 2015 forced journalists to give additional consideration to issues like personal security and possible surveillance when making decisions about their work. Separately, in November, a radio columnist was dismissed by his employer, allegedly under pressure from the authorities, over a column in which he discussed reported security failures surrounding that month's terrorist attacks.

Journalists generally do not face restrictions on their freedom of movement while reporting in the field. However, reporters and photographers sometimes encounter physical interference or violence by police or protesters when covering demonstrations. The problem arose during at least two events in 2015: a protest against police brutality in Nantes in February and a demonstration organized by the League of Jewish Defense in Paris in October.

The online journal Mediapart, which is routinely denied access to events held by the far-right National Front, has experienced increased resistance from the party in recent years. In February 2015, National Front members threatened two journalists from the outlet who were attempting to interview the party's financial representatives.

The terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, in which eight journalists were murdered, made France second only to Syria for the total number of journalists killed in the course of their work during 2015, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula issued a statement to claim responsibility for the attack, citing the satirical magazine's cartoon depictions of the prophet Muhammad as part of its justification. In a sign of broader intimidation, the 17-year-old editor of a school newspaper received persistent death threats after publishing a special issue to show solidarity with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Cyberattacks have become increasingly common, and several were reported in 2015. One of the worst series of cyberattacks in France's history occurred during the week after the shooting at Charlie Hebdo, affecting more than 19,000 websites. Some of the attacks were attributed to Islamist hacker groups. In April, a cyberattack on the television network TV5Monde disrupted its broadcasts as well as its website and social-media accounts.

Economic Environment: 7 / 30

France has a vibrant media environment, with a variety of print, broadcast, and online outlets in operation. Television stations include the three main national public channels as well as a number of private stations. Private radio stations flourish, although public broadcaster Radio France continues to be popular. There are more than 50 daily newspapers, most of which are privately owned. Private print and broadcast media outlets are frequently owned by companies with close ties to prominent politicians and defense contractors. Nearly 84 percent of the population accessed the internet in 2014.

The weak state of the country's economy since 2008 continues to threaten media outlets and often results in layoffs. Radio France employees went on strike for nearly a month beginning in March 2015, as the station faced an unprecedented 21.3 million ($23.6 million) deficit and possible layoffs of several hundred employees. The public television channels have been under financial strain since advertisements were eliminated during prime time in 2009.

The state provides both direct and indirect subsidies to the press, including assistance with the costs of distribution, and controls the prices of newspapers. Following calls for greater transparency, the government released figures detailing the extent of its subsidies for the first time in 2014; two of the country's leading newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro, received more than 16 million ($18 million) each in 2013.

Bribery is not considered a widespread problem in the French media. However, in August 2015 two French journalists, Eric Laurent and Catherine Graciet, were arrested in Paris and charged with extorting money from a representative of King Mohammed VI of Morocco in exchange for not publishing a book containing damaging information about the king.

Copyright notice:  Freedom House, Inc.  All Rights Reserved
Freedom of the Press 2016 - Egypt

Publisher Freedom House Publication Date 26 April 2016 Cite as Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2016 - Egypt, 26 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57220da415.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

2016 Scores

Press Freedom Status: Not Free

Legal Environment: 25 / 30 (1) (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Political Environment: 35 / 40 (2) (0 = best, 40 = worst)

Economic Environment: 17 / 30 (1) (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Press Freedom Score: 77 / 100 (4) (0 = best, 100 = worst)

Quick Facts

Population: 89,074,000

Net Freedom Status: Not Free

Freedom in the World Status: Not Free

Internet Penetration Rate: 31.7%

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's efforts to silence dissent and shutter outlets affiliated with the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood have produced a media environment in which most public and private outlets are firmly supportive of the regime. In 2015, authorities continued to employ a variety of tools against journalists and media outlets that strayed from officially sanctioned narratives, including legal prosecution, gag orders, and the outright halting of operations. Dozens of journalists were physically assaulted during the year by both security agents and civilians.

Key Developments

Egypt was the world's second-worst jailer of journalists in 2015, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), with 23 reporters behind bars as of December.

A new counterterrorism law banned the dissemination of material that contradicts Defense Ministry accounts of militant attacks, severely curtailing journalists' ability to report on national security topics.

The already high rate of media freedom violations spiked during the parliamentary election period, which lasted from October through early December.

The struggling public broadcaster continued to lose viewership during the year, as audiences turned to private channels based both in Egypt and abroad.

Legal Environment: 25 / 30 (1)

The 2014 constitution contains several encouraging provisions regarding freedom of expression, access to information, and the media. Article 65 guarantees freedom of thought, opinion, and the expression thereof. Article 68 declares that all official state documents and information are the property of the people, who have the right to access such materials in a timely and transparent manner. Articles 70, 71, and 72 all govern the press, providing for many of the rights that support a free media environment. They guarantee the freedom of the print, broadcast, and digital sectors; enshrine the right to establish media outlets; ban all forms of media censorship, including the suspension and closure of outlets; ban prison terms for press crimes; and declare the independence and neutrality of all state-owned media outlets. The constitution also calls for the establishment of independent regulatory bodies tasked with supporting and developing both private and state-owned media and administering all relevant regulations.

However, these positive elements are seriously undermined by a variety of exceptions and ambiguities. Article 71 authorizes media censorship "in times of war or general mobilization." The same article, which ostensibly eliminates jail terms for media offenses, leaves room for imprisonment for crimes related to incitement of violence, discrimination, and defamation. The constitution notably fails to specify the composition and appointment procedures for regulatory bodies, meaning future legislation could create structures that enable political influence.

Moreover, the existing press laws and penal code remained in place, including an array of articles that can be used to imprison journalists. For example, defamation is a criminal offense, and sentences of up to five years in prison can be imposed for blasphemy, or "exploiting religion in spreading, either by words, in writing or in any other means, extreme ideas for the purposes of inciting strife, ridiculing or insulting [the Abrahamic faiths] or a sect following it, or damaging national unity."

The authorities continued to arrest and prosecute journalists during 2015, subjecting them to deeply flawed legal proceedings that disregarded their fundamental rights. According to CPJ, 23 journalists were behind bars in Egypt as of December, with the number reaching 36 at its highest point during the year. In April, 13 journalists were sentenced to life in prison, and one was sentenced to death, following convictions for plotting against the state during a 2013 sit-in at Cairo's Raba'a Square, which ended when a violent crackdown by security forces killed hundreds of civilians. After months of delays and obstructions in the appeals process, Egypt's Court of Cassation granted the journalists a retrial in December, though they remained in custody. In January 2015, an appeals court granted a retrial to three employees of Qatar's Al-Jazeera television network who were detained in late 2013 and subsequently sentenced to lengthy prison terms for supposedly spreading false news and aiding the Muslim Brotherhood, now deemed a terrorist organization. One of the reporters, Peter Greste, an Australian citizen, was deported in February 2015. The others  Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, an Egyptian-born Canadian citizen, and Baher Mohamed, an Egyptian national  were released on bail later that month but convicted again at their retrial in August, along with Greste in absentia. In September, Fahmy and Mohamed were released under a presidential pardon. A number of other journalists faced the imminent threat of detention in connection with pending charges or convictions in absentia.

Authorities restricted reporting on security issues through a variety of means during 2015. Among them was a new counterterrorism law, issued by al-Sisi in August, that prohibits journalists from publishing information related to militant violence if it contradicts official government accounts. Violations can result in heavy fines and a one-year ban from the practice of journalism. The measure makes it extremely difficult for journalists to freely report on areas affected by terrorism and insurgency, particularly the Sinai Peninsula.

In November, Hossam Bahgat, a prominent journalist with the online newspaper Mada Masr, was detained in connection with an article on the August convictions of 26 military officers charged with plotting to depose al-Sisi. Bahgat was released after two days in detention, during which time he was interrogated by military intelligence officers and charged with disseminating false information and endangering national security; at year's end it was unclear whether the charges had been dropped. Also in November, investigative journalist Ismail Alexandrani was arrested by security forces upon his return to Egypt from Berlin; Alexandrani, whose work focuses on jihadist movements in the Sinai Peninsula, was later charged with disseminating false information and belonging to a terrorist organization, and he remained in custody at year's end.

Al-Sisi's administration made no progress on draft freedom of information legislation that was initially debated in 2013.

Licensing and registration processes are often arbitrary and opaque, with formal regulations weakly or unevenly enforced. Decisions on media operations are frequently made according to political or security concerns rather than impartial regulatory mechanisms. Despite this lack of standardized procedures, journalists and media outlets that fail to toe the government line regularly face accusations of failing to secure proper registration. In July 2015, for example, security officials arrested Yahya Khalaf, director of the independent online news network Yaqeen, during a raid of its offices; he was accused of possessing video editing equipment without a proper license, in addition to more serious allegations of illegally operating a media wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Khalaf was released on bail in September. Licensing violations were also among the crimes that Fahmy, Mohamed, and Greste of Al-Jazeera were convicted of in August.

The 2014 constitution calls for an independent media regulator, but it has yet to be established. The Ministry of Information performed this function previously, but the relevant department began to be phased out in 2014, when the position of information minister was abolished. Subsequently, the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU), Egypt's public broadcaster, was tapped to manage a transitional process during which a new regulatory body would be established. In 2015, proposals began to emerge concerning the regulator's formation, structure, and authority, but no comprehensive plan was adopted by year's end. Among the proposals was a draft media law developed by Egyptian media professionals, in consultation with government officials, on the regulation of print and digital media outlets. The proposed legislation contained a provision setting very high capital requirements for the establishment of new outlets.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to protecting journalists' rights and freedom of expression have long been subject to restrictive laws that apply to all civil society groups. In 2014, al-Sisi signed a decree that amended the penal code to ban the receipt of foreign funding for activities that "harm the national interest," potentially affecting NGOs. Violations of the law can be punished with life imprisonment and fines of nearly $70,000, and the death penalty would apply if the offender is a public servant or linked to terrorism.

The government has been working to augment its electronic surveillance capabilities over the past several years, adding to concerns about privacy and the confidentiality of journalists' sources and activities. In late 2014, a new interagency body, the High Council for Cybersecurity, was established. Although it was ostensibly founded to defend Egyptian interests against cyberattacks, digital rights advocates have expressed concern that it expands the state's surveillance capacity. Meanwhile, the government has increasingly asserted its intention to monitor online activity in the interest of protecting national security.

Political Environment: 35 / 40 (2)

Following the 2013 coup that brought al-Sisi to power, the authorities began to purge the media of any support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Any strong criticism of al-Sisi was also sidelined or suppressed. This process continued in 2015, with public and private outlets broadly embracing pro-Sisi and anti-Muslim Brotherhood narratives and expressing strong support for the security forces. Al-Sisi himself frequently convenes private meetings with prominent newspaper editors and television presenters, during which he has discouraged critical reporting and called on journalists to produce material aimed at inspiring national unity.

As in previous years, state media generally displayed a progovernment bias. Journalists at public outlets can face disciplinary action for straying from government narratives. In November 2015, a prominent ERTU television host, Azza al-Hanawy, was suspended after calling on al-Sisi to address government corruption; the broadcaster's head, Essam al-Amir, said al-Hanawy was suspended because she "went off the script" and demonstrated a lack of neutrality. She was allowed to return to work later that month.

There are virtually no private stations based in Egypt that oppose the government. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist opposition elements have moved their affiliated media operations abroad, primarily to Turkey, where they established satellite television and online outlets. Many such outlets feature inflammatory political and sectarian rhetoric. While some Egypt-based reporters at private outlets criticized government agencies during 2015, such outlets generally refrain from criticizing al-Sisi, and reporters who do can face pressure from owners and management. The Egyptian Journalists' Syndicate documented numerous cases of managers at private outlets suspending television programs or withdrawing print or online articles for crossing certain redlines in their reporting. In April 2015, the Saudi-owned Egyptian television station MBC Masr suspended the news program of Ibrahim Eissa after he criticized the Saudi government, a close ally of al-Sisi's regime. The same month, the controversial talk show With Islam, broadcast on the privately owned satellite channel Al-Qaherah wal Nas, was canceled following pressure from the powerful grand imam of Egypt's Al-Azhar Mosque, who opposed its programming. In May, Islam al-Beheiry, the show's host, was convicted of blasphemy in connection with its content and sentenced to five years in prison, though in December the term was reduced to one year.

In addition to editorial pressure at public and private outlets, direct censorship was a problem in 2015, with the government or judicial officials issuing multiple gag orders to restrict media coverage of sensitive issues. One such order prohibited reporting on a September incident in which an Egyptian military helicopter mistakenly fired on a group of Mexican tourists and their Egyptian police escorts, killing 12 people.

Journalists frequently face interference in the course of their work. Domestic media rights organizations documented numerous cases of obstruction of coverage, illegal detention, and outright attacks in 2015, and the rate of violations spiked in the last quarter of the year, during and after parliamentary elections. Many such incidents also took place during January 2015 demonstrations marking the fourth anniversary of former president Hosni Mubarak's ouster; numerous journalists were assaulted, detained, or had their equipment confiscated while covering the events. The Association for Free Thought and Expression (AFTE), an Egyptian NGO, documented dozens of physical attacks against journalists in 2015, committed by both security forces and civilians.

Journalists have been detained for long periods of time without charge, and some have reported torture or other mistreatment in custody. According to an August 2015 Amnesty International report, Mahmoud Abu Zeid, a freelance photojournalist who has been held in pretrial detention since August 2013, said he was tortured by security agents and has been denied medication necessary to treat hepatitis.

Economic Environment: 17 / 30 (1)

Egypt has more than 500 newspapers, magazines, journals, and other periodicals, and the state retains ownership of several important titles. However, print media have limited circulation. In a country of 89 million people, the largest newspapers, including Al-Ahram and Al-Masry al-Youm, have circulations of less than a million.

ERTU remains the only terrestrial broadcaster and controls a range of regional and specialty channels. Its programming is among the least popular in the country, with audiences increasingly turning to privately owned Egyptian satellite television channels, or those based in the Gulf Arab states. In 2015, the government began a five-year restructuring process aimed at reducing ERTU's considerable debt and improving the quality of its programming. It is expected to privatize several of its media properties during the restructuring process.

Some 32 percent of Egyptians accessed the internet regularly as of 2014, and nearly 70 percent had access to mobile telephones. Social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, play an important role in diffusing news and information. By 2015, 28 million Egyptians were on Facebook, accounting for roughly 30 percent of all Facebook users in the Arab world.

Authorities sometimes interfere with media production and distribution. In August 2015, the newspapers Al-Mesryoon, Al-Sabah, and Sawt al-Ummah were stopped from printing issues or had pressruns destroyed before distribution due to state objections to their content, resulting in financial damage to the outlets.

Trends in media ownership, spending, revenues, and advertising are difficult to assess given the industry's opacity. The government supports state media directly and through advertising, although it is unclear what types of advertising subsidies exist. The country's weak economy has forced both state-owned and private outlets to slash their budgets. Shutdowns, layoffs, and cuts to content were common across the media industry in 2015.

Copyright notice:  Freedom House, Inc.  All Rights Reserved
Freedom of the Press 2016 - Burundi

Publisher Freedom House Publication Date 26 April 2016 Cite as Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2016 - Burundi, 26 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57220da615.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

2016 Scores

Press Freedom Status: Not Free

Legal Environment: 25 / 30 (1) (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Political Environment: 33 / 40 (4) (0 = best, 40 = worst)

Economic Environment: 22 / 30 (1) (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Press Freedom Score: 80 / 100 (6) (0 = best, 100 = worst)

Quick Facts

Population: 10,742,000

Freedom in the World Status: Not Free

Internet Penetration Rate: 1.4%

Burundi's already-restricted media environment deteriorated dramatically in 2015, a result of the political instability and civil unrest triggered by President Pierre Nkurunziza's controversial decision to run for a third term in office, which he won in a disputed election in July.

Key Developments

Numerous private radio outlets were shut down or destroyed in the wake of a failed coup attempt in May, depriving citizens of a key source of information.

Journalists faced physical attacks and death threats, including from the police and the youth wing of the ruling party, the Imbonerakure.

Dozens of journalists fled into exile throughout the year.

The East African Court of Justice ruled in May that Burundi's repressive 2013 media law violated freedoms of expression and of the press, and therefore constituted a violation of Burundi's obligations under the Treaty for the Establishment of the East African Community.

Legal Environment: 25 / 30 (1)

The constitution guarantees freedoms of speech and of the press, but these rights are not respected in practice and are undermined by the penal code and other laws. The 2013 media law prescribes punishments including high fines, suspensions of media outlets, and the withdrawal of press cards for several broadly worded offenses, such as publishing or broadcasting stories that undermine national unity and public order, or that are related to issues such as national defense, security, public safety, unauthorized demonstrations, and the economy. The law also limited the protection of journalistic sources, required journalists to meet certain educational and professional standards, and increased the enforcement powers of the National Communication Council (CNC), the media regulator, which is widely considered to be controlled by the president. In January 2014, the Constitutional Court  ruling on a challenge brought by the Burundian Union of Journalists (UBJ)  reduced some of the high fines contained in the law, but left the bulk of the legislation intact.

In February 2015, the East African Court of Justice, a regional court, held a hearing on a challenge to the media law filed by the UBJ. In a landmark decision in May, the court ruled in the UBJ's favor, declaring that the law violated freedoms of expression and of the press, and therefore constituted a violation of Burundi's obligations under the Treaty for the Establishment of the East African Community. The court ordered Burundi to amend the law and address these issues. Separately, Burundi's Parliament adopted changes to the media law in March 2015, repealing some of the controversial provisions; however, the president had not signed these as of the end of 2015.

Media outlets and journalists continued to face legal harassment and arrests in 2015. In January, Bob Rugurika, a prominent journalist and director of Radio Publique Africaine (RPA)  the most popular privately owned station in the country  was arrested following RPA's report on the murder of three Italian nuns in late 2014. The report had alleged that Burundian security forces were involved in the attack. Rugurika was charged with conspiracy to murder, violating confidentiality in criminal investigations, harboring a criminal, and failing to uphold "public solidarity." An appeals court ordered his release in February 2015 while he awaited trial; however, after receiving death threats, Rugurika fled Burundi in May and remained in exile at year's end.

Separately, in June a Rwandan journalist was arrested in northeastern Burundi and charged with espionage while reporting on Burundian civilians fleeing the deteriorating security situation and seeking refuge in Rwanda.

Media laws and other statutes affecting journalists are often arbitrarily applied, and ambiguous legal language is interpreted by a judiciary that lacks independence from political forces. Burundi does not have a freedom of information law, and journalists face difficulties in obtaining access to official state documents and information.

The CNC regulates both print and broadcast media, controls the accreditation of journalists, and enforces compliance with media laws. The president appoints all 15 members, who are mainly government representatives and journalists from the state broadcaster. Observers regard the CNC as a tool of the executive branch, as it regularly issues politicized rulings and sanctions against critical journalists and outlets.

Political Environment: 33 / 40 (4)

The state-owned Radio Television Nationale du Burundi (RTNB) is widely perceived as government mouthpiece. Self-censorship and state propaganda is reportedly widespread, especially within the state media and other outlets with close connections to the administration.

Official censorship reached dramatic heights in 2015 as the government intensified its persecution of independent and critical media outlets and journalists in the run-up to the July presidential election. Protests erupted in late April against Nkurunziza's controversial decision to run for a third term. On April 27, authorities raided the offices of RPA and forced the station to close, claiming that its coverage of the protests was inciting violence. Another raid was conducted soon after at the Maison de la Presse in Bujumbura, where a consortium of Burundi's top privately owned radio stations had established a studio to conduct coordinated coverage of the election campaign. Their studio was also forced to suspend its coverage. Authorities later cut RPA's transmission completely, forcing the station off air, and disabled the relay transmitters of privately owned Insanganiro Radio and Bonesha FM, restricting their broadcast range to the capital. The government also blocked access to social-media sites and messaging platforms including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Tango, in an effort to disrupt protesters' ability to organize. However, many were able to access these services using VPNs (virtual private networks) and other methods.

Journalists and media outlets faced extralegal intimidation, attacks, and harassment in the wake of a May coup attempt. In the coup attempt, Burundian general Godefroid Niyombare assembled a small coalition of forces to take control of the country while Nkurunziza was in neighboring Tanzania. Niyombare broadcast a message via a number of private media outlets, including Radiotelevision Renaissance, saying that he was dismissing the government and calling on the police and army to back the coup. However, most of the security forces remained loyal to Nkurunziza and the coup was defeated, prompting an investigation into the media outlets that broadcast the general's announcement. Later in May, police summoned Innocent Muhozi, manager of Radiotelevision Renaissance, for questioning related to the failed coup. In November, Antoine Kaburahe, head of the newsweekly Iwacu, was also interrogated in connection with the coup attempt.

Violent demonstrations both for and against the Nkurunziza government rocked the capital in the aftermath of the coup. A number of high-profile private radio stations, including RPA, Radio Isanganiro, Bonesha FM, and Radiotelevision Renaissance, were attacked, allegedly by government supporters. About 80 percent of their broadcast equipment was destroyed, the buildings housing some of the stations were set on fire, and checkpoints were established to prevent staff from entering their studios, forcing the stations off the air. Iwacu also received threats, and was forced to stop publishing for several days. Nevertheless, it remained one of the few private media outlets that continued to operate though the end of 2015. Rema FM, a private, progovernment station, was also destroyed, apparently by government opponents.

Threats and physical attacks against individual journalists also intensified in 2015. Following the coup attempt and the attacks on media houses in May, journalists and press freedom advocates reported frequent physical harassment, threatening phone calls, death threats, and other abuses. In June, unknown assailants threw a grenade into a Voice of America correspondent's home, though she escaped uninjured. She had been investigating a series of forced disappearances near the capital. In August, a reporter for Agence France-Presse and Radio France Internationale was detained and beaten by security forces while investigating the assassination of a general in Bujumbura.

The high levels of violence and intimidation that persisted throughout the year caused more than 50 journalists and media workers to flee the country in 2015, with most seeking refuge in neighboring countries. At year's end, prosecutors were seeking the extradition of several Burundian journalists from neighboring countries, including Rugurika; Muhozi; Anne Niyuhire, the director of Isanganiro Radio; and Patrick Nduwimana, the director of Bonesha FM.

Economic Environment: 22 / 40 (1)

Radio is the primary source of information for the majority of the population, and, with the destruction of the main private radio outlets after the attempted coup, the state-controlled broadcaster RTNB became the dominant source of information in both radio and television. The government operates Le Renouveau, the only daily newspaper. Private weekly and monthly print publications also circulate. The press runs of most newspapers remain small, and readership is limited. Similarly, most private broadcast outlets have a limited range. Prior to the May attacks on radio outlets, there were approximately 15 privately owned stations. Political parties, labor unions, and foreign nongovernmental organizations are prohibited from owning media outlets in the country. The British Broadcasting Corporation, Radio France Internationale, and Voice of America are available on FM radio in the capital.

The number of mobile-telephone subscribers has increased substantially in recent years, reaching nearly 3.2 million in 2015. Several private mobile companies operate alongside the state telecommunications company in Burundi, with an estimated mobile penetration rate of 31 percent. However, internet penetration remains very low, at 1.4 percent as of 2014, due to the high cost of service, and access remains largely confined to urban areas. Low literacy rates have also restrained the market for online news sources.

In the wake of the shuttering and destruction of several private radio stations in 2015, journalists and civil society members working in Burundi and abroad began operating the outlets online, disseminating news via text-message services, Twitter, Facebook, and the SoundCloud audio platform. However, the low internet penetration rate meant that the reach of these services was limited.

Copyright notice:  Freedom House, Inc.  All Rights Reserved
Freedom of the Press 2016 - Bangladesh

Publisher Freedom House Publication Date 26 April 2016 Cite as Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2016 - Bangladesh, 26 April 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57220da7e.html [accessed 24 October 2022] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

2016 Scores

Press Freedom Status: Not Free

Legal Environment: 18 / 30 (2) (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Political Environment: 27 / 40 (5) (0 = best, 40 = worst)

Economic Environment: 16 / 30 (0 = best, 30 = worst)

Press Freedom Score: 54 / 100 (7) (0 = best, 100 = worst)

Quick Facts

Population: 160,411,000

Net Freedom Status: Partly Free

Freedom in the World Status: Partly Free

Internet Penetration Rate: 9.6%

Status change explanation: Bangladesh's status declined from Partly Free to Not Free due to the murders of four bloggers and a publisher by Islamist militants, threats and nonfatal attacks against other writers, continued legal harassment of media outlets and press freedom advocates, government-sanctioned economic pressure on certain outlets, and attempts to censor social media.

Bangladesh's media environment suffered major setbacks in 2015. The year was marked by deadly attacks against bloggers and a spate of politically motivated legal cases against journalists. Growing concerns over state censorship  including of internet-based content  also had a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

Key Developments

Among other abusive legal cases against journalists, the chairman and a former employee of Ekushey TV were charged with sedition after the station aired a speech by an exiled politician.

In November, the government announced that online news portals would be required to register with the authorities, and that the accreditation of journalists at unregistered media outlets would be canceled.

Four bloggers who were critical of fundamentalist Islam were assassinated during the year. The involvement of Islamist extremist groups was suspected or confirmed in each of the attacks.

Several major companies discontinued advertising in the country's two largest opposition newspapers following pressure from military intelligence officials.

Legal Environment: 18 / 30 (2)

Although the constitution provides for freedom of expression, subject to "reasonable restrictions," the press is constrained by national security legislation as well as sedition and criminal libel laws, which are occasionally used to arrest and prosecute journalists.

Impunity is the norm for those who perpetrate crimes against journalists, and police investigations generally proceed slowly, if at all. Law enforcement authorities largely failed to curb or punish the series of violent attacks on bloggers and other writers during 2015. Officials sometimes advised those who felt threatened to stop writing or leave the country. However, in December, a Dhaka court convicted eight people for the 2013 murder of blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider. Two were sentenced to death, including the organizer of the attack, who was sentenced in absentia and remained at large.

Sedition laws can be applied broadly, and penalties range from fines to life in prison or even the death penalty if the accused is found to have undermined the constitution. Ekushey TV chairman Abdus Salam and former staffer Kanak Sarwar were arrested and charged with sedition in January and March 2015, respectively, after the station aired a speech by exiled Bangladesh Nationalist Party vice chairman Tarique Rahman; it was unclear at year's end whether a court date had been set for their trial. Journalists can also be arrested under the 1974 Special Powers Act  which allows detentions of up to 120 days without trial  for stories that are critical of government officials or policies. Reporters sometimes face contempt of court charges for critical reporting on judicial proceedings or personnel.

The opposition daily Amar Desh has faced a barrage of legal and regulatory threats over the past several years. In August 2015, acting editor and majority owner Mahmudur Rahman was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of corruption stemming from his time as an adviser to the previous national government. Several other cases against him were pending at year's end, including one for sedition in connection with a report questioning the impartiality of a government-established war crimes tribunal. A ban on the newspaper's print edition that had been enacted two years earlier remained in place throughout 2015. Another opposition newspaper, Prothom Alo, is frequently entangled in legal cases; its staff has characterized the proceedings, which have included charges of defamation and contempt of court, as a form of government intimidation.

Legislation adopted in 2013 to amend the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act  which covers online crimes including defamation and blasphemy  upheld the right of law enforcement agencies to arrest and indefinitely detain suspects without bail, and imposed no limits on officials' power during the investigatory period. In addition, penalties for online offenses are set at between 7 and 14 years in prison, regardless of whether the crime is related to defamation or national security. The ICT Act has been used to arrest and charge a number of individuals for online expression in recent years, including bloggers and mainstream journalists. In August 2015, the editor of the online portal Uttaradhikar 71 News, Probir Sikdar, was arrested for "tarnishing the image" of a cabinet member from the ruling Awami League after he wrote on Facebook that he had been threatened by the official as well as by a convicted war criminal and a businessman; the threats came after Sikdar had posted reports online about the two latter individuals. He was released on bail the next day following protests from freedom of expression advocates.

The 2009 Right to Information (RTI) Act, which applies to all information held by public bodies, has improved government transparency and accountability. It simplified the fees required to access information, overrode existing secrecy legislation, and granted greater independence to the Information Commission, tasked with overseeing and promoting the law. However, ongoing challenges include low response rates to requests for information and the need to increase awareness of the RTI Act among the general public and the authorities.

The Ministry of Information controls broadcast licensing for both commercial and community outlets. Television stations have occasionally been closed, ostensibly for being in breach of broadcasting regulations. A comprehensive broadcast policy, intended to simplify the existing patchwork of laws and regulations, has been under discussion for several years by a committee composed of government and industry representatives and other stakeholders. In 2014 the cabinet approved a draft broadcast policy that contained a range of potentially restrictive provisions, including a prohibition on programming deemed excessively critical of state priorities or threatening to national security and sovereignty. The measure called for the establishment of a nominally independent regulatory commission to oversee its implementation, but it also empowered the Ministry of Information to revoke the broadcasting licenses of noncompliant outlets. Parliament had yet to approve the policy at the end of 2015.

In November 2015, the government announced that all online news portals would be required to register with the authorities by December 15, and that the accreditation of journalists with unregistered media outlets would be canceled.

The government at times interferes with journalistic work through surveillance. Some journalists' e-mail correspondence is reportedly watched by police, and those brought in for questioning have been asked to supply personal internet passwords to intelligence officers. An official government committee was formed in March 2014 to monitor blogs and social-media sites and to identify individuals who produced or posted anti-Islamic content. The following month, it was reported that the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a security unit that has been accused of extrajudicial killings and other abuses, had attempted to procure advanced mobile surveillance technology from Neosoft, a Swiss company. The proposed purchase was halted following a May 2015 change to Switzerland's export licensing law designed to prevent the proliferation of surveillance technologies that could be used to commit human rights violations.

The actions of Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal, which is tasked with examining war crimes associated with the country's 1971 independence conflict, had a negative effect on advocacy for journalists' professional rights during the year. In December 2014, British journalist David Bergman was found guilty of contempt of court over articles in which he questioned the tribunal's conduct and its death-toll figures from the war. In response, 50 journalists, academics, writers, and activists signed a statement that was published in several newspapers, expressing concern over Bergman's conviction. (One withdrew her name shortly thereafter.) In January 2015, the tribunal demanded that the signatories explain their statement on the grounds that it challenged the tribunal's "transparency and openness." Subsequently, 26 signatories issued unconditional apologies, which the tribunal accepted. The remaining 23 were charged with contempt of court; one was convicted and 22 were eventually exonerated.

Political Environment: 27 / 40 (5)

The Bangladeshi media collectively present an array of views. However, political coverage can be highly partisan, as the owners of many private outlets exert editorial control that reflects their personal political affiliations. Private broadcast outlets are required to air selected government-produced news segments and official speeches. Reporting on labor disputes has become more biased, as businessmen involved in the garment industry have purchased both print and broadcast outlets. The coverage from these outlets often highlights violence or work disruptions initiated by workers, rather than the underlying labor rights issues.

Private media outlets risk government pressure in response to their coverage. In February 2015, the private broadcaster BanglaVision indefinitely suspended the television program Frontline, ostensibly because of technical problems. The show was known for its critical discussions on current affairs, and the authorities had reportedly attempted to interfere with the station's staffing and content in the weeks before the suspension.

Censorship of internet-based content has become increasingly common in Bangladesh, with periodic blocking of YouTube, Facebook, other social-media and messaging applications, and high-profile Bengali blogs in recent years. In November 2015, the government temporarily blocked the social-media platforms Facebook, Viber, and WhatsApp, allegedly to maintain public order at the time of the controversial sentencing of opposition leaders for war crimes dating back to 1971.

Death threats and attacks against bloggers have exacerbated self-censorship, leading many to stop writing, go into hiding, or leave the country. Some professional journalists practice self-censorship to avoid repercussions when reporting on sensitive topics like the military and judiciary. Tensions have increased in recent years with respect to coverage of the International Crimes Tribunal and the place of Islam in politics and society. Self-censorship can also stem from the business or political interests of media owners.

Journalists faced obstruction and violence while reporting in the field during 2015. Rajib Sen Prince, a correspondent with privately owned Mohona TV, was wounded in November 2015 when gunmen opened fire on a press vehicle returning from the funeral of an opposition leader who had been executed for war crimes.

There was also an increase in threats and retaliatory violence by criminal organizations, party activists, business owners, and Islamist groups. Extremist groups such as Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent were confirmed or suspected in four assassinations that targeted bloggers who had criticized Islamic fundamentalism; one of the bloggers, Bangladeshi American writer Avijit Roy, was stabbed and hacked to death while visiting Dhaka. His publisher was killed in a separate attack. Other bloggers were threatened or assaulted. In October, the radical Islamist group Ansarullah Bangla Team allegedly sent threats via e-mail to several media outlets, including the online newspaper BDNews24 and the Dhaka Tribune. The messages warned them against employing female staffers or criticizing either "jihadi activities" or the murderers of "atheists"; the authors also threatened to kill atheist bloggers living in Bangladesh or abroad.

The police and military intelligence agents have been known to threaten and physically attack journalists. Police brutality toward reporters and photographers attempting to document political protests or other sensitive events remains a concern. Some journalists receive threatening telephone calls from intelligence agencies seeking to prevent negative coverage.

Economic Environment: 16 / 30

There is a wide variety of privately owned daily and weekly print publications. Private broadcasting continues to expand, with more than 40 television and two dozen radio stations  including three commercial FM outlets and 14 community stations. The state directly owns or influences several broadcast outlets, including the public BTV, which remains the sole terrestrial television broadcaster with national reach.

Access to the internet is generally unrestricted, though the penetration rate was still less than 10 percent of the population as of 2014. During the past few years, the number of online news outlets, including news websites and internet-based radio stations, has increased dramatically, as has use of major social-networking sites.

Private broadcast and print media in Bangladesh are often owned by business conglomerates controlled by politically influential individuals or families with extensive assets in other industries, such as manufacturing and finance. Some such outlets allow the interests of their owners to influence their news coverage.

Many families in rural areas  where the majority of the country's population lives  do not have a reliable supply of electricity or cannot afford a television set. Access to television in urban areas is much more common. Low literacy rates in rural areas limit the reach of newspapers outside of urban centers.

Political considerations influence the distribution of government advertising revenue and subsidized newsprint, on which many publications depend. Private media owners and corporate interests are also able to influence content through the allocation of advertising. In 2015, the army's military intelligence wing successfully pressured a number of major companies to stop advertising in Prothom Alo and the Daily Star after both papers reported on a sensitive army operation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region in August.

Because salaries are often low, some journalists are open to bribes or other incentives to slant their coverage or suppress embarrassing or sensitive information.

Copyright notice:  Freedom House, Inc.  All Rights Reserved
North Korea's propaganda website Uriminzokkiri on Tuesday published a crude clip in which aimed shots blow up President Park Geun-hye and Cheong Wa Dae.

The three-minute clip first shows photos of Park and Cheong Wa Dae placed in crosshairs. Then a subtitle pops up, "The traitorous Park Geun-hye clique, which is calling for its own self-destruction, is in here."

Shortly afterwards, an image shows of Park and Cheong Wa Dae being shattered into pieces.
Halloween is nearly here. Find out when Trick-or-Treat is happening in Martinsville.

The leaves are changing, the evenings are getting cooler and excitement is building as Halloween draws closer.
Investigators concluded they simply do not know enough about the process used to get into the iPhone 5c belonging to gunman Syed Rizwan Farook to share any more with the public.

After failing to crack the security codes itself and seeking a court order that required iPhone-maker Apple to write new software to disable the phone's passcode protection, officials last month paid an outside firm more than $1.3 million to gain access.

The FBI confirmed Wednesday it will not reveal how it was able to gain access to the iPhone used by one of the shooters in last December's terror attack in San Bernardino, California.

 FBI Statement

In a statement released Wednesday, FBI Executive Assistant Director Amy Hess said the agency paid to crack the password protection but it "did not, however, purchase the rights to technical details about how the method functions, or the nature and extent of any vulnerability upon which the method may rely in order to operate."

"As a result, currently we do not have enough technical information about any vulnerability that would permit any meaningful review under the VEP [Vulnerabilities Equities Process] process," she said.

The VEP, or Vulnerabilities Equities Process, is a White House-led initiative in which government agencies debate whether to share software flaws with the companies that designed the software so the vulnerabilities can be fixed.

The White House says most flaws are shared, though exceptions are made in cases in which intelligence or law enforcement agencies may need to use the flaw in ongoing investigations. The FBI said it planned to inform the White House of its decision in coming days.

 Knotty Issue

The move, for now, sidesteps a contentious debate over not just the San Bernardino iPhone, but also about how the issue will be handled in future cases.

FBI officials have said previously that the technique used to access the data would not work on other so-called smart phones. FBI Director James Comey had hinted at the FBI decision Tuesday during a conference on cyber engagement at Georgetown University, saying "I think we're close to a resolution."

Comey also said Tuesday he was "very glad" the litigation with Apple regarding the iPhone encryption was over, though he cautioned, "it would be bad if the conversation this started ended."

 'Constructive Relationship'

The FBI director also sought to reassure private companies that the government and law enforcement are looking for what he described as a constructive relationship, similar to what many companies have with local fire departments, which understand the layout of their buildings in case of an emergency.

"We have to get to a place where it becomes routine for there to be an exchange, an appropriate lawful exchange of information," said Comey. "Even in the midst of an attack we don't want to read your memos, we don't want to read your e-mails," he said. "We need to understand how we can quickly get the indicators of attack so we can change the actor's behaviors."

But Comey cautioned it is not feasible to completely ban law enforcement agencies from access to personal devices. "The notion that they will be immune to judicial process takes us to a place we've never lived before," he said. "There has never been a time in the 240 years of our country that privacy was absolute."
Welcome to Club News, a weekly roundup of the latest news in the Big Country. To be included: in 75 words or less, send meeting highlights, guest speakers, officers elected, donations made or received, etc. We don't need the full minutes  just the decisions made or the fun things that happened. Information needed: when and where (with a full street address) the club meets and daytime contact information for questions. Only typed submissions can be accepted. To email the information, please put "club news" in the subject line and send to PublishMe@reporternews.com by 2 p.m. each Monday.

Kiwanis Club of Abilene

Next week, our club will recognize AISD's outstanding career and technology students from Abilene High, Cooper High, Holland Medical High and ATEMS High School. Scholarships will also be awarded to five career and technology students. Don't forget Pancake Day 8 a.m.-2 p.m. and 4-7 p.m. this Saturday at the Civic Center. Tickets are $5.00 in advance or $6.00 at the door. Enjoy all-you-can-eat IHOP pancakes, and visit our huge silent auction.

Regular meeting: noon Wednesdays, Abilene Country Club, 4039 S. Treadaway; club satellite, 6 p.m. first Tuesday of the month, Boys and Girls Club of Abilene-Martinez, 1301 Clinton St.

Contact: Jamie Breed, 672-7200.

Kiwanis Club of Greater Abilene

Quanah Parker and Nelson Wilson will present this week's program. They will entertain us with some old-time gospel music. If you are interested in joining a great civic organization, please contact a member for information.

Regular meeting: noon Thursdays, Beehive Restaurant, 442 Cedar St.

Contact: David McCaghren, 829-3030.

Rotary Club of Abilene

Dani Janka, Rotary exchange student from Hungary, will be guest speaker this week. Club members would like to thank the sponsors and participants who were responsible for making last week's Taste of Abilene a success. Proceeds from the event will be distributed to local nonprofits. Congratulations to Rotarian of the week, Dr. C.G. Gray.

Regular meeting: noon Fridays, Beehive Restaurant, 442 Cedar St.

Contact: Mary Beth Kilgore, 518-5288.

Rotary Club of Stamford

Judy Wilhelm, regional director, Texas Tech Small Business Development Center in Abilene, talked about the many services that are offered for small businesses in the 17-county area that they cover. She stressed the importance of doing homework on a business idea and having it evaluated before making a decision to plunge into a dream idea. She also presented a report from a survey that the SBDC and the Dallas Federal Reserve had conducted.
Another day, another warning of dire economic consequences for Britain if it decides to leave the European Union in a June 23 referendum.

The head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Wednesday that Britain's exit, also known as the "Brexit," would be a costly mistake that could result in a de facto "tax" on British families.

OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said during a news conference at the London School of Economics, "Unlike most taxes, however, this one will not finance the provision of public services or close the fiscal gap. The 'Brexit tax' would be a pure deadweight loss, a cost incurred with no economic benefit. ... Britons would be paying it for many years."

A report from the economic policy organization estimated that the economic blow would amount to 3 percent of Britain's gross domestic product as a result of what the group said would be a loss of confidence and a rise in uncertainty.

The de facto "tax" Gurria referred to would amount to $3,200 for each British household.

The remarks echoed a recent similar warning by the British treasury. A treasury study this month said the British economy would contract by 6 percent, resulting in an annual loss of $6,200 per household.
Today, just about the only time Mary Lee Cagle's name gets mentioned is when someone visits the Nazarene chapel in the Buffalo Gap Historic Village and reads an information placard about her.

But it wasn't always that way. Cagle was quite a sensation in her day. And she made her name right here in our own backyard.

Cagle founded the Nazarene congregation at Buffalo Gap in 1898, three years after coming west from her native Alabama. Cagle defied her family and society by becoming a preacher at a time when women weren't accepted in the pulpit.

She was a trailblazer and deserving of mention along with other women honored during Women's History Month, which is observed each March. Stan Ingersol, archivist for the Church of the Nazarene Global Ministry Center in Kansas, would be the first to put her on that same pedestal.

"In my opinion, she was the most significant of the early women preachers in the Nazarene Church," Ingersol said. "She was really the pioneer."

Ingersol first heard of Cagle when he attended Southern Nazarene University in Bethany, Oklahoma. He was so fascinated with Cagle's story that he wrote his dissertation about her when he earned a doctorate from Duke University Divinity School in 1989. Title of the dissertation was "Burden of Dissent: Mary Lee Cagle and the Southern Holiness Movement."

To this day, Ingersol still gets an occasional inquiry about the woman who he called a role model for women of later generations who followed her path into ministry.

"I don't get a lot," he said in a telephone interview, "but they do pop up from time to time."

And he is more than happy to talk about the woman and her remarkable story. In addition to writing his doctoral dissertation about Cagle, Ingersol also was featured in a video about her that was made by the Center for Public Television and Radio at the University of Alabama.

Cagle was born Mary Lee Wasson on Sept. 21, 1864, in Lawrence County, Ala. She was the daughter of John and Nancy Wasson. According to Ingersol's research, Cagle was raised as a Methodist and wanted to become a missionary. She was discouraged in that calling and instead became a schoolteacher.

In 1891, she married Robert Lee Harris, a Texas revivalist who had lived in Alabama as a child. Harris was a preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1894, Harris broke with the Methodist Church and launched a new holiness denomination known as the New Testament Church of Christ.

When he died a few months later, Mary Lee and two other women were responsible for expanding the new denomination. Mary Lee made it all the way to Buffalo Gap in 1895 and three years later organized a congregation that would become affiliated with the Church of the Nazarene.

Mary Lee also met a cowhand named H.C. Cagle when she moved to Buffalo Gap. First she converted him, and then she married him. According to Ingersol's research, an estimated 1,000 people gathered at the reunion grounds in Buffalo Gap to witness their marriage on Aug. 8, 1900. H.C., under Mary Lee's guidance, gave up being a cowhand and became a preacher.

According to Ingersol, Mary Lee Cagle convened the first annual meeting of the Texas Council of the New Testament Church of Christ in 1902. In 1904, she helped create the Holiness Church of Christ by leading her organization into union with the Independent Holiness Church. In 1908, the holiness denominations merged to form the present day Church of the Nazarene.

In 1908, Cagle's congregations in West Texas formed the Hamlin District, which later became the Abilene District, and then the West Texas District of the Church of the Nazarene.

"No other woman is really responsible for creating a whole district," Ingersol said.

Ingersol said a newspaper story he came across in his research referred to Cagle as "The Mother of Holiness in West Texas."

Ingersol said he learned from researching Cagle's life that she gained acceptance as a preacher because she kept her emotions intact.

"When there were tears," he said, "it was out of compassion," not emotion.

Long before Cagle earned the title of "The Mother of Holiness in West Texas," she had struggled to gain acceptance, even among family members. The video about her life tells of her parents' bitterness about her desire to become a preacher. A relative threatened to stop Cagle's nephews from calling her "Aunt Mary" if she continued her path toward preaching.

A scene in the video tells of Mary Lee bargaining with God to spare her husband, H.C. Cagle, when he was stricken with consumption.

"Lord," she prayed, "If you will heal my husband, I will preach."

According to the video, God responded, "Whether I heal your husband or not, won't you do what I ask?"

Her husband died a few days later, and Mary Lee took up preaching.

"From that day," the video says, "she never wavered again about her call."

Cagle died in 1955 and is buried in the Buffalo Gap Cemetery. According to an article in the Reporter-News, Cagle had been bedfast for two years. She made one of her last pulpit appearances on her 89th birthday in Rotan. She was carried to the front of the church, according to the article, where her career was summarized.

"After the eulogies," the article stated, "she was assisted to the pulpit where, supported by friends, she delivered a 30-minute sermon."
For 25 years, Texas historian Glen Ely researched, visited and documented sites along the Butterfield Overland Trail, with many of his travels crossing towns and remote areas of the Big Country.

The work wasn't just for fun or personal interest. Ely, who holds a doctorate from Texas Christian University, is a historian and writer. His 25 years of work is now chronicled in a 440-page book, with maps, photographs and stories.

Ely, who lives in Fort Worth, will be in Abilene Friday to sign copies of the book, "The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail 1858-1861." The book tells the stories of the people who brought the trail to life, including people in Taylor, Jones, Shackelford and other counties in the Big Country.

"The biggest part of the story is the human story," Ely said in a phone interview.

That includes the story of the trail's namesake, John Butterfield, who received a contract from Congress on March 3, 1857, to provide semiweekly mail and passenger stage service. It took another year-and-a-half before the service actually began.

One of the stops on the route was near Fort Chadbourne, 45 miles southwest of Abilene. Today, that stop is the only fully restored Butterfield stage station in Texas, thanks to Garland and Lana Richards, who created the Fort Chadbourne Foundation to restore and operate the fort as a historic site tourist attraction.

As significant as the Butterfield Overland Trail was to the history of the United States and to the people who used its passenger and mail service, it lasted only 30 months, from September 1858 to April 1861. But Ely said he found evidence that the trail continued to be used by travelers and the military long after the mail and passenger service ceased. It was so significant as a travel route that Ely called it the "Interstate of the 19th century."

Ely's book covers the portion of the trail that extended from the Red River to New Mexico. The entire trail stretched 2,800 miles from St. Louis to San Francisco.

"Although the action takes place within the Lone Star State," Ely wrote in a preface, "in many respects this is an American tale."

Even though the Butterfield Trail is associated with the Old West, it keeps popping up in current events. The National Park Service is working to get the trail designated a National Historic Trail. Part of that process included public hearings held in cities along the 2,800 miles of the trail. The final hearing was held in Abilene in April 2012.

Frank Norris, a historian with the National Park Service, attended the Abilene meeting. At the time, the various steps in the process were outlined. Norris said in an email that the process currently is in phase called the "special resource study and environmental assessment." That should be concluded in a few months, he said.

"Once this happens," Norris wrote, "the public will be able to obtain a copy of the study to make comments."

Even after the public comments, the process will be far from over. The final step will be submitting a formal document to Congress for approval, a process that could take months or years.

The current process isn't the first. At one time, the state Legislature tried to get the Texas portion of the trail designated a state highway. And, Ely said that in the 1930s, an organization called the National Trail Association tried get national status for the Butterfield Trail.

"Nothing ever came of it," he said.

IF YOU GO:

What: Book signing

When: 4:30-5:30 p.m. Friday

Where: Texas Star Trading Co., 174 Cypress St.

Author: Glen Ely

Book: "The Texas Frontier and the Butterfield Overland Mail 1858-1861," published by the University of Oklahoma Press

BUTTERFIELD OVERLAND MAIL STAGE ROUTE

March 3, 1857: Congress authorizes a mail contract to John Butterfield providing semiweekly mail and passenger stage service from St. Louis to San Francisco. Each trip had to be completed within 25 days.

Sept. 15, 1858: First mail run begins in St. Louis

March 1, 1861: Butterfield Overland Mail route ends service

$2 million: Value of contract with John Butterfield

$600,000: Amount of annual compensation paid to Butterfield and associates for carrying the mail, in addition to receipts for passengers and express

2,795: Miles from St. Louis to San Francisco, along the Butterfield route

2,000: Number of people employed by Butterfield Overland Mail

10 cents: Postage rate per half ounce, resulting in receipts totaling $119,766.77 in 1860

Source: Texas State Historical Commission's Handbook of Texas Online
A skull found near a South Carolina elementary school last year has been identified as that of a Cooper High School graduate missing for more than two years.

The Associated Press reported that a coroner identified the skull as belonging to 28-year-old Nicole Goodlett of Spartanburg, South Carolina. The mother of three had been reported missing by her family in March 2014.

Goodlett played softball at Cooper before graduating in 2003, according to Reporter-News archives.

The skull was found in woods about 100 yards from an elementary school by a hunter last fall. The AP reported that DNA was used to make the identification, and there was no sign of trauma. The cause of death has not been determined.

Law enforcement personnel in Spartanburg County, where Goodlett was last seen, searched extensively for the woman when she was reported missing. Goodlett's disappearance was featured on HLN's 'Nancy Grace' program, Dateline NBC's website, the Huffington Post and other media outlets.

Goodlett's father, James Goodlett, of Abilene, a retired Air Force master sergeant, and his wife, Bozena Goodlett, traveled to South Carolina several times to appeal to the media there.

'It's been a very difficult time,' James Goodlett told the Reporter-News in June 2014. 'The days are pretty much the same. You wonder what went wrong and what you could have done differently.'
In the Democratic and Republican presidential races right now, we're hearing a lot of claims about electability in general-election matchups.

Ted Cruz says he's the only Republican who can beat Hillary Clinton in November, while John Kasich is staying in the race because, he maintains, he's the one GOP candidate who can appeal to swing voters in November. And Bernie Sanders' campaign argues that he, not Clinton, would be the strongest general-election candidate.

We're finally getting to the point where, with seven months left to go, general election polls begin to be meaningful. Yet they can be misleading. How should we read the early numbers?

Political scientists have found that, historically, polls on potential general-election matchups don't become more reliable in a steady, gradual arc as the months and weeks go by. Instead, after starting off as essentially meaningless, they ratchet up sharply in two steps.

We are just nearing the end of the first stage, when primary and caucus voters first learned about the candidates and formed opinions about them that can be reflected in the November matchups. The second phase occurs at roughly 100 days before the election, corresponding to the parties' conventions. Once the nominees are known and the general-election campaigns begin, polls do a good job of predicting the outcome.

The polls this year could be somewhat less predictive than usual, because both nominations remain contested. Some partisans who will eventually support their party's nominee are working hard against that candidate right now, and are focused on all the reasons to oppose him or her. That is why we can expect the winners on both sides to get a boost once they win because the parties will at least partially unite behind them.

Normally the parties will rally around the winner. That will almost certainly be true on the Democratic side this year. As the Sanders campaign has signaled throughout the campaign, he'll be a good team player for the fall election.

On the Republican side, who knows? Trump can't fully unite the party if he wins the nomination, and it's possible he'll prevent unity if he loses. And it isn't clear that Cruz could unite the rest of the party, if he's the winner, even without Trump throwing bombs from the sidelines. But expect at least some boost for the eventual nominee anyway. The incentives to unite are strong. There's no way to know what the Republican Party will look like after its convention in Cleveland.

If you believe, for example, that a Trump Republican Party could be united, then you would expect his favorability ratings to move up sharply from their current very low levels.

Voters could also be swayed by new things they learn about the candidates. In the case of Cruz or Sanders, who are still relative unknowns to the general electorate, believe it or not, voters would likely learn more about how ideologically extreme they are, and this would almost certainly hurt them in the general election.

Trump and Clinton are much better known, so new information, on its own, is less likely to change what people think of them.

The candidate who wins the popular vote will almost certainly win the Electoral College. For now  and until October  focus on how the national vote is shaping up. And state polls are a distraction until then.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist covering U.S. politics.
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All 20 North Korean waitresses in a restaurant in Ningbo, China wanted to defect to South Korea early this month, but seven decided not to come because of their families back in the North, the National Intelligence Service here said Wednesday.

The NIS was defending itself in the National Assembly's Intelligence Committee against North Korean claims that it abducted them.

The seven decided not to join their defecting colleagues at the last minute, the NIS said.

The seven were paraded before CNN in Pyongyang recently, where they claimed the defection was an abduction orchestrated by South Korean authorities.

But the NIS said the 13 others left China on their own using their valid North Korean passports.

The spy agency said many North Korean restaurants in China and other countries have closed as customers kept away amid international sanctions against the North.

Meanwhile, the NIS said North Korea has completed preparations for another nuclear test and officials are only waiting for the go-ahead from leader Kim Jong-un.

And it added that the recent test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile was the most successful yet, though it did not fly very far, suggesting the weapon could be warfare-ready in three or four years.

In other news, the NIS said the North Korean regime did not bother inviting foreign dignitaries to an imminent Workers Party congress, though it is giving access to international media.

Business in North Korean markets is slow as people are being press-ganged into preparations for the party congress, giving rise to some discontent among ordinary people.

The regime announced the same day that the first party congress in 36 years will start in Pyongyang on May 6.
Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni delivers a speech during the opening day of the World Climate Change Conference 2015, Nov. 30, 2015

More than 50 members of Cambodias beleaguered opposition party are asking King Norodom Sihamoni to intervene in the countrys increasingly tense political arena, RFAs Khmer Service has learned.

In an April 27 letter, 53 Cambodian National Rescue Party members told the king that the arrests of lawmakers, environmentalists and political pressure put on nongovernmental organizations is hamstringing the political process.

The political tension, if allowed to continue without a timely solution, will lead Cambodia to go backward, just like in the past, where top state institutions like the national assembly, courts and other institutions lost their independence, the lawmakers wrote.

The Cambodian government has arrested more than a dozen opposition lawmakers including Senator Hong Sok Hour, CNRP media director Meach Sovannara and Un Sam An, an opposition member of parliament.

CNRP chief Sam Rainsy went into self-imposed exile following his removal from parliament on Nov. 16 by Prime Minister Hun Sens ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) because of a warrant issued for his arrest in a seven-year-old defamation case.

The CNRP lawmakers told the king that recent political arrests can hamper to democratic process, human rights, rule of law which is guaranteed by the constitution.

The spokesman for the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party Sok Ey San accused the rival CNRP of exaggerating.

People are happy across the country, he said. They intend to scare people, however, the people are aware about it, he said.

Sok Ey San also accused the CNRP of misleading the king.

They are lying to the King, he said. They dont speak the truth about our society.

It is exceptionally rare for the king to intervene in political matters and it would be out of character for Norodom Sihamoni who The Phnom Penh Post labeled the quiet king.

Norodom Sihamoni did, however, pardon Sam Rainsy in 2012. On November 13, 2015, an arrest warrant was issued for him over a 2008 defamation case and he was removed from offices and stripped of his legislative immunity. He has been staying in France or traveling since then.

Reported by Leng Neang for RFA's Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Brooks Boliek.
Military authorities here said on Wednesday that satellite pictures from early this month show the half-size replica at the Taewon-ri shooting range on the outskirts of Pyongyang.

North Korea has recently built what is believed to be a replica of Cheong Wa Dae at a shooting range near Pyongyang in preparation for a live-fire drill.

The pictures also show some 30 artillery pieces, presumed to be field guns and multiple rocket launchers covered with camouflage screens, about 1 km away from the replica.

"It seems highly likely that the regime will stage a massive live-fire drill soon to practice hitting the replica," a Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman speculated.

The spokesman speculated that the regime is trying to create unity by agitating against South Korea ahead of a massive Workers Party congress on May 6.

Back on Feb. 24, the Norths Supreme Command called Cheong Wa Dae its "primary target."

The regime has since ratcheted up threats. On March 23, the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland threatened to "pulverize Cheong Wa Dae in an instant." In an "ultimatum" on March 26, frontline Army units said they were "waiting for an order to launch a preemptive strike on Cheong Wa Dae."

On April 5, a website showed a crude animation of an MRL attack on Cheong Wa Dae.
After a vote by China's parliament foreign rights groups like Oxfam come under new police controls in China.

In a move rights activists say is aimed at "strangling" the country's embattled civil society, China's parliament on Thursday approved a new law that will require overseas rights groups and other nongovernmental organizations to submit to police control.

The standing committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) adopted the Overseas NGOs Domestic Activities Management Law, which enables police to engage in daily supervision and monitoring of foreign civil society and rights groups operating in China. The law goes into Jan. 1, 2017.

Rights groups hit out at the move, which comes amid an ongoing crackdown on NGO activities under the administration of President Xi Jinping.

"Beijing hardly needs more ammunition to crack down on civil society groups, Sophie Richardson, China director at the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Thursday.

"The NGO Law is like many others of the Xi Jinping era: ever-stronger tools to legalize Chinas human rights abuses," she said.

Meanwhile, the overseas-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) network called for the law to be repealed until significant revisions are made to conform with international human rights standards.

Most worrisome

It said the "most worrisome" aspect of the new legislation is that it hands full authority for the registration and supervision of foreign NGOs in China to the country's ministry of public security.

Under the law, Chinese police will be able to enter the premises of foreign NGOs and seize documents and other information, as well as examine groups' bank accounts and limit incoming funds.

They will also have the power to cancel any activities, revoke an organization's registration, impose administrative detention on its workers, as well as taking part in the annual assessment of foreign NGOs, required for the renewal their operating permit.

The new law will also allow police to blacklist NGOs deemed guilty of national security-related crimes like subversion or separatism. Critics say definitions of what constitutes such crimes remain vague and subject to arbitrary interpretation by the authorities.

NGOs operating in China, foreign or otherwise, are already subject to low-level police harassment in the form of invitations to "drink tea," and the new law legitimizes such tactics, sources have told RFA.

"This is a clear indication the government views such groups as a threat to national security," CHRD said, adding that the restrictions on overseas NGOs will also have a negative impact on Chinese civil society groups.

"The legislation will [also] deliver a heavy blow to mainland [Chinese] NGOs, which rely heavily on overseas NGOs financial support due to insurmountable obstacles to securing funding inside China," the group said.

The NPC passed a Charities Law on Mar. 16 that will bar Chinese NGOs from raising funds without government approval on pain of criminal investigation.

Government fear

Veteran Chinese journalist Ma Xiaoming said the Chinese government fears any activity that it doesn't directly control.

"In an authoritarian state, no civil society organization can exist without the approval of the regime," he said. "Those who don't go through this process must be eliminated."

"It doesn't matter if they are religious organizations or civil society groups; they are all regarded as the tools of the state," he said. "This law exists to fulfil the psychological needs of the leadership."

Xi's government has cited concerns that foreign NGOs might be used by overseas governments to promote their objectives, values, or political agendas, according to official media reports.

According to rights activist Xiucai Jianghu, the new law is the latest in a string of attacks on dissent by Xi's administration.

"The Chinese government is terrified of organized dissent, and that's why it's going after NGOs," he said. "Wherever people get together and organize something, there is a spirit of togetherness and unity, and that's exactly what they are afraid of."

"They don't want to let a single NGO survive; they want to eradicate them totally."

Guangdong labor rights activist Guo Chunping agreed, saying groups like his will find it increasingly difficult to operate.

"This is intended as an obstacle, to make it so that nobody can carry out activities that threaten the government," Guo said. "They want to make it impossible or extremely difficult for foreign groups thinking of entering China to do so."

The ruling Chinese Communist Party is increasingly using charges related to national security to target the peaceful activities of civil society groups, human rights activists and dissidents, rights groups have warned.

300 detained

More than 300 human rights lawyers, law firm staff, associated rights activists and family members have been detained, summoned, held under house arrest or surveillance, 'disappeared' or been banned from leaving China since last July, according to the Chinese Human Rights Lawyers' Concern Group (CHRLCG).

Official media have already cited the detention and deportation last January of Swedish human rights worker Peter Dahlin as an example of undesirable foreign activity in China.

Dahlin's group, which trained rights lawyers across the country, was accused of helping petitioners to undermine China's international image by "hyping up" stories of ordinary people with complaints against the government.

Officials say there are currently more than 7,000 overseas NGOs in China, carrying out environmental protection, science and technology, educational, and cultural activities.

Reported by Xin Lin for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Wen Yuqing for the Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
Authorities in the Chinese capital are holding Tibetan poet and author Tsering Woeser and her dissident writer husband Wang Lixiong under house arrest during a visit to Beijing by a U.S. non-government group, Woeser said via Twitter.

Wang and Woeser have been prevented from leaving their Beijing home by state security police since Monday, and the restrictions will remain in place until Friday, Woeser wrote.

"The Beijing state security police told us that it's because of a delegation from the American Himalayan Foundation which arrived in Beijing [on Monday]," she wrote.

"I hope that the American Himalayan Foundation will come to hear of our house arrest during their visit," she said, adding: "I had never heard of this organization."

Woeser and Wang have already been prevented from leaving China, with Wang prevented from boarding a plane for Japan by border guards at Beijing's Capital International Airport in December.

Repeated calls to Woeser's phone and to the American Himalayan Foundation, rang unanswered on Tuesday.

The foundation builds schools, trains healthcare professionals, subsidizes education and healthcare and helps protect cultural artifacts and the environment across the Himalayan region, according to its official website.

It also funds campaigns to stop the trafficking of girls and to save tigers.



Invisible Tibet

Woeser has used her blog "Invisible Tibet," together with poetry, historical research, and social media platforms to give voice to millions of ethnic Tibetans who are prevented from expressing themselves to the outside world by government curbs on information.

In a recent commentary written for RFA's Mandarin Service, she hit out at the politicization of a centuries-old Tibetan Buddhist dispute by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Wang has written several works on Tibetan issues, including Sky Burial: The Fate of Tibet, and has also spoken out about the large-scale losses to Tibetan culture during the state-sponsored destruction of the Cultural Revolution.

In a recent commentary broadcast on RFA's Mandarin Service, he detailed the ruling Chinese Communist Party's mass killing of Tibetan rebels following the arrival of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the region in 1950 and the policies of "class struggle" that divided Tibetan society against itself.

Wang is best-known for his 1991 apocalyptic political parable "Yellow Peril" which prophesies a China embroiled in political, economic, cultural, demographic and ecological crisis and the country's collapse. The novel and his nine other books are banned in mainland China.

Reported by Hai Nan for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
Myanmar protesters and monks from the hard-line Buddhist group Ma Ba Tha rally outside the U.S. embassy in Yangon, April 28, 2016.

About 300 Myanmar nationalists on Thursday publicly excoriated the United States for using the term Rohingya to refer to the stateless, Muslim, ethnic minority group that has long lived in the western part of the country, despite the Buddhist majoritys view that they are illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh.

Buddhist monks and other protesters marched from Yangon University to the American embassy in the commercial city, where some made speeches opposing the U.S. embassys use of Rohingya in a statement issued on April 20.

The U.S. embassy should take care using such controversial terms, said Pamaukkha, a prominent monk from the nationalist Buddhist group Ma Ba Tha. They used the term Rohingya instead of Bengalisillegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

International diplomats should study Myanmars history, he said. I want to declare something here to all foreign countries through the U.S. embassy that there is no such ethnicity as Rohingya in our country.

About 1.1 million Rohingya live in Rakhine state where authorities have imposed harsh restrictions on their movement and access to social services such as health care. The previous government considered them illegal immigrants, although many have lived in Myanmar for generations.

Win Ko Ko Lat, leader of the Myanmar National Network, which organizes demonstrations, said the U.S. embassy had insulted Myanmars sovereignty by using the term Rohingya instead of Bengali.

We dont have a Rohingya ethnicity here, Win Ko Ko Lat said. If the embassy continues using this term, we will strongly reject it and protest.

The protesters had received permission to protest at Boseinhyman stadium in Bahan township, but decided to march instead, said Lt. Col. Kyaw Htut, head of the western Yangon region police.

About about 100 security personnel were deployed during the event, he said.

Protest organizers now face charges for holding the demonstration in an unapproved location, he said.

Extending condolences

In its statement, the U.S. embassy extended condolences to the families of 21 people who died when a boat transporting them capsized on April 19. The statement cited local reports that identified the victims as Rohingya who lived in an internally displaced peoples camp in Sittwe in western Myanmars Rakhine state.

We were saddened by the news about those who tragically lost their lives after a boat capsized near Thae Chaung in Sittwe township on April 19, and we extend our condolences to the families of the victims, who local reports state were from the Rohingya community, it said.

More than 100,000 Rohingya were forced to live in apartheid-like conditions in squalid camps after violence erupted between them and local Buddhists in 2012, leaving more than 200 dead and tens of thousands homeless. Since then, thousands of others have fled persecution on rickety boats to other Southeast Asian countries.

The demonstration took place a day after President Htin Kyaw accepted the credentials of the new U.S. Ambassador Scot Marciel.

State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy (NLD) party came to power at the beginning of April, has so far failed to address the Rohingya issue, prompting criticism from rights groups.

A government spokesman told Reuters on Thursday that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was dealing with the name issue, but provided no further details.

Reported by Kyaw Lwin Oo, Kyaw Zaw Win and Htet Arkar. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Let's talk about missiles.

They have, after all, been in the news over the past couple of days.

And no, I'm not referring to yesterday's embarrassment at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, when -- with Vladimir Putin in attendance -- the much-hyped launch of a rocket had to be delayed for a day due to a technical glitch.



No, I'm referring to something else. I'm referring to yesterday's formal appeal to the Kremlin by two State Duma deputies for Russia to deploy missiles to Cuba.

Yeah, you heard that right.



The proposal is purportedly in retaliation for U.S. plans to deploy a rocket launching system in southeastern Turkey across the border from Syria to fight Islamic State militants.



"We consider it possible in today's circumstances to use corresponding Soviet experience in deterring U.S. expansionist ambitions," the lawmakers wrote.

Apparently, one Cuban Missile Crisis wasn't enough for these guys. They want a do-over.



Now this, of course, isn't going to happen.

But that isn't the point. Carefully orchestrated crackpot ideas like this get floated for a reason -- to create the illusion that Russia is engaged in a twilight struggle with the West, that it is a superpower again.

And the easiest way to do this is to flaunt your nukes, to flex your missiles.

But that illusion is difficult to maintain when your brand new cosmodrome -- which has been plagued by embezzlement scandals, construction delays, and unpaid wages -- can't even pull off a simple rocket launch on time with the president in attendance.

Keep telling me what you think in the comments section, on The Power Vertical's Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.
The European Union says it has postponed an EU-Ukraine Summit that was scheduled for next month until September.

A European Commission spokeswoman said on April 27 that the delay was agreed to in order to give the new government in Kyiv the necessary time to carry out political and financial reforms in the country.

The summit was to have been held in Brussels on May 19 and attended by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

"In the meantime, the new Ukrainian government will pursue work on delivering its reform commitments" under the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, the spokeswoman said.

"The rescheduling of the summit should also allow for the review of the IMF [International Monetary Fund] program to be concluded," she added.

The EU's Association Agreement with Ukraine was the main issue behind a crisis in the country that led to the 2014 ousting of pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych, who rejected the deal.

Based on reporting by AFP and dpa
Iran's fractious political camps clash on April 29 in runoff votes to finalize the makeup of parliament two months after a split result dealt a blow to hard-liners but failed to produce a majority.

There are reasons to watch the voting again this time around, even if the contests make less of an international splash than when reformists and moderates came back in from the political cold in late February.

Nearly one-quarter of Iran's 290 national legislative seats are at stake in the Friday vote, in which President Hassan Rohani and his reformist and moderate allies hope to consolidate their recent gains and minimize the power of the conservatives, who lost dozens of seats in the February 26 elections but still hold most of the cards in a number of other, more powerful institutions.

The runoffs won't redefine power in the Islamic republic because the parliament lacks influence on key national issues, which ultimately lie under the control of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Even determining which political camp -- reformists and moderates, independents, or hard-liners and conservatives -- or combination of camps holds a parliamentary majority is difficult because Iran lacks rigid party affiliations and some independent candidates are claimed by more than one bloc.

Tilting The Balance?

"After an inconclusive first round, the runoff[s] will determine the final balance of power," says Ali Vaez, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group (ICG).

In February, conservatives were credited with winning around 112 seats in the 290-seat parliament, the reformist-moderate camp 90, and independents 29 seats, according to a tally by the Reuters news agency.

That showing for the reformist-moderate camp was particularly significant since it has had little representation in the current legislature, which is dominated by conservatives and hard-liners. Reformists and moderates also had to endure election-vetting authorities' exclusion of hundreds of their candidates.

Reformists boycotted the last parliamentary elections, in 2012, in response to a government crackdown on the opposition that included mass arrests, allegations of torture, and televised trials after the disputed presidential election in 2009.

The last time the reformists and moderates had this much representation in parliament was during reformist President Mohammad Khatami's first term in office, beginning in 1997.

Sixty-eight seats in small towns scattered around 21 of Iran's 31 provinces are being contested in the April 29 runoffs. Mohammad Reza Aref, a leader of the reformist-moderate camp, has set a target of at least 40 of those seats to secure an upper hand in the next parliament, although observers have lowered expectations.

"The reformist-moderate camp has a difficult task ahead," Vaez says. "Turnout, particularly of their constituents, is usually lower in the second round."

Hung Parliament

Dozens of candidates who have no clear factional affiliation entered the parliament in the first round, and scores more are in runoffs. "These first-time lawmakers usually join one of the political blocs that form after the new parliament convenes," Vaez says. "When that happens in May, their choices could tilt the balance of power."

Both the conservative camp and the reformist-moderate camp will look to absorb as many independents as possible to try to create a majority. The success of independents, however, could also prove a pitfall.

"The independents could split the legislature by creating pragmatist and conservative blocs of equal weight, thus giving rise to a hung parliament that slows down -- rather than facilitates -- decision making," Vaez says.

Multiple Power Centers

One unlikely outcome, a decisive majority for the reformist-moderate camp, could strengthen Rohani's hand in his bid to push for mild reform via legislation, along with economic changes, including new laws to encourage foreign investment and the privatization of state industries.

Yet parliament lacks influence over Iran's foreign policy and important national issues, with hard-line allies of the supreme leader controlling many key institutions, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), the Guardians Council, and the powerful judiciary.

"The parliament is not going to be a decisive force on its own," says Scott Lucas, an Iran specialist at Birmingham University in Britain and editor of the EA World View website.

During Khatami's first four-year term in office, both the legislative and executive branches were in reformist hands, yet their reforms were blocked by the Guardians Council, which supervises elections and interprets Iran's constitution, among other things.

Lucas says he expects no decisive victory for any camp in the runoffs. "It's precisely because there won't be a defined majority in parliament that the infighting will continue and you have tension between a whole range of different power centers like the judiciary, intelligence, IRGC, the supreme leader, and the president's office," he says.

Women In Record Numbers

More than a dozen women are competing in runoffs. Combined with the 14 declared female winners in the February vote, that could translate into 20 or so women in parliament. Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the highest number of female legislators has been 14.

There are only nine female lawmakers in the current legislature, or a little over 3 percent of the total.

The female candidates, most of them reformists or independents, could possibly give Rohani more leverage in passing legislation to empower women and loosen the social and political constraints imposed on them by the clerical authorities. Rohani made issues of gender discrimination part of his platform for office, and he appointed several female vice presidents.
Azerbaijani officials said on April 28 that one civilian was killed and 8 were injured by an artillery strike from the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh overnight.

The statement came hours after Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry claimed that forces in Nagorno-Karabakh had shelled Azerbaijan's Terter and Agdam districts in violation of a cease-fire deal that went into effect on April 5.

De facto officials from the breakaway territory rejected Azerbaijan's claims and accused Baku of using tanks, mortars, flame throwers, and multiple-launch rocket systems for military attacks against the region.

Separatist leaders in Stepanakert said earlier this week that three of their soldiers were killed by Azerbaijani attacks.

Earlier this month, Nagorno-Karabakh saw its worst violence since a 1994 cease-fire effectively froze the conflict there between Azerbaijan and the Armenian-backed separatists.

Based on reporting by Trend and Interfax


Police in Pakistan have arrested a man in Karachi on charges of slitting his sisters throat and letting her bleed to death -- the latest so-called "honor killing" in the country.

Police say 20-year-old Hayat Khan used a kitchen knife to murder his 16-year-old sister Sumaira after he found her talking to a man on her mobile phone at their home in Karachis low-income Orangi Town neighborhood on April 27.

Neighbors reported seeing him throw her out of the house where she continued to bleed and writhe in pain until she died.

Investigators said she also suffered multiple stab wounds to the neck, chest, and back.

Pakistan amended its criminal code in 2005 to prevent men who kill female relatives from escaping punishment by pardoning themselves as an "heir" of the victim.

But judges can rule whether prison should be imposed when other relatives of the victim forgive the killer.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed to eradicate the "evil" of honor killings in February but no fresh legislation has been proposed since then.

Based on reporting by AFP and Dawn
The crowd parts as the elderly woman in the conservative beige overcoat and white head scarf makes her way to the front, demanding to be heard.

"We will never allow them to sell our land!" Ogiza Makhambetova shouts, pumping her raised right arm defiantly. "Let them shoot us! I am ready to die!"

But the lifelong geologist really gets the crowd roaring when she demonstratively tugs at the lapels of her overcoat, exposing the traditional Kazakh camisole she is wearing underneath.

Fellow protesters quickly step in to cover her up, but it's already been revealed that for the Kazakh people, their land is a point of national pride.

This Land Is Our Land

The protesters had come out in large numbers -- in the high hundreds, or a few thousand, depending on estimates -- for an unsanctioned rally in an unauthorized place.

But the main square of Atyrau, capital of western Kazakhstan's agriculturally challenged but oil-rich Atyrau Province, was the perfect setting.

They gathered at the foot of a large monument to Isatai Taimanuly and Makhambet Otemisuly -- local heroes who rebelled against Russian ownership of Kazakh land in the 19th century. There they protested against government plans to soon put 1.7 million hectares of fallow Kazakh agricultural land up for auction as of July 1.

The government's idea is that it can make poor or unused land productive again under the stewardship of private owners, all in accordance with amendments to the Land Code adopted in November.

But ever since Kazakh Economy Minister Erbolat Dosaev announced the auction on March 30, public anger has spread on social media and in cities across the country.

One major concern is that the land will not go to small farmers, but to moneyed elites. That fear was expressed by an unidentified protester at the April 24 rally in Atyrau who suggested that oligarchs, after having "bought everything else in the country," would now be able to buy "sacred Kazakh land."

The second is that foreigners -- specifically, the Chinese -- will end up sowing Kazakh fields. Views on that prospect are spelled out clearly on signs held up in Atyrau: "The destiny of the land is the destiny of the nation!" and "Selling the land is selling the motherland!"

"These two lost their lives fighting for the land!" shouts an unidentified protester standing near Istatai and Makhambet's monument. "They did not fight for their own property. They fought and died for our land! They started their fight when the land started being taken and sold!"

WATCH: People gathered in Kazakhstan to protest against a government decision to privatize agricultural land. In the coastal town of Aqtau on the Caspian Sea, police intervened and forced people to leave. (RFE/RL's Kazakh Service)

Sowing Controversy

The government has scrambled to tamp down the protests by offering assurances that foreigners will not be buying land, and issuing warnings to anyone who says otherwise.

Agriculture Minister Asylzhan Mamytbekov said on April 14 that only Kazakh citizens and companies owned by Kazakh nationals would be eligible to participate in the upcoming auction, which would involve less than 2 percent of Kazakhstan's agricultural land.

His effort to "clarify the situation" did little to alleviate concerns, however, and within days dozens of Kazakh intellectuals issued an open letter to President Nursultan Nazarbaev urging him "to be careful" and declaring that "the people's opinion must be taken into account."

Deputy Economy Minister Qayirbek Oskenbaev followed up a week later, stressing that foreigners were only legally allowed to rent, not own, agricultural land, and would not be participating in the auction.

That failed to sway the large number of protesters who gathered in Atyrau, however, leaving President Nazarbaev to hammer the point home while addressing the Assembly of the Peoples of Kazakhstan on April 26.

The president reiterated that foreigners would only be allowed to rent land under leases of 10 to 25 years, and threatened that "those who spread false information, saying that the land will be sold to foreigners, must be apprehended and punished."

The next day, hundreds came out for rallies in the northwestern city of Aqtobe and the northeastern city of Semei, arguing that Kazakh land should not be owned -- or rented, for that matter -- by anyone but Kazakhs.

WATCH: Protests were held in two Kazakh cities against a government decision to privatize agricultural land. At the rare public demonstrations in Kazakhstan on April 27, speakers called for the land to be kept in public hands and not rented to foreigners. (RFE/RL's Kazakh Service and amateur video)

On April 28, dozens gathered in the center of the city of Aqtau in Kazakhstan's west, protesting the government's decision. However, when the protesters started criticizing Nazarbaev personally, police interfered and forced the protester to leave.

Long Row To Privatize

As Kazakhstan made the transition from a planned to a market economy, the government for years tried to address the Soviet legacy of state-owned collective farms and sell citizens on the idea of land privatization.

The effort has encountered stiff resistance, however -- even causing the government led by Imanghali Tasmaghambetov to resign in 2003 after lawmakers refused to support a bill on land sales.

This time, lawmakers are behind the arguments laid out by Economy Minister Dosaev when he presented the proposed Land Code amendments to the upper house of parliament last year.

He noted that nearly all of the country's agricultural land was being leased long-term from the government, with only 1.2 percent in private hands. Selling the land to private entities by way of auctions, he argued, would help increase land values, while also giving farmers the first opportunity to buy land they currently rent -- at a 50 percent discount.

Lawmakers were sold, and passed the bill. But the people are still not buying it.

Deep-Rooted Concerns

There is a historical basis for Kazakhs to be wary of land transfers.

There was the decision under tsarist rule to allow Russian settlers to own Kazakh land, which played a large part in the 1836-38 rebellion in which Taimanuly and Otemisuly played prominent roles.

There were also the treaties between the Russian Empire and China that divided up Central Asia in the 18 century, and whose repercussions are still felt in Kazakhstan. The treaties have left Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs in what is today China's Xinjiang Province, and ethnic Kazakhs living in northwestern districts of the province.

And then there was the Soviet experience, during which Central Asian borders were shifted.

After the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, many areas historically populated by Kazakhs were hived off to the Soviet Russian regions of Altai Krai, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Tyumen, and Astrakhan. Even the first capital of Soviet Kazakhstan, Orenburg, was incorporated into Russia in 1925 because of a border change.

Now, years after the fall of the Soviet Union, many Kazakh believe their land is again under threat.

Trust Issues

One of the organizers of the Atyrau gathering, Talghat Ayanov, underscored the distrust protesters feel toward Astana.

"The decision to sell land was made without taking into account the opinions of ordinary people," he told RFE/RL's Current Time television on April 27. "We are afraid that the government might use this law to satisfy their own needs, as they have been doing for a long time using other laws and regulations they have established for themselves."

Such sentiments do not often reveal themselves in Kazakhstan, where the authorities took steps to limit public protests following deadly unrest in the western city of Zhanaozen in 2011.

But being obedient is something best left to lawmakers, the elderly Makhambetova told her audience in Atyrau. "It is written in our constitution that the land belongs to the people. Now they are amending it. The lawmakers are doing it," she shouted.

"But who are they? They are those who lie down when they are ordered to lie down, they are those who sit when those above them order them to sit."

It is in times like these, she harangued, that the people must "gather like this to show our common fist to them openly and clearly!

Written by Merhat Sharipzhan and Michael Scollon, with reporting by Sania Toiken of RFE/RL's Kazakh Service, and Current Time television
Kazakhstan's Prosecutor-General Zhaqip Asanov has issued a warning that it is a crime to spread "false information about land privatization."

In his April 28 statement, Asanov said information that has been published by media and on the Internet in recent days about possible land ownership by foreigners was "false."

He said "the false data contain calls for unauthorized public gatherings and elements of inciting social discord, which is punishable by law."

Asanov's warning came a day after hundreds of people rallied in Kazakhstan's northwestern city of Aqtobe and the northeastern city of Semei to protest against the government's decision to privatize public land through auctions beginning on July 1.

On April 24, at least 1,000 residents of the western city of Atyrau protested against the plan. The protesters said the land should not be privatized or rented to foreigners.

On April 26, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev said foreigners would be allowed only to rent agricultural land under leases ranging in length from 10 to 25 years.
A second Zika infection was reported in Korea on Wednesday.

A 21-year-old man living in northern Seoul who visited the Philippines in mid-April has tested positive for the virus, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Last month, a man who had been to Brazil tested positive for Zika to become the first confirmed case here. He has made a full recovery.

The new patient returned to Korea on April 14 and developed flu symptoms and later a skin rash and went to hospital for a checkup last week.

The patient said he had been bitten by mosquitoes in the Philippines. He has been released from hospital and told to stay home.

A KCDCP official explained that the virus is not transmitted by air or human skin contact, so there was no need to put the man in quarantine.

Zika also has a low fatality rate.


Police in Kazakhstan's Caspian port city of Aqtau have dispersed protesters rallying against the government's decision to allow private land ownership.

Dozens gathered in downtown Aqtau on April 28 to protest the government's decision to auction off public land to private owners beginning on July 1.

After the protesters started publicly criticizing President Nursultan Nazarbaev, police interfered and forced the protesters to leave the site.

The protest took place hours after Kazakh Prosecutor-General Zhaqip Asanov issued a warning that it is a crime to spread "false information about land privatization."

On April 27, hundreds of people rallied in Kazakhstan's northwestern city of Aqtobe and the northeastern city of Semei to protest against land privatization.

And on April 24, at least 1,000 residents of the western city of Atyrau protested against the plan.
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
WASHINGTON -- A luxury motor yacht belonging to Russian President Vladimir Putin's late press minister has been sold to an unnamed buyer nearly six months after the former Kremlin insider was found dead in a Washington hotel room.

The sale of the 55-meter boat, announced by Florida-headquartered yacht brokerage IYC, comes amid the continuing mystery of Mikhail Lesin and the circumstances surrounding his sudden death, as well as ongoing questions about his estate and assets.

IYC said the boat was sold on April 26 but gave no further details as to selling price, the buyer, or the actual entity that sold it, saying only it was an "impressively fast sale."

Katya Jaimes, an agent for the sale, declined to give RFE/RL any further details, except to say the boat was originally listed for 36 million euros ($40 million).

Press reports in Australia said the yacht had been in Australia for repairs when Lesin was found dead in the Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington on November 5. The craft then was piloted to Florida and listed in time for a major international boat sale in Palm Beach, IYC said.

Lesin was a major player in the Russian television industry whose company, Vi, became one of the largest brokers for television advertising in Russia, as well as Eastern Europe. As press minister in the early years following Putin's rise to the presidency, he helped consolidate Kremlin control over national broadcasters. Later on, he helped create the English-language, state-owned television channel Russia Today, now known as RT.

He fell out of favor with the Kremlin in 2013, and largely dropped out of public view.

In December 2014, a U.S. senator asked federal authorities to investigate Lesin and some of his real-estate assets in California for potential money laundering. Through a corporation known as Dastel, Lesin and his family owned at least two mansions in the wealthy Los Angeles suburb of Beverly Hills.

In November, Lesin was in the U.S. capital and had been invited to attend a fund-raiser for a Washington think tank honoring a prominent Russian banker. Attendees said he never appeared at the fund-raiser, and two days later his body was found in his hotel room.

In March, Washington's medical examiner said Lesin had died of blunt force injuries to the head and other parts of his body, stoking speculation that he may have been murdered.

The autopsy report said the manner of death for Lesin was still under investigation. A spokesman for city police did not immediately return a call from RFE/RL.

The disposition of Lesin's estate remains unclear. No probate records have been filed to date.

At the time of his death, many of Lesin's family, including his estranged wife, were still believed to be living in California. His son, Anton, is a well-known financier of Hollywood movies. His daughter, Ekaterina, has worked as a producer for RT.


An ancient stone sculpture of Buddha's footprints that was looted from the Swat Valley and smuggled into the United States has been returned to the government of Pakistan.

The piece, called a Buddhapada, was taken from Pakistan in 1982 and eventually smuggled to New York by a Japanese antiquities dealer who hoped to sell it for more than $1 million.

It was returned by New York prosecutors on April 27 to the Pakistani Embassy' deputy chief of mission, Rizwan Saeed Sheikh, who said it will remain in New York City for now and may be exhibited at a museum.

Sheikh said the second century Buddhapada, weighing more than 200 kilograms, was "an important element of the cultural history of Pakistan."

Antiquities dealer Tatsuzo Kaku, who pleaded guilty in March to the smuggling scheme, said he was motivated by a desire to preserve Buddhist artworks that he feared would fall into disrepair or be destroyed if they remained in Pakistan.

Based on reporting by AP and Reuters


Russian President Vladimir Putin has been sharply critical of Russian space officials for the delay of the maiden launch of a rocket from the new Vostochny Cosmodrome.

A visibly upset Putin declared shortly after the postponement of the April 27 launch in Russia's Far East that he would stay overnight to attend the expected second attempt at a launch the following day.

Putin told space industry officials at the cosmodrome -- to which he had traveled thousands of kilometers to attend the launch in the Amur region -- that "the fact is there are a large number of hitches. That is bad. There should be an appropriate reaction."

The head of Russias Roscosmos space agency, Igor Komarov, blamed employees and executives in Russias space industry for the delay.

Komarov told reporters on April 27 that the responsibility for what is happening in the space sector lies with the people who are doing this work and supervising it.

A Soyuz rocket carrying three satellites was due to be launched.

But the launch was halted less than three minutes before takeoff.

Russian space program officials said further delays were possible.

Putin also expressed anger towards six people who have been detained for alleged wrongdoing during the construction of the new cosmodrome.

"If those suspected of having committed wrongdoing are found to be guilty, they will have to replace their warm bed sheets with a prison bed," he said.

Based on reporting by Reuters, AFP, Interfax, and AP


Russia has proposed that the United Nations Security Council blacklist Syrian rebel groups Jaish Al-Islam and Ahrar Al-Sham because of their links to the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda terrorist groups.

Russia's proposal to the council's Islamic State and Al-Qaeda sanctions committee on April 27 will go into effect on May 11 unless other nations represented on the 15-member committee block it, UN diplomats said.

"The reason for such a move was the information that these groups, which are waging a war in Syria, are closely connected to terrorist organizations, first of all with [IS] and Al-Qaeda," Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said.

Washington's mission to the UN cautioned against blacklisting the two groups, however, saying it would undermine attempts to get a sustained cessation of hostilities in Syria.

"Designating Jaish Al-Islam and Ahrar Al-Sham -- two groups that are parties to the cessation of hostilities -- would have damaging consequences to the cessation just as we are trying to deescalate the situation on the ground," Edgar Vasquez, a spokesman for the U.S. mission, said.

One UN diplomat told the Reuters news agency that Russia's move is aimed at "dividing the opposition" and weakening the opposition's hand in UN-sponsored negotiations with the Syrian government, Moscow's ally.

But Churkin disputed that the groups have been honoring the cease-fire or contributing to the peace talks in Geneva.

"The time has come to call things by their true names," he said. Blacklisting the groups would make them ineligible to participate in either the cease-fire or peace talks in the future.

Russia's Foreign Ministry has long said that Jaish Al-Islam and Ahrar Al-Sham should not be involved in Syria peace talks because of their ties to banned terrorist groups.

Jaish Al-Islam (Army of Islam) is a major armed rebel group in Syria and is currently a member of the High Negotiation Committee, a coalition of rebel groups formed in Riyadh last December to negotiate for the opposition in the talks.

The High Negotiation Committee is backed by Western nations as well as Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, but it recently suspended participation in the peace talks because of alleged violations of the cease-fire by the Syrian regime.

Ahrar Al-Sham never joined the coalition, contending that "revolutionary groups" were sidelined at the Riyadh meeting. But the group did attend this month's round of peace talks.

Ahrar Al-Sham is an ultraorthodox Salafist group and has fought as part of a military alliance with the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria.

Ahrar Al-Sham's late leader fought alongside Osama bin Laden, but the group has denied sharing Al-Qaeda's ideology or organizational ties.

With reporting by Reuters and TASS
Russian nationalists attacked attendees of an awards ceremony for high school history students in Moscow on April 28, spraying them with a green antiseptic liquid and hurling eggs at them for what the activists called a foreign-sponsored attempt to rewrite Russia's history.

Some 50 high school students had arrived in Moscow from all over Russia to be honored for essays they wrote on 20th-century history for a contest jointly organized by the prominent Russian historical society Memorial.

As participants arrived at Moscow's House of Cinematography on the morning of April 28, organizers and participants say they were met by around 20 nationalist activists -- some wearing military-style uniforms -- who berated them for allegedly diminishing the Soviet Union's role in the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

Activists threw eggs at those arriving for the event and sprayed several of them with zelyonka, a popular Soviet-era topical antiseptic that leaves a deep green stain.

Among those doused with the green liquid was Lyudmila Ulitskaya, a renowned Russian novelist who chaired the jury for the contest. (The tweet below shows Ulitskaya after she had washed off most of the zelyonka.)

Russian-language news website Meduza quoted one of the activists as saying: "We're exorcising demons from these Jewish kids. These kids have been converted. They're off their rockers. They need medical help."

Jury member Irina Yasina, a prominent Russian liberal activist, said the protesters yelled that the competition's participants are "whores, not teachers."

The nationalist activists and pro-Kremlin media also implied the event served as a vehicle for the ominous intentions of its sponsors, which included billionaire Russian businessman Mikhail Prokhorov and several German nongovernmental organizations, including the Heinrich Boell Foundation.

Protesters standing outside the building where the event was staged held placards that read "We don't need history bought with foreign money" and "Stop abusing history."

In an apparent reference to Stalin-era repressions, the activists at one point chanted in unison: "Purges, purges, purges."

The Interfax news agency reported that police arrested one man in connection with the incident and charged him with "minor hooliganism," a misdemeanor.

Memorial, the country's oldest and best-known human rights organization, groups together more than 50 bodies nationwide.

WATCH: RFE/RL's Russian Service reports from the scene (in Russian):

Founded in 1989 under the auspices of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, it has led efforts to uncover communist-era repressions and fight discrimination in modern-day Russia.

Nationalist groups have long accused Memorial of attempting to tar the Soviet Union's history, including the crucial role in played in the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The Justice Ministry last year placed the organization's human rights center on the Russian government's register of "foreign agents" and accused it of calling for regime change for calling Russia's actions in the Ukraine conflict "aggression."

The award-ceremony incident drew widespread criticism on Russian-language social media, particularly because schoolchildren were involved.

Ksenia Larina, a well-known Russian journalist who also served on the jury, said that "as a Muscovite, I'd like to ask for the kids' forgiveness for what happened on the street."

"For many of them, a trip to Moscow is a big event," Larina told the event. "I'd like to say that what happened here -- that is not who we are, this is not our face. This is a pimple that sooner or later we will pick off. And for you it's a baptism by fire."

With reporting by RFE/RLs Russian Service, Meduza, and TV Rain
ON MY MIND

Apparently taking one Savchenko hostage wasn't enough for Russia. They had to grab two. Just hours after the formal procedure to turn kidnapped Ukrainian military pilot Nadia Savchenko over to the Kyiv authorities was reported to have begun, Russia tried to nab her sister, Vira. Russian border guards seized the passport of Vira Savchenko, who was riding in a Ukrainian diplomatic car, and -- in violation of diplomatic protocol -- prevented it from leaving the country. Russia opened a criminal case against Vira Savchenko in November for insulting a Russian judge, whom she reportedly referred to as a "schmuck." The incident is emblematic of the pettiness and disregard for international norms that Russia has displayed throughout the whole Savchenko affair.

IN THE NEWS

Russian border guards have seized the passport of Vira Savchenko, sister of detained Ukrainian military pilot Nadia Savchenko, and prevented her from leaving the country.

The incident happened hours after the procedure to turn Nadia Savchenko over to Ukraine was reportedly launched.



After an embarrassing delay, Russia's Vostochny Cosmodrome launched an unmanned Soyuz rocket today. The launch was originally scheduled for yesterday but, with Vladimir Putin in attendance, it had to be delayed for a day due to a last-minute technical glitch.

Putin sharply criticized Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and the Vostochny Cosmodrome's management after over the delayed launch.

Protesters demanding the resignation of Odesa Mayor Hennadiy Trukhanov remain defiant after being attacked by unidentified assailants.

WHAT I'M READING

Cuban Missile Crisis Redux

Two Communist Party lawmakers have proposed that Russia deploy missiles to Cuba in retaliation for U.S. plans to put a rocket-launching system in southern Turkey to combat Islamic State militants.

Nukes In Crimea?

Speaking at a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko claimed Russia was "deploying elements of its nuclear potential" in Crimea.

Russia's Soviet People

Gazeta.ru has a long piece titled People of the Closed Society that addresses the question: Why are so many Russian people still "Soviet" in their attitudes?

A Fresh Approach to Donbas?

What should the West do next in the Ukraine conflict? A good start would be recognizing the conflict for what it is -- Russian aggression. That's the argument of Marieluise Beck, a member of Germany's Bundestag from the Green Party, and Ralf Fucks, co-president of Germanys Heinrich Boell-Foundation's in a piece on the Atlantic Council's website.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland hints that Washington may take a more active role in resolving the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

"One of the decisions made at Hannover is that the United States will now accelerate its own diplomacy, in close coordination with the Normandy format leaders -- with Germany and with France -- to see Minsk implemented. This will require restoring security and OSCE access across the Donbas, the return of hostages, preparations for real, Ukrainian elections in Donbas that meet international standards and that accord with your constitution, and of course, the withdrawal of all weapons and foreign forces, and a return of sovereignty over your border to Ukraine."

Meanwhile, Ukrainian intelligence says 75 percent of militants in Donbas are Russian citizens.

The Putinization of Poland

The Center on Global Interests asks: Is Poland "Putinizing" European Politics?

Money Can Buy You Passports

Intersection magazine has a rundown of countries where rich Russians have invested in Western countries in exchange for residency or citizenship.

Unrequited Love

How justified are Russia's grievances against the West? Intersection magazine has launched a series titled Has The West Forsaken Russia's Love? to address the issue.
Night-time police raids in Istanbul.

Reports of shoe boxes stuffed with $4.5 million in cash hidden in the home of a Turkish state bank head, plus a money-counting machine in the bedroom of a government minister's son.

And allegations that state funds are being used illegally to buy and funnel gold to Iran to help it evade international sanctions over its nuclear program.

Welcome back to 2013, when Turkey was rocked by a corruption scandal that implicated some of the closest associates of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Over the next months, the case would mesmerize the public as it mushroomed into a head-on clash between the investigators and Erdogan himself, who would accuse them of being part of a shadowy "state within a state" seeking to tarnish his government.

Within a year, dozens of prosecutors and police officials would be removed on executive orders from the case, the investigation would be dropped, and Erdogan would emerge with the image of a far more authoritarian leader than before.

Now the corruption scandal that so fascinated Turks three years ago is back in the news, thanks to the arraignment this week in New York of the key suspect in the case -- a Turkish gold trader and socialite who allegedly acted as the intermediary between Turkey and Iran.

Arrested last month in Miami, Reza Zarrab pleaded not guilty on April 28 to charges of conspiring with two Iranians to conduct hundreds of millions of dollars in financial transactions to help Tehran obtain gold and hard currency despite U.S. sanctions cutting off Iran's access to global financial systems.

According to Turkish investigators in 2013 Zarrab, a dual Turkish and Iranian citizen, was at the heart of a massive corruption scheme that involved payoffs to top Turkish officials. Under the scheme, Turkey legally purchased Iranian oil and gas for Turkish lira -- something permitted under the sanctions regime -- but the lira was then surreptitiously converted to banned bullion, euros, and U.S. dollars in Dubai before being delivered to Tehran by suitcase-toting couriers.

The question now is whether Zarrab's case could resonate beyond the United States to reawaken the investigation in Turkey that created such a political crisis for Erdogan. The answer, to be known only over the coming weeks, will do much to provide the measure of how Erdogan, now president, views the role of the judiciary and the role of political opposition in Turkey today.

Turkey's Fork In the Road

Many political analysts see the Iran-gold scandal as a watershed movement that changed Erdogan into a leader who is increasingly seen as intolerant of opposition and routinely tries to use the branches of government to crush it.

"He made sure by making big changes in the judiciary and among the police that all the dossiers [in the investigation] are closed and ever since that moment he has stepped up his fight against what he perceives as forces that want to topple him," says Barcin Yinanc, who reports on politics for Hurriyet Daily News in Istanbul.

She says the Iran-gold scandal, in which four government ministers resigned as unidentified sources in the judiciary leaked investigators' findings to the press, convinced Erdogan that parts of Turkey's judicial and police forces were riddled with a network of enemies that had to be crushed by force.

Exactly who comprises the network was never directly stated, but Erdogan has used references that make it clear to Turkish listeners he accuses the followers of a once-allied but now archrival Turkish political leader, the influential Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Gulen, who has lived in the United States since 1999 but whose supporters helped to bring Erdogan's Islamist-based AK Party to power in 2002, later split with Erdogan over ideological differences. Some of his teachings directly clash with Erdogan's own, including encouraging interfaith dialogue with Jews and Christians despite the Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader's history of up-and-down relations with Israel.

Since the crackdown on the Gulen movement in Turkey, which included shutting down private exam-preparation centers that the movement uses to recruit new members and raise finances, Erdogan has taken an ever-harder line toward political opponents of all stripes.

"His intolerance toward dissent is not limited to the sympathizers of the Gulen movement, any kind of dissent is unwelcome by him," Yinanc observes. "The very fact that there are nearly 2,000 legal cases that involve insults to the president shows that he is very intolerant of the tiniest criticism."

With the Iran-gold scandal now back in the news, Erdogan may have to brace for new rounds of fire over a scandal that seems to refuse to disappear despite the quashing of the investigation.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of Turkey's main opposition CHP, said when Zarrab was arrested last month that he hoped the U.S. proceedings would shed new light on the complex affair.

"I am sure there are many who won't sleep comfortably in their beds tonight," he told a party meeting in parliament on March 22. "They will hang out all the dirty laundry, and this way we will learn the whole truth."
A Turkish gold trader pleaded not guilty to charges that he conspired to conduct hundreds of millions of dollars in financial transactions to help the Iranian government evade U.S. sanctions.

Reza Zarrab, a dual citizen of Turkey and his native Iran, entered the plea at a hearing before Judge Richard Berman in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. He was arrested last month in Miami.

Zarrab, 33, was charged in an indictment last month along with one of his employees, Kamelia Jamshidy, and Hossein Najafzadeh, a senior officer at a unit of Bank Mellat in Iran. The other two defendants, both Iranian, remain at large.

Prosecutors said that from 2010 to 2015, the trio helped Iranian individuals and entities, including Bank Mellat, one of the largest banks in Iran, evade U.S. sanctions by conducting financial transactions through companies in Turkey and in the United Arab Emirates owned and operated by Zarrab.

The indictment charges Zarrab, Jamshidy, 29, and Najafzadeh, 65, with engaging in conspiracies to defraud the United States, to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to commit bank fraud and to commit money laundering.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AP
American graphic novelist Onrie Kompan has illustrated the famous naval Battle of Myeongnyang in which Admiral Yi Sun-shin defeated a 330-strong invading Japanese fleet ships with only a dozen of his famous turtle ships.

A preview of "Yi Soon Shin: Fallen Avenger" is published Thursday, which marks the birthday of Yi, on the website of the Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival and on YouTube.

The full graphic novel will be unveiled at Comicon in New York this October.

Sales of Kompan's trilogy, "Warrior and Defender," which first featured Yi's feats, totaled around 50,000 copies in the U.S. alone. It was published in Korean last year.

Kompan will visit Seoul in July and meet fans at the festival.
The security situation in eastern Ukraine is worsening, with cease-fire violations at their highest level in months, the chief OSCE monitor warned on April 28.

The statement by Ertugrul Apakan, head of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine, came as four civilians were reported killed in shelling in eastern Ukraine.

"During the past weeks, the OSCE has registered the highest number of cease-fire violations in months," Apakan said in a briefing of the Permanent Council of the OSCE in Vienna. "Armed violence in eastern Ukraine has once again reached worrying levels."

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a pan-European rights and security body, independently monitors the conflict.

The current cease-fire was agreed under a deal known as Minsk II, which was brokered in February 2015 by France and Germany and also signed by Russia, Ukraine, the Russia-backed separatists, and the OSCE.

Apakan warned that artillery and mortars banned under Minsk II "are being used again in increased numbers."

"A sustainable cease-fire is of central importance to the further implementation of the Minsk agreements," Apakan told the council. "Now is the time for the sides to show visible and decisive action to restore it."

More than 9,100 people have been killed in fighting in Ukraine's eastern and southern regions and around 21,000 others wounded since violence broke out between the Ukrainian government and Russia-backed separatists in 2014.

Apakan, speaking to journalists after the briefing in Vienna, also raised concern about "direct attacks" against SMM monitors, which he said were taking place "with impunity for the perpetrators."

"Three serious security incidents have taken place recently: Weapons were shot in the direction of SMM monitors, they were threatened at gunpoint, and one SMM vehicle was hit by a bullet," he said.

"This impunity for people who threaten, violently mistreat or attack the SMM, or who violate its freedom of movement, must end," he said.

Apakan also said monitors "continued to experience restrictions in reaching the Ukraine-Russian Federation border in areas not controlled by the [Ukrainian] government."

Separately, at a security conference in Moscow on April 28, OSCE Secretary-General Lamberto Zannier spoke out against the idea of giving weapons to monitors.

Zannier said arming the OSCE monitors should only be done if there is consensus and clear agreements are in place, and if their tasks are clearly understood.

At least four civilians were killed April 26 when three cars were fired upon close to a rebel checkpoint near the edge of the rebel-held town of Olenivka in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, the OSCE said in a separate statement, without assigning blame.

Alexander Hug, deputy head of the SMM, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service that monitors who examined the site of the attack established that the fire had come from artillery shells.

Kyiv has denied the separatists' accusation that Ukrainian forces opened fire on the checkpoint.

With reporting from RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
A United Nations mediator called on Russia and the United States to salvage a "barely alive" cease-fire in Syria to revitalize faltering peace talks.

"How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?" UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura said on April 27 after adjourning a two-week round of talks in Geneva.

De Mistura said that just in the past 48 hours, one Syrian has been killed every 25 minutes in renewed fighting.

"There is no reason that both [Russia and the United States], which have been putting so much political capital in that success story and have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war, should not be able to revitalize [the cease-fire] they created and which is still alive, but barely," he said.

The talks faltered last week after the main opposition High Negotiations Committee pulled out in protest of alleged cease-fire violations by the Syrian regime.

After briefing the UN Security Council, De Mistura said he hopes to open a fresh round of talks in May, but hasn't set a date.

Based on reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP


WASHINGTON -- A key U.S. congressional committee has backed a substantial increase in defense spending to reassure European allies jittery about Russian military maneuvers.

Lawmakers on the U.S. House Armed Services Committee also voted April 28 to allocate $150 million to help train and equip Ukrainian government forces in their fight against Russia-backed separatists in the east of the country.

But the bill appears to stop short of heeding Kyivs repeated requests for weaponry other than the defense equipment Washington has been providing to date.

At $610 billion, the legislation is one of the largest single annual budget measures considered by Congress, covering a sweeping range of U.S. defense policy. This years package authorizes more money for more advanced fighter jets, new navy ships, and cyberwarfare, as well as more mundane matters like service members salaries and health-care expenses.

But the bill also reflects foreign policy priorities, and the alarm that many lawmakers and policy officials have voiced regarding Russias stepped-up military actions in Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere figures notably in the legislation.

Lawmakers backed an administration proposal called the European Reassurance Initiative,  $3.4 billion effort to increase the U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe. The Pentagon is planning to increase the number of combat brigades rotating into Europe, as well as station heavy weaponry and equipment in some places.

"I think the lack of debate about the European Reassurance Initiative is a reflection that there is a pretty broad consensus on what the administration has proposed," said Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "If anything, there may be people who want to add more money, not less."

Committee members also took aim at a key treaty that authorizes countries to conduct surveillance flights over one anothers territory to monitor military forces. The Treaty on Open Skies has been used by both the United States and Russia to gather information, but U.S. officials in February publicly complained about a Russian request for a flight using advanced digital cameras.

I cannot see why the United States would allow Russia to fly a surveillance plane with an advanced sensor over the United States to collect intelligence, Mac Thornberry (Republican-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in February.

The bill passed by the committee on April 28 aims to cut off funding for cooperation with Russia on U.S. overflights until intelligence officials say there is no threat from the flights.

It also tackles the question of another major arms agreement: the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. The United States has reported for the past three years -- most recently on April 11 -- that Russia has violated the 1987 treaty, which is considered a bedrock Cold War arms-control agreement.

Moscow has strenuously denied any violations, but the Defense Department has drawn up several options to respond to the alleged violations, including reportedly putting missiles back in Europe.

U.S. President Barack Obamas administration, meanwhile, has declined to implement the proposals. The House legislation aims to force the White Houses hand by withholding Defense Department funding.

Committee lawmakers also debated restrictions on the use of Russian-built rocket engines in launching U.S. military satellites. Since U.S. sanctions were imposed on Russia following its annexation of Ukraines Crimean Peninsula in 2014, American officials have proposed curtailing the use of the RD-180 engines, which are built by a Russian state-owned corporation.

But Air Force officials have said that there wont be a viable American-built alternative to the Russian-built engines for several years.

Theres no reason to line Putins pockets right now, committee member Duncan Hunter (Republican-California) said. Just realize that, when we vote yes or no, that if you vote yes, you are literally contributing directly to Russian military modernization.

Lawmakers ultimately voted to raise the cap on the number of Russian rocket engines.

One other substantial policy change included a requirement that American women be eligible to be drafted into the military. Under existing U.S. law, all men between 18 and 25 years old are legally required to register with the federal government, potentially to be drafted in the event of war.

Though able to serve in all branches of the U.S. armed forces, women have long been barred from combat positions, as well as exempted from registering for the draft.

Late last year, however, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that all combat positions would now be open to women for the first time. The bill passed by the committee on April 28 broadens the effort with a measure that would require women to register as well.

The 60-2 vote on the entire defense bill pushes it for a vote by the full House of Representatives, expected next month.

It would then head to the Senate, where John McCain (Republican-Arizona), who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, is widely expected to make more changes.
On June 29, 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gave a speech from the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, Iraq, announcing the formation of an Islamic caliphate, the newly proclaimed "Islamic State" did indeed have many of the hallmarks of an actual state.

It had borders, patrolled by its agents. It had a military, special-forces units, police, an intelligence apparatus, a press office, tax collectors, engineers, a stratified leadership, and both foreign and domestic policies. Unlike its predecessors Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which had only been able to establish a state of mind among their followers, Baghdadi's organization had managed to capture and rule actual territory, not just individual cities or neighborhoods.

That is no longer the status quo. If an observer were giving a State Of The So-Called Islamic State speech, one would have to acknowledge that the "state" is weak. The United States estimates that Kurdish forces and the Iraqi military have taken back 40 percent of the territory held by Islamic State (IS). An unnamed U.S. defense official recently told USA Today that IS oil revenues had been cut by 50 percent. U.S. Major General Peter Gersten said that a series of coalition air strikes have destroyed as much as $800 million in cash that IS was hiding in various safe houses and hidden stockpiles, and that there had been a 90 percent increase in IS defections.

Gersten also said that there has been a massive drop in the flow of foreign fighters to IS, from a high of about 2,000 per month just a year ago to about 200. If true, it is now likely that the U.S.-backed coalition is killing IS extremists faster than foreign fighters can join the organization's ranks.

To make matters worse for IS, many of the militant group's top leaders have been killed by coalition air strikes. In March, a strike killed Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, IS's "top financier." Earlier that month, another air strike killed Umar al-Shishani, or "Omar the Chechen," the "minister of war" for IS.

A slew of less infamous IS leaders has also been killed, including the IS-appointed "governor" of the Al-Hamadaniya district of Iraq, Barzan al-Husam, and many other field commanders. While the big names make the headlines, the killing of local governors and military commanders and the strikes that hit IS in the pocketbook may have a more tangible impact on disrupting local governance, and thus shaking the perception that IS is indeed a state rather than just a terrorist insurgency.

Not Dead Yet

However, for all the military defeats IS has suffered, it is far from dead -- and a number of challenges for the United States remain.

The United States has had a military presence in one form or another in Syria for months. While U.S. soldiers have been in Syria since late last year, working with coalition members on the ground to "tighten the squeeze" on IS and establishing a headquarters at the Rmeilan air base in northern Syria, it appears that this mission may be expanding. U.S. President Barack Obama has announced that the United States will deploy 250 Special Forces soldiers to Syria.

One key challenge is that the United States does not have adequate intelligence on the ground to effectively target its air strikes. According to recent statements by U.S. Central Command's (CENTCOM) Colonel Pat Ryder, the anti-IS coalition has flown 91,000 sorties and conducted 12,000 air strikes -- that sounds like a lot until you realize that only about 13 percent of coalition sorties end in air strikes. As IS shrinks on the battlefield, it will only become more difficult to find, identify, and destroy targets from the air.

IS's leaders have also adopted a simple-yet-sinister plan to block U.S. air strikes -- militants are reportedly covering the roads of cities they occupy with canvas roofs. An activist news agency covering the IS occupation of Raqqah, its so-called capital, has posted pictures of these canvas awnings, which make it impossible for coalition drones or jets to follow the movement of IS fighters below.

It could become very difficult, then, to differentiate the terrorists from the civilians that they are terrorizing. Worse, if this strategy works we can expect to see it copied in other locations IS controls, a move that could prove to be far more effective at stopping U.S. air strikes than even the most advanced antiaircraft weapons. IS may be hemorrhaging money, but tarps are a lot cheaper than guns.

Changing U.S. Tactics

To help defeat IS, the United States may be attempting to refine its tactics and address a sectarian dynamic that is working against Washington.

Last week, pro-IS social-media accounts tweeted pictures they say show that U.S. fighter jets and A-10 Warthogs have been supporting the rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime who have been locked in heavy battle with IS for months but are currently backed up against the Turkish border.

Earlier in the year, a coalition of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) troops, Hizballah fighters, and Iraqi Shi'ite militias fought side by side with the Syrian military to break the battle lines of the anti-Assad rebels who have held northern Syria for years. IS took full advantage of this situation and launched its own offensive, capturing large amounts of territory as its fighters pushed west from their strongholds and north toward the Turkish border. Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) fighters to the west also launched an offensive against the struggling anti-Assad rebels, and a small group of those rebels are now trapped.

The rebels in the area east of Azaz had been making gains against IS in early April, but by the middle of the month that progress had now been reversed. While it's dangerous to ever take the word of jihadist propaganda as truth, the presence of the A-10 in this area would suggest that the United States is providing close air support for the anti-Assad rebels as they push back against IS -- a level of coordination between the United States and local ground forces typically reserved for Iraq or eastern Syria.

If the United States is conducting air strikes against IS, and in support of anti-Assad rebels, it may be an attempt to protect the Turkish border and reassure a frustrated NATO ally. However, IS is still making gains. On April 27, there were reports that IS had captured five rebel-held villages, including Dudyan, west of Al-Rai and right on the Turkish border. IS is now close to closing off and destroying the anti-Assad rebels who are defending their most important border crossing -- and the only one they still control in northern Aleppo.

IS, even more so than Al-Qaeda before it, which survived 15 years of the war on terror, has proven its ability to constantly adapt to both its victories and its defeats. Despite military victories against IS over the last 20 months, even the commanders of the U.S. coalition admit that there are new challenges ahead. IS is currently exploiting the military weakness of one of its principal enemies, the anti-Assad rebels, and it is digging in to its positions in both Syria and Iraq.

The next phase of this fight is far less straightforward, and IS clearly knows that the storm is coming and is preparing accordingly -- with new offensives and canvas tarps.
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Martin Lepkowski talks to the Narragansett Times at his Wakefield home in front of his 20 solar panels. He is part of a local movement to decentralize the energy industry and create energy rather than consume it.
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Government sources on Wednesday said the Nissan Qashqai SUV is the worst offender, prompting authorities here to consider a ban, a recall or a hefty fine for the Japanese automaker. The government is also considering a recall for the other 13.

Nitrogen oxide gases are formed in all combustion engines and are a major source of air pollution, but they are especially bad in cars that run on cheap and dirty diesel.

Fourteen out of 16 diesel cars sold in Korea emit three to 10 times more nitrogen oxides than permitted, an investigation reveals.

According to the Environment Ministry, the National Institute of Environmental Research in January tested the emissions of 16 diesel cars made by five domestic automakers and 11 foreign carmakers. All supposedly meet the Euro 6 emission standards.

But the test, which involved driving them for 3,000 km and inspecting their emissions in various conditions like city or highway traffic and in different temperatures, told another story.

Only the BMW and Jaguar Land Rover diesel cars performed well by emitting less than 80 mg of nitrogen oxide for every 1 km. The other 14 models emitted anywhere between three to 10 times more nitrogen oxide.

Hyundai's diesel cars emitted five to six times more nitrogen oxide than permissible, about average among the cars tested.

Investigators found that the exhaust gas recirculation devices on the 14 cars were programmed to stop operating when external temperatures reached above 30 or below 20 degrees Celsius, causing excessive emissions of nitrogen oxides.

One source said, "EGR stopped functioning when the air conditioner was turned on or the cars accelerated or stopped suddenly. This is prohibited by law, but investigators believe the cars were deliberately programmed that way."

In November last year, Volkswagen was ordered to recall the popular Tiguan SUV because its EGR was programmed to stop working under high or low temperatures, and the German automaker was banned from selling the SUV in Korea and slapped with fines.

But the Nissan Qashqai is apparently worse. It is popular in Europe, and around 2,000 have been sold in Korea since 2014.
Wine-Food Pairing 101, it wasnt. More like Level 3, even 4 for some.

Two teams of high-powered wine guys were challenged to select Virginia wines to pair with three food selections at a breakout session of the always engaging and somewhat annual Virginia Wine Summit earlier this month at glamorous Salamander Resort & Spa in Middleburg.

Kathy Morgan, a D.C.-based master sommelier, wine consultant and educator, provided that challenge. Jack Mason and three others responded  and responded well.

Mason, a master sommelier and wine director at Marta, a highly rated restaurant in New York City, teamed with Steven Grubbs, wine director at two Georgia restaurants, to form what was called the East Coast team. They picked a wine to go with each course.

Chris Tanghe, a master sommelier from Washington state, and David Lynch, owner and wine director of a San Francisco restaurant, formed the West Coast team that also selected a wine for each course.

Morgan set the bar high with three terrific small plates.

First course: kale salad with a fried Rappahannock oyster and shredded Virginia apples.

Second course: country ham sandwich with red-eye gravy aioli on sweet potato biscuits with radish relish.

Third course: young Virginia goat cheese with Catoctin Creek rye-glazed peanuts and pepper jelly.

When I chose the menu, I was trying to create a challenge using typical Virginia ingredients, Morgan said. It is a competition, after all, and both teams are very good at what they do.

Note-takers in the audience of 100 had a chance to learn (more) about wine and food matchmaking. Grab your own pencil to jot down ideas.

Because of the saltiness of country ham, that sandwich seemed to be the biggest pairing challenge. But the East Coast teams choice of Michael Shaps 2014 Petit Manseng provided the perfect complement  and was voted winner over a delicious but ill-suited 2013 Petit Verdot from Veritas.

As team East Coast explained so beautifully, Morgan said, the challenges were the saltiness on the ham, which challenges high alcohol and oak  ; the sweetness of the sweet potato biscuit, (which) makes tannic reds taste sour; the acidity of the relish, (which) makes low-acid wines taste flat.

The coffee in the red-eye gravy offered a window for a very light red, and a chambourcin with some residual sugar could have worked, but the big red the West Coast chose totally overwhelmed the dish.

I knew that the winning team would be the one that had the guts to choose a white for the entree.

It was my favorite pairing of the three, Mason said. Quite a delicious combination.

Delicious but also not the most challenging pairings, according to Mason. (Time to take more notes).

One of the hardest dishes to pair was actually the cheese plate, he said.

There were several different elements to the dish that needed different flavor and structural components from the wine to create the perfect wine pairing: zippy goat cheese, which would call for a wine with bright acidity; pepper jelly, which would call for a wine with some sugar to counterbalance the sweetness and the spice; and glazed peanuts, which would call for a wine with some oxidation or oak aging to match with the rye glaze.

We ended up pairing a wine that had a touch of oxidation and a lot of residual sugar that paired well, but in an ideal world, I would have loved to see more acidity to not have just made the pairing good, but have made it exceptional.

East Coasts pick of Barboursvilles 2010 Paxxito was judged a better fit for the cheese dessert dish than Rockbridges 2014 Tuscarora White because the Paxxito was sweeter than the dessert.

Team East Coasts choice of Ankida Ridges 2014 Chardonnay was a narrow winner over Barboursvilles 2014 Vermentino Reserve in the salad-oyster pairing because of its richness and acidity.

From an opening session on Virginia white wines  in which five state varietals held their own, and more, against similar wines from around the world  to six breakout sessions, including one with sensational vertical tastings of petit verdots, cab francs and Meritages, the summit provided a venue for state wineries to show off their best stuff.

The wines were up to the occasion.
Zaxbys, the Atlanta-based fast food chain specializing in chicken, is planning to open its first location in the city of Richmond at 2309 W. Broad St.

The building housed an Arbys until last week, when that restaurant closed after nearly 50 years in business.

The restaurant space is near the Fan District, at the corners of Strawberry and Broad streets, across from the Department of Motor Vehicles and next to Chicken Fiesta.

Zaxbys franchise owner Ryan Converse said he plans to remodel the former Arbys store and hopes to have the new restaurant open by fall.

There are three Zaxbys in the works  one on Laburnum Avenue between Audubon Drive and Williamsburg Road in eastern Henrico County, one at 5400 Wyndham Forest Drive in Henrico and another in Chesterfield County.

The first Richmond-area Zaxbys restaurant, which opened in February at 5816 W. Broad St. in Henrico, is temporarily closed after Converse said a driver lost control and hit the building on March 31.
Some 140 drivers will race each other in Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens, Porsches and other supercars at the Asia Festival of Speed in Yeongam, South Jeolla Province in mid-May.

AFOS is in its third year. The first race in 2014 drew just 10,000 spectators, but the 2015 event attracted 13,000 and organizers hope for 20,000 this year.

The ill-fated Korea International Circuit hosted the Formula One Korean Grand Prix from 2010 to 2013, but snowballing losses prompted South Jeolla Province to stop it and replace it with the AFOS race, a purely commercial event.

It has paid off so far. The KIC last year posted its second surplus and is slowly emerging from the shock of losing the Grand Prix.
Chesterfield had the most teacher resignations in the Richmond area, with 538 in the past five Junes, followed by 363 in Henrico, 333 in Richmond and 131 in Hanover.
A Richmond man is facing numerous charges after an armed robbery at a Burger King restaurant in Henrico County.

Police were called about 11:30 p.m. Wednesday to the restaurant in the 8000 block of Brook Road, where officers confronted a man exiting the building who matched a description of the suspect from a 911 caller.

During the arrest, officers found a gun and money on the suspect, police said.

Naim Kashif Watson, 27, of the 6000 block of Wainwright Drive in Richmond, is charged with use of a firearm, possession of a firearm by a convicted violent felon and discharging a firearm in a public place.
In a 3-0 decision, the Henrico County School Board on Thursday chose Quioccasin Middle School as the new name for Harry F. Byrd Middle School.

Board member Lisa A. Marshall, who represents the Tuckahoe District, suggested the name during the boards afternoon work session.

Quioccasin is more than just a location or the name of the road on which Byrd sits, she said.

Quioccasin, which is said to have been derived from a Native American word meaning the gathering spot, also lent its name to the historically black community centered on the area of the school, Quioccasin Baptist Church and the predecessor to what is now Pemberton Elementary School.

Thursday nights decision was the culmination of a push beginning last summer to rename the school, which is currently named for the former governor and senator who espoused unrepentant views against desegregating schools.

Opponents of the Byrd name argued that a school nearly evenly divided between whites and minorities should not bear the name of someone who was against those students learning under the same roof.

Nearly 50 percent of the students at Byrd are minorities. Black students make up about 20 percent of the student population, while nearly 13 percent of students are Asian-American and about 11 percent are Hispanic.

While a U.S. senator, Byrd spearheaded Massive Resistance to combat the U.S. Supreme Court decision to integrate schools. Among the tactics used during this period was the closure of schools that attempted to integrate.

Byrd Middle Schools mascot is the Senators, and its logo includes the U.S. Capitol dome. Marshall suggested keeping the Senators mascot, but the board did not decide on that Thursday night.

The day before Byrds death 1966, the School Board voted to name Hermitage High Schools replacement for him. After outcry from the Hermitage community, the name was shifted to a proposed school eventually located at 9400 Quioccasin Road.

After a unanimous vote March 10 to rename the building, the School Board opened a public comment period and received more than 200 suggested names for the school. The names ranged from tributes to deceased Henrico residents to numbers and fictional characters.

Among the top choices were Alysia C. Burton Basmajian, a school system graduate who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; Lonnie E. Gailes, Byrds first principal; Neil Griffin, a school resource officer who died in March; former Superintendent William C. Bosher Jr.; and two members of the Vandervall family.

Benjamin Vandervall previously owned land included in the Byrd schoolyard. Before integration, Pemberton Elementary School, which is adjacent to Byrd, was named for Benjamins brother, educator William LeRoy Vandervall.

Theres so many worthy suggestions in honor of individuals who ... contributed greatly to our community, Marshall said during the work session. It would be very difficult for me to pick between the individual names suggested.

Board member John W. Montgomery, who seconded the motion, agreed with the difficulty of picking one person.

It was very compelling to hear from the families, Montgomery said.

Board member Roscoe D. Cooper III spoke in favor of naming the school for the Vandervall family as a way to right some of the wrongs from naming the middle school for Byrd. He abstained during the vote. School Board Chairwoman Michelle F. Micky Ogburn was not present.

Henrico schools officials estimated a $13,000 price tag to replace essential items carrying Byrds name, such as signs and scoreboards, stationery and the rug in the schools entrance. Athletic gear and other items will be replaced as they wear out, officials said, but some of the name-change proponents have begun to collect money to cover some replacement costs, officials said.

The total cost to replace everything bearing Byrds name was estimated to be $136,000, but Al Ciarochi, assistant superintendent for operations for Henrico schools he is working with the schools staff to find ways to reduce that cost and accelerate the process.

Ciarochi said he expects to present several concepts to the board at its next meeting.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
The Commonwealth Council on Agings 2016 Best Practices Awards Program will recognize Adults Plus Counseling at Family Service of Roanoke Valley for Honorable Mention at a reception next week. Adults Plus is a Counseling Program for adults in the Roanoke Valley 55 and older. It is the only program of its kind that serves older adults in their homes or care facilities, as well as in the agencys downtown Roanoke offices, on a sliding scale fee. Family Service of Roanoke Valley is a community mental health resource, providing prevention, counseling and supportive services across the lifespan. Family Services mission is to strengthen families, heal trauma and restore hope.

We are proud to have Adults Plus recognized by the Commonwealth of Virginia for the important support it offers older adults and their caregivers in our community, Director of Older Adult Services Cathy Thompson said. Roanoke, as many other places, has an aging population and Family Service sees it as our duty to provide these needed mental health services so older adults may be happier, healthier and more independent in their later years.

The Best Practices Awards Program is sponsored by the Commonwealth Council on Aging, a council composed of 24 members who are in part appointed by the Governor and legislators to represent all geographic areas of Virginia. The council helps state government meet the needs of older Virginians in the most efficient and effective manner. As we all struggle to meet the challenges of serving a rapidly aging population during a time of budget cuts and growing demand, we need to share our best practices and applaud our successes. The Best Practices Award Program does both.

Adults Plus was one of 12 applicants that were reviewed by a panel of advocates and providers. Director of older adults Cathy Thompson will attend a reception on May 2 at the Virginia Governors Conference on Aging at the Hilton Short Pump.

Submitted by Ruth Cassell
It was a gorgeous day at Hidden Valley Middle School as the Eagles hosted Cave Spring Middle and Central Academy for the last track and field meet of the regular season on April 20. (Athletes who qualified for the postseason will compete at the annual Cosmopolitan Invitational meet at William Fleming on April 28-30.)
Officers were called to the Papa Johns in the 4500 block of Williamson Road at about 1:13 a.m., police said. An employee told them that a man had walked into the store and demanded money while displaying the weapon. He left without taking anything and walked away before officers arrived.
Voter registrars across Virginia say the state hasnt given them the information they need to approve applications since Gov. Terry McAuliffe restored the civil rights of 206,000 felons last week.

Richmond General Registrar Kirk Showalter said she had been able to verify just two of the 102 applications the office had received by Tuesday night, while Henrico County Registrar Mark Coakley said his office was working through more than 200 online requests and setting aside those it had accepted in case of later questions about an ex-offenders status.

They and other registrars across Virginia said the state wasnt ready to carry out McAuliffes sweeping April 22 executive order that restored voting and other civil rights.

This is the time when government went too fast, Coakley said.

But McAuliffe administration officials said they warned from the beginning that it would take time to update online state databases to show the restoration of rights for so many people.

This is a massive administrative undertaking, but it is the right thing to do, spokesman Brian Coy said.

Edgardo Cortes, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections, said the main state voter database will be fully updated by the end of the week to show when a felons rights had been restored and reminded that the process could not begin until the governor signed the order.

We were totally ready, Cortes said. If we had loaded these folks in before the governor did his order, they would have come off the [prohibited voter] list prematurely.

Much of the confusion has arisen among registrars because they said they were not able to verify restoration of a felons voting rights either on the Virginia Election Registration Information System or a searchable online site operated by the Secretary of the Commonwealth, to which they were directed after the governor issued his executive order.

It is a matter of getting the cart slightly ahead of the horse, said Tracy Howard, general registrar in Radford and president of the Voter Registrars Association of Virginia.

The Virginia Election Registration Information System draws on a variety of sources to show when a person is convicted of a felony, which shows up as a flag on the database of prohibited voters. Normally, the database is updated regularly by the Secretary of the Commonwealths database, which shows when a felons rights are restored.

The scope of the governors order lengthened the time for updating both databases. State officials said the secretarys database was updated Wednesday, while the process would be completed in the Virginia Election Registration Information System by the end of the week.

This is a large-scale restoration of rights ... and it will take some time for us to ensure data has been transferred to our system from the Secretary of the Commonwealths office, Cortes cautioned in an April 22 email to registrars.

Meanwhile, registrars say theyve been in a bind because state law requires them to verify information voters provide on their registration forms, such as when a persons rights are restored.

The law says we should have some sort of verification. ... All I can rely on is the Code of Virginia, said Lawrence Haake, general registrar in Chesterfield County, where only a few applications had been filed by Wednesday.

In addition to the law, registrars say they rely on state election department guidance, which last week directed them to contact the Secretary of the Commonwealths office to determine if a felons rights had been restored, before denying a persons application.

The difference between the guidance and what the law says, its not always in sync, Haake said. Therein lies the problem.
RICHMOND  A Virginia senator with a history of controversial behavior has traveled to Syria on a three-day trip this week in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Sen. Richard Black, R-Loudoun, has met with Assad government officials as part of an ongoing attempt to bring attention to what he has said are persecuted Christians.

I am hoping to move us away from our insane policy regarding Syria. Syria has greater womens rights and religious freedom than any nation in the Arab world, Black said in a series of text messages to The Washington Post.

We are allied with two of the most vile nations on earth, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which are intent on imposing a [Wahhabi] fundamentalist government on the Syrian people, he said.

Black added that he participated in a lengthy interview with Syrian television, but did not answer questions about how the trip was arranged or funded.

While meeting with officials in the war-torn nation Black said, I will be Syrias voice, according to the state government controlled news agency.

A spokesman for the Senate Republican caucus, Jeff Ryer, could not say who is paying for Blacks travel, but confirmed taxpayers are not footing the bill.

Messages left at Blacks legislative office have not been returned.

Sen. Black is traveling to the Middle East as part of his long-standing efforts to protect the safety of Christians in that part of the world, Ryer said.

Senate Minority Leader Richard Saslaw, D-Fairfax, joked about Blacks tendency to step into controversial topics in Virginia and abroad.

Most people would not be concerned about Dick Black going to Syria, Saslaw said. The biggest concern would probably be Dick Black coming back from Syria.

This is not the first time Black, a Vietnam veteran and former Army lawyer, has had contact with the Assad regime. In 2014, he wrote a letter in praise of Assad that was posted on the Syrian presidents Facebook page.

Last year, a magazine published by the Islamic State put Black on its enemies list.

Black is one of the most conservative members of the General Assembly and recently made headlines for a testy email exchange with a Loudoun public school teacher over a bill related to the teaching of sexually explicit material in classrooms.

During the recent legislative session, Black kept a map of Syria on an easel by his desk in Richmond, using it as a prop to explain his opposition to the United States accepting Syrian refugees.

In an interview earlier this year, Black said he had reached out to desperate and hopeless Syrians, but believes military-age male refugees are dangerous.

I view it as operation Trojan horse, he said at the time. I think they represent a danger because theyre not refugees the way we think of refugees.

He added, I love the Syrian people. I answer mail from people in Syria. Times when they have been desperate and hopeless Ive written to them.

Virginia Democrats noted Black is co-chairman of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruzs presidential campaign in Virginia and accused Black of having dangerously clueless views on foreign policy.

It is disturbing beyond words that Sen. Black would praise and promise support for a brutal dictator and mass murderer, party spokeswoman Emily Bolton said in a statement.

Wednesday evening from Syria, Black tweeted that he resigned as Cruz co-chair earlier in the month.
On a recent afternoon, visitors to James Monroes Highland paused to watch archaeological work being done near the front entrance of the main house.

The visitors were particularly fascinated by the deliberate, surgical-like removal of red soil from a course of foundational stones in one of the precisely squared holes. Their interest likely would have been even greater if they had known they were watching the opening act of a new and exciting story unfolding at the home of the nations fifth president.

The archaeology, combined with tree-ring dating, shows that the recently uncovered stone foundation was the underpinning on which Monroes actual 1799 house was built.

For more than a century, it has been believed that the modest home still standing on the property was the 1799 house. Its now known that this structure was built by Monroe about 1818 as a guest house for lodgers. Two rounds of tree-ring dating, called dendrochronology, were done on pieces of wood from the guest house in order to be absolutely certain of the findings.

Dendrochronology showed the wood in the corner posts of the standing house was cut between the spring of 1815 and the spring of 1818, said Michael Worthington, proprietor of Oxford Tree-Ring Laboratory in Baltimore.

Monroes home restores its original name: Highland The name change has been on the docket since Sara Bon-Harper became executive director of Ash Lawn-Highland in 2012.

Modern-day science and old-fashioned toil-and-sweat archaeology have partnered to set right an important piece of history. And these new revelatory findings are just the beginning of what is expected to be years of further research.

We have made a stunning discovery, said Sara Bon-Harper, executive director of James Monroes Highland. These exceptionally well-preserved remains are just beneath the ground surface in the front yard of the 1870s wing attached to the standing Monroe-era house.

This finding represents a breakthrough in how the nation understands Monroe and how he lived. This is where we change James Monroes story.

We had thought the small, very modest, two-room structure had been the main residence for a good portion of Monroes life and public service career. Now were seeing a substantial house  40 by 30 feet as the main footprint, with an additional wing that eventually ends up being about 30 by 40 feet or so.

The archaeological dig was initially started in 2014 with small test holes in an effort to find the mysterious second wing of the 1799 house. The standing house is a one-wing structure, but period insurance documents indicate that there were two wings.

The question has always been, where did the other wing go? Bon-Harper said. What is really the linchpin here of saying this is exclusively the 1799 home, and that is the 1818 home, is the dendrochronology.

One of my essential roles is to more fully explore James Monroes legacy, and all that means. Our understanding of Monroe as coming from modest roots, and always living within modest means and perhaps not being that ambitious  we are revising that.

Now we can think about someone who thought enough of himself and his own ambition to build a substantial house. We dont know how grand it was, but maybe some of our research will tell us that. But its not the small house weve been viewing, and that has been shaping our view of Monroe for so long.

Also recently uncovered is the base of a large chimney and segments of thicker walls belonging to a stone cellar. The cellar had been filled in with brick rubble and charred debris, which suggests a fire.

Benjamin Ford, principal archaeologist with Rivanna Archaeological Services, is leading the archaeology work at Highland. The area now being worked showed promise and warranted a closer look.

Last April, we were doing large-unit excavation (an archaeology term for a dig site) on top of some areas where we suspected we might find architectural features, and also in the general vicinity of a historic artifact scatter, said Ford, who is being aided by historic documents and three of Monroes insurance policies that have sketch plans.

Artifacts which were suggestive that there was architecture here  such as nails, brick, mortar, putty, plaster, bottle glass, pieces of window pane  as well as stone foundations. We believe that one of the structures we have identified here corresponds very closely to one of the insured structures.

Our goal this season is to refine what we know about this existing structure and when it was destroyed. In some of the large units we were excavating last year, we found ash and charcoal. And much of the material we found was severely burned, so we believe that there was a very intense fire here, and that was probably the cause of its destruction.

Bon-Harper said theyre confident that the fire occurred after Monroe sold the property in 1825. Although searches of newspapers published during the 1800s have been done, no account of such a fire has yet been found.

Ford said the fire likely would have occurred between 1825 and the early 1870s. The latter time frame is when newspaper accounts mention that a large fire had occurred at Highland at some earlier date.

It also isnt clear how the 1818 guest house became misidentified as the principal Monroe home. Ford has a theory that goes back to John Massey, who purchased the property in 1867.

In the first decade of the 1900s, during the last years of John Masseys life, one of his children began marketing this as the residence of James Monroe, Ford said. It was written about in newspapers as being the home of Monroe.

Its my opinion that perhaps that started in the early 1900s, if not slightly earlier.

Ford said that it is immensely exciting to be part of this research. He added that archeological research often raises more questions than it answers, but the present work is being rewarded with some fascinating finds.

As part of our overall research, we do more detailed research into the individual artifacts we find, Ford said. Some of the nails we recovered appear to be very early cut nails, which refers to the method of manufacture.

We did research into this, and we believe they may be nails that were manufactured down the road at Thomas Jeffersons cut-nail machine. We also have records from Jeffersons nail book, which records the sale, quantity and size of nails purchased by James Monroe.

And these nails were delivered to him around 1799 to 1800, when this structure was being built. Its really interesting making those connections, and we hope to make more.

Several new panels have been unveiled today, and guide staff will use them during tours of the house. They show some of the documents and images depicting the research process .

The interpretation will be continually evolving as we learn new things, Bon-Harper said. Our broader vision of what Highland will be next is a place of discovery.

Excavation will be a big part of it, and then reinterpretation and figuring out how we get people to understand what was here. Were looking at the creation of a digital reconstruction of the 1799 house, and doing more research to get enough details to figure out what it looked like.

In the future, we would like to have something in a 3-D virtual reality that people can experience. But this is not just a story about a house. Its an exciting opportunity to understand James Monroe better.
To better align with the original identity of James Monroes Albemarle County home, Ash Lawn-Highland announced Friday it now will be known simply as Highland.

Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, lived at the home from 1799 to 1823 and called it Highland.

The name change has been on the docket since Sara Bon-Harper became executive director in 2012.

Aligning our brand with the name given by James Monroe to his historic home is an important step in rediscovering Monroes legacy, Bon-Harper said in a news release.

The author of the Monroe Doctrine had voiced his wish of spending his final years at Highland, but when he left the Executive Mansion in 1825, he was seriously in debt. During the preceding years, he had sold parcels of land to pay creditors, leaving him with fewer than 1,000 acres.

In 1825, Monroe sold what was left of Highland to Edward O. Goodwin for $20 an acre. In 1834, Goodwin sold the bulk of Highland to Bernard H. Buckner. Three years later, Buckner sold it to Alexander Garrett, who changed the name to Ash Lawn.

Around 1840, a wing of the house caught fire and was partially destroyed. The house didn't have any long-term owners until 1867, when it was purchased by John Massey, a retired Baptist minister and future lieutenant governor of the state.

A recent inspection of uncovered nails, wall plaster and window glass led to the conclusion that they likely came from a part of the original Monroe house that had been destroyed by fire. Evidence of foundations also was discovered.

"In the years to come, I would like to see a whole lot of new information about the portion of the house that we confirmed archaeologically," Bon-Harper said in an interview last year. "It has long been understood that the house we have is one wing, and the original house had two wings.

The house was opened to the public when it was sold to philanthropist Jay Winston Johns in 1930. When he died in 1974, he willed the estate to the College of William & Mary, Monroe's alma mater. The will stipulated that the college was "to operate this property as a historic shrine for the education of the general public."

The site now offers tours every day and hosts a number of public events, including the Albemarle County Fair, an annual sheep shearing, the James Monroe 5K and Highland 8K races and the Tuesday Tunes music series.

A new logo features a silhouette of Monroe and his signature in Highland blues. The soft launch Friday included signage at the home and website changes to begin introducing the new name. The period of transition is expected to take several months.

For more information, visit highland.org.
C. Whitney Markley, 84, of Roanoke, Va., died on Tuesday, April 26, 2016. He was preceded in death by his parents, Samuel C. and Elizabeth Markley; daughter, Anne Whitney Markley Denman; sister, Betsy Stuart; and brother, Christopher Markley IV.He was a lifetime member of Second Presbyterian Church, where he was a deacon and elder. Mr. Markley was an Army veteran of the Korean Conflict. He was a longtime member of the Rotary Club of Roanoke and the Cosmopolitan Club for many years. He graduated from Jefferson High School and attended the University of Virginia.Whitney owned and operated C.W. Markley Construction and still today there are many places you will see that he built. He loved working with his hands and making many useful crafts. He and his wife worked together in the workshop coming up with many wonderful gifts they made together.Surviving are his wife, Jo Anne S. Markley, his true love, whom he met on a blind date, were married and together 59 years; son and daughter-in-law, Phillip and Linda Markley of Roanoke; grandchildren, James Whitney Denman, Arthur John Denman, Whitney Markley Denman and Bridget Dianne Markley; sisters, Priscilla Cook and husband, Bill, of Richmond, Judith Baumgardner and husband, Bill, of Roanoke, Susan Lenaeus and husband, George, of Carrollton, Ga.; brother-in-law, Dave Stuart of Portsmouth; and a number of nieces and nephews.A Memorial Service will be held at 11 a.m. on Friday, April 29, 2016, at Second Presbyterian Church with Dr. George Anderson officiating. A reception will follow the service. Interment will be private.In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorials to Second Presbyterian Church or a favorite charity of your choice. Online condolences may be expressed at www.oakeys.com.
Rhonda Robertson Mills, 49, of Lexington, passed into the presence of her Savior and Lord Jesus Christ on Tuesday, April 26, 2016 after a four-and-a-half year long battle with reoccurring health challenges. Rhonda was born on Monday, September 19, 1966 in Lynchburg. She was predeceased by her biological father, CPL Ronald Edward Robertson who died in the Vietnam War, her paternal grandmother, Dorothy Robertson, paternal grandfather, Edward I. Robertson, and paternal uncle, Jerry R. Robertson.Rhonda is survived by her parents, the Rev. Earl and Carla Ragland of Thaxton; Pastor W.A. Mills Jr. husband of 30 years, and their adult children, Rachel Mills Wilson and husband, David of Lexington, Tre Mills and wife Megan of Blacksburg, and Hannah Mills of Washington,D.C. It was Rhonda's great joy to live long enough to see and hold their firstborn grandchild, Gabriel David Wilson. Rhonda leaves behind her five siblings, Ronnie Robertson (Astrid), Mark Robertson (Regina), Robin Ragland Bass (Alvin), Murdock Ragland, and "baby" brother, Corbert Ragland (Dale). She is also survived by her beloved in-laws, the Rev. Tim and Ruth Mills Creel.Rhonda met her college sweetheart at Holmes Bible College in Greenville, S.C. in 1983. After dating two years they were wed on Saturday, October 12, 1989 and spent their 30 years together as husband and wife pastoring churches in North Carolina and Virginia, the last 20 years as Senior Pastor and First Lady of the Buena Vista Pentecostal Holiness Church, who has faithfully stood by their side from day one, providing special care during the last years and days of her life on this earth.Rhonda served as a Registered Nurse for nearly 20 years until her health necessitated an early retirement. She was an accomplished musician, vocalist, and artistic individual who has been described by some as sassy and classy, fun and feisty. She loved her husband, children, grandson, family and friends, but most of all her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, in whose presence she now dwells eternally.A celebration of Rhonda's life is scheduled for Saturday, 11 a.m. April 30, 2016 at the Buena Vista Pentecostal Holiness Church, 1702 Chestnut Avenue, Buena Vista, VA. The internment will follow at the Green Hill Cemetery. The family will receive friends on Friday evening from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Buena Vista Pentecostal Holiness Church. Pastor Bart Hellmuth, Bishop Preston Mathena, and Presiding Bishop Doug Beacham will officiate at the service. All are welcome to attend and celebrate Rhonda's life.In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Buena Vista Pentecostal Holiness Church Building Program. The family would like to thank Carillion Home Health, UVA Medical Staff, church family, and friends all around the world for their faithful, unwavering love and care shown to them during Rhonda's extended illness.Arrangements by Bolling, Grose, and Lotts Funeral Home in Buena Vista, VA.
I've known Freeda Cathcart for four years now, and she has always stood up and fought for all of us.

She is the only council candidate who spoke out against outsourcing the school system's food service workers at the school board meetings. The school board ignored the many people who spoke out against the outsourcing, and signed a two year contract with Sodexo, a large, private, for-profit corporation headquartered in France. Freeda spoke up to protect our school employees' rights and keep our tax money here in the Roanoke Valley, and on council she could do even more for our workers and our local economy.

I've seen Freeda consistently stand on principle on issue after issue, and that's why I trust her to represent the public interest when tempting business deals come before city council. In the last few years we've seen city council override the planning commission and approve controversial development projects over the nearly unanimous opposition of the neighborhoods, and many more such projects will come along in the next couple of years. It is crucial that we have someone of Freeda's integrity on council to make sure our neighborhoods have a say in their own destiny, and that city council puts the public interest ahead of big-moneyed interests.

Freeda has volunteered countless hours over the years to public advocacy on all kinds of issues, because she genuinely cares about creating a better world for all of us. She has an endless list of experience and qualifications, but what matters most to me is the passion in her heart for social justice and human dignity.

Please take a closer look at Freeda Cathcart and vote for her on May 3.

BENJAMIN BRISTOLL

ROANOKE
You can't hear a lot 60 feet (18 meters) below the surface of the ocean -- maybe just your own breathing into the scuba gear or the escape of air bubbles as they rush to the surface. You can feel your heart beating slowly as you watch fish glide past peacefully. You have let your guard down, you are relaxed and enjoying the sensation of the weight of the ocean above and around you, and the slow flow of the current deep beneath the surface.

Then, out of the corner of your eye, you see a large shadow slide its way through the depths. The light down here is tricky, but there's definitely something large circling you and the other divers. You catch sight of it again, but it has multiplied into two shapes, now three. You notice that the fish that were so calming have beat a hasty exit; it's now just you, the other divers and the looming shadows circling ever closer.

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The shapes materialize. Five blacktip reef sharks swim into your view, and your heartbeat, so calm only a moment ago, is raging in your ears as the sharks slowly weave themselves among your group of divers. Their movement is smooth and fluid, so you know they are at ease with you and the other humans, and they seem curious about these visitors to their home.

You are diving with sharks, an activity that's quickly becoming popular with more than just the thrill seekers. In fact, diving with sharks has become a massive business around the world. For example, in South Africa, a prime shark-diving spot, the country earns about $30 million a year from tourists looking to see sharks up close [source: CNN News].

In the following pages, we'll see the different ways you can dive with sharks, what sorts of sharks you might find and the dangers that come along with submerging yourself with these predators of the deep. Read on to find out about most popular way to dive with sharks: cage diving.
SOUTH Yorkshire Polices Deputy Chief Constable Dawn Copley has temporarily replaced suspended police chief David Crompton.

Mr Crompton was suspended yesterday due to his handling of the Hillsborough inquest.

The Police and Crime Commissioner Dr Alan Billings said he had been left with no choice but to suspend the Chief Constable due to an erosion of public trust and confidence after the Hillsborough disaster inquest verdicts.

Prior to the suspension shadow home secretary Andy Burnham described Mr Cromptons position as untenable.

Dr Billings said: I have reached this decision with a heavy heart following discussions with David Crompton both in the run up to, and following the delivery of the Hillsborough verdicts.

My decision is based on the erosion of public trust and confidence referenced in statements and comments in the House of Commons, along with public calls for the Chief Constables resignation from a number of quarters including local MPs.

Mrs Copley said: The Police and Crime Commissioner has taken the decision to suspend Chief Constable David Crompton and has asked that I act as Temporary Chief Constable at this time, which I have agreed to do.

She added the force was absolutely determined to maintain our focus on delivering the best possible policing services to the communities of South Yorkshire.

Mrs Copley became deputy in September having previously worked in the north west of England.

She joined the Police Service in 1987 and served in Lancashire Constabulary for 23 years prior to transferring to Greater Manchester Police in 2010 as Assistant Chief Constable.

Mr Crompton is due to retire in November and Dr Billings said the process to find a new Chief Constable had already begun.

The force has faced further criticism again after a message on its retired officers' website was accidentally made public.

The BBC said the statement on the South Yorkshire branch of the National Association of Retired Police Officers (Narpo) told former officers who served in the 1980s they should be proud of their work, despite the Hillsborough inquests conclusions.

South Yorkshire Narpo secretary Rick Naylor stated there were many examples of outstanding actions and selflessness by police officers on that tragic day as they did their best to deal with the disaster unfolding before them.
In the 37th World Diamond Congress (May 16 to 19), the biennial meeting of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) and the International Diamond Manufacturers Association (IDMA), financing matters are set to be high on the agenda for discussions. Leading figures from the global trade will tackle the subject and take part in a panel discussion, in which members of the audience will be encouraged to participate says a Press note from WFDB.

According to Ernie Blom, WFDB President, the finance sessions of the Congress are set to provide critical information for the industry on the issue of liquidity and other financing matters.

Erik Jens, ABN Amro Bank's Head of Diamond and Jewelry Clients, will speak on the issue of 'Key opportunities in financing the diamond and jewellery industry', followed by Howard Davies, De Beers' Head of Commercial Development speaking on 'Global financing options and requirements for the diamond industry'.

Erik and Howard will take part in a panel debate along with David Bouffard, President, Corporate Affairs at Signet Jewelers Ltd, Feriel Zerouki, Head of Government and Industry Relations at De Beers and other industry figures, which will be attended by the WFDB's 30 bourse presidents and other exchange officials along with their counterparts from IDMA and more than 100 diamond industry representatives from across the diamond pipeline.

Also, Dubai Diamond Finance Seminar, second of a series by the Dubai Diamond Exchange (DDE) will be held, to raise awareness of diamond financing options and how Dubais trade infrastructure and financial institutions can further support the diamond trade.

Ernie Blom said: "We believe that the speakers and panelists and the interactive discussion format during the Congress will provide a comprehensive review of the nature of the financing issues affecting the diamond business and how we can best deal with them. Our aim is to provide a roadmap for the industry to help take it forward during these challenging times. For too long, industry members and the banks have not been on the same wavelength. We aim to correct this for the good of both parties. This also fits in with the overall themes of the Congress: Transparency, Responsibility and Sustainability. We are moving ahead with a new era of way of working in all aspects and this will be clearly seen at the Congress."



Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Bureau, Rough & Polished




Lucapa Diamond Company and its partners have recovered large gem quality diamonds from ongoing trial mining of the E46 alluvial terraces at the Lulo diamond project in Angola.

It said in a statement that the three latest specials, weighing more than 10.8 carats include two high colour white Type 11a diamonds weighing 88 carats and 30 carats.

These diamonds add to the 10 special diamonds  including two other +50 carat stones  recovered from E46 since trial mining commenced in this new area in March 2016, said Lucapa.

It said in addition to the large specials, E46 had also produced fancy-colored diamonds, including an intense-fancy 0.2 carat pink diamond.



Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished




De Beers said diamond jewellery demand by US consumers hit a record level of $39 billion last year.

The group said demand by US consumers increased 5 percent on 2014 levels as they benefited from the sustained economic recovery, higher levels of job creation and wage growth.

Despite 2015 being a challenging year for rough diamond demand, consumer diamond jewellery demand was robust, said De Beers chief executive Philippe Mellier.

Encouragingly, the US  the largest and most mature market  continues to grow the strongest, while China continues to grow from an increasingly larger base.

There remains a positive medium to long-term outlook for diamond jewellery demand, driven by the US and the growth of the middle classes in emerging markets.

The US remains the worlds largest market for diamond jewellery sales and increased its share of global polished diamond demand from 42 per cent to 45 per cent in 2015, said De Beers.

Chinese demand growth was also positive last year.

However, demand from consumers in the Japanese, Indian and Gulf consumer markets saw some declines in local currency terms in 2015, with the strength of the US dollar further impacting growth rates when translated into US dollar terms, it said.

De Beers said growth in the rest of the world declined 13 per cent in US dollar terms, largely as a result of macroeconomic weakness in emerging markets and the strength of the US dollar.

The outlook for 2016 is driven by expectations of steady but subdued global economic growth, with weakening growth in emerging markets and a fragile recovery in the advanced economies. The US is again expected to be the main driver of growth in 2016, it said.



Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished




The Fraud Squad of the Israeli Police has been called in by the Israel Diamond Exchange to investigate serious allegations of fraud perpetrated by a diamond dealer operating in the diamond exchange.

News reports in the Israeli media say a diamond dealer by the name of Hanan Abramovich is suspected of buying diamonds valued at around $60-65 million, which he then passed on, but did not pay for. Several companies reportedly fell victim to this scam, and the fear is that the defaults on payments could cause the bankruptcy of up to a dozen diamond companies.

A police spokesperson is quoted as confirming that Abramovich has been arrested and is currently being questioned on suspicion of embezzlement. Abramovich appeared in court on Wednesday, where his arrest was reportedly extended for two days.

A statement issued by the management of the diamond exchange said that the investigation had been launched after complaints were received by several companies claiming they were owed tens of millions of dollars for goods sold to Abramovich's company.

Israel Diamond Exchange managing director Eli Avidar said, "The Diamond Exchange's management will show zero tolerance to those who hurt other members of the exchange. Israel's diamond sector has been going through difficult times in recent years and to our regret we are being exposed to unfortunate instances like these where the situation is being exploited. The Diamond Exchange management will work resolutely to clarify the case including working with the enforcement authorities."




NPD Group, a market-data analysis company, introduced a service that provides visibility into sales and inventory data across the global diamond industry.

Until now, the industry has relied on anecdotal information to gauge consumer preferences, NPD said. This has posed challenges related to pricing and product mix decisions. In addition, the lack of data has resulted in a disconnect between diamonds supplied and actual retail demand.

Diamond Tracker is the first service that allows industry stakeholders to look into detailed point-of-sale information, monthly sales and inventory trends, NPD claimed. It enables users to drill down into performance trends by specific diamond characteristics for both natural and lab-grown gems. It also tracks factors such as gemological labs, wholesale sources and different forms of purchase such as outright purchase, memo or recycled.

The product has the level of depth necessary to create more focused and effective marketing, pricing, production, and purchasing plans, Chris Casey, managing director of diamonds and diamond jewelry at the NPD, said.




For the first time in two years, an Indian bank - Punjab National Bank (PNB) - has received US $0.15 million from a Middle East client of Winsome Group, reports Economic Times.

Winsome promoter Jatin Mehta, who has been away from the country for the past few years, as consistently claimed that the group's inability to repay banks a loan of $1.02 billion was due to non-payment by overseas customers who lost heavily on gold and currency derivative bets. However, banks in India never bought the story.

In the light of the recent repayment, the spokesperson of the Group reportedly said, "The company has kept the Indian banks appraised of all the developments that have taken place in Sharjah and have provided them with the copy of the reports of the Accounting and Banking experts as well as the 26 decrees passed by the Sharjah Federal Court in favour of Winsome and Forever and not in light of the payment of $0.15 million by the defaulting customers in UAE."



Aruna Gaitonde, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Bureau, Rough & Polished




The Committee of the Russian Federation Chamber of Commerce and Industry on mining business, production, processing and trade in precious metals and precious stones elected Rinat Gizatulin, Vice-President of ALROSA for interaction with public authorities, corporate communications and public affairs, to be the head of the newly established subcommittee, whose work will be focused on promoting the development and support of the Russian industry producing, processing and distributing precious stones.

The nearest tasks of the subcommittee will be to make up an entry list of participants, draw up a program of work for 2016, develop a meetings plan, chalk out questions for debate and bring forward proposals to improve legislation in this field and measures to support the development of the industry to the Russian Federation authorities.

Theodor Lisovoy, Rough&Polished, Moscow




Lodestar Energy Group website

Lodestar Energy Group (LEG) is developing a new multimodal site at the Gulf Inland Logistics Park near Dayton, Texas. The site will contain two facilities: a rail-served Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) facility and a complementary rail car storage yard.

This is the perfect time to open both an NGL rail facility and an independent rail car storage facility due to the unprecedented growth in the energy and petrochemical markets, said Brad Howell, president of Lodestar Energy Group. The growing supply of natural gas liquids has enhanced the low cost position of U.S. chemical manufacturers and the resulting derivative production requires a well-positioned rail car storage yard with direct rail access for users to cost-effectively serve their markets.

The facility will receive direct rail carrier service from BNSF and Union Pacific. The unit train-capable NGL facility, scheduled to open in the second quarter of 2018, will receive and ship purity products, such as propane and butane, as well as mixed streams.

Additionally, the NGL facility will include storage and have pipeline access to the Mont Belvieu industrial complex. Truck loading/unloading in addition to chemical processing and handling capabilities are included in the site master plan.

Lodestars rail-served NGL facility will be open to all parties, allowing market flexibility for producers and marketers while providing direct access to a larger number of markets for their products. Due to its location, the facility can handle unit train volumes without creating additional rail congestion in the Mont Belvieu industrial complex. Further, the ability to receive products from multiple producing regions will provide valuable sourcing options for customers. The phased construction of the project will allow for shorter contract terms and lower volume commitments when compared to traditional pipeline projects.
Deutsche Bank AG (DB) reported Thursday its first-quarter net income of 236 million euros, down 58 percent from last year's 559 million euros.

Net revenues were 8.07 billion euros, down 22% from 10.38 billion euros a year ago. The decline in results reflected a challenging environment and the impact of strategic decisions to downsize and exit certain businesses.

Provision for credit losses was 304 million euros, up 40% year-on-year reflecting specific events in certain portfolios.

John Cryan, Co-Chief Executive Officer, said, "Financial were challenging during the first quarter, largely reflecting concerns about the outlook for the global . This uncertainty led to a decline in client activity in the capital markets, and our revenues fell from the prior year, most notably in our trading and corporate finance businesses."

The company further said that implementing its strategy remains core focus and 2016 will be the peak year for its restructuring efforts.

The company also said it expects to close the sale of its stake in Hua Xia Bank in the second quarter and this will strengthen CET1 ratio.

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Business News
Business software giant Oracle Corp. (ORCL) announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Textura Corp. (TXTR), a provider of construction contracts and payment management cloud services, for $26.00 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $663 million, net of Textura's cash.

Textura's cloud services process $3.4 billion in payments for over 6,000 projects each month, helping keep projects on time and under budget while reducing risk for developers, contractors and subcontractors.

Following the deal, Oracle Primavera, which offers cloud solutions for project, cost, time and risk management, and Textura will form the Oracle Engineering and Construction Global Business Unit. It will offer a comprehensive cloud-based project control and execution platform that manages all phases of engineering and construction projects.

The Board of Directors of Oracle has unanimously approved the transaction.

The transaction is expected to close in 2016, subject to Textura stockholders tendering 66 2/3% of shares in the tender offer, certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Canadian stocks may struggle Thursday morning amid a deluge of corporate news, including a huge deal for struggling plane maker Bombardier.

The Bank of Japan rattled in Asia and Europe overnight by failing to announce new stimulus measures, but steady commodity prices should keep the Canadian market from similar losses.

Crude oil remains above $45 and most metal prices are holding recent gains, including gold.

Looking at the flurry of corporate headlines, Bombardier (BBD.B.TO) made a major sale of C Series planes to Delta Airlines. The deal is for up 125 jets and provides a significant boost for the company's future.

Bombardier posted a higher-than-expected first-quarter loss, but says it is on track for 2016 guidance and 2020 goals.

Telecom firm BCE Inc. (BCE.TO) quarterly earnings advanced to $707 million, or $0.85 per share. This was higher than $532 million, or $0.84 per share, in last year's first quarter.

Potash Corp Of Saskatchewan Inc. (POT.TO) quarterly earnings plunged 80 percent compared to the same period last year. Potash also cut its full-year profit forecast due to weak demand and lower prices.

Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Inc. (VRX, VRX.TO) will announce that five of its long-standing directors have agreed to step down to make room for new nominees, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Suncor Energy Inc. (SU.TO) said it is buying another stake in the Syncrude Canada Ltd. project for $937 million.

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Market Analysis
Dolly Parton says that she will not be cancelling the Greensboro, North Carolina stop of her Pure & Simple Tour, despite the state's new anti-LGBTQ law.

"I have no plans to cancel the show," Parton tells the Winston-Salem Journal.

"I believe that everybody ought to be treated with respect, but I feel we will serve better from the stage. I don't like to get caught up in controversial issues. I will address whatever I need to from the stage."

"I think everybody should be allowed to be who they are, and to love who they love. I don't think we should be judgmental. Lord, I've got enough problems of my own to pass judgment on somebody else," Parton says, adding, "If people want to pass judgment, they're already sinning. The sin of judging is just as bad as any other sin they might say somebody else is committing. I try to love everybody."

Parton's show in Greensboro is scheduled for June 3 at the Greensboro Coliseum.

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Entertainment News
Latino voters could play a crucial role in this year's presidential election, and the results of a new analysis point to a spike in Latino turnout in 2016.

According to the NALEO Educational Fund analysis, more than 13.1 million Latinos are expected to cast ballots this year.

The prediction would reflect a 17 percent jump in turnout and an 8.7 percent increase in the Latino share of the vote compared to 2012.

Approximately 11.2 million Latinos voted in 2012, reflecting an increase of 1.4 million voters or 15 percent from 2008.

A jump in Latino turnout could be bad news for Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump if he manages to win the GOP nomination.

Many Latinos are expected to vote against Trump due to his inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants and his calls for the construction of a wall on the Southern border.

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Political News
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Here's what the new Docking State Office Building could look like
Samoa and five other Pacific countries have been congratulated for taking the leadership in ratifying the Paris Climate Accord.

Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi signed and ratified the agreement in New York last weekend, during a special signing ceremony. The other Pacific nations to have done so include Fiji, Nauru, Palau, Republic of the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu.

We congratulate and commend our member countries for their leadership in not only signing but also taking that extra crucial step to ratify the Agreement, helping to ensure it will come into force, said the Director General of the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (S.P.R.E.P), Leota Kosi Latu.

We are committed to work with C.R.O.P agencies, our member countries and partners to help our region address climate change, the biggest threat to island survival.

The Paris Agreement has far exceeded the historical record for first-day signatures to an international agreement.

Overall there were 175 parties that signed the Paris Agreement, for which 12 out of 14 Pacific islands put pen to paper in signing the agreement signifying commitment.

The signing of this agreement comes at a critical time for Pacific nations, and the Pacific Community will maintain unerring commitment to work with other C.R.O.P agencies and the regions countries and territories to maintain the momentum for collective action, the Pacific Community Director-General, Dr Colin Tukuitonga, said.

The Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, The Kingdom of Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu were the Pacific islands that signed once it was open for signature in New York.

Only by working together can we address the most serious issues brought upon us by the effects of climate change. The C.R.O.P agencies will continue to work together, the Pacific will continue to work together, and the world must continue to work together, to save our vulnerable brothers and sisters, and future generations, said Dame Meg Taylor, Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat.

The Pacific islands contribute to less than 0.03 percent of the worlds total greenhouse gas emissions but are amongst the most vulnerable to its effects. The island region is also amongst the first to feel the impacts of climate change.

The Paris Agreement endorsed during the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris, France, marked a watershed moment in taking action on climate change. After years of negotiation, countries agreed to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius, while pursuing efforts to keep temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

Even as the agreement was adopted, countries recognised that present pledges to reduce emissions were still insufficient to reach these goals. The Paris Agreement mandates regular meetings every five years, starting in 2018, to review progress, and to consider whether it is necessary to increase ambition.

Vice-Chancellor and President for The University of the South Pacific (USP) Professor Rajesh Chandra lauded the efforts of USPs member countries for their wise and timely engagement in such a crucial matter that concerns the future of our Pacific island nations.

In our resolve to stablise the future of our island nations, we stand firm with our C.R.O.P partners in ensuring that this Agreement comes into force. This could not have come at a better time especially when the Pacific region is constantly faced with natural disasters, he said.

He added that a concerted effort such as this will go a long way in paving the way forward for Pacific island nations.

The Paris Agreement can enter into force 30 days after 55 Parties accounting for 55 percent of global emissions deposit their instruments of ratification.  UNFCCC/#4PacIslands
PR - The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive account of the operation and monitoring of Tropical Cyclone Amos by the Meteorology Division (MD) of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MNRE) for information, and to clarify some of the public misunderstandings.

The Meteorology Division (MD) of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment is the official government agency responsible for dealing with all matters related to meteorology in Samoa. MD also has the responsibility for providing quality data and warning information for Earthquake, Tsunami, Volcano, tides and oceans, climate and weather in Samoa. Recipients of such data and information are the general public, the office of DMO, Disaster Advisory Council, Media, private and other government sectors.

MD is also the designated meteorological authority in Samoa for providing weather service for international air navigation in accordance with the rules and regulations of International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the Civil Aviation Division of the Ministry of Works, Transport and Infrastructure, Samoa.

Gathering of Weather Information for TC Amos

MD is receiving in real-time (every 15 minutes) all of its land-based or surface weather information (referred to as observations from a network of 24 automatic weather stations dotted around Savaii and Upolu, all of these stations were working during TC Amos).

Remote-sensing technology (outer space view), commonly referred to as satellite imageries, MD are receiving them every thirty minutes from the latest Japanese satellite Himawari - 8 feeding through the internet, the only one of its kind in Samoa, the best and highest resolution capability. Just to stress that even with this highly defined resolution, estimates of rainfall quantities and wind strengths posed a greater degree of uncertainty. In order to improve the degree of accuracy it is essential to operate on Radar technology (Doppler radar). Hence, MD is requesting government to deploy a Doppler Radar to greatly improve our current crude estimates.

Further, MD has a Wind-Profiler Radar to provide weather information (winds, rainfall, temperatures) at different levels (vertical profiles) of the atmosphere to determine indices (forecast) for these parameters.

Although the notion of an hourly-update is correct for satellite imageries, it is not good practice as this leads to inaccuracy of TC positions, as composite products is essential for accuracy. Also this leaves insufficient time for centers to carry out the analysis/processing/compilation time for products from global, regional and national centers, which requires at least 3 hours of time.

MD Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), for Warnings from Wind Advisory to a Tropical Storm (Cat. 1 or 2) is provided every 6 hours and Severe Tropical Cyclone (> Cat.3) is provided every 3 hours issue time, these time-frames are internationally accepted rules practiced by all meteorological centers.

Aligning Meteorology to International and national Protocols and first prediction

MD is a member of the World Meterological Organisation and other international and national agreements in the handling of meteorology matters such as Tropical Cyclone Amos.

On Wednesday 20th April 2016 at a 3:00 p.m. meeting, ACEO and Forecaster of MD gave a briefing to the Chief Executive Officer of the Ministry on the potential of TD017F (tropical disturbance) brewing to the north-east of the Fiji islands to develop into a tropical cyclone from a consensus view with the Fiji Meteorological Service, Regional Specialized Meteorological Center (RSMC) in Nadi.

After this briefing with MNRE CEO the MD was advised to call a Media Briefing the following day, Thursday 21st April 2016, which was held at 11:00 p.m. at the MDs conference room. At this briefing, MD had an initial prediction for a land-fall, Saturday 23rd April evening towards the morning of Sunday 24th April 2016, this matched with our first issue in Special Weather Bulletin 1. TC Cat.2 Warning at 7:00 p.m. will be effective in the next 36 to 48 hours, if translated to days after the end of 48 hours is Saturday evening.

The forecast track at the time in collaboration with global and regional center in ensemble (combined of 50 models) takes TC Amos south of the country. It was clear also at the media briefing MD made a possible track to the north of Samoa because of the warm pool a favorable ingredient or food to fuel this system (TC Amos). The Disaster Advisory Council (DAC) was called and the meeting was held on Friday 22nd April 2016 at 1:00 p.m., and again MD made a presentation with similar predictions made at the media briefing the previous day.

In addition to adhere to international agreements this included our partner the Fiji RSMC which is the only regional center tasked with the naming of a system under all conditions, even if other centers, including Samoa have identical analysis and view, the reason for MDs reservations sometimes to name it. So it follows why TD017 was named by Fiji RSMC Nadi as TC Amos with condition warrant for a Cat. 1 at 1:00 a.m. when it was located 795 km west of Asau Savaii.

Further on Thursday 21st at 1:00 p.m. MD National Tropical Cyclone Warning Center (NTCWC) was activated and its first Special Weather Bulletin 1 was issue at 7:00 p.m. (SWB 1), Cat. 2 Warning to be effective in the next 36 to 48 hours (after 48 hours, 7:00 p.m. Saturday it shall be effective).

Time Fiji RSMC of Category 3 and Category 4 forecasts for TC Amos, (be mindful that these are forecasts not actual observations)

Cat 3 (issue time Friday 7:00 p.m.) forecast position: 7:00 p.m. Saturday 23rd ;

Cat 4 (issue time Saturday 1:00 a.m.) forecast position: 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning

Although Fiji issued forecasts for Category 3 and Category 4 we had still maintained a warning at Category 2 until the end of TC Amos operations because our observations showed otherwise.

MD would also like to clarify the issue of Cat. 3 in Special Weather Bulletin 10, when it stated TC Cat.3 will be effective in the next 6-18 hours (Sunday 7:00 p.m.) evening after 18 hours, this was just a forecast if the situation warrants then we will have to upgrade the warning. In saying the above the category TC Cat. 3 was never in effect for the remaining time of TC Amos operation.

Performance and valid information from Special Weather Bulletins (SWB)  total of 12 Special Weather Bulletins were issued during the operation of TC Amos

(Highlighted in red is the effective time of TC Cat. 2 (SWB 8) and cancellation (SWB 12)

Thursday 21st @ 7:00 p.m. SWB 1: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 will be effective for Samoa (in the next 36  48) hours  Heavy Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory, and Small Crafts Advisory all in effect;

Friday 22nd @ 1:00 a.m. SWB 2: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 will be effective for Samoa (in the next 24  36) hours  Wind Advisory Heavy Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory, and Small Crafts Advisory all in effect;

Friday 22nd @ 7:00 a.m. SWB 3: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 will be effective for Samoa (in the next 24  36) hours  Wind Advisory Heavy Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory, and Small Crafts Advisory all in effect;

Friday 22nd @ 1:00 p.m. SWB 4: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 will be effective for Samoa (in the next 24  36) hours  Wind Advisory Heavy Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory, and Small Crafts Advisory all in effect;

Friday 22nd @ 7:00 p.m. SWB 5: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 will be effective for Samoa (in the next 12  24) hours  Wind Advisory Heavy Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory, and Small Crafts Advisory all in effect;

Saturday 23rd @ 1:00 a.m. SWB 6: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 will be effective for Samoa (in the next 6  12) hours  Wind Advisory Heavy Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory, and Small Crafts Advisory all in effect;

Saturday 23rd @ 7:00 a.m. SWB 7: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 will be effective for Samoa (in the next 6) hours  Wind Advisory Heavy Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory, and Small Crafts Advisory all in effect;

Saturday 23rd @ 1:00 p.m. SWB 8: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 is in effect, Heavy Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory;

Saturday 23rd @ 7:00 p.m. SWB 9: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 remains in effect- Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory,

Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.3 will be effective for Samoa (in the next 6-18) hours;

Sunday 24th @ 1:00 a.m. SWB 10: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 remains in effect, Heavy Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory

Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.3 will be effective for Samoa (in the next 6-18) hours -;

Sunday 24th @ 7:00 a.m. SWB 11: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.2 Cancelled for Samoa- Tropical Cyclone Warning Cat.1 (Eastern side), Heavy Rain warning, Coastal flood advisory;

Sunday 24th @ 1:00 p.m. SWB 12: Tropical Cyclone Warning Cancelled for Samoa- , Heavy Rain warning for east side of Upolu, Coastal flood advisory;

MD also notes that all the issues raised by the public that challenges the operation of TC Amos probed up post-TC Amos. The hope is that these issues were raised earlier when forecasts were just the means of operation, and would had welcome justifiable comments to improve our services.

Lastly, MD acknowledges and are most grateful to the government agencies involved, all the media outlets and DAC members for the support given. MD will always strive for the most effective services to ensure the safety of lives and protection of properties for the people of Samoa.
The beauty of Samoa and the Pacific Islands was showcased to the giant Chinese travel industry at China Outbound Travel & Tourism Market (C.O.T.T.M) at the beginning of the month.

C.O.T.T.M is regarded as the tourism industrys most important platform in China.

Pacific Trade & Invest (PT&I) China cooperated with South Pacific Tourism Organisation (S.P.T.O) and national tourism organisations from across the Pacific in presenting the region to the Chinese industry.

PT&I and S.P.T.O met with hundreds of China outbound travel specialists to introduce the scenery, destinations and experiences Chinese tourists can enjoy in the Pacific Islands. We face the challenges of limited flight connections between Pacific Islands and China, said PT&I Trade Commissioner in China, David Morris.

But Chinese travellers bring back wonderful stories of unforgettable experiences and there is exciting potential for Chinese tourism to continue growing.

Joining PT&I China to promote the region at C.O.T.T.M were Tahiti Tourism, Polynesie Voyages, Samoa Tourism Authority, Papua New Guinea Tourism Promotion Authority, Air Niugini, Vanuatu Tourism Office and Vanuatu Evergreen Travel Agency.

Samoas Ambassador Tapusalaia Terry Toomata and First Secretary Dorothy Ah Ching Meredith also joined in to promote Samoa at the Pacific Islands booth.

Chinese tourists spent $215 billion travelling overseas in 2015, an increase of 53 per cent over 2014, with Chinese travellers now outnumbering and outspending travellers from developed countries.

The China National Tourism Administration and the UN World Tourism Organisation said Chinese tourists made a record 120 million trips overseas last year, making one in every ten international travellers from mainland China.
Spain has a new Ambassador to Samoa. He is Manuel Pradas Romani.

He presented his credentials to the Head of State, His Highness, Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi, at the Head of States Residence at Tuaefu yesterday.

A traditional Ava ceremony was held to welcome Mr. Manuel Romani and his wife, Elvira Lopez De Quintana Salafranca.

It was followed by the presentation of Mr. Romanis Letter of Credence.

In his letter, Ambassador Romani reflected on the long history of Spanishs presence in the South Pacific.

There are records of the presence of Spanish explorers dating from early on the 16th Century, said Mr. Romani.

Spain wishes to be again in this part of the world, to enhance its relations with the Pacific Region, this is a state policy. Spain reaffirms its commitment to the Samoa Pathway document calling for sustainable development.

He added that Samoa and Spain share the same principles and standards in the fields of democracy, rules of law, promotion of Human Rights, tolerance and diversity.

In times of international changes, Spain particularly values the cooperation and friendship with your country.

There are potential fields for cooperation for tourism to renewable energies. The Embassy will spare no efforts in supporting the developments of our bilateral ties in these and any other area.

In accepting Mr. Romanis letter, His Highness Tui Atua highlighted the importance of sharing a common bond that brings forth unity, harmony and peace.

Such is also the relation that our two countries share. The Kingdom of Spains commitment to this friendship will further strengthen the good relations our countries enjoy locally and in the region.

The Samoa Pathway calling for sustainable development is a reflection of the world we see today and what we do now, determines what the future will be. A commitment by the Kingdom of Spain to the Pacific island Forum as a Post Forum Dialogue Partner reassures us that a sustainable future awaits our future generations.

According to a press release by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Ambassador Romani entered the diplomatic service in 1980 as a First Secretary in the Embassy of Spain to Teheran. Since then, Mr. Romani has held various other positions throughout the Foreign Service of Spain including Deputy head of Mission in the embassy of Spain to Quito, Ecuador in 1990, Ambassador of Spain to the Republic of Angola in 2011, Consul General of Spain in Bayonne, France in 2012 and most recently Consul General of Spain in Lyon, France in 2013.
The Ministry of Health has confirmed four suspicious cases of a bacterial infection disease that has yet to be given a name.

The disease was the subject of a public health alert issued last week.

The cases were confirmed by the Acting Chief Executive Officer of the Ministry of Health, Tagaloa Dr. Robert Thomsen, in response to questions from the Samoa Observer.

Asked how the Ministry could warn members of the public about a disease that they have not named, Tagaloa said the process is a lot more complicated than people think.

For example, he said the Ministry of Health is awaiting the result of test of specimens sent to New Zealand, which will take some time.

The distribution of the cases are not clustered at a certain area but are quite scattered hence the most appropriate thing is to alert and warn the public to lookout and take precautionary measures while we await a confirmatory lab diagnosis, he wrote (see letter page 13).

Considering the current Non Communicable Disease (eg. diabetes) burden in Samoa, such an infection will obviously result in a matter higher fatality rate.

With the current weather, the environment, the transmission of these kinds of infections are ideal hence public awareness is important.

According to Tagaloa the Ministry of Health has a duty to advise the public and likewise the public has a right to know about any health event that poses a threat to human life and health.

The notice you refer to is a general public health advise to alert the public on health issues that may prove life threatening and to advocate simple preventative measures, he said.

This is not an uncommon Ministry of Health process in informing the public on any risks to health. Obviously you have looked up Leptospirosis and have stated an over-reaction on our part. For your information Leptospirosis is a zoonotic disease, prevalent in animals but can be transmitted to humans by direct contact with contaminated wastes mainly urine of infected animals. It is also transmitted by a vector (usually rats and rodents) to humans through contaminated urine.

Furthermore he explained that while treatment is straight forward its complications are quite fatal.

From experience in treating these patients, its consequences can be life threatening and fatal as patients are usually presented late to the hospital. It carries a significant case fatality rate of up to 30%.

The Acting C.E.O. assures that Health did not intend to cause panic for the general public but to inform and advise accordingly as they await confirmation from the lab.

We have a responsibility to the public as we have been tasked with their health security and we strive to do everything to achieve that.

Last week, the Ministry of Health issued a warning about a potentially deadly disease spread through the urine of infected animals.

The Ministry of Health wishes to warn the public of an infectious disease spread through the urine of infected animals which carry these bacteria, the alert 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.
A Chinese businessman, Kuan Hui San, is recovering at the Tupua Tamasese Meaole Hospital after two men broke into his home at Vaitele and attacked him on Sunday night.

Mr. San told Samoa Observer he is shocked by what had happened and is constantly having nightmares about it. He did not wish to discuss the details.

A friend who was accompanying him at the hospital said the incident happened at midnight.

He said that he was attacked from the back by two men. One other was using the knife to hit his head and the other one was punching him as he was trying to fight back for life.

The man said they suspect that one of the alleged attackers was Lauitiiti Tualima, a notorious prisoner who escaped from Tafaigata Prison on Sunday. He has since been caught and taken back to prison.

But Mr. Sans friend said the Chinese businessman is lucky to be alive.

When he fell down, several blows from the knife landed on his face while he was trying to cover his face with his hands, he said.

While he was lying on the ground, the pair continued to punch him in the face. They bruised his arms and head causing serious injuries to his eye, cheek and body.

He was unable to move after the attack. Whats worse is that the pair tied him up and left his wife found him later and took him straight to the hospital.

Mr. Sans friend, said that he was very disappointed.

"It shocking that the most dangerous prisoner in the country escaped several times right in front of their (Prison guards) faces," he said.

They should use a different cell to lock him upand guards at Tafaigata Prison, please have some sense that youre not there to sleep-walk and do your job.

We all need a peaceful country to live in and please, please lock those criminals away. We need to work together to protect our families from time to time.

The Ministry of Police spokesperson, Sua Muliaga Tiumalu confirmed that Lauitiiti Tualima has now been charged over the attack.

Tualima ran away from Tafaigata Prison last Sunday and hes now under police custody after he was found again yesterday.
Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi has praised the determination and commitment of the Grey family to rebuild and revitalise Aggie Greys Hotel, which is launched this afternoon as Sheraton Samoa Aggie Greys.

Tuilaepa offered his congratulations during his weekly media conference yesterday, prior to Samoa putting on a graceful welcome for the President of French Polynesia, Edouard Fritch, at the Faleolo International Airport last night.

Mr. Fritch, set to be bestowed the Tagaloa chiefly title during a ceremony at Mulifanua this morning, is leading a high-level delegation from Tahiti that includes senior Cabinet Ministers, senior government officials and business associates for the opening.

They arrived on an Air Tahiti Nui flight; one Tuilaepa hopes will be the first of many to come, further strengthening the links between the two Polynesian countries.

Speaking ahead of todays opening, Tuilaepa said the return of Aggie Greys could only be great for the local tourism industry, opening the door to further investment opportunities.

Its a five star hotel which means that it will attract famous people to come to our shores and stay at the hotel, he said.

Next month another five star hotel at Taumeasina will also be opened and that would mean two five star hotels in Samoa. It means more business for us.

Locally, the Sheraton Samoa Aggie Greys Hotel will boost the employment prospects for Samoans.

It will help our people develop, especially in terms of employment for our children, Tuilaepa said.

Speaking about the renovation project that has taken three years since Cyclone Evan, Tuilaepa said the hotel owners have had to overcome a lot of challenges.

The renovation has been done for some time now, he said.

The cause of damage is from logs that blocked the water path underneath the bridge forcing the water into the area (of the hotel) damaging the hotel. It cost a lot of money to renovate.

Looking ahead, Tuilaepa said there are plans in the pipeline to pull down the Vaisigano bridge and build a hanging bridge to alleviate the problem. The Prime Minister said this will solve the issue of the river being clogged up with logs, pushing the water over to nearby properties.

As for the arrival of the President of French Polynesia, Edouard Fritch and his high-level delegation, Tuilaepa said it reflects the hard work of the Grey family to strengthen the links between the Polynesian countries.

Tuilaepa said he was particularly excited about the prospect of Air Tahiti Nui and Polynesian Airlines working together to link Samoa to the U.S., Asia and European markets. He added that it is the reason why it is necessary for the government to expand the Faleolo International Airport. Works on the $140million project is already underway.

This morning, Tuilaepa is scheduled to attend the matai bestowal ceremony for Mr. Fritch at Mulifanua before a bilateral meeting between the two leaders is held over lunch.

The Prime Minister is then schedule to deliver the keynote address at the Hotels opening ceremony, which begins at 4.30pm on Beach Road. Traffic will be re-diverted in front of the hotel for the opening.

President Fritch will join Prime Minister Tuilaepa and guests to check out the facilities and be treated to the services at Sheraton Samoa Aggie Greys Hotel and Bungalows.

Among the French Polynesian delegation that arrived last night are the Minister of Tourism, Jean Christophe Bouissou, Minister of Economic Development, Teva Rohfritsch, Minister of Culture, Heremoana Maamaatuaiahutapu, Senator Lana Tetuanui, former President of French Polynesia, Gaston Tong Sang.

Also in the delegation are the C.E.O of Bank Polynesie Tahiti, Christian Carmagnolle, Deputy C.E.O Bank of Tahiti, Emile Achkar, C.E.O Bank Socredo, James Estall, the owners of Pacific Energy, Albert Moux and his son Patrick who are also owners of Vodafone Tahiti, C.E.O of Satnui Stevedoring New Caledonia and French Polynesia, Eric Malmezac.

The Chairman and C.E.O of Air Tahiti Nui, Michel Monvoison, C.E.O of French Polynesia Tourism, Paul Sloan, C.E.O of South Pacific Hotel Management Group, Laurent Bessou, the owner of the World Famous 6 Star Four Seasons Resort Bora Bora, Thierry Barbion, the President of the Chamber of Commerce, Vanaa Chin Loy, the owner of French Polynesias Largest Brewery, Jean Pierre Foucard are all coming.

Set to open to the public next month since the devastation of Cyclone Evan in 2012, todays launch is special for the relationship between Samoa and the tourism mecca of the South Pacific, Tahiti.

President Fritchs trip to Samoa follows the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between Polynesian Airlines and Air Tahiti Nui (A.T.N) last year for flights to, from and beyond Samoa and Tahiti.
Country

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Atlanta, GA -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/28/2016 -- 112,526 Georgians are expected to be injured in car accidents this year, according to an examination of the Georgia Governor's Office of Highway Safety statistics by Darwin F. Johnson, via a new write-up on his website. The lawyer specializing in workers' compensation to Athens, GA and surrounding area citizens also represents clients who were injured in car accidents. His article delves into fatality, injury and other statistics on recent traffic accident numbers for the state of Georgia.



"It was good to discover that fatalities are steadily dropping, but I don't think the numbers are changing fast enough," said Johnson, referring to the fact that auto accident deaths only decreased by 13 total casualties between 2012 and 2013. "We need to work harder to reduce those numbers by more," he said.



His article also revealed that non-fatal injuries go up and down from year to year. While Georgia is currently in a period of steady rise in injuries, the 2016 projections peg a decrease to the lowest numbers since 2012. According to his article, 2013 saw the highest number of injuries since 2009, with a steady annual increase between those years.



Unsurprisingly, Fulton County has more automobile fatalities than any other county in the state, contributing five percent in 2011. Finally, Johnson broke the larger statistics down into specifics, indicating that there were 116 motorcycle deaths, 297 alcohol-impaired deaths and 197 speeding-related deaths in 2013.



Those in need of a qualified accident attorney, or work comp lawyer in Greater Athens, GA, may visit Darwin F. Johnson's website, where they can read the write-up and schedule a complimentary consultation.



About The Law Offices of Darwin F. Johnson

The Law Offices of Darwin F. Johnson provide legal defense for individuals all throughout the greater Atlanta, Georgia area. He provides effective legal defense for individuals unjustly injured while at the workplace, and gets them the compensation they need. Clients of Darwin F. Johnson don't pay unless he delivers compensation.



Reach the Law Offices of Darwin F. Johnson today by phone at 404-521-2667.



For more information, please visit http://www.darwinfjohnson.com.
Singapore -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/28/2016 -- Shepherdscottagedogtraining.com, a renowned dog training school based out of Singapore, recently announced that registrations for their various specialized dog training courses have already started. The owners added that interested dog owners can now register for dog training class Singapore directly through their website or by calling or mailing them. Patrick, the chief dog trainer who has wealth of experience in dig training, told the press that Obedience courses for pet dogs have already started and the classes will continue till June this year across multiple locations and on different dates.



"Whether someone's dog is barking too much or chewing destructively, systematic dog training can definitively make the dog more disciplined and obedient. Dogs are by nature very intelligent and they usually share a friendly relationship with their owners and human beings in general. I have trained more than 15,000 dogs during my stint as a dog trainer and I can claim with conviction that no dog is by nature unruly. The right training can make a dog obedient and a trained dog can also perform many tasks", said Patrick, who has trained over 1000 different breeds of dogs and has been in this business of training since 1985.



Patrick, the chief trainer and owner of Shepherdscottagedogtraining.com, also told that the dogs they train can easily participate in dog shows and competitions that are conducted across Singapore through the year. He said that he is not alone, but a team of trainers is working with him dedicatedly for thoroughly training pet dogs of Singapore.



Patrick, the 'star dog trainer' according to a section of the Singaporean media, also told that he has starred many trained dogs in TV commercials and productions that feature pet animals, especially dogs. He told the press that he now wants to use his experience in training the pet dogs of Singapore residents.



"The whole idea of forming this training institute originated when I started to receive requests from dog owners who are outside my friend circles. That aroused the entrepreneur in me", the dog trainer told the press during a talk show.



About Shepherdscottagedogtraining.com

Shepherdscottagedogtraining.com is a dog training institute in Singapore.



To know more, visit http://www.shepherdscottagedogtraining.com/
Denver, CO -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/28/2016 -- Creativity is the driving force behind innovation. Every new invention, new product, new solution, was at one point an idea. Right now, in the healthcare industry, there are many large and looming issues that face professionals all over the country; not the least of which is infection prevention.



ImageFIRST Denver aids healthcare professionals and the facilities they work in with linen and staff uniforms that go through robust infection prevention processes. By providing those facilities with medical linens in Colorado Springs, CO, staff members are freed up to focus on patients and laundering services are handled by professionals. In an era where the medical industry is searching for answers to new or ongoing challenges, ImageFIRST Denver is doing their part to help.



In a recent study published in the American Journal of Infection Control, researchers tackled one particular barrier to infection prevention; hand hygiene. The results of the study determined that gain-framed messages displayed by screen savers effectively improved hand hygiene, leading to a higher number of individuals participating in washing their hands more often. While the result is a bit surprising given the variable, it's an easily implemented, outside-the-box step to improve healthcare facility hygiene.



ImageFIRST Denver does their part to assist the healthcare industry improve the patient experience. By innovating in the space of laundering services, they've been able to provide services and unique benefits to their customers. Customer Advocates that manage inventory, a redesigned and intuitive Online Customer Portal, Same-Day Linen Rescue, Triple BioShield Protection and many other innovations have allowed ImageFIRST Colorado to become one of the premier healthcare linen services in the area.



To learn more about ImageFIRST Denver, their services and medical uniforms in Pueblo, CO, interested parties are encouraged to visit their website at http://denver.imagefirst.com/.



About ImageFIRST

Founded in 1967, ImageFIRST is the largest and fastest growing national linen rental and laundry service specializing in the outpatient medical market. ImageFIRST's 36 locations nationwide serve over 5,500 medical offices every week, providing linen, patient gowns, scrubs and much more while partnering with facilities to better manage linen inventory. With a customer retention rate of over 95%, ImageFIRST is dedicated to improving patient satisfaction through quality linens and remarkable service: their Comfort Care gowns product line increases patients' favorable perception of a facility by more than 50%.



For more information about ImageFIRST Denver, the cost-effective solution for greater patient satisfaction, please visit http://denver.imagefirst.com.
Norfolk, VA -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/28/2016 -- In the world of online technologies people are living today, it seems quite easy to face frauds and scams that have become too widespread nowadays. This concerns everything a person does on the web, especially shopping and communication. While common communication between people is quite popular, but not that serious in most cases, the same cannot be said about online dating. The fact is that people, who really aim at building long-lasting relationships online or offline, are very concerned with their web safety and pay special attention to selecting trustworthy and credible online dating sites, which can ensure ultimate security  the one, like VictoriaBrides.



VictoriaBrides.com is a renowned international dating agency, the "highlight" of which its geographical focus. This means that the agency offers Western men a superb opportunity to get along with Slavic girls, namely with those, living in Ukraine. The company employs a team of professionals, who realize that their customers' confidentiality and personal safety are a priority. With this purpose, the company has implemented a number of security features, which enhance the privacy of each client, who contacts them with the intention to find the "second half" in Ukraine.



To start with, one of the major features of VictoriaBrides is the authenticity of profiles submitted to the website. Each girl, who has a desire to join the website, should initially prove the seriousness of her intentions by registering in one of the local agencies of the company, where she is screened, interviewed and has to provide all the required documents that prove her personality. This system reduces the potential risks of finding the indecent person and wasting a client's time to the minimum.



The next thing to consider is that the agency provides the users with dating tips and online safety recommendation, which are published directly at the website. Each person, who is going to get involved in the matchmaking process, should be aware of these safety measures and precautions to make the dating experience enjoyable, reliable and secure.



Finally, VictoriaBrides never disclose a customer's personal info unless a client does that himself. They underline that no one (including the girls and the staff!) has the right to ask a client for financial help or provide any financial information. There are also useful safety recommendations and tips provided at the website for those clients, who consider their web safety a top priority.



About VictoriaBrides

VictoriaBrides is a web-based international dating service, which provides high quality, safe, reliable and effective matchmaking services. The major mission of the site is to help foreign men get acquainted with ladies from Ukraine, find out more about them, their country and culture and date or marry them. The site is dedicated to the needs and requirements of each and every customer and considers their web safety a priority. They have a rich database of profiles, which are updated on a regular basis and available any time of the day.



Contact Info:

Address: 257 Scope Arena, PO Box 14121, 23502 Norfolk, Virginia, USA

Tel.: 757-204-2965

Website: https://victoriabrides.com
A team of entomologists has described a new species of scorpion  Pseudouroctonus maidu  from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in northeastern California.

The newfound species belongs to the vaejovid scorpion genus Pseudouroctonus.

According to Dr. Warren Savary from the California Academy of Sciences and Dr. Robert Bryson from the University of Washington, it is only the fourth new species of scorpion to be described from California in the past two decades.

The authors named the new species Pseudouroctonus maidu after the Maidu people of northern California, in whose historic lands the species occurs.

It is known only from the type locality near the confluence of North and Middle Forks of the American River in El Dorado County.

California is home to a remarkable variety of scorpions. However, the more I study them, the more I realize that weve only just scratched the surface. A lot of scorpion diversity remains to be described, Dr. Savary said.

Adult Pseudouroctonus maidu measure between 30 and 40 mm in length. The base color is uniform dark reddish brown. The legs, chelicerae and underside of preabdomen are slightly paler.

Dr. Bryson and Dr. Savary use DNA to help better understand scorpion diversity.

Scorpions have been around for a long time  over 400 million years  and many are quite similar in general appearance, Dr. Bryson said.

We can use DNA sequences to help us piece together how scorpions have evolved and how they are related. Despite looking similar, DNA often reveals that even assumed close relatives can be quite divergent.

The scientists are working on publishing the descriptions of several other new species of scorpions from California.

2016 will be an exciting year for scorpion discoveries, they promised.

Research describing Pseudouroctonus maidu is published online in the journal ZooKeys.

_____

Savary W.E. & Bryson Jr. R.W. 2016. Pseudouroctonus maidu, a new species of scorpion from northern California (Scorpiones, Vaejovidae). ZooKeys 584: 49-59; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.584.6026
By 2040, people in developing countries will continue to spend a greater proportion of their own money on healthcare than those in the developed world as national health spending is failing to keep up with demand, a Lancet study warns.

The researchers say that low-income countries only spend around 3 US cents on health for each dollar that rich countries spend. This is unlikely to change in the next 25 years despite growing wealth, according to the paper.

This means people living in these countries will have to spend a larger share of their own income on private healthcare than those in rich countries  or forego important health treatments, the authors say.

In 2040, the proportion of health spending coming from government is expected to be lowest in South Asia, where it will meet just 33 per cent of demand. Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are forecast to pay for 36 per cent of health costs, while governments in all other regions are likely to meet at least half the costs of their citizens healthcare, according to lead author Joseph Dieleman.

By comparison, Western European countries are expected to pay for close to 90 per cent of healthcare costs by that time, according to the 13 April study.





But to address the situation, countries need more detail on local disparities in healthcare access and spending, which the studys use of national spending per person does not provide, says Divya Parmar, a public health researcher at City University London, United Kingdom.



Parmar also notes that countries may start taxing unhealthy food and substances, such as tobacco and sugar, using the money to improve healthcare. Better infrastructure could further reduce the health burden in the poorest countries, she says.



[These countries] need to improve the cost-effectiveness of healthcare services by expanding access to primary healthcare, safe water and sanitation, she explains. We have seen an overall stagnation in donor funding for global health, says Dieleman, a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in the United States. The slowdown comes just after the global financial crisis that impacted many donor countries.But to address the situation, countries need more detail on local disparities in healthcare access and spending, which the studys use of national spending per person does not provide, says Divya Parmar, a public health researcher at City University London, United Kingdom.Parmar also notes that countries may start taxing unhealthy food and substances, such as tobacco and sugar, using the money to improve healthcare. Better infrastructure could further reduce the health burden in the poorest countries, she says.[These countries] need to improve the cost-effectiveness of healthcare services by expanding access to primary healthcare, safe water and sanitation, she explains.

The research also found that donor money for health services in developing countries is levelling off after tripling between 2000 and 2010. Funding for maternal and child health is growing, but money to care for people with health problems such as HIV/AIDS tuberculosis and malaria is decreasing, the study says.
Researchers have recently unearthed dozens of fossilized teeth in Kuwajima, Japan, and have identified it as a new species of tritylodontid. Tritylodontid is an animal family that is directly related to the evolution of mammals from reptiles.

Tritylodontids are also the last known family of mammal-like reptiles. Researchers from Kyoto University have found out that this group of herbivores lived much longer than what people have originally thought and existed with early mammals for several million years. The discovery led researchers to believe that mammals wiped out mammal-like reptiles soon after they emerged.

According to Science Daily, the study's author Hiroshige Matsuoka explained that tritylodontids were herbivores with a unique set of teeth, which intersects when they bite. "They had pretty much the same features as mammals -- for instance they were most likely warm-blooded -- but taxonomically speaking they were reptiles, because in their jaws they still had a bone that in mammals is used for hearing," Matsuoka continued.

While digging up a geological layer from the Cretaceous era in Kuwajima, researchers found different fossils of dinosaurs, turtles, lizards, fish, different types of plants, and Mesozoic mammals. One of those that are found has more than 250 tritylodontid teeth, the first ever of its kind to be found in Japan.

Although Matsuoka said that the belief of them dying out during the late Jurassic "made sense, because otherwise tritylodontids and the herbivorous mammals would have competed for the same niche," the new study suggests that these mammal-like reptiles may have actually survived more than 30 million years longer than what paleontologists thought, redorbit.com stated.

The discovery "raises new questions about how tritylodontids and their mammalian neighbors shared or separated ecological roles," Matsuoka added. It is the first study to use only details from excavated fossilized teeth to make sure whether or not a specie is new, and also to find where it properly belong in the evolutionary tree.



Check out the video below to further understand this eureka moment:
Acne has always been known as the most common cause of depression and low self-esteem among patients who have it. When they use the commonly prescribed and highly effective drug isotretinoin (Accutane), there is an instant boost in confidence which is always a positive result. However, for almost more than 30 years, this drug has been branded as a danger to pregnant women.

According to Medical Daily, women don't only face higher rates of spontaneous abortion while on the medication; babies also get exposed to it in the womb and have the biggest possibility of being born with severe birth abnormalities. Certain steps have been taken to prevent tragic outcomes like these to happen. Women who are on this drug have strict pregnancy prevention guidelines and yet a new study in Canada suggests that there are still many women and their doctors who fail to follow the rules. Researchers have discovered that about 50 percent of pregnant women taking the drug do not comply with the set regulations.

Researchers have estimated that at least one to two children born in Canada every year suffer from birth defects as a result of isotretinoin treatment. Ontario was found to have the highest rate of pregnancy among women on the drug with 90 percent also receiving social assistance at the same time. It has always been clear with researchers that those with lower socioeconomic backgrounds and increased risk for health problems always go together.

The Globe and Mail stated that the findings imply that doctors are not exhausting all options to warn patients about the risks of isotretinoin. The results also showed that there are still too many women who have not been educated on the potential dangers of the acne drug, the study's authors concluded. Dr. Brandace Winquist, research consultant to the Saskatchewan Health Quality Council and co-author of the study, said the findings regarding socioeconomic factors made the researchers question "the appropriateness of the materials shared with this population as well as the ability to afford contraceptives and reliably use them well."

To conduct the study, the researchers looked at health data for female patients between 12 and 48 who were prescribed isotretinoin from 1996 to 2011 in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. Because of the challenges of tracking all pregnancies and outcomes using only retrospective administrative data, the researchers created two categories for their results: a narrow category that only included women taking isotretinoin who also experienced either miscarriage, abortion, live birth, still birth or other pregnancy defects.

The study was done at Health Canada's request, however the department responded late at the request for information about what it plans to do with the results. The researchers of the study found that birth control rates for women before being prescribed isotretinoin as well as during treatment were almost the same. In Saskatchewan, 29 percent of women were prescribed with birth control in the year before starting isotretinoin, compared to 24 percent who were prescribed with birth control while being on the drug.
Do not mock slime molds, for even though they don't have brains, they still learn something new, said scientists. In a study where they watched Physarum polycephalum search for food, they noticed that the slime mold, despite being literally brainless, can learn to ignore chemical threats.

Slime mold can still learn, despite not having a brain >> https://t.co/v5oBIyy4b6 pic.twitter.com/wu93Hy4OXx  Discovery (@Discovery) April 27, 2016

The findings effectively contradict the idea of requiring neurons to learn. The authors of the study noted that while they initially thought learning is a trait limited to organisms with brains and nervous systems, the view has been changing in recent years. This is because they have seen astounding abilities from animals which are supposed to be brainless.

The slime mold, for instance is a single-celled organism much like an amoeba - it was dubbed primitive and survives on bacteria, fungi, and forest detritus for as long as they lived on the planet. Yet, as the Los Angeles Times noted, they have managed to live through intellectual feats.

Slime molds are particularly intelligent. Japanese researchers said that these molds can effectively "design" efficient rail system on maps, solve mazes, and even predict changes.

Romian Boisseau, lead author of the study, as published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, said that despite having only one cell, these molds are capable of doing things that are pretty amazing, considering that many did not think it possible for them to function as much as they do without brains.

The question remains, however, is whether or not they can actually learn? Scientists from Toulouse University in France tested their behaviors in labs, and learned that these creatures are able to learn their reaction to specific chemicals - but only up to a certain extent. Still, how these creatures manage such feat is interesting in the scientific community, as it puts intelligence on a different light.

Boisseau shared that there is a possibility that learning evolved first, and neurons and the nervous system came second - until then, there is still much to learn about these fascinating brainless creatures.
FLORENCE, S.C.  A portion of East Ashby Street near the Quinby community of Florence County will close on May 9 for construction that it part of the T.V. Road Improvement project.

According to the South Carolina Department of Transportation, East Ashby Street at North Irby Street will close on May 9 with a detour at McIver Road. Officials estimated that the road will remain closed until July 11.

The road will open for local access traffic only.
Music festival features rich folk art repertoire

From:Shanghai Daily | 2016-04-28 02:04

Beautiful melodies will fill Shanghai again as the 33rd Shanghai Spring International Music Festival starts tonight.

The festival, which goes back more than 50 years, will run from today to May 18. So far, the schedule includes more than 50 shows and events presented by both domestic and international artists.

About 5,000 discounted tickets are available at 30 yuan (US$4.62) each.

The festival will keep on providing opportunities for emerging musicians and will encourage original works, composer Xu Shuya, an official of the festival committee, said.

The festival this year will open at Shanghai Symphony Hall with a collection of the best original works that have been presented in previous years, including the symphonic poem Ode to the Red Flag, the violin concerto Butterfly Lovers, the symphonic suite Sketch of Jinling and Erhu Rhapsody No.2. The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra will help stage the classics, while young talents like violinist Chen Jiayi and Lu Yiwen will also participate.

On the same night, The White-haired Girl, a Chinese ballet theater, will be restaged at Shanghai Grand Theater by Shanghai Ballet, starring Fan Xiaofeng, Wu Husheng and Li Chenchen.

In addition to that, the festival will also present concerts with the works of Chinese composers Lu Qiming, Zhao Jiping and Yu Xunfa. A serial concert featuring original Chinese piano works from the past 100 years will give insights into the development of piano music in China.

More than 10 original works will be staged this year, including the recently composed works featuring the Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road.

The contemporary ballet Echoes of Eternity which tells the legend of a Tang Dynasty (AD618-907) emperor who falls in love with his concubine will also be shown.

Orchestre de la Suisse Romande from Switzerland, Orchestra 2001 from the US, Academy of Ancient Music from Britain, Jose Cura from Argentina and Chung Myung-whun from South Korea will also participate in the festival.

A series of performances by artists from countries along the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road will be a new highlight of the festival program arrangements.

The Tehran Symphony Orchestra will stage the closing concert for the Festival on May 18, while artists of the Kazakh National Instrumental Orchestra, Hayrullo Dadoboyev Folk Group, Dance Ensemble Bazamoro from Tajikistan, and the folklore and ethnographical ensemble Kambarkan of the Kyrgyz National Philharmonic will present three Central-Asia concerts from May 11 to 15.

The Shanghai Conservatory of Music will be open to the public from May 8 to 14. With an online reservation, members of the public can attend rehearsals, lectures, lessons and even master and doctoral defenses.

Visit www.ssimf.org and www.shcmusic.edu.cn for more information.

Mini Festival

THE mini festival When Baroque Meets England will be held at Shanghai Concert Hall from May 6-8 as part of the Shanghai Spring Festival.

Britten Sinfonia, the resident orchestra of the festival, will present the concerts The Two Ends of the Music History and Shakespeare.

The program includes works of well-known British composers like Purcell, Britten, Tippett and Huw Watkins, which helps elaborate the development of British music. Corelli, Handel and Bach will also be featured.

The concerts will also star harpsichord player Mahan Esfahani, violinist Jacqueline Shave, horn player Martin Pwen as well as mezzo soprano Allison Cook.

Britain may not be the most eye-catching country in the peak age of Classic music. But we cannot ignore the power of the ancient island kingdom if we expand our view a bit in the timeline, Shen Yanshu of Shanghai Concert Hall said.

In addition to the concerts, the public can also participate in three lectures and a workshop.

Date: May 5-8, 7:30pm

Venue: Shanghai Concert Hall

Address: 523 Yaan Rd E.

Tickets: 80-480 yuan

Tel: 400-8918182

Visit www.shanghaiconcerthall.org for more information

Impression of Muqam

The original musical idyll Impression of Muqam will help unveil traditional Uygur art and lifestyle with a show by Xinjiang Muqam Art Troupe on May 3 and 4.

The program was created based on the 12 Muqam, a national intangible cultural heritage of China, while modern stage settings help revive the ancient art with the help of the Digital Media Art School of Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

Muqam is a musical mode and set of melodic formulas used to guide improvisation and composition. The Muqam art was influenced by Persian music and culture, and passed down orally.

Muqam is like a cyclopedia of the Uygur as it covers history, society and life of common people. The 12 Muqam is an organized and standardized collection of Muqam folk arts spread orally in the region. The concubine Amanni Shahan of the Yerqiang Kingdom (1526-1560) is credited with collecting them and thereby preserving the 12 Muqam.

All the 12 Muqams will be staged in the program, while a love story will help link the songs for the four-act theater. A modern stage setting supported by digital media will help immerse the audience into the scenes, Dai Xiaorong of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music said.

As the story develops, the audience will witness the beautiful scenes of the forest at the foot of Tianshan Mountain, the busy bazaar where the Uygur people exchange their goods, and the royal palace where the legendary concubine worked on the collection, Dai said.

Date: May 3-4, 7:30pm

Venue: The Majestic Theater

Address: 66 Jiangning Rd

Tickets: 80-480 yuan

Tel: 400-880-2340, 5169-1234
Hospital in inflated fee scandal to be probed

From:Shanghai Daily | 2016-04-28 02:04

SHANGHAI East Hospital is under investigation for deliberately overcharging patients, authorities said yesterday.

The scandal came to light when the presenter of a show on Shanghai Radio read out a letter from a member of the public who complained of being overcharged by the city-level public hospital in the Pudong New Area.

The person said he was charged a registration fee of 18 yuan (US$2.80) instead of 13 yuan, as directed under local regulations.

A health and family planning commission official said an inquiry was launched immediately after hearing the allegation.

According to our preliminary investigation, the hospital overcharged on several items, said its Vice Secretary Fan Jincheng.

The hospital later issued an apology and offered to refund anyone who had been overcharged.
Global Snapshot

2016-04-28 11:25

Editor's note: The G20 Leaders' Summit will be held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, in September. China Daily is proud to announce that it has been designated the official newspaper for the event, the first time the summit will be held in China.

In the run-up, China Daily will publish a special section each month highlighting the issues to be tackled at the summit as well as give our readers a glimpse of the host city.

The summit, from Sept 4-5, will be extensively covered by China Daily with special packages looking at all aspects of the event as world leaders address the major challenges facing the global economy.

Click for the PDF version

Summit increasingly significant in global affairs, experts say

As China prepares to host its first G20 Summit, the importance of this grouping of major world economies is becoming more apparent, according to experts.

The event, slated for September 4-5 in East China's Hangzhou city, comes at a time when increasing deflationary risks loom over the global economy's recovery.

Boosting growth among developing countries is highlighted on the summit's agenda, as has making more progress in areas such as addressing global climate change. [Full story]

Thousands of volunteers recruited in Hangzhou to support meetings

Members of an international volunteer team attend a public event in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. More than 100,000 volunteers have signed up to help with the G20 summit. CHINA DAILY

A drive to recruit volunteers ahead of the G20 Summit being held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province in early September is picking up steam.

Since registration opened in December, more than 100,000 volunteers have signed up to help with the high-level international forum for governments and central bank governors.

Around 26,000 of these volunteers are university professors and their students, who will be whittled down to a short list of 3,000 through a strict selection and training process. [Full story]

Central bank expects to maintain a 'prudent' monetary policy

As Zhou Xiaochuan, People's Bank of China governor, spoke at the G20 gathering in Washington, he seemed more relieved than 50 days ago, when the last such gathering was held in Shanghai. Cascading fears about a hard economic landing for China had receded, replaced with improved growth momentum. Pressure on deflation and capital outflow had eased; commodity prices, which had plunged in the previous six months, staged a rebound.

Zhou flagged these achievements at the meeting, especially the strong bounce in March. As a Xinhua report put it: "Positive signs are converging, boosting sentiment that the slowdown in the Chinese economy may be bottoming out." [Full story]

City embraces English language ahead of event

A traffic police officer on the English Service Team wears a special armband while working. Photo provided to China Daily

Residents of Hangzhou in East China's Zhejiang province are honing their English language skills ahead of the G20 Summit being held there later this year.

English learning activities have been organized across the city as part of efforts to better serve the summit, which is scheduled to open in early September.

In March, the team behind local mobile app Xiangfu Community, based in the city's Gongshu district, started a campaign to get residents speaking more English by providing free language learning content and encouraging users to learn a new sentence each day.

Once a week, a lesson with a senior English language teacher is organized through the app, and English-themed discussion activities are held once a month. [Full story]
Historically a fast-growing region for DP World, volumes in the UAE dropped 5.9% year-on-year to 3.6m teu from 3.8m teu in Q1 2015. DP World chairman Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem put this down to a loss of lower-margin cargo," adding that the company would "continue to focus on driving profitability by targeting higher margin cargo."

Despite the challenging operating environment, we are pleased to see that our portfolio continues to deliver ahead of market volume growth. First quarter growth was largely driven by a stronger performance from our European and Indian subcontinent terminals, he said. Conditions in Latin America remain challenging.

Taking into account UAE losses, DP Worlds Europe, Middle East, North Africa region fell 0.4% year-on-year to 6.4m teu. Americas and Australia grew grew 13.4% in total to 1.9m from 1.6m in Q1 2015 thanks to the newly-acquired Prince Rupert terminal in Canada.

Our new developments in Rotterdam (Netherlands), Nhava Sheva (India) and Yarimca (Turkey) are now operational and are expected to deliver an increasing contribution in the second half of 2016. The additional 2m teu of capacity at Jebel Ali (UAE) and 1m teu of capacity in London Gateway (UK) are on course to be delivered in mid-2016, which will offer further room for growth, said Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem.

Overall, we remain well positioned to grow volumes ahead of the market, he continued. Our encouraging start to the year gives us confidence in meeting full year market expectations.
ACP said it, considers inadmissible an alleged study presented Wednesday, April 27, by a Brazilian company Foundation Men of the Sea and the ITF with the support of ITF Panamanian unions members that irresponsibly puts into question the safety of transit through the new locks.

The ITF commissioned the study, which was carried out by Brazils Fundacao Homem de Mar (FHM), in response to safety concerns risen by its Panamanian member unions. FHM was tasked with preparing a mathematical model, using a Manoeuvring Simulator Class A, to recreate the new locks, a neo-Panamax vessel and the tugboats that would assist its manoeuvres, the ITF said in its press release.

The ITF said that the concerns raised by the unions centred on the Panama Canal Administrations refusal to engage in dialogue on matters such as training, as well as the technical and construction issues that have led to delays in the operation of the new infrastructure and concluded that the safety of manoeuvrability is compromised due to several factors.

These include that - The locks dimensions are too small for safe operation (with both gates closed)

- There are no refuge areas for the tugboats inside the locks, leaving no room for failure (human error, miscommunication, broken lines or engine failure)

- The bollard pull is insufficient

- In terms of manoeuvrability in the locks, the control of the vessel was compromised under the average environmental conditions present in that geographic area (data provided by the contracting party). The main reasons were the low power of the tugboats and the required bollard pull. With milder conditions the exercise was concluded safely.

The studys conclusions were released at a press conference in Panama City.

The ITF, like its Panamanian member unions, has previously offered to work with the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) to ensure that the safety concerns of those who will work on the new infrastructure are addressed, and is making the study available to the ACP, it said in the statement.

The study was based on the ACP's original plan to use one forward tug and one aft tug. We understand that compensatory alternatives are being examined, which we welcome, said ITF general secretary Steve Cotton.

We share our affiliated unions concerns and we can assure that The ITF and its canal affiliates want the new canal to be safe and to work. The Panama Canal is crucial for the international maritime industry. We offer our full support to make this important maritime route safe for all those who transit it or work on it, and for a positive engagement between unions and the ACP, said the ITF.

The ACP retorted that, the study is not based on mathematical models, or physical navigation tests as those usually are doing in preparation for operations in the extended channel; therefore, lack scientific rigor and credibility, said Captain Peter Pusztai, Panama Canal pilots training co-ordinator. He added that the authors of this study "have not sailed the Panama Canal, and are not suitable for it."

The Panama Canal in recent years has invested more than $3m in updating its simulation centre with rigorous mathematical models and $8m in a centre of physical simulation ships to scale, which is an exact replica of the navigation channels, including Gaillard Cut.

The Panama Canal administration makes clear that it has not provided data to the Brazilian company to make a report of this type. In addition, the Panama Canal makes all his studies in the simulation centre which is the most advanced in the region, based on rigorous mathematical models and updated, with physical simulations scale ships and real transits in the actual locks, the ACP said.

During the presentation of the report of the ITF, representatives of the Foundation Men of the Sea showed an animation of a lockage with only two tugboats, which is an incorrect premise, because in the expanded Canal will be used up to four tugboats for transit.
Meanwhile HSBC regional transport director Paresh Jain offered various permutations of how further developments will play out.

Just last week, four carriers from three different alliance groupings announced they were forming the new Ocean Alliance, putting together CMA CGM, Cosco Container Lines, Evergreen Line and Orient Overseas Container Line against the might of the dominant 2M alliance while at the same time further weakening the already tottering G6 and CKYHE alliances and essentially decimating the O3 and leaving United Arab Shipping Company (UASC) holding the parcel.

With the combined Chinese group tending to gravitate towards other bigger players, Meng said: That means there could be a hole left for the CKYHE that would make them face more challenges than others and the guys that China Cosco chooses will be in a relatively better position.

Jain pointed out that alliances particularly of the most recent Ocean Alliance type may not necessarily lead to more restructuring or mergers as they are a cost-side solution while they still compete on the freight rates side.

He said for example the only commonality the four partners share is their balance sheet and their orderbook. CLSAs Meng meanwhile added that the most likely candidates for mergers were publicly listed companies with a PE ratio of around 0.6 to 0.7 times but ruled out those with a strong family background such as OOCL and Evergreen.

Jain also noted that with the Ocean Alliance, the combined market share of the eight other main lines across the three remaining alliance groups will not be bigger than either the top two in the 2M or the four in Ocean.

This will put them in a tight spot, he said, as they will not have the option of regrouping themselves into two or more alliances since even as a group they are already smaller than the leading six. For the first time the top six shipping lines will have a categorical edge over the other eight, Jain said.

Looking beyond the changes in the alliances, he analysed the options for the players left and came to the conclusion that they have one of two options: to merge or to shrink.

This is already happening among some of the stragglers, with UASC and Hapag-Lloyd confirming merger talks, essentially forcing a shakeup of the G6 alliance, with only the two bigger Japanese lines (MOL and NYK) and Hyundai Merchant Marine (HMM) remaining and the CKYHE with only K Line, Hanjin and Yang Ming left.

More mergers may yet transpire with the two major Korean lines, Hanjin Shipping and HMM, seen having to come to some kind of arrangement to survive despite official opposition to merge.

The remaining Japanese lines and the Korean lines however are seen as a different kettle of fish, ultimately being state-supported in some way, thus giving them greater financial strength than their European-based competitors. But if the Korean lines are forced to merge, it seems not unlikely that the Japanese may be forced to make similar moves as well.

Meng however said that while the European lines may not be privileged with the same level of state or quasi-state support, they are relatively strong companies in their own right and should be able to survive without having to merge.

Instead it will be smaller companies that will be in the worst position, he noted. I think the ones to lose out will be the smaller ones because they dont have government support and many of them have really stressed balance sheets; these ones will be the first to be phased out of the market, Meng concluded, while declining to name specific companies that would be vulnerable.

The other option to shrink and make a strategic retreat to focus on a specific market segment where there is a competitive advantage, in the same way that Zim Shipping is doing, is a strategy some of the remaining players in the container line musical chairs may have to consider in the wake of the inevitable demise of the G6 and CKYHE alliances. This would be especially true of Taiwan-based Yang Ming, who after the music has stopped, might find itself being the one without a chair.
The regulatory approval will allow Bharat Petroleum to construct the terminal capable of handling one million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of refrigerated propane and butane, as well as facilities for bottling and distribution of LPG.

The proposed project is estimated to cost around $104m and is scheduled for completion within one year from the date of award of the environment clearance.

The project also includes establishing a bottling plant comprising of two LPG-mounded bullet storage facility of 350 tonnes capacity each, besides loading facilities, coupled with machineries and loading gantries for bulk tanker.
Seoul-listed HHI generated an operating profit of KRW325.2bn ($283.2m) while revenue was reported at KRW10.27trn, a 7.8% decline compared to the previous quarter.

For Q1 2016, we have returned to the black mainly due to the following reasons: the phase-out of low priced shipbuilding contracts, stabilisation of manufacturing processes for offshore and industrial plant businesses, reduced material costs, the weakening (Korean) won and noticeable performance improvement of non-shipbuilding businesses including engine and machinery, electro electric systems and construction equipment, a HHI officer said.

The officer added that the strong performance of Hyundai Oilbank, its refining subsidiary, also contributed to the profit.

Since 2014, HHI launched a series of drastic and comprehensive restructuring measures in an all-out effort to tide over the protracted industry crisis.

The profit-focused restructuring measures included the liquidation of unprofitable businesses and overseas incorporated firms such as Hyundai Cummins Engine Company and JaKe. The group also spun off the industrial machinery unit of its engine and machinery division and disaffiliated its trading arm Hyundai Corp.

Additionally the group combined the sales department of its shipbuilding and offshore divisions for increased synergies.

The HHI officer said: Although we have turned a profit in the first quarter of this year, we will concentrate more on cutting costs in case of a falling order backlog.
NYK reported a JPY18.2bn ($168m) profit for FY2015, a drop of 61.7% on the JPY47.6bn it made in the previous year. Revenues fell 5.4% to JPY2.27trn in FY2015 compared to JPY2.4trn a year earlier.

Looking ahead the Japanese shipowner said it expected the operating environment financial year ended 31 March 2017 to be extremely challenging.

Although cargo volume is projected to increase in the container shipping market, the oversupply of tonnage is forecast to persist due to the entry of newly built ultra-large container ships, and spot freight rates are expected to remain stagnant, NYK said.

In the dry bulk transport market, while steady growth is projected, the market is expected to weaken as newly built tanker vessels are launched.

NYK said it expected solid performances from its car carrier, LNG and offshore businesses and expected a strong result from its logistics segment.

As a result it is forecasting a slightly lower profit for FY2016 of JPY15bn, with a decline in revenues to JPY2.18trn.
Press Release

April 28, 2016 PHL Pavilion Aims to Start Conversation on Built Heritage with Country's First Participation at Venice Architecture Biennale The Philippines' participation at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia has started a conversation about the nation's built heritage with its selected exhibition, Muhon: Traces of An Adolescent City curated by Leandro V. Locsin Partners (LVLP). The Philippine Pavilion is located at Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy and it will hold its vernissage on May 27, 2016, while the exhibit will run from May 28 to November 27, 2016. The country's historic first participation at the Architecture Venice Biennale is a joint undertaking of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), and the Office of Senator Loren Legarda. The Filipino word muhon, translated roughly as "monument" or "place-marker," evokes contemplation through the primal act of marking a fixed point in both space and time. The construction of a muhon is an act of affirming one's existence and staking a claim in the universe. Thus, the exhibition anchors on the notion that the interpretation of the built environment is a critical method of understanding one's sense of and belonging to a place. As it stands today, the megalopolis of Metro Manila arose from the ruins of an older colonial city leveled by the Second World War. As such, the reborn capital is conceived in its current context as an adolescent city in flux. In theory, "adolescence" describes the struggle for identity that Metro Manila now confronts. Through the selective investigation of nine post-war buildings and urban elements, Muhon aims to elicit conjectures that reconcile opposing vectors of progress and of permanence. It essays the implications of the careless destruction of a fraught architectural inheritance and the lack of consciousness about the dilemma. In tracing each muhon through its history, modernity, and conjecture, the Pavilion is an attempt to understand a city's identifying markers -- to interpret their meaning and to discern their value. It aspires to be a platform for a collaborative and collective act of reflection about a built environment on the brink of vital renewal or irreversible decay. NCCA Chairman Felipe de Leon Jr., who is also the Philippine Pavilion Commissioner, said, "What is ostensibly an architectural issue is actually the age-old battle between public interest and private, particularly corporate, gain. Architectural structures are not just neutral, static objects in our midst. They are powerful arbiters of social relations. Edifices can impose ways of behaving, valuing and thinking on people." Legarda, the visionary behind the Philippines' re-entry to the Art Biennale and first participation at the Architecture Biennale, explained "Building better is an axiom. When homes and infrastructure are destroyed, people say we need to build better; but building homes and cities is not about having second chances. We have seen hundreds of thousands of lives lost due to severe weather disturbances, flooding and tsunamis--showing us all that the kind of homes and facilities we build, and where we build them, can mean survival or death. " She added, "This underscores the important role of architecture. Today's realities demand a new understanding that transcends the conventional notion that architecture merely means planning, designing and constructing structures." For his part, DFA Secretary Jose Rene D. Almendras highlighted the importance of the country's presence in the Biennale. He stated, "As the Biennale is expected to gather the world's outstanding artists from different disciplines and perspectives, we are confident that the Philippine participation will once again bring pride to all Filipinos - boasting the talent and ingenuity of the country's foremost architects and contemporary visual artists who have created the Philippine Pavilion." This Philippine Pavilion will be the official national representation of the country at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Only one national pavilion for each participating country is recognized by La Biennale di Venezia. The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena has been appointed as the Director of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. He stated that "there are several battles that need to be won and several frontiers that need to be expanded in order to improve the quality of built environment and the people's quality of life." In light of such vision and advocacy, he imagines the 2016 Exhibition to display "success stories worth to be told and exemplary cases worth to be shared where architecture did, is and will make a difference in those battles and frontiers." Nine Participants and Their Muhons The LVLP curatorial team composed of Leandro Locsin, Jr., Sudarshan Khadka, Jr., and Juan Paolo dela Cruz, invited six architects and three artists to participate in the exhibition. The individual architects and firms are 8x8, CS Architecture, Lima Architecture, Manosa & Co. Inc., Eduardo Calma, and Jorge Yulo. Meanwhile, internationally recognized Filipino contemporary artists, represented by 1335 Mabini--Poklong Anading, Tad Ermitano and Mark Salvatus--complete the list of participants. The nine participants surveyed buildings, structures, landmarks, boroughs and urban landscapes, and analyzed its architecture, heritage and cultural merit. After which, they created three sets of abstracted models built for each of the subject corresponding to their original state, their current condition, and their projected future. The subjects that will be featured in Muhon are KM 0 in Luneta (Anading), Pandacan Bridge (Ermitano), Chinatown (Salvatus), Magsaysay Center (8x8), CS Architecture (Pasig River), Makati Stock Exchange (Lima Architecture), Coconut Palace (Manosa & Co.), Philippine International Convention Center (Calma), and Mandarin Hotel (Yulo).
Press Release

April 28, 2016 BONGBONG MARCOS READIES COMPLAINT ON VOTE RECEIPT DISCREPANCIES IN OAV Vice Presidential candidate Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" R. Marcos, Jr. today bared that his legal team is now collating evidence on vote receipt discrepancies in the Overseas Absentee Voting in preparation for the filing of a complaint before the Commission on Elections (Comelec). In an interview, Marcos said he will not take the vote receipt discrepancies issue sitting down as his team is currently gathering evidence from people abroad who have personal knowledge of the incidents wherein votes cast in his favor were credited to other candidates in the receipts. "We are in the process of collating all complaints, all data in preparation for the filing of a complaint before the Comelec regarding the controversy. We will exert all efforts to get to the bottom of this," he said. Marcos said more vote receipt discrepancies have been reported with the latest happening in California, USA. "When the voter in California complained to the election officers, he was scolded by the Board of Elections Inspectors (BEIs) who ordered him to just go home. The BEI even allegedly tore his vote." Marcos lamented, "What is disturbing is that I am the only one losing votes!" Vote receipt discrepancies have been earlier reported in Hong Kong, Dubai, Kuwait and Japan. Marcos further chided the Comelec for warning voters taking selfies with their receipts saying instead of wasting its time on such matters, the COMELEC should ensure the conduct of clean, honest and credible elections on May 9. Marcos aired the call after the Comelec said the Board of Election Inspectors in Dubai, Hong Kong, Vientiane in Laos, Madrid in Spain and Singapore reported incidents of voters taking selfies with their ballots, which is strictly prohibited. Commissioner Arthur Lim said the poll body will investigate if charges should be filed. "Instead of going after voters taking selfies, the Comelec should focus all its efforts in addressing various issues that threaten the credibility of the elections, such as the reported discrepancies in the ballot, the printed receipts and the hacking of their website that compromised voters' data," Marcos recommended. Marcos said the reports on alleged discrepancies in the votes in the ballot and the printed receipts could have spurred voters in the OAV to take selfies with their ballots. "You cannot fault the voters to take actions in a bid to protect their vote if they continue to hear reports of alleged flaws in the voting process. So, instead of going after those taking selfies, the Comelec should get its act together to allay any suspicions of cheating or voting irregularities" Marcos concluded.
ORIENTAL MINDORO GIVES WARM WELCOME TO BONGBONG MARCOS

Bongbong gets endorsement of Calapan City Mayor

Vice Presidential candidate Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" R. Marcos Jr. got another endorsement from local officials who crossed party lines to support him.

Re-electionist Calapan City Mayor Arnan Panaligan of the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) ditched his party when he gave his endorsement to Marcos along with his Vice Mayoral bet Gil Ramirez and the rest of their Council slate.

Marcos was in Oriental Mindoro today bringing his United Caravan to Calapan City and other parts of the province.

The Senator also paid a courtesy call to Liberal Party (LP) stalwart Mindoro Oriental Governor Alfonso Umali Jr. who also gave an equally warm welcome. Umali received Marcos in his office where dozens of local officials and workers mobbed the aspiring Vice Presidential candidate like a rock star.

"Hindi naman pwedeng hindi pagbigyan si Bongbong," Umali said in jest.

Umali is also the President of the Governors League of the Philippines.

Marcos mentioned that both their fathers were good friends and so it is with the two of them.

"Kami ni Gov. Umali ang mga second generation nang magkakaibigan," Marcos said.

Accompanying Marcos was Mandaluyong City Mayor Benhur Abalos who is a childhood friend of Calapan Mayor Panaligan.

Marcos then proceeded to join Vice Governor Humerlito Dolor at the People's Hall where he also received a rousing welcome.

It was here where Dolor presented to Marcos the "Gawad Tamaraw" award for his contribution to the improvement of public works in Oriental Mindoro.

Marcos is Chair of the Committee on Local Government.

Marcos also addressed the barangay officials informing them of the reforms for the local government which he proposed in the Senate such as the SK Reform Law, the Barangay Retirement Benefits Bill, the Barangay Elections Postponement Bill, among others.

"I hope that the next Administration will be more receptive to the proposals that will benefit local government and with your help and support, we will make it happen," Marcos concluded.
Press Release

April 28, 2016 If we can hire 18,000 officials every 3 yrs, why can't we do

the same for cops? - Recto If the nation will be hiring 18,083 politicos to fill local and national positions in May 9, then why can't it hire the same number of additional policemen to combat the crime surge and stop terrorists dead on their tracks? This was pointed out by Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph Recto in pressing his call for a massive police recruitment in retaking streets from criminals and defeating the Abu Sayyaf. "We're spending P6.8 billion to organize an election which is basically a recruitment event for 18,000- plus vacant positions, and yet there seems to be a lack of a national drive to entice qualified young men and women to join the understaffed Philippine National Police (PNP)," Recto said. For 2016, the Comelec has a budget of P16 billion for voting machines and the holding of two national elections, the second one in October for barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan posts. Recto cited the case of certain towns which would choose 10 elective officials this May, "when for many of the residents of these places, what they badly want are 10 additional cops." "I think the national fervor and cost in choosing political applicants should be the same as in hiring key jobs in the community like policemen, doctors, and teachers," he said. "There's something wrong when we have the funds and the salaries for elective officials when we can hardly afford to fund more local doctors," he lamented. "At isa pa, kung elective positions may ads ang mga aplikante, pati gobyerno ang daming announcements, pero kung pulis na ang ire-recruit, halos walang abiso mula sa gobyerno," Recto said While filling 18,083 elective posts every three years is a "national obligation," wiping out the backlog in needed police officers is not. Recto said there are 23,820 vacant positions in the PNP roster as only 150,590 out of the 174,410 "authorized uniformed personnel positions" are occupied. If the vacancies are filled and distributed equally among local governments nationwide, each of the 1,489 towns will get an additional 12 policemen, and each of the 145 cites will get 41 more, Recto said. "This is a rough estimate," Recto said, explaining that there is a formula in assigning policemen. "But just by using the average, it is clear that each town and city will get a tremendous boost in the number of police personnel if the vacancies are filled." By using the simple formula, Mindanao will get 6,417 additional policemen; Visayas, 6,027 and Luzon, including Metro Manila, 11,369, according to Recto's calculation. "If sent out to do foot patrol, they can boost police visibility and deter the commission of crimes," Recto said. "Every day, 28 women or children are raped, 34 hapless Filipinos are killed and 352 others fall victim to robbery. Yet, 23,820 vacant positions for policemen remain unfilled," Recto said. "Last year, rape cases reported to the police and other law enforcement agencies reached 10,298, up from 9,887 in 2014," the reelectionist senator added. "There were 128,389 cases of robbery, theft, carnapping and cattle-rustling last year. Or someone loses his bag, or her cellphone, or the family's car or carabao to thieves or robbers every four minutes," Recto said. On carjacking alone, 12,900 vehicles were stolen last year," Recto said, citing a PNP report. Recto also scored "the brazenness and the impunity" by which murder is committed nowadays, with cases of murder reaching 9,643 last year. "One murder or homicide is committed every 42 minutes." "Malaking bagay ang dagdag na pulis," Recto said. "Dahil sa crime wave, lahat ng bayan at siyudad sa Pilipinas, nagrereklamo na kulang sila sa pulis." Recto said fielding more policemen would require the PNP to step up its recruitment drive and the Department of Budget and Management to speedily approve PNP request for funds for personnel positions. "In recruiting, government should widen its information drive to reach as many interested applicants as possible. There should be a recruitment roadshow targeting schools. And in order to boost the passing rate in qualifying tests, the PNP may have to offer free review classes to state colleges," he said.
This article appears in the Chronicles new home design magazine, Habitat, which premieres Sunday April 24. The print edition is for sale in our online store, SFChronicle.com/Habitat

When the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopens May 14, its permanent collection will have grown by more than 6,000 works of art. More than half will have come from a network of hundreds of individuals, each of whom pulled pieces from their own walls to help launch a new era for modern art in the Bay Area.

Robin Wright knows many of these individuals and each of the acquired works very personally. In addition to being the acting vice chair of SFMOMAs board of trustees, she helped lead the museums decadelong collection campaign  a highly strategic philanthropic effort in which the museum essentially asked individuals to will very specific, very valuable works of art to the institution after their deaths.

We were looking for transformative gifts  gifts that would enhance our permanent collection in some way, says Wright. All four curators had to think about what they had and what they needed, and they knew peoples private collections very well. Their expertise was key in the whole thing.

How did she and the museums curators come up with a gentle way to ask passionate collectors to part with their art? I had no idea how we were going to do it, so I went first, says Wright, who compiled a list of all the pieces she and her husband, Ian Reeves, owned that the museum had previously asked to borrow and exhibit. My thinking was, if they had already requested it to be shown ... they must have valued those works and thought they were a good fit. I let them select from that list, and they took most of them.

Wright and Reeves ended up promising more than 25 works by artists including Sherrie Levine, Ed Ruscha, Alighiero Boetti, Richard Tuttle and Jim Welling.

Next, a committee of 12 major collectors was assembled and asked to give. Their gifts inspired others, and we were off, recalls Wright, who says that once the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection  one of Americas greatest  came to the museum in 2009, the entire tone of the campaign changed. From then on, we were asking from a position of strength  people really desired their own pieces to end up in what has become one of the best collections on the West Coast. They were confident it would be in capable hands.

To Wright, SFMOMA always seemed a fitting place for her beloved works to end up. She acknowledges that over the past two decades, her collecting habits have been strongly influenced by those of the museum, and shes not alone. It started in the late 1980s with (curator) John Caldwell ..., she says. His ideas were exciting, and collectors were drawn to him and the artists he was interested in. The museum was buying, and buyers were buying in connection with them  they were in sync. According to Wright, that momentum has only grown, thanks to successive curators such as Gary Garrels, who specializes in painting and sculpture, and Sandra Phillips, who has brought her passion for photography to the museum.

Wright has spent the last two decades advancing her art education at SFMOMA, from sitting in on accession meetings (where curators discuss works they hope to acquire) to developing close relationships with dealers. Though a dozen of their pieces were recently loaned for the museums grand opening, the couples remaining personal collection is hardly lacking. Their home is a veritable museum, one in which art and life intersect at every turn.

Douglas Burnham, principal of Envelope A+D, helped the couple transform their fairly traditional Pacific Heights house into one where contemporary, thought-provoking works  such as Bruce Naumans Pair of Reversed Heads, which hangs from the dining room ceiling, or Martin Creeds Protrusion, in which an otherwise unadorned white wall bulges as if ready to give birth  not only dont seem out of place but interact with the architecture in masterful ways.

I was tasked with essentially designing a museum with someone who is completely immersed in her collection and lives intimately with it, says Burnham, who said he relished the opportunity to elevate the architecturally mundane, such as outlets, into something more artful. Their collection is very conceptual  a typical wall switch could be mistaken for art, so we had to be more purposeful. The majority of outlets and switches are hidden in panels or in a recessed base of the wall. But for a work by Marcel Duchamp that required electricity, Burnham created a glass vitrine to house a wireless remote.

In many cases, Burnham, Wright and Reeves also worked closely with the artists themselves to execute site-specific works. Lawrence Weiners Dust & Diamonds is etched onto floor-to-ceiling glass panels in the living room; Mungo Thomson designed Negative Space, a swirling celestial image, for the ceiling above the main staircase. We wanted to set the stage for very personal art encounters but have them be seamless and integrated into the architecture, says Burnham.

This is exemplified in the library, where one is essentially placed within the beating heart of the collector. Suspended glass shelves on all sides create the rib cage of the room, and each shelf is filled with ephemera and artists books  media that Wright grew to love while working with the late dealer Steven Leiber.

The two became friends and eventual business partners, launching Rite Editions in 2007. They teamed up with artists to create a series of limited-edition works; one of the latest Rite Editions is a set of Limoges plates created by Seattle artist Jeffry Mitchell, which currently hangs in the Rena Bransten Gallery in the new Minnesota Street Project.

Such creative intersections between artists, collectors, galleries and museums signal a shift in the dynamics of the San Francisco art world. Wright sees SFMOMA as central to this. Its great to see that  that a museum can have that type of impact on the community, says Wright. The collection campaign may be officially over, but Wright says people are still giving. I hope it never ends. It is so meaningful that collectors give locally because it makes an impact on our city that is everlasting.
A power cord slammed by a door caused the brakes on BARTs first new rail car to fail last week, sending the car into a pile of sandbags at the end of a Hayward test track, agency officials said Wednesday.

The rail car, manufactured by Bombardier, a Canadian firm, is undergoing a rigorous series of tests on BARTs test track at the Hayward maintenance yard. Between tests, BART uses it to train its operators how to use it.

During a training session Friday the brakes failed and the car, traveling 6 to 8 mph, plowed into the sandbags. The car did not leave the tracks, contrary to some early reports.

At a Wednesday news briefing, BART officials said the cause of the incident was neither a train equipment failure nor operator error. Instead, said Tamar Allen, chief maintenance and engineering officer, it was caused when a piece of monitoring and testing equipment shorted out, apparently because a power cord was damaged after being struck by a cabinet door that, perhaps repeatedly, slammed open and shut as the train moved and stopped.

The car did not fail, Allen said. The operators did not do anything wrong.

The short circuit caused the cars auxiliary power system to shut down, cutting electricity to the pump that feeds hydraulic fluid to the rail cars friction braking system. Electrical brakes had already slowed the train from 15 mph to about 5 mph, she said, but when the friction brakes failed, the train, heading down an incline, gained speed slightly before slamming into the sandbags.

The car suffered no damage aside from being inundated in sand that needed to be cleaned out of the wheels and off the front of the car, said John Garnham, the project manager for BARTs new car program. No one was injured.

Garnham said the accident wouldnt have occurred in a longer train, even a two-car train, because the other cars, which are independently powered, would have had working brakes and brought it to a halt.

BART will work with Bombardier engineers, who are on site, to install software that will give train operators better warnings of the lack of hydraulic fluid and automatically cut propulsion power to the car, Garnham said.

BART will also improve its training for operators running single-car trains, which is done mainly in rail yards. And theyll remove the door from the power cabinet so it will no longer fray the cord.

Garnham and Allen said the reason BART tests the new rail cars, especially the initial car, so extensively is to find problems and fix them before the agency gives Bombardier approval to crank up the production line.

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When youre testing a new vehicle, stuff happens, Allen said. What you do when stuff happens is you learn things and you make improvements you wouldnt have thought of in the first place.

She said the car will resume regular testing soon. Its the first of 775 new cars BART has ordered. Another nine are due before the end of the year, but theyll be restricted to test tracks or after-hours runs for at least six months.

Once the first 10 cars pass their tests, Bombardier will start assembling the cars in bulk in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and shipping them by truck to the Bay Area. Sixty new cars are expected to hit the rails in 2017, with the full order of 775 expected by 2021. BART is spending $2.5 billion to replace and expand its aging fleet of 664 cars. The agency hopes to find funding to expand that order to 1,081 cars.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan
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A 99-year-old widow will get to stay in the San Francisco flat where she has lived since the 1940s  if she can figure out how to pay about $100,000 in attorneys fees.

A judge made formal on Wednesday his tentative ruling that Iris Canada may continue to reside at 670 Page St. for the rest of her life, which, come July, will total one full century.

The ruling by Superior Court Judge A. James Robertson II seemed to bring an end to the two-year battle to evict Canada, a retired nurse  a battle that was triggered by her refusal to agree to plans to convert the six-unit building to condominiums. But a provision of the ruling obliges her to pay an estimated $100,000 in attorneys fees, which she doesnt have.

I feel terrible about the whole thing, Canada said as she made her way out of court holding onto a walker.

The legal battle illustrates the complexity of real estate law in San Francisco. Under the terms of a deal she signed in 2005, Canada  although she has become a cause celebre in the tenants rights movement  is not a tenant in her flat, but the holder of a life estate co-ownership that allows her to stay for $700 a month for as long as she lives.

But when she declined two years ago to sign off on the condo conversion deal for the rest of the building, the primary co-owner of her flat  Peter Owens of Burlington, Vt.  sued to have her evicted on the basis that she was no longer living there but living instead with her niece, Iris Merriouns, in Oakland. Merriouns has been acting as her aunts chief defender, companion and gatekeeper.

Merriouns said the cause of the dispute was simple.

Owens did not think my aunt was going to live this long, she said.

Owens, through his lawyers, said he was willing to waive the fees if Canada signs off on the conversion deal for the entire building, a deal worth considerably more than $100,000. But Canada, whose signature as a co-owner is required, wouldnt do it, under the advice of her niece. Owens says thats because the niece is seeking financial benefit for herself.

After Merriouns complained that she had difficulty talking about the matter with Owens, the two got on a conference call  and for about half an hour, they argued long-distance over Canadas plight.

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In an often-rancorous exchange, the two adversaries quarreled about Canadas absences from the flat, about her obligation to pay for a rat exterminator and for capital improvements, about the changing of door locks, about whether Canada had been deceived when she signed the life estate deal and about whether it was fair to force a 99-year-old woman to live alone.

Peter, this is very unfair of you, Merriouns said. Did you expect me to just stand out of the way while (Canada) is evicted?

Iris, I want her to keep living there, Owens said. All Ive ever wanted was her cooperation.

The two foes were unable to resolve the matter, and Owens, in frustration, hung up. Their lawyers will return to court at an unspecified time to discuss the issue of legal fees and who pays them.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com
Contra Costa County health authorities warned residents Wednesday to not use any prescription-strength drugs that were not purchased directly from a pharmacist after learning of four overdoses likely caused by pills laced with fentanyl.

In the past month, at least nine people in the Bay Area are believed to have overdosed on counterfeit pills that contained fentanyl, an extremely potent pain reliever, according to public health reports. Four cases were in Contra Costa County, with the others in San Francisco, Alameda and Santa Clara counties. None of the overdoses has been fatal.

The cases may be related to a surge in fentanyl overdoses in the Sacramento area  also linked to counterfeit pain pills  that has spread to the Bay Area. At least a dozen people have died in the Sacramento outbreak.

Im suspicious that its linked, said Dr. David Goldstein, director of emergency medical services for Contra Costa County.

Unfortunately, the pills look very much like the real thing, Goldstein said. And so somebody buying them off the street would not be able to tell that they have fentanyl in them. And fentanyl is so much more powerful than what theyd normally get. Thats why were seeing all these overdoses.

Fentanyl has been causing widespread overdoses elsewhere in the country for years, but has appeared in California only in recent months. San Francisco had an outbreak of fentanyl overdoses, including two deaths, tied to counterfeit Xanax tablets late last year.

The Sacramento outbreak is linked to counterfeit Norco pills. Norco is a popular painkiller that combines acetaminophen and the opioid hydrocodone. Testing of fake Norco pills in Sacramento and the Bay Area has found high doses of fentanyl and only trace amounts of hydrocodone.

Thats dangerous because fentanyl is an extremely potent narcotic  about 100 times more powerful than heroin. Very small amounts can cause people to overdose. So people who take Norco tablets that they believe to contain only the usual mix of drugs can easily, and quickly, overdose, health officials say.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week released a report detailing two Contra Costa County cases in which people showed up in an emergency room just half an hour after taking what they thought were Norco tablets, which they had purchased from a friend. Both patients  a man, 36, and his girlfriend, 30  were given naloxone to reverse the overdose symptoms, and both have since recovered.

Another patient who was treated days later was able to give doctors one of the pills hed purchased. The tablet looked almost indistinguishable from a Norco pill one would get from a pharmacy. But lab analysis of the pill found fentanyl, acetaminophen, Promethazine and trace amounts of cocaine. Promethazine is an antinausea medication that may also be used to increase the high effect of opiates, according to the CDC report.

Promethazine has not been reported in counterfeit pills before, said Dr. Kathy Vo, a UCSF emergency medicine expert who was an author of the CDC report. Vo, who works at the San Francisco division of the California Poison Control System, became aware of the Bay Area overdoses in late March, after fielding calls from emergency room physicians.

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We dont know much about what these two (fentanyl and Promethazine) do together, Vo said. We dont know if it makes it more dangerous. And thats really our main point. These pills can contain anything.

Contra Costa County is sending out alerts to health care providers and schools warning people to avoid taking any prescription drugs purchased from friends or strangers. Anyone who has already bought such drugs should call their local public health agency about proper disposal.

Were spreading the message as far as we can, Goldstein said. We think this is a real public-health risk at this point.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com
There is no doubt in my mind that the nuns of Fraternite Notre Dame, who are planning to move their soup kitchen from the Tenderloin to the Mission District, do good works. And I am sure their pastries are fluffy and feather light.

However, I do think some questions need to be asked about their potential move, which was made possible by the largesse of millionaire self-help guru Tony Robbins after the nuns were threatened with eviction from their current Turk Street digs.

For starters, although the nuns originally said they hoped to start moving into their new soup kitchen at 16th and Mission streets by the end of April  i.e., Saturday  that is turning out to be impossible. This is San Francisco, and when it comes to most anything having to do with development, things move extremely slowly. To get any kind of new business up and running in a matter of weeks is moving at warp speed. That goes double for an operation thats going to attract hundreds of the homeless and otherwise down-and-out.

The cautiousness begins with the Planning Department, where officials seemed as surprised as anyone by the nuns quick move.

Theres absolutely nothing on our end that has been filed, said Planning spokeswoman Gina Simi. If they did want to open a soup kitchen, it still requires a change-of-use permit.

And, Simi says, part of getting that permit is issuing a neighborhood notification.

There is a 30-day review period, she said. Notifications have to be put out in an area within 150 feet of the property. We dont see that has been done yet.

A spokesman for the nuns confirmed that, saying they have a long ways to go to get this done. They are, he said, aware that a neighborhood notification will be necessary.

As weve heard in news reports, some residents are not thrilled with the idea of a soup kitchen in the heart of the Mission, and for the nuns to simply announce that they are setting up shop probably wasnt the best way to proceed.

Supervisor David Campos, while generally supportive of what the nuns want to do in his district, is also concerned about notification.

Campos seeks dialogue

Great intentions, he said in a text, but should have done outreach to the neighborhood. Hopefully, we can still have that dialogue.

Thats not how the nuns have done things in the past, however. When they established their soup kitchen on Turk Street, people in the Tenderloin say, they simply opened the doors and started serving meals.

We never understood how they got to operate a soup kitchen there, said Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. We never understood how a building could open up without any public notice.

If there had been a chance for comment, it is entirely possible that the Tenderloin location might have encountered resistance. Longtime Tenderloin activist Dina Hilliard, who has since left the city, says several people wondered about the need for the service.

I questioned why they were opening a food kitchen within a block of one food service location (S.F. Rescue Mission) and within two blocks of others (St. Anthonys and Glide Memorial United Methodist Church), Hilliard said.

Theres also the question of where the 16th and Mission neighborhood is headed. The citys year-old Navigation Center, in the building next door to where the nuns want to relocate, is the future site of a 165-unit affordable housing development for families, which may begin construction in 2017. Sam Moss, executive director of the Mission Housing Development Corp., predicts that will change the gritty vibe at 16th and Mission.

There may not be the same collection of people there, Moss said. I urge people not to think of how it is now, but in five years.

Eat and linger

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In the Tenderloin, the concern with many of the free food locations is that people congregate on the sidewalk for the meal, then stay there. Mission residents may find that unsettling.

It should be said, however, that Moss is a backer of the free-food project.

I would hesitate to say a soup kitchen is a bad idea, he said. I think it is time to start addressing the issue with services.

If the nuns have to go through neighborhood notification, this will be an interesting dialogue. Opponents are bound to snipe at the nuns, pointing out, for example, that they arent actually a Roman Catholic order.

San Francisco Archdiocese spokesman Mike Brown says that because the order does not recognize the pope as its leader, there seems to be little doubt this religious order is not Roman Catholic.

On the other hand, thats never been a problem before, and the archdiocese has been supportive of the nuns efforts to continue their work. The nuns, and their good works, have gotten a pass so far in the city, and it is entirely possible the feel-good story will carry the day.

After all, says Hilliard, whos going to say no to nuns?

C.W. Nevius is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns appear Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: cwnevius@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @cwnevius
When the FBI paid more than $1 million to crack into the San Bernardino shooters iPhone 5C, it paid only for a hacking tool, not the source code, so it is not able to publicly disclose how the phone was broken into.

The FBI purchased the method from an outside party so that we could unlock the San Bernardino device. We did not, however, purchase the rights to technical details about how the method functions, or the nature and extent of any vulnerability upon which the method may rely in order to operate, Amy Hess, the bureaus executive assistant director for science and technology, said in an email.

Because it doesnt have the technical details, the FBI cant submit any software weaknesses to an interagency White House process that weighs whether such defects should be disclosed to manufacturers, like Apple, or developers. Hess said that process, known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, cannot perform its function without significant details about the nature and extent of a vulnerability.

The decision ends any speculation on whether Apple will be able to shore up some of its outdated devices against the exact exploit the FBI used.

But the announcement still hasnt ended mistrust of the agency, its tactics or the very process the government uses to alert private industry of such problems.

Dual missions are a lie, said security researcher Dan Kaminsky, who has strongly supported Apple, referring to the governments goal of both using and fixing bugs. An organization motivated enough to fully weaponize an exploit, or pay those who have, is not going to turn around and destroy their own newfound capability.

Disclosing this particular issue is extra important, said Oren Falkowitz, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco cybersecurity company Area 1 Security and a former official with the National Security Agency.

The FBI is taking the side of making 24 million people less secure, and that seems not to be on the best side of technology, and all the people who have those phones, he said, referencing the number of iPhone 5Cs that have been reportedly sold. Thats extremely troubling.

The lack of transparency in the equities process is, perhaps, whats causing that sentiment to spread among Silicon Valley firms, said Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security, which advises organizations and governments on vulnerability disclosure and bug bounty programs.

We want to trust whoever has these vulnerabilities is defending critical infrastructure as the greater good, and ideally making most decisions toward that end, she said. But we dont know.

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The revelation last month that the FBI had managed to get into the work phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people in the December attacks in San Bernardino, halted an extraordinary court fight that flared a month earlier when a federal magistrate in Riverside directed Apple to help the FBI hack into the device.

The Associated Press

contributed to this report.

Sean Sposito is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ssposito@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @seansposito
In his first six weeks as an Uber driver, Mark W. Halls tips averaged a measly 29 cents a ride with about 1 in 20 riders proffering a few crumbled bills. In the past few days, hes averaged $2.23 a ride in tips, with almost a quarter of riders tipping.

What changed? Uber last week agreed to notify passengers that tips are not included as part of its $100 million settlement of a landmark drivers class-action lawsuit. The drivers attorney suggested that drivers put signs in their cars saying tips were welcome but not required.

So Hall took several steps. He posted his own sign in his car. He installed a tablet device in the back seat that accepts credit cards for tips. He starting texting passengers before picking them up, saying he wants to give them five-star service and theyre welcome to reward that with a tip via a texting app.

Theres no question it helps, said Hall, who drives full time in San Jose while he seeks a product marketing job. Just the suggestion and the education so people know its not included. A lot of people had a misperception that Uber fares include tips.

The Uber settlement isnt yet approved, and even then, Uber has up to six months before it needs to clarify that tips arent included.

And the company isnt in any rush to simplify the process. It has no plans to include tipping in its app, for instance, the way Lyft has done. Lyfts tipping feature, built into the app since it started, has generated more than $85 million in gratuities, all of them going directly to drivers, it said. About 70 percent of Lyft passengers have left tips.

James Tensuan/Special to The Chronicle

It helps everyone have a better ride experience to keep the entire payment and tipping process cashless and frictionless, by letting passengers choose whether or how much to tip after their ride is over, Lyft said. Both ratings and tips are anonymous on the Lyft platform.

Key element

Shannon Liss-Riordan, the Boston attorney who represented the Uber drivers, said the new tipping policy is what shes most proud of in the settlement. In fact, she first starting looking into Uber because it told passengers that tips were included, even though drivers never actually received tips, she said.

I think drivers will see a significant increase in their take-home earnings if they start getting tips, Liss-Riordan said. Its not unusual for limo and taxi drivers to get 20 percent tips. I think most people are generous, and the public will realize that Uber drivers need this money.

James Tensuan/Special to The Chronicle

But, as she acknowledged, Uber has made a whole generation of passengers think its OK to walk out of the car and not tip their drivers.

That ingrained behavior could be hard to change. Ubers mantra from the get-go has emphasized a seamless, cashless transaction  and thats part of its charm for many passengers. On social media and in article comments, many riders say they resent the idea of having to fumble for their wallets.

Theres a huge shame component if you dont participate once tips are on the agenda, said Marc Roth, founder and CEO of manufacturing company Abricate. As someone who once worked as a Lyft driver, he makes a point to tip both Lyft and Uber drivers. I know these guys are working for $10, $15 or $20 an hour and thats hard, he said. But Id much rather tip via the app than in cash.

Some passengers worry that drivers will give them low ratings if they get stiffed on the tips. Of course, ratings are a two-way street. Drivers could get lower ratings if they bad-vibe passengers who dont tip, for instance. Liss-Riordan said as much in her court declaration on the settlement. If some passengers are unhappy with the signs (or their interactions with drivers regarding tips) and that leads to poor ratings, then given that low ratings are still a basis for deactivation, drivers may still suffer potential repercussions for having such signs in their cars, she wrote.

Until now, many drivers were nervous that Uber would deactivate them for soliciting tips. Liss-Riordan said shes heard from many drivers who got warning emails for having signs about tips in their cars. The lawsuit settlement, which spells out reasons for deactivation and provides a formal appeals process, should ease those concerns.

Other choices

Several third parties are already angling to create simple ways for Uber passengers to tip. Because theyre not integrated into the Uber app itself, though, they dont resolve the problem of erasing the anonymity and convenience passengers currently enjoy. Drivers may learn passengers names or phone numbers through such apps, and passengers will have to pull credit cards out of their wallet or enter payment details into a new service to use them.

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SherpaShare, a service that helps drivers track earnings, last month started testing a text-based tipping app; a few dozen drivers, including Hall, are trying it out. Our primary goal is to increase awareness that tips arent included, said SherpaShare co-founder Ryder Pearce, calling its texting app a temporary alternative.

SherpaShare created a sign saying Tips are appreciated/Tips are not included or necessary, but always appreciated and hopes many drivers will display it so passengers get used to a standard, professional reminder, Pearce said. The company charges passengers a convenience fee to send tips and drivers pay a small processing fee to cash out their balance.

A Santa Monica startup called TripCam has an eponymous product, a tablet for Uber and Lyft drivers to put in the back seat to show news, weather, local events and games, as well as videoing passengers as a security measure.

One of the quickest things we learned off the bat is that drivers wanted a way to earn money on top of base ride fares, said Alex Huf, TripCam co-founder and chief operating officer. So it added in a credit card swipe for tipping in December and said about 5 percent of riders have used it, giving average tips of $5.50.

Liss-Riordan said she hopes that both drivers and passengers will pressure Uber to build in a tip function. In fact, the company already has one. Its UberTaxi service, which hails regular taxis instead of drivers using personal cars, lets passengers set a preferred tip amount  20 or 15 percent, for instance  that applies to all trips, unless they specify otherwise. Uber has not extended that feature to its UberX or UberBlack services, and its website reminds passengers that there is no need to tip on other Uber services.

Drivers say theyd like Uber to make tipping seamless.

If I can tip a barista through the Starbucks app, why cant I tip an Uber driver through the Uber app? Hall said.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
I cant really say that Zenefits CEO David Sacks looked particularly excited to see me sitting in his conference room.

After all, the media  myself included  have relentlessly pounded the San Francisco startup since the human resources software maker disclosed that it had failed to make sure its employees were properly licensed to sell insurance and that it unknowingly hired an agent with a criminal record.

But what was supposed to be a 20-minute conversation at Zenefits headquarters stretched to an hour. And by the end of the interview, Sacks looked like a man who had just undergone a much-needed catharsis.

I wanted to be transparent about went wrong, Sacks told me. In these situations, usually there is a desire to try to minimize what went wrong. You cant fix the problem if you wont admit what happened. Theres no confusion on our part that the rules apply to us, that we do operate in a highly regulated industry.

Even so, that Sacks agreed to the interview  his first since taking over as Zenefits CEO after founder Parker Conrad resigned in February  was a bit surprising.

Regulators from several states, including California and Washington, are still investigating the company and could slap Zenefits with penalties. For example, the fine for a person selling insurance in California without a license is $50,000. Zenefits has not publicly disclosed how many unlicensed employees were selling insurance, but a spokesman said that the company had given that information to the state Department of Insurance.

Facing punishment

But Sacks, a former Microsoft executive, knows what hes doing.

We have thought about the potential punishments, Sacks said. It doesnt change our view that we have to do the right thing. We will accept the consequences, and thats how we move forward as a business.

My view of the company is that its a terrific idea. Its a pretty unique turnaround situation. Most turnarounds in tech involve a company that lost its footing because the product has become obsolete. That didnt happen here.

Founded in 2013, Zenefits upended the insurance industry with a unique business model: The company would give away software that helps businesses automate human resources tasks like writing an offer letter to a prospective employee or enrolling a worker in a health savings account. In return, those businesses would agree to purchase insurance through Zenefits.

The software alleviated the paperwork we had to do, said Deedee Crossett, owner and president of the San Francisco Institute of Esthetics and Cosmetology. Our employees could access their information anywhere online.

Zenefits rapidly grew, and investors like prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and mutual fund giant Fidelity eventually valued the startup at $4.5 billion.

Zenefits, though, owed some of its rapid expansion to cutting corners. Several employees were peddling insurance policies  and pocketing the commission  without licenses. Thanks to a whistle-blower, the board of directors discovered employees were using a piece of code to cheat on a prelicensing online course.

Sacks, who joined Zenefits as chief operating officer in December 2014, said he was unaware of the problems because the sales teams reported exclusively to Conrad. To me, that was Zenefits fatal flaw: dividing responsibilities between CEO and chief operating officer in such a manner. Sacks was Zenefits second-in-command, and oversaw the companys day-to-day operations.

At the same time, you can argue that Sacks bears some responsibility for the mess because he also sat on the board of directors.

In any case, the damage was done, as Zenefits scrambled to reassure employees, regulators and customers.

Big concern

Upon hearing about the lack of licenses, Crossett said, she immediately called her contact at Zenefits.

As a small-business owner, I wouldnt let that fly, she said.

Crossett said she ultimately decided to stick with Zenefits, but suspects that less-experienced entrepreneurs would hesitate working with a company facing such problems.

It would be fair to say that competitors dont feel much sympathy. For years, they watched Zenefits steal their customers, and they viewed the company as another arrogant technology startup that didnt follow the rules because it wanted to disrupt things.

Those feelings carry some merit.

The tragedy is, the licensing stuff should never have happened, said Josh Stein, the companys new chief compliance officer. Its a clear requirement. Its something that you just do. We really set ourselves up publicly in opposition to brokers. Our business model is innovative, but us training and becoming part of the professional ethos of being an insurance broker, we should have embraced it.

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We are still going to compete here. We are not going to make any apologies for taking clients away. But were going to compete by providing value, not by denigrating the profession.

Under the new leadership team, Zenefits has made several important changes. Not only did the company expand its board of directors, but it recruited six insurance experts to serve on an advisory board. The company also hired a major accounting firm to conduct an audit, and Zenefits reported the results to regulators.

Training needed

Employees must undergo 52 hours of training and pass quarterly tests. Zenefits adjusted its internal systems so employees cant pursue sales opportunities or collect a commission without a license.

As of today, we are properly licensed, Sacks said. As of today, we believe we have fixed the licensing problem.

He says the crisis will actually help Zenefits by forcing the company to focus on its core small-business customers instead of chasing every sale. Sacks admits, though, that the companys growth will inevitably slow. Indeed, Fidelity has reportedly lowered the value of its stake in Zenefits.

Great companies focus on what they do best, where they have a competitive advantage, and for us thats small business, he said. I think, long term, its a better growth strategy. In the short term, you definitely give up some sales, because youre willing to say that there are certain deals we wont close. And the reason we are willing to forgo the revenue is because, long term, we are going to be more successful by focusing.

I think one of the traps that software companies can fall into is not having rules of engagement for sales, and they allow them to close any deal, regardless of company. We want to have customers for life. We want to hold onto them forever.

When asked what lesson he took away from the whole debacle, Sacks did not hesitate.

Dont hack regulatory requirements, he said.

Thomas Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. E-mail: tlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByTomLee
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A former San Francisco police lieutenant implicated in the most recent set of racist and homophobic text messages to emerge from the city force was charged with obstructing the rape investigation of another officer, the district attorneys office said Wednesday.

Curtis Liu was charged with one felony count of making a false statement in a police report and two misdemeanor counts of delaying or obstructing a peace officer in the latest in a series of problems and scandals to plague the Police Department.

He is accused of making misleading statements and withholding information from colleagues investigating rape allegations against former Officer Jason Lai, who like Liu worked out of Taraval Station in the Sunset District. Lai has not been charged with sexual assault.

An attorney for the lieutenant did not immediately return a call seeking comment but has said in the past that the accusations stem from an honest misunderstanding.

Egregious allegations

District Attorney George Gascon described the allegations against Liu as egregious in that they sent a message that police officers get special treatment when they are criminally investigated. He said he hoped the charges his office filed against Liu would send a different message.

For a law enforcement officer to break the law, especially when theyre on duty, the consequences are much more significant, Gascon said. These are people who are sworn to protect us. These are people that we as a society pay to protect us. If they themselves become the violators of the law, it degrades the trust between the public and the police, and it makes a mockery of the system.

The case began in August when a woman seeking treatment at San Francisco General Hospital alleged that Lai had sex with her after both of them consumed a lot of alcohol, even though she kept saying no. According to court records, Liu contacted Lai to tell him he was named as a suspect in a rape.

Lius attorney, Tony Brass, has said the lieutenant initially thought the person named by the woman was a different Jason Lai  and called Officer Lai as a joke.

However, prosecutors said that when Liu learned that Lai was indeed the suspect named by the woman, he engaged in a series of actions designed to keep the investigation from focusing on the officer. Liu not only lied about contacting Lai, prosecutors said, but also allowed a police report to be filed with the suspect listed as unknown, even though he knew Lai had been identified.

In a search warrant affidavit, police Sgt. Joseph Minner said Lai eventually told investigators that he had received a copy of the incident report from Liu, and that Liu had asked him a series of questions  including whether he knew the victim, where he met her and if they had sex.

It is my belief that Liu intentionally interfered with a felony sexual assault investigation both by lying to the officers investigating the incident and by contacting the suspect directly to inform him of the investigation and the progress of the investigation, Minner wrote.

It was during this investigation that police uncovered a set of racist and homophobic text messages allegedly exchanged among Lai, Liu, former Officer Keith Ybarreta and a fourth unidentified officer.

200 court cases

A batch of messages recovered from Lais phone was released Tuesday by city Public Defender Jeff Adachi, whose office is reviewing more than 200 court cases involving the officers to see if some of them should be dismissed because of bias.

The messages included disparaging remarks and derogatory slurs about black, Hispanic, gay, transgender, Indian, Muslim and Asian people. In April 2015, Lai said in reference to black people, Theyre like a pack if (sic) wild animals on the loose, and four months earlier told a colleague, Thats some n s, using a racial slur for black people.

Lais attorney, Don Nobles, said this week that the text messages did not reflects Lais character or actions as a police officer.

Police Chief Greg Suhr said he suspended all of the officers in October. Liu retired soon after, and Ybaretta and Lai resigned. The fourth officer is awaiting a disciplinary hearing in front of the Police Commission and faces possible termination. Efforts to reach Ybaretta have been unsuccessful.

Though investigators did not find evidence to press rape allegations against Lai, the officer was charged in March with misusing police databases. He is expected to return to court in May.

An arraignment date has not been set for Liu, according to the district attorneys office. Police officials said in a statement that internal affairs investigators booked Liu into County Jail on Wednesday. Sheriffs department records show that he remains in custody on $21,000 bail.

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The San Francisco Police Department treats all allegations of officer misconduct seriously and will thoroughly investigate all complaints, the police statement reads. Any officer not forthright in an investigation will themselves be the focus of an investigation.

The criminal charges against Lai and Liu, as well as the emergence of the text messages, are the latest in a series of problems and scandals to plague the police force.

The department came under fire last year over the revelation of a previous batch of bigoted texts, allegedly exchanged in 2012 among 14 officers. Those texts contributed to Gascons creation of a panel to investigate systemic bias in the department.

The earlier messages were discovered by federal authorities looking into allegations that plainclothes San Francisco officers had divided up money found during searches of drug dealers. Those messages  containing racist and antigay remarks  forced prosecutors to re-evaluate thousands of cases handled by those officers. Thirteen have been dismissed.

SFPD waited too long

Some officers in the earlier case resigned, and Suhr moved to fire most of those who remained. But the case unraveled in December when a judge ruled that the Police Department had waited too long to take action, allowing the officers to avoid discipline. The city is appealing the ruling.

Following the fatal Dec. 2 police killing of Mario Woods, a stabbing suspect whose shooting was caught on video, many city and community leaders have called for broad police reforms. Several activists are currently on a hunger strike outside Mission Station, demanding that Suhr resign or be fired by Mayor Ed Lee.

At the behest of Suhr and Lee, the U.S. Department of Justices community policing unit is conducting a collaborative review of the department.

Vivian Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: vho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @VivianHo
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The eldest of two sons suspected of murdering their parents in San Jose told The Chronicle in a jailhouse interview that his brother was not involved in the deaths  and that the real story will come out if and when the case goes to court.

The best thing if anyone wants to know what happened is to wait for the trial, said Hasib Golamrabbi, 22, speaking articulately on Thursday afternoon with one hand cuffed to his side and the other holding a phone in the interview room at Santa Clara County Jail.

I want everyone to know what happened, he said, but I cant say anything without a lawyer.

He was more emphatic when asked if his brother, 17, had any role in the slaying Sunday of their parents: No, and thats all I can say. Hes innocent.

Beyond that, the elder Golamrabbi promised that the true story of what occurred would come out in legal proceedings.

Hasib Golamrabbi and his brother were being held without bail in Santa Clara County Jail Thursday, booked on suspicion of murder. The elder brother was arrested Wednesday night in Tracy, the younger in San Jose, said Sgt. Enrique Garcia, a police spokesman.

Santa Clara County prosecutors must now decide whether to charge the brothers. The younger brother was not identified because of his age.

Investigators had been searching for Golamrabbi since Sunday afternoon when his parents, 57-year-old Shamima Rabbi and her 59-year-old husband, Golam Rabbi, were found shot to death in their home at 3006 Lucas Court in San Joses Evergreen neighborhood, Garcia said.

In the days after the killings, police released few details, including a possible motive. But they said Tuesday night that they believe the double slaying was not a random act of violence and that the killer or killers were familiar to the family.

Garcia said there were no other suspects in the Rabbis deaths.

On Thursday, all was quiet at the Rabbis home on the suburban cul-de-sac. A memorial adorned with yellow roses and candles had been placed in front of the house.

The Rabbis immigrated to San Jose from Bangladesh more than three decades ago, and they strove to help others follow in their success  even allowing relatives to stay with them as a first step in the journey to the United States.

They not only brought us here, they also brought us food and shelter  at least until we found our means to survive, the couples 37-year-old nephew, Golam Mustakim, said Tuesday. The Rabbis, he said, displayed this same kindness to other families in the United States.

Mustakim said he had never seen the Rabbis fight with their children.

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Any tension was completely out of my knowledge, he said. They were quiet, nice children. They always got along with their parents.

Abdul Jaka, 70, a co-founder of the Evergreen Islamic Center where the Rabbis worshiped weekly, echoed Mustakims sentiments. He said the family, one of more than 400 who attend the center, was nice, quiet and showed no signs of discord.

There was no indication whatsoever, Jaka said. To me, this is a really big shock. This has never happened in our community. Everyone is hoping that it is someone else and not the kids, but Im not sure what the facts are.

Asked how it felt to find himself behind bars, Hasib Golamrabbi was philosophical.

Its a jail. Im not expecting five-star treatment, said the elder son, wearing yellow prison garb. I cant say Ive ever met anyone whos been extremely happy to be in jail, but its a life experience temporarily.

Evan Sernoffsky and Kale Williams are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com, kwilliams@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @esernoffsky @sfkale
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Hundreds of instructors, librarians and counselors shut down City College of San Franciscos campuses Wednesday with raucous protests across the city over what they called unfair negotiating tactics by the administration in its salary dispute with faculty members.

We want the administration to bargain in good faith. But theyve been shuffling their feet, giving out conflicting facts  and what theyre proposing, we cant accept, said Ed Murray, who teaches English as a second language at the Mission District campus at 1125 Valencia St., where dozens of faculty members and students demonstrated and chanted outside locked school doors.

But if students felt inconvenienced by the one-day shutdown of the 11 City College sites from the Ingleside to Chinatown, they werent saying so Wednesday. Instead, many students joined the picket lines and used the opportunity to express their love for the embattled school that has helped many of them gain a foothold in the United States and in the middle class.

City College is my second home, said Oshia Oraha, who studies English at the main Ocean Avenue campus in the Ingleside. Oraha, a priest with the Assyrian Church of the East who said he fled Iraq with his wife and three children in 2013 under threats from Islamic State militants, marched in the rain with a sign proclaiming, Stop the bad faith bargaining! Stop the downsizing!

Theyre trying to cut our opportunities and make (the college) smaller. We dont want that, he said.

The dispute is about salaries. College officials are offering faculty members a 7.19 percent increase over two years and one-time payments of 2.68 percent a year for two years. They say it would cost $25 million, and that the unions proposal  4 percent a year for the next three years  is too expensive, at $35 million.

Enrollment plunges

Officials cite financial troubles stemming from the colleges accreditation issues, which were prompted by problems with fiscal management, governance and student services. Although the college has fixed many of the problems, full-time enrollment has dropped by at least 10,000 since 2012, costing City College $4,700 per lost student.

The college has received millions of dollars in state stabilization funding, but the law authorizing that cash expires in 2017. This year, City College got an extra $44 million. Next year it will get $25 million. Then nothing.

As a result, City College is cutting 400 classes each year, about 5 percent. It remains accredited, but the final determination is due in February. Without accreditation, City College would be forced to shut down.

Tim Killikelly, president of the union of 1,500 faculty members, says the college is putting forth a doom and gloom scenario that belies an 18 percent reserve that could pay for the raise the teachers want. The union says its proposal is fair, citing a 2015 salary survey showing that most faculty members without a doctorate earn less than colleagues in two-thirds of Californias 72 college districts.

Chancellor balks

Interim City College Chancellor Susan Lamb called Wednesdays labor action illegal because it came as both sides were about to enter a fact-finding phase to determine whether the college has money for higher salaries.

COVID Resources Coronavirus Map Tracking COVID-19 cases across the Bay Area and California.

But Killikelly and other union leaders say the strike was specifically about unfair negotiations. They say college officials are letting the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges  which will decide the colleges fate  improperly influence bargaining. They say the college also violated rules by reducing the amount paid per class to some instructors.

Lamb denied both assertions and said the accreditors have not influenced bargaining. The only connection would be that they look at whether youre fiscally solvent and whether youre making sound fiscal decisions, she said.

Meanwhile, the college halls were empty Wednesday. Jesse Geist, a psychology student, walked the picket line at the main campus in an Army uniform.

I fought for my country, he said. Now Im fighting for my education. I believe our teachers should have a raise in pay.

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov
In this land of the free press, at least one publication has endorsed Donald Trump.

Do we want to continue to undercut our prosperity and limit individual opportunity? Or do we want to move in a different, more promising direction? The latter choice, the right choice, will only be accomplished by someone who has constructed great skyscrapers and gem-like skating rinks; started businesses; written best-sellers; and built brands. Someone who has tried and succeeded and sometimes failed. But who has gotten up and tried again. ... Today, Donald Trump says it is time to make American great again. We agree.

Thanks to Herbert Gold for forwarding this editorial in the New York Observer, a periodical owned by Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law (who, having made this endorsement, has probably fulfilled his Fathers Day gift obligation this year). And I think we can all agree on the need for a president who has built a gem-like rink and thus has earned credit already for making America skate again.

P.S.: Gary Tobin, who created the website Fed Up With Donald Trump a few months ago, says hes had 4,500 site visits and has collected $12 in revenue. Supporters asked for reaction to the candidates misstatements say, Nothing will make me change my mind.

Paul Lessig has been trying to get a bronze plaque installed under a fresco in Coit Tower since 2008. Art mole M.B. sent word of the campaign: Lessig says his brother, Russell Edward Lessig, was a boy living with his family nearby when the murals were painted. The kid hung around the artists in the tower so often that one of them used him as a model for a mural figure. Lessig wants the city to install an 8-by-2-inch plaque to identify his brother, who died in 2007, as the towers first visitor.

Six years after he first contacted officials, Lessig was informed that the request was denied. He didnt give up. This year, an April 20 memo from Allison Cummings, senior registrar of the citys art collection and public art, says, Placement directly on the mural would be permanent alteration of the existing form. ... In addition, SFA staff is concerned about the precedent set in permanently memorializing individuals depicted in the Coit Tower Murals. Lessig was told that honoring his request would be prohibited by preservation rules established by the secretary of the interior.

Lessig says he wants the plaque below the mural, not on it, and furthermore notes that above the mural is a plaque dedicated to the Daughters of the American Revolution. The Art Commissions Visual Arts Committee says that the DAR plaque was in place before the murals were created, and the artists painted around it. The committee has recommended that the commission, which meets May 2, deny Lessigs request.

Reading about the Mighty Mutt March at Crissy Field on Saturday, April 23, of course I wondered if there was any prurient angle. Did any of the hundreds of dogs who met that day fall in love? I asked spokeswoman Cassandra Fimrite. No dog-on-dog action, she said, but Kirara the Shiba Inu only had eyes for Fred, the police horse.

Studying the latest issue of Bluegrass Breakdown, the monthly of the California Bluegrass Association, mandolin player Lynn Ludlow came across word of the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland, which provides not only research facilities but also a venue for Irish traditional music, square dances and political meetings. Im picturing Bernie Sanders at an urban hoedown.

After ceremonies Saturday at the Victoria Theatre, where the San Francisco International Film Festival bestowed its Peter J. Owens Award on Ellen Burstyn, the actress had a leisurely dinner at the Hayes Street Grill.

A Facebook meme cited by Erik Wilson suggests that the Treasury Department put Princes face on the $20 bill, make it worth $19.99 and call it the bill formerly known as the twenty.

This is a weekend full of art, but if you want to DIY, the Mexican Museum is inviting everyone to a Community Painting Day on Saturday, April 30, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. to help with a mural on a construction fence surrounding its new site at 706 Mission St. Precita Eyes muralists, commissioned by the museum, have drawn the bones of the designs. Volunteers will help add the color.

Open for business in San Francisco, (415) 777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @leahgarchik

Public eavesdropping

Im really tired of people telling me to f off. Im a bum. What do they expect?
San Francisco doesnt just show up 250,000 strong for anybody.

The Chronicles front page from April 28, 1960, covers the arrival of French President Charles de Gaulle and the huge outpouring of support shown for him.

De Gaulle, symbol of a nation questing for renewed greatness, flew into San Francisco yesterday to win the warmest greeting this city has ever accorded a foreign chief of state, current Chronicle Science Editor David Perlman wrote on the front page 56 years ago. The French president was showered with ticker tape, cheered in French and English, applauded and welcomed with oratory, music and a 21-gun salute.

The photo on the page shows people packed 10 or more deep on Montgomery Street in a scene that recently has been reserved for Giants celebrations down Market.

It was a symbol, (de Gaulle) said at City Hall, that the torch of friendship between France and America still burns bright because the two nations are linked together by a common ideal  liberty, the story read.

Advertising corner: All it took was a $100 deposit at Home Mutual Savings and Chronicle readers could have scored an adorable puppy-dog savings bank. Look at that guy on the left side of the page. As the ad says, hes cute and fuzzy.

See more front pages: Go to SFChronicle.com/covers to search a database of hundreds of Chronicle Covers articles that showcase the newspaper's history.

Chronicle Covers is a yearlong project highlighting one classic Chronicle newspaper page from our archive every day for 366 days. Library director Bill Van Niekerken, art director Danielle Mollette-Parks, producer Michelle Devera and editorial assistant Jillian Sullivan contributed to the project. Tim ORourke is the executive producer and editor of SFChronicle.com. Email: torourke@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TimothyORourke

More from the Archive The Vault Home of the San Francisco Chronicle's archive and more than 150 years of journalism covering the Bay Area and beyond.

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A pregnant woman was shot in the head Wednesday by her ex-boyfriend in Pacifica and survived while police launched a manhunt for her armed attacker, authorities said.

Ricardo Colindres, a 25-year-old transient known to frequent Brisbane, is considered armed and dangerous and was last seen fleeing the shooting scene at an apartment complex on the 1000 block of Terra Nova Boulevard in a silver Toyota.

Colindres apparently tried to abduct his 25-year-old ex-girlfriend outside the complex, where she worked, before shooting her in the head around 8:10 a.m., said Pacifica Police Capt. Joe Spanheimer.

Our understanding is that he may have attempted to kidnap her, and when she refused to go along, thats when the shot was fired. Spanheimer said.

A witness at the scene reported a gunshot and then heard the victim screaming.

The woman, whom The Chronicle is not naming, was taken to a hospital, where she was treated for a gunshot wound to the back of the head, police said. She was reportedly 8 months pregnant.

Spanheimer initially said the woman gave emergency birth, but later said that doctors did not decide to induce birth.

I believe everyone is stable at this point, Spanheimer said.

Colindres sped away from the scene in a Silver Toyota Camry with California license plate 6CGN644, police said. He was described as 5-foot-5, 125 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes.

Anyone who sees the suspect was urged to call 911.

The victim had filed a restraining order against Colindres in San Mateo County Superior Court in June 2015. The womans family asked for privacy Wednesday at her Pacifica home, while they struggled to make sense of the violence.

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Renee OBrian, 95, lives at the apartment complex where the shooting happened and said the victim worked in the office there. She said the woman was planning on taking time off work soon because of her nearing due date.

This is dreadful, dreadful, OBrian said near the shooting scene Wednesday. She is absolutely gorgeous. Why would anyone shoot her?

Friends on social media had recently been congratulating the victim about the forthcoming birth of a baby boy.

Evan Sernoffsky and Jenna Lyons are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com, jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky, @JennaJourno
South San Francisco police

Federal authorities nabbed a suspect Wednesday in a double shooting at a South San Francisco park that left one man dead and another wounded, officials said.

Agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Marshals Service were tipped off that Cristian Omar Cruz was in a residential neighborhood in Stockton, South San Francisco police officials said.
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As a light rain fell on the young political activists at Sproul Plaza on Wednesday, the morning after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders all but waved the white flag in his White House bid, the undergraduate who founded UC Berkeley Students for Bernie was anything but disappointed.

A lot of people expect us to be more disappointed than we are, said Rigel Robinson, a 19-year-old political science major. But we got on this train because we knew where it was going.

Robinson and the countless young voters Sanders connected with over the past year are the heirs to the Democratic Party, which they can remake as a more progressive political force, analysts say.

That change today could last years into the future, since voters tend to cling to the party and the politics of their early years, even as they grow older and more established, leading to a more liberal Democratic Party.

This generation will be more progressive than its predecessors because of the issues that have dominated its politically formative years. It is maturing in an era in which the minimum wage is rising to $15 an hour in California and New York and ideas like tuition-free public universities and universal health care are discussed by the mainstream, not relegated to the fringe as in years past.

Gabrielle Lurie/Special to The Chronicle

If Secretary (Hillary) Clinton is the nominee, then she has to make it crystal clear that the message of the resurgent progressive grassroots has been taken to heart, said Ben Wikler, Washington, D.C., director of the progressive hub MoveOn, which endorsed Sanders. And if the Democratic convention reflects the values and boldness of the ideas that weve seen in the primary  and not a tack back to the center  then I think (Sanders) people will be on board.

While Sanders insurgent and unexpectedly effective challenge to Clinton presented problems to the Democratic Party establishment, his all-but-certain loss doesnt end their concerns.

Dissatisfied with status quo

The 74-year-old self-described Democratic socialists call for a political and economic revolution found plenty of support among the nations youngest voters, a group polls have shown is both more liberal and more dissatisfied with the status quo than older voters.

In Pennsylvanias primary Tuesday, for example, Clinton thumped Sanders, 56 percent to 44 percent, but Sanders collected 83 percent of the votes from those younger than 30. While a Field Poll of California earlier this month showed Clinton with a 47 percent to 41 percent lead heading into the June 7 state primary, the Vermont senator had the support of 77 percent of voters ages 18 to 29.

We have brought millions of young people who I think many of the pundits had thought were kind of apathetic, not interested in politics, Sanders said Sunday on NBCs Meet the Press. These young people know theyre the future of this country. They want to shape the future.

That surge of young, enthusiastic and progressive support for a longtime independent congressman and senator who wasnt even registered as a Democrat until last year should be a loud wake-up call for the party, said Simon Rosenberg, founder of NDN, a center-left think tank.

This presents Democrats with an enormous opportunity to make their case to many young people who are more identified with Sanders and his progressive ideals than with any particular party, said Rosenberg, a veteran of former President Bill Clintons campaigns. The question of whether these folks become Democrats is up to the Democratic Party itself.

That answer is an important one, since research has shown that the party identity and political leanings voters develop early tend to stay with them through the years.

Reagan Republicans

A 2015 study by the non-partisan Pew Research Center found that young people who grew up during Ronald Reagans years as president, 1980-88, were more likely to register as Republicans. And many in that same group of Republicans who were under 30 in 1994, a year looked at in the study, are now the conservative lawmakers and academics who led the way to the current GOP control of the House and the Senate.

An influx of young Sanders supporters into the Democratic Party could have a similarly transforming effect, only this time on the left.

This could be like that Reagan generation on the Democratic side, said Henry Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Sanders call for things like free college tuition and universal health care have been galvanizing for young people. Democrats now have to provide policies that are just as exciting, but that wont break the bank.

Thats hard to do with a candidate like Clinton, whos not only the poster child for the Democratic establishment, but also a self-described pragmatist who campaigns on the type of small, less-fiery changes she believes can be pushed through the current Republican Congress.

That may be a good governing strategy, but its a lousy way of attracting Millennials disgusted with politics as usual, said Dan Hopkins, an associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Unless the Democrats take both the House and the Senate, the party will still be defined by incremental changes in current policies, he said. The fact that so many of Sanders supporters are independents already signals their dissatisfaction with the existing parties, and the political equivalent of Spackle and a quick coat of paint isnt going to convince them that the revolutionary change theyre calling for has arrived.

A change is gonna come

Like it or not, though, change is coming for the Democratic Party and party leaders have to deal with it, Rosenberg said.

Parties always change when another generation takes power, he said. The era of Clinton, (Rep. Nancy) Pelosi and (Nevada Sen.) Harry Reid is changing to the era of Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, (Hawaii Rep.) Tulsi Gabbard and (New Jersey Sen.) Cory Booker.

The Democrats are in the midst of a transition from a party of the 20th century to a party of the 21st century, Rosenberg said, and Sanders supporters have to be an important part of that change.

These new voters see a failed set of elites running the country and have the sense that the country is not well-led, he added. Democratic leaders must realize these arent wild-eyed critiques, not the critiques of bomb-throwers. ... They must have humility and realize they have a lot to learn.

Theres plenty of potential payoff down the road, Hopkins said.

Its quite possible in 15 to 20 years, both the (Democratic) candidates for office and the people running their staffs will be out of the Bernie Sanders campaign, he said.

John Wildermuth and Joe Garofoli are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com, jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth @joegarofoli
The San Francisco Police Department keeps lurching from crisis to crisis.

In the latest round of the departments racist text messaging scandal, details from the phone of former Officer Jason Lai, who resigned this month, were released Tuesday. The messages are revolting. Lai compared African Americans to animals and barbarians and made light of their deaths. He slurred Latinos, homeless people, South Asians and gay officers.

The messages, sent in 2014 and 2015, were found during the Police Departments investigation of a sexual assault allegation against Lai. (Prosecutors declined to file rape charges, citing insufficient evidence, but he was charged with six misdemeanors for illegally accessing and misusing confidential records.)

There are two big problems with the messages.

The first is their far-reaching legal implications: Public Defender Jeff Adachi has identified more than 200 cases, including three murder cases, that could be adversely affected by the texts Lai allegedly swapped with other officers.

It is a window into the biases they harbored, wrote Adachi in a statement. It likely influenced who they stopped, who they searched, who they arrested, and how they testified in criminal trials.

The racism in these texts is larger than a personal failing  its a poison that affects the public safety of San Francisco.

The second problem is that the texts seem to point to a larger problem within the Police Department.

This is the second batch of racially tinged texts to emerge from the department in the past 13 months. The first round, publicized in March 2015, endangered thousands of prosecutions.

The combined force of these scandals, along with a number of controversial killings by police over the past several months, has outraged San Franciscans. For the past several days, a small group of protesters at the Mission station have said that theyre on a hunger strike for Suhrs resignation or firing. Its a reminder that the person who needs to answer for the departments ills is the one at the top.
Michael Conroy/Associated Press

The fading campaigns of Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich were showing signs of desperation even before Donald Trumps five-state sweep of Republican primaries Tuesday.

Over the weekend, Cruz and Kasich agreed on a plan to essentially cede certain primary contests to each other in an effort to prevent Trump from securing the nomination before the July convention in Cleveland. By Monday, the you (Cruz) take Indiana, Ill (Kasich) take Oregon and New Mexico was dissolving into disagreement over whether the deal involved passive or aggressive retreat.
The gate to Martins Beach, a picturesque cove and magnet for surfers, was closed in 2010 by billionaire entrepreneur Vinod Khosla, who said it was private property. But the public had been welcomed by the previous owners for at least 70 years  and that, a state appeals court said Wednesday, might be a legal basis for prying the gate open.

In a 3-0 ruling, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco reinstated part of a lawsuit by a group called Friends of Martins Beach that a San Mateo County judge had dismissed in 2013. While rejecting the groups argument that all California beaches are public property, the court said a trial could establish that the former owners had, by their words and actions, granted the public a right of access that the current owner could not take back.

Members of the Deeney family, who had owned the property since the start of the 20th century, had opened the beach and an access road to the public since at least the 1930s, displaying a welcoming billboard on a nearby highway and allowing visitors to picnic, fish and surf while shopping at the familys general store, the court said.

In dismissing the lawsuit, Superior Court Judge Gerald Buchwald had ruled that the Deeneys had not shown any intent to invite the public to use the beach and road freely, because at some point the family charged a 25-cent entrance fee  proof, the judge said, that outsiders were entering by permission that could be revoked at any time.

But the appeals court said Friends of Martins Beach could still try to show that the Deeneys overall intent was to allow the public to freely use the beach  while benefiting the familys business  even if it took a quarter in some years for entry or for parking.

Even if the Deeneys were motivated in whole or in part by an expectation of commercial benefit, that would not foreclose their intent to dedicate the road and beach to public use, Justice Therese Stewart said in the courts opinion. She said a trial was needed to resolve disputed factual questions.

The Deeneys sold nearly 90 acres of land to Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, for $32.5 million in 2008. He shut the public access gate in September 2010, citing the cost of maintenance and liability insurance.

In a separate suit by the Surfrider Foundation, a judge ruled in 2014 that Khosla should have gotten a Coastal Commission permit before blocking public access. But Khosla has appealed that ruling and kept the gate closed, and recently offered to restore access if the state paid him $30 million, which wouldnt include additional state costs for road repairs and maintenance.

Wednesdays ruling is likely to change that calculation, said Gary Redenbacher, lawyer for Friends of Martins Beach.

If we go to trial and (win a verdict that) it was dedicated to the public, hes not going to get a dime, Redenbacher said. He said the ruling gave us a road map to how to win at trial.

A lawyer for Khosla was undeterred.

We are confident that we will prevail in the trial court and that our clients property rights will be fully upheld, said the attorney, Dori Yob. She emphasized the portion of the ruling that found no guaranteed right of beach access under the California Constitution, which Yob called a win for our client and for all coastal property owners.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko
The solution to the woeful lack of housing in the Bay Area is pretty simple, if you ask residents of the nine counties surrounding San Francisco Bay  funnel the late-comers out to the sticks.

That was the conclusion of the majority of residents who responded to a poll on solutions to the housing shortage released Wednesday by the Bay Area Council, a business-sponsored public policy advocacy group.

The results were not as supportive of the traditional solutions that emphasize sustainability  like in-fill housing and transit-oriented development  as the experts would have liked. Instead of building more housing in the Bay Area, 60 percent of the respondents said they would prefer housing to be built outside the region. The outliers who need to get to the Bay Area to work would be best served by improving transportation out there in the boonies, according to the poll.

Jim Wunderman, president and chief executive officer of the Bay Area Council, said it is an understandable reaction to decades of government failure to keep up with housing, creating the misperception that the Bay Area is overbuilt.

Unless policymakers are willing to take new steps to see housing built in their own communities, this is what housing in the future will look like, Wunderman said.

Doesnt solve the problem

Whats unfortunate is that pushing housing outside the region still doesnt solve the problem of supply and affordability in the Bay Area. It simply means that fewer working families and workers in lower-income jobs can afford to live here.

The survey of more than 1,000 residents showed a marked increase in concern about housing and affordability in the Bay Area. Wunderman said 30 percent of the respondents considered housing the top problem in the region, compared with 18 percent a year ago.

The survey results were, more than anything, an illustration of the mixed feelings people have about the issue. Although most respondents wanted more housing, along with an improved transportation network, to be built outside the Bay Area, 56 percent of residents were also open to new housing in their neighborhoods. However, only 37 percent supported high-density housing in their areas.

Adding to the seemingly contradictory message, 68 percent supported making it easier to build housing near transit hubs and job centers. One encouraging sign, Wunderman said, was that 65 percent said they would like communities to make it easier for residents to build second units.

The Bay Area Council supports legislation by Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, that would ease the cost and hassle of building second units. Wunderman said 150,000 residences would be added if 10 percent of Bay Area homeowners added another unit to their houses.

Live near where they work

Still, it was clear that residents would be much happier if construction was in someone elses neighborhood, preferably far away. Its a view that infuriates San Francisco housing advocates, who bristle at all the high-end housing they say is being built in the city for employers in other cities, such as Google and Facebook.

I think its really important for workers to live near where they work, said Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer, director of the Housing Rights Committee in San Francisco. Our neighbors in wealthy suburbs need to stop pretending that they dont need to provide housing. San Francisco is the densest city in the country. If the South Bay built housing equal to the number of jobs they put in there, we wouldnt have the kind of housing problem we have.

Just over 20,000 new units were permitted last year in the nine-county Bay Area. But experts say that number isnt close to filling its housing hole, except at the high end of the market, where much of the new construction has taken place.

And housing costs have gone through the roof. Forty-four percent of residents with annual incomes of less than $50,000 are spending between 45 percent and 60 percent of their incomes on housing, well over the recommended percentage, according to the poll.

The poll results show that 73 percent of residents felt it has gotten more difficult to find a place to live over the past year.

Strong and vocal opposition

Wunderman said most residents understand the problem and believe more housing needs to be built, but he believes policymakers are going to have a hard time getting projects approved, with 39 percent of residents in the survey saying they dont want new housing of any kind in their neighborhoods.

The poll also showed that 84 percent support a stronger transportation network between the Bay Area, Sacramento and less-served places like the Central Valley.

By a 2-1 margin, people agree that we should make it easier to build, not necessarily in their neighborhood, but in transit and commercial neighborhoods, Wunderman said. He called that encouraging, saying, Without building density we dont get to the kind of numbers we need to to deal with the regions housing needs.

I think were actually trending in the right direction. But on the other hand, its still an uphill battle to convince people that they should see their own community changing in order to accommodate that need.

The survey, conducted between Feb. 12 and March 9 by the Oakland research firm EMC Research, has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite
A stranded seal pup was outnumbered Wednesday morning when a flock of crows and an off-leash dog pounced at San Franciscos Ocean Beach.

Luckily, three San Francisco police officers stepped in to save the pinniped in peril.
There are times when being mistaken for an actor is flattering, and then there's this story.

A New Yorker is currently living out the strangest week of his life after he was allegedly assaulted over the weekend for looking like "Transformers" actor Shia LaBeouf. After the story hit the news, the actor reached out to the injured man and apologized via voicemail.

Mario Licato, 26, spoke with Gothamist.com and told the news site that he was sucker-punched on Saturday when exiting a subway station.

The Brooklyn-based art director said he never saw his attacker, but according to an NYPD report the man yelled, "This is because you look like f-----g Shia LeBouf (sic)" before taking off on foot.

A photo posted by Mario Licato (@mariolicato) on Apr 24, 2016 at 7:28pm PDT

"I literally just saw a fist for a split second," Licato told the New York Daily News.

A couple who helped Licato at the scene confirmed the line about LaBeouf, reported Gothamist.

Licato was alerted to a voicemail from LaBeouf on Wednesday when the actor commented on an Instagram photo taken by Licato. The message read, "Left you a message on your work phone. Feel better G."

A photo posted by Mario Licato (@mariolicato) on Apr 27, 2016 at 6:12am PDT

Licato told Cosmpolitan.com that he listened to the voicemail and that the "Even Stevens" actor repeatedly apologized for the assault in the voicemail and said, "I'm so sorry. But I get it. It's happened to me before."

LaBeouf then left his private phone number and urged Licato to call him back, saying: "I wish I was in New York. I'd come bring you soup," and, "We could chat. Let's giggle over this. Maybe there's a silver lining in all this."

Licato was knocked unconscious from the assault and fell down four steps before hitting the ground. He received a black eye and a cut above his brow, which is still healing. Licato's attacker was described as a "6-foot to 6-foot-3 white frat boy," according to the New York Daily News.

Licato described the experience as "really weird," and told the fashion website that with his black eye, he's been recognized on the street as "that guy."
Like David Lynchs Mulholland Dr., an obvious influence, Pali Road offers a puzzle about what is real and what is a dream. Pali is about a young womans conflicted romantic impulses  all it lacks is its predecessors depth of mystery and menace, along with its pitch-black humor.

Taiwanese superstar Michelle Chen plays Lily, a talented doctor who wakes up after a car accident and is shocked to learn that shes married to Mitch (Sung Kang), a fellow physician at the Honolulu hospital where she works, and has a 5-year-old son.

Problem is, she remembers nothing about Mitch and the child, but is haunted by recollections of an old boyfriend, Neil (Jackson Rathbone). This unnerves poor Lily, especially when her husband and others assert that Neil is a fiction of her traumatized mind.

Everyone is sympathetic and wants to help, including her parents, visiting from China, and a rather off-putting therapist (Henry Ian Cusick), but eventually they all tire of her clinging to the nonexistent (?) past. As Lily weeps against melancholy piano tinklings, the audience may be inclined to join her.

By-the-numbers dialogue and some stilted acting dont help, and matters hit a low point during a clunky screeching match between Lily, Mitch and her parents. Still, director Jonathan Lim does extract a bit of tenderness from the scenes between Lily and her son.

This kind of psychological mystery, with its suggestion of fugue states, needs to work by hints and whispers, but Pali Road has pretty low expectations of its audience. It ought to be light on its feet, but it lumbers.

Theres some very nice scenery, though, including shots of volcanic flows, the Royal Hawaiian Resort and Diamond Head.

Walter Addiego is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: waddiego@sfchronicle.com

Pali Road

Drama. With Jackson Rathbone, Sung Kang, Michelle Chen. Directed by Jonathan Lim. In English and Mandarin with English subtitles. (Not rated. 92 minutes.)

To see a trailer, go to http://bit.ly/1mPVGCu
IFC

The brief life of Indian math prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan was so compelling that it even transcends the capable but straightforward filmmaking of The Man Who Knew Infinity. Its the terrific story (which has also inspired a novel and a play) of a young man from Madras who lacked university training but whose brilliance earned him an invitation to study with an esteemed professor at Cambridge.

The setting is around the First World War, and after a preamble in India, which establishes Ramanujan (Dev Patel) as both impoverished and married, he arrives in England  sans wife  to be mentored by crusty Professor G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons). The Indian is a naif in the pulsing heart of British math studies  Cambridges Trinity College, which was Isaac Newtons school and for a time that of Bertrand Russell (who, played by Jeremy Northam, has a small role in the story).
Theres no mention of the Zika virus, problematic Olympic preparations or any other real-life horrors in Rio, I Love You, but this mind-numbingly dull omnibus film of 10 short stories  by 10 directors  creates its own disasters.

Its the third in a series of films, following Paris je taime (2006) and New York, I Love You (2009).

Near the beginning of Rio, Harvey Keitel plays a priest. He leans in to kiss a nun. Their lips meet  Cut! yells the director. So hes really not a priest  hes an actor filming a movie. Clever, huh?

We meet several other celebrities briefly  Emily Mortimer as a beautiful woman caring for her husband, who is 30 years older than her and in a wheelchair; Vincent Cassel as a sand sculptor on the beach; John Turturro and Vanessa Paradis as quarreling lovers (perhaps the most excruciating of the 10 stories, and Turturro is the director); and a host of Brazilian actors well known to Brazilian audiences, including the great Fernanda Montenegro (Central Station) as a homeless woman.

The directorial talent assembled is top-notch, including Brazils Fernando Meirelles (City of God), Mexicos Guillermo Arriaga (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritus collaborator in the 2000s), Australias Stephan Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) and South Koreas Im Sang-soo (The Housemaid). But they dont have time to flex their storytelling muscles.

Keitel does crop up later for a nice moment with a homeless boy, and there is a pleasing sequence at the end that integrates the characters to create a smooth ending, but omnibus films  Dead of Night, Twilight Zone  The Movie and New York Stories come to mind  are always hit and miss. Part of the reason Rio, I Love You is such a big whiff is that 10 stories are just way too many. Had producers cut it down to, say, the five most promising stories and fleshed them out a bit, the results might have been better. Instead, just as you might be getting sucked into a story, its over.

G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ajohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BRfilmsAllen

Rio, I Love You

Romantic comedy omnibus. With Emily Mortimer, Harvey Keitel, John Turturro. 10 directors. (R. 110 minutes.)

To see a trailer, go to https://youtu.be/Tx6ZgEB3jJc
JUNEAU, Alaska  Alaska will soon become the first state in the nation to allow customers to smoke pot and snarf marijuana edibles at authorized retail stores.

But rules governing this are still being hammered out, and state regulators were set to consider regulations Wednesday in Anchorage.
WASHINGTON  Women would be required to register for the military draft under a House committees bill that comes just months after the Defense Department lifted all gender-based restrictions on front-line combat units.

A divided Armed Services Committee backed the provision in a sweeping defense policy bill that the full House will consider next month, touching off a provocative debate about the role of women in the military. The panel also turned aside a measure backed by Democrats to punish the Citadel military college in South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag.

The United States has not had a military draft since 1973 in the Vietnam War era, but all men must register with the Selective Service Systems within 30 days of turning 18. Military leaders maintain that the all-volunteer force is working and the nation is not returning to the draft.

The 32-30 vote Wednesday night came with a twist: The proposals author didnt back it.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, a former Marine who served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, does not support drafting women into combat and opposes opening infantry and special operations positions to women. Hunter, R-Alpine (San Diego County), said he offered the measure during the committees consideration of the policy bill to prompt a discussion about how the Pentagons decision in December to rescind gender restrictions on military service failed to consider whether the exclusion on drafting women also should be lifted.

Thats a call for Congress, not the executive branch, Hunter said. I think we should make this decision, he said. Its the families that we represent who are affected by this.

At times, Hunter evoked graphic images of combat in an apparent attempt to convince colleagues that drafting women would lead to them being sent directly into harms way.

A draft is there to put bodies on the front lines to take the hill, Hunter said. The draft is there to get more people to rip the enemies throats out and kill them.

But if Hunter was trying to sway people against his amendment, his plan did not work.

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, said she supported Hunters measure. I actually think if we want equality in this country, if we want women to be treated precisely like men are treated and that they should not be discriminated against, we should be willing to support a universal conscription, she said.

Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz. and a retired Air Force fighter pilot, said draftees arent exclusively sent to the front lines. There are plenty of other useful, noncombat positions for them to fill, she said.

If an 18-year-old man does not register with the Selective Service, he could lose his eligibility for student financial aid, job training and government jobs. Immigrant men could lose their eligibility for U.S. citizenship. According to the latest annual report, 73 percent of 18-year-olds registered on time during the 2015 fiscal year ending Sept. 30. And the registration rate for all men aged 20-25 was 94 percent.

Hunters amendment was part of a defense policy bill that authorizes defense spending for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. The committee passed the legislation by a 60-2 vote early Thursday.
RAMALLAH, West Bank  A survey in 10 countries with significant Muslim populations, released Wednesday, found striking differences in the extent to which people believe the Quran should influence a nations laws.

Possible reasons for these differences include a nations history and religious composition as well as personal factors such as intensity of religious observance, age and level of education, said the Pew Research Center, which conducted the survey among more than 10,000 Muslims and non-Muslims a year ago. Error margins ranged from 3.4 to 4.3 percentage points.

The poll found that half or more of the respondents in Pakistan, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Malaysia said laws should strictly follow the Muslim holy book. Pakistan, a declared Islamic republic, scored highest, with 78 percent supporting the statement. In Turkey, also overwhelmingly Muslim but founded as a secular country, only 13 percent agreed.

In Turkey and Lebanon, younger respondents were less likely to say the Quran should be the source of laws than older ones.

In Nigeria, Turkey, Burkina Faso, Indonesia, Lebanon and Senegal, people with secondary school education were less likely to say national laws should strictly follow the Quran than those with fewer years of schooling.

Non-Muslims were far less likely to support the idea of the Quran as the sole source of legislation than Muslims. For example, in Nigeria  split evenly between Muslims and Christians  52 percent of Muslims but only 2 percent of the countrys Christians agreed with the statement.

In some areas, support for a strict link between laws and the Quran has increased, though the poll did not cite reasons. In the Palestinian territories, for example, backing almost doubled, from 36 percent in 2011 to 65 percent in 2015. In Nigeria, support went up by eight points, to 27 percent.

In Jordan, there was an 18-point decline since 2012, and now 54 percent believe laws should strictly follow the Quran.

The poll also found that Muslim women and Muslim men have similar levels of religious commitment. But when it comes to attendance at worship services, men are more active.
Three adorable juvenile male lions are headed to Oakland this May.

The "bachelor" lions, named Gandia, Tandie, and Mandla, are brothers, and were born in October 2014 at Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo. Although they're only about a year-and-a-half, the animals are now ready to be separated from mom Adia and dad Xerxes, who live in the Washington zoo.

In a statement to SFGATE, Darren Minier, Zoological Manager in Oakland shares the zoo's excitement in bringing three cubs to the Bay Area. "We eagerly anticipate welcoming these three brothers to show a different side of the social lives of lions - showing people a natural state of lions that many may not be aware of," he says.

The move comes in response to a recommendation by the conservation breeding program Species Survival Plan to help ensure that lions in preservation remain diverse and healthy. Lions are an endangered mammal  as few as 20,000 exist in the wild today  so keeping their genetic material safe and strong is of the utmost importance.

That being said, it sounds like Seattle is sad to lose them.

"It's been a pleasure to watch these young lions grow up and discover their world," said Woodland Park Zoo curator Ramirez. "Their curious, playful personalities brought a whole new energy to the exhibit that was genuinely fun to watch. We will definitely miss having them here, but we're confident in the decision made by the SSP to move them to Oakland Zoo where they'll continue to live together and capture the hearts of another lucky community."

Details are still being worked out as to when the lions will arrive, but the Oakland Zoo hopes for them to make their debut in mid to late May.
University of California President Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that she is placing UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi on paid leave during an investigation into whether she violated UC policies.

Students and lawmakers had demanded Katehis resignation, outraged over her involvement with a for-profit education corporation and the schools questionable use of consultants to clean up its online reputation.

Napolitano released a statement Wednesday that said Katehi would be placed on investigatory administrative leave while an outside investigator looks into the allegations. The investigator will submit a report before the start of the 2016-17 academic year.

The probe will look into the campus employment and compensation of some of the chancellors family members, her involvement in contracts related to managing the campus and her personal reputation on social media, and the possible misuse of student fees, Napolitano said. UC Davis Provost Ralph Hexter will serve as acting chancellor.

I am deeply disappointed to take this action, Napolitano said in a statement. But Davis is a strong campus, nationally and internationally renowned in many academic disciplines. Im confident of the campuss continued ability to thrive and serve California students and the Davis community.

Katehi joined the board of the for-profit DeVry Education Group in February, a position that paid $70,000, in violation of UCs policy requiring approval for such positions. Napolitano said she would not have approved the position. Katehi later resigned.

This month, the Sacramento Bee revealed that UC Davis had paid reputation managers at least $175,000 to remove negative Internet references to the widely criticized pepper-spraying of peaceful student protesters by campus police in 2011.

Nanette Asimov and Jenna Lyons are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com, jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov, @JennaJourno
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A Michigan teacher claims she was fired for saying the word 'vagina' when discussing Georgia O'Keeffe during an art history lesson at a middle school, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Allison Wint, who was teaching art as a substitute at Harper Creek Middle School since January, says the lesson on April 21 was addressing "controversies in the art world," including the debate around whether American artist Georgia O'Keeffe intentionally painted her flowers to appear sexual.

Wint told the Free Press she said to the students: "Imagine walking into a gallery when (O'Keeffe) was first showing her pieces, and thinking, 'Am I actually seeing vaginas here, am I a pervert? I'm either a pervert or this woman was a pervert.' "

Administrators at Battle Creek deny Wint's claims and say the teacher was laid off for digressing from the curriculum and failing to inform the principal of her plans to talk about controversy in art.

"She was not terminated due to uttering the word 'vagina,' " Ridgeway said in a statement to the Free Press. "We do not shy away from controversial issues...We work very diligently to ensure that all students, staff and contracted personnel are treated fairly with respect and privacy."

Throughout history, Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings have been associated with eroticism, with people assuming her large-scale studies of flowers weren't meant to depict the female anatomy. But the artist always claimed she didn't intend for her paintings to appear sexual.

Wint says she was discussing this issue with a euphemism.

"And I don't think that's [vagina] a word you should be afraid of," she told the Free Press.

But she claims the school principal, Kim Thayer, didn't agree and the day after the lesson Thayer asked Wint to leave the school and told her the use of the word 'vagina' was inappropriate.
Khan is acting on the behest of BJP and the RSS to create a constitutional crisis in Kerala," Chief Minister Pinarayi VIjayan said.
WASHINGTON  With Donald Trump tightening his grip on the GOP presidential nomination, Democrats outlined plans Thursday to strap incumbent House Republicans  including three Californians in districts with large Latino populations  to the real estate mogul.

Were going to make sure theyre tied to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is tied to them, said Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, this years head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of House Democrats.

Democrats would have to net 30 seats in November to retake the House and reinstall San Franciscos Nancy Pelosi as speaker, a feat that political analysts say would require a landslide loss by Trump that drags even popular GOP incumbents down with him.

But even Lujan refused to go so far as to say Democrats will regain the majority.

Democrats difficulties are illustrated by two of the Californians they have targeted. Reps. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock (Stanislaus County), and David Valadao, R-Hanford (Kings County), are well-established Central Valley incumbents who have easily held on to districts that President Obama won in 2012. Obama, in fact, won Valadaos district by a 10-point margin.

Big wins in 2014

Both Denham, who is married to a Latina, and Valadao, whose heritage is Portuguese, have parted with GOP orthodoxy on immigration. In 2014, Valadao rolled over his Democratic opponent, the well-funded Amanda Renteria, by 17 percentage points, despite a big Democratic advantage in voter registration, while Denham beat back challenger Michael Eggman by 13 points.

Republican leaders have gone out of their way to raise Valadaos profile by letting him lead Central Valley Republicans on water issues.

Its laughable that Washington Democrats continue to insist they can succeed in these districts where their candidates have been soundly defeated over and over again in recent cycles, said Zach Hunter, spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee, the GOPs House campaign arm.

Both men also have big cash advantages over their challengers. Democrat Eggman is making another run at Denham, but he had just $370,000 to Denhams $2.4 million as of the end of last month.

Valadao has $1.1 million in the bank compared with just $116,000 for Democratic challenger Emilio Huerta.

Democrats are touting Huerta as the son of famed civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, noting that the district is 60 percent Latino. Barb Solish, spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Valadao is the only non-Latino in the country representing a majority-Latino district.

The committee settled on Huerta only after several other candidates flamed out amid grousing from local party activists that national Democrats were imposing their preferences in local races.

Insufficient funds?

Both parties see as perhaps most vulnerable a third California GOP incumbent, freshman Steve Knight of Lancaster, a high desert town in Los Angeles County. Knight holds the last red seat in L.A. County, Solish said. He has $500,000 in the bank to $205,000 for Democratic challenger Bryan Caforio, a Yale-educated lawyer backed by the campaign committee.

But again, Democrats had trouble settling on a challenger, with many locals favoring Lou Vince, a city councilman spurned by the national party for his paltry fundraising. Local Democrats have accused Caforio of being a Los Angeles carpetbagger who only recently moved to the high desert.

Obama also won this district in 2012, and Republicans put Knight in their Patriot Program to protect weak incumbents. Caforio has attacked Knight for waiting two months to visit the catastrophic Porter Ranch gas leak in his district and for receiving campaign donations from Sempra Energy, which owns the underground gas storage tank. Caforio is playing up the Trump card, saying there is no daylight between Knight and the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.

A new poll by Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit group, showed that the Republican Partys image has slipped nationwide to its lowest point since 1992, with 62 percent of the public having an unfavorable opinion of the GOP, a decrease in popularity of four points since last fall. Pew said most of the change has come from Republicans tilting against their own party.

Public views of the Democratic Party remain unchanged in the poll, with 50 percent viewing the party unfavorably.

Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead
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Californians will vote in November on far-reaching new restrictions on firearms, including the nations first requirement of background checks for buyers of ammunition, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday.

Declaring a historic opportunity to recapture our leadership nationwide on this issue, Newsom said supporters will submit 600,000 signatures on petitions to qualify an initiative that would strengthen Californias gun-control laws, already some of the strictest in the nation. They need 365,880 signatures of registered voters to make the ballot.

Besides the checks for ammunition purchases  like those already in place for guns  the measure would ban possession of large-capacity rifle magazines, require gun owners to notify police when their weapons are lost or stolen, and enact rules for courts to confiscate guns from criminals who are prohibited from possessing them. Other provisions would reclassify possession of a stolen gun as a felony and require California to share its background check information with the FBI.

We have a chance to vote on the most comprehensive and significant gun-safety measure in decades, said Newsom, who is sponsoring the initiative while preparing to run for governor in 2018.

Brad Chase, spokesman for the Coalition for Civil Liberties, which is fighting the measure, said top law enforcement officials across the state are overwhelmingly opposed to Newsoms initiative.

Representatives for the states 58 sheriffs and thousands of prosecutors have written Newsom in protest, he said. Our frontline law enforcement is screaming that this is going to criminalize the law-abiding and clog up the court system without doing anything to stop criminals or terrorists.

The last gun-control measure on the California ballot, a 1982 initiative that would have tightly limited the purchase of new handguns, was defeated by more than a 3-2 majority after an intense and well-funded opposition campaign by the National Rifle Association.

Asked about Newsoms new initiative, NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter said Thursday that none of the measures provisions would promote public safety.

We will do everything in our power to put an end to this, Hunter said. But she wouldnt say whether the organization plans to spend large sums on the campaign.

Newsom would like to see guns confiscated in California, Hunter said.

Newsom called that assertion fictional.

One part of the initiative, however, would take away one type of firearm, rifles with magazines that can carry more than 10 cartridges, from people who now can legally possess them in most parts of the state. California bans the sale of such weapons but not their possession, though some cities, including San Francisco and Oakland, prohibit possession as well. Federal courts have upheld the local ordinances.

I dont know a legitimate hunter who needs a 15-round clip, said Newsom, who noted that such weapons are often used in mass shootings.

He said the proposed background-check requirement for ammunition purchases was potentially a game-changer in the gun-safety debate.

Newsom said a convicted felon who had illegally obtained a gun now could go down and purchase an unlimited amount of ammunition from anyone with a business license, with no questions asked. He said the initiative would require dealers to be licensed, forbid sales of ammunition to those with histories of serious crimes or mental illness, and  as with guns  require all sales to be face-to-face.

The initiative has been endorsed by the California Democratic Party, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Mayors Ed Lee of San Francisco, Libby Schaaf of Oakland and Sam Liccardo of San Jose. Newsom said supporters had spent more than $3 million for signature-gathering and are prepared to raise whatever they need to win in November.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko
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Even in a political campaign that explodes rational assumptions daily, analysts say there isnt a lot that makes sense about Ted Cruzs choice of former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina on Wednesday as his running mate  should the Texas senator win the Republican nomination.

Start with the fact that after losing five primaries by large margins Tuesday to front-runner Donald Trump, Cruzs only chance to secure the nomination is if Trump fails to win the required 1,237 delegates before the partys national convention in July in Cleveland and Cruz prevails at a contested convention.

And even if Cruz were to pull off a miracle at the convention, analysts say its not clear how Fiorina would help him.

She has never been elected to public office and failed badly the two times she has tried  a 2010 U.S. Senate race loss to Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer in California and her own short-lived presidential campaign this year. Fiorina not only doesnt have an electoral constituency, she also has no geographic constituency  she moved to Virginia after the 2010 loss.

If Cruz is counting on Fiorina to help him win over female voters, she has some apparent bona fides to offer: She was the first woman to lead a Fortune 20 company and is a breast-cancer survivor.

But politically, those experiences are unlikely to help.

Women dont reflexively vote for women, said Kelly Dittmar, a professor of political science at Rutgers University and a scholar at its Center for American Women and Politics. They vote for their party preference first, then policy  gender doesnt come first. Its the same flawed logic, she said, that led the GOPs 2008 nominee, Sen. John McCain, to choose then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Democratic voters were not going to vote for John McCain just because he put a woman on the ticket, Dittmar said. This is just odd on so many levels.

And Fiorinas appeal to women is unproven: She wasnt even the top choice of Republican women at the peak of her presidential candidacy in September, said David Brady, a Stanford University political science professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who has been studying a group of 5,000 voters since June for the site YouGov.

In September, 60 percent of the Republican women in that group had a favorable opinion of Fiorina, while 14 percent had a negative one. But only 11 percent of Republican women chose Fiorina as their favorite candidate in the field of 12 that existed at that time.

The favorite candidate of the Republican women: Trump. Second: former GOP candidate Ben Carson, who now supports Trump.

By January, when voters had gotten to know Fiorina better, her negative rating doubled to 28 percent and her approval rating dropped to 54 percent, Brady said. Soon after, she dropped out of the race.

I dont see how she gets him anything, Brady said, except perhaps that she is not as unpopular among women as Cruz is.

She doesnt really have a constituency, he said.

Far from being strategically smart, analysts said the selection looked like the desperate move of a candidate trying to change the media narrative  if only for a day. After Cruz watched his dream of reaching the White House fade in the face of Trumps landslide victories Tuesday, critics Wednesday wondered if the Fiorina pick was aimed at stealing the media spotlight on the day Trump was delivering a rare serious policy speech in Washington, D.C.

Part of it is very short term in terms of the news cycle of the the last 24 hours, said Lanhee Chen, who teaches public policy at Stanford University and was a top adviser to 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney and a senior adviser to 2016 candidate Sen. Marco Rubio before he left the Republican race. So some of this is trying to turn the page on Tuesdays multiple losses.

One thing Fiorina wont be able to turn the page on is her tenure running HP, which could best be described as mixed, and at worst disastrous. The company laid off 30,000 people during her tenure.

During her 2010 Senate run, she faced ads deriding her for owning yachts and getting a salary increase as HP employees lost their jobs. The Boxer campaign painted her as a one-percenter who received $21 million in cash and another $19 million in stock and pension benefits in her severance package after the HP board ousted her.

Its hard to see how the Cruz campaign would use that experience against Trump, who has had a successful  if uneven  business career.

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicles senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
BEIRUT  A wave of air strikes and shelling killed more than 60 people in less than 24 hours in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, monitors and activists said Thursday. The contested city is now one of the main battlegrounds of Syrias devastating civil war, with a cease-fire that has collapsed and peace talks in Geneva stalled.

At least 27 people died as a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee for the Red Cross and nearby buildings were hit overnight in the rebel-held part of Aleppo.

The U.N. envoy for Syria appealed early Thursday to the United States and Russia to help revive the peace talks and a cease-fire, which he said hangs by a thread.

However, the violence only escalated. New air strikes Thursday in residential areas in the rebel-held part of the city killed at least 20, while state media reported that at least 1,000 mortars and rockets were fired at government-held areas of Aleppo, killing at least 14 civilians.

The chief Syrian opposition negotiator Mohammed Alloush blamed the government of President Bashar Assad for the violence. He said it shows the environment is not conducive to any political action. He denounced the intensive bombing as an attempt by Assads government to drive the residents of Aleppo out, labeling it a crime of ethnic and sectarian cleansing.

About 200 civilians have been killed in the past week in Syria, nearly half of them around Aleppo. There has also been shelling in Damascus, along with a car bombing  both rarities for the capital. The Red Cross said the fighting, including the destruction in air strikes overnight of a key hospital in Aleppo, is putting millions at grave risk.

With peace talks in Geneva completely deadlocked, Syrians are regarding the escalating bloodshed with dread, fearing that Aleppo is likely to be the focus of the next, more vicious, phase of the war.

Rebel commanders said government forces have been mobilizing soldiers, equipment and ammunition in preparation for a military action in Aleppo.

The well-known al-Quds field hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross was hit shortly before midnight Wednesday, according to rescue workers.

The hospital has been one of the main medical centers operating in Aleppo since the city became deeply divided in 2012.
SEOUL  Two suspected powerful intermediate-range North Korean missiles failed to launch Thursday, South Korean defense officials said, bringing the total to three apparent failures in recent weeks.

The reports of the North Korean launch failures come ahead of a major North Korean ruling party meeting next week at which leader Kim Jong Un is believed to want to place his stamp more forcefully on a government he inherited after his dictator fathers death in late 2011.

The launches were probably the second and third attempted tests of a Musudan, a new intermediate-range missile that could one day be capable of reaching far-off U.S. military bases in Asia and the Pacific.

On Thursday, a projectile fired from a North Korean northeastern coastal town crashed a few seconds after liftoff, a South Korean Defense Ministry official said, requesting anonymity because of office rules. It wasnt immediately known whether it crashed on land or into the sea. Then, in the evening, South Koreas Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that the North fired another Musudan missile near Wonsan but that launch also presumably failed.

South Koreas Foreign Ministry called the launches a provocation and said it will try to increase international pressure on North Korea.

The failed launches come amid North Korean anger over annual South Korean-U.S. military drills that it calls a rehearsal for an invasion. The North has fired many missiles and artillery shells into the sea in recent months in an apparent protest against the drills, which end Saturday.

Earlier this week, South Korean media reported that North Korea had placed a Musudan missile on standby for an impending launch. The reports said the missile was one of two Musudan missiles North Korea had earlier deployed in the northeast.

Musudan missiles have a potential range of about 2,180 miles, which would put U.S. military bases in Guam within their striking distance. North Korea is also pushing to develop a nuclear-armed long-range missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.
1 Georgia execution: Georgia officials were preparing to execute a man Wednesday who killed a trucking company owner and his two children in 1998. Daniel Anthony Lucas was scheduled to die by injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital at the state prison in Jackson. Lucas, 37, was sentenced to death for the April 1998 killings of Steven Moss, 37; his son, Bryan, 11; and daughter, Kristin, 15; who interrupted a burglary at their home near Macon in central Georgia. The State Board of Pardons and Paroles on Tuesday declined to spare Lucas life after holding a clemency hearing. His lawyers had asked the board to spare his life, citing his rough childhood and saying hes been reformed in prison.

2 Freeway shootings: Now that a judge has dismissed charges against the man arrested for last summers freeway shootings in the Phoenix area, his attorneys are calling on the court to release all previously sealed documents. Lawyers for Leslie Merritt Jr. said opening the documents will further prove their client isnt responsible for the shootings of 11 vehicles that caused panic on Phoenix-area freeways in August and September.
SEOUL  North Korea said Wednesday that it would open the seventh congress of its ruling Workers Party next week. It will be the countrys biggest political convention in more than three decades and a likely platform for its leader, Kim Jong Un, to cement his authority.

The party faced a task of advancing the final victory of its revolution under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, its Politburo said, announcing that the congress, the first since 1980, would begin next Friday.
Symbols help us find our way around. They are shorthand for "Hey! This thing you need is right here!" Like a public restroom. We all know the white stick figure emblem painted on cobalt blue plastic that marks the spot.

For eons, this white figure donned two outfits: pants or an A-line dress to designate the restroom as men's or women's. Cultural evolution of gender identity led to a third bathroom option, a gender-neutral one, and a new outfit for the white restroom figure.

North Carolina recently mandated that its citizens use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender on their birth certificate. The new law electrified the issue, and celebrities from Bruce Springsteen to Joe Jonas have cancelled appearances in the Tar Heel State as protests erupted and the country divides over bathroom-monitoring antics.

Santa Fe took a stance on who can go where last June, when the City Council passed an ordinance stating that all public single-occupancy restrooms must be gender-neutral. But this week, SFR found several single-occupancy restrooms still with gender-specific signs.

And were not the only ones. On Wednesday, a group calling itself All Families Matter New Mexico started a public awareness campaign to urge more compliance with the Santa Fe law. The group is urging residents to add the names of local businesses breaking the gender-neutral rule to its Facebook page.

Jenn Jevertson, coalition coordinator, tells SFR the ordinance is beneficial to more than just the transgender community. One of the reasons that its needed, is that often times transgender folks dont feel safe and comfortable using the restroom, Jevertson says, but it has a broader positive impact for everyone in Santa Fe. It helps the daughter who needs to help her elderly father in the restroom. It helps the mother with a disabled son. Even though the city ordinance sets up fines for violating the rule, Jevertson says her group isnt asking for that kind of punishment now. Its about providing information and helping businesses make the changes, one, because its required, but two, because its the right thing to do, she says.

Community members can print flyers from the campaigns Facebook page, which provides information about the ordinance and how to be in compliance with it. Jevertson says the campaign has already helped some businesses get with the times.

Betterday Coffee Shop is a great example, she says. Recently, they still had the bathrooms labeled as male and female, and I know a few of our community members dropped off flyers and talked to them about it, and last time I was in there, I noticed the bathrooms were marked as gender neutral.

A spot check of businesses around the city shows compliance is slow.

La Montanita Co-op has two public single-occupancy restrooms. On SFRs first visit to the Co-op on Tuesday afternoon, one restroom had the familiar women's emblem posted on its door. The other restroom was signless, a detail Will Prokopiak, who has managed La Montanita Co-op for 10 years, was unaware of when SFR spoke with him.

During a visit to the Co-op later in the week, new signs had appearedtyped, printed and posted on the bathroom doors. We have non-gender specific bathrooms because sometime gender specific toilets put others in uncomfortable situations, the letter on the restroom door reads.

The Allsups at the intersection of Cerrillos Road and Paseo de Peralta has two single-occupancy bathrooms, both of which have gender-specific signs. An employee at the location did not want her name published but told SFR that she hasnt heard of any plans to change the signs on their restrooms. She also said Allsup's hasn't received any complaints about the restrooms' gender-specific status.

Target has been in hot water as of late over its open-minded bathroom policy, which allows customers to use the restroom of the gender they identify with. Katie Montano, a manager at the Santa Fe location who has worked for Target for seven months, says restroom rules are up to the discretion of Target employees and common sense. If we think it would make others uncomfortable, then we dont allow it, she says. Montano says that larger Target locations have family restrooms, which are gender-neutral.





Santa Fe Community College has four single-occupancy, gender-neutral restrooms. Emily Stern, head of the Center for Diversity and Integrated Learning at the college, says the gender-neutral signs have been posted on campus since 2011. Stern tells SFR the welcoming bathroom movement was spearheaded by two teachers in response to student concerns. Its really terrifying, Stern says, to be a minority of any kind.

Santa Fe Reporter
BENGALURU: The resilient Indian IT services sector's revenue growth would stabilise at 11-13 percent annually, with the bottoming out of the slowdown over the past 18 months, said global credit rating agency Moody's on Wednesday.

"We expect economic stability in developed countries, accounting for 90 percent of Indian software exports, to fuel growth for the global IT services outsourcing industry, benefiting Indian IT firms in particular," the agency said in a statement.

The study report on 'IT services India: Market share gains despite headwinds' also expects the industry to maintain its market share, with Ebitda (operating) margin at 21-22 percent.

Asserting that currency volatility would pressure growth estimate, Moody's said as IT export revenue was largely in US dollars and euro, the cost base would remain same as a result of conversion impact.

"Though the Indian rupee has depreciated against US dollar since April 2011, the latter (greenback) is appreciating against other currencies, leading to volatility and conversion impact on growth estimates," the agency pointed out.

Cautioning the growing industry on competition from global peers and low-cost hubs putting pressure on revenues, the report claimed as a result of increasing outsourcing, multinationals had improved cost competitiveness by developing their presence in low-cost countries like India and Philippines.

"As a fall-out of increasing competition from multinationals (MNCs), Indian IT firms are moving to low-cost destinations within and outside the country and are offering high-end value added services," the report noted.

The report also warned the industry that geo-political factors like curbs on outsourcing would impact its performance.

Noting that Indian firms would embrace new technologies, the report said growth of digital technology and cloud computing services would offset eventual declines in traditional services through acquisitions and in-house developments.

"As shift towards disruptive technologies like digital services, automation (artificial intelligence) and cloud computing will benefit large IT firms, we expect them to have edge over their peers by investing in skill development.

Though cost pressures may lead to consolidation in the long-term, there will be no pressure on credit profiles of the IT firms over the next 12-18 months.

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WASHINGTON: Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, among others, have reportedly pledged to form a foundation in the name of legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Russian billionaire and founder Yuri Milner held a screening of director Matthew Brown's "The Man Who Knew Infinity", a biopic on Ramanujam, over the weekend at the Silicon Valley, which was attended by the Who's Who of US super-elite, according to a source close to the film's unit.

"Sundar Pichai (CEO, Google), Sergey Brin (founder, Google), Mark Zuckerberg (founder, Facebook), Brendan Iribe (CEO of Oculus VR), and some other fifty other '1 percenters' of Silicon Valley were at Yuri Milner's house in Los Altos. Yuri hosted a very private screening and dinner for the film and they came out with tears," said the source.

Some of those, including Zuckerberg and Pichai, who saw this deeply moving film on the life of mathematician who journeyed from anonymity in his village in Tamil Nadu to everlasting fame in England have pledged to form a foundation in Ramanujan's name.

In the film, set in 1913, actor Dev Patel essays Ramanujan, a 25-year-old shipping clerk and self-taught genius, who failed out of college due to his near-obsessive, solitary study of mathematics.

Though Ramanujan had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions.

He passed away at the age of 32 in 1920.

"The Man Who Knew Infinity", which also stars Jeremy Irons, Devika Bhise, Stephen Fry, Toby Jones and Arundhati Nag, is slated to release in India on Friday.

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BENGALURU: According to the study of Economic Times, the FMCG venture, Patanjali Ayurved, promoted by yoga guru Ramdev recently proclaimed that it will invest over 1,150 crore rupees in the end of current fiscal to launch six processing units and one research and development (R&D) unit as it goes after a turnover of 10,000 crore this year.

Ramdev says that the company will invest around Rs 1,000 crore for setting up 5 to 6 units in various parts of India. Along with that Patanjali is also planned to invest 150 crore in R&D. The company is expecting to get a return over Rs 10,000 crore in the current fiscal. The units will be launched at Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Haryana.

In the process execution, Acharaya Balkrishnan, Managing Director, Patanjali Ayurved says that the company is concentration more on the drought-hit areas such as Bundelkhand region in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh and Vidharbh in Maharashtra and supposes that atleast four of these units will become operational by the end of this financial.

During the last fiscal, the company has reported an annual turnover of 5,000 crore and looking to enter the highly competitive dairy segment this year. To accomplish the companys goal and to attain a turnover of 10,500 crore, Ramdev adds that Patanjali will venture into new categories such as animal feed, dairy, and khadi apparels for yoga. The dairy segment consists of products such as cheese, milk, paneer and butter milk.

When the company was asked about the source of funds, Ramdev said that Banks are more than willing to give loans to us. We have no shortage of funds to expand. We are a debt-free company."

Apart from the launching new sector, Patanjali is also planning and working towards improving and increasing its online presence and exports divisions. Ramdev lauds that Patanjalis online sale will increase further as the company expands as it is already getting five crore internet search every month. Besides, the firm has developed four verticals such as Natural Cosmetics and Health Care, Home Care, Beverages, and Health Drink and Natural Food.

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Reliance Jio May Garner 30 Mn Subscribers, $1 Bn In Revenues In 2016-17: Morgan Stanley
WASHINGTON: The U.S. today welcomed efforts undertaken by India to promote intellectual property (IP) rights within the country and the steps it has taken to strengthen protection and enforcement.



"The United States has welcomed efforts undertaken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration to promote IPR within India and the steps it has taken to strengthen protection and enforcement," the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) said in its latest 301 annual report.



The report said high-level national initiatives, such as 'Make in India' and 'Start-up India' have linked realisation of development goals to IP creation and protection.



The 2015 passage of the Commercial Courts, Commercial Division and Commercial Appellate Division of High Courts Bill may provide an important new tool for right holders in India to efficiently and effectively enforce their rights in the courts, it said.



According to USTR, hiring and training of large numbers of new patent and trademark examiners should help to reduce significant delays new applicants face while also cutting down the backlog of pending applications.



Significant state-level enforcement developments included the establishment of India's first anti-piracy policy unit in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh's anti-piracy campaign, which resulted in the arrest of 11 individuals involved in an international piracy ring, the report said.



"The United States also welcomed the deliberate and transparent process employed in India's evaluation of a compulsory license application in 2015," USTR said, but quickly noted that these are not enough to remove India from the Priority Watch List, indicating that it will wait for some time before India is excluded from this list.



In other areas recent actions have raised new concerns. For example, India's proposed Patent Rule Amendments would introduce concerning new incentives to pressure patent applicants to localise manufacturing in India and require the submission of sensitive business information to India's Patent Office, the report said.



India has also not taken the opportunity to address longstanding challenges that represent significant IP regime deficiencies compared to other markets.



The pharmaceutical industry in particular faces a host of challenges related to IP, it said.



Observing that the Indian government is in the final stages of its thorough and holistic review of the IP regime to "nurture the IP culture and address all facets of the IP system including legal, administrative and enforcement infrastructure, human resources, institutional support system and international dimensions," the U.S. report commended India for undertaking this task.



According to the report, the U.S. continues to seek changes to India's copyright protection and enforcement regime that would protect both Indian and U.S. copyright holders in the vibrant and promising Indian market.



In particular, the U.S. urged India to - enact anti- camcording legislation; model its statutory license provisions relating to copyrighted works on the standards of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Berne Convention); ensure that collecting societies are licensed promptly and able to operate effectively; an fully establish and operationalise India's Copyright Boards; address the problem of underreporting of cable subscriptions.



It also urged India to take steps to prevent public broadcasters from facilitating dissemination of pirated content; and provide additional protections against signal theft, circumvention of TPMs, and online copyright piracy.



"The United States urges India to reject policies and practices that amount to barriers that adversely affect not only U.S. companies, but Indian companies as well.



"The United States encourages India instead to adopt policies that both address domestic challenges and support the cutting-edge innovation that can be critical to meeting legitimate domestic policy goals," the report said.

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NEW DELHI: More technology-based start ups are needed in India to create inventions to help enhance the quality of life of the people, V. Ramgopal Rao, director of the premier IIT-Delh isays.

"One thing which needs to happen in the country is more technology start ups. There are a lot of start up companies in India but many of them are e-commerce based," Rao told IANS as the institute prepares to host on April 23 its 12th Open House that gives an insight into the massive research work happening on the campus.

"The technology start-ups will actually create inventions. They have the potential to boost agricultural productivity and can add to the wealth of the nation," he added.

The Open House is set to feature over 20 "high societal impact" projects along with 500 research projects and 80 demo projects.

"Among some of the projects to be showcased at the Open House, the technology can be bought by people and help enhance the quality of life. Technology-based entrepreneurship, product development still hasn't been taken up in India in a big way," Rao noted.

Rao said that an ecosystem needs to be created for those who create technology-based products.

"When a person creates such a (technology-based) product, he takes it to the market. One way is to license it to a company which is already in that space, but it may not always be possible? If a researcher wants to start such a company, the person would want to scale up production facilities which requires investment. For this you will need vice chancellors to support you. This technology incubation is where we (IIT Delhi) are going to put emphasis now."

The director also said events such as Open House will help connect institutes like IITs with the society.

"I see a lot of hope (through such events). The activities have already begun in that direction. IITs are doing research, publishing papers, but we're not connecting strongly enough with society. But now it seems that things are beginning to happen," Rao said.

On the fewer number of women in the field of science and research, Rao said: "I am ashamed over the ratio of female researchers to male researchers at the IIT campuses. There are not even many women in the leadership position in the country right now. This is not a good sign. At IIT Delhi we have actually consciously asked why is that we don't have dean who are women. We have to address this issue."

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MUMBAI: The Small Industries Development Bank of India has sanctioned Rs 1,000 crore to 30 venture funds through the government-financed India Aspiration Fund, which seeks to support startups in their early stages.

The amount was sanctioned by the SIDBI executive committee from the Rs 1,416 crore approved by its independent advisory venture capital investment committee, Chairman Kshatrapati Shivaji said.

Earlier this month, SIDBI signed a memorandum of understanding with Life Insurance Corporation of India under which the government-owned company would contribute 10% of the fund as a co-investor.

"We got many proposals from funds, out of which 35 proposals were recommended by the VCIC to our executive committee. We have already approved 30 of the proposals worth Rs 1,000 crore," Shivaji said.

The proposals are from venture funds such as IvyCap Ventures, Blume Ventures and Exfinity Venture Partners. SIDBI will provide these funds about 15% to 20% of their total investment in startups. The remaining amount will be mobilised by venture funds from private capital and other investors, Shivaji said. "These funds will be invested to startup units. Primarily, our aim is to nudge them to make investments in the seed stage because that is when they need the maximum support," he said.

The government launched the India Aspiration Fund in August 2015 with the intention of providing equity investments to startups and micro and small enterprises and boosting employment.

In January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an additional Rs 10,000 crore to support startups, which will be funded on an annual basis with Rs 2,500 crore. He also announced a tax holiday, simplification of procedures and faster closures for startups.

"The new fund announced in January means that funding of startups will not be an issue. If we need more money, the government is willing to support. This initiative is very critical for India because more than 1 million jobs have to be created every month. We cannot generate employment only through government. We have to facilitate the private sector and provide a conducive environment for their growth," Shivaji said.

It will take 12 to 18 months for the money to flow to the startups. "Due diligence takes time. This is a long-term operation of 10 to 12 years. Venture funds have to start scouting for best companies and then it will take some more time before there is financial closure," Shivaji said.

Earlier this month, SIDBI signed an agreement to provide advisory and consultancy to small enterprises and entrepreneurs in South Asia through the SAARC Development Fund.

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- On May 15, 1976, 14-year-old Port Richmond resident Susan Jacobson was strangled to death and dumped inside an empty oil barrel at an old shipyard. Her corpse remained there until it was recovered 22 months later.



Her boyfriend, Dempsey Hawkins, 16 and also a Port Richmond resident at the time of her death, was arrested after the discovery and accused of murdering her when she attempted to break off their relationship.



He was convicted of second-degree murder in February 1979 and sentenced to 22 years to life in prison.



Now, 40 years after the slaying, a court ruling will give him another chance at freedom.



Citing Hawkins' juvenile status when he committed the crime, the Appellate Division, Third Department, on Thursday upheld a judge's ruling that the Board of Parole violated his Eighth Amendment right during his last hearing and did not consider his youthful status as the time of the murder.



The Appellate Court ordered a new parole hearing where his age at the time of the murder must be taken into consideration.



"Neither the hearing transcript nor the Board's written determination reflects that the Board met its constitutional obligation to consider petitioner's youth and its attendant characteristics in relationship to the commission of the crime," the court wrote in its ruling. "The Eighth Amendment 'requires a sentencer to consider a juvenile offender's youth and attendant characteristics' before punishing the offender with a life in prison."



The ruling continues:



"Because the petitioner was entitled to a meaningful opportunity for release in which his youth, and its attendant characteristics, were considered by the Board, we agree with [the] Supreme Court that petitioner is entitled to a de novo parole release hearing."

DENIED PAROLE 9 TIMES



Hawkins, now 56, has been denied parole nine times, most recently in March 2014, when the Board said, among other things, his release "would so deprecate the seriousness of [his] offense as to undermine respect of the law."





After that denial, he appealed the decision in state Supreme Court seeking a rehearing.



In May of 2015, the Supreme Court in Sullivan County ordered a new hearing and barred one of the Board's commissioners from participating in any future proceedings involving the prisoner.



In Thursday's decision the Appeals Court agreed with that ruling, saying Hawkins was "denied his constitutional right to a meaningful opportunity for release when the Board failed to consider the significance of petitioner's youth and its attendant circumstances at the time of the commission of the crime."



Prosecutors said Hawkins killed Jacobson during a quarrel in which she sought to break off from him. Hawkins then hid her body in a 55-gallon oil barrel inside an underground bunker at a former Downey's Shipyard in Mariners Harbor.



Jacobson's grieving family, whom Hawkins pretended to aid, searched relentlessly for her body for months. They even sought a nationally known psychic's help.



But her decomposed corpse wasn't recovered for nearly two years - and then, by chance. Three boys came across Jacobson's skeletal remains on March 25, 1978, as they were exploring in the area.



'BLEAK, DESOLATE AREA'



A Feb. 21, 1979, Advance story described the site as a "bleak, desolate area" off Richmond Terrace between Holland and Western avenues, near the former Procter & Gamble Co. plant.



Neighborhood residents referred to the area as "Down-back."



Afterward, Hawkins, a native of England, was arrested in Joppa, Ill. He had gone there in April 1977 to live with his father, Advance records show.



Prosecutors' star witness during the trial was Hawkins' cousin, Willie (Puckie) Hawkins. Willie Hawkins testified that his cousin, Dempsey, admitted to choking Jacobson to death with a shirt.



If paroled, Hawkins would be subject to deportation.
Donovan.jpg

The first bill Rep. Daniel Donovan sponsored in Congress has passed the House. (Staten Island Advance/Rachel Shapiro)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- More than a year after the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced changes to its flood insurance program after allegations of widespread fraud, the House of Representatives passed a bill, part of which Rep. Daniel Donovan sponsored to prevent future fraud.

Donovan (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) sponsored the Flood Insurance Mitigation and Policyholder Protection Act, his first in office, last fall, after a "60 Minutes" report that engineers working for flood insurance companies under the FEMA-run National Flood Insurance Program had altered damage reports after inspecting Hurricane Sandy-ravaged homes. The changed reports showed little or no damage to homes, decreasing payouts to homeowners in need of repairs.

Donovan's bill requires engineers to provide copies of their reports to homeowners so they can see whether a later version has been altered.

The bill also extends the deadline for homeowners to file lawsuits against the National Flood Insurance Program if it has denied their claim appeal.

Currently, homeowners have one year from the time of the original claim denial to either appeal the claim decision or file a lawsuit.

Once a suit is filed, the claim review process ends.

The bill extends the suit window so that homeowners would have either two years from the date of loss or 90 days after the FEMA appeal concludes, whichever is later.

The language from Donovan's bill was added to a larger bill, the PREPARE Act, which passed the House this week.

"Two of the biggest reasons I went to Washington were to secure health treatment for heroes who worked at Ground Zero after 9/11, and to help those affected by Superstorm Sandy going through the 'storm after the storm,'" Donovan said in a statement. "I accomplished the first, and I'm so proud to take this step toward accomplishing the second."

Donovan first proposed as version of the bill as district attorney when he was running for Congress.

About 1,200 lawsuits had been filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, with homeowners saying their claims were unfairly denied.

After Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) asked FEMA to apply those settlements to all fraud victims, not just those who sued, FEMA agreed to re-open all cases that were requested.

The senators requested the Senate Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs Committee hold oversight hearings to determine what FEMA's role was in the alleged fraud. It was determined that agency officials knew about the fraud allegations but did little to address it at first.

Gillibrand sponsored a bill last fall to update the federal flood insurance program, making it fairer and smoother and eliminating fraud.

State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is also investigating two engineering firms alleged to have fraudulently changed reports: GEB HiRise Engineering of Uniondale, Long Island, and U.S. Forensic of Metairie, La.

The federal inspector general also has an ongoing investigation into the alleged fraud.
Reichard Donovan composite.jpg

Democrat Richard Reichard is challenging Republican Rep. Daniel Donovan for Congress in November. (Advance composite photo)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - The race for Congress is off to a slow start, as Rep. Daniel Donovan seeks his first full term in Washington, D.C. and faces a challenge from a longtime political activist but first-time candidate.

Donovan (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) was chosen in a special election last May to fill the remainder of Michael Grimm's term after Grimm pleaded guilty to tax fraud and resigned.

Donovan, running in November for a full, two-year term, will face Democrat Richard Reichard, former president of the Staten Island Democratic Association and a retired member of the city Department of Finance.

Henry "Hank" Bardel will run on the Green Party line for the third time, after running against Grimm and Democrat Mark Murphy in 2012, and against Grimm and Democrat Domenic Recchia in 2014.

All three candidates filed their designating petitions with the city Board of Elections recently, Donovan for the Republican, Conservative, Independence and Reform Party lines; Reichard for the Democratic Party line and Bardel for the Green Party line.

Only one general objection was filed against Reichard's petitions, but no specification followed, so the petitions will stand.

No objections were filed against Donovan's or Bardel's petitions.

The Donovan and Reichard campaigns recently filed with the Federal Election Commission reports of their respective fundraising activities for the first quarter of this year.

Reichard was selected as the Democratic nominee in the beginning of March, and with the campaign filing period running from Jan. 1 to March 31, Reichard had little to show for the first filing.

Reichard raised $2,675 from four individuals who donated to the campaign.

"The numbers are low because we had to file right after we announced the campaign, there was no chance to even raise money," said Reichard campaign spokesman Roy Moskowitz, a Staten Island-based political consultant.

Moskowitz said the candidate's first fundraiser was last weekend at a private home in St. George.

He said he expects a more honest assessment by the end of the summer, two quarterly filings away from now.

Bardel has no reports filed with the FEC.

Donovan, on the other hand, began the quarter with $339,657. He raised $130,165 and spent $101,432, leaving his campaign with $368,390 on hand.

Thirteen thousand dollars of the funds came from eight political action committees set up by sugar cooperatives.

Campaign spokeswoman Jessica Proud said the donations came after Donovan met with the groups, not for any specific bill or policy stance.

Proud said after raising $900,000 during a little more than a two-month period for the special election, Donovan has focused on working in D.C.

"His focus was on policy and making sure that he was fulfilling the campaign promises," Proud said. "It hasn't been the highest priority in terms of establishing himself in Congress," she said of fundraising.

Never a prolific fundraiser, Donovan raised the $900,000 and shortly after, there was a contentious district attorney's race to replace him, something that Staten Islanders put a lot into as well.

"We wanted to give people a break," Proud said. "It was a lot that we asked from people in a short amount of time."

Like Reichard's campaign, Proud said Donovan's will ramp up fundraising in the summer months.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A city Department of Sanitation truck, traveling a regular pick-up route in Annadale on Tuesday morning, was packed with over seven tons of trash when a call was received that neighborhood resident Tiffany Otterbeck's rings were in a garbage bag somewhere inside the huge white vehicle that serviced her home.

So what happens next, in this and similar circumstances?

Believe it or not, New York's Strongest have a specific protocol to deal with emergencies such as these.

The director of solid waste management for the Sanitation Department -- Tottenville resident Thomas Killeen, on the job at the agency for 27 years -- provided SILive.com with the explanation in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

Here's what happens, under the department's protocol:

Once a frantic call is received from a Staten Island resident, "we call the borough office on Richmond Avenue."

"We find out the route and truck that serviced the location."

"Then we put an immediate stop on that truck."

The truck is taken off its route and instructed to return to the department's Staten Island transfer station inside Freshkills in New Springville, Killeen told us.

'LOST VALUABLES SEARCH'

Once the truck has returned to the station, "we set up a lost-valuables search," Killeen explained.

"And we set up a time with the civilians to look for it," he continued.

What happens next?

"We dump the contents of the truck and spread it out, by hand."

"The crew (on duty) helps the family search through this."

How often do Staten Islanders call upon the Strongest to help retrieve valuables?

"About once every three to four weeks," said Killeen, noting that requests for help typically involve jewelry, wallets and money, and important paperwork.

And what happens if a call for help comes in after the truck has completed its route and has been unloaded?

That's a different story, according to Killeen.

"Once the truck is dumped, and the garbage is mixed in with that from other trucks and put in rail containers, there's nothing we can do," he said. "It would be like finding a needle in a haystack."

In the case of Tiffany Otterbeck, "she knew (and could describe) what type of bag her ring was in," said Killeen, explaining that a five-man Department of Sanitation crew sorted through the garbage with rakes and shovels and by hand.

The ring was retrieved in about 40 minutes, Killeen reported.

And he wanted to give a shout-out to the crew that did the work and made this a most happy ending for Tiffany Otterbeck and her husband:

Supervisor Roger Vatter.

DOS workers Robert Zinsley, John Morse and Brian Thomson.

DOS attendant James Hansen.

Comments welcome!

Especially if you were ever in a similar circumstance and got help from NYC's Strongest.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - A jury Wednesday convicted a man, then 33, of sodomizing a 14-year-old male relative two years ago in the defendant's home.

Fabian Melendez was found guilty in state Supreme Court, St. George, of three counts of second-degree criminal sexual act.

The charges, formerly classified as sodomy, were the top counts against the defendant.

Melendez, a short, dark-haired man garbed in a charcoal-colored coat, looked down at the defense table, then despondently over at jurors as the foreman read the verdict.

The trial, which began last week, was the second one this year on the case.

In February, the original trial ended in a hung jury.

"The facts of this case proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Fabian Melendez committed these unthinkable crimes," said District Attorney Michael E. McMahon in a statement.

McMahon said Melendez's actions "violat(ed) that sacred relationship" that exists between relatives.

"I want to thank the jury for its service and Assistant District Attorneys Ann Thompson and Melissa Lynch for successfully retrying this case and ensuring a just conviction that ensures the safety of all Staten Islanders."

Melendez's lawyer, Robert Osuna, said he expects his client will appeal.

"We're very saddened by the verdict," Osuna said outside court. "The complainant for years maintained he was abused by someone other than my client."

Osuna contended the boy subsequently changed his story.

According to prosecutors, Melendez, then 33, sodomized the boy one night in late January 2014 while the victim was staying at the defendant's home in the borough.

Melendez, now 36, had been free on $25,000 bond during the trial, online state court records show.

Justice William E. Garnett remanded him after the verdict.

Sentencing is scheduled for May 11.

Melendez faces a minimum of two years up to a maximum of seven years in prison for each conviction. The sentences could run concurrently or consecutively.

The defendant, meanwhile, has criminal sex charges pending in a separate case in Brooklyn state Supreme Court, according to online state court records.
Baby Births

New York state now says insurers must pay for maternal depression screening, without a co-pay or deductible. (Associated Press)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- It's one of those little-talked-about mental health issues that is finally being brought further out of the shadows.

It's a condition that's "all-too-common," but new mothers -- and their families -- either don't see the symptoms or think they're just a passing phase and often think that all will be fine later.

But in some cases it isn't. And the impact of postpartum depression can be life-altering and even tragic.

But now, New York state will soon require health insurers to cover depression screening for pregnant women and new mothers.

It's a smart policy initiative that, for a change, brings welcome health insurance news to New Yorkers.

The move follows a recommendation from a federal panel that insurers cover maternal depression screening without a co-pay or deductible.

In announcing the policy, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the change will ensure that more pregnant and postpartum women can get the treatment they need.

The news came Monday in a letter that the state's Department of Financial Services wrote to insurers outlining the required change.

The department said insurers should begin providing the coverage as soon as they can, but no later than within six months.

American Psychiatric Association President Renee Binder praised the state's action, saying women struggling with maternal depression deserve screening and care for what is an "all-too-common" health condition.

The symptoms range from subtle to obvious, but in all cases, need professional evaluation -- and treatment -- to manage.

"That's very good news," Catherine Mooney, nurse manager in the mother-baby unit at Richmond University Medical Center, told the Advance.

Mooney has been the facilitator at the West Brighton hospital's postpartum support group since the late 1990s.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, data from 25 states participating in the 2011 Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System showed that about 10 percent of women experienced frequent postpartum depressive symptoms. Some estimates are as high as 15 percent.

The new law provides guidelines on maternal depression screening; information on support and referrals; and public education to promote awareness of and de-stigmatize maternal depression.

"A key element of the bill is recognizing that the newborn's pediatrician can have an important role in identifying maternal depression," said Assembly Health Committee Chair Richard Gottfried in a statement. "Early screening for postpartum depression is effective for families and offers long-term emotional benefits and health care cost savings."

WARNING SIGNS

Here are a few top examples of the symptomatic indications from postpartumprogress.com:

You feel overwhelmed. Not like "hey, this new mom thing is hard." More like "I can't do this and I'm never going to be able to do this." You feel like you just can't handle being a mother. In fact, you may be wondering whether you should have become a mother in the first place.

You feel guilty because you believe you should be handling new motherhood better than this.

You don't feel bonded to your baby. You're not having that mythical mommy bliss that you see on TV or read about in magazines. Not everyone with postpartum depression feels this way, but many do.

You can't understand why this is happening. You are very confused and scared.

You feel sadness to the depths of your soul. You can't stop crying, even when there's no real reason to be crying.

You feel hopeless, like this situation will never ever get better. You feel weak and defective, like a failure.

You can't bring yourself to eat, or perhaps the only thing that makes you feel better is eating.
Voting.jpg

Kenneth Cain casts his vote at PS 56 in Rossville during the presidential primary on April 19. (Staten Island Advance/ Jan Somma-Hammel)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - There is no doubt things went awry during last week's election.

Voters from all over the city had issues at the polls, particularly in Brooklyn, where 126,000 Democratic voters were removed from the rolls.

Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan said the agency was behind in maintaining its voting records and removed ineligible voters all at once.

He said 12,000 people moved out of the borough, 44,000 people were moved from active to inactive voter status and 70,000 voters were removed from the inactive voter list, purged from records altogether.

Ryan later explained at a BOE commissioners meeting this week that letters meant to verify voters' addresses may not have gone out. Those letters would have identified which voters are no longer active. A second letter did make its way to voters, Ryan said, informing them they would removed from the active rolls.

It's unclear how many of the 126,000 removed last summer were done so incorrectly.

But beyond that, there were mix ups, many on Staten Island.

Some who are regular voters arrived at their polling station to be told by poll workers that their names were not in the book of registered voters there.

Others were told they were not members of the party whose primary election they were trying to vote in.

Some who say they are lifelong registered Republicans, or lifelong registered Democrats had to fill out affidavit, or provisionary, ballots, swearing they are registered and able to vote. Those ballots, 121,056 of which there are citywide, with 4,566 from Staten Island, will be counted. The BOE can't certify the results of the election until then.

In Brooklyn, 37,214 voters filled out affidavit ballots -- about one-third of those cast citywide.

We do know for sure that there were voters who showed up at the polls, hoping to vote for their candidate of choice, only to be turned away because they weren't registered with either of the two major parties.

One official familiar with the BOE's election procedures, predicted such an occurrence, with many people being unaware of New York state's closed primary system.

In these cases, poll workers were right to now allow them to vote. It's the law.

Critics can say what they will about the closed primary system, argue it disenfranchises people, but must acknowledge it is indeed the system under which voters must operate.

For the 126,000 voters purged from the rolls in Brooklyn, the chief clerk there, Republican Diane Haslett-Rudiano, has been suspended without pay pending an internal investigation.

Her former deputy clerk, Democrat Mary Rose Sattie, had retired in the midst of the purge and a new deputy clerk, Betty Ann Canizio-Aqil, took her place.

Canizio-Aqil has not been disciplined but Ryan said at the Tuesday meeting, "Perhaps when more information becomes available to the commissioners, they'll take appropriate action."

The BOE staff comes by way of political patronage jobs, and insiders know the Brooklyn office as the most poorly run out of the five boroughs, so the recent events come as no surprise to some.

With investigations being handled by both the city comptroller and the state attorney general, some light will be shed on the goings-on that undoubtedly left some voters out in the cold.
Page Content

CARE MAKES A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

Remarks By H.E. Governor Eugene B. Holiday on the occasion of King day Celebrations





Esteemed Guests,

Good evening,

And a very warm welcome to you to this Kings Day celebration in honor of the birthday of His Majesty King Willem-Alexander. My wife Marie-Louise and I are pleased to see you and celebrate with you this evening. We do so in the spirit of this evenings theme: Care Makes a Difference. I shall therefore in the next few moments share some thoughts with you on why care makes a world of difference.

Friedrich Von Hugel, an Austrian Roman Catholic Layman provided an excellent answer to that question with his statement: Caring is the greatest thing, caring matters most. Caring matters most because of the role it plays as the foundation of our interactions with others. That is within our families, our neighborhoods, our workplaces and our wider society. Caring is, in essence, the glue that holds our worlds web of people together. Care brings out the best in you and me. The more we care, the more devoted we will be to attaining our aspirations as individuals and as a society for a more perfect nation. A more stable nation build on the principles of democracy anchored through:

1. the education of our children;

2. the elimination of poverty and hunger;

3. the eradication of violence against and abuse of children and women;

4. the protection of the health of our people and environment; and

5. a strong and sustainable economy for all.





Esteemed Guests,





To care makes a world of difference

In lives, in our society in so many ways

It is rewarding, liberating, uplifting and empowering

Today, tomorrow and always





Hence our continued pursuit of a more just and sustainable society as articulated in the preamble to our Constitution, requires that we  you and I  must continue to nourish our level of care for each other and our nation. If our community is denied the nourishment it needs it will fail to flourish. A plant with insufficient water will wither and so will the spirit of our nation without our care.





Esteemed guests,

Imagine what our society would be like without the dedicated and caring services of so many professionals and volunteers  such as, teachers, nurses, doctors, clergy, policemen, social workers, volunteers, environmentalists and others  who, in so many different ways, work to improve the quality of our lives. The care of these persons, or We, the people, is the oil that fuels our efforts and countrys progress. It is with the knowledge of and appreciation for their valued service to our community that we can look to the future with hope for the further growth of our country. And at the same time use their example to call on others for the necessary expansion of our circle of care. For to optimize our nations potential it is imperative that every one of us demonstrate how much we care for each other and for our community.





Esteemed Guests,

It is therefore with gratitude that we shall in a few moments stand still to highlight the contributions and achievements of a few of our brothers and sisters who, because they CARED AND MADE A DIFFERENCE, have been singled out to receive Royal Decorations. This for their prolonged outstanding service to our community. The four (4) persons are - Reverend Etton Lloyd Brissett and Dr. Pieter Jan Offringa who have each been decorated as Knight in the Order of Oranje Nassau as well as Mrs. Shelly-Ann Alphonso and Mrs. Veronica Margareth Benjamin-Oliver who have each been decorated as member in the Order of Oranje Nassau. A review of the contributions of these persons to the Sint Maarten community reveals a common thread, that of caring to make a difference in the lives of others. They have made their mark in the Sint Maarten community in a variety of areas such as: ministering to the spiritual and Christian development of generations of Sint Maarteners, doctoring to the needs of our children, providing a home and care for underprivileged and abandoned children and enhancement of awareness to help prevent and/or respond to breast cancer. This brief summary does not do justice to the level of giving, devotion, community involvement and care demonstrated by these people towards making a real difference in the lives of so many in our country over a prolonged number of years. Their committed involvement in service to our country for a significant part of their lives through their care for the spiritual, physical and emotional wellbeing of others is a necessary building block for a stronger, more resilient and sustainable Sint Maarten community. And as such serves as an example for all of us to become more involved, and care to make a difference in our community.

I therefore extend my appreciation to each of the 2016 recipients of Royal Decorations for their exemplary service to our community. It is an honor and special distinction to be awarded a Royal Decoration and I thus, in closing, convey my congratulations to each of the 2016 recipients individually and to their family and friends.

Thus as we continue the tradition of celebrating Kings Day with an emphasis on Care Makes A Difference, I wish you an enjoyable evening.





Thank you,

God Bless you, and

God Bless Sint Maarten and protect its coast.
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The presence of Nusra in almost every contested area has allowed the Syrian army and its Russian allies to target opposition-held areas while also claiming not to have technically violated the cease-fire. The opposition backed out of the Geneva talks last week, saying the government had repeatedly violated the cease-fire.
John "Tav" Taverner has urged the ACT Government to upgrade Manuka Pool and keep developers away from it, as he accepted an honour on behalf of his family who managed the iconic pool for decades.

The Taverner Family, cartoonist Geoff Pryor, former chief justice of the ACT Supreme Court Jeffrey Miles, the Jennings Germans, St John's Anglican Church Canberra, and bandmaster and music critic, the late Bill Hoffman are the latest inductees to the ACT Honour Walk, with their plaques in Ainslie Place unveiled on Thursday, recognising their contribution to the city.

The latest inductees on the ACT Honour Walk - former cartoonist for The Canberra Times Geoff Pryor, retired judge Jeffrey Miles, former Manuka Pool manager John Taverner and retired joiner Edgar Weiss. Credit:Rohan Thomson

Mr Taverner's family managed the Manuka Pool for nearly 60 years, starting with his dad Owen in 1955 and ending with his own retirement in 2012.

"It's an understatement to say, 'I'm proud as punch'. My parents certainly would be," he said of their inclusion on the walk.
Fairfax Media's restructure of its ACT publishing operations, including The Canberra Times, will result in fewer job losses than originally proposed, the company has told staff.

Fairfax announced last month that the national capital's daily newspaper would make the historic switch to a compact print format seven days a week as part of the transformation of the company's regional, rural and suburban publishing division, Australian Community Media (ACM).

The Canberra Times' redesigned weekday, Saturday and Sunday editions will be introduced early in the second half of 2016. Credit:Michel OSullivan

Employees in Canberra were briefed on Thursday on the finalised plan for The Canberra Times after a period of consultation with staff and the community.

The editorial director of ACM, Rod Quinn, a former editor-in-chief of The Canberra Times, confirmed that the paper's redesigned weekday, Saturday and Sunday editions would be introduced early in the second half of 2016.
A Canberra man accused of beating two pitbulls tied to a clothesline with a broom handle has been banned from owning animals for a decade.

RSPCA ACT said its inspectors were called to the Isabella Plains home after a complaint about the condition of the two dogs.

Honey and Hank were found tied to a clothesline with wire. Credit:RSPCA ACT

The two dogs, Hank and Honey, were found tethered by a wire to a clothesline in the rain, surrounded by faeces, inspectors said.

A member of the public told the RSPCA they had witnessed the man beating the dogs with his fist and the broom handle and that the dogs had been tied to the clothesline for at least six months.
A Kaleen man has faced court charged with killing Andrew Carville nearly six months after his remains were found in grassland in Canberra's east.

Milan Urlich, 28, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with murder and interfering with a dead body.

Milan Urlich, 28, was in April charged with murdering Andrew Carville. Credit:Facebook

Mr Carville, 52, was reported missing from his Evatt home on November 5. His remains were found during a police line search on Defence land at Majura on November 19.

Urlich wore jeans, joggers and a khaki jacket and did not speak when he appeared briefly before Magistrate Karen Fryar in the ACT Magistrates Court on Thursday.
A man extradited from Canberra to NSW has been charged with murder over the bashing death of his former partner in Sydney's south.

Stephen James Boyd, 51, wore a neck brace and green tracksuit when he was brought before the ACT Magistrates Court on Thursday afternoon.

Stephen Boyd had surgery in Canberra Hospital after hitting his head on the steering wheel during a police pursuit.

It is alleged he bashed Tina Kontozis, 51, to death at her home on Beachcomber Avenue, Bundeena, on Sunday.

A 17-year-old male with an injured arm was also found at the house. He was taken to hospital for treatment.
It is a fitting tribute that a newly renovated concourse has been completed this week at the University of Canberra. It means outgoing Vice-Chancellor Stephen Parker can walk away from the institution via thoroughly modernised and cleverly designed pathways.

His exit on Friday will be symbolic of the legacy he has left after his nine-year term  a UC almost unrecognisable from its former days as the Canberra College of Advanced Education.

The University of Canberra's Vice-Chancellor Stephen Parker relaxes on the newly landscaped concourse. Credit:Graham Tidy

Professor Parker inherited an institution beset with debt and industrial tensions in 2007. Last week he signed a development deal for 3300 residences on campus worth $1.7 billion over the next 20 years. UC also became the first Australian university to introduce an Employee Bonus Scheme in 2015  with full-time staff last year receiving a almost $1200 each, shared with them from the surplus.

Not only has a massive campus redevelopment changed the look of the place, but a spotlight on research, recruitment drive and concerted focus on its international outlook has seen UC place in not one, but two, international league tables over the past 12 months.
Air traffic control provider Airservices Australia should be privatised by the federal government in a move that could raise $1 billion, according to players at the smaller end of the local aviation industry.

The Australian Aviation Associations' Forum (TAAAF), chaired by former Airservices boss Greg Russell, said on Thursday privatisation similar to the not-for-profit model used in Canada would make the air traffic control group more efficient.

The Australian Aviation Associations' Forum says Australia should move to the Canadian model. Credit:James Davies

TAAAF proposed half of the proceeds could be returned to the general government funding pool, with the remaining $500 million to be used to create an Aviation Future Fund that would provide industry training and support technology development.

TAAAF represents regional airlines, recreational, helicopter and business aviation groups but not the two largest customers of Airservices, which are Qantas and Virgin Australia, nor the major international airlines. Earlier this month, the Airline Owners and Pilots Association also proposed that Airservices should be privatised.
If you're thinking of taking skinny odds on the gambling advertising arms race calming down any time soon, think again.

The broke lads at Ladbrokes enlisted Logie winner, Gary Sweet, to front its latest campaign, and the UK-owned gambling giant told analysts that it's being "extremely aggressive" with its Australian advertising.

And it shows, with active customers up 86 per cent as Ladbrokes and all these other European bookmakers try to morph us into a nation of smart-phone wielding punters.

No wonder Ladbrokes boss, Jim Mullen, recently described the Australian market as the jewel in his company's crown.
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and chief executive of Twitter, was in Australia earlier this month spruiking his state-of-the-art payments technology, Square.

Square sells a bit of plastic which you can stick into your mobile phone to allow small businesses to accept card payments.

Meanwhile, as Dorsey was holding forth about Square, one of his customers in Australia was striving to pay his Twitter advertising bill but was told Twitter would only accept a wire transfer to a company in Singapore.

"A wire transfer?" inquired our small business contact Chris Brycki, who runs financial services business StockSpot. Surely that's a bit old-fashioned. He asked his Twitter account executive that, as he was busy and would prefer not attend the bank physically to make this payment to Singapore, would there be a more contemporary way to pay?
Fresh from a four-day holiday on the Gold Coast, a five-months pregnant Ms Barreiro logged online to her Commonwealth Bank account to find the $1350 she had put aside for medical bills had been withdrawn.

But after her debit card was skimmed and her bank account cleared of all funds, she began having second thoughts.

Sabrina Barreiro always thought keeping her money in a bank account was a safer option than under the mattress.

"First I checked my wallet to see if I had my card with me, and I did. So I panicked and called the bank," said Ms Barreiro.

"My expectations were higher:" Sabrina Barreiro struggled to get her money back after her bank card was skimmed and used illegally. Credit:Christopher Pearce

"I checked the transactions online and there had been three withdrawals from an ATM in Punchbowl, taken between the fourth and fifth of April, when I was on the Gold Coast."

Upon calling the bank, Ms Barreiro, from Bondi, found the consumer process of reclaiming her money would not be as simple as she assumed. The experience left her distressed that she would be unable to pay medical expenses in the final months of her pregnancy.

"They told me they would open an investigation, which was going to take 45 days and I would have to wait until they finished the investigation to get any money back.
American apparel giant HanesBrands plans to double Pacific Brands' operating profit in three years by plugging its iconic Australian labels into the might of its global supply chain.

If successful, Hanes $1.1 billion bid for PacBrands will have Bonds, Sheridan and Berlei cosying-up with US imitate labels Playtex and Wonderbra in Hanes' multi-billion dollar international brand stable.

The $11 billion US business had already identified " significant savings" through linking the PacBrands labels with its large-scale, low-cost global manufacturing and supply operations in Asian and cutting out third-party manufacturers.

PacBrands and Hanes have been quietly negotiating this deal since late last year however the bid caught many analysts and market watchers by surprise, despite a 9 per cent rally in the PacBrands share price this week.
Household name Colgate has been found guilty of conspiring with two rivals and supermarket giant Woolworths to manipulate the laundry detergent market and rip off customers, in what its executives called "project mastermind".

The Federal Court on Thursday slapped an $18 million penalty on Colgate-Palmolive, saying it breached Australia's competition laws in its attempts to limit the supply and control the price of detergents.

Colgate had entered into a cartel arrangement in 2008-09 with competitors Unilever and Cussons, with the co-operation of Woolworths, to phase out standard concentrated laundry detergents by a certain date and bring in ultra concentrates, the court found.

All parties stood to profit because ultra concentrates are cheaper to make, store and transport. They agreed to not pass on savings to consumers.
Throwing out your target salary as $103,500 seems a little bit silly  doesn't $100,000 tell pretty much the same story?  but research from Columbia Business School suggests that using precise numbers makes a more powerful anchor in negotiations. According to Malia Mason, the author of the study, kicking off a negotiation with exact-sounding numbers leads the other party to think that you've done research to arrive at those particular digits  and that, in turn, makes them think you're likely correct. 3. It's better to suggest a salary range rather than a single number Using precise numbers doesn't mean using single precise numbers. In a separate study, Mason and her Columbia Business School colleague Daniel Ames find that presenting a salary range  including and above your desired target  is the best way to get results. In the past, organisational psychologists thought a range would work against you  wouldn't people just fixate on the lower number?  but Ames and Mason suggest that's not the case.

Presenting a range works for two reasons, they say: It gives your boss information about what you're actually asking for, and it makes you seem polite and reasonable  which means you're less likely to get hit with a hard-line counteroffer. 4. Ask for advice In another article, Grant suggests approaching someone in the organisation who you trust, has some influence, and has a vested interest in hiring you and following a few steps: First, express your enthusiasm about the offer. Next, explain your possible contribution to the organisation or salary needs. And finally, ask for advice. You could say: "I'm thrilled about the offer. This is my first choice, for the following reasons, and I'd love to join...

"I just have a few questions about the terms that I'd like to address before I'll be ready to sign. I put myself through school as an investment in education, and I'm in debt $X from student loans. I've calculated the cost of living at $Y; I'm concerned about being able to support myself and my family...

"I trust you, and I'd very much value your recommendations. What would you suggest?"

Grant points to studies by researcher Katie Liljenquist, who find that three things tend to happen when you ask for advice: First, you've flattered your contact and appealed to their pride. Second, you've encouraged them to take your perspective and become more empathetic. And third, you've elicited some commitment from them. "In the best case scenario, the contact will take the initiative to advocate for you directly," Grant writes. "Failing that, you'll gain some valuable advice about who to approach and how to make your case, as well as some possible history on precedents for negotiating in your role." 5. Think of the negotiation as a competition In most salary negotiations, you're going after something that the other party doesn't particularly want to give you. That makes it a competition, and viewing it such leads to better results, according to research from George Mason Professor Michelle Marks and Temple Professor Crystal Harold. The team looked at five different negotiation strategies: accommodating, avoiding, collaborating, competing, and compromising. And  spoiler alert  compromising was not the best strategy.

Instead, Marks and Harold suggest that people who use competitive or collaborative strategies  employing "open discussion of issues and perspectives"  end up with higher salaries than those who are "accommodating" or "compromising." 6. Women might consider employing their 'feminine charms'  very strategically According to a study from Berkeley professor Laura Kray, using "feminine charm"  a balance of friendly and flirtatious behaviour  can substantially increase gains from a negotiation. It's a "strategic behaviour aimed at making the person you are negotiating with feel good in order to get them to agree to your goals," she tells The Independent. It's an adaptive strategy that helps our general cultural discomfort with aggressive women. But  as there always is  there's a caveat: a little bit of feminine charm can work for you, but if you're seen as too overtly flirtatious, you're less likely to be trusted by your coworkers, the study suggested. 7. Don't go face to face until you have to

Generally, if you're the one asking for a higher salary, you are not the one in the position of power  the person who is hiring you or determining your raise is in control. They have to agree to the number in the end, and they usually have more power over your career and work environment at the organisation. In face-to-face negotiations, a study out of Imperial College London research finds that the more powerful person will usually win out. People think differently when they're apart, and power hierarchies matter less from a distance. If you're negotiating with your boss, you have a better chance when negotiations are conducted by email. 8. If you're meeting in person, make steady eye contact Not every negotiator resorts to deception. But it's often in their interest to hide how excited they about a candidate  and how willing they might actually be to bump up their offer. According to a study from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the most effective ways to keep people honest is to make steady eye contact.

9. Put any concerns you have on the table all at once When getting an offer, many people want to seem happy, and avoid looking too needy or disappointed. They might bring up a concern or two, but gloss over other issues that  inevitably  end up coming up later. That drives hiring managers crazy, according to Harvard professor Deepak Malhotra. The best strategy is to reveal all of your concerns at once, and note which ones are most important, so you can work through them together. 10. Make the first offer Conventional wisdom is that you should wait for the other party to make the initial offer in order to get more information to act on. The problem with that thinking, though, says Grant in a LinkedIn post, is that it's wrong.

In reality, it's much better to make the first offer because you get to set the "anchor," the figure that affects the trajectory of the negotiation. People who make very high first offers end up with a much better result. The first offer pulls the other person in its direction, and it's difficult to adjust the other way. 11. Only provide a couple reasons for your salary request While a number of negotiation experts say that you should prove your value with a list of your qualifications, accomplishments, and why you are the one best suited for the job, Grant suggests limiting this list to only two points. "When preparing to make a first offer, people often overcorrect," Grant explains. "They're so concerned about justifying their positions that they marshal as many reasons as possible."

Grant points to research that finds skilled negotiators average fewer than two reasons per argument, compared with three reasons per argument from the non-experts. He explains that more reasons can dilute an argument, especially if some are weaker than others. And presenting too many reasons can convey a lack of confidence, "making clear that we're uncertain of the legitimacy of our offer. An effective first offer is best supported by one or two compelling reasons," Grant says. 12. Get them to talk about themselves While you clearly want to make an assertive case for your position, it might be wiser to open negotiations with a little chit-chat  especially if you can get your negotiating partner to talk about themselves. According to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, the author of a recent study on the neurological effects of talking about yourself, it can trigger the same sensations of pleasure as food or money.

13. Chatting works better if you're a man Unfortunately for female negotiators, another study  this one by led by researcher Brooke Ann Shaughnessy, of Technische U. Munchen, in Germany  finds that opening with small talk only works if you're a man. According to the researchers, chatting before diving in leads men to get "more favourable final offers." But the study found that small talk didn't do anything for women (though it also didn't do any harm, and it's possible that women could also get results if they were really good small talkers, the researchers say). That's likely because of long-standing gender stereotypes: Going into a negotiation, men are traditionally seen as aggressive, and friendly small talk can be disarming  and get you what you want. 14. Rank your priorities, and share them

"In a job offer negotiation, for example, you might say that salary is most important to you, followed by location, and then vacation time and signing bonus," Grant writes in a LinkedIn post. "Research shows that rank-ordering is a powerful way to help your counterparts understand your interests without giving away too much information." Then follow up by asking them for their priorities, and look for mutually beneficial trade offs on the most important issues. 15. Strike a 'power pose' before you get started According to research from Harvard Business School Professor Amy Cuddy, adopting a "power pose" with legs widely spaced and hands on hips (channel Wonder Woman) can actually alter body chemistry, making you feel measurably more powerful and willing to take (and stick to) risks. It boosts testosterone, which increases confidence, and it also reduces the stress hormone cortisol. Just what you need before a negotiation.

16. Be a little unpredictable The default for negotiations is a relatively level and less emotional approach, an attempt to be as rational as possible. But injecting some passion and unpredictability can create an advantage. A study from Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky finds that emotional inconsistency from negotiators leads to greater concessions from the other party because they feel less in control of the situation. Expressing anger, alternating between anger and happiness, and alternating between anger and disappointment all yielded bigger concessions. 17. Consider tears (but tread carefully!)

Going into a high-pressure negotiating situation, it makes sense to try to stay on an even keel: you're controlled, you're balanced, you're in charge of your emotions. But one study from ESSEC, the University of Michigan, the University of Paris, and EMLYON, suggests that in certain situations, expressing sadness  and even tears  can make you more likely to get what you want from the negotiation. If your negotiating partner sees you as "low power," if they anticipate continued interactions with you, and if they see your relationship as collaborative, then it's possible that what Science Alert calls a "warranted display of pathos" could  maybe  get you what you your raise. But even if it's true, it's very risky (do you really want to be seen as low power forever?). In the long run, it seems likely you'd be better off with a power pose, a well-chosen salary range, and a competitive spirit. Loading
We sometimes forget that we assert sovereignty over 42 per cent of the Antarctic continent, roughly the size of mainland Australia minus Queensland.

So the Turnbull government's Antarctic strategy and 20-year action plan released this week is important. It responds to the essential elements of a report to the federal government nearly two years ago by Tony Press, a former director of the Australian Antarctic Division.

Press found the pre-eminence we've traditionally held because of our historic polar connections and scientific and diplomatic leadership can no longer be assumed.

If we're not a big player in Antarctic affairs then our polar agenda will be driven by others. There's now, for example, a risk of being left behind by China. China's setting up its first air squadron in Antarctica this year. Last year it announced it was preparing to build a fifth research station on the continent.
"My wife and I are going overseas in the next few months," reports John Boyce, of Cromer, "so I needed to renew my passport. The new one arrived today. Her first remark was 'Why did you renew it for ten years?' It took a little time to see that she thought ten years was too long. I'm only 81 years old. Should I be seeking protection?"

"How about this for a Cryptic clue?" poses Helen Bersten, of Roseville ("DA should see a shrink", Column 8, all week). "American Public Prosecutor needs to view a minimisation." It's great, but "DA should see a shrink" IS the clue, not the solution.

"I'm not sure why Dennis Roy and others seem disappointed that Australia Post 'delivers' their home parcels to their local PO," writes Alan Marel, of North Curl Curl (Column 8, since Monday). "Isn't it all just part of our new, high speed 21st century communications system? Australia Post is just delivering their mail 'to the node'."

Alan may have a point. "Did the screen of my Australia Post Parcel Locker just proudly proclaim that it took me only 16.87 seconds to retrieve my mail?" asks Chris Ramos, of Sydney. "In honour of the Rio Olympics, I will next time endeavour to shave off a few hundredths of a second to achieve a personal best."

"On Tuesday, John Rand of Belrose asked when poppies came to symbolise Anzac Day," writes John Gatfield, editor of Reveille, the RSL NSW magazine. "The answer is they have not  except in New Zealand. The first poppies to be ordered from Great Britain for use by Australia and NZ on Armistice Day in 1922 came by sea, and after the ship had unloaded at Australian ports, it headed across the Tasman but arrived too late for the poppies to be delivered in time. So NZ has ever since adopted the poppy for Anzac Day, while we have stayed with the UK and worn poppies in November. Poppies on offer here this week were not being offered by the RSL."
We've heard much noise from the government about the need for savings as we approach next week's budget.

While the budget should not be solely focused on the expenditure side, there are some clear savings on offer that support rather than harm some of the most vulnerable Australians.

Released on Thursday, the Cost of Youth Homelessness Report paints a stark picture of the cost to society of failing to support vulnerable young people who are homeless or at high risk of homelessness.

Importantly, the study shows that preventing young people from becoming homeless in the first place could save governments an estimated $626 million per year across the youth justice and health services systems alone.
Clause 3.2 states, among other things, that, "The purpose of the MOU is... To ensure that the selection... is: conducted in a fair and open manner; is accountable to the public; is widely accessible;"

Clause 1.6 states, "This Agreement reflects a desire on the part of the ACT Government to strike a balance between ensuring an open process in the selection of tenderers to provide or perform Works and Services to (or on behalf of) government, with a firm commitment to meet the expectations of the community in implementing its procurement policy".

The wording also shows a lack of understanding of what a modern society wants and needs. For example, the MOU was not available to industry or anyone outside government and unions. Yet the wording gives the impression it is about openness.

The other disappointing outcome from this botched bit of nepotism is that the good unions may be sullied as well as the bad ones. This is a negative and destructive document and process.

Will the Canberra Business Council and other industry groups be given the same information and power? If they were offered that, I am sure they would decline as it is completely inappropriate.

Yet the MOU itself was not conducted in a fair and open manner, is not accountable, and was not accessible to the public for more than12 months. The government claims that it was available and all a business had to do was ask. A business would need to know it existed in the first place and it was not on a website in public.

The argument from the government and unions is that this is about safety and conditions. So by having an MOU, the government is sending a message that it has no faith in government agencies involved in tendering, in safety or in workplace relations. UnionsACT also shows no faith in these agencies. Safe Work Australia is a body set up in partnership with unions; surely UnionsACT must formally express their lack of faith to the board of Safe Work Australia.

So why is there an MOU between the ACT government and UnionsACT that was kept secret or at best hidden from view? Why does the government and the unions have no trust in government agencies and what do they intend to do? We need answers to those questions.

The people that will suffer from this include small businesses who tender for government work. This does not just affect the construction sector where this appears to be targeted. This also means that an unknown, unaccountable third party will be involved in assessing tenders from businesses providing: stationary, training services, transport, consulting advice, legal services, cleaning, real estate services, technology hardware and software, newspapers, catering and the list goes on.

I have been involved in a process to improve the goods and services procurement activities of the ACT government instigated by the ACT government agencies. We will not be able to discuss the union's role and so cannot improve processes. This secret deal undermines confidence in the system itself. Disgraceful behaviour.
Parody, they say, is the best kind of flattery.

A Twitter feed sending up E.L. James runaway bestseller, Fifty Shades of Grey, and celebrating geeks across the world has amassed more than 220,000 followers in eight months.

'What's the square root of nine times twelve divided by six point three recurring?': a scene from the film Fifty Shades of Grey and the inspiration for Fifty Nerds of Grey .

The comedian-author who started @50NerdsofGrey in September seems to be a mystery.
A droll start is ensured by the casting of comedian John Clarke as Frank's boss, Phillip, a seemingly blithe spirit who enjoys having Frank around because he makes life interesting, if complicated. When the film opens, Frank is in what Phillip calls "a mood", which means that being nice to the customers is beyond him because every home he sells reminds him of one he's sold before. He's consumed by the conviction his life is stuck on replay.

He and Phillip explore this theme in a downbeat series of set-pieces as they move through their day, inspecting properties. Saville's eye for the comedy to be found in the ordinary kicks in here and the wittiest of their talks is conducted while they're dodging a lawn sprinkler which can't be turned off. A lesser director might have had them leaping and yelping at this piece of rogue machinery but Saville is wise enough to keep the pace measured and the mood low-key. It's a delight.

Justine Clarke is an actress who moves into soap in A Month of A Sundays. Credit:Madman

Things start looking up for Frank when he receives a phone call from someone who sounds remarkably like his dead mother. For a minute or two, he toys with the wish to believe it is his dead mother, whom he misses very much, and the conversation goes on until she calls him by somebody else's name and he reluctantly snaps back to reality, realising it's a wrong number

Yes, it's a scene which requires you to suspend disbelief to an inordinate degree, given the fact that he has already established himself as a complete and irritable cynic, yet the film has built up so much goodwill that it's easy to go along with it. And there's a pay-off since this conceit produces Julia Blake as Sarah, the mystery caller, who is slightly puzzled when Frank seeks her out again, wanting to be friends.
We now have another rock star death to contemplate with the untimely passing of Prince who, only months ago, performed a solo show at the Sydney Opera House.

I wasn't a huge fan, but this multi-faceted performer nevertheless wrote many appealing songs with a vast archive of unreleased music still to see the light of day. An artist who Prince admired was trumpeter Miles Davis, particularly in his electric funk period that burst into life with an open ended musical synthesis on the classic 1969 recording Bitches Brew.

This album spearheaded an astonishing spurt of creativity that transformed jazz. Given that Prince extended the boundaries of pop music to express creative self empowerment, the influence of major exploratory artists like Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis warrants attention.

The Miles Davis bio-pic Miles Ahead is soon to hit Australian cinemas and should be seen by anyone interested in the physical and mental toll that often comes with the creation of great art. The movie is set in the late 1970s when Davis had temporarily retired from the music scene and was holed up in a New York apartment.

He was using sex and drugs to retreat from a prodigious output that had critics scratching their heads in greater numbers when the trumpeter fully embraced a nebulous jazz/funk fusion that sounded like nothing else on the planet.
Special Correspondents

Netflix, from Friday

A remake of the French film of the same name, this gentle comedy stars Australian Eric Bana and the always surprising Ricky Gervais.

Grand Designs

ABC, Sunday, 7.40pm

Season 13 kicks off with the largest house in the show's impressive history.

Biting satire: Kate McLennan (left) and Kate McCartney star in The Katering Show.

Happy Valley

BBC First, Sunday, 8.30pm

Writer and creator Sally Wainwright returns to her Yorkshire stomping ground with a new series of this gritty and engrossing thriller.

The People v OJ Simpson

Ten, Sunday, 9pm

Easy as it might have been to milk viewers' preconceptions about OJ Simpson's guilt or innocence, the stirring finale of this bio-drama sounds a cautionary note about race relations and the motives of the people involved.
A year after the first series sparked protests, threats of legal action and accusations that it was exploiting disadvantaged and vulnerable people, SBS has commissioned fresh episodes of the documentary Struggle Street.

The first series, which was filmed around Mount Druitt in Sydney's west, was dogged by controversy and charges that the broadcaster was promoting "poverty porn".

Now communities in Victoria and Queensland are set to receive the Struggle Street treatment from Keo Films, the producer of the first series.

The exact locations have not been revealed but there was speculation last year that one of the communities in the frame was the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine.
"The extent we care about marine ecosystems for their intrinsic value, we should care," Dr Long told Fairfax Media. "We're also reliant on these systems for food - fisheries will be vulnerable." Marine life will be hit hard if oxygen levels sink. Credit:NOAA According to the models, the process is likely to be underway in the southern Indian Ocean and parts of the eastern tropical Pacific and Atlantic. The study found that eastern Australia, eastern Africa and south-east Asia may be relatively spared, with impacts likely to be delayed until the next century. The effects of lower oxygen levels will compound other harmful trends for wildlife such as oceans becoming more acidic.

"We're driving pretty massive changes in the environment - and we're not just changing one variable," Dr Long said. "We're changing a suite of variables to which marine organisms are sensitive, and basically putting significant demands on their adaptive capacities." CSIRO cuts Dr Long said it was important for governments to invest in long-term, consistent research to help predict and manage the impacts. This role was particularly vital given observation records for much of the world's oceans are limited. He also questioned the decision by Australia's CSIRO to cut climate monitoring and modelling programs. The agency has trimmed the number of scientists to go from two key research programs from almost 100 to about 45, a move that has drawn wide criticism from researchers at home and abroad.

"I don't understand it, and it does seem short-sighted in my view," Dr Long said. In the longer term, the world had to curb carbon impacts and limit global warming. "If the carbon dioxide-driven warming continues, the trend in ocean deoxygenation is basically an inexorable component associated with that warming," he said. Work 'in jeopardy' Richard Matear, a senior research scientist at CSIRO, said a 2001 paper that he and a team of researchers had worked on had detected some changes to oxygen levels south of Tasmania. The new paper, though, suggests, natural fluctuations may be the key there.

"We're just slowly getting a handle on how much natural variability there is in the system," Dr Matear said. The Southern Ocean to Australia's south has relatively high oxygen levels compared with other oceans, and a strengthening of the circumpolar winds with climate change may foster more mixing of oxygen-rich waters, he said. Still, changing circulation would alter which seas become more oxygenated - and at what depths. Those shifts could impact more mobile species such as tuna and squid, whose larger ranges require more oxygen to match their higher metabolism. The current cuts to CSIRO climate science will remove about 13 researchers from Dr Matear's program. His unit has yet to determine which projects will be scaled back or dropped, to cope with reduced funding. Some of his colleagues have just left on a research voyage to conduct "repeat lines" of an area studied in the Pacific, to detect changes.

"We have no funding going forward to do that cruise again in the next five to 10 years," Dr Matear said, hindering the ability to track changes to oxygen and other elements. Of the other key areas being monitored, cruises to the region south of Tasmania may continue with funds cobbled together from other sources. The region south of Perth is another area where monitoring may be disrupted, he said. "In the current situation, there's really no funding to support them," Dr Matear said of the cruises. "We're an important player in the southern hemisphere and the Southern Ocean, and that work is in jeopardy," he said. The evidence suggests that the combination of rising CO2 and falling oxygen levels "will be worse than each one acting independently", Dr Matear said.
But it is clear that won't be on the agenda. Mr Turnbull, who was dumped as Liberal leader in 2009 over his support for an ETS, quickly labelled Labor's mechanism "effectively another tax" that would take Australia well beyond the emissions reduction commitments it made at a United Nations climate summit in Paris last year.

"In order to deliver a near doubling of our emissions target, they will have to very significantly increase the cost of energy, the cost of electricity and all other power," Mr Turnbull said. "So this is yet another economic handbrake that Labor is putting on our economy, another restraint on jobs to add to all the other job-destroying measures that they're proposing."

Environment Minister Greg Hunt on Thursday indicated the government was preparing to fight hard against Labor's ETS in the upcoming campaign, declaring cost of living issues and power prices "a top order issue" for voters.

He said an ETS was in the same "family" as a fixed price or carbon tax, and was designed to "inflict pain" on families, farmers and small businesses. "Of course it is [a carbon tax]," Mr Hunt said.

Sections of the media have also indicated they are willing to once again campaign ferociously against any carbon pricing mechanism. In a dramatic front page dominated by a ghostly skeleton, News Corp's Daily Telegraph said voters had woken "in fright" at the "horror show" of Labor's revamped policy.
The Australian government may share liability for more than $1 billion in compensation claims from people illegally detained at the Manus Island detention centre, as it scrambles to prevent the collapse of a key plank in its offshore detention policy.

Papua New Guinea says it will close the centre after its Supreme Court this week found it to be illegal. It has triggered a standoff with the Turnbull government, which rejected PNG's demands that it "make alternative arrangements" for 850 male asylum seekers and refugees. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton says Australia has paid PNG "a lot of money" to host the centre and the men are the responsibility of that nation.

The stalemate leaves the men, more than half of whom have been found to be refugees, in limbo after years of being locked behind wire in conditions the PNG Supreme Court found breached their human rights.
There were reports he suffered burns to up to 80 per cent of his body. Video footage of the incident and its aftermath shows the man was terribly injured and suffering severe pain.

Nauru's government on Thursday tweeted that the 23-year-old was airlifted "at midday today", or 10am Australian eastern standard time - about a day after he doused himself with petrol and set himself alight over his despair at life on the Pacific Island.

The Australian government took 24 hours to medically evacuate a gravely ill Iranian refugee who set himself alight on Wednesday, despite Immigration Minister Peter Dutton earlier warning the man's outlook was "not good at all".

On Wednesday Mr Dutton said the married man, whose name is believed to be Omid, was "in a very serious condition and the plan is to provide an airlift for him later tonight ... his outlook is not good at all."

A distressed refugee on Nauru, moments before he set himself alight in April.

Speaking to Fairfax Media a few hours after the incident, Omid's friend Arman said the victim's situation was "really, really urgent", and questioned why he had not already been airlifted. It is understood the delay in medical evacuation also caused Omid's wife considerable distress.

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection refused to comment on the delay, or confirm where the victim would be treated in Australia. It is understood the man will be treated at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital.

It also refused to comment on the man's condition, or respond to reports from refugee advocates that doctors did not attend Nauru hospital for several hours to treat the victim, who was instead initially seen to by nurses.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull after announcing the winning bid for the new submarine DCNS in Adelaide. A spokesman for the Korean embassy in Canberra diplomatically expressed concern over the Spanish being named the preferred partners. "We are very much disappointed given the high quality and good prices of the Korean ships and Korea's track record of co-operating with foreign countries," he said. But another Korean source put it more bluntly, saying the free trade agreement reached between Korean and Australia, which entered into force in December 2014, was meant to expedite those defence procurement contracts that were already in train. "Korea feels harshly done by and it is now a matter of maintaining face," the contact said

A spokesman for Defence Minister Marise Payne said the minister was not involved in that assessment process, but all was conducted with integrity. Yet South Korean communities in Australia are mobilising, expressing their displeasure through direct petition to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. They are calling for a review of the process and outcome. Singapore's ST Marine design has not been shortlisted for a competitive bid analysis for an offshore patrol vessels project, leading one high-level contact from that nation to describe the snub as "rudeness in the extreme". Abbott supporters inside the government are grumbling at Turnbull ignoring his predecessor's nod to the Japanese over the subs, as well as to the Koreans over the supply ships.

"I just hope we are not using national security for one-upmanship," one Coalition MP said. Australian National University's Dr Andrew Carr, of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, believes that while the degree to which defence contracts "lock in" relationships can be overstated, Australia potentially has a growing problem in the region. "The Japanese have a right to be disappointed over the subs because to them they did have some sort of promise," he said. "There is realism there though and the wider relationship will remain intact, but with these examples in the region Australia needs to pay more attention to the issue of trust. "Our reputation as a reliable trade partner could be hurt and this could potentially flow on to other areas besides defence contracts."

Watching all this from the sidelines is Taiwan, Australia's seventh largest customer for exports  mostly in the fields of energy and minerals. Although Australia and Taiwan do not have official diplomatic relations, there are strong trade and cultural ties. Taiwan wants a free trade agreement with Australia and consistently posts its most senior trade gurus to its "embassy" in Canberra. The most recent, Dr David Lee, has just been invited back to Taipei to take up a new role as Taiwan's Foreign Minister in the new government, following elections early this year. A highly skilled diplomat and trade negotiator (besides Canberra, he has been ambassador to Washington, Ottawa and the European Union), Dr Lee sees a free trade agreement with Australia as a high priority.

He says successive Australian governments had indicated that with a free trade agreement with mainland China completed, talks could progress with Taiwan. But progress does not appear to be rapid. "I think it is very much up to Canberra, this decision," he said while still in his role as representative to Australia. "Right now among the eight largest export markets, seven out of eight have already had an FTA or are in the process of negotiating an FTA. "Taiwan is the only one left out. I was told that Canberra is interested to explore the possibility in the near future."
A damaging split has opened in federal Labor over asylum seeker policy, with four MPs in the party's Left faction breaking ranks and calling for the 900 asylum seekers on Manus Island to be processed onshore and settled in Australia.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has seized on the division in Labor ranks, telling Fairfax Media that Opposition Leader Bill Shorten had not even been able to get to the election campaign starting line before an outbreak of disunity in ALP ranks over the controversial policy.

Mr Shorten, meanwhile, dodged questions about the split late on Thursday as he lashed Mr Dutton for "negligence and incompetence", and said a future ALP government would not allow indefinite offshore detention.
It's the latest move by McDonald's to step up the quality of its food as it works to stage a turnaround of its business, which has lost customers in recent years.

The world's biggest hamburger chain says it began testing the new recipe in about 140 stores in Oregon and Washington in March.

McDonald's says it is testing Chicken McNuggets with no artificial preservatives as it works to revive its US business.

The company has conceded that it failed to keep up with changing tastes and that it is looking at improving core menu items. Last week, it also said it is testing a version of its Big Mac that comes with bigger patties.

McDonald's wants parents to 'feel good' about new McNugget recipe as it hopes to boost business. Credit:McDonald's

McDonald's did not provide details on what exactly is different about the new McNugget recipe, but said it is "simpler" and "parents can feel good" about it.

It said it was getting feedback from customers with the test, and did not say when it planned to launch the new recipe nationally.

Last week, McDonald's said sales rose 5.4 per cent at established US locations during the first three months of the year. But the company did not say how much of that came from an uptick in customer visits.
The woman told the court on Thursday that she had realised she had been raped only when she discovered blood and "male discharge" on her person.

The Federal Court is considering the case of a young African woman, known only by the pseudonym S99, who was in the midst of a violent epilepsy seizure and barely conscious when she was raped on Nauru. Abortion is illegal in the tiny island nation.

An emergency court order has been imposed preventing an abortion being carried out until the Federal Court case is resolved. Credit:Rob Homer

Australia ignored urgent pleas from its own medical experts to bring a refugee raped on Nauru to Australia for an abortion.

As Fairfax Media revealed last month, the woman's legal battles began when she begged Australian officials on Nauru to let her come here to terminate the pregnancy she does not want. Instead, Australia sent her to Port Moresby for an abortion.

Abortion is also illegal in Papua New Guinea, according to its criminal code, which states a woman who attempts to "procure her own miscarriage" faces a maximum seven years' imprisonment. Last year a PNG couple were jailed for five years for causing the death of their unborn child.

On Thursday, it was revealed the Department of Immigration and Border Protection ignored repeated requests from IHMS, the company it contracts to provide health services on Nauru and Manus Island, to bring the woman to Australia for an urgent termination.

In a letter to the department, IHMS warned that the woman faced long-term health and psychological consequences if she was forced to endure a pregnancy she did not want.

It also said the woman's epilepsy and another health condition, which Fairfax is prevented from disclosing due to a non-publication order imposed on Thursday, posed grave risks to her physical and mental health.
Thousands of Sydney students have been spared from being potentially forced out of their school after the federal government was ordered to restore funding to Malek Fahd Islamic School in Sydney's west.

On Thursday, the school was granted a last-minute stay by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal as the federal government moved to withdraw $19 million in funding.

The 2400-student school is one of the largest in NSW. Credit:Nic Walker

In February, a Federal Department of Education investigation found the private school was operating for profit following allegations of six-figure loans to board members

The tribunal ordered the department to return funding to the school from the first week in May while the school appeals the decision. Students have been back in class running on reserve funds since Tuesday.
"These reports will provide surgeons with information that may help them gain a better understanding of, and learn from, variations, for the benefit of the service they provide to their patients and the community," he said.

Professor Watters also encouraged patients to question surgeons about how many times they had done an operation and what their rate of complications was. He said patients should also ask about fees and if they seem high, they should contact their GP to shop around. The advice comes after the college warned surgeons who charge unreasonable fees could face sanctions if their patients complain to the college.

The report also comes as a range of private health insurers are revealing more about how much specialist doctors charge their members in an effort to drive prices down. The average fees in the Medibank report are those charged privately to patients after Medicare and Medibank have made their contribution to the cost of the patient's treatment.

The data also coincides with Medibank striking controversial performance-based contracts with private hospitals which say the insurer will not pay for "hospital acquired complications" such as bed sores or falls where there is good evidence they are preventable.

Medibank said future reports will look at variation among other common urology procedures, ear, nose and throat surgery, vascular surgery, and orthopaedic operations such as hip and knee replacements.
A record number of people were infected with Ross River virus last year in what doctors believe may be a consequence of global warming.

There were 9549 cases of Ross River fever notified in 2015 - more than double the previous year - and 21 per cent of them were from NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT.

There were a record number of Ross River virus notifications in 2015. Credit:AP

The number of dengue fever notifications has also trended upwards over the past two decades, peaking at 1842 notifications in 2013, the federal Health Department says.

Mosquito-borne diseases cannot be passed between humans, but only by a mosquito biting a person who has been infected and then biting somebody else.
It was first developed in a Canadian lab more than three decades ago, promising and potent - and intended to relieve pain in a less addictive way.

Labelled W-18, the synthetic opioid was the most powerful in a series of about 30 compounds concocted at the University of Alberta and patented in the US and Canada in 1984. But no pharmaceutical company would pick it up, so on a shelf the recipe sat, the research chronicled in medical journals but never put to use. The compound was largely forgotten.

Then a Chinese chemist found it, and in labs halfway around the world started developing the drug for consumers in search of a cheap and legal high - one which experts say is 100 times more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 stronger than morphine.

And now it has come to North America and Australia.
Australia spends more than $30 billion a year on projects which produce grey literature - documents which are produced by government departments, academic institutions, private companies and more. But despite all this effort, Australia lacks a standardised mechanism to curate and freely distribute grey literature.

There has never been a better time, than right now, to investigate opportunities into improving our countrys memory.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull touches the Ideas Boom ball with Australian tech start ups. Credit:Andrew Meares

Government agencies allocate billions of dollars, each year, to research projects and programs. These activities produce research papers, conference papers and other forms of grey literature.

Examples of these agencies include The Australian Research Council and The National Health and Medical Research Council. These two agencies collectively allocated approximately $19 billion in public funding to Australian research projects between 2000 and 2014.
We pay our politicians to be our voice for the public interest, particularly when they are pitted against the profit motive that drives the private sector. We pay them to be custodians of public land. And though we don't pay them to be arbiters of good taste, they usually have views on everything from wind farms to architecture.

But when it comes to the biggest development on the Sydney skyline in decades  the 275-metre casino, hotel and apartment tower at Barangaroo  being built on public land just 30 metres from the harbour's edge, there is a strange silence.

Instead it has been left to Sydney's architects, the City of Sydney and independent member for Sydney Alex Greenwich to argue that putting such a massive building so close to the harbour's edge is a travesty of planning that severely compromises the public domain.
Four Sydney men charged with plotting to carry out the terrorist attack in which NSW Police accountant Curtis Cheng died remain in Goulburn Supermax after they were refused bail.

Raban Alou, 19, Talal Alameddine, 23, Mustafa Dirani, 22, and Milad Atai, 20, appeared via audio-visual link in Goulburn Local Court on Thursday.

Three of the accused were unrepresented and did not apply for bail.
She had been studying a translation course in Sydney and living with her aunt and cousin in Campsie. Michelle Leng, whose naked body was found floating in the Snapper Point blowhole. Credit:Facebook Her brother and mother, who live in China, were grappling with the news, Chief Inspector Jubelin said. "I don't think 'devastated' properly describes it. It's very difficult and even more traumatic for her family that they are so far away at this time." Police look for evidence after Michelle Leng's body was found at the blowhole at Snapper Point in the Central Coast. Credit:Marina Neil

Police released CCTV footage on Friday showing Ms Leng walking along Pitt Street about 3pm last Thursday. She then caught a train from St James railway station, arriving at Campsie station about 4.30pm. The computer-generated image of Michelle Leng that was released by police when they were seeking to identify her body. Credit:NSW Police I don't think devastated properly describes it. It's very difficult and even more traumatic for her family that are so far away at this time. Detective Chief Inspector Gary Jubelin But she never returned to her Campsie home. Her phone and social media accounts have not been active since late Thursday night.

"We know she was communicating with friends up until the late hours of Thursday evening," Detective Inspector Jubelin said. "So obviously it's from that period to the discovery of her body that's the time period we are interested in." Computer image released On Wednesday morning, the NSW Homicide Squad released a computer generated image of a young Asian woman whose body, three days earlier, had been found naked, floating face down in the blowhole. She had no jewellery, no personal items and no tattoos, and remained unidentified for three days.

The image and accompanying description - an Asian woman, aged 20-35, about 170 centimetres tall, with a medium build and shoulder-length dark hair - bore an unnerving resemblance to that of Ms Leng. Savvy social media users seized upon the two separate reports, joining the dots across the English language and Chinese language internet spheres. By Thursday afternoon, NSW Police had all but confirmed the connection and were awaiting final DNA results. On Thursday morning, Ms Leng's family revealed that detectives had begun gathering evidence for a DNA comparison. "Yesterday, New South Wales Police took away her toothbrush, collected hair and other personal items to do DNA comparison. Today the police took away Michelle's computer to find more effective clues," her family told an Australia-based Chinese-language news site. The quote has been translated.

Final moments mapped With one element of the mystery now resolved, homicide detectives have turned their focus to how Ms Leng's body came to be dumped more than 100 kilometres from Sydney's CBD. Chief Inspector Jubelin said detectives had thoroughly canvassed the area, including gathering CCTV footage from the surrounding Lake Munmorah State Conservation Area and were "mapping out her final moments". Police divers had recovered "certain items from the water" near where her body was found, but police would not publicly divulge what they were, or whether the murder weapon was recovered. He said there was "no clear or concise motive at this stage" and would not comment on speculation that Ms Leng had been communicating with a boyfriend or partner before she died.

The blowhole is about five kilometres from the entrance of the Lake Munmorah national park, which has a camping ground, and is accessible by a number of dirt roadways which are open between 5.30am and 6pm each day. "The post-mortem has come back with some results. We're working on a number of theories. Certainly by the condition of her body, we don't anticipate her body was in the water very long," Chief Inspector Jubelin said. When she failed to make contact over the Anzac Day long weekend, her family filed a missing persons report with the NSW Police on Monday. They told detectives her disappearance was very out of character.
An international criminal, a cashed-up drug ring extending across state borders and the alleged involvement by the head of Australia's largest family owned winery.

It could be the stuff of movie plots. Except, it's not.

Police make an arrest in connection with the drug syndicate in February 2014. Credit:NSW Police

It's the extraordinary set of circumstances that police uncovered during an eight-month investigation into drug trafficking on the NSW South Coast.

This sophisticated syndicate didn't work in grams or ounces when it came to deals - they preferred to count drugs by the pound and profits by the million.
The .22 calibre Browning pump action rifle in the rear tray area of a white Nissan Patrol Turbo diesel utility. Credit:NSW Police Mr Strange said he was the one trying to speak to Mr Turnbull but he assumed the body bag threat was directed at Mr Turner. "I asked him to put the firearm down, that he had hurt Glen and I needed to get Glen some help; he had a young family and we needed to get out of there," Mr Strange told the jury. Glen Turner's Office of Environment and Heritage identity card. Credit:NSW Police He said Mr Turnbull replied: "No, no, you've ruined the Turnbulls, we're in a drought, you're constantly persecuting us, you've got planes flying over here".

"He wasn't in any mood to let me get to the vehicle or to let Glen go," Mr Strange said. Killed: Glen Turner. Credit:Tracy Fulford Photography Mr Strange said he tried to get to the drivers' seat of his car several times but "he caught me every time moving forward and aimed the weapon in my direction and told me to get back or I'd get one in the heart." He said for about 20 minutes Mr Turner was crouched down on one side of the car while Mr Turnbull was on the other. Every time Mr Turnbull moved, Mr Strange would tell Glen to move the opposite way or put his head down. Glen Turner's Office of Environment and Heritage colleague Robert Strange outside the NSW Supreme Court. Credit:Janie Barrett

At some stage, Mr Turner made his way to the rear of the car and activated his personal emergency response beacon. Mr Turnbull fired a further two shots through the car, which didn't hit anyone, and Mr Strange again tried pleading with him. "I said, 'we're unarmed, we are not here to hurt you' but Turnbull kept saying you've sent us bankrupt and that we were there persecuting the family," Mr Strange told the court. He broke down as he recalled how Mr Turner "pleaded" with him to get him out. "I said, 'Glen I have to be fit to get us out',".

"It's no good us both being shot." As darkness fell, he said he tried calling Triple 0 and hoped the operator could overhear him telling him Mr Turnbull to put down the gun. But being so far out in the country, there was not enough reception for the call to go through. "I said to Turnbull, 'We are only doing our job', and he said we were not letting him do his job and we wanted to send him broke," he said. Mr Turnbull told Mr Turner twice he would be going home in a body bag, Mr Strange said. As it got darker, Mr Strange said Mr Turner "had had enough and stood up and tried to run".

Mr Turnbull raised the firearm to his eye line and shot Mr Turner as he was running away. His colleague had got about 10 metres away before he was hit and fell, Mr Strange said. The elderly farmer then said to Mr Strange: "You can go, I'm going home to wait for the police". He got into his car and drove off in a controlled manner, Mr Strange said. He estimated the entire incident took about 40 minutes. Mr Strange said he drove the car closer to where Mr Turner lay to take advantage of the headlights and kneeled down and poured water over him. "I was talking to him and letting him know it was going to be OK."

He heard a car approaching and despite his fears it was Mr Turnbull returning, he stood in the middle of the road and waved the car down. "I just closed my eyes ... because if it wasn't someone friendly I didn't want to see what was going to happen," he said. The driver, local farmhand Andrew Uebergang, told Mr Strange to use the phone in his car, which could access mobile reception thanks to an aerial. Mr Strange spoke to a triple 0 operator and then returned to Mr Turner until police and paramedics arrived. "I wanted to get back to Glen because he was all alone," Mr Strange said. Under cross-examination from Mr Turnbull's barrister, Todd Alexis SC, Mr Strange denied Mr Turnbull spoke in a "flat, monotone voice" or that he did not respond to his attempts to engage in constructive dialogue.
Two former detectives charged with the same murder shared many a thing in Silverwater jail.

They shared notes, conversations  even the same cell.

Roger Rogerson leaves King Street Supreme Court in Sydney on Wednesday. Credit:Christopher Pearce

For 52 nights Roger Rogerson and Glen McNamara slept within centimetres of each other in 2015.

And now they are sharing a courtroom together.
The Central Coast sporting community is mourning the death of 15-year-old Jade Frith who died in hospital after she was hit by a car.

The swimming champion was on her way to practise at the local pool when she was struck by a Ford Laser as she crossed Hillsborough Road in Warners Bay just before 5pm on Tuesday.

She sustained significant head injuries and broken bones, highway patrol Superintendent Stuart Smith said.

Paramedics treated her at the scene before taking her to John Hunter Hospital in a critical condition.
A woman whose body was discovered floating face down in a blowhole on the NSW central coast on Sunday is believed to be Chinese student who studied at Sydney's University of Technology.

The 24-year-old was last seen by friends at a bus stop outside the University of Technology on April 21.

Dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, with jeans and carrying a red bag, she told them she was going shopping at Myer in Sydney's CBD, according to a missing person's report circulated by her friends and relatives on social media.

Police now believe the missing student is the woman whose body was discovered by a tourist at the Snapper Point blowhole at the Lake Munmorah National Park on the central coast on Sunday morning.
It was a long-running battle over some of of Sydney's most exclusive waterfront that pitched a BRW Richlister against his equally well-heeled "Darlingpointonians".

But a controversial proposal to build apartments 12 metres closer to Sydney's foreshore than planning controls allow has finally been rejected, almost four years after a development application for more than 1450sq/m of prime, north-facing waterfront land was first lodged with Woollahra Municipal Council.

Aerial view of Darling Point and Rushcutters Bay. Credit:Bob Pearce

John Roth  who inherited part of a family fortune valued at an estimated $320 million by 2014, according to the BRW Rich List  had sought to change planning rules in order to replace two multimillion-dollar homes on Yarranabbe Road at Darling Point with an apartment block 18 metres from the suburb's shoreline.

The planning proposal, seeking to depart from a longstanding requirement that apartment buildings must be set back 30 metres from the waterline, won the backing of council staff but was rejected by its councillors, 6-4, this week.
And why should we care? Massive prime numbers are a great way to measure how fast and efficient computers will be able to handle big data and track just how quickly we are travelling in terms of technology booms. "If you want to take an standard laptop computer and ask it 'Is this number prime or not?' it will take about two minutes to type in that individual number and the six lines of code, that is all that is needed to determine if that number is prime or not," he said. "It then takes that computer six to eight weeks to go away and work out if we have a hit or not. "If you look back over time at the largest prime number we have ever known at any given time, and this explosion in this small, nerdy, niche area of just pure mathematics, what it is is a beautiful metaphor for what is happening everywhere in the world of science and, more broadly, business." The Square Kilometre Array, a large multi-radio telescope project being built in Australia and South Africa, is expected to exceed the internet in terms of daily data traffic.

"When it is up and running, the Square Kilometre Array's daily data traffic is going to be multiple times current worldwide internet traffic," he said. "We are building something that is the size of several of the current internet and it is essentially a single device. "A friend working on it said, 'We are going to start looking at the universe which until now we have looked at through a pinhole camera, (and) we are going to start looking at it on an IMAX screen'." Mr Spencer told audiences the technology disruption was coming and would alter the way we worked in ways we could not even imagine. "Up to 44 per cent of all jobs in Australia are currently held in industries that over the next 20 years could face substantial digital disruption. Not saying every one of those jobs will vanish, but up to half of all Australians at the moment are working in industries that over the next 20 years could face the taxi-Uber moment, the hotel-Airbnb moment," he said.

"But the more people move in a stem, the faster we future-proof the economy and create growth along the way." Mr Spencer said his daughter's response to his amazement when he used Google Maps for the first time was a glimpse into how mind-blowing technology developments will be in the not-too-distant-future. "She said 'whatever Dad', quote 'That is just what your phone does'," he said. "Anyone who tells you that the next wave of technology will not be even more amazing, understand this, the technology world we will be talking about in 10 years that you will be using, that your businesses will be using, that your customers will be using, will not be technology that blows our mind, because our minds are already blown. "We are talking technology that is going to blow her (his daughter's) mind and she is not impressed by a phone that basically steers your car.
A two-year-old boy is fighting for life in a Brisbane hospital, after suffering burns to 90 per cent of his body in a house fire near Bundaberg on Tuesday night.

Austin Cotterill was flown to the Lady Cilento Children's Hospital after his home at Eidsvold, south-west of Bundaberg, was destroyed by fire on Tuesday night.

The blaze broke out about 8.30pm and was believed to have been started by a candle.

The toddler suffered burns to his legs, arms and stomach.
A man impersonating a pound officer is roaming the streets of a south-east Queensland city trying to snatch dogs.

Police and the local council have warned Bundaberg residents to remain vigilant after receiving information from dog owners in the Calavos, Alloway and Moore Park areas of a man who had been telling them they had to hand their dogs over to council.

Huskies were targeted in the attempted snatches.

Police said no dogs had been taken.

Three incidents have been confirmed, however Senior Constable Danielle Loftus speculated there could be more that had not been reported.
Labor has announced it will force banks to share consumer data in a move aimed at making finance cheaper and more flexible for small business.

Known as mandatory comprehensive credit reporting, the move would put pressure on the big four banks to release not just negative but also positive credit information.

"Allowing more lenders to access positive information, like account records, about clients will promote competition for small business financing in the banking sector," said shadow minister for small business Michelle Rowland in a speech to the McKell Institute on Thursday.

"We will make it easier to grow and operate small businesses across Australia. It's about an even playing field and promoting fairness and opportunity for the next generation of small business owners."
The man who helped bring Apple computers to the world says we're on the verge of an artificial intelligence revolution.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told an innovation summit in Brisbane artificial intelligence would be the next big disrupter, separate from the digital revolution that changed the world with personal computers and smartphones.

Steve Wozniak tells the innovation summit that artificial intelligence researchers are getting close to the point of understanding "what the brain is". Credit:Robert Shakespeare

Speaking via video link from the US, "The Woz" described AI as "machines acting like human friends".

"Until recently  artificial intelligence really didn't make much difference in life but now we're getting to the point where we're getting closer to what the brain is," he said.
Charmaine Brillanti lives in Mernda - but not for much longer. She has had enough of the traffic.

For four years Ms Brillanti, a disability worker, has commuted from Mernda where there are - to say the least - significant traffic problems.

Charmaine Brillanti says she's been driven out of Mernda by traffic snarls. Credit:Simon O'Dwyer

Each weekday morning, she drives 19 kilometres to Rosanna. It takes her one hour and 45 minutes. After dropping off her daughter there, she drives another 15 minutes to work in Bundoora.

The two-hour morning drive is now so unbearable she is moving to nearby Briar Hill, near Greensborough. "At least there, if there's a prang you can get off and go another way," she said.
The disqualified driver who allegedly hit a cyclist near Ballarat's Lake Wendouree and left him seriously injured in the middle of the road was probably on drugs and certainly very tired, a court has heard.

Charged with a string of offences including driving while disqualified, Rebekah Emily Stewart, 23, appeared at the Ballarat Magistrates Court on Thursday for a bail application, The Courier reports.

Rebekah Stewart was 'more likely than not on drugs at the time of the incident', police say. Credit:Facebook

Detective Sergeant Mark Amos said police couldn't determine whether Ms Stewart was under the influence of drugs at the time of the collision because she fled, but said her actions were indicative of a driver impaired by a substance.

"There is every possibility she was more likely than not on drugs at the time of the incident," he said.
When it comes to the Australian work ethic, there is one group that can't wait to retire and another that can't wait to go to work.

Jean Beanham is a driven career woman and what is remarkable about her ambition is that she is 92. She even puts in more than 38 hours at the family's motorcycle spare parts business, Modak Motorcycles, that was established in 1955 and has been in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, for 40 years.

Jean Beanham, 92, at work at her desk at Modak Motorcycles. Credit:Simon Schluter

Working alongside son David, Mrs Beanham commands her throne behind a desk in the middle of the old-fashioned shop that's packed to the brim with gruntingly macho exhaust pipes, pistons and gearbox parts.

You'll find her perched there Monday to Friday and a half-day on Saturday wrapping parcels to send to the country, interstate or New Zealand.
A two-month-old baby boy has died in Perth after a suspected spider bite.

Lance Ryder was flown from Geraldton to Perth for treatment after his parents found a spider bite on his hand but he died on Monday night, a relative said on Wednesday.

Lance Ryder lost his fight for life at a Perth hospital. Credit:gofundme

Princess Margaret Hospital would not confirm Lance's cause of death for reasons of confidentiality.

Such a tragedy to hold your dying son in your arms," his aunt Kathleen Nelly wrote on a fundraising website set up to help the boy's family pay for a memorial stone for the baby boy.
Fremantle council's long-delayed $220 million redevelopment of its CBD has been pushed back at least another six months after the city gave the developer an extension to secure an anchor tenant for the project.

The multi-million dollar spruce-up of Kings Square in the heart of the port city, had already been pushed back more than two years, while Sirona Capital - the developer the city will work with on the project - tried to secure an anchor tenant to fill some of the 30,000sqm of office space within the city centre.

The Kings Square redevelopment.

The redevelopment will also see new civic chambers, library, offices for the City of Fremantle and 16,000sqm of retail space.

With the Barnett government dragging its heels on its decision to move the Department of Housing to Fremantle, Sirona asked council on Wednesday to extend its contract for another six months while the government makes up its mind.
A Perth woman searching for her 12-year-old daughter's father has joked she's "been given every Rodney in Queensland's" details after her online appeal to find the mystery man went viral on Tuesday.

Thirteen years ago Kerryn-Leigh met an Australian named Rodney in Queenstown, New Zealand, and nine months later she gave birth to their daughter without his knowledge.

The 52-year-old, a jewellery designer originally from Christchurch but based in Perth, has taken to social media in an attempt to find Rodney, so her daughter, who is about to celebrate her 13th birthday, might finally know who he is.

On Thursday, Kerryn-Leigh's appeal had been shared more than 14,000 times on Facebook and her inbox had been flooded with information about potential Rodneys matching her description.
"I have had a whole lot of bills come through and I am down to my last $400," he said. "I live out of home and my course is so full on that it's very hard to secure any work. My spending is one shop per week at Spud Shed and rent. I can't afford to pay for anything else. "The only person I could turn to is my dad, but he is retired and it would be a burden on his wellbeing to look after me again." The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), the body representing employees of Centrelink, said the delays were shocking.

CPSU Deputy National President Lisa Newman was sceptical the backlog could be cleared in the Minister's timeframe. "We're extremely dubious about the Minister's declaration that this backlog will be fixed in the next fortnight," she said. "It's cold comfort to those claimants who've been forced to drop out of courses or have otherwise been hurt by this situation, and we are also concerned these extra resources are simply being poached from another section of the department." UWA post graduate medicine student Will Scutt has seen first hand the burden of financial pressure on his classmates. "I know people in my cohort who aren't as fortunate financially and have had to find more affordable accommodation and another job. This affects their ability to do coursework and some have had to drop out," he said.

Will moved from Hobart to study in Perth, he needs government support to continue studying away from home. He applied for Centrelink on January 27 and doesn't expect to receive a payment until June. "I worked two jobs last year to save up enough money to move and afford as much rent as I could. I wanted to focus on what is obviously a bloody demanding course," he said. "If I hadn't done this, I would either have had to drop out of uni or take out a loan by now to be able to afford my rent." Will's story came to light after Tasmanian Labor MP Julie Collins hosted a Facebook forum this week to survey the experiences of university students waiting for Austudy and Youth Allowance payments.

His was one of more than 200 responses in the first few days of her online forum. Ms Collins said the stories she had heard through the page were terrible, some involving students losing accommodation due to rent debts and ending up in crisis care. "I've been surprised at how large the response has been, these are real people being affected by a government decision," she said. "The delays have been blamed on a peak period tied to the start of the school year, but no peak period should last four months" "These students have absolutely been let down by the government. They've been told they need to learn and earn, but they're not getting the support to do so."

To make matters worse, students desperately trying to find out what the situation is have struggled to get answers out of with Centrelink, with documents lost, calls going unreturned and in branch visits ending with being told to go online to fix the problem. This is an experience echoed by UWA Bachelor of Commerce student Karla Gibbons, who sat on hold for the Centrelink Complaints number for nearly four hours. "It's borderline impossible to communicate with Centrelink," she said. "I have never received a response to an email, my lowest wait time on a phone call has been 45 minutes a few years ago, and my wait times on phone calls this year have been three plus hours, including a few calls that cut themselves off without getting to an operator." Karla also said criticisms that university students should just get a job are unfair.
Washington: US President Barack Obama, responding to the request of an eight-year-old girl from Flint, Michigan, will travel there in a week to talk with residents concerned about the high level of lead contamination in their water.

Mari Copeny, who acquired the nickname "Little Miss Flint" for her vocal activism on the issue of lead exposure, wrote to Mr Obama last month when she was preparing to come to the capital to watch Michigan's Republican governor Rick Snyder testify before the House Oversight Committee on his state's handling of the issue.

Mr Snyder, as well as the state's Department of Environmental Quality and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, have come under fire for not acting sooner to limit lead contamination coming from the city's ageing pipe system.

"I know this is probably an odd request but I would love for a chance to meet you or your wife," Mari wrote. "My mom said chances are you will be too busy with more important things, but there is a lot of people coming on these buses and even just a meeting from you or your wife would really lift people's spirits."
A building on fire after air strikes hit Aleppo. Credit:Validated UGC/AP 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 Islamic State and drawn in regional and major powers, but the negotiations have all but failed and a truce to allow them to take place has collapsed. Winding up the Geneva talks, de Mistura said he aimed to resume them in May, but gave no date. Civil Defence workers stand in the rubble after air strikes hit a hospital in Aleppo. Credit:White Helmets/AP "Wherever you are, you hear explosions of mortars, shelling and planes flying over," said Valter Gros, who heads the International Committee of the Red Cross Aleppo office.

"There is no neighbourhood of the city that hasn't been hit. People are living on the edge. Everyone here fears for their lives and nobody knows what is coming next," he said. A man leads a woman and child to safety after air strikes hit Aleppo. Credit:Validated UGC/AP Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage? Muskilda Zancada, MSF A Syrian military source said government planes had not been in areas where air raids were reported. Syria's army denied reports the Syrian air force targeted the hospital. The Russian Defence Ministry, whose air strikes have swung the war in favour of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, could not immediately be reached for comment. Russia has previously denied hitting civilian targets in Syria, where it launched air raids late last year to bolster its ally.

Civil Defence workers stand in the rubble after air strikes hit a hospital in Aleppo. Credit:Syrian Civil Defence White Helmets/AP 'Where is the outrage?' MSF said the bombed al-Quds hospital was destroyed after being hit by a direct air strike that killed at least three doctors. "This devastating attack has destroyed a vital hospital in Aleppo, and the main referral centre for paediatric care in the area," said Muskilda Zancada, MSF head of mission in Syria. "Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage?" Red Cross spokesman Ewan Watson said in Geneva: "It is unacceptable, any attack on hospitals is a war crime. But it is up to an investigator and it is for a court to take that decision on whether it is a war crime or not."

Peace talks, which have been deeply divided on the future of Assad, looked to be over last week when the opposition walked out, saying the Syrian government was stalling for time to advance on the ground and calling for implementation of a UN resolution requiring full humanitarian access to besieged areas. De Mistura voiced deep concern at the truce unravelling in Aleppo and at least three other places, but also said he saw some narrowing of positions between the government and opposition visions of political transition. "Hence my appeal for a US-Russian urgent initiative at the highest level, because the legacy of both President Obama and President Putin is linked to the success of what has been a unique initiative," de Mistura said. They should "be able to revitalise what they have created and which is still alive but barely". The US and Russia must convene a ministerial meeting of major and regional powers who compose the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), he said.

Egeland said: "So the appeal of Staffan de Mistura to the United States, to Russia and to the other powers in the ISSG is 'you did it once, you can do it again.'" Future of Assad critical Bashar Ja'afari, who led the government delegation, said on Tuesday the round had been "useful and constructive". But he gave no sign of ceding to the opposition HNC's central demand for a political transition without Assad. The government has said the future of Assad is non-negotiable. De Mistura, asked whether Assad's fate was discussed, replied: "We didn't get into names of people ... but actually how to change the current governance." The UN envoy said the two sides remained far apart in their vision of a political transition, but shared some "commonalities", including the view "that the transitional governance could include members of the present government and the opposition, independents and others".
After a year-long break from executions  which government ministers attributed to the weak economy  prison authorities have been ordered to prepare for a fresh round on Nusakambangan, known as Indonesia's Alcatraz. Andrew Chan became a pastor in prison. Credit:Getty Images The timing of the executions and the names and nationalities of those who will face the firing squad have not yet been disclosed. However Fairfax Media has been told they are likely to be Indonesians after the international outcry following the two rounds of executions last year, when 12 of the 14 killed were foreigners. "We want the death penalty to still be there, but it can be changed": Yasonna Laoly Credit:AP

Chief Security Minister Luhut Panjaitan said Indonesia wanted to avoid the "soap opera" surrounding last year's executions. He said this time only three days' notice of the timing would be given, as stipulated under Indonesian law. "I think Andrew and Myuran contributed to the expedition of the whole process": Todung Mulya Lubis. Credit:Tatan Syuflana Last year's April 29 executions became a circus, with Chan and Sukumaran flown to the island where they were executed accompanied by two Sukhoi fighter jets. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said at the time she couldn't comprehend the dramatic display of military might, given the pair had never done anything to suggest they were violent.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who refused to grant the Bali nine pair clemency. Credit:Reuters Chan and Sukumaran's Indonesian lawyer, Todung Mulya Lubis, told Fairfax Media the international pressure could not be underestimated. He said a draft of the revised penal code, which included the option to commute the death penalty, had been submitted to Parliament late last year. "I think the government expedited the submission of this draft criminal code partly because of the death penalty protest," Dr Todung said. "They want to find a way to answer the criticism of the human rights community. I think Andrew and Myuran contributed to the expedition of the whole process."

However Dr Todung pointed out the low success rate in Parliament passing bills and said he believed it would take Parliament more than a year to deliberate the draft criminal code. Putri Kanesia, from Jakarta-based human rights organisation Kontras, said she was pessimistic about the new penal code, given it had been in the pipeline for many years. In 2007, the Indonesian Constitutional Court upheld the validity of the death penalty, but also recommended that a death-row prisoner who showed rehabilitation after 10 years have their sentence commuted to imprisonment. The Indonesian President, Mr Joko, again defended the death penalty during a visit to Europe this month, saying Indonesia was at an emergency level in the war against drugs. Mr Joko's "position on death for drugs is a genuine one" but also boosts his political popularity, says Tim Lindsey, director of Indonesian law, Islam and Society at the University of Melbourne's Law School.

Certainly, the legal team for Chan and Sukumaran saw Mr Joko's stance as pivotal to their failure to succeed in the final weeks of their lives to get Indonesia's Judicial Commission to investigate claims by the duo's former lawyer, Mohammad Rifan, that judges and prosecutors asked for bribes to commute their death sentence to 20 years during their first trial. The commission, a nominally independent body that examines the probity of judges, refused to summon the Bali Nine pair for interviews even though they were key witnesses to the bribery and had provided statements. "They admitted it would be really, really hard for them to be interviewed," said one senior member of the Indonesian legal team. "They said the President, the executive, the lawmakers were united in performing the executions. They essentially said it was too bad." Right up until just hours before their execution, lawyers, eminent Indonesians, diplomats and others were beseeching the chair of the Judicial Commission, Marzuki Supraman, to intervene, to no avail. "While there are many in civil society and government who oppose executions  even in cabinet  many law enforcement officials, with an eye to promotion, appointment, extension of tenure, now seem reluctant to take a stand against the President's position," said Professor Lindsey.
PHILIPSBURG:--- A special employment law seminar last Monday, 25 April, at law firm VanEps Kunneman VanDoorne: by video conference, prof. Stefan Sagel addressed lawyers and clients on four islands  Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, and St. Maarten  simultaneously. Sagel, professor employment law at the University of Leiden and partner with De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, updated the attendants on the four islands on current developments in employment law.

Prof. Sagel was located in the office in Bonaire. From here, he discussed multiple topics with the employment team of VanEps Kunneman VanDoorne, among which new changes in the right to strike. He discussed relevant and recent rulings and gave the lawyers practical leads and tricks for the litigation practice. For the second part of the afternoon, clients on all islands joined in. With this group, prof. Sagel discussed instant dismissal. Prof. Sagel said: It was special to be able to address four islands simultaneously via de video conferencing system, and rewarding to receive positive feedback of both lawyers as well as clients.

VanEps Kunneman VanDoornes employment law team is led by counsel Kimberley de lIsle, together with partner Molly Steward. Kimberley de lIsle comments: We are very enthusiastic that an expert such as professor Sagel could free some time for us and our clients. He is one of the top employment law lawyers in the Netherlands and has extensive experience in the legal practice. During this seminar, he could share part of this experience with us. With the knowledge gained, our clients can work more independently and we can further improve our services regarding work that requires our advice and assistance. Our goal is to permanently add value by, for example, sharing know-how in this and in other ways.

After the seminar, clients and lawyers of the firm gathered on all islands to evaluate while enjoying a snack and a drink. VanEps Kunneman VanDoorne is looking to repeat this concept periodically, and also follows up on this seminar with individual workshops tailored to the clients needs.
WILLEMSTAD/PHILIPSBURG:--- Last year in Jamaica, President Obama launched the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative (YLAI) to expand opportunities for emerging entrepreneurs and civil society activists in the Americas. YLAI will incubate and accelerate the work of young business and civil society leaders from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

The Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative (#YLAI) Professional Fellows Program Application is now open! Will you be one of the 250 entrepreneurs from Latin America and the Caribbean selected to participate in a five week U.S. program focused on networking and learning new skills? Visit http://YLAI.state.gov to learn more and start your application today!

Residents from Curacao, Aruba, and Sint Maarten are eligible and are encouraged to apply. Participants must be between the ages of 21-35 and cannot have American or Canadian citizenship, or U.S. permanent residency. Applicants must have at least two (2) years of entrepreneurial/leadership experience, preferably with a startup business or social venture and are proficient in reading, writing and speaking English. The future leaders need to apply on the YLAI website (https://ylai.state.gov/fellowship/). Applications are due May 20.

The five week professional fellowship will take place at universities, incubators, and non- governmental organizations across the United States, while follow-on exchanges will send Americans to Latin America and the Caribbean to continue the collaboration.
Patent Trial and Appeal Board Dismisses Blueprint RF Petition to Invalidate Nomadix Captive Portal Patent

AGOURA HILLS, CA  (Marketwired)  04/27/16  The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) today denied a petition for inter partes review filed by Hospitality Core Services LLC, d/b/a Blueprint RF (Blueprint RF), which challenged the validity of s U.S. Patent No. 6,636,894 (the 894 Patent). The 894 Patent is one of several Nomadix patents relating to key technology for redirecting a user to a captive portal for authentication, billing or other functions.

After reviewing Blueprint RFs arguments, including all of the alleged prior art Blueprint RF submitted, the PTAB denied the petition in its entirety. The PTAB specifically found that Blueprint RF failed to demonstrate a reasonable likelihood that any claim of the 894 patent is unpatentable.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Federal Courts have reviewed Nomadixs patents on several occasions, explains Fred Reeder, chief commercial and operating officer of Nomadix. Every prior challenge has failed. Todays result is no different and confirms the value of our intellectual property.

Headquartered in Agoura Hills, California, Nomadix supplies the hardware and software technologies that visitor-based networks, such as hotels, use to provide a world-class Internet experience for their customers. Leading technology companies, including HP, AT&T and Aruba Networks, have licensed Nomadix patents for usage in their product portfolio.

Nomadix offers gateways for seamless wired and wireless connectivity solutions across public access networks and enterprises. Nomadix gateways have earned a global reputation for unparalleled reliability and ease of management. As one customer put it, They just work. Powered by patented technology, Nomadix throughput enhancement technologies make available bandwidth stretch further, slowing the pace of investment in bandwidth upgrades and enabling revenue generation and customization in a number of business models. With Nomadix, public access network providers are able to deploy cost-effective, secure and easy-to-use network services. For more information, visit , call +1.818.597.1500, follow on , and , like on and view the video library on .

Kelly Hughes

Phone: +1-818-597-1500

Email:
ONLYOFFICE: PowerFolder with Document Editors in the Cloud

Meerbusch, April 28, 2016  After a year of intense beta testing PowerFolder has completed the integration of the Document Server of ONLYOFFICE into its proven Sync & Share solution. From now on users can edit their documents, spreadsheets and presentations stored in the PowerFolder cloud, without having to leave the PowerFolder interface and start an external office software. Thanks to this feature  that PowerFolder offers as the only German Sync&Share solution  the work with PowerFolder has become more comfortable. After a thorough evaluation, PowerFolder chose ONLYOFFICE because of its great compatibility with existing Office products.

PowerFolder more comfortable with ONLYOFFICE

With PowerFolder, the last version of user documents is automatically saved in the cloud and is available from anywhere, anytime; not only for the users themselves, but also for all authorized colleagues, employees or students that have access to the relevant directory. Due to the recently integrated ONLYOFFICE Document Server it is now possible to edit documents directly in the cloud. Simply click the relevant document, spreadsheet or presentation and ONLYOFFICE starts within PowerFolder; a separate installation on the user device is not required. Very useful: multiple users can edit a document online simultaneously from different locations, each authors changes are always shown in a different color. The integrated comment and chat features make cooperation easier. PowerFolder including on-premise solution offers the support for the latest version of ONLYOFFICE Document Server with all its advantages since version 10.5.

About ONLYOFFICE

ONLYOFFICE (formerly Teamlab Office) is a multifeatured online office suite for business collaboration, document and project management. It includes an online office application for working within a browser allowing to edit and comment text documents, spreadsheets and presentations in real time. All major file formats are supported, including Microsoft Office formats. The online office application is integrated with CRM system, a project management toolset, and an email server. ONLYOFFICE started out in 2009 and has been translated into 21 languages.
LS Retail Names Winners of 2016 Partner Awards

ROME, ITALY  (Marketwired)  04/28/16  , world-renowned provider of software for retailers and hospitality operators, honored its top-performing partners during a gala dinner and awards ceremony at Villa Piccolomini in Rome, Italy, on April 27. The awards dinner is part of the program at , LS Retails yearly conference and Expo, which this year takes place April 27-29 at Sheraton Roma Hotel in Rome.

LS Retails includes over 230 companies that deliver the LS Retail software solutions worldwide, providing local businesses with personalized project management, implementations and technical support. The awards act as an acknowledgement of the partners dedication and sale successes during the previous year.

In 2016, six partners reached the LS Retail Diamond Partner level, thanks to their excellent performance and dedication to delivering customer success. These partners are CyanSYS in Singapore, Godrej Infotech in India, K3 Retail in the United Kingdom, NaviWorld in Vietnam, Solteq in Finland, and UXC Eclipse in the USA. Twenty-two partners met all the criteria for becoming a Platinum Partner. Twenty-seven more partners reached Gold Partner level.

During the ceremony LS Retail also honored partners for the most innovative and effective marketing. The Best Marketing and Branding award for 2016 went to K3 Retail (UK and Ireland) for their effective promotion of the LS Retail solutions across various channels. The Best Customer Story award was presented to The Concept Group (Belgium) for their videos showcasing the LS Retail products in action.

The LS Retail partner community plays a crucial role in making our solutions a success worldwide, said Sigrun Dora Saevinsdottir, Chief Operating Officer at LS Retail. We congratulate this years Partner Awards winners for this achievement which recognizes their continued commitment to LS Retail and their hard work throughout the year.

About LS Retail

For more than two decades, LS Retail has been developing easy and practical software solutions to make the shopping and dining experience a pleasure worldwide. LS Retail solutions have been installed across more than 55,000 stores in over 120 countries.

Contacts:

LS Retail, ehf.

Eloise Freygang

+354 660-7088
Cogeco Peer 1 Names Bertrand Labelle Vice President, Marketing

TORONTO, ONTARIO  (Marketwired)  04/28/16  Note to editors: An image is included with this press release on Marketwireds website.

, a global provider of essential business-to-business products and services, such as , network , , services and services, today announced the appointment of Bertrand Labelle to the role of Vice President, Marketing. Based in Toronto, Bertrand will be responsible for the creation and delivery of the companys integrated global marketing programs.

Previously at Microsoft, Bertrand held senior positions in national and international sales, marketing and business development  this experience, paired with his knowledge of global marketing and his extensive background in technology, bring a unique perspective to his role. We have appointed Bertrand to this role to drive demand for our continued growth in North America and around the globe. Bertrands commitment to champion marketing as an accountable business function and his success in spearheading global marketing programs, make him an exceptional fit for this position and will enable him to deliver superior programs and services that enhance the brand and promote meaningful customer experiences, said Philippe Jette, President of Cogeco Peer 1.

The team at Cogeco Peer 1 is exceptional and backed by solid leadership  I was immediately drawn to the companys unique place in the market. I am looking forward to collaborating across the organization to develop integrated programs  from product strategy to digital interaction  that will deliver exceptional experiences to our customers and, ultimately, their end users, said Bertrand Labelle, Vice President, Marketing, Cogeco Peer 1.

Bertrand has a Masters Degree in Business Administration, from the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management and a Bachelor of Applied Science, Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

ABOUT COGECO PEER 1

is a wholly-owned subsidiary of . (TSX: CCA) and is a global provider of essential business-to-business products and services, such as colocation, network connectivity, managed hosting, cloud services and managed IT services, that allow customers across Canada, Mexico, the United States and Western Europe to focus on their core business. With 17 data centers, extensive FastFiber Network and more than 50 points-of-presence in North America and Europe combined, Cogeco Peer 1 is a trusted partner to businesses small, medium and large, providing the ability to access, move, manage and store mission-critical data worldwide, backed by superior customer support.

To view the image accompanying this press release, please visit the following link:

Contacts:

Information and Interview Requests:

Shawna Gee

Director, Communications and PR

(416) 903-2025
April 27, 2016

Phoenix Restaurant Owner Pleads Guilty to Employment Tax Charge and Failure to Pay Minimum Wage

PHOENIX, Ariz.  On April 19, 2016, Isamary Diaz, 56, pleaded guilty to a two count information charging her with willful failure to collect or pay tax and failure to pay minimum wage. The defendant has agreed to pay restitution to the United States government in the amount of $288,291.33. Sentencing is scheduled for July 18, 2016.



According to the plea agreement, the defendant owned and operated five restaurants in the Phoenix, Arizona area under the name Armando's Mexican Food. The defendant employed a number of undocumented employees who were paid exclusively in cash and from whose wages taxes were not withheld or accounted for on filed Forms 941. Beginning in approximately 2009 and continuing until at least March 2013, the defendant provided incomplete payroll and wage information to her accountant in an attempt to conceal that she was paying undocumented employees in cash without withholding taxes. The defendant knowingly omitted cash employees from the payroll numbers in order to reduce her payroll tax expenses. The tax loss associated with defendant's conduct with respect to employment tax is $288,291.33.



Also according to the plea agreement, between March 1, 2011, and February 20, 2014, the defendant employed several undocumented individuals to work at Armando's Mexican Food and willfully did not pay each employee $7.25 for each hour that employee worked. The defendant knew that undocumented employees were unlikely to complain about substandard wages and working conditions. The total loss to the employees is $89,919.53.



The investigation in this case was conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations, Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, and U.S. Department of Labor  Wage and Hour Division.
April 27, 2016

PHOENIX, Ariz.  On April 19, 2016, Isamary Diaz, 56, pleaded guilty to a two count information charging her with willful failure to collect or pay tax and failure to pay minimum wage. The defendant has agreed to pay restitution to the United States government in the amount of $288,291.33. Sentencing is scheduled for July 18, 2016.



According to the plea agreement, the defendant owned and operated five restaurants in the Phoenix, Arizona area under the name Armando's Mexican Food. The defendant employed a number of undocumented employees who were paid exclusively in cash and from whose wages taxes were not withheld or accounted for on filed Forms 941. Beginning in approximately 2009 and continuing until at least March 2013, the defendant provided incomplete payroll and wage information to her accountant in an attempt to conceal that she was paying undocumented employees in cash without withholding taxes. The defendant knowingly omitted cash employees from the payroll numbers in order to reduce her payroll tax expenses. The tax loss associated with defendant's conduct with respect to employment tax is $288,291.33.

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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 27, 2016

"Hooked" heroin documentary wins prestigious radio award

Student-produced documentary wins professional award whose past winners include NPR and Public Radio International

PHOENIX Arizona radio listeners have been listening to award-winning journalism. 'Hooked', a student produced documentary on the scourge of heroin in Arizona, has won a top professional honor from one of the nation's oldest journalism organizations.



The radio version of the Cronkite News documentary, the student produced news division of Arizona PBS at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, won the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi award, which dates back to 1932.



The documentary was simulcast in both English and Spanish on 93 Arizona radio stations across the state in January 2015 to shine a light on a growing epidemic that affects every corner of the Grand Canyon State.



"'Hooked' demonstrates the Cronkite School's commitment to excellence and journalism that matters on all media platforms," said Cronkite Professor of Practice Jacquee Petchel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who was the faculty lead on the project. "We are honored to receive this prestigious award from the SPJ."



The Sigma Delta Chi is only the latest award this documentary has won. The documentary was the first student project to win a rare Alfred I. DuPont Award, and has also won a Rocky Mountain Emmy, among other awards.
April 27, 2016

2016 is the 50th anniversary of SCOTUS Miranda v. Arizona ruling

Learn about this iconic court case May 2 with the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records

11:30 a.m.  12:30 p.m. The Miranda Case Arizona Court of Appeals Judge Maurice Portley

1 p.m.  2 p.m. How the Fifth Amendment Protects All of Us Robert McWhirter, JD

2:30 p.m. 

4 p.m. The Miranda Case Ret. Capt. Carroll Cooley, Phoenix Police Department arresting officer in the Miranda case

PHOENIX  In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Ernesto Miranda on kidnapping and rape charges because he was not informed of his rights during his arrest, making his written and signed confession null and void. Learn about this iconic case, Miranda v. Arizona, during Law Day 2016  Miranda: More than Words, May 2, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., in the Arizona Capitol Museum, Historic Supreme Courtroom, 1700 W. Washington St., Phoenix. Admission is free.Items from the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records and the Phoenix Police Museum will be on display in the courtroom where arguments were heard before the Arizona Supreme Court. The exhibit contains displays from the investigation and local trials, including a copy of Mirandas signed confession.The verdict in the Miranda v. Arizona case had a profound effect on law enforcement in the arrest and questioning of defendants; ultimately creating the Miranda Warning recited to suspects by law enforcement officials:You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?A day-long speaker series in the State Library of Arizona Marguerite B. Cooley Reading Room, one floor above the Historic Supreme Courtroom will include:

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Miranda was retried by the state of Arizona and his confession was not used as evidence. Miranda was convicted and sentenced to 20-30 years in prison.



For more information about Law Day 2016  Miranda: More than Words contact the State Library of Arizona at 602-926-3870.



The Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records is a division of the Secretary of State.
Guest Editorial





By Dustin Howard | April 27, 2016

Want to win in November? Save voters from Obamazoning

Whether you are a presidential candidate or someone seeking an office at the local level, there is an issue that resonates with people across the nation, a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulatory overreach destroys local control of zoning laws.



President Obama's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation conditions more than $3 billion of community development block grants on redrawing maps to override local zoning laws using the warped logic that lack of racial and income diversity is proof in itself of racial discrimination.



This is the great sleeper issue of 2016.



Suburban voters work very hard to maintain their standard of living, and choose to avoid the societal dysfunction that is pervasive in liberal-ran urban centers. To arbitrarily export inner city residents to newly constructed government housing built against those communities' wills violates a sense of fair play, as residents worked hard to form communities without the crime and decay found in the city.



Once informed that these policies will devalue their property and make their community less safe, the issue becomes an existential threat to a suburban community's way of life, and residents there will support policies and policymakers who will defend their interests.



Westchester County, where none other than Hillary Clinton resides, was the guinea pig for this federal zoning takeover and Republican County Executive Rob Astorino has been attacking it statewide in New York for more than half a decade. Astorino has won twice in this heavily Democrat county due to his strong opposition to the HUD low-income housing zoning imposition.



Talk Radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have publically inveighed against the HUD rule since 2014, attacking the Obama Administration's radical restructuring of local zoning laws to move heavily Democrat urban dwellers into suburban communities. Levin has done so as recently as last month, so the issue is ripe particularly for conservative voters who have already been familiarized via media gatekeepers they trust.



What's more the issue is now percolating strongly in Baltimore County, Maryland where the county is being forced by HUD to build 1,000 low income units under HUD's twisted legal theory.



But this issue constitutes a real threat to suburban voters beyond just New York and Maryland. About 1,200 counties and cities accept federal community development block grants every single year, all who will suddenly be forced by the feds who tell them where and who to house those who have been failed by liberal urban policies.



This issue is great for contrast, illustrates federal overreach and literally hits voters where they live. It is a motivating issue, and is an opportunity for the candidate or campaign that acts upon it.



The short term solution would be to reject the community block grants that impose this onerous requirement. This will cost lager communities far more than it will cost smaller ones, as the grants range from the thousands of dollars to millions. In the long term, local, state and federal candidates should cultivate voters and put this issue to constituents to achieve a mandate against Washington, D.C. bureaucrats micromanaging their neighborhoods.



No issue is more powerful at the local level than zoning. All roads, schools and shopping centers are built around planning concepts that are the subject of intense local political debate. Obama's HUD rule overrides all those decisions because arrogant officials in Washington are looking at a census map and decide that non-racially and income diverse areas must be racist.



Right thinking candidates across the nation would be insane not to take up this issue. Suburban residents, some of who voted for the very administration that threatens their communities, will be forced to come to terms with the reality of their vote.



In an act of contrition for some and an act of preservation by all, voters should support candidates that will stand against this vile abuse of power by HUD. Candidates on the ballot this November for federal office have never had a better opportunity to stand up for their constituents and stick it to D.C. central planners.



Dustin Howard is a contributing editor to Americans for Limited Government.
Guest Editorial





By Robert Romano | April 27, 2016

OPEC can't agree on production cut thanks to Iran nuclear deal

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) still cannot come to terms with cutting oil production at its latest meeting Doha, Qatar over the weekend.



This, despite months-long low demand for crude oil amid a weakening global economy that has led to a dramatic correction in oil prices  dropping more than 62 percent from its June 2014 high of about $107 per barrel to its current level of about $41 per barrel.



Crude oil inventories hit another record on April 8 at 536.5 million barrels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.



The hang-up? U.S. and European sanctions against Iran have now been lifted thanks to the Iran nuclear deal, and now Tehran is saying it intends to increase production, not decrease it. It is still trying to recover market share.



You can thank President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, who foisted the deal upon the world in the first place. Now Tehran is hell-bent on flooding world oil markets even as prices are crashing.



To a certain extent, one can be relatively thankful OPEC is in such disarray. After all, oil and thus gasoline prices are lower, right?



On the other hand, the nuclear agreement does nothing to stop Iranian enrichment of uranium, risking a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, the most volatile region in the world. When the agreement was reached in July 2015, Saudi diplomats were immediately saying the deal green lights initiating their own nuclear programs.



So, not only is the agreement destabilizing the global economy, it is also destabilizing regional security.



Just one more reason to hate the Iran nuclear deal.



Certainly, Iran can produce as much or as little oil as it pleases, but the fact the agreement reached between the Obama administration and Tehran is now playing a role in the global oil collapse  which is hurting U.S. producers particularly shale big-time  is undeniable. The irony is just too rich to ignore.



In the meantime, members of Congress continue to pretend they had nothing do with it when in fact it was Congress that overwhelmingly authorized the nuclear agreement via H.R. 1191.



The law provided that "any measure of statutory sanctions relief by the United States pursuant to an agreement [with Iran] may be taken, consistent with existing statutory requirements for such action, if, following the period for review provided there is not enacted any such joint resolution" by Congress disapproving of the deal.



The period of review was 60 days. Meaning, when Sept. 17, 2015 came and went, and Congress failed to disapprove the agreement, the Iran nuclear deal was sanctified by law. The next president will more or less be stuck with it.



And with the continued weakness in the U.S. and global economy, OPEC's failure to respond to sinking oil demand  in China, for example  plays a role.



The longer it takes oil producers to figure out they are producing too much to reach demand, the greater the final washout in oil prices. Investors and the rest of the economic fallout will simply be collateral damage.



Robert Romano is the senior editor of Americans for Limited Government.
Guest Editorial





By Dr. Earl Tilford | April 27, 2016

Putin sends a message to Obama

Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war)

On April 11-12, two Russian SU-24 fighter-bombers made repeated low-level passes over the USS Donald Cook, an American destroyer sailing in the Baltic Sea. The ships crew recorded the incidents and the Navy released them online. The video reminds one of the antics of Maverick and Goose, two naval aviators harassing Russian fighter planes in the 1986 motion picture Top Gun. During the Cold War, such incidents were common. If we are, as some think, in a new Cold War, they will occur more frequently, so its important that we understand them.



First, its important to understand what this incident and a similar one in the Black Sea last April were not. While ill-advised and dangerous, they were not acts of war. The USS Donalds commanding officer and its crew knew the SU-24s were unarmed. Had they been armed and had their surface-to-air missile radars locked on, the Donald could have shot them down initiating a serious confrontation between the worlds two superpowers.



Second, it's unimaginable that Russian pilots would do this as a form of hijinks. A gust of wind or unanticipated mechanical failure could have proven deadly. Furthermore, no local commander would sanction such behavior on his own accord. This was a message from Vladimir Putin.



Third, it was not wise, especially since a Polish helicopter was attempting to land on the destroyers small flight deck as part of a refueling effort. Helicopters are very complex and inherently difficult to fly, especially hovering over a moving platform on a rolling sea. Harassment by two very powerful twin-engine jets presents more than a distraction. The jet blast could have sent the helicopter crashing into the Donald, causing destruction, death, and precipitating an international crisis.



Under different circumstances, the Donalds commander might have engaged and destroyed aircraft acting in this manner. For instance, it would be foolish for a pair of Iranian pilots to pull this stunt given the high tension in the Persian Gulf. While blasting a pair of Iranian pilots to smithereens might start a war, since Iran does not yet possess nuclear weapons, it wouldnt mean Armageddon. It is likely a Navy ship commander would shoot down a civilian aircraft engaged in such behavior to eliminate the threat of a suicide attack.



The Russians picked the USS Donald for two reasons. First, it was operating in what Moscow considers its territory. That it was co-operating with a Polish helicopter is also significant because during the last Cold War Polands communist regime was a Russian ally in the now defunct Warsaw Pact. In this case, tomcat Putin is marking his territory and backing it up with an angry hiss.



Second, Putin also is testing U.S. resolve. If the Obama administration reacts weakly, an emboldened Putin might invade Ukraine. While Washington and NATO are not likely to react militarily to further Russian aggression in Ukraine, a move on Latvia, Estonia, or Lithuaniaall NATO alliescould mean war. Not reacting would leave NATO meaningless and invite further Russian aggression. Weakness begs for bullying.



The Obama administration needs to stand up to Putin. Here are some things to consider:



First, modernize the nuclear arsenal to maintain the credibility of our deterrence.



Second, build a NATO air base in Poland and base a squadron of USAF F-22s on it.



Third, bolster Polish defenses with additional F-16 fighters and provide them a couple of squadron of A-10 Warthog tank-busting attack planes. Also, arm Poland with enough M-1A2 Abrams tanks to discourage Russia from its historic propensity for blitzkrieg type invasions. If invaded, the Poles will fight and make Russia pay dearly.



Fourth, end the scheduled reduction of the U.S. Army from its current level of 485,000 to something between 420,000 and 450,000. Build the Army back to a force of at least 550,000.



While ISIS and other terrorist groupsand rogue regimes in North Korea and Iranremain serious threats, Russia and China can challenge our nations existence.



If Russia is deterred, China and lesser threats are also significantly lessened. But if terrorists and rogue nations are not deterred, then the worlds real bullies are emboldened. The old Latin adage, If you want peace, prepare for war, still applies to a world as dangerous today as it was in the fifth century when Roman patrician Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus urged military strength to meet the threat posed by Goths.



--Dr. Earl Tilford is a military historian and fellow for the Middle East & terrorism with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. From 1993 to 2001, he served as Director of Research at the U.S. Armys Strategic Studies Institute.
April 27, 2016

Agents arrest two men convicted for sex crimes against children

Sergio Galaz-Coronado



Tucson Sector Border Patrol agents recently arrested two male Mexican nationals previously convicted on charges relating to crimes against minors.



Agents first apprehended Sergio Galaz-Coronado, 38, outside of Douglas, Arizona, on April 15. During a subsequent biometric-records check, agents found Galaz was arrested by the Maricopa County Sherriffs Office in 2001 for sexual conduct with a minor under the age of 15. He was subsequently sentenced to six months in jail and 10 years of probation before being deported.



The following day, agents assigned to the Casa Grande Border Patrol Station arrested Esteban Aparicio-Molina, 32, outside of Cowlic, Arizona. He had served 12 years in prison for multiple charges relating to inappropriate sexual contact with a child, including sexual assault.



Both subjects, classified as aggravated felons for their prior convictions, face additional criminal charges and stiffer penalties for their illegal re-entry into the United States. They remain in Border Patrol custody pending the outcome of these proceedings.



Nogales CBP Officers seize $7.4M in marijuana



U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the Mariposa Commercial Facility in Nogales, Arizona, seized $7.4 million in marijuana  approximately 14,800 pounds  from a Mexican national April 21 when he attempted to enter the United States.



After an alert by a CBP narcotics-detection canine, officers found the drugs co-mingled within a shipment of watermelons in a tractor-trailer driven by a 51-year-old driver from Nogales, Sonora, Mexico.



Officers seized the tractor trailer and shipment. The driver was arrested and referred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations.



The incident represents the third largest such seizure of marijuana at an Arizona port of entry.



Nogales CBP Officers Seize $793K in Hard Drugs



Customs and Border Protection officers arrested two Mexican nationals and a Honduran national for attempting to smuggle 100 pounds of cocaine and methamphetamine through the Port of Nogales on April 20.



Officers at the Mariposa crossing referred a 44-year-old Mexican national for further inspection of his Volkswagen and found nearly 20 pounds of cocaine, worth almost $223,000, in the rear speaker area.



At about the same time, officers at the Dennis DeConcini crossing referred a 66-year-old Honduran driver for an additional search of her Pontiac sedan. Officers removed a combination of meth and cocaine from the vehicles rear door panel. The haul consisted of nearly 24 pounds of cocaine and more than 40 pounds of meth. Combined, the drugs are valued at more than $390,000.



Later in the day, officers at the Mariposa crossing arrested a 25-year-old Mexican national after a CBP narcotics canine alerted to the presence of drugs within his vehicles drive shaft. Officers found nearly 16 pounds of cocaine worth almost $180,000.



CBP officers seized the drugs and vehicles, and turned the subjects over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations.



Joint Operation results in 42 illegals captured



A Homeland Security Investigations effort, coordinated through Joint Task Force-West partner agencies in Arizona, led to the April 18 arrest of a man driving a tractor-trailer near Rio Ricoloaded with 42 undocumented aliens.



Based on an investigative lead, HSI agents notified Department of Homeland Securitys Joint Intelligence Operations Center that suspected illegal aliens were hiding in some brush north of Nogales, Arizona. JIOC staff then coordinated with the U.S. Border Patrol, Air and Marine Operations, and the Arizona Department of Public Safety for air and interdiction support.



From high above the scene, an aircrew from AMO reported seeing a group of people leaving the brush and climbing into the back of a tractor-trailer.



At approximately 9 p.m., DPS stopped the northbound tractor-trailer on Interstate 19 near Tubac. The undocumented aliens and male driver (a U.S. citizen) were transferred to Border Patrol custody in Nogales.



Processing and investigations are ongoing by the Nogales Office of HSI and Border Patrol.



This collaborative law enforcement action was made possible because multiple agencies work together through the Joint Task Force-West Arizona, explained JTF-W, Arizona Commander Paul Beeson. These types of coordinated efforts leverage partner agency capabilities and jurisdictional authorities to dismantle criminal networks.



The Joint Task Force-West, Arizona integrates the capabilities of several components within the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is to target and dismantle transnational criminal organizations from the point of origin to the point of destination in Arizona, as part of the Southern Borders and Approaches Campaign. The JTF-West, headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, has established corridors in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and West and South Texas. Follow us on Twitter @JTFWest.



Douglas CBP Officers seize $154K in marijuana



Customs and Border Protection officers at the Raul Hector Castro Port of Entry in Douglas, Arizona recently stopped two Mexican women for separate attempts to smuggle a combined 309 pounds of marijuana worth more than $154,000.



After a CBP narcotics-detection canine alerted to a Pontiac sedan on April 19, driven by a 29-year-old woman from Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, officers found more than 238 pounds of marijuana worth in excess of $119,000.



On April 15, officers arrested a 27-year-old woman from Cananea, Sonora, Mexico after finding nearly 71 pounds of marijuana in the headliner of her Jeep SUV. Officers found the drugs, worth more than $35,000, with the help of a drug canine.



Officers seized the drugs and vehicles, and turned both subjects over to Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations.



San Luis CBP Officers Weekend Not So Typical



U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the Port of San Luis recently arrested one woman with more than $16,000 in methamphetamine taped to her abdomen, and two men on bicycles with approximately $1,500 worth of marijuana inside the bikes frames.



A CBP officer working at the port on April 16 requested a canine inspection of two suspicious-looking bicycles ridden by a 26-year-old male, and a 27-year-old male; both U.S. citizens. After the canine alerted to an odor it was trained to detect, inspectors found three packages of marijuana in each of the bicycle frames. The drugs had a combined weight of approximately three pounds.



Both men, their bicycles and drugs were turned over to the San Luis Police Department.



On April 17, a CBP canine team working at the pedestrian crossing alerted to a 33-year-old San Luis, Arizona San Luis, Arizona woman. Officers then conducted a personal search of the subject and found a thick, plastic vacuum-sealed package shaped to her upper abdominal area. Officers removed the package and, inside, discovered more than five pounds of methamphetamine.



Officers turned the subject over to Homeland Security Investigations.



Smugglers continue to endanger illegals by locking them in vehicle trunks



Tucson Sector Border Patrol agents arrested human smugglers attempting to traffic migrants in the trunk of their vehicles during two incidents.



Nogales Station agents working at the I-19 checkpoint on April 16 referred the driver of a Pontiac sedan for a secondary inspection but the driver sped away. Agents followed the driver until he stopped the vehicle a short time later. During a search of the vehicle, agents discovered a Guatemalan juvenile locked in the trunk with no means of escape.



Douglas Station agents stopped a Buick Le Sabre on April 18 and observed three individuals in the rear seat hiding under a blanket. After confirming that all passengers were illegally present in the United States, the agent searched the vehicle and found three more subjects locked in the trunk.



Several of the subjects removed from the vehicles said they had no knowledge of a trunk release mechanism. Although none of the individuals involved were injured, traveling with a person in the trunk of a moving vehicle is dangerous due to heat, the possibility of an accident, or other unforeseen circumstances.



Agents processed all vehicles, drivers and undocumented subjects in accordance with Tucson Sector guidelines.



Customs and Border Protection welcomes assistance from the community. Citizens can report suspicious activity to the Border Patrol and remain anonymous by calling 1-877-872-7435 toll free.



Federal law allows officers to charge individuals by complaint, a method that allows the filing of charges for criminal activity without inferring guilt. An individual is presumed innocent unless and until competent evidence is presented to a jury that establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.



CBP's Office of Field Operations is the primary organization within Homeland Security tasked with an anti-terrorism mission at our nations ports. CBP officers screen all people, vehicles and goods entering the United States while facilitating the flow of legitimate trade and travel. Their mission also includes carrying out border-related duties, including narcotics interdiction, enforcing immigration and trade laws, and protecting the nation's food supply and agriculture industry from pests and diseases.
By Linda Bentley | April 27, 2016

DEAs National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day this Saturday

CAVE CREEK  The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), in cooperation with local law enforcement agencies, has collected and destroyed approximately 5.5 million pounds of unused prescription drugs over the past five years.



The DEA is continuing its efforts to take back unused, unwanted and expired prescription medications at over 5,000 collection sites around the country this Saturday, manned by more than 3,800 law enforcement partners, at this semi-annual event.





The service is free of charge with no questions asked.



America is experiencing an epidemic addiction, overdose and death due to abuse of prescription drugs, particularly opioid painkillers.



According to the most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health, more people abuse prescription drugs than abuse cocaine, heroin and hallucinogens combined.



DEA Acting Administrator Chuck Rosenberg stated, Most prescription drug abusers get their pills from friends and family, including from the household medicine cabinet. Please remove unwanted prescription drugs from your homes and help prevent substance abuse fueled by our medicine cabinets.



According to the DEA, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of injury-related death in the United States, eclipsing deaths from motor vehicle crashes or firearms.



Removing unwanted prescription pills from homes is an easy way to help fight the epidemic of substance abuse and prevent them from being abused, stolen or resold.



The following local law enforcement agencies will be participating in the take-back event this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.



Phoenix Police Department, Black Mountain Precinct, 33355 N. Cave Creek Rd., Phoenix

Maricopa County Sheriffs Office, District IV, Cave Creek Station, 37622 N. Cave Creek Rd., Cave Creek Maricopa County Sheriffs Office, District IV, Anthem Sub-Station, 3701 West Anthem Way, Anthem
By Linda Bentley | April 27, 2016

Marching to dysphoria

This unprecedented holding overrules custom, culture, and the very demands inherent in human nature for privacy and safety 
April 27, 2016

Sen. Allen calls for schools to respect parents over assessment concerns

PHOENIX  State Capitol  Senator Sylvia Allen today urged local school leaders and administrators to work with parents, be respectful and not retaliate against a student for choices parents may make.



It is that time of year again when Arizona schools are administering the statewide assessment to our students, also known as AzMERIT. Unfortunately, another legislative session is coming to an end where a parents right to make educational decisions for their children are not being recognized in our state laws. Senator Allen sponsored SB 1455, which would have allowed parents to opt their children out of the AzMERIT assessment. This year Congress reauthorized the federal education law that gave states the flexibility to develop their own opt-out policies, but Senator Allen was unable to get it through the legislative process this session.



Senator Allen explained, It is a core belief of mine that a parents rights come from God and not the government. Some parents have legitimate concerns about the increased pressure of high-stakes testing and the impact it is having on their children. There is conflict in the law and our values, which is causing confusion and distress and putting schools in unnecessary battle with parents. I will continue to fight for parental rights in directing their childs education next legislative session.



Senator Allen continued, The absence of a law that recognizes a parents right to opt-out of statewide testing will not keep parents from making these important choices on behalf of their students. Some are making the choice to opt-out of AzMERIT and I have heard testimonials that some schools are working with parents with grace and dignity, while I have heard that other schools are bullying and utilizing scare tactics. I am urging our schools to work with parents, seek to understand and treat them with the respect and the dignity they deserve.
April 27, 2016

Free and Equal Elections urges resolutions to ensure Super Delegates reflect will of popular vote

CAMBRIA, California  The nation's leading non-partisan, political organization issued a call to action to state legislators nationwide to ensure the will of the voters is not disenfranchised at upcoming Republican and Democrat State Conventions.



Christina Tobin, Founder and Chair of The Free and Equal Elections Foundation, and a former presidential debate moderator along with Larry King in 2012. said "let me be clear, the electoral process as it stands now is rigged. We are seeing the systematic disenfranchisement of thousands of voters on the right and the left because of an antiquated, good-old boy structure that rewards the establishment candidates while penalizing insurgents  and in 2016, its the insurgent candidates that have caught fire."



Free and Equal Elections will host its United We Stand Fest and Presidential Debate co-hosted by Student Voices Count at University of Colorado Boulder's Macky Auditorium this October. 25th. Free and Equal Elections is the umbrella group which will help bring everyone together to reform our electoral system throughout the United States of America.



Efforts are already underway in states like Maine, where Representative Dianne Russell (D) has drafted a resolution for her party's state convention that urges the super delegates reflect the will of the popular vote.



"We need more bold legislators like Dianne Russell." said Tobin. Voter disenfranchisement is not Democracy."



Free and Equal Elections is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization whose mission is to broaden electoral choices through education.
By Linda Bentley | April 27, 2016

This unprecedented holding overrules custom, culture, and the very demands inherent in human nature for privacy and safety 

RICHMOND, Va.  On Tuesday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals published a split opinion in the case of G.G. (aka Gavin Grimm) v. Gloucester County School Board, reversing the district courts dismissal and remanding the case back to consider certain hearsay evidence in order to consider a preliminary injunction.



The case was brought by Grimm, a 16-year old girl who considers herself a transgender boy, because she wanted to use the boys restrooms at her high school.

By Linda Bentley | April 27, 2016

CAVE CREEK  The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), in cooperation with local law enforcement agencies, has collected and destroyed approximately 5.5 million pounds of unused prescription drugs over the past five years.



The DEA is continuing its efforts to take back unused, unwanted and expired prescription medications at over 5,000 collection sites around the country this Saturday, manned by more than 3,800 law enforcement partners, at this semi-annual event.

April 27, 2016

CAMBRIA, California  The nation's leading non-partisan, political organization issued a call to action to state legislators nationwide to ensure the will of the voters is not disenfranchised at upcoming Republican and Democrat State Conventions.

April 27, 2016

FAIRFAX, Virginia  Americans for Limited Government Foundation today issued a special report on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), "ICANN Do What I Want."



ICANN is poised to take sole control over the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions when its contract with the U.S. Commerce Department expires on Sept. 30, leaving ICANN as the world's only resolver of website IP addresses and domain names.

April 27, 2016

CHANDLER  Retired Superior Court Judge and former Chandler Mayor Boyd Dunn has announced he is running for Arizona Corporation Commission.



Boyd brings more than 37 years of legal experience to the race. Dunn served as an Assistant Attorney General and mayor of the fourth largest city in Arizona. During his time in private practice, Dunn was a partner at Yarbrough, Moll and Dunn.

April 27, 2016

28th Amendment will prohibit Congress from exempting themselves from legislation

WASHINGTON, D.C.  As part of their effort to bring accountability to Capitol Hill, Rep. Matt Salmon (AZ-05) and Rep. Ron DeSantis (FL-06) have reintroduced a constitutional amendment prohibiting Congress from making any law that exempts Members of Congress from its implementation. The 28th Amendment will ensure that we remain a nation in which all citizens are equal under the law.

April 27, 2016

Tucson Sector Border Patrol agents recently arrested two male Mexican nationals previously convicted on charges relating to crimes against minors.



Agents first apprehended Sergio Galaz-Coronado, 38, outside of Douglas, Arizona, on April 15. During a subsequent biometric-records check, agents found Galaz was arrested by the Maricopa County Sherriffs Office in 2001 for sexual conduct with a minor under the age of 15. He was subsequently sentenced to six months in jail and 10 years of probation before being deported.

April 27, 2016

PHOENIX  State Capitol  Senator Sylvia Allen today urged local school leaders and administrators to work with parents, be respectful and not retaliate against a student for choices parents may make.



It is that time of year again when Arizona schools are administering the statewide assessment to our students, also known as AzMERIT. Unfortunately, another legislative session is coming to an end where a parents right to make educational decisions for their children are not being recognized in our state laws. Senator Allen sponsored SB 1455, which would have allowed parents to opt their children out of the AzMERIT assessment. This year Congress reauthorized the federal education law that gave states the flexibility to develop their own opt-out policies, but Senator Allen was unable to get it through the legislative process this session.
For city money, South Bend apartments allot 40% of rooms to poor tenants

The need for reasonably priced one- and two-bedroom units is dire in the city. Many renters are older and disabled residents who live alone.
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.
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The most ancient kinds of microbes on Earth often have special filaments lining their surfaces. Scientists are discovering that these structures can play a variety of roles in helping microorganisms survive the most hostile environments on Earth, findings that could shed light on how alien life might withstand extreme conditions on distant worlds.

The most complex forms of life on Earth nowadays are eukaryotes, organisms whose cells possess nuclei. However, the first life on Earth were prokaryotes, single-celled microorganisms that do not have nuclei. There are two kinds of prokaryotes  the familiar bacteria, and the archaea, many of which thrive in harsh environments such as hot springs, salt lakes, underground petroleum deposits and deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Scientists have discovered a number of prokaryotes that could potentially withstand many of the same extreme conditions found on Mars and other distant planets. A better understanding of how bacteria and archaea survive these dangerous habitats might yield insights into the adaptations that could make life on other worlds possible, said Mechthild Pohlschroder, a microbiologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. [Extreme Life on Earth: 8 Bizarre Creatures]

Pohlschroder and her colleague Rianne Esquivel detailed their researchin the March 2015 issue of the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. Their researchwas supported by a grant from the Exobiology & Evolutionary Biology element of the NASA Astrobiology Program.

A class of protein structures known as type IV pili (T4P) are filaments found on the cell surfaces of species in nearly all known major groups of prokaryotes. This prevalence suggests that these appendages are extremely ancient in origin, Pohlschroder said.

"Because these appendages are found on many archaeal and bacterial species, spanning a broad array of organisms in both prokaryotic domains of life, it's likely that they had important roles to play in the common ancestor of the bacteria and the archaea" Pohlschroder said.

Indeed, these structures might have played a major role in the survival of these microbes, helping them flourish for millions of years, she added.

T4P are filaments composed of small proteins known as pilins that link together to form helical fibers. Pilins all contain short segments called signal peptides that help the pilins get incorporated into T4P. Although pilins can differ greatly across species, their signal peptides are structurally similar to each other, indicating common origins, Pohlschroder noted.

A bacterium that causes deadly cerebrospinal meningitis, Neisseria meningitidis, uses type IV pili to help it erode and cross the human blood brain barrier, a structure that surrounds the brain tissue and ordinarily protects it from invasion. (Image credit: Image courtesy of Xavier Nassif)

Although T4P are often relatively simple structures, researchers are discovering that bacteria and archaea have adapted T4P to play an extraordinarily diverse set of roles.

"Amazingly, although many cell appendages are adapted, to an extent, to efficiently perform a single function, T4P are quite versatile, and can, depending on local conditions, serve many and varied functions, Pohlschroder said.

One key role T4P plays involves adhesion. Sticking onto surfaces can help prokaryotes either colonize fertile new habitats or cluster together in slimy fortresses known as biofilms to withstand potentially lethal hazards such as ultraviolet radiation, desiccation, antibiotics and toxins, Pohlschroder said.

In addition to adhesion, many T4P have evolved to carry out additional functions, such as movement. For example, in many archaea, a kind of T4P sometimes known as archaellum or archaeal flagellum, can rotate like propellers and help the microbes swim through the water. Moreover, in some bacteria, T4P can also retract, allowing a twitching form of locomotion.

A. Haloferax volcanii cell expressing pili and flagella (also termed archaealla). B. Mutant cell hat cannot glycosylate pilins or flagellins, which results in 1. destabilization of flagella 2. bundle-formation of pili, and 3. microcolony formation  each of them being a condition that promotes biofilm formation. Considering that glycosylation is downregulated in low-salt stress, this post-translational modification appears to be one strategy to regulate biofilm formation (in review at JBC). Pilins regulate flagella biosynthesis and/or stability as a mutant strain lacking pilins does not contain flagella on the cell-surface (2014 Mol. Micro). (Image credit: Mechthild Pohlschroder)

Different kinds of pseudopili in bacteria can help the microbes secrete proteins. For instance, the cholera bacterium uses T4P to release a compound that helps it colonize human intestines. Some bacteria may even use electrically conductive T4P to get rid of electrons generated as waste as the microorganisms synthesize vital molecules.

"A highly diverse assortment of single-cell organisms produce T4P, including many organisms that inhabit highly variable and extreme environments," Pohlschroder said. "Therefore, it is not surprising that these cellular appendages have evolved along diverse and varied paths to support processes that allow organisms to thrive under a wide variety of extreme conditions, including conditions similar to those that are found in some extraterrestrial environments, such as the highly salty fluids on Mars."

Researchers have found that the functions of T4P depend on small, precise modifications of pilins. Prokaryotes are capable of quickly modifying the pilins they synthesize, "allowing cells to make rapid transitions between living as a free-swimming cell or living within the constraints of a protective biofilm structure, depending on local environmental conditions," Pohlschroder said.

Future research can focus on T4P proteins that help microbes adhere to surfaces or swim through fluid, which could help scientists better understand how these appendages help microorganisms respond to stress, Pohlschroder said. "We will also attempt to determine the specific roles T4P of specific compositions play in various cell processes, especially with regard to the pili that aid in responding to changes in such things as salt concentration or nutrient conditions."

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+.
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New York, 27 April 2016  On the eve of the UN Security Councils renewal of the mandate of the Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), the Frente POLISARIOs MINURSO Coordinator, Emhamed Khadad, made the following statement to the press.

Moroccos unilateral decision to expel the civilian component of the Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) is a continuation of its longstanding contempt for the UN and its efforts to provide for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara, as required by all previous resolutions of the UNSecurity Council and the General Assembly.

The current so-called crisis was manufactured by Morocco to distract from its unwillingness to engage in meaningful negotiations on nothing more than a vote by the Saharawi people to determine their political future. Yesterday, AU Special Envoy Joaquim Chissanobriefed the Security Councilon Western Sahara and stated, If it happened in East Timor, why not Western Sahara? There is strong African solidarity in favour of the Saharawi people. Morocco is the only African country not in the AU, precisely because it has isolated itself on Western Sahara.

Today is a moment of truth for the Security Council. We hope it wont allow itself to be cowed into a non-response on this big challenge to its authority, and to the security and integrity of peacekeeping missions worldwide.

Given these wider ramifications, a resolution drafted solely by the so-called Group of Friends is not good enough. France and Spain are protecting the King of Morocco for their own selfish reasons. This text needs to come to the full 15 members of the Security Council.

The current draft being considered by the Group of Friends has a strong call for the immediate return of MINURSOs full functionality, including return of civilian personnel, said EmhamedKhadad.True to usual form, France and Spain are seeking deletion of the language in order to entrench Moroccos illegal occupation of Western Sahara. This is a blatant undermining of the UN Security Councils own authority and credibility, added Khadad.

The Security Council must use tomorrows resolution to demand the immediate reinstatement of MINURSO to its mandated status quo ante, including by use of sanctions against Morocco, if necessary. The resolution also needs to set a clear timeline for a return to the negotiating table, with a deadline after which the UN presence should initiate preparations for a referendum.

Moroccos characterization of the UN presence and Saharawi self-determination as threats to its national identity fly in the face of international law. No one country in the world recognizes Moroccan sovereignty in Western Sahara, and any connection was rejected outright by the International Court of Justice. No new facts on the ground change this clear legal reality.SPS

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Accra (Ghana), April 28, 2016 (SPS) - The Ghanaian Forum on Western Sahara asked the President of the UN Security Council, Mr. Liu Jieyi to take concrete steps to ensure full functionality and mandate of MIUNRSO.

In a letter to the President of the Security Council, on Monday, the Ghanaian Forum expressed its concern on recent developments regarding the mandate and functionality of the Mission of the United Nations for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) which its civilian component was expelled by Morocco.

"We hope that the new renewal of the mandate of MINURSO will take more active measures to enable it to effectively carry out its mandate," says the text sent to the President of the Security Council.

The Forum reiterated its urgent appeal to the CS to enable the MIUNRSO to hold the waited referendum which will put an end to the conflict.

The Ghanaian Forum demanded that the Security Council extend the mandate of MINURSO to include the monitoring of human rights to prevent serious violations of human rights raced by Morocco against Saharawi as several bodies of international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, among others have reported.

Finally, the Forum emphasized that the United Nations has a great responsibility to put pressure on Morocco to comply with UN resolutions on Western Sahara and respect the human rights of Sahrawis and end the systematic looting of natural resources of the people of Western Sahara. SPS

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Washington (United States), April 28, 2016 (SPS) - US draft resolution on Western Sahara, requiring from Morocco to immediately re-establish the mandate of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), was altered on Wednesday under the pressure of France, which has reduced its value and removed its urgency," UN sources said Wednesday.

The new version of the resolution, of which APS has a copy, provides for a briefing by the UN secretary general on the re-establishment of MINURSO activities in 120 days (four months).

The initial draft resolution gave to the UN chief 60 days (two months) to inform the Security Council whether MINURSO is fully working.

France and Morocco seek to gain time and remove the urgency of the US proposal by putting back Ban Ki-moon's briefing by two months, the sources stressed.

In addition, the new version is particularly less strict towards Morocco.

"They have diminished the value of the US draft resolution," the UN sources stressed.SPS

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HARTFORD  Democratic leaders of the General Assembly on Thursday afternoon announced they have crafted a new budget that can pass the House and Senate and get signed into law by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

But they said the new $19.7 billion proposal that would take effect July 1 would not come to a vote until further negotiations with Malloy and, possibly, Republicans.

Malloy, however, was critical of the proposal and wont support it in its current form, even though it addressed the projected $920 million shortfall. And by mid-afternoon, Republicans were attacking the Democratic document for its use of short-term revenues and further stress on state hospitals, while cutting more unionized public employee jobs.

The budget plan contains hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to the spending package passed last year in the two-year, $40 billion budget.

In a hastily called news conference outside the third-floor Senate chamber, Democratic leaders said the proposal includes no new taxes, no withdrawal from the $400 million emergency reserves and no new borrowing. Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden, stressed it would continue funding for municipal aid and local schools.

Malloys recent proposal gutted millions of dollars in aid to public schools in affluent communities, including Greenwich, Fairfield, Westport, Darien, New Canaan and Ridgefield

It does include structural changes in our budget that will not only help us ... reach a balanced budget for 2017, but these changes will ... dramatically reduce those projected deficits for the next biennium, Sharkey said.

Governor wont sign

The proposal includes non-union wage freezes and increases in drug co-pays and contributions for health care, and a $125,000 pension cap for non-union employees.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, said the goal was to foster sustainability at a time of reduced tax revenues, to protect the middle class and to approve a balanced budget.

Now its really up to us and to the governor to work together, and with the Republicans, to come up with something we can put on the floor of the House and Senate and vote on and move forward for the state of Connecticut, Duff told reporters. The legislative adjournment deadline is midnight, May 4, but if lawmakers cant reach a budget deal, they will go into special session.

Devon Puglia, Malloys spokesman, said the governor appreciates the work of the Democrats, who have an 87-64 majority in the House and a 21-15 edge in the Senate.

As he has said repeatedly, coming to terms with a new economic reality is hard, and we recognize that the caucuses have moved to find difficult savings, Puglia said. We also want to be clear that the governor has serious concerns about this proposal, and he could not support or sign it in its current form. It relies on hundreds of millions of dollars in one-time revenues and unrealistic savings targets. It is critical that we do things differently this year and find a better, more sustainable way of budgeting. This proposal is still too close to the status quo; it contains too much business as usual. 

Republicans leaders, meeting reporters on the fourth floor of the Capitol later in the afternoon, said Democrats would lay off even more than planned by Malloy.

House Minority Leader Themis Klarides and Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano said the Democratic proposal is just an avenue to adjourn next week and run for re-election, without addressing the states long-term needs.

I dont know how many times we have to see this happen, said Klarides, R-Derby. I dont know how many times we have to stick gum in a hole.

Stopping capital projects

The Republicans on Monday offered their own budget solution, which included ending the states landmark public-financing program for General Assembly and top-of-the-ticket statewide races.

This budget is the same product that they put out year after year after year after year, said Fasano, R-North Haven. It has cuts that result in hurting the poor, hurting hospitals; theyve made more cuts to social services that we dont cut as deeply. They have made significant changes to hide expenses.

Fasano said budget lines were transferred into other departments, creating new costs for state businesses. He said Republicans were unable to get details on the Democrats plan from non-partisan legislative staff.

We released our details, Fasano said. We did a full presentation with details, analysis, long-term impact.

Meanwhile, State Treasurer Denise Nappier on Thursday sent a letter to legislative leaders suggesting that capital projects that have not yet started should not begin.

The only effective way to reduce expenditures on these projects would be for the state agency involved to halt those projects that have not begun, or can be stopped under contractual terms, Nappier wrote. In addition, the State would need to stop authorizing new spending on bond projects, thereby reducing the amount of bonding needed to fund the projects.

And Matthew Barrett, executive vice president of the Connecticut Association of Health Care Facilities, said the Democrats proposed $10.5 million cut to skilled nursing facilities is unacceptable, particularly those that agreed to raise wages to $15 per hour.

The cut, which reverses a legislative promise made just last session, hits nursing home employees especially hard, Barrett said in a statement. It also represents a double hit to the employers who relied on this promise and did the right thing by already giving their employees raises.

kdixon@ctpost.com
One of the most common struggles for small businesses, startups and solo entrepreneurs is standing out from the competition. The good news is, there's a powerful strategy to do just that. Unfortunately, its also one of the most under-utilized: a personal story.

Related: The Strongest Connections Come From Telling Your Story

A personal story is a narrative about the origins of your business, product or service. Since it's your story, it immediately sets you apart. And, in an infinite sea of blogs, businesses and brands, that's a huge advantage. It's also one being emulated widely: Take a closer look at marketing today and youll see that the worlds largest brands are literally spending millions of dollars to sound smaller.

That means you already have the marketing advantage that your larger competitors are seeking. Heres how to take full advantage of that.

1. Select an arc from the epic story framework.

Nearly every epic tale contains most, if not all, of these story arcs:

Paradise

Disaster

Reluctant hero

Fleeting victory

Devastating defeat

Moment of grace

Ultimate victory

Consider The Lord of the Rings: Frodo Baggins lives in the Shire, a paradise graced with great beer, verdant pastures and parties galore. Yet disaster is imminent in Middle Earth: The ancient villain Sauron has arisen once more.

Our reluctant hero Frodo is, through a series of events, entrusted with the immense task of destroying the ring and defeating Sauron. As the story progresses, Frodo experiences a string of victories, but then a devastating loss occurs: the loss of a friend and mentor.

While your business may not have saved Middle Earth from certain doom, youve likely experienced at least one of those seven arcs. Whatever the situation, theres a story there to tell -- especially if you combine it with one of the following:

2. Choose a story element.

Stories often contain the following dramatic elements. Highlight just one of them for now:

Hero or heroine

Villain

Untold facts

Elephant-in-the-room

Story behind the story

Breaking news

Related: How to Tell Your Small-Business Story

In The Lord of the Rings, the villain isnt just Sauron and his minions. The unseen villain is humankinds greed and lust for power -- an infinitely more dangerous foe.

The elephant-in-the-room is the idea that of all the warriors in Middle Earth -- a deft ranger, a sharp-shooting elf, a stout dwarf and a powerful wizard, the least likely candidate -- a tiny Hobbit with little combat experience -- is the one that physically carries the ring and goes into the heart of enemy territory.

If you consider the story behind your own business or brand, its likely that at least one of these six story elements will come to mind.

3. Write your story and tie it to your brand.

Select just one component from each category above. You may well have something that resembles one of the following:

You launched your organization because of a devastating loss in your family, say, a drunk driver, and you want to help others experiencing the same kind of pain.

Youre now the reluctant hero, taking the helm of a floundering family business. The reason for the companys struggles? Everyone knew that the founder, your father, wasnt open to new or innovative ideas, but no one could broach the subject. It was the elephant-in-the-room until you stepped up.

Youve had a successful C-suite career and by all appearances live an optimal life: You have money, status and influence. But the story-behind-the-story is that you no longer find your work fulfilling; or you've tired of the corporate grind; or you long to help multiple organizations rather than just one company. This is why youre making a pivot into speaking, consulting or writing.

The beauty of a personal story is that it is unique, real and relatable. The best stories are specific enough to be believable, yet universal enough to be relevant. Once you add a few names, dates or locales to your story, you'll have a powerful, persuasive and profitable component to your marketing. Then, you can leverage the advantage you inherently have over the bigger brands you compete with.

Related: Make Your Brand Pop By Telling Your Story

So, what exactly is your story?

Related:



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T he antics of Dominic Chappell, the former racing driver who ran BHS until its collapse this week, has taken another bizarre twist as it emerged he bought a Las Vegas shell company from a Russian businessman days before a lifeline loan for the retailer collapsed, the Standard can reveal.

News of the deal sparked speculation  denied by Chappell  that the former bankrupt bought the shell as part of a strategy to buy BHS from the administrators two weeks before they had even been appointed.

The Evening Standard yesterday revealed Chappell, who has been attacked for taking millions out of the business in fees including a 1.3 million loan to pay off his fathers mortgage, was planning to buy back the retailer.

The twice-insolvent businessman, who bought debt-laden BHS from Sir Philip Green last year for a token 1, said his original plan was to use the Las Vegas-based company as a vehicle to secure long-term funding for BHS from the US.

But after talks over a 60 million loan from Gordon Brothers fell through and the firm went into administration, Chappell said he now plans to use it to round up investors to buy back BHS.

He added that he might well look at a dual listing [with shares listed in London and New York] at some point, raising the possibility of a return to the stock market for BHS if he regains control.

The shell company, Todex Corp, was supposedly a software supplier to second-hand car dealers run by a Russian from his home in north London.

However, the business had no revenue. Retail Acquisitions, the vehicle through which Chappell owned BHS, bought Todex Corp for $195,000 (134,000) in cash just days before the collapse.

A BHS spokesman dismissed the entrepreneurs ambitions. He said: A Russian-founded business in the second-hand car game is probably an ideal vehicle for Dominic Chappell.

Todex shares are on the OTC Ventures market. OTC stands for over-the-counter, a form of market known for loose regulation. Shell companies are the preferred vehicles of entrepreneurs looking to save on share-listing costs.

"Dominic Chappell is recognised by clients as a consummate professional."

Chappell said lots of big companies like Marks & Spencer use the OTC, although it is only a secondary exchange for BHSs High Street rival, which has a main listing in London .

He is now the sole director, president, secretary, and treasurer of Todex, a company set up in 2014 by Vladislav Ermolovich, a 32-year-old Russian in Winchmore Hill.

In a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 15 April, Todex wrote: Mr Chappell is a highly experienced entrepreneur with considerable experience in turning around very substantial businesses and implementing effective business planning for sustained growth and longevity.

He is also recognised by clients as a consummate professional, it said.

Last night, the Standard went to Todexs listed north London address to speak to Ermolovich, whose partner said he was at church. He later denied any links with Chappell.
C ivil war has broken out in fund management after top investor Hermes Investment voted against the controversial decision by its big rival Schroders to elevate ex-boss Michael Dobson to chairman.

The funds group, which competes with Schroders to run billions of pounds of savings, said the move was a breach of a fundamental principle of UK corporate governance.

It has also voted against Schroders senior independent director Lord Howard of Penrith, who engineered Dobsons move.

The vote is startling given the close-knit world of City moneymen, who rarely rebuke each other publicly. Hermes is a top-25 shareholder in Schroders.

Dobson was chief executive for 14 years but sparked fury in March when he said he would become chair, breaking governance guidelines. Schroders new boss Peter Harrison defended the move, saying he will be properly challenged by Dobson despite concerns they are too close.

Why would you not want someone with Mikes experience to guide you? From my perspective Im very confident hes going to let me get on with it, he said. Ive no doubt there will be a check on me.
L loyds, the bank bailed out by the taxpayer, saw its headline profits fall just 6% to 2.1 billion in the first half of the year despite growing signs of the UK economy slowing down.

Chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio described them as robust results in a challenging operating environment.

Banks are struggling to grow profits in a low interest-rate world and one where businesses are not borrowing to expand. But Lloyds has benefited next to its rivals from the fact that it does not have an investment bank.

Horta-Osorio said that Lloyds  which, with its offshoot Halifax, is the countrys biggest mortgage lender  had seen strong lending for house-buying ahead of the recent changes to stamp duty.

He added: We saw a surge in buy-to-let lending and, surprisingly, for second homes and we expect that to drop off in the second quarter.

Lloyds shares fell 2.8p, or 4%, to 66.45p, well below the average 73.6p paid by the taxpayer in 2009s 20 billion bailout.

The share fall was blamed on the 800 million charge for buying back 3 billion of retail bonds in the quarter, which Lloyds said would save it 200 million a year in interest costs.

The taxpayer still has a 9.2% stake but the Chancellor was forced in January to postpone plans for a public sale of shares because stock markets went into freefall. Any revival of that plan is unlikely to happen until after the referendum on the EU on June 23.

For once, Lloyds made no increase on the massive 16 billion it has put aside for PPI mis-selling.
W hile most disgruntled shareholders are using AGMs to voice their anger at huge pay packets, Pearson is bracing itself for a protest of a different kind.

The FTSE 100 education publisher is preparing to face angry teachers unions at tomorrows annual meeting at Savoy Place, a few doors down from its Shell-Mex headquarters on the Strand.

The coalition of unions, made up of over a hundred shareholders, has put forward a resolution calling for an end to its part in controversial exam factory testing in the US and privatisation of schools in developing countries.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is leading the protests, which will also involve members of the National Union of Teachers and trade union Unison from the UK.

They will hand in a petition at Shell-Mex before lobbying and handing out leaflets round the corner outside the AGM.

City analysts have rejected the resolution, which requires 75% support, as irrelevant given that those protesting together only own a fraction of the company.

However, the unions argue that those commenting from the Square Mile are oblivious to Pearsons poisoned brand in the US.

AFT President Randi Weingarten said: There is a fork in the road at this moment and if they choose the path of short-term profits, doubling down on flawed education strategies we will do everything in our power to make sure the world knows that. That is what shareholder governance is about.

She added: The UK is a year or two behind the United States in changing of policy. Because theres been this backlash in parents and educators throughout the United States, I think youre going to see the same thing in the UK.

Pearson declined to comment, but previously said: The resolution does not take account of the significant review we published for shareholder in January 2016.

We recognise that there are opportunities in the US for fewer and better tests. We would welcome AFT into this conversation.
B uyers will have the chance to shop at Harrods for Dubai flats in a development boasting the worlds tallest tower.

The firm behind Dubais Burj Khalifa skyscraper today invited investors to the Knightsbridge store with the offer to buy homes in and around the 700 million building, to be built by 2020.

At 2716 feet high, Emaar Properties Dubai Creek Harbour building, dubbed The Needle, will also feature shops, restaurants and glass balconies that rotate outside the wall of the tower.

The exhibition shows how it will tower over skyscrapers such as The Shard and One World Trade Centre, as well as the Burj Khalifa the tallest property in the world.

Ahmad Al Matrooshi, managing director of Emaar, said: We believe UK second-home purchasers, investors and tourists will be fascinated by the iconic tower and drawn to this new Riviera.

More than 19,000 UK nationals own property in Dubai. London-based Harrods Estates has been appointed to market the homes, which will start from 184,135.
T rendy jewellery firm Thomas Sabo has taken a shine to locations near Crossrail stations for new London expansion plans, it's UK boss said today.

The retailer, advertised by model Georgia May Jagger (pictured), is on the hunt for 3 new stores in central London over the next two years.

It has 10 stores and concessions in London currently.

German brand Thomas Sabo, which launched in 1984, wants to open on the King's Road in Chelsea, which may benefit from a potential Crossrail 2.

Jon Crossick, managing director of the UK business, added that other locations will be looked at where there are "opportunities generated by the implementation of Crossrail".

It will join a host of other retailers wanting to capitalise on a flood of new footfall that will arrive when the line opens. Chains such as Planet Organic have agreed to open near the Tottenham Court Road station.

Proposals to upsize follow 3% sales growth to 25 million at Thomas Sabo UK in the year to June 30.

Turnover was boosted by customers buying Love Bridge bracelets and getting them engraved.
T he mayoral campaign has a week to go. By now we have a reasonably good idea of the candidates strengths. And, barring an upset, the next Mayor will be either Zac Goldsmith for the Tories or Sadiq Khan for Labour. Given the advantage Mr Khan enjoys in the polls at present it is possible that the outcome will be decided on the strength of the first round of first-preference votes alone.

Mr Khan has fought a hard-hitting, energetic and highly organised campaign. Both he and Mr Goldsmith have emphasised the housing crisis while putting forward slightly different solutions. Meanwhile Mr Khan has sought to emphasise his inclusivity, that he would do his best to represent the whole capital, not just his natural supporters. He has done his best to put distance between himself and his leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to make clear he would support business  though he still represents Labour, with all its problematic policies right now. Labour, under Mr Corbyn, is Mr Khans big handicap. As for questions about his perceived association with extremists, he has responded with a strengthened commitment to crack down on radicals who endanger London. Indeed, his Muslim identity is an asset. In the wake of Islamist atrocities in Paris and Brussels it would be a confident riposte to extremists to have a Muslim Mayor of London.

However, given that investment in transport infrastructure is an urgent priority, there is a real problem with his popular, and populist, policy of a fares freeze: it leaves a glaring hole in the finances of Transport for London, as TfL has said.

Mr Goldsmiths style has been less vigorous and his campaign got off to a slow start. His problem is, as our poll suggests today, that he is perceived as privileged and out of touch. It may be shyness, but he is awkward and reserved on the campaign trail. Yet he has grown in stature and confidence. He has been thoughtful in his approach to critical issues. He is committed to sensible and intelligent policies on housing and transport. He has a long record as an environmentalist and when he discusses green spaces and the environment he does so knowledgeably. He has emphasised that we must tackle congestion as a matter of urgency. Pollution  the subject of our front page today  is a grave issue and Mr Goldsmith addresses it with confidence.

Given the Tories fractious state, Mr Goldsmiths party is hardly an asset, but he does have the advantage that if elected, his bid for investment funds from ministers would get a sympathetic hearing.

London now faces new challenges, given the increase in its population. It is not just the obvious issues of housing and transport that matter but the overarching question of our quality of life: how we can live together well. The next Mayor must have a vision for the city  a sense of how this can be a safe and beautiful capital as well as a prosperous one. We cannot take prosperity for granted; the Mayor must fight for the City and for the businesses that create the wealth on which our culture, as well as our jobs, depend.

The powers of the Mayor are in fact limited, but there is an area where the Mayor can make a distinctive difference and that is in the quality of our life: our green spaces and the beauty of our built environment and the cleanness of our air. How the candidates address this question should be crucial when we decide how to vote a week today.

London, university city

London's pre-eminence as a financial centre can overshadow our other great strength: our universities. UCL has signed the biggest loan from the European Investment Bank to any university to fund its expansion. It indicates the attraction of the capital for students from around the world. Obviously size isnt all that matters  the focus must be on the academic needs of individual students  but UCLs growth shows the vitality of London as a university city.
O h, just what the Labour Party needs: Ken Livingstone wading in to the anti-Semitism row. According to our former mayor, Naz Shahs Facebook posts were only over the top comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Bradford West MP, who sits on the Home Affairs Select Committee which is currently holding an inquiry into anti-Semitism, had called for the transportation of Israelis to the US and appeared to compare Israels policies with Hitlers. Sure, Ken. Mere hyperbole. Not anti-semitic at all.

That is, I suppose, a view. But does Livingstone actually think Shah was proposing the deportation of everyone in Israel? Because that wouldnt be problem solved, as she put it. Id suggest, then, that she meant to relocate only the Jews. These posts from 2014 (the first couple of which were uncovered by Guido Fawkes, with the Jewish Chronicle later adding to them) also included Shah asking her friends to back a poll criticising Israel with the claim: the Jews are rallying. Again, one could infer that her venom wasnt aimed purely at the Israeli government but at the Jewish community too.

Shahs apology yesterday was categoric. And, prior to this, she had seemed to be a desperately needed voice in politics. Not only had she booted George Galloway out of parliament but she had overcome extraordinary hardship  poverty, forced marriage, a mother imprisoned for killing an abusive partner  to make it to the House of Commons.

But even if you accept her apology (and, as a Gentile, that clearly isnt my decision to make), this is yet another sign that Labour has an anti-Semitism problem. Im sure the partys not alone in that but the bungled handling of Shahs suspension wont have helped fix its already damaged relationship with the Jewish community.

Ken Livingstone calls Hitler a Zionist on BBC Radio London

Jeremy Corbyn initially claimed that these were just historic posts  stretching the common understanding of historic to include something that occurred in 2014. Hours later, though, as the outcry continued, Shah had the whip removed.

This all adds to a sense that Corbyns party is  as a Labourite euphemistically puts it  over-inclusive to those who try to exclude. The fear is that anti-Semitism is festering in the Labour Party, and that it gets downplayed when it is discovered.

As a Jewish friend, whos also a Labour member, remarked yesterday about Shahs comments: Would an MP have said this of any other group? She reels off examples that should make her party wince. A culture  especially in hard-Left student politics  where justified criticism of Israels government morphs into attacks on all Israelis, and then, sometimes, on all Jews. Ludicrous rants about a Jewish cabal pulling the strings in public life.

This isnt about muting criticism of Israeli policy. Criticise away! But there is a complexity here that I  as a half-Irish Catholic  have only come to appreciate through talking to Jewish friends: the way Israel is entwined with Jewish identity. Not for every British Jew, of course  but a 2015 study by City University and Ipsos MORI found that 93 per cent felt Israel formed part of their identity and 90 per cent supported its right to exist as a Jewish state. That doesnt mean theyre uncritical of the Israeli government but it does suggest there isnt necessarily that straightforward dichotomy between Zionism and Judaism that some on the Left claim.

But what must the Labour leadership do to root out anti-Semitism? There can only be a zero-tolerance approach. Excise the tumour before it spreads.

Your guide to how not to be a spy ...

As if to plug a hole for those missing The Night Manager, along comes a new le Carre film: Our Kind of Traitor. This time, the baddies are the Russian mafia and the Hiddlebum has made way for Stellan Skarsgard full-frontal but theres still an everyman implausibly dragged into an espionage drama. Here he doesnt even have the excuse of being a former soldier: our hero (played by Ewan McGregor) is an academic, more used to fusty libraries than dodging bullets. Its supposed to be an appealing fantasy: that we could all be James Bond for the day.

In reality, wed hate it. So the alternative interpretation of le Carre is as an instruction manual, a how-to guide for civilians keen not to play spy. Dont fall in love with mysterious, beautiful women with murderous boyfriends. Dont accept drinks from men with heavies lurking by the door. Avoid anyone with body tattoos. Reject invites to the lavish 18th-birthday parties of strangers daughters. And certainly never get in the helicopter.

Will Sadiq be hurt by the Bradley effect?

Given that the pollsters and bookies believe their party will retake City Hall next week, Labourite Londoners seem remarkably jittery. Thats partly about a distrust of the polls, ignited by last years general election. Theres also a fear that a low turn-out (and the mayoral election is clearly being over-shadowed by the EU referendum) would favour Zac over Sadiq.

But theres a tendency even more depressing than political apathy that worries some: the Bradley effect. Noted in US elections, it refers to how ethnic-minority candidates can perform better in polls than at the ballot box. It attributes this distortion to a desire by some voters to give the more socially acceptable answer when its not just God and themselves wholl know. Theres debate about whether the effect still exists, but lets hope, come May 6, that this isnt what political pundits are talking about.

* Yesterday evening, ahead of a screening of the film Joy, I interviewed Jacqueline Gold, best known as the boss of Ann Summers. What makes Gold rare among businesswomen is that shes willing to talk about anything: being arrested, sketching penises, Brexit and  most daringly of all  the gender question.

When I was a business journalist, I used to feel frustrated that so few female CEOs would touch on the sexism theyve faced or on how other women could replicate their success. Then one did, Facebooks chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and was lambasted for it.

That doesnt stop Gold. She talked about how, at an event where she was a speaker, she was twice assumed to be the one sorting out the slides. Once a man felt up her leg to work out if she was wearing suspenders. It was heartening to hear her cry: We have to raise our heads above the parapet, and keep banging this drum.
Review at a glance









N ick Payne's Constellations won this papers award for best play in 2012 and marked his arrival as a major voice in British theatre, with a talent for writing attractively about science and particularly the brain. In this short new piece he ponders the human cost of a radical medical procedure.

Its set in the near future, where recent advances mean that an operation can save the life of ailing Lorna (Zoe Wanamaker). This involves cutting away diseased tissue and inserting a neural prosthesis to compensate for lost brain function. But such an intervention comes at a price, and Nina Sosanyas crisply efficient doctor Miriam explains that she will lose all memory of her long marriage to Carrie.

The action occurs in reverse, although it takes a while for this to become clear. The result is that we focus not on what will happen but on the emotional and ethical dimensions of the choices the characters make. Were invited to think about the ways in which memory, identity and love are intertwined  and how ageing and illness can erode them.

Paynes jagged dialogue is packed with technical talk about neural networks and the psychosis experienced by lab rats. Yet amid the cleverness theres a simple concern with the implications of medical innovation. At the heart of Josie Rourkes lean production is a huge oak tree inside a glass case, split in two. Tom Scutts imposing design inevitably makes the audience think of what it might be like to have a wedge driven into the pulpy matter of ones brain.

While the subject matter is intriguing, the play feels a touch too brittle and the characterisation is undernourished. But the performances, especially from Barbara Flynn as the woundingly passionate Carrie, are an unsettling reminder that all love stories have the potential to turn into stories of grief.

Until June 18, Donmar Warehouse (0844 871 7624, donmarwarehouse.com)

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V ery occasionally, no matter how busy you may think you are, you meet someone whose ability to conquer project after project forces you to ask just what you could have been doing with your vacant, flabby time.

Whoever coined the saying You have as many hours in the day as Beyonce clearly hadnt met multitaskers Jens Grede (above, left) and Erik Torstensson. Cofounders of creative agency Wednesday (whose clients include Calvin Klein, Armani and Kurt Geiger), over the past decade the two Swedes have headed up a raft of fashion and media companies  taking in everything from PR to art direction  as well as launching biannual magazine Industrie in 2009. Then theres their label, Frame Denim, which over the past four years has gone from a passion project to a multimillion-pound business. Their jeans are worn by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Cara Delevingne, Taylor Swift and virtually every fashion editor in London. Those cropped straight-legs with the faint line near the hem? Theyre Frames Le High Thrasher. The boyfriend style with the turn-ups? Frames Le Garcon.

When I meet the duo in their glass office in Shoreditch, they are a picture of affable, open energy. But lets not forget I am in the presence of professional image makers: Diptyque candles scent the air, a vase of white peonies sits on the vast reception desk and flurries of efficient-looking employees dart around dressed in indigo denim and marl T-shirts. I want to work here  or at least date someone who does. Grede, 38, the businessman of the pair, is dressed in a cashmere crewneck and jeans (both Frame menswear). Torstensson, 37, the creative maverick (whos partner happens to be Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-Porter), wears thick black Ray-Ban glasses and periodically pushes back his fringe. They banter like energetic teenagers. Officially, were here to talk about a new collaboration with Lara Stone (of which more later) but our conversation takes in skateboarding (I was really bad at skating, so I started to do logos and take pictures instead  thats a hundred per cent why I do what I do today, says Torstensson) and Tinder (both fret about the long-term societal effects of digital dating).

The jovial chatter belies a watertight partnership. The pair met while working for Tyler Brule, then editor of Wallpaper* magazine. In 2003, they set up a fashion-oriented media company, Saturday Group, which evolved into a multi-tentacled powerhouse with subsidiaries specialising in distribution, ecommerce, communications and publishing, among others. Theyve been responsible for sending Justin Bieber viral in Calvin Klein jeans, putting Russian supermodel Natasha Poly in an H&M campaign and coordinating the launch of Mrporter.com. But it wasnt until 2012 that they set up Frame Denim, which Torstensson describes as the sum of everything for me. Ambition and tenacity is the strongest currency here.

Incredibly, they dont advertise. Their success (there are 300 Wednesday employees in New York, LA and London, and Frame sales are projected to surpass 70 million this year) has been built through word of mouth. Of course it helped that they owned the branding agency, and have supermodel friends happy to be papped in their jeans.

Still, none of it would have made a difference if the product wasnt superlative. The stretch of the jeans is perfect, the distressing subtle and the cut leg-lengthening. The jeans cost around 200 a pair  more expensive than most on the high street but unlikely to give your bank manager a heart attack. Theres also a growing ready-to-wear line: S/S 2016 hits include a boxy jacket in chestnut suede that rivals anything on Bond Street, and a military button-down shirt, cut neatly on the shoulder. Theres a team of 60 pattern cutters and fabric experts in LA, but Grede and Torstensson decide the palette and pick fabric swatches. They have no desire to be perceived as rarefied designers. Our mission is to become the next Calvin Klein, or what Calvin Klein was in the 1990s, not the next Balenciaga, says Torstensson. Indeed, their speciality leans towards being charming hosts who throw a great bash. We used to party a lot when we were younger, says Grede, and inadvertently started hosting Frame parties as a result. We hang out with 70 per cent of the people we work with.

Get the blues: other cult denim brands to covet 1 /5 Get the blues: other cult denim brands to covet Keji - Former Net-a-Porter buyer Katie Green launched her capsule line of indigo denim in 2015 with the intention of creating a wardrobe of timeless styles. Her denim culottes and kimono jackets are inspired by her buying trips to Asia. Dress, 260, at net-a-porter.com Bliss and Mischief - Alongside preloved denim embroidered with flowers and cacti, Californian designer Hillary Justin offers military jackets and western shirts. The prettiest denim youll find. Jeans, 390, at matchesfashion.com Re/Done - Sustainable fashion is the driving force of Re/Done founders Sean Barron and Jamie Mazur, who specialise in reworking vintage Levis. They were at it before Vetements, you know. Jeans, 375, at stylebop.com Mother - LA-based brand Mother has given us jeans styles including the Dropout Boyfriend and the Groupie. We love the super-soft denim, unfussy washes and flattering mid-rise cuts of this label. Skirt, 226, at mytheresa.com

The Lara Stone capsule collection includes a bomber jacket, jeans, shorts, a skirt, sweater and hoodie. Getting one of the worlds top models to collaborate on  and front  the campaign was an apparent breeze. We had a couple of meetings to chat about what we wanted and came up with some cool pieces from there, says Stone. Torstensson has photographed Stone wearing the S/S 2016 collection in London, in what Grede calls a Brigitte Bardot in Saint Tropez look. In working with the designers, Stone joins Karlie Kloss, who models a line for the long-legged, and Poppy Delevingne, who features in their online #GirlsInFrame campaign.

On New Years Eve 2015, they sold a majority stake in Wednesday Agency Group to BBDO Worldwide for an undisclosed sum, subsequently closing Saturday Group to focus on Wednesday Agency, Industrie and Frame Denim. There was a time when that [empire] excited us, shrugs Grede. Now, it seems, passion projects are more their bag.

Grede is married to Emma, CEO of ITB (International Talent Booking), and they are living in Islington while the family home in Bloomsbury is being renovated. They have a two-and-a-half year old son, Grey, and theres another on the way. Torstensson, meanwhile, lives with Massenet and her two children in South Kensington. He politely declines to answer any questions about her, relenting only when I ask if she wears the jeans. Oh yes. With Frame we tried to design for our partners or wives. For two such natural marketeers, its surprising that they keep their personal lives hidden behind private Instagram accounts. I see social media as an extension of my social life and for that you want a degree of privacy, asserts Grede.

Their PA appears in the doorway; its time for a flight to LA. Last week they opened the flagship store on Melrose Avenue and have another opening in New York in August. In London, their jeans are already sold in Selfridges and Matchesfashion.com but they have their sights set on their own store. London has an energy that is unlike any other city, says Grede. I feel a high degree of individual freedom here. For now, Torstensson says, theyre happy to keep evolving. When someone or something becomes irrelevant its because they hang on to what made them successful. Its important to remember to change when you are doing well.

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P eople who suffer from depression might be able to stave off a relapse just as effectively by practising mindfulness therapy as they would be by taking anti-depressant drugs.

A meta-analysis into the effectiveness of the treatment, conducted by Oxford University, has found that Mindfulness Based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (MCBT) can control depression as well as mood-boosting drugs.

MCBT combines the ideas of cognitive therapy with mindfulness inspired in part by Buddhist philosophy, using techniques such as meditation and yoga.

According to the study, patients who practised mindfulness therapy were 31 per cent less likely to become depressed again within 60 weeks even if they stopped taking their medication, compared to those who continued taking anti-depressants.

The analysis looked at nine trials conducted in the UK, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands and Switzerland and the findings were published in a paper in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Professor Willem Kuyken, the lead author of the paper, said: This new evidence for mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is very heartening.

While MBCT is not a panacea, it does clearly offer those with a substantial history of depression a new approach to learning skills to stay well in the long-term.

Previous studies have claimed mindfulness techniques can bring on panic attacks and lead to paranoia, delusions or depression.

Best books on mindfulness 1 /14 Best books on mindfulness Find your inner peace with our pick of the best mindfulness and meditation books... Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world This bestseller will get you in the right frame of mind for 2016. Based on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)  a successful form of brief meditation this book's success relies on the way in which authors Mark Williams and Danny Penman optimistically focus on adding joy to your life as opposed to ridding it of unhappiness. 10.50, Amazon, Buy it now Anti-Stress Dot-to-Dot Always thought that dot-to-dots were an activity for children? Apprently you're wrong be wrong  the pictures in this book, featuring elegant buildings and nature scenes, will relax and focus your mind in a way you never thought a dot-to-dot book could. 5, Amazon, Buy it now I Am Here Now This will help enhance both your observation and creativity; with an audio track (featuring musings from mindfulness teacher Tara Brach) and a field notes page for recording purposes, I Am Here Now will enable your thoughts and emotions to take on a new lease of life. 7, Amazon, Buy it now The Mindful Workplace What better time to deploy the theories of mindfulness than at work? This book, filled with Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) techniques, provides an eight-week training course to keep your workplace attitude at its peak. 30.50, Amazon, Buy it now Get some headspace This book from Andy Puddicombe, founder of popular digital health platform Headspace, attempts to get people to take ten minutes out of their day for meditation purposes. Once the technique's been learned, these skills will stay with you for the rest of your life. 10, Amazon, Buy it now The Mindfulness Colouring Book Much like the dot-to-dot book above, this pocket-sized adult colouring book is the perfect activity for a 10-minute breather. Consider your stress and anxiety soothed. 4, Amazon, Buy it now The Little Book of Mindfulness In this day and age, it's more important to be in the moment than ever  this book will help you with that. From Dr Patrizia Collard, these brief practices will rid your day of stress and have you feeling more optimistic. 4, Amazon, Buy it now Body Calm The saying mind over matter derives from the idea that our minds have the power to control our bodies if we really want them to. Equally, mental stress can have a damaging effect on our bodies. Newbigging teaches us a new self-healing meditation technique to help keep our bodies healthy and to understand the source of common stress and anxiety triggers. 11, Amazon, Buy it now The Power of Now The Power of Now has become one of the most famous mindfulness books out there. Helping us to tap into our innermost Being, Tolle guides us through various techniques to help us understand that the present moment is all that really matters. 8, Amazon, Buy it now A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled An ambassador for mental health awareness, Ruby Wax OBE has helped to make mindfulness accessible to all. Having suffered from depression herself, in this book she explores how modern living is causing us more stress and anxiety than ever as we know and see too much. Included are mindfulness exercises and tips for everyone from babies to adults; all with sound underlying scientific reasoning. 4, Amazon, Buy it now

However the new study  the largest-ever analysis of research on the subject - found mindfulness-based cognitive therapy did not have any evidence of harmful effects.

Professor Kuyken went on to stress that mindfulness should be viewed as one option alongside drugs and other forms of therapy - rather than a one-size fits all solution.

What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is a Buddhist discipline which encourages focusing on the moment rather than being consumed by the pain of the past or anxiety over the future, a mental state achieved via regular meditation. It's used in western culture as a therapeutic technique to reduce stress, pain and depression.

We need to do more research, however, to get recovery rates closer to 100 per cent and to help prevent the first onset of depression, earlier in life, he said.

These are programmes of work we are pursuing at the University of Oxford and with our collaborators around the world.

Sir Simon Wessley, professor of psychological medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London said: We already know that the best treatments for depression involve talking therapies and antidepressants.

This study confirms that mindfulness is an effective talking therapy, probably about the same as antidepressants, and that both together reduces relapse. If I got depressed I would continue to want a talking treatment and an antidepressant. 

Mindfulness as a practice has been backed by the NHS advisory body, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), and the Mental Health Foundation research charity.

Robert Flaherty, a welldoing.org counsellor regularly uses mindfulness techniques in his practice to treat those suffering with depression.

He says: I find mindfulness a great addition in the therapy room, it can deepen the therpeutic relationship and it can be a powerful tool to increase our tolerance of painful emotions.

"It is not always the answer and there is a need for some caution to be aware of in the use of mindfulness with certain issues but lots of my clients have found it very useful.

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M onday night in a bar near Silicon Roundabout: the craft beers were flowing, cups of hipster hazelnuts and popcorn were being passed around the cool crowd but this was an unusual gathering in one sense: it was an evening of EU referendum talk.

There wasnt a grey man in a grey suit in sight. Almost everyone in the room was under 40, in sneakers, and checking their tweet streams frequently. This was a meeting for We Are Europe, a project that came together by accident when a group of friends working in tech and sustainability suddenly realised that, although they felt strongly about the EU referendum, their voices werent in the debate.

Bethan Harris, one of We Are Europes founders, spotted the problem with the current In offering. If you google Brexit or the EU referendum it is so uninspiring. Even if you are pro, you just arent going to share a picture of a politician.

With of a crank of the social media engines  a Facebook page, a Twitter handle and Instagram account  they were off. Models Lily Cole, digital entrepreneur Jamal Edwards and actor Jude Law signed up, and with some help from designers and amateur video-makers and acoustic guitar soundtracks for their Facebook videos, a new wing of the In campaign had started.

James Murphy, CEO of agency Adam & Eve/DDB, which made last years John Lewis Christmas ad, turned up at the party in east London and was so impressed he has talked about working with them.

The in crowd: Lily Cole, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jude Law and Jamal Edwards

Designer Irene Palacio produced a cardboard stencil, and Harris, along with Harriet Kingaby, both of whom are consultants on branding and social campaigns, photographed friends and random people in the street holding the In For sign and asked them to write down their reason for supporting the campaign.

Crucially the answers given were not along the lines of because George Osborne says I will be better off or national security. They were more emotional: because of European friends, the freedom to travel, a sense of being part of a more connected world.

Theres a key stat in all this: if you are over 40 you are more likely to vote Leave, and you are more likely to vote, full stop. Though the polls are saying that Remain has the edge, the result will hinge on turnout.

Co-founder Kingaby says: We know our friends will talk about it with friends, but they have been scared to do so on social media. This isnt just about facts, its about emotional issues, a sense of identity based on the the things we love about the UK  a diverse, interesting, open and tolerant society. We want to create messaging that is positive.

The Leave campaign has cornered head and heart in this debate with its cri de coeur for the white cliffs of Dover and arguments about immigration. The Remain campaign has so far only done the head. The heart though is stirring, both with We Are Europe and other spontaneous offerings. Earlier this week artist and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans designed a set of posters for those who want to remain, inviting people to share them on Instagram and display them. Slogans include No man is an island. and What is lost is lost forever.

That is not to say that some politicians havent understood the need to engage people at a different level. Last week Gordon Brown, giving a speech hosted by the Centre for European Reform, urged his audience of economists and financiers to make the arguments for a passionate, principled and patriotic Remain vote. Admittedly his messengers may not have been the hottest on Twitter.

What this campaign needs is an amplification through social media, not just to encourage people to vote In, but to make sure they are registered to vote. As Lily Cole puts it: There is a real chance this referendum is going to be decided by the active minority of people who called for it, rather than by the majority of our country reflecting on what the EU really means.

However, it would be wrong to think that the Brexiteers havent themselves spotted social medias value. Within weeks of launching, We Are Europes social media channels have been targeted by the Outers haranguing them with reasons for why it is time to get out of Europe.

On Twitter we are getting a lot of trolls or people getting a bit angsty, says Harris. But their drive to smoke out the shy-Remainers does seem to be working. Weve also had a lot of Remain supporters joining us. We all have to start stepping up, she adds. If you feel it in your gut, you dont have to get into arguments but you do have to get positive and say it. And the place to have your voice heard is online.

Follow Joy Lo Dico on Twitter: @joy_lo_dico

Follow We Are Europe on Twitter: @weareeuropeuk
A security guard who flooded Twitter with messages of support for ISIS after being thwarted in his attempts to go to Syria has been jailed for five years.

Mohammed Moshin Ameen, 23, used 42 different Twitter names to post messages in support of terrorist fighters including ISIS executioner Jihadi John.

He celebrated bombing attacks and mass murders, and retweeted messages calling for young British men to join ISIS, the Old Bailey heard.

In one message re-tweeted by Ameen, it says: "IS will mobilise the army of Dabiq. Bros in the West don't miss this battle. Start packing and join the army of Islam."

Sentenced: Ameen sent around 8,000 tweets, of which 250 were found to be in breach of anti-terror laws / Metropolitan Police

Ameen has admitted posting the terror material on the social media site over eight months, between March and October last year.

He sent around 8,000 messages in total, with 250 found to be in breach of anti-terrorism laws.

"It's apparent you had a significant following on your accounts, and at the time of which this case is concerned you were thoroughly radicalised", said Judge Richard Marks QC, the Common Serjeant of London.

"Any sort of terrorist related activity, the nature and extent of which unhappily is all too prevalent, gives rise to a sense of bewilderment, abject fear, and utter terror on the part of the vast majority of ordinary men and women around the world who simply want to be able to live their lives peacefully and normally as they should be able to do."

Post: One of the tweets spotted by Metropolitan Police investigators / Metropolitan Police

He added: "It's apparent that you were determined not to be silenced in the views you expressed. When accounts were shut down, by the authorities, you simply opened a new one using a different name."

The court heard Ameen was first suspected in December 2013 of trying to travel to Syria, and on a raid on his home counter-terrorism officers found a one-way ticket from Luton to Istanbul.

In June 2014, officers from the Prevent unit went to his home in Dagenham, east London, but he rebuffed their attempts to open a dialogue.

In the autumn of that year, they went back and discovered Ameen had half-packed a bag for "immediate departure" - to the shock of the defendant's father.

Christopher Amis, prosecutor, said although Ameen had not been directly advocating terrorism in his messages, they "amount to a sustained effort indirectly to encourage others to engage in terrorism".

He said: "There is, with one exception, no explicit encouragement. Mr Ameen does not direct, or invite, the reader to engage in acts which would constitute terrorism.

"However, the messages clearly constitute indirect encouragement in that they glorify acts of terrorism and those involved in them and they encourage the emulation of this conduct."

Among Ameen's posts was a professionally-produced ISIS propaganda video which had been specifically designed to appeal to English speaking young men.

Mr Amis said sites like Twitter "face a constant struggle in their efforts to prevent its exploitation by ISIL-supporting fanatics and others who would misuse it.'

He said Ameen "had repeatedly over the eight month period posted distasteful or illegal material, had those accounts suspended and shut down, and then set up fresh accounts, over and over again, in order to continue his proselytising and encouragement of terrorism."

Ameen, a night-shift security guard, pleaded guilty to five counts of encouraging the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism on Twitter, and a further charge of inviting support for Islamic State.

He also pleaded guilty to disseminating a terrorist publication.

He will be subject to terrorism notification provisions when he is released from prison.
A n east London sex predator who attacked a 75-year-old woman in the street and assaulted his final victim while out on police bail, has been jailed for life today.

Unemployed Liban Abdis spree included three assaults carried out on the same day in the area around Poplar and Bethnal Green.

Abdi struck first on November 29 2014 at 9am, when he rummaged through a pensioners pockets, sexually assaulted her and punched the woman to the floor in Ming Street.

Later that afternoon he grabbed a 19-year-old woman in a DLR underpass at Blackwall, sexually assaulting her.

Just an hour later, he struck again, cornering a 21-year-old in a Commercial Road stairwell and sexually assaulting her before punching the woman repeatedly in the face.

Days later, in the early hours of December 4, Abdi followed a woman off the N15 bus and grabbed her from behind as she walked in Elizabeth Close. He dragged his victim to an area of wasteland and raped her.

Abdi was arrested on December 7, denying all offences, and was released on bail while police gathered forensic evidence.

Predator: Liban followed a woman off the N15 bus and raped her / Met Police

But while still on the streets on April 29 the following year, he sexually assaulted a woman who was walking down Hackney Road on her way home from work.

At Snaresbrook Crown Court today, Abdi, of Woodstock Terrace, was sentenced to a mimnimum of 12 years in jail.

He had previously been convicted of a string of offences including two rapes, four sexual assaults and an attempted rape.

Detective Constable Tim Duffin, from the Met's Sexual Offences Exploitation and Child Abuse Command, said: "Abdi targeted lone women and put them through a terrible ordeal.

I would like to praise their bravery in coming forward and continued support throughout the investigation. It is thanks to them that this dangerous man is in prison.

"It is possible that there may be other women who were attacked by Abdi who are yet to contact police. I would ask them to call us so that we can help in any way possible."
A dirty old man known as Father Christmas because of his white bushy beard has been banned from dressing up as Santa for 10 years.

Lawrence Lewis, of Waterlooville, Hampshire, was today also jailed for 22 months for grooming two girls  aged eight and 11 - by attempting to bribe them to show him their privates.

He was sentenced at Portsmouth Crown Court, having pleaded guilty to three charges of inciting a girl under the age of 13 to engage in sexual activity.

Sentencing the 57-year-old, Recorder Shamim Qureshi said: "When Father Christmas turns out to be a dirty old man asking to look at their underpants and private parts, we have a very different situation regarding the Sentencing Council."

The judge banned Lewis from playing the role of Father Christmas, for payment or otherwise, for a period of 10 years as part of a sexual harm prevention order which also restricts him from having any interaction with girls under 16.

Lewis was also ordered to sign onto the sex offenders' register for 10 years and told to pay a 100 victim surcharge.

Robert Forrest, prosecuting, said Lewis had approached an eight-year-old girl on two occasions at the Wellington pub in Waterlooville in December last year and January 2016 and offered her money to expose herself to him.

On another occasion, he also made the girl's 11-year-old friend a similar offer.

He said the girls had known Lewis as Father Christmas.

Mr Forrest said: "This defendant was a regular of that public house; he was known by several other regulars as Father Christmas and Santa because of his appearance at the time.

"He said in interview he did look at the time like Father Christmas - he had a white bushy beard, white curly hair and was well-built."
T his is the British family savagely beaten by a group of Thai thugs while on holiday.

Rose Owen, her husband Lewis and their son were brutally set upon in a busy street in an attack which has shocked people across the world.

Today photographs of the assaulted family emerged, including one issued by the Thai tourist board showing 65-year-old Mrs Owen in her hospital bed where she is recovering.

She and her husband, from Wales, are thought to have been visiting their son, also called Lewis, who lives in Singapore, to celebrate Thai New Year as a family.

Recovering: Rose Owen / Thai tourist board

They were in Hua Hin for the Songkran festivities when Lewis (Jnr) apparently enraged the men after bumping into them on the crowded street.

Festivities: Lewis Owen was out in Thailand with his wife for Thai New Year / Facebook

Shocking footage of what ensued shows all three being punched and kicked in a vicious attack following an argument.

Mrs Owen is thrown to the ground. As she struggles to get up, a man lands a fierce kick to her head, knocking her out cold again.

Attack: The British holidaymakers were beaten unconscious in the attack

Pictures then show the holidaymakers splayed out motionless in the street.

All three needed hospital treatment for blows to the head and body.

Injured: Lewis Owen (Jnr) / Facebook

Neighbours of the Welsh family today told of their horror at news of the assault.

John Miles, a retired university lecturer who lives near Mr and Mrs Owen in the Cardiff suburb of Wenloe, said he learned about the attack in the newspaper.

He said: "I later saw Rose and Lew's daughter in the village - who told me that it was her mum, dad and brother who had been attacked.

"It came as a big shock. She said she hadn't slept all night and looked so worried. It must be hell for her knowing this has happened and being on the other side of the world.

"It is dreadful what has happened.

"Lew and Rose are really well-liked people and everyone is thinking of them. I don't know how they are doing, but when they come back I know that everyone will do whatever they can to help."

Dave Cannon, chairman of the village hall committee, told MailOnline: I've been in touch with Lew by text after seeing the pictures of the attack.

It was a hell of a shock to hear what happened to them.

A spokesman for the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) said Royal Thai Police arrested six people and charged them with grievous assault on April 17  four days after the attack on April 13.

He said: "An investigation is in process and the suspects will soon be under the jurisdiction of the court. If found guilty, the perpetrators of this incident will face full justice under Thai law.
A "persistent pervert" who targeted lone female Tube commuters and chatted to them while fondling himself has been jailed for three months.

Tsvetomir Georgiev roamed the northern part of the Piccadilly Line at night, seeking out lone women he could pleasure himself in front of.

The 25-year-old would sit opposite his victims, making a deliberate show of what he was doing while talking to them.

He struck during the day just once, seeking out a carriage at the weekend which was empty except for one woman.

This week, at Highbury Magistrates' Court, Georgiev of Bendish Road, East Ham, admitted four charges of outraging public decency and was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison.

Speaking afterwards, Detective Constable Allan Taggart from British Transport Police said: "Georgiev put these women in considerable fear when he chose to target them. I would like to thank all of them for their bravery in reporting these incidents to police.

I have no doubt that they have prevented further incidents and other women being targeted by this offender."

Siwan Hayward, Transport for Londons Director of Enforcement and On-Street Operations, said: Nobody should be made to feel uncomfortable when travelling and the brave women who have come forward have helped to put this persistent pervert behind bars."
A woman was sexually assaulted on the Tube before a man allegedly sat opposite her and exposed himself.

The 30-year-old victim was travelling on the Victoria Line towards central London when a man boarded the Tube and sat opposite her.

The man, who is believed to be in his late 20s, made eye contact with the victim while touching himself inappropriately, British Transport Police said.

The victim left the Victoria Line at Green Park to change to the Jubilee Line, and while on an escalator, the same man stood close to her and reportedly touched her inappropriately.

After getting onto a Jubilee Line train, the man sat opposite her again and allegedly exposed himself.

British Transport Police have released a CCTV image of a man they want to speak to in connection with the assault, which happened at about 4.45pm on April 11.

Detective Constable Andrew Parkinson said: The man responsible was committed to harassing his victim it is essential he is identified.

I am keen to speak to the man in the CCTV image as I believe he may hold vital information to this investigation.

We understand that a member of the public may have come to the aid of the victim on the escalator at Green Park.

If this was you, please get in touch as you may hold crucial information which may help detectives.

Anyone with information should call British Transport Police on 0800 40 50 60, quoting reference 300 of 27/04/2016, or contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
P arents in north London are to go on strike and keep their children out of school to protest against tests.

A group of mothers and fathers from Barnet plan to remove their seven-year-olds on Tuesday over English and maths Sats, which they claim take the joy out of learning.

They hope their action will persuade Education Secretary Nicky Morgan to cancel them.

One of the tests, for spelling, punctuation and grammar, has already been scrapped after it was mistakenly published online as a sample paper.

Tests in reading and maths are still scheduled to go ahead in the second week of May.

Mother-of-two Kate Orr will take seven-year-old son Felix out of Livingstone School in Barnet and will have a forest day in a park, using art and games to learn about nature.

Up to 20 parents from Livingstone School are expected to do the same.

Ms Orr said: We are not protesting against the school, which is wonderful, and so are the teachers.

But these tests are not age appropriate. Six and seven-year-olds are being put under stress.

We are giving Nicky Morgan a chance to turn this around and cancel the tests.

She added: We would like Nicky Morgan to start listening to the teachers, headteachers, parents and children when we say we want a system based on the joy of learning, not purely academia. We believe that there should be no further testing of children in year two and that there is still time to cancel the remaining tests scheduled in May.

Children who are kept off school risk getting an unexplained absence mark on their records.

Some parents have already written to teachers explaining why they are taking action and urging them to record the time off as exceptional circumstances. But Ms Orr said she is prepared to accept an absent mark. She added: I will be happy to get an absent mark on my sons record. It will be worth it and I will be proud.

The protest will be echoed across the country as part of the Let The Kids Be Kids campaign.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education said: We know mastering the basics of literacy and numeracy at primary school has a huge impact on how well children do at GCSE, which is why we are determined to raise standards. We have updated the Key Stage 2 tests to reflect our new, more rigorous curriculum which will help every child fulfil their potential regardless of their circumstances.

Tests help teachers identify and provide the support pupils need as well as giving parents a picture of how their child is doing.
F our in 10 nurses fear they will be forced to leave London in the next five years by the high cost of housing, a survey found today.

The Royal College of Nursing research adds to growing concern about the scale of the staffing crisis facing the NHS, with more than 10,000 nursing posts unfilled across the capital.

It sparked demands for the next Mayor to do more to enable hospitals to retain key workers.

The survey of 1,400 nurses found that 79 per cent worried about the cost of their housing and 76 per cent said it took more of their income than five years ago. The average salary of a London nurse is 24,500, 14 per cent lower in real terms than in 2010.

Mike Smith, a nurse working in south-west London, said: Some of our nurses are commuting daily from Hampshire and Sussex because they know they couldnt afford to live in London. Shaun Wright, a senior nurse working in east London, said: Excessive commutes to work are becoming more and more the norm. An 11-hour break between day shifts, required by working time regulations, is not real if three hours is spent commuting.

RCN London regional director Bernell Bussue said the survey of showed that the cost of housing is directly contributing to the regions recruitment crisis.

Todays call for action on housing was backed by NHS trusts including University College London Hospitals and Lewisham and Greenwich hospitals.

Ben Morrin, director of workforce at UCLH, said: Retaining and recruiting staff is the greatest workforce challenge Londons NHS faces.

Claire Champion, director of nursing at Lewisham & Greenwich, said: Sadly too many nurses feel a career in London is not a viable option for them, and are leaving in order to afford homes that suit their long-term needs.
E ager Londoners today told how they braved wind, hail and snow for two nights to secure bargain basement flights to Thailand.

STA travel offered return flights to Bangkok for only 49 to 49 customers on a first-come first-served basis.

It prompted scores of people from the capital armed with tents and umbrellas camped outside the travel store near Victoria Station.

More than 70 people were queuing in the small hours of this morning in the hope of securing the deal offered to the first 49 people through the doors at 9am this morning.

Londoners queue through hail and snow for TWO nights to bag 49 flights to Thailand

Wahid Khan, 30, made sure he was first in the queue after promising his girlfriend a luxury holiday after graduation.

The pair arrived at 11am on Tuesday morning to ensure they did not miss out.

The photo journalism student from Elephant and Castle said she was happy to go through their 46 hour ordeal to secure their bargain flights.

She said: Im just happy we were here first. I was going to pay for flights at the normal price when we saw this and said come on, lets go down there and camp.

We thought wed get here the night before but we read about the New Zealand offer last year where there were people camping then we though ok, lets take this seriously.

First in line: Wahid Khan / Nigel Howard

We were so happy to be first, I sat outside and read my book in the sun, it started off well.

The weather has taken a bit of a turn for the worse but when youve got a tent you can sit inside and feel quite smug, so its not too bad.

It will be the first time either of us has been to Thailand so were excited about seeing the beaches, the elephants, the culture and the food.

I promised my girlfriend a romantic holiday and Ive got her queuing for two nights, she has mentioned that to her friends so I think Im going to get a bit of stick about that.

Wahids girlfriend, Sarah, who has recently graduated with a degree in veterinary studies revealed the pair were in it for the long-haul.

She said: He was going to take me as a graduation present and this way well have more money to spent on nice things in Thailand.

Weve had hail, snow and now the tents leaking so its not been comfy.

"I don't know why I'm still here"

But she said she was happy to be first in the queue and didnt regret their decision.

Its actually been quite a fun experience because theres some nice people in the queue. she said.

I would do three nights if the deal was for Australia.

University College London student David Pepprah joined the queue last night in hope that people ahead of him may drop out - or he could secure one of a further 49 return tickets offered at a discounted price of 299.

The 20 year-old said last night: Its just the slightest chance that something might happen, return tickets to Bangkok normally cost 470.

I dont know why Im still here but Im hoping 10 people might fall ill and Ill get a ticket for 49.

Those who missed out in the queue were entered in a prize draw - with one person lucky enough to win a 49 ticket.
A group of mothers today told how they were banned from breastfeeding at a babies swimming class at a London hotel.

Women attending a mother and baby swim group at the Marriott Hotel Regents Park, in Swiss Cottage, were told on Tuesday that they were no longer allowed to breastfeed next to the pool, or allowed to use the poolside chairs to dress and undress their babies.

The women had been attending Water Babies swimming classes when they were told after a session that they could no longer tend to their children at the poolside.

After one mother, Bianca Zeff, posted about the group's treatment on social media, the hotel received a barrage of complaints from local mothers, and women threatened to stage a protest outside the hotel asserting their right to nurse their children in public.

As a result, the chain was forced to apologise, and told the women breastfeeding was welcome in "all areas of the hotel."

Ms Zeff, a full time mother to one-year-old Gabriel, and Noah, 5 told the Standard mothers pay 240 for a block of ten lessons for their children, but were forced to lay down towels on the tiles to change their babies after they were barred from using the chairs.

She said: "I just felt really frustrated and was a bit shocked.

"I thought it was outrageous. We may not be members of the fitness club, but we pay 240 for a 10 week term, and we're not allowed to spend five minutes sitting on a chair.

"We had to spread towels out onto the tiles."

Ms Zeff, 32, who lives in Belsize Park, said she believes the mothers were banned from using the chairs so that they were left with no place to breastfeed, and told the Standard she was "delighted" the hotel had apologised for imposing the temporary ban.

She said: "We need to stand up against the bullies.

"I'm not breastfeeding anymore, but I got it all the time when I was nursing my two boys.

"You think businesses would have learned by now but they clearly haven't."

In the Hampstead Mums Facebook group, women had planned to organise a "feed-in" protest, but it was called off after the hotel issued the statement.

Posting in the group, Liya Zlotnik said: "Disgraceful - and really stupid on the part of the business. The one thing I would not want to get on the wrong side of as a business is a mother's right to breastfeed anywhere....shame on them."

And Carole Humphris said: "I was told off two years ago for undressing/dressing my twins there. It's because hotel users get priority over lessons.

"I used to have to struggle up and down a dangerous staircase with wet , cold , slippery twins . That's why we stopped going and went to Royal Free pool instead."

Under the Equality Act, nursing mothers are given legal protection to allow them to breastfeed in public places.

In a statement the company said: "Marriott Hotels sincerely apologises for this situation.

"Following investigation we have learnt that an associate of the London Marriott Hotel in Regents Park erroneously gave the instruction to one of the groups who use the pool facilities to not allow mothers to breastfeed in the Fitness Club.

"This instruction is not hotel or company policy. We welcome breastfeeding mothers in all areas of the hotel.

"We will continue to look into the matter with the associate involved.

"Additionally, we will use this opportunity to reiterate to all our associates the local laws allowing guests and visitors to the hotel the right to breastfeed wherever they choose.

"We apologise for any distress or offence caused as a result of this unfortunate situation."

A Water Babies spokeswoman added: We have never, do not and never would discourage mums to breastfeed. On April 19, we were emailed by an employee at one our swimming venues that said poolside breastfeeding had to stop immediately.

We strongly disagreed with the decision which was taken to ease congestion poolside. In the interest of continuing to use the venue and to keep the poolside area clear, we encouraged our mums to use changing rooms, reception area or any other area of the venue.

We regret this incident took place and any distress caused. We will resume discussions with the venue to ensure there is no repeat of this isolated incident.
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F ive business people were taken to hospital after a carbon monoxide leak sparked the evacuation of a luxury Mayfair office block.

Hedge fund managers, art experts and property developers were all evacuated from the Grade II listed office at 9 Clifford Street at around 5pm yesterday after investigators found high levels of the dangerous gas, which is odourless, emanating from a faulty boiler.

Ten people fled a basement conference room after reporting a smell of chemicals before firefighters ordered a further 50 people to leave the 38million office block on the upmarket street just off Savile Row.

Other workers on the street were instructed by the Fire Brigade to stay inside their buildings or escape from any rear facing exits during the commotion.

Graham Chapman, who works across the street, saw the panic ensue as police closed off the road full of designer shops, tailors, gentlemans clubs and art galleries.

Five people were taken to hospital after the leak / Nigel Howard

He said: All the emergency services were here, fire brigades, ambulances and police who were quick to clampdown on the area.

There was something in the air, a very strong gas smell.

There were crowds of people being evacuated.

The block provides office space for fund managers, art experts and property developers / Nigel Howard

I wouldnt be surprised if they had said it was a terrorist attack on Savile Row, there was so much action going on.

A London Fire Brigade spokesman said that five people were taken to hospital for precautionary checks.

He said: Crews using specialist equipment found raised levels of carbon monoxide and carried out a sweep of the building to identify the source of the leak.

This was found to be a boiler in the basement which they isolated. The building was ventilated before being handed back to the owners.

Private equity investments firms LGT Impact Ventures and LJ Partnership, art recovery agency Art Recovery Group and property developer Tiger Developments are among the firms in the building.
P assenger planes flying into Heathrow were struck by lightning during a thunderstorm, according to shocked passengers.

Photos and video have been posted on social media of the strikes on Wednesday evening, with one photographer capturing the moment an aircraft approaching Heathrow appeared to be hit by a lightning bolt.

Catherine Mayer was travelling back from a research trip on an Icelandair flight from Reykjavik to Heathrow when the lightning struck.

Strike: Lightning hitting a plane approaching Heathrow / ARJ Photography

She said: "I was rushing back to campaign for the Women's Equality Party in the May 5 elections here. When we flew into the storm, my first thought was 'I can't die. I have to vote'.

"It was very obvious we were flying into a storm which is why I was able to take a photograph of the moment we entered the storm.

"But I didn't catch the moment of the lightning strike which was sudden and loud and very bright and unmistakeable for what it was.

"I think all the passengers were too shocked to react but when we landed everybody was talking about it.

"The captain came on the tannoy and said, laconically, that we 'may have noticed a lightning strike' and people laughed."

Another passenger flying into City Airport from Edinburgh said his plane was also hit at around 8.20pm.

Student Phillippa Burns, 21, was flying into Heathrow after a holiday in Prague. She said: "We were going though low clouds and I was just looking out the window, as you do and there was a huge light and crack.

"It was a huge lightning bolt but I couldn't tell where on the plane it hit."

Ms Burns, who said the strike felt like turbulence, added: "I'm not a very good flyer anyway and I think that started a mini panic attack. I just had to deal with it."

A spokesman for British Airways said of the Prague flight: "Flight BA857 landed safely, and will undergo inspection before it returns to service. The safety of our customers and crew is always our top priority.

"Lightning strikes are fairly common, and aircraft are designed to cope with them."
T his is the moment a group of youths surrounded an Audi in the middle of a busy east London street in a suspected gang attack.

Motorcyclist Allan Wilkins, 36, captured the dramatic footage in New Road, Aldgate, on his head cam as he rode home from work at 4pm on Friday.

The video shows six youths kick and try to force open the drivers door in full view of shoppers on both sides of the street.

A car door on the vehicles passenger side is open as traffic is brought to a standstill.

Surrounded: The group of youths swarm around the Audi in New Road / Allan Wilkins

Eventually a man in the drivers seat emerges and charges at the group, who quickly scramble in different directions away from the car.

The man pursues one of the youths down the street before he calmly walks back to the Audi.

While the car was left unattended, one man is seen leaning inside and grabbing something before he leaves the scene.

Mr Wilkins told the Standard he had no idea what the conflict was about but said he feared for his safety as he thought he could be just yards from a possible gang attack.

Attack: The group are filmed kicking the car and trying to force open the car door / Allan Wilkins

He said: I saw this commotion unfold in front of me and wasnt sure if it was a carjacking or some sort of gang warfare.

I had no idea what it was all about but I half expected gun and knives to be brought out. It is amazing how quickly the group dispersed after the man got out of the car.

It was very scary to witness. I was wondering whether I needed to abandon my bike and get out of the area if Id have seen a weapon thats what I would have done.

Dispersed: The group run off in different directions when a man emerges from the car / Allan Wilkins

Its concerning that this happened in the middle in a busy street in broad daylight.

Mr Wilkins, an NHS manager, said he didnt contact police because he felt it was a waste of time.

A spokeswoman for the Met said there was no record of the incident.
F ollowing our dreams, learning to speak up for ourselves and putting up with the daily annoyances of our nearest and dearest are the major themes in the five books shortlisted for Oscars Book Prize 2016.

Princess Beatrice, one of our six judges, declared herself particularly smitten by the empowered princess in Sir Lilypad, a story about a frog who goes in search of rescuing a princess, only to find that shes doing fine on her own. This story shows all girls can be princesses and I loved the fact the princess was wearing Converses, had her own sword and red hair, she said.

Together with our other judges Rebecca Nicolson, publisher and co-founder of Short Books, Nicky Dunne, chairman of Heywood Hill Books, Rupert Thomas, marketing director of Waitrose, and Oscars parents, Viveka Alvestrand and Evening Standard columnist James Ashton, Princess Beatrice spent a lively hour and a half choosing the final five.

The atmosphere grew heated as they argued over whether a fox who loses his guiding star should give way to a bear who gets bored by a hummingbird  even though theyre best friends  and whether cows who can climb trees stand a better chance than a mouse who can roar or an undersized but heroic frog known as Little Tad.

Of the 60 books originally submitted, a longlist of 12 were chosen with help from the Eveline Day Nursery in Wimbledon, where book-loving Oscar, who was three and a half when he died of a heart condition in December 2012, was at school.

The most important considerations in the annual hunt for the best pre-school book were not just the power of the story and its illustrations, but whether Oscar himself, to whom this prize is a tribute, would have enjoyed them.

The final five are Sir Lilypad by Anna Kemp and Sara Ogilvie, The Lion Inside by Rachel Bright and Jim Field, Hector And Hummingbird by Nicholas John Frith, The Cow Who Climbed A Tree by Gemma Merino and The Fox And The Star by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

To celebrate the announcement of the shortlist, the first 50 London nurseries or primary schools to email oscarsbookprize@standard.co.uk will receive a complimentary set of the five books.

THE COW WHO CLIMBED A TREE

by Gemma Merino (Macmillan): I loved the great splodges of colour and how Tina struck out from her snarky sisters. Great for anyone with older siblings. James Ashton

THE FOX AND THE STAR

by Coralie Bickford- Smith (Particular/Penguin): The publisher should be applauded for producing such a beautiful object with an extremely moving story. Nicky Dunne

HECTOR AND HUMMINGBIRD

by Nicholas John Frith (Scholastic): This explains that its OK to be annoyed by someone you love. Good for both adults and children. Rebecca Nicolson

SIR LILYPAD

by Anna Kemp and Sara Ogilvie (Simon & Schuster): Hugely expressive illustrations and I wish the frog would defend me. Viveka Alvestrand

THE LION INSIDE

by Rachel Bright and Jim Field (Orchard/Hachette): This book teaches children to be brave, I loved the heart of it. Rupert Thomas

The winner will be announced on May 23, when culture minister Ed Vaizey will make a speech and Princess Beatrice will award the 5,000 Waitrose-sponsored prize.
P assengers today told of mid-air drama as their planes were struck by lightning on descent into Heathrow.

Holidaymakers on at least three flights reported the shocking moment the strikes hit the aircraft during a thunderstorm yesterday evening.

Passengers described a huge crack and a white flash of light illuminating their planes.

The dramatic lightning strikes were captured on camera by Londoners on the ground and shared on social media.

Impact: The moment the lightning struck a plane as it came in to land at Heathrow

Liz Dobson, 35, from Greenwich, her husband Alexander Smith, 40, a consultant, were on Icelandair flight 454 from Keflavik, Iceland when it was hit at about 8pm.

Mrs Dobson, head of programme funding at charity Farm Africa, said: It came out of the blue. There was a really loud bang and white flash  not really what you want on a plane.

It really did sound like something hit the plane.

We could see the flash but it was on the opposite side of the plane to me. The lightning hit the wing.

Mid-air drama: Alexander Smith and Liz Dobson were caught up in the ordeal

Everyone was just wowed. There was a sharp intake of breath.

When we landed the pilot said Im sure you noticed we got hit by lightning but dont worry planes are made to withstand that kind of thing.

I travel really regularly but thats the first time in a lightning strike. Im quite relaxed about it. I think my husband was a little bit more shaken up by it.

Mr Smith, who was returning from a weeks holiday with his wife, added: There was a huge crack sound followed by a flash of light and some sparks on the right hand side of the plane. It was a bit of a shock to a lot of the passengers, but we landed safely so its all good.

Catherine Mayer, co-founder of the Womens Equality Party, who was also on the same flight, said: When we flew into the storm, my first thought was I cant die. I have to vote.

The moment of the lightning strike which was sudden and loud and very bright and unmistakeable for what it was.

I think all the passengers were too shocked to react but when we landed everybody was talking about it.

The captain came on the loud speakers and said, laconically, that we may have noticed a lightning strike and people laughed.

Another passenger flying into City Airport from Edinburgh said on social media his plane was also hit at around 8.20pm.

While British Airways said its flight BA857 from Prague was also hit as it descended into Heathrow.

Student Phillippa Burns, 21, who was on the flight said: We were going though low clouds and I was just looking out the window, as you do and there was a huge light and crack.

It was a huge lightning bolt but I couldnt tell where on the plane it hit.

Ms Burns, who said the strike felt like turbulence, added: Im not a very good flyer anyway and I think that started a mini panic attack. I just had to deal with it.

A spokesman for British Airways said: Flight BA857 landed safely, and will undergo inspection before it returns to service. The safety of our customers and crew is always our top priority.

Lightning strikes are fairly common, and aircraft are designed to cope with them.

Londons tallest building The Shard was also reportedly struck by lightning in yesterdays storm.
Z ac Goldsmith today pledged to put up electronic signs to warn the public about toxic air levels.

He pledged that, if elected Mayor next week, he would install the signs at key transport hotspots in the capital to advise how bad pollution was in the area.

Transport for London would also provide smog alerts as part of a London journey-planner app and website.

Ive spent my whole adult life campaigning to clean up our environment, said the Tory MP for Richmond Park.

When I promise to make London the greenest and cleanest city in the world, its not just a slogan thought up to snatch a few green second-preference votes.

His Labour rival Sadiq Khan said he would also consider public signs and tore into Mayor Boris Johnson, saying it was shocking that the Tories have allowed Londons air to get so polluted.

Ill look at introducing a new text warning system, as well as roadside signs across the city to alert Londoners when the air is dangerously polluted, added the Tooting MP.

Ill also put a new focus on using social media, radio and TV broadcasts to alert Londoners when our air is dangerous.

TODO: define component type apester

A public sign, showing air quality levels, on the US Embassy in Beijing is credited with forcing the Chinese authorities to take stronger action against pollution.

The issue has shot up the agenda after it was revealed that more than 9,000 people a year die in London as a result of nitrogen dioxide and tiny particulate pollution.

Sian Berry, the Green candidate for Mayor, supports innovative ways of providing public displays of real-time pollution data on the streets. Lib-Dem contender Caroline Pidgeon said: Signs are all well and good, but people will be still be travelling in poor air quality.
S adiq Khan put housing centre stage today with a pledge to bring in a charter for good development, as the mayoral campaign entered its final week.

With just seven days to go to polling day, the Labour frontrunner said he would change planning rules to boost the number of affordable homes.

He will adopt the Good Development Standard set out by community activists London Citizens ahead of a 6,000-strong assembly organised by the group at the Olympic Park tonight.

Mr Khan said he would rewrite the London Plan  the Mayors planning bible  to ensure that at least 50 per cent of development on public land is genuinely affordable. He would also expect big developers to share more information on the profits they expect to raise from projects. Other asks he has signed up to include giving Londoners priority on obtaining affordable homes  already a Labour pledge  and a right of return for existing residents on estate regeneration schemes, a proposal pushed by Tory candidate Zac Goldsmith.

Mr Khan said: As Mayor I will adopt a Good Development Standard for London that will ensure we build as many genuinely affordable homes as possible.

The new standard will ensure that Londoners get first dibs on new homes, rather than overseas investors, while requiring greater transparency around the planning process.

Crucially, it will ensure that local people are properly consulted on any new developments in their area. Its all part of my plan to finally get a grip on Londons housing crisis after eight years of Tory failure.

According to a new Labour analysis, it would be cheaper to live in a four-star hotel in two thirds of European capitals than to rent the average London flat.

With the average rent in the capital now 1,676 per month  55 a night  visitors could stay in the plush Assenzio Hotel in Prague, the Best Western Plus in Paris or the Nordic Hotel Domicil in Berlin.

The London Citizens event is one of the highlights of the election race, with thousands of members putting their asks on housing, jobs and other key areas to the main contenders.

TODO: define component type apester

As the campaign entered its final days, Mr Goldsmith admitted he faced the fight of my life to beat the Tooting MP to City Hall. He claimed the election would come down to just 1,000 voters in each of Londons 33 local authorities  the number that could have changed the result in 2012  and said he would be campaigning tirelessly for every vote over the next seven days.

The Richmond Park and North Kingston MP claimed the capitals future prosperity was at stake if Labour won the contest, as many expect, as it would put Jeremy Corbyns hands on the lever of power.

He said: In one weeks time Londoners will decide between my action plan for Greater London, which will freeze council tax and keep the economy strong, or Jeremy Corbyns hands on the levers of power thanks to his man in London Sadiq Khan, putting up taxes and our city grinding to a standstill.

The election will come down to one thousand voters in every borough, it could not be closer. Ive got seven days to campaign tirelessly and fight for every last vote. Its the fight of my life and Londons future prosperity is at stake.

Mr Goldsmith was out leafleting with some 30 Tory MPs in St Johns Wood this morning, before touring Leadenhall Market in the City with Boris Johnson later in the day.
F ormer Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has been confronted by an angry Labour MP in an anti-semitism row.

John Mann, MP for Bassetlaw, confronted Mr Livingstone while he was on a telephone interview with LBC radio after the former mayor had said Adolf Hitler had originally supported Zionism by supporting moving Jewish people to Israel.

In a video uploaded to Twitter by BBC political correspondent Vicki Young, Mr Mann can be seen calling Mr Livingstone a "Nazi apologist" along with accusing him of "rewriting history".

The Moment John Mann came face to face with Ken Livingstone

Mr Mann urges Mr Livingstone to go back and "check what Hitler did" before telling the former mayor: "You've lost it mate, you need help."

He continues to berate Mr Livingstone and says his comments were "factually wrong racist remarks".

Meanwhile, LBC presenter James O'Brien is on the phone to the former Mayor of London.

After first being approached by Mr Mann, Mr Livingstone tells the presenter: "I've got a violent MP threatening me."

Ken Livingstone calls Hitler a Zionist on BBC Radio London

As the line in the LBC studio goes quiet, Mr O'Brien tells listeners: "I'm going to stay with this just to make sure Ken is alright."

TODO: define component type apester

The argument between the Labour MP and the former Mayor of London can then be heard on a muffled line.

Shortly after the row, Mr Livingstone was suspended by Labour "for bringing the Party into disrepute".

Earlier today, Mr Livingstone told BBC Radio London he had never heard anyone in the party say anything anti-Semitic, before adding: Lets remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel.

"He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

There has been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-Semitic."

The comments led to Labours current mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan calling for him to be kicked out of the party.

Mr Khan tweeted: Ken Livingstones comments are appalling and inexcusable. There must be no place for this in our party.
K en Livingstone today faced calls for him to be expelled from Labour after he plunged the party into a new anti-Semitism row.

The former Mayor of London - who was today suspended by the Party - spoke of a well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby in comments that immediately provoked a wave of criticism.

He said Adolf Hitler was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

Labours current mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan led calls for him to be kicked out of the party.

Ken Livingstone was later confronted by a furious John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw.

Mr Khan tweeted: Ken Livingstones comments are appalling and inexcusable. There must be no place for this in our party.

Mr Livingstone deepened the crisis by telling the Evening Standard later that he stood by his comments. He said defiantly: Whats wrong with the remarks I made? Is it insensitive to look at history?

But his remarks caused outrage among MPs and heaped embarrassment on party leader Jeremy Corbyn  already on the rack for failing to crack down on perceived anti-Semitism in Labours ranks.

The row comes less than 24 hours after Labour MP Naz Shah was suspended over offensive social media posts.

Ken Levingstone interviewed by LBC Radio

Mr Livingstone told BBC Radio London he had never heard anyone in the party say anything anti-Semitic. Then he went on: Lets remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel.

"He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

There has been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-Semitic.

I had to put up with 35 years of this, being denounced because back in 1981 we were campaigning to say the Labour Party should recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Labour MP Jess Phillips immediately tweeted that Mr Livingstone must be suspended from the Labour Party.

Ex-frontbencher John Woodcock said: Ken Livingstone must be suspended for this. He must actively be seeking suspension and notoriety with these remarks.

"Well said Sadiq. Livingstone chairs Labours international policy commission. This cannot go on.

TODO: define component type apester

Labour MP John Mann reportedly told Mr Livingstone: You are a f***ing disgrace. Frontbencher Chris Bryant said in the Commons: Anti-Semitism is wrong. And yes I am talking to you Ken Livingstone.

MP Wes Streeting, who wants the party to take action to stamp out anti-Semitic behaviour, said: Ken Livingstone has form on anti-Semitism and has been tolerated for far too long. He should be suspended immediately.

Decent Labour members need to decide how to respond to anti-Semitism within our ranks. Silence is complicity. We must all speak out.

Ex-frontbencher Stella Creasy tweeted: Not in my name #kenlivingstone  he should be suspended immediately without equivocation. Our #labourfamily has no place for such bigotry.

A top UK Jewish figure today accu- sed Mr Corbyn of lacking the will to tackle Labours anti-Semitic demons.

President of the Board of Deputies Jonathan Arkush told the Standard: If a Labour MP was to propose, say, the transportation of black people back to Africa for example, I just cant imagine the shock, the outrage, if that person was allowed to remain in the party a split second.

The full exchange Vanessa Feltz: You will have seen yourself written about in the Telegraph today. It says others are furious about the conduct of Mr Corbyns friend and allie Ken Livingstone who said Naz Shahs comments were not anti-semitic. Now shes profusely apologised for them, said she made a mistake. If she has apologised for them, presumably she acknowledges that they were anti-semitic. Do you still maintain they were not? Ken Livingstone: Shes a deep critic of Israel and its policies and her remarks were over the top but shes not anti-semitic. Ive been in the Labour Party for 47 years and I have never heard anyone say anything anti-semitic. I have heard a lot of criticism of the state of Israel but I have never heard someone be anti-semitic. VF: She talked about relocating Israel to America, she talked about what Hitler did being legal and she talked about the Jews rallying, and she used the word Jews not Israelis or Israel. You didnt find that to be anti-semitic? KL: Its completely over the top. Its not anti-semitic. Lets remember when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews. But the simple fact in all of this is that Naz made those comments at a time when there is brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians and there is one stark fact that no one in the British media ever reports. In almost all these conflicts, the death toll is usually between 60 to 100 Palestians killed for every Israeli. Any other country doing that would be accused of war crimes but it is like we have a double standard about the policy of the Israeli Government. VF: Some people will say that there is a double standard operating in the Labour Party and whats really a flagrant kind of anti-semitism, a deeply embedded systemic anti-semitism, is hidden behind a mask of anti-zionism or criticism of Israeli foreign policy, but thats not what it really is. Its really as John Rentoul said, using a phrase that I would hesitate to use but he used this morning. He said: There are Jew haters, long-term Jew haters and they can use criticism of Israel as a cloak behind which to mask that sentiment. KL: There has been a very well orchestrated campaign by the Israel Lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-Semitic. I had to put up with 35 years of this, being denounced because back in 1981 we were campaigning to say the Labour Party should recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation. VF: What do you think over the top really means? When I say was it anti-semitic and you say no it wasnt categorically no, anyone who says it was is a liar but it was over the top, over the top of what? KL: If you think of anti-semitism and racism as exactly the same thing and criticising e.g the government of South Africa, which is pretty unpleasant and corrupt, it doesnt make me a racist and it doesnt make me anti-semitic.

It reinforces the regrettable impression and perception that the leader of the party somehow seems to lack the political will to face up to the anti-Semitic demons in the party.

Mr Khans spokesman confirmed the mayoral candidate felt Mr Livingstone should be forced out of the party, though due process should be followed.

Mr Livingstone was thrown out of the party in 2000 for standing as an independent against official mayoral candidate Frank Dobson. He won his first term by a landslide and was allowed to rejoin in time to stand for re-election.

But Team Khan pointedly excluded the former Mayor from being involved in their campaign because they viewed him as a liability. Labour peer Lord Levy, a former fund-raiser for the party, has said it has a serious problem with anti-Semitism.

Labour put out a statement last night saying Jeremy Corbyn and Naz Shah have mutually agreed that she is administratively suspended.

While Mr Arkush said suspension was right, he added that Mr Corbyn needed to be more pro-active in rooting out broader anti-Semitism. He said: I am waiting for any clear steer, any lead, any statesmanlike, measured approach to be forthcoming from the leader.

Why, the Jewish community is asking, does this seem to be so difficult? Why on earth is it taking so long?

Mr Corbyns spokesman has emphasised that the leader has consistently condemned anti-Semitism and all forms of racism.

Meanwhile, Ms Shah told MPs: The words that I used caused upset and hurt to the Jewish community and I deeply regret that. Anti-Semitism is racism, full stop.

But it failed to kill the row, with Lord Levy saying: The lack of sensitivity when an MP talks about transportation of the largest Jewish community in the world...it just shows such ignorance.

He added that it had taken too long for the leadership to act and that Mr Corbyns team had dithered.
K en Livingstone was today suspended from Labour in disgrace after plunging the party into a new anti-Semitism storm.

The former London Mayor sparked fury by claiming that Adolf Hitler was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

During a surreal few hours in Westminster, Jeremy Corbyn's close ally also spoke of a well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby in comments that immediately provoked a wave of criticism.

A Labour spokesman said: Ken Livingstone has been suspended by the Labour Party, pending an investigation, for bringing the Party into disrepute.

Suspended from Labour: Ken Livingstone (Anthony Devlin/PA ) / Anthony Devlin/PA

He was later confronted by furious Labour MP John Mann, who branded him a Nazi apologist and accused him of "rewriting history".

A Labour spokesman said Mr Mann, MP for Bassetlaw, has now been summoned to Chief Whip Rosie Winterton to explain his actions.

Mr Livingstone's suspension came after Labour's current mayoral candidate, Sadiq Khan, led calls for him to be kicked out of the party.

Ken Levingstone interviewed by LBC Radio

Mr Khan tweeted: Ken Livingstones comments are appalling and inexcusable. There must be no place for this in our party.

Labour MP Jess Phillips was among the first to call for Mr Livingstone's suspension frpom the party on Twitter.

Ex-frontbencher John Woodcock said: Ken Livingstone must be suspended for this. He must actively be seeking suspension and notoriety with these remarks.

"Well said Sadiq. Livingstone chairs Labours international policy commission. This cannot go on.

The row comes amid mounting pressure on Labour leader Mr Corbyn to stamp out perceived anti-Semitism in his party's ranks.

Mr Livingstone's comments came less than 24 hours after Labour MP Naz Shah was suspended over offensive social media posts.

Mr Livingstone told BBC Radio London he had never heard anyone in the party say anything anti-Semitic. Then he went on: Lets remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel.

Ken Livingstone calls Hitler a Zionist on BBC Radio London

"He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

There has been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-Semitic.

I had to put up with 35 years of this, being denounced because back in 1981 we were campaigning to say the Labour Party should recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

The full exchange Vanessa Feltz: You will have seen yourself written about in the Telegraph today. It says others are furious about the conduct of Mr Corbyns friend and allie Ken Livingstone who said Naz Shahs comments were not anti-semitic. Now shes profusely apologised for them, said she made a mistake. If she has apologised for them, presumably she acknowledges that they were anti-semitic. Do you still maintain they were not? Ken Livingstone: Shes a deep critic of Israel and its policies and her remarks were over the top but shes not anti-semitic. Ive been in the Labour Party for 47 years and I have never heard anyone say anything anti-semitic. I have heard a lot of criticism of the state of Israel but I have never heard someone be anti-semitic. VF: She talked about relocating Israel to America, she talked about what Hitler did being legal and she talked about the Jews rallying, and she used the word Jews not Israelis or Israel. You didnt find that to be anti-semitic? KL: Its completely over the top. Its not anti-semitic. Lets remember when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews. But the simple fact in all of this is that Naz made those comments at a time when there is brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians and there is one stark fact that no one in the British media ever reports. In almost all these conflicts, the death toll is usually between 60 to 100 Palestians killed for every Israeli. Any other country doing that would be accused of war crimes but it is like we have a double standard about the policy of the Israeli Government. VF: Some people will say that there is a double standard operating in the Labour Party and whats really a flagrant kind of anti-semitism, a deeply embedded systemic anti-semitism, is hidden behind a mask of anti-zionism or criticism of Israeli foreign policy, but thats not what it really is. Its really as John Rentoul said, using a phrase that I would hesitate to use but he used this morning. He said: There are Jew haters, long-term Jew haters and they can use criticism of Israel as a cloak behind which to mask that sentiment. KL: There has been a very well orchestrated campaign by the Israel Lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-Semitic. I had to put up with 35 years of this, being denounced because back in 1981 we were campaigning to say the Labour Party should recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation. VF: What do you think over the top really means? When I say was it anti-semitic and you say no it wasnt categorically no, anyone who says it was is a liar but it was over the top, over the top of what? KL: If you think of anti-semitism and racism as exactly the same thing and criticising e.g the government of South Africa, which is pretty unpleasant and corrupt, it doesnt make me a racist and it doesnt make me anti-semitic.

Mr Livingstone was thrown out of the party in 2000 for standing as an independent against official mayoral candidate Frank Dobson. He won his first term by a landslide and was allowed to rejoin in time to stand for re-election.

But Team Khan pointedly excluded the former Mayor from being involved in their campaign because they viewed him as a liability. Labour peer Lord Levy, a former fund-raiser for the party, has said it has a serious problem with anti-Semitism.

Mr Corbyns spokesman has emphasised that the leader has consistently condemned anti-Semitism and all forms of racism.

Mr Livingstone's suspension means he will not be eligible to seek any office in the party and cannot be nominated for any panel of prospective candidates.

Labour's rules add that: "The member concerned will not be eligible to attend any CLP (Constituency Labour Party) meeting other than to fulfil the requirement to participate in ballots".
A top UK Jewish figure today accused Jeremy Corbyn of lacking the will to tackle Labours anti-Semitic demons after he hesitated to suspend an MP who made offensive comments.

President of the Board of Deputies Jonathan Arkush said if someone made similar comments about the transportation of black people back to Africa they would be kicked out in a split second.

His outspoken attack comes as a Labour peer said the party had an anti-Semitism problem, while a major donor said it had become a plague.

Labour suspended MP Naz Shah pending an investigation over social media posts suggesting a solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict would be transporting Israeli Jews to the US.

Another post, which like the first was made before she was an MP, saw Ms Shah compare Israels actions to those of Hitler in Nazi Germany.

Initially Mr Corbyn only reprimanded Ms Shah, who apologised in an article and in the Commons, but following pressure from his shadow cabinet and David Cameron he went further.

Mr Arkush said: If a Labour MP was to propose, say, the transportation of black people back to Africa for example, I just cant imagine the shock, the outrage, if that person was allowed to remain in the party a split second.

It reinforces the regrettable impression and perception that the leader of the party somehow seems to lack the political will to face up to the anti-Semitic demons in the party.

Labour put out a statement last night saying Jeremy Corbyn and Naz Shah have mutually agreed that she is administratively suspended.

TODO: define component type apester

While Mr Arkush said suspension was right, he added that Mr Corbyn needed to be more pro-active rooting out broader anti-Semitism.

He said: I am waiting for any clear steer, any lead, any statesman-like measured approach to be forthcoming from the leader.

Why, the Jewish community is asking, does this seem to be so difficult? Why on earth is it taking so long?

Mr Corbyns spokesman has emphasised that he has consistently condemned anti-Semitism and all forms of racism.

Ms Shah told MPs: The words that I used caused upset and hurt to the Jewish community, and I deeply regret that. Anti-Semitism is racism, full stop.

But it failed to kill the row, with Labour peer Lord Levy telling BBC Newsnight: I do think that its a serious problem.

The lack of sensitivity when an MP talks about transportation of the largest Jewish community in the world, I think it just shows such ignorance.

He added that it had taken too long for the leadership to act and Mr Corbyns team had dithered.

Rabbi Baroness Neuberger, a crossbench peer, said: Labour does have a problem with anti-Semitism. Thats not to say that other parties havent...but Labour has a very particular problem, and a particular problem at the moment.

Party donor David Abrahams told Jewish News: I have been appalled by the growth of anti-Semitism in the party. This is a plague that has to be stamped out.

Shadow education secretary Lucy Powell today said Ms Shahs posts had been appalling and abhorrent and admitted the party had to do more, but defended Labour actions so far.

She told BBC radio: Sometimes I know people want us to act immediately but sometimes it does take some time to establish the facts.
A virus of anti-Semitism has infected the Labour Party, Boris Johnson said tonight as a bitter row continued in the wake of Ken Livingstone's suspension.

The Mayor of London waded into the increasingly fractious dispute hours after Labour took action against his predecessor for bringing the party into disrepute.

Mr Johnson told LBC radio: "There is plainly some sort of virus of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party that needs to be addressed."

He also sought to implicate the party's mayoral hopeful Sadiq Khan in the dispute. Earlier today Mr Khan was among the first major Labour figures to call for Mr Livingstone's suspension.

Feud: Boris Johnson laid into his former political opponent / Getty

The mayor, who leaves office next month, said: "There is an ideological continuum between Ken Livingstone about Israel and the position of Jeremy Corbyn and indeed the views of their candidate for London mayor, Sadiq Khan.

"They are now basically captured by the old Livingstonian mafia, the machine, the London Labour Party - that's who's running the Labour Party now. That's what the Corbynistas are.

Ken Livingstone suspended by the Labour party in anti-Semitism row

"The reality is that they have some pretty tough views about Israel and if you listen to some of the things that are being said about Israel and what should happen to Israel, in my view, it shades into anti-Semitism."

A storm erupted around Mr Livingstone today after he defended remarks about Israel posted by Bradford MP Naz Shah on social media.

He sparked fury with a claim that Adolf Hitler was "supporting Zionism" in the early 1930s before he "went mad and ended up killing six million Jews".

Mr Khan was among those to immediately call for his suspension, tweeting that the comments are appalling and inexcusable. There must be no place for this in our party.

Ken Livingstone calls Hitler a Zionist on BBC Radio London

Tonight a spokeswoman added: Sadiq has led the criticism of the Labour Party leadership for failing to take proper action to root out anti-Semitism.

Sadiq has consistently spoken out against anti-Semitism and finds Ken Livingstones comments appalling and indefensible.

TODO: define component type apester

"He thinks it's right that Ken Livingstone has been suspended - a course of action he called for.
A group of former South Yorkshire Police officers have allegedly been told they did a good job as the force faces criticism following the Hillsborough inquests.

The retired officers, who served in the 1980s, were said to have been told they had tried to act with dignity while bile and hatred had been directed towards the force.

The message from Rick Naylor, secretary of the South Yorkshire National Association of Retired Police Officers, appeared on the organisation's website although it was not intended to be made public, according to the BBC.

A jury found at the conclusion of a two-year inquest on Tuesday that the 96 victims of the Sheffield stadium disaster in 1989 were unlawfully killed and Mr Naylor said former officers had "great sympathy" for the families.

However he said members would be feeling "sore, angry and disheartened" by the criticism and highlighted the force's success in catching the Yorkshire Ripper.

He added: "You did a good job - we all did.

The message, which has since been removed, said: "Mistakes were made and we would all like to turn the clock back.

"There were many examples of outstanding actions and selflessness by police officers on that tragic day as they did their best to deal with the disaster unfolding before them."

Mr Naylor said the comments were not meant to offend anyone.

A second statement co-signed by the group's chairman, Mick Brookfield, said: "Retired officers from South Yorkshire Police have always had great sympathy for the grief of the families and friends of the 96 who so tragically lost their lives in the Hillsborough disaster.

Today, as always, our thoughts are with them. We sincerely hope that they have gained some comfort from the inquests.

"We are proud of the manner in which our members have volunteered to assist with the process. Many are now elderly and in failing health; without their co-operation the proceedings would not have been possible."

South Yorkshire Police Chief Constable David Crompton was suspended on Wednesday amid an outcry over the handling of the Hillsborough inquest and the polices response.

South Yorkshire Police chief suspended over Hillsborough findings

The suspension came after the force came under criticism in the House of Commons.

In a statement released on Wednesday, South Yorkshire Police said it had not sought to defend its failures in the inquest, but added: "Nevertheless, these failures had to be put into the context of other contributory factors."

Additional reporting by Press Association.
A n online campaign to save the life of a man suffering from a rare form of leukaemia has just days left to hit its 400,000 target.

Kate Brandon, 33, has so far raised more than 250,000 towards the costs of her husband Mike's treatment at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mrs Brandon has launched the "#donate4Mike" campaign on social media to raise the money for her 31-year-old husband's treatment, which is due to begin next Tuesday.

His treatment is funded by the university but the medical costs associated with its administration must be self-funded.

It is the second time the couple, from Bristol, have appealed directly to the public for help after Mr Brandon was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in 2014 - a month after proposing to his now wife.

A matching donor was found and Mr Brandon underwent a successful transplant on his 30th birthday.

Last summer the couple married but sadly Mr Brandon relapsed at Easter - and the cancer was spreading at an aggressive rate.

In a video posted on their gofundme page, Mrs Brandon said: "I am so grateful for every moment we have had together in the last two years.

"You feel so much closer to life when you are in this situation and although some bits have been really rough the good times are so, so special."

She told supporters: "I know with your help we can get through it again. We launched the campaign and it has been such a strong start.

"It is just a pleasure to see my Facebook and Twitter account explode with love and affection.

"Please share this #donate4Mike page. Please donate as much as you can or simply change your profile page to our logo or just spread the word. Tell your friends, tell your family.

"I'm sure you can all imagine losing the most important person to you, so please help me combat what we are facing. I know with your help we can get him where he needs to be."

Mrs Brandon said any extra money raised from her fundraising page will be donated to the Bristol Royal Infirmary haematology oncology unit.

Additional reporting by the Press Association.
T he last paediatrician in the Syrian city of Aleppo was today feared to have been killed in overnight air strikes that claimed at least 20 lives.

Opposition leaders blamed President Assads regime for the attack on a field hospital and nearby buildings in the rebel-held al-Sukkari district of the contested city.

The air strikes just before midnight yesterday came as the UN envoy for Syria begged the US and Russia to help revive peace talks and a ceasefire which he said hangs by a thread.

Syrias chief opposition negotiator Mohammed Alloush said the latest violence by government forces shows that the environment is not conducive to any political action.

They struck a well-known field hospital in the rebel-held district of al-Sukkari in Aleppo. The dead was said to include the last paediatrician in the city, Dr Wassim, as well as a dentist.

The head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 20 people were killed, including three children, and that the hospital was completely destroyed.

The Syrian Civil Defence, a volunteer first-responders agency, whose members went to the scene of the attack, said the al-Quds hospital and adjacent buildings were struck in four consecutive air strikes.

The agency, also known as the White Helmets, gave a slightly higher toll, saying 22 were killed. It said there were still victims buried under the rubble and that rescue work was continuing.Among those killed were three of the hospitals medical staff, they said.

Mr Alloush, who was one of the leading negotiators of the opposition in the Geneva talks, described the air strikes as one of the latest war crimes of Assads government.

Whoever carries out these massacres needs a war tribunal and a court of justice to be tried for his crimes. He does not need a negotiating table, he told the AP in a telephone interview. Now, the environment is not conducive for any political action.

The February 27 ceasefire has been fraying in the past weeks as casualty figures from violence mount, particularly in Aleppo and across northern Syria. Air strikes earlier this week also targeted a training centre for the Syrian Civil Defence, killing five of its team in rural Aleppo.

Since April 19, nearly 200 people have died, including at least 44 in an air strike on a market place in rebel-held area in northern Idlib province, as well as dozens of civilians in government-held areas from rebel shelling.

The UN envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, briefed the UN Security Council via video-conference about the largely stalled indirect talks between the Western- and Saudi-backed opposition and envoys from Assads government, which has the backing of Moscow.

He said that, after 60 days, the cessation of hostilities agreed to by both sides hangs by a thread.

I really fear that the erosion of the cessation is unravelling the fragile consensus around a political solution, carefully built over the last year, he said in his council briefing obtained by the Associated Press.

Now I see parties reverting to the language of a military solution or military option. We must ensure that they do not see that as a solution or an option.
B ritish soldiers have flown to West Africa to help step up the fight against elephant poachers.

A 14-strong team, including a tracker from the Royal Gurkha Rifles, will train around 60 men and women in anti-poaching patrols. Led by Northern Ireland-based 2 Rifles, and supported by specialist staff, they will be deployed for six weeks in the Minkebe region, a large area of Gabon with rainforests and few roads.

They will train park rangers and trackers in ambush drills, weapon handling and safety, live firing, navigation skills, patrolling techniques, evidence gathering, first aid, injury prevention in the jungle, fitness and teamwork, and lessons on Gabonese law and rules of engagement.

The British Army will be supporting the Gabon National Parks Agency and will also impart expertise in sharing operational experience, surveillance and analysis, and the collection and use of criminal intelligence to support the prosecution of poaching gangs.

Armed poachers are not only targeting elephants, but also villages and park rangers. Defence minister Julian Brazier said: We have put our full support behind the Gabonese government in the battle against the scourge of ivory poaching.

The UK mission, which started last week and follows a similar deployment last August, will be carried out alongside a US military team, and in partnership with the Gabonese government, the Prince of Waless Charitable Foundation and the Department of Environment.
T he first elephants I knew about were fictitious.

Every night, as my grandfather tucked me in, I would hear how Vladimir and Evgeny would get stuck in mud holes and tramp around the African forests having adventures.

It was how my grandfather, a leading Soviet biologist, instilled in me a love of wildlife.

A few years later, accompanying him on a government trip to Africa, I came face to face with the real thing. Two hours from Nairobi, I saw from my car a small herd congregated around a waterhole.

My grandfather explained that all the adults were female, except for two young males.

He named them: Vladimir and Evgeny.

As a 14-year-old I couldnt help but be moved by the sight of the young bulls playing and sheltering under their parents. Vladimir and Evgeny were young enough then to still be alive now, and they may well be.

When I saw that herd aged 14, there were about 1.2 million elephants in Africa. Three quarters of those have since been hunted for their tusks  and the rate of slaughter in the last decade has been increasing.

But as all supporters of elephant conservation know, the numbers suggest otherwise.

They could be trumpeting around the African bush. But its more likely all that remains of them is an intricately carved trinket on a Chinese mantelpiece.

When I saw that herd aged 14, there were about 1.2 million elephants in Africa. Three quarters of those, including most likely many of the elephants I saw that day, have since been hunted for their tusks  and the rate of slaughter in the last decade has been increasing.

This is why it is so important that the Giants Club inaugural summit  a unique gathering of African heads of state, corporate leaders, philanthropists and scientists dedicated to ending the illegal killing of elephants and safeguarding the landscapes in which they roam  starts tomorrow.

Kenya Environment Cabinet Secretary Judi Wakhungu: We can win this fight by uniting against poachers When I took office I remember people telling me it was impossible to combat the poaching crisis in Kenya, the land I was born in and love like no other. They said those killing elephants for their ivory were too organised. The criminal cartels who backed them too powerful. The demand for ivory products in Asia too insatiable. I was determined that on my watch Kenya would prove them wrong. In the past few years my ministry has done just that. The rangers in the Kenyan Wildlife Service and our conservancies, those brave men and women who patrol  often for days on end  to guard our wildlife, have taken the fight to those who wish to harm our precious species. We have strengthened our anti-wildlife trade laws so that they are now among the strictest in the world. Our ports are actively seeking and intercepting shipments of ivory. Trafficking gangs are being tracked and arrested. The fight against poaching may not be over but the tide has turned. What Kenya has shown is that with government commitment, and a president dedicated to this cause, we can overcome. That is why the Giants Club summit this week is so important. Poachers heed no borders. Nor do elephants. It is only by uniting with other elephant range states committed to combating the illegal wildlife trade, and by uniting with the conservationists who share this objective, that we can achieve a continent-wide action plan. That is the objective of these two days. That is what we will be working to begin. Africa uniting and showing, together, that in this struggle against criminal gangs only motivated by greed and avarice, it is Africa that will overcome.

Never before have so many African leaders gathered on African soil with the express aim of addressing the poaching crisis.

President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya is hosting and will be joined by fellow Giants Club members President Ali Bongo of Gabon, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and senior representatives of President Ian Khama of Botswana.

These four countries are home to more than half of Africas remaining savannah elephants, and three quarters of its forest elephants.

Barack Obama is to send a message of support delivered by deputy secretary of state Heather Higginbottom.

President John Magufuli of Tanzania is sending high-level delegations.

Helen Clark, head of the UN Development Programme, and Ibrahim Thiaw of the UN Environment Programme, will attend, with Jorge Rios of the wildlife and forest crime programme at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

I am delighted that the nation of my birth, Russia, is attending, as is France, whose environment minister will speak at the event.

Representatives of global finance and philanthropy include Richard Branson and Jody Allen, president of the Paul G Allen Family Foundation set up with her brother Paul, Microsofts co-founder.

African musicians including pop band Sauti Sol will perform at a gala dinner.

Campaigning: Evening Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev with President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya / Valentina Morriconi

The Giants Club was founded on the conviction that no nation, UN body or NGO can save elephants by acting alone.

By bringing together a wide range of like-minded folk with an interest in preserving wildlife for future generations, the club aims to protect 50 per cent of Africas elephants by 2020.

Its an objective I firmly believe in and why Im so proud to be the Giants Clubs patron. The summit will go a long way to helping achieve that objective.

As Kenya environment secretary Judi Wakhungu said to me: This is not another talking shop. This is an extraordinary opportunity for us to show the world that we know how to stop poaching.

Elephants may be iconic, intelligent, grand in size and symbolism, but they are also an asset, a crucial ingredient in Africas future prosperity.

As Mr Kenyatta wrote in this newspaper recently, the continent depends on its wildlife for tourism and economic stability. Elephants, it must be emphasised, are worth infinitely more alive than dead.

My grandfather always wanted me to be a zoologist. I may not have achieved that, but I still gained from him a love of nature and a lifelong commitment to conservation and wildlife protection.

That is why I am delighted that this momentous gathering is taking place. The Giants Club is helping achieve just what he taught me to care about.

Evgeny Lebedev is owner of the Evening Standard and patron of the Giants Club and its implementation charity Space for Giants
M igrants have revealed some of the dangerous ways they are being smuggled into Britain  including being doused in petrol to avoid detection.

An undercover investigation exposed the ordeals suffered by people from Vietnam who submit to the traffickers to take them 6,000 miles to the UK.

Journalists from Al Jazeera travelled to Vinh City in central Vietnam, known as a hotspot for people-smuggling, to track down a trafficker transporting locals across continents into Britain. Posing as a couple wanting to live in the UK, they were told a trip would cost 22,000, with the smuggler saying: I will arrange for you to get to Russia. Then take a car to Poland, Germany, and then France.

Once in France, I will pick you up to go to England. I assure you its really safe. I assure you, you wont have to walk at all. You just sit in the car and go directly there. Dismissing the female researchers concerns that she may be-come enslaved, the smuggler told her: We go in groups of five people to Russia pretending to be students.

In fact, you wont be studying. You will travel on to other countries. You can go to England and apply to work in a nail bar. If your husband goes there hell manage to get a job.

The sister of one Essex nail-bar owner was smuggled successfully into Britain. The woman, named Huyen, told an undercover reporter working at the business in Havering that the final leg of her journey from France was the hardest.

It was so scary. I was hidden in the drivers cabin. I was even covered in petrol so the dogs couldnt smell me. Very dangerous, she said.

For one man the crossing took 26 hours. If I was him, I would have died. I avoided eating or drinking ... If you thought youd need to go [to the toilet] youd wear a nappy like a child.

Shocking cases of modern slavery were found, with men forced to work for drug barons and women made to become prostitutes. Anti-slavery commissioner Kevin Hyland, who recently returned from Vinh City, said: There is a network operating in that region who are exploiting people who start off as being smuggled. That turns into trafficking, because it becomes a debt bondage and they get moved into situations such as cannabis farms or nail bars where theyre exploited and forced to work in dangerous situations.

The Government estimates there are about 13,000 slaves in Britain. The Modern Slavery Act, passed last year created the role of commissioner and toughened anti-slavery laws.

Britains Modern Slave Trade is on Al Jazeera English at 9pm tonight.
T hree British tourists were punched and kicked unconscious in a savage mob attack on a packed street in Thailand.

The tourists, two men and a woman, needed hospital treatment after a gang assault in Hua Hin during the country's Songkran New Year celebrations.

CCTV footage released by Thai police shows the victims, believed to be related, being punched and kicked after an argument with their attackers.

The elderly woman was punched unconcsious. As she struggled to get up, a man lands a fierce kick to her head, knocking her back to the ground.

Both men suffered blows to the head and body.

Pictures show the holidaymakers splayed out on the street after they were beaten unconscious.

Six people are believed to have been arrested over the incident which took place on Wednesday, April 13.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: "Our staff have been in contact with the family to offer assistance and will remain in contact with the local authorities."

The FCO said they had no information on the condition of the British trio following the attack.

In the video a Good Samaritan appears to come under attack from several men after they tried to intervene in the melee.

A contributor to the Hua Hin internet forum said they had rushed to help the family who they recognised from a nearby bar.

They wrote: "Within 20-30 metres of leaving the bar the Thais were punching the 65-year-old lady in the face!! The elderly gentleman was down on the floor and their son was beaten very badly!!!

"At this point I caught up to the scene and pushed one of the youths away from the woman...

"I got severely punched and kicked for my troubles, but felt the need to protect this frail lady.

"The three of them are still hospitalised and I will need cosmetic dental work done."

According to the account, "gangs of Thai youths were priming themselves to start punching Westerners" in the area before the attack.

Additional reporting by Press Association
B ritish actor Mark Farmer has died at the age of 53.

Best known for his roles in Grange Hill and Minder, Farmer had reportedly been battling cancer in his final months.

Grange Hills official Twitter account announced the news on Thursday, confirming that the star had passed away.

It read: It is with great sadness we report that Mark Farmer aka Gary Hargreaves died earlier today. RIP.

Best TV dramas 2016 1 /38 Best TV dramas 2016 The Missing The addictive and twisty second series of the BBC's crime anthology series BBC/New Pictures/Robert Viglasky Dark Angel Joanne Froggatt stared as Victorian mass murderer Mary Ann Cotton in this ITV drama ITV Close to the Enemy Stephen Poliakoff's post-war drama thriller BBC/Little Island Pictures Ordinary Lies The BBC anthology drama returns with more twisted tales BBC/Red Productions/Adrian Rogers The Night Of Riz Ahmed stars in HBO's critically acclaimed crime mini-series HBO Cold Feet The classic ITV comedy-drama returns - and it's just as good as it ever was ITV Victoria ITV have given Poldark some stiff competition with this period drama about a young Queen Victoria ITV Poldark The BBC's hit drama returns with more brooding, and less naked scything BBC/Robert Viglasky One of Us The BBC kept everyone guessing with this claustrophobic four-part whodunit Ripper Street The fan-favourite Victorian police drama returned for Series 4 BBC/Tiger Aspect 2016/Bernard Walsh The Secret Agent Toby Jones led the cast in the BBC's Joseph Conrad adaptation BBC/World Productions/Mark Mainz/Matt Burlem The Living and the Dead The BBC's gothic romance debuted in full on iPlayer BBC Preacher AMC's adaptation of Garth Ennis' cult comic book is available week-by-week on Amazon Prime Amazon / AMC Versailles A raunchy royal romp around the court of King Louis XIV, spicing up Wednesdays on BBC Two Canal +/ BBC Locked Up The Spanish prison drama came to the UK thanks to Channel 4's Walter Presents series Channel 4 / Global Series Peaky Blinders The Birmingham-set gangster thriller was more popular than ever in its third series BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd/Tiger Aspect/Robert Viglasky The A Word The BBC gave us a nuanced and emotional take on autism BBC/Fifty Fathoms Marcella Anna Friel stars in ITV's British take on the Scandi-noir thriller ITV Grantchester James Norton is back as the crime-solving vicar ITV / Lovely Day Stag The comedy-thriller from the team behind The Wrong Mans is both hilarious and chilling BBC/Des Willie/Hal Shinnie/Matt Burlem Vinyl Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger present a glossy drama about the Seventies music industry HBO American Crime Story: The People vs OJ Simpson Cuba Gooding Jr leads an all-star cast in a dramatic re-telling of the 'trial of century' BBC/Fox Happy Valley Sarah Lancashire returned as Sgt Catherine Cawood for a second series of the gritty crime thriller BBC/Red Productions/Ben Blackall The X Files Mulder and Scully return for a brand new set of mysteries War and Peace The BBC's epic adaptation of the Russian literary classic BBC/Mitch Jenkins Call the Midwife The BBC period drama moved into the Sixties for Series 5 BBC/Neal Street Productions/Sophie Mutevelian Dickensian Charles Dickens' most famous characters collide in this historical soap BBC Jericho ITV's British western set in the wilds of Yorkshire Silent Witness The hugely popular detective drama returns for a 19th series

Farmer became well-known for playing character Gary Hargreaves in the BBC childrens drama, starring in the show from 1979-1981.

Just a couple of years after leaving the programme, he took on the lead role in BBC drama Johnny Jarvis and in 1984 joined the cast of Minder.

Famer went on to land roles in Channel 4 sitcom Relative Strangers and Mister Corbetts Ghost, before turning his attentions to music.

Alongside old school friend Billy Hardwicke, he formed a band called Littlehouse, and played guitar for ska band Bad Manners.

He later released a solo album, The Goodbye Look, before returning to acting one last time in 2008s HottieBoombaLottie.
A ctor Barry Howard has died at the age of 78.

The British star, who is best known for playing Barry Stuart-Hargreaves in the long-running sitcom Hi-de-Hi, had been battling cancer.

Agent Sharry Clark confirmed the news on Twitter, writing: My lovely friend and client Barry Howard has passed to Spirit today. I will miss him more than I can say. RIP lovely man.

She added in an official statement: The much-loved actor Barry Howard, best known for his exquisitely supercilious Barry Stuart-Hargreaves, the champion ballroom dancer in BBCs hugely popular Hi-de-Hi, passed away today aged 78.

Paul Shane, Ruth Madoc and Barry Howard in Hi-De-Hi (PA ) / PA

Clark confirmed that Howard had been suffering from blood cancer for some time.

The actor became well-known for playing the dance instructor in the holiday camp sitcom, in which he starred for seven series.

He eventually left the show was replaced by character Julian Dalrymple-sykes, who was played by Ben Aris.

Howard also appeared in Terry and June, You Rang, MLord and The House of Windsor.

Last year Howard voiced the lead character in ITVs sitcom Mr Snufflesworth.


A uthorities investigating the death of Prince found prescription opioid medication on his body, according to reports in the US.

They claim pain-killing prescription pills were found where the musician died at the age of 57 at his home in Minneapolis last week.

Both reports, from CNN and Minneapolis newspaper Star Tribune, quoted unidentified police sources.

Local police are also said to have requested the US Drug Enforcement Administration to assist in the investigation.

Prince - In pictures 1 /34 Prince - In pictures Purple Rain Prince performing in 1984 Rex First UK Show Prince performing his first UK Show at The Lyceum in London in 1981 Rex Prince among men Prince onstage during the 2015 American Music Awards in Los Angeles Kevin Winter/Getty Images Super Bowl Show Prince performs during the Super Bowl Half-Time show in 2007 Evan Agostini/Getty Images Brit Awards Prince with backing bad 3rdeyegirl - Donna Grantis, Hannah Ford and Ida Neilsen - with James Corden at The Brit Awards in 2014 Rex Married man Prince and his wife Manuela Testolini backstage at the 35th Annual NAACP Image Awards held at the Universal Amphitheatre in 2004 Frank Micelotta/Getty Images Prince with his wife Mayte as they arrives at the De Beer and Versace "Diamonds are forever" charity fashion event in 1999 AFP/Getty Images Festival performance Prince performs during the second day of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2008 Chris Pizzello/AP Under a cherry moon Prince starring in a scene from the film 'Under the cherry moon' (1986) Sensational singer Prince performing on stage Ebet Roberts/Redferns Flamboyant fashion Prince at the Radio 1 Awards in 1986 Rex At The Grammy Awards Musician Prince as he presents the winner for Record of the Year during the 55th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, California Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images 21 Nights Prince announces his '21 Nights in London' gigs at a press conference at the Hospital on May 8, 2007 in London Claire Greenway/Getty Images Dynamic duet Singer Mary J. Blige (L) and recording artist Prince perform onstage during the 2012 iHeartRadio Music Festival at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on September 22, 2012 Christopher Polk/Getty Images American Idol Musician Prince performs onstage during the American Idol Season 5 Finale in 2006 Vince Bucci/Getty Images Funk and soul Prince performs during the halftime show at the Super Bowl XLI football game at Dolphin Stadium in Miami IN 2007 Chris O'Meara/AP Young Prince Prince in 1987 Rex Prince with his band The New Power Generation Rex MTV Moves Prince at tHe MTV Awards in 1994, Monaco Rex On the big stage Musician Prince performing at Wembley Arena in August 14, 1986 in London David Corio/Michael Ochs Archives Music world rocked: Prince in concert at Madison Square Garden, New York Breaking new sounds Prince performs live at the Fabulous Forum on February 19, 1985 in Inglewood, California Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Sexy cool Prince in concert at Paradiso, Amserdam, Netherlands in 1981 Rex Paradiso found again Prince in concert at Paradiso, Amserdam in 2013 Rocking the look American musician Prince in concert at Earl's Court, London on 15th June 1992 Dave Benett Prince uncovered Prince performing bare chested in 1984 Rex

Authorities have said they have found no signs of suicide or obvious trauma, but that it could take weeks before autopsy results reveal how the performer died.

The intensely private musician, whose hits included Purple Rain and When Doves Cry, was found dead in a lift at his home last Thursday, shocking millions of fans around the world and prompting glowing tributes by fellow musicians.

A week before Princes death, he suffered a health scare which caused the unscheduled landing of his plane in Illinois. He is believed to have suffered an overdose while flying back to Minnesota from Atlanta, where he had played in two concerts in one night.

Paramedics responded to a call of an unresponsive passenger and sources claim he was given a shot of the opioid antidote Narcan.

In the week leading up to his death, he was spotted making several trips to a local pharmacy.

Prince death - Police have 'no reason to believe' it was suicide - Press conference

Follow @StandardShowbiz for more news.
I f you want to talk about the biggest shocks in British TV from the year so far, three of them have all come from the latest series of Line of Duty

In the first episode of Series 3, new main character Sgt Danny Waldron was  SPOILER ALERT  bumped off with a grisly surprise death.

Then came the second shock  SPOILER ALERT, AGAIN  that Keeley Hawes character DI Lindsay Denton was back, after being sent to prison for life in Series 2.

As if that wasnt enough, Denton was  SPOILER ALERT, OBVIOUSLY  bumped off at the end of Episode 5 by AC-12s own Dot Cottan after she discovered his link to paedophile Tommy Hunter and refused to take 100,000 to keep her silence.

All of which leads us to the series finale, a 90-minute special that should give every character space to breathe  even if the audience will be holding theirs.

Will it finally be the end for The Caddy, or will Cottan manage to keep his criminal side a secret?

And with DS Steve Arnett arrested on suspicion of murder, can he prove his innocence?

Line of Duty Series 3 1 /10 Line of Duty Series 3 Vicky McClure, Daniel Mays and Martin Compston star in Line of Duty Vicky McClure, Daniel Mays and Martin Compston star in Line of Duty BBC/World Detective Constable Kate Fleming played by Vicky McClure Detective Constable Kate Fleming played by Vicky McClure BBC/World Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott played by Martin Compston Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott played by Martin Compston BBC/World Arsher Ali as PC Hari Bains Arsher Ali as PC Hari Bains BBC/World Leanne Best as PC Jackie Brickford Leanne Best as PC Jackie Brickford BBC/World PC Rod Kennedy played by Will Mellor PC Rod Kennedy played by Will Mellor BBC/World Danny Mays as newcomer Sgt Danny Waldron Danny Mays as newcomer Sgt Danny Waldron BBC/World Adrian Dunbar, Martin Compston and Vicky McClure return for new series Adrian Dunbar, Martin Compston and Vicky McClure return for new series BBC/World

Expect more pulse-pounding interrogations and heart-stopping surprises as the critically-acclaimed series draws to a close  and start mentally preparing yourself for Series 4.

Yes, its actually happening! Now, please don't make us wait for two years this time.

BBC Two, 9pm
Authorities arrested a homicide suspect west of Pine Bluffs on Wednesday.

In a press release, Sgt. David Wagener of the Wyoming State Patrol, said Jared J. Stone, a 21-year-old resident of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, initially led troopers with the Nebraska State Patrol on a pursuit westbound on Interstate 80 in western Nebraska in a 1988 Oldsmobile passenger car.

As the pursuit approached Wyoming, WHP Troopers set up tire deflation stop sticks at the Wyoming / Nebraska state line on I-80 near Pine Bluffs. Troopers successfully deployed the stop sticks on the Oldsmobile at 9:55 p.m. as Stone entered Wyoming.

After the Oldsmobile had lost multiple tires from the stop stick deployment, Stone stopped the Oldsmobile at mile post 391 on I-80 approximately 10 miles west of Pine Bluffs at 10:05 p.m.

Stone remained in the vehicle for approximately 25 minutes before surrendering without incident.

Stone was wanted out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, off of a warrant for homicide, Wagener said. He was also charged locally for driving while impaired, possession of a controlled substance (suspected methamphetamine), eluding and three other traffic violations.

The Nebraska State Patrol, Laramie County Sheriffs Office and Pine Bluffs Police Department assisted the WHP during the pursuit and arrest. Both west and east bounds lanes of I-80 were temporarily stopped to keep oncoming traffic away until Stone had been taken into custody.
Fourth graders at Northfield Elementary in Gering on April 27 were able to get a firsthand account of what a senator does. Senator John Stinner is in the process of meeting with all of the elementary schools in District 48 to pass out information about the Nebraska Legislature.

Northfield Elementary was the first to receive a visit from Stinner. Fourth graders have a unit on Nebraska history and Stinner said that he thought it would be a good idea to hand out informative packets to these classes.

Allison Wagner, fourth grade teacher at Northfield Elementary, was very impressed he took the initiative to talk to the students.

I thought he presented himself well and the kids learned a lot, said Wagner.

Wagners class wrote a letter to Scottsbluff Mayor Randy Meininger in February about getting a stoplight by Target at the intersection of Highway 26 and College Road. Some of the students from the class were able to present in front of the Scottsbluff City Council last month.

The result of the presentation at the meeting was for Mark Bohl, director of Public Works for Scottsbluff, to contact the Nebraska Department of Roads for a site assessment. The school recently received a letter saying that something will be done about the intersection in the future.

They learned so much this year, just about government. Our experience going to the city council had a huge impact on them, said Wagner.

She said they learned that their voice could be heard and about the process of making a change or law happens.

Having Sen. Stinner come from a higher level tied it all together for them, said Wagner.

Stinner talked to the students about passing bills for the Nebraska Legislature and what happens with bills on the floor. Stinner said that seven out of nine bills he authored were passed by members of the legislature in the last session. He had three larger bills which were over 200 pages which he said he had to make notes on and keep re-reading to make sure they were what he wanted.

Stinner will be entering his third year as a senator this fall. He said that he didnt think he would ever be a senator but he was able to get involved in the community when he was chief executive officer and president of Valley Bank and Trust Company. He was on the Gering Public Schools school board for 10 years and being a senator was something that he wanted to do for the community. When he was running for the Nebraska Legislature, he said that he had a good energy level and felt that he was at a place in his life where he could give back to the community.

This is important work. I deal with a lot of interesting subjects I would not deal with otherwise. In my week we deal with medical marijuana on one end and school financing on the other end then property tax on another end. Its mentally challenging and theres a wide array of subjects, said Stinner.

He also told the students that being a senator is a lot of hard work.

You have to read a lot, you have to study a lot, said Stinner.

Stinner just completed his second legislative session and the next one will take place at the start of the next year.

He told the students that his work is year-round. He said that the more effort that he puts into it he will be more knowledgeable and be a better senator.

Right now, he will be back in the Scottsbluff/Gering area twice a month.

Ill be busy all summer and all fall. Ill have about four or five committees and go to three or four conferences. Ive also got a fellowship on Early Childhood development, said Stinner. It will be a busy schedule.
Winter's just around the corner, and if there's anything that's certain about a Nebraska winter, it's that nothing is certain. This winter will be no different, forecasters say.
LINCOLN  The Nebraska Supreme Court has upheld the murder conviction of an Omaha man who fired shots into a group of people who were partying after a Miley Cyrus concert in 2014.

LaRon M. Jones appealed on the grounds that the conviction was based on unreliable witnesses who had been shown a rigged photo lineup by police. The Supreme Court rejected his arguments in an opinion released Thursday.

Jones, 26, is serving life in prison after being convicted by jury of first-degree murder and two weapons charges in the March 7, 2014, shooting of Brandon Samuels, 21.

According to trial testimony, Jones was with a group of people who crashed an after-concert party. Several of the people in Jones group got into a fight with one of the party-goers, and witnesses said Jones brandished a handgun and threatened to kill anyone who intervened.

As Jones and his group were about to drive away, Jones fired several shots into the air and about eight shots toward the house. Samuels was standing on the porch and was struck with bullets in the neck and leg.

He was pronounced dead at Creighton University Medical Center.

Contact the writer: 402-473-9587, joe.duggan@owh.com
GILLETTE, Wyo. (AP)  Gov. Matt Mead and others are hailing the possibilities of an industrial-scale laboratory where researchers will test new technologies to make profitable use of carbon dioxide emissions from a coal-fired power plant.

Noting the recent loss of hundreds of coal mine jobs in Wyoming, Mead said the Integrated Test Center is a proactive effort to protect mining jobs in the state.

In addition, he envisioned the lab leading to coal-rich northeast Wyoming becoming a hub for innovation and technology research.

"We should be looking at building that sort of hub right here in Gillette and Campbell County, creating that sort of manufacturing, technology, discovery industry right here, and no better place to do it than the energy capital of the country," Mead said.

Construction of the Integrated Test Center already has begun at Basin Electric's Dry Fork Station power plant near Gillette.

Mead and others spoke during a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday.

Eventually the lab will host teams that will compete for $20 million in awards, through the NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize, to develop carbon conversion technology. Half of the XPrize competition will focus on carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants and the other half on those from gas-fired plants.

Wyoming has pledged $15 million toward construction of the lab. The state has more coal mining than any other, supplying about 40 percent of the nation's coal.

Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association Inc. has promised $5 million toward the center, and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association has pledged $1 million.

Officials say the ultimate goal of the project is to prevent CO2 from entering the atmosphere and instead put the gas to profitable use, such as manufacturing exotic materials.

The coal industry is being hit by bankruptcies and layoffs from low prices and increased regulation of fossil fuel use. Capturing CO2 to prevent its release into the atmosphere is seen as one possible solution to reduce pollution from burning coal.

Jim Spiers, vice president of business and technology strategies with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, said coal remains an important and affordable energy resource for the nation, especially rural America.

"Any increase in the cost of the electricity hits rural America harder," Spiers said. "That's a death spiral that we can't afford to have happen."
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Thursday, 28 April 2016 09:33:58 (GMT+3) | Shanghai

Henan Province-based Chinese steelmaker Anyang Iron and Steel Co. (Anyang Steel) has announced in its annual report that in 2015 it registered an operating revenue of RMB 20.363 billion ($3.13 billion), down 24.16 percent year on year, with a net loss of RMB 2.551 billion ($0.39 billion) compared to a net profit of RMB 28.53 million in 2014.
Thursday, 28 April 2016 00:07:16 (GMT+3) | Sao Paulo

Representatives of Brazil s steel association, IABr, met this week with the nations vice-president, Michel Temer, in a move that could help the struggling sector find some help if president Dilma Rousseff is impeached.





According to IABr representatives, the nations steel industry could eventually have more conditions to dialogue with the government if Temer assumes the office as Brazil s interim president, as the impeachment process is approved in Brazil s Senate.





During the meeting, the executives updated Temer regarding the situation Brazil s steel industry currently faces.




For the given period, Kobe Steel has reported a net loss of JPY 21.55 billion ($199.3 million), compared to a net profit of JPY 86.5 billion recorded in the previous fiscal year. The company's consolidated net sales revenues for the whole financial year amounted to JPY 1.82 trillion ($16.85 billion), down 3.4 percent year on year, owing to a decline in steel sales price due to lower prices of primary raw materials.

According to Kobe Steel , automotive demand is recovering and demand in shipbuilding and other sectors will generally be firm. However, it will take time to resolve the oversupply of steel in the Asian region. In addition, the slowdown of Chinas economy, sluggish energy-related demand in emerging countries and resource-rich countries against the backdrop of low crude oil prices and economic stagnation are a concern. Under this outlook, taking uncertain factors into consideration including the sales volume of steel products, Kobe Steel forecasts net sales of about JPY 1.75 trillion ($16.17 billion) and net income of about JPY 20 billion ($184.8 million) in the fiscal year 2016-17.
Thursday, 28 April 2016 00:06:08 (GMT+3) | Sao Paulo

Both the cost of civil construction and rebar in the greater Buenos Aires area increased in March, according to data released by the nations institute of statistics and census, Indec.





According to Indec, cost of civil construction in the greater Buenos Aires area increased 1 percent in March, month-on-month, and 5.7 percent in Q1, year-on-year.





Cost of materials, workforce and general expenses in the third month of the year rose 1.8, 0.2 and 2.5 percent, respectively, in the month-on-month analysis, and 11.2, 0.4 and 15.5 percent in Q1, year-on-year.





Rebar was among the main products whose cost increased the least in the general expenses category. Rebar costs rose 0.6 percent in March, month-on-month, according to Indecs data.


Thursday, 28 April 2016 00:02:34 (GMT+3) | Sao Paulo

A source from a major exporter in Brazil told SteelOrbis that his last deals for sales of Galvalume to the US were closed in the range of $760/mt to $770/mt, FOB conditions, compared to $750/mt two weeks ago.





He mentioned that a marketing effort to US customers, reduced availability of Galvalume, and higher prices in world terms were the main factors behind the increased prices, adding that lower freight rates are also aiding the upward trend.





In March, Brazil exported Galvalume to the US in average at $571/mt, FOB conditions, price deals probably closed in January.




Thursday, 28 April 2016 14:41:37 (GMT+3) | Istanbul

During the past two weeks, demand for Turkish merchant bar in the export markets has failed to improve and is still slack. Although global scrap and billet quotations have continued their upward movement in the same period, the rises seen in Turkish merchant bar export prices have been very limited as buyers consider these prices to be on the high side. Turkish merchant bar export prices have increased by $20/mt in this period to the following levels:

Product Price ($/mt) Angle 520-530 IPN-UPN 530-540 Flat bar 540-550 IPE 530-540

All prices are on FOB basis and for June shipment.
The Bucharest City Hall (PMB) has approved the strategic lines proposed by Bucharest Cultural Centre - ARCUB within the process of preparing the file for Bucharest's candidacy to the title of European Capital of Culture in 2021.

"The Bucharest City Hall together with local public cultural institutions have debated and approved the strategic lines proposed by the Cultural Centre ARCUB in the process of preparing the file for Bucharest's candidacy to the title of European Capital of Culture 2021 as follows: encouraging a generalized and balanced participation of all citizens of the city in the cultural system, positioning of Bucharest as a cultural capital attractive in the European area, recovering and reviving the cultural identity through the material and immaterial heritage, increasing quality of life of Bucharest's residents through exposure to cultural experience, transforming the paradigm of thinking in terms of entrepreneurship in culture, Bucharest seen as a connective city," informs a PMB press release.

The Cultural Strategy of Bucharest for the next 10 years will be drawn up and coordinated by PMB's Culture, Sport and Tourism Directorate together with experts in the field, and with the continuous involvement and consultation of local public culture institutions, Bucharest's cultural institutions subsidized from the state budget, as well as the independent cultural sector.

Agerpres
National Defence Minister Mihnea Motoc on Thursday received the ambassador of the People's Republic of China to Romania, Xu Feihong, the two dignitaries addressing the bilateral cooperation in defence.

The relevant ministry (MApN) informs in a press release that during talks the "active political-military dialogue" between Romania and China was emphasized. "Likewise, the two sides expressed their interest for the strengthening of the bilateral collaboration relationship in the military education," the MapN release adds.

Agerpres
Centene was awarded a three-year contract to manage health care for the poor in Pennsylvania, effective Jan. 1, 2017, pending regulatory approval.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Centene did not respond to a request for comment.

Centene does not currently have operations in Pennsylvania. This is the 25th state in which it manages state-sponsored programs like Medicaid.

Centene's subsidiary, Pennsylvania Health and Wellness, will manage health care benefits for Medicaid recipients in three "zones," the company announced Thursday.

Centene's subsidiary will cover the Medicaid recipients in the HealthChoices program in the Southeast Zone, Southwest Zone and Lehigh Capital Zone.

"We are pleased to be selected to offer quality healthcare servides and programs to Pennsylvania residents. This is particularly rewarding having been a resident of Altoona, Pennsylvania myself," Michael Neidorff, president and CEO of Centene, said in a statement.

Clayton-based Centene is the nation's largest Medicaid managed care company.
MADISON, Wis.  Menard Inc., the owner of home improvement chain Menards, has agreed to change some practices after the National Labor Relations Board found it was violating federal labor law.

The board found in April that the Eau Claire-based retailer has been improperly requiring employees to sign mandatory-arbitration agreements that bar them from engaging in class-action lawsuits. The board also found that Menards has withheld merit pay raises for workers engaged in protected union activities.

In a settlement agreement with the board Wednesday, Menards agrees to rectify those issues.

Seth Goldstein, a representative with the Office and Professional Employees International Union who filed the initial complaint with the board, called it a major victory for employees.

A company spokeswoman said Menards had no immediate comment Wednesday afternoon.
The kitchen brain trust behind south city fried-chicken restaurant Byrd & Barrel  co-owner Bob Brazell, Ryan McDonald and Hana Chung  and Strange Donuts co-founder Corey Smale plan to open a restaurant called Good Fortune in the Central West End. As Feast first reported, Good Fortune will serve what the partners are calling "Chinese-Americanese" cuisine.

"We're looking to do nods to American Chinese food," Brazell tells Off the Menu, "but (to) put our spin on it and try to do it the best way we can: sourcing (ingredients) from the right place, using really good ingredients and cooking it really well."

Brazell cites Mission Chinese Food, the restaurant in San Francisco and New York where chef Danny Bowien has won national acclaim for his idiosyncratic takes on Chinese and Chinese-American food, as an inspiration. McDonald will run Good Fortune's kitchen; Brazell and Chung will assist him but also continue to work at Byrd & Barrel.

Brazell said he, McDonald and Chung had already been discussing a concept along the lines of Good Fortune when, during a conversation with Smale, he learned the Strange Donuts co-founder was considering a similar idea. Smale will leave Strange Donuts, which he and Jason Bockman debuted in Maplewood in 2013.

Good Fortune will open at 510 North Euclid Avenue, just south of Washington Boulevard, in the space formerly occupied by Silk Road Chinese Restaurant. Brazell says the restaurant will focus on carryout and delivery, with seating for only about 30 diners inside.

The partners have targeted this fall for Good Fortune's opening. Brazell says the buildout they have planned is not "crazy big," nor are they planning to serve alcohol, thus avoiding the need for the liquor-licensing process.

In the meantime, Good Fortune will stage occasional Monday pop-up dinners at Byrd & Barrel (3422 South Jefferson Avenue). The first is lated for May 16.
A recent list showing St. Louis to be one of the best cities in the Midwest for Hispanic businesses came as no surprise to one local agency.

The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis has hired two more staff members because of the overall growth of STL's Hispanic community:

Gabriela Ramirez-Arellano, a native of Mexico, has been hired as a business counselor to help entrepreneurs and small businesses. She has degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia and Lindenwood University.

Carlos Restrepo, a native Colombian, takes on the role of new-membership coordinator. A 10-year resident of STL, Restrepo attended Webster University and recently headed communications for two homeless shelters.

The new staff will have a sharp focus in recruiting, training and counseling new Hispanic- and minority-owned small businesses, which we see as pillars of our local economy," said Karlos Ramirez, the chamber's executive director.

Ramirez noted that a recent St. Louis University study by sociology professor J.S. Onesimo Sandoval indicates that STL's Hispanic population of 90,000 could more than double to 190,000 in the next 14 years.

Marketing website Wallet Hub rank St. Louis as No. 42 when it comes to the "2016 Best Cities for Hispanic Entrepreneurs," putting the city ahead of Memphis, Chicago, Kansas City and Indianapolis, and trailing only Springfield, Mo., and Overland Park, Kan. in the Midwest. Also, St. Louis was No. 2 in the U.S. for the highest percentage of Hispanic residents with at least a bachelor's degree.
A gunman who killed a teenage girl and a man during an argument in a car in 2014 has been sentenced to serve 15 years in prison.

Thomas Oates III was sentenced to 15 years for one count of second-degree murder, 10 years for another count, and five years on each of two armed criminal action charges, but the sentences will run concurrently. Circuit Court Judge Kristine A. Kerr sentenced Oates.

Oates was in a Pontiac G6 with Darrah Lane, 17, and Leon Davis, 27, at the Plaza Madrid shopping center at New Halls Ferry Road and Parker Spur on May 21, 2014, police said. They argued, and Oates shot Lane and Davis in their heads.

Two witnesses told police they saw Oates crawl out of the Pontiac and get into a car nearby and drive off, police said. Oates later confessed to the murders, police said.

Oates, of the 8800 block of Maya Lane in Jennings, was found guilty on March 17 in St. Louis County Circuit Court. He was sentenced Tuesday.

Davis lived in Jennings. Lane lived in the 3100 block of New Castle Drive in north St. Louis County. She was a junior at McCluer North High School.
UPDATED at 9 a.m. with victim's name.

ST. LOUIS  A man found shot and killed Wednesday night in the Walnut Park East neighborhood in St. Louis has been identified as 42-year-old Courtney Ward, of St. Louis.

Ward was found in a residence in the 4900 block of Plover Avenue about 10:40 p.m., St. Louis police said. He was unconscious and not breathing and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Ward lived a few blocks away in the 5900 block of Sherry Avenue.

Authorities had no suspect information. The investigation is ongoing, police said.
A man whose online posts and alleged approaches to parents of children unsettled many Metro East residents now faces felony charges as he is being evaluated for his mental fitness.

James Lopes, 40, now faces six felony charges alleging that he attempted to solicit adults into having sex with children via the internet, and gave children cards imprinted with a website that contained his teachings regarding sex between adults and children as a "religious rite."

He was charged Wednesday with three counts of grooming, a class 4 felony, in connection with the cards he allegedly handed out on Saturday and Sunday. He has also been charged with three new counts of disorderly conduct, a class C misdemeanor alleging that he approached young girls and declared that he was on a mini date with one and asked a 7-year-old girl, Hi princess, are you looking for your prince? Im right here.

These charges come two days after Lopes was charged with two counts of misdemeanor trespass and disorderly conduct. He was arrested late Sunday at a gas station outside Livingston. According to court filings, he had waved at a little girl in the gas station parking lot, and was told by the attendant that his behavior was inappropriate and to leave. Lopes allegedly became disruptive and refused to leave, at which point Madison County Sheriffs Department deputies were summoned.

Lopes had been the subject of much attention on social media all weekend after he allegedly approached a young girl at the Collinsville VFW on Saturday night, and then approached a young girl in an Edwardsville store. Both times he was interviewed by police, but had not yet committed a crime, according to law enforcement officials.

After his arrest, Lopes was held on $15,000 bail, which has since been increased to $75,000 due to the felony charges. Lopes was in custody Wednesday, and Madison County Associate Judge Jennifer Hightower ordered that he be held regardless of bail for a psychological evaluation.

Additionally, Madison County States Attorney Tom Gibbons said a petition has been filed to declare Lopes a sexually dangerous person. If found to be sexually dangerous, Lopes would be committed to the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections for treatment for an indeterminate period of time.

The maximum penalty for the Class 4 felony charges is three years in prison.
JEFFERSON CITY  With a legislative last call looming in two weeks, the Missouri House handed big beer companies a victory Thursday.

Under legislation now heading back to the Senate for further debate, breweries would be able to lease coolers to retailers as a way to promote their brands.

Opponents said the change in law is a way for companies like Anheuser-Busch InBev to gain market share lost to the growth of smaller, craft brewers.

The measure, which moved out of the chamber on a 103-38 vote, is part of a sweeping package of changes to Missouri alcohol laws. Other provisions include the legalization of self-serve beer at restaurants and changes that will make it easier to buy large containers of beer  known as growlers  at convenience stores.

The cooler issue, however, dominated the debate.

Supporters say retailers could load the portable coolers with any kind beer. Opponents say it is doubtful a retailer would stock, for example, a Budweiser-labeled cooler with craft brews.

Im really concerned about big guy, little guy  David and Goliath, you know, said Rep. Keith Frederick, R-Rolla. This really is not a level playing field.

This is a horrible bill, added Rep. Keith English, an independent from Florissant. The small businesses are the backbone of our state.

Rep. Robert Cornejo, R-St. Peters, who sponsored the measure, said the legislation requires lawmakers to revisit the issue in three years, meaning if it is not working, the law can be revised.

This is one small change to our current liquor laws to allow economic freedom, Cornejo said.

Rep. Dan Shaul, R-Imperial, said the proposal would help store owners.

This allows the retailer so many more options to move his product, said Shaul.

Its unclear whether the measure is on a fast track for passage in the Senate. A similar proposal barely squeaked out of the chamber earlier this year. And, if the Senate alters any of the House-approved language, the differences would have to be hashed out between negotiators in both chambers before the final day of the legislative session on May 13.

In the end, much of the debate Thursday centered on which beer companies had the ear of lawmakers.

This will do great things for my community, said Penny Hubbard, D-St. Louis, who has the Budweiser plant in her district.

By contrast, Rep. John McCaherty, R-High Ridge, said craft brewers are worried.

Some of our small brewers are afraid. They are afraid the big boys are going to come in and put them out of business, he said.

The legislation is Senate Bill 994.
WASHINGTON  Sen. Claire McCaskill is trying to toughen policies on military sexual assaults, in the wake of a new report that says that the Pentagon may have misled Congress during debate over the current policy three years ago.

McCaskill, D-Mo., was a leader in getting that policy passed, and her insistence on keeping the military chain of command involved in sexual assault cases won out in reforms eventually passed in 2014. They are designed to encourage more reporting of sexual assaults and give alleged victims more support.

But Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., continues to try to remove senior commanders from the loop in favor of a system of independent, trained military prosecutors.

An Associated Press report, citing documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the veterans group Protect Our Defenders, alleges that the Pentagon misled Congress in using inaccurate or vague information about sexual assault cases and inaccurately portrayed senior military officers as often more willing than civilian authorities to prosecute sex offenders.

The revelations have heated up debate over Gillibrands approach, and on Thursday sparked opposition of McCaskills latest efforts to strengthen the previous reforms.

McCaskill and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, introduced on Thursday legislation that would make it a separate crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice to retaliate against people making allegations of sexual assault.

McCaskill and Ernst, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard, said they were generally pleased that the reforms had resulted in drops in assaults while reports by alleged victims have gone up. But they were troubled by a Pentagon survey showing that a majority of those reporting sexual assaults experienced retaliation, often from peers. Their bill would make official retaliation a crime, bolster training for investigators and strengthen record-keeping of retaliation cases.

They hope these reforms are attached to the Pentagons 2017 spending bill.

But former Air Force Chief Prosecutor Don Christensen, president of Protect Our Defenders, said that although his organization supported every effort to stem the disturbing reality of retaliation, the McCaskill-Ernst approach was another band-aid measure that fails to address the underlying problem.

He said that Congress should take the lead to create a professional and impartial justice system for military sexual assault, and that commanders should not be in a position to put their fingers on the scales of justice.

McCaskill said commanders were not the problem.

If the Pentagon misrepresented that data, no one will be tougher on them than I will, than (Ernst) or the rest of us who advocated for commanders continuing to have a role, McCaskill said.

But, she said, commanders were never the problem in terms of cases being brought forward. The problems were not getting support at the beginning of the process. That is why the reforms that we have enacted address that problem.
JEFFERSON CITY  State lawmakers came out swinging Wednesday against a plan being pushed by the St. Louis Zoo to create a regional sales tax to finance the century-old institution.

In a hearing of a House committee, Republican and Democratic lawmakers said the zoos proposal was ill-timed and lacked the kind of detail they need to make tough decisions.

Rep. Tracy McCreery, D-Creve Coeur, said the zoo was being sneaky by filing the bill with just weeks to go in the Legislatures annual session.

You dont wait for the last few weeks of the session, McCreery said. It makes me very suspicious of what youre trying to do.

I dont think this is the right way to go about this, added Rep. Becky Ruth, R-Festus.

The proposal would allow officials in St. Louis County, St. Charles, Jefferson and Franklin counties and in the city of St. Louis to put a question on the ballot asking if voters support a sales tax of up to one-eighth of a cent for the zoo.

If approved, it would raise about $36 million annually.

It would be the first time the three outlying counties would have a financial stake in the Forest Park facility.

And, zoo officials say, it would help them keep the zoo free to visitors while also bankrolling on-going maintenance programs and planned improvements, including a newly unveiled $500 million expansion proposal.

Rodney Boyd, a lobbyist representing the zoos board of directors, said the zoo is willing to add language that would ensure counties that are charging the sales tax have representation on the zoo board.

McCreery suggested the proposal faces long odds as lawmakers work toward a May 13 adjournment date.

She said people in St. Louis County would be charged twice if they have to pay a sales tax on top of the property tax they currently pay.

She said an admission fee might be a better plan. Zoo officials have said an admission fee may actually bring in less than a sales tax levy.

McCreery also said someone should approach Illinois counties about chipping in.

Its a big part of our metro area, McCreery said.

Rep. John Wiemann, R-OFallon, told the panel that local lawmakers are opposed to the plan.

We did not feel this was the appropriate means for instituting a potential tax increase in our counties, Wiemann said.

St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann left lawmakers a page-long outline of some of the issues facing the effort.

If legislation had been filed in January, there would have been several public hearings on the issue by now, he wrote.

The measure was not voted on Wednesday, but could be taken up by the House General Laws committee as early as Thursday.

The legislation is Senate Bill 937.
JEFFERSON CITY  When Rep. Elijah Haahr, R-Springfield, called the Missouri House committee he chairs to order on Wednesday, he looked out to a packed room.

Soon, everyone would know whether Senate Joint Resolution 39, the controversial measure that would protect businesses and individuals from working at same-sex weddings, would survive. Maybe it would make it through Haahrs House Emerging Issues committee unchanged, pass through a second House committee and be approved by the full House. Then voters would get a say. Thats what Haahr wanted.

A monthslong battle that included a 37-hour filibuster, intense lobbying by business groups and scathing legal opinions all came down to this one meeting.

In the end, the measure was defeated on a 6-to-6 vote.

But first, there were 20 more minutes of emotional debate.

Democratic Rep. Mike Colona of St. Louis, the only openly gay member of the Missouri Legislature, was first to speak.

I was big man on campus  in high school and college, Colona said. Dated all the cheerleaders, dated all the sorority girls. So I didnt come out until I was in law school. Im the oldest boy in the family, all right. You know us Italians, the oldest boy, were the golden child.

He told the panel about coming out to his mother.

Her reaction? Tears, Colona said. Mom, you know, you didnt do anything wrong. This has nothing to do with you. This is all about me.

Eventually, his mother accepted it. They waited to tell his father, and did, but thats not the point of the story, he said. What if he wanted to get married? Have a reception at a restaurant?

Youre there with your brother, your sister, your son, your daughter, your good friend  and youre there when they say, No, we dont serve your kind here,  Colona said. Your kind here. What message does that send to our kids, our grandkids, our friends?

After Colona, Democrat Sharon Pace of Northwoods spoke out against the measure.

Reps. Gary Cross of Lees Summit and Jack Bondon of Belton, both Republicans, spoke in support.

I urge all Missourians to set a new example in this nation to hold the debate in a way that does not demean or demagogue, does not degrade or demonize, Bondon said. The truth is is that there are good people on both sides of this issue who are trying to do what they think is best for the people of Missouri.

The last speaker was state Rep. Jim Hansen of Frankford, a Republican.

I have family thats  thats in this situation, he said slowly. But I love them. As a Christian. Not as their judge. Not as his judge. Theres a lot of sins out there, every bit as great as what people say this sin is.

My wife and I talked about this for hours. Hours. Hours, he said. My minister and I talked about this for hours. And what he says, I believe. I put my faith in God, not in man. So Im not here to judge anybody.

After Haahr thanked the committee for its deliberation, he asked that the roll be called. Republican Reps. Anne Zerr of St. Charles, Caleb Rowden of Columbia and Hansen voted with the committees three Democrats to oppose the measure.

By your vote of 6 to 6, the Senate Joint Resolution fails, Haahr said.

Later, in a statement, Haahr said his committee had worked diligently to study the issue, hearing from thousands of people.

While I personally supported SJR 39 and am disappointed in this result, I thank my members for their time and work. I will continue to personally fight for the protection of religious freedom in our state, he said.

Other statements poured in after the vote, from disappointed supporters and relieved opponents alike.

All along, opponents said that SJR 39 would wreck Missouris reputation, scare off business and enshrine discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the states constitution.

Proponents said that in the aftermath of a Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states, there had to be some mechanism to protect those who disagree with the practice on religious grounds.

State Sen. Bob Onder, R-Lake Saint Louis, a sponsor of the measure, indicated that it was dead.

I am deeply disappointed that Missourians will not have the opportunity to vote on protecting religious freedom, he said. Today, House members caved to pressure from special interests and killed the religious freedom amendment. It is wrong that Missouri voters will be denied a voice in the decision-making process.

Democratic leaders in the House called the vote historic.

The ultimate issue here is whether our state constitution protects all Missourians or grants special rights to some to detriment of others. In the years to come, I am confident todays action will be remembered as being on the right side of history, said House Minority Leader Jacob Hummel, D-St. Louis.

Hugh Grant, CEO of Creve Coeur-based Monsanto, released a statement praising the vote.

This is an important victory for all Missourians  each who deserves to be valued and treated with dignity and respect no matter who they are.

House Speaker Todd Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, indicated that SJR 39 wouldnt come back up this year. But he said the conversation wouldnt end with the defeated measure.

While I am disappointed by todays outcome, I understand this is a very difficult issue and I remain committed to fighting for the religious freedoms of all Missourians, he said in a statement. I am confident this caucus will continue to pursue policy solutions to ensure these freedoms are protected.
JEFFERSON CITY  Less than 10 days after transferring more than $376,000 into his campaign account, Sen. Dan Brown has dropped his bid for state treasurer.

Brown, a Republican from Rolla, was running for the GOP nomination against Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Glendale Republican.

Browns withdrawal leaves Schmitt as the lone Republican in the race, as well as the candidate with the most money in his campaign account. Through March, Schmitt has $2.59 million in his war chest.

Brown, 65, could not be reached for comment Thursday. He has served in the Senate since 2011 and previously served in the House. His decision to withdraw from the Aug. 2 primary was listed Thursday on the Secretary of States website.

Democrats in the race include Pat Contreras of Kansas City and Judy Baker of Columbia. Libertarian Sean OToole of Kansas City also is on the ballot.
GODFREY  A married couple who operate a day spa for massage, Botox injections and other treatments were accused Thursday of having a concealed video camera in a changing room.

The Madison County Grand Jury indicted Miroslawn "Mirka" Figueroa, 55, owner of the Dutch Hollow Medical Day Spa, and her husband, Dr. Samuel P. Figueroa, 67, of unauthorized video recording and live video transmission. Dr. Figueroa is charged with a felony, Mirka Figueroa with a misdemeanor.

Also charged with a misdemeanor count was Ronald E. Riddlespriger, 53, owner of Hi-Tech Security Systems, who allegedly installed the camera. The Figueroas live in Alton. Riddlespriger is from Godfrey.

Madison County State's Attorney Tom Gibbons said in a statement that the sheriff's office received a tip in September that a camera was concealed in the changing room. Deputies found the camera but not images or video, he said.

Gibbons said deputies contacted all of the spa clients who had appointments during the two-day period in which the camera appears to have been operated.

The spa's website identifies Mirka Figueroa as chief executive officer and Dr. Figueroa as medical director. Among other offerings listed were laser hair removal and waxes. It says the business is at 3042 Godfrey Road.

The maximum penalty for the felony count is three years in prison. The misdemeanor offense carries a one-year term in jail.
LONDON MARKET OPEN: Pound rises past $1.13 as Johnson backs out

Monday, October 24, 2022 - 09:08

The pound was recovering some ground on Monday, holding back the internationally exposed FTSE 100 stock index, after former prime minister Boris Johnson pulled out the race to take back his former job, clearing the way for market favourite Rishi Sunak.

The FTSE 100 index was down 24.70 points, or 0.4%, at 6,944.50. The mid-cap FTSE 250 was up 79.70 points, or 0.5%, at 17,286.25, and the AIM All-Share was up 0.67 of a point, or 0.1%, at 786.07.

The Cboe UK 100 was down 0.4% at 693.63, the Cboe UK 250 up 0.4% at 14,750.50, and the Cboe Small Companies down 0.1% at 12,233.88.

In European equities on Friday, the CAC 40 in Paris and the DAX 40 in Frankfurt were both 0.4% higher.

Former chancellor Sunak could be declared the next prime minister within hours after Johnson ruled himself out of the race for No 10, with uncertainty over rival Penny Mordaunt's prospects of securing sufficient support from members of Parliament.

Tory MPs will choose who they want to be their new leader in the first stage of the contest on Monday, should both remaining candidates get the 100 nominations required to reserve a place on the ballot.

If Mordaunt falls short of this total by the deadline of 1400 BST, or pulls out of the contest, Sunak will take charge of the party without the need for a vote.

It comes after Johnson dramatically withdrew from the race  having never officially entered, claiming he had the numbers but admitting he could not unite his warring party. In a statement on Sunday evening, he said there was a "very good chance" he could have been back in No 10 by the end of the week if he had stood.

Sterling was quoted at $1.1343 early Monday, sharply higher than $1.1203 at the London equities close on Friday.

In London, housebuilders were crowning the FTSE 100. Persimmon added 2.9%, Taylor Wimpey 2.8%, Barratt Development 2.2% ,and Berkeley gained 2.1%.

Figures from lender Halifax showed cities have driven house price growth in the UK this year, leaving the suburbs lagging behind.

Since the start of the year, as people have gradually returned to the office, property prices across Britain's cities have typically grown by 9.2%, compared with 7.9% growth on average in surrounding areas, Halifax said.

Andrew Asaam, mortgages director at Halifax, said a trend of people looking for greener spaces to move to, which was seen early on in the coronavirus pandemic, had remained.

He said: "That trend didn't disappear completely this year, as house price growth in these areas remained strong. But, as daily life started to get back to normal for many, the opportunity to live in cities became more attractive again, driving up demand."

Pearson was 2.5% higher.

It said trading in the nine months to September 30 was "strong", with underlying sales up 7% year-on-year, allowing the company to reaffirm its full-year sales and adjusted profit outlook.

The London-based education publisher said Assessment & Qualifications sales grew 12% in the nine-month period due to a "continued focus on health and wellness, as well as US Student Assessment and UK & International Qualifications, as exam timetables continue to normalise after Covid-19 disruption".

Virtual Learning sales were up 5%, and English Language Learning sales up 28%. Higher Education sales were down 4%, however, holding back the overall growth.

Looking ahead, Pearson said it is on track to deliver at least 100 million of cost efficiencies next year, and it remains on track to deliver group sales and adjusted operating profit in line with consensus expectations for 2022.

At the other end of the blue chips, Shell gave back 2.2%. The UK oil major and QatarEnergy on Sunday announced that Shell will take a 9.375% in a huge gas field extension offshore Qatar for an undisclosed sum.

TotalEnergies last month said it had been selected for a 9.375% participating interest as well. QatarEnergy, which will retain 75% of the project, said a third international partner will be announced "in due course", with a 6.25% stake remaining. TotalEnergies was down 1.4% in Paris.

The North Field South expansion project is expected to have capacity for 16 million tonnes per year of liquefied natural gas.

The overall North Field project, which also includes North Field East, is "the industry's largest ever LNG project", QatarEnergy said. Starting production in 2026, it will add more than 48 million tonnes per annum to world LNG supplies by 2027.

The project has taken on particular significance in recent months, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine restricted gas supply to Europe. QatarEnergy estimates that the North Field, which extends under the Gulf into Iranian territory, holds about 10% of the world's known gas reserves.

On AIM, Pure Gold slumped 48% after it said financing woes will see it suspend operations and place its PureGold mine on care and maintenance immediately.

"This step follows an evaluation of several potential alternative scenarios and has become necessary because the mine has not yet achieved consistent positive site-level cash flow, notwithstanding recent reductions in operating costs and sequential quarter over quarter increases in production," it added.

Pure Gold said if it can not secure additional financing in the short term, it will be forced to default on its debt obligations.

In China, the Shanghai Composite closed down 2.0%, while the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong lost 6.7%.

Xi Jinping on Sunday was confirmed as general secretary of China's Communist Party's for a rare third term, disregarding traditionally respected age and term limits and cementing his grip on power.

A day earlier the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held only every five years, amended the party constitution to more deeply reflect Xi's ideology and enshrine his leadership role.

China's economy grew 3.9% year-on-year in the third quarter, according to official data released on Monday, beating forecasts.

China had been expected to announce some of its weakest quarterly growth figures since 2020, with its economy hobbled by Covid-19 restrictions and a real estate crisis.

In the previous quarter, growth in the world's second-largest economy collapsed to 0.4% compared with the previous year, the worst performance since 2020. The country posted 4.8% growth in the first quarter of 2022.

But Monday's data, published six days later than scheduled, showed a slight rebound, with China posting growth higher than the 2.5% predicted by a panel of experts surveyed by AFP.

The Japanese Nikkei 225 index closed up 0.3%. The S&P/ASX 200 in Sydney ended up 1.5%.

The euro traded at $0.9844 early Monday, higher than $0.9802 late Friday. Against the yen, the dollar was quoted at JP148.94, up versus JP148.03.

In the US on Friday, stocks ended sharply higher, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 2.5%, the S&P 500 up 2.4% and the Nasdaq Composite up 2.3%.

Stocks were boosted by a Wall Street Journal report that said some US Federal Reserve officials want to slow the pace of rate rises after the November central bank meeting.

Gold was quoted at $1,650.60 an ounce early Monday, higher than $1,643.70 on Friday evening. Brent oil was trading at $90.00 a barrel, lower than $92.84 late Friday.

Still to come Monday, there are PMI readings from the eurozone at 0900 BST and the UK at 0930 BST, followed by US at 1445 BST.

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
With the Met Gala looming this Bank Holiday Monday (this year's theme is 'Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology', don't you know), celebs celebrating one of the high points of the fashion calendar (the other being CFDA) will be thrilled to learn they can also sashay the red carpet in a similar event in London sometime soon.

DazedDigital.com reports that "The British Fashion Council has unveiled the Global Fashion Awards an "event aimed at raising money... Scheduled to take place on December 5th, the Global Fashion Awards will be staged at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The venue has a capacity of over 3,000 people and one of them (if you have the cash) could be you. 'The special thing about this event is that its also open to the public for purchasing of tickets,' explains Nadja Swarovski of Swarovski, which is partnering with the BFC."

Given this is being touted as an 'Oscars meets Met Ball' type fundraising event, one can assume you should've started saving for potential "public tickets" a long time ago.

So who will the funds go to? Money raised will go to the BFCs Education Foundation, to help young fashion hopefuls to realise their potential. According to the report, fashion critic Sarah Mower "issued a stark warning" to Dame Natalie Massenet, chairman of the BFC, stating "that the industry had a 'potential crisis on its hands' and that 'people like an Alexander McQueen, who had a scholarship to go to school, will not emerge and that that we will lose some of the diversity, some of the left-field thinking, the anti-establishment that the fashion industry craves and needs'."

As for the Met Gala; E! are reporting from the red carpet for the first time this coming Monday. While it's being shown live at 7:30 p.m. ET, one can (hopefully) assume it'll be repeated ad nauseam this side of the Atlantic.
Product placement in modern films is, sadly, a necessary evil.

Skyfall famously ran out of its production budget during filming and turned to brands such as Heineken to get them over the finish line - which is why you never seen Bond asking for a vodka and Martini in the film, but you do see him drinking a perfectly visible bottle of Heineken in at least one scene in the film.

Transformers 4, however, was a pretty egregious example of product placement. You had Bud Light, Chevrolet and about ten different other brands mercilessly shoe-horned in because, well, Michael Bay's all about them dollars. However, Paramount Pictures, the studio behind Transformers 4, has been slapped with a $27.7 million lawsuit by a Chinese state-backed travel company over alleged omissions in the film.

The suit claims that the film didn't meet the obligations of a deal signed in 2013. The suit claims that Wulong Karst Tourism paid $750,000 before production kicked off in exchange for promotion in the film, specifically a shot of a logo for China Wulong. However, Paramount and China Movie Channel both conceded that the logo didn't make it into the finished film.

However, Michael Bay shot a short advertisement for the resort and the production crew left behind a number of props and sets at the resort, which they believed could be leveraged as an attraction.

The verdict has yet to be delivered.

Via THR.com
Biographical Information

Paul Riismandel Consultant Paul Riismandel is a media producer and consultant with 20 years of experience in higher education. He is co-founder of RadioSurvivor.com and reports on radio and online media.

Articles for Paul Riismandel

What Higher Education Can Learn From Podcasts: How to Go Long

Why do long-form video lectures get dull in a hurry, while long-form podcasts remain engaging? Because podcasts are built on conversations.

Educators, Embrace the Power of Video Editing and Trim the Fat

Think there's no way to trim that glorious hour-long lecture down to a tight six minutes? Think again. Edit it into a concise video that students can easily absorb.

Streaming Video in Higher Education Has Had a Slow Evolution

Colleges and universities were among the earliest adopters of online video, but getting it right took some time. Here's a look back at a 21-year history.

The State of Education Video 2016

Both inside and outside the classroom, video is as essential to students as email and Wi-Fi. Look for live streaming to increase in higher-ed, especially for popular events.

Buyer's Guide to Education Video Platforms 2016

If you don't currently use a video platform to manage your college or university's video content, it's time to start. Here are the critical factor to think about when making a choice.

Online Students Do Not Learn By Video Alone, Finds Study

Streamed lectures, it turns out, are a poor replacement for classroom learning. To help students absorb what they hear, add interactive activities to the curriculum.

When Putting Lecture Videos Online, Keep Em Short and Sweet

Why replicate the worst aspects of college lectures when posting lecture videos online? Instead, edit those massive videos into more usable short takes.

The Problems With dSLR Video: Shaky Focus, Jello Artifacts

Call it the price of progress: Low-priced dSLRs have made cinematic video mainstream, but they're no substitute for camcorders.

Educational Videographers Need to Make Time for Creativity

While the school year is a hectic one for video teams, it's important to carve out a few hours to meet together and think creatively about upcoming projects.

Cash in on Video Learning Boom by Offering Advanced Instructions

There are thousands of online video lessons available, but many gaps to fill. Companies and colleges should look to the niche topics they can deliver.

Video Platforms Bring Guest Lecturers to the Classroom

Thanks to platforms like Skype, Google Hangouts, and Apple FaceTime, instructors can break up the routine by bringing in a guest or two.

When the Producer Becomes the Student: Creating Classroom Video

Recording video lectures is a challenge for even the best professors, since they don't get live feedback. The producer needs to step in and fill that role.

The State of Education Video 2015

From flipped classrooms to MOOCs, video is at the very center of education in 2015. But are colleges and students getting their money's worth?

Buyer's Guide to Education Video Platforms 2015

Your school's video has value, not just for learning and assessment, but for training, promotion, publicity, recruitment, and more. Make sure you choose an education video platform that helps you maximize that value while keeping your video secure and well-managed.

Educational Institutions Need to Preserve Video Assets Better

While some colleges and universities have redundant systems in place to safeguard video files, others are haphazard about video organization.

Found in Translation: How to Stream Video in Multiple Languages

Reach out to an international audience. Here are video translation steps to follow for strong results, as well as expert tips for high quality.

It's Elementary: Schools Should Teach Basic Video Literacy

Just as today's workers need to know how to write a clear and effective report, tomorrow's workers will need to know how to present their message on video.

With Online Video, the Classroom Becomes a Laboratory

Using data from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), researchers are discovering how to make online learningand online videobetter.

Educators, Adopt 4K Video Now and Get Ahead of the Curve

While ultra-high definition video is years away from becoming the viewing standard, there's no reason to wait that long for video production.

Kaltura Enters Lecture Capture with CaptureSpace

Software-based system designed to let schools that haven't started using lecture capture to start doing so cheaply, using Open Capture Standard

Colleges Need to Teach the Teachers to Produce Quality Video

Technical snafus can disrupt lectures and frustrate instructors. For strong results, colleges and universities need to think about training ahead of time.

The Problem With Flipped Classrooms: Teachers Shoot Lousy Video

Educators are recording video lectures for students to watch outside of class, but they're often terrible quality. Here are easy fixes for lectures worth watching.

The State of Educational Video 2014

The proliferation of mobile devices and the surge in popularity of the flipped classroom mean that video is at the head of the class in today's schools.

Rochester Institute of Technology Embraces the Flipped Classroom

Online video lessons viewed at home let university professors get the most out of classroom time, and students reap the rewards.

How to Choose a Captioning Service

Few content publishers have the know-how or resources to do their own captioning. Here are the issues to explore when selecting a service provider.

Play and Learn: Why Its Time to Gamify Educational Video

Gamification keeps students engaged, yet it's been underused in classroom video. It needs to take a giant leap forward -- and the games need to be fun!

CreativeLive Launches 24/7 Educational Video Channels

With a catalog of more than 500 video courses in topics covering art, business, music, video, and more, CreativeLive brings video education to users around the world, 24/7.

CDNs Offer More Than a Quick Byte

Nowadays, CDNs are jazzing up their menus with value-added services such as transcoding, content management, and monetization. Want fries with that?

Authenticity Is Key for Educational and Training Videos

What separates useful educational videos from laughably bad ones? To be successful, they first need to feel authentic to the audience.

Flipped Classroom Model Taking Off, Thanks to Online Video

A new report from Sonic Foundry and the Center for Digital Education shows instructor and student benefits from a video-driven flipped classroom approach to learning

Online Video Disrupts Higher Ed, Streaming Courses to the Masses

Massive Open Online Courses are reinvigorating the way we use educational video -- and video is changing online learning.

Learning by Design: Go Beyond Performance in Educational Video

Anyone creating educational online videos should discover the principals of instructional design, which emphasize what the student learns.

Research Report Charts the Rise and Challenges of OTT Video

An in-depth survey of over 750 media industry professionals looks at the growth of cord-shaving, the importance of rights management, and the continuing problem of bandwidth limitations.

New York Schools Choose Ensemble for Media Sharing and Delivery

SUNY and NY6 schools have adopted similar measures for sharing digital media and controlling costs.

Attention Colleges and Universities: Kill the Lecture!

Lectures are outdated, ineffective, and just plain dull. Online video is ready to take over, delivering information in a far better way.

Online Video Lets Professors Flip the Classroom

In a trend called "flipping the classroom," college instructors have students view instructional videos online before class, so that classroom time is put to better use.

Three Paths to Lecture Capture in Higher Education

Learn how Duke University, UCLA, and California State University-San Marcos all took different approaches to offering lecture recording for students.

The State of Education Video 2013

Online video is flipping the classroom: students view instructor videos at home, then do homework in class for maximum teacher-student interaction.

Whats the Path to Purchase for Video on Campuses?

Video use is growing at colleges and universities, but who makes the call on purchasing systems is often not clear.

How to Create a Video Strategy for Colleges and Universities

Captions, interactivity, and lifespan management should all be part of a comprehensive video strategy.

Having an Online Video Strategy Is Crucial for Higher Education

Campuses need to think about their streaming video needs before choosing a solution. Here are the factors to consider and the questions to ask.

Kaltura Upgrades its Cross Campus Media Suite

Version 3.0 brings cross-course sharing and new LMS plug-ins

Sonic Foundry Mediasite 6.1 Simplifies Multimedia Presentations

Mediasite moves from lecture capture to online video management with online storage and editing.

Higher Education Faces a Storm of Change with Video at the Center

Video is transforming how college students learn, but creating a video strategy takes careful planning.

The State of Education Video 2012

With universities like MIT and Stanford using online video to expand their reach, and with technology and platform vendors investing serious dollars into the educational market, 2012 is shaping up to be a very exciting year for video in schools.

Academic Job Market Growing for Video Professionals

Despite the slow economy, colleges and universities are recognizing that they need specialized professionals for digital and online media production.

Lecture Capture: A Bold Idea to Make Classroom Learning Flexible

Recording lectures for use out of the classroom seems to help in-classroom performance.

Educators and Students Benefit from Video's Power to Connect

Whether it's in the classroom or not, video can play an important role for teachers, students and coaches, helping them build one-on-one connections.

R.I.P. to the Flip, a Camera that Made a Big Impact in the Classroom

The Flip camera was dead simple to operate, inexpensive, and never needed a USB cord. For those reasons and more, it was beloved by teachers.

Online Video E-Portfolios are Coming into Their Own

Schools that provide a seamless, video-rich e-portfolio are giving their students a leg up in advancing to colleges and the job market

Educational Video in 2011

Video is no longer novel on college campuses. While video's not quite as ubiquitous as textbooks, it's getting there.

Class Act: Good Times

There's never been a better time to be using video in education

Class Act: Learning in HD

Despite the move towards HD for online video, there are still use cases where SD is the best fit

Kaltura Announces Cross-Campus Education Suite

MediaSpace lets colleges create their own YouTubes, letting everyone contribute online media.

Class Act: It's Not About the Equipment

Class Act: Navigating the Hallways of Academia

Video.edu News: Adobe, Bucknell University

Adobe opens up the eLearning Suite to the Mac, while Bucknell University's Video-Rich virtual tour wins a Webby award

Class Act: The iPad and the Flash Challenge for Elearning

Apple's public brand has been polished to a bright luster over the last decade. But it's fair to say that Apple has always had a special place in the education worldsince the introduction of the Apple II. Thus, I anticipate that educators will pay a lot more attention to the iPad than they have to any previous tablet or e-reader.

Video.edu: Video Remixing, and the Pain and Pleasure of iPads

USC's Stroome online video suite leverages Kaltura for remixing, while at least two universities are blocking some iPads from campus networks

Video.edu: iPad U?

Seton Hill to give incoming first-year undergrads iPads; Adobe's CS5 offers tools for educators

Video.edu: U.S. DOE Releases Technology Plan, C-SPAN Puts Thousands of Hours Online

Video figures prominently in the Department of Education's National Education Technology Plan, and C-SPAN has created an online video library with 160,000 hours of content.

Video.edu: UCLA Starts Streaming Again, OpenCourseWare Consortium Raises $350,000

Citing the TEACH Act and fair use, UCLA asserts that streaming copyrighted content is a legit educational use, while the OpenCourseWare Consortium gets a boost from universities across the globe

Video.edu: Library Alliance Defends Streaming, Yale Admissions Goes Viral

In the latest education video news roundup, the Library Copyright Alliance says that streaming films is just fine, while Yale channels Glee for a new admissions video.

Wed., Feb. 24, by Paul Riismandel

The Tipping Point: 2009 Education Video Year In Review

Video.edu: Education Video News Roundup

In this new biweekly feature, we'll keep you apprised of the latest developments in education video news. This week: UCLA suspends online video and President Obama's 2011 budget proposes big changes for education technology funding.

Tues., Feb. 9, by Paul Riismandel

Class Act: Wheres the Teaching Camera of Today?

Class Act: Form to Enhance Function

Class Act: On Production Values and Flipping Burgers

There's a tangle of ideas embedded in the concept of production values.

Class Act: Making Educational Video More Accessible

Though many sites offer a bevy of educational video, there is still no central hub for academic content that spans the web.

Class Act: Preserving Your Video Legacy

With the last distributor of new VHS movies giving up the format, it is time for educational institutions to think about what video they have stored in this medium.

Advanced Learning: Education Year in Review

The use of video in higher education has moved beyond mere lecture capture.

Futurewatch: EducationCritical Decisions

2009 will be the year educational media goes beyond podcasts and becomes truly mobile.

Adobe's New eLearning Suite

The Adobe eLearning Suite, which includes the brand-new Captivate 4, takes aim at both rich media presentation tools and conferencing/collaboration platforms with offerings that should appeal to both academic users and enterprise training departments.

Tues., Jan. 20, by Paul Riismandel

Futurewatch 2009: Big Opportunities, Big Challenges in Educational Video

Its an exciting time to be working in educational media, but its also a critical time as we make decisions on platform, content, format, and management that may well determine the equality of students learning for years to come.

Class Act: What Makes for Compelling Video?

Faculty profile videos are a good way to get people excited about your institution, but only if you have something to show.

Tues., Dec. 2, by Paul Riismandel

Class Act: Educating the Next Generation of Online Media Makers

The maturation of online media will demand an increasing level of sophistication in production, design, and distribution. So who's training our future online media innovators?

Mon., Nov. 3, by Paul Riismandel

Class Act: Intellectuals' Property Rights

How should we balance protection and openness when it comes to educators' intellectual property?

Tues., Sept. 30, by Paul Riismandel

Class Act: Is DIY the Way to Go for Educational Institutions?

With a DIY approach to online video, you're substituting one resource for anothertime for money. It's not a bad equation, particularly if your institution is just testing the waters, but it is wise to recognize that trade-off at the start and budget learning time as an investment in your school's online success.

Fri., June 27, by Paul Riismandel

Class Act: What's Your Digital Media Strategy?

These days, most learning institutions take the necessity of investing in their websites seriously. But when it comes to digital media, I feel like its 1998 all over again.

Futurewatch: Education

To CDN or not to CDN? That is the question for schools in 2008.

Gimme Five: Rich Media Presentation Systems for Education and the Enterprise

By carefully assessing your needs and comparing them against the features of these five rich media presentation systems, you're likely to find one that meets your requirements.

Tues., April 15, by Paul Riismandel

How to Manage Video Content in Higher Education

Managing online video content isn't simple, easy, or cheap. Yet, when the use of dynamic content management systems (CMSs) for websites has trickled down within reach of every blogger, its frustrating to realize that the same kind of management for digital media has not necessarily made the same journey, especially in education.

Class Act: We're Educational Media Professionals

What's in a name? Plenty, and it's time that those of us whose job is to coordinate digital media to make their case.

Class Act: The Future of Educational Video?

It's time digital media becomes an adjunct to writing for college students and instructors, and schools, colleges, and universities should provide basic audio and video production skills.

Fri., Nov. 16, by Paul Riismandel

Class Act: ROI in the EDU

Increasingly, educational technologists are asked to weigh the costs in money and labor of technologies with tangible, demonstrable returns.

Changing in a Flash

Just because Flash Video has leapt to the forefront of consumer content delivery doesn't mean it's time to abandon all other formats within the academy.

Commentary: Class ActEducational Media: Changing in a Flash

The academy is a breeding ground for technological innovation, but sometimes lags behind when it comes to actually adopting it. Such is the case with Flashuniversities are beginning to deploy it, but slowly.

Commentary: Streaming in the Ivory Tower

Educators can learn a lot from the enterprise side of the streaming media industry, where ROI and audience data comprise core metrics. Likewise, the rest of the industry can learn a lot from educators who are faced with making media pay off with very tangible results: better grades and better jobs.

Sun., May 6, by Paul Riismandel
Michael Pearson, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc., poses following their annual general meeting in Laval, Quebec May 19, 2015. REUTERS/Christinne Muschi

By Sarah N. Lynch and Bill Berkrot

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Activist investor William Ackman promised U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday that he will urge the board of Valeant Pharmaceuticals (NYSE: VRX) to reduce the high prices of four life-saving drugs that are now at the heart of two congressional probes.

Speaking before the Senate Special Committee on Aging, Ackman revealed that Valeant's board will hold a conference call on Thursday to discuss the costs of heart medications Isuprel and Nitropress, as well as Cuprimine and Syprine, two drugs that are used to treat a genetic disorder that causes copper to build up in the body's organs.

Valeant raised the price of Isuprel by about 720 percent and Nitropress by 310 percent, after acquiring them in 2015. The other two were raised by 5,878 percent and 3,162 percent, respectively.

"My recommendation is going to be to reduce the prices," Ackman testified.

The Senate Special Committee on Aging is one of two U.S. congressional panels investigating sky-rocketing price increases of certain decades-old drugs acquired by companies including Valeant and Turing Pharmaceuticals, a company founded by Martin Shkreli.

Ackman, a major Valeant shareholder, appeared Wednesday alongside the company's outgoing Chief Executive Michael Pearson and Howard Schiller, a board member and former chief financial officer.

Ackman joined the board last month as Valeant faced mounting scrutiny by members of Congress, prosecutors and regulators over its drug pricing, business practices and accounting - issues that have caused its share price to plummet almost 90 percent since August.

Valeant has about $30 billion of debt and has been negotiating with creditors, some of whom issued notices of default after it missed a deadline for the filing of its financial results.

Ackman said Wednesday that one of his top priorities is to protect the company from bankruptcy. Later, in response to a question from Reuters, he expressed confidence that the company will recover.

There is not going to be any bankruptcy of Valeant, he said. We were in a death spiral, and we have taken steps to deal with the banks. We are going to file our 10K on time. We brought in a new CEO.

Pearson, Ackman and Schiller all told lawmakers on Wednesday they regretted Valeant's pricing decisions.

"The company was too aggressive and I, as its leader, was too aggressive in pursuing price increases on certain drugs," he said.

But many lawmakers on the panel appeared skeptical. They questioned Valeant's business model of investing little in research and development, and the company's practice of acquiring decades-old drugs and raising the prices.

Senator Claire McCaskill, the panel's top Democrat, angrily asked each of the panelists at one point if they could recall one drug that Valeant didn't raise the price on.

"Not in the United States," Pearson responded, while Schiller was only able to come up with the name of one drug Valeant acquired after its purchase of Salix.

"That is not social good, that is social bad," McCaskill said.

Lawmakers also questioned whether Valeant's patient assistance and rebate programs are truly helping patients and hospitals afford the medications.

Senator Susan Collins, the panel's chairman, said her committee's investigation has thus far been unable to find a single hospital that has received a discount.

"I can assure you that many of the large hospital systems are getting discounts on the heart drugs," Pearson said.

Pearson is expected to step down in the coming weeks to make way for the incoming CEO, Joseph Papa, previously of Perrigo Company (NYSE: PRGO).

Wednesday's hearing also featured testimony from doctors and a patient with Wilson's Disease who was forced to stop using Syprine because of the price spike.

Dr. Frederick Askari of the University of Michigan told the panel that the cost of Syprine is now so high that it has become less expensive to get a liver transplant and a life-time supply of anti-rejection medications.

The patient, Berna Heyman, testified that Valeant refused to help her when she called to complain about the prices. Later, after speaking with the media, the company changed its tune, offered to help, and even sent flowers.

"I refused the flowers," she said.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington and Bill Berkrot in New York; Editing by Bernard Orr and Alan Crosby)
Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH) announced the signing of a master development agreement with Equinox Ventures Ltd, a joint venture between Equinox Group Ltd. and Al Tayyar Travel Group, to introduce and develop three of Choice's most prominent brands: Clarion, Comfort and Quality across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. This announcement, its fifth EMEA market portfolio expansion in the past six months, is part of Choice's strategy to continue to expand its brand internationally.

The Middle East travel industry is forecasted to rise to $98 billion by 2017, from $71.8 billion in 2014, according to Phocuswright. With an emerging middle class looking to travel both within the region and internationally, and an increase in inbound business, leisure travel and tourism, there is growing demand for mid-market and budget accommodations as well as a continued desire for upscale brands.

Shuja Zaidi, President of Dubai-based Equinox Group Ltd. said, "Currently, markets such as Dubai, Riyadh, Jeddah and Makkah are undersupplied in mid-market hotel accommodations, providing an opportunity for a strong hotel brand such as Choice to bring its portfolio to the market. We believe that the next wave of growth and expansion in our region belongs to the mid-market segment. To prepare for it, it was only natural that we partner up with one of the largest and most globally recognized brands with a portfolio that spans from mid- to upscale properties and can offer travelers what they need."

Abdullah Aldawood, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Altayyar Travel Group said, "Our cooperation with a global player like Choice will help us close the gap in our efforts to integrate all parts of our travel business. We had started with the acquisition and development of hospitality assets and asset management and are now ready to roll out globally recognized brands in the region, working closely with our partners to bring their expertise and regional knowledge."

The master development agreement is anticipated to deliver approximately 25 hotels and 8,000 hotel rooms for Choice's portfolio in the UAE and Saudi Arabia by 2021.

"We are delighted to sign this agreement with Equinox Group and Al Tayyar Travel Group that will help Choice establish a presence in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and also offer a platform for rapid expansion. Drawing on their regional expertise and infrastructure, we are perfectly placed to provide travelers with the quality mid-market hotel accommodations they need, all backed by Choice's global hotel platform and brand reputation for value and service," said Mark Pearce, senior vice president, international division, for Choice Hotels.

This agreement is the fifth EMEA market portfolio expansion Choice has announced in the last six months, having signed agreements related to the co-branding of 19 properties in Germany, Austria and Hungary under the Comfort and Quality brands, and another deal to establish multiple hotels in Belgium. Choice is further growing its presence in Germany with two new Comfort brand hotels in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, and recently launched its upscale Ascend Hotel Collection in the UK and France.

Turkey is another strategically important market for Choice where it currently has three hotels in Istanbul and one in Kahramanmaras, and a growing development pipeline.
Suncor (NYSE: SU) announced that it has agreed to acquire a further position in Syncrude, purchasing the five per cent interest from Murphy Oil Corporation's Canadian subsidiary at a purchase price of approximately $937 million, subject to closing adjustments. The transaction will be effective as of April 1, 2016.

"We're pleased to acquire this additional interest in the Syncrude joint venture," said Steve Williams, president and chief executive officer. "This transaction is a strategic fit for our portfolio given the quality of the resource, our existing interest in Syncrude and the potential for value creation. It's consistent with our focus on capital and operational discipline and builds on our successful acquisition of Canadian Oil Sands, increasing our production capacity by 17,500 barrels per day of high-quality light sweet synthetic crude. This growth gives us even more leverage to oil prices as they recover."

Through this transaction Suncor's share in the Syncrude joint venture will increase from 48.74 per cent to 53.74 per cent. With the increased stake in Syncrude and the Fort Hills and Hebron projects on target for first oil late next year, Suncor expects to profitably grow production by over 40 per cent versus 2015, reaching 800,000 barrels per day in 2019.

The transaction is subject to closing conditions, including regulatory approval under the Competition Act. The transaction is anticipated to close by the end of the second quarter.
After more than 10 months of negotiating, Verizon today presented union leaders from the CWA and IBEW with an updated comprehensive proposal for about 36,000 wireline employees in the company's Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

As part of this last, best and final offer, the company increased its wage offer to 7.5 percent over the term of the contract. The company is also offering continued access to high quality healthcare at an affordable cost and generous retirement benefits.

"We're putting our last, best final offer on the table, one that provides the foundation for quality jobs now and in the future," said Marc Reed, Verizon's chief administrative officer. "From the beginning, our goal has been to reach an agreement that's fair to our employees, good for our customers and helps our company better compete in the digital world. This offer meets those objectives. A better offer would be hard to find."

Among the highlights in the company's last, best final offer:

Wages: 7.5 percent wage increase over the term of the contract.

Job security (layoff protection): If an employee has job security today, that will be retained for the term of the contract provided the company gets increased flexibility in managing and deploying the workforce, through measures such as voluntary retirement incentive offers and other workforce flexibility changes.

Retirement benefits: The generous 401k company match will continue. Eligible employees will also continue to participate in a pension plan with three annual increases subject to a 30 year cap.

Healthcare: The company is maintaining excellent healthcare coverage, with increases in contributions and some plan design changes that will help in efforts to better manage escalating costs.

"Verizon has always offered excellent jobs with outstanding compensation and benefit packages, and with this very competitive contract offer that will continue," Reed said. "The ball is now in the unions' court to do what's right for our employees."

This offer also includes the company's final proposals regarding call routing, contracting, and temporary work assignments. Specifics vary by region, but full details can be found at www.verizon.com/laborfacts.

Over the duration of the strike, now in its 16th day, thousands of non-union Verizon employees have been on special assignment filling-in for striking employees in call centers, in the field and in all facets of network operations. Together these employees have resolved tens of thousands of repair dispatches and have fulfilled thousands of new Fios orders.

To date, over 1,000 of the union-represented employees have returned to work and this number has been growing each day. The company also reports the strike has had minimal impact to its operations.
Passengers on a British Airways flight travelling from Prague to London were shocked last night when their plane was struck by lightning as they prepared to land in Heathrow Airport.

Passengers on Flight BA857 described their ordeal on social media.

Plane got struck by lightning on the way into Heathrow. Good to be back in London.  Alaxen (@Alaxen) April 27, 2016

Plane just got hit by lightning on the descent into Heathrow. Didn't die #winning aiA?asiA?Y  liz dobson (@liz_dobson) April 27, 2016

Hello London! Welcomed back by a lightning strike to the plane just as we were coming into land at Heathrow. #NoFear  Alexander (@AlexanderSE10) April 27, 2016

My plane got struck by lightning. I screamed small small.  #ThePoint (@Afo_B) April 27, 2016

Storm West London Putney. Lightning, rain, snow, hail. The BA987 Airbus struck by lightning on aprch to LHR. pic.twitter.com/uNmYQB0jlk  London Flyer (@hi_flyer7) April 27, 2016

Photographer Aled Rhys Jones also managed to capture the the incredible moment on his phone.

Via Mashable
MARSEILLE, France, April 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Innate Pharma SA (the "Company" - Euronext Paris: FR0010331421 - IPH) today announces that it will be present at the following investor events during the second quarter of 2016:

- Gilbert Dupont Healthcare Conference - Paris, May 10, 2016

- Citi Swiss Healthcare Investor Day - Zurich, May 19-20, 2016

- Goldman Sachs 37th Annual Global Healthcare Conference - Rancho Palos Verdes, June 7-9, 2016

- Kepler Cheuvreux Biotech Days Conference - Paris, June 15-16, 2016

- Bryan Garnier 1st Oncology Day - Paris, June 17, 2016

- Citi European Healthcare Conference - London, June 21-22, 2016

- Societe Generale CIB Healthcare & Biotechnology Conference - Paris, June 28, 2016

***** The Company will host an Investor & Analyst Update on May 16th, 2016, in New York, USA, from 12:00 to 3:00 pm ET.

Innate Pharma's management team will give an overview of the Company's pipeline of first-in-class monoclonal antibodies in Immuno-Oncology and provide an update on the Company's strategy.

The event is intended for institutional investors and sell-side analysts only. Please RSVP in advance if you plan to attend, as space is limited. To reserve a spot, please contact LifeSci Advisors, LLC at [email protected].

*****

Innate Pharma is committed to meet on a regular basis with the financial community. All corporate information on the Company, such as its financial statements or its corporate presentations, is available on the Company's website in the Investors' section (www.innate-pharma.com/en/financials).

About Innate Pharma:

Innate Pharma S.A. is a biopharmaceutical company discovering and developing first-in-class therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of cancer and inflammatory diseases.

Innate Pharma specializes in immuno-oncology, a new therapeutic field that is changing cancer treatment by enhancing the capability of the body's own immune cells to recognize and kill cancer cells.

The Company has pioneered the development of antibodies that block inhibitory checkpoint receptors on NK cells. Today, Innate Pharma has three first-in-class antibodies in clinical development in immuno-oncology and a pipeline of preclinical candidates to novel targets and mechanisms.

Its innovative approach has translated into alliances with leaders in the biopharmaceutical industry such as Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk A/S.

Based in Marseille, France, Innate Pharma had 118 employees as at December 31, 2015. The company is listed on Euronext Paris.

Learn more about Innate Pharma at www.innate-pharma.com.

Practical Information about Innate Pharma shares:

ISIN code Ticker code FR0010331421 IPH

Disclaimer:

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements. Although the company believes its expectations are based on reasonable assumptions, these forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. For a discussion of risks and uncertainties which could cause the company's actual results, financial condition, performance or achievements to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, please refer to the Risk Factors ("Facteurs de Risque") section of the Document de Reference prospectus filed with the AMF, which is available on the AMF website (http://www.amf-france.org) or on Innate Pharma's website.

This press release and the information contained herein do not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe to shares in Innate Pharma in any country.

For additional information, please contact:

Innate Pharma ATCG Press Laure-Helene Mercier Director, Investor Relations Marie Puvieux (France) Mob: +33 (0)6 10 54 36 72 Tel.: +33 (0)4 30 30 30 87 Jean-Medhi Grangeon (ROW) Mob: +33 (0)6 62 22 00 24 [email protected] [email protected]

PR in English http://hugin.info/155662/R/2007437/742081.pdf

HUG#2007437

Source: INNATE PHARMA
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Mercer has signed an agreement with RiskFirst to offer the risk management platform PFaroe to clients and pension schemes. PFaroe is a powerful web-based platform allowing defined benefit (DB) pension schemes direct access to a broad range of analytics for the purpose of evaluating the risks affecting their schemes and performing real-time scenario stress testing. For those clients seeking access to the analytics the platform provides, Mercer will use PFaroe to support their consulting work across all disciplines of defined benefit pensions  retirement planning, investment consulting and fiduciary management  to provide a holistic and cohesive solution.

Alan Baker, Partner and UK Head of DB Risk at Mercer, comments: In the face of ongoing volatility and other pressures, companies and trustees are looking for innovative ways to manage their pension scheme liabilities. Mercer has always tried to be ahead of the curve in meeting those needs through innovative solutions such as Mercers Pension Risk Exchange or SmartDB. While we continue to invest in our own tools and innovations, this more formal relationship with RiskFirst provides a very valuable alternative for those clients looking to make use of PFaroe. We believe we are the first major global employee benefit consultancy to make use of RiskFirsts market-leading platform in this way and we are already working with a number of clients to implement the product.

Matthew Seymour, CEO, RiskFirst, says: Innovation is deeply seeded within Mercer's ethos, and here they are demonstrating that by not "reinventing the wheel", but rather by adapting and developing new operating practices to meet the needs of their clients.

Seymour adds: This is a significant advance for a number of pension plans who have wanted to use PFaroe, but have been keen to work with one of the Big 3 benefit consultants to provide the advice and direction they want. They can now have both and I am confident that PFaroe will be a valuable addition to Mercers existing risk management tool kit.

-Ends-

Notes to Editors

About Mercer

Mercer is a global consulting leader in talent, health, retirement and investments. Mercer helps clients around the world advance the health, wealth and careers of their most vital asset  their people. Mercers more than 20,000 employees are based in 43 countries and the firm operates in over 140 countries. Mercer is a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies (NYSE: MMC) a global professional services firm offering clients advice and solutions in the areas of risk, strategy and people. Marsh is a leader in insurance broking and risk management; Guy Carpenter is a leader in providing risk and reinsurance intermediary services; Mercer is a leader in talent, health, retirement and investment consulting; and Oliver Wyman is a leader in management consulting. With annual revenue of $13 billion and approximately 60,000 colleagues worldwide, Marsh & McLennan Companies provides analysis, advice and transactional capabilities to clients in more than 130 countries. The Company is committed to being a responsible corporate citizen and making a positive impact in the communities in which it operates. Visit www.mmc.com for more information and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter @MMC_Global.

About RiskFirst

RiskFirst (formerly PensionsFirst) is a financial technology business that provides intuitive, user-friendly risk analytics and reporting. Its core product PFaroe is web-based, available anytime and anywhere, and allows users to evaluate risk from multiple perspectives and to perform real-time scenario stress testing. Since being launched, PFaroe has established itself as the industry standard benchmark for risk management technology. Over 1,200 pension plans and $750 billion of pension liabilities are now modelled on RiskFirsts technology. For more information please go to www.riskfirst.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428005119/en/

RiskFirst / Mercer

Alistair Peck / Mags Andersen (UK Press Office)

+ 44 (0) 20 7178 3143/3513

[email protected]

Follow us on Twitter @MercerPressUK

or

Thomas Morris, Moorgate Communications,

London: +44 20 7377 4998

Source: RiskFirst
TRIPOLI (Reuters) - At least nine Egyptian migrants and three people smugglers were killed in a money dispute in the town of Bani Walid, a local official said on Wednesday.

The official said a group of Egyptians had killed the Libyan smugglers and tried to drive the bodies away, but they were stopped at a checkpoint when blood was noticed on their car.

A fourth smuggler then went to the police station where the Egyptians were being held, and opened fire on them, he said.

The United Nations mission to Libya said the deaths had occurred in a series of incidents on Tuesday and Wednesday. It said as many as 13 Egyptians had been killed, and called for an investigation.

Hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants and internally displaced people are currently in Libya, according to the United Nations. Some foreign migrants have settled in the North African country to work, while others are seeking to cross the Mediterranean Sea for Europe.

Powerful smuggling networks linked to Libya's numerous armed groups generally control migration flows, and migrants are frequently subjected to abuses.

(Reporting by Ahmed Elumami, writing by Aidan Lewis, editing by G Crosse)
By Alisa Tang

BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The fight against slavery in Thailand's multibillion-dollar seafood industry will fail unless solutions are "localized" and workers are granted the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining, a prominent British activist said.

Thailand's reputation has suffered in recent years after numerous investigations by news organizations and rights groups into human trafficking, slavery and violence in its seafood industry.

The country, which has been politically unstable for a decade and is currently under military rule, has vowed to crack down on human trafficking and slavery, and recently introduced reforms to its fisheries law.

But Steve Trent, founder and executive director of the UK-based Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), said the EJF would keep its focus on Thailand until durable reforms were put in place that would not "disappear between transition governments".

"At the moment because Thailand's had all this attention, you'll find bilateral agencies focusing efforts there and international organizations heading toward Thailand to save the day," he said in a Skype interview from London on Monday.

"The reality is it's not going to be organizations like EJF that save the day. When I talk about localizing this, I'm serious - it has to be a Thai solution, otherwise it won't be durable."

Trent is one of the speakers at Trust Forum Asia, an event on Thursday in Singapore hosted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

EJF conducted an in-depth, three-year investigation into slavery on Thai fishing boats, uncovering a well-oiled system of trafficking, abuse and exploitation.

Trent said there had been positive changes, from a past when Thai officials issued flat denials, to the substantive talks he held earlier this month with Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan and senior government officials in Bangkok.

He highlighted in particular the reform of fisheries laws and the sophisticated vessel monitoring system that has been created to track Thai fishing vessels, a system he described as being "among the best in the world".

Yet he said law enforcement must be system-wide and consistent, and extend beyond Bangkok to the provinces where powerful individuals have their own personal fiefdoms.

Thailand must also introduce fundamental changes to its labor laws granting freedom of association for Thai and migrant labor communities, to allow for scrutiny of the laws, he said.

"Without that, I don't believe the changes implemented will be durable or consistent over time... Allow them to unionize and allow collective bargaining," Trent said, calling for more funds to be dedicated to Thai and migrant labor organizations.

"The money's there to do that. If the donors are sensible, that is where they should channel their efforts. I'm not trying to do my way out of any funding, but that's the promised, clear path."

(Reporting by Alisa Tang, editing by Tim Pearce. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, womens rights, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)
By Khalid Abdelaziz

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Police fired tear gas at hundreds who gathered in central Khartoum and outside the city's main university on Thursday, protesting against the killing of a student at a campus demonstration a day earlier, witnesses said.

Crowds chanted: "Killing of a student, killing of a nation, down with military rule," at the rare rally in the center of the heavily-guarded Sudanese capital.

Protesters later blocked a road and set fire to tires outside Khartoum university. Police fired tear gas canisters and used batons to beat protesters who hurled rocks back at them.

Students had initially demonstrated on Wednesday against government plans to sell off Khartoum University buildings, before witnesses said gunmen in plain clothes opened fire on them, killing 20-year-old Mohammed al Sadek.

Anti-government-protests erupted at his funeral later on Wednesday.

The government said on Thursday that unnamed armed groups were trying to undermine security at Sudan's universities - long centers for political activism and debate.

"The government will not allow any disruption to the stability of universities," President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's aide, Ibrahim Mahmoud, told the Sudanese Media Centre, an agency which is close to Sudanese security services.

Bashir, who took power in a 1989 coup backed by the army and Islamists, brooks little dissent in Sudan, which has been suffering from an economic crisis since South Sudan seceded in 2011, costing Khartoum more then 70 percent of its oil revenues.

The former army officer is wanted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court on charges of masterminding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes during Sudan's Darfur conflict. He denies wrongdoing.

"I remain concerned about a number of human rights issues in the country," Aristide Nononsi, the United Nations Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in the Sudan, said in a statement on Thursday.

"I continue to hear about cases of arbitrary arrests and detention, as well as allegations of ill-treatment and travel ban on human rights defenders and political activists by security forces."

(Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

FORM 6-K

Report of Foreign Private Issuer

Pursuant to Rule 13a-16 or 15d-16

of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934

For the month of April 2016

Commission File Number: 1-15256

OI S.A.

(Exact Name as Specified in its Charter)

N/A

(Translation of registrants name into English)

Rua General Polidoro, No. 99, 5th floor/part  Botafogo

22280-001 Rio de Janeiro, RJ

Federative Republic of Brazil

(Address of principal executive offices)

(Indicate by check mark whether the registrant files or will file annual reports under cover of Form 20-F or Form 40-F.)

Form 20-F: x Form 40-F: 

(Indicate by check mark if the registrant is submitting the Form 6-K in paper as permitted by Regulation S-T Rule 101(b)(1)):

Yes:  No: x

(Indicate by check mark if the registrant is submitting the Form 6-K in paper as permitted by Regulation S-T Rule 101(b)(7)):

Yes:  No: x

(Indicate by check mark whether the registrant by furnishing the information contained in this Form, the Registrant is also thereby furnishing the information to the Commission pursuant to Rule 12g3-2(b) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.)

Yes:  No: x

If Yes is marked, indicate below the file number assigned to the registrant in connection with Rule 12g3-2(b):

EXHIBIT INDEX

Exhibit

Number Description of Document 1 Notice to the Shareholders, dated April 27, 2016 (English translation). 2 Notice to the Market, dated April 26, 2016 (English translation).

SIGNATURES

Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned, thereunto duly authorized.

Date: April 28, 2016

OI S.A. By: /s/ Flavio Nicolay Guimaraes Name: Flavio Nicolay Guimaraes Title: Chief Financial Officer and Investor Relations Officer

EXHIBIT 1

Oi S.A.

Corporate Taxpayers Registry (CNPJ/MF) No. 76.535.764/0001-43

Board of Trade (NIRE) No. 33.300.29520-8

Public-Held Company

NOTICE TO THE MARKET

Oi S.A. ( Oi  or the  Company ), hereby notifies its shareholders and the market in general that considering that the financial covenant related to leverage was not complied with by the Company, the Trustee of the 5th Public Issuance of Subordinated Non-Convertible Debentures (the  5 th Issuance ) has convened a general meeting to deliberate on the subject. The general meeting on first call was scheduled for April 15, 2016, and was not installed due to the lack of quorum. The general meeting on second call was scheduled for this date and was also not installed since no debenture holder was present.

Thus, the Trustee of the 5th Issuance declared, on the date hereof, the early termination of such outstanding debentures, in accordance with Clause 6.21.2 of the deed of the 5th Issuance, effective on this date (April 27, 2016) (the  Declared Early Termination Date ). The outstanding principal amount of these debentures is estimated to be R$ 1,520,794.08.

The Company will pay the Updated Nominal Unitary Amount of the outstanding debentures of the 5th Issuance and their respective accrued remuneration, calculated on a pro rata temporis basis from the date of the immediately preceding payment date to the effective payment date, which is three business days after the Declared Early Termination Date, or May 2, 2016.

Further, the Company notes that the early termination of the outstanding debentures of the 5th Issuance does not, and will not, trigger a cross-default of any of the Companys financial debts, either domestic or international, given the small outstanding principal amount of the 5th Issuance.

Finally, the Company advises its customers and the market in general that the early termination of the debentures of the 5th Issuance, as with the early termination of the debentures of the 9th Issuance, will not affect its ability to continue to provide services and supply products with the best technology and the highest quality standards.

Rio de Janeiro, April 27, 2016.

Flavio Nicolay Guimaraes

Financial Officer and Investor Relations Officer

Oi S.A.

Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements:

This communication contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and Brazilian applicable regulation. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements regarding the beliefs and expectations of Oi, business strategies, future synergies and cost savings, future costs and future liquidity are forward-looking statements. The words will, may, should, could, anticipates, intends, believes, estimates, expects, forecasts, plans, targets, goal and similar expressions, as they relate to Oi or its management, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. There is no guarantee that the expected events, tendencies or expected results will actually occur. Such statements reflect the current views of management Oi and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on many assumptions and factors, including general economic and market conditions, industry conditions, corporate approvals, operational factors and other factors. Any changes in such assumptions or factors could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations. All forward- looking statements attributable to Oi or its affiliates, or persons acting on their behalf, are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements set forth in this paragraph. Undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Except as required under the Brazilian and U.S. federal securities laws and the rules and regulations of the CVM, the SEC or of regulatory authorities in other applicable jurisdictions Oi and its affiliates do not have any intention or obligation to update or to publicly announce the results of any revisions to any of the forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, future events or developments, changes in assumptions or changes in other factors affecting the forward-looking statements. You are advised, however, to consult any further disclosures Oi makes on related subjects in reports and communications that Oi files with the SEC.

EXHIBIT 2

Oi S.A.

Corporate Taxpayers Registry (CNPJ/MF) No. 76.535.764/0001-43

Board of Trade (NIRE) No. 33.300.29520-8

Publicly-Held Company

NOTICE TO THE MARKET

S&P rating

Oi S.A. (BOVESPA: OIBR3, OIBR4; NYSE: OIBR.C, OIBR) (the Company or Oi) discloses to its shareholders and the market in general that Standard & Poors announced today its review of the credit rating attributed to the Company, downgrading the long-term global scale credit rating from CCC to CCC- and the long-term domestic scale credit rating from brCCC to brCCC-. The outlook is negative.

Rio de Janeiro, April 26, 2016

Flavio Nicolay Guimaraes
UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

FORM 8-K

CURRENT REPORT

Pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d)

of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934

April 28, 2016 (April 27, 2016)

Date of Report (Date of earliest event reported)

TYLER TECHNOLOGIES, INC.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

Delaware 1-10485 75-2303920 (State or other jurisdiction of incorporation or organization) (Commission File Number) (I.R.S. Employer Identification No.)

5101 TENNYSON PARKWAY

PLANO, TEXAS 75024

(Address of principal executive offices)

(972) 713-3700

(Registrants telephone number, including area code)

Check the appropriate box below if the Form 8-K filing is intended to simultaneously satisfy the filing obligation of the registrant under any of the following provisions (see General Instruction A.2. below):

 Written communications pursuant to Rule 425 under the Securities Act (17 CFR 230.425)

 Soliciting material pursuant to Rule 14a-12 under the Exchange Act (17 CFR 240.14a-12)

 Pre-commencement communications pursuant to Rule 14d-2(b) under the Exchange Act (17 CFR 240.14d-2(b))

 Pre-commencement communications pursuant to Rule 13e-4(c) under the Exchange Act (17 CFR 240.13e-4(c))

Item 2.02 Results of Operations and Financial Condition

On April 27, 2016, Tyler Technologies, Inc. issued the earnings news release announcing results from operations and financial condition as of March 31, 2016, attached hereto as Exhibit 99.1, which news release is incorporated by reference herein.

Exhibit

number Exhibit description 99.1 News Release issued by Tyler Technologies, Inc. dated April 27, 2016.

SIGNATURES

Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned hereunto duly authorized.

TYLER TECHNOLOGIES, INC. Date: April 28, 2016 By: /s/ Brian K. Miller Brian K. Miller Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (principal financial officer)

Exhibit 99.1

Tyler Technologies Reports Earnings For First Quarter 2016

Quarterly non-GAAP net income rises 46 percent as non-GAAP revenues grow 37 percent

PLANO, Texas  April 27, 2016  Tyler Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: TYL) today announced financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2016.

First Quarter 2016 Financial Highlights:

 Total revenue was $179.3 million, up 32.8 percent from $135.0 million for the first quarter of 2015. Organic growth was 13.8 percent.

 Recurring revenue from maintenance and subscriptions was $110.1 million, an increase of 33.3 percent compared to the first quarter of 2015, and comprised 61.4 percent of first quarter 2016 revenue.

 Operating income was $28.0 million, an increase of 3.2 percent from $27.2 million for the first quarter of 2015.

 Net income was $17.1 million, or $0.44 per diluted share, down 1.1 percent compared to $17.3 million, or $0.48 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2015.

 Cash flows from operations were $40.3 million, compared to negative $2.1 million for the first quarter of 2015.

 Tyler repurchased 757,513 shares of its common stock during the first quarter for a total of approximately $94.5 million.

 Non-GAAP total revenue was $185.0 million, up 37.1 percent from $135.0 million for the first quarter of 2015.

 Non-GAAP operating income was $49.1 million, up 48.1 percent from $33.1 million for the first quarter of 2015.

 Adjusted EBITDA was $52.3 million, up 48.1 percent compared to $35.3 million for the first quarter of 2015.

 Non-GAAP net income was $31.3 million, or $0.81 per diluted share, up 46.5 percent compared to $21.3 million, or $0.59 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2015.

 Total backlog was $808.7 million, up 17.3 percent from $689.6 million at March 31, 2015. Software-related backlog (excluding appraisal services) was $763.3 million, an increase of 20.5 percent compared to $633.4 million at March 31, 2015.

Our first quarter results provided a great start to 2016, with strong revenue, margin and cash-flow growth, said John S. Marr Jr., Tylers president and chief executive officer. Subscription revenues grew 34.8 percent as our SaaS business continues to gain momentum. Our non-GAAP gross margin expanded by 290 basis points and our non-GAAP operating margin rose 200 basis points. We are pleased with the contribution to results from New World Systems Corporation, which we acquired in November 2015, and our current outlook for New Worlds revenue and earnings contributions for the year remain unchanged. We are also pleased with our progress integrating New Worlds operations and products.

- more -

Tyler Technologies Reports Earnings

For First Quarter 2016

April 27, 2016

Page 2

Bookings in the first quarter were solid, growing 21 percent over last years first quarter, with particularly robust growth in subscription bookings. The broader market environment continues to be good and our new-business pipeline is very active.

Guidance for 2016

As of April 27, 2016, Tyler Technologies is providing the following guidance for the full year 2016:

 GAAP total revenues are expected to be in the range of $750 million to $765 million.

 Non-GAAP total revenues are expected to be in the range of $765 million to $780 million.

 GAAP diluted earnings per share are expected to be approximately $1.92 to $2.02.

 Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share are expected to be approximately $3.35 to $3.45.

 Pretax non-cash, share-based compensation expense is expected to be approximately $30 million to $31 million.

 Fully diluted shares for the year are expected to be between 38.5 million and 39.5 million shares.

 The GAAP effective tax rate is expected to be in the range of 38.0 percent to 39.5 percent. The non-GAAP effective tax rate is expected to be in the range of 35.5 percent to 37.0 percent. With the issuance of ASU No. 2016-09, Compensation  Stock Compensation (Topic 718) on March 31, 2016, which will require us to recognize the income tax effects of stock option exercises in the income statement, both our GAAP and non-GAAP effective tax rates could differ substantially from this guidance. We are currently assessing the impact of adopting the new standard, and given the scope of the new standard, we are currently unable to provide a reasonable estimate regarding the financial impact. We expect to adopt this standard in mid- to late-2016.

 Capital expenditures are expected to be between $37 million and $39 million, including approximately $18 million related to real estate. Total depreciation and amortization expense is expected to be between $50 million and $51 million, including approximately $36 million of amortization of acquisition intangibles.

Conference Call

Tyler Technologies will hold a conference call on Thursday, April 28, at 10:00 a.m. EDT to discuss the companys results. The company is offering participants the opportunity to register in advance for the conference through the following link: http://dpregister.com/10084351 . Registered participants will receive an email with a calendar reminder and a dial-in number and PIN that will allow them immediate access to the call on April 28, 2016.

Participants who do not wish to pre-register for the call may dial in using 844-861-5506 (U.S. callers) or 412-317-6587 (international callers), and ask for the Tyler Technologies call. A replay will be available two hours after completion of the call through May 4, 2016. To access the replay, please dial 877-344-7529 (U.S. callers), 412-317-0088 (international callers) and 855-669-9658 (Canada callers) and reference passcode 10084351.

- more -

Tyler Technologies Reports Earnings

For First Quarter 2016

April 27, 2016

Page 3

The live webcast and archived replay can also be accessed at www.tylertech.com/investors .

About Tyler Technologies, Inc.

Tyler Technologies (NYSE: TYL) is a leading provider of end-to-end information management solutions and services for local governments. Tyler partners with clients to empower the public sector  cities, counties, schools and other government entities  to become more efficient, more accessible and more responsive to the needs of citizens. Tylers client base includes more than 14,000 local government offices in all 50 states, Canada, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and other international locations. Forbes has named Tyler one of Americas Best Small Companies eight times and the company has been included six times on the Barrons 400 Index, a measure of the most promising companies in America. More information about Tyler Technologies, headquartered in Plano, Texas, can be found at www.tylertech.com .

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

Tyler Technologies has provided in this press release financial measures that have not been prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and are therefore considered non-GAAP financial measures. This information includes non-GAAP revenues, non-GAAP gross profit, non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP operating income, non-GAAP operating margin, non-GAAP net income, non-GAAP earnings per diluted share, EBITDA, and adjusted EBITDA. We use these non-GAAP financial measures internally in analyzing our financial results and believe they are useful to investors, as a supplement to GAAP measures, in evaluating Tylers ongoing operational performance because they provide additional insight in comparing results from period to period. Tyler believes the use of these non-GAAP financial measures provides an additional tool for investors to use in evaluating ongoing operating results and trends and in comparing our financial results with other companies in our industry, many of which present similar non-GAAP financial measures. Non-GAAP financial measures discussed above exclude write-downs of acquisition-related deferred revenue and acquired leases, share-based compensation expense, employer portion of payroll taxes on employee stock transactions, acquisition-related costs, and expenses associated with amortization of intangibles arising from business combinations.

Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, or superior to, financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. The non-GAAP measures used by Tyler Technologies may be different from non-GAAP measures used by other companies. Investors are encouraged to review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, which has been provided in the financial statement tables included below in this press release.

Forward-looking Statements

This document contains 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 that are not historical in nature and typically address future or anticipated events, trends, expectations or beliefs with respect to our financial condition, results of operations or business. Forward-looking statements often contain words such as believes, expects, anticipates, foresees, forecasts, estimates, plans, intends, continues, may, will, should, projects, might, could or other similar words or phrases. Similarly, statements that describe our business strategy, outlook, objectives, plans, intentions or goals

- more -

Tyler Technologies Reports Earnings

For First Quarter 2016

April 27, 2016

Page 4

also are forward-looking statements. We believe there is a reasonable basis for our forward-looking statements, but they are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties and actual results could differ materially from the expectations and beliefs reflected in the forward-looking statements. We presently consider the following to be among the important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and beliefs: (1) changes in the budgets or regulatory environments of our clients, primarily local and state governments, that could negatively impact information technology spending; (2) our ability to protect client information from security breaches and provide uninterrupted operations of data centers; (3) our ability to achieve growth or operational synergies through the integration of acquired businesses, while avoiding unanticipated costs and disruptions to existing operations; (4) material portions of our business require the Internet infrastructure to be adequately maintained; (5) our ability to achieve our financial forecasts due to various factors, including project delays by our clients, reductions in transaction size, fewer transactions, delays in delivery of new products or releases or a decline in our renewal rates for service agreements; (6) general economic, political and market conditions; (7) technological and market risks associated with the development of new products or services or of new versions of existing or acquired products or services; (8) competition in the industry in which we conduct business and the impact of competition on pricing, client retention and pressure for new products or services; (9) the ability to attract and retain qualified personnel and dealing with the loss or retirement of key members of management or other key personnel; and (10) costs of compliance and any failure to comply with government and stock exchange regulations. A detailed discussion of these factors and other risks that affect our business are described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the detailed Risk Factors contained in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K. We expressly disclaim any obligation to publicly update or revise our forward-looking statements.

###

(Comparative results follow)

Contact: Brian K. Miller

Executive Vice President - CFO

Tyler Technologies, Inc.

972-713-3720

[email protected]

16-27

TYLER TECHNOLOGIES, INC.

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF INCOME

(Amounts in thousands, except per share data)

(Unaudited)

Three Months Ended March 31, 2016 2015 Revenues: Software licenses and royalties $ 16,850 $ 14,300 Subscriptions 34,089 25,288 Software services 42,430 30,804 Maintenance 76,032 57,348 Appraisal services 6,558 6,089 Hardware and other 3,334 1,137 Total revenues 179,293 134,966 Cost of revenues: Software licenses and royalties 638 553 Acquired software 5,459 456 Software services, maintenance and subscriptions 85,270 65,377 Appraisal services 3,962 4,135 Hardware and other 1,846 566 Total cost of revenues 97,175 71,087 Gross profit 82,118 63,879 Selling, general and administrative expenses 40,759 28,545 Research and development expense 9,956 7,004 Amortization of customer and trade name intangibles 3,362 1,152 Operating income 28,041 27,178 Other (expense) income, net (467 ) 181 Income before income taxes 27,574 27,359 Income tax provision 10,495 10,086 Net income $ 17,079 $ 17,273 Earnings per common share: Basic $ 0.47 $ 0.51 Diluted $ 0.44 $ 0.48 Weighted average common shares outstanding: Basic 36,549 33,562 Diluted 38,557 35,895

TYLER TECHNOLOGIES, INC.

RECONCILIATION OF GAAP TO NON-GAAP FINANCIAL MEASURES

(Amounts in thousands, except per share data)

(Unaudited)

Three Months Ended March 31, 2016 2015 Reconciliation of non-GAAP total revenues GAAP total revenues $ 179,293 $ 134,966 Non-GAAP adjustments: Add: Write-downs of acquisition-related deferred revenue 5,584  Add: Amortization of acquired leases 111  Non-GAAP total revenues $ 184,988 $ 134,966 Reconciliation of non-GAAP gross profit and margin GAAP gross profit $ 82,118 $ 63,879 Non-GAAP adjustments: Add: Write-downs of acquisition-related deferred revenue 5,584  Add: Amortization of acquired leases 111  Add: Share-based compensation expense included in cost of revenues 1,317 701 Add: Amortization of acquired software 5,459 456 Non-GAAP gross profit $ 94,589 $ 65,036 Non-GAAP gross margin 51.1 % 48.2 % Reconciliation of non-GAAP operating income and margin GAAP operating income $ 28,041 $ 27,178 Non-GAAP adjustments: Add: Write-downs of acquisition-related deferred revenue 5,584  Add: Amortization of acquired leases 111  Add: Share-based compensation expense 6,480 4,258 Add: Employer portion of payroll tax related to employee stock transactions 18 76 Add: Amortization of acquired software 5,459 456 Add: Amortization of customer and trade name intangibles 3,362 1,152 Non-GAAP adjustments subtotal $ 21,014 $ 5,942 Non-GAAP operating income $ 49,055 $ 33,120 Non-GAAP operating margin 26.5 % 24.5 % Reconciliation of non-GAAP net income and earnings per share GAAP net income $ 17,079 $ 17,273 Non-GAAP adjustments: Add: Total non-GAAP adjustments to operating income 21,014 5,942 Less: Tax impact related to non-GAAP adjustments (6,819 ) (1,866 ) Non-GAAP net income $ 31,274 $ 21,349 Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share $ 0.81 $ 0.59 Detail of share-based compensation expense Cost of software services, maintenance and subscriptions $ 1,317 $ 701 Selling, general and administrative expenses 5,163 3,557 Total share-based compensation expense $ 6,480 $ 4,258 Reconciliation of EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA GAAP net income $ 17,079 $ 17,273 Amortization of customer and trade name intangibles 3,362 1,152 Depreciation and other amortization included in cost of revenues, SG&A and other expenses 8,814 2,561 Interest expense included in other expense, net 501  Income tax provision 10,495 10,086 EBITDA $ 40,251 $ 31,072 Write-downs of acquisition-related deferred revenue 5,584  Share-based compensation expense 6,480 4,258 Adjusted EBITDA $ 52,315 $ 35,330

TYLER TECHNOLOGIES, INC.

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS

(Amounts in thousands)

March 31, December 31, 2016 2015 (Unaudited) ASSETS Current assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 35,341 $ 33,087 Accounts receivable, net 137,332 176,360 Current investments and other assets 41,065 37,688 Income tax receivable 11,798 21,080 Total current assets 225,536 268,215 Accounts receivable, long-term portion 3,098 2,777 Property and equipment, net 114,291 101,112 Other assets: Goodwill 655,167 653,666 Other intangibles, net 286,475 295,378 Non-current investments and other assets 33,442 35,422 Total assets $ 1,318,009 $ 1,356,570 LIABILITIES AND SHAREHOLDERS EQUITY Current liabilities: Accounts payable and accrued liabilities $ 39,576 $ 55,945 Deferred revenue 250,108 281,627 Total current liabilities 289,684 337,572 Revolving line of credit 140,000 66,000 Deferred revenue, long-term 4,561 3,115 Deferred income taxes 91,775 91,026 Shareholders equity 791,989 858,857 Total liabilities and shareholders equity $ 1,318,009 $ 1,356,570

TYLER TECHNOLOGIES, INC.

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS

(Amounts in thousands)

(Unaudited)
Police hold serious concerns for missing Chinese woman on a tour of New Zealand.

A 60-year-old Chinese woman has gone missing with increasing fears for her mental wellbeing.

Counties Manukau Police said they are looking for 60-year-old woman Yaqin Wu and hold serious concerns for her mental wellbeing.

The woman entered New Zealand with a Chinese tour group on Sunday.

Staying at the Heartland Hotel in Airpark Drive in Mangere, she left the hotel on Wednesday morning and did not return.

Comments that Wu had made to other members of the group have caused police to hold fears for her mental wellbeing.

She doesn't speak any english whatsoever and is not believed to know anyone in New Zealand.

She was reported missing on Wednesday night and a number of enquiries had been made through much of Thursday, police said.

Search and Rescue had spent the afternoon scouring the area around the hotel and searched nearby parks and reserves.

Police said they will continue to search until nightfall.

A police ethnic liaison officer has been in constant contact with Wu's family back home in China.

Anyone who may have seen her is asked to contact the Counties Manukau Police District Command Centre on 09 263 2709.
Pinot noir grapes ripe for picking at Matahiwi vineyard in the Wairarapa.

The Matahiwi harvest in Wairarapa is coming to a close and the atmosphere is heavy with the scent of fermenting grapes.

At about 1200 tonnes, (including those contracted) this year's vintage is a big one, reinforcing what commentators have been forecasting nationwide.

But whether it will match the 2013 vintage for quality will not be known for some time.

GERARD HUTCHING/FAIRFAX NZ Matahiwi winemaker Jane Cooper: "it takes a while to gain a reputation but it's happening".

Inside the winery, huge stainless steel tanks full of pinot noir give off overpowering carbon dioxide fumes. It's Hilton Delegat's task to push down the skins which have bubbled to the top into the foaming red ooze.

Winemaker Jane Cooper and her staff constantly test the stainless steel vats for brix or sugar content levels.

Matahiwi, just north-west of Masterton, is owned by local MP Alistair Scott who returned to the region in the late 90s after an overseas career in investment banking.

GERARD HUTCHING/FAIRFAX NZ A harvester at work at Matahiwi. All but the reserve wines are machine picked.

The first plantings were done in 1998, with the bulk carried out over three years. There has been some replanting since.

Spread over 75 hectares, Matahiwi has 45 ha of pinot noir, 20 ha of sauvignon blanc, five pinot gris and the remainder chardonnay. Like most Wairarapa land, it is free draining, stony silt loam.

The winery has a cooling capacity of 1600 tonnes, which allows it to carry out contract winemaking for vineyards such as Ohau in Horowhenua.

"We could take on more wine making - it spreads out the revenue. And it's good to see other types of wine," Cooper says.

Compared to its better know neighbouring region Martinborough, Matahiwi has a little more rain (850 millimetres a year compared to 650mm) because it is closer to the ranges. It also has wind, but Cooper contends this works in pinot noir's favour by keeping crops low.

The region is named for a raised ridge in the near distance, in historic times a strategic vantage point for local Maori.

"It takes a while to gain a reputation but it's happening. We are probably the biggest winery in the Wairarapa," she says.

Cooper has been winemaker since 2002, time enough to analyse the vineyard and understand its subtleties. It now employs 13 fulltime staff as well as contract workers to help with the harvest and pruning.

The pinot noir are kept in vats inside, the sauvignon blanc in the lee of the main building on the south side where they keep cool.

Some of the sauvignon vats were filled only a few days ago and have not started to "work"; others, more advanced, are constantly churning away as if there is a large agitator moving the liquid. But no, this is simply the fermentation process.

Their skins removed, the white wines are cooled slightly to hold back the fermentation.

Red wines demand higher investment costs than white. Whereas white wines are kept in large vats until they are bottled, and ready for sale towards the end of the year, pinot noir is double fermented, first in vats and then matured in oak barrels at a cost of $1500 each for 10 months.

Matahiwi uses 200 barrels for its pinot noir, with the life of a barrel 5-6 years.

Eighty per cent of the wines are exported, mainly to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and Asia.

Out among the vines, vineyard manager Karina Southey relaxes a little now that most of the harvest is in. The two most stressful periods in a vineyard manager's life are late spring when frosts threaten, and harvest time.

In order to ward off frosts, Matahiwi hires helicopters, which over a 10-year period work out less expensive than wind turbines.

As the grapes mature, water becomes a worry. Cooper says this season has been a tough growing one, with just about every day recording a maximum 30 degrees.

Most years the vineyard uses water from a water race - for which it has a consent - but from February this was restricted and it had to apply for another consent.

Matahiwi follows Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand (SWNZ) criteria in its vineyard management, planting crops to attract natural predators and provide nitrogen.

Over the years the vineyard has been rewarded with accolades, especially the top of the range Holly series. In 2014 Matahiwi was a finalist in the Wellington Gold Awards, in recognition of its global success.
Police will be handing out flyers (pictured above) to people in the area of Onehunga, warning them about the attacker.

An Auckland mum has told of how a young man responsible for multiple sexual attacks groped her from behind while she was out running.

But she said she won't be discouraged from feeling safe in her community.

The woman, who did not want to be named, spoke of how the young man, who police say may be as young as 12, ran up behind and inappropriately touched her as she was running on Amaru Rd in Onehunga.

The teen is believed to have targeted and assaulted 11 women walking or running alone in the Auckland suburb of Onehunga since October 2015.

READ MORE:

* Fears serial sex offender will strike again

* Police appeal to serial sex offender's family and friends for help

* Onehunga self defence classes prompted by fear of "serial groper"

* Police hunt offender after young women indecently assaulted in Onehunga

The victim called the incident "horrible" and described the attacker as a "teenage dirt bag" - but also as someone nobody would think could be capable of the attacks.

She recalls a summer evening in November when she had put her children to bed and set out for a run.

A young man had come up close behind her as she was running through Cornwell Park. She actually apologised to him, thinking she may have been blocking his path and continued on.

However, she became suspicious when he began to follow, so she picked up her pace and ran for the park's exit.

He eventually headed off in a different direction and her nerves eased. But shortly after, he again ran up behind her and this time groped her.

"I was in absolute confusion and disbelief at this point. I turned around on him... when I saw it was this young guy, I started yelling at him and I chased him for a couple of blocks," she said.

"The guy is a teenage dirt bag. The thing that struck me is that I did not feel physically intimidated by him, I thought the attack was weirdly hesitant, it was over in a flash.

"But ultimately, he touched me against my will".

She called police on her mobile phone as she chased him and a unit as well as a dog squad turned up immediately. However the attacker could not be found.

She said the police response to the incident and the other attacks was good and the community of Onehunga were aware and talking about the attacks.

"People are talking about it and are really supportive, people want something to be done".

She believes when the attacker is caught, "there will be absolute disbelief" about who it will turn out to be.

Police have put a description of the offender on Facebook who is described as a young Maori or Pacific Island teenager, between 12 to 16 years old and of a thin to slim build.

He has light brown hair which has possibly been dyed a yellow/brassy colour.

"He is not a thug. The guy looks like a choir boy, when he gets caught there will be absolute disbelief because he looks like a lovely boy.

"But he is capable of carrying out incredibly horrible and unwelcome acts".

She now finds herself thinking twice before heading out for a run, but she does not let the attack prevent her from feeling safe in her community.

"There has been a shift in me and yet at the same time I don't think I will be cowed and nor should other women living in the community".
For those of you who've not watched The Jinx as yet - there are some SPOILER ALERTS contained. In short, Robert Durst is the antithesis of Making a Murderer's Steven Avery...



The New York Post is reporting that the 73-year-old multi-millionaire has been sentenced to seven years and 1 month - not for the alleged murder of his first wife Kathleen McCormack, or for the alleged murder of his friend Susan Berman - rather for a "weapons violation." According to the report: "Durst, as a previously convicted felon, had faced a maximum of 10 years for illegally carrying a .38-caliber revolver" in New Orleans.

It's a bit like the time he went on the run and, for some reason, decided to shoplift a hoagie, which resulted in his arrest.

Robert Durst has been sentenced to 7 years on weapons conviction https://t.co/bGmeVXg8xj pic.twitter.com/a5SeZnmBwQ  People Magazine (@people) April 27, 2016

The New York real estate heir also stood trial for the murder of his neighbour, Morris Black, in Texas back in 2001. He got away with that killing - despite methodically dismembering the body and attempting to dispose of it at sea. Meanwhile, he is due to stand trial in August for the 2000 murder of Berman in California.

People Magazine reports that: "on Monday, Durst's attorney filed a motion for his client to serve his time at Terminal Island, California, where he would be closer to the trial venue and medical facilities... In March 2015, a Los Angeles judge signed an arrest warrant for Durst for the alleged murder of Berman. Days later, Durst was discovered in a New Orleans hotel where he had checked in under the alias 'Everette Ward'. A room search performed by the FBI uncovered a .38-caliber revolver, a mask and over $40,000 in cash, the press release states. Durst was indicted in April for the weapons charge."

As for his wife, Kathleen, her body has never been found. The couple shared a cottage by Lake Truesdale in Salem, New York.
Prime Minister John Key has given the collective approach of the Motueka Family Service Centre the big tick of approval.

He told representatives from NGO's like SVS Living Safe, the Salvation Army, centre partners and Te Awhina Marae on Wednesday that he admired the centre's structure and its collective co-operative approach to providing non-Government organisation social services.

Key spent the day in the Nelson region, attending the meeting before visiting Waimea Nurseries and Appleby's NZ Hops Ltd.

ALDEN WILLIAMS "Every individual support group is really well meaning and what they are doing is legitimate, but in the end the Government pays the bill", said Prime Minister John Key on a visit to a Motueka Community Centre on Wednesday.

Those at the meeting were frank in relating the challenges the community, and its social support groups faced. Issues like housing, drug and alcohol addiction, and parenting topped the list.



READ MORE:

* PM gets a taste of Tasman

* Key has doubts over KiwiRail dream

Key said the Government was trying to provide a better targeted service for those in greatest need and help organisations, like the Motueka Family Service Centre, either have more resources or better support.

He said the current Child Youth and Family review could have a "very direct impact on the way that people here work for instance".

But any change would not be around nationalisation of community services, Key said.

Rather it would look at the possibility of rationalising the number of providers in communities.

"Every individual support group is really well meaning and what they are doing is legitimate, but in the end the Government pays the bill and the question is the cost of delivery to us," Key said.

Tumuaki of Te Awhina Marae Ann Martin said she would hate to see Motueka's services nationalised.

"We know our community - national bodies do not. We have had difficulties with some agencies that come in and try to work in our community but do not understand our culture.

They are trying to do good but sometimes it just does not work. We have to find a balance between national organisations and the smaller localised groups."

Run by a community trust the Motueka Family Service Centre is a one-stop-shop offering a range of social services which generally focused on helping those facing challenges around family, parenting, children and sexual health.

Manager Lisa Lawrence said last year the centre had contacts with 976 individuals. She estimated it had worked with around 30 per cent of the community's residents.

It had an open door policy. No-one was turned away and services were found for people whom the centre could not support directly, she said.

Martin said the community's strength lay in the strong collaborative approach agencies took to working with families, some of whom faced multiple challenges.

"It's about getting that flexibility and being responsive to local needs rather than a prescribed national response," said Lawrence.

"Motueka NGO's are committed to co-ordinated care - so it's not about having 15 (support agency) cars up the driveway."

"It's about the client - not your client," Lawrence said.

Dee Cresswell of SVS Living Safe said what was needed was support and systems to help resolve long-term issues for young people.

Rather than just dealing with the intervention on a isolated basis, long-term intervention for the child and therapeutic support for those young children who were very damaged were required, she said.
The 92m Pacific Discovery was towed to Nelson after an accident damaged two of its propellers.

A replacement support ship is heading to the Maari oilfield to continue work on the $60 million upgrade of the Raroa storage and production vessel.

Eight mooring lines anchoring the Raroa to the sea floor 100 metres beneath are being overhauled.

But earlier this month a support vessel, the Pacific Discovery, got rope caught in one propeller, causing significant damage.

A second propeller was also affected in the April 11 accident and the ship had to be towed from the site, about 80kms off the Taranaki coast, to Port Nelson, on the South Island, for repairs.

READ MORE:

* Pacific Discovery vessel towed to Nelson after being damaged in offshore accident in Taranaki

* Oil storage and production vessel the Raroa to get $60 million upgrade

* Government awards oil permits in Taranaki, near Marlborough Sounds

* Maari oil field gets a boost

* Maari field offshore Taranaki reaches 30 million barrel milestone

Now a replacement vessel, the Maersk Server, is sailing from Freemantle in Western Australia and is expected to arrive in Port Taranaki early next month.

After a change of crew it will set sail for Raroa to continue the work on the last two mooring lines.

OMV New Zealand, which is behind the project, said the work was back on track and it had been able to use a smaller support vessel to get around the delay and minimise costs.

"We've brought forward a scheduled maintenance shutdown, undertaken marine growth clearing and underwater ROV inspections of all the Maari facilities," OMV New Zealand senior vice-president Gabriel Selischi said.

"We are very committed to finishing this important project."

The work on the production vessel, which began in February, will not need to be repeated for 10 years.

The work is still expected to be completed by the end of this month.

"The incident with the Discovery put a real strain on the project, but OMV NZ expects the delay to be minimal due to the combination of the work-around and the ongoing good weather to date," Mr Selischi said.

"The whole maintenance project is in two parts: the mooring upgrade work is the first, and the Maersk Server will support the Skandi Hercules for part two, the replacement of a water injection flowline at the Maari field."

The Raroa vessel processes oil and condensate pumped from the field which is then taken away by oil tankers.

According to New Zealand Oil and Gas Limited's December 2015 quarterly report, the Maari oil field produced 13,960 barrels of oil per day on average for the quarter.
The European Union issued new warnings regarding fishing practices in Kiribati, Sierra Leone and Trinidad and Tobago last week. In Kiribati, the EU is concerned about the countrys capacity to keep control over fishing capacities by foreign fleets. Brussels says that it has reasons to be concerned that there are major risks of illegal fishing and of laundering illegal catch through the ports of Kiribati. The concerns stem from the fact that the country does not have a robust system that traces fisheries products. Kiribati is generally seen as reluctant to share information on third country vessels in their territorial waters, which undermines the Commissions efforts to improve sustainability of tuna resources in the Western and Central Pacific as well as boost transparency of Kiribatis fisheries governance.

In Trinidad and Tobago, authorities likewise do not control or inspect foreign ships nor cooperate with relevant flag States. The country also suffers from laundering of fisheries products and has a poor traceability system. In contrast, in Sierra Leone, the Commission says, fisheries governance is outdated and it fails to deter illegal operators that use the countrys flag to fish illegally in international waters without the authorities knowledge. On top of its negative feedback, the Commission has also formulated a proposal for these countries to help them identify the problematic issues.

The EU executive has proposed a tailor-made action plan to help these countries implement robust fisheries management control. If the issues are not improved within half a year, the Commission will consider taking further steps including restrictions on fisheries imports. On a more positive note, the Commission has also relaxed its restrictions against Sri Lanka, which has significantly improved the management of its fisheries. Brussels confirmed that country successfully reformed its fisheries governance system, improved fleet control and amended relevant legal framework.
Andrew von Dadelszen

Former Regional Councillor

Transport Minister Simon Bridges announcement last week is huge for the Western Bay of Plenty and Tauranga in particular.

The Bay of Plenty Regional Transport Committee, chaired by councillor Jane Nees, had for many years prioritised a new motorway out past Rotoruas Airport above Taurangas Northern Corridor.

This was plain madness, with strong growth in Tauranga and the Western Bay, and negative growth in Rotorua.

Last month the New Zealand Transport Agency announced the Rotorua Eastern, out to the Airport, proposition had been scrapped, saying the land held for this would now be sold.

I argued for this as far back as 2007, so Im delighted.

The commitment of $520m for the highway between Tauranga and Waihi shows recognition of not only a huge safety problem, but also of the rising significance of this route for our ever-increasing tourism. Simon and the NZTA need congratulating for making the right decision, rather than continuing to pander to a parochial Rotorua.

One rule for all update

Thanks to the countless people who emailed me regarding the squatter in our  your  park. I got just two emails that inferred I was a racist for raising the issue, but that was to be expected! Has he been removed? Unfortunately not. To get our council off its backside, I think the next move might be to put a big sign up beside the motorway saying Freedom Campers Welcome. My thanks to Tauranga City councillor Bev Edlin for at least trying to get her council staff to take action.

If you have a view on these or any other local government issues, I invite you to email me at andrew@vond.co.nz or visit www.vond.co.nz
The Minister for Land Information must investigate and disclose how many applications to the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) have links to Mossack Fonseca, says Labours Land Information spokesperson David Cunliffe.

Labour can now reveal the OIO approved an application from Panamanian company Ceol & Muir  a client of Mossack Fonseca  to purchase the 1300ha landmark Onetai Station at Awakino in North Taranaki in February 2014.

Onetai Station Ltd has one shareholder, Ceol & Muir, according to companies website Open Corporates. Ceol & Muirs listed agent is Bufete MF  a trading name of Mossack Fonseca.

Mossack Fonseca was implicated in the release of the Panama Papers which pointed to New Zealand being used as a tax haven by the mega-wealthy for tax avoidance.

The Governments contention that only one application is caught up with Mossack Fonseca needs further scrutiny, especially when the OIO admits it has taken a lighter touch in rejecting applications. The OIO should be our safeguard, but with only one application declined since 2011, questions should be asked about the effectiveness of its oversight.

The Government must immediately front up about just how many OIO deals are now under review. We need a robust OIO system to give New Zealanders assurance about foreign buyers purchasing our sensitive land, says David Cunliffe.

SOURCE: Office of David Cunliffe
Every year hundreds of men and women across New Zealand head into work but never make it home.

Today marks Workers Memorial Day and all the men and women killed while at work here in the Bay will be remembered at a special event taking place at Pilot Bay in Mount Maunganui from 12pm.
More than 200 top business people will join Communications Minister Amy Adams for New Zealands first Cyber Security Summit in Auckland next Thursday (May 5).

Ms Adams signalled the summit at the launch of New Zealands Cyber Security Strategy in December, with a call to action for the public and private sector to come together to keep the economy cyber secure.

Cyber-attacks can and do damage our economy. Businesses are acutely aware of the $257 million lost to cybercrime last year. As a Government, were serious about improving New Zealands cyber security and ensuring New Zealand is an open and safe place to do business, Ms Adams says.

The challenge cyber security presents cant be met by the public sector alone. Whats clear is that we need a joined up response  the private and public sectors working together to share information and expertise.

The Summit is an opportunity for chairs and chief executives from across New Zealand to continue the conversation around how as a country we tackle the threat of cybercrime, and improve our resilience and security in this increasingly digital age.

International keynote speakers include:

Jim Lewis from the US Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington

Matt Thomlinson, Vice President of Security at Microsoft

Richard Bejtlich, Chief Security Strategist at FireEye.

Since the Government launched our refreshed Cyber Security Strategy in December, the business communitys awareness of, and interest in, cyber threats has continued to grow. Cyber security is rightly a key issue for businesses in 2016, Ms Adams says.

The refreshed Cyber Security Strategy signalled a step-change in how we manage the security challenges and opportunities resulting from our increased connectivity. A strong partnership between the public and private sectors sits at the heart of the strategy, and its essential that we work together to improve our nations cyber security.

The theme of the inaugural Summit is Keeping New Zealands Economy Cyber Secure.

SOURCE: Office of Amy Adams
Wicked has just got too wicked and has been slapped by the Office of the Chief Censor.

The International van rental has been courting notoriety by whats variously described as offensive slogans incorporated in the livery on their vehicles.
VW, Volkswagen

A security guard stands on the roof of the Volkswagen old power plant and monitors the area during the company's annual press conference in Wolfsburg, Germany, Thursday, April 28, 2016.

(Markus Schreiber | AP)

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- Volkswagen said Thursday it had set aside 7.8 billion euros ($8.8 billion) to buy back or fix diesel-powered cars that had been rigged to cheat in emissions tests.

The sum is part of 16.2 billion euros the company deducted from last year's earnings to cover the costs of the emissions scandal, in which its cars were fitted with software that enabled them to pass tests but then turned emissions controls off during everyday driving.

The German automaker further broke down the set-aside for 2015 by saying it included 7.0 billion euros for fines and legal costs worldwide.

Analysts say the final bill will likely be much higher, when including the impact of lower sales. Volkswagen says it is reporting costs that it knows about at the present time.

The company said last week that it lost 1.5 billion euros on an after-tax basis after a profit of 11.1 billion euros in 2014.

Volkswagen is currently working out a settlement with U.S. authorities in federal court in San Francisco, and has said that would include an offer to buy back as many as 500,000 of the just under 600,000 defective vehicles.

CEO Matthias Mueller said Thursday that recalling and fixing the cars that were rigged to cheat on the tests "will remain our most important task until the very last vehicle has been put in order."

He used the company's annual news conference to also sketch out a wide-ranging transformation of the company that would see it focus more on electric vehicles and services like car-sharing as it seeks to get past its scandal over cheating on diesel emissions tests.

He stressed that the company's car business remains "fundamentally sound" but detailed a promised plan to emphasize digital services and zero-emissions vehicles. The company would soon form a legally independent company to promote business in mobility services, which can include things like ride-sharing apps and car-sharing, he said.

Mueller said that the company would "make electric cars one of Volkswagen's new hallmarks" with 20 new models by 2020.

Volkswagen had previously emphasized diesel technology, which has suffered a blow since it became clear Volkswagen engines could not meet U.S. emissions standards without cheating. The company has admitted using engine software that disabled emissions controls when vehicles were not being tested. That improved performance and mileage but meant the vehicles spewed far more than the legal limit of pollutants.

Mueller apologized again for the scandal, telling the company's annual news conference in Wolfsburg, Germany, that "we disappointed many people who trusted Volkswagen."

The company said its robust cash reserves of 24.5 billion euros at year end left it in a strong financial position. Chief Financial Officer Frank Witter said that the company would not propose any capital increase to shareholders at its annual meeting in June.
Guildford-UntitledJobJON_9270.jpg

Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics, will open a new location on Destiny USA's second level next to Williams-Sonoma, with an anticipated opening this summer.

(Provided photo)

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics is opening a new location this summer at Destiny USA.

The cosmetics retailer says it uses only vegetarian ingredients in its products and doesn't test on animals. Lush says its products are made from organic fruits and vegetables, essential oils and safe synthetics.

"Lush is one of the most buzzed about brands we receive on social media and through feedback from our guests," Destiny USA Director of Marketing Aiden McGuire said in a news release. "We're excited to welcome Lush to the Syracuse market and expand our offering of unique products available to the community."

The new location will be open on Destiny's second level next to William-Sonoma with an anticipated opening this summer. This will be the United Kingdom-based brand's 14th location in New York.

Lush has stores at Walden Galleria near Buffalo and Crossgates Mall near Albany. Both share the same owner as Destiny, Syracuse-based Pyramid Cos. Eastview Mall near Rochester has a Lush as well.

The company's website has listed the Destiny location as coming soon since December 2015.

Lush has more than 230 locations across North America. The brand offers a variety of cosmetics, skincare and hair care products.

Sarah Moses covers the northern suburbs of Onondaga County and Oswego

County. Contact Sarah at smoses@syracuse.com or 470-2298. Follow @SarahMoses315
Syracuse, N.Y.  Members of a workers' rights organization drew body outlines in chalk in Clinton Square Thursday to call attention to workplace fatalities.

About a dozen members of the Syracuse-based Workers' Center of Central New York urged workers to report employers who fail to provide personal protection equipment and who do not maintain a workplace free of safety hazards.

Nikeeta Slade, an organizer for the center, said workplace safety is a particular problem on farms that employ migrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala and other Central American countries. Many Latino workers are afraid to report injuries and hazards to government inspectors because they are afraid they will be forced to leave the country, she said.

Slade said the law protects workers who report unsafe workplaces, no matter what their immigration status is.

The event was held on Workers' Memorial Day, a day that is observed every year on April 28 to honor workers who have died on the job. It is also the day that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration was established in 1971.

According to OSHA, 4,679 workers were killed on the job in 2014, or 3.3 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers. That's an average of 90 deaths a week, or more than 13 deaths every day, on the job.

Many of those killed on the job are Hispanics or Latinos. According to OSHA, 789 Hispanic or Latino workers were killed from work-related injuries in 2014  on average, more than 15 deaths a week or two Hispanic or Latino workers killed every day of the year, all year long.

"Many of these deaths are actually preventable," said Slade.

Members of the group stood in Clinton Square and held signs that said, "Mourn the dead, fight for the living," and drew body outlines on the concrete to represent workers who have been killed on the job.

Among those participating in the event was Antonio Salinas, a 36-year-old migrant worker from Mexico. He said he injured his back in October when he slipped off a forklift on a farm in Cameron, near Corning, where he worked and lived.

Salinas said the farm's owner claimed his injury was not related to his job and evicted him from the farm because he was unable to work. With help from the Workers' Center, he filed a workers' compensation claim with the farm's insurance carrier and, after a months-long legal battle, won the right to medical benefits and lost wages, he said.

Salinas urged other workers in similar situations to contact organizations like the Workers' Center because they can provide help filing insurance and other claims and reporting unsafe workplace conditions to OSHA.

Contact Rick Moriarty anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-3148
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Police are searching for three suspects who attacked and robbed a man Wednesday night in Ithaca.

A man was walking on West Buffalo Street around 9:45 p.m. when three men walked past him, said Officer Jamie Williamson, of the Ithaca Police Department. After passing the victim, one of the men turned around and attacked, he said.

The man repeatedly punched the victim in the face, Williamson said. The other two suspects joined the attack -- punching the victim and grabbing him when he tried to run away, he said.

After "forcefully" removing the victim's backpack, the suspects ran away, Williamson said.

A passing motorist stopped and helped the victim call police. Officers and Bangs Ambulance responded.

The victim was evaluated by Bangs Ambulance. He declined treatment, Williamson said.

Police asked anyone with information about the robbery to call (607) 697-0333 or submit a tip through the department's website.


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Emily Keeley watches intently as she pours colored sand into a jar while attending a previous Children's Art Festival at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. This year's festival is April 30. (FILE PHOTO)

SHARE Blue Angels crew members Lt. Tyler Davies (left) and Capt. Corrie Mays exit their Boeing F/A-18 Hornet at Piper Aircraft after their arrival to the Vero Beach Regional Airport Nov. 23 for a pre-visit meeting in preparation for their 2016 Vero Beach Air Show. The Blue Angels are the Navy's flight demonstration squadron. (FILE PHOTO)

By Willi Miller

The Vero Beach Museum of Art is having its 35th annual Children's Art Festival April 30.

This is a big event for the community, with kids of all ages involved in performances, exhibitions and hands-on projects. The Congressional Art Awards will be presented by U.S. Rep. Bill Posey. Florida's 2015 Teacher of the Year, Christie Bassett, will hand out ribbons to Indian River County middle and high school students being honored for their artistic talent.

The museum's Concert in the Park series celebrates Cinco de Mayo, rain or shine, 5 to 7 p.m. May 5 with Don Soledad supplying the music. (verobeachmuseum.org)

Airshow

The next Vero Beach Air Show, complete with our favorites, the Blue Angels, is set for the weekend of June 25-26, but for a lucky few, June 24 will be the unforgettable day.

At auction beginning May 1 are four rides with the Aeroshell Aerobatic Team and one ride with the SHOCKWAVE jet truck. I'll just watch from the sidelines, thank you. Discounted tickets for active and retired members of the military with proof of their military status are at the Victory Center and the Navy SEAL Museum until June 22, and every K-5 student in Indian River County will be admitted free. Tickets for the weekend are on sale now, with information on the website, veroairshow.com.

Tidbits

A quick note from Community Church of Vero Beach: The Atlantic Ringers concert scheduled for this weekend has been canceled.

Temple Beth Shalom and Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Vero Beach will screen "Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald" 4 p.m. May 1, 1590 27th Ave., Vero Beach. Holocaust survivor Alex Moskovic will answer questions afterward. (uufvb.org)

The Space Coast Flute Orchestra has a free concert 3 p.m. May 1 at Eastminster Presbyterian Church at 106 N. Riverside Dr. in Indialantic. (www.SCFO.org)

Applications and entries are due soon from artists who want to be considered for the four-county 2017 Helping People Succeed calendar. (www.hpsfl.org)

Willi Miller writes about things to do in Indian River County for #TCPalmSocial. Contact her at caribsea@bellsouth.net
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Robert Oiler, 30, 3200 block of Southwest Habrick Street, Port St. Lucie; battery  commit domestic battery by strangulation.

Carrington Taylor, 18, Hallandale Beach; kidnap  false imprisonment; obtain a controlled substance by forgery; possession of a controlled substance (Phenergan/codeine) without a prescription; trafficking in a controlled substance.

Wisdom Williams, 18, Miami; kidnap  false imprisonment; possession of a controlled substance without a prescription; obtain a controlled substance by forgery; trafficking in a controlled substance.

Richard Reynolds, 37, 300 block of Acorn Way, Fort Pierce; aggravated battery  person uses a deadly weapon; aggravated battery  offender knew/should have known that victim is pregnant; crime against a person  corruption by threat of a public servant or family.

Michael Mccaskill, 29, 1100 block of Southeast Petunia Avenue, Port St. Lucie; warrants fraudulent use of a credit card, criminal use of personal I.D.

Shalonda Green, 28, 1100 block of 14th Avenue, Vero Beach; driving while license suspended  habitual offender; warrants for grand theft, fraudulent use of a credit card, exploitation of the elderly or disabled adult  position of trust.

Ronald Williams, 26, Tavernier; warrant for court order to revoke bond, battery, disorderly conduct, assault.

David Brown, 33, 5700 block of University Lane, Fort Pierce; warrant for fraud  worthless check.

Abel Hernandez, 42, Hialeah; warrant for grand theft.

Gary Clark, 45, 700 block of South Eighth Street, Fort Pierce; warrants for giving false information to a pawnbroker, dealing in stolen property.

Alexander Krueger, 19, 2500 block of Kerr Street, Fort Pierce; warrant for court order for pretrial detention and termination of pretrial supervision  sale of cocaine, sale or delivery of marijuana, possession of a controlled substance without a prescription, use or possession of drug paraphernalia.

Marlon Wilson, 27, 1900 block of Southwest Libra Lane, Port St. Lucie; warrants for attempted first-degree murder with a firearm, discharge of a firearm resulting in great bodily harm.

Dillon Finch, 18, 100 block of Northwest Berkeley Avenue, Port St. Lucie; re-admit, driving without a valid driver's license.

Scott Giavedoni, 45, 500 block of Northwest Montevina Drive, Port St. Lucie; re-admit, willful, wanton reckless driving, driving while license suspended, prior conviction.

Larry Hoeben, 44, 1900 block of Southwest Oldsmar Drive, Port St. Lucie; re-admit, driving while license suspended.

Devon Graham, 21, West Palm Beach; re-admit, driving without a valid license.

Aaron Johnson, 28, 5100 block of LaSalle Street, Fort Pierce; re-admit, driving while license suspended, forcible felon.

Jermario Dunn, 18, 2200 block of Southeast Haddon Street, Fort Pierce; warrant for court order to revoke bond, driving without a valid driver's license.

Ashli Whitman, 20, 1100 block of Southwest Broadview Street, Port St. Lucie; warrant for court order, possession of cocaine, use or possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of 20 grams or less of marijuana, possession of alprazolam.

Donquesta Sowell, 24, 100 block of 11th Street, Vero Beach; re-admit, driving while license suspended.

Dawn Gillis, 50, 2600 block of Jersey Avenue, Fort Pierce; warrant for violation of probation, DUI impairment, three priors.

Matthew Smith, 27, 2800 block of Southeast Melaleuca Boulevard, Port St. Lucie; battery by strangulation; tampering with witness, victim or informant.

Robert Schneider, 47, 8400 block of North U.S. 1, Fort Pierce; warrant for violation of probation, driving while license suspended or revoked, DUI, one prior.

Francisco Lopez, 20, 1700 block of Delaware Avenue, Fort Pierce; re-admit, driving while license suspended.

Jason Bell, 49, 100 block of Southeast Eyerly Avenue, Port St. Lucie; re-admit, DUI, two priors, driving while license suspended.

Maria Copeland, 58, Orlando; re-admit, petty theft.

Destinee Mccoy, 18, 200 block of Southwest Twig Avenue, Fort Pierce; re-admit, driving while license suspended.

Jessica Nivens, 29, 4000 block of North U.S. 1, Fort Pierce; cruelty toward child, abuse of child without great bodily harm.

Shaun Hicks, 45, 4000 block of North U.S. 1, Fort Pierce; cruelty toward child, abuse of child without great bodily harm.

Maritza Velez, 37, 100 block of Northwest Dorchester Street, Port St. Lucie; warrants for grand theft, giving false statement for public aid. Arrested in Martin County.
The Herbert Hoover dike around Lake Okeechobee is in need of $800 million in repairs. There are still questions as to where money will come from to fund the repairs. (FILE PHOTO)

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By Bartholomew Sullivan, bartholomew.sullivan@tcpalm.com

WASHINGTON  Efforts to expedite repairs to the Herbert Hoover dike around Lake Okeechobee are moving along several legislative paths but ultimately come down to an $800 million question: Where would the money come from?

"We're twisting arms everywhere we can find arms to twist," said U.S. Rep. Curt Clawson, R-Bonita Springs, who proposed fast-tracking the repairs in a bill he introduced early last month.

Since then, others have weighed in, with U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Jupiter, writing to President Barack Obama last week asking for emergency funding for the work, as well as estuary restoration funding.

Clawson is still working behind the scenes to see if he can get language from a bill he introduced in March into the Water Resources Development Act bill expected to move this year. Clawson said he believes the expedited work has been authorized by earlier versions of the WRDA law that called for a 10-year repair effort.

Some environmentalists point out the dike repair will not in itself limit the discharges into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers that are harming their sensitive estuaries.

If expediting work already authorized in the 2014 or earlier WRDA bills is considered a modification of an existing U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project, Clawson would not have to get the bill passed as a separate measure. It currently has 21 bipartisan co-sponsors, including 14 from Florida.

SUPPORT

Clawson held an event on the discharges on Marco Island Monday night that drew a crowd of nearly 200 in a part of his district probably least affected by the discharges. Wednesday, he had an hourlong meeting with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials and asked them how they could gear up if the money is forthcoming. They told him to give them until August to answer, he said.

"As long as they're working on it, I'm not going to complain," he said. Later, he said: "Everywhere we turn, I want to be known as Mr. Clean Gulf Water."

Clawson also has talked with U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Miami, who sits on the Appropriations Committee that would ultimately decide on funding expedited repairs.

But with all the efforts underway, Clawson said: "I can't tell you I know which path will get to the final destination."

Meanwhile, the chairman and top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Tuesday introduced their bipartisan WRDA bill, which cleared its first committee Thursday.

The Senate measure contains the Central Everglades Planning Project, a $1.95 billion project for moving water south of Lake Okeechobee and into Everglades National Park. The Senate measure also authorizes a $322.7 million project to make improvements to Port Everglades in Broward County and calls for a study of the need for flood control in Daytona Beach, among other items.

A business meeting of the Senate committee is scheduled for Thursday to discuss the WRDA bill (SB 2848).

CEPP

The bill's introduction was applauded by a wide variety of supporters. The Everglades Foundation has made passage of CEPP its top legislative priority.

"After three years of united advocacy among the Florida congressional delegation and community leaders, it was great to see the Senate include language to authorize CEPP in its 2016 water bill," said Murphy, an original co-sponsor of Clawson's dike bill, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for the open Senate seat.

"This is a major win for our community and the fight to protect our waterways," Murphy added. "By working together, we were able to reach this critical milestone and will continue to make progress to move this and other Everglades projects forward to send more clean water south."

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, said in a statement the bill "advances a number of projects important to Florida, including restoring the natural flow of water south to the Everglades and readying Port Everglades for the new mega-ships that will soon be coming through the newly expanded Panama Canal."

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, also has been a staunch supporter to the central Everglades plan.

LAND BUY

Clawson also introduced a bill last month that would direct the Interior Department to buy up to $500 million worth of Everglades Agricultural Area land south of the lake for water storage. Clawson said he has placed a higher priority on the dike repairs because he believes they have been authorized. Spending on a land buy, the ultimate solution to the discharge problem, would be a heavy lift in an election year.

Mark Perry, executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society in Stuart, has said dike repairs, though needed, will have no immediate effect on lake levels because the Army Corps of Engineers won't adjust the 2008 regulation schedule until the repairs are completed. Even when completed, CEPP is estimated to reduce discharges east and west by no more than 14 percent.

Gov. Rick Scott asked the Obama administration in late February to fully fund the $800 million in needed repairs to the dike as heavy rains were requiring massive discharges of toxic water into the Indian River Lagoon and sensitive Gulf waters.

On April 22, Earth Day, ground was broken on a 2.6-mile project bridging another section of the Tamiami Trail that ultimately will aid in the sheet flow south into the park.

Bartholomew Sullivan, a veteran Washington reporter, heads Treasure Coast Newspapers' D.C. news bureau.
Patrick Murphy (FILE PHOTO)

By Isadora Rangel of TCPalm

Editor's Note: This story was updated from its original version.

The Treasure Coast was the stage for one of the most expensive and nastiest congressional races of 2012. Millions were spent on personal attack ads featuring drunken arrest mug shots, accusations of military misconduct and volleys of fire exchanged between Democrat Patrick Murphy and then-Republican U.S. Rep. Allen West.

After beating West that year, Murphy presented himself as a positive candidate as he cruised to re-election two years later: a champion of the Indian River Lagoon who works across party lines.

But as he faces formidable opponents in one of 2016's most important U.S. Senate races  it could help his party regain control of the chamber  Murphy is amping up attacks on primary challenger U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson and the Republicans in the race to replace Marco Rubio.

Murphy has called Grayson a liar and a lawbreaker who's unfit to hold office. Nothing's been proven, but congressional investigators this month recommended the House dig into allegations he broke federal laws and House rules by mismanaging his hedge funds and using his office for personal gain.

Murphy also criticized GOP candidate Carlos Beruff for saying the U.S. should not allow anyone from the Middle East into the country, calling it "bigotry."

Grayson and some Republicans have attacked Murphy too, especially for the money his father and his family company have given to a Super PAC that supports him.

MURPHY'S POLITICAL RISE

PRIMARY THREAT

Murphy's campaign spokesman downplayed Grayson's threat to his nomination, but the Aug. 30 primary will be competitive, said Darryl Paulson, emeritus professor of government at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. Known for his off-the-cuff style, Grayson has support from progressives and is riding the anti-establishment wave that propelled Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders in the presidential race.

Many of those so-called "establishment" Democrats hope Grayson will drop out before the primary, forced by the negative coverage of his ethics investigation, said Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of D.C.-based Rothenberg and Gonzales Political Report.

"I think the seed has been sown for a negative Democratic primary from Grayson's distaste of Patrick Murphy, in part because of (Murphy's) background and being a former Republican," Gonzales said, "and also the Democratic establishment's distaste for Alan Grayson, particularly based on ... concerns that he could jeopardize the party's ability to win the seat in November."

GOING NEGATIVE

Murphy and Grayson led in different recent polls that show a large number of undecided voters, with Grayson ahead by one point in the latest one released this month.

Murphy has one advantage: He has more money than any other candidate to bad mouth his opponents  $5.6 million at the end of March.

Pundits say to brace for the muckraking turning into all-out mudslinging.

"If the race remains very close between Murphy and Grayson, Murphy, who's got all this money, has got to do something to separate himself from Grayson and often that means going negative," Paulson said.

Grayson has given plenty of fodder for Murphy with his hedge fund issues, by referring to a reporter as an "(expletive) robot," and his ex wife as a "gold digger."

Yet Grayson's firebrand personality also is his strength and he can use the media for free publicity, as Trump has done, by spewing controversial statements, Paulson said. Grayson also will continue to highlight Murphy's donations to Republican Mitt Romney's 2008 presidential bid and instances when he sided with the House GOP, for example to approve the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline, which many environmentalists and President Barack Obama opposed.

GETTING PERSONAL

While most attacks in the Senate race have been based on politics, voters have yet to see the character attacks Murphy and West exchanged in 2012.

West's campaign ran ads that showed a 19-year-old Murphy's mug shot after he was arrested outside a Miami nightclub for disorderly intoxication and possessing a fake driver's license. Murphy countered with an ad recalling West, a former lieutenant colonel, was relieved of his duties after firing a gun near an Iraqi detainee's head.

As in 2012, Murphy won't have to take on negative campaigning all on his own. Super PACs, outside groups that raise unlimited money and can run their own political ads as long as they don't coordinate with political campaigns, spent $3.5 million to help him and attack West in 2012. There's at least one of such groups, Floridians for a Strong Middle Class, supporting him this year.

Gonzales expects the Senate race to cost at least tens of millions, but the total will depend on how much the millionaire Beruff, a home builder, will invest in his bid. If he wins the Democratic nomination, Murphy can expect the same kind of attacks West lobbed at him, Gonzales said.

"When stakes are high, parties do what they need to do to win," he said.
2016 Florida legislative session in Tallahassee. (FILE PHOTO)

By Isadora Rangel of TCPalm

With a large number of undecided voters in the race to replace U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, it's hard to determine which candidates are the front-runners in both parties, yet some already are claiming the lead.

U.S. Reps. Alan Grayson, a Democrat, and David Jolly, a Republican, called themselves the front-runners in their respective primaries during an April 25 debate in Orlando.

Republican Carlos Beruff last week launched attacks against Grayson, whom he described as the "Democratic front-runner."

Grayson led Treasure Coast U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy 33 percent to 32 percent in the latest public poll in March, which was commissioned by two pro-Grayson progressive groups.

Murphy leads Grayson in four of nine polls taken this year; however, most of the people surveyed said they hadn't decided how they'd vote. For example, undecided voters accounted for more than 54 percent of surveyed Democrats in a March St. Leo University poll.

"Patrick is leading the race with support from grass roots Democrats and elected leaders, from city mayors to President Obama (who endorsed Murphy)," said Joshua Karp, Murphy campaign's spokesman.

ANTI ESTABLISHMENT

The anti-establishment sentiment Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have cultivated in the presidential race has turned the notion of who's a front-runner upside down, said Darryl Paulson, emeritus professor of government at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. Past indicators such as fundraising and endorsements don't seem to matter as much. Or they can backfire, painting the candidate as part of the establishment, Paulson said.

Grayson and Jolly portray themselves as outsiders, and both lag behind their opponents in fundraising. Grayson has raised most of his money from small donors, the Miami Herald reported this month. Jolly has pledged to stop personally asking donors for money, and filed a bill to ban federal elected officials from directly soliciting donations.

Murphy, a former Republican, has more than 143 endorsements from unions as well as so-called establishment Democrats, from Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to several congressmen.

"The D.C. establishment has propped up this Wall Street errand boy with sewer money for his campaign," Grayson said in an emailed statement. "Democrats won't be fooled, though, by this Republican masquerading as a Democrat."

The fact Grayson and Jolly set up a debate, even though they haven't won their primaries, shows the two are trying to set themselves apart, Paulson said. Only candidates who averaged 15 percent or more in public polls conducted in 2016 were allowed in the debate sponsored by the bipartisan Open Debate Coalition and broadcast online. Although there are four other Republican contenders in the race, Murphy was the only other candidate who qualified; his campaign declined to comment on why he didn't participate.

NO NAME RECOGNITION

Jolly is ahead of his Republican primary opponents in most polls, but naming a GOP front-runner is even harder than it is for Democrats because there are more candidates, none of which has statewide name recognition, Paulson said.

Jolly faces U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, a tea party favorite; Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, who's getting establishment endorsements such as Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi; home builder Beruff, a millionaire and first-time candidate who's branded himself as the outsider, much like Trump has done; and Orlando defense contractor Todd Wilcox, also a newcomer.

On the Democratic side, Grayson seems to be better known statewide than Murphy, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Some media coverage has focused on a House ethics investigation into his hedge funds and quoted his controversial comments, such as asking a reporter if he's an "(expletive) robot" to saying Republicans' health care plan is to "die quickly."



The question is whether Democrats are paying enough attention to Grayson's ethics investigation and whether that will affect his primary chances, said Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of D.C.-based Rothenberg and Gonzales Political Report. The Office of Congressional Ethics on April 5 recommended a House committee keep investigating allegations Grayson improperly managed his hedge funds, used his public office to attract businesses and did not disclose all of his finances.

"I think we have to wait and see how much Democratic voters are paying attention to the news of the day," Gonzales said, "and whether they are reading stories on Grayson, or if Murphy's allies will have to use that information to communicate that to voters."
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida speaks about Zika virus legislation at a news conference Wednesday on Capitol Hill while Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (right) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi look on. (Ledyard King/USA TODAY)

By Ledyard King, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON  Florida U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson joined other top Democrats on Wednesday in accusing Republican congressional leaders of moving too slowly on a spending bill to combat the Zika virus as it spreads from Latin America to the United States.

Nearly 900 cases of the mosquito-borne illness have been confirmed in states and U.S. territories, including 94 in Florida.

But Nelson said he's hearing reports that it's much more pervasive.

"Go to the southeast of Miami, go down to Puerto Rico and what you find is an estimate that there may be as many as 20 percent of the population that is infected," he said during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

House and Senate Democrats used the news conference to scold Republicans for not approving legislation based on President Barack Obama's $1.9 billion request to fight Zika. Administration officials have said the money would be used for vaccine research, mosquito control, public outreach and other efforts.

Republican leaders have criticized the administration for not being more forthcoming with details on how they would use the money. The measure also has been held because some Republicans are demanding that Zika spending be offset by cuts in other programs. So far, discussions between lawmakers from both parties have focused on a smaller $1.1 billion package.

Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran, who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said last week the panel has met with administration officials and independent experts to assess how much funding is needed.

"This committee has been working diligently to determine whether resources are necessary to address the public health threat posed by the Zika virus," Cochran said. "While it has been difficult to obtain the detailed information necessary to thoroughly evaluate the administration's request, we recognize that there is an urgency associated with the threat."

Cochran said an appropriations measure to address Zika should come up for a Senate floor vote "in the near future."

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the president's full request should be funded without having to find cuts elsewhere, given the gravity of the crisis.

"If this is not an emergency, there's nothing that is," he said at the news conference. "No flood. No earthquake. No fire. Nothing. Under tradition, precedent and common sense, it's an emergency."

Women who contract Zika while pregnant risk giving birth to children with severe birth defects, and the virus might increase the risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome, which causes paralysis, studies have shown. Most people infected with Zika will show no symptoms.

Wednesday's news conference was held two days after the Florida Department of Health announced the 94th case of Zika in the state  a case involving a person diagnosed after traveling to Palm Beach County. The cases in Florida and the rest of the country so far have been related to people traveling outside the U.S., but officials worry domestic cases will start appearing as mosquito season arrives and moves northward.

"Mosquitoes ready to sting and infect don't care that we don't have a budget agreement. They're here," Maryland Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski said, "and we need to make sure that we respond according to what we know is going to happen."
Sen. Marco Rubio won't be returning to the U.S. Senate after his failed presidential bid. (AP FILE PHOTO)

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By Ledyard King, USA Today

Correction: This article has been modified from the original version to correct the spelling of U.S. Rep. David Jolly's name.

WASHINGTON  Florida is a political juggernaut, wooed by presidential candidates and often pivotal in deciding who occupies the White House and which party controls Congress.

But the nation's third-largest state punches below its weight in Congress. Only one of the Florida delegation's 29 members  two senators and 27 House members  is chairman of a committee: Republican Jeff Miller, who runs the House Veterans' Affairs panel.

And the state's congressional clout likely will diminish further next year.

Miller is one of eight House members from the Sunshine State who decided not to run for re-election this year. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio also opted not to seek a second term after his presidential bid came up short. Three House members who do want to keep their jobs face tough re-election contests.

At a minimum, Florida will lose nearly one-third of its current House members, who collectively represent 61 years of experience and seniority.

"It's a bad thing," lamented GOP Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Okeechobee, who's seeking a fifth term in November. "For being such a big state, our influence-wielding ability in Congress is waning and that's a problem. And the only way to address that is seniority. When you keep having turnover, you keep kicking that can down the road."

OPEN AND AT-RISK SEATS

Miller, who represents Florida's western Panhandle, is one of four House members leaving Congress to pursue other interests. The others are Republicans Ander Crenshaw and Richard Nugent, and Democrat Gwen Graham.

Nugent decided he wanted to spend more time with his family in Hernando County, and Graham opted not to run for re-election in her Big Bend district earlier this month after a federal court upheld newly drawn maps that place her in a much more Republican district.

Crenshaw's departure will mean lost clout because he influences congressional spending decisions as chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government.

Four House members  Republicans Ron DeSantis and David Jolly, and Democrats Alan Grayson and Patrick Murphy  are surrendering their House seats to run for the Senate.

Three GOP Florida congressmen  Carlos Curbelo, John Mica and Daniel Webster  might not return if they don't win tough re-election fights.

If the GOP retains control of the House, no Florida Republican is expected to lead a standing committee next year. Compare that to Texas, the nation's second-largest state, with House members presiding over six committees, including two of the most prestigious: Armed Services and Financial Services.

Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, would assume the panel's gavel if his fellow Democrats win back the Senate in November's election.

SIZE STILL EQUALS INFLUENCE

Simply because of its size, Florida wields influence through representation on numerous committees even if few of its members occupy senior positions, said Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar with the American Enterprise Institute.

"A large state gains leverage by having two things: first, a delegation that works together across party lines to protect and enhance the interests of the state," he said. "Second, by having seniority and major chairmanships. Florida does have some semblance of unity on the former, although it has also succumbed to the tribalism of our time."

More Florida members would wield gavels if not for a GOP rule that allows Republican lawmakers to serve no more than six years chairing a committee. Reps. John Mica (Transportation and Infrastructure) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Foreign Affairs) both had to give up their chairmanships.

The same rule would have forced Miller from the Veterans' Affairs chairmanship in January, a key reason he's leaving Congress.

Chairing a committee means setting the agenda for oversight of the agencies under a panel's purview. That can have geographic benefits.

Miller has bird-dogged construction of a VA hospital in Orlando beset by cost overruns and project delays. His committee's investigators also helped unearth evidence that VA patient data was manipulated, equipment wasn't sterilized properly, and radioactive isotopes weren't properly stored at the VA Medical Center in Miami.

CHAIRMANSHIPS LESS IMPORTANT

But chairing a committee is less important than it once was, especially given the level of partisan rancor on Capitol Hill that has concentrated power more in the hands of party leaders, said Kevin Evans, a political science professor at Florida International University.

Congressional battles these days tend to focus more on hot-button issues that divide lawmakers along party lines than on cutting deals over how much to spend on a specific program, he said.

Being an appropriator "helps you build influence if you're able to dole out the goodies of government," Evans said. "But when it becomes about telling other legislators that they can't have their projects, then it becomes more burdensome."

Nelson said he's not worried about the expected influx of rookies.

"It is what it is, so you do the best you can," he said. "But I'm sure that they will be a bunch of fast learners."

There's only so much you can learn on the fly, Rooney said.

"For a few years while you're in any place, you're sort of biding your time to be more and more relevant," he said.

Rooney said that when junior GOP lawmakers make a point or ask a question at caucus meetings, they're often ignored by more senior Republicans.

"But certain people get up and everybody stops and listens to what they say. That's clout," Rooney said. "So when you lose Jeff Miller and you lose Ander Crenshaw, you're losing the people that everybody stops to listen to when they have something to say."
Traffic along Indrio Road is seen looking west of Kings Highway across from Lakewood Park Elementary School during an active school zone, slowing traffic in front of the school on Thursday. On May 2, construction is scheduled to begin widening Indrio Road from two to four lanes between Interstate 95 and Emerson Avenue, just west of the school. Initial construction will have no impact on school traffic because the work will start on the western section first and the school will break for summer at the end of May, said St. Lucie Schools spokeswoman Kerry Padrick. School officials are working on a traffic plan with the state for when school resumes in the fall, Padrick said. (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)

SHARE Four-lane traffic is seen looking east on Indiro Road at the Interstate 95 interchange as it narrows to two-lane traffic on Thursday in northern St. Lucie County. Construction is scheduled to begin May 2 on widening a two-lane stretch of Indrio Road to a four-lane divided highway, from I-95 east to Emerson Avenue. (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)

By Keona Gardner of TCPalm

ST. LUCIE COUNTY  Construction will start Monday to widen almost three miles of Indrio Road from Interstate 95 east to Emerson Avenue.

The three-year, $23.9 million project includes:

Widening Indrio from two lanes to four lanes

Installing a raised median, lighting, signs and traffic signals

Building a six-foot-wide sidewalk along the south side of Indrio and a 12-foot-wide multipurpose trail on the north

Realigning Spanish Lakes Boulevard to connect with Koblegard Road

Reconstructing a half-mile section of Koblegard Road to connect with Indrio

The project, being paid for by federal and state governments, is expected to be completed by spring 2019.

"The project will upgrade transportation service along the corridor to accommodate future traffic growth and allow further economic development," said Kathleen Dempsey, project public information officer.

At least one lane of traffic in each direction will be open during construction, and two-way traffic along Spanish Lakes Boulevard will be maintained at all times, she said.

The project excludes Indrio east of Emerson to Kings Highway, where Lakewood Park Elementary is located, because that section already can accommodate future traffic demands, Dempsey said.

School principal Dianne Young said the widening is needed.

"We have 700 students and about 150 parents who drop off and pick up their child every day, and I hear from them all the time how congested the road is," Young said. "I'm glad something is being done about the traffic to make things safer for our students and parents."

Initial construction will have no impact on school traffic because the work will start on the western section and school will be out for summer break at the end of May, said St. Lucie schools spokeswoman Kerry Padrick. School officials are working with the state on a traffic plan once school resumes in the fall, Padrick said.

About 9,822 vehicles a day travel on Indrio between I-95 and Emerson, which is the most heavily traveled section of the road, according to the St. Lucie Transportation Planning Organization fall 2015 traffic count.

Indrio is one of a handful of roads in St. Lucie County connecting I-95 and U.S. 1. The two-lane rural road is surrounded by agricultural land where cows and horses graze.

Widening Indrio could help St. Lucie County officials in their plans to increase the visibility and improve access to Treasure Coast International Airport and Business Park, a 3,400-acre general-aviation airport in north county.

The county hopes to make the airport a maintenance, repair and overhaul hub for aviation-related businesses.

"We are happy to have it widened, as we are working to expand the Treasure Coast International Airport and Business Park and Indrio is a major access point to the airport from I-95," county spokesman Erick Gill said.

Indrio Road widening project open house

What: The Florida Department of Transportation engineers will discuss the widening project

When: 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Lakewood Park Branch Library, 7605 Santa Barbara Drive
Lonnie Melvin, of Fort Pierce, protests following a special City Commission meeting called by Commissioner Reggie Sessions on Wednesday at Fort Pierce City Hall. The meeting was held in light of the fatal shooting of 21-year-old Demarcus Semer by Fort Pierce Police over the weekend. (XAVIER MASCARENAS/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)

Fort Pierce is on edge. Wednesday night, the Fort Pierce City Commission made things worse.

Facing a frustrated and at times angry crowd, commissioners voted to ask the U.S. Department of Justice to evaluate Saturday's fatal police shooting of 21-year-old Demarcus Semer, and intervene if the agency feels the need to do so.

Many citizens wanted the commission to formally ask the DOJ to launch an inquiry. But Commissioner Reggie Sessions' motion died for lack of a second, so for now the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office will continue its probe while the State Attorney's Office conducts a parallel investigation.

That's not good enough for many Fort Pierce residents who attended the meeting and protested the decision. It's easy to understand their frustration.

Fort Pierce Police, the sheriff's office and State Attorney's Office work closely with one another. Sheriff's deputies frequently patrol the same streets as Fort Pierce officers. They routinely work shoulder to shoulder on gang activity, weapons and drug cases. Everyone is on the same "team." Additionally, two of the three officer-involved shootings in the city since March 2013 have been at the hands of sheriff's office personnel.

Both the sheriff and Chief Assistant State Attorney Tom Bakkedahl may well be capable of running truly independent, impartial, transparent and responsive probes. But if the close ties between the agencies discourage witnesses from telling what they know, that's a problem.

And ultimately, if the local investigations deem the shooting justified  even if the facts fully support that conclusion  it might sow mistrust and cynicism, causing people to wonder if there was ever a chance the verdict would be otherwise.

For these reasons, Treasure Coast Newspapers' Editorial Board believes the best move is to proactively turn over the investigation of the incident to the DOJ or the state.

It's common for Florida law enforcement agencies to ask the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate officer-involved shootings. An April 26 shootout between Orange County Sheriff's deputies and a man wielding a shotgun was quickly turned over to FDLE. Police in Miami-Dade turned the investigation of an April 20 officer-involved shooting over to the FDLE, as did the Holmes County Sheriff's Office following an officer-involved shooting April 13 near Noma.

Sessions, however, said the FDLE has too many close ties to local law enforcement. That's why he wanted the Department of Justice to handle the probe, saying "we need outside investigators."

Other city commissioners don't see it that way.

Commissioner Eddie Becht said he opposed the Department of Justice's involvement because it sends a message that "I don't support my sheriff." Commissioner Tom Perona said he didn't want to offend the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office by asking an outside agency to intervene.

These are among the most tone-deaf comments by public officials in recent memory.

This isn't about supporting the sheriff; it's about trust. The community will have little confidence in a homegrown probe. That's a problem, whether Becht and Perona choose to acknowledge it or not.

Whichever agency investigates the case, it must do more than merely determine the facts. It must do so in a manner that's transparent, forthcoming and as fair as possible.

That doesn't mean it's bound to punish the officers; if the officers have done nothing wrong, it mustn't.

Yet in our post-Michael Brown, post-Freddie Gray era, investigators have an obligation not just to avoid bias, but to avoid the perception of bias.

Putting additional distance between the investigators and the investigated could go a long way toward dispelling that perception and calming the tensions now roiling Fort Pierce.

More on the shooting in Fort Pierce
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By Editorial Board

HARD TO FATHOM: It's a story line that continues repeating itself.

The Florida Highway Patrol is investigating a fatal hit-and-run involving a pedestrian west of Sebastian that occurred Wednesday night. The following day, FHP identified the victim as Nick Kenesky, 33, of Sebastian.

The accident happened at 9:05 p.m. on eastbound County Road 512 near 104th Avenue, Florida Highway Patrol spokesman Sgt. Mark Wysocky said. FHP identified the driver of the car as Angela Shelton, 44, of Sebastian.

Shelton told troopers she did not realize she had hit anyone at the time, according to an FHP report. Once Shelton arrived at home, she saw the damage to her car and contacted authorities, the report said.

There were 186 hit-and-run fatalities in Florida in 2015, according to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. With this latest incident, there now have been three hit-and-run deaths in Indian River County in the past five months.
Water from Lake Okeechobee is released through the St. Lucie Locks. (FILE PHOTO)

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By Mac Stuckey

The city of Stuart needs to devote a full-time effort to fixing the poisoned St. Lucie River.

We are "Stuart on the St. Lucie." I have lived here since 1956, when the river bottom was sandy and there was sea grass everywhere. The water was clear. We swam in it and fished in it with joy and without fear  except for the occasional sand shark.

Our city receives the biggest direct negative impact in the state from this problem. The river flowing through Stuart is like black coffee. The city needs to hire or assign a full-time city employee, preferably an environmental lawyer (not just the city attorney), to file every possible complaint with every possible federal and state agency and court, demanding that the polluted water from Lake Okeechobee be permanently stopped.

There are plans to stop the discharges and restore the Everglades, which will work, but they take commitment and a federal directive if the state Legislature will not act.

It is not Big Sugar's fault. It is the legislatures of both the state and federal governments being sold out to big-money lobbyists. The higher-ups have the power and the duty to fix this toxic threat, but they just give it lip service and take the special interest money to maintain the status quo.

Stuart is a local government with police power. We can make them listen if we make this our top priority  and we will have a lot of help from all the people who have been making a noisy, but largely futile, effort thus far.

Our recreational water is our greatest asset here. The Okeechobee muck, full of pollutants, accumulates on the bottom with every discharge and gets worse with every discharge. It is not an occasional inconvenience. It is a public health hazard and substantially affects our property values.

Let Stuart be the spearhead to stop this now. Hire a competent environmental lawyer, give him or her a small staff, and there will be substantial public donations to help him or her. It is the best investment Stuart can make for the future. Removing septic tanks and stopping fertilizer will not even make a dent in the problem. The only fix is to permanently stop Lake Okeechobee discharges. Then the river can start regenerating itself, which it will, if it can be protected from the billions of gallons a day of water and muck which should never be there, ever.

Citizens are the victims. The perpetrator is government policies of the last 60 years that turn Lake Okeechobee and the St. Lucie Canal into a point source of toxic pollution for our river. The freshwater in the lake is pristine, but we are a saltwater estuary. It does not belong here; it belongs in the Everglades, which is drying up without it.

The City Commission is supposed to protect us from public health hazards. Putting up a sign to avoid the river when it is toxic is not protection.

There are no priorities in Stuart more important than this. If city leaders take care of that, Stuart will be one of the most desirable cities in the state, and our businesses and residents will prosper and have an excellent quality of life.

Don't say you cannot do anything or cannot afford it. City commissioners have a voice which has to be heard. Help us, please.

Mac Stuckey grew up in Stuart and has been practicing law in the city since 1977. He is the author of the Stuart charter amendment which prevents the sale or long-term lease of Stuart's city-owned waterfront property without a vote of the citizens.
Gov. Rick Scott (AP Photo/Steve Cannon)

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By Paula Dockery

There was a lot of speculation on what action Gov. Rick Scott would take on this year's alimony bill. The legislation was among the most contentious and divisive of the legislative session.

Senate Bill 668 was the last bill to reach the governor's desk  starting the 15-day clock on his decision to sign it, let it become law without his signature, or veto it.

Spoiler alert: He vetoed it.

It's not the first time he had to deal with the issue. A similar bill passed both chambers  the state House and Senate  in 2013, as Scott's first term was ending and he sought re-election. That version of the bill was strictly alimony reform and contained what he and many in the legal community considered a major flaw.

The changes in the 2013 bill could have retroactively altered existing divorce and alimony settlements. Scott vetoed it and suggested a future attempt at alimony reform should not be retroactive.

Subsequent efforts at major alimony reform didn't make it to his desk until this year. The sponsors, state Sen. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland, and state Rep. Colleen Burton, R-Lakeland, heeded Scott's advice in crafting the bill by prospectively applying the changes.

There were other changes as well  some good, some bad, depending on what side you're on in the debate.

The Family Law Section of the Florida Bar  attorneys who have the most knowledge and experience in divorce, alimony and child custody matters  opposed the 2013 bill and actively participated in the 2016 legislation.

The sponsors and Family Law attorneys worked together on a consensus bill. The legislation would have replaced permanent alimony with a system based on spouses' incomes and would be awarded for a duration based on the length of the marriage.

Had their agreed-upon bill language moved forward unaltered, both sides would have been OK with the compromise and Scott most likely would have signed it.

The major change  which became the poison pill  would have created a new legal premise that both parents should have equal time in the custody of their children. This child custody issue would have had an impact on the financial considerations of child support.

It's probably true that there are injustices in the alimony law; that it is outdated and doesn't take into account changes in our society, longevity and wage-earner status.

Changes in the law might be necessary, but they should be based on what's in the best interests of the children. Not all parents are equally prepared or willing to nurture a child in a safe and loving environment.

Sometimes the judge has to make tough decisions. That's why judges should have the discretion to base their decisions on the individual and unique circumstances of each case.

Historically, bad outcomes have occurred when we removed judicial discretion. Didn't we learn from the unintended consequences mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes legislation have had on our criminal justice system?

Former Circuit Court Judge Robert Doyle, who has handled many divorce cases, actively opposed the bill, arguing that "this bill is bad for kids, it's bad for women and it's bad for Florida."

The debate stirred tremendous emotional reactions on both sides. A throng of at least a hundred supporters and opponents clashed in the state Capitol, in and around the Governor's Office, with each side trying to influence Scott's decision. It quickly escalated with an exchange of angry and heated rhetoric.

The Family Law Reform group, a grass-roots organization, led the effort to support the bill. The opposition came from the National Organization for Women, the League of Women Voters and the Family Law Section of the Florida Bar.

Scott's office received nearly 10,000 requests to sign the bill and roughly 3,000 to veto it.

It would have been much easier for Scott to sign the bill  pleasing most of the Republican legislators who passed it  but he didn't choose the politically easy option.

In his veto message, Scott wrote:

"Current law directs a judge to consider the needs and interests of the children first when determining a parenting plan and time-sharing schedule. This bill has the potential to upend that policy in favor of putting the wants of a parent before the child's best interest by creating a premise of equal time-sharing."

Kudos to him.

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.
The Sebastian Inlet in Indian River County. (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)

SHARE A devastating fish kill struck the northern Indian River Lagoon in late March. (MARJORIE SHROPSHIRE/CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

By Tim Ayers

It's is time to do what has been suggested for years: Cut more inlet(s) in the Indian River Lagoon.

The northern lagoon and Mosquito Lagoon near Titusville could collapse any day. The brown tide that wiped out the Banana River has persisted throughout the (practically nonexistent) winter and very similar conditions exist here that existed in the Banana River before its collapse.

The hot weather coming greatly increases that likelihood.

The Indian River Lagoon has existed just fine for centuries as a mostly closed system with very few connections to the ocean. There have not, however, been millions of people for centuries  and the system has had its fill of our effluent and affluent.

Nutrients have accumulated with nowhere to go. Hence, we've reached this tipping point.

It is 88 straight-line miles from the Ponce Inlet south of Port Orange to the Sebastian Inlet, which are the only connections to the ocean in the northern lagoon. At Ponce Inlet, the waterway is so narrow there is not a huge volume of water flushed with the tides. At Sebastian, it is only slightly more.

The Canaveral Lock at Port Canaveral prohibits any flow to the Banana River. It's 28 miles from Sebastian to the Fort Pierce Inlet and 22 more to St. Lucie Inlet. The area most in need is the Mosquito Lagoon, where in several places only 100 yards or so separate the ocean from the lagoon.

Let's get rid of the locks at Port Canaveral, cut another inlet around Patrick Air Force Base and space others further south. I know this sounds extreme and there are consequences: tides and currents (which would be beneficial); the flow of sand down the beach; maintaining the openings, etc.

In my view, this is an emergency situation and the only thing that might avert catastrophe is to turn to the ocean for rescue.

I look at the west coast of Florida where there are far more and bigger openings to the Gulf of Mexico and therefore the tidal-flushing effect. There are millions of people there as well, and they experience frequent algae blooms (many toxic red tides) and fish kills  but none as catastrophic as the Banana River kill. The flushing effect gives nature a chance to mitigate the effects of both natural and man-made blooms.

"Dilution is the solution to pollution" has been practiced worldwide, and although it is not the absolute solution, it is the emergency measure needed now. It's necessary until we can finally get a handle on the well-known causes: fertilizer-laden runoff; overwhelming and dilapidated septic systems; direct flow from stormwater relief canals, ditches, etc.

There are many concerned groups and caring officials trying to accomplish the task of controlling the source, which has to be done for any long-term hope. But this is a right-now emergency, and if millions of dead fish in two days doesn't get that across, what will?

All the solutions proposed to this point will take time, and I fear the northern Indian River Lagoon doesn't have much time. I think we need to pray that it survives the coming months.

For me, that area has been a sanctuary for my well-being most of my adult life. To see it die would be a monumental tragedy.

Tim Ayers is a Florida native and retired teacher who taught marine and environmental science for 30 years, including 12 at Martin County High School.
LORI GRIFFITH/SPECIAL TO THE COURIER NEWSWEEKLY Miles has been "fairly healthy and enzyme sufficient, which means he doesn't have to take the extra nutrients to help with digestion like so many other CF sufferers. He is gaining weight, thriving, and we haven't had any serious lung issues." Sharon Stokey

SHARE LORI GRIFFITH/SPECIAL TO THE COURIER NEWSWEEKLY The Stokeys continue to raise awareness and much-needed funds to assist with ongoing research. Treatments are expensive and place a huge financial burden on families with Cystic Fibrosis. LORI GRIFFITH/SPECIAL TO THE COURIER NEWSWEEKLY Brandon Stokey LORI GRIFFITH/SPECIAL TO THE COURIER NEWSWEEKLY Miles enjoys his surfboard and paddleboard, and feels at home on the water. LORI GRIFFITH/SPECIAL TO THE COURIER NEWSWEEKLY Brandon and Sharon Stokey: "Team Miles"

By Lori Griffith Special To The Courier Newsweekly

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation will be attempting to break a hippity hop world record.

Travis Suit, whose daughter Piper battles Cystic Fibrosis, will lead a choreographed dance on over-sized bouncing balls.

The "Great Strides" event this year is on Sunday, May 22 at the Meyer Amphitheater ... with a beautiful walk along scenic Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach.

A fun-filled day follows with music, kids zone, delicious barbecue and music.

Hard to miss will be "Team Miles," with more than 115 registered walkers recently.

But there's more to the story.

'No one wants this for their child' ...

With a diagnosis at 13 days old, the Stokeys  Sharon and Brandon  knew they had a 25 percent chance of having a child with Cystic Fibrosis. So, they were somewhat prepared for the news.

"No one wants this for their child," Sharon Stokey recalled.

"However, I feel we were meant to raise awareness and help find a cure" for the debilitating disease their son Miles inherited.

Miles has been "fairly healthy and enzyme sufficient," which means he doesn't have to take the extra nutrients to help with digestion like so many other CF sufferers.

"He is gaining weight, thriving, and  knock-on-wood  we haven't had any serious lung issues," Sharon says.

They are battling pseudomonas, a bacteria that can cause dangerous infections, with Miles requiring antibiotics every other month to keep it "on the down low if not eradicate it."

Thus far, the family has eradicated it twice. But it continues to return, prompting the need for continual antibiotics, common for CF patients.

According to Brandon Stokey, antibiotics affect Miles' appetite. "And the one thing we continually tell him is that he must eat, eat, eat to get big and strong."

waking at 6 a.m. ...

Miles' day consists of waking at 6 a.m., having breakfast followed by vibrating vest therapy with a nebulizer.

Luckily, Brandon works from home and is able to care for Miles during the day. Part of that care includes daily trips to the beach for salt air/water therapy. Miles has another vest therapy nightly.

The vest therapy is used to clear his airway and break up mucus. The machine connected to the vest is an air compressor that delivers bursts of air to rapidly inflate and deflate the vest.

This creates gentle pressure and vibration on the chest, which breaks up mucus making it thinner; creates mini-coughs in the lungs, which help push the mucus out; and makes the cilia move faster, helping them to carry the loosened mucus to the upper airways.

"Because water and salt can't flow freely into or out of cells, the inside of the airways of a person with CF is not as moist as the inside of the airways of a person who does not have CF," according to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

"This makes it difficult for the cilia to sway freely and sweep the mucus from the lungs. This causes mucus and germs to build up in the lungs. Germs (which can lead to infection) can then build up in the lungs. This causes inflammation and scarring that can lead to more obstruction. This can lead to pulmonary exacerbations. Pulmonary exacerbations are periods when symptoms get worse.

"This can mean decreased lung function, as well as more coughing and mucus, infections and weight loss. Pulmonary exacerbations can also lead to the need for antibiotics and hospital stays. The repeated cycle of mucus buildup, infection and inflammation can cause damage to the airways. This includes a condition called bronchiectasis. This is a permanent reshaping of the airways, which causes them to become loose and scarred. Bronchiectasis can make it harder to clear mucus from the lungs. It also makes it harder for the airway to move air in and out as a person breathes," the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation stated.

The vest therapy began when Miles was 15 months. And while initially difficult for him to adjust, this now has become an accepted part of his daily routine.

Sharon says they tell him how important it is for him and that it will keep him strong and healthy.

"We totally promote being healthy in our house," she said.

prolonged exposure to salt air ...

A major part of Miles' therapy involves prolonged exposure to salt air, prompting the family to relocate to the beach from Central Florida.

Studies have long proven the positive effects breathing salt air has on CF patients' lungs.

Exposure by surfing, paddle boarding, swimming or playing at the beach mimics a breathing treatment, thereby doubling the benefits of home treatments.

Miles is at the beach on most days soaking up the healing salt air.

The Stokey's continue to raise awareness and much needed funds to assist with ongoing research. Treatments are expensive and place a huge financial burden on families with Cystic Fibrosis.

new and effective CF therapies ...

Thanks to ongoing support, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation has raised and invested hundreds of millions of dollars to help discover and develop new and effective CF therapies.

Sixty years ago, when the foundation was established, the average life of child with CF was about five years. Today, because of dramatic advances in treatment and care, people with CF are living into their 30s, 40s and beyond.

"Team Miles" ...

Meanwhile, Team Miles continues to add walkers to its Great Strides group.

A first-grade teacher at Alamanda Elementary School, Sharon gratefully acknowledges the "incredible girls I work with," she says.

"They have been so kind and have registered themselves and their family members. Word keeps spreading and our team keeps growing. We are incredibly honored. I really have the best family and friends," she said.

"Our logo is a happy face for a reason."

Stomp Out Cystic Fibrosis ...

To this end, Civil Society Brewing Company is hosting a "Stomp Out Cystic Fibrosis" evening in support of Miles.

The event will be held May 7, from 5 to 10 p.m. in downtown Abacoa  1200 Town Center Drive, in Jupiter.

A $20 donation gets you all you can drink from a donated keg at Civil Society and lite bites from Jumby Bay Island Grill.

In addition there will be a silent auction, classic car show, raffles, and lots more. Also, 100 percent of the proceeds are donated to finding a cure for Cystic Fibrosis.
The Cambridge University Students' Union has recently decided to slash its funding of The Cambridge Student, forcing the publication to become online-only. If passed through CUSU Council, this move would strip the paper of its core character and render it obsolete in competition with the multinational heavyweight that is the Tab.

The incompetence of CUSU is often touted as a running joke within the University. Most students seem to accept with an indifferent resignation that CUSU is structurally useless, and for the most part it manages to avoid doing too much harm to the student body. This changes, however, when an organisation responsible for crippling the finances of a student society attempts to cover its mistakes by punishing that society, and the students involved.

Most readers will not be aware of how TCS affiliation to CUSU works. We are editorially independent (indeed, we receive complaints from CUSU whenever we dare to allude to their ineptitude) but our finances are completely controlled by CUSU staff. This means that it is CUSU staff who have been abjectly failing to source advertising for TCS (compare the adverts in Lent 2016 to those of Lent 2015). It is CUSU staff who are responsible for the inefficient funding model of TCS. It is CUSU staff who are responsible for the 12,000 (yes, 12,000) drop in TCS revenue over a single-year period. It is CUSU staff who pay our delivery driver. Or forget to pay him.

In recent weeks representatives have crowed delightedly over the fact that TCS made a loss last year. Why did no one tell the TCS board of directors? Why did it not occur to the CUSU general manager to reconsider the funding model, to made reductions or adjustments? Did he think that the loss-making would just magically take care of itself? The only solution CUSU offered was to introduce "digital distribution bins which are useless, irrelevant and a foolish and unnecessary expense.

TCS is currently costing CUSU far, far more than it needs to. The TCS Board of Directors has known this for some time, and in two separate meetings with a CUSU representative during Lent term we informed them of this fact. We told them we could reduce costs. We told them we needed a better advertising model. CUSU ignored us, and nothing was done.

Last year CUSU decided to move TCS to a new office, but failed to complete the office in time, leaving us attempting to fit a team of 35 students into a temporary office big enough for three people. We eventually gained access to this new office in January  four months later than planned. It is now April, and the office is still not completed  we dont have a working printer (the irony), there are whiteboards taking up floorspace instead of having been put on the walls as promised, and we cannot open the window, leaving us trapped in the heat of an un-ventilated furnace.

In week two of Michaelmas 2015, our printers threatened to stop printing the paper as CUSU had failed to pay an invoice. On another occasion in the same term, CUSU forgot to pay our delivery driver. Issue eight was never delivered as the employee in question refused to do so until he had been paid for his labour.

At the end of Michaelmas, my predecessor sent an email to the CUSU business manager, expressing concern that her lack of care was seriously threatening the paper. Yesterday I received an email informing me that CUSU recently, yet again, failed to pay an outstanding invoice on time.

As you can see, CUSU is not an organisation that I would want in charge of toasting a slice of bread, let alone financing an internationally-renowned newspaper. However, the fact remains that, as appalling as CUSU is, TCS needs funding. The simple solution to this problem would be to disaffiliate, but with what start-up fund? CUSU have chosen to stab us in the back in exam term, when the core members of TCS are desperately trying to keep their lives and their degrees afloat.

This is not a game of hearts and minds. I love TCS. I have said this to CUSU, to Facebook, to the national press. But that isnt going to change the fact that CUSU has screwed up its finances so catastrophically that it can no longer pay for the most successful and engaging of its activities.

So what do we need? We need CUSU to give TCS a bare minimun of 10,000 next year, in order to recover our tattered finances  now in pieces in the wake of CUSUs management. We only need one year to test a model of reduced costs and increased revenue. I wholeheartedly believe that TCS can easily earn that money back, given some competent financial management for a change.

CUSU has gleefully told us on several occasions that it has healthy reserves and is not in financial difficulty. The Board of Trustees are currently refusing to fund us on the grounds that the budget would then predict a loss  which would be unconstitutional. However, the budget has been unconstitutional for some time. According to clause K.3 of the CUSU constitution, the budget should have been drawn up and available for inspection by students by April 11. That makes it almost three weeks late.

We cannot bear the weight of CUSUs mistakes. It is in dire financial straights, but not through the fault of TCS. This paper spent more than a decade as a CUSU cash-cow, raking in huge profits for the organisation. Now we are being cut without a second thought.

CUSU representatives have repeatedly attempted to silence our complaints about their abject incompetence, but we are editorially independent. CUSU has not protected our future, why should we protect its reputation?
The Cambridge University Students' Union has recently decided to slash its funding of The Cambridge Student. If passed through CUSU Council, this move will force the publication to become online-only. What's so wrong with that? Read on to find out, in the words of those who know best.

Zoe Trodd, Co-Founder of TCS

When we founded The Cambridge Student in 1999, it felt like a brave experiment. We wanted the university community to have a smart, provocative, engaged broadsheet-style newspaper, one that looked outward beyond the Cambridge bubble while also challenging the campus community to new ways of thinking. Even back then, before Facebook or Twitter and just a few months after the Guardian went online for the first time in early 1999, we hoped that one day TCS would have a digital presence. Over the years I have carried on reading TCS online, including during the 11 years I spent in the US, and have been grateful for that digital access. But I would be devastated if TCS was no longer piled up in porters lodges. When the  first issue appeared off the press in October 1999, as the last great student newspaper to be founded in Britain in the 20th century, I walked round every college to check it was there in each porters lodge. I watched that week how fast the piles disappeared in comparison to Varsity. At one point I chased an abandoned copy as it blew across Parkers Piece, in horror that this precious object was loose in the wind. I slept with each copy of that hard-won first term under my pillow each week. And I have kept that  first run of issues from our founding term in a box that travels with me, from country to country and apartment to apartment. Holding the physical object, seeing others holding the same thing, was part of Cambridges imagined community in 1999 and it should still help cohere that community of readers as TCS prepares to turn 20 in 2019. Heres hoping our brave experiment of the 20th century  a pile of free and well-written words to open, touch and carry around  survives well into the 21st.

Tristan Jones, Founding Director of TCS; CUSU President, 1999-2000

I was one of the team that founded TCS  indeed I think it was my idea, picked up and expanded and made real and fabulous by Zoe and others. I recently returned to Cambridge to give a careers talk and was delighted to see TCS still very much alive, sitting in piles waiting to be united with its readers. I had a very strong sense that those of us involved at the start, and over the years, have built something lasting, now an integral part of Cambridge life. To go online only would, I fear, be to remove TCS from the institution. Its physical presence is what brings it into peoples lives, what makes it part of the furniture. If you lose it then, in years to come, you will want to leaf back through its pages and  and yourselves unable to do so. Please dont do it!

Tom Whipple Interviews Editor, 2003 & 2004; Science Editor, The Times

When I arrived at Cambridge, I was awed by the student newspapers. I had never conceived that people my age could produce something that so resembled a proper paper  with columnists, features, op-ed and news. As a mathmo I presumed it was not for me, but TCS took me in, gave me a chance and introduced me to serious journalism. It launched my career and the career of many of my contemporaries. Including, as it happens, my wife  with whom I now work on The Times. Anything that undermines its quality and seriousness of purpose would be a tragedy. It is not impossible for an online-only publication to succeed, but without the clear format of a paper, the clout that having a physical copy gives in getting decent interviewees and the discipline of having to fill something once every week for fear of printing white space, it will be a lot, lot harder.

Thomas Williams Editor-in-Chief, Michaelmas 2004 & Lent 2005

When I edited TCS, we barely had a website. Facebook had only just arrived, and the web wasnt the dominant medium that it now is. Times have changed, but a physical printed paper is still something special. Someone sees a pile of them in the porters lodge, idly picks on up to check the cuppers results or do the crossword, and ends up reading about the latest news about CUSU or the university in a way that just wouldnt happen if they had to actively seek it out online. Stopping the print edition of TCS would relegate it to just another website, and would be a very sad day indeed.

Nicholas Tufnell, Editor-in-Chief, Michaelmas 2012

I am very sad to hear that The Cambridge Student print edition is facing closure. Editing and overseeing both digital and print versions of TCS provided me with the experience necessary to go on to write for the BBC, the Observer, the Guardian, Bloomberg and WIRED magazine. Print allows for a slower paced, more considered and more investigative approach to journalism. Its focus  perhaps now more than ever  is on quality over quantity. To lose this would be a tremendous shame. I hope CUSU will reconsider.

Tonicha Upham TCS Director, 2015-16

It is devastating to see print journalism being sacrificed as a dying art form not worthy of saving. TCS is alive and kicking in its print form. Print journalism, and specifically the flavour of print journalism provided by TCS, still has its place in Cambridge, and indeed is vitally important, not only for the quality journalism which it provides but for the immense solidarity of its successive editorial teams and writers. Journalism is an impenetrable world open only to a privileged few with contacts. To reduce opportunities for involvement in student journalism is to deny students the chance to develop their skills and  nd a foothold from which they can forge a career.

Elsa Maishman, Editor-in-Chief, Lent 2016

TCS exists for Cambridge students, and has changed the lives of thousands of them over the years. The experience of reading, writing, illustrating, designing and editing a print newspaper is a different world to that of online publication, and one that CUSU should not be allowed to rob us of.

Amelia Oakley Editor-in-Chief, Easter 2016

So long as there are national newspapers and magazines still printing, its absolutely vital that students can get the necessary experience. People engage with TCS online, but they fall in love with journalism through the many diverse skills and experiences that print media offers.
This article contains reference to sexual assault, and we advise caution before reading it.

In Cambridge, I constantly hear jokes being thrown around, comments and snarky asides that, like most people, Ive learnt to submerge into background noise. Its only recently that Ive tried to teach myself to not just look awkwardly at my shoes when someone makes a laddy joke, which seems to increasingly just mean sexually violent. What may seem like a harmless joke to you, can mean a sleepless night of triggered memories to someone else, someone you might care about, quite possibly a friend.

I was raped when I was 12, but I was 19 when I realised it.

Were taught all our lives what the stereotype of a rape survivor looks like: a quivering mess sitting in a dark corner, rocking back and forth. Were told the line dont blame yourself and it wasnt your fault. I didnt identify with any of this. For years I saw rape like most people must, as something that happened to girls in dark alleys in the middle of the night. I probably dont look like a victim, after all, who does?

This is probably why people dont stop to think when they talk. It wasnt until I became a welfare officer, and was being trained in how to teach others about consent that I suddenly realised, sitting in a room of almost 100 people, that I was a victim myself. It took even longer to realise that Id been sexually abused.

What were not shown in the media is that rape takes so many forms. It isnt necessarily being pinned against a wall, you dont have to be held down or forced, you dont even have to say no or try to stop your attacker. In my case, the pure shock of what was happening stopped me from even reacting.

For seven years I was so embarrassed that it wasnt a case of telling someone, but of making sure he didnt tell his friends. In my mind, Id done something wrong and disgusting, everything around me taught me that what had happened made me a slut.

Even now, the main barrier to me opening up to friends isnt the pain of the memory but the shame associated with it, and the lingering belief that theyll see me the way I did for so long, as dirty. It took a throwaway joke about the consent campaign from a man in my college that bugged me for days for me to suddenly sit up at 2am and realise why I was so angry, I wasnt a slut, I had been raped.

The last thing you need when youre trying to desperately glue back together the shattered pieces of your self-worth, is to feel like theres somebody standing over you and laughing. While people may think their comments are harmless because they carry no real intention or malice, you can never know if somebody near you has had an experience of rape or sexual assault.

Using rape to shock people into laughter isnt new or clever, its cheap, and it hurts. My body is not a punchline, I dont care how ironic you think youre being, my nightmares dont feel ironic. Consent is not a feminist catchphrase for you to roll your eyes at, it can be the difference between sleeping at night and staring for hours at the ceiling, trying not to choke on tears. Its one of the most important lessons our society has to learn. It is not a joke. Rape is not funny.
Nick Clegg's visit to the Cambridge Union Society on the 27th April was met by a full house of students keen to hear the ex-Deputy Prime Minister speak.

He began by talking about the European Union, and was a strong advocate of remaining a part of Europe. He described the way in which our attitude towards the union has negatively affected our view of the EU, namely that we saw being part of Europe as losing our identity as opposed to gaining a new one, meaning that we are now less likely to support the EU. When questioned on what he thought would happen if we left the EU, he was adamant that disaster would ensue. He thought it highly probable that Scotland would leave us, seeing as gaining independence would allow them to be a part of the EU. He also briefly described the economic problems we would face if Britain was to leave the union.

An audience member asked the pertinent question "Is it ok for politicians to say sorry?". Yes it is, according to Nick Clegg, so long as they have something to say sorry for. He quickly shifted to the broader implications of the question, saying that in life it is always generally a good idea to say sorry. However he reluctantly admitted to the possibility of an apology making a politician look weak, despite the fact he still believed this is the right thing to do.

The issue of tuition fees cropped up a few times, he handled this topic in a jokey manner, attempting to shake it off and view it as a matter of the past, although he clearly felt uncomfortable about this given the room filled with students.

He spoke about the difficulties faced by minority parties in an election, citing the example of himself, who, having come into government suddenly realised that he was not able to do what he wanted. In terms of publicity he explained the difficulties of occupying the middle ground due to the fact that intruding on duopoly incites ire from both sides. Furthermore, as a smaller party, compromise was necessary to get things done, he talked about his desire to take action, even if this might not be the perfect solution, if he was to remain pure in his ideological beliefs, nothing would ever be achieved. In some ways he seemed to make excuses for his over compromising during the coalition government.

The electoral system reform was briefly discussed, Clegg dismissed the suggestion that the Lib Dems should never have agreed to the referendum since it was not on their terms. Again he says doing something is better than nothing.

Finishing with his proudest moment in government, the progress made in early childhood education, Clegg was met with applause as he left the room.
The proposed CUSU 2016/17 Budget was published last tonight, further cementing plans to cut The Cambridge Students budget, stopping regular print editions. The proposed budget, which is set to be debated at CUSU Council on 2 May, reveals that CUSU faces significant shortfalls in the coming year. This difference is set to be made up by removing the role of CUSU Coordinator and slashing TCSs Budget.

It states that CUSU is set to make losses of 11,000 in 2016/15, following losses of 6,000 in 2015/14. It also estimates that CUSUs financial situation will be worsened by falling advertising incomes and rising staff costs, with the creation of the role of Disabled Students Officer earlier this year.

However, a motion has been filed to force the publication of alternative budget solutions including raising affiliation fees, reducing the size of the staff or sabbatical teams and making use of CUSUs reserves. This motion will be debated on Monday, alongside the rest of the budget.

CUSU Council is made up of representatives of each affiliated college, however any student may attend or propose a motion.

While the budget states that TCS made a loss of 273 in 2015/14 and is predicted to make a loss of 12,400 in 2016/15, under its current constitution the TCS editorial team cannot procure advertising.

Commenting on this, incoming Editor-In-Chief of TCS, Amelia Oakley said The TCS Editorial team does not have control of the business side of TCS. Over the past year of TCS we have undergone a full redesign of our print edition and have time and time again produced high quality content.

Following discussions of proposed cuts, the TCS Editorial team asked the CUSU Board of Trustees to defer the decision for a year in which time the TCS editorial team would take over the responsibility for reducing costs and increasing revenue.

However, the Budget Briefing document stated that this proposal had been rejected, saying demonstrating CUSUs financial competence to members and the University was of utmost importance.

This budget shortfall comes after Varsity reported earlier this year that CUSU was in crisis, following the cancellation of a contract with an external contractor.

Coverage of the potential cuts to TCS have received widespread attention, including coverage in The Independent and the support of around 60 individuals through an open letter, including a former CUSU President and current MP, Wes Streeting. The letter states that TCS is vital and has earned its place as one of the great Cambridge student institutions.
The Obama administration has authorized a new online campaign in its slow, grinding war against ISIS, The New York Times reported earlier this week. The Pentagons Cyber Command will target ISIS in a way that essentially will get inside the heads of terrorist commanders to disrupt their military operations.

The goal appears to be to sow mistrust and confusion among ISIS leaders by interfering with their ability to pay their soldiers, execute operational orders, recruit new fighters, and communicate with one other.

The plan amounts to dropping cyberbombs on the enemy, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work told the Times, which is something the U.S. never before has done in such a large-scale battlefield environment.

Shift in Strategy

The Cyber Commands primary focus has been on Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, Admiral Michael S. Rogers, commander of the unit, said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month.

Also known as the Islamic State in the Levant, or ISIL, ISIS has limited organic cyberwarfare capabilities, he told lawmakers, and it has used the Web primarily for recruiting, propaganda, radicalization and fundraising.

The Pentagon intends to use cyberwarfare as one tool in the toolbox, suggested Isaac Porche III, associate director of the Forces and Logistics Program at the Rand Arroyo Center.

Although he has no inside information on the Pentagon strategy, it appears that the aim is to break the will of the enemy, he told TechNewsWorld.

That type of effort is not used as a substitute for traditional counterterrorism or battleground campaigns, but in conjunction with them, Porche pointed out.

Cyber is just one domain that we fight in, and all the domains have to be addressed, he emphasized. No one domain is necessarily the place to take on an adversary. They understand its a test of wills.

As a nation, the U.S. has to be prepared to respond to retaliatory attacks, Porche said.

One of the reasons there have been so few major attacks on the U.S. is that enemies know retaliation could come in a multitude of ways.

The response from the U.S. would not necessarily be in cyber, Porche noted.

Domestic Concerns

In many ways, the U.S. is living in a pre-cyber-disaster world, observed GreatHorn CEO Kevin OBrien. That is, it has not suffered a crippling large-scale cyberattack from a foreign entity.

We have not yet seen a cyberattack take down the power grid, disrupt critical infrastructure, or  so far as we know  gain access to military secrets, OBrien told TechNewsWorld. However, it is likely a matter of time before we see one of these events take place. There are routes through our cyberdefenses that are largely unsecured.

For example, ISIS last year gained access to the Twitter accounts of U.S. Central Command, OBrien noted.

While this was essentially Web vandalism, one can imagine a scenario where instead of posting propaganda pictures, they used their access to begin a more sophisticated, longer-term, and insidious social engineering attack against targets both public and private, he suggested.

Federal prosecutors just last month charged seven Iranians working for two companies sponsored by the Iranian government, ITSECTeam and Mersad, with a series of crimes against U.S. financial institutions that resulted in losses of tens of millions of dollars.

The suspects between 2011 and 2013 allegedly used botnets and other malicious computer code to carry out distributed Denial of Service attacks on nearly 50 financial institutions, preventing victims from gaining online access to their bank accounts.

One of the suspects, Hamid Firoozi, allegedly gained access to the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems of the Bowman Dam in Rye, N.Y., in 2013.

Separately, federal prosecutors last month charged three members of the Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Assad hacker collective, with spearphishing attacks against U.S. media organizations, a U.S. Marine Corp recruitment site, and the Executive Office of the President.

The Defense Department did not respond to our request to comment for this story.
China-funded power transmission lines inaugurated in southern Cambodia Updated: 2016-04-28 14:50 (Xinhua)

KANDAL, Cambodia - A China-funded power transmission system in the length of 100 km was inaugurated here on Thursday after four years of construction, officials said.

Cambodian Minister of Mines and Energy Suy Sem and Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Bu Jianguo jointly unveiled the project.

According to a report by Keo Rattanak, director-general of Cambodia's state-owned Electricite du Cambodge, the project included two substations and a 230-kilovolt transmission line and a 115-kilovolt line, which stretch across southern Kandal Province, southwestern Kampong Speu Province and Phnom Penh capital.

The project was built by the China National Heavy Machinery Corporation at the cost of $83.4 million in which $75.9 million (or 91 percent) was a concessional loan from the Chinese government and the remaining amount was met by the Cambodian government, he said.

The transmission system has played a vital role in importing the electricity from generation sources such as hydropower plants and coal-fueled power plants, he said.

"This is a new achievement for Cambodia, the project will ensure the power supply with reliability, quality, stability and sustainability," he said.

Minister Suy Sem said the development of electricity sources and power grids was a key element for boosting economic growth and reducing poverty.

"I'd like to express my sincere thanks to the Chinese government for supporting Cambodia in the development of energy sector and for encouraging Chinese investors to invest in this sector," he said. "And I'm confident that the Chinese government will continue to support Cambodia in this sector."

Ambassador Bu said the power transmission lines would benefit tens of thousands of families in these provinces.

"As a good and true friend of Cambodia, China is very pleased to support Cambodia in developing economy and in improving people's living conditions," she said. "I believe that this project will contribute further to enhancing friendly relations between China and Cambodia."
Samsung India today announced Make for India Celebrations, marking 17 days of never before offers on a range of mobile phones and tablets, TVs, home theatre systems, refrigerators, ACs, washing machines and microwave ovens, to thank consumers for making it the Most Trusted Brand in India.

Make for India Celebrations will be held between 29th April and 15th May across the country. The offers will include exciting cash back, attractive easy EMI options, services and free gifts on select products across categories.

Ranjivjit Singh, Senior Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Samsung Electronics India, said, We are humbled by the trust that Indian consumers have reposed in Brand Samsung. There is no greater satisfaction than becoming the Most Trusted Brand in India, and we recommit ourselves to our mission to Make for India. Make for India Celebrations is a small gesture from Samsung for all our consumers. It has always been the endeavor of Samsung to transform peoples lives with innovative ideas and technologies.

Attractive offers on Consumer Electronics

On the television and home theatre system purchases, consumers will get the option to avail up to 20% cash back on MRP and an Easy EMI facility of 18/4 on select models. The facility is being offered by our partners Bajaj Finserv, Tata Capital (CROMA & Reliance Digital Stores) and Capital First. On select models of LED TVs, consumers will get a free Samsung Home Theatre System worth Rs 19,990. An extended warranty of 2 years (1+1) will also be valid for specific models purchased during the offer period. AirTel HD DTH offers are also being made available on the purchase of select models of televisions.

For consumers looking for a deal on microwave ovens, Samsung is offering free Larah Dinner Set by BOROSIL with select models. Easy EMI option is also being made available on all 32L and 35L Hotblast models under the 15/0. In addition, 10/1 and 12/4 EMI option is available on all Convection models.

All Front Load Washing Machines & Activwash+ Top Load Washing Machine models will have Easy EMI options under the 10/2 scheme. In addition, 12/4 EMI option is available on all Fully Automatic Washing Machines. The 18/6 EMI option is also available on select 6.5Kg Front Load models & all 7Kg & above Activwash+ Top Load models.

Consumers can get a free Galaxy Tab on the purchase of all Side by Side, Food Showcase & French Door Refrigerators. Consumers looking to exchange their old refrigerators will get up to 18% off on MRP under exchange, on select models. The Easy EMI option is also available on select Frost Free and Side by Side Refrigerator models under 18/4 & 30/6 schemes. EMI options of 12/4, 15/0 and 10/1 is also available on select models by Bajaj Finserve, Tata Capital (CROMA & Reliance Digital only) and Capital First.

All of Samsungs 5 star & Digital Inverter ACs will come with the Free Standard Installation offer. In addition, 3 star, 5 star and Digital Inverter AC models will come with a 10/2 and 12/4 Easy EMI option.

In addition to the above, Samsung is also giving its consumers the chance to win up to Rs 9,999 on a scratch card offer available on Television and Home Theatres (applicable on all 81.28 cm (32) and above TV models), Refrigerators (applicable on all Frost Free Double Door Refrigerator models), Microwave Ovens (applicable on all 28L/30L Convection models), Washing Machines (applicable on 6.2Kg Activwash+ models and 6.5Kg and above all Top Load Washing Machine models) and Air Conditioners (applicable on all 5 Star and Digital Inverter AC models).

Unbeatable offers on Galaxy range of smartphones

Samsung will offer its consumers attractive payment options with benefits for purchasing the Samsung Galaxy Note5 (single SIM), which will make this popular device affordable for all. The device has been attractively priced at Rs 42, 900. The Galaxy S6 is also being made available to consumers at an attractive price of Rs 33,900. Consumers can avail 10% Cashback* on Debit and Credit cards for all EMI and Non-EMI transactions. No extra Cost EMIs will be available in 3, 6, 9 and 12 months tenures from leading banks. Buyers have an option of owning the device by making an initial down payment of Re. 1 and the remaining through 10 easy EMIs from Bajaj Finserv or Capital First.

In addition, the stylish and new Galaxy A7 (2016 Edition), Galaxy A5 (2016 Edition) will be available at attractive prices allowing everyone to make a style statement with this smartphone. The Galaxy Grand Prime will also be available at amazing prices under this offer. For the duration of this offer, the Galaxy A7 (2016 Edition) will be available at Rs 29,900, the Galaxy A5 (2016 Edition) at Rs 24,900 and the Galaxy Grand Prime at Rs 8,250.

Samsung has been regularly introducing India-inspired innovations, with its commitment to transform peoples lives with innovative products and technologies. Samsung India has launched Make for India initiative to develop India-centric innovations such as Active Wash Washing machines, Naan Roti Microwave Ovens, 5 in 1 Convertible Refrigerators, Galaxy J2 with Ultra Data Saving Mode, Galaxy J3 with S Bike Mode, among many others. Samsung is dedicated to improving the lives of consumers through its constant pursuit of ground breaking innovations and value creation and has launched products which have won the hearts of many Indian consumers.

Samsung recently completed 20 years in India. Its operations in the country include two Manufacturing Units, three R&D Centres and one Design Centre. It operates the countrys largest chain of single brand retail stores and reaches out to consumers across the country through 1.5 lakh outlets. Samsung has been ranked Indias Most Trusted Brand in the consumer durables and mobiles segment.

@ Technuter.com News Service
Idea Cellular has announced the expansion of its hi-speed 4G LTE service to 84 more towns of the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana circle, taking the total tally to 121. Covering all major towns across all 23 districts, the company has increased its presence exponentially within a short span of time.

In 102 out these 121 towns, Idea has also become the first operator to provide 4G LTE services.

Ideas world class 4G LTE service is available in the major towns of Anakapalli, Jadcherla, Ghatkesar and Ananthapur, in addition to the other major towns of Hyderabad, Mahaboobnagar, Nizamabad, Rajahmundry, Tirupathi, Vijayawada and Vizag, that were launched earlier.

B. Ramakrishna, COO  Andhra Pradesh, Idea Cellular said, Since December last year, until today, we have been aggressively focusing on reaching out to the maximum population and have re-structured our focus on the service delivery. With better internet experience at affordable tariff plans and unequivocal commitment to customer delight, we aim to provide the best-in-class experience to our subscribers.

@ Technuter.com News Service
OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei said back in February that his company plans to release its next flagship smartphone by the end of the second quarter, or in other words, by the end of June.

We're still waiting for official word on the device but in the meantime, a couple of benchmarks allegedly from the upcoming OnePlus 3 have been spotted.

If the Geekbench test is authentic, OnePlus' 2016 flagship killer will ship with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 alongside an impressive 6GB of RAM and up to 64GB of local storage. GFXBench reveals a 5-inch, 1080p display (1,920 x 1,080), Qualcomm Adreno 530 graphics, NFC, a 15-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 7-megapixel selfie cam and a host of other sensors.

Curiously enough, one benchmark references the device as RAIN A3000 while the other calls it RAIN RAIN A3000. There's also a discrepancy as one mentions just 4GB of RAM instead of six. As such, OnePlus will likely launch the OnePlus 3 in multiple configurations at various price points.

Key to the success of the OnePlus will of course be its asking price as the Chinese smartphone maker has made a name for itself by undercutting the competition. It's unique invite-only sales model initially made owning the original handset a bit of a status symbol although over time, it became more of an annoyance than anything else. Fortunately, Pei said his company expects to offer a "better" buying process this time around.
HTC is just coming off the launch of its new flagship smartphone, the HTC 10, but the company's unannounced Desire 830 has already leaked in the form of images and specs.

Samsung, LG, and HTC attended this year's Mobile World Congress 2016 and all three companies launched new smartphones. Samsung unveiled its new flagship Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, while LG took the wraps off its top-tier LG G5, and HTC announced its mid-range Desire 530, 630, and 825.

After HTC watched Samsung and LG announce their 2016 flagship smartphones, the company threw shade at its rivals when its CFO, Chialin Chang said HTC would have a "very, very compelling camera experience."

"We're making this comment after we've seen what's going on in the market," Chang said.

HTC launched its 2016 flagship smartphone, the HTC 10, at an event in April, which can be purchased unlocked through the company's online store. Verizon will also be the first U.S. carrier to release the HTC 10 and will open preorders for the handset on April 29.

It now appears HTC is already preparing to release a new smartphone. This time it will be a member of its Desire series. Images and specs of the HTC Desire 830 were revealed by Nowhereelse.

According to the site, the HTC Desire 830 will pack in a 5.46-inch 1920 x 1080 Full HD display, is powered by a 1.3 GHz MediaTek MT6753 processor and 3 GB of RAM. The smartphone will include 32 GB of internal storage, but it's unclear if it will also ship with a microSD expansion slot.

As you can see in the image above, the HTC Desire 830 won't use an all-aluminum body. The case is constructed out of white plastic, and additional colors are expected to be introduced at launch.

We'll keep you posted on any new HTC Desire 830 details as they become available.

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OpenStack Foundation launched the new Certified OpenStack Administrator program. It aims to give cloud professionals an avenue to display their skills, as well as meet the increasing demand for cloud administrators in the business.

A Certified OpenStack Administrator is someone who has at least six months of professional OpenStack experience. According to the foundation, he or she should also have the necessary skills needed in the daily operation and management of an OpenStack cloud.

"OpenStack skills are in high demand as thousands of companies around the world adopt and productize OpenStack," says the foundation on its official site. "Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) is the first professional certification offered by the OpenStack Foundation. It's designed to help companies identify top talent in the industry, and help job seekers demonstrate their skills."

The foundation also notes that "Cloud Computing" was recently ranked at LinkedIn as 2015's "hottest global skill." Moreover, a data released from Indeed showed that job listings for OpenStack had increased by up to two times in 2015.

The COA exam will reportedly take 2.5 hours to accomplish and will use English as its medium. It is a performance-based exam wherein candidates are expected to accomplish tasks or solve problems through the Horizon dashboard and the command line interface.

In order to prepare admins for the certification program, OpenStack partnered with a number of companies for the training which ranged from 101 to advanced skills. A great majority of these companies has bundled the COA exam along with their own training courses.

Some of these partners include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Mirantis, Ubuntu, Solinea, Linux Academy, Rackspace and Suse among others.

Cloud computing is now a major challenge to companies as it brought the need to re-skill engineers and that it gave a new meaning to culture and processes, said Jonathan Bryce, executive director at the OpenStack Foundation.

The COA exam will at least provide a target to meet the increasing demand for cloud administrators because, after all, more and more organizations are adopting the OpenStack framework.

One of the key areas where a certification would be deemed as a most valuable achievement is the service providing companies. Telecommunications companies such as Verizon, Ericsson and AT&T have all built their public clouds based on OpenStack. Managed service providers such as Rackspace have established large scale private cloud services also based on the framework.

These service providers see COA as a way to allow them in scaling their clouds. Normally, clouds have several admins and not just one. As the scale of the OpenStack cloud increases, there is also the need for more admins.

Photo: Chris Potter | Flickr

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Two of Motorola's upcoming mid-range smartphones, the Moto G4 and Moto G4 Plus, recently leaked. Now what is believed to be the company's 2016 flagship, Moto X, made an appearance on Geekbench, revealing some of its key specs.

In January, a Lenovo executive revealed that new Moto-branded smartphones were on the way and would include fingerprint scanners for increased security. One of those handsets, the Moto G4 Plus, was posted on Twitter, and the image confirmed that the device would sport a square fingerprint scanner below its display.

A few days later, a new Motorola smartphone, reportedly the mid-range Moto G4, made its way online with the image once again backing up Lenovo's claim that new Moto-branded smartphones would ship with fingerprint scanners.

Lenovo recently unveiled a new smartphone, the Zuk Z2 Pro, and at the launch event the company's CEO, Yang Yuanqing, revealed that Motorola would be releasing a new and "exciting" device on June 9.

At the time, it was believed that device would possibly be one of the leaked Moto G4 variants but June 9 could actually be the launch of the flagship Moto X since it just made an appearance on Geekbench.

The Moto X (2016)'s codename is "Sheridan" and is listed by its model number, "Motorola XT1650" on Geekbench. The results show the smartphone is running Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, Adreno 530 GPU (graphics processing unit), and 4 GB of RAM. These specs put the new Moto X on an even playing field with flagship rivals like the Samsung Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, LG G5, and HTC 10.

While the Moto X's display wasn't listed, it's safe to assume it will pack in a 2560 x 1440 Quad HD screen and should be available in 32 GB and 64 GB storage options at launch. Users will also be able to customize the handset using Motorola's Moto Maker, which allows consumers to choose different colors and materials to make the handset more personable. The handset could also sport a full metal design, as seen in a leaked image in December.

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Han Solo's faithful and hairy Wookiee friend Chewbacca is now the namesake of one of four newly discovered species of flightless beetle in New Guinea.

The small weevil beetle Trigonopterus chewbacca has hairy legs and dense scales that scientists found quite peculiar, reminding them of the towering Wookiee's shaggy fur.

T. chewbacca is among four new weevil species found on New Britain Island in the Bismarck Archipelago. Among its siblings were T. obsidianus, T. silaliensis, and T. puncticollis.

Meet The Chewbacca Beetle

Unlike the beetle's Star Wars namesake, it cannot rely on size to scare other species off as it is only between 2.78 to 3.13 millimeters.

The beetle's body is black and shaped like a rhomboid, while its antenna and legs seem rusty. What likens the beetle to Chewbacca, however, is its strangely dense scales, covering its legs and head.

Searching For Beetles

The beetle genus Trigonopterus is endemic in the Oceania subregion Melanesia where Papua New Guinea is located, but prior to the new study, there had been only one species of Trigonopterus known in the Bismarck Archipelago.

To find out how it was possible that the hyperdiverse Trigonopterus has never been spotted in New Britain, two members of the research team, which had comprised of Dr. Alexander Riedel, Dr. Matthew Van Dam, and Raymond Laufa, travelled to the island, double-checking leaf litter and foliage.

After 10 days of beating foliage and sifting leaf litter, researchers eventually found 18 individual beetles in primary forests on limestone karst. They later assigned the beetles to four different separate species.

However, the scarce findings were still striking, especially because the beetles were abundant in similar areas in the New Guinean mainland.

Meanwhile, the research team concludes that the beetle genus must have occupied New Britain at least four times in the past. Given the topography, tropical vegetation, and size of the island, it is possible that the genus has undergone "local speciation" on the island, but this requires deeper investigation.

The Chewbacca beetle is not the only creature christened with the Wookiee's name. A Mexican moth was named Wockia chewbacca in 2009, while a wasp was described as Polemistus chewbacca in 1983.

The findings of the new study are featured in the journal ZooKeys.

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Rivals become allies to fight for a common cause as Google and four other companies join forces to form a coalition for self-driving car adoption.

Car-making competitors Volvo and Ford, ride-sharing opponents Uber and Lyft and technology stalwart Google are leading the charge to urge government action on the adoption of self-driving vehicles.

Some states are working on their own autonomous driving laws but the laws differ widely from state to state.

David Strickland, the former head of the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), will be the new group's spokesman and counsel. The NHTSA is the U.S. auto safety agency that is drawing up new guidance on self-driving cars, which it hopes to release in July.

Strickland told Newsweek that the coalition's main role is to provide all the necessary data and policy inputs to create "one clear set of federal standards" as a unified voice.

"The reason why these companies got together is that we see states taking actions and new rules and the federal government doing the same. They want to be a voice to bring self-driving cars to the public as quickly as possible," Strickland said.

The coalition plans to work with local governments, civic organizations and businesses to help promote the vision that self-driving cars can safely roam American roads.

NHTSA reported that more than 30,000 fatalities and 2.3 million injuries resulted from 6.1 million crashes on American roads in 2014. The transportation agency also revealed that about 94 percent of crashes are caused by human error and that vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 29.

The U.S. Department of Transportation and the coalition see the possibility of self-driving cars helping to reduce the frequency and severity of vehicular crashes.

"Self-driving technology will enhance public safety and mobility for the elderly and disabled, reduce traffic congestion, improve environmental quality and advance transportation efficiency," said the coalition in a statement.

Getting The Government On Board

Early this year, the Obama administration unveiled a plan to support research work into autonomous driving by budgeting about $4 billion for the research over the next 10 years.

The plan is an effort to head off what could become a patchwork of laws and set the foundation for state officials, manufacturers and consumers to use the potential of new technologies and ensure the safety of self-driving cars, said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.

Self-parking and lane control are among the most common autonomous driving features that are already included in some cars on the production line.

Tesla, for its part, launched a feature called "Summon" that can autonomously drive the car into a parking space and steer it back to the driver on command. Initially, it is working on a short distance, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk said it could be made to work nationwide, say from LA to NY. Current laws, however, wouldn't allow such an unattended long drive, hence the need for new legislation.

Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson said in a speech in Washington, D.C. in October that the U.S. stands to lose its leading position in the autonomous driving industry if federal legislation for the testing and certification of self-driving vehicles doesn't come quick enough.

A letter sent by the NHTSA to Google in February, conceding that the artificial intelligence that autopilots Google's autonomous car can be considered a "driver," may be a signal of good things to come.

Photo: Andre Torrez | Flickr

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Google launched a new scheduling feature for its Calendar app for Android on Wednesday that makes it so much easier to set up an appointment with multiple people.

We all have insanely busy schedules, and keeping up with when is the best time to have that company meeting or important call with a client can be hard to do  especially when you are trying to pencil the appointment in when on the run.

Google Calendar for Android's new feature finds the best meeting time for everyone so that none of the people participating have to worry that they won't be available.

Called "find a time," the new Google Calendar feature is now available for those who use Google Apps for Work or Edu.

To use the feature, users start by making a new event in the app and invite people to join by entering in their names. Once people are added to the event, the user will see the option to tap on "find a time" featured underneath their names.

The feature will then come up with the best time that works for everyone, regardless of their times zones. It figures this time out by assessing the availabilities of the users, and also takes into account when is the typical time that this group holds a meeting.

The person who set up the meeting or invite will then be provided with a list of the times available, as well as the times that day where a person seems likely to be unavailable so that they can choose which option is the best bet. This means they are still in control of when it comes to setting up the meeting, while Calendar makes the process as painless as possible.

However, what if it can't find a time that works? Don't worry, because Calendar will then look at the meeting that conflicts with the best time for everyone else to see if that one can be rescheduled. For example, if this is weekly work meeting that happens sometime on Tuesdays, but you arranged to meet a friend for lunch at that time, it might be easy to just push your lunch date back to another day, as opposed to making everyone miss the meeting.

For now, the "find a time" feature is available for Google Calendar for Android, which can be downloaded from the Google Play Store for free. The company has plans to release this feature for iPhone users as well as for desktop.

Source: Google Blog

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The Samsung Gear 360 VR camera debuted during the 2016 Mobile World Congress with the Galaxy S7 lineup, and now, it gets an official April release date.

Back during the huge February event, the smartphone maker didn't say how much it'll cost, and it still has yet to provide an official price tag. However, it did turn up on a couple of websites, giving a good idea of what to expect.

According to the German website Vrodo, the device will set customers back by 350. That equals to roughly $396. More or less in line with the estimated price range is a listing over at Adorama, putting it up at $399.99.

Needless to say, that's a pretty hefty sum of cash to fork over for a ball the size of Fido's plaything, but that's just at first glance. In fact, it's arguably a good deal because of what the Samsung Gear 360 VR camera has in store  two fisheye f/2.0 lenses that can record videos at nearly 4K quality and capture 30 megapixel stills, microSD card support that can store up to 128 GB worth of content and a body that's resistant to dust and water.

What's more, it'll work well with most Samsung smartphones and the Gear VR, the $99 VR headset that sold out quickly when it rolled out because of its immense popularity and affordable price.

To pitch in a little scenario of what's possible, the combination of the Gear 360 VR camera coupled with a Galaxy S7 edge and a Gear VR makes for one heck of a Samsung-branded VR ecosystem, not to mention that Milk VR can be included in the mix, too.

As for the 360-degree shooter's availability, it's set to go on sale on April 29 in Singapore and South Korea and across the globe after some time.

Let us know what you think of the VR cards that Samsung is putting into play in the comments section below.

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Manila's role in averting China-US conflict Updated: 2016-04-28 07:59 By Rommel C. Banlaoi(China Daily)

Visiting US Defense Secretary Ash Carter gestures during a joint press conference with his Filipino counterpart Voltaire Gazmin (not pictured) at the presidential palace in Manila April 14, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

In the choppy waters of the South China Sea, China and the United States are entangled in a complex power struggle. The two major powers have accused each other of "militarizing" the South China Sea disputes. In the crosshair of this power struggle is the Philippines. As China's neighbor and the US' long-time ally, the Philippines has been strategic in its unique role.

According to China, the US is the main source of militarization in the South China Sea. This has resulted in disputes because of the US' regular deployment of advanced American aircraft and warships pursuing "freedom of navigation operations" in the region. So far, the US has conducted two major "freedom of navigation operations" in the South China Sea using guided-missile destroyers USS Lassen in October 2015 and USS Curtis Wilbur in January 2016. The US Navy has also strengthened its military presence in the region and its warships have made port calls to Asian allies, particularly the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Australia.

The US and the Philippines recently conducted their annual joint military exercise, called Balikatan 2016(Shoulder-to-Shoulder 2016). The primary focus of the drill was to help the Philippine military improve its capability for "territorial defense" against the backdrop of rising tensions in the South China Sea. This year's drill was the 32nd Balikatan between the two allies, but it also involved two other US military allies, Japan and Australia.

The Philippines has been the main focus of the US since it's the only Washington ally that has a dispute with China in the South China Sea. The Philippines is also the US' front line state in the pursuit of enacting the US policy in the South China Sea, because it provides the US military effective access to the waters as Washington implements its "rebalance to Asia" strategy.

For the US, its increased military presence in the South China Sea is essential to fulfill its security commitments to its allies, particularly the Philippines. Though Washington publicly declares that its increased naval and air presence in the South China Sea is not aimed at confronting Beijing militarily, China regards the US military presence as a form of strategic encirclement of the country. The fear of US encirclement, in turn, has prompted China, too, to increase its presence in the South China Sea by building islands on the seven reefs of Nansha Islands (called Spratlys in the Philippines). The US is convinced that China's "artificial" islands in the Nansha Islands can have no other but military purpose.

China and the US have recently intensified their power struggle in the South China Sea because of their competing security interests and strategic outlooks. Though the South China Sea is not yet a military problem, increased military activities by the two major powers have increased the risk of unintended military conflicts in the area.

Manila has a pivotal role to play, in preventing or exacerbating the possibility of an unintended military conflict between the two giants. To repair its damaged ties with Beijing, Manila has to resume direct bilateral talks by reopening channels of communication at the highest levels of decision-making. Though public opinion in the Philippines continues to reject Chinese buildup in the Nansha Islands, Filipinos continue to admire China's culture, civilization and economic prosperity as evidenced by the growing number of Filipino visits and investments in China. In fact, most of the presidential candidates for the May 2016 Philippine elections say they would improve Manila's relations with Beijing if elected.

But if the Philippines fails to improve its relations with China while continuously enhancing its defense alliance with the US, it can become a catalyst for the proverbial "Thucydides trap" in the vast sea where China and the US could collide.

The author teaches international studies at Miriam College in Quezon city of the Philippines, and is director of the Center for Intelligence and National Security Studies. Source: chinausfocus.com
Cases of HIV are higher among particular groups in Minnesota including young adults and minorities, a new report has revealed.

The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) released a new report showing that the cases of HIV/AIDS went higher in some populations in 2015 compared to the previous year.

Although the total number of HIV cases detected in 2014 and 2015 did not show a significant gap, MDH was able to identify notable increase of cases for some groups.

HIV By The Numbers

The report says that there were a total of 306 and 294 new HIV/AIDS cases in 2014 and 2015 respectively. Since 1982, the total number of cases reported in MDH is 11,007. At present, there are about 8,215 individuals infected with HIV/AIDS living in Minnesota.

For the latest report, all eyes were turned to the drastic increases of HIV/AIDS cases among certain populations. Among these groups include young adults aged 20-29 years old, which exhibited an increase of 24 percent, leaping from 87 cases in 2014 to 108 in 2015. These particular cases were heavily noted in the Twin Cities urban locations, in persons of color and in men who have sexual relations with the same gender.

Injection drug users also saw a significant increase in HIV/AIDS cases, with an 86 percent increase or a rise of 14 to 26 cases from 2014 to 2015. This rate is mostly noted in non-Hispanic males, people aged 20 to 39 years old, residents of Twin Cities and men who engage in sexual intercourse with other men.

Lastly, the reports states that 58 percent of new cases were composed of people of color. For females, more than 50 percent were born in Africa and for males, more than a quarter were African-Americans and non-Hispanics.

Access To Care

"We are seeing higher HIV infection rates in communities with limited access to HIV testing and prevention programs due to longstanding social, medical or income disadvantages," says health commissioner Dr. Ed Ehlinger.

Ehlinger says the rates of HIV/AIDS can be decreased by enhancing access through broader collaborations for disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment and care within the widely-affected communities.

HIV Preventive Measures

Health authorities say HIV is now very preventable. Among the effective strategies to avoid the disease include safe sex practices by using condoms appropriately, limiting sexual partners and barring from sharing needles for tattoo, piercing and drugs administration purposes.

People with high risk of acquiring the disease can also now get a prevention pill called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) by prescription.

Ehlinger also says that individuals who are already diagnosed with the disease should also know that receiving treatment can significantly halt the spread of HIV.

Checkout the full report [pdf] of MDH.

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Getty Images joins the list of companies lobbying against Google's dominance in the online search market. Tech Times earlier reported on the coalition of companies that seeks legal action against Google for allegedly breaking antitrust rules in Europe, the United States of America, and other regions.

Photography company Getty Images has released a statement confirming that a formal complaint has been filed against Google with the European Commission, to investigate Google's anti-competitive practices.

Getty Images is questioning the search functionality of Google, which it claims is hurting its image licensing business. In 2013, Google started displaying high-resolution photos owned by Getty and other similar businesses on its own search results engine. Getty argues that because image consumption is immediate, giving the public instant access to high-resolution photos in large format decreases traffic in their website, as well as other original image sites.

According to Getty, Google has turned users into "accidental pirates" by making Getty images available for quick download while discounting existing copyright and intellectual property laws.

Getty Images' general counsel Yoko Miyashita said the company represents over 200,000 photojournalists, content creators, and artists around the world who rely on the company to protect their work, as well as receive appropriate compensation.

"Google's behavior is adversely affecting not only our contributors, but the lives and livelihoods of artists around the word [sic], present and future," says Miyashita.

Getty also slams Google for threatening innovation and abusing its dominant position by monopolizing the image marketplace. Getty said that by siphoning traffic, Google is directly hurting artists who need to earn a living and fund their future works.

In an interview with Times, Miyashita divulged that Getty Images had attempted to resolve the issue with Google but after three fruitless years, it finally decided to launch an official complaint to the antitrust commission.

"Google's proposed solution [was to] accept its presentation of images, or opt-out of image search," Miyashita said.

In an official statement, Getty Images appeals to other photographers and the image industry to join its battle against Google "to defend intellectual property and ensure a fair marketplace for content creators."

Photo: Carlos Luna | Flickr

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A new rumor is spreading like wildfire suggesting HTC is set to build the upcoming two Android N Nexus devices.

Famous leakster Evan Blass (@evleaks) reports on Twitter that the company is presently building the Android N devices that are internally codenamed M1 and S1.

HTC is building a pair of Android N devices for Google internally dubbed M1 and S1 #nexus  Evan Blass (@evleaks) April 27, 2016

Blass, however, does not go into detail if these devices are smartphones or tablets. Speculation is rife, however, that they could rock different display sizes.

For those who aren't aware yet, Android N is Google's most recent mobile operating system that is currently available on preview to those who consider themselves developers.

A separate report from Android Police, in the meantime, adds fuel to this recent rumor, saying that Blass's revelation is "likely accurate" and that these devices carry codenames we'd never expect.

"[W]e believe Google is, as has now been reported multiple times, working on two Nexus phones in cooperation with HTC," reads the report. "We believe those devices are codenamed Marlin and Sailfish."

Android Police even shows a piece of evidence, the AOSP Gerrit reference, a code review tool.

The report says a senior Qualcomm engineer was referencing Marlin in this tool, adding that Qualcomm likely knows a lot about Google's next Nexus devices, if these will come fitted with Qualcomm chips.

Previous rumors said HTC named these devices as HTC T50 and T55, probably hinting at their screen sizes. These names, however, have been dropped, it seems.

At any rate, we will learn more about these Nexus phones, for instance their release dates and prices, at the Google I/O 2016 next month.

If this rumor holds true, this will not be the first Nexus handset from HTC. In 2010, the company joined forces with Google in pushing out the Nexus One, deemed the very first Nexus smartphone, running Android 2.1 and sporting a 3.7-inch screen with 480 x 800 resolution.

In related news, HTC unveiled its most recent flagship device, the HTC 10, featuring a superb design and powerful software. If HTC will also pack in premium design and features to these purported Nexus devices, then Google could have two high-quality devices that will showcase Android N down the line.

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Kennewick Man, among the oldest and most complete set of ancient skeletons found in North America, is Native American, a new report has revealed.

Last year, scientists were able to uncover genetic evidence, which showed that the ancient remains, also known as the Ancient One, have strong DNA similarities with Native Americans more than other populations.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Northwestern Division announced on April 26 that they arrived at a conclusion after a thorough review of the DNA and skeletal analyses provided to them. Commander of corps' Northwestern Division Brig. Gen. Scott A. Spellmon expressed confidence in their findings [PDF] - statistical, skeletal, and genetic evidence all support Native American origins of Kennewick Man.

The Ancient One, believed to be about 8,500 years old, was found in 1996 in Washington near the Columbia River in Kennewick. Since it was found under federal land, the U.S. Army Corps handled the bones. In the past, scientists would associate modern native tribes to have Siberian ancestors who used a land bridge that previously extended to Alaska. Kennewick Man, however, has skull features that suggest a different origin.

Scientists wanted to study the set of bones, while tribes pressed that it should be immediately buried. The arguments have led to a legal battle between the tribes and scientists. After winning the 2004 court battle, scientists proceeded to study the remains.

With the latest findings, the skeleton is now under the Native American Graves Protections and Repatriation Act. No further scientific study can be carried out. While processing the return of the bones to the tribes, Kennewick Man will be kept under the care of the Burke Museum.

Corps spokesperson Michael Coffey said the process of deciding on which tribe would have the right to bury the ancient remains would take a while. Cultural affiliation should first be established. The corps is now awaiting interested tribes to submit a claim. Colville, Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakama, and Wanapum Indians have previously claimed relation to the Kennewick Man.

Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon communications director Chuck Sams said that they will cooperate with the corps to accelerate the burial of Kennewick Man.

"We will send in our joint request for disposition for the reburial of the Ancient One," said Sams.

Photo: Mike Steele | Flickr

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First it was fictional character names, then Instagram filters in 2015. Now airlines has made its way to becoming a real human baby's name and the child's name is Jet Star.

On April 22, a team of doctors and the crew of Jet Star flight 3K583 from Singapore to Myanmar successfully aided and delivered a 6 pounds, 7 ounces baby boy shortly after landing in Yangon. Pleased with the care the pregnant woman received from the airline, the family decided to name their little boy Saw Jet Star.

Now begins the story of Jet Star's free marketing wherever the boy goes and the possible conflicting emotions the little boy would have as he grows up and tries to determine what possessed his parents to not give him a well thought out actual human being's name like, perhaps, become the namesake of the actual person who called the shots in order to give the mother and child utmost care.

"The Jetstar crew on board 3K583 led by Customer Service Manager, Mr Saw Ler Htu exercised utmost care and concern for the passenger, calling for medical assistance on board the aircraft when required," Jetstar's Facebook page stated.

Alright, perhaps it also has something to do with the SG$1,000 worth of baby supplies that Jetstar gave the family or it really is just the overwhelming gratitude and exhaustion that took over after pushing out a 6 pound baby from her belly.

The point is that more and more parents are giving their children very eccentric and unconventional names that beg the question "why on earth would you subject your kid to that?"

Other baby names that would just make people wonder if the child's parents hated them would be Winner and Loser, Hashtag, Facebook and-we kid you not-Tula Does The Hula From Hawaii. Let's not forget the names of two children born from a musician who is millions in debt and a member of a reality tv family. Do you need directions to guess those correctly?

According to Mark Mason from The Spectator, the trend has to do with parents desperately trying to make their children stand out. However, as more and more children are christened with unusual monikers, it not only gets confusing, it also make the names stand out less.

"In an attempt to make their children stand out, parents are only helping them to blend in," Mason said.

Even Syndrome from Disney Pixar's The Incredibles understood the concept. After all, he was the one who said: "When everyone's super, no one will be."

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The Raspberry Pi may be the king of single-board computers right now but Samsung is moving to knock it off its throne with the new Artik 10 eight-core board computer.

The South Korean tech company announced that the new board computer will be made available online through Digi-Key beginning next month.

While pricing for the Artik 10 has yet to be revealed, chances are it could end up being a bit more expensive compared to other similar devices. The smaller Artik 5 for small wearable devices costs $99.99 per unit, while the Raspberry Pi 3, which is the Artik 10's chief rival, costs about $35 per unit.

As far as specs go, the Artik 10 is fitted with a decent eight-core, 32-bit ARM CPU, which provides it with enough horsepower though not as much as that of the Raspberry Pi 3's 64-bit quad-core ARM CPU.

Samsung has been using 64-bit chips on its new line of smartphones, but it opted to go with a dated setup for its new board computer.

The Artik 10's CPU comes with four Cortex-A15 cores to manage even the most demanding of computing tasks, as well as four low-power Cortex-A7 cores to handle lighter tasks.

One advantage the Samsung Artik 10 has over its Raspberry rival is in the graphics department. The Mali T628 MP6 graphics chip on the Artik 10 can handle high-definition videos at 120 fps, while the Pi 3 can only handle HD clips at 60 fps.

Data storage for the new Samsung board computer comes in the form of a 2 GB LPDDR3 mobile DRAM and a 16 GB flash storage, which are both a notch higher compared to the memory storage found on Pi 3. The Artik 10 also features USB ports.

The Artik 10 can also connect to other devices, such as cameras, displays and external sensors, through the use of its expansion ports and wireless capabilities. Its Zigbee component allows it to have better communication with sensor devices, a feature that is not present on the Raspberry Pi 3.

According to Samsung, the Artik 10 will also be able to communicate with other devices through an open platform known as the Artik Cloud service. Owners can tap into the Artik Cloud for various applications such as health, security, driver assistance and even home automation.

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PayPal Holdings Inc.'s profit and revenue surged as the e-commerce company's user base and payment volume increased. PayPal's figures for the quarter exceeded the analysts' predictions.

In particular, PayPal shares increased by 2 percent ($40.90) in extended trading on April 27. The increased rate was compared to last year's eBay Inc. spin-off.

PayPal's active user base also surged by 11.5 percent, finishing with 184 million active users in the first quarter. As per FactSet StreetAccount, the average numbers estimated by analysts were 182.8 million.

PayPal also finished with a 28.6 percent increase in total payment volumes, which amounted to a whopping $81.06 billion.

In the first quarter, the total number of processed PayPal transactions were 1.41 billion. Analysts estimated an average of 1.39 billion.

"When you have 184 million active accounts, moving that customer engagement number even one point from quarter to quarter is significant," said Dan Schulman, PayPal's CEO who joined in September 2014.

Schulman shared that the company's recent performance can be traced to its renewed focus on customer engagement improvements. Early this year, PayPal app's got a facelift.

The redesigned PayPal app encapsulates the company's vision on the "future of money." The app had been redesigned to become simpler but more personal for users, enabling them to manage their finances even on the go.

"We are on track to expand to more merchants and open the service to our full Venmo customer base in the second half of this year," added Schulman.

PayPal acquired Venmo in 2013, another offering that allows users to pay for services and goods within other apps. In January, Venmo rolled out a limited release of its payment solutions to vendors.

The January launch allowed users to purchase meals using the delivery app Munchery and buy game tickets using the ticketing app Gametime. According to Schulman, the Venmo pilot program now has about 550,000 users.

To stay ahead of rising competitors such as Samsung Electronics, Square and Apple, PayPal is forging ties with airlines, retailers and other brands to push their steady growth further.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Jessica Alba's The Honest Company is facing a lawsuit over "hazardous" ingredients in one of its baby food products. The lawsuit claims that the company's Organic Infant Formula has "unnatural ingredients."

The suit was filed by the Minnesota-based group Organic Consumers Association (OCA) at the Los Angeles Superior Court. The group claims that The Honest Company's product contains 11 synthetic substances that are not allowed in organic products. This includes sodium selenite, taurine, cholecalciferol and calcium pantothenate.

OCA claims that the alleged ingredients are not included in the National List, which identifies the substances allowed in organic products. The suit said that the inclusion violated the California Organic Products Act (COPA) of 2003.

"The Honest Co. is falsely representing its Premium Infant Formula as 'organic' even though this product contains 11 synthetic substances," said OCA associate director Katherine Paul who labeled the false representation as "unacceptable."

Paul added that these 11 synthetic substances are prohibited in organic products under the federal law.

This isn't the first time Alba's company has been hit by legal complaints claiming that The Honest Company is playing dirty.

In September 2015, customer Jonathan Rubin filed a suit in the Northern California District Court, alleging that several of The Honest Company's items were being advertised as 'organic' items but actually contain "unnatural ingredients." Rubin's suit claimed that some of these "unnatural ingredients" include a "synthetic preservative."

In February, Brad and Manon Buonasera filed a suit against The Honest Company in the New York District Court for the similar reasons. The Buonasera's suit accused Alba's company of falsely labeling its products as "natural" or "plant-based."

A spokesperson for The Honest Company said that the Organic Infant Formula in the most recent lawsuit has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The product has also met all of the nutritional and safety standards.

"It is also certified USDA Organic by an independent third party, in strict accordance with the National Organic Program," added The Honest Company's spokesperson who expressed the company's confidence that the current lawsuit will be dismissed.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice received mixed reviews, partly because it was being compared to the movies being churned out by Marvel. With the release of Captain America: Civil War, DC's offering is sinking even farther out of the limelight.

The story of Captain America: Civil War follows the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron. As trailers have revealed, the movie centers around a clash within the Avengers as they have different stands on whether to sign and accept the Sokovia Accords. The document states that the United Nations should oversee and control the Avengers.

The rift between the Avengers has split the team into two. On one hand, Captain America believes that the Avengers should not be controlled or prevented to act immediately on addressing potential threats. Iron Man, on the other hand, believes that such oversight is necessary to prevent civilian casualties due to the dangers that their abilities possess.

The movie that unfolds from this plot is an adrenaline-pumping action-packed film that never lets go of the throttle, while masterfully utilizing all 12 characters to have an impact on the movie and on its story.

Sharing The Spotlight

Captain America: Civil War has been nicknamed by some as Avengers 2.5, due to the sheer number of Marvel heroes featured in the film. In addition to the titular Captain America and Iron Man, also present in the movie are the Winter Soldier, Falcon, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, Ant-Man, War Machine, Vision, Black Widow, Black Panther and Spider-Man (we'll come back to him later).

Despite the number of characters in the movie, directors the Russo brothers were able to provide each one with enough share of the spotlight to prevent them from being relegated to a filler character. Captain America is the one that had most of his emotions portrayed through the film though, which is just appropriate given that this is his movie... Or is it?

Spider-Man: Civil War

Another nickname being given to the movie is Spider-Man: Civil War, due to the excitement generated by the webslinger. This is the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe where Spider-Man is involved, and theaters all over the world will likely be cheering the moment that the wallcrawler first appears onscreen.

Tom Holland's portrayal of Peter Parker is spot on. I was skeptical that anybody could do a better job at it than Andrew Garfield, but Holland was able to pull it off much better than expected.

Spider-Man is back with Marvel, and Holland's depiction of the character will have fans looking forward to Spider-Man: Homecoming, which will be released in July next year.

Action Scenes, And More Action Scenes

While the story of the movie is a compelling one, showing the many facets of Captain America's dilemmas as he looks to protect his best friend in Bucky, the Winter Soldier, amid his disagreements with Iron Man and some of the Avengers, the action scenes steal the show.

The superhuman capabilities of the Avengers are in full display, but standing out in the action scenes are the perfectly choreographed hand-to-hand combat sequences, especially the one between Captain America, the Winter Soldier and Iron Man that is featured in the trailers. The movie could have resorted to blasting everything and everyone out of fights, but the action was crafted perfectly to make each battle feel and look different from the others.

Verdict: A Rare Superhero Movie Masterpiece

Equal parts fun, smart, emotional, thrilling and thought-provoking, Captain America: Civil War is a rare masterpiece of a superhero movie. With First Avenger, The Winter Soldier and now Civil War, the case can be made that the Captain America films could possibly be the greatest superhero movie trilogy of all time.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is expanding its Android probe to seek more evidence on Google's possible antitrust violations and its abuse on being the leading search engine channel in mobile devices where it constantly pushes its services.

The regulator is said to be in talks with companies to gather more information and is even hoping to get some evidence from the EU to come up with a definitive answer and reach a decision.

Last week, European regulators charged Google with using Android's global popularity in making advances wherein OEMs and wireless carriers are forced to favor its search engine and other services against the competition. Furthermore, the EU has questioned Google's financial incentives to its partners in Android for not allowing the competitors' software to be installed on their devices.

While it is true that the FTC is indeed gathering additional information and that the probe is on a progressing phase, it doesn't necessarily mean that the commission believes that Google is indeed abusing its authority and is using such to promote its own services.

In other words, it may or may not reach similar conclusions with the European regulators.

There are a number of reasons that could explain why it is possible for the FTC to arrive at a decision that is not aligned with the EU's.

In Europe, competition laws allow antitrust officials to have more power when taking action against dominant companies.

Android's market share in Europe is also greater than in the U.S. Currently, the OS runs in over 70 percent of the smartphones in four out of the five largest countries of the European Union. Android users in the United States currently make up 59 percent of the market.

Lastly, U.S. laws would encourage the commission to give credit to Google as long as its actions can be justified in light of its business standards, especially if they provided users with enhanced experiences in using Android as a result.

In 2013, a similar probe was also conducted by the FTC, which ended up with the commission not suing Google on charges of abusing its dominant position in the world of online search. Part of the decision to not pursue a case could have been influenced by Google's agreement to apply some minor changes to its search practices.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
After about a year and a half of life, the Nexus 9 was just put down quietly by Google. While the tablet's premium aspirations and matching price tag may have caused it to stumble out of the gates, the very capable tablet is still available at third-party vendors and HTC.

While Google hasn't said anything about the Nexus 9's retirement, the company has removed the tablet's listing from the Google Store. Google, with past Nexus devices, has left marketing materials for discontinued products online for awhile, along with an epitaph noting that this item is "no longer available for purchase."

The Nexus 9 is still listed on Google's site, but that listing now leads to the Google Store's homepage. That link to the Google Play store on the main site is flanked by a link to Amazon where the Nexus 9 is available for 20 percent off the list price.

HTC, which was commissioned by Google to build the Nexus 9, hasn't given up on the tablet just yet and is still selling it. But HTC isn't offering any discounts on the tablet right now.

While its price and certain parts put it comfortably in the premium tier, there were several issues that plagued the Nexus 9 and made it a hard sell to those considering rivals like the iPad Air 2 or even the older Nexus 10.

Ultimately, it seems Google and HTC's 9-inch baby just never had the wow factor needed to build a big following. Despite that, the Nexus 9 still had a lot of power under its hood and a stunning display.

The 8.9-inch display, protected by Gorilla Glass 3, puts out a pixel count of 2048 x 1536 and its graphics are rendered by a 192-core Kepler GPU from Nvidia.

The device is powered by a 64-bit Nvidia Tegra K1 Dual Denver processor that is clocked at 2.3 GHz. It's stocked with 2 GB of RAM in both of its storage configurations, which are 16 GB and 32 GB.

For more on the Nexus 9, check out Tech Times' review of the tablet:

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Triby is a new device that takes Amazon's Echo Alexa AI and packs it into a different shell, keeping the essential features.

Alexa is regarded as a bold step towards the future of computing, due to its versatility and capabilities. The virtual assistant can engage in small talk, can stream music and is even able to make dinner suggestions thanks to the connection with Amazon's cloud.

Now, a French company took the developed platform and gave it a new spin.

Meet Triby, a $199 speaker from Invoxia, specifically crafted for the kitchen. In the retro design, the coding team fitted the Alexa Voice Service, not without help from Amazon itself.

Unique Features

One main plus of Triby is that, unlike the Amazon Echo, it features a screen. Nothing fancy, but the simple e-ink display can instantly give info about current time, date and temperature.

There is a pseudo-whiteboard component to the screen, too. By using the companion app, users may draw or write short messages that get posted on the display. Thanks to the Wi-Fi connection embedded into Triby, you can write mementos on your refrigerator-mounted Triby from anywhere.

A quirky element of Triby is its signaling of sent messages. After you press "Send," the speaker makes a little noise and pops out a yellow flag from its side. As a housemate reads your message, they simply press the flag back and can send you a proper emoji to let you know they acknowledged your text.

More additional features land on Triby due to the Wi-Fi connectivity. The pre-installed call function allows you to ditch your landline. One button triggers a voice call to a contact of your choice. This can be extremely helpful for families with children, where a button can be assigned to call mom or dad immediately.

It should be mentioned that all calls go through the Triby app, virtually making it unavailable to Android or Windows Mobile users. The manufacturer promised that Android support is scheduled for this year. This lets users enjoy Spotify playlists or Internet radio stations.

Looking at the above features, it seems that Triby sets itself apart from the predictability of Echo models.

"With the built-in magnets on the Triby, the kitchen is an obvious home for the little speaker," James Risley from GeekWire notes.

Alexa Makes It Or Breaks It

Alexa implementation remains the main reason why users should consider purchasing the gadget for their kitchen. The virtual assistant is ideal for the environment: it can convert measurements instantly and is able to set timers on the go. The audio streaming should keep you entertained while you do the dishes or cook a delicious meal for the whole family.

By tapping into the Amazon Prime Music library, kitchen chores simply become a fun activity.

Luckily for mobility enthusiasts, Triby pulls juice out of a battery. This means that you can drag it around the house and still get every voice-activated Alexa feature you need. The sound quality is not stellar, but for radio purposes most audiophiles would agree that it is a good choice.

It should be noted that the responsiveness of the Amazon Echo is smoother than that of Triby.

"She didn't hear me as regularly as the Echo version, and I had to repeat my requests a lot of the time," points out Dan Ackerman from CNET.

Alexa Voice Services are also a bit lackluster, at least when it comes to using Spotify Connect.

Conclusion

Overall, the Triby appears to be a promising way to use Alexa outside the Echo. As Amazon supports more ventures to experiment with Alexa through the Amazon Alexa Fund, we could see the AI spread to other useful devices.





 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
TechGig To Host Third Edition Of Code Gladiators | TechTree.com

Renowned for creating the largest community of techies in India, TechGig is set to host the third edition of its nationwide inter-company hackathon 'Code Gladiators 2016'. After a successful two year run, and being officially recognized by the Limca Book of Records as the biggest code contest in India, this year's competition is slated to be a magnum opus event. Code Gladiators 2016 anticipates over 1,50,000 coders participating from 15,000 plus companies from across the country.

The competition has been increased in large scale with a whopping 34 programming languages for gladiators to choose to compete in, new parallel theme tracks and a huge prize money of over INR 15 lakhs to be won.

The contest started in March with internal online coding contests to identify the best coders in companies. The winners will then compete in the semi-finals in May against the best coders from across companies. With the finals slated to take place on May 27, 2016. The 'National Grand Finale' will be a live event, that will see the finalists converge

at a single venue and fight it out face-to-face - to be the next 'Code Gladiator'.

"TechGig.com is by far the largest community of technology professionals in India, and an event like Code Gladiators attracts top talent from across the globe, with last year's event even having a winner from Malaysia. Very senior programmers and project leads also participated and appreciated the level of difficulty and challenges of Code Gladiators. Keeping this in mind the format of the main event has been kept the same

as last year. In addition, we have introduced more languages and new parallel theme tracks for the app

specialists in our TechGig community," says Nilanjan Roy, Head of Strategy, Times Business Solutions, which owns TechGig.com.

This year, there is also a Specialist flavor in the event, there are multiple parallel theme tracks that are optional and can be participated in after taking part in the first round of the Main track. There are three Theme tracks - Location Based Apps, e-Commerce and Payment Gateway in which techies can compete and prove their domain

expertise.

The Theme tracks started in March and qualifiers from the first round will compete in Theme Hackathons for a place in the Theme Finale. The winners from the Theme Hackathons present their submissions to a Jury of domain experts in the Theme Finale to take place on May 27, 2016 and compete to become the 'Theme Champion'.

Also, while the tension is building up post the Main Track Semi Finals, there is 'Beat the Leader' for techies who like to challenge other techies and themselves at writing the most perfect Code. 'Beat the Leader' starts on 11th May 2016 and over the next 6 days participants compete to write the most optimized code and become the 'Beat the

Leader Champion'.

Code Gladiators is the only inter-company contest where skills, talent and passion prevail over seniority, qualifications and rank of a person, companies who participated last year testified that 'Code Gladiators' indeed helped them in identifying their hidden jewels and marketing their companies as 'Great Places to Work'.

"Code Gladiators is undoubtedly an excellent platform designed to test and showcase the tech skills of India's talent - We have been particularly impressed with how this event has scaled - in terms of participants, submissions, languages, themes, geographic spread and diversity. Based on our great experience last year, we decided to sponsor

Code Gladiators 2016 and so I expect this relationship to get both deeper and wider in the future as we expect continuous innovation on this platform," says Anil Apte, Director,IRIS Software.

The registrations are open at http://www.techgig.com/codegladiators

TAGS: TechGig, #codegladiators, hackathon, Coding
Docoss X1: Is It Similar To Freedom 251 Or Something New? | TechTree.com

It has not been very long since Ringing Bells, a Noida based company introduced Freedom 251, a smartphone that shot into fame in no time. We haven't yet forgotten the legal issues, criticisms and controversies faced by the company. We still don't know about the fate of those people who booked the smartphone online, almost considering it their dream phone!

And now, another company seems to be taking its baby steps. Docoss Multimedia Pvt Ltd which claims to be having its office in Jaipur, Rajasthan, has recently announced a smartphone for just Rs 888.

Dubbed as the Docoss X1, the smartphone is being claimed to sport a 4 inch display screen, 1 GB RAM, 4 GB internal storage, dual core processor, 2 MP camera, and 0.2 MP Front camera. The smartphone is said to be backed by a 1,300 mAh battery and runs on Android 4.4 KitKat.

The smartphone is currently available for booking on its website http://www.docoss.com until April 29. According to claims, the X1 will be shipped from May 2. But much like Freedom 251, the Docoss website has also been reported to have crashed making space for more negative thoughts about the device.

Now, don't be surprised! Even we haven't heard about the company before, but somehow the Docoss X1 is managing to grab the interest of the Internet population. However, the scheme somehow reminds us of Freedom 251 by Ringing Bells.

Reporting on the new Docoss X1, Tech2 seems to have found out that the company's domain was registered a couple of hours ago. This is one more thing that runs down chills in our spine!

This doesn't end here. In-fact, if you visit Docoss's FB page, you can come across a comment by a person with a hyperlink to winklestar.com. That's another smartphone being sold by a company without any office details. The price is Rs 299. What's happening? Are we able to understand the difference between scams and reality? Are we being cheated in the face of wanting to buy a budget smartphone? May be Docoss is a real, legal company dealing ethically. But, how are we supposed to trust them, keeping in mind the fate of Freedom 251, still remains a question!

TAGS: Docoss X1, Freedom 251, Smartphone Scams
12 million PC worldwide are found to have a backdoor developed by Tuto4PC

In one of the biggest scandals of 2016, nearly 12 million PCs are found to have a backdoor which granted administrative rights of those PCs to the software developers.

Security researchers from Cisco discovered a piece of software that installed backdoors on 12 million computers around the world. Researchers determined that the application, installed with administrator rights, was capable not only of downloading and installing other software, such as a known scareware called System Healer, but also of harvesting personal information. Furthermore, experts found that the software is designed to detect the presence of sandboxes, antiviruses, security tools, forensic software and remote access doors.

The software or backdoor which exhibits adware as well as spyware capabilities, was developed by a obscure French advertising company called Tuto4PC. A close associate of the firm, called Wizzlabs was earlier pulled up by French authorities over installing spyware and harvesting users personal details.

The Cisco researchers analysed Tuto4PCs OneSoftPerDay application and uncovered roughly 7,000 unique samples with names containing the string Wizz, including Wizzupdater.exe, Wizzremote.exe and WizzInstaller.exe. The string also showed up in some of the domains the samples had been communicating with.

These full fledged spying features have led Cisco Talos to classify the Tuto4PC software as a full backdoor capable of a multitude of undesirable functions on the victim machine.

Cisco researchers were able to detect the backdoor on 12 million devices. An analysis of a sample set revealed infections in the United States, Australia, Japan, Spain, the UK, France and New Zealand.

Based on the overall research, we feel that there is an obvious case for this software to be classified as a backdoor. At minimum it is a potentially unwanted program (PUP). There is a very good argument that it meets and exceeds the definition of a backdoor, Cisco Talos researchers said in a blog post.

The creation of a legitimate business, multiple subsidiaries, domains, software and being a publicly listed company do not stop this adware juggernaut from slowing down their attempts to push their backdoors out to the public, they added.
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is going to unleash a bigger Panama Papers dump on May 9 leaving no place for the high and mighty of the world to hide

If you have been following the world news lately you may know that the Panama Papers leak has already caused turbulence in many a countries. One of the first casualties of the massive Panama leak was Sigmundur Gunnlaugss, prime minister of Iceland. Vladimir Putin of Russia and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan are already having a tough time in their countries over the leaks.

Now the team behind the previous leak, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is preparing to send even more rich and famous to the cleaners with the next installment of Panama Papers.

The ICIJ is about to unleash another huge data dump about how some of the worlds most wealthy and powerful people hide their cash. In a mail to Business Insider, ICIJ said that on May 9 it will publish what will likely be the largest-ever release of information about secret offshore companies and the people behind them, based on data from the Panama Papers investigation.

ICIJ told BI that, The searchable database will include information about more than 200,000 companies, trusts, foundations and funds incorporated in 21 tax havens, from Hong Kong to Nevada in the United States.

The Panama Papers are documents leaked from a hack on a Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The massive data trove of nearly 2.6TB of data was leaked by the hackers to German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung. In turn, the paper shared the information with the ICIJ  which is made up of 107 media organisations in 78 countries.

The leak belonged to a small, relatively unknown Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca, which showed a massive global complex network of offshore companies helping the wealthy launder money, dodge sanctions and evade tax.

The details of the investigation has already claimed the scalp of Spains acting Industry Minister Jose Manuel Soria and Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson  both of which stepped down due to their links within the Panama Papers documents. This week, three people go on trial in Luxembourg on Tuesday over the so-called Panama Papers scandal.
Microsofts Windows 10 interrupts a live and important TV broadcast with an unwanted upgrade

Microsoft is so eager to push its Windows 10 and make it worlds number operating system that it doesnt consider what user needs. We have had cases of Microsoft pushing Windows 10 upgrade popups to Windows 7 and 8.1 users despite of the fact that some of them dont want to upgrade to the Redmond giants latest operating system.

Ever since it decided to make Windows 10 a recommended update we have had hundreds of users complaining but Microsoft seems to have taken that in stride.

However things seemed to have moved from bad to worse when the Windows 10 upgrade popup interrupted a live show on TV.

Microsofts free Windows 10 recommended upgrade nag interrupted a weather person mid-flow as she was live describing the conditions around Des Moines, Iowa, on KCCI News.

If you are a Iowa citizen and were watching the KCCI 8 News Meteorologist Metinka Slaters thunderstorm update and warning of 12 hours of heavy rainfall, you would have noticed the live and important program interrupted by an unwelcome upgrade message covering up much of the radar screen.

Microsoft recommends upgrade to Windows 10, what should I do? a surprised Slater asked.

As always the annoying window offered two choices  Upgrade now, or Start download, upgrade later. Slater wisely chose neither option and switched to another video source instead.
Snapchat speed filter motivated car crash that left Georgia man with brain damage

We have all read about how people are losing their lives in their quest for the ultimate selfie. Now we have something more shocking to worry about  Snapchats speed filter!

For those who have not used Snapchat, its a feature in it, that uses sensors in a smartphone to record the speed at which a user is traveling when he or she sends a message. Snapchat users use the speed filter to snap images at high speed and earn brownie points among friends to soothe their egos.

The Snapchat speed filter eggs users to send snaps from fast-moving cars and that can be suicidal as well as cause harm to others. This was proved in a suit filed by Uber driver, Wentworth Maynard, who was left with brain damage due to this speed filter.

Christal McGee, an 18-year-old girl from Atlanta struck Maynards car at over 100 mph while using Snapchats speed filter. While driving her parents Mercedes down the highway in Atlanta, Georgia last September, McGee decided to test the limits of the speed filter.

With three passengers in the car, McGee used Snapchat to take selfies while traveling at speeds as fast as 113 mph, according to the speed filter in the Snapchat app. The recklessness of taking and sending the snaps diverted her attention and she did not see Maynard coming from the opposite side.

McGee struck the Maynards car while traveling at 107 mph damaging it completely and almost causing fatalities.

According to NY Daily News, the lawsuit seeks unspecified damages from McGee and Snapchat, which is named in the lawsuit because the companys speed filter motivated McGees reckless driving. Maynard, an Uber driver, was left with brain damage that his lawyers say will prevent him from doing his job.

The filter facilitated McGees excessive speeding and distracted her in the moments before the crash, the suit says.

Snapchat on its part has put up a warning on its speed filter, telling users: Please, DO NOT Snap and drive. However, most young people disregard the warning completely causing incidents like above.
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.
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
Human-like robots say 'hi' to President Xi 2016-04-27 11:26 By (chinadaily.com.cn)

President Xi Jinping visits the Institute of Advanced Technology in University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, east China's Anhui province, on April 26, 2016, where he was introduced to different innovative technologies.[Photo/Xinhua]

President Xi Jinping Tuesday visited the Institute of Advanced Technology in University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Heifei, Anhui province, and was greeted by two human-like robots developed by the institute.

The two life-like robots named "Xiao Man" and "Jia Jia" interacted with Xi when he approached them during the inspection.

"Hello Mr. President. I am Xiao Man. We have been looking forward to your visit," Xiao Man said.

"I'm very happy to see you, dear President, I wish you happiness every day," said Jia Jia, who has been dubbed "robot goddess" for her good-looks.

Xi praised technicians' work on innovation, and said the country must rely on innovation to boost high-end manufacturing as China has now entered the "new normal".

He stressed that self-led innovation, as the leading concept among the five development concepts, must be promoted under the country's fundamental principal of opening-up policy.

Xi also visited the library of the university and encouraged the students to study hard and devote themselves to the country.
Amid improving market sentiment and a weakening dollar, the World Bank is raising its 2016 forecast for crude oil prices to $41 per barrel from $37 per barrel in its latest Commodity Markets Outlook, as an oversupply in markets is expected to recede.

The crude oil market rebounded from a low of $25 per barrel in mid-January to $40 per barrel in April following production disruptions in Iraq and Nigeria and a decline in non-Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries production, mainly U.S. shale.

A proposed production freeze by major producers failed to materialize at a meeting in mid-April.

We expect slightly higher prices for energy commodities over the course of the year as markets rebalance after a period of oversupply,

said John Baffes, Senior Economist and lead author of the Commodities Markets Outlook.

Still, energy prices could fall further if OPEC increases production significantly and non-OPEC production does not fall as fast as expected.

All main commodity indexes tracked by the World Bank are expected to decline in 2016 from the year before due to persistently elevated supplies, and in the case of industrial commodities  which include energy, metals, and agricultural raw materials  weak growth prospects in emerging market and developing economies.

Energy prices, including oil, natural gas and coal, are due to fall 19.3 percent in 2016 from the previous year, a more gradual drop than the 24.7 percent slide forecast in January. Non-energy commodities, such as metals and minerals, agriculture, and fertilizers, are due to decline 5.1 percent this year, a downward revision from the 3.7 percent drop forecast in January. Read more.
An employee passes by a Zalora sign at their office in Singapore April 5, 2016.

Thailand's Central Group is buying the Thai business of fashioned-focused e-commerce site Zalora, a unit of the group said on Wednesday.

"Central Group Online .... has studied the deal and signed the agreement to acquire Zalora business in Thailand," Narumon Wipajaroen, company secretary for Central Group Online (COL.BK), said in a statement.

Zalora Group said in a statement that it was also selling its Vietnam business. A spokeswoman for Central Group declined to comment on the Vietnam business.

The two groups did not give financial details of the deals but a media report said the Thai and Vietnam deals were done at $10 million each.

E-commerce in Southeast Asia has become a focus for consumer firms. China's biggest e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (BABA.N) earlier this month announced a deal to buy a controlling stake in Southeast Asian online retailer Lazada Group for about $1 billion.

Central Group, like most major Thai retailers, is looking to expand its e-commerce business to win back customers who increasingly prefer to shop online.

It is controlled by the Chirathivat family, the third-richest in Thailand. The group is among the bidders for French retailer Casino Group's Big C supermarket chain in Vietnam.

Zalora is part of Global Fashion Group, the e-commerce firm backed by Sweden's Kinnevik and Germany's Rocket Internet.
A Vietinbank office. The bank is set to finish its merger with PGBank, controlled by state-owned fuel trader Petrolimex. Photo credit: Vietinbank

Vietinbank, one of Vietnam's biggest lenders, is set to finish its merger with PGBank, controlled by state-owned fuel trader Petrolimex, after two years of planning, local media reported on Tuesday.

The deal is expected to be approved by the government next month and completed in September, news website Dau Tu cited Nguyen Van Thang, CEO of Vietinbank. He was speaking at a shareholder meeting the same day.

The merger will help Vietinbank expand its retail activities, Thang said, adding that the lender plans to continue to increase its presence and market share through mergers and acquisitions in the future.

Vietinbank expects its equity to be more than VND64.45 trillion (US$2.88 billion) after the merger, up 14.8 percent from the end of last year, while the chartered capital will increase 31.6 percent to around VND49.02 trillion ($2.19 billion).

According to a plan announced last year, the bank will issue 270 million shares to swap for 300 million shares of PGBank, one of Vietnam's smallest banks by chartered capital.

First announced in early 2014, the merger was one of many similar deals orchestrated by the central bank in an attempt to restructure the overcrowded banking sector that was blamed for dragging on the economy with bad debts in previous years.

Since 2011, 22 commercial banks and four finance companies have been merged in 12 deals, according to new figures released on the central bank's website. Another five mergers between five banks and five financial companies organizations approved by the central bank over the years are waiting for conclusion.

Vietnam now has 43 banks, including six wholly foreign owned. That number is expected to be reduced to 20-25 in the next two years, according to the central bank's plan.

The banking sector's bad debts were equivalent to 2.9 percent of total loans at the end of last year, compared to 3.7 percent estimated at the beginning of the year.
Residents walk past the building of the Vietnam Asset Management Company in Hanoi, Vietnam October 8, 2015. Photo: REUTERS/Kham

This no-frills office with PVC sofas, chintzy 1980s decor and no elevator houses what has been the central bank's shoestring savior for wayward banks and risky borrowers who ran up US$20 billion in bad debt in 2012 and almost brought a promising economy to its knees.

Even as more debts sour at lenders in Southeast Asian neighbors Thailand and Indonesia and also in China, Vietnam's $295 billion banking sector has slashed non-performing loans (NPLs) to 2.9 percent of total loans by September from 17.2 percent in 2012.

VAMC and its 100 staff have, since its July 2013 launch, helped banks get $10 billion in NPLs off their books. In return, banks have received $8.5 billion in special bonds which they can pledge with the central bank to obtain liquidity.

"We save anything that can be salvaged, those that can be profitable over time, we give them time," VAMC chairman Nguyen Quoc Hung told Reuters. "We handle the most frightening NPLs first... and those that can be fixed, we find ways to fix them and help businesses."

The VAMC doesn't actually buy the NPLs but only houses them and helps banks restructure them or sell them off. The risk thus stays with the banks, who must fully write off unrecovered debts over time by making provisions from their annual profits.

How successful VAMC is in disposing of NPLs will determine banks' profit margins. The key to that is expediting sluggish sales of the distressed assets, analysts say.

Can Van Luc, economist and adviser to lender BIDV, said banks are now well-placed to handle debts, but would have to take a hit on profits.

"Banks have to make a sacrifice," he said. "They're lucky they aren't bankrupted or recording net losses."

Supportive economy

Vietnam's bad debt fight has been aided by an economy outperforming much of Asia's, with forecast 6.5 percent growth this year, driven by strong exports, factory output and consumption, and record foreign investment, mostly into manufacturing. Firms are being lured by its looming accession to Pacific and European Union free-trade pacts.

The State Bank of Vietnam (SBV), the central bank, has launched aggressive measures to clean up a fragmented sector of over 40 banks which was blighted by poor oversight, cross-ownership, frivolous state-sector borrowing and widespread fraud that saw tycoons and rogue bankers jailed.

Since 2011, mergers and acquisitions have shrunk 15 lenders into seven, while three banks have been taken over by the SBV.

A healthier economy, a property market rebound and stricter lending have meant fewer loan defaults. Commercial banks have forecast 2015 average profit growth of 9.7 percent and credit growth at a four-year high of 17 percent.

A rebound in real estate has beefed up asset value, hence increased the ability to retrieve assets"

The Thomson Reuters index of Vietnam bank shares has risen 63.2 percent this year, compared to a 7.4 percent fall in the Thomson Reuters Asia-Pacific Banks Index.

The NPL ratio in Indonesia rose to 2.8 percent in August from 2.0 percent in April, while Thai banks' quarterly results last week showed bad debts in the sector climbing, and hitting five-year highs for two banks.

"We've been strict with lending," said Luu Trung Thai, vice chairman of Vietnam's Military Bank, which has trimmed NPLs to 1.8 percent from 2.7 percent nine months ago. "A rebound in real estate has beefed up asset value, hence increased the ability to retrieve assets."

Lingering questions

While banks have rid their books of substantial problem loans, recoveries have been marginal. Only $664 million in NPLs, or 7 percent of the NPLs managed by VAMC, have been restructured or sold.

"There's still the lingering question of how will these NPLs ultimately be resolved and for that there's no clear or easy answer," said Asian Development Bank economist Aaron Batten.

VAMC chairman Hung admits the bad-debt bank is no magic wand, and says formation of a secondary market for poor-quality assets could be the long-term solution.

VAMC really wants to call for foreign capital ... but it needs adequate mechanisms and legal framework"

It's a route taken by China, which is seeing appetite for a $280 billion NPL tide engulfing its banks. Chinese asset management companies are selling high-risk, high-reward assets on the secondary market at heavy discounts.

"VAMC really wants to call for foreign capital ... but it needs adequate mechanisms and legal framework," Hung said. It's unclear how close Vietnam is to establishing a secondary market.

Without a market to sell assets at discounted prices, VAMC won't find it easy to offload collateral it holds, the majority of which is real estate with high book values, analysts said.

"Buyers don't want real estate-backed debts. Prices right now, without a debt market, are just too high," said Nguyen The Minh of Viet Capital Securities.
Australia has commenced work on market access for fresh dragon fruit from Vietnam, the Australian Embassy said in a statement on Wednesday.

Australia has already undertaken preliminary work on the assessment, including reviewing pests and diseases.

Further work on risk assessment will be carried out over the next few months, including a field visit to production areas and an evaluation of production and export practices.

A draft report is expected to be released for public feedback later this year.

Australia is also considering other Vietnamese fruits.

Lychee was the first Vietnamese fruit shipped to Australia, starting May last year. Lychee exports reached 28 tons at the end of 2015.

Mango has been accessed since November and the first shipment is expected soon.

Vietnamese lychees sold at a supermarket in supermarket in Melbourne, Australia in June last year. Photo credit: VOV



In 2014, Vietnam became the first country to export dragon fruit to New Zealand, after the two countries agreed on procedures to ensure safety requirements.

Vietnam has more than 36,000 hectares of dragon fruit, mostly in the central province of Binh Thuan and the southern provinces of Long An and Tien Giang with a total annual productivity of more than 615,000 tons, according to the Vietnam Fruit and Vegetables Association.

The bright pink fruit is believed to be very nutritious, low in calories and high in fiber.
New Zealand Ambassador to Vietnam Haike Manning and Nguyen Xuan Hong, director of the Plant Protection Department under Vietnam at the ceremony to sign a program to export dragon fruits into New Zealand. Photo credit: New Zealand Embassy in Vietnam

Vietnam became the first country to export dragon fruits to New Zealand after the two countries signed a program on May 28 to set out procedures to ensure biosecurity and health requirements of the fruit.

The Official Assurance Program was signed in Hanoi between New Zealand Ambassador to Vietnam Haike Manning and Nguyen Xuan Hong, director of the Plant Protection Department under Vietnams Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.



Vietnamese leaders from Ministry of Industry and Trade, Ministry of Foreign Affairs also witnessed the signing ceremony.

The program sets out procedures and activities carried out prior to export to ensure that fresh dragon fruit imported from Vietnam to New Zealand meet biosecurity and import health requirements.

Manning said Vietnam is now the first and only country approved to export dragon fruit to New Zealand.

I am sure imports will start arriving on New Zealand shores soon so that New Zealand consumers can start enjoying this wonderful tropical fruit, he said.

In 2011, Vietnamese mangoes were approved for exporting to New Zealand, which is also working on a request to allow the export of Vietnamese rambutan.

According to New Zealand Embassy in Vietnam, the Vietnam - New Zealand Premium Fruit Variety Development Project sponsored by New Zealands official development assistance program has also contributed significantly to the growth of the dragon fruit industry in Vietnam.

Researchers from New Zealands Plant and Food Research in collaboration with Vietnamese Agricultural Research Institute successfully found ways to control a dragon fruit canker disease that has broken out across Asia, and these methods will be soon used across Vietnam.

Another unexpected success of the project has been the legal protection of a specific dragon fruit variety (LD5) and sale of the licence for the fruit to a commercial farm.

This is the first time a fruit variety in Vietnam has been legally protected in this way and demonstrates that of fruit varieties that are legally protected can deliver premiums to producers through increased market recognition, the New Zealand Embassy said in a statement.

New dragon fruit varieties being developed under the project will also be bred to have resistance to the dragon fruit canker disease, it added.

Trade is an important part of the bilateral relationship between New Zealand and Vietnam. At the end of 2013, total two-way goods trade increased from US$761.7 million to $926.8 million, a 21.7 percent increase from 2012.

New Zealand exports to Vietnam are predominantly dairy products (52 percent) followed by wood products (13 percent).

New Zealand's imports from Vietnam are more varied, with steady growth in imports of a number of food and beverage products, particularly coconuts, crustaceans and coffee. Other growth categories for imports include telephones/cellphones and computers, which showed a 125 percent and 242 percent increase on the previous year.

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Vietnamese mangoes are going to be exported to Australia. Photo: Minh Khoi

Australian agencies are finalizing procedures to allow Vietnamese exporters to ship mangoes into the market, said a source from the Vietnam Business Association.

Relevant agencies and companies have carried out market research and other activities to connect Vietnamese exporters with Australian buyers, the source told Thanh Nien.

Vietnamese mangoes are expected to sell well in the "difficult market," the source said.

According to the business association in Australia, the Vietnamese-Australian community is now supplying around 30 percent o f tropical fruit and vegetables to Australian consumers.

However, fruit exports directly from Vietnam have not been able to make inroads into the market. So far Australia has only licensed the imports of lychees.

According to customs, the total value of Vietnams fruit and vegetables exports last year was $2.2 billion, up 47 percent over the previous year.
Police in China will deport 108 Vietnamese after they were caught crossing the border to find factory jobs with the help of smugglers.

China Youth Daily reported Wednesday that police raided the human smuggling ring run by nine Chinese early this month after receiving a tip-off.

The report said the gang received the illegal immigrants from a Vietnamese woman and was transferring them to factories in Guangdong, which had paid commissions for the cheap laborers.

Each illegal immigrant had to pay a fee of up to 1,000 yuan (US$154) to the smugglers, who would arrange transport and look out for them at highway toll areas and petrol stations, it said.

A 40-year-old Vietnamese man said, as cited in the report, that he paid the fee after learning that a tile factory in Guangdong was going to pay workers 3,000 yuan a month, three times what he could earn for the same job in Vietnam.

He said he traveled for ten hours by bus to the China border and then switched through three other vehicles before arriving at a transit warehouse, where the smugglers gathered illegal immigrants.

Police in China have sent 930 Vietnamese illegal immigrants to Guangxi border for deportation this year, according to the report.
Police in South Korea are looking for five Vietnamese women who allegedly paid some locals a fee to help them enter the country illegally.

Three Korean men were arrested Wednesday for their roles in the scheme, The Korea Herald reported.

Initial investigation found the women, all in their early 20s, each paid the men a brokering fee of 1.5 million won ($1,300) so the men could help them obtain hospital registration forms to apply for visas for medical treatment.

The women reportedly arrived in August last year but have since never showed up for any medical procedures registered.

In a separate case, t hree people in Hanoi are being investigated for allegedly running a human smuggling ring that sent dozens of Vietnamese to South Korea to work illegally in January.

The Vietnamese arrived as tourists but 59 of them then disappeared from the tour. The Korean government has deported 34 so far.

According to the Korea Tourism Organization, around 170,000 Vietnamese tourists visited the country last year, with 4,353 of them reportedly leaving their tour and illegally staying on Jeju Island.

In 2011, there were only 282 cases.
A bear rescued from ten years of cage life in the central city of Da Nang. Photo credit: Animals Asia

A man in Da Nang Tuesday handed over a bear he had held captive for 10 years for an animal rights organization to send it to a sanctuary in northern Vietnam.

Hong Kong-based Animals Asia said it is a 13-year-old female weighing more than 200 kilograms.

The bears health has been checked and she will make a trip of 800 kilometers to the charitys bear sanctuary at Tam Dao National Park not far from Hanoi.

She is in good condition except for several decayed teeth and feet callouses.

This bear has been caged for an awfully long time and we look forward to changing that, Tuan Bendixsen, Animals Asia Vietnam director, said in a statement on the groups website.

We assume that the bear has been kept to extract bile, but we wont know for sure until we can run proper medical tests.

The bear, named Chau after the Da Nang village where she grew up, is the 162nd rescued by Animals Asia in Vietnam.

Last year the group rescued 41 bears, including 33 in Quang Ninh Province, which was the bear bile industrys epicenter. Many owners handed over their animals voluntarily after the government banned the bile business.

There are still around 1,200 bears caged in Vietnam for bile extraction for use in traditional medicine, and more than 10,000 in China.
The nine acres in southern Vietnam that double as rice paddy and shrimp pond for farmer Nguyen Thi Tam have become a wasteland. After the worst drought in 90 years, almost nothing grows.

Tams family had no income for two harvests because the rice crop failed and the shrimp died. They ran up $8,000 in debt -- more than twice her earnings in a typical year. To make ends meet, Tam plans to leave her village to work at a factory hundreds of miles away. Many others in the area already have fled, she said, including her daughter-in-law, who couldnt endure the poverty.

I am worried about everything, Tam, 55, said inside the thatched house in Kien Giang province she shares with her husband, three grown children and two grandchildren. I cannot sleep.

The dry spell in the once-fertile Mekong Delta is devastating food supplies in southern Vietnam and threatening to reduce global exports of rice, seafood and coffee. It is also compounding a Southeast Asia water shortage along a 3,000-mile river that runs from Tibet to Thailand to the South China Sea, as climate change and too many dams erode livelihoods for millions of farmers.

Waters in the Mekong Delta, a network of channels that cut across vast flatlands in southern Vietnam, are at the lowest in almost a century, which may mean shortages for as much as 50 percent of the region this year, according to a United Nations report. That means less for irrigating crops and an increase in salt levels as more seawater seeps into the delta, causing more damage.

The Mekong River countries of Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar produce about 62 million metric tons of rice, or 13 percent of global output, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. The river accounts for as much as 25 percent of the global freshwater catch and provides livelihoods for at least 60 million people, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Vietnam exported about $3 billion of shrimp last year. Almost half of Vietnams population of 91 million works in agriculture, which accounts for about 13 percent of the economy.

People in Indonesia and the Philippines will go hungry if the Thais and Vietnamese dont produce enough rice, said Richard Cronin, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Stimson Center in Washington. This is a preview of the longer-term effect of development and climate change to the Mekong Delta.

More dams

Rice exports from Vietnam, the worlds third-largest shipper, probably will drop 10 percent this year because of lower production, said Do Ha Nam, the chief executive officer of Intimex Group, a major Vietnam exporter of agricultural products. Rice output from the Mekong Delta fell 6.2 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, reducing the countrys total agricultural production by 2.7 percent, according to Nguyen Bich Lam, head of the General Statistics Office.

Water from the Mekong was already under pressure before the drought, which the UN attributed to a stronger-than-normal El Nino weather pattern. China has completed six of seven major dams on the river in southern Yunnan Province, Cronin said. Vietnam has built dozens in the Central Highlands, which, like the Chinese and Laotian dams, deprive the Delta region of the critical sediments needed to replenish eroded soil, he said.

Agriculture losses

Eleven more dams planned in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia could result in fish and farming losses of $750 million in Vietnam and $450 million in Cambodia, with extinctions for as much as 10 percent of fish species in the region, according a study submitted to the Mekong River Commission, a group created to mediate water disputes.

Nguyen Van Nhin pumps well water inside his home. Photo: Bloomberg.

Vietnams government, which relied on rice farming to feed its population during years of dire poverty after its war with the U.S., needs to encourage Mekong Delta farmers to switch to more profitable crops, such as fruit trees that require less water, and raise higher-value shrimp in coastal areas, said Vo-Tong Xuan, a professor of agronomy and rector of Nam Can Tho University.

Costly change

Its not that easy to switch, said Nguyen Trung Kien, vice chairman of the Vietnam Food Association. Fruit trees can take years before the first harvest, he said.

The drought is changing the landscape in the Mekong Delta. Along National Road 63 in coastal Kien Giang province, the soil is parched and cracked on land once soaked with water for rice paddies tended by Vietnamese in conical hats. Sugar-cane trees that should be green have yellowed.

This is the first time in my 22 years of rice farming I could not grow rice, said Nguyen Van Nhin, 36, who tends nine acres in Kien Giang province behind his thatched-roof hut with wood-plank beds and mosquito nets.

In Kinh 5, Nhins village, 70 percent of the 281 farms produced no rice this season, said Danh Nhac, the local vice chief of the Communist Party. The majority of the people left in the hamlet are children and people older than 45 or 50.

For those who remain, it means looking for alternatives to commercial farming. Nhin is trying to grow vegetables for food and looking for work as a manual laborer.

I am just waiting for the rain to return so I can grow rice again, he said.
Some Vietnamese experts and scientists were not convinced after officials announced that tests could not find any connection between Taiwanese firm Formosas industrial discharge and an ongoing environmental disaster in central Vietnam.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment organized a press conference late Wednesday, three weeks after the first fish deaths along the central coast were reported. Around 200 reporters attended the event as Vietnamese across the country anxiously awaited a plausible explanation.

Vo Tuan Nhan, deputy minister, told the press that a meeting was convened by relevant ministries and agencies earlier the same day to discuss the possible causes of the mass fish deaths in several coastal provinces.

The meeting concluded that the mass fish deaths were possibly caused by chemical toxins discharged by human activities on the land and in the sea, and red tides  a phenomenon caused by algal blooms, he said.

Nhan said that authorities did not have evidence to link Taiwanese-owned Hung Nghiep Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Company (FHS) to the disaster.

Tests did not show that the sea waters safety indexes failed to meet required standards, he said.

Dr Le Phat Quoi, a professor at the Ho Chi Minh City National University, told Thanh Nien that the environment ministrys conclusion was not convincing. It did not publicize detailed data related to the tests on the seawater and the dead fish either, he said.

He said there were reports that tests conducted in Thua Thien-Hue Province found some heavy metals, including chromium, in the seawater.

He rejected the theory of red tides, saying that harmful algal blooms would have affected a much larger area.

Quoi said he believed the fish were poisoned by a considerable amount of heavy metals in the seawater.

Vu Trong Hong, former deputy minister of water resource, said the environment ministry must clarify which chemical agents had poisoned the fish, who used these agents and how.

To know whether the mass fish deaths were caused by Formosas wastewater, I think we should invite scientists to investigate, he said.

Dr To Van Truong, another respected environmental expert, told Thanh Nien he believed Formosas use of chemicals to clean sewage pipes had killed the fish.

The solution used to clean sewage pipe is usually very hard to be treated, as it contains many substances that are not easily diluted and decomposed, he said.

Formosa has been the prime suspect in the case since its sewage pipe running straight into the sea was discovered hidden deep under the water.

Environment versus economic growth

After the press conference, deputy minister Nhan met with the press to answer some questions.

He said the environment ministry will continue to investigate the case, and confirmed that the ministry will not trade the environment for economic growth.

If we find any company polluting the environment, it will be strictly punished, he said.

Nhan said authorities will continue to work with scientists to investigate the causes of the mass fish deaths based on the preliminary results.

If necessary, we will ask for help from international scientific organizations. We will soon issue warnings for fishers and consumers, he said.

The environment ministry has already ordered affected provinces to test the quality of seawater in coastal areas in order to offer appropriate advice to swimmers and tourists, according to Nhan.

When asked about the deadline to have an answer for the mass fish deaths, Nhan said "it depends on the research" but the ministry is taking urgent measures.

There were similar cases in which it took years to find out the causes, he said.

The environment ministry will send teams of inspectors to check the waste discharges of companies, especially those with high risks of pollution, in the affected provinces, according to Nhan.

The ministry has warned residents in these provinces not to eat dead fish and sell them to animal feed companies.
Police and locals outside a hotel on Bui Vien Street in Ho Chi Minh City's District 1 where a Malaysian man was found dead on April 27, 2016. Photo credit: Hai Hieu/VnExpress

Police in Ho Chi Minh City are investigating the death of a Malaysian man whose body was found inside a hotel room in the backpacker district, with multiple cut wounds.

Employees of the hotel on Bui Vien Street broke the door and found the body on the bed at around 7 p.m. after the man did not answer them.

There were many cuts on his head and shoulders. Bloodstains were found on the floor.

Initial investigation found the 33-year-old victim checked into the room two days earlier with another Malaysian man of 32, whose whereabouts remain unknown.

Police are looking for the roommate, saying he may be directly linked to the death.
Nguyen Van Tan had to learn the hard way that doing business is never easy.

On August 13 last year, only five days after he opened his coffee shop Xin chao! (Hello!) in Ho Chi Minh City's Binh Chanh District, police officers showed up from a station right across the street.

They did not come to say hi.

Tan was f ined VND17 million (US$800) for running a business without a registration certificate, even after he told the officers that he had already applied for one and would receive the license within days.

The police checked his shop again on September 10 and concluded that Tan broke several regulations on food safety, including doing business without a food safety and hygiene certificate. Tan said that certificate would be granted to him at the end of the month.

Binh Chanh police chose not to let the case go. Soon later Colonel Nguyen Van Quy, the district police chief, proposed criminal charges of " doing business illegally against the shop owner, claiming that he had repeatedly broken the law.

On March 11, district prosecutors decided to pursue the case, officially issuing an indictment. The hearing was scheduled on April 28.

But when Tan was about to appear in court, the case attracted media attention. Multiple outlets picked up the story and since last week the public outcry has only grown stronger. Many people questioned why Binh Chanh police was so zealous in a case involving a small coffee shop, with some even accusing Quy, the police chief, of having "personal motives." Amid the outrage, newly-elected Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on April 20 ordered Ho Chi Minh City authorities to review the case.

Nguyen Van Tan smiles at his coffee shop in Ho Chi Minh City's Binh Chanh District after Head of the Supreme People's Procuracy Le Minh Tri ordered Binh Chanhs prosecutors to drop his case on April 23, 2016. Photo: Cong Nguyen/Thanh Nien

Many lawyers said there is no legal basis for criminal charges in this case. They argued that Tan did not repeatedly break the law because his business had been licensed by the time of the second inspection.

The case also prompted Head of the Supreme People's Procuracy Le Minh Tri to step in. On April 23 Tri ordered Binh Chanhs prosecutors to drop the case.

Ho Chi Minh City authorities this week suspended the police chief to review his responsibility.

After the suspension, Quy admitted he was wrong.

I was hasty and mechanical in applying the laws, leading to this mistake, he told Tuoi Tre newspaper in an interview published on Tuesday.

Quy however rejected accusations that his action stemmed from personal motives.

Some newspapers and blogs accused me of wiping out Mr. Tans cafe so that my wife can sell drinks well at the canteen inside the police office, or claimed that I want to do harm to Tan so that I can buy the land lot where he is leasing. These accusations are spiteful, Quy said.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visits the Paektusan Hero Youth Power Station No. 3 in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang on April 23, 2016. Photo: KCNA/via REUTERS

North Korea fired what appeared to have been an intermediate range ballistic missile on Thursday but it crashed seconds after the test launch, South Korea's defense ministry said, the second such failure this month.

A defense ministry official told Reuters that the launch from near the North Korean east coast city of Wonsan appeared to have been of a Musudan missile with a range of more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles), at about 6:40 a.m. local time (2140 GMT).

Isolated North Korea has conducted a flurry of missile launches and tests of military technology in the run-up to a rare congress of its ruling Workers' Party that is set to begin on May 6.

Thursday's apparent failure, however, marks another setback for young leader Kim Jong Un. A similar missile launched on the April 15 birthday of his grandfather and the country's founder, Kim Il Sung, exploded in what the U.S. Defense Department called a "fiery, catastrophic" failure.

South Korea also says the North is ready to conduct a nuclear test at any time. It would be its fifth nuclear test.

The defense ministry official, who declined to be identified by name, said South Korean and U.S. officials were analyzing the cause of the missile crash, declining to comment on why the launch was revealed hours after it took place.

The South's Yonhap News Agency said the fired missile was not detected by South Korean military radar because it did not fly above a few hundred meters, and was spotted by a U.S. satellite.

The South Korean defense ministry told Reuters it could not confirm that report.

On Saturday, North Korea tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile, which traveled about 30 km (18 miles) off its east coast.
A gas flame is seen in the desert near the Khurais oilfield, about 160 km (99 miles) from Riyadh, June 23, 2008. State oil giant Saudi Aramco is adamant the biggest new field in its plan to raise oil capacity will arrive bang on schedule in June next year.

"King Abdulaziz and the men who worked with him for the establishment of the state did not depend on oil and they established the kingdom without oil, and they ran this state without oil, and they lived in this state without oil," Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in an televised interview on Monday.

The deputy crown prince criticized the kingdom's subsequent "addiction" to oil which has "disrupted the development of many sectors in the past years" implying this was a relatively recent problem.

The prince claimed his national transformation program would enable the kingdom to "live without oil" as early as 2020 ("Transcript of Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Interview", Al Arabiya, April 25).

But if modern Saudi Arabia was founded by conquest and the skilful statesmanship of Abdulaziz, it has been held together by the revenue from oil, even more than conservative religion.

Distribution of oil revenue to client groups has formed the foundation of the state from its earliest years and shaped the contours of the economy and society.

Sharing oil wealth in exchange for popular submission to absolute monarchical rule has always been central to the social contract between the ruling Al Saud and the kingdom's population.

Transforming that contract so that it does not center on oil is an enormously ambitious undertaking fraught with considerable risks and with an uncertain chance of success.

Oil and Arabia

Before the discovery of oil, Saudi Arabia was a desperately poor country, with a largely subsistence economy and depending on the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.

The modern state was assembled through a series of conquests between 1902 and 1926 and proclaimed as the unified Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

At the time, the only government revenue came from customs duties, pilgrimage taxes and tithes. From the start, the state was short of money and desperately looking for additional sources of income.

One reason the kingdom granted a concession in 1933 to prospect for oil to the U.S. company Socal rather than Britain's Iraq Petroleum Company was that Socal was prepared to offer more cash up front and loans to be repaid from future production ("A king and a concession", Aramco, 1984).

In 1938, the government's revenue amounted to just $7 million, according to Arthur Young, the U.S. financial expert sent out after World War Two to help set up the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency.

The first commercial oil discovery was made the same year and the kingdom received $340,000 in oil royalties ("Saudi Arabia: the making of a financial giant", Young, 1983).

Hopes of an immediate bonanza were delayed by the world war, which led to the postponement of exploration and development work. But once the war ended, production and oil revenue began to ramp up.

The kingdom's annual oil revenue surged from $340,000 in 1938 to $10 million in 1946, $57 million in 1950, $334 in 1960, $1.2 billion in 1970 and $84 billion in 1980.

Money and power

Even before oil, gift-giving was an important element of the compact between the ruler and his subjects, and the need to demonstrate generosity frequently strained royal finances ("Two kings in Arabia", Bullard, 1993).

Once the gusher of oil revenue arrived, it provided the scope to co-opt almost all social groups and make them clients of the state.

Tribal groups were granted generous state subsidies and recruited into the national guard. Hundreds of thousands of other citizens have been put on the payrolls of the armed forces and various ministries.

Money could also be used to settle tensions within the royal family by allowing each senior prince to be given their own vast and essentially autonomous bureaucratic fiefdom.

Oil wealth enabled the state to avoid levying income and other taxes and to subsidize the provision of basic services including water, electricity and gasoline.

Oil wealth enables Saudi Arabia to maintain more than 250,000 men under arms and run the world's third-largest defense budget ("Princes, brokers and bureaucrats: oil and the state in Saudi Arabia", Hertog, 2010).

More or less everything in modern Saudi Arabia depends directly or indirectly on oil.

Budget problems

From the very beginning, however, expenditure tended to run ahead of receipts. "When oil production and spending grew after the war, spending grew even faster", according to Young.

"Governments, like individuals, have the urge to spend more whenever income suddenly increases."

In 1949, despite oil revenue amounting to $39 million, the government was struggling to pay its bills, the first of several budget crises in the subsequent decades.

The kingdom's history from the 1950s to the 2010s has been a series of oil-fueled booms followed by painful adjustments when oil prices fell and revenue shrank.

Addicted to oil

Periodic crashes in the oil price and state revenue have brought periodic calls to adjust the social compact between the state and its citizens.

Prince Mohammed, effectively the kingdom's top economic policymaker, is not the first ruler to complain about the country's addiction to oil ("Saudi reform efforts wax and wane with oil prices," Reuters, February 2016).

"The GCC governments and peoples should realize that the boom period is over. We must all get used to a certain type of lifestyle that does not rely entirely on the state," then-Crown Prince Abdullah warned back in 1998.

"The upcoming period needs the private sector to assume part of the responsibility which has up until now been carried by the state."

Abdullah was speaking at the GCC summit in Abu Dhabi in December 1998, just as oil prices were hitting rock bottom at the end of a long period of stagnation through the late 1980s and 1990s.

But the impetus to reform was lost as oil prices and revenue soared again in the 2000s.

The problem is that when oil prices are low the revenue needed to accomplish the transition are scarce and the difficulties can appear daunting. When oil prices rise, it has been easier to postpone difficult decisions.

Transformation

Prince Mohammed's "SaudiVision2030", adopted by the cabinet and published on Monday, is essentially a diversification strategy which aims to move the kingdom away from dependence on oil revenue (April 2016).

It is closely modeled on an earlier and even more comprehensive study by the McKinsey Global Institute entitled "Saudi Arabia beyond oil: the investment and productivity transformation" (December 2015).

The aim is to shift the economy away from an almost exclusive reliance on oil (and the spending of oil revenue) to develop other sectors such as mining, manufacturing, retail, tourism, pilgrimage, and healthcare.

The strategy also envisages developing the country as a logistics hub for East-West trade, becoming a financial services center, localizing defense manufacturing, and development more small and medium-sized enterprises.

The prince has stressed that much of the transformation can be achieved through improvements in government efficiency and restructuring (termed "qawam" in the vision document).

There is no doubt Saudi Arabia needs to undertake these changes, and a younger generation of policymakers has brought an increased sense of urgency to tackling the problems.

But describing the kingdom's problem as an "addiction" to oil, as if it was incidental, rather than a fundamental part of the political, social and economic structure, risks understating the challenge involved.

External commentators have focused on the valuation likely to be realized from a part-privatisation of state-oil company Saudi Aramco but that is the least of the problems.

True diversification requires developing industries which have nothing to do with the extraction of oil and spending of oil-related revenue.

Pilgrimage is a natural choice but the business environment for other sectors such as finance, logistics and manufacturing remains forbiddingly tough.

Saudi Arabia's rulers must construct an attractive place to do business when companies currently have much simpler alternatives such as the United Arab Emirates.
Fighters from Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate Al-Nusra Front patrol the northern city of Aleppo in May 2015

Syria's Al-Qaeda affiliate and allied rebels pushed offensives around northern, central and coastal Syria on Monday, triggering a spike in violence that could threaten a truce ahead of peace talks, a monitoring group said.

The Islamic State (IS) group also took back control of the town of Al-Rai near Turkey, which rival rebels had captured last week, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Neither the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front nor IS are included in a truce brokered by the United States and Russia that came into force on February 27.

But the fact that rebels are fighting alongside Al-Nusra in such a broad offensive, while regime forces push back, has sparked concerns over the durability of the shaky truce.

"Al-Nusra and allied rebel groups are waging three synchronised offensives" on front lines in Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces, Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

So far, they have seized a hilltop in Latakia province, the heartland of President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect, the group said.

"This is the offensive that Al-Nusra warned it would carry out several weeks ago," Abdel Rahman said.

He was referring to a threat issued by the jihadist group when President Vladimir Putin, a key backer of Assad's regime, announced the partial pullout of Russian troops from Syria last month.

A military source confirmed that an offensive was under way.

"Armed groups are trying to attack some military positions in Latakia and Hama provinces, but they have not succeeded in making any advances," the source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Further north, rival jihadist group IS took back the town of Al-Rai, their key supply route from neighbouring Turkey, the Observatory said.

Rebels fighting IS had taken Al-Rai last week following two days of clashes.

"The fact that the rebels could not hold on to Al-Rai shows that it is impossible to maintain an advance against IS without adequate air cover," Abdel Rahman said.

Syrian, Russian and US-led coalition warplanes are all staging separate air campaigns in the war-torn country.

The latest violence came ahead of a new round of peace talks in Geneva on April 13, which will see indirect negotiations between government and opposition delegations.

"Neither Al-Nusra nor IS have an interest in the ceasefire or a peaceful solution to Syria's war -- because should the war end, they would no longer have a role," Abdel Rahman said.

Syria's conflict erupted in March 2011 with anti-government protests but has since evolved into a multi-front war drawing in regional powers.
Migrants stranded in Greece, along with human rights activists and students, shout slogans during a protest against recent border closures across the Balkans in Athens, Greece, March 30, 2016. Photo: Reuters /Alkis Konstantinidis

Five days before Turkey is due to begin taking back illegal migrants from Greece under a deal with the European Union, neither side is fully ready, with officials scrambling to be able to make at least a symbolic start as new arrivals rise.

Turkey agreed with the EU this month to take back all migrants and refugees who cross illegally to Greece in exchange for financial aid, faster visa-free travel for Turks and slightly accelerated EU membership talks.

The returns are supposed to begin on April 4 under the plan, which aims to close the main route by which a million migrants and refugees poured across the Aegean Sea to Greece in the last year before heading north mainly to Germany and Sweden.

But uncertainty remains over how many will be sent back, how they will be processed, and where they will be housed. The plan risks being overwhelmed by the continued flow of migrants to Greece, where arrivals rose sharply on Wednesday.

A series of steps needs to be taken by Monday for the deal to get underway, according to people familiar with an internal European Commission report. These include legislative changes in Greece and Turkey, transport and other logistical arrangements, and clarity on how Turkey will treat non-Syrian refugees.

The report, which followed meetings in Ankara on Wednesday between EU special envoy on migration Maarten Verwey and Turkish officials, called on EU member states to make public reports which portray Turkey as a "safe third country" for refugees.

That appeared to be an attempt to ease concern among rights groups and some European politicians about the legality and feasibility of the deal. They have questioned whether Turkey has sufficient safeguards in place to defend refugees' rights and whether it can be considered a safe country for them.

The first returnees are expected to be taken by boat from the Greek islands to Dikili, north of the city of Izmir on Turkey's Aegean coast, Turkish officials said. But where they will be housed in the longer term remains unclear.

"Our worries are that not just Dikili but the whole region's infrastructure is not ready if they stay here - whether it's health or education facilities. We have expressed these worries," Dikili's mayor, Mustafa Tosun, told Reuters.

District governor Mustafa Nazmi Sezgin was quoted by the Haberturk newspaper as saying the plan was not to set up a refugee camp but just a registration centre, from where migrants would be sent on to Izmir or other areas within 24 hours.

Kerem Kinik, vice president of the Turkish Red Crescent, said his organization was preparing a camp with 5,000 places in the province of Manisa east of Izmir after being asked for help by the government, although it would not be ready immediately.

"We will host the first returnees most probably in hotels, seaside holiday camps," he told Reuters. Some might then be housed in refugee camps, but others were likely to return to the Turkish provinces where they had previously settled, he said.

Deal rushed through

Turkey has spent almost $10 billion since the start of the Syrian conflict, much of it on refugees camps close to the Syrian border whose standards have won international praise. A new law gives migrants permission to work in Turkey, although there are limitations on where and in which sectors.

Syrians would be free to settle outside camps if they wanted, according to an official from Turkey's disaster management agency AFAD, which has taken a lead role in managing the 2.9 million Syrian refugees already in Turkey.

"We can't lock them down in accommodation centers. If they want, they can go to camps, or if they have relatives they might stay with them. But if they say 'I can take care of myself' ... we can't pressure them," the official said.

Turkey's refugee camps house fewer than 300,000 of its migrant population, who mostly fend for themselves. Critics of the EU-Turkey deal fear some of the returnees from Greece will also end up forced to take illegal jobs or beg on the streets.

Under the pact, Ankara will take back all migrants and refugees who cross to Greece illegally by sea. In return, the EU will resettle thousands of legal Syrian refugees directly from Turkey - one for each Syrian returned from the Greek islands.

The first European resettlement of 40 Syrians to Germany is planned for next week, a diplomatic source said, declining to be named because the plan has not yet been finalized.

Turkey intends to send non-Syrians who do not meet asylum criteria back to their countries of origin, under readmission agreements which Ankara already has with some states and is negotiating with 14 others - including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Eritrea and Somalia - according to foreign ministry officials.

That has raised concern among rights groups, who worry the deal has been rushed through by European and Turkish leaders without sufficient thought about its implementation.

"Every individual should have access to individualized procedures with the chance to explain if they don't want to return to Turkey... Being able to achieve all this in such a short period of time seems unrealistic," said Irem Arf, regional migration researcher for Europe for Amnesty International.

"We don't consider Turkey a safe country for refugees and asylum seekers. We have documented cases of forced returns to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan," she told Reuters.

Amnesty accused Turkey last week of forcibly returning about 30 Afghan asylum-seekers to Afghanistan despite their fearing Taliban attacks.

The Turkish Directorate General of Migration Management acknowledged the return of 27 Afghans, but insisted all were returned voluntarily and that none had requested asylum.
A Romanian army serviceman stands next to an US fight jet F-22 Raptor at the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, near Constanta, Romania, on April 25, 2016

Two American stealth F-22 fighter jets landed in Lithuania on Wednesday in an apparent show of force, after tensions with Moscow flared this month when a Russian aircraft buzzed an American warship in the Baltic Sea.

The US air force's most advanced planes landed at the Siauliai air base which currently also hosts Spanish jets from NATO's air policing mission, created to help small Baltic members protect their borders with Russia.

Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said the planes' brief visit from their base in Britain demonstrated US commitment to defend the region, which keeps a wary eye on the Kremlin's territorial ambitions.

"It is a signal that the alliance is ready and capable to respond to any kind of threats," she said at the air base, standing in front of Lithuanian, US and NATO flags.

Asked if that was a message to Russia, the outspoken president responded: "Everyone should abstain from sticking his nose into things here."

Lithuania and other NATO members formerly behind the Iron Curtain have been rattled by Russia's actions in Ukraine, where it annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 before pro-Moscow separatists began fighting Kiev's forces in the country's east.

Earlier this month, Russian warplanes flew within metres of an American missile destroyer in the Baltic Sea in what the United States called a "simulated attack".

Days later, a US reconnaissance plane was intercepted by a Russian fighter, prompting NATO to accuse Russia's military of "unprofessional and unsafe behaviour".

Russia has denied the actions were provocative and blamed NATO for increasing the risk of conflict by building up its troops in eastern European countries.
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...

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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,...

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Revellers who attended Groovin' The Moo in Canberra on Sunday have accused security guards at the festival of mocking and failing to help those in need of attention, even walking away from a girl who had collapsed and was "trampled on".

Festival-goer Jamie Guy said she was sitting on the grass at the popular music festival when she noticed some young girls struggling to carry their friend who had collapsed.

Groovin' The Moo patrons have criticised the inaction of security guards at Sunday's event. Credit:Jamila Toderas

She said at least 10 security guards and medics were standing around "having a laugh and a banter" while the girls passed them, forcing a male bystander to step in and help the friends carry the sick girl to the tent.

"We were in shock that none of the medics or security guards were helping her  they just stood and watched," Ms Guy said.
AFL players would become free agents for life, if an idea to further loosen the system gains the support of the AFL later this year.

The idea that players should remain free agents after swapping clubs is among several that will be put forward by the AFL Players Association as the system comes under review as part of collective bargaining negotiations.

AFL Players' Association boss Paul Marsh. Credit:Getty Images

The AFLPA is keen for players' service to be measured by the number of years they have spent in the competition, rather than the service they gave given one club.

Their idea would see free agents retain the choice of where to play at the end of their contract with with the club they joined as a free agent, rather than have to re-qualify by spending eight or more years there.
Online travel giant Priceline Group said its chief executive, Darren Huston, is resigning after an investigation found he had a personal relationship with an employee that violated the company's code of conduct, handing the company's reins back to the former CEO that led its rapid expansion in the 2000s.

Huston's resignation is effective immediately, the company said in a statement on Thursday. Former CEO and Chairman Jeffery Boyd, who led the company from 2002 to 2013, will replace Huston as interim CEO while Priceline looks for a new leader. Huston also resigned as CEO of Booking.com, the group's largest unit. Booking.com Chief Operating Officer Gillian Tans will take over as permanent CEO of that Priceline subsidiary.

Priceline shares fell 1.2 per cent to $US1337.68 at 1:52 pm in New York. The stock was up 6.2 per cent this year through the end of trading on Wednesday.

"This resignation was not related in any way to the company's operational performance or financial condition," Leslie Cafferty, a spokeswoman for Priceline Group, said in an email. There were no issues related to accounting or financial reporting either, Cafferty said.
ANZ Banking Group will become the first Australian bank to process payments through Apple devices, a deal the bank hopes will encourage many of the tech giant's devotees to open ANZ deposit accounts.

Social media lit up on Thursday as customers of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp and National Australia Bank demanded that their banks also offer Apple Pay, which allows contactless payments with iPhone 6s and Apple watches.

ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliott quipped at a briefing for ANZ staff in Sydney that he was pushed to do the deal because he was "sick of being hounded on Twitter and email by customers saying 'When are we going to get Apple Pay?' "

"That was sort of a joke, but actually it is real," he said.
Noela Hjorth had a unique way of looking at the world. She was bowerbird, deeply linked to environment, ritual and her story. The way Noela connected was liberating and inspiring. She was a trail-blazer for women and art in this country.

A nude lithograph by Noela Hjorth.

She was born Noela Budge, in Collingwood, Melbourne. Her mother died when Noela was 14, and her father  who was deaf  committed suicide when Noela was 21. Her much older sister Dorothy was a continuing support.

Noela grew up in Alphington and matriculated from University High School. She went to art school at Prahran Tech and began teaching at Moreland High School, which was progressive and suited her free spirit. She continued her study at RMIT and later took classes at Chelsea Art School in London.

In 1962 Noela married Bob Hjorth and their son Greg was born in 1963. They spent some years in London, where Bob undertook specialist medical training in neurology, and their daughter Larissa was born in 1971. Noela continued to paint and developed her interest in printmaking.

When the family returned to Melbourne, Noela brought presses with her. She leaves a legacy as an important female printmaker, helping to establish print workshops at the Meat Market in the 1970s and 80s with artists such as Noel Counihan. She also began a hands-on renovation of the family's Victorian house in East St Kilda.
As Australia heads to a federal election, it appears certain the fate of hundreds, and possibly thousands, of refugees will again emerge as a hotly divisive issue. Yet there is barely a breath of difference between the two major political parties on this issue. Both the Coalition and Labor have implemented and strongly supported a policy that has led to many hundreds of asylum seekers being detained for years on Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island. The stated rationale has been to deter other asylum seekers from approaching Australia by boat. But the human impact has been dreadful. People fleeing persecution have been deposited behind wire fences, left to wait without hope and without any clear indication of what will happen to them. Papua New Guinea's Supreme Court has ruled that detaining asylum seekers on Manus Island is illegal. Credit:Andrew Meares There can be no pretence that this is a satisfactory solution  or, indeed, a "solution" at all. It is a morally indefensible and inhumane practice that has been denounced by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Amnesty International and others, and which smothers Australia with shame. There must be an end to it. And perhaps there will be now that Papua New Guinea's Supreme Court has ruled that detaining asylum seekers on Manus Island is in breach of human rights principles enshrined in PNG's Constitution.

The PNG government is not pushing back against the court's unanimous decision. It is not seeking a legislative fix that might regularise the problem. Instead, it says it will close Manus Island, and it says the responsibility for deciding what happens to the 900 men at the facility rests with Australia. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has declared they will not be brought here. He says the government cannot be "misty-eyed" about their plight because to back down from the tough policies would send a green-light to people-smugglers to resume their trade. In our view, the court's decision exposes what a cockamamie, ramshackle and politically driven strategy the whole offshore processing arrangement has been. It was flawed from the outset because there was no endgame. Look to the source of these problems. The tide of people seeking refuge does not ebb merely because Australia decides to ship some to remote islands. The circumstances of persecution that caused people to flee their own countries are not altered by locking them up. It is imperative to stamp out the odious trade of people smugglers but, in doing so, governments should never lose sight of the people who genuinely need empathy and care. Deterrence strategies should not be punitive; they should not exacerbate the already-grievous situation of refugees. The court's decision is a wake-up call for the entire region. It demonstrates how this tragic situation is a collective responsibility. The Turnbull government must work closely with regional neighbours to foster a co-operative, practical and durable manner of dealing with the flows of asylum seekers. But it must free the people who have been unfairly and illegally locked up.
There's no great surprise here. This was such an obvious violation of the PNG constitution that the PNG government tried frantically in 2014 to change the constitution to make it legal. When the moment of truth arrived, neither the PNG nor Australian governments mounted a meaningful defence. This die was long cast. Illustration: Andrew Dyson Marles' only real defence is to say this whole centre should be empty by now; that we might have got away with it if only the getaway car had turned up on time. Hence: "PNG never imagined people would be on Manus for so long  we didn't either." Well, that's a monstrous failure of imagination, then. Because while it's true Labor said its Manus centre would be empty in a year, it's also true there was no plan to make that happen. It was an entirely unaccountable dream: a declaration utterly devoid of meaning. The Manus Island detention centre will soon close. Credit:Andrew Meares

Labor never knew where these people would be resettled, once found to be refugees. It never handed the Coalition a stack of agreements with other countries guaranteeing these people would have a home. It passed on a detention regime made of matchsticks. Now it stands ready to tut, the moment things collapse. No, the real feat of imagination here would have been to pretend this could end any other way. Because the PNG Supreme Court this week did nothing more than reveal the obvious: that our policy was only ever to sweep asylum seekers under someone else's rug. It was designed to stop boats coming to us, but solve no greater problem than that. We've not brokered an agreement with our regional neighbours to share the load, because we've preferred instead to bribe the poorest nations into removing the problem from our sight. PNG Prime Minister Peter ONeill, Credit:Joosep Martinson Occasionally, as in Cambodia's case, we've paid them dozens of millions of dollars for almost exactly nothing. Pursue that kind of non-policy and eventually it catches up with you. Manus is full of people already found to be refugees, stuck in a country that says it simply cannot afford to take them, and right next to one that very easily could.

They're there because "stop the boats"  in truth a bipartisan slogan  only ever masked a question we could never answer: what happens to these people? What happens to the ones who don't die at sea, or the ones we convince to return home? Do they die elsewhere? We don't really know because the minute they aren't on boats headed for us, they cease to exist. And as far as we're concerned, their misery doesn't exist either. That's why all the stories simply wash over us. Reza Berati is killed under our care. The ABC's Four Corners program reveals that Hamid Khazaei died because the Immigration Department pointlessly delayed vital medical treatment. This week we learnt an Iranian man set himself on fire in Nauru. None of this fundamentally moves us because we've constructed an elaborate world that makes this simply the cost of doing business, rather than anything that registers as a series of tragedies we've helped create. Nothing gets in the way, except when a court uses brute force. That's when you'll find Richard Marles, not questioning how his own party's scheme could be so hopelessly conceived, but demanding Peter Dutton fly to PNG to keep this thing alive. Somehow. Anyhow. It's also when you'll find Peter Dutton responding by saying refugees from Manus "will not be settled in Australia". That's not even remotely an answer to the question of what we'll do now that our main policy has been quashed. But it is the only thing anyone since Rudd has ever needed to say.
The candidacy of Bernie Sanders for the Democrat nomination for president of the United States has excited many pro-Palestinian activists. Even academic Amin Saikal ("Bernie Sanders dares to challenge Israel", Times2, April 20, p5) has jumped on the bandwagon.

This Sanders euphoria is based on few facts and much posturing, vitriol and emotion. For instance, Sanders told the New York Post that he thought more than 10,000 "innocent civilians" had been killed in the 2014 Gaza war. Even Hamas and the United Nations put the number at more like 1500, and Israel says it was about 1000. Similarly, his claims about "disproportionality" reflect a basic ignorance of what the term "proportionality" means in international law.

Bernie Sanders told the New York Post that he thought more than 10,000 "innocent civilians" had been killed in the 2014 Gaza war. Credit:Bloomberg

Though it is of course true that residents of Gaza have been and continue to be the innocent victims of the conflict, and it is a tragedy that there is still not peace between Israelis and Palestinians, any fair analysis of the situation demonstrates that to hold Israel solely responsible, as Saikal does and implies Sanders also does (though this is far from clear), is untenable.

Start with Gaza. Israel evacuated it completely in 2005, removing 8000 settlers and all military bases. Rather than establishing a prosperous territory living in peace next to Israel, and paving the way for proposed Israeli withdrawals in the West Bank, terror groups started raining rockets down on Israel. This worsened after Hamas took control of the Strip in June 2007 in a bloody coup. Since 2005, more than 11,000 rockets have been fired indiscriminately from Gaza at Israeli civilians, each one a war crime.
Jude Rae was exploring a Canberra rubbish tip when she unearthed what would become a focus of her artistic practice.

"They let me fill up a shopping trolley of gas cylinders and fire extinguishers," she says.

Jude Rae, with her painting 'SL 359', is the winner of the 2016 Bulgari Art Award. Credit:Daniel Munoz

Rae says her unusual collection won her a few odd looks but she was allowed to take away her finds.
Danish toy manufacturer LEGO has admitted it was wrong to deny dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei a bulk order of plastic bricks for an artwork portraying Australian human rights campaigners.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, LEGO's vice chairman and grandson of the company's founder, blamed the decision to refuse the National Gallery of Victoria's request for bricks on an employee who had misinterpreted the company's policy on political neutrality. The board wasn't involved, he said.

Ai Weiwei in the "Letgo Room" of portraits of Australian human rights champions. When LEGO refused the gallery's order, other toy bricks were substituted. Credit:Tom McKendrick

"It was an internal mistake," Kristiansen said. "It is a typical example of what can go wrong in a big company."
The three-time ARIA award winner received a lapel pin, two medals and the right to add the letters AM after his name. "It's just something you don't expect to get, let alone at 32 and still on the journey, so it's really quite an honour," he says. There has also been the odd fringe benefit. "Someone shouted me dessert," he says, before adding: "It looks nice on a jacket. I wore it on Q&A." Tawadros brought his quick wit and eloquence to the ABC talk show earlier this month, responding to Germaine Greer's contentious views about transgender people by joking: "As a very ugly woman, I totally disagree with you."

He went on to say that treating transgender people with respect was key even if you did not comprehend their feelings. Tawadros also performed Forbidden Fruit from his 2010 album The Hour of Separation on Q&A with his percussionist brother James. The brothers teamed up on Tawadros' latest recording World Music, together playing a remarkable 63 instruments ranging from the bouzouki to the banjo, a tenor ukulele to a Tibetan singing bowl. "Well, I could have done better [but] from what we got, it's good," he says.

A collector of musical instruments, Tawadros also borrowed from friends and the recording studio to create "a trip around the world" on tracks such as The Daintree, Camino de Santiago and Jerusalem. But he was anxious to avoid the sonic "mishmash" that can occur on multi-instrumental recordings. "I think the lack of technique on a lot of the instruments gave me that natural restraint," he says. "I was able to use them just enough to sound convincing and add to the story rather than just be a mishmash." The didgeridoo was the only instrument Tawadros says he did not feel confident enough to play. The album is tinged with the lingering sadness of his mother's death from cancer in 2012 and his father's sudden death from a stroke in 2013. Tawadros describes the loss of both parents as surreal.

"That's why music was this refuge in a way," he says. "It's really important to remember them through music." Tawadros says he believes audiences are drawn to the emotive aspect of his music. "When you connect on an emotional level, the ethnicity of any instrument goes out of it," he says. "It's not like, 'There's an Arab playing a sad tune'." Tawadros' sense of humour and onstage banter is as memorable as his musicianship. He says the levity balances the solemnity of his music as well as giving him time to prepare for the next piece.

"It's also the opposite of what normal oud players do," he says. "Oud players are so serious, they usually talk about war and there's a lot of melancholy." He also feels a profound sense of gratitude towards his audience: "There's almost a disbelief that anyone would pay to come and see my art." At a recent concert at Bundanon, Arthur Boyd's property on the NSW South Coast, he joked about James playing tribute shows after Tawadros moves to England in May. He has projects already lined up with the BBC Symphony Orchestra after being the first Australian composer to have work performed at the Academy of Ancient Music last year. "I just think it's time to get over there and spread my art a little bit more," he says.
First trailer for David Brent film released

Ricky Gervais as Golden Globes host is nearly off the rails Comedian Ricky Gervais has a solution to quieten the inevitable complaints from Donald Trump if he doesn't become American president in November. "What if we just told him he got in?" Gervais suggested to his host on Late Night With Seth Meyer. Ricky Gervais wants to see 24/7 coverage of Donald Trump. Credit:Getty Images Gervais continued: "So he gets up every day and he does a little address and we go 'yeah it's brilliant ... Hi Mr President.'

"And [the people watching] are all extras ... and he just never knows that he was never President." Meyers even speculated Trump may not mind if his presidency was faked so long as he was popular: "A year in, you'd say 'it's been fake but the ratings are huge'. And he'd go 'very good, I'll keep doing it'." Gervais said part of him wanted Trump to win because of the comedy value, a line he also took when interviewed at the Tribeca Film Festival this month. "I can't get enough of him," Gervais told Meyers. "I started off thinking it was funny and then it got a bit serious. And now I don't know whether I want him to get in for the fun or not. I love him.
ORPHANS

Old Fitzroy, April 27. Until April 30

Dennis Kelly's slashing portrait of middle-class urban Britain confronts us with the product of the late Margaret Thatcher's famous pronouncement on individual responsibility: "Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."

Christopher Morris, Liam Nunan and Jack Mison.

Helen and Danny are sitting down to dinner. In bursts Helen's brother Liam, covered in blood.

We quickly learn the blood is not his own. The panicky Liam claims he found a man, a young Asian guy on the pavement, stabbed and unconscious. Liam tried to help, even cradled the wounded man in his arms. Hence the blood, see?
The plan includes placing a $3-a-tonne level on all exports of thermal coal used to generate electricity to raise $700 million a year.

During a visit to the reef on Thursday, Greens leader Richard Di Natale unveiled a seven-point plan to curb Australia's fossil fuel industries to limit impacts on the reef from climate change.

The Greens would block new thermal coal mines and coal seam gas fields, as well as taxing coal exports, under a policy that would channel funds into restoring health to the Great Barrier Reef.

The money would contribute to a $1 billion fund to help workers exit the fossil fuel industry as the ban on new coal and coal seam gas projects kicks in. Mines supplying coal used in steel making would not be covered by the ban on new ventures.

Coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef. Credit:Eddie Jim

"Coal is going down - that's a market reality - but only the Greens have a plan to make sure workers and the reef don't go down with it," Senator Di Natale said.

The Greens took aim at the two major parties, which have supported the opening of a giant new coal province in Queensland's Galilee Basin. The new mines  if they ever reach financial viability - would ship coal through the Great Barrier Reef to India and other markets.

"Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition are dumb and dumber when it comes to the subject of coal," Senator Di Natale said. "They've sold out to their fossil fuel donors, handing out billions of dollars in subsidies and approvals for new coal and gas projects when this is an industry in decline."
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has ruled out sending people illegally detained at Manus Island detention centre to Christmas Island, leaving resettlement on Nauru one of few options left to the government.

Papua New Guinea said it would close the Manus Island centre after its Supreme Court this week found it to be illegal, forcing the government to find an alternative processing centre and settlement options for 850 male asylum seekers and refugees.

Mr Dutton shot down the suggestion by 7.30 host Leigh Sales that the government had a responsibility to process the men on Christmas Island.
Australia pledged an extra $450 million in sweeteners to Papua New Guinea to settle refugees  but most of the money is yet to be spent and could evaporate with the closure of the Manus Island detention centre.

The inducements Australia offered in 2013 included an expansive new hospital, the deployment of 50 Australian police to bolster the local force, roadworks, and upgrades to the PNG university and law courts buildings.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has conceded the future of this additional aid to PNG must now be re-negotiated.
Up to 200 transport workers have blocked a major road in Sydney's city centre in protest over the federal government's decision to abolish the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal.

Workers wearing white T-shirts bearing the slogan "Coles pushing safety down the chain" sat across Goulburn Street for about 20 minutes, observing a minute's silence for International Workers' Memorial Day before being moved on by police.

Transport Workers Union NSW secretary Michael Aird said politicians and big businesses must be held to account, including supermarket giant Coles, "the biggest effective employer of transport workers in this country".

"They've said, 'We're prepared to sacrifice a life, we're prepared to sacrifice a transport worker or member of the community, so packets of peas don't go up by two cents,' " he said.
Fortitude Valley will complement its night economy by becoming home to Queensland's newest Start-up Precinct.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced encouraging up to 500 start-up businesses to a new $4 million StartUp Precinct in the historic TC Beirne Building in Fortitude Valley.

The move comes two months after Brisbane City Council announced a $5 million start-up innovation centre called the Capital, hosting 200 new business ideas in a building in the Queen Street Mall.

The council centre has prominent start-ups Fishburners and Little Tokyo Two as anchor tenants.
All knives were out as world-famous Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai showed two Queensland chefs how to peel an apple.

The three chefs had gathered for "performance rehearsals" ahead of Wednesday night's Advance Queensland Summit welcome dinner and while the rehearsals were subdued, it was hoped the rotating platform they stood on would work to liven things up for the real thing.

World-famous Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai of Japan and Queensland chefs (left) Alastair McLeod and (right) Matt Golinski at the Advance Queensland summit. Credit:Chris Hyde

Each chef was in charge of two dishes each and had been furiously prepping in the lead-up, getting ready to bring together the flavours and textures of Queensland's produce for the expected 600 guests.

Chef Sakai, best known as the "King of Iron Chefs" after appearing on 86 episodes of the Japanese cult cooking show Iron Chef, stood alongside Queensland culinary creators Alastair McLeod and Matt Golinski to discuss what Chef McLeod called the "love letter to Queensland" menu.
Police have located a 13-year-old girl who had been missing since Wednesday.

EARLIER

A Lowood teen went missing from her home on Wednesday morning. Credit:Georgia Matts

Queensland police are concerned for the welfare of a missing 13-year-old girl who was last seen on Wednesday.

She went missing from her home in Lowood, a rural town about 40km west of Brisbane, about 11am.
Two south-east Queensland hospitals are among the least efficient in metropolitan Australia, a federal government report has found.

But there have been signs of improvement almost across the board.

The National Health Performance Authority has named Chermside's Prince Charles Hospital among the least efficient in Australia. Credit:Steve Holland

The Prince Charles Hospital in Chermside and the Logan Hospital both rated in the top 10 when it came to the cost of offering similar care to similar patients, the National Health Performance Authority report covering the 2013-14 financial year has found.

The report, released on Thursday, shows some hospitals spent between $6100 and $3100 to deliver a notional "average" service for patients admitted with acute health problems.
It has also been blamed for a wave of violent home invasions and car-jackings Apex gang members rioting outside Flinders Street station last March Credit:@russmulry, via Twitter The gang was linked in the media with a violent car-jacking in Toorak on Monday morning where the stolen car was used for a home invasion in Cranbourne, though police have not said if the attackers were gang members. The four men responsible were described as of African and Pacific Islander appearance. It is unclear how many young people connected with Apex or other street gangs linked with recent crime were actually on visas. Many are also believed to be underage.

In an interview with Fairfax Media on Thursday, Mr Quaedvlieg said Border Force was not targeting Apex, and in fact, he had not heard of the gang until he was contacted by the Herald Sun on Wednesday. "Any notion we would use this tool as a blanket weapon against a group of people is nonsense. That is never going to happen," he said. "The manifestation of youth crime and violence has many complex causal factors and therefore many complex ... solutions "The character test is only one tool that should be used in extraordinary circumstances." The character test was introduced to the Migration Act in 2014, giving Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton the power to cancel the visas of suspected or convicted criminals.

If the Minister reasonably suspects a person is, or has been, a member or associate of a group that is involved in crime, regardless of whether that person has been convicted, they can be deported under the tougher character test. So far, the laws have been used to order foreign-born bikies and organised crime figures out of the country. Mr Quaedvlieg said if Victoria Police presented a case of an individual linked to Apex or any street gang, Border Force could suggest to Mr Dutton that they be deported. "It doesn't need to be patched bikies, if can be gangs of any nature and certainly if there are street gangs with a large number of migrants ... if the state and territory cops want to work with us in that regard, we're up for it," he said. Mr Kelly said using the "overwhelming threat" of an excessive law that can only be applied to certain sections of the Australian community was akin to "apartheid politics".

"It's inherently racist because it implies that race or ethnic background is a causal factor in their offending when we know that not to be true," he said. Assistant Commissioner Bob Hill sits over Taskforce Tense, the police operation targeting street gangs linked to the recent home invasions and car-jackings. Mr Hill told a press conference this week that out of the 70 young people arrested by the taskforce in six months, only 26 identified as belonging to Apex. Loading "We're providing this group with oxygen, notoriety they do not deserve. We have clear evidence that the majority of people charged don't have anything to do with Apex," he said.
Police believe a body found in Victoria's alpine region is that of missing man Taddeo Haigh.

The body was found in bushland in Sawmill Settlement, near Merrijig, on Thursday afternoon, four days after the 31-year-old disappeared while taking an evening walk.

"The body, which is yet to be identified, is believed to be that of missing person Taddeo Haigh," Victoria Police spokeswoman Belinda Batty said.

Police said the death was not being treated as suspicious and a report would be prepared for the coroner.
A company owned by a prominent Melbourne bar operator has been fined $40,000 for allowing rodents and filth to infest the kitchen of a popular laneway venue.

Sister Bella, tucked off Lonsdale Street, was found to have rodent droppings throughout its kitchen, on benches, food preparation equipment and in utensil drawers, Melbourne Magistrates Court heard on Thursday.

Jerome Borazio, who owned Sister Bella. Credit:Luis Ascui

Besides being a haven for rodents, the kitchen also had holes in walls and floors, had filthy floors, greasy walls and equipment, a sink without soap and paper towel, and unsealed bags of food, the court heard.

The bar was closed for three weeks in April 2014 when City of Melbourne inspectors found the kitchen in a filthy state, prosecutor Andrew Sim told the court. The inspectors also found food particles littered through the kitchen and two dead mice on the floor.
A massive new road from the Ring Road at Greensborough to EastLink looks set to become Melbourne's next big transport project, with Treasurer Tim Pallas declaring it "innately" makes sense.

Adding to Victoria's already crowded infrastructure agenda, Mr Pallas revealed the state's independent major projects adviser, Infrastructure Victoria, would be delivering a verdict on the "North East Link" proposal by the end of the year.

"If you look at the way that most modern cities operate, this idea of an outer suburban high capacity freeway network I think has a lot of merit to it," he told The Melbourne Press Club. "Innately, I think there is some sense in it."

The project - often referred to as the "missing link" - has been the RACV's top transport priority for years. The roads lobby group argues completing the Metropolitan Ring Road would dramatically cut congestion and connect freight centres around Dandenong with the Hume Highway.
While many are alarmed at the growing possibility Donald Trump could become President of the United States, one Melbourne councillor has identified a business opportunity.

Melbourne: A refuge for fleeing Americans?

Crikey founder Cr Stephen Mayne says Melbourne should roll out the red carpet to Americans  and in particular their top companies  urging them to move Down Under in the event Trump wins the keys to the White House.

Cr Mayne says Melbourne is a far more pleasant place to live than any American city  and it comes with the benefit of great coffee and an Asian timezone.
Three security staff were attacked by a patient at Footscray Hospital on Wednesday night, reportedly leaving one of the guards concussed.

Two security guards were escorting the patient from the hospital's emergency department when they were attacked, radio station 3AW is reporting.

Three security guards were attacked at Footscray Hospital's emergency department. Credit:Paul Rovere

A Western Health spokeswoman confirmed the guards suffered minor injuries.

The attack comes more than two years after a neurosurgeon was viciously stabbed 13 times in the hospital's foyer in February 2014, and was left with life-threatening injuries.
Police are still questioning the 44-year-old son of a grandmother found dead in her home in Melbourne's south east.

Socrates Tamvakis was arrested at a Bentleigh cafe at 4pm on Wednesday after a member of the public recognised him and called police.

Victoria Police said on Thursday morning that Mr Tamvakis remained in custody and had not been charged.

Mr Tamvakis lived with his mother Violet Tamvakis, 75, who was found in her London Street home in Bentleigh on Tuesday afternoon.
Police are searching for three teenagers who allegedly bashed a 16-year-old boy at a suburban shopping centre in Melbourne's north.

The Roxburgh Park teen was confronted by the group at Broadmeadows Shopping Centre on Pascoe Vale Road about 1pm on Saturday.

Police want to question three men over an alleged assault in Broadmeadows. Credit:Victoria Police

Leading Senior Constable Melissa Seach said one of the offenders hit the victim, causing him to fall to the ground.

"The two other offenders then punched and kicked him to his upper body, before all three fled the scene," Senior Constable Seach said.
An usually high number of staff have called in sick at Melbourne's major prisoner remand centre.

It is believed as many as 50 staff at the Melbourne Assessment Prison on Spencer Street, which houses prisoners in the CBD before and after court appearances, called in sick on Thursday morning.

The Melbourne Assessment Prison on Spencer Street.

Corrections Victoria is yet to confirm exact numbers, with a spokesman saying only that an "usually high number" of staff had called in sick.

"Additional staff have been called in to cover shifts and there is no threat to security at the prison," the spokesman said.
Two Perth mayors have joined forces in an effort to combat increasing gridlock in central Cockburn, a situation they say will only worsen unless a bypass road is built to help deal with the 100,000 vehicles which already travel through the area every day.

Cockburn Mayor Logan Howlett and Armadale Mayor Henry Zelones have teamed up in an effort to secure funding for a bridge to be built to connect Armadale Road on the east of the freeway with North Lake Road on the west of the freeway.

The proposed bridge would connect Armadale Road to North Lake Road.

The pair said congestion on Armadale Road and around Cockburn Central costs millions of dollars in lost productivity as residents east of Kwinana Freeway travel to jobs and try to access goods and services on the west side of the freeway and along the coast.

Forecasts show that without an Armadale Road bridge there will be 17,500 more vehicles per day on Beeliar Drive by 2020.
A Perth radiographer has been banned from practising after he admitted to pulling down a woman's panties without consent and spreading her legs.

Mr Pei Ren Un is not allowed to work in his profession for 18 months after disciplinary action brought against him by the Medical Radiation Practice Board of Australia.

Mr Pei Ren Un admitted to opening the patient's robe and pulling down her underpants without consent.

Mr Un, who was employed at the Perth Radiological Clinic in Gosnells in 2014, had to front the State Administrative Tribunal in April.

There he admitted to opening the patient's robe and pulling down her underpants without consent.
A state tribunal has ordered the City of Swan to reconsider its decision, on planning grounds, to shut down 'Australia's strictest rehab' Shalom House.

The not-for-profit, long-term facility in Henley Brook houses addicts who volunteer for intensive counselling and community reintegration under the watchful eye of manager Peter Lyndon-James, himself a former addict.

Peter Lyndon-James cares for men struggling with lifelong addiction problems. Credit:Emma Young

The facility, presently housing 37 men, has expanded across several more locations and taken on couples' and family counselling, but was told to shut down after the city rejected its application to change the use of its rural block from dwelling to 'community purpose'.

Mr Lyndon-James took the fight to the State Administrative Tribunal, which agreed 'community purpose' did not fit but 'invited' the council to reconsider the proposal "on its merits, as an unlisted or innominate use".
Veteran journalist and Curtin University academic Sean Cowan fears for the future of journalism in WA because, not only did no one predict the death of Scoop Publishing, it wasn't meant to happen.

On Tuesday, Scoop Publishing managing director David Hogan said the company was shutting up shop after 19 years because it was no longer viable to produce its nine magazines with the poor state of the WA economy.

Who else is catering for lifestyle readers in WA?: veteran journalist Sean Cowan.

Mr Cowan's said the closure of Scoop was of concern because their publications were the sort of niche magazines that were expected to survive.

"Much of the discussion about the future of print publications of late has been around the issue of 'niche' publications," he told WAtoday.
Terre Haute, Indiana: The campaign of presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said on Wednesday that it is shedding "hundreds" of staff in a move to "rightsize" with just a few contests left on the Democratic nominating calendar.

Word of the lay-offs came a day after Senator Sanders lost four of five Eastern primaries to Hillary Clinton, rendering his path to the party's nomination virtually non-existent.

Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs told reporters travelling with Senator Sanders that the decision, first reported by The New York Times, would have been made regardless of Tuesday's election results. He did not specify how many people are being let go or what percentage of Senator Sanders' sprawling staff they represent.
This "I-have-a-running-mate" strategy has been tried before  and as a device for a desperate candidate it failed when last tried.

Hugely premature, the announcement was a measure of the desperation that now informs the Cruz campaign, with just two states left among 12 remaining primary contests, in which analysts believe that Cruz might stall the runaway campaign of Donald Trump.

Washington: Failed Republican presidential wannabe Carly Fiorina once said that struggling Republican presidential wannabe Ted Cruz would "say whatever he needed to say to get elected". And in the future, Fiorina can say that Cruz would do whatever he needed to do to get elected  because on Wednesday Cruz named Fiorina as his running mate.

The year was 1976 and the candidate was Ronald Reagan, the man for whom Cruz is a self-anointed torchbearer. Back then, it already seemed that Gerald Ford would win the Republican nomination, but Reagan figured he might jump-start his flagging campaign by announcing that Senator Richard Schweiker would be his running mate  Ford won the nomination but he lost the election to a Georgia peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter.

Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz is joined by former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina during a rally in Indianapolis. Credit:AP

In hindsight, the night of April 19 was when the wheels started falling off the Cruz campaign and that of GOP primaries also-ran, Ohio Governor John Kasich.

When both were wiped out by Trump in the New York primary it became a mathematical impossibility for either to win the nomination and so they agreed a non-aggression pact, by which they would cede different states to each other in the hope of winning more convention delegates in one-on-one contests with Trump  thereby denying Trump the 1237 delegates needed to lock up the nomination.

That amounted to diddly-squat when five eastern states voted on Tuesday  Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Rhode Island. Trump wiped the floor with both of them, winning an average vote of 59 per cent and, humiliatingly for Cruz and Kasich, by an average margin of 35 percentage points.
Press information: KYOCERA to Break Ground on Third Kyoto Ayabe Manufacturing Facility

[KYOCERA Corporation logo] Press information KYOCERA to Break Ground on Third Kyoto Ayabe Manufacturing Facility Company expands production of organic packages for microelectronic devices used in smartphones and tablet PCs Kyoto, Japan / Neuss, Germany, April 27, 2016 a Kyocera Corporation (President: Goro Yamaguchi) today announced that it will begin construction this week on a third manufacturing facility at its Kyoto Ayabe complex in Ayabe City, Kyoto Pref., Japan. The new facility will produce miniaturized, low-profile organic packages to house microelectronic devices used inside smartphones, tablet PCs and related mobile communications equipment. Kyoceraas microelectronic packaging technology can facilitate higher functionality, greater integration and slimmer designs in mobile communications equipment. The market for Kyoceraas package products is expected to grow as consumer devices incorporate multiple internal modules for camera, wireless, power amplifier and control functions. In addition, the expanding IoT (Internet of Things) trend is expected to generate new applications for Kyocera products as wireless chips and sensor chips are increasingly modularized into packaging solutions based on organic material technology. Until April 1, 2016, the Kyoto Ayabe complex was operated by the former Kyocera Circuit Solutions, Inc. (aKCSa???), Kyoceraas wholly owned subsidiary specializing in high-density organic wiring boards, packages and large-scale printed motherboards for semiconductor devices. On April 1, 2016, KCS was merged into Kyocera Corporation as part of a business integration strategy to enhance the development of new products and markets while further expanding business synergies. Since 2005, Kyoceraas Kyoto Ayabe complex has manufactured a wide range of organic packaging products, including FC-BGA (flip-chip ball grid array) substrates for high-end application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Over the years, Kyocera has cultivated cutting-edge technologies in high-density wiring and automated production processes to create smaller, lower-profile products. Kyoceraas second facility at Kyoto Ayabe was added in the summer of 2014, and the third, targeted for completion in December 2016, will strategically expand the companyas capabilities. Outline of the Third Facility Name Kyoto Ayabe Plant, Third Facility Location Ayabe City, Kyoto Pref., Japan Facility size Building area: 13,143m2 (steel-framed, two floors, 140A84m) Floor space: 25,420m2 Construction plan Groundbreaking: April 21, 2016 (planned) Completion: December 2016 (planned) Start of operations April 2017 (planned) Production Organic packages for telecommunication devices Note: The factory building will be designed with environmental consideration such as reuse of water emissions. For more information about Kyocera: www.kyocera.eu About Kyocera Headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, Kyocera Corporation is one of the world's leading manufacturers of fine ceramic components for the technology industry. The strategically important divisions in the Kyocera Group, which is comprised of 226 subsidiaries (as of March 31, 2015), are information and communications technologies, products which increase quality of life, and environmentally friendly products. The technology group is also one of the oldest producers of solar energy systems worldwide, with more than 40 years of experience in the industry. The company is ranked #552 on Forbes magazineas 2015 aGlobal 2000a??? listing of the worldas largest publicly traded companies. With a global workforce of over 68,000 employees, Kyocera posted net sales of approximately a11.74 billion in fiscal year 2014/2015. The products marketed by the company in Europe include printers, digital copying systems, microelectronic components, fine ceramic products and complete solar power systems. The Kyocera Group has two independent companies in the Federal Republic of Germany: Kyocera Fineceramics GmbH in Neuss and Esslingen and Kyocera Document Solutions in Meerbusch. The company also takes an active interest in cultural affairs. The Kyoto Prize, a prominent international award, is presented each year by the Inamori Foundation a established by Kyocera founder Dr. Kazuo Inamori a to individuals and groups worldwide who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of humankind (converted at approximately a360,000 per prize category)
AKRON, Ohio, April 27, 2016 -- The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company today reported record results for the first quarter of 2016.

"We are very pleased with our strong first quarter performance," said Richard J. Kramer, chairman, chief executive officer and president. "Demand for our premium-branded, high-value-added products is robust and our product mix continues to grow richer, driving margin expansion," he added. The company's first quarter segment operating margin of 11.4 percent was up from 9.6 percent a year ago.

"Our results are a reflection of our ability to successfully execute on our strategy," said Kramer. "We will continue to focus on profitable growth in market segments where our innovation, brand and operational excellence capabilities provide a competitive advantage."

Goodyear's first quarter 2016 sales were $3.7 billion, down from $4.0 billion a year ago, largely due to unfavorable foreign currency translation of $141 million and the deconsolidation of the company's subsidiary in Venezuela.

Tire unit volumes totaled 41.5 million, up 2 percent from 2015, driven by growth in the Asia Pacific region, primarily in Japan and China. Replacement tire shipments were up 2 percent. Original equipment unit volume was up 2 percent. Excluding the impact of the deconsolidation of Venezuela, unit volumes increased 3 percent.

The company reported record first quarter segment operating income of $419 million in 2016, up from $388 million a year ago. The increase was driven by favorable price/mix net of raw materials and the impact of higher volume. These improvements were partially offset by the deconsolidation of the Venezuelan subsidiary and higher selling, administrative and general expenses. Core segment operating income, which excludes Venezuela, was $366 million in the year-ago quarter.

Goodyear's first quarter 2016 net income was $184 million (68 cents per share). Excluding certain significant items, adjusted net income was $195 million (72 cents per share). Per share amounts are diluted.

Goodyear's first quarter 2015 net income was $224 million (82 cents per share). Net income included a non-cash, one-time gain of $155 million ($99 million after taxes and minority interest) for the recognition of deferred royalty income resulting from the termination of a licensing agreement associated with the company's former Engineered Products business. Excluding certain significant items, adjusted net income was $148 million (54 cents per share). Per share amounts are diluted.

See the note at the end of this release for further explanation and reconciliation tables for Segment Operating Income and Margin; Adjusted Net Income; and Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share, reflecting the impact of certain significant items on the 2016 and 2015 periods.

Business Segment Results

Americas



First Quarter (in millions) 2016

2015 Tire Units 18.0

19.2 Sales $ 1,951

$ 2,243 Segment Operating Income 260

248 Segment Operating Margin 13.3%

11.1%

Americas' first quarter 2016 sales decreased 13 percent from last year to $2.0 billion. Sales reflect a 6 percent decrease in tire unit volume, primarily due to the deconsolidation of the Venezuelan subsidiary and the sale of the former Goodyear Dunlop Tires North America Ltd. business (GDTNA). Replacement tire shipments were down 6 percent. Original equipment unit volume was down 7 percent.

Excluding Venezuela and GDTNA, tire unit volume was down 2 percent, driven primarily by the weak economic environment in Brazil.

First quarter 2016 segment operating income of $260 million was a 5 percent improvement over the prior year. The improvement was driven primarily by favorable price/mix net of raw materials, partially offset by the deconsolidation of the Venezuelan subsidiary and lower volume.

The deconsolidation of the Venezuelan subsidiary negatively impacted volumes by approximately 0.4 million units, sales by $94 million and segment operating income by $22 million.

The sale of GDTNA negatively impacted volumes by approximately 0.3 million units, sales by $64 million and segment operating income by $12 million.

Europe, Middle East and Africa



First Quarter (in millions) 2016

2015 Tire Units 16.2

15.9 Sales $ 1,251

$ 1,331 Segment Operating Income 80

73 Segment Operating Margin 6.4%

5.5%

While Europe, Middle East and Africa's first quarter tire unit volumes were up 2 percent, sales decreased 6 percent from last year to $1.3 billion, primarily due to unfavorable price/mix and foreign currency translation. Replacement tire shipments were flat. Original equipment unit volume was up 5 percent.

First quarter 2016 segment operating income of $80 million was 10 percent above the prior year due to favorable price/mix net of raw materials and lower conversion costs.

Asia Pacific



First Quarter (in millions) 2016

2015 Tire Units 7.3

5.7 Sales $ 489

$ 450 Segment Operating Income 79

67 Segment Operating Margin 16.2%

14.9%

Asia Pacific's first quarter 2016 sales increased 9 percent from last year to $489 million. Sales reflect a 28 percent increase in tire unit volume, primarily due to growth in Japan and China. This improvement was partially offset by unfavorable foreign currency translation. Replacement tire shipments were up 41 percent. Original equipment unit volume was up 14 percent.

First quarter 2016 segment operating income of $79 million was up 18 percent from last year, driven by higher volume and favorable price/mix net of raw materials.

The acquisition of a controlling interest in Nippon Goodyear Ltd. (NGY) in Japan positively impacted volumes by approximately 0.9 million units and sales by $41 million. The net unfavorable impact on segment operating income of the NGY acquisition and the sale of the company's 25 percent interest in Dunlop Goodyear Tires Ltd. was $3 million.

2016 Financial Targets

The company reaffirmed its 2016 financial targets, which include:

Core Segment Operating Income growth of between 10 percent and 15 percent (excludes Venezuela );

); Positive Free Cash Flow from Operations and

An Adjusted Debt to EBITDAP ratio of 2.0x to 2.1x at year-end.

Shareholder Return Program

The company paid a quarterly dividend of 7 cents per share of common stock on March 1, 2016. The Board of Directors has declared a quarterly dividend of 7 cents per share payable June 1, 2016, to shareholders of record on May 2, 2016.

As a part of its previously announced $1.1 billion share repurchase program, the company repurchased 1.6 million shares of its common stock for $50 million during the first quarter.

Investor Day

The company announced that it will hold an Investor Day on September 15, 2016 in Boston. Additional details will be made available at a later date.

Conference Call

Goodyear will hold an investor conference call at 9 a.m. today. Prior to the commencement of the call, the company will post the financial and other related information that will be presented on its investor relations Web site: http://investor.goodyear.com.

Participating in the conference call will be Richard J. Kramer, chairman, chief executive officer and president; and Laura K. Thompson, executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Investors, members of the media and other interested persons can access the conference call on the Web site or via telephone by calling either (800) 895-1715 or (785) 424-1059 before 8:55 a.m. and providing the Conference ID "Goodyear." A taped replay will be available by calling (800) 723-7372 or (402) 220-2666. The replay will also remain available on the Web site.

Goodyear is one of the world's largest tire companies. It employs about 66,000 people and manufactures its products in 49 facilities in 22 countries around the world. Its two Innovation Centers in Akron, Ohio and Colmar-Berg, Luxembourg strive to develop state-of-the-art products and services that set the technology and performance standard for the industry. For more information about Goodyear and its products, go to www.goodyear.com/corporate. GT-FN

Certain information contained in this press release constitutes forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. There are a variety of factors, many of which are beyond our control, that affect our operations, performance, business strategy and results and could cause our actual results and experience to differ materially from the assumptions, expectations and objectives expressed in any forward-looking statements. These factors include, but are not limited to: our ability to implement successfully our strategic initiatives; actions and initiatives taken by both current and potential competitors; foreign currency translation and transaction risks; a labor strike, work stoppage or other similar event; deteriorating economic conditions or an inability to access capital markets; work stoppages, financial difficulties or supply disruptions at our suppliers or customers; the adequacy of our capital expenditures; increases in the prices paid for raw materials and energy; our failure to comply with a material covenant in our debt obligations; potential adverse consequences of litigation involving the company; as well as the effects of more general factors such as changes in general market, economic or political conditions or in legislation, regulation or public policy. Additional factors are discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K. In addition, any forward-looking statements represent our estimates only as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our estimates as of any subsequent date. While we may elect to update forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, even if our estimates change.

(financial statements follow)

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and Subsidiaries

Consolidated Statements of Operations (unaudited)







Three Months

Ended



March 31,

(In millions, except per share amounts) 2016

2015











NET SALES $ 3,691

$ 4,024











Cost of Goods Sold 2,701

3,066

Selling, Administrative and General Expense 615

608

Rationalizations 11

16

Interest Expense 91

107

Other (Income) Expense 6

(132)











Income before Income Taxes 267

359

United States and Foreign Taxes 78

123











Net Income 189

236

Less: Minority Shareholders' Net Income 5

12











Goodyear Net Income $ 184

$ 224











Goodyear Net Income - Per Share of

Common Stock

















Basic $ 0.69

$ 0.83











Weighted Average Shares Outstanding 267

270











Diluted $ 0.68

$ 0.82











Weighted Average Shares Outstanding 271

274











Cash Dividends Declared Per Common Share $ 0.07

$ 0.06





























The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and Subsidiaries

Consolidated Balance Sheets



(In millions, except share data) March 31,

December 31,

2016

2015 Assets:





Current Assets:





Cash and Cash Equivalents $ 1,079

$ 1,476 Accounts Receivable, less Allowance - $114 ($105 in 2015) 2,482

2,033 Inventories:





Raw Materials 418

419 Work in Process 145

138 Finished Products 2,073

1,907

2,636

2,464 Prepaid Expenses and Other Current Assets 178

153 Total Current Assets 6,375

6,126 Goodwill 574

555 Intangible Assets 138

138 Deferred Income Taxes 2,074

2,141 Other Assets 676

654 Property, Plant and Equipment less Accumulated Depreciation - $8,934 ($8,637 in 2015) 6,940

6,777 Total Assets $ 16,777

$ 16,391







Liabilities:





Current Liabilities:





Accounts Payable-Trade $ 2,653

$ 2,769 Compensation and Benefits 615

666 Other Current Liabilities 943

886 Notes Payable and Overdrafts 76

49 Long Term Debt and Capital Leases due Within One Year 314

585 Total Current Liabilities 4,601

4,955 Long Term Debt and Capital Leases 5,685

5,074 Compensation and Benefits 1,437

1,468 Deferred Income Taxes 87

91 Other Long Term Liabilities 635

661 Total Liabilities 12,445

12,249







Commitments and Contingent Liabilities













Shareholders' Equity:





Goodyear Shareholders' Equity:





Common Stock, no par value:





Authorized, 450 million shares, Outstanding shares  266 million (267 million in 2015) after deducting 12 million treasury shares (11 million in 2015) 266

267 Capital Surplus 3,053

3,093 Retained Earnings 4,735

4,570 Accumulated Other Comprehensive Loss (3,950)

(4,010) Goodyear Shareholders' Equity 4,104

3,920 Minority Shareholders' Equity  Nonredeemable 228

222 Total Shareholders' Equity 4,332

4,142 Total Liabilities and Shareholders' Equity $ 16,777

$ 16,391

















The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and Subsidiaries Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows (unaudited)

(In millions) Three Months Ended

March 31,

2016 2015 Cash Flows from Operating Activities:



Net Income (Loss) $ 189 $ 236 Adjustments to Reconcile Net Income (Loss) to Cash Flows from Operating Activities:



Depreciation and Amortization 174 172 Amortization and Write-Off of Debt Issuance Costs 7 2 Provision for Deferred Income Taxes 46 91 Net Rationalization Charges 11 16 Rationalization Payments (24) (26) Net (Gains) Losses on Asset Sales (1) 1 Pension Contributions and Direct Payments (25) (26) Gain on Recognition of Deferred Royalty Income -- (155) Changes in Operating Assets and Liabilities, Net of Asset Acquisitions and Dispositions:



Accounts Receivable (399) (495) Inventories (116) 8 Accounts Payable - Trade (96) (82) Compensation and Benefits (100) (82) Other Current Liabilities 24 (9) Other Assets and Liabilities (71) 87 Total Cash Flows from Operating Activities (381) (262) Cash Flows from Investing Activities:



Capital Expenditures (253) (204) Asset Dispositions 1 1 Decrease in Restricted Cash 7 2 Short Term Securities Acquired (12) -- Short Term Securities Redeemed -- 21 Total Cash Flows from Investing Activities (257) (180) Cash Flows from Financing Activities:



Short Term Debt and Overdrafts Incurred 26 16 Short Term Debt and Overdrafts Paid (2) (22) Long Term Debt Incurred 1,085 616 Long Term Debt Paid (822) (628) Common Stock Issued 2 2 Common Stock Repurchased (50) (1) Common Stock Dividends Paid (19) (16) Transactions with Minority Interests in Subsidiaries (6) (1) Debt Related Costs and Other Transactions (1) -- Total Cash Flows from Financing Activities 213 (34) Effect of Exchange Rate Changes on Cash and Cash Equivalents 28 (72) Net Change in Cash and Cash Equivalents (397) (548) Cash and Cash Equivalents at Beginning of the Period 1,476 2,161 Cash and Cash Equivalents at End of the Period $ 1,079 $ 1,613













Non-GAAP Financial Measures (unaudited)

This earnings release presents Total Segment Operating Income, Core Segment Operating Income, Adjusted Net Income and Adjusted Diluted Earnings Per Share (EPS) on a historical basis and our targeted Core Segment Operating Income growth rate for 2016 and our targeted ratio of Adjusted Debt to EBITDAP for 2016, which are important financial measures for the company but are not financial measures defined by U.S. GAAP, and should not be construed as an alternative to corresponding financial measures presented in accordance with U.S. GAAP.

Total Segment Operating Income is the sum of the individual strategic business units' (SBU's) Segment Operating Income as determined in accordance with U.S. GAAP. Management believes that Total Segment Operating Income is useful because it represents the aggregate value of income created by the company's SBUs and excludes items not directly related to the SBUs for performance evaluation purposes.

Core Segment Operating Income is Total Segment Operating Income excluding the operating income from our Venezuelan subsidiary, which we deconsolidated on December 31, 2015. Management believes that Core Segment Operating Income is useful because it represents Total Segment Operating Income from the company's ongoing reported operations.

Adjusted Net Income is Goodyear's Net Income as determined in accordance with U.S. GAAP adjusted for certain significant items. Adjusted Diluted EPS is the company's Adjusted Net Income divided by Weighted Average Shares Outstanding-Diluted as determined in accordance with U.S. GAAP. Management believes that Adjusted Net Income and Adjusted Diluted EPS are useful because they represent how management reviews the operating results of the company excluding the impacts of rationalizations, asset write-offs, accelerated depreciation, asset sales and certain other significant items.

Adjusted Debt is the sum of our total debt and our global pension liability, each as determined in accordance with U.S. GAAP, and EBITDAP, as adjusted, represents Net Income (the most directly comparable U.S. GAAP financial measure) before interest expense, income tax expense, depreciation and amortization expense, net periodic pension cost, rationalization charges and other (income) expense. We refer to the ratio of Adjusted Debt to EBITDAP because we believe it is widely used by investors as a means of evaluating a company's leverage.

We are unable to present a quantitative reconciliation of our forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable U.S. GAAP financial measures, because management cannot reliably predict all of the necessary components of those U.S. GAAP financial measures without unreasonable effort. These components could be significant to the calculation of those U.S. GAAP financial measures in the future.

It should be noted that other companies may calculate similarly-titled non-GAAP financial measures differently and, as a result, the measures presented herein may not be comparable to such similarly-titled measures reported by other companies.

See the tables below for reconciliations of historical Total Segment Operating Income, Core Segment Operating Income, Adjusted Net Income and Adjusted Diluted EPS to the most directly comparable U.S. GAAP measures.

Segment Operating Income and Margin Reconciliation Table



Three Months

Ended March 31,



(In millions) 2016 2015 Core Segment Operating Income $419 $366 Venezuela Subsidiary Operating Income -- 22 Total Segment Operating Income $419 $388 Rationalizations 11 16 Interest Expense 91 107 Other (Income) Expense 6 (132) Asset Write-offs and Accelerated Depreciation 2 3 Corporate Incentive Compensation Plans 26 13 Intercompany Profit Elimination 2 4 Retained Expenses of Divested Operations 5 2 Other 9 16 Income before Income Taxes $267 $359 United States and Foreign Taxes 78 123 Less: Minority Shareholders Net Income 5 12 Goodyear Net Income $184 $224





Sales $3,691 $4,024 Return on Sales 5.0% 5.6% Total Segment Operating Margin 11.4% 9.6%







Adjusted Net Income and Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share Reconciliation Table



Net Income Weighted Average

First Quarter 2016 After-tax and

Minority Interest Shares Outstanding-

Diluted Diluted EPS (In millions, except EPS)





Goodyear Net Income $ 184 271 $ 0.68







Significant Items:





Rationalizations, Asset Write-offs, and Accelerated

Depreciation 12



Debt Repayments 12



Discrete Tax Items (11)



Insurance Recovery  Discontinued Products (2)





11



As Adjusted $195 271 $ 0.72









Net Income Weighted Average

First Quarter 2015 After-tax and

Minority Interest Shares Outstanding-

Diluted Diluted EPS (In millions, except EPS)





Goodyear Net Income $ 224 274 $ 0.82







Significant Items:





Rationalizations, Asset Write-offs, and Accelerated

Depreciation 14



Discrete Tax Items 5



Charges for Labor Claims Related to a Closed Facility in

Greece 4



Gain on Recognition of Deferred Royalty Income (99)





(76)



As Adjusted $148 274 $ 0.54

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/goodyear-reports-record-first-quarter-results-300258330.html

SOURCE The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company

CONTACT: MEDIA CONTACT: Keith Price 330-796-1863; ANALYST CONTACT: Christina Zamarro 330-796-1042

RELATED LINKShttp://www.goodyear.com
CHICAGO, April 27, 2016 --

Revenue increased to $22.6 billion

Solid core EPS (non-GAAP)* of $1.74 after $0.24 KC-46 charge; GAAP EPS of $1.83

Strong operating cash flow of $1.2 billion ; repurchased 28.6 million shares for $3.5 billion

Backlog remains robust at $480 billion with over 5,700 commercial airplane orders

Revenue, margins, EPS and operating cash flow guidance reaffirmed

























Table 1. Summary Financial Results

First Quarter



(Dollars in Millions, except per share data)

2016

2015

Change













Revenues



$22,632





$22,149



2%















Non-GAAP*











Core Operating Earnings



$1,694





$2,132



(21)%

Core Operating Margin

7.5%



9.6%



(2.1) Pts

Core Earnings Per Share



$1.74





$1.97



(12)%

GAAP











Earnings From Operations



$1,788





$2,019



(11)%

Operating Margin

7.9%



9.1%



(1.2) Pts

Net Earnings



$1,219





$1,336



(9)%

Earnings Per Share



$1.83





$1.87



(2)%

Operating Cash Flow



$1,231





$88



1,299%







* Non-GAAP measures. Complete definitions of Boeing's non-GAAP measures are on page 6, "Non-GAAP Measures Disclosures."

The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] reported first-quarter revenue increased 2 percent to $22.6 billion (Table 1). Core earnings per share (Non-GAAP)* of $1.74 reflect solid core operating performance that offset a $156 million after-tax charge ($0.24 per share) on the KC-46 Tanker program to maintain schedule with concurrency between late-stage development testing and the transition to initial production. GAAP earnings per share was $1.83.

The company's full year guidance is reaffirmed, primarily driven by improved performance.

"Higher year-over-year deliveries of military aircraft and continued solid operating performance on core production programs drove revenue growth and strong cash flow for Boeing in the first quarter," said Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg. "This performance enabled our ongoing investments in new product innovation and in our people, and the return of significant cash to shareholders through stock repurchases and dividends."

"Overall, we are pleased with our performance trends and our outlook for the year remains positive. On the tanker program, we are making the investments necessary to meet our customer commitments, deliver the initial production aircraft on schedule, and transition the program into full production," said Muilenburg.

"Our teams are focused intensely on delivering on our existing commitments including the production ramp-up associated with our large and diverse backlog, accelerating progress on quality, safety and productivity improvements company wide, returning greater value to shareholders through profitable growth, and investing in the future as we enter our second century in business."



















Table 2. Cash Flow

First Quarter (Millions)

2016

2015 Operating Cash Flow



$1,231





$88

Less Additions to Property, Plant & Equipment



($748)





($574)

Free Cash Flow*



$483





($486)



Operating cash flow in the quarter was $1.2 billion, reflecting commercial airplane production rates, solid core operating performance and the timing of receipts and expenditures (Table 2). During the quarter, the company repurchased 28.6 million shares for $3.5 billion, leaving $10.5 billion remaining under the current repurchase authorization which is expected to be completed over approximately the next two years. The company also paid $0.7 billion in dividends, reflecting an approximately 20 percent increase in dividends per share compared to the same period of the prior year.



















Table 3. Cash, Marketable Securities and Debt Balances

Quarter-End (Billions)

Q1 16

Q4 15 Cash



$7.9





$11.3

Marketable Securities1



$0.5





$0.8

Total



$8.4





$12.1

Debt Balances:







The Boeing Company, net of intercompany loans to BCC



$7.6





$7.6

Boeing Capital, including intercompany loans



$2.4





$2.4

Total Consolidated Debt



$10.0





$10.0







1 Marketable securities consists primarily of time deposits due within one year classified as "short-term investments."

Cash and investments in marketable securities totaled $8.4 billion, down from $12.1 billion at the beginning of the quarter, primarily due to share repurchases and the timing of cash flows. Debt was $10.0 billion, unchanged from the beginning of the quarter (Table 3).

Total company backlog at quarter-end was $480 billion, down from $489 billion at the beginning of the quarter, and included net orders for the quarter of $13 billion.

Segment Results

Commercial Airplanes

























Table 4. Commercial Airplanes

First Quarter



(Dollars in Millions)

2016

2015

Change













Commercial Airplanes Deliveries

176



184



(4)%















Revenues



$14,399





$15,381



(6)%

Earnings from Operations



$1,033





$1,617



(36)%

Operating Margin

7.2%



10.5%



(3.3) Pts



Commercial Airplanes first-quarter revenue decreased to $14.4 billion on lower delivery volume (Table 4). First-quarter operating margin was 7.2 percent, reflecting the $162 million pre-tax charge on the KC-46 Tanker program, higher R&D, mix and a $70 million pre-tax charge on the 747 program.

During the quarter, the company completed first flight of the 737 MAX. The 737 program has captured nearly 3,100 orders for the 737 MAX since launch. Also during the quarter, the company began major assembly of the 787-10 ahead of schedule and launched the Next-Generation 737 freighter conversion program.

Commercial Airplanes booked 121 net orders during the quarter. Backlog remains strong with over 5,700 airplanes valued at $424 billion.

Defense, Space & Security

























Table 5. Defense, Space & Security

First Quarter



(Dollars in Millions)

2016

2015

Change Revenues1











Boeing Military Aircraft



$3,659





$2,726



34%

Network & Space Systems



$1,735





$1,732



%

Global Services & Support



$2,562





$2,251



14%

Total BDS Revenues



$7,956





$6,709



19%

Earnings from Operations1











Boeing Military Aircraft



$334





$259



29%

Network & Space Systems



$148





$167



(11)%

Global Services & Support



$340





$317



7%

Total BDS Earnings from Operations



$822





$743



11%

Operating Margin

10.3%



11.1%



(0.8) Pts







1 During the first quarter of 2016, certain programs were realigned between Boeing Military Aircraft and Global Services & Support.

Defense, Space & Security's first-quarter revenue was $8.0 billion. First quarter operating margin was 10.3 percent, reflecting the $81 million pre-tax charge recorded at BMA on the KC-46 Tanker program partially offset by strong performance on production programs (Table 5).

Boeing Military Aircraft (BMA) first-quarter revenue increased to $3.7 billion, reflecting higher F-15 and C-17 deliveries. Operating margin was 9.1 percent, reflecting the KC-46 Tanker program charge partially offset by delivery mix. All four planned KC-46 test aircraft are now flying, and during the first quarter the KC-46 demonstrated its refueling capabilities with multiple other aircraft types. Also during the quarter, BMA was awarded a contract from the U.S. Navy for 20 P-8A Poseidon aircraft and a contract from the U.S. Army for 117 Apache helicopters.

Network & Space Systems (N&SS) first-quarter revenue was $1.7 billion. Operating margin was 8.5 percent, reflecting timing on United Launch Alliance launches. During the quarter, N&SS successfully launched the first of six Boeing-built Intelsat Epic satellites.

Global Services & Support (GS&S) first-quarter revenue increased to $2.6 billion, reflecting higher volume in Aircraft Modernization & Sustainment and Training Systems. Operating margin was 13.3 percent, reflecting program mix. During the quarter, GS&S was awarded a NATO contract for C-17 training.

Backlog at Defense, Space & Security was $56 billion, of which 37 percent represents orders from international customers.

Additional Financial Information



















Table 6. Additional Financial Information

First Quarter (Dollars in Millions)

2016

2015 Revenues







Boeing Capital



$64





$86

Unallocated items, eliminations and other



$213





($27)

Earnings from Operations







Boeing Capital



$5





$20

Unallocated pension/postretirement



$94





($113)

Other unallocated items and eliminations



($166)





($248)

Other income/(loss), net



$26





($12)

Interest and debt expense



($73)





($61)

Effective tax rate

30.0%



31.3%



At quarter-end, Boeing Capital's net portfolio balance was $3.2 billion, down from the beginning of the quarter. Unallocated items and eliminations first quarter revenue reflects the payoff of two aircraft previously financed by Boeing Capital. Total pension expense for the first quarter was $629 million, down from $785 million in the same period of the prior year. Other unallocated items and eliminations decreased from the same period in the prior year primarily due to lower deferred compensation expense.

Outlook

The company's 2016 financial and delivery guidance (Table 7) is reaffirmed and reflects continued solid performance across the company.









Table 7. 2016 Financial Outlook



Current (Dollars in Billions, except per share data)



Guidance







The Boeing Company





Revenue



$93.0 - 95.0 Core Earnings Per Share*



$8.15 - 8.35 GAAP Earnings Per Share



$8.45 - 8.65 Operating Cash Flow



~$10.0







Commercial Airplanes





Deliveries



740 - 745 Revenue



$64.0 - 65.0 Operating Margin



~9.0%







Defense, Space & Security





Revenue





Boeing Military Aircraft



~$12.3 Network & Space Systems



~$7.3 Global Services & Support



~$9.4







Total BDS Revenue



$28.5 - 29.5







Operating Margin





Boeing Military Aircraft



~10.0% Network & Space Systems



~9.0% Global Services & Support



~11.5%







Total BDS Operating Margin



>10.0%







Boeing Capital





Portfolio Size



Stable Revenue



~$0.3 Pre-Tax Earnings



~$0.05







Research & Development



~ $3.6 Capital Expenditures



~ $2.8 Pension Expense 1



~ $2.1 Effective Tax Rate



~ 30.0%





1 Approximately ($0.1) billion is expected to be recorded in unallocated items and eliminations * Non-GAAP measures. Complete definitions of Boeing's non-GAAP measures are on page 6, "Non-GAAP Measures Disclosures."

Non-GAAP Measures Disclosures

We supplement the reporting of our financial information determined under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) with certain non-GAAP financial information. The non-GAAP financial information presented excludes certain significant items that may not be indicative of, or are unrelated to, results from our ongoing business operations. We believe that these non-GAAP measures provide investors with additional insight into the company's ongoing business performance. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the related GAAP measures, and other companies may define such measures differently. We encourage investors to review our financial statements and publicly-filed reports in their entirety and not to rely on any single financial measure. The following definitions are provided:

Core Operating Earnings, Core Operating Margin and Core Earnings Per Share

Core operating earnings is defined as GAAP earnings from operations excluding unallocated pension and post-retirement expense. Core operating margin is defined as core operating earnings expressed as a percentage of revenue. Core earnings per share is defined as GAAP diluted earnings per share excluding the net earnings per share impact of unallocated pension and post-retirement expense. Unallocated pension and post-retirement expense represents the portion of pension and other post-retirement costs that are not recognized by business segments for segment reporting purposes. Management uses core operating earnings, core operating margin and core earnings per share for purposes of evaluating and forecasting underlying business performance. Management believes these core earnings measures provide investors additional insights into operational performance as they exclude unallocated pension and post-retirement costs, which primarily represent costs driven by market factors and costs not allocable to government contracts. A reconciliation between the GAAP and non-GAAP measures is provided on page 13.

Free Cash Flow

Free cash flow is defined as GAAP operating cash flow without capital expenditures for property, plant and equipment additions. Management believes free cash flow provides investors with an important perspective on the cash available for shareholders, debt repayment, and acquisitions after making the capital investments required to support ongoing business operations and long term value creation. Free cash flow does not represent the residual cash flow available for discretionary expenditures as it excludes certain mandatory expenditures such as repayment of maturing debt. Management uses free cash flow as a measure to assess both business performance and overall liquidity. Table 2 provides a reconciliation between GAAP operating cash flow and free cash flow.

Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "may," "should," "expects," "intends," "projects," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "targets," "anticipates," and similar expressions are used to identify these forward-looking statements. Examples of forward-looking statements include statements relating to our future financial condition and operating results, as well as any other statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions, which may not prove to be accurate. These statements are not guarantees and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict. Many factors could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from these forward-looking statements. Among these factors are risks related to: (1) general conditions in the economy and our industry, including those due to regulatory changes; (2) our reliance on our commercial airline customers; (3) the overall health of our aircraft production system, planned production rate increases across multiple commercial airline programs, our commercial development and derivative aircraft programs, and our aircraft being subject to stringent performance and reliability standards; (4) changing budget and appropriation levels and acquisition priorities of the U.S. government; (5) our dependence on U.S. government contracts; (6) our reliance on fixed-price contracts; (7) our reliance on cost-type contracts; (8) uncertainties concerning contracts that include in-orbit incentive payments; (9) our dependence on our subcontractors and suppliers, as well as the availability of raw materials, (10) changes in accounting estimates; (11) changes in the competitive landscape in our markets; (12) our non-U.S. operations, including sales to non-U.S. customers; (13) potential adverse developments in new or pending litigation and/or government investigations; (14) customer and aircraft concentration in Boeing Capital's customer financing portfolio; (15) changes in our ability to obtain debt on commercially reasonable terms and at competitive rates in order to fund our operations and contractual commitments; (16) realizing the anticipated benefits of mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures/strategic alliances or divestitures; (17) the adequacy of our insurance coverage to cover significant risk exposures; (18) potential business disruptions, including those related to physical security threats, information technology or cyber-attacks, epidemics, sanctions or natural disasters; (19) work stoppages or other labor disruptions; (20) significant changes in discount rates and actual investment return on pension assets; (21) potential environmental liabilities; and (22) threats to the security of our or our customers' information.

Additional information concerning these and other factors can be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made, and we assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law.

Contact:













Investor Relations:

Troy Lahr or Ben Hackman (312) 544-2140 Communications:

Bernard Choi (312) 544-2002

The Boeing Company and Subsidiaries Consolidated Statements of Operations (Unaudited)

















Three months ended

March 31 (Dollars in millions, except per share data) 2016



2015

Sales of products

$19,885





$19,485

Sales of services 2,747



2,664

Total revenues 22,632



22,149









Cost of products (16,945)



(16,380)

Cost of services (2,136)



(2,100)

Boeing Capital interest expense (16)



(16)

Total costs and expenses (19,097)



(18,496)



3,535



3,653

Income from operating investments, net 54



79

General and administrative expense (888)



(945)

Research and development expense, net (917)



(769)

Gain on dispositions, net 4



1

Earnings from operations 1,788



2,019

Other income/(loss), net 26



(12)

Interest and debt expense (73)



(61)

Earnings before income taxes 1,741



1,946

Income tax expense (522)



(610)

Net earnings

$1,219





$1,336









Basic earnings per share

$1.85





$1.89









Diluted earnings per share

$1.83





$1.87









Cash dividends paid per share

$1.09





$0.91









Weighted average diluted shares (millions) 665.8



714.2



The Boeing Company and Subsidiaries Consolidated Statements of Financial Position (Unaudited)















(Dollars in millions, except per share data) March 31

2016



December 31

2015

Assets





Cash and cash equivalents

$7,886





$11,302

Short-term and other investments 466



750

Accounts receivable, net 9,711



8,713

Current portion of customer financing, net 258



212

Inventories, net of advances and progress billings 47,266



47,257

Total current assets 65,587



68,234

Customer financing, net 2,980



3,358

Property, plant and equipment, net of accumulated depreciation of $16,476 and $16,286 12,269



12,076

Goodwill 5,132



5,126

Acquired intangible assets, net 2,594



2,657

Deferred income taxes 267



265

Investments 1,297



1,284

Other assets, net of accumulated amortization of $478 and $451 1,421



1,408

Total assets

$91,547





$94,408

Liabilities and equity





Accounts payable

$11,558





$10,800

Accrued liabilities 12,790



14,014

Advances and billings in excess of related costs 23,926



24,364

Short-term debt and current portion of long-term debt 1,243



1,234

Total current liabilities 49,517



50,412

Deferred income taxes 2,297



2,392

Accrued retiree health care 6,614



6,616

Accrued pension plan liability, net 18,196



17,783

Other long-term liabilities 2,096



2,078

Long-term debt 8,721



8,730

Shareholders' equity:





Common stock, par value $5.00  1,200,000,000 shares authorized; 1,012,261,159 shares issued 5,061



5,061

Additional paid-in capital 4,784



4,834

Treasury stock, at cost - 372,446,158 and 345,637,354 shares (32,939)



(29,568)

Retained earnings 39,975



38,756

Accumulated other comprehensive loss (12,838)



(12,748)

Total shareholders' equity 4,043



6,335

Noncontrolling interests 63



62

Total equity 4,106



6,397

Total liabilities and equity

$91,547





$94,408



The Boeing Company and Subsidiaries Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows (Unaudited)

















Three months ended

March 31 (Dollars in millions) 2016



2015

Cash flows  operating activities:





Net earnings

$1,219





$1,336

Adjustments to reconcile net earnings to net cash provided by operating activities:





Non-cash items 





Share-based plans expense 51



50

Depreciation and amortization 443



459

Investment/asset impairment charges, net 33



17

Customer financing valuation benefit (2)



(2)

Gain on dispositions, net (4)



(1)

Other charges and credits, net 84



76

Excess tax benefits from share-based payment arrangements (44)



(112)

Changes in assets and liabilities 





Accounts receivable (1,002)



(389)

Inventories, net of advances and progress billings (56)



(1,822)

Accounts payable 960



848

Accrued liabilities (467)



(900)

Advances and billings in excess of related costs (435)



(422)

Income taxes receivable, payable and deferred 273



443

Other long-term liabilities (116)



(82)

Pension and other postretirement plans 79



608

Customer financing, net 276



31

Other (61)



(50)

Net cash provided by operating activities 1,231



88

Cash flows  investing activities:





Property, plant and equipment additions (748)



(574)

Property, plant and equipment reductions 11







Contributions to investments (204)



(807)

Proceeds from investments 493



1,159

Other 10



8

Net cash used by investing activities (438)



(214)

Cash flows  financing activities:





New borrowings 115



761

Debt repayments (128)



(813)

Stock options exercised 42



231

Excess tax benefits from share-based payment arrangements 44



112

Employee taxes on certain share-based payment arrangements (76)



(87)

Common shares repurchased (3,501)



(2,500)

Dividends paid (717)



(639)

Net cash used by financing activities (4,221)



(2,935)

Effect of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents 12



(17)

Net decrease in cash and cash equivalents (3,416)



(3,078)

Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of year 11,302



11,733

Cash and cash equivalents at end of period

$7,886





$8,655



The Boeing Company and Subsidiaries Summary of Business Segment Data (Unaudited)

















Three months ended

March 31 (Dollars in millions) 2016



2015

Revenues:





Commercial Airplanes

$14,399





$15,381

Defense, Space & Security:





Boeing Military Aircraft 3,659



2,726

Network & Space Systems 1,735



1,732

Global Services & Support 2,562



2,251

Total Defense, Space & Security 7,956



6,709

Boeing Capital 64



86

Unallocated items, eliminations and other 213



(27)

Total revenues

$22,632





$22,149

Earnings from operations:





Commercial Airplanes

$1,033





$1,617

Defense, Space & Security:





Boeing Military Aircraft 334



259

Network & Space Systems 148



167

Global Services & Support 340



317

Total Defense, Space & Security 822



743

Boeing Capital 5



20

Segment operating profit 1,860



2,380

Unallocated items, eliminations and other (72)



(361)

Earnings from operations 1,788



2,019

Other income/(loss), net 26



(12)

Interest and debt expense (73)



(61)

Earnings before income taxes 1,741



1,946

Income tax expense (522)



(610)

Net earnings

$1,219





$1,336









Research and development expense, net:





Commercial Airplanes

$671





$543

Defense, Space & Security 258



224

Other (12)



2

Total research and development expense, net

$917





$769









Unallocated items, eliminations and other:





Share-based plans

($23)





($21)

Deferred compensation 16



(58)

Amortization of previously capitalized interest (30)



(29)

Eliminations and other unallocated items (129)



(140)

Sub-total (included in core operating earnings) (166)



(248)

Pension 45



(152)

Postretirement 49



39

Total unallocated items, eliminations and other

($72)





($361)



The Boeing Company and Subsidiaries Operating and Financial Data (Unaudited)













Deliveries Three months ended

March 31

Commercial Airplanes 2016



2015



737 121



121



747 1



4



767 1



5



777 23



24



787 30



30



Total 176



184



Note: Deliveries under operating lease are identified by parentheses.









Defense, Space & Security







Boeing Military Aircraft







AH-64 Apache (New) 7



6



AH-64 Apache (Remanufactured) 11



10



C-17 Globemaster III 3



1



CH-47 Chinook (New) 3



6



CH-47 Chinook (Renewed) 9



4



F-15 Models 4



1



F/A-18 Models 8



11



P-8 Models 4



2













Global Services & Support







AEW&C











C-40A





1













Network & Space Systems







Commercial and Civil Satellites 1







Military Satellites





































Contractual backlog (Dollars in billions)

March 31

2016



December 31

2015

Commercial Airplanes



$423.0





$431.4

Defense, Space & Security:







Boeing Military Aircraft

22.1



19.9

Network & Space Systems

8.0



7.4

Global Services & Support

17.1



17.9

Total Defense, Space & Security

47.2



45.2

Total contractual backlog



$470.2





$476.6

Unobligated backlog



$9.8





$12.7

Total backlog



$480.0





$489.3

Workforce

159,100



161,400































The Boeing Company and Subsidiaries Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Measures Core Operating Earnings, Core Operating Margin and Core Earnings Per Share (Unaudited)

The tables provided below reconcile the non-GAAP financial measures core operating earnings, core operating margin and core earnings per share with the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, earnings from operations, operating margin and diluted earnings per share. See page 6 of this release for additional information on the use of these non-GAAP financial measures.

























First Quarter

Guidance

2016

2015

2016 Revenues

$22,632





$22,149

















GAAP Earnings From Operations

$1,788





$2,019





GAAP Operating Margin 7.9%



9.1%

















Unallocated Pension/Postretirement Expense

($94)





$113



~($300)

Core Operating Earnings (non-GAAP)

$1,694





$2,132





Core Operating Margin (non-GAAP) 7.5%



9.6%

















Increase/(Decrease) in GAAP Earnings From Operations (11%)









Increase/(Decrease) in Core Operating Earnings (non-GAAP) (21%)





















GAAP Diluted Earnings Per Share

$1.83





$1.87



$8.45 - $8.65

Unallocated Pension/Postretirement Expense1

($0.09)





$0.10





($0.30)

Core Earnings Per Share (non-GAAP)

$1.74





$1.97



$8.15 - $8.35













Weighted Average Diluted Shares (millions) 665.8



714.2



645 - 650

Increase/(Decrease) in GAAP Earnings Per Share (2%)











Increase/(Decrease) in Core Earnings Per Share (non-GAAP) (12%)

















1 Earnings per share impact is presented net of the federal statutory tax rate of 35.0 percent.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/boeing-reports-first-quarter-results-and-reaffirms-2016-guidance-300258331.html

SOURCE Boeing
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, April 27, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --

Net profit of US$ 103 million for 2015

for 2015 Total revenue of US$ 9.02 billion on back of increased passenger and cargo volumes

on back of increased passenger and cargo volumes Passenger volume continues to grow faster than capacity, outpacing regional growth

Equity strategy delivers success in network, revenue growth and economies of scale

Partnership revenues up to US$ 1.4 billion , delivering five million passengers onto Etihad Airways network

, delivering five million passengers onto Etihad Airways network Growth across group's business streams, including cargo, MRO, catering and ground handling, and frequent flier programme

2015 PERFORMANCE HIGHLIGHTS OF ETIHAD AIRWAYS

Key Indicators 2015 * 2014 ** Revenue (US$ billion) 9.02 7.55 EBIT (US$ million) 259 257 EBITDAR (US$ billion) 1.4 1.1 Net profit (US$ million) 103 73 Total passengers (million) 17.6 14.8 Revenue passenger kilometres (billion) 83.2 68.6 Available seat kilometres (billion) 104.8 86.6 Seat factor 79.4% 79.2% Number of aircraft 121 110 Codeshare partners 49 49 Partner revenue (US$ million) 1,379 1,129 Cargo tonnage (tonnes '000) 591 569 Number of employees 26,566 24,206 * 2015 figures shown above represent Etihad Airways' consolidated financial statements ** 2014 figures shown above represent the stand alone airline business

Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, today announced its strongest annual financial results to date, with a net profit of US$ 103 million on total revenues of US$ 9.02 billion.

The performance, which marked the airline's fifth consecutive year of net profitability, also saw earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) of US$ 259 million, and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortisation and rentals (EBITDAR) of US$ 1.4 billion, representing 16 per cent of total revenues.

James Hogan, Etihad Airways President and Chief Executive Officer, said:

"Our mandate is to build a sustainably profitable airline. A fifth year of net profits, with our best annual financial performance to date, shows that we are delivering against that goal.

"Our profitability clearly demonstrates the success of our business strategy, based on organic growth boosted by our partnerships.

"As well as operating profitability, we are building enterprise value across the airline and its many additional business streams."

Etihad Airways' financial statements are audited by Deloitte and are in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

Strong operational performance saw improved load factor, as passenger volumes outpaced capacity increases

Etihad Airways carried a total of 17.6 million passengers in 2015, an increase of 18.9 per cent year-on-year. The growth in passenger volume continued to exceed Etihad Airways' capacity increase and outperformed regional market growth, which has seen a decline in load factors since mid-2014.1 Revenue Passenger Kilometres (RPKs), which measure passenger journeys, increased 21.3 per cent to 83.2 billion, while Available Seat Kilometres (ASKs), which represent capacity, grew by 21.0 per cent to 104.8 billion.

In total, the airline operated 97,400 flights covering 467 million kilometres. The average network-wide seat load factor was 79.4 per cent for 2015, compared with 79.2 per cent in 2014.

Six new destinations were added to Etihad Airways' global network  Kolkata, Madrid, Hong Kong, Entebbe, Edinburgh and Dar es Salaam  and capacity increased on 16 existing routes with bigger aircraft, more frequency and improved seat occupancy.

Etihad Airways' fleet increased by 11 aircraft to a total of 121 at year end. With an average age of 5.8 years, Etihad Airways' fleet is one of the youngest and most environmentally friendly in the industry. The additions included four A380-800 and four Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft, while further leased capacity was also added. The A380 was rolled out on the Sydney and New York routes, and inducted on a second daily flight to London Heathrow, while the 787 began commercial operations between Abu Dhabi and Zurich, Brisbane, Washington DC and Singapore.

Partnership strategy delivered five million passengers and $1.4 billion in direct revenues, as well as significant cost synergies

Etihad Airways' partnership strategy, based on almost 50 codeshare agreements and its strategic minority investments in selected airlines, remained a key driver of its growth in 2015.

A new codeshare agreement was introduced in 2015 with Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), while Etihad Airways' existing codeshares with Air Serbia, American Airlines, flynas, Jet Airways, Korean Air, NIKI and S7 Airlines were significantly expanded. As a result, Etihad Airways now offers a combined passenger and cargo network of nearly 600 destinations through its 197 interline and 49 codeshare partnerships.

Etihad Regional was the latest addition to Etihad Airways' equity partner network, which also includes airberlin, Air Seychelles, Jet Airways, Air Serbia, Alitalia and Virgin Australia. Etihad Airways' stake in the latter increased to 25.1 per cent in 2015. Combined, the equity partners comprise the seventh largest global grouping of airlines, together flying more than 100 million guests worldwide.

The strategy has contributed to a large increase in sales across Etihad Airways' global network, delivering revenues of US$ 1.4 billion  an increase of 22.1 per cent on 2014 figures  and more than five million passengers onto Etihad Airways' flights. In addition, the airline and its equity partners have been able to identify and develop significant business synergies and cost savings.

Mr Hogan said the airline's return on its equity investments into the seven airlines was many times more than the money it had spent.

"For an investment smaller than the cost of three new aircraft, we have been able to build our global network, attract five million new customers and $1.4 billion of revenues, and share massive cost synergies. That's smart business.

"This is 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.

"Each partner then has a P&L goal, which is the responsibility of its 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.

"Even with an investment such as airberlin, where it has taken longer than expected for the airline to reach sustainable profitability, we are seeing incredibly strong returns directly into our business, far in excess of our original expectations. We have already received more than US$ 500 million in direct revenues to Etihad Airways and airberlin today delivers more than US$ 150 million a year in direct revenues, as well as wide-ranging cost synergies which have already reached more than US$ 100 million. In addition, the airberlin relationship is delivering a contribution of more than US$ 630 million a year to the Abu Dhabi economy. This is why we remain committed to the restructuring of that business as it moves forward."

Global financial community continued to recognize success of Etihad Airways' strategy



During the year, Etihad Airways was instrumental in securing a US$ 700 million financing transaction to fund expansion for the airline, its subsidiary Etihad Airport Services and five of its seven airline equity partners within Etihad Airways Partners (EAP).

Mr Hogan added: "This ground-breaking transaction was the first of its kind in the airline industry, and its success highlights the high level of confidence and support from institutional investors for our unique business strategy. It was a vote of confidence not just in Etihad Airways but in our partners too."

In 2015, Etihad Airways was assigned the rating of 'A' with a Stable Outlook, by Fitch Ratings. Fitch Ratings, one of the world's largest credit ratings agencies, issued the Long-term Issuer Default Rating (IDR) following a detailed independent analysis of Etihad Airways' business, its commercial performance and its equity alliance strategy.

Growth continued across group's business streams, including cargo, MRO, catering and ground handling, and frequent flier programme

In 2015, Etihad Airways' strategy of diversifying from a single airline entity into a travel and aviation group delivered strong results. All major business streams, including cargo, MRO, catering and ground handling, and frequent flier programme, as well as the core airline, experienced growth.

Etihad Airways' cargo division continued to perform well in 2015. Cargo freight and mail volumes rose four per cent to 591,000 tonnes, making it one of the world's most successful air freight operations.

Accounting for 88 per cent of air cargo imports, exports and transfers at Abu Dhabi International Airport last year, Etihad Cargo enhanced its global reach by offering bellyhold capacity on the six new passenger routes, bringing to 96 the total number of passenger destinations on which freight was flown. Etihad Cargo also expanded its freighter services to several new markets including Dakar, Nouakchott and Douala in Africa, taking the number of freighter-only destinations operated to 20.

A further measure of Etihad Airways' growth was the increased membership of its Etihad Guest loyalty programme. Membership numbers increased from 2.9 million to 3.75 million, representing an average of 70,000 new members each month during 2015.

Airline continued to be a driving force in the nation's Emiratisation programme

By the end of 2015, Etihad Airways employed 26,566 people worldwide from more than 144 nationalities, representing a 9.7 per cent increase on the previous year. Emiratis remain the single largest nationality grouping in the airline. In 2015, the airline welcomed more than 1,200 UAE nationals to its global workforce, bringing the total number of Emirati employees to more than 3,000  29 per cent of core staff at the national airline.

Since its inception in 2003, Etihad Airways has been a driving force in the nation's Emiratisation programme, investing in the development of the national workforce and promoting the role of Emiratis in the aviation sector and empowering them for leadership.

Airline recognised by industry awards throughout the year

Etihad Airways was named '2016 Airline of the Year' by Air Transport World, in recognition of its outstanding growth model and commercial focus as it continued to define the landscape of modern air travel. For the seventh year running, Etihad Airways was declared the World's Leading Airline at the World Travel Awards.

Etihad Airways Partners' (EAP) US$ 700 million landmark finance transaction was recognised as Innovative Deal of the Year by Airfinance Journal; as Emerging Europe Middle East and Africa Bond of the Year by the market intelligence organisation International Financing Review (IFR); and as Debt Financing Deal of the Year Middle East by Global Transport Finance.

1CAPA report on growth of Gulf airlines

About Etihad Airways

Etihad Airways began operations in 2003, and in 2015 carried 17.6 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 121 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

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/etihad-airways-announces-net-profit-of-us-103-million-for-2015-300258303.html

SOURCE Etihad Airways

CONTACT: Katie Connell, Etihad Airways, Tel: (917) 515-1136 (direct), Email: KConnell@etihad.ae; Samantha Stark, Ketchum on behalf of Etihad Airways, Tel: (202) 835-9424 (direct), Email: Samantha.Stark@Ketchum.com

RELATED LINKShttp://www.etihad.com
DALLAS, April 27, 2016 -- Omnitracs, LLC, a global pioneer of fleet management solutions to transportation and logistics companies, today announced the appointment of experienced executive Stacy Repult as vice president of finance. In her role, Repult will provide leadership and coordination of company financial planning, debt financing and budget management functions; she will also ensure company accounting procedures and reporting conform to generally accepted accounting principles. A Certified Public Accountant, Repult most recently served as managing director of SLR Consulting Group and has more than 20 years of experience at both public and private companies, serving cross-functionally in financial management, strategic planning, international expansion and corporate development.

"As the leading provider of mobile fleet management, routing and predictive analytics solutions, Omnitracs has experienced significant growth in recent years. As we remain on an extraordinary forward trajectory, Stacy's leadership of key finance functions will support our continued progress," stated Sarah Hagan, chief financial officer at Omnitracs. "Stacy's experience and impressive educational background will be great assets to Omnitracs as the company continues to innovate."

Repult started her career in the mergers and acquisitions tax practice at Pricewaterhouse Coopers and has also held positions at Fujitsu-ICL, Cinemark International, Sammons Enterprises Inc., and FedEx Kinko's. She holds a bachelor's degree in finance and accounting from Baylor University and earned an MBA in international finance with honors from Exeter University in England, which she attended on a full Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship. She is licensed as a Registered Representative and holds Series 79 and 63 licenses.

"I'm thrilled to join Omnitracs and look forward to contributing to the company's strategic growth objectives," noted Repult. "The commercial transportation sector is foundational to our national economy and it's exciting to lend my experience and expertise to a company that is committed to delivering the most advanced solutions available to help fleets improve productivity, safety, efficiency and compliance."

For more information about Omnitracs, please visit www.Omnitracs.com.

About Omnitracs, LLC

Omnitracs, LLC is a global pioneer of fleet management, routing and predictive analytics solutions for private and for-hire fleets. Omnitracs' nearly 1,000 employees deliver software-as-a-service-based solutions to help more than 50,000 private and for-hire fleet customers manage nearly 1,500,000 mobile assets in more than 70 countries. The company pioneered the use of commercial vehicle telematics over 25 years ago and serves today as a powerhouse of innovative, intuitive technologies. Omnitracs transforms the transportation industry through technology and insight, featuring best-in-class solutions for compliance, safety and security, productivity, telematics and tracking, transportation management (TMS), planning and delivery, data and analytics, and professional services.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/omnitracs-appoints-stacy-repult-as-vice-president-of-finance-300258169.html

SOURCE Omnitracs, LLC

CONTACT: Belinda Rueffer, Director of Marketing Communications and Public Relations, brueffer@omnitracs.com

RELATED LINKShttp://www.omnitracs.com
SHANGHAI, April 27, 2016 -- eHi Car Services Limited ("eHi" or the "Company") , a leading car rentals and car services provider in China, today announced that the Company has filed its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 26, 2016. The annual report on Form 20-F can be accessed on the Company's investor relations website at http://ir.ehi.com.cn.

eHi will provide a hard copy of the annual report containing its audited consolidated financial statements, free of charge, to its shareholders and ADS holders upon request. Requests should be directed to eHi Car Services Limited, Attn: Investor Relations Department, Unit 12/F, Building No. 5, Guosheng Center, 388 Daduhe Road, Shanghai, People's Republic of China, 200062.

About eHi Car Services Limited

eHi Car Services Limited is China's No. 1 car services provider and No. 2 car rentals provider in terms of market share by revenues in 2013, according to Frost & Sullivan. The Company's mission is to provide comprehensive mobility solutions as an alternative to car ownership by best utilizing existing resources and sharing economy to create optimal value. eHi distinguishes itself in China's fast-growing car rental and car services market through its complementary business model, customer-centric corporate culture, broad geographic coverage, efficient fleet management, leading brand name, and commitment to technological innovation. eHi is the exclusive strategic partner in China of Enterprise, the largest car rental company in the world, and is the designated and preferred business partner of Ctrip, a leader in the online travel agency industry in China. For more information regarding eHi, please visit http://ir.ehi.com.cn.

For investor and media inquiries, please contact:

In China:

eHi Car Services Limited

Tel: +86 (21) 6468-7000 ext. 8742

E-Mail: ir@ehic.com.cn

In the United States:

The Piacente Group, Inc.

Mr. Don Markley

Tel: +1-212-481-2050

E-Mail: ehi@tpg-ir.com

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ehi-car-services-filed-2015-annual-report-on-form-20-f-300258298.html

SOURCE eHi Car Services Limited
RICHMOND, Va.Compare.com, the first true car insurance comparison website in the United States, has welcomed Metromile, a pioneer in pay-per-mile car insurance, to their website offerings. Metromile is now providing quotes to compare.com users in California, with the intention to expand their reach to more states later this year.

Compare.com launched in March 2013 with the goal to make shopping for car insurance easier for customers. Instead of having to compare car insurance prices by calling multiple insurance carriers and remembering which coverages were quoted, compare.com teams up with 70 insurance brands to make comparing easy. By filling out one simple form, compare.com can help customers easily compare insurance prices side-by-side, with the knowledge that the quotes they receive are for the exact same coverages. If a customer sees a quote theyd like to buy on compare.com, they can click the Buy Now, button and work directly with the carrier of their choice to complete the sale.

As we hope to revolutionize the way people shop for car insurance, Metromile is working to redefine the way people pay for insurance, said compare.com President and CEO Andrew Rose. From day-one, weve wanted to provide customers transparent comparison in the hopes that we can help them find the right policy and save money, and there is no better way to do this than work with a company like Metromile with such an innovative offering like pay-per-mile insurance.

Metromiles product is one of the first to provide an alternative to traditional insurance policies. Metromile caters to low-mileage drivers, a population that makes up 65 percent of U.S. drivers. Rather than paying a standard monthly premium, Metromile is based simply on how many miles you drive - so customers that drive less, spend less on car insurance. With tools such as a mobile app to help drivers find their cars and avoid parking tickets, they take customer service beyond just responding to claims and aim to make driving and owning a car as easy as possible.

"The vast majority of Metromile's customers come from companies like Progressive and Geico and typically save more than $500 a year by switching to pay-per-mile insurance," said Katy Allen, Director of Business Development at Metromile. "More and more people are using services like compare.com to shop insurance options and because they get a real quote, it's a great way for customers to see savings first hand."

If you would like to get a free car insurance quote comparison to see if Metromile is right for you, go to http://www.compare.com.

About compare.com

Compare.com is a limited liability corporation headquartered in Richmond, VA, majority owned by the Admiral Group, LLC, the UKs second largest auto insurer and a member of the FTSE 100. Currently offering car insurance comparison services for US consumers in 48 states, compare.com allows consumers to fill out a single form and get multiple quotes from trusted auto insurers. Through simple side-by-side comparison, compare.com makes finding the best available rates on car insurance easy.

About Metromile

Metromile is revolutionizing car insurance through technology with its pay-per-mile insurance model. By offering affordable car insurance, transparent pricing based on the miles you actually drive, data to optimize how you use your car, and instant access to detailed vehicle diagnostics via the driving app, Metromile is transforming car insurance  and car ownership  to be more intelligent, seamless, and accessible than ever before. Metromile is expanding across the US, and currently empowering drivers in California, Illinois, Oregon, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington. For more information, visit metromile.com.

Contacts

Compare.com

Sara Woznicki, 804-887-3737 ext. 2165

sara.woznicki@compare.com

or

Lauren Hartung, 415-458-2609

lauren@metromile.com
FORT WORTH, TexasGeneral Motors Financial Company, Inc. (GM Financial or the Company) named Grand Rapids Auto Auction, Jenison, Michigan, as 2015 Open Sale Auction of the Year and ABC St. Louis, Centreville, Illinois, as the 2015 Closed Sale Auction of the Year. These prestigious awards are part of GM Financials annual nationwide Auction of Excellence program.

"I have been privileged to partner with GM Financial for more than 10 years, and its an honor for GRAA to be recognized with this coveted award, said Mark Capel, General Manager, who received the award on behalf of Grand Rapids Auto Auction. GRAA has been named to this honor previously, so our staff has had a benchmark to operate at a very high level. Its knowing those high standards that I want to thank GM Financial and my staff - senior management, operations, internal, external, transportation and our compliance department at GRAA - who worked so diligently to operate near perfection for the GM Financial account."

2015 marks the first year GM Financial has recognized two winners - one for Open and one for Closed sale performance. Recipients were chosen after reviewing each of the Companys 46 auction partners performance in customer service, marketing promotions, pre-sale activities and overall auction success.

"Our auction team at ABC St. Louis is a very competitive group. It is such an honor to win the Auction of Excellence Award from GM Financial, said Jason Hockett, President, who accepted the award on behalf of ABC St. Louis. GM Financial runs at some very strong auto auctions, so to be honored as the top-performing auction is a testimony to the hard work and service of Todd Ritter, General Manager, and his team at ABC St. Louis."

A quarterly and year-end overall winner is awarded to one auction in each of GM Financial Remarketings five regions. This years Regional Auction of Excellence winners are as follows:

Midwest Region: Grand Rapids Auto Auction, Jenison, Michigan

Northeast Region: Manheim Pennsylvania, Manheim, Pennsylvania

Southeast Region: Manheim Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia

Southwest Region: ADESA Austin, Austin, Texas

West Coast Region: Manheim Portland, Portland, Oregon

Dan Heinrich, SVP Remarketing at GM Financial, extended his congratulations to all awarded auctions.

"Many of these auctions successes can be attributed to the extraordinary people who work the GM Financial lanes. Without them, honoring each of these locations would not be possible. Thank you to everyone involved in moving GM Financial vehicles through the auction process. Congratulations to all of our winners.

About GM Financial

General Motors Financial Company, Inc. is the wholly-owned captive finance subsidiary of General Motors Company and is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. For more information please visit www.gmfinancial.com.

Contacts

GM Financial

Lane Borrello, 817-302-7525

Lane.Borrello@gmfinancial.com
READING, Pa., April 27, 2016 -- Penske Logistics has been given the North America Corporation of the Year Award by Automotive Supply Chain magazine. Penske was one of 17 companies and individuals rewarded for having achieved extraordinary success or for having pioneered a new way of thinking or working.

In 2015, Penske was named the publication's North America Third-Party Logistics Provider of the Year. It was the first year that the North America ceremony was held.

"It is an honor to accept the award for Corporation of the Year," stated Penske Logistics President Marc Althen, who attended the Las Vegas ceremony. "It is always a privilege to receive industry recognition for our service offerings, administration and sustainability efforts. I am proud of our North America associates and their dedication to excellence for our automotive customers."

Automotive Supply Chain is a source of incisive information on the global supply chain. With a presence in more than 60 countries globally, the magazine focuses on each and every aspect of automotive supply chain right from when the parts come in to when the finished car reaches the dealership and everything else in between.

"These awards reflect the enthusiasm for development and innovation across the whole industry," said Peter Wooding, Chief Executive of Three6Zero, who organized the ceremony. "I am delighted with the support we have had to bring this event to North America once again and believe it has brought the opportunity to connect, debate and share the hot topics in the industry but also, to celebrate the achievements of our colleagues and peers."

Penske Logistics is a wholly owned subsidiary of Penske Truck Leasing. With operations in North America, South America, Europe and Asia, Penske Logistics provides supply chain management and logistics services to leading companies around the world. Penske Logistics delivers value through its design, planning and execution in transportation, warehousing and freight management. To learn more visit www.PenskeLogistics.com. Penske Logistics on social media: Move Ahead Blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/penske-logistics-named-corporation-of-the-year-by-automotive-supply-chain-magazine-300255181.html

SOURCE Penske Logistics

CONTACT: Alen Beljin, 610-775-6364, alen.beljin@penske.com; Randy Ryerson, 610-775-6408, Randolph.ryerson@penske.com

RELATED LINKShttp://www.penskelogistics.com
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., April 27, 2016 -- Fort Lauderdale-based Future Energy Solutions (FES) today announced it has been selected as a Qualified Vendor by Choice Hotels International, Inc. . Choice Hotels is one of the world's leading hotel companies and franchisor of more than 6,400 hotels around the world across 10 well-known global brands, which include Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites, Cambria hotels & suites as well as the Ascend Hotel Collection.

The agreement provides more than 5,300 Choice Hotels franchisees across the United States access to FES' Gold Initiative Program (the FES Program), enabling them to potentially achieve significant energy and maintenance savings at zero capital cost.

"Our Qualified Vendor program identifies the best in class hospitality offerings on the market, taking out the guess work for our hotel franchisees and enabling them to focus on what they do best -- delivering exceptional guest experiences," said Rick Summa, vice president of Procurement Services for Choice Hotels.

The new relationship was initiated after select Choice Hotels franchisees' partnered with FES to upgrade their exterior lighting, seeing the quality of the lighting upgrades completed, and having reviewed the details of the FES Program. With over 650 customer sites across the USA, FES demonstrated its ability to deliver the FES Program nationwide.

The FES Program for businesses is unique as the Company supplies and installs new energy-efficient lighting fixtures for customers at no capital cost to them, and maintains the lamp, ballast and fixture at no cost to the customer for the lifetime of the agreement. The FES Program utilizes an unparalleled, customized financial model to help create savings for customers that would otherwise be impossible for them to achieve at no capital cost, helps eliminate their maintenance costs, and turns an operational expense into an asset.

FES installs the new energy efficient lighting systems with little to no impact on a customer's day-to-day operations.

The enhanced lighting levels, along with subsequent improvements to the quality, health and safety of the customer environment, leads to heightened visibility and an enhanced sense of security for staff and customers. Other benefits include a substantial reduction in the site's carbon footprint and the transfer of maintenance responsibility to FES, which assumes all upkeep for the lights throughout the FES Program contract term.

FES is delighted to be selected as a Qualified Vendor by Choice Hotels, as hotels are a perfect fit for the Gold Initiative Program, according to FES Chief Executive Officer Daniel Gold.

"Hotel owners often forego investing in upgrades such as exterior lighting that don't directly translate into added sales or service standards. Their priorities are to focus on those standards and amenities that bring in guests and result in more bookings," Gold says. "But FES makes it possible for them to get the best of both worlds: state-of-the-art, energy-efficient lighting systems with no upfront investment and the ability to concentrate on the hospitality side of their business."

About Choice Hotels

Choice Hotels International, Inc. is one of the world's largest lodging companies. With more than 6,400 hotels franchised in more than 35 countries and territories, Choice Hotels International represents more than 500,000 rooms around the globe. As of December 31, 2015, 720 hotels were in our development pipeline. Our company's Ascend Hotel Collection, Cambria hotels & suites, Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites, Sleep Inn, Quality, Clarion, MainStay Suites, Suburban Extended Stay Hotel, Econo Lodge, Rodeway Inn, and Vacation Rentals by Choice Hotels brands provide a spectrum of lodging choices to meet guests' needs. With more than 25 million members and counting, our Choice Privileges rewards program enhances every trip a guest takes, with benefits ranging from instant, every day rewards to exceptional experiences, starting right when they join. All hotels and vacation rentals are independently owned and operated. Visit us at www.choicehotels.com for more information.  2016. Choice Hotels International, Inc. All rights reserved.

About Future Energy Solutions (FES)

Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Future Energy Solutions (FES) is an innovative, global, green technology company that designs, installs and maintains energy-efficient lighting solutions for industrial and commercial markets. Future Energy Solutions' Program allows Customers substantial cost savings, energy-efficient light fixtures and improved lighting levels at no capital cost.

FES has upgraded exterior lighting for clients in a wide variety of fields, including fast food/fast casual restaurants, shopping plazas, private schools, gas stations, automotive dealerships, parking garages, warehouses and more. To learn more about Future Energy Solutions, call +1 954 714 0300 or visit www.feslighting.com.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/future-energy-solutions-selected-as-a-choice-hotels-qualified-vendor-300258165.html

SOURCE Future Energy Solutions

CONTACT: Jeff Bray / Matt Levinson, O'Connell & Goldberg, (954) 964-9098, jbray@oandgpr.com / mlevinson@oandgpr.com

RELATED LINKShttp://www.choicehotels.comhttp://www.feslighting.com
MALVERN, Pa., April 27, 2016 -- AmericanMuscle.com, the leading aftermarket Mustang parts supplier, today unveiled a supercharged sweepstakes to celebrate 10 years of providing an unparalleled experience for Mustang, and now F-150 owners, looking to customize their rides. Marking a decade of supporting owners building their dreams, AmericanMuscle is giving away over $100K in prizes including a 2017 Ford Raptor, 850+ HP S550 Mustang GT and a custom race trailer stocked with everything you'll need for the track. Enter weekly at: http://www.americanmuscle.com/2017-raptor-2015-mustang-sweepstakes.html.

An Auto Enthusiast's Dream

An 850+ HP Mustang built by the AmericanMuscle crew will turn heads with $30K in custom modifications from the team who knows Mustang Street & Strip performance and style better than any. Standouts include a Whipple Supercharger and a full MMD styling package, all wrapped in an eye popping Tangerine Orange paint job - an ode to a factory color only ever used on 829 Mustangs.

The yet-to-be-released 2017 Ford Raptor is an attention grabber in its own right. The second generation of one of the boldest trucks to hit the streets, rumored at 450+ horsepower, the 2017 F-150 Raptor will demonstrate the true potential of the recently refreshed F-150 platform. The redesigned Raptor features a Terrain Management System with six preset, easy-to-use off-road drive-assist modes including Normal, Street, Weather, Mud and Sand, Baja and Rock, making it comfortable when riding in any terrain.

Beyond the greatest in vehicles and parts, the winner gains a lifetime of experiences. Load up the Raptor with friends, hook up the new trailer and get ready for effortless 10-second  mile passes all weekend in a custom built, supercharged 850 crank horsepower, 752 rear wheel horsepower Mustang GT. All details listed below and for the full experience check out the Giveaway Spotlight Video at: http://www.americanmuscle.com/2017-raptor-2015-mustang-sweepstakes.html

Once in a Decade

This contest kick-off represents an important 10-year milestone for AmericanMuscle. To celebrate this achievement and give back to the company's fans, founders Andrew and Steve Voudouris felt only an over-the-top dream package would suffice. For 10 years, AmericanMuscle has offered the best option for Mustang, and now F-150 owners, to modify their vehicles. At the heart of AmericanMuscle, they're a company that is passionate about providing the best way for Mustang and F-150 owners to enjoy taking their vehicles to the next level.

"We couldn't think of a more appropriate way to celebrate 10 years," says Steve Voudouris, AmericanMuscle CEO. "We're excited for fans to see these vehicles and provide them with a once in a decade opportunity to win this insane prize package!"

Full Prize Details

850+ HP Whipple Supercharged 2015 S550 Mustang GT Built Fully Loaded for the Street or Strip Over $30,000 in Aftermarket Mods Dyno Tested at 850+ Crank HP: 752RWHP / 484 RWTQ Watch Full Episode of the Build: http://www.americanmuscle.com/hot-lap-april-2016.html

2017 Ford F-150 Raptor Brand New / Unreleased 450+ HP Raptor (TBA) Off-Road Ready 10-Speed Automatic (TBA) 35" All-Terrain Tires and FOX Racing Shox (TBA) 6-Preset Terrain Management System Modes (Norma, Street, Weather, Mud/Sand, Baja , Rock)

Custom Aluminum Tilt Racing Trailer with Tool Box and Tire Rack

Full Set of Eastwood Tools for Wrenching at the Race Track

for Wrenching at the Race Track Extra Set of Wheels/Tires for the Track  DarkStar Wheels w/Slicks & Skinny Fronts

Starting 4/26 and through November 11, 2016, fans can enter online up to once a week to win the supercharged prize package. Must be 18 or older to enter and a legal resident of the United States and District of Columbia or Canada. For more information about the sweepstakes, please visit: http://www.americanmuscle.com/2017-raptor-2015-mustang-sweepstakes.html.

About AmericanMuscle

AmericanMuscle.com offers a full array of Mustang and F-150 parts to customize your vehicle for the best driving experience possible. Headquartered in Malvern, PA, AmericanMuscle's staff of over 300 and 300,000+ sq. ft. facility makes it possible to deliver on their mission of offering expert assistance and a great selection of finely tuned products to meet every Mustang and F-150 owner's need. With over 10 years of experience as a leader in aftermarket Mustang, and now F-150 parts, AmericanMuscle is dedicated to make it easy to find the products you need.

Video - http://youtu.be/m02d0Ix1qsM

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160426/360166

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160426/360167LOGO

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-win-a-2017-ford-raptor-850-hp-mustang--racing-trailer-from-americanmuscle-300258041.html

SOURCE AmericanMuscle

CONTACT: JMPR Public Relations, Inc.: Alexia Bunce, C: 310-854-9505, abunce@jmprpublicrelations.com; or Ario Arian, 818-620-0480, aarian@jmprpublicrelations.com

RELATED LINKShttp://www.americanmuscle.com
SAILAUF, Germany, April 27, 2016 - Magna International Inc. announces today that Dongfeng GETRAG Transmission Co., Ltd., a 50/50 joint-venture formed in 2012 between GETRAG and Dongfeng Motor Group, has started serial production at its plant in Wuhan, China. The plant is manufacturing the GETRAG 6DCT150, a third-generation dual-clutch transmission (DCT) with a new compact gear design that was developed jointly by the JV partners.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360541)

The 6DCT150 is a six-speed DCT developed for front-transverse applications in small and compact cars. With six forward gears, one reverse gear and a wet clutch, the automatic transmission addresses market demands in China for a smaller, lower weight system. In addition, the transmission could contribute to a favorable fleet fuel-consumption rating as well as lower fuel costs for individual vehicle purchasers. Another DCT family member, the GETRAG 6DCT200 will also be brought to the China car market in 2017.

"Compared to automatic torque converters and CVTs in the low-cost segment, the GETRAG low-torque DCTs can achieve a fuel-consumption advantage of 10 to 20 percent," said Didier Lexa, GETRAG Chief Technical Officer. "It can also achieve a fuel-consumption advantage of 5 percent compared to a five-speed manual transmission. The GETRAG low-torque DCTs can therefore provide an efficient and affordable automatic transmission to lower-priced vehicles."

Dongfeng GETRAG Transmission Co., Ltd. is one of two GETRAG engineering and manufacturing joint ventures in China. "The Chinese car market is important to us. The joint development of 6DCT150 and 6DCT200 together with Dongfeng shows that we take this market and its requirements very seriously," said YoungHo Lee, GETRAG Asia Pacific CEO. "We believe that economic growth, automation and climate change will drive the developments in our industry. These new products can help us to get a better position to realize future opportunities."

GETRAG brings an 80-year history in transmissions and technology leadership, offering a range of transmission systems including manual, automated-manual, dual-clutch, hybrid and other advanced systems. Magna International acquired GETRAG early in 2016 as part of its Magna Powertrain operating unit. Beyond enhancing Magna's powertrain systems engineering and manufacturing capabilities, the combined product portfolio is expected to enhance vertical integration opportunities and provide new opportunities for growth.

About Magna International

We are a leading global automotive supplier with 305 manufacturing operations and 93 product development, engineering and sales centres in 29 countries. We have over 139,000 employees focused on delivering superior value to our customers through innovative products and processes, and World Class Manufacturing. Our product capabilities include producing body, chassis, exterior, seating, powertrain, electronic, vision, closure and roof systems and modules, as well as complete vehicle engineering and contract manufacturing. Our common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (MG) and the New York Stock Exchange (MGA). For further information about Magna, visit our website at www.magna.com.

THIS RELEASE MAY CONTAIN STATEMENTS WHICH CONSTITUTE "FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS" UNDER APPLICABLE SECURITIES LEGISLATION AND ARE SUBJECT TO, AND EXPRESSLY QUALIFIED BY, THE CAUTIONARY DISCLAIMERS THAT ARE SET OUT IN MAGNA'S REGULATORY FILINGS. PLEASE REFER TO MAGNA'S MOST CURRENT MANAGEMENT'S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS OF RESULTS OF OPERATIONS AND FINANCIAL POSITION, ANNUAL INFORMATION FORM AND ANNUAL REPORT ON FORM 40-F, AS REPLACED OR UPDATED BY ANY OF MAGNA'S SUBSEQUENT REGULATORY FILINGS, WHICH SET OUT THE CAUTIONARY DISCLAIMERS, INCLUDING THE RISK FACTORS THAT COULD CAUSE ACTUAL EVENTS TO DIFFER MATERIALLY FROM THOSE INDICATED BY SUCH FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS. THESE DOCUMENTS ARE AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW ON MAGNA'S WEBSITE AT WWW.MAGNA.COM.

SOURCE Magna International Inc.

CONTACT: Rej Husetovic, Director Corporate Communications & Media Relations, (+49-6093) 9942-5056, rej.husetovic@magna.com

RELATED LINKShttp://www.magna.com
TORONTO, April 27, 2016 /CNW/ - The Honourable Marc Garneau, Minister of Transport, today marked Rail Safety Week by announcing new funding for railway crossing improvements. This year, Transport Canada will provide more than $10.9 million to upgrade over 400 railway crossings across the country through its Grade Crossing Improvement Program (GCIP). Under the GCIP, eligible railway crossings are upgraded based on factors such as traffic volume and accident history.

Transport Canada also provides funding through its Grade Crossing Closure Program (GCCP) to encourage the closure of certain grade crossings that are under federal jurisdiction. This year, under the GCCP, Transport Canada is providing $125,000 in funding to close seven crossings, in addition to $50,000 approved last year to close seven crossings.

Later today, Minister Garneau will address the Economic Club of Canada, where he will discuss the future of Canada's transportation system. He will also discuss how Budget 2016 investments, including funding of $143 million over three years to enhance rail safety and the transportation of dangerous goods, will help protect communities and build a safer, more efficient and sustainable transportation system.

Following his Economic Club speech, Minister Garneau will also participate in a Town Hall meeting on rail safety. The Town Hall is being hosted by the Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Minister of International Trade and Member of Parliament for UniversityRosedale and the Honourable Carolyn Bennett, Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs and Member of Parliament for TorontoSt. Paul's, and will bring together rail and community stakeholders.

Quote

"A safe and secure national rail transportation system is important to local communities and to Canada's economic well-being. Budget 2016 provides $143 million over the next three years to address railway safety. Through the Grade Crossing Improvement Program, the Government of Canada is helping to enhance safety for pedestrians and motorists at over 400 railway crossings across the country."

The Honourable Marc Garneau

Minister of Transport



Quick Facts

Rail Safety Week, taking place this year from April 25 to May 1 , is a national celebration aimed at increasing awareness of safety around railway operations and highlighting government's and industry's commitment to making the rail system safer for Canadians.

, is a national celebration aimed at increasing awareness of safety around railway operations and highlighting government's and industry's commitment to making the rail system safer for Canadians. Since 1980, the number of crossing collisions in Canada has fallen dramatically from over 800 per year to 164 in 2015. However, there still remains unnecessary loss of life and injury with 47 fatalities and 36 serious injuries occurring in 2015 as a result of crossing collisions and trespassing on rail property.

has fallen dramatically from over 800 per year to 164 in 2015. However, there still remains unnecessary loss of life and injury with 47 fatalities and 36 serious injuries occurring in 2015 as a result of crossing collisions and trespassing on rail property. The Government of Canada also supports other initiatives to improve safety at railway crossings, such as Operation Lifesaver  a national public education program whose goal is to reduce the needless loss of life, injuries and damages caused by highway/railway crossing collisions and train/pedestrian incidents. Transport Canada provides Operation Lifesaver with $300,000 per year to support their safety outreach and education campaigns.

Related Products

Backgrounders: Grade Crossing Improvement Program and Grade Crossing Closure Program

Associated Links

Grade Crossing Improvement Program

Grade Crossing Closure Program

Operation Lifesaver

Transport Canada is online at www.tc.gc.ca. Subscribe to e-news or stay connected through RSS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr to keep up to date on the latest from Transport Canada.

This news release may be made available in alternative formats for persons living with visual disabilities.

Backgrounder

Grade Crossing Improvement Program

Through the Government of Canada's Grade Crossing Improvement Program (GCIP), contributions are available to road authorities and railway companies for safety improvements at public grade crossings that are under federal jurisdiction.

Transport Canada funds up to 50 per cent of safety enhancement costs (to a maximum of $550,000 per project) at many rail crossing locations across the country every year.

Some examples of eligible projects are:

installing flashing lights, bells and gates;

replacing incandescent lights with LEDs;

adding gates or extra lights to existing signal systems;

interconnecting crossing signals to nearby highway traffic signals;

modifying operating circuits within automated warning systems;

improving roadway alignment or grades; and

modifying nearby intersections and adding traffic control signals in some circumstances.

These sites are most often identified through:

an application from a road authority and/or railway company;

an inspection by a Transport Canada railway safety inspector, through regular monitoring or after an accident;

a recommendation following an accident, including any made by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada ; or

; or a complaint concerning the safety of a crossing.

This year, Transport Canada is investing more than $10.9 million under the GCIP, to upgrade over 400 rail grade crossings across the country.

The majority of the projects involve the replacement of incandescent lights to light emitting diode (LED) signal modules which will greatly improve the safety of Canadian motorists and pedestrians by improving warning system visibility, and result in grade crossing warning systems that operate more efficiently.

Province Number of Projects Federal Contribution





British Columbia 12 $1,552,459.72 Alberta 107 $1,665,246.63 Saskatchewan 41 $1,643,392.46 Manitoba 53 $1,368,442.00 Ontario 93 $2,680,052.22 Quebec 100 $1,999,518.75 Total 406 $10,909,111.78

April, 2016

Backgrounder

Grade Crossing Closure Program

Through the Government of Canada's Grade Crossing Closure Program (GCCP), funding is available to encourage the closure of certain grade crossings that are under federal jurisdiction, in the interest of public safety.

The program provides a $20,000 grant for a public grade crossing and a $5,000 grant for a private grade crossing in exchange for the beneficiary (generally a road authority or private property owner) relinquishing their rights to the crossing and closing it.

In 2016-2017, Transport Canada will provide $125,000 in GCCP funding to close seven crossings.

Province Number of Closures Total Grant





Saskatchewan 1 (public crossing) $20,000.00 Manitoba 2 (public crossing) $40,000.00 Ontario 3 (public crossing) $60,000.00 Quebec 1 (private crossing) $5,000.00 Total 7 $125,000.00

In 2015-2016, Transport Canada approved $50,000 in GCCP funding to close seven crossings.

Province Number of Closures Total Grant





Manitoba 6 (5 private and 1 public crossing) $45,000.00 Ontario 1 (private crossing) $5,000.00 Total 7 $50,000.00

April, 2016

SOURCE Transport Canada

CONTACT: Contacts: Delphine Denis, Press Secretary, Office of the Honourable Marc Garneau, Minister of Transport, Ottawa, 613-991-0700; Media Relations, Transport Canada, Ottawa, 613-993-0055, media@tc.gc.ca
VALLEY COTTAGE, New York, April 27, 2016 --

The global yacht charter market, valued at US$ 8.5 Bn in 2015, is set to increase at over 7% CAGR through 2026, surpassing US$ 18 Bn in revenues. Yacht chartering is gaining popularity as a leisurely activity, especially among corporate consumers. Sailing yachts have a massive lead over motor yachts, with the former accounting for nearly 80% revenue share of the market in 2014. These insights are part of FMI's new research, "Yacht Charter Market (Under 24m length): Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment, 2016-2026."

Yacht charter service providers are using the reach of online mediums, such as websites and social media platforms to showcase their offerings. Increase in the number and range of yachts available for booking, and collaboration between yacht companies and leading travel agencies are key factors driving the growth of the global yacht charter market.

Request a Sample Report: http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-1436

FMI's report has segmented the global yacht charter market on the basis of cabin, consumer, yacht type, end-use, mode of operation, and region.

On the basis of cabin, the report has segmented the market into 2 cabin, 3 cabin, 4 cabin, and others. Yachts with 3 cabins and 4 cabins are popular among consumers -- in 2015, these two segments collectively accounted for over 70% of revenue share.

In a bid to identify the motive for chartering yachts, FMI has segmented the market on the basis of end-use. The key segments under end-use include instructional, events, vacation, adventure and sports, honeymoon, and others. FMI's research revealed that nearly 80% of consumers in the yacht charter market could be classified as vacationers. Owing to rising popularity of yacht chartering for annual events and adventure activities, vacation as an end-use segment is expected to witness a 90 BPS decline in its market share by the end of 2026 over 2015.

Preview Analysis: http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/yacht-charter-market-under-24m-length

Yacht charter consumers have been broadly segmented into corporate and retail, with the former segment expected to increase at a higher CAGR during the forecast period 2016-2026. The retail consumer type has been further sub-segmented into individual, family/group, couple, and others. Among these, family/group consumers accounted for the bulk of retail bookings, representing nearly 65% revenue share in 2015.

Key segments on the basis of yacht type include sailing yacht and motor yacht. Motor yachts are further sub-segmented into displacement, semi-displacement, planing, catamaran, and trimaran, whereas key segments under motor sailing yacht include sloop, schooner, catamaran, and ketch. Sailing yachts are highly sought-after and represented nearly 80% revenue share in 2014.

On the basis of mode of operation, FMI's report offers 10-year forecast on the segments - operative and bareboat. Yachts with bareboat mode of operation are expected to increase at a higher CAGR than operative yachts.

Request for TOC: http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-1436

Region-wise, the report offers market forecast for Mediterranean, Caribbean, Asia Pacific, Americas, and Rest of Europe, and Middle East and Africa. Mediterranean is the most popular yacht charter destination, with the region accounting for nearly 40% revenue share of the global market in 2014. Asia Pacific is emerging as a yacht charter destination, and is expected to offer significant opportunities to key players during the forecast period.

Leading players in the global yacht charter market include Yachtico Inc., Boatbookings, Sailogy S.A., Antlos S.r.l, Collaborative Boating Inc., Fraser Escape Bareboat Charters, Princess Yacht Charter, TUI Group, and Zizooboats GmbH.

FMI Latest Insights:

Car Rental Market: http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/car-rental-market-forecast-period-2015-2025

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/car-rental-market-forecast-period-2015-2025 Pet Care Market: http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/southeast-asia-pet-care-market

http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/southeast-asia-pet-care-market Ecotourism Market: http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/gcc-ecotourism-market

About Us:

Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights and an aerial view of the competitive framework and future market trends.

Contact Us:

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Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.com

Website: http://www.futuremarketinsights.com



SOURCE Future Market Insights
DENVER, April 27, 2016 -- Solace Home Healthcare, a Denver-based home health company specializing in the niche market of pediatric and adult home healthcare, is partnering with Enterprise Fleet Management to offer company vehicles to its growing team of nurses and therapists.

"Our work would not be possible without the hard work and dedication of our team of qualified nurses and therapists who provide in-home health services to clients throughout the greater Denver area," said Solace CEO Mike Billinghurst. "We're committed to offering our employees the best benefits package we can. Being able to drive a new car  for both professional and personal use  without paying for insurance, gas or maintenance is a significant benefit we're thrilled to provide to our talented and committed team of clinicians."

Enterprise Fleet Management is a privately-held, full-service fleet management business for companies, government agencies and organizations operating medium-sized fleets of 20 or more vehicles, as well as those seeking an alternative to employee reimbursement programs. The company provides local service to its customers through a network of more than 50 fully staffed offices throughout North America.

Solace employees who participate in the program will receive a new Nissan Rogue for their business and personal use.

Enterprise Fleet Management will conduct ongoing use and performance monitoring, as well as track fuel purchases and miles driven  ensuring that all of Solace's vehicles are properly and regularly maintained. Enterprise Fleet Management also will handle licensing, registration and auto insurance, as well as provide fuel and maintenance cards to cover vehicle expenses.

The initial phase of the program involved the deployment of 13 vehicles this spring, with additional vehicles being provided upon request. Solace estimates its fleet size will double by the end of 2016.

"In addition to being an attractive employee benefit that supports recruitment and retention efforts, fleet cars will also have a positive impact on Solace's business operations," said Larry Caster, senior account executive for Enterprise Fleet Management in Denver. "The use of these newer, well-maintained and fuel-efficient vehicles will contribute to more reliable service and cost savings over the long run."

About Enterprise Fleet Management

Owned by the Taylor family of St. Louis, Enterprise Fleet Management supplies most makes and models of cars, light- and medium-duty trucks and service vehicles across North America. The Taylor family also owns and operates, through regional subsidiaries, the extensive Enterprise Rent-A-Car network of more than 5,600 fully staffed neighborhood and airport branch offices, all located within 15 miles of 90 percent of the U.S. population. Enterprise Fleet Management has been recognized with the Automotive Service Excellence "Blue Seal of Excellence" award for 19 consecutive years, an industry record. For more information about Enterprise Fleet Management, visit www.efleets.com.

About Solace Home Healthcare

Solace Home Healthcare's mission is to bring Solace to those in need through compassionate, progressive therapy and nursing services in the home. Solace has been providing speech, physical and occupational therapy, as well as nursing services, to children and adults in the Denver metro community for 11 years. For more information about Solace Home Healthcare, visit www.solacehealthcare.com.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/solace-home-healthcare-partners-with-enterprise-fleet-management-to-provide-company-car-benefit-for-employees-300258394.html

SOURCE Enterprise Fleet Management

CONTACT: Katie Bowring, Enterprise Fleet Management, kathryn.h.bowring@ehi.com

RELATED LINKShttp://www.efleets.com
AUBURN HILLS, Mich., April 27, 2016 --

Deal opens new marketing channel for FCA US dealerships on nation's fastest growing car shopping platform

Enrolled dealers may post their Certified Pre-Owned Vehicle inventory on CarGurus website

FCA US LLC and CarGurus, a leading car shopping website, today announced an agreement that provides FCA US dealers an opportunity to advertise and post their Certified Pre-Owned (CPO) Vehicle inventory on the CarGurus site.



The agreement puts dealer CPO Vehicle inventory in front of 20 million monthly unique automotive shoppers on the CarGurus website and gives FCA US dealers access to the platform's top-performing lead generation and display advertising programs.



"As our dealers drive continued growth with CPO, it's important that we support their efforts to get these vehicles in front of as many shoppers as we can," said Eric Swanson, Head of Certified Pre-Owned Vehicles at FCA US. "In partnering with CarGurus, we are opening a new channel to expose these great vehicles to highly engaged buyers. We're confident that CarGurus will help us generate quality leads for our stores and tell the CPO story in ways we never could before."



Founded in 2007, CarGurus uses technology and data analysis to help consumers search their local market for the best car deals, and then connects shoppers with listing dealerships. CarGurus works with dealers and OEMs to incorporate their inventory feeds on the site, and offers dealerships a range of high-performance lead generation and audience extension advertising packages.



"We are excited to bring more FCA US Certified Pre-Owned Vehicle choices and brand information to CarGurus shoppers, and we look forward to working with FCA US dealerships to help them reach our audience with the most efficiency and impact," said Frank Weishaupt, Senior Vice President of Audience Sales at CarGurus. "There's no question that CPO is becoming an important consideration for car buyers, and aligning with brands like FCA to tell their CPO story allows us to help our users make the best buying choices."



Dealers interested in learning more about CarGurus free and paid subscription programs should contact the FCA US Certified Pre-Owned Vehicle group.

About CarGurus

Founded in 2007 by Langley Steinert (also co-founder of TripAdvisor), CarGurus (www.cargurus.com) is a leading online automotive shopping destination focused on bringing transparency and efficiency to the car research and shopping experience. The site serves 20 million unique monthly users and more than 14,000 car dealerships, and ranks number one among third party car shopping websites in the U.S. for mobile shopper traffic. With corporate headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., CarGurus also has sites in the UK and Canada.

About FCA US LLC

FCA US LLC is a North American automaker with a new name and a long history. Headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan, FCA US is a member of the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. (FCA) family of companies. FCA US designs, engineers, manufactures and sells vehicles under the Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Ram and FIAT brands, as well as the SRT performance vehicle designation. The company also distributes the Alfa Romeo 4C model and Mopar products. FCA US is building upon the historic foundations of Chrysler, the innovative American automaker first established by Walter P. Chrysler in 1925; and Fiat, founded in Italy in 1899 by pioneering entrepreneurs, including Giovanni Agnelli.



FCA, the seventh-largest automaker in the world based on total annual vehicle sales, is an international automotive group. FCA is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "FCAU" and on the Mercato Telematico Azionario under the symbol "FCA."

Follow FCA US news and video on:

FCA Content On Demand (COD): www.fcacod.com

Company blog: blog.fcanorthamerica.com

Company website: www.fcanorthamerica.com

FCA360: 360.fcanorthamerica.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/ChryslerGroup

Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/chryslergroup/

Media website: media.fcanorthamerica.com

Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/fcacorporate

Instagram: www.instagram.com/FiatChrysler_NA

Streetfire: www.streetfire.net/uploaded/chryslervideo.htm

Twitter: www.twitter.com/FiatChrysler_NA

Twitter (Spanish): www.twitter.com/fcausespanol

YouTube: www.youtube.com/pentastarvideo

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fca-us-llc-names-cargurus-premier-partner-for-certified-pre-owned-vehicle-advertising-300258314.html

SOURCE FCA US LLC

CONTACT: Ralph Kisiel, 248-512-2757 (office), 248-705-9688 (cell), ralph.kisiel@fcagroup.com

RELATED LINKShttp://www.fcanorthamerica.com
AUSTIN, Texas, April 27, 2016 -- Localeur, where locals find and share the best local places to eat, drink and play, announced today it has opened its platform to expand to cities throughout the country. This expansion will open its community from its current roster of 20 cities to include locals in cities nationwide such as Baltimore, Detroit, Las Vegas and Minneapolis, among others.

"We experienced phenomenal growth in 2015 on our way to reaching one million users, but there are millions more millennials in cities around the country who have local insight and want to help travelers experience local in an authentic way," said co-founder and CEO Joah Spearman. "In opening up our platform this year, we reinforce that a community of locals built on authenticity, quality and trust is the way of the future. Localeur places the power in the hands of millennial locals in cities across the country who can join our community and share their local insight."

Localeur, which launched exclusively to Austin during South by Southwest Festival 2013, has expanded city by city over the past three years. In 2014, Localeur launched its first iPhone app, and in 2015 launched on Android devices. The app has since garnered praise from The Today Show, Forbes, Time and numerous outlets as a top travel app.

Today, Localeur's geographic footprint includes major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The startup says more than 80 percent of its users are between 18 and 35 years old and use Localeur on mobile devices  and that none of its cities account for more than 10 percent of its user base.

To meet with many of these millennials in cities around the country, Spearman is embarking on a roadtrip to at least 35 cities in the next 40 days  promoting the trip through social media outlets with the hashtag #35in40 - to meet with locals, connect with local business owners and raise awareness for Localeur's presence in each market. In support of the roadtrip, luxury brands Cadillac and Tablet Hotels have partnered with Localeur to provide transportation and hotel accommodations in various cities. So far, he has traveled more than 1,200 miles in four days to meet locals and local business owners in Houston, New Orleans, Jacksonville and Savannah. More information about the trip can be found at blog.localeur.com.

Earlier this year, Localeur announced a national partnership with JetBlue Airways. Through the partnership, Localeur provides city-specific content for JetBlue's fans and followers through the airline's digital channels. JetBlue has already featured Localeur content for cities ranging from Austin to Boston, Los Angeles and New York City.

"A list of tourist attractions is nice, but being able to provide unique, credible content and hidden gems from Localeur is what turns a pleasant vacation into an unforgettable one," said Elizabeth Windram, JetBlue's brand and advertising director, of the partnership.

About Localeur

Localeur helps users find and share the best local places to eat, drink and play. Last year, Localeur reached 1 million users with just four employees and no venture capital funding. Recently, Datafox named Localeur one of the top startups in Austin without Series A funding. Initially launched during South by Southwest 2013 in Austin, Localeur was named the best new startup by Austin Monthly and has gone on to receive praise from The Today Show, Forbes, TIME, Men's Journal, MTV, MSN, Mashable and countless other outlets.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/localeur-expands-nationwide-founder-visits-35-cities-300258227.html

SOURCE Localeur

CONTACT: Joah Spearman | joah@localeur.com | 512.422.3686

RELATED LINKShttp://www.localeur.com
NCTech and Top Gear USA capture the Rubicon Trail in 360 degrees

NCTech and Top Gear USA capture the Rubicon Trail in 360 degrees iSTAR camera used to create immersive visual experience of challenging off-road route on Google Maps Los Angeles, CA & Edinburgh, UK - April 27, 2016 - <http://nctechimaging.com> NCTech, the developer of reality imaging systems, today announced that its <https://www.nctechimaging.com/istar/> iSTAR panoramic camera has been used the Top Gear USA television show to create the first ever virtual online experience of the infamous Rubicon Trail, using high-resolution 360 degree imaging. The images are being uploaded to Google Maps <https://goo.gl/hdO2Bx> to provide a visual online record of the Top Gear team's journey - a route that Google's Street View cars could never access. The Rubicon Trail is a 22-mile-long route, part road and part 4x4 trail, located in the Sierra Nevada in California. It is viewed as one of the most difficult off-road vehicle routes in the world, with an average driving speed of 2 miles per hour during the trail section meaning that it takes several days to complete. Top Gear is an American motoring television series, based on the BBC series of the same name. The show's presenters are professional racing driver Tanner Foust, actor and comedian Adam Ferrara, and automotive and racing analyst Rutledge Wood. The Rubicon Trail feature was part of Top Gear's new season premiere, which aired on April 26. "The Rubicon Trail is one of the toughest and most well-known 4x4 routes in the world and based on our research, no one has ever captured it in 360 degrees," said Patrick Costello, Showrunner and Executive Producer of Top Gear USA. "So we wanted Top Gear USA to be the first. Our research into 360 degree photomapping led us to NCTech and their incredible iSTAR camera. NCTech helped us put together all the technology to turn this big idea into a reality. We wouldn't have been able to do it without them. The iSTAR camera impressed everyone. Top Gear is tough on everything, vehicles, camera gear, etc. and the iSTAR camera held up perfectly to heaps of abuse." iSTAR is the world's highest resolution, fully automatic, 360-degree HDR camera. Machined from solid metal for robustness and accuracy, iSTAR precisely captures full spherical immersive images and high resolution panoramic data streams for fast, efficient visual documentation of almost any environment. With the camera set to automatically capture an image every minute or so, over 6,000 images were captured as part of the project, each of them automatically location tagged with iSTAR's built-in GPS module. For the upload to Google Maps, a reduced number (around 2,000) will be added. To date, around 30 images of the journey have been uploaded, with the full number to be completed over the weeks ahead. "When we heard what Top Gear were hoping to do, we were instantly interested because the project was a perfect fit for the easy-to-use and rugged capabilities of iSTAR," said Neil Tocher, Co-Founder and CTO, NCTech. "We assisted their team build a mounting plate so the iSTAR could be easily attached to any of their vehicles, sent them some quick instructions on how to use the camera and set them loose with it!" To access images and other background information relating to this story, visit: https://www.nctechimaging.com/topgear/ Full iSTAR product information and images available at: https://www.nctechimaging.com/istar/ About NCTech NCTech designs and manufactures leading 360 degree reality imaging systems that automate and streamline the workflow of image documentation and can be used repeatedly, accurately, consistently by anyone anywhere. NCTech's industrial-grade camera, iSTARR, is a fast, fully automatic, 50 megapixel, 360 degree HDR camera. Fully calibrated for high precision applications such as colourisation of laser scans or extracting photogrammetric measurements, iSTAR has multiple applications: from covert operations and police reporting of crime scenes to 3D laser documentation and asset management for the engineering and heritage sectors. In 2015, the company launched iris360, a non-calibrated camera system, intended for aesthetic panoramic image capture and fully integrated with Google Maps' new Street View app. NCTech is headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland and is funded by Archangel Investors Ltd and the Scottish Co-Investment Fund. For more information, visit <http://www.nctechimaging.com> www.nctechimaging.com Media contact: NCTech Limited Danny Sullivan +44 772 497 4255 media@nctechimaging.com
PUNE, India, April 27, 2016 --

Worldwide armor materials market growth is influenced by factors such as rising security concerns, increasing demand for homeland security and development of advanced armor materials suitable for urban warfare arenas, wherein modern weapons, such as Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs) are used.

Complete report on global armor materials market spread across 186 pages, profiling 14 companies and supported with 103 tables and 78 figures is now available at http://www.reportsnreports.com/reports/458644-armor-materials-market-by-type-metals-alloy-ceramic-composite-para-aramid-fibers-uhmwpe-fiberglas-by-application-vehicle-aerospace-body-civil-marine-and-by-region-global-trends-forecast-to-2020.html .

Vehicle armor has been projected to control the major share of the armor materials market by 2020. Need to reduce the weight of armored vehicles to increase effectiveness and provide protection from advanced weapons and ammunitions are expected to be the major driver for the vehicle armor segment during the forecast period.

Asia-Pacific has been estimated to dominate the armor materials market by 2020. Increasing demand for armor materials in the region can be attributed to military modernization programs by countries, such as China and India. The increasing political tensions between various countries in the region, as well as internal conflicts, are also driving the growth of the market in the region.

This report also identifies market dynamics, such as drivers, restraints, and opportunities. The major companies involved in this market, such as ATI (U.S.), DuPont (U.S.), Royal TenCate (Netherlands), and DSM (Netherlands), have been comprehensively profiled in this report. Order a copy of Armor Materials Market by Type (Metals & Alloy, Ceramic & Composite, Para-Aramid Fibers, UHMWPE, Fiberglas), by Application (Vehicle, Aerospace, Body, Civil, Marine) and by Region - Global Trends & Forecast to 2020 research report at http://www.reportsnreports.com/purchase.aspx?name=458644 .

In the process of determining and verifying, the armor materials market size for several segments and sub segments gathered through secondary research, extensive primary interviews were conducted with key people. In Tier 1 (54%), Tier 2 (38%) and Tier 3 (8%) companies were contacted for primary interviews. The interviews were conducted with various key people such as C-level (46%), Director Level (40%) and others (14%) from various key organizations operating in the global armor materials market. The primary interviews were conducted worldwide covering regions such as North America (47%), Europe (32%) and APAC (21%).

On a related note, another research on Ballistic Protection Market Global Forecasts & Analysis to 2014 - 2020 says, the global ballistic protection market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.11% by 2020 due to the growing demand in the different regions across the world. The defense segment contributes 75% to the ballistic protection system market, 17% of the demand comes as investment in homeland security and the remaining 8% constitutes the commercial segment. Companies like eijin Limited (Japan), Honeywell International (U.S.), BAE systems (U.K.), Royal TenCate Corporate EMEA (Netherland), E.L. DuPont DE Nemours & Co. (France) have been profiled in this 202 pages research report available at http://www.reportsnreports.com/reports/300692-ballistic-protection-market-by-type-personal-protective-equipment-vehicle-armor-sub-type-soft-armor-hard-armor-personal-protective-head-gear-by-application-defense-homeland-security-commercial-global-forecasts-analysis-to-2014-2020.html .

Explore more reports on the advanced materials market at http://www.reportsnreports.com/market-research/advanced-material/.

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SOURCE ReportsnReports
PITTSBURGH, April 27, 2016 -- U-Haul recently acquired the iconic Iron City Storage building at 3700 Bigelow Blvd. and is refurbishing the facility to better meet the moving and storage demands of Pittsburgh college students.

U-Haul Moving & Storage of Iron City offers 744 storage units; 292 feature climate-control. The facility is within two miles of the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Carlow University. Duquesne University is just four miles away.

"There are a lot of students in the area, so we are excited to serve the flow of young people moving in and out of temporary housing or back home from the universities," U-Haul Company of Pittsburgh president Bob Bourgeois said. "I'm proud to see U-Haul expanding the market in Pittsburgh."

Residents of Pittsburgh aren't surprised to see a U-Haul presence at the 1.38-acre site. Iron City Storage supplemented its primary business as a U-Haul neighborhood dealer for 11 years prior to U-Haul acquiring the property last September.

"I've worked here for over 12 years," general manager Kevin Smith explained. "Bob was my area field manager when Iron City Storage first joined the dealership network. Since the owners lived in New Jersey, I pretty much ran the business. No one knows more about this building."

The 71,208-square-foot building is more than a century old and has been home to a handful of businesses including Goodyear Tire, Geyer Printing and, most recently, Iron City Storage. U-Haul has made the facility a one-stop shop for storage units, truck and trailer rentals, towing equipment, boxes and more.

"We are a huge landmark at the end of the Bloomfield Bridge," Smith said. "More than 35,000 cars pass us every day, so we have a great opportunity for exposure here. People didn't know what or who we were before. But with U-Haul taking the reins and giving this place direction, we'll be a real part of this community."

Once the cleanup and renovations are completed, there will be no question what the four-story building is. This will become a full-service U-Haul store, renovated inside and out.

The acquisition of the Pittsburgh facility was driven by U-Haul Company's Corporate Sustainability initiatives: U-Haul supports infill development to help local communities lower their carbon footprint. Our adaptive reuse of existing buildings reduces the amount of energy and resources required for new-construction materials and helps cities reduce their unwanted inventory of unused buildings.

Contact U-Haul Moving & Storage of Iron City at (412) 687-4256 or stop by to visit Smith and his team. Hours of operation are from 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. Reserve equipment at uhaul.com or contact Reservations at 1-800-GO-UHAUL.

To learn more about U-Haul in the news and in your community, visit myuhaulstory.com.

Contact:

Andrea Batchelor

Jeff Lockridge

E-mail: publicrelations@uhaul.com

Phone: 602-263-6981

Website: uhaul.com

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360641

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090622/LA34860LOGO-b

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/u-haul-purchase-by-pitt-campus-to-address-student-storage-needs-300258519.html

SOURCE U-Haul
SAINT-CLOUD, France, April 27, 2016 --

Marrakech Menara Airport (RAK), April 27-30

Dassault Aviation will present its long range Falcon 900LX at the fifth International Marrakech Air Show.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120925/564526-a )



(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360740 )



Dassault's front line Rafale fighter will also be featured at the show, which opens today, as part of a French Air Force exhibit.

The 4,750 nm (8,800 km) Falcon 900LX is the most advanced version of the proven and highly capable Falcon 900 trijet line, which has set records for reliability, versatility and fuel economy since it was first introduced. Equipped with advanced winglets that reduce drag and optimize climb performance, the Falcon 900LX can fly non-stop from Rabat to Dubai, Delhi or Washington, or from Marrakech to Johannesburg or Rio. It is the only jet in its class capable of landing with nearly a full fuel load enabling, for example, a takeoff from Rabat with a stop in Marrakech for additional passengers before continuing to intercontinental destinations without refueling.

Since it was first introduced, the Falcon 900 family has evolved into six different versions, the latest of which is the 900LX, certified in 2010. It is equipped with the most advanced equipment on the market, including Dassault's second-generation award winning EASy II flight deck and FalconCabin HD+ cabin management system. Its three engine configuration - unique to Dassault - offers improved runway performance and added safety margin when flying over oceans and hostile terrain.

"In addition to performance and cabin comfort, aircraft efficiency has become a decisive factor in choosing an executive jet," said Gilles Gautier, Vice President, Falcon Sales for Dassault Aviation. "And the Falcon 900LX is the most efficient business jet in its class, offering 40% better fuel economy than any competing aircraft."

Qualities like this, added to the legendary robustness of Falcon jets which are designed and built to the exacting standards of Dassault fighters, make them top performers in North Africa which has more than a dozen Falcon aircraft currently in operation.

"We are extremely bullish over prospects here," said Gautier. "With its buoyant agricultural and petrochemical sectors and fast growing financial industry, the regional market appears poised for solid long term growth."

Notes for Editors

Dassault Falcon is the recognized global brand for Dassault business jets which are designed, manufactured and supported by Dassault Aviation and Dassault Falcon Jet Corp.

About Dassault Aviation

Dassault Aviation is a leading aerospace company with a presence in over 90 countries across five continents. It produces the Rafale fighter jet as well as the complete line of Falcons. The company employs a workforce of over 11,000 and has assembly and production plants in both France and the United States and service facilities around the globe. Since the rollout of the first Falcon 20 in 1963, over 2,400 Falcon jets have been delivered. Dassault offers a range of six business jets from the twin-engine 3,350 nm large-cabin Falcon 2000S to its new flagship, the tri-engine 6,450 nm ultra-long range Falcon 8X.

About Dassault Falcon Jet

Dassault Falcon Jet Corp. is a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of Dassault Aviation, France. Dassault Falcon Jet markets and supports the Falcon family of business jets throughout North and South America.

Follow us on Twitter: @DassaultFalcon

Photos

Copy and paste the link into your browser to access the high resolution photos: http://www.falconphotogallery.com

For more information about Dassault Falcon business jets, visit: http://www.dassaultfalcon.com



Press Contacts

Dassault Aviation (Saint-Cloud, France)

Vadim Feldzer Tel. +33-1-47-11-44-13

vadim.feldzer@dassault-aviation.com

Marie-Alexandrine Fouillard Tel. +33-1-47-11-64-23

marie-alexandrine.fouillard@dassault-aviation.com

Dassault Falcon Jet (Teterboro Airport, USA)

Andrew Ponzoni Tel. +1-201-541-45-88

andrew.ponzoni@falconjet.com

Grant Kielczewski Tel. +1-201-541-46-79

grant.kielczewski@falconjet.com

SOURCE Dassault Aviation
COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 27, 2016 -- Safelite AutoGlass employees turned out in a big way to raise money for the future of the most vulnerable children in South Africa. Nearly 400 people all over the world traveled to Las Vegas to participate in the 7th Annual Safelite Challenge  a volunteer-led fundraiser welcoming employees, friends, family and supplier and insurance client sponsors to participate in an individual or team triathlon or duathlon, a 5K fun walk, a motorcycle poker run, a virtual race, or an online silent auction.

Thanks to their fundraising efforts, a record-setting $340,000 will be donated to Afrika Tikkun, a charitable organization co-founded by Bertie Lubner who also was the co-founder of Safelite's parent company, Belron.

Over the last seven years, Safelite's people have had unique opportunities to contribute in meaningful ways to this non-profit. Afrika Tikkun is aimed at developing new generations of productive citizens in South African communities through Centers of Excellence where they can provide everything the child needs  from cradle to career. In fact, Nelson Mandela was so impressed with the impact of Afrika Tikkun, that from 1995 until he passed away, he was its Chief Patron.

In addition to Safelite being the leading U.S. financial supporter, groups of Safelite employees have traveled to South Africa to see first-hand the impact their efforts have had. And, each year, four young adults within the Afrika Tikkun system are selected to travel to the U.S. to participate in the Challenge while also benefiting from mentoring programs within Safelite.

"It's absolutely humbling to talk with the bright young men and women who travel from South Africa to participate in the Challenge alongside us," said Brian DiMasi, Safelite's Corporate Counsel and volunteer lead. Knowing that we can make a difference in the lives of children giving them hope is an amazing reward in and of itself. The Safelite Challenge is also a wonderful opportunity to engage our people in a fun and healthy event."

The Safelite Challenge has raised more than $2 million for Afrika Tikkun since its inception. Last year alone, Safelite's contributions enabled Afrika Tikkun to serve more than 1,000 children.

"I am once again inspired by the selflessness of Safelite's people, friends, family and corporate sponsors who give so generously to support a good cause," said Tom Feeney, president and CEO of Safelite AutoGlass. "It's these our wonderful people who make Safelite the company it is  caring and compassionate. We are proud to support both this cause, and many others like it right here in the U.S."

A team consisting of top-performers and top fundraisers will next travel to London to participate in the Spirit of Belron Challenge, a similar event organized by Safelite's parent company, Belron.

About Afrika Tikkun

Afrika Tikkun was founded 20 years ago, soon after the emergence of democracy in South Africa in 1995, to actively address the consequences of decades of institutionalized oppression. Recognizing that the youth of the country would become the future leaders of South Africa, the founders' vision of the sustainable upliftment of children and youth from the most devastated communities immediately won the personal support of President Nelson Mandela as its founding patron. Afrika Tikkun's 600+ employees in South Africa work to break the cycle of poverty, providing their beneficiaries with Hope, Capability and Promise  the education, life-skills and confidence that enable them to become the self-sustaining, productive future of South Africa. Through a holistic Cradle-to-Career model, Afrika Tikkun invests in the sustenance, education and social development of disadvantaged children, 19,000 in 2014 alone, from early infancy through young adulthood and into gainful employment, thereby enabling them to become the leaders of tomorrow. For more information, visit AfrikaTikkun.org.

About Safelite AutoGlass

Safelite AutoGlass is the nation's largest provider of vehicle glass repair and replacement services with 6,800 MobileGlassShops and company stores in all 50 states. Last year, nearly 5.4 million customers chose Safelite for its 24/7 national contact centers, advanced online scheduling, superior repair and replacement systems, and the industry's only nationwide lifetime guarantee. Founded in 1947, the Columbus, Ohio-based company employs more than 12,000 people across the United States. For more information, visit Safelite.com, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Media Contact: Melina Metzger, Safelite AutoGlass, 614.210.9232, melina.metzger@safelite.com

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/safelite-autoglass-donates-340000-to-afrika-tikkun-charitable-organization-after-7th-annual-triathlon-fundraiser-300258703.html

SOURCE Safelite AutoGlass

RELATED LINKShttp://www.safelite.com
JOHN FORCE TO RACE ADVANCE AUTO PARTS PEAK FUNNY CAR IN HOUSTON

JOHN FORCE TO RACE ADVANCE AUTO PARTS PEAK FUNNY CAR IN HOUSTONHOUSTON, TX (April 27, 2016) ---- 16-time Funny Car champion John Force will be racing an Advance Auto Parts branded Chevrolet Camaro SS Funny Car this weekend at the NHRA Spring Nationals in Baytown, Texas. The 10,000 horsepower Funny Car will continue to fly the standout blue PEAK Antifreeze branding but Force will be looking for his unprecedented 144th career Funny Car win with some new partners. The Houston NHRA race will be the first of eight races during the 2016 NHRA season Force will be in the red and blue Funny Car.aI am excited to be racing this PEAK/Advance Auto Parts Chevy Funny Car starting in Houston. PEAK has been aggressive in promoting this race team and using the NHRA to build their business with all my race cars. We have three wins already this season from Robert Hight and Brittany Force but I want to get this hot rod into the winneras circle as fast as I can,a??? said Force.aWe are working with a lot of companies through PEAK and it is great to be growing this program. They stepped up to the full season and we are working and racing hard for them and all our sponsors. Plus theyall have the Advance RV in Nitro Alley, special store incentives for Speed Perks members, and fans might even be able to get a die cast replica of this hot rod too,a??? added Force.So far this season Force has raced to a runner-up finish at the Carquest Auto Parts NHRA Nationals A as well as two additional semi-final finishes. The PEAK Chevrolet Camaro team sits No. 3 in the Funny Car point standings and was the No. 3 qualifier at the most recent NHRA Four-Wide Nationals.A
ATLANTA, April 27, 2016 -- Delta Air Lines' Board of Directors today declared a quarterly dividend of $0.135 per share. The dividend is payable to shareholders of record as of the close of business on May 11, 2016 and will be paid on June 1, 2016.

Delta Air Lines serves nearly 180 million customers each year. In 2016, Delta was named to Fortune's top 50 Most Admired Companies in addition to being named the most admired airline for the fifth time in six years. Additionally, Delta has ranked No.1 in the Business Travel News Annual Airline survey for an unprecedented five consecutive years. With an industry-leading global network, Delta and the Delta Connection carriers offer service to 324 destinations in 58 countries on six continents. Headquartered in Atlanta, Delta employs nearly 80,000 employees worldwide and operates a mainline fleet of more than 800 aircraft. The airline is a founding member of the SkyTeam global alliance and participates in the industry's leading trans-Atlantic joint venture with Air France-KLM and Alitalia as well as a joint venture with Virgin Atlantic. Including its worldwide alliance partners, Delta offers customers more than 15,000 daily flights, with key hubs and markets including Amsterdam, Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York-JFK and LaGuardia, London-Heathrow, Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Tokyo-Narita. Delta has invested billions of dollars in airport facilities, global products and services, and technology to enhance the customer experience in the air and on the ground. Additional information is available on the Delta News Hub, as well as delta.com, Twitter @DeltaNewsHub, Google.com/+Delta, Facebook.com/delta and Delta's blog takingoff.delta.com.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/delta-air-lines-declares-quarterly-dividend-300258757.html

SOURCE Delta Air Lines

CONTACT: Investor Relations, 404-715-2170 or Corporate Communications, 404-715-2554, media@delta.com

RELATED LINKShttp://www.delta.com
2016 Ram ProMaster, A Cubist's Dream

SEE ALSO:Totally RAM

By Thom Cannell

Michigan Bureau

The Auto Channel

Authors Note: No attempt at completeness, simply comments on one weeks driving experiencebalanced against decades of experience and hundreds of comparisons.

Opening the window on our 2016 Ram ProMaster my friend remarked "It's a noisy engine." "Yes, it is a diesel, I replied listening to the muffled clatter of a modern diesel. That is part of the story of the 2016 Ram ProMaster and its 3.0-liter diesel engine, its terrific functionality.

Again, we were moving boxes, wheelbarrows, framed artwork, cabinets and the whatnots accumulated throughout life. This time our prime mover was a 2016 Ram ProMaster. This van, introduced at the 2013 Chicago Auto Show, has quickly earned a solid reputation and place in the We Move Stuff pantheon of cargo vans, which have largely supplanted what were called B-vans. Stylish, sleek, well equipped, our week long test went smoothy.

ProMaster is part of the changeover from small pickup-based vehicles to purpose built large-capacity vehicles, most having their origin in Europe. However, our North American ProMaster is considerably changed from its Italian Fiat Ducato origins with changes in powertrains for our stricter emissions requirements, heavier duty cycles, and an improved suspension that is far more robust. Parenthetically, many of the changes engineered for North America have been accepted in other parts of the world, according to Ram spokespersons.

Though brand-related to the ProMaster City we wrote about recently, there is no kinship or part sharing. ProMaster is a medium duty (2500) van available with either a I-4 diesel or V6 gasoline engine. That gas engine, a 3.6-liter Pentastar rated at 260 pound-feet of torque and 280 horsepower is not what we wanted for test. No, we wanted the 3.0-liter turbodiesel, and thats what we received. Its lesser in the raw horsepower with only 174 horses, it has more torque (295 lb-ft) and torque is developed at a low 1400 rpm. That means plenty of grunt, immediately, for heavy cargos as well as good fuel economy. The gas engine is mated to a truck-rated six-speed automatic transmission, the diesel to a Dual Active Drive six-speed automatic manual transmission thats electronically controlled.

The day the 2016 Ram ProMaster arrived we were ready to load it, perhaps not to its full 5,160 pound capacity, nor did we tow anything, though the ProMaster is rated to tow 5,100 pounds. What we quickly discovered was really good suspension; with only 400 pounds of load on very bad roads there wasn't the crash-bang we expected. We also appreciated sliding doors at both sides and very wide opening rear doors. Regardless Door Number 1-2-3, loading is a breeze, including loading with a fork lift through any door.

We were surprised by acceleration that, while adequate, is best described as lethargic, accelerating as if it had a full load. Part of the reason derives from the transmission, part the weight hauled and the weight of the truck, part the relatively small engine. For instance, on freeway entries we needed all of the ramp and entry lane to achieve 65 mph. Staying with performance aspects of the 3.0-liter diesel in our 2016 ProMaster, the automated manual transmission is the source of our only complaint. This M40 automated manual uses internal solenoids to hydraulically release an internal clutch and switch between gears. And often we found the sensation odd, to say the least. Like a beginning driver using a manual transmission it would often hesitate greatly upon upshifts, other times change gears smoothly and quickly. Needless to say this shift hesitancy was more felt than a true difficulty. Automated manuals were notorious for this behavior early on, so were mystified to find it here. That said, the 3.0-liter seems relatively unaffected by load, though we never exceeded 40% of its 2.5-ton capacity.

Since driving isnt all about acceleration or capacity we note that the 2016 ProMaster has controls well placed for commercial operation. One thing anyone unfamiliar with trucks will find different is a steering wheel position that will remind you of a bus or semi. The steering column is adjustable for height, but leaves you with a city bus kind of knees-under-wheel driving position.

We found plenty of storage bins, several USB connectors, and multiple cupholders available to insure operator comfort, and modern utility. We think that with a partition behind the seats, which many upfitters offer, it would be a much quieter vehicle and quicker to warm up as the heater takes a very long time to unfreeze toes.

Like its competitors, the center console navigation and audio display is sufficient but clearly from an earlier design generation with its 5" screen. However the smaller size in no way indicates lesser operating efficiency. The touch screen works well and is responsive, but, for instance, without reading the manual (we're no different from you in that respect) there was no clear way to change scale on the navigation screen. FCAs UConnect system has always been rated highly and the embedded Bluetooth hands free system works marvelously, as does satellite radio. What is requested by voice is accomplished without hesitation despite lack of mice or trackballs, instead focusing on hands-free function.

So, heres the Bullet Points:

PRO:



The 2016 Ram ProMaster wins us over with good looks, stylishness, overall functionality, making it a wise choice for any operator. As is the overall high mileage we achieved. While less than the rated 29 mpg at around 24 MPG in 50% City, 50% highway use, were happy.

Interiors are roomy, seats comfortable, and the turning radius is tight.

Doors, all of them, open widely and easily, the rear doors wrapping around and secure with built-in magnets.

Both high roof, standard roof versions and a cut-away are offered in 118, 136, and 159 wheelbase chassis for a wide variety of cargo and window vans with roof heights of 91 or 101.

Ram says the ProMaster has the lowest cost of ownership in its group, the primary attraction for fleet owners. In fact the US Post Office will begin using gas engined ProMasters.

Edmunds dot com named the 2015 ProMaster a winner in its Best Retained Value  Awards. Another selling point for fleets.

Ram also says the 2016 ProMaster has the best-in-class ceiling heights, lowest load floor, and best step-in height. All factors in both loading and operator comfort.

CONS:



Were surprised that the turbodiesel engine isnt peppier, and by the slow-to-shift transmission.

Wed think more D-rings might be good (theyre model dependent), but thats an upfitter and model order thing. And we did like the wooden standoff rails that are standard.

The Most In-Depth RAM Buyer's Research - Anywhere!
UMP Modifieds Take On New Name At Terre Haute IN Action Track

*aUMP Modifieds Take On New Name At Terre Haute Action Track* * Scott's Custom Colors UMP Modifieds To Race Sunday* Whether it is USAC Silver Crown, USAC Sprints, MSCS Sprints, or the Indiana Late Model Series, the UMP Modifieds are with them, putting on a great show at the Terre Haute Action Track. Now the division has a new name, as Scott's Custom Colors, of Terre Haute, IN has stepped up as title sponsor. Scott's Custom Colors was started in 1994 by owner, Scott McDaniel, on the site of the old Fast Track Race Track in Terre Haute. After continued growth and building additions, Scott's Custom Colors has taken the lead in customer service, technology, and training. All of this ensures that each vehicle is repaired correctly and with safety as a priority. The company has supported auto racing for a long time, with the logo noticeable on a number of cars, including that of Scott's son Josh, who works for the company and races in the division. Now, the company has moved forward with naming rights to the division, the Scott's Custom Colors UMP Modifieds. "We are thrilled to expand our support of the UMP Modified class to involve the Terre Haute Action Track itself. We look forward to the future of the class and the track in the Wabash Valley", owner Scott McDaniel said. The Scott's Custom Colors UMP Modifieds are scheduled to be in action this coming Sunday, May 1 as part of the Spring Fling. Also on the card are the MSCS Sprint cars. At intermission, the kids from the Terre Haute Quarter Midget Association will be taking a lap around the track in their rides. Pit gates open at 3:00 on Sunday, grandstands at 4:00, hotlaps begin at 5:00, and racing will begin at 6:30. Grandstand admission is $20, infield admission is $15, and children 10 and under are free. *About Scott's Custom Colors: * Scott's Custom Colors is located at 3140 N 25th Street in Terre Haute, IN. They can be contacted by calling 812-466-1416 or by checking out their website at scottscustomcolors.com. Don't forget to like their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/scottscustomcolorsandautobody. *About Terre Haute Action Track: * For more information, follow the Action Track online at www.terrehauteactiontrack.net and on Facebook (www.facebook.com/terrehauteactiontrack). Updates are also available by calling the Track Enterprises office at 217-764-3200. The Terre Haute Action Track is located at the Wabash County Fairgrounds, in Terre Haute, IN. The physical address is 3901 South US Hwy 41, Terre Haute, IN 47807.
CLEVELAND, April 27, 2016 --

Quarter Highlights:

Q1 2016 shipments increase 3%. Revenues decrease 2.9%

Strong U.S. dollar and weak Brazil market performance continue to negatively affect revenues and results

Acquisition of Penta Holding S.p.A ., the majority stakeholder in Bolzoni S.p.A., completed on April 1, 2016

Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc. today announced consolidated revenues of $604.2 million and net income of $10.0 million, or $0.61 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2016 compared with revenues of $622.3 million and net income of $13.9 million, or $0.85 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2015. Consolidated operating profit was $9.7 million for the first quarter of 2016 compared with $21.0 million for the first quarter of 2015.

EBITDA for the first quarter of 2016 was $16.5 million. EBITDA in this press release is provided solely as a supplemental non-GAAP disclosure with respect to operating results. For reconciliations from GAAP results to the non-GAAP results, see page 8.

The Company's cash position was $138.5 million as of March 31, 2016 compared with $155.1 million as of December 31, 2015. Debt as of March 31, 2016 increased to $63.0 million from $53.1 million at December 31, 2015.

As previously announced, on April 1, 2016 Hyster-Yale's indirect wholly-owned subsidiary, Hyster-Yale Capital Holding Italy S.r.l. (" HY Italy "), acquired 100% of the outstanding shares of Penta Holding S.p.A. from its shareholders and therefore, indirectly, an approximately 50.43 percent stake in Bolzoni S.p.A. (BIT: BLZ) for an aggregate cash purchase price of 53.5 million (approximately $60.9 million at April 1, 2016).

Subsequent to the completion of the acquisition of Penta, HY Italy, in compliance with Italian law and CONSOB regulations, commenced the steps to launch a mandatory tender offer in Italy for all of the remaining outstanding shares of Bolzoni, with the intention to achieve the delisting of Bolzoni following completion of the mandatory tender offer and the processes related thereto. The maximum amount to be paid pursuant to the applicable agreement, in the event that the remaining outstanding shares are tendered in Italy pursuant to the mandatory tender offer, will be 41.9 million. The mandatory tender offer is expected to be funded using Hyster-Yale's cash on hand and borrowings under Hyster-Yale's credit facility.

On April 26, 2016, HY Italy purchased an additional 3,107,794 shares, or approximately 11.96%, of Bolzoni's outstanding stock at a per share price of 4.30, resulting in a total aggregate price of 13.4 million (approximately $15.1 million at April 26, 2016), bringing its total ownership in Bolzoni to approximately 62.39%. There can be no assurance HY Italy will be able to acquire 100% ownership of Bolzoni in the mandatory tender offer.

Lift Truck Results

The lift truck business reported net income of $13.7 million and revenues of $603.9 million for the first quarter of 2016 compared with net income of $17.5 million and revenues of $621.1 million for the first quarter of 2015. Lift truck operating profit was $15.8 million for the first quarter of 2016 compared with $27.0 million for the first quarter of 2015.

Consolidated worldwide new unit shipments increased to approximately 20,500 units in the first quarter of 2016 from approximately 19,900 units in the first quarter of 2015. Consolidated revenues declined compared with the prior year quarter.

First quarter 2016 bookings were approximately 23,500 units, or approximately $490 million, compared with approximately 23,700 units, or approximately $500 million, for the first quarter of 2015. Worldwide backlog was approximately 29,900 units, or approximately $670 million, at March 31, 2016 compared with approximately 31,900 units, or approximately $730 million, at March 31, 2015 and approximately 26,900 units, or approximately $660 million, at December 31, 2015. The March 2015 backlog included a very large customer order secured in late 2014 that did not ship until the second and third quarters of 2015.

Consolidated lift truck net income declined primarily as a result of a substantial decrease in operating profit due to higher selling, general and administrative expenses and lower gross profit, partially offset by a tax benefit of $4.0 million recognized in the first quarter of 2016. As a result of the Bolzoni transaction, the Company can now assert that $4.0 million in deferred taxes on foreign earnings is no longer required.

Americas

Total shipments in the Americas segment, which includes the North America, Latin America and Brazil markets, increased by approximately 800 units in the first quarter of 2016 compared with 2015 as a result of the continued implementation of the Company's strategic initiatives. Strong unit shipments in North America and Latin America were partially offset by a decrease in shipments in Brazil driven by continued weakness in the Brazil economy. As a result of the increase in unit volumes, revenues in the Americas improved modestly to $417.2 million in the first quarter of 2016 from $415.9 million in the first quarter of 2015. Benefits from increased unit volumes were mostly offset by a shift in trucks sold from higher-priced Class 5 trucks, including Big Trucks, to lower-priced Class 3 warehouse trucks and Class 4 internal combustion trucks, as well as unfavorable currency movements of $5.9 million from the translation of sales into U.S. dollars, which strengthened against the Brazilian real. Lower deal-specific pricing, partially offset by price increases in Brazil implemented to offset the impact of the weak Brazilian real, also partially offset the increase in revenues.

Despite the improvement in revenues, operating profit in the Americas decreased in the first quarter of 2016 compared with the prior year. Operating profit declined as a result of higher selling, general and administrative expenses primarily from acquisition-related costs of $2.8 million, a $2.8 million estimated loss on recovery of assets for recourse obligations and higher employee-related expenses. The increase in selling, general and administrative expenses was partially offset by improved gross profit, including continued material cost deflation, favorable foreign currency movements of $4.5 million and higher unit sales volume. These items were partially offset by unfavorable manufacturing variances, a shift in sales to lower-margin lift trucks and lower product pricing during the first quarter of 2016 compared with the first quarter of 2015.

In 2016, the Company expects the Americas market to decline moderately compared with 2015, including substantially reduced volumes in Brazil due to depressed market conditions. Along with an anticipated shift in sales to lower-priced units, these market conditions are expected to result in a modest decline in overall unit shipments and revenues in the Americas in 2016 compared with 2015. This decline in unit shipments is expected to be partially offset by an increase in North America and Latin America shipments from market share gains. Revenues in the first half of the year, and particularly the second quarter, are expected to decrease compared with 2015, primarily as a result of strong North America sales in the first half of 2015 due to a very large customer order secured in late 2014 that was shipped primarily in the second and third quarters of 2015.

Full-year 2016 operating profit in the Americas segment is expected to decrease compared with 2015. Expected benefits from favorable currency relationships based on current currency rates and anticipated improvements in Brazil's operating results are expected to be offset by higher employee-related operating expenses, increased professional fees related to the Bolzoni transaction and lower pricing of products. Operating profit in the first half of 2016 is expected to be substantially lower than the first half of 2015. This decline is expected to be partially offset by operating profit improvements in the second half of the year driven by increased unit volumes, particularly in the fourth quarter.

EMEA

Total shipments in the EMEA segment, which includes operations in the Europe, Middle East and Africa markets, increased approximately 200 units in the 2016 first quarter compared with 2015. Despite the increase in shipments, EMEA's overall revenues declined to $147.0 million in the first quarter of 2016 from $157.6 million in the first quarter of 2015 mainly as a result of unfavorable currency movements of $8.7 million due to the translation of sales into U.S. dollars, a shift in sales to lower-capacity lift trucks and the unfavorable effect of lower pricing of trucks.

Unfavorable currency movements also significantly reduced EMEA's operating profit, which declined to $2.0 million in the first quarter of 2016 from $8.7 million in the first quarter of 2015. Benefits realized in gross profit from higher shipments were more than offset by unfavorable currency movements of $8.0 million.

During 2015, EMEA had currency hedges in place that mitigated the unfavorable effect of the strengthening U.S. dollar. However, as these hedges have expired, the new hedges have not been and are not expected to be as favorable, based on current currency rates, in offsetting increased U.S. dollar-based costs incurred. As a result, the strong U.S. dollar is expected to have a larger unfavorable impact on results in the remainder of 2016.

Markets in the EMEA segment are expected to continue to grow modestly in 2016 as moderate increases in Western Europe are expected to be partially offset by a decline in the Middle East and Africa market. Despite these anticipated market conditions, the Company expects unit shipments and revenues in EMEA to grow more favorably than the market as a result of market share gains. Parts revenues are also expected to increase for the 2016 full year. Nevertheless, operating profit in the EMEA segment is expected to decrease substantially in 2016 compared with 2015 as a result of the reduced favorability of the hedge contracts in place at current currency rates coupled with unfavorable currency movements, an anticipated shift in sales mix to lower-margin products and lower pricing of products.

JAPIC

Revenues for the JAPIC segment, which includes operations in the Asia and Pacific regions, including China, as well as the equity earnings of the Sumitomo-NACCO operations, decreased in the first quarter of 2016 compared with the first quarter of 2015 primarily as a result of a decrease in unit shipments of approximately 400 units, a shift in mix to lower-priced lift trucks and unfavorable currency movements of $1.3 million.

JAPIC generated an operating loss of $1.6 million during the first quarter of 2016 compared with operating profit of $1.1 million in 2015. The decline was primarily due to a decrease in gross profit from the effects of unfavorable currency movements of $1.2 million and reduced sales volumes.

Looking forward, the JAPIC segment market is expected to continue to weaken in 2016, predominantly due to lower demand in China and Japan partially offset by modest growth in certain other markets. Despite these anticipated market conditions and as a result of the continued execution of the Company's strategic initiatives, full-year shipments, as well as unit and parts revenues, are expected to increase compared with 2015. Shipments and operating results in the first half of 2016 are expected to be lower than the first half of 2015, particularly as a result of the weak first quarter, but are expected to be offset by improvements in the second half of the year, resulting in full year 2016 operating results comparable to 2015.

Overall Lift Truck Outlook

The overall global market is expected to decline modestly in 2016. Market growth in EMEA is expected to be more than offset by declines in the Americas and JAPIC markets. Despite these market conditions, unit shipments, revenues and parts sales are expected to increase in the remainder of 2016 compared with 2015. However, as a result of the lower first quarter 2016 revenues, which are not expected to be recouped in future quarters, revenues for full-year 2016 are expected to be down modestly compared with full-year 2015. In addition, the Company expects operating profit and net income in 2016 to be lower than in 2015 as the increases in unit and parts volumes are expected to be offset by higher operating expenses, lower pricing of products and an anticipated shift in sales mix to lift trucks with lower average profit margins. Substantially lower operating profit is anticipated in the first half of 2016, primarily as a result of the lower operating profit in the first quarter of 2016 combined with the previously projected second quarter decline, with improvements anticipated in the second half of the year as a result of healthy backlog levels.

Commodity costs declined throughout 2015 and in the first quarter of 2016 and are expected to continue to be favorable in the remainder of 2016. However, these commodities, including steel in particular, remain volatile and sensitive to changes in the global economy.

Cash flow before financing activities, excluding the impact of the Bolzoni transaction, is expected to be positive but substantially decline in 2016 compared with 2015.

Hyster-Yale remains focused on gaining market share in its lift truck business over time by implementing the following key strategic initiatives: (1) enhancing its understanding of customer needs at the product and aftermarket levels, (2) driving for the lowest cost of ownership by utilizing the Company's understanding of customers' major cost drivers and developing solutions that consistently lower cost of ownership and create a differentiated competitive position, (3) strengthening independent distribution, (4) improving the Company's warehouse market position, (5) focusing on increased success in the Asia markets by offering products aimed at the needs of these markets, enhancing Asia distribution and focusing on strategic alliances with local partners, (6) enhancing its Big Truck market position and (7) strengthening its sales and marketing organization in all geographic regions.

The Company is also developing new products in many segments that are expected to support its market share growth. The new standard 2.0-3.0 ton Class 5 internal combustion engine lift truck line was introduced to the market in early April 2016 and is expected to be in production later this year.

Nuvera Results

Nuvera reported revenues of $0.3 million, an operating loss of $6.1 million and a net loss of $3.7 million for the first quarter of 2016 compared with revenues of $1.2 million, an operating loss of $6.0 million and a net loss of $3.6 million in the first quarter of 2015.

Nuvera Outlook

Hyster-Yale believes that the fuel-cell market for lift trucks has significant growth potential. Accordingly, the commercialization of Nuvera's fuel-cell technology is one of the Company's key strategic initiatives. Early stages of production of Nuvera's PowerEdge units, which can be substituted for lead-acid batteries in Class 1, 2 and 3 lift truck models, began in late 2015 and progress toward commercialization is expected to continue in 2016.

Nuvera expects to begin shipping PowerEdge units in the first half of 2016. Customer interest in these products is high and production is expected to ramp up throughout 2016 as additional sales of PowerEdge units are made. As a result, Nuvera expects to generate modest PowerEdge unit revenues in the first half of 2016, which are expected to grow gradually over the course of the year as production accelerates and new units are sold. The Company believes its U.S. customers will qualify for the 30% Federal Energy Credit on these PowerEdge units, which would allow those customers to realize a lower after-tax cost in 2016. The tax credit currently expires at the end of 2016. Political support to extend this credit has improved recently but is uncertain given the current political and federal budget environment.

Nuvera expects to continue to focus on commercializing its fuel-cell technology, integrating this technology into the Hyster and Yale lift truck product ranges and expanding its product line, while also increasing its focus on reducing manufacturing costs per unit as production increases. As a result of the costs to implement these programs, Nuvera expects to generate an operating loss in 2016 of approximately $24 to $27 million. Nuvera has an objective of reaching a quarterly break-even operating profit by the end of 2017 or early 2018 on a run rate of approximately 700 PowerEdge and ten PowerTap units per quarter at target margins. Nuvera is also exploring a number of partnership opportunities which would be complementary to its core operating plan and which could potentially accelerate achievement of break-even results.

The Company believes the commercialization of the Nuvera fuel-cell-related technologies is an investment that will reinforce the Company's core strategies and help drive further lift truck unit market share growth, as well as meet customer needs. It also provides the Company with the ability to expand its offering of best-in-class energy solutions to customers by integrating fuel cells with lift trucks in a way that is expected to optimize the performance and energy efficiency of the combined system. This also adds another power solution to what Hyster-Yale already believes is a market-leading complement of power solutions for lift trucks, which now includes lead-acid and lithium-ion battery and hydrogen fuel-cell-powered electric trucks, as well as a range of internal combustion engine-powered products. This, in conjunction with the Company's capability to provide full life cycle maintenance, service and fueling requirements, is expected to provide Hyster-Yale with an opportunity to meet customers' needs, drive market share, enhance Hyster-Yale's margins and offer a low overall cost of ownership alternative.

Nuvera's PowerTap hydrogen generator appliance, which produces fuel-cell grade hydrogen, is in commercial production and has an expanding list of customers in several applications.

Hyster-Yale believes the combination of Nuvera's technology and innovative culture with the lift truck business' supply chain, manufacturing and distribution expertise will help ensure the rapid commercialization and production ramp-up of Nuvera's products, as well as help reduce the manufacturing costs per unit as production increases.

*****

Conference Call

In conjunction with this news release, the management of Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc. will host a conference call on Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 11:00 a.m. eastern time. The call may be accessed by dialing (877) 201-0168 (Toll Free) or (647) 788-4901 (International), Conference ID: 87345894, or over the Internet through Hyster-Yale's website at www.hyster-yale.com. Please allow 15 minutes to register, download and install any necessary audio software required to listen to the broadcast. A replay of the call will be available shortly after the end of the conference call through May 5, 2016. The online archive of the broadcast will be available on the Hyster-Yale website.

Non-GAAP and Other Measures

This release contains non-GAAP financial measures within the meaning of Regulation G promulgated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Included in this release are reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures calculated in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles ("GAAP"). EBITDA in this press release is provided solely as a supplemental non-GAAP disclosure of operating results. Management believes that EBITDA assists investors in understanding the results of operations of the Company. In addition, management evaluates results using EBITDA.

For purposes of this news release, discussions about net income (loss) refer to net income (loss) attributable to stockholders.

Forward-looking Statements Disclaimer

The statements contained in this news release that are not historical facts are "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 forward-looking statements are made subject to certain risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those presented. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly revise these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that arise after the date hereof. Among the factors that could cause plans, actions and results to differ materially from current expectations are, without limitation: (1) reduction in demand for lift trucks and related aftermarket parts and service on a global basis, (2) the ability of dealers, suppliers and end-users to obtain financing at reasonable rates, or at all, as a result of current economic and market conditions, (3) the political and economic uncertainties in Eastern Europe and Brazil, (4) customer acceptance of pricing, (5) delays in delivery or increases in costs, including transportation costs, of raw materials or sourced products and labor or changes in or unavailability of quality suppliers, (6) exchange rate fluctuations, changes in non-U.S. import tariffs and monetary policies and other changes in the regulatory climate in the non-U.S. countries in which the Company operates and/or sells products, (7) delays in manufacturing and delivery schedules, (8) bankruptcy of or loss of major dealers, retail customers or suppliers, (9) customer acceptance of, changes in the costs of, or delays in the development of new products, (10) introduction of new products by, or more favorable product pricing offered by, competitors, (11) product liability or other litigation, warranty claims or returns of products, (12) the effectiveness of the cost reduction programs implemented globally, including the successful implementation of procurement and sourcing initiatives, (13) changes mandated by federal, state and other regulation, including health, safety or environmental legislation, (14) the successful commercialization of Nuvera's technology, (15) the introduction of a more accepted product to the market by a competitor, making the Nuvera technology less marketable, (16) competing offers for Bolzoni S.p.A., (17) changes in the conditions affecting the industries in which Hyster-Yale or Bolzoni S.p.A. operate, (18) the successful integration of Bolzoni S.p.A.'s operations and employees, and (19) other factors that may affect Bolzoni S.p.A. and are described under the heading "Principal Risks and Uncertainties" in Bolzoni S.p.A.'s Annual Report for the year ended December 31, 2015 and its Quarterly Reports.

About Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc.

Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc., headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, through its wholly-owned operating subsidiary, Hyster-Yale Group, Inc., designs, engineers, manufactures, sells and services a comprehensive line of lift trucks and aftermarket parts marketed globally primarily under the Hyster and Yale brand names. Nuvera Fuel Cells, LLC, a subsidiary of Hyster-Yale Group, is an alternative-power technology company focused on fuel-cell stacks and related systems, on-site hydrogen production and dispensing systems. For more information about Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc. and its subsidiaries visit the Company's website at www.hyster-yale.com.

Disclaimer

The mandatory tender offer in Italy will not be made, directly or indirectly, in the United States of America, or by use of the mails, or any means or instrumentality (including, without limitation, facsimile transmission, telephone and internet) of interstate or foreign commerce of, or any facilities of any national securities exchange of, the United States.

This news release does not constitute an extension into the United States of any offer mentioned in this news release, nor does this news release constitute or form part of an offer to buy securities or the solicitation of an offer to sell securities in the United States or any other jurisdiction in which, or to any persons to whom, such offer or solicitation would be unlawful.

*****





HYSTER-YALE MATERIALS HANDLING, INC. FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS









Three Months Ended

March 31

2016

2015

(In millions, except per share data)







Revenues $ 604.2



$ 622.3

Cost of sales 506.3



519.4

Gross Profit 97.9



102.9

Selling, general and administrative expenses 88.2



81.9

Operating Profit 9.7



21.0

Other (income) expense





Interest expense 1.1



1.0

Income from unconsolidated affiliates (1.3)



(1.1)

Other 1.0



1.4

Income before Income Taxes 8.9



19.7

Income tax provision (benefit) (1.0)



5.7

Net (income) loss attributable to noncontrolling interest 0.1



(0.1)

Net Income Attributable to Stockholders $ 10.0



$ 13.9









Basic earnings per share $ 0.61



$ 0.85









Diluted earnings per share $ 0.61



$ 0.85









Basic weighted average shares outstanding 16.352



16.277

Diluted weighted average shares outstanding 16.399



16.331















EBITDA RECONCILIATION

Quarter Ended





6/30/2015

9/30/2015

12/31/2015

3/31/2016

LTM

3/31/2016

(In millions) Net Income Attributable to Stockholders $ 22.7

$ 20.9

$ 17.2

$ 10.0

$ 70.8 Noncontrolling interest income (loss) 0.1

0.1

0.1

(0.1)

0.2 Income tax provision (benefit) 4.6

7.4

11.7

(1.0)

22.7 Interest expense 1.3

1.3

1.1

1.1

4.8 Interest income (0.3)

(0.3)

(0.6)

(0.4)

(1.6) Depreciation and amortization expense 7.6

7.2

6.8

6.9

28.5 EBITDA* $ 36.0

$ 36.6

$ 36.3

$ 16.5

$ 125.4































*EBITDA in this press release is provided solely as a supplemental disclosure. EBITDA does not represent net income, as defined by U.S. GAAP, and should not be considered as a substitute for net income or net loss, or as an indicator of operating performance. Hyster-Yale defines EBITDA as income before income taxes and noncontrolling interest income plus net interest expense and depreciation and amortization expense. EBITDA is not a measurement under U.S. GAAP and is not necessarily comparable with similarly titled measures of other companies.

HYSTER-YALE MATERIALS HANDLING, INC. FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS









Three Months Ended

March 31

2016

2015

(In millions) Revenues





Americas $ 417.2



$ 415.9

EMEA 147.0



157.6

JAPIC 39.7



47.6

Lift truck business $ 603.9



$ 621.1

Nuvera 0.3



1.2

Total $ 604.2



$ 622.3









Gross profit (loss)





Americas $ 72.2



$ 67.0

EMEA 22.1



29.8

JAPIC 4.2



6.9

Lift truck business $ 98.5



$ 103.7

Nuvera (0.6)



(0.8)

Total $ 97.9



$ 102.9









Operating profit (loss)





Americas $ 15.4



$ 17.2

EMEA 2.0



8.7

JAPIC (1.6)



1.1

Lift truck business $ 15.8



$ 27.0

Nuvera (6.1)



(6.0)

Total $ 9.7



$ 21.0









Net income (loss) attributable to stockholders





Americas $ 13.1



$ 9.2

EMEA 1.4



7.3

JAPIC (0.8)



1.0

Lift truck business $ 13.7



$ 17.5

Nuvera (3.7)



(3.6)

Total $ 10.0



$ 13.9



CASH FLOW AND CAPITAL STRUCTURE

Three Months Ended

March 31

2016

2015

(In millions) Net cash used for operating activities $ (18.3)



$ (3.4)

Net cash provided by (used for) investing activities 1.8



(8.0)

Cash Flow Before Financing Activities $ (16.5)



$ (11.4)











March 31, 2016

December 31, 2015 Cash $ 138.5



$ 155.1

Debt 63.0



53.1

Net Cash $ 75.5



$ 102.0











To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hyster-yale-materials-handling-inc-announces-first-quarter-2016-results-300258844.html

SOURCE Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc.

CONTACT: Christina Kmetko, (440) 229-5168

RELATED LINKShttp://www.hyster-yale.com
ISTANBUL, April 27, 2016 --

Turkish Airlines brought the world-famous, iconic Batmobile to Istanbul to travel cross-continental for the first time via the newest Bosphorus bridge to celebrate the release of Warner Bros. Pictures' highly anticipated action adventure movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360803 )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360802 )



The Batmobile travelled from Europe to Asia by crossing the Bosphorus Strait via the new Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge which officially opens to the public this summer. This marked the longest-ever ride for the one-of-a-kind vehicle.

"The ride across the newest Bosphorus bridge is symbolic of how the Batmobile unites people worldwide as a pop culture icon, how Istanbul is the one and only city connecting two continents, and how Turkish Airlines bridges passengers globally to 113 countries and more than 287 destinations" said M. Ilker Ayc, Turkish Airlines' Board Chairman.

"This is an opportunity for us to introduce our precious city, Istanbul and our newest bridge to the world. The Batmobile is one of the most symbolic movie icons of all time, and has now connected the world with Istanbul," added M. Ilker Ayc.

Turkish Airlines' Istanbul hub is centrally located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, serving as a geographically attractive and natural transfer point for international routes. The Istanbul hub provides Americans in eight cities, Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, a one-stop connection to more than 287 destinations.

The video of the Batmobile's cross-continental travel can be watched on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/n0y7NzMCR8s

The Batmobile ride across the Bosphorus is one of many promotional events Turkish Airlines is hosting as the Official Airline Partner for Warner Bros. Pictures' action adventure Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. What is more, the movie experience is extended to fans inflight through an exclusive 777 Turkish Airlines wrapped in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice livery; limited-edition Turkish Airlines Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice-themed amenity kits; a Time Out travel guide for the airline's newest "destinations," Gotham City and Metropolis; inflight menu items; and a special edition frequent flyer Miles & Smiles card.

Additionally, an advertisement announcing Turkish Airlines' newest "destinations," Gotham City and Metropolis, featured the film's stars Ben Affleck and Jesse Eisenberg, garnering more than 50 million online views worldwide.

SOURCE Turkish Airlines

CONTACT: Turkish Airlines Inc., GLOBAL PR, Head Office Building, YeAYilkAy 34149 Astanbul Turkey, +90-212-463-63-63
ISTANBUL, April 28, 2016 --

The cross-continental journey is the first-ever and longest-ever real world ride for the Batmobile

Turkish Airlines brought the world-famous, iconic Batmobile to Istanbul to travel cross-continental for the first time via the newest Bosphorus bridge to celebrate the release of Warner Bros. Pictures' highly anticipated action adventure movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360803)

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360802)

The Batmobile travelled from Europe to Asia by crossing the Bosphorus Strait via the new Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge which officially opens to the public this summer. This marked the longest-ever ride for the one-of-a-kind vehicle.

"The ride across the newest Bosphorus bridge is symbolic of how the Batmobile unites people worldwide as a pop culture icon, how Istanbul is the one and only city connecting two continents, and how Turkish Airlines bridges passengers globally to 113 countries and more than 287 destinations," said M. Ilker Ayc, Turkish Airlines' Board Chairman.

"This is an opportunity for us to introduce our precious city, Istanbul and our newest bridge to the world. The Batmobile is one of the most symbolic movie icons of all time, and has now connected the world with Istanbul," added M. Ilker Ayc.

Turkish Airlines' Istanbul hub is centrally located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, serving as a geographically attractive and natural transfer point for international routes.

The Istanbul hub provides Turkish Airlines with a competitive advantage that allows the carrier to reduce flight time and offer one-stop connections to more than 287 destinations.

The video of the Batmobile's cross-continental travel can be watched on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/n0y7NzMCR8s

The Batmobile ride across the Bosphorus is one of many promotional events Turkish Airlines is hosting as the Official Airline Partner for Warner Bros. Pictures' action adventure Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. What is more, the movie experience is extended to fans inflight through an exclusive 777 Turkish Airlines wrapped in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice livery; limited-edition Turkish Airlines Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice-themed amenity kits; a Time Out travel guide for the airline's newest "destinations," Gotham City and Metropolis; inflight menu items; and a special edition frequent flyer Miles & Smiles card.

Additionally, an advertisement announcing Turkish Airlines' newest "destinations," Gotham City and Metropolis, featured the film's stars Ben Affleck and Jesse Eisenberg, garnering more than 50 million online views worldwide.

SOURCE Turkish Airlines

CONTACT: Turkish Airlines Inc., GLOBAL PR, Head Office Building, YeAYilkAy 34149 Astanbul Turkey, +90 212 463 63 63, globalpr@thy.com
2016 ROUSHcharged F-150 Truck Now Shipping







New 2016 ROUSHcharged F-150 Truck Pickup capable of 600 horsepower with ROUSH R2300 TVS supercharger

PLYMOUTH TOWNSHIP, MI - April 28, 2016: The new 2016 ROUSH F-150 SC, designed, engineered and tested by ROUSH Performance for on- and off-road power, durability and looks, is now shipping to ROUSH Performance dealerships across the United States.

The pre-title 2016 ROUSH F-150 SC comes with a 5.0L V8 engine from the Ford factory. Adding the fully integrated and calibrated ROUSH F-150 5.0L V8 Phase 1 Supercharger Kit, featuring the ROUSH R2300 TVS (Twin Vortices Series) supercharger, boosts power to an incredible 600 horsepower and 557 lb-ft of torque. The truck comes with a three-year, 36,000-mile limited warranty.

"The high-performance lifestyle is what drives our customers, and that's equaled only by the passion ROUSH Performance's people have for designing and engineering American-made vehicles like the 2016 ROUSH F-150 SC with raw power, looks and legacy that meets that need," said Justin Schroeder, director of vehicle operations.

On-demand power and torque comes from the ROUSH TVS 2300 supercharger, which features twin four-lobe rotors twisted to 160 degrees. When applied to the 2016 ROUSH F-150 SC, it increases horsepower by 56 percent over stock (+215 hp) and torque by 44 percent (+170 lb-ft).

The 2016 ROUSH F-150 SC also sets a high standard when it comes to appearance. ROUSH exterior components include front grille and fender flares, both with clearance lighting; front bumper cover; square hitch cover; and license plate and frame. The package also includes a full ROUSH graphics package, including hood, front windshield, side rocker and tailgate graphics. Additional options include a splash-style graphic.

A ROUSH/Fox 2.0 Performance Series Suspension System, featuring front coil-overs and rear shocks with boots, means the 2016 ROUSH F-150 SC is as tough and nimble off-road as it is on-road. ROUSH 20-inch wheels with beefy Mickey Thompson Baja ATZP3 305/55 tires give the truck a stance that's second to none. A ROUSH Performance Side-Exit Exhaust System makes the 2016 ROUSH F-150 SC rumble no matter where it's driven.

The 2016 ROUSH F-150 SC is now available for purchase at ROUSH Performance dealerships in federal emissions states not governed by California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations.

For more information about the 2016 ROUSH F-150 SC, contact ROUSH Performance at 800.597.6874, visit its website or your local ROUSH dealership.

About ROUSH Performance: ROUSH Performance, a division of Roush Enterprises, designs, engineers and manufactures completely assembled pre-titled vehicles, aftermarket performance parts, performance crate engines, and marine engine superchargers for the global performance enthusiast market. Based in Plymouth Township, Michigan, ROUSH Performance was founded in 1995 by motorsports legend Jack Roush.
SOUTHFIELD, Mich., April 28, 2016 -- DENSO announced today the following executive management changes. These changes will be effective after the 93rd Annual General Meeting of Shareholders at DENSO's global headquarters on June 21, 2016.

Kenichiro "Ken" Ito will serve as chairman of DENSO's North American Board of Directors and chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of DENSO International America, Inc., DENSO's North American corporate headquarters. Located in Southfield, Michigan, Ito will oversee all North American group companies and affiliates. He will be responsible for strengthening our One DENSO approach to business and the DENSO brand in North America. Previously, he served as executive director of the Corporate Planning, Finance & Accounting Division and Business Innovation Department at DENSO Corporation in Japan. Ito will assume the position from Sadahiro "Sam" Usui who will serve as CEO of DENSO International Europe B.V.

Hisaaki Sato will serve as president and chief operating officer of DENSO International America, Inc., responsible for overseeing all aspects of business related to OEM customers for DENSO in the Americas. Previously, he served as executive director of Global Sales & Business Development, Global Business Planning, Chubu Sales and Hiroshima Sales divisions at DENSO Corporation. Sato will assume the position from Kazumasa "Kaz" Kimura who will serve as executive director of Global Sales & Business Development, Global Business Planning, Chubu Sales and Hiroshima Sales divisions.

Satoshi "Scott" Inukai will be promoted to senior director of Global DENSO. Inukai will serve as chief manufacturing officer (CMO) of DENSO International America, Inc., responsible for overseeing all aspects of manufacturing in North America in addition to the lead of North America Production Innovation Center.

About DENSO Corporation:

DENSO Corp., headquartered in Kariya, Aichi prefecture, Japan, is a leading global automotive supplier of advanced technology, systems and components in the areas of thermal, powertrain control, electronics and information and safety. Its customers include all the world's major carmakers. Worldwide, the company has more than 200 subsidiaries and affiliates in 38 countries and regions (including Japan) and employs more than 150,000 people. Consolidated global sales for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016, totaled US$40.2 billion. Last fiscal year, DENSO spent 8.8 percent of its global consolidated sales on research and development. DENSO common stock is traded on the Tokyo and Nagoya stock exchanges. For more information, go to www.globaldenso.com, or visit our media website at www.globaldenso.com/en/newsreleases/media-center/

About DENSO in North America:

In North America, DENSO employs more than 22,000 people at 30 consolidated companies and affiliates. Of these, 25 are manufacturing facilities located in the United States, Canada and Mexico. In the United States alone, DENSO employs more than 14,000 people in California, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Arkansas. DENSO's North American consolidated sales totaled US$9.9 billion for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016. For more information, go to www.densocorp-na.com.
Convenience Store Chain Wawa Offers Free Wi-Fi

Convenience store chain teams up with Comcast to offer customers free Wi-Fi at more than 700 Wawa locations.

PHILADELPHIA April 28, 2016; Customers who visit the more than 700 Wawa stores in Delaware, Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia will have access to free Wi-Fi, thanks to a new collaboration between the convenience store chain and Comcast.

To access Xfinity WiFi at Wawa locations, customers should logon to the xfinitywifi SSID in the list of available networks on their devices. There is no charge to use the service and it is available to everyone.

At Wawa we exist to fulfill customers lives every day, and part of this commitment means creating meaningful customer connection points that add the highest level of value and convenience, said Carol Jensen, chief marketing officer for Wawa.

As a part of Wawas focus on becoming a one-stop-shop for its customers needs, the company has turned to technology to evolve the in-store experience. Comcasts Wi-Fi solution helps enable a consistent in-store experience for Wawas mobile app, and the Wi-Fi service allows customers to take advantage of a free connection without having to rely on their cellular service.

To meet Wawas needs, Comcast designed and built an enterprise-grade managed Wi-Fi and broadband solution that includes public Xfinity WiFi for Wawa customers and private access Wi-Fi for associates and vendors. The scope of the business services implementation includes Wawa locations in and out of Comcast's traditional service areas
Fiat Chrysler Joins Forces With Google Autos (Another Merger Of Equals?)

SEE ALSO: Hey Car Industry Open Your Eyes, The Silicon Valley Crowd Is On Their Way To Appliance-ize Cars (And The Need For Your Company)

SEE BELOW: Video Of Complete 1 hour and 11 minute Merger of Equals Press Conference From London We bet you can't find it anywhere else on the net!!!

MOUNTAINVIEW CA and auburn hills mi; Google and Fiat Chrysler are in "late stage talks" on a technical partnership on Google's self-driving car project, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, citing AutoExtremist. The talks are said to have been underway for several months, and are in final negotiations.

This is just the latest in a series of reports about Google looking for a partner in the automotive industry to help it build cars with the self-driving technology that it has been building for years. Back in December, a number of stories claimed Google and Ford were creating an entirely new company to build self-driving cars.

"Google has been looking for a partner for a while"

It seemed like a good fit, but Fiat Chrysler and Google could be even better. Google is looking for a partner with car-building experience to help it build its cars at scale, while Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne spent much of 2015 trying (and failing) to merge with GM after spinning off Ferrari into its own firm  and has recently hinted that the search for a merger partner isn't over.

Comment From Karl Brauer, senior analyst for Kelley Blue Book:

FCAs efforts to merge with another automaker have failed, but if the automaker can join forces with Google it could immediately change the dynamic. Every car company is trying to get into the tech space right now because they all know their future depends on it. At the same time, tech companies are trying to understand how to transition from software, interface and personal device production into the much more complicated world of automotive manufacturing. A Google/FCA tie-up could simultaneously put both companies in lead in this critical race.

Comment From Matt DeLorenzo, managing editor of Kelley Blue Book:

Googles investment in John Krafcik is paying dividends. While the tech giant has massive amounts of cash and technical expertise, it has had very little contact with the real world of building and selling automobiles. Theres a lot Alphabet can learn from an active manufacturer in the business. This tie-up is an important step in the decision of whether or not the company should or could get into the auto business. On the flip side, FCA has been lagging in terms of a presence in Silicon Valley. With resources more limited than its competitors, it has been taking a go-slow approach to future tech (and even electrification of its fleet). For someone in FCAs position, thats not a bad strategy since the cost of technology drops quickly once it reaches critical mass. FCA may not be first with new features, but it can adopt them later when costs are lower and still be competitive in the marketplace. This tie-up, however, could put it back into a leadership position when it comes to future tech, including autonomous vehicles.

The Auto Channel 1 Hour 10 Minute Video Of The Mercedes-Benz Chrysler "Merger" Press Conference




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There is no end in sight for the legal maneuvering and spin-doctoring in Hulk Hogans sex video lawsuit against Gawker Mediain which a St. Petersburg, Fla., jury awarded the celebrity wrestler $140.1 million in damages last month.

The billable hours continued to mount on Wednesday with the release of previously sealed defense filings dating back to December and claiming that Terry Bollea (Hogans real name) perpetrated a fraud on the trial court by lying about his real reason for suing Gawkernamely, to prevent ugly racist remarks he made on a different sex video from becoming public and harming his career.

Bolleas attorney, David Houston, scoffed at Gawkers latest move: Gawker is now releasing motions that were denied back in December. One has to wonder what their true motive may be because it isnt relevant for any legitimate purpose.

Team Gawker trumpeted the released court papers in advance of a May 25 hearing to determine whether the media company must post a $50 million bond pending the outcome of an appeal.

"The court documents finally unsealed today prove that Hulk Hogans actual concern was not the supposed privacy of his sex life, but the contents of another sex tapeone that Gawker never hadthat recorded him making repeated racist statements about his daughters boyfriend, Gawker Media said in a statement. The court papers show how Hogan engaged in a massive cover up, denying under oath that he knew about the tape with his racist rant despite clear evidence proving he did. Hogan also denied knowing about an FBI investigation he requested and claimed his representatives had never seen the tape with the racist remarks, even though FBI evidence includes them watching the tape.

The Gawker statement continued: The jury should have known about this cover upBut the judge decided to keep all of that secret. As this trial proved, its easy to win a case when the jury is only told a fraction of the story.

Team Gawkers 32-page motion to dismiss Bolleas invasion of privacy lawsuitoriginally filed last December, and subsequently denied, kept from the jury and sealed from the public until now by Pinellas County Circuit Court Judge Pamela A.M. Campbellargues that Bollea and his legal team engaged in a systematic effort to hide from Gawker and this Court the existence of additional tapes of his encounters with Heather Clem [the then-wife of Bolleas friend, radio shock jock Bubba Clem], including one that shows him making a series of racist and homophobic statements.
Bob Bates was a wealthy insurance executive turned volunteer cop when he killed an unarmed black man in Tulsa. The grandpa deputy claimed he mistook his gun for a Taser when he delivered the fatal blast.

On Wednesday, a jury found him guilty of manslaughter.

The jury took three hours to convict Bates of second-degree manslaughter after a nearly two-week trial. The 74-year-old faces up to four years in prison.

Bates was a reserve deputy with the Tulsa County Sheriffs Office when he shot Eric Harris, 44, during a sting operation last yearan incident that made national news amid other police-involved shootings of minority suspects.

Walter Scott, a 50-year-old unarmed black man in South Carolina, was gunned down by a cop two days after Harris died. The officer shot Scott eight times in the back and was caught on a bystanders cellphone camera.

That month, witnesses also recorded the brutal arrest of Freddie Gray, who died of spinal cord injuries while in Baltimore police custody.

Harriss tragic demise was also captured on camera.

Tulsa deputies targeted Harris on April 2, 2015, as part of an illegal gun-buy sting operation, and he tried to flee before they tackled him.

Police body camera footage showed an officer cuffing Harris on the ground. Seconds later, Bates warns, Taser! Taser! before a gunshot is heard.

Oh! I shot him. Im sorry, Bates says. As Harris lay dying, he yells, He shot me! He shot me, man. Oh, my god. Im losing my breath.

Fuck your breath, a deputy replies.

After the guilty verdict, Harriss brother, Andre, stood outside the courtroom and told reporters he could finally be at peace.

I want to make one thing clear for all the cameras to know: Bob Bates was not a qualified deputy when he shot and killed my brother, Andre Harris said, referring to a 2009 internal affairs report on Batess lack of proper traininga document that wasnt mentioned at trial.

Harris called Bates a pay to play police officer rather than a true reserve deputy.

But now he gets to pay to play in the penitentiary, Harris said.

Batess attorney, Clark Brewster, told reporters he plans to appeal the verdict. His clients sentencing hearing is scheduled for next month.

When a reporter asked prosecutor Kevin Gray what the deciding factor was for the jury, he replied, Hopefully, it was just common sense.

What we presented throughout the week was it doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out that you just generally shouldnt accidentally shoot somebody, and thats exactly what happened in this case, Gray said.

During closing arguments Wednesday, Gray told jurors that Bates previously stated Harriss death was on his conscience.

Im asking you to put it on his record, Gray said, according to the Tulsa World.

The prosecutor also bashed the defenses focus on Harriss criminal past. This was the first time Ive ever felt like the victim was on trial, he said.

Fellow prosecutor John Luton added, according to News on 6, Do we need an expert, ladies and gentlemen, to determine what happened to Eric Harris? Eight minutes after hes shot, hes dead.

Meanwhile, Brewster said Bates was somebody we should be proud of in contrast to Harriss rap sheet, of which he added, I didnt write his resume. He wrote his resume.

Bates chose not to testify at trial. On response to a question by Judge William Musseman, the grandpa ex-cop said he was satisfied with his attorneys. Absolutely, Im tickled to death, Bates said on Tuesday.

The jury, which was entirely white, consisted of six men and eight women. Most of them appeared to be over 40 years old, News on 6 reported.

Tulsa prosecutor Kevin Gray also raised questions about the jurys racial makeup after the defense asked that the last two black jurors be excused, the Tulsa World reported.

Daniel Smolen, who is representing Harriss family in a civil suit against Bates and Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz, released a statement last week criticizing the jury makeup as 100 percent white.

The victim, Eric Harris, was African-American, and the Defendant, Bob Bates, is Caucasian. Thus, Mr. Bates fate will be decided by a jury with no racial diversity whatsoever, the statement read. At the very least, this lack of racial diversity gives the appearance of a stacked deck

At the heart of the case was whether Harris died of Batess gunshot or a heart attackand if Bates was culpably negligent when he mistook his .357 revolver for his stun gun.

An expert for the defense testified on Monday that stress, rather than negligence, likely caused Bates to withdraw his handgun from its holster. Dr. Charles Morgan said Batess muscle memory kicked in during the stressful encounter and that he reverted to habit when he made the deadly mistake, News on 6 reported.

Defense attorneys also impugned the state medical examiners ruling that Harriss death was a homicide.

On Tuesday, two doctors testifying for the defense objected to the state medical examiners autopsy report, which said Harris died of lung collapse and blood loss after Batess bullet pierced his right armpit, the Tulsa World reported.

Trauma doctor Mark Brandenburg said Harris died after having a heart attack caused by elevated adrenaline and a high level of meth in his system. He called the state pathologists finding that Harris bled to death absolutely untrue, the World reported.

Brandenburg accused the medical examiner, EMS technicians at the scene, and ER personnel at the hospital of making errors in their reports on Harriss death. This seems to be pervasive through this whole case, Brandenburg testified, according to The Frontier. A heart attack killed this man, the bullet did not.

Cardiologist James Higgins also testified for the defense, saying Batess bullet didnt strike the conduction system of Harriss heart and had no effect on its electrical function.

The prosecution presented experts to counter these claims.

Dr. Gajal Kumar, an emergency room surgeon who treated Harris, testified that Harris had lost so much blood that a medical procedure she performed didnt work. Kumar agreed with the medical examiners opinion that Harris died of the gunshot wound.

Another expert, Dr. R. Douglas Ensley, contested the defenses testimony that Harris went into cardiac arrest. He said medical records showed Harriss heart was flat or flaccid, which isnt typical for someone dying of a heart attack, the World reported.

The trial also heard from the cops conducting the sting operation.

Deputies Ricardo Vaca and Miranda Munson thought Bates was dozing off for several minutes as he waited in his Tahoe for cops to make a move, the World reported. The officers testified that they saw Batess head was drooped and eyes closed.

Vaca testified that Batess gunshot was just inches from hitting him as he subdued Harris. I mean, I almost got killed, Vaca said, according to the World.

There were also questions about whether Bates should even have been permitted to participate in such a dangerous bust.

Deputy Lance Ramsey testified that Bates called him the night before to ask if something was going on the next day, according to The Frontier . Bates wasnt listed on the operations plan but added to a group of nine deputies, Ramsey said.

Batess role was supposed to be carrying less-lethal weapons, including Tasers and pepper-ball guns, The Frontier reported.

The case ended the career of Sheriff Stanley Glanz, who resigned last September following a grand jury probe.

A fishing buddy of Glanz and his former campaign chairman, Bates was accused of being a pay to play cop over his donations to the sheriffs department.

The Daily Beast previously revealed how Bates acted as Glanzs sugar daddy, treating the lawman to exotic cruises while also providing thousands of dollars in vehicles and equipment to the force. Bob and I both love to fish, Glanz told the Tulsa World last year. Is it wrong to have a friend?

Sheriffs Office higher-ups later testified to a grand jury that Batess training records were falsified and that a 2009 internal investigation into Batess special treatment went straight to the sheriffs dead file.
Was a Harvard Law School students remark to a smelly visiting Israeli dignitary anti-Semiticor simply bizarre?

A small group of Jewish students and recent alumni have signed a letter defending Husam El-Qoulaq, a third-year Palestinian law student, echoing his anonymous apology: He did not intend to employ an anti-Semitic stereotype when, during a public panel on Palestinian-Israeli relations this month, he asked former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, How are you so smelly?...shes very smelly, and I was just wondering.

El-Qoulaqs remarks have been condemned by Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, the Jewish Law Students Association, and other Jewish-affiliated groups around the country, and Israeli newspapers like the The Jerusalem Post.

In an email to Harvard Law School affiliates, Minow denounced the comment as offensive and an embarrassment to this institution, noting that many perceive it as anti-Semitic, and no one would see it as appropriate.

When The Harvard Law Record first reported on the incident, it did not name El-Qoulaq and redacted comments identifying him.

School administrators also initially declined to name him, citing federal privacy laws. They also cut his remarks from an online video of the event, inciting accusations of censorship.

After online commenters repeatedly referred to him by name, El-Qoulaq granted The Record permission to publish his identity. He did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast by press time.

The incident has raised larger questions in the Harvard Law School community about what distinguishes hate speech from free speech. In this case, even those who roll their eyes at El-Qoulaqs insistence that he didnt intend to invoke a derogatory stereotype think the administration was right not to punish him for it.

I think what he said was clearly offensive, and he has no right to make a statement in public and have his name remain confidential, Charles Fried, Beneficial Professor of Law at HLS, told The Daily Beast. But Im glad hes not being disciplined because that would make us look like Erdogan, he added, referring to the former prime minister of Turkey, where speech is not protected under law.

Fried cited speech declaring homosexuality immoral as an example of offensive but protected speech. You might call it hate speech, but in the United States its a point of view, he said.

Those who signed the letter defending El-Qoulaq noted Livnis controversial history and key role in Operation Cast Lead, a 23-day military operation that was condemned by the U.N. and other credible organizations for the brutality it visited upon Palestinian civilians.

They also insisted that while Husam has participated in protests regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they reject the charge that our friend is an anti-Semite. At a previous event this semester, they said he called a Palestinian speaker a smelly liar.

While Husams insistence that he didnt intend to offend has been accepted by some people in the communitythat had he known some listeners might interpret my comments as anti-Semitic, there is absolutely no chance that I would have uttered themweve seen similar incidents on campuses where declared intent has been disregarded.

Last semester at Claremont McKenna College in California, Assistant Vice President and Dean of Students Mary Spellman was effectively forced to resign over an email students declared racially insensitive.

The email was addressed to a student who had expressed frustrations about being a minority on campus, with Spellman stressing that the students concerns are important to me and the DOS staff and we are working on how we can better serve students, especially those that dont fit our CMC mold.

One student went on hunger strike in protest of those last words in her email, refusing to eat even after Spellman apologized repeatedly for her poorly worded email that was intended to support a student.

The relatively temperate response to El-Qoulaqs remarks suggest that perceived racism may be more tolerated when the race it targets is believed to be less oppressed than others.
Last night, Caitlyn Jenner posted a video of herself using the womens restroom at Trump Tower in New York.

In the one-minute clip posted to the reality stars Facebook page, Jenner pretends to just stumble upon the Trump International Hotel just when she needs to pee. As Jenner explains to the camera, Trump said in an interview last week that she was welcome to use any bathroom in one of his buildings.

One inside the lobby, Jenner dramatically passes the mens room, saying, M, not anymore before entering the door marked W. When she emerges a second later, she remarks, Thank you, Donald, I really appreciate it.

And by the way, Ted, nobody got molested.

That last shot at Cruz is significant not only because he has been using the issue of transgender people using public restrooms in an attack ad against Trump but also because Jenner has previously indicated that she would support Cruz for president, despite his anti-LGBT views.

Speaking about North Carolinas HB2 bill, which would force people to use the bathroom that corresponds with their birth gender, Trump told the Today show last week that he believes people should use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. Matt Lauer asked him point blank if Caitlyn Jenner were to walk into Trump Tower and wanted to use the bathroom he would be fine with her using any bathroom she chooses Trump replied, That is correct.

It was those comments that caused Cruz to start running an ad that contains scary rhetorical questions like these: Should a grown man pretending to be a woman be allowed to use the womens restroom? The same restroom used by your daughter? Your wife? Donald Trump thinks so.

This is the same man that Jenner singled out as her preferred presidential candidate in an interview with The Advocate last month.

I like Ted Cruz. I think hes very conservative and a great constitutionalist and a very articulate man, she said. I havent endorsed him or anything like that. But I also think, hes an evangelical Christian, and probably one of the worst ones when it comes to trans issues. Later, she said she would happily serve as his trans ambassador.

Now, with her new Facebook video, the most famous Republican trans woman in America has begun to shift her allegiance to Trump. This week, Jenner had a conversation with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof while standing outside of an all-gender restroom at Brooklyns Academy for Young Writers.

Jenner, who is registered to vote as Republican in Californias increasingly important June primary, said that Democrats are definitely better than the GOP on trans issues, but because shes not a one-issue voter she still plans to vote for one of the Republican candidates. But this time, she indicated that she is open to voting for Trump, a man who was still referring to her as Bruce months after she came out as transgender.

To be honest, Ted Cruz is kind of disappointing me lately, especially the way hes dealing with our issue, Jenner said.

That is perhaps putting it mildly about a candidate who had this to say to an Indiana crowd over the weekend, Let me make things real simple: Even if Donald Trump dresses up as Hillary Clinton, he shouldnt be using the girls restroom.

Like many Republicans, Jenner appears caught between two bad options. What more do the Democrats have to do at this point to get her on their side?
Detectives with the Maricopa County Sheriffs Office in Arizona announced on Wednesday that they had discovered an active meth lab at the Phoenix home of a political consultant for former Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

Emily Pitha and her boyfriend, Christopher Hustrulid, face 12 counts of drug possession and child abuse after the raid of their home on Tuesday, according to court documents obtained by The Arizona Republic.

Pitha had previously worked as a staff member for Arizona Senators Jon Kyl (now retired) and Jeff Flake, both Republicans, and was listed as a contact for various fundraisers for Sen. McCains re-election campaign.

Deputies at the Maricopa County Sheriffs Office received word that a package from the Netherlands containing drugs had been taken into the possession of customs and border patrol agents on its way to Pithas home. The package reportedly contained 250 grams of MDMA and Hustrulid signed for it upon delivery.

During a subsequent search of the house, detectives discovered an active meth lab, a quarter of a pound of meth, around 5 grams of marijuana, several grams of heroin and cocaine, approximately 50 milliliters of liquid MDMA, and 10 tabs of LSD and hash, according to a report provided to The Daily Beast by the Maricopa County Sheriffs Office. They also recovered $7,000 in cash and signs of the production of butane honey oil, which is a derivative of marijuana.

The drugs were found near the rooms of Hustrulids children, who are 5 and 10 years old and were reportedly in day-care when Hustrulid and Pitha, who are being held on a $20,000 bond in Maricopa County Jail, were arrested.

Detective Doug Matteson also told KPHO/KTVK that there were bomb-making materials on the property, along with the beginning stages of a building they were building with a fake wall that would possibly to be used for growing illegal marijuana."

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, an ardent surrogate for Donald Trump, announced the arrest on his Twitter account. My Det's seized large drug shipment from Europe,2 arrests,meth lab, xplosive material, many drugs involved, he wrote.

Pitha worked for a fundraising outfit called Lovas Co., whose client list also includes former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The company did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast.

A spokesman for McCains reelection bid told KNPX that the campaign immediately terminated any relationship with Ms. Pitha upon learning of her alleged involvement in the operation.

A former Senate colleague who asked not be named told The Daily Beast that the arrest came as quite a surprise.

She was a really good and diligent caseworker, the colleague said. Everyones really shocked, the person said. She always was a bit of a wild child but I dont think anyone really expected anything like this.
In 2014, a South Carolina father allegedly did the unthinkable.

Timothy Jones, 34, is on trial for the murders of his five children. According to officials, he picked them up from day-care and then strangled four of themone after anotherwith his bare hands until they were dead. The fifth he beat to death.

He allegedly placed the little bodies of Merah, 8, Elias, 7, Nahtahn, 6, Gabriel, 2, and Abigail, 1, in black plastic bags and drove for days, over 700 miles, to dump their remains in a shallow ditch in Alabama.

The crime Mr. Jones is charged withfor which prosecutors are seeking the death penaltyis horrific, and compounded by the possibility that it could have been prevented. Believing that to be the case, the childrens mother, Amber Jones, 31, is suing the South Carolina Department of Social Services (DSS), alleging the agency failed to provide the statutorily mandated protection that would have saved [her children] from abuse and neglect and prevented their deaths.

Ms. Joness complaint seeks unspecified damages from the state DSS, calling the Lexington County agency grossly negligent, in its multiple interactions with the Jones family leading up to the murders. The organization failed to fully investigate multiple allegations of abuse, from teachers, school officials, neighbors, babysitters, and Amber Jones herself, according to the complaint. When investigations uncovered abuse, the DSS made a half-dozen ineffectual safety plans, instead of reporting evidence of child abuse to the authorities and removing the children from Mr. Joness care.

When reached by phone Wednesday, a spokesperson for South Carolinas Department of Social Services said, We arent commenting at this time.

The complaint, filed in Richland County on Friday, details Mr. Joness alleged crime and the lead-up to it, in a way previously unknown because of a court-imposed gag order on his murder trial.

According to the new complaint, Timothy Jonesa former Navy man with a history of substance abuse and a stint in prison for drug possession, forgery, burglary, and car theftmarried Amber Jones when she was 19 years old. They had their first child in 2006 and soon had three children within three years time.

In 2011, DSS started to receive complaints about the Joneses.

The kids were filthy, trash and power tools were strewn around the home, and Mr. Jones was threatening to shoot a neighbors dog, according to the DSS reports referenced in the complaint. Mr. Jones lashed out at a DSS caseworker and accused the agency of ruining peoples lives.

From 2011 to 2012, the county DSS made multiple visits to the home, but failed to follow up on safety plans. By May 2012, Mr. Jones was displaying signs of a violent nature, according to the complaint.

Mr. Jones threatened to snap his wifes neck in front of their children and shoot his neighbors. Once, Ms. Jones alleges, her husband played chicken with an 18-wheeler with her and the children in the car. On the same occasion, she says he head-butted her and spit in her face.

Ms. Jones says she filed a domestic violence report with the sheriff and informed her DSS caseworker about the report as well as other instances of alleged violence around the home that she hadnt told law enforcement about.

In June, Mr. Jones discovered his wife was having an affair, according to divorce records, and took the children to his parents home in Mississippi without Ms. Joness consent. When Ms. Jones called the DSS caseworker, she says she was told to contact a family lawyer.

Timothy and Amber Jones divorced in 2013. In his divorce complaint, Mr. Jones argued his wifes lifestyle and her inability to care for the children made her unfit. He said she was having an affair with a much younger neighbor and would leave the children alone after she put them to bed to spend the night at her new boyfriends home. Mr. Jones noted the Department of Social Services had investigated his wife and found that she maintained a sloppy home, but didnt mention his own record with DSS. Its unclear whether Amber Jones had an attorney to plead her case. While his wife did not have a job or a car or any money, Mr. Jones said he was making $6,000 a month as an engineer at Intel and could move the kids to Mississippi where he had family and a support system.

Mr. Joness personal therapist, Dr. April Hames, filed an affidavit in support of his request for custody. In it, she described Mr. Jones as a highly-intelligent, responsible father.

His thoughts are very detailed, action oriented, and focused on his children When Mr. Jones sees an obstacle, he sets his sights on the solution and is willing to go through the often difficult process of achieving his goal of resolution.

And so, Mr. Jones won primary custody of the children.

As a single father, Mr. Jones continued his connection with the county DSS. In April 2014, a teacher reported a handprint-sized bruise on one of the children, who told her teacher she had been grabbed and pulled around the house as punishment.

No action was taken, according to the complaint.

In May, one of the children was reported to have been choked and thrown against a wall. Mr. Jones had left bruises on the childs neck and jaw. Another child reported that her crotch area hurt. The children were beaten with belts and one received 12 spankings. They were also forced to do push-ups and excessive exercises for misbehaving. When DSS asked Mr. Jones about the markings, he reportedly told a caseworker that his child was very clumsy and bruised easily.

The county DSS drafted their sixth and final safety plan.

Over the summer, a teacher who saw Mr. Jones at the store called DSS and reported bruising all over the children.

A babysitter called a month later, telling the agency that she walked in as Mr. Jones was about to hurt one of his children.

The agencys third investigation, just weeks before the murders, found evidence that Mr. Jones had been beating one of his sons and wasnt feeding his children. A caseworker visited the mobile home where he had moved with the kids. Her report stated Mr. Jones sometimes fed all five children with one 20-piece chicken nugget dinner and didnt want to send his kids back to public school because he does not want the school to report the beatings.

On Aug. 28, 2014, the children were killed. Each one suffer[ed] a horrific, but entirely preventable death, the lawsuit reads.

While the courts will decide whether the Jones children might have been saved by a more effective Deparment of Social Services, the agencys record of inadequacy when it comes to protecting the children in its care is well-documented.

Two months after the Jones childrens murders, a legislative committee charged with auditing state agencies released a report on the Department of Social Services (PDF). Among its findings: South Carolinas DSS employees are unqualified, their caseloads are excessive and inequitable from county to county, the DSSs overall systems are inadequate, and because of unreliable record keeping, the agency doesnt even know how many children in the DSS system have been killed as a result of abuse or neglect.

A DSS spokesperson told a local newspaper, The State, on Tuesday that the organization had recently received increased funding for 177 new caseworkers and 67 new caseworker assistants.

Several state senators formed the Department of Social Services Oversight Subcommittee in 2013 and held 13 hearings to hear testimony from parents with experience in the system, many of whom echoed Amber Joness account of agency inaction when presented with evidence of abuse.

Phones calls [to DSS], complaints, emails, contacts, subpoenas, all go unanswered, said Nathan Ginter, a father who expressed frustration to the committee that the mother of his child was not being investigated for abuse by the agency.

The committee planned to look specifically at the Jones murders, but after a request from law enforcement not to question agency officials during an investigation, the hearing was canceled.

After reviewing the DSS file, one committee member, State Sen. Katrina Shealy, told local news station WISTV she couldnt say whether DSS could have done anything to prevent their deaths.

Were sorry for the kids, Shealy said. Were sorry for the family thats left You know, theres just not a lot you can say about it.
I was the baddest-ass dude in Scientology, declares Marty Rathbun in My Scientology Movie, a surreal documentary in which British journalist Louis Theroux attempts to make a film about the most controversial religious organization of the 20th century only to find himself in the crosshairs when they send hostile surveillance crews out to film him right back.

Truer words have rarely been spoken about Rathbun, a devoted Scientologist for over a quarter-century who served as its Inspector General and righthand man to feared leader David Miscavige. That is, until he blew and left the church in 2004, thus becoming one of Scientologys most aggressively targeted enemies.

While acting as Scientologys second-in-command, Rathbun revealed last year in Alex Gibneys Going Clear, he was instructed to wiretap Nicole Kidman, a suspected SPor suppressive person, aka an enemy of the churchand engineer her split from the most famous Scientologist in the world, Tom Cruise. In one interview, an ex-member remembers being sucker-punched years ago during an internal church interrogationby Rathbun, who nonchalantly acknowledges the assault when meekly challenged by Theroux. Its no wonder hes been subjected to one of the churchs most fervent discreditation campaigns since leaving 12 years ago. After all, as another ex-Scientologist explains in the film: Marty knows where all the bodies are buried.

Rathbuns presence throughout My Scientology Movie is just one of several unconventional twists in director John Dowers film, which premiered at Tribeca and opens on an unusual gimmick. Stymied for years in his attempts to interview members of the church, Theroux set up camp at a studio in Los Angeles and set out to understand how Scientology works, both as a belief system and an image-savvy corporatized organization, by interviewing former members, inserting himself into the process, and staging dramatic reenactments of key moments in Scientology for the camera.

He flies Rathbun to Hollywood from his home in Texas to consult and help cast amateur L.A. actors to play the elusive Miscavige, members of the church, and Cruisepart education for Theroux and his actors, part exorcism of personal ghosts for Rathbun. Along the way, Rathbun develops a complex closeness to Theroux, forging one of the more unusual and sometimes volatile filmmaker-subject relationships ever committed to nonfiction film.

The fact that Rathbun delivers that bad ass dude explanation while riding in the passenger seat as Theroux drives around the greater Los Angeles area, a la Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, only adds to the sublimely Kafkaesque strangeness the film achieves with surprising regularity. That unreal edge unfolds as Theroux, filming his vehicular conversations with Rathbun on a dash cam, realizes theyre being followed by a white SUV while driving through town. Later, Scientology members pop up while the crew is out in the field, bringing their own cameras to silently record Therouxs every move.

One of the films more bizarre incidents captured in My Scientology Movie happens early on, shortly after Theroux picks Rathbun up at LAX. As they stand awkwardly in a hotel room in front of a giant window overlooking the pool, a beautiful woman in a bikini coyly knocks on the door, demanding to know what theyre filming. My name is Paz, she eventually says, revealing herself to be Boardwalk Empire actress Paz de la Huerta in the strangest inadvertent celebrity cameo of the year. As soon as she leaves, Theroux grows paranoid.

They sent her over, dont you think? theorizes an incredulous Theroux.  Honey trap!

Backed by the BBC and the producer of Searching for Sugarman, Man on Wire, and The Imposter, Theroux applies his immersive gonzo style to memorable effect. His British politeness and uncanny resemblance to Last Week Tonights John Oliver often makes for unintentional straight man comedy, particularly as he attempts to politely argue with Scientologist bulldog Catherine Frazier, who shows up multiple times with silent cameramen in tow to film the filmmakers and kick them off of roads adjacent to church grounds, and when he pushes Rathbun a little too far about his past transgressions on behalf of the church.

The film doesnt so much raise new questions about the controversial religion as much as it illuminates the terrifying ways in which Scientology allegedly programs its converts and defends itself from journalists and ex-members alike. Also remarkable is how Theroux explains Scientology methodology and terms like squirrel-busting and tone 40, before agents of the church show up outside his studio to intimidate his crew using those very same tactics. But My Scientology Movie really builds toward a pointed indictment of Scientology leader Miscavige, his mesmeric control over the churchs members, and the alleged physical and psychological abuse ex-confidantes like Rathbun claim he exacted over his flock behind the ironclad walls of the church.

Given intimate access to notable former Scientologists and high-ranking Sea Org officers like Rathbun, Jeff Hawkins, Tom De Vocht, and Marc Headley, Theroux draws out the desperation it took for the onetime loyalists to turn their backs on the churchand bears witness to the intimidation tactics they deploy in front of his own cameras.

I had to walk away from a 35-year commitment, my wife who I love very much, all of the friends I had in the world [who] were at that Int Base, explains Hawkins, who was once married to Frazier. A person has to be so desperate to just turn their back on everything and say, I dont care about all thatI have to leave this place because its just too oppressive, and walk out into a world thats totally foreign, where they dont know anybody, where they dont know how to get a job, they dont know how to get a bank account you have to say, my life is over, and Im walking out of my life into a totally different life.

Theroux has Rathbun train their cast of actors the way the church teaches its members to aggressively confront and neg their perceived enemies, like soldiers in a psychological war. Blurring the lines between educational drill and personal exorcism, the ensemble re-creates the abuse Rathbun describes experiencing in The Hole, a secretive compound on the churchs Gold Base in Hemet, California. Thats where Miscavige is said to have sent dozens of senior Scientology officers for punishment and reprogramming akin to the worst corporate retreat of all time, where some are said to have spent months and years in semi-imprisonment. (The church has denied that The Hole exists.)

It is the most destructive quote unquote religion cult I have ever read about, condemns de Vocht, who left in 2005 after being allegedly beaten by Miscavige in The Hole. It is a fucking nightmare Its a crock of shit. Hawkins claims Miscavige physically beat me up on five separate occasions, including once when he attacked him in front of 30 to 40 top executives at a meeting because he was unhappy with a script for a Scientology infomercial Hawkins presented.

Rathbun, who turns out to be a mystifying collaborator-slash-subject when it comes to his own past transgressions, remembers fleeing the church after spending just a few days in The Hole. I thought leaving was the only thing I could do to wake [Miscavige] up. I thought because I held the keys to the kingdom, that should sober him up.

In the end it was Rathbun who experienced a wake-up call. As Theroux and the films crew captures the umpteenth confrontation by uninvited Scientologists during their shoot, two of the churchs squirrel-busters spark Rathbun to renew his commitment to taking Miscavige down.

I didnt want to do it, but Im going to have to pull the plug on this organization, he tells Theroux. Later, when he refers to his former boss as if hes Voldemort himself, Rathbun is a man on fire: Its as if he literally, in his warped mind, is begging me to end this all for him.
The trailer for the forthcoming Oliver Stone movie Snowden has been viewed over two million times less than 24 hours after it was posted on Youtube, suggesting huge interest in the story of one of Americas most polarizing heroes/traitors, ahead of the films release in September this year.

After the clip was posted, the real Edward Snowden, the CIA operative who smuggled vast amounts of data exposing the workings of the NSA, and is now living in Russia, tweeted: For two minutes and thirty nine seconds, everybody at NSA just stopped working.

Oliver Stone, the director of classic, politically-charged movies such as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street and JFK has cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the CIA worker who in 2013 exposed the industrial levels of surveillance activities being routinely carried on by the NSA.

The movie makes great play of Snowdens intelligence, and the trailer shows Snowden completing a four hour ability test in just 38 minutes.

It was originally claimed that Snowden had smuggled the data out of the NSA using a flash drive, however in the trailer he is seen hiding a memory card into a Rubiks cube which he uses to dodge security protocols when leaving his office.

Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian reporter, has previously told how Snowden arranged a secret meeting where he identified himself by carrying a Rubik's cube.

Snowdens disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments.

Snowden was hired by Booz Allen Hamilton, an NSA contractor, in 2013 after previous employment with Dell and the CIA

On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents.

He has claimed he would return to the US if he could be guarranteed a fair trial.
Paul Ryan began by thanking the audience for indulging him, but he didnt say in what.

That would become clear soon enough.

Ostensibly, the Speaker of the Houses talk at Georgetown University on Wednesday afternoon was about about the issues facing the 700 millennial voters seated within the mahogany and stained glass confines of Gaston Hall. But to listen closely was to hear a man fully in denial.

The grim reality of the Republican Party in 2016 seems just too much for Paul Ryan to bear.

And so he isnt bearing it.

Things are, to hear Ryan tell it, peachy.

Ive been very dismayed by this years election thus far, a junior government major rose from his chair to tell Ryan, who responded by joking, Why is that?

The student asked for advice and reasons for optimism for young conservatives like himself, who will never support Donald Trump but who dont like Ted Cruz, either.

Unfortunately this is not the first time Ive had this question, Ryan said, laughing.

Then he explained that, actually, everything is fine if you ignore the bad stuff entirely.

I would look at the ideas, Ryan said, look at the platform that is being advanced.

Ryan pointed to his five-point legislative agendabroadly: national security, the economy, health care, poverty, and the Constitutionthe specifics of which hes promised will be worked out by the time that we have a nominee.

The agenda is supposed to guide whomever wins the nomination as well as Republican congressional candidates around the country.

In front of you is not just a vote for a person, a political personality, Ryan said. In front of you, if we do our jobs the right way, will be a choice of two paths that you will have to take: Do you want to stay in the status quo, do you want to stay on the path were on, or do you want to go in this different direction?

Thats the choice youll have, Ryan said, far more than a personality.

Even Karl Rove understands that the Republican brand has been sullied by the rise of Donald Trump.

Having led the polls and won the majority of primaries and caucuses since the race formally began, Trump is now a few hundred delegates away from mathematically qualifying for the nomination. And its Trump, a populist neo-fascist who is running under and all over the GOP banner despite having donated to Democrats. Trump partied at his third wedding with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and, who misunderstood just about every aspect of conservatism, is the de-facto leader of the Republican Party, not Paul Ryan or any of his establishment cohorts with their big brains and bullet points.

And the alternative to Trump, Ted Cruz, is not much better for the GOPs reputation, a hardass evangelical Christian who would sooner put cement in his shoes and swim in the Potomac than move an inch to get something done in Washington.

Earlier Wednesday, on MSNBCs Morning Joe, Ryan dismissed the idea that there is any conflict between him and the Republican candidates. We have lots of different views, he said, but come from the same principles.

Ryan is now the real-life version of the meme of the dog saying This is fine and having a cup of coffee while his kitchen is engulfed in flames.

In fairness, hes trying to sell these kids a broken product. The GOP at this point is a like a Shamwow that covers your car in black paint instead of soapmaking the mess 10 times dirtier than it was when you started.

Pitching love and happiness could work if your standard bearer wasnt a fearmonger.

But Trump isso its unclear what Ryans endgame is here and why the hell hes spending his afternoon talking to college kids about Uber and Snapchat (he said the world needs them to produce more apps like that) instead of, I dont know, governing.

The budget deadline passed weeks ago because Ryans House cant agree on what color the sky is on a clear day.

Still, Ryans excuse for not getting into the presidential race, after establishment forces begged him to run, was that he was too busy with his job as Speaker.

But it would seem as though hes conflicted, and it would also seem as though hes definitely not busy.

He uploads gauzy YouTube videos that could, with a little tweaking, become campaign ads. (By the way, hes definitely not running for president, so stop asking.)

In March, he made a video called Bracketology about his March Madness strategy.

This month, he released a clip called, Politics These Days, about how he wants to bring people together rather than divide them.

After the event, a tiny cavalry of black SUVs pulled out of the driveway, onto 37th Streetthe unsatisfying Paul Ryan motorcade his non-campaign about nothing deserves.
Rush Limbaugh has a prescription for Americas sexual frustration thats better than Viagra: Donald Trump.

During a segment of his Thursday radio show, the famed right-wing bloviator said that America is eagerly waiting for the Republican frontrunner to unload on Hillary Clinton.

If Trumps the nominee, and if he does unload on Hillary Clinton, as hes promising to do, said the gasbag radio host, let me just tell you something, you do not know how many gazillion Americans are going to be delirious and orgasmic with delight.

Limbaughs right-wing sexual fanfiction didnt end there.

There are gazillions of Americans who have had to swallow, who have had to sit there and take it, he shouted, whatever the Clintons have gotten away with since they entered the public national scene in 1992.

Despite never outright endorsing him, Limbaugh has frequently flopped his jowls over Trump and his alleged prowess.

He giddily lauded Trumps confusing Wednesday foreign policy address as among the greatest ever and squealed at the Alex Jones-like promise that Were gonna get rid of the globalists.

Limbaugh predicted that the so-called GOP establishment is going to have the vapors over Trumps use of the infamous phrase America First, which has its origins with Charles Lindbergh and the movement opposed to U.S. entry into World War II.

The attempt to insinuate that Trump doesnt care about the Nazis, thats how theyre gonna hear it and its just gonna cement them even tighter to Trump, he spat into his microphone. Falsely connecting the candidate to alleged Nazi sympathizers, Limbaugh suggested, will embolden the Trumpkins anti-elite sentiment.

Yet it hasnt been all orgasmic between Limbaugh and the orange-tinged demagogue.

He recently chided Trump for constantly complaining that the GOP delegate process is a rigged system keeping him from securing the partys nomination. Nobody is being cheated, Limbaugh grumbled. Im really trying to get you to not think that this particular system is being rigged or youre being cheated. Youre not, this is how politics is.

Its not totally surprising, however, that the anthropomorphic trash-pile licks his lips at the prospect of Americans shrieking with delight during a Trump general election. But considering Trump has viciously made fun of women and called out Clintons use of the woman card, an analogy about unloading on a woman likely wont do much to improve his unfavorability.
A Navy sailor charged with sharing classified information to Taiwan and Chinaallegations that carry a potential life sentence in prisoncould still avoid a full military trial and end up with a shorter sentence, defense officials told The Daily Beast.

It will all depend on who fears the prospect of a trial morethe military lawyers who have to navigate painstaking administrative procedures in order to admit the very classified information that Navy Lt. Cmdr Edward Lin allegedly shared. Or Lin, himself, who faces such serious charges that he likely could only avoid a lesser sentence by cutting a guilty plea deal.

The legal complexities of charging Lin have some Pentagon officials already suggesting that he could avoid a trial of his peers.

I wouldnt be surprised if this ends in a plea, one defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the case.

Military lawyers would have to get permission to introduce classified information from any agency or department whose secrets might be aired in a public trial. Lin, 39, worked in and around military reconnaissance aircraft and had extraordinary access to information about equipment that the U.S. uses to spy on its adversaries. At a minimum, lawyers would have to get permission from the Navy, and potentially any intelligence agencies that developed or also use the equipment found on the aircraft, experts said.

You have a number of other people in the decision-making process whose priorities are not aligned with criminal prosecution, Michel Paradis, a military law expert and fellow at the Center on National Security, told The Daily Beast.

From the intelligence perspective, in the trial process more information is getting put into the hands of those who dont need it. Its almost seen as a leak, Paradis said, noting that he was not familiar with the particular details of Lins case.

Lin would also have the opportunity to defend himself by potentially introducing other classified information, a defense strategy known as gray mail. His lawyers would also have to get permission from relevant agencies to introduce any classified information.

Lin stands accused of providing military secrets to Taiwan, his birth countrypossibly in exchange for sexual favors, defense officials told The Daily Beast. He faces two charges of espionage and three of attempted espionage.

The military can close the trial proceedings from public view. But that involves a cumbersome administrative process, so much so that its an incentive for some military lawyers to reach a plea deal and avoid the problem altogether, military legal experts said.

Lawyers for the prosecution and the defense must also have the appropriate security clearance to view classified information. The traditional process of discovery, in which the defense gets to examine the evidence the prosecution plans to introduce, slows down as lawyers muddle through the classification process. A mistake in the presentation of classified information could affect the cases outcome.

Its an administrative nightmare, Philip D. Cave, legal adviser in military cases, told The Daily Beast.

In some instances where the charges are as serious as those against Lin, the military hands the case to federal district courts. It wasnt clear yet whether military officials were contemplating such a move.

Perhaps the best known person to face charges close to the allegations against Lin under U.S. military law was Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who was charged with violating the Espionage Act after disclosing military and diplomatic information to Wikileaks. Manning was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison. Only a few active-duty service members have ever been charged with espionage in the past three decades.

That lack of experience of charging service members with crimes that carry a life sentence also complicates the U.S. military effort to conduct a court martial.

There are cases when government has prosecuted espionage cases. Its difficult. Frankly, it is something that happens so infrequently that it is something the military has little experience with especially compared with the justice department, one legal expert with extensive court-martial experience, who asked to speak anonymity when discussing Lins case, explained to The Daily Beast.

Other aspects of Lins case indicate that he may avoid a trial. He was held in pretrial confinement for eight months before the military announced charges this month. That could be a sign that lawyers on both sides were taking time to negotiate. Lin is represented by counsel, defense officials said, but neither the military nor Lins family have disclosed his lawyers name.

Lins long confinement is a little unusual because the military is normally very conscientious about making sure the trial process moves quickly, Paradis said. Service members have very clear rights under the Uniform Code of Military Justice to have any criminal accusation dealt with promptly.

On Wednesday, defense officials said military lawyers submitted a preliminary report to the convening authority for Lins case, in this case, U.S. Fleet Forces commander Adm. Philip S. Davidson, who will make the ultimate decision on whether to proceed to a court-martial. That report was supposed to be delivered last Friday, and the delay suggests that negotiations for a deal or some charge besides espionage may be underway, military law experts said.

Simply put, both sides have an incentive to walk into a military court with a worked out plea agreement and to avoid a lengthy, potentially revealing trial, Cave said.
Wade Sweatt died from a white powder. Immediately after trying it, the 24-year-old told his wife that it was making [him] sick, his parents recalled in a statement. Then, his heart stopped working.

What followed was several long terrible days, in which Wade had cardiac arrest over and over again, his parents wrote. We finally had to make the terrible decision to take him off life support, after it was clear that he was brain dead.

The white powder Sweatt ingested was not cocaine. It was the same substance found in a bar of chocolate or your morning coffee, only packaged in a more concentrated form: powdered caffeine.

According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), ingesting a single teaspoon of powdered caffeine is roughly equivalent to drinking 28 cups of coffee at once. In large amounts, it can cause vomiting and diarrhea. Overdosing can result in a rapid or dangerously erratic heartbeat, seizures, and death.

Even more frightening is how easy it is to take too much pure caffeine. One brand recommended that consumers use a 1/32 teaspoon to measure a safe amount. For comparison, a pinch of salt is generally considered to be one-sixteenth of a teaspoon.

According to ABC News, Sweatt had been searching the Internet for conversion tables shortly before his death in order to determine a safe amount. His calculation was fatal. Sweatt died in June of 2014. The month before, high school wrestler Logan Stiner also overdosed on the powder and passed away days before graduation.

Since their untimely deaths, the FDA has posted a consumer advisory about powdered caffeine and written six warning letters to companies that sell it. But the federal agency has not yet banned the product. That seeming delay has prompted the Center for Science and the Public Interest (CSPI), a nonprofit organization focused on nutrition and food safety, to urge the FDA to take swifter action.

It is astonishing that a substance that is fatal for adults in the amount of two tablespoons is sold cheaply over the Internet as loose powder in large bags without clear warnings, said CSPI Regulatory Affairs Director Laura MacCleery in a statement.

FDA officials met with the families of both Sweatt and Stiner in December of 2014 and again this Tuesday.

The FDA told The Daily Beast that it cannot discuss the pending CSPI petition to ban powdered caffeine but a spokesperson said that the FDA takes concerns raised about safety of these types of products very seriously and we are considering the matters raised by the petition and giving it our careful attention.

For the CSPI, the wait has already been too long for comfort.

In her statement, MacCleery noted that after a quick Google search, the watchdog group was able to order a bottle of liquid caffeine from South Korea that was strong enough to kill nearly seven people.

We easily purchased large bags of pure powder sufficient to kill several dozen people, and a gallon jug of what looks like water but is actually a highly caffeinated liquida cup of which would be a fatal dose, she added.

As the National Institute for Drug Abuse notes, powdered caffeine is especially appealing to young people who want added caffeine stimulation and to those who believe the inconclusive evidence that caffeine can assist in weight loss. And before the high-profile deaths of Sweatt and Stiner, it was even easier to access than it is now.

The FDAs first action against the powdered caffeine market came in July 2014 after the agency learned of Stiners fatal overdose. That tragedy prompted an official warning, which urged consumers to avoid the product and stressed that it is nearly impossible to accurately measure pure powdered caffeine with common kitchen measuring tools and you can easily consume a lethal amount.

The following summer, the agency wrote five warning letters to companies that were distributing powdered caffeine and allegedly violating the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

One company was recommending that consumers use a quarter-teaspoon tool to measure a recommended dose of approximately one-third of a quarter teaspoon (PDF).

Another product label for a bag of powdered caffeine included information about how many milligrams of caffeine were in a quarter-teaspoon, even though the maximum recommended dose size was only one-sixteenth of a teaspoon (PDF). If someone were to have mistaken the quarter-teaspoon measure for a recommendation, they would have downed the equivalent of eight cups of coffee in a heartbeat.

And given how minuscule pure caffeine doses are supposed to be, many of the packages contained an alarming quantity of the powder. One package cited by the FDA contained over 125,000 servings, which is enough for three people to have one dose per day for over 100 years (PDF).

Four out of five of these products were taken off the market after the warning letters were sent out, the FDA told The Daily Beast, and the lone holdout is no longer marketed to consumers.

Just last month, they had to send another letter to a company that was falsely marketing powdered caffeine as a fat-burning drug (PDF).

So far, the FDA has not received any new reports of deaths resulting from powdered caffeine but a spokesperson said that they are still concerned about its sale and will consider every legal option in determining the best path forward.

But the CSPIand the families of the teenagers who overdosedbelieve that the only acceptable action is a categorical ban. A ban, they note, would allow the FDA to seize powdered caffeine at the border and penalize any company that sells it.

Any action less than a ban would be confirmation that FDA has lost its way, said MacCleery.
The porn industry just got a nerdy endorsementthe science world.

According to new research released by Columbia University, men who watch sexually explicit material may actually be healthier than those who dont. Published in the journal Plos One, the study surveyed 265 men who have sex with men, finding that those who watched porn were more likely to practice safe sex.

Indeed, our finding that viewing pornography that contains condom use is associated with fewer condomless anal sex encounters suggests that pornography may have a potentially important protective function by encouraging men to use condoms, the authors said in a press release.

The prevalence of pornography use among homosexual men has been widely studied, but the potential health benefits of such activities have not. To dive into the idea, researchers zeroed in on post-pornography sexual habits. Doing so required recruiting 265 participants, all above the age of 18 and living within 50 miles of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, D.C.

Each participant in the study was questioned on the amount, compulsivity, and proportion of safe and unsafe anal sex they engaged in, specifically after watching porn. Among the 92 percent who reported watching condomless porn, nearly half admitted that the images had influenced them to have condomless sex. The men agreed that pornography depicting safe sex encouraged them to wear a condom as well.

Eric Schrimshaw, a lead author on the study and associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia, said the observation supports greater availability to sexually explicit images that promote safe sex. The potentially negative consequences on behavior, therefore, has policy implications for pornography directors, producers, distributors, performers, and viewers, says Schrimshaw.

If watching sex safe encourages gay men to engage it in it themselves, then it may be a powerful way to protect them against HIV. Martin J. Downing Jr., the studys other author and a doctor at the nonprofit group Public Health Solutions, suggests that activists in the HIV world should consider it.

These findings have important policy and HIV prevention implications, says Downing.

Despite no longer being in the spotlight, HIV remains a major issue among American men. At the end of 2010the most recent year for which there is datathere were 1.2 million people living with HIV in America, 76 percent of them male. Gay and bisexual men specifically make up a large portion of the population, with men who have sex with men accounting for 69 percent of HIV cases overalls.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that at least 156,300 (12.8 percent) have yet discovered that theyre carrying the infectionmaking safe sex crucial to preventing spread of the disease. While both researchers are bold in their support of pornographys potential benefits, they also suggest that more studies on its potential influence on behavior need to be done before ruling it healthy.

The idea that porn may be useful, rather than harmful, is controversial for more than just those in the science world. Just last week in Utah, Gov. Gary R. Herbert declared porn a health hazard in America, suggesting that it produces a sexually toxic environment which poses significant threats to those around it.

In revolt, Herbert signed S.C.R. 9 asking for education, prevention, research, and policy change at the community and societal level. In it, he declares pornography an epidemic and says it causes a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms. Among the negative effects: decreasing mens desire to marry, hindering brain development, and increasing deviant sexual behavior.

Porns effect on the brain has long been fascinating to scientists, who studied it thoroughly in the 2014 Journal of American Medicine paper titled The Brain on Porn. While some were quick to call the study proof positive that porn is detrimental, a more thorough investigation in Psychology Today confirmed that the actual truth about how porn affects us is more nuanced.

In the study, researchers looked at the brains of 64 adult men who regularly watched porn. After analyzing their scans based on the amount the men watched per week, the researchers concluded repeated exposure dulls the reward circuitrys response to pleasure. The researchers were unable to form a causal link between the two, leaving questions as to whether some men were predisposed.

As to the dangers, the study didnt necessarily point one way or another. One of the most troubling theories on pornography that it promotes violence against women is similarly complicated. The National Online Resource Center on Violence Against Women says that after two decades of research on the question, there is little consensus.

Schrimshaw and Downings study is an unusually positive take on pornographya topic that the science world desperately needs to keep studying.
As the self-proclaimed Islamic State trumpets its global terrorist campaign, U.S. special operations forces have quietly killed more than three dozen key ISIS operatives blamed for plotting deadly attacks in Europe and beyond.

Defense officials tell The Daily Beast that U.S. special operators have killed 40 external operations leaders, planners, and facilitators blamed for instigating, plotting, or funding ISISs attacks from Brussels and Paris to Egypt and Africa.

Thats less than half the overall number of ISIS targets that special operators have taken off the battlefield, one official explained, including top leaders like purported ISIS second-in-command Haji Imam, killed in March.

The previously unpublished number provides a rare glimpse into the U.S. counterterrorist mission that is woven into overall coalition efforts to defeat ISIS, and which is credited with crippling ISIS efforts to recruit foreign fighters and carry out more plots like the deadly assault on Paris that killed 130 last fall.

As proof of the campaigns overall success, Pentagon officials this week said the overall size of ISIS from a high estimate of 33,000 a year ago to between 19,000 to 25,000 fighters, and that the influx of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria had dropped from up to 2,000 a month last year to just 200. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter was more cautious about that figure in testimony Thursday morning, saying it is hard to be accurate estimating foreign fighter flow, but that the numbers generally are falling. Thats set against the warning by Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper this week that ISIS cells are likely already in place across Europe.

Thats set against the warning by Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper this week that ISIS cells are likely already in place across Europe.

The U.S. strikes have picked up pace since Defense Secretary Carter announced the deployment of special operations forces to northern Iraq last December, under the unwieldy moniker of Expeditionary Targeting Force, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe the special operations mission publicly.

The officials expect that tempo to rise as the newly expanded special operations advising team inside Syria also grows from 50 to up to 300, as President Obama announced in Germany on Monday.

Officials say the Syria-based U.S. special operators help stitch together the disparate members of the Syrian Defense Force and vet others who want to join the mission, while also gathering intelligence on the ground that leads to strikes.

The CIA, NSA, and other elements of the U.S. intelligence community are also driving the effort, finding and feeding the intelligence to the coalition strike force.

At the top of the special operations target list is the network of ISIS operatives blamed for external operations: 60 attacks in 21 countries that have killed 1,000 people since January 2015, the officials said. Most of the ISIS targets were killed in Syria, by special operations combat aircraft, but also by troops who attempted to capture a handful of high-value ISIS targets in raids. All of those targets resisted arrest and were killed, the officials said.

That grim tally includes the previously announced December killing of Syrian-based ISIS member Charaffe al-Mouadan, who officials have concluded had direct ties to Abdel Hamid Abaoud, the leader of the ISIS cell that attacked Paris last November. Mouadan was among an estimated 10 militants taken out in a spec-ops airstrike.

Another was Abdul Kader Hakim, killed in Mosul in December. The Pentagon called Hakim an external operations facilitator and a forgery specialist with links to the Paris attack network.

Its not clear how many civilians may have been caught in the special operations-related strikes. The U.S. has admitted to accidentally killing 41 civilians in the 20 months since coalition strikes began.

Sometimes the kills or attempted captures are not announced, in order to see how ISIS responds, one of the senior officials explained. What are they doing, what are they saying, who are they communicating to? How do they backfill the missing operator? he said. Those reactions can reveal weakness the U.S. task force can exploit.

The point of such operations is to keep ISIS guessing, he said.

Defense officials acknowledge the downside of the secrecy of the operations is that humanitarian and human-rights organizations that try to serve as neutral arbiters in war zones dont always know who to call when civilians report allegations of casualties or damage in the aftermath of a military strikeor when someone goes missing, possibly taken in a raid. Two senior defense officials said they were actively working to establish and maintain relationships with such agencies in areas where their troops operate, including sharing with the International Committee of the Red Cross details of any detainees taken within a short time of their capture, as per Pentagon policy on detainees.

Defense regulations stipulate that information concerning detainees in U.S. military custody should be provided to the ICRC normally within 14 days, ICRC spokesman Anna Nelson said. In practice, as soon as we are made aware of a new detainee in U.S. custody, we will get in contact with the U.S. authorities to organize a visit.

The special operations counterterrorist mission is spearheaded by troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, the U.S. militarys premier counterterrorist unit.

But unlike previous conflicts, where JSOC raiders worked in secret, usually apart from other types of special operators, the Iraq and Syria teams blend specialists from multiple disciplines. Door kickers from units like the U.S. Armys Delta Force and the Navy SEALs Naval Special Warfare Development Group who train for hostage rescue missions or kill-capture raids are paired with operators like Green Berets who specialize in learning foreign languages and cultures, and training local forces.

The teams are integrated in just about everything we do, one defense official said.

The mixing of troops may have something to with the background of those in charge of the ISIS fight. Current JSOC commander Lt. Gen. Austin S. Miller and his predecessor, Gen. Tony Thomas, both ran the overall special operations task force in Afghanistan, which blended the different skills of very different, sometimes competing spec-ops tribes.

Thomas now runs the U.S. Special Operations Command. Miller most recently commanded Fort Benning, Georgia, where he oversaw the U.S. Army Ranger School that produced the first successful women candidates ahead of the Pentagons decision to open all combat roles to women.

And Gen. Joseph Votel, who previously led both USSOCOM and JSOC, now runs the ISIS campaign as head of Central Command. While rooted in the counterterrorism realm earlier in his career, he has a broader perspective on what the different special operations tribes bring to the fight.

Updated 4/28/16 10:30 a.m. to add the director of National Intelligences warnings that ISIS cells are likely already deployed to Europe, coalition airstrike casualty figures, and comment from the ICRC.
Before last fall, you likely knew of Emory Cohen only if you happened to be part of the demographic that hate-watched NBCs notorious TV musical series Smash. Then Brooklyn came out, and moviegoers collectively swooned over the now-26-year-old actor and his sweet, grounded performance as smirking Italian suitor Tony in the coming-of-age period piece.

Instantly Cohen, who previously made a splash in the intense 2013 indie The Place Beyond the Pines, was on the top of everyones Breakout Stars list. Just like that, this journeyman young actor was heading from Brooklyn to, just maybe, a galaxy far, far away.

With his rising star coinciding with a high-profile casting search for a Star Wars spin-off starring a young Han Solo, Cohen was named alongside hot Young Hollywood actors Miles Teller, Dave Franco, and Logan Lerman among those in the running.

They dont even want me! Cohen mock-cries in a Manhattan hotel room, where he is promoting the indie-thriller Detour, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. I read for it once and then there was some release thing about me testing for it in London when I was in New York. But they did bring me in.

Misreports in the industry trades: a rite of passage in a breakout actors career as significant as the public superhero/franchise film audition is in the first place.

Youd be great for it, though, Tye Sheridan, Cohens 19-year-old Detour co-star says, rubbing Cohens shoulder supportively. You hear this? Cohen laughs. From Tye Sheridans mouth.

Its fitting that Sheridan is by Cohens side for this conversation. The two actors are at very similar turning points in their careers.

The barely legal Texan actor made his own Brooklyn-like splash a few years ago with a trio of preternaturally strong performances in Terrence Malicks The Tree of Life (opposite Brad Pitt), Jeff Nicholss Mud (opposite Matthew McConaughey), and Joe (opposite Nicolas Cage).

He, too, quickly found himself in casting rooms for some of the industrys biggest studio flicks. This spring hell star as young Cyclops in X-Men: Apocalypse, and he just wrapped shooting as the lead on the Steven Spielberg thriller Ready Player One. And Cohen? He recently finished filming war satire War Machine opposite Brad Pitt.

Detour, then, is a remarkable gathering of clearly the most exciting young actors in the business.

In addition to Cohen and Sheridan, 24-year-old British actress Bel Powley co-stars. Last year, Powley, who was essentially unknown in the U.S., stunned critics in The Diary of a Teenage Girl, eventually winning the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Actress over the likes of Cate Blanchett (Carol), Lily Tomlin (Grandma), and eventual Oscar winner Brie Larson (Room).

A year and a half ago when we came up with all this stuff, Brooklyn hadnt come out, Christopher Smith, who wrote and directed Detour, says. Tye was without a shadow the most successful so far of the three. Bel hadnt done anything yet. She was apparently good in this movie no one had seen about a teenage girl.

In Detour, Sheridan plays a young law student contemplating killing his stepfather in a revenge plot. Cohen is the gritty hitman he less enlists to do it than who convinces him that it should be done. Powley is Cohens associate, and, eventually, the girl that Sheridan decides to save from a seedier life.

With Detour premiering at Tribeca, we gathered Sheridan, Cohen, and Smiththe director with the forethought to cast themto discuss what its like to be Hollywoods Next Big Thing and find yourself torn between the indie world that you love and the universe of spandex your agents often push you toward. (Powley, in true testament to her breakout status, couldnt make it because she was on set shooting.)

Its jarring to see you guys in such dark roles. Especially you, Emory, after just watching you be so sweet in Brooklyn.

Emory: After I did Brooklyn I did about five or six violent films in one way or another, and not always with me being the bad guy, but something violent about it to keep the street cred up really. [Laughs] To be honest with you its to keep the street cred up.

So its a conscious decision to do darker movies after being in something lighter like Brooklyn?

Emory: Yeah. I did Pines and everybody wanted me to be the bad boy. Then I did Tony in Brooklyn and everybody wanted me to be the sweet kid. So I just want to keep everybody on their toes. Basically that was the thought process. Plus, I loved the script and got on the phone with Chris and loved working with Chris.

Why did you want to do a film like this, Tye?

Tye: I never had an opportunity like this. First of all, it was one of the first scripts I ever read and I thought I would be an idiot not to jump on board. Plus, what the character offered me was much more mature than anyone I ever played. It was much smarter than anyone I ever played.

So it was an opportunity to introduce yourself as an adult, instead of the movies token kid. That youre not a teen actor anymore.

Tye: Yes, thank you.

Chris: I said it to him when he came on that his performance in Joe is so unbelievable. You actually believe he is this little feral kid. Hes played all these sort of responder behavior kind of characters. Its strange to suddenly be the one whos feeding the narrative and others have to feed off. Its a different set of rules playing the lead.

What was it about these two specifically that you wanted in this, Chris?

Chris: I love Terrence Malick. I mean, Joe, I fucking love that film. I realized very soon for this that you have to find somebody whos not shot, in the sense that you know all about their private lives.

Tye: What youre trying to say is that were mysterious

Chris: What Im saying is that youre a young actor but youre not wrapped up in the Hollywood scene. I dont know anything about you, but you have the skills to play this, so youre perfect. Getting to Emory or Bel, I wasnt sitting there going, I have to get these three. It was a process of originally thinking OK, Johnny Ray [Emorys character] should be in his 30s. When I pitched the idea first in 2007, before I wrote it, I thought Id get Josh Hartnett and stick him in tattoos and get him to play something he hasnt played before.

And when you cast Emory, you aged the character down?

Chris: I saw Emory in Place Beyond the Pines, just fucking loved it. So when Ems came up really late in the day, I had just kept saying no to people. They would suggest people who would get you on the front page of a magazine and I was just like, no, he cant do that. But a year and a half ago when we came up with all this stuff, Brooklyn hadnt come out. Tye was without a shadow the most successful so far of the three. Bel hadnt done anything. She was apparently good in this movie no one had seen about a teenage girl.

You read the Tribeca summaries and see these three names listed and realize its a crazy gathering of actors on everyones breakout lists.

Emory: Also you did Glee. I did Smash. And Bel did EastEnders. So I dont know, we did all that kind of stuff.

Chris: Although I wouldnt have given you the job if I had known that.

[They all laugh]

Chris: I wouldnt have given you the role if I had seen Brooklyn either! Hes so soft, this guy. Have you seen him? This little sweetheart.

The street cred thing you mentioned earlier, Emory: What was it like to have everyone swooning over you so heavily after Brooklyn?

Emory: Its just this slow process where doors open a little further than you had known about, or maybe cracked open a little before. You just remember this is a process of trying to have a career. And thats really what I took it as. Whats funny is as much as beyond this breakout star thing, Ive been doing this for 10 years as just a profession. Im trained in this. So I guess I just ignore all that.

You both have lots of projects to your name. Now were talking about the breakout thing. What is it like to balance the journeyman actor creditsthe films that you believe inwith the big stuff. The X-Men movie. The Spielberg movie. The trades are reporting on Emory in the running for Han Solo.

Emory: They dont even want me!

Tye: Youd be great for it, though.

Emory: You hear this? From Tye Sheridans mouth. Theres a great thing out about what if a Jew could play Han Solo.

They saw you for it?

Emory: I read for it once and then there was some release thing about me testing for in London when I was in New York. But they did bring me in.

That speaks to the question I was asking, balancing the pressures of a Star Wars audition with the indie work you love. Doing movies like this when everyone wants to put you in spandex.

Emory: Thats why you work with guys like Chris. You work with guys you believe in. Tye was talking about the process of reading the scripts, its funny to realize that because of the position were in how many terrible scripts we read, and how many times the agents want us to do the terrible scripts. So when you get a script like Detour and you get on the phone with a guy like Chris, its like everybody can just go away because I know Im doing good material.

Tye: Also, Emorys such a, for me, strong role model. After meeting you and working with you I understand what it means at the purest aspect, just the choices you make and the ethic which you have and approach every job with. Youve given me some incredible advice. Im just so honored to have you as a friend and to be working with both you guys.

Is there an actor who has a resume thats a back and forth between studio and indie that you think youd like to do something similar?

Emory: John Hawkes. He does small indies. He does bigger roles. He does comedies. That guy is just doing his job, too. Hes an artist and hes just making his living and thats what I appreciate most. Not just the work, but the way he seems to conduct himself. Hes not on the covers of magazines or doing any of this stuff. Hes just doing his job.

Tye: I respect people who are simply doing it just for the passion of the craft; for the art that theyre making. Thats what Id like to try to emulate.

Is it hard to make your teams understand why you want to do these things when they might have visions of spandex?

Emory: Is it hard for you, Tye?

Tye: Ive been so blessed and lucky to have the right people there with me in my team, every step of the way. When Detour came around they knew how passionate I was about the script. Everyone loved the script. We all think Chris is amazing, Tye, I think this is a great choice for you. I just came off a pretty big film that I was shooting this summer and now Im doing another studio picture this summer. Thats all very new to me. I never defined myself within those films, but now I do. But I dont know, you want to keep that element about yourself that is the artist.
Whitman College decided to retire its mascot, the Missionary, after conducting a survey of more than 18,000 alumni, students, and community members this winter, according to a press release.

More than 7,100 members of the Washington state colleges community responded to the survey where the primary question was, Do you think the Missionary is an appropriate mascot for Whitman College today?

Sixty-two percent of the respondents said no, 29 percent said yes, while 9 percent had no opinion.

I felt it was important to bring our entire community together to consider this question. President Kathleen Murray said in the press release. Now that our community has spoken, we are going to work to create a new, official mascot for everyone to celebrate.

The Missionary mascot was a reference to Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, two Presbyterian missionaries who traveled to Walla Walla Valley in Washington in 1836 with hopes of establishing a mission on the Cayuse tribes land and bringing the Christian religion to the Native American people.

After a group of Cayuse attacked the mission in 1847, killing both the Whitmans and 11 others, the first Indian war in the Northwest broke out and later, a treaty stripped the Cayuse people of most of their land.

The college was named in the Whitmans honor by founder Rev. Cushing Eells.

The decision to retire the Missionary mascot reflects a trend in colleges across the United States to eliminate mascots that appropriate Native American motifs or are non-inclusive and imperialistic.

The University of Illinois dropped mascot Chief Illiniwek in 2007. North Dakota retired the nickname Fighting Sioux in 2012, trading it in for the Fighting Hawks in 2015. And as early as 1978, Syracuse University banned the Saltine Warrior mascot, replacing it in 1982 with Otto the Orange.

The mascot debates are part of a larger trend in which institutions of higher learning have begun to ponder whether the people they are honoring with things like mascots, buildings, and statues on campus align with the values that those institutions currently embrace.

Students at Northwestern University want founder John Evanss name removed from buildings across campus as well as from faculty positions. Evans was the territorial governor in Colorado at the time of the Sand Creek Massacre when a 700-man Colorado territory militia attacked and destroyed Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian villages, killing nearly 200 women, children, and older men.

When you are honoring people from earlier eras of our country, there is a good chance that those people are a mixed bag, said Joel Barkin, the vice president for communications at Oneida Indian Nation.

We live in a very multicultural society today, and most of the older institutions by and large are honoring not a very diverse set of people, Barkin said. So when you talk to a student who is walking around at a university where everything, the statues and monuments, has no connection to them or even has a negative connection, you have to ask, is that the kind of inclusive environment you want to create on a campus?

Whitmans campus in particular is covered in signs and symbols representing what student Lachlan Johnson referred to as the Whitman myth.

In its simplest form, it is a celebration of people who were involved in violence against indigenous people, Johnson said, and for me, I view it as part of this false history that has been sort of created and promoted and if we are going to have an honest discussion about the history of Whitman College and the area that it is in and if we are going to engage in this way, we need to take down these symbols."

Johnson is a member of the Indigenous Peoples Education and Culture Club (IPECC) at Whitman but is not indigenous himself. IPECC worked with a number of groups on campus to change the mascotthe first step of many in either contextualizing or eliminating these so-called historical symbols around campus.

The fourth president of the college in particular built up this idea of what Whitmans history was when in reality, it was something different and more complex. Because Whitman was in danger of closing, he needed to raise money and being named after a Martyr was good for fundraising.

The early founding fathers started to build up this myth about how Marcus Whitman saved the Pacific Northwest from the savages and the British for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, he said.

IPECC aims to have a plaque by every symbol that acknowledges its history and for things, like the mascot, that cannot be contextualized they aim to have them changed. The newspaper, The Whitman Pioneer, is changing its name, as is the yearbook, called Waiilatpu.

Beyond Whitman, Barkin poses two questions: Should taxpayers subsidize the commercial use, at least at a professional level, of a derogatory term? And is it appropriate that schools receiving taxpayer subsidies be allowed to perpetuate a derogatory term, too?

It is again that question of whether this is the kind of image we want to promote, he said.

Barkin said that when it comes to making these changes, people always ask, Why now?

That is a very close-minded argument, Barkin said. They say, Weve had it for this long, why are we making a big deal of this now? The bad is a part of the legacy. The Washington team name was given by a racistthat is the legacy. This is a team that refused to integrate, a guy who was known for being a racist and was forced to integrate his team. You dont hear about that part. What schools can learn from this is if you deal with this honestly and you take a real look at the people being honored and decide whether it is appropriate or whether people have a just reason for feeling offended.

Whitman will hold a vote in the fall of 2016 to choose a new mascot. Although the decision is facing some backlash from alumni and other keyboard warriors on social media, President Murray insisted that Whitman is more than just its mascot.

While important, we all know that the mascot is not Whitman Colleges defining element, Murray said. Instead, it is our shared commitment to our educational missionthat of providing a rigorous, residential education in the liberal arts.

Barkin notes that moving away from these polarizing terms is a huge deal for those being impacted on the other side.
How China uses economic tools of national power to pursue its strategic objectives is the topic of a new book by Texas A&M University Professor William J. Norris, who will discuss the book today (April 28) at 6 p.m. at the George Bush Presidential Library Orientation Theater.

The Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs will host a book spotlight focused on the book Chinese Economic Statecraft: Commercial Actors, Grand Strategy, and State Control, written by Norris, an assistant professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service. Norris will be joined by Ren Mu, associate professor at the Bush School, and Hiroki Takeuchi, associate professor at Southern Methodist University for a panel discussion on the topic of Chinese economic statecraft.

In the book, published by Cornell University Press, Norris shows what Chinese economic statecraft is, how it works, and why it is more or less effective. The book has already received praise from scholars in US-China relations, including from Thomas G. Moore, University of Cincinnati, author of China in the World Market.

"Chinese Economic Statecraft is a timely, compelling, first-rate piece of scholarship, said Moore. William J. Norris' argument, which will be widely read and discussed among political scientists, economists, and scholars of Asian studies, is presented in a way that will also engage policy-oriented observers and laypeople interested in the book primarily for its insights into the factors shaping Chinas economic behavior."

Norris is currently an assistant professor of Chinese foreign and security policy at the Bush School where he teaches graduate-level courses in Chinese domestic politics, East Asian security, and Chinese foreign policy. He is also a non-resident associate with the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. where his work examines the potential for a conventional US-China conflict to escalate to the nuclear realm.

Norris has been a postdoctoral research associate at the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs and a fellow in the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, a joint program created by the two universities to foster the study of Chinas foreign relations. He completed his doctoral work in the Security Studies Program in the Department of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he specialized in the confluence of economics and security, focusing on the role of economics in contemporary Chinese grand strategy.

The event is open to the public, but reservations are recommended. To register for the event, visit here.
A man who assaulted his girlfriend then broke into a home she fled to was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Wednesday.

According to the Brazos County District Attorney's Office, Logan McMann got into a physical argument with his girlfriend. When she tried to escape, he threw a stone through the driver's side window of her car. She ran to a neighbor's home, and officials say he broke through the French doors on the back patio of the home and fought the homeowners.

McMann will serve half his sentence before he becomes eligible for parole, officials said.

"The impact of domestic violence goes far beyond just the victim," said Assistant District Attorney John Brick. "Those willing to use violence against their partners and anyone who shelters them have no place in our community."
The global north has viewed Morales as a comrade of Castro, but Cuba has been among the most aggressively prohibitionist advocates in recent decades. In truth, Morales is more of an indigenist than a socialist; unlike Castro, his politics are more communitarian than statist.

Even politicians friendly to the US, such as Mexico's plutocratic president Enrique Pena Nieto, are breaking with prohibition. Pena Nieto attended the UNGASS after a dramatic volte-face, and surprised the Assembly by calling for "a transition from prohibition to effective prevention and effective regulation."

In truth, it's a 'war on culture'

At a pop-up exhibition in midtown Manhattan called 'The Museum of Drug Policy', I met Amapola (opium poppy'), a Peruvian peasant activist at odds with her government's increasingly hawkish approach to prohibition.

She told me about being excluded from the process of decision-making: "we have no real participation - agriculture is not represented, and the interests of farmers are neglected." Outgoing president Ollanta Humala, elected on an indigenist-leftist ticket, failed to improve conditions. "We have not seen greater justice: there is still repression, and little respect for the rights of workers and peasants."

Now, to the horror of human rights campaigners, Peru is set to elect Keiko Fujimori, daughter of an imprisoned ex-president whose office was characterised by privatisation, corruption, and repression. Amapola says that Keiko is "a candidate of the capital [Lima], and of capitalists", and remembers Fujimori's tenure as a time of "assassinations, incarcerations, disappearances". It was he who pursued a policy of forced sterilisation in indigenous areas; arguably an act of genocide.

At a roundtable discussion at the exhibition, policy analyst Vicki Hanson described the criminalisation of cannabis as "a war on culture" - an assault on Rastafarian religious tradition. Hanson challenged the audience to look beyond the recreational image of marijuana to acknowledge its ceremonial and medicinal significance.

This issue has thrust the Caribbean to the forefront of the reformist movement. "Jamaica is the new Bolivia", says Pien Metaal of the Transnational Institute. Metaal is insightful on how prohibitionist drug policy evolved from a limited European understanding of the ritual role of hallucinogenic plants. Liberalism is astute on the virtue of personal choice, but it underestimates the importance of communal bonds.

The late Eduardo Galeano, always a perceptive observer of the iniquities of globalisation, wrote on the eve of the millennium:

"Five centuries ago, the people and the lands of the Americas were incorporated into the world market as things. A few conquerors, the conquered conquerors, were able to fathom the American plurality, and they lived within it and for it; but the Conquest, a blind and blinding enterprise like all imperial invasions, was capable of recognising the indigenous people, and nature, only as objects to be exploited or as obstacles. Cultural diversity was dismissed as ignorance and punished as heresy, in the name of a single god, a single language and a single truth, and this sin of idolatry merited flogging, hanging or the stake."

Embrace legalisation, say the reformists, and incorporate drugs into the world market of things, so they may be treated as a commodity, like soya or timber.

But this ought to tell us that liberalisation is only a limited solution: the global market is inherently indifferent to the fates of those cultivating and producing goods. Most consumers are unconcerned by the conditions of those who toil, in part because their labours are out of sight.

Legalisation of narcotics will not solve the social crises of the global south, although it will bring greater peace and stability and lessen corruption. Social justice requires a profound shift in our relationship with the developing world: one that is symbiotic, rather than parasitic.

And it demands we reassess our attitude to how other cultures use drugs - because, as Amapola says, "it is more important than the market; it is sacred."

Benjamin Ramm is editor-at-large at openDemocracy. He writes and presents documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. Follow him on Twitter @BenjaminRamm

This article was created as part of an editorial partnership between openDemocracy and CELS, an Argentine human rights organisation with a broad agenda that includes advocating for drug policies respectful of human rights. The partnership coincides with the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs. It was originally published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
However, I needed to focus on the ISG report and the papers. It was, in fact, fairly simple. The ISG said that badgers pass bTB to cattle at significant levels. It attempted to measure the effects of culling badgers on the frequency of new herds 'breaking down' with bTB.

Two types of badger killing were conducted by the RBCT in separate 'treatment' areas, each of about 100 sq.km in size.

'Reactive' culling removed badgers in response to, and at and around the locations of confirmed herd breakdowns, but was scrapped prematurely after a year.

'Proactive' culling removed badgers randomly across a separate 'treatment' area. Both approaches removed a high proportion of badgers, and control study areas were set up for comparison. Edge areas were also monitored.

The analysis in 2007 had also been very simple. Twenty areas in a line from Lands' End to Staffordshire, either culled or left alone. Ten paired comparisons. The ISG report offered tables that were hard to compare by eye, but with an evening or two of simple number crunching it was plain to see the trends.

Basically, in two of the control areas in one part of England, there had been large spikes of breakdown, elsewhere everything else looked pretty similar between treatment and control. Two other things stood out:

Firstly, and you had to go back to a previous ISG report to find it, the study areas had been chosen, not as random bits of countryside with bTB, but as the very centres of the most intense bTB outbreaks. One with nearly half the herds infected from the start. Not surprising then, that over five years, the rate of breakdown slowed from the centre, as study areas ran out of new herds to infect, and bTB accelerated at its edges.

It's a pattern that might mistakenly be interpreted as a perturbation effect. Some areas had over 80% of herds infected by the end of the trials, and in one, all herds had broken down.

Second, a 2013 paper derived from the RBCT had suggested that the new breakdowns caused by badgers were not around 1 in 20 as first thought, but 1 in 27. This means that of the total 472 breakdowns in the studies, around 18 were due to badgers. That is just about a third of a new breakdown per year, per study area. Or one new herd infection over around three years.

The Foot & Mouth Disease outbreak should have ended the trials

So subtle were the effects in fact, and so vast the confidence intervals, that I was beginning to have some sympathy with the amateur maths bloggers who have derided both Imperial Colleges' statistics and the reliability of the peer reviewers. A few breakdowns, from some unknown, uncertain or misconstrued variable, crashes the analysis.

Checking a range of papers since 2006, it seemed that the significance of findings has relied on 'data adjustments'. One of these papers had dropped three of the ten comparison pairs due to the impact that Foot & Mouth disease (FMD) had on the calculations, taking the overall analytical power below the critical threshold.

In the middle of the RBCT, FMD resulted in the slaughter on a massive scale, of sheep, pigs and cattle, based on what other published criticism later called "unvalidated predictive models".

What happened during the FMD epidemic has been described by one group of published statistical experts as resulting from the "abuse of mathematical models". As the UK authorities culled herds in the proximity of outbreaks, Ireland used FMD vaccination and avoided culling on the UK scale.

The additional expenditure from the UK culling has been estimated to have resulted in the over-expenditure of more than 3 billion. Problems were apparently attributed shortly after the events to "a lack of mutual understanding between veterinarians and modellers." The FMD outbreak messed up and should have ended the RBCT.

A full re-examination of the RBCT is needed

What was described to me as a 'pro-cull' website is also commenting on ISG analysis, having obtained raw RBCT data from DEFRA in March 2016. It is offering graphs showing why the concept of perturbation may be wrong. The data 'adjustments' create the significance, or rather - the perturbation effect is a function of the adjustments made. Something that is clear from the raw data.

This is actually quite helpful. There are many uncontrolled variables in the RBCT; bTB testing and herd numbers varied before and during the trials, pre-RBCT culling of badgers was high and uneven, and cattle testing regimes variable in type and frequency and so on. It is hard to square this with the ISG comment "very few such interactions [variables] were uncovered". They were everywhere.

What next? Well, with unsafe controls, do badgers contribute 1 in 27 new breakdowns, 1 in 2,700 or 1 in 27,000? Impossible to say. Those closer to the folk involved in the study say (in protection of reputations and funding), that if there is contra-evidence, then publish it. A re-examination of the RBCT assumptions and methods is needed.

So was 50 million really wasted? Well not completely. We did learn about badger behaviour along the way, and that killing badgers may cause a carnivore release effect on European designated sites and species - and all nature reserves and countryside actually. This, the government now accepts, requires proper investigation before considering more badger killings.

The post-RBCT period has been peppered with new offshoots and arguments. Some big sums have been allocated to vaccine development for badger and cattle in an unenthusiastic way.

But the 'elephant in the room' is what EC officials pointed out to Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee members in 2013: that we really must accept that the only known way to tackle bTB is to test cattle effectively and remove infected animals. In other words, to stop side-lining disease control in favour of short term economic output.

Conclusion; badgers have been more than unlucky. They have had the bad end of equivocal science, and the bad end of bad government. The question of whether or not to kill badgers at public expense, without good evidence, is surely facing an inevitable reality check.

Tom Langton has been a consulting ecologist to government, business and industry and a voluntary sector volunteer, more recently working on assisting small pressure groups in legal opposition to destruction of species and habitats in Europe.
Yet in South Africa's Karoo, a vast semi-desert the size of Germany in the arid centre of the country, there is no public debate. No local government is prepared. No strategic assessment process is in place. No advocacy groups balance the glossy claims of the industry against sobering experiences on the ground.

Only now ares the local media beginning to wake up to this potentially disruptive industry pushing its way into pristine areas of the Karoo.

Opponents of fracking had long made mention of the known occurrence of uranium in the Karoo subsoils. They pointed out the dangers of extensive drilling and fracking of uranium-bearing formations. Formation and flow-back water could contaminate surrounding waterways the same way as has happened in Pennsylvania, USA.

Namibia set to increase uranium production through Chinese investment

For the last 50 years, uranium exploration and some mining have occurred in the Karoo on and off. Exploration first started in 1969, but the Three Mile Island nuclear accident ten years later put paid to all further plans. The short-lived nuclear renaissance of 2005-2008 rekindled interest and saw serious new investments and geological studies, especially undertaken by the French parastatal nuclear corporation Areva.

When this company ran into serious troubles globally, they had to sell their assets in 2013. Again, the full-blown nuclear disaster of Fukushima-Daaichi of 2011 curtailed further investment, as market prices for uranium remain severely depressed.

Why then suddenly such large-scale and determined plans to mine a resource that the market hardly needs at this point in time, just as the market for nuclear power is shrinking?

The answer lies more in strategic geopolitics than in short-term economic realities. Since the turn of the century, China has been on an aggressive investment path into African nuclear resources. Within a short period it has invested heavily into the nascent uranium mining industry in Southern Africa, especially in Namibia. Chinese involvement in Namibia is about to make this country the third biggest uranium producer worldwide.

Further investments have been made into the uranium sectors of Botswana, Zimbabwe and Malawi, to name just a few. The Soviet Union and later Russia has always relied on its 'domestic' resources first from East Germany, today from Kazakhstan and Ukraine. Today, however, both countries are less stable and reliable.

Therefore Russia needs to look elsewhere for uranium resources, and to underpin its continued aggressive marketing of its nuclear industrial capacity with assurance of secure nuclear fuel supplies.

Russia's largest bid so far is an agreement with South Africa to build 9,600 MW of new nuclear electricity generation at six new nuclear power stations. If concluded it would also be South Africa's largest infrastructure project ever - and so far Russia's biggest foreign investment in Africa.

Who is behind these plans?

There is a deafening silence in the public domain regarding uranium mining in the Karoo. Unnoticed, the largely unknown South African company Lukisa JV silently accumulated uranium exploration concessions und nuclear concessions in the three Karoo provinces of Northern Cape, Western Cape and Eastern Cape.

The company did so by changing partnerships with different nuclear corporations like UraMin and Areva, thus gaining access to all earlier exploration data. The Perth-based Australian uranium miner Peninsula Energy is now engaged in a joint venture with Lukisa, called Tasman RSA Mines, with offices in Beaufort West.

Its working capital comes from several institutional investors, but is dominated by Pala Investments, domiciled in Jersey (UK) with offices in Zug (Switzerland). Pala is a relatively unknown mining giant. According to its website, since its inception in 2006 the fund has invested in a total of 87 mining ventures in 25 countries across all six continents.

The company is controlled and run by the Russian oligarch billionaires Vladimir Iorich and his son Evgeniy Iorich. This should come as no surprise, as the secret (but leaked) nuclear agreement between Russia and South Africa calls for Russia to invest and possibly control the entire value chain of the nuclear cycles from mining, beneficiation, enrichment and fuel fabrication to energy generation, waste disposal and decommissioning.

Only in this context does the renewed Russian interest in the Karoo uranium make sense.

It is particularly interesting to see who are the South African partners in this joint venture. The Black Economic Empowerment partner in this case is Lukisa, which holds a total of 26% of Tasman RSA Mines, primarily in the form of exploration rights and nuclear licenses from the National Nuclear Regulator (NNR).

Perhaps more important are the excellent relations Lukisa has with Government and the ruling ANC. Today the company is run by Tefo Maloisane, who is said to have a long history of excellent political connections.

Environmental impact of uranium mining

The South African public can be forgiven to be rather in the dark about uranium mining. Despite its long and sometimes glorious mining history, uranium mining is a new thing. Past production always came as a by-product of gold mining. Dedicated uranium mines did not exist before.

In addition, the shallow nature of uranium deposits makes it look more like a quarrying operation than a proper mine. Yet, the dimensions are enormous.

Agricultural production from farms is next to impossible after uranium opencast mining. Meaningful rehabilitation is prohibitively expensive. Thus, about 32,000 hectares of farmland have already been bought and are directly owned under freehold by the mining company. Local farmers find it hard to resist purchase offers, as farming in this part of the Karoo is particularly difficult due to low rainfall and poor soils.

Even faraway neighbours might be affected. It is worth noting that a full 25 years after the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl, British sheep from Northern Wales, Scotland and North Cumbria had to be checked for radiation levels (from radioactive caesium 137) in their flesh.

Only a few sections will be extracted by underground mining. Initially, the company had applied for a license for 'in-situ-leaching', a particularly polluting but low-cost method that avoid classical mining infrastructure. Here, large quantities of a leaching agent are injected underground. The uranium is thus dissolved and can be recovered in well fields.

Today, the company plans huge open pits and some underground workings at shallow levels of less than 100 metres depth. A local uranium mill outside Beaufort West will produce 'yellow cake', which would be shipped overseas for enrichment.

Since the Karoo uranium deposits are scattered over a large zone of 200 by 300 kilometres, this requires long-haul trucking of ores over poorly constructed dust roads for hundreds of kilometres to reach a planned Central Processing Plant outside the Central Karoo town of Beaufort West.

The impact on water alone could be devastating

For this plant alone, the company has already applied for a water licence to abstract 1.3 billion litres of groundwater annually, roughly the total water consumption of the Central Karoo Municipality. It is unclear where that amount of water could come from.

The biggest structure will be a string of open pits 70km long stretching across two major rivers in the Karoo from Rietbron to Aberdeen. It is still unclear what will happen with the contaminated waste water. A discharge of radioactive waste water into the aquatic environment, above or below ground, would be illegal under South Africa's strict Water Act.

Therefore contaminated sludge will be delivered to large tailings dams similar to those at the South African gold mines around Johannesburg. From these dams the remaining water will evaporate. This leaves behind a soft and unstable pile of contaminated soil, which can be easily mobilised by the strong prevailing winds in the Karoo into large dust dispersal.

Already today, the environment close to the previous mine sites around Beaufort West is contaminated. First field studies by the author show unprotected nuclear wastes with 10 to 20 times the background radiation. Impacts extend far beyond the Karoo itself. Radioactive contaminated dust can travel for hundreds of kilometres in the windy and dry conditions of the Karoo.

Most of the uranium mining fields of the Central Karoo drain into the Gouritz and the Gamtoos River Basins, feeding rich irrigation agriculture in their lower reach. In addition, the Gamtoos reaches the Indian Ocean near Jeffrey's Bay, ironically only a few kilometres away from the site of the proposed nuclear power station at Thyspunt.

Dust and radiation - two deadly impacts

The devastating impacts of uranium mining on people, especially the mine workers, and the environment have been well researched and documented.

Several studies with large numbers of cases and with exposure over many years (Wismut AG in the former East Germany, the Colorado-Plateau in the USA, and Saskatchewan in Canada) have established a particular direct relationship between occupational exposure to uranium and its decay products and lung diseases.

Mining uranium ore in the Karoo will invariably create huge plumes of contaminated dust. Dust clouds are unavoidable during drilling, blasting and transporting in any mining environment. Dust suppression by spraying water is only partially effective and creates new problems with contaminated slimes, adding to the environmental cost of groundwater abstraction.

Peninsula's Karoo project is still at the Pre-Feasibility-Study (PFS) stage. Old boreholes have been retested to better delineate the ore bodies. Peninsula reports good progress. Engineering studies are underway for the Central Processing Plant at Ryst Kuil.

To conduct the legally required Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), the company had contracted Ferret Mining and Environmental Services as so-called independent Environmental Assessment Practitioners (EAP). After completion of the specialist studies for the Environmental Impact Assessment (EAI) and the Environmental Management Plan (EMP), the 30 years mining rights application is now before the provincial Department of Minerals.

South African law requires a rigorous public participation process with very clear rules. The company has probably flouted most of them and made sure that nobody knew about it. It took civil society groups like SAFCEI to break that veil of secrecy.

Most material is published through a dedicated Facebook page Stop Uranium Mining in the Karoo. Today, only South African media has reported extensively. Thousands of Karoo residents have learnt about the dangers of uranium mining. More than a hundred substantial objections against uranium mining have been submitted to the authorities.

This is slowly is opening the space for a more rigorous public debate on a key issue of the future development of the Karoo, not only in the directly affected Central Karoo, but also further afield. Yet, the three provincial governments are completely silent. It is their duty to equip their citizens with the necessary knowledge to participate in a meaningful debate.

None of the local and regional development plans is even mentioning how to prepare for the impact of the arrival of an international mining industry in the very rural setting of the Karoo.

As in so many places, the current South African national nuclear debate centres on nuclear power generation alone. It fails to address uranium mining at the origin of the nuclear value chain, with its widespread damages and costly remediation requirements.

Uranium mining campaign

The early uranium trial mines at Ryst Kuil and Rietkuil left thousands of tonnes of high-grade uranium stockpiled just outside Beaufort West with no safeguards. The companies simply walked away when the market collapsed, leaving behind a deadly legacy of unprotected radioactive materials.

Uranium and its daughter products are slowly leached into adjacent reservoirs and aquifers. Radioactive dust is settling on plants and is ingested and inhaled by grazing animals. Worse, it was recently discovered that even today the trial mines are used as a dumping ground for undeclared radioactive wastes. The South African authorities are investigating.

With little activity on the ground, local resistance against uranium mining in the Karoo is still at its infancy. Only a few farmers, environmentalists and representatives of the KhoiSan, the early inhabitants of these dry plains, are vocal and active trying to ward off this disruptive industry. They fear for water, the most precious resources in the Karoo.

They predict the negative consequences of an unregulated industrialisation of a very rural and traditional lifestyle. It will be important to mount a credible legal challenge in very much the same way as the people of the Karoo have been able to ward off fracking for shale gas for nearly ten years now.

In the meantime, renewable energy sources like wind and solar energy are becoming more and more viable - much cheaper than nuclear power and with none of its existential hazards.

The Karoo is a world-class site for both forms of regenerative industry, peacefully co-existing with current land uses. Time is on their side.

Dr Stefan Cramer is a semi-retired hydrogeologist from Germany with life-long international experiences, currently seconded to the Karoo by the Southern African Faith Communities' Environment Institute (SAFCEI). He is based in the heart of the Karoo in the small town of Graaff-Reinet. His mission is to assist local communities with the problems of fracking and uranium mining.

Facebook: 'Stop Uranium Mining in the Karoo'.

This article is an updated version of one originally published by KarooSpace. See more information on the Karoo, its history, biodiversity and how to visit at KarooSpace.
Spotlight claims that in a series of eight reports, it will "debunk all core aspects of the bull case to comprehensively demonstrate that things are definitively not 'what they seem here'."

'Nonsensical' Zika virus hype

Spotlight's first report is titled 'Intrexon: The Public Markets' Theranos Part 1 - Zika Virus Hype Is Nonsensical'.

In the report, Spotlight states that Intrexon's technology has been questioned by high-ranking officials from the World Health Organisation, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health. It adds, "Smart money is hitting the 'eject' button and leaving retail investors holding the bag."

According to the report:

Intrexon's long-time chief operations officer has abruptly left the company in advance of what are hyped as great opportunities;

Intrexon has overstated its revenues by 50% by "round-tripping" its own cash through related "shell companies";

These related companies are almost exclusively "failed" or "shady" enterprises; blue chip companies have steered clear;

Even the related company transactions may be overstated;

Intrexon's biofuels interests are likely to fail: the head of the company's biofuels division "has worked at three failed biofuel startups in a row".

Spotlight says that this "self-proclaimed 'Google of life sciences' technology platform is an overhyped, undifferentiated collection of commodity and failed products".

It adds that the company "employs lots of fancy jargon to explain their core technologies" - but "we examined each closely and we found nothing more than a collection of products that anyone can (and does) use themselves smashed together with failed science experiments from years ago".

Thus, while Intrexon "can pursue as many clinical trials utilizing their commoditized technology as they like to keep the dream alive, such trials in our view are extremely unlikely to result in valuable commercial products in the future. And without a real prospect of commercialized products, there can be no meaningful equity value."

The report adds, "Intrexon has been around for more than 17 years and commercialized effectively zero meaningful commercial products using their own technology. Their technology is a 'secret'. Nobody can explain exactly what they do ... The company is only able to generate revenue through related party transactions and selling livestock. The fair value of this company is minuscule compared to its current market cap of ~$4.5 billion."

Zika: no game-changer

Spotlight says that if Oxitec's GM mosquitoes, which are engineered to be sterile, were shown to effectively combat the Zika virus, that could be a "game-changer" for Intrexon - but "we think that it clearly is not." Oxitec has spent a decade fighting dengue fever and malaria, two far more serious diseases than Zika, with its technology, but "wasn't able to generate any meaningful amount of revenues... why should Zika be any different?"

The report points out that "Oxitec has never actually measured the impact of dengue fever on its GM mosquito releases in any country, despite a scientific consensus that such measurements would be necessary to determine whether the technology was effective."

What's more, Spotlight says, there is some evidence to suggest that Oxitec's GM mosquitoes actually make things worse rather than better: "A village in Brazil where the mosquitoes were being tested showed an increase in dengue fever cases."

In an apparent comment on the potential for Intrexon to capitalize on the fear that's been generated around the Zika virus, Spotlight says that the company is not allowing the facts to get in the way of a good story, "particularly when it involves scaring consumers / retail investors into buying up Intrexon stock".

Oxitec's GM mosquitoes are just one of a number of risky GMO products that have been acquired by Intrexon. The company also owns Okanagan Specialty Fruits, developer of the GMO Arctic apple. Growers are reportedly shunning it in order to avoid the GMO stigma.

Intrexon also owns the majority share of AquaBounty, the developer of GMO salmon. Commercialization of the salmon has stalled, pending the US FDA issuing labelling guidelines. Even if the GMO fish does make it onto the market, some retailers have said they won't stock it.

Intrexon fights back

In a statement released last Friday, Intrexon called the Spotlight report "materially false and misleading" and said it appears to be part of a hedge fund campaign to manipulate the company's stock, damage the reputation of the company and its CEO, and benefit from the consequent trading activity. It also said that it had sought the advice of lawyers and was taking "appropriate steps".

In the midst of the row, Intrexon CEO Randal Kirk was named by Wired magazine as one of "25 geniuses who are creating the future of business". Kirk told Wired, "Analysts don't understand our company."

In spite of Intrexon's indignant response, Spotlight's report appears to have struck a chord with some analysts. The stock commentary website Citron Research responded to the report by saying that it had previously sold its shares in Intrexon "as we found none of the company's businesses to have any imminent viability".

It added, "its businesses are too scattered with partners that Citron believes are not as they appear to be. Lastly, what has bothered us about Intrexon is while the company has not been shy about going to investment conferences and selling stock offerings, they were never able obtain a smart money biotech shareholder. If they don't get it, then we don't get it."

The investment website, The Motley Fool, also reacted with a downbeat verdict on Intrexon's performance and prospects:

"Despite several potentially promising research programs underway, Intrexon remains unprofitable, with management reporting an operating loss of $147 million in 2015 ... Intrexon lost investors $84 million last year ... 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."

My own verdict on the Spotlight report is that its motivation and provenance are uncertain - I couldn't find out much about Spotlight Research and the document's authors are anonymous. But the case made against Intrexon and Oxitec's GM mosquitoes business appears convincing and reflects what we and other critics of this approach to insect-borne diseases have said for many years.

Now, with the law firms' involvement, the questions over the worth of Intrexon's GMO 'solutions' may not be solved in Internet debates, but in the courts.

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.
Photo courtesy Henderson County Historical and Genealogical Society This large moonshine still was confiscated in 1931 by the Henderson County Sheriff's Department. From left are Sheriff R.C. "Cotton" Soaper and deputies Jim Tom Reed, Claude Brown, Frank Cosby and Albert Dade.

Kentucky is the land of fast horses, smooth whiskey and beautiful women.

Or is it beautiful horses and fast women? I can never keep that one straight. But I know Kentucky is definitely famous for its whiskey, both legal and illegal.

Western Kentucky has its share of whiskey lore, although it's nowhere near as voluminous as that of Eastern Kentucky. But over the years Henderson County alone had the Burbank, Oakland, Winstead, Withers-Dade, and Peerless distilleries, while Owensboro and Uniontown also had large distilleries.

But I want to talk about moonshine, which has an even more colorful history here. The last two local moonshine stills  to the best of my knowledge  were busted in Henderson County in the mid-1960s.

The May 4, 1966, raid on the Guy Cabell farm on Pleasant Hill Road near Hebbardsville by sheriff's deputies and federal revenue agents was the result of a federal search warrant, which was extremely detailed because someone had tipped law enforcement officers as to the exact location of the still, according to The Gleaner of the next day.

Cabell, 55, lived on a small farm about three-quarters of a mile from the old church at the end of Pleasant Hill Road. When Sheriff Clyde Adkins Jr., along with Deputy Ira Bridges and federal agents, first approached the house they told Cabell they had a search warrant and asked if he knew what they were seeking.

"You've made a mistake; you're wrong," Cabell replied.

"Armed with advance information, the officers led him down the path to a hog lot on the side of a hill some 100 yards from the Cabell home. The still was found in a lean-to in the hog lot. The operation used LP gas fuel for the burner and had a 10-gallon pumper."

The still was not operating at the time of the raid. Bridges, who had some experience with illegal stills, said the 55-gallon drum of mash indicated it had been operating over the past weekend. They estimated it would produce between 5 and 10 gallons of moonshine per day.

About two-thirds of a gallon of 'shine was confiscated, as well as 50 pounds of sugar. The officers destroyed the equipment. Cabell was taken to Owensboro by the federal agents.

The sheriff said he suspected the still's output was probably sold in Evansville.

Adkins also noted that the raid on Cabell's property was the first since one since a still was seized on the Green River at Spottsville about 1954.

Adkins busted another still almost exactly a year later two miles south of Henderson on Old Madisonville Road, which apparently was Henderson County's most recent.

The Gleaner of May 4, 1967, included a photograph of Adkins, along with Deputies Arnold "Steamboat" Ligon and Clark Fisher with a 75-gallon copper still owned by Tom Young, 52.

Young came to the door with a pan of "patch dough," which he apparently was using to plug leaks in the still when the officers arrived. The still was operating "full tilt" when they entered.

"We could hear the still cooking and the whiskey running into the container when we opened the front door," Adkins said.

Young wasn't very talkative, but disclosed he had been making 40 to 50 gallons a week. He would not say where he was selling it.

The still took up most of back room of the two-room house. The front room contained a cot, clothes cabinet, as well as assorted jugs, lard cans and barrels labeled with the days of the week.

Seized in the raid were 12.5 gallons of whiskey, 175 gallons of mash (75 of which were cooking at the time of the raid), 120 pounds of sugar, some yeast and some cracked corn.

The heyday of local moonshining, of course, was during Prohibition, when the illegal alcohol was popularly known as "white mule," presumably because it kicked like a mule and was white.

One of the county's biggest illegal stills was seized in May 1925 from John Lindenschmidt's property on Green River Island.

"The still had a capacity of 1,000 gallons and besides the still officers found 30,000 gallons of still beer (mash) and 100 gallons of 190 proof alcohol," The Gleaner reported.

Lindenschmidt pleaded guilty in April 1926 and was sentenced to a year in jail and a $500 fine.

That was one big still. It's too bad that stills were usually wrecked when they were discovered by authorities, because I'm sure they would prove fascinating to folks nowadays.

Spalding Trafton, my predecessor in recording the community's history, said as much in his history column of Nov. 1, 1931. He noted that one corner of Sheriff R.C. "Cotton" Soaper's office was crammed full of confiscated slot machines, moonshine stills and other paraphernalia associated with illegal liquor and gambling.

He proposed making a tourist attraction out of them. "Quite an interesting museum could thus be assembled for the benefit of tourists who come to our fair city."

It's a shame all that material was disposed of. But I'll leave you with a story told by a friend whose family was involved in the moonshining business here for couple of generations. In the interests of discretion, I'll leave him unnamed, but I can vouch for his veracity.

When things got a little hot in the early 1950s, he said, an uncle of his decided to store his still in a safer place. So he buried it in the dirt floor of his barn. He says it may be there still.

100 years ago

A train wreck on the Henderson Route near Spottsville closed the track for several hours, The Gleaner reported May 4, 1916.

Several boxcars attached to a westbound freight train derailed, tearing up about 50 feet of track. "As far as could be learned no one was injured."

75 years ago

James S. Drennan, manager of the Owensboro Social Security office, announced Henderson would have a new branch office beginning May 1, 1941, according to The Gleaner of that date.

The office was located in the second floor of the Farmers Bank building, and operated 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every Thursday. Up to that point, the local Social Security office operated at the post office.

25 years ago

Webster County miner Tim Lewis stopped in at The Pantry convenience store in Clay and picked up a lottery ticket on a whim. It paid off to the tune of $1.5 million, The Gleaner reported May 1, 1991.

Lewis, 35, was the first Tri-County resident to win Lotto Kentucky, the state's big lottery prize. He took the payout over 20 years.

Frank Boyett is on Facebook and also be reached on Twitter at @BoyettFrank.
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Gleaner staff

A local organization is sponsoring a parade to raise funds for Riverview School.

Backyard Games of America said the parade will be Sept. 17 and follow the same route as the Christmas parade.

The theme of the parade, according to Lawrence Butler, founder of Backyard Games of America, is "Yes We Can" and is in honor of diversity month.

"There will be Latinos, Amish, African-Americans and Caucasian people participating in the parade ... People from other states such as Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee and Mississippi, are coming in," he said.

The idea for the parade theme came from watching the rioting and race relations in other states, Butler said.

"I've looked at surrounding cities with all the problems they've had with diversity, and we in Henderson have risen above that," he said.

"With this parade, we're letting people know that there are no excuses," Butler said. "If they apply themselves, they can do anything."

The parade committee is looking for those willing to show off their vehicles.

There is a fee for each vehicle participating in the parade, and proceeds go to Riverview School.

"We just want to show support for the school," Butler said.

There's a $25 fee for luxury vehicles; $15 for other types of vehicles; and $10 for antique cars.

People are also encouraged to enter floats.

Those who want to enter their cars, a float or otherwise participate in the parade can send an email to www.eacabell@hotmail.com.
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The following information is based on public records from local and area law enforcement agencies and/or court systems:

HENDERSON DISTRICT COURT

Several cases were recently bound over to the grand jury from district court.

Jeremy W. Denton, 29, 1300 block of Washington Street, faces a charge of being a felon in possession of a handgun.

Norman Coomes-Utley, 31, 700 block of Lieber Street, faces a charge of second-degree assault (domestic violence).

Amanda G. Black, 35, 900 block of Pebble Creek Drive, faces a charge of second-degree forgery.

Rodricus S. Ross, 33, Mayfield Lane, faces charges of theft of an identity without consent, driving under the influence (third offense), speeding, driving on a DUI suspended license (second offense in five years) and license to be in possession.

Amber N. Reynolds, 29, 1700 block of South Green Street, faces charges of first-degree possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Radonna L. Hogue, 45, 1400 block of Pringle Street, faces charges of first-degree possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

David A. Hardiman, 56, Princeton, Indiana, faces a charge of theft by deception under $10,000.

Jeremy W. Blake, 38, Dixon, faces charges of first-degree trafficking in a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia, controlled substance prescription not in original container, carrying a concealed deadly weapon, first-degree possession of a controlled substance and failure to produce insurance cards.

Billy J. Rigdon, 35, 1900 block of Country Drive, faces charges of license plate not legible, first-degree possession of a controlled substance and manufacturing methamphetamine (second or greater offense).

Sheila R. Utley, 45, 4800 block of Old Madisonville Road, faces a charge of fourth-degree assault (minor injury).

Nathan A. Horn, 35, 400 block of Hearthstone Lane, faces charges of first-degree robbery and third-degree terroristic threatening.

Cole E. Schrieber, 21, 200 block of Lincoln Avenue, faces charges of carrying a concealed deadly weapon, possession of drug paraphernalia, first-degree trafficking in a controlled substance, trafficking in a controlled substance within 1,000 feet of a school and trafficking marijuana less than 8 ounces.

Several cases were recently waived to the grand jury from district court.

Mason R. Book, 21, 200 block of Lincoln Avenue, faces a charge of first-degree possession of a controlled substance.

Courtney L. Kyle, 26, 3300 block of Zion Road, faces charges of first-degree trafficking in a controlled substance, third-degree possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Elizabeth M. John, 28, 1700 block of South Green Street, faces two counts of theft of an identity without consent.

Ashley V. Nunnelly, 28, address unavailable, faces a charge of first-degree possession of a controlled substance.

Jody M. Mauro, 23, Owensboro, faces a charge of second-degree assault.

Joshua D. Downey, 38, 400 block of Meadow Street, faces a charge of theft of identity without consent.

Keith A. Freeland, 57, 900 block of VillageBrook Drive, faces charges of third-degree assault on a police officer, alcohol intoxication, second-degree disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Bradley W. Fulkerson, 35, 1600 block of Powell Street, faces charges of first-degree possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Brandi Weaver, 38, 800 block of Larkview Drive, faces a charge of second-degree burglary.

HENDERSON POLICE DEPARTMENT

Laken C. Lucas, 21, 1700 block of Clay Street, was arrested Monday on a warrant charging her with first-degree trafficking in a controlled substance. The warrant was issued as part of HPD's and KSP's drug roundup on April 7.
Laura Acchiardo / The Gleaner This bill, signed by Daniel Boone, was one of two artifacts Kent Whitworth brought to Henderson on Thursday for his presentation to Rotarians. Whitworth is executive director of the Kentucky Historical Society.

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By Laura Acchiardo, laura.acchiardo@thegleaner.com

"History is as much about the future as it is the past," Kent Whitworth, executive director of the Kentucky Historical Society told Henderson Rotarians on Thursday.

"That may seem counter intuitive, but the whole reason for history is to educate and engage people through Kentucky history. If we're not confronting the challenges of the future through the lens of our past, we're missing a huge opportunity."

Whitworth spoke at the Rotary Club for Kentucky's 224th birthday, bringing a birthday cake featuring Kentucky history and a pair of historical artifacts.

After his speech, Rotary members were able to look at moon rocks from the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing and a bill from 1792 signed by Daniel Boone. As a surveyor, Boone explored and settled Kentucky, and every June the Kentucky Historical Society celebrates Boone Day in Frankfort.

"One of the things that get us curious is artifacts," Whitworth. "To me, that speaks to one of the powers of history. We tend to think about history in terms of names and dates, but what the objects and stories of history will do is lead to that natural curiosity and stir the soul."

In his speech, Whitworth emphasized the importance of engaging people and a community through history, bringing the focus to Henderson and local preservation. He cited the work of the Henderson Historical and Genealogical Society and Henderson schools' participation in National History Day.

"One of the reasons we love to come to Henderson is that history is alive and well here," Whitworth said. "So many individuals and organizations have worked to preserve the nations treasures so they can be preserved for generations to come. The knowledge we're gaining from this community is helping us inform things on the state and national level. We're grateful of your sense of history and community."
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.
This week, it came out that Mischa Barton was fired from The Hills: New Beginnings for an unforgivable TV sin: 
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  A Connecticut high school history teacher chosen as the National Teacher of the Year on Thursday says she was surrounded by poverty, drugs and violence as a child but imagined other possibilities for her life with help from educators.

Jahana Hayes, who teaches at John F. Kennedy High School in Waterbury, was selected for the honor by the Council of Chief State School Officers. She will be recognized by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony on Tuesday.

Hayes, 44, grew up in a Waterbury housing project and became a teenage mother while still in high school. She said the influence of her own teachers taught her that a school's job sometimes overlaps with the job of parents, and she wants her students to know there are no dead ends.

"No matter where you are or how bad you think it is, there's always opportunities for growth and opportunities for improvement," she said. "I think too often, especially at the high school level, people deal in absolutes and students get the message that, 'If I mess up or I don't do everything exactly right right now, that that's the end of my story.'"

At an urban school with a widely diverse student body, she said she has found teaching is a lifestyle that extends beyond the contracted hours. She finds herself serving not only as a teacher but also as a counselor, a confidant and a protector of her students.

Hayes has won praise for her emphasis on community service and development of a service learning curriculum.

"A lot of my students, they feel like they have nothing to give, which is a very defeating attitude," she said. "I've had students who live in shelters, and they're out with me working with Habitat for Humanity. It is empowering for them because they know no matter where they are right now, there's opportunity for improvement. So many people have helped them along the way, it just feels good for them to help somebody else."

Hayes was selected from among four finalists named in January. The other three teachers hail from Washington state, California and Oklahoma. Hayes will spend a year traveling the nation to represent educators and advocate on behalf of teachers.

"Daily, Jahana gives back to the community which didn't give up on her," Waterbury schools superintendent Kathleen Ouellette said.
An Orange woman is making history with the U.S. Army for the second time in eight months.

Capt. Kristen M. Griest received approval this week to transfer from the military police to the infantry, and on Thursday she is set to graduate from the Maneuver Captain's Career Course, according to the Army Times.
NORWALK -- Fairfield County's railroad crossings are safer than in other parts of the country, but accidents -- some even fatal -- still occur when drivers try to beat trains or stop on the tracks.

Norwalk had the most vehicle and train collisions -- four over the last 10 years -- in Fairfield County, a review by Hearst Connecticut Media of rail crossing accidents involving Metro-North trains shows.

Danbury, Milford and Redding each had two accidents at rail crossings during the 10-year span. In Redding, two people were killed and two injured during a horrific 2012 crash between a car and a Metro-North train.

Ansonia, Stamford, Ridgefield and Darien each had one rail crossing accident, the data show.

Judd Everhart, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, said Connecticut's rail crossing are safe, as long as drivers use common sense.

"We are satisfied that all railroad crossings have adequate approach warnings," Everhart said. "As in all driving situations, driver responsibility is paramount."

Southwestern Connecticut's record is far better than that of some other parts of the country national data released by the Federal Railroad Administration last week shows. Phoenix Arizona, for instance, had 24 crossing accidents over the last 10 years, resulting in two injuries, according to the railroad administration.

Glendale, Arizona, had 19 incidents over the period, resulting in three injuries, and Ashdown, Arkansa,s had 16 accidents, with four fatalities and four injuries, FRA data show.

The Federal Railroad Administration is urging states to review crossings and invest in safety improvements.

"I urge our state partners to join the FRA in taking additional actions to improve crossing safety," said FRA Administrator Sarah Feinberg. "I know that, together, we can do more to save lives. FRA is ready and willing to help our partners in any way we can."

Aaron Donovan, a Metro-North spokesman, said the commuter railroad is focused on safety.

"Railroad crossing safety is often discussed in terms of the three 'E's: Education, Enforcement and Engineering," Donovan said. "We are focusing on all three."

Dangerous crossings

One of the worst accidents in Metro-North history occurred in 2015 when a passenger train struck an SUV stopped on the tracks in Valhalla, N.Y. The SUV driver exited her vehicle as the gates came down just as the train collided with the SUV.

The driver was killed, along with five Metro-North passengers, and 15 others were injured. The force of the impact tore up 450 feet of the track's third rail, which supplies electricity to the train.

Donovan said the Town of Mt. Pleasant, N.Y., is investigating whether to close the Commerce Street crossing, where the Valhalla accident occurred, and a Cleveland Street crossing as well.

The Commerce Street crossing had been the subject of complaints that it's difficult to see given the winding nature of the rural road.

"This is a process that originates at the town level and involves the New York State Department of Transportation, Metro-North and the MTA (Metropolitann Transportation Authority)," Donovan said. "Metro-North supports the closure of grade crossings as a general rule."

Redding crash

In December 2012, a Subaru traveling south over a rail crossing in West Redding was struck by a speeding Metro-North train. The driver and a passenger were killed, and two other passengers were severely injured.

In 1990, a driver failed to stop before the Norwalk's Broad Street crossing and was hit by a Metro-North train. The driver and a passenger were killed.

"There are thousands of cars that drive through Norwalk's train crossings on a daily basis and there are very few crashes annually," said Terry Blake, a Norwalk police spokesman.

"All of the crashes were the vehicle operators fault for failing to obey the law," Blake said.

Darien had only one accident over the last 10 years, at a Camp Avenue crossing, but two people were killed in separate fatal accidents in 1984 and 1986, federal records show.

Everhart added "Just use common sense. Trains and cars don't mix. If you see a train approaching, wait for it to go by before you cross the tracks. And never go around gates, even if a train is not immediately visible."

More education

Donovan, the Metro-North spokesman, said the railroad has stepped up enforcement and education efforts.

"Over the past year, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority police have significantly increased the level of motorist railroad crossing education and enforcement," Donovan said.

In 2015, the MTA police distributed 4,905 railroad crossing safety pamphlets to motorists and pedestrians and issued 1,875 summonses and 831 written warnings at railroad crossings," Donovan said.

"In September 2015, the MTA board approved a contract worth $269,000 to a third party safety consulting company, CTC, Inc., to help us conduct a pilot risk assessment at 20 railroad crossings," Donovan said.

The assessment is ongoing and is expected to be completed at the end of this year.
NORWALK  General Growth Properties doesnt want traffic jams at The SoNo Collection any more than anyone else does, the mall developers traffic engineer told the Norwalk Zoning Commission on Wednesday.

We want a successful economic development that provides a good customer experience, one that they come back to -- if its not, they have other (shopping) options  while minimizing the impact on local traffic, said John D. Plante, managing principal of Langan Engineering.

Several dozen people, including many GGP representatives, were at City Hall for the public hearing, which is expected to continue on May 4. Wednesday was devoted to GGP presenting the mall plan in detail, addressing traffic, design, landscaping and other aspects. The presentation lasted several hours.

The mall plan calls for more than 700,000 square feet of retail development, including anchor stores Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's, 80 to 100 in-line retail stores, a 150-room boutique hotel and public space on the dozen-acre site off West Avenue and Interstate 95.

The commission members initial questions Wednesday focused on the exterior of The SoNo Collection.

Is there going to be any signage or indication to Washington Street or SoNo nightlife? asked Zoning Commission Chairman Adam J. Blank.

GGP Design Director Paul Madden said a comprehensive sign plan would be submitted to the citys Department of Planning and Zoning.

Commission member Douglas Stern asked where a circulator trolley -- GGP has committed $550,000 toward such service -- might stop at The SoNo Collection.

Madden said the southwest plaza, at the corner of West Avenue and North Water Street, would be our proposed stop for the trolley.

To move forward with The SoNo Collection, GGP needs a zoning change to treat the 9.6-acre parcel north of North Water Street and 2.5-acre parcel south of North Water Street as one site.

Were going to build a building over a street and its going to operate as one building, said William J. Hennessey, a Stamford attorney representing GGP.

As part of Wednesdays presentation, residents also drove through and alongside The SoNo Collection. A three-dimensional video took visitors through the North Water Street underpass and onto West Avenue, past the main facade of the development.

GGP, a Chicago-based mall developer, purchased the development site from Spinnaker Real Estate Partners LLC, of South Norwalk in November 2013 for $35 million.

When we had the opportunity to purchase this site, our company saw a big opportunity, GGP Senior Director Douglas T. Adams said. We saw a city, Norwalk, on the rise, with a plan to redevelop its downtown, to bring people back to living in its urban core -- a trend we see across the United States -- and providing an opportunity for those who already were there.

Hennessey said GGP, based on its negotiations with the city, intends to construct The SoNo Collection, including the hotel, in a single phase.

Adams told The Hour that GGP hopes to break ground in August, but he added that completing the project by October 2018  the original target  could prove tight.
NORWALK -- A Norwalk man is facing charges after he allegedly threatened the staff and patrons of a South Norwalk eatery Monday night.

Police were dispatched to Local Kitchen and Beer Bar at 68 Washington St. at around 8:30 p.m. on a complaint that a customer there, who had just been ejected for attempting to fight with the staff and customers, was now attempting to re-enter the restaurant.

Upon arrival, police say they found 48-year-old Jonathan Orcutt banging on the restaurant windows. Orcutt allegedly had a fresh cut to his leg, police said.

The restaurant manager told police that Orcutt had been alternately making unwanted advances to women, saying rude things to customers, and was refusing to leave when asked to do so.

Orcutt had allegedly approached a couple and was "hitting on the man's girlfriend," police said. When he was told by the man to leave them alone, Orcutt reportedly pulled out a closed utility knife and allegedly said, "You'll need this to protect your girlfriend."

According to police, the suspect allegedly told bar staff that he was going to "come back every day with his army and make it a bad day for everyone."

Orcutt was finally escorted outside by customers and the door was locked to prevent his re-entry.

The suspect allegedly denied causing a disturbance and told police he wanted to "press charges against the people who had thrown him out."

When Orcutt was informed that he was going to be issued a summons for breach of peace, he allegedly refused to sign the summons and began cursing at officers.

Orcutt was placed in handcuffs after a brief struggle with police and reportedly continued to be combative when he was brought to police headquarters.

Police said that the suspect berated officers and was banging on the cell doors and throwing himself on the floor. He was brought to Norwalk Hospital by ambulance for evaluation before being returned to police headquarters.

Orcutt, of 6 Magnolia Ave., was charged with second-degree breach of peace. He was issued a $5,000 bond and given a court date of May 6.
Its no secret that it takes a large number of volunteers and organizations to maintain Edwardsvilles status as one of the top cities in the state.

At the City Council meeting on April 19, Mayor Hal Patton proclaimed April 20, 2016, as Volunteer Appreciation Day.

We have many great people that help make Edwardsville what it is, Patton said. I want to take advantage of that by recognizing our volunteers.

Patton then read a proclamation.

The city of Edwardsville and the entire community can realize a positive change with any volunteer action, no matter how big or small. And whereas volunteers working in our community utilize their time and talent daily to make a difference in the lives of residents and visitors to Edwardsville. And whereas experience teaches us government by itself cannot provide all the resources to assist our residents and visitors. And whereas Edwardsvilles volunteers are a great treasure and will be recognized for their commitment to service. And whereas our volunteers are vital to our future as a caring and productive city in the state of Illinois.

In other business, the aldermen approved an agreement for resident engineering services with Jim McAdams.

McAdams, who has been a construction inspector for the city in the past, is responsible for daily inspection and oversight of several jobs.

Also, the aldermen approved a resolution granting signature authority to Public Works Director Eric Williams and City Engineer Ryan Zwijack for Illinois Environmental Protection Agency permit applications.

This was a housekeeping item and has been done throughout the years to help streamline operations in the field with developers.

Aldermen also approved a resolution allowing Williams and Zwijack change order authority for projects under $1.5 million.

This resolution, also done annually, will run from June 1 through May 31, 2017.

Williams and Zwijack were also approved change order authority for Booster Station No. 1 improvements. The individual change order is not to exceed $10,000 per occurrence or a project change order not to exceed 10 percent of the project awarded amount of $1.797 million.

The two were also approved the same authority for the South Buchanan Street reconstruction.
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Linkedin Aboeprijadi Santoso (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

President Joko Jokowi Widodo is not a king nor does he behave like one. But like royal visits, visits by Indonesian heads of state to the Netherlands have all been marked by dramatic moments  albeit in various forms. The first such visit, in the 1970s, came amid a climate of growing concerns and protests in Europe against military dictatorships in Asia, Latin America and Africa.



President Soehartos arrival on Sept. 2, 1970, turned the city of The Hague and the Huis ten Bosch Palace into a dramatic scene of war against protestors. Assigned to drive the car carrying minister Widjojo Nitisastro, I was able to see how the security, much to the annoyance of the guests, had been prepared to the maximum. The planned three-day visit was eventually cut to just one.



The second visit was by president Abdurrahman Gus Dur Wahid on Feb. 3, 2000  only two years after the fall of General Soeharto. It was the time of the introduction of a new era  the era of openness and democracy. Gus Dur arrived just days after his unexpected dismissal of military chief Gen. Wiranto  the first of its kind in Indonesian history.



Gus Dur was particularly warmly welcomed, becoming the first Indonesian president to address the Dutch parliament.



At a ceremony, he told Queen Beatrice Your Majesty, here I am, a blind president with a wife in a wheelchair. The Queen responded with a smile expressing respect and sympathy. Addressing his many friends in Holland, Gus said, I told you, didnt I, that Id be president of Indonesia.



Gus Dur created his own dramatic moments as he proudly introduced the new Indonesia. Soehartos drama, by contrast, was caused by his dictatorial regime. The third drama ironically happened because of a serious misunderstanding of a democracy based on the principles of Trias Politica.



On Oct. 5, 2010, president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was about to board a flight when he abruptly cancelled his visit, worried the Dutch would respond to the demands made by the Republic of the South Moluccas ( RMS ) separatist group to arrest the Indonesian president.



For Yudhoyono, it was apparently a timely decision to demonstrate his leadership and patriotic image. Heroism seems never redundant whenever it involves a former colonial power  as if we were still at war with them.



Likewise, on the Dutch side, war veterans opposed Queen Beatrices plan to attend the 50th anniversary celebration of Indonesian independence on Aug. 17, 1995, as this would suggest that they, in the 1940s, had acted as an aggressor equivalent to the German Nazis. The Queen had thus to wait in Singapore before arriving in Jakarta two days later.



Now there are no more recalcitrant war veterans and no more RMS actions demanding independence. Instead, President Jokowi is confronted with a much greater drama at home and what is left of it abroad: the fate of Indonesian exiles since 1965.



In 2000 Gus Dur met with exiles, calling them wandering heroes, but he was not able to restore their civil rights. Yudhoyono, who enjoyed being among the worlds top Whos-Who, never really showed much concern for them.



Jokowi, a simple man whos not shy about his simplicity, likes to listen to peoples concerns. Taking a break from his business agenda, he approached his compatriots in the streets, talked at a hotel and visited Indonesian students in Leiden.



Unfortunately, there was no chance given to this first president with no link to the New Order regime to meet exiled compatriots at exactly the same time his government at home was sponsoring a historic symposium to publicly discuss, for the first time, the tragic impact of the 1965 genocide.



The Indonesian Embassy in The Hague apparently failed to see the significance of the opportunity for President Jokowi, who has promised to resolve the 1965 tragedy, to meet with exiles and compatriots concerned with the continuing impunity.



Fortunately, and surprisingly, though, Francisca C. Pattipilohy, accompanied by fellow exile Soengkono, bravely found her way to shake the hand of the President and deliver a letter from the International Peoples Tribunal of Crimes against Humanity 1965 ( IPT ).



Yes, Im aware, Im aware, said the President as he received the letter, which urged the Indonesian state to proceed with the findings of Indonesias national commissions on human rights and violence against women.



Had there been a dialogue, the President would have acquired greater understanding of the depth of the problem  how stigmatizing and humiliating it was for hundreds of exiles to be denied civil rights to live safely in their own homeland.



For Tante Cisca, as Francisca is affectionately called, it was a precious moment. Once outside the hotel she cried and proudly said I did it! Oh, after 48 years Im meeting and talking to an Indonesian president. She then rejoined the IPT rally, which rejected any reconciliation without uncovering the truth.



Francisca, 90, a translator exiled since 1968, and her husband Zain Nasution, a journalist who died in prison in 1975, could have been among the nations heroes. In the 1940s Francisca joined the Zain-led Indonesian student bond in Holland, the RUPI. Both were members of the famous Perhimpoenan Indonesia ( PI ), the nations independence movement, which first used the term Indonesia and the members of which included founding vice president Mohammad Hatta.



Zain and Cisca were passionate fighters. They protested against Dutch aggression by returning their Malino scholarships in 1948 and returned home only to be persecuted and left in detention in December 1965.



Its not clear what recommendation the government commission in July will present to the President and what approach he will take to resolving the festering wound of 1965. That will presumably be the thorniest question for President Jokowi.



He will have to decide whether to follow the lead indicated by his politics and security minister Luhut Pandjaitan, who vehemently rejected any apology to the millions of innocent victims affected by the 1965 tragedy, or whether to issue an apology on behalf of the state and bravely seek a way  his own way  to resolve the issues by listening carefully to the suffering survivors.



***

The writer is a journalist formerly with Radio Netherlands.

---------------

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.
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Linkedin Ni Nyoman Wira (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

Released soon after the highly anticipated battle between DC Comics' Batman and Superman, which offered a somewhat disappointing result with only 27 and 44 percent ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively, hopes are high for the epic showdown between Marvel's Captain America and Iron Man.

Directed by the Russo brothers, Anthony and Joe, who previously helmed 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the third installment of the franchise still revolves around Captain America/Steve Rogers' (Chris Evans) old buddy, the Winter Soldier/James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes (Sebastian Stan).

Back in 1991, after being revived by Hydra from a decades-long sleep, the brainwashed Winter Soldier went on a mission that involved crashing a car and, the audience found out later on, murdering the passengers.

The film later moves to the present day where members of the Avengers are in Lagos, Nigeria, to chase after a terrorist group led by Crossbones/Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo). But the mission turns ugly when a building is accidentally blown up as Scarlet Witch/Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) tries to save Rogers from a suicide bomb.

The incident adds another bad record to the Avengers' already long list of missions that turn to catastrophes, resulting in an international decision to monitor and regulate the team's future actions. Not all the Avengers agree to this, thus splitting the group into two: Team Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Team Captain America.

During the signing of the so-called Sokovia Accords agreement, the place is bombed by terrorists, with Bucky the main suspect. The disagreement between Stark and Rogers further escalates as the latter is not convinced that Bucky was the culprit. Little do they know that the whole thing was a setup and the Avengers are about to face a very different challenge  the most difficult they will ever face as a team.

Starting with the Avengers' fight scene in Lagos, the no-nonsense movie is full of action throughout. Throw in a convincing storyline, amazing cast (including Paul Rudd's Ant-Man and Tom Holland's very promising debut as Spider-Man) and perfectly timed one-liners here and there, and the result is an enjoyably balanced and entertaining film for youth as well as adults. (kes)
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Linkedin Dian Arthen (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

Two Indonesian films -- one feature and one short -- have been selected for presentation at the Cannes 2016 film festival, which is slated for May 11-22.

One of the movies, thriller-drama Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, is the only film from Southeast Asia listed in the LAtelier Cinefondation category.

"The story centers around a woman in Sumba who is robbed inside her house. She fights back and beheads one of the burglars and carries his head around on a journey," director Mouly Surya told thejakartapost.com during a press conference held by Institut Francais dIndonesie (IFI).

LAtelier is a program under Cinefondation that aims to bridge young filmmakers, producers and international distributors.

The aforementioned movie project is still in preproduction and shooting is planned to begin in August or September this year. Filmmaker Garin Nugroho serves as the screenwriter while actress Marsha Timothy is set to take the lead role.

Also attending the press conference was Wregas Bhanuteja, the man behind the short film Prenjak/In The Year of Monkey, which was shortlisted in the Semaine de la Critique competition.

Mouly Surya, director of thriller-drama "Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts", poses for the camera.(thejakartapost.com/Dian Arthen)

The 12-minute short tells the story of widow Diah, who is on a lunch break from her work. In desperate need of money, she offers Jarwo a single matchstick for the price of Rp 10,000 (less than US$1), explaining that he will have the opportunity to take a peek at Diah's body parts by lightning up the match in a dark place.

"The idea for the story came from a Yogyakarta cultural practice that existed in the 1980s. Nowadays, there arent any girls who do this anymore, and I want to implement this culture in today's era, but in a different context where Diah needs money so badly that she has to do this," said Wregas, who brought along the film's crew and cast.

The 23-year-old recalled that it had taken them only two days to shoot the movie and that they had decided to submit the project to Cannes three days before registration closed.

After Cannes, the filmmaker is planning to release the movie in Indonesia, with Yogyakarta slated for the premiere.

When asked what he would do if the movie won the Semaine de la Critique competition, Wregas jokingly answered: "We would have a feast of kambing guling [roasted lamb] in our hometown, Yogyakarta." (kes)
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Linkedin Jake Coyle (Associated Press) New York, United States  Thu, April 28, 2016

For decades, the quest for another "Ghostbusters" movie was as elusive as an ectoplasmic phantom.

Various iterations for a third "Ghostbusters" movie cycled through countless rumors and possibilities that had one thing in common: Bill Murray just didn't want to do another one.

Eventually, the proton pack was passed to Paul Feig, the "Freaks and Geeks" creator turned de facto filmmaker of female comics ("Bridesmaids," ''Spy"). Amy Pascal, then-Sony Pictures chief, convinced Feig to take on a reboot of the 1980s comedy franchise.

"I was like: OK, how would I do it? I don't want to compete with the memory of those guys, but if I got the funny women that I love working with, that, to me, I have ideas with," Feig says. "In my mind, it would avoid comparisons going: 'He's not as funny as Bill Murray' or 'He's not as funny as Dan Aykroyd.' And the main reason being: I love my funny ladies."

"Ghostbusters," which opens July 15, stars Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones as the ghost-fighting foursome. Of all the summer's blockbuster-hopefuls, none has had more eyes on it than "Ghostbusters."

It's the rare big-budgeted comedy (reportedly costing more than $150 million to make), so the stakes are as high as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And "Ghostbusters" has proven a curious kind of lightning rod to some, in part for nothing more than the gender of its paranormal pursuers. When the film was announced, some on social media decried it.

"This is the first time I've actually done something where right out of the gate, people cared so much that it just brought all this extra scrutiny on it," says Feig. "Truth be told going into it, I kind of thought: This will be fun and didn't realize there would be a small segment so vocally against it."

Feig understands those who simply didn't want to see a beloved classic remade, but not those who object to his female-led cast.

"Look, I totally understand the fear of somebody touching something you love. I completely get that. That's kind of why I wanted to do a reboot because that's almost the more respectful way to do it," says the director. "Then there's a small, tiny segment that have a problem with it being women, and that's a nonstarter for me. That just is ridiculous."

More controversy followed, though. When the film's trailer debuted in March, some questioned why Jones, the lone black star in the leading quartet, wouldn't play a scientist like the other characters. She plays a subway worker.

There's some history of "Ghostbusters" and stereotyping. Ernie Hudson, who played Winston in the first film, has lamented the relative insignificance of his character.

"I put people in the roles that they are going to be funniest in, and that's the only way I cast them," says Feig. "We had this role and it's the exact, perfect showcase for Leslie's comedy. Personality-wise, it matched what I knew she was going to be the funniest doing."

Jones, the "Saturday Night Live" standout, earlier took to Twitter to defend her role. Feig encourages fans not to "pre-judge" from a trailer. "You've got to see the movie," he says. "She's awesome in it."

Feig's track record of putting funny people in the right position  from "Freaks and Geeks" to "The Heat"  makes "Ghostbusters" one of the year's absolute most must-see comedies. Feig, who's currently finishing the edit and doing test screenings, promises his cast's chemistry is excellent and that co-star Chris Hemsworth proved an equally talented comic performer.

"It's just the greatest idea in the world to have funny people fighting the paranormal with technology," he says. "There's too much there for it to have just been two movies."
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Linkedin Agus Maryono (The Jakarta Post) Cilacap, Central Java  Thu, April 28, 2016

Nine convicts serving time on Nusakambangan prison island in Cilacap, Central Java, tested positive for crystal methamphetamine in recent urine tests jointly conducted by the National Narcotics Agency's (BNN) Cilacap chapter, the Indonesian Military and the National Police.

The nine prisoners are serving sentences at the islands narcotics penitentiary, which should have been free from any kind of illicit drugs.

We have handed over this finding to the Cilacap Polices narcotics division for further legal steps. A team from the police joined us [in carrying out] these urine tests, BNN Cilacap head Adj. Sr. Comr. Edy Santoso told journalists recently.

He said the urine tests were conducted in two of the prisons on Nusakambangan, namely Pasir Putih and the narcotics prisons, last week. Nine of 141 prisoners at the narcotics prison who took the test were positive for crystal meth. Meanwhile, none of 119 Pasir Putih prisoners tested positive for drug use.

Edy added that BNN personnel had also found small packages of marijuana at the narcotics prison. We have not yet weighed them but it is estimated they are around 30 grams in total, he said.

The facility is known to have a super maximum security system but evidently it still can be breached by drug smugglers.

It is not the first time security authorities have found drugs inside Nusakambangan cells. Some illegal drug distribution practices even apparently run with support from Nusakambangan prison guards.

The close involvement of security guards in drug distribution in the prisons came into the public spotlight in March 2011. In that case, BNN officers discovered a large drug network operating inside Nusakambangan, which involved three senior prison officials.

Then Nusakambangan narcotics prison warden Marwan Adli and two of his staff members were arrested by BNN officers for helping to facilitate several convicts running drug businesses from their cells.

Marwan and his men were accused of enabling drug convict Hartoni to operate an illegal drug ring from inside the prison. It was later discovered during a trial that billions of rupiah made from the drug distribution went to Marwan, who later used it to finance businesses run by his family.

In 2012, the Cilacap District Court sentenced Marwan to 13 years in prison and ordered him to pay Rp 10 billion (US$757,289) in fines for misusing his authority. Meanwhile, two of Marwans staff, Iwan Syaefudin, who headed the prisons security division, and Fob Budiyono, the prisons management division head, were each sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay Rp 1 billion in fines.

In 2012, the Supreme Court sentenced to death Hartoni, alias Giam Hwei Liang, and his fellow convict at the narcotics prison, Syafrudin, in the case. At the time, the two convicts were serving sentences of 20 years in prison for drug crimes.

In March this year, Hartoni, 56, reportedly died on Nusakambangan. Authorities said he died after he fell into a toilet at the prison. (ebf)
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

The Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) will focus on safety issues in its program this year.

AAPA Director General Andrew Herdman said the association would prioritize safety alongside sustainability, aviation infrastructure and regulatory issues.

To achieve these goals, the association works with many airlines throughout the region.

"A number of ASEAN carriers already participate in our activities and we encourage more active involvement, as aviation safety is a common priority for all," he told thejakartapost.com on Wednesday.

From the 16 members of AAPA, seven of them are a part of ASEAN, namely Garuda Indonesia, Bangkok Airways, Malaysia Airlines, Philippine Airlines, Royal Brunei Airlines, Singapore Air and Thai Airways International.

Andrew underlined that the association is open to all carriers, not only to full-service airlines or flag carriers, but also low cost carriers.

"AAPA membership is open to any airline based in the Asia Pacific region operating scheduled international services, including full service airlines and low cost carriers," he said. (ags)
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Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama will go ahead with a plan to construct a port resembling the Port of Rotterdam on reclaimed land in Jakarta Bay, with construction expected to begin in 2017.

The governor said he would discuss the plan with President Joko Jokowi Widodo, particularly the possible unification of Islet N with the planned islets O, P and Q.

Islet N has been constructed by Tanjung Priok Port operator PT Pelindo II. Islet O will be developed by PT Jakpro, while P and Q islets will be reclaimed by PT KEK Marunda.

Ahok plans to invite Port of Rotterdam management and the central government to hold shares in the Port of Jakarta.

We plan to invite the government to hold 30 percent of shares in the Port of Jakarta and we hope the management of the Port of Rotterdam might have 60 percent of shares in the Port of Jakarta, Ahok told journalists at City Hall.

The city administration hopes to get further clarity about a moratorium on the reclamation projects agreed on by Ahok and two ministers. Ahok added that such a decision needed to be officially ruled through a regulation such as a presidential decree.

Reclamation projects have been in the spotlight since the arrest of city councilor Mohamad Sanusi by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in late March for allegedly accepting bribes from PT Agung Podomoro Land, one of the concession holders of the reclamation projects.

The arrest of Sanusi, who is linked to the deliberations of the two reclamations bills, has caused a halt in the deliberation of the bills by the City Council. (bbn)
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Linkedin Didi Tang (Associated Press) Beijing  Thu, April 28, 2016

China passed a law Thursday tightening controls over foreign non-governmental organizations by subjecting them to close police supervision, a move officials say will help the groups but critics charge is the latest attempt by authorities to clamp down on perceived threats to the ruling Communist Party's control.

The law, adopted by the national legislature, states that foreign NGOs must not endanger China's national security and ethnic unity. It grants police the power to question NGO administrators, search residences and facilities and seize files and equipment.

The move to pass such a law has drawn criticism from US and European officials and business and academic organizations. They are concerned it will severely restrict the operations of a wide range of groups, further limiting the growth of civil society in China and hindering exchanges between China and the rest of the world.

The law includes a clause that allows police to blacklist "unwelcome" groups and prevent them from operating in the country. Groups can be blacklisted if they commit violations ranging from illegally obtaining unspecified state secrets to "spreading rumors, slandering or otherwise expressing or disseminating harmful information that endangers state security."

The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders denounced the law as "draconian," saying it allows police to exercise "daily supervision and monitoring" of foreign NGOs. The law will have "a profoundly detrimental impact on civil society in China," it said.

The group said the most alarming aspects include the ability of police to end foreign NGO-organized activities that they deem to "endanger national security," a term that is not clearly defined. Police will also be able to more closely monitor foreign organizations' funding sources and expenses, "which has the chilling effect of intimidation," the group said.

The law appears to be an effort to utilize of the resources and expertise of foreign NGOs as China struggles with problems including environmental pollution and mental health, while preventing them from competing with the Communist Party for hearts and minds.

Still, the final version of the law eased many of the restrictions included in an earlier draft, including exempting foreign schools, medical facilities, and academic and research groups in natural sciences and engineering technology.

It also allows foreign NGOs to set up multiple representative offices in China, removes restrictions on hiring volunteers and staff, and eliminates a requirement that they reapply for permission to operate in China every five years.

However, in an apparent attempt to limit their influence, the law bans foreign groups from setting up regional chapters, recruiting members from among the public at large or raising funds within China. It also subjects them to closer financial scrutiny, requiring that they submit annual reports detailing their sources of financing, spending activities and changes in personnel.

"You are here to do deeds, not to build up your troops," Guo Linmao, a legal inspector for the legislature, said at a news conference following the law's passage.

Guo sought to offer words of assurance, saying the law aims primarily to welcome foreign non-governmental groups, help promote their activities and protect their lawful interests while filtering out those few organizations that may hurt China's national security and interests in the name of NGO work.

And, despite a relentless crackdown on domestic legal aid and civic society groups, Guo said international organizations working on human rights issues are welcome in China, as long as they comply with Chinese laws.

He said the law shifted the authority to register and supervise foreign groups from civil affairs bureaus to the police in part because Chinese police already have responsibility for managing and overseeing foreign nationals.

Many overseas organizations have partnered with Chinese academic and social groups, but still operate in a legal gray area that leaves them vulnerable to crackdowns by security forces.

In one recent example, China in January deported a Swedish man it accused of training and funding unlicensed lawyers in the country.
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Linkedin thejakartapost.com (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

The city administration will appeal to the Supreme Court over its defeat in the land eviction case against residents of Bidara Cina, East Jakarta, at the Jakarta State Administrative Court on Monday.

Yes, we will appeal to the Supreme Court, said Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama.

The residents hired Yusril Ihza Hahendra as their lawyer. Yusril may run against Ahok in the 2017 gubernatorial election.

Just let it be, Ahok said at City Hall on Thursday as quoted by tribunnews.com.

Evicted Bidara Cina residents filed a lawsuit against a gubernatorial decree on the extension of the canal project that links Ciliwung River to the East Flood Canal.

Eni Nuraeni, a clerk at the Jakarta State Administrative Court, said on Wednesday that the judges had ruled that the decision of the city administration to expend the project was not adequately disseminated to the affected residents. Second, the decision went against good administrative principles and third, the city administration did not send representatives to the court hearings.

Yayan Yuhana, head of the administrations legal bureau, said that the administration had seven days to prepare an appeal document to be submitted to the Supreme Court. (bbn)
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Linkedin Bill Barrow (Associated Press) Atlanta  Thu, April 28, 2016

Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have launched into a rhetorical scrum, with the Republican front-runner eliciting a backlash that highlights his perilous standing among female voters who could help propel the likely Democratic nominee to the White House.

Trump celebrated his five-state primary sweep Tuesday by swiping at Clinton for playing "the woman's card" in her bid to become the nation's first female president, and he repeated the charge again Wednesday as he campaigned.

"She's got nothing else going," Trump told supporters in New York after primary victories in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. "And, frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote." He added in an immediate contradiction that "the beautiful thing is women don't like her."

Clinton, herself enjoying victory in four out of five of Tuesday's Democratic primaries, retorted in Philadelphia, that "if fighting for women's health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the 'woman card,' then deal me in."

The exchange prompted social media hashtags like #dealmein and #womancard, the latter ranking among the top 10 global trending topics on Twitter Wednesday, with more than 45,000 uses by late afternoon.

Many voters also circulated video of Mary Pat Christie, the wife of Trump backer and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who, standing behind Trump during his victory speech Tuesday, looked as though she was rolling her eyes at the same time as he made those comments.

Clinton's retort isn't a new line of argument; for months she's framed issues important to many female voters as matters of economic security for everyone.

But it shows Clinton is willing to engage directly on matters of gender, highlighting policy and personality differences with Trump, whose long history of incendiary comments about women already have helped define his candidacy.

An anti-Trump Super PAC, backed by Republican donors, last month launched an ad in which unnamed women read aloud quotes Trump has proffered about females. "Bimbo. Dog. Fat Pig," the ad begins, with later references to Trump critiquing "flat-chested" women and referring to "a young and beautiful piece of a--" and a woman "dropping to your knees."

In March, Trump distributed via social media an unflattering image of Heidi Cruz, Trump rival Ted Cruz's wife, prompting the Texas senator to assert that "strong women scare Donald."

Four years ago, 11 out of 13 general election swing states went to the nominee who won among women. Of those eleven, President Barack Obama, with 55 percent of the female vote nationally, won nine; Republican Mitt Romney won just two.

If she manages an even wider advantage among women than Obama, Democrats say she may get a boost in states like Pennsylvania and Colorado, casting them out of Trump's reach while allowing her to compete in GOP-leaning territory like Georgia and North Carolina.

The back-and-forth comes as Trump and Clinton solidify their nomination paths. Combining earned delegates and publicly committed super-delegates, Clinton has 90 percent of the total she needs.

Trump's path to the GOP's required 1,237-delegate majority isn't assured, but his Tuesday sweep intensifies pressure on Republican leaders who would seek to deny him the nomination during Republicans' July convention.

Cruz, who's aiming to topple Trump at the Cleveland gathering, implicitly emphasized the front-runner's turbulent relationships with women Wednesday as he tapped former candidate Carly Fiorina as his would-be running mate, praising her as someone who has "over and over ... shattered glass ceilings."

As for Trump's claim that women "don't like" Clinton, he's wrong at the very least about Democratic primary voters. Exit polls conducted for the Associated Press and television networks in 25 states this year show Clinton won 62 percent of female voters over Bernie Sanders' 36 percent.

According to a recent AP-GfK poll of the general population, 40 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion and 55 percent have an unfavorable opinion of Clinton. Women weren't significantly more likely than men to have a favorable opinion. But for Trump, things were even worse. Just 26 percent had a favorable opinion and 69 percent had an unfavorable one, also with no significant gender gap.

Women, however, were more likely than men to say they definitely would not vote for Trump in a general election, 66 percent to 60 percent. About half of men and women said they would definitely not vote for Clinton.

Among Republicans only, primary exit polls have shown Trump facing a gender gap his last remaining rivals do not have. In the 25 states polled, Trump won 36 percent women and 44 percent of men. Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich both demonstrated consistent support across genders. (bbn)

Associated Press News Survey Specialist Emily Swanson and AP writer Laurie Kellman contributed to this report from Washington.
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

Temasek-owned Bank Danamon Indonesia Tbk has announced it will pay Rp 717.99 billion of dividends, or Rp 74.9 per share. The figure equals 30 percent of the companys net profit last year, totaling Rp 2.5 trillion.

Bank Danamon president director Sng Seow Wah explained that the company had committed to distributing the dividends despite the lowering profit. The lenders net income declined 7.97 percent last year, compared to that in 2014 worth Rp 2.76 trillion.

The bank has launched an efficiency program and gradually cut staff numbers over the last three years. From 2013 to 2015 Danamon saw 17,503 job cuts. The biggest cut was in 2015 of 10,392 staff.

Danamon continues to strengthen its franchise services and human capital in order to remain one of the key players in the SME [small and medium enterprises], commercial, consumer and mass banking consumer segments, he said after an annual shareholders meeting to agree on the dividends, held on Wednesday in Jakarta.

The meeting also approved the resignation of Fransiska Oei from her position as director, and hired two new directors  Adnan Qayum Khan, a risk expert from the Royal Bank of Scotland, and Heriyanto Agung Putra, a former human capital and corporate affairs director at Garuda Indonesia.

In 2015 the bank recorded a worsening quality of credit that slashed its net interest margin (NIM) to 8.2 percent, a new record low after a 8.4 percent margin in 2014. Prior to that, the banks NIM had never been below 9 percent.

Danamon is controlled by Temasek through two subsidiaries, Asia Financial (Indonesia) Pte, Ltd., which owns 67.37 percent of shares, and JPMCB-Franklin Templeton Investment Funds, which holds 6.81 percent.

In total, the Singaporean company holds 74.18 percent ownership, with the remaining 25.82 percent owned by the public. (ags)
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Linkedin Mohammed Daraghmeh (Associated Press) Qatana, West Bank  Thu, April 28, 2016

Palestinian siblings gunned down at a West Bank checkpoint after approaching Israeli troops  with knives, according to Israel  were needlessly killed and could have been subdued without deadly force, their parents, witnesses and an Israeli lawmaker said Thursday.

The fatal shootings of 24-year-old Maram Taha and her 16-year-old brother Ibrahim raise new questions about Israel's use of lethal force against knife-carrying Palestinians in recent months, said the Israeli rights group B'Tselem.

Israeli police have said security forces at the Qalandiya checkpoint opened fire on the Taha siblings on Wednesday after they ignored calls to halt and Maram Taha threw a knife toward a policeman.

Police did not explain why lethal force was used after the sister dropped the knife and why her brother was fatally shot. Two knives were found on the teen, but only after he was killed, police said.

Three witnesses interviewed separately Thursday said that the siblings were at least 20 to 25 meters from Israeli troops when they were shot. The witnesses, including a coffee vendor and a fruit seller, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions from Israeli authorities.

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said Thursday that security camera footage of the incident, which could presumably clear up questions, would not be released until an investigation is completed. She did not say when such a probe might be finished. In recent months, police have rarely released footage of stabbings.

Dov Hanin, a dovish Israeli lawmaker, demanded that the security footage be released and quoted witnesses as saying the Taha siblings posed no threat.

Wednesday's shootings are part of a deadly routine in the volatile region in recent months.

Dozens of Palestinians, often in their late teens or early 20s and mostly acting on their own, have attacked or tried to attack Israelis with knives or other means, such as ramming them with cars.

Twenty-eight Israelis and two Americans have been killed by Palestinians since September, while some 200 Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli troops and civilians, the vast majority in what Israel says were attacks or attempted attacks.

Human rights groups alleged that Israeli forces have often been quick to pull the trigger, rather than trying to subdue suspects.

Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B'Tselem, noted that security forces are only permitted to use lethal force when their lives are in danger.

"When we look into the circumstances, very often we find that the degree of threat posed by an individual was much lower than the claim made by the security forces, and they are still killed," Michaeli said.

She said that calls by some Israeli officials saying that attackers should expect to be killed may have been an influence.

Earlier this year, the Israeli military chief angered right-wing nationalists when he urged soldiers to use only necessary force in subduing attackers. Hawkish lawmakers said at the time the military chief's comments weakened Israel.

Samri, the police spokeswoman, said security forces are "trained to act quickly, to seek contact and to neutralize the attacker."

In the West Bank village of Qatana, Saleh and Fatima Taha grieved for Maram and Ibrahim, two of the couple's seven children. Maram left behind two young daughters.

Saleh Taha, 61, said that even if the object his daughter threw on the ground was a knife, troops didn't have to kill her.

"And why did they kill her brother? Did he throw anything at them? He didn't," he said.

The parents said Maram and Ibrahim had told them Wednesday morning that they were going to a West Bank hospital for a checkup, and that the family only heard from neighbors later that day that the two had been killed.

Saleh Taha said he was summoned by Israeli troops for questioning later Wednesday, and that the bodies of his children had not been handed back to the family yet.

Maram Taha moved back to her father's house a week ago, a possible indication of difficulties in her personal life. Her parents dismissed the idea that the siblings had attempted to carry out a politically motivated attack.

Israel alleges that Palestinian factions and social media activists incite to attacks, while Palestinians argue that half a century of Israeli military occupation is reason enough. In some cases, motives are personal, including Palestinian women trying to escape difficult circumstances at home by trying to get arrested or killed.

___

Associated Press writers Karin Laub in Jericho, West Bank, and Daniella Cheslow in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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Linkedin thejakartapost.com (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

The Central Jakarta Immigration Office has detained five Chinese workers for questioning on allegations they were trespassing on the Halim Perdanakusuma Air Force Base in East Jakarta.

Immigration office spokesman Heru Santoso Ananta Yudha said the five foreigners are suspected to have violated immigration laws for failing to present travel documents and stay permits.

"According to preliminary investigations, the five Chinese nationals are currently employed in the high-speed train project, which is a national project,"Heru said in a written statement received by thejakartapost.com on Wednesday.

Heru said the air force had informed the immigration office of the detainment of five foreign citizens who had allegedly trespassed on government land while conducting work.

Heru said the five suspects were identified as CQ, ZH, XW, WJ, and GL.

"Both WJ and GL were not able to provide any proper documents," he said.

Meanwhile, CQ provided a copy of a passport, ZH provided a temporary stay permit card (KITAS) and XW was able to show a Chinese identification card, Heru said, adding that for the purpose of further investigations, the immigration office would coordinate with the Air Force to confirm the exact activities in which they were involved.

Tempo.co previously reported that Air Force spokesman Air Marshal Wiko Sofyan confirmed the detainment of five foreigners at the Halim Perdanakusuma Air Force Base in East Jakarta on Tuesday.

Another two people, who are Indonesian citizens, were also detained in the same incident. The suspects were captured when they were drilling a hole in the ground.

The Chinese nationals are reportedly employees of PT Geo Central Mining (GCM), a partner of PT Wijaya Karya, the company that is currently responsible for the Indonesia-China high-speed train project (KCIC). Meanwhile, the two Indonesians are contract workers with PT GCM.

According to the air marshal, the five foreigners are identified as drill laborer and administrator Guo Lin Zhong, 26, administrator and researcher Wang Jun, 28, mechanical engineer Zhu Huafeng, 47, engineer Cheng Qianwu, 48, and engineer Xie Wuming, 41. (liz/bbn)
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Linkedin Arientha Primanita (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

The government has vowed to tighten the supervision of foreigners coming in and out of Indonesia following the arrest of five Chinese nationals at Halim Perdanakusuma air base in East Jakarta, a top official has said.

The five were caught illegally drilling within the air base area, allegedly for the high-speed railway project.

The government would keep improving management to strengthen the monitoring of foreigners' movements and activities, director general of immigration at the Law and Human Rights Ministry Ronny F. Sompie said on Wednesday.

Authorities were currently checking on the identities of the Chinese nationals and possible immigration violations. The men are employed on Indonesia's high-speed train project and trespassed in the Air Force complex.

"They only had limited stay permits for work purposes in Indonesia," Ronny said in Beijing, China, as quoted by Antara news agency.

He is on a working visit to China accompanying Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Binsar Panjaitan at an Indonesia-China dialogue.

Besides the five foreigners, air base authorities also detained two Indonesian citizens who were caught drilling a hole in the ground, alongside the Chinese nationals, in the Air Force area on Wednesday.

The Chinese nationals were reportedly employees of PT Geo Central Mining (GCM), a partner of state-run construction firm PT Wijaya Karya, the company responsible for the Indonesia-China high-speed rail project (KCIC). Meanwhile, the two Indonesians are contract workers with PT GCM.

Data from the Immigration Office showed that 196 Chinese nationals returned to their home country in the first three months of this year for violating immigration regulations such as overstaying their visas.

Most of the Chinese citizens came to Indonesia in groups using tourists visas.

"As they visit the country as tourists, they also look around for job opportunities or other activities in Indonesia," he said, adding that most of them worked in mining, cement plants or power plants. (rin)
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Linkedin Erika Anindita Dewi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

Lawmakers have not yet reached an agreement on approving the tax amnesty bill into law, as lawmakers still differ on the urgency of the bill's approval, says House of Representatives Speaker Ade Komarudin.

With the House's current sitting session set to end on Friday, Ade expressed hope that lawmakers would instead agree to approve the bill in the next session, by the middle of next month.

"I actually wanted the bill to be finished in this sitting session. But it's not easy. We don't have enough time [to discuss the bill]," Ade told journalists in Jakarta on Wednesday, adding that the next session would take place from April 30 to May 17.

Previously Ade expressed his aim for the bill to be approved this month to help the government attract wealthy Indonesians to bring home funds that they have kept in other countries.

But Ahmadi Noor Supit from House Commission XI overseeing finance and banking said the commission would need to form a working committee to look closely into crucial articles in the bill that have become burning issues during the deliberations.

A number of lawmakers continue to question the urgency of the bill and the amount of incoming funds if the bill is approved into the law, Ahmadi said after a hearing with Indonesia Stock Exchange executives on Wednesday.

Lawmakers are still waiting for government disagreements about the urgency of the bill to be resolved, Ahmadi added, particularly on whether the incoming funds would significantly help the countrys economy.

The approval of the bill is expected to help the government provide amnesty to individuals and companies who declare their untaxed wealth. For the execution of the regulation, the House still needs to revise three related laws, including the General Provisions and Tax Procedures Law.

President Joko Jokowi Widodo has reportedly prepared alternative regulations such as a government regulation on the tax amnesty if lawmakers fail to approve the bill into law.

The total tax revenue target for this year is Rp 1.36 quadrillion (US$102.64 billion), 28.2 percent higher than the Rp 1.06 quadrillion achieved in 2015. However, the government plans to revise the state budget to a more realistic figure, including its tax revenue target. (bbn)
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Linkedin thejakartapost.com (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

Indonesia and China have agreed to set up an extradition treaty, pushed by the need to address the issue of corruption fugitives.

The two countries agreed to intensify cooperation in law enforcement and exchange intelligence on fugitive Indonesians convicted of corruption and suspected to be located in China, Hong Kong and Macau, said Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan on Tuesday.

After leading the Indonesian delegation in a dialogue on politics, law and security with China, Luhut said Indonesia wanted both countries to ratify an extradition treaty as soon as possible.

"To date, we have deported many Chinese nationals who have committed crimes or brought trouble to Indonesia," said Luhut as quoted by Antara news agency in Beijing on Tuesday evening, local time.

"And we hope that the same thing will be done for us. We can strengthen cooperation in this area if there is a ratified extradition [treaty]," he added.

The process of deportation between the two countries is conducted within the framework of a mutual legal assistance (MLA) pact, Luhut explained.

Indonesian Ambassador to China and Mongolia Soegeng Rahardjo said he suspected that there were still several Indonesian fugitives residing in China.

"We continue to cooperate and coordinate with local authorities in the deportation process," he said.

The Chinese delegation leader, Senator Yang Jiechi, agreed on the need to ratify an extradition treaty with Indonesia.

China supports the effort to restore the Bank Century assets that have been frozen by the Hong Kong Court, he said.

In 2014, the Indonesian government found a way to obtain and partly confiscate the assets related to the PT Bank Century case located under the jurisdiction of Hong Kong.

The value snatched amounted to US$4 million.

The pathway to acquiring the assets was opened up after the Hong Kong High Court partially granted a request made by the law and human rights minister on behalf of the Indonesian government.

The value of the assets fluctuates because the majority of the assets come in the form of stocks.

The MLA request made by the Indonesian government was processed and submitted by the law and human rights minister and was based on a Central Jakarta District Court ruling.

The process at the Hong Kong High Court has not been finalized. (liz/bbn)
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Linkedin Liza Yosephine (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

Indonesia will gather with Malaysian and Philippine officials in the capital next month to coordinate a joint patrol and intensify maritime security as a response to the increasing threats happening in the region's key trade sea lanes, an official said on Thursday.

The trilateral meeting scheduled to take place on May 5 would involve foreign ministers and military top officials from each country, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Arrmanatha Nasir said.

"The meeting will produce a joint statement on the commitment to maintain security in the region that is a common interest of the three countries and to maintain stability that is conducive to economic activity and the movement of people around the region," he told journalists during a press briefing on Thursday.

The military commanders of the three countries will also sign a memorandum of understanding on the cooperation and coordination of maritime security.

The meeting will also discuss details and commitments in the running of the joint patrol, including standards of procedure issues, patrol zones and resources to protect the waters, Arrmanatha said.

The meeting comes at the initiative of President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo in the wake of the recent hijacking and hostage-taking of Indonesian seamen by the Philippines' Abu Sayyaf militant group.

Although there is continuous daily communication between the Indonesian and the Philippine governments regarding the movement of the terror group and the condition of the hostages, Arrmanatha said the meeting would not specifically discuss release efforts.

The notorious Abu Sayyaf rebels had demanded a US$ 1 million ransom for 10 Indonesian seamen whose vessels were hijacked late last month. The group also tried to hijack other Indonesian-flagged vessels in mid April in Malaysian and Philippine waters but failed to do so following the arrival of Malaysian authorities. Still, the group managed to take four Indonesian crew members, which total 14 Indonesian currently held captive. (rin)
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

Rating agency Moody's has given a warning about Indonesian corporate debt, which relies heavily on foreign sources, while choosing not to downgrade the sovereign rating of the country.

Moody's kept the sovereign rating at Baa3 with a stable outlook as government and corporate debts were at 26.8 and 23.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), respectively. The level of government debt is moderate, as the average debt of other countries with the same rating is around 42 percent.

"However, almost half of the debt is denominated in foreign currencies, and overseas investors hold more than 38 percent of local government bonds," managing director Atsi Seth said in Jakarta on Wednesday.

Compared to 2010, Indonesian corporate debt to GDP has increased by 11.3 percentage points from 12.4 percent to 23.7 percent, and most of the additional debts were foreign currency denominated.

While the overall leverage remained modest and non-performing loans stand at around 3 percent, Atsi explained, the rising cost of servicing foreign currency-denominated corporate debt and weaker dollar income from commodities had contributed to defaults in recent years.

"Further weakening in the rupiah or slowing in growth could spur defaults and weigh on bank asset quality. For instance, telecommunications company Trikomsel defaulted on a Singapore dollar bond in 2015 as debt servicing requirements ballooned due to the rupiah depreciation," he said.

As for commodity based companies, Atsi continued, the risk of falling commodity prices which affect dollar income had reduced their natural hedge against foreign exchange volatility last year. Thus, coal miner Berau Coal Energy Tbk defaulted, after Bumi Resources Tbk registered a default in 2014. (ags)
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Linkedin Lita Aruperes (The Jakarta Post) Manado, North Sulawesi  Thu, April 28, 2016

The North Sulawesi Police have dispatched a company-level unit (SSK) of Mobile Brigade (Brimob) personnel as reinforcement for the Operation Tinombala task force deployed under the operational control of the Central Sulawesi Police to pursue wanted terrorist Santoso and his men.

North Sulawesi Police chief Brig. Gen. Wilmar Marpaung said the deployment of one SSK of Brimob personnel was based on concerns that Poso in Central Sulawesi remains at threat of terrorism. An SSK consists of 100 personnel.

The North Sulawesi Polices Brimob is trusted to take part in Operation Tinombala to arrest Abu Wardah, alias Santoso, who is believed to still be hiding in Poso forests, Wilmar said at the Brimob headquarters in Mapanget on Wednesday.

He added that acts of terror had damaged the nation.

Wilmar reminded all Brimob personnel who would be on duty in Poso to stay alert in carrying out their tasks. Youre not alone in your duty. Working together with Indonesian Military [TNI] personnel, you should avoid egoism as much as you can. This is because what we need is solidity in performing our tasks, said Wilmar.

He hoped that all Brimob personnel dispatched to support Operation Tinombala would not display arrogance and would coordinate with their colleagues and superiors. Please strengthen your faith and confidence in carrying out your duty so that you will always get blessings from God, said Wilmar.

North Sulawesi Governor Olly Dondokambey handed over logistical support from the provincial administration for Brimob personnel deployed to hunt for Santoso.

He said it was hoped that all personnel dispatched to Poso could perform their tasks well and protect themselves. We hope the North Sulawesi Police can impose tight security in the North and Central Sulawesi border areas, said Dondokambey. (ebf)
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Linkedin Tom Hays (Associated Press) New York  Thu, April 28, 2016

A commercial pilot was under the influence of alcohol while flying a JetBlue airliner carrying 151 passengers last year from Orlando to New York City, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

A criminal complaint says Dennis Murphy Jr. was selected for a random alcohol test after Flight 584 landed at Kennedy Airport on April 21, 2015. The court papers allege the test found that his blood-alcohol level was 0.11, exceeding the .04 legal limit for pilots.

A co-pilot later told investigators he saw Murphy "drinking an unknown beverage from a cup before and during" Flight 584 and another flight earlier in the day from New York to Orlando, the complaint says. On the way to being tested for alcohol, the pilot was red-faced and "chewing gum rapidly," it adds.

Murphy was released on $50,000 bond after appearing Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn. There was no immediate response to a phone message left with his attorney.

In a statement, JetBlue said it has a "zero tolerance" drug and alcohol policy, and that Murphy no longer works there.

The case follows that of an Alaska Airlines captain who is scheduled to go on trial in July on federal felony charges that while drunk he flew a plane full of passengers from Portland, Oregon, to Orange County, California. And In March, an American Airlines co-pilot was arrested when he failed a sobriety test before a flight in Detroit.

Under federal law, airlines can test pilots for alcohol and drug use at random. They also can be tested after an accident or when impairment is suspected.

According to records from the Federal Aviation Administration, 225 pilots for commercial airlines have tested above the legal blood-alcohol limit since 1995.

In 2015, there were 56,327 tests given to workers in the airline industry including pilots, mechanics, flight attendants and air traffic controllers. Of those, 119 people tested above the limit a or 0.2 percent a the FAA said. Also, aviation workers failed 1,546 of 218,448 drug tests. (bbn)

Associated Press Writer David Koenig in Dallas contributed to this report.
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Linkedin thejakartapost.com (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

The Jakarta Police have extended the detention of Jessica Kumala Wongso for another 30 days. As the final extension of her detention period, the police must present sufficient evidence against her in that time, or set her free.

Jessica, 27, who is suspected of murdering her friend Wayan Mirna Salihin, has been in detention since Jan. 31. The Jakarta Police have extended her detention until May 28, Jakarta Police general crimes division head Sr. Cmr. Krishna Murti said on Thursday as reported by kompas.com.

Investigators have asked for the district court's permission for the detention extension, he said.

Jessica was detained after the Jakarta Police named her as the sole suspect for the murder of Mirna, who died after drinking a cyanide-tainted coffee at a cafe in the Grand Indonesia mall in early January.

Police investigators are allowed to detain a suspect for a maximum 120 days under the Criminal Law Procedures Code (KUHAP). However, if the police cannot complete the dossiers before her detention period ends, then Jessica must be released from detention, according to the KUHAP.

For the 90 days that Jessica has been in detention, the polices case dossier has two times been rejected by the prosecutors office as incomplete. The police submitted the dossier to the prosecutors office for the third time on Friday.

The police seek to charge Jessica with pre-meditated murder. If she is found guilty, she could face the death penalty.

Hidayat Bostam, one of Jessica's lawyers, said he came to the Jakarta Police headquarters on Thursday to sign the detention extension and check on his client's condition.

Jessica was unwell, and had complained of difficulty breathing, Bostam said, adding that he would ask permission from the police to have a doctor check her lungs.
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Linkedin thejakartapost.com (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has expressed concern about land subsidence in Jakarta, which is sinking at an increasingly rapid rate, and he called on all relevant parties to prevent further subsidence.

"From the data I have received, the land subsidence in Jakarta is already very worrying, an average of 7.5 - 12 centimeters [annually]," Jokowi said when opening a meeting on the Jakarta reclamation project, or the National Capital Integrated Coastal Development (NCICD), at the Presidential Office on Wednesday, as quoted by Antara news agency.

Jokowi said the land subsidence had prevented several rivers from flowing into Jakarta Bay. "For this reason, the management of water and the environment in Jakarta must be integrated, from the headwaters to downstream," he said.

As the countrys capital city, Jakarta must have the proper defense and support for a sustainable environment, the President added.

"In the provision of clean water, drinking water and also the mitigation of land subsidence, waste water management, river revitalization and flooding," said Jokowi.

The development in Jakarta Bay under the NCICD scheme would be the answer for Jakarta, said the President, referring to the construction of 17 islets in Jakarta Bay.

When asked about the Jakarta reclamation, all parties should focus on dealing with strategies to anticipate the prospects of the citys environment up to 2030.

"During my recent visit to The Netherlands, I saw the water management of The Netherlands, including water supply, sanitation and other issues," Jokowi said.

He also underlined the importance of reclamation to support the construction of city infrastructure. It will also later relate to the development of ports, airports, highways and mass transportation that will all have to be well integrated," Jokowi said. (liz/bbn)
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Linkedin Elly Burhaini Faizal (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

President Joko Jokowi Widodos efforts to start a reconciliation process around the tragedy of 1965 demands both domestic and international recognition and support, a rights activist has said.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) deputy Asia director Phelim Kine said a lack of support from senior ministers and the government bureaucracy could foil Jokowis plan to document mass graves from 1965.

There are powerful elements within the government and the security forces who would prefer that the details of those victims and their killers  state security forces and the paramilitary groups under their control  remain buried and unaccounted for, Kine said in a statement on Thursday.

Kine cited the recent statement from Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Pandjaitan as an example. Luhut challenged the enormity of the massacres by stating that the death toll was probably less than 1,000 victims.

Luhut, Kine said, had ruled out the possibility of an official apology for the abuses and the minister had expressed skepticism about the existence of already well-documented mass graves.

As reported earlier, on April 25, Jokowi instructed Luhut to start documenting the location of mass graves across Indonesia, thought to hold more than 500,000 victims from the 1965 communist purge.

Powerful religious groups are also opposed to accountability for the 1965/1966 killings, Kine said.

He was referring to the Indonesia Ulema Council, the countrys highest Islamic clerical body, who cautioned that locating and excavating the mass graves would be a socially and politically divisive policy, tantamount to awakening a sleeping tiger.

Elements of the government, the security forces and religious bodies have  without basis  equated moves toward justice for the victims and their families as an effort to revive communism, Kine said.

He said Jokowis order was an act of political courage that defied half a century of official lies and denial.

Establishing the location of those mass graves is the first step toward identifying the victims buried within and the circumstances of their death, said Kine.



He further stated that Jokowis order posed a threat to the official narrative that had long silenced survivors and their families. In the governments account, the killings were a justified and heroic response to an Indonesian Communist Party plot to overthrow the government, said Kine. (ebf)
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Linkedin Ayomi Amindoni (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

The planned tax amnesty for Indonesians keeping untaxed funds abroad could backfire on rupiah stability, an economist has warned.

Permata Bank economist Josua Pardede said the tax amnesty could bring some Rp2,000 trillion (USD153 billion) back to the country and increase tax revenues by Rp40-60 trillion, but cautioned that it could also strengthen the rupiah and thereby hurt exports.

"If the rupiah becomes overvalued, exports will drop and [create] a fiscal disadvantage, Josua asserted.

Indonesia's current account deficit currently stands at around 2 to 2.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).

Therefore, Joshua said, it was necessary for the Finance Ministry and the central bank to issue a policy mix in the short term to anticipate a flood of foreign funds repatriated to the country.

"Tax amnesty aims to help the state budget, but on the other hand it is expected not to interfere with the stability of the exchange rate," he said.

The Finance Ministry's head of fiscal policy, Suahasil Nazara, admitted the tax amnesty bill, which is currently in deliberations at the House of Representatives, was a controversial way to increase tax revenue.

However, once the bill was passed, the tax amnesty would bring two advantages: the declaration of unreported assets and the repatriation of assets from abroad.

"Tax amnesty aims to provide the opportunity [for citizens] to declare overseas assets that have not been reported and benefit from a special tax rate," he said.

"We understand that it is controversial, but we believe it is an opportunity to bring back the assets owned by Indonesian people abroad to contribute to economic growth," he added.

For the implementation of the regulation, the House needed to revise three related laws, including the General Provisions and Tax Procedures Law, Suahasil explained.

Meanwhile, President Joko Jokowi Widodo has reportedly prepared alternative regulations, such as a government regulation on the tax amnesty, in case lawmakers fail to approve the bill.

The tax revenue target for this year has been set at Rp1.36 quadrillion (US$102.64 billion), 28.2 percent higher than the Rp 1.06 quadrillion achieved in 2015. However, the government plans to revise the state budget with more realistic figures, including a less ambitious tax revenue target. (dan)
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Linkedin Ruslan Sangadji (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 28, 2016

The Traditional Music Festival 2016, held in Parigi Moutong regency in Central Sulawesi last weekend, may have helped to ignite a love for traditional music in children and preserve Indonesia's culture.

The festival involved 400 children from 34 provinces across the archipelago. They joined in various competitions, in categories such as Best Music Arrangement, Best Musical Player and Best Performer.

The judges scored participants on overall performance, originality, ideas and creativity.

The festival may have been a "once in a lifetime" experience for the children and encouraged them to participate more in preserving Indonesia's traditional music and culture, said Hilmar Farid, director general of culture at the Education and Cultural Ministry.

Hilmar also encouraged the appointment of a traditional music ambassador at next year's festival, to help promote Indonesia's vast cultures, especially traditional music. The young ambassador, he said, could help to raise awareness around the preservation of culture.

"An introduction to art at school for children, especially traditional art, is very important because nowadays children are not familiar [with traditional art]," Hilmar added.

Music observer and festival judge Embi C. Noer said he noted that some participants lacked preparation. He urged them to enjoy playing and performing music, not only for the sake of competing at the festival. (rin)
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Linkedin (Associated Press) United Nations  Thu, April 28, 2016

The UN Security Council will hold an informal meeting on May 6 on the protection of Palestinian civilians, an issue the Palestinians have pressed for decades and say is more needed now than ever.

Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour said four council members  Egypt, Senegal, Venezuela and Malaysia  are organizing the meeting which will hear briefings from a legal scholar, an Amnesty International representative and others.

Last October, the UN sent the council a study on precedents in addressing the protection of civilians in conflicts around the world Mansour told reporters Wednesday that the meeting is a first step toward action that the Security Council must take.

"Our desire is to find any form of protection to protect our people from the brutality of this occupation," he said. (bbn)
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Linkedin Aya Batrawy (Associated Press) Dubai, United Arab Emirates  Thu, April 28, 2016

Saudi Arabia has plans to issue select visas to welcome tens of thousands of tourists a year as part of a sweeping national reform plan aimed at showcasing the country's rich heritage, including pre-Islamic sites, and encouraging Saudis to spend some of their tourist money at home.

A day after Saudi Arabia outlined its Vision 2030 plan to wean itself off dependence on oil, a top Saudi prince told The Associated Press how the country plans to develop its tourism industry over the coming years.

Prince Sultan bin Salman, who is head of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage and the oldest living son of King Salman, said that while the country will be opening up, it will not be "totally open for everybody to just show up and come in."

"It is open for people that are doing business, for people working in Saudi Arabia, investing in Saudi Arabia, and people who are visiting for special purposes. And now it will be open for tourism again on a selected basis," he said.

The religiously conservative country currently does not issue tourist visas, though it ran a pilot program between 2006 and 2010 welcoming around 25,000 visitors annually to see Saudi Arabia's ancient archaeological sites and vast landscapes of mountains, coastline, valleys, volcanoes and deserts.

No date has been set for when tourist visas will be issued again.

Though Saudi Arabia may seem an unlikely destination for a holiday, it boasts regions where Christian and Jewish communities once thrived, historic forts, a stunning Red Sea coastline and a diverse culture molded by ancient trade and pilgrimage routes.

Prince Sultan envisions a kingdom that also attracts big-spending Gulf nationals. Travelers from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman are expected to spend $216 billion on world travel by 2030, according to a 2014 study for the travel tech company Amadeus. The study found that, on average, a traveler from these countries spends around $9,900 per trip outside the Gulf.

In this photo taken on April. 22, 2015, A Saudi man stands at al-Ukhdood archeological site in Najran, Saudi Arabia. (AP/Hasan Jamali)

Promoting domestic tourism among Saudis is not just aimed at capturing some of that tourism money, but also at forging a stronger national identity among the country's youth, hundreds of thousands of whom have studied abroad on scholarships and are active users of social media and the Internet.

"Smelling and hearing the sounds of their country and tasting this fantastic multicultural country is something that's important for any nation that wants to go to the future confidently," Prince Sultan said.

"So many people today may look at their country practically as an ATM machine, which is very, very, very sad," he said, particularly as the country faces domestic and regional challenges. He said a lack of understanding about how the disparate tribes of Arabia became unified under his grandfather, the late King Abdelaziz, poses a major obstacle because the country needs "to have a Saudi citizen totally buying into their country's history."

Karen Young, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said these initiatives are particularly important to the kingdom as sectarian tensions with rival Iran play out across the region.

"This notion of Saudi Arabia as center of the Arab world and really having ownership of not just Arab identity, but also Islamic identity. That's a big goal," she said.

The Vision 2030 plan approved by the Saudi Cabinet on Monday is a national blueprint for preparing the country for an era of lower oil prices, which have eroded the state's ability to finance subsidies, wages and infrastructure projects.

Currently, 70 percent of Saudis work for the government. More than half of Saudis are under the age of 25, and millions will soon be looking for work and affordable housing.

In this photo taken on April. 22, 2015, A Saudi vendor displays beads to customers at a market in Najran, Saudi Arabia. (AP/Hasan Jamali)

Prince Sultan said tourism is one of the most promising industries for "creating real, meaningful, long-lasting jobs that Saudis like to do."

The tourism commission's figures show that around 245,000 Saudis work in the tourism sector. The target is to boost that to 352,000 by 2020 and to see investment in tourism upped by $8 billion to reach nearly $46 billion.

The prince said Saudi Arabia could have implemented many of the reforms outlined in the new roadmap when oil prices were above $100 a barrel and the kingdom's finances were in surplus. He said ideas have been on the table for years for developing Saudi tourism sites and building museums to attract investors and visitors.

"Lost opportunities are the most dangerous thing to any economy, to any country. This transformation project has happened because we need to recover," he said.

Though around 11 million Muslims from across the globe flock to Saudi Arabia annually to perform religious rites at holy sites in Mecca and Medina, the infrastructure for tourism outside these two cities remains nascent.

The prince said allowing pilgrims to stay on as tourists and creating an industry to support that would show visitors that Saudi Arabia "is moving forward" and that Islam did not emerge in a land void of history.

"The issue is very important to us, that people come and find a country that is stable, that is secure... to show off, if you like, our country," he said.
A high-ranking official in the de Blasio administration was told in May of 2014 that the operator of Rivington House wanted to remove all deed restrictions on its Lower East Side property. [Politico New York]

The city is shutting down the office that coordinates Lower Manhattan construction. Local elected officials say thats a bad idea. [Channel 2]

A bouncer says he lost his libido because it was too hot inside a Lower East Side bar. [Daily News]

During May and June, an artist is staging an East River exhibition that involves outfitting pigeons with LED lights so that spectators can see them flying thrrough the air at night. [New York Post]

Edra Soto grafts Puerto Rican architecture onto the Lower east Side at the Cuchifritos Gallery. [Hyperallergic]
Thousands of junior doctors are returning to work after two days of industrial action. The strikes were held over disputes on working conditions and pay in new contracts.



It was a historic 'all-out' strike, including for the first time junior doctors providing emergency care. Less intensive strike action was held earlier in the year.



James Crane (pictured), a diabetes registrar at St. Thomas' Hospital in central London, spoke to The National Student about what the strike action meant to him: Earlier on this year Jeremy Hunt decided he was going to impose a contract on us that we feel is unsafe.

It also introduced working practices that did not enable us to provide safe care for our patients and will lead to [...] working patterns that are unsustainable for junior doctors.

Crane said those striking regret having to cancel outpatients appointments and elective surgeries, but that without causing a degree of disruption, were unable to get through to the Department of Health.

The proposed new contracts could potentially send junior doctors over a tipping point and [...] reduce the workforce to levels that are unsafe for the future care of patients, Crane warned.

Speaking about what a positive outcome for the junior doctors would look like, the father of two said: Victory is very simple: for the department of health to return to meaningful negotiations, so we can work together to arrange a safe contract for junior doctors.
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Home >Police Enforcement > Drunk Driving Laws > US Supreme Court To Decide On DUI Laws
Abandoned Rohingya migrants reveal new smuggling route

CHUMPON: Police apprehended 13 illegal Rohingya migrants left on a roadside in Chumphon province yesterday (Apr 27), learning that the Malaysia-bound Muslims were being smuggled on a previously unknown route.

crimeimmigrationtransportpolice

By Bangkok Post

Thursday 28 April 2016, 11:13AM

Highway police find Rohingya migrants left by Highway 41 in Chumphon province yesterday morning (Apr 27). Photo: Amnart Thongdee

Highway police found 10 adults and three children aged 1-2 years close to Highway 41 in tambon Khun Krathing of Muang district early yesterday.

A Rohingya man said through a translator that they came from Mottama town in Myanmar. A man there brought them to Kanchanaburi province where a Thai driver picked them up Tuesday night (Apr 26) to smuggle them into Malaysia.

But Tuesday night the driver told them to get out of the vehicle and hide in the woods. Fearing he would not return for them, some group members went looking for the vehicle near the highway after dawn broke.

Sub Lt Wasant Trato, a deputy highway inspector, said highway patrol police first saw two Rohingya men beside the highway before they ran away.

A chase led police to the group of exhausted migrants who had no travel documents.

The discovery came about a kilometre from a police checkpoint, so it was assumed the people smugglers abandoned the aliens to avoid arrest, the inspector said.

Capt Panuwat Chomyong, another deputy highway inspector, said police had already identified the group of Myanmar traffickers and learned that they changed their smuggling route from Ranong to Kanchanaburi province because of serious suppression efforts in Ranong.

Read original story here.
Airport officials defend security protocols as gas tank prevented from boarding Phuket-bound flight

BANGKOK: Officials at Don Mueang International Airport have defended their actions in bringing a gas cylinder to a passenger at a boarding gate on Tuesday (Apr 26) in order for the man to identify it. The passenger was ready to board a Thai Lion flight to Phuket.

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By The Phuket News

Thursday 28 April 2016, 06:19PM

Airport officials presented the bag containing a 13.6kg canister of refrigerant gas and electrical appliances to Prakob Jaitieng at the barding gate just 30 minutes before Mr Prakob was to board his flight to Phuket. Photo: Facebook user NooNuchy PS

Airport officials presented the bag containing a 13.6kg canister of refrigerant gas and electrical appliances to Prakob Jaitieng at the boarding gate just 30 minutes before Mr Prakob was to board his flight to Phuket. Photo: Facebook user NooNuchy PS

The news broke after Facebook user NooNuchy PS posted photos of airport staff presenting a bag containing a 13.6kg canister of refrigerant gas and electrical appliances to Prakob Jaitieng at Gate 74 of Terminal 2 at 5pm  just 30 minutes before Mr Prakob was to board his flight to Phuket, reported Thai PBS (See story here.)

I wonder how this luggage went through the initial security system, she wrote, prompting a slew of comments questioning security procedures at the airport that sent NooNuchy PSs photos viral.

Nitinai Sirimahatakan, President of Airports of Thailand (AoT), which operates Don Mueang Airport, today affirmed that the baggage was detected by the airports inline x-ray screener, dismissing claims that it passed through the screener undetected.

He said that after the cylinder was detected, security authorities called on the airport public-address system for the owner of the luggage to claim ownership as he was not waiting in the checking queue.

A subsequent check showed that the belonged to Mr Prakob. Security officials were then required to follow standard security protocols and present the bag to Mr Prakob to open at the boarding gate and claim ownership, AoT confirmed.

AoT said the tank never made it on board, as it is a prohibited item and the passenger was asked to cancel his flight, reported the Bangkok Post. (See story here.)

Lion Air in Bangkok declined to comment to The Phuket News regarding the incident. The flight left Don Mueang at 5:45pm and safely landed in Phuket at 7:10pm, was all one staffer would confirm.
Dubai Thai woman drug mule caught with 1.8kg of cocaine at Phuket Airport

PHUKET: Security at Phuket International Airport arrested a 21-year-old Thai woman found with 1.8 kilogrammes of cocaine hidden in two boxes of chocolates after her arrival from Dubai today (Apr 28).

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By Eakkapop Thongtub

Thursday 28 April 2016, 03:59PM

Oathcara Wikho said she was paid B150,000 to bring the chocolates to Thailand, but denied any knowledge that she was carrying drugs. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Oathcara Wikho said she was paid B150,000 to bring the chocolates to Thailand, but denied any knowledge that she was carrying drugs. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Oathcara Wikho said she was paid B150,000 to bring the chocolates to Thailand, but denied any knowledge that she was carrying drugs. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Oathcara Wikho said she was paid B150,000 to bring the chocolates to Thailand, but denied any knowledge that she was carrying drugs. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Oathcara Wikho was found with B1.8kg of cocaine mixed with chocolates in her duty-free bag. Photo: Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Officials estimated the drugs to be worth about B5.4 million.

Phuket Airport Customs House Chief Hattaya Thipyawat and Phuket Governor Chamroen Tipayapongtada announced the arrest at a press conference at 2pm.

Oathcara Wikho, from Prachinburi, was found in possession of the drugs when officers stopped and searched her during a routine security check, Ms Hattaya said.

Ms Oatchara arrived on Emirates Flight EK394, which left Dubai last night and arrived at Phuket Airport at 4:15am today, Ms Hattaya added.

Upon suspicion, custom officers search Oatcharas bags and discovered 100 packages of cocaine wrapped with chocolate covers.

Some were mixed with actual chocolates in two boxes that were inside a duty-free bag that she was carrying, Ms Hattaya explained.

Oatchara said that she was hired by a man who she knew only as Mr Michael and had never met.

She said he paid her B150,000 to bring the chocolates to Phuket, but denied any knowledge that she was carrying drugs, Ms Hattaya said.

She said that Michael instructed her on the phone to contact him after she had checked in to a hotel so he could arrange someone to collect the chocolates, she added.

Oatchara was taken to Tha Chatchai Police Station and charged with possession of a Category 2 drug with intent to sell and smuggling a Category 2 drug into the Kingdom.
Man, 20, wanted for Phuket robbery hunted down via CCTV

PHUKET: A 20-year-old man wanted for robbery of a Family Mart convenience store in Phuket has been arrested with drugs after police spent four days hunting him down through CCTV footage.

crimepolicedrugs

By Darawan Naknakhon

Thursday 28 April 2016, 08:49AM

Krittanai Maneechoti was identified by items seen in the CCTV footage. Image: Phuket City Police

Phuket City Police led by Lt Col Somsak Thongkleang arrested Phattalung native Krittanai Maneechoti at 5:30pm on Tuesday (Apr 26).

Krittanai, taken into custody in front of Khunthawat apartments in Soi Rassadaramlieg, off Thepkrasattri Rd, in Rassada, was found in possession of 760 grammes of kratom and 64 pills of alprazolam when police searched him and his motorbike.

Among the items seized in making the arrest were Krittanais Honda Wave motorbike, clothing, a bag and a knife which police say he used in carrying out the robbery.

Krittanai was wanted for robbery of the Family Mart store on the corner of Soi Patchanee-Bang Cheelao and Thepkrasattri Rd at 3:55am last Friday (Apr 22), Col Somsak said.

We got a description of him and his getaway vehicle after we saw CCTV footage from the store that show a male suspect armed with a knife approached the store clerk and then went behind the counter to empty the cash register, he added.

While we were looking for the suspect in the area, an undercover officer noticed that Krittinai and his motorbike matched the description, so we approached him and searched his motorbike, where we found all items using during the robbery in a brown bag.

Krittinai confessed to the robbery, Col Somsak said.

He said he had spent all the money (B5,000) that he got from the robbery, he added.

Krittinai was taken to Phuket City Police Station and charged with robbery and possession of Category 5 and Category 2 drugs.
Military respond in beach clearing protest face-off

PHUKET: Around 50 protesters holding signs turned up at Provincial Hall this morning (Apr 28) demanding the resignation of Phuket Governor Chamroen Tippayapongtada and and Vice Governor Chokdee Amornwat following the dismantling of the illegal structures on Layan and Leypang Beaches yesterday (Apr 27).

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By Eakkapop Thongtub

Thursday 28 April 2016, 03:02PM

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Around 300 people turned out to show their support for the beach clearances. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

However, the 50 soon dispersed after 300 people turned up top show their support of Gov Chamroen and V/Gov Chokdee.

The large group supporting the Gov and V/Gov turned up at Provincial Hall at around 10am today after learning that the group of 50 people had gathered at the Chai Field opposite Provincial Hall with signs asking officials to resign.

The protesters claimed that they have suffered loss of business since officials removed businesses on Surin and Leypang beaches. They said officials continued to clear beach businesses regardless of the affect on local peoples livelihoods.

In retaliation, the larger group turned up at Provincial Hall with signs expressing their support for officials clearing the illegal structures.

Some supporters even brought flowers to give to Gov Chamroen and V/Gov Chokdee and said that they understand that officials only followed NCPO orders.

Phuket Provincial Police Chief Col Teeraphol Thipjaroen, who arrived at Provincial Hall after learning of the situation said, I ordered more than 40 officers both in and out of uniform to come to the area and maintain peace and order in and around Provincial Hall.

We dont want these two group to get into confrontation. Defense volunteers and Navy officers were also called in to help maintain order, he said.

Todays protest followed the beach clearance on Leypang Beach yesterday which saw V/G Chokdee hold a press conference at Cherng Talay Tambon Administration Organisation office (OrBorTor) once the clearance had started.

During the press conference, V/G Chokdee confirmed to media that officials followed the law every step of the way when they carried out the removal of Tony Restaurant.

He explained, The area is public land and the restaurant was illegally built without permission from local officials. Officials could not grant a building permit for the restaurant to be built on public land.

If we ignore this issue and let other owners have their way, then this whole idea of beach organisation will fail, he said.

We have demolished or removed more than 100 businesses that encroached on Phukets beaches since receiving orders from the NCPO. The remaining businesses that encroach on public land and are still standing are there because the owners filed an appeal.

We cannot continue with the removal of these businesses until we have received a decision from the court, he added.
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Phuket manhunt afoot after man, 26, fatally beats own grandmother

PHUKET: Police are hunting for a 26-year-old man wanted for fatally beating his 74-year-old grandmother at her home in Kathu early this morning (Apr 28).

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By Eakkapop Thongtub

Thursday 28 April 2016, 03:12PM

Police and rescue workers in front of the home where Jintana Chairab, 74, suffered her fatal beating early this morning. Photo: Thung Thong Police

Phuket police have launched a manhunt for Nopparit Sophapan, 26, for fatally beating his own grandmother. Photo: Thung Thong Police

Phuket police have launched a manhunt for Nopparit Sophapan, 26, for fatally beating his own grandmother. Photo: Thung Thong Police

Thung Thong Police Lt Sawanya Eidthrong said that Nopparit Sophapan allegedly assaulted his grandmother, Jintana Chairab, at her home in Moo 7 at 3am.

She later died at Vachira Phuket Hospital.

More than 20 officers are looking for him right now, Lt Sawanya said.

When help arrived, the victim was still alive but she was badly injured. Kusoldharm rescue workers rushed her to hospital, where she died at 7:45am.

Local residents told us that Nopparit was intoxicated when he attacked her and fled the scene on a motorbike, he added.

Lt Sawanya urged people to report any possible sightings of Nopparit to the nearest police station, or directly to Thung Thong Police Station at 076-321321.

Nopparit has a history of violence, Lt Sawanya added.

The suspect was arrested before when he assaulted his wife near a 7-Eleven at Thung Thong, he said.
Phuket police arrest man wanted for fatal beating of his grandmother

PHUKET: The man wanted for fatally beating his grandmother at her home in Kathu early this morning (Apr 28) has been arrested this afternoon.

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By Darawan Naknakhon

Thursday 28 April 2016, 06:44PM

Phuket police launched a manhunt for Nopparit Sophapan, 26, for fatally beating his own grandmother. Photo: Thung Thong Police

Nopparit Sophapan, 26, allegedly assaulted his grandmother, Jintana Chairab, at her home in Moo 7 at 3am. She later died at Vachira Phuket Hospital. (See story here) Thung Thong Police chief Col Chaowarit Petchsripia said that undercover police were instructed to wait at the home of Nopparit believing he would return. However, he didnt return. A second team of officers were instructed to look for Nopparit in the surrounding area. The team found Nopparit hiding in a friends home. Nopparit has been taken to Thung Thong police station where he is currently being questioned. More details to follow.
Police deny ties to bodies at boneyard

UDON THANI: The Royal Thai Police (RTP) yesterday (Apr 27) insisted no police were involved with the charred bones found in a forest in Udon Thani last week.

deathviolencehomicidepolice

By Bangkok Post

Thursday 28 April 2016, 08:54AM

Investigators, detectives and forensic experts including Khunying Porntip Rojanasunan (inset) believe Udon Thani police arrested, tortured, then burnt criminal suspects on tyre-fired pyres outside the North-east city. Bangkok Post file photos

Deputy police spokesman Kritsana Phatthanacharoen said yesterday that the investigation found no policemen were embroiled in the case, insisting legal action must be taken against the offenders when found.

The RTPs comments came after residents in Udon Thani claimed local police were linked to the bones found last Friday (Apr 22) in 20 locations at a site known as Koke Thao Khampa (The Old Khampa Mound), in tambon Nong Waeng, Ban Phue district of Udon Thani.

The remains were discovered after bushes covering them were burned by a wildfire.

Police suspect the bones belonged to murder victims whose bodies were burned in an attempt to cover up the killings.

Col Kritsana said national police chief Chakthip Chaijinda told authorities to speed up the probe and Maj Gen Pornchai Sutheerakun, head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Royal Thai Police Office, said the bones belonged to humans.

So far, more than 10 families have lodged missing person complaints following the discovery of the remains. Col Kritsana said the investigation had made progress and authorities expected to solve the case soon.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha said he had told officers overseeing the case to find out when the incidents occurred.

Also yesterday, Prasert Laosophaphan, former mayor of Maha Sarakhams Muang district, petitioned national police chief assistant Piya Sorntrakul, calling on the RTP to probe the disappearance eight years ago of his older brother Kamol Laosophaphan, a member of an anti-corruption network.

Mr Prasert said he decided to petition the RTP after learning about the bones in tambon Nong Waeng, 200km from his house.

He said Kamol went missing after uncovering corruption in the construction of a commercial building close to Ban Phai railway station.

Mr Prasert said he also suspects Department of Special Investigation (DSI) authorities could be involved in his brothers disappearance as documents related to the case at the departments office were ransacked in 2009.

Read original story here.
How to watch and what to know about South Dakota State at North Dakota
OTTAWAThe federal anti-money laundering agency has levied a $1.1-million penalty against an unnamed Canadian bank for failing to report a suspicious transaction and various money transfers.

It is the first time the Ottawa-based Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, known as Fintrac, has penalized a bank  and its being billed as a warning to thousands of other businesses.

Generally, the centre tracks cash flows linked to terrorism, money laundering and other crimes by sifting through millions of pieces of data annually from banks, insurance companies, securities dealers, money service businesses, real estate brokers, casinos and others.

In this case, Fintrac spokesman Darren Gibb said he cannot legally discuss details of the banks infractions, and the federal agency is exercising its discretion to withhold the identity of the financial institution, which recently paid the penalty of $1,154,670.

But Fintrac wants to send a strong message that it will take whatever measures are needed to encourage compliance with the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act.

The agency depends on a steady flow of reports about suspicious dealings, electronic fund transfers and large cash transactions in order to produce needed intelligence, Gibb said in an interview.

The reporting to us is absolutely critical. Without those reports, Fintrac is out of business, he said Tuesday.

Were going to be extra-diligent to ensure that entities are submitting suspicious transaction reports when they should be.

Some 31,000 businesses across the country must furnish Fintrac with reports. The agency, in turn, provided 1,260 disclosures of financial intelligence to police and national security partners in 2014-15.

The penalty announcement comes amid heightened scrutiny of Canadian financial institutions due to publication of leaked files, known as the Panama Papers, about dubious global dealings.

The fine was levied against the bank for failing to report:

 an attempted or actual suspicious transaction;

 receipt of $10,000 or more in a single transaction;

 an electronic funds transfer of $10,000 or more to a destination outside Canada;

 receipt from outside Canada of an electronic funds transfer of $10,000 or more.

In addition, the bank was penalized for failing to apply written compliance policies and procedures that are kept up to date and approved by a senior officer.

Gibb said he could not divulge exactly how the unreported transactions came to Fintracs attention, nor could he discuss the nature of them.

I cant say to you that weve identified money laundering or terrorism financing. What I can say is that weve identified an entity that has not fulfilled its obligations under the law, he said.

The obligations are in place to ensure that we get the reporting that we need to provide financial intelligence to our partners.

The Canadian Bankers Association declined to make anyone available for an interview.

In an emailed statement, the association said Canadian banks have a strong track record of compliance with the anti-money laundering regime, noting they process billions of transactions in Canada every year.

On the rare occasion when a problem arises, a bank will take immediate steps to resolve the issue and ensure that it is in compliance going forward, the association added.

Fintrac received 92,531 suspicious transaction reports from businesses across Canada in 2014-15, an 11 per cent increase over the previous year.

Yes, weve made significant progress, and were pleased by that, Gibb said. But he quickly added: Some sectors still have some work to do.

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OTTAWAThe federal government used taxpayer money to shield itself from lawsuits related to the deadly Lac-Megantic rail disaster  but its refusing to say how much it paid.

Transport Minister Marc Garneau acknowledges the government contributed to a $460-million settlement fund for those affected by the fiery 2013 derailment, which killed 47 people.

Garneau says the payment doesnt equate to an acknowledgment of government responsibility  and that Ottawa wanted to make the payment because of the impact of the crash.

At least two of the other 24 other settling parties accused of wrongdoing connected to the accident have disclosed how much they paid to be released from all derailment-related liabilities.

The bankruptcy trustee for Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, the company at the centre of the crash, says the settling parties are not acknowledging any liability with their contributions.

Robert Keach says had it not settled, the Canadian government would have faced numerous lawsuits linked to the crash on both sides of the border.

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Ever since Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin served his guests turtle bouillon, lamb chops and champagne on the worlds first international passenger flight in 1912, on-board catering has been key to winning the hearts and stomachs of top-paying passengers.

These days, about 4 million meals are consumed in the air every day. So with competition increasing between the highest-rated airlines in Asia and the Middle East, its no surprise that their battalions of food trolleys are in the vanguard of the fight for premium passengers.

Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. and Singapore Airlines Ltd. introduced new food and beverage offerings as they try to lure back premium passengers from carriers such as Emirates Airline and Etihad Airways PJSC that offer shower spas and luxurious suites. The Middle Eastern operators have used their geographic position at the crossroads of global flight paths to build giant transfer hubs that connect passengers between Asia and Europe and the U.S.

As the Champagne corks pop, we take a look inside the galleys of five airlines to see how each is looking to appeal to the modern road warrior.

Singapore Airlines

Rated as the worlds best business class by Skytrax last year, Singapore Airlines is targeting the health conscious traveler with new dishes in first and business class that are high on protein and essential minerals.

The so-called Deliciously Wholesome meals use fresh vegetables, lean meat, fish, seeds, herbs and spices that the airline claims help passengers feel less tired and jet-lagged after a long trip. Under the carriers Book the Cook service, you can order a meal online in advance from one of Singapores panel of international chefs. Think spring salad bouquet of haricot vert beans, artichokes, asparagus and tomatoes with boiled eggs and roasted walnuts, designed by triple Michelin-starred Georges Blanc.

But dont worry, theres still a Charolais steak with foie gras, white wine and truffle Perigueux sauce to be found if youre not so concerned about the jet lag.

Cathay Pacific

Hong Kong-based Cathay teamed up with Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group last year to design a menu for its first-class cabin and has been busy adding Chinese cuisines to lure mainland flyers. Try a seasonal winter melon soup, clay pot rice and hairy crab roe, for instance.

The 14 types of noodle soups are very popular in first and business classes, or for a trip into Hong Kongs colonial past, theres a tiered English cream tea, complete with scones and strawberry jam.

Cathay has also upped its game down in the cellar, hiring Debra Meiburg, one of five Masters of Wine based in Asia, to help sample beverages that go nicely miles above the ground.

Emirates

Speaking of wine, why start with the food and pair the wine when you can do it the other way round? Emirates introduced Dom Perignon vintages last year to first- and business-class with pairing menu of canapes that included cured duck with saffron poached peach and wild smoked salmon, lemon and cumin cream cheese on Norlander bread.

The airline also has delved into some of the best-known chateaux in Bordeaux for its wine selection. Emirates food menu has also taken the healthy tack, with offerings shunning the evil saturated fats and added sugars.

For those who want to socialize at 40,000 feet, premium class passengers on the A380 can head to the bar, graze on canapes and get the bartender to fix you a drink.

Etihad

Etihad caused a stir with the introduction of its three-room luxury suite on its superjumbo called The Residence, which comes with a Savoy-trained butler, en-suite shower and private chef, earning the Skytrax award for the best first-class cabin.

For those slumming it back in business class, the situation is still far from dire. Half a dozen premium-class passengers can socialize or hold a meeting at the Lobby on the upper deck of the airlines A380 aircraft. Etihad has an all-day dining menu in addition to its a la carte options, rather like room service, so you can eat that steak sandwich whenever you like.

Alternatively the airlines food and beverage manager will assist you in selecting dishes like Gulf lamb machboos, and theres always the classic Arabic mezze platter. While Etihad has gone large for its super-elite customers, its gone small for the wine selection, choosing bottles from smaller, boutique vineyards, rather than big producers. Have a glass of Champagne Jacquart Mosaique.

Qatar Airways

For its business-class cabin, Qatar Airways Ltd. signed up celebrity Michelin-starred chefs Nobu Matsuhisa and Vineet Bhatia, with a sample menu including a roasted mustard and dill salmon with dill pine nut rice as well as the necessary mezze selection.

The caviar starter is a particular favourite, but Qatars silver bullet in its food offerings is storied French bakery Laduree, which has been churning out handcrafted pastries and macarons for more than a century. Chocolate torte, anyone?

Like Emirates, Qatar also has its club in the sky on the A380. You can sip an Old Fashioned prepared by the on-board mixologist. Count von Zeppelin would have approved.

Information is taken from the airlines statements and websites and sample menus. Offerings vary, depending on the type of plane and the route taken.

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Are you a dead ringer for Shia LaBeouf?

Be careful out there. You might want to buy a goalie mask. Or hire a bodyguard. Maybe expand your social group to include a police sketch artist. You know, just in case a stranger punches you in the face.

Just ask Mario Licato. While exiting a New York subway station this week, the LaBeouf doppelganger was cold-cocked by an unknown assailant. His glasses were shattered. His face was bloodied. Paramedics were called.

I didnt even see the guy, Licato told Gothamist. I just see his fist coming towards me. It knocked me, and while I was falling down the stairs, all I hear was, This is because you look exactly like Shia LaBeouf!

For the sin of hangdog eyes and a hipster beard, he couldve been murdered.

I suppose theres a reason fan is derived from fanatic. Consider the mass outpouring of cray cray exhibited by Beyonce loyalists who, fueled by a cryptic lyric about a mysterious side chick in Lemonade, launched a global jihad this week against Becky with the good hair.

(If you have no idea what any of that means, can we please be friends?)

The Beyhive  no, really, come over and we can read Albert Camus together  was at least acting in solidarity with their idol Beyonce. I get that. Over the years, Ive run afoul of various fan bases  Justin Biebers Beliebers, Britney Spears Army, Chris Browns Team Breezy, Donald Trumps Moonbat Nation  but always understood the outrage was coming from a place of love.

These fans believed I had disrespected their idols and, as such, felt compelled to let me know I was an ugly moron with stupid-ass opinions who deserved to be trampled by bison. Fine. Nothing I havent heard before from my wife.

But what we have here, with this bizarre assault, is the opposite of unhinged love. It is pure hatred for a celebrity. The man who attacked Licato, who remains at large, loathes LaBeouf with such intensity, hes injuring lookalikes.

This raises a question: what is Shia LaBeouf doing to incite acts of violence?

Coincidentally, an interview with LaBeouf was published this week in Complex. The magazine is calling it one of the most unique interviews ever. Why? LaBeouf, the executive producer of the new film LoveTrue, answers every question in verse.

Q: How, if at all, did this film relate to other projects you take on in film and other mediums?

A: LoveTrue is quite metamodern

In that you are watching broken ironic people

Trying to find (and make) meaning.

Good lord. Now I feel like punching someone in the face.

This is the problem, isnt it? LaBeouf has become something of a curiosity in Hollywood, largely because he sees himself as an artist more than a celebrity. Nowadays, under the rules of fame, this is like a librarian who sees herself as a DJ.

Its confusing. And confusion can lead to rage.

LaBeouf was on a leading man trajectory but ejected from the starship and parachuted into the jungles of direction, production and performance art. While he still acts, he also seems to be acting out against acting.

You could argue his entire life is now one big anti-celebrity piece.

LaBeouf turned heads at the Berlin Film Festival in 2014 when his red carpet attire included a paper bag over his head that read, I am not famous anymore. Soon after, the paper bag was back when he performed #IAMSORRY, a Los Angeles exhibit in which visitors were encouraged to do something to him with supplied implements.

This perhaps was not terribly wise; LaBeouf later claimed a woman raped him.

Did the man who punched Licato this week know that woman? Probably not. But a team of psychiatrists and criminologists needs to conduct an urgent study to see if LaBeoufs subsequent metamodern works are turning citizens into monsters.

When someone loves a celebrity, the biggest danger he poses is to himself. When someone hates a celebrity, we are all at risk. That guy who sucker-punched Licato could have missed and hit a bystander who doesnt look like anyone famous.

And what happens if this inspires copycats? If someone who detests Kim Kardashian crosses paths with someone who resembles Kim Kardashian, will 911 light up with reports of slapping, scratching and screaming? Should a person who looks like Michael Strahan live in fear when passing someone in a Kelly Ripa T-shirt?

Maybe its not fair to blame LaBeouf for this disturbing trend. But after watching Transformers: Dark of The Moon, Im blaming him for this and everything thats wrong in the world. Its all his fault, all of it.

Now if youll excuse me, I need to tidy up and find my copy of The Stranger.

Seven reasons a person might really hate Shia LaBeouf

1. This person tuned into #Elevate and thought, Why am I watching a celebrity gab in an elevator for 24 hours?

2. This person streamed #AllMyMovies and suddenly realized he was watching a celebrity watch all of his movies.

3. This person has chronic nightmares about ironic facial hair.

4. This person is allergic to pretense.

5. This person suffered a teenage trauma during the TV run of Even Stevens.

6. This person is secretly in love with Isabel Lucas.

7. This person knows Shia LaBeouf

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Keanu

Starring Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Method Man, Tiffany Haddish, Nia Long and Will Forte. Directed by Peter Atencio. At GTA theatres. 99 minutes. 14A

Keanu is named for Keanu Reeves only in the drive-by sticking sense of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, whose dearly departed Comedy Central show adored absurdity.

The movie should more accurately be titled Worlds Cutest Kitten, since the Keanu in question is an adorable gray-and-white furrball who manages to melt the hearts of L.A.s most dangerous gangstas and wannabe gangstas, along with the tickers of everybody in the audience.

When the cat is in the picture, the movie is a whisker away from comedy purr-fection and who cares about Key and Peele? In their big-screen debut, directed by their TV helmer Peter Atencio and scripted by Peele with show writer Alex Rubens, the duo bravely ignore the dictum often attributed to W.C. Fields: Never work with children or animals.

Even when Keanu (or WCK) isnt in a scene, the film is still pretty funny, although the racial humour gets as repetitive as the gangbanger shootouts.

Key and Peele are above-mentioned wannabes Clarence and Rell, mild-mannered cousins and BFFs who adopt a stray kitty to restore Rells reason to live. Hes been dumped by his girlfriend, who couldnt abide his couch-surfing and bong-boosting ways (go figure).

Clarence and Rell dont know that Keanu is the fleet-footed survivor of a crime-turf massacre seen in the opening frames, led by the sinister cloaked figures of the shadowy Allentown gang, who still have Glocks to cock.

Our hapless heroes are also brought up short when Keanu ends up in the paws of a drug lord named Cheddar (Method Man), who also loves kittens  and dont let that cheesy name fool you into thinking Cheddars a mouse.

Clarence and Rell adopt street names and attitudes, to bluff their way into Cheddars posse, which is guarded by the no-guff Hi-C (Tiffany Haddish).

This scenario allows free rein for patented Key and Peele riffing on race, rap and drug stereotypes while also freestyling on pop-cult obsessions  namely Clarences insane love of the vanilla music of George Michael while the hoods white drug dealer (Will Forte) is mad for hip-hop.

None of these jokers can scratch up a laugh or sigh like Keanu, who is assured of a sequel through a plot twist thats as goofy as the films celebrity cameos. Did I mention hes the Worlds Cutest Kitten?

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If I liked meat more and found a piece of protein that made vegetables taste better, then Id serve it. I just havent come across it yet.

Thats how chef Amanda Cohen of New Yorks Dirt Candy describes her affinity for vegetables. Theyre not a side dish or an afterthought, theyre the main attraction.

Vegetables are inherently good for you, so were really lucky, says the Ottawa-born, Toronto-raised chef over the phone. Applying words like healthy or political words like environmental is doing a disservice to vegetables. Lets just eat them because they taste good.

Since opening in 2008 with 18 seats (Cohen moved to a nearby, larger 60-seat space last year), Cohens Dirt Candy received critical acclaim (including a nod in the Michelin guide) for making vegetarian cooking inventive and fun without being proselytizing. Every review mentions her signature portobello mousse as elegant, while her sticky-sweet Korean Fried Broccoli sits at the other end of the classy spectrum. Basically its broccoli in crack form, says the menu.

Cohen will be in town next week serving lunch at Terroir, the annual gathering of the countrys hospitality industry (plus a few international speakers) thats part workshop, part TED-like Talks and part all-night food and booze fests once the seminars are over. She was previously at Terroir in 2014 speaking about the lack of female chefs in food media (she sighs that its an ongoing problem, pointing to the lone female chef in the just-released list of Food & Wine magazines top 10 new chefs for 2016) and has done numerous interviews on eliminating tipping at her restaurant.

The only reason I speak out so much is one: how can I not speak up? And two: I have a young kitchen and I feel like Im responsible for the cooks. I want them to grow up in the industry, and be proud and lead the industry, she says. I look at all these problems and think, how will I send them into the world? Im doing such a disservice to them if I dont say anything.

On a lighter note, she has a few words for the home cook running out of ways to cook veggies. For me, the biggest mistake people make when cooking vegetables is listening to cookbooks that say roast vegetables for 25 minutes at 325F, she says.

Youre just cooking them, and you never want to just cook a piece of chicken. You want to sear it, braise it, turn that oven way up and sear those vegetables, or cook it at a really low temperature and let it become chewy or fall apart in a braise. Those are techniques you use with meat but you can totally apply it to vegetables.

As part of Terroirs all-vegetarian lunch service, Cohen is serving up her carrot sliders: mini soft burger buns made from carrot juice sandwiching slow-cooked carrots, pickles, crispy tofu skin, onions and hoisin sauce. Its an all-day process, but Cohen says theres no reason why it cant be scaled down without sacrificing taste.

People can buy frozen bao buns at the store, and slowly cook any hearty vegetable. We cut carrots into half-inch rounds, put them in the oven at 250F for a couple of hours. You can undercook them but you cant really overcook them. Put them between the buns and top it with any sauce that you have, you dont really need a recipe, she says.

My goal in life is to get people to eat more vegetables, and this is an easy way to do that.

Terroir takes place on April 25 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Find more information at terroirsymposium.com.

Dirt Candys Carrot Sliders

These buns adapted from the King Arthur Flour site, look gorgeous after replacing the water with carrot juice. The chef is also serving beet sliders at Terroir so we also made buns using beet juice, which we bought from a mall juice stand. Youll need to set aside a few hours to let the dough rise but if youre going to make carrot sliders, you might as well go all the way and make the buns.

For the burger buns

1 cup (250 mL) lukewarm carrot juice

1 tbsp (15 mL) active dry yeast

2 tbsp (30 mL) melted unsalted butter

1 large egg, beaten

1/4 cup (60 mL) granulated sugar

1 1/4 tsp (6 mL) table salt

3 cups (750 mL) all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling dough

1 large egg, beaten (for egg wash)

2 tbsp (30 mL) white sesame seeds

Preheat oven to 375F (190C).

In a large mixing bowl, dissolve yeast in carrot juice. Add butter, 1 beaten egg, sugar, salt and flour. Mix and knead ingredients by hand until dough is smooth and soft. Cover with damp cloth and let dough sit for two hours, or until it doubles in size.

Turn dough on to lightly floured surface. Divide into 18 balls and gently flatten with palm. Transfer dough to two lined baking sheets. Cover with damp cloth and let rest for an hour.

Brush with egg wash and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Bake 10 to 15 minutes or until golden brown. Remove buns from pan and cool completely on wire racks.

Makes 18 slider buns.

For the carrot confit

Confit typically means cooking food (generally meat) in grease over a low temperature for a long time as a way to preserve it. The technique also brings out the natural sweetness in vegetables and renders them ultra tender but not mushy. Save the remaining oil to flavour potatoes and other vegetables.

1 cup (250 mL) carrot juice

1/2 cup (125 mL) olive oil

3 minced garlic cloves

2 1/2 lbs (about 13 to 14) carrots, sliced into half-inch rounds

Salt, to taste

Preheat oven to 225 F (105 C).

In a bowl, stir together carrot juice, olive oil and garlic. Set aside.

In a large, ovenproof casserole dish arrange carrots in a single layer. Pour liquid over carrots. Season generously with salt.

Bake for at least four hours, or until carrots are tender and soft.

Makes about 4 cups carrots.

For the quick pickles

1 cup (250 mL) white vinegar

1/2 cup (125 mL) water

1 tsp (5 mL) table salt

1 tsp (5 mL) soy sauce

1 1/2 tsp (7 mL) sugar

1/2 cucumber thinly sliced

In a small bowl whisk together vinegar, water, salt, soy sauce and sugar. Add cucumbers and let marinate for 20 minutes. Drain and serve.

Makes 1 cup quick pickles.

To assemble the sliders

Yuba, the skin of bean curds, is easily found at Asian grocers. You need to soak them in water overnight or cheat and submerge them in boiling water until the skins turn a opaque cream colour (Cohen says you could also just use potato chips). Once yuba is rehydrated, tear into smaller pieces thatll fit the slider buns before pan-frying to a crisp.

4 to 5 large sheets rehydrated yuba (bean curd skins), cut into slider-sized sheets

2 tsp (10 mL) vegetable or canola oil

Salt, to taste

18 slider buns or store-bought mini baos, sliced open

1 cup (250 mL) quick pickles

Carrot confit (from preceding recipe)

2 cups (500 mL) lettuce of your choice, torn into small pieces

1 white onion, sliced into thin rings

Vegetarian hoisin sauce, to taste

In a large skillet over medium heat, heat oil and fry yuba sheets until golden and crispy, about 30 seconds to a minute per side. Once done, place yuba on a plate lined with paper towel and season lightly with salt. Repeat with remaining yuba sheets.

Assemble sliders by layering each bun with fried yuba, lettuce, onions, pickles, confit carrots and a small drizzle of hoisin sauce. Serve immediately.

Makes 18 sliders.

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BRUSSELS-Wine lovers tour Italy. Whisky connoisseurs tour Scotland. Beer lovers visit Belgium.

On my five-day beer pilgrimage to Belgium, I tasted or drank more than 107 beers, visited six towns/cities and at least 11 breweries, and lost count of the number of brewers I met.

With the relatively recent popular craft beer explosion in North America, it was a treat to visit a country where the beer roots run so deep and be part of the 2015 European Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference.

The conference was sponsored by the non-profit Belgian Family of Brewers. Its made up of 22 family breweries, which have been brewing beer in Belgium for at least 50 years. They represent 15 per cent of the total annual beer volume produced in Belgium. Only 185 beers carry the Belgian Family Brewers label.

This trip broadened my beer palate.

At the famous Moeder Lambic bar, I had my first sip of lambic beer. This bar was my launching point as I waited to visit Cantillon Brewery (cantillon.be). Cantillon is like Mecca for many of the bloggers I met and it brews lambic-style beer.

Lambic beers are a product of spontaneous fermentation. Theyre left in open vats where wild yeasts and bacteria do the work. They are left to take on the floral and fauna influences living in the air. Once the fermentation process begins, the beer is stored in barrels and aged for up to three years.

The result is a distinctly sour beer and definitely one for a specific palate. Many bloggers told me the love of lambic comes as your beer palate matures.

With the 107-plus beers I tasted, there were a few lambics, some sours, blonds, bruns, pale, fruit, wit, saison, dark, and tripel, some with high alcohol, others with low alcohol, and some with very high alcohol (more than 11 per cent).

One of the most unique bottled-beer experiences I had was from Petrus Sour Beers (petrussourbeer.com/en).

As the story goes, the brewer was showcasing his selection of sour beers at a bar and caught a bartender mixing a few of his beers together to make a beer more to his liking. After getting over his initial anger, this gave the brewer an idea. Why not let everyone create their perfect beer and Petrus would give them the sours they needed to do that?

So by packaging up the Petrus Aged Pale, Aged Red, Oud Bruin and the 50/50, which is half red and half bruin, the beer connoisseur can mix up his or her perfect beer.

We were able to try this at the conference. With a little of this and little of that, I found my perfect beer. For us, we didnt have the 50/50, but I found that 40 per cent bruin, 40 per cent red and 20 per cent pale made a delicious beer for me.

This isnt available in Ontario yet, but it can be found throughout the U.S., Belgium and parts of Europe.

Having gained all this new beer knowledge from the conference, I then toured the country to drink all that it has to offer.

The next Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference (beerbloggersconference.org) is on July 8-10 in Tampa, Fla. Registration is now open.

Anne-Marie Maraiss trip was sponsored by Tourism Flanders, which didnt review or approve this story.

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NELSON, B.C.A father found guilty of not providing his ailing toddler with medical care says he worries that others will be arrested if they dont fall in line with parenting as seen fit by the government.

David Stephan wrote a dear jury letter on his Facebook page Wednesday, one day after he and his wife were convicted of failing to provide the necessaries of life to their son, Ezekiel, who died of meningitis.

The letter said he deeply loves the jurors and appreciates their time  but they were wrong.

I only wish that you couldve seen how you were being played by the Crowns deception, drama and trickery that not only led to our key witnesses being muzzled, but has also now led to a dangerous precedent being set in Canada, Stephan wrote Wednesday.

The floodgates have now been opened and if we do not fall in line with parenting as seen fit by the government, we all stand in risk of criminal prosecution.

May heaven help us all!

Stephan and his wife, Collet, were convicted by a jury in the death of their 19-month-old son in March 2012.

The jury heard that the couple thought the boy had croup or flu and treated him for 2  weeks with remedies that included hot peppers, garlic, onions and horseradish, even though a family friend who was a nurse told them she thought Ezekiel had meningitis.

Court also heard that Collet Stephan drove the little boy from their rural home to a naturopathic clinic in Lethbridge, Alta., to pick up an echinacea mixture, although he was too stiff to sit in his car seat and had to lie on a mattress in the vehicle.

The Crown argued during the trial that the couple loved their son but still had to follow a legal standard of care. The defence argued they were responsible parents who simply didnt realize how sick their son was.

David Stephan confirmed in an interview with The Canadian Press that he wrote the Facebook letter because he and his wife are disappointed with the court process.

It was just definitely heart-wrenching to see the direction that it went, he said. Theres the Crowns version of our story, then theres our story of us who actually lived it.

He said they are considering an appeal.

Not so much for ourselves, but for the fact this sets a tremendous precedent for the Canadian populace. It would have been easier for us just to take a plea bargain a long time ago and just basically keep living our lives, but we didnt want this precedent being set. Thats why we proceeded forward in the first place.

I dont know yet whether were going to throw in the towel.

The maximum penalty for failing to provide the necessaries of life is five years in prison. A sentencing date is to be set in June.

After Ezekiel died, the Stephans moved from Glenwood, Alta. to Nelson, B.C., and returned there after the verdict with their three other boys: eight-year-old Ezra, three-year-old Ephraim and one-year-old Enoch.

Stephan said he and his wife are worried about going to prison because of their children. He said his mother died when he was 10, and he doesnt want his children to be without a mother or father.

It is a heart-wrenching thought and I dont see how this is doing the public any good.

A spokeswoman for Alberta Justice says the department could not immediately comment on Stephan's comments.

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OTTAWAThe federal government used taxpayer money to shield itself from lawsuits related to the deadly Lac-Megantic rail disaster  but its refusing to say how much it paid.

Ottawa denies any legal responsibility for the fiery 2013 oil-train derailment that killed 47 people, even though it was released from liability by contributing to a $460-million settlement fund for victims and creditors affected by the crash.

At least two of the other 24 settling parties accused of wrongdoing connected to the accident have disclosed how much it cost them to avoid potential damages and legal fees.

So far, the Liberal government is staying mum.

Thats a classified amount, but we made a contribution because we felt that it was important, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Wednesday in Toronto when asked about the settlement.

We dont acknowledge that we had any responsibility; however, we did want to make a contribution because of the impact of this terrible tragedy in Lac-Megantic.

The federal decision to settle may have been made to avoid the cost of fighting the allegations in court. But it also suggests the government was concerned it could have been found liable for damages.

Had it not settled, the Canadian government would have faced numerous lawsuits linked to the crash on both sides of the border, said the U.S.-based bankruptcy trustee for the company at the centre of the crash  Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway.

None of these things were acts of altruism, said Robert Keach, referring to the 25 parties that paid into the settlement fund.

They definitely contributed because they were being threatened with legal liability.

Contractually speaking, however, the arrangement explicitly states the settling parties are not acknowledging any liability with their contributions, Keach said in a phone interview from Maine.

But of course theyre paying money.

Garneau met with Lac-Megantic residents Tuesday to mark rail safety week. He heard locals reiterate their long-standing demand for a new bypass route that would steer trains away from the downtown core, part of which was obliterated by the spectacular crash.

Lac-Megantic resident Gilles Fluet said people left the meeting with unanswered questions. Some had also hoped to ask about repairs on the existing tracks.

On Wednesday, Garneau announced Ottawa would allocate $10.9 million to make more than 400 rail crossings safer in Canada.

Bruce Campbell, a visiting fellow at the University of Ottawas law department, said the government has a responsibility to be more transparent about the disaster and the settlement.

Campbell, who has studied and written about the derailment, noted that Ottawa was open about its $60-million commitment to the town a couple of weeks after the crash.

This is the taxpayers of Canada that are paying the shot here, but I think, perhaps, the greater obligation is to the people of Lac-Megantic, said Campbell, whos on leave from his role as executive director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives think tank.

Whatever (the government) contributed, its disinclined to admit any role in this, even though I think the Transportation Safety Board did say it played a role, that there was causality there.

The TSBs 2014 report on the accident said Transport Canada failed to recognize MM&A had urgent safety problems and was not following the rules. It also said the department failed to audit safety procedures at the railway and didnt do enough inspections.

Who was the guardian of public safety? Wendy Tadros, the then head of the board, said at the time. That is the role of the government  to provide checks, balances and oversight.

Lisa Raitt, who was Canadas transport minister at the time, responded to the report by saying the governments role in safety was to put the rules in place. The companies, the Conservative minister added, were expected to follow those regulations  something she said MM&A did not do.

A couple of months later, Raitt introduced safety protocols, including stricter hand-brake requirements for parked trains, more research on volatile crude oil and a rule that short-line rail companies, such as MM&A, submit training plans for review.

Transport Canada would also seek 10 new safety auditors across Canada, Raitt said.

Following the derailment, the Canadian government was targeted in lawsuits  as were about two dozen other parties, Keach said.

Last year, Irving Oil announced it had contributed $75 million to the settlement fund. The train was transporting crude oil to Irvings refinery in Saint John, N.B.

We fully support the establishment of the fund as an industry-wide response to the tragedy, which will provide substantial payments without further lengthy legal proceedings, Irving said in a March 2015 statement.

World Fuel Services Corp., the U.S. company that owned the oil aboard the train, provided $110 million (U.S.).

We believe that participating in the settlement and contributing to the compensation fund is in the best interests of our shareholders and will also aid in providing closure to those affected by this tragic accident, Michael Kasbar, the companys chairman and CEO, said in a June 2015 statement.

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OTTAWAThe federal government acknowledges some records of the pass system  the apartheid-like policy that forbade First Nations from leaving their reserves without written permission  were destroyed before anyone knew of their historical value.

Historical records were disposed of as a result of normal government-wide record keeping reduction exercise throughout the past century. These activities were conducted throughout the government and modified overtime, Valerie Hache, a spokeswoman for Indigenous Affairs and Northern Development Canada, wrote in an emailed response to a request for an explanation from the Star.

The pass system  the subject of a documentary by the same name directed by Toronto-based filmmaker Alex Williams  was brought in as a temporary emergency measure in response to the Northwest Rebellion led by Metis leader Louis Riel in 1885 and remained in effect for more than half a century, despite never having gone through Parliament.

Throughout the five years he spent researching the film, Williams could find only two of the passes at Library and Archives Canada.

He also found a letter from 1941 ordering all passes to be returned to Ottawa for destruction.

The response from the Indigenous Affairs department  the first since the film came out last year  confirms some of the details the Star reported last month as possible reasons for why the records have been so hard to find.

Some records that were considered administrative or unnecessary at one time may be considered to have historical value that was not previously understood or anticipated. Other records were destroyed accidentally (fire, flooding, etc.), Hache wrote.

The statement also made clear the pass system was a policy of the past and has no place in plans to renew the relationship between the federal government and First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples.

The Government of Canada is committed to a Nation to Nation relationship based on recognition of rights, respect, co-operation, and partnership. The pass system is a vestige of past policies and it was abolished in 1941, Hache wrote.

Today, INAC is committed to working in genuine partnership with Indigenous partners and communities to advance the vital work of reconciliation, she wrote.

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VANCOUVERA British Columbia woman is suing the Canadian government, Canada Border Services Agency and several government employees alleging she was labelled a terrorist and lost her multimillion-dollar business over the accusation.

Perienne de Jaray filed the suit in Western Washington District Court, seeking at least $21 million in damages for what she claims was extreme and outrageous conduct by the Canadian government.

Court documents allege de Jaray and her father were targeted in 2009 by Canadian officials who hoped to prove Canada was tough on terrorism by upholding United States legislation restricting arms trade to certain countries.

The documents say a shipment to China from her fathers B.C.-based company was wrongly declared to contain weapons-grade electronics and the Canadian government shared the allegation with the FBI, who began investigating her own company based in Washington state.

More than two years later, the Canadian government dropped criminal charges against de Jarays father and paid him a reportedly very large settlement, but de Jaray claims the FBI probe against her did not end for another two years.

Her lawsuit says Canada has never apologized for actions that destroyed her $30-million-a-year business and caused irreparable harm and de Jaray is asking a U.S. jury to award a significant settlement.

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ERBIL, IRAQAbandoned villages, a shattered bridge, hidden bombs and a steady stream of fighters headed to the front line.

Thats the scene that greeted Canadas top general as he paid a dramatic visit to northern Iraq Thursday to the area where Canadian special operations forces soldiers are aiding peshmerga fighters in their battle against Daesh.

Gen. Jonathan Vance, the chief of defence staff, said Daesh (also known as ISIS and ISIL) is doomed to defeat and predicted that Canadian forces and their peshmerga allies will play a key role in the coming battle for Mosul, the Iraqi city that remains a key extremist stronghold.

We are on key terrain with a key partner as what is being billed as the final coup de grace of ISIL in Iraq occurs on Mosul, Vance said.

The Toronto Star and CTV News had exclusive access as Vance came to take stock of Canadas military mission, to get eyes on as we contemplate next steps in the campaign.

For more than a year, a small group of Canadian special operations forces soldiers have been working here, teaching peshmerga troops skills that range from the basics  map reading and shooting  to calling in airstrikes.

That mission will get bigger in the coming months with the Liberals decision to end airstrikes and instead triple the number of troops on the ground to act as advisers.

The United States has also committed Apache attack helicopters, more cash and more troops as western nations lay the groundwork for a final push to defeat Daesh, which has wreaked havoc across Iraq and Syria since 2014.

With the extra personnel, Canada will stretch its reach in this area west of Erbil, assisting peshmerga along a line more than 100 km long.

All of it is key terrain, some within sight of Mosul.

Vance predicts the battle for the Iraqi city will unfold over the coming year, a battle delayed as Iraqi forces first seek to oust Islamic extremists from other sites across the country.

Theres no question that Iraq and the coalition, they all want to get on with it, but theres other things that have to get done, said Vance, who was making his first visit to Iraq since taking over as chief of defence staff in 2015.

For a battle that must be started correctly and finished correctly, you dont want to necessarily rush it, Vance said.

But when that battle comes, Iraqi forces will squeeze Mosul from the south and it will be up to the peshmerga soldiers, mentored by Canadian special operations forces troops, to protect the northern flank  and block Daeshs path of escape.

At some point, the coalition and Iraqi security forces will deal with Mosul and our forces will be on vital ground, key to the containment of ISIL, Vance said.

Vance stressed that the peshmerga  not Canadians  will be on the frontline to hold Daesh fighters in place. We are responsible to train and support them. Theyre responsible to hold, Vance said.

Canadian forces and their peshmerga allies are already eroding Daeshs capabilities in Mosul, thanks to their proximity to the city, which enables intelligence collection and targeting, said Col. Andrew Milburn, of the U.S. Marine Corps, who commands coalition special operations forces.

Its very careful targeting. Your guys are not causing civilian casualties here. I can affirm that, Milburn told the Star in an interview earlier this week.

Thats a hard claim to make, but these guys are doing this very well. Theyre deliberately going after what we call key nodes in ISIS infrastructure, leadership, (command and control) nodes, he said.

It was Vances first visit to Iraq since taking over as top general last summer and he saw firsthand the devastation caused by Daesh and the ongoing disruption caused by the conflict.

Vance visited a key stretch of the highway linking Erbil and Mosul where it crosses the Khazir River.

In 2014, this territory was all held by Daesh. With Erbil at risk, peshmerga forces counterattacked, pushing Daesh back. In their retreat, the militants blew up the bridge to stall the peshmerga counterattack.

Today, two spans of the bridge are nothing more than smashed concrete and twisted metal, resting in the river.

An improvised single-lane, steel-girder bridge has been erected in its place. On Thursday afternoon, a steady stream of cars carrying peshmerga fighters headed to and from the front, just a short distance to the west. Lacking military transport, they are forced to rely on their personal vehicles to move about.

Three villages, all within eyesight, have been largely abandoned and the buildings and terrain remain littered with explosive devices.

Anything in the bushes, avoid it. The last thing I want is for you guys is to step on something that goes boom, a Canadian special operations sergeant cautioned journalists as they awaited Vances arrival.

Indeed, the generals visit  done under a tight cordon of security provided by Canadian special operations forces troops  was not without risk. Daesh militants are just a few kilometres away and their rockets and mortars land on the riverside villages every day, the sergeant said.

Vance cast an expert eye on the demolished bridge and said it highlights the capabilities of Daesh. Thats a professional military act to drop that bridge, he said.

But while still dangerous, Vance painted a picture of Daesh as a faltering force, starved of financing, losing terrain and forced to put inexperienced personnel into battle as cannon fodder.

Theres no doubt in my mind  and I dont want to overplay this  they will lose militarily in Iraq. Its inevitable, Vance said.

But between now and the time they lose militarily they still have the power to generate big events that can cause a lot of problems.

Thats why local commanders like Maj.-Gen. Aziz Waisi, commander of the Zeravani forces, express gratitude for the work of Canadian soldiers  and appeal for more.

The Canadian people should be proud of their forces on the ground. Theyre doing excellent work with us, said Waisi, who accompanied Vance.

But like others here, he pressed home their need for better weapons to replace decades-old military gear, equipment like vehicles, anti-tank weapons, night-vision goggles, robots to help defuse improvised explosive devices, and drones.

We are hoping that Canada can assist us more, Waisi said.

As part of its retooled mission, Canada has committed to providing arms for a new Zeravani commando force. As we form it and train it, theyll have the weapons necessary to do the job, Vance said.

But he quickly adds, We are not doing a wholesale re-equipping of the peshmerga.

Canadian commanders have conceded that more troops on the ground means more risk.

But Vance is hoping Canadians get behind the expanded mission.

Just because its hard and dangerous doesnt mean its bad, Vance said.

We do danger. Thats what a military force is for. Canadas military goes to dangerous places all the time. Its always for a good cause. Id like very much for Canadians to put their shoulder behind what were doing here, Vance said.

Despite the dangers, it is for a good cause.

Vance, Canada's top general, talks about a Daesh tactical operation in Iraq.

Related: Canadas special forces play vital role in helping peshmerga troops battle Daesh in Iraq

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The stage is set. Barring a last-minute miracle, American voters will face a choice next November between consummate insider Hillary Clinton and the outrageous Donald Trump.

Dont assume Clinton will win that contest.

Tuesdays primaries have virtually sealed the deal. Trump trounced his two remaining Republican rivals handily in five northeastern states.

His victory was so convincing that last-ditch attempts by anti-Trump Republicans to throw the final decision to the partys convention in Cleveland this summer now seem wishful thinking.

On the Democratic side, Clinton won four out of the five. Her sole rival, self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders, has effectively no chance of preventing her from locking up a majority of delegates before the Democrats hold their convention in July.

But can Clinton defeat Trump in the general election?

In the beginning, the answer to that question seemed obvious. When this campaign kicked off last year, Clinton was perhaps the best-prepared presidential candidate in recent U.S. history. Trump was arguably the worst

The 68-year-old Clinton has done almost everything. She advised from inside the White House when her husband, Bill, was president. She served in the Senate, the senior legislative branch in the U.S. system.

In 2008, she came close to capturing the Democratic Partys presidential nomination. When she lost that, she faithfully served the winner, Barack Obama, as his secretary of state.

Trump, on the other hand, was a blowhard and a joke. Or at least thats how he was portrayed at the beginning.

But guess what? Trump, 69, has caught on. On Wednesday, he even gave his first formal foreign policy address (he used a teleprompter but didnt say much that was new).

The Republican establishment may despise him. The Republican base, it seems, does not. Citing exit polls, the New York Times reported that Trump won support in Tuesdays primaries from a broad array of Republicans, including the affluent and college educated as well as the white working class.

National polls suggest that in a Clinton-Trump standoff, she would still have the edge  but not by much. The poll aggregator Real Clear Politics puts Clinton just 8.5 percentage points ahead of Trump. Other poll aggregators produce similar results.

In a general election thats a gap that could be easily closed.

How can this be? How can an untested reality television star have a good chance at becoming a president of the worlds most powerful nation?

The answer is twofold. First, there is a thirst for change. Canadians should understand this. Last fall, Canadian voters looking to oust Stephen Harper chose the untested Justin Trudeau over experienced politician Thomas Mulcair. They did so in large part because they wanted someone completely different.

In the U.S., the yearning for change is even greater. Americans have been side-swiped more than Canadians by globalization and recession. Inequality is starker. The loss of good jobs is more evident. The political class is less trusted

Second, Clinton is not particularly popular. A Washington Post-ABC poll last month found that 57 per cent of respondents found her dishonest and untrustworthy  charges that have dogged her since her husband was president.

Almost certainly, some of this stems from misogyny. There are people who dont like smart women.

But some of it stems from a bigger disconnect. To many Americans, she remains well-known but distant. The same poll found that only 50 per cent of respondents thought Clinton understands the problems of people like you. (Billionaire Trump, incidentally, did even worse on that question).

If Trump wins his partys nomination, some Republicans may end up voting for Clinton. Others may not vote at all. The New York real estate developer is not universally loved in his own party.

But Hillary Clinton is even less loved by Republicans. Would rank-and-file members of that party really stay at home on election day if they thought that doing so would let the woman they view as a she-demon win the presidency?

I suspect they wouldnt. I suspect that even the Republican establishment would hold its collective nose and vote for Trump.

And so, I fear, would many other Americans.

Thomas Walkoms column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday.

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A Toronto man has been charged with aggravated assault after a 68-year-old woman was head-butted at the Eaton Centre.

Jonathan Gallant, 33, was arrested Wednesday in connection with an incident at the Eaton Centre on Saturday, when according to police a man in a Denver Nuggets jersey head-butted a woman as she stopped to look into her purse.

The woman was knocked to the ground, suffering a broken wrist, and the man walked off toward the Dundas subway station.

Gallant is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday morning.

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Premier Kathleen Wynne will ensure the release of the secret Special Investigations Unit report into the Toronto police shooting death of Andrew Loku within the next few days, the Star has learned.

We support working with the director of the SIU to find a way to make the information in the Andrew Loku report public. And we expect that information to be made public in the coming days, a government spokesman said Wednesday.

The announcement comes after weeks of mounting public pressure to release the secret SIU directors report documenting why the watchdog laid no charges in Lokus July 2015 death.

Reached in Saskatoon Wednesday, Lokus uncle, Senos Timon, was thankful to learn he will soon know more about the watchdogs investigation of his nephews death.

The family has been asking the SIU for more information since the day they were told no charges would be laid.

We are grateful that the premier is taking a true leadership role in this, Timon said. Thats all we need, is to see the report, and exactly how (the SIU) reached the conclusion. Its in the best interest of the family and its in the best interest of the public, and thats all that weve been asking for.

Its not yet clear how much of the Loku report will be released, including whether the Toronto police officers involved will be named. Wynne has said her government is working to determine all privacy issues before releasing the report, but said she is committed to getting the information out.

Its not a matter of whether, its a matter of how we do that, and thats the work that were doing now, she said last week.

I know that theres some urgency around this, she added, saying a provincial review of police oversight is beginning soon.

Its not yet clear what the release of Lokus report will mean for other SIU investigations, past and present.

Once made public, the Loku report will be the first released by the watchdog in years, possibly since the creation of the SIU in 1990. The directors report, sent to the Attorney General at the conclusion of every investigation, has always been considered a secret document in Ontario.

In all SIU cases, the only explanation the public gets about a completed investigation is through an SIU news release.

But despite being the sole recipient of the directors report, Attorney General Madeleine Meilleur admitted earlier this month that she had not read the Loku report, although she had it for nearly a month. One day later, she said she had read it and wanted to work with the SIU to release it.

Both opposition parties at Queens Park are now urging the release of all SIU reports. But just because the government has committed to releasing the Loku document at some point doesnt mean other SIU reviews will be made public any time soon.

Wynne and Meilleur have said they want to wait until an upcoming review of police oversight agencies is completed before deciding whether all reports should be put into the public realm.

Ontarios current and former information and privacy commissioners have both publicly said the reports can be released.

Current commissioner Brian Beamish has said some information, such as the name of a police officer involved, may be disclosed in circumstances of significant public interest.

The intention behind the SIU was always to make the watchdogs reports public. The recommendation from the 1989 Task Force on Race Relations and Policing that led to creation of the SIU stated that the agency would communicate its decisions to the public.

Outside of a coroners inquest into Lokus death, for which no date has been set, the directors report into his death is the only way to learn the details of how and why the SIU investigators cleared police  including what evidence was considered, what unreleased surveillance video of the encounter shows and how the director weighed any conflicting evidence.

Loku, a 45-year-old father of five from South Sudan, was fatally shot by an unnamed Toronto police officer in his apartment building hallway while holding a hammer.

The SIU, the civilian agency that investigates fatal encounters with police, said the officer was justified in shooting Loku to prevent an imminent hammer attack. But witnesses within the building say Loku did not present a threat to police and that he did not need to be shot.

The SIU decision to clear the officers prompted Black Lives Matter Toronto to protest outside Toronto police headquarters for two weeks, which ultimately prompted the calling of an inquest.

Rodney Diverlus, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, said Wednesday that the group is anxiously waiting to read the rest of the report. He hopes the release provokes greater transparency throughout the police oversight system.

Our ideal situation would be that every SIU report would be made public, he said.

Timon said Lokus family feels grateful to those who pushed for more information about Lokus death.

In my heart, I am really thankful to Black Lives Matter and every group that took on this case and for creating a situation where it was kept alive. Without them, I dont see that this would have happened.

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Police have charged 80 Ontario residents with a total of 274 offences after a sweeping, multi-force investigation into child sexual abuse and child pornography.

Child pornography is the sexual abuse of our children, Ontario Provincial Police Chief Supt. Don Bell told a news conference Thursday. Every image of child pornography represents a child victim. Every trading or transmission of that image represents a re-victimization of that child.

The OPP worked with the RCMP, Canadian Border Services Agency, Canadian Forces National Investigation Service, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and 26 local police departments to make the arrests.

This isnt a crime specific to Canada, said Homeland Security Special Agent Aaron Chapman. We have a shared responsibility in the United States to combine all our efforts to combat this horrendous crime.

Moments before the news conference, the OPP released the names, ages and charges of most of the people captured during the investigation. At least one persons identity was withheld because they are underage.

The charges include sexual assault, possessing child pornography, making child pornography, distributing child pornography, accessing child pornography, luring a child, and drug and weapons offences.

The OPP said more charges are pending.

ONTARIO PROVINCIAL POLICE:List of people charged

Over the past 90 days, investigators collected 2,038 unique IP addresses of people suspected of downloading child pornography or visiting child porn sites.

The internet provides the perfect tool for people to be able to go out and find this material, said OPP Det. Staff Sgt. Frank Goldschmidt.

Investigators were also able to identify 20 victims of child exploitation and refer them to community-based assistance programs. Police say there was also some overlap with human trafficking investigations, and they were able to ensure the safety of nine people who had been working in the sex trade as minors.

The sweep that was carried out over the past few days serves as another wakeup call to those who commit these monstrous crimes against our children, Bell said.

The investigation was part of Ontarios Provincial Strategy to Protect Children from Sexual Abuse and Exploitation on the Internet, launched in 2006.

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A man was taken to hospital Thursday morning after wandering into a downtown homeless shelter with stab wounds.

Toronto police were called to Seaton House, a city-run shelter near Jarvis St. and Gerrard St. E., just after 7:30 a.m.

Officers say a 33-year-old man had been stabbed at another location before walking into the shelter.

He was taken to hospital, but police say his injuries are minor and he will be released soon.

Police have asked the public to share any information they may have on the incident.

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Toronto police say two teenage gang members were kidnapped and tortured in retaliation for a condo shootout earlier this month.

Three men have been charged in the incident, and police are seeking two more.

According to investigators, early on April 19, members of the Young Buck Killers gang were partying in an Airbnb-rented condo on the 25th floor of a building near Front St. and Blue Jays Way.

The revelers heard that members of a rival gang, the Queens Drive Crips, planned to show up uninvited. Four Young Bucks went downstairs to look for the gatecrashers. When they came back upstairs, the Queen Drive Crips were waiting for them in the hallway.

Security footage shows the gang members opening fire as the elevator doors open.

Police do not believe anyone was seriously injured in the shootout.

Later the same day, two 17-year-olds involved with the Queens Drive Crips were kidnapped when they arrived at a Swansea Mews townhouse complex that police allege is associated with the Young Buck Killers.

In a news conference Thursday, Staff Insp. Mike Earl said police believe the kidnapping was in retaliation for the condo ambush.

I wouldnt call this an innocent stranger kidnapping, Earl said. This is basically a gang-war kidnapping.

The two boys were tied to chairs and beaten, threatened with a gun and forced to play Russian roulette with a loaded handgun. At one point, a shot was fired on the property.

Police were called to the area twice during this time on reports of suspicious activity but were unable to find anything. After police showed up, the kidnappers moved the boys to locations in the Flemingdon Park and Lawrence Heights neighbourhoods, the investigators allege.

Earl said they were tied to chairs again and beaten throughout the day. It is also alleged they were forced to perform sexual acts.

Ransom demands were made to the boys families. Police were notified and began investigating.

A ransom was eventually paid, and the boys were released on April 21.

On April 23, police arrested Quinton Gardiner, 19, one of the Young Bucks leaders. He was charged with kidnapping for ransom, assault with a weapon, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence and three weapons offences.

As part of the investigation, police searched an apartment on Shaughnessy Blvd. near Don Mills Rd. and Sheppard Ave. E. Officers found a loaded handgun in the home and arrested two men and a 16-year-old youth.

Akli Whyte, 23, faces 10 charges related to possession of the gun. Deshawn Walters, 18, faces nine weapon charges.

The 16-year-old, who cannot be identified, faces seven charges.

Earl said police are still looking for two people in connection with the kidnapping. They have issued warrants for Lincoln Anthony Richards, 23, and a 17-year-old male.

Update - December 21, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version to remove references to the name of an accused who can't be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

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An outspoken former Toronto deputy chief of police has joined Deloitte Canada, just a few months after he left the service following being passed over for role of chief.

Peter Sloly is now an executive director at the consulting firm, the company announced Thursday morning.

Sloly said he will focus on advising clients on cybersecurity in a special position created for him, just as management at the company was looking to expand expertise in the area.

The timing of my departure from the Toronto Police Service was very serendipitous, he said in an interview.

Sloly worked for the Toronto police for 27 years, rising through the ranks to deputy chief of police of executive command in 2009.

He was passed over for the top cop role in 2015 when it went instead to another deputy, Mark Saunders.

Councillor Michael Thompson, who was a member of the Toronto Police Services Board while Sloly was part of the force, called him an immensely talented person and said the move is a loss for policing.

Weve lost a great police leader, a great voice which is lacking now in the police service, he said.

Its a great coup for (Deloitte) and its a great loss for the citizens of Toronto.

Sloly was a rare critic of the service from within its ranks, leading a 2013 internal review of the controversial practice of carding.

At a January 2016 public forum he said radical change was necessary to restore the publics trust, and blasted the bloated police budget. He resigned the following month.

Asked if he still has concerns about the state of Toronto policing, Sloly was not quite as candid on Thursday.

Its a challenging period for almost every sector, he said.

Im starting to sound like my dad, but Ive never seen a period in my life where theres been so much change and so much complexity and so much challenge, he added.

Sloly, who holds an MBA from York University, said he will continue his work as a member oo several boards, from the YMCA of Greater Toronto to the International Centre for Prevention of Crime, and said he can absolutely make a difference for the public in his new private-sector role.

Asked if he would ever return to policing he said hes always believed in keeping all his options open.

But at 50 years old and with a 22-month-old toddler at home, Ill be working into my early 70s, so I hope to have a long run with Deloitte, he said.

I hope that Ill also have other opportunities to test my leadership skills in other companies, other organizations, other capacities.

Ryan Brain, regional managing partner with Deloitte in Toronto, called Sloly a proven leader and out of the box thinker with a unique background that will serve the companys clients well.

In addition to cybersecurity, Sloly will focus on crisis response and digital media, and work on diversity and inclusion issues, Brain said.

With files from Peter Goffin

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There comes a time when the options for judging those charged with oversight of our police force boil down to either dereliction of duty, or nefarious cover-up. There may be other explanations, but they are frustratingly hard to imagine.

The matter at hand is a secret report into the death of Andrew Loku, who was shot by a Toronto police officer. Not the report of the Special Investigations Unit that investigates whether criminal charges need to be laid  that secret report is in the hands of the Attorney General, and the premier has told us it will be released in the coming days. This secret report, the one Im talking about, is the one the police force is statutorily obliged to have completed and submitted to the Toronto Police Services Board 30 days after the SIU closes its investigation, or about April 17.

This report should detail whether the force needs to undertake any policy change, disciplinary action, or additional training as a result of what was learned through the incident. It should detail those things, but we dont know. No one will say whether the report itself exists.

Did the board consider the report at its April 20 meeting? Will its members instead consider it at their upcoming May 19 meeting? Did the police even bother to fulfill their statutory obligation by preparing the report, or did they blow it off? Who knows?

Police board chair Andy Pringle says he will not confirm or deny that he received the report, as my colleagues Wendy Gillis and Jacques Gallant reported on Wednesday. Spokespeople for the Toronto Police Service have joined Pringles line in refusing to confirm or deny to the Star that the report exists.

This is not normal. It is not acceptable. Its not even understandable. Its plain ridiculous.

In some other jurisdictions, such reports are sometimes made public in their entirety. Others, such as Peel, remain secretive but confirm that the chief of police has handed over the report on time, satisfying her obligations.

No one here set out to suggest that Police Chief Mark Saunders had broken the law by refusing to report as the Police Services Act obliges him  and I am not suggesting he has, merely pointing out that Pringles bizarre refusal to confirm the reports existence raises the question. What we set out to do was suggest  as we have with the SIU report Premier Kathleen Wynnes cabinet minister has been holding  that the report should be made public.

Assuming the report exists, and was submitted to the police board as required, there is no legal reason it should not be publicly released  the law says the board may release it.

And there is every moral reason it should be: A police officer killed someone; what does the force conclude about that incident? Did they learn anything? Do they feel anything could have been done differently? Are they adapting their practices as they go along to be more effective and avoid incidents of extreme violence? We deserve to know. And we sure as hell deserve to know that they are at least asking these questions of themselves, and seeking to answer them.

Which is why there is a law requiring that the report be written and that it be submitted to the Police Services Board, which acts as the civilian body in charge of managing the police department.

Of course, the Stars reporting makes it enragingly clear that if the report exists, and if it were released, it might well not be satisfying to read. Former police board chair Alok Mukherjee says that during his term, it got to the point where I stopped reading these reports, they were so meaningless. I dont recall a single case where they said, Heres what we learned.

Former mayor and longtime police accountability activist John Sewell spent months trying to get specific reports from the chief to the board released, asking specifically for information that showed what the police had learned from their investigations of incidents of fatal shootings. A privacy adjudicator finally denied his request because, as the Star reported Wednesday, the records requested by Sewell did not contain an analysis of the events that would inform the actions of other officers.

If indeed these reports are meaningless, and violate the spirit of the law that requires them by containing no useful analysis on lessons learned, then that is all the more reason they should be public. So we, the public, can see that our laws are being scoffed at by our public servants. So we can see what our police services boards have been quietly accepting when they should have demanded better. So we can demand better.

To recap: We have a law requiring the chief to undertake an analysis of events and report on what hes learned. And we have some evidence that in the past, such reports show no analysis or learning, to the point that a former police board chair says theyre routinely meaningless. We have a current police board chair, Andy Pringle, who will not comment on a report he (maybe) has not seen or may not exist, and a police chief whose spokespeople offer no comment on whether he has complied with the law.

Every time there is a question that comes up, well want to review, Are we doing the right thing?

To date, I would say it would be obvious by the fact that we havent changed, that we have thought so, Pringle tells my colleagues, in both a stunning admission of obliviousness to his role as a public guardian and a proclamation of toothless obeisance to the status quo.

As the public appointee charged with heading police oversight, he says he sees no problem with keeping information secret. Not that hell confirm to the public he serves whether that information even exists.

He sounds more like a man shielding the force from public oversight than a man providing it.

We deserve to know whether the report exists, and we deserve to see it. And the chair of our Police Services Board should be the one ensuring we do.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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Dr. Javad Peirovy sexually abused four female patients in the span of one year at a walk-in clinic, leaving them traumatized  the word used by a discipline panel of Ontarios medical watchdog.

On Wednesday, that same panel decided that Peirovy was fit to keep his licence. Instead of revoking it, they suspended him. In six months, the Toronto doctor will be back at work.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons lawyer had requested that the panel, which is independent of the college, revoke his licence.

The college proposed last year that provincial legislation be amended so that all physical sexual contact between a physician and patient would lead to mandatory revocation.

A provincial task force, created 16 months ago following a Star investigation into doctors still at work after sexually abusing their patients, is on the cusp of delivering a much-anticipated report to the government on the issue.

The college took the rare step of issuing a statement to the Star on Wednesday.

The College is disappointed in the discipline panels decision not to revoke Dr. Peirovys licence, said college registrar Dr. Rocco Gerace.

Council supports revisions to the legislation that would require mandatory revocation in any case where physical sexual contact with a patient is proven to have occurred.

Current legislation makes revocation mandatory for nearly every other form of sexual abuse, including penetration, oral sex and masturbation. But sexual touching remains a grey area, and revocation is entirely at the discretion of the discipline committee panel hearing the case.

This has been my concern all along, and I see the college (discipline committee) refuses to act unless pushed specifically and directly by the government, said medical malpractice lawyer Amani Oakley. This (decision) is not a logical way to proceed when they themselves have recognized that this is sexual abuse.

Peirovy was found guilty by the panel last July of acts of professional misconduct in that he engaged in the sexual abuse of four patients.

In the case of two patients, Ms U and Ms V, he placed his stethoscope on their nipples and cupped their breasts. Regarding Ms W and Ms X, he touched their nipples when there was no clinical reason to examine the women in that way, the panel found.

He denied the allegations before the committee, and his lawyer, David Porter, declined to comment on Tuesday.

Peirovy was also found to have demonstrated conduct that was disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional in telling a fifth patient that they could see each other socially.

He pleaded guilty in criminal court in 2013 to two counts of simple assault, after being initially charged with sexually assaulting six female patients. He had earlier pleaded not guilty to sexual assault in those two cases, and the charges relating to the other four women were withdrawn by the Crown.

Peirovy was given a conditional discharge and 18 months probation and was ordered by the court to take counselling.

He is at low risk to reoffend and can practise on female patients safely in the presence of a female chaperone who must also be a health professional, found the four-member discipline panel, chaired by former CPSO president Dr. Marc Gabel, along with Drs. John Watts and Robert Sheppard and community member Diane Doherty.

To me, any physician who has deliberately sexually abused his patients should be subject to revocation. Full stop, said medical malpractice lawyer Paul Harte.

Gabel declined to comment through CPSO spokeswoman Kathryn Clarke.

Decisions of the discipline committee stand on their own and reasons for the decision are provided in detail, she said.

Evidence presented at Peirovys penalty hearing showed that he is sincerely embarrassed at and ashamed of his actions, and that he never wants this to happen again, the panel wrote in its 16-page decision.

The members placed substantive weight on the expert evidence of a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Rootenberg, who is identified only as Dr. M in the decision.

He found Peirovy is at a low risk to reoffend and hes worked hard to understand his inappropriate behaviour by also working with a medical professional who specializes in boundary issues.

The committee accepted Dr. Ms evidence that Peirovy can improve through professional training and counselling.

The rehabilitative needs of Dr. Peirovy have been addressed. Specific and general deterrence have also been served, the panel wrote, also ordering Peirovy to pay $35,000 in costs.

The penalty, in the view of the committee, is consistent with similar penalties previously imposed by the discipline committee in similar cases.

The College has taken some action since the Stars 2013 investigation. It now posts more disciplinary information about doctors on its website, including whether physicians are facing criminal charges, and has said it will consider sharing more information with police.

OTHER CASES

Sammy Sliwin

The prominent Toronto plastic surgeon lost his licence last year after a disciplinary panel found him guilty of professional misconduct for having sex with a patient who was also his lover. He is appealing his revocation to Divisional Court, arguing that it violates his rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He is still practising pending that appeal.

Bruce Minnes

The former Hospital for Sick Children emergency room pediatrician lost his licence last year after he was found to have engaged in very instrusive and coercive sexual activities with a 17-year-old girl who was not his patient. His behaviour was manipulative and predatory, concluded a disciplinary panel. The incident took place at a summer camp when the girl was a camp counsellor and he was the camp physician. Minnes lost his appeal in Divisional Court.

Sharif Tadros

The Burlington doctor was found to have sexually abused three of his patients and pressured them to drop complaints against him. He groomed the three over a 20-year period for sex, and two ended up with depression and anxiety, according to an agreed statement of fact filed at his discipline hearing.

Eleazar Noriega

The Toronto pediatrician lost his licence last year after the discipline committee found he engaged in sexual impropriety with a patient in January 1979. The panel found he subjected the teenaged patient to protracted sexual stimulation with him at a health clinic. She only came forward in 2008 after seeing his name on television in relation to other professional misconduct allegations.

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Mayor John Tory strongly favours a by-election to replace Rob Ford as councillor for Ward 2, Etobicoke North, rather than council appointing a replacement.

I think thats the appropriate way to fill this seat, given that were less than halfway through this term of city council, Tory told reporters Thursday.

Ford died March 22, 18 months after being diagnosed with pleomorphic liposarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer.

At its meeting that starts next Tuesday, city council will vote on how to fill the vacancy.

Ford represented Ward 2 from 2000 to 2010. He was mayor from 2010 to 2014, then re-elected in Ward 2.

Fords nephew, Michael Ford, a Toronto District School Board trustee, told the Star that either he or his uncle Doug Ford, who served as Ward 2 councillor while his brother was mayor, will seek to represent the ward until the October 2018 election, whether it is filled by appointment or by-election.

Our intentions will be known within the next couple of weeks, Michael Ford said in a text.

City staff suggest in a report to council that a by-election could be held Monday, July 25.

Tory said he would like to see the vote held as soon as possible and, if possible, co-ordinated with by-elections to replace two school trustees if that would save the city money.

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Ontarios NDP set up a secretive union-financed holding company to help bankroll election campaigns and serve as its landlord at party headquarters, the Star has learned.

The Ontario Cornerstone Leadership Corporation, a privately held firm that owns the downtown Toronto office building housing the provincial NDP, has an elaborate corporate structure straight out of Bay Street.

It is unclear what impact the looming reforms to Ontarios lax political fundraising laws  including a proposed ban on union and corporate donations  will have on Cornerstone.

But it is possible a ban on contributions to political parties from unions and corporations would lead to an unravelling of the arrangement. That would put extra pressure on the NDP, which still has a $5-million debt from the 2014 election campaign, to dig itself out of a deep financial hole.

Related:NDPs righteous rhetoric rings hollow: Cohn

The New Democrats support some revamp of the fundraising system though they have never specified exactly what they want. They oppose the governing Liberals legislative approach, instead preferring a non-partisan public consultation.

While Cornerstones existence has been known for years, the NDP always maintained the corporation was separate from and had no direct financial connections to the political party or its campaigns.

The Star has obtained the previously secret shareholders agreement from Sept. 9, 2009 that shows Cornerstone, which owns 101 Richmond St. E., is a complex corporate entity where the NDP controls all of the Class A common shares.

All of the Class B common shares are owned by eight public-sector and private-sector unions or their locals. These shareholders have fewer powers than the NDP with its Class A shares.

Any dividends from the shares are reinvested into the company unless the unpaid board of directors decides otherwise. Each union has a seat on the board, the NDP has one seat.

That corporate structure is not illegal. But it appears to challenge past assertions by the NDP that the party had an arms-length relationship with Cornerstone.

Requests for an interview with NDP Leader Andrea Horwath to discuss Cornerstone were declined by her office.

New Democrat House leader Gilles Bisson (Timmins-James Bay) insisted the partys current concerns over Premier Kathleen Wynnes reforms to political fundraising have nothing to do with Cornerstone.

Bisson implied Cornerstone is a bit of a mystery even to New Democrats at Queens Park.

I dont really understand how Cornerstone is set up. I thought it was to buy a building, said Bisson, co-chair of the 2014 NDP campaign.

In a 2011 interview with journalist Jonathan Jenkins, then of the Toronto Sun, Horwath said Cornerstone has no role whatsoever in our campaign.

None whatsoever. Its a separate corporation, separate board of directors. Theres no financial connection whatsoever. Its completely separate. Not a dime, she said at the time.

We have some unions that guarantee our loans, we have this separate, completely separate organization, a completely separate entity called Cornerstone that guarantees some of our loans.

However, the shareholders agreement shows Cornerstone and the party are deeply entwined.

The corporation shall, upon request from time to time by the ONDP and in compliance with applicable law, provide such guarantees, liens, and other financial assistance and such further assurances and instruments in respect thereof, as the ONDP may request from time to time to assist in financing its activities, it states.

Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation president Paul Elliott, whose union helped create the Cornerstone, said the company was launched to bolster the New Democrats.

We wanted to ensure there was a progressive voice in the political landscape in Ontario. This was created when Howard Hampton was the leader of the NDP and at the time we (were) concerned about the ability of the NDP to compete against the Liberals and Conservatives, said Elliott.

Elections Ontario data shows that during the 2014 provincial election, Cornerstone guaranteed a $6-million loan to the NDP to pay for the campaign.

The party in turn paid Cornerstone $273,904.56 for office and equipment rent that year. The corporation, which purchased 101 Richmond St. E. for $3.1 million nine years ago, does not have a listed phone number or a website.

Derek Johnstone, the Ontario regional director of the United Food and Commercial Workers, another Cornerstone shareholder, said this was an investment that we made over a decade ago.

Its an investment that we are active in  in terms of doing our due diligence for the members resources. We have one member on the board and in terms of any changes to the legislation here in Ontario were, of course, monitoring it, he said, referring to the upcoming bill on political fundraising.

UFCW, of course, will comply with any legislation thats passed as weve done in every other province.

Cornerstone board chair Anne Healy  who is also executive assistant to the national secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), another shareholder in the corporation  said we wont know how any new legislation will affect us until it is tabled.

The Cornerstone board will look at any new legislation when details are available to see how it will affect our operations, but until then we dont think speculation is a useful exercise, said Healy.

Bob Gallagher, communications and political action department head of the United Steelworkers, Cornerstones largest shareholder, said the union is proud of our support of the Ontario New Democratic Party.

We also strongly support reforms to the election financing legislation that would eliminate political contributions from corporations and unions, said Gallager.

We support an open dialogue between all parties to determine the scope of any new legislation regarding election financing. Once consensus by all parties is achieved we will then be able to understand the future implications, he said.

Political fundraising reforms have been on the front-burner since the Stars March 29 story about Liberal cabinet ministers having party fundraising targets of up to $500,000 apiece.

Wynne scrambled to announce legislative changes in the wake of the expose.

The Liberal bill expected to be tabled next month will ban corporate and union donations, reduce annual contributions to a maximum of $1,525 from $9,975, and close a slew of loopholes.

But the New Democrats  as well as the Progressive Conservatives and the Greens  oppose the way Wynne is revamping fundraising.

Horwath, backed by Conservative Leader Patrick Brown and Green Leader Mike Schreiner, tried unsuccessfully last week to strike a new non-partisan committee to design the changes.

Bisson emphasized there was no self-interest in the partys bid to have a say in the fundraising reforms.

If you want to ban union (and) corporate donations, we can live with that. But theres got to be a process by which . . . everybody gets it, its transparent . . . , he said, arguing that Wynne is trying to rush through changes without adequately consulting opposition parties, stakeholders, or the public.

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WASHINGTONThe last time Annabel Attridge treated herself to anything was a few weeks ago. It was a McDonalds hamburger.

Attridge, 20, is a photographer and part-time cashier who doesnt make enough money to get health insurance or move out of her parents house in Colorado. Shes very liberal, but she wont vote for Hillary Clinton, not even against Donald Trump.

Hell no, she said Wednesday. Bernie Sanders, she said, is the only one who cares about people like her.

People like her  members of the 74-year-olds army of frustrated millennials  are now the most important voters in Democratic politics. Clinton needs their votes to win the general election. And Sanders needs their support for his causes if he is going to build a legacy beyond the next two months.

The democratic socialist wont yet admit it, and neither will his ardent devotees, but his astonishing run is nearing its end. With just 14 contests left, Clintons lead is far too big for Sanders to overcome unless some calamity befalls her.

Sanders appeared to temporarily acknowledge defeat on Tuesday, saying in a statement he was now running to fight for a progressive party platform. His campaign laid off 200 employees on Wednesday. It is now clear that he came far short of his desired political revolution.

But there are signs he changed how young people think about politics. A Harvard poll found that Americans under age 29 had become markedly more liberal on a range of issues over the last year.

Hes not moving a party to the left. Hes moving a generation to the left, polling director John Della Volpe told the Washington Post.

The Vermont senator has normalized socialism, though Americans still oppose the concept. He has won primaries as a fiery environmentalist and a critic of Israel. He has shown how small donors can compete with Super PACs. And he has influenced Clintons policies and priorities.

If Bernie Sanders had not been in this race, theres not a question in my mind that income inequality would not be the focus that it is in this race right now. And we wouldnt be having the difficult discussion about money in politics and the problem of structural corruption, said Neil Sroka, spokesman for Democracy for America, which endorsed Sanders.

Two thirds of Sanders supporters are already prepared to support Clinton in the fall. The number will likely rise if and when Sanders makes a real effort to persuade them.

Theres a bunch of us who are kind of out wandering around trying to find the next thing, if we need to. Whats our second option? I think for a lot of Bernie supporters, its still very much in the air, said Grassroots for Sanders chief David Fredrick.

The more complicated question is what happens after the election. Campaign energy is notoriously difficult to harness post-campaign.

Fredrick said the Internet-centric nature of Sanderss organization will make it easier to keep supporters together and energized. He and colleagues plan to focus on backing progressive candidates at all levels.

If he doesnt (win), I think were going to be hit by a morale loss. But there are enough fervent supporters of this new movement that we can continue this energy, he said.

Mark Keith, a 28-year-old in Scranton, Pa., had never voted before he volunteered for Sanders. Now, he said, he is motivated to get engaged in even city council races.

Hes engaged a subset of the population, myself included, that felt disillusioned and disenfranchised by the political system, he said. He added: If we were all engaged a little earlier, I dont think this would have been the outcome.

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NEW YORKBernie Sanders announced Wednesday that he would soon be laying off hundreds of paid staffers to his presidential campaign and redirect his remaining resources to California.

We want to win as many delegates as we can, so we do not need workers now in states around (the) country, Sanders said in an interview with the New York Times. We dont need people right now in Connecticut. That election is over. We dont need them in Maryland. So what we are going to do is allocate our resources to the 14 contests that remain, and that means that we are going to be cutting back on staff.

The layoffs are primarily field centred along with national support for those field people, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told Bloomberg Politics.

Weaver emphasized that the campaign is fully staffed in the field in the states that have yet to vote. The campaign plans to have 60 or 70 staffers on the ground in California when that state votes on June 7.

The field people who were in the five states from yesterday, theres no other place for them to go, you know what I mean? he said.

This is not an unusual process, he said. At one point we had twice as many staffers as we do now. When we were competing in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and all the March 1 states we had a thousand staffers.

The move comes one day after Sanders latest campaign setback. The Vermont Senator lost four of Tuesdays five Democratic presidential primaries to front-runner Hillary Clinton, and fell further behind in the delegate race to secure the nomination.

Sanders told the Times that he would remain in the race through the Democratic Partys national convention in Philadelphia, Penn., in late July, but that hundreds of staff members would be let go in the near future. After Tuesday nights results, Sanders trails Clinton by 813 delegates, including superdelegates, with just 1,276 delegates yet to be awarded. Assuming no superdelegates walk back their commitment to support Clinton at the convention, the former secretary of state needs to pick up just 232 more delegates to secure the nomination.

Sanders said he would move staff members to California, where he hopes to score a final big win on June 7.

If we win this, every one of those great people who have helped us get this far, they will be rehired, Mr. Sanders told the Times. But right now, we have to use all of the resources we have and focus them on the remaining states.

Weaver emphasized that the campaign was conceding nothing.

The road has always been a hard road. It was never harder than the day Bernie announced, he said. Every state coming up is going to have staff in it.

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BEIRUTA wave of airstrikes and shelling killed more than 60 people in less than 24 hours in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, monitors and activists said Thursday. The contested city is now one of the main battlegrounds of Syrias devastating civil war, with a ceasefire that has collapsed and peace talks in Geneva stalled.

At least 27 people died as a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) and nearby buildings were hit overnight in the rebel-held part of Aleppo.

The UN envoy for Syria appealed early Thursday on the U.S. and Russia to help revive the peace talks and a ceasefire, which he said hangs by a thread.

However, the violence only escalated. New airstrikes Thursday in residential areas in the rebel-held part of the city killed at least 20 while state media reported that at least 1,000 mortars and rockets were fired at government-held areas of Aleppo, killing at least 14 civilians.

The chief Syrian opposition negotiator Mohammed Alloush blamed the government of President Bashar Assad for the violence. He told The Associated Press that it shows the environment is not conducive to any political action.

About 200 civilians have been killed in the past week, nearly half of them around Aleppo. There has also been shelling in Damascus, along with a car bombing  both rarities for the capital. The ICRC said the fighting, including the destruction in airstrikes overnight of a key hospital in Aleppo, is putting millions at grave risk.

With peace talks in Geneva completely deadlocked, Syrians are regarding the escalating bloodshed with dread, fearing that Aleppo is likely to be the focus of the next phase of the war.

Rebel commanders said government forces have been mobilizing soldiers, equipment and ammunition in preparation for a military action in Aleppo.

The well-known Al-Quds field hospital supported by MSF and ICRC and located in the rebel-held district of Sukkari was hit shortly before midnight Wednesday, according to opposition activists and rescue workers. Six hospital staff and three children were among the 27 who died there.

The Syrian Civil Defence, a volunteer first-responders agency whose members went to the scene of the attack, put the death toll at 30 and said the dead included six hospital staff. Among those slain was one of the last pediatricians remaining in opposition-held areas of the contested city and a dentist.

The defence agency, also known as the White Helmets, said the hospital and adjacent buildings were struck in four consecutive airstrikes. It said there were still victims buried under the rubble and that the rescue work continued. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said three children were among the 27 victims but it was not immediately clear if they were patients at the hospital.

MSF said in a statement that at least 14 patients and staff were among those killed, with the toll expected to rise. Destroyed MSF-supported hospital in Aleppo was well known locally and hit by direct airstrike, it said.

This devastating attack has destroyed a vital hospital in Aleppo, and the main referral centre for pediatric care in the area, said Muskilda Zancada, MSF head of Syria mission. Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage?

The 34-bed, multi-storey hospital had an emergency room and offered services such as obstetric care, outpatient and inpatient treatment. It had an intensive care unit and an operating theatre. Eight doctors and 28 nurses worked full time in the hospital, the MSF said. It has supported the hospital since 2012, the aid group said.

An unnamed Syrian military official quoted on state TV denied reports that the hospital was targeting, saying they were false.

A video posted online by the White Helmets showed a number of lifeless bodies, including those of children, being pulled out from a building and loaded into ambulances amid screaming and wailing. It also showed distraught rescue workers trying to keep onlookers away from the scene, apparently fearing more airstrikes.

Shortly after midday, new airstrikes in rebel-held areas killed at least 20 people in two neighbourhoods, the Syrian Civil Defence and the Observatory said.

Videos provided by activists show scenes of dust rising up from buildings on fire as men and women run away from collapsing houses and children cry, looking for their parents. In one clip, a man is seen lifting his daughter out of the rubble.

State media said at least 1,300 rockets and missiles fell in residential areas in government controlled parts of the city, killing 14 people on Thursday.

Alloush, who was one of the leading negotiators of the opposition in the Geneva talks, described the airstrikes as one of the latest war crimes of Assads government.

Whoever carries out these massacres needs a war tribunal and a court of justice to be tried for his crimes. He does not need a negotiating table, Alloush told the AP in a telephone interview. Now, the environment is not conducive for any political action.

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BANGKOKA British couple and their son were savagely attacked during a family vacation in Thailand in the latest blow to the countrys image as a welcoming tourist paradise. Police said Thursday they have arrested the four suspected attackers.

A video of the attack, which was captured by overhead security cameras and posted this week on social media, has stirred shock and outrage over its brutality and the ages of the victims, a 65-year-old woman and 68-year-old man from Scotland and their 43-year-old son. The attack is the latest act of violence against tourists in the Southeast Asian country.

In the video the family is seen walking down a crowded street in the beach town of Hua Hin on the evening of April 13, amid festivities for the Thai New Year.

An altercation breaks out with a group of men on the street who punch all three in the face, kick their bodies and stomp on their faces in an attack that lasts about 2 minutes.

Police Col. Chaiyakorn Sriladecho said it started after the son accidentally bumped into one of the Thai men.

The attack stops only when all three victims are seen lying apparently unconscious on the ground. As the Thai gang disappears, bystanders come to their aid.

We have now arrested all four suspects, Chaiyakorn said. Three of the men were arrested within days of the incident and the fourth on Thursday, he said, identifying them as in their 20s and 30s.

The men say they are sorry and that they wouldnt have done this if they werent drunk, he said.

The father and son suffered head injuries requiring stitches, Chaiyakorn said. The mother received serious eye and head injuries that caused a buildup of fluid in the brain and required an operation, he said.

In March, four French tourists were assaulted on the island of Koh Kut as they walked to dinner. They included a mother and daughter who were both raped.

Two British backpackers were murdered on the island of Koh Tao in 2014. Autopsies showed the couple, a young man and woman, had been severely beaten and the woman raped. Two Burma migrants were convicted of the crime based on DNA evidence that rights groups say was questionable.

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MILANItalian police have arrested four people in a foreign fighter investigation, including a Moroccan-born man living in Italy who had received Daesh orders to carry out attacks on Rome during Holy Year, prosecutors said Thursday.

Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli told reporters that investigators intercepted the communication from within Daesh territory ordering attacks in Italy, with particular attention to the city of Rome and focusing on the Holy Year pilgrimage now underway.

There was no indication any attacks were imminent and Romanelli said authorities acted quickly to close the investigation, arresting four people and issuing arrest warrants for two others believed to be in Daesh territory.

This is a new profile, because it was not a generic indication, but an indication given to a specific person who was invited to act within the territory of the Italian state, Romanelli said.

Authorities arrested the Morroccan-born man, identified as Abderrahim Moutahrrick, and his wife, Salma Bencharki, who allegedly were planning on travelling from their home in Lecco, north of Milan, to Daesh territory with their children ages 2 and 4. Romanelli said Moutahrrick had taken Italian citizenship and was an accomplished boxer.

Another Moroccan man who was planning to travel with them, identified as Abderrahmane Khachia, 23, was arrested in the northern city of Varese, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors also issued arrest warrants for an Italian-Moroccan couple who left to join Daesh, also known as the Islamic State group or ISIS, last year with three small children. Romanelli said that man, identified as Mohamed Koraichi, had become a Daesh fighter and had communicated the orders to carry out attacks in Italy while making arrangements for the other family to join Daesh.

The fourth arrest was of Koraichis sister, prosecutors said.

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Over the last seven years, most states have banned texting by drivers, and public service campaigns have tried an array of tactics  It can wait, among them  to persuade people to put down their phones when they are behind the wheel.

Yet the problem, by just about any measure, appears to be getting worse. Americans confess in surveys that they are still texting while driving, as well as using Facebook and Snapchat and taking selfies. Road fatalities, which had fallen for years, are now rising sharply, up roughly 8 per cent in 2015 over the previous year, according to preliminary estimates.

That is partly because people are driving more, but Mark Rosekind, the chief of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said distracted driving was only increasing, unfortunately.

Radical change requires radical ideas, he said in a speech last month, referring broadly to the need to improve road safety.

More than one-third of licensed Ontario students in Grades 10 to 12  or an estimated 108,000 teens  reported having texted while driving at least once in the past year, according to the 2013 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey.

For Grade 12 students alone, 46 per cent of those who drive say they also texted at least once while operating a vehicle.

This was a big surprise to us, said Robert Mann, a senior scientist at CAMH in Toronto. We know that this is a very hazardous behaviour and some of the reports in the literature suggest that texting while youre driving can increase your chances of being involved in a collision by about 20 times or more.

To try to change a distinctly modern behaviour, legislators and public health experts are reaching back to an old strategy: They want to treat distracted driving like drunken driving.

Harvards School of Public Health, for example, is developing a new push based on the effective designated driver campaign it orchestrated in the United States beginning in the late 1980s. Candace Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, has helped found a new group this year, Partnership for Distraction-Free Driving, which is circulating a petition to pressure social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to discourage multi-tasking by drivers, in the same way that Lightner pushed beer and liquor companies to discourage drunken driving.

The most provocative idea, from lawmakers in New York, is to give police officers a new device that is the digital equivalent of the Breathalyzer  a roadside test called the Textalyzer.

It would work like this: An officer arriving at the scene of a crash could ask for the phones of any drivers involved and use the Textalyzer to tap into the operating system to check for recent activity.

The technology could determine whether a driver had used the phone to text, email or do anything else that is forbidden under New Yorks hands-free driving laws, which prohibit drivers from holding phones to their ear. Failure to hand over a phone could lead to the suspension of a drivers license, similar to the consequences for refusing a Breathalyzer.

The proposed legislation faces hurdles to becoming a law, including privacy concerns. But Felix W. Ortiz, a Democratic assemblyman who was a sponsor of the bipartisan Textalyzer bill, said it would not give police access to the contents of any emails or texts. It would simply give them a way to catch multi-tasking drivers, he said.

We need something on the books where peoples behaviour can change, said Ortiz, who pushed for the states 2001 ban on hand-held devices by drivers. If the Textalyzer bill becomes law, he said, people are going to be more afraid to put their hands on the cellphone.

If it were to pass in New York, the first state to propose such an idea, it could well spread in the same way that the hands-free rules did after New York adopted them.

Lightner said the intensifying efforts around distracted driving are the equivalent of the early 80s in drunken driving, when pressure led to tougher laws and campaigns emphasizing corporate responsibility.

Distracted driving is not being treated as seriously as drunk driving, and it needs to be, she said.

Its dangerous, devastating, crippling, and its a killer, and still socially acceptable, she added.

The safety administration plans to release the final fatality numbers as early as Thursday but previously announced that the numbers appeared to be up sharply.

Now, the police can obtain a warrant for cellphone records, but the process takes time and resources, limiting the likelihood of investigation, Ortiz said. But those protections are there for good reason, according to privacy advocates, who oppose the New York bill.

It really invites police to seize phones without justification or warrant, said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

A unanimous decision by the Supreme Court in 2014 ruled that the police could not search a cellphone without a warrant, even after an arrest, suggesting an uphill fight on the New York legislation.

But the bills authors say they have based the Textalyzer concept on the same implied consent legal theory that allows the police to use the Breathalyzer: When drivers obtain a license, they are consenting in advance to a Breathalyzer, or else they will risk the suspension of their license.

Matt Slater, the chief of staff for state Sen. Terrence Murphy, a Republican and a sponsor of the bill, said the constitutional concerns could and should be solved. Its monumental if we can get this done, he said.

Slater said he hoped it could happen this session, which ends in June, but, he added, it may take several tries and may require broader public support.

Were facing the same hurdles we faced with drunk driving, he said. Were trying to make sure safety and civil liberties are equally protected.

Deborah Hersman, the president of the non-profit National Safety Council and a former chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said she liked the Textalyzer idea because it would give the police an important tool and would help gather statistics on the number of crashes caused by distraction.

She said the Textalyzer-Breathalyzer comparison was apt because looking at and using a phone can be as dangerous as driving drunk.

Why are we making a distinction between a substance you consume and one that consumes you? Hersman said.

With files from The Canadian Press.

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The Oklahoma state legislature is working on revising its sex assault laws after a state appeal court ruled that oral sex with an unconscious, drunk teen was not rape.

The legal loophole was exposed when an appeals court unanimously ruled that oral sex with someone who has passed-out after drinking too much isnt rape.

In its brief, two-page Mar. 24 ruling, the court found that Oklahoma law does not consider oral sex with someone who is incapacitated by alcohol rape. While it is illegal in the state to have vaginal or anal sex with someone who is drunk to the point of incapacitation, no such law exists for oral sex.

Forcible sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act of oral copulation, the ruling said.

On Tuesday, State Representative Scott Biggs amended a victims rights bill that was already being discussed in the states legislature to change the definition of forcible oral sodomy.

The new wording adds incapacitation from intoxication to the list of reasons why a person would be unable to consent to oral sex, he told the Star.

The new bill has bipartisan support, he said, and could become law as early as next week.

We have to (act now), he said.

If you read the opinion its kind of appalling, the lack of justice for that victim.

The case involved a 17-year-old boy who was charged with second-degree rape and forcible oral sodomy of a 16-year-old girl in April, 2015. The Tulsa County District Court judge dismissed both charges, and the appeals court upheld that judges decision.

We will not, in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offence, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language, the ruling said.

Karla Docter, senior director of sexual violence prevention and response at the YWCA in Oklahoma City, said the appeals court ruling was very disappointing.

I think we all know what the real definition of rape is, she said.

Oklahoma is ranked in the top 15 in the U.S. for sexual assaults, she said, and its clear the law needs to be updated.

Its vital for the legal system to catch up to our evolved understanding of consent and sexual assault, and for victims to know that the system can bring them justice, said Docter, who advocates for sexual assault survivors.

Sex assault will continue to exist in our communities if we as a society let it, she said.

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WASHINGTON  The Pentagon has disciplined 16 service members for mistakes that led to the deadly airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan last fall, but no one will face criminal charges, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

The punishments follow a six-month Pentagon investigation into the disastrous Oct. 3 attack, which killed 42 medical staff, patients and other Afghans, and wounded dozens more at the international humanitarian aid groups trauma centre in Kunduz.

The 16 found at fault include a two-star general, the crew of an Air Force AC-130 attack aircraft and Army special forces personnel, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal investigation.

One officer was suspended from command and ordered out of Afghanistan. The other 15 were given lesser punishments: Six were sent to counselling, seven were issued letters of reprimand, and two were ordered to retraining courses.

Doctors Without Borders had informed U.S. and Afghan officials of the hospitals GPS co-ordinates numerous times in the days before the airstrike because of fighting in the area, the military has acknowledged, and the facility was on U.S. list of prohibited targets.

The Americans who repeatedly raked the hospital with heavy fire believed they were targeting a separate building several hundred yards away where several Taliban fighters were supposedly hiding.

Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF for its French name, Medecins Sans Frontieres, is based in Geneva and has won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work in war zones and during epidemics.

It described the attack on the clearly marked medical facility in Kunduz as a likely war crime. The incident generated an outcry from international aid groups, some of whom demanded criminal prosecution.

The gravity of harm caused by the reported failures to follow protocol in Kunduz appears to constitute gross negligence that warrants active pursuit of criminal liability, Donna McKay, executive director of the non-profit Physicians for Human Rights, wrote in a letter to the White House and Pentagon on Monday.

Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, is expected to announce the administrative actions Friday at the Pentagon. He will not release names of the 16 because some are overseas or in units that are regularly deployed.

Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, will post more than 3,000 pages of a redacted investigative report on its website after Votel appears.

The investigation focused on why a heavily armed AC-130 attack aircraft made multiple strafing runs on a hospital even as aid officials frantically called U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington to stop the attack.

The aircraft obliterated the hospitals main building, including an emergency room, intensive care unit and operating theatre. The attack lasted more than 30 minutes and killed 24 patients, 14 staff members and four caretakers. Some patients burned to death in their beds.

Gen. John F. Campbell, then-commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in November that the cause of this tragedy was ... avoidable human error, compounded by process and equipment failures.

Campbell said decisions on whether to prosecute anyone would be made by him and the U.S. Special Operations Command, where Votel was commander before he was assigned to Central Command.

Campbell, who retired last month, ordered discipline for 12 of the 16 personnel involved. He suspended an officer, issued three letters of reprimand, ordered six into counselling and sent two to retraining courses.

The attack was launched in error as U.S. warplanes, backed by special operations troops, were assisting Afghan forces fighting to retake Kunduz from the Taliban, which had captured the city in September.

A preliminary investigation last fall found that fatigue and high operation tempo had played a role after several days of intense fighting.

Votel issued four letters of reprimand and suspended the AC-130 aircrew from performing flight operations until they passed a flight evaluation board, which will determine when they can return to service.

Tim Shenk, a spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, said Wednesday that the aid organization would not comment on the punishments until the military publicly released its investigation.

The Pentagon is expected to brief the group before Votel speaks to the news media on Friday.

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Over the last decade, in the absence of federal leadership, Canadian provinces have gone their own way on carbon pricing. Alberta chose a unique carbon pricing system, British Columbia implemented a carbon tax, and Quebec launched a cap-and-trade system which Ontario will soon join. Others are waiting in the wings, either weighing their options or vehemently opposed. As a result, Canadas environmental standing fell and full economic potential went untapped.

Now that the country has an engaged federal government that is determined to act on climate change, things are likely to take a new direction. Provinces that arent pursuing any form of carbon pricing will likely be asked to do so. The current musing is that the federal government will set a $15 carbon tax to act as a minimum carbon price. But is a national price floor enough, or should the federal government consider other options? The problem is that $15 is not enough to drive the deep emissions reductions needed. Without a hard cap, population and economic growth will drive growth in emissions. Furthermore, it is hard for governments to commit to continually increasing a tax; whereas it is not too difficult to continually tighten the cap in accordance with emissions targets.

Cap-and-trade is the best way for Canada to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and still maintain economic growth and competitiveness. Rather than having multiple provincial auctions, the administrative costs of the program would be minimized through co-ordinated joint auctions across provinces. The system would operate similarity to the Western Climate Initiatives system, where each province puts up a number of allowances for auction, and all provinces bid on the common pool of allowances. A countrywide carbon price would be determined.

The federal government would set its cap in line with Canadas commitment to reducing emissions to 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050. Auction revenue would be distributed across the provinces, in line with their respective allocation of emissions (determined using 1990 levels). This way, each province contributes evenly to achieving Canadas goal. Doing so will ensure that Canada is able to fulfil its international commitment while ensuring fairness across provinces.

Rather than a patchwork of provincial policies, a Canada-wide system would send a stronger signal to businesses and investors that a low-carbon future is upon us. This will help businesses make better informed investment decisions.

If Canada as a whole puts a hard cap on emissions, the domestic demand for low-carbon (clean-tech) goods and services will increase. This will help the country develop its clean-tech market, providing space to grow and sell to a domestic market, eventually maturing, exporting and capturing global market share.

With a common carbon price across provinces, interprovincial competitiveness concerns related to asymmetric climate policy are alleviated  firms cannot skirt the carbon price by shifting production across provincial borders. This reduces the carbon leakage that more environmentally progressive provinces would face under asymmetric climate policy.

Another major benefit to a common Canadian market is that, when engaged in allowance trading across provinces, each province benefits. In our most recent paper, we find that Ontarios economic outcomes are improved when firms are able to import cheaper allowances from low-cost regions, like California. Under a pan-Canadian system, through allowance trading, high-cost provinces would benefit from lower compliance costs, while firms in low-cost provinces would increase their profits by abating and selling excess allowances.

A Canada-wide cap-and-trade system would achieve the best outcomes for the environment and the economy, while respecting each provinces autonomy. Provinces would be allowed to use auction revenues as they see fit  whether to invest in low-carbon technology, infrastructure, cut other taxes, issue household transfers, etc. Each region also has the autonomy to issue free allowances to at-risk industries in order to minimize the costs on businesses and address competitiveness concerns. This should tame the fears of industry and politicians in Canadas resource-dependent provinces, like Alberta and Saskatchewan.

To be frank, a $15 price floor does almost nothing to guarantee that the country lives up to its international commitments. A national cap, on the other hand, with obligations spread evenly across provinces, will allow the country to address climate change while providing best outcomes for the economy.

It feels as though Canada may be on the cusp of fulfilling its role in fighting climate change, while still ensuring the economic growth we need. There is a model wherein we can have both federal leadership and provincial control. The prime minister and the premiers can have a thoughtful conversation about carbon pricing and pipelines at the same time. Now is the time to do so together, rather than at odds with one another, and take our place on the global stage as both an economic and environmental leader.

Jamison Steeve is executive director of the Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity. The Institute published a working paper this week: Toward a low-carbon economy: The costs and benefits of cap-and-trade.

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Hamiltons first and only black city councillor says local police arbitrarily stopped and questioned him this week while he waited for a bus. Ward 3 councillor Matthew Green says a local officer questioned him at length, and even asked if Green, who was born and raised in Hamilton, was from the area.

Many people on social media reacted with surprise to Greens story, which he initially shared through Twitter. How could police be foolish enough to target an elected official, they wondered. But this isnt about tactics  black people, young and old, rich and poor, are targeted by our police every single day.

Sadly, we know what comes next for Green. People will ask what he was doing when he was stopped, how he was dressed, how he answered questions. Folks will comb through his story for inconsistencies, as if a racist police stop is surprising or new or difficult to believe. Black people dont get justice for police discrimination because our media, friends, colleagues, and fellow residents are as suspicious of us as the cops are.

When I heard Greens story, I started contacting black people I know. Some are well-known public figures. Others are students or folks with a day job. All of them have a personal story like Greens or know a black person with a similar experience. But in general, the media simply refuses to normalize black peoples experiences with racist policing. We fail to relate the story of a public figure like Green to the lived reality of black people in all walks of life.

Debbie Douglas, the executive director of the Ontario Coalition of Agencies Serving Immigrants, told me the young people her agency works with are routinely stopped and questioned by police. Being new to the country, they are absolutely intimidated given the experiences they have had with security forces in their countries of origin, said Douglas, a black woman and longtime immigrant advocate.

Richard Whyte, a black 26-year-old insurance salesman, says he has been stopped by Peel Regional Police nearly 30 times. A few weeks ago, police pulled Whyte over and told him they couldnt read his license plate because the plastic cover on it was too dirty. He was then asked questions about his residence, his job, and where he was going.

Whyte says one officer remarked that Whyte was driving a nice car, and must be making a lot of money. They kinda gave away the reason for pulling me over, Whyte told me. They were probably thinking Im a drug dealer. During another incident last month, police drove the wrong way on a one-way street to question Whyte while he stood talking to his mother in her front yard. (Peel police did not respond to a request for comment.)

I dont ever feel like theyre there to protect me, said Whyte. He expressed gratitude that he has the patience to remain calm after repeated, arbitrary police stops. Ive been blessed by God to articulate what Im saying and defend myself. What about other people?

Peel police recently bragged that they had become the first police force in Ontario to implement a new regulation on carding, the practice of stopping and documenting civilians who are not suspected of a crime. Tell that to Whyte. Its more likely police simply arent documenting the ongoing targeting of black residents. Similarly, Hamilton police boasted only last week that they no longer needed carding to do their jobs. Even as police disavow carding, they seek to further normalize the needless scrutiny of black people, while the media and public play along in mock astonishment and confusion.

I understand if stories like Councillor Greens shock people, but they should not surprise anyone. In fact, people seem to be so surprised by arbitrary police scrutiny of black people that there is no room to be shocked, to be outraged and indignant. The public is afraid to draw any conclusions from the serial criminalization of black bodies. Stories that do make the news are debated and fade away, only to be forgotten when the pattern repeats itself.

Green said of his recent police stop, this happens to thousands of people across the province; statistically, we know this is going on. Yes, we hear the stories, but their meaning continues to escape us.

Desmond Cole is a Toronto-based journalist. His column appears every Thursday.

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Week by week, one legislative brick at a time, the courts are tearing down former prime minister Stephen Harpers tough-on-crime agenda.

It was bound to happen. Even as the Harper regimes legislative excess was in full bloom, legal experts were predicting the inevitable demise of the wave of punitive measures it had created.

This is what happens when ideological zeal overtakes reason; when sound advice is filtered out and ignored; when rhetoric rules the day.

In the past two weeks alone, several mandatory minimum sentencing laws have been ruled unconstitutional by Canadian appellate courts because they removed a judges ability to tailor a fair sentence to the unique circumstances of the offender before them. Judicial discretion has always been at the root of sound sentencing policy, so the provisions were doomed from the start.

A fundamental question now faces the Trudeau government. Does it intend to stand by and wait for the courts to systematically dismantle every last plank of regressive legislation left behind by our last government? Or, will it move proactively to undo the damage?

There are powerful arguments in favour of taking timely action. They range from the high cost of fighting constitutional battles to the destructive effects that these laws have on offenders caught up in the court system.

Striking down legislation in a piecemeal fashion takes years to accomplish and comes at great expense. Few offenders are in a position to pay the mounting legal bills involved in obtaining a trial decision and then advancing up the appellate ladder.

In order to reverse the damage done by the Harper regime, the Trudeau government has the option to undertake a rapid review of provisions that are constitutionally suspect, rescinding the worst of them. It could commence with those one-size-fits-all mandatory minimum sentences that still remain in force.

Jail does not make people better citizens. Instead, at a cost of almost $120,000 per year, offenders are packed into a brutalizing prison system that crushes the spirit and hold out precious little hope for rehabilitation. Impressionable young offenders who comprise the largest segment of the prison population come into contact with career criminals who can warp their perspective on life. Moreover, if anything, having a prison record makes an ex-offender virtually unemployable after release.

Since a disproportionate number of prisoners are aboriginal, indigent or members of some other minority group, there is no mystery as to who pays the highest price for the legislative folly of mandatory minimum sentences.

Exacerbating this problem, the previous government took pains to erect hurdles for ex-offenders seeking a pardon once their sentence was complete. Quadrupling application costs and doubling waiting time to as much as ten years before a criminal record can be expunged runs counter to notions of common sense and reintegration.

When an offender has served his time and is striving to live a clean and productive life, why wouldnt we make every effort to enhance his prospects for rehabilitation and finding a job?

Another target ripe for reform is the contentious mandatory victim surcharge, which requires all offenders to pay hundreds of dollars after being convicted regardless of their financial situation. Those who fail to pay these hefty fines are thrown back into jail creating a modern day debtors prison. We must give judges the discretion to once again waive this surcharge where appropriate.

In a similarly harsh vein, the Harper government passed legislation permitting the swift deportation of anyone convicted of an offence that carries a maximum term of imprisonment of ten years or more even if they werent actually sentenced to a single day in jail for the crime. How many families have been torn apart by the effect of this unforgiving sanction?

These and other comparable measures typified the world view of a government that misused crime statistics in order to stoke public fear, then catered to these fears with vindictive measures and a costly prison-building program.

Criminologists who tried to blow the whistle on this cavalcade of folly were ignored. So, too, were criminal lawyers and legal scholars who warned that the new laws could not withstand constitutional scrutiny.

It is up to the Trudeau government now to prove its commitment to sound justice policy by erasing these monuments to penal delusion.

Daniel Brown is a criminal defence lawyer and a Toronto Director with the Criminal Lawyers Association.

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Re: What happened to their moral compass? April 23

What happened to their moral compass? April 23

As an ordinary citizen I am appalled at the lack of political interest in eliminating the unelected Senate. Canadians have no respect for the institution. Certainly there are many better ways to use the financial resources that the Senate consumes.

Let Canadians decide on the fate of the Senate with a national referendum. Then let the politicians act and Canadians can send any political party into oblivion who opposes the will of the people.

I dont expect anything to change as it is not in the best interest of political parties to eliminate perks. We shouldnt wonder why so many citizens are politically apathetic.

Brian F.C. Smith, Toronto

Heather Mallicks columns help us sort out our muddles. This one sent me to the Google dictionary to look up abstemious and sybarites. Id like to add synonyms for the first, decent, and the second, bums.

The behaviour Mallick explores incenses me, always has. Her colleague, Chantal Hebert, adds some perspective a few pages before by drawing the clear distinction between illegality and immorality.

To both of you, please keep the pencils sharp. It helps us keep our daggers cloaked.

Eric Doubt, Toronto

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JNU students who have been punished by the university in connection with the controversial February 9 event on Wednesday began an indefinite hunger strike to demand revocation of punitive action.

JNU Students' Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya along with other students started the hunger strike at night and said they reject the findings and recommendations of the high-level inquiry committee that probed the incident.

Kanhaiya, Umar and Anirban Bhattachayra were arrested on the charge of sedition in February in connection with an event on campus against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised. They are out on bail now.

"We have been maintaining right from the beginning that we have no faith in the probe committee. We are all sitting on hunger strike against the arbitrary punishments given to us. The inquiry was a sham and students have rejected it in our general body meeting. We will not abide by the punishment given to us," JNUSU General Secretary Rama Naga said.

The students took out a march late night from Ganga Dhaba to administration block against the action. While Kanhaiya has been slapped with a penalty of Rs 10,000 on grounds of "indiscipline and misconduct", Umar, Anirban and Kashmiri student Mujeeb Gatoo have been rusticated for varied durations.

Fourteen students have been imposed financial penalty, hostel facilities oftwo students have been withdrawn and university has declared the campus out of bounds for two former students.

ABVP member Saurabh Sharma, who was complainant in the case lodged over the event, has also been slapped with a penalty of Rs 10,000 for blocking traffic.

Five members of ABVP have been sitting on hunger strike since yesterday, alleging that the university is "criminalising" patriotism.

The university officials, however, maintained that the decision has been taken after thorough investigation by a five-member probe panel and are in accordance with varsity norms.
Pre-poll war of words in Kerala reached the doorstep of court with Chief Minister Oommen Chandy filing a defamation case against opposition leader V.S. Achuthanandan for levelling 'false' allegations against him.

Chandy filed the case in Thiruvananthapuram additional district court and demanded Rs one lakh as damages. He has also lodged a complaint with the Election Commission.

Earlier, while addressing an election rally in Kannur district, the CPI-M veteran had alleged that the chief minister was facing 31 corruption cases and that there were a total of 136 cases against 18 UDF ministers in various courts.

Chandy had warned Achuthanandan of legal action if the latter didn't withdraw his statements.

In his complaint, Chandy also sought a direction to ban media from publicising or commenting on such 'baseless' allegations which are made solely aiming the ensuing elections. This is the second time Chandy has filed defamation complaint against Achuthanandan.

Reacting to the defamation suit, Achuthanandan said Chandy filed the case to protect his fake conscience, and added that the chief minister, who tries to clip his tongue, was in the idiot's paradise.
India on Thursday said the recent 90-minute talks with Pakistan was just a courtesy meeting between foreign secretaries of the two countries, during which New Delhi insisted that a team of Indian investigators probing the January Pathankot terror attack be allowed to visit that country.

I would first of all clarify that there was no official dialogue between our foreign secretary and Pakistan's foreign secretary, Minister of State for External Affairs V.K. Singh said in parliament.

He said Pakistan Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry was here to attend a conference on Afghanistan peace and development and as an etiquette, there were some talks between him and Indian Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar.

But, it should not be taken as official dialogue," Singh told the Rajya Sabha.

The minister's reply was surprising because India had described the April 26 talks, which continued for some 90 minutes between Chaudhry and Jaishankar, as a bilateral meeting that was expected to lead to progress towards the start of the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue.

The minister was replying to Congress leader Anand Sharma who asked the government to clarify whether Pakistan had agreed to allow an Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA) team to visit that country for probe into the attack on the Indian Air Force (IAF) base at Pathankot.

India blamed the suicide attack, which left seven people dead, on militants who had crossed over into India from the border with Pakistan. A team of Pakistan investigators was in March allowed to visit Pathankot as part of its probe. This sparked bitter criticism by the Congress-led opposition of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government.

Singh said the issue was raised with Pakistan and "they have to look into our NIA visiting Pakistan.

So far as we are concerned, (we have) conveyed formally to Pakistan foreign ministry that the terms of reference of the (probe team) visit are broadly agreed to with the proviso that they would be on the basis of reciprocity and followed in accordance with the extant legal provisions.

Singh said that the Pakistan government has to take a formal view and convey to us.

The issue of visit of Pakistan investigators to Pathankot was also raised in the Lok Sabha with opposition members lamenting that Islamabad did not respond in the right spirit to India's gesture.

Congress member Jyotiraditya Scinda accused the government of going soft on Pakistan.

"The visiting team also comprised an ISI officer," he said, adding diplomacy with Pakistan should not be handled with "emotive yardstick".

"We should negotiate with Pakistan from the position of strength."

But there was no response from the government.

In Pakistan, Chaudhry said his talks with Jaishankar may not have produced a breakthrough. But we conveyed our concerns (about Kashmir and India's alleged involvement in Balochistan trouble) forthrightly, the Pakistan foreign secretary said in Islamabad on Wednesday.

Pakistan is ready for dialogue, whenever India agrees to it, Chaudhry said.
A combative Congress president Sonia Gandhi and former prime minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday dismissed the bribery charges in the VVIP chopper scam as the BJP tried to corner the main opposition party.

Sonia Gandhi, whose name figures in a judgment by an Italian court, said she was "not afraid" and dubbed the allegations as false. Manmohan Singh and former defence minister A.K. Antony echoed the sentiment.

The Congress in turn accused the Narendra Modi government of trying to help the Italian firm which had been blacklisted.

The issue sparked tensions in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha.

A Milan court sent Finmeccanica's former CEO Giuseppe Orsi and AgustaWestland ex-head Bruno Spagnolini to jail for false accounting and corruption in the sale of 12 VVIP choppers to India.

The court ruling refers to Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, her secretary Ahmad Patel and also former Indian Air Force chief S.P. Tyagi.

Congress members were in uproar in the Rajya Sabha when BJP's Subramanian Swamy named Sonia Gandhi in the Rajya Sabha during zero hour while speaking on the AgustaWestland deal.

"It is touching to see leader of opposition relying on (Christian) Michel for what he said orally but the high court of Italy have recorded a letter written by Michel stating that Sonia Gandhi is the main..." Swamy couldn't finish his sentence.

Congress members sprung to their feet and rushed towards the treasury benches aggressively.

Soon after, Sonia Gandhi hit back, saying she was "not afraid" of any inquiry and there was nothing to hide. She accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of indulging in character assassination.

"We have nothing to hide. Let them (government) take my name, I am not afraid of anyone because there is no basis to that allegation. They amount to calumny. Where is the proof? They are lying. This is part of their (BJP's) strategy of character assassination," Gandhi told the media.

Union minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy said Sonia Gandhi should ask the Italian court why she was named in the documents.

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh also rebutted the charges. "There is no case. My party will respond."

Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel, whose name also figures in the Milan court ruling, said he was ready to hang if anything was found against him.

Former defence minister Antony dared the government to order a CBI probe and get it completed at "war footing".

He said it was the UPA government that ordered a CBI probe and blacklisted the company and accused the Modi government of trying to help the tainted company.

"They have shown criminal negligence in the case... This is a conspiracy to malign Congress leaders."

Antony said officials from the Indian government were present at the Milan court when the case was first taken up and there were no evidences against any Congress leaders.

The Congress said it had earlier proposed a Joint Parliamentary Committee on AgustaWestland, but BJP refused to participate or cooperate in the matter.
Donald Trump was back to his Trump-y self after a five-state sweep on Tuesday, and the boast of the night was one he had previously declined to make: I consider myself the presumptive nominee.

Flashback to Super Tuesday, another good day for the Republican presidential front-runner: All he would say then was I feel awfully good when asked twice during a victory news conference if it was time to break out the p-word, presumptive.

Clearly, Trump has gained confidence in the last eight weeks  and rightfully so. In that time, he has knocked out GOP rivals Marco Rubio and Ben Carson, and built a significant delegate lead.

But its still too early for the media to dub Trump the presumptive nominee.

In calling for the mantle on a night when he completely dominated, Trump was selling the notion that his victories fundamentally changed the race. They didnt. Trump was heavily favored in all five states, meaning all the talk before Tuesday about a contested convention included the assumption that he would run the table in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

To be precise, my colleague Philip Bump projected that Trump would collect between 106 and 109 delegates along the I-95 corridor. The Associated Press had him at 105 late Tuesday, with seven still to be allocated. At most, Trump will exceed his anticipated range by a measly four delegates. Thats not exactly a game-changer.

Trump had a very good night, but  mathematically speaking  hes pretty much right where we expected him to be. He still needs to win a majority of the remaining delegates to reach the magic number of 1,237. He cant get there before California votes on June 7, meaning hell still have to sweat it out until the final day of the primary season. A contested convention remains a realistic possibility.

Now, setting the math aside for a moment, there might be intangible benefits to Trumps wide margins of victory on Tuesday. In Pennsylvania, for instance, where 54 delegates are unbound by the results, the billionaires overwhelming popularity could put pressure on those free agents to honor the will of the electorate.

Similarly, the media will be forced to give Trump credit for an impressive showing that proved he can win majorities, not merely pluralities  something political analysts have doubted his ability to do. Trump has argued for a while that it would be unjust to deny him the nomination at a contested convention, should he come up just short of 1,237. Journalists  even those who have covered him toughly  might be more inclined to agree after seeing the way he walloped his rivals on Tuesday.

But they shouldnt refer to him as the presumptive nominee yet. Trump still has work left to do before he can earn that title.

The Washington Post  Callum Borchers
Barely two months after the United States and Russia joined together to forge a partial cease-fire in Syria, cooperation between them, including on a long-term political solution to that countrys civil war, is rapidly eroding.

Russia this week accused the administration of appeasing its regional partners by ignoring the presence of terrorists among opposition forces it backs in the fight against Syrian President Bashar Assad. Noting President Obamas decision to send an additional 250 Special Operations forces to the separate war against the Islamic State in Syria, despite pledges of no U.S. boots on the ground, a foreign ministry spokesman asked sarcastically whether they were deploying barefoot.

Inside the administration, there is growing dissension over whether to call Russia out for acting in bad faith.

Some Defense Department and intelligence officials believe Russia and its Syrian government client are clearly violating the cease-fire and provoking the opposition into doing the same. Despite White House insistence that the fight against the Islamic State cannot be won without resolving the civil war, they argue, administration support for the opposition is a low priority.

Other senior administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity about the sensitive issue, said the situation on the ground is murky and there is no clear path. In any case, they argue, publicly shaming Moscow at this point would achieve little.

Meanwhile, the truce itself is on the verge of collapse.

Violence has escalated throughout April, leading the opposition last week to suspend participation in United Nations-run political talks in Geneva. At least 90 people, including more than two dozen women and children, have been killed over the last four days in shelling and airstrikes by the Russian-backed Syrian government on rebel-held zones in the strategic city of Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The cessation of hostilities is still in effect, U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura insisted Friday. But it is in great trouble if we do not act quickly. De Mistura, who is scheduled to brief the U.N. Security Council late Wednesday, has called for an urgent meeting of the International Syria Support Group that Washington and Moscow co-chair.

The situation was foreseeable and was widely predicted when the two powers met in early February with a group of 20 nations and international organizations with vested interests in ending the civil war. What emerged was the outline of a process for transition to a new Syrian government, to be bolstered by an immediate stop in the fighting against all but universally agreed terrorist groups, and humanitarian access to besieged areas where civilians were without food and medical care.

Russian and its Iranian ally in support of Assad signed up. The United States and its regional allies pressured opposition groups to do the same, and to begin negotiations with Assads representatives.

Left out were the Islamic State, whose forces have gobbled up territory outside the western swath of Syria where the civil war has centered, and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, whose forces are scattered through the heart of the war in the northwest. There, Nusra fighters have often overlapped and fought together against Assad with opposition forces.

Although Russia lost a battle to declare as terrorists certain Islamist opposition groups supported by Turkey and Americas Arab allies in the Persian Gulf, it has continued to press the issue. This week, it asked the United Nations to update its official terrorist list by adding at least two of them  Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham.

But the Nusra cease-fire exception had already left a hole big enough for the Syrian government and Russia to barrel through, and they have not hesitated to do so in pursuit of regaining the initiative on the ground for Assad.

The dynamic has differed from place to place but overall has left a complex battlefield with endless combinations of tangled forces, tactical alliances, and significant room for disagreement among Russia, the United States and others that say they are trying to follow the cease-fire rules. A U.S.-Russia task force set up to adjudicate claims of violations has been virtually silent as fighting has escalated after initial weeks of relative quiet.

Last week, two northwest villages were heavily bombed by Assad after rebel forces threw out Nusra occupiers and civilians took to the street in anti-Assad demonstrations.

One recent visitor to the Damascus outskirts described an area held by an Islamist group nominally part of the cease-fire  but deemed terrorist by Russia  under bombardment by the government. In another area, a Nusra checkpoint stood just 50 yards down the road from one manned by Islamic State fighters, leading Nusra and government forces to make a local deal to join forces against them.

In many locations, particularly around Aleppo, Nusra and opposition fighters are not geographically distinct or delineated on the battlefield. Its not possible to physically disaggregate them, said Chris Kozak, who monitors their movements at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. Sometimes they fight together; other times they fight against each other.

Russia and Assad paint with a very broad brush, Kozak said. If a group is working tactically with Jabhat al-Nusra, or is co-located with them, then that group is Jabhat al-Nusra. For its part, he said, Nusra wants the cease-fire to collapse. . . . They pitch the case to other groups that the regime is still shelling and striking them and violating the cease-fire all over and then offer to help them retaliate.

Over the past few weeks, Russian and Syrian government forces have moved their heavy artillery and the troops that operate it from Palmyra, the ancient city in south-central Syria they recently retook from the Islamic State, to the outskirts of Aleppo to stop what both have said is a pending attack on the city by up to 8,000 Nusra troops massed on its southern outskirts.

But U.S. intelligence assessments, while acknowledging degrees of overlap, are that nothing has changed in Nusras positioning outside Aleppo, Syrias largest city. Assad and his backers are simply using the claim as an excuse to encircle the city and cut off rebel supplies from across the Turkish border.

In what the White House called an intense telephone conversation last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Obama made the case to President Putin that he should use his influence with the Assad regime to live up to the commitments that theyve made in the context of the cessation of hostilities, spokesman Josh Earnest said.

Four days later, however, in a news conference in London, the president appeared to acknowledge he had little immediate leverage.

Progress on the political track was the only way to solve the Syria problem, he said. We are going to have to play this option out. If, in fact, the cessation falls apart, well try to put it back together again even as we continue to go after ISIL, another term for the Islamic State. And its my belief that ultimately Russia will recognize that.

In an interview Friday with The New York Times, Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged that separating the forces on the ground has proven harder . . . than we thought.

But Kerry responded testily to suggestions that the administration was giving the Russians a free pass. We are not going to sit there and let [Putin] do his thing supporting the regime and hammer at the opposition and say This is working,  he said. Obviously, were not stupid about it.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post  Karen DeYoung
Following a five-primary sweep Tuesday night, Donald Trump repeatedly insisted that he would beat Hillary Clinton so easily, because she is a crooked politician and a flawed candidate whom people do not like. It is undoubtedly true that Clinton is beatable. By her own admission, she is not a natural politician. But that does not mean that Trump can beat her, let alone easily.

Trump offered a few arguments for his electability in his Tuesday victory speech. He made the familiar case that he would attract votes from white, working-class men. He talked about traveling around New York and seeing hollowed-out industrial towns. He reminded his audience that Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he linked to the economic hardship among blue-collar workers. With his usual lack of detail, he insisted that he would force companies to stop outsourcing manufacturing jobs. Taking his populism in a slightly new direction, he made a play for Bernie Sanders voters, talking about how Clinton is funded by Wall Street and insisting that The Democrats have treated Bernie very badly. He also painted Clinton as incompetent. She knows nothing about jobs, except jobs for herself, he said. She doesnt have the strength, she doesnt have the stamina. . .to deal with China or other things. Trump predicted that he would put states such as New York in play in the general election.

This is a fantasy. It is highly unlikely that white working class Democrats who have not already defected to the Republican Party are likely to do so now. After reviewing survey data, political scientist Charlotte Cavaille concluded that, rather than causing a defection of blue-collar Democrats into his camp, Trump is mostly benefiting from defections that have already happened. His only hope would be dramatically increasing the turnout among the younger and politically unaffiliated white working class, she concluded. Given that Trump is the least popular candidate among the general public, with poor favorability numbers even among white men, that probably would not be enough.

Trump would have to use gains among blue-collar voters to offset losses among minorities and women, among others. He did little to offer minority voters, particularly Latinos, a reason to change their feelings toward him Tuesday night, repeating his familiar talking points on immigration.

But he did discuss women. As usual, he insisted that he would be great for women. But then he said this about Clinton: The only card she has is the womens card. He insisted that she would not get 5 percent of the vote if she were a man. It is not clear whether he was trying to appeal to women or men. It could be that he wants to stoke resentment among men who see talk of womens issues as inappropriate identity politics. But he could also be attempting to stoke resentment among women who feel as though Clinton expects them to vote for her based on their shared gender, a sentiment that circulated among some Sanders voters during the New Hampshire primaries. His conclusion hinted at the latter intent: The beautiful thing is, women dont like her, Trump said.

Except women really dont like Trump. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 69 percent of women view the GOP frontrunner negatively. His campaign appears to believe that he can turn his negatives around. But his numbers are historically bad. Trump may think that he can fool most of the people, but he has only shown that he can fool some of the people.

Trump is right that Clinton is a vulnerable opponent. What he does not realize, or does not admit, is that he is even weaker.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post  Stephen Stromberg
Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been on a campaign since last October to impeach  literally  the tax collector.

But the Utah Republican has found little appetite among House leaders to call for a hearing, much less a vote to remove John Koskinen as head of the beleaguered Internal Revenue Service. Instead, Chaffetz says he is in conversations with his GOP colleagues about a vote on the lesser but still harsh charge of a censure.

My foremost goal is impeachment and Im not letting go of it, Chaffetz said in an interview, But if censure is the right precursor while we go through the process of educating our members, I have a [censure] bill drafted and ready to go.

Chaffetz and his fellow Republicans have a slew of grievances against Koskinens management of the tax agency he took over in 2013, and last week the House passed six anti-I.R.S. bills by party-line votes to mark Tax Day.

But the effort to remove Koskinen, whose term has just eight months left, stems from a scandal that preceded him  the IRSs treatment of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

Chaffetz says Koskinen should be impeached for violating the public trust and lying to Congress as it investigated the IRSs singling out of conservative groups for scrutiny. The congressman has accused the commissioner of erasing back-up computer files containing thousands of emails written by Lois Lerner, the central IRS official in the scandal. Koskinen has told lawmakers his staff turned over all emails that were relevant to the investigation, and when some were found to be missing, said they were unrecoverable.

Chaffetz filed his articles of impeachment days after the Justice Department closed its investigation of the case and declined to file criminal charges.

The Department of Justice should have taken action itself, Chaffetz said. Weve got to stand up for ourselves. Our constituents are fed up with the inaction of the House.

A censure resolution, rare in Congresss modern history and far more common against lawmakers than government officials, would be a formal rebuke that states the Houses lack of confidence in Koskinen and calls on President Obama to fire him.

It would fall short of outright impeachment, with no real consequence other than the announcement of the vote itself and a good measure of humiliation.

Chaffetz says he now has 60 co-sponsors for his impeachment resolution. But he acknowledged that it has gotten little traction with House leaders, including the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which would need to approve the measure. The House leadership spent last week focusing on IRS reforms but did not seek to highlight the effort to oust the agencys leader.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., when asked about the impeachment effort earlier this month, said the IRS is not being led well and misled Americans but stopped well short of backing Koskinens ouster.

What I think we need to do is win an election . . . get better people in these agencies and reform the tax code so were not harassing the average taxpayer with a tax code they cant even understand, Ryan said. His spokeswoman, AshLee Strong declined to comment on Chaffetzs censure proposal.

The Judiciary panel, meanwhile, has kept busy on other issues, including an ambitious reform of criminal sentencing and a rewrite of drug laws to address a spike in narcotics abuse. Spokeswoman Jessica Collins said only that the committee continues to review the impeachment resolution.

Earlier this month, a half-dozen Republican lawmakers  most of them members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus  went to the House floor to call for Koskinens impeachment in a mostly empty chamber.

Its really a question of the Houses self-respect: How much longer can we as elected officials allow the bureaucracy to simply walk all over the Congress? said Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., who has been among the most vocal advocates for Koskinens ouster.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said he is still talking and still pushing with House leadership to get impeachment articles considered, but he welcomed Chaffetzs censure proposal.

Getting the ball moving make sense, Jordan said. How that is manifest, Im open to all kinds of ideas. All I know is that what this guy did was wrong, and he deserves to be impeached, so lets get it moving.

An IRS spokesman said in a statement, Commissioner Koskinen and the IRS workforce remain focused on wrapping up work on a successful filing season for the nations taxpayers. In addition, we continue making progress on a number of important issues involving taxpayer service, tax enforcement and cybersecurity.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters last week that President Barack Obama has full confidence in his tax commissioner.

Mr. Koskinen has an extraordinarily difficult job, and its made only more difficult because Republicans seek to try to cut the funding of his agency, Earnest said. He is somebody who undertakes that work with a lot of professionalism and seriousness of purpose, and he deserves our gratitude for his good work.

Congress, led by House Republicans, has slashed the IRS budget by about $1 billion over the last five years. Customer service has deteriorated as a result. One of the measures passed last week requires bonuses to be withheld from every employee until customer service improves.

Said Chaffetz: Look at all the problems at the IRS. The list has grown beyond the destruction of evidence. Just because theres eight months left in the administration does not mean you let improper acts go.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post  Lisa Rein, Mike DeBonis
By Rabbi Yair Hoffman for the Five Towns Jewish Times

It has recently been reported that Dayan Yechezkel Roth, the Karlsburger Rov, who had recovered slightly from a massive heart attack, had upon some improvement in his condition, remarried his wife anew. Sources within the Karlsburg Beis Din have responded to this author that the entire story was a hoax.

Supposedly, the remarriage occurred after Dayan Roth was released from the hospital on Erev Pesach. The report had it that the Dayan had asked his wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Rechel, if she wanted to remain married to him. When she of course replied in the affirmative, he performed a kiddushin before two witnesses.

It was further reported that Dayan Roths concern was based upon a Trumas HaDeshen.

The report stated:

Rav Roth, it has been explained, was acting based on the psak of the Terumas Hadeshen, who maintains that if a person hovers between life and death and falls unconscious, he should perform a second kiddushin with his wife after he has recovered.

This is a woefully mistranslated Trumas HaDeshen, who discusses another matter entirely.

But first, some background:

There are two people in our Torah tradition who achieved a form of immortality.

The Navi (Malachim II 2:11) informs us that Eliyahu HaNavi ascended to the heavens alive. The Talmud further tells us that Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi fooled the Angel of Death and entered Heaven alive as well. The Gemorah (Ksuvos 77b) explains that Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi was so great that, when he was ill, the Heavenly court instructed the Angel of Death to go to him and fulfill anything that he wishes. Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi requested to see his ultimate resting place in Gan Eden, but first asked the Angel of Death for his knife.

The Angel of Death complied with the requests. When he was shown the place, Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi jumped over to the other side. The Angel of Death held onto him by the edge of his cloak. Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi swore an oath that he will not come back. What was the Angel of Death to do?

Hashem Himself responded and ruled, If Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi in his lifetime had ever annulled an oath, he must go back and cannot enter Gan Eden alive. If he had never annulled an oath then he may remain. The Gemorah explains that, in fact, he had never annulled an oath and Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi was let alive into Heaven.

ARE THEIR WIVES STILL MARRIED?

The first halachic authority to discuss the issue as to whether their wives were to be considered married women or not was Rabbi Yisroel Isserlein the author of the work entitled the Trumas HaDeshen in his Psakim UKesavim (#102). He explains that the Torah forbade the wife of a man  not the wife of an angel (VaYikra 17:5). Rabbi Isserlein lived in Vienna, Austria in the early 1400s. His rulings form the basis of many laws of the Shulchan Aruch. This ruling is also cited in the Bais Shmuel Even HoEzer 17:11.

It is also interesting to note that Eliyahu HaNavis student also ripped Kriyah after the ascension of Eliyahu haNavi. The Gemorah in Moed Kotton 26a understands this as an obligation and we derive our obligation to tear Kriyah for a Rebbe from this very case. It seems that the conversion to a state of immortality would also bring on the halachos of sitting Shiva and other forms of mourning.

WHY WAS IT ADDRESSED?

Another issue is why the issue was addressed by the Trumas haDeshen in the first place. He answers that he addressed it in case something like this should ever happen again. One might also add that it is feasible that a related question might also crop up in the future and the words of this responsa of the Trumas HaDeshen might be most apropos.

The Gemorah in Megillah 7b discusses a case where Rav Zeira came back from the dead on account of Rabba. There, however, the Gemorah does not mention anything about remarrying ones wife. This could perhaps be proof enough that the story is not correct, because Dayan Roth certainly knows the Gemorah. [EDITORS NOTE: Since this story was first posted, there have been conflicting reports from the family members as to whether or not the incident happened. We will hopefully report any new developments]

WHO STARTED THE STORY?

It is possible that the rumors were started by the same people that went to Rav Elyashiv about Dayan Roth a number of years ago, regarding his permitting certain types of marehs  those who were angry at him for permitting the Eiruv in Borough Park. However, this seems to be below that group  since the Dayan has just recovered from a massive heart attack.

THE CASE DISCUSSED IN THE BIRCHEI YOSEF

It happens to be, however, that the case is discussed in the Birchei Yoseph (YD 260), where the husband died and came back to life. He concludes that there is no need to marry again. In his Pesach Aynayim commentary on Megillah 7b, he writes that since he came back to life before he was buried there is no need to remarry his wife. The indication is that if he was actually physically buried, then he would have to remarry his wife.

The Nefesh Chaya (Even HaEzer Siman 3) however, disagrees with this implication and rules that even if there was tchiyas hameisim after burial  there would still be no need to remarry a spouse.

Regardless, I am sure that all readers wish Dayan Roth a complete Refuah Shleimah and nachas from kol maaseh Yadav and all his children.

Dayan Roth heads the Karlsburger Bais Medrash and Bais Din, and is the author of the ten volume Emek Hateshuvah. When this author was in Eretz Yisroel, the Batei Dinim in Bnei Brak that all of Klal Yisroel are somech upon were in communication with him and held him in the highest esteem.

All are asked to say Tehillim for the complete recovery of Rav Yechezkel ben Yehudis

The author can be reached at [email protected]
With the general election in his sights, Republican Donald Trump delivered a sober foreign policy address Wednesday aimed at easing fears about his temperament and readiness to be commander in chief. Rival Ted Cruz made a desperate attempt to jolt the GOP race by tapping Carly Fiorina as his running mate.

Both moves underscored Trumps commanding position in the GOP race. Though the businessman needs to keep winning primaries in order to clinch the nomination before this summers national convention, he has breathing room to start making overtures to general election voters. All Cruz can do is throw obstacles in his path.

Cruz planned to announce Fiorina as his vice presidential pick in Indiana, a state he must win next week in order to keep his White House hopes alive. A Republican with direct knowledge of Fiorinas selection confirmed the pick on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized speak before the official announcement.

Texas Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are trying to keep Trump from securing the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch, thereby pushing the Republican race toward a contested convention. But Trump strengthened his standing this week with a sweep of five Northeast primaries, giving him 77 percent of the delegates he needs.

Trump headed to Indiana Wednesday as well, following his address in Washington.

Before an audience of foreign policy experts in Washington, Trump outlined a doctrine that he said would put American interests first, leaving allies to fend for themselves if they dont contribute financially to back up security agreements. He also vowed to send U.S. troops into combat only as a last resort, a break from years of hawkish Republican foreign policy.

Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war and destruction, he declared in the 38-minute address that was heavy on broad statements about U.S. strength and light on specific policy details. Unlike his rambunctious, free-wheeling rallies, Trump read prepared remarks in a measured tone off a teleprompter.

Trump also used the address to target Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, his expected opponent in a general election. He assailed her for her handling of the deadly 2012 attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, and said that during her tenure as secretary of state, the U.S. had a reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy.

Clintons campaign sees foreign policy as an area ripe for a sharp general election contrast with Trump, given her years at the State Department and his lack of experience in international affairs. In a campaign conference call Wednesday, Clinton supporter and former secretary of state Madeline Albright called Trumps views incoherent.

Ive never seen such a combo of simplistic slogans and contradictions and misstatements in one speech, Albright said. He just underscored the fact that hes running the most reckless and dangerous campaign in modern history.

Like Trump, Clinton emerged from this weeks Northeastern primaries with a stronger claim on her partys nomination. With four victories Tuesday, she now has 90 percent of the delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, campaigning in Indiana as well Wednesday, conceded that the delegate math was not in his favor against Clinton. He said that while his campaign still aims to win the nomination, it will also seek to assemble as many delegates as possible to influence the partys platform and message.

Our job whether we win or whether we do not win is to transform not only our country but the Democratic Party, to open the doors of the Democratic Party to working people and young people and senior citizens in a way that does not exist today, Sanders said.

Cruz hoped that adding Fiorina to his potential ticket would be a draw for Republicans desperate to keep Clinton out of the White House. Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, was frequently praised for her tough criticism of Clinton during her own presidential campaign.

Fiorina dropped out of the GOP race after the New Hampshire primary and endorsed Cruz. Shes since been his most active surrogate, making frequent campaign appearances alongside him and on her own.

Wednesdays planned announcement was highly unusual. Candidates typically wait until theyve secured their partys nomination before picking a running mate, in part of avoid appearing as though theyre getting ahead of the will of the voters.

But in Cruzs case, the announcement seemed aimed at keeping up the appearance that he has a claim to the nomination and potentially attracting more voters to his campaign in Indiana and other remaining states  including Fiorinas home state of California.

Asked earlier on Fox & Friends about Cruz potentially naming a running mate, Trump said, To me it looks ridiculous, hes not going to get the nomination.

Trump emerged with more than 50 percent of the Republican votes in Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Maryland, and scored over 60 percent in Delaware and Rhode Island. Similarly, Clinton won convincingly in four of the five contests, scoring 56 percent in Pennsylvania and 63 percent in Maryland  the two biggest contests of the night. Sanders won the Rhode Island primary with 55 percent of the vote.

(AP)
Bernie Sanders movement for a political revolution is reaching a crossroads even as he promises to campaign against Hillary Clinton through the June primaries and into the Philadelphia convention.

The Vermont senator said in an interview with The Associated Press after losses to Clinton in Tuesdays primaries in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut that he would now seek as many delegates as possible to fight for a progressive party platform, acknowledging that he had only a very narrow path to the nomination.

Every person in this country should have the right to vote for whom they want to see as president of the United States and what they want to see the agenda, Democratic agenda, look like, Sanders told The AP late Tuesday.

Sanders said at a rally at Purdue University in Indiana on Wednesday that he was in this campaign to win and become the Democratic nominee, adding, if we do not win, we intend to win every delegate that we can so that when we go to Philadelphia in July were going to have the votes to put together the strongest progressive agenda that any political party has ever seen.

Sanders won the Rhode Island primary on Tuesday, adding to his trove of more than 1,300 delegates, but his loss in New York last week and Tuesdays defeats in the delegate-rich states of Pennsylvania and Maryland is likely to change the focus to shaping the Democratic platform, Clintons policy agenda and his movement to address income inequality and the campaign finance system.

Sanders hopes to score a victory in next weeks Indiana primary and is looking ahead to upcoming contests in Oregon and California but he remains about 300 pledged delegates behind Clinton. He has vowed to compete until the final District of Columbia primary in June.

Clintons campaign and Democratic leaders are watching closely to see if Sanders will continue to raise issues that could damage Clintons chances in November or whether he will encourage his youthful following to support Clinton.

I would hope that there is a beginning of a pivot for him to make it really clear to his supporters whats at stake against the Republicans, said former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who supports Clinton.

Clintons allies note that Republican Donald Trump has been co-opting Sanders pitch against Clinton, which the businessman acknowledged on Wednesday.

Bernie Sanders has a message thats interesting. Im going to be taking a lot of things Bernie said and using it, Trump said Wednesday on MSNBCs Morning Joe. When he said Bad judgment I said, Soundbyte!'

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said Sanders had every right to compete until the end of the primaries as Clinton did in 2008. But he expressed hope Sanders would point out their differences but not assail her judgment or character anymore.

Rendell, a Clinton supporter, said that could undermine Sanders effort to address wealth inequality and campaign finance reform. If he believes what hes talking about, hes got to understand that hes got to help her by toning it down, Rendell said.

At rallies, Sanders has sent mixed signals during the past week over whether he will ease up on Clinton. He has demanded that Clinton release the transcripts of her lucrative private speeches to Wall Street, a point he made in Indiana, and has critiqued Clinton on other issues like trade and the war in Iraq. But in other events Sanders has largely steered clear of Clinton, focusing instead on Trump.

In the AP interview, Sanders bristled when asked if he would continue to contrast his record with Clintons. Of course. Im getting attacked by Hillary Clinton and her surrogates every damn day. Every day were getting attacked and our record is being distorted, he said.

We are trying to run an issue-oriented campaign and a campaign means that you talk about your record, what you believe in, as opposed to your opponents. Thats what Clinton does. Of course were going to do that, he said.

(AP)
Donald Trump strained to lay out a clear vision of his America first foreign policy on Wednesday, vowing to substitute hard-headed realism for what he called a post-Cold War era replete with U.S. national security failures.

Yet the Republican presidential front-runner outlined no strategy for how hed make the United States at the same time a consistent and unpredictable force in the world. And he didnt appear to allay the concerns of U.S. and international critics  Republicans at home as well as Democrats  who see him as unfit for the responsibilities of commander in chief.

America first will be the major and overriding theme of my administration, Trump declared, echoing motifs from his campaign that is now close to sealing the GOP nomination.

Delivering his lines in a more sober, restrained manner than usual to cast himself as presidential material, the billionaire businessman and reality TV star toned down or omitted several of his most explosive  and oft-repeated  barbs. He made no reference to forcing Mexico to pay for a wall across the nations Southern border. He also didnt revisit the idea of allowing Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia or any other country to develop nuclear weapons for self-defense purposes.

Instead, Trump took aim at President Barack Obamas embrace of an Iran nuclear agreement, Obamas failure to eliminate the Islamic State group and other examples of what he termed a foreign policy of randomness and chaos. His criticism extended to Republicans, too, assailing President George W. Bush for the Iraq war and mocking a foreign policy establishment of old people who have scoffed at his diplomatic and national security credentials.

Its time to shake the rust off Americas foreign policy, Trump told academics, reporters and a smattering of supporters in a Washington hotel ballroom after being introduced by one such old voice of the foreign policy elite  Zalmay Khalilzad, a Bush-appointed former ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations.

My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people and American security above all else, he said. It has to be first. Has to be. That will be the foundation of every single decision that I will make.

Trumps new direction in American foreign policy was vague even by the standards of presidential campaigns.

The U.S. approach to fighting IS will be strong under a Trump administration, he vowed, offering no indication of troop levels he might authorize. He intends to ease tensions with Russia while negotiating from a position of strength, but he wouldnt say what that means for U.S. sanctions punishing Moscow for annexing Ukrainian territory. He said hed balance Americas massive commercial deficit with China quickly, without a word about tariff policy or existing trade agreements.

Trump also contradicted his own broad-brush approach to foreign policy. He said at one point that the best way to achieve his goals was through disciplined, deliberate and consistent policy. Later, however, he exhorted the nation to be more unpredictable in how it combats enemies.

We have to be unpredictable starting now, Trump declared in the 38-minute speech hosted by the Center for the National Interest, an organization founded by President Richard Nixon.

Democratic and Republican opponents immediately pounced on the speechs substance, or lack thereof.

No one wants an unpredictable ally, said James Stavridis, the retired Navy admiral who served as NATOs top commander in Europe from 2009 to 2013. It sounds like isolationism.

The America First anthem is precisely what the world worries about, said Christopher Hill, a Bush-appointed former ambassador to Iraq.

But Republican former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich voiced support.

This was a serious foreign policy speech by Trump, he tweeted. It is worth reading and thinking about. It will be ridiculed by Washington elites.

Fresh off a sweep of five Northeastern primaries and on a clearer path to nomination, Trump repeated assertions that U.S. allies must contribute more to international security agreements, such as NATO, to reap the benefits of American military protection. Yet he tried to assure allies the U.S. would recommit to them if hes elected president.

Some of the messaging was no different than Obamas, Bushs or any other recent U.S. leader. We should seek common ground based on mutual interests, Trump said of Russia and China, two leading geopolitical rivals.

But his criticism of the last 15 years of U.S. policy in the Mideast was particularly pointed, coming after weeks when Obama himself has lamented the poor post-war planning in Libya. Trumps likely opponent in the general election, Democrat Hillary Clinton, was Obamas secretary of state at the time and a key architect of the effort.

Weve made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before, said Trump, lumping in Obamas abandonment of U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, a record of recriminations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a refusal to enforce his own red line for military action after Syrian President Bashar Assad unleashed chemical weapons.

Even before Trumps address, Clintons campaign blasted his use of the most reckless rhetoric of any major presidential candidate in modern history.

Some prominent Republican national security voices, too, expressed dismay.

This is worse than Obama, said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an early loser in the presidential primary season.

(AP)
Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended from Britains main opposition Labour Party after he defended a lawmaker whose membership was put on hold over anti-Semitic postings on social media.

Livingstone described Hitler as a supporter of Zionism as part of his defense of lawmaker Naz Shah, who was thrown out of the party in the House of Commons on Wednesday for posts suggesting Israelis should be transported to the United States.

The controversy has distracted attention from Labours campaign for a series of elections across the country on May 5, the first such test under new leader Jeremy Corbyn. The party is seeking to minimize seat losses in voting for local councils in England and the legislative assemblies in Wales and Scotland amid a fall in support, though its the favorite to win the mayoral contest in London.

Ken Livingstone has been suspended by the Labour Party, pending an investigation, for bringing the party into disrepute, Labour said in an emailed statement. Another Commons lawmaker, John Mann, who accused Livingstone in a televised confrontation of being a Nazi apologist, has also been called before party officials to explain his actions.

Livingstone said in a series of media appearances Thursday that Shah, a Muslim who represents Bradford West in northern England in the House of Commons, had been the victim of a witch hunt. While her comments, made before her election to Parliament in 2015, were over the top, and incredibly rude, she is not anti-Semitic and has the right to criticize Israel, Livingstone said.

We cant confuse criticism of the government of Israel with antisemitism, Livingstone said. If they find any evidence that shes anti-Semitic shell be expelled from the party, but I dont think they will.

Prime Minister David Cameron said its clear Labour has a problem with anti-Semitism.

Theyve got to recognize that anti-Semitism is like racism, its unacceptable in a modern political party and every party facing this problem has got to deal with it, Cameron told an audience at an event in Peterborough, eastern England.

Sadiq Khan, Labours candidate for London mayor and a Muslim, called for Livingstone to be thrown out of the party, as did Chris Bryant, the shadow leader of the House of Commons.

Hitlers policy when he first came to power was to move Germanys Jews to Israel, Livingstone told BBC Televisions Daily Politics program. Thats a historical fact.

If you are Jewish, and you watch those interviews, how can you be expected to feel about Labour? Rob Ford, professor of politics at Manchester University, said in an interview. The party has to ask itself what it could possibly do to make its claim that its serious about tackling anti-Semitism credible. Theyve got a very serious credibility problem here.

Livingstone, 70, was expelled from Labour in 2000 after he said he would stand as an independent against Frank Dobson, the official party candidate, in the race to become the first elected mayor of London. Livingstone won and was allowed to rejoin the party, retaining the post in the 2004 election. He was then twice defeated by Boris Johnson from the Conservative Party in 2008 and 2013.

(c) 2016, Bloomberg  Thomas Penny
[VIDEOS IN EXTENDED ARTICLE]

The Johannesburg Magistrate Court denied bail for Rabbi Eliezer Berland, head of the Breslov Shuvu Banim Kehilla, and ordered him to remain in custody. The court said that Rabbi Berland was a flight risk and he was therefore denied bail.

In court, the rabbi was described as an elderly man in poor health.

His defense assured the court he has ties to South Africa and wont flee if granted bail.

However, the State pointed out he fled Holland while on bail a few years ago after being arrested and set to be extradited to Israel.

The State argued that if he ignored his bail conditions once, what would stop him from doing it again.

His lawyer, Themba Langa, says the magistrate ruled that he is a flight risk despite his age and has access to money and a number of passports.

But Langa says they will appeal.

The magistrate emphasized the fact that the rabbi did not comply with bail conditions in Holland and the court wasnt convinced that, if granted bail, he would do the same.

Tensions were running high among chassidim, who were waiting to hear the verdict, if the Rabbi will be extradited to Israel or be released. Thousands of his chassidim recited Tikun Klalli at Meoras hamachpela last night..

Israel Police have been after the Rabbi for a number of years, hoping to finally hear the extradition request is granted to send him home to face an investigation based on complaints by multiple women against him in Israel.

The ravs saga during recent years has been difficult as he has been on the run, entering and fleeing from a number of countries as was reported by YWN-ISRAEL.

VIDEOS BELOW ARE FROM LAST WEEKS COURT PROCEEDINGS:
Syrian President Bashar Assad scored a minor, if bizarre, publicity victory Thursday, receiving a part-time state senator from America at a time when U.S. officials have repeatedly asserted Assad has lost his legitimacy to rule the war-torn country.

Outspoken Virginia state Sen. Dick Black  who resigned as co-chairman of Sen. Ted Cruzs presidential campaign in Virginia just before his trip  told reporters outside Damascus it would be beneficial for the U.S. to speak directly to Assad.

Black has no role in official U.S. foreign policy, and its highly unusual for a state lawmaker to contradict the State Department line. He is one of the most vocal social conservatives in Virginias General Assembly, and has drawn national attention for his opposition to abortion and gay rights. In 2014, he raised eyebrows when he sent a letter to Assad praising him. It was posted on the Syrian presidents Facebook page.

The U.S. has called publicly for Assad to step aside in the wake of a brutal crackdown against demonstrations demanding his ouster in 2011. The country has since descended into all-out war.

Black, however, said there is no moderate opposition in Syria.

I wish that the U.S. could take a stronger stand and recognize that most of these groups are simply terrorists, he said.

The senator called on the U.S. to lift its economic sanctions against the government, saying they have crippled the countrys ability to provide its wounded with medical care.

But various human rights groups say the government and its allies have targeted hospitals as a strategy of war.

A report by Physicians for Human Rights last year said the Syrian government systematically violated the principle of medical neutrality by targeting medical facilities and doctors; detaining patients; and arresting, torturing, and executing doctors.

The Syria conflict has claimed over a quarter-million lives, according to the U.N., which stopped counting casualties last year. Around half of the countrys population has been displaced.

(AP)
A lawyer for one of the former allies of Gov. Chris Christie accused in the George Washington Bridge lane-closing case says he wants access to the governors cellphone.

Attorney Michael Baldassare said Thursday that he will pursue emails, documents and Christies phone as he fights to have charges against former Port Authority of New York and New Jersey deputy executive director Bill Baroni tossed.

The government alleges the 2013 lane closures were orchestrated to create traffic jams in the town of Fort Lee to punish its mayor for not endorsing Christie. Christie has not been charged.

Baldassare says that recently received evidence bolsters the case that Baroni and co-defendant Bridget Kelly shouldnt have been charged.

U.S. District Judge Susan Wigenton gave attorneys time to submit additional filings before deciding whether to let the case proceed.

(AP)
Bonus ban: Wier Group chief executive Keith Cochrane

Millions of shareholders turned on the bosses of some of the Footsies biggest names in anger over fat cat pay.

In one of the most significant results of the shareholder spring revolt so far, engineering firm Weir Group lost a plan to bring in a lucrative share deal for its top executives.

More than 72 per cent of shareholders voted down the pay policy which could have seen bosses take home millions in share options regardless of how well the company performed.

While many of the pay revolts this year have not been binding, the one against Weir was, so it must go back to the drawing board to come up with a new bonus scheme for bosses.

Chief executive Keith Cochrane, got 1.07million last year (down from 1.46million the previous year), and would have been awarded a payout worth 90 per cent of his salary regardless of performance but shareholders stopped it because it was a binding remuneration policy which is set every three years.

Weir chairman Charles Berry said the new policy had meant that although pay was not linked to direct performance criteria it instead closely aligned senior management incentives with shareholder interests, as their value is dependent on share price performance.

He said Weir had extensively consulted shareholders and that he looked forward to further engagement with them on remuneration.

The FTSE 250 firm, which has been hit by the tumbling oil price and cutbacks, will now operate under the pay policy which was approved by shareholders in 2014 and which runs until next year.

Drug giant Shire was the other big name to suffer a significant revolt, at its annual meeting in Dublin. Some 49.5 per cent of shareholders voted against its pay report where chief executive Flemming rnskov was awarded a 25 per cent pay rise to nearly 15million for 2015.

Oliver Strawbridge, senior assistant company secretary, said it had engaged with major shareholders and acknowledged the protest.

Shire, which is buying Baxalta for 22billion, has said that under rnskov total shareholder return between April 2013 and December 2015 had risen 128 per cent and only 10 per cent of his award was fixed pay.

However many shareholder advisory groups have spoken out about the over-reliance on share awards.

Stefan Stern, director of campaign group The High Pay Centre, said: Packages need to be simpler. Linking bonuses to the share price builds in volatility and completely unpredictable outcomes.

Most of us just get paid in cash to do a job. Why should CEOs be so different? Agree a figure, and if the boss does a bad job you can sack him or her.

BP was the first company to court shareholder anger this month when chief executive Bob Dudleys 13.9million pay was voted against by 59 per cent of shareholders.

A shareholder revolt was also expected at the annual meeting of Barclays yesterday.

In total, 6.4 per cent voted against the report which recommended that chief executive Jes Staley, who joined in December, would get 1.2million in annual salary, 1.15million in other pay and annual bonuses worth a potential 80 per cent of his salary and long-term share awards worth a possible 1.44million.

The Barclays board was told by one investor that remuneration had got wildly out of kilter.
Offering advice on money to people is a minefield.

Pitfalls range from being shot down for talking from a position of privilege, to the prospect that you get blamed for someones failure to do their own research if something goes wrong.

And these potential traps dont even take into account the financial industrys desire to claim the word advice as only suiting its narrow definition, rather than its common usage in the English language.

Think about this for too long and your initial piece of helpful advice loses any real-life feel and veers off into the realms of the over-crafted line.

Our readers shared their golden nuggets of advice they would give someone about money

It should therefore come as no surprise that the personal finance advice that a bunch experts said they would give an 18-year-old this week looked slightly over-considered.

What was more interesting was the answers that our readers delivered in reply to the question in the articles headline: What's the one money tip you'd give to an 18-year-old?

These carried the off-the-cuff benefits that the experts suggestions didnt.

They range from simple life rules, such as earn first and spend second, or buy things because you need them, not just because you want them, to some short practical advice on money-saving, credit cards and investing in your future.

Id suggest that each one of them provides a useful pointer to an 18-year-old starting out their independent financial life, as did many of the other comments from the original article that I havent picked.

We place a huge burden on young peoples financial shoulders nowadays. As they start university or work they become the target of some very clever industries offering them credit so they can profit, from banks and credit card firms, to mobile phone companies and car dealers.

At the same time they face tough job prospects, huge student debt, uncertain career paths and a very high cost of putting a roof over their head.

Forget the dangers of offering advice, this is the real minefield. So, if youve got a money tip that you think it would be helpful to tell a young person, do it.

Better still, tell them the mistakes you made too - those are the things we really learn from.

What's the money tip you'd give an 18-year-old? My favourite suggestions

Surely one of the best and simplest pieces of advice would be do not use credit cards unless you can pay off the entire balance. SirSparky

Get a credit card ASAP, Pay off in full every month, never miss the monthly date. Ideally pay by direct debit. Never never miss a payment. Credit card helps a build credit record. Wysiwyg

Money is for spending but always remember that someone is willing to sell you a product or service because they will make a profit on the deal. ChrisinOxon

Many experts tend to focus on gaining your wealth via making more money either through work or through investments. They ignore for the most part the simple (not easy) process of making sure you control your expenditure and over the long haul keep a surplus of income, from whatever avenue, over and above your expenditure. In companies/business we call this free cashflow and the best businesses to back are those that do this. Likewise, an individual focussing on the same thing will find ultimately it brings you long term rewards even if in the short term you may feel as though you are occasionally missing out on things you might like to do or have. SC, Preston

Young people of today should educate themselves in consumer finance - mortgages, credit cards, investments, pensions etc to be able to make informed decisions. Knowledge is power. Rent one of mine

Take control of your finances by keeping a written record of all income and expenditure and get into the savings habit as soon as you can, even if it is only for a few pounds per month. Make a point of learning about the basics of money management and develop good arithmetical skills so that you are not totally reliant on calculators or smart phone apps. Finally, as many others have correctly stated, do not routinely spend more than you earn, especially if it is to keep up with the lifestyle of others. Dead Wood

Never too young to start a pension, retirement creeps up on you before you realise. Mycatmurphy

Don't put off your ' to do ' list until you retire, your body won't oblige. Davek

Earn first and spend second. George of Wentworth

Take your time trying to find your soulmate, getting divorced and maintenance payments can be costly. Djh1975

Buy things because you need them, not just because you want them. Dave

My old Dad used to say if at the end of the month you have loose change in your pocket then you have had a good month but if you have notes in your hip pocket then it has been even better. Simple don't spend. Doug

Plus my own eight simple lessons about money

Save a rainy day fund Learn to love compound interest and returns  start small, save early and save regularly Buy things that last and are worth it Ask why is this person trying to sell this to me? Enjoy the money that you can afford to spare and be generous Borrow carefully and wisely  and pay it off Invest over the long-term  and learn to love compounding even more Your power to earn is the thing most likely to make you richer




The economic slowdown in the United States was even sharper than in the United Kingdom at the start of the year  sparking fresh fears for the global outlook.

Official figures in Washington showed American output rose by just over 0.1 per cent in the first quarter of the year as storm clouds gathered around the world.

That was far slower than 0.4 per cent growth rate seen in Britain and undermined claims that the UK is suffering because of the looming referendum on membership of the European Union.

Slowdown: Official figures in Washington showed American output rose by just over 0.1% in the first quarter of the year as storm clouds gathered around the world

George Osborne was this week accused of talking down the economy after he warned that the threat of Brexit is weighing on our economy.

His claims were immediately undermined by experts who said economies around the world have slowed in recent months amid turmoil on financial markets and worries about China and other emerging nations.

Jonathan Loynes, chief economist at Capital Economics, said: The slowdown in the US would seem to suggest pretty strongly that it is a global phenomenon.

Its certainly our feeling that the UK slowdown is due to factors other than Brexit concerns.

Howard Archer, chief UK economist at research group IHS Global Insight, said: You certainly cannot pin all of the UK slowdown down to uncertainties over the EU referendum.

Donald Trump: Lower tax pledge

Clearly global economic uncertainties have had an impact as well as the financial market turmoil earlier in the year.

Gross domestic product in the US  the worlds biggest economy  rose at an annual rate of 0.5pc in the first quarter of the year as consumer spending growth slowed, business investment plunged and exports declined.

It followed annual growth of 1.4 per cent in the final three months of 2015. The slowdown in the US fuelled speculation that the Federal Reserve will not raise rates again until the end of this year.

An annual rate of growth of 0.5 per cent is the equivalent of quarterly growth of 0.125 per cent on the measure favoured in Europe  putting the US well behind the UK in recent months.

Britains economy grew by 0.6 per cent in the final three months of last year before the rate of expansion slowed to 0.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year.

Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, said: The UK is an open economy so it is heavily influenced by the global environment.

'We estimate that the global economy grew at its weakest rate for just over three years in the first quarter, which clearly hit our exports.

The economy is once again likely to be a key battleground in the US Presidential elections later this year with the Democrat and Republican front-runners  Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump respectively  offering widly different policies.

While Clinton has promised more spending, higher taxes and more regulations, Trump has promised less spending, lower taxes and fewer regulations.
Victrex shares faltered yesterday after the firm revealed that it had been the subject of an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US.

Its medical arm Invibio was at the centre of the probe. The business makes a material known as PEEK which is used in implant devices to treat spinal conditions.

Its a durable, lightweight product also used in smart phones, aeroplanes, knee implants and dentistry.

The FTCs gripe was that Invibio was getting its customers, which are typically companies that make medical devices, to sign long-term exclusivity agreements which meant they couldnt use other suppliers. It meant the firm could keep prices high even when new competitors came into the industry.

Probe: Victrex's medical arm Invibio makes a material known as PEEK which is used in implant devices to treat spinal conditions

The commission has told Invibio that it shouldnt do this any more  it is not an illegal practice but the regulator is concerned it could be anti-competitive.

Invibio must now contact existing suppliers and tell them they are allowed to use other companies if they wish. The FTC is not taking any punitive action. Invibio accounts for around 50million of the groups total revenues, which were 263million last year.

Still, spooked investors pushed Victrex 6.9 per cent, or 104p, to 1414p.

The ongoing bidding war for European retailer Darty drew towards its conclusion when Steinhoff chucked in the towel.

The South African firm had been battling French group Fnac for ownership of the electricals retailer and earlier this week Fnac made a third, final offer of 170p a share.

Steinhoff finally said it would not increase its bid of 160p a share as raising its offer would no longer create sufficient value for shareholders.

Darty shares had thrived as the bidding war dragged on, advancing from 131.5p to 172p in a week. Yesterday it finished flat at 168.7p.

After a dismal days trading on Wednesday, Sepura bounced back. The firm had suffered after a disappointing trading update.

After sleeping on it, investors had apparently decided that things werent as bad as they seemed.

Its shares rebounded 18.4 per cent, or 9p, to 58p. It still has some way to recover before it gets back to 112p, where it started the week.

The FTSE 100 eased back 2.5 points to 6322.4. Rolls-Royce, among the biggest risers of the day, saw its share price rev up on reports that staff have been told to push cost-savings to 400million. Its shares accelerated 3.1 per cent, or 21p, to 694p.

Miners accounted for many of the top movers on the market. Anglo American rallied 8 per cent, or 56.3p, to 753.2p on news of the sale of its Brazilian phosphates business, while Rio Tinto climbed 4.3 per cent, or 95.5p, to 2329.5p after it announced plans to repay 0.9billion of its gross debt ahead of schedule.

In the small-cap index mining company Petropavlovsks shares sparkled after it revealed an agreement to purchase Russian gold mining business Amur Zoloto.

In its annual results Petropavlovsk also announced a joint venture with Russian conglomerate GMD Gold to finance the construction of one of its projects.

Petropavlovsk was hit hard when the gold price crashed in 2013, and a year later refinanced. Investors bullish on bullion pushed the share price on 3.8 per cent, or 0.3p, to 8.2p after good news yesterday.

Howdens Joinery got a boost yesterday after a trading update for the first four months of the year showed revenue was up 8.7 per cent.

The firm said its performance was in line with expectations despite currency movements affecting its pricing. Shares gained 1.7 per cent, or 8.4p, or 493.7p

County Durham-based Kromek, which develops radiation detectors for medical, security and nuclear companies, saw its shares boosted after announcing it had won a five-year contract worth 8.6million.

Kromeks radiation detector technology will be incorporated into bone density diagnostics systems. Shares advanced 5.6 per cent, or 1.8p, to 33.3p on the news.

It was an instant share price update for IMImobile after it appointed a new non-executive chairman.

The technology company provides instant messaging software which businesses use to communicate with customers who are shopping online.

Yesterday Vishwanath Alluri, who founded the company in 2000, stepped down as non-exec chairman.
Shares boost: South Africa oil workers on the platfoorm at one of Tullows oil rigs

Shares in West Africa-focused oil explorer Tullow Oil rose nearly 8 per cent after lenders agreed to extend its loans.

Irish-based Tullow has cut spending to cope with the continued weak oil prices that have fallen 60 per cent since a 2014 peak of $115 a barrel.

Yesterday, it said it plans to cut annual spending by 69million to around 700million.

Its debt is 3billion and it has an available unused debt of 900million and has extended its lending facility by a year to April 2018.

Tullow hopes to restart production at its Jubilee oil field in Ghana next month.

The companys West African production averaged 59,200 barrels a day and it is on target for first oil in July from its TEN project, which is nearly complete.

Tullow, which is venturing into East Africa, said its appraisal programme in Kenya showed fields there could hold as much as 1billion barrels, if more exploration is done.
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By Patrick Donachie

The preferences of Queens voters mirrored city and statewide trends in the April 19 New York presidential primaries, with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump claiming dominant victories throughout most of the borough.

Donald Trump handily bested his Republican rivals, according to an analysis from the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center that was based on unofficial city Board of Election returns from the night of the election. Trump won overwhelmingly in Middle Village, Howard Beach and throughout much of northeastern Queens.

Michael Krasner, a professor of political science at Queens College and the co-director of the Taft Institute for Government, said the Republican results were expected in the context of Trumps appeal with white working-class Republicans who desire a strong leader and who view illegal immigration and shifting social changes with trepidation.

They want someone who is going to cut through red tape and procedure and just get things done, he said. And thats what Trump promises to do.

Krasner also speculated that Queens native Trump enjoyed a hometown advantage from being so closely associated with the city, and said U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)likely damaged his chances in New York when he criticized New York values during a Jan. 14 presidential debate.

Krasner said the Democratic contest also reflected national trends. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent running as a Democrat, won in areas like Ridgewood, Astoria and Middle Village, which have large concentrations of white, younger working-class voters. Clinton prevailed in northeastern Queens neighborhoods with sizable percentages of older voters, as well as in areas like Jamaica, St. Albans and Queens Village that had higher rates of African-American voters.

Clinton has had from the beginning a substantial advantage in African-American communities, Krasner said, and noted that her prominence on the national stage worked to her advantage with older voters. Shes a more familiar candidate than Bernie. Its been hard for him to make a dent with people who have a long acquaintance with Clinton.

Krasner said while New York states closed primary system likely hurt Sanders chances because independents were unable to vote for him, he had still expected Sanders to capture liberal enclaves throughout the city that eventually went to Clinton, including the West Village and the Upper West Side in Manhattan. He speculated that Sanders stances on gun control may have hurt him with city liberals.

Registered Democrats in Queens vastly outnumber other parties, according to state Board of Elections data. According to the BOE, Queens had 722,740 registered Democrats as of April 1, as opposed to 123,479 registered Republicans and 27,796 registered Independents.

In 2016, 28,549 votes were cast in the Republican presidential primary in Queens, according to unofficial vote tallies from the BOE. In the 2012 Republican presidential primary, only 7,217 votes were cast, according to certified BOE data. President Barack Obama ran unopposed on the Democratic line in 2012.

On average, 33 percent of registered Democrats and 26 percent of registered Republicans in the city voted in the 2016 primary, according to the CUNY analysis.

A spokeswoman from the League for Women Voters said turnout in the primary had surpassed expectations.
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By Patrick Donachie

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton gave a robust defense of the police officers who shot and killed a man in South Ozone Park April 17, as others continued to call for a special prosecutor to investigate the incident.

Im very confident, very confident that our version of that story will stand up. That suspect was armed, Bratton said in a news conference Monday. The best way to not get shot by a New York City police officer is not carry a gun and not raise that gun toward them.

According to police, at about 1:30 a.m. April 17, two officers from 106th Precinct approached George Tillman, 32, a licensed electrician and father of five from Maryland, after they allegedly saw him with an open container of alcohol while leaning against the outside of an SUV. Police claimed that the officers also saw the butt of a firearm sticking out of his waistband.. The two officers approached Tillman, who then fled the scene, according to the NYPD. The two officers chased him and were joined by three others. They reached the corner of 116th Avenue and 135th Street, at which point police said that Tillman tried to pull his weapon. Four officers fired on him. According to the medical examiners office, Tillman was shot 11 times and died from a fatal gunshot wound to the head.

The NYPD subsequently tweeted out a picture of a weapon they said was recovered at the scene. However, state Sen. James Sanders Jr. (D-South Ozone Park) said there were eyewitness reports that Tillman was not armed and noted that he had seen several videos of the moments leading up to the shooting that prompted him to ask state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to appoint a special prosecutor.

Calls to the attorney generals office were not returned by press time .

Queens District Attorney Robert Brown opposed appointing a special prosecutor and called on Sanders to make any information he had about the shooting available to his office.

Under the law, responsibility for the investigation into the facts and circumstances surrounding the death of George Tillman last weekend rests with my office, Brown said in a statement. Let me assure everyone that our investigation will be thorough, fair and impartial. In the meanwhile, demands for the appointment of a special prosecutor are neither helpful nor productive  nor does there exist any basis in law or in fact therefor.

On April 21, Sanders, members of the Tillman family and the community held a gathering at St. Clement Pope Church in South Ozone Park to inform attendees about updates in the investigation. Rev. Al Sharpton also recently supported the appointment of a special prosecutor.

.
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By Bill Parry

On Earth Day last Friday, City Comptroller Scott Stringer blasted a tax giveaway that allows airlines at LaGuardia and JFK airports to avoid paying city sales tax on airline fuel.

The exemption costs the city anywhere between $100 million and $200 million a year  revenue which, he said, could be used to modernize and green the airports that are consistently ranked among the worst in the country.

Stringer noted that a tax on jet fuel would create a new funding stream to help support Gov. Andrew Cuomos $5 billion project to reconstruct LaGuardia and build a new rail link that would reduce the number of passengers arriving and leaving by private car.

U.S. airlines have been flying for free when it comes to paying a sales tax on jet fuel, and its time to make them pay their fair share, Stringer said. Ending this giveaway would help New York City and the Port Authority secure the funds they need to modernize and green our airports, helping cut down on soaring emissions from the aviation industry.

Unlike millions of New Yorkers who pay the citys 4.5 percent sales tax everytime they fill up at the pump and with the price of jet fuel at a 12-year low, Stinger said the carriers racked up a record $29 billion in profits last year. Airlines are hit with refueling sales taxes in San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles County, according to Stringer.

Theres no good reason why airlines should be exempt from a tax that the rest of us pay every day, whether we are buying a sandwich or filling up at the pump, Stringer said. By levying city sales tax on jet fuel, our city can invest in transforming our airports into models of sustainability that can help mitigate the enormous footprint of air travel.

Joseph Sitt, founder of Global Gateway Alliance, which advocates for improved airports, backed Stringers call for a new city tax to help fund airport improvement projects.

New York airports need billions to finally make them world class instead of Third World,so dedicated new revenue sources are the right approach, Sitt said.
By Mel Gurtov

Sanctions on North Korea have failed.





North Korea has now been sanctioned five times by the United Nations Security Council for its nuclear and missile tests: resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), 2094 (2013) and 2270 (2016). UNSC Resolution 2270 is the strongest one yet, spelling out in great detail the proscribed goods and requiring that all parties neither import them from nor export them to North Korea. Each resolution obliges the members to carry out the terms of the sanctions and (as the April 15 press statement of the UNSC says) facilitate a peaceful and comprehensive solution through dialogue. This is a case of mission impossible for two fundamental reasons: the sanctions will not work, and the fact of them impedes any chance for a peaceful and comprehensive solution.

Foremost among the obstacles to an effective North Korea sanctions regime is smuggling along the China-DPRK (North Korea) border. Military items disguised as ordinary goods seem easily able to evade detection thanks to inconsistent inspection by border guards, bribery, false declarations, and North Korean firms based in China that actually belong to military-run trading companies. Since these practices are surely well known to the Chinese authorities, it seems fair to assume they have no strong interest in preventing or at least substantially reducing itsomething they could accomplish with a more intensive border inspection process. That China is not doing so no doubt reflects its oft-stated position that the North Korean nuclear issue is the result of other countries policies, not Chinas, hence that resolving it is others responsibility, mainly the US.

This is not to say that China is refusing to follow the UNSCs latest resolution (UNSCR 2270). Beijings criticism of North Koreas nuclear and missile tests has become increasingly harsh and open over the last few years, and voting to approve UN sanctions is one way to underscore its criticism. Reports indicate, for example, that China has closed its ports to North Korean coal and iron ore exports. But the Chinese have created a large loophole. At their insistence, 2270 allows for humanitarian trade affecting peoples livelihood. Thus, as Chinas foreign ministry spokesperson said on March 4, We will earnestly observe the UNSCR 2270. The resolution prohibits the DPRKs export of coal, iron ore and iron, but those that are deemed essential for peoples livelihood and have no connection with the funding of the DPRKs nuclear and missile programs will not be affected. As a result, Chinas exports to North Korea actually rose about 15 percent in the first three months of 2016 compared with 2015, and Chinese imports rose nearly 11 percent.

These figures come from a Chinese customs official. They may underplay the actual trade figures, which are said to have been deleted from official PRC trade reports in order to hide the volume and character of the trade.

China is hardly alone when it comes to evading sanctions on North Korea. The DPRK operates numerous entities that do business abroad in illicit goods. Namibia, Iran, and Russia are usually mentioned in this regard. Two specialists call these trading entities North Korea, Inc. Their research concludes that sanctions have actually improved North Koreas ability to procure components for its nuclear and missile programs.

The reason is that the trading firms, mainly in China and Hong Kong, have been willing and able to pay a higher price for these goods to middlemen, who in turn are willing to take greater risks to sell. The writers acknowledge the great difficulty in getting ahead of the curve when it comes to identifying the North Korean firms and finding ways to put them out of business. In the end, they say, only diplomacy will resolve the problem.

Reflagging and renaming North Korean ships is another common tactic, as is falsely claiming a ships destination as (for example) China rather than the DPRK. For example, anunpublished UN report describes how the North Koreans used a Singapore branch of a Chinese bank to pay for their ships to transport weapons through the Panama Canal. Then there is the story of a British banker who, according to the Panama Papers, set up a front company in Pyongyang, registered in the British Virgin Islands, to sell and procure arms.

North Koreas military program also benefits from the fine line that often exists between civilian and military items. Commercial trucks, for example, can be used to mount a variety of weapons. A Chinese-made truck used in both China and North Korea for mining operations has reportedly been adapted by the North Korean military for its new mobile rocket-propelled artillery system. Six mobile intercontinental missiles (possibly fakes or mock-ups) paraded in Pyongyang in April 2012 likewise were mounted on Chinese-made trucks.

When all is said and done, the most likely scenario is that the new round of sanctions will produce no better results than previous rounds. This is so not only because North Korea has many ways to procure items needed for its military purposes, and plenty of willing private sellers. China, as North Koreas principal trade partner for many years, is not going to watch the North disintegrate in spite of Beijings discomfort over Pyongyangs nuclear and missile programs. Chinas leaders will do more than previously to enforce sanctions, such as inspection of cargo bound for and incoming from North Korea; but they will do a good deal less than the US wants, especially when it comes to border inspections. For just as President Obama has hawkish advisers who want to turn the screws on North Korea even tighter in hopes of regime change, President Xi has people around him who think resisting US pressure is strategically more important to China than undermining Kim Jong-un. Secretary of State John Kerry may well say that Chinas approach has not worked, and we cannot continue business as usual. But the Chinese have a perfectly good comeback, namely, that Washington and Pyongyang must find a way back to the negotiating table.





The views expressed in this article are the author\s own and do not necessarily reflect The Times Of Earth\s editorial policy.
The Austrian parliament on Wednesday adopted one of Europe\s toughest asylum laws, as the country\s political leaders struggle to halt the surging far-right which is leading in presidential polls.

The hotly-disputed bill, which passed by 98 votes to 67, allows the government to declare a "state of emergency" if migrant numbers suddenly rise and reject most asylum seekers directly at the border, including those from war-torn countries like Syria.

Opposition parties and rights groups have slammed the legislation, with the UN\s refugee agency warning that it "removes a centrepiece of refugee protection".

But Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka insisted Austria had no other choice as long as "so many other European Union members fail to do their part" to stop the influx.

"We cannot shoulder the whole world\s burden," he said.

Wedged between Europe\s two main refugee routes  the Balkans and Italy  Austria received around 90,000 asylum requests in 2015, the second-highest in the bloc on a per capita basis.

More than a million people, primarily from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, landed in Europe last year, triggering the continent\s worst migration crisis since the aftermath of World War II.

Many braved a short but dangerous sea journey from Turkey to Greece, before trekking up through the Balkans toward western and northern Europe.

To reduce the flow, the EU recently struck a controversial deal with Ankara, under which all irregular migrants reaching Greece after March 20 will be returned to Turkey.

Although the pact has led to a sharp drop in arrivals, the International Organisation for Migration last week warned that the numbers were starting to rise again.

The crisis has boosted populist fringe parties across Europe, pressuring traditionally centrist governments to adopt a much firmer stance on migrants.

Under Austria\s new law, the government can now declare an emergency if the migrant flow threatens "national security".

Border authorities will then only grant access to refugees facing safety threats in a neighbouring transit country or whose relatives are already in Austria. Some groups including minors and pregnant women will be exempt from the rule.

The "special measures" will also force migrants to request asylum directly at the border in yet-to-be-built registration centres, where they may be held for up to 120 hours while their application is being checked.

The restrictions are similar to tough rules introduced by the right-wing government in neighbouring Hungary last year.

In addition, MPs also voted to restrict existing asylum laws by placing limits on the length of asylum granted to migrants and making it harder for their families to join them.

"These are extremely dangerous tools that are being sharpened here, especially if they fall into the wrong hands," said the leader of the small NEOS opposition party, Mathias Strolz.

Shortly before the vote, a group of protesters threw leaflets from the parliament\s upper gallery reading "Don\t walk over dead bodies, it won\t keep you afloat".

The vote comes after the candidate of the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), Norbert Hofer, sent shock waves through the political establishment by winning the first round of the presidential election on Sunday.

The two candidates of the ruling centrist coalition failed to even make it into the runoff on May 22.

The FPOe also looks set to do well in the next scheduled general election in 2018.

Trying to stem voter desertion to the far-right, Austria erected border fences and introduced an annual cap on asylum-seekers.

It also pressured other countries along the Balkan trail to close their frontiers earlier this year, effectively shutting the route to migrants.

The clampdown has left some 54,000 migrants stranded in Greece and pushed people smugglers to seek out new routes into Europe.

More than 26,000 migrants have landed on Italy\s shores so far this year after setting off from Libya.

The arrivals have prompted Austria to announce plans to reinstate border controls  including a 370-metre (1,200-foot) fence  at the Brenner pass in the Alps, a key transport corridor between northern and southern Europe.

The move has sparked protests at the checkpoint in recent weeks and drawn strong condemnation from Italy.

"We\re very far from an invasion," Foreign Affairs Minister Paolo Gentiloni told Austrian newspaper Die Presse on Wednesday.

SOURCE: AFP





Austria plans fence to stop migrants at major border crossing with Italy

Austria outlined plans on Wednesday to erect a fence at a border crossing with Italy that is a vital link between northern and southern Europe, escalating a stand-off between the two states over how to handle a migration crisis. Migrants are crossing the Mediterranean from Africa to Italy in growing numbers and Austria has said Rome must stop them traveling onwards towards northern Europe or it will have to introduce border controls at the Brenner Pass in the Alps. But with Austrian preparations for controls already under way, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said Austria\s move was "shamelessly against European rules, as well as being against history, against logic and against the future". Austrian police in the Alpine province of Tyrol, which borders on northern Italy, presented plans for the installation of facilities at Brenner to inspect vehicles and process migrants, in the event formal controls are introduced. Building work on some of the facilities at Brenner began two weeks ago but their scale was not immediately known. "A security fence of 370 meters (1,220 feet) is planned," a Tyrol police spokesman said, adding that the fence was part of a system aimed at channeling migrants in the deep valley that the Brenner Pass runs through. Whether the fence is built, however, will depend on the outcome of talks in Rome on Thursday between Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka and his Italian counterpart, the spokesman said. Austria has taken an increasingly hard line on how to deal with the hundreds of thousands of asylum-seeking migrants, many of them fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and elsewhere, who have poured into Europe over the past year. After throwing open its borders to the arrivals with Germany in September, Vienna has since said it cannot cope with the numbers, and it coordinated border restrictions that shut down the main Balkans migrant route from Greece to northern Europe. Italy and Austria are part of the European Union\s Schengen open-border zone, but free movement has been jeopardized by the reimposition of controls at some key crossings by countries affected by the migrant influx.

SOURCE: REUTERS
Local safety experts offer advice for keeping Trick-or-Treat fun for everyone

As families prepare for fun night of Trick-or-Treating, local safety experts are offering some tips on how to stay happy and healthy this Halloween season.
TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS Courtney Provence, a floor leader for Amfuel, makes repairs to a fuel cell bladder at the new plant on I-44. The company held an open house Wednesday afternoon and gave members of the public tours. The fuels cells are used in a wide variety of military and commercial aircraft.

SHARE TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS Antonio Feagins, a supervisor for Amfuel, runs a pressure test on a fuel cell bladder at the plant on I-44. The building formerly housed the Delphi plant. Amfuel manufactures fuel cells for commercial and military planes and helicopters. TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS Norm Bullinger of Amfuel, center, conducts a tour of the new operation which manufactures fuel cells for military and commercial aircraft. The business expects to add 10-15 jobs per month through the end of the year.

By John Ingle of the Times Record News

An important determining factor for businesses looking to start up or expand is often location.

Britt Gourley, interim president and CEO of aviation fuel bladder manufacturer Amfuel, said Wednesday afternoon that the location of Wichita Falls was one of several reasons the Magnolia, Arkansas-based company chose to expand to North Texas. The business is located in a portion of the old Delphi plant north of Wichita Falls.

The main attraction was the location, proximity to the (Dallas-Fort Worth) Metroplex and the large number of aerospace jobs in the general location," he said.

"Also, here you have Sheppard Air Force Base, which we knew that we would hopefully be able to attract ex-military folks who perhaps served here and wanted to stay in the neighborhood; that were familiar with aerospace and regulation; and many of whom have actually worked with our cells."

He said the T-38C Talons used for advanced pilot training at Sheppard's 80th Flying Training Wing have Amfuel fuel cells in them.

Gourley said Midwestern State University was also a draw for the manufacturer. He said the previous owners of Amfuel's predecessor, Zodiac Aerospace, "decimated" their core group of engineers, a specialty that's important to the company's processes.

He said he contacted a couple local members of Amfuel's board of directors who also happened to be members of MSU's board of regents for assistance.

It was a short time later, Gourley said, that he had three resumes from MSU engineering students, two of whom are employed with Amfuel now.

The Wichita Falls City Council approved on Aug. 5 an incentive package worth more than $2 million developed by the Wichita Falls Economic Development Corp. The package included funds for capital equipment purchases, cash for jobs and a state grant for training employees.

Dick Bundy, chairman of the WFEDC, said it's "exhilarating" to see the hard work by those involved in the process come to fruition with 30 employees working in the factory and production of fuel cells underway. He said building relationships is what helped make the venture and investment happen.

"I still say that we get a lot for our money when we're dealing out incentives like that. We take it seriously," he said. "I would put us up against just about any community as far as what we get for our money, you know, what we get per job. It's just a big deal to us."

Bundy also praised local investment group Texoma Angels for seeing the entrepreneurial opportunity with Amfuel, whereas others might have looked at the company as a startup. He said their investment was critical in Amfuel selecting Wichita Falls.

Henry Florsheim, president and CEO of the Wichita Falls Chamber of Commerce & Industry, said Wichita Falls has two things manufacturers look for  a quality workforce and facilities.

"We have a good, skilled manufacturing workforce and we were able to find them the right facility that fits their needs, not just today, but for many, many years to come to help them expand and hopefully move other companies in here as well," he said.

"I think we're seeing that across the board, workforce is almost always the No. 1 issue for a company, and when you're able to come in here and find the workers that you need, whether that's manufacturing or if it's IT staff for GuideIT and companies like that, if they're able to find the workforce, they'll come."

The annual economic impact of Amfuel, once it is fully up and running, is expected to be more than $20 million. Gourley said the company will add 10-15 employees per month through the remainder of 2016, with a goal of eventually employing more than 200.
This two-story house on the northwest corner of Ninth Street at Kemp Boulevard was the site of a Department of Homeland Security raid involving human trafficking Wednesday morning. Wichita Falls Police's SWAT team helped in the execution of a high-risk warrant serve, but few details were available.

SHARE WFPD aids Department of Homeland Security with a raid involving human trafficking on April 27, 2016. Photo taken by Amanda Hughes.

By Times Record News

Wichita Falls Police helped the Department of Homeland Security execute warrants in connection with a suspected human trafficking ring Wednesday morning.

The high-risk SWAT team bust occurred at 2600 Ninth Street at the corner of Kemp Boulevard.

Officer Tim Johnson with WFPD said because local authorities were only there to assist, little information on the case was available.

He said the human trafficking ring apparently operated primarily out of the Dallas area but involved four suspects here.

Thirteen local officers and an armored vehicle were used in the bust. Johnson said he didn't know if any arrests resulted.
SHARE Litteken Lunns Col

Martin F. Litteken Jr. of Wichita Falls, Texas, passed away on Saturday, April 23, 2016, at the age of 64. A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 30, 2016, at Grace Church in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Martin was born on November 21, 1951, in Wichita Falls, Texas, to Martin and Doris Litteken. He graduated with honors from Texas A&M University's College of Engineering. Martin was a member of the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets where he served as commander of Squadron 14, a Ross Volunteer, and was on the swim team. He went on to serve as a Civil Engineer in the United States Air Force. He served as the President of First Federal Savings and Loan, and in 1998 Martin opened Cornerstone Engineering, LLC, a civil engineering and surveying firm.

Martin's strength of leadership and heart of service were evident in all areas of his life. He was a Boy Scout and became a Cub Scout Pack Leader and Assistant Scout Leader. He chaired the Wichita Archer Clay Baptist Association Fundraising campaign for motel accommodations at Camp Chaparral, was a Loaned Executive for the United Way, served on steering committees for Cattle Baron's Ball, the inaugural FallsFest, and was a member of Rib's Inc. He was an Elder at Grace Church, and was on the board of the Priddy Foundation and First National Bank. Martin joyfully supported the Boys and Girls Club of Wichita Falls. He was on the corporate board of directors for 34 years, and served as Vice president and President of the Board. In recognition of this commitment, Martin received the 30-year service to youth award and was the recipient of the 2015 Josh Kimbrough Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Martin's personal relationship with Christ was evident in all parts of his life. He lived with integrity and sacrificially gave of himself to his friends and community, but that character was most evident in his relationship with his family. He survived by his loving wife Jeanie (Fischer) Litteken; his son Brad Martin Litteken and wife Megan of Wichita Falls; daughter Sara Beth (Litteken) Taylor and husband Jeff of Dallas, TX; four grandchildren, Callum, Evan, Jack, and Clara; and his sisters, Jean Ann Darnell of Wichita Falls, TX and Joan Frances Spurlock of Fort Worth, TX and their families. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorials are made to The Boys and Girls Clubs of Wichita Falls and Hospice of Wichita Falls. Condolences may be sent to the family at www.lunnscolonial.com.
Claire Kowalick/Times Record News Wichita County Sheriff's Office Detention Officer Josh Wood locks a cell door Thursday at the Wichita County Downtown Jail Annex. The WCSO is hosting a job fair 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday for positions including detention officers, patrol deputy and jail facilities engineer.

SHARE Claire Kowalick/Times Record News Wichita County Sheriff's Office Detention Officer Josh Wood fingerprints a person Thursday in the book-in area of the Wichita County Downtown Jail Annex. The WCSO is hosting a job fair 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday for positions including detention officers, patrol deputy and jail facilities engineer.

By Claire Kowalick of the Times Record News

A job as a detention officer with the Wichita County Sheriff's Office could be the beginning of a fulfilling career in law enforcement.

The WCSO will host a job fair 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Wichita County Courthouse, 900 7th Street.

WCSO Deputy Brien Conner said the department has about a dozen positions available for detention officers and is also seeking a patrol deputy and jail facilities engineer.

No experience is needed to become a detention officer; the only requirements are that a person is 18 years of age or older, has a high school diploma or GED, valid driver's license, and no major criminal background. The other positions for patrol deputy and jail facilities engineer require some previous experience and certification.

"This position (as a detention officer) opens doors within the criminal justice system and can be used as a stepping stone into law enforcement," Conner said.

After a person is hired, but before they attend the academy, a candidate attends a week-long orientation, followed by shift work paired with a seasoned officer. The candidate then attends a month-long academy, at the end of which they earn a Texas Commission of Law Enforcement (TCOLE) certification.

Working in the jail environment is not for everyone, Conner says, but for the right person the experience has many advantages. The county offers a benefits package, paid training and TCOLE certification, and opportunity for career growth.

"We're looking for someone who is not afraid of hard work, has attention to detail and can handle their own. It's a great way to get into criminal justice and law enforcement; or for people who are retired to start something new," Conner said.

WCSO Detention Officer Josh Wood had been working at Sheppard Air Force Base for about 10 and a half years and was looking for a career change and applied for the position through the Texas Workforce Commission. Wood has been with the county for over a year and said he most enjoys working with great co-workers. Wood also said he's enjoyed learning about the legal process and hopes to continue his career in law enforcement.

Interested applicants should bring a copy of their high school diplomas or GED certificates, college transcripts, DD-214 (certificate of release/discharge from active duty military), birth certificate, valid Texas drivers license, and Social Security card. Applications can be downloaded and completed prior to the event and can be found at www.wichitacountysheriffsoffice.org, under the career opportunities page. Veterans are highly encouraged to apply. For more information contact WCSO recruiter Deputy Conner at (940) 716-8678 or e-mail brien.conner@co.wichitia.tx.us.
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A Minnesota judge appointed a corporate trust company on Wednesday to temporarily oversee Prince's multimillion-dollar estate, saying the emergency appointment was necessary because the superstar musician doesn't appear to have a will and immediate decisions must be made about his business interests.

Judge Kevin Eide granted a request from Prince's sister to appoint Bremer Trust as special administrator, giving the company authority to manage and supervise Prince's assets and identify his heirs.

Eide said Prince had no appointed personal representative but had substantial assets and owned businesses that require immediate attention and ongoing management.

The judge also noted that identities and addresses of Prince's heirs need to be determined.

Prince's only full sibling, Tyka Nelson, requested the move Tuesday, telling the court she believed her brother didn't have a will.

Prince also has five surviving half-siblings who could share in the estate.

Eide wrote that Prince died "intestate," meaning he did not have a valid will, and said there was no pending application or petition for probate of a will in any court.

For now, Bremer Trust will act as special administrator for six months or until a personal representative is appointed, whichever is less.

Prince, 57, died last week at Paisley Park, his famous home and recording studio complex in suburban Minneapolis. His cause of death hasn't been released. An autopsy was conducted Friday, but results aren't expected to be released for weeks.

The value of his estate isn't known. Prince made hundreds of millions of dollars for record companies, concert venues and others, and the outpouring of grief and nostalgia after his death prompted fans to buy 2.3 million of his songs in just three days.

 Associated Press

Real estate heir's plea deal approved

Robert Durst, the estranged member of a wealthy real estate family and subject of a documentary about the death of his first wife, was sentenced to 7 years and 1 month in prison on a weapons charge that cleared the deck for him to face murder charges in California.

U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt sentenced Durst, 72, on Wednesday in New Orleans, approving a sentence that Durst had accepted in February as part of a plea agreement. Engelhardt also fined Durst $5,000 and said that his sentence, once served, would be followed by three years of supervised release. Durst will serve more than 4  times the maximum under federal guidelines.

Durst is charged in Los Angeles in the 2000 killing of a female friend, Susan Berman, to keep her from talking to New York prosecutors about the disappearance of his first wife in 1982.

His attorneys have said repeatedly that he is innocent, does not know who killed Berman, and wants to prove it.

 Associated Press

Actor fails drug test while on probation

Former "Scandal" actor Columbus Short has tested positive for cocaine and marijuana use and is facing a probation violation in a felony assault case, court records show.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Leslie E. Brown received details about the failed drug tests Thursday and ordered the actor to appear at a hearing May 9 to address them.

The actor told probation officials in early April he used medicinal marijuana daily but had not used cocaine in three years. A drug test administered on April 8 tested positive for cocaine and marijuana use, according to a probation report filed April 21.

A probation officer recommended that Short receive drug and alcohol treatment and be ordered to abstain from alcohol. Short pleaded no contest to felony assault in September and was sentenced to three years of supervised probation, two months of community labor and anger management counseling. He was charged after he delivered a running punch during a fight at a family gathering in March 2014. The blow knocked a man unconscious, gave him a concussion and fractured his eye socket.

The actor has completed anger management counseling, but has not yet completed community labor terms of his sentence.

 Associated Press

Fleming, Rochester ensemble to perform

Grammy-winning soprano Renee Fleming will perform with Rochester's Eastman Philharmonia at Lincoln Center's Allice Tully Hall this fall.

The Eastman School of Music announces Wednesday that the ensemble and Fleming, a Rochester-area native, will perform Nov. 14 at the Manhattan venue.

The performance will include a new composition written exclusively for Fleming and the Philharmonia by Kevin Puts, an Eastman School alumnus and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for music.

 Associated Press
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Friday marks the 12th annual Blue Friday to recognize the sacrifices made by police.

Blue carnations will be available for a $5 donation all day, beginning at 5:45 a.m. in the Hannaford parking lot at Wolf and Sand Creek roads in Colonie, Ninety Nine Restaurant in the Wilton Mall and Advance Auto Parts, 15 Maple Ave., Catskill.

Blue Friday is the last Friday in April, set aside by the state Legislature since 2005 to honor law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty as well as current officers.

A limited edition of Blue Friday challenge coin, T-shirts and sweatshirts also will be available. Money raised will go to Blue Friday of New York, which helps the families of officers killed in the line of duty.

The Blue Friday Fallen Officer's Memorial Ride will be Saturday, May 14, from Malta.

For details, visit http://www.bluefridayny.org/ or call retired Albany Police Officer Pat Fox, 469-9201, or Saratoga County Deputy Lou Somma, 421-2921.
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New York Army National Guard Lt. Col. Michael Tagliaferro of Saratoga County is the new commander of the 2nd Battalion, 106th Infantry Regiment.

The battalion trains Army National Guard and Reserve soldiers at Camp Smith Training Site near Peekskill.

Tagliaferro replaced fellow Iraq war veteran Lt. Col. Christopher Ciccone Jr. of East Greenbush. Ciccone was assigned as deputy intelligence officer for the New York National Guard's Joint Forces Headquarters in Latham.

Tagliaferro of Porter Corners joined the Army in 1983 and served as a cavalry scout in Germany and Fort Knox, Ky., for four years. He joined the New York Army National Guard's 1st Battalion, 210th Armor in 1987. In 1989, he received his commission through Officer Candidate School and was the scout platoon leader of the 1st Battalion, 210th Armor until 1992.

Tagliaferro entered the inactive reserve in 1993 and left military service in 1998. After Sept. 11, 2001, he rejoined the New York Army National Guard in the 42nd Infantry Division.

He deployed to Tikrit, Iraq, as the commander of the 42nd Infantry Division's Headquarters and Headquarters Company.

In 2009, Tagliaferro deployed to Iraq as an information operations targeting officer with the National Guard's 34th Infantry "Red Bull" Division. He was in Iraq with the "Big Red One" 1st Infantry Division until August 2010.

Afterward, Tagliaferro served in the New York Army National Guard's Joint Force Headquarters as the Homeland Response Force implementation and plans officer.

He earned a Bronze Star and a Meritorious Service Medal.

As a civilian, Tagliaferro is employed by the state comptroller's office in the Local Government and School Accountability Division in Glens Falls.

Mission completed

The March 25 arrival of a New York Army National Guard helicopter crew in Latham marked the end of a six-month mission on the Mexican border.

Chief Warrant 2 Franz Scott, Chief Warrant 5 Chuck Rodda and their UH-72 Lakota light utility helicopter supported the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies in Marana, Ariz.

The pilots and nine other soldiers of Detachment 2 of the 1st Battalion, 224th Security and Support Battalion rotated through the mission for 45 days at a time with two pilots and two mechanics on duty.

The missions were designed to stop the smuggling of drugs and illegal immigrants across the border. All missions included a Customs and Border Patrol agent.

Yellow Ribbon Day

A Yellow Ribbon Day "Remember Our Troops" program begins at 11 a.m. Friday at the Halfmoon Town Hall.

Volunteers will collect donations for VETHELP, which aids homeless veterans as well as Vet House for male veterans and Guardian House for female veterans in Ballston Spa.

Needed are Lysol spray, large Ziploc freezer bags, plastic storage bins, floor cleaners, trash bags, air fresheners, tote bags, sheet sets, lamps, shower curtains and liners, hot cocoa K-cups, Febreze fabric spray, storage shelves and blankets as well as money.

The Capital Region Chapter 2 of Blue Star Mothers is collecting beef jerky, granola bars, trail mix, toiletries, socks and playing cards to ship to troops from the Capital Region and Fort Drum stationed in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The Blue Star Mothers are collecting money for shipping.

Carol Hotaling, the "Yellow Ribbon lady," will be on hand. For a list of care package items, visit http://www.capitalregion2bsm.org.

News of your troops and units can be sent to Duty Calls, Terry Brown, Times Union, Box 15000, Albany, NY 12212 or brownt@timesunion.com.
NEW ORLEANS (AP)  A federal judge on Wednesday approved a plea agreement for real estate heir Robert Durst to serve 7 years, 1 month in prison on a weapons charge.

U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt approved the sentence during a hearing in New Orleans on Wednesday. The 72-year-old Durst had accepted the sentence as part of his guilty plea in February and was waiting for judicial approval. Engelhardt also fined Durst $5,000 and said that his sentence, once served, would be followed by three years of supervised release.

Ten years and a $250,000 fine would have been the maximum sentence that Durst could have faced for illegally carrying a .38-caliber revolver after being convicted of a felony.

Durst still faces a separate murder charge in California. Durst is charged in Los Angeles with killing a female friend, Susan Berman, in 2000 to keep her from talking to New York prosecutors about the disappearance of Durst's first wife in 1982.

His attorneys have said repeatedly that he is innocent, does not know who killed Berman, and wants to prove it.

"I have been waiting to get to California about a year so I can state my not guilty plea," Durst told the court. "I truly, truly want to express my statement that I am not guilty in the death of Susan Berman."

While federal guidelines recommended a sentence of between 12 and 18 months, Engelhardt said the sentence was "reasonable" since it included agreements in three jurisdictions. Under the deal, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York; the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Texas; and the Orleans Parish agreed not to prosecute Durst on a variety of offenses.

Durst's attorneys and prosecutors in Los Angeles have agreed that he will be in Los Angeles by mid-August.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael McMahon says it is likely he will leave Louisiana must sooner than that.

"He'll be out of here pretty quickly," McMahon said, noting that timing and the specific prison that Durst goes to is up to the federal Bureau of Prisons.

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Attorneys for Durst filed a motion Monday to ask Engelhardt to recommend that Durst serve his time at FCI Terminal Island, California, about 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The location is near the trial venue and has medical facilities Durst needs because of his "advanced age and serious health considerations, including mobility challenges."

An estranged member of the wealthy New York real estate family that runs 1 World Trade Center, Durst was tracked to New Orleans in March 2015 by FBI agents worried that he was about to flee to Cuba.

He was detained at a hotel on the eve of the finale of a six-part documentary about him, and was arrested early on the morning of the show. "The Jinx" described the disappearance of Kathleen Durst, the death and dismemberment of a neighbor in Galveston, Texas, and Berman's death.

At the end of the show, Durst is heard muttering, "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course."
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Just when I thought I'd had enough for one evening, an Afro-Cuban-American gentleman pulled me off the bustling Calle Ocho and into a room jammed with dancers bouncing up and down to the beat of congas. No, this wasn't a '90s-style rave; this was the normally unassuming lounge at Top Cigars, a cigar shop in Miami's Little Havana.

I recognized the owner, Cristobal Mena, from an exchange we'd had that morning at a Cuban restaurant across the street about what constitutes a classic Cuban dish. Now, I was hopping in a sea of his patrons on the famous boulevard that is the social and commercial hub of Little Havana.

The occasion was Viernes Culturales (Cultural Fridays), the last Friday of each month, when the storied neighborhood hosts what feels like a block party on Calle Ocho (actually Southwest Eighth Street) between 13th and 17th avenues.

The monthly festival serves as a showcase of what this Cuban-American enclave has to offer. Painters and artisans mingle with the crowds. Music from Latin bands intermixes, and double-decker buses unpack tourists while the smells of arroz con pollo, fried plantains and cafe Cubano drift from windows. As soon as you step onto the street, lined with wide sidewalks and colorful facades, the music fairly insists that either your shoulders or your hips move, not necessarily together.

More Information If you go Ball & Chain (1513 SW Eighth St.; ballandchain.com) is a Cuban nightclub that emphasizes Latin music and offers dance lessons on certain days. Drinks and tapas run about $20. HistoryMiami (101 W. Flagler St.; citytourshistorymiami.org) offers a variety of tours with historian Paul George. Members: $20. Nonmembers; $30. Tower Theater (1508 SW Eighth St.; towertheatermiami.com) screens independent and foreign films and other specialized cultural programs aimed at the Latin community. Hoy Como Ayer (2212 SW Eighth St.; hoycomoayer.us) is a traditional Cuban nightclub that offers live Latin music. Cover: $15 to $50. Dinner with drinks runs about $35. Top Cigars (1551 SW Eighth St.; 305-643-1150) is a cigar shop and emporium that sells cigars and paraphernalia. Drinks on Cultural Fridays are free. El Pub Restaurant (1548 SW Eighth St.; elpubcubancuisine.com) is a family-style restaurant on Calle Ocho that serves country Cuban cuisine. Dinner is around $10. El Nuevo Siglo (1305 SW Eighth St.; 305-854-1916) is a supermarket and luncheonette on Calle Ocho that serves Cuban and Latin food and sells baked goods from around Latin America. Lunch is about $7. Corinna Moebius is a cultural anthropologist and tour guide (littlehavanaguide.com) who offers tours of Little Havana. Tours are $45 per person and up. Cubaocho Museum & Performing Arts Center (1465 SW Eighth St.; cubaocho.com) is a free art gallery and gathering space for local artists and residents. Drinks with tapas is about $27. La Tradicion Cubana (1336 SW Eighth St.; tradicion.com) is a family-owned cigar shop, cigar manufacturer and emporium that sells cigars and cigar paraphernalia. El Titan de Bronze (1071 SW Eighth St.; eltitancigars.com) is another family-owned cigar manufacturer and cigar shop that employs tabaqueros (cigar rollers) on-site. Versailles Restaurant (3555 SW Eighth St.; versaillesrestaurant.com) is a landmark Cuban restaurant on Calle Ocho that serves a variety of Cuban and Latin dishes and baked goods. Dinner and drinks run around $25. See More Collapse

Here in this adaptation of Havana, where the thrum of the old country persists, proposed zoning changes have led the National Trust for Historic Preservation to place a portion of Little Havana on its list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2015.

News of that development was reason enough to send me back to the city where I grew up. For years, I had wanted to see if I could find something of what my father had so often recounted of the time he'd taught dance on cruise ships from New York that docked in Havana during Cuba's reign in the '40s and '50s as "America's Caribbean Playground." I wanted to catch a glimpse of what he called "a better time" before time ran out, and thought I might find it here, on U.S. soil, before gentrification had a chance to dilute this neighborhood's distinctive character.

I had visited Calle Ocho only a few times as a teenager, back when mom-and-pop restaurants, bodegas and bakeries dotted the shady boulevard. But those were calmer days  before Calle Ocho earned its way into the Guinness Book of World Records with the "world's longest conga line" in 1988.

"The phenomenon of Little Havana today is of relatively recent vintage," said Paul George, professor of history at Miami Dade College and historian at HistoryMiami, a nonprofit that works to preserve Miami's cultural past. "It's been in the last decade that things have really surged in terms of night life and this quest to know the Cuban experience.

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"Nowhere else in this country has a generation of immigrants been so successful so fast. Maybe 10 or 12 years ago, 300,000 or so people came to Little Havana in the course of a year. Now it's between 3 million and 3 1

2 million."

The focus of my visit last fall was Calle Ocho, the artery that fuels the heart of Little Havana, a roughly 3-square-mile area that is home to 55,000 residents. Over the years, much of Cuba's deeply rooted culture remained intact here, as it rode in on succeeding waves of the Cuban diaspora. One of those waves occurred between Castro's 1959 coup and 1973; another brought in more than 120,000 Cuban immigrants in 1980. The latter influx was a controversial mass flotilla to Florida shores that also included individuals freed from Cuban jails and mental institutions. The majority of immigrants simply wanted a new start in the United States.

More recently, concerns that the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act  a pathway to U.S. citizenship for Cubans  could be rolled back as part of the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba, have generated another wave of new arrivals. Conversely, some Cubans are going back to their homeland now that Cuba has loosened its grip on returning immigrants.
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Albany

The nannies in the Albany County Legislature are at it again.

This time, they're proposing that nobody under the age of 21 be allowed to purchase cigarettes, a measure that would keep adults from making decisions about their own health and preferences.

If you've been paying attention, you know this is nothing new in Albany County. If you haven't been paying attention, I suggest that you go to Dunkin' Donuts and ask for a polystyrene cup.

Yes, the 39 members of the legislature  about 27 members too many, by the way  are always looking for ways to keep the good citizens of the county safe from their own behavior. Golly gee, what would we do without them?

Most especially, the legislature really, really hates it when people smoke. So do I, actually.

As I've previously written, I spent my childhood haranguing my mother to stop smoking, as she eventually did. No sane reasonable person disputes that smoking is a destructive habit that causes cancer.

It is also perfectly legal.

Yet the Albany County proposal would essentially mean that while an 18-year-old can decide whether to join the military, get married, buy a house or otherwise engage in adult behavior, he or she is too stupid to know that smoking is unhealthy.

What's the argument in favor?

"It would get smoking out of high schools, hopefully," said Paul Miller, a legislator from Albany who is among those sponsoring the legislation.

What Miller means is that 18-year-old students who can legally buy cigarettes are probably hanging around with younger teens who can't and are therefore spreading the pernicious habit.

So why not just raise the smoking age to 19?

It won't surprise anyone that New York City was among the first places to make 21 the legal age for tobacco purchases, a move that came during the mayoral tenure of Michael Bloomberg, the micromanaging zillionaire who famously tried to ban big sodas.

Hawaii and cities such as San Francisco followed suit on tobacco, as did Suffolk County. Onondaga and Nassau counties raised the purchase age to 19.

The drinking age is an obvious precedent. But while the primary argument for raising that to 21 was the need to protect the innocent from drunken driving, no such argument exists for raising the smoking age.

This is about protecting adults from themselves.

I asked Miller if adults shouldn't get to decide whether to smoke.

"There's no constitutional right to smoke at 18," the Democrat said. "(But) we're not stopping them from smoking. We're keeping them from purchasing cigarettes in Albany County."

We live in a conflicted time. On one hand, states like Vermont and Massachusetts are on the verge of legalizing marijuana, as other states have done. On the other, prohibitions against cigarettes mount.

On one hand, the so-called progressives on the Albany County Legislature would argue until they're blue that a 19-year-old woman has the right to make her own reproductive health choices.

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And yet that same women can't buy a cigarette?

Of course, the Albany County law wouldn't actually keep 18- to 20-year-olds from buying or smoking cigarettes. It will just make them drive to Rensselaer or Saratoga counties  or other places without a nanny-state mindset.

The legislation would just make buying cigarettes more of a hassle, which suggests, I think, that it is more about Puritanism and prohibition than anything else. This is about lawmakers' personal distaste for smoking.

I won't be the first to note that many anti-smoking measures smack of elitism. Most who smoke are poor or working people. Most elected officials, meanwhile, are professionals  lawyers, accountants and the like.

They probably don't know anyone who smokes. Their friends and family aren't affected by the taxes and the meddlesome restrictions on sales.

They are also less likely to see first-hand that prohibition has real-world impacts. Remember that New York City police harassed and ultimately killed Eric Garner because he was selling loose cigarettes to people who couldn't afford the taxes on an entire pack.

What did they say about good intentions?

Maybe that's making too much of the Albany County law, which is expected to pass on May 9. Maybe the simplest argument is one I made in Sunday's column, in which I praised this very same legislature for lifting the ridiculous ban on sparklers: A country that wants a responsible and engaged citizenry has to treat people like responsible citizens.

If a 20-year-old wants to smoke a cigarette, it's not the county's business to decide otherwise.

cchurchill@timesunion.com  518-454-5442  @chris_churchill
The following editorial appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

As the U.S. Department of Defense goes in quest of a larger piece of the overall budget, its claims of threats to America's security grow in amplitude and volume.

Its latest ambitions are for 40 percent more submarines than it and some of the American media claim Russia has, as opposed to the 25 percent more the U.S. Navy has now. The other is a desire by the U.S. Africa Command for money to use larger numbers of U.S. forces to fight Boko Haram, a group of terrorists in northeastern Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

The claim is that these African states are U.S. allies. In reality they are African states that have the resources and should have sufficient motivation to fight off Boko Haram themselves. What occurs in that landlocked region of Africa is the responsibility of the people located there and poses no threat to the United States. They are countries; they are not U.S. allies, as even some U.S. media profess to believe. Cameroon has had the same president, Paul Biya, for 33 years; Chad's president, Idriss Deby, has been in office for 25 years. Niger is somewhat democratic. Nigeria, an oil state, is noted for corruption.

The United States doesn't need the new submarines. The Navy wants them because it feels it has not had a big enough role in recent wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen) to have put enough money into its pockets. Overstating the Russian threat, it hopes, will remedy that shortfall.

It is worth noting that the new ships  and the tanks, missile batteries, artillery and other hardware being sought by President Barack Obama for use in Eastern Europe against Russia  also represent important purchases from the U.S. defense industries, large donors to current political campaigns.

The budget will be in imbalance already, without the new military expenditures, and the U.S. national debt currently stands at $19 trillion and rising steadily, with $6 trillion  about a third  of it owed to China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other foreign countries. Wouldn't it make more sense to reduce our financial vulnerability to them, as opposed to increasing our military exposure in Africa and buying more hardware that we don't need?
Tipp native Margaret Healy has extended a special thanks to all voters in Tipperary who helped elect her husband Joe as the 15th President of the IFA last week.

Joe Healy won the race last week in the IFA presidential bid with the second largest number of votes for the Galway man coming from the premier county.

Margaret (nee O Dwyer), who grew up on her family farm in Milestone just outside Hollyford, told the Tipperary Star that the Tipp supporters were instrumental to her husband throughout the presidential race.

We owe a great gratitude to Tipperary. They really came out and supported us. They gave us a phenomenal vote, says the new first lady of the IFA who herself was a regular canvasser on the campaign trail throughout the premier county along with a strong team of local supporters including her siblings and their families who are spread across North Tipp.

Its a huge challenge for Joe, every area of farming is on its knees right now but we are 100 percent behind him every step of the way and we are confident he will do his very best, she says. The former Macra president had been considered the underdog in the IFA race however at final count last Wednesday Mr Healy had taken 50 percent of the vote; surpassing the quota with a final tally of 14,122 votes.

Margaret, who is now a nurse manager in University Hospital Galway, first met her future husband through his sister who worked at the same hospital in Dublin. The pair were introduced at a welcome home party organised for Joe following his return from a year long Macra sponsored scholarship to a dairy farm in New Zealand.

Im very proud of my home turf and well certainly organise a night in Tipp for everyone who helped throughout the campaign. They couldnt do enough to help us and we want to acknowledge that. And despite being firmly settled in Athenry, when it comes to G.A.A. Margaret says her loyalties will always lie with her home county.

If Galway is playing Ill support them but Tipp always wins out if it comes down to the two, she says proudly.
Clonmel World Music proudly presents the Russell de Carle Band at the Raheen House Hotel on Thursday, May 5th.

Clonmel World Music is delighted to welcome Canadian music royalty for a very special night. Best known as the voice of Canadian country band Prairie Oyster for over thirty years, Russell deCarle visits the UK and Ireland this month for a tour with his new band which plays old-time country music that ranges from hillbilly folk, to country blues, swing and Tex Mex. Theres a luxuriously laid back rockabilly edge to the fluent mix of blues, jazz and R&B-tinged western swing that this trio perform.

De Carles songs are refreshing yet familiar all at once and he delivers his rock n roll in crowned-King crooner style, with a luxurious velvety tone in his voice.

Prairie Oyster were a very big deal in their homeland who racked up an impressive list of Canadian JUNO and Canadian Country Music Awards, gold and platinum selling records and number one singles. As a songwriter, Russell carried off two SOCAN Song of the Year accolades - once in 1994, for Prairie Oysters first number one single Such A Lonely One, and again in 2008 for One Way Track. Prairie Oyster had four number one singles in Canada while twelve others featured in the top ten.

Originally formed in Toronto in 1974, the band were a trio of Russell de Carle, guitarist Keith Glass and steel guitarist Dennis Delorme. They split up after four years before re-forming in a larger line-up with keyboards, fiddle and drums in 1982. Picking up a couple of JUNO Awards, it was the full band's debut album, 'Oyster Tracks', that came to the attention of RCAs Nashville head Joe Galante who signed them in the US. Prairie Oyster came to the attention of many in the USA with singles such as 'Goodbye', 'So Long, 'Hello', 'I Dont Hurt Anymore' and 'One Precious Love'.

More recently de Carle has swapped his bass guitar for an acoustic and he has gone full circle to the roots of Prairie Oyster and he has been playing as a trio once more with Steve Briggs and Denis Keldie. De Carle plays the Rhythm guitar in this band. The trio play many of the old Oyster tunes, along with a healthy batch of newly composed songs and some selections, in new arrangements, from the Oyster days.

The trio released a 15 track CD in 2014 and the record has a rootsy, southern feel to it.

Doors for the gig will open at 8pm. There will be no support act and the band will start at 9pm prompt.

Tickets for this gig are available in the Premier Music Centre in Clonmel on 052 612 9811, from Gerry Lawless on 086 338 9619 and from Martha Beardmore on 087 910 7201.
April 26, 2016

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Do you remember the excitement of your first apartment? You got to decide where things would be placed in the kitchen, how to fold the towels in the bathroom and which long distance carrier you would use. Yes, that shows my age  we had to pick a long distance carrier when I moved into my first apartment. And, if I wasnt happy with the rate or the service, another one would be calling that evening to offer something better, likely relying on some sort of predictive dialer to make the connection.





We wont bother to do the math to determine whether or not predictive dialers have been around as long as I have, but I do remember the point at which the fun ran out on the calls. Yes, I did get to experience some perks by jumping long distance carriers, but was it worth the sales pitch to get to the prize? Not to mention these calls were just a small percentage of the total calls I would receive.

From magazine peddlers to vacuum salesmen to cable companies, my number was on everyones list. I quickly went from feeling pretty important to guilty about saying no to hanging up before they finished their pitch. Once I could afford caller ID  back in the day when it wasnt included as part of a smartphone because smartphones didnt exist  it was easier to avoid the unwanted calls. Now, customers in the U.K. can enjoy the same kind of freedom.

According to a piece in the IB Times, companies that cold call their customers are now required to display their telephone numbers. If a company violates this law, they could see fines as high as $2.88 million, demanded by Ofcom, the communications regulator. The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) can increase the fine is the company persists in making unwanted calls. This move is expected to provide consumers with more control, making the decision on whether or not they want to take a call and lodge a formal complaint if they are being harassed.

The move wont halt cold calling, but it is expected to set a higher standard for companies who use the practice to try to drum up new business. And while some may believe this kind of marketing should be outlawed, there are others that continue to see its value and use it as an important part of their overall strategy. After all, if it didnt work, companies wouldnt be doing it.

For consumers, the important point is a good balance between information on the things that they want, but the opportunity to ignore messages from companies they dont want to do business with. Is this the next best thing or will additional rules come out? We may just have to wait and see.

Edited by Rory J. Thompson
April 26, 2016

Mitel (News - Alert) is a global leader in real-time business, cloud and mobile communications that has been especially busy this month. Even still, the company took the time last week at the 2016 Mitel Elite Experience partner event on April 20 to recognize its top performing channel partners.







At a special awards ceremony held during the event, partners from across the United States and Canada, as well as from the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA) region, gathered to celebrate Mitels largest partners. In particular, the event highlighted these partners efforts in driving business across the Mitel solutions portfolio throughout the Americas region.

Awards included achievements in top overall performance, as well as success in specific categories like the cloud, contact center and vertical markets.

This years Mitel Elite Experience partner event came during a period of major change for Mitel. Earlier in the month, the company acquired Polycom (News - Alert) to create a new UC industry giant, following weeks of rumors. This move follows a series of strategic acquisitions, all of which have allowed Mitel to help its customers operate more efficiently and cost effectively.

Also this month, Mitel rolled out a series of updates to a number of its key offerings in order to better meet the needs of todays workforce. For example, Mitels MiContact Center has been updated to be a mobile-first customer engagement platform that delivers the agility necessary to stay ahead of todays communication trends.

These awards are a reflection of the channels commitment to deliver only the best communications solutions to their customers throughout the year, said Rich McBee (News - Alert), CEO of Mitel. The success of Mitel is tightly tied to the success of our channel partners who represent our brand and our portfolio in the marketplace.

Mitels top partners for this year include Frontier Communications, which took home the Partner of the Year 2015 award, as well as Top Overall Revenue Partner 2015, Top Premise Revenue Partner 2015, and Top Wholesale Cloud Bookings Partner 2015. The Partner of the Year 2015 for Canada is Zayo, while Cimcorp took home the award for the CALA region.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi
[April 28, 2016] Fitch Rates Duke University Health System's (NC) Series 2016A Bonds 'AA'; Outlook Stable

Fitch Ratings has assigned an 'AA' rating to the following bonds expected to be issued by the North Carolina Medical Care Commission (the Commission) on behalf of Duke University Health System (DUHS): --$169,420,000 health care facilities revenue bonds series 2016A. Additionally, Fitch has affirmed the 'AA' rating on approximately $582 million of revenue bonds issued by the Commission on behalf of DUHS. The series 2016A bonds will be issued as tax-exempt fixed rate bonds. Combined with the health system's series 2016B and 2016C variable rate tax-exempt bond issuance (approximately $90 million each and privately placed with two banks), bond proceeds will be used to refund (1) the outstanding series 2009A fixed rate bonds, (2) the outstanding series 2005C privately placed variable rate bonds, and (3) a portion of the series 2005B privately placed variable rate bonds. Fitch will not rate the series 2016B/C private placement bonds. Pro forma maximum annual debt service (MADS) is expected to equal approximately $79.6 million. The series 2016A bonds are expected to price the week of May 9 through negotiation. The Rating Outlook is Stable. SECURITY Debt payments are unsecured, general obligations of the obligated group. KEY RATING DRIVERS ROBUST OPERATING PROFITABILITY: Operating profitability has been extremely strong with operating EBITDA equal to 17.8% in fiscal 2015 and 16.4% in the nine-month interim period ending March 31, 2016 (the interim period), easily exceeding Fitch's 'AA' category median of 11.5%. MANAGEABLE DEBT BURDEN: The system's manageable pro forma debt burden, with pro forma MADS equal to 2.6% of fiscal 2015 operating revenues, and robust cash flow produced strong MADS coverage by EBITDA of 8.1x in fiscal 2015 and 7.4x in the interim period. STRONG LIQUIDITY POSITION: Unrestricted liquidity remains strong with 385.9 days cash on hand, 35.7x cushion ratio and 239% cash-to-debt at March 31, 2016. With a planned transfer of $510 million to Duke University in fiscal 2017, projected liquidity metrics remain favorable compared to Fitch's 'AA' category medians. LEADING CLINICAL REPUTATION: DUHS maintains a strong national reputation and an academic affiliation with Duke University School of Medicine, one of the nation's leading medical schools. RATING SENSITIVITIES CREDIT PROFILE MAINTAINED: Fitch expects that Duke University Health System's cash flow will be sufficient to offset both the planned fund transfer to Duke University in fiscal 2017 and potential capital plans without materially impacting the system's overall credit profile. CREDIT PROFILE DUHS is a large integrated delivery system, based in Durham, NC, with total operating revenues of $3.1 billion in fiscal 2015. Operations include three hospitals, home care and hospice services, a large primary care practice and ambulatory care centers. Fitch's analysis is based upon DUHS' consolidated financial statements. The credit group accounted for 94% of total consolidated operating revenues and 95% of consolidated total assets in fiscal 2015. ROBUST OPERATING PROFITABILITY The system achieved record operating profitability in fiscal 2015 with operating and operating EBITDA margin equal to 11.6% and 17.8%, respectively. Profitability has been consistently strong with operating EBITDA averaging a robust 14.2% since fiscal 2009, exceeding Fitch's 'AA' category median of 11.5%. The strong operating profitability continued in the interim period, with operating EBITDA equal to 16.4%. The robust operating profitability reflects continued cost management initiatives, increased volumes, strengthened acuity, enhanced collection processes and clinical documentation improvements. Management has been consistently focused on operating improvement initiatives since 2008, achieving approximately $160 million in operating improvements through fiscal 2013. DUHS' latest operating improvement initiative targets an additional $200 million in improvements. Management expects to achieve $369 million in cumulative improvements by the end of fiscal 2017. Major focus areas include care redesign, clinical operations, supply chain and revenue cycle. The North Carolina Medicaid program is currently undergoing a transition that may impact DSH funding. DUHS received an average of $78 million per year of net Medicid DSH funding in fiscal years 2013 through 2015.



MANAGEABLE DEBT BURDEN The system's pro forma debt burden remains manageable with pro forma MADS equal to 2.6% of fiscal 2015 operating revenue relative to Fitch's 'AA' category median of 2.4%. The manageable debt burden combined with the system's robust profitability produced strong MADS coverage by EBITDA equal to 8.1x in fiscal 2015 and 7.4x in the interim period, easily exceeding Fitch's 'AA' category median of 5.7x.

STRONG LIQUIDITY POSITION Liquidity metrics remain strong despite $229 million in academic support cash transfers to Duke University in fiscal 2015 (see below) and unrealized investment losses in fiscal 2015 and the interim period. With $2.8 billion of unrestricted cash and investments at March 31, 2016, liquidity metrics are strong across the board with 385.9 days cash on hand, 35.7x cushion ratio and 239% cash-to-debt, exceeding Fitch's 'AA' category medians of 289.4 days, 27x and 201.7%. Capital spending may increase in fiscal years 2017 to 2020 as the system addresses potential capacity constraints due to strong volume growth. However, capital plans are preliminary. If the projects are pursued, DUHS may issue additional debt over the next two years. Fitch will assess the impact of additional debt, if any, upon DUHS' overall credit profile as more details become available. DUHS provides academic support to Duke University and the School of Medicine. Total unrestricted transfers equaled $231 million and $69 million in fiscal years 2015 and 2014, respectively. The 2015 transfer included a one-time transfer of $150 million to the School of Medicine to support research and development. Additionally, DUHS plans to complete a transfer of $510 million to the university on July 1, 2016 to fund future support. Projected liquidity metrics remain favorable to Fitch's 'AA' category medians after inclusion of the increased academic support. LEADING CLINICAL REPUTATION The system's strong clinical reputation and academic affiliation with one of the nation's leading medical schools are additional credit strengths. Duke University Hospital, DUHS' flagship facility, has been consistently ranked as one of the top hospitals in the nation for over a decade. The strong clinical reputation is supported by the high acuity of services provided at Duke University Hospital, with a high Medicare case mix index of 2.3 in fiscal 2015, and is bolstered by DUHS' solid market share in its primary service area. Additionally, Duke University Hospital is the principal teaching affiliate of Duke University School of Medicine, which is consistently recognized as one of the nation's top medical schools. DEBT PROFILE DUHS had approximately $1.2 billion of total debt outstanding at March 31, 2016. The series 2016 bond transactions are refundings and will not materially affect the total debt levels. The pro forma debt portfolio will consist of approximately 56% underlying fixed rate bonds and 44% underlying variable rate bonds. The variable rate bonds are currently directly placed with four banks, but will be directly placed with five banks after the series 2016B/C refunding issuances. The direct placement covenants are substantially similar to those contained in the master trust indenture. DUHS is counterparty to a basis swap and three fixed payor swaps, effectively converting the variable rate bonds to synthetic fixed rates. Variable rate exposure will increase over time starting in 2017 given the amortization schedules. DUHS had $23.7 million of collateral posted related to the swaps at March 31, 2016. DISCLOSURE DUHS covenants to provide annual disclosure within 180 days of each fiscal year end and quarterly disclosure within 60 days of each fiscal quarter end. Disclosure is provided through the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board's EMMA system. Additional information is available at 'www.fitchratings.com.' Applicable Criteria Revenue-Supported Rating Criteria (pub. 16 Jun 2014)

https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=750012 U.S. Nonprofit Hospitals and Health Systems Rating Criteria (pub. 09 Jun 2015)

https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=866807 Additional Disclosures Dodd-Frank Rating Information Disclosure Form

https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/press_releases/content/ridf_frame.cfm?pr_id=1003520 Solicitation Status

https://www.fitchratings.com/gws/en/disclosure/solicitation?pr_id=1003520 Endorsement Policy

https://www.fitchratings.com/jsp/creditdesk/PolicyRegulation.faces?context=2&detail=31 ALL FITCH CREDIT RATINGS ARE SUBJECT TO CERTAIN LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS. PLEASE READ THESE LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS BY FOLLOWING THIS LINK: HTTP://FITCHRATINGS.COM/UNDERSTANDINGCREDITRATINGS. IN ADDITION, RATING DEFINITIONS AND THE TERMS OF USE OF SUCH RATINGS ARE AVAILABLE ON (News - Alert) THE AGENCY'S PUBLIC WEBSITE 'WWW.FITCHRATINGS.COM'. PUBLISHED RATINGS, CRITERIA AND METHODOLOGIES ARE AVAILABLE FROM THIS SITE AT ALL TIMES. FITCH'S CODE OF CONDUCT, CONFIDENTIALITY, CONFLICTS OF INTEREST, AFFILIATE FIREWALL, COMPLIANCE AND OTHER RELEVANT POLICIES AND PROCEDURES ARE ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE 'CODE OF CONDUCT' SECTION OF THIS SITE. FITCH MAY HAVE PROVIDED ANOTHER PERMISSIBLE SERVICE TO THE RATED ENTITY OR ITS RELATED THIRD PARTIES. DETAILS OF THIS SERVICE FOR RATINGS FOR WHICH THE LEAD ANALYST IS BASED IN AN EU-REGISTERED ENTITY CAN BE FOUND ON THE ENTITY SUMMARY PAGE FOR THIS ISSUER ON THE FITCH WEBSITE. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428006687/en/

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[April 28, 2016] New UnitedHealthcare Health Benefits Store in Fullerton Offers Enhanced Experience for People Eligible for Medicare

UnitedHealthcare today opened its newest health benefits store to provide enhanced customer service support and health education opportunities customized for the Asian-American community in Orange (News - Alert) County. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428007019/en/ Linette Choi, from Assemblywoman Young Kim's office, presents Matt Rodriguez of UnitedHealthcare with a proclamation in honor of the opening of UnitedHealthcare's newest health benefits store in Fullerton today (April 28, 2016). It is the first UnitedHealthcare storefront staffed by representatives who speak Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese, enabling the staff to offer customized in-language support for more people (Photo: Jamie Rector). UnitedHealthcare opened the Asian Resource Center - 1401 S. Brookhurst Road, Suite 105, in Fullerton - to serve the approximately 70,000 Asian-American Medicare beneficiaries in Orange County, making it the first of its kind in Orange County. It is also the first UnitedHealthcare storefront staffed by representatives who speak Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese, enabling the staff to offer customized in-language support for more people. Community leaders joined UnitedHealthcare executives at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new storefront, which is the company's eighth storefront dedicated to serving Asian-American communities in the United States and the third such store in California. "UnitedHealthcare is opening this newest storefront in Orange County to provide people eligible for Medicare with simple, personalized information about their Medicare coverage as well as their health and well-being needs," said Chris Law, national vice president, UnitedHealthcare's Asian Initiatives. "We hope this new storefront adds a personal touch to the health care experience of our plan participants in Orange County." Orange County Medicare beneficiaries and caregivers can stop by the store to learn about their Medicare coverage options. People can receive personalized customer service at the sore, directly from a Customer Care representative who speaks their preferred language, whether it's Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese. Customer Care representatives can answer questions and can help connect people with community resources and social services to support their health and well-being.



The UnitedHealthcare representatives at the Asian Resource Center can also assist community members who need help with translation of documents, including materials not related to their Medicare plan, such as documents related to Social Security benefits or obtaining a driver's license. UnitedHealthcare will also host free public health education events for seniors and other beneficiaries at the store. Upcoming events include Medicare 101 seminars at 11 a.m. on the last Thursday of each month from May through July.

UnitedHealthcare was one of the first health insurers to provide culturally relevant health care services to Asian Americans. The company founded its Asian Initiatives business in 1994 and established an office in New York City's Chinatown to serve local Asian Americans. In California, UnitedHealthcare operates storefronts in Alhambra and Koreatown. In addition, the company opens MedicareStores nationwide each fall during the Open Enrollment Period to support beneficiaries shopping for new Medicare coverage, including a store on Whittier Boulevard in Los Angeles last fall. "Medicare can be complex and confusing, especially for people who speak English as a second language. We hope our new storefront in Fullerton will make it as simple as possible for people to find the plan that works best for them and receive the support they need to make the most of their benefits," said Mike McCarthy, CEO of UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement in Southern California. "We look forward to serving our neighbors and offering our plan participants a personalized customer service experience at this new location." UnitedHealthcare is the nation's largest business dedicated to meeting the health and well-being needs of seniors and other Medicare beneficiaries, with more than 11 million people enrolled in its Medicare plans.* For more information, visit www.UHCAsian.com. Medicare beneficiaries and caregivers can also find helpful information translated into Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese at www.MedicareMadeClear.com. UnitedHealthcare serves nearly 3.5 million people throughout California with a network of 365 hospitals and nearly 95,000 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). *CMS Data, 2016.

All other statistics in this release can be attributed to UnitedHealthcare Internal Data, 2015. Click here to subscribe to Mobile Alerts for UnitedHealth Group. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428007019/en/

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[April 28, 2016] Samsung and U.S. Government Officials Celebrate Students, Winners of National STEM Competition

A solar-powered charging station for electric cars, a smartwatch app for pedestrian safety and prosthetic devices for veterans were among the winning projects of this year's Samsung (News - Alert) Solve for Tomorrow contest. Students from the public schools named National Winners earlier this month were honored at an annual awards luncheon attended by congressional leaders. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160427006924/en/ The National Winners of the 2016 Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest pose with His Excellency Ahn Ho-Young, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Korea to the U.S. (center); Chairman Michael T. McCaul (R-TX) (center left); Won-Kyong Kim, Executive Vice President of U.S. Public Affairs at Samsung Electronics America (back right); and Ann Woo, Senior Director of Corporate Citizenship at Samsung Electronics American (far right). Credit: Margarita Corporan. (Photo: Business Wire) The contest challenges students in grades 6 through 12 nationwide to use their STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills to innovate a solution to a problem affecting in their community. This year, the Grand Prize Winners were selected from a pool of more than 4,100 school groups that submitted ideas last October for how they would apply STEM to making a difference. Caption: The National Winners of the 2016 Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest pose with His Excellency Ahn Ho-Young, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Korea to the U.S. (center); Chairman Michael T. McCaul (R-TX) (center left); Won-Kyong Kim, Executive Vice President of U.S. Public Affairs at Samsung Electronics America (back right); and Ann Woo, Senior Director of Corporate Citizenship at Samsung Electronics American (far right). Credit: Margarita Corporan. The awards luncheon was held at Top of the Hill Banquet & Conference Center at the Reserve Officers Association in Washington, D.C. Welcome remarks were provided by the Korean ambassador to the United States, His Excellency Ahn Ho-Young. He said: "Programs like Solve for Tomorrow are a great way to highlight the important role STEM skills play in solving the challenges our communities face. The talent, creativity and compassion for their neighbors hat this year's winners have shown makes me more confident than ever in our shared future together."



In addition to honoring the students, Samsung recognized Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Chairman Michael T. McCaul (R-TX), Representative Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Congressman Trey Gowdy (R SC-4), and Representative Jared Polis (D-CO) for their commitment to STEM education in K-12 schools nationwide, naming them Samsung Solve for Tomorrow STEM Champions. "As someone who grew up in poverty, I know full well the power of education," said Scott. "That's why I fully support the STEM education motto, because I've seen firsthand the amazing things that can come from these programs."

McCaul and Polis received their awards in person. "I am honored to receive this distinction from Samsung, but the true recognition goes to the students and teachers committed to STEM education and breakthroughs," said McCaul. "With great programs like 'Solve for Tomorrow' and its participants, I am more confident than ever that America's scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematics future are bright." Keynote speaker Mick Ebeling, CEO of Not Impossible Labs, spoke about his company's mission "Technology for the Sake of Humanity," to provide tech-based solutions to help people with disabilities and illnesses around the world live fuller lives. Not Impossible Labs engineers and makers have used STEM to create affordable and unique healthcare tools, such as the acclaimed Eyewriter, which helped a paraplegic street artist to draw again after seven years. "Commit, then figure it out" was Ebeling's advice for the invention process, adding, "If you fail, it's okay - that means you're one step closer to finding the solution." While in Washington, D.C., the winners also had the opportunity to meet with their respective congressional representatives and present their projects. "We are so happy to give the students this opportunity to show their congressional representatives what they have been working on," said Ann Woo, senior director of Corporate Citizenship at Samsung Electronics America. "Their projects, while addressing local issues, could have an impact on communities across the country. We are also humbled to be among members of Congress as well as industry leaders who are also working to make a difference through STEM." The Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest was created in 2010 to bridge the gap in STEM education in public schools across the United States. Since its inception, the contest has awarded more than $17 million* in technology and prizes to more than 1,000 schools. To learn more about the competition, please visit: http://www.samsung.com/solve. B-roll and images from the luncheon and trip will be made available at http://news.samsung.com/us/ * Estimated Retail Value About Samsung Electronics America, Inc. Headquartered in Ridgefield Park, NJ, Samsung Electronics America, Inc. (SEA), is a recognized innovation leader in consumer electronics design and technology. A wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., SEA delivers a broad range of digital consumer electronics, IT and home appliance products. Samsung is the market leader for HDTVs in the U.S and America's fastest growing home appliance brands. To discover more of the award-winning products you love with Samsung, please visit www.samsung.com and for the latest Samsung news, please visit news.samsung.com/us and follow on Twitter (News - Alert) @SamsungNewsUS. About Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies that redefine the worlds of TVs, smartphones, wearable devices, tablets, cameras, digital appliances, printers, medical equipment, network systems, and semiconductor and LED solutions. We are also leading in the Internet of Things space with the open platform SmartThings, our broad range of smart devices, and through proactive cross-industry collaboration. We employ 319,000 people across 84 countries with annual sales of US $196 billion. To discover more, and for the latest news, feature articles and press material, please visit the Samsung Newsroom at news.samsung.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160427006924/en/

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[April 28, 2016] SERMO Collaborates with Wharton, Google and McKinsey to Release Pharma 3D

SERMO, the leading global social media network exclusively for doctors and largest health care provider polling and survey company, announced today its contribution to Pharma 3D: Rewriting the Script for Marketing in the Digital Age, an eBook released on April 27 by the Wharton School, Google, and McKinsey & Company (News - Alert). "We're honored to contribute to Pharma 3D, collaborating with such prestigious companies," said SERMO CEO Peter Kirk. "Today's marketplace is digital, and the health care industry must stay in step with this transformation. Now more than ever, health care professionals are turning to new places like social networks for their information, as well as relying on a host of new tools like mobile applications and wearables. At SERMO, we understand that these channels provide valuable opportunities to garner insight and tailor marketing strategies accordingly. Pharma 3D provides pharma with unique insights into the future of digital marketing." Pharma 3D draws on conclusions from across industries to help pharmaceutical companies build a pragmatic, actionable strategy for engaging with the new digital reality. To support the best practices outlined in the text, SERMO-a featured partner in the book-contributed data and case studies on the online and social media behavior of doctors. A few SERMO findings highlighted in the book include: One in four US physicians use social media daily to seek out medical information; one in seven actually contribute to a social network;

Close to two-thirds of doctors believe medical crowdsourcing on social platforms will become an important clinical decision support tool;

More than half of doctors stick to physician-only networks to discuss the businss and practice of medicine; and

Close to 60 percent say social media improves the quality of care delivered to patients.



News - Alert), Twitter and Patients Like Me on a panel to discuss how technology is changing the doctor-patient relationship, and how pharma can connect with these audiences to support better care and outcomes. Benshoshan remarked, "Doctors have unique needs when it comes to engaging with pharma, patients and peers. I'm so pleased SERMO was able to voice physician preferences among such prestigious colleagues, and provide insights into how doctors are using technology and social networks." In 2015, 56 percent of pharmaceutical companies saw declines in net revenues, and the industry as a whole grew just one percent. According to the book, to fuel growth, the pharmaceutical industry should "think in 3D": innovate how they "Discover" the behaviors and decision-making influences of patients and health care professionals; "Design" experiences that engage patients and health care professionals in ways that truly add value; and "Deliver" experiences that fit with people's lives and improve over time, based on feedback.

Pharma 3D is available for download here. For more information, follow #Pharma3D on social media. For additional information about how SERMO connects forward-thinking marketers to health care professionals, please write to [email protected] or [email protected]. About SERMO

SERMO is the leading social network for physicians - the world's largest virtual doctors' lounge where doctors talk real world medicine. SERMO's mission is to revolutionize real world medicine by providing physicians a safe, private and trusted platform for free and open dialogue on an unprecedented global scale. SERMO has more than 550,000 fully verified and licensed members and is now available for doctors in 24 countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the UK, the US and Venezuela. SERMO is also the world's largest health care professional polling company with 1.8 million HCPs in both the social network and a digital research network, spanning 80 countries. SERMO conducts 700,000 surveys a year. Learn more at www.SERMO.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428006085/en/

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[April 28, 2016] Wolters Kluwer's "UpToDate Talk" Quickly Becomes a Must-Listen

Wolters Kluwer, a leading global provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry, announced today that clinicians worldwide are quickly adopting the innovative new clinical podcast, "UpToDate Talk" as a convenient way to keep up with new developments in medical research. First launched in December 2015, the podcast was featured on iTunes' "New and Noteworthy" list for Science & Medicine, with the first five episodes streamed nearly 36,000 times in the first four months. The free digital media series is designed to help clinicians keep abreast of the most current clinical information in an easy, portable, listen-as-you-go format. Dr. H Nancy Sokol, Senior Deputy Editor and Deputy Editor for Adult Primary Care and Geriatrics, UpToDate, hosts the podcasts. On each episode of UpToDate Talk, Dr. Sokol is joined by world-renowned clinical domain experts who are authors and editors of UpToDate clinical content. She discusses important "What's New" and "Practice Changing UpDates" based on recent medical journal articles and studies. Podcast guests take a deeper look at each update and share their expertise on the impact these updates can have on daily clinical practice. Topics in the first five episodes include: Empagliflozin for diabetes; Pneumococcal vaccines; PCSK9 antibodies

Neonatal hypoglycemia; Hysteroscopic sterilization; Dabigatran reversal agent

SPRINT Trial; Recurrent Wheezing in Children; HTN in Pregnancy and Risk of Congenital Heart Defects

DAPT Score for coronary stents; Bronchoscopic interventions for severe emphysema; Beers criteria

Hodgkin lymphoma survivors; medical management of pediatric appendicitis; PPIs and dementia risk The podcast series is receiving early praise. Writes one listener, "This is very exciting to the many of us who use UpToDate in our daily practice." UpToDate Talk has become a popular podcast for clinicians worldwide. Podcast listeners streamed from Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, UK, and over 50 other countries. "Wolters Kluwer is committed to helping clinicians stay current, especially when it comes to new research that changes how they care for patients," said Peter Bonis, MD, CMO, Clinical Effectiveness, Wolters Kluwer. "With the UpToDate Talk podcast series, we add a dynamic new dimension to how we share this critical information. Plus, our users enjoy the added benefit of hearing about new research directly from leading experts covering thesedevelopments."



To listen to the podcasts, read bios of podcast guests and check podcast references, visit the UpToDate Talk web page: http://www.uptodate.com/home/clinical-podcasts. To be alerted to new episodes, subscribe to the UpToDate Talk podcast channel on iTunes or add the podcast to your favorite podcast app. UpToDate Talk is also available on the popular podcast app, Stitcher, allowing users to listen to episodes through automotive infotainment system such as Apple CarPlay, Android (News - Alert) Auto or GM's MyLink.

Follow UpToDate on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. About Wolters Kluwer Health

Wolters Kluwer N.V. (AEX: WKL) is a global leader in information services and solutions for professionals in the health, tax and accounting, risk and compliance, finance and legal sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with specialized technology and services. Wolters Kluwer reported 2015 annual revenues of 4.2 billion. The company, headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands, serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries and employs 19,000 people worldwide. Wolters Kluwer shares are listed on Euronext Amsterdam (WKL) and are included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices. Wolters Kluwer has a sponsored Level 1 American Depositary Receipt program. The ADRs are traded on the over-the-counter market in the U.S. (WTKWY). Wolters Kluwer Health is a leading global provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry. For more information about our products and organization, visit http://www.wolterskluwer.com/, follow @WKHealth or @Wolters_Kluwer on Twitter (News - Alert), like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, or follow WoltersKluwerComms on YouTube. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428005490/en/

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[April 27, 2016] Sec. Salazar Headlines Energy & Environment Summit This Week Convened By Hispanic State Legislators In Washington, DC

WASHINGTON, April 27, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Representative Angel Cruz (PA), President of the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators (NHCSL), announced the convening of NHCSL's 2016 Energy and Environment Summit, which will be held this Thursday, April 28 and Friday, April 29, 2016 in Washington, DC. Latino state legislators from across the country will gather to focus on key energy and environmental priorities and the role Latinos will play in shaping those policies during the 2016 elections and beyond. The keynote speaker for the Summit, former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, will address participants on Friday at 9am. In addition, Dr. Otto Schwake of Virginia Tech University will give remarks on Clean Water on Thursday at 3pm. Dr. Shwake is a key member of the team of researchers who conducted the Flint Water Study in the aftermath of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Summit attendees will alo hear from a diversity of expert panelists, including: Janet McCabe of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lola Infante of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), Sam Jamal of Solar City, Mark Magana of Green Latinos, among other industry and advocacy representatives.



Summit participants will engage in a wide ranging discussion on energy and environmental issues ranging from the EPA's Clean Power Plan and the interrelation between energy and Clean Water Act to Weighing the Costs of Energy Diversity, the Grid, and Consumer Protection and Innovation and the Workforce, and other relevant topics. NHCSL's 2016 Energy and Environment Summit will be held at the Capital Hilton Hotel, located at 1001 16th St NW, Washington, DC 20036. This program will be open to the press. Please contact us directly for more details on the Summit.

The NHCSL is the premier national association of Hispanic state legislators working to design and implement policies and procedures that will improve the quality of life for Hispanics throughout the country. NHCSL was founded in 1989 as a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)3 with the mission to be the most effective voice for the more than 390 Hispanic legislators. For more information visit www.nhcsl.org. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sec-salazar-headlines-energy--environment-summit-this-week-convened-by-hispanic-state-legislators-in-washington-dc-300258970.html SOURCE NHCSL-National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators

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[April 27, 2016] Register Now: Europe's Digital Capital Hosts Berlin Web Week

BERLIN, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- From June 7-17, entrepreneurs, bloggers, developers and designers will meet in Berlin - the digital capital of Europe - for this year's ninth Berlin Web Week. At approximately 20 conferences, networking events, fairs and forums, visitors will have the opportunity to discuss topics and trends in the digital economy, the startup scene and the digital media landscape. With more than 100 lectures on digitization, Axel Springer NOAH16 Berlin is one of the highlight events of this year's Berlin Web Week, together with the HEUREKA founders' conference, Connexpo tools and the Fempreneur Summit. The 2016 Berlin Web Week is increasingly focusing on the business aspects of the digital economy. Other events include; the e-commerce conference, K5 Berlin, the online marketing finance conference, OMfin-Con; and, the European Venture Market, a network conference for entrepreneurs. Berlin Web Week is a joint initiative of the State of Berlin's Department of Economics, Technology and Research and the economic development agency, Berlin Partner for Business and Technology. A schedule of events is available at http://www.berlin-web-week.com. Axel Springer NOAH16 Berlin



NOAH Berlin offers entrepreneurs, investors and digital industry thought leaders a platform for open discussions on current trends within the Internet ecosystem. Axel Springer and NOAH bring together disruptive challengers and established champions with more than 100 lectures and discussions on the subject of digitization. This premier event takes place from 8th to 9th June 2016 at the Tempodrom. Registration is now open http://www.noah-conference.com/request-invitation/ HEUREKA

HEUREKA began as one of Berlin's first founders conferences and has become one of the most important events in the startup scene. At inspirational speeches, panels and workshops, founders and managers share their knowledge on key factors of success and help entrepreneurs and digital pioneers develop their business further. The one-day event, taking place on 7th June at Alte Munze Berlin, offers the perfect setting for networking with high-level investors. Early Bird tickets are still on sale through the end of April at http://www.heureka-conference.com. Connexpo tools From 15th to 16th June 2016, on the Berlin Exhibition Grounds, Connexpo tools will bring together tool providers and digital technology experts. Digital transitions at the workplace, in particular in small and medium-sized companies, are the focus of the third edition of this event. "Connexpo," as in Conference + Expo + Connection, is designed to highlight successes in digitization processes and demonstrate how companies can successfully engage digitally with customers, as a team and in management. Tickets are available at http://www.tools-berlin.de/en/TradeVisitors/Tickets Fempreneur Summit #FemSum16 - The Fempreneur Summit 2016, an inspiring event for self-employed startup-interested women, takes place in the Startup Hub Berlin on 9th June 2016. The conference will feature keynote speeches delivered by female founders and business experts such as Milena Glimbovski of Original Unverpackt, Val Racheeva of wefound.org, Masoud Kamali of WestTech Ventures, Felicia Mutterer of Straight Magazine and many more. Tickets are available at http://www.eventbrite.de/e/fempreneur-summit-tickets-24189551600. More information at http://www.fempreneur-summit.com Contact:

Annabell Dorksen

press spokeswoman

+49-30-46302-599

[email protected]

Berlin Partner for Business and Technology http://www.berlin-partner.com

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[April 28, 2016] ArisGlobal Expands Its Safety Leadership Team with Industry Expertise

TOKYO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ArisGlobal, a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions for life sciences, today announced key new leaders have joined the Safety and Pharmacovigilance team to bring a wealth of insight to a growing business. This will bolster the company's safety business unit with unparalleled pharmacovigilance knowledge. George Phillips joined ArisGlobal in the position of Vice President - Safety. George has over 30 years' experience in pharmacovigilance. George worked for UCB Inc. where he held the position of Vice President, Digital Safety Surveillance. George has held various positions within pharmacovigilance with Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Parke-Davis and Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals. George is a registered pharmacist and received his B.S. and Pharm.D. Degrees from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. ArisGlobal has created the National Competent Authorities (NCA) to address the needs of health authorities. Dr. Vivek Ahuja will lead this initiative as the Vice President - Global Pharmacovigilance. Dr. Ahuja was Director, Research and Development at PATH India. He co-authored the Pharmacovigilance Program of India (Ministry of Health & FamilyWelfare, Government of India). Dr. Ahuja is a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) from Government Medical College, Chandigarh, India and an MD from All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.



Stephen Schmidt has joined as the Product Manager - Safety. Before joining ArisGlobal, Stephen was a Senior Safety Systems Analyst within the Medical Safety department at Alcon. Stephen served as the Divisional E2B Coordinator, Business Functional Lead, Validation Team Lead, System Support and Subject Matter Expert for Safety Systems. Stephen's career in the pharmaceutical/medical device industry began in 1996. "ArisGlobal has been a leader in Safety and Pharmacovigilance for years," noted Sonia Veluchamy, Managing Director, "but the introduction of this leadership and knowledge will position ArisGlobal for exciting new growth and industry insight. This is a bold new step into our increasingly bright future."

About ArisGlobal ArisGlobal's (http://www.arisglobal.com) innovative cloud-based solutions facilitate global drug development and regulatory compliance within the Life Sciences and Healthcare industries. Its cloud platform supports the entire product life cycle including Clinical Development, Regulatory Affairs, Pharmacovigilance and Medical Communications. Hundreds of drug and device manufacturers, CROs and regulatory agencies leverage ArisGlobal's advanced technology solutions to make better and more informed decisions, facilitate compliance, reduce risk and improve operational efficiency. Headquartered in the United States, ArisGlobal has regional offices in Europe, India and Japan. Nicole Drapeau Gillen

Director, Product Marketing

ArisGlobal LLC

Mobile: +1-609-360-4082

[email protected]

http://www.arisglobal.com

Twitter / Linkedin

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[April 28, 2016] Infosys Supports Acatech Announcement of Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index

HANNOVER, Germany, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- - Leading Research Institutions and Industry Leaders Collaborate on Index to Support 'Industrie 4.0' Adoption - RWTH Aachen University and Infosys Preview Inaugural Work Acatech, the German Academy of Science and Engineering, today announced the formation of a consortium to create an Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index. The index will enable companies to assess their current 'Industrie 4.0' capabilities, and map out concrete steps to realize the potential of intelligent integration of machines and humans by means of the Industrial Internet. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130122/589162 )

Acatech coined the phrase 'Industrie 4.0' and advises organizations as well as the public on forward-looking issues concerning technical sciences. Building on a global study commissioned by Infosys and the Institute for Industrial Management (FIR) at the RWTH Aachen University, the acatech Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index is aligned with leading academic research. It provides a unique multidimensional assessment that covers not only production and logistics but also includes research and development, service, as well as sales and marketing to provide a holistic assessment. The consortium will expand and further develop the index to define specific capabilities needed to utilize the benefits of Industrie 4.0 and will support companies to evaluate their own progress, identify specific actions, and derive suitable measures to achieve their strategic goals. The following research institutions have joined the consortium: Institute for Industrial Management (FIR) at the RWTH Aachen University, Darmstadt University, Paderborn University, Fraunhofer IML, and the DFKI Saarbucken. They are joined by partners from industry: Infosys, TUV SUD, and It's OWL (Intelligent Technical Systems Ostwestfalen-Lippe), which is a cluster of companies, universities and research institutes). Quotes Prof. Dr. Henning Kagermann, President, acatech: "Research shows that companies are looking for guidance and a systematic method to assess their current 'Industrie 4.0' level of implementation. This index provides a sound methodology and underscores acatech's oal to promote future technology by facilitating the cooperation between the sciences and business."



Dr. Vishal Sikka, CEO & Managing Director, Infosys: "As software permeates deeper into the physical world, it is critical to baseline the maturity of the cyber-physical systems and tap the immense potential of Industrie 4.0. Infosys already has been working closely with customers and research institutions like FIR Aachen to drive adoption of Industrie 4.0, helping organizations accelerate innovation and create new business models. As a founding member of the consortium, we will bring this experience and our engineering expertise to help create the comprehensive, business-centric acatech maturity index."

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dipl.-Wirt. Ing. Gunther Schuh, Director of FIR, RWTH Aachen University: "Industrie 4.0 needs to be introduced step by step and has to be aligned to the business strategy and existing skills and competences. Every step will already add a measurable benefit to the company. As a result, implementation is controllable, because the success is immediately apparent. Hence, I am very confident that we can make a great contribution to the implementation of Industrie 4.0 in companies." The announcement was made at the Hanover Fair (Hannover Messe Industrie), the world's biggest industrial fair, which is taking place from April 25 to 29, where a preview of the index is being shown at the acatech and Infosys booths. 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 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 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. 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

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[April 28, 2016] MindLink Expands Reseller Network With NeWay and CWSI to Provide Secure Messaging Solutions to Israel & Ireland

LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- MindLink Software (MindLink), developer of secure Chat Enabled Collaboration (CEC) tools for businesses, today announces two major partnerships with NeWay Technologies, an Israeli consulting and management services firm, and CWSI, a leading Mobile IT Integrator in the UK and Ireland. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160413/354760LOGO )

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160413/354761 )

Enterprise Messaging and Chat is a hot topic for most businesses today. Being able to expand rapidly and service new, core market is one of MindLink's key focus areas in 2016. NeWay and CWSI are both experienced, high calibre partners with extensive knowledge in Mobile IT and Microsoft technologies and have a substantial reach within their core markets of Israel and Ireland respectively. Neway and CWSI have joined the MindLink resellers program offering its secure enterprise messaging platform to clients & prospects in their home markets. Greg Finnigan, Channel Director comments: "We are very excited to be bringing secure messaging applications to firms in Israel and Ireland via our new partnerships. Our firms have the goal to connect people and knowledge and create a collaborative enterprise, whilst putting major emphasis on data security, privacy and compliance". NeWay, based in Israel, specialises in IT projects in Microsoft environments and was selected Microsoft Best Partner in Israel and worldwide in previous years. "The heritage of both our firs and our close ties with Microsoft makes offering chat enabled collaboration solutions to Lync & Skype for Business clients a natural extension to our business offering." remarks Shmulik Barr, CEO NeWay Technologies.



CWSI, based in Ireland, bridges the gap between mobile and IT and specialises in Mobile IT, EMM/ MDM and delivery of Enterprise Mobility Solutions. "We're very excited about the promise both our companies are committed to fulfilling through this partnership," explains Ronan Murphy, CEO, CWSI. "It is especially advantageous for financial services and government entities requiring highest data security and compliance whilst enabling collaboration on mobile devices."

About MindLink MindLink is a highly secure Chat Enabled Collaboration (CEC) platform for enterprises. Its messaging & collaboration app encourages employees to stay actively connected, reduce Email usage and build a more agile and responsive business. MindLink offers all modern collaboration features - presence, instant messaging, group chat as well as file sharing & archiving, combined with mobility, data security, regulatory compliance and advanced integrations to provide relevant content to users. On top of that, MindLink also connects to UC platforms such as Microsoft Lync & Skype for Business.

Think of MindLink as a secure alternative to WhatsApp designed for corporate use. Sign up for free: http://www.mindlinksoft.com About Neway Since 2004, NeWay aspires to focus its experience, knowledge and expertise in providing innovative and creative solutions to complex IT and computer-related challenges. We manage complex projects in a variety of vertical markets including; Hi-tech, Communications, software and Internet, Banking & Government. With offices and professional service personnel in Israel & the US, we manage and execute complicated projects creatively and flexibly, integrating advanced technological solutions and a range of methodologies that best meet each specific requirement. We successfully combine field-proven experience and vast knowledge of Microsoft technologies with a highly trained professional team. NeWay Technologies is a Microsoft Gold Partner with communication, cloud platform & cloud productivity competencies. The company integrates the most advanced technologies and solutions available by Microsoft, among customers of all sizes, as well as other 3rd party software and hardware solutions. About CWSI CWSI, a Deloitte Fast 50 company is a dedicated Mobile IT integrator and leader in enterprise mobile security, in Ireland and the UK. The company enables mobile workers to move freely, securely and focus on what matters. The company provides innovative solutions in the areas of mobile IT, including Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), Enterprise File Share and Sync (EFSS) and the delivery of Secure mobility solutions and policies. With a specialist knowledge of Mobile IT and a network agnostic position in the market that allows CWSI to work with multiple carriers and operating systems. CWSI also provides solutions, managed services and integration services to many of Ireland's and the UK's best known enterprises and institutions. The company has offices in Dublin and London. http://www.cwsi.ie Media Contact:

MindLink

Annekathrin Hase

[email protected]

+44(0)20-3582-1487

SOURCE MindLink Software Ltd.

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[April 28, 2016] Epson America Announces Retirement of President and CEO John Lang

LONG BEACH, Calif., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Epson America, Inc., regional headquarters of Seiko Epson Corporation (TSE: 6724, "Epson"), today announced that John Lang, president and CEO will retire effective June 30, 2016. As part of a planned succession, Keith Kratzberg, currently senior vice president, will assume the role of president and chief executive officer as of July 1, 2016. Lang joined Epson America in 1987 and has served as president and CEO for the past 14 years. In this role, he has been the driving force behind the company's strategic direction and consistently strong operational performance. He led the company through a period of unprecedented change in technology, markets and customers. Under his leadership, Epson significantly grew a wide-range of businesses in over 20 countries in North and Latin America and the Caribbean. Lang was also instrumental in dramatically expanding Epson's strategic focus from a consumer and small business printer manufacturer to a market leader in businesses as diverse as robotics, textile printing, augmented reality display technology, and point of sale solutions. Under Lang, Epson America has grown its branded market share to a number one or two position in virtually all of the categories it competes in and has grown the company's operations to more than 2,000 employees in North and Latin America with revenues in excess of $2.5 billion. "Since I began at Epson almost three decades ago, I have been extremely fortunate to have worked with an incredible team of professionals across the Americas, at our Seiko Epson headquarters and around the world," said Lang. "Together we have helped bring innovative, reliable and easy-to-use technology solutions that enrich all aspectsof our customers' lives  from business to the home. It has been an honor to be part of a company that has set a high bar for integrity, quality and collaboration."



Keith Kratzberg joined Epson in 1996 and has held positions of increasing responsibility in product development, marketing, sales, strategy, and general management. Since 2011, he has held the position of senior vice president, Sales & Marketing, most recently successfully expanding his management and oversight to the Latin America region of Epson America. Kratzberg has been responsible for driving innovation and market leadership across Epson's wide range of consumer and commercial imaging products, 3LCD projectors and point-of-service solutions. "With over 20 years at Epson America, and 11 years as a member of our senior management team, Keith's extensive experience in overseeing all aspects of the business combined with his consistent track record of driving revenue growth makes him the ideal person to lead Epson America's next phase of growth," said Lang. "Keith's experience at Epson and market knowledge will ensure a seamless transition."

"I am very excited to step into this role and look forward to further enhancing Epson America's position as a market leader," said Kratzberg. "I'm honored to have been affiliated with the management, employees, partners, and customers of Epson under John Lang's leadership and look forward to continuing to grow and develop his legacy of leadership, innovation and partnership. Moreover, I appreciate the support Seiko Epson has shown me in this transition and look forward to continuing the growth of the Epson brand in the Americas." About Epson

Epson is a global technology leader dedicated to connecting people, things and information with its original efficient, compact and precision technologies. With a lineup that ranges from inkjet printers and digital printing systems to 3LCD projectors, smart glasses, sensing systems and industrial robots, the company is focused on driving innovations and exceeding customer expectations in inkjet, visual communications, wearables and robotics. Led by the Japan-based Seiko Epson Corporation, the Epson Group comprises more than 67,000 employees in 90 companies around the world, and is proud of its contributions to the communities in which it operates and its ongoing efforts to reduce environmental impacts. Epson America, Inc., based in Long Beach, Calif., is Epson's regional headquarters for the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. To learn more about Epson, please visit: epson.com. You may also connect with Epson America on Facebook (facebook.com/Epson), Twitter (twitter.com/EpsonAmerica), YouTube (youtube.com/EpsonAmerica), and Instagram (instagram.com/EpsonAmerica). EPSON is a registered trademark and EPSON Exceed Your Vision is a registered logomark of Seiko Epson Corporation. Copyright 2016 Epson America, Inc. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121130/LA21891LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/epson-america-announces-retirement-of-president-and-ceo-john-lang-300259040.html SOURCE Epson America, Inc.

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[April 28, 2016] Level 3 Reports First Quarter 2016 Results

BROOMFIELD, Colo., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NYSE: LVLT) today reported results for the first quarter 2016. "Level 3's first quarter results demonstrate the benefit of our emphasis on profitable growth, as evident in our expanding margins and strong Free Cash Flow during the quarter," said Jeff Storey, president and CEO of Level 3. "The continued evolution of our products and service capabilities matches the changing and complex needs of enterprises, positioning the company to become the premier provider of global communications services." Total revenue was $2.051 billion for the first quarter 2016, compared to $2.030 billion on a pro forma basis, for the first quarter 2015, excluding the results from the company's Venezuelan subsidiary's operations that was deconsolidated as of September 30, 2015. In the first quarter 2016, the company generated net income of $124 million, basic earnings per share of $0.35 and diluted earnings per share of $0.34. Included in basic and diluted earnings per share was Income Tax Expense of $94 million, $85 million of which was non-cash, primarily due to utilization of the company's U.S. federal net operating losses. For the first quarter 2015, net income was $122 million and basic and diluted earnings per share were $0.35. Financial Results







Metric ($ in millions) First

Quarter

2016 First

Quarter

2015 Pro

Forma(1)(2) Core Network Services Revenue $1,947 $1,904 Wholesale Voice Services Revenue $104 $126 Total Revenue $2,051 $2,030 Network Access Costs $694 $720 Network Access Margin 66.2% 64.5% Network Related Expenses (NRE) (3) $331 $349 Selling, General and Administrative Expenses (SG&A)(3) $316 $341 Non-cash Compensation Expense $47 $31 Adjusted EBITDA(4) $710 $620 Adjusted EBITDA Margin(4) 34.6% 30.5% Capital Expenditures $297 $251 Unlevered Cash Flow(4) $324 $188 Free Cash Flow(4) $213 $42 Net Income $124 $122 Net Income per Common Share-Basic $0.35 $0.35 Weighted Average Shares Outstanding (in thousands)- Basic 356,785 346,874





(1) References to "pro forma" figures represent the results adjusted to exclude the company's Venezuelan subsidiary's operations except for Net Income, Net Income per Common Share-Basic and Weighted Average Shares Outstanding (in thousands)- Basic. (2) The reported first quarter 2015 results have been adjusted to reflect changes made to customer assignments between the wholesale and enterprise channels as of the beginning of 2016. (3) Excludes non-cash compensation expense. (4) See schedule of non-GAAP metrics for definitions and reconciliation to GAAP measures. Revenue Core Network Services (CNS) Revenue ($ in millions) First

Quarter

2016 First

Quarter

2015 Pro

Forma(1)(2) Percent Change, Constant

Currency North America $1,601 $1,534 4% Wholesale $434 $438 (1%) Enterprise $1,167 $1,096 6%







EMEA $191 $207 (5%) Wholesale $65 $71 (5%) Enterprise $107 $110 -% UK Government $19 $26 (22%)







Latin America $155 $163 8% Wholesale $39 $44 -% Enterprise $116 $119 10%







Total CNS Revenue $1,947 $1,904 4% Wholesale $538 $553 (1%) Enterprise $1,409 $1,351 6%



(1) References to "pro forma" figures represent the results adjusted to exclude the company's Venezuelan subsidiary's operations. (2) The reported first quarter 2015 results have been adjusted to reflect changes made to customer assignments between the wholesale and enterprise channels as of the beginning of 2016. CNS Revenue CNS Revenue was $1.947 billion in the first quarter 2016, increasing 3.6 percent year-over-year on a pro forma and constant currency basis. Adjusted EBITDA For the first quarter 2016, Adjusted EBITDA was $710 million. For the first quarter 2015, Adjusted EBITDA on a pro forma basis was $620 million, which excluded the results from the operations of the company's Venezuelan subsidiary. Adjusted EBITDA margins expanded to 34.6 percent in the first quarter 2016 from 30.5 percent on a pro forma basis in the first quarter 2015. Capital Market Transactions and Liquidity After the close of the quarter, on April 21, 2016, the company fully redeemed $775 million aggregate principal amount of Level 3 Financing, Inc.'s 7% Senior Notes due 2020. To fund the redemption of these notes, Level 3 Financing used the net proceeds from the issuance of its 5.25% Senior Notes due 2026, along with cash on hand, to pay for principal, accrued interest, applicable premiums and transaction fees and expenses. The company will incur a loss on extinguishment and modification of debt before taxes as a result of this transaction and related redemption of $40 million, or approximately $0.11 in basic earnings per share in the second quarter 2016. As of March 31, 2016, the company had cash and cash equivalents of $1.004 billion. 2016 Business Outlook "With our continued focus on profitable revenue growth and strong Adjusted EBITDA results in the first quarter 2016, we are increasing our outlook for full year 2016 Adjusted EBITDA growth," said Sunit Patel, executive vice president and CFO of Level 3. "We now expect full year 2016 Adjusted EBITDA growth of 10 to 12 percent, compared to our previous outlook of 9 to 12 percent. In addition, we continue to expect to generate Free Cash Flow of $1.0 to $1.1 billion." The company has also updated full year 2016 outlook measures for interest expense and non-cash compensation expense. Metrics Old Outlook New Outlook Adjusted EBITDA(1) YoY growth of 9% to 12% YoY growth of 10% to 12% Free Cash Flow $1.0 to $1.1 billion No Change GAAP Interest Expense $570 million $555 million Cash Interest Expense $520 million $510 million Capital Expenditures 15% of Total Revenue No Change Depreciation and amortization $1.230 billion No Change Cash Income Tax $40 million No Change Non-cash Compensation Expense $130 million $170 million Full Year Income Tax Rate ~30% No Change



(1) From a starting point of $2.592 billion, which is adjusted to exclude Adjusted EBITDA from the company's Venezuela subsidiary. Conference Call and Website Information Level 3 will hold a conference call to discuss the company's First Quarter Results today at 10 a.m. ET. The call will be broadcast live on Level 3's Investor Relations website at http://investors.level3.com. Additional information regarding First Quarter Results, including the presentation management will review on the conference call, will be available on Level 3's Investor Relations website. If you are unable to join the call via the Web, the call can be accessed live at +1 877-283-5145 (U.S. Domestic) or +1 312-281-1200 (International). Questions should be sent to [email protected]. For additional information, please call +1 720-888-2518. About Level 3 Communications

Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NYSE: LVLT) is a Fortune 500 company that provides local, national and global communications services to enterprise, government and carrier customers. Level 3's comprehensive portfolio of secure, managed solutions includes fiber and infrastructure solutions; IP-based voice and data communications; wide-area Ethernet services; video and content distribution; data center and cloud-based solutions. Level 3 serves customers in more than 500 markets in over 60 countries across a global services platform anchored by owned fiber networks on three continents and connected by extensive undersea facilities. For more information, please visit www.level3.com or get to know us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  Level 3 Communications, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Level 3, Level 3 Communications, Level (3) and the Level 3 Logo are either registered service marks or service marks of Level 3 Communications, LLC and/or one of its Affiliates in the United States and elsewhere. Any other service names, product names, company names or logos included herein are the trademarks or service marks of their respective owners. Level 3 services are provided by subsidiaries of Level 3 Communications, Inc. Forward-Looking Statement

Some statements made in this press release are forward-looking in nature and are based on management's current expectations or beliefs. These forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of performance and are subject to a number of uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside Level 3's control, which could cause actual events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the statements. Important factors that could prevent Level 3 from achieving its stated goals include, but are not limited to, the company's ability to: successfully integrate the tw telecom acquisition; manage risks associated with continued uncertainty in the global economy; increase revenue from its services to realize its targets for financial and operating performance; maintain and increase traffic on its network; develop and maintain effective business support systems; manage system and network failures or disruptions; avert the breach of its network and computer system security measures; develop new services that meet customer demands and generate acceptable margins; manage the future expansion or adaptation of its network to remain competitive; defend intellectual property and proprietary rights; manage continued or accelerated decreases in market pricing for communications services; obtain capacity for its network from other providers and interconnect its network with other networks on favorable terms; attract and retain qualified management and other personnel; successfully integrate future acquisitions; effectively manage political, legal, regulatory, foreign currency and other risks it is exposed to due to its substantial international operations; mitigate its exposure to contingent liabilities; and meet all of the terms and conditions of its debt obligations. Additional information concerning these and other important factors can be found within Level 3's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Statements in this press release should be evaluated in light of these important factors. Level 3 is under no obligation to, and expressly disclaims any such obligation to, update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Contact Information Media: Investors: D. Nikki Wheeler Mark Stoutenberg +1 720-888-0560 +1 720-888-2518 [email protected] [email protected] Level 3 Communications: Non-GAAP Metrics Pursuant to Regulation G, the company is hereby providing definitions of non-GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. The following describes and reconciles those financial measures as reported under accounting principles generally accepted in the United States (GAAP) with those financial measures as adjusted by the items detailed below and presented in the accompanying news release. These calculations are not prepared in accordance with GAAP and should not be viewed as alternatives to GAAP. In keeping with its historical financial reporting practices, the company believes that the supplemental presentation of these calculations provides meaningful non-GAAP financial measures to help investors understand and compare business trends among different reporting periods on a consistent basis. In addition, measures referred to in the accompanying news release as being calculated "on a constant currency basis" or "in constant currency terms" are non-GAAP metrics intended to present the relevant information assuming a constant exchange rate between the two periods being compared. Such metrics are calculated by applying the currency exchange rates used in the preparation of the prior period financial results to the subsequent period results. Core Network Services Revenue includes revenue from colocation and datacenter services, transport and fiber, IP and data services, and voice services (local and enterprise). Network Access Costs includes leased capacity, right-of-way costs, access charges, satellite transponder lease costs and other third party costs directly attributable to providing access to customer locations from the Level 3 network, but excludes Network Related Expenses, and depreciation and amortization. Network Access Costs do not include any employee expenses or impairment expenses; these expenses are allocated to Network Related Expenses or Selling, General and Administrative Expenses. Network Related Expenses includes certain expenses associated with the delivery of services to customers and the operation and maintenance of the Level 3 network, such as facility rent, utilities, maintenance and other costs, each related to the operation of its communications network, as well as salaries, wages and related benefits (including non-cash stock-based compensation expenses) associated with personnel who are responsible for the delivery of services, operation and maintenance of its communications network, and accretion expense on asset retirement obligations, but excludes depreciation and amortization. Network Access Margin ($) is defined as total Revenue less Network Access Costs from the Consolidated Statements of Operations, and excludes Network Related Expenses. Network Access Margin (%) is defined as Network Access Margin ($) divided by total Revenue. Management believes that network access margin is a relevant metric to provide to investors, as it is a metric that management uses to measure the margin available to the company after it pays third party network services costs; in essence, a measure of the efficiency of the company's network. Adjusted EBITDA is defined as net income (loss) from the Consolidated Statements of Operations before income tax (expense) benefit, total other income (expense), non-cash impairment charges, depreciation and amortization and non-cash stock compensation expense. Adjusted EBITDA Margin is defined as Adjusted EBITDA divided by total revenue. Adjusted EBITDA Metric Q1 2016 (as reported) (in millions)



Net Income $ 124

Income Tax Expense 94

Total Other Expense 144

Depreciation and Amortization 301

Non-Cash Stock Compensation 47

Adjusted EBITDA $ 710





Total Revenue $ 2,051

Adjusted EBITDA Margin 34.6 % Adjusted EBITDA Metric Q1 2015 (pro forma)1 (in millions)



Net Income $ 109

Income Tax Expense 5

Total Other Expense 189

Depreciation and Amortization 286

Non-Cash Stock Compensation 31

Adjusted EBITDA $ 620





Total Revenue $ 2,030

Adjusted EBITDA Margin 30.5 %

1Represents the consolidated results pro forma to exclude the Company's Venezuelan subsidiary's operations that was deconsolidated as of September 30, 2015. Adjusted EBITDA Metric Q1 2015 (as reported) (in millions)



Net Income $ 122

Income Tax Expense 5

Total Other Expense 189

Depreciation and Amortization 288

Non-Cash Stock Compensation 31

Adjusted EBITDA $ 635





Total Revenue $ 2,053

Adjusted EBITDA Margin 30.9 % Management believes that Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin are relevant and useful metrics to provide to investors, as they are an important part of the company's internal reporting and are key measures used by Management to evaluate profitability and operating performance of the company and to make resource allocation decisions. Management believes such measures are especially important in a capital-intensive industry such as telecommunications. Management also uses Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin to compare the company's performance to that of its competitors and to eliminate certain non-cash and non-operating items in order to consistently measure from period to period its ability to fund capital expenditures, fund growth, service debt and determine bonuses. Adjusted EBITDA excludes non-cash impairment charges and non-cash stock compensation expense because of the non-cash nature of these items. Adjusted EBITDA also excludes interest income, interest expense and income taxes because these items are associated with the company's capitalization and tax structures. Adjusted EBITDA also excludes depreciation and amortization expense because these non-cash expenses primarily reflect the impact of historical capital investments, as opposed to the cash impacts of capital expenditures made in recent periods, which may be evaluated through cash flow measures. Adjusted EBITDA excludes the gain (or loss) on extinguishment and modification of debt and other, net because these items are not related to the primary operations of the company. There are limitations to using Adjusted EBITDA as a financial measure, including the difficulty associated with comparing companies that use similar performance measures whose calculations may differ from the company's calculations. Additionally, this financial measure does not include certain significant items such as interest income, interest expense, income taxes, depreciation and amortization, non-cash impairment charges, non-cash stock compensation expense, the gain (or loss) on extinguishment and modification of debt and net other income (expense). Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin should not be considered a substitute for other measures of financial performance reported in accordance with GAAP. Unlevered Cash Flow is defined as net cash provided by (used in) operating activities less capital expenditures, plus cash interest paid and less interest income all as disclosed in the Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows or the Consolidated Statements of Operations. Management believes that Unlevered Cash Flow is a relevant metric to provide to investors, as it is an indicator of the operational strength and performance of the company and, measured over time, provides management and investors with a sense of the underlying business' growth pattern and ability to generate cash. Unlevered Cash Flow excludes cash used for acquisitions and debt service and the impact of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents balances. There are material limitations to using Unlevered Cash Flow to measure the company's cash performance as it excludes certain material items such as payments on and repurchases of long-term debt, interest income, cash interest expense and cash used to fund acquisitions. Comparisons of Level 3's Unlevered Cash Flow to that of some of its competitors may be of limited usefulness since Level 3 does not currently pay a significant amount of income taxes due to net operating losses, and therefore, generates higher cash flow than a comparable business that does pay income taxes. Additionally, this financial measure is subject to variability quarter over quarter as a result of the timing of payments related to accounts receivable and accounts payable and capital expenditures. Unlevered Cash Flow should not be used as a substitute for net change in cash and cash equivalents in the Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows. Free Cash Flow is defined as net cash provided by (used in) operating activities less capital expenditures as disclosed in the Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows. Management believes that Free Cash Flow is a relevant metric to provide to investors, as it is an indicator of the company's ability to generate cash to service its debt. Free Cash Flow excludes cash used for acquisitions, principal repayments and the impact of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents balances. There are material limitations to using Free Cash Flow to measure the company's performance as it excludes certain material items such as principal payments on and repurchases of long-term debt and cash used to fund acquisitions. Comparisons of Level 3's Free Cash Flow to that of some of its competitors may be of limited usefulness since Level 3 does not currently pay a significant amount of income taxes due to net operating losses, and therefore, generates higher cash flow than a comparable business that does pay income taxes. Additionally, this financial measure is subject to variability quarter over quarter as a result of the timing of payments related to interest expense, accounts receivable and accounts payable and capital expenditures. Free Cash Flow should not be used as a substitute for net change in cash and cash equivalents on the Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows. Unlevered Cash Flow and Free Cash Flow





Three Months Ended March 31, 2016 (as reported) Unlevered



($ in millions) Cash Flow

Free Cash Flow







Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities $ 510



$ 510

Capital Expenditures (297)



(297)

Cash Interest Paid 112



N/A

Interest Income (1)



N/A

Total $ 324



$ 213

















Unlevered Cash Flow and Free Cash Flow





Three Months Ended March 31, 2015 (pro forma)1 Unlevered



($ in millions) Cash Flow

Free Cash Flow







Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities $ 293



$ 293

Capital Expenditures (251)



(251)

Cash Interest Paid 147



N/A

Interest Income (1)



N/A

Total $ 188



$ 42



1Represents the consolidated results pro forma to exclude the Company's Venezuelan subsidiary's operations that was deconsolidated as of September 30, 2015.



Unlevered Cash Flow and Free Cash Flow





Three Months Ended March 31, 2015 (as reported) Unlevered



($ in millions) Cash Flow

Free Cash Flow







Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities $ 305



$ 305

Capital Expenditures (254)



(254)

Cash Interest Paid 147



N/A

Interest Income (1)



N/A

Total $ 197



$ 51



LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES Consolidated Statements of Income (unaudited)

















Three Months Ended (dollars in millions, except per share data) March 31, 2016 December 31, 2015 March 31, 2015







Revenue $ 2,051 $ 2,053 $ 2,053







Costs and Expenses





Network access costs 694 708 723 Network related expenses 338 344 356 Depreciation and amortization 301 294 288 Selling, general and administrative expenses 356 369 370 Total costs and expenses 1,689 1,715 1,737







Operating Income 362 338 316







Other Income (Expense):





Interest income 1  1 Interest expense (135) (152) (180) Loss on modification and extinguishment of debt  (55)  Other, net (10) 3 (10) Total other expense (144) (204) (189)







Income Before Income Taxes 218 134 127







Income Tax (Expense) Benefit (94) 3,189 (5)







Net Income $ 124 $ 3,323 $ 122







Basic Earnings per Common Share:





Net Income per Share $ 0.35 $ 9.33 $ 0.35 Weighted-Average Shares Outstanding (in thousands) 356,785 356,274 346,874







Diluted Earnings per Common Share:





Net Income per Share $ 0.34 $ 9.24 $ 0.35 Weighted-Average Shares Outstanding (in thousands) 360,339 359,712 350,832

LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES Consolidated Balance Sheets (unaudited)









March 31, December 31, March 31, (dollars in millions) 2016 2015 2015







Assets













Current Assets:





Cash and cash equivalents $ 1,004 $ 854 $ 1,114 Restricted cash and securities 837 8 7 Receivables, less allowances for doubtful accounts 807 757 743 Other 141 111 151 Total Current Assets 2,789 1,730 2,015







Property, Plant and Equipment, net 9,974 9,878 9,744 Restricted Cash and Securities 41 42 19 Goodwill 7,746 7,749 7,740 Other Intangibles, net 1,074 1,127 1,298 Deferred Tax Assets 3,365 3,441 284 Other Assets 50 50 55 Total Assets $ 25,039 $ 24,017 $ 21,155







Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity













Current Liabilities:





Accounts payable $ 680 $ 629 $ 629 Current portion of long-term debt 781 15 503 Accrued payroll and employee benefits 146 218 177 Accrued interest 131 108 187 Current portion of deferred revenue 283 267 300 Other 166 179 148 Total Current Liabilities 2,187 1,416 1,944







Long-Term Debt, less current portion 10,870 10,866 10,849 Deferred Revenue, less current portion 1,012 977 895 Other Liabilities 628 632 750 Total Liabilities 14,697 13,891 14,438







Stockholders' Equity 10,342 10,126 6,717 Total Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity $ 25,039 $ 24,017 $ 21,155

LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows (unaudited)









Three Months Ended

March 31, December 31, March 31, (dollars in millions) 2016 2015 2015







Cash Flows from Operating Activities:





Net income $ 124 $ 3,323 $ 122 Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash provided by operating activities:





Depreciation and amortization 301 294 288 Non-cash compensation expense attributable to stock awards 47 49 31 Loss on modification and extinguishment of debt  55  Accretion of debt discount and amortization of debt issuance costs 5 6 7 Accrued interest on long-term debt, net 23 (29) 22 Deferred income taxes 85 (3,207) (10) Gain on sale of property, plant and equipment and other assets   (1) Other, net (9) 3 21 Changes in working capital items:





Receivables (44) 43 (23) Other current assets (35) 10 (19) Payables 48 5 (24) Deferred revenue 46 29 8 Other current liabilities (81) (25) (117) Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities 510 556 305







Cash Flows from Investing Activities:





Capital expenditures (297) (330) (254) Change in restricted cash and securities, net (828) 2 1 Proceeds from sale of property, plant and equipment and other assets  1 1 Net Cash Used in Investing Activities (1,125) (327) (252)







Cash Flows from Financing Activities:





Long-term debt borrowings, net of issuance costs 765 885 492 Payments on and repurchases of long-term debt and capital leases (1) (949) (2) Net Cash Provided by (Used in) Financing Activities 764 (64) 490







Effect of Exchange Rates on Cash and Cash Equivalents 1 (2) (9)







Net Change in Cash and Cash Equivalents 150 163 534







Cash and Cash Equivalents at Beginning of Period 854 691 580







Cash and Cash Equivalents at End of Period $ 1,004 $ 854 $ 1,114







Supplemental Disclosure of Cash Flow Information:





Cash interest paid $ 112 $ 173 $ 147 Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140908/144115 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/level-3-reports-first-quarter-2016-results-300259028.html SOURCE Level 3 Communications, Inc.

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[April 28, 2016] Sandvine's Universal PCRF Enables Innovative LTE Subscriber Services for Paratus Telecom

Sandvine's PCRF Experiencing Global Success Driven by Industry Upgrade Cycle WATERLOO, ON, April 28, 2016 /CNW/ - Sandvine, (TSX:SVC) a leading provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for fixed and mobile operators, today announced that Sandvine's universal Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) continues to gain momentum, having been recently selected by operators around the globe, including in Asia-Pacific, EMEA, Latin America, and North America. The most recent deployment is at Paratus Telecom in Namibia, who selected Sandvine in February this year to enable a diverse set of subscriber services on their newly launched LTE network. Sandvine's Service Delivery Engine (SDE) provides communications service providers (CSPs) with the industry's only universal PCRF  a policy controller that supports the 3GPP (mobile) and PCMM (cable) standards as well as other interfaces such as RADIUS CoA and REST  in order to facilitate deployment in any mobile, fixed or converged network. This deployment flexibility allows operators to enable innovative subscriber services such as shared data, data rollover, sponsored data and consistent policy control in any network or across multiple networks simultaneously, using a single PCRF provided by Sandvine. Paratus Telecom, recently deployed Sandvine's PCRF to enable pre-paid and post-paid service plans for their newly launched LTE network in Namibia. One innovative postpaid plan powered by Sandvine at launch is the "Flix" package which targets subscribers in Namibia who are movie buffs. For a low monthly fee, the "Flix" plan provides subscribers with 5GB of data to use on any application they see fit, and 100GB of data to use exclusively on Netflix, allowing them to binge-watch hours of their favorite movies and television shows. "The tight integration between Sandvine's traffic classification, PCRF and PCEF solution allows us to rapidly enable and update the service plans our subscribers are looking for," said Schalk Erasmus, Chief Operating Officer, Paratus Telecom. In addition to innovative data services, Sandvine's PCRF can also enable a number of VoLTE-specific use ases, including guaranteed quality of service (QoS) for voice calls. When Sandvine's PCRF is deployed as part of a complete Sandvine network policy control solution in a network with VoLTE, the additional intelligence gained enables a number of additional use cases for operators, including measurement of Quality of Experience (QoE) for both VoLTE and over-the-top (OTT) services.



"The market is currently going through a PCRF upgrade cycle which has resulted in Sandvine receiving multiple PCRF orders in each of our previous four quarters," said Tom Donnelly, COO, Sales and Global Services. "These PCRF orders have been diverse in nature with them being distributed across all of our major sales regions, from both new and existing customers, and with and without Sandvine's Policy Traffic Switch fulfilling the role of PCEF."



For CSPs interested in launching innovative subscriber services like Paratus Telecom, Sandvine is hosting a webinar on May 25, 2016 on the topic of "Zero-rating and Sponsored Data under Net Neutrality". The webinar will discuss how CSPs can leverage Sandvine's experience and technology to deliver innovative subscriber services within local definitions of network neutrality, to seize market share and grow revenue. Those interested in attending can register at sandvine.com/webinars. ABOUT SANDVINE Sandvine's network policy control solutions add intelligence to fixed, mobile and converged communications service provider networks, to increase revenue, reduce network costs and improve subscriber quality of experience. Our networking solutions perform end-to-end policy control functions, including traffic classification, policy decision and enforcement. Deployed as virtualized network functions or on Sandvine's purpose built hardware, the products provide actionable business insight, and the ability to deploy new consumer and business subscriber services, optimize and secure network traffic, and engage with subscribers. Sandvine's network policy control solutions are deployed in more than 300 networks in over 100 countries, serving hundreds of millions of data subscribers worldwide. www.sandvine.com. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Certain statements in this release which are not historical facts constitute forward-looking statements or forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws ("forward-looking statements") and are made pursuant to the "safe harbour" provisions of such laws. Statements related to the scope of deployment of Sandvine's products by a specific customer, the potential revenue opportunity with any particular customer or in any market segment, the benefits of Sandvine's products and services to be realized by customers, Sandvine's market position, future opportunities, product development plans and demand for Sandvine's products and services are forward looking statements, as are any statements relating to future events, conditions or circumstances. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements involve both known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Sandvine to differ materially from the results, performance, achievements or developments expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, changes in internal deployment strategies or plans by specific customers; the growth of broadband internet usage and levels of capital spending on broadband network management systems; the timing of orders and manufacturing lead times; changes in customer order patterns or customer mix; insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; increased competition in the broadband network equipment industry; dependence on the timely development and market acceptance of new product offerings and standards; rapid technological and market change; manufacturing and sourcing risks including dependence on key suppliers and key technologies; dependence upon indirect channel sales and resellers; factors such as business and economic conditions and growth trends in the broadband network equipment industry and in various geographic regions; global economic conditions and uncertainties in the geopolitical environment including the impact of regulation related to the internet and the delivery of internet services. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current plans, estimates, projections, beliefs and opinions, and Sandvine does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements should assumptions related to these plans, estimates, projections, beliefs and opinions change, except to the extent required by applicable law. SOURCE Sandvine

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[April 28, 2016] Flexpoint Sensor Systems, Inc. Spotlights Guidance for Explosive Revenue Growth in 2016

DRAPER, Utah, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Flexpoint Sensor Systems, Inc. (FLXT), a leader in flexible Bend Sensor technology, hosted a much anticipated conference call for investors and interested parties on April 19th, 2016 to reflect on company performance for 2015 and give an in-depth look into the 2016 market focus and provided guidance for the year. According to Clark Mower, Flexpoint CEO, "We specialize in the development and manufacture of highly customized and innovative products featuring the Bend Sensor. There are a large number of applications either currently on the market or in development and on the cusp of commercialization. The keys to success lie in execution across the many market segments upon which we are acutely focused. The company has positioned itself for tremendous success in 2016 and we are extremely eager for the future." According to Paul Sexauer, Flexpoint VP Sales and Marketing, "Our technology is adaptable to a wide variety of applications and uses." This is evidenced by the customers and partners across industries comprised of automotive, trucking, consumer toys, medical and a rapidly expanding field of wearables  also spanning numerous market segments including gaming, medical/rehabilitation, virtual reality, sports, robotics and industrial. During the call, the company highlighted significant progress of Bend Sensor driven technologies and projected revenue success in 2016. The company is increasingly receiving orders from repeat and new customers from around the world and across industries. Flexpoint has completed or i on track to complete previously stated goals and the following contributors will allow the Company to achieve these previously stated cash flow and revenue goals:



Orders from a Fortune 100 global toy manufacturer with production products scheduled to hit consumer markets in late 2016

An expanding number of wearables/gloves customers

Rapid commercialization success of the recently patented HTK Safety Anti-Rollaway System with which Flexpoint has taken on a critical and expended sales and marketing leadership role

A Tier 1 automotive manufacturer featuring the patented Flexpoint Horn Actuation system

Haemoband, a European based medical device manufacturer which is expected to be successfully completing new product certification trials in mid/late 2016 and moving rapidly into mass production Sexauer further commented, "Besides our ongoing successful relationships, there is so much to be motivated for in the future. Flexible smart phone and hand held technologies, consumer products of varying types, and more are just some of the innovative projects we will advance in the remainder of the year and thereafter. Please visit http://www.flexpoint.com/ for more information including the presentation from the April 19, 2016 conference call.

About Flexpoint Sensor Systems, Inc. Flexpoint Sensor Systems, Inc. (FLXT) is an innovative technology firm specializing in developing products that feature the Company's patented Bend Sensor and related technology. The Bend Sensor is a groundbreaking sensing solution that is revolutionizing applications in the automotive, safety, medical and industrial industries. The Bend Sensor's single-layer, thin film construction cuts costs and mechanical bulk while introducing a range of functions and stylistic design possibilities that have never before been available in sensing technology. Flexpoint's technology and expertise have been recognized by the world's elite business and academic innovators for over 17 years. The company is setting a new standard for sensing solutions in the "smart" age of technology. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that certain statements in this release are "forward-looking statements" and involve both known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors. Such uncertainties include, among others, certain risks associated with the operation of the company described above. The Company's actual results could differ materially from expected results. Contact Information: Flexpoint Sensor Systems

Clark Mower, President

801-568-5111 Brokers and Analysts

Chesapeake Group

410-825-3930 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/flexpoint-sensor-systems-inc-spotlights-guidance-for-explosive-revenue-growth-in-2016-300259064.html SOURCE Flexpoint Sensor Systems, Inc.

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[April 28, 2016] MPIRICA Health announces an industry first: the addition of over 1 million outpatient surgeon quality scores

SEATTLE, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- MPIRICA Health, Inc., a healthcare startup focused on quality transparency, today announced they will be launching over one million outpatient quality scores for individual physicians and hospitals, covering approximately 1,000 surgeries. Industry-wide, this will be the first time objective scoring of surgeons and hospitals has been done for outpatient procedures. The majority of surgical care in the U.S. is performed on an outpatient basis. "When it comes to delivering straight answers to consumers about provider quality, there is no substitute for an objective, outcomes-based approach that adjusts for patient risk," said Shakil Haroon, Founder and CEO of MPIRICA. "Yelp-style reviews are easy to compile, but they result in various 'top doctors' and 'best hospitals' lists, with no two being consistent. It's no wonder consumers are confused." The MPIRICA Quality Score is a "FICO-like" 3-digit nuber that is based on 4 years of individual provider outcomes for a specific procedure. The scoring model risk-adjusts, weights, and summarizes massive amounts of medical data into a type of "batting average" of success for providers who perform each surgery.



It is well known that the cost savings of outpatient care can be significant. But when it comes to choosing an outpatient provider based on quality, healthcare consumers and their employers have had no guidance beyond hearsay and subjective opinions. The MPIRICA Quality Score solves this uncertainty. "We are breaking new ground here," commented Haroon. "I truly believe the widespread use of our score will have a significant impact on patient safety as well as cost savings for those paying the bills, including self-insured employers."

Extreme variance in surgical quality is prevalent throughout all US metros for both outpatient and inpatient care, with the poorest performing facilities experiencing 3-5 times more complications, readmissions, and mortality compared to the top performers. Moreover, lack of quality is not only dangerous, it is expensive. Severe complications can increase a surgical procedure's cost to almost six times more than the same procedure with no complications. MPIRICA's launch of scores covering over 1,000 outpatient procedures significantly expands on the company's previous release six months ago of inpatient surgeon scores covering just 65 procedures. The statistical models and methods that support the MPIRICA Quality Score were created by a team of physicians and statisticians with decades of medical quality analytics experience, through an exclusive partnership with MPA Healthcare Solutions. Read more about the New Frontier of Outpatient Surgery Quality on MPIRICA's company blog. About MPIRICA Health, Inc.

Based in Bellevue, Washington, MPIRICA Health was founded in 2014 to demystify healthcare quality transparency for consumers with an intuitive measurement of medical providers based on past performance, at a surgical procedure level. Find information about MPIRICA on Twitter, LinkedIn or on their website at www.mpirica.com. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150421/200132LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mpirica-health-announces-an-industry-first-the-addition-of-over-1-million-outpatient-surgeon-quality-scores-300259151.html SOURCE MPIRICA Health, Inc.

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[April 28, 2016] HubSpot Announces Julie Herendeen Joins Board of Directors

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS), a leading marketing and sales software company, is pleased to announce that Julie Herendeen, a seasoned global marketing leader, has joined its Board of Directors. Julie joins the HubSpot Board as Stacey Bishop, a partner at Scale Venture Partners and early HubSpot investor, vacates her seat. A HubSpot board member since August 2013, Stacey saw the company through a successful IPO in October 2014. "We're so thankful to Stacey for her commitment to HubSpot over the past two and a half years, and while we wish that she could stay, we are thrilled to welcome Julie," said Brian Halligan, HubSpot Co-founder and CEO. "Julie not only understands the voice of the customer and what it takes to build a delightful, low-touch product onboarding process, but she's also worked for companies we admire and would like to learn from. Myself and members of our board gelled with her from the get-go, and we think she brings the perfect mix of knowledge, experience, and West Coast approach to help HubSpot expand its brand effectively around the globe." "HubSpot is an exciting technology company that's helping businesses change the way they market and sell for the better," said Julie Herendeen. "I am honored to have the opportunity to join the HubSpot Board of Directors and look orward to working with the team."



About Julie Herendeen: Former head of global marketing at Dropbox, where she led all aspects of marketing and had revenue responsibility for Dropbox's self-serve business. In addition, she previously served as CMO at Lookout, growing the company from an early startup into the leading provider of cloud-based mobile security solutions for both consumer and enterprise customers.

Past roles include Corporate Vice President and GM at Yahoo!, founding Vice President of Marketing at Shutterfly, and leadership roles at Netscape and Apple.

Holds a BA in Economics (Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of California, Berkeley , and an MBA from Harvard Business School . "Julie is a fantastic addition to the HubSpot Board of Directors," said Stacey Bishop. "I could not have enjoyed my time on HubSpot's Board more, and I am so pleased that they have selected someone with Julie's pedigree and expertise to join the team. HubSpot is an amazing company and I look forward to following their growth and achievements in the years to come."

About HubSpot HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) is a leading inbound marketing and sales platform. Since 2006, HubSpot has been on a mission to make the world more inbound. Today, over 18,000 customers in more than 90 countries use HubSpot's software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers. HubSpot's inbound marketing software, ranked #1 in customer satisfaction by VentureBeat and G2Crowd, includes social media publishing and monitoring, blogging, SEO, website content management, email marketing, marketing automation, and reporting and analytics, all in one integrated platform. Award-winning HubSpot Sales enables sales and service teams to have more effective conversations with leads, prospects, and customers. HubSpot has been recognized by Inc., Forbes, and Deloitte as one of the world's fastest-growing companies and the Glassdoor, Fortune, the Boston Globe and Entrepreneur as a best place to work. HubSpot is headquartered in Cambridge, MA with offices in Singapore, Dublin, Ireland, Sydney, Australia, and Portsmouth, NH. Learn more at www.hubspot.com Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160428/361213

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110817/NE53515LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hubspot-announces-julie-herendeen-joins-board-of-directors-300259591.html SOURCE HubSpot

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[April 28, 2016] Enova Announces First Quarter 2016 Results

CHICAGO, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Enova International (NYSE: ENVA), a technology and analytics driven online lender, today announced financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2016. "Our solid first quarter results were driven by strong origination growth and good loan performance across our portfolio. These results demonstrate the earnings power inherent in our business and our focus on executing on the market opportunity ahead of us," said Enova's CEO David Fisher. "In addition to our strong financial results, we achieved a number of important operational milestones in the quarter, including closing our first securitization and receiving full authorization for our UK businesses." First Quarter 2016 Summary Total revenue of $174.7 million in the first quarter of 2016 increased 5.4% from $165.7 million in the first quarter of 2015, driven primarily by growth in near-prime installment products.

in the first quarter of 2016 increased 5.4% from in the first quarter of 2015, driven primarily by growth in near-prime installment products. Gross profit margin of 60.2% in the first quarter of 2016 declined from 76.7% in the first quarter of 2015, driven by stronger growth in the U.S. installment loan portfolio and a higher mix of new customers, which require higher loan loss provisions. The higher gross profit margin in the first quarter of 2015 was heavily influenced by regulatory changes in the United Kingdom and the resulting wind down of our line of credit portfolio in that market.

and the resulting wind down of our line of credit portfolio in that market. Adjusted EBITDA of $37.8 million , a non-GAAP measure, compared to $61.1 million in the first quarter of 2015.

, a non-GAAP measure, compared to in the first quarter of 2015. Net income decreased to $9.9 million , or $0.30 per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2016 from $24.5 million , or $0.74 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2015. "Continued growth in our small business and consumer near-prime installment loan and financing products led to a 47.1% year over year increase in our combined loan and finance receivable balance, ending the quarter at $523.0 million. Overall, installment loan and financing products have grown to represent the largest portion of our revenue mix, accounting for 44% of total revenue and 67% of our loan and finance receivable balance for the first quarter," said Robert Clifton, CFO of Enova. Enova ended the first quarter of 2016 with cash and cash equivalents of $112.2 million. As of March 31, 2016, the company had debt outstanding of $594.4 million, which included $113.9 million outstanding under Enova's $175 million securitization facility. During the first quarter, Enova generated $98.6 million of cash flow from operations. Outlook

For the second quarter of 2016, Enova expects total revenue of $155 million to $170 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $23 million to $33 million. For the full year 2016, Enova expects total revenue of $680 million to $730 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $125 million to $140 million. For information regarding the non-GAAP financial measures discussed in this release, please see "Non-GAAP Financial Measures" and "Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Financial Measures" below. Conference Call

Enova will host a conference call to discuss its results at 4 p.m. Central Time / 5 p.m. Eastern Time on April 28, 2016. The live webcast of the call can be accessed at the Enova Investor Relations website at http://ir.enova.com, along with the company's earnings press release and supplemental financial information. The U.S. dial-in for the call is 1-855-560-2575 (1-412-542-4161 for non-U.S. callers). Please ask to be joined to the Enova International Call. A replay of the conference call will be available until May 12, 2016, at 10:59 p.m. Central Time / 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time, while an archived version of the webcast will be available on the Enova Investor Relations website for 90 days. The U.S. dial-in for the conference call replay is 1-877-344-7529 (1-412-317-0088). The replay access code is 10084807. About Enova

Enova (NYSE: ENVA) is a leading provider of online financial services to non-prime consumers and small businesses, providing access to credit powered by its advanced analytics, innovative technology, and world-class online platform and services. Enova has provided over four million customers around the globe access to more than $17 billion in loans and financing. The financial technology company has a portfolio of trusted brands serving consumers, including CashNetUSA, DollarsDirect, NetCredit, On Stride Financial, Pounds to Pocket, QuickQuid and Simplic; two brands serving small businesses, Headway Capital and The Business Backer; and offers online lending platform services to lenders. Through its Enova Decisions brand, it also delivers on-demand decision-making technology and real-time predictive analytics services to clients. You can learn more about the company and its brands at www.enova.com. Cautionary Statement Concerning Forward Looking Statements

This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 about the business, financial condition and prospects of Enova. These forward-looking statements give current expectations or forecasts of future events and reflect the views and assumptions of Enova's senior management with respect to the business, financial condition and prospects of Enova as of the date of this release and are not guarantees of future performance. The actual results of Enova could differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements because of various risks and uncertainties applicable to Enova's business, including, without limitation, those risks and uncertainties indicated in Enova's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Forms 10-Q and current reports on Forms 8-K. These risks and uncertainties are beyond the ability of Enova to control, and, in many cases, Enova cannot predict all of the risks and uncertainties that could cause its actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements. When used in this release, the words "believes," "estimates," "plans," "expects," "anticipates" and similar expressions or variations as they relate to Enova or its management are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Enova cautions you not to put undue reliance on these statements. Enova disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements after the date of this release. Non-GAAP Financial Measures

In addition to the financial information prepared in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, Enova provides historical non-GAAP financial information. Management believes that presentation of non-GAAP financial information is meaningful and useful in understanding the activities and business metrics of Enova's operations. Management believes that these non-GAAP financial measures reflect an additional way of viewing aspects of Enova's business that, when viewed with its GAAP results, provide a more complete understanding of factors and trends affecting its business. Management provides non-GAAP financial information for informational purposes and to enhance understanding of Enova's GAAP consolidated financial statements. Readers should consider the information in addition to, but not instead of or superior to, Enova's financial statements prepared in accordance with GAAP. This non-GAAP financial information may be determined or calculated differently by other companies, limiting the usefulness of those measures for comparative purposes. Combined Loans and Finance Receivables

Enova has provided combined loans and finance receivables, which is a non-GAAP measure. Enova also reports allowances and liabilities for estimated losses on loans and finance receivables individually and on a combined basis, which are GAAP measures that are included in Enova's financial statements. Management believes these measures provide investors with important information needed to evaluate the magnitude of potential cost of revenue and the opportunity for revenue performance of the loan and finance receivables portfolio on an aggregate basis. Management believes that the comparison of the aggregate amounts from period to period is more meaningful than comparing only the residual amount on Enova's balance sheet since both revenue and the cost of revenue for loans and finance receivables are impacted by the aggregate amount of loans and finance receivables owned by Enova and those guaranteed by Enova as reflected in its financial statements. Adjusted Earnings and Adjusted Earnings Per Share

In addition to reporting financial results in accordance with GAAP, Enova has provided adjusted earnings and adjusted earnings per share, or, collectively, the Adjusted Earnings Measures, which are non-GAAP measures. Management believes that the presentation of these measures provides investors with greater transparency and facilitates comparison of operating results across a broad spectrum of companies with varying capital structures, compensation strategies, derivative instruments and amortization methods, which provides a more complete understanding of Enova's financial performance, competitive position and prospects for the future. Management also believes that investors regularly rely on non-GAAP financial measures, such as the Adjusted Earnings Measures, to assess operating performance and that such measures may highlight trends in Enova's business that may not otherwise be apparent when relying on financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP. In addition, management believes that the adjustments shown below are useful to investors in order to allow them to compare Enova's financial results during the periods shown without the effect of certain expense items. Adjusted EBITDA

Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP measure that Enova defines as earnings excluding depreciation, amortization, interest, foreign currency transaction gains or losses, taxes, and stock-based compensation, and Adjusted EBITDA margin is a non-GAAP measure that Enova defines as Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of total revenue. Management believes Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA margin are used by investors to analyze operating performance and evaluate Enova's ability to incur and service debt and Enova's capacity for making capital expenditures. Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA margin are also useful to investors to help assess Enova's estimated enterprise value. The computation of Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA margin as presented below may differ from the computation of similarly-titled measures provided by other companies.







ENOVA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS (dollars in thousands, except per share data) (Unaudited)





March 31,



December 31,





2016



2015



2015

Assets























Cash and cash equivalents

$ 112,211



$ 143,444



$ 42,066

Restricted cash and cash equivalents (includes restricted cash of consolidated VIEs of $11,122 as of March 31, 2016)



20,908





7,410





7,379

Loans and finance receivables, net (includes loans of consolidated VIEs of $150,427 and allowance of consolidated VIEs of $12,172 as of March 31, 2016)



428,202





279,055





434,633

Income taxes receivable



7,436











5,503

Other receivables and prepaid expenses



18,810





15,667





20,049

Property and equipment, net



45,740





40,257





48,055

Goodwill



267,012





255,856





267,008

Intangible assets, net



6,221





33





6,540

Other assets



8,636





8,173





9,304

Total assets

$ 915,176



$ 749,895



$ 840,537

Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity























Accounts payable and accrued expenses

$ 74,278



$ 54,175



$ 72,141

Income taxes currently payable









8,445







Deferred tax liabilities, net



28,879





28,038





20,519

Long-term debt (includes long-term debt of consolidated VIEs of $113,913 as of March 31, 2016)



594,414





481,417





541,909

Total liabilities



697,571





572,075





634,569

Commitments and contingencies























Stockholders' equity:























Common stock, $0.00001 par value, 250,000,000 shares authorized, 33,196,625, 33,000,000 and 33,151,088 shares issued and 33,158,148, 33,000,000 and 33,121,594 outstanding as of March 31, 2016 and 2015 and December 31, 2015, respectively

















Preferred stock, $0.00001 par value, 25,000,000 shares authorized, no shares issued and outstanding

















Additional paid in capital



11,892





2,006





9,924

Retained earnings



210,716





181,391





200,853

Accumulated other comprehensive loss



(4,758)





(5,577)





(4,622)

Treasury stock, at cost (38,477 and 29,494 shares as of March 31, 2016 and December 31, 2015, respectively)



(245)











(187)

Total stockholders' equity



217,605





177,820





205,968

Total liabilities and stockholders' equity

$ 915,176



$ 749,895



$ 840,537



ENOVA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF INCOME (in thousands, except per share data) (Unaudited)





Three Months Ended





March 31,





2016



2015

Revenue

$ 174,653



$ 165,676

Cost of Revenue



69,577





38,570

Gross Profit



105,076





127,106

Expenses















Marketing



21,181





24,156

Operations and technology



20,134





18,012

General and administrative



27,925





25,566

Depreciation and amortization



3,987





5,283

Total Expenses



73,227





73,017

Income from Operations



31,849





54,089

Interest expense, net



(15,915)





(13,305)

Foreign currency transaction gain (loss)



1,568





(944)

Income before Income Taxes



17,502





39,840

Provision for income taxes



7,639





15,310

Net Income

$ 9,863



$ 24,530

Earnings Per Share:















Earnings per common share:















Basic

$ 0.30



$ 0.74

Diluted

$ 0.30



$ 0.74

Weighted average common shares outstanding:















Basic



33,142





33,000

Diluted



33,187





33,008

ENOVA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOW (dollars in thousands) (Unaudited)





Three Months Ended March 31,





2016



2015

Cash flows provided by operating activities

$ 98,592



$ 87,865

Cash flows used in investing activities















Loans and finance receivables



(65,670)





(4,800)

Change in restricted cash



(13,717)







Property and equipment additions



(2,230)





(11,572)

Other investing activities



58







Total cash flows used in investing activities



(81,559)





(16,372)

Cash flows provided by financing activities



52,184







Effect of exchange rates on cash



928





(3,155)

Net increase in cash and cash equivalents



70,145





68,338

Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of year



42,066





75,106

Cash and cash equivalents at end of period

$ 112,211



$ 143,444

ENOVA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION (dollars in thousands)

The following table presents information on Enova's domestic and international operations for the three months ended March 31, 2016 and 2015.





Three Months Ended March 31,





















2016



2015



$ Change



% Change

Domestic:































Revenue

$ 143,428



$ 119,053



$ 24,375





20.5 % Cost of revenue



60,456





33,930





26,526





78.2

Gross profit

$ 82,972



$ 85,123



$ (2,151)





(2.5)

Gross profit margin



57.8 %



71.5 %



(13.7) %



(19.2) % International:































Revenue

$ 31,225



$ 46,623



$ (15,398)





(33.0) % Cost of revenue



9,121





4,640





4,481





96.6

Gross profit

$ 22,104



$ 41,983



$ (19,879)





(47.4)

Gross profit margin



70.8 %



90.0 %



(19.2) %



(21.3) % Total:































Revenue

$ 174,653



$ 165,676



$ 8,977





5.4 % Cost of revenue



69,577





38,570





31,007





80.4

Gross profit

$ 105,076



$ 127,106



$ (22,030)





(17.3)

Gross profit margin



60.2 %



76.7 %



(16.5) %



(21.5) % ENOVA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES LOANS AND FINANCE RECEIVABLES FINANCIAL AND OPERATING DATA (dollars in thousands)

The following table shows loans and finance receivables and related loan loss activity, which is based on loan and finance receivable balances, for the three months ended March 31, 2016 and 2015.

Three Months Ended March 31

2016



2015



Change

Cost of revenue

$ 69,577



$ 38,570



$ 31,007

Charge-offs (net of recoveries)



69,995





52,136





17,859

Average combined loans and finance receivables, gross:























Company owned(a)



500,817





356,752





144,065

Guaranteed by Enova(a)(b)



32,627





28,953





3,674

Average combined loans and finance receivables, gross (a)(c)

$ 533,444



$ 385,705



$ 147,739

Ending combined loans and finance receivables, gross:























Company owned

$ 495,906



$ 330,275



$ 165,631

Guaranteed by Enova(b)



27,114





25,355





1,759

Ending combined loans and finance receivables, gross (c)

$ 523,020



$ 355,630



$ 167,390

Ending allowance and liability for losses

$ 68,886



$ 52,165



$ 16,721

Combined originations (d)

$ 446,838



$ 401,411



$ 45,427



























Loans and finance receivables ratios:























Cost of revenue as a % of average combined loans and finance receivables, gross(a)(c)



13.0 %



10.0 %



3.0 % Charge-offs (net of recoveries) as a % of average combined loans and finance receivables, gross(a)(c)



13.1 %



13.5 %



(0.4) % Gross profit margin



60.2 %



76.7 %



(16.5) % Allowance and liability for losses as a % of combined loans and finance receivables, gross(c)(e)



13.2 %



14.7 %



(1.5) %



(a) The average combined loans and finance receivables, gross, is the average of the month-end balances during the period. (b) Represents loans originated by third-party lenders through the credit services organization (or CSO) programs, which are not included in Enova's financial statements. (c) Non-GAAP measure. See the above discussion for additional information regarding combined loans and finance receivables. (d) Represents loans and finance receivables originated by Enova and third-party lenders through the CSO programs and includes renewals of existing origination agreements to customers in good standing. The disclosure is statistical data that is not included in Enova's financial statements. (e) Allowance and liability for losses as a percentage of combined loans and finance receivables, gross, is determined using period-end balances. ENOVA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES RECONCILIATION OF GAAP TO NON-GAAP FINANCIAL MEASURES (dollars in thousands, except per share data)

Adjusted Earnings Measures





Three Months Ended





March 31,





2016



2015

Net Income

$ 9,863



$ 24,530

Adjustments (net of tax):















Intangible asset amortization



180





2

Stock-based compensation expense



1,109





1,054

Foreign currency transaction (gain) loss



(884)





581



















Adjusted earnings

$ 10,268



$ 26,167



















Diluted earnings per share

$ 0.30



$ 0.74

Adjustments (net of tax):















Intangible asset amortization



0.01







Stock-based compensation expense



0.03





0.03

Foreign currency transaction (gain) loss



(0.03)





0.02



















Adjusted earnings per share

$ 0.31



$ 0.79









Adjusted EBITDA

















Three Months Ended





March 31,





2016



2015

Net Income

$ 9,863



$ 24,530

Depreciation and amortization expenses



3,987





5,283

Interest expense, net



15,915





13,305

Foreign currency transaction (gain) loss



(1,568)





944

Provision for income taxes



7,639





15,310

Stock-based compensation expense



1,968





1,712



















Adjusted EBITDA

$ 37,804



$ 61,084



















Adjusted EBITDA margin calculated as follows:















Total Revenue

$ 174,653



$ 165,676

Adjusted EBITDA



37,804





61,084

Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of total revenue



21.6 %



36.9 % ENOVA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES RECONCILIATION OF GAAP TO NON-GAAP FINANCIAL MEASURES (dollars in thousands)

Estimated Adjusted EBITDA For 2016

The following table reconciles estimated Income from operations to Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure:





Estimated Results





Three Months Ended June 30, 2016





Low



High





Unaudited

Income from operations

$ 17,000



$ 27,000

Depreciation and amortization



4,000





4,000

Stock-based compensation expense



2,000





2,000

Adjusted EBITDA

$ 23,000



$ 33,000























Estimated Results





Year Ended December 31, 2016





Low



High





Unaudited

Income from operations

$ 97,000



$ 112,000

Depreciation and amortization



18,000





18,000

Stock-based compensation expense



10,000





10,000

Adjusted EBITDA

$ 125,000



$ 140,000

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150202/173006LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/enova-announces-first-quarter-2016-results-300259626.html SOURCE Enova International, Inc.

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[April 28, 2016] Infosys and Amazon Web Services Collaborate to Accelerate Cloud Migration

SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in consulting, technology and next-generation services, has announced a global strategic initiative with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make transitioning to the cloud easier and faster. Infosys will use AWS to host a suite of Infosys technologies that will help enterprise customers securely adopt cloud-based systems swiftly. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130122/589162 )

Together, Infosys and AWS will enable clients to move enterprise workloads including mainframe and enterprise resource planning (ERP) to the AWS Cloud. Infosys will also leverage AWS's offerings around analytics to provide deep, actionable insights and enable enterprises to gain competitive advantage in their industries. Infosys will also support enterprises in their transition from legacy technologies to the modern, innovative AWS Cloud. Yesterday's legacy technologies are challenging today's enterprises on several fronts. Legacy deployments are increasingly difficult and costly to improve and maintain, hindering the delivery of new business applications and preventing companies from innovating rapidly. The AWS Cloud infrastructure changes this equation by allowing businesses to reduce IT spend while enabling the realization of new IT innovations, all while reducing infrastructure spending. Infosys and AWS are focusing on workload migration solutions (SAP and other Enterprise workloads), mainframe and legacy modernization services to move complex legacy workloads, and data & analytics solutions including hybrid analytics cloud platform and analytics as a service. Additionally, this relationship will include Infosys Assurance Suite that focuses on security, risk management, compliance and governance aspects of AWS deployment for customers and Infosys Information Platform (IIP), an industry-leading data and analytics platform that helps enterprises leverage their data assets for innovation and enhance business growth. As part of this collaboration, Infosys is creating a dedicated AWS Cloud Center of Excellence cutting across all Infosys Service lines, and Infosys will employ 5,000 AWS-trained and 2,500 AWS-certified resources focused on the entire portfolioof AWS services. The AWS Cloud Center of Excellence, which has access to all the latest tools and technology from AWS, will constantly help create new enterprise transformation solutions leveraging the AWS Cloud and based on design thinking with Zero Distance to the customer.



Quotes: Sandeep Dadlani, President and Global Head, Alliances, Infosys

"By collaborating with AWS, Infosys can help organizations realize the full potential of the AWS Cloud without being weighed down by a daunting onboarding process. The migration to a modern, high-performance and scalable infrastructure built on AWS will be faster, easier and more cost-effective than ever before." Mike Clayville, Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Business Development, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "AWS works with many large, complex enterprise organizations that are looking to transform their business by leveraging the AWS Cloud," said Mike Clayville, Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Business Development, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "The strategic collaboration with Infosys will help accelerate these organizations' legacy workload migrations to the cloud by empowering them to rapidly achieve the agility benefits of moving to AWS. Customers will now have more streamlined access to several innovative cloud computing solutions that stand to transform and modernize their enterprise." 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. 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

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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...

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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...
Groovin The Moo, Australias favourite regional touring festival, kicked off last weekend and was a resounding success, delivering stellar performances from the likes of The Rubens, Twenty One Pilots, Alison Wonderland, and many more.

However, the first of the festivals three weekends was not completely without incident. As Tone Deaf reported earlier this week, a 15-year-old girl was one of two punters rushed to hospital after suffering a suspected drug overdose at GTM Maitland.

Paramedics performed CPR on the girl after she collapsed and stopped breathing. She was subsequently rushed to John Hunter Hospital where detectives were looking to question her in relation to large amounts of an unknown substance found on her clothing.

Meanwhile, punter Joana Perkins has slammed security at GTM Canberra, describing their attitude as patronising and inadequate after she was allegedly urinated on by a male punter as she attended the festival with her 15-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter.

Ms Perkins claimed that when she asked members of the ISEC security company why the male punter hadnt been thrown out one of the security guards looked at me extremely aggressively and said if you dont shut up youll be chucked out.

Festival organisers have now released a statement in which they address last weekends incidents, writing, Groovin the Moos first weekend is wrapped, and the GTM Famooly rolls into Bendigo VIC and Townsville QLD this coming Saturday 30 April and Sunday 1 May.

While the majority of GTMs Moo crew partied safely, we would like to continue to remind everyone to look after themselves, their friends and other Moo patrons. Were very thankful to the many service providers who are an integral part of each GTM event.

Red Frogs, State Ambulance, each local Medical supplier, Headspace, Police and Security assist Groovin the Moo throughout the planning process, on each event day and following each event with a detailed report.

Groovin the Moo takes the responsibility of patron care seriously. Our systems are developed in consultation with our service providers. Organisers concluded the statement by backing their service providers.

We acknowledge several media reports with regards to the welfare of patrons and conduct of security and emergency service providers at both GTM Maitland and Canberra, they wrote. Groovin the Moo believes all actions taken by service providers were delivered in the best interest of GTM patrons.

Its important to note that that police praised the conduct of the majority of punters who attended both Groovin The Moo Maitland and Canberra. The event is set to continue this weekend with events in Bendigo and Townsville.
Vancouver-Based Roots and soul explorer Buckman Coe is currently in the country to celebrate the release of his stunning new album Malama Ka Aina.

The fourth LP from the environmentally and socially conscious roots and soul musician, Malama Ka Aina is a danceable album filled with positive vibes, delivers its strength through the albums ability to thematically bridge participation in civil society and celebrate life, love, and humanity. It deals with the destructive nature of capitalism and corporate media while reflecting on the importance of community and the natural environment.

Bringing together progressive forms of soul, folk and reggae, this record is a manifestation of the artists spiritual nature, musical evolution and passion for social justice. To celebrate its release and Buckmans Aussie visit, the songwriter has kindly penned a track by track run down on the LP which you can check out below along with the album stream. Give it a spin and if you like what youre hearing pop by www.buckmancoe.com.

Malama Ka Aina

This is my ode to the Big Island of Hawaii where I wrote a lot of the album. In Hawaiian the language it means Respect the Land. This song is about the need to travel for inspiration and to always respect the people and place you visit.

Courage

Originally this was a much more spiritually philosophizing type song and I rewrote it to be a love song. And how your partner should be someone who makes you feel more brave in the world.

Red Moon

This is one of the more reggae-fusion type tunes that plays with a time signature change 6/8 to 4/4. It has a cyclical view of time and our lives and loves.

False Flags

Probably the hardest hitting reggae song on the album, its about corporate greed and the use of mass deception to justify wars. And still upholds a belief that basic human kindness can prevail.

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Missing You

This is just a funky reggae track about missing your woman even if shes a batshit crazy because that often goes hand in hand with being a superfreak.

Carnival Ride

I wrote this one as protest song against the pipelines that are being proposed from the Alberta tar sands to the coast of British Columbia. Its a worldy reggae track that really is about a global movement of people of all creeds against corporate greed and government corruption.

Que Nos Espera

This one was borne out of a nasty fever and a documentary I watched about our solar system being destroyed by a neutron star.

Love is Eternal

I wrote this one for one of the loves of my life even while our relationship had some fatal flaws. Doesnt stop you from wanting it to work!

Rubber Bands

A left-field song on the album. Kind of Beatlesque and whimsical.

World Waking Up

This song is about the personal struggle of waking up to the state of the world, and not shying away from responsibilities of being engaged in a movement towards a more loving society.

Jah People

A blend of reggae, ska, and world-beat. This is a conscious roots reggae romp that we love to play near the end of sets to get people really dancing.

Trails of Light

This song was written for a young man in our community in Vancouver, Daniel Rezmer, who made a huge impact on the people around him in his 20-some years.

After All

This tune is a dreamlike waking up to a new world. It is more reminiscent of some of my psychedelic folk rock beginnings in my first two records.

Upcoming Aussie Shows

April 28th | Toff in Town | Melbourne

April 29th  May 1st | Mount Beauty Festival | Mount Beauty
With CherryRock 2016 set to kick off this weekend, Australias only dedicated rock and roll street festival is ready once again to blow the non-existent roof off of AC/DC Lane.

Ten years under our belts and I firmly believe this is our best line-up ever, said Cherry owner and booker James Young. The Sigit from Indonesia sound like Graveyard from Sweden! Kadavar are my favourite band in the world and AC/DC Lane will grow a beard while these hairy Germans play.

Supersuckers were born with a tail and will finally shake that tail in AC/DC Lane. And with locals such as High Tension, Power, Dead City Ruins and Dallas Frasca I know Melbournes CherryRock street rock n roll festival shall stand proudly beside the legendary Richie Ramone himself, together, too tough too die!

To celebrate the huge milestone for this incredible festival, we caught up with the Cherry Bar legend James Young to find out just how hes managed to keep the festival cranking for a decade.

On clocking 10 years

Ten large, hairy, denim-clad, beer-spilling years in AC/DC Lane, yes. And as the Ramones record Richie Ramone played on and co-wrote declares, Too Tough To Die. And Richie is co-headlining CherryRock016 this Sunday, as you know. Cant wait to hear AC/DC Lane singing like theyre in church, Somebody Put Something In My Drink.

How To Make It To 10 Years

Dumb luck or strategic genius. Not sure which. I think we accidentally stumbled upon the music festival survival model. Modest capacity, affordable ticket price, unique space and a commitment to only putting on hard rock acts we absolutely love. Id take a bullet for any band on my line-ups. A small rubber bullet fired into a very fat bullet-proof vest.

Did You Ever think Youd Make It To 10 Years?

You seem to have a theme running in your questions. I like it. Look when we started CherryRock my dream was to create a festival with one aim: To get AC/DC to play in AC/DC Lane. Im still chasing that dream. Phill Rudd would fit right in lets face it. Until AC/DC play well just keeping on hosting Australias only dedicated street rock n roll festival. There is no finish line. Commit. Day drink. Thats where its at.

Best Cherry Line Up In History

Our tenth birthday line-up. Kadavar (Germany), Richie Ramone (USA), Supersuckers (USA), Gay Paris (Sydney), The Sigit (Indonesia), Polish Club (Sydney), Power (Footscray), Dead City Ruins, High Tension, Dallas Frasca, Mammoth Mammoth, Mesa Cosa and Devil Electric. Hands down best line-up ever. AC/DC Lane is going to grow a beard. A tough rockin one that eats shit hipster beards for breakfast.

Favourite CherryRock Moment

A: Hard to go past CherryRock008 when Six Ft Hick played with the two topless lead singing brothers screaming their guttural scarred lungs out, twisting and writhing on stage, physically menacing each otherall while they were being showered by the squirted breast milk of a lactating curvaceous new Mum, who had Mothers Milk firing into their faces and open mouths from at least three metres away. You dont see that everyday.

Fu Manchu headlining for the first time in Australia in over ten years was also stellar.

Why You Cant Miss the Cherry Rock 10 Year Celebration

A: 2 stages, 13 acts, no clashes. Ten years. Cherry Bar and AC/DC Lane Melbourne, a true celebration of rock n roll both international and local. Its going to be like a group denim-hug.

But remember, if you cant rock n roll, dont fuckin come.

CHERRY ROCK 2016

Kadavar

Richie Ramone

Supersuckers

Gay Paris

The Sigit

High Tension

Polish Club

Power

Dead City Ruins

Dallas Frasca

Mammoth Mammoth

Mesa Cosa

Devil Electric

Sunday, 1st May 2016

AC/DC Lane, Melbourne

Tickets: Cherry Bar
Fear Factory vocalist Burton C Bell has never been known to mince words and hes certainly cemented that reputation with a recent rant aimed at former Soundwave promoter AJ Maddah.

Fear Factory are one of the many bands who still havent been paid since performing at Soundwave 2015 and during a recent interview with Sticks For Stones, Bell claimed that Maddah belongs in jail.

The owner ripp[ed] everyone off. None of the bands ever got paid, Bell told Sticks For Stones, via FasterLouder. The best thing that could happen is that man goes to jail.

He deserves to go to jail for ripping so many people off. Not just bands from out of the country but local bands as well, he ripped off local contractors also.

We needed that money to survive until the record came out and when that didnt happen, my family suffered because of it. He should just hope that he never comes across me, ever.

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According to documents filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Comission, Soundwave Festival Pty Ltd, a company now in administration, owes Fear Factory some $78,000.

Interesting to note is the fact that this isnt the first time that Bell has expressed dissatisfaction with Soundwave. Speaking to Music Business Facts last year, well before Soundwaves downfall, Bell claimed the band hadnt been paid in six months.

Bell and the legendary industrial metal group are set to return Down Under this June off the back of their latest album, the critically acclaimed Genexus.
Lees Summit Councilman Chris Moreno Calls On Target to Create Safety Measures for New Bathroom Policy

Moreno issues common sense safety steps that protect inclusion

Mainstream media reports thatLocally, this issue has inspired a newbie politico to act on constituent concerns, talk with top brass at the company and develop a new set of rules.Checkit:Lees Summit, MO.  Today, Lees Summit City Councilman Chris Moreno publicly called on Target, headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota to put in place new corporate staffing protocols and other measures to protect the safety and privacy of all customers in bathrooms and changing facilities.This comes after Councilman Chris Moreno spoke to Targets national government affairs team in Minneapolis, on behalf of constituents, where he asked very specific staffing and security questions in relation to their new policy.After speaking to Targets national headquarters in Minneapolis, I am troubled by their new policy. I want to be clear, that this is not about Transgender shoppers or staff. Every store has a unisex bathroom, and every person deserves to be treated with respect. My concern is that this policy allows any male-- dressed as a man or woman--to enter a female bathroom or changing facility without staff or other security protocols in place to protect those inside. This reactive policy sharply increases the chance of a potential attacker, yet tells potential victims if you escape, notify us, and Target will try to do something. That is just not right, said Councilman Moreno.Councilman Moreno proposes that Target take the following actions on behalf of women and families in Lees Summit and other communities:- Immediately place a trained team member outside of the restrooms and changing areas in every store, at all times to ensure the safety and privacy of anyone inside.- Amend their bathroom and changing room policy to deny those with a visible appearance of the opposite sex from entering a different restroom or changing room.- Construct a welcoming and visible unisex restroom and changing rooms next to gender specific rooms that Transgender staff and customers to easily locate.- Issue to state and local governments, as well as, law enforcement agencies their guidelines and plan to identify predatory or malicious intent vs. genuine gender identity of a shopper.While I respect Targets goodhearted efforts toward inclusion, it is critical that Target protect the safety of all other customers in our community. Their new policy does not do that, said Moreno.################
MAYOR SLY'S BIZ SESSION ABOARD THE TOY TRAIN STREETCAR IS STRUGGLING TO GARNER ATTENDANCE FROM COUNCIL!!!

COUNCIL DOESN'T SEEM TO WANT THEIR BIZ SESSION TURNED INTO A STREETCAR PR EVENT!!!

YES, WE'RE POSTING THIS SO LOCAL MEDIA CAN DO A HEAD COUNT AND TAKE NOTE OF HOW MANY COUNCIL MEMBERS COULDN'T MAKE IT FOR WHATEVER REASON THAT ALLOWED THEM TO ESCAPE THIS PR STREETCAR SMILEY SESSION!!!

Yet another painful gimmick leading up to the grand opening of the Downtown toy train streetcar might go wrong for Mayor Sly's Administration.To wit check this important deet about today's big politico debut:We're fairly certain thatmight be on board and snuggling up to father figure Mayor Sly given that the 3rd District dude directed so much of 3rd district's PIAC money toward the project that hasn't employed anyone but the media consultants among his constituents . . .Still, the message is clear . . .One more . . .Again, this signals Mayor Sly having a tough time recruiting any support among those who aren't directly on his payroll. And while local media probably won't ask many questions about the PR display, what's clear is that the development agenda of the current administration is beginning to draw opposition from council-members pressured by their constituents who have more pressing neighborhood concerns beyond a development scheme along a tiny swath of faux transit.You decide . . .
This summer, National Geographic will bring an extraordinary cultural experience to Washington, D.C. THE GREEKS: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great is an exceptional journey through 5,000 years of Greek history and culture. This exhibition features more than 500 priceless treasuresmany of which have never been on display outside of Greece. Washington, D.C. is the only east coast museum to host the exhibit. We expect to draw visitors from New York to Richmond for this exhibition, as it is the largest and most comprehensive survey of Greek culture in a generation.

Featuring collections from 22 national museums in Greece, THE GREEKS tells the unique story of one of the worlds greatest ancient civilizations. Visitors will encounter the early origins of Greek writing and art from the Cycladic and Minoan cultures of the Aegean, meet the Mycenaean rulers and priestesses, the warriors of Sparta, the heroes, athletes and philosophers of Classical Greece and Alexander, the king that would spread Greek culture throughout the worldgiving rise to civilization as we know it. The exhibition explores pivotal moments that led to the birth of Western democracy, modern art, science, medicine, theater and sports.

Buy tickets 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

Enjoy the video...
A newly-set up Investment Team Greece is part of a special initiative and the first step signalling a more dynamic presence of EIB in the country

European Investment Bank (EIB) is determined and committed to contribute in the recovery of the Greek economy both through funding public and private sector projects and through offering consultancy services, Nicholas Jennett, head of Investment Team Greece and deputy managing director of EBI said on Wednesday.

Speaking to ANA-MPA, Jennett said: "We enhance our presence in Greece, we are here to finance Greek business activity, business ideas with a perspective that will contribute in the recovery of the Greek economy and create permanent job positions".

"We do not have a ceiling on total funding to Greece, specially after the activation of the Juncker investment plan. As a bank we invite private businessmen seeking funds for their investment plans to knock on our door and to cooperate. Total funds for 2016 will depend exclusively on demand for funding by the private and public sectors in Greece," the banker said.

He noted that EIB has no limitations or priorities on which business sectors it planned to finance. "In any sector, contributing in the development of the country, such as energy, tourism, food industry, technology and innovation and in general sectors related with export activity and create sustainable job positions are open to financing," Jennett said.

"Our goals is to finance not to reject funding requests," Jennett said, adding that emphasis will be given to finance investment plans located not only in Athens and Thessaloniki but in regional Greece as well.

"Greece has a very high quality human resource, part of which left the country because of the crisis and the aim is to bringing it back with growth," he said.

Technical support

Jennett said that EIB will respond to all funding requests, even those outside its jurisdiction, offering direction. "We are here to contribute in offering technical support for projects suitable and sustainable, particularly in the private sector, to small- and medium-sized enterprises which are the back bone of the Greek economy," he noted.

EIB plans to further strengthen its cooperation with Greek systemic banks, particularly on funding of SMEs which are not directly funded by EIB.

A newly-set up Investment Team Greece is part of a special initiative and the first step signalling a more dynamic presence of EIB in the country. The Investment Team Greece will be based in Athens, ensuring that the bank will be able to contribute in the economic recovery of Greece. The team will have a staff of 30, all EIB Group staff, of which around half will be based in Athens.

European Investment Bank has offered more than 12 billion euros to Greece since 2008, in the form of loans and guarantees, of which 1.4 billion euros in 2015.

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 S&D chief stressed that the leaders of Europe should take the lead at an extraordinary Summit next week

The President of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) Gianni Pittella stressed that Europe cannot allow Greece to be blackmailed, from the stand at the European Parliament. Mr. Pittella supported the call of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and underlined the need for an extraordinary summit meeting, in an effort to avoid a new European crisis from developing.

"We cannot ask Greece to take additional measures. This would mean that some 'hawks' want to kill Greece and we cannot allow this blackmail. The stakes are too high for Europe. We should all work to prevent a crisis in Greece in the run-up to the British referendum, especially now that  under extraordinarily difficult conditions  Greece has over-performed on its primary balance target for 2015" he noted.

Moreover, Mr. Pittella commented that "if the Eurogroup cannot find a way out, despite the efforts of the European Commission, then the political leadership of Europe should take the lead at an extraordinary Euro Summit next week. We want a fair deal for Greece which also includes a discussion on debt relief".

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
Tour operators in Germany have double-digit growth in bookings for Portugal this summer as demand surges for Western Mediterranean destinations.

Portugal has already generated good growth on the German market in recent years. Last year, the number of German visitors increased to 1.1 million from 977,000 in 2014, with the Algarve, Madeira and Lisbon as the top destinations. This years growth looks set to be even stronger.

Being a Portugal specialist is definitely paying off for Olimar. The family-owned tour operator, which has specialised in the westernmost country in Europe since 1972, currently has a 35% surge in bookings. Managing director Markus Zahn expects an overall increase of at least 20% for the whole year. The only concern is whether capacity will be sufficient to cope with demand. Not only German tourists are visiting Portugal in greater numbers this summer, he pointed out.

TUI does not have such worries after expanding its capacity for Portugal massively this year. TUIfly has 14,000 additional seats for Madeira and 8,000 to Faro this summer, while in Lagos the group will open its second adults-only Sensimar resort in Portugal.

Dertour product manager Jens Reinhardt expects a double-digit increase in bookings this year but he warned that Portugal should not take this years success, based on the general trend towards the Western Mediterranean, for granted. As Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia are characterised above all by all-inclusive offers, it will be difficult for Portugal to profit sustainably from this customer group, he commented.

Longer summer season

However, Portugals growth is not only a result of the weak bookings for other destinations. Thomas Cook senior product manager Gunter Buseck said the current growth certainly meets our expectations. He explained: The longer summer season on the Algarve from March to November, which we promoted for the first time in 2015, is already proving successful with more bookings. Moreover, prices for the Algarve this summer are slightly lower than last year, while Cook is benefiting from offering more hotels and tours, he pointed out.

Additional flight capacity, especially to the Algarve, is the most important factor behind this years high double-digit growth, according to FTI regional manager Manuel Morales who expects very high demand for the peak season in July and August. He noted that this years price stability is the positive result of contracting rates last year before the big switch in destination demand started. The price rise is not significant. But that could change in 2017, he cautioned.

Airlines are also responding to this demand by adding more flights from Germany for this summer. Easyjet, Ryanair, Eurowings, Air Berlin and TUIfly will all add various new services from different German airports to the Algarve.

Moreover, tour operators are now looking to maintain the growth trend by diversifying their products and offering more tours of the country and new destinations. Dertour and FTI, for example, both offer self-drive tours from Lisbon to cultural highlights such as Porto and Coimbra, while Studiosus has a cultural trip for families in the footsteps of the seafarers.

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
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Saudi Arabia is revising plans for a glitzy financial district in Riyadh and the creation of six industrial cities, after the projects were plagued by delays and a lack of enthusiasm among potential tenants and investors.



The government's frank, public assessments of the projects suggest Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is not hesitating to tackle projects which once enjoyed top-level political support as he pushes an economic reform drive launched this week.



The project to build the King Abdullah Financial District began in 2006; skyscrapers were to house banks and the financial regulator. Parts of the area will now be turned over to residential housing, hotels and commercial establishments.



A document outlining Prince Mohammed's Vision 2030 reform plan, released on Tuesday, also said authorities would "strive to salvage" the industrial cities, which were designed to diversify the economy beyond oil and create jobs.



It said the financial district had been started "without consideration of its economic feasibility" and that the project had failed to convince the financial community to invest.



"Without any dramatic shift in direction, renting the 3 million sq m of built-up areas at reasonable prices, or even achieving decent occupancy rates, will be very challenging," the document said.



The government will therefore aim to transform the district into a special business zone with competitive regulations, visa exemptions for foreigners working there, and direct connections to Riyadh's international airport, it said.



"We will also seek to repurpose some of the built-up areas and change the real estate mix, increasing the allocation for residential accommodation, services and hospitality areas."



The financial district will house the headquarters of the government's Public Investment Fund, which Prince Mohammed plans to build up in the reform drive to hold SR7 trillion ($1.9 trillion) of assets compared to SR600 billion at present.



The reform document also acknowledged difficulties in efforts to create the six "economic cities".



The most prominent of these is King Abdullah Economic City on the Red Sea coast near Jeddah, which is being developed by Emaar the Economic City, a publicly listed firm.



"Work has halted in several cities, and others face challenges that threaten their viability," the document said.



"We have worked in cooperation with Aramco to restructure Jizan Economic City," it said, referring to state oil giant Saudi Aramco.



"We will strive to salvage other economic cities, especially those with comparative advantages. To achieve this, we will work with the companies owning those cities to revamp them and transfer vital facilities."  Reuters
Challenges, no matter how severe they may be, will not dissuade Bahrain from continuing on the path of comprehensive development to achieve a better future for the nation and the people, His Royal Highness Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa has asserted.



The real estate and urban boom currently being witnessed by Bahrain in various regions affirms anew the ability of the national economy to overcome all obstacles, he said after inaugurating the gulfBID, Gulf Property Show 2016, and gulfInteriors exhibitions, organised by Al Hilal Conference and Exhibitions (HCE).



HRH Premier urged investors to launch their ventures in the kingdom confidently, and avail of the economic openness ensured by Bahrain, which has entitled it to be among the main investment and business destinations in the kingdom, a BNA report said.



He asserted that the investment atmosphere in the kingdom boasts many distinctive features that make it the most attractive to investors, especially in the real estate and construction fields, amid the multiple facilities that are put in places, and are regularly reviewed and updated to cater to the requirements of the development process the country is witnessing.



The exhibitions, at the Bahrain International Exhibition and Convention Centre, are participated by 144 local, regional and international exhibiting companies. They will run till April 28.



HRH Premier toured the expo pavilions and sections after the inauguration. He was informed about the exhibited products in various sectors.



He expressed admiration for the quality of exhibited items and the techniques used.



"The government is keen on providing all the requirements that enable the real estate sector to play its role as one of the pillars of the national economy," the Premier said. He emphasised that the steady progress of the exhibitions and conferences industry reflects the prestigious reputation enjoyed by the kingdom regionally and globally, highlighting the government's unwavering support to the industry.



He affirmed that gulfBID has succeeded in attracting more exhibiting companies every year thanks to its high organisational potentials, and given its importance in providing a suitable opportunity for businessmen to reach deals and share expertise.



"What distinguishes the gulfBID is that it is a GCC gathering that we need in order to launch more joint projects that meet the aspirations of our countries and peoples for more development and progress," he said, praising the remarkable urban boom currently witnessed by various GCC countries, which, he stressed, reflects their keen interest in strengthening the pillars of comprehensive development for the best interests of their peoples.



HCE chairman Anwar Abdulrahman extended sincere thanks and appreciation to HRH Premier for patronising gulfBID annually, which, he said, reflected his support for the private sector, and interest in all events that benefit the national economy, and ensured the success of the event.



He pointed out that the government, led by HRH Premier, is interested in the real estate sector out of its belief in its ability to boost the national economy, as well as ability to generate for the national workforce.



HCE managing director Jubran Abdulrahman affirmed that HRH Premier's patronage of the event had encouraged companies to participate in it.



He pointed out that this year's edition has attracted many domestic and GCC companies, especially from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Leading paint manufacturer Hempel Paints has introduced a new range of paints called Fusions Makhmaleyat at gulfInteriors.

One of the latest products from the Fusions brand, Fusions Makhmaleyat has a velvet finish which adds elegance to the interior walls, said Jamil Matraji, area sales manager, Hempel.



"The final look varies in colour tone from dark to light, symbolising the movement of a fabric. While it takes more time to dry, it gives the applicator the flexibility to fix and retouch it, explained the official.



Makhmaleyat adds glamour to ones walls and fits into both classical and modern styles as it breaks the limits of plain paint, he added.



Matraji said business for Hempel was good last year with the company registering a six per cent increase in sales over the same period in 2014.



Hempel Paints, a regular exhibitor at gulfInteriors, has previously used the show to launch some of its most innovative products for the world of decor, colour and interior design.



The firms list of clientele within Bahrain includes elite companies of the industrial sector, such as the Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco), Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), the Arab Shipbuilding and Repair Yard (Asry), the Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company (GPIC) as well as many other private and public sector enterprises.



The importance of gulfInteriors for us is very much built on the advantage of being able to meet our existing and potential customers as well as to provide a strong brand presence to our key targets in the real estate and construction sectors of the Middle East, remarked Matraji.



Hempels products for Bahrain are manufactured in our factory in Mina Salman. We are taking the opportunity as strategic sponsors to highlight our made local but selling global credentials, said Matraji.



Meanwhile, the group's Saudi Arabian unit recently unveiled a new brand identity to coincide with the first anniversary of opening its biggest showroom in the Middle East at Riyadh.



One year on, Hempels largest regional showroom, which is strategically located in the Saudi capital, has successfully catered to the needs of its customers in the area.



Ahmed Abdulaziz, Hempel area sales and marketing director in the Middle East, said: "Hempel received a unique turnout from its customers. This is the fruit of distinct quality driven by global standards, and a great potential to withstand the harsh weather conditions in the region."



"Since its opening in April last year, the showroom has managed to record staggering results as sales have witnessed daily upturns and the store saw increased footfall, he added.

Malte Eggers, Hempels group communication director, said: "The Helix, used in Hempels new logo, symbolises layers and motions of mixing coatings, while also indicating global interconnection as it integrates all Hempels visual identity into one feel."

And as the world becomes more connected, so does the need for our businesses to operate, expand and appear as one unified Hempel.



"This strategic step comes with an aim to achieve absolute consistency across all of Hempels visual communications and to increase customer trust in delivering advanced and high-performance solutions," he added.



The showroom in Riyadh instilled the concept of sustainable paints through the introduction of particular products developed and tailored for the Middle Easts severe weather conditions, such as Contex.

Available in a variety of finishes and textures which can prolong the life span of concrete surfaces, the Contex range promises protection in a large range of attractive colours that are accredited with certificates from global test centres; and it also uses advanced technology, as it is ideally suited for buildings and bridges.-TradeArabia News Service
Bahrains leading interior design brand Mobilia Uno is wowing the audiences at gulfInteriors with its modern furniture designs and special exhibition discounts.



GulfInteriors is a dedicated showcase of luxury, creative and designer products for the home or commercial spaces providing exhibitors with a unique opportunity to showcase their products.



The event kicked off yesterday (April 26), and will run till tomorrow (April 28), at the Bahrain Exhibition Centre.



Its range of living room, bedroom and dining room furniture is designed to provide a modern and elegant environment as well as comfort.



Designed in Bahrain, Mobilia Unos catalogue of products includes interior accessories such as chandeliers, lamps and lighting along with curtains, carpets and wallpapers.



We are thrilled to announce that we are providing special packages and discounts to visitors of gulfInteriors 2016, remarks Zahra Haji, the managing director of Mobilia Uno.



For Mobilia Uno, we see gulfInteriors as an important promotion tool for our designs and products. Our designs are a proud statement of modernity and sophistication that are concepts designed in Bahrain, says Haji.



Mobilia Uno believes participating in gulfInteriors is an opportunity to help strengthen its brand. Knowing fully well that branding is a huge aspect of business success, especially in industries that depend on trust and reputation, exhibiting at gulfInteriors is a wonderful way to tell the industry that the company is serious, reliable, and large enough to afford its own presence at leading events and conferences, Haji says.



Mobilia Uno has supplied furniture to the Royal Tulip Hotel in Amwaj, Saraya compounds, Bahrain Deal Properties, Lelamlak apartments, Zawia Two, Zawia Three and Amwaj Homes.



Over the last few years, Mobilia Uno has grown into a household name in Bahrain for affordable luxury. Offering a wide range of furniture and interior designing expertise, the brand has become synonymous with sophistication and refinement. Our showroom, located in Tubli, captures a modern-day interpretation of Bahraini lifestyle, Haji adds.



On the companys expansion plans, Haji says: Acquiring a large showroom has been one of our major expansions that has led to an increase in staff, stock levels and customer base. In fact, we have been successful enough to extend our roots to Saudi Arabia through a franchise located in Dammam.



And since the franchise has been a great success, Mobilia Uno seeks to cover all GCC countries by allowing each country have a piece of us. So we aim at investing on high-end products at more affordable prices.



Mobilia Uno has been successfully growing since last year, Haji says. We were able to meet our sales target and boost our performance levels, she concludes.  TradeArabia News Service
Siemens has been awarded a 25-year service contract for the planned Umm Al Houl combined cycle power plant in Qatar.



The customer is Umm Al Houl Power, a company established through a partnership among Qatar Electricity and Water Company (QWEC), Qatar Petroleum (QP), Qatar Foundation (QF) and K1 Energy (joint venture established by Mitsubishi Corporation and TEPCO Fuel & Power, Incorporated).



The service agreement covers the plants six SGT5-4000F gas turbines, four SST5-4000 steam turbines, 10 SGen5-1200A generators including instrumentation and controls service for a period of 25 years. It also provides for an electrical and a resident engineer to be located on-site.



Qatar is experiencing rapid industrial, economic and population growth, said Tim Holt, CEO of Siemens Power Generation Services, Power and Gas. Supported by our highly experienced technical experts, our strong presence in the region and in close collaboration with our customer, our advanced services and maintenance solutions will help ensure this important new power plant will operate reliably for many years to come.



The long-term service agreement is designed to improve the operating capabilities, flexibility and profitability of the Umm Al Houl power plant by boosting efficiency, reliability and availability throughout its entire lifecycle. The agreement will enable implementation of innovative service solutions through preventative maintenance, shortened lead times and on-site technical field assistance.



The Umm Al Houl combined-cycle power plant will be an essential part of Qatars infrastructure, delivering more approximately a quarter of the countrys installed power generation capacity. This latest agreement is reiteration of Siemens commitment to Qatars long-term vision and our understanding of the nations requirements. We have a long history in Qatar, and we are proud to be working with our partners to support sustainable economic growth, said Fatih Sakiz, CEO, Siemens Qatar.



The new power plant will be located 15 km south of the capital Doha, adjacent to Qatar Economic Zone. The plant will consist of two power blocks, each in a 3+2 configuration. Each block will consist of three gas turbines which will be used to generate the steam to drive two downstream steam turbines. With a total electrical output of 2.5 gigawatts, and up to 136 million imperial gallons (618 million litres) of drinking water per day, the plant will deliver almost one quarter of the nation's installed power generating capacity.



It will ensure adequate power and water supply to accommodate seasonal fluctuations and major events. Commissioning of the first phase is scheduled for 2017, with commissioning of the entire complex scheduled for mid-2018, said a statement.



Siemens has received two major power generation service orders from Qatar in the past six months. In addition to this agreement for Umm Al Houl, Siemens signed a long-term service contract with Dolphin Energy Limited, headquartered in Abu Dhabi, for the Dolphin Gas Project in Qatar. Siemens is providing service and maintenance for nine aero-derivative gas turbines from former Rolls-Royce Energy and the associated nine Dresser-Rand compressors over a contract period of 18 years. - TradeArabia News Service


Volkswagen will strengthen cooperation with Qatar, its third-largest shareholder, chief executive Matthias Mueller said, as Europe's biggest carmaker struggles to overcome the emissions scandal and reposition its business.



"In future there will be closer cooperation in different areas," Mueller told Reuters TV after the carmaker's earnings press conference on Thursday.



The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) holds a 17 per cent stake in Volkswagen (VW) and two seats on its supervisory board.



"I very much welcome the role of Qatar," Mueller said, adding VW's top management was in "very constructive" talks with the QIA.



Since the emissions scandal broke last September, there have been reports in the German media saying the QIA had urged VW's top management to scale back the role of labour leaders who have balked at efforts by management to increase cost savings.



"I have no knowledge of this," Mueller said when asked whether he knew of plans to increase the supervisory board's six-member steering committee to grant a seat to QIA.



Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported earlier this month that Qatar wanted a seat on the steering committee. - Reuters
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Written by one of my favorite bloggers, this new book will inspire and guide readers to instill a love for nature in their children.

"There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes." This phrase hails from Scandinavia, where it's a common mantra repeated by parents who insist that their children spend time outdoors every day. Sadly, it's the opposite in the United States, where the slightest sign of inclement weather is an excuse to stay inside and even good weather fails to lure children out to play.

This stark difference in parental attitudes came as a shock to Linda Akeson McGurk, a Swedish woman who married an American and moved to Indiana to start a family. Quickly she realized that the nature-centric parenting philosophies she'd taken for granted as a kid in Sweden were not the norm in the U.S. and that many factors, from the emphasis on standardized tests to overly-packed schedules to ubiquitous smartphones to lack of playmates, conspired to make getting outside a real challenge.

McGurk refused to give in to the American way of doing things and fought daily to make the outdoors a regular part of her daughters' life. Several years ago she started a wonderful blog called Rain or Shine Mamma (which has inspired many a post on TreeHugger), and has now published a book, titled There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids (from Friluftsliv to Hygge) .

In the book, McGurk documents her parenting journey, which starts in Indiana but then moves overseas to Sweden, when she takes her girls for a six-month stay. There, she's immersed in a child-raising approach that's both familiar, from her own childhood, and foreign, after 15 years of living on American soil. But it doesn't take long for both of her daughters to flourish in their Swedish school settings, where time spent in nature and 'free-range'-type independence are top priorities.

Research-Based Nature Recommendations

The book is not all personal anecdote. It is chock-full of the latest research on the importance of outdoor play and the ability of nature to foster child development all around -- academically, emotionally, physically. For example, McGurk writes about the value of dirt in boosting children's health and combating the high rates of asthma and allergies that now affect 40 percent of U.S. kids. I was intrigued by the mention of Mycobacterium vaccae, a microbe found in soil that has the ability to "trigger our serotonin production, effectively making us happier and more relaxed."

She talks about the importance of outdoor free play to develop crucial physical skills. Kids spend so much time indoors these days that they fail to build strength in the most basic of ways, like holding a pencil or being able to lift with their upper bodies.

Letting kids move freely outdoors makes them better at assessing risk. They learn that the world isn't eternally cushioned for every fall, which in turn builds the grit and resilience known to be key to professional success. In Sweden, the parental attitude is one of "freedom with responsibility," where kids are expected to learn boundaries, but as they demonstrate maturity, those boundaries expand.

Change the Parenting Narrative

The book is a great read that I devoured in a weekend and it has been on my mind ever since. What particularly resonated was McGurk's point that we have limited years of influence on our children. She writes of her oldest daughter, Maya:

"Somewhere deep inside I felt a gnawing urge that now was the tie to cement her love for nature, nurture her sense of outdoor adventure, and help her to form memories that would last a lifetime."

If you have any regular interaction with children, then please read this book. Allow it to be your guide to another way of doing things, where nature is used as a wholesome tool to entertain, teach, calm, and delight children. The book has certainly affected me. I'm now looking into a local forest school for my kids to attend once a week and planning to buy a year-long membership to a local provincial park for more frequent hiking and camping.

Together, we can change the parenting narrative within the U.S. and Canada, where I live. We can challenge the fear-based approach that is driving parents to hold onto their children far too tightly and prevent them from growing in healthy ways. McGurk's book can play a major role in helping this to happen.
Allison Arieff has written about how in America, our schools look like prisons.

School design, particularly public school design, is often lumped in with the design of other institutional structures like jails, civic centers and hospitals, to detrimental effect. My high school, for example, had the dubious distinction of having been designed by the architect responsible for San Quentin. (The convicts got the better building.) Schools fulfill a practical function, to be sure, but shouldnt they be designed to inspire?

 Leigh Simpson/ Burry Port SchoolThen you go to the UK and- this. It's the latest school from Architype, the UK firm that we recently gushed over with their Enterprise building. And if you think I gush, you should read what the Royal Institute of British Architects writes in their award citation:

A superb example of collaboration between the client, Carmarthenshire County Council, the architect, Architype and the School, working together as one to achieve a high quality, inspirational educational environment for both the pupils and the staff and a source of aspiration to others.

 Leigh Simpson/ Burry Port School

It is the first school in Wales to be built to the Passive House standard, but it is also a great example of the use of wood. The pod building is made of Brettstapel, where instead of nails or glue, the wood is held together by dowels. In this case the wood "been sourced largely from Welsh woodland, comprising of 90% Sikta Spruce and 10% Douglas Fir, with Beech specified for the hardwood dowels." There are lots of good reasons to build a school this way; as the architects note in their brief,

Natural materials are to be employed wherever possible, from the timber frame structure to the internal nishes to the timber cladding, ensuring a healthy environment for the end users and those involved in constructing the building. In many cases the use of natural products, such as timber, allows local resources to be utilised and lends itself to the capture and storage of embodied carbon... The implementation of natural materials throughout the buildings not only avoids using pollutants in the creation of materials and buildings construction, but means that as the materials age they will not emit toxins or pollution.

 Cedarian

The Brettstapel is made from a low grade timber that they say "would otherwise be unsuitable for use in construction". By popularizing this technology, Architype is adding value, and "increasing local employment opportunities by using Welsh softwoods." It is something we could be doing all over North America too.

There are good reasons to build to the Passivhaus or Passive House standard too; operating costs are much lower, and that is a big deal in schools.

The Junior block has been designed as Passivhaus, the most rigorous international building standard. It uses sound building physics to reduce energy consumption by design, and enables simple, robust and long lasting buildings. This provides cost savings from day one, and throughout the life of the building.... By designing out unnecessary complexity and keeping detailing simple and elegant, it is possible to produce Passivhaus standards at no extra capital cost.

 Leigh Simpson/ Burry Port School

The RIBA concludes in their award description.

This is an extremely sensitive, very carefully considered building that focusses on health and wellbeing and sets the bar higher for the schools of the future. All credit to the local authority for recognizing the importance of achieving excellence of design within inevitable budget constraints. Their choice of architect was inspired, the resulting building is inspiring.

It also shows that they don't have to look like prisons.
The governments almost-impulsive about turns have made its Pakistan policy unpredictable and prone to gaffes. But there is some serious work happening underneath the surface of cultivated indifference and caution. As the India-Pakistan relationship is prone to many missteps, both governments have replicated the technique of springing a meeting from the closing years of the UPA-Zardari governments. This denies spoilers time to activate their standard technique of arranging bomb blasts just before a high-level Indo-Pak meet. The Pakistan Foreign Secretarys sudden visit to Delhi and his prolonged conversation with his counterpart may be part of this piece just like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval met their counterparts virtually unannounced.

Then Pathankot happened and the pace slowed down. But it was the result of the continuing conversation that India convinced Pakistan to send a probe team to Pathankot, although the outcome wasnt what it had wished for. And the arrest of a former Indian Navy officer has diminished Indias moral high horsing. In the eyes of the international community, both seem to be fomenting violent discontent in each others land. The separate statements issued at the end of the talk between the Foreign Secretaries reflect this realism in Indo-Pak affairs. India called the talks frank and constructive, meaning both sides pulled no punches, and Pakistan highlighted the cordial environment which stands for courteous allowance to the other sides views. What is noteworthy is neither side has criticised the other.

From available indications, the talks might have paved the way for a structured meeting between the Foreign Secretaries. Provided there is no Pathankot or Dinanagar, this could herald the beginning of the composite dialogue, a format that discusses each and every issue of discord. Continued dialogue among officials with adequate political oversight should set the stage for the meeting between the Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers, respectively, on the sidelines of two international conferences late this year. The Modi government has shown the gumption to take a leap in the dark. The coming days will test its talent to land on its feet.
Jalandhar, April 27

The members of the Democratic Mulazim Federation, Punjab, will meet the Principal Secretary on May 2 at Punjab Bhawan, Chandigarh, to discuss the ongoing issues of labourers in the state.

Federation president Bhupinder Singh Waraich said following the massive protest held on April 9, the Jalandhar Deputy Commissioner had ensured to get them time from the Punjab Government to discuss their issues but the time was not given till date. But today, we approached the DC again to submit a memorandum on the issue and the DC immediately provided us time from the Principal Secretary, he added.

He said one of their major demands was the recruitment of employees on a regular basis. The ASHA workers, the Mid-day meal workers, and the Anganwari workers have been working at meagre salaries. They were not being provided even with minimum wages.  TNS
Shivani Bhakoo

Tribune News Service

Ludhiana, April 28

The local hosiery manufacturing units have started introducing hanger conveyor system as it helps to keep a tab on the production, the lapses on the part of labour and to keep a check on the rejected pieces, thus curtailing wastage of material.

According to Vivek Lakra from Superfine Industries, the system provides the owners details on how many pieces were made each day, was the labour able to produce sufficient number of pieces, how many pieces got rejected and for whose fault, the pieces made faulty (cutting person, stitching person, one putting buttons, making collars etc everyone became accountable).

He said that adoption of the hanger conveyor system had been necessitated by the increasing wastage of raw material as many finished pieces of garments got rejected at the final stage.

Lakra said many of the neighbouring countries including China, Vetnam, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh were getting most of the raw material (in garment sector) from India, still they were able to sell the end product at cheaper prices, giving tough competition to the Indian manufacturers. The major factor for this was that these countries used technology, which was not just energy efficient but enhanced production as well.

The new system helps to keep a tab on the production, the lapses on part of labour and to keep a check on the rejected pieces. Vivek Lakra said that the hangers had different loading stations and these kept on moving till the stocks reached at last loading station- the checking point.

The production increases with the new system in place. It makes the labour not just accountable but also helps increase his/her efficiency at work. They remain focused and alert. The chain of hangers keeps on moving and the labour remains cautious as they need to produce a fixed number of pieces. In case of labour becoming sluggish and lethargic, the supervisor can ask them to pull up socks to increase production and ultimately, we, by sitting in our offices regularly monitor the labour/production as everything is online, said Lakra.

The particular system has been adopted by three leading hosiery units in city and is slowly picking up. By keeping a tab on labour working on hangers, the owners start giving them incentives according to increase in production and those who fail to deliver (labour), are replaced.

The new system also ensures that the garments do not touch the ground and get dirty since the hangers keep moving from one labour to another. The manufacturers said that earlier they had to spend huge on removing the stains but now since the pieces were hung on hangers, there were rare chances of any stain or dirt.
New Delhi, April 28

Observing that there is a valid and binding extradition treaty between India and Chile, the Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed a plea of a jailed French woman facing extradition to Chile for her alleged role in the murder of a senator there in 1991.

A bench comprising Justices MB Lokur and NV Ramana directed the trial court to proceed with extradition proceedings.

"On the basis of material available on record, we find that there is a valid and binding extradition treaty between India and Chile. We direct the magistrate at Patiala House Court to continue with the extradition proceedings. The petition stands dismissed," the bench said.

Earlier on October 9 last year, the Supreme Court had sought response from the Centre on the plea of a jailed French woman challenging her arrest and the ongoing extradition proceedings at the request of Chile for her alleged involvement in 1991 assassination of a senator there.

Besides seeking "immediate release" of Marie Emmanuelle Verhoeven, the plea filed through lawyer Ramni Taneja, had also sought a direction to the External Affairs Ministry, which is pursuing the extradition proceedings on behalf of Chile, to quash the ongoing inquiry before the magisterial court.

The plea had also sought quashing of the extradition request, made on March 24, 2015 by the Government of Chile through the Ministry before the court here.

Verhoeven, arrested on February 16 last year from Uttar Pradesh on the basis of an Interpol red notice issued against her, is alleged to have participated in a conspiracy leading to the assassination of Chilean Senator Jaime Guzman Errazuriz on April 1, 1991.  PTI
Washington: Concerned over Chinas provocative actions in the disputed South China Sea, four top US Senators have introduced a legislation to enhance US maritime power in Asia Pacific region and provide more military aid to its American allies. The Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Initiative Act of 2016 authorises the Secretary of State to provide Foreign Military Financing assistance and International Military and Education Training activities in the Asia-Pacific for maritime security capacity building. PTI

ISI controlled Osama's Abbottabad compound: Book

Washington: The Abbottabad hideout of Osama bin Laden was under ISI control and a Pakistan Army doctor treated the most dreaded terrorist in the world before he was killed in a daring raid by US commandos in 2011, according to a new book. In his latest book, 'The Killing of Osama bin Laden', investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims that ISI got hold of bin Laden in 2006 after paying bribes to some of the tribal leaders. At the time he was said to be very ill. PTI
Washington, April 28

The Taliban must "face the consequences" for calling off peace talks with the Afghan government, the US said on Thursday as it once again asked Pakistan to go after terrorists that threaten its neighbours.

"Unfortunately, the Taliban have refused to come to the table, so it is our view that they should face the consequences of that decision," Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Olson told members of the House Foreign Relations Committee during a hearing.

"We've long expressed our concerns to the Pakistanis about their reluctance to go after terrorists that threaten their neighbours with the same degree of assiduousness that they go after their own terrorists. We think that they are at a moment of needing to make a very strategic and fundamental choice," Olson said when asked what Pakistan is doing to bring the Taliban to the negotiation table.

"Their (Pakistan's) stated policy, which we agree with, is not to discriminate among terrorist groups. We believe there is considerable room for improvement in the application of that policy on the ground and we believe in particular that Pakistan has not taken as vigorous action against groups that threaten its neighbours as it has against those that threaten it domestically," he noted.

"So Pakistan has also been very helpful in the reconciliation process, but I do believe that there is a strategic choice right now. With the Taliban having refused to come to the table, it seems to us that it is time to address more robustly the question of groups that threaten Afghanistan," Olson said.

The US, he said, has pressed the Pakistan Government on its commitment not to discriminate among terrorist groups.

"We believe across regions there must be zero tolerance for safe havens," he said.

America's relationship with Pakistan, a growing country with more than 190 million people, a nuclear arsenal, terrorism challenges and a key role to play in the region, will remain a critical one, he said.

"In Pakistan, we see the government in a concerted and difficult fight against terror groups that threaten Pakistanis. But unfortunately, Pakistan does not take equivalent steps against groups that threaten its neighbours," Olson said.

"Our core initiatives in Pakistan, include promoting economic growth, countering terrorism, fostering regional stability and promoting the consolidation of democratic institutions. Let me emphasise, we have repeatedly and frankly underscored with most senior leaders of Pakistan that the Haqqani Network must be part of their wider counter-terrorism operations in order to keep their commitment not to discriminate between terrorist organisations," Olson said.  PTI
Washington, April 28

Top US lawmakers have voiced concern over the Obama Administration's decision to sell eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, saying the aircrafts could be used against India and not in combating terrorism.

They have also urged the Obama Administration to review its decision in this regard.

"Many members of Congress, including me, seriously question the judgement and timing of such a sale.

Additionally, Indo-Pak tensions remain elevated and some question whether the F-16s could ultimately be used against India or other regional powers, rather than the terrorists as Pakistan as asserted," Congressman Matt Salmon said during a Congressional hearing yesterday.

Salmon was joined by several other lawmakers during the Congressional hearing on Afghanistan and Pakistan convened by the Subcommittee on Asia and Pacific of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wherein the Obama Administration was represented by the Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Olson.

"We've got to be concerned what military assistance and whether the F-16s constitute the least expensive, most efficient way for the Pakistani air force to go after the terrorists and the least disruptive weapon system to the balance of power between India and Pakistan," Congressman Brad Sherman said.

"We need to offer to Pakistan those weapon systems well- crafted to go after terrorists and not crafted for a war with India," Sherman said.

The US Senate has currently put a hold on the decision of the Obama Administration to give eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan at an estimated cost of USD700 million.

Salmon asked Olson to clarify the underlying purpose and timing of the intended sale and how is it in the best interest of the United States.

"Despite giving Pakistan enormous amounts of counter-terror assistance over the years, over USD25 billion since 9/11, terrorist organisations continue to operate with impunity in Pakistan.

"Pakistan has used terror as a tool of statecraft and terrorist proxy groups, for the Pakistani military have carried out fatal attacks inside India," he claimed.

The subcommittee chairperson, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen also held similar reservation over sale of F-16 to Pakistan.

"I think that we need to leverage our military sales to Pakistan in order to get some more cooperation within the region. Can you please update us on the status of the F-16 sales and how would you describe our ability to leverage our aid to Pakistan?" she asked.

Olson strongly defended the decision of the Obama Administration saying that this is in the best interest of the United States.

"The administration is supportive of the F-16 sale to Pakistan. This is been developed between our military coordinating groups over the course of time that is consistent with our overall program of support for the Pakistani military, which is based on counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism. The Pakistanis have developed a precision strike capability that they use in the F-16s they have right now to take out targets," he said.

"These are principally the Pakistani Taliban, but we think that that is a good thing. The Pakistani Taliban has been involved in attacks against Americans at Chapman in Afghanistan in 2009 and, indeed, in supporting the Times Square bomber," he said.

"So we applaud the actions that the Pakistanis have been taking against their domestic terrorism threat, even as we call upon them to take more robust action against those groups that threaten their neighbours," he argued.

The Pakistan Air Force reports having flown thousands of sorties, dropping more than 800 US-provided Guided Bomb Units (GBUs), and killing more than 1,700 terrorists.

The use of precision munitions has greatly minimized collateral damage, including civilian casualties, he said.  PTI
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The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will host what it calls an informal roundtable on the financial responsibility of property brokers and freight forwarders. The meeting is part of the agencys appeal for public comment on this issue.

The public meeting will be held on May 20 from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. EDT at the Department of Transportation, Media Center, 1200 New Jersey Avenue SE., Ground Floor, Washington, DC, 20590.

The agency said it is seeking information from motor carriers and shippers on challenges theyve experienced in being compensated for claims against freight forwarders and brokers due to insufficient funds.

FMCSA stated that the meeting will not delve into increasing motor carrier, broker, or freight forwarder minimum financial responsibility limits.

The agency said it welcomes comments or questions before and during the roundtable discussion. The roundtable will center on the following questions:

Which, if any, BMC-85 Trust Fund holders routinely deny claims made by shippers and motor carriers against those trust funds?

What is the nature of the assets that are being held in BMC-85 trust funds and what is the most desirable composition of the assets? For example, should trust funds consist solely of cash or other highly liquid financial instruments? What types of instruments constitute highly liquid? Aside from cash, what else can satisfy the mandate that trust funds consist of readily available assets? Should the Agency define the classes of investments held in trust relative to risk profile of the issuer and identify the relative liquidity of such assets or should it rely on other sources for such information?

Aside from FMCSA, are BMC-85 trust fund filers being regulated by any other governmental entity? If so, what is the nature of their regulation by state or other authorities?

What actions can FMCSA take to ensure that motor carriers and shippers are able to collect on BMC-85 trust funds where legitimate claims are filed with the financial institution?

Should the Agency act to address potential issues associated with the solvency of BMC-85 trust funds? If so, what type of action would be most appropriate? What type of FMCSA action pertaining to 49 U.S.C. 13906(b)(6) and (c)(7)(payment in cases of financial failure or insolvency) is necessary? Would agency guidance, as opposed to rulemaking, be sufficient?

Should FMCSA require brokers and freight forwarders to demonstrate the creditworthiness of the entity with whom brokers or freight forwarders intend to execute a trust fund, based on a determination of creditworthiness by the applicable state regulatory authority or the Department of Treasury Financial Management Service?

FMCSA noted it will use comments received ahead of the roundtable to further frame the issues.

Written comments on the roundtable topic, which should bear Docket ID FMCSA-2016-0102, may be submitted via any of the following methods:
Lassalles New Orleans Deli, a popular lunch spot at 601 S. Boston Ave., is moving to the Pythian Building in mid summer.

Its a larger location at the Pythian Building where the former Quiznos was, said Chris West, who owns Lassalles with his wife, Amanda.

We will be adding a significant amount of new menu items and will have a full-point beer license. Our emphasis will be on Louisiana and Oklahoma breweries.

Among Lassalles most popular items are muffulettas, a variety of po boys, red beans and rice, gumbo, jambalaya, Amaretto bread pudding, chocolate chip cookies and sugar cookies.

West said the target date for the move is late July.

We also will be adding Friday nights at the start to our hours of operation and more nights in the future according to how business goes, he said.

The Wests are natives of New Orleans. They settled in Tulsa in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and opened Lasalles in 2014.

The ornate Pythian Building, 423 S. Boulder Ave., is known for its two-story lobby with colorful tile patterns, metal work, chandeliers and a fluted glass skylight.
The Oklahoma State Department of Education on Wednesday notified school districts across the state that yet another shortfall in state revenue collections will likely cause their budgets for the current year to suffer.

The Common Education Technology Revolving Fund, one of six sources of revenue that are combined to provide schools with state aid, has only received $26.5 million with two more months left in the fiscal year.

That is $20 million, or 44 percent, shy of the $47.4 million expected.

Education officials told school districts they need to prepare to have their final state aid payments for the 2016 fiscal year ending June 30 shorted by $13 million to $17 million.

Tulsa Superintendent Deborah Gist said her district has been notified that its share of this latest cut is $800,000 to $1.05 million.

At the beginning of a special board meeting Wednesday evening, she announced the news and said she hopes people understand the magnitude of the state funding reductions to public schools.

This is an incredibly difficult time for all of us, for Oklahoma, for Tulsa, for Tulsans. Were making the best we can out of an incredibly difficult situation, Gist said. These are historic cuts to education  we really need to emphasize that.

According to information from the Oklahoma State Department of Education, other Tulsa-area school districts were notified of projected losses as follows:

Broken Arrow: $345,900 to $449,600;

Berryhill: $21,500 to $28,000;

Bixby: $105,200 to $136,800

Claremore: $74,000 to $96,100

Collinsville: $46,800 to $60,800

Glenpool: $50,100 to $65,100

Jenks: $215,000 to $279,500

Owasso: $167,900 to $218,200

Sand Springs: $99,000 to $128,600

Sapulpa: $76,600 to $99,500

Skiatook: $45,500 to $59,200

Sperry: $22,800 to $29,700

Union: $306,000 to $397,800
A jury spent less than three hours deliberating Wednesday to decide that Robert Bates was criminally negligent and deserves criminal punishment for shooting and killing an unarmed suspect while on duty as a Tulsa County Sheriff's Office reserve deputy last year.

Jurors recommended the maximum sentence of four years in prison after finding Bates guilty of second-degree manslaughter for mistaking his revolver for his Taser and shooting Eric Harris.

Bates, 74, didn't show much emotion but stroked his chin after he heard the verdict and waited to be taken from the courtroom.

The room was filled beyond capacity with spectators and 12 deputies, and District Judge William Musseman said would hold in contempt anyone who reacted audibly to the verdict.

Bates softly told family members he loved them as a deputy escorted him, handcuffed, from the courtroom to be taken to the Tulsa Jail, where he will be held without bail until he is formally sentenced on May 31. Bates had been out of custody on bond as his case progressed through the courts.

Local and national media merely caught a glimpse of him as deputies led him out a side door.

Tulsa County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Casey Roebuck told reporters security officers wanted to lessen Bates' exposure for his safety.

"We wanted to make sure he wasnt getting special treatment, but we also wanted to make sure that his life wasnt in danger," Roebuck said.

In the courtroom after Musseman read the verdict, Harris' sister-in-law visibly wept and was held by her husband, Andre Harris.

"I love (my brother) with all my heart, and now (Aidan Fraley) doesn't have a dad," Andre Harris told reporters afterward. "But we put the criminal behind bars." The defense had called an out-of-state psychiatrist to testify that Bates mistakenly shooting Harris was reasonable given the stress of the situation, and before closing arguments jurors were instructed on the statutory requirements for "excusable homicide." But after hearing from 21 witnesses in the 1 week-long trial, jurors apparently agreed with prosecutors who asserted that Bates' failure to exercise reasonable caution when he shot Harris constitutes criminal negligence.

Within seconds of selling a gun to an undercover deputy on April 2, 2015, Harris was on the ground being restrained by multiple deputies when he was shot by Bates, witnesses testified.

But Bates' lack of "reasonable" care began the night before, prosecutors argued, when Bates called the leader of the Sheriff's Office drug task force and asked to volunteer the next morning in the take-down of Harris.

"He shouldn't have even been there," Assistant District Attorney John David Luton told jurors in his closing argument.

Deputies testified that the next morning, while awaiting the signal that deputies were ready to arrest the felon they'd been warned was dangerous and likely armed, they saw Bates nodding off in his personal vehicle.

As multiple deputies struggled to restrain Harris on the ground after a short pursuit, Bates approached holding a nonlethal weapon in one hand and a lethal one in the other, Luton reminded jurors.

Seeing a small area of Harris' body where he wasn't covered by deputies, Bates announced that he was going to use his Taser and shot a bullet that struck Harris inches from another deputy's head, witnesses testified.

And despite hours of technical medical testimony from the defense, the jury agreed that the bullet killed Harris.

Luton said after the trial that despite the abundance of expert testimony, he thought common sense was probably what carried the day.

Bates was convicted by a jury with no African American members. During the final stage of jury selection last week, the last two African American potential jurors were eliminated from the pool after the judge agreed that the defense had given "race-neutral" reasons for their excusal.

When asked whether he was satisfied with the jury's sentence recommendation, Andre Harris said four years in prison would "teach him (Bates) a lesson."

"That place ain't that nice," Andre Harris told reporters.

He said he hopes Bates learns that all lives matter, and he said Bates should not have been on a drug task force chasing supposedly deadly criminals.

"Not at 73," Andre Harris emphasized. "Not at 73."

He cited the 2009 Sheriff's Office internal investigation involving Bates, which contained allegations of falsified training records, intimidation of subordinates and special treatment that benefited the insurance executive.

Looking back at the county's changes prompted by exposure to the inner workings of the Sheriff's Office, Andre Harris told reporters that his brother "accomplished a lot in his death. I think maybe even more than he accomplished in his life."

Harris' death snowballed into a wide-reaching scandal that largely emptied the top shelf of the Stanley Glanz administration at the Sheriff's Office. Glanz himself resigned from his longtime position as sheriff following a grand jury's scathing accusation for his ouster and two indictments on misdemeanor crimes.

"He's going to be remembered as a guy who helped change the city for the better," Andre Harris said. "He'll be a guy who helped change the sheriff's department and helped to better the city in general, basically."

Assistant District Attorney Kevin Gray clarified to reporters afterward that prosecutors sought "justice" rather than "victory" because this was a case with "no winners."

"Mr. Bates had a long career and was a successful businessman, and now he will be a convicted felon whos going to the penitentiary," Gray said. "For the Harris family, they lost somebody they loved."

Bates' attorney Clark Brewster told the Tulsa World by telephone that the "massive amount" of negative media reports his client attracted in the past year generated an "uphill battle" and "created a climate in which it was virtually impossible to defend (Bates)."

Brewster said he disagrees with the jury's decision and will evaluate appeal options.

"We certainly are obviously fresh from the verdict, so we need to understand more about our options going forward," he said.

An earlier version of this story appears below:

BREAKING: Former Reserve Deputy Robert Bates was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter by a jury Wednesday evening after about three hours of deliberation.

The jury recommended that Bates, 74, serve four years in prison, the maximum possible sentence on the conviction.

Deputies handcuffed Bates and led him from the courtroom.

Bates was charged in the April 2, 2015, shooting death of Eric Harris.

Bates was volunteering as a reserve deputy on a Tulsa County Sheriffs Office drug task force operation when he shot Harris, the target of a gun-sale sting whom deputies were restraining on the ground after a short foot pursuit when he was shot.

Andre Harris, Eric Harris' brother, said after court was adjourned that the verdict was a victory for the family and for Tulsa.

Asked by a reporter whether four years in prison would teach Bates a lesson, Andre Harris said that "at his age," yes, it will teach him a lesson.

This story will be updated. Here is a previous version of the story.

After about two hours of closing arguments, jury deliberations began about 2:45 p.m.

First Assistant District Attorney John David Luton opened for the prosecution, painting a portrait of Bates as negligent, not following a reasonable standard of care a reasonable person would follow under similar circumstances.

Luton portrayed Bates as a reserve who called up the operations commander the night before to get an assignment Bates wasnt prepared for. Not only did Luton question Bates intentions to use a Taser, Luton stated Bates shouldnt have even been with the task force that day.

Luton emphasized the testimony of two deputies who saw Bates dozing off in his SUV minutes before the take down of Harris happened, with his eyes closed and head drooped before rousing himself.

Harris did deserve to be chased, tackled and arrested by deputies, Luton said.

But (Harris) didnt deserve to be gunned down and killed, he said.

Defense attorney Clark Brewster stated the prosecution didnt present a single witness who testified Bates was culpably negligent. Brewster said the task forces deputies agreed the shooting was a mistake.

He told jurors not to condemn Bates because he "got out of his vehicle to man up and help" his fellow deputies capture a dangerous fleeing felon.

"This is somebody we should be proud of. Honestly," Brewster said.

Luton clocked 35 minutes overall, using a chunk of that time denouncing the defenses use of expert witnesses.

Luton told jurors now is the time to use common sense and not let paid experts argue Harris wasn't killed by Bates' bullet by playing "Monday morning quarterback." The defenses medical experts "picked and chose" from which medical records to draw an opinion, he said.

Luton pointed out that the forensic pathologist who performed Harris' autopsy and the emergency room surgeon who cut into Harris both agreed blood loss killed him and not the defenses notion of a heart attack unrelated to the gunshot.

"Do we need an expert to tell us he died from a gunshot wound? Ridiculous," Luton said, drawing attention to the fact those two were the only witnesses to physically touch Harris' heart in forming their opinions.

Luton questioned Bates' judgment that the reserve deputy saw a "very brief opening" in which he could use his Taser near Harris' right shoulder during the ground struggle.

"Deputy (Ricardo) Vaca is basically spooning with Eric Harris," Luton said, emphasizing there were two other deputies on Harris, as well.

Brewster followed by -- as he did throughout the trial -- emphasizing Harris' criminal history. He referred to Harris' convictions of armed robbery, escape from a penal institution and assault and battery on a law enforcement officer during his 45 minutes talking to jurors.

"Incidentally I didn't write his resume," Brewster said, explaining to jurors the danger Harris presented to deputies. "He wrote his resume."

Brewster called the prosecution's characterization of Bates sleeping before an undercover operation to be "outrageous" and "disparaging," saying his client was an "appropriate selection" to be on the task force.

"That's an absolute insult to try and convict someone on that basis," Brewster said, explaining there are any number of reasons (such as thinking) that his eyes would be closed and head down.

Brewster also referred back to a defense expert witness who testified "more than not" a person will "make mistakes" in a stressful life-or-death situation trying to help others.

"This case is all driven by something else," Brewster said. But the defense attorney never specified what exactly he meant before moving on to another point.

Brewster restated the findings of his expert medical defense witnesses. That testimony constructed his argument that a heart attack killed Harris because of the methamphetamine in his system, physical exertion and stress brought on by running from and fighting with deputies, and heart disease.

It's "truly coincidental" that Harris was shot by Bates' bullet moments before dying from a heart attack, he said.

"The bullet didn't kill him," Brewster said. "The bullet didn't kill him."

Gray got the final word as part of the prosecution, taking 25 minutes to rebut Brewsters closing argument.

Gray characterized Bates as locked and loaded when he stepped from his SUV, holding a less-lethal rifle in his left hand, his revolver in his right hand and a bright yellow Taser strapped to his chest.

People usually dont accidentally shoot someone, Gray said, chiding the defense for arguing theres a need to have experts  tell you not to accidentally shoot somebody.

Gray noted that Bates in his statement to investigators said Harris death was on his conscience.

Im asking you (jurors) to put it on his record, he said.

The jury has been instructed that to find Bates guilty, they must find beyond a reasonable doubt that Harris' death wasn't an excusable homicide. Jury instructions define a homicide as excusable "when committed by lawful means, with usual and ordinary caution, and without any unlawful intent, but occurs by accident and misfortune while doing some lawful act."

Tuesday's trial coverage:

Filled with terminology so technical and contentious that the judge twice asked attorneys and witnesses to slow down and not talk over each other, the entire last day of testimony in Robert Bates manslaughter trial was devoted to whether the reserve deputys gunshot killed Eric Harris.

The cause of Harris death and whether Bates was culpably negligent when he by his own admission mistook his revolver for his Taser and shot the unarmed suspect are at the crux of Bates two-fold charge.

Bates elected not to testify after the defenses last witness testified Tuesday. When asked in court whether he was pleased with his attorneys work in his defense, Bates said he was tickled to death.

Bates, 74, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree manslaughter in the death of Harris on April 2, 2015.

Bates was volunteering as a reserve deputy on a Tulsa County Sheriffs Office drug task force operation when he shot Harris, the target of the gun-sale sting whom deputies were trying to restrain on the ground after a short foot pursuit.

Both sides rested their cases Tuesday evening after almost five hours of testimony from two defense experts and two rebuttal witnesses from the prosecution focused on whether other medical factors could have caused 44-year-old Harris death.

The defenses case consisted of three expert witnesses. A psychiatrist was called to the stand Monday to theorize that Bates mistaking his revolver for his Taser was a reasonable error due to the stress of the situation.

The two doctors who testified for the defense Tuesday disagreed with Harris autopsy report, which lists his cause of death as bilateral lung collapse and blood loss caused by the bullet wound.

Dr. Mark Brandenburg, an expert in emergency medicine, told jurors Tuesday that the medical examiners conclusion  which she held despite heated cross examination on Friday  that Harris bled to death after being shot by Bates is absolutely untrue."

Brandenburg was not involved in Harris medical treatment but has been paid by the defense to review medical records in preparation for his testimony.

Basing his opinion on medical records, Brandenburg said Harris death was caused by a heart attack that was not prompted by the gunshot but brought on by an underlying heart disease coupled with elevated adrenaline and the very high level of methamphetamine in his system at the time.

On cross-examination, Assistant District Attorney Kevin Gray pointed out that Harris condition, including meth use, was the same in the previous days when he had interactions with an undercover officer, and he maintained that the gunshot was the difference that resulted in Harris death.

Dr. James Higgins, a cardiologist at Hillcrest Medical Center, agreed with Brandenburg that the gunshot did not cause Harris death.

Higgins testified that the bullet didnt hit the conduction system of Harris heart so it had no effect on its electrical function.

When asked on cross examination about his review of EMSA records, Higgins said he made only a cursory read of those documents despite the EKG information from those records constituting a large part of his testimony.

To rebut the defenses medical experts, prosecutors Gray and Assistant District Attorney John David Luton called a cardiologist and an emergency room doctor who performed surgery on Harris after he was shot.

Dr. Gajal Kumar, a surgeon who treated Harris in the emergency room at St. John Medical Center, said she made a thoracotomy incision to allow better access for compressions, but there was nothing to compress because of the lack of blood.

She said blood transfusions by then were futile because at that point hed lost too much blood to do anything about it.

Agreeing with the medical examiner, Kumar said she believed that Harris cardiac arrest and death were caused by blood loss due to the gunshot wound.

Dr. R. Douglas Ensley, a cardiologist with Saint Francis Health System, countered the defense testimony that Harris died from a heart attack.

After reviewing Harris medical records, Ensley testified that Harris heart was described as flat or flacid when he arrived at the hospital, and he said that is not the typical appearance of the heart of a person whos dying from a heart attack.

Previous trial coverage:
OKLAHOMA CITY  Evangelist Franklin Graham said he's not running for political office nor is he endorsing any candidates  but he is on a mission.

Wednesday, with the Oklahoma State Capitol building serving as a backdrop, the preacher told an estimated crowd of 5,100 why he was visiting Oklahoma City on his "Decision America Tour."

"I am running a campaign. Im running a campaign for God," Graham said.

"I want to put God back in the discussion. I want to put God back into politics because there is no hope for this country outside of Almighty God."

Graham's remarks came at his prayer rally designed to encourage Christians to become involved in the political process. The president and chief executive officer of the international aid organization Samaritans Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association said he is on a journey to give to believers in all 50 states the same message: Vote your biblical convictions and principles. Consider running for office yourself.
The 2016 Federal Budget will be handed down on Tuesday May 3 and ABC has first interviews with Treasurer Scott Morrison and Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen, as well as analysis and commentary from the ABCs political and business teams.

Monday May 2  Budget Eve

Four Corners

Home Truths: What happened to the Great Australian Dream?

8.30pm on ABC & iview

On the eve of the budget, Ben Knight reports on the white hot issues of housing affordability and negative gearing and the generation left wondering if they will ever own their own home.

Q&A

9.35pm on ABC, plus simulcast live at 9.35pm AEST on iview, ABC NewsRadio & on ABC News 24 (SA, NT, WA only)

On the eve of Treasurer Scott Morrisons first budget, we ask: Is our political system up to the challenges of the 21st Century? Joining host Tony Jones on the Q&A panel will be: Essayist George Megalogenis, who says stalled reform and failing infrastructure could make Australia the next victim of globalisation; American journalist and politics veteran James Fallows; Political editor of the Australian Financial Review Laura Tingle; Executive Director of the NewDemocracy Foundation Iain Walker, who believes the coming election wont solve our problems; and journalist and broadcaster turned State Cabinet Minister Pru Goward.

Tuesday May 3  Budget Day

ABC, ABC News 24 & iview:

The Drum

5.30pm on ABC & iview / 6.30pm AEST on ABC News 24

As the press gallery bunkers down in the budget media lock-up, The Drum host Julia Baird and a panel of experts will count down to Budget 2016 and preview what to expect.

ABC News

7pm on ABC & iview

The news of the day and the lead up to the Federal Treasurers Budget speech.

ABC News Budget 2016 Special

7:30pm AEST on ABC, ABC News 24 & iview

ABC will deliver uninterrupted coverage and first-rate analysis and commentary from Australias top political and business journalists and commentators.

Leigh Sales hosts the ABC News Budget 2016 special with Political Editor Chris Uhlmann live from Parliament House in Canberra on ABC TV, ABC News 24 and iview. Following the 7pm ABC News bulletin, at 7.30pm AEST the Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison will deliver his first Federal Budget speech live from the House of Representatives. Immediately after his speech, the Treasurer will join Leigh Sales for his first interview of the night, followed by the response from the Oppositions Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen. The ABCs Barrie Cassidy, Annabel Crabb, Sabra Lane and Greg Jennett will examine the politics. ABC Business Editor Ian Verrender, Alan Kohler and George Megalogenis, one of Australias leading economic and political commentators, will explore the business and economic breakdown of who are the winners and losers this year.

The coverage will also include reaction from economist Chris Richardson, Cassandra Goldie from the Australian Council of Social Services and Jennifer Westacott, Chief Executive of the Business Council of Australia. The extended Budget 2016 coverage will continue with Leigh Sales and Chris Uhlmann on ABC News 24 & iview from 8.40-9.30pm AEST. This special extended broadcast will include interviews with Greens Leader Richard Di Natale and Independent Senator Nick Xenophon. There will be a full recap of the Budgets key points as well as further analysis about how it affects you in this election year.

Lateline

9.30pm AEST on ABC News 24 & iview / 10.30pm on ABC & iview

Lateline will be hosted by Emma Alberici live from Canberra and will feature interviews with Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Shadow Finance Minister Tony Burke. Well have analysis from economist Saul Eslake and further commentary from Australias top political journalists.

The Drum

10.30pm AEST on ABC News 24 & later on ABC

Join us for a special half hour Budget night special, hosted by Ticky Fullerton. What segments of society will be most affected? What are the initial impressions? What is the political spin from the parties?

Wednesday May 4

ABC News Breakfast

6.00am on ABC & iview / 6.00am AEST on ABC News 24

News Breakfast will broadcast live from the front lawn of Parliament House in Canberra on the morning of Wednesday May 4. Hosted by Virginia Trioli and Michael Rowland, the program will feature key interviews with senior figures from both sides of politics as well as the crossbench. Virginia and Michael will put a spotlight on the key announcements and the reaction to these measures from stakeholders and voters through our own audience feedback. Well also have analysis from ABCs Barrie Cassidy (Insiders) looking at the political implications as both sides begin the long campaign to the Federal Election.

National Press Club Address

12.30pm on ABC & iview / 12.30pm AEST on ABC News 24

Live from the Great Hall at Parliament House Canberra, Treasurer Scott Morrison presents his post-budget address to the National Press Club.

Thursday May 5

Budget Right of Reply

7.30pm AEST on ABC, ABC News 24, iview, ABC NewsRadio, ABC Local Radio

Live on television, radio and online, ABC presents the Budget 2016 Right of Reply by the Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

7.30

8.00pm AEST on ABC & iview / 8.00pm AEST on ABC News 24 & iview

Following the Budget Right of Reply, Leigh Sales hosts 7.30.

Sunday May 8

Insiders

9am on ABC & iview / 9am AEST on ABC News 24

Host Barrie Cassidy and a panel of Australias top political journalists  including George Megalogenis, the Financial Reviews Laura Tingle and the West Australians Andrew Probyn  will help make sense of the events of Budget week. How do the Treasurers Budget and the Oppositions Budget Reply set each party up for the approaching Federal Election?
TEN News & Current Affairs boss Peter Meakin will step back into a consultancy role, after two years in the top role.

He will take on the new role of Executive Consultant, News and Current Affairs for The Project and Studio 10.

Meakin joined TEN in 2014 following his departure from Seven. The news veteran has a wealth of industry experience including 3 decades with the Nine Network.

From Sunday Network News Director, John Choueifate, is promoted to Executive Director, News. He joined TEN in December 2013 following senior roles at Seven.

TEN CEO, Paul Anderson, said: Peter has made an important and valuable contribution to our news and current affairs programs over the past two years, in particular to The Project, and Im delighted that he is staying with us in his new role.

John is one of the best and most experienced news and current affairs executives in Australia. Under his direction, the TEN Eyewitness News First At Five bulletins have continued to dominate their timeslots around the country and have continued to deliver compelling and informative news to our viewers seven days a week.

I am delighted to be continuing my association with The Project and Studio 10, working closely with Chief Programming Officer Beverley McGarvey. I hold Chouf in enormously high regard and TEN News will be in safe hands with him, said Peter Meakin.

John Choueifate added: I would like to thank Peter for his guidance at TEN over the past two years.

Im thrilled to be leading an enthusiastic and committed team. There are many exciting opportunities that lie ahead and Im keen to continue to grow TEN News across all platforms.
Nine has won the case against WIN Television over its Live Streaming service 9NOW.

Justice Hammerschlag dismissed the case today in the NSW Supreme Court.

WIN had claimed Nine is denying it advertising revenue by the 9Now Live streaming service being accessible in WIN markets.

Justice Hammerschlag said, I have concluded that live streaming is not broadcasting within the meaning of the PSA (program supply agreement), and that Nine is under no express or implied obligation not to do it.

WINs claim for an injunction must therefore be refused.

WINs proposition that its exclusivity is undermined by Nine being able to internet live stream begs the question as to what exclusivity it got.

He ruled WIN only enjoyed exclusivity to broadcast free-to-air in the WIN licence areas.

A Nine spokesperson said, We are pleased with the result and it vindicates our position.

In a statement WIN said, WIN is obviously disappointed with the outcome of the case. This case further highlights the absolute absurdity of the 75% audience reach rule in this digital age and the need for the Turnbull government to remove this outdated legislation with a greater sense of urgency.

The case should also serve to remind regional broadcasters entering into future affiliation agreements that the value of these agreements is decreasing as metro broadcasters set out to erode regional broadcaster value by directly competing with their affiliates for viewers and revenue in regional Australia.

The ruling is a landmark decision as the industry debates Live streaming into regional markets.

WIN and Nine are currently in an extended period on their affiliation deal until June after a disagreement on revenue.

A hearing for costs is set for May 6.

Source: Mumbrella, The Australian
Quickflix is remaining optimistic in the face of massive financial hurdles.

This week the Perth-based SVOD and DVD service entered administration after negotiations to restructure failed to reach an agreement with shareholders Stan.

Clearly we see that there is a scenario here of a restructure that enables Quickflix to go forward, and I am dedicated to seeing an outcome, CEO Stephen Langsford told the Australian Financial Review.

We see Quickflix having a valuable underlying business  and it is clear what the impediments were in taking that business forward.

This week Quickflix advised its subscribers, As a small independent company listed on the ASX and owned by thousands of Australians, the Quickflix journey has been exciting but not always easy, especially when it comes to competing against much larger media interests. Some years ago one of our competitors acquired shares in our company which has resulted in an impediment to securing necessary new capital to ensure our service is the best it can be.

Today Langsford acknowledged Stans redeemable preference shares had prevented the company to move forward and secure additional capital.

Clearly we havent been successful with that, so we will let everyone draw their own conclusions on Stans motivations.
Next weeks federal budget is expected to slash the $153 million in annual licence fees for free to air networks, according to a media report.

The Australian suggests networks will be getting good news in Tuesdays budget, with a reduction (but not abolition) of the 4.5 per cent of their revenue they currently pay.

A spokesman for Communications Minister Mitch Fifield said: The government has indicated that it will examine the issue of licence fees in the context of the budget. The government does not comment on speculation in relation to what may be decided in the budget.

Seven CEO Tim Worner recently told a Senate hearing Were paying licence fees that are far in excess of any other jurisdiction in the world. Governments in other jurisdictions have moved some years ago to address this.

Weve shown already with the last lot of licence fee reductions that more than 100 per cent of it will go back into the production of local content. We will see hundreds if not thousands of new jobs created because of the amount of local production that we can undertake, he said.

We simply cannot now. We have things that are parked waiting at an amber light. We just do not have the money to fund them.

Nine and TEN management will front a Senate hearing committee today on media reforms.

Plans for media reform will stall if Malcolm Turnbull calls a July 2 election, but would resume if the Coalition was returned.
Controversial SBS documentary Struggle Street will film in both Victoria and Queensland for a second season, now confirmed by SBS.

Expanding to six episodes, it will again tackle poverty, unemployment and social and economic hardship.

But SBS is not revealing which suburbs will feature, despite media rumours of both Sunshine and Frankston in Victoria.

SBS was widely expected to announce a new season after record ratings for season one followed volatile headlines.

SBS Television and Online Content Director, Marshall Heald, said: At the heart of SBS is a commitment to contributing to a cohesive society. Struggle Street will seek to raise awareness and deepen our understanding of those of us in the community facing social and economic hardship through an honest reflection of what its like to be doing it tough in Australia today.

SBS Chief Content Officer, Helen Kellie, said: There are 2.5 million people in Australia living below the poverty line. Some research points to the situation getting worse not better and this is a barrier to social cohesion. But the statistics dont allow us to connect with the real stories, in a way that Struggle Street does, to raise awareness about hardship.

Keo Films Director of Programs, David Galloway, said: Struggle Street is a candid and powerful account of the lives of people struggling in Australia today. We anticipate stories of resilience, community support and family love in what will be compelling and insightful storytelling that doesnt shy away from the realities of hardship faced by millions of people across the country.

Struggle Street series two will again be produced by Keo Films, with funding support from Screen Australia and Film Victoria.

The series will air in late 2017.
In news nobody saw coming HBO drama The Leftovers is reportedly headed to Australia for its third season -both in storyline and production.

The Hollywood Reporter says production will pick up where it left off last season in Austin, Texas, before coming here.

The series from Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, which has established itself as a critical hit, started out in a fictional New York suburb before relocating in season two to a miracle town in Texas.

The series explores what happens in a world where 2% of the population has mysteriously disappeared.

No word yet where in Australia it may land but Season Two did reference Perth. HBO is yet to confirm the move.

The Leftovers screens on Showcase.
Provocations are being prepared in the southern port city during the commemoration of the May 2 tragedy anniversary that took place in Odesa two years ago.

Advisor to the Chairman of the SBU Yuri Tandit told viewers of TV Channel 5.

"The commemoration of the May 2, 2014 tragedy is used by provocateurs who are trying actually to cause distrust in the government and doing their best to organize activities on May 2, on the very day of the tragic events in 2014 that will be realized. But we will make every effort so that the city could live in peace," said Tandit.

Governor of the Odesa region Mikheil Saakashvili wrote on his Facebook, 300 servicemen from "Azov regiment had already arrived in Odesa.
The UN Security Council will hold a meeting at the request of the Ukrainian delegation on the situation development in the context of Russia's aggression in Ukraine on Thursday, April 28.

The press service of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine reports.

"On April 28, the UN Security Council will hold a meeting at the request of the delegation of Ukraine concerning the Ukrainian issue to discuss developments in the context of Russia's aggression against our country," a statement said.

Ukraine Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Vadym Prystaiko will take part in the meeting.
Famous actor and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Orlando Bloom visited school 13 in Slovyansk city, Donetsk Region.

According to media reports, Bloom visited the cities of Svyatohirsk, Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.

He visited school 13 in Slovyansk and he was spotted at a local cafe in Kramatorsk.

One photo posted in Instagram has a caption stating the actor will be in Kyiv next week.
The mumps outbreak in Harvard University started over two months ago. In February, the institution announced the first two cases of mumps infection, but the contagious disease continued to spread and infected at least 40 students despite prevention and isolation efforts. Many of those infected with mumps are vaccinated.

The increasing number of students being infected with mumps is worrying health officials. Paul J. Barreira, director of the university's health service,s told the school paper that if the mumps infection trend increases this week the outbreak could interfere with Harvard University's commencement exercise on May 26. Those who get infected are isolated to prevent the spread of the highly contagious disease, CNN reports.

The number of #Harvard mumps cases has spiked from a post-spring break low of two cases to 40 cases, as of Monday. https://t.co/s3mTdvkDUE  The Harvard Crimson (@thecrimson) April 26, 2016

All Harvard students infected with mumps have been vaccinated. UPI notes that before they are admitted to the university, all new students must have MMRV (measles, mumps and rubella) immunization. More than ten students are in isolation since Monday. Barreira adds that the increasing incidence of mumps infection in Harvard University is also due to students not taking important precautions to not spread and get infection with the disease.

Susan Feinberg of the Cambridge Public Health Department told ABC News that college campuses are a dangerous breeding ground for infectious diseases like mumps. She further explained that because students are in close proximity with others and sharing things will make the spread of the disease more likely.

Mumps is a viral disease that causes inflammation of the salivary glands. The most common symptoms of mumps infection include headache, fever, muscle aches, tiredness, appetite loss and the appearance of swollen jaws caused by the inflamed salivary glands under the ears. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shares that mumps is spread through saliva or mucus. People can get infected through coughing, talking, sneezing, sharing eating utensils and touching infected surfaces.
Liberty University is now allowing students with concealed handgun permits to keep their weapons in their dorms starting next fall. However, students will need to get permission from the university first.

ABC News reports that the policy change was approved by the institution's board of trustees this month. Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. said last year that those with permitted concealed handguns could carry their weapons on campus. However, it was previously forbidden to bring handguns inside the residence halls where the students sleep. Liberty University is one of the most gun-friendly institutions in the entire state of Virginia. They disposed the concealed weapons ban in the campus in 2011.

According to CBS News, Falwell was heavily criticized when he made an announcement last year that Liberty University students can carry concealed guns in campus. It was during the time of the San Bernardino mass shootings last year that Falwell said that guns should be carried to "end Muslims before they walked in." Washington Post notes that Falwell explained that he meant Islamic terrorists behind the shootings.

Liberty University to allow handguns in dorms next fall https://t.co/woDYWJxc1L pic.twitter.com/vSTkGPC3vj  13News Now (@13NewsNow) April 27, 2016



Falwell explained that the new policy change will help eligible students keep their concealed handguns in their rooms instead of having them keep it in the glove compartments of their cars. Liberty University will reportedly provide handgun safes for students who choose to bring their permitted handguns in their dorms. Students must also follow certain gun safety policies. They must immediately put the gun in the allotted safes and keep them there.

However, Falwell said that the changes will only affect older students as majority of Liberty University goers are under 21 and thus, can't apply for handgun permits from the state yet. News Advance shares that in 200 eligible students that are in dorms; approximately 20 of them have permits.
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has signed the higher education budget plan House Bill 2003, the Fiscal Year 2017. This results in the prevention of tuition fee increases for public colleges and universities in the state in the coming fall semester.

The budget plan gives an additional fund of $71.3 million to the higher education sector in Missouri. The extra budget could be allocated operating funds and scholarships for low-income students. According to KY3.com, this is the fourth time that the spending plan has prevented the tuition fees from increasing since Gov. Nixon became the state's governor.

Talking w higher education ldrs @COPHE_news about the need to keep #MO number one in holding down tuition increases pic.twitter.com/kA0lClzn8U  Governor Jay Nixon (@GovJayNixon) April 13, 2016



The Daily Journal shares that the signing has resulted in an overall 4 percent funding increase for public colleges and universities. Columbia Tribune shares some of the breakdown of the approved funds. $4 million will go to Access Missouri scholarships, more than $2 million will go to the A+ Scholarship program at community colleges and $500,000 will be given to Bright Flight scholarships for high-performing students in Missouri. Furthermore, university leaders agreed to freeze tuition free increase because of increased budget as well.

For the rest of the funding, some will be set aside for tuition and requred fee rates for school year 2016-2017 in University of Missouri (UM). A meeting is in order but no final date is set but it is said that it will be around next month. The Columbia Missourian notes that the UM System's 17 million inreased funding would take care of the $3.8 million cut which will take place in July.

It took almost two months before lawmakers reached a decision on how to fund the UM System. This year the bill appropriates the money to the UM System via seven line items. The outlet reports that each campus will have their own share including MU Extension and UM System Administration as well.

What do you think of the increased funding for Missouri public colleges and universities? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.
United Nations / International Astronautical Federation Workshop on Space Technology for Socio-Economic Benefits:

"Integrated Space Technologies and Applications for a Better Society" Guadalajara, Mexico, 23-25 September 2016 in conjunction with the 67th International Astronautical Congress Co-sponsored by European Space Agency Hosted by Mexican Space Agency

Updates:

Information Note

1. Introduction

The United Nations through its Programme on Space Applications implemented by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (OOSA) and the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) are jointly organizing a Workshop on Space Technology for Socio-Economic Benefits on the theme "Space Technologies and Integrated Applications for a Better Society" to assist Member States with building capacity in using space science, technologies and their applications in support of sustainable economic, social and environmental development.

The Workshop will be held in Guadalajara, Mexico, from 23 to 25 September 2016 in conjunction with the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC). A limited number of Workshop participants from developing countries, selected by the United Nations and the IAF, will also be invited to attend the IAC to be held from 26 to 30 September 2016.

The Workshop will be the 25th in a series of Workshops jointly organised by the Office for Outer Space Affairs and by the International Astronautical Federation and has been endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly as part of the 2016 activities of the United Nations Programme on Space Applications. It will be co-sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA), with contributions from the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) and the International Institute of Space Law (IISL).

2. Workshop Objectives

The Workshop will discuss space science, technologies and applications in support of economic, social and environmental sustainable development with a focus on the use of integrated space technologies and applications for a better society, in particularly also in the developing countries.

The main objectives of the Workshop will be to:

Enhance the capabilities of countries in the use of space-related technology, applications, services and information for economic, social and environmental development;

Examine relevant affordable and accessible space-related technologies and information resources;

Increase awareness among policy- and decision makers and the research and academic community of space technology applications and consider initiatives to help integrate space solutions into policy- and decision making processes;

Discuss the role of space science, technology and applications in support of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development;

Strengthen international and regional cooperation in that area;

Present relevant capacity building initiatives;

Consider associated legal and regulatory matters;

Identify issues for consideration at UNISPACE+50

3. Workshop Programme

The Workshop programme will be structured around a series of topical sessions related to the Workshop theme. Presentations will be solicited through a Call for Papers. In addition, renowned experts in the field will be invited to make presentations.

The following topics will be considered in dedicated sessions:

Space and Global Challenges

Space for Economic Development

Disaster Management and Early Warning

Health and Education

Environment and Biodiversity

Connectivity for Reducing Social Divide

In addition to the topical sessions there will be panel and round-table discussions to share experiences and lessons learned and to discuss opportunities for international and regional cooperation among the participants.

It is also planned that the sessions will be complemented by a poster session and technical visits. The co-sponsors strive to organize an attractive programme of side-events for the Workshop participants.

4. Participation Requirements and Qualifications

The Workshop primarily targets relevant space technology and application experts in relevant government organizations, international or national agencies, non-governmental organizations, research or academic institutions or industry. Applicants should have a university degree and well-established professional working experience in a field related to the theme of the Workshop. Due consideration will be given to geographic balance. Applications from interested and qualified female experts are particularly encouraged. Special consideration will be given to the applicants, who

are relevant policy- and decision- makers;

have Workshop-related papers accepted by the IAC International Program Committee;

have experience in leading or conducting project(s) related to the use of space technology and its applications for economic benefits.

The co-sponsors of the Workshop will jointly select participants on a competitive basis. Selected participants will be notified by mid August 2016 . Invited participants will receive a formal invitation letter with further information with details on board and lodging and other local arrangements.

5. Support to Qualified Applicants

Within the limited financial resources available to the co-sponsors, a number of qualified applicants from developing countries , who have express ed the need for financial support will be selected on a competitive basis based on their qualifications, experience and expected contributions to the Workshop and offered financial support to attend the Workshop and the International Astronautical Congress. All selected applicants are required to make either an oral or poster presentation related to the Workshop theme. The support to applicants may include the provision of a round-trip economy class air ticket between Guadalajara and the applicant's international airport of departure and/or room and board for the duration of the Workshop and the 67th International Astronautical Congress. En-route and other expenses or any changes made to the air ticket provided by the co-sponsors must be the responsibility of the participants.

Due to the limited availability of financial resources, it is usually not possible to provide assistance to all qualified applicants who express the need for financial support. Applicants and their nominating organizations are therefore strongly encouraged to identify sources of sponsorship to allow them to attend the Workshop.

6. Dates and Location

The Workshop will be held from 23 to 25 September 2016 in Guadalajara, Mexico, in conjunction with the 67th International Astronautical Congress.

7. Language of the Workshop

Applicants must have a good working knowledge of English, which will be the official working language of the Workshop.

8. Life and Health Insurance

Life and major health insurance is the responsibility of each selected participant or his/her nominating institution or government. The co-sponsors will not assume any responsibility for life and major health insurance, nor for any expenses related to medical treatment or accidents.

9.Information Note

Detailed information on the workshop is also available in the associated Information note (PDF format).

10. Further Information and Contact Details

For questions related to the Workshop programme and participation opportunities, please contact:

Mr. Werner Balogh and Mr. Luc St-Pierre

Office for Outer Space Affairs

E-mail: werner.balogh [at] unoosa.org, luc.st-pierre[at]unoosa.org

For questions related to travel arrangements for funded participants, please contact:

Mr. Kurian Maniyanipurathu

E-mail: kurian.maniyanipurathu [at] unoosa.org

For questions related to local arrangements of the Conference, the point of contact for Kenya is:

Mr. Enrique Pacheco

Mexican Space Agency

E-mail: IAC2016 [at] aem.gob.mx

Workshop Programme

Instructions for Speakers, Chairpersons, Rapporteurs and Poster Authors

Participants that will contribute a poster presentation are kindly requested to bring their printed poster (A1-size (approx. 594 x 841 mm)) on the first day of the Workshop. The local organizers will provide poster display walls at the Workshop site. Posters will be mounted Friday, 23 September and a special poster session will be organized.

We aim to provide all Workshop participants with a full set of electronic copies of all the presentations/posters, therefore we kindly ask you to bring an electronic version (.ppt or .pdf) of your presentation/poster along with you. A full paper is not required, however, if you provide one, we will include it in the electronic proceedings of the Workshop.

All speakers/poster presenters are kindly requested to provide us with a short 5-10 line biography/CV which we will make available to the session chairpersons and to all Workshop participants. Please complete the biographcy/CV template and return it to Mr. Kurian Maniyanipurathu (email: kurian.maniyanipurathu [at] unoosa.org).

Logistics Information

Workshop Location

The Workshop will be held in Room Oceania of the Hilton Guadalajara (Ave. de la Rosas 2933, Guadalajara, Jalisco, 44530, Mexico).

Accommodation for Funded Participants

Participants receiving funding support (accommodation) from the co-sponsors in accordance with their invitation letter will be staying at the Hotel Ibis Guadalajara Expo (Av Mariano Otero No 1400, Col Jardines Del Bosque, Guadalajara, 44520, Mexico).

Visa Arrangements and Health Insurance

All Workshop participants are kindly advised to proceed immediately, using their invitation letters, to start making the necessary arrangements with their nearest Consulate or Embassy of Mexico for obtaining any required visa to enter Mexico. It is also important to check whether any transit visa is required. Obtaining the entry visa in time for the Workshop will be the responsibility of each Workshop participant, however, in case any assistance is needed, please do not hesitate to contact us, providing your passport details and the contact details of your point of contact in the Consulate/Embassy of Mexico.

Please also note that adequate health insurance cover is the personal responsibility of each Workshop participant.

International Astronautical Congress

In accordance with their letter of invitation, selected funded participants will receive free registration as a full participant in the 67th International Astronautical Congress:

Media Advisory

Useful Documents and Links

Workshop Committees

HONORARY COMMITTEE (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER):

S. Di Pippo - Director, Office for Outer Space Affairs, United Nations

F.J. Mendieta Jimenez - Director General, Mexican Space Agency (AEM)

K. Higuchi - President, International Astronautical Federation

J.D. Woerner - Director General, European Space Agency

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER):

W. Balogh - Office for Outer Space Affairs, United Nations

J.-C. Bigot - European Space Agency

M. Cho - Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan

K. Conole - NASA, United States of America

C. Feichtinger - International Astronautical Federation

J.-L. Fellous - Committee on Space Research (COSPAR)

C. Giannopapa - European Space Agency/IAF-CLIODN

A. Ginati - European Space Agency/International Academy of Astronautics

C. Lechtenboerger - German Aerospace Center (DLR)/IAF-CLIODN

T. Masson-Zwaan - International Institute of Space Law (IISL)

J. Ortner - EURISY

E. Pacheco - Mexican Space Agency, Mexico

S. Saveliev - International Astronautical Federation/ROSCOSMOS

L. St-Pierre - Office for Outer Space Affairs, United Nations

C. Welch - International Astronautical Federation/International Space University (ISU)

LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER):
Published: April 28, 2016

UT Set to House Premier, National Student Entrepreneur Organization

The University of Tampa announced today that the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization, the largest and premier national organization devoted to collegiate level entrepreneurs, will now be housed at UTs John P. Lowth Entrepreneurship Center in the Sykes College of Business.



The Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization (CEO), founded in 1983, works to inform, support and inspire college students to be entrepreneurial and seek opportunity through enterprise creation. It serves more than 250 university chapters nationwide, provides networking opportunities, coordinates pitch competitions, produces a newsletter, offers leadership programming and organizes an annual conference that in past years has attracted nearly 1,500 participants. This years CEO National Conference will be held Oct. 2729 at the Tampa Convention Center.



UT President Ron Vaughn said he is very pleased to bring CEO to Tampa as it will help to enhance both the Universitys and the Tampa Bay communitys entrepreneurial ecosystem.



The CEO will bring large numbers of talented young entrepreneurs to Tampa where theyll get the chance to discover some of the many benefits to launching their businesses and living in Tampa, Vaughn said.



Giles Hertz, UT associate professor of business law and entrepreneurship, was named the new executive director of CEO. Hertz, who has taught at UT since 2009, is also the faculty advisor of the UT Entrepreneurs Club, a chapter of the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization. He has served as a CEO chapter faculty advisor at various schools for 15 years and has served on the CEO National Faculty Advisory Board for the past five years.



Hertz, who follows organization founder Gerry Hills as only the second executive director in CEOs history, said his initial goals are to focus on the growth of the organization and to deliver even more outstanding programming to the affiliated chapters around the U.S.



I am committed to continuing the legacy of providing an outstanding conference and high quality programs to our chapters, Hertz said. I am also excited by the fact that the programs and activities offered by CEO fit perfectly with UTs new Quality Enhancement Program (QEP), with its emphasis on experiential learning, since almost all of CEOs activities enable students to learn by doing, in other words, to apply what they learned in the classroom, Hertz said.



The CEO announcement comes within nine months of UT opening the John P. Lowth Entrepreneurship Center on the top floor of the Maureen A. Daly Innovation and Collaboration Building. The center, which is part of UTs Sykes College of Business, was creatively designed to bring together prospective student entrepreneurs, educators and experienced executives to generate, define and develop entrepreneurial concepts and to launch new ventures.



In January 2016 the entrepreneurship center was awarded the National Model Program Award for undergraduate entrepreneurship programs by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) at its annual conference in San Diego. In 2015 the Lowth Entrepreneurship Center was awarded the Entrepreneurship Teaching and Pedagogical Innovation Award by the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers.



Also in 2015, a team of UT entrepreneurship students (Tembo) were finalists  and the only U.S.-based team  in the $1 million Clinton Global Initiative Hult Prize, amongst 20,000 student participants.



The entrepreneurship major is one of the largest on campus and provides students with skills that are critical for anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur or think like one. Additionally, UT has approved the offering of a Master of Science degree in entrepreneurship beginning in the Fall 2016 semester.
Gillette Student Wins $30K Entrepreneurship Competition at UW

A Gillette students business proposal that specializes in designing and providing tools to sanitary companies to help maintain the cleanliness of portable toilets (porta-potties) won the recent John P. Ellbogen $30K Entrepreneurship Competition sponsored by the University of Wyoming College of Business.

Trevor Trouchon, a sophomore computer engineering student, received $15,000, with half awarded after the recent competition. He will receive the balance after submitting a satisfactory progress report. Trouchon also will receive space in the Wyoming Technology Business Center for one year to grow the business.

This semester, 47 teams entered the 15th annual competition from various disciplines across campus, ranging from undergraduate to doctoral students. Eight student teams created companies that made the final round; each worked with a mentor for the final presentation.

Known as the UW $10K Competition until 2011, the John P. Ellbogen $30K Entrepreneurship Competition encourages students to act on their talents, ideas and energy to produce tomorrow's leading businesses. The competition awards cash prizes to outstanding teams of student entrepreneurs who submit their business plans for new ventures that show significant business potential.

Trouchons company, SanMon, currently is developing a unit to monitor data from discrete sensors within portable toilets, and use that information to determine if the portable toilet requires maintenance. The sanitary company using the SanMon units will be able to analyze the data to more efficiently schedule cleanings of the portable toilets. The final design will include GPS capabilities to record locations and also solar panels to recharge unit batteries.

The second-place team received $7,500, and third place received $5,000. Second- and third-place winners received half their prize winnings after the competition, and the remaining will be awarded after the teams submit a progress report.

Second place in the competition went to Paradox and team leader Vinay Ramakrishnaiah, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering, from Udupi, Karnataka, India.

Paradox targets commercial companies and profit/nonprofit organizations that seek simple and effective ways to get personalized high-performing computer solutions. The company provides a general solution to simplify the development of high-performance parallel applications, which is source code language and platform independent, and also hardware robust.

Third place went to Cowboy Performance and Manufacturing led by Kyle Kuhn, a senior in mechanical engineering, from Laramie. The company will design, manufacture and market high-performance, after-market snowmobile components and provide sophisticated manufacturing services to Laramie and the surrounding area. The company will target two specific areas: the aftermarket snowmobile industry, and the engineering consulting and manufacturing industry.

Additionally, the Fan Favorite Video Pitch Award was presented to Roti Magic, led by Dilraj Kaur, a masters degree candidate in finance, from New Delhi, India.

Kaur and her team is developing a small machine that makes Rotis, similar to tortillas, in about three minutes, compared to 40 minutes it takes to make by hand. The product can help markets overseas where particular types of tortilla/breads are handmade on a regular basis -- mostly by women. The teams goal is to make a Roti maker available at a competitive price because some units cost more than $500.

Judges for this years competition were Tori Campbell, president and founder of Mizzen Energy and Mizzen Energy Services; Kim DeVore, Jonah Bank CFO; Bob Jensen, former Wyoming Business Council CEO and current principal at RJBC, LLC Business Consulting; Pat Rile, Wells Fargo Advisors senior vice president; Stephanie Teubner, CEO of Warren Federal Credit Union; Chris Tice, CEO of Pharmacy Solutions Inc. and PharmaC LLC; Jacques Dubois, retired chairman and CEO of Swiss Re America; and Sandy Hesseler, former assistant dean of Harvard Kennedy School of Business.

For more information, contact Steve Russell, College of Business marketing and external relations director, at (307) 766-4112 or srusse18@uwyo.edu.
UW Receives Gift of Artwork from Wyoming Artist

Sounds of Sorcery is one of two paintings recently given to the University of Wyoming by Wyoming artist Neltje. A dedication ceremony for the artwork is planned Friday, April 29, at 6:30 p.m. at the Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts. (Neltje)

A recent gift of artwork to the University of Wyoming has been permanently installed in the east lobby of the Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts. A dedication ceremony is planned Friday, April 29, at 6:30 p.m.

Wyoming artist Neltje provided the gift to honor former UW President Tom Buchanan, namesake of the Performing Arts Center, and his wife, Jacque.

The two paintings by Neltje are Follies and Foolishness (2005) and Sounds of Sorcery (2015). The first, a composition of color and brush marks on a near-white canvas, is minimal and pure. The second, a monumental work that measures 10 feet by 30 feet, is a densely painted, energetic work that embodies dance and music. The composition was created specifically for the Performing Arts Center.

Neltjes gift to the university resulted from conversations among Marsha Knight, UW Department of Theatre and Dance professor; Susan Moldenhauer, UW Art Museum director and chief curator; Jacque Buchanan; and Neltje following last Octobers ribbon-cutting ceremony for the expanded Performing Arts Center.

I was looking around at the crowd while Tom (Buchanan) was speaking quite passionately about the importance of the arts, of his view that the Performing Arts Center is among the most important that UW will ever build, and that a commitment to strength in the arts is a prerequisite to calling yourself a good university. Looking in the direction of Neltje, it seemed a perfect fit to request her presence in the new building, Knight says.

It is thrilling to see Neltjes paintings grace the walls of the exquisite new lobby of the Performing Arts Center, Moldenhauer says. The works transform the space in a duet of color, movement and style. They are an exquisite addition to the art in public places on UWs campus.

About Neltje

Neltje was born in New York City and raised in Oyster Bay, Long Island. From 1979-80 she took a few classes at the Art Students League in New York, N.Y., and, in 1980, she took a few classes at the New York Studio School of Drawing. She is essentially self-taught. Neltje is a prolific abstract expressionist painter whose works have been described as an exploration of making the sensed visible.

In 2005, she received the Governors Arts Award that recognizes Wyoming's preeminent artists. She received an honorary degree from Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Mont., and is the founder and benefactor of the Neltje Blanchan Literary Award in memory of her grandmother. She served on the board of the Wyoming Arts Council from 1985-88. In 2010, Neltje made the largest estate gift in UWs history.

Neltje's work has been featured in collections at the Smithsonian, the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Mont., the IBM Corp. in Denver and the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne, among others. Additionally, her work is in private collections in California, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania and Wyoming. In 2013, the UW Art Museum presented a major survey exhibition of her work, Neltje. Painting. 1990-2012.
UW Religion Today: Christianity and the Holy Land

By Paul V.M. Flesher

Nowadays, when people say, I went to the Holy Land, we know both who they are and where they went. They are Christians, and they went to Israel (and perhaps the few religious sites just over the borders in Egypt or Jordan). But, for nearly three centuries after Jesus death, it was not that way. Not only was the land not holy, there were few Christians in it.

In A.D. 60, Christians in Rome and Antioch were more visible than those in Palestine. Indeed, in Rome in A.D. 50, Christians were well known enough (and sufficiently disliked) to be wrongly blamed by Emperor Nero for a fire that burned much of the city.

In Israel itself, modern archaeologists have discovered no remains of churches built prior to 324, and although we know of Christians living in Palestine and even the names of some bishops, there is no evidence of large numbers.

Part of this can be explained by travels of Paul the Apostle. He went first to Antioch, and while he went west from there into Asia Minor, Greece and ultimately Rome itself, other missionaries went throughout Syria. Building on his influence, Christianity apparently did a better job of gaining adherents in the lands around the eastern Mediterranean in general than in Palestine in particular.

Another reason was probably the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman legions in A.D. 70, after four years of Jewish rebellion against the empire. Rome banned the Jews from living in Jerusalem and ultimately expelled them from all of Judea. Jerusalem and its temple were razed, and then blotted out from official memory.

A new colony was built upon its ruins, Aelia Capitolina. This city was named after Caesar Augustus, and the primary trinity were of the gods of Rome itself: Jupiter, Roma and the female deity Aphrodite/Minerva. Temples to these gods were erected in Aelia, and it became a pagan city. And so it remained for over two centuries, and the name of Jerusalem passed from Roman memory.

It was not until Emperor Constantine became the sole Roman emperor in 324 and declared his support of Christianity and the church, that matters began to change. At the urging of the bishop of Jerusalem, and over the objections of his superior, the bishop of Caesarea, Constantine decided to reclaim Palestine for Christianity by building churches at all the important sites of Jesus activities and even at some locations of key events of the Old Testament.

But Constantines main interest was in recreating Jerusalem. Not as the Jerusalem of the Jews, but as the Jerusalem of Jesus. Thus, the site of Jesus crucifixion and burial was located, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built. This church rapidly became the highlight of every Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land and has remained so down through the centuries, even under the nearly millennium-long rule of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

These churches rapidly became attractions for Christian pilgrims from across the Mediterranean world. They came in droves to worship and pray at the sites of Christs birth, life and death. And many of them stayed in Palestine rather than return home.

Surprisingly, these Christians settled away from the area where Jesus did most of his missionary work. The Christians settled in villages and built churches in Judea and in western Galilee, even though Jesus carried out most of his activities in eastern Galilee around the freshwater Sea of Galilee. So, although the Christians wished to live in the Holy Land, few wanted to associate themselves day in and day out with the holy sites of Jesus life. Perhaps that was just too much.

Flesher is a professor in the University of Wyomings Religious Studies Department. Past columns and more information about the program can be found on the Web at www.uwyo.edu/RelStds. To comment on this column, visit http://religion-today.blogspot.com.
UWyo Magazine

January 2016 | Vol. 17, No. 2

Prairie Dog Town by Jeff Hubbell and Lindsay Olson, 2013. Photo by BHP Imaging



Art for Communitys Sake

The Laramie Mural Project brings a valuable sense of pride and beauty to downtown Laramie.

By Jeff Tatay

There is something about Laramiea humble little city on the high plainsthat calls on the traveler, prospective student, faculty or company looking to expand its business. Whether driving into the valley and watching the Gem City twinkle or coming over the Snowy Range Road bridge and seeing historic downtown aglow with the setting sun, something about the beauty of a place draws people in.

In the summer of 2011, the Laramie Mural Project saw its first mural go up on the north facade of the Big Hollow Food Co-Op. The mural, by Talal Cockar titled Tierra y Libertad, is visible when entering Laramie from the west on Snowy Range Road.

It was great because [the mural] was big and really visible from the perspective of driving over the bridge, says Susan Moldenhauer, director and chief curator of University of Wyoming Art Museum. We began to realize that it became kind of a marker for people coming in from the west side and, if you looked in, you might say, what else is there in downtown Laramie? We need to go down and see it. 

The project is a collaboration among the UW Art Museum, Laramie Main Street Alliance, local artists and downtown business and building owners that has grown since the first mural in 2011 to more than a dozen murals in 2016. The most recent phase of the project includes a series of murals based on prominent figures from Wyomings history and can be found in the alleyway between Second and Third streets.

I think part of the idea of doing murals in the alleys was to help beautify them, Moldenhauer says. If business owners know that people are going to be walking through the alleys and seeing the back of their businesses, then maybe they will start making sure it is a little bit cleaner and its kept up a little bit betterI think it instills pride.

Although practicality may not be the first thing that comes to mind, Trey Sherwood, executive director of the Laramie Main Street Alliance, says that art has a way of making practical things happen. The beautification that the project adds to downtown Laramie has an allure that leads to action.

We know that its easier to recruit faculty, staff, students and businesses if your community looks good outwardly, Sherwood says. There is an economic impact to how the downtown looks and feels, and this correlates to how much time people want to spend down here and, ultimately, to the money spent in our many shops and restaurants.

The projects potential to create positive change within the community can be seen in the collaborative bonds being made between the university and downtown Laramie, as well as in the space it opens up for a discourse on what it means to come together and create a culturally rich and vibrant community.

I love any project that brings the community and the university together and, especially, when it brings the university downtown, says Jeff Hubbell, who with Lindsay Olson created the mural Prairie Dog Town in the alley between First and Second streets. I think theres a lot of positive energy through the Main Street Alliance, the community and the university just in the way that peoples habits are beginning to change.

There are plans for additional historic figures to be added to the alley, which will be developed over the winter, Moldenhauer says. There are also discussions about new murals that will help advance the new Laramie Public Art Plan.
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By Sarah Goulding, Special to The Star

NORTHRIDGE  Five Democratic candidates for the 27th Senate District discussed transportation, the economy, education and the environment Wednesday in a half-full meeting room at CSU Northridge.

Six candidates, including one Republican, are vying to succeed Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, who is termed out.

The CSU Northridge Young Democrats and San Fernando Valley Young Democrats organized the debate.

The candidates went round-robin until education became the topic. Specifically, candidates debated President Barack Obama's proposal to make community college free.

George Christopher Thomas, of Agoura Hills, did not make clear his stance on the president's proposal but instead said that loans are a tax write-off for the "five to 10" years students pay them.

Janice Kamenir-Reznik, of Encino, said she fully supported Obama's free community college proposal.

"It only hurts society not to make it available to everybody, and that is why I support his program wholeheartedly. (It) is aimed at getting everybody the opportunity to learn a trade and to get an education because that's the promise of America  to have opportunity," Kamenir-Reznik said.

Henry Stern, of Canoga Park, said that he supported the proposal and that students should be able to refinance their debt and "push it down under 7 and 6 percent."

Debate ensued over an oil and gas well simulation bill Stern created with Pavley. Stern is a policy adviser to Pavley.

"We felt it was our public duty, at least, to get it regulated," Stern, an environmental attorney, said.

The law, SB4, requires groundwater and air quality monitoring, public disclosure of all chemicals used, as well as an independent scientific study of any risks. Stern said oil and gas companies have spent millions trying to kill climate change legislation in California.

Kamenir-Reznik, a nonprofit president and former lawyer, said it was preposterous that a bill was required for gas companies to oversee their work and reports should have been presented before the Porter Ranch gas leak happened late last year.

David Pollock, of Moorpark, said the biggest flaw leading up to that gas leak was a lack of oversight.

"Yeah, the governor doesn't want fracking, but he's not the last word on this. You can also start a ballot initiative," said Pollock, a Moorpark City Council member.

Shawn Bayliss, a chief legislative deputy, from Encino, emphasized gas companies' responsibility in the matter.

"Gas companies have got to fund the bills. It should not be passed down to anyone else," Bayliss said.

Thomas said there is no fracking in Van Nuys, where he is president of a neighborhood council.

The discussion ended with Stern, who said it is not easy to have a bill pass, but "it's easy to have an opinion in debate."

Steve Fazio, of Encino, is the only Republican candidate in the race.

The 27th District includes the east Ventura County cities of Moorpark, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, and surrounding unincorporated areas. In Los Angeles County, the district includes Westlake Village, Agoura Hills, Calabasas, Malibu, the western San Fernando Valley and part of Santa Clarita.

The top two candidates in the June 7 primary will move on to the general election in November.
SHARE Fran Pavley

By The Associated Press

SACRAMENTO  The California Assembly is advancing legislation to extend the closure of a gas storage facility after it spewed massive amounts of natural gas for nearly four months.

Lawmakers sent a bill to the state Senate Thursday on a 68-1 vote as thousands of Los Angeles-area residents in Porter Ranch wait to return to their homes.

SB380 by Democratic Sen. Fran Pavley of Agoura Hills responds to the leak of climate-changing methane at the Aliso Canyon facility.

"This bill holds state regulators and SoCal Gas to their promise that all 114 wells will be thoroughly investigated," said Sen. Pavley, whose district includes the community of Porter Ranch that was severely disrupted by the leak. "This is the only course forward that provides maximum protection against another disastrous leak. The Assembly today spoke very clearly in asserting that safety must come first."

Republican Assemblyman Scott Wilk of Santa Clarita, a co-author who also represents the area, presented the bill on the Assembly floor.

"Many families affected by the gas leak remain concerned about moving back into their homes," Wilk said. "SB 380 is vital to ensuring any new injections of natural gas and use of vintage wells at the Aliso Canyon storage facility are safe. I will continue to fight for the residents of Porter Ranch and I also thank Senator Pavley for her leadership on this issue."

SB 380 now goes back to the Senate to reconcile Assembly amendments. In January, the Senate unanimously approved the bill in its original form.

It continues Gov. Jerry Brown's January moratorium on injecting natural gas into the Southern California Gas Co. underground site.

It requires state regulators to complete a safety review and decide if one of the nation's largest natural gas storage fields should be eliminated.

Opponents fear that limiting the major natural gas supplier for Southern California could lead to power outages.
<p>CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR</p><p>Fillmore & Western Railway Co. President Dave Wilkinson talks to people working in a train car in August. He has about 10 steam and diesel locomotives and several dozen train cars.</p>

SHARE CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Fillmore & Western Railway Co. President Dave Wilkinson sits in his office. CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Fillmore & Western Railway Co. President Dave Wilkinson walks in the train yard in Fillmore. Many of his steam and diesel locomotives and train cars have been used in movies. CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Fillmore & Western Railway Co. President Dave Wilkinson talks to crew members of M. Constant Pictures, who were making a music video for the band Finch in Fillmore in August. CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Fillmore & Western Railway Co. President Dave Wilkinson poses in front of a steam locomotive at the Fillmore rail yard in August. He has about 10 steam and diesel locomotives and several dozen train cars.

By Mike Harris of the Ventura County Star

Dave Wilkinson is tired.

The Fillmore & Western Railway owner is tired of the bruising legal battle the Ventura County Transportation Commission and he have been waging for more than a year.

He is tired of dealing with lawyers on an almost daily basis. He is tired of feeling that he runs the vintage, tourist-oriented railroad to the best of his ability yet is being driven out of business. Finally, he is tired of just not having much fun anymore.

Its interesting that the business that youve run and enjoyed running and run well  all of that all of a sudden kind of gets switched over to attorneys almost every day and fighting a fight that you really shouldnt have to be fighting, Wilkinson, 66, said recently, sitting in his tiny, mobile office overflowing with railroad memorabilia.

Yeah, you get tired of it, said Wilkinson, a physical bear of a man with a white walrus mustache. I can guarantee you get tired of it. You know, its just no fun.

The legal hostilities commenced last year when the commission told Wilkinson it was terminating the railroads 20-year lease to use the 32-mile Santa Paula Branch Line. The railway is a major Heritage Valley tourist attraction, drawing tens of thousands of riders a year.

The commission says it cut short the contract, which was negotiated in 2001 to expire in 2021, in an effort to stop the rail corridor from bleeding money. The agency owns the line, which runs from Ventura to the Los Angeles County line east of Piru.

The commission filed an eviction lawsuit against Fillmore & Western in March. The railway has filed its own suit, charging that the commission improperly ended its lease.

Ventura County Superior Court Judge Rebecca Riley evicted the railway in July, barring it from using the branch line between Santa Paula and Piru for its tourist trains. But she stayed the eviction pending the outcome of the railroads appeal of its ouster, which could take months.

Still to be decided is whether Fillmore & Western will be allowed to use portions of the branch line for freight purposes and to rent its historic trains for such Hollywood productions.

The commission has terminated its lease to do so, but Fillmore & Western is challenging that in a lawsuit against the agency, which is being litigated. In the meantime, the railroad continues leasing its movie trains.

Passion for trains

Wilkinson jokes when asked how he got into the railroad business.

I love to tell people that I was at the wrong place at the wrong time, he said.

Born at Foster Memorial Hospital in Ventura and raised in Ojai, Wilkinson graduated from Nordhoff High School, then worked for the U.S. Forest Service for about three years. He attended Ventura College but did not graduate. About that time, he embarked on a career as a movie theater projectionist that lasted nearly three decades.

I always had a great passion for projection systems, said Wilkinson, who still lives in Ojai. Pretty much worked every theater in Ventura County. Favorite movies include John Wayne westerns  without or without trains, he noted  and Patton.

Wilkinson had another passion as well.

Ive been attracted to trains throughout my entire life, he said.

He started brokering train cars part time in the 1980s. It was lucrative, and I had a lot of fun doing it, he said.

Fillmore & Westerns predecessor, Short Line Enterprises, set up shop in Fillmore in 1991 and on occasion leased some of Wilkinsons train cars for movie productions, such as Chaplin that year. Short Line started adding tourist and dinner trains, and over the next few years, Wilkinson became more involved.

He founded Fillmore & Western about 1993.

The name came down to Fillmore & Western or Piru & Pacific, but we didnt want to be known as the PP railroad, he said with a laugh. So we opted for Fillmore & Western.

In 1996, his wife, Teresa, and he bought Short Line for an undisclosed sum.

We started out from scratch, he said, and they now own about 65 train cars.

Over the years, Fillmore & Western trains have been ridden by more than a million tourists and used in upwards of 450 productions, he said.

But its always been a challenge, Wilkinson said. Its never been a big moneymaker. Like any company, weve struggled at times. But you know, the railroad has always fed the employees and my family.

Teresa and he have been married for more than 30 years and have two adult sons, Andy and Joel. All but Joel work at the family business.

Legal woes

Wilkinson said he is not really sure how relations with the commission deteriorated to their current litigious state.

What bothers me about the situation is that we have a contract and that they (the commission) fail to recognize that it is a contract, he said. The commission had no good cause to end it, he said.

Commission Executive Director Darren Kettle said the agency did not need a cause to terminate the contract to run the tourist trains. The commission did need a cause to terminate the contract for movie trains and freight purposes, he said. Those causes included the commissions contention that the railroad was not maintaining the tracks at various locations, Kettle said.

Why does Wilkinson think the commission terminated the contracts?

Well, they say its because of money, he said. They also say theyve been negotiating with Fillmore & Western. Thats the furthest thing from the truth.

Kettle said the commission tried for several years to negotiate a compromise solution with the railroad but that the two sides could not reach an agreement.

Over the past 11 or so years, the commission has earned about $3.5 million from the corridor, primarily from agriculture leases alongside it, but has spent about $7.2 million, including for maintenance, according to Kettle.

Fillmore & Western alleges that commissions mismanagement has caused the lines financial problems.

The public agency has subsidized the branch line, which allows the private Fillmore & Western to operate, with about $300,000 a year, Kettle said.

The railroads attorney, Donna Standard, has said that the commission did not subsidize the railway. Rather, Fillmore & Western was paid an allowance to perform maintenance work on the line, she said.

Future options

Wilkinson has repeatedly said that the railroad has gotten little support from the city of Fillmore. Councilman Steve Conaway disagrees.

The original agreement between the city and Fillmore & Western was pretty one-sided to his favor ... to give him the highest chance of success, Conaway said. The city has gone so far as to incorporate a Train Theme in its official planning and building codes.

Despite his grousing about the city, Wilkinson has a good track record of community involvement, Conaway said.

He has been a strong supporter of the tourism board and office, he said. Hes been active in civic groups and has helped with fundraisers for local charities. Its safe to say that Dave has had a large impact in and on Fillmore.

Cindy Jackson, immediate past president of the Fillmore Chamber of Commerce, agreed that Wilkinson has been very generous to the community. She still hopes a solution can be found to keep the railroad in Fillmore, which, like Santa Paula, benefits economically from the money-spending tourists it draws.

It would be devastating to the Heritage Valley economy if Fillmore & Western went out of business, she said.

Wilkinson said even if it does, his family and he have options.

Im a businessman, and Im known throughout the country, and theres a lot of people out there who understand economic development, he said. So frankly, Ive got offers to take the operations to three other places and get the hell out of here.

Life will go on, he said. I have no doubt about that.
CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR Santa Cruz Island

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By Staff Reports

Officials found a boat they were searching for Wednesday after discovering it had not returned to Santa Barbara at its scheduled time, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The 27-foot vessel named Honokai was found near Pelican Cove with five people and two dogs on board, officials said. The boat left Santa Barbara Friday for Santa Cruz Island and was scheduled to return Monday, authorities said.

The Santa Barbara Harbor Patrol was contacted about 12:30 p.m. after one of the boaters did not show up for work, authorities said.
SHARE CONTRIBUTED PHOTO/OXNARD POLICE DEPARTMENT Three guns and drugs were recovered during a gang-related search warrant operation Wednesday in Oxnard. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO/OXNARD POLICE DEPARTMENT Three guns and drugs were recovered during a gang-related search warrant operation Wednesday in Oxnard. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO/OXNARD POLICE DEPARTMENT Three guns and drugs were recovered during a gang-related search warrant operation Wednesday in Oxnard. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO/OXNARD POLICE DEPARTMENT Three guns and drugs were recovered during a gang-related search warrant operation Wednesday in Oxnard.

By Staff Reports

Three men were arrested in a multi-agency gang-related search warrant operation Wednesday in Oxnard, officials said.

Authorities with the Oxnard and Ventura police departments as well as the Ventura County Sheriff's Office and California State Parole Office served the warrants about 5:30 a.m. at four locations in the city, Oxnard police said.

Richard Chairez, 20, was arrested in connection with possession of a loaded firearm and being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm and ammunition, authorities said. A 19-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of child endangerment related to the location of a gun, officials said. Robert Delacerda, 37, was arrested in connection with violating his parole by allegedly possessing drugs for sale, authorities said.

The operation was done as a result of ongoing investigations into recent gang-related shootings in the city, officials said.
SHARE CONTRIBUTED PHOTO/VENTURA COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE Daniel Forhan, 37, of Oxnard.

By Staff Reports

A 37-year-old Oxnard man suspected of selling drugs was arrested last week, officials said Wednesday.

Detectives served a search warrant at 6:30 p.m. Friday on Daniel Forhan, his vehicle and his home after receiving information that he was selling marijuana and cocaine, according to the Ventura County Sheriff's Office.

They found more than 100 pounds of marijuana, 5 ounces of cocaine, 700 hydrocodone pills, 5 grams of psilocybin mushrooms, a small amount of Methamphetamine, nearly 2 ounces of concentrated cannabis and a large of sum of money while searching his home in the 700 block of Halifax Lane, authorities said.

The cocaine was valued at $14,000, the pills were valued at $3,500 and the marijuana was valued at $450,000, officials said. A firearm and ammunition was also found, authorities said.

Forhan was arrested in the 1600 block of South Victoria Avenue in connection with several offenses related to drug possession for sale and being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm and ammunition, officials said.

The Oxnard Police Department and West County Street Team also investigated the incident.
STAR FILE PHOTO

SHARE CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Tavonte Jones, 19, of Bakersfield. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Jovan Johnson, 19, of Bakersfield. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Isaia Mims, 19, of Bakersfield.

By Staff Reports

Simi Valley police arrested three men in connection with a theft at an Apple store, officials said.

The theft occurred on April 22 at the Simi Valley Town Center.

Officers learned that two people went into the Apple store, stole cellphones, then apparently fought with security guards in the store. The suspects ran away and got into a car that was waiting in the area. The three men were eventually found behind a building in the 600 block of Los Angeles Avenue and were arrested.

The men, Tavonte Jones, Isiah Mims and Jovan Johnson, all 19 of Bakersfield, are accused of strong arm robbery and conspiracy, police said. The stolen property was recovered.
STAR FILE PHOTO Ventura Unified School District Superintendent Michael Babb.

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By Arlene Martinez, amartinez@vcstar.com

As the city of Ventura continues to explore a joint sales tax increase with the Ventura Unified School District, the district is moving forward with an extension of its parcel tax.

That doesn't mean the school board has made any decisions on what could appear on the November ballot, Superintendent Michael Babb said.

But any ballot initiative takes several steps, which requires time, he said.

"We're entertaining the city idea," Babb said, referring to a one-cent sales tax increase the city and district would split.

Here's a synopsis of what could happen in November:

The city puts forth its own half-cent sales tax increase, which would bring in $10.8 million annually.

The district puts out an extension of the $59 annual parcel tax increase, which brings in $2.6 million a year.

The city and district put a joint one-cent sales tax increase on the ballot, which would bring in $21.6 million. The city would receive 70 percent, and the district would receive 30 percent.

In that last scenario, the district would get $6.7 million and the city $14.9 million. As part of the arrangement, the city would use a portion of the increase to "make all school playfields and playgrounds available to the public when they were not being used for school or other designated purposes  essentially a lease," according to a city staff report.

The split recognizes that the city handles a "broader range of services. Cities do a lot to support schools," City Manager Mark Watkins told the City Council on Monday night.

A district can't raise the sales tax; it can only seek to raise the parcel tax. That's what it did in 2012, and just over two-thirds of voters supported the four-year parcel tax. Measure Q, as it was called, expires at the end of this year.

The district must weigh a perhaps easier route  the public historically can be quicker to support schools over cities  against getting more money and opening up its facilities to the public.

Two recent efforts by the city to raise the sales tax failed, the last one in 2009. While two-thirds of voters must approve the district's parcel tax, a simple majority would need to approve the sales tax increase.

"It's an unusual funding relationship," Babb said. Figuring out "what it would look like is really important."

Community groups and residents have long seen opening up school facilities as a way of getting more open space and recreational opportunities.

Doing so presents challenges though, Babb said.

"We want kids to come to school on a Monday and the site be ready for action...so we have to work all that part out," Babb said. "We're just getting started on talking about it."

If the two joined efforts on a sales tax, the district would continue to get the $2.6 million it would have gotten from the parcel tax, Watkins said.

The district has used that to reduce class sizes, and for technology, arts and music. The additional $4.1 million would be used for facilities, maintenance and related issues.

Residents will no longer pay the parcel tax if the joint measure proceeds "so there's a partial offset there," Watkins said.

The district is holding a special meeting May 4 to discuss the parcel and sales tax increases. It will be held at 4:30 p.m. at the district offices, 255 W. Stanley Ave.

On May 10, there will be a public hearing on the parcel tax. That starts at 7:30 p.m. at City Hall, 501 Poli St.

For its part, the City Council is waiting to see what the school board does before it provides staff direction on any revenue measure in May.
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State Sen. Bob Huff has come up with another bright idea to bring in some money to fix our highways in California. The San Dimas Republican is suggesting the state Department of Transportation sell ads on its highway message signs.

Huff says the idea could bring in $200 million a year or more to the state, and he would make sure all that money goes solely to road maintenance or repairs. Knowing our sensibilities, he would prohibit ads selling alcohol, tobacco, guns or porn. But apparently everything else would be OK, subject to approval by the folks at Caltrans, who suddenly would have editorial control over commercial messages.

We can hardly wait to see the Trump for President ad flashing on the state highway sign as you slow down to get off Highway 101 at Victoria Avenue in Ventura.

Setting aside that scary idea of government tiptoeing around control over of what is and what is not an acceptable ad, the idea clearly comes from people who simply do not drive for a living.

A study about 10 years ago found that 80 percent of accidents were caused by drivers who turned their attention away from the road for a few seconds. And that was before texting and talking became the distraction du jour for drivers. A crackdown last week in Ventura County saw dozens of tickets handed out on just one day for distracted driving.

Now you want to put a big, lighted ad on a sign in front of us that alternates between telling us about road closures, Amber Alerts and Papa John's pizza offers?

This is one instance where we can only hope the federal government will step in and save us from our California silliness. Federal law prohibits use of any of those official signs for any advertising message. Huff's bill would take place only with federal approval. Without that, if California decided to go ahead with the concept, the state could lose up to $350 million a year in federal transportation funding.

The bill has already surprisingly won approval of the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee. It now goes to the Senate Appropriations Committee. We would be delighted to see it join the pile of bills that simply fade away.

We do not need one more distraction on our highways.
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Once again this year, Foothill Technology High School in Ventura and Westlake High School in Thousand Oaks have been named among the best high schools in California, in the U.S. News & World Report's annual listing.

This is getting to be a fairly regular occurrence, with these two schools being listed among the top 100 in California and top 400 nationally in the magazine's report. But that does not make it any less special.

The sustained honoring of these high schools shows the dedication  from the district level through the school administration and into individual classrooms  to provide quality education to their students.

Each year we have anecdotal stories about the successes of those students, but it's always nice to have this kind of honor to recognize the effort of the entire school.

Congratulations to both schools. It's an honor earned and an honor deserved.
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The 6.2 magnitude quake on Japan's Kyushu Island got our attention earlier this month. Then a few days later, we received the alert about the 7.8 quake in Ecuador. That was followed by the prediction that the Eastern Sierra was about 30 years overdue for a 7.0 quake.

Earthquakes are always in the back of our mind, living in Southern California. These three recent events simply served as reminders that we could face the next big quake any day, any time, any place in Ventura County.

It also served as a reminder that there is no time like the present to get ourselves prepared for a disaster, such as an earthquake. If you already have your disaster plan and your supplies in place, let this serve as a reminder to take a moment to make sure everything is fresh and current, that everyone remembers your plan and contacts, and that you are ready to respond to a disaster as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If disaster preparedness is something you are going to do tomorrow, then consider this your tomorrow.

A great place for all of us to start is Ready Ventura County (readyventuracounty.org), which has been created by the Ventura County Sheriff's Office of Emergency Services to give us tips on what to do to be prepared for an emergency or disaster.

For Oxnard-area residents who learn best in a hands-on atmosphere, the city is hosting a Disaster Preparedness Training Academy on Saturday at the Oxnard Performing Arts and Convention Center, 800 Hobson Way.

The academy will have hourlong classes on disaster preparedness, first aid, fire extinguisher use and search and rescue. Classes will be held in English and Spanish.

Although the classes are free, space is limited, so call 385-7717 (385-7722 for Spanish speakers) to get more details and register.

These, of course, are not the only sources of information for disaster preparedness. It's not as important where you go to get yourself prepared. It's important to just get yourself  and your family  prepared.
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Re: George Wills column April 24, The drive to silence climate debate:

George Will describes a political conspiracy, led by progressives, to criminalize debate on human-induced climate change. However, no one has been charged with such a crime, and were that to happen, their defense likely would come from the ACLU.

What we have observed is that rather than a conspiracy, governments have determined the debate has become sufficiently lopsided and the consequences of inaction sufficiently severe that action to mitigate climate change is both reasonable and responsible. This has been the relationship between government and science throughout history.

If Columbus had postponed his voyage until the debate over a flat Earth had been settled, i.e., the last flat Earth proponent had been converted, it would not have occurred in his lifetime. Ongoing debate over whether our moon landing was a hoax has not prevented subsequent space exploration, and ongoing debate over the identity of the 9/11 culprits did not prevent our invasion of Iraq or the killing of Osama bin Laden.

What enables productive debate is when both sides acknowledge the possibility of evidence or argument that would change their minds, without which there is no incentive. Before accusing the other side of trying to criminalize the process, we should ensure we have a sufficiently open mind to make it worth their while talking to us.

Nick Fotheringham, Thousand Oaks




Crazy Horse III commemorated its fourth successful year of business with an over-the-top celebration hosted by model and reality star Joanna Krupa on Friday, Oct. 18 (Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com).

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Krupa, a stand-out on Bravos The Real Housewives of Miami has graced the covers of Maxim and Shape and was dubbed the sexiest swimsuit model in the world by Playboy. The blonde bombshells appearance also served as a benefit for Angels For Animals Rescue.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.

Photo:  Erik Kabik / www.ErikKabik.com.


Sherri Shepherd, co-host of The View, attended Saturday nights 9:30 p.m. performance of JabbaWockeeZ critically-acclaimed new show MUS.I.C at Monte Carlo Resort and Casino.

Following the show, Shepherd met the world-famous dance crew on-stage for photos.

Photo courtesy of Monte Carlo Resort and Casino.


Bettie Page inside Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino hosts a meet-and-greet with Claire Sinclair, the face of Bettie Page Clothing, from 1 to 5 p.m. on Friday, April 22.

Sinclair will be available to take photographs and sign autographs for fans. The Las Vegas resident, rumored to soon be named Playboys 2011 Playmate of the Year, returns as a guest star in MGM Grands Crazy Horse Paris April 20  27.

For more information about Miracle Mile Shops, visit www.miraclemileshopslv.com.
Migrants line up at transit area between Austria and Slovenia in December. (Photo: AFP/Joe Klamar)

VIENNA: The Austrian parliament on Wednesday (Apr 27) adopted one of Europe's toughest asylum laws, as the country's political leaders struggle to halt the surging far-right which is leading in presidential polls.

The hotly-disputed bill, which passed by 98 to 67, allows the government to declare a "state of emergency" if the migrant numbers suddenly rise and reject most asylum-seekers directly at the border, including from war-torn countries like Syria.

Rights groups, religious leaders and opposition parties have condemned the legislation - the latest in a string of hardline measures against migrants - as violating international human rights conventions.

But Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka insisted Austria had no other choice as long as "so many other European Union members fail to do their part" to stop the influx. "We cannot shoulder the whole world's burden," he said.

Wedged between Europe's two main refugee routes - the Balkans and Italy - Austria received around 90,000 asylum requests in 2015, the second-highest in the bloc on a per capita basis.

More than a million people, primarily from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, landed in Europe last year, triggering the continent's worst migration crisis since the aftermath of World War II.

Many braved a short but dangerous sea journey from Turkey to Greece, before trekking up through the Balkans toward western and northern Europe.

To reduce the flow, the EU recently struck a controversial deal with Ankara, under which all "irregular" migrants reaching Greece after March 20 will be returned to Turkey.

Although the pact has led to a sharp drop in arrivals, the International Organisation for Migration last week warned that the numbers were "once again ticking up".

The crisis has boosted populist fringe parties across Europe, pressuring traditionally centrist governments to adopt a much firmer stance on migrants.

'DANGEROUS TOOLS'

Under Austria's new law, the government can now declare an emergency if the migrant flow threatens the country's "national security".

Border authorities will then only grant access to refugees facing safety threats in a neighbouring transit country or whose relatives are already in Austria. Some groups including minors and pregnant women will however be exempt from the rule.

The restrictions are similar to tough rules introduced by the right-wing government in neighbouring Hungary last year.

"These are extremely dangerous tools that are being sharpened here, especially if they fall into the wrong hands," warned the leader of the small NEOS opposition party, Mathias Strolz, ahead of the vote.

It comes after the candidate of the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), Norbert Hofer, sent shock waves through the political establishment by winning the first round of a presidential ballot on Sunday.

The two candidates of the ruling centrist coalition failed to even make it into the run-off on May 22. The FPOe also looks set to do well in the next scheduled general election in 2018.

'FAR FROM AN INVASION'

Trying to stem voter desertion to the far-right, Austria's government erected border fences and introduced an annual cap on asylum-seekers.

It also pressured other countries along the Balkan trail to close their frontiers earlier this year, effectively shutting the route to migrants. The clampdown left some 54,000 migrants currently stranded in Greece.

It also pushed people smugglers to seek out new routes into Europe, including via Italy, which has so far this year seen 26,000 migrants land on its shores after setting off from Libya.

The surge in arrivals in neighbouring Italy has prompted Austria to announce plans to re-instate border controls - including a 370-metre (1,200-feet) fence - at the Brenner pass in the Alps, a key transport corridor between northern and southern Europe.

The move has sparked protests at the checkpoint in recent weeks and drawn strong condemnation from Italy. "We're very far from an invasion," Foreign Affairs Minister Paolo Gentiloni told Austrian newspaper Die Presse on Wednesday.
Accordingly, visitors taking part in this tour will have to wear a special helmet with oxygen supply and follow a tour guide.

During a walking tour under the sea within 15 to 20 meters on the seabed, visitors have a fascinating experience when watching the corals and other sea creatures.

As scheduled, the tour will open to public on May 1.

Located 15 kilometres east of Cua Dai Beach in Hoi An city, Cu Lao Cham consists of eight islets and a UNESCO-recognised Biosphere Reserve.

Nearly 2,550 islanders live in four villages and make their living by aquatic farming and tourism.

The island welcomes over 50,000 tourist arrivals every year.
The parents of 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa teachers school hold their portraits and torches during a march in Mexico City on Apr 26, 2016. (Photo: AFP/Yuri Cortez)

MEXICO CITY: The foreign experts came to Mexico in March 2015 with the daunting task of helping investigators solve the mysterious disappearance of 43 students.

A year later, the five experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights are going home without an answer for the desperate parents of the young men missing since September 2014.

But they leave behind a blistering account of the government's investigation - a report on Sunday that accused authorities of stonewalling them in their quest for new information and of possibly torturing suspects.

Before their mission formally ends on Saturday, two of the experts told AFP they are now concerned about how the parents, who have a tense relationship with the government and wanted the experts to stay, will be treated.

The experts also voiced hope that the government will follow their recommendations and use their conclusions to improve the country's opaque judicial system.

"We are sad to leave without being able to say where the missing are," Angela Buitrago, a former Colombian prosecutor, said on Tuesday.

"It's very important that the victims' right to know the truth be guaranteed, that they be protected and given visibility by the Mexican state," Buitrago said.

Fellow Colombian lawyer Alejandro Valencia said the government has a "duty to guarantee it will investigate this grave human rights case."

'WORRIED ABOUT PARENTS

At the request of the parents, the government invited Valencia and Buitrago, along with a Chilean lawyer, a former Guatemalan attorney general and a Spanish psychologist, to help in the investigation.

President Enrique Pena Nieto faced international outrage and protests before his administration invited them to help resolve a case that became a symbol of the tens of thousands of deaths and disappearances in a decade-old drug war.

When the experts arrived, the government had already concluded that the students vanished after they were abducted by municipal police in the southern city of Iguala on the night of September 26-27, 2014.

Prosecutors said the officers delivered the 43 young men to a drug gang, which killed them and incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump. The remains of only one student have been identified.

But parents of the students never bought that story, especially after the experts said in a September report that there was no scientific proof that the teachers-in-training were burned at the dump.

While the experts are leaving, the commission will set up a mechanism to make sure the government pursues their recommendations, including investigating the possibility that the students were attacked because they inadvertently commandeered a bus packed with heroin.

Valencia said this could mean periodic visits to Mexico, which could help ensure that the parents of the students, who had little communication with the government before their mission, are protected.

"Their security really worries us because we have seen in recent weeks actions that not only re-victimize them but also criminalize them," Valencia said.

Valencia said local media recently published an alleged recording of a conversation between a student's father and a lawyer in which they apparently discuss money sent to the parents by a gang.

While Mexico has a law on protection of victims, Valencia said it needs to "improve a lot" and "dignify" the victims.

The parents are from the impoverished state of Guerrero and their sons, most of them first-year students, were in school to become teachers in rural areas.

The families said the experts' latest report exposed the government's "big lies." Mario Cesar Gonzalez, whose son Julio Cesar is among the missing, said the families "don't trust any authority."

Pena Nieto has been criticized for only meeting twice with the parents, though other officials have held several meetings with them to give them updates about the investigation.

After meeting with the experts on Tuesday, deputy interior minister Roberto Campa said their recommendations on attention to victims "must be... included in public policies."

PROBE BLOCKED?

Pena Nieto vowed Sunday that his government would study the experts' report and keep working to "get justice."

Officials denied stonewalling the experts, saying they gave "full access" to the probe and that their mission was not extended because they were given enough time.

But the experts said the authorities began to be less cooperative in January, blocking interviews with jailed suspects or soldiers who were present the night of the mass disappearance.

"We are not absolutely sure what happened. Maybe the lines of investigation were getting close to some important clues," Valencia said.
Chou Chun-fan told newspaper Tuoi Tre that he had received the decision to terminate his employment from the companys leadership this morning and was heading back to Taiwan.

I was fired because of my comment that caused a public uproar. I deserved to be. I have to take responsibility for my actions. I currently feel very sad and hope that the Vietnamese people will forgive my mistake. Again, I would like to apologise, he said.

Earlier, in response to allegations that Formosas pollution caused the mass dying of fish along the central coast of Vietnam, Chou said in an interview with VTCNews that, sometimes there is a trade-off. The leadership of Hung Nghiep Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Ltd. then held a press conference during which they distanced themselves of the comment and promised to punish him for acting without permission.

Today the Vietnamese Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment met with other government agencies and provincial authorities affected by the mass fish death to discuss and announce the results of the investigation to find the cause. Reporters were not allowed in.

Formosa has a bad track record regarding pollution. In 2009, two Formosa subsidiaries in the US, Formosa Plastics Corp. (Texas) and Formosa Plastics Corp. (Louisiana), were fined $10 million over violations of air, water, and hazardous waste disposal regulations at their petrochemical plants in Point Comfort, Texas, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

In 2013, Formosa Plastics Corp. was fined almost $1.5 million by US Environmental Protection Agency for failing to install more than 8,000 units of leak detection and repair equipment at its plastics and chemicals plant in Point Comfort. These violations are part of a list of 15 environmental violations in the US for which Formosa has been fined.
Ho Quoc Dung, Chairman of Binh Dinh provincial Peoples Committee, last week said that the developers, leading Thai petroleum group PTT and Saudi Aramco, have just announced that they might reduce the projects capacity in a break from their original plan.

The projects investment was set below $22 billion, with a production capacity of 400,000 barrels per day (bpd), lower than the $28.7 billion in investment and 660,000 bpd capacity initially proposed by the developer in November 2012.

However, Dung added that the investors were withholding their decision until June 2016, when they would comment in detail on the scale and progress of the project.

The adjustments came after the investors hired experts  including some from the Vietnam Petroleum Institute  to make further assessments on project restructuring to take into account the context of global oil prices, which have experienced a deep nosedive.

Nguyen Ngoc Toan, deputy head of Nhon Hoi Economic Zone Management Authority, told VIR that the future of the project would be decided in the coming meeting with provincial authorities and investors. The province would work with ministries to recalculate preferential rates in the context of unexpectedly low oil prices if they choose to continue developing the project. If they do not, authorities must allow other investors the chance to use the land set aside for Victory Nhon Hoi for their industrial and tourism projects instead.

Many other projects are in the same boat, as low oil prices have decreased the incentive for investors to move forward with their multi-billion-dollar oil refinery projects in Vietnam.

For instance, the future of the Long Son petrochemical project in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau is uncertain, as Qatar Petroleum, one of the four investors involved in the $4.5-billion project, pulled out last year.

Meanwhile, the city of Can Thos Planning and Investment Department is considering asking municipal authorities to revoke the licence granted to a $538 million Can Tho oil refinery project because of the investors slow implementation of the project.

Although Vietnam has about 10 oil refinery and petrochemical projects with the potential to produce more than 60 million tonnes of oil per year, only Dung Quat in the central province of Quang Ngai is currently operational.

Aside from Dung Quat, other refinery and petrochemical projects will rely on crude oil supplies from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, making fuels produced in Vietnam less competitive.
PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc chairs the video conference on food hygiene, April 27, 2016 - Photo: VGP/Quang Hieu

The PM made the point on April 27 in Ha Noi while chairing a video conference with Deputy PM Vu Duc Dam, and officials from 63 cities and provinces with a view to figuring out solutions to addressing weak management of food hygiene in recent time.

Many participating delegates attributed loose regulations on responsibilities of competent agencies; weak investigations; a lack of budget and certified technical equipment; light sanctions; and ineffective dissemination campaigns to rampant incidents of food poisoning and unsafe food products.

Minister Cao Duc Phat underscored the need to clarify the responsibilities of related ministries, sectors and localities.

The Peoples Committees at all level are in charge of supervising food hygiene conditions at production units, street food, restaurants, and markets.

Addressing the event, PM Phuc stressed that unhygienic food not only affect Vietnamese's health but also the nation's prestige.

He called for taking drastic, comprehensive measures to resolve the problem to live up to peoples aspirations.

Besides local expenditure, the Government leader mentioned the necessity to promote social engagement in technical procurement.

Heaviest administrative penalties, even criminal charges will be imposed on infringements of food hygiene regulations.

The Government chief also asked for regular investigations and communication campaigns to raise public awareness of food safety.

Right after the video conference, the PM plans to issue a fresh directive to tighten State control of food hygiene.

In Vietnamese culture, many people buy their food at wet markets, where the origins of food sold, or whats inside the food are hardly traced. They might be safe, but recent discoveries of unsafe food sold in wet markets and on streets worried wise consumers.

Many now try to grow their own vegetables, and get pork, beef and poultry products from trusted sources. Many avoid wet markets and turn to supermarkets or safe food shops  where food origin standards and food prices are often higher. But not everybody can afford that.

The revised Criminal Code has increased the penalties for violations of food hygiene regulations. Those caught using banned substances in the manufacture, processing or preservation of food will face up to 20 years in prison.
Fish and shrimp over factories Pham Ha, CEO of Luxury Travel Tourists and locals will always choose fish and shrimp over any steel factory, Pham Ha, CEO of Luxury Travel talks with VIR's Van Nguyen. Though the cause behind the mass fish deaths in several central provinces stays unknown, the situation is putting a hefty burden on on the regional tourism. What are your views on the implications? The central coast of Vietnam is home to the most beautiful beaches in the country. As widely reported in the media recently, a massive wave of dying fish has been detected along the beaches of Nghe An, Quang Tri, and Thua Thien Hue. As a travel agent, I am truly worried about the impacts that this situation may have on provincial tourism. We have received cancellations from our guests who planned to visit the central provinces in the upcoming holiday. There is no doubt that the number of visiting tourists will be massively reduced. They are worried not only about beach activities, but also the quality of seafood. I think the development of Vietnams tourism cannot be sustained as long as industrial projects are allowed rampant pollution. I am sure that tourists as well as locals will choose fish and shrimp over any steel factory. The relevant competent authorities are investigating the causes of this incident. In your opinion, what should they do to calm the public in the meantime? I think the government should quickly provide precise information and possible solutions to the media and travel agencies to avoid confusion. The current pace is not fast enough. Though some provincial authorities have warned tourists about the possible contamination of the water and seafood at the polluted areas, some others have remained quiet, leaving tourists worried and confused. People planning to go to Tuy Hoa and Nha Trang are wondering if their travel destinations are affected. The Vietnam National Administration of Tourism should put out an official announcement without delay, about which destinations are safe for tourists to visit and which ones to avoid in the upcoming holiday.



The number of tourists coming to the central coast has reduced dramatically. When do you think they will come back? The number of visitors to these beaches has decreased to zero. This situation will remain so until there is an official statement from the relevant authorities. This case is a wake-up call for Vietnam and especially the central coast about the dangers of sea pollution. The problem to solve here is controlling factories wastewater treatment around touristic destinations, such as beaches. In my opinion, to make the tourism industry sustainable, we should create a beautiful place for the locals to live in and even better places for tourists to visit. What should we do to ensure the sustainable development of the tourism industry after this crisis? Related provinces should create a body to handle media crises. A body responsible for giving out official information, post updates, and follow the situation. In addition, violations should be handled with a lot more gravity and strictly fined. When the beaches are safe, this body could cooperate with restaurants, airlines, and hotels to invite the media and travel agencies to come and examine the situation for themselves. Vietnam should know that the tourism needs a development plan, human resources, and promotion. We should not rush building factories. We need to prioritise environmental protection. Ha Tinh will suffer the most after this case, but neighbouring provinces will also be affected. They should cooperate with each other to overcome this hardship. In the long term, sea tourism needs to take more care of the marine environment. We also need to encourage restaurants and hotels to develop a high quality wastewater treatment system in order to protect the environment. Violators should be strictly punished. In addition, activities to promote and educate travellers about environmental protection should be encouraged.
Following the complaint to Lazada Vietnam that the product was not 100 per cent new, as it was advertised, Lazada temporarily suspended the seller to carry out an investigation. The results showed that the iPhone 5 really was a refurbished product, so on April 13 Lazada Vietnams customer services department contacted the customer and refunded him, as well as terminated the sellers activities.

According to Lazadas marketing director Le Xuan Long, the incident came about without the companys intention due to one-sided violation from its merchant. Lazada Vietnam has done a thorough investigation to address the incident, he said, adding that the company also timely terminated the violating merchants forever.

Long said Lazada continuously strived to bring the best shopping experience to customers and always puts customers rights at the core of all its activities. Therefore, if any doubts arise as to the products legality, origin, and whether they are counterfeit, customers can contact the customer services department to have an investigation carried out and can expect the companys full support.

After this incident, Lazada hopes that shoppers will help us detect products and sellers in violation, by giving us feedback, he said.

Established in 2012, Lazada Vietnam now has 3,000 sellers providing 500,000 products in 13 different categories. In a recent interview with VIR, CEO Alexandre Dardy said the company was seeing a rapid adoption of e-commerce by Vietnamese consumers and that it was excited by the prospect, and remains committed to continue serving Vietnamese consumers, developing the domestic e-commerce ecosystem, and further growing its online shopping marketplace.
Cam Ranh Bays long coastal line and many beautiful beaches make coastal resort properties in the area promising investments. In the last two years, the market has witnessed a substantial number of projects launched here.

According to a real estate expert, resort properties projects are currently in high demand. The projects currently on the market provide many options with different price levels to target different customers. Moreover, the price of resort properties is predicted to continue increasing together with the development of the tourism sector in the upcoming period.

Like Danang, Nha Trang or Phu Quoc, Cam Ranh Bay, with well-constructed infrastructure, has become an attractive destination for spa resorts and several emerging investment projects with high potential return for both domestic and foreign investors.

Among projects in Cam Ranh Bay, the Movenpick Cam Ranh Resort, with outstanding policies, has become an appealing choice for customers.

The reason for the attraction of Movenpick Villas is the reputation of the operator, Swiss hotel management company Movenpick Hotels & Resorts, which plays an important role in increasing the rate of return of the project.

Customers can use their villa for up to 180 days a year or join in the subleasing program to sublease their villa and get 85 per cent of the leasing revenue or an amount no less than 10 per cent of the price of the villa per annum for 10 years.

Different from all other resort properties in Viet Nam, the project bears the Movenpick trademark which ensures Movenpick Hotels & Resorts 5-star quality in design, construction, maintenance and operations. Investors can use, trade or transfer their villa under the trademark of Movenpick Villas.

After considering some investment projects, I decided to invest in Movenpick Cam Ranh. In addition to the promised high rate of return, reasonable price, and being able to get a long term loan of up to 70 per cent of the value of the villa, my investment is also guaranteed by the bank, if I want, with minimum rate of return for leasing for 9 per cent per annum. This is the only coastal resort property in Vietnam that has this policy, said Hung Duc Tran, an investor looking for a villa by the sea.

Movenpick Villas are also favoured because it satisfies the most important criterion for a coastal resort property  having a unique design that faces the sea. Not only do the 121 Movenpick Villas have ocean view but also all the rooms in the villa are designed to have unobstructed views.

More importantly, after buying a villa, investors also expect that the price of the property will increase.

This depends on the potential of tourism at the location. Movenpick Cam Ranh Resort has a favorable location with 800 metres in the total 26-kilometre coastal shore of Bai Dai, Cam Ranh, Khanh Hoa. This is one of the most beautiful shores in Vietnam and the booking rate can reach 90 per cent in peak season.

When assessing the potential rate of return in resort property, experts said that this is the most suitable time for investment. However, investors should carefully inspect the investment and other related factors.

Resort property is a long-term investment. The investor should pay attention to the rate of return, the developer and the operator as well as other factors like the location and the potential for tourism development of the project, an investor said.


photo source 24h

In the framework of the press conference organised yesterday, Deputy Minister of Natural Resource and Environment Vo Tuan Nhan said that the ministry had yet to find evidence of the link between the mass dying of fish and the discharging of wastewater into the sea at Ha Tinh provinces Vung Ang economic zone in general and Taiwanese Hung Nghiep Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Ltd., in particular.

Besides, Nhan concluded that the cause of the mass dying of fish in central Vietnam is caused by chemical toxins and the red tide phenomenon produced by human activities. However, no one has been pinpointed.

Notably, the chemical toxins were produced by human activities both maritime and mainland and the red tide phenomenon, known as harmful algal blooms (HABs), which is caused by microscopic algae. HABs produce toxins capable of killing fish and poisoning the flesh of shellfish.

Previously, the Thua Thien-Hue Department of Agriculture and Rural Development assessed that the levels of pH, chemical oxygen demand (COD), dissolved oxygen (DO), and Cyanide (CN-) were within the permissible limits set by the national technical regulations on marine water quality, known as QCVN 10-MT:2015/BTNMT. However, the volume of chromium and nitrogen exceeded the permissible limits of both QCVN 10-MT:2015/BTNMT and the national technical regulation on marine water quality, known as QCVN 08-MT:2015/BTNMT.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton addresses supporters during a primary night event in Philadelphia after winning the Pennsilvania state primary. (AFP/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

WASHINGTON: Republican Donald Trump trained his fire on Hillary Clinton on Wednesday (Apr 27), accusing his Democratic rival of playing "the woman card" in her White House bid, after both took a giant step towards clinching their parties' nominations.

Clinton and Trump crushed their rivals in Tuesday's latest round of primaries, leaving the former secretary of state virtually assured of the Democratic nomination and Trump in an ever more dominant position in the Republican race.

Despite unfinished business in the primary contests, both candidates turned their sights to November's general election with Trump dismissing Clinton's credentials in a frontal attack.

"Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get five per cent of the vote," he told supporters at a victory press conference. "The only thing she's got going is the woman's card."

The billionaire real estate developer doubled down on Wednesday on CNN, goading: "She's playing the woman card left and right... she will be called on it. Absolutely."

It wasn't the first time Trump had goaded Clinton with the accusation, and she took up the gauntlet in a victory speech late Tuesday in Philadelphia. "Well, if fighting for women's health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman's card, then deal me in," she said.

If Clinton wins the presidential nomination, she would be the first woman of either party to do so.

Though longtime frontrunners, both candidates until now have been more preoccupied fighting off rivals for their parties' nomination than with each other.

But with the latest primary results, the curtain is lifting on what promises to be a fierce Clinton-Trump general election battle.

"I'm not going to be changing. I'm presidential anyway," Trump told CNN, assuring there will be no makeover of his mocking, insult-laden campaign style.

As Trump prepared to deliver a major speech in Washington outlining his foreign policy, the Clinton campaign pre-empted it by highlighting his many controversial proposals - a ban on Muslims, bringing back torture, and encouragement for a nuclear armed Japan and South Korea, among others.

"As Hillary Clinton has said, loose cannons tend to misfire," her campaign said.

STUBBORN RIVALS

Both candidates, meanwhile, must still contend with stubborn rivals intent on tripping them up before their parties' nominating conventions in July.

Trump's closest challenger, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, summoned media following him on the campaign trail in Indiana for what he promised would be "a major announcement" on Wednesday at 4.00pm (2000 GMT).

He was widely expected to reveal his pick of running mate, with former White House contender Carly Fiorina tipped as a likely choice.

Cruz has teamed up with Ohio Governor John Kasich to try to block Trump's path, and wrest the nomination from him at the Republican convention in Cleveland.

Trump is still short of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination outright, but his blowout wins Tuesday in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island give him momentum going forward.

"I consider myself the presumptive nominee," he told a crowd at Trump Tower in New York. "As far as I'm concerned, it's over."

A key test of the "stop Trump" strategy will come in the Indiana primary on May 3.

Kasich has agreed not to campaign there, giving Cruz an opportunity to compete head to head with Trump for the state's 57 delegates. Cruz has agreed not to compete with Kasich in New Mexico and Oregon.

Trump now stands at 988 delegates, according to CNN's running estimate. Cruz was a distant second with 568, while Kasich increased his numbers only slightly, to 152.

PARTY UNITY

Clinton's problem will be to mend the sharp divisions opened during her contest with Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist with an ardent following among young, independent and white blue-collar voters.

The former secretary of state won four out of five primaries on Tuesday, taking Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and the night's big prize, the battleground state of Pennsylvania. She conceded only the small state of Rhode Island to Sanders.

"What a great night," Clinton told a thrilled crowd of supporters in Philadelphia. "Let's go forward, let's win the nomination, and in July let's return as a unified party," she said.

The Vermont senator, however, has refused to concede the race, vowing to take his campaign to the Democratic convention "with as many delegates as possible to fight for a progressive party platform."

"The people in every state in this country should have the right to determine who they want as president and what the agenda of the Democratic Party should be. That's why we are in this race until the last vote is cast," Sanders said in a statement.

Clinton needs 2,383 delegates to win the nomination, and now has 2,168 delegates, including more than 500 "super-delegates," against Sanders's 1,401. Fourteen nominating races remain, with about 1,000 more delegates to be distributed.
Makara Vin always wanted to become a dancer. When he was aged seven, he moved to Battambang to pursue an education in the arts and to train under experienced teachers.

In Battambang he met one teacher who was in a circus act. He soon left behind the dream of professional dancing for a life in the big top.

Circuses have played an important role in Cambodian culture and art, but the survival of the tradition depends on the renewed interest of would-be trainees like Vin.

Ouk Socheat, secretary of state at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Art, said there had been circuses in Cambodia for hundreds of years, but only recently had new acts begun to spring up to fill the gap left by decades of conflict.

Circuses went silent for a long time. But if people are picking it up again now, I will be happy to see this again, he said.

Phare, a Cambodian circus troop that employs people from difficult social and economic backgrounds, has trained performers and organized festivals to promote circus culture for over 10 years.

This year, it is holding the Tiny Tinou Circus International Festival in Phnom Penh from April 28 to April 30 at the Chenla Theatre; Battambang from May 3 to May 6 at Phare Ponleu Selpak; and in Siem Reap from May 8 to May 10 at Phare, the Cambodian Circus.

Aneka Rao, spokesperson for Phare, said it hoped festivals such as this would help re-popularize the circus among Cambodians.

It is very inspiring to watch. There will be a mix of cultural performances, so audiences can experience what its like to live in different cultures, Rao said.

Artists from other countries will also be attending.

We want artists from all over the world to exchange ideas and see how Cambodia does the circus. We also want them to create something new. The international and national artists will stay together to share their skills, learn from each other and create a new show for the audience.

Rom Rachana, 28, who saw Phare twice last year, said the shows were enjoyable and eye catching.

Those people whove never seen it, they dont know how amazing it is when Cambodian and foreign artists perform together. Its much better than watching it on television, he said.

However, Rachana added, few people were aware of the circus and when shows were on.

More than 800 international artists have come from dozens of different countries to join the Tiny Tinou festival this year.

Kheang Meng, 19, a student at Northbridge International School, said hed stumbled across the circus by accident and was expecting a good show.

Ive only seen stage shows before, such as plays. But Ive heard the circus is completely different. There are lots of dynamics and thrills. Thats what Im expecting to see.

Makara, the circus performer, is hoping the art receives more state support.

I want governments to think more about circuses and art. I want it to be widely known, like circuses are in foreign countries. I want the government to help create more working opportunities.
Deadly anti-war protests in the United States over Richard Nixons decision to attack Cambodia in 1970 and the controversial US bombing campaign is explored at a three-day event at Kent State University.

The 46th Annual May 4 Commemoration, is held to remember four students who were fatally shot by Ohio National Guard troops just days after Nixon announced armed intervention in Cambodia. The three-day event is supported by Kent State's College of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. James Tyner, a professor of geography at the university who is co-organizing the event, said it was intended to raise awareness of the historical connection between Kent State and Cambodia.

The Kent State shootings came amid widespread opposition to expanding the war in Indochina.

So what we want to do is to highlight to our students, and the public, the legacy of this decision [to expand the war], he said. How this decision to go into Cambodia impacted not only politics in the United States, but also impacted politics in Cambodia.

While many of the US students know about the Kent State shootings, they were unaware of the wider consequences of the governments actions.

So we want to call attention to Cambodias civil wars from 1970 and 1975 to the Khmer Rouge regime, and then to question the legacy of May 4 and the legacy of Cambodias genocide, and how both events have or have not been remembered and memorialized, he said.

Tyner has researched extensively on Cambodia's geography and the history of the Khmer Rouge regime. In 2008, he wrote a book about Cambodia, titled "The Killing of Cambodia: Geography, Genocide, and the Unmaking of Space.

About 2 million tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia during the US campaign, killing at least 50,000 people, according to estimates, while many place some blame on the US for pushing people into the arms of the Khmer Rouge.

Chum Mey, a prominent survivor of the Khmer Rouges most infamous political prison, S-21, spoke about his experiences on Tuesday. He said it was important to spread genocide education and for American public to understand why Khmer people killed Khmer people.

Loung Ung, author of First They Killed My Father, which is being made into a movie directed by Angelina Jolie, spoke yesterday about her experiences surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide and discussed girls education in contemporary Cambodia.

Today Linda Saphan, a genocide survivor, and John Pirozzi, director of the award-winning documentary Dont Think Ive Forgotten, is screening the documentary to the public at the Kent State event. The film is about the Khmer Rouges impact on the countrys formerly booming pop music scene.
Unknown gunmen in police uniforms have kidnapped a female foreigner in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan.

Details are sketchy, but the Nangarhar province police chief, Zarawar Zahid, told VOA the woman is an Australian national who worked for Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees (DACAAR). However, that group later denied that the person kidnapped works for DACAAR or its sponsoring organization, the Danish Refugee Council.

Local sources say she recently arrived from Kabul and was staying at Spinghar hotel while working with DACAAR-supported local NGO Zardozi.

Wednesday night, she decided to stay with her local colleagues in the Zardozi compound in a part of Jalalabad called Angoor Bagh.

Early Thursday, gunmen entered the compound and kidnapped her. No one has claimed responsibility.

This is the second kidnapping in Jalalabad in the past two months. Gunmen had kidnapped the father of Afghanistan's chief justice, but security forces later rescued him.

Kidnappings for ransom is considered one of the highest risks for foreigners working in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has criticized Pakistan for allowing a Taliban delegation to visit the neighboring country, saying a terrorist organization should not have been been allowed to undertake such activities.

The objection came a day after the Islamist insurgency confirmed a three-member Taliban delegation traveled to Islamabad from its Qatar-based political office for talks with Pakistani officials on border-related issues and problems facing Afghan refugees in the country.

While addressing a news conference in Kabul on Thursday, presidential spokesman Shah Huseen Murtazawe,demanded Pakistan deal with the government in Afghanistan on these and other bilateral issues.

The Talibans trip to Pakistan is highly questionable. A terrorist group has no right to visit any country, Murtazawe said.

He went on to assert that Pakistani authorities cannot discuss with a terrorist group issues like border disputes and problems facing Afghan refugees in Pakistan, saying the Afghan government strongly opposes such discussions.



In fact, Afghans have been forced to leave their country because of the violence and crimes (the) Taliban inflicted on them, the spokesman said, referring to nearly 3 million Afghans living in the neighboring country as refugees or economic migrants.

In Islamabad



The Taliban delegation arrived in Islamabad earlier this week, but Pakistani officials have neither denied nor confirmed it categorically.

I do not have any information on any such visit, Pakistans foreign secretary, Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, said Wednesday when asked about the presence of Taliban negotiators.

Diplomatic sources, however, have confirmed to VOA the Taliban delegation is in Pakistan on a mission to hold exploratory discussions with local authorities on possible peace talks with the Afghan government, although the Taliban said resumption of Afghan peace talks was not on the agenda of the meetings in Islamabad.

Ghani faces pressure



Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has been under growing pressure at home to abandon his policy of seeking peace talks with the Taliban since the April 19 Taliban bomb-and-gun attack in Kabul that killed nearly 70 people and wounded around 350 others.

The pressure prompted Ghani to condemn Taliban insurgents as terrorists responsible for murdering innocent Afghans. The president used to refer to the insurgency as political opposition in his bid to encourage the Taliban to come to the negotiating table for a peaceful settlement of the Afghan conflict.

In a further hardening of Kabuls stance with regard to the insurgency, presidential spokesman Murtazawe also said President Ghani was expected Thursday to sign a list of terrorists sentenced to death so they could be executed and a strong message would be sent to those waging war against the state.

After the Kabul attack, the Afghan government accused Islamabad of not taking action against Taliban and militants linked to the Haqqani network who it says used Pakistani soil for plotting the assault and other insurgent violence in Afghanistan.

Foreign Secretary Chaudhry, however, dismissed the allegations, saying Pakistan condemns all forms of terrorism and has taken all necessary actions against all groups that were operating on its territory.

Pakistan does not make any distinction between any terrorists...We will continue our endeavor in fighting terrorism and rooting it out of our country, Chaudhry said.

He added that Islamabad will continue its efforts to arrange peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
There is one less media outlet providing news coverage in Iraq after the Iraqi government shut down the office of Al-Jazeera in Baghdad.

Iraq's Communications and Media Commission decided to revoke Al-Jazeera's license and close its office for one year, effective Wednesday. Iraq cited Al-Jazeera's "continuing violations" of 2014 rules issued into regulate media coverage of "the war on terror."

Iraqi authorities have long perceived Al-Jazeera's media coverage as hostile to Iraq's Shiite majority and too friendly toward Islamic State.

The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera Media Network denied violating the rules, maintaining it has consistently provided professional and objective coverage.

"Al-Jazeera is committed to its editorial principals in the coverage of current affairs in Iraq," the company said on its website.

Al-Jazeera expressed hope its Baghdad bureau can resume operations as soon as possible, "in the spirit of the press freedoms guaranteed by the Iraqi constitution."

This is the third time Iraq has banned Al-Jazeera from reporting in the country. Al-Jazeera was prohibited in 2013 from reporting on a military crackdown allegedly on Sunni Muslims. Iraq imposed the ban after blaming Al-Jazeera's TV stations for promoting banned terrorists groups who committed crimes against Iraqis.
Members of al-Shabab in Somalia who recently pledged allegiance to Islamic State are moving into the capital, Mogadishu, according to a senior intelligence analyst.

Colonel Abdullahi Ali Maow, a former national intelligence officer who now heads the new Mogadishu-based Somalia Institute for Security Studies, told VOA that some al-Shabab members are fleeing to the capital and to areas near the border with Kenya because they were overpowered in the region of Middle Juba.

Maow said Mogadishu is attractive because, as a city of several million people, it is an easy place to blend in.

This week, Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack in Somalia when an explosion targeted a convoy of African Union troops outside the capital.

But AMISOM military spokesman Joseph Kibet told VOA that Islamic State may not have been behind that attack.

Al-Shabab, however, did not claim responsibility for that attack, as they often do.

An intelligence official who did not want to be identified by name told VOA that al-Shabab is hostile to former members who have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, creating a rift between the two factions. He predicted there may be instances of violence known to the two groups, but left unexplained to the general public.

Colonel Maow, who told VOA the pro-Islamic State al-Shabab members are coming to Mogadishu, said the government plans to treat them the same way it treats other al-Shabab members. But he said the government is concerned that the Islamic State adherents will gain more followers.

"They may not have power now," he said, "but it complicates the situation."
The Austrian parliament approved Europe's strictest asylum laws Thursday in response to the migrant crisis in the continent.

The bill, which passed by 98 votes to 67, permits the government to declare a "state of emergency" if migrant numbers suddenly rise. The law also stipulates that asylum seekers would be turned back directly at the border, including those from war-torn countries like Syria.

The legislation makes it more difficult for relatives of asylum seekers to join their family members in Austria.

Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said Austria had no other choice as long as "so many other European Union members fail to do their part" to stop the migrant and refugee influx.

"We cannot shoulder the whole world's burden," he said.

Opposition parties and rights groups have criticized the legislation.

Austria received about 90,000 asylum requests in 2015, the second highest in the bloc on a per capita basis.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday told Austria's lower house of parliament that increasing restrictions on migrants will "negatively impact" Europe's commitments to international law.

Ban, the first foreign dignitary to address a session of Austria's parliament, did not single out any country in his speech to lawmakers in Vienna, but said he was alarmed about "growing xenophobia," as Europe faces its worst migrant crisis in decades.

"But I am concerned that European countries are now adopting increasingly restrictive immigration and refugee policies, he said. Such policies and measures negatively affect the obligations of member states on the international humanitarian law and European law. I welcome the open discussions in Europe including in Austria, on integration; but I am alarmed again about growing xenophobia here and beyond."

Ban told the legislators that, under international and European laws, they have a moral and legal principal obligation to help those fleeing war, human rights abuses, and persecution.
Prominent Tibetan writers Tsering Woeser and her husband, Wang Lixiong, told VOA they were placed under house arrest Wednesday in Beijing.

According to an email from Woeser, the couple are to remain in their home for the remainder of the week because of a five-day visit to China's capital by the head of the American Himalayan Foundation, with whom Woeser is not personally familiar.

Woeser said neither she and nor her husband had ever had any contact with the foundation or received notification of its president's visit. Her protest on Twitter caused concern and angry cries from supporters.

She also tweeted a message to the foundation notifying the group of their house arrest.

AHF made no response to VOAs interview request by the deadline of filing the story.

Woeser, who has been recognized for speaking out publicly about human rights conditions for China's Tibetan citizens, is regularly under state surveillance and placed under house arrest by Beijing. In 2013, she was denied a passport after planning to travel to the United States to receive a State Department "Women of Courage" award to mark International Women's Day.

Woeser and her husband rank among Chinas best-known thinkers on Beijing's policies regarding ethnic minorities.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is in Iraq for talks with Iraqi leaders "focused on encouraging Iraqi national unity and continued momentum" in the fight against Islamic State.

"The Vice President will also be discussing steps the international community can take to promote Iraq's economic stability and further regional cooperation," a statement from Biden's office said.

Biden is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Iraq since his previous trip to the country in 2011. He met with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi shortly after his arrival.

"The vice president has been the point person on Iraq for the administration since the beginning," said an unnamed U.S. official traveling on Biden's plane.

Political paralysis

Thursday's trip, which was previously unannounced over security concerns, comes as the political turmoil in Iraq has paralyzed the country's government.



Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is trying to implement a longstanding pledge to reform his government while thousands of protesters loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have held nearly daily demonstrations demanding a new Cabinet composed of technocrats instead of political loyalists.

On Tuesday, Iraq's parliament approved a partial cabinet reshuffle proposed by the prime minister.
China has passed a controversial law that imposes new rules on foreign non-governmental organizations and puts the registration and supervision of such groups under the control of public security authorities.

The full text of the law was not immediately available, but authorities said the legislation has seven chapters and 54 articles. The law was passed by Chinas parliament, the National Peoples Congress, with a vote of 147 in favor and only one opposing and one abstention vote.

Following passage of the law Thursday, authorities gave assurances the legislation was not meant to restrict foreign NGOs from operating, but aimed at providing clearer regulations and boundaries for the nearly 10,000 foreign organizations in China.

Critics argue the law is an assault on civil society organizations.

In a statement released shortly after the legislation was approved, the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders called for the repeal of what it called the draconian law.

The adopted version appears to retain the most troubling elements of the previous draft, and allows for even tighter government control over NGO activities, the group said. Once the law takes effect on January 1, 2017, it will further restrict international NGOs working in China and suffocate the countrys already beleaguered independent organizations.

The new law bans foreign NGOs from raising funds domestically and recruiting Chinese members.

According to earlier versions of the legislation, the law would give Chinese police the power to cancel activities they deem a threat to national security and to summon the leaders of foreign NGOs to report for meetings with government officials.

Details released earlier this week said police would also be allowed to ban from the country any NGO they believe is promoting "subversion of state power" or "separatism. But authorities deny they would have a so-called blacklist.

Officials argue Chinas requirement for foreign NGOs to register through police is reasonable because public security officials are already the ones who handle entry and exit of foreign nationals. They also said that in France, NGOs must register with the police is well.

But unlike France, where citizens have the right to offer up viewpoints that may be at odds with the government, China has been cracking down on dissent and, for many, the legislation appears to be an extension of that broader effort.

China recently detained and later deported a foreign NGO worker accusing him of damaging national security. Swedish NGO worker Peter Dahlin was paraded on state television and his group was accused of breaking the law because of its support of human rights lawyers.

China has long regarded foreign groups with suspicion and one of its key concerns about NGOs is the possible influence they could have on the general public and the fear such groups could threaten the Communist Partys rule.
Federal investigators have served warrants in California in connection with the investigation of the December attack that killed 14 people in San Bernardino.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller says the warrants were served early Thursday in the southern California cities of Corona and Ontario. She said the actions are linked to the San Bernardino shooting, but declined to share more details.

Reuters reported the Corona warrant was served at the home of Syed Raheel Farook, the brother of Syed Rizwan Farook the man who along with his wife, Tashfeen Malik opened fire at a December holiday party.

Farook was a county restaurant inspector and the people he shot were his co-workers at the San Bernardino County Health Department. He and his wife later died in a shootout with police.
With only about eight months left in office, President Barack Obama is still trying to fulfill his campaign promise to close down the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

At its peak, close to 800 so-called enemy combatants were detained at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo. Now, there are 80 detainees left, and the president would like to empty the center and close it down, saying it provides terrorists around the world with a powerful recruiting tool because of its tainted reputation.

But Congress has repeatedly passed legislation to keep the president from relocating detainees to prisons on the U.S. mainland, citing national security concerns.

Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania wants to continue that policy. Perry, who is chairman of a Homeland Security Committee panel on oversight and management efficiency, held a hearing Thursday to look at the impact relocating detainees would have on local communities.

Perry summed up the situation like this: "The American people do not want Gitmo terrorists detained in their communities, their neighborhoods or down the street from their children's school. Fortunately, Congress passed legislation that prohibits transferring Gitmo detainees to the homeland  and the president signed it. However, he's still moving forward with his legacy-driven agenda, which includes closing Guantanamo, despite the will of the American people."

'Keep the terrorists where they are'

Perry invited South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who has been outspoken about not wanting detainees transferred to a naval brig near Charleston. She told the panel that Defense Department officials visited the navel brig, but have not kept her informed about their plans.

Haley brought up last June's massacre at a Charleston, South Carolina, church Bible study by suspected killer Dylann Roof. Roof allegedly killed nine people in the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church as they prayed with him.

Haley told the committee: "Last summer, the people of Charleston stared hate directly in the eye. We know true hate, and we know what fear it can bring. We don't need to see it again, nor do we wish it on any other state. Keep the terrorists where they are, where they belong. Do not bring them to my home."

Democratic members of the panel seized on Haley's mention of the alleged Charleston killer, saying they have always objected to people calling him a "deranged individual." His actions make him a "domestic terrorist," they argued.

Security issues in S.C.

Ranking member Bennie Thompson addressed the issue of suspected killer Roof currently being imprisoned in South Carolina.

"And has that posed any security issues, to your knowledge, to the people of Charleston?" Thompson asked Haley.

"We won't let it pose any security issues, Haley responded. But what I can tell you right now it is a constant reminder."

Thompson argued that the U.S. has a long record of successfully incarcerating convicted dangerous terrorists in U.S. maximum-security prisons, with no escapes.

But Haley said she would do everything in her power to keep detainees away from South Carolina. Most Republican panel members said they also would work to keep detainees at Guantanamo.
After mounting a spirited challenge to centuries-old traditions, Indian women have gained access to the inner sanctum of a key Hindu temple that had prohibited them from entering for hundreds of years, and are spearheading a movement to have similar bans overturned in other temples and a historic mosque.

When 31-year-old activist Trupti Desai set foot on the platform where the deity of the Shani Shingnapur temple is placed, it was hailed as a huge victory for gender equality in a country where large strata of society remain patriarchal.

Desais entry in Ahmednagar in Western Mahasrashtra state this month, along with a small group of other women, marked the culmination of a high-profile campaign that she launched five months ago on hearing that priests had conducted a purification ritual in the temple after a woman offered prayers to the idol.

After police foiled Desais attempt to literally parachute from a helicopter onto the raised platform of the open-air temple earlier this year, women activists mounted a legal challenge to the ban.

The Mumbai High Court ruled in their favor, saying it was a fundamental right of women to access any place of worship where men are allowed, and that authorities should facilitate their entry into temples that ban them.

After some resistance, the temple trustees finally threw open the inner sanctum to women. It has not happened easily; the activists had to enter armed with a court order and protected by a ring of policemen because they faced angry counter protests by locals who wanted to protect the temple from what they felt was its desecration by women.

Many people had said that 'til the sun, moon and stars exist, you will never be able to set foot here. I am very happy that womens power has won, and tradition has lost, said Desai after tasting victory.

She said her movement does not target religious practices; it aims to fight the notion that women have a lesser status. Most Hindu temples allow women, but a handful of prominent ones have shut the doors on them.

As the campaign to change the status quo gains traction, women have set their sights on other temples with similar restrictions. At least two - the well-known Trimbakeshwar temple in Nashik and Mahalaxmi temple in Kolhapur - lifted their bans on women this month.

But the battle is not over, as similar campaigns are playing out in other parts of the country. The most high-profile one is for access to the famous Sabarimala Ayyappa temple in Kerala state in Southern India, which does not allow women of reproductive age to enter the temple. The ban is born out of the belief that menstruating women are impure.

The Supreme Court, which is due to rule on a challenge to that centuries-old custom, has said it will the test this restriction on the basis of the constitution.

What right does the temple have to forbid women from entering any part of the temple? Can you deny a woman her right to climb Mount Everest? The reasons for banning anything must be common for all, said Justice Dipak Misra, one of the three judges said during a recent hearing.

Temple authorities have defended the tradition saying the deity being worshipped is a celibate.

It is not just Hindu temples that are coming under pressure to allow women. Muslim women petitioners have challenged a ban on them in the mausoleum at the 15th century Haji Ali Dargah, one of the countrys most prominent mosques in Mumbai and a famous city landmark. The restrictions were imposed in 2011 by trustees who said allowing women in the proximity of the tomb of a revered saint is "a grievous sin" in Islam.

Zakia Soman, the co-founder of a Muslim womens rights group (Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan), questions the ban, saying both men and women are allowed right into the holiest place for all Muslims in Mecca.

She said they went to court after efforts to have a dialogue with the trustees made no headway making it clear that as women raise their voice for equality, these people are getting even more regressive than what they are. We cannot just allow this to pass, we have got to fight it.

Womens rights advocates describe the movement to enter places of worship as an important milestone in the quest for gender equality. They say what is significant is the campaign took root in a relatively small town and not in the big cities, where such battles are usually waged.

A professor of sociology at Delhi University, Mala Shankar Das Kapoor, points out that these campaigns have been drawing nationwide attention.

A lot of more people will realize that these things need to be stopped, so that gives the women who have been deprived a little more courage to stand for their rights and express themselves. All this adds to the confidence of women asking for equality, she said.
Felipe Vieira moved from his home in Brazil to the tiny town of Stowe, Vermont, under a program that allows foreign investors the chance to become a permanent U.S. resident.

But he says after handing over $500,000, he and others who backed a development project at a pair of ski resorts are worried their dreams will be dashed. The project, which involves a hotel and a biomedical research plant, is the subject of a federal fraud lawsuit filed earlier this month.

"Everybody is scared to death," Vieira said Wednesday.

He was at an event where the state's governor and other officials gave assurances the resorts have a bright future, despite their operations being placed under the control of a court-appointed attorney who said "financial statements paint a very bleak picture."

Vieira invested under what is known as the EB-5 visa program. Launched in 1992 to stimulate the economy, it allows foreigners to put $1 million into a new commercial venture that must create 10 new jobs. If the project is located in a rural area or one that has lost a lot of jobs, the figure drops to $500,000.

Those projects have included the Barclay's Center arena in New York, development on Washington's Southwest Waterfront and numerous hotels across the country.

Conditional residency



Investors who get an EB-5 visa earn a conditional residency status in the U.S. for two years, after which they can apply to become a permanent resident. Out of the 140,000 employment visas the U.S. allocates each year, about 10,000 of them are allowed to be EB-5s.

The program has exploded in recent years, with approvals for the first step rising from 642 in 2008 to 8,756 in 2015. China is the dominant source of those granted EB-5 visas, accounting for 8,156 last year. Out of 71 other countries and regions on the list, only Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea and India had even 100 nationals get an EB-5.

That massive expansion has brought concerns about fraud on both sides of the transaction.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report identifying questions about the source of the money from the foreign investors, who must provide that information in their application. It also highlighted questionable practices by businesses that accept the money, saying because investors are also seeking residency, they may not follow due diligence before agreeing to the deal. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has launched multiple investigations, including civil action in four EB-5 cases.

The SEC is the plaintiff in the lawsuit against Ariel Quiros, owner of Q Resorts, which in turn owns the Jay Peak resort; and William Stenger, the president and CEO of Jay Peak.

Massive fraud scheme



It alleges a "massive eight-year fraud scheme" in which Quiros and Stenger were primarily responsible for misusing more than $200 million of the $350 million raised from foreign investors. The money came from over 700 people in more than 70 different countries, with Stenger telling them they would earn returns of between 2 and 6 percent. The suit says the defendants made numerous misrepresentations and omissions to the investors and diverted millions of dollars for their own use.

"The most recent project, for which the defendants continue to raise money from unwitting investors, purports to be for a nearby $110 million biomedical research center that the defendants have operated as nearly a complete fraud."

The developers are also trying to raise $98 million for a hotel project, and in recent months have gone on fund-raising trips to Vietnam, Dubai, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Singapore and South America, the suit says.

Those who have already invested fear that if the projects never open, the jobs are not created and their permanent residency evaporates.

The day after the lawsuit was filed, the court appointed Michael Goldberg as the receiver in charge of the 15 companies named along with Quiros and Stenger.



Business as usual



Two weeks later he detailed the troubling financial situation in a filing to the court, laying out questions about how much the resorts actually profit and a lack of funds to complete construction of the planned additions. He also cited the difficulty the ski resorts have in making money outside of ski season.

But on Wednesday Goldberg gave a more positive assessment, declaring "business as usual." He said he secured enough funding to keep Jay Peak open and that he expects the hotel cited in the lawsuit to open in the fall.

"The only thing we're praying for is snow in the winter right now," he said.
Efforts to squeeze the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria have put the self-declared caliphate on shaky ground, leaving the terror group in perhaps its most vulnerable state since the start of the U.S.-led bombing campaign, according to U.S. officials.

For months, U.S. military officials have been touting IS's territorial losses  up to 40 percent of the land it once controlled in Iraq and upward of 10 percent of the areas it held in Syria.

But military and intelligence officials now say the bombing campaign, along with pressure from U.S. partners on the ground, is eating away at IS's ability to send forces into the fight.

"ISIL is at its weakest point since its rapid expansion in 2014," a U.S. intelligence official told VOA on condition of anonymity, using an acronym for the terror group.

"The flow of foreign terrorist fighters to Syria and Iraq has been reduced," the official said. "Consequently, ISIL is no longer able to replenish its ranks at the rate its fighters are dying on the ground."

Tipping point reached

Just a year ago, senior military officials said IS was bringing in as many as 1,000 foreign fighters a month. "They've been able to continue to recruit at the rate we kill them," one such official told VOA at the time.

"That has drastically dropped off," Maj. Gen. Peter Gersten, deputy commander for operations and intelligence for Operation Inherent Resolve, told Pentagon reporters during a video briefing Tuesday. "Our estimates are down to around 200 [a month]."

The Pentagon this week also reaffirmed U.S. intelligence estimates that the total number of fighters IS can muster in Iraq and Syria is now in the range of 19,000 to 25,000, down from earlier, high-end estimates of up to 32,000.

"We're seeing a fracture in their morale," Gersten said, pointing to increases in IS desertion rates.

'Still in the fight'

Yet despite the growing optimism, there are persistent concerns about underestimating the terror organization's capabilities and staying power.

Contrary to some military assessments, U.S. intelligence officials have said they believe IS is not being forced to turn to child soldiers and is still "largely dependent" on foreign fighters and recruits from areas the group controls.

"There's no doubt that they've taken losses, but there's no doubt they're still in the fight," said Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and senior editor of The Long War Journal.

Joscelyn is one of a number of analysts who has consistently been skeptical of official U.S. estimates for the size of the IS force, pointing to Washington's own estimates of the number of IS fighters killed in airstrikes  about 25,000  as reason to be wary.

"You're saying they've basically replaced their entire fighting force," he said. "That's hard to believe given that ISIS is still an effective fighting force on so many battlefronts."

Per Joscelyn's own estimates, at its peak, IS possibly had as many as 50,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria. And he said recent claims by the group's Amaq News Agency that it launched 287 suicide or "martyrdom operations" in the first three months of 2016 "implies that they have quite a roster of available martyrs."

Still, others contend that the new U.S. assessments of a much smaller IS force may be on the money.

"There has been a lot of evidence that these fighters are being degraded at an enormous rate," said Malcolm Nance, a former counterterrorism and intelligence officer, including what he described as "fantastic rates of suicide bomber usage for even the most basic combat operations."

Nance, who now heads the Terror Asymmetrics Project, said the newer U.S. estimates may also reflect intelligence, possibly even detailed information on foreign and local fighters, collected during the May 2015 raid that killed top IS financial figure Abu Sayyaf.

Strategic shrinkage

But even if IS's fighting force is shrinking considerably, the terror group's own strategy has likely played a role.

"ISIL's public calls for fighters to wage jihad on other fronts has probably also been a factor," a U.S. intelligence official said.

For months, IS has been telling would-be jihadists not to go to Iraq or Syria, but to go to Libya instead, seen by some analysts as a lynchpin in the terror group's Africa strategy.

"Its long-stated its goal is to endure and to expand," John Watts, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.

"As it is squeezed within its self-proclaimed caliphate, the importance of finding new safe havens and new targets increases," the former Australian Army officer said, warning that the group apparently has yet to settle precisely on how to move forward.

"There is currently a split between various ISIS leadership factions as to whether they should prioritize to retain the current territory at all costs or devolve into a decentralized international terrorist organization," Watts said.

Some former intelligence officials say time may be running out for the terror group's leadership to make that call, as IS's supply of fighters continues to erode.

"I think the appeal of the caliphate is being lost," said the Terror Asymmetrics Project's Nance. "Two hundred [foreign fighters] per month may be high unless coming from Syrian lines or crossing Saudi desert."
For years, Israel tried to erode Hamas grip on the Gaza Strip. Officials calculated what Gazans needed for survival and let in little else. Records show that sometimes pasta, notebooks and musical instruments were banned.

Israeli leaders eventually realized that Hamas downfall could lead to chaos or the rise of a more radical Jihadist group. So Israel is now easing up on the strips economy.

We do understand that a deep and whole recovery of the Gaza Strip is essential for stability, army Deputy Chief of General Staff Major General Yair Golan, told reporters.

Some 700 to 800 trucks a day carry goods to the Kerem Shalom Crossing. There, security checks are supposed to catch every item that could serve Hamas military purposes. Palestinian trucks then carry the goods into the strip.



Meanwhile, officials are debating the kind of a port Gaza might have.

The economy cannot survive without being connected to the outside world, the World Banks Country Director for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip Steen Lau Jorgensen said in a recent report.

Israel maintains a naval blockade on Gaza, but lets the Palestinians use its port of Ashdod. Israeli and Palestinian economists found Ashdod time consuming and expensive.

Because of bureaucracy, security checks and transportation requirements it takes a Palestinian-bound container 38 days to reach its destination, compared to 10 days for a delivery in Israel. The costs are more than double.

Israeli-Palestinian agreements provided for a port in Gaza and work began in 2000, but the Israelis bombed the site during the Second Intifada.

Starting again there would boost Gazas economy. Investors have avoided the strip because it is a high risk area with occasional outbursts of hostilities, noted Palestinian economist Saeb Khatib.

A port would provide tens of thousands of jobs, easing unemployment, which has reached 45 percent, according to the World Bank. Gazans can not work abroad because the strips borders are closed.

Security concerns



Such a port would, some say, endanger Israels security. Gazas experienced tunnel diggers could open an underground arms smuggling channel, they say.

Moreover, Israeli officials want their inspectors to check the shipments, but such inspectors would risk their lives if they enter the strip.

Israels experience with European Union observers several years ago was also problematic. From their side of the border, Israelis monitored the Rapha Crossing between Egypt and Gaza. They alerted EU representatives at the crossing whenever Palestinian officials seemed to violate agreed regulations, but the observers were not enforcers.

Mark Gallagher, who heads the political section at the European Unions delegation to Israel, acknowledged that, If they [the Palestinians] let something out, they let something out.

But there are few alternatives.

Boarding ships at sea to check their cargo is no solution. It is impossible to thoroughly check a ship carrying thousands of containers.

Other suggestions talked of unloading cargoes in Cyprus or Egypt, checking them there and letting a trusted third party deliver them to Gaza.

Israeli Transport Minister Israel Katz is pushing for construction of an artificial island some 4.5 kilometers off Gazas coast and a bridge linking it to the shore. The eight-square-kilometer island should be under an international regime, Katz told a conference at the Ruppin Academic Center. Imports would be checked in accordance with Israeli standards.

It would be an expensive project, with estimates it would cost $7 billion to $10 billion.

Hamas a political problem

A key problem would be political. Hamas wants a port, but rejects U.S., European Union, Russian and United Nations demands that it commit itself to non-violence.

If we give Hamas [a port], we will strengthen Hamas versus the Palestinian Authority... Hamastan will become a sovereign entity, Amos Gilad, who heads the Israeli defense ministrys political-military affairs branch, warned in an address at the Hebrew Universitys Truman Center.

The Palestinian Authority wants the port to be part of an independent state encompassing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and not under Hamas, noted former Palestinian minister Ashraf al-Ajrami.

It would be a symbol of Palestinian sovereignty, he said.

Israels decision could affect the internal Palestinian power contest.

Professor Matti Steinberg, an Israeli expert on Palestinian affairs, noted that Israels withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 helped Hamas win the 2006 elections. Hamas argued its attacks forced Israel out, not Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas no-violence policy.

Minister Katz said he is confident of a sweeping majority in the Cabinet for his initiative, if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would bring it up.

I know that. I am not guessing, he told the VOA. Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel said he had discussed the matter with Netanyahu, who said he was considering it.
Before the body of African music legend, Papa Wemba, was taken to the Democratic Republic of Congo for burial, International and local artists in Ivory Coast paid a final tribute to the musician known as "the King of Rumba Rock".

The crowd encouraged the members of Papa Wemba's band to perform despite their grief, as they stood, visibly emotional, on a stage surrounded by flowers.



A few thousand people, all dressed in white, came to pay tribute to one of Africas most famous musicians. The message on their t-shirts and on the stage read "We mourn you, long live Wemba."

Audience member Alain Aka says Papa Wemba was a big man of music. Sadly he is gone, he says, so they are here to pay him the stirring tribute he deserves.

For young local musician Eric Kouassi, Papa Wemba was an inspiration.

"We have all known him since we were little", Kouassi says. "We grew up with his music and his melodies. His death really affected us, that is why we came to give support."

Officials and artists took turns praising the man known for his Congolese rumba.

Africa mourns a son. Ivory Coast mourns a brother. And the D.R.C. mourns a father, said one presenter.

Papa Wemba, whose real name was Jules Shungu Wembadio, died Sunday after collapsing on stage. He was performing at the FEMUA music festival, organized in Abidjan by another legendary African musical act, the Ivorian band Magic System.

Wemba's family was present at the wake in Abidjan, dressed mostly in black and sitting in the front row.

Music System band member ASalfo says that Papa Wemba wanted to die on stage. He says we should not be sad, we should be proud. If the biggest artist of African music decides to die where Magic System was born, he says it means he wanted to send a message.

The celebration lasted until dawn before Wemba's body was flown to home to the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was 66 years old.


A leading member of Kenyas Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission said the group wants to improve the administration of next years general election.

The constitution requires that elections be held August 8, 2017. IEBC officials said they have been engaging with stakeholders to address their concerns in the run-up to the election.

Yusuf Nzibo of the IEBC said the commission was working with international partners to help correct some of the challenges the group faced during the 2013 elections.

We are looking for support from international organizations such as the American IFES [International Foundation for Electoral Systems] ... to help us in terms of improving on the technology," Nzibo said, adding that there are two particular areas of concern: results transmission and voter identification equipment. "The equipment we had, unfortunately, arrived late and there were challenges with the batteries, Nzibo said.

Weve also engaged the various political parties and other stakeholders in terms of taking them through our preparation," he added. An election preparation plan "spells out what should be done from now until the 8th of August.

Nzibos remarks came after political opponents and some civil society groups protested at IEBC offices. The groups said the electoral body failed to administer credible elections in 2013, and they demanded that it be dissolved and reconstituted.

Bishops' concern

Their demands came after the Catholic Bishops of Kenya expressed concern about reports of tribalism and corruption at the IEBC. At a recent state-of-the-nation address, the priests called on the IEBC to meet the stakeholders to address concerns and ease tensions before the election.

Nzibo said the protesters had contended that problems with the transmission of results from polling stations to the main election headquarters in Nairobi undermined the integrity of the electoral process. But he noted that the opposition parties had accepted the decision of the Supreme Court after election outcomes were legally challenged. The opposition parties, he said, apparently wanted to score political points before next years vote.

Its interesting in that what is being contested is the presidential election," Nzibo said. "We held six elections on one day ... and in all those elections, nobody came out and said, 'I was not elected fairly.' They all accepted. Secondly, where we had by-elections for one reason or another, the same verdict was returned by the voters. So, 90 percent of the by-elections we did had the same results.

Despite problems with the voting results transmission, "there has not been one complaint to say that the results that were announced at the polling station were different from the ones which were announced in Nairobi," Nzibo said.
Hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside of the U.S. embassy in Myanmar Thursday over its use of the term Rohingya to describe the country's ethnic Muslim minority group.

The protesters, joined by some Buddhist monks, are calling on the group be referred to as 'Bengalis,' saying they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. However, many of the Rohingya have lived in Myanmar for generations.

The protest began after the U.S. Embassy used the term Rohingya in a statement of concern following the drowning of dozens of people after their boat capsized off the coast of Rakhine state.

"Normally, we would call them what they ask to be called," said U.S. Ambassador Scott Marciel in comments to VOA's Burma's service. "It is not political decision, just normal practice."

The Myanmar government does not officially recognized the Rohingya as an ethnic group denying them basic rights and citizenship.

They are unable to travel freely in Myanmar and cannot marry or have children without official permission.

Rohingya are also largely barred from higher education and face the constant threat of violence as Buddhist extremism gains traction.

Some 120,000 Rohingya live in squalid displacement camps after being forced to flee their homes after violence erupted in Rakhine state between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012

Thousands more have fled persecution and poverty in the country.

Earlier this month, the United Nations gave Myanmar's incoming civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) 100 days to improve living conditions for the Rohingya community.
Can millennial voters support Republicans?

That was the question House Speaker Paul Ryan tried to answer for a group of several hundred Georgetown University students Wednesday, days after a new Harvard University poll found that millennial voters overwhelmingly reject Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump and his policies.

"Why support Republicans?" Ryan asked the students, gathered in person and online under the hashtag #RyanatGU. One student said he wasn't thrilled about the choices in the Republican presidential primary field.

Ryan pushed back, saying, "Look at the ideas, look at the agenda."

Ryan  who will be serving as the chairman of the Republican National Convention later this summer  said he had to be careful about not favoring one Republican candidate over another, but appeared to address some of Trump's outspoken statements when he said, "Republicans lose personality contests anyway  we always do. We've learned that lesson the hard way. But we win ideas contests."

The hourlong town hall touched on the national debt, health care and the environment, but focused largely on immigration and racial diversity  issues that have traditionally held Republicans back with younger voters.

Ryan told students that he recognized that millennial voters want to see that politicians will address the issues they care about. "You should want to be competed for and not taken for granted," he said.

Students applauded enthusiastically for Ryan's assertion that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley did the right thing by taking down the Confederate flag from the state Capitol.

"This symbol does insult," Ryan said. "This symbol, I think, does more to divide the country than it does to unify it."

Earlier, Ryan made his opening pitch, saying, "The America you want is the America we want  open, diverse, dynamic."

But he said the opportunity to get immigration reform through Congress was "lost" because the president had "poisoned the well" by issuing executive orders.

"It's not at all about a demographic. It's not at all about Latinos," Ryan said. "It is about the rule of law. It is about this country knowing who is coming and going and then getting these laws right so they work."

Megan Miraglia, a graduate student at Georgetown and a self-described Hillary Clinton supporter, said she respected Ryan's realistic outlook on the Republican Party's outreach to younger voters. But  as Ryan said in the event  the decision comes down to policy.

"Because he's willing to talk about the policies," Miraglia said, "it's still clear for me where we're separate in terms of right and left and the government, but I appreciate the way he approached the event and took all the questions."

WATCH: Paul Ryan reaches out to millennial voters
Russia has launched the first rocket from its new cosmodrome, Vostochny, after a one-day delay for technical reasons.

Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to the far-east Russian location for the launch, and congratulated cosmodrome workers after the event - while also scolding them for the delay.

"Despite all its failings, Russia remains the world leader in the number of space launches," he said at a televised meeting following the launch.

The Soyuz rocket carried three microsatellites into orbit Thursday. Putin said afterward that the next stage for Vostochny was to launch a heavier rocket.

Russian media reported early Wednesday that the first attempt at the launch was stopped just minutes before takeoff.

The Vostochny spaceport in Russia's far eastern Amur region has been hailed by the Kremlin as a major step forward, despite numerous construction delays and a budget of up to $6 billion.

It is seen as a means to reduce Russia's dependence on the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan. Russia has been forced to pay rent for the use of Baikonur at the rate of $115 million a year since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But Russian officials say they will continue to use Baikonur for manned missions until 2023. Thursday's launch was the only one planned this year from Vostochny.
The U.N. Security Council plans to vote by Friday on a U.S. resolution demanding full restoration of the peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara after Morocco expelled 83 staffers last month.

Drafts of the resolution say the mission's ability to carry out its mandate has been affected, particularly civilian efforts to put together a referendum on Western Sahara's political future.

The current mission in Western Sahara expires Saturday, and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned of "full-scale war" if the peacekeeping mandate is not renewed.

He told the council that "terrorists and radical elements" could be expected to exploit the situation.

"The risk of a rupture of the cease-fire and resumption of hostilities, with its attendant danger of escalation into full-scale war, will grow significantly in the event that MINURSO [the U.N. peacekeeping mission] is forced to depart or finds itself unable to execute the mandate that the Security Council has set," Ban said this month.

The mission in Western Sahara began in 1991 to monitor a cease-fire between Morocco and independence fighters from the Algerian-backed Polisario Front.

Morocco annexed Western Sahara in 1975 and considers it part of its territory.

During a recent visit to a camp in Algeria for Western Saharan refugees, Ban infuriated Morocco by calling it an "occupation."

Morocco responded by expelling 83 U.N. staffers and shutting down a military liaison office, severely hobbling the mission.
North Korea has apparently test-fired an intermediate-range missile that crashed seconds after takeoff, in what appears to be the second such failure in a matter of weeks.

South Korea's Defense Ministry reported the failed launch Thursday. The incident comes just before a high-profile party meeting next week in Pyongyang.

The South Korean Defense Ministry says North Korea is likely trying to launch its new Musudan mid-range missile, which could be used to reach military bases in Asia and in the Pacific Ocean.

The launch comes as South Korea and the United States conduct annual joint military drills that North Korea has labeled a provocation.
A slump in Chinese tourists is hitting retail stores hard in Hong Kong where shopping malls have become reliant on the influx of wealthy travelers from the mainland since travel restrictions were lifted in 2003, allowing mainland tourists to travel independently to the former British colony.

Mainland Chinese account for up to three-quarters of visitors to Hong Kong, but that number is falling, and shopping centers are struggling to "shift gears" and maintain sales.

Sebastian Skiff, executive director of retail development and asset management for Asia at Colliers International Group, said, When you see such a sharp downturn, it is relatively harder for a shopping center to react as quickly, as a lot of spaces are tied up with very long leases. So its like moving a very, very large boat in the ocean.

Hong Kong is experiencing its biggest retail slump since 2003. The government and industry groups have said the purchases of jewelry, watches, clocks and other high end items have already fallen nearly 25 percent this year.

Chinas slowing economy means tourists are buying less when they come to Hong Kong, and many are choosing to travel elsewhere as visa restrictions for Chinese ease in other countries. The Chinese governments crackdown on corruption is also denting sales of luxury brands.

It impacts the whole retail market, because most of the people stay away from gift-giving practice, because its just politically wrong, said Helen Mak, senior director of retail services for Hong Kong at Knight Frank, LLP.

Some Hong Kong shopping malls expect the decline in tourism, and it resultant slump in retail sales, to reduce rental income from large retailers as much as 40 percent over the next five years. To compensate for the loss, shopping centers may replace high-end stores that occupy many square meters of space with smaller food kiosks.

Swire Properties plans to increase the number of food and beverage outlets in its malls by 50 percent over the next two years. Analysts like Forrest Chan, with CCB International Securities, worry the retail sales slump will impact Hong Kongs broader economy.

Quite a good portion of the population in the retail sector is unemployed, and quite a number of the workers are very experienced in the service sector, so it might not be that easy for them to change to other sectors within the economy. So in the near term the unemployment figures are going to go up a little bit in Hong Kong, he said.

That could impact Hong Kongs retail sector even further, as shopping malls increasingly rely on local residents to make up for the loss in sales from mainland tourists. Last year retail spending was down more than eight percent, and analysts predict sales to decline further in 2016.
Many homes today are fitted with security cameras and sensors to alert the owners if someone is moving on their property, be it a family member, a mail carrier or an intruder. French company Netatmo has designed a smart home camera that recognizes familiar faces and alerts owners if a stranger has entered their home. The face-recognition camera has helped at least one man catch a thief.

The smart camera can let parents at work know that their children have returned home from school, or that a package has been delivered at their door. It can also let them know if an unknown person has trespassed on their property.

"Current security cameras are not that smart. So, they can tell you if something is moving but they don't necessarily know if it's a human being or if it's your kids; they don't know the difference. So, they will alert you all the time, also if lighting conditions change and it can be very annoying. But, if you're a very busy working professional, you want to know what's going on at your place," explained Janina Mattausch, a product marketing manager for Netatmo.

When family members enter a home, the smart camera "recognizes" them and sends information to the owner's smartphone. The owner can check the information at a convenient time. But if an intruder enters a home, the camera will send an alert that will sound an alarm on the owner's smartphone.

That's what happened recently to smart home camera owner Damien in Paris.

"On a Friday I was at work, attending a big monthly meeting at work. When my phone vibrated, at first I told myself; 'Oh, it must be a wrong alert, maybe I have to do some adjustments, but the notification on my phone was telling me that there was a movement in my flat and also a face that the app did not recognize," said Damien.

So the French businessman put the video on and was shocked with what he saw.

"I saw a person I did not know with his shoes on, which is totally forbidden in my apartment. I was watching it live on video. So I felt totally frozen, stupefied. I asked a colleague to take me back home as fast as possible and I called the police on the way, he said.

Damien showed the video of the intruder to the police and they found him later in the day. The burglar was sentenced to nine months in prison.

The French smart home camera is part of a growing trend of the so-called connected technology, which enables various devices to "communicate" with one another via the Internet.
The Islamic State militant group claimed its first ever attack in Somalia earlier this week, though the claim has not been verified. Meanwhile, al-Shabab militants have stepped up their attacks as Somalia gears up for elections later this year.

The situation has led to growing frustrations among Somalias Western backers over the countrys slow progress in establishing its armed forces to bring security, after 25 years of chaos.



Somali authorities say they are countering a resurgence from al-Shabab rebels after years of progress in driving back the militants. Abdihakim Mohamoud Haji-Faqi, the countrys defense minister until 2014, attributes this to strategic changes on the part of the militant group.



Al-Shabab has changed strategically their operations, from face-to-face fighting to targeting military bases, or targeting civilians, such as hotels, so they can terrorize the civilian population, Haji-Faqi said.



That has included a series of suicide attacks in recent weeks, many of them targeting government figures in the capital, Mogadishu.



Analyst Cathy Haenlein of Britains Royal United Services Institute says al-Shabab has been extending its reach across east Africa as it has lost territory in Somalia.



So we have seen it exert a much greater level of influence in Kenya for example, there are much higher levels of recruitment and fundraising going on in Kenya, Haenlein said.



Peacekeepers effectivity questioned

Kenya recently marked the first anniversary of the Garissa university attack, when al-Shabab gunmen killed 148 people. Kenya is one of the main contributors to the African Union peacekeeping force, known as AMISOM.



After initial territorial gains, Somali authorities say AMISOM forces have been largely confined to their barracks for the past year. Haenlein said this is in part due to certain suspicion surrounding the peacekeepers.



It is having problems holding onto and establishing a presence in the territories that it has retaken. In Somalia, especially, there is a suspicion about what the troop contributing countries interests are in the country, and that they may not be operating for the greater good of Somalia, Haenlein said.



Somalias Western backers, including the United States, have been effectively paying the wages of Somali government troops. The European Union recently cut the monthly stipend it pays to AMISOM soldiers. Former defense minister Haji-Faqi says it is vital the support continues.



They need support by the international community because the government financially is not in the position to pay their salaries and to arm their military. And also to lift the arms embargo against the Somali national army, Haji-Faqi said.



The United States has carried out a series of drone strikes against al-Shabab militants. The Somali government has welcomed the intervention and warns of a growing threat in the run up to elections scheduled later this year.
Arzu Geybullayeva was a correspondent for Agos, an Armenian bilingual weekly newspaper published in Istanbul, in 2014 when she faced an ugly campaign from the Azerbaijani government to hurt her credibility with the Azerbaijani people.

Authorities called her a traitor because the government was not happy with her critical reporting.

"I was doing a lot of work with Armenians at the time, she said. I was co-directing a small not-for-profit organization that did dialogue programs between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. But the funny thing is, when I was called a traitor and they made an enemy of the state out of me, they never mentioned anything about my critical reporting. They always mentioned my Armenian link and how I was writing for an Armenian paper in Istanbul  and I was selling government secrets."

This, Geybullayeva said, is still a very common method to discredit journalists in Azerbaijan.

"It's the easiest way to get public support, because we are in a war with Armenia and there are a lot of people who are fed propaganda," she added.

Shared stories by female journalists

Her story is included in a new book released by the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ. It brings together essays from female journalists who shared stories about the threats and online abuse they faced while reporting.

For the launching of CPJ's annual Attacks on the Press, a panel discussion was held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., where four journalists told their stories of sexual violence, online harassment and gender-based discrimination.

CPJ Board Chair Sandy Rowe said this edition is a "different approach" because the committee decided to focus on the intersection of gender and press freedom.

The need for a book like this, Rowe said, became apparent five years ago when Lara Logan, a CBS correspondent, was sexually assaulted while covering Arab Spring protests in Egypt.

"Five years later, I can tell you that the landscape is better in some ways, and in some ways, it's worse," Rowe said.

Although words can change the world, Rowe said, they can also do "tremendous harm." She points to the damage caused by internet trolls who target female reporters for abuse that includes threats of physical and sexual violence.

I think online, definitely weve seen time and time again that women are subject to so much more verbal abuse online as a foreign correspondent," said Molly McCluskey, a freelance foreign correspondent.

McCluskey said she has been harassed online even for neutral stories such as those that give financial advice.

"Ive written some personal finance articles about paying down student debt or how to save for a mortgage that Ive had some really vicious comments in them," she said.

According to CPJ, platforms like Twitter allow anonymity or pseudo-anonymity for predators while Facebook prohibits anonymity, or makes it more difficult.

The women suggested solutions to resolve some of these issues, such as having managers in the newsroom who can offer better support, or even a policy change that could address online anonymity.

Assaulted and beaten

Logan, who attended the discussion, said she knew her story needed to be told. The CBS correspondent endured at least 25 minutes of brutal sexual assault and beating by a mob the day Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak stepped down from power.

An Egyptian doctor who treated her after she was safely taken to a hotel refused to listen to what had happened at Cairo's Tahrir Square.

"I wanted to tell him what happened to me, and he didn't want to know [be]cause that was more than he could process. And he just kept saying to me, Stop talking; you're lucky to be alive,' " she said.

No one would look at her. No one would talk to her. At that moment, she said, "I felt like I disappeared."
A senior Republican lawmaker on Thursday challenged the Obama administration's upbeat assessments of progress against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

While not disputing recent battlefield improvements, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain accused the administration of a myopic focus on calibrating anti-IS tactics that misses the larger threat profile America faces.

"I worry we are staring at our challenges in the broader Middle East through soda straws," the Arizona Republican said at a committee hearing.

"Despite the real tactical gains we have made, we must ask ourselves: Is this working? Are we winning? Are we getting ahead of the threats and problems we face, or are they getting ahead of us?" the senator added.

Testifying before the panel, Defense Secretary Ash Carter detailed multiple facets of a ramped-up campaign against Islamic State, from cyber warfare to additional special operations forces deployed to Syria. But he cast doubt on the wisdom and feasibility of forging a large coalition ground force to battle the militants, as McCain urged.

Carter said that "a significant foreign ground force" would be "hypothetically international, although almost certainly preponderantly American."

"And it would be ceding our competitive advantage of special forces, mobility and firepower, instead fighting on the enemy's terms of ground combat amidst a local population that has previously responded violently to such an approach," the secretary added.

Progress affirmed

Earlier this week, U.S. intelligence sources told VOA that IS is at its weakest point since its rapid expansion in 2014" and that it is no longer able to replenish its ranks at the rate its fighters are dying on the ground."

Testifying alongside Carter, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, affirmed progress has been made.

"We've reduced ISIL's territorial control, undermined its brand and aura of invincibility, and destroyed much of its war-fighting capability," Dunford said, using an acronym for Islamic State. "The enemy's resources and freedom of movement have also been significantly reduced, and the pressure we are applying is degrading the enemy's morale."

In light of a faltering cease-fire in Syria, several senators asked about possible actions to limit the Syrian government's ability to conduct airstrikes. Dunford affirmed that the United States has the ability to decimate Syria's air force. But he declined to say whether he would recommend such an action, noting that neither Congress nor President Barack Obama has authorized direct military strikes against the Syrian regime.

Carter said that America's military campaign remains focused on Islamic State and that the end of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's rule will be achieved politically.
U.S. allies in northern Syria, fighters from a Kurdish-dominated alliance and militiamen from the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), clashed Thursday as Russian and government warplanes increased airstrikes on and around the city of Aleppo.

As fighting intensified, the U.N. envoy to Syria pleaded with the United States and Russia to intervene "at the highest level" to revive struggling peace talks, saying a partial truce reached in February was now barely alive. Rebel leaders said the cease-fire was dead in all but name.

Fighting intensifies



That was clear on the ground in northern Syria as fights erupted among an array of armed groups, some, in theory, on the same side in opposing President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian government and Russian warplanes also intensified airstrikes in the north, hitting an Aleppo hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders Wednesday night, killing 14 civilians and three doctors, including the last pediatrician working in the rebel-controlled part of the city.

The hospital strike was condemned by international medical charities.



The hospital bombing comes as the latest round of peace talks falters and the cessation of hostilities agreed in February is disintegrating into bloodshed, says Sonia Khush, Save The Childrens Syria country director.

Save the Children partners in the area have told us of almost constant bombing and shelling this week, and urgent action is needed to save the small but crucial gains of the past few months," she added.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest strongly condemned the wave of airstrikes. He said the United States was particularly appalled by the attack on the hospital. He described the tactics of the attack as abhorrent and immoral. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement: "We are outraged by yesterdays airstrikes in Aleppo on the al-Quds hospital supported by both Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which killed dozens of people, including children, patients, and medical personnel." Kerry said the U.S. was still trying to establish all the facts about the airstrike but added, "it appears to have been a deliberate strike on a known medical facility and follows the Assad regimes appalling record of striking such facilities and first responders. These strikes have killed hundreds of innocent Syrians." He added that the regimes most recent "offensive actions" in Syria "compound the violence and undermine the cessation of hostilities."

It was not clear what steps the U.S. can take to shore up the always fragile and frequently broken cessation of hostilities agreement.

UN envoy calls for meeting



U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura called on Washington and Moscow to convene a ministerial meeting of major and regional powers that compose the International Syria Support Group (ISSG).

At a news conference in Geneva, he said both the Americans and Russians have common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war. He hinted some progress had been made in peace talks before the rebel negotiators left the formal discussions.

The High Negotiations Committee of the Syrian Opposition, the rebel delegation to the stalled Geneva-based peace talks, questioned the credibility of the negotiations.

The delegation walked out of the formal talks last week, arguing that the negotiations were not bringing Syria nearer to a political transition. The rebels insist Assad should play no part in any transition, a position rejected by Damascus and Assad-backers Russia and Iran.

The HNC said instead of meaningful negotiations the Assad regime intensified its atrocities on the ground. The committee has called for an urgent meeting with Western and Gulf countries opposed to Assad remaining in power.

HNC members have been briefing U.S. lawmakers privately for days that the peace talks are now effectively finished, according to Capitol Hill aides, and with it, the cessation of hostilities.

De Mistura insisted Thursday the truce is still alive but added that the perception is that it could collapse any time...Lets put it in a few words - in the last 48 hours we had on the average one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes.

US concerns



State Department spokesman John Kirby said he shared de Misturas concerns and urged Russia to press the Assad regime to fulfill its commitments.

Opposition political activists accuse the Assad government and its Russian backers of using the cessation of hostilities as an extension of a military strategy to undermine the rebels, saying that regime bombing and ground attacks have been targeting them as much as the terrorist groups the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaidas affiliate in Syria, which were excluded from the truce.

Assad regime forces and militias loyal to the regime failed to abide by the terms of the cease-fire agreement, according to Omran Center for Strategic Studies, a pro-opposition think tank.

Assad regime forces violated the agreement many times, and quite often with Russian air support, striking Syrian revolutionary forces in a majority of the provinces. As of April 19, 2016 there were 1,180 confirmed Assad regime violations, calculates the research group.

Many of the violations occurred as a preparation for future regime offensive operations or to prevent Syrian rebels from maintaining control of any frontline operations against the Islamic State.

Aside from the collapsing cease-fire, Washington will also have to consider how it can disentangle its allies on the ground.

According to local political activists, Islamist factions Ahrar al-Sham and the Levant Corps, along with FSA militiamen, launched a major offensive Wednesday on the outskirts of the strategically important town of Tell Rifaat, which was captured in February by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is also backed, as is the FSA, by the West.

Casualties



The renewed battles over Tell Rifaat, involving mortar and artillery exchanges, leaving casualties on both sides, will further complicate U.S. efforts to shape a coherent on-the-ground alliance to fight the Islamic State terror group.



The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based monitoring group that relies on a network of local activists for its information, reported at least 11 fighters with FSA and Islamist factions were killed in the renewed fighting.

The Syrian Observatory said there were also SDF casualties but was unable to give a precise figure, although some SDF supporters put the figure at more than 60. Fighting between the two groups was also reported to have redoubled on the outskirts of the nearby town of Ain Daqna, south of Azaz, on the border with Turkey.

The clashes between anti-Assad factions assisted Islamic State militants in seizing control mid-week of several villages in the northern Aleppo countryside, killing a number of rebels during the fighting, say local activists.



IS has been attempting for weeks to regain villages it recently lost to the rebels. The Islamic militants were reported to have grabbed back the villages of Dudyan, Yahmoul, Jarez and Telil al-Hisin, despite a Turkish cross-border artillery bombardment aimed at halting them.
Taiwans incoming ruling party is signaling its intention to get tougher on espionage by China as cross-strait relations sour and increased contact between the two sides makes spying easier.

The Democratic Progressive Party government of President-elect Tsai Ing-wen intends to raise the military budget and experts said it may add a cyber-espionage unit to the defense ministry. Parliament, which is controlled by the same party, aims to pass a bill by years end that would cut pensions for Taiwanese military retirees who spy for China.

Analysis said spying cases, which embarrassed Taiwan in November and again this week, stand to increase because China will lack legal channels to understand the islands new government after May 20, when Tsai takes office. She and Beijing have not agreed on conditions to sustain the friendly dialogue the two sides have held since 2008 under current President Ma Ying-jeou.

The Democratic Progressive Party is especially worried about spying by China, said William Sharp, a visiting scholar at Academia Sinica in Taipei and recent author of research on espionage. Im certain that this spying will keep up. The mainland (China) is not going to stop it, Sharp said. These people are very dedicated and theyve come up with some pretty clever ideas, too.

China and Taiwan have been separately ruled since the Chinese civil war of the 1940s. China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and insists the two eventually unify. It also requires that both sides see themselves as part of a single China before holding any talks. But Tsai prefers for Taiwan to bolster its autonomy rather than veering closer to China.

Over the past six years, despite cordial relations with China, Taiwan has dug up at least 33 cases involving citizens who sold sensitive defense-related information, Sharp said. Some cases involve the lure of women as well as money, analysts believe.

Three spy cases came to light in November, when Taiwan said China returned two former colonels with the islands Bureau of Military Intelligence. They had been arrested for espionage in 2006. Around the same time Taiwan returned Li Zhihao, who Taiwanese media call Chinas man in black. He was serving a life sentence in Taiwan.

Their releases preceded the first-ever summit between presidents of the two sides.

On Wednesday this week, Taiwans high court upheld the four-year prison sentence of Zhen Xiaojiang, a former Chinese Peoples Liberation Army captain who local media said reached Taiwan as a tourist and then recruited military retirees for spying.

The signing of 23 transit, trade and investment deals with China under the current government has also increased contact, expanding the pool of people China could choose to buy or sell secrets. Chinese tourists made 3.4 million visits to Taiwan last year.

Its going to be hard for the agencies to track down every suspicious lead and try to find out things, said Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan. We have limited manpower, and the volume or travelers are increased.

Some fear that under the new government, Beijing will target people from the outgoing Nationalist Party because they have updated information about military activities.

Tsai has said she would increase the military budget from 2.2 to 3 percent of Taiwans gross domestic product (GDP), which the government estimates at $532 billion this year. Some of that budget may establish a unit to fight cyber-espionage, which could be a new component of Chinas effort.

China has already used cyber-spying against the United States, the U.S. national intelligence director said earlier this year.

Taiwan's new government will step up prevention of cyber espionage, Huang said, adding that documents from her camp indicate plans to set up a "cyber command" under the defense ministry.

More than 20 legislators from Tsai's party are also pushing a bill that would cut the pensions of military retirees convicted of spying.

The bill is expected to pass by years end, said Chan Shou-chung, office manager for the bills sponsor, ruling party legislator Cheng Yun-peng. He says the legislator is afraid spy cases will surge after Tsai takes office but finds todays laws too light to discourage espionage.

Retired military personnel are considered the most likely spies because of their exposure to secrets while on the job, Chan said.

The infiltration by the PRC in Taiwan is becoming more intensive and sometimes more extensive, especially into the military establishment here in Taiwan, so we need a mechanism to deter this kind of espionage activities," said Democratic Progressive Party legislator Lo Chih-cheng.

"In the past the retired generals or military people, when they got caught for espionage, even if they were imprisoned they still got their pension fund," he said.
Turkey says it has arrested 12 people in connection with Wednesday's bomb attack in the northwestern city of Bursa, in which 13 people were wounded.

The state-run Anadolu Agency said police detained 12 people in Bursa and Istanbul as well as two other cities.

A female bomber blew herself up Wednesday near a mosque in Bursa's historic district, a popular tourist destination. There has been no claim of responsibility.

Turkey has been hit by a series of suicide bombings this year, including two in Istanbul, which were claimed by Islamic State, and two in the capital, Ankara, claimed by a Kurdish militant group.

Leftist groups have also carried out attacks, mostly on police and security forces.

Bursa is Turkey's fourth largest city, an industrial center south of Istanbul across the Marmara Sea and a city distinguished by its abundance of Ottoman-era architecture.
Turkey sentenced two journalists to two years in prison for blasphemy after reprinting a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

A court in Istanbul convicted Cumhuriyet newspapers' columnists Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Cetinkaya Thursday on charges of inciting public hatred, but acquitted them of insulting religious values.

"We will appeal [the ruling]. We will not leave this country to fascists in Islam sauce," Karan said on Twitter.

Turkey's constitution strictly separates state and religion but its penal code makes it a crime to insult religion.

For their columns in Cumhuriyet, Karan and Cetinkaya reprinted the caricature of the Prophet Mohammad following the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris in a show of solidarity with the magazine.

The judgment against them is likely to fuel reactions about freedom of expression in Turkey where newspapers have been seized and a number of journalists have been sued for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Cumhuriyet chief editor Can Dundar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul are facing possible life imprisonment over charges of espionage and of trying to topple the government after publishing video last May purporting to show Turkey's state intelligence agency helping to ship weapons to Syria in 2014.

Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey 151st out of 180 countries in the world press freedom index rankings in 2016, released last week.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says he is "outraged" by an airstrike on a Syrian children's hospital in Aleppo, directly blaming President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

The airstrike destroyed the hospital, which was supported by Doctors Without Borders. At least 20 children and doctors were killed, including the last pediatrician working in rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo.

"It appears to have been a deliberate strike on a known medical facility and follows the Assad regime's appalling record of striking such facilities and first responders, Kerry said Thursday. "These strikes have killed hundreds of innocent Syrians."

The airstrike was part of a bloody 24 hours in Aleppo which saw more than 60 people killed in fighting between Syrian forces and rebels.

Watch video report from VOA's Zlatica Hoke:

United Nations envoy Staffan de Mistura says the February cessation of hostilities that he helped negotiate "hangs by a thread" and could totally collapse at any time.

Kerry is calling on Russia  Assad's top ally  to use its influence to get him to stop the attacks.

"Russia has an urgent responsibility to press the regime to fulfill its commitments under UNSCR 2254 [United Nations Security Council Resolution], including in particular to stop attacking civilians, medical facilities and first responders, and to abide fully by the cessation of hostilities," Kerry said.

But de Mistura is urging both the United States and Russia to revive the peace talks.

"In the last 48 hours, we have had an average of one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes," he said Thursday.

U.N. aid chief Stephen O'Brien addressed the Security Council on Thursday, saying that all members "must be ashamed" by what is happening in Aleppo.

Aleppo is Syria's largest city. Both the Syrian government and rebels control different parts of the city while numerous groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State, control parts of the surrounding province.

Syria and the opposition agreed on a temporary truce in February, aimed at setting the stage for peace talks. The Islamist militants were not part of the truce and the government assault against them continues.

But the Syrian airstrikes do not appear to discriminate between the extremists and the so-called moderate opposition.

The pro-government newspaper Al-Watan reports that the Syrian army is now set for a "decisive battle" against rebel strongholds in Aleppo.

It says the final battle for Aleppo "will not take long to begin, nor to finish."
Iraq is trying to cope with one of the most volatile humanitarian crises in the world as well as battling the vicious extremist Islamic State group while buckling under the low price of oil, its chief export, and growing political instability. VOAs Sharon Behn sits down with Lise Grande, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator, to talk about the challenges Baghdad faces.

VOA: What has been the cost of batting Islamic State extremists?

Grande: The cost of the battle to degrade and defeat IS has been absolutely enormous in Iraq, since ISIL rose up in 2014, more than 3.4 million Iraqis have been forced to flee their homes. Many of these people have lost everything. They have lost their property, they have lost their community they have been forced into exile, the impact is absolutely dramatic. In the last year alone, we have seen 1 million people displaced, and our expectation is that as the campaign to defeat IS gains intensity, we could see up to another million people, if not more, displaced in the coming months. If you look at the percentage of the population that has been impacted directly by ISIL, we are talking about nearly a third of all Iraq he's have had to pay some kind of price.

There are 3.4 million people who have been displaced, but there are an additional 7 million Iraqis who have been [living] in host communities, who are now in trouble because they have opened up their homes, they have opened up their communities, and they're hosting families, and their own conditions have deteriorated because of that.

Altogether we have estimated that there are 10 million Iraqis right now who need some form of humanitarian assistance, and that by the end of this year that number will probably be close to 12 if not 13 million Iraqis. It is a huge number, absolutely huge.

VOA: What impact has this had on the people of Iraq?

Grande: Anytime you have so many people who have been displaced, and displaced because of horrific violence, you know, they are fleeing some of the worst human rights violations ever committed in the world. It's unbelievable the situations that they are leaving and that they are fleeing from. And in all of the circumstances, the psychological impact is almost in calculable. We will often refer to what we call a lost generation, and this is a lost generation not just of children but of young people, in fact of entire families. The dislocation that is caused, the violence and impact that that has on people, it ruins lives. People can recover, people do recover, but at the time of the crisis it is just devastating to see what is happened.

VOA: What are the chances of reconciliation after such polarization and violence?

Grande: We have to be frank that in cases where families have stayed under ISIS control there is deep suspicion about their motivations for doing that, by families who left, and when families who have left in an area return, and the families who didn't leave are still there, the issue of how you reconcile those groups, of how you prevent retaliation -- on either side -- is absolutely huge. Out of the 3.4 million people that have been displaced since ISIS rose up, 500,000 people have returned home in the past year alone. They have gone back to their communities that have been liberated from ISIL and are now under government control. And the reconciliation, the compensation element is huge in this process. We have seen that in many cases families are not prepared to go back until they know that compensation is going to be paid, that there has been an adjudication process at the community level that establishes the kinds of compensation that are necessary to prevent retaliation.

It is very important political elites and political leaders are involved in strategic reconciliation, that there is a political dispensation between all the political leaders around the country, regardless of where they come from, that unites Iraq. There is another very crucial element to reconciliation that happens at the community level and this is what I have been describing, where families and tribes and communities find ways of mending their fences, and coexisting, and living together as they did before. It's a tough process, but it's crucial.

VOA: Have displaced families been able to return to their communities that have been retaken from IS control?

Grande: When the famous city of Tikrit was liberated and came under the control of the government forces, when that happened the United Nations was able to help the local authority stabilize the area relatively quickly so families could come back, and that give us a lot of confidence that the stabilization process could be done relatively quickly and relatively inexpensively. Then Ramadi happened. And in the case of Ramadi, the town was booby-trapped. And it was booby-trapped with some of the most complex IEDs we have ever seen anywhere, and the whole town is infested and is infested in a way that is unpredictable. So, we have to go street by street, area by area, to ascertain if the place has been contaminated and if it has then to remove it so that families can return safely. This did not happen in Tikrit but it has happened in Ramadi and we are very worried that it will happen in a place like Mosul, in Fallujah and Hawija and in the other areas that are still under ISIL control.

VOA: Can you estimate the humanitarian impact of the battle for IS stronghold of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq?

Grande: It will depend on how the battle is prosecuted. If there is limited damage, if the fighting is contained, populations are protected during that process, then we would expect that 300,000 people would be impacted. If it is [like] Ramadi, you could have more than 1 million you could have up to 1.2 million people who are going to be displaced. If their homes are destroyed, they are going to be displaced for months and months on end. If there is infestation of booby traps and complex IED's add more months to it.

VOA: Human rights organizations have voiced concern over the treatment of fleeing and displaced Sunnis, for example in Kirkuk. What is going on?

Grande: I think this issue of the security of populations is going to be central to everything that happens. It is already central in the case of Kirkuk, where you have families that have come from Hawija and the authorities have very serious concerns about whether these families may or may not have supported ISIL, may or may not have been complicit. So the element of security screening which impacts on whether families can move, when families are being screened then the authorities want them to remain in place, they don't want them to move. Our understanding with the authorities is that once the screening is done, and the family has been cleared, they should move, they are Iraqi citizens, they are allowed to move and to go into places as they choose. But the screening process itself, which is of course the right of the authorities to undertake, we have also encourage them to be clear about it, transparent about it, fair and just, about how that is done. But that is when families are being detained by the authorities. This is, as you point out, already happening in Kirkuk, it happened when families left Ramadi, it is happening with the families that are fleeing from Hit. If you have mass displacement out of Mosul, of course it will happen there as well.

VOA: Iraq has parallel security forces, the Iraqi army and Shiite militias grouped under the name Hashd al Shaabi or Popular Mobilization Forces, a group that has been accused of human rights abuses. How can these be reconciled?

Grande: I think there have been some very positive steps, where the Popular Mobilization Forces have been incorporated officially into the command and control structures of the Iraqi security forces, and that has brought shape and discipline to the way in which the PMF operates. From the United Nations point of view, one of the most important, crucial things that happens in any context of conflict or violence or war is respect by the parties to that conflict for international humanitarian law. This has been a point that we have raised across the spectrum with their Iraqi security forces, with all the parties to the conflict, with the Popular Mobilization Forces, helping to educate them on what their obligations are under international humanitarian law and continuing to insist that as a party to the conflict they apply the law. It is clear that there have been violations across the board. Part of our responsibility is to monitor those, to report on them and to take the crucial, most important step of advocating with the perpetrators of those violations to stop. They must be held accountable for that.

VOA: How is Iraqs political instability affecting the situation?

Grande: One of the very important things about Iraq right now is Iraq is not just facing one crisis, it is facing three crises simultaneously. One of the largest most volatile humanitarian crises in the world is in Iraq. At the same time, the government is facing a massive security crisis as it is trying to degrade and defeat ISIL. And thirdly, the country is facing probably its worst fiscal crisis in recent history, all three of those crises are happening at the same time. Anyone of them would have been difficult to deal with. To try and address and deal with all three of them is nearly paralyzing. And I think what we have seen is that the political leaders are struggling. Struggled with one, struggled with the other, they're struggling with all three. This has created tensions and problems that have been very very hard to manage. From the humanitarian perspective, for us what matters the most is that there is a stable, transparent government, and that it upholds its responsibilities under international humanitarian law and does absolutely everything it can to make sure that people are safe and that they receive the services that they need and deserve in order to survive. That is the critical point.

VOA: Are you getting enough funds?

Grande: No.

One of the things that I have to say is disappointing and in a way it is shocking, Iraq is in the global headlines, every day when you watch international news media when you watch regional media, open a newspaper, it is clear that Iraq is one of the great stories of the moment, and yet we can't fund the humanitarian operation at even a minimum level.

Right now we are in April and we only have 20 percent of the requirements that we need for the year.

I think it's important to consider rebalancing international engagement, so that it is not simply the international community supporting the military side of things but that we are also supporting the humanitarian operation, the stabilization operation, which are the direct consequence of the military activities that are taking place.

VOA: The Iraqi government and the US government seem to have differences of opinion on the stability of Mosul Dam. What is the U.N. take on the potential of the dam collapsing?

Grande: We are certainly familiar with the U.S. analysis of Mosul Dam. We speak all the time to the government authorities about their understanding of the situation. I think the fact that The prime ministers office very recently reached out to the United Nations Development Program and asked us to help them establish an emergency alert and warning system indicates that they share the concerns that Mosul dam may not be stable or they would not have asked us to that otherwise. We have been working with the government for the past four months to put that kind of a system in place. We have also developed a set of protocols that would activate an international response in the case of a catastrophic outburst.
Talks on ending the five-year Syrian conflict have ground to a halt in Geneva, and the United Nations mediator on Thursday appealed to the United States and Russia to help put the peace process on track as violence worsened in Syria.

There is no reason that both of them, who have been putting so much political capital in that success story and have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up on another cycle of war, should not be able to revitalize what they created, and which is still alive, but barely, Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. mediator, said early Thursday.



The latest round lasted two weeks and failed to produce a face-to-face meeting between the government and opposition delegations.

Seeking compromise



The main divide is on the question of whether Syrian President Bashar al- Assad should remain in power. In a desperate effort to salvage what was the third round of proximity talks since January, mediators floated alternatives, including the formation of a transitional government run by a council made up of military officials and moderate rebels.

None of the options was accepted by either side.

Last week, most of the opposition walked out of the talks in protest of what rebels said were the governments continued attacks that were making the delivery of humanitarian shipments impossible, in violation of a cease-fire brokered by the U.S. and Russia in February.

How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling? de Mistura said Thursday.

Renewed violence



Hours after he spoke, violence flared yet again. Doctors Without Borders said at least 14 people were killed in airstrikes at a hospital run by the group in the city of Aleppo. Syrian state media said a total of 27 people died in violence that included shelling by rebel forces.

It was the latest incident in what has been a week of reported airstrikes, rocket attacks, and gunfire in the city.

Cease-fire in jeopardy

The cease-fire agreement was an American-Russian deal. For it to continue, we need them to remain very determined to keep it going, Rim Turkmani, a researcher at the London School of Economics Civil Society & Human Security Research Unit and a senior adviser to de Mistura, told VOA after returning from Geneva.

Both of them need to keep working together, make sure they dont do something the other doesnt want. Its not time to fight each other. They both need to rally behind one solution in Syria, she said.

Moscow and Washington are divided on whether Assad should remain in power. Russia supports the Assad government and wants Assad to stay. The United States wants him to leave.

High-level talks between U.S. and Russian officials have been under way for the past week. One of the aims of the discussions is to set a date for a meeting of the International Syria Support Group to bolster the peace process.

IN PICTURES: Deadly airstrikes in Aleppo
U.S. federal prosecutors have announced hate-crimes charges against two men in connection with an attack on three Somali men in Dodge City, Kansas, last June.

The indictment, unsealed Wednesday, charged Omar Cantero Martinez, 31, and Armando Sotelo, 24, both of Dodge City, with three counts of causing bodily injury to a victim because of actual and perceived race and national origin.

It also alleged that they used a broken glass bottle in the assault on June 19, 2015, against two of the Somali men, who were staying in the United States legally.

Each charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Because the charges included a federal hate crime, the FBI joined the Dodge City police in investigating the case.
A U.S. lawmaker who has taken a leading role in trying to protect religious minorities in the Middle East says the fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria is a fight for civilization itself that needs broader support from all nations.

Congressman Jeff Fortenberry told VOA's Kurdish Service in an interview that Sunni Arab nations in particular must cooperate with the United States and its Western partners in working to contain IS and to resolve the "horrific" refugee situation in the region.

Fortenberry, a Republican from Nebraska, sponsored last month's U.S. congressional resolution declaring as genocide the Islamic State group's campaign of violence against Christians, Yazidis and other ethnic and religious minorities.

The resolution passed unanimously, 393-0, in the U.S. House of Representatives. Fortenberry said it "puts the full weight and authority of the United States government in declaring the reality of what has happened: a systematic attempt to exterminate entire groups of people based upon their faith."

The congressman said the United States is continuing its extensive support for humanitarian aid to help those fleeing Islamic State terror, but there also must be a broader effort to create conditions for security, stability and political reform in the areas ravaged by IS. The Sunni Arab world must play a more robust role in reform efforts, he added.

Looking to the future, Fortenberry said U.S. military forces devoted to fighting Islamic State may increase, but no one should expect to see thousands of American troops arriving in the region. "This is a responsibility of the Middle East itself," he added.

Wiping out Islamic State, which he described as a gang of "8th-century barbarians," is separate from the task of stabilizing war-torn Syria, Fortenberry said. Although removing President Hafez al-Assad from power is an absolute goal of many many opposition groups in Syria, the congressman noted: "To simply demand that Assad go, and create a vacuum, could make the circumstances worse. To 'protect' Assad and his brutality is unconscionable. So you have to have a transition period here."

The United States and its partners must address all aspects of the refugees' flight from Syria, Fortenberry told VOA's Kurdish Service:

The United States shouldnt do this alone, nor can we do it alone. It's particularly incumbent in the Middle East on Sunni Arab nations to fight for values, to fight for the protection of innocent life, to fight for the principles of civilization, and stability and order itself," he said.

Fortenberry estimated the United States is currently spending about $1 billion a year to help regional governments - Iraq's Kurdish regional government and the central government in Baghdad, as well as Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon - care for refugees.

Protecting civilians' lives and respecting human dignity is a complicated task in areas where Islamic State has mounted systematic efforts to exterminate religious minorities, Fortenberry said. Looking forward, he proposes a system of "safe havens" where returning refugees can begin to re-establish stable societies.

"If we don't do this, and the Middle East is emptied of people simply because there is security and cultural conflict, then there is no chance in the future" to heal the wounds that extremists have caused, the congressman said. "That's why this proposal is so important. It not only meets the needs of the humanitarian crisis, but it creates long-term conditions for stability," said Fortenberry.


Victims of a secretive German colony in Chile hope that Germany's decision to declassify documents will help shine light on human rights abuses committed there.

For three decades beginning in 1961, the enclave of Colonia Dignidad, or Dignity Colony, was the site of torture, slavery and child abuse.



German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Tuesday that he ordered documents about the colony through 1996 to be declassified. He also expressed regret that his country's diplomats failed for years to act on the abuses.



Roberto Celedon, a lawyer for some of the victims, called the decision a milestone but said Wednesday that the period being reviewed was too limited.



Colonia Dignidad was founded by Paul Schaefer, a former medic in the Luftwaffe. After his World War II service, Schaefer became an evangelical preacher. He fled Germany after being accused of molesting boys at the orphanage he ran, and began what became home to several hundred Germans and Chileans in a strictly regimented enclave about 210 miles (338 kilometers) south of Santiago.



According to witnesses' testimony in court documents, Schaefer allowed Gen. Augusto Pinochet's security forces to operate a clandestine prison on the grounds where they detained, tortured and executed dissidents during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship.



Colony members say he ruled them cruelly as well. Married couples were forced to live apart, and children were separated from parents. Residents were prevented from leaving. Those who angered Schaefer were subject to electric shocks, high doses of tranquilizers and long periods of isolation.



Many "became real slaves of Schaefer, like robots dedicated only to obey his orders and not displease him,'' members said in a newspaper ad they took out in 2006 acknowledging human rights abuses at the colony and asking for forgiveness.



There were also dozens of allegations of child molestation, leading Schaefer to flee Chile in 1997. He was arrested in neighboring Argentina in 2005 and extradited back to Chile the same year. Schaefer died in prison in 2010, while serving time for abusing about 20 children at the colony.



"We hope that this information will contribute to clearing up the crimes that were committed there, so that the victims and their families can find the justice that they demand,'' said Chilean Foreign Minister Heraldo Munoz.
While the United States is the only developed country in the world that does not offer paid maternity leave for new mothers, both of the current Democratic presidential candidates support a national standard of 12 weeks of paid family leave.

Its not a new proposal, though. President Barack Obama called for it in his 2015 State of the Union address, but it drew quick opposition from some Republicans in Congress

It's not unusual in the United States for a new mother to quit her job after giving birth to a child. Sam is only 9 months old, and his mother, Lora, dreaded the thought of going back to work.

"I got only six weeks with him, and it is just not enough time. We needed someone to take care of him, but the cost of day care in D.C. is high. I would not be bringing home enough money to cover day-care bills," she said.

While the U.S. is nowhere close to a federal law that mandates paid maternity leave, some states are addressing the issue. A new law in New York assures new mothers 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. New Jersey covers 67 percent of six weeks of leave. California covers 55 percent of six weeks. Rhode Island covers four weeks.

"If you live in those four states, you would be covered and eligible to have paid leave, but if you live in the rest of the USA, it really just depends on whether or not your employer voluntarily offers those benefits, since we do not have any national programs to provide wage replacement," said Sarah Jane Glynn from the Center for American Progress.

US law 'has not caught up'

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders favor a national program that would allow new mothers to take 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. This is an improvement over the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act  which provides job-protected unpaid leave to government employees or those in private sector companies with 50 or more employees. But critics say that law covers only 60 percent of new mothers because only 60 percent of workers even qualify  and many new moms cannot afford to take time off.



"The U.S. has not caught up with the fact that most women today work. Our labor laws ... the majority were set a long time ago when families looked very different. Today the majority of women work, the majority of mothers work, even the majority of moms who have very young children are in the paid labor force," said Glynn.

Still, some companies do provide not only paid maternity leave but paid paternity leave as well.

New dad Joe is thrilled to have six weeks of paid leave.

"I think it is up to employers to pay or not, but the best employers are doing it now. It is good for the employee, which means it is good for the company," he said.



Opponents of a paid family leave law say its bad for business because its too costly.

"Small businesses cannot afford to have that burden on them. Also, the small businesses cannot afford increases in taxes," said one.



But supporters of the idea say the cost of paid maternity leave is very low relative to the benefit to the family.
A suicide car bomber in Yemen detonated outside the home of Aden's security chief, wounding at least two people.

Security guards fired on the attacker before the vehicle exploded. Reports said the attacker was dressed as a woman and had passed through several security checkpoints.

The security chief, Shallal Shayei, was unharmed.

It was the third attack on his residence since December.

The blast set off a small blaze outside the residence.

Yemen is embroiled in a conflict pitting Shi'ite Houthi rebels against the government. Militant groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaida have taken advantage of the chaos to commit their own acts of violence.
The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-N) formation of Welshman Ncube says it is shameful that the government has failed to assist in the repatriation of 32 Zimbabwean women stranded in Kuwait, who were promised lucrative jobs but found themselves performing menial jobs.

In a statement, the MDC-N said it is ironic that President Robert Mugabe recently travelled to New York to sign a climate change agreement, blowing thousands of dollars in the process, and yet his government cannot rescue the women and girls.

Another opposition party the Peoples Democratic Party led by Tendai Biti also issued a statement castigating Mr. Mugabe for failing to bail out the women and girls in Kuwait.

The statement read in part: The revelations by the government of Zimbabwe that it does not have money to repatriate about 200 Zimbabwean women who are stranded in the Middle East oil rich state of Kuwait once again confirms, what we in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have consistently said, that Zimbabwe is better off without a government than the ZANU PF curse it is enduring.

"In making this case it is important to flag out that section 35 (3a) of the Constitution of Zimbabwe is very clear that all Zimbabwean citizens are entitled to the protection of the State wherever they maybe. In light of this provision, the moribund ZANU PF regime is, therefore, clearly in breach of the Constitution by failing to extend protection for its citizens who have been turned into sex slaves in Kuwait."

The 32 are part of a group of about 200 Zimbabweans that were lured to Kuwait in the Middle East by some employment agencies after they were promised top jobs only to be turned into commercial sex workers and some low-paying jobs.



A parliamentary delegation led by speaker Jacob Mudenda is currently in Kuwait where attempts are being made to bring some of the women back home.

Controversial Zimbabwean businessman Wicknell Chivayo has reportedly bought some tickets for the womens flights to Zimbabwe.

Speaking on LiveTalk's Women RoundTable, one of the delegates who reached out to Chivayo from Kuwait, chairman of the parliamentary portfolio committee on foreign affairs, Kindness Paradza, said the tickets were already in their hands and they were making plans to repatriate the women and girls when their delegation leaves early Saturday morning.

"We are bringing the girls home and we will be meeting with the girls here in Kuwait on Friday to finalise their departure but we want to thank the Speaker Mr. Jacob Mudenda for spearheading the repatriation with the assistance of the Zimbabwe Embassy in Kuwait and Mr. Chivayo who bought the tickets for the girls," said Paradza.

Paradza said a delegation of ministers, medical staff and counselling staff would be at the airport to welcome the delegation and counsel the women and girls before reuniting them with their families.

He said some of them had been sexually abused as well as emotionally bruised.

"We have a huge welcome team prepared for our arrival. We are going to keep the identity of the women and girls secret to protect them and we will also be making sure they are reunited with their families safely after their arrival," added Paradza.

He also announced that Chivayo would avail tickets for the remaining women and girls in Kuwait being held against their will until all of them are back home.

Women's organisation and rights groups have been working tirelessly to bring the women and girls back home.

African Union Goodwill Ambassador on Early Child Marriages, Mrs. Nyaradzai Gumbondzvanda, welcomed the latest development in Kuwait .

She urged the African Union and Southern African Development Community to take action on human trafficking and for governments to ensure that conditions in member countries are conducive and are ripe with opportunities to deter young girls from being lured to unsafe countries on promises of greener pastures.

We need a strong Pan-African intervention around the issue of human trafficking. We cannot achieve Agenda 2063 if the young women and women of Africa are experiencing all these modern forms of slavery from child marriage, human trafficking all the kind of abuses we are seeing so we need as a continent to really step our efforts for opportunities for young women and girls so that when people chose to leave their countries they are going as a matter of choice and also with the full information and the legal protection around them, said Mrs. Gumbodzvanda.
The Zimbabwean government has selected Chinhoyi General Hospital as a center of excellence in obstetric fistula operations following successful medical procedures on 129 women, who sought help at the Mashonaland West health facility.

Health Minister David Parirenyatwa, who has been touring various health centers, said the hospital was selected as a result of its excellent reputation of carrying out obstetric fistula operations.

Dr. Parirenyatwa said United Bulawayo Hospitals in Matabeleland region is set to be accorded the same status.

Some international and local medical practitioners have been carrying out the obstetric fistula operations, designed to rectify women's injuries sustained when giving birth.

Dr. Parirenyatwa noted that there was need to mobilize resources to ensure that most poor women benefited from free surgeries.

United Nations Population Fund country representative, Dr. Cheikh Cisse Tidiane, who visited Chinhoyi Hospital with Dr. Parirenyatwa, said more than 500 women are on the fistula operations waiting list.

Dr. Tidiane said he was happy to see women who have lived with injuries for many years receiving free surgeries.

Joy, sheer joy, and nothing else was written all over the faces of some Zimbabwean women who recently underwent successful obstetric fistula operations at Chinhoyi General Hospital.

So far this year, 28 women have benefited from the program that seeks to correct a situation most of these women have lived with for as many as 20 years.

One of the beneficiaries Bliss Fambira from Nyamweda communal lands in Mhondoro said she developed difficulties in passing urine in 2010 after giving birth to her first child.

Fambira urged women with child birth scares to seek medical attention.

If there is someone suffering from this condition she should not be shy to share what she is facing with others because from such discussions one can find someone who is aware of organizations that help women in this condition.

Another woman, who only wanted to be identified as Chipo of Honde Valley in Manicaland province, had her family torn apart when she sustained injuries when giving birth 12 years ago.

Chipo said her husband left the matrimonial home saying he could not stand the putrid stench emanating from her urinal system.

Every time we went to bed my husband always told me that I was stinking. He said the smell was emanating from my damaged urinary system.

Women Health Alliance International coordinator, Fortune Mabhande, said their main objective in Zimbabwe is to end obstetric fistula.

Mabhande said the obstetric fistula operation program is also designed to impart skills to local doctors.

Women and Health Alliance International is working in conjunction with Chinhoyi General Hospital, the Ministry of Health and partners from the United Nations in tackling obstetric fistula in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwes opposition Renewal Democrats of Zimbabwe party led by Elton Mangoma claims that several homesteads belonging to its members in Mukuwamombe Village in Makoni North constituency, Manicaland province, were set on fire Tuesday night by suspected Zanu PF activists.

Party spokesman Pishai Muchauraya claims that the affected villagers lost several household items, including foodstuffs, when their homes were set on fire.

They lost everything, everything. The fortunate part is that none of them was injured in the fires but they are traumatized, said Muchauraya.

Muchauraya said they had to find safe accommodation for some of the victims while others were rushed to Harare for counselling.

He said the villagers reported the matter at Mayo Police Station but no one has since been arrested in connection with the arson.

He claimed that the development occurred following a weekend rally by known Zanu PF leaders who threatened opposition supporters in the area with unspecified action.

Police spokesperson Senior Assistant Commissioner Charity Charamba said they had not yet received a report of this incident. Zanu PF chairman Simon Khaya Moyo was not reachable for comment as he was said to be in a meeting in Victoria Falls.

Muchauraya added the villagers are also expected to pursue the matter through political channels.

We know that Zanu PF is frightened by the large numbers of people who are joining us, especially in rural areas thats why it is resorting to violence but we will not be intimidated, said Muchauraya.

Suspected Zanu PF activists in Masvingo this week threatened to kill MDC-T supporters, who attended a recent meeting addressed by party leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Zimbabwes Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku on Thursday dismissed an urgent chamber application by the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights or ZLHR to stay the reciting of the national pledge in schools until the court makes a ruling on the case.

ZLHR lawyer David Hofisi says the Constitutional Court will only hear the matter in June.

Government, through the ministry of education, introduced a national pledge which school children have to recite and Minister Lazarus Dokora said schools would start enforcing it starting next month.

President Robert Mugabe will now join 4.2 million pupils, parents and guardians in the inaugural national schools pledge to be recited in all schools on May 3.

The urgent application was filed Tuesday by a parent Mathew Sologani. The respondents were cited as Dokora, the headmaster of Mashambanhaka Secondary School, Mashonaland East, the headmaster of Chizungu Primary School in Harare and the Attorney General.

The Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights is representing Sologani, a father of three. The lawyers had argued in papers filed Tuesday that, the applicant (Sologani) is entitled to an urgent hearing of the matter due to the fact that he will suffer irreparable harm if his children are compelled to recite a pledge which is contrary to their views, opinions and beliefs.

The lawyers further said Sologani prayed for the following order:

The policy requirement for recitation of the national pledge in all schools and by all schoolchildren as required by the 1 st Respondent be and is hereby stayed pending the determination of the Constitutional Court Application filed in Case Number CCZ /16.

Respondent be and is hereby stayed pending the determination of the Constitutional Court Application filed in Case Number CCZ /16. Consequently, there shall be no recitation of the national pledge as required by the 1 st Respondent pending the determination of the Constitutional Court Application filed in Case Number CCZ 31/16 .

Respondent pending the determination of the Constitutional Court Application filed in Case Number CCZ 31/16 As such, the 2nd and 3rd Respondents shall not, require school children, including Applicants children, to recite the national pledge as formulated pending the determination of the Constitutional Court Application filed in Case Number CCZ 31/16.

Each party to bear its own costs.

The National Pledge

The pledge reads" Almighty God in whose hands our future lies: I salute the national flag. United in our diversity by our common desire for freedom, justice and equality Respecting the brave fathers and mothers who lost lives in the Chimurenga/Umvukela. We are proud inheritors of the richness of our natural resources. We are proud creators and participants in our vibrant traditions and cultures. I commit to honesty and dignity of hard work.

To illustrate his objection, Sologani quotes from the Bible, Exodus Chapter 5 verses 3 - 5:

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

Sologani also argued that he is also guided by the text of the Gospel According to Matthew Chapter 6: 5-6

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Sologani further said, It is apparent to me that what is being referred to as a national pledge is in fact a prayer. It is a prayer which exalts various secular phenomena including the national flag and the mothers and fathers who lost their lives in the liberation struggle."

He adds, "It is an address to Almighty God and salutation of various secular values in the presence of God. This is not my understanding of prayer or indeed that shared by my faith. Worship, to me, is reserved for God and for nobody and nothing else. Whilst it is laudable to extol the virtues of the diversity and even those of the Liberation Struggle, that is not done in the context of prayer. 

The Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe Teachers Association have both opposed the pledge calling it propaganda and unconstitutional.

Opposition Peoples Democratic Party president Tendai Biti called the pledge fascist.

MDC-T spokesperson Obert Gutu argued that the national pledge can also be viewed as some form of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in violation of Section 53 of the countrys supreme law.

But Dokora defended the national pledge, saying it derived most of its content from the Constitution of Zimbabwe.

The preamble to the Constitution carries a greater part of the content of the pledge."
Photo: BBC America, BBC One

We know well by now that theres no shortage of excellent British comedies, light and dark, readily available to watch. When it comes to science-fiction shows, though, would you be able to name anything other than Doctor Who? For some, that might be an easy yes, but for those of you who need a little guidance, weve compiled ten gritty British sci-fi shows worthy of your time  in honor of another foreign import, Canadas thrilling Orphan Black, in the midst of its fourth season on BBC America  that are streaming right now.

Misfits

Whats it about? The series opens as a seemingly normal drama  it follows a group of five petulant teens who are forced to work hours of community service due to having committed various small crimes. However, when a sudden electrical storm rages through their London neighborhood, the gang realizes they have procured supernatural powers that reflect their personalities; this, as you might expect, becomes a blessing and a curse. (But mostly a curse.) Soon enough, our lovable chavs are defending their home turf from all types of baddies who also possess newfound, often unconventional superpowers.

How gritty is it? The characters are vulgar, the dialogue is littered with profanity, and brutal violence often sneaks up out of nowhere. But Misfits, at its core, has both heart and an excellent sense of humor, which becomes more evident with each passing episode.

Where can I watch it? Hulu

Torchwood

Whats it about? As the dark, kinky spinoff of Doctor Who, Torchwood primarily revolves around hunky Who favorite Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) who leads a team of alien hunters in Cardiff as they attempt to keep extraterrestrial visitors at bay. When a newbie, Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), joins the covert organization, we become quickly immersed in the very weird world of modern alien lifeforms and technologies.

How gritty is it? Compared to the family-friendly Who, you might be surprised at how inherently gritty Torchwood is. Themes of corruption and existentialism (did we mention Captain Jack is immortal?) are often woven in with biting humor and sex. So dont be deceived by the Who association  this aint for kids.

Where can I watch it? Amazon Prime, Netflix

Utopia

Whats it about? Part sci-fi, part drama, part thriller, Utopia chronicles a small group of young adults who, after meeting in an online chat room about comic books, find themselves running from a cryptic organization called The Network when its revealed theyre in possession of an original unpublished manuscript of a cult graphic novel. As it turns out, the manuscript contains information regarding a deadly conspiracy, and The Network is willing to torture and kill to get it back.

How gritty is it? Its a nightmarish narrative, and theres a shockingly high amount of violence. Proceed with caution. (The aesthetics are stunning, though.)

Where can I watch it? Daily Motion

The Fades

Whats it about? Paul, a teenage boy on the cusp of adulthood, has a lot of issues  hes a social outcast, has frightening dreams, and wets the bed. So when he begins seeing visions of the Fades all around him, also known as spirits of the dead who are trapped and have yet to ascend Earth, it quickly becomes up to him to stop the embittered spirits from wreaking havoc on the human race.

How gritty is it? The Fades has a hearty mix of horror, supernatural drama, and teenage angst. And at six episodes, its an easy miniseries to watch in one sitting.

Where can I watch it? Hulu, Amazon Prime

Life on Mars

Whats it about? A skilled inspector wakes up in the year 1973 after being hit by a car in modern-day Manchester. Hes quickly forced to make sense of his new life and continue to work with the police department, but with a lowlier title and an eccentric partner. Perhaps his monologue from the shows opening credits describes the predicament best: Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? (If Life on Mars indeed piques your interest, a spinoff, Ashes to Ashes, may as well.)

How gritty is it? Its a gripping police procedural, so theres naturally a decent amount of grit and violence that comes with it. Tongue-in-cheek humor often makes its way in, though, to lighten the mood, and the 70s soundtrack is killer, too.

Where can I watch it? Amazon Prime, Daily Motion

Ultraviolet

Whats it about? Four words: Idris Elba, Vampire Hunter. This late 90s show depicts a detective who stumbles upon a secret government organization that investigates threatening vampire-related activity. He gets recruited into the organization with the hopes of finding out the truth about whether his friend turned into a vampire. In an interesting twist, the show takes a more scientific approach to stopping the baddies, known as Code Fives. Gone are the days of simple garlic-clove necklaces  wooden stake bullets are where its at.

How gritty is it? Pretty damn gritty. Did we mention Idris Elba stars in it?

Where can I watch it? Hulu

Being Human

Whats it about? An irresponsible ghost, an intelligent werewolf, and a refined vampire walk into a house  thats the premise of the first season of Being Human, which finds a trio of unlikely supernatural friends attempting to live together in perfect harmony while working and socializing amongst humans without arousing suspicion  which proves to be difficult when certain underworldly urges come a-knockin. (Its hard to find a constant supply of blood to consume in Bristol, after all.)

How gritty is it? A decent amount. But the dark, horroresque elements are evened out by the humor youd expect from such an amusing narrative.

Where can I watch it? Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime

Primeval

Whats it about? A professor of evolutionary biology and his merry band of associates are tasked with investigating earthquakes in time, which allow creatures from the distant past and future to appear in, and proceed to terrorize, modern-day England. The gang also has to capture these dinosaurs and parasites before any potential harm is exposed to the country, which often proves to be extremely dangerous, and sometimes deadly.

How gritty is it? Avoid if you have a major aversion to dinosaurs. But compared to other shows on this list, Primeval is noticeably lighter in tone and spirit. You can draw a lot of parallels between this and Doctor Who.

Where can I watch it? Hulu, Amazon Prime

Black Mirror

Whats it about? The simple premise of the dystopian miniseries Black Mirror is that it poignantly reflects on the darkest sides of modern human life and the unexpected ramifications of technology. However, it digs much deeper than that, and the anthology format allows the show to explore unique settings and realities to tell different narratives that are credible enough to terrify. (The creator, Charlie Brooker, also created Dead Set, an excellent horror-drama miniseries that chronicles the filming of the reality show Big Brother during a zombie outbreak.)

How gritty is it? A plot from the first episode involves the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom being forced to have sexual intercourse with a pig on live television. That pretty much sets the tone for the series, which is two short seasons, seven episodes total. (Netflix has commissioned a 12-episode third season.)

Where can I watch it? Netflix

Humans

Whats it about? Have you ever imagined a world where humans and robots live together in perfect harmony? Humans tackles that premise head-on: Set in the present day, the hottest gadget to own is a synth, or an anthropomorphic robot whose main purpose is to be a servant in your home. However, they might not be as robotic as they appear, as one family is slowly discovering.

How gritty is it? Its more suspenseful than gritty, and will likely leave you fretting about a potential future with high-functioning robots.

Where can I watch it? AMC on Demand
Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images

What do Richard Bransons home videos look like? Like him flying across the Atlantic Ocean in a crazy massive hot-air balloon, is what. Last week at the Tribeca Film Festival, the madcap $5.2 billionaire and Virgin Group founder debuted a documentary, Dont Look Down, about his pursuit of world records for ocean- and globe-crossing in boats and balloons, with intense home-shot footage of the many times he almost died.

It seems like a fitting lead-in to what Branson hopes will be the launch of commercial space travel in the next two years with Virgin Galactic (which hasnt had the smoothest track record thus far). We chatted with the 65-year-old Brit about American politics and his two favorite kinds of getting high  like, actually going into the air in spaceships and hot-air balloons, and smoking weed with Peter Tosh. Here are 14 things we learned.

We may see commercial space travel as early as next year.

Branson has said hed be astounded if Virgin Galactic doesnt take off in the next two years, but it sounds like it might be even sooner. When I asked him if he planned on hot-air ballooning next year, he replied, Next year, I think its more likely to be the space trip. Just how close is everything to completion? The spaceship has just been unveiled, beautiful. And now its going through its tests, he said. If and when it passes all its tests, hopefully with flying colors, well be up, up, and away. Im not giving dates, but the team are working diligently in getting it right.

He can neither confirm nor deny that Leonardo DiCaprio will be on the first official flight.

I think so. Im not sure, he said about Leos attendance, stoking the anxiety of some sure to be seriously pissed off gazillionaires, whove paid almost $5 million at amFAR auctions in Cannes over the years to get a seat on Leos spaceship  and pay witness to his zero-gravity Titanic reunion with other rumored space traveler, Kate Winlet (whos married to Bransons awesomely named nephew, Ned RocknRoll, and who once sort of saved Bransons mother from a fire). Weve got about 700 people signed up and theyve been pretty committed, Branson went on. Some of them have been signed up for as long as ten years since we started the program. But were not too long now, I think.

The reason hes most excited to go to space is because its fucking space!

I think thats the reason most people want to go to space, said Branson, laughing. Theres a wonderful book called The Overview Effect, by Frank White, which is interviews with all the people whove been to space and looked back on our Earth and our planet. And its so inspiring to read. Ive seen the iconic picture of Earth from the moon and I want to experience that myself if I can in my lifetime. And I want to enable, hopefully, tens of thousands of other people to have that experience in their lifetimes as well. Oh, and he also wants to put up a bunch of satellites to connect the half of the worlds population currently without internet, and get rich people from L.A. to Tokyo in an hour.

Brits cant vote here, obviously, but if he could, its a pretty safe bet that he wouldnt be voting for Trump.

Im not going to talk about specific people, Branson said, disappointingly, when I asked about the 2016 election, but I would dearly love to have somebody be in the White House whos all-encompassing and genuinely cares about this world we live in and somebody that, as the Pope said, builds bridges, not walls. Because itd be terrible for America to go inward with inward thinking and to start treating people in an abysmal way. Branson recently declared war on the War on Drugs, so how does he feel about Trumps proposal to make Mexico pay for an actual 1,000-mile wall along its border with the U.S.? Thats not the way to deal with people whove got drug problems, he said. If my children or sisters and brothers had a drug problem, Id want them to be helped. Anyway, putting walls up is not going to make an iota of difference. So yeah, not a Trump man.

Dont think hes feeling the Bern, either.

Are banks evil? Banks certainly caused a problem during the financial crisis of 2007, but theyre not generally the problem, he said. They caused a problem, and it was very painful for the world, and they deserve to be criticized for it, but its far too simplistic to start thinking that banks are the main problem in this world. He does sound like he will miss our current POTUS, though. President Obama, to have somebody of that intellect, somebody that people feel has got moral standards, in the White House is tremendous. I hope America appoints someone of that sort of caliber.

You can probably guess what his party affiliation would be, though.

Specifically, on environmental issues, theres no question, he said. The Democrats, by and large, understand that the world has a problem, whereas some of the Republicans bizarrely dont. So, for somebody who lives overseas, it is completely and utterly bizarre when 99 percent of scientists say one thing and then you get some Republican politicians still with their heads in the sand.

And hed probably live in Colorado or Oregon; hes way into marijuana decriminalization.

Branson is part of a global drug commission urging global governments, and America in particular, to treat drugs as a heath issue rather than a criminal issue. The War on Drugs has been an abject failure for 60 years, said Branson. Its caused untold misery. Its filled up Americas prisons, its created AIDS and HIV and thousands of hepatitis deaths. Its created an underworld, and its put $390 billion a year into the underworlds hands. Its been an abject failure.

Hes lost count of how many times hes almost died.

The first time Branson tried to set a world record, with the fastest crossing of the Atlantic by boat, in 1985, he capsized and had to be rescued by helicopter from the middle of the ocean. Then theres the time, two years later, when the hot-air balloon he was using to cross the Atlantic started rising on its own, deflating just before reaching the total implosion point of 44,000 feet. And oh-so-many more. Fortunately, Ive been through my nine lives, said Branson. So I know I dont have that horrible ninth one to go. He does, however, get flashbacks to all those times he almost died. I used to, he said, and then they stopped, and then I made the mistake of making this film, and Im now getting them again.

And even after all that, he still wants to try to circumnavigate the globe by balloon.

Branson tried to balloon his way around the world in the mid-90s, but gave up after Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones completed the feat before he could. Still, hes itching to get back up there. Would I do it again? I suspect the answers yes, Branson said. Once weve got the space thing out of the way, yeah, one day wed like to finish the job.

Can you blame him? He does make high-speed hot-air ballooning sound pretty unmissable.

When it goes well, its just breathtaking to be up crossing K2, some of the biggest mountains in the world, he said. Going all the way down the Himalaya chain was completely and utterly breathtaking and there are few people that have experienced it. I love adventure and ballooning is one of the ultimate adventures of all, particularly when you fly at that sort of height and those sorts of speeds. Its very quiet and this massive glass dome we had  the views out of it are all 360 degrees of stunning. Its fascinating how beautiful this world is that we live in. Everybody lives in these cities, so there are these vast amounts of unspoiled land and then you see a batch of lights. It does illustrate, fortunately, how much of the world is untouched and pristine and beautiful and worth protecting.

Want to set your own world record for something? Branson says its super easy.

Heres his advice: I think if you want to try to achieve something thats not been achieved before, youve obviously got to have the idea  the vision of what it is you want to achieve  and surround yourself with really good people to help you bring that dream into reality. And you need to ask lots of questions and hopefully youll get to the right answer at the end. Piece of cake!

Hes sorry you miss his Virgin Megastores, but youve got to give it up.

It was a lovely era, he said, but the industry is obviously different than when I was in it, and I think we were just lucky getting out of it at about the right time, I think. Recorded music, he said, is never going to recover, but concerts arent a bad investment. Live music will continue forever and its gotten stronger and stronger and stronger.

Kanye Wests endless tweaking of The Life of Pablo is Branson-approved.

If somebody wants to change the tracks on their album after theyve published, why not? he said. We may well change this film after its published. Who knows?

Oh, and theres that time he got super high with Peter Tosh (and, lets face it, probably a lot more times after that). It sounds amazing.

Branson lives in the Caribbean and mostly listens to older reggae music like the Gladiators and the Abyssinians, which reminds him of the time he sat outside of Peter Toshs house in Jamaica trying to persuade him to sign to Virgin Records just after leaving Bob Marley and the Wailers. After three days, [Tosh] lets me in, said Branson. And he has these pots of ganja and these spliffs he rolls, which are this big. Branson mimes something the size of a small baguette. And he then puts me through three hours to see if I will survive that. Finally, he agrees to sign with Virgin, and the first record he brought out was Legalize It, which became the anthem for [legalization]. So, very appropriate. Just how stoned was Branson after those three hours? He laughs. I was lying flat on the floor!
Jessica Lange in Long Days Journey Into Night. Photo: Joan Marcus/2016 Joan Marcus

Apparently, Jessica Lange had a path in mind. You might call it the Tandy Trajectory: that sequence of classic American roles, all memorably played by Jessica Tandy, from Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire to Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie to Mary Tyrone in Long Days Journey Into Night. But Lange, despite her 1992 Streetcar and 2005 Menagerie on Broadway, and her London Long Days Journey in 2000, did not seem a likely candidate to complete the trifecta here. Her Blanche and Amanda had been underpowered: finely shaded but barely perceptible ten rows past the proscenium. An explosive performer onscreen, Lange onstage seemed rather to implode, a trait that would be especially disastrous for the drug addict Mary in ONeills autobiographical howl of sadness. A Mary not fighting her family (and herself) with everything in her arsenal would all but dissolve in the plays famous fogs.

But something highly unexpected happened in the 11 years since Lange was last seen in New York: Her voice opened up, not just in volume but in range and color. Either that or sound technology has improved to the point that it can now make a symphony from a lone instrument. In any case, the change has allowed Lange to harness her interpretive gifts and triumph in a new Long Days Journey, directed by Jonathan Kent for the Roundabout. Her Mary has a broader emotional palette than any Ive seen, including that of Vanessa Redgrave, who made her Mary a harrowing wraith dying from the plays first words. Lange situates the character more as ONeill depicts her: at the beginning of a relapse, not at the end. She is still a coquette, not only in the moderately sunny opening, but also in flashes throughout, as she continues to wrestle with her illness. Its the struggle that makes the tragedy; indeed, her descent is far more painful for the shy pride she takes in her apparent good health at the start, and for the pleasure of her brogue as it occasionally flirts out like a well-turned ankle from beneath her long skirts. As a result, when she eventually heads up the long, long stairs of Tom Pyes set to the morphine vials in the spare bedroom upstairs, you feel every steps disaster.

The unexpected size of Langes portrayal seems to have surprised and upended the whole production. Usually it is Marys husband, James Tyrone, whose theatricality dominates. James is, after all, an actor  one who, like ONeills own father, traded a potentially brilliant career in the classics for the security of romantic hogwash. (In James ONeills case, the hogwash was The Count of Monte Cristo.) But Gabriel Byrne is oddly recessive and small-scale in the role, the junior player instead of the matinee idol hes meant to be. Its still a very smart performance, offering vanity, paranoia, love, disappointment, and worry in a flickering slideshow. You see his embarrassment at the way the poverty of his upbringing has permeated every crevice of his personality, like the fog creeping into the house and warping it forever. (Jamess penny-pinching, we learn, is the root cause of his wifes addiction.) But Byrne does not ultimately make an argument for his character thats strong enough to stand up to Langes for hers. Maybe its a simple matter of age: Lange is a few years older than Byrne, whereas Mary, as ONeill specifies her, is 11 years younger than James.

Not that we have to take ONeill literally. His insanely detailed stage directions  they go on for pages at a clip, naming even the titles of the books on the Tyrones shelves  are not indicators of realism but a kind of seawall defining its limits. Long Days Journey is not a documentary, however spiritually accurate it may be. Like The Glass Menagerie, its a memory play, with all the distortion that suggests. (ONeill wrote it in the early 1940s about events that took place around 1912; it was not performed until 1956.) Kents production, particularly Pyes set with its expressionistically tilted ceiling and ghostlike traveler curtain, gets that distortion just right. The way Mary is placed on the stage, often at the furthest down-left lip of the living room, on a little settee, makes her seem to loom out of frame like a silent-movie star. And Natasha Katzs exquisite lighting always manages to pick her out of the miserly dark, leaving the rest of the cast mostly in the murk.

Its not just the lighting doing that, though. The men  in particular the Tyrones two sons, humiliated Jamie (Michael Shannon) and consumptive Edmund (John Gallagher Jr.)  are not quite in the same play as their parents. At six-foot-three, Shannon literally sticks out from them, and his emotional temperature is different as well. Although his suit is just the right amount of spotty (the unerring costumes are by Jane Greenwood) and his perma-squint extreme, he is too hale and powerful to suggest the decadence of the son who failed to escape his fathers gravity. (Jamie works small jobs in the theater when James can procure them; at the summer cottage he does landscaping to earn his keep.) And Gallagher, despite an ONeill-like mustache and a solid grasp of the characters line-by-line posture, lacks the style to bring the authors stand-in to a full romantic boil. Hes often moving, especially in his hopeless mother-love, but its a detail-oriented, contemporary performance in a play thats anything but.

These imbalances do not at all sink the production, which though uncut weighs in at a relatively svelte 3:45. Long Days Journey needs every minute, even if its plot can be summarized in just a few words. (Illness and addiction destroy a familys romantic notions of itself.) The relentless repetitiveness of the characters, here somewhat allayed by the use of crosstalk, is part of the point: Liars eventually lie themselves to death. For the Tyrones no less than the ONeills, life itself is a hopeless addiction.

Long Days Journey Into Night is at the American Airlines Theatre through June 26.
Last week was the anniversary of Paul Reveres ride. Few events in American history have as much drama as his racing through the night to warn colonists that British soldiers were on the way. Much of our romantic interpretation of it comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellows 1860 poem that begins with the famous couplet Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. Today, critics note that its a farrago of historical inaccuracies, but it transformed Revere into an American icon.

Also last week, the current Broadway sensation Hamilton added a Pulitzer Prize to its numerous accolades. As a historian Im often asked how accurate Hamilton is. Is it good history?

The musical is based on historian Ron Chernows excellent biography of Alexander Hamilton which Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamiltons creator, read on vacation and by which he was immediately captivated. It helped cure my initial skepticism to learn how determined Miranda said he was to get the history right.

And he largely has. Among many other things, it accurately portrays the centrality of George Washington, most of the details of Hamiltons financial plans, and his work on the Federalist Papers. Many of the songs directly quote his letters. Its both artistic and accurate to have Washington explain his decision to retire from the presidency by singing If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on/it outlives me when Im gone.

Its also accurate to have King George III doubt someone would willingly step away from power. I wasnt aware that was something a person could do, he sings in one of his three hilarious songs.

But there are factual errors, too. Hamilton implies that Washingtons farewell address and Thomas Jeffersons retirement from Washingtons cabinet are much closer than they are. Its also wrong in saying that President John Adams fired Hamilton. Do these things matter? On a test, yes. Here, not so much. Its not the facts that make the musical work so well. Its the truth behind the story.

Some critics are determined to rake it over the coals not just for factual inaccuracies, but because it doesnt square with current political ideas. One writer complains that Hamiltons policies were not necessarily as in tune with contemporary progressive values as audiences leaving the theater might assume. After having listened to the soundtrack constantly over the past weeks, I can say there are few things apart from his opposition to slavery that would give an audience reason to assume that he was progressive, unless you define progressives only by their desire to have a strong national government. (Or unless you just assume that any story of an immigrant these days would be a progressive parable.)

Another criticizes the play for not including identifiable African-American roles (as opposed to African-Americans playing the all main historical parts), while another grouses that the play glorifies Hamilton, who was more a man for the 1 percent than the 99 percent.

David Marcuss essay, Hamilton haters are why we cant have nice things, offers the best response Ive seen to this. In our relentlessly politicized culture, some demand works of art must not merely be entertaining and insightful, they must be constantly investigated ... to find the ways they cross the boundaries of political correctness. But in reality the best you can hope for from historical art is that it will develop a framework and spur an interest in a subject that leads audiences to deeper learning.

This is just what Hamilton does, and its the best thing that a study of history, whether in the form of art or not, can achieve.
Leave it to the acclaimed piano duo Anderson & Roe that even when theyre doing something old, theyre doing it in a new way.

The ever-inventive duo of piano virtuosi Greg Anderson and Liz Roe have built a considerable reputation not only for their dynamic playing, both four-hand and two-piano, but for a vibrant repertory that doesnt stop at what the music fans hear in concert. Theres a virtual library of music videos that theyve written; a smaller, but equally impressive library of arrangements; and an online presence  blog/website/YouTube/Twitter/Facebook/Instagram  that fully connects them to fans, peers and patrons.

And theyve been doing this for 13 years since the two started performing together at Juilliard School, where they earned bachelors, then masters degrees and a reputation not only for superlative playing, but also for adventurous programming and clever promotion.

The two return to Waco three years after performing at McLennan Community Colleges Ball Performing Arts Center and will be playing for MCC again, but at the much larger Waco Hall. Its one of the final celebrations of the schools 50th anniversary year and, like their program then, it promises to showcase their dynamic style and range.

Anderson & Roe are Steinway Artists, representing the piano maker in MCCs Steinway Concert Series that celebrates the schools status as an All-Steinway School. Harry Harelik, executive director of the MCC Foundation, said not only did the two pianists play to a packed, standing-room-only crowd that night, but played multiple encores after three curtain calls and standing ovations.

For the 50th anniversary of MCC, we could think of no better Steinway diplomats than Anderson and Roe to return to headline the Waco community celebration of this anniversary, he said.

Anderson and Roe, interviewed by phone recently on their way from the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to a Cliburn

Foundation performance in Fort Worth, are equally anticipating their return to Waco.

We really enjoyed our concert in Waco, Roe said, with Anderson adding Its one of the concerts Ill never, ever forget. Part of his memories of that unforgettable night might have been an incident where a young audience member seated onstage got sick on Andersons side of the stage, prompting a brief concert break for cleanup.

Anderson & Roe will share the stage and the concert this time with the Waco Symphony Orchestra. The WSO, led by Music Director Stephen Heyde, will open with Brahms Hungarian Dances No. 5 and 6, which will set the stage for more Brahms  by way of Anderson & Roe  to follow.

The two will perform Brahms Double Concerto with the orchestra. The German composer wrote the work for violin and cello as featured parts, but Anderson substituted piano parts for those string instruments. Anderson, who arranges many of the duos pieces in addition to composing pieces of his own, found echoes of those string parts in Brahms earlier piano works.

The pianists will close the concerts first half with their really wild piano version of Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5. For the second half, theyll play Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals, narrated by Steinway & Sons Regional Manager Tommy Edds, before concluding with the premiere of their piano-orchestral arrangement of the Bacchanal from Saint-Saens Danse Macabre.

Like so many of their concerts, the May 5 performance will showcase the intricate choreography of their four-hand work, where two pianists share the same piano, and the sonic thunder of their two-piano playing. The latter will be magnified even more with the addition of an orchestra to the mix.

Were upping the ante, Anderson laughed.

Shake It Off

Those who follow the piano pair on their website and YouTube videos may have found encores previewed in smaller pieces theyve just released: Taylor Swifts Shake It Off and Mambo from Leonard Bernsteins West Side Story.

That wide-ranging, even sprawling musical range has characterized the duo over their nearly 14 years as a performing team, proving energizing even if sometimes exhausting.

Its been such an incredible journey and celebration with Greg, said Roe. Weve grown as friends and expanded our view of whats possible.

A busy concertizing schedule, new pieces and arrangements that must be practiced and learned, music videos that they create, keeping in contact with one of classical musics hipper fan bases plus separate personal lives (hes married, shes not)  how do they do it? Its all hard, and it comes naturally at the same time, Anderson said.

Energetic shows

Roe continued the thought. The hard part is the practical element of time. Were never at a loss for ideas, but touring takes a lot of energy, she said.

And its not just the two of them. I think we motivate each other to move forward, but theres definitely the audience. They give us so much appreciation, he said, and Roe agreed. Our audiences now come to the concert less skeptical and more supportive from the get-go, she said.

Through their energetic, passionate performances and inventive repertory, Anderson & Roe have brought new attention to the piano duo, a genre that makes casual fans think either of young sisters or beginning duets, she said.

Theyre more interested in finding connections in music, playing Bach next to Radiohead, than compartimentalizing pieces by period or style. Unifying it all is a love for beautiful music, wherever they find it  or make it.

Theyre all pieces we love and selfishly want to play, Anderson said. Its like we have this incredible box of crayons with infinite colors.
 The Connally High School theater department tunes up its state-bound One-Act Play production Lafayette No. 1 with a public performance at 7 p.m. Thursday at the high school, 901 N. Lacy Drive. $5. > Read more

 The Music Association of Central Texas honors notable local performers, musicians and music venues in its 15th annual Groovy Awards at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Waco Hippodrome, 724 Austin Ave. $10.

 World Hunger Relief, Inc., celebrates its 40th anniversary with Farmily Reunion activities at 6 p.m. Friday and 10 a.m. Sunday, bookending the annual Farm Day held from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. All activities at the farm, 356 Spring Lake Road. Free.

 Austin indie-rock band Darkbird stops off for a 10 p.m. Friday show with Loafers and The DiMaggios at Truelove Bar, 414 Franklin Ave., on the first leg of a Midwest and Canada tour. Free.

 Baylor Theatre alumni, faculty and others will read through the bulk of Horton Footes celebrated nine-play Orphans Home cycle Saturday at Baylors Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center at 11:30 a.m. and continuing until about 10 p.m. The theater will stage Story of a Marriage, a three-play cycle from Orphans, at 5 p.m. Free admission to the readings with play tickets at $20. Call 710-1865 for information.

 The Central Texas Choral Society and the Youth Chorus of Central Texas team up for Americana! Music of America, performed at 3 p.m. Sunday at Central United Methodist Church, 5740 Bagby Ave. $5.

 The Waco Jazz Orchestra plays Shades of Jazz at 7:30 p.m. Monday at McLennan Community Colleges Ball Performing Arts Center. Free.

New movies

 Opening Friday at Waco first-run movie theaters are Keanu, Mothers Day and Ratchet & Clank.
A Waco mother and her two sons who were injured almost three years ago when a Sanderson Farms truck slammed into the back of their car settled their lawsuit with the chicken processing company Thursday for $27.5 million.

Judge Vicki Menard of Wacos 414th State District Court approved the agreement during a short hearing that came after the parties in the case had been through two mediation sessions.

Waco attorney Jim Dunnam, who represents the family with Houston attorney Robert E. Ammons, said the proceeds from the settlement involve three insurance companies for Sanderson Farms and will be divided into three trust accounts that the family can draw on for long-term health and educational needs for the two boys.

One of the boys was 2 weeks old at the time of the accident and suffered severe brain damage that likely will leave him incapacitated for the rest of his life, Dunnam said. The boy, who is almost 3 now, cannot speak, walk or crawl.

The lawsuit does not identify the plaintiffs by name, only by their initials, and the Tribune-Herald is honoring Dunnams request not to name the family because the children are minors.

Obviously the injury to this child and the impact to this family are catastrophic, Dunnam said. But the results reached today, and the funds which will be safeguarded by the court, will allow this child to receive the best possible care and reach his fullest potential in life. While this has been a difficult fight, Sanderson Farms should be acknowledged for stepping up in the end to financially see to this childs care.

Waco attorney Jim Hering, who represents Sanderson Farms, said the company is pleased to put the lawsuit behind them.

I know they are looking forward to closing this matter up, Hering said. Sanderson Farms really cares about its employees. They care about their people, and I think this settlement today reflects how they take care of people when they step up and accept responsibility. They know with these settlement funds that this child will be taken care of for the rest of his life, and that was their idea behind this. They wanted to make sure this child was provided with the best medical care possible for the remainder of his life.

The mother, who was waiting to turn onto Timbercrest Lane from Loop 340, suffered a compound fracture to her left arm and other injuries in the November 2013 wreck. Her older son, who was 2 at the time, suffered minor scratches on his neck.

The infant, who was in a car seat in the back, suffered a fractured skull, massive brain damage and a collapsed lung. The injuries caused one half of the babys brain mass in one hemisphere to die and about a third in the other hemisphere to die, according to the lawsuit.

The Sanderson Farms truck, driven by Joshua Frank Perkins, was traveling 57 mph when it struck the back of the womans car, according to the lawsuit. After the impact, the womans car was knocked into oncoming traffic and was hit by a van.

Perkins told several versions of how the wreck occurred, the lawsuit contends, but he later told his girlfriend that he fell asleep behind the wheel and struck the car.

The lawsuit alleges that in the days before the crash, Perkins worked long and irregular work hours on a schedule which disrupted Perkins sleep patterns.

On the morning of the accident, Perkins said he got up about 5:30 to drive to work at a chicken farm in Chilton. He said he had to be in Chilton between 6:30 and 7 a.m. and that he normally worked 10 to 16 hours a day. In the week before the wreck, records show Perkins worked 67.5 hours, the lawsuit states.
A 47-year-old man was arrested on a charge of child indecency after a traffic stop by Waco police Wednesday. Jerome Stafford Jr. is accused of inappropriately touching a 12-year-old girl in March, Lacy Lakeview Police Chief John Truehitt said.

Lacy Lakeview police began an investigation after the girl told a school counselor about an acquaintance who touched her in a sexual manner on about March 20, Truehitt said. Officers collected enough information and issued an arrest warrant for Stafford on April 7, he said.

Officers with the Waco Police Department initiated a traffic stop on Stafford Wednesday night and discovered he was wanted on the warrant, Truehitt said. Stafford was taken to McLennan County Jail on a $20,000 surety bond.
The expansion is proof that many of the factors integral to the so-called Texas miracle  dynamics encouraging new businesses to settle here and current ones to expand  continue to engage, even though low oil prices globally have slowed our states enviable pace in creating jobs. A new report says Texas has lost 65,000 oil and gas jobs, which in turn has dampened other job prospects statewide. For instance, Texas construction industry lost 5,300 jobs in February.

Allergans evolving local presence is evidence of shrewd, insightful decisions about diversifying the Texas economy made in the wake of the major oil bust of the 1980s: It opened 27 years ago in Waco with 60 employees, lured here by Curtis Cleveland, longtime industry recruiter for the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce (and now an executive at Central Texas Iron Works), and Bland Cromwell, ever-busy industrial sales specialist at Coldwell Banker Jim Stewart Realtors.

In his remarks during the groundbreaking, Waco Mayor Malcolm Duncan Jr. made important points on how local dynamics make the expansion eminently logical, including our institutions of higher learning  Baylor University, Texas State Technical College and McLennan Community College. The plant will more than double its capacity to produce eye-care and dermatological products, create 250 jobs in the near future and unleash an economic multiplier effect on our economy, including in terms of construction. An analysis by Tom Kelly of the Baylor Center for Business & Economic Research forecasts an annual economic impact locally of $461.3 million. And, yes, Allergan will receive incentive money from the Waco-McLennan County Economic Development Corp. fund, though the exact amount remains under negotiation.

Given all the political interest here Tuesday, a few caveats: U.S. Sen. Cruz and other federal lawmakers must rally around House Speaker Paul Ryan in pressing overdue reforms to ensure our tax system is more fair and competitive, addressing problems pharmaceutical giant Pfizer sought to address in a now-shelved merger with Allergan, an Irish company. And while Lt. Gov. Patrick may well carry on his crusade for religious liberty, he should demonstrate extreme caution that it doesnt veer into ugly discrimination of the sort that caused businesses to recoil from North Carolina.
The pact by Republican presidential rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich to keep frontrunner Donald Trump from winning the nomination outright by forcing a brokered convention prompted plenty of ire on Sen. Cruzs Facebook page, little of it friendly. A sampling, with the spelling corrected:

Matt Reed: You have been mathematically eleminaTED from securing the GOP nomination. Be a patriot and step aside.

Dylan Wetherill: Ted Cruz is taking away the rights of Americans to choose their president. This is America  not a dictatorship! Anyone supporting Ted Cruz is an embarrassment to themselves and the people around them. Go Trump!

Imogene Yoder: More Trump [idiots] who dont understand how the process works. Hey! I know! Why dont you yell, Cruz cheated! That ought to convince people who understand the process.

Shonda Brown-Brennen: Are you really defending the process? Is the will of the people not important? How can you defend a process that is in place to undermine the voters and allow the party to choose whomever they like to represent us? Blows my mind that people are so blind to the corruption. Would you be defending the process if your candidate was the one being targeted? Think about the consequences of this in terms of our rights being taken away. Just because it favors your candidate is not a reason to defend it.

Mark Elliott: Shonda, the political parties are private organizations. There was a day when they did not even have primaries or caucuses. The party leadership decided which candidate it was. Be [grateful] that the people are involved today. The people have voted, the people vote for the delegates and the delegates vote for the presidential candidate at the convention.

Blair Gubernath: The Republican National Committee is a private organization that will soon have a severe drop in membership because of this crappy Soviet process. Defend the process all you want, but Sen. Cruz has proved hes a small man who cares nothing about the country. His only goal is to serve himself.

Chris Holloway: Cruz, its time for you to do exactly what you asked Kasich to do and he wouldnt. And thats drop out. You said and I quote, John Kasich has no mathematical path to the nomination. Neither do you, so take your own advice. Go and finish your term as senator and stop trying to steal this election.

Jodi Fleming: Ted Cruz is in bed with the GOP establishment and he is their puppet now. He will do anything to be elected POTUS including lying, cheating, stealing votes and much worse. I did like Cruz but these past months have proven what kind of person he really is. I will not vote for Cruz.

Iris Long: The media focuses on the fringe, but the heart of America is still alive and beating with hope for our future. We support you, Sen. Cruz, as our next president.

Mark Hargis: Its choosing whether you want to go along with establishment games and corruption or take a chance on a proven leader who speaks the truth, even if you dont want to hear it. Trump can do the job. You are losing your integrity, Ted. Quit the rigging of votes. Win it with honesty and integrity. Dont be a part of the GOP BS.

Jay Luttrull: You said Trump couldnt get over 30 percent of the votes, then he did. You said he couldnt get 40 percent, then he did. You said he couldnt get over 50 percent, then he did. Tonight [Tuesday] he is over 60 percent. The people are speaking. Why dont you listen? Time to get out and unite the party, Ted.

Ted Neely: Trump won five liberal Democratic states tonight, but they are all states that will go big for Clinton in November, so the wins mean nothing. Teds our only hope to beat Hillary one on one. It has to go to a contested contest or we are looking at a Clinton presidency. So sad.

Elena Ramirez: Mr. Cruz, no matter what happens, please do not give up! Do not give in. America needs you! True patriots see you as president. Dont let go for our sake! God can turn this around. He can fight the battle!

Faith Gentry McLamb: I am ashamed I voted for you! Teaming up with that loser Kasich. How dare you? You should let the people decide whats right and stop trying to steal the election.
Heartbreak, Texas, is 50 or 500 miles west of Houstons trendy sushi bars. I found refuge there after a traumatic divorce. Later, I found love, in the form of Sally Rae, the main waitress at The Waterin Hole Cafe. We married, and experienced a wild sort of happiness that men my age seldom see. My daughter, Janey, grew up and went to college. Along the way we inherited a special, savant sort of little genius, Lil Billy. More on him later; much, much more.

I tried to raise goats on a little ranch just outside of town. Tried is the important word here. My goats died almost as soon as they were born. Coyotes and other varmints accounted for most of the rest of that loss.

A banker, a barn fire and a galloping case of rheumatoid arthritis made Sally Rae and me move in to town, next to The Waterin Hole. We own it now; I never wanted to be a townie again, but lifes about bearing with what happens, not what you want to happen.

Fortunately for me, the lot out behind The Waterin Hole is several acres. There, I could indulge my habit of keeping a few chickens, my favorite goats, a hog and Bandit, my idiot dog. I worried that my animals might wake up the town early, even though Heartbreak was a tiny island of civilization in a sea of pastoral grandeur, but my worries were misplaced.

My first morning in town I was awakened by 120 donkeys all braying for breakfast. Imagine teaching a class of bass tubas, now put all those kids on teenage hormones, in a small room. Thats what those donkeys sounded like.

Donkeys are often called jackasses for a good reason. They are intelligent, social creatures with naturally bad manners. If a donkey can find a way to step on your last nerve, or foot, hell give up fresh corn to do it.

Mean Old Man Storm had found a new way to irritate Heartbreak, and he delighted in doing so. Years ago his only son went off and got killed in a boot camp training exercise. Before that, he was merely unpleasant. After that, his unhappy soul worked toward some dark perfection. People said he gave up dairy farming because theres a limited market for sour cream.

Jenny Caballara was, to be kind, just plain-looking. Her long, wrinkled face was softened just a little by her oversized, dark eyes. A donkeys mane stands straight up, stiff and bristly; and so did her hair. Her laugh, always used to show disapproval, was distinctly like a bray. This was a woman who, frankly, had spent too much time around donkeys. Both her appearance and her spirit had migrated toward Equus africanus asinus.

Jenny was the district representative for Donkeys Without Borders. This was a private-public partnership that re-homed the unfortunate donkeys that moved across the border from Mexico with a load of drugs on their backs. Always, they were released in the Northern Sonora Desert, usually in southern New Mexico or Arizona. These donkeys were creating an environmental disaster by stomping out Sonoran Desert tortoises. Someone in Washington, D.C., could not stand the thought of all those tiny bloody, broken shells; those precious claws, all baking in the southern deserts. Washington had a heart, and it was time for Washington to show it!

There might be immigration limits on two-legged refugees, but there would be no limit on undocumented, four-footed animals with a drug-smuggling history. The simplest thing would have been to round them up and send them back to Mexico, or just shoot them. They could have been sent to Japan as sushi on the hoof, but that would have been deemed inhumane and impolitic.

Donkeys Without Borders caught them, one by one. They paid ranchers, like Mean Old Man Storm, to feed them; $600 per month for every 40 donkeys, vet bills included. Mean Old Man Storm took three lots of 40.*

Anyway, Jenny made her way to Heartbreak near the first of every odd-numbered month to check on her herd. Funny thing, she didnt have a travel trailer, she didnt stay at the Heartbreak Hotel, but she usually she dined at The Waterin Hole, for about three or four lunches in a row during her visits.

Mean Old Man Storm came in on a Friday. Gimme a Jack, straight up! he demanded.

Without a word, Sally Rae brought him a Jack Daniels.

By now, I had developed a certain sense of when a man needed to drown his sorrows. There were several clues: Mean Old Man Storm was not known to drink. His tanned, deep, frown lines looked newly washed; that could have been sweat, but the streaks looked like tear marks. It was hard to tell when his mood varied from bad to dismal, or even downright nasty. But there was a final clue: He rode his horse into town so he wouldnt have to drive home. His horse, Old Nellie, waited patiently at our front hitching post and parking lot.

Gimme another, Sally Rae, he barked.

I sat down beside him. Its important to guide an amateur drunk from the fighting stage to the weeping stage and avoid collateral damage on the regular customers. I needed to protect my customer base as well as I tried to manage my herd.

I recollected that Jenny had eaten an usually brisk lunch here earlier in the day. Her normally horse-like face had been down-right mulish. She left a 2-cent tip and announced loudly, Thats plenty enough for this town! Then, she stomped out.

Mr. Storm, its plain to see you got a burr under your saddle. Whats happening? I asked.

Mean Old Man Storm downed his fifth straight drink and looked me dead in the eye for a full minute. I figured I was about to eat a whole can of whup-ass. Ive eaten several cans of whup-ass in my life; darn it, I never got a likin to it.

To my relief, he broke into tears. I was saved. Heres a hint to amateur drunks trying to drown their sorrows: do it at home, in front of the TV.

I loved that little Jenny! I thought she loved me back! All those days, watchin those donkeys grazing my pastures, biting and kicking each other; all those nights, watchin them huddled together, I thought Id finally found my woman. She was so sweet, so kind, so like me ...

At this point in his drunken confession I looked up at Sally Rae and ordered a Jack myself. Some things a man shouldnt have to do completely sober.

Well, what happened to ruin the Great Romance? I asked.

D**n Gubmint, thats what happened! Too many dollars, too little sense. You see, they put a chip in every donkey out there. They track em by satellite. One of em hadnt come in for three days, stayed in one spot in the North 40. Well, most of them burros look mighty much alike. Why, compared to cows, donkeys are as much alike as pennies in a pod! Why, they love you one moment, bite you the next, and theyll kick you quicker than a liberal can spend your tax money.

Mean Old Man Storm went on slandering the donkeys and liberals for a while longer. My mind wandered back to a psychology course some 40 years before, back at Baylor University. Transference, or substituting another for the object of ones wrath, crept to mind. Meanwhile, I learned all the bad habits of donkeys and all the virtues of Holstein cattle in far more depth than any ex-goat rancher ever needed (or wanted) to hear.

... Why, when a cute little Holstein, just 400 or 500 pounds, wants to breed for the first time; shell come up and rub on you, lick you, why, shell even ...

Stop right there, Mr. Storm. I think where youre headed is still illegal, even in the State of Texas!

Mean Old Man Storm collected himself somewhat.

So anyway, what has you so et up? I asked.

Today, Jenny counted the donkeys and we were one short. She told me that each one was satellite-chipped and tracked. We found the lost one, down in a ravine in the North 40. He had gotten all wound up in an old roll of bob-wire, and drowned in about two feet of water. Dave, youre my best friend; no one else ever came over and listened to me! You see, Jenny loved those Gubmint donkeys more than she ever loved me. I thought I had found my soulmate, my beloved other, my rancherita, my dream heifer ... Now, shes gonna pull the other 119 donkeys and Ill never see her sweet face again!

About now, Mean Old Man Storm surprised me yet again for the evening. He turned from a weeping drunk into a singing, weeping drunk and serenaded all The Waterin Hole and much of greater Heartbreak in a rich baritone and displayed an unexpected gift for lyrical improvisation:

Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows come

Why should my heart feel lonely and long for Heaven and home

When Jenny is my portion, a constant friend.

Her eye is on the burros and I know she watches over them

Her eye is on the burros and that is all she really needs.

(* Satellite-tracked, microchipped government donkeys really exist. Look it up. Transference is alive and well-documented.)

-----

David L. Mosley is a retired teacher who owns an 80-acre ranch in North Waco, where he raised goats until discovering he was really raising coyotes, bobcats and wild dogs. He is a fourth-generation Wacoan. He calls himself over-educated, underfunded and land poor, and he drives a broken pickup truck. Email him at David_Mosley1951@yahoo.com
Much like the town of West itself, Pichas Czech-American Restaurant is a cultural dichotomy that blends the best of both into an eclectic menu that is both European and Texan.

Diners might not find Czech fries  or seasoned sauteed potatoes and onions  in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, but they are among the most popular items on the menu at the little diner downtown.

Pronounced PEA-ka, the Picha family has been serving up good food and old-fashioned hospitality for generations. Back in 1980 when Patsy and Albin Picha first opened the place in the old Royal Confectionary building at 220 N. Main St., they wanted to offer their customers the best of everything that represents their Czech, German and American heritage.

The Pichas daughter, Jenene, took over the business in 1997.

My grandparents on both sides were Czech immigrants, she said. When my mother started grade school, the teachers encouraged the parents to speak English to them at home so they could learn the language. My daddy couldnt even speak English when he started school. Moravian was his native language.

That cultural influence was carried on as the family grew, and the restaurant was the heartbeat of their lives.

There were six of us kids, three girls and three boys, and weve all worked here. My kids have worked here; my siblings kids have all worked here. Its all kind of a family thing. All the members of our family have worked here at one time or another growing up, Picha said. Mama still worked here until she died last year at the age of 73. She was in charge of the pies. She was a real go-getter.

Her influence lives on in the recipes that she passed down and which Picha still serves to her customers.

Those pies  coconut, chocolate and lemon meringue  are served up in large slices with mile-high fluff baked to golden perfection.

Mama taught us girls how to make the meringue pies and the other desserts, Picha said. Most of them are her recipes. I know some of it she learned from her mama, and some of it she made up herself and some of it I made up as the years went by.

Those treasured recipes are like family heirlooms that are served day in and day out for their customers.

There are a lot of recipes we dont want to share, laughs Picha. The cucumber salad on the salad bar is one. We have a lot of people ask, How do you make your kraut because its kind of sweet? Youre not getting that recipe or our Czech fries recipe.

She wants customers to know some of their favorites wont change and strives to meet their expectations with every visit.

Everybody loved Mamas fried chicken and her turkey and dressing. I was fortunate enough to keep that tradition going, and I think I nailed it. Everybody loves it, she said.

The sweet and savory sausage and kraut plate, like most everything on the menu, is served with homemade bread giving diners the true mean of chutny, or delicious.

Hungry patrons include loyal travelers from near and far and locals who can find their home-cooked favorites at an affordable price.

We have lots of travelers, Picha said. We have our ones who travel from Dallas and Austin just to come here. Youd be surprised.

Chicken fried steak with fresh mashed potatoes and perfectly seasoned green beans appeal to the American appetite along with hamburgers and chicken and dumplings.

We always have fried chicken on Wednesdays for lunch, and people tell us it is the best around, Picha said. We always have three meats on our lunch special. They are served with three veggies, usually a potato and two more vegetables for $5.95.

Sides include a plethora of down-home favorites reminiscent of grandmas Sunday dinner table.

We make our own homemade mashed potatoes, and everybody loves them, she said. We have Broccoli Normandy, a trio of cauliflower, carrots and broccoli. We have a good salad we make called layered salad that everybody loves. Our fried zucchini, fried okra, mixed veggies, grilled veggies, green beans, pinto beans, lima beans, cabbage  all that stuff is homemade.

Lunch specials start at 11 a.m. and last until we run out, Picha said. On fried chicken day, that can even be as early as 12:30 p.m. but usually specials are served until about 2:30 p.m.

Cabbage rolls stuffed with ground beef, rice and onions and covered with tomato sauce are among the house specialties.

Bohemian sandwiches, such as fish and shrimp, are served on a hoagie bun. American entrees like fried liver, hamburger steak and chicken spaghetti fill up people who come by for a hearty meal.

We have a salad bar thats really good, and we also have other desserts like apple strudel and homemade peach cobbler, Picha said. We do not sell kolaches anymore because we have so many bakeries here in town.

The pub side of the house serves beer, even Czech beer, and wine.

The restaurant has been featured in Texas Highways magazine, the New York Times and Food Network magazine for its right-off-the-highway cultural offerings.

The century-old building lends to the informal setting with a rustic atmosphere.

The wiring is exposed on the ceiling, and we have three original two-blade ceiling fans and they all work, Picha said. We still have a lot of the old light fixtures that hang down from the ceiling. We have tin up on the walls. Its a unique place. Its a little hole in the wall, but its cute.

Pichas Czech-American Restaurant

220 N. Main St. in West

11 a.m. to 8:45 p.m. Monday, Wednesday-Saturday

11 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. Tuesday

254-826-3008

The restaurant is on Facebook
The famous Prada Marfa faux store/art piece may have Marfa in its name, but it's a half-hour northwest of the town on U.S. Highway 90 and is closer to the even-smaller Valentine, Texas (population 134 in the 2010 census). Photo by Cassie L. Smith

The idea of a town engulfed in art, artists and the creative spirit was more than enough to tempt me to West Texas.

If youve been itching for a road trip or feel the need to escape, heres some things to know about Marfa.

The West Texas town of less than 2,000 in the high desert of the Trans-Pecos, Marfa operates at its own speed and on its own time.

Despite the frustration of locked doors from businesses that opted to close because the wind changed direction, the less than eight-hour drive from Waco to Presidio County is well worth a three-day weekend.

Marfa is etched in art, from the varying architectural homes and structures to contemporary museums to the way residents use the countless cacti to decorate a front porch.

Why decorate with them?

We cant get rid of them, was a popular response.

Dont bother trying to blend in. They know youre a tourist, because they know everyone in town.

So embrace the semi-awkwardness of driving into someones hometown to gawk at houses that appear dropped from different parts of the county into the sandlot that is Marfa. Just remember to slow down and pull over for the locals actually trying to carry on their day.

Pack snacks and prepare not to have cellphone service the majority of the drive. Gas stations are few and far between the trip half-consumed by goats, cacti and century plants and the other with hills and rocks.

Plan ahead and make reservations. The hype surrounding Marfa leaves something to be desired without the realization that the town is struggling to create enough labor or residency to catch up to tourists desires. But just because the hype doesnt meet expectations, doesnt make the journey less worthy.

At 5:30 p.m. on a Thursday, the only place open to eat  that wasnt Dairy Queen  was Jetts Grill on the first floor of the Hotel Paisano, ensuring the amount of customers far outmatched the servers on hand. After a long drive consisting of junk food and music from every Disney movie except Frozen I was famished.

Jetts Grill showed no restraint with spices as the salsa, buffalo tenders and pistachio-fried sirloin steak all left you itching for quicker refills to drink. The servers were kind enough, and what the food lacked in pleasantness, the architectural displays of the hotel were worth eyeballing.

A half-mile from the center of the town, unpack a tent and embrace the temperamental weather that is West Texas. One day I bathed in sunscreen, and the next I was wearing everything Id packed. What you can expect is a dramatic dip in the temperature when the sun sets below the horizon that stretches on for eternity.

Inexpensive Camping

The Tumble In R.V. Park off U.S. Highway 90 features space for visitors to pop a tent at $15 a vehicle, plus $5 per person after the first two. Dont expect to be greeted with a smile. The small, family-owned park features a self-check-in camper. Its too beautiful at night to sleep indoors. Besides, Tumble In provides strong  and free  Wi-Fi, incredibly clean bathrooms and showers, and a community room featuring a washer and dryer, small kitchen, board games and a refrigerator. Dont forget reservations.

Those less interested in having a rabbit watch you pitch a tent or in feeling the strength of a wind unblocked by the flatlands, the Hotel Paisano  where James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson stayed during filming of the 1956 movie Giant  and Thunderbird Hotel, which has a total of 24 rooms, are available, among others. Whatever you choose, reservations are key, and planning is better. There is irony in trying to explain how space is limited in a town surrounded by nothing but space.

Leave dinner and drive nine miles east of town, and gather at the viewing area off Highway 90 to try and catch a glimpse of the Marfa Lights. Wrap up in a blanket and listen to childrens excitement as they point toward an empty field stretching toward the horizon, or at least swap conspiracy theories with newfound friends as to how those flickering colored lights keep dancing along the horizon. My favorite theory was there was an old man, without television or newspapers, who loves to light paper lanterns, sending the flickering speckle into the heavens for his deceased wife to see.

I was kidding about the amount of theories.

On a Thursday night, there was about 50 people nonstop coming and going from the viewpoint.

Tales of the lights date to 1883 when a rancher first spotted the colored mystery beyond the cacti and cries of coyotes. Marfa has since dedicated a viewing stage amongst the tumbleweeds where frustrated photographers attempt to focus their camera on a speck in the sky.

For a moment, enjoy the scene of a bunch of strangers coming together to stare into an empty field when a simple glance upward reveals the very real dropcloth of stars blanketing the nights sky.

Morning comes effortlessly as the sun readily sets fire to the desert, illuminating the sleepy town. Stumble over to Tumbleweed Laundry. Enter Frama through the bright orange door and prepare to be welcomed with Taylor Swifts Shake It Off blaring over the rich smell of coffee. Those with a sweeter tooth can partake in a wide selection of ice cream, from Spumoni, smores, oatmeal cookie and Mexican vanilla.

Coffee was all I wanted first thing in the morning and I enjoyed the menu made from Scrabble pieces. Theres also a community board of events in town. The board harshly pointed out Id missed Marfa stand-up comedy. There might have been some real pouting.

Some say Donald Judd helped put Marfa on the map for what some of the locals jokingly refer to as the drainage ditch. This I had to see.

Eccentric Arts

While at first glance the 15 outdoor concrete blocks outside the Chinati Foundation may not appear, well, more than blocks. Like much of Marfa itself, the pieces warrant explanation. Sprawling across 340 acres, the site was designed by Judd as a permanent spot for his large-scale installations. Now featuring a variety of artists, the site houses Judds concrete blocks of minimalistic art.

It may seem like blocks in a field, but in part its about how the light works with the material, transforming the pieces with the angle of the sun. The structures juxtapose the harsh concrete structure against the organic, flat land surrounding it. Concrete versus the dandelion sprouting alongside it.

Minimalism is about the material. Its never meant to be something else.

If youre not a big contemporary art fan  I tried  the $20 for the two-hour tour was well worth hearing about the rich history that prevailed before art in the middle of the desert. The tour guides proved to be full of information about what once existed along that land, including why theres a giant horseshoe serving as a tombstone for a horse.

The military headquarters of the Big Bend District in 1914, Camp Marfa became Fort D.A. Russell in 1930, named after a general who died in the Civil War.

My possibly tied-for-favorite part of the trip was discovering that Judd preserved paintings done by soldiers stationed at the base.

The tour takes you building by building throughout the base, and inside one structure worn from history, four paintings are framed behind Plexiglass to preserve whats left of the artistic side of soldiers stationed there during World War II. The cartoonish face of a soldier sweating and wearing headphones was painted above a doorframe. Morse code flows in one ear and out the other.

It says Piss Call,  my tour guide said, obviously eagerly awaiting whatever facial expression I gave him. Its an old Army joke.

Our guide explained how the painting illustrated a soldier taking down a message while needing to relieve himself, hence the beads of sweat.

With the end of World War II, the government returned the donated land to the city of Marfa, where it was later rescued by Judd for art. A four-hour tour of the exhibits at The Chinati Foundation is also available for $25, and includes a two-hour lunch break.

Whats open?

Driving around town, dont let the lack of Were Open signs deceive. Luckily, I was warned of this by previous visitors to the town. Even with the fly-by-the-seat hours prevalent in Marfa, when shops do open, owners dont go out of the way to let passers-by know. In a plain white building with green lettering, Ballroom Marfa on East San Antonio Street hosts rotating exhibits of art, film and music in a minimalist space. As if a prelude to the style inside, the doors to the building slide the opposite way, sending some frustrated art lovers away under the assumption its closed. At the other end of the block, Marfa Contemporary  which looks like a refurbished gas station  hosts various artists and installations. Both art museums are free.

And no matter how enticing it might be to catch a tumbleweed and lug it around in your vehicle for photo ops, maybe just enjoy the dry compilation of species in their element. Or you can find out the hard way like I did and stick it in the back of your vehicle with the rest of your camping supplies, only to spend the evening picking out thorns from your sleeping bag after lying down to sleep.

If the tumbleweed meets your hearts desire, take a can of spray paint  clear or color  and spray it down to keep it intact. You can thank a local for that tip.

Art Appeal

The best part of my trip was literally stumbling upon Brothers Fine Art Marfa, off West Texas Street. Owner Christa Brothers warmly welcomed me into her home-turned-art gallery. Brothers, who used to own and operate an art gallery in San Antonio, features pieces from artists across the world in her home, which was partly built in the 1800s. Brothers showcased art from people who had simply visited Marfa for a weekend and captured their view of the sky melting into the desert on a canvas.

Being out here, you cant do anything without working with the light, she said.

In the few years Brothers has lived in Marfa, she said a lot of the town is the need for explanation.

Just because you see something doesnt mean you see it, she said.

Brothers excitedly described each piece of artwork, what it meant to the artist and what it represents. Many of the pieces are abstract work created by artists visiting the town for inspiration, each showcasing a different view of the small town in the desert.

Over a glass of wine, she outlined how Marfa still isnt ready for the attention its received from outsiders.

Then again, she joked, it isnt ready for anything.

I could have listened to her for hours. Drop in and tell her hello. Bonus points if you bring her a rock. Shes a collector.

Was Marfa what I expected? No. Would I recommend a trip? Absolutely.

While I winged the trip with the hopes of discovering aspects off the beaten trail, for a much easier time, Id recommend going with a long itinerary, and making reservations in advance. That will give you options once you arrive at a business only to discover its doors locked during normal business hours. Marfa provided a different terrain than Im used to  breathtaking sunrises, sunsets and night skies, and a chance to understand art from a different perspective.

While youre there, never pass up the opportunity to talk to a local, especially about art.

Visit to Marfa

Travel time: Less than eight hours from Waco.

Once there: Marfa Visitor Center, in the historic USO Building, 302 S. Highland Ave. Call 432-729-4772.
My sister, Laura, and I looked up at the three-story Bungalow towering over the sidewalk in New Orleans wondering how to get past its locked front gate.

Less than three hours prior, neither of us had known where we would be by lunchtime. Now, only blocks from the French Quarter, we waited in front of a bed and breakfast somewhat at a loss for what to do next.

The trip was to celebrate my 30th birthday. Laura insisted we take a trip, but neither one of us could decide on a destination or had the energy to plan the details. When a friend recommended Pack Up + Go, a travel agency that planned mystery trips, we booked a weekend that afternoon.

The travel agencys website promised two nights and three days to a surprise destination. You set your budget, answer a short questionnaire and someone plans your trip. All I had to do was arrive at D-FW Airport at a predetermined time. A sealed envelope sent in the mail to open at departure revealed the destination.

What could go wrong?

The front door opened and a woman with a blond bob shouted down from the porch.

Are you my surprise girls?

Relief flooded through me. We were in the right place.

The woman introduced herself as Michelle and welcomed us by name. We dragged our bags up the stairs and through a wide hallway rimmed with crown molding into a dining room filled with visitors just finishing breakfast. Our room wasnt ready, but Michelle pulled out a map and gave us the rundown of the area. She armed us with mimosas, and we were off!

Hitting the French Quarter

The sun shone pleasantly as we marched deeper into the French Quarter, and I laughed in delight at our success.

My co-workers at the Tribune-Herald had been taunting me with stories of Flint, Michigan, and Akron, Ohio, as potential destinations for my mystery trip. They couldnt believe I would relinquish control of my vacation into the hands of a stranger.

A game for the Tribs readers was suggested: why not guess the location? The idea flourished and soon a video was posted online. Readers sent emails, texts and Facebook comments guessing locations that included Little Rock, Arkansas, to Berea, Kentucky. I had become the unofficial driver of an armchair adventure for our readers and felt responsible for delivering a good one.

The city sprawled in the sun, gripping the banks of the Mississippi River. The aroma of bile and sewage occasionally wafted up from the grates in the streets, reminding me of our proximity to the water. Plastic beads hung on porch railings and purple flags waved lazily, still celebrating Mardi Gras from a few weeks earlier.

Music washed through Jackson Square in waves. People strolled by singing aloud and jazz players stood on every corner. Halfway through the afternoon a brass band led a procession of cars through the square, opening the street to traffic in a daily ritual. It didnt matter where we were, rhythms beat throughout the crowds, providing a soundtrack for the trip.

Off the Beaten Path

Students traveling on spring break clogged most of the tourist attractions, so we veered toward seeing outside monuments and finding fun restaurants with good food. We stayed away from any of the popular ghost or cemetery tours but found a privately owned Museum of Death with a display on serial killer Ted Bundy. The exhibit had original newspaper sketches of the trial.

The short duration of the trip forced us to make decisions based on availability. After seeing its long lines, we decided to forgo the National World War II Museum for the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, which was empty and easily accessible.

We also walked right past the line wrapping around Cafe du Monde to purchase beignets at the cafe next door. We were happily eating our puffed pastries on the rivers boardwalk within minutes.

The pinnacle of the trip was dinner the first evening. We left the B&B after dark in search of food. Silent tourists weaved under the faux lanterns before pausing to listen as guides told haunting stories of the surrounding buildings. Any open restaurant could be seen ahead, the doorways spilling light and noise into the otherwise hushed neighborhood.

Exceptional Food

We paused on Royal Street to read a menu for Cafe Amelie, a New Orleans courtyard restaurant, when a woman stepped out.

You must eat here! It was amazing! I was so impressed. She said, her arms extended in emphasis.

She was right. The food was amazing. After we left, I felt cheated out of 30 years of sub-par fare. The world had lied about what stood as quality food. Never again would my standards be so low.

The restaurant was housed in the 150-year-old Princess of Monaco Courtyard and Carriage House. Chefs could be seen upstairs from our vantage point near the fountain. I chose the house special of the evening, which was a Louisiana redfish with a version of Creole sauce made with pecans. Laura ordered the same, but with a crawfish sauce. Neither of us offered to share.

Dessert was a chocolate bread pudding that put the beignets to shame.

I self-indulgently triumphed over my coworkers while spooning up the decadence.

In reality, I hadnt expected much from the trip: travel to a traditional city, eat some food, laugh with Laura and then go home. Rested, mildly disappointed that I hadnt gone somewhere else and ready to face a new onslaught of stories.

Great Experience

So far, our destination had superseded my expectations.

Few cities often live up to the hype people credit to them. Whether washed with nostalgia or linked to horror, most events retold can rarely match the same effect experienced. But the sights, sounds and smells of NOLA assured me some risks were worth taking.

Being shoved out of the monotony of my routine had opened the doorway to experiences I never would have considered. I needed someone else to lend me their perspective to wander outside my own habits.

The rest of the weekend was similarly successful.

I tried more food, drank and soaked up the citys atmosphere whenever possible.

The final morning we boarded the Steamboat Natchez, which pushed up the Mississippi for about an hour on its jazz tour.

The announcer explained how the Natchez is the only true steam-powered boat still operating on the Mississippi. We chugged past the Historical Garrison of Jacksons Barracks built in the 1830s, named for President Andrew Jackson, who used the site after his victory at Chalmette battlefield, which can also be seen from the river.

We opted out of the lunch offered aboard the cruise, which I would recommend. The meal is served indoors and looks to be the standard cafeteria offerings. The true value of this two-hour trip is sitting on the deck watching the scenery.

As we dragged our bags back down the stairs to the taxi waiting on the curb, I overheard Michelle explaining to another guest the premise of our stay. I smiled as her excitement grew.

Doesnt that sound amazing? she asked the unseen guest.

Yes, I thought, it does.

Pack Up + Go

Phone: 412-404-6545
Editors note: Recently, there has been discussion in our communities about changing the names of geographical features in the Brookfield area. The features incorporate the name Jim Crow, which has several historical references, most notably to the system of segregation and oppression of African Americans. The names most likely stem from the presence of an African American who lived and worked along the lower Columbia, Jim Saules. Eagle Reporter Diana Zimmerman went looking for background on Saules and found this information and text which are taken from Dangerous Subjects: James D. Saules and the Enforcement of the Color Line in Oregon, a thesis by Kenneth Robert Coleman, who received an MA in history from Portland State University in 2014.

James Saules was a free black man, born in the United States. In 1839, while in Peru, he joined the United States Exploring Expedition led by Charles Wilkes, a Navy lieutenant. There were six ships and a crew of 400 to explore and survey a vast area, including the South Pacific and the Pacific Northwest.

According to those either who knew or wrote about him, Coleman wrote, Saules fit the profile of the worldly, versatile, and independent black sailor. He was capable of maneuvering between various communities and cultures, while employing various means of survival.

One man believed Saules came from Virginia. How he came to be in Peru, no one is certain, but in 1846, Saules told US Navy Lieutenant Neil M. Howison that he had followed the sea 20 years.

At the time, sailing was one world in which a black man could make the same wage as anyone and be free from the deeply racist society at home. A multi-ethnic crew was not unusual.

Saules worked as a cook on one of the ships, the Peacock, for two years. He saw places like Antarctica, Tahiti, Hawaii and the Fiji Islands before the Peacock failed to cross the Columbia Bar and wrecked in 1841.

Desertion was a regular occurrence, and Saules was one of three that left the service after the shipwreck. The commander of the Peacock believed that Saules had fallen in love with a Chinookan woman.

Saules never returned to the sea.

Suddenly he was a man with options. He could have headed back east where there were few opportunities for a free black man; where he could risk being sold back into slavery by unscrupulous men looking for easy money. Instead he chose to stay in the northwest where the racial caste systems had not yet ossified. A government had not been established and therefore, neither had racist laws.

Saules built a cabin near what is now Fort Canby, and a year after his desertion, he began a boat service between Cathlamet and Astoria.

His craft was a small fore-and-aft schooner in which he carried passengers, livestock and miscellaneous freight, Coleman wrote. Traveling between these locations was not an easy task in 1842, as the Columbia had no channel improvements, dams, or levees. Therefore, Saules must have been a skilled and knowledgeable navigator. According to author E.W. Wright, [Saules] continued in this trade for a considerable length of time and made money. This was four years before James Birnie, the Hudson Bay Company employee who helped the crew of the Peacock at Fort George, moved his family from Fort George and established a trading post at Cathlamet.

The following year, Saules moved his wife and family to the Willamette Valley. He purchased a farm and a horse from a friend. At the same time, the Great Migration of 1843 had begun, and hundreds of white settlers were headed west to claim land alongside him.

Or maybe not.

The overland settlers also brought a distinct ideology that had a dramatic effect on regional laws, notions of property rights, and race relations, Coleman wrote. Their plan was to create a self-contained agrarian settlement with little use for the regions indigenous population.

It was a time when the settlers were afraid that Natives would not respect their property rights and the Natives were justifiably convinced that the newly arrived settlers would appropriate their lands.

New laws regarding property were imposed, and clashing cultures lead to misunderstandings. One incident involved a member of the Wasco Tribe named Cockstock who retaliated when a relative was flogged for entering the home of a local missionary. Walking into anyones home was an accepted custom, as was retaliation, for Native Americans.

Cockstock had been working the land for the man who eventually sold the farm to Saules. He may have even continued to work for Saules after the exchange. Bad feelings arose when the man sold Saules the horse that he had promised to give to Cockstock for all his labor.

Cockstock stole the horse and then harassed Saules and the other man for months. Saules wrote a letter to Dr. Elijah White, who had earlier announced to settlers that the U.S. War Department had assigned him as subagent to the Natives of the region.

SIR: I beg leave to inform you that there is an Indian about this place, of the name of Cockstock, who is in the habit of making continual threats against the settlers in this neighborhood, and who had also murdered several Indians lately. He has conducted himself lately in so outrageous a manner, that Mr. Winslow Anderson has considered himself in personal danger, and on that account has left his place, and come to reside at the falls of the Wallamette; and were I in circumstances that I could possibly remove from my place, I would certainly remove also, but am so situated that it is not possible for me to do so. I beg, therefore, that you, sir, will take into consideration the propriety of ridding the country of a villain, against the depredations of whom none can be safe, as it is impossible to guard against the lurking attacks of the midnight murderer. I have therefore taken the liberty of informing you that I shall be in expectation of a decided answer from you on or before the 10th of March next; after that date, I shall consider myself justified in acting as I shall see fit, on any repetition of the threats made by the before-mentioned Indian or his party. I am, &c., with respect, James D. Saules.

Cockstock had allegedly killed some members of another tribe who had considered acquiescing to some of the new rules imposed by White. A bounty was offered for the capture of Cockstock, and it led to his death. There was more than one version of the events, White describing him as a dangerous man going to a violent death, and another in which outsiders claimed he was coming peacefully to claim his innocence. The incident brought 70 armed members of Cockstocks tribe looking for answers.

People were on edge.

In 1844, Saules was arrested when a neighbor, Charles Pickett, asserted that Saules had threatened to incense the Indians against his property, to destroy the same; and that he...verily believes that unless measures are taken to prevent [Saules]...he will carry those threats into execution.

Two witness backed up Picketts assertion.

They claimed, Indians had come in a menacing manner; and that Saul [sic] said he would stand for the Indians rights; and that [Saules] was armed and prepared to do so; and that the Indians would burn and destroy his house and property. The jury, also comprised of American immigrants, three of whom arrived via the Great Migration of 1843, found Saules guilty of all charges.

According to Coleman, one juror was Picketts close friend and traveling companion. Four of the jurors were members of an organization led by Pickett. Saules was not given any legal representation, and these were not a jury of his peers. He wasnt even allowed to be considered a citizen of the United States.

Pickett was a young southern man who had grown up on a fruit plantation. He was pro-slavery and an outspoken white supremacist. He was also involved in land speculation and once squatted on a 640 square plot claimed by the Methodists, going so far as to plant crops in order to establish his own claim. He must have meant business because that was a lot of work for a man once described as a spunge and a loafer and above all a debaucher with Indian women by a Methodist missionary.

Pickett got the Methodists land and broke it up into lots which he sold before moving to California.

Meanwhile, Saules served time at Subagent Whites own home. Finally, Saules was told to leave the Willamette Valley and find work at the Methodist mission at Clatsop Plains.

White later spoke of Saules in a letter to the U.S. Secretary at War, stating that he remains in that vicinity with his Indian wife and family, conducting, as yet, in a quiet manner but with an about face said that Saules should be transported, together with every other Negro, being in our condition dangerous subjects. Until we have some further means of protection, their immigration ought to be prohibited.

Saules returned to his cabin overlooking Baker Bay and worked for the Methodist missionaries while Oregons provisional government instituted the Lash Law, which banned immigration of free black people to the region. If they dared appear and did not leave in a set amount of time, they would be flogged. And flogged again if necessary.

Two years later, Saules would have to move again over a land claim issue.

Saules was well known for failing to pilot the U.S.S Shark over the Columbia Bar. He had been willing to help when the captain was unable to locate a trained pilot to assist. Twenty minutes later, Saules had run the ship aground on Chinook shoal. The ship did not sustain any damage and later broke free. However, when it was time to return to the open sea, the captain attempted the passage himself and struck a bar. He got his entire crew to shore, but the ship was wrecked.

Saules worked aboard the Calapooia, a 35-ton schooner that carried freight and people throughout the region.

In 1846, Saules made the Oregon Spectator.

A negro man named James D. Saul was brought to [Oregon City] recently from the mouth of the river, charged with having caused the death of his wife, an Indian woman. He was examined before Justice Hood, the result of which examination we have never been able to ascertain, but the accused is at large and likely to remain so, we suppose.

Coleman wondered if there was a lack of evidence, or if it went away because the life of a native woman held so little value.

By 1848, Saules was commanding the Calapooia. One passenger later wrote that it was a queer kind of craft...built like a scow and rigged as a schooner. The passenger described Saules as an odd character who felt the dignity of this position of so fine a craft and that he was good natured, however, and we got along very well.

Another writer claimed that Saules later survived the sinking of the Calapooia near Astoria.

In 1850, Saules land on Cape Disappointment was given to the man who had acted as his judge in the Willamette Valley, Elijah White.

Saules doesnt show up again except in the 1851 ledgers of the Cathlamet general store. He is believed to have died sometime in the 1850s, possibly in a boating accident in 1851, when angry citizens attempted to apprehend three black men who were selling alcohol to Native Americans. The boat capsized and one man drowned, possibly Saules.

During his lifetime, he entertained his friends and neighbors with his fiddle playing.

One writer was impressed with the man. From his association with culture people [Saules] had acquire considerable knowledge of things in general and could sustain a very interesting conversation on a variety of subjects, he wrote.

According to Coleman, the 2007 Oregon Boating Guide, published by the Oregon State Marine Board, states that Jim Crow Point near Cathlamet was named for James Saules.

If this is true, Coleman wrote, Saules may have lived there toward the end of his life.
Boats belonging to gillnetters and anglers alike remain moored as fishery managers watch the number of spring chinook headed over Columbia River dams.

The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission at its March meeting reviewed fishery harvest reforms on the Columbia River that effectively remove commercial gillnetters from the mainstem river by 2017 but allows gillnetting in the lower river in select areas.

The three-year transition will be complete by next year.

It consists of harvest allocation shifts, with recreational anglers taking a larger chunk of the mainstem fishing while commercial fishing transitions to select off-channel areas, such as Youngs Bay and Knappa and Blind sloughs in Oregon, and Deep River and eventually to the Cathlamet Channel, all in the lower Columbia River estuary.

It also includes enhancing production of salmon in the select areas with more hatchery fish, all by the 2017 fishing season. The idea is to offer commercial fishing areas where few of the wild protected fish venture.

The plan also calls for the continued assessment of alternative commercial gear, such as seines, that it is hoped can be used in the mainstem with fewer negative impacts  mortalities  on wild fish surging up the river.

"The off-channel 'select areas' that now exist would be supplemented with the outplanting of additional chinook and coho to help make up for the loss of mainstem catch," according to the new fishing regulations adopted by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission.

The Columbia River Fish Management and Reform was a joint Oregon and Washington Policy initially adopted in 2012 and readopted in 2013. The shift in allocation has already begun, and each type of salmon has its own story.

The allocation to recreational anglers in 2013 for federal endangered species act impacts on spring chinook was 65 percent of the allowed catch with gillnetters on the mainstem river getting up to 35 percent of the total allowed catch. The actual ratio in 2013 was 60/35 with 5 percent unallocated.

That changed with the ratio of recreational to gillnet catch in 2014 - 2016 to be 70 percent recreational and 30 percent gillnet. For these years, allocation goals have been met.

In and after 2017 when gillnetters are no longer allowed to fish the Columbia River's main channel the ratio changes to 80/20 for spring chinook.

Summer chinook began with a 60/40 ratio in 2013 and moved in 2015 to 70/30. The allocation after 2017 is undecided. Actual in 2013 was 55/45, 60/40 in 2014 and 70/30 in 2015.

Sockeye is 70/30 and will go to 80/20 in 2017. Actual has been 70/30, 2013 15.

The allocation for lower Columbia River fall chinook and Snake River wild fall chinook is currently less than about 70 percent for recreational anglers and more than about 30 percent for gillnetters. That allocation ratio will move to less than about 80 percent and more than about 20 percent in 2017. Actual for LCR fall chinook in 2013 was 60/31 and 2014 15 has been 70/30.

Actual for Snake River wild fall chinook was 44/56 in 2013, 38/62 in 2014 and 55/45 in 2015.

Providing additional hatchery fish releases in select areas was also one of the policy objectives.

That is progressing, with actual releases through 2015 near the pre-program objectives, according to the summary. Actual releases of hatchery juveniles in 2015 were 90 percent of target for spring chinook, 93 percent for coho and 86 percent of target for select area bright fall chinook. ODFW will not meet its goal of brights in 2016 as the collection of broodstock in 2015 fell far short of goals.

In the second year of releases of select area brights by WDFW in building a new select area site near Cathlamet, the goal is not being met due to disease issues. With a goal to release 250,000 smolts each year, WDFW released 200,000 in 2014 and just 141,500 in 2015. WDFW expects to reach just 46 percent of its target this year.

Expanding commercial fishing opportunities may be having more success, but the opportunity in Oregon select areas is limited because fishing already was allowed there much of the year. Winter fishing is one time of year that has been expanded which has occurred in three consecutive years for an average of 20 additional days per year, the summary says. Participation and harvest have been limited, however.

WDFW has been evaluating Cathlamet Channel as an additional select area site.

ODFW is testing purse and seine fishing as alternative fishing methods, but seining in the fall took a high number of upriver chinook and has especially been harmful to released steelhead, which gillnetters are required, often unsuccessfully, to return to the river. The summer seining took moderate numbers of chinook, but sockeye numbers were high.

The average weight of chinook caught by seine fishers was 34 percent less than those caught in mainstem nets. The biggest issues with the seine fishery are low mark rates, so many fish must be returned unharmed, and the high startup and operational costs, according to participants in the fishery.

Tangle nets (less than 4.25 inch mesh) were tested in 2011 and found, for the most part, to have decent catch rates of hatchery fish, moderate mortality and low bycatch, but full use of the nets in 2013-15 are also taking up to 22 percent coho salmon. Tangle nets were required for five of the eight commercial fishing openings in 2015.

According to the summary, winter/spring chinook harvest for gillnetters in the mainstem totaled 891 fish: 10,999 chinook were harvested in select area fisheries for a total harvest of 11,890 chinook. That was 119 percent of the five-year average and the best take by commercial gillnetters since 2010.

At one point in 2015, upriver impacts left on the table by the recreational fishery downstream of Bonneville Dam were transferred to the commercial fishery under adaptive management provisions.

Commercial gillnetters in the mainstem fished ten periods in the early fall season over a record run of 1.3 million fall chinook, landing 33,422 chinook and 202 coho. In the late fall season, fishing was limited to five periods, but landings were high at 43,638 chinook and 819 coho.

Select area gillnetting in the fall took 18,087 chinook and 27,399 coho.

The return of select area bright chinook was just 75 percent of the five-year average and the lowest since 2010, and harvest of the fish was 70 percent of the five-year average.

Over both fall seasons, gillnetters caught 81,170 chinook, 119 percent of preseason expectations.

Coho fishing using tangle nets in October took a lower than expected percentage (67 percent) of hatchery fish.

Overall, changes resulted in 2015 in the second highest number of recreational angler trips to the lower Columbia River since 1982.

Anglers in the lower Columbia River caught a record high 103,600 chinook breaking the old record of 70,800 in 2014. Including areas upstream of Bonneville Dam, anglers caught 158,700 chinook, 21,800 steelhead, 28,300 sockeye and 37,900 coho in 2015.

For gillnetters, the overall catch was the second highest since 1989, largely because of record returns of chinook in 2015. Mainstem fisheries accounted for 69 percent of the commercial catch with select areas accounting for the remaining 31 percent.

From 2013 to 2015, the mainstem gillnet fishery targeting fall chinook accounted for 46 percent of the value of all commercial catches. Coho harvest in select area fisheries represented the second largest harvest component for commercial fishers.
MEMPHIS  Making proper use of one of Nebraskas State Recreation Areas, 105 athletes participated in the fifth annual Omaha Duathlon at Memphis State Recreation Area this past Sunday morning.

Participants ran 2.5 miles, biked for 14.5 miles and then ran a final 2.5, miles before finishing lakeside to the cheers of onlookers, family and friends.

Theres a lot of support, emotion, love and positive feedback out there, said Race Director Kurt Beisch with Race Omaha. The last person gets cheered on by the first-place person.

Race Omaha is a non-profit organization that puts on triathlons, kids events and camps, said Beisch.

Were giving the opportunity for people to do races. We started because there was nothing else established, he said.

The Omaha Duathlon in Memphis officially marks the beginning of Race Omahas season of activities.

Of Sundays 105 competitors, ages ranged from 21 to 66, said Beisch.

There were 12 teams and 22 first-time multi-sport athletes.

The majority of people are 30 to 40 years old. They have more time, money and energy.

The first across the finish line was Gerald Kubiak of Omaha with a time of 1:12:54.

The top 10 or 15 competitors to finish are highly competitive and race a lot, said Beisch.

But, regardless of the time that showed upon completion, all participants were greeted as they crossed finish line with pizza, beer and a smile.

If not lingering immediately afterward, racers could begin the road to recovery, as chiropractors and physical therapists set up tents to aid the needy.

And the needy had put a lot of wear and tear to their feet.

There is no water element in this multi-sport event, which differentiates it from triathlons.

Duathlons are for land animals. They like their feet on the ground, said Beisch.

Sundays land animals came from all over Nebraska, but some participants make the trek from Iowa, Colorado, Kansas and California.

The first female finisher, and third overall, was Holly Beavers from Belleville, Kan., finishing with a time of 1:13:57.

The event was well organized and ran smoothly, said Beavers.

However, the one hitch for all participants was the construction taking place on Highway 63, just north of Memphis.

Most of the miles biked in the race were on a milled surface. The route was not a loop, but seven miles west and back.

It was not bad on the way down, but real rough on the way back, said third-place female finisher Niki Kubiak.

The milled surface caused for a lot of jostling for riders on bikes.

I thought I was going to pop a tire, said Beavers.

Both Beavers and Kubiak said they had to grip their handlebars to the point of burden, just to stay on their bikes.

Barring the road construction, the event incorporated all that a State Recreation Area hopes to incorporate.

We love bringing this to the Nebraska State Pak system, said Beisch. Fifty percent of the people will not know this place exists.
NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING

Public notice is hereby given by the Board of Trustees of the Village of Mead, Nebraska, that a public hearing will be held at 6:00 oclock p.m. on Tuesday, May 10, 2016, at the Village Office, 312 S. Vine Street, Mead, Nebraska. The purpose of the hearing is to consider a Final Plat for a subdivision request from Mead Public Schools and will (1) review the final plat and other material submitted for conformity

thereof to village regulations and will (2) review any recommendations of the Village Engineer, (3) hear the recommendation of the Mead Planning Commission and (4) act on the request.

The land which is the subject of this notice and the public hearing is

described as follows:

MEAD PUBLIC SCHOOLS

SUBDIVISION No. 1:

THAT PART OF THE NORTH

WEST QUARTER OF THE

NORTHEAST QUARTER OF SEC

TION 35, TOWNSHIP 15 NORTH,

RANGE 8 EAST OF THE SIXTH

PRINCIPAL MERIDIAN, VILLAGE

OF MEAD, SAUNDERS COUNTY,

NEBRASKA; DESCRIBED AS BE

GINNING AT THE SOUTHWEST

CORNER OF LOT 6, MEAD DE

VELOPMENT 2ND ADDITION TO

THE VILLAGE OF MEAD, SAID

POINT BEING ON THE WEST

LINE OF THE NORTHWEST

QUARTER OF THE NORTHEAST

QUARTER OF SECTION 35;

THENCE S891425E (ASSUMED

BEARING), ON THE SOUTH LINE

MEAD DEVELOPMENT 2ND ADDI

TION TO THE VILLAGE OF MEAD,

A DISTANCE OF 720.71 FEET TO

A POINT ON THE WEST RIGHT

OFWAY OF ELM STREET, SAID

POINT BEING THE SOUTHEAST

CORNER OF LOT 1, MEAD DE

VELOPMENT 2ND ADDITION TO

THE VILLAGE OF MEAD; THENCE

S010626E, ON THE WEST

RIGHTOFWAY OF ELM STREET,

A DISTANCE OF 525.13 FEET TO

THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF

LOT 2, MEAD DEVELOPMENT

SUBDIVISION; THENCE N8917

57W, ON THE NORTH LINE OF

MEAD DEVELOPMENT SUBDIVI

SION, A DISTANCE OF 366.05

FEET TO THE NORTHEAST COR

NER OF LOT 6, MEAD DEVELOP

MENT SUBDIVISION, THENCE

N891538W, ON THE NORTH

LINE OF LOT 6, MEAD DEVELOP

MENT SUBDIVISION, A DISTANCE

OF 353.44 FEET TO A POINT ON

THE WEST LINE OF THE NORTH

WEST QUARTER OF THE

NORTHEAST QUARTER OF SEC

TION 35, SAID POINT BEING THE

NORTHWEST CORNER OF LOT 6,

MEAD DEVELOPMENT SUBDIVI

SION; THENCE N011417W, ON

THE WEST LINE OF THE NORTH

WEST QUARTER OF THE

NORTHEAST QUARTER, A DIS

TANCE OF 525.67 FEET TO THE

POINT OF BEGINNING; CON

TAINING A COMPUTED AREA OF

8.68 ACRES MORE OR LESS.

MEAD PUBLIC SCHOOLS

SUBDIVISION No. 2:

THAT PART OF THE NORTH

WEST QUARTER OF THE

NORTHEAST QUARTER OF SEC

TION 35, TOWNSHIP 15 NORTH,

RANGE 8 EAST OF THE SIXTH

PRINCIPAL MERIDIAN, VILLAGE

OF MEAD, SAUNDERS COUNTY,

NEBRASKA; DESCRIBED AS BE

GINNING AT THE NORTHWEST

CORNER OF LOT 1, NORTH VINE

SUBDIVISION, VILLAGE OF

MEAD, SAUNDERS COUNTY, NE

BRASKA; THENCE N010334E

(ASSUMED BEARING), ON THE

EAST RIGHTOFWAY OF VINE

STREET, BEING THE EAST LINE

OF HANSONS FIRST ADDITION,

A DISTANCE OF 305.98 FEET TO

A POINT ON THE EASTERLY EX

TENSION OF THE NORTH LINE

OF BLOCK 4; HANSONS FIRST

ADDITION; THENCE S892056E,

ON SAID EASTERLY EXTENSION,

A DISTANCE OF 110.05 FEET;

THENCE S005939E, A DIS

TANCE OF 305.35 FEET TO THE

NORTHEAST CORNER OF LOT 1,

NORTH VINE SUBDIVISION;

THENCE N894026W, ON THE

NORTH LINE OF LOT 1, NORTH

VINE SUBDIVISION, A DISTANCE

OF 109.68 FEET TO THE POINT

OF BEGINNING; CONTAINING A

COMPUTED AREA OF 0.77 AC

RES MORE OR LESS.

June Moline, Village Clerk

12082799;Apr 28
WAVERLY  Erica Peterson of Waverly has always had a dream of visiting farms in other countries.

The opportunity to see that dream come true came about while attended a Nebraska Young Farmers Conference.

We had a speaker talk to us about the IFYE (International Foreign Youth Exchange) program and how give young adults the opportunity to see agriculture in other countries, she said.

And they were especially looking for students who had an FFA and 4-H background. And I had both.

Peterson soon began to fill out all the needed paper work and recently received word that she will be one of three young ladies from Nebraska who will leave for Europe the end of June.

Peterson said she didnt have her complete itinerary yet, but she knew that she would be visiting farms in Poland and Switzerland, returning to the states in December.

During this time Ill be working on different farms, experiencing the different cultures, Peterson said.

And she has been told that some families will treat her like she is on vacation and some may work her to the bone.

But no matter what, she is prepared.

I have been busy learning the basic words in Polish and German so I can communicate with people, she said.

The three young ladies have been through orientation in the state, but once they leave Nebraska will join a larger group of young adults in Washington D.C. for more orientation before departing for Europe.

During the six months overseas, Peterson will spend two weeks with each family.

I figure I could be visiting up to 10 farms, or so, she said.

She will go to Poland first and come September, she along with all the other youth will have two weeks to visit countries on their own. From there she will travel to Switzerland.

Peterson says she hopes to gain a more worldly view of farming in those countries.

I want to be able to say I know how they do things, she said. I want to learn from them, see first hand on how they do things.

She said she was excited about the trip.

This is something I have always wanted to do, Peterson said. In fact I have had my passport for years.

Peterson will graduate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln next week with a degree in agriculture education leadership and a minor in animal science.

Shell have a few weeks to pack, but says that has been made easy for her.

They have told me not to pack the closet. They told me what is needed, and how it can all fit in one bag which has made it easy.

Peterson said that she would not mind continuing to travel overseas, but at this time, she knew she would have to come home and get a job.

And she has another big event planned.

Im getting married June 2017 so besides finishing school, getting ready for this trip, we have been working on wedding plans, she said.

Its a challenging time for me, but Im ready for it.
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Genesee & Wyoming Inc. owns and leases freight railroads. It operates through three segments: North American Operations, Australian Operations, and U.K./European Operations. The company transports various commodities, including agricultural products, autos and auto parts, chemicals and plastics, coal and coke, food and kindred products, lumber and forest products, metallic ores, metals, minerals and stone, petroleum products, pulp and paper, waste, and other commodities. It owns or leases 122 freight railroads, including 105 short line railroads and 2 regional freight railroads located in the United States, 8 short line railroads located in Canada, 3 railroads located in Australia, 1 railroad located in the United Kingdom, 1 railroad in Poland and Germany, and 2 railroads in the Netherlands with a total of approximately 16,200 miles of track. The company also operates 6,200 additional miles of track that is owned or leased by others. In addition, it operates deep sea maritime containers and provides bulk haulage, including coal, aggregates, cement, and infrastructure services. Further, the company provides rail service at approximately 40 ports; rail-ferry service in North America, Australia, and Europe; and contract coal loading and railcar switching for industrial customers. Genesee & Wyoming Inc. was founded in 1899 and is headquartered in Darien, Connecticut.
Parker-Hannifin Corporation manufactures and sells motion and control technologies and systems for various mobile, industrial, and aerospace markets worldwide. The company operates through two segments, Diversified Industrial and Aerospace Systems. The Diversified Industrial segment offers sealing, shielding, thermal products and systems, adhesives, coatings, and noise vibration and harshness solutions; filters, systems, and diagnostics solutions to monitor and remove contaminants from fuel, air, oil, water, and other liquids and gases; connectors, which control, transmit, and contain fluid; control solutions for extreme corrosion resistance, temperatures, pressures, and precise flow; and hydraulic, pneumatic, and electromechanical components and systems for builders and users of mobile and industrial machinery and equipment. This segment sells its products to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and distributors who serve the replacement markets in manufacturing, packaging, processing, transportation, construction, refrigeration and air conditioning, agricultural, and military machinery and equipment industries. The Aerospace Systems segment offers products for use in commercial and military airframe and engine programs, such as control actuation systems and components, engine build-up ducting, engine exhaust nozzles and assemblies, engine systems and components, fluid conveyance systems and components, fuel systems and components, fuel tank inerting systems, hydraulic systems and components, lubrication components, pilot controls, pneumatic control components, thermal management products, and wheels and brakes, as well as fluid metering, delivery, and atomization devices. This segment markets its products directly to OEMs and end users. The company markets its products through direct-sales employees, independent distributors, and sales representatives. The company was founded in 1917 and is headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio.
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After Paul Mumford left school he went and worked in the banking industry. Raised on the family's dairy farm at Won Wron in South Gippsland, he was a farm boy who also had a very good head for figures.

But after eight years of working in banking, Mr Mumford swapped his indoors job and returned to the family farm in the foothills of Victoria's Strzelecki Ranges.

Dairy farmer Paul Mumford on his Won Wron farm. Credit:Joe Armao

Now 46, his family have been Murray Goulburn suppliers for more than 50 years continuously. His lengthy career as a dairy farmer, detailed knowledge of finance and numbers, and his long association with Murray Goulburn means he is uniquely placed to assess the dramatic news from the dairy processor that rocked the Australian dairy industry on Wednesday.

And in a nutshell, he's disappointed by what he's heard. The payments he was expecting for milk from his 420 cows have been cut, and the value of his supplier shares in the co-operative has slumped as the market responded to news of Murray Goulburn's woes.
Fact: Housing investors are helping increase supply and that's taking pressure off house prices. Last year, Australia constructed a record 220,000 new dwellings  65 per cent were purchased by owner/occupiers and 35 per cent by investors. The investors are vital to helping Australia meet its housing shortfall. Myth: Negative gearing disproportionately benefits surgeons and anaesthetists Fact: There are 891 anaesthetists and 1020 surgeons who negatively gear. By comparison, there are 89,900 clerical staff, 48,900 teachers and 33,700 nurses and midwives who negatively gear. Changes to negative gearing will shut the door to these people to build a "nest egg" for the future. Myth: Negative gearing is a big hit on the budget Fact: The cost to the budget of negative gearing is dropping. Net rental losses from investment properties have fallen from $7.9 billion in 2011-12 to $3.7 billion in 2013-14. This is a drop of 53 per cent in two years.

Myth: Negative gearing is a rort that does nothing for the economy Fact: The property industry employs 1.1 million people. The construction of a typical home involves 40 tradies and contractors. The industry is a vital part of the economy. Labor's negative gearing policy puts an additional $32 billion in taxes on property over the next 10 years. But all these arguments miss a bigger point  those blaming negative gearing for all the woes in our housing markets have constructed a strawman. When in fact the chronic undersupply in the past decade  leaving a deficit of 200,000 homes against demand  is the root cause of escalating prices and where policymakers should turn their attention. In Sydney, we are still paying the price for the policies of the previous state government that declared "Sydney is full". The prices that families, couples and singles are paying for housing in Sydney, and in other capitals is a direct result of policies that hinder supply.

No one can escape the laws of supply and demand  and policies that smash negative gearing and drive up capital gains tax, will affect investment decisions. It is only in recent years that we have started to tackle the housing deficit in our country, and as we have done so, house prices and rents have started to moderate. However, demand pressures will remain as our population grows. In Sydney alone, it is estimated we will need to construct an additional 44,000 dwellings every year for the next 15 years just to keep up with demand. During a time when housing investment is vital for jobs and to keep a lid on housing prices, the Grattan Institute and the federal Opposition are proposing radical changes to property investment. They are arguing that property owners, who last year paid a record $45 billion in property taxes (up over 10 per cent), should be slugged even more. The Opposition has said its policy will not impact investment decisions. My question is when was the last time a government took an extra $32 billion from an industry and expected it to have no impact?
"They will not come to Australia, I want to be very, very clear about that," said the prime minister about a group of asylum seekers.

But which prime minister was it? And when were the words uttered?

Because it sounds very similar to this statement: "Asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia."
The Productivity Commission has recommended the free import of books, the free use of copyrighted material under new so-called "fair use" rules, a leglislated guarantee that consumers have the right to defeat internet geoblockers and much tighter restrictions on the granting and use of patents, under reforms it says could save consumers up to $1 billion a year.

Consumers should also have a legislated right to defeat internet geoblocks set by such companies as Amazon, it says.

Subtitled Copy(not)right, the draft report of the commission's nine-month inquiry into intellectual property finds copyright terms are way in excess of what is needed, offering more than 100 years of protection for works that ought to be protected for 15 to 20 years.

It says the typical commercial life of a book, film or piece of music is less than five years, but that Australia's copyright rules often grant 120 years, which is the life of the author plus 70 years.
"The low level of Newstart is encouraging the unemployed to seek higher income support in the form of disability payments. This is both psychologically damaging for the individuals and costly for government. The differential between the disability payment and Newstart needs to be substantially reduced although it need not be eliminated," KPMG found. Low unemployment benefits discourage workers from changing jobs, the analysis warned. Credit:Tamara Voninski Social Services Minister Christian Porter said the government was giving no consideration to increasing base payments for the unemployed. "A $50 increase in the base rate of Newstart was estimated by ACOSS [Australian Council of Social Services] to have the astonishing cost of nearly $6 billion over four years . This Government doesn't believe in more taxing for the sake of more welfare spending, nor in borrowing more money to expand welfare expenditure. And where savings can be found inside the welfare system, the priority has been for expenditure in important areas such as childcare and budget repair rather than across the board increases in base payments," he said. There are more than 725,000 people claiming Newstart, fewer than the 825,000 people who claim the Disability Support Benefit.

The Newstart payment is currently set at $263.80 a week - or less than the $271 nightly allowance MPs and senators receive when they stay in Canberra. This week it was reported that the Human Services Department had found nearly one in 10 Newstart recipients were using doctors' certificates to sidestep requirements to attend job interviews. KPMG found Newstart effectively locks some people into sticking with jobs rather than moving around the jobs market. "The low level of Newstart has the effect of locking people into jobs for fear that they could not survive on Newstart and cannot risk moving jobs. There may even be dimensions here in the start-up and small business sector. The very low safety net may act as a disincentive to take risks," the report found. Greens Senator Rachel Siewert has a bill before Parliament that would increase Newstart by $50.

She said KPMG was right in its finding that political rhetoric had prevented the payment from going up. "The demonisation of our vulnerable Australian's seeking income support by the Government has ramped up blatantly in the lead up to the budget. I dread to think what they have in store for these people on income support who need our support," she said. Broadly, KPMG recommended a series of streamlining measures to the welfare and health systems to address the long-term deficit. "It is clear that based on our current policy settings, government expenditure will increase faster than revenue projections. What we are doing now, and have been doing for almost a decade is simply not sustainable," it found. "The entire political spectrum  spanning government and business leaders - needs to be concerned about, and agree to act on this."
The co-founder of internet browser Mozilla Firefox has revealed in a viral personal essay published on Facebook that he is unable to see mental images.

The essay, which has been shared more than 9000 times, details writer and programmer Blake Ross' experience with aphantasia, a condition that prevents a person from being able to visualise images in their "mind's eye", essentially rendering them "mentally blind".

Mind's eye: A Facebook post expressing what it's like to live with aphantasia has been shared more than 9000 times. Credit:Getty

Sufferers struggle to visualise items such as the face of a relative on demand. However, they rarely have trouble placing names to faces they see in real life, only struggling to put faces to names in their mind.

Ross discovered he had the condition after reading a New York Times article published last year, covering the publication of a study by researchers at the University of Exeter which first coined the term "aphantasia" (from the Greek, meaning the "absence of fantasy").
The Australian economy will be $72 billion worse off if it does not dramatically increase the number of students completing high school, a new report has found.

The research, commissioned by the Australian Education Union and completed by former World Bank economist Adam Rorris, comes just a week before the federal budget.

It warns that future expenditure will blow out by at least $60 billion in unemployment benefits and incur a $12.2 billion loss in tax revenue by 2070 if current trends are not reversed.
A 60-year-old Australian charity worker in Afghanistan was kidnapped at gunpoint by two men who talked their way into her compound by posing as Afghan intelligence officers, the chairman of her organisation has said.

Dominic d'Angelo, chairman of the charity Zardozi, told Fairfax Media by phone from the Afghan capital, Kabul, he believed that no contact had yet been made with the kidnappers.

Katherine Jane Wilson, who goes by the name Kerry, was taken about 5am on Thursday from her office in the eastern city of Jalalabad. Local authorities were interviewing the NGO's staff members, Mr d'Angelo said.

"My understanding is that two people came to the door at approximately five o'clock yesterday morning claiming to be members of the Afghan national directorate of security and spoke to the gatekeeper of the building, who let them in, at which point they produced guns," he said.
Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida gestures during a press conference at the International Media Center in Hiroshima, Japan on April 11, 2016 after Foreign Ministers meeting of G7 countries visit the Peace Memorial Museum. [Photo/IC]

As announced by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying on Wednesday, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida will finally make a three-day visit to Beijing tomorrow, a visit he and his government have eagerly anticipated.

This is understandable considering the strained bilateral ties and, more recently, the Tokyo-orchestrated G7 declaration on the East and South China seas.

Tokyo has appeared anxious for high-level exchanges, but it has a lot to clarify and explain to Beijing.

From Beijing's standpoint at least, Tokyo had eaten too many of its words previously. So many so that it hardly matters what it has to say this time.

The Shinzo Abe administration has a serious credibility problem in handling relations with neighboring countries, China in particular, so Beijing's frustration and disappointment is justifiable as well as understandable.

As both Beijing and Tokyo have admitted, however, the two countries are inescapable neighbors. Not to say they have grown too dependent on each other economically to pretend they can live well without dealing with the other.

Some may resist such a meeting at such a juncture, believing the atmosphere is simply not right.

Certainly there may not be anything substantive about a meeting like this. It will neither settle any dispute, nor bring any genuine rapport.

It has to be, will be, about damage control, about crisis prevention.

That is exactly why Japan's top diplomatic envoy is arriving in town tomorrow and planning to stay till Sunday.

Like his colleagues at home, Kishida may go back on his words soon after he returns from a China visit. We will not be surprised if such an episode reoccurs. But that should not be the reason for Beijing to shut its doors to him.

After all, he had just talked about establishing a new kind of bilateral relations "commensurate with the new times". It will be interesting to hear how he explains Tokyo's recent moves that were provocative to China. And it helps when Beijing has better knowledge about Tokyo's vision of bilateral ties.

Like it or not, Beijing and Tokyo have to communicate and coordinate on many thorny issues, of which the sanctions on Pyongyang is one.

And it does matter how China and Japan manage their relationship and if they get along well. Kishida was correct in putting that as the two countries' common responsibility.
Prime Minister Christie is reported to have said that the National Insurance Board (NIB) scheme is not sustainable.

Of course, and I paraphrase here, he blames this eventual bankruptcy on more claimants than contributors, unemployment, fraud, slowing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), the financial crisis, compliance problems, and last but not least, the attack on our financial services sector.

And whats going to fix this litany of problems? You guessed it, a new multi-million dollar IT system.

Nowhere does the prime minister mention the $200 million he just transferred to prop up the failing Bank of The Bahamas.

Not once does he mention the millions upon millions of dollars the government has borrowed from the NIB fund for buildings etc that is yet to be repaid. This government debt by the way is reported to be more than 50% of the schemes portfolio.

Is this just one more speech abroad to make it sound as if the government is doing the right thing only to return home and forget what he said? After all, its not that these problems have been unknown for a decade or more.

Like everything else, the countrys debt will be increased until the international community stops them and more NIB taxes and VAT increases will be slammed to the already beleaguered taxpayer.
Bridge deck work at two different locations in Graves County start this week
By Paul Schaumburg, Graves County Schools Apr. 28, 2016 | 03:32 PM | MAYFIELD, KY

The Graves County School District announced Thursday that its nutrition services department is taking all appropriate precautions to ensure that no contaminated chicken is served in its cafeterias.

Pilgrims Pride Corp., a Waco, Texas establishment, is recalling approximately 4,568,080 pounds of fully cooked chicken products that may be contaminated with extraneous materials, including plastic, wood, rubber, and metal, the U.S. Department of Agricultures Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced (April 28, 2016), according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture web site.

I am in contact with the local health department inspector and the vendor who supplies us chicken, said Graves County Schools nutrition director Shelina McClain. We are following their instructions to ensure that if we find any unsafe food products that we dispose of them quickly and appropriately.

Mrs. McClain is very thorough and detailed in her work and she reinforces that standard constantly in her department, said Graves County Superintendent Kim Dublin said. Im grateful for the diligence she and her department follow. Another asset in situations like these is her close contact with the local health department and the vendor. I believe the dedication and collaboration of these individuals and their organizations ensures that our cafeterias continue to serve uncontaminated, healthy food. I want to thank all of them publicly.

Both Dublin and McClain emphasized the only reason they are announcing their efforts is to reassure students, faculty, staff, and their families that the recall Pilgrims Pride has issued and the national publicity surrounding it are being addressed in their district and that the cafeterias are safe in their schools.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Apr. 28, 2016 | BENTON, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 28, 2016 | 03:41 PM | BENTON, KY

A new home manufacturing facility will soon be opening in Benton, creating up to 150 new jobs.



Gov. Matt Bevin announced Thursday that housing manufacturer Champion Home Builders Inc. plans to lease a 100,000 square-foot building on Venture Lane, and will be spending $6.3 million on new state-of-the-art equipment, as well as refurbishing existing equipment to build manufactured homes.



The Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority has preliminarily approved $2.25 million in tax incentives for the company.



"We are pleased to welcome Champion Home Builders to the Commonwealth and are excited about the opportunity to create 150 jobs for hard-working Kentuckians in Benton," Bevin said. "This location will allow Champion to utilize the logistics and distribution advantages that make Kentucky an ideal home for manufacturers. We are excited to see this kind of growth. This is a great day for western Kentucky and the state."
By The Associated Press Apr. 27, 2016 | 05:35 PM | FRANKFORT, KY

Republican Gov. Matt Bevin has vetoed all or parts of seven bills passed on the last day of the legislative session.

Bevin's vetoes mean Kentucky will not have a new driver's license that complies with federal security standards. Bevin had said he supported the new driver's license but said he changed his mind after noticing what he called "tremendous opposition" to the bill.

His vetoes mean some Kentucky high school graduates will not have free community college tuition beginning in the fall. Instead, the program will start in 2017.

And Bevin's vetoes mean some parents won't be able to send their children to public preschool programs. The budget bill included language that expanded the program's eligibility requirements. But Bevin vetoed it, saying the state could not afford to pay for it.
By The Associated Press Apr. 27, 2016 | 04:55 PM | FRANKFORT, KY

Former Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear has released tax returns from his final year in office.

Beshear and his wife earned more than $351,000 in 2015. About $135,500 came from salary. The rest came from investments, rental income and Social Security and retirement benefits.

The Beshears paid more than $65,000 in taxes and received a refund of more than $8,800. They gave more than $8,000 to charity.

Beshear noted he has released 10 years of his individual tax returns dating back to his first campaign for governor. He criticized Republican Gov. Matt Bevin for not releasing his tax returns.

Bevin says he discloses what he must under state law. He has said his taxes are private and not anyone's business.
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By The Associated Press Apr. 27, 2016 | 05:02 PM | LEXINGTON, KY

The University of Kentucky has suspended a fraternity for five years for alcohol and hazing violations.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reports a letter from Denise Simpson of the university Office of Student Affairs said Phi Kappa Psi engaged in behavior including forcing pledges to drink until they vomited, watch gay pornography and do calisthenics in pools of vomit.

Current members are required to remove all Phi Kappa Psi paraphernalia and move out of the fraternity's housing by May 8. They may not meet as an organized student group.

University spokesman Jay Blanton said the punishment came after an extensive investigation of multiple reports of hazing.

The newspaper said fraternity member R.J. Ariel accepted responsibility on the fraternity's behalf. The paper said neither he nor the national Phi Kappa Psi returned calls for comment.

___

Information from: Lexington Herald-Leader, http://www.kentucky.com
Rita Redmond was a true lady who felt that every pupil had something to gift to the world
PARK RIDGE HEALTH WANTS USED BIBLES FOR PRISON AND JAIL MINISTRY

Park Ridge Health is dedicated to providing compassionate care to the whole person: body, mind and spirit. That is why it is once again partnering with the Bible Toolbox Project to provide Bibles to Blue Ridge Prison and Jail Ministries.

Park Ridge Health will serve as a drop-off site for people wishing to donate used Bibles, in any condition.

Simply bring the used Bibles to the Park Ridge Health Main Campus. You will find drop boxes located at the front entrance to the hospital and outside the Park Ridge Health Cafe during the month of May.

This partnership falls directly in line with the Park Ridge Health mission to Extend the Healing Ministry of Christ, says Jimm Bunch, Park Ridge Health President and CEO. Our associates are thrilled to invite our entire community to join us in this effort to give more people access to the hope and inspiration the Bible can offer.

Blue Ridge Prison and Jail Ministries provides Bibles for inmates in prisons or jails in Western North Carolina. Prison and Jail Chaplains often do not have budgets for Bibles. Many inmates have said having access to a Bible during their time in prison was their only source of peace and hope.

We have seen our guests find comfort in reading the Bibles that are available to them here on our main campus, says Chaplain Michael Lombardo, Park Ridge Health Director of Pastoral Services. We are excited to be able to provide Bibles for others in our community who are in need of comfort.

The Park Ridge Health Bible Toolbox Project runs from May 1-31, 2016.

Drop-off used Bibles in any condition

Park Ridge Health Main Campus:

Main Hospital Entrance

Outside Park Ridge Health Cafe
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Set against the spectacular beauty of Lake Superiors north shore, this coming-of-age story starts with aimless adolescent goofing around but builds, gradually and subtly, to devastating emotional effect. A remarkably assured feature-film debut from writer-director Andrew Cividino, Sleeping Giant also manages to be down-deep Canadian without any dutiful CanCon obviousness.

Premiering at Cannes and snagging awards at both the Toronto and Vancouver film fests, the story centres on three teenage boys, all played with easy, unforced naturalness by relative newcomers. (Two of the kids, Nick Serino and Reece Moffett, were non-actors found in an open casting call in Thunder Bay.)

Adam (Jackson Martin) is a shy, sheltered kid whose urban upper-middle-class family owns a cottage on the lakeshore. Cousins Riley and Nate (Moffett and Serino) are townies, currently living with their grandmother in a small, slightly rundown house.

Riley is sweet and socially adept, a good kid, but Nate is volatile and angry, already sensing, perhaps, that the world waiting on the other side of adolescence isnt going to open up for him.

Cividino and co-writers Blain Watters and Aaron Yeger incisively examine socio-economic class, adolescent identity and family dynamics, without ever being explicit about these issues. Rather, the film concentrates on the characters moods, which are shifty and unpredictable, pulled around by restless physical energy.

Adams nervous parents pester him about wearing his bike helmet and sunscreen, but out of their sight, hes exhilarated by Nate and Rileys recklessness, joining in as they whack things with sticks, set things on fire, attach fireworks to skateboards, and rip off liquor from the gas-station convenience store. More ominously, a legendary 30-metre cliff looms large in the boys imaginations. Its been nicknamed Todds Cliff after some poor kid who died trying to jump off it into the lake, and we sense it will feature, maybe fatally, in the outcome of this story.

The tippy triangular relationship among the boys becomes even more unstable when Nate spitefully tells Adam that his father (David Disher), an aging hipster a little too desperate for cool dad status, is involved with a local woman. Meanwhile, Riley and Adams bond is challenged when Riley starts making out with Taylor (Katelyn McKerracher), Adams childhood friend, though the jealousy doesnt play out in the expected way.

Cividino spends a lot of time watching kids mope around and do stupid stuff but his filmmaking is sneakily disciplined. Hes aided by sharply beautiful cinematography from James Klopko and a brooding score from Chris Thornborrow and the band Bruce Peninsula.

D FILMS Sleeping Giant

This is adolescence without Hollywood hijinkery or European poetry. Cividino is compassionate towards his characters but also stark in his exposure of the casual cruelty and intense self-absorption of adolescence. While the story is about teens, it isnt made for teens. In fact, Sleeping Giant should probably be watched only by adults, who can look back knowing they somehow managed to live through those confusing, difficult, sometimes dangerous years.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

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Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow the Free Press to deepen our reporting on theatre, dance, music and galleries while also ensuring the broadest possible audience can access our arts journalism. BECOME AN ARTS JOURNALISM SUPPORTER Click here to learn more about the project.

D FILMS Tayor (Katelyn McKerracher) in Sleeping Giant. D FILMS Sleeping Giant D FILMS Adam (Jackson Martin) D FILMS From left, Jackson Martin, Reece Moffett and Nick Serino.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/04/2016 (2371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

EDMONTON  Albertas largest union is to have an unusual guest at its ceremony to honour workers killed or injured on the job.

The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees says for the first time ever the provinces labour minister will attend its annual day of mourning service Thursday.

Union president Guy Smith said having Minister Christina Gray speak at the event indicates the NDP wants to make meaningful improvements to workplace safety.

Smith said the union hopes that will include making it easier for employees such as social workers, hospital emergency room staff and correctional officers to get help for post-traumatic stress disorder.

We are seeing many more members coming forward with these psychological issues. Really, what we need to see is changes to law and legislation that really supports and protects workers who are suffering from PTSD, Smith said Wednesday.

By having it recognized formally in legislation  I think that might open the door to people coming forward more. A lot of people suffer in silence.

In 2012, the Progressive Conservative government passed legislation to give first responders such as police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians coverage for PTSD without having to prove their condition is work-related.

During debate on the bill then-opposition NDP member Rachel Notley proposed an amendment that called for including correctional officers, social workers and emergency health employees in the legislation.

Notleys amendment was voted down.

Smith said the union has been lobbying the NDP to take action to broaden the legislation to cover more workers since it won the provincial election last May.

He said the challenge is the government has so many other issues on its plate that change could take time.

The labour minister is well aware of our concerns, Smith said. We would like to see it sooner than later but we also want to make sure that they get it done right.

Last month Gray announced a review of the Workers Compensation Board, including coverage for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Gray said the government wont decide if and what it will change until the review is complete next year.

I definitely think this is a topic worthy of consideration and I dont want to judge the work that panel will be doing, she said Wednesday.

Albertas review will include a look at legislation that came into effect in Manitoba this year that recognizes PTSD as a work-related occupational disease for any employee who has WCB coverage.

She called Manitobas legislation very progressive, but said the review panel will look at how other provinces and the federal government deal with PTSD.

In the meantime, Gray said it is important for the labour minister to speak at the unions day of mourning event.

I think being there to recognize that there is more we can do for safety and to take care of our employees is critical, she said. I dont know why a labour minister in the past would not have attended, but it is certainly a priority for me.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VANCOUVER  A decision by Earls restaurants to ditch Alberta beef in favour of U.S. meat that is free of added hormones has prompted a backlash from cattle ranchers and threats to boycott the Canadian chain.

The company announced this week that it would become the first restaurant chain in North America to serve only beef with the U.S.-based Certified Humane designation, raised without the use of antibiotics, steroids or added hormones.

Earls spokeswoman Cate Simpson said as the companys commitment to conscious sourcing deepened, it spent nearly three years searching for a Certified Humane producer in Canada that could meet its large supply needs.

A Earls restaurant is pictured in North Vancouver, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A decision by Earls Restaurants to ditch Alberta beef in favour of hormone-free U.S. meat has prompted online threats to boycott the Canadian chain. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

They just werent able to increase the level of production they have, but hopefully one day they will and then we will happily switch back to Alberta or Canadian beef, she said in an interview.

She said all of the chains 66 restaurants in Canada and the U.S. would now serve Certified Humane beef from a Kansas supplier. The chain sells about two million pounds of beef a year, she added.

The announcement incited anger on social media, with Opposition Wildrose party Leader Brian Jean and federal Conservative MP Jason Kenney jumping into the fray on Twitter. Scores of social media users threatened to boycott the chain.

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley tweeted on Thursday that Alberta beef is the best in the world and shes proud of the provinces producers.

Simpson said the online backlash would not force Earls to reconsider. She said the Twitter campaign appeared to have been started by lobby groups, but she declined to single out any in particular.

Certified Humane is run by non-profit Humane Farm Animal Care, which is headquartered in Virginia. Several farms in Canada have the designation.

Earls said animals on Certified Humane ranches are treated with care, respect and dignity from birth to pasture, while its abattoirs are designed by animal-behaviour expert Temple Grandin, who specializes in calm, low-stress environments.

Alberta Beef Producers chairman Bob Lowe said the decision by Earls was a slap in the face, because it implied that the beef raised in the province was not humane.

He said Canadas codes of practice for beef cattle, developed by the National Farm Animal Care Council, recommend ranchers meet many of the same criteria as the Certified Humane program  apart from raising beef without added hormones.

Its nothing new. Its not rocket science. Its just that they now have a stamp that says this beef is raised humanely, he said. Its a marketing niche.

Canadian Cattlemens Association general manager Rob McNabb said if the chain had consulted with his group before making the decision, it would know that the Canadian industry is developing a program that could meet the same standards.

He said the program, called Verified Beef Production Plus, would not include a requirement to have no added hormones, but such criteria could be added for individual farms. He said the program could be ready within the next month or two.

They went to a packaged program in the U.S., I suspect just not realizing what we were on the verge of doing here, he said.

Dave Solverson, a rancher and board member of the Canadian Cattlemens Association, said growth hormones allow ranchers to raise leaner cows and produce more sustainable beef because fewer acres of land are required and are ready to be slaughtered at a younger age.

Theres no trace of the synthetic hormone left in the beef after the animal has been slaughtered, Solverson said.

Its perfectly safe and I think theres a humane reason to use it, he said. Its so much better for the environment.

But Adele Douglass, executive director of Humane Farm Animal Care, said the Canadian codes of practice are guidelines that are not enforced through inspection, unlike the Certified Humane standards.

All of this ruckus, I dont get, she said. If the farmers in Alberta really want to increase their market, they should apply for certification.

 Follow @ellekane on Twitter.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Trudeau government congratulated Bombardier for its CSeries deal with Delta Air Lines on Thursday but stopped short again of committing federal money for the Montreal-based conglomerate.

Quebec has promised US$1 billion of public money for the aircraft manufacturer and the company is seeking a similar sum from Ottawa.

Federal Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains congratulated Bombardier (TSX:BBD.B) on the US$5.6-billion deal, calling it great news for the company and the Canadian aerospace industry.

Bombardier's CSeries commercial jet takes off on its first flight on Monday, Sept. 16, 2013 in Montreal. Bombardier says Delta Air Lines Inc. has placed a firm order for 75 CS100 aircraft with options for an additional 50 CS100 aircraft in what would be the largest order for the CSeries jets. The company says, based on the list price, the firm order is valued at approximately US$5.6 billion. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

In a statement, Bains said discussions about federal aid are ongoing.

We are continuing our dialogue with Bombardier, he said. We remain committed to working with Bombardier and the sector as a whole to keep Canada at the forefront of global leadership.

In Ottawa, federal Transport Minister Marc Garneau refused to speculate on the status of active negotiations between the two parties.

Minister Bains is leading those discussions and I know that he is actively discussing with Bombardier their request that came from last December, he said.

Their respective comments came shortly after Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard said the pressure was mounting on Ottawa to provide financial assistance for Bombardiers CSeries planes after the announcement that Delta had placed an order with the company for 75 CS100 aircraft with options for an additional 50 planes.

Couillard reiterated that Quebecs aerospace industry is as important as the automobile sector in Ontario and said aerospace is currently the most innovative sector in the Canadian economy.

Governments invested billions of dollars  and lost billions of dollars  with the support of the automobile sector in Ontario, Couillard said in Quebec City.

So it would not be understandable that the federal government would not be very actively present in this innovative sector  the most important innovation project in Canada today is the CSeries plane and we should all be proud of that.

He called it paradoxical that Ottawa hasnt hesitated to help Ontario with billions in public funds while seemingly dragging its feet with respect to Quebecs key sector.

The governments of Quebec and Ontario, both provinces where Bombardier has an extensive presence, have urged Ottawa to provide financial assistance.

Couillard noted that government involvement in the CSeries must be strategic.

We dont want to become makers of airplanes but we want to support innovation, he said. Governments in a situation like this should not behave like investors or bankers, but economic agents.

The premier said hes not worried about Bombardiers financial situation, noting the CSeries order book is filled until 2020 with the first commercial flight scheduled for July in Europe.

Federal money would give Bombardier flexibility for the future development of the program, Couillard said.

PQ Leader Pierre Karl Peladeau, meanwhile, called on Ottawa to invest in the aerospace sector as a whole, including Bombardier, saying the CSeries needs a capital base to really take off and that the cash infusion must come from the federal government.

Diane Finley, the Conservative critic for innovation, science and economic development, said her party was thrilled about the purchase order.

With the Liberals placing more and more debt on hard-working Canadians, its encouraging to see that there are private-sector solutions available to help Bombardier succeed and grow the CSeries program, Finley said in a statement.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VANCOUVER  The trial of a Dutch man facing dozens of child pornography and online extortion charges related to the suicide of a British Columbia teenager is slated to begin Friday morning in Amsterdam, despite Dutch media reports that his lawyer has quit on the eve of the hearing.

Aydin Coban is accused of using webcam video with sexual content to blackmail up to 39 victims from various countries, many of them underage.

The federal government has asked the Netherlands to extradite Coban to Canada, so he can stand trial on five separate charges linked to the 2012 death of 15-year-old Amanda Todd of Port Coquitlam.

Todd killed herself following relentless bullying that was sparked after an Internet harasser allegedly distributed nude photos of her online.

The Dutch court postponed the trial last month after Coban released his first lawyer. In the latest development, media reports from the Netherlands said Cobans second lawyer, Robert Malewicz, quit Thursday after the court refused another extension.

A good defence is far more than just a file read fast, Malewicz is quoted in Dutch as saying in the news outlet Omroep Brabant.

A suspect has the right to a fair, adequate defence, he added.

The lawyer who preceded Malewicz, Christian van Dijk, said in an interview the case file contains 25,000 pages.

Its impossible for him, in my opinion, to read and to prepare himself, van Dijk said.

Coban faces more than 72 charges in the Netherlands, including making, distributing and possessing child pornography, according to a spokeswoman from the Dutch National Prosecutor. They also include assault, attempted assault and luring young victims, she said.

The majority of those charges involve 34 underage victims from the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.

Five charges involve five men from Australia and the U.K., who Coban is accused of blackmailing.

The trial is scheduled to run into the latter half of May, with a ruling scheduled for June 13. Its unclear how a possible shuffle in lawyers will affect scheduling.

None of the allegations have been proven in court.

Canada is the only country that has asked for Cobans extradition. That proceeding is scheduled to begin June 14.

The request for extradition was made by the federal government, but it was triggered by B.C.s attorney general.

The provincial Justice Ministry said in a statement that, if found guilty, Coban wouldnt necessarily have to serve his entire sentence in the Netherlands prior to being extradited.

Todd is not included in the criminal proceedings taking place in the Netherlands.

The case against Mr. Coban is a serious one that has affected British Columbians and it should be tried locally, wrote the ministry.

The tragic consequences for Ms. Todd in this matter had a significant impact on British Columbians, and they have the right to see that justice is served in their community.

The Netherlands could postpone Cobans extradition, if approved, until criminal proceedings were complete or his sentence was served, though he could be extradited to Canada for prosecution, said the Dutch prosecution service.

Still, van Dijk said its unlikely the extradition will be approved.

Both Todds case, and that of the other 39 alleged victims, revolve around the use of controversial police surveillance software called a keylogger, which was used to collect evidence against Coban, van Dijk said.

A keylogger is a covert device that monitors computer activity by recording which keys are pressed on a keyboard.

If the Dutch court or the European court decides that the keylogger is not lawful  then this whole case will collapse like a card house, said van Dijk.

That would mean no conviction against Coban and likely no extradition to Canada because the same keylogger was used to gather evidence in the Todd case, he said.

Todds death, as well as those of several other young Canadians, helped spur Ottawa to pass anti-bullying legislation that criminalized the distribution of intimate images without consent. The law came into effect in March 2015.

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This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dr. Mark Torchia and Richard Tyc started off buying chunks of meat in a Winnipeg supermarket to test an idea for a gizmo in their lab  now its performing brain surgery in 35 medical centres across North America.

University of Manitoba alumni Torchia and Tyc are one of six teams receiving the inaugural Governor Generals Innovation Awards May 19 for their development of the NeuroBlate System.

Their NeuroBlate device, two decades in the making, drills through the skull to deliver a laser beam on a lesion, with the minimal possible damage to brain tissue. Its about two millimetres wide and made of a polymer and sapphire construction, details of which are proprietary. The name is a combination of the words neurosurgery and ablation.

WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Richard Tyc (left) and Dr. Mark Torchia are one of six teams that will receive the inaugural Governor Generals Innovation Awards on May 19 in Ottawa.

Torchia is an associate professor of surgery in the U of Ms College of Medicine and the director of the Universitys Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. Tyc is vice-president, technology and advanced technology, at Monteris Medical, a spinoff company established in 1999 to create groundbreaking neurosurgical technologies.

The idea about using lasers in brain surgery has been around a long time, Torchia said Thursday, but perfecting it to allow surgeons to work with the least possible damage has been the key.

Rich and I have been working on it, youre probably looking at two decades.

Given the amount of evidence and documentation needed for government approval, that amount of time is not atypical for sticking something in the brain, Torchia said.

Tyc said it was 2009 before they were allowed to experiment on a human brain.

Before that, We were using meat we could buy at the butcher shop, Torchia said. You get into a model that mimics live tissue.

Then came approval for a clinical study in Cleveland.

These were real people, quite terrifying, Torchia said. 

You get people with a bad disease, no option, and they volunteer.

Since then, said Tyc, Weve had over 700 patients treated to date in 35 centres in North America, but that number started very slowly and has grown to the point there are several procedures each day. We almost doubled our caseload since last year.

The company is headquartered in Minneapolis, Tyc said, but all the hardware and software design is done in Winnipeg.

Torchia said they cant discuss cost, which is somewhere between a plaster bandage and an MRI.

MONTERIS.COM NeuroBlate System for MRI guided neurosurgical ablation.

Tyc said the devices use increases as evidence of its success mounts and doctors talk among themselves about it. Regulations preclude their talking in terms of a rate of cure, he said. Its minimally invasive, and patients go home much sooner compared with other forms of brain surgery.

It was first used in the U.S. and has been in use at Vancouver General Hospital for more than a year. Regulatory approval came faster in the U.S. than in Canada, said Tyc.

NeuroBlate also won the Ernest C. Manning Principal Award in October 2015.

The NeuroBlate System, developed at the St-Boniface Hospital Albrechtsen Research Centre, is a unique technology that encapsulates the criteria for the Governor Generals Innovation Awards: exceptional technology that transforms a field and positively impacts the quality of life in Canada, the U of M said.

Torchia and Tyc will receive their award at the inaugural ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa May 19.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca
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This article was published 27/04/2016 (2371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Its a case that is drawing comparisons to that of Phoenix Sinclair: a 21-month-old Manitoba girl neglected, starved and beaten to death after being returned by Child and Family Services to her biological parents.

And its one we are legally prohibited from telling you about  at least for now.

Kierra Elektra Star Williams Details surrounding the July 2014 death of Kierra Elektra Star Williams on the Peguis First Nation have mostly been shrouded in secrecy. Police have released little information publicly while government officials, community leaders and those who were tasked with protecting the little girl have remained silent.

A series of publication bans have also been imposed on the bail hearings for the three people charged in Kierras death: her mother, Vanessa Bushie; her father, Daniel Williams; and her 22-year-old sister, Jasmine Williams. Bushie is accused of second-degree murder, while her husband and sister are charged with manslaughter. They are also all charged with failing to provide the necessities of life. The charges have not been proven and they are presumed innocent.

The three accused have now been returned to the community, the latest occurring on Wednesday when Bushie was released by Queens Bench Justice Vic Toews despite objections from the Crown. At this point, we cant tell you about any specific submissions or reasons behind the decision without the risk of contempt of court proceedings.

The Free Press will challenge the publication ban here because the facts of this case need to be heard now in a province where problems involving children in care have made international headlines, Free Press editor Paul Samyn said following the latest court decision. The public has been told that the system has been fixed in the wake of Phoenix Sinclair. But what the Free Press heard in court (Wednesday) suggests otherwise and the public shouldnt have to wait years to find out what happened to baby Kierra after CFS returned her to her parents.

Inquiry expected

A three-week preliminary hearing is set to begin in December, and a Queens Bench trial isnt expected to happen until 2018, at the earliest. By then, it will be at least four years since the tragedy occurred. Justice officials have told the Free Press they expect an inquiry will be called once all the details of what happened emerge publicly. That could happen years after the trial concludes and the appeals process is exhausted.

SUPPLIED Phoenix Sinclair is shown in a family photo released by the Commission of Inquiry that looked into her 2005 death. I should hope there would be (an inquiry). This is Phoenix Sinclair, Part 2, a source said Wednesday. Phoenix suffered months of horrific abuse at the hands of her mother and stepfather, then went months before anyone even noticed she was dead. Her case has become emblematic of a system in such turmoil it could not protect toddlers from harm at the hands of those meant to love them.

As the Free Press previously reported, Intertribal CFS was involved with the family prior to Kierras death. The girl was returned home to her birth parents in the months prior, although further specifics have not been shared publicly by officials.

Within hours of the three arrests in January 2015 following a six-month police investigation, the province launched two separate investigations.

Some investigations are automatically launched when children die in care, including a child-abuse investigation, designed in part to determine whether an individuals name should be placed on the Provincial Child Abuse Registry, and another to assess the safety and risk to other children in the home.

The Office of the Childrens Advocate may also investigate if the child was in care or if the family had involvement with a Child and Family Services agency. The child-welfare system typically waits until a criminal investigation is complete before opening its own probes. However, the results of both investigations will likely never be made public.

Case still not well known

Government officials previously confirmed Kierra had a child-welfare case file, but would not say what kind of services the girl received, from what agency, for how long or whether there are early indications child-protection safeguards failed.

Senior staff at CFS have told the Free Press their review found the agency generally did the right thing in Kierras case. The review recommended better training and better assessment, which reviews always do, but highlighted no systemic failures.

Unlike Phoenix, it would appear Kierras name and case barely register with most members of the public. Previous calls by the Free Press about her to band leaders in Peguis, social-work sources and provincial staff often required a reminder: You know, the toddler killed in Peguis.

As well, the Free Press had to fight to allow publication of Kierras name, which was at one point covered by a publication ban that was eventually overturned.

There has been little outcry from First Nations about Kierras death, and the board of Intertribal  or the chiefs who appoint them  has offered no explanation, assurances or accountability.

www.mikeoncrime.com
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This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitobas three big hospitals are eliminating the competition between them to create one big hospital lottery with big prizes, including a luxury Bridgwater Lakes home package worth more than $1.5 million.

The Health Sciences Centre, Childrens and St. Boniface Hospital foundations launched the 2016 Tri-Hospital Dream Lottery at the Lake Bend Road house up for grabs Thursday, marking the first time the three have ever worked together.

Chuck LaFleche, president and CEO of the St. Boniface Hospital Foundation, said having one hospital lottery as opposed to two or three will hopefully eliminate confusion and generate more money for all three hospitals.

What was happening in the marketplace was our buyers, including my mom, were getting confused, LaFleche said. But we couldnt blame her. The people were confused because there was lotteries overlapping.

The St. Boniface Hospital Foundation and the Childrens Hospital Foundation of Manitoba had previously come together for the Dream Lottery 4 Kids. But, LaFleche said, there were still days that separate hospital lottery advertisements ran in the paper side by side.

The three foundations held meetings to discuss changing the time of year the lotteries ran, but they came up with a different solution.

We were only going to cooperate on setting our dates and staying away from each other, LaFleche said. But we said, Why not go the extra mile and actually cooperate and do it together?

Lawrence Prout, president and CEO of the Childrens Hospital Foundation of Manitoba, said theTri-Hospital Dream Lottery and its prizes will hopefully bring in more support for all three foundations to help people with different needs.

We were competing a little bit, there was an overlap in the fall time, Prout said. It also gives people an option. They can turn around and support the one lottery and help all three institutions. Whether its somebody in cardiac at St. Boniface, or trauma at HSC or Childrens. Youre helping lots of people by buying a ticket to this lottery.

The foundations coming together also means they can offer bigger prizes. The grand prize winner will get to choose one of four options: a luxury Maric home package in Bridgwater Lakes worth more than $1.5 million, a Foxridge Home by Qualico in Sage Creek worth more than $1.4 million, a cottage north of Gimli on Lake Winnipeg with a Winnipeg condo worth more than $1.3 million, or $1.2 million cash. The lottery has more than 3,600 other prizes including cars, vacations, Apple products and cash.

While there is a lot of hype over the prizes, the money raised on top of the business expenses goes to support a number of programs at each hospital. Susan Robinson, director of operations of the Health Sciences Centre Foundation, said these lotteries have a huge impact on the future of hospitals.

Those who purchase a lottery ticket help us purchase advance life-saving technology, Robinson said. They also help us fund research  research set to create new treatments and care methods, ultimately improving patient care in our province.

The hospitals serve one million patients a year, which Robinson said includes the delivery of 11,000 babies and assistance to 200,000 families in emergency rooms.

Tickets are available at London Drugs in St. Vital Centre, Red River Co-op Food Stores and select Shoppers Drug Mart locations. You can also buy them online at TriHospitalDream.com or by phone at 204-254-4677. You can buy one ticket for $100, two for $175, four for $300 or eight for $500. The 50/50 Plus pot could grow to more than $1.7 million with the winner taking half. Those tickets cost $15 for one, $30 for six or $60 for 20.

Bailey.Hildebrand@freepress.mb.ca
Opinion

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This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The idea  blasphemy, really  of having a Canadian woman on our money is gaining momentum after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on International Womens Day in March a woman will be put on a banknote. Thats what you get when you put a feminist in office. Now if they could just make it so women are paid the same amount as men, wed have real progress.

In 2004, the Bank of Canada did honour the Famous Five  the activists who sought to have women legally considered persons in 1927  and political leader Therese Casgrain on a new $50 banknote. That was the first time Canadian women had appeared on a bill; the March announcement was designed to address this deficit.

The Bank of Canada asked Canadians for their nominations; when the nominations closed earlier this month, more than 26,000 names had been put forward. The criteria were pretty straightforward. Had to be a Canadian (by birth or naturalization). Had to have demonstrated outstanding leadership, achievement or distinction in any field. Had to have been dead for at least 25 years. Had to be real  no Anne of Green Gables allowed.

SUPPLIED Julianna Sampert, with the baby on her lap, is one of the many women who worked beside her husband to turn her homestead into thriving farmland.

Now its up to an advisory council to review the list and whittle it down to about 10 to 12 names. The council will then speak with historians and produce a short list of three to five names. Then, the governor of the Bank of Canada and the finance minister will make the final call. The banknote will be produced in 2018.

Our southern neighbours are also getting set to put women on their less colourful bills. Last week, the treasury secretary announced abolitionist Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the US$20 bill. This is the first time in more than a century a woman has been on U.S. currency. Just as swiftly, the backlash began. The Twitterverse erupted with concerns Tubman is too ugly for the honour. Not too sure Andrew Jackson was a stud, but the outpouring of hatred toward someone who likely didnt care one bit about her looks was breathtaking and once again supports the theory the public education system (at least in the U.S.) needs to be revamped. Lets hope the same doesnt happen here in Canada when the announcement is made, but thats like hoping it wont snow in January in Winnipeg.

Im a bit struck that somehow we have to limit ourselves to just one woman. Of the five bills we have in circulation, one already has a woman on it: Queen Elizabeth II on the $20. Then we have former prime ministers Wilfrid Laurier ($5), John A. Macdonald ($10), William Lyon Mackenzie King ($50) and Robert Borden ($100). Why not have two women and two men to keep things equal?

The big question is: who should be on our bills? Some impressive names have come forward. Of course, Nellie McClung is high on the list. McClung was famous for pushing for Manitoba women to have the right to vote. She was successful, and in 2016, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the beginning of womens suffrage in the province. Viola Desmond has also been mentioned. She fought for the right to sit in the whites-only section of the movie theatre in New Glasgow, N.S., in 1946.

Rosemarie Kuptana, a trailblazer for Inuit rights, has also been mentioned, but unfortunately, she doesnt meet the criteria because she is still very much alive. This leads me to wonder if maybe the criteria should be changed. After all, the first female prime minister, Kim Campbell, should most certainly be on a bill. Shannen Koostachin should also be considered, despite the fact she died just a few years ago. As a 13-year-old in 2008, she stood up to the federal government to ask for a school to be built in her home town of Attawapiskat, Ont., that was as nice as then-Indian affairs minister Chuck Strahls. She died far too young in a car accident at the age of 16 after being nominated for an international childrens peace prize and inspiring a DC comic character.

Lets not forget Jeannette Corbiere Lavell and Yvonne Bedard, who both fought for the right to maintain their treaty status despite marrying white men.

There are so many other amazing women who should and could be honoured, many of whom are unsung heroes. Women who are the backbone of this country, who came from lands far away to work on homesteads, side by side with their husbands, turning hard Prairie clay and brush into soil that could support crops.

Women such as my great-grandmother Julianna Sampert, who came over from Russia with her husband, Johann, and her nine kids in the 1920s to homestead north of Edmonton. Or my grandmother Josephine, who came over from Germany between the two world wars, set up a bakery in northern Alberta and had her own bank account  something women did not do in the 1940s. Or my mom, who lied about her marital status to continue working for the Government of Canada and then used her amazing mathematical skills (something I didnt inherit) to maintain accounts for an oilfield company  this long before a working mom was the norm. They were an important part of Canadas economy and success. And I bet if you looked through your family tree, you, too, could find women who belong on a Canadian bill.

Its time to look beyond the history books dominated by stories of the many important accomplishments of men to realize they were very often supported by women, who toiled in virtual anonymity with little or no recognition except a nice card on Mothers Day. They made the meals, did the chores, cleaned the floors and nursed the babies  all womens work that is underappreciated and underpaid. Its nice to finally see some of them are getting their recognition, although its hardly enough, and its long overdue.

Shannon Sampert is the Winnipeg Free Press perspectives and politics editor.

shannon.sampert@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @paulysigh
Opinion

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This article was published 29/04/2016 (2369 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Wednesday, city council handed a death sentence to downtowns Public Safety Building. People who find it ugly could not care less.

They ought to, however, if only because demolition is something Winnipeg does so well. When it comes to finding creative reasons to flatten interesting structures, few other Canadian cities can compete.

Consider the recent track record:

BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES The Public Safety Building should be considered for heritage building status.

1. Public Safety Building

Born: 1966. Death: Pending.

Cause of death: Municipal incompetence and possible malfeasance.

Love it or hate it, the brutalist home of the Winnipeg Police Service has cast a unique shadow over the Civic Centre neighbourhood for two generations. Unfortunately, the buildings most important feature  the Tyndall-stone cladding  has proven to be its fatal flaw.

By 2006, decades worth of freeze-thaw cycles has loosened that stone from the building, prompting the City of Winnipeg to come up with a repair plan. After elected officials balked at the cost, the city decided to find out if it made more sense to replace it instead.

According to a city-commissioned study, it would have cost about $184 million to renovate the PSB and expand it over the site of the Civic Centre Parkade. The same study figured it would cost about $180 million to instead buy the Canada Post complex on Graham Avenue and turn it into a new police HQ.

For reasons only a public inquiry can discern, council wasnt told about the renovation option and also was led to believe the Canada Post plan would only cost $135 million. Council also wasnt told about an 1875 caveat that restricts the land below the PSB to some form of public use.

Adding insult to injury, the Canada Post purchase saddled the city with a mostly empty Graham Avenue office tower that faces $20 million worth of its own renovations. And after the city bought that lemon of a tower, council went out and approved long-term municipal office leases in other privately-owned downtown buildings.

The myopia is astounding. On Wednesday, council approved the demolition of the PSB because a costly renovation makes no sense when the city is hamstrung by existing office leases and is also trying to peddle the Graham Avenue office tower.

The only thing uglier than the building is the manner in which its fate was sealed.

2. Lukes Machinery

Born: 1948 Died: 2015

Cause of death: Manitoba Hydro land assembly.

Between 1948 and 1977, a trio of humble storefronts rose on Notre Dame Avenue, where they served as a vital part of the pedestrian streetscape. They were toppled last year as part of a domino effect that began in 2009 when Manitoba Hydro was denied the right to gut the interiors of three far more handsome McDermot Avenue heritage buildings in order to expand an Exchange District substation.

Still in need of space for a substation, Hydro bought a surface-parking lot on Adelaide Street from the Calvary Temple. It then helped broker a deal that saw the church purchase and demolish the low-rise structures at 312-318 Notre Dame Ave. to ensure it would still have enough surface parking.

Whatever Hydro wants, Hydro eventually gets.

3. Shanghai Restaurant building

Born: 1882 Died: 2012

Cause of death: Demolition by neglect.

The Chinatown building variously known as the Robert Block, the Coronation Block and the Shanghai Restaurant building arose on King Street shortly after Winnipeg was first served by a railway. The building briefly housed city hall offices and had both commercial and residential tenants before the first Chinese restaurant set up shop on the main floor in 1929.

The Shanghai name first appeared in 1941 and stuck around for seven decades, until city council allowed the entire structure to come down. The upper floors hadnt been heated in decades, the building was beyond repair and the ironically named Chinatown Development Corporation sought the land for a residential tower.

All that remains now is a plot of grass.

4. Old Richardson terminal

Born: 1964 Died: 2012

Cause of death: Expediency.

After the Second World War, a relatively cocky Canada was big on using architecture to make a statement. In order to convey an image of a cutting-edge country, the feds commissioned the construction of several modernist airports, including the original terminal at Winnipeg International Airport.

It was decorated with purpose-built art, boasted space-age furniture and had the clean lines so closely associated with modernism. Half a century later, the construction of its ultramodern replacement left the Winnipeg Airports Authority with a cavernous white elephant that was too expensive to maintain.

So down went the original terminal, imbued with all the hopes and dream of a postwar era that now seems foolishly optimistic.

5. Albert Street Business Block

Born: 1877 Died: 2012

Cause of death: Electrical fire.

Up until this decade, Albert Street boasted one of the Exchange Districts most attractive streetscapes, thanks in part to the Albert Street Business Block, a quirky little low-rise built around one of Winnipegs oldest existing homes.

In 2007, when the owner of the neighbouring St. Charles Hotel sought to knock down the Business Block to make way for a parking-lot entrance, heritage advocates fought hard to convince city hall to intervene.

Council, in its wisdom, demanded the hotel be redeveloped as a precursor to the blocks demolition. But fate had other plans.

An electrical fire took down the building, leaving the lower portion of Albert Street just as desolate as anywhere else in a downtown where empty lots and new developments trade places like an immense, asphalt-and-steel version of whack-a-mole.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
Opinion

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This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An inadvertent error by a federal lawyer has let the Catholic Church off the hook, legally speaking, for more than $20 million it owed to a healing and reconciliation fund, set up as part of the Indian Residential School settlement. But that does not free the church  specifically, the churches and religious organizations named in the settlement  of the larger moral obligation. Churches preach all the time about doing the right thing. They should walk the talk.

The right thing, now, is to get busy fundraising, pull out the stops on everything from the ubiquitous church bazaars to special envelope pleas in the pews and the more lucrative estate-planning solicitations many religious organizations have made a part of their long-range budgeting strategies. Churches do not survive on the coins in the Sunday offerings plates.

But the more than 50 Catholic organizations named in the 2006 settlement have essentially said theyve done all they can. They raised $3.7 million of a $25-million total obligation, but when they went knocking on the door of corporate Canada, they came up empty, the Globe and Mail was told.

KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES A smudging ceremony at a monument to Indian residential schools survivors at The Forks in 2014.

The healing fund is financed from a much larger pool of money, including from the federal government. The Catholic Church alone has paid a total of $54 million in cash or in-kind services toward it already. But in negotiations last year, as Ottawa was pursuing the church to fulfil the outstanding obligation, a federal lawyer inadvertently indicated the Catholic entities were discharged of the remaining debt. A judge said anyone looking at what the lawyer said would agree the churches were justified in believing they could halt their fundraising efforts.

Ironically, Phil Fontaine, the man who was a force behind Canadas residential school compensation settlement and apology to survivors of the era, went on to help the Catholic Church in its fundraising efforts after the IRS settlement was signed. He has described as futile any efforts to force the church now to drum up the $21.3 million owed.

And more insult to injury: the shortfall means two other churches  Anglican and United  were released from part of their fundraising obligations for healing and reconciliation, which were tied, as a percentage, to the Catholic Churchs contributions. In fact, the Catholic shortfall resulted in $2.7 million being returned to the Anglicans and $450,000 to the United Church. In contrast, the Presbyterian Church waived any refund of the $1.3 million it deposited into the fund.

The healing and reconciliation fund was set up to pay for programs and organizations working to improve the health and promote the healing of former students, their families and communities. Its there to mend fences and foster understanding between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. That funding continues, but the work would suffer by the total shortfall of almost $25 million.

Symbolically, however, there is likely greater fallout to be seen if the churches walk away from this obligation. There will be damage to the hard work that is continuing on reparations and national reconciliation with First Nations people. It makes one wonder if there is no end to the residential schools pain, the legacy of woe and deep distrust they produced.

The Trudeau government may ultimately wear this one and be responsible to fulfil the debt to the fund. But that would be a stain upon the names of the churches. What they should do now is have the heart-to-heart talks with their parishioners and congregations, crank up the fundraising machinery and put the healing fund at the top of their priorities.

After all, as St. Paul would say, God loves a cheerful giver.
There is another contender in the races for Winona Countys legislative districts.

Mike Goggin is running as a Republican for the District 21 Senate seat held by Sen. Matt Schmit, DFL-Red Wing, who was first elected in 2012.

Goggin is a first-time candidate who said if elected he would help southeast Minnesota businesses and citizens save costs, and work for higher wages and job growth.

Ive been seeing all the tax increases weve had, all the additional regulation weve had on our businesses, Goggin said in an interview. I said, I had to get involved. We cant continue down this path.

Goggin said that despite Schmits position as an incumbent, he will be able to sway voters to his side.

Youre always going to have an advantage as an incumbent in the seat, Goggin said. I just think my background, and my giving back to the community  will outweigh him as an incumbent.

Goggin received the Republican Party endorsement at its April 16 district convention, and said he would be an independent-minded senator with a proven track record who knows how to get things done.

Schmit, who has taken on broadband funding and expansion, transportation and other initiatives as his key issues, is finishing his first term. The district extends south from Red Wing and Goodhue County and includes a portion of Winona County, including the cities of Goodview, St. Charles, Elba, and Altura.

Goggin, also from Red Wing, is an engineering project manager at the Prairie Island nuclear plant. He graduated from Red Wing High School, got a bachelors degree in business administration from Gustavus, and worked for the Red Wing Shoe Company before joining Xcel Energy at Prairie Island in 2004 and getting a subsequent bachelors degree in electrical engineering, according to his campaign bio.

Several other area state lawmakers are facing opposition as well.

Rep. Greg Davids, R-Preston, is running against Thomas Trehus, a first-time candidate, as he tries for his 13th term as the House District 28B representative.

Sen. Jeremy Miller, R-Winona, will face opposition for his District 28 Senate seat against Jon Pieper, who lost the election against Davids for his House seat in 2014. Pieper had initially announced plans to run against Davids again this year, then moved to run for the Senate seat earlier in April.
As residents of Winona County, we are blessed to live in what is arguably the most beautiful part of Minnesota with the scenic blufflands of the Mississippi and some of the best trout fishing in the state, both right in our backyards. For now.

Driving up Hwy. 61, a friend remarked she was nearly moved to tears at the changing landscape and ugly scars on the Wisconsin side left as a result of the silica sand mining operations. Is this what we want to leave for future generations?

I respect one's right to do what they will with land they own  until what they do infringes on the rights of others. We all have the right to breathe clean air; we also have the right to clean water and safety on our roads. Silica sand is a known carcinogen. Frac sand mining operations and the transportation of silica sand introduces this dust to the air; workers at these mining and processing operations wear respirators for protection, but quite often, fugitive dust is spread across roads and communities where residents aren't afforded these protections.

Secondly, the amount of water required for processing silica sand drains aquifers at an alarming rate, and the waste water isn't recycled. Lastly, who pays for the road repair that increased hauler traffic creates?

What are the benefits? Jobs? The proposed silica sand processing plant outside of St. Charles would have been the largest in the world, and it would have created an estimated 20 jobs  20!  and the majority of the sand would have been transported by a rail system with one of the worst safety records in the nation. Our community took a firm stand against this, and it is my hope that we are leading by example.
Baraboo leaders have endorsed a plan to bring a national bike route through the city.

On Tuesday, the City Council voted unanimously for a resolution supporting the establishment of the U.S. Bicycle Route System, including Bike Route 30 through Baraboo.

This is just showing our support for the project coming through the city of Baraboo, Parks and Recreation Director Mike Hardy said.

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials is working to develop a system of designated bike routes across the nation. Route 30 would run from Massachusetts west to Montana, and from Milwaukee to La Crosse as it passes through Wisconsin.

The proposed route would send bicyclists to Baraboo from Merrimac. The route would enter Baraboo near Devils Lake State Park, at South Lake Drive. It would wind north to South Shore Road and state Highway 123 to South Boulevard. There it would head west to Sauk County Highway W, where it would lead to North Freedom, Rock Springs and Reedsburgs 400 Trail.

Last week the city Plan Commission approved a resolution supporting the bike route designation, and requesting that the route go through Baraboo, rather than an alternate route through Sauk City.

How do we grease the wheels to get it to go this way? Alderman Tom Kolb asked Tuesday with a smile.

Hardy explained that the route from Merrimac to Baraboo would be the primary loop, to be used when the Merriac ferry is operational. When the ferry closes for the winter, cyclists would be routed from Sauk City west to Loganville, then north to Rock Springs.

Both those loops would be named part of Bike Route 30, he said.

The bike route is designed to follow existing roads and bike trails. If its established, and the route through Baraboo approved, the city would post signs in the right-of-way identifying the route.

The project has been in the works for several years. Among its proponents is the Bike Federation of Wisconsin, which is asking affected communities to pass resolutions of support.

City leaders have looked favorably on increasing opportunities for cyclists because it promotes fitness and tourism. Bike tourism contributes an estimated $47 billion annually to the economies of communities that provide bike paths. The citys Parks Commission formed a bike committee in September.
The eight regulars involved in the Beaver Dam Senior Woodshop picked up their rulers and saws once again and got back to work with a new and bigger shop, but kept to the same work they are known for.

We can cut a 12-foot board without hitting anyone in the head with it, Burt Beyer said.

Beaver Dam Senior Woodshop opened its doors early April at a new location; Don Smith Learning Academy, 400 E. Burnett St. It was previously located in the former senior center, 114 E. Third St. The woodshop was required to move or cease operations after the opening of The Watermark, 209 S. Center St., in January.

At the moment, the shop is being leased for two years and, once this lease is up, it may be extended to five years.

Beyer said in the past, the confined space required him to move machines and tables to take on big cuts. This isnt the case anymore.

He said it took a couple of weeks to move all of the equipment. In the process, he said, everyone found a lot of junk.

Evonne Boettge, community activities and services administrator said the excess or duplicated tools and equipment were sold at auction.

John Schmid said there havent been any problems with the new shop. He said part of the agreement with the Beaver Dam Unified School District is that the woodshop members are not expected to interact with the students at Don Smith Learning Academy and the agreement states the woodshop participants will be subject to a federal background check.

He and the other eight regulars have been working almost every day on requested projects  like a new conference table for Boettges Watermark office and bird house kits, and the wooden toy cars for the annual downtown holiday parade. A total of 150 have been completed with an ultimate goal of 1,000.

The American Legion donated money for the 4,000 wheels, but the rest of the cars are being made from donated wood and wood scraps. Schmid said the woodshop is always looking for wood donations and volunteers.

Now, with a bigger shop, Schmid said the crew could take on bigger projects as well. According to him, the shop is three times larger than the old shop attached to the former senior center.

Schmid is happy its back because now he has something to do, Boettge said.

She said the end goal would be to bring the woodshop closer to The Watermark, but for right now, this works.

As part of the agreement to open The Watermark the former senior center at 114 E. Third St. will completely close, which means that the woodshop would be closed as well. Due to cutbacks to The Watermark plans, a wood shop is not part of the new building.

Wood shops are unique to senior centers now, she said. Sometimes people think senior programs are little old women knitting in the corner.

If residents are interested in having a project completed or would like to discuss anything about the shop, they may visit The Watermark, 209 S. Center St., on Wednesdays from 8 to 9:30 a.m.
Two Columbus Police officers were honored at the Wisconsin Professional Police Association annual awards banquet at the Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells Saturday, April 23.

Officers Kelly Towne and Matthew Schultz were awarded the Certificate of Merit for their actions stemming from an incident that occurred in Columbus last September. Following is a synopsis of the event they were involved in:

On Saturday, Sept. 19, at about 9:37 a.m., Columbus Police Officer Kelly Towne responded to a single-family residence on Hibbard Street regarding a domestic disturbance.

Upon arrival, Towne made contact with the elderly female resident of the home. The resident advised her that another person was inside the house. This other person was on the premises in violation of court-issued bond conditions from a recent felony case.

Towne intended to take the suspect into custody for violating the court-ordered conditions and verbally announced herself to the suspect, but when she approached an interior doorway, she observed the suspect point a firearm at her.

Towne quickly and tactically retreated to another room and safely escorted the female resident to safety outside the house. A brief standoff ensued with the suspect.

Off-duty Columbus Police Officer Matthew Schultz responded to the scene to assist Towne. Schultz was able to engage the suspect in dialogue over the phone. At about 10:15 a.m. the suspect exited the residence and surrendered to the officers without further incident.

No shots were fired and nobody was injured as a result of this incident. The suspect was taken to the Columbia County Jail in Portage and booked on multiple felony charges.

Multiple firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition were taken from inside the residence.

Due to their high degree of professionalism and quick thinking, the officers were able to stabilize a potentially deadly situation and take the suspect into custody without injury to anyone.

Columbus Police Chief Daniel Meister congratulated the two officers for their high degree of professionalism and conduct on that day.
Logan Kehoe of Columbus, a senior at Columbus High School, received Wisconsin Lutheran Colleges Collegiate Scholarship. The $10,000 Collegiate Scholarship is awarded to incoming freshmen meeting select criteria. This scholarship is renewable each year by remaining in good standing at Wisconsin Lutheran College, for a lifetime value of $40,000.

Kelly Tramburg of Fall River, a senior at Fall River High School, received Wisconsin Lutheran Colleges Academic Scholarship. The $12,000 Academic Scholarship is awarded to incoming freshmen who have a composite ACT score of at least 23 or an SAT score of 1060 and have a cumulative high school GPA of at least 3.30. This scholarship is renewable each year by maintaining a cumulative GPA of 2.75 at Wisconsin Lutheran College, for a lifetime value of $48,000.
The race for the Wisconsin Assemblys 42nd District seat is shaping up to be a rematch from two years ago.

Rep. Keith Ripp, R-Lodi, has told the states Government Accountability Board that he will seek a fifth term representing a district that represents the lions share of Columbia County, as well as parts of Dane, Dodge, Fond du Lac, Green Lake and Marquette counties.

And his Democratic challenger from two years ago, George Ferriter of Doylestown, is running again.

There is still time for others to join the race. Candidacy declarations and nomination papers are due at the GAB on June 1. If there is more than one candidate from any party vying for the seat, the field will be narrowed in the Aug. 9 Fall Partisan Primary.

Ferriter is a retired engineer, and currently a trustee of the village of Doylestown, where he was, until recently, village president. Two weeks ago, he was re-elected to a two-year term as a Columbia County delegate for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Conservation Congress.

When Ferriter began his Assembly campaign in 2014, he said that recent reform in state government could very easily devolve to deform.

Two years later, he said, the same concerns that prompted his first Assembly run continue to exist.

There are two examples of deform that come immediately to mind, Ferriter said  Wisconsins voter identification law, which he said makes ballot box access more difficult for certain sectors of the electorate, and expansion of the private school voucher program, which he said takes much-needed money away from public schools.

Ripp -- who, for his last two terms, has led the Assemblys Transportation Committee -- said the factors that motivate him to seek re-election include the things Ive learned about transportation, whether its the science of road-building or working on the issues that I know.

Whether its transportation or agriculture, Ripp added, I want to serve as a resource for legislators on both sides of the aisle.

Transportation, said Ferriter, is one issue on which he plans to confront Ripp --including the regulations for heavy farm machinery traveling on rural roads (a measure for which Ripp was a primary mover and shaker), and the effects of such machinery on town roads that werent meant to handle such heavy vehicles.

Outside influences

Both Ferriter and Ripp said the election for District 42 could be shaped, to some degree, by the top of the ticket races, principally the presidential election.

Ripp said there are people who wonder if people who usually vote Republican might not do so if the Republican nominee is current front-runner Donald Trump. But by the same token, he said, people in Wisconsin tend to vote for the person, rather than the party, in a state legislative election, as was shown during his first run in 2008, when he won (after a recount) in the same year that Democrat Barack Obama was first elected president.

Ferriter said Democrats, too, are keeping an eye on the presidential race, where former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is currently leading Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for the nomination. However, Ferriter noted, there are other top-of-the-ticket races that are likely to pique the interest of Wisconsin Democrats, including Russ Feingolds effort to regain the U.S. Senate seat he lost six years ago to Republican Ron Johnson.

Both Ripp and Ferriter tout their rural roots as an asset for someone who would vie to represent, in Madison, a strongly rural district.

Ripp, a farmer, said his understanding of agriculture and the blue-collar ethic will hold him in good stead among his constituents.

Ferriter noted that, while much of District 42 consists of communities populated largely by people who commute to jobs in the greater Madison area, the cities in the district -- like Lodi, population 3050 in the 2010 census -- are fundamentally rural cities.

In the 2014 election, Ripp dominated in all Columbia County towns in the 42nd District and some of the villages, while Ferriter carried most of the villages and all of the cities.
MADISON  A Reedsburg man who brought a teenage girl from Tennessee last year to work as a prostitute was sentenced Tuesday in federal court to 10 years in prison for transporting an individual to engage in commercial sex.

U.S. District Judge James Peterson imposed the statutory maximum sentence on Alexander Kluball, 25, for committing a horrible crime against a vulnerable child in a calculated way.

According to court records, Kluball had been unable to solicit girls to work as prostitutes through Facebook messages until a girl responded to his friend request. The girl had been in a foster home but ran away and was living with some men, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Pfluger.

Weeks later, she posted a suicide threat on her Facebook page and Kluball quickly responded saying she could make money in Wisconsin. Within a day of her agreeing, Kluball drove her to Reedsburg, photographed her and posted ads about her on a sex-for-sale website.

She had sex at least eight times last July with persons responding to Kluballs postings, according to court documents.

She was having sex with strangers and giving (Kluball) the money. She had never done that before, Pfluger told District Judge James Peterson.

The girl told authorities that Kluball would take 50 percent of her earnings if she had sex with him, and 60 percent if she did not, Pfluger said.

Disgusted with how Kluball treated her, the girl stayed with one customer, refusing to return to Reedsburg with Kluball, Pfluger said.

Worried he could be prosecuted for transporting a minor across state lines, Kluball called the girls mother to find out whether she was 17 or 18 years old. After learning she was 17, Kluball called Reedsburg police saying he had kicked her out of his residence because she was smoking too much weed, Pfluger said.

The girl left Reedsburg with another customer and was turned over to Rock County authorities before returning to Tennessee, Pfluger said.

Local and federal law enforcement began investigating Kluball and searched his Reedsburg apartment in September. He was indicted in October and pleaded guilty to the charges in January.

Kluballs attorney sought a five-year prison sentence, saying his client has endured four sexual assaults, 12 psychiatric hospitalizations, six suicide attempts and was threatened by the person who killed Weston High School Principal John Klang in 2006.

The shooter (Eric Hainstock) pointed a gun in Kluballs face before moving to the next room  the main office  and killing the principal, stated Kluballs attorney Peter Moyers in a letter to the court.

Peterson rejected Moyers request to factor in Kluballs mental health issues and traumatic past in lessening his personal responsibility for the crime.

There are people who love him but even to those who do hes been abusive and manipulative, Peterson said.

Kluballs mean and deviant tendencies and fascination with guns make him a risk to himself and the public and drives the need for a lengthy prison sentence, Peterson said.

The prison sentence is to be followed by 20 years on supervised release.
National Orders for four Witsies

Wits congratulates all those honoured, and especially those Witsies who have made a mark in our society.

The Wits recipients of National Orders for this year are Professor Benedict Wallet Vilakazi (posthumous) (Father of Zulu poetry), Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng (President of Wits Convocation), Professor Helen Rees (internationally renowned expert in HIV prevention, reproductive health and vaccines), and Wits alumna, Sylvia Magogo Glasser (choreographer).

They were honoured during a ceremony by President Jacob Zuma today, Thursday, 28 April 2016.

As we continue on this path of creating a shared humanity and history for all South Africans, it is fitting that Professor Vilakazi (scholar, poet and lecturer) and Mrs Glasser (teacher and choreographer) are honoured today for their contributions to create a multiracial and multicultural society.

We are also very proud and privileged to have Professor Phakeng in our midst where she continues to play a significant role in shaping our young leaders as the President of Wits Convocation.

And we commend the countless contributions made by Professor Helen Rees to address todays biggest global health challenges through her outstanding research and intellectual achievement at the highest level, says Professor Adam Habib, Wits Vice-Chancellor and Principal.

Order of Ikhamanga

Recognising South Africans who have excelled in the fields of arts, culture, literature, music, journalism and sport:

Professor Benedict Wallet Vilakazi (posthumous) - Order of Ikhamanga (Gold)

At the time of his death in 1947, Vilakazi was the first black PhD-graduate in South Africa and working in the Department of African Languages at Wits  a teaching position that made him the first black South African to teach white South Africans at university level. Together with Wits linguist, Professor Clement M. Doke, Vilakazi co-created the Zulu-English dictionary.

He is revered as the father of modern Zulu poetry and as the literary giant of the Zulu language of the first half of the 20th Century[1]. Vilakazi Street in Soweto, where Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu once lived bears his name.

The Order of Ikhamanga (Gold) is awarded to Vilakazi for his exceptional contribution to the field of literature in indigenous languages and the preservation of isiZulu culture.

Sylvia Magogo Glasser - Order of Ikhamanga (Silver)

A Wits alumna, celebrated teacher and choreographer, Glasser is the founder of Moving into Dance (MID)  a non-racial dance company that in 1981 held the first mixed race dance performance in the Great Hall at Wits.

Through MID, Glasser inspired and transformed hundreds of performers, teachers, choreographers and leaders in the dance community, and brought together people from all races in the 1980s to break down apartheid-barriers.

In 2014 she received a Knighthood in the Order of Oranje-Nassau from the Netherlands.

The Order of Ikhamanga (Silver) is awarded to Glasser for her excellent contribution to the field of dance and transference of skills to the young people from all racial backgrounds, fostering social cohesion in the time of apartheid.

Order of the Boabab

Recognising South Africans who have contributed to community service, business and economy, science, medicine and technological innovation:

Professor Helen Rees (OBE) - Order of the Baobab (Silver)

Executive Director of the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, Rees has a long and distinguished career as an internationally renowned expert in HIV prevention, reproductive health, vaccines and drug regulation. She serves in leadership roles in both national and international structures and chaired, and continues to chair, various councils and research bodies of the World Health Organization related to Ebola vaccines, polio and immunisation. She is currently chair of the Medicines Control Council and was appointed to this position by the Minister of Health.

In 2001 Professor Rees was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE).

The Order of the Baobab (Silver) is awarded to Rees for her excellent contribution in the field of medical science and research. Her work gives hope to communities who have been affected by the scourge of HIV and AIDS.

Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng - Order of Boabab (Silver)

Professor Phakeng is the first black woman to obtain her PhD in Mathematics Education. A Wits alumna and former associate professor at Wits, she is now the Vice-Principal of Research and Innovation at Unisa and President of Wits Convocation. She is the founding director of the award-winning Marang Centre for Maths and Education at Wits and has been named the most influential woman in education and training in Africa (CEO magazine) and most outstanding senior black female researchers the past five to 10 years (2011 National Science and Technology Forum).

The Order of Boabab (Silver) is awarded to Phakeng for her excellent contribution in the field of science and representing South Africa on the international stage through her outstanding research work.

[1] Natalia 35 (2005), Adrian Koopman pp. 63  74
Science rewrites history at the home of President James Monroe

Highland is located in Charlottesville, Virginia, adjacent to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home. The property currently encompasses 535-acres. Photo by Neal Piper

New find. An archaeological dig in 2015 uncovered what is now believed to be the foundation of the Monroe (1799) house. Photo courtesy of James Monroe's Highland

Home fires. Remnants of a chimney were also found during the 2015 archaeological dig. Photo courtesy of James Monroe's Highland

Other finds. The 2015 archaeological dig also unearthed nails, fragments of home furnishings and a significant amount of bottle glass and ceramic pieces dating from the late 18th/early 19th Century. Photo courtesy of James Monroe's Highland

Policy minded. This insurance policy is made out to Monroe and references the Virginia property. Photo courtesy of James Monroe's Highland

Forget the candles for telling age, researchers used dendrochronology or tree-ring dating to test the age of the standing structure at Highland determining that is was built in 1818. This core sample shows the tree-rings. Photo courtesy of James Monroe's Highland Photo - of - Hide Caption

Recent excavations at Highland  the historic, Charlottesville home of the nations fifth president  are upending history. The archaeology, combined with tree-ring dating, shows that the newly discovered foundation, not the modest home still standing on the property, was the Monroe (1799) house. The property is part of William & Mary and is the only U.S. presidents home currently owned by a university.

We have made a stunning discovery. These exceptionally well-preserved remains are just beneath the ground surface in the front yard of the 1870s wing attached to the standing Monroe-era house, said Sara Bon-Harper, executive director of James Monroes Highland. This finding represents a breakthrough in how the nation understands Monroe and how he lived.

Over his lifetime Monroe, an alumnus of William & Mary, contributed a 50-year career in public service, serving both the Commonwealth of Virginia and the nation in a variety of positions including his two-term presidency from 1817 to 1825.

People always ask me about the importance of archaeology and how it makes a difference in todays world, said Mike Barber, state archaeologist with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Highland provides a prime example of the power of the archaeological record to rewrite history. The evidence is often just below ground and following the best practices of stewardship and archaeology returns the best results, as these findings at Highland prove.

The newly discovered foundation shows a free-standing and sizeable house. Bon-Harper said the findings include part of the base of a large chimney preserved below the floor level, several sections of stone wall foundations, segments of thicker walls belonging to a stone cellar now filled with brick rubble, and charred planks, likely pointing to the destruction of the building by fire.

Monroe sold the core of his Highland property in early 1826, and it is likely that the house burned sometime in the mid-1800s. We have not yet found contemporary accounts of a fire at Highland, but later newspaper articles refer to the destruction of the former Monroe residence, and the subsequent construction of the new Massey house in its place. The Massey structure was likely completed in the 1870s, said Benjamin Ford, principal at Rivanna Archaeological Services, LLC, in Charlottesville, the firm conducting research on the newly discovered house.

The discovery of the new foundation is part of larger research efforts on the property, including dendrochronology, the dating of historic wood through tree rings. Dendrochronology was conducted on the modest building that has been long considered James Monroes house, providing confirmation that the house now standing on the property dates to 1818, and not 1799 as previously thought.

Dendrochronology showed the wood in the corner posts of the standing house was cut between the spring of 1815 and the spring of 1818, said Michael Worthington, proprietor of Oxford Tree-Ring Laboratory in Baltimore.

This later structure is now believed to be a dwelling Monroe mentioned building in a Sept. 6, 1818 letter to his son-in-law. The construction was likely part of a larger renovation and building campaign that Monroe conducted on his Albemarle and Loudon County properties early in his first term as president, Bon-Harper added.

Other artifacts found during the investigations included a significant quantity of bottle glass, ceramics, and fragments of home furnishings.

Bon-Harper said the discovery of the new foundation sets the stage for continued research, noting additional archeology began at the site earlier this month.

Surprisingly, this home of the last of our founding presidents has so much that remains to be explored archaeologically. The positive identification of the current house as the 1818 building confirms the interpretation of the archaeological remains as the house that Monroe and his family lived in beginning in November 1799, she said. Future interpretation on site will incorporate the new revised understanding of the guest house while we continue archaeological research of Monroes main house.

Beginning this year on James Monroes April 28 birthday, tours of the property will reflect the new interpretation of the site. Long-term plans for the property include extensive excavation and eventually virtual reality experiences of the house now being uncovered.

Discovery will be the essence of the new visitor experience, Bon-Harper said.

We believe our research efforts will reveal a greater understanding of the historic resources related to Monroes home, and also Monroes legacy, she added. A long-term research project will be visible to visitors who will witness the unearthing of a new knowledge as part of the historic site visit. 

Highland is located on James Monroe Parkway, Charlottesville, Virginia, adjacent to Monticello and encompasses 535-acres. It was recently re-named with James Monroes name for his plantation. It had been previously known as Ash Lawn-Highland, adding the name contributed by a later owner. Highland is open to the public and offers daily tours. The property is also used for community and private events.
W&M announces 2016 Plumeri Award recipients

From a globally recognized leader in international criminal law and a leading linguistic scholar to a widely published neuroscientist, the 2016 Plumeri Awards for Faculty Excellence will be bestowed to 20 talented and visionary professors across William & Marys campus.

The ultimate goal of the Plumeri Awards is to promote and reward the innovation and creativity of our faculty, who serve as the foundation for the universitys excellence, said Provost Michael R. Halleran. Invariably, recipients of Plumeri Awards express what a significant difference their awards make in their teaching and research. That difference can be felt across campus and beyond.

The award, established in 2009 with a generous gift from Joseph J. Plumeri II 66, D.P.S. 11, empowers faculty to continue to work passionately to challenge the minds of exceptional students. Today, the university is announcing all of the honorees.

What you accomplish in life  who you are and who you can become  is chiefly a product of your own individual desire, passion and vision. As a student at William & Mary, I was inspired by professors who fostered creativity, encouraged me to think big and taught me to embrace challenges as opportunities, said Joseph Plumeri. Supporting professors today is my way of recognizing the important role they play in helping young people to set their sights high and pursue their goals with great honor and integrity.

The impact of the award has been remarkable, providing critical funding for faculty who are leading innovative research efforts, including research that has led to greater advances in our understanding of debilitating conditions. For example, Robin Looft-Wilson, a kinesiology and health sciences associate professor and 2014 Plumeri Award recipient, used the funding to complete data collection on two research projects. One project, performed in collaboration with Eastern Virginia Medical School, examined the mechanism of abnormal blood vessel growth in retinopathy of prematurity, a condition that affects many premature babies. The second examined the molecular mechanisms of arterial dysfunction with hyperhomocysteinemia, a common risk factor for atherosclerosis.

I am so grateful for the Plumeri Award. It came at a time when my National Institutes of Health grant had just been completed and continued biomedical research funds were extremely hard to obtain, said Looft-Wilson. For our second project, the manuscript is in preparation for submission to a scientific journal and includes several undergraduate authors. Mr. Plumeri has not only been instrumental in keeping my research going during lean times, but has contributed to the advancement of these undergraduate researchers.

The awards recognize 20 faculty members each year for exemplary achievements in teaching, research and service. All recipients receive $10,000, which can be used during the course of two years for research, summer salaries or other stipends associated with scholarly endeavor.

The Plumeri Awards are a vital, tangible affirmation of those who make William & Mary one of the worlds greatest universities, rooted in the liberal arts and based on the close interaction of students and faculty, Halleran said. To achieve this type of experience for all students, we need resources that allow faculty to deepen and expand their work and increase student involvement in that work. The Plumeri Awards do exactly that.

Brief biographies of each of the 2016 Plumeri Award recipients appear below:

Mark J. Brush

Brushs leadership in the classroom, dedication to mentorship, service as chair of both the Academic Status and Degrees Committee and Quantitative Skills Committee, as well as his significant research record make him a vital resource to VIMS Department of Biological Sciences and the schools educational missions. Having authored and co-authored numerous publications and scientific meetings, Brushs publication record continues to increase as his research and his students research add to the body of literature on ecosystem modeling. He holds a doctorate in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island.

Joshua A. Burk

Associate Professor of Psychology

Burk is praised as a collaborative faculty member and productive researcher, adding value to a wide range of topics in the field of neuroscience. Since his arrival at William & Mary in 2002, he has published 25 peer-reviewed papers, many of which were co-authored with undergraduate and graduate students, and he currently has eight publications in preparation or under review. Burk has supervised 11 graduate students at William & Mary and works with many research assistants in undergraduate labs. Burk currently serves as the chair of the psychology department. He has previously served as director of the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program and has devoted his time to multiple steering committees and working groups. He holds a doctorate in experimental psychology from the University of New Hampshire.

Lynda L. Butler

Chancellor Professor of Law

After eight years of service as vice dean of W&M Law School and one year as acting dean, Butler has quickly established herself as a prominent scholar in the field of property rights and land use law. She is also known as a thoughtful teacher who devotes a considerable amount of time to ensuring that her students not only learn basic legal principles, but also learn how those principles affect real-world problems. Through her recent scholarship, Butler is establishing herself as an important voice in the debates over how the law should address property. Her continued directorship of the Law Schools Property Rights Project and her leadership of its annual conferences in Williamsburg and around the world will continue to solidify her place in the academic community. She holds a J.D. from the University of Virginia and a B.S. from the College of William & Mary.

Bruce Campbell

Class of 1964 Term Associate Professor of History and European Studies (German)

Campbell serves as the program director for European Studies and holds positions as the Class of 1964 Term Associate Professor and as a Faculty Fellow with the Center for the Liberal Arts. He is deeply involved in mentoring students in German Studies for Fulbright and other major international scholarships; between one-quarter and one-third of all William & Mary Fulbright Scholars are German Studies majors. He publishes on Nazi perpetrator biography, German detective fiction and radio. Campbell holds a doctorate in modern European history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nancy Combs

Ernest W. Goodrich Professor of Law

Combss ground-breaking scholarship has made her a recognized leader in the field of international criminal law. She has authored two books and more than two dozen articles and book chapters. She also has served as an expert witness in genocide trials in Norway and the Netherlands; she has trained defense counsel in Bosnia, and she has served on the International Expert Framework, a project that identified and explicated the fundamental principles of international criminal procedure. Through these many activities, Combs is deeply engaged with the practice of international criminal law as well as with its most theoretical aspects. A dynamic and exceptionally popular teacher, Combs also weaves her cutting-edge scholarship into her courses on U.S. criminal law, international criminal law, and human rights. She holds a doctorate from Leiden University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining William & Mary Law School, Combs clerked on the United States Supreme Court and served as a legal advisor for the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in The Hague.

Timothy Costelloe

Professor of Philosophy

Costelloe takes a classical liberal arts approach to teaching philosophy. His primary research and teaching interests are in aesthetics and history of philosophy, with particular emphasis on Hume, Kant and the modern period. In his 15 years at William & Mary, Costelloe has consistently received high evaluations in the wide range of courses he has taught in the Department of Philosophy, and has a long record of service at both the university and departmental level. He is the author or editor of three books, including his most recent book, The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein, and has contributed articles to a variety of collections and journals. Costelloe is the recipient of various awards, including the William & Mary Alumni Award and a Humboldt Fellowship, which he took at Maximilians-Universitat Munchen. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Emory University and a doctorate in sociology from Boston University.

Melanie Dawson

Associate Professor of English

Dawson, recently named the David and Carolyn Wakefield Term Distinguished Associate Professor of English, is a specialist in American literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She has published widely on such topics as affect theory, age studies, realism and interdisciplinary approaches to literature and the environment. Dawson holds national office in the Edith Wharton Society and is co-directing the societys international conference this summer in Washington, D.C. A 2014 recipient of the Alumni Teaching Award, Dawson is frequently in demand as an advisor of undergraduate honors research and seeks to promote undergraduate research in small, innovative conferences and on the national level. Dawson is at work on several projects, including a third book, which focuses on representations and technologies surrounding aging in modern literature.

Michael DiPaola

Chancellor Professor of Education

DiPaola is a stellar representative of educational leadership  exemplifying all dimensions of the School of Educations conceptual framework that emphasizes the importance of educators being content experts, reflective practitioners, educational leaders and effective collaborators. He is sought after as an expert who tackles difficult leadership challenges within schools and is able to identify effective solutions. His books, articles and scholarly presentations have extended the knowledge base pertaining to effective leadership. As the primary force in the development of the School of Educations Executive Ed.D. program, DiPaola has led an innovative effort to meet the academic needs of practicing school personnel who seek to become school principals and superintendents. He holds a doctorate in Educational Administration from Rutgers University.

Will Hausman

Chancellor Professor and Chair, Department of Economics

Hausman is an active member of the William & Mary community and a leader in the field of economic history. He has served three different terms as chair of the Economics Department and has been a faculty representative to the Board of Visitors. He most recently published an edited volume, entitled Regulation between Legal Norms and Economic Reality: Intentions, Effect, and Adaptation: The German and American Experiences. Hausman currently serves as the assistant editor for Business and Economic History On-Line and has a long history of editorial positions outside the university. He holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois.

John M. Hoenig

Professor of Marine Science

Hoenig is highly regarded as a quantitative fisheries ecologist and statistician, and has made substantive contributions to VIMS educational, research and advisory service missions. A gifted teacher and inspiring mentor, Hoenig continues to make a real contribution to the academic program at VIMS through his innovative and engaging classroom teaching style, as well as his supportive mentality as a mentor. He equips his students with professional experience around the world that has them in high demand even before they complete their degrees. Hoenig has developed an internationally recognized research program and provides advice to governments and commissions around the world on fisheries management including in the Chesapeake region, the Caribbean, Europe and Australia. He holds a masters degree and doctorate in oceanography and a masters degree in statistics from the University of Rhode Island.

Darian M. Ibrahim

Professor of Law

Since coming to William & Mary in 2014, Ibrahim has quickly become a leading scholar and beloved teacher. His expertise on law and entrepreneurship has been widely recognized, and his careful qualitative analysis have helped both those in academics and business to gain a better understanding of innovative forms of startup investing and business development. A prolific scholar, he has published one or more major articles each year in some of the nations leading law journals. With his scholarly pace showing no signs of slowing down, Ibrahim will continue to have an impact on how we think about law and entrepreneurship for some time to come. He holds a J.D. from Cornell University.

Hiroshi Kitamura

Associate Professor of History

Kitamura addresses topics ranging from U.S. diplomacy and Japanese cinema, to the global politics of nuclear power with an interdisciplinary and transnational academic focus. With two monographs underway, tentatively titled Transpacific Cultural Exchange during the Cold War and Japanese Popular Culture and High Growth, he has a prolific publication history and publishes in both English and Japanese. Since joining the department in 2004, Kitamura has served in many volunteer positions and continues to teach sought-after classes accompanied by glowing reviews from students. In 2011, he took a group of students to Parma, Italy to explore slow food, and in 2014 he served as a guest curator for the Muscarelle Museums exhibit entitled Tree to Mountain: The Woodblock Prints of Toshi Yoshida. Kitamura is a founding member of the departments James Blair Historical Review, past faculty advisor to Phi Alpha Theta, and current graduate director. He also coordinated the W&M Japan Recovery Initiative to aid the victims of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that struck Japan in 2011. Kitamura holds a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.



Teresa V. Longo

Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies

Longo is a faculty member in Hispanic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures who brings immense experience and a great passion to her groundbreaking scholarship, interdisciplinary teaching and devoted service. As the dean for educational policy and dean for curriculum review, she worked on the design of William & Marys new College Curriculum, which emphasizes an integrated, interdisciplinary and global approach to liberal education. Also in her role as dean for educational policy, she had oversight of the Humanities and Arts Departments and the Global Studies programs. As a scholar, Longo has a history of publications, including her forthcoming journal article Galeano, published article Humanity Rendered Visible: Literature, Art and the Post-9/11 Imagination, and book manuscript Visible Dissent. Professor Longo is also the editor of Pablo Neruda and the US Culture Industry. She holds a doctorate in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nathan B. Oman

Tazewell Taylor Research Professor of Law

An expert on bankruptcy law, Omans teaching focuses on contract law, the philosophy of private law and religion in legislature. With more than two dozen articles and publications on law and religion in the past decade, he has become one of the Law Schools most respected teachers and highly accomplished scholars. Oman leads the Financial Crisis Reading Group at William & Mary, an interdisciplinary organization sponsored by the Law School and dedicated to the discussion of contemporary economic issues. He is a current or former member of the American Bar Association, the American Society for Legal History, the Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, the Mormon History Association, and the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology. Oman, who received a Plumeri Award in 2012, brings an impressive intellectual depth and breadth to his scholarship and teaching. He holds a J.D. from Harvard University.

Kostas Orginos

Associate Professor of Physics

Since joining the William & Mary Physics Department in 2005, Orginos has made quick contributions within the field of physics in his early career. Deeply sought after in the application of lattice field theory to study interactions in nuclear physics, he is currently a senior theory group staff member at Jefferson Lab, and a founding member and senior staff of the Nuclear Physics with Lattice QCD collaboration. Orginos was named as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015. Orginos dedicates much of his time to his students  he is currently rated in the top third of the department by student evaluations and has been a post-doctoral mentor to three graduates who have gone on to tenure-track faculty positions at premier universities. Orginos also serves the department as a member of the Graduate Studies and Facilities committees. He holds a doctorate in physics from Brown University.

Charles Palermo

Associate Professor of Art History

Palermo is director of Film and Media Studies and co-chair of the Global Film Festival Oversight Committee. Named to an Alumni Memorial Term Distinguished Professorship for 2010-13, he shares his vision of modern expressions (including photography and film) as art and incorporates this interdisciplinary approach into his course offerings. Palermos scholarship is deeply respected in the field of art history, and he is frequently invited to lecture at art museums around the country. Palermo is one of the co-founders of nonsite.org and currently serves as an editorial board member. He holds a doctorate in history of art from Johns Hopkins University.

Denys Poshyvanyk

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Poshyvanyk has built a repertoire of research in the field of software engineering with interests in evolution and maintenance, mobile app development and testing, energy consumption, performance, privacy, and reuse. Since arriving at William & Mary in 2008, he has been awarded well over $2 million in external research funding, including a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award. He is also the winner of three ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards and five Best Paper Awards. Poshyvanyk has published more than 100 conference and journal papers, and he currently teaches software engineering courses and has been active in advising graduate and undergraduate students at William & Mary. In the Computer Science Department, he has served on several committees, including the Graduate Admissions Committee and Faculty Recruiting Committee. He holds a doctorate in computer science from Wayne State University.

Ronald Schechter

Associate Professor of History

A renowned scholar of early modern Europe, Schechters research focus is in French and Jewish history. His work in preparation will be titled A Genealogy of Terror: Reflections on a Concept in Eighteenth-Century France. Schechter holds editorial positions for Reflexions historiques, History Compass and Eighteenth-Century Life. Praised as a captivating teacher, his median evaluation scores from students are exceptionally high across the board. He has a strong history of service to the department, serving on numerous boards and committees for departmental affairs, pre-major advising, social and program committees, and has administered language exams for French, German, Italian and Latin. He holds a doctorate in history from Harvard University.



Jonathan R. Scheerer

Associate Professor of Chemistry

Scheerer has established an outstanding record of accomplishment in teaching, scholarship and service. His research is inspired by natural products, and the journals in which his publications appear are high-quality and high-impact journals. In addition, Scheerer has been able to integrate his enthusiasm for teaching organic chemistry with his talents as a research mentor. He has mentored over 30 students  sponsoring four to five during the summer and over 10 during the academic year. Scheerer has also been a pre-major advisor and has recently become an executive officer for the Alpha Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. He holds a doctorate in organic chemistry from Harvard University.

Talbot J. Taylor

Louise G.T. Cooley Professor of English and Director of Linguistics Program

In his 34 years at William & Mary, Taylor has distinguished himself as a renowned linguistic scholar. Taylor is the sole author of three books, co-author of four, and has authored and co-authored 38 peer-reviewed articles or book chapters. He currently serves on several university committees, including the Arts & Sciences Committee for Chairs and Program Directors. In 2002, he founded the universitys Oxford Program, for which he continues to serve as director, and he was the founding co-director of the Murray Scholars Program, now known as the 1693 Scholars Program. In addition, Taylor was presented with the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994  a feat only three other William & Mary professors have been awarded. He holds a doctorate in linguistics.




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At left, Call General Manager Paul Palange and Publisher Jody Boucher present Arthur and Alice Aubin, of Harrisville, with the grand prize for The Call and The Times 2016 Publishers Giveaway contest. The Aubins said they are donating the $5,000 prize to their church, St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church in Harrisville.
Lovers (illustration)

By: Mahesh Sarin

A woman was arrested on a charge of assault after allegedly pouring hot water on her husband and her sister because they were having sex, police in Zambia said.

The woman, who was not identified, was charged with two counts of assault.

According to the police investigation, the woman came home from work during the day, and she found her husband having sex with her sister.

She became extremely angry and went to boil a pot of water.

When the water was very hot, she poured it over her husband and sister.

The two victims were rushed to a nearby hospital, where they are said to be in serious condition, but they are expected to survive.
Hundreds Attend Opening of Gwersyllts New Home Bargains

This article is old - Published: Thursday, Apr 28th, 2016

The much anticipated opening of a new Home Bargains store in Gwersyllt attracted large crowds over the weekend  with hundreds visiting throughout the morning.

Saturday 23rd April saw formal opening of the new Home Bargains store on Dodds Lane, Gwersyllt  with huge crowds gathering throughout the day to visit the premises.

Throughout the morning there were celebrations taking place at the store, with a giant Minion cutting the big red ribbon to formally open the store.

Home Bargains has taken over the occupancy of the former Tesco store, which closed last year during a company reorganisation. Since then the 17,600sq ft store has remained vacant.

Work on the new Home Bargains has been ongoing for a number of months  with the company investing almost 500,000 in the store, along with creating over 50 jobs.

The company, which is one of the UKs largest family-run retailers, has invested almost 500,000 into the new Gwersyllt store  with up to 50 new jobs being created.

Locally the opening of the new Home Bargains store had been much anticipated in the area  with large crowds gathering throughout the day to visit the store and grab a bargain.

One shopper told us that the car park was packed, with cars seen driving around the car park trying to find a space.

Another told us that car were parking on grass banks and that queues to get into the car park were backed up from Dodds Lane towards Lidl on the Old Mold Road.

Speaking about the opening of the new Home Bargains, Joe Morris, operations director at Home Bargains, said: The store opening was a great success and wed like to thank Wrexham residents for their warm welcome.

Were thrilled by the response weve already seen from shoppers in Wrexham and are looking forward to seeing even more new customers come through the doors. Wed also like to thank all staff members for ensuring the launch day ran as smoothly as possible.
WIN: Ten Pairs Of Real Ale Trail Tickets Up For Grabs

This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Apr 27th, 2016

Are you free on Saturday, and like or want to try a range of real ales while enjoying the beautiful Dee Valley?

Dee Valleys Great Scenic Ale Trail is taking place this weekend and we have three pairs of tickets to give away.

This Saturday April 30th the bus based Ale Trail delivers hundreds of Ale lovers straight to the doors of 7 quirky village pubs all stocked up with an impressive line up of award winning local ales.

The organisers tell us: The RAT shuttle bus drives through the lanes of glorious countryside to reach seven carefully selected rural pubs known for their style and ambiance plus their support of local dynamic micro breweries. All thats expected of people is to enjoy the hospitality, sample the local ales and not worry about who is driving.

Dee Valley Ale Trail starts either at Wrexham or Llangollen at 11am and ends 11pm, has over 50 unique ales on the day many exclusively brewed for the Ale Trail only.

You can start and finish anywhere on the route and tickets are available from any of the participating pubs; 10 in advance and 12 on the day  or take part in the competition below!

Real Ale Trails was created 7 years ago for the County of Flintshire to help save village pubs from closure by introducing new people to venues to eat and drink with resounding success.

The risk to rural pubs is still very much here, said Paul Owner of the Aqueduct Inn Froncysyllte. CAMRA reported 29 rural pubs closing each week. Its a tough trade but by joining events like the Ale Trail it encourages locals and visitors to come and discover new pubs, with the aim that they will come back on their own steam one day.

The Real Ale Trail will be visiting The Saith Seren Wrexham, Cross Lanes Marchwiel The Buck House Bangor on Dee, Aqueduct Inn Froncysyllte, Prince of Wales Llangollen, LLangollen Brewery and the Sun Trevor in Trevor.

You can find out more about the event on RealAleTrailWrexham.co.uk

To win one of the ten pairs of tickets please use this form  please make sure you are free on Saturday, and have the right contact details so we can get in touch if you win!

COMPETITION CLOSED

Rules Of Entry:

 No entries from contributors or families of contributors to Wrexham.com

 Wrexham.coms decision is final in all entries & no correspondence will be entered into.

 Winner will be selected at random.

 One entry per person please, we will just discount doubles!

 No alternative prizes offered or monetary value.

 You are of legal age to drink!
The Partei fur Soziale Gleichheit (PSG) is currently collecting more than 2,000 signatures to enable it to take part in the Berlin state elections and the district elections in Tempelhof-Schoneberg and Mitte this September. At the center of the PSGs campaign is the building of an international anti-war movement.

The PSG held a rally on Saturday in the Schoneberg district of Berlin.

Seventy years after the end of the Hitler dictatorship, the German elite are once again staking their claim as a world power and hegemon of Europe, said Ulrich Rippert, chairman of the PSG and its leading candidate, in Kaiser Wilhelm square. The square is home to a memorial bearing the names of concentration camps and serving as a reminder of the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

While austerity measures are enforced in every category of social services, German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen has called for additional military spending in the amount of 130 billion, he explained. We accuse the German government and all the parties that determine its policy at a federal and state level of systematically rearming the military and risking a Third World War.

Joining Rippert were other speakers who made clear that the return to militarism and war was being caused by the deep crisis of capitalism. The ruling elites were reacting to the growing social polarization of society and the political crisis as they did in the 1930s: they plan and carry out wars, foment nationalism and, fearful of social uprisings, strengthen the oppressive state apparatus.

We appeal to all those who are not willing to stand by and accept the threat of war, explained Rippert. The fight against war must be led by the international working class and based on a revolutionary socialist perspective.

Numerous passers-by in the lively shopping quarter stopped to listen, supported the intervention of the PSG in the elections with their signatures and took copies of the pamphlet Socialism and the Fight against War, as well as leaflets announcing the international May Day rally to be held online May 1.

World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke with workers and students at the rally about the threat of war and growing social inequality.

The current developments toward war are terrible, said graphic designer Corinna N. One has to see Germanys policies in a global context. Germany gets enormous revenues from arms exports. If it supports military operations abroad, it can push its weapons exports even more.

Especially tragic is the situation of the refugees, said Corinna. One of the worst terms created in recent years is economic refugee. A distinction is made between war refugees and economic refugees. Europe sponged off the African countries and made sure the people there would have to flee. And then it told them: No, we cant take in any refugees. That is indescribable cynicism.

If youre talking about closing borders, said Corinna, one should have closed the borders on the African side years agobefore the European locusts came to Africa. For me, colonialism never stopped. First they pulled the rug out from under the people and then said let them all die. That made her furious.

The agitation against refugees in the media and in politics was, in her opinion, above all a means of diverting attention away from abuses in Germany. The way the media has reported on the influx of refugees has made people completely hysterical and encouraged hatred. In reality, Germany is rich enough to take in refugees and improve the social situation.

The right-wing Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has now gained influence as a result of official policy, said Corinna. For years the ruling parties emphasized that the danger from the left was just as great as that from the right. For years the brutal activities of right-wing parties like the NPD were covered up. Now we are suffering the consequences. I have never understood why they did nothing for so long. Sometimes I think the major parties wanted it.

Twenty-two-year-old Gamze, an international business administration student at Viadrina University in Frankfurt (Oder), pointed to the increase in military spending. Instead of weapons, the money should be invested in education or other social areas, she said. Building up the military will only further promote war. The real reason for the wars was oil, she continued. Its all about money. Every country just wants to assert its power.

Gamze criticized the pact between the European Union and Turkey which provides for the deportation back to Turkey of those who have fled to Greece. Whether the money that Turkey receives will really be used for the good of the refugees is doubtful, Gamze said.

The most recent refugee tragedy in the Mediterranean had appalled her. One has to let refugees into the country legally, she stressed, so that they dont become dependent on smugglers.

Gamze was skeptical of the established parties. The major parties, for example the SPD [Social Democratic Party], all say they want to support refugees and stand for peace, but despite this they go in the direction of war. One doesnt know what to believe. They say one thing and do another.

Two young men from Egypt voiced their anger over the wars that have been waged in the Middle East for decades. Mohamed, 26 years old, works as an engineer in Berlin. I consider the German policy of military buildup to be hypocritical, he said, because the government is supporting through its actions what they have rejected in words. The delivery of weapons to Saudi Arabia and countries in the Middle East is just one example. Germany is taking part in the US wars and the politics of violence, just like every European country.

If one is opposed to the terror of the Islamic State (IS), one must first recognize the roots of the problem. The IS would not even have gotten so strong if no weapons had been sent there, said Mohamed. For the western countries, this is not about a fight against IS, its about oil.

Mohamed and his friend Anwar, also 26, who studies in Aachen, follow the developments in Egypt with concern. Unfortunately, the revolution has not accomplished the goals we had hoped for. Meanwhile, the army has taken on more and more control, Anwar explained.

Under the dictatorship of Al-Sisi, the weapons were being used against his own population, said Anwar, who also reported that his friends had been arrested for no reason. One Egyptian friend who helped children on the street was arrested at a police checkpoint because she was only able to show an American passport. For that, she now has to sit for three years in prison. That is one of a thousand stories not told here, he said.

German policy was also purely hypocritical when it came to Egypt, said Mohamed. Right after [President Mohamed] Mursi was removed from office, Germany criticised the putsch. And now the German government is shaking hands with the dictator.

The government treats the refugees with the same hypocrisy. They claim too many refugees come to Germany. Thats why Syrias neighboring Arab countries have to take in a lot more people. The refugees are victims of the system, said Mohamed. They suffer the consequences of the American and European wars. It affects those the worst who dont have enough money to pay for help to escape and must hold out in those devastated regions.
On Tuesday, April 26, unions at the French National Railways (SNCF) called a one-day protest strike opposing the new state decree attacking rail workers conditions.

The trade unions had received the final text of the rail decree, after negotiating it with the SNCF and the government, over two months ago, on February 23. This was the same day as the announcement of the labour law reform of Labour Minister Myriam El Khomri. The El Khomri Law, which allows the unions to negotiate firm-level contracts violating the Labour Code and lengthens the work week, provoked escalating anger among youth and workers, compelling the student unions to call protests starting in early March.

As part of the unions broader strategy of blocking a struggle against the Socialist Party (PS) government of President Francois Hollande, the rail unions did not, however, call for industrial action against the rail decree or against the El Khomri Law.

As the contents of the rail decree have become known, however, and anger mounted among the workers, the unions finally felt compelled to organise a symbolic one-day strike on Tuesday, during which they organised no demonstrations or public meetings.

The purpose of the decree is to prepare rail services for privatisation and the introduction of competition on French rail lines by operators such as Germanys Deutsche Bahn (DB) and Italys Trenitalia against the SNCF. Since these operators will run their operations under the regulations imposed on the private sector, they are expected to intensify exploitation so as to do the same work with 18 percent less staff than the SNCF.

The provisions of the rail decree, which apply to all rail workers in France, make clear that the privatisation process is being used to slash working conditions in the industry. The provisions include:

*Cutting the number of days off by 16 per year and breaking up the work week, so that workers will have only 30 two-day weekends yearly, of which many will be Sunday-Monday weekends.

*Increasing the travel radius around a workers main workplace to which he can be assigned to report for work to 50km.

Rail workers struck across France on Tuesday. Fifty percent of SNCF workers, including 70 percent of train staff, heeded the strike call. One-half of high speed trains (TGV) and Paris suburban trains (Transilien) and two-thirds of Inter-city trains did not run.

Philippe Martinez, general secretary of the Stalinist General Confederation of Labour (CGT), who has responded to youth struggles against the El Khomri Law by presenting the CGT as turning over a new leaf and adopting a militant posture, said the day of action was a massive warning strike. He praised trade union unity and confirmed that there would be other days [of action] in mid-May.

This last statement is a signal to the ruling class by Martinez that the trade unions will continue to do everything they can to block industrial action by the working class against the PS government, and will delay even the symbolic one-day strikes until the decree is on the verge of being adopted.

WSWS reporters were invited to a trade union strike meeting ( Assemblee generale ) at a Paris train station by rail workers. The meeting drew a limited attendance, mainly restricted to low-level trade union delegates, who said that workers were angry and ready to fight, but that they did not trust the unions and did not believe in the usefulness of symbolic one-day actions. They also noted a definite reluctance on the part of the workers to discuss strategy for strikes and protest actions with them.

After four years during which the trade unions mobilised no industrial action against the PS government as it carried out unprecedented attacks on social rights, the social gulf between the trade unions and the working class is in the open. The mood in the working class is increasingly militant, but this does not translate into increased support for symbolic union actions or for political allies of the PS and the unions, such as the pseudo-left New Anticapitalist Party.

This is an indication of the revolutionary character of the emerging political crisis. Social struggle, when it does erupt, will increasingly take the form of an explosion outside the official channels through which the class struggle was regulated and suppressed in the period since the 1968 general strike, the last great revolutionary experience of the working class in France.

For those who occupy the bottom rungs of the union bureaucracy, however, and who have for decades overseen the mechanisms through which the class struggle was contained in safe channels, the growing militancy of the workers is troubling. The more left-talking officials want to organise more actions and are frustrated by the union leaderships open sabotage of their attempts to do so.

They are determined, however, to avoid discussion of the fact that the working class can only be mobilized in struggle independently of the union bureaucracies that they are a part of, and on the basis of a revolutionary socialist perspective opposed to all the parties that have for decades worked in the periphery of the so-called Socialist Party.

At the meeting, the WSWS spoke with Serge, a maintenance worker and trade union delegate, who observed that the union leaderships were not mobilising the workers during the strike.

Yesterday morning, I returned to the shop to see who was going to strike today, and I had nothing to propose. I was not aware of anything that was going be taking place today. In fact, when I got more information, I learned that the CGT had said it was a day that had been scheduled, but it is a day for workers to strike at home, and for a lot of guys that were a little  he said, shrugging to indicate that his fellow workers thought the CGT was not fighting.

For me, a day of strike is to do thingsat least, to demonstrate, assemble, discuss, and now, now there is really nothing on offer, he said. He added, Thats a shame, because for many workers, it is a day [of action] for practically nothing.

Serge indicated that there was significant opposition among workers to war and the state of emergency imposed after the November 13 terror attacks in Paris, noting that networks of Islamist fighters who carried out the attacks are the bastard offspring of the NATO powers Syrian war.

France is deeply implicated in this war, and in fact terrorism is linked to the disorder that they, that means the French government and other rich states, bring in that region. When we see poverty, chaos and war, we cannot expect anything else ... there are plenty of wars in the world and it is still linked to the politics of the great powers, he said.
The strike by nearly 40,000 Verizon workers in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, which reached its two-week mark on Wednesday, is at a crossroads. The giant telecom, backed by powerful financial interests, is carrying out a well-planned strikebreaking operation and remains intransigent in its demands for sweeping health care, pension and wage concessions. On April 30, the company is cutting off health care benefits for all strikers and their families.

In the face of this assault, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), along with other AFL-CIO unions, have left the strikers isolated. In place of a real mobilization of the working class, the unions have staged phony solidarity rallies involving union executives who have a long record of betraying their own members. The CWA and the IBEW have also told workers to place their faith in the Democratic Party, which has long sided with the telecommunication monopolies against workers.

If this struggle is not to be defeated like the 2011 Verizon strike and countless others, rank-and-file workers must take the conduct of the fight into their own hands and appeal directly to workers throughout the US and internationally to join them in a common struggle.

Within this context it is important to review the experience of the last major strike by telecom workers, the 2014 struggle against FairPoint Communications, the North Carolina-based firm that bought a portion of Verizon New Englands operations in 2008 for $2.4 billion. In 2009, Fairpointby then the eighth largest phone company in the USentered Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On October 14, 2014, three years after emerging from bankruptcy, the company froze the pensions of nearly 2,000 workers in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine who had built the company.

Three days later, on October 17, 2014, the longest US strike of the year began. It lasted 131 days, through the holiday season and into February 2015. More than 40 percent of FairPoints employees joined the pickets.

In Maine, workers were represented by Local 2327 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which provided no strike fund. Instead, striking employees had to seek part-time jobs to support their families. Peter McLaughlin, a lead negotiator for the local, told the web site InsideSources , We went into this knowing we had to take concessions. The CWA also represented workers from some areas of northern New England.

FairPoint had purchased Verizons landline business in all three states at the end of March 2008 and was demanding deep concessions in the union contracts it had inherited. Shortly after the contracts expired in August 2014, the company declared a bargaining impasse as an excuse for imposing cuts.

FairPoint, which had filed for bankruptcy in October 2009 and emerged a little more than a year later, was determined to extract as much as possible from its telecommunications workers. Spokesperson Angelynne Amores Beaudry told InsideSources the unions have dug in on almost all of their current benefits under contracts from a bygone era.

Federal mediators undug the heels of union negotiators, who agreed to vicious cuts. When asked by the Portland Press Herald, McLaughlin would not disclose how many workers voted to approve the deal. Instead, a joint statement issued by FairPoint and the unions claimed that the deal would provide employees with wages and benefits that are among the best in northern New England.

In truth, the agreement guaranteed a raise of only 1 percent in August 2016a year and a half after ratificationand an increase of 2 percent a year after that. An insulting delayed ratification payment of only $500 was added. Sick days, which previously were unlimited, are now capped at six per year.

Retiree medical benefits were axed for workers who were not yet retirement-eligible. Those who had reached a certain age could get a monthly health insurance stipend if they retired during the first 30 months of the new contract, but not if they were over age 65. Accruals in the defined benefit pension plan were cut in half.

Under the new contract, the IBEW took over administration of workers health insurance, saving FairPoint about $10 million per year. Such agreements have enabled the International to build up nearly $125 million of assets in 103-12 benefits entities, along with almost $180 million of stock investments.

At the beginning of the contract negotiations, FairPoint demanded a total of $700 million worth of concessions; the starting point of the unions was that they were willing to give up at least $200 million. When asked by the Portland Press Herald, the IBEW would not provide a figure for how much they gave up in the final agreement.

The IBEWs craven perspective was expressed in its appeals for FairPointwhich was owned mostly by hedge fundsto be sold after the contract was signed. McLaughlin happily told the Bangor Daily News that FairPoint was ripe for acquisition and that this agreement makes it even more appealing. IBEW Business Agent Jen Nappi told the News, I pray to God someone comes in and buys us. FairPoint likely had the same goal in mind when it laid off 200 workers after the strike ended.
A 2008 email from a Michigan water quality official asked a technician in Fenton, Michigan, near Flint, to falsify the results of a high lead sampling by testing more homes.

The Guardian reviewed the email and reported on it Wednesday. Adam Rosenthal of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) sent the email to the technician and copied Mike Prysby, the engineer in MDEQs Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance who was just indicted on criminal charges for his role in the Flint water crisis.

Samples collected from five of the nearly 45 homes in the Chateaux Du Lac Condominiums, in the small town of Fenton, which runs its own private water system, were sent to the MDEQ and showed high levels of lead. One of the homes tested at 115 parts per billion (ppb)almost ten times higher than the US Environmental Protection Agencys (EPA) action level of 15 ppb. Rosenthal wrote in his September 16, 2008 email, I just saw the results115 ppb for lead is a bit high. Since this is an annual round of monitoring, which ends 9/30/08, there is still time to collect more samples and possibly bump this one out.

Dr. Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech University engineering professor who exposed the high lead levels in Flint when he conducted his own sampling, told the Guardian, Oh my gosh, Ive never heard [it] more black and white. In the Flint emails, if you recall, it was a little bit implied  this is like telling the strategy, which is: You failed, but if you go out and get a whole bunch more samples that are low, then you can game it lower.

It just shows that this culture of corruption and unethical, uncaring behavior predated Flint by at least six years.

The Flint emails referred to by Edwards were from June of last year, seven years later. In one, the same Adam Rosenthal wrote to Flint water official Mike Glasgow, who is another of those indicted by the state of Michigan, We hope you have 61 more lead/copper samples collected and sent to the lab by 6/30/15, and that they will be below the AL [EPA action level] for lead. As of now with 39 results, Flints 90th percentile is over the AL for lead.

The EPA Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) is the federal law governing the monitoring and mediation of lead in water. According to the LCR, 90 percent of the sampling results for a community must be below the 15 ppb threshold. Otherwise, a high lead public notice must go into effect, warning residents that the water is unsafe to drink until measures to resolve it are introduced and further testing confirms the water is safe to drink.

In the case of the Fenton testing, rather than taking appropriate measures to address the high lead, Rosenthal encouraged taking a minimum of 5 more samples, which if below 15 ppb, would have kept the system in compliance. Since compliance is based on the 90th percentile, the 9th highest sample would count, 20 samples would be the 18th highest for the 90th, and so on, explained Rosenthal.

Otherwise were back to water quality parameters and lead public notice.

Another Virginia Tech water expert, Yanna Lambrinidou, who worked with Edwards in uncovering the lead in water crisis in Washington DC, explained to the Guardian how the MDEQ subverted the protections intended in the LCR: So if you collect 10 samples and you put them in order from lowest to highest, [if] the sample in position No 9 is below 15ppb  then what that last sample is doesnt matter for compliance purposes, she said. It could be 40,000ppb, but it still gives you compliance with the lead action level.

Of Rosenthals email, Lambrinidou said, Of course, its alarming  The one and only regulation in the nation to protect us from lead in drinking water was subverted.

LeeAnne Walters, the Flint resident and mother who was instrumental in exposing the health danger and the lies of local and state officials on Flint water, spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the revelation: If you had told me this two years ago, I wouldnt have believed it. But with all thats happened over the last two years, Im not surprised.

In Philadelphia, it has emerged that they have been improperly testing since 2002, by sampling a greater and greater proportion of homes that are least at risk in violation of the lead and copper rule. This is just one more thing that has been revealed now as a result of whats come out about Flint.

Rosenthal remains on the MDEQ payroll while five other higher-level officials of the department have either been fired or forced to resign so far due to their roles in the Flint water crisis.

Last week, the State of Michigan announced the indictment of three officials in connection with the crisis: Prysby, Glasgow and Stephen Bush, the district supervisor in the MDEQ Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance. These indictments are part of a damage control operation aimed at shielding those who oversaw the transfer of the citys water supply from Detroit to the corrosive Flint River, then covered up the consequences. Among those culpable are Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (a Republican), former Emergency Manager Darnell Earley and former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling (both Democrats), and the Obama administrations Environmental Protection Agency.

The indifference on display in the email form Rosenthal is the product of a culture created by a system in which the health and safety of residents is subordinated to the various profit-making schemes of the entire political establishment, operating on behalf of the corporate and financial elite.
As the American political establishment enters the final stages of the primary contests to choose the presidential nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties, the acute danger confronting the US and international working class emerges more clearly. The leading contenders in both parties, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, are committed to a vast military escalation following the November election.

In a speech on foreign policy delivered Wednesday, Trump combined virulent nationalism with a pledge to carry out a massive buildup of the American military to overcome any and all opposition to the drive of US imperialism for world domination.

Declaring America First to be the guiding principle of his foreign policy, Trump proclaimed, We will develop, build and purchase the best equipment known to mankind. Our military dominance must be unquestioned, and I mean unquestioned, by anybody and everybody.

The billionaire real estate mogul linked military supremacy with the restoration of the once dominant economic position of American capitalism, pledging to eliminate quickly the US trade deficit with China, now more than half a trillion dollars a year, as well as the $1 trillion US manufacturing trade deficit.

These figures underscore the delusional character of Trumps grandiose ambitions. The trade deficits are not the result of poor trade deals, but the outcome of the protracted decline of American capitalism over nearly half a century. It is this historical crisis that drives US imperialism to the ever more reckless use of military force.

Insofar as he criticized American foreign policy in the past three administrationsthose of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obamait was for an inordinate focus on the Middle East, with the result that the region is today, in Trumps words, more unstable and chaotic than ever before.

The slogan of America First, the axis of Trumps speech, is associated historically with sections of the US ruling elite oriented more towards dominance of the Pacific than the Atlantic. That might explain Trumps relatively conciliatory language towards Russia, in contrast with his strident demands that China toe the US line on trade, North Korea and the South China Seademands that are central to the Obama administrations pivot to Asia.

Trump made an open appeal to the military for support. Our generals and military leaders, he said, should be given free rein once an armed conflict begins. If America fights, he said, it must fight to win. Referring to US soldiers and veterans, he added, A great country takes care of its warriors. Our commitment to them is absolute, and I mean absolute.

Trump concluded the speech with a denunciation of the false song of globalism, declaring, The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. This was not the only part of his address that recalled the speeches of Hitler and Mussolini.

Trumps remarks were notable for the openness with which they expressed the American ruling classs ambition of global domination. However, the policy of his probable Democratic opponent, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, a more experienced representative of American imperialism, is, if anything, even more ruthless.

The likely contest between Trump and Clinton will be a clash of warmongers. As an admiring New York Times profile explained last week, Clinton is the most hawkish of the remaining Democratic and Republican candidates and has the closest ties to the military-intelligence apparatus, particularly the Pentagon brass. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic state into oblivion, the Times wrote, neither Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.

It is noteworthy that her campaign delegated its response to Trumps speech to former secretary of state Madeline Albright, one of the principal architects of the 1999 war against Serbia and a leading advocate of a confrontational policy against Russia in Eastern Europe.

Clintons Democratic rival Bernie Sanders is playing a critical role in preventing anti-war sentiment from finding any expression in the 2016 elections. He combines rhetorical denunciations of the millionaires and billionaires and fraudulent claims to represent a democratic socialist perspective with uncritical support for the predatory foreign policy of the Obama administration. On Monday, in an interview on MSNBC, he declared his support for Obamas latest increase in troop levels in Syria and the White Houses kill list of people targeted for drone-missile strikes.

There is enormous opposition to war in the American and international working class. The elections have been dominated by mass anger and hostility to the political establishment, largely of a left-wing character. Yet the outcome will be a campaign between the most right-wing, pro-war candidates in generations.

The real alternative to the program of imperialist militarism is the campaign of the Socialist Equality Party. Our candidates for president and vice-president, Jerry White and Niles Niemuth, are the only ones who tell the truth to the working class about the crimes committed by American imperialism and the even greater ones being prepared for after the election. Tens of millions of youth and working people must be mobilized against the warmongers in Washington and on Wall Street.

To take forward the building of an international anti-war movement based on the working class and the fight for socialism, the International Committee of the Fourth International is holding an International May Day Online Rally this coming Sunday, May 1, at 1:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time. We urge all readers and supporters of the World Socialist Web Site to register today and join the rally.

For more information and to register, visit internationalmayday.org.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality have been promoting the International Online May Day Rally at college campuses across the United States. We spoke to Wayne State University students in Detroit, Michigan about the danger of war.

Wayne State University students speak out against war

The International May Day Rally is on May 1. Register at internationalmayday.org.
A new report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveals that the official number of workers on zero-hours contracts in Britain has soared to 801,000, amounting to 2.5 percent of the workforce.

Workers on zero-hours contracts have to be ready to work any time they are required. The majority are on minimum wage with no guaranteed hours or income and suffer irregular pay. They are forced to work intensively, often with unpaid meal breaks or none at all. As a result, the majority struggle to pay bills, to save money and to get access to loans, rent or mortgages. Many do no get enough income (5,772 a year) to qualify for the state pension.

According to the ONS, the number of workers on zero-hours contracts in 2005 stood at 100,000, but by December 2015 it had increased to its now-record levels. It also revealed that zero-hours contracts have risen by 15 percent in the last three months.

The ONS figures may substantially undercount the real levels. In 2013, the ONS said the use of such contracts had risen from 189,000 to 250,000. However, in an extensive survey at the time, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) said there were approximately 1 million (four times the ONSs calculation) workers on these types of contracts.

The ONS reports that those on zero-hours contracts work an average of 25 hours per week. More than a third of these would like to work more hours, compared to 10 percent of workers on normal contracts. The CIPD warned that businesses are giving fewer hours, none at all or firing those who object to their treatment.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) reported that, on average, zero-hours workers earn 188 per week, in contrast to 479 for those workers with fixed contracts. However, 39 percent of zero-hours contract workers earn below 111 a week.

The TUC report is an indictment of the disastrous impact on workers of the TUCs own pro-capitalist policies. The growth of zero-hours contracts is a direct outcome of the collaboration of the trade unions with the Conservative governments austerity measures and the destruction of well-paid, previously secure jobs.

As a result, zero-hours contracts have spread throughout the public and private sector, from agriculture, hotels, catering, education and health, social care, the National Health Service, and advertising, to high street food chains and major retailers, supermarkets and manufacturing. Thirty-eight percent of those on zero-hours contracts are 16 to 24 years old, and 23 percent are in full-time education.

Jon Ingham of Glassdoor recruitment explained, There is now a significant proportion of the young workforce without guaranteed incomes.

Zero-hours and similar contracts are having a severe impact on workers and their families. A number of organisations describe what they have defined as income shock when reduced hours or none at all result in desperate moments of poverty and hunger.

StepChange, a debt charity, issued a report showing 14 million people suffered income shock in the last year. It said the growth in zero-hours contracts, self-employment and similar contracts created conditions for sudden income falls. StepChange reported that up to two thirds of people on zero-hours contracts suffered income shocks in 2015. It added that those without permanent jobs were twice as likely to suffer, resulting in higher debt through high-interest loans, credit cards and overdrafts, creating further dependence on the use of food banks.

An added problem for those on zero-hours and similar contracts was highlighted in March by the charity Citizens Advice. In 2015, around 380,000 workers contacted them concerning workplace situations. Of these, 67,000 were related to abuses of pay and work-related benefits. At the same time, they recorded a near doubling of demands for redress of unauthorised deductions from wages, from 4,900 in 2014 to 9,000 in 2015. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

Gillian Guy, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, said for workers in such casual and insecure work, its particularly concerning that theres an emerging trend of pay errors and wage theft that can further undermine peoples financial security.

Tania Weber, an employment caseworker with Citizens Advice in Kent, explained, Many of the clients we see dont work set hours and their employer doesnt record their hours or work out their entitlements properly. ... People dont get paid for all the hours theyve worked, dont get holiday pay, or dont get paid at all. Weve seen cases where employees whove asked for their wages get sacked, or where people have tried to pursue their employer and the business has simply gone insolvent without paying up.

A report by Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell at the Cambridge University Department of Sociology into work practices at a large supermarket drew attention to the impact on the well-being of workers on such contracts. The report has been sent to the Conservative governments review of zero-hours contracts being conducted by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The department is dedicated to smashing up workers employment rights and working conditions. It is headed by Business Secretary Sajid Javid, a former senior banker, who is the author of the Trade Union Bill criminalising strikes and protests that is currently being legislated.

Wood noted, People and their families are suffering enormous levels of anxiety, and even mental illness, because of what is fast becoming common practice.  High unemployment and tough economic times, combined with ever-increasing flexible working practices that favour big business, is creating a culture of servitude, trapping people in vicious cycles of instability, stress and a struggle to make ends meet. Its affecting psychological well-being to an extent that no one is grasping.

Such contracts are the British manifestation of an international phenomenon. In 2015, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) explained that a factor in the growth of poverty is what they call non-standard work. The OECD added that since 1995-1996 more than half of all jobs created amongst its member states are in the category of non-standard work. The report adds that families living on such contracts suffer significantly higher poverty.

In March, Seamus Nevin, the Institute of Directors head of employment and skills summed up how these intolerable conditions have been deliberately cultivated by business, successive Labour and Conservative governments and the trade unions. He said, One of the reasons that UK employment figures remained so impressive despite the financial crisis is because employers have been able to adopt zero-hours contracts instead of having to make redundancies.
6 years, 5 months ago QPD

Shane R Dierker (26) 1036 Jefferson for Operating Uninsured Vehicle and Failure to Reduce Speed to Avoid Accident at 33rd & Maine NTA

Adam P Miller (31) 318 Maiden Ln Apt 214 for Fighting at 318 Maiden Ln NTA

Michael L Berry (20) 2142 N 12th for Expired Registration at 14th & Maine PTC

Mark Vollbracht 61, of Quincy for failure to yield-stop sign.

Nina A Johnson 18, of MO for fighting at 414 S 7th on 4/14.

Jessica L. Jones, 43, 1115 S. 56th for Fighting at 710 Cherry St. on 04-18-16. NTA

Andrew J. Terford, 24, 2900 Chateau Ct. for Expired Registration Sticker at 12th & Spring on 04-26-16. PTC

Glenn Baker 1728 Spruce reports his detached garage was entered on 4/22. Ammunition and two non-working guns were stolen.

Joshua Marx of Quincy reports his business at 250 Broadway was entered between 4/4 and 4/18 and all the copper wiring had been removed.

Ryan L. Stanton 1115 1/2 S. 8th reported that his 2004 Chevrolet Trailblazer was damaged by an unknown suspect while parked in the 600 block of North 4th Street sometime between 2200 hours on 04-21-16 and 0100 hours on 04-22-16. Both drivers side tires were slashed, the vehicle was egged and sugar was poured into the gas tank. Stanton had no suspects

April Owens of Quincy reports being contacted by a long lost friend on Facebook requesting financial assistance. She wired a large sum of money to two different people and was later contacted by her bank telling her she had been scammed.

Austin L. Crepps of 623 Lind reported that his 1998 Ford F-150 was struck by an unidentified white female driving a gray minivan while his vehicle was parked near 8th & Adams on 04-16-16 at 0128 hours. The suspect vehicle struck the rear driver's side of his vehicle, causing significant damage to both his vehicle and the suspect's vehicle as well. Debris from the suspect vehicle was left at the scene and collected as evidence.

A black Dockers brand wallet was located in the alleyway, 18th to 19th, State to Ohio Streets on 04-24-16. The wallet was logged in at QPD HQ.

Brandon Gallaher 306 1/2 Cherry reports his apt entered between 4/8 and 4/22. He reported jewelry and electronics missing.

Debra C. Hollensteiner of 1863 Vermont reported the theft of her two bicycles from the back yard of her residence by an unknown suspect sometime between 04-17-16 and 04-20-16. The first bike was described as a light blue colored women's 24" Murray bicycle; and the second bike was described as a blue/black colored 26" men's Murray bicycle.

Jessica J John (35) 300 West Prairie St. Camp Point for failure to reduce speed to avoid an accident at 24th and Broadway on 4-25-16. PTC

Ophia T Curley (32) 107 S. Clay Griggsville, IL for stealing at 840  State St. on 3-13-2016. NTA

Jochris D James (18) 4400 Stardust Dr. Hannibal, MO for interfering at 1001 N. 2nd on 4-26-16. NTA

Richard C Walz (86) 2918 Vicky Court Quincy for improper lane usage in the 1300 block of South 18th St on 4-20-16. PTC

Jason L Mallory (34) 925 N. 8th for expired registration and operating uninsured vehicle at 8th and Spring on 4-26-16. NTA.

Cory R Mayes (26) 1205 N. 6th St for operating uninsured vehicle at 8th and Chestnut on 4-26-16. NTA

Arnold T Serrato Jr (27) 804 W Monroe La Grange, MO on a warrant for FTA - possession of cannabis at 641 Jackson on 4-26-16. Lodged

Michael D Austin (42) 708  Jefferson for a warrant for petition to revoke - Theft at 837 Jefferson St. on 4-26-16. Lodged

Preston A. Holland, 42, Homeless for Possession of Meth. Lodged

Bobby Hill 2625 Chestnut St. reports his residence was entered and several pairs of shoes and a ps3 were stolen on 4-12-16

Dustin Reeves 522 S. 21st reports his unlocked 2012 Mazda was entered between 4-6 and 4-7-16. A backpack, knives and fishing gear were stolen.
LOWNDES COUNTY, FL (WTXL) - Two people are sent to the hospital Lowndes County Wednesday, after a man loses control of his van on US 84.

Troopers say a van crashed into a utility pole, before overturning.

Just before 8 a.m., troopers responded to a the crash on US 84, just west of Lake Alapaha Drive.

A GMC van driven by 51-year-old Jacino Tomas, lost mechanical failure, drifting off the road.

Troopers tell us six others were in the van, but only the driver and one passenger had their seat belts on.

However, the Georgia State Patrol says no charges will be filed in the crash.
You are the owner of this article.
MABTON, Wash.  Phin Haglin was ceremonially sworn in Tuesday as Mabtons new police chief, the third person to hold the job this year.
SEATTLE  Five tribal bands claiming Kennewick Man as a relative, including the Yakama Nation, will work together to rebury him after the U.S.
Women could be headed for the draft, after House committee vote
Rodney Watkins, a lead driver for Recology CleanScapes, pulls out food waste that should have been thrown into the food/yard-waste bin instead of the garbage bin in December 2014. A judge on Wednesday ruled that trash collectors in Seattle cant examine garbage for food scraps. (Steve Ringman/The Seattle Times)
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We just celebrated Passover, the holiday of freedom. Democracy, human rights, freedom of speech, womens equality, and the rule of law are the free worlds foundational principles. It seems weve reached the age of freedom.

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But something went wrong. Freedom of speech includes the right to spread lies. The liars have become, over time, much more efficient. If you repeat a lie a thousand times, it breaks through. If thousands of intellectuals, journalists, and politicians have said over the past decade that Israel is the main source of violence in the world  and they have  then the free(!) worlds opinion will lean towards believing that.

Rothschild Award recipient Professor Nathan Linial recently decried Israels fascistic turn during his acceptance speech. That was another sad moment in Israeli discourse. His statements werent different from those of other members of his social strata. Sometimes it seems that if you dont say that Israel is fascist you may no longer count yourself among the ranks of the enlightened.

Mosques and refugee centers are being burnt at higher rates in Europe, even in relative terms. And the Belgian prime minister, just last week, backed his interior minister after the latter said very harsh things about Muslims. The difference is that in Europe, these things are seen in their correct proportions. The press there is not slowly trickling the poisonous idea into the publics mind that fascism has taken over the government.

And that is interesting, since Linial and his ilk, the movers and shakers, like comparing Israel to Germany of the 1930s. In Europe, it's happening as part of the campaign of anti-Semitism. In Israel, its done in the name of enlightenment. History is indeed repeating itself. Almost everything Nazis said of Jews in the 1930s is being said today of the Jewish State by self-professed enlightened people. Back then, it was hatred, now its supposedly enlightenment. Nothing has changed.

Self-loathing

According to every objective measure, Israel is becoming more democratic, not less. The Israel Democracy Institutes latest Democracy Index stated a few months ago that "the periodic wringing of hands, and the widespread sense that democracy here is on the decline, seem to be needlessly pessimistic when Israel is examined empirically in comparison with other countries. And this is not an organization that would ever be suspected of belonging to the political right.

The claim that the Israeli public is responding to the Hebron shooting affair in a more nationalistic fashion than it did to the Bus 300 affair is ludicrous, as the website Presspectiva has taken care to show. But the lie wins. Thers no democracy in the world that harbors such unmitigated self-loathing as Israel. Justified criticism of the government, of Prime Minister Netanyahu, of controversial incidents  has turned into a generalized, racist self-loathing. When the right makes similar generalizations about Arabs, its racism. But generalizing about Jews is seen as enlightenment. This phenomenon is well known: Its called anti-Semitism.

Prof. Linial, and hes really just one case, defended the heroic Yuli Novak in his aforementioned speech. Novak is the executive director of Breaking the Silence, and also happens to be Linials niece. And thats interesting, since Breaking the Silence has become a chief distributor of the anti-Israel poison used by the new anti-Semites. Irish MP Richard Boyd stated that Breaking the Silence's people came to speak at the Irish Parliament and told the legislators about how everything Israel does is murder. The anti-Semitic Boyd mentioned the organizations book of testimonies, edited by Avner Gvaryahu, which has been circulating across US college campuses recently.

Avner Gvaryahu (Louise Green)

Gvaryahu and his friends wont stop until theres a new Kristallnacht. They wont have to wait long. The applause for Gvaryahu's latest lecture, at Columbia University, came from hostile organizations such as SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) and JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), two organization that support BDS, meaning they support Israels destruction. And almost every lecture by someone who wants to speak in Israels favor is interrupted by hooligans from the ranks of the new anti-Semites. Thats right, those same people who encourage Gvaryahu.

But Linial refuses to read the writing on the wall. Hes the son of Holocaust survivors, and he cant understand that the venomous propaganda against the Jewish state today is a carbon copy of the anti-Jewish propaganda of the 1930s. But there is one difference: Jews did not rise to support the anti-Semitic propaganda back then. These days, Jews are at the forefront of the anti-Jewish-state hate campaign.

The dark era of academic freedom

Something bad is happening to the free academic world. Freedom is slowly eroding, being replaced by the edicts of the thought police. Any group that manages to categorize itself as oppressed is automatically supported, even if theyre a representative of the benighted. To heck with womens repression. To heck with Hamas's calls to Annihilate Jews, Christians, and Communists to the last one. To heck with the fact that in the short period of time in which the US, Britain and other European countries have been operating in the Middle East, just in recent years, theyve killed many more Muslims  mostly innocents  than Israel has killed throughout its existence. To heck with the fact that the Palestinians, for the past several decades, have rejected any peace plan that was based on a two-state solution. And to heck with the fact that Palestinians living under Israeli rule are in a much better state than other Middle East Arabs, by almost any parameter  from infant mortality, through education, to life expectancy.

All of that doesnt matter, since the brown-red-green coalition has decided to point an accusatory finger at the Jewish entity. It is to blame for all of the worlds problems. And this coalition has spread into the mind of academic elites in the free world and in Israel. The only entity that is hatefully campaigned against on US college campuses is Israel. This is a return to the dark days. Once, it was pointed against Jew. These days, its pointed at the Jewish state.

Self-hatred germs

There are fascist phenomena in Israel. Where are there not? But only in Israel is there a monstrous over-blowing of errant soldier and every Facebook post. Naftali Bennett was the first minister to condemn, within hours  maybe minutes  the MK from his party who made ignorant statements about Arabs. He was the first to cry out in opposition to the mayor who announced, during a period of tensions, that he would not employ Arabs. That shall not be, said Bennett. And no  I am not one of his followers. Ive never voted for a right-wing party (unless you consider Labor a right-wing party). But they are turning Israel into a fascist country with intolerable ease.

This isnt new. Berl Katznelson, who didnt ignore fascism, wrote of a Jewish strand that Here, in the land of Israel, has been infected with self-hatred germs. He asked, Is there any people whose descendants have reached such mischaracterization, mental and spiritual, that all their people do, all of their creations and all of their woes, are contemptible and hated, and everything that a bitter enemy does fills their hearts with admiration and addiction?

The years pass, the question remains.

BDYemini@Gmail.com
UNITED NATIONS - The UN Security Council will hold an informal meeting on May 6 on the protection of Palestinian civilians, an issue the Palestinians have pressed for decades and say is more needed now than ever.

Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour said four council members - Egypt, Senegal, Venezuela and Malaysia - are organizing the meeting which will hear briefings from a legal scholar, an Amnesty International representative and others.

Mansour told reporters Wednesday that the meeting is a first step toward action that the Security Council must take.

"Our desire is to find any form of protection to protect our people from the brutality of this occupation," he said.

Israel's UN Ambassador Danny Danon responded to the announcement of the council meeting saying: "The Palestinians are continuing to lie to the world and turn to the international community with ridiculous claims instead of focusing their efforts on fighting terror and incitement."
The United States has issued a new warning to its citizens about "credible indications" of terrorist threats at tourist areas in Turkey.

In a warning posted on its website late Tuesday, the US Embassy said Washington continued to receive reports that terrorist groups "are seeking opportunities to attack popular tourist destinations throughout Turkey."

Turkey has been hit by six deadly suicide bombings since July that were either claimed by Kurdish militants or blamed on the Islamic State group. Two Israeli-Americans, an Israeli and an Iranian were killed in an IS attack at Istanbul's main pedestrian street last Month. In January, 12 German tourists were killed in the city's historic district.

The US Embassy asked its citizens to be vigilant in "crowded public areas and popular tourist destinations."
RICHMOND - Sen. Ted Cruz's campaign co-chairman in Virginia has traveled to Syria and promised support for the government of President Bashar Assad, who US officials have repeatedly said has lost the legitimacy to rule the war-torn country.

Virginia state Sen. Dick Black's trip to a Middle Eastern country in the midst of a civil war and his comments in the face of official US foreign policy are highly unusual for a state lawmaker.

Black, an outspoken Republican, is a part-time state senator who has no role in official US foreign policy. Still, he has met with Assad government officials and said he would advocate for better relationships between Assad and the US, according to the official Syrian news agency.

"I will be Syria's voice," Black said, according to the news agency.
Asians have discovered the Israeli-made unleavened Passover bread - the matzah - leading many Israeli companies to export it to countries such as Japan and India for the first time in 2016.

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Carolyn Nave, the food and beverage manager for the Israel Export Institute, said that the institute works to reach any place that has a Jewish community, noting that every year more and more countries import matzah from Israel.

"Next month, an Israeli food-tasting event will be held in Vietnam," Nave related excitedly. "An 'Israel week' will also be held in Japan next month that will feature matzot. The export of matzot to the Far East is picking up momentum."

Tzvi Tzur, of Tzur Sochniyot, which exports, among other food items, hand-made matzah, explained that "this year there has been an increase of between 10 and 15 percent of matzot exports abroad. There is particularly an increase in demand for the handmade, round, authentic matzot and this represents more than a million dollars a year in exports  most of the export is to the United States, but in remote areas as well, those who want matzot can find them in the big chains."

Tzvi Tzur of Tzur Sochniyot (Photo: Public Relations)

Roi Wolf, CEO of Matzot Aviv, states that 50 percent of his matzot are exported, mainly to the US, Canada, Australia and Europe, but notes that "for the first time this year, we will be exporting matzot to India. Individuals bought quite a bit of matzot from us and they will distribute them there to whoever requests them."

A noteworthy exporter of matzot is Ma Yoffi Ltd.  Flavor of Israel, founded a year ago by Arkadi Mayufis, who made aliyah from Russia. The company's CEO Nimrod Saltzman expressed hope that Ma Yoffi will begin exporting matzot to the Far East next year.

Matzot packaged by Ma Yoffi Ltd. (Photo: Dan Lev)

Ma Yoffi is, in fact, a packaging firm, which has six employees, all of whom speak Russian. Saltzman explained that they "take food products and package them in small packages 200-250 g. Our starting point is that Israel is the land of milk and honey, and we take existing products that represent the Land of Israel, and give them a new design, and thereby give respect to the local productPeople come to Israel, and when they come here, they take things home with them, things they consider to be the most Israeli, such as date syrup, carob spread, honeys from different areas in Israel, and matzot, wrapped in a roll of recycled carton."

He recounted that he "recently met representatives of a Japanese company, who were very enthusiastic about our products. During our second meeting we were already discussing operations, how to export our products to Cosco in Japan. There is no doubt that exporting matzot to the Far East is the next big thing, and it's happening here and now."
ISTANBUL - Turkish police have detained 15 people over a suicide bombing in the northwestern city of Bursa where a woman injured eight bystanders as she blew herself up near the city's main mosque, Turkish media said on Thursday.

The TRT and CNN Turk television stations quoted Interior Minister Efkan Ala as giving the total and saying evidence pointed to a link with a militant group, but gave no details.

The attack on Wednesday was the fifth suicide bombing in a major urban centre in Turkey this year.

"Fifteen people have been detained in connection with the Bursa attack. There are strong indications that it is related to a group," the broadcasters quoted Ala as saying.
Ilana Romano, whose husband weightlifter Yossef Romano was murdered in the Munich Olympics massacre, refused to appear in a new documentary titled "Munich: A Palestinian Story," which purports to present the Palestinian point-of-view of the attack, because the film director insisted on calling the murderers "freedom fighters," Ynet has learned.

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Last year, director Narsi Hajjaj contacted Romano and asked her to participate in his project and present the Israeli side of the story.

Ilana Romano, widow of weightlifter Yossef Romano, murdered at Munich Olympics in 1972 (Photo: Dana Kopel)

Romano conditioned her participation on Hajjaj calling those who murdered the Israelis "terrorists" and not "freedom fighters," but the Lebanese filmmaker of Palestinian origin refused to commit to it.

"Eight Palestinian freedom fighters attacked the Olympic Village in Munich and took 11 Israeli athletes hostage," stated the text accompanying the project which will be screened at a special event highlighting Arabic cinema at the Cannes film festival next month, but not as part of the official program of the festival.

During the conversation between Romano and Hajjaj a year ago, Romano also told the director he could not use their conversations in the film, threatening to sue if he does.

Palestinian film director Narsi Hajjaj with Yasser Arafat (Photo: Facebook)

Hajjaj is a veteran filmmaker who grew up in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, where he met Afif Hamid, one of the terrorists who attacked the Olympic village. He studied at the University of Middlesex in London, and directed two films that deal with the Palestinian issue. His first film "Shadow of Absence" from 2007 documented Palestinian graves throughout the Arab world, in an attempt to illustrate how Palestinians born in Israel are now scattered throughout the world. His second film "As The Poet Said" from 2009 deals with the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

In "Munich: A Palestinian Story," Hajaj seeks to examine "why this operation was launched?" and notes that "the film will be the first Palestinian documentary on this event, and will shed light on many new facts, documents and people involved in it."

"The film starts in the refugee camps of Ain al-Hilweh and Shatila, in which most of the group's members grew up, and then moves on to the countries where they trained for this operation. Eight films have been made about what happened in Munich, but none are Palestinian or Arab. I wanted to present the Palestinian version of this story, which is not necessarily devoid of criticism of the operation itself and its consequences," Hajjaj concluded.
PARIS - France's lower house of parliament voted in favour of lifting European Union sanctions against Russia on Thursday, in a non-binding vote that went against the Socialist government's recommendation.

French deputies voted by 55-44 in favour of the resolution to lift the sanctions slapped on Moscow by the 28-member EU after Russia annexed Crimea and tension escalated with Ukraine.

Former president Nicolas Sarkozy's Republicans party, as well as centre-right and far-left groups voted for lifting the sanctions. The Socialists and Greens voted against the resolution put forward by conservative lawmaker Thierry Mariani.

"(The sanctions are) totally ineffective today to solve this international crisis and are dangerous for France's interests," Mariani, who represents French residents in eastern Europe and Russia, said.
Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended by his own Labour Party after he sparked an outcry on by claiming Hitler supported Zionism on Thursday.

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In a BBC Radio interview, Livingstone was asked to comment on the scandal that erupted after his party member Naz Shah called to "relocate" Israel to the United States, and responded, "It's completely over the top but it's not anti-Semitic. Let's remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism  this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews."

He added that, "The simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians."

X

The suspended member asserted that there was "well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticized Israeli policy as anti-Semitic."

Livingstone later claimed in an interview with Sky News that he was merely "stating historical facts."

Ken Livingstone

More than 20 MPs called for Livingstone to be removed from the party, including shadow cabinet member Luciana Berger and London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan.

MP John Mann confronted Livingstone on Thursday morning, calling him a "f***ing disgrace," a "Nazi apologist" and a "disgusting racist."

Watch this. Extraordinary. John Mann MP: You're a disgusting Nazi apologist, Livingstone'. pic.twitter.com/1wlbA1BmND  Chris Ship (@chrisshipitv) April 28, 2016

This is not the first time that Livingstone has uttered serious anti-Semitic statements. In 2005, he attacked journalist Oliver Finegold, asking him whether he was "a German war criminal." On learning that Mr. Finegold was Jewish, the mayor reportedly said: "You are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren't you?"

Last month Aysegul Gurbuz, 20, a Labour Party councilor, was suspended after saying that Hitler was "the greatest man in history."

On Tuesday it was revealed that Naz Shah, a Labour Party MP, wrote a post on Facebook which expressed support for a proposal to relocate the State of Israel to US territory, thus supposedly solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After the post was revealed, Shah publically apologized, stating that it was written two years ago and does not represent her current views. She has since been suspended.

On Wednesday she apologized to the House of Commons stating: "I accept and understand that the words I used caused upset and hurt to the Jewish community and I deeply regret that. Antisemitism is racism, full stop. As an MP I will do everything in my power to build relations between Muslims, Jews and people of different faiths and none.
Update: Hungarian authorities have reported that they have located the body of Ofir Gross (40), an Israeli citizen who studied in Germany and had been missing for more than a week. He was last seen in Debrecen. Gross' family is on the way to identify his body. Initial findings indicate that he was murdered.

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The last contact anyone had with him was Thursday of last week. The Israel Police representative in Europe had updated the Hungarian authorities as to his disappearance, and the Hungarian authorities had begun to send out search teams.

Gross had just finished his studies in medical engineering when he went on his trip to Hungary.

His sister Gali said "We are at a loss and ask anyone who has any information (regarding Ofir's whereabouts) to update us and the embassy."

Ofir Gross, last seen in Debrecen

Gross's family report that he went to stay at a friend's house in Tiszakecske who needed to leave Budapest. It seems that Gross then went in the direction of Debrecen in the east of the country to go stay at another apartment, and it was on this journey that he disappeared.

"His friend took him to the city and from there he called us telling us that he didn't have a place to sleep," Gali said.

"Since he doesn't have a Facebook, he asked me to go into different Hungarian Facebook groups to find him a place to stay. However, a short while later, he told me that he met a guy who invited him to stay over. That was the last time I was in contact with him," she continued

Gali went on to say that "we used to talk every day on WhatsApp or on the phone, but now, it's as if the earth swallowed him whole."

She stated that her brother has no mental or physical problems, and that his disappearance comes as a surprise.

"He's a very stable person," she said. "He's someone who studied computer science and mathematics at Hebrew University, and while he lived in Israel, he worked on a patent and founded his own startup. We're all worried and request anyone who's seen him in Europe to either contact us or the Israeli embassy."

A situation room was opened in the Foreign Ministry regarding the incident.
MILAN- Italian police have arrested four people suspected of conspiring to join ISIS in a probe that revealed a plan to carry out a militant attack in Italy, a Milan prosecutor said on Thursday.

Italy has been spared deadly attacks by Islamist militant groups such those seen in recent months in France and Belgium, but authorities are nevertheless carrying out regular arrests of suspects, some of whom they accuse of plotting assaults.

As part of the same investigation, police also issued arrest warrants for two fugitives -- a Moroccan man and his Italian wife -- who left Italy and headed towards Iraq and Syria last year.

Investigators believe one of the suspects asked another to plan an attack in Italy and mentioned Rome, Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli told a news conference.
WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - Ambassador John Bolton is proud to contribute to U.S. Congressional candidates French Hill (AR-2), Trent Franks (AZ-8), Ed Royce (CA-39), Dana Rohrabacher (CA-48), Darrell Issa (CA-49), Duncan Hunter (CA-50), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25), Carlos Curbelo (FL-26), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-27), David Young (IA-3), Steve King (IA-4), Adam Kinzinger (IL-16), and Steve Russell (OK-5), as well as U.S. Senate candidates Todd Young (IN), Richard Douglas (MD), and James Lankford (OK) for nearly $100,000 in contributions.

This announcement comes as part of a larger effort by Ambassador Bolton to ensure America elects officials who will vote for a strong national defense and keep America safe. In the 2016 cycle the Ambassador has endorsed 37 candidates for Congress and the John Bolton PAC has contributed nearly $290,000 to their respective campaigns. In 2014 the PAC was a major contributor in the midterm elections with 87 endorsements and PAC contributions.

"It is our mission to build on the historic majority that the John Bolton PAC helped elect in both the House and the Senate in 2014, and it is of the utmost importance that we keep these majorities intact for our next Republican president," said Ambassador John Bolton. "These individuals have a proven track record of fighting for strong national security and smart foreign policy positions that protect America's interests abroad," he said. "I am proud to help these fine candidates as they enter pivotal stages of their campaigns."

Statements from each candidate for Congress on the endorsement can be viewed here: www.boltonpac.com/candidates

The John Bolton PAC is committed to supporting candidates for the House and Senate who believe in restoring America's national security and protecting the United States' vital freedoms at home through securing U.S. interests in an increasingly dangerous world.

About John Bolton PAC (www.boltonpac.com): The John Bolton PAC was founded by former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John R. Bolton to raise the importance of American national security in federal elections. The PAC will support and contribute to candidates who are committed to restoring strong American economic and national security policies that secure America's interests in a challenging world.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry has protested the US stationing 150 troops on Syrian soil against the wishes of the Syrian government in Damascus.

We received with deep concern the news that 150 US troops have entered the Syrian territory into Rmeilan area, a source at the Foreign Ministry said, dismissing the move as "a blatant act of aggression that constitutes a dangerous intervention and a gross violation of the Syrian sovereignty.

The troops are due to arrive to a newly built US airbase located at Rmeilan in the Kurdish controlled Hasakah region of northeastern Syria.
BEIRUT- A wave of airstrikes and shelling killed more than 60 people in less than 24 hours in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, monitors and activists said Thursday.

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The contested city is now one of the main battlegrounds of Syria's devastating civil war, with a cease-fire that has collapsed and peace talks in Geneva stalled.

At least 27 people died as a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee for the Red Cross and nearby buildings were hit overnight in the rebel-held part of Aleppo.

The UN envoy for Syria appealed early Thursday to the United States and Russia to help revive the peace talks and a cease-fire, which he said "hangs by a thread."

Results of an airstrike on a hospital (Photo: AFP)

The chief Syrian opposition negotiator Mohammed Alloush blamed the government of President Bashar Assad for the violence. He told The Associated Press that it shows "the environment is not conducive to any political action." He denounced the intensive bombing as an attempt by Assad's government to drive the residents of Aleppo out, labelling it "a crime of ethnic and sectarian cleansing."

About 200 civilians have been killed in the past week in Syria, nearly half of them around Aleppo. There has also been shelling in Damascus, along with a car bombing -- both rarities for the capital. The ICRC said the fighting, including the destruction in airstrikes overnight of a key hospital in Aleppo, is putting millions at grave risk.

With peace talks in Geneva completely deadlocked, Syrians are regarding the escalating bloodshed with dread, fearing that Aleppo is likely to be the focus of the next, more vicious, phase of the war.

Rebel commanders said government forces have been mobilizing soldiers, equipment and ammunition in preparation for a military action in Aleppo.

The well-known al-Quds filed hospital supported by MSF and ICRC and located in the rebel-held district of Sukkari was hit shortly before midnight Wednesday, according to opposition activists and rescue workers. Six hospital staff and three children were among the 27 who died there.

Airstrikes against civilians in Aleppo (Photo: AFP)

The hospital has been one of the main medical centers operating in Aleppo since the city became deeply divided in 2012.

Dating back to the 1990s, the hospital was renamed after the area came under rebel control to carry the name of one of the uprising's early victims, Basel Aslan, who was detained and tortured to death, said civil defense volunteer Ibrahim Alhaj. It received aid and assistance from various foreign groups, as well as a volunteer medic from the United States, according to its Facebook page.

The Syrian Civil Defense, a volunteer first-responders agency whose members went to the scene of the attack, put the death toll at 30 and said the dead included six hospital staff. Among those slain was one of the last pediatricians remaining in opposition-held areas of Aleppo and a dentist.

The defense agency, also known as the White Helmets, said the hospital and adjacent buildings were struck in four consecutive airstrikes. It said there were still victims buried under the rubble and that the rescue work continued. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said three children were among the 27 victims but it was not immediately clear if they were patients at the hospital.

MSF said in a statement that at least 14 patients and staff were among those killed, with the toll expected to rise, and that the hospital was "hit by direct airstrike." It was the area's main pediatric care center.

"Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage," asked Muskilda Zancada, MSF head of Syria mission.

Kurdish fighters in Aleppo (Photo: MCT)

The 34-bed, multi-story hospital had an emergency room and offered services such as obstetric care, outpatient and inpatient treatment. It had an intensive care unit and an operating theatre. Eight doctors and 28 nurses worked full time in the hospital, the MSF said, adding it has supported the hospital since 2012.

An unnamed Syrian military official quoted on state TV denied reports that the hospital was targeting, saying they were false.

A video posted online by the White Helmets showed a number of lifeless bodies, including those of children, being pulled out from a building and loaded into ambulances amid screaming and wailing. It also showed distraught rescue workers trying to keep onlookers away from the scene, apparently fearing more airstrikes.

Shortly after midday, new airstrikes in rebel-held areas killed at least 20 people in two neighborhoods, the Syrian Civil Defense and the Observatory said.

Videos provided by activists show scenes of dust rising up from buildings on fire as men and women run away from collapsing houses and children cry, looking for their parents. In one clip, a man is seen lifting his daughter out of the rubble.

State media said at least 1,300 rockets and missiles fell Thursday in residential areas in government-controlled parts of the city, killing 14 people.

Alloush, one of the leading opposition negotiators in the Geneva talks, described the airstrikes as one of the latest "war crimes" of Assad's government.

"Whoever carries out these massacres needs a war tribunal and a court of justice to be tried for his crimes. He does not need a negotiating table," Alloush told the AP in a telephone interview. "Now, the environment is not conducive for any political action."

Results of an airstrike on an MSF hospital in Aleppo (Photo: AFP)

Syrian lawmaker Omar Ossi, who was part of the government delegation in Geneva talks, blamed the escalation on Turkey and Saudi Arabia as patrons of the rebels. "The Syrian army will be able to regain initiative and rein in this Turkish interference," he said.

The end-of-February cease-fire has been fraying in recent weeks as casualty figures mount, particularly in Aleppo and across northern Syria. Airstrikes earlier this week also targeted a training center for the Syrian Civil Defense, killing five volunteers in rural Aleppo.

Since April 19, nearly 200 people have died, including at least 44 in an airstrike on a market place in rebel-held area in northern Idlib province, as well as dozens of civilians in government-held areas from rebel shelling.

U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura told the Security Council via videoconference that after 60 days, the cessation of hostilities agreed to by both sides "hangs by a thread."

"I really fear that the erosion of the cessation is unraveling the fragile consensus around a political solution, carefully built over the last year," de Mistura said in his briefing. "Now I see parties reverting to the language of a military solution or military option. We must ensure that they do not see that as a solution or an option."

The talks foundered last week after the main opposition group, called the High Negotiating Committee, suspended its formal participation to protest alleged government cease-fire violations, a drop in humanitarian aid deliveries and no progress in winning the release of detainees in Syria.
WASHINGTON- Defense Secretary Ash Carter is defending the US strategy for defeating the Islamic State group.

He tells the Senate Armed Services Committee that US-backed local forces in Iraq and Syria are making substantive gains toward retaking Islamic State strongholds.

Carter is also advising against an American-led "foreign ground force" to battle the Islamic State. He says that would play into the hands of the extremists.
Arrest warrants were issued for six people affiliated with ISIS on Thursday evening, four of which planned to attack the Israeli Embassy in Rome and the Vatican.

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Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli told reporters that investigators intercepted communications from within ISIS held territory ordering attacks in Italy, "with particular attention to the city of Rome" and focusing on the Holy Year pilgrimage now underway.

He said the messages promoting lone-wolf attacks were "very strong, very serious and very efficient," indicating that ISIS's current policy is to push for attacks in locations where foreign fighters are residing "as the best way of creating terror within Western countries."

Two of the people who planned to carry out an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Rome (Photo: EPA)

Interior Minister Angelino Alfano told Sky TG24 "there was a serious intention to hit Italy," and while they weren't yet involved in the material preparations for an attack, "there was a decision, an accentuated willingness, to proceed."

Romanelli said authorities acted quickly to close the investigation, arresting four people in the northern Lombardy region and issuing arrest warrants for two others believed to be in IS territory.

"This is a new profile, because it was not a generic indication, but an indication given to a specific person who was invited to act within the territory of the Italian state," Romanelli said.

He said the death in battle late last year of a foreign fighter with ties to the group within ISIS territory had contributed to the radicalization process. The fighter had been expelled from both Italy in 2015 and later from Switzerland before traveling to IS territory, where he was killed.

Abderrahim Moutahrrick, ISIS member (Photo: EPA):

Italian Premier Matteo Renzi praised the anti-extremists operation as "very important."

Authorities arrested the Moroccan-born man, identified as Abderrahim Moutahrrick, and his wife, Salma Bencharki, who allegedly were planning on traveling from their home in Lecco, north of Milan, to ISIS territory with their children aged 2 and 4. Romanelli said Moutahrrick had taken Italian citizenship and was an accomplished kick boxer.

Another Moroccan man who was planning to travel with them, identified as Abderrahmaneth, 23, was arrested in the northern city of Varese, prosecutors said. It was the death of his elder brother that prosecutors identified as the radicalizing event.

Prosecutors also issued arrest warrants for an Italian-Moroccan couple who left to join IS last year with three small children. Romanelli said that man, identified as Mohamed Koraichi, had become an IS fighter and had communicated the orders to carry out attacks in Italy while making arrangements for the other family to join ISIS.
2 female terrorists were neutralized on route 443 after attempting to stab a soldier.

The terrorists arrived to the Bell checkpoint with a knife and a syringe filled with an unidentified substance, and suicide notes. The two asked the soldiers on duty for water. The soldiers understood that something suspicious was going on, and by that point, the terrorists took out a knife and began to attack.

The terrorists are currently being treated at Sha'arei Tzedek Medical Center in Jerusalem
Two female terrorists were neutralized on route 443 after attempting to stab soldiers.

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The terrorists arrived to the Bell checkpoint with a knife, a syringe filled with an unidentified substance, and suicide notes. The two asked the soldiers on duty for water. However, the soldiers understood that something suspicious was going on, and at that point, the terrorists took out a knife in an attempt to stab the soldiers.

One of the terrorists is currently being treated at Sha'arei Tzedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, and is in moderate to serious condition. The second assailant reportedly attempted to escape, but was later apprehended. None of the soldiers were injured. Palestinian media reports them to be minors.

Knives used at Qalandia checkpoint

This comes at the heels of an attempted terror attack at the close by Qalandia checkpoint on Wednesday. In that attempted attack, two terrorists, one female and one male, attempted to walk through a passage intended for vehicle entry and began speeding up in the direction of Border policemen stationed at the scene.

The female assailant had her hand in her bag in which there was a knife. The male assailant's hand was held behind his back which aroused the security forces suspicion.

The police called upon them to stop several times. However they continued to quickly approach in their direction. The police continued to call upon them to stop and throw down the bag the woman was holding. The woman stopped close to the Border policemen, both of them took several steps backwards and then suddenly they turned towards the forces, the woman took out a knife and threw it straight at the policeman closest to her. The policeman was not injured.
"The quiet isn't stable. Thus Col. Shay Klapper, a battalion commander in the Samaria region, describes the decrease in the number of terrorist attacks over the past few weeks. When the wave is renewed, it will be at a much higher pace. It wont return to be 13 year olds with knives," he predicts.

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"This wave of terror isn't really behind us. The explosion on the bus in Jerusalem took us all back to the beginning of the 2000s.

Klapper, 40, is not alone is his evaluation. His five colleagues, also senior commanders of West Bank battalions, hold similar views. Many measures are being undertaken at different levels, and that is what's bringing the quiet.

Samaria commander Col. Yariv Ben-Ezra, 40 said, The number has significantly decreased, but only for now.

Undoubtedly, while Hamas is continuously digging tunnels in the south, and Hezbollah has been rearming for years in the north, the most intense area for the IDF over the past few months has been in the West Bank, which large security forces and personnel resources have been forced to address.

Only the relative calm in recent weeks (five attacks since the beginning of April compared with 72 in October, 47 in November, 42 in December, 21 in January, 20 in February and 23 in March) enabled us to meet with the six busiest battalion commanders in the IDF. For several hours they discussed almost everything pertaining to the wave of terrorism: they provided explanations for its sharp decline , shared the methods which were formulated to cope with it, and spoke candidly about the most sensitive issues such as Elor Azaria , who shot dead a neutralized terrorist who had carried out a stabbing attack in Hebron.

Heads of the Judia and Samaria Division (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

In October 2015, with the murder of the Henkin family , which ignited the current wave of terror, security forces broadcasted an almost helpless message. This is a lone attack, the security officials claimed. We have no way of preventing a Palestinian who works in a Tel Aviv building from suddenly taking a screwdriver and stabbing people in the street because of something they read that morning on Facebook.

Very quickly at the outset of the violence, we understood that we were facing a different kind of threat. explained Col. Roman Gofma, 39, commander of the Etzion battalion.

The lone terrorist is basically everything. They're the planner, the supplier of their own weapons, and the one who carries out the attack. They dont need directives, infrastructure or intelligence. Even the weaponry which they use is the simplest there is, as simple as a vehicle used for a car-ramming attack."

"We began defining the problem," the colonel continued. "Until then, this problem didn't exist, and if it did, it was only on the margins. However, it became a critical threat the moment that we officially labeled them as lone-wolf attackers.'

How can an attacker be prevented from carrying out an attack?

Gofman: We began to analyze and build an 'attacker profile' according to the attack that they carried out. Where did they come from? What age were they? What motivated them? With these criteria, we began implementing comprehensive and focused action. We realized, for instance, that between 50 and 60 per cent of the attacks were not the first instances of friction between the attackers and the security forces.

"Many of the attackers, such as the murderer of Hadar Bukris, were people who had engaged in rock throwing. Most of them had been arrested in the past. The majority had been stopped for illegally staying in Israel. We began to check the list of people whom we had arrested and created a list of dangerous groups comprising young people between the ages of 15 and 25. We searched people of this age group who were previously arrested for rock-throwing incidents, for being in Israel illegally or for disruption of public order and we began checking their Facebook pages.



And when you locate them?

We started to target them directly. We compiled a list of around 100150 such people who matched our criteria in every village; in Beit Ummar or in Beit Fajjar, for example. Those that we could arrest, we arrested. For those who we had no reason to arrest, we warned, and for others we mapped their homesevery night we went to their houses and searched them. We also exerted pressure on their families. We made it clear that if their child involves themselves in terror, the equipment they used to provide for themselvesbe it farming equipment or engineering toolswould be confiscated."

"When we carry out these measures without stopping, every night, it has an effect," the colonel says, continuing, "It also affects those whom we haven't visited yet. The statistics began to illustrate a decline.

Kfir Brigade soldier on patrol in West Bank Arab village (Photo: Yoav Zeitun)



The number of comprehensive measures done during the last few months is astonishing. says Col. Israel Shomer, 38, from the Binyamin brigade.

I personally, every night and including weekends, am deep in the field. We operate with the Shin Bet and with the police. In Qalandiya, Silwad. Arrests, weapon searches, inspections, warning the families of wanted suspects. With intelligence or without, we operate in every case without a break.

Is this what causes young people who have heard incitement to stop?

It hasnt altered the motivation of the young people, but it did sharpen the elders understanding that it's worthwhile for them to exert greater pressure (on young people to not commit attacks).

The hot map works

A few hours before the meeting took place, Col. Shomer met with all brigade officers from the position of platoon commander and above. "We made an evaluation of the situation. We spoke about the decline in the number of terrorist attacks in all the divisions and in the Binyamin division in particular, he explained.

And what are the conclusions?

The quality of defense has greatly improved. The method of hot mapping works. In places where there were soldiers, there were no attacks, or they were directed at them only and not towards civilians. That is why we began stationing soldiers in many places in the (Binyamin) area for longer periods of time. The stationing of security inflicted a great cost to the other side. It took time but they internalized that the heavy presence of soldiers in the field greatly increased the chances that they would be seriously injured or killed.

The security and civilian coordination with the Palestinian security forces is extremely significant and, of course, maintaining the differential workthere were villages that didn't support terror that not only did we not enter them, but we also gave them permits and concessions. They see these as payoffs.

Twelve terrorists for example, Etzion Commander Gofman added, came from Sair village in two and a half months. We checked into which of the clans (in the village) they belonged to and focused in on (those clans) alone. Meanwhile we provided concessions to the remainder of the clans (in the village). (The problematic clans) quickly recognized this and stopped the people that they needed to.

Economic levers have a massive influence, explained Col. Hazi Nehama from the Menashe brigade (located between Jenin and Tul Karem). This is an extremely efficient way of sending a message. After one of the incidents a decision was taken by a major general to close the Jalamah checkpoint for a day or two, and the result was immediately felt. The authorities understood that it was worth their while to take care of the problem. The began receiving reports every day from schools of children who had not arrived to school the same morning and even located Palestinian policemen who had conducted preliminary checks before they (potential terrorists) arrived at the checkpoints. According to (the Palestinian Security Services), they caught dozens of youths who had arrived with the intention of carrying out an attack.

One day, Klapper reminded, the governor of Nablus publicly called on parents to protect their children, and declared that in all of the (security) incidents, they (the perpetrators) are injured or killed. This was in a city home to 200,000 Palestinians. When it's closed off because of a terror attack, it cannot exist.

Efraim Battalion Commander Colonel Roi Strait gave the example of the village of Budrus north of Ramallah. This small village with about 2,500 residents caused a lot of problems, he said. But the moment that we began to pave a road in the center of the town, the mayor and the principal of a school came and stopped a demonstration that had erupted.

Does the demolition of terrorists homes have any influence?

This is part of the warning process, Klapper replied. We have to establish a situation in which a terrorist who leaves Hebron, Nablus or Jenin knows that even if they're prepared to die, they'll lose something else besides their lives. Two weeks ago I toured all of the homes that we demolished, and none of them were renovated. We are talking about renovation, collection of money, but it isnt pleasant to have your home destroyed. Home demolition is a tool which has been proven to be effective.

This is one step which influences others and it is a good thing in our opinion, agreed Col. Shomer.

The IDF DNA

Shomer knows the importance of deterrence all too well. Ten months ago, he almost experienced terrorism firsthand when he stumbled into a Palestinian ambush wherein Palestinians threw boulders at his vehicle in the Qalandiya area. The military courts recently closed the investigation against him after he shot and killed one of the rock throwers.

That was during Ramadan on a Friday at 06:30, when I opened the checkpoint to allow Palestinians to pray, he recalled. We drove in a convoy of three military vehicles and found that they set up an ambush. My jeep was struck by a boulder at point blank range on the front windshield which got smashed. The jeep that was travelling in front of me got stuck, and the rocks continued to fly at us. I felt like I was in mortal danger. I knew that there was no choice. I enacted the rules of engagement procedures towards those throwing the boulders, and one of them was mortally wounded."

Weren't you afraid of getting in trouble for firing your weapon?

When they're waiting for you at 6:30 in the morning in an ambush and with another two hurling rocks at you from point blank range, I expect every IDF soldier to respond. The rules of engagement aren't merely an option: they're obligated to respond. You cant just stand there when you're in a situation in which you know that if you dont respond, it's you or them. I'm extremely satisfied with how I reacted. Immediately after I shot him we called the Red Crescent to tend to him. Despite this, the incident was investigated.

I was appropriately investigated " the colonel said. "It was legitimate and a good thing that they looked into it. That's procedure.

He continued, "I'm proud of the fact that despite that I'm a colonel, my case was checked in exactly the same way as other regular soldiers are checked. Obviously the investigations of the military criminal investigation division (CID) aren't pleasant, but my belief in the prevailing of justice and the support which I received outweighed the unpleasantness.

The closure of the case against you was announced shortly before the arrest of Elor Azaria, the soldier who shot a neutralized terrorist in Hebron.

I dont think that there was any connection whatsoever between the Hebron soldiers case and timing of the announcement about the conclusion of the case against me.

IDF Pillbox in the West Bank (Photo: Yoav Zeitun)

Do you think that the investigative procedures you, as a battalion commander, underwent will make others hesitate before they shoot?

I dont believe so, and we see this in practice. They continue to respond and respond professionally.

In the moment you dont hesitate, Gofman concurred. I was an operations branch officer in Division 36 during Operation Protective Edge, and during the operation, I saw several commanders taking decisions which fell well outside the rules of engagement, which we delineated before the operation. For example, artillery fire in built-up areas. At the same time, in operational reality, they didnt hesitate to act even if they knew that later they would have to explain their actions. The prospect of investigation didn't influence the commanders decisions to deviate from the rules when the time came. The investigations that come afterward are positive things. They are necessary for balance. Our army is proactive, offensive and active. This is our DNA, and it is a good and important that there are limits within the military system.

Many say that Elor Azarias actions in Hebron were also justified.

The incident in Hebron has to be divided into two, says Ben-Ezra, commander of the Hebron battalion. From an operational perspective it was a good thing. Two soldiers thwarted an attack, and two of the assailants were neutralized. At this point the second part of the affair began, which was not a good thing. Contrary to what was publicized and the claims that we heard about this from Btselem, we understood directly from the field what happened. I received a report from the regiment. I also heard from one of the residents who came and told me. We understood everything, even though we didnt have a video. But we had a full verbal description. The incident was handled by me personally and those above me even before anyone else had come to us.

Ben-Ezra said that there could be no doubt as to the incident. It was a bad thing. There was no need to shoot. What caused him to shoot? That is what they are investigating right now. As I understand it, from a military aspect, the situation didn't require any shooting. That's not what we expect from our soldiers, and these aren't the rules of engagement. There wasn't a single person who, after they understood the facts, asked why it wasn't a good thing that he shot.

On social media there's massive support for Azaria. There was a demonstration of support for him.

We can't ignore the conversations on social media, says Ben-Ezra. This is a command challenge, a leadership challenge but at the end of the day, it only builds the resilience of the army and its commanders. I believe that we will emerge from this stronger as an army.

But it wasn't only a few people in the public who supported Azaria. The battalion commanders were surprised to hear that Nehama, along with one of his regiment commanders at the rank of lieutenant colonel, didn't immediately understand the severity of the incident and wondered, of all things, about the IDF's response to the altercation.

Two days after the incident in Hebron the division commander instructed us to discuss the matter with the subordinate commanders from the rank of second lieutenant, Nehama said.

In the beginning I didnt understand why this was necessary, explained Nehama, commander of the Menasheh Brigade. I was sure that they read the investigation and passed it along to their soldiers. Then suddenly, one of the battalion commanders stood up and asked, How did the IDF not support the soldier? How can the chief of staff not support him? Why is he being indicted for murder?

What did you answer?

You have to understand that the soldiers receive a lot of information via social media. We have no control over this. What goes up isn't verified information, but statements and responses. Obviously, I explained that the chief of staff is not the person who decides if the soldier is to be investigated or not. Nor is he the one who determines the regulations according to which he will be indicted. It's done by the military system and is totally unconnected with the commanding ranks.

"I presented all of the specific facts of the incident and the things said by the senior military officials and the commanders, including the battalion commander, understood what exactly happened. I, as a battalion commander, do not see any difference between the rules of engagement and the option of implementing them in the field. I've never found myself asked a question on this subject in a briefing before a military operation that I dont have an answer to. This includes very opinionated reserve battalions. If your life is in danger, you shoot to remove the threat. The subjectivity of the danger is permissible.

That aside, it seems that this affair has cracked the publics faith in the army.

A month ago, the Supreme Court prevented a gas deal and the entire country got involved in it, explained Ben-Ezra. I haven't met one person who can explain what exactly the gas plan is. The public discourse has become one between extreme camps without understanding the meaning. A public crisis of faith? The children of the same public are the soldiers in the army, and I dont think that the public doesn't believe in their children. We aren't even close to that. In a situation where there's a genuine public crisis of faith, soldiers won't turn up to base on Sunday mornings. In the meantime, the motivation to serve is only rising.

Heads of the Judia and Samaria Division (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)



The incident such as what took place in Hebron exemplifies the complexity which exists in the West Bank, explains Strait. The public asks, Why are you commenting on it in public? The soldier made a mistake. Why burn him at the stake? We interpret what transpired differently. We didnt become confusedand I say this based on my discussions with Col. Ben-Ezra (Hebron battalion commander) during the initial hours after the incident. It's clear to us how to operate.

"These are short incidents which last between 1015 seconds. Take the example of what happened at the entrance to Ariel. The soldier who was there saw the terrorists and calmly closed the distance between them and it was finished. Then he ran to save the life of the female soldier who was stabbed. Everything is extremely precise, extremely surgical. I see the soldier in that video and I feel like kissing him in the spot.

The army is the country, added Ben-Ezra. It's not disconnected from it. Our soldiers go home at the end of the week and hear the opinions outside. The Hebron affair happened just before the end of the week of Purim. On Sunday, when the soldiers returned, there was a need to reset the system. All of the discourse today reaches the soldiers with a much higher intensity. When we were soldiers we would receive a weekly briefing. The commander of the platoon would read us sections of the paper from the week and we would talk about them. This is how we were updated. Today, in the space of one second on social media, they already know everything.

This wasn't the only problem in the area. In Har Brakha soldiers were attacked by terrorists and fled their post. At Awarta checkpost, soldiers burned the Palestinian flag. This are already a number of incidents

Seven months, tens of thousands of soldiers, police, border police, the Shin Bet, more than 1,000 complicated situations. That is how our days look, said Ben-Ezra. Obviously that amongst such a large proportion of incidents there will be a number individual cases which aren't good. But we put them on the table and deal with them.

This week we investigated the case of the burning of the flag at the checkpoint, Gofman said. Among other things, we looked into the measures that we took to prevent such incidents and their effectiveness. I organized a discussion with the commanders of the division. We discovered that we undertook measures, but that they weren't sufficiently effective. When we speak with soldiers, when the platoon or regiment commanders speak with them, they lay out a clear direction. They expect that from us. Apparently we didn't explain well enough.

The purity of arms, he continued, is the backbone of the IDF. If something is damaged in it, we walk with our heads down. Since the IDF was established, it has prided itself on its morals and values. That notwithstanding, even to this day we have fought, on a daily basis, for our existence and to protect our citizens. In incidents such as Har Brakha, Hebron, or the flag incident, the soldiers found themselves in an extremely difficult position and in such circumstances the soldiers do not always act according to what we desire. In my opinion the problem is not with the soldier but with the commander. In the Har brakha incident for instance, as commander, we didn't successfully instill the soldiers with the values to which they should have adhered to."

"To my delight," he continued, "despite the failures of this incident, no civilians were harmed. Our job as leaders is to leverage events like this, talk about them, and make sure they never happen again. We, as fighters, grew up with the story of Midhat Yusef or with the story of the soldier from the elite paratroopers unit who did not attack during a firefight and his commander Eitan Balahsan was killed.

Midhat Yusef was a Druze border policeman who died as a result of getting shot in the neck while defending Joseph's Tomb during the Second Intifada. His death led to the IDF policy of not leaving wounded on the battlefield.

Ben-Ezra expressed his unequivocal agreement: We are tested precisely by these sorts of incidents. Values manifest themselves during combat. Over the past two months many soldiers have found themselves in the midst of terrorism. Our obligation is to talk about the negative incidents and deal with them. If we dont do that there will be problems. Our responsibility is to inform the soldiers of exactly what is expected of them. The rules of engagement are well defined. If we wish to preserve our values, our norms, our discipline and our orders in the long run then we, as leaders, cannot permit our soldiers to become confused by a speech or a discussion or anything else.

Head of the Givati Battalion in the West Bank (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

Songs of Gush Etzion Junction

Perhaps the most important subject to the battalion commanders in the area is the connection with the settlements. When the wave of terror began and grew, there was widespread anger toward us from the residents of the settlements which were well justified from their points of view, says Shomer.

One attack followed another. Yanai Weissman was murdered in a Rami Levy supermarket branch as he ran, exposed, to fight terrorists. Most people wouldn't do such a thing. The residents felt that the state of their security was harmed. The murder of the Henkin family engendered a lot of frustration. There were protests and, to be perfectly honest, we didnt give them an answer. However, there was no crisis with the settlements residents. At the end of the day, they're very supportive, Zionistic, nationalistic and cooperative.

It is dangerous to be at Gush Etzion Junction?

Gush Etzion Junction has become a symbol of struggle, says Gofman, whose battalion controls the junction. There are already songs written about. The Palestinians call it death square. The reasons for the repeated attacks there are first and foremost based on practicality. It's a crowded place where many people pass through, and there are many people to harm. It's a central area, it's easy to get to, and it's a large commercial area (where loitering) doesn't arouse suspicion.

"There's also the element of contagious successif they've already succeeded, why not do it again? However there's another reason: The junction has come to symbolize the values of the Gush Etzion settlements for years. Take the Rami Levy supermarket branch at the junction as an examplethere, one can see a Christian Arab buying groceries next to a (Jewish) resident of Alon Shvut receiving service from a (Muslim) cashier from Beit Ummar wearing traditional clothing. What's been done at the junction is the meaning of coexistence. That's why to strike there is to strike a symbol. The terrorist who goes there doesnt only do it for tactical purposes. He also wants to kill the coexistence. This is something we also need to defend.

We're here for the settlements, emphasized Klapper. It is the object of our defense and our job is to give the residents security. Their sense of security declined recently and this is our opportunity to try and improve that. The settlements have withstood significant challenges and demonstrated their resilience and strength in recent months.

And the nationalist criminal networks ?

There are very few problematic people in the settlements, Ben-Ezra replied. I can count them on three fingers. The rest are exemplary civilians. All of the territorial defense forcesit's them. Our responsibility is to do everything possible to ensure that the relative quiet will remain.

In the meantime, we see that this is succeeding.

This is a slight decrease but the wave hasn't finished yet, Ben-Ezra insists. The other battalion commanders nod in agreement. The business is not yet over. The beginnings of the wave of terror began at the beginning of Ramadan, Klapper pointed out. Independence Day still lies ahead, Shavuot and then Ramadan once again. We're still very far from being able to breathe a sigh of relief.

As if to reinforce what the commanders say, a man then walked into the room and hands Shomer a note before he stands up and rushes out. There's a warning that one of the residents in the area is planning an attack.
Israel rejected the Palestinian Authority's request to stop all military operations in Area A as part of a possible solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict PLO Chairman Saeb Erekat claimed on Thursday.

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The statement was made a few hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reported that he rejected the French peace initiative.

Netanyahu said that "Israel believes that the best solution to the conflict is direct, bilateral negotiations. Israel is ready to begin these negotiations immediately, with no preconditions or any other initiatives which will keep the Palestinians from coming to the negotiating table."

Saeb Erekat (Photo: AFP)

Erekat responded harshly to the Prime Minister's statement, and also to the fact that Israel refuses to cease operations in Area A of the West Bank.

"This is a ratification of the Israeli government's decision to continue on with their crimes and offenses," Erekat said.

He continued, saying "the call for bilateral negotiations by the Israeli government isn't a call to come to an agreement for two states, but is an attempt to legitimize the development of the settlements, and is coercion by an apartheid government."

Erekat called on the French government and on the rest of the international community to take immediate steps to give peace a chance.

"We will continue to support the French initiative and the convening of an international peace conference. We once more call on the world to work to keep to the two state solution, including the recognition of a Palestinian state, and to continue to boycott products produced in the settlements which supports the occupation."
Nebraska Boating Safety Course

You may obtain your Nebraska Boating Safety certification through this five-hour classroom class. Nebraska law requires any motorboat operator (including personal watercraft) born after Dec. 31, 1985 to complete a boating safety course and be in possession of a course certificate when operating a boat. The minimum age to operate a motorboat or personal watercraft remains at 14 years of age in Nebraska. (Personal watercraft includes Jet Ski, Sea Doo, Waverunner, etc.) This will be last class offered in York this spring/summer. The class will be held at the York Middle School on May 14, 9:30-2:30 p.m. Tuition is $10.

Learn How to Meditate & Relax

More information is coming out on how meditation can help with mental, physical and emotional problems of the body. You will learn the basics of meditation that you can do any time or anywhere! It can reduce stress on your body and mind, create an ability to let things go, and create a focus in your life. You will learn simple Yoga stretches for the neck, shoulders back, sciatica and relieving tension. Learn to RELAX! This class will be held on Saturday, May 14 from 11 a.m.  2 p.m. Tuition is $45.

Please register early! If something changes in your schedule, full refunds are available if you call at least 24 hours before the class begins.

Sign up today by calling Lori at 402-362-6700 or emailing: lori.suddarth@yorkdukes.org. All classes will be held at York Middle School unless otherwise noted. Go find York Community Education on Facebook and Like the page to stay updated on upcoming classes
YORK  James Lyon, 26, of York has been sent to prison for possession of methamphetamine.

He appeared in York County District Court this week, before Judge James Stecker.

York County Attorney Candace Dick told Judge Stecker, I want the court to be aware that he will have another sentencing coming before you, for assault by a confined person.

In that unrelated case, Lyon was found guilty of assaulting another inmate in the county jail while he was incarcerated on the methamphetamine charge.

My client spent 113 days in jail, said Lyons attorney, York County Public Defender Nancy Waldron. He has been working and has been trying to find more positive people to be with. He completed treatment and has been attending (programming sessions). He is willing to continue (those programs). And he successfully completed probation twice as a juvenile.

I just want to say Im sorry, Lyon said to Judge Stecker. I was a junkie. I was just doing whatever I had to do to get high. Im trying to do better in my life and I hope you give me a chance.

Looking at your priors, you have a marijuana infraction, an assault conviction, one for obstructing a police officer, assault by a confined person and this conviction of possession of a controlled substance, Judge Stecker said to Lyon. I find it extremely troubling that you are not following through with after-care.

If I got the chance for probation, I would appreciate it, Lyon said.

Another concern is that you continue to drink, Judge Stecker said.

Im not, Lyon responded.

Well, probation reported that you are, the judge said.

I quit, sir, Im really trying to move on, Lyon said.

You reported drinking despite going through treatment, the judge responded.

I dont remember saying that, sir, Lyon said.

Well, you are not fit for probation, as the risk is substantial you will continue to engage in illegal conduct, Judge Stecker said, before sentencing Lyon to a term of 18-36 months in prison, with credit for time already served. If you are truly serious, you will take advantage of the treatment available while serving this sentence.
WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - Ambassador John Bolton is proud to endorse U.S. House of Representatives candidate Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-27) ahead of the 2016 election. The John Bolton PAC will also make a total campaign contribution of $5,000. This announcement comes as part of a larger effort by Ambassador Bolton to ensure America elects officials who will vote for a strong national defense and keep America safe.

"It is our mission to build on the historic majority that the John Bolton PAC helped elect in both the House and the Senate in 2014, and it is of the utmost importance that we keep these majorities intact for our next Republican president," said Ambassador John Bolton. "Ileana is a strong advocate of the United States' relationship with Israel, and fights for the enforcement of sanctions against countries that empower violent extremists, which is why I fully support her candidacy for Congress."

The John Bolton PAC is committed to supporting candidates for the House and Senate who believe in restoring America's national security and protecting the United States' vital freedoms at home through securing U.S. interests in an increasingly dangerous world.

"I'm honored by John's support this election year because he knows the threats that our nation faces," said Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen. "The John Bolton PAC advances the principles John artfully advocates for as a private citizen and embodies the same leadership he demonstrated as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John's mission to ensure we have a foreign policy based on strength is what our nation needs in troubled times."

In 2014 the PAC was a major contributor in the midterm elections with 87 endorsements and PAC contributions.

About John Bolton PAC (www.boltonpac.com): The John Bolton PAC was founded by former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John R. Bolton to raise the importance of American national security in federal elections. The PAC will support and contribute to candidates who are committed to restoring strong American economic and national security policies that secure America's interests in a challenging world.
Honors Night was a chance for the community to celebrate all the incredible achievements and hard work of students at York High School. The event was held at the YHS Theater on Monday, April 28, 2016.

Presidents Education Awards

Alyssa Arndt, Jessica Belfiore, Camille Bolte, Hayley Burke, Brandi Clement, Jackson Coffin, Payton DeMers-Sahling, Alexandra Dolan, Samantha Ellis, Jared Fletcher, Nora Friberg, Emma Grenfell, Tonya Grotz, Samuel Hall, Eva Hansen, Taylor Hansen, Mary Heng, Norah Hernandez Banda, Andrew Hoffmann, Andrew Paul Holmes, Lauren Horras, Courtney Jacobsen, Mackinley Johnson, Zachary Kisby, Devin Knight, Samuel Knutzen, Trent Koehler, Erin Lee, Fiona Lindsey, Allee Maronde, Mariah Niewedde, Riley Osentowski, Ryleigh Ott, Shivani Patel, Hayley Peterson, Nicholas Pettygrove, Ashley Reynolds, Allison Riley, Evan Ronne, Jarrett Samson, Jared Schulz, Devin Sikes, Kirsten Wagner, Felicia Walker, Camryn Wiens, Allison Woods, Allen Ye, Cade Zumpfe

4.0 Club

Jessica Belfiore, Jared Fletcher, Andrew Hoffmann, Andrew Paul Holmes, Lauren Horras, Trent Koehler, Erin Lee, Fiona Lindsey, Riley Osentowski, Hayley Peterson, Allison Riley, Kirsten Wagner

Top 10% Senior Class

Jessica Belfiore, Jared Fletcher, Andrew Hoffmann, Andrew Paul Holmes, Lauren Horras, Trent Koehler, Erin Lee, Fiona Lindsey, Riley Osentowski, Hayley Peterson, Allison Riley, Kirsten Wagner

Senior ACES

Alyssa Arndt, Jessica Belfiore, Camille Bolte, Hayley Burke, Jackson Coffin, Payton DeMers-Sahling, Samantha Ellis, Jared Fletcher, Emma Grenfell, Tonya Grotz, Samuel Hall, Mary Heng, Andrew Hoffmann, Andrew Paul Holmes, Lauren Horras, Zachary Kisby, Trent Koehler, Erin Lee, Fiona Lindsey, Hayley Peterson, Nicholas Pettygrove, Allison Riley, Devin Sikes, Kirsten Wagner, Camryn Wiens, Cade Zumpfe

Academic Letters

Seniors  93.00 or above for 7 semesters  Alyssa Arndt, Jessica Belfiore, Payton DeMers-Sahling, Samantha Ellis, Jared Fletcher, Emma Grenfell, Tonya Grotz, Eva Hansen, Mary Heng, Andrew Hoffmann, Andrew Paul Holmes, Lauren Horras, Zachary Kisby, Trent Koehler, Erin Lee, Fiona Lindsey, Riley Osentowski, Hayley Peterson, Allison Riley, Kirsten Wagner, Camryn Wiens, Allison Woods

U.S. Marine Corps Scholastic Excellence Award

Erin Lee

U.S. Army Reserve Scholar/Athlete Awards

Emma Grenfell and Jackson Coffin

2015 Dekalb Agricultural Accomplishments Awards

DEKALB Outstanding Ag Mechanics Award  Ethan Thorne

DEKALB Outstanding Agriscience & Technology Award  Camryn Wiens

DEKALB Outstanding Ag Leadership Award - Jason Gloystein, Tonya Grotz, Allison Riley

Duke Academic Hall of Fame Awards

Most Representative Students

9th Grade - Rebecca Poole and Daniel Gomez

10th Grade - Carsyn Zumpfe and Grant Case

11th Grade - Mara Stuhr and Jayden Vanderheiden

12th Grade - Jessica Belfiore and Samuel Hall

Spirit Scholars

9th Grade  Kaiya Alexander, Morgan Peterson, Kaitlyn Phinney, Grace Sinsel, Bradyn Heiss, Sam Kohmetscher, Jeb Lucas, Garrett Snodgrass

10th Grade - Kinsley Flynt, Ann Magner, Nicole Mittman, Karlee Seevers, Bryce Danielson, Simon Otte, Luke Stuckey, Nick Weskamp

11th Grade - Bailey Gocke, Tayte Hansen, Kennedy Mogul, Hannah Way, Will Bailey, John Erwin, David Jinright, Alex Kowalski

12th Grade - Payton DeMers-Sahling, Lauren Horras, Erin Lee, Allison Riley Jared Fletcher, Andrew Hoffmann, Andrew Paul Holmes, Trent Koehler Man/Woman of the Year

9th Grade - Lauren Kaliff and Reid Hoffmann

10th Grade - Reegon Cast and Dalton Mogul

11th Grade - Samantha Redfern and Braydon Conell

12th Grade - Emma Grenfell and Jared Schulz

Class of 2016 Scholarships

Alyssa Arndt  York State Bank Scholarship; York General Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Nebraska Wesleyan University Black and Gold Academic Scholarship

Nicolas Arvizu  Learn to Dream Scholarship

Jessica Belfiore  Kathleen Dougherty Bartizal Scholarship; Rob & Carol Schardt MMM Scholarship; Nebraska Wesleyan University Black and Gold Academic Scholarship, Multi-Student Award, Achievement Scholarship

David Beltran  Learn to Dream Scholarship

Camille Bolte  Floyd and Karen Jacobsen Memorial Scholarship; LaVern Obermier Memorial (Sunrise Sertoma) Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Concordia University Regents Scholarship, Lutheran Heritage Award, NACC Church Award, Church Workers Scholarship

Hayley Burke  Dorothy and Howard May Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Victor and Rosa Blum Foundation Scholarship

Mayra Cerritos  Learn to Dream Scholarship

Brandi Clement  York General Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Hastings College ProRege Award, Legacy Grant, Alexander Academic Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship

Jackson Coffin  Lance J. Boyle Memorial Scholarship; U.S. Army Scholar Athlete Award; York Kids Wrestling Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Victor and Rosa Blum Foundation Scholarship

Shianne DeLeon  Teammates of York Scholarship; Wood Family Student of the Arts Scholarship; Jason Barrett Memorial Scholarship; Holthus Family Scholarship; Learn to Dream Scholarship

Payton DeMers-Sahling  Kathleen Dougherty Bartizal Scholarship; Beth Ellis Memorial Scholarship; Concordia University Academic Scholarship

Tommy Eckhart  York College Academic Scholarship; Hastings College Choir Scholarship; Doane University Academic Scholarship, Choir Scholarship, Threatre Scholarship, Visit Grant

Kennedy Eifert  Holthus Family Scholarship; Learn to Dream Scholarship; Susan Buffett Foundation College Opportunity Scholarship; University of Nebraska Kearney Loper Excellence Scholarship; Benedictine College Award

Samantha Ellis  Natalie Teegerstrom-Schlegelmilch Memorial Scholarship; York P.E.O. Chapter A Scholarship; York P.E.O. Chapter I.O. Scholarship; York General Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Flint Hills Resources Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship

Anastasia Emick  Shirley Reetz Memorial Scholarship; American Legion Bolton Post 19 Scholarship; Xenon Academy Cosmetology Scholarship and Go the Distance Scholarship

Carter Fernau  Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Harold Elkins Memorial Golf Scholarship

Jared Fletcher  LaVern Obermier Memorial (Sunrise Sertoma) Scholarship; Winsor Tucker Scholarship; UTC Aerospace Systems-University Scholarship; University of Nebraska Lincoln Regents Scholarship

Nora Friberg  Teammates of York Scholarship; Wood Family Future Science Educator Scholarship; York Education Association Scholarship; Concordia University Speech Scholarship, Academic Cheer Scholarship

Emily Geiger  Knights of Columbus Council #1708 Scholarship; McBride Dolphins Scholarship; Teammates of York Scholarship; York High Band Boosters Scholarship; Benevolent Patriotic Order of Does Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Catholic Daughters of the Americas Scholarship; Doane University Visit Grant, Teammates Scholarship, Legacy Award, Instrumental Music Scholarship, Cheer Scholarship

Brian Gibson  R.A. and Lena Freeman Vocational/Technical Scholarship; Ray Korbelik Memorial Scholarship; York Noon Sertoma Club Achievement Scholarship; Learn to Dream Scholarship

Jason Gloystein  York State Bank Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Harold Elkins Memorial Golf Scholarship; Henderson State Bank Scholarship; York County Outstanding 4-H Member Scholarship; Victor and Rosa Blum Foundation Scholarship; FFA Alumni Harvest Moon Outstanding Ag Leadership Scholarship; Community Blood Bank Scholarship

Emma Grenfell  U.S. Army Scholar Athlete Award; Kendell Holthus Memorial Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Hastings College Ringland Scholarship, Basketball Scholarship; Midland University Grant and Basketball Scholarship

Tonya Grotz  York Area Chamber of Commerce Scholarship; York General Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; FFA Alumni Harvest Moon Outstanding Ag Leadership Scholarship; Community Blood Bank Scholarship; Tyler Grotz Memorial Scholarship; University of Nebraska Lincoln Canfield Scholarship; Nebraska Wesleyan University Academic Scholarship; University of Nebraska Kearney Academic Scholarship

Samuel Hall  York Area Chamber of Commerce Agri-Business Scholarship; York County Farm Bureau Scholarship; York Lions Club Scholarship; Cornerstone Careers in Agriculture Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Victor and Rosa Blum Foundation Scholarship

Eva Hansen  York P.E.O. Chapter A Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Cornerstone Bank E.A. Levitt Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Hagan Scholarship; University of Nebraska Lincoln Canfield Scholarship, Nebraska Opportunity Grant

Taylor Hansen  York Lions Club Scholarship; York General Allegra Johnson Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship

Mary Heng  Foreign Language Scholarship; Jim B. and Lillian F. Cooper Foundation/Midwest Bank Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; University of Nebraska Lincoln Canfield Scholarship

Norah Hernandez Banda  Knights of Columbus Council #1708 Scholarship; Tom & Carole Miller Scholarship;York Area Restaurants Scholarship; York Education Association Scholarship; Learn to Dream Scholarship

Andrew Hoffmann  LaVern Obermier Memorial (Sunrise Sertoma) Scholarship; Youth Against Alcohol and Drugs Scholarship; York General Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Nebraska Wesleyan University Black and Gold Academic Scholarship, Achievement Scholarship, Legacy Scholarship; Morningside College Founders Scholarship, Basketball Award

Andrew Paul Holmes  Winsor Tucker Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; University of Nebraska Omaha Regents Scholarship; Northwest Missouri State University Distinguished Scholarship, Bearcat Advantage

Kira Horn  Drive For Your Goal Scholarship; Holthus Family Scholarship; Shirley Reetz Memorial Scholarship; Learn to Dream Scholarship

Lauren Horras  Foreign Language Scholarship; Mildred Sterner Baker Scholarship; Winsor Tucker Scholarship; York Ellks Lodge #1024 Local Scholarship; Henderson State Bank Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; University of Nebraska Kearney Chancellors Scholarship; University of Nebraska Lincoln Canfield Scholarship; Concordia University Regents Scholarship

Courtney Jacobsen  McBride Dolphins Scholarship; York State Bank Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship

Mackinley Johnson Rosemary Stahr Memorial Scholarship; York Business Womens Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship

Logan Kaliff  Kent Spader Swine Education Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Doane University Visit Grant, Community Award, Mens Track Scholarship, Mens Cross Country Scholarship; York College Campus Visit Award, Mens Track and Cross Country Scholarship, Panther Award

Brayden Keepers Forbes Family Trust Scholarship

Zachary Kisby  Steve Block Memorial Scholarship; Chris E. Stauffer Scholarship; UTC Aerospace Systems  Technical Scholarship; York Rotary Vocational-Technical Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship

Trent Koehler  Foreign Language Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Nebraska Wesleyan University Black and Gold Scholarship, Achievement Scholarship; Doane University Presidential Scholarship, Mens Track Scholarship, Visit Grant, Directions Program Award; University of Nebraska Kearney Chancellors Scholarship

Marvin Lazo  Holthus Family Scholarship; York Youth Football Scholarship; York Football Team Athletic Scholarship; York Masonic Bodies Lodge #56 Scholarship; Doane University Van Hoy Scholarship, Football Scholarship

Erin Lee  Youth Against Alcohol and Drugs Scholarship; Henderson State Bank Scholarhip; Kansas State University Heritage Award, June Hull Sherrid Scholarship, Track & Field/Cross Country Scholarship

Rebecca Lichtenberg  Knights of Columbus Council #1708 Scholarship; Shirley Reetz Memorial Scholarship

Fiona Lindsey  Winsor Tucker Scholarship; York Elks Lodge #1024 Local Scholarship; York P.E.O. Chapter A Scholarship

Paige Manley  Kenneth & Joyce Rhoades Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship

Allee Maronde  Knights of AK-SAR-BEN Scholarship; National Western Stock Show Scholarship

Joe Miller  Nebraska VR Irrigation Tech with Pivot Doc

Courtney Mulinix Learn to Dream Scholarship

Alyssa Naber  Teammates of York Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Central Community College ACT Advantage/Compass Scholarship, Tuition Scholarship

Riley Osentowski Frank Valentine Memorial (Optimist Club) Scholarship; Yorkshire Playhouse Scholarship; University of Nebraska Lincoln Canfield Scholarship; Doane University Presidential Scholarship; University of Nebraska Omaha Scholarship

Ryleigh Ott  Rosemary Stahr Memorial Scholarship; Xenon Academy Go the Distance Scholarship, Ten-Year Scholarship

Shivani Patel  Learn to Dream Scholarship

Hayley Peterson  Arthur M. and Belle L. Merrill Memorial Scholarship; York State Bank Scholarship; Youth Against Alcohol and Drugs Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Susan Buffett Foundation College Opportunity Scholarship; University of Nebraska Lincoln Achievement Tuition Waiver; University of Nebraska Kearney Chancellors Scholarship; Concordia University Regents Scholarship, Music Scholarship

Nicholas Pettygrove  Drive For Your Goal Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation Scholarship

Ashley Reynolds  Levitt Family Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship

Rayvn Richards  Anthony Howe Memorial Scholarship

Allison Riley  Teammates of York Scholarship; Yorkshire Playhouse Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; FFA Alumni Harvest Moon Outstanding Ag Leadership Scholarship; Community Blood Bank Scholarship; Kearney Health Opportunities Program (KHOP) Pharmacy Scholarship, Partial Housing Waiver; University of Nebraska Lincoln David Distinguished Scholarship

Deisy Rodriguez  Learn to Dream Scholarship

Maria Rodriguez  Learn to Dream Scholarship

Candida Rodriguez Jaime  Shirley Reetz Memorial Scholarship; Learn to Dream Scholarship

Evan Ronne  York Rotary Scholarship; Victor and Rosa Blum Foundation Scholarship

Ashlee Rowe  American Legion Bolton Post 19 Scholarship

Elisa Salinas  Learn to Dream Scholarship

Whitney Schlueter  LaVern Obermier Memorial (Sunrise Sertoma) Scholarship; Concordia University Academic Scholarship

Jared (JJ) Schulz  Kristopher and Jennfer Kunze Scholarship; Mildred Sterner Baker Scholarship; Teammates of York Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation Scholarship

Devin Sikes  UTC Aerospace Systems-University Scholarship; Greg Holoch Memorial Scholarship; Cyclonaire Corporation Scholarship; Oklahoma Christian University ACT Merit Scholarship, Leadership Scholarship, Heart of America Leadership Training for Christ Outstanding Senior Male Scholarship

Haleigh Smith  Teammates of York Scholarship

Jordyn Stearns  Teammates of York Scholarship; York Area Chamber of Commerce Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; York Football Team Athletic Scholarship; Doane University DCA Academic Award, Softball Scholarship, Track Scholarship, Visit Grant, Teammates Scholarship

Braden Stutzman Learn to Dream Scholarship

Ethan Thorne  FFA Alumni Harvest Moon Outstanding Ag Engineering & Mechanics Scholarship

Whitney Turner  Learn to Dream

Kirsten Wagner  American Legion Auxiliary Bolton Post #19 Scholarship; Youth Against Alcohol and Drugs Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Concordia University Regents Scholarship, Lutheran Heritage Award, Music Scholarship, Womens Tennis Scholarship, NACC Church Award

Felicia Walker  New American University Scholarship

Camryn Wiens  York Area Chamber of Commerce Agri-Business Scholarship; York County Farm Bureau Scholarship; Victor and Rosa Blum Foundation Scholarship; FFA Alumni Harvest Moon Outstanding Agscience and Technology Scholarship; Iowa State University Academic Recognition Award; University of Nebraska Lincoln College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources Scholarship, Canfield Scholarship

Allison Woods  Harold and Ginny Rosenau Fine Arts Scholarship; Oklahoma Christian University Presidential Scholarship; Doane University Board of Trustees Scholarship; Nebraska Wesleyan University Board of Governors Scholarship, Art Talent Scholarship

Cade Zumpfe  Adam James Hansen Memorial Scholarship; Kendell Holthus Memorial Scholarship; Peyton Hoffman Memorial Scholarship; Warren and Velda Wilson Foundation Scholarship; Victor and Rosa Blum Foundation Scholarship; University of Nebraska Kearney Deans Scholarship; Nebraska Wesleyan University Black and Gold Scholarship
Four year-old Dawson Stock loves music and instruments his mother says he is obsessed with the violin. He knows the alphabet forwards and backwards and is ready to read. Dawson is teaching himself the sign-language alphabet. He knows his numbers and how to add. Dawson is a high-functioning child. However, this was not always the case.

In the fall of 2014, Dawsons parents had noticed something was off.

Dawson would not answer to his name and eye contact was rare, said Jennifer Stock, Dawsons mother. He had [little] to no interest in properly interacting with children his own age and [he was] extremely hyper.

According to his mother, Dawson would engage in very little verbal communication. He babbled at an age he should have been talking in fragmented sentences, she said. After having three older children, I had learned many techniques to use when my kids misbehaved time out, counting or a disapproving look however, none of those worked with Dawson. He just didnt understand.

Having my older boys helped me see sooner that Dawson needed special help, Jennifer Stock recalled.

Dawsons parents decided to schedule a visit with a behavioral health nurse practitioner and took Dawson to Fort Belvoir Community Hospital for an examination. Just weeks before his 3rd birthday, Dawson was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

Autism, a general term for autism spectrum disorder, is a developmental disorder which can affect social, emotional and communication skills.

Early detection and treatment is critical to the care of children with autism, according to Lt. Col. (Dr.) Eric Flake, Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics program director at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash. The reason why the greatest emphasis is placed on identifying autism in children as early as possible is to begin teaching children the benefits of healthy social communication and to avoid the adverse consequences of social avoidant behaviors.

As soon as Dawson was diagnosed, he was prescribed a combination of occupational therapy, speech therapy and applied behavior analysis, or ABA.

If there is one person in this world who has been the most amazing, it was our behavioral nurse practitioner, Dr. Jennifer Hensley, said Dawsons father, Maj. Michael Stock. She is one of the greatest humans on earth. She diagnosed Dawson  and took him in like one of her own kids.

Diagnosed on a Tuesday in October 2014, Dawson was actively engaged in occupational therapy by the following week.

Enrollment in speech therapy and ABA followed. Once Dawson was fully enrolled in all three therapies, his regimen consisted of ABA in-home for two hours a day, five days a week; speech therapy for 50 minutes, one day a week; and 50 minutes of occupational therapy, two days a week.

Research estimates the cost of care for a person with autism is between $1.4 million and $2.4 million across a lifespan. In the civilian sector, the average cost of a one-hour session of therapy is $90. To cover speech therapy, physical therapy and occupational therapy, the cost after insurance is approximately $29,000 annually.

Conversely, TRICARE covers the cost of services such as occupational therapy, speech therapy and physical therapy. For eligible beneficiaries, ABA is covered under the TRICARE Comprehensive Autism Care Demonstration.

If not for the right medical insurance, the expense of autism care would have been overwhelming, shared the Stocks. The cost of ABA therapy would have been astronomical. For people with no insurance, there is nothing they can do and it breaks our hearts.

While therapy co-pay amounts vary based on the TRICARE plan selected, the annual cost of autism related therapy services can amount to approximately $600 after insurance.

ABA addresses social development and behavioral issues. ABA services focus on how learning takes places and applies techniques and principles to increase useful behaviors and decrease potentially harmful behaviors, or those which could interfere with learning. For a young child, this could involve learning how to communicate to avoid throwing toys which is not done with any malice, but as a means of communicating.

Dawson has the biggest smile  the biggest heart, said Jennifer Stock. Hes so pure  hes missing any meanness. Everything he does is pure, sweet and from the heart.

Applied behavior analysis uses behavior modification principles and can help with development of skills such as speech and self-help. Since beginning ABA therapy, Dawson has grown and developed in leaps and bounds, but there is still a long road ahead, according to his parents.

Children with autism have a hard time connecting with other people, said Maj. Stock. They dont look you in the eyes. However, now you see Dawson looks you in the eyes, interacts, and it is apparent he is making that intentional effort to have a physical and emotional interaction.

He is now beginning to play with his cousins like kids should do, instead of ignoring other children, Jennifer Stock said.

You can tell when he wants to play, said Dawsons father. He has been able to learn those basic skills that come naturally for other kids.

Dawson is becoming well-versed in nursery rhymes, shared his mother. For him to recognize a nursery rhyme and be able to sing it is a great accomplishment. When he sees a star, or hears twinkle, twinkle,  he will say, like a diamond in the sky.

Since Dawsons diagnosis in 2014, the Stocks have gone through a permanent change of station, to Fort Hood, Texas. It was the right move for our family, said Maj. Stock. We had family in Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio. It was critical for our kids to be around family. Fort Hood was the only base that made sense for us.

While Dawson is too young for enrollment in elementary school, his parents have already begun thinking about his future education and plan to speak with a counselor. Dawsons education is something huge that I think about often. I dont want him to be isolated I want him to be integrated with the other children, said Jennifer Stock. We are hoping to have some type of normalcy. For that reason we dont want to move. We are hoping to stay at Fort Hood for as long as we can.

The Air Force Exceptional Family Member Program provides support for families with a member who has special needs. For military sponsors with a special needs family member, enrollment in the program is mandatory.

The EFMP helps to ensure that families with special needs children are assigned to locations which can support the medical and educational needs of those children. Families preparing for a permanent change of station should get in touch with the local EFMP office preferably six months ahead of their move. It is critical that families have TRICARE insurance and the Extended Care Health Option transferred to their new duty location.

For parents whose children are diagnosed with autism, the Stocks shared advice.

Breathe, it will be okay, said Jennifer Stock. Take a deep breath and look into ABA.

Maj. Stock talked about the importance of developing a social network. We have very good friends whose kids have autism. If not for reaching out to them, we wouldnt have fully understood how to navigate through it  only experience teaches you.

The Stocks credited as a great source of support, the experience of other parents whose children had also been diagnosed with autism. I called my buddy as soon as we first learned about what was going on with Dawson. He gave me a pep talk, told me what would happen, and literally gave me a mental checklist of what to do.

We did everything on the list and it all worked out, Maj. Stock said.

Overall, we are extremely happy with how things are working out, said the Stocks. The best thing you can do is to be your childs best advocate dont settle.

Stay tuned throughout April, as AFMS continues the month-long series on military childrens health.
ACOS April 2016

Col. Erich C. Novak, 302nd Airlift Wing vice commander briefs local community and military leaders during the April 20, 2016 Colorado Springs Regional Business Alliance Military Affairs Council Area Chiefs of Staff meeting. The organization's April meeting was held in an aircraft maintenance hangar at the 302nd Airlift Wing allowing the Reserve wings leader to share the airlift mission of the Peterson-based wing first hand. After the meeting, attendees were given an opportunity to tour the C-130 and learn more about the aircraft maintenance, airlift, airdrop, Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System and aeromedical evacuation operations from Air Force Reservists representing those missions. (U.S. Air Force photo/Daniel Butterfield)
This has been a long time in the making, but in our continuing pursuit to bring only the best of firearms, 2nd Amendment and defence related news to our readers, we are very excited to announce the next step in our evolution as a company.

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The issue of brokers and their commission is currently subject to review, with the Australian Securities & Investment Commission currently holding a wide-ranging inquiry into the practice.

One major bank, Westpac, also announced this week that it will review its commission structure.

While scrutiny of that level may be a warning bell for some about conduct in the broking industry, Jane Slack-Smith, director of Investors Choice Mortgages, said the vast majority of mortgage brokers are working with their clients best interests, not commissions in mind.

When Im working with a client and looking for a lender or loan for them I base all my decision on what would suit them and I would say thats the case for the majority of brokers, Slack-Smith, a two-time Your Investment Property Magazine Readers Choice Mortgage Broker of the Year, said.

Thats at the top of the list and the potential commission is so far down the list that its not important at all. Its just not something that most would think about when working with a client, she said.

Though she believes the majority of brokers are acting appropriately, Slack-Smith said she still welcomes the spotlight being shone on the industry.

One of the things that happens when you have a review like this is that people get to see the potential benefits and downfalls that can come with any decision, she said.

I think one of the things people will see is that brokers across the country are doing the right thing by customers and see that when it comes to assessing somebody and what loan might suit them brokers have access to a lot more information to help them make the right decision.

The other thing is that there probably are a small number of people who arent doing the right thing so I welcome the review in that it might encourage them to leave the industry.

Even though she believes the majority of the industry is acting appropriately, Slack-Smith said she isnt surprised regulators have turned their attention to mortgage brokers.

Im not sure theres anything in particular that has prompted it.

In reality I think this is just progression and mortgage brokers are the next financial group being looked at, weve seen it happen with financial planners and those sort of people and now its happening to us.

While the current reviews are focussing on the commissions brokers receive from banks, concerns have also been raised recently about brokers being incentivized by developers to direct clients to specific property purchases, but Slack-Smith again said that practice is not as widespread as many may think.

There are a few developers who will dangle things to brokers, I had one who offered me a brand new BMW if I referred 10 clients to them but I said I was happy with my Toyota.

Again there may be some who accept those deals, but if you listen to the concerns that APRA and the RBA have been raising recently in regards to people borrowing to buy off the plan and new apartments youll see that its really not in the best professional interest of brokers to point people to those kinds of things.
According to the results of survey conducted by non-major lender ME Bank in December 2015, 76% of Australian households are in favour of the government intervention around affordability; while 9% disagreed action should be taken while 16% were neutral to the idea.

Compared to the previous edition of the survey carried out in June 2015, support for government action increased 3%, while those disagreeing decreased by 1%.

Source: ME Bank

Support for government action on the issue of affordability was widespread among buyer types, with 81% of respondents to the December survey who are looking to buy property in the next 12 months supporting the idea, while 70% of investors were also in favour.

When it comes to what actions should be taken, 76% agreed (9% disagreed; 15% neutral) the federal government should do more to encourage the development of lower priced housing, up 2% from June 2015.

Sixty-one percent of respondents agreed (20% disagreed; 19% neutral) the federal government should reform the tax system to provide less support to investment property buyers, with 42% of investors believing the tax mix should be addressed.

Source: ME Bank

ME Bank chief executive officer Jamie McPhee said the surveys results show housing affordability is a pressing issue for many Australians, particularly younger generations.

We see the impact a lack of access is having on younger generations sense of financial wellbeing, which is falling behind the financial wellbeing of older Australians, McPhee said.

Property is an important wealth generator and the inequities in accessing housing should be tackled, he said.

While property taxes may be a contentious issue at the moment, McPhee said the fact that a significant portion of investors believe the tax mix should be addressed is an important statistic.

Australias current tax arrangements are contributing to the problem by advantaging investors over first home buyers and they should be addressed within a broader review of our taxation system.

"That 70% of property investors agree something should to be done and 42% agree tax concessions for property investors should be changed, shows reforms would receive wide support.
(Adds details, political context)

BRASILIA, April 28 (Reuters) - Brazil's comptroller general said it had barred builder Mendes Junior Engenharia from public tenders for at least two years on Thursday, making it the first engineering company to be penalized for involvement in the Petrobras corruption scheme.

While a dozen other engineering companies have come forward to negotiate leniency deals with the comptroller general's office, Mendes did not do so by the deadline last year.

The company will be banned from contracting work with federal, state and municipal governments.

Mendes is one of about 30 companies implicated in the bribery and kickback investigation that began two years ago and has ensnared dozens of politicians, including the speaker of the lower house of Congress Eduardo Cunha, and added to pressure to impeach President Dilma Rousseff.

The graft scheme involved engineering firms that siphoned off money from over-priced contracts with state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as Petrobras is formally known. The money was used to bribe Petrobras executives and provide kickbacks to politicians in Rousseff's governing coalition.

The blacklisting of these companies by Petrobras has led to bankruptcies of builders and their suppliers, and the laying off of thousands of workers, contributing to the Brazil's worst recession in a century.

Negotiating leniency settlements with the comptroller general's office, known as the CGU, would allow companies to bid for future government contracts in return for admission of guilt, reparation of financial damages and payment of fines.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Bill Trott)
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My sole motivation behind letting myself into that abominable prison house called school was the little white stick that my mother allowed me to grab and lick after the classes were over. I used to look with wishful eyes the attractive white box of ice cream walla who also had other varieties-the red tangy one that came in twenty five paisa, the slightly yellow one that came in fifty paisa and the expensive white creamy one that came in full one rupee. My mother had warned me against eating the orange one as she said it contained worms that came out if you sprinkled salt on it! So my childhood remained deprived of that one single taste that so often contented the appetite of my not-so-affluent friends. <BR><BR> When I went to college I read about globalisation, about the invasion of markets by foreign goods and of absolute wiping out of the local economy by organized production houses. But I could not understand these things till one day while crossing from near my school my eyes failed to spot that old ice cream walla whose presence had become such an inseparable part of the entire set up. It came as a rude shock to me that his place was now taken by three four colourful wheeled vans endorsing attractive logos and pictures of branded ice cream. <BR><BR> That changes are always for better or worse is like putting an emotion into plain black and white. I may have in my own personal way some attachment with the white stick ice cream or with the more expensive soapy, frothy softie of my school days but the accessibility, taste and variety that the present day ice cream industry is offering is no doubt incomparable. <BR><BR> Who would have thought barely a decade ago of eating ice creams made of real fresh fruits- a la Gelato Vittorio or a cool creamy liquid fried in hot boiling oil or what is called today the fried ice cream. <BR><BR> In India the ice cream industry took sometimes to catch the global cue because the country has an indigenous rich and well developed dessert market. What ice cream would stand in competition against Indian sweets? But no you cant say so just because you are born in the land of Kulfi. You will have the authority only when you taste Baked Alaska (an ice-cream sponge cake dish topped with meringue), Arctic roll (British dessert made of vanilla and flour), Adzuki (Japanese red bean ice cream) and Dondruma( a Turkish ice made of salep and mastic resin). <BR><BR> We Indians who generally go gaga over a handful of varieties that Baskin Robbins offers are unaware of the fact that the company actually makes 1000 flavours! What we get in India generally as branded ice cream is nothing but milk and corn flour seasoned with a few chemicals and packed in attractive cones, cups and cornettos. Our knowledge of Ice cream is so poor that we do not even know what cornetto is! Most of us think it is the name of an ice cream that Kwality offers. Update your dictionary- it is actually the registered name of an improved variety of waffle cone that does not become soggy and that was invented and patented by an Italian firm called Spica in 1960! <BR><BR> The world offers so much in shape of that delicate, cool, tender delight called ice cream that I being a lover of it feel choked with emotion at my own minisculeness and misfortune of not having tasted even a fraction of that tremendous, rich and inexhaustible treasure. What is thy life O mortal, my heart cries out, if thou hast not known the glories of the Australian Giant Sandwich Monster, the Manoco Bar, the Irish Scottish Sliders, the Argentine Helado, the Greek Kimaki and the Japanese Macha! <BR><BR> Sometimes I wonder whether there is an intricate connection between the survival of a race and its appetite for ice cream! Otherwise why would the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese and the Persians survive the ravages of time and the Glorious Harappan civilization fade into oblivion? And let us be pragmatic and not blame some harmless ecology or innocent river for their decline. The reason I am sure was hidden in their food habits-they having failed to secure the divine blessings of the Gods. Yes, thats precisely what the ancient Greeks called ice cream! Imagine what foodies they must have been that nearly 4000 years ago they got for themselves ice houses constructed at the banks of Euphrates and as early as 5th century BC they began its marketing by selling ice cones mixed with fruit and honey. A honey flavoured cornetto.! <BR><BR> Roman emperor Nero (62 AD) was fond of fruit ice cream and hence sent his servants to fetch ice from mountains! The Falooda that we eat today is actually a Persian dish Faloodeh made from starch and has its origin around 400BC. The Chinese who claim to be the pioneers in almost everything -be it the first currency notes, the first stint with silk or the first to flood the markets of neighbours with cheap plastic goods-were not far behind in making ice cream too. They are credited to have invented a device that made quick ice using salt peter (no, it was not imported from Bihar, China had enough of it). <BR><BR> The unfortunate Charles I whom the world knows as an autocrat, a despot, a tyrant, an enemy of democracy and parliament was also a lover of ice cream! It is said that he made his chef keep the formula a secret so that it remained a royal prerogative. <BR><BR> Our great Mughals, we should not forget were the die hard lovers of food and all that is rich and luxurious in the modern Indian cuisine has a Mughal origin. So they too loved ice cream and they too enjoyed it in royal feasts and ceremonies. When they could get choicest fruits from Farghana and Samarquand and the best wines from Persia, why couldnt they send relays of horsemen to bring ice from Hindukush for their aromatic fruit sherbets? <BR><BR> But were sending horsemen to run and fetch ice or storing ice in underground icehouses near rivers, the only way of making ice creams in those days? Sadly, yes. And thats why the common man remained deprived of and unknown to its delectable taste. But lets thank Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia who first got the patent for a small hand run ice cream freezer. Gradually with the coming of electricity there also came a revolution in ice cream making. Thereafter Giant corporates like Howard Johnson, Dairy Queen, Baskin Robbins, Gelato Vittorio, Ben and Jerrys, Haagen Dazs and Carvel changed the concept of ice cream in the world. Soft serves, Sundaes and super premiums began to be offered by shops next door. <BR><BR> Thanks to globalisation, the world has really become a small place to live in. Today I can access any ice cream from the world over in my local confectionary shop. but among the confused tastes of multitudinous flavours I some how always try to find that one singular taste of the white stick ice-cream which trickled through my fingers and ran into my nursery uniformspoiling it but leaving an imprint on my memory which has failed to faint in all these years.
Guwahati: Several people on Thursday were injured in bomb blast outside a shop in Debipukhuri Pachali area of Tinsukia town in upper Assam.

As per initial reports, bomb was kept outside a shop in a dustbin.

Bomb squad of Army and Assam Police has reached the spot.

The injured persons were admitted to Tinsukia Civil Hospital from where the people who were seriously hurt were referred to the Assam Medical College Hospital in neighbouring Dibrugarh district.

The area has been cordoned off and investigations are on.

Early this morning, a hand grenade exploded at Duijan near here adjacent to a CRPF camp but none was injured.

Those responsible for the explosions were yet to be ascertained, police said.

Yesterday a hardcore ULFA militant, self-styled Sergeant Major Rongmon Asom alias Mecuri, was killed in an encounter with army in Tinsukia district.

(With Agency inputs)
Patna: In a bid to avert any incidents of fire, the Bihar government has issued an advisory which bars cooking, puja or any other religious activity between 9 am and 6 pm in rural areas.

The move aims at helping prevent incidents of fire which have increased abnormally during the westerly winds this month.

Disaster Management principal secretary Vyasji said, "Summer is at its peak and accidents happen due to fire."

In a letter to all divisional commissioners and district magistrates, Vyasji said that people living in rural areas should finish cooking by 9 am and start preparing their dinner only after 6 pm.

After facing floods and droughts for several years, Bihar is reeling under a different calamity this year: fire.

Over 60 people have been killed and property worth lakhs of rupees gutted across the state which is experiencing unprecedented heat wave these days.

(With ANI inputs)
New Delhi: Following inspection of records of EWS admissions in private schools, Delhi Government has issued a fresh set of instructions to school managements warning them of strict compliance.EWS admissions in private schools, Delhi Government has issued a fresh set of instructions to school managements warning them of strict compliance.

Noting that some private unaided recognized Schools are not admitting the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) children to the extent of 20 per cent (as mandated) in all fresh admissions made in upper classes other than entry level, the government has asked schools to submit data of all admissions made under the category.

"Schools must maintain proper records and registers including student admission and withdrawal register, student attendance, etc. No tuition fee is to be charged from the students admitted under EWS/DG category and if any school has charged then it is supposed to refund the same immediately under proper intimation to the Directorate of Education(DoE)," a communication sent by govt to school principals said.

"Schools have to provide free books, school uniforms and writing material to each and every student admitted under EWS/DG category. Income certificate issued by the competent authority declaring the total annual family income less than Rs 1 lakh is a valid document for admission whether it is in the name of mother or father of the child," it added.

DoE had earlier this month constituted 24 teams to randomly inspect the records of EWS/DG category admissions in private schools in the national capital after 300 schools were identified as defaulters for not sharing the status of admissions.

The nursery admission process began from January 1 and was to conclude by March 31. Since the schools are yet to complete the process under the first list of draw of lots, the admissions have stretched beyond the stipulated time.

According to DoE officials, the second draw of lots will be conducted once the department is aware of the status of vacant seats.

In February, about 26,600 entry level seats in private schools were alloted through computerised draws under the EWS category, an experiment introduced by Delhi government for the first time.

DoE had received over 73,059 applications for admissions to nursery, UKG and Class 1 against the total numbers of 28,193 seats.
New Delhi: Folks, feast your eyes on the new KFC 'serving bowls'  that will get you smacking your lips, licking your fingers. Not kidding, but you might even end up eating them and the good thing is that they won't charge more for that.

As per reports, KFC is introducing edible serving bowls in India by this week in a bid to make its products more eco-friendly.

The new initiative means, you can also eat up the packaging made from tortilla after when you are done eating the food. The edible tortilla bowls will replace the plastic packaging used for the chain's Rice Bowlz, an India-specific dish and one of KFC India's best-selling items.

KFC's green initiative will do away with the plastic bowls, thus avoiding unnecessary wastage of packaging material while saving the planet.

The fast food restaurant chain said that it won't charge more for edible bowls.

"We will not charge more for our edible bowls," Rahul Shinde, MD of KFC India, was quoted as saying.

The edible bowls are an "India-first innovation," Shinde added.

He hinted that the new move could be adopted in KFC's global markets if they prove popular - as was the case with KFC Krushers, originally launched in India.

In 2015, KFC announced plans to launch edible coffee cups in the UK. Named as the 'Scoff-ee Cup', the edible coffee cup is made from biscuit, wrapped in sugar paper, and lined with a layer of heat-resistant white chocolate.

Initially, the edible bowls will be available at KFC outlets in Bangalore. It may be noted that the Karnataka government has recently banned plastic, for a trial period beginning April 28.
New Delhi: After cancelling the visa of Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa, India has barred another exiled Chinese dissident from boarding a flight to attend a meeting in Dharamsala.

Lu Jinghua, a well-known Tiananmen Square activist, was scheduled to attend the April 28-May 01 meeting of dissidents and exiles in Himachal Pradesh.

The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) is scheduled from April 28 to May 1 in Dharamsala as a closed-door event. It is being organised by the US-based Initiatives for China.

It is the same program which Dolkun Isa had planned to attend.

According to India Today, Lu was about to board an Air India flight from New York when she was informed that her visa was cancelled, despite the fact that she had earlier received an e-mail confirmation for an electronic visa.

"At the airport, the Air India staff told me simply that I couldn't board as my visa was cancelled...The staff did not tell me why, they kept me waiting at the counter for a long time and were having a heated conversation with each other in Hindi."

Dolkun Isa had voiced disappointment after the Indian Home Ministry cancelled his tourist visa saying it is not a valid travel document to attend a conference.

A leading NGO, Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD), will host the World Uyghur Congress jointly with US-based group Citizen Power for China (CFC) and Initiatives For China (IFC), also US-based.

The delegates will be be addressed by Tibet's exiled ruler and supreme spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
New Delhi: Amid the row over AgustaWestland VVIP chopper bribery scandal, a report claimed on Thursday that Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica has yet to be formally banned by India.

The Times of India reported that Finmeccanica, parent company of the UK-based AgustaWestland, and its subsidiaries have still not been formally blacklisted by the Indian government.

This despite the fact that no new arms deals are being inked with them, the report added.

As per sources in the Defence Ministry, the firms can be formally blacklisted only after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is investigating the VVIP chopper scam, files a chargesheet in court or reaches a certain point in the probe into the kickbacks case.

The Rs 3,546 crore deal to purchase 12 VVIP choppers was signed with AgustaWestland in 2010.

In Parliament, the ruling BJP and main opposition Congress have fought over the blacklisting of AgustaWestland.

Congress has claimed that the erstwhile UPA government, led by it, had initiated the process to ban AgustaWestland following revelations of bribe being paid in the purchase of choppers for the VVIP fleet.

The BJP-led NDA government has, however, said that the firm was formally banned soon after it took over in May 2014.
New Delhi: The Central government and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Thursday proposed before the Supreme Court the schedule of the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) to be conducted this year.

The schedule was proposed even as the Supreme Court reserved its order on whether All India Pre-Medical / Pre-Dental Test (AIPMT) or National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) will be conducted this year for admissions to MBBS and MD courses.

The apex court had earlier this month paved the way for holding the NEET, a single common entrance test for medical courses including MBBS, BDS and PG courses in all medical colleges, when it scrapped its 2013 order to stop the the single common entrance test.

As per the proposal by the Centre and the CBSE, NEET can be conducted in two phases this year.

The first phase of NEET can be conducted on May 1 instead of the scheduled AIPMT; second phase can be held on July 24.

The proposal says 6.5 lakh candidates can appear in the first phase of NEET while 2.5 lakh candidates can sit for the test in the second phase.

A joint result can be announced on August 17 and the entire admission procedure completed by September 30.

In its verdict earlier this month, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice AR Dave was unanimous in saying that the 2013, 2:1 verdict of the three-judge bench, which had paved the way for private colleges to conduct their own examinations, needs reconsideration as the majority view has not taken into consideration some binding precedents.

Suffice to mention that the majority view has not taken into consideration some binding precedents and more particularly, we find that there was no discussion among the members of the Bench before pronouncement of the judgement. We, therefore, allow these review petitions and recall the judgment dated 18 July 2013 and direct that the matters be heard afresh. The review petitions stand disposed of as allowed, the bench had said.

Justice Dave in the 2013 verdict had given a dissenting verdict, while Justice Vikramjit Sen (since retired) had shared the views and findings of then CJI Kabir on the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET).

The verdict, delivered on the day when CJI Kabir demitted office, had created a buzz in the apex court corridors as an advocate posted on a social networking site about the outcome in advance.

Interestingly, Justice Dave had then too, in his dissenting judgement, said the three judges of the bench had no discussion on the subject due to paucity of time which is normally done.
New Delhi: Amid a bitter row over portrayal of legendary revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad and others as terrorists in a Delhi University history book, the Human Resources Development Ministry has now cautioned the university to make corrections.

Reports on Thursday said that the HRD Ministry has written a letter to the University of Delhi, asking it to avoid using the word "terrorist" while referring to freedom fighters as ''it could hurt national sentiments".

The ministry, in its letter, reportedly said that the word today has a different meaning of terrorists, so any reference to freedom fighters should be done with great caution.

It is believed that the letter from the HRD Ministry was sent after it came to light that a book, which has been part of Delhi University's history curriculum, refers to Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Surya Sen and other freedom fighters as "revolutionary terrorists".

The book titled "India's Struggle for Independence" has been co-authored by noted historian Bipin Chadra and Mridula Mukherjee.

The controversial book mentions several freedom fighters as "revolutionary terrorists" in Chapter 20. The book also calls the Chittagong movement a 'terrorist act', while Sanders killing has been called an 'act of terrorism'.

Bhagat Singh's family had raised serious objections to the term prompting the HRD Ministry to ask Delhi University to make amends. The family members had written to the HRD Minister Smriti Irani seeking her intervention in this regard and demanded appropriate changes in the textbook.
Washington: Top US lawmakers have expressed concerns over the Obama Administration's decision to sell eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, saying the aircrafts could be used against India and not in combating terrorism.

They have also urged the Obama Administration to review its decision in this regard.

"Many members of Congress, including me, seriously question the judgement and timing of such a sale. Additionally, Indo-Pak tensions remain elevated and some question whether the F-16s could ultimately be used against India or other regional powers, rather than the terrorists as Pakistan as asserted," Congressman Matt Salmon said during a Congressional hearing yesterday.

Salmon was joined by several other lawmakers during the Congressional hearing on Afghanistan and Pakistan convened by the Subcommittee on Asia and Pacific of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wherein the Obama Administration was represented by the Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Olson.

"We've got to be concerned what military assistance and whether the F-16s constitute the least expensive, most efficient way for the Pakistani Air Force to go after the terrorists and the least disruptive weapon system to the balance of power between India and Pakistan," Congressman Brad Sherman said.

"We need to offer to Pakistan those weapon systems well- crafted to go after terrorists and not crafted for a war with India," Sherman said.

The US Senate has currently put a hold on the decision of the Obama Administration to give eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan at an estimated cost of USD700 million.

Salmon asked Olson to clarify the underlying purpose and timing of the intended sale and how is it in the best interest of the United States.

"Despite giving Pakistan enormous amounts of counter-terror assistance over the years, over USD25 billion since 9/11, terrorist organizations continue to operate with impunity in Pakistan.

"Pakistan has used terror as a tool of statecraft and terrorist proxy groups, for the Pakistani military have carried out fatal attacks inside India," he alleged.

The subcommittee chairperson, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen too expressed concerns over sale of F-16 to Pakistan.

"I think that we need to leverage our military sales to Pakistan in order to get some more cooperation within the region.
Delhi: Narendra Modi government is all set to release third set of files relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose at 12:30 PM on Friday, as per ANI.

"Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma will release the next set of 25 files pertaining to Bose tomorrow," an official said, as per PTI.

Last month, the minister had released 50 declassified files relating to the leader on web portal www.Netajipapers.Gov.In.

Similarly, as many as hundred secret files were made public by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Netaji's 119th birth anniversary on January 23

Earlier, on April 26, government had said that two crucial files relating to Netaji would be declassified by Japan this year-end, but the country had given no assurance regarding three more such files in its custody.

Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju had told the Lok Sabha that the five files, which are with Japan, could be 'crucial' to resolve the mystery over the fate of Bose.

"Japan has conveyed to us that they will declassify two of the five files by the end of this year but no commitment has been given to the rest of the three files. But we are hopeful that they will declassify the remaining three files too," he had said during Question Hour, as per PTI.

Rijiju had said that two files relating to Netaji which were with the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Home Affairs continued to be missing and efforts were on to trace them.

The Minister had said that around 150 Netaji files had been declassified and were available online, while 25 more files each were being uploaded online every month.

In October last year, PM Modi had met the family members of Netaji and had announced that the government would declassify the files relating to the leader whose disappearance 70 years ago remains a mystery.

While two commissions of inquiry had concluded that Netaji had died in a plane crash in Taipei on August 18, 1945, a third probe panel, headed by Justice MK Mukherjee, had contested it and suggested that no such aircrash had taken place.

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi: There seems to be no end in sight to controversy over AgustaWestland VVIP chopper scam!

BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who triggered huge protests from Congress on Wednesday over his attempts to drag Sonia Gandhi in the AugustaWestland helicopter row, on Thursday again made some controversial remarks in Rajya Sabha which the Chair immediately expunged and warned him of action for unnecessary provocation.

With Congress members continuing to protest, Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien asked them to return to their seats and said it was a deliberate attempt to subvert the Zero Hour.

As Kurien asked Congress members resume their seats, they wanted the Chair to ask Swamy to take his seat first.

"You cannot direct me like that. You are shouting on nothing. I have expunged (the remarks) then and there. It cannot be reported, it cannot come on TV channels," Kurien said.

With the protests continuing, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi twice went up to Swamy to convey something.

Kurien then called Naqvi to his chair and spoke to him about the continued pandemonium. Naqvi then went up to Swamy who then resumed his seat. Azad also went up to the agitating party members and prevailed upon them to resume their places.

As Congress members returned to their seats, Swamy was up on his feet again. Kurien asked him to resume his seat. "You sit down now. Come and meet me in Chamber later."

"I am not going to mention that lady's name," Swamy said in apparent reference to him yesterday dragging Sonia Gandhi.
Islamabad: Pakistan`s Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry said that there was no breakthrough in talks with his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar on his recent trip to New Delhi.

This was their first formal interaction since their scheduled talks were deferred in the wake of the Pathankot attack in January.

Chaudhry was in the Indian capital on Tuesday to attend the Heart of Asia Senior Officials` meeting. During his visit, the Pakistani official held talks with his Indian counterpart on bilateral issues, including resumption of the peace dialogue

It was expected that the talks might lead to progress towards the start of the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue which was agreed by the two countries in December last year.

However, Chaudhry said at a media briefing here on Wednesday: "I would not say there is a breakthrough, but we conveyed our concerns forthrightly."

He said he had stressed the need for a "structured, sustained and result-oriented comprehensive dialogue process", resolving the Kashmir dispute and conducting a fair trial in the 2007 Samjhauta Express attack case.

He also expressed concern over the involvement of alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, in subversive activities in Pakistan and said "such acts undermine efforts for normalisation".

He said the Indian foreign secretary did not indicate any date for his visit to Pakistan for discussing a timetable of the comprehensive dialogue.

The two secretaries were to meet in mid-January in Islamabad, but the sitting had to be postponed because of the Pathankot attack. The two countries have not so far been able to reschedule the meeting.

"Pakistan is ready for dialogue, whenever India agrees to it," Chaudhry said.

(With IANS inputs)
Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party's digital cell recently tracked social media profiles of all its MPs on instructions from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as per a media report.

As per a report in India Today, both Twitter and Facebook was taken into account and a six-page report was circulated among all BJP MPs.

The report apparently listed follower counts of all MPs, the number of tweets and retweets they received and the status of their profiles.

An column pertained to whether party MPs propagate the work of the government or not.

As per the report, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj topped the list of star performers with 5 million Twitter followers.

The comment she got was - "ideal activity, worth following".

On the other hand, Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari has 8.4 lakh Twitter followers and received the following comment as per the website - "he is an example of how to run social media, though he can be more interactive."

Then came VK Singh, Kalraj Mishra, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore and Dr Mahesh Sharma who were also reportedly praised for their Twitter and Facebook activity.

However, most of the ministers and MPs were found to be lagging behind.

Ministers like Maneka Gandhi, Santosh Gangwar, Dr Ram Shankar Katheria, Sanjeev Balyan, Niranjan Jyoti, Nihalchand, Haribhai Chaudhary and Hansraj Ahir were hardly active on social media.

Uttar Pradesh BJP president Keshav Prasad Maurya was dubbed as inactive.

BJP's digital cell report also highlighted the fact that most of the MPs did not highlight 'government's achievements' online.

In Gujarat, 15 of 26 MPs are either not on Twitter or Facebook or have multiple inactive accounts, as per the website.

In Uttar Pradesh, 43 of 71 BJP MPs are 'inactive' on social media.

Former Mumbai police Commissioner and BJP MP from Baghpat, Satyapal Singh was quoted by India Today as saying, "It's good to be on Twitter. It not only allows us to put out what the government is doing but it also lets us tell our side of the story in case of a misrepresentation by the media, which is happening a lot these days."

And Dr Jitendra Singh, MoS PMO, said, "Under the guidance of our Prime Minster, (social media) helps us put great initiatives like Jan dhan, beti bachao, etc, in front of everybody."

PM Modi has 19.6 million Twitter followers and is considered quite active on social media.
London: Prime Minister Narendra Modi took his place alongside other world leaders at Madame Tussauds in London on Thursday.

The official Twitter handle of Madame Tussauds posted the following, "PM Modi has now taken his place alongside other world leaders."

The figure is featured in the famous attraction's popular "World Leaders" enclosure.

Those who will give company to PM Modi are present day leaders Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Francoise Holland, as well as political heavyweights of the past including Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

PM Modi's new wax figure arrived at the Baker Street attraction fresh from Delhi, where Modi had a private viewing with his likeness last week.

Modi was closely involved in the creation of his figure and was delighted with the final results, declaring that the Madame Tussauds team are "exceptional at what they do".

Earlier he had tweeted: ""Today, I had an opportunity as the prime servant of my people to meet my wax figure..."

"Today, I had an opportunity as the prime servant of my people to meet my wax figure..." https://t.co/iybQr8HzO4 @MadameTussauds  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 20, 2016

Indian Prime Minister @narendramodi joins world leaders at MT attractions in Asia and Europehttps://t.co/Cv8fTG3G9W pic.twitter.com/zOFn0l3jFI  Madame Tussauds HK (@TussaudsHK) April 20, 2016

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi joins world leaders at Madame Tussauds: https://t.co/scbeo6bdGJ via @YouTube  Madame Tussauds HK (@TussaudsHK) April 20, 2016

Indian PM @narendramodi's figure is travelling back from India and will join other world leaders here on 28th April pic.twitter.com/yyqM6306Gm  Madame Tussauds (@MadameTussauds) April 20, 2016

General Manager of Madame Tussauds London, Edward Fuller, said, "We are delighted that Mr Modi was able to see this very figure in India last week, and to welcome him to Madame Tussauds London today."

"It's wonderful that our visitors now have the chance to get up close to this influential leader, who is the source of so much public interest. It's not every day you get to stand alongside the statesmen and women shaping our world and we think guests will relish the chance to rub shoulders with Mr Modi," he added, as per PTI.

PM Modi's figure is dressed in his signature Kurta in cream with jacket and he is featured in a traditional pose making a namaste gesture.

London's figure is one of four created of the statesman, with the other three taking up residence at Madame Tussauds attractions in Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok.

Each figure took a team of talented artists four months and cost 150,000 pounds to create.

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday paved the way for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) to be conducted this year for admissions to medical courses, both in government and private colleges, across the country.

The Supreme Court also approved the NEET schedule for this year, proposed by the Central government, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the Medical Council of India (MCI).

As per the proposal, NEET will be conducted in two phases this year.

The first phase of NEET will be conducted on May 1 instead of the scheduled AIPMT; second phase will be held on July 24.

As per the proposal, 6.5 lakh candidates can appear in the first phase of NEET while 2.5 lakh candidates can sit for the test in the second phase.

A joint result will be announced on August 17 and the entire admission procedure will be completed by September 30.

The court had earlier in the day reserved its order on whether All India Pre-Medical Test (AIPMT) or NEET will be conducted this year for admissions to MBBS and MD courses.

The apex court had earlier this month paved the way for holding the NEET, a single common entrance test for medical courses including MBBS, BDS and PG courses in all medical colleges, when it scrapped its 2013 order to stop the the single common entrance test.

A five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice AR Dave was unanimous in saying that the 2013, 2:1 verdict of the three-judge bench, which had paved the way for private colleges to conduct their own examinations, needs reconsideration as the majority view has not taken into consideration some binding precedents.

Suffice to mention that the majority view has not taken into consideration some binding precedents and more particularly, we find that there was no discussion among the members of the Bench before pronouncement of the judgement. We, therefore, allow these review petitions and recall the judgment dated 18 July 2013 and direct that the matters be heard afresh. The review petitions stand disposed of as allowed, the bench had said.

"We don't agree with the submission" that it was "not proper to hold NEET", the bench added, declining plea by three states that they have their own statutory regime for holding their separate entrance examinations.

Senior counsel PP Rao, L Nagashwar Rao and Harin Rawal appearing for the Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana respectively, argued that the medical admissions in their states were done on the basis of qualifying or entrance examinations conducted as per their statutory regime.

They told the court that their their regime had the sanction of article 371(d) of the constitution and had received the president's assent, and contended that unless the court hold their statutory regime as void, they could not be asked to follow the NEET route for admission in undergraduate and post graduate medical courses.

Appearing for Tamil Nadu, Nagashwar Rao said that since 2007, the admission in medical course in the state were on the basis of the qualifying marks obtained by the aspirants. He said that if NEET was thrust on them suddenly at this stage, they many not succeed in the competitions at all as all India competition requires a lot of preparation.

Justice Dave in the 2013 verdict had given a dissenting verdict, while Justice Vikramjit Sen (since retired) had shared the views and findings of then CJI Kabir on the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET).

The verdict, delivered on the day when CJI Kabir demitted office, had created a buzz in the apex court corridors as an advocate posted on a social networking site about the outcome in advance.

Interestingly, Justice Dave had then too, in his dissenting judgement, said the three judges of the bench had no discussion on the subject due to paucity of time which is normally done.

(With Agency inputs)
Mumbai: After successfully breaking age-old traditions at Shani Shingnapur and Trimbakeshwar temples, Bhumata Brigade president Trupti Desai on Thursday tried entering Haji Ali Dargah, but was stopped at main entrance.

As she reached the premises of the Dargah, the Mumbai Police did not allow her to get down from her car at the main entrance.

Desai, however, made another attempt to enter, but was once again stopped.

Speaking to ANI, We are going to Chief Ministers residence from here. Whether he meets us or not, we will go and do sit-in there.

Were these the achhe din (good days) for women they had promised us, she added.

However, on her way to CM's residence, she along with her supporters was detained by the police at near Breach Candy Hospital.

The police has also registered a case against her for taking out a protest without permission. The case has been registered in Tardeo station.

Desai and other activists have been fighting for gender equality at religious places where women are not allowed to enter.

The decision to enter Dargah was taken after several Muslim women and activists demanded that gender discrimination be abolished at places of worship.

Desai joined with a new forum, "Haji Ali Sab Ke Liye - Haji Ali For All" in April.
New Delhi: Not withstanding the 'Incredible India' controversy involving actor Aamr Khan, the BJP has decided to invite all the three Khans of Bollywood among others to attend a mega event to celebrate second anniversary of Prime Minister Narendra Modi government at the Centre.

A report in the Mumbai Mirror said on Thursday that the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has sent special invites to Bollywood A-listers for the event.

Among the attendees are the three Khans of Bollywood - Shah Rukh, Aamir and Salman who have mostly been cordial with each other but also snapped out at each other on certain occasions.

Nearly 60,000 people are expected to attend the eight-hour long BJP show titled Zara Muskura Do which is due to be held on May 26.

To mark the occasion, a series of short films highlighting the achievements of the Modi government will be screened.

The BJP had organised a similar event titled Saal Ek, Shuruaat Anek in 2015.

A panel of ministers headed by the Urban Development Minister M Venaiah Naidu will be supervising the preparations of the event.
United Nations: An Indian-flagged cargo ship has been blacklisted by the UN Security Council for transporting crude oil illicitly exported from Libya.

The UN Security Council's committee concerning Libya yesterday added the vessel 'Distya Ameya' to its sanctions list that includes names of individuals and entities subject to assets freeze, travel ban and other measures relating to attempts to illicitly export crude oil from Libya.

The listing makes the vessel prohibited to load, transport or discharge and enter ports.

The designation is valid till July 26 unless terminated earlier by the Sanctions Committee.

The vessel, whose flag state is India, "may have been sold recently to an unknown buyer and the vessel's name may have changed to Kassos," said the Libya sanctions committee.

"The vessel Distya Ameya was listed pursuant to the resolution as transporting crude oil illicitly exported from Libya, based on information received from the Government of Libya," the committee said in its reason for the listing.

As of April 26, the vessel was north of Al-Bayda, Libya, heading for Malta.

A senior Indian official told PTI that the ship is on a time-charter agreement for a UAE-based company.

Being an Indian-flagged ship, the owner of the ship is registered in India but is doing work for a UAE-based company.

The official said India is already in touch with the ship and has told it to talk to the UAE entity about the UN decision and see how to address the issue.

The official made it clear that the ship is not working for or on behalf of the Indian government nor the oil it is transporting is for India or from an Indian entity.

Libya's National Oil Corporation had said in a press release last week that it had notified the Libyan authorities of an attempt by the parallel administration in Beyda to export oil illicitly from Libya.

Tripoli-based NOC's chairman Mustafa Sanalla said in the release its subsidiary Agoco in the east was instructed by a Beyda official to load the 'Distya Ameya' at the port of Marsa el-Hariga but the Libyan authorities took the necessary steps to stop the vessel from loading.

Agoco had been instructed to load 650,000 barrels of oil on April 21-23 at Marsa el-Hariga for DSA Consultancy FZC, a company registered in Sharjah, UAE.

Through the Libyan mission to the UN, the Libyan government notified the UN Security Council's Libya sanctions committee that the attempted export breached UNSC resolutions.

The vessel arrived at Marsa al-Hariga on the night of April 21 but was not cleared to load and remained at anchor.
New Delhi: Amid the raging row over VVIP chopper scam, a report said on Thursday that former Indian Air Force chief SP Tyagi, during his interrogation in 2013, had admitted before the Central Bureau of Investigation that he had met middleman Guido Ralph Haschke.

According to a report published in The Times of India, a CBI official has claimed that Tyagi had told the investigating agency that he had met Haschke 5-6 times. Tyagi's cousins Julie, Docsa and Sanjeev Tyagi were also present during the meetings.

The report states that details of the AgustaWestland deal were discussed during the meetings. Notably, the middleman is alleged to have passed 20 mn euros as bribe for the contract to the ex-Air chief's cousins.

The 225-page judgement by the Milan Court of Appeals (an Italian court) says that there was "reasonable belief that corruption took place" in the 2010 VVIP helicopter deal and SP Tyagi was involved.

SP Tyagi was IAF chief from 2005-07 when VVIP choper deal was processed. However, he has denied involvement in any wrongdoings.

Meanwhile, the Parliament has been witnessing fireworks after the Bharatiya Janata Party raked up the VVIP chopper scandal in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha following the Italian court's reported observation that the UPA government showed "substantial disregard" in arriving at the full truth behind the multi-crore scam.
New Delhi: Launching a scathing attack, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal has asked the Central Information Commission (CIC) on Thursday why it was not making public the educational qualification of PM Narednra Modi.

"But I have come to know that you have refused to put the degrees of PM Narendra Modi in the public domain, " Kejriwal asked CIC.

"I have no problem if information related to me is made public," Kejriwal added in a letter to the CIC.

"The people of this country want to know the truth," Kejriwal said.

"Show "courage" and make the documents public," Kejriwal said to CIC.
New Delhi: As World Immunisation Week is observed, CEO of Gavi - Seth Berkley, the global Vaccine Alliance, has praised the Narendra Modi government for its proactiveness and initiatives taken like 'Mission Indradhanush'.

"Indian children have missed out not because of a lack of vaccines but a tardiness of political will and access issues," Seth Berkley said in an interview to TOI.

Mission Indradhanush

"The Modi government has been a highly proactive supporter; introduced bold initiatives to improve access like Mission Indradhanush," the Gavi CEO added.

Lauding India's efforts in eliminating polio, Seth Berkley said, "India's success in eliminating polio in less than a decade simply cannot be overstated."

Praises for PM Modi's Make in India initiative

When asked how how can Indian entrepreneurs contribute, Berkley said,"The Make in India initiative could hold the key to many of the challenges; India could massively improve access to vaccines by modernising supply chains."

Noteworthy, Gavi, the global Vaccine Alliance, plays an important role in saving lives worldwide.
Jammu: A grenade attack on a police post in Sherbagh in the Anantnag district was reported on Thursday.

According to reports, some unidentified militants hurled grenades on police post, however, no one was injuredin the incident.

In view of the incident, security has been tightened.

More details area awaited.
Srinagar: At least one militant was today holed up in a mosque in Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir as security forces launched an operation there.

An army official said security forces launched the operation in Kanthpora village of Lolab?following information about the presence of militants in the area.

"After a brief exchange of firing, at least one militant took shelter in a local mosque," the official said.

He said the operation was being hampered by local residents who were pelting stones at security forces.

Several policemen, including an officer, were hurt in the stone pelting, a police official said.

The operation was going on till reports last came in, he added.
Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy on Thursday filed a Rs 1 lakh defamation case against CPI-M leader VS Achuthanandan after he said there were 136 cases of corruption against Chandy and his cabinet colleagues.

Achuthanandan, at an election rally in Kannur earlier this week, said there were as many as 31 cases of corruption registered against the chief minister.

Chandy threatened that if Achuthanandan did not withdraw his statement, he would take legal steps.

In his petition filed at a court here, Chandy said Achuthanandan made the "baseless" statement to belittle him and his colleagues ahead of the May 16 Kerala assembly polls.

Earlier on Thursday, Chandy in his Facebook page said that while there was not a single case against him or his cabinet ministers, there were cases against Achuthanandan and quite a few candidates from the Left Front opposition.

Chandy said there was a corruption case filed with the vigilance department against Achuthanandan in a land deal case.

He said the Left Front candidate from Azhikode, M.V. Nikesh Kumar -- a journalist who co-owns the Reporter TV channel - said in his affidavit that there were 54 cases against him for dishonour of cheques.

The chief minister said CPI-M politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan is named in the SNC Lavalin corruption case that is being heard in the Kerala High Court.

Chandy said other leaders contesting from the Left opposition who have cases against them include T.V. Rajesh, James Mathew, Antony Raju, AA Rasheed and Naushad.

"The truth is that while there are no cases against me or my cabinet ministers, there are cases against Achuthanandan and others and by now the people of Kerala have come to know the truth," said Chandy.


WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - The Council of Chief State School Officers today announced that Jahana Hayes, a high school history teacher in Waterbury, CT is the 2016 National Teacher of the Year.

Hayes teaches at John F. Kennedy High School, but the community is her classroom. Connecting lessons learned in school to real life is an integral part of her instruction. Hayes seeks to send students into the world not just academically prepared but as conscientious and productive members of society.

"I am honored to be the 2016 National Teacher of the Year," Hayes said. "In the course of the next year, I hope to stoke a national conversation about education that is inclusive of everyone. I want to engage people who have not traditionally been part of the conversation to join in this important effort to prepare well-rounded students for success in life."

The National Teacher of the Year program, run by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and presented by Voya Financial, Inc., identifies exceptional teachers in the country, recognizes their effective work in the classroom, engages them in a year of professional learning, amplifies their voices, and empowers them to participate in policy discussions at the state and national levels.

As the 2016 National Teacher of the Year, Hayes will spend a year traveling the nation to represent educators and advocate on behalf of teachers. Hayes looks forward to sharing her belief in the importance of service-learning, and in making the teaching profession more attractive and appealing to young people across all demographics.

"CCSSO is honored to support the nation's great teachers, and I am excited that people across the nation and the world will soon learn from Jahana Hayes' commitment to education," said Chris Minnich, executive director of CCSSO.

"Jahana values a quality education for all students, and she finds ways to engage students outside of her classroom walls to improve her community -- and strengthen the character of her kids. I look forward to the year ahead and all that parents, students and fellow educators will learn from Jahana."

Story continues

Every year, exemplary teachers from each state, the U.S. extra-state territories, the District of Columbia, and the Department of Defense Education Activity are selected as State Teachers of the Year. From that group, the National Teacher of the Year is chosen by a panel representing 15 renowned education organizations, which collectively represent more than 7 million educators.

"The Selection Committee selected Jahana Hayes as the 2016 National Teacher of the Year because we believe her message of service-learning resonates in the education discussion today," the committee stated. "In addition, we believe she has a strong story that speaks to educators and will bring an important perspective to the public discourse over the next year."

"Teachers like Jahana Hayes are leading the way to a brighter future for America. What an exceptional educator -- we are all proud," said Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. "Extraordinary academic rigor, high expectations, and unwavering commitment to service outside the classroom are the characteristics that Jahana brings to Waterbury students each and every day. She is truly preparing the next generation of global citizens. I want to congratulate Jahana and thank her for making a difference in the lives of so many Connecticut children and families."

"Jahana Hayes inspires her students to believe in their ability to change the world. She ignites a love of learning and builds their self-confidence. This well-deserved distinction provides Jahana the platform and opportunity to share her gifts, passion, and talent with students and educators across the nation. Without question, Jahana will inspire others to believe in the power of teachers to change the world through education," said Connecticut Department of Education Commissioner Dianna R. Wentzell. "Connecticut is so proud of Jahana. She is a true role model for educators across the nation who seek to deliver on the promise of an outstanding education for every student."

"To be the National Teacher of the Year requires not only pedagogical precision, but also the ability to connect to the hearts and minds of a school community," said Waterbury Superintendent Kathleen M. Ouellette. "Jahana's own life experience, her passion for education, and the inspirational manner in which she impacts her students, all contribute greatly to her success. Jahana has masterfully refined a focused, pragmatic, yet heartfelt approach to an evolving global vision of education, bringing her to this pinnacle -- the 2016 National Teacher of the Year! We in Waterbury, Connecticut are very proud!"

The finalists for 2016 National Teacher of the Year are Nathan Gibbs-Bowling, (Washington), Daniel Jocz, (California), and Shawn Sheehan, (Oklahoma). You can read more about the finalists here.

Hayes and the other 55 State Teachers of the Year have been invited to an event Tuesday at the White House, where they will be honored by President Barack Obama.

Learn more about Jahana Hayes, including photos and a bio, at http://www.ccsso.org/ntoy.html.

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is a nonpartisan, nationwide, nonprofit organization of public officials who head departments of elementary and secondary education in the states, the District of Columbia, the Department of Defense Education Activity, and five U.S. extra-state jurisdictions. CCSSO provides leadership, advocacy, and technical assistance on major educational issues. The Council seeks member consensus on major educational issues and expresses their views to civic and professional organizations, federal agencies, Congress, and the public.
Mumbai: Maharashtra`s Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar has squarely blamed the Congress party and the governments that it has run in the state for the ongoing drought that has left hundreds of thousands of people in various districts in a parched and hapless state.

Participating in ETV`s "The JC Show" in Mumbai, Mungantiwar spoke on the crisis brought on by the drought as well on several other important issues related both to the BJP and the government it runs in Maharashtra under the leadership of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis.

Coming specifically to the drought-related crisis that has ravaged most parts of Maharashtra, Mungantiwar told Head, ETV News, Jagdish Chandra, that the state government is taking all necessary steps to provide enough water to the people and is particularly focused on all irrigation-related matters.

"Congress brought this distress to the farmers. We are providing water through trains in Latur but our main worry is what development has the Congress done till now? The condition has become so worse that we have to deliver water through trains, Mungantiwar told ETV.

Defending the policies of the Devendra Fadnavis-led state government with regard to the measures taken to counter the drought, Mungantiwar told Chandra, "Even a state like Rajasthan is ahead of us in terms of dealing with water-related issues. Wherein, in terms of the scarcity of water, we have only been able to irrigate 18 percent of our state because of the water problem. That is why I am focusing on irrigation. The people of Rajasthan know the value of water, I have heard that Rajasthan is starting 3500 Jalyukta camps."

"We are ranked 28th in irrigation among the 29 states. We have provided relief through budget. We have reduced the expense in this budget and provided concession on crops," the Maharashtra finance minister added.

"Maharashtra`s budget is a budget of the farmers. The development rate has increased. Farmers did not develop during Congress rule."

Mungantiwar`s comments assume significance in the wake of Maharashtra facing its worst drought in almost half a century. Millions of families have seen their crops destroyed, lost their livestock and suffered from life-threatening water shortages over several months.

There are reports of 50-wagon trains carrying 2.5 million litres of water daily and still not being able to sufficiently meet the needs of the population.

Maharashtra`s Latur District is the worst hit in the state, with people standing in line for as long three to five hours in scorching heat to fill two pitchers of water.

Regarded as India`s most prosperous state, Maharashtra has long been prone to drought, but this year, has been hit harder than in previous years because of poor rainfall.

There are reports of mismanagement and a continued diversion of water to large industries like sugar and liquor, which some experts claim has worsened the situation.

The state government, however, denies this charge and maintains that every effort is being made to end the crisis and ease the plight of the common man.

According to government estimates, around 330 million people - a quarter of India`s population - have been affected by the drought, which is only expected to become more severe as temperatures rise across the country during the summer.
New York: Not just connecting you with friends, interaction with fellow students on social networking website can help you focus and study better, say researchers.

Developers of open online courses may want to take a page from Facebook to keep more students engaged and enrolled.

"Current open course platforms do not include collaborative features for students to work together, or good conversation channels between students and between students and teachers. Social media may provide another communication channel for the students, said Saijing Zheng, former doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University.

The researchers found that open course students were more engaged on Facebook groups and preferred interacting more on the social media site than through the course tools.

"We found that social media tools may be one way to keep students engaged in a open course, said Zheng, currently research scientist at Microsoft.

One of the advantages of Facebook groups is that users tend to sign up with their real names while students can create fake personas on course message boards and forums.

Real names give other students the idea that they are talking to a real person and that, perhaps, helps build a sense of community and they trust that type of environment more," Zheng noted.

Students appreciate that Facebook offers several ways to contact the professor, she said.

They can reply to a post, like a post, and even send a private message.

Students on Facebook groups can meet and chat weeks before the course starts and, in some cases, long after it ends.

Facebook replies and posts also tend to be better organised than message board conversations, which can easily become buried among other posts, according to the researchers.

For the study, the researchers collected data from three different courses on Coursera, a platform that hosts MOOCS, and from Facebook groups.

The findings were shared at the annual ACM conference on Learning at Scale at University of Edinburgh in Britain this week.


Bhubaneswar: The India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Thursday sounded a severe heat wave warning in coastal Odisha for the next 3-4 days.

Odisha continued to reel under the scorching sun on Thursday, and the government confirmed the death of nine people due to sunstroke.

It said it has received unconfirmed reports of 119 deaths so far due to heat stroke.

The maximum temperature was recorded above 43 degrees Celsius at 10 places, and above 40 degrees at 18 places.

Sonepur and Talcher recorded a maximum temperature of 45.4 degrees, while the state capital boiled at 45.3 degrees, the IMD said.

Bhubaneswar wore a deserted look throughout the day as people preferred to remain indoors to save themselves from the blistering heat wave.

Bhubaneswar Met department director Sarat Chandra Sahu said coastal Odisha would continue to experience increase in temperature in the coming days.

He also predicted light rainfall in interior parts of the state.

Meanwhile, the special relief commissioner's office said the state government has received reports of 119 deaths due to sunstroke, while it has confirmed only nine.

"Of the total case, 50 have been inquired into and nine deaths have been confirmed due to heat stroke. The rest 69 cases are under inquiry," it said.


New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday congratulated the Indian Space agency on the successful launch of the seventh and final satellite, IRNSS-1G, of Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) from Sriharikota.

The Prime Minister, who himself watched the launch of the PSLV C33/ IRNSS 1G, also congratulated the people.

Few minutes into the launch, and congratulating the scientists at ISRO, Modi wrote on the micro-blogging site Twitter:

Check out some of his tweets below-

First and foremost I want to congratulate all @isro scientists and the entire team. I also congratulate the people of India: PM  PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 28, 2016

In space science, our scientists have achieved many accomplishments. Through space science lives of people can be transformed: PM  PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 28, 2016

With this successful launch, we will determine our own paths powered by our technology. This is a great gift to people from scientists: PM  PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 28, 2016

Our efforts will not only help India but we can help fellow SAARC nations as well: PM @narendramodi  PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 28, 2016

Exactly at 12.50 p.m. the PSLV rocket standing 44.4 metres tall and weighing 320 tonnes tore into the afternoon skies with fierce orange flames at its tail. And just over 20 minutes into the flight, the PSLV rocket ejected its sole passenger - IRNSS-1F - at an altitude of 488.9 km.
Aleppo: At least 20 civilians were killed late Wednesday in regime strikes on a hospital and nearby residential building in the Syrian city of Aleppo, civil defence volunteers known as the White Helmets said.

A dentist and five members of a family, including two children, were among those killed "by airstrikes targeting al Quds Hospital and a nearby residential building in al Sukkari neighbourhood in eastern Aleppo," the volunteers told AFP.

A doctor who was the only paediatrician in the rebel-held eastern neighbourhoods of Aleppo was also among the dead, an AFP correspondent on the ground said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group confirmed the raids were carried out by "regime airplanes" and said two hospital guards and a doctor were among the dead.

Video footage filmed by AFP showed images of the badly damaged hospital, aid workers transporting the victims in ambulances and a weeping man holding a child.

Rescuers were at the scene searching for victims trapped under the rubble, the AFP correspondent said.

Separately, 11 people were killed in western parts of Aleppo earlier on Wednesday, according to the Syrian Observatory. State news agency SANA blamed the rocket and gunfire on Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front and its allies.

Also earlier in the day, five civilians were killed in two neighbourhoods in eastern Aleppo, according to the White Helmets. An AFP correspondent said that regime aircraft targeted one area with barrel bombs and another with missiles.

Following a lull in fighting after the ceasefire took effect on February 27, violence has intensified in recent days, with more than 100 civilians reported dead in air strikes, shelling and rocket fire since Friday.

Once Syria`s commercial hub, northwestern Aleppo has been divided between rebel control in the east and government forces in the west since 2012.

The fighting has put the ceasefire in jeopardy and overshadowed a new round of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva that were entering a recess on Wednesday.

More than 270,000 people have been killed in Syria and millions been forced from their homes since the conflict erupted in 2011.
Mexico City: Three federal police officers and two soldiers will face trial on torture charges after a video surfaced showing a woman being nearly suffocated with a bag, authorities said Wednesday.

The case is the latest allegation of torture against the country`s security forces amid a relentless drug war.

The video, which circulated on social media, shows a policewoman placing a bag over the woman`s head while she is being interrogated.

A female soldier also points the muzzle of her assault rifle on the head of the woman, who sobs as she sits barefoot on a dirt floor.

Officials say the video captures an incident that took place in February 2015 in the town of Ajuchitlan del Progreso, in the southern state of Guerrero.

The defense ministry, which arrested the two soldiers on charges of disobeying orders, says it only learned about it last December.

In addition to the policewoman, two male officers were charged, the attorney general`s office said in a statement.

The defense ministry has said that the troops were an army captain and the female soldier.

The heads of Mexico`s military and National Security Commission, which oversees the federal police, issued rare apologies over the incident.

Rights groups say the video shows that torture remains a technique for authorities to obtain coerced confessions.
Seoul: North Korea on Thursday fired a Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile, but it appeared to have failed, South Korea's defence ministry said.

The projectile was launched at 6.40 a.m. (local time) from the Wonsan area in North Korea, Xinhua news agency quoted a defence ministry official as saying.

The launch appeared to have failed as the projectile was believed to have crashed several seconds after liftoff, the official said.
Moscow: Moscow will join the global battle against tax evasion and other illicit activities by signing up to an international scheme to stamp out fiscal cheating, Russia's finance minister said on Thursday.

It follows in the wake of the "Panama papers" scandal which shined a light on the vast offshore holdings of individuals close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that Russia will sign the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development agreement on automatic sharing of tax data at a meeting in Beijing in May.

Moscow hopes to be a full member of the OECD's information exchange system by 2018, according to Russian media.

A close Putin confidante was implicated in a series of global reports that revealed how a Panamanian law firm set up offshore entities to help the world's wealthy stash their assets.

Reports based on the leaks linked Putin's close friend, cellist Sergei Roldugin, to shell firms that shuffled at least USD 2 billion and made money out of thin air from questionable deals with Russian state companies.
Milan: Italian police have arrested four suspects in a foreign fighter investigation, including a Moroccan-born man living in Italy who had received Islamic State (IS) orders to carry out attacks on Rome during Holy Year, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli told reporters that investigators intercepted communications from within IS territory ordering attacks in Italy, "with particular attention to the city of Rome" and focusing on the Holy Year pilgrimage now underway.

He said the messages promoting lone-wolf attacks were "very strong, very serious and very efficient," indicating that Islamic State's current policy is to push for attacks in locations where foreign fighters are residing "as the best way of creating terror within Western countries."

While prosecutors gave no indication that attacks were imminent, Romanelli said authorities acted quickly to close the investigation, arresting four people in the northern Lombardy region and issuing arrest warrants for two others believed to be in IS territory.

"This is a new profile, because it was not a generic indication, but an indication given to a specific person who was invited to act within the territory of the Italian state," Romanelli said.

He said the death in battle late last year of a foreign fighter with ties to the group within IS territory had contributed to the radicalisation process. The fighter had been expelled from both Italy in 2015 and later, from Switzerland before traveling to IS territory, where he was killed.

Italian Premier Matteo Renzi praised the anti-extremists operation as "very important."

Authorities arrested the Moroccan-born man, identified as Abderrahim Moutahrrick, and his wife, Salma Bencharki, who allegedly were planning on travelling from their home in Lecco, north of Milan, to IS territory with their children aged 2 and 4.

Romanelli said Moutahrrick had taken Italian citizenship and was an accomplished boxer.

Another Moroccan man who was planning to travel with them, identified as Abderrahmane Khachia, 23, was arrested in the northern city of Varese. It was the death of his elder brother that prosecutors identified as the radicalising event.
Seoul: North Korea on Thursday tried and failed in what appeared to be its second attempt in two weeks to test a powerful, new medium-range ballistic missile, South Korea`s defence ministry said.

A ministry official said the North had fired what was understood to be a Musudan missile at around 6:40 am (2140 GMT Wednesday) from Wonsan on the east coast, but it plunged back to earth seconds after launch.

"It is believed to have failed," the official told AFP.

There had been widespread intelligence reports in recent days that the North was preparing for another flight test of a Musudan, which is capable of striking US bases on the Pacific island of Guam.

North Korea initially launched a Musudan on April 15 -- the birthday of founding leader Kim Il-Sung -- but the exercise ended in what the Pentagon described as "fiery, catastrophic" failure, with the missile apparently exploding just after take-off.

The failed tests come as the country is gearing up for a rare and much-hyped ruling party congress next month, at which Kim Jong-Un is expected to take credit for pushing the country`s nuclear weapons programme to new heights. There is growing concern that Pyongyang is preparing to conduct a fifth nuclear test in the run-up to the event which opens May 6.

In recent months the North has claimed a series of major technical breakthroughs in developing what it sees as the ultimate goal of its nuclear weapons programme -- an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to targets across the continental United States.

The achievements trumpeted by Pyongyang have included miniaturising a nuclear warhead to fit on a missile, developing a warhead that can withstand atmospheric re-entry and building a solid-fuel missile engine.

Last Saturday, it successfully tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) and was promptly criticised by the UN Security Council.

Existing UN resolutions forbid North Korea from the use of any ballistic missile-related technology, and South Korea said it would push for fresh penalties to be imposed on Pyongyang.

"The government strongly condemns this additional ballistic missile launch ... which is a clear violation of UN resolutions and an act of provocation," the foreign ministry in Seoul said in a statement.

It said it would work with other UN members to "try to put the North`s regime under more sanctions."

The Musudan is believed to have an estimated range of anywhere between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres (1,550 to 2,500 miles). The lower range covers the whole of South Korea and Japan, while the upper range would include US military bases on Guam.

The missile has never been successfully flight-tested.

Two failures in swift succession will be seen as an embarrassment for the leadership, especially ahead of the party congress which is meant to celebrate the country`s achievements.

Speaking last weekend during a visit to Germany, US President Barack Obama warned that North Korea was making dangerous progress even when its efforts fell short of outright success.

"Although, more often than not, they fail in many of these tests, they gain knowledge each time," Obama said.

"We take it very seriously, so do our allies and so does the entire world," he added.

Anxiety has been high on the divided Korean peninsula since Pyongyang conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and a rocket launch a month later that was widely seen as a disguised ballistic missile test.

The UN Security Council responded with its toughest sanctions to date, angering the North, which has since made repeated threats of attacks targeting the South and the United States.
Tokyo: Japan`s southwestern region, jolted by two powerful tremors that killed 50 people earlier this month, has witnessed over a thousand aftershocks since the first strong quake hit the country on April 14.

This volume of seismic activity is unusually high even for Japan, a country used to frequent tectonic movements and which recorded 1,842 humanly-perceptible quakes last year, EFE news reported.

The Japan Meteorological Agency on Thursday urged that quake alert in Kumamoto and Oita, the two worst-affected prefecture cities on Kyushu Island, be continued.

On April 14, Kumamoto registered a violent 6.5-magnitude earthquake, which triggered a series of tremors, including one of 7.3 magnitude that struck two days later and caused even greater destruction.

The quakes claimed 49 lives with one person still missing and led to the evacuation of 30,000 people.

Moreover, authorities said 16 people died in the aftermath of the quakes, owing to fatigue and stress from harsh living conditions in the area, where many have had to spend several nights in their cars.

Almost 300 sites on local roads are still blocked by rocks, fallen trees or debris, which have cut off access to several areas.
The Syrian army was preparing an offensive to retake the northern city of Aleppo, where 53 civilians were killed in fighting Thursday in a new blow to a tattered truce.

It was the highest death toll for a single day in a week of fighting in the divided city of Aleppo between rebels and regime forces that has cost more than 200 lives, a monitoring group said.

UN envoy Staffan de Mistura warned that a hard-won February 27 ceasefire was now "barely alive", appealing for urgent action by its co-sponsors Russia and the United States to rescue it.

At the Security Council, UN aid chief Stephen O`Brien echoed de Mistura, urging world powers to revive the truce and put an end to the "massive human suffering" in war-torn Syria.

But pro-government newspaper Al-Watan said the army was poised for a "decisive battle" for Aleppo and the surrounding province, while a source close to the regime said the campaign was imminent.

"Now is the time to launch the battle for the complete liberation of Aleppo," the paper said, adding that it "will not take long to begin, nor to finish".

The regime source told AFP that "the army is preparing a huge operation in the coming days to push the rebels away from the city by encircling it and creating a security zone".

Rebels have controlled eastern districts of Aleppo city since 2012, while western neighbourhoods are held by the regime.

Control of the surrounding province is divided between a myriad of armed groups -- jihadists of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, Kurdish militia and various rebel factions as well as the army.

Further north in the province, rebels including the powerful Islamist Ahrar al-Sham group and Kurdish forces fought fierce battles Wednesday and early Thursday that left 64 fighters dead, a monitor said.The upsurge in violence in and around Aleppo has strained the February truce between the government and non-jihadist rebels and cast a shadow over UN efforts to convene a new round of peace talks next month and channel aid to Syria`s beleaguered population.

Rebel rocket and artillery fire on government-held neighbourhoods on Thursday killed 22 civilians, including two children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Regime air strikes on rebel-held districts killed 31 civilians, including three children, according to the British-based monitor.

An AFP correspondent said every building in sight in the Bustan al-Qasr district had had its windows blown out by the air strikes.

"It is the worst day in Aleppo in five years. The regime did not spare a single neighbourhood," said one resident.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned that Aleppo city was "on the brink of humanitarian disaster".

"Wherever you are, you hear explosions of mortars, shelling and planes flying over," said Valter Gros, who heads ICRC`s office in Aleppo.

The UN aid chief also raised the alarm, urging world powers to salvage the truce.

"We must all be ashamed this is happening on our watch," said O`Brien.

"You must not squander the opportunity presented by talks in Geneva and by the cessation of hostilities to put an end to the massive human suffering in Syria," he said, appealing to world powers.On Wednesday, government air strikes hit a hospital and nearby block of flats in Aleppo`s rebel-held Sukkari neighbourhood, killing 30 people, the civil defence group known as the White Helmets told AFP.

Among the dead was the last paediatrician still working in rebel areas of the city.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which had been supporting the hospital, condemned the strike which it said killed 14 people.

"MSF categorically condemns this outrageous targeting of yet another medical facility in Syria," said Muskilda Zancada, the medical charity`s head of mission in Syria.

"This devastating attack has destroyed a vital hospital in Aleppo, and the main referral centre for paediatric care in the area."

A rescue worker said 10 of the dead were so badly disfigured they could not be identified.

Syria`s main opposition group, the High Negotiations Committee, condemned the strike on the hospital as "heartless".

The Aleppo violence has raised fears for the ceasefire in other areas of Syria and called into question the future of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva that have now gone into recess.

De Mistura said the truce was "in great danger" and could collapse "at any time".

He said the United States, which supports some rebel groups, and regime ally Russia needed to act, calling on them to organise a high-level Syria meeting before negotiations resume.
Aleppo: A leading pro-government newspaper in Syria said on Thursday that the army is preparing a major offensive to recapture the whole of second city Aleppo and its surrounding province.

The editorial in Al-Watan came as fighting intensifies in and around the divided city despite a February ceasefire brokered by Russia and the United States.

"Now is the time to launch the battle for the complete liberation of Aleppo," the paper said.

"It`s no secret that the Syrian army has prepared this decisive battle with its allies. It will not take long to begin, nor to finish."

A source close to the regime also said the army would launch a major offensive in the coming days.

"The army is preparing a huge operation in the coming days to push the rebels away from the city by encircling it and creating a security zone," the source told AFP.

The comments echo remarks made by Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi during a visit to Damascus by Russian lawmakers earlier this month.

"With our Russian partners, we are preparing an operation to free Aleppo and block all illegal armed groups that have not joined or have broken the ceasefire deal," Russia`s Interfax news agency quoted him as saying on April 10.

Rebels have controlled eastern districts of Aleppo since 2012, confining the government to the west.

Control of the surrounding province is divided between a myriad of armed groups -- jihadists of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, Kurdish militia and various rebel factions as well as the army.

Al-Watan said Damascus had given the fragile February 27 truce a chance at the request of its "Russian friends," but should now deal a "severe blow" to opponents.

"Recapturing Aleppo city and then the entire province will be a severe blow to anyone who thinks about dividing up Syria", the paper wrote.

"The battle for Aleppo and its results will... mark a huge paradigm shift in defeating terrorism and cleansing Syria of it."

The drive for an offensive by the army comes despite an appeal by UN envoy Staffan de Mistura late on Wednesday for urgent steps to rescue the truce from its cosponsors Moscow and Washington.

Washington has accused Moscow of encouraging its Damascus ally to embark on an offensive to retake Aleppo, Syria`s pre-war commercial hub.

Moscow has countered that the rebels in the city are fighting alongside Al-Qaeda, which is not covered by the ceasefire, and has asked the UN to add two key Islamist rebel groups to the exclusion blacklist.
Los Angeles: The FBI arrested three people on Thursday, including the brother of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook, on charges of marriage fraud and lying to investigators, authorities said.

Syed Raheel Farook, 31, was arrested in the early morning at his home in the California town of Corona, along with his wife Tatiana Farook, also 31.

Mariya Chernykh, Tatiana's 26-year-old sister who lives in the nearby town of Ontario, was also arrested.

The five-count indictment against the three centers on Chernykh's alleged sham marriage to Enrique Marquez, who is awaiting trial on

charges of aiding the December 2 attack carried out by Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik.

The duo were later killed in a shootout with police.

"This is the latest step in the comprehensive investigation into the horrific attacks in San Bernardino last year that took the lives of 14 innocent Americans and deeply affected so many more," US attorney Eileen Decker said in a statement.

"As I have said previously, we owe the victims, and the entire community of San Bernardino, a thorough investigation that uncovers all criminal activity surrounding these events."

The trio arrested today were expected to make an initial court appearance later in the day, according to local news reports.

They face up to five years in prison on a charge of lying to immigration officials. Chernykh also faces up to 25 years in prison on charges of fraud and misuse of visas as well as lying to federal agents.

Marquez told investigators after his indictment in December on charges of buying weapons used in the San Bernardino assault that he had entered into a fake marriage with Chernykh in November 2014 and had lied about living with her.

Chernykh and her sister are both from Russia and Syed Raheel Farook's marriage to Tatiana has also come under scrutiny.

Investigators have executed several search warrants at his house since the massacre, the deadliest terror attack on US soil since September 11, 2001.

Syed Raheel Farook served in the US navy between 2003 and 2007 and is a decorated veteran.
Vienna: UN chief Ban Ki-moon hit out Thursday at what he called "increasingly restrictive" refugee policies in Europe as the continent faces its worst migrant crisis in decades.

Ban also said he was "alarmed by the growing xenophobia here" and elsewhere in Europe, in a speech to the Austrian parliament.

"I am concerned that European countries are now adopting increasingly-restrictive immigration and refugee policies," Ban told lawmakers.

"Such policies negatively affect the obligation of member states under international humanitarian law and European law. Divisiveness and marginalisation hurt individuals and undermine security."

His comments came a day after the Austrian parliament adopted one of Europe`s toughest asylum laws, as the country`s centrist government struggles to halt the surging far-right whose candidate won the first round of presidential polls on April 24.

The hotly-disputed legislation allows the government to declare a "state of emergency" if migrant numbers suddenly rise and reject most asylum seekers at the border, including those from war-torn countries like Syria.

If the mechanism is triggered, border authorities will only grant access to refugees facing safety threats in a neighbouring transit country or whose relatives are already in Austria.

Some groups including minors and pregnant women will be exempt from the rule.

The measures are similar to tough laws introduced by Hungary`s rightwing government last year.

The UN`s refugee agency warned on Wednesday that the legislation "removes a centrepiece of refugee protection".

But Austria insisted it had no other choice as long as "so many other European Union members fail to do their part" to stop the influx.More than a million people, primarily from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, landed in Europe last year, triggering the continent`s worst migration crisis since the aftermath of World War II.

Wedged between Europe`s two main refugee routes -- the Balkans and Italy -- Austria received around 90,000 asylum requests in 2015, the second-highest in the bloc on a per capita basis after Sweden.

The influx has boosted support for the far-right Freedom Party, whose presidential candidate made it into a May 22 runoff.

The party is also leading polls ahead of scheduled general elections in 2018.

In a bid to stop the populist resurgence, Austria has erected border fences, introduced an annual cap on asylum-seekers, and pressured other countries along the Balkan trail to close their frontiers, effectively shutting the route to migrants.

It has also restricted existing asylum laws by imposing limits on the length of asylum granted to migrants and making it harder for their families to join them.

"I fully appreciate the enormity of the challenges but I trust that Austria will continue to contribute toward the EU`s efforts to forge a truly cooperative approach to addressing the (migration) issues," Ban said.
United Nations: UN Security Council diplomats on Thursday warned North Korea to expect a response after Pyongyang`s repeated failed attempts to test-fire a powerful ballistic missile, the latest defiance of UN resolutions.

At the request of the United States, the council held urgent closed-door consultations after North Korea`s unsuccessful launch earlier in the day of two medium-range missiles as fears grew that the secretive country was preparing to conduct a fifth nuclear test.

North Korea has now made three bids in two weeks to test-fly a Musudan missile, which is capable of striking US bases on the Pacific island of Guam.

"We are looking at a response," China`s Ambassador Liu Jieyi, who holds the Security Council presidency this month, told reporters after the hastily arranged meeting. He did not elaborate.

Japanese Ambassador Motohide Yoshikawa said his government "condemns the series of grave and very clear violations of Security Council resolutions."

"This is a threat to Japan`s national security," he said, adding that the 15-member council was unanimous in condemning the latest launches.

Current UN resolutions bar North Korea from developing any ballistic missile-related technology, and South Korea said it would push for fresh penalties to be slapped on Pyongyang.

The South Korean foreign ministry issued a strong condemnation, calling North Korea`s latest tests "an act of provocation" and said it would work at the United Nations to "try to put the North`s regime under more sanctions."

Diplomats said they expected the council to issue a statement on Friday after the Chinese delegation requested time to consult with officials in Beijing.South Korea said a first launch Thursday of what was understood to be a Musudan missile saw the rocket plunge back to earth seconds after take-off.

A second attempt in the evening -- again of a Musudan -- also appeared to have failed, a defense ministry official said.

An initial effort on April 15 -- the birthday of founding leader Kim Il-Sung -- ended in what the Pentagon described as "fiery, catastrophic" failure, with the missile apparently exploding just after take-off.

South Korean military officials say the North is desperate to register a successful launch ahead of next week`s ruling party congress, at which leader Kim Jong-Un is expected to take credit for pushing the country`s nuclear program to new heights.

In recent months, the North has claimed a series of major technical breakthroughs in developing what it sees as the ultimate goal of its nuclear drive -- an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to targets across the continental United States.

The achievements trumpeted by Pyongyang have included miniaturizing a nuclear warhead to fit on a missile, developing a warhead that can withstand atmospheric re-entry and building a solid-fuel missile engine.

Last Saturday, it successfully tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile -- a move that was promptly condemned by the Security Council.The Musudan is believed to have an estimated range of anywhere between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometers (1,550 to 2,500 miles).

The missile has never been successfully flight-tested.

US President Barack Obama has warned that North Korea is making dangerous progress, even when its efforts fall short of outright success.

"Although more often than not they fail in many of these tests, they gain knowledge each time," Obama said.

"We take it very seriously, so do our allies and so does the entire world."

Anxiety has been high since Pyongyang conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and a rocket launch a month later that was widely seen as a disguised ballistic missile test.

The council responded with its toughest sanctions to date, angering the North, which has since made repeated threats of attacks targeting the South and the United States.

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Aleppo: The United States and the United Nations Thursday condemned an air strike on a hospital in Syria`s Aleppo, with Washington demanding that Russia restrain its Syrian ally.

UN officials also voiced alarm at the "catastrophic deterioration" of the situation in Syria and appealed on world powers to salvage a February 27 truce.

But in Aleppo on Thursday, fighting between rebels and regime forces killed 53 civilians -- the highest toll for a single day in a week of violence that has cost more than 200 lives, according to a monitor.

The Syrian army was meanwhile poised to launch an offensive against rebels who control part of the northern city.

Secretary of State John Kerry expressed "outrage" over Wednesday`s air strike that hit Al-Quds hospital in Aleppo`s rebel-held Sukkari neighbourhood.

He said it appeared to be "a deliberate strike on a known medical facility" and said Russia, which backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, must restrain the Damascus regime.

"Russia has an urgent responsibility to press the regime to fulfil its commitments under UNSCR 2254, including in particular to stop attacking civilians, medical facilities, and first responders, and to abide fully by the cessation of hostilities."

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said attacks that target civilians are "inexcusable" violations of humanitarian law.

"There must be accountability for these crimes," he said.

The city`s last remaining paediatrician and three children were among the 20 people killed in the air strike overnight on the Al-Quds hospital, which was supported by Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

A civil defence group known as the White Helmets told AFP 30 people were killed in the strike on the hospital and a nearby block of flats.The Aleppo violence has raised fears for the ceasefire in other areas of Syria and called into question the future of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva that have now gone into recess.

UN envoy Staffan de Mistura warned that the hard-won February 27 ceasefire was now "barely alive" and could collapse "any time".

Speaking late Wednesday after a third round of Syria peace talks fizzled out, De Mistura also urged its co-sponsors Russia and the United States to take action to rescue it.

He said the United States, which supports some rebel groups, and regime ally Russia needed to act, calling on them to organise a high-level Syria meeting before negotiations resume.

UN aid chief Stephen O`Brien further raised the alarm on Thursday in remarks made at the UN Security Council.

"We must all be ashamed this is happening on our watch," said O`Brien, urging world powers to salvage the truce.

"You must not squander the opportunity presented by talks in Geneva and by the cessation of hostilities to put an end to the massive human suffering in Syria," he said.

And the UN`s Jan Egeland, who heads an international humanitarian taskforce for war-ravaged Syria, spoke of a "catastrophic deterioration" of the situation in the country.

"The stakes are so incredibly high," Egeland told reporters in Geneva, and warned that "the lifeline to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people... may be broken." Rebel rocket and artillery fire on government-held neighbourhoods on Thursday killed 22 civilians, including two children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Regime air strikes on rebel-held districts, including Bustan al-Qasr, killed 31 civilians, including three children, said the British-based monitor.

An AFP correspondent said every building in sight in the Bustan al-Qasr district had had its windows blown out.

"It is the worst day in Aleppo in five years. The regime did not spare a single neighbourhood," said one resident.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned that Aleppo city was "on the brink of humanitarian disaster".

The pro-government Al-Watan newspaper and a Syrian regime source meanwhile said the army was preparing to take the whole of Aleppo.

"Now is the time to launch the battle for the complete liberation of Aleppo," the paper said, adding that it "will not take long to begin, nor to finish".

A regime source told AFP that "the army is preparing a huge operation in the coming days to push the rebels away from the city by encircling it and creating a security zone".

Rebels have controlled eastern districts of Aleppo city since 2012, while western neighbourhoods are held by the regime.

Control of the surrounding province is divided between a myriad of armed groups -- jihadists of al Qaeda and the Islamic State group, Kurdish militia and various rebel factions as well as the army.

Further north in the province, rebels including the powerful Islamist Ahrar al-Sham group and Kurdish forces fought fierce battles Wednesday and early Thursday that left 64 fighters dead, a monitor said.

More than 270,000 people have been killed in Syria and millions forced from their homes since the conflict erupted in 2011.
Aden: A suicide bomber targeted the police chief of Yemen`s second city Aden on Thursday in the latest attack against senior officials in the base of the Saudi-backed government, a security official said.

The bombing came after loyalist forces backed by a Saudi-led military coalition seized the key southeastern port city of Mukalla and the nearby airport and oil facilities from Al-Qaeda, ending a year-long occupation by the jihadists.

General Shallal Shayae escaped unharmed from the attack but one guard was wounded when the bomber blew up a vehicle packed with explosives, the official said.

A witness said the bomber, dressed as a woman, was stopped at a checkpoint on the perimeter of the compound around the general`s house, where he blew himself up.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, but Shayae has survived attacks by jihadists more than once.

In February, suspected Al-Qaeda militants opened fire on a convoy carrying Shayae and Aden governor Aidarus al-Zubaidi, but they escaped unharmed.

Shayae and Zubaidi also survived a car bombing that targeted their convoy in Aden on January 5 killing two of their guards.

The port city has seen a growing jihadist presence since loyalist forces backed by the Saudi-led coalition drove Huthi Shiite rebels out of the city in July.

For the first 12 months of the intervention that the coalition launched in March last year, it focused its firepower on the rebels, creating a power vacuum that was exploited not only by Al-Qaeda, but also by rival jihadists of the Islamic State group.

As a ceasefire with rebels went into effect on April 11, the loyalists and their allies turned their guns on the jihadists, driving them out of a string of southern provincial capitals and imposing heavy losses.

Washington regards Al-Qaeda`s Yemen-based branch as its most dangerous and has waged a drone war against its commanders since 2002.
TORONTO, ON and TAMPA, FL--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - Cott Corporation (NYSE: COT) (TSX: BCB) ("Cott" or the "Company") today announced that, effective June 27, 2016, Steven Kitching, the current President of the Company's Cott North America business unit, will return to the United Kingdom to be the President of the Company's Cott United Kingdom/Europe business unit, a position similar to the one he previously held from 2008 to 2013.

The Company has appointed Bradley J. Goist to assume the role of President of the Company's Cott North America business unit. Mr. Goist joins Cott from the Kellogg Company where he held various positions from 2009 to 2016, including Senior Vice President and General Manager, US Snacks and Senior Vice President of Marketing and Innovation, US Snacks. Prior to that, Mr. Goist held several positions with The Coca-Cola Company from 1996 to 2009, including Senior Vice President and General Manager, Hydration and Senior Vice President, Juices, Teas and Emerging Brands. Mr. Goist holds a Masters in Business Administration from Ohio State University and is a graduate of University of Michigan, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics.

"Steve was instrumental in setting a clear strategy for stability and growth in North America, with a significant focus on growing our Contract Manufacturing business," said Mr. Fowden. "We are very thankful for the many contributions Steve made to the North America business unit and are very pleased that he is staying with Cott on his return to his native United Kingdom to lead our United Kingdom/Europe Business Unit," continued Mr. Fowden.

"We are excited about Brad's appointment as President of the North America Business Unit. With 30 years of diverse sales, marketing and general management experience, Brad has the knowledge and expertise to lead our North America Business Unit. Brad and Steve will collaborate with the rest of the management team in the North America business unit in a phased handover of responsibilities," continued Mr. Fowden.

ABOUT COTT CORPORATION

With the acquisition of DS Services of America, Inc. in December 2014, Cott combined a leading provider in the direct-to-consumer beverage services industry with its traditional business, one of the world's largest producers of beverages on behalf of retailers, brand owners and distributors. Cott now has the largest volume-based national presence in the U.S. home and office delivery industry for bottled water and one of the five largest national market share positions in the U.S. office coffee services and filtration services industries. Cott reaches over 1.5 million customers (approximately 60% commercial and 40% residential) through over 2,000 routes located across its national network supported by national sales and distribution facilities, as well as a fleet of over 2,000 vehicles. Cott's broad portfolio allows it to offer, on a direct-to-consumer basis, a variety of bottled water, coffee, brewed tea, water dispensers, coffee and tea brewers and filtration equipment. With the ability to cover approximately 90% of U.S. households, in terms of geography, Cott believes it has the broadest distribution network in the direct-to-consumer beverage services industry in the United States, which enables it to efficiently service residences and small and medium size businesses, as well as national corporations, universities and government agencies.

Website: www.cott.com
YEREVAN, APRIL 27, ARMENPRESS. President of the National Assembly Galust Sahakyan said to journalists he welcomes Vartan Oskanians decision to form a party. He said that the more parties are being formed, the better it would be for the state.

He also added that it is incorrect to think that newly formed parties can immediately win. According to him, such case never happened in Armenia.

Referring to the statement by Vartan Oskanian who said he is going to apply to business circles to provide finance to his party, Galust Sahakyan said firstly you need to have opportunities, then to form a party.

When asked who funds the RPA, Galust Sahakyan mentioned that the existence of RPA is based on membership fees. He added that they have 150.000 party members who pay membership fees. Not all of them pay on time, however, large number pays. Sahakyan added that he pays 20.000 AMD as a membership fee.
YEREVAN, APRIL 27, ARMENPRESS. Armenia has always supported peaceful settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict through negotiations, and Azerbaijan makes empty efforts to present Armenia as a side declining the negotiation process, Foreign Minister of Armenia Edward Nalbandian told at the National Assembly. Armenia has always supported peaceful settlement of the conflict and negotiations. Armenia has never refused to participate in different-level meetings. If there were wrecked meetings, Azerbaijan is responsible for that. The last case happened in Washington, where Azerbaijanis refused to meet even with the Co-chairs, Armenpress reports Nalbandian mentioning.

He mentioned that the prospects for further negotiations depend on to what extent it will be possible to prevent Azerbaijan from resuming large-scale military operations against the people of Artsakh. He stated that the efforts of the international community, the Co-chair countries and Armenia are aimed at excluding the reoccurrence of the incidents of early April. Sergey Lavrov told the same during his visit to Yerevan. The talks that he had brought some documents and some negotiations were held were mere rumors. If there are no proper conditions, there can be no talks of negotiations, the Minister clarified.

Edward Nalbandian also mentioned that Azerbaijan made an attempt to cast doubt on the trilateral ceasefire agreement signed in 1994. Such attempts were made in diplomatic arenas in Vienna and New York. And the Co-chairs adequately responded. They told what we say, that the trilateral agreements on the ceasefire and its reinforcement, signed in 1994 and 1995 are valid and must be unconditionally respected. This is the opinion of the international community and the Co-chairs. Azerbaijan once again demonstrated that it is in confrontation with the international community. These were their diplomatic miscalculations, the Minister said.

He added that Azerbaijanis pretend that they are not aware how it happened that they waged large-scale military operations against Artsakh on April 2, they are not aware of how many casualties they suffered during this period, they are not aware what is the meaning of the proposal on the creation of investigative mechanisms and they are not aware of the 5 statements of the Co-chairs on Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement.

I believe that we can remind for those uninformed that not having information does not exempt them from responsibility. I think it is time for the international community to sober up Azerbaijan and bring back to the negotiation table, where it will be possible to go on with the talks. While our current meetings are aimed at the elimination of the consequences caused by the operations unleashed by Azerbaijan, Nalbandian concluded.
YEREVAN, APRIL 27, ARMENPRESS. The April war brought forward numerous questions and concerns, as well as revealed a number of cosmopolite politicians, Prime Minister of Armenia Hovik Abrahamyan told at the National Assembly. I believe we have numerous issues to discuss, criticize and be concerned of. I refer not only to the Government, but the National Assembly, the civil society, and political forces. As refers to the plans of the Government, the Executive looks forward, to the future, not forgetting the past and taking lessons from drawbacks. We try not to lag behind; we must be very vigilant, cautious and responsible in this fast changing world. Any step and announcement of a Cabinet member assumes concrete responsibilities and obligations. For that reason in the near future we will issue a large and comprehensive statement, and all the changes and reforms we had planned to implement in 2016, will be revised, considering the 4-day war of April, Armenpress reports the PM mentioning.

Abrahamyan added that when a relevant legislative package is ready, they will discuss it with the National Assembly. PM Abrahamyan called on politicians not to make advantage of the situation engaging in populism. According to the PM, such behavior cannot be productive and create positive expectations for the country. During these days we understood that we are consolidated, that the Diaspora, Armenia and Artsakh are unified when facing such problems. And we must transform our consolidation into practical activities. I call on all political forces, be opposition or governmental, to gather and discuss together, Hovik Abrahamyan said, mentioning that the Government is ready to give explanations, express opinion and introduce its future plans to colleges.
STEPANAKERT, APRIL 27, ARMENPRESS. The Azerbaijani side breached the relative tranquility on April 27 on the contact line of Karabakh-Azerbaijan forces at 17:40. The Azerbaijani armed forces started to shell the military positions of the Defense Army in Martakert direction using 82 mm mortars (14 projectiles). As Armenpress was informed from the press service of NKR Defense Ministry, movement of adversarys military equipment was noted in the northern direction of the contact line.

Defense Army frontline units attentively watch the developments on the frontline and quell the adversary by punitive measures.
YEREVAN, APRIL 27, ARMENPRESS. In a meeting with Ambassadors of EU member states to Armenia on April 27, Foreign Minister Nalbandian emphasized the inadmissibility of breaching the untimely ceasefire agreement of 1994 and the agreement of its reinforcement of 1995.

As Armenpress was informed from the press service of MFA Armenia, Minister Nalbandian introduced the situation after the large-scale military aggression of Azerbaijan against Artsakh and the efforts of Armenia and the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chair countries for the elimination of its consequences.

The Foreign Minister of Armenia answered the numerous questions of the EU Ambassadors during the meeting.
YEREVAN, APRIL 27, ARMENPRESS. Foreign Minister of Armenia Edward Nalbandian answered the questions of MPs at the National Assembly during a Q&A session with the Government. The questions mostly referred to the situation after the large-scale military onslaught by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh in early April. Armenpress presents important parts of the session.

Samvel Farmanyan inquired about prospects for peace talks and if it is possible to force Azerbaijan not to fire.

Edward Nalbandian answered that those prospects are directly linked with the elimination of the consequences of Azerbaijani aggression. The last announcements and interviews of the President of the Republic touch upon that issue, he said. Nalbandian mentioned that the prospects for further negotiations depend on to what extent it will be possible to prevent Azerbaijan from resuming large-scale military operations against the people of Artsakh. He stated that the efforts of the international community, the Co-chair countries and Armenia are aimed at excluding the reoccurrence of the incidents of early April. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the same during his visit to Yerevan. There were talks that he had brought some documents and some negotiations were held were mere rumors. If there are no proper conditions, there can be no talks of negotiations, the Minister clarified.

Armenia has always supported peaceful settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict through negotiations, and its not Armenia that declined the meetings. If there were wrecked meetings at any level, Azerbaijan is responsible for that. The last case happened in Washington, where Azerbaijanis refused to meet even with the Co-chairs, Nalbandian said. The Minister also mentioned that Azerbaijan made an attempt to cast doubt on the trilateral ceasefire agreement signed in 1994. Such attempts were made in diplomatic arenas in Vienna and New York. And the Co-chairs adequately responded. They told what we say, that the trilateral agreements on the ceasefire and its reinforcement, signed in 1994 and 1995 are valid and must be unconditionally respected. This is our opinion, as well as the opinion of the international community, the Co-chairs. Azerbaijan once again demonstrated that it is in confrontation with the international community. These were their diplomatic miscalculations, the Minister said.

Edward Nalbandian added that Azerbaijanis pretend that they are not aware how it happened that they waged large-scale military operations against Artsakh on April 2, they are not aware of how many casualties they suffered during this period, they are not aware what is the meaning of the proposal on the creation of investigative mechanisms and they are not aware of the 5 statements of the Co-chairs on Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement.

I believe that we can remind for those uninformed that not having information does not exempt them from responsibility. I think it is time for the international community to sober up Azerbaijan and bring back to the negotiation table, where it will be possible to go on with the talks. While our current meetings are aimed at the elimination of the consequences caused by the operations unleashed by Azerbaijan, Nalbandian concluded.

The next MP to ask Nalbandian a question was Khachatur Kokobelyan. His question referred to the process of the elaboration of a treaty of military partnership between Armenia and NKR assigned by President Sargsyan during the first Security Council meeting. Kokobelyan also asked a question referring Russian arm sales to Azerbaijan and the delay by Russia to supply Armenia with the weapons it has bought by a credit agreement.

Foreign Minister Nalbandian answered that the process of the elaboration of the document assigned by the President of the Republic is underway. That document is being prepared together with Nagorno Karabakh, and I believe you realize very well that it is not a simple process and there is a need for much expert and other works, the Minister said, adding that it will be implemented after those works are done and opinions from relevant agencies are considered.

As refers to Rogozins announcement in Baku and the announcement of Belarus, over which the Ambassador of that country was summoned to the MFA Armenia, Edward Nalbandian noted that there are some talks that should not be revealed for their effectiveness.

As refers to the war unleashed by Azerbaijan, it is conditioned by the failure of negotiations of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani tried to create favorable conditions for negotiations, but they totally failed, the Minister said, clarifying that the main existing documents for the conflict settlement are the 5 statements issued by the heads of the Co-chair states, which is the only internationally authorized mandate. But Azerbaijanis do not want to make any reference to those documents and pretends that they are unaware of what they are about. The display the working documents put on the table in a distorted manner. According to them, the Co-chairs have not proposed any working document since 2009. In that case a question rises. What was the topic of discussion on the presidential level, including Azerbaijans president, during the several summits? What were the foreign ministers discussing during the dozens of meetings? What were the Co-chairs discussing during their numerous regional visits to Armenia, Artsakh and Azerbaijan?

They failed the negotiations and wanted to derive some achievements in the battlefield. But they again failed. And of course, they will have to return to the negotiation table, because there is no other alternative. There has been no conflict or war in the human history, that did not end around negotiation table, Nalbandian said.

To the remark of MP Kokobelyan that the military partnership agreement with NKR should be elaborated as soon as possible, and noted that it is already a bit delayed, FM Nalbandian answered, You may be right, but when such actions are taken, especially considering our interest in finding a solution through negotiations, and when we continue that process, we must also take into account many other factors and circumstances.
Reuters

While tight lipped, Japanese policy makers clearly intervened again to support the yen on Monday, slamming the dollar down to as low as 145.28 from an early peak of 149.70. Yet all the BOJ seems to have managed is to give yen bears better levels, and much-needed liquidity, to sell into and the dollar quickly rallied back to around 149.00. While the BOJ is only acting under the directions of the MoF, selling dollars for yen sits at odds with its dogged commitment to uber-easy monetary policy and will add to pressure for a change of course at its policy meeting on Friday.
By Liana B. Baker and Rishika Sadam (Reuters) - Comcast Corp, the owner of NBCUniversal, said on Thursday it would buy Hollywood studio DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc for $3.8 billion to boost its family-friendly offerings and help it take on media conglomerate Walt Disney. The acquisition will add major children's franchises to Universal's film library such as "Shrek," "How to Train Your Dragon" and "Kung Fu Panda," which it could tap for its growing theme parks and consumer products businesses. Comcast's Universal Pictures found success with blockbuster family films like "Despicable Me" and "Minions," but this deal will ramp up its portfolio. DreamWorks' burgeoning TV business will also be a boon to Universal, Wall Street analysts said. DreamWorks provides original programming to streaming service Netflix and other digital platforms that are eager for content as TV viewership rapidly moves online. "Its a sensible strategy," MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said. "They are buying characters." In addition to brands it created, like "Shrek," DreamWorks owns rights to iconic characters such as Lassie and Casper the Friendly Ghost that it acquired in its 2012 purchase of Classic Media. "There's a lot of opportunity for them to create interesting content out of those brands and monetize them," Moffett said. Comcast, the largest cable distributor in the United States, has steadily boosted its ownership of content and invested in expanding its theme parks business, positioning itself as a diversified conglomerate to rival Disney. The $41-per-share cash offer represents a premium of about 27 percent to DreamWorks' Wednesday close. DreamWorks shares, which have gained nearly 50 percent in the last six months, soared 24 percent to $39.95 on Thursday. Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg will become chairman of DreamWorks New Media, which will include the company's ownership interests in technology company NOVA and Awesomeness TV, a teen-focused studio that cultivates stars of Alphabet Inc's YouTube and other digital platforms. Katzenberg will also serve as a consultant to NBCUniversal. DreamWorks Animation was spun off from DreamWorks Studios in 2004. The studio was founded in 1994 by Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. The animation studio struggled in recent years as the market for children's movies became crowded. In 2015, it cut one-fifth of its workforce and reduced its movie slate from three films a year to two. This year, it had a hit with "Kung Fu Panda 3." DreamWorks Animation had come close to being sold before. In 2014, the company held talks about a possible sale to Japanese communications and media company Softbank Corp, a source with knowledge of the matter told Reuters at the time. Later that year, toymaker Hasbro Inc held preliminary talks to buy DreamWorks Animation, according to another source at the time. The talks formally ended a few days later after Hasbro's board voted to walk away. Stifel analyst Benjamin Mogil said he did not think another bidder would come in and top Comcast's offer "given the valuation and the operational role for DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg in this deal." DreamWorks Animation was advised by boutique investment bank Centerview Partners Holdings LLC, which Reuters first reported on Wednesday, and legal adviser Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. Comcast's legal adviser was Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and the company did not list a financial adviser. (Additional reporting by Malathi Nayak in New York and Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles, Supantha Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Meredith Mazzilli)
Artists of the Ballet in Giselle, onstage June 15 - 19, 2016 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic.Click here for high-resolution version

VANCOUVER, BC--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - MediaValet Inc. (TSX VENTURE: MVP), a leading provider of cloud-based digital asset management software (DAMS) is delighted to announce that The National Ballet of Canada (the "National Ballet") has selected MediaValet to archive performance and choreography footage dating back over 65 years and make the footage available on-demand as a teaching and reference tool for the company's artistic, production and administrative staff and dancers.

Having performed both classical and contemporary repertoires for over 10 million people since 1951, The National Ballet is the country's premier dance company. Every year, the National Ballet offers seasonal performances in Toronto, and on tour it performs in some of the most well-known venues in New York, Washington, D.C., and London, England. In addition to live performances, the company dedicates much of its time to outreach and education in communities that otherwise would not have the opportunity to learn and experience ballet as an art form.

Known for its innovation in dance, The National Ballet is embracing technology, such as the cloud and digital asset management software, in newfound ways. In addition to using MediaValet as a central library for all of its marketing assets and historical footage, the National Ballet will use MediaValet to enable new teaching methods. While instructing, the Company's Artistic Staff will have direct and on-demand access (using Microsoft Surface Pros and MediaValet) to 65 years of performance and choreography footage. This approach is meant to help make it easier for today's dancers to learn and improve dance techniques utilizing the expertise and experience of their Artistic Staff and that of great ballet dancers before them.

"With the advent of the cloud and new innovative solutions like MediaValet, we saw a unique opportunity to help our dancers and staff leverage all that has been achieved before them," commented Christopher Sonneman, Director of Technology at The National Ballet. "MediaValet's passion and dedication to their craft is a perfect match for our organization. We feel we've found a great technology partner that we can continue to innovate with for years to come."

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The National Ballet of Canada will also be utilizing MediaValet's integration with Microsoft Active Directory, to enable single-sign-on for all of their dancers and staff, as well as Microsoft's newly announced Canadian data centres located in Toronto and Quebec City.

"The National Ballet of Canada is a national treasure that has been a source of inspiration and pride for many on our team, and their families, for generations," commented David MacLaren, founder and CEO at MediaValet. "We're honored that the National Ballet chose MediaValet and we look forward to working and innovating with them for years to come."

About The National Ballet of Canada

One of the top international ballet companies, The National Ballet of Canada was founded in 1951 by Celia Franca. A company of 70 dancers with its own orchestra, the National Ballet has been led by Artistic Director Karen Kain, one of the greatest ballerinas of her generation, since 2005. Renowned for its diverse repertoire, the company performs traditional full-length classics, embraces contemporary work and encourages the creation of new ballets as well as the development of Canadian Choreographers. The company's repertoire includes work by Sir Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, John Cranko, Rudolf Nureyev, Glen Tetley, John Neumeier, William Forsythe, James Kudelka, Jiri Kylian, Wayne McMcGregor, Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon, Crystal Pite and Aszure Barton. The National Ballet has toured in Canada, the US and internationally with recent appearances at Sadler's Wells in London, England, The Music Center in Los Angeles and Lincoln Center's David H. Koch Theater in New York City.

Photo Credit: Artists of the Ballet in Giselle, onstage June 15 - 19, 2016 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic. National.ballet.ca

About MediaValet Inc.

MediaValet stands at the forefront of the cloud-based digital asset management industry. Built exclusively on Microsoft Azure and available on 26 highly secure and hyper scalable Microsoft data centers around the world, MediaValet is uniquely equipped to meet the digital asset management needs of any organization, no matter its size, its industry or its location. Cutting-edge technology, exceptional product design, and unlimited friendly customer service are at the core of MediaValet's DNA -- ensuring exceptional customer and user experiences are delivered at all times.

Follow MediaValet: Blog, Twitter and LinkedIn

Surf: www.mediavalet.com

"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."

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By Sweta Singh (Reuters) - Priceline Group Inc said on Thursday that Chief Executive Darren Huston has resigned, effective immediately, after an investigation found that his personal relationship with an employee violated the company's code of conduct. The investigation into Huston's relationship with the employee, who was not under his direct supervision, determined that he had engaged in activities inconsistent with the board's expectations for executive conduct, Priceline said. The travel website operator said the 50-year-old Huston, who has been the company's CEO since January 2014, had acknowledged his misconduct and expressed regret. Priceline named chairman and former CEO, Jeffery Boyd, as interim CEO. "Despite this surprising news, we remain constructive on Priceline shares," RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney wrote in a note to clients. "Having former CEO Jeff Boyd return as interim CEO will provide continuity, experience, and leadership," he added. Priceline's shares were down 1.2 percent at $1,337.58 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq, amid a slight dip in the broader market. The investigation and Huston's resignation was not related in any way to the company's operational performance or financial condition, Leslie Cafferty, a company spokeswoman, told Reuters in an email. Priceline said Huston will also step down as CEO of Booking.com, a unit of Priceline, and be replaced by Chief Operating Officer Gillian Tans. He will not receive any severance payments and forfeit a portion of his equity-based awards, Priceline said in a regulatory filing. His annual compensation was close to $22 million for 2014, according to a company filing. Huston joined the company in September 2011 and one of his first major moves after becoming CEO was to acquire restaurant reservation website operator OpenTable Inc for $2.6 billion to broaden Priceline's services outside the increasingly competitive online travel industry. Priceline, Expedia Inc and other travel companies have been facing increased pressure in their hotel bookings business from the rise of apartment-sharing startups such as Airbnb. One of Huston's last deals was to sign an agreement with TripAdvisor Inc in October last year, allowing Booking.com customers to directly book hotel rooms on the travel review website operator. The company's revenue has increased nearly 36 percent since Huston became CEO in January 2014. Since then, Priceline's shares have risen about 16.5 percent through Wednesday's close, outperforming a 13.4 percent increase in the benchmark S&P 500 index. Huston's resignation comes a week before the company is scheduled to report second-quarter results on May 4. (Reporting by Sweta Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva and Savio D'Souza)
By Chuck Mikolajczak NEW YORK (Reuters) - The technology sector has taken it on the chin in recent days, after lukewarm-to-disappointing results from a range of bellwethers such as Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft, but stocks of smaller tech companies have managed to buck the downtrend. The S&P technology index has tumbled nearly 4 percent during the past five days, dragged lower by sharp declines among some of the biggest tech names. Apple and Microsoft are off nearly 9 percent while both classes of Alphabet shares have tumbled more than 7 percent. There has been no such weakness among smaller stocks. The S&P Midcap tech sector has climbed 0.8 percent while smallcap tech has advanced 1 percent. "The smaller names arent in everybodys portfolio, the bigger names are, thats why I would assume retail and institutional investors are selling their tech," said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst, Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh. "Maybe the big cap is really the consumer-focused tech and media names and they deserve the selloff because they are not performing." While many of the smaller names are not expected to report until later in the earnings season, many of those that have reported already have posted positive results. Among midcaps, Advanced Micro Devices has surged more than 38 percent after besting forecasts last week. Smallcap Anixter International is up 10.7 percent as the best performer in that index for the past five sessions after posting results that topped expectations. "Expectations have been relatively low and as we go through earnings season, you are definitely seeing those areas  the smaller companies - with the larger earnings beats," said Eric Marshall, director of research at Hodges Capital Management, Dallas. Some smaller tech names have also benefited since the start of the year from merger activity that, while slowed, has not disappeared completely. Checkpoint Systems is up more than 60 percent for the year after it agreed to be acquired by CCL Industries Inc for about $422 million. Coherent Inc is up 50 percent on the year after it reached a deal to buy Rofin-Sinar Technologies for about $942 million. "It dried up a little bit but every company out there that is large enough to do an acquisition is always doing acquisitions, they may not be completing them but they are talking to people," said Forrest. (Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by David Gregorio)
By Malathi Nayak NEW YORK (Reuters) - A strike by nearly 40,000 Verizon Communications Inc workers is in its third week with unions and the company still far apart on contract talks, even as employee healthcare benefits are set to expire on Saturday. Workers, from network technicians to customer service representatives, in Verizon's Fios Internet, telephone and TV services walked off the job on April 13 in one of the largest U.S. strikes in recent years after contract talks hit an impasse. A resolution on various issues, including temporary job relocations, pensions and moving call center jobs offshore, has yet to be reached, representatives of Verizon and the Communications Workers of America union said on Wednesday. Verizon, which said last week that a long-drawn labor dispute would pressure its earnings, remains committed to reaching a fair deal, spokesman Rich Young said in a phone interview. A meeting between Verizon and union representatives is scheduled for Thursday afternoon, he said. HEALTHCARE OPTIONS Verizon has notified striking workers that under federal law their health care coverage was set to expire on April 30, Young said. Verizon has said it spent over $3.2 billion on healthcare for employees last year. The company offers insurance coverage to those employees who are actively working, Young said. Striking employees have the option of seeking coverage under the U.S government's Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) health insurance plan to get temporary healthcare coverage. "They think that this is going to be used as a wedge to break this strike. I assure you it will not," said Ed Mooney, vice president of CWA District 2-13, said in a phone interview. The CWA also has funds, collected through contributions from affiliated union members and other donors, to help cover healthcare costs of members when needed, Mooney said. "It's horrible. Most of us are parents, I have a daughter and the prospect of losing our children's healthcare is actually quite disturbing," Fitz Boyce, 45, a field technician at Verizon for over two decades, said in an interview at the picket line in front of the company's Times Square store in New York. The strike affects Fios Internet, telephone and TV services across several U.S. East Coast states, including New York and Virginia. Verizon has trained thousands of non-union employees over the past year to ensure no service disruption. The company has fielded over 60,000 requests since the strike began, Young said. The unions have said that replacement workers do not have the necessary expertise, especially in highly technical jobs such as equipment installations. (Reporting by Malathi Nayak,; additional reporting by Mir Ubaid in New York; Editing by Richard Chang)
MARKHAM, ON--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - Mother's Day is a special day when everyone looks forward to celebrating their mothers. With new Canadian immigrants, Mother's Day can be especially poignant, since in most cases distance separates parents and grandparents who stay behind in their home countries.

So, this Mother's Day, WelcomePack Canada is running a special campaign to connect new immigrants with their moms in Canada and in their home countries, with a 'Win-a-Gift-for-Mom' contest. Participants choose a gift for their mom from the company's website, and WelcomePack Canada will deliver the winners' chosen gift to their mother, anywhere in the world on May 8, with a special message from the sender.

"As a Company that leads many Canadian brands in welcoming new immigrants to Canada, WelcomePack Canada sees itself as an integral part of the newcomers' settling in journey. This Mother's Day initiative is one of the many ways we demonstrate to newcomers the caring Canadian spirit," says Andrew Srinarayan, Vice President of WelcomePack Canada.

The campaign launches today with an evocative video acknowledging a mother's love, and ends with the opportunity for all contest participants to share a heartfelt e-card with their moms on Mother's Day.

Visit welcomepackcanada.com/mothersgift to watch the video and participate in the contest.

About WelcomePack Canada

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BEIRUT (Reuters) - Attacks by government forces and rebels killed at least 30 people, including eight children, in the last 24 hours in Aleppo, a city seeing some of the worst of a renewed escalation in the Syrian war, a monitoring group said. Intensified fighting has all but destroyed a partial ceasefire that started at the end of February, with U.N.-led peace talks in disarray. In Aleppo, divided between areas controlled by the government and by rebels, 19 people were killed by rebel shelling and 11 were killed by government air strikes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. That adds to another 60 people killed over the weekend in Aleppo, Syria's largest city before the war, according to the Observatory. Air strikes were also reported in rebel-held areas near Damascus and in Hama province on Tuesday. In a separate incident west of Aleppo, five Civil Defence workers - first responders in opposition-held territory where medical infrastructure has all but broken down - were killed by air strikes and a rocket attack on their centre. The Observatory and Civil Defence colleagues said the attack appeared to have deliberately targeted the rescue workers in the town of Atareb, some 25 km (15 miles) west of Aleppo. "The targeting was very precise," Radi Saad, a Civil Defence worker, told Reuters. "They were in the centre and ready to respond. When they heard warplanes in the area they did not think they would be the target." Two people were seriously wounded and ambulances and cars belonging to doctors were destroyed, another Civil Defence member, Ahmad Sheikho, said. It was unclear whether Syrian or Russian warplanes had launched the raids. There was no immediate comment from the Syrian government. Each side accuses the other of targeting civilian areas in the five-year-old war that has killed more than 250,000 people. A Syrian military source said the army would "respond firmly" against rebels attacking government-held parts of Aleppo. State news agency SANA said what it called terrorist groups, including the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, had shelled those neighborhoods. In the north of Aleppo, insurgents resumed bombardment of a Kurdish-controlled neighborhood, Sheikh Maqsoud, according to the Kurdish YPG militia. "Civilian areas were shelled at random," the YPG said. The YPG and its allies have been battling rebels, including groups backed via Turkey by states opposed to President Bashar al-Assad, for several months near Aleppo and close to the Turkish border. Rebels accuse the YPG of collaborating with the government in trying to stop people using the only road into opposition-held Aleppo, something the YPG denies. Turkey sees the YPG as a terrorist group and is concerned at moves by Kurdish forces to expand their control along the Syrian-Turkish border, where they already hold an uninterrupted 400 km (250 mile) stretch. (Reporting by John Davison; additional reporting by Tom Perry and Marwan Makdesi in Damascus; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza has condemned the killing of a senior army officer who was shot along with his wife and bodyguard in an attack that also wounded their child in an expanding wave of violence in the central African nation. Brigadier General Athanase Kararuza, who was a military adviser in the office of the vice president, was dropping his child off at a school in the capital Bujumbura on Monday when his car was attacked by rocket and gun fire, army spokesman Gaspard Baratuza told reporters. Kararuza had previously worked as a deputy commander of an international peace force in the Central African Republic (CAR). "He energetically fought against the coup plotters last year and exceptionally contributed in strengthening peace and security during and after elections," Nkurunziza said in a statement late on Monday. "We humbly pray that, with the help of God, perpetrators of the shameful acts are arrested and quickly punished according to the law." Tit-for-tat attacks between Nkurunziza's security forces and his opponents have escalated since April 2015 when he announced a disputed bid for a third term as president. He won re-election in July. The United Nations says more than 400 people have been killed and more than 250,000 have fled the country. Burundi and neighbouring Rwanda, which both have an ethnic Hutu majority and Tutsi minority, have been torn apart by ethnic conflict in the past. Experts fear the recent violence during the political crisis in Burundi may reopen old ethnic wounds and risk causing civil war. TALKS PLANNED As a step to defuse the crisis, former Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa - heading a mediating team under the East African Community trade bloc to which Burundi belongs - said on Sunday he would convene talks among all the parties in the dispute between May 2-6 in the Tanzanian city of Arusha. Willy Nyamitwe, a spokesman in the president's office, said they were yet to receive a formal invitation to the talks. "The government of Burundi has to be consulted, we have to agree upon persons to invite, the date and the venue," he said. Charles Nditije, a member of opposition coalition CNARED, said they would attend the talks when they get an invitation. "We are ready to go to talks without preconditions and to discuss every topic. It is not for the government to determine who goes to the negotiating table while it is a party to the conflict," he said. Previous talks held last year faltered when the government refused to meet with people it said were supporting violence. On Monday the international war crimes court said it would investigate the rising violence in Burundi. Three armed groups, including one led by officers that attempted a coup in May 2015, have launched armed rebellions against Nkurunziza's government. (Writing by Elias Biryabarema and George Obulutsa, editing by Gareth Jones)
Landmine clearance teams in Cambodia say they are facing a major new challenge, due to a mass movement of people to areas contaminated with hidden explosives laid decades ago.

Huge road construction projects along the border with Thailand are allowing thousands of Cambodians to seek homes and farmland in newly accessible areas.

But while the road projects are breathing new life into a part of the country previously cut-off from development, the course of the road runs next to the notorious K5 mine belt.

It means the demining efforts are now more urgent than ever.

Around two million mines were laid in the area between the late 70s and early 90s by Vietnamese and then Cambodian forces, aiming to push the Khmer Rouge out of the country.

Thousands of Cambodians have been killed or maimed in the years that have followed.

Since 1991, Scottish charity the HALO Trust has been working on the demining effort, backed by government funding from the UK and US, among other donors.

During those 25 years of operations, they have cleared well over 1,000 square km of mined terrain, and yet that still only amounts to 53% of the work that needs to be done.

Even with 1,000 mainly Cambodian staff employed as full-time deminers, HALO estimates it will need to remain in the country until at least 2025.

At the Chub Koki village, in Oddar Meanchey province, Sky News witnessed families living in the midst of a minefield that was still being cleared.

In some cases new homes had been built just metres away from sites where anti-personnel mines had been discovered.

Using a variety of sensors, including ground-penetrating radar, they have unearthed more than 100 anti-personnel mines at the project at Chub Koki in just the last four months.

Susanna Smale, HALO's location manager in the province, told Sky News people are already waiting to move onto land the moment it is cleared.

"In the area which we are clearing they have plans to build houses for another 45 families, and they've already started to cultivate some of the land where mines have been found," she said.

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In the rocky border terrain in neighbouring Banteay Meanchey province, there is a similar situation.

Major clearance is underway along the route of the new roads that are expected to draw thousands more to the area.

New tin-roofed homes are already emerging, as diggers and rollers prepare for tarmac to be laid.

Demining teams are working as quickly as possible to stay ahead of the population increase, but already they are seeing new arrivals head into uncleared areas of the K5 mine belt to cut wood for construction and to collect resin to sell.

"Because they are poor families, they've no option but to go into the uncleared areas. It's very dangerous", said Nhim Rina, HALO's location manager in Banteay Meanchey.

The village of Damnakakor, further down the road, provides an indication of just how dangerous those actions may be.

HALO teams have uncovered and destroyed more than 7,000 anti-personnel mines near the village, as well as more than 200 pieces of unexploded ordinance and 21 anti-tank mines.

Recognition of the threat posed by anti-tank mines is now increasing deeper inside the country.

As the use of agricultural machinery grows, anti-tank mines laid by the Khmer Rouge are being triggered by tractors and ploughs.

There have been 135 accidents involving anti-tank mines in the last five years, in many cases identifying mine fields that had not previously been known about.
By Jim Finkle (Reuters) - SWIFT, the global financial network that banks use to transfer billions of dollars every day, warned its customers on Monday that it was aware of "a number of recent cyber incidents" where attackers had sent fraudulent messages over its system. The disclosure came as law enforcement authorities in Bangladesh and elsewhere investigated the February cyber theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. SWIFT has acknowledged that the scheme involved altering SWIFT software on Bangladesh Bank's computers to hide evidence of fraudulent transfers. Monday's statement from SWIFT marked the first acknowledgement that the Bangladesh Bank attack was not an isolated incident but one of several recent criminal schemes that aimed to take advantage of the global messaging platform used by some 11,000 financial institutions. "SWIFT is aware of a number of recent cyber incidents in which malicious insiders or external attackers have managed to submit SWIFT messages from financial institutions' back-offices, PCs or workstations connected to their local interface to the SWIFT network," the group warned customers on Monday in a notice seen by Reuters. The warning, which SWIFT issued in a confidential alert sent over its network, did not name any victims or disclose the value of any losses from the previously undisclosed attacks. SWIFT confirmed to Reuters the authenticity of the notice. SWIFT, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a cooperative owned by 3,000 financial institutions. Also on Monday, SWIFT released a security update to the software that banks use to access its network to thwart malware that security researchers with British defense contractor BAE Systems said was probably used by hackers in the Bangladesh Bank heist.[L2N17S0RG] BAE's evidence suggested that hackers manipulated SWIFT's Alliance Access server software, which banks use to interface with SWIFT's messaging platform, to cover their tracks. BAE said it could not explain how the fraudulent orders were created and pushed through the system. But SWIFT provided some evidence about how that happened in its note to customers, saying that in most cases the modus operandi was similar. It said the attackers obtained valid credentials for operators authorized to create and approve SWIFT messages, then submitted fraudulent messages by impersonating those people. FireEye, the internet security company whose Mandiant unit was hired by Bangladesh Bank to help investigate the heist, said the same group behind that hack had probably attacked other financial targets. "FireEye has observed activity in other financial services organizations that is likely by the same threat actor behind the cyber attack on the Bank of Bangladesh," Vivek Chudgar, Mandiant's senior director for the Asia Pacific said in a statement emailed to Reuters. FireEye declined to go into detail. Rakesh Asthana, the World Informatix Cyber Security CEO, who is overseeing Bangladesh Bank's probe into the hack, declined to discuss the other attacks that SWIFT referred to. He did, though, urge banks to conduct independent security assessments to make sure their networks are secure and prevent future attacks. SWIFT builds on security practices established by the customer itself and therefore it is imperative that in the wake of this attack, customers using SWIFT Alliance Access must strengthen their cyber security posture, Asthana said FOLLOWING THE MONEY Cyber security experts said more attacks could surface as SWIFT's banking clients look to see if their SWIFT access has been compromised. Shane Shook, a banking security consultant who investigates large financial crime, said hackers were turning to SWIFT and other private financial messaging platforms because such attacks can generate more revenue than going after consumers or small businesses. "These hacks specifically target financial institutions because smaller efforts result in much larger thefts," he said. "It's much more efficient than stealing from consumers." Justin Harvey, chief security officer with Fidelis Cybersecurity, said hackers followed the money and would be drawn into such schemes in hopes of emulating a big heist like the one on Bangladesh Bank. "After the Bangladesh Bank heist became public, every other attacker out there is looking to see if they can do the same," he said. SWIFT spokeswoman Natasha Deteran told Reuters that the commonality in these cases was that internal or external attackers compromised the banks own environments to obtain valid operator credentials. "Customers should do their utmost to protect against this," she said in an email to Reuters. SWIFT told customers that the security update must be installed by May 12. "We have made the Alliance interface software update mandatory as it is designed to help banks identify situations in which attackers have attempted to hide their traces - whether these actions have been executed manually or through malware," she said. (Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston; Additional reporting by Serajul Quadir in Dhaka; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Martin Howell and Peter Cooney)
Ford Motor Company issued five recalls today, with most affected vehicles being Ford-model trucks and SUVs. Combined, the recalls affect roughly 285,000 vehicles in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

If you believe that you own one of the vehicles listed below, we encourage you to call Ford Customer Service at 800-392-3673 or Lincoln Customer Service at 800-521-4140 for additional details. Recall notices will be sent to owners of affected vehicles by mail.

RECALL #1: 2011-2012 Ford F-150, 2012 Ford Expedition, Ford Mustang, and Lincoln Navigator

UNITS AFFECTED: 201,900, including 184,000 in the U.S. and 17,900 in Canada

This recall stems from a transmission problem--specifically, an issue with the output speed sensor on the transmission's lead frame. The underlying problem appears rooted in the software associated with the powertrain control module, which could cause vehicles to downshift suddenly. According to Ford:

"Under certain conditions, the transmission controls could force a temporary downshift into first gear. Depending on the speed of the vehicle at the time of the downshift, the driver could experience an abrupt speed reduction that could cause the rear tires to slide or lock up. This condition could result in loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash."

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Three accidents have been potentially linked to the problem, but no injuries.

Ford says that dealers will inspect the powertrain control module and upgrade the software if there are no diagnostic trouble codes found. The upgrade will prevent the vehicles from downshifting into first gear if a fault with the output speed sensor takes place. Ford also says that it will replace the lead frame on vehicles that have logged fewer than 150,000 miles.

The recall is limited to vehicles equipped with 6R80 transmissions that were manufactured on the following dates:

2011-2012 Ford F-150 vehicles built at Dearborn Assembly Plant and Kansas City Assembly Plant between August 19, 2011 and March 9, 2012

2012 Ford Expedition vehicles built at Kentucky Truck Plant between August 19, 2011 and December 19, 2011

2012 Ford Mustang vehicles built at Flat Rock Assembly Plant between August 19, 2011 and February 21, 2012

2012 Lincoln Navigator vehicles built at Kentucky Truck Plant between August 19, 2011 and December 17, 2011

RECALL #2: 2014-2015 Ford Explorer and Ford Police Interceptor Utility

UNITS AFFECTED: 81,036, including 75,364 in the U.S., 4,615 in Canada, and 1,057 in Mexico

This recall is meant to address a problem with the SUVs' suspension systems. Ford says poor weld quality could cause the left and right rear suspension toe links to crack. Depending on the severity of the fracture, owners might hear noise coming from the rear of the vehicle, have difficulty steering, or experience loss of steering control.

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Ford has received a report of one accident and one injury related to the problem.

The recall affects vehicles built on the following dates:

2014-2015 Ford Explorer vehicles built at Chicago Assembly Plant between January 17, 2014 and May 31, 2014

2014-2015 Ford Police Interceptor Utility vehicles built at Chicago Assembly Plant between January 21, 2014 and May 13, 2014

The repair will involve dealers replacing the left and right rear suspension toe links and aligning the rear suspension.

RECALL #3: 2007-2012 Ford Flex, Ford Taurus, Lincoln MKS, and Mercury Sable

UNITS AFFECTED: 199, all registered in the U.S.

This small recall is meant to repair a problem with the cars' driver-side airbag. According to Ford, a crucial element of that device may be missing, and as a result, the airbags might not deploy as intended during collisions. Thankfully, Ford knows of no accidents or injuries related to the problem.

The recall affects vehicles built at Chicago Assembly Plant and Oakville Assembly between December 13, 2007 and October 6, 2011. Dealers will replace the driver-side airbag module at no cost to owners.

RECALL #4: 2016 Ford Fusion

UNITS AFFECTED: 39, all registered in the U.S.

The vehicles affected by this recall may suffer from a problem with the driver seat track assembly. According to Ford, the bracket that mounts the seat to the track rail might not have been properly welded, which could increase the risk of injury to drivers. However, Ford says that it's received no reports of associated accidents or injuries.

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The recall is limited to vehicles manufactured at Hermosillo Assembly Plant between March 10, 2016 and March 16, 2016. Dealers will replace the Fusion's driver seat track assembly at no charge.

RECALL #5: 2016 Ford F-Series Super Duty

UNITS AFFECTED: 2,596, including 2,288 in the U.S., 271 in Canada, and 37 in Mexico

Ford says that the sidewalls of tires on some of these vehicles might have been damaged during the assembly process. If the damage was severe enough, the tires could rupture while the vehicle is in motion, increasing the risk of a crash. However, Ford has no reports of accidents or injuries related to the problem.

The recall affects vehicles manufactured at Kentucky Truck Plant between April 5, 2016 and April 10, 2016. Ford says that dealers will inspect the tires on those vehicles for inboard sidewall damage and replace tires, as necessary.
In the heartland of Oklahoma sits a pretty town dotted with American flags and a quaint main street of century-old brick buildings. But in Guthrie, the devastating impact of oil-industry-induced earthquakes is being felt hard.

Look closely and you see cracks in the historic buildings, where the old masonry is giving way to a shifting ground. Guthrie has seen a wave of earthquakes since hydraulic fracturing  or fracking  picked up in the area.

There's no denial from the Oklahoma government or seismologists from 20 countries who met in Reno, Nev., last week that practices related to fracking are behind the swarms of earthquakes that have increased in volume and intensity since 2011.

"There's definitely a relationship between deep well disposal and the earthquake activity," the state's oil and gas regulator, Tim Baker, said in an interview with CBC News, referring to the practice of injecting fracking waste water deep into the ground.

At the Reno meeting, seismologists from Canada also warned that fracking in Alberta and British Columbia could bring similar consequences.

"In Western Canada, most of the seismicity we're experiencing is being actually directly related to hydraulic fracturing," says Gail Atkinson, a specialist in induced seismicity from Western University in London, Ont.

While there's been little noticeable damage in Canada so far, she warns it could happen.

"I think damage is a function of getting the wrong ground motions in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Atkinson helped chair a day-long session on the impacts of fracking and earthquakes at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America. She also presented her own Canadian research.

She says smaller earthquakes shouldn't be ignored because they can lead to larger, more destructive ones.

"For every 100 magnitude three earthquakes, you'll get 10 of magnitude four and one magnitude five," she says. "The higher the rate of seismicity, the greater likelihood you'll trigger at least one large event."

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In Alberta's Fox Creek area, there were 367 tremors measured in 2015, according to Alberta's Energy Regulator. Most of them were under magnitude three, but a magnitude 4.4 hit in January 2015, and an even stronger magnitude 4.6 shook the area in January 2016.

After that, the regulator shut down a nearby fracking operation. It has now restarted.

Atkinson says it's wise for Canada to pay attention to what's happening in Oklahoma.

The Oklahoma experience

Oklahoma, like Alberta, is oil country. The landscape is dotted with huge pumpjacks and sites where waste water from fracking is injected deep into the ground.

The petroleum industry also fuels local economies and the state government. For the longest time, it was easy to ignore a growing body of science and ever-increasing damage that was being caused by the industry. But now it's serious  and the denial is over.

"For us to ignore this problem, or industry to ignore this problem  that wasn't an option," said Baker, adding industry has also acknowledged the problem and is working on solutions.

"They want this problem to go away as bad as anybody else does because it's a black eye for them as well."

Baker describes the task ahead of him as "Herculean." He says that earthquakes caused by the oil and gas industry threaten not just homes and residential buildings, but critical infrastructure like the oil terminal at Cushing, which is the largest pipeline and oil storage facility in the United States.

"We started having earthquakes in the Cushing area," Baker said, "so there is concern."

It happened in 2014 when a new injection well opened near the town. There was enough concern that the well was shut down and the earthquakes stopped.

When new wells were drilled, the earthquakes started again. When three of them were capped, the earthquakes subsided, but not entirely.

Based on its observations at Cushing, the state felt that simply modifying the wells and shutting down those that were considered too deep would be a solution. About 200 of the deeper wells were plugged.

Baker says there was "some success, but it was measured. It wasn't enough to solve the problem."

Now the state is phasing in a plan that will reduce the amount of waste water injected into more than 600 wells by up to 40 per cent.

The plan is in its early stages and earthquakes in Oklahoma are down, according to Baker, but he admits it's hard to determine if that's because of regulation or the fact the downturn in oil prices has curtailed drilling substantially.

Less doubt

The meeting in Reno last week drew nearly 700 seismologists and other experts from government, academia and industry.

During a full-day session on induced earthquakes, 29 scientists presented new research in a series of 15-minute oral presentations, while 35 researchers presented new findings in poster presentations.

The cumulative volume of research leaves little doubt about the link between fracking and earthquakes. One point of debate that did emerge is the significant difference between how the quakes are caused in Canada and the U.S.

In Oklahoma, the earthquakes are blamed on the industry practice of injecting waste water from oil production into wells dug deep into the ground. This causes changes in underground pressure and deep underground faults to slip, resulting in earthquakes.

In Canada, the direct action of fracking is blamed, as less water is used and injected back into the ground.

University of Calgary seismologist David Eaton says in the past six years, 90 per cent of earthquakes larger than magnitude three taking place in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin can be linked to fracking or waste water disposal. The vast majority  62 per cent  are directly linked to fracking.

He believes that like those in Oklahoma, the earthquakes are being caused by changes in pressure underground.

Atkinson believes part of the difference between Canadian and U.S. quakes can be attributed to different geology.

"There's evidence that the types of formations that are being explored have differences that would explain why hydraulic fracturing is so much more likely to induce seismicity in Western Canada than it is in Oklahoma."

Another key difference is the earthquakes in Canada have so far caused very little damage.

Part of the reason may be that the larger Canadian quakes have happened in largely isolated areas, where the Oklahoma quakes have affected highly populated areas.

Atkinson warns that Canadians shouldn't get complacent.

"As much as it would be nice to say we've had magnitude four and a half earthquakes in Western Canada and we haven't seen any damage yet and therefore we'll never see any damage, I don't think you can reach that conclusion."

Canadian researchers are now turning their sights toward learning how to better predict which fracking operations might cause earthquakes.

"The first level of mitigation is avoidance. So if we know that there's a problem and we can map areas where it's more problematic ... then what we need to do is design strategies that would minimize risk within those areas," says Eaton.

Putting an end to fracking isn't on the table on either side of the border. Regulators in Oklahoma, B.C. and Alberta are instead looking toward regulations and changing industry practices as a means to mitigate the damage.

But no one really knows if that will help stop the shaking, and no one even knows whether an end to fracking altogether would be enough to completely stop the earthquakes.

Correction : This story originally reported that In Oklahoma, a number of earthquakes have been blamed on the industry practice of injecting waste water from fracking operations into wells dug deep into the ground. In fact, they are blamed on the injection of waste water from oil production into wells.(Apr 28, 2016 10:08 AM)

Correction : This story originally quoted University of Calgary seismologist David Eaton saying that in the past six years, 90 per cent of earthquakes larger than magnitude three taking place in Western Canada can be linked to fracking or waste water disposal. He was actually referring to earthquakes in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin.(Apr 28, 2016 10:05 AM)
Mobile phones sold in India from next January will have to be equipped with panic buttons, the country's government has said.

And, from January 2018, phones will also have to have a built-in GPS tracking device so they can be tracked.

"Technology is solely meant to make human life better and what better (use) than ... for the security of women," a statement from the ministry of communications and technology explained as the plan was revealed.

An emergency call will be triggered when the user presses a finger continuously on number 5 or 9 on the new phones, the ministry said.

On smartphones, pressing the power button three times in quick succession will trigger an emergency call.

The move follows concerns over women's safety after a number of violent crimes in recent years.

The fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old student on a bus in Delhi in 2012 sparked nationwide protests and resulted in stronger rape laws.

In another high-profile case, an Uber taxi driver was found guilty of raping a female passenger in Delhi.

India reported 337,922 crimes against women in 2014, including more than 36,000 rapes, a 9% increase from the previous year.

The country is the world's second-biggest market for mobile phones, with more than one billion users.

However, several villages in the western state of Gujarat recently banned girls and single women from owning mobile phones, saying the devices distracted them from their studies.
By Naomi Tajitsu

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese car maker Mitsubishi Motors Corp <7211.T> said on Tuesday it used fuel economy testing methods that did not comply with Japanese regulations for 25 years, much longer than previously known.

It said aggressive internal targets may have put pressure on employees to overstate the fuel economy of its vehicles, and would set up an external committee to investigate the matter.

Japan's sixth-largest automaker has lost half its market value - some $3.9 billion - since it admitted last week to manipulating test data for four domestic mini-vehicle models, including two it produced for Nissan Motor Co <7201.T>.

It has also said that more models may have used tests non-compliant with Japanese standards, prompting concern about ballooning potential compensation costs and fines. The U.S auto safety regulator is also seeking information, while Japanese authorities have raided one of the company's research and development facilities.

Mitsubishi Motors said it used appropriate testing methods on vehicles sold in the United States, and had no indications of data manipulation in vehicles sold in other overseas markets.

It said it had been submitting non-compliant data to Japan's transport ministry since 1991. It previously said such non-compliance went back only to at least 2002.

Ryugo Nakao, executive vice president, said Japanese regulations changed in 1991 to require testing methods to better reflect stop-and-go urban driving, but Mitsubishi Motors did not follow that rule change. "We should have switched, but it turns out we didn't," he said.

A committee of external experts will report the results of its investigation in three months, he said.

Nakao added that repeatedly raised internal fuel economy targets during the development of the affected models may have contributed to the cheating. "Judging by what the investigations have shown so far, it seems there was pressure," he told reporters.

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Another executive, Koji Yokomaku, said Mitsubishi Motors raised its fuel economy targets five times in two years while developing the mini-vehicles, reaching 29.2 km (18.14 miles) per liter from an initial target of 26.4 kms per liter.

Chief Operating Officer Tetsuro Aikawa, who was on the engineering team that developed the original eK Wagon, said he had no idea the fuel economy readings were being falsified. "I was totally unaware this was happening," he said. "It's a problem that this issue didn't come up until now."

FASTER TEST

The automaker has said it compiled data for fuel economy tests using U.S. standards, where higher-speed, highway driving is common, rather than Japanese standards, where more prevalent city driving commonly consumes more fuel. Mitsubishi Motors said the U.S. testing method may have been used as it is shorter and would save time.

Japans transport ministry said it found irregularities with the way Mitsubishi Motors compiled mileage data on models in addition to the four affected mini-vehicles. It said it wanted an explanation for this from the company by May 11.

The ministry earlier said it set up a task force to examine how other automakers submit fuel economy data. Last week, it ordered other domestic automakers to submit fuel economy test data by May 18.

The misconduct has revived memories of a scandal more than 15 years ago in which Mitsubishi Motors admitted systematically covering up customer complaints for more than two decades, bringing the company close to collapse. It was bailed out by other Mitsubishi Group companies.

Senior officials at other Mitsubishi firms say it would be difficult for them to help the car maker this time, if needed, as they face their own financial squeeze, as well as calls to put shareholder returns above ties with the former Mitsubishi business empire.

Takehiko Kakiuchi, President and CEO of trading group Mitsubishi Corp <8058.T>, told Reuters he as "aghast" at the scandal engulfing its sister company.

(Reporting by Naomi Tajitsu, with additional reporting by Maki Shiraki and Yuka Obayashi; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Ian Geoghegan)
By Jack Kim and Lesley Wroughton SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States warned on Tuesday it would consider "other" options, which could include new sanctions or security steps, if North Korea continued nuclear and ballistic missile testing. South Korea's Yonhap news agency earlier said North Korea appeared to be preparing a test-launch of an intermediate-range ballistic missile, after what the United States described as the "fiery, catastrophic" failure of a launch attempt this month. It is widely expected to conduct a fifth nuclear test soon, perhaps ahead of a congress of the ruling Workers Party congress in early May. President Barack Obama said the United States was working on defending itself and its allies against potential threats from North Korea, which he called an "erratic" country with an "irresponsible" leader. In a CBS interview that aired on Tuesday, Obama said the United States was spending a lot more time positioning its missile development systems to set up a shield "that can at least block the relatively low-level threats," posed by North Korea. U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner urged North Korea to refrain from actions that destabilize the region and said Washington would consider "other" options if Pyongyang continued nuclear and missile testing. Toner noted that past steps had included sanctions and security measures, but declined to elaborate. "I think it's pretty clear that as North Korea continues to make decisions that we believe are counterproductive, that we've got to also continually look at what our options are in terms of response," he told a daily briefing. Asked what those options were, Toner added: "We don't want to announce anything before it's been fully formed and fully vetted." North Korea tested its fourth nuclear bomb on Jan. 6 and launched a long-range rocket on Feb. 7, prompting a significant tightening in United Nations and U.S. sanctions. It has conducted several missile tests since, including what it said was a submarine-launched ballistic missile on Saturday. On April 15, North Korea failed to launch what was likely a Musudan, a missile with a range of more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles), meaning that it could, if launched successfully, hit Japan and also, theoretically, the U.S. territory of Guam. Yonhap quoted an unnamed South Korean government official as saying there were indications North Korea might try to launch another of the missiles, which is not known to have been successfully flight-tested. South Korean Defence Ministry spokesman Moon Sang-gyun declined to confirm the Yonhap report but said North Korea's military would likely spend some time trying to fix the problem following the failed launch. North Korea's Foreign Ministry was quoted on Tuesday as saying that the country needed a "powerful nuclear deterrence" to counter U.S. hostility and threats. It said "nuclear threat and blackmail" would only prompt it to make "drastic progress in bolstering nuclear attack capabilities," state media said. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said he could not confirm reports that North Korea appeared to be preparing for another nuclear test. However, he said Washington would continue to "ramp up the pressure," including working with China, to persuade Pyongyang to curb its nuclear activities. North Korea, whose lone ally is China, routinely threatens to destroy South Korea and its major ally, the United States. The two Koreas remain technically at war after their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, rather than a peace treaty. Obama said there "was no easy solution" to the North Korean threat. He said that while the United States "could destroy North Korea with our arsenals," there would not only be humanitarian costs, but also a potential impact on South Korea. Experts see North Korea's Musudan test as part of an effort to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach the mainland United States. Obama said it was important to guard against such attacks. "They are erratic enough, their leader is personally irresponsible enough that we don't want them getting close" to obtaining such weapons, he said. The April 15 failure was seen as an embarrassing blow for its leader, Kim Jong Un, who has claimed several advances in weapons technology in recent months. North Korea said its submarine-launched ballistic missile test on Saturday was a "great success" that provided "one more means for powerful nuclear attack". South Korea on Tuesday described the test, which sent a missile travelling about 30 km (18 miles), as a partial success. Washington and Seoul began talks on possible deployment of a new missile-defence system, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), after the latest North Korea nuclear and rocket tests. (Reporting by Jack Kim in Seoul; Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton, Susan Heavey, Alana Wise and David Brunnstrom in Washington and Dominic Evans in London; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky and James Dalgleish)
By Ju-min Park and David Brunnstrom SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea test-fired what appeared to be two intermediate range ballistic missiles on Thursday, but both failed, the U.S. military said, in a setback for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ahead of next week's ruling party congress. The isolated nation has conducted a series of missile launches in violation of U.N. resolutions ahead of the Workers' Party congress which begins on May 6. South Korea also says North is ready to conduct a new nuclear test at any time. China said the U.N. Security Council was working on a response to North Korea's latest missile tests, while U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Pyongyang to cease "further provocative actions." Thursday's tests looked to have been hurried, according to a defense expert in Seoul, and follow a failed launch of a similar missile earlier this month. The first launch, at about 6:40 a.m. local time (05:40 p.m. EDT Wednesday) from near the east coast city of Wonsan, appeared to have been of a Musudan missile with a range of more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles) which crashed within seconds, a South Korean defense ministry official said. Later, at around 7:26 p.m., the North shot a similar intermediate range missile from the same area, but the launch was also understood to have failed, the official added. The U.S. military's Strategic Command said it tracked two attempted launches, neither of which posed a threat to North America. "NOT SUCCESSFUL" "Initial indications reveal the tests were not successful," said Lieutenant Colonel Martin O'Donnell, a STRATCOM spokesman.. The Musudan missile theoretically has the range to reach any part of Japan and the U.S. territory of Guam. It has never been successfully flight-tested. A similar missile launched on the April 15 birthday anniversary of Kim's late grandfather, North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung, exploded in what the U.S. Defense Department called a "fiery, catastrophic" failure. Some experts had predicted that North Korea would wait until it figured out what went wrong in the previous launch before attempting another, a process that could take months. Yang Uk, a senior research fellow at the Korea Defence and Security Forum and a policy adviser to the South Korean navy, said the North Koreans appeared to be in a rush to demonstrate a success head of the party congress. "They need to succeed but they keep failing," he said "They didn't have enough time to fix or technically modify the system, but just shot them because they were in a hurry." U.S. and South Korean officials have expressed concerns that North Korea could attempt a fifth nuclear test in a show of strength ahead of the congress. "Signs for an imminent fifth nuclear test are being detected ahead of North Korea's seventh Party Congress," South Korean President Park Geun-hye said at a national security meeting on Thursday. The 15-member U.N. Security Council met to discuss the latest missile tests at the request of the United States. China's U.N. Ambassador Liu Jieyi, president of the council for April, said: "We're looking at a response from the Security Council." Diplomats said the council was likely to issue a statement condemning the latest missile tests. Japan's U.N. Ambassador Motohide Yoshikawa, also a council member, said that during the closed-door meeting "everybody condemned the latest failed launches." Ban's spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, called the actions "extremely troubling." Yonhap said the first missile was not detected by South Korean military radar because it did not fly above a few hundred meters, and was spotted by a U.S. satellite. On Saturday, North Korea tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile, which traveled about 30 km (18 miles) off its east coast. The tests have come in defiance of U.N. Security Council sanctions which were strengthened after North Korea's last nuclear test in January and a space rocket launch the following month. (Editing by Mike Collett-White and Alistair Bell)
Former CEO of South Africa's MTN Group Sifiso Dabengwa listens during an interview in this file picture taken April 10, 2013. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings/Files

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's MTN paid its former chief executive officer Sifiso Dabengwa 23.7 million rand ($1.6 million) after he resigned over a record fine imposed on the company by Nigerian authorities. Dabengwa quit in November after Nigerian authorities imposed a $5.2 million fine on MTN's Nigerian unit in October. He was awarded a total payout of 40.6 million rand, MTN said in its annual report on Monday. Non-executive chairman Phuthuma Nhleko was then named executive chairman of Africa's biggest mobile phone group for a period of six months, to help resolve the fine. MTN has since managed to negotiate the penalty down to $3.9 billion but is still hoping to reduce it further. MTN's share price has been down almost 20 percent since October when the fine was imposed. The stock had fallen 1.21 percent at 145.59 rand by 1407 GMT. Last year, Nigeria imposed a deadline on mobile operators to cut off unregistered SIM cards, which MTN missed, amid fears the lines were being used by criminal gangs, including militant Islamist group Boko Haram. ($1 = 14.4865 rand) (Reporting by Nqobile Dludla and Tanisha Heiberg; Editing by James Macharia)
By Zandi Shabalala JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South African supermarket operator Pick n Pay plans to expand into Nigeria next year through a partnership with a local conglomerate, as it seeks to reduce its reliance on its home market, it said on Tuesday. Pick n Pay already operates in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia and plans to open new stores in Ghana next year. Like many other South African companies it wants to expand further across the continent amid sluggish economic growth at home. The retailer, which reported a 26 percent jump in annual earnings on Tuesday, said it would take a 51 percent stake in a Nigerian joint venture with conglomerate A.G. Leventis, which runs a food business. It did not disclose the size of the investment. "We are not suddenly going to explode onto the scene in Nigeria next year but we are going to start the process of looking at all those things," Pick n Pay's CEO Richard Brasher told a results briefing, adding that he was aware of tough trading conditions in Nigeria and would not expand hastily. Nigeria is Africa's biggest economy but some South African companies that expanded into the west African country, including Dairy products maker Clover Industries and fashion retailer Truworths, have either pulled out or scaled down due to a scarcity of hard currency to import spare parts and raw materials. Brasher said Pick n Pay was taking a long-term view of Africa's most populous nation. "If you're in the retail business and you are an African business its hard to ignore Nigeria," he told Reuters. Gryphon Asset Management analyst Reuben Beelders said he backed Pick n Pay's conservative approach to Nigeria. "People have realised that Africa is not just going to be a pot of gold at the end of the road, it's a lot of graft and it's going to need long-term investment rather than something that happens quickly," Cape Town-based Beelders said. Pick n Pay has lost ground in South Africa to rivals such as market leader Shoprite, after failing to invest in new stores. But Brasher, a former UK head of Tesco who took over in January 2013, is implementing a plan to win back market share. Pick n Pay said headline earnings per share (EPS) rose 26.4 percent from a year earlier to 224.04 cents in the year to the end of February, helped by cost-cutting measures. Headline EPS, a measure that excludes certain one-off items, is the profit figure most widely used in South Africa. The company declared a final dividend of 125.20 cents per share, bringing the year's total payout to 149.40 cents, 26.5 percent higher than the previous year. Shares in Pick n Pay, which are up nearly 30 percent over the last year, inched up 0.58 percent to 69.89 rand by 1215 GMT. (Editing by James Macharia and Susan Fenton)
Freeport-McMoRans 1Q16 Earnings Call: Mostly About Asset Sales

(Continued from Prior Part)

Indonesia: A burning issue

Freeport-McMoRans (FCX) 1Q16 earnings conference call was dominated by two burning issues: the assets sales program and the lingering issues in its operations in Indonesia. In this part of the series, well look at the updates on the Indonesia issue.

Freeport must sign an amended contract of works (or COW) with the Indonesian government. Freeport needs assurance from the government so it can proceed with the investment to convert the Grasberg mine into underground operations. However, according to Indonesian law, the contract cant be extended before 2019, which is two years before the current contract expires. The Indonesia government also wants Freeport to construct a smelter in the country and divest an additional stake in the Indonesia operations to the government or its citizens.

Contract extension

According to Freeport, it needs an assurance that the permit will be extended to proceed with the smelter construction. Freeport and Rio Tinto (RIO) (TRQ), Freeports partner in the Grasberg mine, are spending ~$1 billion per year to convert the mine to underground operations. Its only natural that a company would want to be certain about the future before investing large chunks of money. Note that Newmont Mining (NEM) has also been adversely hit by the changes in Indonesian (EIDO) law.

Stake sale issues

As for the stake sale, the Indonesian government is valuing the Grasberg mine at only a fraction of what Freeport proposed. According to Freeport, it wants the asset to be valued at fair market value, but the Indonesian government is valuing the asset on replacement cost. According to Freeport, its in talks with the government to settle these issues amicably. However, the company said it could look at international arbitration over this issue, as it has no obligation to divest the stake in Indonesia.

In the next part, well see what Freeport management had to say on the asset sales program.

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CBC

Ethan Reilly loved to help people, laugh with his buddies and ride anything with a motor. The first Rufus Run  Ethan was called Rufus around the neighbourhood  had it all on Sunday in West Prince, P.E.I. Though Reilly wasn't there in person, he was on the minds of everyone who was. "He was one that always loved to have fun and a few laughs and I hope that's what everyone here can do, remember Ethan and think of him, his laughs and some experiences they had with him," said his mother, Kim Reill
Violence against workers in health-care settings like hospitals, nursing homes and psychiatric environments is an under-reported, ubiquitous and persistent problem, says an article published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

What's worse, the article says, it's a problem that's been tolerated and largely ignored.

What were "once considered to be safe havens are now confronting steadily increasing rates of crime, including violent crimes such as assault, rape and homicide," says the review article.

For the review, titled Workplace Violence against Health Care Workers in the United States, Dr. James Phillips from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston looked at previous studies looking into workplace violence and interventions to reduce violence.

In one study, 46 per cent of nurses reported workplace violence during their five most recent shifts, and one-third said they were physically assaulted.

Nursing professionals in Canada say nurses on this side of the border face the same dangers on the job.

"This study is of no surprise to us," says the president of the B.C. Nurses' Union. Gayle Duteil says there needs to be a cultural shift in how nurses are viewed.

Nurses are repeatedly told that violence comes with the job, she says.

"It is not part of the job," she says. "No nurse should expect to go to work and be assaulted and be beaten up."

The head of the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions says punching, biting and scratching are "typical physical violence," but now there's also "a lot of the bullying and harassment," Linda Silas adds.

According to the Association of Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada, there were more than 4,000 reported incidents of workplace violence against Canadian nurses between 2008 and 2013.

'He broke my nose'

Jean Dobson has been a nurse for 44 years, and has experienced first-hand what it's like to be attacked by some of her patients. There was the time at University Hospital in London, Ont., when a male patient punched her so hard, she blacked out.

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"He broke my nose," she said in an interview with CBC News. "He kicked me in the face with his left foot. My nose was no longer in the middle of my face. I ended having to have it surgically set."

Another time, during a night shift at London's St. Joseph's hospital, a female patient grabbed the stethoscope hanging around Dobson's neck "and started squeezing," says Dobson.

'Changes who you are'

Cranbrook, B.C., nurse Nancy Silzer used to work in the psychiatric unit at the East Kootenay Regional Hospital, but was transferred from that unit because of incidents with extremely violent patients. She suffered neck injuries when one patient twisted her neck. Silzer now works in the surgical unit, but suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

"It changes who you are," she says. "I don't like the dark. I don't like sudden noises or sudden movements."

When she's not nursing, Silzer is a representative on the nurses union's regional occupational health and safety committee.

Some nurses don't mind talking about on-the-job violence, but many others won't talk about their experiences because they fear they might lose their jobs for speaking out.

According to the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, a nurse in North Bay, Ont., was dismissed from her job earlier this year because of comments she made at a union meeting about violence in the workplace.

Nurses are also reluctant to lay assault charges because often the patient has mental health issues, dementia or has problems with substance abuse.

The B.C. Nurses' Union says nurses are encouraged to press assault charges, and the union says it will assist them in the process of legal challenges.

Earlier this month, an Abbotsford, B.C., man pleaded guilty to assaulting a nurse at the hospital there.

More and more, provincial governments and union groups are working to make the workplace in hospitals safer.

Emergency "code whites" in hospitals are now routinely used, under which security guards assist nursing staff with physical takedowns of problem patients.

In Ontario, nursing staff can log on to computers and flag potentially dangerous patients or visitors.

The Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario has come up with a set of guidelines for violence-free environments.

Hospitals in that province can be charged for not providing a safe environment for their staff.

And last summer, the British Columbia Nurses' Union joined the Health Ministry in announcing a $1.56-million violence-reduction plan on Aug. 6. Four high-risk hospitals will receive key safety upgrades, including security systems, personal alarms, better training in violence de-escalation training, and code white drills.

In a news release issued last August, Ontario said it will develop an implementation plan to:

- Make hospitals safer.

- Reduce workplace violence in hospitals and the broader health-care sector.

- Change attitudes toward workplace violence and improve workplace safety culture regarding violence.
By Felix Onuah ABUJA (Reuters) - The World Bank held talks with the Nigerian president on Wednesday on how it could help Nigeria overcome an economic crisis caused mainly by a sharp fall in crude prices eating into its oil revenues. On her second day of meetings with Nigerian officials, World Bank Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer Sri Mulyani Indrawati met President Muhammadu Buhari, who plans to stimulate the flagging economy with a record 6 trillion naira ($31 billion) budget. Nigeria will have to borrow 1.8 trillion naira from abroad and at home to help fund the budget, which has been delayed by several months and wrangling with parliament, if it goes ahead. Although Nigeria has held talks with the World Bank over a possible loan or credit facility in recent months, Indrawati did not address this when speaking to reporters after the meeting. "We would like to know how we can help Nigeria to make the very important decisions, whether on micro economic policy and other sectoral policy, that will make this economy move forward to become a strong middle income country," she said. Indrawati, who met Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun on Tuesday, said she and Buhari discussed the government's "commendable goals to improve tax collection and crackdown on corruption. Nigeria's economy, the largest in Africa, grew by 2.8 percent last year, its slowest pace since 1999. (Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick takes a stand against critics who want an IPO

Travis Kalanick, co-founder and CEO of ride-hailing service Uber, said Wednesday he's going to take as long as possible to go public  responding to critics and stressing he's focused on product and innovation, not liquidity.

"We are 5-years old. And it's a little early in our lifecycle go there," Kalanick told CNBC's " Squawk Box ," referring to the IPO process. "We'll go there eventually. We have to find liquidity for ... [investors]."

Back in February, Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson was critical of Kalanick, saying: "He's wimping out. [Uber] should be a publicly traded company. ... You have a responsibility to give me my money back sometime."

Kalanick told CNBC that Wilson does not have money in Uber. "He passed on the Series B [funding round,] if I remember correctly. That was a $300 million valuation. Just putting that out there."

The Series B closed in January 2012. Since then, Uber's valuation has skyrocketed, currently estimated at about $62 billion.

Listening to the interview, CNBC's Kayla Tausche tweeted out Kalanick's response to Wilson. Moments later, Wilson responded to her tweet, writing Kalanick was "correct" about his passing on Uber.

Uber also faces political critics in many cities across America and around the world, claiming among other things Uber drivers are taking jobs away from licensed taxi drivers and causing traffic problems.

"What we see is wherever Uber does well we eventually see resistance. And it's because we happen to be in an industry that has set things up [so] that essentially competition has been outlawed," Kalanick said.



In a speech outlining her economic policies in July, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton raised questions about services like Uber.

"As the on-demand economy creates exciting opportunities and unleashes innovation, it's also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future."

Weiterlesen

Kalanick countered by telling CNBC the average Uber driver works fewer than 10 hours per week. Uber "can become a safety net" for people looking for jobs or seeking the flexibility of working when they want.

"On the Uber system, it's not just about the on-demand economy where you're pushing a button and getting a ride," he said. "On the driver side, I can push a button and start work. And I can push a button and stop work whenever I choose."

"I think that's the story we need to get better at telling," he said.

In addition to political pressure, Uber has found itself at the center of thorny legal issues. Just last week, Uber agreed to pay $100 million to settle a class action lawsuit over how it classifies its drivers in California and Massachusetts.

Kalanick said the settlement "reaffirms independent contractor status" for drivers who "appreciate and prefer" that status.

"But it holds us to account in some ways. You should have a deactivation policy that's straightforward and transparent and essentially fair. There are things we have to do to get better, too," he said, referring to stipulations in the settlement.



Also Wednesday, Kalanick announced that Arianna Huffington, founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, is joining Uber's board of directors.

He told CNBC he's known Huffington for a few years and he felt that they had a connection from the beginning. "We have a simpatico thing on building companies.

In a post on Uber's website, Kalanick wrote:

"For those of us who know Arianna, it's clear she knows a thing or two about being an entrepreneur."

"From the start of our friendship it was obvious that she believes deeply in our mission."

"[Her] ability to tell stories is invaluable for an engineer like me, whose natural tendency is to rely on data."

Huffington, sitting next to Kalanick, told CNBC she was briefed extensively about the company in the lead-up to becoming a board member.

Kalanick walked her through "the big-ball bets for the future, through the controversies, through the cultural values," she said, adding the final meeting to get her on the board was last week.









More From CNBC


Immerse yourself in culture and history when you #DiscoverBudapest from our city center hotel. Click here for high-resolution version

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY--(Marketwired - Apr 27, 2016) - The world may be getting smaller, but there are still discoveries to be made and Budapest is chief among them. Born out of the majestic Danube River, the city's two sides, Buda and Pest, are as scenic as they are dynamic. And the Budapest Marriott Hotel is the perfect place to discover it all.

Located on the banks of the river in the heart of the city, the Budapest Marriott Hotel welcomes visitors in search of everything from ancient ruins to the hottest nightlife. Some of the city's most notable attractions are just steps away, including the picturesque Chain Bridge linking the two sides of the city.

Other must-see sights are ones that define the city, including:

Buda Castle : An imposing structure that has weathered time and fortune to house several cultural institutions and museums today.

The Parliament : As the third largest parliament in the world, this iconic structure is one of Europe's oldest legislative buildings.

Gellert Hill : Overlooking the city, this landmark is crowned by the Freedom Monument.

St. Stephen's Basilica: The Classicist architecture is more than just a pretty face -- it houses Hungary's most sacred relic, the mummified right hand of St. Stephen (known as the Holy Right).

This stunning destination, however, is more than the sum of its historical attractions. Visitors also come for the shopping (which ranges from major shopping malls to local boutiques) and the Michelin-starred dining. Restaurants like Onyx at Vorosmarty Square and Borkonyha near the Basilica are just two of five in the city to have earned Michelin stars.

When the sun goes down, visitors and locals alike have plenty of options for nightlife, starting with ruin bars. Set within formerly dilapidated buildings and courtyards, the best of these bars welcome big crowds for music, dance and film.

Festivals more your thing? Budapest has plenty of them, along with concerts, exhibitions, fairs, sporting events and national celebrations. Chief among these is the Sziget Festival, which is considered one of Europe's top music and cultural events. Attracting nearly 400,000 visitors each August, the event occurs on Obudai-sziget, an island in the middle of the river, for an unforgettable experience.

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Of course, no trip to Budapest is complete without a visit to one of its 118 thermal springs. Since Roman times, natives and visitors alike have taken the plunge. Today, options include the likes of Szechenyi Thermal Bath, one of the largest spa complexes in Europe, and Gellert Baths, which impress visitors with stunning Art Nouveau decor.

No matter what draws you to this exciting destination, one thing is for certain: There are many ways to love and #DiscoverBudapest.

About the Budapest Marriott Hotel

Welcoming visitors with an enchanting mix of elegance and convenience, the Budapest Marriott Hotel features well-appointed accommodations and an enviable, city-center location on the banks of the Danube. Guests will enjoy modern accommodations with plush bedding, renovated bathrooms and high-speed Internet access, as well as a state-of-the-art fitness center and available spa treatments. The hotel offers three different dining options ranging from the signature Peppers! Mediterranean Grill to AQVA Lounge Bar where visitors can enjoy a sophisticated atmosphere. The hotel is also ideally suited to meetings and weddings, with more than 15,500 sq. ft. of flexible event space and tech-friendly features that distinguish it within a city of unsurpassable beauty and charm.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=2998802


By Natalia Zinets and Matthias Williams

KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine thinks it is highly likely to receive its next aid tranche of $1.7 billion (1.1 billion) from the International Monetary Fund in June but is in a comfortable position to service its existing debt, new Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk said on Thursday.

A day after Kiev passed energy tariff reforms demanded by the IMF, Danylyuk said in an interview that parliament would reconvene in May to pass laws that are a further precondition to securing the IMF funds.

In its negotiations with the IMF, he said Ukraine would seek to "fix" aspects of its planned pension reforms but declined to go into specifics regarding what Kiev might want to change.

With renewed cooperation there was a "very very high likelihood" of Ukraine receiving a long-delayed third tranche of IMF loans in June, he said.

"We are in a good shape now," he said, when asked if Ukraine would be able to service its debt this year.

He stressed that he wanted Ukraine and the IMF to work as equals rather than seeing the IMF as a source for handouts.

"We are not looking at the IMF as a chocolate bar that you eat and how much energy and how many kilometres, miles you can run before you get another chocolate bar," he said.

"They need to understand that we are equal partners."

Danylyuk joined Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman's newly formed cabinet in April, which took power after months of political turmoil that stalled reforms and Ukraine's efforts to stamp out endemic corruption.

Ukraine's chief international backers  the IMF, the U.S. government and the European Union, have pressed Kiev to accelerate the pace of reforms, and the EU has publicly warned it not to renege on existing commitments.

The economy has been battered by a Russian-backed separatist conflict in its industrial east, although Danylyuk said the economy has bottomed out. He declined to give precise predictions for growth this year.

Danylyuk said he wanted to turn the finance ministry into an "engine that drives reform" to show potential foreign investors that Ukraine aims to make their life easier.

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A priority is transforming an inefficient tax office by merging it over the next two years with the customs service to create an efficient, combined system that will crack down on corrupt practices.

These include customs offices allowing companies to forge documents to misrepresent goods in order to reduce their tariff burden.

"If it's not one system, then some goods that enter Ukraine are just lost or turn out to be something else. What we have is cars coming, but they're sold as teapots. It's a real mess," he said.

He also wants to slash the role of regional tax inspectors by minimising the number of times they audit companies and reduce red tape by cutting the amount of documents companies have to file.

More broadly, the new government will not look to ditch a $17.5 billion aid package agreed with the Fund by the previous government, he said, but didn't rule out making changes later.

"Finding exactly what are the solutions, that's where we will have discussions with the IMF. On pension reform, because that needs to be fixed, eventually, the vision of it. And many other areas," he said.

Groysman's predecessor Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk struggled to pass unpopular reforms in parliament.

Danylyuk said the government would smooth the passage of such bills by engaging with lawmakers as opposed to trying to strong-arm them into accepting reforms as a fait accompli.

"We just have to be in constant dialogue with them, not blackmailing them. It's the wrong tactic, I hate it. ... This time it will not be like that," he said.

(Editing by Hugh Lawson)
WASHINGTON, April 27, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Israel Project congratulates the Iowa State Legislature today for its strong stance against BDS discrimination. The legislature passed a bill that prevents state agencies from investing in companies that discriminate against Israel as part of the BDS movement.

BDS is a discriminatory effort to undermine the longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship between the United States and Israel. Its leaders call openly for the destruction of the only Jewish state, and they espouse ugly anti-Semitic views in their effort to unfairly target Israel.

The bill passed today rejects BDS hatred and discrimination, protecting Iowa taxpayers from playing an unwitting role in this pernicious movement. The Israel Project applauds Iowans and their elected representatives for taking a stand against this hatred.

The bill was sponsored by Senator Jeff Danielson (D) and Representative Quentin Stanerson (R).

Though the BDS movement claims to advocate for a two-state solution, it is in fact part of an effort to delegitimize and ultimately eradicate Israel. For the boycotters, no change in Israeli policy would be sufficient. Fundamentally, this is a hate campaign that questions Israels right to exist, not its actions.

The people of Iowa have a lot to be proud of today, said The Israel Project CEO Josh Block. By resoundingly declaring that BDS discrimination has no place in the Hawkeye State, the state legislature took an affirmative stand to ensure no taxpayer money is used to espouse anti-Semitism. We are very grateful for the strong leadership shown Sen. Danielson and Rep. Stanerson and to all of the partners that worked with us to reach this momentous day.

Similar legislation has been passed in seven other states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana and South Carolina.





About The Israel Project

The Israel Project (TIP) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization that provides factual information about Israel and the Middle East to the press, policymakers and the public. Founded in 2003, TIP works in multiple languages to provide real-time background information, images, maps, audio, video, graphics and direct access to newsmakers. To learn more about TIP, visit http://www.theisraelproject.org.
Lithuanian English

Vilnius, Lithuania, 2016-04-28 12:12 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Annual General Meeting of APRANGA APB (hereinafter Company) shareholders held on 28 April 2016 has resolved the following:

1. Consolidated annual report on the activities of the Company in 2015.

Resolution:

Taken for the information consolidated annual report of the Company for the year 2015, prepared by the Company, assessed by the auditors and approved by the Board.

2. Auditor's report on the Companys financial statements and annual report.

Resolution:

Taken for the information.

3. Approval of the Consolidated and Companys financial statements for the year 2015.

Resolution:

Approve the annual Consolidated and Companys financial statements for the year 2015 (attached).

4. Company's profit (loss) allocation for the year 2015.

Resolution:

Approve the Company's profit (loss) allocation for the year 2015:

1) The unappropriated profit of the preceding financial year at the close of the reporting financial year: EUR 11 610 552;

2) The net profit of the reporting financial year: EUR 8 658 908;

3) The profit (loss) of the reporting financial year not recognized in the profit (loss) account - none;

4) Transfers from the reserves - none;

5) The shareholders contributions to cover the losses of the company - none;

6) The total profit available for appropriation: EUR 20 269 460;

7) The share of profit allocated to the mandatory reserve: EUR 2 633;

8) The share of profit allocated to the reserve for acquiring own shares - none;

9) The share of profit allocated to other reserves - none;

10) The share of profit for the payment of dividends*: EUR 6 635 035;

11) The share of profit for the payment of annual bonuses: EUR 210 000;

12) Unappropriated profit at the close of the reporting financial year and brought forward to the next financial year: EUR 13 421 792.

* EUR 0.12 per one share.

5. Election of firm of auditors and establishment of the terms of remuneration for audit services.

Resolution:

To elect UAB PricewaterhouseCoopers as APB APRANGA firm of auditors for the year 2016. To set the amount of the fee payable for audit services for the year 2016 - not more than EUR 20 000 plus VAT. To authorize the Company's CEO to sign the audit services agreement with firm of auditors.
NEW YORK, April 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- LifeSci Advisors, LLC, (the "Company" or "LifeSci") an investor relations and corporate communications firm focused on the life sciences sector, today announced the appointment of Niki Dilger as Advisory Managing Director and Head of European Corporate Access. Based in the UK, Niki will enhance and manage LifeScis pan-European corporate access capability, bringing together LifeScis US and European clients and specialist investors in Europe.



Niki has over 15 years experience in the healthcare sector including 10 years in institutional equity sales in Europe specializing in US and European Healthcare stocks at Cowen, JP Morgan and then Fortis Bank, with a particular focus on Biotechnology companies at the latter. In 2009 she founded Aetia Ltd, a UK-based specialist financial services firm offering capital raising and investor access services to private and public healthcare companies around the world, further developing her long-standing relationships with the healthcare investment community across Europe. During her career, Niki has managed numerous deal and non-deal roadshows across the UK and Europe and has a successful track record raising capital for a wide range of both public and private global life science companies at various stages of development. Prior to her investment banking career, Niki worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers. She has a BSc in Business Management and Languages from Kings College, London.

"Niki has exceptional relationships across Europe and will strengthen LifeScis unparalleled access to specialist institutional investors on behalf of our clients," said Michael Rice, President and Co-Founder of LifeSci Advisors. "We are committed to growing our European team due to increased interest from European companies seeking access to the US capital markets as well as continued interest from our US-based clients to access the European healthcare investment community."

LifeScis clients can now benefit from upgraded seamless industry-leading IR services on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean thanks to Niki joining our team, added Chris Maggos, Managing Director of LifeSci Advisors European business.

LifeSci Advisors, LLC (www.lifesciadvisors.com) is a unique investor relations consultancy founded to provide companies in the life sciences a comprehensive solution to investor communications and outreach. With local presence in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Geneva, the firm provides the highest quality service for its clients through its deep sector specialization. Our roster of Ph.D.s enables us to better understand our clients' R&D, regulatory, and commercial strategy, and our team of financial services, investor relations, and public relations specialists help our clients effectively communicate their strategies to the marketplace. This combination of life sciences, financial services, and investor relations expertise allows us to provide a valuable and unique service offering to our clients.
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
* Guatemala raises US$700m after three-year hiatus

* Province of Neuquen mandates ahead of bond deal

* AES Dominicana to start roadshows

* Argentina's Chubut preps secured debt sale

By Mike Gambale

NEW YORK, April 28 (IFR) - Below is a recap of primary issuance activity in the LatAm market on Thursday:

Number of deals priced: 1

Total volume: US$700m

REPUBLIC OF GUATEMALA

Guatemala has announced a 10-year bond ahead of pricing on Thursday. The Central American country has capped the size at US$700m and will use proceeds to pay down debt and to finance investment programs as well as capital expenditures. The senior unsecured bond is expected to be rated Ba1/BB/BB and is being led by sole bookrunner Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

IPTs 4.875% area

GUIDANCE: US$700m 10-year at 4.65% (+/-5bp)

LAUNCH: US$700m 10-year at 4.60%

PRICED: US$700m 10-year at 99.206 with 4.5% coupon

BOOK: US$3.5bn-plus

NIC: 10bp (vs. 4.875% 2028s at 4.65%-4.60%)

PIPELINE

Panama's Aeropuerto Internacional de Tocumen SA (AITSA) is looking to issue US$625m in 20-year bonds to finance further construction of the new South Terminal at the Tocumen International Airport outside Panama City. Citi is advising AITSA.

The Province of Neuquen will start fixed-income investor meetings as it looks to market a US dollar 144A/RegS transaction through Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan.

The borrower will be in Boston on Monday, in New York on Tuesday and in London on Wednesday. The offering of bonds, which will by backed gas royalties, is being done in conjunction with an exchange for outstanding 2021.

AES Dominicana will start roadshows this week ahead of a possible USD 144A/RegS bond sale after mandating Citigroup and Credit Suisse, according to a source. The borrower will be in London and Los Angeles on Friday and will head to Boston and New York on Monday. Ratings are B+/B+ by S&P and Fitch.

The Province of Chubut is preparing to sell an up to US$83m New York law bond due in 2023, according to Moody's, which assigned a B3 rating to the issue on Thursday.

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The Province of Mendoza is looking to raise US$300m in both the local and international markets to refinance debt, according to local reports.

Argentina utility Pampa Energia's shareholders have approved a US$500m debt program.

(Reporting by Paul Kilby and Mike Gambale; Editing by Marc Carnegie)
By Claire Milhench

LONDON, April 27 (Reuters) - A dispute between Libya's $67 billion sovereign wealth fund and Goldman Sachs over advice given on trades made in 2008 will be back in London's High Court on May 5, with amended court papers that emerged on Wednesday adding new details.

In the ongoing litigation, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) alleges the Wall Street bank advised the fund to invest some $1 billion in nine trades that it claims were unsuitable and ultimately worthless.

At the time, Libya was still headed by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who was overthrown in 2011. The leadership of the LIA is currently being disputed by two rival chairmen.

Goldman Sachs has rejected the LIA's allegations and is contesting the case. It maintains that its relationship with the LIA was at all "material times an arm's length one" between banker and client.

A pre-trial review hearing has been confirmed for May 5 and a trial date is expected to be set for early June.

In re-amended claim filings seen by Reuters on Wednesday, the LIA alleges that in 2008, Goldman Sachs hired Haitem Zarti, the brother of Mustafa Zarti, the LIA's former deputy chief, as an intern in its investment banking division.

Among details first reported in the Financial Times, the papers revealed that Haitem Zarti was paid a salary of 36,000 pounds per annum as an intern, plus a 1,000 pound housing allowance.

The LIA alleges this hiring was in breach of Goldman's own compliance rules. In a separate filing to the High Court, also seen by Reuters, the U.S. investment bank denies this claim.

Neither side disputes the internship took place. Reuters could not independently verify the claims. Neither could it reach either of the Zarti brothers.

The papers show the LIA also alleges that Mustafa Zarti's willingness to do business with Goldman was influenced "by the favourable treatment Goldman was conferring on his brother".

Goldman strongly denies these allegations: "We do not believe the internship influenced in any way the LIA's decision to enter into the trades," the bank said in a statement to Reuters.

Story continues

"The claims are without merit and we will continue to defend them vigorously."

In its re-amended defence document, the bank says Haitem Zarti was employed as an intern, and paid the same salary as other interns.

It adds that it believed Zarti would likely have a role within the LIA in London, and the internship was tailored towards giving him training and exposure that would help him prepare for that role.

(Reporting by Claire Milhench)
By Peter Maushagen

HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - German airline Lufthansa (LHAG.DE) wants to take part in much-needed industry consolidation in Europe so carriers can compete better with U.S. and Asian rivals, Chief Executive Carsten Spohr said on Thursday.

Spohr told an annual shareholders meeting in Hamburg on Thursday that the five largest airlines in the United States have an 80 percent share of the market, while in Europe the top five have just 40 percent.

"Consolidation is a part of what needs to happen in Europe in order to make the sector more competitive when compared to the United States and Asia," Spohr said.

"As Europe's largest airline, we want to take part in consolidation, not just be a bystander," he told investors.

Lufthansa said late on Wednesday it was looking at ways to bring part-owned Brussels Airlines under its low-cost Eurowings brand, though the Islamic State attacks in Brussels have pushed back the deadline for a decision to August.

Sources have also told Reuters that Lufthansa is considering partnerships, or even takeovers, of Scandanavian carrier SAS (SAS.ST) and Condor, the airline that belonged to Lufthansa for decades before being bought by Thomas Cook (TCG.L).

Lufthansa is already one of the few European airlines to have driven merger activity in the region, snapping up Swiss, Austrian and bmi several years ago.

But the restructuring of Austrian proved time consuming, while Lufthansa eventually sold British Midland to British Airways parent IAG (ICAG.L) in 2012, meaning not all shareholders are in favour of further merger forays.

"The desire for size has not always suited Lufthansa," Ingo Speich, portfolio manager at shareholder Union Investment, told the meeting.

"Instead of casting an eye over Brussels, Condor or SAS, Lufthansa should invest the capital into its balance sheet, restructuring and renewing its fleet," Speich said.

IAG too has been on a buying charge, adding Vueling and Aer Lingus to a stable that started with British Airways and Iberia.

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British holiday carrier Monarch [MONA.UL] said on Thursday it was considering acquisitions too, while Qatar Airways said on Wednesday it had increased its stake in IAG to 12 percent.

But several analysts and sector bankers have told Reuters they feel there are few major deals to be done, with small deals or cooperation agreements instead more likely.

Ryanair (RYA.I), set to overtake Lufthansa as Europe's largest carrier this year in terms of passenger numbers, has also said it prefers to grow organically, while Air France-KLM (AIRF.PA) is grappling with a restructuring.

(Additional reporting by Victoria Bryan in Berlin and Sophie Sassard in London; editing by Ludwig Burger and David Clarke)
WEST JORDAN, UT--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - Mountain America Credit Union earned honors as a top ten "Best Places to Work in Idaho." After receiving top-ten honors in the Small Employer category (fewer than 100 employees), the credit union moved into the Large Employer category (100+ employees) for the first time this year. The ranking is determined by the results of an employee satisfaction survey conducted by POPULUS, a marketing and research firm.

"Mountain America understands that a quality culture starts with engaged and committed employees," said Sterling Nielsen, President/CEO of Mountain America. "We achieve this through investing in employees, helping them learn and grow with the best-possible educational opportunities and tools. Combined with an exceptional work environment, where staff is empowered to use their talents, the result is consistently superior member service."

Mountain America has 15 Idaho branches, with more than 100 employees across Southern Idaho.

The Best Places to Work in Idaho is a community of organizations working together to identify, recognize and inform Idaho employers about Idaho's best employment practices, using a data-driven process. This community is composed of Idaho universities, chambers of commerce, Idaho chapters of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), and is organized by POPULUS.

Mountain America Credit Union has more than $5.1 billion in assets and serves more than 575,000 members, wherever they are, through online and mobile banking, 86 branches in five states and access to more than 30,000 ATMs and 5,000 shared-branching locations nationwide. With roots dating back to the 1930s, Mountain America offers a variety of financial products and services for consumers and businesses, including savings accounts, auto loans, checking accounts, mortgage loans, business checking, student loans, SBA loans and retirement options. Visit www.macu.com for more information.
The GSEE private sector workers' union told the Greek government to prepare for a "permanent fight" if it did not back down over pension reforms (AFP Photo/Louisa Gouliamaki)

The Hague (AFP) - Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem said late Tuesday that a mooted Thursday meeting of the eurozone finance ministers will not take place, as Greece's creditors need more time to decide next steps for the country's massive bailout.

"No additional Eurogroup on Greece this Thursday, more time needed," Dijsselbloem's spokesman Michel Reijns said on Twitter.

"Meeting on first review, contingency package and debt at later stage."

Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister, had said earlier Tuesday that a meeting could take place Thursday "to finalise as many things as possible" in unlocking bailout cash and triggering potential debt relief for Greece.

But he told Dutch broadcaster RTL-Z that the meeting would only happen if it had "a chance of succeeding".

Debt-crippled Greece still needs to deliver crucial reforms in order to unlock more cash from its massive 86-billion-euro ($95 billion) bailout plan.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras secured the bailout in July -- the country's third international financial rescue in five years -- in return for tough economic reforms including a pensions overhaul.

In one of the few concessions handed to Greece, eurozone leaders agreed to also debate ways of easing Greece's debt burden once key reform pledges were met.

Reducing Greece's mountain of public debt -- standing at an eye-watering 177 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2015 -- is a key condition set by the IMF to remain a partner in the rescue plan.

"We're not just going to say 'Let's drop it,' and we're not going to lift a part of the debt. But we could decide to give more time or to grant them some periods without interest payments or reimbursements," Dijsselbloem said Tuesday.

To persuade the IMF to stay on board, the Europeans have agreed a package of extra measures which would be slapped on Greece if it does not meet its budget goals set for 2018, the year when the current bailout plan would expire.

Athens is required by then to have controlled its budget so its deficit is no more than 3.5 percent of GDP -- a goal the IMF deems unrealistic in the long-term.
OSLO, April 28 (Reuters) - Norway's $868-billion sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, does not expect the Chinese economy to come to an abrupt standstill, a senior official said on Thursday.

"There have been many discussions about the slowdown in growth (in China). There seems to be signs that it will not be too harsh a stop," the fund's deputy CEO, Trond Grande, said during a presentation of the fund's first-quarter results.

He added that the fund would remain a long-term investor in China.

(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche and Joachim Dagenborg, editing by Stine Jacobsen)
The short answer is that ALL the networks spend a lot of time of money researching and tracking their own data, partly out of frustration with Nielsen, but also because of all the controlled chaos in the industry right now. Nielsen itself has done quite a lot of shifting and developing new ways of measuring viewership, so they're not as old-fashioned as we might like to think they are. You are correct that NBCUniversal has some (propietary) insights into how its Comcast/Xfinity customers view content; their research department recently spent quite a bit of time trying to crack a way to measure Netflix, which is notoriously secretive about how many people are watching how much of its original content. (Netflix quickly debunked NBC's findings, which were shared at the last TV press tour. What NBC had found, or alleged through its analysis of data, which I admit I forget how they came up with this, but ANYHOW, NBC noted a sharp dropoff of Netflix series once they had been released for a few weeks.)

Overall, the Nielsen ratings are still the most solid way to measure, mostly the time-shifted (DVR, on-demand) numbers. But nobody's happy about it because everyone senses there must be a better, public way to measure all this.

What I've noticed in the last few years is how happy the networks can make themselves with the far more ephemeral and hard-to-measure sense of buzz around a TV show. If lots of people are tweeting about, talking about it, sharing clips of it on social networks -- well, that's a new form of currency that's increasingly accepted.
Foley on Microsoft

Of Mice and Pen: Microsoft's Latest Digital Ink Push

Microsoft hopes that the digital ink trend will finally find traction as new features for digital note takers will be included in the Windows 10 Anniversary update.

For well more than two decades, Microsoft has invested heavily in natural UIs of all kinds, ranging from touch to speech recognition and computer vision.

Microsoft is stepping up its campaign to use digital pens with PCs, tablets -- and perhaps phablets and phones -- more intuitive and desirable. Microsoft has championed to greater and lesser extents over the years the concept of digital ink. Do you remember Windows for Pen Computing, which debuted in 1992 and was supplanted a decade later by Windows XP Tablet PC Edition? After those effectively flopped, with some niche exceptions in certain verticals, Microsoft went back to the drawing board. Now Microsoft sees digital ink as a key opportunity to advance the use of computers and devices. The reason: The pen is another way to distinguish its hardware and software. Yes, I know that's not what Microsoft officials say is happening. They claim all users are naturally inclined to write and draw, and that it makes sense to support those inclinations on their computing devices. But I'm not sure whether digital pens are the chicken or the egg here.

Until a year ago or so, I still took all of my notes, both work and personal, on paper using a real pen. I finally weaned myself from this practice. As a result, I almost never use ballpoint pens or paper for writing anything anymore. Given my new input habits, Microsoft's contention that we all commonly doodle, make lists and create sticky notes for ourselves using pen and paper doesn't resonate with me. But that doesn't mean Microsoft isn't going to continue to try to get all of us to acknowledge our handwriting-centric tendencies.

With the coming Windows 10 Anniversary update, Microsoft is all in with its pens-for-one-and-all campaign with Windows Ink.

Microsoft is adding a new Ink Workspace to the Anniversary update due this summer. That environment will be accessible by pressing the top button on a pen. It's meant to get users to more easily find and use ink-centric-like Sticky Notes, Sketchpad and Screen Sketch screenshot markup features. There's also a "Get more Pen apps" link that takes users to the Windows Store in search of additional pen-enabled titles created by developers with access to Microsoft's new Windows Ink-related tooling.

The digital ink emphasis goes beyond the core OS. Microsoft is improving pen support for its Edge browser, Maps and Office apps beyond OneNote, which has incorporated support for pen input since the get-go. Microsoft also is working with Wacom to provide a Windows Ink-compatible pen via various retailers this holiday season. Microsoft quietly bought digital-pen technology from N-Trig last year as part of its quest to make pens a built-in component of its Surface devices.

At the Build conference in San Francisco, Microsoft said it's making available to app developers tools, programming interfaces and documentation to encourage them to build ink and digital pen support into as many new programs and services as they can.

As I've noted before, Microsoft management's decision to move the company's Devices Group under Windows chief Terry Myerson has meant the Windows team is prioritizing features in its releases that the hardware team wants. Because the hardware team opted to make pens an intrinsic part of the Surface experience, digital pen/ink support is at the top of the Windows 10 Anniversary feature list. And because Microsoft's PC/device partners also will want in on the Anniversary update action, expect to see more OEM devices of all sizes that ship with pens moving forward.

Call me a luddite (and many do), but I find keeping track of $50 or so pens to be more trouble than it's worth. If I were a digital artist/creative, of course I'd want my Windows device to be pen- and ink-ready. But for the rest of us, I still feel like pens are more gimmick than must-have tools. I say give me my mouse and get off my lawn. What's your take?
By Lisa Barrington and Stephanie Nebehay BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) - Air strikes destroyed a hospital and killed dozens of people in rebel-held areas of Aleppo, including children and doctors, in an attack that a U.S. official said appeared to be solely the work of the Syrian government. The city of Aleppo is at the centre of a military escalation that has undermined peace talks in Geneva aimed at ending the five-year-old war. U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura appealed to the presidents of the United States and Russia to intervene to salvage a ceasefire that was "barely alive". The truce is intended to allow an opportunity for peace talks and delivery of humanitarian relief. Six days of air strikes and rebel shelling in Aleppo, which is split between government and rebel forces, have killed 200 people, two-thirds of them on the opposition side, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says. The "catastrophic deterioration" in Aleppo over the last 24 to 48 hours has jeopardised the aid lifeline that supplies millions of Syrians, said Jan Egeland, chairman of the U.N. humanitarian task force. "I could not in any way express how high the stakes are for the next hours and days." The U.S. State Department said Syria's air strike on the hospital in Aleppo was "reprehensible," and it called on Russia to use its influence to pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government to stop the attacks. "Once again we call on the regime to cease these absolutely senseless attacks, which are of course violations of the cessation of hostilities," State Department spokesman John Kirby said. A State Department official said there were indications that the bombing of the hospital was conducted solely by the Syrian government. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Russia had an urgent responsibility to press the government of its ally Assad to stop attacking civilians and observe the ceasefire. The Geneva talks aim to end a war that has created the world's worst refugee crisis, allowed for the rise of Islamic State and drawn in regional and major powers, but the negotiations have all but failed and a truce to allow them to take place has collapsed. Winding up the latest round of talks, de Mistura said he aimed to resume them in May, but gave no date. "Wherever you are, you hear explosions of mortars, shelling and planes flying over," said Valter Gros, who heads the International Committee of the Red Cross Aleppo office. "There is no neighbourhood of the city that hasnt been hit. People are living on the edge. Everyone here fears for their lives and nobody knows what is coming next," he said. A Syrian military source said government planes had not been in areas where air raids were reported. Syria's army denied reports that the Syrian air force targetted the hospital. The Russian defence ministry, whose air strikes have swung the war in favour of President Bashar al-Assad, also denied its planes were responsible. The British-based Observatory said 31 people were killed as a result of air strikes on several areas of opposition-held Aleppo on Thursday. In addition, it said at least 27 people were killed in the air strike on the hospital late on Wednesday. Rescue workers put the toll higher. In government areas, rebel mortar shelling killed at least 14 people, the Observatory and Syria's state news agency SANA reported. The war in Syria has killed more than 250,000 people though with tens of thousands unaccounted for, some say the death toll may be as high as 400,000. "WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?" The bombed al-Quds hospital was supported by international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which said it was destroyed after being hit by a direct air strike that killed at least three doctors. This devastating attack has destroyed a vital hospital in Aleppo, and the main referral centre for paediatric care in the area," said Muskilda Zancada, MSF head of mission, Syria. "Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage? ICRC spokesman Ewan Watson told Reuters in Geneva: "It is unacceptable, any attack on hospitals is a war crime. But it is up to an investigator and it is for a court to take that decision on whether it is a war crime or not." Peace talks, which have been deeply divided on the future of Assad, looked to be over last week when the opposition walked out, saying the Syrian government was stalling for time to advance on the ground, and calling for implementation of a U.N. resolution requiring full humanitarian access to besieged areas. De Mistura voiced deep concern at the truce unravelling in Aleppo and at least three other places, but also said he saw some narrowing of positions between the government and opposition visions of political transition. "Hence my appeal for a U.S.-Russian urgent initiative at the highest level, because the legacy of both President Obama and President Putin is linked to the success of what has been a unique initiative," de Mistura told a news conference. They should "be able to revitalise what they have created and which is still alive but barely". The United States and Russia must convene a ministerial meeting of major and regional powers who compose the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), he said. Egeland said: "So the appeal of Staffan de Mistura to the United States, to Russia and to the other powers in the ISSG is 'you did it once, you can do it again.'" FUTURE OF ASSAD CRITICAL Bashar Ja'afari, who led the government delegation, has given no sign of ceding to the opposition HNC's central demand for a political transition without Assad. The government has said the future of Assad is non-negotiable. De Mistura, asked whether Assads fate was discussed, replied: "We didnt get into names of people ... but actually how to change the current governance." The U.N. envoy said the two sides remained far apart in their vision of a political transition, but shared some "commonalities", including the view "that the transitional governance could include members of the present government and the opposition, independents and others". Giving a chilling statistic about the backdrop of violence against which the talks played out, de Mistura said that in the past 48 hours there had been an average of one Syrian civilian killed every 25 minutes and one wounded every 13 minutes. Hossam Abu Ghayth, 29, a documentary film-maker living in the rebel-held area of Kalasa in Aleppo which was bombed on Thursday, said by WhatsApp: "There are still planes ... They're hitting everything, mosques, markets, residential buildings, field hospitals. Dozens of people were under the rubble and the Civil Defence could not dig out the bodies because of the intensity of the bombardments, he said. Tony Ishak, 26, a resident of the government-held area of Suleimaniya in Aleppo and a politics student, said via WhatsApp: "It's been really bad for around four days now, the situation is worse than bad. Shells are falling like rain everywhere. The hospitals are full." (Writing by Peter Millership; Reporting by Lisa Barrington, Tom Perry, Suleiman al-Khalidi, John Davison, Stephanie Nebehay, Shadia Nasralla, Lesley Wroughton and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Giles Elgood)
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
A senior Army officer leading the military operation against the Abu Sayyaf in Sulu has been relieved following his reported resignation over operational disagreements with his superiors.

Brig. Gen. Alan Arrojado was replaced by Col. Jose Faustino Jr. as commander of the Armys 501st Brigade, a key Army unit directly involved in the operations against the Abu Sayyaf in the island province.

Arrojados relief came after last Mondays beheading of John Ridsdel, one of two Canadians and two others held hostage by the Abu Sayyaf since September last year.

Arrojado was earlier stripped of his command as overall commander of the Joint Task Group-Sulu (JTGS), a move that removed him of operational control over all military units engaged in fighting the Abu Sayyaf in Sulu.

For the last 18 months, he led the campaign against the Abu Sayyaf in the island of Jolo. Army officers usually serve a minimum of one year and six months in major positions to complete their billet requirements, military spokesman Brig. Gen. Restituto Padilla said, explaining why Arrojado was replaced.

Padilla, however, belied reports that Arrojado has resigned his position, stressing the military manual prohibits the resignation of an officer from his assignment unless he is being relieved of his post.

In Arrojados case, he is being replaced not because of the Ridsdel beheading but as part of a routine movement within the military where officers are reassigned to another position, Padilla said.

According to the Army manual, no army officer, aside from major position, can resign because it is covered by orders. Everything is covered by orders. Its written in the order that an officer signed, during an assumption of command, that he will only relinquish his post when properly relieved, Padilla said.

There were reports that Arrojado was so disappointed that he resigned his position after figuring in a shouting match with his superior officer, Maj. Gen. Gerardo Barrientos, commander of the 1st Infantry Division. Barrientos earlier replaced Arrojado as Joint Task Force Sulu commander.

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The shouting match, according to sources, was triggered by disagreements between the two officers over the Samal hostage crisis setback with the execution of Ridsdel.

Three other Samal hostages, aside from 14 Indonesians and four Malaysians being held captive by the Abu Sayyaf, are Canadian Robert Hall, Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstand and Halls Filipina girlfriend, Maritess Flor.

The bandits, asking for P300 million ransom for each of the Samal victims, issued a final ultimatum that they would executive one of the captives if their ransom demand was not met earlier this week.

Arrojado reportedly dismissed the Abu Sayyaf ultimatum and took it upon himself to rescue the hostages at all cost despite dissenting opinions of his superiors, who in turn aired a different approach in solving the crisis, including the conduct of discreet negotiations with the bandits.
He called for a more clean and righteous cyberspace, urging officials to engage with the public for feedback, suggestions, and well-meant criticism

The President of China, Xi Jinping, sent out mixed messages on April 19 in a speech that was released on Monday. He called for a more clean and righteous cyberspace, while urging officials to engage with the public for online feedback, suggestions, and well-meant criticism.

For well-meant criticism raised on the Internet, be it aimed at the overall work of the Party and the state, or at individual officials, be it gentle or harsh-sounding, we will not only welcome it, but also study it for future reference, said Chinese state media outlet Xinhua, paraphrasing Xis speech in English.

Xis comments come amid heightened censorship that has affected players across the board, from tech companies to human rights advocates. In December 2015, renowned humans right lawyer Zhiqiang Pu was charged with eight years of prison for seven tweets on Chinese social media site Weibo. Last week, iTunes Movies and iBooks were blocked from Chinas internet, following new guidelines on publishing content by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) that were enacted on March 10.

China cannot and will not shut its door to the world, said Xi, contrary to the actions carried out on Apples two content platforms. We welcome foreign internet enterprises as long as they abide by Chinese laws and regulations.

Also Read: How Chinas new tariff rules will impact e-commerce business

As China continues to pursue its Internet Plus strategy, aiming to make homegrown entrepreneurs and information-based services the core of Chinas economy, the Chinese government faces a difficult balancing act: The public sphere must remain sanitised and clean, yet creativity must be cultivated and allowed to grow. According to Xi Jinpings speech, part of the solution lies in promoting collaboration between tech companies, as well as academic and research institutions.

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Unlike Microsoft, Intel, Google and Apple, Chinese internet enterprises do not cooperate well with each other on research, which is one of the reasons why there is a large gap between China and other countries, said Xi.

Xis speech underscores his vision for Chinas cyberspace as one where open data and access are privileges enjoyed by an elite few, such as select companies and government organisations. In contrast, the public is seen in a more paternalistic light, and must be guided away from slanders, rumors, [and] crimes.

Internet users come from many places, each with their own experiences, and opinions. Therefore, it is too much to ask them to be right on every topic, said Xi.

Government officials will need to be patient when dealing with the public, as Netizens are susceptible to fuzzy ideas and wrong perceptions, he said. At the same time, public opinion is an important source of information that government officials can leverage.

Xis speech also reemphasised the importance of cybersecurity, especially in the industries of finance, energy, transportation, and telecommunication. Increased Internet access to more rural and impoverished areas was also mentioned in Xis speech, as was the concept of cyber-sovereignty, which Xi announced during the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen last December.



The article Xi Jinpings call to clean cyberspace highlights crossroads in Chinas Internet future was first published on TechNode.

The post Xi Jinpings call to clean cyberspace highlights crossroads in Chinas Internet future appeared first on e27.
STEM

MathWorks and The Discovery Museums Bring Hands-On STEM Workshops to Schools

The two partners will continue to bring interactive STEM workshops to students throughout New England.

The Discovery Museums has renewed its partnership with MathWorks in Natick, MA to continue to bring the Traveling Science Workshops (TSW) program to elementary and middle schools. Entering their sixth year of collaboration, the partners host a variety of state curriculum-based workshops for pre-K8 classrooms throughout New England.

For the last 23 years, the TSW program has delivered its 17 classroom-based, hands-on workshops that teach students lessons ranging from electromagnetism to lasers to weather. The program reached more than 1,400 classrooms in Massachusetts and 29,000 students last year alone.

This is our sixth year supporting the Museums Traveling Science Workshop because it is a unique and impactful program that brings hands-on science, technology, engineering and math to students in a fun and accessible way, said Kevin Lorenc, director of corporate communications at MathWorks.

With MathWorks ongoing support, weve been able to bring hands-on science to kids throughout the Commonwealth, letting them experience doing science rather than just hearing or reading about it, said Neil Gordon, CEO of The Discovery Museums.

Aside from the TSW program, MathWorks has funded accessibility programs at The Discovery Museums. The company also sends employees to volunteer at the museums several days of the year. In 2014, the partners received a Partners of the Year award from the Boston Business Journal in recognition of their impact on the community.
An illuminated sign is seen at an Argos store in London, Britain January 13, 2016. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth

By James Davey

LONDON (Reuters) - Argos-owner Home Retail (HOME.L), which agreed last month to be taken over by British supermarket Sainsbury's (SBRY.L), said on Wednesday it did not expect to hear what the competition regulator thinks of the deal until August.

The home and general merchandise retailer's board recommended a 1.4 billion pound cash and shares bid from Sainsbury's last month. The deal is expected to complete in the third quarter of this year, assuming there is no major intervention from the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA).

Some analysts fear the deal could yet be delayed by a long wait for regulatory approval.

"The likely timetable for us for having any feedback, at the very earliest it's going to be some time in the summer ... probably August would be our best guess," Home Retail's Finance Director Richard Ashton told reporters.

"We would think that we wouldnt have issues over time but its too early to tell," Chief Executive John Walden added.

A spokeswoman for the CMA said Home Retail and Sainsbury's were currently in an informal pre-notification phase with the parties voluntarily providing information.

After that process concludes the regulator will launch a formal "Phase 1" up to 40 working days inquiry, after which it can either clear the deal, seek remedies or move to a "Phase 2" 24-week investigation.

Sainsbury's wants Argos to accelerate its growth by creating Britain's largest general merchandise retail business and by expanding its online presence.

On Wednesday Home Retail reported a 28 percent fall in annual profit, reflecting tough markets and increased investment.

It made an underlying pretax profit of 94.7 million pounds for the year to Feb. 27, down from the 132.1 million pounds made in 2014-15. However, it beat analysts' average forecast of 93 million pounds.

Sainsbury's would have been well aware of market expectations for Home Retail's profit.

Group sales fell 1 percent to 5.67 billion pounds. They were flat at Argos and down 3 percent at home improvement retailer Homebase.

Story continues

Shares in Home Retail, up 71 percent so far this year, were down 0.6 percent at 169.3 pence at 0939 GMT.

In February Home Retail sold Homebase to Australian group Wesfarmers (WES.AX) for 340 million pounds. Wesfarmers intends to rebrand the chain as Bunnings and invest 500 million pounds refurbishing its 265 stores.

Home Retail said recommendation of Sainsbury's offer resulted in an exceptional goodwill impairment charge of 852 million pounds, leading to a total loss after tax for the 2015-16 year of 808 million pounds.

The goodwill, which has remained unchanged for decades, had to be aligned to the value of Sainsbury's offer.

Walden declined to comment when asked if Home Retail/Argos' top management wanted to stay after the Sainsbury's takeover.

(Editing by Susan Fenton)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Euro zone finance ministers will hold an extraordinary meeting on May 9 in Brussels on Greece, the spokesman for the chairman of the eurogroup said on Thursday.

A meeting was initially foreseen on Thursday to sign off on a deal with Athens on its bailout programme and discuss Greek debt relief, but the meeting was cancelled because of insufficient progress towards an agreement.

There will be "an additional eurogroup on Greece on Monday May 9 at 3 p.m., in Brussels," chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem's spokesman said.

(Reporting by Jan Strupczewski; Writing by Francesco Guarascio; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
By Ahmad Ghaddar

LONDON (Reuters) - An Indian-flagged oil tanker is returning to Libya, the North African country's rival oil corporation said on Thursday, after its failed first attempt to export crude oil led to the ship being blacklisted by the United Nations Security Council.

The Distya Ameya tanker is heading to the western Libyan port of Zawiya, said Nagi al-Maghrabi, chairman of the National Oil Corporation (NOC) set up by Libya's rival eastern government in parallel to the Tripoli-based NOC. The Tripoli NOC is recognised internationally as the legitimate seller of Libyan oil.

Magrabi told Reuters he would continue to fight for the right of the eastern NOC to export crude, describing the situation as "a legal issue and we will work on it."

The Tripoli NOC and its international backers say that if the eastern government succeeds in its long-held aim of selling oil independently, it would undermine a U.N.-backed unity government that arrived in Tripoli last month and put the political and economic future of Libya at risk.

The U.N. Security Council Libya sanctions committee blacklisted the Distya Ameya on Wednesday after receiving a request from the Libyan U.N. ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi. This requires states to ban it from entering any port.

The ship left Libya's Marsa el-Hariga port late on Monday carrying 650,000 barrels of crude and was currently near Malta. A source close to the situation said the cargo was to be offloaded at Zawiya and processed for use within the country.

Deepak Shetty, director general of shipping with India's Ministry of Shipping, said he had told the vessel's operator and the charterer to instruct the captain not to discharge the cargo "at all, anywhere."

"They will follow the U.N. guidance which will come to them through us," Shetty said. "They are now staying put ... no oil will be discharged even if the charterer wants them to. They will wait for the U.N. to tell us where the vessel will have to go."

Story continues

However, the U.N. spokesman's office in New York said the U.N. Libya mission was not involved in the issue at all.

Under U.N. Security Council resolutions adopted since 2014 on the illicit export of Libyan oil, it is up to states - not the United Nations - to direct designated vessels "to take appropriate actions to return the crude oil, with the consent of and in coordination with the Government of Libya, to Libya."

(Additional reporting by Nidhi Verma in NEW DELHI, Libby George in London, Michelle Nichols and Louis Charbonneau at the UNITED NATIONS and Aidan Lewis, writing by Jonathan Saul and Michelle Nichols, editing by Dale Hudson and Marguerita Choy)
DGAP-News: UNIWHEELS AG / Key word(s): Change of Personnel





The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.



UNIWHEELS AG expands the management board



Dr. Wolfgang Hiller appointed as Chief Operating Officer and Head of the Accessory division Bad Durkheim, 27th April 2016 At its meeting on 26 April 2016, the Supervisory Board of UNIWHEELS AG passed a resolution to appoint Dr. Wolfgang Hiller as an additional member to the Management Board effective 1 June 2016. As the Chief Operating Officer (COO), Dr. Hiller will be in charge of the production plants and is also assigned responsibility for the Accessory division. Dr. Hiller has many years of international experience in the automobile industry. His most recent post was at Buderus-Guss, Breidenbach, a brake manufacturer, where he was CEO. Prior to this appointment he spent many years at Bosch in Japan and Thailand, where he was a board member and senior managing director. Dr. Hiller completed his masters degree in physics in 1987 and earned his doctorate at the University of Bonn in physics and computer science. "The Supervisory Board is very pleased to have won such an internationally experienced executive for the Management Board and is convinced that he is the perfect match to accompany the strong growth in the group's production as the new plant in Poland goes into operation. Dr. Hiller will also focus on continued expansion of the Accessory business marketed under the UNIWHEELS brands, ATS, RIAL, ALUTEC and ANZIO." - says Ralf Schmid, UNIWHEELS AG Chairman of the Supervisory Board. The other members of the Management Board are Dr. Thomas Buchholz (CEO and Chairman) and Dr. Karsten Obenaus (CFO).

/ About UNIWHEELS: The UNIWHEELS Group is one of the leading manufacturers of aluminum wheels for cars in Europe and is one of the few technology leaders worldwide in the aluminum wheel industry. UNIWHEELS is Europe's third largest manufacturer of wheels supplying OEMs in the automobile industry and is the leading producer of alloy wheels for the aftermarket in Europe. The group's most well known proprietary brands are ATS, RIAL, ALUTEC and ANZIO. Currently the group has three production plants of which two are in Poland (Stalowa Wola) and one in Germany (Werdohl). The new plant (No. 4) will go into operation in the middle of the year and increase the group's maximum annual production capacity by roughly 2 million wheels. UNIWHEELS sees itself as one of the leading partners of the automotive industry for the optimum reduction of CO2 emissions by reducing the weight of alloy wheels. As well as weight-optimized construction methods, the following procedures are primarily used: Flow Forming, Lightforming, undercutting and forgecut. In 2015 UNIWHEELS Group had with a sales volume of 7.8 million wheels EUR 436.5 million of revenues and an EBITDA of EUR 58.7 million. 2,539 employees worked for the Group. Since 2015, UNIWHEELS AG is publicly listed on Main Market of Warsaw Stock Exchange. The UNIWHEELS stock is floated under security identification number A13STW, ISIN DE000A13STW4 and ticker symbol UNW. For more information please contact: Oliver Madsen

Head of Investor Relations

E-Mail: o.madsen@de.uniwheels.com

UNIWHEELS AG

Gustav-Kirchhoff-Str. 10

67098 Bad Durkheim

Germany



+++++

Additional features:



Document: http://n.eqs.com/c/fncls.ssp?u=TQOYQLPEBO

Document title: UNIWHEELS PR COO



2016-04-27 Dissemination of a Corporate News, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.



The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases.

Media archive at www.dgap-medientreff.de and www.dgap.de




LONDON (Reuters) - There are solutions to the high pension fund liability at the steel plant at Port Talbot in Wales that would not involve public money, Bimlendra Jha, the chief executive of Tata Steel UK, said on Thursday.

The government has said it is working with the pension scheme trustees of Tata Steel to reduce the impact on any purchaser, including whether it could separate the scheme from the business.

Jha said without action to solve Port Talbot's pension fund liability, there would be no buyer for the steel plant.

(Reporting by William James, writing by Elizabeth Piper; editing by Kate Holton)
Syria's fragile ceasefire is hanging by a thread after airstrikes on an Aleppo hospital killed at least 27 people, including a doctor believed to be the city's last paediatrician.

It comes as the UN called on the US and Russia to salvage the "barely alive" two-month truce and make urgent efforts to revitalise the peace process.

The four consecutive strikes hit and destroyed Al Quds hospital and nearby homes in the rebel-held district of Sukkari just before midnight on Wednesday.

Three children are believed to be among the dead, with Doctors Without Borders - which helps support the hospital - saying 14 patients and medical staff had died.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the total number of dead at at least 27.

Volunteer rescue team The White Helmets are continuing to dig through the debris in an attempt to locate and recover survivors.

A tweet from the Syrian Coalition said the number of dead could rise significantly.

Mohammed Alloush, the political leader of the country's Saudi-backed rebel group Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam), and one of the leading opposition negotiators at February's peace talks in Geneva, blamed the attack on President Bashar al Assad.

:: Syria's Ceasefire Has Been Blown To Pieces

"Whoever carries out these massacres needs a war tribunal and a court of justice to be tried for his crimes. He does not need a negotiating table," he said.

"Now, the environment is not conducive for any political action."

The ceasefire brokered by the US and Russia in February has been crumbling, as casualty figures from government and opposition violence escalate in Aleppo and across northern Syria.

Since mid-April some 200 people are reported to have been killed, including at least 44 in an airstrike on a market in a rebel-held area of Idlib and dozens of civilians in government-held areas during rebel shelling.

UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura expressed concern the truce was beginning to unravel in rebel-held areas and urged a new US and Russian initiative to save the peace process.

"There is no reason that both of them (that) have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war should not be able to revitalise what they have created and which is still alive but barely," he said.
By Colin Packham SYDNEY (Reuters) - Papua New Guinea said on Wednesday it will close an Australian immigration centre on a northern island after its Supreme Court ruled it unlawful, but Australia ruled out accepting more than 800 asylum seekers detained there. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton stressed the success of Australia's hard-line policy that has been strongly criticised by the United Nations and human rights agencies. Under Australian law, anyone intercepted trying to reach the country by boat is sent for processing to camps on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru or to Manus Island off Papua New Guinea. They are never eligible to be resettled in Australia. Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O'Neill said the detention centre would close after Papua New Guinea's Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the detentions breached the country's constitution and would have to stop. Dutton said that it was still government policy that asylum seekers sent to offshore detention centres would never be resettled in Australia. "As I have said, and as the Australian government has consistently acted, we will work with our PNG partners to address the issues raised by the Supreme Court of PNG," Dutton said in a statement after the announcement. O'Neill said he would ask Australia to make arrangements for the asylum seekers held on Manus Island, adding that they would be able to stay in Papua New Guinea if they wanted. A spokesperson for Dutton did not immediately respond for requests for comment on the closure but Dutton said in Melbourne that the Manus detainees could return home or go to another country willing to accept them. The detainees on Manus and Nauru are mostly refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East, Afghanistan and South Asia. While Australia maintains its hard-line stance, a second case concerning the fate of the detainees on Manus is set to be heard by the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court later this week. Lawyers acting on behalf of nearly all the Manus Island detainees will argue that they should be taken to Australia and be compensated for being held in custody. The detention centre on Nauru houses about 500 people and has been widely criticised by the United Nations and human rights agencies for harsh conditions and reports of systemic child abuse. Against such a backdrop, many of the detainees have self-harmed, with Dutton on Wednesday confirming that a 23-year-old man from Iran had set himself on fire on Nauru. Dutton said the man would be evacuated from Nauru later on Wednesday. Broadspectrum Ltd , which runs the detention centres on Manus and Nauru, declined to comment. (Additional reporting by Jane Wardell and Matt Siegel in SYDNEY; Editing by Nick Macfie)
BAKU (Reuters) - Azerbaijan said one civilian was killed and six were wounded by gunfire from the breakaway Armenian-backed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh early on Thursday, as tensions simmered weeks after an eruption of clashes. Both sides said they exchanged fire overnight and blamed each other for starting the fighting. A Moscow-brokered ceasefire halted four days of violence in the South Caucasus region on April 5, but sporadic shooting is still frequent at night. "One resident of Chemenli village in Agdam region was killed, six others were injured and taken to the hospital in a serious condition," the Azeri prosecutor general's office said in a statement. Azerbaijan's defence ministry said in a statement that it had carried out "retaliatory strikes" only on military targets after Nagorno-Karabakh's army hit its positions and villages from multiple rocket launchers. The defence ministry accused the Armenian-backed rebel region's armed forces of violating the ceasefire more than 117 times with the use of mortars and howitzers. It added that it had had to return fire. The defence ministry in the rebel region accused the Azeri armed forces of violating the ceasefire and shelling their positions from tanks, mortars, multiple rocket launchers. It also accused Azeri armed forces of violating the Geneva convention by taking up positions close to populated areas. Nagorno-Karabakh is a mountainous region within Azerbaijan's borders, populated mainly by ethnic Armenians who reject Azerbaijan's rule. With support from Armenia, they fought a war in the early 1990s to establish de facto control over the territory. The fighting this month was the most intense since a 1994 ceasefire that stopped the conflict but did not resolve the underlying dispute. (Reporting by Nailia Bagirova and Hasmik Mkrtchyan; Writing by Margarita Antidze; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
By Roberta Rampton and Stephen Kalin ERBIL, Iraq/BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden met Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and other top officials in unannounced visits to Baghdad and Erbil on Thursday to show support for a government battling Islamic State amid political and economic crises. It was the first visit for Biden, the White House's point person on Iraq, since U.S. forces withdrew in 2011 after nearly nine years of occupation. He was the third and highest-level U.S. official to visit the country this month. Islamic State, also known as ISIL, seized large portions of Iraq and neighboring Syria in 2014. Iraqi forces have won back some territory, such as the western city of Ramadi, but often after long battles that have left the areas destroyed. Biden's trip, several months in the planning, is a sign of the progress Washington believes Iraqi forces have made in beating back the militants over the past year and its hope that the northern city of Mosul can be recaptured before U.S. President Barack Obama leaves office in January. "This is a good indication of the United States' continued support for Prime Minister Abadi's efforts to unify the nation of Iraq to confront ISIL," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. The vice president has close relationships with Iraqi leaders and speaks with them about every 10 days. Still, "there's no substitute for being able to sit down face-to-face," a U.S. official said. Biden, a longtime U.S. senator before becoming vice president in 2009, said he had been to Iraq almost 30 times during his career. His first stop on Thursday was Baghdad where he met Abadi and Parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri to discuss "progress" in the fight against Islamic State, including plans to retake Mosul. "It's real. It's serious. It's committed," Biden told reporters. Iraqi officials say they will retake Mosul this year but, in private, many question whether that is possible. Biden hopes some progress can be made before the extreme summer heat, a senior administration official said. He later flew to Erbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, for a 90-minute working dinner with the Kurdistan region's president, Massoud Barzani, to discuss the Mosul offensive in which Kurdish peshmerga forces are expected to have a critical role. The peshmerga have emerged as a key component of a U.S.-led coalition's strategy to "degrade and destroy" Islamic State, driving the insurgents back in northern Iraq with the help of air strikes despite a financial crisis that has made it difficult to pay salaries. POLITICAL CRISIS Biden's trip also served to counter a "misperception in the region" that Iran, which backs powerful Shi'ite Muslim militias fighting Islamic State in Iraq, has undue influence in the nation, the U.S. official added. But it comes at a turbulent time in Iraqi politics. Abadi has faced resistance to a government overhaul aimed at tackling corruption. He won lawmakers' approval to replace a handful of ministers on Tuesday after delays and disruptions. The political battle has also sparked populist protests that forced the government to bring back troops from the front lines to secure the capital. U.S. officials have expressed concern that unrest could distract from the war effort. Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited Baghdad earlier this month to show their support. "It's been a pretty all-consuming political affair," a senior U.S. official told reporters, noting recent signs of a "calmer trajectory" in the drama. Obama has said he has seen "momentum" in the efforts of the coalition fighting Islamic State, and recently authorized more U.S. forces to go to Iraq and Syria to help train and assist local fighters. Their goal is to help Iraqi and Kurdish forces retake Mosul by the end of the year. The United States has already redeployed several thousand troops to Iraq to help defeat Islamic State. The White House is concerned that not enough is being spent to rebuild parts of Iraq devastated by the fight, a deficit made worse by the low price of oil, Iraq's main revenue source. The United Nations is urgently seeking $400 million from Washington and its allies for reconstruction, while Obama asked Gulf Arab leaders to assist during a visit to Riyadh last week. He also discussed the issue with European leaders in London and Hanover, Germany, and told reporters Iraqi reconstruction would be a topic for the G7 meeting in Japan next month and for NATO. Biden, whose late son Beau spent a year in Iraq with the Army, later spoke with U.S. troops and embassy workers. He showed them a daily tally of the number of U.S. troops serving, killed and injured in the line of duty that he carries in his front suit pocket. "The history of this region is a nightmare from which everyone is constantly trying to awake," he said, adapting a line from Irish novelist James Joyce. (Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Peter Cooney)
OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) - A court of appeals in Burkina Faso has rescinded a series of international arrest warrants, including those against deposed leader Blaise Compaore and neighbouring Ivory Coast's parliament speaker, a senior court official said on Thursday. A military tribunal in Burkina Faso investigating the murder of former President Thomas Sankara nearly three decades ago as well as a failed coup that took place last September had issued a total of 18 international warrants in December and January. However, the appeals court public prosecutor, Armand Ouedraogo, said the tribunal had failed to follow proper procedure when issuing the warrants. "The military court can take these warrants back and correct them," Ouedraogo said. Sankara, an African folk hero, disappeared and is believed to have been killed during the 1987 coup that brought Compaore to power. Compaore himself was ousted in 2014 by crowds opposing his bid to change the West African nation's constitution and extend his 27-year rule. Ivory Coast granted him citizenship and he currently resides there. Members of an elite unit loyal to Compaore attempted a coup against the transitional government that replaced him in September, but the putsch was put down by the regular army. One of a series of recorded telephone conversations later linked Guillaume Soro, a former rebel leader who is now the speaker of Ivory Coast's parliament, to the coup attempt. He has denied any involvement. (Reporting by Mathieu Bonkoungou; Editing by Jonathan Oatis; Writing by Joe Bavier; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
China continues to ramp up its space plans, which include a Mars rover mission set to launch in 2020.

Chinese officials have been discussing the Mars rover and other projected upcoming space initiatives  including moon missions and the construction of a space station in Earth orbit  recently, to help mark a "National Day of Spaceflight."

That day, which was celebrated on April 24, commemorated the 46th anniversary of the launch of Dongfanghong No. 1, China's first satellite. [Latest News About China's Space Program]

Five-year plan

Over the years, China has launched its Long March series of carrier rockets 226 times, with a success rate of over 96 percent, noted Xu Dazhe, administrator of the China National Space Administration.

Xu explained in a televised April 22 briefing that in 2016  the beginning of China's 13th Five-Year Plan  China's Mars Exploration Project has been officially approved, the National Civil Space Infrastructure Construction has been established, the moon-bound Chang'e-4 mission has been initiated, the Chang'e-5 lunar project has entered a key stage and the Beidou Navigation System has accelerated integration with global networking.

The "non-poisonous and pollution-free" Long March 5 and 7 boosters are also due for their maiden flights this year, Xu added in the briefing. (You can read a translated transcript of the speech here.)

China's Tiangong-2 space lab and Shenzhou-11 piloted craft, Gaofen-3 Satellite, Fengyun-4 Meteorology Satellite, Hard-X Ray Modulation Telescope Detection Satellite and Quantum Science Experiment Satellite will also be launched this year, Xu said.

Xu also noted that China has in place more than 100 cooperation agreements signed with 30 state-level space institutions and international organizations.

"Starting from this new point, we are willing to take a more open attitude and collaborate with other countries to compose a new chapter in space exploration and contribute to human welfare," Xu said.

Story continues

Mars rover

"The Mars mission marks China's entry into the de facto phase of deep-space exploration. Even though our spacecraft have already entered deep space, we need the Mars mission to help us improve our understanding of deep space," Xu said, according to China.org.cn.

Xu had reported earlier that the Mars mission is expected to orbit the Red Planet, land and deploy a rover all in one go, "which is quite difficult to achieve."Xu said the Mars project was approved by central authorities in January, according to the state-run news agency Xinhua.

Xu stressed the Mars mission's importance and difficulty, saying that, although China has already sent spacecraft deep into space, "only by completing this Mars probe mission can China say it has embarked on the exploration of deep space in the true sense," Xinhua reported.

Reusable rocket technologies

Xinhua also reported that China is working on its own reusable rocket technologies.

According to Xinhua, Chinese rocket specialists have built a prototype model to test theories on reusable rocket booster landing subsystems. They have completed "experimental verifications" using "multiple parachutes" apparently attached to the booster, said a source with China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technologies (CALT), the developer of China's Long March rocket series.

Ma Zhibin, deputy director of CALTs aerospace department, also confirmed to Xinhua that Chinese scientists are working on reusable rockets, although the technologies they employ may differ from those of Elon Musk and his SpaceX rocketeers.

"There is of course more than one way to do this  I believe we could see some serious results during the 13th Five-Year Plan period," Ma told Xinhua, referring to the five years between 2016 and 2020.

Space lab living room

In related Chinese space news, Wang Zhongyang, spokesman with the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), detailed more about the upcoming launch of the countrys second space lab, Tiangong-2, which is scheduled to lift off in the third quarter of this year.

Tiangong-2 is assigned various duties, including carrying out space science experiments and repair tests as a prelude to China's first orbital space station, which is expected to be in service around 2022.

Wang said Tiangong-2 has been modified from its predecessor, Tiangong-1. Those modifications will make the space lab more livable for crews.

"Unlike Tiangong-1, Tiangong-2 will be our first genuine space lab," Wang said, according to China Daily. A two-person Shenzhou-11 spacecraft is to be linked to Tiangong-2 in the fourth quarter of this year. The two male Chinese astronauts are expected to partake in a 30-day mission in the new space lab before returning to Earth.

The yet-to-be-identified Chinese astronauts are currently receiving training for the mission.

Tiangong-2 and China's first space cargo ship, Tianzhou-1, are to link up in the first half of 2017. Tianzhou-1 is to be orbited via a next generation Long March-7 rocket. During that mission, Chinese space authorities aim to verify key technologies such as in-space propellant refueling, China Daily reported.

Leonard David is author of "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet," to be published by National Geographic this October. The book is a companion to the National Geographic Channel six-part series coming in November. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us@Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on LeonardDavid.com.

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By Rod Nickel and Arathy S Nair (Reuters) - Canada's Potash Corp of Saskatchewan , the world's biggest fertilizer company by capacity, cut its full-year profit forecast due to weak demand and lower prices on Thursday, raising concerns of another dividend cut. The company in January cut its dividend by 34 percent to $1 on an annual basis. BMO analyst Joel Jackson said the dividend looked at risk of further reduction as it represents 143 percent of forecast profit this year. U.S.-listed shares of Potash fell 2 percent to $17.87 after the company posted an 80 percent plunge in first-quarter profit. Near term, cutting the dividend may be the best option, although Potash should weigh alternatives, such as selling stakes in other fertilizer companies, said Ryan Bushell, portfolio manager at Leon Frazer & Associates, which owns shares. "Long-term, we're not fans of companies that cut dividends to appease pressure," he said. "We're fans of companies that stick to their discipline." Potash owns stakes in Chinas Sinofert Holdings Ltd <0297.HK>, Israel Chemicals , Arab Potash Co PLC and Chiles SQM , worth a combined $4 billion. The company's cash flow may increase next year after finishing expansion of a Saskatchewan mine. Despite bleak current conditions, improving economic factors such as expected Chinese stimulus spending bodes well for a commodity rebound, Bushell said, adding that Potash is "weathering the storm" well by cutting production. Potash prices have plunged over the past year due to overcapacity and weak currencies in major consumers such as India and Brazil. The company cut its 2016 earnings forecast to a range of 60 to 80 cents per share from 90 cents to $1.20. Analysts expected 90 cents per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. "The guidance cut is deeper than anticipated, with the lower-half of the range meshing in our view with uber bear expectations," Jackson said. The company forecast second-quarter profit of 15 to 25 cents per share, below the average estimate of 27 cents. "Lower prices for all nutrients weighed on our performance for the quarter and contributed to a more subdued outlook for the year," Chief Executive Jochen Tilk said in a statement. Weak demand and increasing competition pressured potash prices in North America while a lack of new contracts in China and India limited global deliveries, the company said. Net earnings fell to $75 million, or 9 cents per share in the quarter from $370 million, or 44 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue fell 27.4 percent to $1.21 billion. (Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel, Shounak Dasgupta and W Simon)
By Ayman al-Warfalli BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - A government based in eastern Libya has shipped its first cargo of crude in defiance of authorities in the capital Tripoli, a bold move that could deepen the divisions that have brought chaos since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. The Tripoli authorities asked the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday to blacklist the India-flagged tanker Distya Ameya, which left the eastern Libyan port of Hariga overnight carrying oil they said could not be lawfully sold. The eastern government has set up its own National Oil Company (NOC) to act in parallel to the Tripoli-based NOC that is recognised internationally as the only legitimate seller of Libyan oil. The tanker departed Hariga carrying 650,000 barrels of crude late on Monday bound for Malta, said Mohamed al-Manfi, a spokesman for the eastern NOC. Maltese national TV said the ship was in international waters near Malta. The island's Port Directorate said the tanker was not authorised to dock there and requests would be refused. The ship last reported its position through the publicly available AIS tracking system earlier on Tuesday as still in Libyan waters. Libya's economy depends almost exclusively on oil export revenue and the fight over who controls those funds has driven chronic instability and civil war since long-serving autocrat Gaddafi was toppled and killed by Western-backed rebels in 2011. Parallel parliaments and governments have operated in Tripoli and the east since 2014. Much of the country is in the hands of dozens of armed groups loyal to one or other government, while small areas are controlled by Islamic State fighters. Political division, labour disputes and security threats have reduced Libya's oil output to less than a quarter of the 1.6 million barrels per day produced before the uprising. A U.N.-backed unity government, which arrived in the capital last month, includes figures from across Libya's divides but has not yet been fully accepted by either of the two loose alliances fighting for power since 2014. UN RESOLUTIONS It was not immediately clear how the eastern NOC could conduct a sale given the international opposition. One possibility might be to attempt a ship-to-ship transfer in international waters. "We are concerned about purchases of Libyan oil outside of legitimate channels," U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday, emphasizing all sales should go through the Tripoli-based National Oil Corporation. The United States has stopped unauthorised sales of Libyan oil in the past, sending special forces in 2014 to board a tanker off Cyprus loaded with crude shipped by a group pressing for more autonomy in eastern Libya. The U.S. troops forced that ship to return. Another senior U.S. official would not be drawn on whether Washington might undertake a similar operation, saying it would "look at all appropriate mechanisms to address the situation." If the shipment went through, it could spark copycat sales that would further shrink the unity government's revenues. "Thats very bad for Libya and very threatening, potentially, to the viability of any Libyan government," said the second U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Among U.S. concerns are that such oil sales could fund arms purchases by those resisting the unity government's authority. The eastern NOC has long been trying to sell its own oil, but until now those efforts have been blocked by the NOC in Tripoli, with the support of Western countries. The NOC in Tripoli says any sale by its eastern rival would breach U.N. Security Council resolutions and put the future of Libya's economy at risk. NOC Tripoli officials said on Tuesday they had notified the United Nations, countries with naval forces in the Mediterranean and a unity government now working in Tripoli that the shipment had not been authorised and should be stopped. "We have done our job and we are waiting for them to do theirs," said spokesman Mohamed al-Harari. The NOC in Tripoli has continued to run oil production throughout the crisis that followed Gaddafi's fall, with the funds paying state salaries across Libya, including many of the rival armed groups, which have generally been granted official status. The Tripoli NOC has retained international backing, and says it is working to plan future oil sales with the new U.N.-backed unity government. News of the eastern NOC's effort to export its first shipment of oil emerged late last week, when the NOC in Tripoli said it had prevented port workers from loading oil onto the Distya Ameya. It said the shipment had been ordered for a company called DSA Consultancy FZC, registered in the United Arab Emirates. (Additional reporting by Ahmad Gaddar and Libby George in London, Chris Scicluna in Valletta and Aidan Lewis in Tunis; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Peter Graff and James Dalgleish)
QUITO (Reuters) - Ecuador is negotiating credit lines to finance reconstruction after this month's devastating earthquake with multilateral agencies that include the International Monetary Fund, a government official said on Thursday. The Andean nation has already opened an emergency credit with multilateral agencies including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank for about $600 million, and plans to continue seeking additional financing. An IMF official on Wednesday said Ecuador had requested a credit line, without offering details. "The work has been positive, and right now (officials are) in negotiations both the (IMF) and with other multilateral agencies," said Planning and Development Secretary Sandra Naranjo in an interview. "We have to keep all our options open." She did not say which other agencies were involved in financing talks. Ecuador could receive up to $368 million (252 million pounds) through an IMF credit line, according to a Reuters calculation based on the rules governing such loans. Disbursements would depend on the country's balance of payments needs. President Rafael Correa, a harsh critic of IMF policies, has estimated the quake caused around $3 billion in damages and that the country will need "tens of millions of dollars" for reconstruction in the short term. That includes rebuilding some 6,600 homes, along with roads, schools and health centres affected by the 7.8 magnitude temblor that killed at least 659 people, according to the latest official estimates. (Reporting by Alexandra Valencia; Editing by Tom Brown)
Illinois claims the highest property tax rate among the 50 states and the District of Columbia at 2.67%, which works out to $2,670 for every $100,000 in value. Hawaiians pay the lowest property taxes, just 0.31%, or just $310 per $100,000 in valuation. The national median property tax rate is 1.31%, or $1,310 per $100,000 in valuation.

Trailing Illinois at the top of the list are New York (2.53%), New Hampshire (2.4%), New Jersey (2.37%) and Texas (2.17%). At the low end of the rankings, South Dakota (0.38%), Alabama (0.54%), Wyoming (0.65%) and Colorado (0.66%) trail Hawaii.

Of the states and D.C., 16 (31%) have a median property tax rate below 1%, while 28 (55%) have a rate between 1% and 2% and seven (14%) have a rate above 2%.

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The data were reported Wednesday by CoreLogic, which noted that property tax rates not only differ in amounts from state to state, but also in how many agencies get a piece of the pie. The researchers calculated the median overall property tax rate at the national and state level, taking into consideration all taxing and collection entities. The result provides a complete picture of the cost of owning real property.



CoreLogic also noted:

The analysis shows that higher median tax rates are seen primarily among states in the northeast, with Texas a notable exception at 2.17 percent, where there are multiple levels of tax collection. Conversely, the majority of states with low median tax rates have only a single level of tax collection at the county level. Other than Hawaii, the lowest median property tax rates are primarily in the Rocky Mountain regionin states like Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and South Dakotaas well as in southeastern states.

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In the following map, states shown in green have property taxes between 1% and 2%. States in blue have property taxes greater than 2%, and states in red have property taxes less than 1%.

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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan has done its best to root out militants from the Waziristan region, its foreign secretary said on Wednesday, after Afghanistan called for its neighbour to act against the Taliban and other groups aligned to the militants. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said on Monday that Taliban leaders were sheltering in the western Pakistani cities of Peshawar and Quetta, and he called on the government in Islamabad to wipe them out. Afghanistan has in the past also called for Pakistan to strike against the Haqqani network, which is blamed for past attacks in Kabul. Afghanistan has long accused Pakistan of actively harbouring the Afghan Taliban leadership on its soil, a charge Islamabad denies, saying it only has "limited influence". Ghani made his request after a bomb set off by the Taliban last week killed at least 64 people and wounded hundreds in Kabul, the biggest single attack in the capital since 2011. Responding to questions about Afghanistan's request for Pakistan to deal with the Haqqani militants believed to be in the north Waziristan region, Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry said Islamabad had already acted. "Pakistan has already taken all necessary action against all groups operating in north Waziristan and elsewhere," Chaudhry said in New Delhi, after meeting with his Indian counterpart. Pakistan has previously said that the Haqqani network militants, aligned to both al Qaeda and the Taliban, now mostly operate from inside Afghanistan after the Pakistani army launched operations against the group in north Waziristan. The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, are seeking to topple the Western-backed government in Kabul and reimpose Islamic rule. In recent months the Afghan government has been frustrated by what it sees as Islamabad's refusal to honour a pledge to force Taliban leaders based in Pakistan to join the talks, or face military action. (Reporting by Drazen Jorgic)
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan has done its best to root out militants from the Waziristan region, its foreign secretary said on Wednesday, after Afghanistan called for its neighbor to act against the Taliban and other groups aligned to the militants. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said on Monday that Taliban leaders were sheltering in the western Pakistani cities of Peshawar and Quetta, and he called on the government in Islamabad to wipe them out. Afghanistan has in the past also called for Pakistan to strike against the Haqqani network, which is blamed for past attacks in Kabul. Afghanistan has long accused Pakistan of actively harboring the Afghan Taliban leadership on its soil, a charge Islamabad denies, saying it only has "limited influence". Ghani made his request after a bomb set off by the Taliban last week killed at least 64 people and wounded hundreds in Kabul, the biggest single attack in the capital since 2011. Responding to questions about Afghanistan's request for Pakistan to deal with the Haqqani militants believed to be in the north Waziristan region, Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry said Islamabad had already acted. "Pakistan has already taken all necessary action against all groups operating in north Waziristan and elsewhere," Chaudhry said in New Delhi, after meeting with his Indian counterpart. Pakistan has previously said that the Haqqani network militants, aligned to both al Qaeda and the Taliban, now mostly operate from inside Afghanistan after the Pakistani army launched operations against the group in north Waziristan. The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, are seeking to topple the Western-backed government in Kabul and reimpose Islamic rule. In recent months the Afghan government has been frustrated by what it sees as Islamabad's refusal to honor a pledge to force Taliban leaders based in Pakistan to join the talks, or face military action. (Reporting by Drazen Jorgic)
By Reem Shamseddine KHOBAR, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - The world's biggest energy company Saudi Aramco outlined financing plans on Wednesday that will support its expansion into new areas under a sweeping economic reform plan released by Riyadh this week. The reforms envisage Aramco transforming itself from an oil and gas firm into a "global industrial conglomerate" involved in many sectors and services, using its vast financial resources to create jobs and help diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil. The plans suggest Saudi Arabia's state oil company, which Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman estimated this week was worth over $2 trillion, aims to move rapidly into its new role. "We will continue to build on our accelerated transformation and serve as a pillar, role model and champion of transformation in the kingdom," Aramco's official magazine, Arabian Sun, quoted chief executive Amin Nasser as saying. Aramco's board, which met in Tokyo last week, decided to provide interim financing for a planned shipyard at the town of Ras al-Khair on Saudi Arabia's east coast, the magazine said without giving details. In January, Aramco signed a memorandum of understanding to establish the shipbuilding and repair complex with National Shipping Co of Saudi Arabia (Bahri), a subsidiary of Lamprell Plc, a United Arab Emirates-based engineering firm, and South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries. The company did not reveal the size of the project, but an oil industry source aware of the scheme said it was expected to cost several billion dollars. Aramco's board also decided to set up joint ventures for onshore and offshore drilling rig services, the magazine said without giving details of those ventures. Traditionally, Aramco has relied heavily on outside contractors to provide it with such services, but it now wants to control more of those businesses to create jobs for Saudis, stimulate local demand and control costs. The board approved an additional equity contribution for its Sadara petrochemical joint venture with U.S. firm Dow Chemical, Arabian Sun said, without disclosing the size of the capital injection. Aramco also approved the creation of a programme to issue Islamic bonds (sukuk), the magazine added. It gave no details, but since the capacity of the Saudi banking sector to lend is being squeezed by low oil prices, bankers think Aramco might sell foreign currency debt in the international market. The reform plan is expected to be accompanied by a big increase in foreign borrowing by the Saudi government and companies as Riyadh juggles the need to pursue development projects with a large state budget deficit caused by cheap oil. EXECUTIVES Under the reform plan, a stake of less than 5 percent of Aramco is to be offered to the public, as well as stakes in some subsidiaries. An initial public offering of Aramco, which will be a complex process given the company's size and strategic importance, may occur in 2017 or 2018. Aramco officials quoted in the magazine on Wednesday did not comment on the IPO beyond saying they welcomed it as a way to participate in the reform programme. Also announced on Wednesday were several appointments to senior posts in Aramco, including four people to the level of vice president. Nabeel al-Mansour was appointed general counsel, the first Saudi to hold that post. One goal of the reform programme is to move local citizens into jobs, both senior and junior, for which Saudi Arabia has traditionally relied on foreigners. Comments by top Aramco officials over the past few months indicate the company sees itself not just as a big investor, but as an agent for moving the economy beyond dependence on oil. For example the firm, which has about 60,000 employees, plans to use its extensive educational and vocational training programmes to help create the human capital needed for the transformation. "Saudi Aramco will be a bridge for a transition away from itself," the company's chairman Khalid al-Falih told a business conference in January. (Writing by Andrew Torchia; Editing by Catherine Evans)
Evening Standard

Max Verstappen has won his second Formula One world title but is still yet to receive his official trophy. F1 is unusual in comparison to most sports, which hand out the major prize immediately after the season finishes. It has led to some atypical sights in previous years with Lewis Hamilton winning the 2019 title having finished second in Austin while he was not even on the podium when claiming the championship in Mexico a year earlier, forcing him to run around the track to enjoy a moment in front of the fans.
By Andrius Sytas SIAULIAI AIR BASE, Lithuania (Reuters) - Two of the U.S. Air Force's most advanced jets landed in Lithuania for the first time on Wednesday in a show of force and support for a region worried by Russian military manoeuvres. The Baltic states and Washington have been riled by acts by Russian warplanes in the region in recent weeks, including one making "simulated attack passes" near a U.S. warship and another passing within 50 feet of a U.S. reconnaissance plane. The two U.S. Air Force F-22 fighters landed in Romania earlier this week and F-22s last year visited Poland and Estonia, all counties concerned about Russian military ambitions. The jets spent 20 minutes making three low-flying passes with aerial acrobatics over Lithuania's Siauliai air base before landing to be met by President Dalia Grybauskaite. "Without singling out any neighbour, I would like to say that no one has any right to poke their noses into here," Grybauskaite told reporters. "This is a demonstration that the United States is honouring its commitments and is ready to protect our region with all the most modern measures." Lithuania and its Baltic neighbours Estonia and Latvia are former parts of the Soviet Union which today are members of NATO. After Russian intervention in Ukraine, they asked the military alliance to permanently deploy up to 5,000 troops as a deterrent, a request that is still under consideration. In April, Russia's envoy to NATO accused the United States of trying to put pressure on Moscow by sailing a warship near the Kaliningrad enclave, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. F-22s, the newest U.S. fighter planes, are almost impossible to detect on radar and are so advanced that the U.S. Congress has banned Lockheed Martin from selling them abroad. (Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Robin Pomeroy)
By David Alexander WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military conducted "freedom of navigation" operations against 13 countries last year, including several in dispute of China's claims in the South and East China seas, according to an annual Pentagon report released on Monday. The operations were against China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Malaysia, the Maldives, Oman, the Philippines and Vietnam, the report said. It did not specify how many such operations were conducted against each of those countries. The U.S. military carried out single operations against Taiwan, Nicaragua and Argentina, for a total of 13 countries, the department said in the two-page report. The freedom of navigation operations involve sending U.S. Navy ships and military aircraft into areas where other countries have tried to limit access. The aim is to demonstrate that the international community does not accept such restrictions. The U.S. military has repeatedly conducted operations disputing China's maritime claims in recent years and did so again in 2015, a year in which Beijing's island-building activity in the resource-rich areas of the South China Sea led to rising tensions in the region. A U.S. guided-missile destroyer conducted a freedom of navigation patrol near one of China's man-made islands in the Spratly archipelago in October. U.S. military flights near the islands have been warned to go away. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the Navy would continue to operate in the region despite China's condemnation of the patrols. Admiral Harry Harris, the head of U.S. Pacific Command, said this year the Navy would step up the freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea because of concerns China is attempting to assert its dominance by building military facilities there. U.S. freedom of navigation operations last year also challenged China's claims of jurisdiction in the airspace above its maritime Exclusive Economic Zone as well as restrictions it has tried to impose on aircraft flying through an Air Defense Identification Zone over the East China Sea. The number of countries the United States challenged last year was down from 2014, when it targeted 19 countries. That was the largest number in more than a decade. Iran and the Philippines have been the most frequently challenged countries over the years, mainly because they sit astride heavily traveled sea lanes whose use they have tried to limit or govern. (Reporting by David Alexander; Editing by Peter Cooney)
By Yeganeh Torbati and Idrees Ali WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States borrowed an Israeli military tactic known as "roof knocking" to try to warn civilians before it dropped a bomb targeting Islamic State fighters in Iraq this month, but a woman was killed in the attack, a U.S. military official said on Tuesday. The controversial tactic consists of firing a warning missile above or near an intended target, to give residents time to flee before the real strike. The Israeli military used such "roof knocks" in the 2014 Gaza war, but a United Nations commission found in 2015 that the tactic was not effective, because it often caused confusion and did not give residents enough time to escape. The United States used the tactic in an April 5 operation in the Iraqi city of Mosul. One woman who initially did leave the targeted building but then ran back inside was killed, a U.S. defense official said. Air Force Major General Peter Gersten, deputy commander for operations and intelligence for the U.S.-led coalition, said the airstrike targeted a building that housed a member of Islamic State in charge of distributing money to fighters, as well as being a cash storage site. U.S. intelligence and reconnaissance aircraft tracked the site and observed that a woman and children also frequented the house, which the United States believed to contain about $150 million. Looking to ensure they and any other non-combatants were clear of the building, the military turned to a tactic used by the Israeli Defense Forces in some of its operations against Hamas militants, Gersten said. The plan consisted of firing a Hellfire missile above the building "so it wouldn't destroy the building, simply knock on the roof to ensure that she and the children were out of the building," he said. "We've certainly watched and observed their procedure," Gersten said of the Israelis, while noting that the military did not coordinate with the Israelis on the strike. "As we formulated the way to get the civilians out of the house, this (technique) was brought forward from one of our experts." But the woman ran back into the building after the U.S. warplane had fired its weapon, Gersten said, adding that it was "very difficult for us to watch and it was within the final seconds of the actual impact." The U.S.-led coalition could employ the roof knock technique again in the future, he said. The air campaign against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria has been a key part of the U.S. plan to eventually destroy the hardline Sunni militant group. But Islamic State's presence in major Iraqi and Syrian cities has made it difficult to destroy its most important headquarters, because of concerns about killing scores of innocents in the process. The U.S. military acknowledges killing 41 civilians so far in the air campaign, which began in 2014. (Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Phil Stewart and Frances Kerry)
By William James MIHAIL KOGALNICEANU AIR BASE, Romania (Reuters) - For the squadron of U.S. fighter pilots standing on the runway of an air base in Romania, the mission is clear: show that the United States is ready to flex its military muscles if needed, and don't provoke the Russians. Two advanced F-22 U.S. fighters flew to the base on the Black Sea on Monday for the first time since Washington beefed up military support for NATO's eastern European allies, who say they are under pressure from an increasingly aggressive Russia. The men behind the exercise, taking smartphone pictures of their planes and handing out badges and uniform patches to local Romanian crews, know their job is not to lock horns with President Vladimir Putin's pilots, but to keep their NATO friends happy. "We're not here to provoke anybody, we're here to work with our allies," says Dan Barina, a 26-year-old pilot on his first trip to a region where tensions have risen markedly since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Romania's neighbour Ukraine two years ago. But they also know that the risks of operating in the region are real. This month, two Russian warplanes flew simulated close-quarters attack passes near a U.S. guided missile destroyer in the Baltic Sea. "I guess you can watch the video and see for yourself how those intercepts are," said Dan Naim, another F-22 pilot, smiling wryly as he chewed cinnamon-flavoured gum on board a refuelling plane accompanying the fighters. "If you want to intercept people over international waters, we just want to encourage them to do that in a safe way." Knowing that their opponents may want to engage in a high-stakes mid-air staring contest with the West, how would the pilots handle an airborne encounter with a Russian jet? "The type of missions we run generally are offensive-defensive types of mission. You're looking to be cool, calm and collected," said Rob Morgan, a short time after stepping out of the cockpit of his F-22 at the Romanian base. "Our actions definitely do have greater consequences. We're very, very careful with what we do. The mission planning that went into something like this was extensive." But, laughing, joking and poking around the overgrown cold-war-era Russian-made MiG-29 jets on display at the base, the pilots wear the responsibility of flying the frontier between Putin's Russia and the West lightly. "Until you're in that situation, I don't know if you really do know what it feels like," said Barina - nicknamed 'Scream' because he reminds some of the figure in Edvard Munch's expressionist painting. "If it's got to be done, it's got to be done. I'm not sure I'd think about a whole lot else ... It's the job we all signed up for." (Reporting by William James; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Kevin Liffey)
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.
Italian buyout firm Alto Partners has sold its entire 95% stake in BIA, a European producer and distributor of couscous, to B.F. S.p.A., which is the holding company of Bonifiche Ferraresi.
Modified On Apr 28, 2016 01:02 PM By Arun

German automaker, Mercedes-Benz has proposed shifting its entire range of diesel passenger and commercial vehicles to run on biodiesel. This proposal comes in the wake of the Delhi diesel ban that disallows sales of diesel vehicles with engines larger than 2,000cc. The interim ban was initially slated to end on March 31, but, was extended till further notice.

"Mercedes has given me a letter that they can use 100% biodiesel in their cars and buses," road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari said. He went on to add, "Mercedes India chief has told me that the standards which we have prescribed for biodiesel can be easily used to power their motors".

The authorities are expected to issue a notification on the matter soon. Nitin Gadkari said he was already in talks with the petroleum ministry to make bio-diesel available at petrol pumps. He also mentioned that other manufacturers, such as JCB had proposed a similar move. The switch to biodiesel will help keep the emissions in check. It is a cleaner source of energy as compared to standard diesel and is renewable as well.

Mercedes has been amongst the worst hit by the diesel ban. More than ten vehicles from the automaker's line-up cannot be sold in Delhi since they house motors larger than 2.0-litre capacity. The biodiesel proposal may allow the automaker to resume sales in the capital. Mercedes has been vocal about its displeasure with the ban and went on to say it had been difficult to get investments as well. You can read the detailed report here.
Modified On Apr 28, 2016 05:43 PM By Nabeel for Audi Q2

Audi has generated a buzz while teasing its new baby SUV, the Q2. Its popularity was well noticed by the Indian auto enthusiasts and when the car was revealed at the 2016 Geneva Motor Show, it was welcomed with open arms. Unlike its elder siblings, the Q3, the Q5 and even the Q7, the Q2 is rather sporty and fun. And since it has to be priced below the Q3, the Q2 might very well be the cheapest Audi available in the country!

The Q3 SUV has become a fairly popular car, courtesy the embracement of the SUV culture by the masses. Customers are content with the entry point price and the fact that it comes from the stable of a luxury carmaker. Although, the Q2 shares the MQB platforms with the Q3, it is more advanced and features the new Q lineup design.

Expected to be priced around the INR 25 lakhs mark, the Q2 will be cheaper than the BMW X1, the 1 Series (INR 30 lakhs, ex-showroom, Delhi), the locally produced Mercedes-Benz GLA, the CLA and the most affordable Mercedes, the A-Class (INR 27.4 lakhs, ex-showroom, Delhi). If priced below the Audi A3, the Q2 could be the cheapest luxury car in India and this can potentially redefine Audis sales in the country.

Also, at the said price, the Q2 will snatch some buyers from the premium SUV segment, which hosts seven-seater cars such as the Endeavour and the Trailblazer.But a buyer who are solely in search of a good SUV, might be attracted to the Q2.

It appears to be nimble and sporty from the side profile, courtesy the sloping roof line and the partial floating roof. The front, on the other hand, looks aggressive with the big, in- your-face grille, and bold air dam surrounds and stylish LED headlamps. The rear profile is rather subtle and features a roof mounted spoiler, a skid plate and dual exhaust place on the left-hand side. The car measures 4,191mm L X 2,009mm W X 1,508 H and is compact exteriors as well as interiors.

The Q2 will most likely arrive next year in India. We cant wait to take this car for a spin and provide you with more insights. Till then, do tell us how the car looks and given a chance, will you buy one?

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Published On Apr 28, 2016 06:31 PM By CarDekho

The past few months have been pretty stressful for diesel carmakers in India. The Supreme Court-imposed blanket ban on the registration of new 2000cc-plus diesel cars in the NCR, which contributes to more than 12 percent of the total new car volumes in the country, has had several of them reconsider their strategies on the Indian shores.

However, the countrys fourth-largest carmaker, Toyota is taking the bull by its horns and is reportedly all set to launch a new Rs 1,000 crore diesel engine plant in the country by the third week of June. The facility is expected to be able to manufacture around 1.08 lakh units annually.

Toyota Kirloskar Motor vice chairman Vikram Kirloskar has stressed on continuing with Diesel engine technology as an integral part. That too, considering the stringent fuel efficiency norms being introduced in the year 2017.

The new plant in Bengaluru will be formally launched in the third week of June. The engine in question is the new GD series that was designed in the year 2015 to replace the KD series. These engines feature the economy with superior thermal efficiency combustion (ESTEC) technology and are concurrently manufactured at Japan, Thailand and now in India. This engine complies with BS IV/Euro 4 emission standards and can be upgraded to Euro 5 and 6 with minimum investment and lead time, one top official told the Times of India.

Generating employment for more than 500 people, the high-performance diesel engine manufacturing plant is Toyotas first such endeavour in India. These powerplants will be manufactured for local consumption while Toyota has revealed no export plans as of now.

Toyota had reportedly halted new investments in India after the diesel car ban but it now seems to have backtracked on its statement. As for its portfolio in the country, the Japanese carmaker is currently preparing the launch of its popular Innova MPV in the Crysta avatar next week.
Police try block the area near the site of a bombing, in Bursa, north-western Turkey, on April 27, 2016 (AFP Photo/-, Ihlas News Agency) (Ihlas News Agency/AFP)

Ankara (AFP) - Turkish police on Thursday arrested 12 suspects as they stepped up efforts to identify a female bomber who blew herself up in the city of Bursa, wounding 13 people, state media said.

The arrests took place in Bursa, Istanbul, the southeastern city of Sanliurfa and Afyon in central Turkey, Anatolia news agency said.

Wednesday's bombing, the latest attack to strike Turkey, took place near Bursa's 14th century Grand Mosque, a historic symbol of the city that was the first capital of the Ottoman empire.

Of the 13 who were hurt, eight were still in hospital on Thursday. None of them suffered critical injuries, local officials said.

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, which was carried out by a woman, according to Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Local newspapers however said the Islamic State group, which is blamed for previous deadly attacks in Turkey, was likely behind the latest assault.

They also said the bomber may have detonated her explosives prematurely, avoiding a higher toll. Police have taken her fingerprints and experts are carrying out DNA tests to identify her.

Turkey remains on high security alert after a series of deadly attacks since last summer blamed on IS and Kurdish rebels.

The latest attack came a day after the US embassy in Ankara warned tourists in Turkey of possible threats as the summer season approaches.
* Bonds is Australia's top selling underwear brand

* Offer at 22 pct premium to Pacific Brands' Wed closing price

* Pacific Brands' board recommends the offer, shares up 23 pct (Adds analyst quote and Pacific Brands' adviser; updates shares)

By Byron Kaye

SYDNEY, April 28 (Reuters) - A century after an American founded Australia's biggest underwear brand Bonds, the label is set to return to U.S. ownership after its parent company accepted a A$1.1 billion ($836 million) buyout by clothesmaker HanesBrands Inc.

Sydney-listed Pacific Brands Ltd said on Thursday it agreed to an all-cash takeover by North Carolina-based HanesBrands.

The offer, at a 22 percent premium to Pacific Brands' closing price on Wednesday, came after the Australian company underwent an overhaul by moving its manufacturing to China and reshuffling its portfolio of products.

"After a number of years of very hard work restructuring the business and getting it into good shape... a very high quality company has recognised all that and said 'we'd like to talk to you'," Pacific Brands' Chairman Peter Bush told Reuters.

Following a period of losses and weak profits as well as political pressure over plans to stop manufacturing in Australia, Melbourne-based Pacific Brands posted its highest interim net profit since 2012 in February. Before the HanesBrands announcement, its shares had tripled since mid-2015.

On Thursday, the shares rose another 23 percent to A$1.155, their highest closing since 2010 and higher than HanesBrands' A$1.15 offer price, a sign some investors believe Pacific Brands may receive a counter-offer.

"That's what that implies, people are speculating that it's small," said a retail analyst who asked not to be identified because he was not authorised to comment outside of published research.

"It is a recommended bid and a cash offer so there is a floor there, but it will see if it flushes anyone else out."

In a separate statement, HanesBrands said the buyout, its sixth in three years, would add Australia and New Zealand to the countries where it has the biggest or second-biggest share of the underwear market.

Story continues

Bonds, started in Australia as a women's hosiery importer by U.S. businessman George Allan Bond in 1915, is Australia's biggest selling brand of men's underwear, women's underwear, children's underwear, babywear and socks.

Pacific Brands' Bush declined to comment on the new owner's plans but noted that HanesBrands owns manufacturing facilities in China due to which "there's some very good synergies".

HanesBrands was advised by Goldman Sachs & Co, while Macquarie Group advised Pacific Brands.

($1 = 1.3160 Australian dollars) (Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Richard Pullin and Muralikumar Anantharaman)
Shopping for car insurance, like many other types of shopping, has largely moved online, a new J.D. Power study finds, but it adds that while consumers shop for insurance online, many still make the actual purchase through an agent.

The study found that 74% of shoppers use insurer websites or aggregators for obtaining quotes and researching information. While nearly half of customers obtain a quote via insurer websites, only 25% actually purchase their policy online; 50% close through an agent and 22% phone a call center.

While many customers want to shop online, they often still want to talk to someone when they buy their insurance to make sure they are getting the right coverage or have questions about their policy answered, said Hoeg. Insurers need to focus on the delicate balance of providing an easy shopping experience while providing product differentiation and professional service.

Rankings

Erie Insurance and Liberty Mutual tied for first place in providing a satisfying purchase experience, each with a score of 853. This marks the fourth consecutive year Erie Insurance has ranked highest in the study.

The Hartford ranks third (850); American Family fourth (845); and Automobile Club Group fifth (840).

Now in its 10th year, the J.D. Power U.S. Insurance Shopping Study measures auto insurance shopping, purchase behavior, and purchase experience satisfaction among customers who recently purchased insurance.

The study found that direct premiums written increased by approximately 4.7% to $199 billion in 2015, with much of that growth coming from new business generated by direct writers.

Direct writers have invested heavily in digital channels to increase the functionality and ease of using their websites, which has clearly created an advantage for direct distribution relative to traditional agency distribution in some respects and has supported agency distribution in others, said Greg Hoeg, vice president of U.S. insurance operations at J.D. Power.

Fewer shoppers

Hoeg said the challenge for insurance companies is that there are fewer consumers shopping around for insurance at the moment. Many companies have kept premiums flat or even lowered them, giving consumers fewer reasons to look for cheaper policies.

In addition, customers who do switch are saving an average of $356 on their annual premiums, less than the $388 in savings for those who switched in 2015.

With more price competition and smaller savings, there simply is not as much motivation for most customers to switch, said Hoeg. Many policyholders see insurance as a price-differentiated commodity, and shoppers are opting to remain with their incumbent insurer as they find the savings offered by competitors is not as great as they had expected, or as much as they saved the last time they switched.

The 2016 U.S. Insurance Shopping Study is based on responses from more than 17,000 shoppers who requested an auto insurance price quote from at least one competitive insurer in the past 9 months and includes more than 50,000 unique customer evaluations of insurers.
Managing Bank Secrecy Act/Anti-Money Laundering risk requires careful and extensive planning and governance. A credit union should establish a sound BSA/AML program to properly identify, measure, monitor, and control its risks. BSA/AML regulatory enforcement actions can greatly impair a credit unions image and reputation.

There are four pillars to an effective BSA/AML program: 1) development of internal policies, procedures, and related controls, 2) designation of a compliance officer, 3) a thorough and ongoing training program, and 4) independent review for compliance.

National Credit Union Administration guidelines require that credit unions periodically perform a comprehensive risk assessment of their BSA/AML programs.

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Councils BSA/AML Risk Assessment also is an important tool for quantitatively and qualitatively documenting your programs effectiveness.
Democrats' Warmonger Sheepdog Bernie Sanders claims the US targeted assassination list is legal, a lie, and supports US troops in Syria. See Bernie Sanders Says US 'Kill List' Legal, Backs Troops in Syria, 4/26/16 at http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Bernie-Sanders-Says-US-Kill-List-Legal-Backs-Troops-in-Syria-20160426-0017.html This is the same Sanders that supports military contractors in Vermont and everywhere else, supported US military blockades and sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, supports Nazi Ukraine and the encirclement of Russia, voted for NATO's war in ex-Yugoslavia in 1999, for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and always for Israel, the US military base in the Middle East to protect US oil profits. We cannot have guns and butter. He has no chance of winning the Democratic nomination but is coming to California to register Democrats for the November election for his fellow Democrat, millionaire war criminal Hillary Clinton, whom he repeatedly states he supports.While Hillary Clinton does Democratic fundraisers in California at least once a week, starting this week, through Election Day, June 7, 2016, Sanders does voter registration for the Democrats throughout the entire state of California. When confronted with Sanders warmongering record, the Sanders people have no defense, which demonstrates that they are simply the sheep whom Sanders is herding to the Democratic Party which has only war, racism and fascism to offer since the Democrats and the Republican Parties are twin capitalist parties, paid by the same capitalist corporations proudly announcing they have NO DIFFERENCE on foreign policy and ALWAYS SUPPORT THE POLICE STATE AT HOME. You can remind the Sanders voter registration table monitors that we cannot have guns and butter and that if they want to support peace, labor, the environment, free education, free medical care, the abolition of student debt and all other things the workingclass needs, they have to register and vote Peace & Freedom or Green.In addition to this latest foot-in-mouth statement by Sanders supporting targeted assassinations and US troops in Syria, here are more references:Cindy Sheehan, a Peace & Freedom Party candidate in the past, has compiled the reactionary voting record of Sanders on 2/17/16, "Confessions of a Real Socialist" with lots of links at:Barry Bush has his own listing of reactionary Sanders votes at:See photos & article at Bernie Sanders Loves This $1 Trillion War Machine by Tim Mak, 2/8/16 at http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/09/bernie-sanders-loves-this-1-trillion-war-machine.html The Myth of Bernie Sandersby Thomas H. Naylor in Counterpunch 9/30/11 atandBernie Sanders Is a Russia-Bashing, Pro-Israel, Militarist Tool atHe also called Hugo Chavez, the late leader of Venezuela murdered by the CIA, a communist dictator, standard US capitalist war machine hatemongering. SeeUS Presidential Candidates Demean Muslims and Hugo Chavez by Steve Lendman, 9/19/15 at http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/09/19/18777841.php His support of US imperialism is outrageous and unconscionable. SeeDoes Bernie Sanders Imperialism Matter? by Shamus Cooke, 1/5/16The Black Agenda Report of May 6, 2015 has a good description of all of the Democrats' sheepdogs at http://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary The skinny California Voter Pamphlet is arriving in the mail at your current voter registration address containing the Proposition 50 information and US Senate candidate statements. The rest will come in the thick County Voter Pamphlet arriving this week or next, followed soon thereafter by the permanent vote-by-mail ballot so that you can vote in the comfort of your home anytime from May 9 through June 7, 2016 and never forget to vote. If you have not received any voter materials by May 9 at your current address, go to your County Registrars office between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and register, then immediately vote absentee (also known as vote by mail) and sign up to be a permanent vote-by-mail voter. Your County Registrar is listed at http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-resources/county-elections-offices/ You can also register online at https://covr.sos.ca.gov/?language=en-US . Voter registration ends in California on May 23, 2016 for the June 7, 2016 election.For more information on the only pro peace, labor and environment parties, see: http://www.votepsl.org/ (Gloria LaRiva for President) (Be sure to read her serious socialist program.)and http://www.jill2016.com/ (Jill Stein for President)ALL ABOARD THE PEACE & FREEDOM-GREEN PARTY FREEDOM TRAIN!
The state of emergency is that arrangement by which totalitarian powers were established in Europe.

The security state is neither part of the constitutional state nor what Michel Foucault called the

disciplinary society. The security state is permanently grounded on fear and must keep fear alive at any cost because it has its essential function and legitimacy from it. The de-politization of citizens is a characteristic of the security state.

FROM THE CONSTITUTIONAL STATE TO THE SECURITY STATEBy Giorgio Agamben[This article published in April 2016 in Luxemburg 1/2016 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de .]What really is at stake in extending the state of emergency in France [1] can only be understood when this is set in the context of a radical transformation of our familiar state model. Firstly, the statement of an irresponsible politician that the state of emergency supposedly protects democracy should be rejected. History has shown that the opposite is true. The state of emergency is that arrangement by which totalitarian powers were established in Europe. So the social democratic governments [2] of the Weimar Republic often fell back to the instrument of the state of emergency in the years before Hitlers assumption of power. Germany had already stopped being a parliamentary democracy before 1933.Hitlers first official act after his nomination (to Reich chancellor) was the proclamation of the state of emergency that was never retracted (during the NS rule). If one is amazed at the crimes committed with impunity in Germany by the Nazis, one forgets that these actions were absolutely legal because the land was subjected to a state of emergency and basic rights and freedom rights were suspended.Such a scenario could be repeated in France. A rightwing extremist government can be easily imagined that makes use of a state of emergency to which the socialist government accustomed citizens. A fast and permanent damage of the public institutions can occur in a country under a permanent state of emergency where police operations increasingly replace the powers of the judiciary.KEEPING FEAR ALIVEThis is all the more true when the state of emergency is part of a process where western democracies are changed into something that must be described as a security state. The word security has become a constant element of political discourse. So-called reasons of security (raisons de securite) replace what was earlier called the reason of the state (raison d etat). An analysis of this new form of government is overdue. Reflections on a possible definition are important since the security state is neither part of the constitutional state nor what Michel Foucault called the disciplinary society. In the model of the Brit Thomas Hobbes that has greatly influenced our political philosophy; the social contract with which power is transferred to the sovereign presupposes mutual fear and the war of all against all. The state is the institution that ends this fear. This pattern is reversed in the security state. The state is permanently grounded on fear and must keep fear alive at any cost because it has its essential function and legitimacy from it.Preventing catastrophes and famines was not uppermost when the word security first appeared in the political discourse in France with the Physiocrat governments before the French Revolution. [3] Rather these were allowed and were made themes of profitable government actions.Security does not aim at preventing terrorist acts (which is extremely difficult if not impossible since security measures are only effective afterwards and terrorism by its nature strikes again and again in different ways). Instead a new relation between persons is produced that consists of a generalized and boundless monitoring. That is the reason for institutions that allow a complete control of the populations electronic and communication data including the complete copying of all computer data. [4]The first risk consists in drifting into a state where terrorism and the security state enter in a symbiotic relationship. When the state needs fear to gain legitimacy, it has to provoke terror in the extreme case or at least not hinder its genesis. One only needs to consider the foreign policy of some countries that fuel terrorism which then must fought internally. When weapons are sold to these states, they become known as terrorist organizations.A second point is the change of the political status of citizens and the people who were considered bearers of sovereignty. In the security state, an unstoppable tendency aims at an increasing de-politization of citizens. Their participation in political life is reduced more and more to inclusion in public opinion polls on the eve of elections. This tendency was all the more alarming when it was cast in theoretical form by Nazi jurists. They defined the people as a politically powerless element whose protection and growth had to be guaranteed by the state.According to these lawyers, there is only a single method for helping this politically powerless element have a political effect: by referring to common origin and race distinguishing them from foreigners and enemies. The Nazi state and the contemporary security state should not be equated. When citizens are de-politicized, they can only be freed from their passivity and mobilized by the fear of a foreign enemy who is not merely external to them (this is true for Jews in Germany and for Muslims in France today).UNCERTAINTY AND TERROROn this background, the disgraceful bills on the decheance de nationalite (expatriation) for persons with double citizenship must be considered. The 1926 fascist law on rescinding Italian citizenship for unworthy citizens and the Nazi laws on expatriating the Jews should be recalled. [5]A third point that may not be underrated involves the criteria according to which truth is produced today in the public sphere. A radical shift has occurred hereThe fact of a crime can only be officially ascertained in a constitutional state with the help of a legal procedure Sometimes rumors and gossip seem more important than serious findings. The security state has an interest in keeping people in uncertainty as to what threatens them. Uncertainty and terror go hand in hand. [6] The security state has to ensure their security.The legal text of November 20, 2015 that established the present state of emergency in France is marked by vagueness. [7] Special arrangements are in force for any person whose conduct represents a threat for public security and order. This arbitrariness could refer to any person at any moment. In a security state, vague targeted formulations become the norm even though they are always criticized by lawyers as violations of the principle of legal certainty.DE-POLITIZATION OF CITIZENSThe same vagueness and the same ambiguities mark statements of politicians who say France is at war against terrorism. The talk of a war on terrorism is a contradiction in itself because the state of war includes identifying a combative enemy. In contrast, the enemy must remain oblique in the security state so whoever can be defined this way  internally or externally  doesnt matter.These three characteristics of the security state  maintaining a generalized state of anxiety, de-politization of citizens and renunciation on any legal certainty  should make us think. The security state to which we are moving does the opposite of what it promises. While security means the absence of worry (Latin sine cura  without worry  as the root for the French word securite), the security state foments permanent fear and terror. The security state is a police state that increases the polices freedom of decision by suspending the power of the judiciary. The state of emergency that becomes daily routine and acts as the sovereign more and more becomes the normal case.The security state breaks out of familiar politics to move to an indeterminate zone where public and private whose borders are hard to define become ever more blurred  through the increasing de-politization of citizens. This article first appeared on December 23, 2015 in the Le Monde journal.NOTES1 Inzwischen wurde der Ausnahmezustand erneut bis Ende Mai 2016 verlangert (Anm. d. U.).2 Agamben meint hier eher die Bruning- und die nachfolgenden Regierungen in den Jahren von 1930 bis Anfang 1933, die jedoch zur burgerlichen Rechten zahlten. Zwar hatte die SPD den sogenannten Blutmai am 1. Mai 1929 in Berlin zu verantworten, aber die Notverordnungskabinette waren keine SPDRegierungen (Anm. d. U.).3 Es handelt sich um eine okonomische Schule, die um 1768 entstand und von 1774 bis 1781 den Generalkontrolleur der Finanzen des Konigs stellte (Anm. d. U).4 Diese Praxis war bei den uber 3 000 Hausdurchsuchungen auerhalb richterlicher Kontrolle, die auf der Grundlage des Ausnahmezustandsgesetzes seit Mitte November 2015 durchgefuhrt wurden, zunachst gang und gabe, wurde jedoch als einzige Manahme am 19. Februar 2016 vom franzosischen Verfassungsgericht in der bisherigen Form fur unzulassig erklart (Anm. d. U.).5 Die franzosische Regierung plant, die bereits bisher in rechtlich engen Grenzen mogliche Ausburgerung von DoppelstaatburgerInnen auf weitere Personenkreise auszudehnen. Voraussetzung dafur ware eine Verurteilung wegen Verbrechen oder Vergehen, die fundamentale Interessen der Nation verletzen. Der Gesetzentwurf dazu wurde in erster Lesung am 10. Februar 2016 in der Nationalversammlung angenommen. Er bedarf jedoch einer noch ausstehenden Verfassungsanderung, um rechtskraftig zu werden (Anm. d. U.).6 Hier auch im ursprunglichen Wortsinne von Schrecken gemeint (Anm.d.U.).7 Gemeint ist das Gesetz, mit dem das franzosische Parlament den Ausnahmezustand fur die Periode vom 26. November 2015 bis zum 26. Februar 2016 erstmals verlangert hat (Anm. d. U.).8 So bedarf es nach geltendem Ausnahmezustand keinerlei richterlichen Kontrolle mehr etwa im Vorfeld von Hausdurchsuchungen oder bei der Verhangung von Hausarrest (Anm. d. U.).
For a REAL International Workers May Day by John Reimann

This May Day, ILWU Local 10 will be leading a march in San Francisco. But to be really serious, the unions must break with the corporate-controlled Democratic Party as well as really fight for their members on the job.

May Day is International Workers Day, and ILWU Local 10 will be leading a march in recognition of this day in San Francisco. This is the second year that Local 10 led a May Day event in this area, and like last year it the central theme was a protest against the wave of racism and violence of the police. But what has been accomplished? Since last May Day in SF alone the police killed Mario Woods and Luis Gongora. They brutally beat car theft suspect Stanislov Petrov, as he lay helpless on the ground (thus proving that while racism is a major factor, its not the only one). How many other such cases exist we will never know, since the only reason Petrovs assault came to light is that it happened to have been caught on a security camera.



Local 10 Work Stoppage



By using a contract clause to call their members off the job this May Day, Local 10 is raising the specter of a general political work stoppage. (In fact, Local 10 is going one step beyond that clause by not seeking the agreement of the employer. Good for them.) Equally important, they are helping draw attention to the issue of police abuse and police racism.



READ REST OF ARTICLE AT WEB SITE ABOVE
Refusing to share Tedr77 [at] aol.com) by Ted Rudow III, MA

The World knows that Israel is being very stubborn, rebellious and is bucking the entire Earth in her selfish possession of Palestine, refusing to share it with its original inhabitants and occupants, the Arabs, the Palestinians, the Christians.

The whole World is trying to plead with them to share it so they won't start another World War, but do they listen?--No! Do they pay any attention to the United Nations?--No! They vote, one sole lone vote against the United Nations! Everybody's out of step but them. Everybody's out of step but Israel.The U.S. makes some little pitiful kind of a weak protest, not even hardly a little slap on the wrist!



Like the old lady watching the boys marching off to war. She saw her little son Johnny amongst the boys there, not-so-little any more, grown son, one of the soldiers, marching with his company, marching off to war. And poor Johnny hadn't been in the service very long and he'd sort of gotten out of step somehow. But that's not the way it looked to her! She said, "Look there! There's my Johnny! And everybody in his company is out of step but my Johnny!"



Everybody in the world is out of step but us Israelis! Everybody in the World is out of step but us Jews. We're the only ones that are right! We don't care if the whole World says we're wrong, we know we're right. It doesn't matter what we do to the Palestinians, it doesn't matter how selfish we are with our land and Jerusalem, with the other religions, we know we're right and we're not going to back down an inch!"



Ted Rudow III, MA


WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - The United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC) is proud to endorse Secretary Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Secretary Clinton's views on issues important to America's small business community are simply far more qualifying than the empty rhetoric and lackluster record of Senator Bernie Sanders.

Secretary Clinton has stood with the USHCC and the Hispanic community at-large for decades. For more than 40 years, Secretary Clinton has fought to ensure that those who are willing to work hard in America have the opportunity to get ahead and stay ahead. From registering Hispanic voters in south Texas as a college student -- to helping raise education standards in one of the poorest states in America as First Lady of Arkansas -- to strengthening diplomatic and commercial ties around the globe for American small business owners as Secretary of State, Clinton has always stood by our community.

Secretary Clinton also recognizes that small businesses are the engine of American economic prosperity. As the daughter of an entrepreneur, Clinton has personally witnessed the formidable challenges, risks and opportunities our business men and women face each day. She earned our endorsement because, unlike her primary Democratic opponent, Secretary Clinton has demonstrated the ability to enact a robust and pragmatic policy agenda that will allow the Hispanic small business community to thrive and prosper.

There is so much at stake in this election and our country cannot afford to have those who would divide our nation and prey on the fears of the American people as our President. By way of example, Donald Trump's rhetoric toward women, immigrants, the disabled, Muslims, and the Hispanic community not only divides our country, but sends a clear message that Hispanic voters won't forget: he does not stand with our community.

For these reasons and more, we proudly endorse Secretary Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Presidential nominee.

Embedded Video Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTGFbTuKc1g&feature=youtu.be


Springwood Named Anthropology Associations President Elect

Chuck Springwood poses with skulls in his office.

April 28, 2016

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. Illinois Wesleyan University Professor of Anthropology Chuck Springwood has been elected to serve as president elect of the Central States Anthropology Society (CSAS).

Founded in 1921 as the earliest section of the American Anthropological Association, CSAS is a four-field professional society that welcomes students and interested in promoting anthropology in the central United States and beyond. The organizations annual meeting is open to cultural and physical anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, applied anthropologists, and other interested scholars. The CSAS executive board offers graduate and undergraduate paper prizes and sponsors two scholarships for student research.

The president elect position is a four-year term. For the first two years Springwood will also serve as vice president before assuming presidential duties for two additional years.

Springwood graduated from the University of Illinois with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. His special areas of interest include semiotics, race, gender, visual culture, colonialism, ethnographic methods, sport, and alcohol usage. He has conducted research in Japan, Mexico, and the United States. He is the author or co-author of four books, including Beyond the Cheers: Race as Spectacle in College Sport (Suny Press), and the editor of Open Fire: Understanding Global Gun Cultures (Berg), a volume on guns and their use in various societies around the world.
- Balarabe Musa said the atrocities being committed by suspected Fulani herdsmen across the country was because of the weakness of the government

- President Buhari condemned the reported attacks by the suspected Fulani herdsmen

- Fulani herdsmen was reported to have killed 40 persons at Nimbo in Uzo- Uwani Local Government Area of Enugu State

Former governor of the old Kaduna State Balarabe Musa, said that the only explanation for President Muhammadu Buharis silence over renew attacks by armed men suspected to be Fulani herdsmen resulting in the deaths of several Nigerians is absolute weakness, incompetent and loss of focus.

About 40 persons have so far been reportedly killed in the latest attacks by some Fulani herdsmen at Nimbo in Uzo- Uwani Local Government Area of Enugu State.

Former Kaduna state Governor, Balarabe Musa

He laments in an interview with Legit.ng that not only are the Fulani herdsmen killing and attempting to forcefully take over other peoples land, they also engage in stealing of cows belonging to others, a crime he said not reported in the media.

READ ALSO: Investigation: How Amaechi and Wike fuel beheadings in Rivers state

He said the atrocities being committed by suspected Fulani herdsmen across the country and the killings of innocent Nigerians and destruction of properties in the northeast by Boko Haram insurgents are indication that government at the central is weak and lack the competence to address the current overwhelming insecurity plaguing the country.

The killing by Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen appears to be the only crime taking place in the country. It is not at all. These Fulani herdsmen are also stealing cows of others and the federal government is at moment powerless.

"My own cows have been stolen twice; last year and this year. It was never like this until this present government came to power. For people to be able to steal cows in the day time in Nigeria that shows the level of insecurity."

It is terrible. The President and his government are weak. Has the President said anything since the Fulani herdsmen started this senseless killings?" he asked.

"Let us not deceive ourselves. The President is quiet because he is a weak President. The state (Kaduna) government is also very weak in terms of security. They have put the lives of Nigerians in danger more than any government in recent times," he said.

He explained that the current level of confidence with which the Fulani herdsmen carries out their activities across the country in total disregard for indigenous people who owns the land in the first instance without a word from the President, supports the arguments in some quarters that they are backed by highly placed government officials.

READ ALSO: Listen to the top radio stations on Naij Radio App

President Buhari condemned the reported attacks by suspected herdsmen on some communities across the country in a statement on Wednesday night.

A statement issued by the Presidents Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, said the President particularly condemned Monday's attack on Ukpabi Nimbo in Enugu State.

However, Balarabe Musa said Nigerians should not take the statement issued by Presidential Spokesperson serious on a matter that involves loss of lives, and augured that until the President personally address the nation over the killings and how he plans to urgently tackle it he cannot be said to have spoken to Nigerians.

Source: Legit.ng
Caracas (AFP) - Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro faced rising pressure Wednesday over his latest measures to deal with severe electricity shortages, including a two-day public sector workweek, as opponents pushed for a referendum to remove him.

A day after Maduro announced his latest drastic measures to tackle power shortages in the recession-hit country, the opposition was gathering signatures for an official petition to launch a referendum.

Citizens queued up to sign the demand presented by the opposition, which blames Maduro for the country's economic crisis.

"I came to sign it to end this anarchy," said Miriam Leal, 54, in eastern Caracas.

"We are lacking medicine, work, education, and on top of that there is the electricity problem."

After daily power-cuts were imposed on Monday, looting was reported in several places including the country's second-biggest city, Maracaibo. Locals there told AFP looters had struck a market and other businesses including a bakery overnight Tuesday to Wednesday.

"The situation is very tense. There are areas that have been nearly 10 hours without electricity and that has made people even more annoyed," said Doris Falcon, who works in Maracaibo as an administrator in a training college.

Isolated incidents were also reported in the capital Caracas.

- Warning against violence -

Maduro on Tuesday announced enforced leave for public sector employees three workdays a week for at least two weeks in a bid to slash electricity use.

His Vice President Aristobulo Isturiz also said primary and high schools would be closed on Fridays.

That followed the start of daily four-hour electricity blackouts in several states on Monday, which Maduro said would last 40 days.

Electricity shortages have compounded an economic crisis that has left Venezuelans queuing for hours in shops to buy scarce goods.

Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves, but is reeling from the collapse in global crude prices. The government has resisted using oil to generate electricity, calling it inefficient.

Story continues

"I ask for greater understanding, support, solidarity, action and awareness," Maduro said in a televised address on Tuesday.

"Whoever attempts violence during circumstances such as these... will be hit with the fullest weight of the law, because they are committing serious crimes against security and the homeland."

The government blames the power shortage on a drought caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon, which has caused the country's hydroelectric dams to run low.

Critics blame economic mismanagement and inefficient running of the energy network.

The government has also said it will shift its time zone forward on Sunday by 30 minutes to save power by extending the hours of daylight.

- Referendum by Christmas? -

Maduro is under fire from the center-right opposition which took control of the legislature in January after winning a landslide election victory.

Leading opposition figure Henrique Capriles said Wednesday his side hoped to hold a referendum as early as November.

The opposition advanced Tuesday in its mission against Maduro when the National Electoral Board handed over the paperwork allowing them to seek the nearly 200,000 signatures needed as a first step towards calling a referendum to remove the president before the end of his term in 2019.

But the mission could be complicated. Analysts say Maduro's allies could slow down the process until January 2017, at which point Maduro could legally be replaced for the rest of his term by his vice-president.

Maduro's opponents say he controls the National Electoral Board and the Supreme Court, which has blocked several of their bills in the legislature.

Analysts and some politicians have warned that public discontent could lead to mass unrest in the country, which is already ranked by the United Nations as one of the most violent in the world.

"We do not want an explosion of unrest nor a coup," said Capriles. But he warned: "The opposition does not have the capacity to contain an overflow of social tension."

Anti-government street protests in Venezuela left 43 people dead in 2014.
Recently, Nigerias federal minister of power, works and housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola, said on live that his children are also having their own share of the hot season.

During an interview on Channels TV on Tuesday, April 26, the minister said: Its a very hot season of the year. I see my children too sweating, having heat rash and they look at me like what are you doing about this thing. Let me be very clear, this problem can be solved. It needs detailed and methodical approach. First work to do is to supply more gas because without gas, I am like a generator owner who cant get fuel, so I cant power my plants. There are errors of planning of yesterday but they are errors that can be corrected.

PAY ATTENTION: Get the latest gossips on Naij Gossip App

Lol, here are photos of one of Fashola's children who, he says, are also sweating and experiencing heat rashes:

Ademola Fashola and girlfriend, Yasmin

Ademola Fashola and girlfriend, Yasmin

Ademola Fashola and his girlfriend, Yasmin

Super-sexy Yasmin has been Ademola's girlfriend for about five years. They were said to have met at a conference in Abuja... She is also a lawyer like Ademola!

Rich kids!

Source: Legit.ng
WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND / ACCESSWIRE / April 27, 2016 / New Zealand Energy Corp. (NZ.V) ("NZEC" or the "Company") announced today it has filed with Canadian regulatory authorities its 2015 year-end consolidated financial results, management discussion and analysis and Form 51-101F1 reserves report, which documents are available on the Company's website at www.newzealandenergy.com and on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

The net loss for the year was $10,058,739 (including non-cash charges of $8,221,825) compared with a loss for the 2014 year of $84,107,442 (which included non-cash charges of $82,358,978). The Company realized a loss per share for the year of $0.05 (2014: $0.49).

The Company achieved average net daily production of 143 BOE/D (80% oil) through the 2015 year. At year end, 31 December 2015, the net daily production rate averaged over the last 10 days of December was 248 BOE/D (83% oil). Production of oil and gas from the Copper-Moki pools accounted for 163 BOE/d (i.e. 66%) of this production rate. The increased production has continued through the first quarter of 2016 at an average of 332 BOE/d (75% oil) from 1 January to 31 March 2016.

NZEC CEO Mike Adams commented, "The Company's improving production performance in 2016 is the result of focussed technical work and our team's innovative and efficient implementation of production enhancement activities while maintaining high operational and HSE standards. The results from the Copper-Moki pools have been particularly satisfying and the success of the low cost waterflood project is a highlight."

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"James Willis"

Chairman

New Zealand Energy Corp.

New Zealand Energy Contacts:

Email: info@newzealandenergy.com

Website: www.newzealandenergy.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as such term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Story continues

FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION AND CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING RESERVE ESTIMATES

This document, the condensed consolidated interim financial statements for the period ended 30 September 2015 and Management's Discussion and Analysis contain certain forward- looking information, forward-looking statements ("forward-looking statements"). The reader's attention is specifically drawn to the qualifications, disclosure and cautionary statements in these documents regarding forward-looking statements and reserve and resource estimates.

The Company notes that such forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond NZEC's control, the impact of general economic conditions, industry conditions, volatility of commodity prices, currency fluctuations, imprecision of reserve estimates, environmental risks, operational risks in exploration and development, competition from other industry participants, the lack of availability of qualified personnel or management, stock market volatility and the ability to access sufficient capital from internal and external sources. Although the Company believes that the expectations in its forward-looking statements are reasonable, they are based on factors and assumptions concerning future events which may prove to be inaccurate. Those factors and assumptions are based upon currently available information. Such statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could influence actual results or events and cause actual results or events to differ materially from those stated, anticipated or implied in the forward looking information.

As such, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the forward looking information, as no assurance can be provided as to future results, levels of activity or achievements. All forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this document or the date of the documents referenced above, except as required by applicable law, the Company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or to revise any of the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE: New Zealand Energy Corp.
- The tension between Fulani herdsmen and farming communities has existed for many years

- There has been a dramatic escalation in recent times to include many more attacks

- The brutality and impunity with which the assailants operate without regard for the law and the sanctity of life is appalling

- A human rights activist Abu Anthony emphasized that the federal government must urgently summon the political will to forge a lasting solution to the violence

As Nigeria is still reeling from the Boko Haram insurgency and its numerous atrocities, the country plays host to another terrorist group as yet unrecognized. Fulani herdsmen, nomadic cattle grazers, have been named one of the deadliest terror groups in the world comparable to Boko Haram, ISIS, the Taliban and al-Shabaab.

The group has wreaked enough havoc to be acknowledged by the global community as the fourth deadliest terror group in the world. The Fulani militants, as they have come to be known, is made up of members of the Fulani or Fula ethnic group, a tribe of over 20 million people, 70 per cent of whom are nomadic grazers, who are native to at least seven West African countries.

The tension between Fulani herdsmen and farming communities has been in existence for many years, but has seen a dramatic escalation in recent times to include attacks, kidnappings and killings by the nomads.

File picture of a Fulani herdsman

Between 2010 and 2013 Fulani militants killed about 80 people in total, but by 2014 they had killed 1,229 people. Benue, Taraba, Nassarawa, Plateau, Kaduna and Katsina states have been the worst hit of late having suffered devastating attacks by the Fulani herdsmen with a heavy toll in human lives and property.

The attacks

Fulani herdsmen brutally kill natives of invaded farming communities including women and children in various states across the country. They are armed with sophisticated weapons and usually attack their target communities at a time they are most vulnerable such as at midnight or on Sundays when they are in church, killing people indiscriminately and burning houses and looting properties.

Most worrisome is the brutality and impunity with which the assailants operate without regard for the law and the sanctity of life. The Nigerian police and even the military seem powerless to defend the victims from being mercilessly slaughtered in their homes.

The nomadic militants dominate the middle belt region. The Global Terrorism Index of 2015 states that over 90 per cent of the attacks carried out by the group are on private citizens, accounting for 81 per cent of deaths in the area. And these attacks have mainly been through armed assaults, killing an average of 11 people per attack.

IGP Solomon Arase with one of the victims of the deadly attacks on Wednesday, April 27, 2016.

READ ALSO: Investigation: How Abuja as a model city is failing

According to a report published by SMB Intelligence, over 2,000 people have been killed in conflicts between the herdsmen and different host communities in 2015 alone. In comparison, the Boko Haram insurgency that has attracted the attention of the Nigerian government and the global community kills 2,500 people annually, the report states.

In 2000 Fulani herdsmen and farmers had a major clash in Oke-Ogun area of Oyo state, which led to a visit by a delegation from the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) to the office of the then governor, the late Lam Adesina.

Before the report, the largest attack was when the group killed over 200 people: community leaders and residents who were meeting in a remote village in Zamfara state, Nigeria. But their recent activities have surpassed this. Recently, no fewer than 300 people were killed following a series of attacks launched by Fulani herdsmen in Benue state.

File picture of Fulani herdsmen

According to reports, several villages were razed by fire, with the decomposing remains of people lying in sight. The number of internally displaced persons is also on the rise in these communities as people desert their homes for neighbouring towns.

Recently some local government areas in Benue state were savagely attacked by suspected Fulani herdsmen who killed hundreds of people, torched houses, sacked some communities and occupied them. For instance in Ghajimba, the capital of Guma LGA, 25 farmers were massacred.

On Monday, April 25, herdsmen stormed communities in Enugu state and killed mostly women and children.

The unfortunate situation

It is unfortunate that this level of criminal impunity is happening in a sovereign nation with a constitution which declares that the security and welfare of the citizens shall be a major responsibility of the state. Perhaps we need to ask why the police and the military are incapable of protecting the farmers from violent attacks by Fulani herdsmen.

Is it true that the Fulani militia is better armed and sometimes outnumbers the police? Why is it difficult for the federal government to contain the terror of the Fulani militia? Who are those arming the Fulani cattle rearers to unleash mayhem on innocent and defenceless Nigerians?

An armed Fulani herdsman

READ ALSO: Panama Papers: Will Saraki, Mark lead the nation into chaos?

Since both the Fulani herdsmen and the host communities have their complaints, could not the local and state governments mediate between both parties in the affected communities to forestall a breakdown of law and order?

Why is it that the Fulani herdsmen alleged to be behind the inhuman killings and destruction of property in the affected states and indeed across the country always get away with their crimes without being brought to justice?

There is certainly grave danger ahead because some of the ethnic nationalities incessantly attacked by the Fulani militia have warned that if the government fails to protect them, they are left with no other choice than to form their own militias to defend themselves and their land from the marauders.

The way forward

Only recently, the president of the Southern Kaduna Union, Dr Ephraim Goje, in a media chat said: The Fulanis have unofficially declared war on our people. He said that they may take actions aimed at defending ourselves and our land in order to put an end to this impunity and senseless killings".

This, if allowed to happen, can only degenerate into anarchy and a failed state situation, which the government can ill afford. Besides, the country has had enough of security challenges from existing ethnic and religious militias to allow room for the formation of more ethnic or religious armies, he said.

The human rights activist Chief Femi Falana (SAN) on April 25 filed at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague and the ECOWAS court a case of genocide and ethnic cleansing against Fulani herdsmen for their continued massacres of the innocent people and farmers in Jukunland, in Southern and Central Taraba state, in north eastern of Nigeria.

Femi Falana (SAN)

Another human rights activist Abu Anthony, speaking to Legit.ng, emphasized that the federal government must urgently summon the political will to forge a lasting solution to the problem of clashes between the Fulani herdsmen and the farmers to prevent the escalation into tribal wars and to avert further loss of lives and property.

He said the federal government must as a matter of priority re-position the intelligence agencies and the police to stop the attacks and the killing and wanton destruction of property by the Fulani militia, and retaliatory attacks by the victims.

They need to be arrested, disarmed, prosecuted and jailed if guilty while their sponsors should be smoked out and brought to justice.

On its part, the Nigerian Immigration Service must be alive to its responsibilities in identifying and expelling foreign nationals who constitute security risks to the country.

"The national Confab must deliberate on the Fulani herdsmen and their host farmers palaver with a view to recommending a just solution to this potential anarchy and destruction of the unity of Nigeria, he said.

Fulani herdsman spotted with a gun

He called on the federal government to take urgent and drastic action against the massacres being perpetrated by Fulani herdsmen against innocent farmers before they drag the nation into another avoidable war.

He expressed shock at the scale of the unprecedented massacre of unarmed farmers being killed by these herdsmen in Jukunland in Taraba state and the other parts of North Central Nigeria everyday.

He said: It is very clear by the pictorial and other evidence that the people of the North Central Nigeria are going through terrible things daily in the hands of these herdsmen.

"Lives and properties are no longer safe from these people who killed and maim, and rape women at will just because they wanted their cattles to graze on other peoples farmlands.

He therefore charged the federal government to move security agencies to the North Central state of Taraba in order to protect the lives of innocent Nigerians who are being killed on their farmlands everyday by these blood-sucking herdsmen, before the people resort to self-help.

Source: Legit.ng
April 28 (Reuters) - Zurich Insurance is set to take full ownership of Malaysia's MAA Takaful after the deal received regulatory approval, giving Europe's fifth-biggest insurer a foothold in the world's second largest Islamic insurance market.

MAA Takaful, one of Malaysia's 11 Islamic insurers, is a joint venture launched in 2006 by MAA Group Berhad and Bahrain's Solidarity, which hold 75 percent and 25 percent stakes respectively.

MAA Group said it had received central bank approval for the sale, a deal which was first proposed in November of last year. No size for the transaction was given.

MAA Takaful held 1.2 billion ringgit ($306.7 million) worth of assets as of June 2015, a 5 percent increase from a year earlier.

The Swiss insurer has been reshaping its geographic footprint, scaling back parts of its Asian franchise seeking to build more sustainable businesses and improve profitability.

A move into takaful could allow for greater penetration in core markets in the Gulf and southeast Asia. Zurich Insurance also has a presence in Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

An alternative to conventional insurance, takaful is based on the concept of mutuality; the takaful company oversees a pool of funds contributed by all policy holders.

In their investments, takaful firms follow religious guidelines, including bans on interest and pure monetary speculation, and a prohibition on investing in industries such as alcohol and gambling. ($1 = 3.9130 ringgit) (Reporting by Bernardo Vizcaino; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
Sector Overview

Opportunities

Rice is the main cereal consumed in Nepal, however, in 2012-13, rice worth NPR 9 billion was imported, signalling an opportunity for the expansion of rice cultivation.

Lentils, which are grown in the Terai region, are a good source of export earnings for Nepal and are popular in South East Asian markets.

Cardamom, turmeric and cinnamon are the main spices exported from Nepal.

Nepali tea is considered some of the best tea in the world, with major export markets in Europe and the US.

Coffee farming has become popular in recent times and its market share has grown domestically and overseas.



Nepal depends primarily on imported chemical fertilizers, creating a market for chemical fertilizers to be manufactured in Nepal.

Modern agricultural equipment could alleviate the problem of low land productivity in Nepal.

Source

Important Links

Nepals economy is largely dependent on agricultural, which accounts for 36% of GDP and absorbs about two-thirds of the labour market. About 30% of Nepals total land is used for agricultural purposes. The major cash crops are oilseed, potato, tobacco, sugarcane, jute, cotton, and rubber; and the major cereal crops are paddy, maize, millet, wheat, barley, and buckwheat. Cardamom, ginger, garlic, turmeric, silk cocoons, honey and mushroom are also cultivated in copious amounts.Nepals geography, water resources and ample supply of labour gives Nepal a comparative advantage in agricultural production. The temperature and rainfall differ from place to place, but the wet season is roughly the same in all areas of Nepal. The sector has seen NPR 3.37 billion (USD 338 million) in foreign investment in about 180 agriculture projects, which employ over 7,500 people.Even though Nepal is endowed with the resources needed for high land productivity, many households, particularly in the mountainous regions of Nepal, experience food shortages for 49 months a year. More than 50% of the districts in Nepal are considered food-deficient by FAO. This problem of low agricultural productivity arises due to fragmented subsistence farming, poor technical knowledge, and lack of irrigation facilities. Erratic weather patterns, pest epidemics, and lack of fertilizers and improved seeds exacerbate the problem.Nepal also faces a negative trade balance in agriculture. The countrys agricultural imports were NPR 40 billion (USD 400 million) in 2012/13. This figure is estimated to be at least NPR 45 billion (USD 450 million) for 2013/14. However, agricultural imports from India have been growing at an astounding rate of 40% annually for the past 7 years. On the other hand, exports in 2012/13 stood only at NPR 13 billion (USD 130 million) and were expected to reach NPR 18 billion (USD 180 million) for 2013/14. Agricultural equipment, chemical fertilizers, rice, and vegetables account for more than two-thirds of the imports from India, whereas food and live animals comprise over 90% of total agricultural exports to India.As the agriculture sector is the biggest contributor to GDP, the Government of Nepal is committed to uplifting this sector. The government is currently focusing on the modernisation, diversification, commercialisation and marketing of the agriculture sector. Towards this, the government plans to make available agricultural inputs, such as irrigation, electricity, transportation, and agro-credit.
Dambazau calls for cleanup of weapons, drugs among Fulani youths

The former minister noted that one of the steps should be blocking access to weapons and cleaning up all the weapons already in circulation among Fulani youths.
Services rendered online are easier and more convenient to access. Most Nigerian airlines now offer online platforms that enable travelers conveniently handle Airline Booking and other Flight Booking services online.

The Online flight booking platforms vary in the features they offer. While some offer just basic flight booking, others go beyond that allowing for online booking and online rescheduling of flights as well as e-payment, e-ticketing, and online check-in.

Want Affordable Flight Booking Online? Click Here

Leading Nigerian airlines like Arik Air, Aero Air, Air Peace, Med-View Airline, FirstNation airways, and Dana Air all offer some level of online airline booking services. Some Nigerian airlines offer discounts to travelers who use online flight booking by purchasing their ticket and paying online.

Join us after the break for the full gist about booking cheap flights online in Nigeria.

Online Booking Features

Online flight booking is simple and hence makes life easier for travelers. All one needs is an internet connection and they can handle most of their booking transactions online.

Transactions supported by good airline booking platforms include: flight booking, secure online payment, online ticketing (e-ticket printout), online check-in, fares calculation, online flight rescheduling, online flight cancellation, viewing of flight schedule, flight information, traveling and boarding guide, etc.

However, not all flight booking services are available in online airline booking and ticketing platform offered by Nigerian airlines.

In fact, some do not allow online rescheduling and cancellation; they still require that cancellations and rescheduling be made via phone or by visiting their flight ticket office.

Booking your flight online is simple. You can use a service like TravelStart to search for flights to your destination.

The beauty of using a flight comparison service like TravelStart for your flight booking is that you can compare prices across different airlines in one place making it very easy to find the best deal.

You can also visit the website of the airline directly and make use of the flight booking facility at the site.

Most airlines now have online payment facility on their website, while it is possible that their may still exist a few that only allow online airline booking, but still require you to visit a ticketing office or bank to make payment.

Nigerian airlines, like Arik Air, Air Peace and Aero Air even allow online check-in for hand luggage customers.

Nigerian Airlines and Flight Booking

Most airlines in Nigeria now offer online booking facilities on their website. Here is a brief overview of Nigeria airlines and their online booking services.

Looking for Cheap Online Flight Booking? Click Here

Arik Air Online Booking

Arik Air in my opinion has the best airline booking platform of all the Nigerian-based airlines. The company has a good online booking and ticketing platform.

Arik Air has the most comprehensive platform supporting transactions like: online flight booking, secure online payment, e-Ticket printout, fares calculation, viewing of flight schedule, etc. You can pay with most debit/ATM cards.

Arik Air does not currently allow rescheduling and cancellation of flights online. Arik Air flight cancellations and rescheduling can only be made via phone or by visiting a local Arik air office. Read more about Arik Air Booking.

Arik Airline Booking website: www.arikair.com

Air Peace Booking

Air Peace is one of the new entrant in the scene, but offers an online airline booking platform as good as the competition.

Aside online flight booking, Air Peace customers can also do online flight rescheduling, secure online payment, e Flight Ticket, online check-in (for hand-luggage customers), etc.

Air Peace offers a loyalty program called Peace Advantage where customers can earn points the more they fly which they can redeem for air travel or other gift. Read more about Air Peace Booking.

Air Peace Booking website: www.flyairpeace.com

Dana Airline Booking

Dana Air online booking and ticketing platform supports similar airline booking services as the Aero Air platform.

Like other airline booking platforms they support global e-payment cards like Visa, as well as local e-payment cards like Verve (InterSwitch) and e-Tranzact, multiple payment options is always better.

Transactions supported by the Dana Air online platform include: online flight booking, flight rescheduling, online flight cancellation, secure online payment, e-Ticket printout, fares calculation, online check-in, viewing of flight schedule, etc. Read more about Dana Air online booking.

Dana Airline Booking website: www.flydanaair.com

Aero Air Online Booking

Aero Air also offers a very comprehensive online flight booking and ticketing platform.

Booking of Aero Air flights can also be done via SMS. All these make booking of Aero Air flights easy and convenient for travelers.

Aero Air online platform supports the following transactions: airline booking, online flight rescheduling, secure payment, e Ticketing, online check-in, etc. Online payment can be made with Visa, InterSwitch or Etranzact.

Payment can also be made with Aero Air ticket voucher. Booking Aero Air flights online and ahead of time attracts discounts. Read more about Aero Air booking.

Aero Airline Booking website: www.flyaero.com

Medview Air Online Booking

Medview Air also offers a platform for booking online, though the interface isnt great in the eye. It however gets the job done.

On Medview flight booking platform you can pay online with your debit card or just book online and pay later at an ATM or bank branch. Read more about Medview Booking.

Medview Flight Booking website: medviewairline.com

Useful Tips about Flight Booking Online

Booking flights online is easy and convenient. Most airlines will offer discounts for booking and paying for your flights online especially if you pay ahead of time.

In fact, that is the advantage of online airline booking. Book a week or even months ahead of your travel date and you would be amazed at the price at the time.

You can also use a service like TravelStart to compare air fares across multiple airlines, Click Here.

Familiarise yourself with the online platform before booking your flights. Note that, although airline booking can be done online, you will still have to get to the airport to board your flight.

At least An ID card and your ticket info will be required for boarding flights at the airport. There may be other requirements so confirm with the airline.

International flights require more documentation. Remember to be at the airport early. Have a safe trip.

Using Flight Comparison Engines for Flight Booking

Flight Comparison sites like TravelStart enables you compare prices of airline tickets across multiple airlines to your destination.

This ensures you get the best deals for your travel, making them very attractive for travelers looking for the best travel deals.

Find the best Flights deals to Lagos, Abuja, Enugu, Asaba, Port Harcourt, Owerri, Uyo, Calabar, Benin, Kano, Kaduna, and dozens of cities in Nigeria.

The beauty of Flight Comparison sites is that your flight booking is not restricted to only local airlines, you can also get the best flight deals from international airlines like Virgin Atlantic, Emirates, Etihad Airways, Qatar Airways, Lufthansa, Kenya Airways, KLM, British Airways, and dozens of international airlines.

This means you can access deals on international flights to popular destination like London, New York, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Los Angeles, Delhi, Accra, Turkey, Ukraine, China, and hundreds of cities worldwide.

To checkout TravelStart, Click Here.

Popular Routes

Here are some of the most popular routes for flight Booking:

Lagos to Abuja

Lagos to London

Abuja to Lagos

Lagos to Owerri

Lagos to New York

Port Harcourt to Lagos

Lagos to Accra

Lagos to Dubai

Enugu to Lagos

Lagos to Canada

Lagos to Johanesbourg

Kaduna to Lagos

London to Lagos

Lagos to Houton

Lagos to Toronto

Need more info about Online Services?

You can also connect with us:

Like us on Facebook | follow us on Twitter | Join us on Google+

A number of other services are also available online, like Banking Online, Learning Online, Shopping Online, Online Forex Trading, and Making Money Online.

More Online Services
Air Peace Booking website is as good as the competition with flight booking and online check-in. Air Peace Airline is one of the youngest airline (if not the youngest) in Nigeria, but has grown in popularity in the past few months with its affordable flights and good customer service.

Want to Book Cheap Flights Online? Click Here

Air Peace offers intending passengers a website where they can conveniently book flights online.

The Air Peace Booking website allows you book your airline ticket online. If you are a hand-luggage passenger, you can also check-in online.

Air Peace began operation in Nigeria in 2014 and has since grown in popularity with its affordable and excellent service.

The Air Peace package also includes free Wi-Fi to customers and flies military officers to all destinations for just 10,000 Naira.

You can do your Air Peace Booking directly on this site using the tool here. The tool is powered by TravelStart a site for comparing flights and finding cheap flights online in Africa. You may also do your Air Peace Booking directly on TravelStart, Click Here.

The advantage of using a flight comparison tool for your Air Peace Booking is that you can compare the cost of air fare across multiple airlines, not just AirPeace.

Air Peace Booking is Convenient

With Air Peace Booking platform, you can book a flight to and from any of their current destinations, which include Enugu, Asaba, Owerri, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Abuja, Calabar, Akure, Benin, Kano, Sokoto, Yola, Uyo, Gombe, and Kaduna.

Air Peace has been given an International Carrier status by the federal ministry of transport, which according to the airline will allow it fly to Atlanta, Dubai, Guangzhou, Johannesburg, and Mumbai.

The airline started flights to Accra, Ghana on February 16, 2017. For now, Peace Air flies to Accra, Freetown, Banjul, Dakar, Dubia, and Monrovia.

Air Peace offers a loyalty program called Peace Advantage where customers can earn points the more they fly which they can redeem for air travel or other gift.

One thing I noticed different in the Air Peace Booking platform is that it defaults to one-way trip, which is a departure from other airlines that often assume that we are interested in two-way (return) tickets. This means one fewer click than others for most travelers.

However, what the Booking platform gained by defaulting to one-way trip, it lost by not defaulting to one Adult.

The Booking platform expects you to specifically enter the number of adults rather than default to one adult like most other airlines.

Want to Book Cheap Flights Online? Click Here

Contact Air Peace Airline

Air Peace is warning about scammers who are currently scamming potential customers. So, it is very important to no the official website and contact information for Air Peace.

For questions and enquiries, you can call Air Peace customer care on 0700-35924-773223. You can also connect with Air Peace on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

Planning to travel by air? Checkout Air Peace booking website at www.flyairpeace.com.

Articles on Booking Flights Online
The Carlson Hotel Group, one of the top-10 largest hospitality companies in the world, has sold its hotel business to the Beijing-based HNA Tourism Group. Carlson operating more than 1,400 hotels in more than 110 countries and territories. In addition to various Radisson brands, its portfolio includes Park Plaza Hotels

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Cushman & Wakefield has significantly expanded its Valuation & Advisory team. Martin Belik, who has headed up Valuation & Advisory in Germany since 2007, currently manages a team of 40 advisors in Frankfurt and Berlin.

And, according to Belik, this number is set to rise further: As a result of th...

Photos: Cushman & Wakefield



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ING Real Estate Finance and Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg (LBBW) have jointly underwritten a 515 million (400 million), five year senior term loan to refinance Salesforce Tower, also known as 110 Bishopsgate, in the City of London. The 46 storey office building is owned by a consortium of investors including Heron International,

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CBRE has seen a new trend on the Prague office real estate market. Karlin has become a popular location for offices in the last five years, which has even surpassed the city centre in terms of the transactions volume. In response to market demand, a number of new development projects

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Kungsleden has signed a 20-year lease agreement with the hotel operator Kista Hotel Apartments for an apartment hotel in the property Holar 1 in Kista, involving the entire property with a total area of 6,000 sqm. Opening is expected to take place during spring 2018. The lease will lower Kungsledens

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P3 Logistic Parks handed over a 20,000 m build-to-suit (BTS) automotive parts distribution centre at Niedersachsenpark in northern Germany to Peugeot Citroen Germany GmbH on Monday 25 April 2016. The company belongs to the French PSA Group, the second largest automobile manufacturer in Europe. The P3 Niedersachsenpark logistics centre,

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Bajaj Qute has probably had the worst journey to its domestic launch having for years been kept away from launch based on multiple stay-orders, and subsequent court orders. In what was planned as a quadricycle that aimed to replace the rickshaw as a safer alternative for public transport, the vehicle has languished in no mans land longer than it has been available in the Indian market. 6 years since the idea was first showcased.

And while vehicle segmentation has dampened initial plans that were key to the success of Bajaj Qute, it seems to have found a new lease of life, owing to its unique classification. In its uber small form, Bajaj Qute is now listed as a vehicle on offer under Uber XS. The classification in itself is a giveaway to the size of vehicle to be expected.

Uber XS is positioned between Uber Auto and Uber Go, and with the exception of surge pricing and the working of situational algorithms, one can expect the price of Uber XS rides to be more economical than of the Uber Go. Uber Go itself offers small cars for a ride with Maruti Suzuki WagonR being the most likely vehicle to turn up.

The partnership between Uber and Bajaj Auto, helps place Bajaj Qute exactly as planned by the company. Uber said, We joined hands with Bajaj to add Qute, a four-passenger quadricycle, under a new category, UberXS exclusively in Bengaluru. Riders living around Indiranagar, Koramangala, HSR Layout and parts of the outer ring road can book a quadricycle starting today on the Uber app.

Bajaj has faced great difficulty in finding acceptance for the Bajaj Qute as a small passenger vehicle alternative but an association with Uber helps place the quadricycles in the heart of an action packed ecosystem, where it will essentially be put in use as a people carrier.

Theres no update on how many vehicles are on the Uber platform but it sure seems like a pilot project that could have scaleability. Baja Qute is available in CNG and petrol. The vehicles being deployed as part of the Uber XS fleet will run on CNG with mileage of 43km/kg.
People recently released from correctional facilities in Ontario had a risk of dying from a drug overdose 56 times greater than the general population, a new study has found.

The life expectancy of people who are or have been incarcerated was also shorter than the general Canadian population, by 10.6 years for women and 4.2 years for men, according to the study published in CMAJ Open.

"This is the first Canadian study to examine mortality rates in this population both during incarceration and after release," said Dr. Fiona Kouyoumdjian, a public health physician and post-doctoral fellow with the Centre for Research on Inner City Health of St. Michael's Hospital. "This study reveals a very high death rate in people who spend any time in provincial custody."

The study obtained data from the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services on the nearly 50,000 people admitted to Ontario provincial correctional facilities in 2000, and then looked at death records at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences to determine how many of these people died between 2000 and 2012 and what they died of.

Dr. Kouyoumdjian said there may be opportunities to intervene during incarceration to prevent people from dying from causes such as overdose. These may include initiatives to divert people from incarceration to treatment programs, better access to drug substitution therapies and treatment programs, overdose prevention training and access to naloxone, which can reverse overdoses when they occur.

Dr. Kouyoumdjian said her study also found that the death rate for this population between 2000 and 2012 was four times as high as the rate for the general population over age 15. Of the 48,166 prisoners studied, 4,126 died, or 8.6 per cent.

While in custody, the death rate was double that of the general population.

Dr. Kouyoumdjian said the consistently high death rate, both in custody and after release to the community, suggests that it is not simply the experience of incarceration that increases the risk of death, but rather that this population is likely at high risk of death due to complex social, medical, and behavioural factors.

The most common cause of death among people who experienced incarceration was injury (which includes overdoses and suicides), diseases of the circulatory system and cancer.

In Canada there are more than 250,000 admissions to correctional facilities each year and about 40,000 people in correctional facilities on any given day -- about one in every 250 people.
The largest meta-analysis so far of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for recurrent depression has found that MBCT is an effective treatment option that can help prevent the recurrence of major depression. The study used anonymised individual patient data from nine randomized trials of MBCT. It suggests that for the millions of people who suffer recurrent depression it provides a treatment choice and an alternative or addition to other approaches such as maintenance anti-depressants.

Major depression is a significant public health problem. Without ongoing treatment, as many as four out of five people with depression relapse at some point. MBCT is a group-based psychological treatment that helps people change the way they think and feel about their experiences and learn skills that reduce the likelihood of further episodes of depression. This meta-analysis, included data from trials that compared MBCT to usual care as well as to other active treatments such as maintenance antidepressants -- the current mainstay approach to prevention of depressive relapse.

Across the nine trials, 38% of those who received MBCT had a depressive relapse within 60 weeks' follow-up, in contrast to 49% of those who did not receive MBCT. Taking the time to relapse into account, people who received MBCT were 31% less likely to relapse during the 60-week follow-up compared with those who did not receive MBCT.

The inclusion of individual patient data made it possible to demonstrate that a person's age, sex, level of education and the age at which they first became depressed did not significantly influence the effectiveness of MBCT, suggesting that this approach is useful for a broad range of people. Those people who experienced more symptoms of depression when they entered treatment tended to show greater benefits from MBCT compared with other treatments. Clinical trials systematically record the occurrence of adverse events and negative outcomes such as death or hospitalisation for any cause. The study found no evidence of adverse events associated with MBCT when delivered by well-trained teachers in a clinical context.

Four of the trials that contributed to the meta-analysis compared MBCT combined with continuation, tapering, or discontinuation of antidepressants to continued maintenance antidepressant treatment alone. Data from these trials showed that those who received MBCT, and in many cases tapered or discontinued antidepressant medication, were 23% less likely to relapse to major depression than those who continued on antidepressants and did not receive MBCT.

Reflecting on the findings, Richard Byng, Professor of Primary Care, University of Plymouth and one of the co-authors said

"While the evidence is from a relatively small number of trials, it is encouraging for patients and clinicians to have another option. There was insufficient data to examine which types of patient or context predict who would benefit most. This, along with varied individual study and wide combined study confidence intervals, means that clinicians need to be cautiously optimistic when tapering off antidepressant medication, and treat each patient as an individual who may or may not benefit from both MBCT and other effective treatments."

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Lead author, Willem Kuyken, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre said, "This new evidence for Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy, collated from individual patient data across nine randomised trials is very heartening. While MBCT is not a panacea, it does clearly offer those with a substantial history of depression a new approach to learning skills to stay well in the long-term. It offers people a safe and empowering treatment choice alongside other mainstay approaches such as cognitive-behavioural therapy and maintenance antidepressants. We need to do more research, however, to get recovery rates closer to 100% and to help prevent the first onset of depression, earlier in life. These are programmes of work we are pursuing at the University of Oxford and with our collaborators around the world."

Background Information

MBCT is a treatment developed to help people who have experienced repeated bouts of depression by teaching them the skills to recognise and to respond constructively to the thoughts and feelings associated with relapse, thereby preventing a downward spiral into depression. The MBCT course consists of guided mindfulness practices, group discussion and other cognitive behavioural exercises. Participants receiving MBCT typically attended eight 2-2.5 hour group sessions alongside daily home practice.

The nine trials contributing to the current study were conducted in the UK, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The current analysis involved data from 1258 participants from these trials. In all the trials, MBCT was delivered according to the published treatment manual and all trials included people with a history of recurrent depression who were currently in full or partial remission from depression. In each trial, MBCT was compared to either usual care or a non-MBCT approach, typically maintenance anti-depressants. Only one trial compared MBCT to another psychological treatment.

An online blog " Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for recurrent depression: 'What do we know? What does it mean? Where to next?'" provides more detailed context and interpretation of this study and can be found at http://oxfordmindfulness.org. The blog provides more detail and interpretation of the key studies bearing on the question of MBCT's effectiveness, especially compared with the mainstay current approach -- maintenance anti-depressant treatment.

Efficacy of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy in Prevention of Depressive Relapse: An Individual Patient Data Meta-analysis from Randomized Trials JAMA Psychiatry. Published online April 27, 2016. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.0076.
Let's say you're trying to pinpoint when a particular past event occurred, but your best possible estimate puts it only within a span of 10,000 years. Now imagine if something could shrink that window of "when" to just 30 years.

That's the power of a new mathematical tool devised and tested by an international team of scientists, led by two from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The tool, a machine-learning algorithm honed by Abbas Ourmazd and Russell Fung, reduces timing uncertainties during changing events, improving accuracy by a factor of up to 300.

It could have numerous applications, from dating past climate-change events with better precision to determining when molecular bonds form or break during chemical reactions lasting only a few quadrillionths of a second.

"Timing uncertainty has been a bane in many areas of science for a long time," said Ourmazd, UWM distinguished professor of physics. "You often have data, but no exact time stamps on that data."

Joining UWM's researchers in the discovery were scientists from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science at DESY Research Center in Hamburg, Germany; the University of Hamburg; and Northwestern University.

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The work appears in the April 28 issue of the journal Nature.

Ourmazd and Fung built the algorithm by extracting a weak "arrow of time" from noisy data with corrupt time stamps. Think of it as restoring the initial sequence of a deck of cards after it has been shuffled.

"There are some remnants of the original sequence information in the shuffled deck," said Fung, a UWM senior scientist. "There's a weak whisper of time, like a faint voice in a loud party."

The researchers conceived the algorithm while working with data from a project tracking the movement of molecules using an X-ray free electron laser. Called an XFEL, this equipment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is the world's brightest X-ray laser and it serves as a camera of matter at nanoscale.

The XFEL uses an ultraquick flash of light to grab a "snapshot" with such speed that the sequence of snapshots yields a slow-motion movie of extremely rapid events.

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Making such a movie requires not only hundreds of thousands of snapshots, but also knowledge of the precise time when each snapshot was taken. Despite the unparalleled speed of the XFEL, much of the action is smeared, because the sequence of events is scrambled.

The algorithm Ourmazd and Fung devised resolves this problem. In an experiment at the Linac Coherent Light Source, the XFEL at SLAC, the researchers used the mathematical tool to reconstruct a clear movie of molecules as the bonds holding their atoms together were torn apart.

The algorithm identifies internal correlations to make sense of the ocean of snapshots. The sheer amount of data the XFEL generates aids the algorithm in this task.

"One image viewed in conjunction with another gives you richer information than you would get by considering the two images separately," Ourmazd said.

The research team sees applications in other sciences involving dynamical histories that are imprecisely known, such as geology, metrology, chemistry, biology and astronomy.

"There's a treasure trove of information to be had," Ourmazd said, "and we've pried the door open."
Beachgoers may soon be able to know in a timely manner if the water is clean enough for swimming, thanks to some new technology developed by researchers from Michigan State University and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The technology comes in the form of buoys that are deployed in the water near a beach. By combining statistical models with real-time data that are gathered by sensors embedded in the buoys, they provide quick and dependable information on water quality.

"Current beach-management practices are slow and unreliable," said Phanikumar Mantha, an MSU professor of civil and environmental engineering and a member of the research team. "A water sample needs to be gathered, then taken to a lab for analysis. That can be anywhere from 24 to 48 hours.

"If you go to the beach today and swim, then you find out tomorrow you shouldn't have gone, that's not very helpful."

Here is how this new technology works: The sensors in the buoys gather the information, everything from temperature to how clear the water is. Using a cellular modem on board the buoy, the data are uploaded to a land-based server.

From there, it uses web-based technology -- an RSS feed -- to get the information to the people who need to know, for example, a parks official who then makes the decision whether or not to close the beach and web pages that provide the same information to the public.

Data from the sensors are used to automatically run executable programs specific to E. coli, which Mantha said is an "indicator bacteria."

The technology gives authorities the information they need to make the correct decision.

"That can have a real effect on local economies," Mantha said. "If you close a beach unnecessarily, it's hurting the local businesses."

Work on this early warning system has been ongoing for more than a decade and is being used on a number of Lake Michigan beaches in Chicago.

"Our ultimate goal is to protect the public from getting exposed to contaminated water," Mantha said. "This problem can be particularly hard on children and seniors, who tend to be more susceptible to its dangers."

Details of this research are published by the MSU -- USGS team in the journals Environmental Science and Technology and the Journal of Environmental Management.
A new study found that vulnerability of deep-sea biodiversity to climate change's triple threat -- rising water temperatures, and decreased oxygen, and pH levels -- is not uniform across the world's oceans.

The analysis by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego used responses to natural variation in temperature, oxygen, and pH to reveal that deep-sea biodiversity from Baja California to San Francisco may be highly susceptible to projected climate changes in the future.

Climate change is often thought of as a single environmental threat from increases in atmospheric CO 2 . However, multiple climate stressors, from ocean warming and acidification to low oxygen levels, are expected to result in cumulative impacts on marine life. The deep ocean, which covers more than 60 percent of Earth's surface, is a biodiversity hotspot at increased risk from climate change.

The National Science Foundation-funded study, published in the April 27 issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, looked at how marine communities change across natural gradients to better understand the influence of the three climate stressors.

"These stressors are often under-appreciated threats to diversity and ecosystem health," said Scripps biological oceanographer Lisa Levin, the senior author of the study. "Yet, they raise questions about whether, and how, populations will adapt and which stressors are the primary drivers."

To untangle the impacts that these three climate stressors will have on seafloor diversity in the future, the researchers examined existing published data and collected new data on organisms living in deep-sea sediments in upwelling regions along continental margins, where the ocean and continental crusts meet along the seafloor. The researchers found that organisms from each ocean basin had its own unique threshold for the level and type of stressor it could tolerate.

The researchers found that diversity of marine life in the eastern Pacific Ocean is highly sensitive to declining oxygen levels, while CO 2 levels were of importance to biodiversity in the Indian Ocean. Oxygen levels are falling throughout the world's oceans, and the decline is expected to have the greatest impact to biodiversity in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

"Global change affects so many different environmental aspects, and across such a range of conditions, that it can be difficult to study in the laboratory," said Erik Sperling, assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, lead author of the study, which was conducted while he was a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps. "In some sense nature has already run these experiments on continental margins, where sharp natural environmental gradients exist."

Continental margins cover over 11 percent of the world's oceans. They are considered biodiversity hotspots and play a major role in supporting commercially important fisheries. They are also considered the largest "carbon sink" of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth.

The results from the study can help better identify areas under the most stress, and to predict the regions most susceptible to future climate change.
Coral reefs are widely known for their stunning array of color, shape and forms of life, making them a model for extreme biodiversity. Hidden within the multitude of reef inhabitants, but no less important, is their genetic diversity-- variability in DNA that gives species the capacity for adaptation, speciation and resilience in the face of stress. Research published today by a team of scientists from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UHM) School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), University of St. Andrews, and University of Melbourne discovered that large areas of intact coral reef with extensive live coral cover, not disturbed by humans or climate change, harbor the greatest amount of genetic diversity.

The team, led by Kimberly Selkoe, associate researcher at the UHM Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) and UCSB, assessed genetic diversity from over 17,000 samples taken from 47 common reef-associated species across the Hawaiian Archipelago. With this work, the researchers uncovered a link between species diversity of an ecosystem and the genetic diversity encoded within the DNA of those species.

Genetic diversity is linked to adaptive capacity, extinction risk of species, and the overall functioning of ecosystems, so conservation strategies often call for preserving areas of high genetic diversity. However, prior to this study there was little direct data to guide debates such as whether many small versus one large marine reserve would be better to protect genetic resources. The study found that Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (PMNM) safeguards the majority of Hawaiian reef biodiversity, but populations in the Main Hawaiian Islands (MHI) are genetically distinct and warrant additional protection.

"Management of marine resources should be based on the best available science, and this study underscores the importance of protecting large areas of coral reef habitat," said Randall Kosaki, NOAA's Deputy Superintendent of Papahanaumokuakea. "Protecting biodiversity and ecosystem integrity is our primary goal."

"Our study provides support for campaigns such as the Big Ocean Initiative, that seek to protect large areas of healthy coral reef habitat," said Rob Toonen, research professor at HIMB and co-author of the study. "However, we also need a diversity of approaches to preserve marine biodiversity because one size simply does not fit all in conservation efforts."

The researchers found that genetic diversity varies across the inhabited MHI, extending the argument for targeted protection of reefs throughout the MHI. Notably, Hawai'i Island has the greatest amount of coral reef area, harbors the greatest proportion of genetic diversity, and serves a unique, and particularly influential role due to its large size at the margin of the chain. Nihoa and Ni'ihau, which sit at the transition between PMNM and the MHI, also stand out and warrant future research and protection due to intriguing combinations of high genetic divergence and unusual fish composition.

Genetic diversity is widely accepted as critical for adaptation to a changing climate. Although coral bleaching in Hawaii has been relatively rare over the past few decades by comparison to many other places in the Pacific, this stressor still exerts a large impact on the reef communities studied. Researchers found that areas which experienced the most frequent coral bleaching conditions also showed depressed levels of genetic diversity, not just for corals but for the entire community of fishes and other invertebrates associated with those habitats.

"This negative impact of thermal stress on genetic diversity suggests that climate change will compromise the adaptive capacity and genetic integrity of not just corals but the entire coral reef community," explained Selkoe.

Identifying features of the landscape that are associated with biodiversity hotspots is one of the key strategies for conservation. In the future, the team will follow up on intriguing evidence in the dataset that the same large-scale ecological rules that predict species diversity also predict genetic diversity.

"If these relationships can be confirmed and replicated elsewhere, DNA sampling may one day allow rapid assessment of species diversity and new metrics of resilience and adaptive capacity," explained Selkoe, also an associate at UCSB's National Center for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis and an adjunct professor at the campus's Bren School of Ecological Science & Management.
An increased curiosity about others and the wider world could be the 'silver lining' of undergoing a quarter life crisis or midlife crisis.

This is the finding of a study by Dr Oliver Robinson and James Demetre of the University of Greenwich and Jordan Litman of the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, Florida that is presented today, Thursday 28 April 2016, at the British Psychological Society's 2016 annual conference in Nottingham. The study was funded by Springer Nature.

Dr Robinson said: "Our previous research using interviews shows it can be common for someone to undergo a period of emotional difficulty and instability which leads them to be more curious than usual about who they are and what their place in the world is. In this study we wanted to explore this using a large-scale survey, and see whether our curiosity systematically increases as a consequence of a personal life crisis in adulthood."

Over 900 participants (aged 20 and over, 425 male, 538 female) undertook questionnaires rating their curiosity of themselves, others and the wider world. They also rated their own feelings of currently undergoing a life crisis by agreeing or disagreeing with a statement. This asked whether they are currently going through an emotionally volatile time of change that has lasted at least a year and has at times overwhelmed their capacity to cope.

Overall middle-aged participants were more likely to say they were in a period of crisis (24 per cent) compared to younger adults (22 per cent) and older adults (14 per cent). Analysis of the results showed that, for both quarter life crisis and midlife crisis, individuals were more curious about themselves and the wider world than those who were not in crisis.

Dr Robinson said: "While crisis episodes bring distress and feelings of uncertainty, they also bring openness to new ideas and stimuli that can bring insight and creative solutions, which can move our development forward. This enhanced curiosity may be the 'silver lining' of crisis. Armed with this knowledge people may find the crises of adult life easier to bear."
Looking to tap into the promise of the National Cancer Moonshot initiative to accelerate cancer research in the United States and improve cancer detection and treatment in the process, a University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center clinician-scientist said there is an equally critical need to address disparities in cancer treatment around the globe.

Satish Gopal, MD, MPH, in a perspective published in the April 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, called for a commitment to contribute resources and energy to control cancer in less-resourced countries where there are significant gaps in cancer awareness, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

"With the 'Cancer Moonshot,' there's a huge amount of enthusiasm and serious commitment to take the fight against cancer even further," said Gopal a member of UNC Lineberger and an assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine and UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. "What I see is very little of the energy, funding, enthusiasm, and outrage getting channeled to parts of the world where there's a huge amount of unaddressed need. The science community needs to help address this issue."

Gopal is the only board-certified medical oncologist practicing in Malawi, a southern African country of about17 million people. He also is the cancer program director for UNC Project-Malawi, a research and care collaboration between UNC-Chapel Hill and the Malawi Ministry of Health.

Few, if any, of the significant advances made in cancer care during the past several decades have reached Malawi, said Gopal, who has lived and worked in the country with his family since 2012. Even basic services are sometimes lacking. There are no radiation oncology services anywhere in Malawi and generic chemotherapy medicines that were licensed 40 to 50 years ago are sometimes not available.

Further illustrating disparities in care and prevention, the vaccine against human papillomavirus, a virus linked to cervical, oropharyngeal and other cancers, is not available to girls and women in Malawi, despite overwhelming disease burden. And surveys have shown extremely low awareness about breast cancer among women in Malawi, which contributes to late diagnosis and reduced opportunities for cure, and highlights an urgent need for greater awareness.

"The pace of cancer advances has been quite rapid over the past decade. We treat and diagnose many cancers totally differently from when I entered my oncology fellowship six years ago," Gopal said. "And I think now with the Moonshot, we have a remarkable opportunity to accelerate that even further. This is going to change cancer domestically. What I'm trying to highlight is we could also have the opportunity to change cancer worldwide, and that is not being done."

Gopal said while organizations, including the National Cancer Institute, are making greater investments in global cancer programs, the response needs to extend beyond research grants and papers. At UNC Project-Malawi, he said researchers and physicians are both working on groundbreaking science, and also using proven strategies to more effectively treat, prevent, and diagnose cancer in a low-resource country. Broadly, he believes the cancer initiative needs to mirror the global response to human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which included tremendous social activism and political will even outside the research community.

"What happened in the HIV world is that the research community in some ways led the way, and was a catalyst," Gopal explained. "But they were also able to catalyze a movement that was bigger than universities and science, and that's what was ultimately required to complete change the face of that disease worldwide."
A study to be published in the May 2016 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) reports that use of certain antidepressants during pregnancy can result in offspring depression by early adolescence.

Using national register data from Finland, researchers found that children exposed to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) during gestation had more chance of being diagnosed with depression after age 12, reaching a cumulative incidence of 8.2% by age 15. For children exposed to maternal psychiatric illness but no antidepressants, the incidence was 1.9%. Rates of anxiety, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses did not differ significantly between the two groups. Comparing SSRI-exposed children to children of mothers with neither antidepressant use nor psychiatric diagnosis, researchers found the rates were significantly elevated for each outcome.

Animal studies already demonstrated that exposure to SSRIs during early brain development can result in depression-like behavior in adolescence; this is the first study that follows children beyond childhood to monitor the development of depressive disorders, which typically emerge after puberty has started. The increasing rate of SSRI prescriptions to pregnant women since their introduction 30 years ago makes the study of affected children particularly urgent. Today 6% of pregnant women in the US and 4% in Finland are on SSRIs at some stage of pregnancy.

To investigate whether using SSRIs during pregnancy is associated with offspring psychiatric disorders, researchers from Columbia University, New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology joined forces with researchers from the University of Turku and Helsinki in Finland. They examined psychiatric diagnoses, including depression, anxiety, ASD, and ADHD, in the offspring of nearly 16,000 mothers who had used SSRIs during pregnancy between 1996 and 2010. Children in this cohort ranged in age from 0 to 15 years old. Because maternal psychiatric illness can affect offspring neurodevelopment in the absence of SSRIs, primary comparisons were made between offspring of the SSRI group and offspring of mothers with a psychiatric disorder diagnosis but no antidepressant use.

"The results are in line with studies in rodents, suggesting that SSRI use during pregnancy increases the risk of offspring depression,'' Dr. Heli Malm, the first author of the study, said. "However, the oldest subjects had only just entered the age of risk for depression, and we know that mood disorders typically emerge after the onset of puberty. Further research is therefore urgently needed to follow these children as they get older to substantiate our findings. Until confirmed, these findings must be balanced against the adverse consequences of untreated maternal depression. While some women with mild to moderate depression may do well coming off antidepressants during pregnancy, severe depression when left untreated can lead to serious consequences in the mother and can have direct and indirect adverse effects on the pregnancy, the fetus, and the child."

While it might seem reassuring that the results showed no elevated risk of ASD and ADHD for SSRI-exposed offspring, there may still be significant effects on offspring risk for depression. Dr. Andre Sourander, co-author of the study, added: "Further studies should determine whether the developing fetus is particularly sensitive to the effects of SSRIs in different trimesters, whether some medications may be safer than others for the fetus, and whether evidence-based psychotherapies could be better utilized to maximize maternal benefits while minimizing risk to the long-term health of the developing fetus."
Nearly 10 billion years ago in a galaxy known as PKS B1424-418, a dramatic explosion occurred. Light from this blast began arriving at Earth in 2012. Now, an international team of astronomers, led by Prof. Matthias Kadler, professor for astrophysics at the university of Wurzburg, and including other scientists from the new research cluster for astronomy and astroparticle physics at the universities of Wurzburg and Erlangen-Nurnberg, have shown that a record-breaking neutrino seen around the same time likely was born in the same event. The results are published in Nature Physics.

Neutrinos are the fastest, lightest, most unsociable and least understood fundamental particles, and scientists are just now capable of detecting high-energy ones arriving from deep space. The present work provides the first plausible association between a single extragalactic object and one of these cosmic neutrinos.

Although neutrinos far outnumber all the atoms in the universe, they rarely interact with matter, which makes detecting them quite a challenge. But this same property lets neutrinos make a fast exit from places where light cannot easily escape such as the core of a collapsing star and zip across the universe almost completely unimpeded. Neutrinos can provide information about processes and environments that simply aren't available through a study of light alone.

Recently, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole found first evidence for a flux of extraterrestrial neutrinos, which was named the Physics World breakthrough of the year 2013. To date, the science team of IceCube Neutrino has announced about a hundred very high-energy neutrinos and nicknamed the most extreme events after characters on the children's TV series "Sesame Street." On Dec. 4, 2012, IceCube detected an event known as Big Bird, a neutrino with an energy exceeding 2 quadrillion electron volts (PeV). To put that in perspective, it's more than a million million times greater than the energy of a dental X-ray packed into a single particle thought to possess less than a millionth the mass of an electron. Big Bird was the highest-energy neutrino ever detected at the time and still ranks second.

Where did it come from? The best IceCube position only narrowed the source to a patch of the southern sky about 32 degrees across, equivalent to the apparent size of 64 full moons. "It's like a crime scene investigation," says lead author Matthias Kadler, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, "The case involves an explosion, a suspect, and various pieces of circumstantial evidence."

Starting in the summer of 2012, NASA's Fermi satellite witnessed a dramatic brightening of PKS B1424-418, an active galaxy classified as a gamma-ray blazar. An active galaxy is an otherwise typical galaxy with a compact and unusually bright core. The excess luminosity of the central region is produced by matter falling toward a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the mass of our sun. As it approaches the black hole, some of the material becomes channeled into particle jets moving outward in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. In blazars one of these jets happens to point almost directly toward Earth.

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During the year-long outburst, PKS B1424-418 shone between 15 and 30 times brighter in gamma rays than its average before the eruption. The blazar is located within the Big Bird source region, but then so are many other active galaxies detected by Fermi.

The scientists searching for the neutrino source then turned to data from a long-term observing program named TANAMI. Since 2007, TANAMI has routinely monitored nearly 100 active galaxies in the southern sky, including many flaring sources detected by Fermi. Three radio observations between 2011 and 2013 cover the period of the Fermi outburst. They reveal that the core of the galaxy's jet had been brightening by about four times. No other galaxy observed by TANAMI over the life of the program has exhibited such a dramatic change.

"Within their jets, blazars are capable of accelerating protons to relativistic energies. Interactions of these protons with light in the central regions of the blazar can create pions. When these pions decay, both gamma rays and neutrinos are produced," explains Karl Mannheim, a coauthor of the study and astronomy professor in Wurzburg, Germany. "We combed through the field where Big Bird must have originated looking for astrophysical objects capable of producing high-energy particles and light," adds coauthor Felicia Krau, a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg in Germany. "There was a moment of wonder and awe when we realized that the most dramatic outburst we had ever seen in a blazar happened in just the right place at just the right time."

In a paper published Monday, April 18, in Nature Physics, the team suggests the PKS B1424-418 outburst and Big Bird are linked, calculating only a 5-percent probability the two events occurred by chance alone. Using data from Fermi, NASA's Swift and WISE satellites, the LBA and other facilities, the researchers determined how the energy of the eruption was distributed across the electromagnetic spectrum and showed that it was sufficiently powerful to produce a neutrino at PeV energies.

"Taking into account all of the observations, the blazar seems to have had means, motive and opportunity to fire off the Big Bird neutrino, which makes it our prime suspect," explains Matthias Kadler.

Francis Halzen, the principal investigator of IceCube at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and not involved in this study, thinks the result is an exciting hint of things to come. "IceCube is about to send out real-time alerts when it records a neutrino that can be localized to an area a little more than half a degree across, or slightly larger than the apparent size of a full moon," he concludes. "We're slowly opening a neutrino window onto the cosmos."

But this study also demonstrates the vital importance of classical astronomical observations in an era when new detection methods like neutrino observatories and gravitational-wave detectors open new but unknown skies.
Infections continue to threaten human health. With remarkable genetic flexibility, pathogenic organisms outsmart available therapies. Fortunately, microbial versatility is matched by the host immune system, which evolves in dialogue with the microbes. Therapies that enhance the beneficial effects of the immune response represent a promising, but underexplored, therapeutic alternative to antibiotics.

A recently published paper identifies a new therapeutic target for the treatment of bacterial infections that regulates the immune response. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have now found an "off" switch for destructive inflammation in infected kidneys that does not impair the anti-bacterial defense.

The challenge is to strengthen the good, antibacterial defence without causing tissue damage. Inflammation accompanies most infections and symptoms like fever and pain are the price to pay for an effective defense.

"Here we address how to avoid the exaggerated immune response to severe infections, which can lead to tissue destruction and even organ failure," says Manoj Puthia, researcher at Lund University, Sweden and lead author of the study.

"We knew that specific transcription factors regulate innate immune responses to bacterial infection and that the outcome of infection be beneficial or destructive, depending on how these regulators work'' says Lund University Professor Catharina Svanborg. "We have also identified genetic variants in susceptible patients that support this concept."

Using mice lacking the closely related transcription factors IRF-3 or IRF-7, we were surprised to find that IRF-3 and IRF-7 control different facets of the immune response to kidney infection and that this determines the susceptibility to acute pyelonephritis, which is a severe, potentially life-threatening bacterial infection of the urinary tract.

In contrast to mice lacking IRF-3, which became very ill, Irf7-/- mice were protected from infection and chronic inflammation, suggesting that suppression of Irf7 might be beneficial.

"Based on these findings identifying Irf7 as an immunotherapeutic target. we used siRNA therapy to silence Irf7 and were able to demonstrate protection in susceptible mice," says Dr. Puthia.

Infections remain the major cause of the deaths worldwide, especially in developing and poorly developed areas. While antibiotics have greatly reduced illness and mortality, many pathogens have developed resistance and we are facing a global crisis.

"We propose to fight infections by learning from the innate immune system. We also need to define why the immune system is not protecting certain patients and learn to replenish these defects by boosting the '' good'' immune response."
Just as parts of South Florida are bracing for potential risks of flooding in low-lying areas due to the close proximity of the moon, high tides, sea-level rise and inclement weather, Florida Atlantic University is spearheading efforts to bring together professionals from the private sector as well as the public sector to help identify solutions and develop adaptation pathways.

"Connected Futures from Alaska to Florida," FAU's third Sea-level Rise Summit, will take place from Tuesday, May 3 through Thursday, May 5 at the Hyatt Regency Pier 66, 2301 SE 17th St., in Fort Lauderdale. The summit will bring together sustainability professionals from the private sector -- including insurance companies, realtors, architects and developers -- who will join leading scientists, decision-makers and members of the public sector.

Among the distinguished panel of speakers and presenters at the summit are Daniel A. Reifsnyder, Ph.D., deputy assistant secretary for environment, Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental And Scientific Affairs, U.S. Department of State; U.S. Congressman Ted Deutch; State Rep. Kristin Jacobs; Jim Cason, mayor of Coral Gables; Roderick King, M.D., Florida Institute for Health Innovations; Nic Kinsman, Ph.D., National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); and Alex Gardner, Ph.D., NASA Jet Propulsion Lab.

"While Florida and Alaska are on the opposite ends of the continent, they share mutual concerns of the imminent challenges presented by environmental changes," said Colin Polsky, Ph.D., director of the Florida Center for Environmental Studies at FAU. "The rapid melting of Arctic ice is threatening coastal locations globally, and impacts include increased flooding from sea-level rise in Florida to infrastructure instability from permafrost melting in Alaska."

The aim of the summit is to compare and contrast the unfolding impacts and response in these different regions to identify and highlight opportunities for building coastal resilience both locally and globally. The subtropics and the Arctic are rarely discussed together, and comparing shared experiences is expected to unlock new insights. Stakeholders in both regions will identify globally relevant public policy and private adaptation strategies to lessen the impacts everywhere.

"Like the Arctic, South Florida is one of the world's most vulnerable areas to climate change, especially sea-level rise," said Polsky. "In Florida, potential adaptation to sea-level rise is complicated by the porous limestone geology of the region, permitting salt water intrusion into important aquifers. The low level terrain in many areas makes even a relatively small sea-level rise problematic."

Since the United States assumed chairmanship of the eight-nation Arctic Council for the period 2015-17, the U.S. State Department has highlighted how ice melting in the Arctic affects people, infrastructure and ecosystems worldwide, multiplying risks around the world.

"Coastal cities are critically important for our economy and society, and are facing unprecedented environmental challenges," said Polsky. "This summit will break new ground by pairing two coastal regions that are both experiencing environmental challenges, but are already working to adapt to these changes. By tapping into the collective wisdom of the participants, the summit will result in a living document titled 'Adaptation Pathways 1.0.' that will serve as a blueprint for other coastal communities throughout the world."

FAU's Sea-Level Rise Summit will open with a pre-summit examination of the science, commencing with a presentation by NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. The following two days will include facilitated panel sessions and interactive visioning activities covering topics such as the economic implications of sea-level rise, impacts on infrastructure, health and livelihoods, and response success stories.

FAU's summit is supported in part by the Canadian, British and Dutch Consulates in Miami; the Chambers of Commerce of Greater Fort Lauderdale and Miami Beach; the U.S. Geological Survey; World Resources Institute; Union of Concerned Scientists; Florida Climate Institute; and FAU. The summit is open to the general public, agencies, decision makers, businesses, planners, researchers, risk management offices, and other interested parties.
How old is the universe? What causes a star to catastrophically explode? Answering these and other questions about stellar evolutions requires knowing the rates of the reactions involved. Specifically, scientists need to understand low-energy nuclear reactions that involve stable and unstable nuclei, the positively charged core of atoms. With few exceptions, laboratory measurements are limited to stable isotopes and high energy levels and thus must be extrapolated to lower energies. Nuclear scientists at Texas A&M University devised a method, using the asymptotic normalization coefficients (ANC), that allows scientists to determine key reaction rates at stellar energies using conventional nuclear reactions.

The measurement of the ANC for the capture of a proton by a specific atom, 14N, caused nuclear scientists to reconsider the age of the universe, which had been based on earlier work. This result is just one of many important rates that have been measured by this technique.

Measurements of ANCs over the past decade have provided new information about rates of many stellar reactions that involve capturing a proton by light-mass nuclei. Such reactions are important in supernovae and other stellar burning and stellar evolution phenomena. The ANC method involves both stable and unstable nuclei. Results from the ANC research have been published in more than 70 papers in the leading peer reviewed journals. A summary of the work has been published as a review article in Reports on Progress in Physics.

Funding was provided by three organizations: Department of Energy Office of Science, grant numbers: DE-FG02-08ER41533, DE-FG02-93ER40773, DE-FG52-09NA29467, DE-SC0004958, DE-SC0004971; National Science Foundation Division of Physics, grant number: PHY-1415656; and the Italian Ministry for University Research, grant number: RBFR082838 Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare.
A new study led by ICTA-UAB (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) researcher Victor Sarto and colleagues from the Institute of Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (CSIC-IQAC) has described for the first time in two centuries of knowledge a case of evolutionary convergence in the order of butterflies (Lepidoptera), certainly representing an evolutionary breakthrough to what has been known about their sexual communication. The research has discovered important behavior and physiological changes in the mating process of the moth Paysandisia archon (Castniidae). This neotropical moth that reached Europe in 2001 from Argentina (also inhabiting Uruguay and Brasil) breaks the known sexual rules by behaving like a diurnal butterfly.

The moth's behavior was already described as "strange" by scientists when this new species reached Europe by sea, hiding within infested palms in big ship cargoes. For the next 15 years it spread eastward along the Mediterranean basin to other countries and reached Bulgaria, Greece and Cypress, causing considerable havoc among palm trees.

Researchers noticed there was something very special concerning this moth. Strangely, the adults (males and females) behaved quite differently to other moths, so much that they acted more like butterflies than moths. This therefore prompted further research into the 'alien' moth.

Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) is one of the most diverse insect groups with currently about 160,000 described species. Within this vast group of insects and until 2012, only two basic partner-finding strategies pertaining to 'butterflies' and 'moths' were known. In short, in the case of butterflies (which are primarily diurnal) males use their vision to detect conspecific females at some distance and pursue them. Female butterflies, in turn, have no sex pheromone glands in their ovipositors and therefore do not release any long-range pheromone to attract males.

In contrast, in the case of moths (mostly nocturnal), males use their olfactory system to detect females at some distance because the latter release long-range pheromones from their pheromone glands. Once together and in close courtship interactions, males (butterflies and moths), and in some cases also females, release close range pheromones or 'scents' that facilitate or hinder the last courtship steps leading to copulation.

The butterflies simply use vision to find mates in their sunlit environment with no need to produce long-range sex pheromones. The moths, in turn, maintain the so-called "female calling plus male seduction" strategy, which implies the production of long-range sex pheromones.

In two recent papers published in 2012 and 2016, ICTA-UAB researcher Victor Sarto demonstrates that this alien moth, Paysandisia archon, breaks the known rules by behaving like a butterfly.

Among their abnormal behaviour, it is highlighted that males are territorial, use only vision for partner-finding, females do not release pheromones to attract males and have even lost their pheromone glands (which are normally located in the ovipositor) to the extent that they resemble female butterflies. "All these attributes are new and have no parallel in the world of moths, certainly representing an evolutionary breakthrough to what has been known about sexual communication in Lepidoptera" says Victor Sarto who states that this evolutionary convergence has taken place since day-flying moths have been subject to analogous evolutionary pressures such as those of butterflies.
The belief that online user ratings are good indicators of product quality is largely an illusion, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study.

Yet almost all retailers provide user ratings on their websites and many consumers rely on the information when making purchase decisions, according to the paper, published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research.

For the study, researchers examined user ratings for 1,272 products across 120 product categories, such as car seats, bike helmets, sunblock, air filters, smoke alarms and blood pressure monitors. Their analyses show a very low correspondence between average user ratings of products on Amazon.com and product ratings, based on objective tests, found in consumer reports.

"The likelihood that an item with a higher user rating performs objectively better than an item with a lower user rating is only 57 percent," said Bart de Langhe, author of the study and professor of marketing at CU-Boulder's Leeds School of Business. "A correspondence of 50 percent would be random, so user ratings provide very little insight about objective product performance."

In addition, user ratings do not predict the resale value of used products, found the study.

"Products with better reliability and performance retain more of their value over time," said de Langhe. "If average user ratings reflect objective quality, they should correlate positively with resale values. The fact that they don't casts more doubt on the validity of user ratings."

Philip Fernbach and Donald Lichtestein, professors of marketing at the Leeds School, co-authored the study, which also examined what information consumers rely on when judging the quality of products on Amazon.com. Consumers rely very heavily on the average user rating, which is presented front and center, according to the paper. They do this regardless of whether the average rating is based on a small or a large sample of consumers.

"This is a mistake," said de Langhe. "Oftentimes, there are just not enough ratings for a product or there is too much disagreement among reviewers. In this case, consumers should not trust the average very much, but they do nonetheless."

In light of their findings, the authors recommend consumers be more cautious when they make inferences about product quality based on user ratings.

"Accurately evaluating product performance is not an easy task," said de Langhe. "Different alternatives need to be evaluated side by side under the same conditions using objective measurement instruments. You can't assume that people follow such a scientific approach before they rate products online."

What are the implications for marketing and branding in the age of user-generated content? Because consumers comparing two products with the same objective qualities tend to give higher ratings to the one that is more expensive or from a brand with a premium reputation, marketing still counts.

"Brand managers should not fear for their jobs just yet," said de Langhe. "User ratings do not shield consumers from the influence of good old-fashioned advertising and price-signaling."
When her oldest friend in the world passed away, the blind elephant stood over her body for six hours. When people finally had to take the body away, she couldn't stop pacing and crying.

For Jokia, no one could ever replace Mae Perm, the friend who guided blind Jokia through constant darkness ever since they met 17 years ago, at Elephant Nature Park (ENP), a sanctuary for abused and worn-down elephants in Thailand. But even as she grieves Mae Perm, Jokia is learning to love again. Yai Bua, another elephant at ENP, has been standing by Jokia in her time of need.

Dodo Shows Odd Couples Dog Is So Gentle And Patient With Her Foster Kittens

"After Jokia lost her best friend, we worried about her mourning," ENP wrote on its website. "We try to walk her around the park to meet the other elephants and we hope she can find her new partner in a short time."

When Jokia met Yai Bua, an old elephant rescued from giving rides to tourists earlier this year, they seemed to hit it off. "Both of them seem to have a good relationship," according to ENP. "[T]hey used their trunk[s] to touch and hug each other."

The people at ENP observed that Yai Bua even stays by Jokia all night to protect her.
He was too shocked to even stand up. "I imagine he'd flown into my window and was stunned," Emily Milton, who found a bird in her backyard in North Carolina, wrote on Imgur.

Emily Milton

For her, it was an emotional experience. "When I first saw that little bird laying on the table, I turned into a damn mess, just crying my eyes out," Milton told The Dodo. He was unable to fly or even stand. "I sat outside for a while and the little bird started to perk up and perch on my fingers," she said.

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Emily Milton

Despite standing upright, the bird didn't fly, so Milton decided to welcome the bird into her home for the night.

Emily Milton

Milton's mother, who used to care for birds when she was younger, advised Milton to make a small home for the bird to keep him safe throughout the night. "I held him closely to my chest and went in the house to start gathering what I needed to make his bird hotel."

Emily Milton

She found a spare cardboard box and "stabbed a ton of holes in it" with a screwdriver, then added grass, twigs and a shredded paper towel to make the bird feel more at home. She closed the box, brought it inside and placed it in a room where her cat wouldn't be able to get to it. In addition to her cat, Milton also has three snakes and a parakeet. The next day, she woke up and was thrilled to see that the bird had survived the night. "When I took him outside and opened the lid, he didn't immediately move, so I tried to see if he'd hop on my finger," Milton explained. "The moment he flew away I was so freaking happy I squealed!"

Emily Milton

He flew away into this very bush, according to Milton. It may not look like much, but to a bird who flew into glass, stunned himself and spent the night recuperating, it looks like home sweet home.

Emily Milton
Mothers instinctively protect their young, but two mothers must've sensed no danger when they crossed paths with two paddleboarders off the coast of Laguna Beach, California. They swam within a few feet of each other.

This browser does not support the video tag. YouTube/Mark G Media

"I paddle with whales almost every day," Rich German, the man on the bright orange paddleboard in the video, told The Dodo. What made this day different was that German's friend Mark Girardeau was in a nearby boat with his drone to capture the encounter from high above as German filmed from his board. "They were moving super slow," he said. "I love that they feel safe. They would bring the baby right over to us. Obviously, they realize that we're no threat to them, and that's just a pretty amazing, magical experience."

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This browser does not support the video tag. YouTube/Mark G Media

"They seemed kinda curious," Girardeau, the drone operator, told The Dodo. "They didn't seem scared or anything. It was just like the paddleboarders were one with nature." Whales aren't the only ones who feel comfortable approaching German. Here's a photo of a dolphin swimming just below his board.

Rich German
<p>Owl Rescue Centre</p>

The woman who found an orphaned baby owl thought he would make an ideal pet. Until she realized that an owl's belly is lined with more than love. The spotted eagle owl, named Fluffy, had a seemingly insatiable appetite for rats. And, at 10 rand (about 70 cents) per rat at the pet store in Johannesburg, South Africa, it quickly added up.

Owl Rescue Centre

So Fluffy ended up like a lot of wayward wildlife, surrendered to the care of professionals. The first thing Brendan Murray, founder of the Owl Rescue Centre, noticed about Fluffy was his overwhelming tameness. "We get hundreds in every year," Murray tells The Dodo. "But that specific one had a completely different character. Every single owl has his own unique personality, but this one, when he came in, he was not scared of humans at all. He wanted to be with you."

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Owl Rescue Centre

Murray was worried that Fluffy had imprinted, meaning he thought he was a human - a known problem with owls that can make it difficult for them to transition back to the wild. "They won't breed with owls," Murray explains. "They won't recognize other owls."

Owl Rescue Centre

Staff at the rescue center went through the usual drills with the baby owl, rehabbing him, teaching him to fly - and ultimately, giving him a so-called soft release on the property, which was basically a feeding platform he could access at any time.

Owl Rescue Centre

But Fluffy wouldn't have it. "He'd just sit outside there in the middle of winter and he'd knock on the window until you'd open the door for him," Murray recalls. Once inside, Fluffy would make himself right at home.

Owl Rescue Centre

"He loved to watch TV," Murray says. "He'd watch TV for a good 45 minutes to an hour. Then he'd get bored of that and see what the wife's cooking." And if that wasn't interesting enough for Fluffy, he could always troll the dogs. "He'd come inside and then he'd walk up and down and chase after the dogs," Murray says. "Most owls would get away from dogs, but he'd chase after them or sit on them."

Owl Rescue Centre

For about a year and a half, Fluffy was every inch the strange and doubtful guest. But he did seem grateful to his hosts. Fluffy would frequently come bearing presents - snakes and rats, mostly. He would eat half in front of the TV and leave the rest for the humans to enjoy as they liked. Fluffy would also swoop down and ever-so-gently perch on the arm of Murray's son Spencer.

Owl Rescue Centre

But every baby must eventually grow up. Fluffy's designated outdoor dining area was on top of a shed. "You could see over the months, he wasn't that keen to come down anymore," Murray says. "And he wasn't that keen to come inside any more. He was basically weaning himself off of us up until he became a teenager. Then he realized he doesn't have to sit inside. He can fly around."

Owl Rescue Centre

And like a teenager, Fluffy realized he could talk to girls. One day, he brought a fully wild female owl to the feeding platform. And the whirlwind that he brought to this family's life began to subside, as Fluffy fell into another sort of tempest altogether - the love kind. Breeding season arrived. And Fluffy, who was once supposed to be someone's pet, went fully, mercifully wild - just the way he was always meant to be - and started a family of his own. "He would sit and watch you from a distance," Murray says, "just to make sure you're OK." Love would eventually lure Fluffy from the human world. But it was also love that brought him into this family's life in the first place - the kind that comes from dedicated animal lovers at the Owl Rescue Centre.

Owl Rescue Centre

Like many animals, owls are under siege from urbanization, constantly being edged out of their habitats by human development. Owls in particular, according to the center, have a high mortality rate as they struggle to deal with not only habitat loss, but poisoning - often from eating poisoned rats - and even deadly traffic collisions.

Owl Rescue Centre
Earlier this year the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent an open letter to the candidates for president, outlining the steps the nations largest companies believe would boost their investment in the United States. It is, in large part, a list of things that presidential front-runners in both parties have denounced.

The recommendations included expanding international trade and immigration reform, reducing deficits, relaxing regulations and cutting corporate tax rates and safety-net programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Few have attracted support from the major candidates.

Big companies  not just Wall Street bankers  find themselves and their priorities more adrift from American politics than they have in decades. Republican candidate Donald Trump blasts firms for outsourcing jobs overseas. Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders hits them for how much corporate tax they pay; his rival Hillary Clinton laments their focus on profits at the expense of broader economic vitality.

A confluence of factors is fanning the flames. The ginger recovery from the financial crisis has produced few sustained income gains for most workers. Corporations are enjoying record profits but investing a historically low amount of them back into the economy. Meanwhile, social media has given corporate critics new and powerful platforms.

Business is a popular punching bag in every election, but its reaching unprecedented levels this time around, said Tom Donohue, the chambers president. This is what happens in a poorly performing economy when people are looking for someone to blame.

Frustrated with the dynamic, some executives, such as the CEOs of General Electric and Verizon, have taken the extraordinary step of rebutting their campaign-trail critics online. Others are warning lawmakers and candidates that they risk damping investment and economic growth for years to come.

Leaders of the top business lobbying groups, in particular, heap scorn on lawmakers and candidates, who they say have lost the will to push for policy changes that have long enjoyed corporate support. Many of those policies have aroused voter anger in a time of middle-class income stagnation, low growth and lingering memories of the crisis that began on Wall Street and spread to the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

In the postwar era, Theres never been a greater disconnect between the presidential campaign trail and the business community, said John Engler, a former Michigan governor who now heads the Business Roundtable in Washington.

Others, though, say that business leaders are misreading the mood of the electorate and the steps they must take to reconnect with angry voters.

Some in the business community think that if we just explain things better, people will understand, said Peter Scher, who served in President Bill Clintons administration and is now vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase in Washington, overseeing the firms $100 million investment in Detroit. Its more than just a messaging issue.

Not enough leaders in Washington are offering alternatives to the idea that if its good for business it must be bad for the middle class, he added.

Big corporations remain large drivers of employment and investment in the United States, but their attachment to Americans everyday lives is fading.

The number of U.S. companies listed on the stock market dropped by half from 1997 to 2012, said Jerry Davis, a sociology professor at the University of Michigans Ross School of Business. New companies that have undertaken initial public offerings and issued public stock have created relatively few genuinely new jobs, Davis argues, especially compared with the industrial giants of 50 years ago. Existing companies remain under pressure from shareholders to automate or outsource jobs and hold salaries down.

In the Twentieth Century, the American economy was dominated by major corporations, Davis writes in a book out this month. In the Twenty-first, that will no longer be true.

A Pew Governance Survey last summer found that only one-third of Americans believe large corporations are having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country. Gallup surveys show that about 2 in 10 Americans say they have a high amount of confidence in big business, a slight improvement from the depths of the recession but still lower than in the late 1990s.

Theres no question that this is the toughest communications environment that Ive ever seen, said Lance Morgan, a former aide to the late New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is now chief communications strategist at Powell Tate. To the extent that the presumption of good ever existed for companies, it certainly is rarer and rarer.

The democratization of complaints online  and the opportunity for candidates to seize upon them  complicates companies collective image problem, executives and veteran corporate communicators say.

In the past, information was disseminated through established media, so if a candidate said something outrageous you worried less because reporters would fact-check it, said Craig Silliman, executive vice president of public policy and general counsel of Verizon Communications. Thats not true anymore. With social media there are no truth filters, so it is important to respond directly before a false statement gains traction.

Verizon chief executive Lowell McAdam recently tangled online with Sanders over issues stemming from a worker strike at the company. He disputed Sanderss allegations of corporate greed and called the senator from Vermont uninformed. GE chief executive Jeffrey R. Immelt published a similar counterattack this month on Sanders, defending the companys record of job creation  including in Vermont.

More than reputations are at risk for business leaders. Their agenda is effectively stalled in Washington, where immigration reform and infrastructure spending are dead issues for now, tax reform is proceeding sluggishly and prospects look dim for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement negotiated by the Obama administration.

Donohue and the chamber are focusing their political spending this year on the House and Senate, in hopes of electing candidates who will pursue the business lobbys agenda no matter who wins the presidency.

The critiques may sting on the trail, said Jay Timmons, who heads the National Association of Manufacturers, but the agenda is what business leaders are most worried about losing. Having people say nice things about you only goes so far, he said. Youve got to have the policies in place that will let us thrive and let us expand.
In 1962, Phil Kives went on television, doing a live, five-minute demonstration of a skillet. He fried an egg, and when he was done, the egg slid right out of the pan, thanks to a new nonstick surface called Teflon.

Considered one of the first infomercials in history, it caused customers to flock to stores by the thousands, and it made Mr. Kives (pronounced KEE-vuss) a marketing trendsetter. In time, he would launch a company that became a mainstay of television advertising, pitching hundreds of products in kitschy commercials that developed a cult following for their loud, relentless style.

Mr. Kives, who was the K in K-Tel, died April 27 at a hospital in Winnipeg. He was 87.

The death was confirmed by a daughter, Samantha Kives. The cause was not disclosed.

Early in his career on the Canadian prairies, Mr. Kives trapped weasels and sold them for 50 cents a pelt. He went on to write and produce hundreds of low-budget commercials that shouted their way into global consciousness, making K-Tel one of the most successful marketing companies of all time.

Philip Kives, seen in 1997. (Courtesy of K-Tel International)

Mr. Kives touted one miraculous product after another with the phrase As Seen on TV, leading to sales of 28 million units of the Brush-O-Matic  an adjustable brush ideal for old suedes, woolens, hats and all other clothes!  at $2.99 apiece.

The versatile Veg-O-Matic kitchen slicer could make french fries or chop onions without shedding a tear. It was Mr. Kives himself who used the Feather Touch Knife to slice a ripe tomato without crushing it, immediately after cutting through a shoe and a block of wood.

Normally, cutting through a chicken bone is impossible, the announcer intoned without an ounce of irony. Not with Feather Touch!

K-Tels hard-sell commercials were memorably spoofed in a Saturday Night Live skit featuring Dan Aykroyd hawking the Super Bass-O-Matic 76, a blender in which the actor emulsified a fish.

Using the power of personal demonstration, Mr. Kives shipped boxes of the knives to Australia in the early 1960s, then bought commercial time on television.

Ten days later I was on TV in Newcastle, Australia, and it just took off, he told Britains Independent newspaper in 2005. Five months later Id sold a million knives and I made a dollar a knife.

But wait, theres more!

In the early years, Mr. Kives may have specialized in kitchen gadgets, but K-Tel took off when the company began to sell record albums over TV. The first, in 1966, was 25 Country Hits. Every copy was sold. K-Tel then branched out with 25 Polka Greats, which sold 1.5 million copies in the United States alone.

Soon, K-Tel was releasing a series of compilation records, a new concept in which a single album contained songs from a variety of artists. On 24 Tear Jerkers, the Everly Brothers, the Platters and Dion and the Belmonts appeared together on one album. Hooked on Classics sold more than 10 million copies, and many of the records produced by K-Tel went gold. The records were marketed as if they were knives or frying pans and were sold not in music shops but in department stores and drugstores and even hardware stores.

By the early 1980s, K-Tel had sold more than 500 million record albums and once had the No. 1, 3, 4 and 5 albums on the charts in Britain. Mr. Kives negotiated with record companies and often with the artists themselves to gain the rights to their former hits.

Elton John, he was nice to do business with, Mr. Kives said in 2005. And the singing barber, Perry Como  very, very nice. Liberace took me to his house and made dinner for me and my wife.

Then you turned around and had to deal with a guy like Sammy Davis Jr. He could only see in one eye. Did you know that? I didnt know that. He was talking to me but looking elsewhere and I thought he must have been talking to somebody else. And he screamed at me Im TALKING to you! ANSWER ME! Gee. He was tough.

Philip Kives was born Feb. 12, 1929, in Oungre, Saskatchewan, where his Romania-born parents had moved as part of a Jewish farming colony. He grew up in a house without electricity or running water.

As a boy, he shot gophers, earning a penny per tail. He figured out how to cut the tails in half to double his earnings. By his early 20s, he was living in Winnipeg, driving a taxi before finding a niche as a door-to-door salesman of kitchen utensils.

Not long after, he began hustling wares on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, demonstrating gadgets and learning the art of salesmanship. He learned how to play the crowd, saying, Just come in closer, a step at a time, we call it walking.

Then, even though no one was offering to buy, hed say, Thank you, hold on to your money, Ive got more to show you.

By then, people were digging into their pockets.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Kives demonstrated the Teflon frying pans at Macys department store in New York. He then moved back to Canada, deciding that if he could sell to dozens of people at a live demonstration, he could sell to millions on TV.

He formed a company in 1962 that eventually became K-Tel, with headquarters in Winnipeg. In the early years, Mr. Kives bought many of his products  the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman  from Sam Popeil, an inventor who was the father of pitchman Ron Popeil.

When Mr. Kives found success, Sam Popeil stopped selling to him and instead joined his sons business, known as Ronco.

Mr. Kives found other suppliers, and K-Tel branched out into music and other fields.

We grew into a big company, and it was very difficult for me to control it, he told Canadian Business magazine in 2006. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my life was having 13 relatives working for me.

K-Tel went bankrupt in the 1980s after failed investments in oil and gas and real estate. But after several years, Mr. Kives brought the company back, focusing on the Internet. With the rights to 20,000 song titles in the catalogue, K-Tel became one of the earliest independent suppliers of music to Apples iTunes.

Mr. Kives continued as chief executive of the revamped K-Tel until his death.

Survivors include his wife of 44 years, the former Ellie Corman of Winnipeg; three children, Samantha Kives and Kelly Kives, both of Toronto, and Daniel Kives of Winnipeg; a brother; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Kives owned a stable of race horses, some of which won major races. He sold one brood mare for $7,000, thinking it would not produce an outstanding foal. But the mare later gave birth to a horse that ran in the Kentucky Derby.

In 2008, a sixth-grader wrote to Mr. Kives, saying he wanted to interview him for a project on Canadian history.

Mr. Kives showed up at the boys school, with a Veg-O-Matic in hand. When the youngster had trouble slicing french fries, the master of the boardwalk took over.

He adjusted the blade, saying, Dont push like this. Snap it through!

The fries were perfect.

An earlier version of this story stated that Phil Kives may have coined the phrase as seen on TV. It was used by other advertisers as early as 1950.
Harper Lee, the beloved author of To Kill a Mockingbird, would have turned 90 today. In the months since her death in February, Ive been thinking about my correspondence with her almost 30 years ago when I was starting my career as a writer.

I had imagined Lee as someone private and shy. The person I found was protective of herself, but she was no Boo Radley, her claims to the contrary notwithstanding. And she had more to say than one would expect from a hunted and reclusive author.

In 1988, the year after my first book was published, I wrote a letter to Lee asking whether she would consider cooperating with me in a biography of her. I had done enough research to know the odds were greatly against it. She did not grant interviews and was as unlikely to work with a biographer as was J.D. Salinger.

At the very least, I hoped to persuade Lee to meet me, even if it were on the condition that I publish nothing until after her death. Her answer, which came promptly, astonished me.

She had read and admired my biography of Katharine S. White, the longtime fiction editor of the New Yorker. Although Lee would not cooperate with a biography (I make Boo Radley look like a publicity hound), she wrote me, When Im dead and gone  thats a different matter, and I hope youll be there when the dust settles. She went on to instruct me about getting in touch with her agent.

What I did next makes me wince.

On the advice of a much more experienced biographer, I decided to take a more aggressive approach. I wrote to Lees older sister, Alice Lee, a lawyer who was fiercely protective of her sister. I made tentative plans to travel to the Lees home town, Monroeville, Ala. I again pressed, politely, for an interview. The letter I wrote  long and gushing (How young I was!)  was at least honest about my intentions.

Harper Lees answer was swift, but polite: No.

I suddenly remembered myself and backed off. Why had I not listened to my instincts? In that letter, Lee had thanked me for the sensitivity and sensibility of your approach to me  which had been in a letter sent in care of her agent. I cannot help contrasting it with Ian Hamiltons own account (in this months Vanity Fair, I think) of his hot pursuit of J.D. Salinger. Mr. Hamiltons attitude toward his prey  for that is the word  should alone explain Mr. Salingers need of a twelve-foot fence.

Lees panicked reaction to my preliminary efforts  written before she knew I had changed my mind  made me feel ill. The idea of contacting my friends, family and whomever may give you information is tantamount to your working on a biography as of now, and I earnestly request you to refrain therefrom. The idea of contacting my sister for pre-burial information is one you should not pursue  she, of all people, respects and protects my privacy, and understands what its been like for me.

I apologized profusely by return mail. In a last, handwritten letter, Lee took considerable pains to console me: If in my haste I implied that I thought the less of you for your efforts, I am deeply sorry: from your biography of Katharine White and from your letters I had formed the opinion that you are person of great integrity, an opinion I have not changed. She even suggested a better subject for me: Eudora Welty. In my opinion Miss Welty is simply the best there is. Not only was a whole generation of Southern writers indebted to her (McCullers, Williams, Capote are but three), her influence is felt by every youngster today. If you could secure her consent to a biography, you would have a prize indeed.

[Salman Rushdie to be first speaker in lecture series honoring Eudora Welty]

Although I wrote Lee a few more times (simply an effort to keep in touch) and eventually mailed her a copy of my second book, a biography of Stephen Crane, I never heard from her again. And by the time I began my third biography, of cartoonist Charles Addams, I had decided that this would be my last biography and last book, even if Lee died before I did.

In Harper Lees letters  some of them written on a typewriter, as mine were, and signed with green ink, which I also used (such small things can help a biographer empathize with her subject)  I found a writer who had clearly never stopped working at her craft. Her sentences were tight and polished. She was generous, kind, funny, encouraging and almost maternal. She was also remarkably trusting. If you read the Gerald Clarke biography of Truman Capote, she wrote, you will find among its amazing inaccuracies a particularly malicious lie to the effect that my mother was mentally unbalanced and had tried twice to kill me! (A glittering example of Trumans cruelty and jealousy  all my gentle mother ever did was love him.) Mr. Clarke, by the way, had worked on his biography of Truman for years before Trumans death, and for years afterward, but did not bother to check with me or anybody else on the truthfulness of that particular story. As you say, indeed you do need a tough hide for this racket!

Another biographer might have contacted Clarke about Lees claims, but I decided not to. Further efforts to research Lees life, even discreetly, felt like a betrayal of trust.

In time, other writers would breach that 12-foot fence, against her wishes. Having glimpsed something of what life had been like for Harper Lee, I could feel only relieved that I had backed off. Her letters  which taught me a lesson I never forgot  remain a gift.

Linda H. Davis is the author of three biographies, including Charles Addams: A Cartoonists Life.


Elaris (voice of Rosario Dawson) and Capt. Qwark (Jim Ward) finally accept Ratchet (James Arnold Taylor) in Ratchet & Clank. (Gramercy Pictures)

6 and older

Ratchet & Clank (PG)

Fans 6 and older of the PlayStation video-game series can zoom along with this animated movie adaptation. (Of course, a new video game based on the movie came out April 12.) Its fast-moving and full of throwaway gags, but kids will have no trouble following the story of how the intergalactic heroes of the title first met. Ratchet, a little Llombax with a fox/raccoon kind of look, leads a fairly dull life on his planet as a mechanic. He dreams of being a hero, but hes too small to be accepted by the Galactic Rangers and their big-jawed leader, Capt. Qwark. Elsewhere in the galaxy, the evil Chairman Drek plots to destroy planets and use parts of them to make himself a new one. Hes aided by the mad scientist Dr. Nefarious and the enforcer robot Victor. A malfunctioning little bot escapes Dreks lair and crashes onto Ratchets planet. Ratchet repairs him and names him Clank. Clank warns of Dreks plans, and, sure enough, Dreks warbots start to invade. Ratchet and Clank cleverly repel them, and Qwark has to enlist them into the Rangers. They must now take the fight to Drek and Nefarious and save the galaxy. (94 minutes)

THE BOTTOM LINE: An intelligence officer with the Rangers, Elaris, tortures one of Dreks robots for information in a scene that goes a little far for PG. There are bits of semi-crude slang that whiz by.

Featuring the voices of Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Lupita Nyong'o, Scarlett Johansson, Christopher Walken and others, "The Jungle Book" is a reimagining of the 1967 movie of the same name. ( / Walt Disney Pictures)

10 and older

The Jungle Book (PG)

A dazzling piece of technical filmmaking, this new take on Rudyard Kiplings books has less success with its stark shifts in tone. Some bits are so visually intense, because of the blend of 3-D animation, live-action and motion-capture, that one cannot really recommend the movie for kids younger than 10. Yet other moments deep in the middle of the film lighten into a cheerful nod to the comic and musical gems of Disneys 1967 animated version. With the voices of Bill Murray as Baloo the carefree bear and Christopher Walken as King Louie, the menacing ape, we hear snatches of The Bare Necessities and I Wanna Be Like You. But poor little Mowgli (Neel Sethi)  the orphaned human man cub rescued by the panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) and raised by a loving wolf mother, Raksha (Lupita Nyongo)  has a tough time of it. A vengeful tiger, Shere Khan (Idris Elba), has a grudge against the boy and aims to kill him, first dispatching his adoptive wolf father, Akela. Bagheera sees that Mowgli, for all his human cleverness, will only be safe in the man village. But trying to get him there proves a perilous journey, fighting off Shere Khan, a hungry python, King Louie and his monkey army, and the distractions of lazing down the river with Baloo. (105 minutes)

THE BOTTOM LINE: Parents will need to decide what their own children can handle, whether in 3-D or not  perhaps by pre-screening the film. When the tiger Shere Khan or the python Kaa  who both want to kill and/or eat Mowgli  go after the little boy, the encounters are quite scary. Mowgli survives in triumph, but its a rough go.

Starring an ensamble cast of Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts, Kate Hudson and others, a group of seemingly unconnected people come to terms with the relationships they have with their mothers as Mother's Day draws close. ( / Open Road Films)

PG-13

Mothers Day

No corn goes unprocessed in this syrupy celebration of modern motherhood. That doesnt mean willing audiences cant have a good cry and a good laugh watching Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, Julia Roberts and others get in and out of family-focused messes in upscale Atlanta. The film is fine for teens, but its tough to predict whether theyd actually like it. They may view its heavy-handed lesson, aimed at the boomer generation, about accepting mixed-race and same-sex marriages as really old hat. The characters might interest them more: Sandy (Aniston) has a meltdown when her ex (Timothy Olyphant) weds a young beauty, whom her two young sons dare to like. She meets a nice widower (Jason Sudeikis), but hes still grieving and, anyway, she cant flirt. Sandys pal Jesse (Hudson) is married to Russell (Aasif Mandvi), whos of South Asian ancestry, and has a son with him, but has never told her racist parents. They also dont know that her sister is married to a woman. Another subplot about a young mother, her stand-up comic boyfriend and Roberts as a television personality feels wholly fake. (118 minutes)

THE BOTTOM LINE: Theres a good amount of verbal and visual sexual innuendo, mostly mild and comic, but sometimes a little crude. Certain characters use racial, ethnic and homophobic slurs. Theres one use of the F-word.

An aging widow, Marnie (Susan Sarandon) is lonely and heartbroken. When her daughter, Lori (Rose Byrne), moves to Los Angeles, she follows along and constantly interferes with Lori's life. (Sony Pictures Classics)

The Meddler

The inevitable bumps in the road of adult life underpin the gentle plot of The Meddler. A low-key, sweet-natured film, it might pull in thoughtful teens who like to know what makes older people tick. Based on the real-life experiences of writer/director Lorene Scafaria, it sets up a tug-of-war between a recently widowed mom, Marnie (Susan Sarandon), and her troubled daughter, Lori (Rose Byrne). Marnie moves out to Los Angeles to be near Lori, a TV writer under stress at work, still grieving over her dad and pining for a boyfriend who has dumped her. A nonstop talker who needs to be with people, Marnie bugs Lori, via text, phone call and just-dropping-in-with-bagels. When Lori goes to New York for an extended shoot, Marnie stays in L.A., filling her lonely hours helping people she barely knows, trying to become part of their lives. She meets a nice retired cop (J.K. Simmons), but may not be ready for romance. Gradually, both Marnie and her daughter come to grips with their shared loss and move on. (100 minutes)

THE BOTTOM LINE: Pot-smoking is depicted, and there is some to-do about a home pregnancy test.



Jessica Chastain, as the warrior Sara, is part of a strong cast that does heavy lifting in "The Huntsman: Winter's War." (Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures)

The Huntsman: Winters War

The tortuous plot of this prequel/sequel, even for fans familiar with Snow White & the Huntsman, will prove quite a tangle, but the movie is a visual feast. Its A-list actors add emotional and verbal heft, making that plot tangle feel both magical and real. The films violent battles, although largely bloodless, render it an iffy choice for preteens and even some middle-schoolers, as does its crude humor and sexual innuendo. A narrator intones, Long before happily ever after,  as things get underway. Ravenna (Charlize Theron), that villainous queen with the magical mirror, arranges the fiery death of an infant (only implied), the love child of her sweet younger sister, Freya (Emily Blunt). Embittered, Freya turns cold and founds a kingdom with her own icy powers. She enslaves children to become her warriors. This takes place before the events of the first film, in which Eric the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) saved Snow White from Ravenna. Eric is one of the children Freya enslaves. He trains alongside Sara (Jessica Chastain). As adults, they are lovers, which is forbidden. Freya separates them violently and seemingly forever. The film then jumps ahead seven years  leaping over the Snow White story  and puts the Huntsman on a quest to find the missing mirror that Ravenna used for evil. With comically bickering dwarfs, he braves the wrath of Ravenna and Freya. (114 minutes)

THE BOTTOM LINE: The battle scenes are harsh, with swords, sticks and axes implying lethal impalements, although no gore is shown. Magical characters bleed tar. The protagonists pass through battlefields with the bodies of soldiers, horses and, occasionally, skeletons. Eric and Sara have two non-graphic love-making scenes with subtly implied nudity. There is one use of the B-word, and some fairly crude sexual innuendo.


Ed (Giovanni Ribisi) thinks hes found a father figure in Ernest Hemingway (Adrian Sparks) in Papa Hemingway in Cuba. (Yari Film Group)

Ernest Hemingway must have gotten boatloads of fan mail, and every once in a while he may have replied. Thats how journalist Denne Bart Petitclerc became friends with the great novelist during the final years of his life. Petitclerc sent a letter in 1959 and got a phone call in reply, plus an invitation to come to Cuba and fish. Can you imagine?

That remarkable story is the basis for Papa: Hemingway in Cuba. Using a script Petitclerc wrote shortly before his 2006 death, director Bob Yari (producer of Crash) has brought the tale to the big screen with a few embellishments, plus a new protagonist. Here, the journalist, played by Giovanni Ribisi, becomes Ed Myers  although Hemingway just calls him the kid.

Papa is notable for being the first Hollywood film in decades to be shot in Cuba. Beyond that milestone, however, the movie doesnt leave much of an impression. The most glaring of many distractions is a badly cast title character. With his beard and belly, stage actor Adrian Sparks looks the part  especially when he is lazing around on his fishing boat, his shirt fully unbuttoned. But he completely lacks the verve of a man who embraced adventure  not to mention the charisma of a guy who collected (and sometimes alienated) so many brilliant friends.

Given the films weirdly uneven pacing and overly expository dialogue, Sparks doesnt have much to work with.

Before the call comes from Hemingway, the movie hustles through some of Eds past: His father abandoned him as a child; then he gets a job as a reporter, where he starts dating a co-worker (Minka Kelly). Once he meets Hemingway, the two quickly form a father-son bond. When Ed explains that hes an orphan, Hemingway says, Well be your family, huh kid? To which Hemingways wife (Joely Richardson) adds, Im not sure the kid knows what hes getting himself into.

True enough.

To Ed, Hemingways life looks like paradise, but that changes after the journalist starts making more frequent trips to Cuba to cover the countrys coming revolution. Eds new father figure can be a mean drunk, and hes a cruel husband. Whats more, hes paranoid about the FBI following him. (In the movie, as in real life, his fears are warranted.)

On paper, this is an extraordinary story. But the careless production values blunt its impact. The score is obtrusive and generic; the sound editing makes a shootout sound reminiscent of an old Western; continuity errors abound. Papa often feels more like a play, as if the actors are straining to emote to the cheap seats. They shouldnt need to, though, given the script. When Ed, for example, is shown crying in the rain after fighting with Hemingway, we hardly need voice-over explaining that hes sad.

Papa is less a phenomenal true story than a missed opportunity. The director should have listened to the advice Hemingway himself gives the kid: Its the power of less.
Savage Mill, a onetime cotton mill in Savage, Md., has everything from antiques to zip lines to restaurants and ghost stories. (Winyan Soo Hoo/For The Washington Post)

Built on the banks of the Little Patuxent River, Savage Mill is a former cotton mill from the 1820s with a storied past and community-centered present.

The mills worn red-brick exterior gives way to a modern shopping and dining complex that honors its historic charm. Tucked away in Savage, Md., the 175,000-square-foot complex (8600 Foundry St.) is between Washington and Baltimore in Howard County, with more than 90 tenants comprising the mix of retail, businesses and offices.

Its a place where a visitor can go ziplining, grab a meal and visit an artist at work, all in an afternoon.

More than a century ago, it was an idea among siblings. Amos Williams and his brothers constructed the cotton mill with $20,000 borrowed from John Savage, a Philadelphia banker and industrialist. They named the mill and surrounding town for Savage. Raw cotton  its early production at the hands of slaves  arrived from the Port of Baltimore via horse or ox wagon for canvas production at the mill. During the Civil War, the material was used for ship sails, tents and other military products. During World War II, the mill produced 400,000 pounds of canvas a month.

Today, the complex is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Winer family, which owned a plastics company in Odenton, Md., bought the mill in the 1950s and later created the one-stop shop for small boutiques, restaurants and artists-in-residence. Its a unique historic location that has all the amenities that you need, says marketing manager Aimee Troglio.

Savage Mill also stretches over the landmark Bollman Truss Bridge, which is accessible by foot and bicycle. The bridge, also historical, is one of the last standing iron bridges of its kind.

Where would all the history be without ghosts? On Friday the 13th this month, the mill will hold a ghost tour of areas allegedly haunted by the spirits of former mill workers and child laborers. Mill historian Marty Schoppert, clad almost daily in a black top hat and a period-style frock coat, leads the tours. From Sept. 2 through early December, he conducts tours on Friday and Saturday nights, telling stories of visitors and employees who say theyve encountered paranormal activity.

There are dozens of cases in Savage where new employees hear someone behind them calling their name, Schoppert says. Theres also 12-year-old ghost Ellen, whos known to trip people on the steps of the mills New Weave Building.

Girls night out at Savage Mill is something quite different. On a Thursday evening each quarter, women get store deals and freebies from mill retailers. The mills Antique Center offers free champagne. The next special night is May 5 , in fact.

Dianne Baker is the daughter of the Antique Centers owner, Julie Baker. The large-scale shop offers low- and high-end antiques and collectibles. Set designers for Hollywood films such as Lincoln and Jackie and the Netflix drama House of Cards are known to frequent the place.

Where else can you go for a thousand-dollar chandelier and then buy a Beatles album or comic book for a couple bucks, Baker said. This place is a living museum, except you can buy the stuff and touch it.
I have a major apology to deliver here. It is particularly galling to me, and its going to get messy.

Theres an oddity of spoken language that I first noticed around the beginning of the George W. Bush adminishtration, pronounced like that. It was as though the new president had issued some secret directive to pronounce str- words as shtr- words, which was particularly odd since, according to the dictionary there is no such thing as a shtr- word.

(Actually, if your dictionary is thick enough, you might find exactly one: shtreimel, which is a wildly expensive type of fur hat that I will not make fun of inasmuch as it is commonly associated with a religion. But if you Google images of it, you, being a less noble person than I am, will possibly wet your pants. This hat resembles an ottoman and would be very useful if you decided to do headstands.) But I digress.

My point is, no English word should be pronounced with a shtr sound. Yet suddenly, around 2001 or thereabouts, I began hearing politicians talk about the need for shtrength against terrorism. We launched air shtrikes. This linguistic hiccup was particularly rancid to my ears. For one thing, it sounds shtupid. But there is also a faint echo of  Hitler.

In German, words beginning with str- are always pronounced shtr-. The greatest line in Casablanca  Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.  has always been ruined for me because Captain Renault, the Nazi toady who should know better, pronounces Strasser like an American.

(Illustration by Eric Shansby)

Still with me? Okay, so over the years, shtr- has been getting more and more ubiquitous. Just a few minutes ago, I disgustedly switched off NPR after being told how an Amtrak train shtruck a crew of track workers.

Okay, you are thinking that I am obsessing over something trivial, which is true, and that I am very possibly deluded, which is not true. Its a thing. It turns out that professional linguists have been discussing it passionately among themselves, in their blogs and whatnot. It is an example of something called alveopalatal assimilation, and though everyone agrees it is on the upswing, there is no consensus on why. It does not appear to be of regional or ethnic origin.

This is where my apology comes in. As a committed uber-leftist demagogue who blames George W. Bush for most of the ills of the world, I did so here, too. Ive written about it. I rant to friends. In my memory, George W. Bush was the first and worst perpetrator of the shtr- phenomenon, its main enabler. I cringe when I hear him saying shtrength in my head.

Alas, my head appears to be the only place he says it. This column was going to be filled with righteous liberal fury at yet another way W stupidized (and Nazified!) our culture, until I listened to a bunch of his speeches. Nope. Innocent. On this issue I have been casually slandering him for years for reasons involving political bias and having the memory of a doddering centenarian.

Then my research took me somewhere I didnt want to go. I like Bernie Sanders, but he just said the Panama free-trade agreement is something I very shtrongly oppose. Bernie, it turns out, is a recidivist shtr-flinger. But there is someone worse, someone whose use of shtr- is so flagrant, so crystal clear, and so consistent in her speech that it actually caught the attention of the linguists, who have declared her the worst violator of all. This happens to be someone whom most reasonable people respect and admire, a National Treasure whom I am now obliged to smear.

Video is damning. Here she is in London, talking about all the ekshtraordinary women she has met, and her fathers shtruggle with illness. Here she is as a commencement speaker, discussing shtrategic choices. Here she is talking about people being stopped on the shtreet because of the color of their skin. She says frushtrated. She says shtructural. Shes incorrigible.

Michelle Obama. This has me all shtressed out.

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Angel C. Dye cant pay her tuition and as a result was asked to leave school until she could. She attended classes anyway, hoping to get retroactive credit if she could patch together the money. (Andre Chung/For The Washington Post)

After being kicked out of a Howard University dorm, Angel C. Dye found herself sleeping on an air mattress in the kitchen of a friends apartment on North Capitol Street.

If things had gone her way, she would have been graduating this month, moving a step closer to a doctorate in English and one of her goals of opening an arts center for children.

In January, she was among the nearly 200 dorm residents purged from Howard because they owed the university money. Chips were installed in dorm-room locks to keep them out.

Dye  the only daughter of a single mother, with a father in prison since she was 5  decided to go to classes anyway in hopes shed get credit retroactively once her bill was cleared, maybe by fall.

She has struggled since freshman year to close the gap between her financial aid package and the costs of attending Howard, working part time, applying for scholarships, seeking help from alumni in her home state of Texas, even this winter starting a GoFundMe campaign. She cut costs, too, by doing things like dropping the school meal plan. Her balance has gone from $28,000 to $20,000, she says.

She loves Howard, the school that produced such giants as Thurgood Marshall and Toni Morrison, and legions of others who helped shape the 20th century. The onetime dean of its law school, Charles Hamilton Houston, was dubbed The Man Who Killed Jim Crow for the legal strategy to bring separate but equal to its knees.

Dye knew early that education was her ticket, and being accepted to Howard had sent her into the stratosphere. Her last grade-point average was 3.13, she says.

Her problem is complicated and simple: She just cant afford to be there.

It has been an epic battle between this unyielding fact and her unyielding will to earn a degree, to make a place for herself in the world. In this she follows the narrative of generations of black Americans who have long seen education as a critical part of the freedom journey and who have had to fight for it every step of the way.

On the eve of its 150th year  2017 is the sesquicentennial  Howard University is fighting, too. It is embattled financially, struggling to sustain a budget-draining hospital and a student population disproportionately in need (more than 60 percent qualify for federal Pell Grants).

The Great Recession hit black families especially hard, and to compound things, Congresss mandated cuts under sequestration meant reductions in Howards federal appropriation. Policy shifts under the Obama administration also hurt a loan program meant to help parents pay for college. In 2008, Howard dispensed $42 million in need-based aid; last year, it was $110 million  half of its $221 million appropriation.

For generations, Howard has also grappled with a dual reality: a university known for its singular educational experience and a mind-boggling level of bureaucratic dysfunction. Now it is being hounded by a narrative from some who say they fear the Capstone, the Mecca, is losing ground, its legacy being chipped away bit by bit.

President Wayne A.I. Frederick and other university officials balk at such talk. They have a strategy they believe will close the financial gap that too many of its students are falling through. They say they are tackling the hospital problems, diversifying revenue sources, employing new approaches to address academic needs and seeking creative solutions to finance and protect the historic treasures on its campus.

We have a historical footprint and a current one, says Frederick, as he insists the university is holding firm on its commitment to excellence, noting current names from Howards ranks: Ta-Nehisi Coates, the prize-winning writer; Kamala Harris, the California attorney general running for U.S. Senate; and a host of entertainers.

President Obama will deliver the commencement speech May 7, when the university will award more than 1,300 bachelors degrees, 300 masters and 100 doctorates; 400 will receive degrees in law, medicine, pharmacy and dentistry.

This is Howard in the crucible of the 21st century. It  as well as other historically black colleges  is working through challenges as higher education in general is transforming, with soaring student loan debt and the Web redefining the college experience. It seems Howard, born out of the smoke and fire of the Civil War, is racing toward a modern-day tipping point: Either it will forge boldly ahead or slip decidedly into a shadow of its great past.

In the churn of it all, what might it mean for students like Dye?

1 of 8 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  A day in the life of Howards campus View Photos We asked a student to photograph campus life at the D.C university. Caption We asked a student to photograph campus life at the D.C university. New members of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity on the Yard during the spring 2016 probate. Maiyah Mayhan/For The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

The layers of problems  some self-inflicted with leadership issues and financial turmoil  have been laid bare for a while. A trustees urgent letter about Howards crisis was leaked three years ago. The hospitals chronic losses contributed to consecutive drops in the schools credit rating, the most recent in June. And this fall students took to Twitter with a grievance campaign.

Using the hashtag #TakeBackHU, they complained about older dormitories being plagued by rodents and bugs, bad plumbing, and faulty air conditioning and heating. (Two new dorms opened in 2014.) Campus WiFi was spotty. And the financial aid office could be quicksand and chaos at once, where aid could be seriously delayed or riddled with errors. Another hashtag emerged, #SilentShowtime. Howards marching band refused to perform until members received their funding. (Eventually they did, with an apology.)

Its a troubling picture for a place that is a leading producer of African Americans who earn doctorates. Its business and law schools are highly regarded. The U.S. Department of Education just recognized it as one of 13 private universities that excel at graduating federal Pell Grant recipients in six years.

Frederick points out that Howard had two Rhodes Scholar finalists last fall and a Marshall Scholarship winner. It also has a 2016 Truman Scholarship winner. As of March, Frederick said, applications were up, to 18,000 for fall 2016 from 13,000 in 2015. He added that the SAT average of this years incoming class was 1126.

The school is taking steps to put starch in its financial picture and its bureaucracy, officials say. One was the purge of unregistered occupants. In a Letter from the President, Frederick said the university was owed $22 million in uncollected tuition as of last spring. The school has started requiring students to have a zero balance to register or to pay one-third of their balance and be enrolled in a payment plan.

Education has to be paid for, students know, but some say it can feel like priorities are shifting, with focus less on them and more on business. I think its really sad to see people with lots of potential not being able to get the proper education because of money, sophomore Cydney Anderson said in an interview for @focusonhu on Instagram.



Howard students pose for a photo at the 2016 Charter Day Dinner on March 5. The gala is the premier fundraising event for the university. This years proceeds went to the Bridging the Gap Student Aid Campaign. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

On March 2, 1867, President Andrew Johnson signed papers officially establishing Howard. The annual Charter Day celebration includes a convocation, followed the next evening by a black-tie awards dinner, the premier fundraiser. Together they create a palpable moment when its almost possible to visualize history, to watch the long walk from then to now.

Education for African Americans has always been a battlefield, from the days of slavery when it was denied outright, to Reconstruction, when black colleges faced violent attacks, to Jim Crow, to the present, when too many black and brown children are warehoused in subpar and defacto segregated elementary and high schools.

This years convocation came on an overcast March 4. In the Cramton Auditorium audience sat the president of Trinidad and Tobago, Fredericks birthplace. There was also national security adviser Susan Rice; Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), an alumnus; Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the civil rights legend; and Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), head of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Frederick  who arrived on campus at 16, earned his bachelors and medical degrees (he is a surgeon) and an MBA  spoke of responsibility to the most noble and majestic of all institutions of higher learning. He also spoke of the universitys first black president, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, a Tennessee preacher and son of former slaves who presided from 1926 to 1960. The school began, Johnson liked to say, in a little frame building with four students, one teacher and no money.

Sounds familiar, Frederick joked dryly. I think I can give that speech.

Johnson arrived at Howard a year after the universitys Alain Locke published his groundbreaking The New Negro, the famous anthology heralding the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson grew the faculty, expanded departments and shaped the school for the 20th century: a private, prestigious research-based powerhouse of intellectual muscle and social progress. It was destined to be the mecca of black intelligentsia, Howard professor Kelly Miller asserted in his essay for The New Negro.

In 1928, Congress, in an effort driven by Michigan Rep. Louis C. Cramton, voted to authorize an annual appropriation for Howard. The schools future, the Republican declared, as the great colored educational center for America is therefore now well assured. It is the only HBCU out of 100 to receive such an appropriation.

Now here was Frederick, 44, in a dramatically different time.

No doubt on that stage were those who loved the university deeply but who were as fearful of losing a legacy as much as others were anticipating what may come.

The doctor president, as someone yelled from the audience, is a man awash in Howards tradition but working to retool an institution, and moving fast. And not without controversy.



Howard President Wayne A.I. Frederick is attempting to end the schools dependency on tuition revenue and to help all students graduate, regardless of their income. (Andre Chung/For The Washington Post)

Fredericks office is on the fourth floor of the Mordecai Wyatt Johnson Administration Building, or the A Building. Named president in July 2014 after serving as interim president and provost, Frederick presides over 13 schools and colleges, Howard University Hospital and the nations only black-owned public television station. The system has a $613 million endowment and an $822 million operating budget for fiscal year 2016.

Frederick, with a new cabinet, has tried to respond to students calls for greater transparency and accountability. Last fall he appointed a student ombudsman and is bolstering the adviser process, including revamping the way graduation requirements are tracked. He set up a program that partially reimburses students for part of their senior year if they finish in four years. In 2015, when some seniors risked not graduating because they owed money, he launched an 11th-hour campaign to raise the funds.

Other decisions, not necessarily the Frederick administrations, have generated student complaints. A policy that allowed students to participate in graduation even if they had six credits to finish was ended. And the stricter tuition payment policy  meant to help the university collect revenue while helping students deal with costs  offers little wiggle room for some struggling to stitch together resources.

Frederick has said he wants to end the universitys dependence on tuition and guarantee an education regardless of a students income. In his plan, that means diversifying revenue streams by monetizing some of the schools real estate, finding entrepreneurial opportunities and increasing philanthropy income, including from alumni.

In January, the university announced it would join a Federal Communications Commission auction to potentially sell the rights to the spectrum on which Howards station, WHUT-TV, is broadcast. While some hope the sale would reap as much as $460 million, the final figure is expected to be less. The university can withdraw from the process, and objections to a possible sale have been widespread.

It is our position and concern that African Americans and other diverse populations that are able to be seen and heard through the stations programming would lose substantially if WHUT were to cease to exist, the Howard Media Group at the School of Communications wrote Frederick early on.

The university says it cant comment under FCC rules. An agency spokesman says auction updates shouldnt be expected before June.

In February, Howard announced it was leasing to a developer the land under Meridian Hill Residence Hall, off-campus student housing on 16th Street NW. Again came cries that Howard was being sold off. But school officials are quick to correct those who describe the 99-year, $22 million deal as a sale. The developer plans high-end apartments, and the school would get a share of the profits.

We are going to stay in ownership of the ground, Frederick says.

Where no one disagrees is on the issue of alumni giving, and university officials say they are planning a major campaign for the 150th anniversary.

We have to go out and convince corporations and foundations why investing in Howard University is going to make America and the wide African diaspora stronger, Frederick says.

He is traveling the country to let alumni know how much the university needs their support. Weve already started to turn it around, he says. When I took over we were at 6.4 percent alumni giving. Were up to 9 percent.

Some of the fundraising difficulty is due to the limits of black wealth. As of 2013, 42 percent of African Americans ages 25 to 55 carried student loan debt, compared with 28 percent of whites, according to the Urban Institute.

But some alumni have said they want greater assurance about how their money would be used.

Renee Higginbotham-Brooks, the former trustee whose letter was leaked three years ago, is more optimistic now. She was an early supporter of Fredericks. Things are going much better, she says, though shes under no illusion that the road to recovery is short.

She rejects the notion that the school is being sold off.

Just because you take something away doesnt mean you arent going to be able to add something that will improve the education, she says. Give him a minute. And instead of complaining, give financially to the university.



Taylor Tiamoyo Harris was editor of the school newspaper, the Hilltop. Harris said its staff members have had to work in other areas on the campus because the office doesnt have consistent WiFi or all the software needed to publish. (Andre Chung/For The Washington Post)

Howards family is real  in all its glory and frustrations. Students learn early to travel wearing Howard gear. The alumni network is global, and a cap or sweatshirt can open a door, make a connection. Its students are dynamic and ambitious, and many take the Howard motto of truth and service seriously.

Theyre told, too, by their alumni parents and others that navigating the bureaucracy is part of the education. If you make it out of Howard, then you can make it anywhere, the saying goes.

Yet theres a protectiveness: In family, you can criticize, but that doesnt mean others can.

When Ta-Nehisi Coates tells the Charter Day Convocation audience that its always spring when I think of Howard, the audience embraces the poetry of that moment. When he talks about the beauty and the humanity and the dignity that he discovered on campus  a haven from the perils of overt and covert racism  he is profoundly understood.

But there is no contradiction a few nights earlier when, asked whether the issues that appeared with the Twitter campaign sounded familiar, he laughed. Hell yeah, it sounds familiar, he said. Everyone has had experiences with long lines, someone losing your housing assignment.

Students have a right to speak out, he says. Those students dont want Howard to go away. They want Howard to do better.

Family.

Taylor Tiamoyo Harris knew about Howard long before she arrived on campus. Her father attended an HBCU, and his dad recently retired from teaching history at the University of Central Arkansas. Shes excited about graduating May 7 from the School of Communications.

HBCUs do teach you confidence, Harris says. Academics, Greek life, everything is competitive here. I think its getting us ready to graduate.

This year, she was editor of the Hilltop, the student newspaper. One day in March, Harris was sitting in the Hilltops business office in the West Towers dormitory. The newsroom, a few doors away, was empty. Theres no WiFi there, nor does it have the software the paper needs, she explains, which means the staff must scatter to find other places to work.

Its hard to function when you dont have the basic necessities, she says, noting that budget cuts left her with about nine staff members when in previous years there was double that. The print publication was reduced from Mondays and Fridays to just Mondays.

On this particular Monday, however, there was no print edition. The printer had called on Friday and explained that the school hadnt paid the company, Harris says.

Last fall she had emailed Frederick late one evening about Hilltop issues. He responded within 30 minutes, she says.

We know that things can get resolved, Harris says, but theres not exactly a road map to show how to get there.

Howard has many first-generation college students and generations of legacy Bison whose families can help pay for their educations. On both sides of that economic fence are young strivers with compelling stories and dreams.

But those dreams are precarious for the economically vulnerable. One false move  their own or someone elses  could turn their lives.

As a junior, economics major Khalil Saadiq lost a scholarship when his GPA dropped one-tenth of a point, from the required 3.3 to 3.2. The student leader, whod organized a viral picture of students with their hands up after the Ferguson, Mo., shooting, left amid the dorm cuts this winter and went home to Birmingham, Ala., with plans to join the military.

Senior Victor Foreman, a computer science major, wont graduate this month, he says, because a financial aid mix-up kept him from registering. The classes he needs wont be available until spring 2017, he says, and now hes deciding whether to even bother.

The university said it is prohibited by law from discussing matters regarding students.

Allyson Carpenter, a junior political science and government major and the newly elected student association president, is passionate about Howard, but is  to put it politely  frustrated by the way HBCUs are funded and judged.

She came to Howard from Cleveland at 17, became a D.C. advisory neighborhood commissioner at 18 and just won a Truman Scholarship. First lady Michelle Obama recognized her work during a White House event, and Carpenter has spent this school year studying at Oxford.

She grew up with a sister and a single mother. Her father, once a successful preacher, struggled with drug addiction, which devastated the family and their income.

Carpenter has her prescription for Howard: Transparency, financial aid expansion and academic renewal, meaning it should consider creative ways of teaching beyond lectures.

Discussing Howard, or any HBCU, out of context is reckless, she says.

We cant talk about Howard doesnt have this, Howard doesnt have that, its graduation rate is 43 percent, she says (referring to its four-year graduation rate; 60 percent graduate within six years). Well, if I went to Harvard and my tuition was guaranteed because I make a certain amount of money and I had a guarantee that I was going to get a full scholarship, then I should graduate ... then you have no excuse to not graduate.

I also think that HBCUs are only a microcosm, only one example of the way the federal government is treating black education in general. They are failing us in public schools with the school-to-prison pipeline.



Howard junior Allyson Carpenter is the newly elected president of the Howard University Student Association. Historically black colleges and universities struggle with underfunding, she says. (Andre Chung/For The Washington Post)

Michael J. Masch is Howards new chief financial officer. He is a Philadelphia native with experience in both higher education and government. On the day we met he was on the first floor of the A Building with William Whitman Jr., vice president of communications.

Heres the main point Masch wants to make: Howard University is in the first stage of a significant turnaround.

Operating revenue after expenses was $95 million in 2013; by 2015 it was down to a little more than $30 million. For 2016, the university projects it to be up to $77 million.

This, he says, is based on the efforts to diversify revenue and to tackle the hospitals financial problems, for which the school has hired an outside consultant.

Freedmens Hospital was founded in 1862, five years before the university, to care for former slaves. Ultimately, it became a teaching hospital, committed to serving the Districts black population. Today that population is declining, and with it, hospital revenue.

Theres a larger wave that Howards caught up in, Masch says. One is changing demographics: younger population. ... Theyre not going to the ER; theyre going to SoulCycle or CrossFit.

Moodys Investors Services 2015 downgrade said addressing the hospital operation would be key to improving Howards credit rating. The FY 2016 budget also anticipates new income from the monetization of real estate, the report said, but it expected the school to be wrestling with its problems for a while.

Howards federal appropriation also dropped, from $234 million in 2012 to $221 million in 2013, but has held steady since.

Eligibility requirements for the Parent PLUS loan program got tougher in 2011, which caused a crisis at HBCUs as more families couldnt qualify. The Obama administration readjusted its policy after an outcry, but by then schools, including Howard, had been hit with unexpected enrollment declines.

In general the average household income of a family thats sending their son or daughter to Howard is $60,000 a year, Masch said. These are not deep-pocketed families, and thats one of the reasons why we provide as much financial aid as we do, because thats how we bridge the gap, and thats why tuition increases have been moderate here.

Annual undergraduate tuition has been frozen at $22,737 for two years but is expected to rise a little bit, Masch said. (To compare, tuition at American University for 2015-2016 was $42,556.)

While the goal is to end the schools dependence on tuition and continue to find ways to help students pay no matter their income, the university wants families to come up with four-year financial plans.

The luxury of being able to get into Howard and not have that financial plan in place will not serve students well or their families well, Whitman says.

Adds Masch: Our direction in terms of our enrollment and financial aid strategy is not to spread aid so thinly that we have a lot of students who are getting some help from us but not enough to stay here.

Those unregistered dorm residents who had to leave had been repeatedly invited to work out payment plans, Masch says.

For some, however, payment plans werent workable.



Angel Dye: I only am one of 10,000 Bison, and my story is complicated but probably not incredibly unique. (Andre Chung/For The Washington Post)

At times, Angel Dye has wondered if community college would have been a better route, but I was getting all this praise and support for getting into Howard. In the end, she says, nothing replaces the educational experience shes having, even with its major hurdles.

She went home after her first Howard semester with a 3.5 GPA, 16 credits and an unpayable bill of $10,000.

Her mother feared it was going to be hard. I am a single parent and never made that much, says Sharon Cobb, who was unemployed when she and Dye took three buses for nearly 24 hours to get to Washington. The recession really hurt us. I lost three jobs during that time. We ended up being evicted from a couple of apartments.

This March, Cobb had been working about four months as a medical scheduler, making about $30,000 annually, she says. She sends Dye money when she can, and Dye has received some support from her church. Cobbs poor credit disqualified her for a Parent PLUS loan.

Cobb said she kept her daughter involved in arts activities while growing up and always stressed education. It paid off. Dye has helped finance school by winning writing contests, $100 there, $500 here. She has also self-published a few books, including an anthology of black womens writings.

That second semester of freshman year, Dye returned to school in hopes of finding a way to register. She was at Obamas second inauguration when an administrator called and told her theyd found a $7,500 loan that would help her onto a payment plan.

And thats how its been: a patchwork of grit, hope, lucky breaks and bureaucratic shifts.

She registered one fall by getting her debt below $10,000  by a cent.

That year the administration was allowing people to still register for classes if they had a balance of $10,000 or less, Dye recalls.

Her mother gave her $200, and that brought her bill to $9,999.99. The guy looked at the computer and looked at me, incredulous. But she registered.

She got a job working 30 hours a week. By this time, Dye says, her department knew the challenges and began passing on scholarship information, and one semester hired her for a work-study position. Payment went directly to the university for her tuition.

Once she registered when there was no hold on her account, though she had a balance.

I was saying this is a miracle, but Im sure it was a mistake.

But the bill always comes due.

In January 2015 she got a knock on her dorm-room door at 7 a.m. It was her dorm director explaining that she had a balance and had to pay or leave. A friend crowdsourced the $1,300 she needed, but not before her dorm room was locked.

I was ready to go home, she says. Maybe, she thought, Im fighting for something that just wasnt supposed to happen.

But a mentor encouraged her to keep fighting. In August, she wrote an open letter to Frederick:

I only am one of 10,000 Bison, and my story is complicated but probably not incredibly unique. I believe that I am receiving a world-class education at Howard University. My professors, advisors, mentors, and friends have made these last three years some of the best I have ever known, and I do not want that to be forfeited because of money. In the same regard I do not want another student to have to pen a letter like this one.

She emailed it on Aug. 26, just after midnight. On Aug. 27, she got a response from financial aid official Derek Kindle noting that at one point the school and her mother had worked out a payment plan, but that the payments stopped the next month. He invited her to look at another extended plan and wished her well.

And thats how she ended up one of those people unregistered in the dorm, trying to find a way to close the gap.

Dye got news during spring break. She received a summer fellowship at the University of Texas at San Antonio to work at its African American Literatures and Cultures Institute.

She also learned that shed won a scholarship from the Extraordinary Institute, a D.C. organization committed to helping students finish school.

It is a $5,000 award.

Marcia Davis is a Post Magazine editor and writer. To comment on this story, email wpmagazine@washpost.com.
Dear Heloise: I was shopping for an electric toothbrush and checked online at a major big-box store. The model I liked was $49.99, but I didnt want to wait for it to be shipped. I found that the store price for the same model posted on their website was $64.98!

Thats a big difference. I asked a salesperson, and she told me the store would match the price that was listed on the company website. Tell your readers to ask about matching prices.

Roland D., via email

Roland D.: Good advice! It does seem to be the Wild West when it comes to pricing online versus in retail stores. Watch out, though, for shipping and handling charges online  they can eat up the savings.

Dear Heloise: I read your column in the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News. I use my wine cork for the pointed probe of the meat thermometer when storing it so that nobody can stick themselves when searching for the thermometer in the drawer.

Angelo C., Dayton, Ohio

Dear Heloise: When using a public restroom, I place the paper seat protector sideways across the toilet seat, and it will stay in place and not fall into the bowl before sitting down.

T.W. in Florida

Dear Heloise: I have been using baby wipes instead of the (much) more-expensive makeup-removal towelettes. They work well, and I moisturize immediately after.

Im wondering if this might have any long-term negative effects on my skin. What are your thoughts? I like the savings, but dont want to pay down the road with damage to my skin.

Mary in San Angelo, Tex.

Mary in San Angelo, Tex.: Somehow I think if its safe for a babys bottom, its safe for your face! A babys skin is much more sensitive than adult facial skin, so dont worry.

I use them too, and even cut them in half. After Ive wiped my face to remove makeup, I rinse out the wipe and use the back side to go over my face.

This adds up to a big savings over a year, and no extra washcloths to launder.

Bonus hint: When done, use the wipe to clean the sink, then toss into the trash can. Dont flush it down the toilet, even though the package says its all right to do so.

Dear Heloise: Ive found another use for a headband: I use one as a neck scarf. It works well, and I have received several compliments. We went to dinner, and the waitress said I should write to you! She said it was a great hint.

Lou M., Greencastle, Pa.

Dear Heloise: I have a hint that I find handy. If you are carrying a cake or casserole in the car, place it on a piece of nonslip carpet to keep it from sliding around.

Phyllis F., 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.


Donald Trump stares at the stage as comedian Seth Meyers makes fun of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Association dinner. (Image from C-SPAN )

Regarding the vast mystery that is Donald Trump, one question eclipses all others: Why is the billionaire reality star running for president?

I dont know. You dont know. But a handful of armchair psychoanalysts  reporters for major news organizations, no less  have decided that it all began at the 2011 White House Correspondents Association dinner, where Trump was the butt of jokes by President Obama and Saturday Night Live comedian Seth Meyers.

Trump was so humiliated by the experience, they say, that it triggered some deep, previously hidden yearning for revenge. That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature in the political world, wrote the New York Times last month.

Aside from the questionable premise that the Republican front-runner has ever had an unexpressed thought, theres the problem of speculation based on nothing but YouTube clips of the night. The only person who knows definitively when or why he decided to run is Trump.

Its such a false narrative, Trump told me this week. I had a phenomenal time. I had a great evening.

I was there. Seated directly behind him, in fact, so that when I turned my chair to listen to the speeches, my head was precariously close to The Donalds left ear and that golden blow-dried confection he calls his hair. In C-SPAN videos, I can be seen arching my head back rather than nuzzle his neck. Yes, I was thatclose, and the ballroom was that crowded.

So heres a novel concept: Lets talk about the facts of the evening. How he ended up at the dinner. Why he was in the news. And yes, lets go to the videotape.

It helps to understand that the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner had devolved from a little-known media evening into a black-tie mash-up of the Super Bowl, the Oscars and Davos, Washington-style  thanks primarily to the presence of the president, which confers a gravitas that the evening no longer deserves, and an influx of Hollywood stars and corporate rubberneckers looking for free publicity. Now its a red-carpet conga line for anyone with enough power, fortune or fame to land a ticket.

[Five myths about the White House Correspondents Dinner]

Trump, the Celebrity Apprentice star, was a natural for the dinner: wildly popular, gregarious, huge. He came at the invitation of writer Lally Weymouth. The daughter of The Washington Posts legendary Katharine Graham and mother of then-publisher Katharine Weymouth co-hosted the Washington Post-Newsweek reception for years and always invited her famous New York and D.C. friends as guests of the newspaper.

In 2011, however, Trump had become more than a television star. He was one of the leaders of the birther movement, a loud campaign that insisted that Obama had not been born in the United States and was not eligible for the presidency. Although the claim was discredited, Trump (publicly toying with a presidential campaign) remained unconvinced of the presidents citizenship. The story was everywhere; Hawaii released Obamas original long-form birth certificate just days before the April 30 dinner.

Word that Trump was attending as a guest of The Post landed in the newsroom with a thud. Inviting a reality star was fine. Inviting a leading voice of the birthers was a problem for many reporters, who were concerned that it appeared as though one of Americas most respected newspapers was giving Trump (and by extension, birthers) credibility.

Trump arrived with his wife, Melania, at his side. He was gracious and engaging as he greeted, charmed and flattered his way through the endless security line, recalled Marcus Brauchli, The Posts executive editor at the time. Reporters asked Trump whether he expected any jokes to come his way. Sure, he told them: Im fine with this stuff.

President Obama and comedian Seth Meyers skewered Donald Trump at the 2011 White House correspondents' dinner. From the birther movement to his potential run for president, here's a look back at some of their jabs. (The Washington Post)

Thus commenced the annual ritual  introductory speeches that no one listened to, aggressive schmoozing, photo ops and other strange encounters. By the time the president got up to speak, the crowd had been drinking for more than three hours.

Obama opened his speech with a recording of the Hulk Hogan theme song Real American and his birth certificate pulsating on the video screen. He threw one-liners at VIPs in the crowd before turning to Trump halfway through the 19-minute routine.

Now, I know that hes taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald, Obama said. And thats because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter  like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?

Then he turned serious: But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example  no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice  at the steakhouse, the mens cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didnt blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.

[Barack Obama, the first alt-comedy president]

What no one in the crowd knew until the next day was that even as he joked, Obama had authorized the secret raid that took out Osama bin Laden.

Then it was Meyerss turn. The SNL veteran launched into what was essentially a 20-minute Weekend Update segment, with withering jabs at all. By the time he got to Trump, he was lobbing jokes like grenades:

Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican  which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.

Trump owns the Miss USA Pageant, which is great for Republicans, because it will streamline their search for a vice president.

Donald Trump said recently hes got a great relationship with the blacks. Unless the Blacks are a family of white people, I bet hes mistaken.

[The VIPs attending the 2016 White House Correspondents Association dinner]

With cameras aimed at him, Trump smiled at Obamas jokes and waved at the crowd. His response to Meyers was less lighthearted: As the comedian hammered him, the billionaire didnt crack a smile.

The president was making jokes about me, he recalled this week. I was having a great time. I was so honored. I was actually so honored. And honestly, he delivered them well. But as for Meyers: I didnt like his routine. His was too nasty, out of order.

Had I been sitting anywhere else, I probably would have giggled at more of the jokes. But I felt that, personal opinion aside, Trump was a guest of The Washington Post and deserved to be treated with respect. I wasnt going to laugh to his face. (Okay, his ear.)



The Washington Posts Lally Weymouth, left, with Donald and Melania Trump at the 2011 dinner. (Clint Spaulding/Sipa Press/AP Images)

At the end of the dinner, Trump was swarmed by reporters demanding to know what he thought. He told them hed had a great time and was honored to be skewered by the president. And then he headed to the airport to jet home. Pundits took that as yet more proof that he was upset, but some VIPs stick around for the after-parties, and some beeline to their private jets  which is why, Trump says, he didnt linger.

The next morning, the newspapers had a different version that boiled down to Trump humiliated. Trump says he was baffled by the headlines, because that wasnt his take on the night. I didnt know that Id be virtually the sole focus, and I guess when youre leading in most of the polls, that tends to happen, he told Fox & Friends the next morning. I thought Seth Meyers, frankly, his delivery was not good  hes a stutterer and he really was having a hard time.

In retrospect, Trump broke the classic rule of political humor that says that the only response to a joke about you is to laugh harder than anyone else in the room. Whatever he was thinking, Trump looked unhappy and gave pundits a reason to pounce.

[What do his Palm Beach neighbors think of Donald Trump?]

Never one to let facts get in the way of a good story, the New Yorkers Adam Gopnik decided that this was the night that changed everything. Not only, as we did not know then, was President Obama in the midst of the operation that would lead shortly to Osama bin Ladens killing, he wrote last fall, it was also the night when, despite that preoccupation, the President took apart Donald Trump, plastic piece by orange part, and then refused to put him back together again.

Based on his seat a few tables away, Gopnik was not only able to observe Trump but apparently also believed that he could read Trumps mind. On that night, Trumps own sense of public humiliation became so overwhelming that he decided, perhaps at first unconsciously, that he would, somehow, get his own back  perhaps even pursue the Presidency after all, no matter how nihilistically or absurdly, and redeem himself, he wrote last fall.

This narrative flies in the face of actual history: Trump mentioned running for president as far back as the 1980s, so the notion that this dinner was the single catalyst for this presidential campaign is absurd. He frequently used humor as part of his self-promotional tool kit and was the guest of honor at a 2011 Comedy Central roast just two months before the correspondents dinner  an X-rated drubbing that made Obama and Meyers look like weenies. As a developer, Donald Trump has done so much damage to the New York skyline, instead of calling him The Donald they should call him the 20th hijacker, joked comedian Gilbert Gottfried.

Trumps rebuttal? Whats the difference between a wet raccoon and Donald J. Trumps hair? A wet raccoon doesnt have seven billion f---ing dollars in the bank.

Trump returned to the correspondents dinner last year, creating a stir when he threw an arm around national security adviser Susan E. Rice and whispered into her ear as cameras flashed.

Any lingering scars from 2011?

There are many reasons Im running, he told me. But thats not one of them.
As a veteran politician, Virginia Sen. Richard H. Black is no stranger to the grip-and-grin. But this was something extraordinary: a handshake with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

A photo of their encounter in Damascus on Thursday zipped around the world via Twitter, the smiling, silver-haired state senator grasping the hand of a man the White House calls a brutal dictator.

At the same time, a series of airstrikes was being unleashed on rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo, Syrias largest city, destroying a hospital run by international aid groups and killing at least 60 people, including one of Aleppos last pediatricians. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Thursday that he was outraged by the attacks.

The image of Black, 71, shaking hands with Assad prompted outrage from some people but praise from others who, like Black, see Assad as a protector of Syrian Christians. It also prompted knowing head shakes and chuckles in Richmond, where the outspoken Loudoun County Republican has a reputation for going all out for causes he champions.

Dick Black, I love him, but sometimes Dick is ready to take on the world, said former state senator Ralph K. Smith, a GOP ally from Roanoke. Smith compared Black to another friend and Virginian, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, and said Blacks friends can relate to the televangelists devoted, but sometimes exasperated wife.

She was the most supportive wife in the world, but sometimes she just wanted to say, Jerry, shut up! 

Syrian news media reported the meeting between Assad and Black on Thursday, one day after it disclosed that the lawmaker was visiting the country. Black confirmed his visit Wednesday via text message but did not respond to messages Thursday about his reported meeting with Assad.

Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said that Black is entitled to his views, but they do not reflect this administrations policy on Syria.

Black declined Wednesday to say who was paying for his trip but said he would discuss it upon his return. Jeff Ryer, a spokesman for the Virginia Senate Republican Caucus, said no tax dollars were used or sought for the trip.

Misidentifying Black as a U.S. senator, Syria Online reported: President Bashar al-Assad received on Thursday US Senator Richard Black and discussed with him the situation in Syria and the foreign-backed terrorism war waged against it.

The President highlighted during the discussion that the terrorist attacks which have hit several areas in the world prove that terrorism knows no borders, the news site said. For his part, the US Senator said it is important that the American people get acquainted with the reality of what is happening in Syria away from the disinformation practiced by some parties at the US administration. Black highlighted the necessity of putting efforts to lift the economic sanctions imposed on Syria which constitute a flagrant violation of the international laws.

Currently, the State Department warns U.S. citizens against all travel to Syria and strongly recommends that U.S. citizens remaining in Syria depart immediately.

However, we cannot prevent people from traveling there, and it is not illegal to travel to Syria, said Elizabeth Kennedy Trudeau, a State Department spokeswoman.

The White House declined to comment on Blacks trip but an administration official suggested that the senators support for Assad stemmed from ignorance.

Assad has, time and again, proven himself to be a brutal dictator responsible for the deaths of his own countrymen, including Muslims and Christians, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic matters. He has shown no respect for human life, and anyone who suggests otherwise is ignorant of the depths of his brutality.

[Outspoken Va. senator travels to Syria]

Black is one of the most conservative members of the Virginia General Assembly. He drew attention years ago for questioning the notion of spousal rape and for sending tiny pink plastic models of fetuses to fellow legislators ahead of a vote on an abortion bill. More recently, he has worked with womens advocates to successfully push laws related to rape. But he ignited controversy again this year by equating Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrisons Beloved to moral sewage, a comment he made in support of a failed bill to require schools to notify parents of sexual content in course material and allow them to opt out their children.

A Vietnam veteran and former Pentagon lawyer who was chief of the U.S. Armys Criminal Law Division while stationed in Germany in the 1980s, Black has sometimes used his perch in state politics as a soapbox for international affairs. He drew attention a year ago by sending a letter to Assad, thanking him for defending Christians. The Syrian president posted the letter on his Facebook page.

The gesture landed Black on the Islamic States enemies list  a distinction he touted in his re-election campaign last year.

[Virginia state senator named on ISIS enemies list]

The photo of the handshake circulated in the states via a tweet from Zaid Benjamin. He is a Washington-based reporter for Radio Sawa, a U.S. government-funded, Arab-language radio venture akin to Radio Free Europe. News of the meeting infuriated Assad critics, such as M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.

Shame on State Sen Richard Black (R-VA)! Jasser wrote on Facebook. Follow the money. Hes very likely to be on the Assadist-Putin-Khameini payroll. The only thing more grotesque than the actual war criminals like Assadists or Khomeinists or ISIS is a so called American army veteran with the worlds information and freedom at his disposal who chooses to stump for genocidal tyranny.

Virginia Democrats accused Black of having dangerously clueless views on foreign policy.

Republicans in the state were mostly holding their tongues, but some betrayed amusement. I cant comment on this. But I want to. So much, Del. C. Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah) wrote as he retweeted the handshake photo.

laura.vozzella@washpost.com

Juliet Eilperin and Carol Morello in Washington contributed to this report.
VIRGINIA

FBI seeks help in

finding robber

A man robbed a bank in Alexandria on Thursday, and FBI officials think the same man also robbed a bank in the town 10 days earlier.

On Thursday, the man robbed the Wells Fargo Bank at 1711 Fern St. about 11:50 a.m., according to the news release. He passed a note to the teller and demanded money. After receiving an undisclosed amount of money, the man fled on foot.

On April 18, an unknown man robbed the SunTrust bank at 2809 Mount Vernon Ave. In similar fashion, a man passed a note to the teller, demanded money and fled.

The FBI is offering up to $5,000 for information that leads to the identification and conviction of the robber.

 Victoria St. Martin

MARYLAND

Man is shot, killed

in Greenbelt condo

Charles Damon Hall, 43, was shot and killed inside a Greenbelt condominium where he apparently lived, Greenbelt police said.

Hall was found dead at the scene after police received a call about 6 p.m. Wednesday from someone who told them that, hours earlier, they believed they heard the sound of a single gunshot in the 6900 block of Hanover Parkway, according to George Mathews, a spokesman for the Greenbelt police.

The case is being investigated as a homicide. Mathews said it does not appear the incident was random.

When police arrived at the home, they looked through a balcony door and saw someone inside on the floor near the front door. After a forced entry to the condo, police found Hall with a gunshot wound to the head.

 Dana Hedgpeth

Police: Boy, 13, with fake gun faced officer

A 13-year-old boy who was shot by a plainclothes Baltimore police officer Wednesday while carrying a replica handgun turned to face the officer with the fake gun in his hand, Baltimore police say.

At a news conference Thursday, Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said two officers identified themselves to the boy before a 150-yard foot chase that ended with one of the officers shooting the boy in the leg and shoulder. The boy is in a hospital. These two police officers, 18 years experience in all, identified themselves as police officers, Davis said, and ran after a 13-year-old who ran for whatever reason.

Davis said police interviewed an independent witness who describes the 13-year-old as raising the gun at the conclusion of the chase. It was not known what direction the gun was pointed in.

 Justin Moyer
Marine Major. Mark Thompson is photographed at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he taught history. He faces new criminal charges in a sexual misconduct case. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

The military has filed new criminal charges against Marine Maj. Mark Thompson, a former U.S. Naval Academy instructor who insisted that he had been unfairly convicted of sexual misconduct with two female midshipmen.

After revelations about his case in The Washington Post, the military has now charged Thompson with making a false official statement and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

If convicted of lying under oath, Thompson could face up to five years in prison, a dismissal from the service and a total loss of his retirement benefits. Retired U.S. Air Force judge advocate Rachel VanLandingham said the potential penalty for the conduct-unbecoming accusation depends on the underlying offense.

The Marine Corps will hold an Article 32 preliminary hearing in May in Quantico, Va., to determine whether the case should proceed to a court-martial.

[A Marine fights to prove hes innocent of sexual misconduct. Then a lost cellphone is found.]

Thompson, who served in Afghanistan, has long fought to prove he was falsely accused of having sex with two students in 2011, but a Post investigation revealed that hed been dishonest when he testified under oath in 2014 to an administrative board deciding whether he should be expelled from the Corps. Asked in January of this year why he had lied to authorities, Thompson described the immense pressure he faced after one of the women asserted that hed raped her.

I simply had to, when they were coming after me for 41 years, Thompson said, I cant begin to say, you know, how terrifying that is.

Thompson, whose defense attorney declined to comment, was acquitted of the rape charge but found guilty of five lesser offenses. He served two months in a military brig and was fined $60,000.

After the Post story was published last month, the Marine Corps launched a new investigation, rapidly building a case against the 19-year veteran.

A prosecutor met earlier this month with one of the accusers, Sarah Stadler, to review the contents of her long-missing cellphone. A number of the more than 650 messages she and Thompson exchanged appear to contradict several assertions he made at the administrative hearing. Then, earlier this week, Marine Maj. Michael Pretus  a key witness for Thompsons defense at his 2013 court-martial  told The Post that he would now serve as a witness for the prosecution against his longtime friend.

Pretus was removed this week from his position as a Naval Academy instructor after school officials learned of his involvement in Thompsons case. In 2013, Stadler had alleged that, while a student, she had a threesome with the men at Thompons house. Military records show that accusation led to a criminal investigation into Pretus, which ended after he refused to cooperate and invoked his right to remain silent.

I feel vindicated, Stadler said of the new charges. I feel relieved that this might now finally be coming to an end and that the end might actually be justice.

Thompson, however, has always maintained that he did nothing wrong.

On the night of April 30, 2011, Stadler and a female friend  both of whom knew Thompson through the schools rifle team  attended the boozy annual croquet match between the academy and St. Johns College. Afterward, they stopped by Thompsons house, just two blocks off campus.

He claimed that they asked to use the bathroom, did so and left. The women claimed that he served them shots of tequila before they played strip poker and staggered to his bedroom, where he had sex with both of them. Under military law, a threesome is considered an indecent act  a serious crime.

Stadler  later dismissed from the Navy for lying about her relationship with an enlisted sailor after shed graduated from the academy  said the sex was consensual and part of an ongoing relationship. But her friend told authorities that she was too drunk to give Thompson consent, alleging that hed raped her.

In 2014, a year after his sexual misconduct convictions, Thompsons case was reviewed again at what is known as a board of inquiry hearing. There, three Marine officers were assigned to decide whether Thompson should be discharged for his crimes.

The combat veteran testified that he was never friends with Stadler outside the rifle team, insisting that his interactions with her were appropriate, professional and within academy guidelines.

He told the board that she had created a complete fiction about a relationship that never existed  and specifically denied ever having any sexual conversations with her. The board members believed Thompson, allowing him to remain a Marine and even decrying his convictions as unjust. Soon after, Thompson asked The Post to examine his case, arguing he was innocent.

But many text messages on Stadlers old phone  which she discovered after being contacted by The Post  strongly imply that the two were involved in an inappropriate relationship. One exchange was sexually explicit.

The texts also revealed that Thompson had misrepresented to the board the last time he saw Stadler. She had alleged during his trial that they had sex a final time on the night of her May 2011 graduation, a time when Thompson had a compelling alibi. The texts, however, show that the two actually saw each other at 11:30 p.m. the following night.

At his board hearing, Thompson testified that the last time he remembered seeing Stadler was nearly one month earlier.

When confronted in January of this year by The Post, Thompson acknowledged that Stadler had come to his house the night after graduation but insisted she did so only to give him a pair of commemorative glasses and her photograph. He still denied ever having sex with her.

VanLandingham, who teaches at Southwestern Law School, said Thompson had put himself in jeopardy.

A military officer who, as an instructor at a premiere military academy, sleeps with his students commits a serious fraternization crime, she said. However, a military officer who lies under oath about it, plus arrogantly engages others to help spin his web of lies on the front page of the nations leading newspaper, is deserving of years in jail and our collective condemnation.
Baltimore police shot a 13-year-old boy in east Baltimores Jonestown neighborhood April 27. The shooting comes days after the anniversary of the funeral of Freddie Gray (Baltimore Police Department)

Baltimore police shot a 13-year-old boy in east Baltimores Jonestown neighborhood April 27. The shooting comes days after the anniversary of the funeral of Freddie Gray (Baltimore Police Department)

A plainclothes Baltimore police officer shot and wounded a 13-year-old boy who ran from police Wednesday as he carried a BB-gun replica of a semiautomatic handgun on the first anniversary of rioting that swept west Baltimore, police officials said.

The teen is expected to survive wounds to his lower extremities, Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said at a news conference.

Two intelligence detectives were driving on a street and saw the teen walking with what looked like a handgun, and the officers approached him.

They identified themselves as police officers to this young man, [and] the young man took off on foot with the gun in his hand, Davis said.

The officers chased him for about 150 yards to the area of the unit block of Asquith Street where one of the officers fired. The gun mimics a Beretta semiautomatic pistol and Davis defended the officers actions.

I put my own eyes on it. Its an absolute, identical replica semiautomatic pistol, Davis said. Those police officers had no way of knowing that it was not an actual firearm.

The officers got out of their car and engaged a person who they believed they had a gun. Come on, this what we are supposed to do. Thats what cops do, Davis said.

The commissioner said the teens mother told police he left home with a BB gun, but it is not clear where he was going with the gun or why he ran from police.

The shooting happened one year to the day that rioting spread across west Baltimore in response to the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. The unrest led to burned businesses, buildings and police cars, widespread looting, and clashes with police and citywide curfews.

Wednesdays incident occurred more than three miles from the epicenter of the riots. The area is east of downtown Baltimore.

Today is an important day. It is not lost on me what April 27th means to this city what it means to this police department, Davis said. Anybody walking down the street with a real gun or a replica handgun in his or her hands poses a public safety threat to our community.

The departments newly formed Special Investigation Response Team is probing the shooting, Davis said.

The police shooting Wednesday in some aspects was reminiscent of the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland in November 2014. A Cleveland police officer fatally shot Tamir, who was playing in a park with a replica gun. He died a day later. Tamirs death was one of several incidents that led to an ongoing national discussion over the use of deadly force by police, especially among African Americans.
Thierry Kinshala Nkusu, right, has been charged in the fatal stabbing of Maria Veronica Mbunga, left, in Takoma Park, Md. (Takoma Park Police Department photos)

A Silver Spring man charged in the fatal stabbing of a 36-year-old pregnant woman had recently indicated to at least two people that he didnt want to help care for the child, according to arrest records filed Thursday that provide more details on how detectives put together their case.

Thierry Kinshala Nkusu, 33, is scheduled to have the terms of his jail bond  currently set at $5 million  reviewed Friday by a judge. He stands charged with second-degree murder in the death of Maria Veronica Mbunga, with whom hed had a relationship, according to the arrest records.

Mbunga was 20 weeks pregnant. Her unborn child did not survive.

According to an acquaintance of Nkusus who spoke with detectives, Nkusu called recently to say he had a friend who got a woman pregnant and asked whether the friend should be responsible for the baby if the woman said she would take care of the child. If that were me, Nkusu allegedly told the acquaintance, I would not take responsibility for the child, detectives said in the arrest records.

Another acquaintance told detectives that Nkusu planned to write to Mbungas relatives in Angola, telling them that he would not be taking responsibility for the child, according to an affidavit filed by the Takoma Park Police Department.

Nkusu told detectives he and Mbunga had a good relationship, and hed often texted her to check on the progress of her pregnancy. It is unclear if Nkusu has retained an attorney.

The stabbing occurred at 2 p.m. Wednesday in an apartment building in the 600 block of Houston Avenue in Takoma Park. Initially, it appeared as if Nkusu also had been a victim of an assailant. But that story fell apart, police said.

The narrative police described in their affidavit states that police initially were called about a man who was bleeding in the lobby of the building with a stab wound to the stomach. Officers arrived and learned the man was associated with a tenant in a fourth-floor apartment. They went to that unit and found the door locked, with a trail of blood leading to the elevators.

Officers got a key from the building manager, entered and found Mbunga unconscious, with multiple stab wounds. She was taken to a hospital.

The man in the lobby, Nkusu, also was taken to a hospital, where he told detectives that before the stabbing, he had been in the apartment.

According to Nkusu, detectives would later write, he dressed for work this afternoon, gave Mbunga a kiss at the door of the apartment, and walked to his vehicle which was parked on Houston Avenue near Flower Avenue. He stated that once he got to his car, he realized that he forgot his wallet. . . . Once he got to the apartment, he used his key to open the door. He heard music playing and the shower on. Assuming that Mbunga was taking a shower, he yelled at her with no response. He walked toward the bathroom and, at that time, he felt a sharp pain in the back of his right leg. As he was going down to the ground, he saw a masked man standing over him and then he was stabbed on the right side of the stomach.

Nkusu said he blacked out, not remembering anything until he opened the door and made it to the hallway, where he pulled himself down the hallway, banging on doors for help, and rode the elevator to the first floor.

His story soon crumbled, according to police.

An apartment building manager, who called police, said that about 10 minutes before she placed the call, she saw Nkusu walk past the front of the apartment building, carrying a black rucksack over his shoulder.

She stated that he stopped and adjusted the items in the bag and was looking around nervously, detectives wrote in the affidavit. She stated that she had never seen him behaving this way before. The next time she saw him, he was moaning and bleeding outside the elevator.

Detectives also noted that Nkusus injuries, as it turned out, were relatively minor  two superficial puncture wounds requiring only a few stitches.

After being released from the hospital, Nkusu agreed to come to the Takoma Park Police station, where he advised of his rights in English and French. Nkusu said he was from Congo and had been in the United States for a few years, according to the arrest records.

Nkusu described going to work and returning from work ahead of the time of the murder, doing so in clear detail  down to the boots he was wearing, detectives wrote. In recalling events just before and after Mbunga was attacked, though, he became vague.

Among the topics he wasnt clear about: What shoes he was wearing, according to the detectives. Nkusu did say that after going into the apartment to retrieve his wallet, he took his shoes and socks off, but still could not recall what shoes he wore, detective wrote.

Inside Mbungas apartment, police had found a pair of sneakers with blood on them. Detectives showed Nkusu a photograph of the sneakers.

He agreed that they were his shoes, detectives wrote, but again, didnt know if those were the shoes he wore that day.

Nkusu also said his cellphone was in his right front pocket before the attack. Police had found it on the floor of the living room with blood on it, according to the arrest records.

Nkusu spoke about a leaving a bag next to the front door, but police hadnt been able to find the bag.

Detectives spoke to a person who said there was friction between Nkusu and Mbunga, and said that Nkusus father did not approve of her. In Nkusus culture, detectives wrote, if the parents do not approve of a relationship, the family will disown that family member.

Nkusu told detectives he and Mbunga had a good relationship.

He stated they are both Christians and that they solve their problems with words, detectives wrote. He described texting her often to see how her and the unborn baby were doing.
Police in Alexandria spent several hours overnight at a possible barricade situation on East Reed Avenue that began to unfold late Wednesday.

Crystal Nosal, a spokeswoman for the Alexandria police department, said early Thursday, that police received a call from a man on East Reed Avenue about 10 p.m. Wednesday saying a family member shot at him from inside the home. No one was injured.

The relationship between the two men was not immediately known, Nosal said.

Police had closed some streets in the area for several hours throughout the night and into Thursday morning, as authorities were on the scene. Just before 6:30 a.m., police said they were breaking down the scene and found the suspect was not in the home.

The situation was considered a possible barricade because police were not sure whether the man who fired the shots was inside the home or had fled the area.

When we believe someone has a weapon and has retreated back into a house and we try to make contact with them and we dont, then we have to treat it as a worse case scenario, Nosal said.

In a Twitter message, police said residents in that area may have heard loud noises as the Alexandria Police Departments Special Operations Team was in the area dealing with the situation.
A court hearing for a frequent Fox News analyst charged with lying about a lengthy CIA career to win government work has been delayed until Friday morning.

Wayne Simmons, 62, of Annapolis, was indicted on claims that he won contracting work and received security clearances by falsely claiming that he had worked as a CIA officer for 27 years. He pleaded not guilty in October to counts of major fraud, wire fraud and making false statements.

[He claimed to be ex-CIA. Prosectors say it was a lie.]

Now, court records show, Simmons is to change his plea. A hearing in federal court in Alexandria was initially scheduled for 4 p.m., but has been moved to Friday morning. If a plea agreement has been reached, it will not be final until it has been approved by a judge.

An attorney for Simmons said he could not discuss the matter in detail but confirmed that Simmons would be in court. A spokesman for the U.S. attorneys office for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to comment.

Simmonss case has drawn national attention since he was indicted last fall. For years, Simmons has claimed to have taken part in CIA operations around the world, including Deep Cover Intel Ops against drug cartels and arms dealers in Latin America and the Middle East. He said on his website, which has since been taken down, that he was recruited into the agencys Outside Paramilitary Special Operations Group in 1973 while serving in the Navy.

Simmonss purported credentials helped him land a spot as an unpaid commentator for Fox News, where, beginning in 2002, he regularly weighed in on issues involving terrorism and national security. In 2009, he secured a temporary position through a subcontractor as an intelligence adviser to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal that involved a trip to Afghanistan, according to the seven-count indictment. Around the same time, he was hired by BAE Systems as a Human Terrain System Team Leader and received training for the role at a U.S. Army facility, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors said it was all an elaborate fraud. In reality, they said, Simmons had no relevant experience and had concealed a long record of criminal activity that included 11 DUI convictions, as well as convictions for assault, gambling and firearm possession. They accused Simmons of repeatedly lying about his resume in government documents used to vet him as a candidate for contracts. They also charged him with using his supposed CIA affiliation to coax an unidentified person into lending him $125,000 for a fraudulent real estate investment.

Simmons has been under house arrest at his Annapolis home since late last year. Prosecutors had fought to keep him in jail pending trial, arguing that he had a violent past and a history of ignoring court orders.
That womans card everyones talking about?

It didnt work that well for Kristen Jarvis Johnson.

Johnson, 33, climbed the ladder of Big Law until she reached a pretty sweet place, making $400,000 a year at Squire Patton Boggs and slaying legal dragons as a senior associate in its Qatar office. She specialized in international disputes.

But when we talked this week, she was still jetlagged after pulling the plug on all of it, putting her family on a plane and jetting home.

Shed had enough of the 24/7 work, not seeing her two young sons, even missing her grandmothers funeral.

Alexandra Petri explains the perks that come from signing up for a "woman card." (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

But more important, shed had enough of being one of the few women in the upper ranks of her white-shoe law firm. Shed had enough of hitting or exceeding all her targets and being told she didnt need a bonus. Shed had enough of being told she had to work harder after advising on a case in between contractions as she was in labor.

I encountered blatant gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and a very clear glass ceiling, Johnson wrote in a Reddit post that started out being about her new idea  creating a boy version of the American Girl dolls, called Boy Story  but quickly became about her experience as a woman in a huge law firm.

Having a baby apparently makes you worth less as a lawyer, she said.

Her former law firm didnt see it that way. Angelo Kakolyris, a spokesman for Squire Patton Boggs, said in an email that 13 of the 29 lawyers promoted to partner globally this year were women. He added that during the period when Johnson was in Doha, there were four partners in the office, two of whom were women. Throughout the firms Middle East practice, he said, one woman made partner the year she was on maternity leave; another was made partner the year after she was on maternity.

We were disappointed to see the comments made by Ms. Johnson and strongly disagree with these comments, particularly with her assessment of the firms policies toward women, he said. We are committed to a firm culture that promotes full and equal participation, advancement and retention of women.

In an interview, Johnson said she never expected to encounter discrimination when she began her law career.

I went out of [American University] law school having never perceived there could be any problem, any issues with gender bias, she said. Its only when youve started getting into the upper ranks do you see it.

When she thought shed hit the glass ceiling, she talked to one of the few female leaders at her firm.

Through tears, she described to me the massive number of instances where she had pushed forward an idea or proposal, and then the inner group of male leaders seized it, held meetings without telling her and took credit, Johnson said.

This happened over and over and over. And I talked to others in the industry. Close friends in other big firms. Young mothers who were being told by male partners that they probably couldnt make it with kids at home and the partnership isnt a place for working moms. I am not kidding.

That womans card did nothing but hold her back.

[Play the woman card and reap these rewards!]

Donald Trump had no clue how stupid he sounded to millions of American women when he asserted Tuesday that if Hillary Clinton were a man, I dont think shed get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing shes got going is the womans card.

Oh, really?

Eight years of duty inside the White House, two terms as an influential senator from New York and five years as secretary of state, and her experience amounts to two X chromosomes?

Heres what those chromosomes get women in the workplace: discrimination, a yawning pay gap and even blatant, physical sexual harassment.

Dont think any of that still exists? Watch the searing video produced by Just Not Sports, which reveals the abuse endured by sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro on Twitter.

Or consider the awful online harassment hurled at Virginia firefighter Nicole Mittendorff. The Fairfax County fire department is investigating whether her co-workers were the ones who savagely cyberbullied Mittendorff and whether that played any role in her suicide last week.

[Was a firefighter humiliated by co-workers online before she killed herself?]

In a statement on Saturday, Fairfax County Fire Chief Richard Bowers vowed that my department can not and will not tolerate bullying of any kind. We will thoroughly investigate this matter and take any appropriate actions needed.

But the department has faced numerous lawsuits in the past because of men who couldnt stop taunting their female colleagues about sex toys and body parts in the firehouse, whod joke about rape and sex when handling pike poles and fire hoses.

Women had to fight to become firefighters. Just like the women who have made it in law, just like the women who have made it in tech.

In a casual conversation this week, a woman who works in tech and is a senior member of her team described the performance evaluation shed just received.

They had no complaints about my work, she said. Nothing but praise. But they told me I use my eyebrows too much when I talk and I should smile more.

Thats what the womans card gets far too many of us: disparagement, discrimination, discouragement.

Its like youre going and going, and then you hit this wall, the eyebrow woman said. And the discrimination hits you in the upper ranks. And thats why were having this whole new awakening.

Twitter: @petulad
This map shows Arlington National Cemeterys plan to expand its burial grounds around the Air Force Memorial and realign the eastern end of Columbia Pike. Its the second big expansion of the cemetery in the last three years; this one would involve a land swap with the county the Virginia Department of Transportation and create graves on either side of the Air Force Memorial. (Arlington National Cemetery)

Arlington National Cemetery, which inters 7,000 military veterans, spouses and dignitaries each year, unveiled preliminary plans this week to create room for more than 25,000 new graves by rerouting part of Columbia Pike and swapping land with local and state governments.

The southward expansion of the cemetery into 38 acres around the Air Force Memorial would not only create new plots contiguous with the existing grounds but also could help improve local transit and traffic flow along the often-congested route to the Pentagon and the Pentagon Row shopping area.

Residents who live nearby who examined the preliminary plans Wednesday generally expressed support for the project, which is expected to take about six years.

Donna DiFelice of the Arlington View neighborhood said her father, a World War II veteran who lives with her, may be the beneficiary of one of the new graves the cemetery.

As much land as we can give for this purpose is good, she said. We cant do enough for our veterans, a sentiment echoed separately by several others.

Much of the land was the site of the now-demolished Navy Annex, a million-square-foot complex built as a temporary warehouse during World War II. The Air Force Memorial would remain the centerpiece of the property.

[Navy Annex being razed after 70 years of service]

The Army began land-swap negotiations with Arlington County and the Virginia Department of Transportation three years ago because the county and state own most of the roads that would be affected by the project. Southgate Road, which now divides the property from the existing cemetery, would be closed, and a new street may be built between the vacant land and the several dozen homes of Foxcroft Heights on the lands western border.

The negotiations are complicated, because its not just a two-party agreement, said Greg Emanuel, the countys director of environmental services. I feel as though were moving forward. All parties want to do the right thing. This is going to be how the corridor is aligned for a long time. These are critical transportation connections. This is the link  theres no alternatives or redos. Weve got to get this right. . . . My opinion is all parties are moving in the right direction, and I think well get this done.

The goal is to finalize those negotiations within a year, Emanuel and others said, so when the Armys environmental assessment is completed and final plans are drawn up, roadway construction could start in 2018, and cemetery construction could start in 2019. Final completion is tentatively set for 2022.

The cost of the cemetery portion of the project is estimated at $274 million, Army Col. Doug Guttormsen said. However, Guttormsen, the director of engineering at the cemetery said, that money has not been appropriated by Congress. That does not including $30 million for road realignments, which will be shared by state and federal governments.

Arlington National Cemetery, with 400,000 existing graves and about 30 new burials each weekday, has been running low on space for years. In 2013, it began a 27-acre expansion in its northwest corner that will provide about 27,000 new grave sites, which is expected to handle demand through the mid-2030s. The southern expansion is expected to provide enough room for another 20 years or so of burials.

[Arlington National Cemeterys northwest expansion]

The Army is soliciting comments on the proposal and its upcoming environmental assessment.

Tom and Marguerite Greig of the Penrose neighborhood, just across Washington Boulevard, said they have been frustrated by the pace of land-swap negotiations, which has dragged on for years. One holdup, they noted, was when the county wanted to use land it would get south of the realigned Columbia Pike to store and maintain its bus fleet. That idea has since been rejected, but the county now wants to use those seven acres for county or public use, which could include a bus stop, a park or a museum.

The county could have been more accommodating, because its a national monument to people all over the country, Marguerite Greig said. The cemetery deserves deference. There are plenty of places for a bus stop.

John Moran, president of the Foxcroft Heights Civic Association, said he has been urging the cemetery and county for the past nine years to pay more attention to the traffic volume and traffic flow through his neighborhood to the adjacent Fort Myer-Henderson Hall. This project, he hopes, will finally correct those problems.

Buses shake pictures off my walls, Moran said, and GPS devices send drivers through neighborhood streets to get to one of the military bases gates. Removing the mid-rise Navy Annex gave the modest homes of Foxcroft Heights multimillion-dollar views of downtown Washington, he noted, and the addition of the white military gravestones on that land will be welcome.

My grandfather was gassed in World War I, and my father served in World War II, Moran said. I have no objection at all to burials here.
Accidents happen, and if theyre someone elses fault, you can go to court to try to get compensation for your medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering. If you win, though, what you receive may be considerably less than you expect: Your health plan may claim some or all of it as reimbursement for money it spent on your medical care.

Its completely legal and it happens all the time. But a recent Supreme Court decision gives consumers ammunition to push back.

The basic facts of the case are common. In December 2008, a drunk driver ran a stop sign and hit Robert Montanile, seriously injuring him. Montanile had lumbar spinal fusion surgery and other medical treatment that cost $121,044, which was paid for by his employer plan, the National Elevator Industry Health Benefit Plan. Montanile sued the drunk driver and won a settlement of $500,000. He paid his attorneys $263,788 in fees and expenses, leaving him with $236,212.

Montaniles health plan claimed it was entitled to be reimbursed for his medical care.

Contract provisions allowing most health plans to reimburse themselves if a member receives a personal-injury settlement or jury award are routine and often assert that the plan should be first in line for settlement or award money. The notion is that if the person is permitted to keep the money paid on his behalf for medical expenses, hes essentially getting his medical bills paid twice  once by the insurer and then again under the settlement.

Montanile hired another lawyer to negotiate with the health plan, but when they reached an impasse, the lawyer informed the plans trustees that if he didnt hear from them in two weeks, he would release the remaining settlement money to Montanile. When the plan didnt respond, thats what he did.

The health plan later sued Montanile for the money, but he said he had spent nearly all of it to pay his second lawyer and to care for himself and his daughter. Lower courts ruled that even though he had spent the settlement funds, the plan was entitled to reimburse itself from Montaniles other assets. The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling 8-1 in January that the health plan was entitled to take only the specific funds he had received in the settlement or goods that could be traced to it.

The case was remanded to a lower court, and the plan may be able to recover some money from Montanile if it can trace assets to the settlement he received, said Radha Pathak, one of Montaniles lawyers at Stris & Maher,the Los Angeles-based law firm that represented him in the appellate and Supreme Court cases.

In the simplest sense, the case turned on a lapse in timing. If the health plan had responded to the letter sent by Montaniles attorney within 14 days, it might have received the funds it was entitled to.

The clearest message is that if plans want to assert their rights, they need to do it promptly, said Leslie Anderson, a partner in the Washington Resource Group at benefits consultant Mercer.

But the case also has a significant impact on consumers, who are often fighting an uphill battle in these subrogation and reimbursement cases. The Supreme Courts decision makes it clear that plans cant seize an individuals general assets to pay themselves back for medical expenses. The ruling may also improve consumers odds of receiving a larger portion of their settlement or jury award by prompting health plans to negotiate early.

In these cases, problems sometimes arise when theres not enough money to go around. The total  especially after paying legal bills  may not be large enough to cover the injured persons medical bills as well as the amounts awarded for lost wages and pain and suffering. In those cases, health plans may claim all or a significant portion of the settlement, leaving the injured person who brought the lawsuit with nothing or much less than the amount awarded.

Jason Lacey, a partner at Foulston Siefkin in Wichita, who represents employers in subrogation cases, said he understands how the process may seem unfair to individuals who have taken on the task of going to court. I took the time to go out and file this lawsuit, and youre swooping in at last minute and feeding off my efforts is how they might feel, Lacey said.

About half of the states have laws that limit or prohibit health plans from reimbursing themselves in subrogation cases until the consumer has received all that was awarded, such as lost wages and pain and suffering. But those laws dont apply to self-insured plans that pay health-care claims directly, a process generally used by large businesses.

Although the Supreme Courts decision doesnt alter the general landscape of these cases, it may encourage plans to negotiate with an injured worker sooner to agree on how to divvy up a settlement or jury award in a way thats fair to both sides, said Matt Wessler, a principal at Gupta Wessler in Washington, who has represented workers in such cases.

It can be hard for workers and their lawyers to learn whether a health plan intends to assert a lien and, if so, for how much, Wessler said. Now, after the Montanile decision, its clearer that plans may lose the ability to recover any funds if they wait to share their intentions with the plan member. Once theyre armed with that information, workers and their lawyers can use the leverage that they may not pursue a payment at all if the health plan doesnt negotiate early in the process.

If health plans dont notify workers or their lawyers early in the process that they have an interest in any potential award, they risk the possibility that by the time they actually get something sorted out, the money will be gone, he said.

This column is produced through a collaboration between The Post and Kaiser Health News. To submit a question, go to kaiserhealthnews.org/contact-insuring-your-health.
High blood pressure is, for many people, a wake-up call to make challenging lifestyle changes such as exercising more, eating better and possibly taking medication.

When the patient is a child, the diagnosis can bring tougher decisions.

About 7 percent of kids between the ages of 3 and 18 have elevated blood pressure, also called hypertension or pre-hypertension. And that number seems to be growing  with particularly high rates among overweight and obese teenagers.

But data is still scarce about how best to treat high blood pressure in kids, and even how to assess it. The condition is frequently missed when its there and diagnosed when its not. When diagnoses are confirmed, its still not clear what the long-term consequences might be of taking medication for decades, with some studies suggesting that half of cases will resolve on their own, says Margaret Riley, a family physician at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor.

As a result of theses uncertainties, experts disagree about how often kids should undergo blood pressure testing and even if they should be tested at all. In a less contentious form, its the young-persons version of the debates over mammography and PSA testing for breast and prostate cancers.

[Why Im saying no to mammography]

Common sense says that if you diagnose and treat high blood pressure early, it will help, Riley says. But we dont know if treating will lead to improved outcomes. Thats where the controversy is.

Blood pressure is a measure of how hard the heart has to work to pump blood. For adults, the target numbers are 120/80 mm Hg. Above that, pre-hypertension is a warning sign. Over the 140/90 level, prolonged hypertension can lead to heart attacks, strokes, kidney damage and other problems.

In kids, the numbers are more complicated to interpret. Blood pressure starts out comparatively low in small children and rises as they grow. But normal varies by age, gender, body size and time of day. Anxiety matters, too. In one study, more than half of kids showed signs of white coat hypertension, with a spike in blood pressure at the doctors office.

Some kids get more opportunities than others to exhibit false positives. The National High Blood Pressure Education Program recommends that children get screened every time they are seen in a medical setting, starting at age 3. Other organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have recommended screening once a year during preventive well-child visits. But after a rigorous analysis in 2013, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, or USPSTF, concluded that there was insufficient data to make any recommendation about the relative benefits and risks of screening kids for hypertension.

[Youve never heard of the powerful doctors making decisions about your health]

In practice, many kids miss out on testing altogether, either because they dont get well-child appointments or because their doctors dont follow the guidelines. In one 2012 study, kids were screened in about two-thirds of preventive visits and one-third of other office visits.

Even when their blood pressure is taken, results are easy to misinterpret. A cuff of the wrong size can skew numbers. And doctors dont always look closely at those numbers, which can be plugged into complex tables that indicate hypertension if a kid is in the 95th percentile or higher compared with other kids of the same age, height and sex. Readings above the 90th percentile qualify as pre-hypertension.

As clear as mud, my family pediatrician answered during my 8-year-olds recent annual visit when I asked him about figuring out what to make of blood pressure readings in kids. Those layers of complication make the condition easy to miss in young people. In a 2007 study of more than 14,000 children, only 26 percent of those with high blood pressure had been diagnosed in the course of routine office visits.

When doctors do catch the condition in very young children, its usually a sign of some other cause that can be sleuthed by a full work-up of tests to look for such things as heart defects, hormonal problems and kidney disease.

By the time kids hit adolescence, though, between 85 and 95 percent of cases are not linked to another condition, and many experts think body weight is a big part of the problem. An estimated 11 percent of obese children have high blood pressure, according to the USPSTF, and some studies have put rates of hypertension as high as 30 percent in certain groups of obese teens.

In one large 2013 study, blood pressure levels above the 90th percentile showed up in 19 percent of boys and 12 percent of girls ages 8 to 17. Hypertension and pre-hypertension were most common in kids who ate more than the recommended amount of sodium, says study co-author Bonita Falkner, a pediatric nephrologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

Studies have yet to look at whether high blood pressure in childhood leads to cardiovascular problems later in life. But there are reasons to be concerned, Falkner says. According to a number of clinical studies, teens with hypertension show signs of heart stress, including thickening of certain parts of the heart and structural changes in the blood vessels. Kids with hypertension may even score worse on challenging brain tasks. Some evidence also suggests that high blood pressure becomes more likely in adulthood when it starts in adolescence.

When hypertension coincides with excessive weight, Falkner says, the best first step is to try to lower blood pressure by helping kids develop better eating and exercise habits. The next step is medication. And options include the same kinds of drugs that adults use, including beta blockers and ACE inhibitors.

Still, there have been no long-term trials in children to compare classes of drugs or to assess the safety or effectiveness of taking these drugs indefinitely. And, Riley adds, its impossible to predict which kids conditions will resolve on their own.

Nobody knows if treatment long term will lead to decreased numbers of heart attacks and strokes, she says, adding that she wouldnt hesitate to treat a child with medication if needed or to try to wean him off medication after a while. Kids are not followed long enough.

To avoid a run-in with hard treatment decisions, experts recommend teaching kids heart-healthy habits from the get-go  and getting the whole family involved.

I think the best advice for parents is to try to model a healthy lifestyle and have kids live as healthy a life as possible, Riley says, including plenty of fruit and vegetables, no sugar-sweetened drinks and at least an hour of physical activity and less than two hours of screen time each day. They are general guidelines for health that also relate to blood pressure.


Kendall Balentine gets a call from her distressed friend and transgender mentee Kendra Heathscott. (Kristina Barker for The Washington Post)

After decades of fighting her family, her community and herself over her gender identity, Kendall Balentine finally made peace with it. She became content to live out her retirement quietly, for the first time in her life as a woman, with her wife and dogs in the relative isolation of Deadwood, S.D.

That is, until February. The South Dakota legislature advanced a bill requiring transgender students to use the bathroom matching the sex on their birth certificates. When an organizer with a national gay rights group called to see if she would come forward to call for the governor to veto the bill, requiring her to push herself into the limelight in a way she never imagined, she didnt hesitate.

All my life, I put myself in harms way because I couldnt be who I was, said Balentine, 49, a retired Marine and deputy sheriff who fully transitioned from living as a man to a woman last year. I decided now I was willing to die for who I am and fight for those who didnt have a voice.

[Truth and transgender at 70: A story of enduring love]

Balentine is part of a new wave of transgender people stepping out of the shadows to fight a surge in state bills requiring people to use the bathrooms, locker rooms and dressing rooms that differ from their gender identity  measures they consider unnecessary, dangerous and rooted in offensive stereotypes.



Balentine talks about her Harley-Davidson motorcycle at her home in the Black Hills of western South Dakota on April 16. "I wanted to die," she says about how she felt before her transition. (Kristina Barker for The Washington Post)

Many, like Balentine, have been recruited for the spotlight by national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights groups, scrambling to address a critical weak spot in their broader fight for rights: the countrys unfamiliarity with transgender people.

This small but visible group has emerged as the newest target, say gay rights activists, of conservatives who want to slow the momentum of last year, when the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a right to marry.

[The GOP cant avoid fights over LGBT issues in the South]

After that landmark victory, activists moved to expand LGBT rights by pushing for local and state protections against discrimination. Their opponents seized on one singular outcome of the proposed expansion: the bathroom issue.

By arguing that nondiscrimination measures will permit biological males to enter womens bathrooms, they have found a message that resonates with a broader cross-section of voters than measures that target same-sex marriage, which more than half of Americans now support.

The most stark example of that resonance came last fall, when Houston, a diverse and Democratic-leaning city that, at that time, was led by a gay mayor, voted overwhelmingly to repeal a nondiscrimination ordinance that opponents said would lead to male sexual predators gaining access to sex-segregated spaces.

I think it makes common sense to voters that they dont want men to use womens locker, shower or bathroom facilities, said Mat Staver, chairman of the Liberty Counsel, which has endorsed the bathroom bills. The transgender agenda could be, and I think is becoming, the Achilles heel of the gay and lesbian movement.

[Backlash builds against N.C. law on transgender bathroom use]

Cognizant that bathroom bills imperil broader rights for all LGBT people, the gay rights movement is shifting much of its formidable organizational machinery to focus on transgender issues. Groups are rallying large companies and celebrities who long ago signed on to gay rights to vocally oppose laws that they view as targeting transgender people. They are diverting millions of dollars to campaigns that depict transgender people as ordinary Americans deserving of dignity and legal protections.

Allowing transgender people to use the restrooms of their choice has split Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, left, and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), and even has drawn attention from President Obama in recent days. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

They are combing states for transgender people they can groom to lobby lawmakers and speak to media representatives, much as they identified gay men and lesbians with compelling personal stories to become faces of the movement and plaintiffs in lawsuits. And they are recruiting parents of transgender children to speak out on their kids behalf.

[A Florida school board just blocked transgender kids from choosing bathrooms]

The movement-wide focus now centers on how to crack the code on figuring out how to introduce transgender people to America, said Kasey Suffredini, chief program officer for Freedom for All Americans, a group founded last year to prod cities, states and Congress to expand minority civil rights protections to gay and transgender people.

In a way, the task of introducing the public to transgender people has never been so easy. High-profile figures such as Caitlyn Jenner and actress Laverne Cox have put an attractive public face on the community. The Emmy-winning television series Transparent has delved deeply and frankly into one familys dynamics after the father transitions to a woman. Transgender youths are increasingly making their presence known in schools.

The movement has logged some significant wins  including last week before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond, which sided with a transgender teenager who sued his school district for forbidding him to use the boys restroom.

But challenges remain. The transgender population is tiny, about 700,000 adults, according to the most recent serious effort to count the population, a 2011 study by the Williams Institute (the studys author, Gary J. Gates, said in an interview that he thinks the number is an undercount). There exist only two major national advocacy groups dedicated exclusively to transgender issues, advocates say, and their combined budget is about $5 million. Just this week, the small town of Oxford, Ala., passed a harsh new ordinance that could result in jail time for people caught in a public restroom different from their gender at birth.

Its not just Southern states that have balked at extending civil rights laws to transgender people. New Hampshire, New York and Wisconsin all bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation but not gender identity, according to Freedom for All Americans.

[Lesbians sue N.C. after being turned away from fertility clinic]

And even Massachusetts, the first state in the country to legalize same-sex marriage, lacks protections for transgender people in public accommodations. The gap is at least in part the result of bathroom concerns. Lawmakers are trying to remedy that with legislation this year.

A recent report from the Center for American Progress and the Human Rights Campaign found that transgender workers experience twice the rate of unemployment as that of the population as a whole and are four times as likely to have an income of $10,000 or less. Also, 1 in 5 transgender people has experienced homelessness at some point, according to the Center for Transgender Equality.

With the marriage question settled, opponents of same-sex marriage are instead going after an extra-vulnerable component of our community, the transgender community, said Marc Solomon, formerly the national campaign director for Freedom to Marry. The advocacy group, devoted to advancing same-sex marriage, closed shop after the Supreme Court decision.

Several major efforts are underway to counter that push.

The Gill Foundation, a leading philanthropy supporting pro-

LGBT causes, recently funded a $400,000 study looking at ways to change voters minds about transgender people through door-to-door canvassing. Freedom for All Americans recently began its Transgender Freedom Project, a $1 million public education initiative focused on building support for transgender people and nondiscrimination laws that protect them.

Groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, the organization that initially reached out to Balentine, have begun holding training sessions and collecting stories of transgender people to use as part of media campaigns and to rally at statehouses. And two foundations that support LGBT causes, the Arcus Foundation and the NoVo Foundation, have begun a multiyear $20 million project to increase visibility as well as the quality of life for transgender people globally.

A key goal of many of these projects will be to get more policymakers to meet transgender people in person. The power of such meetings, they say, was evident in South Dakota, where Gov. Dennis Daugaard (R) vetoed the bathroom bill after meeting with a group of transgender youths on Feb. 23.

In explaining his veto, Daugaard said school districts were best equipped to address bathroom and locker room accommodations, not the state government. But activists are convinced that the meeting played a part.

Balentine was not part of the group that formally met Daugaard. But as she snapped pictures at the state Capitol in Pierre that afternoon in her No Hate In Our State T-shirt, she thought to see if Daugaard might see her for a few minutes. To her surprise, his secretary invited her right in.

One week later, Daugaard vetoed the bill.

Daugaard mostly listened as Balentine told parts of her life story, she recalls. In an interview, she said she knew at a very young age that she was a girl but was told by her disciplinarian, Vietnam-veteran dad that such feelings were unwelcome and unnatural.

She compensated for her feminine feelings by becoming an uber male, she said, dating lots of women and immersing herself in athletics. She chose as her role model a figure who at the time seemed the very epitome of masculinity  Olympian Bruce Jenner, now better known as Caitlyn. She joined the military and then law enforcement, where she routinely volunteered for the most risky assignments, she said.

I built this wall of lies around me, she said, and it made me want to die.



I'm willing to give my life for everyone's rights, the disabled Marine veteran says about her active role in the local and national LGBT community. There's no reason to not be accepted. (Kristina Barker for The Washington Post)

Balentine began her transition around the time the couple moved to South Dakota  a move she and her wife, Pam, made in an attempt to build up the strained relationship with Balentine's parents. (Kristina Barker for The Washington Post)

At one point, she enrolled in cosmetology school. But she endured ridicule as a male makeup artist, she said, and eventually abandoned the trade to return to the military.

A few years ago, Balentine retired. She and her wife, Pam, moved to an isolated, seven-acre property surrounded by lush national forest near Mount Rushmore and far from their closest neighbors. When she resolved to transition, to her disbelief and gratitude, her father came around, embracing her for the first time in her life. Pam stayed and even chose Balentines new middle name, Nichole.

But the challenges continued to pile up for Balentine, as they do for so many transgender people. All but one of her kids stopped talking to her the day she underwent gender-reassignment surgery. She struggled to find a community of transgender people for support.

Last week, on the first anniversary of her surgery, Balentines wife left her. But on Tuesday, Balentine said, Pam flew back, pledging to remain for the long haul.



Kendall Balentine, right, hugs her wife of 17 years, Pam, at the couple's home. Following a suicide attempt, Kendall has spent the past four years discovering whom she has always been. On April 20, Balentine celebrated the first anniversary of her sex-reassignment surgery. (Kristina Barker for The Washington Post)

She thinks its going to be so easy for me to meet someone or have friends, Balentine said a few hours after Pam had boarded her plane. But she doesnt understand. Transgender people dont have it easy. Who would choose this? Who would want to lose their family and now their wife?

A bright spot has been her newfound activism, Balentine said. The Human Rights Campaign has asked her to travel to North Carolina or Mississippi to help rally against recently passed legislation there. Shes helping to start a nonprofit organization, called TransAction South Dakota, which is focused on building up transgender advocacy within the state.

Ive just found a whole new career I absolutely love, she said. The first one Ive liked since cosmetology.
GREECE

E.U. deepens pressure over bailout reforms

The head of the European Union is resisting Greeces demand for an emergency leaders summit on the countrys troubled bailout program, stressing that finance officials need to resume talks and agree within days on reforms needed.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras spoke Wednesday with European Council President Donald Tusk to propose the meeting of leaders of the 19 European nations that use the euro currency. But Tusk said the finance ministers should make more progress before the leaders intervene.

Greece and its creditors  its European partners and the International Monetary Fund  have been struggling to agree on the reforms and cutbacks the country must carry out to pass the first review of its bailout program, originally scheduled for last October.

Tsiprass left-led government had hoped that successful negotiations would allow euro-zone finance ministers to meet Thursday to approve the review.

But it now looks as if the impasse could severely delay the review, which Greece needs before it can start other talks with creditors on relieving its crippling debt load. A successful review would also release a long-delayed rescue loan installment, without which Greece cannot make scheduled payments to creditors.

Tusk said the euro-zone finance chiefs need to set another date by which they should agree on a deal. I am talking not about weeks but about days, he said.

 Associated Press

LIBYA

At least 12 Egyptians killed in clashes

At least a dozen Egyptians have been killed in clashes with smugglers in Libya, Egypts Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.

Spokesman Ahmed Abu-Zeid said 12 to 16 Egyptian illegal migrants were killed in clashes in the central town of Beni Walid.

Egyptian state-run newspaper al-Ahram al-Arabi quoted witnesses as saying that a dispute broke out between the Egyptian migrants and the Libyan smugglers, leading to the killing of three smugglers. The witnesses said relatives of the slain smugglers opened fire on the migrants, killing 16 of them.

Libya has become a major conduit for migration from Africa and the Middle East toward Europe as traffickers have exploited the chaos in the country. Libya has been ruled mostly by militias since the 2011 uprising that toppled Moammar Gaddafi and has been split between rival governments since 2014. A U.N.-brokered effort has led to the formation of a unity government.

 Associated Press

SYRIA

Islamic State advances against rebels in north

Islamic State militants seized five villages from Syrian rebels close to the Turkish border on Wednesday, further weakening the rebels foothold in and around the northern city of Aleppo.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists on the ground, said the extremist group took five villages in Azaz district, north of Aleppo, where a rebel enclave is home to tens of thousands of displaced civilians.

Syrian rebels are anticipating a major government offensive in Aleppo, Syrias largest city, which has been contested since 2012. Dozens of civilians have been killed in shelling and airstrikes on the city over the past week.

In another blow to the rebels, government troops repelled an attack on the western edge of Aleppo by a coalition of insurgent groups, killing at least 19 fighters, said Nazeer al-Khatib, an Aleppo-based activist who keeps close contact with the insurgents.

Khatib said the rebels were ambushed by government forces near a factory, trapping nearly 600 fighters inside. Nine rebels reportedly were killed in the clashes, while 10 died during an operation that freed the trapped fighters but failed to dislodge the government forces.

The Observatory also reported the failed attack but put the number of rebels killed at 34.

 Associated Press

Cholera outbreak hits Zanzibar, kills 45: A Zanzibar health official said a cholera outbreak on the island archipelago has killed at least 45 people since March. Muhammed Dahoma, the director of disease prevention and control at the Health Ministry, said 3,000 people have been hospitalized with cholera. Heavy rains continue to pound parts of Zanzibar, clogging sewer systems and exacerbating the cholera problem.

Suicide bombing in Turkey wounds at least 13: A female suicide bomber struck in a historic district of Turkeys fourth-largest city, wounding 13 people, according to officials. The bomber was about 25, said Health Minister Mehmet Muezzinoglu. He said 13 people were wounded in the attack in Bursa but none critically. The explosion ripped through an area that is home to an Ottoman-era mosque and bazaar in the city, which is a popular tourist destination for locals and foreigners. The attack occurred a day after the United States issued a warning to its citizens about credible terrorist threats against tourist areas in Turkey.

Bulgarian town bans full-face veils: A town in central Bulgaria banned the wearing of full-face veils in public. The ban is the first of its kind in the Balkan country. Wearing full-face veils had become common among some Muslim Roma women in Pazardzhik, a town of about 70,000 people. Muslims make up about 12 percent of Bulgarias population, and most belong to a centuries-old community in which full-face veils are not common. Part of the Roma minority practices an ultraconservative form of Islam; its women have started wearing full-face veils in recent years.

 From news services
French CGT union Secretary-General Philippe Martinez, right, speaks on the Place de la Republique during the Nuit Debout, or "Up All Night" movement in Paris. (Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images)

FRANCE

Scores arrested in labor law protests

Protesters clashed with police in several cities in France on Thursday over proposed changes to the countrys labor rules, and a strike forced cancellations and delays at two major airports serving Paris.

Thousands of demonstrators marched in Paris, and violence broke out when several dozen people, many with their faces covered, started throwing objects at police. Police used tear gas to disperse protesters and said one officer was seriously wounded.

French television also showed clashes in the southern city of Marseille and in the western cities of Nantes and Rennes.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said 124 people had been arrested in protests nationwide.

A strike by air traffic controllers led to the cancellation of 20 percent of all flights at Pariss Orly Airport and caused delays at Charles de Gaulle Airport, according to the Paris airport authority website.

France has seen strikes and protests against the labor reform bill, which aims to encourage companies to hire. Critics say the reforms will compromise Frances hard-won worker protections without cutting the stubbornly high unemployment rate.

The bill will be debated next week in the lower house of Parliament.

 Associated Press

MIGRANTS

Italy, Austria reach border-crossing deal

Italy and Austria have reached a deal to avoid closing the heavily trafficked Brenner Pass, an important conduit for tourists and goods transiting Europe, Italys interior minister said Thursday.

Angelino Alfano said he was assured by his Austrian counterpart at a meeting in Rome that no wall will be constructed at the two nations border to block migrants from possibly moving through Italy to Austria.

He said Italy must block large numbers of migrants from reaching the border while Austria must be reasonable to avoid a block that would cause enormous damage to tourism in Italy and in Austria, and to imports and exports.

Italian transport companies and businesses remain concerned about tensions along the border, noting that delays will make Italian goods less competitive in the important German market. About 2 million vehicles transit the pass each year.

Alfano said Italy refused Austrias request to deploy Austrian police on Italian trains heading north but said Italy would reinforce police patrols along the roads leading up to the Brenner Pass.

The deal comes a day after Austrian police announced that they were planning to set up three highway checkpoints to prevent migrants from crossing into Austria from Italy, along with a 400-yard border fence to prevent unauthorized crossings.

 Associated Press

BURMA

U.S. Embassys use of Rohingya spurs ire

Buddhist monks joined several hundred protesters outside the U.S. Embassy in Burma on Thursday to demand that it stop using the term Rohingya to refer to a Muslim ethnic minority group.

The protesters insisted that the group be called Bengali and be regarded as illegal migrants from Bangladesh. The families of many members of the minority have lived in Burma for generations.

Burma, also known as Myanmar, does not officially recognize the Rohingya as an ethnic group and denies most of them citizenship and basic rights. Conflict over land and resources in the western state of Rakhine, where most of the estimated 1 million Rohingya live, led to deadly violence between Buddhists and Muslims that later spread to other parts of the country. More than 100,000 Rohingya were forced to flee their homes and live in decrepit camps.

The U.S. Embassy used the term Rohingya this month in a statement of concern about their situation after dozens died when a boat they were on capsized.

Police who were deployed to guard the embassy allowed one of the protesters to present a letter to an embassy official.

 Associated Press

Man accused of Rome terror plot among 4 arrested in Italy: Italian police arrested four suspects in a foreign-fighter investigation, including a Moroccan-born man living in Italy who prosecutors said had received orders from the Islamic State militant group to carry out attacks on Rome during Holy Year. Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli said investigators had intercepted communications from within Islamic State territory ordering attacks in Italy, with particular attention to the city of Rome. He said authorities arrested four people in the Lombardy region and issued arrest warrants for two others suspected to be in Islamic State territory.

Equatorial Guineas long-serving leader is reelected: Africas longest-serving leader is extending his rule further, with election officials saying the president of Equatorial Guinea has won another term. Teodoro Obiang Nguema, 73, took power in 1979 after a military coup. Although the constitution has been changed to impose term limits, those rules do not retroactively apply to him. Election officials said Obiang won 93.7 percent of the vote.

Sikh temple assailants were ISIS sympathizers, Germany says: German authorities said two teenagers suspected of bombing a Sikh temple in the western city of Essen were sympathizers of the Islamic State militant group, also known as ISIS and ISIL. Three people were wounded in the April 16 blast, one of them seriously. The Interior Ministry of North Rhine-Westphalia state told regional lawmakers that one of the two 16-year-old suspects had been in a violence-prevention program aimed at Islamist extremists.

 From news services
Bolivian President Evo Morales and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa visit victims of this months 7.8-magnitdue earthquake, in Manta, Ecuador. At least 654 people were killed and over 16,000 were injured. (Abi / Handout/EPA)

John Vidale, a professor at the University of Washington, directs the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network and is the Washington state seismologist.

A tragic month along the tectonic subduction zones that surround the Pacific Rim has also been a spellbinding one for seismologists. A magnitude 6.2 quake on April 14 was followed a day later by a magnitude 7.0, together killing at least 49 in the Kyushu region of Japan. Less than 24 hours later, a magnitude 7.8 in Ecuador killed at least 650. Major deep earthquakes in Burma and Afghanistan in April were also deadly, and a series of quakes this month struck Vanuatu, too. So many earthquakes of at least magnitude 6.5 in a week is quite uncommon, even in the volatile tectonic zone known as the Ring of Fire, which encircles the Pacific Ocean. But the dangers of this region remain widely misunderstood, and myths  the notion that animals can predict earthquakes, for instance, or that the government knows theyre coming but hides the information  stubbornly persist.

1. Giant faults such as the San Andreas dominate the danger.

World-destroying films such as San Andreas and Earthquake feature magnitude 8s and 9s. NBC even produced a miniseries called 10.5: Apocalypse, about a quake that splits North America into two islands. The Really Big One, the New Yorker story for which Kathryn Schulz won a Pulitzer Prize this year, explained the potential dangers of living near the large Cascadia fault in the Pacific Northwest. And the plate collision zones under South America and Alaskas Aleutian Islands are famous for the monster quakes they spawned in the 1960s: magnitude 9.5 in Chile and magnitude 9.2 in Alaska.

But the bigger threats come from smaller quakes. Some are along the major faults, but even more are from the small faults right underfoot. Only one earthquake larger than magnitude 8.0 is on the list of the 16 deadliest earthquakes; about one-third had magnitudes of less than 7.5. Each year, on average, there are one or two quakes bigger than magnitude 8; 15 bigger than 7; about 150 bigger than 6; and so on.

Christchurch, New Zealand, had to be essentially rebuilt after a direct hit from a mere 6.3 in 2011. Japan was shocked when a magnitude 6.9 decimated Kobe in 1995. And the costliest U.S. earthquake was the magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake that shook Southern California in 1994.

2. Huge tsunamis are the foremost consequence of giant quakes.

Two horrific tsunamis, in 2004 in Indonesia and 2011 in Japan, jointly killed some 300,000 people. No wonder floods consume so much of our imagination. As a quote in Schulzs New Yorker article put it, Everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast when a big quake triggers a mega-tsunami. Summarizing on Fox News, Shepard Smith predicted Seattle, Tacoma, Portland and Olympia, Salem and Eugene, wiped out, altogether about 7 million people. Thats not including tourists.

But in the United States and many other countries, the costliest and most deadly faults are inland, whereas the subduction zone coastline is sparsely populated. The third-deadliest tsunami in the past century killed a few thousand people, but in the past 40 years alone, a dozen earthquakes each killed more than 10,000. The scariest likely scenario is a temblor that hits the heart of Los Angeles, the San Francisco bay area, Seattle, Portland or Vancouver, not the nearby Pacific Rim oceanfront.

3. Earthquakes often trigger volcanic eruptions.

According to the laws of geology, where tectonic plates collide, volcanoes rise in the background. Volcanoes such as Mount St. Helens throw a long and deep shadow in the Pacific Northwest. And Charles Darwin said he observed volcanic eruptions triggered by the magnitude 8.5 Chile megaquake during the voyage of the HMS Beagle in 1835.

But the connection is hardly reliable, as this doesnt happen very often. A 2013 study in the journal Nature Geoscience found that two giant temblors  magnitude 8.8 in Chile in 2010 and 9.0 in Japan the next year  caused no eruptions and that nearby volcanoes even sank, instead of rising in response to the tectonic shifts. Because of the 100 or more miles between most volcanoes and the largest faults, such as Cascadia, the shaking at the volcanoes is relatively weak. Earthquakes result from shifting tectonic plates, not magma flows, and have only a weak effect on volcanoes.

4. The major American Pacific fault lines are 10 months pregnant, locked and loaded or overdue.

In The Really Big One, the Cascadia fault is on the verge of popping. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle, Schulz wrote. It is easy to imagine a valve keeping more and more pressure contained until it finally bursts.

Yet earthquakes tend to unfold differently with each iteration on a given patch of fault. Quake recurrence is fairly sporadic because the strength of fault surfaces is highly irregular, and so the complex ruptures are unique each time. Sometimes they break south to north, sometimes the reverse. Sometimes they break in two or three smaller earthquakes rather than one big one.

The chance of a quake on a fault rises slowly after a previous earthquake, not suddenly near a due date. After half the average recurrence interval, the chance per year rises to roughly the long-term average. The probability rarely exceeds twice the long-term odds; it is these fairly steady odds that we need to anticipate. The current risk of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake for the Puget Sound, for instance, is 1 chance in 300 per year. Quakes are not like a pregnancy  after a certain amount of time, birth is not inevitable or immediate.

5. The entire Ring of Fire settles down or pipes up all at once.

There have been six earthquakes greater than magnitude 8.5 since 2004, after none between 1965 and 2004. Some scientists say weve entered a period of enhanced earthquake activity (a sign of the times, as a recent article in Nature had it). One week in April saw five places near the Pacific Rim with greater than magnitude 6.5 quakes. Signs of the Times, a site dedicated to undercovered global trends, drew connections between 10 Pacific Rim volcanoes active at the same time in 2013. One well-circulated reading of scientific data says current conditions  including a spike in carbon monoxide  indicate that its unsafe to visit the West Coast.

Our relentless imagination, coupled with our compulsion to spot patterns in the noise, makes us poor statisticians of combinations of widely separated earthquakes. A century of observing large quakes tells us that the biggest events trigger, at most, a tiny number of earthquakes beyond 1,000 miles away. A bad day in Ecuador does not mean a dangerous day in Japan, and vice versa.

It may be frustrating that our estimates of earthquake danger change little from day to day and year to year, except for the temporary threat of aftershocks. Personally, I consider it reassuring. There really is almost nothing to foreshadow big quakes, although we continue to prospect for silver bullets. Relax, build a long-term shaking- and tsunami-resilient society, and play it as it lies.

Twitter: @seismoguy

Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.
The District has been talking for years about statehood. A better idea would be to retrocede the land to Maryland. There is precedent for this: The portion of the nations capital ceded by Virginia in 1790 was retroceded in 1846.

Many consider the land area and population of the District to be too small to make a viable state. Retrocession would give the citizens of the District all the political rights that other Americans enjoy. The District could be incorporated by the state in a manner similar to Baltimore, giving citizens home rule, including the election of a city council and mayor.

Some Marylanders object to retrocession in the belief that it would fundamentally change the political landscape of Maryland. But the effect would be much smaller than that of making a state out of what was once a small portion of Prince Georges County, creating an entity with the power to counteract the will of Marylanders. If Maryland passes on its opportunity to regain the land ceded, it will regret it. And to repurpose the land without the express permission of the people of Maryland would be a betrayal of trust.

Maryland should petition to have the land comprising the District returned to Maryland. If the people or the federal government no longer want it for the purposes of its donation, it should be returned to Maryland with costs paid by the federal government.

Hugh M. Mealy, Annapolis
Vice President Biden returned to Iraq for the first time in five years Thursday, determined to help calm the countrys increasingly chaotic politics and ensure that the fight against the Islamic State was not thrown off course by Iraqi infighting.

The vice presidents trip, which was kept secret prior to his arrival, coincided with a tumultuous moment for Iraq and its prime minister, who is battling to hold on to his office amid a paralyzing political crisis, a badly weakened economy and a grinding war against the Islamic State. Biden landed in Baghdad on a military cargo plane and was immediately ferried via helicopter to a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, where they discussed plans to drive the Islamic State from Mosul, Iraqs second-largest city.

Its real, serious, and its committed, Biden said of the ongoing military operation and Mosul plans, and so Im very optimistic.

[Islamic State suffers battlefield losses]

Iraqi forces have made significant progress militarily against the Islamic State in the past year, taking back 40 percent of the territory lost to the group.

Bidens remarks elided a growing worry among top White House officials that the political chaos in Iraq could begin to undermine the battlefield momentum against the Islamic State. The vice presidents trip to Iraq was planned within the past two months, before the political crisis exploded in Baghdad, but the timing of his visit could not be more opportune for the United States.

The political crisis began when Abadi, who has the strong support of the Obama administration, made a bold push recently to replace politically connected members of his cabinet with a new slate of technocrats and reformers. Abadi characterized the move as part of a broader plan to stamp out corruption amid the countrys budget crisis caused by plunging oil prices.

But the proposals alienated powerful blocs within the Iraqi parliament, which has descended into chaotic sessions in recent weeks, with lawmakers throwing water bottles and tissue boxes at each other  and at some points even throwing punches. The antics have made it an uphill battle for Abadi to get parliament to vote on his reshuffle and have led thousands of protesters to descend on the gates of Baghdads heavily fortified Green Zone to demand reform.

Now is not the time for government gridlock or bickering, President Obama said of the protests last week in Saudi Arabia. Asked about Abadis hold on power, Obama described the prime minister as a good partner and said he was concerned.

The concern over Iraq has led to a flurry of recent visits and promises from top administration officials , including the secretaries of state and defense. In separate trips, they offered more American aid, military advisers and firepower.

[Obama outlines plan to expand fight against Islamic State]

Biden is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Iraq since his last trip to the country in 2011, and his presence is a sign of the administrations commitment to Abadi. The vice president also met with Salim al-Jabouri, the Sunni speaker of the parliament and a key U.S. ally, who recently survived an attempt to oust him by lawmakers staging a parliament sit-in. The rebel parliamentarians claimed to have voted him out, though he contended that there had not been enough members in the legislature to hold a legitimate vote.

Biden made a point of standing beside Jabouri for the press to demonstrate his support for the embattled politician. This is an old friend, Biden said, gesturing to Jabouri. Weve been doing this a long time. The last time, you were in my office.

A major goal of Bidens trip was ensuring that the political infighting among Iraqi leaders did not derail Iraqs military operations against the Islamic State.

Senior Obama administration officials have said that they would like to see the Iraqis drive the Islamic State from its stronghold in Mosul before the end of the year. Obama has described such a possibility in hopeful, but hedging, terms.

My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall, he said in a recent interview with CBS News.

The political chaos in Baghdad has made the already complicated politics of planning for such an offensive into treacherous urban terrain even harder. Mosul is a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian place, said the senior administration official. What you dont want is a race to Mosul from a bunch of different forces that end up getting in each others way or clashing with each other.

[Obstacles hamper Iraqi goal to retake Mosul]

The vice president, who was handed the Iraqi portfolio by Obama in 2009, has remained immersed in the countrys political, ethnic and sectarian struggles for much of the past seven years.

This is my 27th or 28th, I dont know how many, times, Biden said before his meeting with Jabouri.

In fact, the vice president has visited the country at least 17 times as a senator and vice president. Biden is also connected to Iraq through his son Beau, who spent a year deployed to the country and who died of brain cancer last year. In a brief meeting with about 200 U.S. Embassy personnel, Biden spoke of his son and his service three times in a 12-minute speech that praised the troops and embassy civilians in the room for their service in the war zone.

At one point, he referred to an unnamed former Iraqi prime minister who was challenging him about the U.S. commitment to Iraq, to which Biden said he responded: Would you send your son to my state to defend me?

And he shut up, the vice president added.

In the past few days, there have been some signs that the political crisis surrounding Abadi is stabilizing. Recently, Iraqs parliament approved Abadis request to replace six of his 22 cabinet ministers, but the moves came only after opposing lawmakers moved to another room, and the rebel lawmakers claim they were locked out.

The replacement of the more high-powered ministers demanded by thousands of protesters who have gathered outside the Green Zone is still to come. Abadi is expected to present his candidates for those positions on Saturday.

In his speech to the embassy staff, Biden paraphrased the Irish writer James Joyce when describing the plight of Iraq and the broader Middle East.

If you think about it, the history of the region is a nightmare from which everyone is trying to awake, Biden said.

Loveday Morris in Baghdad contributed to this report.
In an election defined by anti-establishment energy and anger, the two parties are now diverging as Republicans fully embrace an outsider as their presidential nominee and Democrats line up behind a quintessential insider.

Republicans seem certain to nominate a bomb-throwing insurgent in celebrity real estate mogul Donald Trump or, should he fall short, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, while Democrats are consolidating around a guardian of the status quo, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who all but locked up the nomination with decisive victories in Tuesdays primaries.

The successes of Trump and Clinton underscore important nuances in the sentiments coursing through the two parties. While voters in both share a frustration with the state of the nations economy and politics, Republicans blame their own leaders as much as anybody else and are, therefore, more eager for a radical fix, whereas Democrats still believe their elected leaders can bring change from within.

Its fundamentally different, said David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist and architect of President Obamas presidential campaigns. The GOP is in full-out revolt  not just a revolt against government, but a revolt against their own party. . . . But Democratic voters appear to be choosing candidates who look like people who can work for institutional change within the institution rather than fighting for it from the fringe of the institutions.

This dynamic played out Tuesday beyond the presidential level as well. In a pair of hotly contested Democratic Senate primaries, establishment favorites  Chris Van Hollen in Maryland and Kathleen McGinty in Pennsylvania  defeated more liberal, insurgent challengers.

I think Democrats really want to win, and theyre not willing to sacrifice winning to ideology and grievance, which I think in the Republican Party is the case, said Robert Shrum, a strategist who is a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns.

In a GOP riven by dissent and distrust, Trump unquestionably has tapped into the frustrations more effectively than any other candidate. His challenge now is to unite his fractured party and expand his appeal beyond it to voter blocs that have found his candidacy divisive.

By contrast, Clinton must demonstrate that a politician with deep establishment roots can channel voters simmering anxiety over economic conditions and their dissatisfaction with political elites.

I think she has to tap into the economic anxiety that leads Americans to think all the systems are breaking down, said Bill Burton, a Democratic strategist and former Obama aide. She has to stay authentic to who she is but hear and understand what Americans who feel stuck in the lower-middle class are feeling.

Stan Greenberg, a longtime Democratic pollster, noted that an overwhelming majority of Republican voters have supported outsider candidates, from Trump and Cruz to early interest in retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former technology executive Carly Fiorina.

Republicans, Greenberg said, are angry at their leaderships inability to check or counter Obama.

No one has stopped Obama, he said. No one has stopped the Democrats from governing. So theres anger at the leadership of their party. Democrats generally like their leaders.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton hit back at GOP front-runner Donald Trump's comments about Clinton playing "the woman's card," after the April 26 primaries. (Hillary Clinton)

Democrats, instead, channel their anger at Wall Street, big corporations and other economic-based complaints, Greenberg said, and the party as a whole has shifted to the left on these issues over the past few years.

Clintons challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is not giving up and has vowed to soldier on until primary voting ends in June, although his campaign said Wednesday that it would shed hundreds of staffers. Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs characterized the layoffs, first reported by the New York Times, as a move to right-size with only a few contests remaining on the Democratic calendar.

Sanders plans to focus much of his time and resources in coming weeks on California, which holds its primary on June 7 and awards the largest single trove of delegates.

Regardless of the outcome of the voting, Sanders wants to influence the partys agenda at the Democratic National Convention. A challenge for Clinton will be to incorporate his progressive ideals  especially on trade and Wall Street regulations  into the structures of her campaign and her party in a way that satisfies him and his millions of supporters.

Hes got a big following egging him on, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a Clinton backer. I think the following has to understand its getting more and more assured every day what the outcome will be, and work together, across our party, to have a platform that represents the views of Democrats.

In 2008, after the divisive primary season concluded, Feinstein opened her Washington manse to host a secret unity meeting between Obama and Clinton. She said she would reprise that role for Clinton and Sanders. Id be very happy to offer that, Feinstein said.

Veteran Democratic operatives and officeholders said the Clinton-Sanders divide is typical of past contests  Obama vs. Hillary Clinton in 2008; John Kerry vs. Howard Dean in 2004; Al Gore vs. Bill Bradley in 2000; Bill Clinton vs. Jerry Brown in 1992  and does not represent a unique or fundamental challenge to bringing the party together for a general election.

There has always been a renewing wellspring of enthusiasm, former Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle (D) said.

Doyle, who supported Obama in 2008 and now backs Clinton, drew a comparison between the Democrats last nomination fight and the current one. The difference this time is that Hillary Clinton has been a much better candidate, for one thing, he said. And, with all due respect to Bernie Sanders, hes not Barack Obama.

Top Democrats take pride in how smoothly their partys primary battle is shaping up, relative to the Republicans.

On Wednesday, as Sanders sounded some conciliatory notes and acknowledged the long if not impossible odds of him overtaking Clinton, Cruz dug in for what he hopes will be a long and contentious fight with Trump. A day after his primary losses made it mathematically impossible for him to clinch the nomination on a first convention ballot, Cruz took the unusual step of naming a vice presidential running mate, Fiorina, a fellow anti-establishment outsider.

We are moving to that inevitable moment where the nomination is clear, and I think were doing it in a very positive fashion, quite a contrast to the other side, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said.

One reason Democrats exhibit relatively more cohesion is because they are led by Obama in the White House, whereas Republicans have been out of executive power for eight years.

Thats helped them a lot, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said. Its very frustrating for Republican voters to have control now of both houses, and [Democrats] still get to play goalie down there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Still, the anti-establishment frustrations have influenced both nominating contests  and Clintons challenge will be to show that she understands that mood and demonstrate that she has the ability to do things to ameliorate those feelings.

That anger isnt going to go away, Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis said. It is a reflection of economic anxiety and the complete lack of confidence in the political establishment of both parties to fix it. . . . I think [Washington] completely missed whats been going on.

Kofinis said Clintons team should not be complacent about the challenge that Trump presents. I imagine some Democrats who look at Trump roll their eyes and say, Never, never, never,  he said. I think that would be a mortal strategic mistake. He has tapped something real.

John Wagner in West Lafayette, Ind., contributed to this report.
Even before it started to unravel, the deal between Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to lay off each other in three GOP primary states baffled Jason Atkinson.

The former Republican state senator endorsed Kasich for president in early April and was helping pitch him to moderate voters. Cruz barely seemed to be organizing here. The deal, aimed at giving Kasich a path to victory in the Oregon primary, just felt wrong.

I dont think its good at all, said Atkinson, who left the Senate in 2013 and directed a documentary about an environmental pact between Oregon and Native Americans. I dont think its good for the process. I dont think its good for the Republican brand. I dont think good for the Kasich campaign.

In interviews, none of Kasichs backers here could say they liked the pact, which also included a Kasich retreat from Indiana and a Cruz withdrawal from New Mexico. Scott Bruun, another former Republican legislator, said outright that Donald Trump would probably win the state (as much as I hate to say it) despite the deal. While Cruz barnstormed Indiana this week aiming for an outright win, Kasich started his western push here on Thursday amid nervousness about the stakes and his ability to organize.

That whole Cruz decision was totally removed from those of us who have supported Kasich here in Oregon, said state Rep. John Davis. Whatll focus the attention of local voters and media is the candidate campaigning here. Thats actually novel in itself.

Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and John Kasich sent out near-simultaneous statements announcing a collaborative effort to block rival and front-runner Donald Trump in Indiana, Oregon and New Mexico's primaries. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Kasichs campaign in Oregon effectively began in March, when he won a straw poll of the Dorchester Conference, a coalition of moderate Republicans. Only this week did the candidate get a hands-on state manager, Charlie Pearce, who managed the Oregon GOPs star-crossed 2014 Senate candidate. Truly ironic hipsters vote Republican, Pearce joked on Twitter.

In the time between, Team Kasich failed to provide a candidate essay for the forms that go out with ballots. (All voting in Oregon is conducted by mail.)

Come on, guys! grumbled Atkinson. Its hard to win elections when you miss the little details like paperwork.

Cruzs campaign did provide an essay, despite being invisible on the ground. The Texans local leaders, announced months ago, include a state Eagle Forum director who does not talk to press and a baker who is under a gag order as part of a lawsuit over her refusal to bake a cake for a gay wedding.

That thin presence, in a state where libertarian-minded rural voters seemed gettable for Cruz, encouraged the Kasich campaign. According to sources with knowledge of the deal, Kasichs team first suggested that Cruz stay out of two states in exchange for surrender in Indiana: Oregon and New Mexico, or Oregon and Washington. Cruzs campaign calculated that he was not in a winning position in Oregon anyway, and  more importantly  that the states proportional delegate selection would still inch him closer to the Republican nomination.

Last Tuesdays primaries in the Northeast offered some grist for the theory, as Cruz won three delegates in Rhode Island, a state where he never competed, simply by getting more than 10 percent of the vote. And on Thursday, the Portland-based Hoffman Research Group released a poll of 555 Republican voters that found Trump at 43 percent, Cruz at 26 percent, and Kasich at just 17 percent.

Both Cruz and Kasich are attempting to turn the deal to their advantage. On Wednesday, Oregon voters began seeing Kasichs first TV ad, which introduces the governor with a warning about his rival.

Ted Cruz pulled out of Oregon, and John Kasich is the only one that can stop Trump, says the ads narrator.

Cruz has campaigned in the same way, telling voters in Indiana that Kasich pulled out of the state and telling reporters there on Thursday that the idea of an alliance between the campaigns was a media construction. Kasichs strategist, John Weaver, who joined the candidate in Oregon, responded with a tweet: I cant stand liars.

It has been four decades since either Indiana or Oregon played a role in a Republican primary. In that year, challenger Ronald Reagan narrowly won in Indiana, while President Gerald Ford took Oregon by a four-point margin.

Since then, Indianas Republicans have grown dominant while Oregons Republicans have only occasionally wandered out of the desert. Outside of Portland, where most Republicans live, there are Trump-friendly towns that have lost manufacturing jobs and libertarian farmers whose homemade signs decry the EPA. But its been 34 years since the party won the governors mansion, 14 years since it won a Senate seat and 32 years since a Republican presidential candidate painted the state red. Kasichs implicit argument to Oregon Republicans is that a hard-right candidate will lose the general election  and they should know.

On Thursday, introducing himself to Portland voters in a rehabbed warehouse, Kasich got a question from a businesswoman whose start-up was in the valley of death, with investors skittish about putting more money in. The candidate quickly said that government should not pick which start-ups to fund, then he offered advice.

Im familiar with the valley of death,  said Kasich. That tells me theres a great opportunity for someone to raise capital.

Kasich, suddenly a fount of financial advice, might well have been talking about his campaign.
In the space of just seven minutes here Thursday, Ted Cruz reminded fellow Republicans that he has few friends in the party.

First he tangled with former House speaker John A. Boehner, a longtime foe who so dislikes Cruz that he labeled him Lucifer in the flesh. Then Cruz undercut another Republican, fellow presidential candidate John Kasich, who had entered into an alliance with him to stop GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

There is no alliance, Cruz told reporters on Thursday, acting as if a pact announced by his own campaign days before had never happened.

Minutes later, Kasich strategist John Weaver dispatched a cryptic tweet: I cant stand liars.

For Cruz, it was just another day of brawling with leading figures from his own party  a role that has formed the cornerstone of his short political career. But for many Republicans, it crystallized an overriding problem for Cruzs campaign: Many people simply dont like him.

Ted Cruz is the political version of liver and onions, said veteran GOP strategist Ana Navarro. Some people love it and cant get enough. And some people gag at the mere thought of it.

At a moment when he is in urgent need of a Republican army united behind him, Cruz is going into the next Tuesdays primary here in Indiana with, at best, a platoon. The Republican U.S. senator and House members from Indiana are on the sidelines. However, Cruz got a surprise boost Friday when Gov. Mike Pence endorsed him.

Cruz is trying to shake up the race by picking Carly Fiorina as his running mate, but even as Cruz regularly talks of uniting the party, his prickly relationships with many Republicans have come back to haunt him.

The bad blood extends all the way to corporate boardrooms and fellow Latinos. On Thursday, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the nations largest Hispanic business group, took a pass on endorsing Cruz  the only Latino candidate left in the race  and instead backed Kasich and Democrat Hillary Clinton.

[Delegate tracker: The race to the Republican nomination]

For years, Cruz has angered fellow Republicans with his actions in the Senate. His push to shred the federal health-care law led to the 2013 government shutdown. He declined to endorse his GOP colleagues against insurgent primary challengers in 2014, despite holding a leadership position with the GOP committee responsible for reelecting them. He has refused to apologize for calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor  an extraordinary breach of decorum.

Cruz also openly feuded with Boehner, plotting against him with rogue House Republicans in moves that eventually led to Boehners ouster.

1 of 9 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Moments when Ted Cruz was more surprising than Donald Trump View Photos Although Trump has voiced myriad eyebrow-raising positions, Ted Cruz has at times taken more surprising stances. Caption Although Trump has voiced myriad eyebrow-raising positions, Ted Cruz has at times taken more surprising stances. Cruz and Trump Ted Cruz, left, and Donald Trump. Left: Cassi Alexandra for The Washington Post. Right: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

On Wednesday night, Boehner told a crowd at Stanford University that Cruz is Lucifer in the flesh and that he had never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life, according to the Stanford Daily.

Boehner also said that he would back Trump if he is the GOP nominee in November  but that he would not vote for Cruz.

[Bad blood: John Boehner and his tormentor Ted Cruz]

Cruz fired back on Thursday, telling reporters that Boehner had allowed his inner Trump to come out.

If youre happy with John Boehner as speaker of the House and you want a president like John Boehner, then Donald Trumps your man, Cruz said.

The senator also said that he has never had any substantive conversation with John Boehner in any respect. He served as Boehners lawyer in a 1998 lawsuit against a Democratic congressman. The Cruz campaign said his comments were consistent with his work as a junior associate on the case.

[Long before John Boehner called Ted Cruz Lucifer in the flesh, he called him his lawyer ]

The brawling has a direct bearing on Cruzs inability to stop Trump. Mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination before the Republican National Convention, Cruz now hopes he can keep Trump from getting 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination by winning the Indiana primary. Cruz is also working to elect loyalists to state delegations who can switch sides if Trump fails to win on a first ballot  which would likely thrust the convention into chaos.

Trump has angrily dismissed Cruzs maneuverings as part of a rigged game and routinely derides Cruz as Lyin Ted.

He was a failed senator, he couldnt get anything passed, Trump said in Warwick, R.I., this week. All he is is a guy that will go down and stand and filibuster for a day or two. And all the other senators will look: Whens he getting off the floor, Jim? Guys a pain in the ass, whens he getting off the floor? 

Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, echoed Trumps sentiments. He said in an interview that he was heartbroken to not back a Latino candidate. But, he said, if you look at Teds divisive rhetoric about immigrants, it disqualified him from consideration. His inability to work within his own caucus, let alone with Senate Democrats, made it hard for us to consider him. He also pushed for the deportation of up to 12 million people.

[Clinton, Kasich  not Cruz  endorsed by nations largest Hispanic business group]

Under Cruzs pact with Kasich  which was announced separately by both campaigns on Sunday  Kasich effectively stopped competing in Indiana, giving Cruz a one-on-one shot at Trump. In return, Cruz cleared the way for Kasich to compete against Trump alone in Oregon and New Mexico.

The accord went wobbly almost immediately, after Kasich said he still expected his Indiana supporters to vote for him. But Cruzs remarks on Thursday went further, suggesting there was never much of an agreement at all.

I recognize that the media is all eager to talk about an alliance. There is no alliance, Cruz told reporters. Kasich and I made a determination of where to focus our energy. Where to focus our assets. Where to focus our resources.

He added: John Kasich made the decision in his own political self-interest to withdraw from Indiana and go compete elsewhere.

OKeefe reported from Washington. Jose A. Del Real in Santa Ana, Calif., contributed to this report.
Throughout the Republican Party, from New Hampshire to Florida to California, many leaders, operatives, donors and activists arrived this week at the conclusion they had been hoping to thwart or at least delay: Donald Trump will be their presidential nominee.

An aura of inevitability is now forming around the controversial mogul. Trump smothered his opponents in six straight primaries in the Northeast and vacuumed up more delegates than even the most generous predictions foresaw. He is gaining high-profile endorsements by the day  a legendary Indiana basketball coach Wednesday, two House committee chairmen Thursday. And his rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are making the kind of rushed tactical moves that signal desperation.

The party is at a turning point. Republican stalwarts opposed to Trump remain fearful of the damage the unconventional and unruly billionaire might inflict on the partys down-ballot candidates in November. But many also now see him as the all-but-certain nominee and are exhausted by the prospect of a contested July convention, according to interviews this week with more than a dozen party figures from coast to coast.

People are realizing that hes the likely nominee, said Tim Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor and onetime endorser of Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. The hysteria has died down, and the range of emotion is from resignation to enthusiasm.

In Colorado  where Cruz outfoxed Trump in a series of clamorous meetings earlier this month to win all of the states 34 available delegates  former state party chairman Dick Wadhams said, Fatigue is probably the perfect description of what people are feeling.

He continued: There is an acceptance, a resignation or whatever, that Trump is going to be the nominee. More and more people hope he wins that nomination on the first ballot because they do not want to see a convention that explodes into total chaos. People just want this to be over with  and we need a nominee.

[Trump rolls to crushing victories in five East Coast primaries]

With likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton pivoting to a general election and her well-funded allies readying for a full-out assault, Republicans are eager to unite quickly. Some are fearful that waiting until the convention in Cleveland to pick a nominee would put the party at a disadvantage in raising money and engaging the Democrats.

The lions share of Republicans want the process settled, said Mike Dennehy, a veteran New Hampshire-based party strategist. Theres anxiety setting in about the process, and thats what people are tired of. They just want it done, they want the fighting to stop, and they want a general-election campaign to begin in a meaningful way.

So does Trump. Celebrating his sweep in Tuesdays primaries, he declared himself the presumptive nominee. At a rally the next day in Indianapolis, he proclaimed, Were just about ready to put it away, folks.

Cruz is pushing back on the idea that Trump is nearing a lock on the nomination. He took the unusual step Wednesday of choosing a running mate, businesswoman Carly Fiorina. The new ticket, as well as independent groups opposed to Trump, see Indianas primary on Tuesday as their best  and perhaps last  chance to derail the front-runner and deny him the nomination.

Opposition to Trump still runs strong in parts of the GOP establishment. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a vocal Trump critic and former presidential candidate, praised Cruzs pick of Fiorina in a CNN interview that aired Thursday  in part because he said she takes on Trump really well.

Speaking to reporters Thursday in Fort Wayne, Ind., Cruz predicted that Trump will not win the majority of delegates  1,237  and blamed the mainstream media for bestowing what the senator considers a false sense of inevitability on Trumps campaign.

Donald, sadly aided and abetted by media network executives who are all liberal Democrats, who are all rooting for Hillary, are quick to say that the race is over, Cruz said.

[Indiana looms large for Cruz, while options to stop Trump dwindle]

The race is not over, but both Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are already mathematically eliminated from clinching the nomination on a first ballot and would need a convention floor fight to win. Trump has won 992 of the required 1,237 delegates so far, according to the Associated Press. Cruz has 562, and Kasich has 153. If he falls short, Trump could persuade unbound delegates to lift him over the threshold on the first ballot at the convention.

Trump has become a fact rather than a problem, said Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who has offered informal advice to Trump but has not endorsed him. Show me mathematically how youre going to stop him. This all assumes, by the way, that the guy who wrote The Art of the Deal cant figure out a way to make a deal with the undecided delegates.

Republican consultants across the country are singing the same tune. Reed Galen in Southern California said: Is it a done deal? Its certainly looking that way. In Georgia, Tom Perdue said, If you go to barbershops in Atlanta, youll hear people say they never thought hed end up being the nominee, but for the most part people think he will be the nominee.

On Thursday, Trumps top campaign adviser, Paul Manafort, was on Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers and press his case that Trump is becoming the de facto GOP standard-bearer.

Two prominent GOP establishment congressmen  Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, who chairs the House Transportation Committee, and Jeff Miller of Florida, who chairs the House Veterans Affairs Committee  endorsed Trump on Thursday.

Its time for our party to unite behind Donald Trump and focus our time and energy on defeating Hillary Clinton, Shuster said in a statement.

[At RNC meeting, some elites arent quite convinced by Trump charm offensive]

That echoes what Florida Gov. Rick Scott said Wednesday in a Facebook posting calling for an end to the Never Trump movement among conservatives: Donald Trump is going to be our nominee, and he is going to be on the ballot as the Republican candidate for President. The Republican leaders in Washington did not choose him, but the Republican voters across America did choose him. The voters have spoken.

Brian Ballard, a Florida-based lobbyist whose clients have included Trumps real estate company and who also was a top fundraiser for the Bush and Rubio campaigns, said many donors in his state are ready to give to Trump and the Republican National Committee for the general election.

I think he has earned the nomination, as far as Im concerned, he said of Trump. The folks that I talk to are moving towards him rapidly, though theres going to be holdouts till the very end who are bitter about what happened.

At last weeks RNC meeting in Hollywood, Fla., many party officials seemed resigned, if not thrilled, with the idea of Trump as the GOP candidate.

More and more Republicans are believing that Trump is the inevitable nominee, said Ron Kaufman, an RNC member from Massachusetts who is close to 2012 nominee Mitt Romney and former president George H.W. Bush. Theyre accepting the fact that hes the nominee and looking forward to moving on.

Sean Sullivan in Fort Wayne, Ind., contributed to this report.
Rubio surveys newspapers featuring his photo aboard his campaign bus following a rally in the Villages, Fla., on March 13. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

As Sen. Ted Cruz was addressing the Indiana Republican Partys spring dinner last week, his father was on a secret mission to Puerto Rico.

Rafael Cruz, a pastor who is one of his sons most popular surrogates, was meeting privately at a home in Dorado with some of the islands 23 delegates to the Republican National Convention  all of whom are still bound to a presidential candidate who got out of the race more than a month ago.

Thats Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). His White House bid may be over, but his potential to keep the GOP nomination from going to Donald Trump lives on.

Rubio  berated on the campaign trail by Trump as Little Marco  still has scores of convention delegates who are required to vote for him on the first ballot, and who could go anywhere on the second and beyond.

The senator suspended his bid more than a month ago, on the night he lost his home state of Florida to Trump.

View Graphic Tracking the race to the Republican nomination

But  in part at the request of Cruzs campaign  he has done what he can to hang on to the 171 delegates he won in 21 states and territories. That is more than Ohio Gov. John Kasich has, even now.

[Delegate tracker: The race to the Republican nomination]

Rubio sent letters to state parties noting that his decision to suspend his campaign should not be interpreted as a release of his delegates. Whether they remain bound to him, however, varies according to the rules of individual states, how they are interpreted by party officials, and the inclinations of GOP leaders in those states.

The best estimates now suggest that Rubio can count on at least 50 delegate votes on the first ballot and may have to relinquish 30 to 40. The remainder  as many as 81  are in limbo.

Rubios delegates could be crucial should Trump fall short of the 1,237 delegates he needs to take the nomination on the first ballot.

They also give him leverage, although those close to him say he is not sure what he would do with it.

Its about keeping doors open  to step through and do what, who knows? said one adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the topic is sensitive.

1 of 53 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Presidential hopeful Ted Cruz on the campaign trail View Photos The Texas Republican, the first major presidential candidate to formally declare a bid, is one ot the last three candidates, along with Donald Trump and John Kasich, left in the race. Caption Looking back at the Texas senators presidential bid. May 3, 2016 Sen. Ted Cruz speaks with his wife, Heidi, by his side during a primary night campaign event in Indianapolis. Cruz ended his presidential campaign, eliminating the biggest impediment to Donald Trumps march to the Republican nomination. Darron Cummings/AP Wait 1 second to continue.

[Trump won at least 39 unbound Pa. delegates, according to WaPo tally]

Rubio declined a request for an interview.

He has insisted that he has no interest in being someone elses pick for vice president or in putting his name back in the presidential mix, should the convention reach a deadlock.

[Trump to personally court delegates at Calif. convention, but Va. visit canceled]

Asked by Univision in a weekend interview about his plans for his delegates, Rubio said in Spanish: What I want to see at the convention is for the party to name someone as a candidate who is conservative and who can win. That, and if my delegates can have a role, can play a role in reaching that goal, were probably open to that, but we havent reached that point yet.

I really dont have secret or comprehensive plans about what Im going to do at the convention, the senator added. Were just keeping those options open in order to be able to contribute in a positive way to the party naming a candidate who is conservative and can win.

Meanwhile, his delegates have their own ideas about how they might use their clout.

Puerto Ricos, for instance, plan to vote on the first ballot for Rubio, as their rules require, but say their support in later ones would hinge on one issue: statehood for their island.

Whoever wants our vote needs to pay attention to our particular issues, as well as our struggle for equality as U.S. citizens. If thats not taken into consideration, we could care less what the polls say, said Elias Sanchez, a San Juan lawyer and delegate who co-chaired Rubios Puerto Rico campaign.

Rubio endorsed statehood, but of the remaining field, only Kasich has done the same. Cruz and Trump have said they support the right of self-determination, which the delegates say is not enough.

Thats why last weeks meeting with Rafael Cruz was appreciated, delegates said, but didnt seal the deal for the senator from Texas. Ultimately, they plan to vote as a bloc for their second choice, whomever that turns out to be.

In Arkansas, other considerations are in play, as state Republicans prepare to gather next month to pick their 40 delegates  including nine who will vote for Rubio on the first ballot.

Bart Hester, an Arkansas state senator, said that he and others who backed the senator from Florida would like to see his delegate slots filled by seasoned state leaders  ideally the governor, lieutenant governor and GOP lawmakers.

If we go to a brokered convention, emotions are going to be high. Theres going to be a lot of alternatives, Hester said. Its about being a good steward, to make sure we got people there that have a history of making good decisions and being level-headed people. Its best for all Republicans involved.

Rubio does not appear to be exerting much pressure.

[Marco Rubio is good at staying on message  too good, it turns out]

In Minnesota, the only state Rubio won, the senator hasnt been prescriptive with us at all, said Jeff Johnson, a Hennepin County commissioner who chaired Rubios campaign and now backs Cruz.

Virginia GOP Chairman John Whitbeck said, We havent heard anything other than that letter from Rubio asking to retain his delegates.

Even without a request from Rubio, Virginias rules require its delegates to cast 16 of its 49 votes for Rubio on the first ballot. The same holds true in Minnesota, where Rubio won 17 delegates, and in Tennessee, where he won nine. And in Kansas, where he won six.

But after that, Whitbeck said, this is all new territory for all of us.

In D.C., Rubio won 10 delegates, but one of his supporters already has announced her plans for later ballots.

Rina Shah Bharara, who was chosen to vote for Rubio, told Fox News Channel this month that she will vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton if Trump wins the GOP nomination. As if that werent awkward enough, the local party is investigating reports that Bharara isnt even a District resident.

Bharara didnt return requests for comment. But her situation means that party leaders probably wont be able to decide what to do about Rubios delegates until at least June.

By then, Trump is likely to be the presumptive nominee  or in a spot where Rubios delegates could keep the prize just beyond his grasp.
The Obamas host a Passover Seder for family, staff and friends in the Old Family Dining Room of the White House in 2012. (Pete Souza/White House)

The Passover Seder that the Obamas hosted Thursday night at the White House had many of the hallmarks that have defined it for years  the Maxwell House Haggadahs, the glass kiddush cup the first lady received in 2009 from a rabbi in Prague and bottles of Manischewitz wine. But there was also something new at the plate of each guest: a thin, cream-colored, spiral-bound booklet with photographs from previous celebrations on the left and recipes for some of the Passover dishes that the participants have shared on the right.

What began as a hastily arranged holiday observance in the basement of a Sheraton hotel in Harrisburg, Pa., in 2008 has become a White House tradition. But this Seder was the last one of Obamas presidency.

The Obamas, and the people who work for them, have entered a series of lasts. For two-term presidents, this is a period thats expected  often with dread but occasionally with anticipation because of the opportunity for experimentation that comes with it. For presidents who serve just one term, they may have no idea that theyve even entered it.

Some presidents and first ladies have not left easily. Theodore Roosevelts wife, Edith, took more than half a dozen statues of female dancers from the White House to Sagamore Hill in New York, according to White House Historical Association historian William Seale. She also exhumed all the pets they had buried on the complexs grounds because they disliked the Tafts.

Anita McBride, who served as Laura Bushs chief of staff and under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said first couples are keenly aware of the ticking clock once they make it past a first term.

President Obama marks the beginning of Passover with a Seder with friends and staff in the Old Family Dining Room of the White House in 2010 (Pete Souza/White House)

In some ways, the entire four years of the second term is guided by the sense that this is the last opportunity to get it all done and that youve left nothing unfinished, she said.

Cody Keenan, the presidents chief speechwriter, said that while Obamas never bit his tongue, he has urged aides to be more adventurous. He encourages us now with every speech to push the envelope as far as you can  if I think its too far, Ill rein it back a little bit. But he has no interest in half-measures or moderated language.

Still, parts of the job have a more personal, nostalgic feel.

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight last month, Michelle Obama explained that she decided to include Sasha and Malia in the state dinner for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife because it might amount to their last chance.

We generally dont include the girls. We tried to normalize their lives as much as possible, she said. But I realized that they hadnt been to a state dinner. I thought, when I look back on this time, when they are talking to their kids and they are like, Mom, did you ever go to a state dinner? and they say no, I would feel pretty bad about that. So we thought, Were going to invite them to one. And they got to do the big-girl dress-up thing.

Most of the social events the first family hosts are ones that presidents and their wives have thrown for decades  the Easter Egg Roll, the congressional picnic and an extensive round of holiday parties. But the Seder is different.

Three young aides  Eric Lesser, Arun Chaudhary and Herbie Ziskend, whose jobs in 2008 were luggage wrangling, videography and advance work for Obamas campaign  decided to celebrate Passover with a Seder even though they were on the trail and their candidate faced the prospect of losing the Pennsylvania primary. Lesser briefly mentioned the gathering at one point to Obama, who showed up with his friends Valerie Jarrett and Eric Whitaker.

During his trip to Israel in March 2013, President Obama said the story of Passover contains the story of "the universal human experience." The Obamas are set to celebrate their last White House Seder on April 28. (White House)

[A campaign tradition takes on a life of its own in the White House]

Just as the Obamas had to adjust to hosting massive social events at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Lesser, Chaudhary and Ziskend had to master holding a Seder there. There were some mishaps in the early days, including the time that everyone was seated when they realized no one had matches. (We prepare now, and we have a checklist, Ziskend said.) When Neil Cohen, husband of the first ladys then-chief of staff, Susan Sher, tried to bring macaroons from Chicago into the White House, the Secret Service got involved. (With an assist from Reggie Love, the presidents body man at the time, the macaroons made it inside.)

The Obamas and their aides had to scramble in similar ways right after their arrival, recalled former deputy social secretary Ebs Burnough. While planning their first black-tie event, the governors ball in February 2009, Burnough and his boss, Desiree Rogers, realized at the last minute that the china they selected lacked enough tea cups. They didnt know, he recalled, theres a china book somewhere in the White House that tells you, with relative accuracy, what sets of china actually have all the pieces.

For the most part, the group of roughly 20 participants has remained true to a fairly simple Reform Jewish ceremony that they started eight years ago. They still use the 1930s-era coffee makers Haggadah, even though plenty of people have suggested that they use something fancier or more politically correct. They replace them every year (people tend to take them), and Ziskend became so panicked last year that he ordered 30 from Amazon.com and 30 more from eBay, which is why he had 60 stacked on his desk at the D.C.-based investment firm Revolution this week.

Sara Netanyahu, wife of Israels prime minister, gave the Obamas a silver Passover plate in 2013, replacing the one Chaudharys mother-in-law, Jane Moser, had proudly provided for the entire first term. Mercifully, Netanyahus gift went into storage after that one meal.

Jane Mosers Seder plate is back in regular rotation, restoring order to my world, Chaudhary said.

The change that is most visible now takes place before the meal begins, when former and current White House aides bring their children in for photos with the Obamas. Chaudharys wife, Laura Moser, was so far along in her pregnancy during the first White House Seder that Sasha Obama asked her mother if she was going to give birth right then; their son, Leo, is now about to turn 7, while their daughter, Claudia, is 3. Lesser was single during that dinner, in 2009, but is now a state senator in Massachusetts with a 21/2-year-old daughter of his own, Rose.

And while the Obama daughters, Sasha and Malia, have come most years, on occasion theyve missed it, meaning the next-youngest guest must perform the traditional role of hunting for the hidden matzo known as the afikomen.

Sending someone like Herbie Ziskend to look for the afikomen on the State Floor is pretty funny, said Michelle Obamas deputy chief of staff, Melissa Winter, who has attended every Seder since 2009. Because the Obamas daughters did not attend this year, Jarretts daughter Laura  a grown lawyer from Chicago  did the hunt.

No one is exactly sure whether the next president will hold a Seder or whether the Obamas will observe Passover once they leave the White House. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the only Jewish presidential contender this year, said on NBCs Meet the Press last weekend that he was too busy to celebrate it, though Chaudhary, who works as his creative director, said he is confident it would continue if the senator from Vermont managed to win in November.

The topic came up during Thursdays dinner, according to Lesser, and was left open. It was broached not at the outset but well before the final line that Jews utter in homes across the world each spring, Next year in Jerusalem! In 2008, Barack Obama changed the line to Next year in the White House! And at the time he said it, Lesser recalled, there was a sort of feeling that everything was about to change, very dramatically. For all of us, though especially for him.

This years event had that same sensation, marking an end rather than a beginning.

To prepare the Obama family members for the next stage of their lives, the three young men gave them a Seder in a box, similar to the starter kit they used back in 2008. It has a kiddush cup, affikomen cover, haggadahs, copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and even some of the campaign luggage tags Lesser retained from that fateful trip to Pennsylvania, as Chaudhary put it.

The Obamas reacted with amusement, Lesser said. It was a good touchstone for retelling the story, which we love to retell.

Like Passover itself, in a sense.
The small-dollar fundraising juggernaut that has kept Bernie Sanderss insurgent White House bid afloat far longer than anticipated has generated another unexpected impact: a financial windfall for his team of Washington consultants.

By the end of March, the self-described democratic socialist senator from Vermont had spent nearly $166 million on his campaign  more than any other 2016 presidential contender, including rival Hillary Clinton. More than $91 million went to a small group of admakers and media buyers who produced a swarm of commercials and placed them on television, radio and online, according to a Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission reports.

While the vast majority of that money was passed along to television stations and websites to pay for the advertising, millions in fees were kept by the companies, The Post calculated. While it is impossible to determine precisely how much the top consultants have earned, FEC filings indicate the top three media firms have reaped payments of seven figures.

Sanderss money blitz, fueled by a $27 average donation that he repeatedly touts, has improbably made the anti-billionaire populist the biggest spender so far in the election cycle. The campaigns wealth has been a surprising boon for vendors across the country who signed on to his long-shot bid.

The large profits stem in part from the fact that no one in Sanderss campaign imagined he would generate such enormous financial support. So unlike Clinton, he did not cap how much his consultants could earn in commissions from what was expected to be a bare-bones operation, according to campaign officials.





[Jeb Bushs ambitions paid dividends for GOP admaker over the years]

That has meant big payouts for the firm of senior strategist Tad Devine, which has produced the bulk of the campaigns ads; Old Towne Media, a small media placement operation run by two of Devines longtime buyers; and Revolution Messaging, a digital firm led by veterans of President Obamas 2008 campaign.

And the commissions may continue to pile up, even though Sanderss chances of securing the Democratic nomination have been all but extinguished. After he lost four out of the five states that held primaries Tuesday, his campaign began laying off 225 staffers around the country. But Sanders is still actively seeking donations, and he has said repeatedly that he plans to press on through the California primary in early June, an effort that could include more expensive advertising. So long as we have a path toward victory, no matter how narrow it may be, well pursue it, the senator told The Post on Wednesday.

[In his own words: Bernie Sanders on winning, the party platform and political reforms]

In an interview, Devine acknowledged that he has made more money than expected from the campaign, but he noted that he is working for a much lower rate than usual. While he usually gets a double-digit percentage of a campaigns ad spending, the veteran admaker is instead splitting a single-digit-percentage commission with the media buyers at Old Towne Media.

Because of his commitment to Sanders, Devine said he had to turn down doing campaigns this year for two previous foreign clients, the kind of consulting that had taken up most of his time in recent years. (His work for a Bolivian presidential candidate was featured in the 2005 documentary Our Brand is Crisis, which inspired a feature film of the same name last year starring Sandra Bullock.)

Yes, there was more profit from this account than I thought there would be at the beginning, but theres also the fact that I cant do work I could be doing elsewhere, Devine said.





When he signed on in 2014 with Sanders, a longtime client and friend of two decades, Devine said he never envisioned the campaign would end up being a behemoth.

It didnt seem like a realistic possibility that there would be an endeavor of this nature, he said.

The huge sums that Sanders has been able to command show how lucrative it can be to harness a large, energized base of small donors online  and how overwhelming it can be to manage a sudden flood of cash. By the end of March, 2.2 million supporters had contributed more than $184 million to Sanderss campaign  just about $7 million less than Clinton raised in the same time period. More than half his money has come from donors who have contributed $200 or less, according to the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute.

As donations surged this year, the Sanders campaign ratcheted up its spending each month, racing through an astounding $45 million in March alone.

[How much money is behind each campaign?]

Behind the scenes, aides scrambled to handle the influx of cash, boosting the campaigns investments in polling, field organizers and direct mail. But the bulk of the newfound resources went into paid ads, most of them produced by Devine, a longtime Democratic media strategist who served in senior roles on the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John F. Kerry.

The Clinton campaign, which went on the air two months earlier than Sanders, has still spent far less on media buys and consulting: nearly $62 million compared with his more than $91 million. (Clintons total does not include money spent through a joint fundraising committee with the Democratic Party.)

Sanders said in an interview Wednesday that the campaign has relied heavily on television as a counterweight to the establishment support that Clinton enjoys in many states.

Television is one way where we can have an equal opportunity, in some cases more, the senator said. So we use it.

A campaign spokesman declined to comment on whether Sanders feels the high fees earned by his media consultants are appropriate.

The outfit placing the television and radio spots on the air, Old Towne Media, is run by two veteran Democratic media buyers, Barbara Abar Bougie and Shelli Hutton, who have worked with Devine for decades and handled ad placement for Sanderss previous campaigns.

As of the end of March, Old Towne Media had placed nearly $60 million worth of commercials on local television and radio stations, according to ad tracking data obtained by The Post. Such volume translates into significant fees, even with a single-digit commission split between the media buyers and Devines firm, Devine Mulvey Longabaugh. A small fee of just 5 percent, for example, would equal almost $3 million. (Ad buyers alone typically get between 2 percent and 5 percent commission.)

Abar Bougie declined to comment, and Hutton did not return a request for comment.

On top of Devines commission, which is paid out of funds sent to Old Towne Media, Devine Mulvey Longabaugh has received more than $4 million for media production from the Sanders campaign, FEC reports show. A share of that money was used to pay licensing fees for images and music.

Devine noted that his firm has produced a dizzying number of spots: more than 250 television, radio and digital ads altogether.

It has been a much bigger enterprise than I expected, and as a result, I have had to build a much bigger apparatus, he said, adding: Im very proud of the work weve done.

Another large share of the campaigns spending  more than $23 million  has gone to Revolution Messaging, a 60-person digital firm founded by Scott Goodstein, who served as Obamas external online director in 2008.

The company, whose work has helped raise more than $200 million for the campaign, provides an array of services, including digital consulting, online ads and website development. In return, Revolution gets a monthly $30,000 retainer, along with a 10 percent commission on digital media buys, according to a person close to the campaign who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe contractual details. That translates to at least $2 million in fees so far, according to an analysis of FEC filings. The firm declined to comment.

[Sanders fundraising email includes photo of the Clintons at Donald Trumps wedding]

The fees paid to Sanderss media consultants far outstrip the salary earned by his campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, the senators former chief of staff, who had been in political retirement and was running a comic book shop in Virginia before joining the campaign. He has been paid about $103,000 through March, FEC filings show.

Many of the smaller vendors who have benefited from Sanderss success are outside the usual Beltway consulting class. The campaign has paid $2.6 million for polling to Tulchin Research, a firm run by San Francisco-based pollster Ben Tulchin, who worked on the 2004 presidential campaign of former Vermont governor Howard Dean.

An additional $7.5 million went to Tigereye Design, a company in western Ohio that provides unions and Democratic campaigns with merchandise. The Sanders account is so large that it is now the companys main focus, said owner Monica Baltes.

I have been a supporter personally of Bernie Sanders for many, many years, so the people here, their hearts are in it, she said. Its not just a money thing for us. Its a passion.

Thats the sentiment at First Step Print Shop, an eight-person outfit in Underhill, Vt. The company, owned by husband and wife Bob and Mary Martelle, has been doing work for Sanderss campaigns for a decade. He kept them on the payroll for his presidential run, paying First Step nearly $400,000 through March for thank-you notes and business cards.

Were just a small piece of the pie, said Bob Martelle. There are so many different printers involved now. But its an honor. Its quite the thing for our shop.

It remains to be seen where Sanderss money will flow in the coming weeks as he pares back his once-sprawling campaign and instead makes a targeted hunt for more delegates.

Devine rejected the idea that spending more resources is a lost cause, saying he believes Sanders can still narrow the gap with Clinton significantly. And he did not rule out putting more ads on the air, even in an expensive media state such as California.

A lot will depend on resources we have available and where we are in the race, he said. We are ready to go. We have some advertisements that will be very powerful.

John Wagner in West Lafayette, Ind., contributed to this report.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the firm Devine Mulvey Longabaugh.
Donald Trump said in a foreign policy speech delivered Wednesday that America first would be the major and overriding theme of his presidential administration, and he dismissed globalism as a false song that has helped bring America to its knees in the world.

Trump charged President Obama with direct responsibility for chaos in the Middle East, Chinas rise and Russias hostility, along with a string of international humiliations that undercut respect for U.S. power. Offering few specifics, he said that as president he would reward friends, punish enemies  including very, very quickly destroying the Islamic State  and reexamine whether international institutions and alliances served U.S. interests.

My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people and American security above all else, Trump told about 100 invited guests and an equal number of journalists who attended the event hosted by the National Interest magazine at a Washington hotel.

The morning after he swept five Republican primaries in his steamrolling quest for the GOP nomination, Trump was somewhat subdued, reading his 40-minute address from a teleprompter without his usual bombast and with relatively few off-script interjections. A senior campaign official said that Trump had largely rewritten a draft prepared by staffers from ideas he has expressed during the campaign.

While he struck familiar themes of protectionism, nationalism and promises to correct a reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy, many of Trumps more incendiary views were absent. There was no mention of Mexico, let alone the construction of a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants. Although he spoke vaguely of a pause for reassessment of immigration policy overall, he did not repeat his pledge to stop all Muslims from entering the country or his acquiescence to the spread of nuclear weapons.

[Trump questions need for NATO, outlines noninterventionist foreign policy]

Most of the interruptions for applause, a frequent occurrence at Trumps campaign speeches  came from a single row of seats filled with his own entourage and representatives of groups working to support him.

The senior campaign official  who requested anonymity to keep the spotlight centered on Trump, said those positions were politics, not policy, and that the goal of the speech was to give his vision, in his words.

Trumps address, the first of what his campaign has said will be a number of formal policy speeches, came as the real-estate mogul seeks to pivot to a general-election battle against former Obama secretary of state Hillary Clinton. He has faced persistent questions throughout the campaign about his grasp of foreign policy issues, and his interest in policy generally.

He notably drew scrutiny during a nationally televised debate in December, when he appeared caught off guard by a question about the nuclear triad, a term that refers to the countrys land, sea and air nuclear weapons delivery capabilities.

Trumps advisers have now set their sights on reforming the billionaires image with establishment Republicans and moderate voters who remain skeptical that he is prepared for the presidency.

It was pretty well done, said one former national-security official from previous Republican administrations who, while speaking on condition of anonymity as a Trump consultant, said the speech was in the tradition of Reagan, Dole and Cheney.

In Pennsylvania  Republicans werent just voting for Presidential candidates on Tuesday, they were voting to see who would be delegates heading to Cleveland. Follow Gabriel Keller through a days highs and lows. (Dalton Bennett/The Washington Post)

Trump had initially proposed delivering the speech from a balcony at his 800-acre Trump National Golf Club along the Potomac in Sterling, Va.

GOP critics of the speech described it as contradictory and lacking specifics. Not sure who is advising Trump on foreign policy, but I can understand why hes not revealing their names, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who dropped out of contention for the Republican nomination in December, said via Twitter.

[Anxious about Trump? Try being a foreign ambassador]

Another dropout from the GOP race, former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, who attended the address, said that he absolutely agreed with a lot of what Trump said, and have said it myself.

But I noticed a lot of things that seemed to contradict each other, Gilmore said. He talks about pulling back and confronting our allies with their failure to back U.S. policies and pay for their own defense, as well as supporting them. Im not sure how these pieces all fit together.

In one of the more puzzling statements, not included in prepared remarks posted on his campaign website before he spoke, Trump ruminated near the end of his speech about too much destruction out there, too many destructive weapons. The power of weaponry, he said, is the single biggest problem that we have today in the world.

Earlier, he said that under Obama, our nuclear weapons arsenal, our ultimate deterrent. had been allowed to atrophy and is desperately in need of modernization. He criticized shrinkage in the number of U.S. active-duty military forces, and the age and decreasing size of both the Navy and the Air Force.

Our military is depleted, and were asking our generals and military leaders to worry about global warming, Trump said. We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. . . . We will develop, build and purchase the best equipment known to mankind.

He offered no specifics on how he would pay for those expansions, beyond repeating his campaign promises to improve the economy by revitalizing American manufacturing and cutting off those trading partners, chiefly China, that refuse to rectify the U.S. trade deficit.

Trump did not mention Russian President Vladimir Putin, of whom he has spoken with admiration in the past, but said that improved relations with Russia was absolutely possible.

Some say the Russians wont be reasonable, he said. I intend to find out. If we cant make a deal under my administration, a deal thats great  not good  great, for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table. With the United States at loggerheads with Russia over the Ukraine, Syria and a number of other issues, he did not expand on what the proposed deal would be about.

Trump said that were getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world. He warned that leaders who have sought to bring democracy to countries uninterested in it have only plunged into chaos.

Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or want, he said, positive reforms should be spread by strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishment. At the same time, Trump said, we will never again enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs.

After Im elected president, he said, I will also call for a summit with our NATO allies and a separate summit with our Asian allies to discuss a rebalancing of financial commitments and priorities. If they are not prepared to pay U.S. costs for defending them, Trump said, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.

A number of Republican foreign policy experts have said they would not work for a Trump administration. But Trump indicated that was fine with him.

My goal is to establish a foreign policy that will endure for several generations, he said. Thats why I also look and have to look for talented experts and with approaches and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war.

We have to look to new people, he said, because many of the old people frankly dont know what theyre doing.
Hillary Clinton is seen aboard the campaign bus in Cleveland on the third day of a bus tour through Pennsylvania and Ohio.

July 31, 2016 Hillary Clinton is seen aboard the campaign bus in Cleveland on the third day of a bus tour through Pennsylvania and Ohio. Melina Mara/The Washington Post

The former secretary of state, senator and first lady is the Democratic nominee for president.

The former secretary of state visits key states in her quest to become the Democratic nominee for president.

The former secretary of state visits key states in her quest to become the Democratic nominee for president.

Donald Trumps accusation that Hillary Clinton is playing the womans card and would be a failed candidate if she were a man touched off a contentious debate about gender politics and sexism that seems likely to define the presidential election as much as any issue.

While celebrating sweeping victories in five Republican primaries Tuesday night, Trump mocked the qualifications of the Democratic front-runner, saying she would be a bad president who lacks strength. The remarks seemed a preview of a general-election strategy to use Clintons potential to be the first female president against her.

Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I dont think shed get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing shes got going is the womans card, Trump said in a news conference at Trump Tower. And the beautiful thing is, women dont like her.

That was a significant expansion of Trumps by-now-familiar claims that Clinton is unqualified  and one that made New Jersey Gov. Chris Christies wife, standing behind Trump before the TV cameras, appear to grimace.

It also crystallized the question of how the nation will reckon with its first presidential election between a man and a woman. What was once subtext  latent sexism in American life and the question of what is and is not off-limits when contemplating a woman as commander in chief  is now a full part of the political conversation.

Whats shaping up is a battle for the ages, said David Brock, a Clinton confidant who heads the pro-Clinton super PAC Correct the Record.

Youve got one candidate who is vying to be the first woman president and is embracing the historic nature of her own candidacy, and on the other hand, youve got Trump, who represents a kind of retrograde social structure of the past that is blatantly sexist, Brock said. Theres no better foil for Hillary.

Clinton allies and the campaign itself have been startled by what some call Trumps unsubtle line of attack, which stands in dramatic contrast with the more subtle presence of race in President Obamas historic election eight years ago.

But most Clinton allies consider the newly escalated gender wars of 2016 a helpful point of comparison that she can use to rally womens support and show how each candidate might behave as president.

They might make flashy headlines, but Trumps comments arent a joke, the campaign wrote Wednesday. Hillary can handle these attacks. Millions of women shouldnt have to.

As if to validate the importance of female voters and Trumps weakness with them, GOP rival Ted Cruz on Wednesday announced that he was choosing Carly Fiorina as his running mate. Both Cruz and Fiorina criticized Trump and his rhetoric.

In television interviews Wednesday, Trump dismissed critics who called the election-night remarks sexist.

1 of 12 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Cutting ties with Trump: Who has dumped him and why View Photos The Republican presidential hopeful has faced an avalanche of criticism over his characterization of illegal immigrants as rapists, drug dealers and other criminals. Caption The GOP presidential hopeful has faced an avalanche of criticism over his characterization of illegal immigrants. Randal Pinkett, Tara Dowdell and Kwame Jackso Former "Apprentice" contestants Randal Pinkett, right, Tara Dowdell, center, and Kwame Jackson speak at a news conference in New York. The contestants claim that a great deal of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's conversation has been divisive and extremely dangerous for America. Pinkett, a business consultant who won the shows fourth season, said he is grateful for the opportunities that have come his way as a result of The Apprentice but added, because our allegiance to our country supersedes our relationship with Donald, we see today as an act of patriotism, not disloyalty. Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images Wait 1 second to continue.

Its not sexist. Its true. Its just a very, very true statement. If she were a man, shed get 5 percent. Shes a bad candidate. Shes a flawed candidate, Trump said Wednesday on ABCs Good Morning America. Shes not going to do very well in the election, and I look forward to showing that.

He also made fun both of Clintons delivery on the stump and of the social niceties  or political taboo  that says youre not supposed to make fun of that.

I havent quite recovered  its early in the morning  from her shouting that message, he said on MSNBCs Morning Joe. And I know a lot of people would say you cant say that about a woman because, of course, a woman doesnt shout, but the way she shouted that message was not, and with that Trump broke off with a dismissive, eww.

I guess Ill have to get used to a lot of that over the next four or five months, he added, while also saying that he expects to do well with female voters.

Some responses on Clintons behalf were outraged and some mocking. And some sought to raise money from what Clinton allies see as an unappealing glimpse into both Trump as a Republican standard-bearer and a slice of the GOP electorate that is receptive to language and viewpoints other politicians have been schooled to avoid.

Women still face too many barriers  a president shouldnt be part of the problem. Comments like Trumps set us back, Clinton said in one of a blizzard of Twitter messages about the remarks Wednesday.

The real estate mogul has won female voters on average by 10 percentage points over his rivals in primary contests this year. On Tuesday, he won by more than 20 points among female voters in Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

But Trumps successes in winning Republican women has not translated to popularity with women or men in the broader electorate, where he continues to be deeply unpopular.

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released this week found 66 percent of likely women voters nationwide have an unfavorable view of Trump, compared with 48 percent who have a negative opinion of Clinton. Among men the two are closer  57 percent see Trump negatively while 61 percent say the same of Clinton.

He continues to paint women with a broad, reductive brush, which may be a great strategy in appealing to his very particular audience of primary voters who have found his offensive tone endearing, said Stephanie Schriock, who heads Emilys List, a group that promotes and funds Democratic women running for office. But in a general election, it is really difficult to shift from the place where he is to being presidential.

Women are far more likely to have intensely negative views of Trump. A Washington Post-ABC News poll this month found 64 percent of women feeling strongly unfavorable toward Trump, compared with 41 percent of men.

Trump has consistently trailed Clinton, as well as Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, in general-election matchups. The USA Today/Suffolk University poll found Clinton leading Trump by 11 percentage points, fueled by a 21-point lead among women. Women have historically leaned more toward Democrats than men have, but Trumps deep unpopularity with women threatens to diminish his Republican support.

Despite the potential for a gender gap in which more women decamp the Republican Party, many Trump supporters see him as the stronger general-election candidate, particularly when facing Clinton.

Bob Sutton, chairman of the Broward County GOP Executive Committee in Florida, voiced confidence that Clinton would be easy to defeat in a debate  with a comment not likely to endear him to some female voters.

I think when Donald Trump debates Hillary Clinton shes going to go down like Monica Lewinsky, he said.

Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, said Clinton is poised to benefit from Trumps unfavorable ratings and any gap between women and men voters. Clinton has been embracing her gender, something that could further endear her to women.

Clinton strategists think women are likely to be the key to a general-election victory for the former secretary of state, including independent and moderate Republican women motivated to vote for the first female president or because they are turned off by Trump or his chief rival, Cruz.

Clinton has built a 2016 campaign focused on issues of keen interest to female voters, including equal pay, health care and paid family leave. Her economic plan promises to lift up participation in the workforce  especially for women.

After deliberately playing down her gender in her loss in the 2008 race, Clinton now talks freely of her own experiences in the workplace and in politics. She often speaks of breaking that highest, hardest glass ceiling by being elected president, and she jokingly tells audiences that after more than 200 years and 44 male presidents, Its time. She also gushes about being a grandmother and jokes about coloring her hair.

Walsh said women tend to vote not based on gender, but on sets of issues including economic security. Trump, she said, has been playing his own gender card, by trying to paint himself as the stereotypical strong  and male  presidential candidate.

But Ryan D. Enos, an associate professor of government at Harvard University, said it remains a real possibility that Clinton could lose votes because she is a woman.

Its not clear how much of that would be generated by Trump saying all this stuff and how much would be generated because some people dont want to vote for a woman, Enos said.

Enos said that if Trump is the Republican nominee, people could choose to vote for him because of party affiliation despite what he has said about women. And no matter who the Republican nominee is, if Clinton is the Democratic nominee, the election will probably be about gender.

Its unprecedented enough to have a woman running anyway. I think in a certain respect this would be an election about gender politics one way or the other, he said.

Jose DelReal in Indianapolis and Emily Guskin in Washington contributed to this report.


Steve Goetz and Tiffany Williams, with Betty, left, and Jimbo, relax in their Hyattsville condo. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

When Steve Goetz purchased his 800-square-foot condo in Columbia Heights about three years ago, the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home had more than enough space for him. But then he got engaged. Then he and his now-wife, Tiffany Williams, got a dog. Then they wanted another dog, which was against the condo rules.

When we talked about starting a family someday we knew that the condo would be too small, Goetz said. We wanted to stay in the city, but we quickly discovered that to go up in size by 500 square feet would cost us about $200,000 more than the place we own now.

Goetz purchased his condo for $300,000 and in the beginning of 2015 contacted a realty agent who estimated he could sell it for at least $400,000.

We started exploring Rockville and Gaithersburg in search of more space and then found Hyattsville with the help of our Realtor, Balaram Owens with Real Living at Home, Goetz said. It seemed the closest to an urban environment, and we can walk to a grocery store and restaurants.

Goetz and Williams purchased a newly built end unit townhouse with 2,000 square feet, a back yard and a deck.

We feel like we made the right decision because we love the space, especially the outdoor space, he says. On the other hand, were in a pseudo-urban environment and we still miss our favorite Thai restaurant.

The couples Columbia Heights condo sold for $423,000, and their new place, with more than double the square footage, cost $435,000. Goetz estimates that a comparable home in the District would cost $800,000 or more, if they could even find a similar place. Their commute time increased by about 20 minutes via Metro. The couple continues to live without a car even though they have a two-car garage.

[In the Washington suburbs, the march of the mini cities]

Goetz and Williams are not alone in discovering that their dollars go further outside the Districts borders. According to a recent report by Redfin, on a national basis the typical home sold in 2015 was about 4 percent farther from a city center than the typical home sold in 2011. In the D.C. area, the median distance of sold homes from the city center rose from 16 miles in 2011 to 16.9 miles in 2015. While that sounds negligible, its a 6 percent increase in distance from the city.

The affordability gap between D.C. and its suburbs is among the widest in the country, according to Redfins data. The median price per square foot in the city was $511 compared with $187 in the metro area in 2015.



Goetz and Williams purchased a newly built end unit townhouse with 2,000 square feet, a back yard and a deck. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

The couples Columbia Heights condo sold for $423,000, and their new place, with more than double the square footage, cost $435,000. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Redfins findings are supported by the 2016 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends Report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), which found that contrary to the popular image of millennials flooding the cities, more of them are buying in the suburbs than in the past. The survey shows that the share of millennials buying a home in an urban or central city location decreased to 17 percent in 2015 from 21 percent in 2014. In addition, fewer millennial home buyers purchased a multifamily home (10 percent) in 2015 compared with 2014 (15 percent). NARs survey found that the majority of buyers in all generations purchase a single-family home in a suburban area.

Affordability issues

Young buyers, even when they want to live in a city, often find it impossible to find something they can afford there. Some buyers will decide to continue to rent. For others, location trumps home preference and theyll buy something smaller or in worse condition than they anticipated. The rest head to the suburbs.

The most affordable prices in the closer-in suburbs right now are found in Prince Georges County.

According to Rockville-based multiple-listing service MRIS, 50 percent of single-family homes listed for sale in Prince Georges County in February were priced under $300,000, compared with 12 percent in the District, 4.5 percent in Montgomery County and 4.3 percent in Northern Virginia.

[Four D.C. suburbs rank among the best places to live, magazine says]

Ria Caldwell and her fiance, Will Townshend, both recent law school graduates at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, started jobs in D.C. and hoped to buy a home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, where they rented while working in the city last summer. The couple has three dogs that collectively weigh more than 80 pounds, so renting is not an option.

Our budget was $500,000, and, with the dogs, our priority was a home with a yard, Townshend said. We couldnt find anything in our price range in Capitol Hill, and then we looked at Petworth, Carver Langston and Woodridge, too.

Caldwell and Townshend worked with Leslie White, an agent with Redfin, who encouraged them to look just over the District line from Woodridge in Mount Rainier. The couple purchased a two-bedroom, two-bath single-family home for $350,000 three blocks from the District line. The 1920s Colonial-style home has 1,500 square feet and sits on a one-fourth-acre lot. The home has already been renovated, so the couple only needs to add a fence for the yard.

A similar-sized home in Woodridge would have cost $500,000, and our taxes are lower, too, Caldwell said. Were near the Glut Food co-op and the Arts District, plus theres new development and new restaurants coming in.

The couple says their commute is actually shorter since theyll drive together rather than commute by Metro. They tested the drive at rush hour and say its only about 20 minutes.

We dont have any regrets now about leaving the city, although we do miss being able to walk to everything in our old Capitol Hill neighborhood, Townshend said. But we got exactly the home we wanted, and were paying much less than we were paying in rent.



The five-bedroom, three-bathroom, 3,412-square-foot home in Crofton, Md., is listed at $539,550. (HomeTracks)

The four-bedroom, four-bathroom, 3,674-square-foot rowhouse on Capitol Hill in Northeast Washington is listed at $1.795 million. (Photo by Scott Goodson)

Owens says his area of expertise is helping buyers make the move from the city to the inner suburbs. A real estate agent friend who works primarily in Columbia Heights sends clients his way who decide theyre ready to give up looking for something affordable in the city.

The number one driver for buyers leaving the city is that they need more space so they can live their lives, Owens said. If your budget is $500,000 or under, you cant find a house with a yard or with modern accommodations like an open floor plan, a master bedroom with an attached bathroom or an updated kitchen.

Owens said the priority for most of the buyers he works with, besides getting a little more square footage, is living within a 20-minute walk from a Metro station.

Buyers who have been looking in Columbia Heights often start looking in Takoma Park, Silver Spring, Hyattsville, Cheverly and Mount Rainier, Owens said. If they can live in a place with restaurants or bars in walking distance, thats a bonus, too.

Unfortunately, Owens said, competition is stiff in those locations, and homes within an easy commute by Metro receive multiple offers.

Hunting for a home at the right price point and location is like hunting for buried treasure, White said. Its a little easier when people are less transit-dependent or are willing to take a bus to get to Metro or to work, but some people dont have that tolerance.

[From April 2015: Suburban Maryland areas where houses are selling quickly]

White said most buyers search online for information about a particular location, such as how far it is to stores and commuting options.

Sometimes people are resistant to going farther out from the city but then they find that some of the older brick houses in pockets in Silver Spring and Forest Glen are bigger than they look from the outside and have a real yard, White said. I encourage people to open their eyes to different areas and just search for homes based on their price range. They drive by or tour the house and the area and then cross it off or keep it on the list, but at least theyve seen what else is available in neighborhoods that they didnt know about.

Yolanda Muckle, a realty agent with Long & Foster Real Estate in Mitchellville, Md., says she recently worked with a young couple who relocated to this area from Texas. They were renting in Ballston, where the husband works, while the wife works in D.C.

Ideally they wanted to live in the city where they could walk to restaurants and shops, but their maximum budget is $350,000, Muckle said. They looked in Northern Virginia and in Montgomery County but didnt find anything that fit their budget. They eventually bought a new townhouse in Westphalia in Upper Marlboro.

While they can drive to the Branch Avenue or Suitland Metro stations, neither is within walking distance. Westphalia will eventually have a town center with shops, restaurants, entertainment and a fitness center.



The 2,793-square-foot, five-bedroom, three-bathroom home in the 16th Street Heights neighborhood of Northwest Washington is listed at $989,000. (BTW Images)

The 2,809-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bathroom home in Fairfax, Va., is listed at $647,500. (Photo by Jan Johnson)

Affordable spots with city amenities

The phenomenon of people leaving the city in search of a more affordable home is nothing new, of course, but the desire for walkability and urban life, particularly for young people and empty-nesters, has grown in recent years.

Its always been true that the farther out you go, the more you can get for your money, said Jane Fairweather, an agent with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Bethesda. Whats different now is that people can find downtown areas with a sense of community and places where you can walk to restaurants outside of the city. Were getting back to more of a European model where people can walk to everything and be involved in their local community.

Fairweather said empty-nesters selling their older single-family homes in Montgomery County who plan to downsize in a walkable community face sticker shock when they discover that prices in Bethesda are now $900 to $1,500 per square foot.

Some of those buyers go to the next Metro stop on the Red Line to Pike & Rose in North Bethesda, Rockville Town Center or to Crown in Gaithersburg, as long as theyre not downtown snobs,  Fairweather said. Younger people are moving farther out, too, looking for a place where their kids can play outside, but they want to ride their bikes or walk to a Metro station if possible because of their commute.

Hyattsvilles Arts District and downtown Silver Spring also offer a city feel.



The two-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,430-square-foot penthouse loft in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Northwest Washington is listed at $929,000. (Photo by HomeVisit)

The five-bedroom, three-bathroom, 1,208-square-foot bungalow in Mount Rainier, Md., is listed at $350,000. (Photo by HomeVisit)

Role of schools in affordability

Young buyers without kids may be less concerned about the school system in the neighborhoods they are exploring, but most buyers recognize the connection between school reputations and home values. Owens said that many of his buyers assume that school quality will improve by the time they have children.

Homes have a higher premium in Montgomery County because the schools in that county are considered among the best in the country, Owens said. Takoma Park is known for having a historically strong community with good schools, but thats kept home prices higher there. Silver Spring has already transitioned to having better schools than in the past, and home prices have risen there, too. The hope is that schools in areas with new development such as in Hyattsville and Mount Rainier will improve.

White said that most people understand that schools change over time.

Some buyers are entirely focused on a particular school, but most look at schools as one of many factors when choosing a home, along with the monthly payment and the commute, White said.

Goetz and Williams started their home search in Montgomery County in part because of the better reputation of that countys school system compared with Prince Georges County.

We dont have kids yet, but we looked at the ratings and county websites for information on test scores to find elementary schools that seemed to be improving in Prince Georges County, Goetz said. We bought in an area with 300 new homes that will feed into the elementary school and feel that the schools in Prince Georges County are going in the right direction.

Realty agent Carol Temple with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Arlington said she constantly hears buyers say they would rather live in the city but that its too expensive.

Buyers today are extraordinarily price conscious, Temple said. No matter what their price range is, they just dont want to feel stupid at the end of the day and feel as if they paid too much. They know enough to temper their wants for what they can comfortably afford.
A Slovakian architectural firm is marketing Ecocapsule, an 86-square-foot off-the-grid home that comes with a kitchen, shower, bed, sitting area. The unit, which costs $90,000, comes with a a 750-watt wind turbine. (Courtesy of Ecocapsule)

For house hunters a bit on the nonconventional side, heres an edgy idea:

A new off-the-grid home comes with a kitchen, shower, bed and sitting area. But its only 86 square feet  smaller than a tiny house  and can be towed behind a car. If you happen to drive an electric vehicle, itll even charge the car for you.

The Ecocapsule, designed by a Slovakian architectural studio, is an egg-shaped abode for a single person or a snug residence for a small family. Powered by solar and wind energy, its completely mobile: no water or power hookup needed.

A filtration unit collects rainwater and stores purified water. With a 750-watt wind turbine that pops up, it looks as futuristic as it sounds  ideal for adventure-seekers with a nomadic lifestyle, families looking for life beyond the suburbs or millennials and empty-nesters seeking attention-grabbing affordable housing options.

Its currently available for pre-order in limited quantities for a little more than $90,000 (shipping from Slovakia not included). Since revealing the design at last years Pioneers Festival in Vienna, the design team says it has received more than 50,000 inquiries.

The interior. (Courtesy of Ecocapsule)

Its too much email to read, Tomas Zacek, one of the designers at the Bratislava-based Nice Architects, said, joking. A good problem to have, though.

[Tiny house or in-law suite? Off-road RV offers options for the space crunched.]

The United States, the European Union and Australia are the three target markets for Ecocapsule  with the United States being the largest, at about 60 percent, Zacek estimates. While he has interested buyers in Texas, Arizona and New York, the majority are from California.

I think the lifestyle and values really align there, he said in a Skype interview from Slovakia.

Those values  namely a love for the outdoors and sustainable living  are embodied in the Ecocapsule. Onboard batteries are charged by a wind turbine, which pops in and out, and 600-watt solar panels are embedded in the roof. The combination can yield electricity for 24 hours. The current prototype consists of a polycarbonate fiberglass outer layer, a steel frame and wood furnishings  all of which is customizable. The add-ons, Zacek said, could also make it even more ecological. For instance, the fiberglass outer layer could be swapped with a hemp-based material that is biodegradable.

Beyond sustainability, the Ecocapsule delivers a stylish residence with the basic necessities  a folding bed, two windows, a work/dining table, a kitchenette and a toilet with a shower. Strategically placed cabinets even offer storage.

The first 50 Ecocapsules will be made to order, most likely in Slovakia. The architects are keen to send the first batch of capsules to various geographies to test out how the design performs in different climates and landscapes.

Were talking to families in California but also hoteliers in Bali, Indonesia. We may even have bloggers drive it around the U.S. and catalogue the experience, Zacek said.

[Try a 120-square-foot home on for size at the tiny-house hotel in Portland, Ore.]

The Ecocapsule is not limited to one purpose: In the United States, he notes, theyre getting more requests about its serving as a tiny home for a couple or small family. But in Europe, its seen largely as a caravan, suitable for trips.

Its multi-purpose and really up to the customer on how they want to use it, Zacek said. In the U.S., the tiny-house movement is already popular, and this could be a good option for a ready-built small home.

The pods are a mere 86 square feet. Thats smaller than most tiny houses, which are defined as anything less than 500 square feet.

The Nice Architects team first crafted a prototype in 2008 for a competition. The architects proposed to create an off-the-grid temporary residence for artists and travelers, not a permanent home. They didnt win the prize but garnered a fair amount of media for their construction. The team, which then consisted of three designers including Zacek, put the project on the back burner.

The technology wasnt ready then for this kind of house, he said. In 2015, everything changed. We realized it was feasible. It wouldnt be perfect, but this is a very good prototype.

Rick Fedrizzi, chief executive officer of the U.S. Green Business Council, said he is thrilled with the invention.

Its ideas like this that start in whimsy that are most likely to drive the kind of innovation we need that leads to greener classrooms, healthier hospital rooms and sustainable homes and offices, Fedrizzi said.

But before that can happen, the price has to come down, said Travis Price, a Washington-based architect who specializes in eco-friendly structures. He broke down the costs:

At $1,265 per square foot, it belongs in a protective garage more than outside. A great modern eco house is somewhere between $250 and $300 per square foot.

Well, its cute, Price added. And much like buying a solid-gold Apple watch, its truly a boutique green bling item at best.

Zacek said he is aware of the problem. As we make more of them and the volumes increase, we can bring the prices down, he said.

In fact, the designers hope to bring down the price with their next prototype, set to debut in 2017, which will include improvements in energy storage and will be available in larger quantities for sale.
A Syrian boy is comforted as he cries next to the body of a relative who died in a reported airstrike in the northern city of Aleppo.

April 27, 2016 A Syrian boy is comforted as he cries next to the body of a relative who died in a reported airstrike in the northern city of Aleppo. Karam Al-Masri/AFP/Getty Images

A strike on a hospital supported by the aid group Doctors Without Borders has been destroyed in the Syrian city. At least 14 patients and medical workers are reported dead.

An airstrike hit a hospital supported by the aid group Doctors Without Borders in the Syrian city. At least 14 patients and medical staffers are reported dead.

An airstrike hit a hospital supported by the aid group Doctors Without Borders in the Syrian city. At least 14 patients and medical staffers are reported dead.

The scene after an airstrike in Aleppo

The scene after an airstrike in Aleppo

An onslaught of airstrikes in rebel-held areas of the Syrian city of Aleppo has killed scores and destroyed a hospital supported by international aid groups, activists and humanitarian workers said Thursday, prompting the United Nations to warn of a catastrophic deterioration that could intensify an already dire humanitarian crisis.

A two-month-old cease-fire had brought a brief respite to areas of Syria racked by fighting. But in a 24-hour period between Wednesday and Thursday, at least 60 people  including children and doctors  were killed in rebel-controlled neighborhoods of Aleppo, Syrias largest city and once the countrys commercial center.

Airstrikes Wednesday night collapsed a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), killing patients and staff members, including one of the citys last pediatricians, the two aid groups said. The strikes were the latest in a series of increasingly violent attacks that have violated the truce, raising fears of a complete breakdown of efforts to end the years-long conflict.

[The worlds most-needed hospitals are under attack]

I cannot express how high the stakes are for the next hours and days, the chairman of the United Nations humanitarian task force on Syria, Jan Egeland, told reporters in Geneva.





Egeland said Aleppo, which Syrian officials have said will be the target of an upcoming offensive, had suffered a catastrophic deterioration in the previous 24 to 48 hours.

It was not immediately clear who carried out the airstrikes.

But the Syrian air force  backed by Russia  has stepped up raids in Aleppo in recent days, striking civilians and rebel factions in what some Syrians fear is a prelude to a wider government offensive on the city. Russias Foreign Ministry on Thursday denied that the Kremlin had launched any airstrikes in the past few days, despite carrying out air raids in the past.

The chief Syrian opposition negotiator, Mohammed Alloush, blamed the Syrian government for the airstrikes. He told the Associated Press that the latest violence shows the environment is not conducive to any political action.

[U.S.-Russia cooperation frays as Syria truce falls apart]

In a statement, U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said he was outraged by the airstrikes in Aleppo.

Russia has an urgent responsibility to press the regime . . . including in particular to stop attacking civilians, medical facilities, and first responders, and to abide fully by the cessation of hostilities, Kerry said.

Earlier Thursday, the chief U.N. envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, broke down a stark tally covering recent days: An average of one Syrian has been killed every 25 minutes, he said.

He called on the United States and Russia to intervene to save the cease-fire, brokered by world powers in February, after talks between the government and opposition all but broke down in Geneva. The opposition walked out of the talks last week to protest alleged cease-fire violations by government forces.

We must all be ashamed that this is happening on our watch, U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen OBrien said in a statement to the Security Council on Thursday.

You must not squander the opportunity presented by talks in Geneva and by the cessation of hostilities to put an end to the massive human suffering in Syria, he said.

Syrias civil war started after government forces brutally suppressed a pro-democracy uprising five years ago. It has morphed into bloody proxy warfare that has ensnared world powers and given rise to the Islamic State.

Last fall, Russia intervened with troops and airstrikes to bolster its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has led a campaign of repression.

The United States, too, has carried out airstrikes against Islamic State fighters and al-

Qaeda-linked militants in Syria. Iran has provided Assads government with aid and scores of military advisers, while Turkey has aided Sunni rebels, particularly in Syrias north.

Also on Thursday, the Islamic State said it destroyed three Turkish tanks along the Syrian border, in a sign of the growing conflict between the jihadists and Turkeys government.

But it was the hospital raid late Wednesday that was likely to have the most devastating humanitarian impact, U.N. and other aid officials said.

Al-Quds hospital in Aleppos al-Sukkari neighborhood had an emergency room, an intensive-care unit and eight doctors and 28 nurses on staff, Doctors Without Borders said. It was well known locally, the organization said on its Twitter account Thursday.

At least 14 patients and medical staffers  including three doctors  were killed when the hospital was hit by a direct strike, the aid group said. One of the doctors was Mohammed Waseem Maaz, Aleppos last pediatrician, activists said. Another was a dentist.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said 27 people were killed in the hospital strike. The local rescue unit, the White Helmets, said their volunteers were still working to extract bodies from the rubble on Thursday evening.

A separate strike on Thursday killed 20 people, the monitoring group said. Syrian state television said that rebel shelling had killed 14 people in government-held areas of Aleppo.

Nour Mashhadi, a media activist based in Aleppo, said another airstrike had hit a bakery Thursday morning.

Military planes are in the sky all the time, Mashhadi said in a telephone interview from Aleppo.

In a statement, the ICRC called the hospital attack unacceptable and said it pushed the city closer to the brink of humanitarian disaster.

We urge all the parties to spare the civilians, said Marianne Gasser, head of the ICRC mission in Syria. Dont attack hospitals, dont use weapons that cause widespread damage.

Aleppo has been divided between rebel- and government-controlled sections since 2012.

In recent months, rebels have been encircled by troops and fighters loyal to Assad. Russia has also lent support to the embattled leader, sending troops and aircraft to pound rebel fighters.

In October, U.S. Special Forces strafed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, killing at least 42 patients, medical staffers and caretakers.

President Obama apologized for the airstrike, which the U.S. military described as a mistake during missions to drive out Taliban fighters. Doctors Without Borders has pressed for a full international investigation and possible war-crimes charges.

Brian Murphy in Washington and Zakaria Zakaria in Istanbul contributed to this report.

Read more:

The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Husseins.

How the battle against the Islamic State is redrawing the map of the Middle East

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Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Zhang Yong of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress answers questions during the press conference held in Beijing Thursday. (Wu Hong/EPA)

Chinese lawmakers on Thursday passed legislation to bring foreign nongovernmental organizations under the direct supervision of the security apparatus, a move that has raised alarm among civic groups, Western governments and business lobbying groups.

The long-delayed law on regulating foreign NGOs was the subject of much debate within the Communist Party and intense lobbying from abroad, but officials said a third draft was finally passed by the Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress.

[Arrest of Swedish rights worker in China possible hint of pressures to come]

Despite the lobbying effort, the bill retains the key elements that have caused alarm among people working here to fight poverty and discrimination, offer legal aid and improve health education.

Foreign NGOs will be supervised by the Public Security Bureau, rather than the Ministry of Civil Affairs, which traditionally oversees them. Many fear that the organizations will now be treated more as a security risk, not as a partner of the government.

The NGOs will be subject to tight supervision of their activities and budgets, as well as police spot-checks, and they will face closure if they do anything that China s as undermining state security  essentially, whatever is seen as threatening Communist Party rule.

The new law is part of a broader crackdown on civil society and free speech under President Xi Jinping, who took power in 2013, but it also reflects fears that foreign groups are intent on undercutting Chinas one-party state.

Officials insisted, however, that it would not affect the activities of the majority of the nearly 10,000 NGOs operating in the country.

Theres no need to worry, Zhang Yong, a member of the NPCs Legislative Affairs Committee, said at a news conference.

[The global war against non-government groups]

We have always held a welcoming and supportive attitude toward overseas NGOs that are engaged in friendly activities in China, he said. But an extremely small number of NGOs attempt to, or have already engaged in, activities that endanger Chinas social stability and state security. Therefore, we need to apply the rule of law to overseas NGOs activities in China.

Similar moves also have taken place in Russia under President Vladimir Putin. Both regimes see the Wests hand in the color revolutions that opposed autocratic regimes in the former Soviet Union and in the Balkans in the early 2000s, in the Arab Spring in 2011, and in pro-democracy protests that swept Hong Kong in 2014.

Beijing is increasingly worried about an infiltration by hostile Western forces, meaning Western values and political concepts like autonomous representation of interests or fostering a rule of law, said Kristin Shi-Kupfer, director of research into politics, society and media at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.

But, she said, the Chinese leadership wants to benefit from the know-how and commitment of foreign nongovernmental organizations in selective areas.

Members of the Legislative Affairs Committee and an official from the Public Security Bureau said at a news conference that the law was meant to facilitate the work of NGOs in China, not drive them out.

[Hong Kong groups have already faced Beijings crackdowns]

We spent a year revising the draft to provide better management and service, the NPCs Guo Linmao said. Any NGO, as long as they are friendly and operate according to law, we will protect their legal interests. Dont be afraid because the Ministry of Public Security is involved.

Officials repeatedly declined to give examples of NGOs that had endangered state security or of their illegal activities.

Under the new law, which takes effect Jan. 1, foreign NGOs will need to find a government agency to sponsor them, a requirement that could prove tough for some.

They will have to submit an annual work plan and budget to the authorities. Police can check their offices, question employees and examine materials, with the power to seal offices if they find evidence of what they deem illegal activities.

Staffers can be detained for up to 15 days if found to have been inciting the obstruction of justice, making up rumors, slandering, spreading harmful information, funding illegal political or religious activities, or endangering state security.

Criminal charges will be brought if evidence is found of anyone trying to split the country, disrupt national unity or subvert state power.

[Western businesses uneasy over tightening Chinese rules]

Some revisions were made to the law to soften its effect, including giving NGOs more freedom in their recruitment, removing a clause that had demanded that they re-register every five years and allowing them more than one representative office in the country. The law exempts collaboration between schools, hospitals, and academic and research institutions.

One European diplomat welcomed those changes but expressed concern that the sweeping powers of the police remained in the law.

We are worried that work for foreign NGOs will be made harder by the law, the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the sensitive subject.

This will especially affect NGOs that deal with more sensitive areas, such as migrant workers, but also with issues that have been recognized by the political leadership as in need of addressing, such as poverty reduction and environmental protection.

Some civil society groups fear Chinas extremely broad definition of state security  it encompasses almost anything the Communist Party does not like  could be used against them.

Shi-Kupfer said foreign NGOs and their Chinese partners offering legal aid, for example, will face increasing difficulties and possible closure.

Sophie Richardson, China director at New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the law was not designed to protect or emancipate independent voices in China but to produce authoritarian activism, or state-approved advocacy or work.

Thats a blow to all the issues supported by domestic groups across China and many of those around the world who support them, she said. And its a major rebuke to all those governments, business groups, universities and cultural exchanges who pushed for the law to be dropped.

The law was approved 147 to 1, with one abstention.

Xu Yangjingjing and Liu Liu contributed to this report.

Read more

[Proposed Chinese security laws rattle U.S. and European businesses]

[Chinese law would bring civic groups under security supervision]

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Police fired tear gas at hundreds who gathered in central Khartoum and outside the Sudanese capitals main university on Thursday, protesting the killing of a student at a campus demonstration a day earlier, witnesses said.

Crowds chanted, Killing of a student, killing of a nation, down with military rule, at the rare rally in the center of the heavily guarded capital city.

Protesters later blocked a road and set fire to tires outside the University of Khartoum. Police fired tear gas canisters and used batons to beat protesters, who hurled rocks back at them.

Students had initially demonstrated on Wednesday against government plans to sell off University of Khartoum buildings. Witnesses said gunmen in plain clothes opened fire on them, killing 20-year-old Mohammed al-Sadek.

Protests against the government erupted at his funeral later on Wednesday.

The government said Thursday that unnamed armed groups were trying to undermine security at Sudans universities, long centers for political activism and debate.

The government will not allow any disruption to the stability of universities, President Omar Hassan al-Bashirs aide, Ibrahim Mahmoud, told the Sudanese Media Center, an agency that is close to Sudanese security services.

Bashir, who took power in a 1989 coup backed by the army and Islamist forces, brooks little dissent in Sudan, which has been suffering from an economic crisis since South Sudan seceded in 2011, costing Khartoum more then 70 percent of its oil revenue.

The former army officer is wanted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court on charges of masterminding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes during the conflict in the western region of Darfur. He denies wrongdoing.

I remain concerned about a number of human rights issues in the country, Aristide Nononsi, the United Nations independent expert on the situation of human rights in Sudan, said in a statement on Thursday.

I continue to hear about cases of arbitrary arrests and detention, as well as allegations of ill-treatment and travel ban on human rights defenders and political activists by security forces.
U.S. Secretary of State Kerry, right, stands onstage with documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, left, for "A Conversation With Documentary Filmmakers," at The Vietnam War Summit held at the LBJ Presidential Library Wednesday. (Nick Ut/AP)

Secretary of State John F. Kerry discussed the driving role of the Vietnam War in his life's work at a conference on the war Wednesday night, talking in unusually personal terms about his experiences as a combatant and a protester.

In a speech at the LBJ Presidential Library, Kerry had to pause and regain control of his emotions while recalling his most famous statement ever while testifying before a Senate committee after he returned from Vietnam and became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Kerry rarely discusses in public his time as an anti-war protester. His pointed remarks suggested that the poised, silver-haired diplomat who negotiates ceasefires and treaties, is just an evolution from the angry, shaggy-maned protester who posed the rhetorical question of how to ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake.

In 1971, when I testified against the war in Vietnam, Kerry said, I spoke of the determination of veterans to undertake one last mission so that in 30 years, when our brothers went down the street without a leg or an arm and people asked why, wed be able to say Vietnam and not mean a bitter memory .

Then Kerry stopped, seeming to choke back tears and taking a chug from a water bottle before he composed himself and completed the thought.

. a bitter memory, he continued, but mean instead the place where America turned and where we helped it in the turning.

Now, 45 years later, Kerry said, the corner has been turned in Vietnam, a country he will visit next month accompanying President Obama on a trip that will highlight mutual economic and strategic interests.

The few hours Kerry spent at the Vietnam War summit felt at times like paging through a Kerry scrapbook, infused with sights and sounds that reached deep into his memory banks.

Touring the LBJ Library, he paused before an exhibit that explained 385,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam in 1966.

I was one of those 385, Kerry said, before moving on to another placard saying fewer than half of Americans supported President Johnsons policies in Vietnam by 1967, a timeline he expressed surprise over.

In the background could be heard strains of a soundtrack of the Johnson era, a video featuring clips of newscasts reporting battles in Vietnam, civil rights marches and protest songs. David Thorne, a senior advisor to Kerry who was with Kerry on the tour, said it brought back a flood of memories.

You feel the tension, the edge of the time, said Thorne, who has been a close friend of Kerrys since they attended Yale and, after graduating, enlisted to go to Vietnam. It was a sense of, my God, the worlds gone mad.

Early in his speech, Kerry said that a 10-part documentary in the works by filmmaker Ken Burns will vindicate critics of the war.

Those who expressed concern about the way the war in Southeast Asia was conducted were, I think this film will show, clearly justified in those concerns, he said. Im not going to dredge up all the old arguments  that is well-trodden ground by myself and by others. I know were gonna be reminded by Ken Burns documentary, there were mistakes in leadership, mistakes in communications in strategy. There were huge mistakes in the basic assumptions about the war. So its not a surprise that public support virtually disappeared at a critical point in time.

Kerry also said the blame some Americans placed on U.S. servicemen and women was tragically misplaced.

I know that well as one of the four founders of the Vietnam Veterans against the War, he said, citing inadequate benefits for veterans, as well as homelessness and trauma.

So when we talk about the lessons of Vietnam  heres number one: Whether a war is popular or unpopular, we must always  always  treat our returning vets with the dignity and respect they have earned by virtue of their service to the nation.

Kerry called for Americans to move forward from the wars lingering pains and divisions.

He recalled working with Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) to investigate whether any Americans were still alive as POWs, at times climbing into deep pits where planes had crashed looking for human remains. At one point, they even dug under the tomb of Ho Chi Minh investigating a report Americans were captives there in a subterranean prison. Their efforts paved the way for normalization of relations with Vietnam, and the search for remains of Americans missing in action is ongoing.

This process of accounting tells you something not only about us as Americans and keeping faith those who fall in battle, he said. It also tells you something about the incredible openness of the Vietnamese people, who helped us search for the remains of our fallen troops even as the vast majority of theirs, a million strong probably, would never be found. They allowed helicopters to land unannounced in hamlets that brought back bitter memories of the war itself.

In an onstage talk with Burns, Kerry said he is reminded of Vietnams lessons when he is involved in negotiations aiming to end wars in far-flung locales.

Kerry told Burns he had deep reservations about an all-volunteer military.

I think that there should be shared responsibility among all Americans, he said. I think thats one of the best ways that you dont have wars.

Though he stopped short of endorsing a draft, he expressed support for some form of national service.

I think every American ought to find a way to serve somehow, he said. It doesnt have to be in the military. There are plenty of things to do. But I rather like still the idea that everybody ought to give back something.

Kerry repeated a theme he has frequently mentioned, rooted in his war experience If you are gonna ask young men and women to go and put their lives on the line, and if not die suffer perhaps grievous injury and live with whatever kind of injury for the rest of their lives, youd better make damn sure you tried everything possible that is legitimate to first exercise diplomacy and make war the last resort.

But Kerry said he is not a pacifist, citing the military campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Were living in a period where we have to call on people to go into harms way, particularly against Daesh, some other people who threaten us and with whom there is nothing to negotiate, he said, using the Arabic acronym for the group.

Kerry said he was one of the lucky ones, who returned from Vietnam whole. I am now in a position of responsibility, to live my beliefs, to live my lessons, he said.

As Kerry left the stage, a loudspeaker played the 60s anti-war anthem by Peter, Paul and Mary, Blowin in the Wind.
Federal officials fear that national security may have been jeopardized when the company building a sensitive phone-number database violated a federal requirement that only U.S. citizens work on the project.

The database is significant because it tracks nearly every phone number in North America, making it a key tool for law enforcement agencies seeking to monitor criminal or espionage targets.

Now Telcordia, a Swedish-owned firm, is being compelled to rewrite the database computer code  a massive undertaking  to assuage concerns from officials at the FBI and Federal Communications Commission that foreign citizens had access to the project. These officials fear that if other countries gain access to the code, they could reap a counterintelligence bonanza, learning the targets of U.S. law enforcement and espionage investigations.

The security rewrite began in March after the agencies learned that a Chinese citizen with a U.S. work permit had helped write the system code, said individuals familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Seven other foreign citizens, including a British engineer, also worked on the project, although it was the Chinese engineer who raised red flags for officials.

In a separate development, a former Telcordia employee in New Jersey alleged in a civil lawsuit made public this week that he was fired in retaliation for blowing the whistle on a foreign worker.

Put together, these incidents raise a broader question about the security of a database that is perhaps the most important cog that most people have never heard of in the communications network.

The system was created in 1997 to solve a consumer problem: allowing people to keep their numbers when they switch phone companies. It is also instrumental every time a person makes a call or sends a text message, allowing that persons carrier to ping the database to learn which other phone service should next receive the call or text. In addition, law enforcement agencies rely on the database to link suspects numbers to carriers so that search warrants can be executed.

Telcordia, headquartered in Piscataway, N.J., and owned by Ericsson, said in a statement that the foreigners who worked on the project were all highly qualified legal U.S. residents with work permits and that the companys work now meets all the security requirements of its contract. The company would not comment on whether the Chinese engineer was let go or reassigned but said that no foreign citizens were working on the system any longer.

There was no indication that there was any issue with any source code but regardless, to mitigate any concerns, the final application will be an entirely new version, designed and coded by U.S. citizens, Telcordia spokeswoman Sharon Oddy said.

Oddy also said that the former employees claims in court were without merit.

From its creation, the system, called the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC), was run by a Northern Virginia-based firm, Neustar. The firm has run NPAC under a contract with a consortium of phone companies that pay for the databases operation. But in 2013 for the first time, the work was put up for competitive bid. Last year, Telcordia was given the go-ahead to begin negotiating a contract, which still needs to receive final approval from the FCC.

One of the requirements: Only U.S. citizens could work on the project. Last fall, the FCC learned of a Chinese citizen being employed by Telcordia for the database and contacted the FBI, officials said. The two agencies conducted a review.

Consistent with that review and in close coordination with the national security agencies, the commission and Telcordia agreed that the company would discard the pre-contract work performed and start entirely anew, FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield said in a statement to The Washington Post.

The current draft contract includes rigorous oversight measures and explicitly requires that only appropriately vetted U.S. citizens work on the project, Wigfield said.

FBI spokesman Christopher Allen confirmed that the FBI is working closely with the FCC . . . to help identify and mitigate national security and law enforcement risks.

In addition to the counterintelligence risks, officials are concerned that if access to the database fell into the wrong hands, a hacker could misdirect calls to erroneous or nonexistent networks, which could be especially disruptive during a national emergency.

Some critics have faulted the FCC and the phone company consortium, which wrote the language requesting bids, for not building in adequate security requirements from the start.

The right time to be addressing the issues is at the [bid] stage, not after youve selected a winner and are trying to retrofit security as an afterthought, said Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security who was paid by Neustar to help with its bid for the contract.

The United States has long been concerned about Chinese espionage.

The Chinese breach of the Office of Personnel Managements databases, which exposed sensitive information concerning more than 22 million current and former federal employees and their families, was seen by intelligence officials as a move by Beijing to build dossiers on employees they might target or recruit for spying.

Neustar, which declined to comment for this story, last year appealed the FCCs selection of Telcordia to a federal court on grounds that the process was unlawful.

Neustars contract was worth $496 million a year, whereas Telcordia said it could do the same work for $143 million annually.

Neustar is expected to continue running the NPAC database until the transition to Telcordia has been completed. As part of that transfer, Telcordia must build its own system, a task that Oddy said the company expects to finish by fall 2017 as called for in the draft contract.

The source code for Neustars NPAC took hundreds of thousands of hours to write, said an industry official familiar with the project. Some 4,800 telecommunications systems from 2,000 carriers feed information to the database. It is a major undertaking, the official said.
North Korea test-fired another intermediate-range ballistic missile early Thursday, South Korean military officials said, but the launch appears to have failed, for a second time in two weeks.

The apparent failure would be embarrassing for Kim Jong Uns regime ahead of next weeks much-anticipated Workers Party Congress  if it chose to report it. Instead, North Koreas propaganda department has been busy whipping up excitement about the congress, the first in 36 years.

Some analysts  and the South Korean president, Park Geun-hye  say there is a reasonable chance that Kim could conduct a fifth nuclear test in the lead-up to the congress, which will open May 6 and could be a platform for Kim to announce policy and personnel changes.

South Korean military officials said Thursday that satellites detected the launch on North Koreas east coast.

The missile, presumed to be a Musudan, was fired around 6:40 a.m. from the vicinity of Wonsan, but it appears to have crashed a few seconds later, the Yonhap News Agency quoted an official as saying.

North Korea attempted its first test of a Musudan  a missile also known as a BM-25 that is technically capable of reaching the U.S. territory of Guam  two weeks ago, on the 104th anniversary of the birthday of the countrys eternal president, Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994. That missile exploded a few seconds after takeoff.

Thursdays launch was also highly likely a failure, officials said.

But analysts warn that even failed tests give North Koreas rocket scientists opportunities to learn about weaknesses in their designs and iron out problems.

South Koreas Foreign Ministry condemned the launch and said Seoul would push for further ways to punish Pyongyang.

Earlier in the day, Park said that there will no longer be a future for North Korea if it goes ahead with another nuclear test.

It will be taking place under the strongest-ever U.N. Security Council sanctions imposed upon the fourth test. This is an explicit full-frontal challenge and provocation against the international society, the president told her national security council.

North Korea has displayed the Musudan at its military parades and is believed to have supplied assembly kits for the missile to Iran, but until this month it had never tested the model.

North Korea is banned by U.N. Security Council resolutions from launching ballistic missiles or carrying out nuclear tests. But this year, ahead of the congress, it has been testing one piece of technology after another.

It conducted a test in January of what it said was a hydrogen bomb  but was likely to have been a simpler atomic one  then in February launched a long-range rocket that appeared to be part of an intercontinental ballistic missile program. Last weekend, North Korea claimed to have launched a ballistic missile from a submarine.

A senior Pentagon official said this month that North Koreas weapons and missile programs pose a growing threat to the United States and its allies in East Asia.

North Korea is seeking to develop longer-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the United States and continues efforts to bring [a road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile] to operational capacity, Brian McKeon told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee.

North Korea has fired numerous short-range missiles and rockets into the Sea of Japan and has boasted of multiple advances in its missile technology.

One purported advance  its use of road-mobile launchers  appears to be true. South Korean officials have reported seeing, on satellite images, Musudan missiles on mobile launchers moving around the east coast.

This is concerning because the mobile launchers can be hidden in tunnels or buildings and rolled out when needed, allowing missiles to be prepared for firing much more quickly than from traditional launch pads and making the preparations much more difficult for satellites to spot.
Anzac Day celebrations on Monday underscored the connection between the glorification of Australian involvement in the imperialist wars of the 20th century and the current preparations for new wars. Politicians and media commentators invoked the Anzac Spirit to promote Australias participation in the US-led wars in Iraq and Syria, and Canberras neo-colonial military occupations of East Timor in 1999 and 2006, amid mounting tensions in the Asia-Pacific region and internationally.

Anzac Day officially marks the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 as part of the catastrophic invasion of Turkey by Allied forces during World War I. Over the past three decades, it has become the central focus of attempts by the political establishment to undermine mass opposition to war and promote Australian nationalism and pro-war sentiment.

This years events were held in the midst of a four-year celebration of the centenary of World War I, funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by both state and federal governments. Last year, to mark the centenary of the Gallipoli landing, the Australian population was subjected to an unprecedented barrage of pro-war events, television programs and commemorations, particularly targeting school students and young people.

In his Anzac Day speech in Canberra, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared that Anzac Day commemorated, those men and women who 100 years ago and ever since and today put their lives on the line to keep us safe, free and defend the interests of Australia and the values of democracy, freedom and the rule of law which we share and for which we stand. He specifically hailed Australian troops in the criminal invasions of Afghanistan, including SAS Special Forceswho have been implicated in war crimes, including assassinations and the mutilation of corpsesas exemplars of these values.

Turnbull went on to emphasise that Australia and its allies, including Turkey, confronted a war fought both abroad and at home and in every dimension in the conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The bogus character of this war on terror has been underscored by the fact that Turkey is a central backer of Islamist militias in Syria who are being backed by the US as part of its regime-change operation against the Bashar Al-Assad governmentRussias main ally in the Middle-East.

Significantly, US Secretary of State John Kerry, sent greetings to the Canberra dawn service. The United States is proud to partner with Australia and New Zealand in continuing the legacy of Anzac, he wrote. As well as highlighting Australian involvement in the new US-led war in the Middle East, Kerry noted: In the Asia Pacific, our three countries are working and training together to ensure regional stability.

Far from ensuring stability, the US is engaged in an escalating military build-up throughout the region as part of its pivot to Asia against China. Leading figures within the Pentagon have been pressing for further freedom of navigation military incursions into Chinese-claimed territory in the South China Seaprovocations that could lead to open conflict between nuclear-armed powers. The Pentagon is also placing mounting pressure on the Turnbull government to conduct freedom of navigation operations of its own.

Media commentaries hailed the presence of young people at the Anzac Day marches, many of whom were dragooned into attending by their schools, which have been key targets of the governments celebration of World War I. Former army officer John Bale called for greater efforts to link the current generation of youth to those that  fought in the same tradition of that Anzac tradition. In an implicit acknowledgement of the widespread anti-war sentiment, he warned of commemoration fatigue, saying if we don't do that very quickly, the opportunity will slide.

As with the centenary campaign as a whole, Mondays official events and commentaries were aimed at mythologising Australias role in World War I to foster a pro-war climate. No mention was made in the eulogies and speeches of the mass opposition to war that found powerful expression one hundred years ago.

After major Allied losses at Gallipoli, the number of new volunteers plunged from 36,500 in July 1915, to around 9,900 in October. It was the scale of anti-war sentiment that prompted Labor Party prime minister, Billy Hughes to move for the introduction of conscription. In response, many workers formed an anti-conscription movement, holding mass meetings and strikes against the war in Sydney, Melbourne, Broken Hill and elsewhere.

In the course of 1916, this movement grew as casualties mounted on the Western Front. Between July and September, some 23,000 Australians died in the Battle of Pozieres, fought between German and Allied troops. In the Battle of the Somme, an estimated one million Allied and German soldiers were killed between July 1916 and November 1916.

In August 1916, more than 100,000 people attended an anti-conscription meeting in Sydney that had been called by a number of organisations, including parties describing themselves as socialist. This number amounted to one-sixth of the citys population. In October, Hughes conscription referendum was defeated. This social upheaval was part of an international upsurge of the working class against the war, which reached its high point in the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the event that played the central role in ending the global conflict.

One hundred years later, the advanced preparations for an even more catastrophic global conflagration poses the necessity for workers and young people to build an international anti-war movement aimed at abolishing the source of war, the capitalist nation-state system. Workers, students and young people who agree with this perspective should register immediately for, and participate in, the International May Day Online Rally, called by the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site.
A diplomatic row between India and China erupted after New Delhi granted a visa to exiled Uyghur leader Dolkun Isa, a separatist from Chinas Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The decision prompted an angry reaction in Beijing. Last Thursday, Chinas foreign ministry said Isa was a terrorist on red notice of Interpol and the Chinese police for his arrest. Bringing him to justice is a due obligation of relevant countries, it said.

On Monday, under pressure from Beijing, India canceled the visa it had granted to Isa, the executive chairman of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC). Isa was to attend an April 30-May 1 conference of Chinese opposition groups in the city of Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile and of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader. Indian officials told the Hindu, however, that the visa did not allow Isa to address public gatherings, and could be reissued if Isa applied for the correct category.

New Delhis decision to back Chinese separatists point to the explosive international tensions emerging amid Washingtons pivot to Asia designed to isolate and prepare for war against China. The reckless US pivot is coming together with other conflicts, such as NATOs proxy war in Syria and the Indo-Pakistani conflict, to fuel bitter international tensions.

After orchestrating wars for regime change by backing Al Qaeda-linked Islamist terrorist forces in Libya and Syria, US imperialism and its allies are considering whether to use similar methods against China, a nuclear-armed power that is the worlds second-largest economy. Washington is well aware of explosive ethnic and regional divisions within China, a country with 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities.

Beijing is concerned over large-scale participation of Uyghur Muslims in NATO-backed Islamist militias fighting to topple Syrian president Bashar al-Assads regime. On April 25, Al Jazeera reported, In Syria, the Uighurs have formed their own units and also joined up with other Central Asian units composed of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz and others. They mostly fight for the Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front.

After the Syrian war ends, these fighters could return to foment wars in their home countries. In September, Christina Lin, a former Pentagon and State Department official, wrote that if Assad fell to the NATO-backed Islamists, fighters from Russias Chechnya, Chinas Xinjiang and Indias Kashmir will then turn their eyes toward the home front to continue jihad, supported by a new and well-sourced Syrian operating base in the heart of the Middle East.

This policy is extraordinarily reckless. Beijing has made clear that it would react violently to overt encouragement by the major powers of separatism in China, threatening to use military force. At the 2005 Chinas National Peoples Congress (NPC), the regime passed an anti-secession law pledging to go to war in response to any declaration of independence by Taiwan, which it fears could be the signal for the broader international promotion of separatist tendencies in China.

Indias decision to grant Isa a visa points to the growing alignment of Indian foreign policy on the reactionary intrigues of US imperialism, particularly the Asia pivot, as it seeks to leverage its relationship with Washington to attain the status of a global power. With New Delhi already considering whether to base US forces aimed at China on its soil, it is now embroiling itself in more intractable ethnic conflicts in the region.

Chinas northwestern autonomous region of Xinjiang is home to the predominantly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority, who speak a Turkic language. Xinjiang has seen significant ethnic unrest that has killed hundreds of people. The Uyghur separatists in the WUC claim that they have faced oppression ever since coming under the Chinese Communist Partys rule after the 1949 revolution.

The Chinese government, which has relied ever more on fomenting Han Chinese nationalism since restoring capitalism in China over the course of the 1980s, accuses the WUC of fomenting unrest and terrorist activity in Xinjiang.

The WUC is a reactionary tool of American and European imperialism. It receives funding directly from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), whose main sponsor is the US government. According to its web site, the NED gave the WUC $215,000 in 2015 alone for unspecified human rights research and advocacy projects.

The WUC was formed in 2004 at a meeting in Munich, Germany, comprising various exiled Uyghur groups including the World Uyghur Youth Congress (WUYC) and East Turkestan National Congress (ETNC). Most WUC leaders live abroad, including its president, Rebiya Kadeer, in the United States, Isa in Germany and others in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Japan, Britain and Sweden.

Kadeer, a businesswoman, became a millionaire in the 1980s through her real estate holdings and ownership stake in a multinational conglomerate. In June 2007, at a conference on democracy and security held in Prague, Kadeer met privately with then-US president George W. Bush, who praised people like her as far more valuable than the weapons of their army or oil under the ground.

As for Isa, he received an award from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington last month.

Washington sees Xinjiangwhich is rich in oil, gas and rare-earth metals, and strategically located in the center of Eurasiaas vital to its strategic interests. Xinjiang borders on Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Mongolia and the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.

The region is an important trade and transportation hub, as Chinese exports cross the territory to reach the Pakistani port of Karachi and then to South Asia. It is a critically important route for Chinas ambitious Silk Road infrastructure project to connect East Asia to Europe, from China to the Mediterranean Sea. Some 53 Chinese state-owned enterprisesfrom energy to construction and tech companieshave invested $300 billion in 685 projects in Xinjiang.

While US and European imperialisms intervention in the region is utterly reactionary, the response of the Chinese business oligarchy is not in the least progressive, either. Beijing is also promoting nationalism and militarism, while stepping up police repression in Xinjiang and extending political backing to terrorist groups as part of its international diplomatic maneuvers.

According to Indian press reports, New Delhis decision to grant a visa to Isa was in part a retaliatory move against Chinas decision to side with Pakistan and help shield the Pakistani militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in Kashmir. This month, India reacted angrily to Chinas decision to put a hold on New Delhis request to add JeM leader Masood Azhar to the United Nations Al Qaeda-Islamic State blacklist.

Welcoming Indias decision not to grant a visa to Isa, China recommended that India and Pakistan discuss directly to resolve the differences on placing Azhar on the UN terror list. On Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said: We encourage all parties related to the listing matter of Masood Azhar to have direct communication and work out a solution through serious consultations. China is willing to continue with its communication with all the relevant parties.

Azhar is suspected of carrying out a string of deadly attacks against Indian targets, including the attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.
Highlighting the strategic importance of the Maldives, a 1,190-island Indian Ocean archipelago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Maldives President Abdulla Yameen have signed an Action Plan for Defence Cooperation.

Speaking April 11, at the conclusion of a two-day official visit to New Delhi, Yameen declared India the most important friend of Maldives and pledged to pursue an India first foreign policy. Modi, meanwhile, boasted about Indias role as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean region.

Military-security collaboration between India and the Maldives is not new. However, enhanced strategic ties between New Delhi and Male take on great importance under conditions where India is aggressively seeking to limit Chinas economic and political influence in the region and integrating itself ever more completely into the US pivot to Asiathat is Washingtons drive to strategically encircle and prepare for war with China.

Yameen and his government have come under sharp criticism from the opposition Maldives Democratic Party (MDP) and the US and European imperialist powers for accepting large-scale Chinese investment and offers of military-security collaboration. India, albeit less publicly, has also communicated its keen displeasure to Male over its pro-China tilt.

Yameens pledges of fealty to India and the new defence cooperation agreement were clearly intended to placate New Delhi.

They came just the day before US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and his Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar, announced that Washington and New Delhi have agreed in principle on a logistic exchange agreement which will enable the US military to make routine use of Indian bases and ports for resupply, repair, and rest.

By persuading the Maldives government to sign the Action Plan, the Modi government provided Carter, the Obama administration and the Pentagon a clear demonstration of Indias strategic heft in the region and potential as a frontline ally in thwarting Chinas rise. For its part, the US has been urging India to press forward with its plans to develop a blue-water navy, including offering to work with it to develop and produce aircraft-carrier technology.

While details of the Action Plan are scant, a description on the Indian Ministry of External Affairs web site says that it envisages an institutional mechanism at the level of Defence Secretaries to further bilateral defence cooperation.

At his joint press conference with Yameen, Modi described the main elements of the Action Plan as development of Maldives port facilities, continuous training and capacity-building of Maldives police and security forces, enhanced exchange of information between the countries security agencies, and Indian assistance in supplying Maldives with military equipment and maritime surveillance capabilities.

India has long viewed the Maldives as part of its regional sphere of influence. Its determination to act as the Maldives principal security-provider has only been spiked by its ambitions to become a major power in the Indian Ocean.

Lying to Indias south-west, the Maldives straddle some of the worlds most important shipping lanesincluding those that provide China, Japan, South Korea, and India with Mideast oil. Eight hundred miles directly south of Male lies Diego Garcia, the USs principal Indian Ocean base.

Like the western powers, India has become nervous about the growing Chinese influence in the Maldives. This has increased since MDP leader Mohammed Nasheed resigned the presidency in 2012 amid protests led by loyalists of the longtime former president Mamoon Abdul Gayoom, the current presidents brother-in-law.

While the US and European powers have been exploiting the February 2015 arrest and imprisonment of Nasheed, censuring the current Maldives government and threatening sanctions, India has used a carrot-and-stick approach to compel Male to adhere to its strategic agenda. In this, it has sought to leverage its longstanding ties to the current ruling clique. For three decades, India worked closely with Gayoom including intervening militarily in 1988 to prevent him from being overthrown.

Last year, Modi cancelled a scheduled visit to Maldives under the pretext of opposing Nasheeds jailing. From February 15 to 18 this year, India dispatched its largest and most potent warship, aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, accompanied by destroyer INS Mysore and Tanker INS Deepak, to the Maldives.

During his joint press conference with Indian Prime Minister Modi, Yameen made statement after statement aimed at reassuring New Delhi that the current government acknowledges its regional primacy and welcomes even greater Indian involvement in Maldive affairs.

The security of the Maldives, declared Yameen, is intimately linked with the security of India. He requested Modis assistance in strengthening government and the democratic process in the Maldives" and invited the Indian Prime Minster to make an official visit to Male this year.

For his part, Modi emphasized Indias readiness to forcibly assert its interests. India understands its responsibility as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean Region, said Modi. And India is fully ready to protect its military interest in this part of the globe. Modi added that Yameen had agreed that Maldives will be sensitive to our strategic and security interests.

In addition to the Action Plan, Modi and Yameen signed five other agreements, covering taxation, tourism, joint research and surveys, and satellite tracking.

Modi also announced that India is ready to partner (with) Maldives in its ambitious Ihavan (or Ihavandhippolhu Integrated Development Project) project. Ihavanddhipppolhu atoll is Maldives northern-most island. In the hopes of taking advantage of its proximity to what a Maldive government website describes as the channels through which the main East-West shipping route, connecting South-East Asia and China to the Mid-East and Europe run, the atoll is being developed as a major Indian Ocean transport hub, with an airport, port, docks and warehousing facilities. To entice investors, the mega-project is being developed under Special Economic Zone (SEZ) provisions that give them tax breaks and exemptions from financial, environmental and labor laws.

Modis offer to partner in the Ihaven project is a clear challenge to China, which has been developing close ties with Maldives, including negotiating its formal inclusion in Beijings Maritime Silk Road.

In September 2014 Chinese President Xi visited the Maldives and a year later the two countries agreed to launch free trade negotiations. The Chinese government, banks and engineering firms are also financing and building a series of major infrastructure and development projects, including a US$ 200 million bridge connecting Male and Hulhumale, the modernization of the Ibrahim Nasir International Airport, and a road between the interlinked islands of Gun and Funadhoo in Laamu atoll.

Beijing is also developing closer military ties with Male. Maldives Minister of Defense and National Security, Mohamed Nizam, visited Beijing in November 2014 and met with his Chinese counterpart. Recently, China started providing training to Maldive maritime security personnel.

The Maldives ruling elite is clearly anxious to profit from the bounty of Chinese investments, but it is also desperate not to run afoul of New Delhi and Washington. Hence Yameens bowing and scraping during his visit to New Delhi earlier this month.

Yameen may be hoping he can still balance between Beijing, on the one hand, and New Delhi and Washington, on the other. But the ever-widening geo-political fissures are rendering such a policy increasingly untenable.

The US Pivot to Asia has pulled all of South Asia and the Indian Ocean into the maelstrom of great power conflict and war preparations, underscoring the urgency of building a socialist anti-war movement uniting the workers and toilers across South Asia in opposition to imperialism and all the rival national bourgeois cliques.
In what amounts to an indictment of the Australian political establishment, the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that the imprisonment of refugees in an Australian-controlled detention facility on PNGs remote Manus Island was unconstitutional.

The unanimous decision by five judges of PNGs highest court demonstrates that the detention at Manus not only violates international law, which recognises the right to seek asylum, but also flagrantly breaches the countrys constitution, which bans the unlawful deprivation of personal liberty.

Immediately, the verdict affects nearly 1,000 male detainees, including 482 UN-recognised refugees. Many have been imprisoned indefinitely since 2012 in the camp, which is located inside a World War II-era PNG naval base. More broadly, the ruling effectively exposes the illegal character of the bipartisan Australian policy of incarcerating asylum seekers on islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceanson Manus, Nauru and the Australian outpost of Christmas Island.

The court noted the poor conditions in which the detainees are held, behind razor wire and guarded by security officers, after being forcibly transported there by Australian Federal Police officers. The judges cited a 2013 UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report on Manus that detailed the lack of basic conditions and standards required by the international Refugees Convention.

At least two refugees have been killed or died due to lack of adequate medical facilities at Manus. Many more have committed acts of self-harm, either in protest at their imprisonment or due to the psychological trauma of indefinite detention. The inhumanity of the detention was underscored on Tuesday, when a 23-year-old Iranian man, known as Omid, set himself on fire inside the Nauru facility. He remains in a critical condition.

This so-called Pacific Solutionnow being emulated by the European Unions drive to force back to Turkey thousands of refugees fleeing the US-led wars in the Middle Easthas been pursued by successive Liberal-National Coalition and Labor governments in Australia since 2001. The Manus camp was first opened in that year by the Howard Coalition government. It fell into disuse in 2004, but was then reopened by the Gillard Labor government in 2012.

The Supreme Court ordered both the Australian and PNG governments to forthwith take all necessary steps to cease and prevent the continued unconstitutional and illegal detention of the asylum seekers or transferees at the relocation centre on Manus Island.

However, both the Coalition government and the Labor opposition immediately defended the Manus facility and declared there would be no change to their common policy of using offshore processing centres to bar entry to Australia to all asylum seekers arriving by boat.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull today vowed that despite the ruling, none of the detainees there will come to Australia and warned people not to become misty-eyed about the plight of the Manus detainees. We must have secure borders, he declared, and they will remain so, as long as I am the prime minister of this country.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said the government would seek talks with PNG to resolve these matters. Dutton also raised the possibility of removing the Manus detainees to Nauru. Likewise, Labors immigration spokesman Richard Marles said the offshore system must remain. A Labor government would seek discussions with PNG about how this facility can continue.

PNG Prime Minister Peter ONeill called on Australia to immediately make alternative arrangements for the detainees. But there was no move to shut down the illegal facility. Instead, ONeill signaled the readiness of his cash-strapped government, which is currently applying for a World Bank bailout, to seek a new monetary deal with Canberra on the refugees.

Australias current agreement with PNG, formalised by Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd before the 2013 federal election, required spending by Australia of at least $1.1 billion on detention facilities over four years, plus $420 million in funding for PNG road projects.

In their ruling, the PNG judges said the detention regime at Manus, firstly, violates the right of personal liberty guaranteed by section 42 of the PNG Constitution. Secondly, the way in which the asylum seekers are treated breaches other constitutional rights and freedoms, including the right to communicate with a lawyer of their choice. Thirdly, a purported constitutional amendment rushed through the national parliament in 2014a bid to shut down the court caseis invalid with no force and effect, as are administrative measures proclaimed by the government under the countrys Migration Act to try to legalise the detention.

The court also condemned the protracted efforts of the PNG government to delay, sabotage or thwart the legal challenge, which was commenced by PNG opposition leader Belden Namah in August 2013nearly three years ago. These efforts included failing to comply with previous orders and directions by the court. It was obvious, the judgment said, that the government and its lawyers failed for no good reason to discharge their obligation to  avoid unnecessary delays in an expedited prosecution and disposal of this case.

The defiant reaction by the Australian government and Labor opposition to the court ruling signals a united front behind the anti-refugee policy in the lead-up to the double dissolution election of all members of both houses of parliament, likely to be called for July 2.

Labors response to the courts verdict was plainly dishonest. Marles, the shadow immigration minister, claimed that when the Labor government reopened the Manus and Nauru camps in 2012 it did not intend to detain people indefinitely, but find other countries to resettle them. This contradicts the explicit statements by Labors then ministers, led by Prime Minister Julia Gillard, that asylum seekers would be locked away for many years, precisely to deter refugees from trying to reach Australia.

The Greensthe third party of the Australian political establishmentwelcomed the PNG court ruling and called on Prime Minister Turnbull to close the Manus facility and bring the detainees to Australia to have their refugee claims assessed. Aware of the widespread public opposition to the inhuman anti-refugee policy, the Greens are seeking to position themselves to capture votes on that basis.

The Greens, however, bear direct political responsibility for the Labor governments reopening of the offshore camps. While opposing the facilities in words, the Greens kept the minority Labor government in office from 2010 to 2013, helping to supply the parliamentary numbers it needed to cling to power.

More fundamentally, the Greens are committed to maintaining the underlying border protection framework that denies refugees the right to seek protection and the right of all working people to live and work where they choose. That nation-state framework is inevitably enforced by military means.
The Liberal-National government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced on Tuesday that French state-owned shipbuilder DCNS has been awarded the contract to build 12 submarines for the Australian Navy, with the assembly taking place in Australia. The new submarine fleet, one of the largest military procurements in the world, will cost at least $50 billion to build over the next two decades. As much as $100 billion extra will be required to keep the submarines operational until the 2060s.

The announcement places militarism and war preparationsfinanced through austerity against the working classat the very centre of the Australian budget to be brought down on May 3 and the federal election that will be called shortly after. Turnbull and his ministers are attempting to justify cutbacks to social spending with the assertion that the country must live within our means, while squandering vast resources on a build-up of the armed forces and the revival of military manufacturing industries.

The first of the new submarines will not enter service until at least 2031-32. They are intended to replace Australias current fleet of six Collins class, diesel-electric powered submarines. One of the largest conventional submarines in the world, the Collins subs have a range of 12,000 nautical miles. Australias submarines are integrated with US naval operations and deployed to stalk the key sea lanes between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the South China Sea. In the event of war with China, they would be used to assist the US to impose a naval blockade, cutting off Chinese access to oil and other raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

The submarine project has been the subject of competitive bids and evaluation for the past three years. Backed by the French government, DCNS offered to redesign its existing nuclear-powered Barracuda class to meet Australian specifications for a stealthy, diesel-electric powered vessel capable of matching the long range of the Collins. German shipbuilder ThyssenKrupp offered to upscale its smaller diesel-electric submarine, while Japans Mitsubishi Heavy Industries proposed to significantly modify its Soryu conventional submarines. Each bidder had to agree that the submarines combat system and weapons be sourced from the United States so that the Australian vessels would be fully compatible and interoperable with the American Navy.

The three competitors also had to undertake to assemble all 12 submarines at the naval shipyards in Adelaide, the South Australian state capital. The opposition Labor Party and the trade unions waged a reactionary campaign of economic nationalism, demanding that all construction take place in Australia, regardless of any additional costs.

Under former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the Liberal-National Coalition government adapted to Labors campaign. Elected in September 2013, the Coalition is facing potential defeat in the coming election, after just one term. Its standing is particularly low in South Australia, where jobs are being decimated. General Motors Holden will end car production at its plant in northern Adelaide and sack its remaining workforce at the end of 2017. Thousands of jobs are being destroyed in car-related industries. Steel producer Arrium hovers on the brink of bankruptcy, threatening to close its plant at Whyalla, west of Adelaide.

Turnbull, who ousted Abbott in a backroom factional coup last September, announced the submarine contract at the Adelaide shipyards, hoping to shore up electoral support. He said the submarines would be built with Australian jobs, Australian steel, [and] Australian expertise. The claim that submarine construction will reverse the deindustrialisation and social decay of the working class areas of Adelaide is a delusion, however. Work will not even begin until the early 2020s and employ barely 2,800 workers. Moreover, the jobs to be created are completely tied to the catastrophic perspective of preparing for war.

The Japanese government, which backed Mitsubishi, expressed bitter disappointment that its bid was not successful. The submarine contract would have been the first major arms export by a Japanese corporation and had been touted in both Australia and Japan as a means of cementing closer strategic relations between the two countries. It was an open secret that, if Mitsubishis offer was competitive, the Obama administration and the US military establishment wanted the contract to go to Japan, rather than European companies.

Military commentators have concluded that, in the end, the Japanese offer was inferior to the French and even the German proposal. The official evaluation team included not only former top-ranking Australian military figures, but former US admiral Stephen Johnson, who oversaw American submarine procurements. The team that peer-reviewed the recommendation to give the contract to DCNS included two other former US admirals.

Various media and think tank commentators are nevertheless speculating over whether Chinese opposition to awarding the contract to Japan played a role in the governments decision to award it to DCNS.

In its marketing pitch, DCNS itself played up the prospect of tensions with China. In March, DCNS president Herve Guillou declared, while visiting Australia, that handing the contract to Japan could be perceived in China as part of a containment strategy. In a remarkable statement, company deputy chief executive Marie-Pierre de Bailliencourt warned: You start wars through perceptions. She asked journalists what Australia would do if Japan and China went to war while the submarines were still being constructed.

Under conditions in which Australia is a frontline US ally in Washingtons provocative military build-up in Asia against China, the decision to award the submarine contract to DCNS has avoided any immediate worsening of relations with Beijing. It also serves the US and Australian objective of drawing France more closely into the strategic planning for confrontation with China. France still holds significant Pacific territories, including French Polynesia and New Caledoniaan island group just 1,200 kilometres from eastern Australiaand has a small, but capable, military presence in the region. The 2016 Australian Defence White Paper stressed military cooperation with France, both in the South Pacific and to support the security of both their claims over territory in Antarctica.

French President Francois Hollande declared the DCNS contract was a decisive step forward in a strategic partnership with Australia. Defence Minister Jean Yves Le Drian enthused: Were married to Australia for the next 50 years.

The relationship will come with a price tag, in the form of US and Australian expectations that France will give more vocal and even practical support to their stance against China. The French navy is already conducting a growing number of joint exercises with American, Australian and South East Asian militaries in the Asia-Pacific.

In March, following US freedom of navigation provocations inside Chinese-claimed waters in the South China Sea, Rear Admiral Bernard-Antoine Morio de lIsle, the joint commander of French forces in French Polynesia, declared that the French Navy would also perform their missions in international waters, as they should.
Imagine having to carry a birth certificate and bail money just to use a public bathroom. That's become a reality for the transgender community in and around Oxford, Alabama.

This largely white northeastern Alabama city of over 21,000 passed a law Tuesday making it a misdemeanor for individuals to use a public bathroom that is different from the gender on the person's birth certificate.

The price for those who break the law? $500.

Alternatively, violators could receive up to six months in jail, the Associated Press reported.

Oxford's law is one more example in Southern and Midwestern states to enact laws restricting the rights and liberties of transgender people as backlash to growing trans visibility in the nation.

But some supporters of the bathroom laws say that without them predators will gain access to bathrooms to harm women and children. All despite the fact that there have been zero reports of transgender people attacking others in bathrooms.

Very proud of Oxford, Alabama for doing what needed to be done to protect women and children.

Oxford, Alabama - the nearest place with movie theater to my hometown - just did something real dumb.https://twitter.com/IanMenard/status/725275357788667904 ...

Until Oxford, Alabama, repeals this transphobic law I'll be buying my meth and truck nutz from more progressive Alabama cities.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, nearly 20 0 rel ig ious fr ee dom me as ures have been pr opose d in 33 stat es so this year . Tha t num ber in cl udes the measures in North Car olin a and Mississippi that have sparked boyc otts and rebukes fro m cor pora ti ons and entert ainers.

Recent response has included the NBA's announcement that it may not hold its All-Star game in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2017. Target announced on April 19 that it would gi ve transgender employees and shoppers their choice of bathroom and dressing room. Target 's move in spired Oxford' s bathro om ordi nance , City Council President Steven Waits told local news outlets, according to the AP.

Oxford has a Target store at a local shopping center.

"Bathroom bills" targeting transgender people and other anti-LGBT legislation passed in recent months have also prompted ups. The American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday morning.
The father of Scientology leader David Miscavige has written a book about his son provocatively titled Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me  and David Miscavige has threatened to sue over the book, which its U.K. publisher says details the younger Miscaviges brutal approach to running the organization. In the first excerpts from an interview Ron Miscavige did with ABC, he talks about his estranged sons childhood and says he wasnt always that way.

When he was a kid, I am telling you, he was a lovable kid, Ron, who introduced David and other family members to Scientology in the 60s, tells ABCs 20/20 in an interview airing this Friday in advance of the memoir, due out May 3.

According to the publishers description of the book, the elder Miscavige opens up about his sons rise to prominence within the controversial church, which counts celebrities including Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Kirstie Alley among its members. As a young man, Miscavige worked directly with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, and eventually assumed control of the church following Hubbards death in 1986.

A preview clip from the interview in which they visit Davids childhood home:

Ron, who admits his son grew up in a dysfunctional household, says David began getting into fistfights in the first grade and grappled with severe asthma attacks.

He enjoyed having a fight, he says. And Im sure he instigated it Hes a tough kid. I mean, for his size, hes like a stick of dynamite. Ron also said that young David had a tendency to complain about other people: He would come home and start complaining about somebody and I would say, 'Hey, come on, youre like Little Bad News, what the hell is this?  and then he would knock it off.

But Ron Miscavige tells 20/20 he remembers seeing a profound change in David when the boy completed his first auditing session  a kind of Scientology counseling session  in 1969 at just 9 years old.



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After 45 minutes, David walks out, smiling, bright, he says. [That moment] decided his life, and mine.

Miscavige also says that after Scientology came into Davids life, the asthma attacks lessened considerably.

Of course, thats what the auditing handled, the actual psychological phenomena of it, he says.

I think it was at that moment that he decided hes going to do something with this, he adds.

Ron says he first heard about Scientology at a business meeting in 1968. He said the entire family eventually began studying L. Ron Hubbards teachings, and David became particularly devout in his teens. With his familys blessing, David left home at 16 to join Sea Organization or Sea Org, a group featuring Scientologys most dedicated members.

He advanced very rapidly in the Church, Ron tells 20/20. He really decided at a very young age to make it his career and his mission.

David rose quickly within the church, and in 2006 even served as best man in Tom Cruises marriage to Katie Holmes. However, he has been the subject of criticism over the years by ex-members including Leah Remini, who released her own memoir last year about her bumpy exit from the church.

According to ABC, Ron also admits in the interview that he hit his then-wife and children. There was some domestic abuse, which I dont feel good about, he says. But he denied a statement that his daughters, Denise and Lori, released to ABC through their attorney, alleging that our father beat our mother senseless in drunken tirades, averaging two violent attacks with his fists per week. Ron called that claim a flat-out lie.

Although David has not commented on the book directly, Monique Yingling, an attorney representing the church, spoke to 20/20 and called Rons book a literary forgery."

"On a personal level, I think he [David] is probably very, very sad that his father would do this, she also said. There seems to be no explanation except that his father is trying to make a buck off his name. "So I think theres that level of sadness and Im sure a sense of betrayal.

Attorneys working on behalf of the Scientology leader contacted Silvertail Books, which is publishing his fathers memoir in London, threatening to sue if the book is published next month.

You are now on notice of the highly defamatory content of the subject book, according the letter, which was first published by noted Scientology reporter Tony Ortega. In the event that you proceed  our client will be left with no alternative but to seek the protection of UK/Irish defamation and other laws. Accordingly, even at this late stage, we would urge you to reconsider your decision to proceed  [with] what clearly will be a totally unjustified, premeditated attack on our clients reputation and character.

The letter reportedly indicated that the U.S. publisher, St. Martins Press, received a similar letter.

Silvertail Books publisher Humfrey Hunter told The Hollywood Reporter that the book is still expected to be released on schedule.

My plans for the book havent changed at all since I received the letter. Full legal due diligence has been carried out on the manuscript and I am both confident in its integrity and very proud that Silvertail is publishing it. Rons story is an important one, and he is a brave man to be telling it.
Ellen Page in Tallulah; films producer says she was told this story with female leads that wasnt about getting the guy was not commercially viable (Photo: Sundance)



Its hard for many filmmakers to get financing for their movies, especially if theyre working on independent projects perceived as niche or risky. But for producers and artists behind films that focus on women, raising the necessary cash can be damn near impossible, according to several producers at a recent panel discussion hosted and covered by Variety in New York.

Related: Headless Women on Movie Posters = A Visual History of Hollywood Sexism



This film was deemed not commercially viable, because it was a womans story, and it wasnt about getting the guy, said Heather Rae, producer of the indie film Tallulah, starring Ellen Page and Allison Janney, who added that executives said this to her face. Netflix bought streaming rights to Tallulah prior to the films strong debut at Sundance.

Two other producers who participated in the panel, Lydia Dean Pilcher and Alix Madigan, said they have encountered similar issues, particularly because theres a perception that films made by or about women cant become global successes. The foreign sales side is very, very male-driven, Madigan said. There are maybe one or two female film directors on lists we get back from our foreign sales, and a very small handful of women are seen as viable.



Related: Lack of Female Directors Problem Wont Be Solved By Fox or Paramount Before 2018

The focus on a movies performance in international markets has become increasingly significant over the past decade, in ways that affect not only female-driven films. Earlier this year, Don Cheadle noted that a white character was added to his Miles Davis portrait, Miles Ahead, because it was considered necessary in order to secure financing. There are different metrics by which those who are going to spend money on films determine if its a good risk or not, and there is a lot of apocryphal, not proven evidence that black films dont sell overseas, he said at the time.

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Related: Hollywood Respects Women? JANE Twitter Feed Tells a Different Story

Whether its true that black films or female films dont sell overseas, the perception exists and that puts a pretty big barrier in front of anyone trying to tell a story that doesnt fit within the preconceived notions of what will appeal to international audiences. But the constant dialogue around these issues in recent months suggests that perhaps progress can start to be made; during that Variety panel, Pilcher said she was heartened recently when a marketing executive at Disney said that authenticity is what would sell Queen of Katwe, Mira Nairs film about a female chess player from Uganda that Pilcher is producing.

Change is possible. But, in life and in the movie industry, it often happens at a pace that is maddeningly slow.

Elizabeth Banks directing debut on Pitch Perfect 2: Watch a featurette:
Vice's forthcoming nightly news show on HBO is starting to take shape.

The media company has tapped NBC News veteran Madeleine Haeringer to executive produce the news program, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

Haeringer most recently was the exec producer of MSNBC's news coverage. Before that, she was exec producer of international news for NBC News, and before that, she served as senior producer of NBC worldwide newsgathering. During her tenure at NBC, Haeringer worked as the lead producer for international correspondent Richard Engel and made her name in the field covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She also oversaw the network's Olympics news coverage.

Read More: Vice's Shane Smith Asks, "You Think I Could Hoodwink Bob Iger, Jeff Bewkes and Rupert Murdoch?"

Over her career, Haeringer has won 10 Emmy Awards, five Edward R. Murrow Awards, three Peabody Awards and two Dupont Awards, among other accolades. The news veteran joins former Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel, who was brought on board in October to oversee the forthcoming show.

Vice announced in March 2015 that it would produce a daily newscast for HBO, an expansion of the two companies' current relationship which includes a weekly docu-style news show that dates back to 2013. The weekly show will continue alongside the daily newscast, which will consist of five half-hour shows each week for 48 weeks a year. According to Vice, the daily show will feature original, on-the-ground reporting and pull from its 30 international bureaus.

The untitled newscast was scheduled to debut in early 2016. However, it currently is unclear when the program will launch, except that Haeringer is not due to start until May 16. Vice has been busy the last several months with the launch of its own cable channel, which took over what was formerly History's H2, in February.

Read Tyrangiel's memo to the staff about Haeringer below.

It's my pleasure to welcome Madeleine Haeringer as executive producer of the Vice on HBO nightly news show. Madeleine's most recent gig was as the executive producer of MSNBC's news coverage, but she's spent the majority of her career mocking people who do desk jobs. She made her name in the field covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Working as Richard Engel's lead producer, Madeleine consistently broke news and found ways to do the stories other people couldn't or wouldn't cover. She's won ten Emmys, five Murrows, three Peabodys, two DuPonts and an Overseas Press Club for her work. (The EMOP.) In addition to spending a decade living and working in the Middle East, she's been the EP of all of NBC's international news coverage and overseen the network's Olympic news coverage, too.

Madeleine is pretty much what you'd expect from her resume - smart, tough, funny, profane, intrigued by our free beer, and eager to cover important global stories in surprising ways. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Virginia in a restaurant family. Her dad still runs L'Auberge Chez Francois (four-and-a-half stars on Yelp!) She starts May 16th. Feel free to Google her now.
Semiconductors, software and IT services.

The heart of the technology sector's earnings season typically brings with it a lot of big swings, even in the bluest of blue-chip tech stocks. But you can avoid the volatility from quarterly tech earnings season by getting some of your exposure in a more well-rounded way: via exchange-traded funds, which let you invest in the sector as a whole, or in specific industries such as Internet companies or semiconductor makers. Here's the top 10 tech ETFs as of this writing, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report.

#10: iShares Global Tech (IXN)

You would imagine that the iShares Global Tech ETF took a worldwide view of the technology sphere, and you'd be less than a quarter correct. Less than 25 percent of the fund is invested in companies domiciled outside of the U.S., with Japan leading the way at 5.1 percent. With heavily weighted top holdings such as Apple (AAPL, 12.5 percent) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT, 8.9 percent), this fund shares a lot in common with most other broad tech funds.

Expenses: 0.47 percent, or $47 annually for each $10,000 invested.

#9: SPDR S&P Semiconductor ETF (XSD)

The XSD is a diversified, balanced fund of semiconductor companies, almost all of which are in the U.S. What is notable is its equal-weighting methodology -- XSD weighs each of its 40 holdings the same at each rebalancing so no one stock has an outsized effect on the ETF. However, weights do fluctuate in between rebalancings depending on performance, so currently, top holdings are Inphi Corp. (IPHI), Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Expenses: 0.35 percent

#8: Market Vectors Semiconductor ETF (SMH)

The SMH also invests in the tech sector's semiconductor subsection. This is a very niche ETF of just 26 holdings currently, all involved in the production or other aspects of the chip business. Top holdings Intel Corp. (INTC) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM) make up more than a quarter of the fund, but SMH offers some geographic diversification -- a little more than 30 percent of the fund is invested in stocks from Taiwan, the Netherlands, Singapore, the U.K. and Bermuda.

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Expenses: 0.35 percent (includes fee waiver)

#7: Fidelity MSCI Information Technology Index (FTEC)

The FTEC is a broad-based ETF, focusing on mostly large-capitalization, growth-oriented stocks within the tech sector. Thus, you get consumer-facing hardware companies like Apple, software companies like Microsoft, Internet companies like Facebook (FB) and even payment tech companies such as Visa (V). While the FTEC is diversified in that it holds nearly 400 companies, this still is a top-heavy fund, with the top five companies weighted at nearly 45 percent, including a 13 percent-plus weighting for Apple -- a common theme among many big tech ETFs.

Expenses: 0.12 percent

#6: iShares North American Tech ETF (IGM)

The IGM is another broad-based tech fund, with this one focusing on roughly 275 North American tech companies. This is a traditional cap-weighted fund, so 30 percent of the fund is concentrated in its top 10 holdings, led by MSFT, AAPL and FB. However, investors are treated to a decent industry spread, with double-digit portions of the fund invested in five areas, including Internet software, storage and semiconductors. Internet retail comes close at nearly 9 percent of the fund.

Expenses: 0.47 percent

#5: iShares Exponential Technologies ETF (XT)

The iShares' XT ETF aims to be at the forefront of the tech sector's prevailing trends, using what it calls a "unique evaluation process to identify companies developing and/or leveraging promising technologies." As a result, XT is invested in things such as 3D printing via 3D Systems Corp. (DDD) and Indian IT outsourcing via Wipro (WIT). This is another equal-weighted fund, with no stock making up more than 1 percent of the fund. Nearly 30 percent of the fund is invested in health care technology.

Expenses: 0.47 percent

#4: iShares U.S. Technology (IYW)

The IYW would seem to be pretty spread out given that it has 140 holdings within America's tech sector. However, this fund is extremely concentrated at the top, with the top five companies representing more than half of the IYW's weight. Apple alone is a massive 17 percent of the fund, and Microsoft and Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) each take up 12 percent. This is a great fund when all is going well for technology's most blue-chip stocks, but when the chips are down ... watch out.

Expenses: 0.43 percent

#3: Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight Technology ETF (RYT)

The RYT is, as the name would suggest, an equal-weight fund that invests in the Standard & Poor's 500 index's tech stocks -- 68 blue-chip names. Thanks to the equal weighting methodology, no stock makes up more than 1.7 percent of the holdings. RYT has a heavy bent toward IT services and semiconductors, each at nearly a quarter of the fund. One note with the last of our equal-weighting funds -- the methodology provided better diversification, but in the tech sector, not always (or even often) better returns.

Expenses: 0.4 percent

#2: Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK)

The XLK is the gold standard for tech funds -- both the most well-recognized and the largest with nearly $14 billion in assets under management. The XLK is a collection of all the tech favorites -- Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, though it also features AT&T (T) in its top five holdings. The XLK also is one of the cheapest tech ETFs out there, and it even has a performance edge over the lifetime of the top-ranked fund out there, which we'll look at next.

Expenses: 0.14 percent

#1: Vanguard Information Technology ETF (VGT)

The dirt-cheap VGT is also a strong performer, beating out the S&P 500 in total returns at 143.46 percent to 136.74 percent since inception in late January 2014, and it's no slouch at $9 billion in assets under management. Still, the XLK has the overall performance advantage, with 148.72 percent gains in that time. VGT is similarly constructed, though telecoms like AT&T and Verizon Communications (VZ) are utterly absent. If you're driven by paying the absolute least for broad tech exposure, you'll want to lean toward VGT.

Expenses: 0.1 percent





More From US News & World Report


James Monroe was the only president, aside from George Washington, to run unopposed for re-election. But that may not be the most surprising fact about the last Founding Father to occupy the White House.

Monroe was born on April 28, 1758, in Virginia, and his public career started from humble roots. He was an eyewitness to many of the events that led to the creation of the United States and the U.S. Constitution.

But you wont hear Monroes name used in the same lofty terms as his friends Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and his former commander, George Washington.

Monroe did leave a lasting impression on Americas destiny because of the Monroe Doctrine, a policy he established to keep other nations out of the Western Hemisphere.

Here are 10 interesting facts about an underrated Founding Father who spent more than four decades at the center of American change.

1. Teenage James Monroe was a hero at the Battle of Trenton. The 18-year-old lieutenant was sent across the Delaware River by Washington to scout, and he nearly died after being shot during the fight in Trenton.

2. Monroe was a law apprentice for Thomas Jefferson. Monroe studied under the third president, but he wasnt an outstanding lawyer. Monroe was more interested in politics in his native Virginia and served in the Continental Congress at the age of 25.

3. Monroe initially opposed the Constitution. Monroe wasnt at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and opposed it at Virginias ratification convention, wanting a strong bill of rights. Monroe eventually supported the document.

4. Madison and Monroe had an unusual friendship. James Madison won the fight in Virginia over ratifying the Constitution in 1789 and then ran against Monroe for a seat in the House of Representatives. Madison and Monroe took part in a series of public debates, and Madison narrowly won the election. But the two opponents became fast friends on the campaign trail, much to the chagrin of Madisons enemy, Patrick Henry.

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5. Monroe was not friendly with George Washington. The men had a falling out after Washington sent Monroe, his former lieutenant, to France as an ambassador. Washington eventually fired Monroe after he criticized the Jay Treaty. Monroe also wasnt fond of Alexander Hamilton, Washingtons close associate.

6. Monroe was a key player in two presidential administrations. Monroe was a minister to France and England for President Thomas Jefferson, and he served as both secretary of state and secretary of war for President James Madison. He held virtually every key public office before becoming president in 1817.

7. Monroe was one of the most dominant presidential candidates ever. Monroe received 68 percent of the vote when he defeated Rufus King in the 1816 election. He ran unopposed in the 1820 race, getting 81 percent of the vote. Only one cranky elector in New Hampshire kept Monroe from a unanimous win in the Electoral College.

8. Monroe had some help writing the Monroe Doctrine. John Quincy Adams was a driving force behind the policy, which President Monroe introduced with his annual message to Congress in 1823. The doctrine stated that Europe needed to stay out of the affairs of new countries and territories in the Western hemisphere; in exchange, the United States would stay out of European affairs.

9. Monroe was able to buy Florida for $5 million. Monroe had started talks with Spain about Florida while he was James Madisons secretary of state in 1815. After violence in the region and a flurry of diplomacy, Adams helped negotiate a deal for Monroe where the U.S. would pay off damage claims made by Spain during the violence. The U.S. got Florida and promised that it would recognize Spains sovereignty over Texas.

10. Monroe died on the Fourth of July, too. Three Founding Fathers who were elected president died on July 4. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Monroe died on July 4, 1831. Monroe was also the last president who was never photographed in his lifetime.

Presidential Stories on Constitution Daily

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zuckerberg

Good morning. Here's everything you need to know in the world of advertising today.

1. We spoke to Pinterest cofounder Evan Sharp about the company's plans for world domination. On Thursday, Pinterest announced that finally just over half of its 100 million+ monthly active users are international.

2. Facebook crushed expectations, and its stock soared. Facebook reported its Q1 earnings on Wednesday afternoon, beating expectations on the top and bottom lines.

3. Here's how much time people spend on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger every day. People are spending nearly an hour every day scrolling through Facebook status updates, liking Instagram posts, or chatting on Messenger.

4. Marissa Mayer was "outraged" people were comparing Yahoo to AOL. Yahoo is a fraction of the size of Google and Facebook, but the three companies still largely compete in the same digital advertising space.

5. A US Olympic runner is auctioning off ad space on his shoulder. Olympian and six-time US 800 meter champion Nick Symmonds is auctioning off nine inches of ad space on his right shoulder on eBay.

6. Yahoo caved to the man who wants Marissa Mayer fired and announced four new board members. On Wednesday, Yahoo announced that it reached a settlement with Starboard Value, the activist investor that's been calling for the complete overhaul of the current board and management.

7. 11 things other CEOs could learn from Marissa Mayers struggle to turn around Yahoo. Here are a few lessons, according to a Quora thread.

8. Watch out: "The end of VC welfare on ad spending" means trouble for a lot of companies. The worry is that if the VC-funded startups start cutting back on ad spending, that means less revenue for internet companies whose businesses are based on advertising.

9. 13 celebrities you had no idea were in TV commercials as kids. Many of Hollywood's most familiar faces kicked off their careers by starring in TV commercials as kids.

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10.WPP, the world's largest advertising agency holding group, reported a 10.5% year-on-year lift in revenue to 3.08 billion ($4.48 billion) in its first quarter. Net sales grew 8.1% in sterling and 2.2% in dollars, although the company warned that clients "generally remain cautious."

NOW WATCH: Heres why airlines ask you to raise the window shades for takeoffs and landings





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From Cosmopolitan

Fourteen-year-old Destiny Gleason was found dead in her Warrenton, Missouri, room Wednesday after months of relentless bullying at school, her parents told FOX 2. Destiny hanged herself from a pull-up bar in her bedroom.

"She just wanted everybody to like her, that's all she wanted," her mother Stephanie Clark said. When Destiny started at Black Hawk Middle School as a new student in the fall, she was allegedly plagued by a group of about six female students who did "anything they could possibly do to hurt her and bring her down" and "at one point took some photo of some random person's private parts and put Destiny`s name across it and spread it around the school," Clark explained.

Two weeks ago, Destiny posted a now-removed video to Facebook addressing said alleged bullies: "The words you call me are just words," she said. "That's not who I really am. That's not what I'll ever be." Last Tuesday, Destiny was in a fight at school that ended with her taken away in handcuffs and being charged with assault. Who she fought with and why is not clear.

The district superintendent told FOX 2 he couldn't comment on the case specifics but that the school takes bullying "very seriously" and encourages everyone to report any bullying he or she encounters.

According to a GoFundMe set up by a friend of Destiny's family, the student's organs have all been donated and already placed: "She was such a kind, caring, compassionate, loving person who would do anything to help others." You can donate to the family's funeral fund here.

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"In the last 48 hours, we have had an average of one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes," Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy to Syria, said, Al Jazeera reported.

Mistura's comments come after the al-Quds hospital, supported by Medecins Sans Frontieres and based in a rebel-held area of Aleppo, was hit by one of two airstrikes Wednesday night, killing at least Among the dead was one of the last remaining pediatricians in Aleppo. Over 60 people died in total, the Washington Post reported.

(Editor's Note: This post contains graphic images. View with discretion.)

A young boy's body is carried from the rubble of an airstrike.

Source: Uncredited/AP

On average, one Syrian is killed every 25 minutes. One Syrian is wounded every 13 minutes.

The Syrian government, backed by Russia, has ramped up its offensive against rebels over the past week, leaving many concerned that the tenuous and fragile ceasefire is coming to an end.

On Monday, President Barack Obama announced "up to 250 Special Forces soldiers" would be deployed as ground troops in Syria to fight the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, Reuters reported. Despite international efforts to quell the violence and instill stability, civilians continue to pay the highest price, bearing the brunt of casualties in the civil war, which sees no end in .

Aleppo holds strategic significance in the power struggle between President Bashar al-Assad's government and the various rebellious factions (which includes ISIS) fighting for control over the country. Aleppo is now on the verge of becoming a humanitarian disaster.

An injured woman is carried to a hospital.

Source: Uncredited/AP

With a population of more than 2 million, the number of medical facilities available  in a city gripped by daily violence  is vastly inadequate, Red Cross spokesman Pawel Krzysiek told Al Jazeera.

"There is no neighborhood [in Aleppo] that has not been touched by the recent fighting," Krzysiek told Al Jazeera. "This should not happen."
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israeli authorities arrested on Thursday two Palestinians who tried to stab Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank, the army said, adding that one of them was shot and wounded.

The suspects carrying knives approached Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near the West Bank city of Ramallah in an apparent bid to attack them.

The soldiers opened fire in self defence and one of the Palestinians was wounded, an army spokeswoman added.

A wave of violence has killed 203 Palestinians and 28 Israelis since October.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, Israeli authorities say.
Vin Diesel announcing Fast 8 at CinemaCon 2015 in Las Vegas. (Photo: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)



By THR Staff

Fast and Furious is revving up for its next installment: Fast 8.

Four years after the death of franchise star Paul Walker, Universal is set to release the series eighth film in 2017. Helmed by Straight Outta Compton director F. Gary Gray, the action thriller will see its hero Vin Diesels return with newcomers Charlize Theron and Scott Eastwood.

Related: Critics Picks: 10 Landmark CGI-Meets-Live-Action Movies

In an attempt to keep up with all the latest breaking news on the highly anticipated project, The Hollywood Reporter has compiled everything known about the project so far into a helpful cheat sheet.

WHO



Newcomers

Scott Eastwood: He will operate under Kurt Russells character in the film.

Charlize Theron: She will play the films villain.

Returning

Vin Diesel (Dominic Toretto)

Dwayne Johnson (Hobbs)

Jason Statham (Deckard Shaw)

Michelle Rodriguez (Letty Ortiz Toretto)

Tyrese Gibson (Roman Pearce)

Ludacris (Tej Parker)

Kurt Russell (Mr. Nobody)

Related: Helen Mirren Explains Why She Wants to Be in Fast 8

WHAT

While details of the plot have not yet been revealed, another round of car-racing action can be expected, and the original cast will be pitted against Therons villainous character.

WHERE

In Fast and Furious fashion, the upcoming film will continue its globetrotting by trekking to Cuba. In January, THR exclusively reported that the eighth installment is eyeing the northern Caribbean island for filming. Universal Pictures is currently in the process of seeking approval from the United States and Cuban governments to explore shooting a portion of the next installment of the Fast & Furious series in Cuba, the studio said in a statement. If approved, it would be the first Hollywood studio film to shoot on the island since the embargo was set in the 1960s. Sources say that Furious 8 will be based in Atlanta, but a number of exotic locations  including Russia and Iceland  are being eyed for filming.

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Update from the 'Fast and Furious Twitter:

Welcome to Cuba - #F8 is now in production!https://t.co/0aneIVMhJm  Fast & Furious (@FastFurious) April 28, 2016

WHEN

The eighth film in the Fast and Furious franchise is set to hit theaters on April 14, 2017, followed in two-year release date increments for the ninth  April 19, 2019  and tenth  April 2, 2021 installments.

Related: How 'Furious 7 Brought the Late Paul Walker Back to Life

WHY

Give audiences what they want. Furious 7 proved to be a global success when the film became the first Universal project to make it to the $1 billion mark in its original run, and later set a new benchmark by grossing $1.5 billion worldwide.

 Compiled by Natalie Stone and Arlene Washington

'Furious 7 cast tells us who would win a fight between Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, and Jason Statham:
At bars near Harvard University, there's a saying: "I hope this drink doesn't give me mumps."

Harvard is in the midst of an outbreak. Since February 29, when two students first contracted mumps, there have been 40 new cases, according to Paul Barreira, Harvard's Director of Health Services. The viral disease has apparently spread to nearby Tufts University and Boston University.

"Honestly, what people have been saying is if you haven't gotten mumps yet, you're a prude," Sydney Jenkins, a 23-year-old senior at Harvard, told Mic. "It's not actually the case, it's a joke  but this hasn't stopped people from going out to drink."

Weeks after the initial outbreak, students are starting to treat the mumps scare as the status quo, but the university's director of health services can't overstate the need for diligence.

"I'm desperate," said Barreira, according to the Harvard Crimson. "I'm desperate to get students to take seriously that they shouldn't be infecting one another."

"Honestly, what people have been saying is if you haven't gotten mumps yet, you're a prude."

Mumps is highly contagious and travels through saliva. On the mild end of symptoms, it can cause fever, headache, muscle aches and loss of appetite. But in serious cases, it can result in meningitis, deafness and orchitis  or sterility.

Students with mumps on campus have been quarantined. According to junior Sophie Altchek, 23 (sister of Mic's Chris Altchek), the Inn at Harvard, a building usually used for student swing housing, is now acting as a quarantine zone for affected students. "I know three or four people who've had mumps now," Altchek said in a phone interview Thursday. "They used to just [quarantine] them at Health Services. They had to move them to that dorm."

But besides the campus-wide letters they've received urging them to wash their hands frequently, throw away snotty tissues and stop sharing drinking and eating utensils, students say the scare in the air has ebbed.

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Source: Steven Senne/AP

"When it first started, there were fewer than 10 cases and people were very afraid of it," said Consuelo Hylton, a 20-year-old student who knows someone currently quarantined, in a phone interview. (Hylton's sister Antonia also works at Mic.) "Right after spring break, most students had given up and stopped thinking about it. At this point, it's kind of a joke. Most people say we're all gonna get mumps and then go off on summer break and spread it. But it's not really funny."

The dumbfounding thing here is that mumps is an old disease. It's broken out at Harvard before  in 1937. Most children are vaccinated against it. But according to Anita Barry, director of the Infectious Disease Bureau of the Boston Public Health Commission, the mumps vaccine only works 88% of the time. That's a B+ at best, depending on the curve.

What's most alarming now isn't how those first two students, an undergraduate and a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, originally got mumps. In the face of a rare outbreak months before students go back to their home states, countries and continents, the number of cases is only rising.
From Cosmopolitan

It has been almost a full 100 years since the first woman was elected to Congress, and while running for office has become increasingly acceptable since Jeannette Rankin won a Montana House seat in 1917, sexism in politics is still an everyday occurrence. Female politicians face higher standards when it comes to their qualifications, more scrutiny over their personal lives, and endless critiques about their wardrobe or general appearance. In fact, in the past year alone, there have been numerous examples of male politicians getting away with much more than their female counterparts ever could.

1. Complaining about "sacrifice." Texas Sen. Ted Cruz wasn't lying when he said in a campaign email, "running for President of the United States is a significant sacrifice." But when he went on to complain about his lack of sleep and loss of family time, or even the endless campaign attacks, it's no wonder Sen. Elizabeth Warren responded "boo hoo." Can a female candidate complain about not having enough personal time or say she felt like everyone was trying to "tear me down"? Ask 2008 Hillary Clinton, who appeared a little teary-eyed on the trail in New Hampshire during her last campaign, admitting how hard the race had been, a moment that turned an entire news cycle into "Hillary cried."

2. Go home "for a change of clothes." When Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson lost the Iowa caucus Feb. 1, his best option should have been to go straight over to New Hampshire and start knocking doors immediately to revive his campaign. Instead, he told the press he was going to going to take some time off to head back home and "get some fresh clothes." Rivals and pundits alike snickered at the statement, but it had very little effect on his overall campaign, which continued to limp on until he eventually bowed out on his own terms in early March.

3. Ask to balance his political commitments with time home with his kids. Being the top-ranking leader in Congress is normally a choice position. Instead, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan told his party that he didn't want the job unless they would promise it wouldn't interfere with his personal time. "I cannot and will not give up my family time," he bargained, demanding a smaller role in fundraising and campaigning - a big deal as the party headed into the 2016 presidential campaign and the possibility that they could lose the Senate to Democrats. The GOP agreed that yes, Ryan could totally balance it all - political career and family time. Meanwhile, just three months later, the Ohio Senate Majority Leader argued that his female opponent shouldn't be running for office because she would have to spend too much time away from her 1- and 3-year-old children. "The gal that's running against me is a 30-year-old, you know, mom, mother of two infants," he told a local radio show. "And I don't know if anybody explained to her we've got to spend three nights a week in Columbus. So, how does that work out for you?"

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4. Campaign in an ice cream shop and not get asked about calories. Presidential candidates eat a lot on the trail. Lucky for all of the men running, no one says much about the food they ingest. When Ohio Governor John Kasich made a campaign stop in You Scream Ice Cream in Catonsville, Maryland, the story was about his policies and what voters thought of the long-shot presidential contender. When Hillary Clinton made a stop at Mikey Likes It Ice Cream in New York City a week later, a reporter questioned whether she knows the calorie count on her dessert.

5. Be called "authentic" for not caring about clothing. Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has the rumpled hair and wrinkled suits of a tenured philosophy professor, but that just makes him even more "authentic," according to the presidential candidate's biggest fans. It's a double standard that is universally recognized by the political media machine, yet is still accepted as just a fact of life when running for office. "Clinton and Fiorina already get enormous scrutiny of their clothing, hair and makeup, as all female politicians do," wrote Paul Fahri in the Washington Post in October, after calling Sanders, "Oscar Madison, albeit with a more detailed college-tuition plan." "It's unfair, of course, but all female candidates know they have to look perfect when they appear in public. An 'older' female candidate practically needs to seem regal to stand a chance."

6. Go gray. OK, hair is scrutinized almost universally among all candidates. When John Edwards ran for president in 2008, his costly cuts made headlines everywhere, and Mitt Romney's stylist got his own Q&A in 2012. Meanwhile, Rand Paul was pleased to admit he cut his own hair at home. But one thing a female politician can't get away with? Gray hair. "You're not going to see me turning white in the White House," Clinton quipped last May on the campaign trail, joking about the media's obsession with her hair. Clinton, like most female politicians, knows that showing a little fade at the temples could be a death knell for her candidacy. On the other hand, for a man, a little white makes him a more serious contender. Romney, Edwards, and Paul all had a few grays to add to their gravitas. Daily Beast columnist Michael Daly even wondered if GOP front-runner Donald Trump had dyed his hair a little gray to help him look "slightly more presidential." Trump, meanwhile, is actually a year older than Clinton.

7. Act mad when people talk about their shoes. Shoes are always a campaign issue when women are running, from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's "sensible flats" to the notorious "I do not wear high heels" taunt of 2010, where Colorado senate candidate Ken Buck tried to explain to his audience why they should vote for him over his female primary opponent. Start talking about a male candidate's shoes, however, and he becomes extremely defensive. When Florida Senator Marco Rubio was still a GOP presidential contender, he was less than amused to find out his new fancy, stack-heeled boots were the subject of scrutiny from media and political rivals alike. Rubio dismissed the jokes as "craziness," but he only got a touch of the type of "shoe analysis" that female politicians (or political spouses) deal with every day.

Follow Robin on Twitter.
The Robert Capa Gold Medal Award Bassam Khabieh, international photojournalist with Reuters, won the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award, honoring the best photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise. Mr. Khabieh is being honored for Field Hospital Damascus, a photo-essay that puts into perspective the tremendous dangers and difficulties facing journalists in Syria today.

The 22 award-winning entries for the annual Overseas Press Club (OPC) Awards highlight the increasing hazards facing foreign correspondents around the world. The Associated Press, the Center for Public Integrity, Foreign Policy, Frontline, Reuters and the New York Times won multiple awards; the Associated Press won two awards for its story, Seafood from Slaves.

While the award-winning stories reflect themes of conflict, corruption and disaster, they also show how, in a hyperconnected world, these dangers spill over and quickly present global perils. Journalists covering these events now face a more hazardous climate with a growing number of limitations to free speech across the globe.

Our jobs have become more dangerous and harder to come by as our profession faces economic and technological change, says Marcus Mabry, president of the Overseas Press Club of America and managing editor of Twitter Moments. We gather tonight not to bemoan this reality, but to confront it. Our role as journalists is to bear witness, and ensure that suffering is not in silence, injustice is not unknown.

As part of confronting this new reality, the OPC joined last year with the Frontline Freelance Register, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and other advocacy groups and news organizations to sign the global safety principles and practices for protecting freelancers in dangerous overseas assignments.

Kai Ryssdal, host and senior editor of American Public Radios Marketplace, will MC the awards night, and the OPC will honor David Fanning, founder and executive producer at large of Frontline, with its Presidents Award. Jason Rezaian, journalist and former Tehran bureau chief for the Washington Post, who was released from Iran in January after more than 18 months in jail, will light the press freedom candle in memory of journalists who have died in the line of duty in the past year and in honor of those imprisoned or missing.

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Photography awards go to Bassam Khabieh, international photojournalist with Reuters, who will receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award honoring the best photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise. Mr. Khabieh is being honored for Field Hospital Damascus, a photo-essay that puts into perspective the tremendous dangers and difficulties facing journalists in Syria today.

Stephen Dupont receives the Olivier Rebbot Award for best photographic reporting from abroad in magazines or books. His book Generation AK: The Afghanistan Wars, 1993-2012 is a compelling body of work documenting life in a war-torn nation for nearly two decades.

Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter for the New York Times receives the John Farber Award for best photographic reporting from abroad in newspapers or news services for Exodus, a series of images on the migrant crisis that tells the broad story of the plight of the migrants and what they endured in hopes of a better life.

Daniel Berehulak for the New York Times receives the Feature Photography Award for best feature photography published in any medium on an international theme. In High in the Himalayas, A Search After The Nepal Quake Yields Grim Results, Daniel Berehulaks images convey grief, humanity and the scale of the tragedy, telling the story from different perspectives and getting close enough to connect readers with his subjects and communicate their emotions and loss. (OPC)

See below for a look at some of the award-winning photography.

For more images by the award-winning photographers visit the OPC. The OPC Awards will be live-streamed on Thursday night, April 28, 2016. Follow the OCA awards on Twitter @opcofamerica and tweet using #OPCAwards.

Find more news-related photo galleries on the Yahoo News Photo Tumblr!
INSIDER

"When you listen to him on the range of issues from foreign policy to the virus to racial injustice, it's clear he did not know what to do," Woodward wrote in the Washington Post.
From Cosmopolitan

If you've ever gone to a formal, you know the most stressful part of getting ready for an event is figuring out what you're going to wear. That anxiety is closely followed by the question of WTF are you're going to do with your hair and makeup? Here, Regan Rabanal, MAC Cosmetics senior makeup artist, and celebrity hairstylist Laura Polko take the guesswork out of getting ready.

1. Amethyst Eye Shadow and Pale Pink Lip + Emerald Green Pleated Gown

It's safe to say that jewel tones go well with other jewel tones. If you're dying to wear a deep green dress, a pretty purple shadow is the perfect complement (as you can see below on model Kamie Crawford).

Emerald Plunge-Neck Pleated Gown, FAME AND PARTNERS, $249; Green Crystal Mismatched Earrings, ELIZABETH COLE, $268; Gold Tassel Necklace, LULU FROST, $238

To get the look: Create a smoky effect with a shimmery purple shadow stick, like Rimmel london ScandalEyes Shadow Stick in "Paranoid Purple," line the inner upper and lower rims of your eyes with a waterproof kohl pencil, and top your lashes with mascara.

Emerald Plunge-Neck Pleated Gown, FAME AND PARTNERS, $265; Green Crystal Mismatched Earrings, ELIZABETH COLE, $268; Gold Tassel Necklace, LULU FROST, $238; Gold Chain and Tassel Cuff, HENRI BENDEL, $139

With a plunging neckline like this one and a makeup look that is super-intense, Polko suggests keeping your hair minimal.

2. Bronze Makeup and Dewy Skin + Pastel Yellow Lace Midi

If you're planning on wearing a pastel yellow number to prom, like model Naja's, go with makeup that brings warmth to your face and has a coral undertone, Rabanal suggests. Orange and yellow are next to each other in the rainbow and naturally go together, so it will be a winning combo.

Yellow Lace Midi Dress, SELF PORTRAIT (Available at Net-A-Porter), $480; Gold Crystal Flower Earrings, LELE SADOUGHI, $198

To get the look: Add warmth to your skin with a matte bronzer, like NYX Cosmetics Matte Bronzer, along your hairline, bridge of nose, and high points of your cheeks. Next, dust a bronze shadow into the crease of your eyes, like MAC Cosmetics Eye Shadow X 9: Dusky Rose Times Nine in "Quiet Time," and pat a highlighter, like Pat McGrath Labs Skin Fetish 003 in "Nude" or "Fine Gold," along the top of your cheekbones toward your temples to give your skin a sexy sheen that will catch the light perfectly in your prom pics.

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Finally, top your lashes with mascara, like Revlon Ultimate All-In-One Mascara, and dab a pinky salmon-colored gloss on your lips and cheeks, like MAC Cosmetics Retro Matte Liquid Lipcolour in "Rich & Restless" for a hint of coordinated color.

Yellow Lace Midi Dress, SELF PORTRAIT (Available at Net-A-Porter), $480; Gold Crystal Flower Earrings, LELE SADOUGHI, $198; Nude Scalloped Pump, PAUL ANDREW (Available at Shopbop), $675

As for your hair, Polko recommends smoothing it out using the heat of a blow-dryer and a round brush, deeply parting it to the side, and then using a 1.25-inch curling iron, like the GHD Soft Curl Iron, to give the hair in front a subtle bend. Finally, spray it with hairspray to smooth any flyaways and keep it back with three Scunci No-Slip Bobby Pins.

3. Bronze Smoky Eye + Dusty Rose Plunging Maxi

Any time you have multiple tones in a dress, it's nice to highlight them in your makeup to pull your look together. Here, Rabanal used a golden brown shimmery shadow to complement the dusty rose and gray tones.

Pink Patterned Maxi Dress, FOR LOVE & LEMONS, $365;Multicolor Stone Fan Earrings, ELIZABETH COLE, $173; Gold and Faux Pearl Cluster Ring, LULU FROST, $115

To get the look: Create a winged almond-shaped eye using creamy brown shadow with gold shimmer in it (try the bronze shadow in NYC New York Color Lovatics by Demi Eye Shadow Kit Compact), rim your inner upper and lower lashlines with black liner, like Prestige Eyeliner in "Black," and apply a few coats of mascara, like MAC Cosmetics In Extreme Dimension 3-D Black Lash. Then contour the cheeks (try L'Oreal Paris Infallible Pro Contour Palette in "Deep"), and put a soft pink, like NYX Cosmetics Extra Creamy Round Lipstick in "Frappucino," to finish off the look.

Pink Patterned Maxi Dress, FOR LOVE & LEMONS, $365; Multicolor Stone Fan Earrings, ELIZABETH COLE, $173; Silver Strappy Heels, SCHUTZ, $170

As for a perfect hairstyle to pair with it, Polko suggests a unique Dutch braid that starts at the very back of your part that continues along your part, across your hairline, and is secured behind your ear into a baby ponytail with a Scunci elastic.

4. Periwinkle Liner + Laser-Cut Mini

"A lot of people want to experiment with color for a formal, so using it as an accent to your normal makeup is the easiest way to incorporate it without it feeling forced," Rabanal says.

Blue Lace Mini Dress, SELF PORTRAIT (Available at ASOS), $445; Gold Cube Dangle Earrings,YAEL SONIA, $8,000

To get the look: Line your lower lashline with MAC Cosmetics Technakohl Liner in "Metallic Deep Skyblue," then line your upper lashline with black liner, like Clio Waterproof Pen Liner in "Killer Black." Pat a pinkish berry stain onto your lips, like E.L.F. Cosmetics Lip Stain.

Blue Lace Mini Dress, SELF PORTRAIT (Available at ASOS), $445; Gold Cube Dangle Earrings, YAEL SONIA, $8000

Finish off your look with a sleek hairstyle. To recreate this one, Polko suggests creating a dead-center part using a fine-toothed comb, smoothing down the hair along your hairline with pomade, like Reverie Rake Styling Balm, and using L'Oreal Paris Elnett Satin Strong Hold Hairspray to keep it sleek.

5. Sleek Cat-Eye + Sexy LRD (Long Red Dress)

"When you're wearing a bold red dress like the one Kamie is in here, you want to apply makeup that will complement it, not compete with it, " Rabanal says.

Red Satin Wrap Dress, FAME AND PARTNERS, $219; Mismatched Gold Dangle Earrings, ELIZABETH COLE, $133; Gold Ram Head Collar Necklace, ELIZABETH COLE, $198

To get the look: Top your eyelids with a taupe-y brown shadow, like Maybelline New York Expert Wear Eyeshadow Single in "Tastefully Taupe," and then apply dramatic black liner using an angle brush pot of gel liner, like H&M Black Gel Eyeliner. Pro tip: Rabanal suggests lining your eyes as usual on the top and bottom, then drawing the flick of the cat-eye while your eyes are open, so you know exactly what the wing will look like when you're done. Um, genius. Dust on a pretty pink blush (try Milani Baked Blush in "Delizioso") and a berry stain, like Palladio Cosmetic Lip Stain in "Berry," to tie in your red dress but not take away from it.

Red Satin Wrap Dress, FAME AND PARTNERS, $219; Mismatched Gold Dangle Earrings, ELIZABETH COLE, $133; Gold Ram Head Collar Necklace, ELIZABETH COLE, $198; Gold Feather Cuff, LULU FROST, $250; Nude Strappy Heels, SCHUTZ, $170

For Kamie's sporty pony, Polko says to use a boar bristle brush and hair serum, like Living Proof Satin Hair Serum, to pull it into a bump-free sleek style. Secure with an elastic to finish.

6. Sexy Scarlet Lip + One-Shoulder White Gown

If you're opting for a super-glam, stunning stark white gown, go for that red lip classic thing that you like.

Ivory One-Shoulder Cape Dress, JILL JILL STUART, $328; Silver Crystal Staircase Earrings, DANNIJO, $495

To get the look: Apply your usual foundation with a makeup sponge. Subtly contour your cheeks with Rimmel London Kate Sculpting and Highlighting Kit. Use a waterproof black kohl liner, like Ardency Inn Modster Smooth Ride Supercharged Eyeliner in "Black," to line the inner rim of your eyes, then apply a few coats of mascara, like L'Oreal Paris Voluminous Original Mascara, and then a matte red lip color, like CoverGirl Colorlicious Lipstick in "Hot."

Ivory One-Shoulder Cape Dress, JILL JILL STUART, $328; Silver Crystal Staircase Earrings, DANNIJO, $495; Silver and Crystal Cuff, HENRI BENDEL, $111

To copy Naja's coif, Polko recommends smoothing your hair with a blow-dryer-and-round-brush combo, sectioning out the middle of your hair from your hairline to the crown, and wrapping it around the iron toward the back of your head. That way you can wear your part however you'd like it. Finally, use a boar bristle brush, like Spornette's, to break up the curl and make it more uniform, giving it that Old Hollywood glamorous look.

7. Charcoal Smoky Eye and Neutral Lip + Black Cutout Gown

A long black dress like this is the ultimate backdrop to a dramatic makeup look, Rabanal says. "You can really create any look against it, but I chose a sultry smoky eye to play up the dress's drama."

Black Strappy Gown, JILL JILL STUART, $328; Gold Crystal Drop Earrings, ALEXIS BITTAR, $494

To get the look: Create a black smoky eye by applying black cream liner, Wet n Wild MegaEyes Creme Eyeliner, along your upper lashline and on the inner rim of your lower lash line. Next, smudge out the top liner with a tapered blending brush, like MAC's 224 brush, to create an almond shape to elongate your eye, leaving the lower lash liner alone. Then, contour your cheeks with a coral blush, like Revlon Powder Blush in "Classy Coral," apply a tawny lip color like CoverGirl Queen Collection Lipcolor in "Tawny Port," and trace your cupid's bow with gold powder, like MAC Cosmetics Mineralize SkinFinish in "Gold Deposit."

Black Strappy Gown, JILL JILL STUART, $328; Gold Crystal Drop Earrings, ALEXIS BITTAR, $494

To get Kamie's sleek hairstyle, straighten your hair, part your hair to the side in a deep part, slick it back into a low ponytail, and hit it with a shine hairspray, like Oribe Shine Light Reflecting Spray.

8. Mixed Metals Liner + Plunging Silver Grecian Mini

If your dress is in the neutral family and has a grayish tone with some warmth to it, choose a taupe smoky eye with pewter accents to complement its shimmery effect.

Silver Grecian Mini Dress, FAME AND PARTNERS, $219; Gold Vine Headband, LULU FROST, $195

To get the look: Create an elongated oval shape to your eye with a sheer bronze shadow, and then pat some pewter shadow, like ColourPop Liberty, onto the inner and outer corners of your eye, and under your lash line for dimension. Next, trace the upper and lower inner rim of your eyes with black liner (try MAC Cosmetics Pro Longwear Eye Liner), subtly contour your cheekbone with a powder that is a deeper shade than your skin tone, like Neutrogena Mineral Sheers Powder Foundation, and put a clear balm on your lips, like H&M Conscious Lip Balm in "Raspberry."

Silver Grecian Mini Dress, FAME AND PARTNERS, $219; Gold Vine Headband, LULU FROST, $195; White Crystal Flower Ring, LELE SADOUGHI, $150

To add the Grecian look of this dress, Polko says to go for braids, and then add a bejeweled headband underneath the braids to finish your look.

Models: Naja Derenoncourt, Kamie Crawford

Get non-boring fashion and beauty news directly in your feed. Follow Facebook.com/CosmoBeauty.

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An interconnected system

Dr. Gregory Poland's obese patients know they're at risk for heart disease and diabetes, and they've heard their weight could doom them to an early death. But few recognize just how vast an impact obesity has on all their body systems -- from their brains to their skin to their immune systems, which Poland studies at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "The human body was designed to be elegantly redundant and interconnected," he says. In effect, obesity leaves no system untouched. Here are eight lesser-known ways it leaves its mark on the immune system:

1. It weakens your immune responses.

Think about the immune system as a three-brigade army: The front-line system, also known as the innate immune system, first fights against invaders without knowing their specific identity. Next, the adaptive immune response makes antibodies to protect against future invaders. At the same time, the body develops memory cells to help recognize the same pathogen in the future. On all three levels, obese people's systems are weaker, says Poland, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic, where he also directs the Vaccine Research Group. "That whole system is suppressed and broken in obese people," he says. "It's a very, very difficult problem."

2. It makes you more prone to infections.

Whether recovering from a scrape or a surgical incision, obese people's cuts can more easily lead to infection -- particularly if they're severely obese, says Dr. Aaron Glatt, an infectious disease specialist and chairman of the Department of Medicine at South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside, New York. "Sometimes the layers of fat prevent the healing from easily occurring; sometimes the wound can't be kept clean," he says. That's why it's important for medical staff to keep an eye on obese patients' blood sugar levels (higher levels can compromise healing), even if they don't have diabetes, Glatt says.

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3. It contributes to the development of autoimmune disorders.

Poland calls it the "Goldilocks dilemma" -- the idea that the immune system is supposed to maintain a balance between responding "vigorously" to external threats like infection-causing pathogens and giving its own body's cells a free pass. But in obese people, Poland says, "that balance is turned upside down." As a result, obese people are more susceptible to autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, he says. Other research also implicates obesity in the development of Crohn's disease and multiple sclerosis.

4. It makes you more susceptible to colds.

At the same time, while the immune system is on overdrive in obese people when it doesn't need to be, it's left under-responding to real threats like an everyday cold. "[My obese patients] will acknowledge ... that they seem to get more colds, and the colds seem to hang on longer," Poland says. And they're right. To make it worse, obese people with colds typically aren't treated like other immune-compromised populations, such as children, the elderly and people with bone marrow transplants. "They don't get the health care they deserve to have given the risk," Poland says.

5. ... and the flu.

Just how much obesity affects the immune system became clear during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. "Obesity turned out to be a very clear-cut risk factor for severe infection in both children and adults, and it was a clear-cut risk factor for an increased risk of death," Poland explained to a group of journalists at an obesity fellowship program in February. Specifically, adults with body mass indexes over 30 were 3.1 times more likely to die from the infection than people of lower weights, while adults with body mass indexes over 40 were 7.6 times more likely to die.

6. ... and pneumonia.

It doesn't stop there: Flu complications, like pneumonia, are more likely among obese people, in part because obesity can make it difficult to take deep breaths -- part of the reason obese people are also more prone to sleep apnea. "The chest pad prevents them from ventilating, particularly when they're lying in a hospital bed," Poland explained in February. Meantime, the belly's pressure on the abdomen pushes up the diaphragm, limiting the lung's expansions and contractions. "And when those secretions pool into the lungs," he says, "pneumonia results."

7. It lowers the flu vaccine's effectiveness.

If we know obesity makes you more prone to infections like the flu, can't we just double-down on efforts to get that population vaccinated? Fat chance. As it turns out, vaccines are generally less effective among people with obesity for the same reason they're more susceptible to diseases in the first place: Their bodies are in a constant state of "immunodeficiency," Poland explains. In some ways, obese people's immune systems, he's found, actually look like those of older adults. "That shocked us," he says, "and may be among the reasons they can't respond to these vaccines."

8. ... as well as other vaccines' effectiveness.

It's not just the flu vaccine that's compromised by obesity. Other research has found that hepatitis A and B, as well as tetanus shots, are less effective in obese people. When it comes to the HPV vaccine, it's not only less effective, but obese people are less likely to adhere to the three-dose schedule, although no one knows why, Poland says. Some vaccine resistance might have to do with needles that aren't long enough to cut through the fat and reach the muscle. "There is no dosing recommendation or specific vaccines that have been devised for the obese," Poland says. "I think the reality is, we're going to have to."

A solution in sight?

Meantime, Poland has a few tips for obese patients who are trying to lose weight -- a goal that can boost the immune system, in addition to delivering other health benefits. Eat with chopsticks, which forces you to slow down and recognize when you're full, he suggests; shop the perimeter of the grocery store (where the fresh produce resides) and make time to move every day. "Everything in moderation," Glatt adds. And while you work the weight off, don't forget to wash your hands frequently and thoroughly -- a practice that can save normal-weight people up to two episodes of respiratory disease and one episode of vomiting or diarrhea a year. "So in some ways," Poland says, "it's even more important that obese people wash properly."
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in its first extensive remarks on cybersecurity following the theft of $81 million from accounts it held for the central bank of Bangladesh, said the incident is a "wake-up call" for the global financial system and the Fed is taking the issue "very seriously."



However, a senior New York Federal Reserve official said in an interview with CNBC that the central bank has no authority to inspect or oversee the cybersecurity precautions at foreign central banks that keep their assets at the New York Fed. That means there can be varying cybersecurity risk levels around the world for transactions between global central banks and the New York Fed.



The New York Fed stands at the center of the globalized, dollar-denominated world, maintaining as many as 250 accounts for central banks that contain approximately $3 trillion in assets. One of the reasons those funds are concentrated in New York is that the United States is seen as among the safest places in the world for central bankers looking to protect assets. At the same time, that massive pool of money represents a rich and tempting target for international thieves and their growing attempts at cybertheft.

The amounts involved are staggering: The Federal Reserve official told CNBC, for what appears to be the first time, that as much as $80 billion is electronically wired into or out of international accounts at the New York Fed on an average day.



"I'm surprised it hasn't happened before," said a former senior New York Fed official who left the bank several years ago, referring to cyberthefts from the Fed.



Current and former Fed officials in this story spoke to CNBC on condition of anonymity.

In February, cybercriminals attempted to transfer $951 million from the account of the Bangladesh Central Bank at the New York Fed. Of that amount, $81 million was sent to accounts in the Philippines and then onto casinos there. The remaining transfers were blocked before the money could be sent from the New York Fed. It is unclear where the missing money is now, or who stole it. One technique that may have been used in the heist is inserting malware into the system involving SWIFT electronic messages that are used in international finance to authorize the transfer of money between financial institutions.



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The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, which is itself operated by a financial cooperative based in Brussels, said in a statement Tuesday that it "is aware of a malware that aims to reduce financial institutions' abilities to evidence fraudulent transactions on their local systems." SWIFT also said that the Bangladesh hack is not the only time thieves have attempted to break into an international financial institution's software. "There are other instances in which customers' internal vulnerabilities have been exploited," SWIFT said. The cooperative said it made a mandatory software update available to its customers this week.



The New York Fed has repeatedly emphasized that its own computers were not compromised in the Bangladesh case. However, it appears that the overall process for transferring money out of accounts at the New York Fed was compromised.



At the New York Fed, the official declined to say what measures, if any, the institution has taken to tighten security in the wake of the attack. "We can't comment on specific security procedures and internal processes for obvious security reasons," he said.

The official added that security by end users of electronic systems and the bank is "critical to the stability of the global financial system."



Still, the official acknowledged the Fed has no ability to control cybersecurity procedures at the roughly 250 foreign central banks around the world that have accounts at the Fed. "Every user of authenticated financial messaging traffic is ultimately responsible for its own systems," the official said. Pressed on whether the Fed should take a more aggressive role in the cybersecurity of its foreign counterparts, the official said: "I guess I'm struggling a little bit to understand in what context we would be involved."



"For example," the official said, "why would the Bank of England have any right to come into the Fed and look at the end security of our systems?"



In a 2014 operating circular issued to institutions seeking electronic connections to the Federal Reserve, the Fed wrote that those institutions should comply with security measures "required" by a reserve bank, but each one should also "exercise its own independent judgments about security and additional steps or procedures needed to prevent fraud, unauthorized access or other unauthorized use of an Electronic Connection."







That raises the question of just who is responsible for covering the loss when money is stolen from Fed accounts. In the same circular, the Fed spelled out what it considers its own liability. "The Reserve Banks are not liable for loss or damage resulting from a problem beyond their reasonable control," the Fed wrote. That includes "malware received from or introduced by any entity other than a Reserve Bank."



It's unclear whether there have been any other previous heists from accounts at the Fed. Asked whether there have been other hacking attempts to fraudulently transfer assets out of a Fed account, the official said: "I am not aware of attempts in the central bank context." CNBC then asked whether there had been hacking attempts in a non central-bank context  that is, in the accounts the Federal Reserve maintains for private banks. A Federal Reserve spokesperson declined to answer and said simply: "Check with the private banks."



The public would not necessarily know if even large amounts of money have ever been stolen from accounts at the New York Fed. The Fed says it is not bound by any disclosure requirements to report thefts. "I am not aware of any laws or regulations that require public disclosure, certainly by the Fed," the official said.



CNBC contacted a number of large banks to ask if they would have to disclose a cyberheist from their accounts at the Fed. One bank said it would not have to make any public disclosure of such a heist, so long as the amount stolen was not material to the bank. The private bank would have to file what's known as a "suspicious activity report" of illicit hacking to the U.S. Treasury, but those documents are not released to the public.



A former federal law enforcement official said public disclosure of thefts from the New York Fed would improve security, and keeping incidents hidden could make matters worse. "If it's under the table and nobody sees it, I think that does a disservice because I think the problem continues to grow and fester unchecked," he said. He explained that law enforcement would sometimes like thefts to be kept confidential during investigations to avoid tipping off thieves as to how much investigators know.



But generally, he said both the big banks and the New York Fed are averse to disclosing cybertheft: "They don't want people to lose confidence in the integrity of the system, that's why."



Historically, there is one incident on the public record in which accounts at the New York Fed were tapped by a fraudster. In the 1980s, thieves used apparently bogus Telex messages to route money into private accounts. In that case, the central bank account victimized was not that of Bangladesh, but Uganda.









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Photo credit: Getty Images

From Cosmopolitan

If you, like Meghan Markle, are pregnant, the last thing you want to think about is contracting Zika, the mosquito-borne virus that can cause birth defects like microcephaly, eye problems, hearing loss, and impaired growth. To alleviate anxieties, Cosmopolitan.com spoke with the doctors of the Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey (RMANJ) about how you should prepare yourself for a Zika-free nine months if you're pregnant or trying to conceive.

1. If you travel to one of the Zika-infected regions like the Caribbean, Mexico, or Brazil before you get pregnant, wait at least two months after you get back to try to conceive. But be aware that this timeframe is a bit of a moving target. The original recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control was to wait four weeks; now they've pushed it back. It could change again as more research emerges.

2. Men can harbor Zika in their sperm for as many as three months if they get infected. Because Zika can be sexually transmitted, this means no unprotected sex for that duration after travel. Some men are opting to freeze their sperm before going on vacation to Zika territories, then unfreezing it when they return so they can safely try to get their partners pregnant without the wait.

3. While not a must, you may want to limit contact with people who have recently returned from risky areas. The hypothetical concern is that a mosquito could bite an infected person you're hanging out with, then turn around and bite you. But the risk may be small. "I don't think I would discourage contact, but obviously it's a personal preference," says Thomas Molinaro, MD, MSCE, FACOG, a reproductive endocrinologist at RMANJ. "I can't say you should never leave your house for the next nine months and just sit in air conditioning."

4. Preventing mosquito bites is paramount. The good news is that there are repellants safe for use during pregnancy that work against the Aedes species of mosquitoes that can carry Zika. The most effective repellants are Sawyer Picardin and Natrapel 8 Hour, according to a May 2018 study from Consumer Reports. They contain picardin, an alternative to the more toxic chemical DEET. Repellants containing DEET, like Off! Deep Woods VIII, are also very effective, but how DEET affects fetuses has not been widely studied yet. One study of 471 baby boys who were born with a common birth defect affecting their urethras found that a woman's use of DEET within the first three months of pregnancy correlated to an 81 percent increased risk of that defect, called hypospadias. But another study of women in Thailand who used DEET during their second and third trimesters found no impact on the health of their babies compared with women who did not use DEET.

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Some doctors believe the benefits of not getting bitten may outweigh the potential harms of repellents when it comes to Zika and consider it safe to use DEET in small amounts. Check here to see if the repellent you're considering is registered with the Environmental Protection Agency, which means the company has provided technical data on its product's safety and effectiveness.

5. If bug repellent chemicals freak you out, and you're in an area of active Zika transmission, avoid going outside at dusk, especially when it's humid. When you do go out, wear light colors and long sleeves as much as possible. But also beware of getting overheated, a pregnancy no-no. If you have a backyard, consider putting up screened-in mosquito netting. Be sure to check your door and window screens for any tears before summer hits.

6. Avoid standing water, where mosquitoes breed. It is wise to avoid outdoor swimming pools, fountains, birdbaths, and flower pot saucers or empty yours if you live in an area where there is active Zika transmission.

7. If you do get bitten, see your doctor and ask to be tested for Zika. Only about 20 percent of people who get Zika show symptoms like rash, joint pain, fever, and red eyes. There is a test you can take to find out if you were infected, but be warned that it's not easy to access. Doctors have to work with state and local health departments to obtain and interpret the test, something called a reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) on serum. Then the test can take 12 to 20 days to turn positive. If you get bitten by a mosquito in any area with active Zika transmission, see your health-care provider and ask for the serum test (ZIKV RT PCR and Zika IgM), even if you are asymptomatic. If you do come down with symptoms, get the test within seven days. Then, even if your test was negative, make sure you get an ultrasound at 18 to 20 weeks to assess the fetus for possible brain anomalies.

8. Stay up-to-date on the latest research. We still don't really know how likely it is that a fetus will be affected if the mother is infected. Researchers are working to collect more data to fill in the major gaps in general Zika knowledge.

9. Want to escape town for a summer babymoon? Check frequently with the CDC to make sure your destination is Zika-free. The website is updated every day with new cases; bookmark it here. "No one knows how the mosquitoes in the U.S. will spread," Dr. Molinaro says. "An Alaskan cruise is looking pretty good right now."

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('You Might Also Like',)
(Images courtesy IMAX)

NASA has a new documentary out, a humorous, heartwarming look at life on the International Space Station. The space agency has also just released an IMAX flick that turns a concerned gaze toward our planet and what were doing to it. You can see both for the price of one, because theyre the same movie.

A Beautiful Planet  NASAs eighth collaboration with IMAX  performs one of those roles better than the other.

Still, if youve yet to attend one of NASAs social-media meet-ups to hear astronauts talk about their work (and you should absolutely do so if you ever have a chance, especially if its one that involves a launch), then this 3-D movie narrated by Jennifer Lawrence and debuting April 29 may be the next best thing.

A home away from our home

Over the movies 46 minutes, crew members from Expeditions 42, 43, and 44 teach us that the ISS  big enough to see from the ground, continuously occupied by humans since Nov. 2, 2000  is both a research facility and a home.

We see how astronauts and cosmonauts flood a narrow passageway to the airlock to hug new crews as they float from their Russian Soyuz capsule into the station. We hear the wistfulness in Barry Butch Wilmores voice as the NASA astronaut muses about boarding a Soyuz to return to Earth: We are not going to have that fellowship with those people ever again.

(Sadly, there are no shots of launches, something IMAX does exceedingly well.)

The movie, directed by Toni Myers, also effectively captures the untidiness of life in zero gravity. NASAs Terry Virts describes the process of unloading cargo from a SpaceX Dragon as organized bedlam and relates how easily things float away: We lost a 14-inch torque wrench for five weeks.

Hilarity ensues when Wilmore has so much trouble wriggling out of his space suit that fellow astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti must float above him and push the suit away from him with her feet.

(Wilmore was at a reception that followed the screening I attended Friday at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, so I could not resist inquiring if hed ever felt like asking Does this space suit make me look fat? He laughed and replied that space suits make everybody look fat.)

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We watch space travelers from the U.S., Russia, Europe and Japan exercise on a treadmill and on an industrial-looking contraption that helps that them do squats. We see the ISSs menu enlivened by the delivery of an espresso machine and the successful cultivation of lettuce. And we get a quick overview of zero-G hair care. (Virts jokes about cutting Cristoforettis hair: Of all the things we do as astronauts, this scares me the most.)

The 3-D effects help make all this real, maybe too real. I felt a little queasy watching the first scenes onboard the ISS.

The view of here from up there

We also see the astronauts and cosmonauts looking out the window  a lot. As Ive heard at least a dozen of them say, the view from the ISS  especially from the seven large windows of its Cupola module  is the most distracting thing about living off Earth. A Beautiful Planet treats us to such sights as the cities of Europe aglow at night (and in contrast, the near-total darkness of North Korea); the Caribbeans shades of blue; and the green glow of the aurora borealis.

The most memorable view: the silent, explosive bursts of light inside clouds that mark lightning below. You see power, observes Virst.

ISS crewmembers also spy the damage that we have done to a planet (which, as Lawrence remarks in the movies opening sequence, is the only place we know in all the universe to harbor life).

Some of this damage  such as massive deforestation in Madagascar and Brazil  is visible from the ISS. Other insults  such as the the slow increase in the planets temperature caused by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases  are less apparent, and here the movie struggles.

In these sections, Lawrence becomes the voice of doom, intoning that, Californias reservoirs could soon be dry and, The city of New Orleans could be gone.

More compelling testimony about the importance of not sitting on this slow-motion disaster comes from the astronauts themselves. Cristoforetti says that seeing the thinness of Earths atmosphere from above it forced her to see our planet as a spaceship itself.

But what, exactly, are we to do? Lawrence improbably suggests that the answer lies in adopting nuclear fusion, the unobtainium of power generation.

Look, I would like to see us use fusion for something besides thermonuclear weapons. But by the time we have that or any other miracle source of energy working reliably, well either have braked climate change through other means or the Kennedy Space Center will have long since drowned along with much of the rest of Floridas coastline.

And back on Earth, the bigger problem is that a large fraction of the American public remains militantly invested in denying human-caused climate change. The day after the screening, the Washington Posts op-ed page featured a George Will column with this are-you-kidding-me serving of word salad, Is change necessarily ominous because todays climate is necessarily optimum?

This movie alone wont dent that level of denial. But what will?

Email Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com; follow him on Twitter at @robpegoraro.
Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Julie Jacobson/AP, AP (2)

Like Stalin and Churchill huddled over a map of Europe in 1944, Ted Cruz and John Kasich began a very odd week by announcing  publicly, for reasons known only to them  that they were divvying up the remaining primary states in order to maintain individual spheres of influence. Cruz would get Indiana (which is next to Ohio), while Kasich would get New Mexico (which shares a border with Texas). Super-logical.

Of course, primary voters  unlike, say, Polish peasants  tend to do whatever they want, so all this plotting didnt exactly make Cruz and Kasich grandmasters of global domination. More like a couple of guys playing Risk in somebodys basement. Ural attacks Irkutsk! Coming for you next, Kamchatka!

And like most games of Risk, the whole thing fell apart within a few hours, as both campaigns backtracked and said they werent telling voters in any state not to vote for their chosen candidates, exactly. They just werent telling voters they should vote for their chosen candidates, either.

Im not telling anybody anything in Indiana, because Im not competing there, Kasich told the baffled hosts of NBCs Today show. He accused the media of obsessing over process, which seemed odd, since it was his and Cruzs campaigns that had apparently spent days, if not weeks, dividing up media markets according to the latest polls.

When Matt Lauer finally asked him point blank whom Republican voters in Indiana should vote for, Kasich replied: Im not getting into that, Matt. Things are not so plain and simple.

No offense to Lauer or Savannah Guthrie here, but when you manage to make a morning show interview look like a scene from Frost/Nixon, its probably an indication that you should step back and think through what youre doing.

In the end, the short-lived pact between Cruz and Kasich  followed closely by Cruzs equally odd announcement that he was taking on a running mate, but more about that in a minute  served only to make a couple of things even clearer than they were before.

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The first is that you should never, ever take strategic advice from Mitt Romney, unless it has to do with buying up companies and shedding overhead.

And the second is that there is a substantive vacuum at the heart of this years non-Trump campaigns  a vacuum that has, as much as anything else, enabled Trump to emerge, especially after Tuesdays romp through the Eastern Seaboard, as a near-certain nominee.

Its not just that the Cruz and Kasich campaigns managed, in the space of a few hours, to validate all of Trumps conspiracy theories about the dark soul of the Republican establishment  although they did that pretty well.

For weeks, after all, Trump has been going around saying that corrupt Republicans are rigging the system against him, even though, as Ive written before, the nominating rules of the party have always been the same.

But whatever high ground Trumps opponents may have commanded was pretty much squandered when Cruz and Kasich announced that they were, in fact, going to game the system in an effort to subvert Trump at the convention. Now, when Trump says the party elites are trying to rig the process and undermine the voters, youd have to admit hes not crazy.

Whats more illuminating about the nonaggression pact, though, is that it even seemed plausible to both sides in the first place. In a world where Cruz and Kasich, Trumps only remaining obstacles, were offering any galvanizing arguments of their own, there couldnt possibly be any discussion of one side ceding voters to the other.

They represent, after all, two sharply opposed views of the partys future. Cruz is a divider and a moral crusader, a peddler of nostalgia, a party crasher who essentially disdains government and those who serve in it.

Kasich is a bridge builder and a futurist, a successful insider who embraces the power of governance. Where Cruz sees a Republican Party that has destroyed itself by cravenly compromising its principles, Kasich sees a party that has grown too inflexible, too narrow and too often mean.

But neither camp has advanced much by way of a substantive vision. Cruzs campaign is a bland rhetorical exercise, lacking any signature proposals. Kasich goes on about the Ohio record, but I defy anyone to synthesize his plan for replicating that success as president.

So why should a bunch of principles get in the way of tactics?

Kasich can decry the medias focus on process, but the suggestion that he and Cruz could somehow appeal to the same voters in Indiana or New Mexico is a tacit admission of how mushy their underlying rationales still are. Its an admission that they havent asked Republican voters to choose any real direction for the party other than to stop Trump from becoming the nominee.

How else are we supposed to view the sudden political marriage of Cruz and Carly Fiorina? Other than to create the least likable ticket in human history, it only served to reinforce how cynically tactical Cruzs entire campaign really is.

No one can believe Cruz went through the rigorous process of choosing the best-qualified potential vice president in America before rushing out to introduce his new partner. What he did was to look at the demographics and decide that Trump had a particular vulnerability with women, and it had to be exploited now.

Trumps campaign apparatus, from all outward appearances, is about as orderly as a Pakistani traffic circle. The campaign manager who shoved a reporter got shoved aside, although now he may be back.

The new boss  who, according to my colleague Michael Isikoff, has some lingering business issues with Russian oligarchs in the Cayman Islands, no joke  is said to be on the outs already, after telling a roomful of Republicans that Trump was just an actor playing a role. Apparently this was meant to be reassuring.

But hey, train wreck or not, heres one thing no one can say about Trump  that he lacks an argument. Ask any third-grader in America  Im serious about this  what Trump wants to do as president, and Im guessing more than half of them will tell you hes going to build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it, or that hes going to make America great again, or that hes going to stop Chy-nah from stealing our money.

This cultural saturation isnt merely a measure of Trumps skill as an entertainer. Its also a reflection of how consistently hes held to his theme, how utterly fearless hes been in the face of endless derision and common sense.

Trump may be running the most disingenuous and synthetic campaign in memory, but he knows exactly what its about, and so does everyone else.

And because of this hes done to this years Republican race  and to the Cruz and Kasich campaigns  exactly what hes done to every building or airplane hes ever acquired, to every televised stage hes ever graced.

Hes made them all about Trump and nothing else.
By Bill Berkrot

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When Abbott Laboratories said on Thursday it would buy heart device company St. Jude Medical Inc for $25 billion, it set off a flurry of Wall Street speculation over whether Abbott Chief Executive Miles White is laying groundwork to split the company yet again.

Three years ago, White spun off Abbott's fast-growing branded drugs business into a new company, AbbVie, buoyed by top-selling arthritis medicine Humira, which helped AbbVie shares double. Abbott retained medical devices, nutritionals, diagnostics and some generic medicines.

Now with St. Jude, Abbott is creating a cardiovascular device division with more than $8 billion in sales. Two months ago, White announced plans to buy a diagnostics company, Alere Inc, for $5.8 billion. With these two new businesses, the company is set up for yet another spin-off in two to three years, analysts and investors said.

White, however, sounded a cautionary noted when asked on a conference call with analysts if a spin-off of the combined cardiovascular businesses is in the offing.

"I think right now you should be anticipating the integration of St. Jude and the performance of the company overall going forward as a healthy growth company in the healthcare space," White said.

All the same, analysts and investors say that historically in healthcare, the one-two step of an acquisition and then a spin-off has paid off for investors.

Historically, when companies split, they perform quite well, said BMO Capital Markets analyst Joanne Wuensch, saying this acquisition looks like a candidate for such an event. "We remember when Baxter bought (Swedish dialysis firm) Gambro that was sort of signal that it would eventually split into two."

Baxter did spin off its biotech drugs business into Baxalta while retaining its hospital products and other businesses.

There has been similar speculation that Pfizer's deal in February 2015 to buy Hospira for $15 billion was intended to make its off-patent drugs business more attractive as it contemplates selling that unit. Pfizer said it expects to make that decision by the end of this year.

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Jeff Jonas, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, said he does not believe White will engineer another split for two to three years. Abbott will need to work on integration and paying down debt, and see how the rapidly changing market for medical devices evolves. "But he's certainly kept that option open now," said Jonas, whose firm owns shares in Abbott, St. Jude and Alere.

"I think he'd sell off the medical devices," Jonas said. "Then you'd have nutritionals, generic drugs and diagnostics, which may or may not go with medical devices."

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot and Caroline Humer; Editing by Leslie Adler)
ABC is adding another revival of a classic game show to its summer lineup: a new Match Game, from FremantleMedia North America, hosted and executive produced by Alec Baldwin. The 30 Rock alum, who is said to be commanding one of the highest game-show-hosting salaries ever, will be donating his talent fee to his wife Hilarias foundation.

I am beyond grateful to ABC and FremantleMedia for the chance to host a summer series of the legendary

Match Game

Alec Baldwin

, said Baldwin. Hilaria and I are thrilled to donate this fee to arts-related charities. And we look forward to having a lot of fun.

The 10-episode series, which will tape in New York where Baldwin lives, will premiere June 26 and air Sundays at 10 PM as part of ABCs Sunday Fun & Games block, joining Celebrity Family Feud with Steve Harvey and The 100,000 Pyramid with Michael Strahan.

The panel game show features two contestants as they attempt to match the answers of six celebrities in a game of fill in the blank.

Baldwins rich deal also is said to include ownership in a potential syndicated Match Game offshoot.

Match Game is one of the crown jewels in our portfolio, and were thrilled to

ABC logo

be bringing it to viewers in primetime, said FremantleMedia North America co-CEO Jennifer Mullin, who will executive produce alongside Baldwin.

Match Game initially premiered on NBC in 1962 and was rebooted several times over the next several decades. A Mark Goodson/Bill Todman production, the original version aired on NBC daytime from 1962-1969. It returned in 1973 on CBS, with an expanded panel, larger cash payouts and more of a comedic emphasis. The CBS series moved to first-run syndication in 1979, ending in 1982. From 1975-1981, it ran with a companion primetime version, Match Game PM, which also went to syndication. The show made a full circle back to NBC in 1983 as part of a 60-minute hybrid series with Hollywood Squares. Its most recent home was at ABC for a run in 1990, moving into syndication in 1998. In 2013, it ranked as No. 4 on TV Guides list of 60 greatest game shows ever.

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Baldwin, one of the most popular Saturday Night Live hosts, won two Emmy Awards, three Golden Globes and seven consecutive SAG Awards as Best Actor in a Comedy Series for his role on NBCs 30 Rock. He received an Oscar nomination for The Cooler and a Tony nom for A Streetcar Named Desire.

Last fall, he served as a guest announcer on NBCs Best Time Ever With Neil Patrick Harris.

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By Natalie Grover

April 28 (Reuters) - An imminent ruling on Acadia Pharmaceuticals Inc's drug for Parkinson's disease psychosis is being closely watched by a Bermuda-based company with a similar treatment for dementia.

Axovant Sciences Ltd's experimental drug for Lewy body dementia - after Alzheimer's, the most common form of progressive dementia - would benefit from the approval of Acadia's drug, Axovant's chief development officer told Reuters.

The decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is due by May 1. Analysts expect a positive ruling after the drug won the backing of an independent panel of experts.

Both companies' drugs are designed to treat conditions that have no specific pharmaceutical therapy approved by the FDA. The drugs target the 5-HT2A receptor in the brain, which is linked with neuropsychiatric disturbances.

But while San Diego-based Acadia's Nuplazid seeks to treat Parkinson's disease psychosis (PDP), Axovant is targeting an oft-misunderstood form of dementia that affects 1.4 million Americans.

Lewy body dementia, or LBD, is characterized by a build-up of abnormal proteins called Lewy bodies in parts of the brain that control cognition, movement and behavior.

Since the symptoms resemble those of better-known diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, LBD is underdiagnosed.

In fact, conclusive diagnosis is possible only after death; an autopsy of comedian Robin Williams found the condition.

Dr. Lawrence Friedhoff, Axovant's chief development officer, said approval of Acadia's drug would open a regulatory pathway for a class of drugs that would also include his own company's treatment, called Nelotanserin.

Since the meeting of the panel of experts on March 29, shares of Acadia and Axovant have risen about 25 percent and 17 percent respectively.

"If Acadia is successful with Nuplazid, that would have a positive read-through for Nelotanserin," Friedhoff said in an interview. "It would suggest that we have a good chance."

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Friedhoff has decades of experience in the field. A former executive at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co and Eisai Co Ltd , he has sometimes been called the 'Father of Aricept' for his work in developing the top-selling drug for Alzheimer's.

Nelotanserin is being tested in two mid-stage studies to treat visual hallucinations and REM sleep behavior disorder. The earliest the drug be approved is 2019, according to Axovant.

Acadia's Nuplazid is expected to generate peak sales of $300 million, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters Cortellis.

The potential for Nelotanserin is even greater.

Piper Jaffray analyst Charles Duncan said the drug's addressable population was about quadruple that of Nuplazid as a treatment for Parkinson's disease psychosis alone. Acadia could also test its drug on LBD patients, he added.

"Lewy body dementia is one of the most interesting, under-recognized disorders," said Duncan. "I suspect you'll see Acadia go there too." (Reporting by Natalie Grover in Bengaluru; Editing by Robin Paxton and Ted Kerr)
Acura is hoping its buyer base will identify well with turning 30.

The luxury arm of Honda was the first of several premium brands to come out of Japan when it launched in 1986. Although Acura hasn't enjoyed the long-running success of Lexus, the division has staked out a claim for itself as a tech and performance-oriented choice.

READ: Porsche 960 mid-engine supercar back in the spotlight

Acura's new ad, titled 30 Years Young, features the brand's new voice: Michael B. Jordan (he was also in Acura's Super Bowl 50 spot). The actor has appeared in a number of Hollywood films but is perhaps best known for his role in Friday Night Lights. Ironically, Jordan is 29, so he can't quite identify with turning 30.

New ad features Honda founder Soichiro Honda

The brand's buyers can, apparently: Acura said in a release issued to the media that it has a larger percentage of buyers who fall under the Millennials category than any other luxury brand.

CHECK OUT: Driving the Superformance Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe

As for the ad itself, it takes viewers time traveling through Acura's history, highlighting cars like the original NSX and, briefly, the Integra Type R. The ad is clearly geared toward enthusiasts, and, interestingly, it doesn't shy away from Acura's connection to parent company Honda. Founder Soichiro Honda even makes an appearance a few times.

Acura says its dealers will get in on the 30th birthday party, too, with collateral related to the ad campaign.

_______________________________________

Follow Motor Authority on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.




Last year Nigerian-English grime music pioneer Skepta joined Drake to remix afropop sensation Wizkid's single "Ojuelegba," rapping "When I was in school being African was a diss/ sounds like you need help saying my surname Miss." This unguarded admission of otherness was no doubt relatable to those who have been in a similar position.

But these days a new generation of creatives on the continent and across the diaspora is challenging outdated stigmas about being African. They are sharing art, fashion and music that facilitates self-directed dialogues about their backgrounds and experiences. More important, they're doing from a personal and authentic point of view.

African fashion in particular is having a global moment, and retailers are taking notice. Labels such as Mango have responded by attempting to project a more multicultural identity. However poorly received efforts like the Kendall Jenner-fronted "Tribal Spirit" campaign for Mango only illustrate the importance of allowing the real people behind the inspiration to lead the conversation.

Talented makers like Loza Maleombho have been doing exactly that. The Ivorian designer even caught the eye of Beyonce, who went on to feature the her latest collection in the politically charged "Formation" music video.

That's only one of many labels dedicated to bringing a more multicultural point of view to the often-insular fashion industry. Here are 12 African labels you should get to know.

Osei Duro

Osei Duro

Former classmates Maryanne Mathias and Molly Keogh launched Osei Duro in 2009 after becoming fascinated with Ghana's textile industry while traveling the country. Though neither are of African descent, both felt there was a unique opportunity to align themselves with a network of local artisans who wanted to bring their skills to a larger audience.

These days, the duo are based in Accra's East Legon area, churning out seasonal collections that are carried in boutiques like Opening Ceremony and Creatures of Comfort. "When we were originally planning to come here [Ghana] we wanted to work with co-ops and smaller artisans. It was really important to us to support smaller scale businesses," Mathias said in an email.

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Osei Duro

Though the brand has grown tremendously in the past few years, Mathias and Keogh continue to focus on small-scale production and traditional methods that support the slow-made processes that have been replaced by the fast fashion cycle. From hand-dyed patterns to traditional wax prints, Osei Duro embodies a refreshing blend of laid-back California style and a uniquely Ghanaian aesthetic.

Loza Maleombho

Source: Loza Maleombho

You may or may not recognize designer Loza Maleombho's clothing from Beyonce's "Formation" music video. Garments from the SS16 collection, inspired by traditional masks from Cote d'Ivoire's Northern region, were front and center in more than a few scenes.

Source: Loza Maleombho

The label first launched in 2009 in New York before Maleombho moved production to her childhood home of Cote d'Ivoire in 2012. Born in Brazil and raised in the United States and Cote d'Ivoire, Maleombho's work is informed by the spirit of multiculturalism and an appreciation for the histories and subcultures of every place she's ever lived. It's an incredibly heady infusion that never repeats itself.

Maki Oh

Source: Maki Oh

First lady Michelle Obama, Beyonce and Rihanna are a few of the high-profile names who have been spotted in Lagos-based Amaka Osakwe's label Maki Oh. She founded the line in 2010 and quickly became among the first Nigerian brands to attain global recognition. In 2012, Osakwe made her New York Fashion Week debut, garnering warm reviews. The New York Times even praised her collection for utilizing skill sets that were being forgotten.

"It is left to creative and artistic designers like Amaka Osakwe, behind the Maki Oh label, to revitalize dying skill," the Times wrote. "She found a Nigerian woman believed to be the last person using the traditional handwork process of making adire, a fabric with an indigo-dye pattern. The designer reinvented the method, using silk instead of cotton, to create her own prints that she then mixed with silken fringing."

Source: Maki Oh

Osakwe's interest in traditional dye and textile-making methods are really what set her collections apart. Most of her garments are hand dyed and use natural ingredients like indigo leaves and other plant-based byproducts. Osakwe also frequently inserts historical dialogues into her collections and has designed clothing around regional coming-of-age ceremonies in Ghana, and traditional funeral ceremonies in Nigeria.

Brother Vellies

Source: Brother Vellies

When Brooklyn, New York-based creative Aurora James started Brother Vellies she had the simple goal of introducing people to her favorite African footwear. James's first shoe silhouette was the veldskoen, which is essentially a forerunner to the desert boot. After an overwhelmingly positive reception, James began exploring other ways to update little-known styles and share them with the world.

Source: Brother Vellies

Today, Brother Vellies operates a small-scale production model out of its workshop in South Africa. Each day a handful of master craftspeople make a few dozen pairs of shoes which are then shipped around the world.

If there was any doubt that Italy, England and Portugal aren't the only places artisanal shoemaking can happen, Brother Vellies is proving the naysayers wrong.

Raffia

Source: Raffia

When Maddona Kendona-Sowah noticed that Northern Ghanaian textiles were often neglected by other designers she decided to solve the problem herself. In 2013 she founded Raffia, a line that combined her economic development background with her fashion aspirations.

Source: Raffia

Today the label produces collections that utilize regional textiles to educate others about the traditions of Northern and Upper Eastern regions of Ghana. Even the name Raffia is an ode to Kendona-Sowah's childhood in the North. The area's dry climate reminded her of the raffia palm before it has been processed for use.

Studio 189

Source: Studio 189

Actress Rosario Dawson teamed up with Abrima Erwiah to conceptualize Studio 189, a far-reaching fashion platform that is creating a space for slow-fashion and specialty craft. Though based in Accra, Ghana, the label sources items from all over the continent, including mud cloth from Mali and wax prints from Nigeria.

At the heart of the brand is community, sustainability, and a belief that fashion can be used to spark large-scale social changes. Since its founding in 2011, Studio 189 has collaborated with Vogue and also founded the Fashion Rising collection, launched in support of One Billion Rising, an initiative that aims to end violence against women.

Chemphe Bea

Source: Chemphe Bea

Designer Emily Okoampah founded Chemphe Bea in 2010 while studying fashion design in London. Okoampah's designs often call on brightly colored wax print fabrics which she combines with textiles like silk or taffeta to create unexpected textures.

She also frequently experiments with draping to create figure flattering garments for all body types. Okoampah's clothing was featured in the first season of the web series An African City after she caught the eye of the show's creator, Nicole Amarteifio.

Christie Brown

Source: Christie Brown

Aisha Ayensu's label Christie Brown finds the sweet spot between modern and traditional with its contemporary-leaning aesthetic and well-articulated point of view. Each collection taps into trends ranging from military-influenced styles to the voluminous sleeves and puffed skirts popular in the '80s.

Source: Christie Brown

Yet even while experimenting with a bevy of references, Ayensu's success in juxtaposing trend-right details with traditional fabrics manages to subtly tie in her identity as a modern African woman and situate her collections in the now.

Korlekie

Source: Korlekie

Korlekie is the brainchild of former London College of Fashion student Beatrice Korlekie Newman. The semi-eponymous label comes from Newman's middle name, which she inherited from her father who is of the GA-Adangbe tribe in Ghana's Eastern region. Roughly translated "Korlekie" means "queen of eagles", indicating a majesty Newman felt was present in her brand.

Source: Korlekie

The collection melds traditional UK manufacturing techniques with hand-knitted details, heavy beadwork and hand-placed embellishments that pay homage to Newman's African background. Since its founding in 2012, Korlekie has appeared on celebrities like Rita Ora and Ellie Goulding and has been featured in Vogue and Elle.

Sindiso Khumalo

Source: Sindiso Khumalo

Botswana-born, South African womenswear designer Sindiso Khumalo wasn't always going to work in fashion. In fact, she studied architecture at the University of Capetown before relocating to London to work with award-winning Ghanaian architect David Adjaye. In London, Khumalo eventually enrolled in prestigious fashion school Central Saint Martins where she studied textile design.

Source: Sindiso Khumalo

She founded her label in 2012 and was shortlisted for Elle's "Rising Star" awards that very same year. One year later, in 2013, one of her dresses was awarded "Most Beautiful Object in South Africa" by Design Indaba Capetown.

In 2015, Khumalo went on to receive Vogue Italia's "Who Is On Next?" award in Dubai. Her architecture background is often reflected in clean silhouettes and precise textile patterns offset by bright, playful colors.

Lisa Folawiyo

Source: Lisa Folawiyo

Nigerian designer Lisa Folawiyo founded her now-eponymous label in 2005 under the name "Jewel by Lisa." She is among the first wave of African fashion designers to achieve international acclaim. Although many of her designs use traditional West African textiles, Folawiyo's ability to find the intersection of history and the contemporary give her garments a global appeal and timelessness that has caught the eye of luxury retailers like Moda Operandi and Selfridges.

Source: Lisa Folawiyo

As the best stories often go, Folawiyo began her career with no traditional fashion background  she actually studied to be a lawyer. Despite this, she went on to win the African Fashion Awards in 2012 and is currently among The Business of Fashion's #BoF500. The comprehensive list encompasses global creatives who are shaping the fashion industry today.

Lanre Da Silva Ajayi

Source: Lanre Da Silva Ajayi

Hailing from Lagos, Nigeria, designer Lanre Da Silva Ajayi's calls upon the country's history of tailoring to produce delicate, feminine garments that are reminiscent of the 1940s and '50s. Ajayi began her career as a banker, but after spending much of her spare time designing clothing for herself and her family, decided to transition into fashion design full time.

Since then, Ajayi has collaborated with Dutch wax print fabric behemoth VLISCO on special campaigns, and also shown at the Arise Made in Africa New York Fashion Week presentation.

These 12 labels are doing far more than offering up gorgeous clothing  although we have more than a few pieces on our wish list. Their influence is globalizing the fashion industry and reminding fashion editors, retailers, stylists and shoppers that cutting edge fashion exists outside of the New York, Paris, London and Milan circuits.
Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. APD surpassed earnings expectations in second-quarter fiscal 2016 (ended Mar 31, 2016), backed by its restructuring and self-help actions. However, its sales fell year over year and lagged expectations.

The industrial gases giant logged second-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.82 per share, up 17% from $1.56 per share recorded in the year-ago quarter. Earnings also beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.80, providing a positive surprise of 1.11%. Adjusted earnings exclude charges associated with business separation, business restructuring and pension settlement expenses.

Net income from continuing operations, as reported, was up 30% year over year to $379.8 million or $1.74 per share. The bottom line was supported by lower costs. Cost of sales for the reported quarter declined roughly 11% year over year to around $1.5 billion. Selling & administrative, and R&D expenses also fell year over year.

Revenues declined roughly 6% year over year to $2,271.2 million in the reported quarter and missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2,330 million. The top line was hurt by currency headwinds and lower energy pass-through of 3% each, as volumes and price remained consistent with the prior-year quarter.

Segmental Highlights

Revenues from the Industrial Gases  America segment went down 10% year over year to $798 million in the reported quarter, hurt by lower energy pass-through of 6% and unfavorable currency impact. Lower demand in Latin America and weaker North American steel and oilfield services markets reduced volumes by 2%. Prices rose 1%.

Sales from the Industrial Gases  Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) segment fell 6% year over year to $420 million due to unfavorable currency impact and lower energy pass-through. Underlying sales were up by 1% as lower volumes of 1% were counter-balanced by higher pricing of 2%.

Sales from the Industrial Gases  Asia segment rose 3% year over year to $406 million on the back of a 10% increase in volumes, mainly from new plants and strong businesses. Unfavorable currency translation hurt sales by 6% and pricing dipped 1%.

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Revenues from the Materials Technologies segment declined 7% year over year to $494 million, hit by 6% lower volumes. Sales of Electronics Materials fell 10% on lower delivery system volumes. Performance Materials sales dropped 5% year over year due to lower volumes and reduced pricing.

The Energy from-Waste (EfW) segment of the company was discontinued. To write down the assets to their estimated net realizable value, a pre-tax loss of $946 million was recorded in the reported quarter.

Financial Position

Air Products ended the second quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $313.1 million, up roughly 51.7% year over year. Total long-term debt fell around 9.5% year over year to $3,573.2 million. Operating cash flow for the reported quarter rose 10.2% year over year to $1,087.5 million.

Outlook

Air Products expects earnings from continuing operations for third-quarter fiscal 2016 to be in the range of $1.87$1.92 per share, up 13%16% from the prior-year quarter. The company also raised its earnings guidance for fiscal 2016 to the band of $7.40$7.55 per share from the earlier view of $7.25$7.50.

Air Products lowered its estimated capital expenditures for fiscal 2016 to around $1.2 billion from the previously stated $1.3 billion.

Air Products, in Sep 2015, announced plans to separate its Materials Technologies unit through a tax-free spin-off.

Following the spin-off, both Air Products and the Materials Technologies businesses will operate as two best-in-class public companies with separate business models. The spin-off will enable Air Products to become the safest and most profitable industrial gas company in the world, providing outstanding service to its customers. Also, it will allow the company to focus entirely on specialty materials.

Zacks Rank

Air Products currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Some other favorably ranked companies in the chemical space include Akzo Nobel N.V. AKZOY, Arkema S.A. ARKAY and Koninklijke DSM N.V. RDSMY, all sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

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By Lisa Barrington and Stephanie Nebehay BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) - Air strikes destroyed a hospital and killed dozens of people in rebel-held areas of Aleppo, including children and doctors, in an attack that a U.S. official said appeared to be solely the work of the Syrian government. The city of Aleppo is at the center of a military escalation that has undermined peace talks in Geneva aimed at ending the five-year-old war. U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura appealed to the presidents of the United States and Russia to intervene to salvage a ceasefire that was "barely alive". The truce is intended to allow an opportunity for peace talks and delivery of humanitarian relief. Six days of air strikes and rebel shelling in Aleppo, which is split between government and rebel forces, have killed 200 people, two-thirds of them on the opposition side, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says. The "catastrophic deterioration" in Aleppo over the last 24 to 48 hours has jeopardized the aid lifeline that supplies millions of Syrians, said Jan Egeland, chairman of the U.N. humanitarian task force. "I could not in any way express how high the stakes are for the next hours and days." The U.S. State Department said Syria's air strike on the hospital in Aleppo was "reprehensible," and it called on Russia to use its influence to pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government to stop the attacks. "Once again we call on the regime to cease these absolutely senseless attacks, which are of course violations of the cessation of hostilities," State Department spokesman John Kirby said. A State Department official said there were indications that the bombing of the hospital was conducted solely by the Syrian government. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Russia had an urgent responsibility to press the government of its ally Assad to stop attacking civilians and observe the ceasefire. The Geneva talks aim to end a war that has created the world's worst refugee crisis, allowed for the rise of Islamic State and drawn in regional and major powers, but the negotiations have all but failed and a truce to allow them to take place has collapsed. Winding up the latest round of talks, de Mistura said he aimed to resume them in May, but gave no date. "Wherever you are, you hear explosions of mortars, shelling and planes flying over," said Valter Gros, who heads the International Committee of the Red Cross Aleppo office. "There is no neighborhood of the city that hasnt been hit. People are living on the edge. Everyone here fears for their lives and nobody knows what is coming next," he said. A Syrian military source said government planes had not been in areas where air raids were reported. Syria's army denied reports that the Syrian air force targeted the hospital. The Russian defense ministry, whose air strikes have swung the war in favor of President Bashar al-Assad, also denied its planes were responsible. The British-based Observatory said 31 people were killed as a result of air strikes on several areas of opposition-held Aleppo on Thursday. In addition, it said at least 27 people were killed in the air strike on the hospital late on Wednesday. Rescue workers put the toll higher. In government areas, rebel mortar shelling killed at least 14 people, the Observatory and Syria's state news agency SANA reported. The war in Syria has killed more than 250,000 people though with tens of thousands unaccounted for, some say the death toll may be as high as 400,000. "WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?" The bombed al-Quds hospital was supported by international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which said it was destroyed after being hit by a direct air strike that killed at least three doctors. This devastating attack has destroyed a vital hospital in Aleppo, and the main referral center for pediatric care in the area," said Muskilda Zancada, MSF head of mission, Syria. "Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage? ICRC spokesman Ewan Watson told Reuters in Geneva: "It is unacceptable, any attack on hospitals is a war crime. But it is up to an investigator and it is for a court to take that decision on whether it is a war crime or not." Peace talks, which have been deeply divided on the future of Assad, looked to be over last week when the opposition walked out, saying the Syrian government was stalling for time to advance on the ground, and calling for implementation of a U.N. resolution requiring full humanitarian access to besieged areas. De Mistura voiced deep concern at the truce unraveling in Aleppo and at least three other places, but also said he saw some narrowing of positions between the government and opposition visions of political transition. "Hence my appeal for a U.S.-Russian urgent initiative at the highest level, because the legacy of both President Obama and President Putin is linked to the success of what has been a unique initiative," de Mistura told a news conference. They should "be able to revitalize what they have created and which is still alive but barely". The United States and Russia must convene a ministerial meeting of major and regional powers who compose the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), he said. Egeland said: "So the appeal of Staffan de Mistura to the United States, to Russia and to the other powers in the ISSG is 'you did it once, you can do it again.'" FUTURE OF ASSAD CRITICAL Bashar Ja'afari, who led the government delegation, has given no sign of ceding to the opposition HNC's central demand for a political transition without Assad. The government has said the future of Assad is non-negotiable. De Mistura, asked whether Assads fate was discussed, replied: "We didnt get into names of people ... but actually how to change the current governance." The U.N. envoy said the two sides remained far apart in their vision of a political transition, but shared some "commonalities", including the view "that the transitional governance could include members of the present government and the opposition, independents and others". Giving a chilling statistic about the backdrop of violence against which the talks played out, de Mistura said that in the past 48 hours there had been an average of one Syrian civilian killed every 25 minutes and one wounded every 13 minutes. Hossam Abu Ghayth, 29, a documentary film-maker living in the rebel-held area of Kalasa in Aleppo which was bombed on Thursday, said by WhatsApp: "There are still planes ... They're hitting everything, mosques, markets, residential buildings, field hospitals. Dozens of people were under the rubble and the Civil Defence could not dig out the bodies because of the intensity of the bombardments, he said. Tony Ishak, 26, a resident of the government-held area of Suleimaniya in Aleppo and a politics student, said via WhatsApp: "It's been really bad for around four days now, the situation is worse than bad. Shells are falling like rain everywhere. The hospitals are full." (Writing by Peter Millership; Reporting by Lisa Barrington, Tom Perry, Suleiman al-Khalidi, John Davison, Stephanie Nebehay, Shadia Nasralla, Lesley Wroughton and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Giles Elgood)
ABC is betting big on gameshows this summer, on Thursday adding a revival of The Match Game hosted by Alec Baldwin to its slate.

Sundays in particular will be heavy on classic game reboots, with the network creatings what its calling a Sunday Fun & Games Block. Following encores of Americas Funniest Home Videos, ABCs Sunday lineup starting June 26 will feature the Steve Harvey-hosted Celebrity Family Feud at 8 p.m., the Michael Strahan-fronted $100,000 Pyramid at 9 and now Match Game at 10.

Match Game, produced by FremantleMedia North America, is a panel gameshow that features two contestants as they attempt to match the answers of six celebrities in a game of fill-in the missing blank. It will be executive produced by Alec Baldwin and FMNAs Jennifer Mullin. ABC ordered 10 hourlong installments.

I am beyond grateful to ABC and FremantleMedia for the chance to host a summer series of the legendary Match Game,  said Baldwin. Hilaria and I are thrilled to donate this fee to arts-related charities. And we look forward to having a lot of fun.

The list of celebrity contestants will be announced at a later date. Match Game began on NBC in 1962 but didnt take off until it moved to CBS in the 70s. Charles Nelson Reilly, Brett Somers and Richard Dawson were among the regular panelists during Gene Rayburns lengthy run as host.

ABCs summer programming will also include a revival of To Tell the Truth, hosted by Anthony Anderson and featuring Betty White, NeNe Leakes and NBA star Jalen Rose as special guests. Also from Fremantle North America, it will air for six weeks on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. starting June 13.

And a second season of 500 Questions will premiere Thursday, May 26. Nightline co-anchor Dan Harris will host the show from Mark Burnett and Mike Darnell, which is produced by MGM Television in association with Warner Horizon Television.

Related stories

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Story continues

TruTV Orders 'Late Night Snack' Comedy Series, Announces Spring Premiere Dates

Berlin: Foresight Sells Demi Moore Movie 'Blind' to Multiple Territories (EXCLUSIVE)
Lara Croft has been found.

Alicia Vikander has signed on to star in Tomb Raider for MGM, Warner Bros. and GK Films, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

The movie project, which has Roar Uthaug (The Wave) on board to direct, will tell the story of a young and untested Croft fighting to survive her first adventure.

MGM and Warner Bros. are co-producing the film, with MGM overseeing production. They acquired the rights from GK Films, which had previously purchased the film rights in 2011 from Square Enix Ltd.

Graham King is serving as producer.

Angelina Jolie famously starred in the two previous Tomb Raider movies, 2001's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and 2003's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, which established her as a bankable, franchise-carrying international star.

Vikander, who won an Oscar for her turn in The Danish Girl, is hoping for a similar path, and the Tomb Raider movie gives the actress her own franchise after proving herself in acclaimed dramas.

Last year was a turning point for Vikander, who in addition to her Danish Girl Oscar win also starred in Ex Machina, Burnt and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. This year she will be seen in the drama The Light Between Oceans as well as the Matt Damon action pic Jason Bourne.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / ALIX RESOURCES CORP. ("Alix" or the "Company") (AIX-TSX:V) (37N.FFRANKFURT) announces it has completed an initial sampling program at its Jackpot Lithium property ("Jackpot Property") located in the Georgia Lake area within the Thunder Bay Mining Division, Ontario.

Approximately 90 kg of spodumene-bearing pegmatite rocks were collected from the surface and will be sent to the laboratory for assaying. At the request of Lithium Australia NL ("LIT")(LIT-ASX) an additional 5-10 kg sample will be shipped to Australia for testing using LIT's proprietary LIT's proprietary Sileach process.

Lithium was first discovered in 1955 at the Jackpot property in granitic pegmatites. The property covers the Jackpot lithium deposits, described by E.G. Pye in a 1965 report published by the Ontario Depart. of Mines on the Georgia Lake Area. The deposits were tested by a total of 32 holes drilled in 1955 by Ontario Lithium Company Limited an its associated company Conwest Exploration Co. Ltd. The drilling confirmed the presence of at least two spodumene-bearing pegmatite bodies, one at the surface (No. 1) and the other (No. 2) lying directly beneath the No. 1 deposit. Historical resources at Jackpot, comprising only the No. 2 Dyke pegmatite zone, was reported as 2Mt @ 1.09 Li2O estimated in 1956 by Ontario Lithium Company Limited*. The No. 2 pegmatite dyke, which was discovered by diamond-drilling, was intersected at 30 to 100 meters intervals over a strike length of 215 meters and at 30-60 meters intervals over a distance of 365 meters across strike. Dyke No. 2 is 4 to 20 meters thick, averaging 11 meters.

*The estimates presented above are treated as historic information and have not been verified or relied upon for economic evaluation by the Company. These historical mineral resources do not refer to any category of sections 1.2 and 1.3 of the NI-43-101 Instrument such as mineral resources or mineral reserves as stated in the 2010 CIM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves. The explanation lies in the inability by the Company to verify the data acquired by the various historical drilling campaigns. The Company has not done sufficient work yet to classify the historical estimates as current mineral resources or mineral reserves.

President and CEO Michael England commented, "We look forward to getting feedback from Lithium Australia with regards to samples collected from the Jackpot Lithium Project. We are also eager to commence work at our Electra Lithium Project in Mexico."

Managing director Adrian Griffin of Lithium Australia NL states "Lithium chemical production, from spodumene, needs to be accomplished without roasting, to get into the lowest cost quartile. That's what the Sileach process is all about. We will strive to give the Jackpot project the best possible process options, and that will start with Sileach evaluation."

The technical contents of this release were approved by Michel Boily, PhD, P.Geo a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. The properties have not been the subject of a National Instrument 43-101 report.

Alix Resources is a junior mining exploration company focussed on seeking and acquiring world class lithium projects globally. Alix continues to evaluate suitable prospects that fit the mandate of the Company.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Michael England"

Michael England, President, CEO, Director

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Telephone: 1-604-683-3995

Toll Free: 1-888-945-4770

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.

SOURCE: Alix Resources Corp.
From ELLE

While George Clooney has made his support for Hillary Clinton and distaste for Voldemort-er, Donald Trump-well-known, his much better half has held her tongue...until now.

Amal Clooney spoke up in an interview with the BBC on Monday, criticizing he-who-must-not-be-named for his xenophobic attitude and foretelling the dawn of a bright new day when he gets whooped by a lady.

"I mean, when you listen to what the leading candidate on the Republican side has been saying about building walls, about excluding Mexicans, and saying there has to be a complete shutdown on all Muslims coming in," Clooney said, it's obvious that this election is "very critical, perhaps more than in many other elections that have happened for a very long time."

Clooney continued:

If you actually look at what he specifically says in that now infamous speech about Muslims, he kept saying, "They only want jihad; they don't believe in our way of life; they don't respect our system." And when he says "they" ... And, you know, you watch the media coverage afterwards and people should've been saying, "Do you mean the 1.5 billion people around the world around the world who fit that description? Do you mean the people who are U.S. citizens, who are members of your military, the vast majority of whom are not extremist or violent in any way?"

But Clooney is hopeful that good will triumph over evil in the end. "If, at the end of all of this, he gets beaten by the person who becomes the first female president of the United States, then I think that would send a very positive message from the electorate back to him as to what they really think about that point of view," she said.
From Road & Track

This is the truck I was looking for. This is the truck I want. Not one with a 2.5-liter four-cylinder and not one with a 3.6-liter V6. When it comes to GM's midsize trucks, the diesel is the sweet spot.

I recently spent a week with the GMC Canyon diesel, and rarely have I found a better example of a good vehicle that has been transformed into a great one solely by the choice of engine. With the newly available 2.8-liter Duramax turbo-diesel, the GMC is the midsize truck many of us have been hoping for.

Note that while I haven't had the chance to test drive the Canyon's Chevrolet twin, the Colorado, it shares the same mechanicals. So I'd expect the same happy result.

Engine choice has always been important, but these days there are few that outright suck. Many are just fine. Like so-so, meh-to-middling, I-can-live-with-it fine. But often there's another engine choice offered on the same vehicle that makes it fabulous. So it's a shame if you buy a car and get stuck with the former.

Notably, the more expensive option is not always the better choice. Cadillac's 2.0-liter turbo four-cylinder, for instance, is my pick over the aging, naturally aspirated 3.6-liter V6. Both are available on the new CT6. The turbo is less expensive and delivers more torque lower in the rev range, which gives a readier response in a significantly less nose-heavy package.

The best way to avoid the wrong powerplant? Test drive all of the options. I'm amazed how many people are loathe to actually test drive their prospective buys at a dealership. So if you're doing it anyhow, try out every engine. Go ahead and dedicate the extra 30 minutes per powerplant and annoy the salesperson. Because the difference in something like the oil-burning Canyon and its gasoline brothers is a big one-and may well impact how much you do or don't love your shiny new automobile.

The difference in something like the oil-burning Canyon and its gasoline brothers is a big one.

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Perhaps your truck needs are similar to mine. You don't tow stuff, but you do need to haul wood and rocks and garbage cans, and you're likely to use your truck every day to commute or run errands. You want to be able to fit the damn thing in your garage. So a midsize is the right size for you.

But your first thought probably wouldn't be diesel. "A lot of people probably never considered one before," says Anita Burke, the chief engineer of GM midsize trucks. "But since its release four months ago, the order rate for the diesel has been very strong. People get in and drive them and they love them. You don't feel the bumps and bumps of the old diesels. This is not the diesel of old."

Burke says the company opted to wait for the second year to release the diesel to give themselves ample time to make sure everything was right. The company says that the Duramax is the cleanest truck diesel that it has every released. Like many new diesels, it uses urea to scrub nitrogen oxide from the exhaust, and GM recommends refilling the tank when you change the oil.

The engine that I thought I'd most enjoy in the Canyon, the 305-horsepower V6, just wasn't as smooth, responsive, or lovely as I'd envisioned. Torque isn't impressive at 269 lb-ft, and the six-speed automatic too often is on the hunt for a happy gear. And while the 2.5-liter four-cylinder seems like a progressive idea, its 200 hp and 191 lb-ft of torque lacks the real-world punch you want to live with. (At least the smaller engine is available with a six-speed manual.)

Compare those numbers with the livability of the turbo-diesel's 181 hp at 3400 rpm and 369 lb-ft of torque at 2000 rpm. That's 100 more lb-ft of torque than the V6, which doesn't reach its 269 lb-ft peak until 4000 rpm. And the diesel is even within spitting distance of the Chevy Silverado's 5.3-liter V8, which makes 383 lb-ft.

GM's aim was to create a diesel that produced none of the uncomfortable rumble or tremors common to the powerplant, and engineers were almost German in their over-engineering. Burke says that a "centrifugal pendulum vibration absorber" was designed into the transfer case, basically a mechanical damper that evens out the irregularities that transmit into the truck. All Canyons and Colorados come with hydraulic engine mounts, which help, and the diesel models get additional acoustic materials with more density.

The engine lends a constant thrum of competent power

It all results in a truck that is rewarding to both drive and ride in. No rough idle or uncomfortable shudders transmitting into your bone marrow. The engine lends a constant thrum of competent power, sweeping the truck up highway ramps and ably allowing merges into fast traffic. It also scoots around mountain roads. Big hills are no problem, and it's always fun to look down and watch the rpms steadfastly stick below 3000. You sweet, refined oil-burner, you.

And this time, GM's six-speed transmission doesn't need to do much at all. It's like the Maytag repairman in the commercial, just kinda hanging in the background looking for something to do.

The diesel is a $3730 option, and it only comes as a crew cab. And yes, diesel is more costly, but I still don't care. It makes 22 city, 31 highway, versus 18/26 for the two-wheel-drive V6. The four-cylinder, meanwhile, only manages 20/27 for the rear-wheel.

"Most midsize drivers use their vehicle every day, and the diesel's range is phenomenal," Burke says. "It really fits a lot of people who want that fuel economy and the low-end torque in a really drivable form. It makes my heart sing."

One expects the chief engineer to cry her vehicle's praises. But in this case, I don't disagree. The diesel Canyon left my heart feeling pretty glad, too.

Jason Harper, a contributing editor to Road & Track, has tested and written on cars for two decades. His scariest drive was a rally race in an original Lancia 037, his first drive of a supercar was the Porsche Carrera GT, and the only time he's gotten a speeding ticket was in a base Mini Cooper. His column, Harper's Bizarre, runs every Wednesday.
American Tower Corporation AMT is slated to release first-quarter 2016 results on Apr 29, before the market opens.

In the last reported quarter, the companys earnings surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 2.42%. Lets see how things are shaping up ahead of this announcement.





Factors to Influence the Quarter

In order to support the rising demand for LTE deployment, American Tower plans to construct nearly 2,500 sites across the world in 2016. Mobile subscriber growth has significantly boosted the wireless tower industry. Next-generation 4G LTE networks, and increased usage of smartphones and tablets are creating impressive demand for tower leasing. This has prompted carriers like Sprint Corp. S and T-Mobile US Inc. TMUS to aggressively deploy the technology, thus providing organic growth opportunities for American Tower, going ahead.

Moreover, American Tower is rapidly expanding in international markets, especially in the emerging Asian and Latin American markets. This geographic diversification will boost revenues.

Earnings Whispers

Our proven model does not conclusively show that American Toweris likely to beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate this quarter. This is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), 2 (Buy) or 3 (Hold) for this to happen. Unfortunately, that is not the case here as elaborated below.

Zacks ESP: American Tower has an Earnings ESP of 0.00%. This is because both Most Accurate estimate and Zacks Consensus Estimate stand at $1.25.

Zacks Rank: American Tower has a Zacks Rank #3, which increases the predictive power of ESP. However, the companys 0.00% ESP makes earnings surprise prediction difficult.

A Stock to Consider

Here is a company you may want to consider as our model shows it has the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter:

Host Hotels & Resorts, Inc. HST, with an Earnings ESP of +2.63% and a Zacks Rank #3.

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Zacks Investment Research
Libreville (AFP) - Amnesty International expressed alarm Thursday over the disappearance of more than 20 soldiers and police officers in Chad since this month's presidential election, calling on authorities to open an independent investigation.

"According to some media, more than 40 members of the defence and security forces may have gone missing since April 9," the rights group said.

Amnesty and the Chadian League of Human Rights (LTDH) "are in the position to confirm more than 20 cases of suspected disappearances," the two groups said in a statement.

Soldiers had voted on April 9, a day before the April 10 election that saw President Idriss Deby extend his 26 years in power, despite opposition claims that the vote was marred by widespread fraud.

In at least two polling stations, military officials forced troops to publicly vote for the ruling party.

"Those who did not obey orders were either publicly beaten or locked in a cell for several hours," the statement said.

Authorities said the soldiers had been sent on a mission. On April 21, four of the missing men were shown on national television.

"But no information on their whereabouts has been communicated to their families, who have lost contact with them and do not know when they may be coming back," the rights groups said.

"Chadian authorities must shed light on this," the statement added, urging "an independent inquiry into mistreatment suffered by those who would not have voted for the ruling party".

Civilian disappearances have also been reported since Deby's re-election, including that of Mahamat Ahmat Lazina, president of the National Movement for Change in Chad (MNCT), who vanished on April 19.
LONDON (Reuters) - Miner Anglo American said on Thursday it had agreed to sell its niobium and phosphates businesses to China Molybdenum for $1.5 billion in cash to reduce its debt level. The businesses, consisting of mines, plants, processing facilities, chemical complexes and deposits, are located in Brazil. The deal is subject to certain approvals and is expected to close in the second half of the year. "The proceeds from this transaction ... will enable us to continue to reduce our net debt towards our targeted level of less than $10 billion at the end of 2016," Anglo's Chief Executive Mark Cutifani said in a statement. (Reporting by Sarah Young; Editing by Susan Fenton)
* Sale price exceeds market expectations

* Deal is subject to approvals, expected to be sealed by year-end

* Share price climbs 3 percent then pares gains (Adds Brazil context, Deutsche Bank advising, updates share price)

By Barbara Lewis

LONDON, April 28 (Reuters) - Anglo American has agreed to sell its niobium and phosphates businesses in Brazil to China Molybdenum for $1.5 billion in cash, it said on Thursday, as it seeks to cut debt in a radical restructuring of the global mining group.

Anglo American shares rose more than 8 percent, outperforming the sector as analysts said the price was higher than expected and boded well for further deals.

"The proceeds from this transaction ... will enable us to continue to reduce our net debt towards our targeted level of less than $10 billion at the end of 2016," Anglo's chief executive Mark Cutifani said.

The niobium and phosphates businesses consist of mines, plants, processing facilities, chemical complexes and deposits.

Niobium is an ingredient of specialist high-strength steels while phosphate production serves Brazil's domestic market for fertilisers.

The deal reflects Asia's increasing interest in Brazil's agricultural sector. Shipping data analysed by Reuters showed the world's traditional trading houses have lost their century-old dominance of Brazil's grain market to Asian rivals.

While Japanese firms have directly acquired Brazilian soybean producing companies, China has bought stakes in international firms involved in fertiliser and other sectors that indirectly boost production.

Analysts said the purchase price was around $500 million above expectations following reports of interest from other firms, including Apollo Global Management LLC and Vale.

Bernstein said in a note the deal should give investors confidence that Anglo can realise good value for its assets and marked a shift in strategy.

"Anglo American is dressing itself up as an attractive takeover target," it said.

The group is selling parts of its business after a commodities rout that has triggered a fight for survival even among heavyweight miners.

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As it aims to cut its net debt to less than $10 billion by the end of the year from $12.9 billion at the end of December, the ratio under scrutiny is net debt to earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation.

BMO Capital Markets that ratio should shrink to less than three from a previous projection of 3.3.

On first analysis it said the deal could reduce Anglo Amercian's debt sufficiently for it to regain an investment grade credit rating following its downgrade to junk by credit ratings agencies.

The deal is subject to certain approvals and is expected to close in the second half of the year.

China Molybdenum, which is advised by Deutsche Bank, is one of China's largest producers of molybdenum, used in making alloys.

(Additional reporting by Sarah Young in London and Caroline Stauffer in Sao Paulo; Editing by Greg Mahlich and David Evans)
By Matt Siegel and Swati Pandey

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Apple Inc expanded its Apple Pay digital wallet in Australia on Thursday after ANZ became the country's first bank to support the mobile payment service, executives at the pair told Reuters.

Apple Pay allows users to register credit cards on devices such as iPhones, and pay for goods and services by swiping the devices over contactless payment terminals. Apple charges card providers for transactions via the service, which it introduced to Australia last year with American Express Co.

The latest partnership extends the service to ANZ customers and represents the culmination of months of talks with the bank and three bigger peers. Of the four, ANZ and Westpac Banking Corp have already agreed to support rival Android Pay from Alphabet Inc unit Google.

Collectively, the four banks account for 80 percent of all credit cards that consumers have linked to mobile payment systems, in a country with a relatively high rate of contactless payment.

The partnership also coincides with Apple's first-ever drop in iPhone sales during a quarter in which services such as apps, music and payment emerged as the firm's second-largest business.

"Our customers ... are much closer to being able to leave their wallets at home," Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay, said in an interview.

Apple has partnered with a bank widely seen as trailing its three bigger peers in digital technology, a situation ANZ's new Chief Executive Shayne Elliott has set out to change with Apple Pay, as well as by hiring Google's Australia managing director.

"It would be pretty hypocritical of me to ... do all this hoo-ha about digital banking and then not be at the forefront of change," Elliott said in an interview.

Shares of ANZ rose over 0.5 percent early on Thursday, more than other banks as well as the broader market.

For Apple, the partnership is a "coup" as it would increase pressure other banks to follow suit, said Foad Fadaghi, managing director of technology researcher Telsyte.

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"The similar forces that drove other numerous banking corporations in say the U.S. or Europe to get onboard will probably start to also kick in Australia as well," he said.

Analyst David Ellis at Morningstar said one partnership does not automatically entail success because the big four banks have such dominance over payment systems.

"It's a different market here in Australia to the U.S. and to other global economies ... but who knows," he said.

"iPhones have the highest market share in Australia of smartphones, so the banks won't want their customers being put at any disadvantage to competitors within their peer group."

(Reporting by Matt Siegel and Swati Pandey; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
Tech giant Apple have paid tribute to the young and talented employee who was found dead in the conference room of their headquarters in California.

The Hispanic staff member was found with a head wound and a gun by his side and his death is apparently being treated as a suicide.

An Apple spokesman said: We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of a young and talented co-worker.

Our thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends, including the many people he worked with here at Apple.

Apple said they were providing assistance to the staff members co-workers.

Headquarters: Apple has around 10,000 employees at its Cupertino base (Rex)

The victim has so far not been identified, while the Santa Clara County Sheriffs department confirmed that no one else was involved in the incident.

They added that their was no risk to other staff and that the death was an isolated incident - despite earlier reports that another woman was involved in an apparent dispute with the man.

His death came on the day that Apple announced its first ever decline in iPhone sales.

The firm has around 10,000 employees at their Cupertino headquarters in California.

Top pic: Reuters
Apple on Thursday morning issued an official statement after a man was found dead on Wednesday at Apple's corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California. Officials from the Santa Clara Countys Sheriffs Department confirmed on Wednesday that they responded to a call around 8:35 a.m. local time stating that there was a "person down" on Apple's Cupertino campus. Upon arriving at the scene they discover the body of a deceased male. The coroner is currently examining the body and the cause of death has not yet been confirmed, but reports suggest that the victim died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Now, Apple has released a statement confirming that the deceased man was indeed an Apple employee.

MUST SEE: Completely change the look of your iPhone with round folder icons, no jailbreak needed

"We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of a young and talented coworker," an Apple spokesperson told Matt Keller, a reporter with local ABC affiliate ABC 7. "Our thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends, including the many people he worked with here at Apple. We are working to support them however we can in this difficult time."

The Sheriff's Department isn't confirming much at this point, and the man's identity and cause of death have not yet been released to the public. In light of Apple's confirmation that the deceased man was an Apple employee and that it is working to support his friends and family, it is apparent that his family has been notified of his death.

TMZ at first reported that multiple people may have been involved with the incident, including a woman who was being removed from Apple's campus by security personnel. That report was dismissed by police soon after. The site later reported that the deceased person was a Hispanic male Apple employee, and that a gun was found near the body in a conference room at Apple's headquarters. Those details have not yet been confirmed by authorities.

Story continues

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This article was originally published on BGR.com
By Julia Love and Anya George Tharakan

(Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O) on Tuesday posted its first-ever decline in iPhone sales and its first revenue drop in 13 years as the company credited with inventing the smartphone struggles with an increasingly saturated market.

The company's sales dropped by more than a quarter in China, its most important market after the United States, and it also forecast another disappointing quarter for global revenues.

Its shares fell about 8 percent, dropping below $100 for the first time since February. A hike in Apple's share buyback and dividend as well as bumper revenue from services failed to mollify investors.

Apple's results followed disappointing quarterly reports from Microsoft Corp(MSFT.O) and Google-owner Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), and microblog Twitter (TWTR.N) also on Tuesday reported results that missed expectations.

Apple said it sold 51.2 million iPhones in its second fiscal quarter, down from 61.2 million in the same quarter a year ago but above analysts' estimates of about 50 million devices.

While Apple executives had predicted iPhone sales would decline this quarter, they must reassure investors that the drop represents a momentary roadblock, rather than a permanent shift for the product that fuelled its meteoric rise.

After years of blockbuster sales, many investors fear the iPhone has reached saturation, spelling the end for Apple's exponential growth.

"Apple needs to come up with a radical new innovation or product rather than just the current incremental improvements to existing products. This is the only way in which it will reinvigorate sales growth," said Neil Saunders, chief executive of research firm Conlumino.

Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri told Reuters that the success of the iPhone 6 a year earlier had set a difficult bar to beat in the second quarter. "The iPhone 6 is an anomaly," he said.

But Chief Executive Tim Cook told analysts that the smartphone market was not growing, reinforcing wider concerns of saturation.

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Cook also conceded that the iPhone 6S was driving customers to replace phones at a much lower rate than the 6. "I don't mean just a hair lower; it's a lot lower," he said. "If we'd had the same rate on 6S as 6, it would be time for a huge party."

He pointed to the services division, which includes Apple Music and the App Store, as a bright spot. Its revenue grew 20 percent to $6 billion and surpassed iMac and iPad sales.

Cook also hinted that Apple had more gadgets to come.

"The future of Apple is very bright," he said. "Our product pipeline has amazing innovations in store."

Earnings of $1.90 per share fell short of the average analyst estimate of $2 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Revenue of $50.56 billion missed expectations of $51.97 billion.

Apple forecast third-quarter revenue of $41 billion to $43 billion, short of the Wall Street consensus of $47.3 billion.

Apple also said it was raising its capital return program by $50 billion through a $35 billion increase in its share buyback authorization and a 10 percent rise in the quarterly dividend.

iPHONE SE DEMAND STRONG

In March, Apple released the iPhone SE, a smaller, 4-inch-screen phone featuring much of the company's latest technology. Although sales of the phone were not captured in the second quarter, the device is off to a strong start, particularly in emerging markets, Maestri said.

"The situation right now around the world is that we are supply-constrained," he said. "The demand has been very, very strong."

Although Apple's revenue in Greater China fell 26 percent from the year-ago quarter, Maestri stressed that the company was "extremely optimistic" about China. "We continue to make a lot of investment there," he said.

Cook said that mainland China sales were down only 7 percent in constant currency, attributing much of the Greater China drop to Hong Kong, where strength in the local dollar, which is pegged to U.S. currency, deterred tourist shopping.

The company did not comment on prospects for its iBooks Stores and iTunes Movie service, which were shut down last week in China.

The drop in after-hours shares wipes out roughly $46 billion in market capitalisation, roughly the value of heavy equipment maker Caterpillar Inc (CAT.N).

In reaction to Apple's results, shares of its suppliers Skyworks Solutions (SWKS.O), Qorvo (QRVO.O), Broadcom (AVGO.O) and NXP Semiconductors (NXPI.O) all fell 2 percent or more on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Julia Love in San Francisco and Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Noel Randewich and Rodrigo Campos; additional writing by Peter Henderson; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
28 Apr - It was reported that Arci Munoz is set to star in a new TV series alongside award-winning actor, Jericho Rosales.



According to ABS-CBN News, the actress, who had a successful run on her previous drama, "Pasion de Amor", stated that she is thrilled to portray a new character and to work with Rosales for the first time.



"I've met him before and I think it will be good to work with him as well. He is a very nice guy and very approachable. I am just really excited," said Munoz.



The actress revealed that she will play the role of a provincial girl in the new drama, who travels to Manila to achieve her dream of becoming a lawyer.



"It's something new. The story is quite heavy but I am really excited that we will be shooting in Caramoan. It's a new combination. I will be doing this with Jericho Rosales. It's quite a blessing," she enthused.



The untitled drama will be directed by FM Reyes and also star John Estrada and Gelli de Belen.



(Photo source: instagram.com/ramonathornes)
MILAN (Reuters) - Italian police issued arrest warrants on Thursday for six people suspected of conspiring to join Islamic State, and court documents said three of them had been discussing possible attacks on the Vatican and the Israeli embassy in Rome. Four of the suspects - a couple living near Lake Como, a 23-year-old-man and a woman, all of them Moroccans - were detained in Italy on Thursday, Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli told a news conference. The other two - a Moroccan man and his Italian wife - left Italy last year, traveled to Iraq and Syria and are still on the loose, Romanelli added. Italy has not suffered the kind of deadly Islamist attacks that hit France and Belgium, but authorities have arrested a number of people suspected of planning assaults. Transcripts of wire-tapped phone conversations between three of the suspects, contained in the arrest warrant and seen by Reuters, mentioned the possibility of an attack against the Vatican and the Israeli embassy in the Italian capital. "I swear I will be the first to attack them in this Italy of crusaders, I swear I'll attack it, in the Vatican God willing," one of the arrested men is quoted as telling the man on the run in the transcript. In a separate conversation with another of the suspects arrested on Thursday, the same man said he wanted to hit the Israeli embassy in Rome and had contacted an Albanian man to get a gun. "The new aspect here is that we are not talking about a generic indication (of an attack) but a specific person being appointed to act on Italian soil," Romanelli said. "Rome attracts attention because it is a destination for Christian pilgrims," the prosecutor added. A lawyer appointed to represent two of the suspects declined to comment, saying he was waiting for court papers. A 22-year-old Somali asylum seeker who worked as an imam was detained in southern Italy last month on suspicion of planning an attack in Rome. (Reporting By Emilio Parodi, writing by Isla Binnie; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky and Andrew Heavens)
This story first appeared in the May 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Getting your pop-culture artifact into the Smithsonian depends on a few factors - including what it's made of. "We try not to collect too much plastic because it's a new material and it deteriorates badly," says Valeska Hilbig of the National Museum of American History, which recently rejected a famous movie prop for that reason. (She won't say which.) The surest way into the collection is an invitation, but studios regularly make offerings - sets, props, costumes, scripts - hoping they'll be accepted. In 2013, 30 artifacts from 13 Warner Bros. films were accepted, including Christopher Reeve's Superman suit. Lately, the Smithsonian has shown an openness to controversy, accepting Sony's gift of two bags of "Blue Sky" meth from Breaking Bad. ("If you had told me there'd be crystal meth in the same museum as ... Dorothy's ruby slippers, I'd have told you you were using too much of Walter White's product," Vince Gilligan joked at the time.)

The National Air and Space Museum was gifted a model of Star Trek's Enterprise by Paramount in 1974, and the National Portrait Gallery houses dozens of star portraits, including renderings of Katy Perry and Brad Pitt. "We work directly with artists," says spokeswoman Bethany Bentley, citing a portrait of House of Cards' President Frank Underwood that curators discovered while visiting the London studio of Jonathan Yeo, who has painted Kevin Spacey several times. A Hollywood caveat: While acceptance into the Smithsonian guarantees the best preservation, it doesn't guarantee an audience. Only 1 percent of the collection is on display at any given time.

Read More: 20 Hollywood Hotspots of D.C.'s Obamalot
Turnbull

In Australia, a bold, and potentially damaging experiment is playing out to see what happens when a former venture capitalist with no scientific experience takes over a top science research agency.

After facing an intense domestic and international backlash, the Australian government is scaling back a plan to make deep cuts to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the countrys premiere science research organization, and instead save a sliver of its climate research capabilities.

Those cuts, critics have argued, would have decimated its world class climate science research units.

SEE ALSO: Nearly 3,000 climate scientists condemn Australia's dramatic research cuts

However, the new plan, which involves setting up a new national climate center in Hobart, Tasmania, is not earning much praise either.

Marshall's Plan

Larry Marshall, the CSIRO director who has previously worked as the managing director of Southern Cross Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, is still planning to get rid of about 75 climate science-related positions as part of a restructuring aimed at turning the CSIRO into an agency geared toward conducting research that will have the potential to bring in outside money from the private sector.

In other words, he is running the science organization more like a venture capital firm, rather than an organization that funds science that provides a public good, such as climate modeling that enables individuals to make decisions on where to buy a house based on sea level rise projections.

Marshall, who took over CSIRO last year, has deemphasized science research for the public good, instead focusing on research that could have near-term commercial applications.

The CSIROs climate functions are the equivalent to the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S., which monitors, researches and communicates how the Earths climate is changing, from the depths of the seas to the upper atmosphere and into space.

Story continues

Image: Daniel Kalisz/GETTY Images

In February, word came that Marshall was pushing a plan to cut as many as 350 CSIRO jobs, including 110 out of the 140 staff members in its oceans and atmosphere division, in order to bring in a workforce that would spin off profitable ventures.

This plan sparked Parliamentary hearings that continued this week, as well as worldwide condemnation from climate scientists, who said it would damage international scientific research that is vital for understanding the rapidly warming changing world.

Marshall and other CSIRO officials argued that the changes were necessary to position Australia for a new wave of innovation-driven economic growth.

Indeed, just like a startup, our nation needs to re-invent itself (pivot) in order to navigate a new and uncertain future, Marshall stated in a memo to CSIRO staff on Feb. 4.

CSIRO pioneered climate research  But we cannot rest on our laurels, that is the path to mediocrity, he wrote.

Is the new climate center an addition, or downsizing?

The new plan, announced on April 25, would set up a climate research center in Hobart with 40 staff members.

"Our Strategy 2020 is focussed on collaboration, global connection, excellent science and innovation  all four of these pillars are at work in this Centre," Marshall stated in an April 26 press release.

The center would have guaranteed funding for the next decade. However, even under the new plan, about 75 climate scientists and climate-related support staff would still lose their jobs, with notices expected to go out during the first week of May.

Image: APRob Griffith/AP

According to two CSIRO staff members, one of whom requested anonymity due to a lack of authorization to speak to the press, morale at the organization is low, and there is a likelihood that the months of uncertainty and unflattering media reports will contribute to a brain drain of climate researchers to other institutions abroad.

One CSIRO employee told Mashable in an email that a new climate center is nothing different to what we already have but smaller.

Currently there are two climate programs with more than 130 people, which will be replaced by one center with far fewer people, the employee stated.

The ability to bring in outside funding for CSIRO research will still be a criteria in judging an employees value, this person said, noting this is a change from before when scientists were judged by the quality of their work and the number of scientific studies they contributed to.

My priority is not to do good quality science  it is to do 'sexy science' that politicians can write media sound bytes around so they will then keep funding me, the CSIRO employee stated.

The new staff training programs for staff are about teaching us to set up spin off companies. This is CSIRO's metric now.

John Church, a CSIRO senior fellow in oceanography, told Mashable via email that the new climate center will focus specifically on climate modeling, with some other climate-related activities being retained elsewhere within CSIRO, though details on that have not been revealed.

In addition to climate modeling, currently CSIRO also observes the climate, contributing to monitoring networks of Antarctica and the Pacific Ocean, for example.

Its not clear if any of these observation networks, which are key to understanding the role the Southern Ocean plays in the setting the planet's thermostat, will be shut down or transferred to another agency or institution.

Image: GIPHY

For example, according to Paul Durack, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and a former CSIRO scientist, no mention has been made of a ship-based observing network that CSIRO helps operate, known as GO-SHIP.

"The long story short of the new announcement is that they are continuing to progress with a significant cutback to the climate science capacity of CSIRO (and Australia)," Durack told Mashable. He called the new climate center a "rebranding" effort meant to fend off political pressure to reduce the climate program cuts.

The climate center announcement is not staving off the likelihood that some top climate researchers will leave Australia.

...Yes morale is low," Church said. "Some of the retained staff may leave (I know of some applying for jobs), but people like living and working in Hobart, Church said.

According to Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, the focus of the new center could be helpful since it effectively prioritizes some of the topics to be dealt with.

But the New Zealand native told Mashable that 40 employees is extremely small: not enough.

Trenberth said its unclear exactly what the 40 employee minimum actually means.

If they are all real scientists and in addition they have software engineers, and support scientists so the total staff is more like 100, plus administrative support, then this might be a positive development, he said in an email. I am interested to know these details though and what drops on the floor.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, who previously worked at CSIRO and is now at the University of New South Wales, said the biggest loss from any scientific brain drain and related layoffs will come in the form of gaps in Australians knowledge of how to adapt to and mitigate global climate change.

While a decade of promised funding is encouraging, it is still certain that the quality climate research undertaken at CSIRO will be seriously compromised, she said in a statement.

This goes deeper than people losing their jobs  the cutting-edge climate projection tools that underpin Australian adaptation and mitigation to climate change will almost certainly suffer, meaning that all Australians will suffer too.
Sydney (AFP) - Australia cannot be "misty-eyed" about boatpeople, the country's prime minister said Thursday, the day after his immigration policy was thrown into disarray when Papua New Guinea ordered an offshore processing camp to close.

Malcolm Turnbull, who likely faces an election in coming weeks, said allowing even genuine refugees who arrived by boat to settle in Australia would encourage more people to make the risky journey.

"By stopping the people-smuggling we have stopped people drowning at sea," he told reporters.

"We cannot be misty-eyed about this. We have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose."

Canberra has a long-standing policy of sending boatpeople to processing centres in Papua New Guinea's Manus island and the Pacific nation of Nauru.

Applicants who are deemed legitimate refugees are offered resettlement in PNG or Cambodia, but not admitted to Australia.

The policy was dealt a blow Wednesday when the PNG government ordered the Manus island facility to close after the supreme court ruled it was unconstitutional and illegal.

Canberra officials are set to hold talks with their Port Moresby counterparts next week on what to do with the 850 or so men held there.

But Turnbull was unequivocal.

"They will not come to Australia. That is absolutely clear and the PNG government knows that, understands that very well," he told reporters.

"To do that would send a signal to the people-smugglers to get back into business, and that is utterly unacceptable."

Boat arrivals have been halted since the government put in place its tough policies, compared to at least 1,200 people dying trying to reach Australia by sea between 2008 and 2013.

Australian media have reported the government is trying to negotiate deals with Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

It also has a detention camp on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru, where an asylum-seeker on Wednesday set himself on fire during a visit by UN officials.

No timeframe for closing the Manus island facility has been provided.
VIENNA (Reuters) - Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann on Thursday dismissed growing calls from within his party for him to be forced to step down after it suffered a thrashing in last weekend's presidential election and the far right achieved a record result. Both Austria's traditional parties of government - Faymann's Social Democrats and the conservative People's Party, currently in coalition together - suffered historic losses on Sunday. For the first time since Austria's head of state became directly elected in 1951, their candidates' combined share of the vote fell below 50 percent, crashing to less than a quarter. "I am in my eighth year. Keep counting on me being here," Faymann, who has been chancellor and leader of the Social Democrats since 2008, told broadcaster ORF. "One should never confuse them (critics) with the majority," he said in the joint interview with Vienna mayor and party heavyweight Michael Haeupl, who expressed his support. The next general election in Austria is due to be held in 2018. The far-right Freedom Party's candidate, Norbert Hofer, unexpectedly scored 35 percent on Sunday, bringing him into a run-off with former Greens leader Alexander van der Bellen, who came second on 21 percent and is running as an independent. The government's reaction to the election result has been muted. Faymann has called it a "clear warning" but he and the conservative vice chancellor have responded with little more than a pledge to announce new measures at the end of May. A growing number of Social Democrats have expressed their dismay and called for a party conference expected in November to be brought forward so that senior party figures can be replaced. "After an electoral loss like Sunday's there must be a leader of this party who takes responsibility," Tanja Wehsely, a member of Vienna's provincial assembly and one of the first Social Democrats to publicly call for Faymann to step down after the election, told Austrian news agency APA. "A leader is a leader and must also behave as such," she added. In a series of provincial elections last year in which more than half Austria's population voted, the Social Democrats and People's Party consistently lost ground, while the Freedom Party's share of the vote increased. Fears linked to rising unemployment and Europe's migration crisis, as well as dissatisfaction with the government, have fueled a rise in support for the Freedom Party, which is now the country's most popular, regularly polling above 30 percent. (Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
The first-quarter earnings season is turning out to be favorable for the auto sector with most companies beating on earnings. General Motors Company GM, Penske Automotive Group, Inc. PAG and Lear Corp. LEA were among the noteworthy releases over the past week. All three companies managed to beat both earnings and revenue estimates and even recorded year-over-year growth.

Meanwhile, Toyota Motor Corporation TM reported a decline in its global sales volume for fiscal 2016, while Ford Motor Co. F announced new investments for its U.S. plants.

(Read the previous roundup here: Auto Stock Roundup for Apr 21, 2016)

Recap of the Weeks Most Important Stories

1. General Motors recorded adjusted earnings of $1.26 per share in the first quarter of 2016, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.01 by a wide margin. Earnings also surged 46.5% from 86 cents per share recorded in the first quarter of 2015. Revenues in the reported quarter were $37.3 billion, 4.5% higher than $35.7 billion recorded in the year-ago quarter. The top line also surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $34.95 billion (read more: General Motors Q1 Earnings Beat Estimates, Surge Y/Y).

2. Penske Automotives first-quarter 2016 earnings per share improved 7.1% to 90 cents from 84 cents earned a year ago. Moreover, earnings surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 87 cents. Revenues grew 7.6% year over year to $4.82 billion, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $4.77 billion (read more: Penske Automotive Beats on Q1 Earnings and Sales).

3. Lear Corp. posted adjusted earnings per share of $3.40 in the first quarter of 2016, up 49% from $2.28 in the year-ago quarter. Moreover, earnings beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2.83. Revenues increased 8% year over year to $4.66 billion beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $4.64 billion. For 2016, Lear raised its adjusted net income forecast to $900$940 million from the prior guidance of $720$755 million.

Story continues

4. Toyota reported global sales of 10.09 million vehicles in fiscal 2016, which represents a 0.7% year-over-year decline. A 3.5% fall in sales in Japan and a 2.1% decline in exports from Japan contributed to the downturn. These offset the 0.04% increase in sales outside Japan.

5. Ford announced a $1.6 billion investment to upgrade its manufacturing plants. Of this, $1.4 billion will be invested in the Livonia Transmission Plant in Michigan to build a new 10-speed transmission. The remaining $200 million will be invested in the Ohio Assembly Plant to build Super Duty chassis cabs.

Performance

Most auto stocks had favorable fortunes in the stock market over the last week, led by Harley-Davidson, Inc. HOG, which recorded a 5.3% gain. General Motors was the only loser among the stocks listed blow, losing merely 0.1%.

Meanwhile, Tesla Motors, Inc. TSLA and Advance Auto Parts Inc. AAP retained their positions as the biggest gainer and loser, respectively, over the last six months.

Company Last 1-Week Period Last 6 Months GM -0.1% -8.7% F +1.3% -8.8% TSLA +0.6% +18.1% TM +1.4% -15.8% HMC +0.3% -15.8% HOG +5.3% +3.6% AAP +0.6% -18.0% AZO +0.4% +0.3%

Whats Next in the Auto Space?

Ford will report its financial results for the first quarter of 2016 before the market opens today. Tesla will also report first-quarter earnings in the coming week.

Most automakers will also report their U.S. auto sales for April on May 3.

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FORD MOTOR CO (F): Free Stock Analysis Report



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We expect the global beauty retailer, Avon Products Inc. AVP to beat expectations when it reports first-quarter 2016 results before the bell on May 5.



However, the company has been grappling with currency headwinds and tough macroeconomic conditions. As a result, it delivered negative earnings surprises in three of the last four quarters, with an average negative surprise of 85.7%. Lets see how things are shaping up for this announcement.





Why a Likely Positive Surprise?



Zacks ESP: Avon currently has an Earnings ESP of +50.00%. This is because the Most Accurate estimate stands at 3 cents, while the Zacks Consensus Estimate is pegged lower at 2 cents. A favorable Earnings ESP serves as a meaningful indicator of a likely positive earnings surprise.



Zacks Rank: Avon carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Note that stocks with a Zacks Rank #1, 2 or 3 have a significantly higher chance of beating earnings. Conversely, Sell-rated stocks (#4 or 5) should never be considered going into an earnings announcement.



The combination of Avons favorable Zacks Rank and positive ESP, the two key ingredients to predict a beat, make us reasonably confident of a positive earnings surprise.



What's Driving the Better-than-Expected Earnings?



In spite of Avons dismal earnings trend, the companys recently announced transformation plan to cut costs and efficiently channelize these savings toward driving growth seems to make sense. Effective implementation of this plan is likely to help Avon attain its long-term revenue and margin targets.



Apart from this, Avon is focused on enhancing Active Representatives growth, with significant progress noted on this front in 2015, along with expectations of further improvement in 2016. Also, with its offloaded North American business, sold Liz Earle brand and efforts to enhance IT infrastructure through a pact with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, Avon seems well positioned to revive its business. All these factors make us confident of a reasonably good quarter this time.



Other Stocks to Consider



Avon is not the only firm looking up this earnings season. The following companies are also likely to beat earnings in the to-be-reported quarter:



Church & Dwight Co. Inc. CHD, scheduled to report earnings on May 5, has an Earnings ESP of +1.19% and a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



Home Depot Inc. HD, scheduled to report earnings on May 17, has an Earnings ESP of +1.50% and a Zacks Rank #3.



Urban Outfitters Inc. URBN, scheduled to report earnings on May 18, has an Earnings ESP of +8.00% and a Zacks Rank #2.



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Ball Corporation BLL is one of the worlds leading suppliers of metal packaging to the beverage, food, personal care and household products industries. It also supplies aerospace and other technologies and services to government and commercial customers.



Ball Corporation continues to grow from capacity additions, focus on ramping up capital projects and expansion in developing regions. Ball Corporations pending acquisition of Rexam will bring growth opportunities. However, unfavorable foreign exchange, elevated aluminum premiums and impact of uncertainty regarding government funding programs on Aerospace segment remain headwinds for the company.



Lets have a quick look at the first-quarter 2016 earnings release of the company.



Estimate Trend & Surprise History



You should note that the earnings estimate revisions for Ball Corporation depicted a neutral stance prior to the earnings release. The Zacks Consensus Estimate has remained stable over the last 30 days and currently stands at 69 cents for the first quarter.



Coming to earnings surprise history, Ball Corporation beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate in 2 out of the trailing 4 quarters with an average positive earnings surprise of around 1.12%.



Earnings



Ball Corporation delivered adjusted earnings of 58 cents per share in the the first-quarter 2016. Earnings missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 69 cents. Earnings also declined around 16% on a year over year basis due to competitive pricing in China, tough year-over-year comparisons in metal food packaging and start-up costs for growth projects.



Revenue



Ball Corporation misses on revenues in the first quarter. Ball Corporation posted revenues of $1.76 billion, fell short of the Zacks Consensus Estimate for revenues of $1.90 billion.



Key Stats



Ball Corporation continues to progress on proposed offer for Rexam and expect the transaction to close in late June. The company also expects to benefit from increasing EVA dollar generation and multiple growth capital projects ramping up in the remainder of 2016 and beyond.



The company expects its businesses to gain momentum through the balance of this year as cost optimization efforts are further realized and the growth capital deployed in 2015 transitions into full production.



Zacks Rank



Currently, Ball Corporation has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), but that could change following Ball Corporations earnings report which was just released.



Market Reaction



Ball Corporations shares were inactive following the release. It would be interesting to see how the market reacts to the results during the trading session today.



Check back later for our full write up on this Ball Corporations earnings report later!



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Zacks Investment Research
The discourse surrounding proper law enforcement in African-American communities was rekindled Thursday morning as news spread of an officer-involved shooting in East Baltimore  on the anniversary of Freddie Grays funeral.

A city police officer shot a teen who was carrying a fake handgun Wednesday afternoon following a brief foot chase near Aisquith Street and East Baltimore Street, authorities said. The teens injuries arent considered life-threatening.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said two plainclothes detectives assigned to the departments intelligence section had been driving down the street in an unmarked police car when they spotted the young person with what looked like a Beretta 92FS semi-automatic pistol and identified themselves as police officers.

Its a replica semi-automatic pistol, and I looked at it myself today. I stood right over top of it. I put my own eyes on it. Its an absolute identical replica semi-automatic pistol, Davis said during a news conference later that day. Those police officers had no way of knowing that it was not, in fact, an actual firearm. It looks like a firearm.

The teenager took off running, leading to a 150-plus yard chase that ended with one of the officers discharging his weapon, he said. The boy was taken to an area hospital for injuries to a lower extremity, according to police.

Volanda Young, the boys mother, identified her son to the Baltimore Sun as Dedric Colvin, a 14-year-old in the eighth grade, and said he left their home with a BB gun. Police said he is 13.

He gets good grades. My son is a good kid, Young told the local newspaper. I know he was scared. They shot at him while he was fleeing.

A video recorded on-site shortly after the shooting, obtained by The Sun, shows Maj. Deron Garrity telling the injured teens older brother, Alvin Colvin, that the detectives thought the gun was real.

Im looking at you man-to-man, nobody wants to do that [shoot an unarmed person]. OK? Your little brother had a gun, he said. Im telling you right now that gun looked 100 percent real, a thousand percent real. Thats what Im trying to tell you.

Story continues

Garrity asked how he could possibly tell his officers to make sure he shoots you first.

But if hes not pointing it at the police, why do they have the right to shoot? Alvin Colvin asked.

Investigators from the departments Special Investigation Response Team were called to the scene to look into the circumstances surrounding the incident. The Baltimore Police Department swiftly shared a picture of the replica handgun on its Facebook page.

At this point, Davis said, he has no reason to think that the officers acted inappropriately in any way.

The shooting occurred one year after the highly publicized funeral for Gray, a 25-year-old man who died of a spinal cord injury while in police custody in Baltimore, and subsequent riots, which ultimately led to a state of emergency and the National Guard being called into the city.

SLIDESHOW Funeral services for Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland >>>

People march in the Penn North neighborhood of Baltimore, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, the first anniversary of rioting following the funeral of Freddie Gray. Gray's death, which occurred a week after he was arrested and injured in a police transport van, became a focal point in the national debate over police treatment of African-Americans. (Patrick Semansky/AP Photo)

Davis said he cannot wrap his head around why the teen would leave his home with a replica pistol in his hand, and said that no Baltimore officer wants to shoot a 13-year-old.

Its a 13-year-old young man. Thats not lost on me whatsoever, Davis said. Why this young man chose to leave his home with a replica semi-automatic pistol in his hand, I dont know. Why this young man chose to flee on foot when he was approached by two Baltimore police officers, I dont know. Why the young man chose not to drop the gun and comply with the officers demands to stop, I dont know that either.

This is certainly not the first time an officer has mistaken a BB gun or replica pistol for an actual firearm. The shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was playing with an airsoft replica in Cleveland, was one of the tragedies that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Earlier this month on April 8 in Arlington, Texas, a 15-year-old approached an officer in his patrol car and pulled out a BB gun, police said. The cop said he feared for his life and struck the teens arm so the gun would fall to the ground.

The gun was a BB gun, Arlington Police Chief Will Johnson said in a news release. However, you can see it looks real. Officers have to make split second decisions. Thankfully no one was hurt.

Related video:
Dedric Colvin was still in the hospital on Thursday, April 28, after he was shot by Baltimore police officers while holding what police are calling a replica gun. Colvin, 13, was shot in the leg and shoulder on the anniversary of the riot that followed the death of Freddie Gray from injuries he sustained in police custody.

Police Commissioner Kevin Davis went through the details of the shooting in a press conference on Thursday. Officers spotted Colvin carrying what they thought was a gun when they tried to stop him. Davis said the two officers, who were plain-clothed, identified themselves as police before Colvin ran from them. Colvin turned toward officers with the gun in his hand, Davis said, and the male officer opened fire, wounding the teenager.

T.J. Smith, Baltimore police spokesman, said the victim was carrying a Daisy brand PowerLine Model 340 spring-air pistol, which sells for $15. It cannot be bought in toy stores, he said. However, it is available from WalMart.

Police displayed the BB gun and a real gun during the press conference. Davis asked the press if they could tell which gun was the real one, citing it would be hard for officers to tell in the heat of the moment.

Davis acknowledged the shooting took place on the anniversary of the riot. He also acknowledged the age of the victim demands a heightened scrutiny of the circumstances. But, he questioned, what should officers do if they see someone with a gun? He also said he doesnt know why Colvin ran, and he also questioned why the victim was carrying the replica gun.

He also said the only way officers would have known the gun was fake is if they were on the receiving end of it being fired. No one wants police or anyone else to be in that position, he said.

Davis also addressed police treatment of Colvins mother, who was taken into custody in handcuffs. It was a judgment call in an emotional moment, he said. Credit: YouTube/Baltimore Police Department
A 13-year-old boy carrying a 'replica' handgun was shot by Baltimore police Wednesday, authorities said.

Undercover detectives saw the boy holding what they thought was a real weapon and began chasing him, Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said at an evening press conference.

Read: A Year On, Baltimore Mom Who Scolded Son During Riots Is Still Thinking of His Future

The commissioner said he had "no reason to believe that these officers acted inappropriately in any way," The Baltimore Sun reported.

The boy did not obey orders to stop from the officers, Davis said, and never dropped the "dead-on ringer" for a semi-automatic handgun.

Neither the boy nor the officer was identified. Davis said the teenager sustained non-life-threatening injures and is expected to fully recover.

The shooting happened as demonstrators on the other side of the city marked the one-year anniversary of Freddie Gray's funeral. The 25-year-old man died from critical spine injuries he suffered while being transported in the back of a police van.

Protesters march to Pennsylvania and North Aves to recognize 1st anniv. death of #FreddieGray pic.twitter.com/RKPrcTyw4w  Karl Ferron (@lightforall) April 27, 2016

Read: Freddie Gray's Mother Reportedly Tries to Take Her Life

Six officers have been charged in Gray's death. All have pleaded not guilty. A mistrial was declared in December for one of them, but charges have been refiled. The first of this year's trials begins in May.

Davis said the 13-year-old's mother was also questioned by officers because "she knew" he had left home with the fake gun.

"Those police officers had no way of knowing that it was not, in fact, an actual firearm. It looks like a firearm," said the commissioner.

Story continues

Watch: Was Freddie Gray Taken on a Wild Ride Inside the Police Van?

Related Articles:
The chance of snapping up a bargain return flight to Thailand for just 49 proved to be too much to resist as hundreds queued for 38 HOURS before they went on sale.

The deal was being offered at STA Travel for the first 49 people to turn up at their branches in Birmingham and London at 9am today.

Eager to be the lucky few, desperate bargain hunters began queuing on Wednesday, camping out overnight to make sure they didnt miss their chance

Those who missed out were still able to pick up one of 49 return tickets priced at 299.

Bargain hunters: People queued for 38 hours to get tickets (SWNS)

Leon Cheung, 27, from London, was the first in line at the Birmingham Corporation Street branch after he arrived at 7pm on Tuesday night.

He said: When I first received the email from STA Travel, I thought it was a hoax so I disregarded it.

"But then my friend mentioned it to me, so I decided to call them and check it was real - and it was.

"I travelled up to Birmingham from London, even though STA Travel are holding the flash sale at a London branch too.

First in the queue: The tickets were offered to the first 49 people (SWNS)

"I knew it would be a lot busier there so I wanted to have a better chance by coming to Birmingham.

Speaking about his plans, he added: I am planning on doing some volunteer work all over the country for the three months.

"I am going on holiday with my family in two weeks and we are visiting Dubai, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Taiwan.

Desperate: Hundreds turned up to the Birmingham and London STA stores (SWNS)

"I just couldnt refuse an amazing offer like this, and I cant wait to go back to Thailand.

Kelly Pennington, 26, an anaesthetist nurse, travelled down from Urnstone, Manchester with student Danny Andrews, 26, at midnight on Wednesday.

She said: "It was a bit of a mad decision, I just put something up on Facebook saying anyone fancy it and Danny got back to me so we went.

Second chance: Another 49 tickets were offered at 299 (SWNS)

Story continues

"When we arrived there were only a few other people, but it was a really friendly atmosphere.

"Some people had come from London, its mad.

The firm held a similar flash sale last year, offering discount flights to New Zealand for 75.



Top pic: SWNS
There are two Trump campaigns underway: one, to secure the GOP nomination and two, to remake Trump into an acceptable presidential candidate. Especially after Trumps resounding wins last night and in recent primaries, a new Donald may be the heavier lift.

Housebreaking this unruly Golden Retriever will require buy-in from his master. Trump has worked hard to win votes and primaries; now he has to win self-control. He has to listen to his advisors, which will be a challenge, and he has to stop pandering to the adoring crowds who have brought him so far. When 10,000 cheering supporters demand red meat, its hard to throw them salmon fillets. But thats what he must do.

Trump needs to deflate his extremely high unfavorables by dumping his trademark vulgarity and bullying. A test will come at his sit-down with Fox News host Megyn Kelly on May 17; hell have to show he can handle a tough interviewer without resorting to playground insults.

Related: Trump Keeps Defying Predictionsand His Own Advisors

Improving his tone is important, because voters will then focus more intently on his actual policies  many of which are more mainstream and popular than pundits suggest. For every past Trumpism that has caused a ruckus, there is a kernel of common sense. Right-wing pundits rail that Trump is no conservative  but millions of Americans are impressed with Trumps authenticity and could care less about his ideological purity.

These policy positions have landed Trump in hot water, but he is actually in agreement with the majority of Americans:

Abortion. Trump has repeatedly stepped in it when asked about abortion. He has called for a ban, but also suggested the laws in place today should stand. He suggested to MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews that the woman should be punished for breaking the law but immediately walked that assertion back when informed that it countered established conservative dogma. He also has said that he would like to change the party platform banning abortion to carve out exceptions for rape and incest.

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His multiple responses reveal the obvious: He couldnt care less about the issue. He has been pro-choice in the past, and he is most likely pro-choice now, despite his nod to the pro-lifers who loom large in GOP primaries. Trumps veering off-message is the result of not having studied the issue, but also reflects his gut instinct, which is not so out of line with the consensus. Americans do not list abortion as one of their top concerns. His journey on this issue is very similar to Mitt Romneys.

Conservatives want to ban abortions under all circumstances; only 19 percent of the country agrees -- a figure that has not budged in 40 years. Similarly, for more than four decades a little over half the country has thought that abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances. Last year, a Quinnipiac survey asked, How about when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest? Do you think abortion should be legal in that situation or illegal? 78 percent said legal. Thats where Trump is, and where Romney was.

Muslims entering the country. Last December, Trump was hammered as a racist for suggesting a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." He called for the ban in the wake of the San Bernardino mass murders by two Islamic terrorists and while President Obama was advocating for the admission of 10,000 Syrian refugees. At the same time, both National Security Chief James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey had testified that it was almost impossible to properly vet refugees from war-torn regions where records were unavailable. They also admitted that there were instances of jihadists posing as refugees. Europe is dealing with just such problems, with jihadists hidden among the flood of Syrians seeking asylum.

Related: Is Trumps Anti-Muslim Rhetoric Winning Him Support from Democrats?

In a recent YouGov/Huffington Research poll, 51 percent of Americans agree that we should have a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country, compared with 40 percent who disagree. That represents increasing support for the idea, now embraced by 62 percent of independent voters.

Immigration and building the wall. Trump early on inflamed critics by suggesting, When Mexico sends their people, they are not sending their best. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems. Theyre bringing drugs, theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. When asked why he called them rapists, Trump cited studies showing that 80 percent of women entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico had been raped during that journey. Challenged by CNNs Don Lemon, who pointed out those rapes occurred outside our borders, Trump countered, Well, somebodys doing the raping.Whos doing the raping? How can you say such a thing?

He has a point. In a recent survey of Americans top concerns, immigration and illegal aliens ranks fourth, just below the economy, jobs and dissatisfaction with government, and ahead of terrorism, healthcare and education. A recent Rasmussen survey showed that more than half the country supports Trumps plan to build a wall along the Mexican border. Moreover, 59 percent of likely U.S. voters think gaining control of the border should be the priority when it comes to immigration reform. Thirty-four percent (34 percent) disagree and say its more important to grant legal status to those already living here. This is not new; the polling outfit notes that the findings have been roughly stable for the past four years. Unlike Obama, Trump is in sync with the country.

Related: Trump Plays the Woman Card Against Hillary. Will It Backfire?

Theres no doubt that Trump has work to do to convince American voters that he is fit to be president. People need to envision him in the Oval Office and as Commander in Chief. Should he run against Hillary Clinton in November, he will be competing against another candidate with high unfavorables. Her problem is that she is not considered honest and trustworthy.

As Trumps new r campaign chief Paul Manafort noted, Fixing personality negatives is a lot easier than fixing character negativesYou cant change somebodys character. But you can change the way somebody presents themselves. Its easier to change issues of style than issues of character.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden met Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Thursday to discuss political and security issues during an unannounced trip to Baghdad, state television said. The trip is the first time that Biden, the point person for the White House on Iraq, has visited the country since the United States withdrew its forces in 2011. He is the third and highest-level U.S. official to visit Iraq this month. (Reporting by Stephen Kalin; Editing by Alison Williams)
(Adds further pricing estimate, context on Embraer, trade)

By Allison Lampert and Jeffrey Dastin

MONTREAL/ATLANTA, April 28 (Reuters) - Bombardier scored a major order for its new CSeries passenger jets from Delta Air Lines Inc on Thursday, boosting the Canadian manufacturer's stature in the airline industry even as it faces a long road back to profitability.

The order for 75 CS100 jets, worth an estimated $5.6 billion based on the list price, was the biggest yet and the first from a major U.S. airline for the CSeries program, which is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

Quebec-based Bombardier hopes the deal marks a turning point in its attempt to break into the fleets of top airlines and serve the niche market for 100-seat planes spurned by larger rivals Boeing and Airbus.

It is also locked in competition with Brazil's Embraer , its most direct rival for small jet sales.

Clinching the order does not appear to have come cheap for Bombardier, however, with its chief executive conceding the company had been "aggressive" on pricing in order to win.

Aerospace industry sources involved in negotiating similar deals estimated discounts as high as 75 percent may have been offered to reboot the CSeries program with a big order, matching some of the most aggressive pricing seen lately in the market.

Two sources pegged the discount closer to two-thirds off the nominal list price of $71.8 million.

Commercial jets typically sell for roughly half of their catalog prices before adjustments for inflation, according to those familiar with the business.

Bombardier said it would book a $500 million "onerous contract" charge in the second quarter related to the Delta order and a separate order from Air Canada in February.

The deal came as Bombardier pushes the Canadian government to inject $1 billion into the company, as Quebec's provincial government vowed to do last year. The talks with Ottawa have hit an impasse partly over federal demands for more oversight.

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Bombardier supporters are hoping Delta's endorsement could help win backing from the government. But the order does not change Canada's position on the issue, a source familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity.

Bombardier CEO Alain Bellemare said the company's dual class structure is a factor in the funding negotiations, but expressed confidence that an agreement could be reached.

"There's a lot of back and forth obviously. We've not yet converged on a win-win solution, and ... we're going to keep talking to them until we find one," he told a news conference.

Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard urged Ottawa on Thursday to help Bombardier, arguing that governments should not behave like bankers or investors but as "economic agents."

The two governments and the company have said the cash infusions would not violate World Trade Organization rules, but Brazil and the United States are expected to scrutinize any aid.

Bombardier shares closed up 1.5 percent at C$2.04 after jumping 13 percent at the open.

'MASSIVE VALIDATION'

The widely anticipated deal with Delta included an option to buy an additional 50 CS100 aircraft, Bombardier said. Atlanta-based Delta also has an option to convert a number of its orders into the larger CS300 variant at a later date.

The size of Bombardier's order book for the jet program will dramatically increase with the deal, which also makes Delta the single largest CSeries customer.

For its part, Delta will be able to phase out the 50-seat jets that it contracts regional airlines to fly under its Delta Connection brand. The larger CS100 planes burn less fuel per passenger and have room for two cabin classes rather than one, giving the global carrier an opportunity to add revenue.

Ed Bastian, Delta's incoming CEO, said the order meant that Bombardier was now a competitor to Boeing and Airbus in the mainline aircraft market. "And we're thrilled to have that choice in the marketplace," he told the reporters in Montreal.

Still, analysts say Bombardier and Brazil's Embraer remain dwarfed by the two transatlantic plane giants.

Coupled with Air Canada's commitment from early this year, the deal puts Bombardier's CSeries above a target for 300 orders or commitments before the jet enters service this summer.

"It's a massive validation of the aircraft because of how financially savvy Delta is," said Kevin Michaels, vice president at consulting firm ICF International. "If Delta is ordering the CSeries, then boards at other airlines are going to be asking their managements about considering it."

The deal carries CSeries' firm order book beyond 2020, when the program is expected to break even on a free cash flow basis. Analysts had feared the CSeries order book could dry up just as the program turned profitable.

Separately, Bombardier had an unexpectedly larger adjusted first-quarter loss of 3 cents a share, above the average analyst estimate for a loss of 1 cent per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Revenue fell nearly 11 percent to $3.91 billion.

Bellemare said the second quarter is looking a bit better, but more work needs to be done to improve the company's cost structure. He said Bombardier is on track to meet 2016 guidance.

(Additional reporting by Euan Rocha in Toronto, Sweta Singh and Sayantani Ghosh in Bangalore, Tim Hepher in Amsterdam, David Ljunggren in Ottawa and Alwyn Scott in New York; Editing by Walker Simon, Paul Simao and Alan Crosby)
In the last decade, the niche farm-to-table dining trend has grown into a vibrant, albeit small, industry of its own. Farmers markets have popped up (and expanded) throughout the country. Individual farmers have become celebrities. Yet making farm-to-table accessible on a broader scale has remained difficult. Chipotle, which struggles to find enough sustainably sourced meat to fill all its restaurants, has so far been the only large corporation to make a concerted attempt to take farm-to-table to scale.

That changed Wednesday as yogurt maker Dannonthe leading supplier in the United Statesannounced that it is throwing its hat in the ring.

In July, products in Dannon's Oikos, Danimals, and Dannon yogurt lines will be reformulated to include fewer overall ingredients and fewer sourced from GMOs. The company will remove fructose, switch from beet sugar to cane sugar, and source non-GMO starch, according to Mariano Lozano, president and CEO of the Dannon Company. Starting in 2017, cows whose milk supplies these lines will be switched to non-GMO feed. In addition, the seven farming families partnering with Dannon on these changes will start receiving a more reliable income in the form of an agreement that will guarantee a certain margin of profit and offset costs.

Related: New Ag-Gag Law Pits Dairy Against Greek Yogurtand Animal Rights

In the last three years we have had the highest- and lowest-ever milk prices, said Lozano. The open-book contracts will remove uncertainty and volatility by ensuring a long-term relationship to farmers. One of Dannons Kansas-based milk suppliers, Ken McCarty, explained that this type of deal is incredibly different from what is typically seen in the dairy industry.

To say that being attached to the open market is difficult is an understatement, he said. Being freed from that uncertainty allows you to focus on the things youre truly passionate about and the truly impactful things, like sustainability, animal welfare, and community revitalization. One of the investments McCarty has been able to make is in a milk-condensing plant that will reclaim 20 million gallons of water a year.

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Yet there are a number of unknowns in Dannons plan. While McCarty and other dairy farmers often grow some of their own feed and can make the transition to non-GMO corn and soy without much difficulty, those crops are a relatively rare commodity. To supply the three yogurt lines, the company will need enough feed for roughly 50,000 cows, said Lozano. Most dairy cows require roughly 50 pounds of food every day. Even to supply Dannon alone would require more than 900 million pounds of non-GMO feed every year. Today the reality is that there is very limited availability, Lozano says.

In 201415, ninety-four percent of all soybeans and 89 percent of all corn grown in the United States were produced with some form of biotechnology, according to the USDA. But low prices for commodity crops may be pushing some farmers toward non-GMO crops. Earlier this month the Des Moines Register reported, A farmer growing a non-GMO soybean crop could get as much as $2 a bushel for soybeans and $0.35 a bushel for corn over the market price.

McCarty said that his expertise is in dairying, not growing feed crops, and that it remains to be seen how difficult growing non-GMO feed will be. We dont know exactly how well find all that feed, he said, though he believes local partnerships with farmers could make the goal achievable.

With stores such as Costco and Walmart looking for more sustainably produced, natural items, its likely that there is a market for Dannons improved product. But Dannon said it does not know how much of the increased costs of production will be passed on to the consumer. We are entering this journey firmly believing there is value to be created, Lozano said. If more large suppliers follow Dannons example, that may reduce some of the companys costs by making non-GMO feed (for example) less expensive.

Do we have all the answers? No. But we have a strong willingness to go down this path, Lozano said.

Take the Pledge: Stand Up for Food That Is Responsibly Grown and Farmworker Assured

Related stories on TakePart:





 Another Major Food Company Announces Nationwide GMO Labeling

 General Mills Will Label GMOs on Products Nationwide

 Is the GMO Labeling Battle Almost Over?

Original article from TakePart
FRANKFURT, April 28 (Reuters) - German engineering services group Bilfinger is nearing a decision on the future of its Building and Facility unit after the field of serious contenders has narrowed to one, several people familiar with the matter said.

The company remains in talks with buyout group EQT, which has offered to buy the unit for less than 1.4 billion euros ($1.6 billion), the sources said.

It may, however, still opt for keeping the business, which last year posted earnings before interest, taxes, and amortisation (EBITA) of 148 million euros on 2015 sales of 2.9 billion euros.

Bilfinger and EQT declined to comment.

Bilfinger, 26 percent owned by activist investment firm Cevian, said in January it was considering selling its most profitable businesses, raising the prospect of investors getting a return from the struggling group but leaving it dependent on a volatile energy market.

Bilfinger had said it intended to update markets on its strategy in mid-May. Since then, its chief executive unexpectedly quit, raising fresh questions about its future direction.

Other initial suitors, such as Engie, JLL and CBRE, are no longer actively pursuing the asset, the sources said. ($1 = 0.8837 euros) (Reporting by Arno Schuetze, Alexander Hubner and Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Christoph Steitz)
Boeing has won a contract from China Eastern Airlines for 15 787-9 Dreamliner planes worth nearly $4 billion, Boeing said Thursday.

China Eastern plans to use the long-haul planes for travelling between China, North America and Europe, Boeing said.

We are very happy to introduce the new 787 Dreamliners into our long-haul fleet," said China Eastern Airlines Chairman Liu Shaoyong in a statement.

"The addition of these next-generation, fuel-efficient airplanes will play a key role in supporting China Eastern's strategy for international expansion, and enable us to realize profits in point-to-point routes across the Pacific Ocean, and between China and Europe."

The aircraft will be mainly used on flights from Shanghai to Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Chicago.

China Eastern is one of China's top three airlines, operating 560 aircraft and carrying around 100 million passengers annually.

The order comes one day after Boeing reported an 8.8 percent drop in first quarter earnings to $1.2 billion, partly due to slower aircraft deliveries into a slowing global economy.
By Gulsen Solaker ANKARA (Reuters) - Brawls between lawmakers from Turkey's ruling AK Party and the pro-Kurdish opposition have delayed efforts to pass legislation on a migration deal with the European Union, but the country's EU minister said a deadline next week would still be met. Deputies threw punches, pushed and tried to restrain each other in the assembly late on Wednesday in a row over military operations targeting Kurdish militants in Turkey's largely Kurdish southeast. The acting speaker announced at the end of Wednesday's session that, following these scuffles, the parliament would now not meet again in full session until Monday. Lawmakers had been expected to work on Friday and Saturday on legislation needed for Turks to secure visa-free travel to Europe, a key part of Ankara's deal with the European Union on stopping uncontrolled migration to Europe. Brussels aims to propose waiving visas for Turks on May 4 but that is strongly opposed by some EU member states. The EU has said Turkey fully meets fewer than half of the 72 criteria and that its conditions will not be softened. "If the security surveillance law had been completed last night, as of today Turkey would have done what is required," EU Affairs Minister Volkan Bozkir told broadcaster NTV. "The 10 or so remaining articles ... will God willing be passed on Monday. But we can effectively say it's done. After that the 72 expectations are met from our perspective." Bozkir said he expected the EU Commission to recommend the lifting of visas for Turks in a report next week. Under the deal with the EU, Turkey agreed to take back migrants who cross to Greece illegally in return for financial aid, the prospect of accelerated EU accession talks and quicker visa-free travel to Europe for Turks. The fierce exchanges erupted in parliament after MP Ferhat Encu from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) referred to the killing of civilians in military operations against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants. Thousands of militants and hundreds of security force members and civilians have been killed since the PKK resumed its insurgency in the southeast last summer after a 2-1/2-year ceasefire, shattering a peace process. While the general assembly was shut, there were scuffles again on Thursday during a meeting of a constitutional commission which was discussing legislation on lifting lawmakers' immunity from prosecution. President Tayyip Erdogan accuses the HDP of being an extension of the PKK and has said members of parliament with links to militants should be prosecuted. Around half of some 550 requests to lift deputies' immunity are aimed at HDP members. The PKK, designated a terrorist group by Turkey and its Western allies, launched an insurgency in the southeast in 1984 and more than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict. (Additional reporting by Tulay Karadeniz; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Raissa Kasolowsky)
(Adds details on CSN)

By Alberto Alerigi

SAO PAULO, April 28 (Reuters) - Brazilian steelmaker Usiminas appointed Elias Brito as chairman on Thursday in a rare unified vote between two controlling shareholders that have been battling for control of the company for 18 months.

Brito will replace Marcelo Gasparino, who had been appointed last year by minority shareholders after the controllers, Japan's Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp and Italo-Argentinian Techint, could not agree on a candidate.

Sources close to Usiminas management said the consensus between the warring factions had been formed in order to block advances by rival steelmaker CSN which received permission this week from Brazil's anti-trust body Cade to nominate two members to the board.

Nippon, Usiminas and Techint filed three different injunctions trying to block CSN's participation in the board member vote but all were rejected by judges in Belo Horizonte and Brasilia.

Cia Siderurgica Nacional SA, as CSN is formally known, is a shareholder in Usiminas but had been prohibited from electing board members due to anti-trust concerns. Sao Paulo-based CSN owns 14.1 percent of voting shares and 20.7 percent of non-voting stock of Usiminas. The value of CSN's original 3 billion real investment in Usiminas in 2011 has declined 85 percent.

"It's the Steinbruch effect," one source said, referring to Benjamin Steinbruch, the Chief Executive of CSN.

CSN has long been rumored to want a bigger role in running Usiminas, with which it competes in the Brazilian flat steel market. The company had previously been told by Cade to sell down its stake, but has delayed doing so.

CSN and Techint declined to comment about the new chairman. Nippon Steel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"It's the first sign that a shred of rationality has returned ... Since September 2014 there has been no consensus," said a second source close to the controlling shareholders.

Shareholders at the assembly also raised the number of board seats to 11 from 10, and elected three independent members that were endorsed by minority shareholders CSN and Grupo BTG Pactual SA.

(Reporting by Alberto Alerigi; Writing by Tatiana Bautzer and Stephen Eisenhammer; Editing by James Dalgleish)
Britains Got Talents upside-down pianist is embroiled in a new fakery scandal over false claims he is a Guinness World Record holder.



Crowd pleaser Colin Fingers Henry is said to have told bosses he won it for the longest time playing while balancing on his head, but the organisation says there is no such accolade.

Fingers, 68, below, a TV talent show veteran who was on New Faces in 1974, said in an interview before his audition: Ive even got the world record for playing the piano upside down.

BGT bosses wrote in their official information pack that he holds the Guinness World Record.

But a Guinness spokesman told The Sun: We currently do not recognise this record.

A TV source added to the newspaper: Hes such a loved individual on the show, it was really unexpected.

Last night the wannabe claimed he was in Mike Barwells The Alternative Book of Records and produced a hand-written certificate  but The Sun reports the organisation had no proof of his claim.

Its the latest in a string of BGT fakery scandals. Last year, dog-dance winners Jules and Matisse used a stunt border collie for a trick, and a trampoline artist claiming to be amateur was revealed to be a Moscow State Circus star.

Pictures Getty Images/Syco
* Reports Q1 net sales in line with forecasts

* Data shows WPP winning most U.S. work

* Shares slip in weak market

* Sorrell defends 70 mln stg pay packet (Adds details on pay)

By Kate Holton

LONDON, April 28 (Reuters) - Britain's WPP, the world's biggest advertising company, enjoyed a solid first three months to the year after it outperformed rivals in securing a wave of contracts up for grabs in the United States.

An unprecedented number of U.S. blue-chip companies have put their contracts up for review in the past year, re-thinking which agencies they want for marketing advice and trying to drive down the prices they pay.

Nicknamed "reviewageddon", analysts estimate that more than $25 billion in spending on advertising was put up for review in 2015, a record for the industry which grew up from the 1920s on the New York street of Madison Avenue.

In the first quarter of 2016, WPP's agencies either won or retained contracts from fast food chain Wendy's, e-commerce company Jet.com and retailer Target in North America.

Data from research company Recma and cited by WPP in presenting its results on Thursday showed the firm had either won or retained the most contracts put out for review by blue chip firms which are generally in a cautious mood at the moment.

While U.S. rivals Omnicom and Interpublic also gained new work, the Paris-based Publicis appeared to suffer the most according to the data.

"We've been the best performing agency," WPP's high-profile chief executive Martin Sorrell told Reuters. "This tsunami has happened over the last year, it's starting to ease but it's still there."

The performance of WPP, which has grown from a two-person operation in the London area of Lincoln's Inn Fields, has helped Sorrell to earn a 70 million pound ($102 million) package, making him the best paid boss on the FTSE 100 Index.

According to the Recma graph, WPP won or retained nearly $7 billion of work during the wave of reviews, while Publicis lost more than $3 billion. The rest of the spoils were shared between Omnicom, Interpublic and Dentsu.

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The strong performance helped WPP to report first-quarter like-for-like net sales growth of 3.2 percent, in line with forecasts and putting it on track for its full-year target.

Its shares slipped 1 percent, in line with a drop of the wider FTSE 100.

SOLID PERFORMANCE

The update from WPP echoed similar performances from its rivals which have reported solid trading helped by buoyant demand in North America, where events such as the U.S. presidential election plus business connected to the Olympic games in Brazil have boosted demand.

Despite the review setback for Publicis, Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group, said its numbers had been boosted by revenue from those clients which have already announced plans to change agencies, but have not yet completed the transition. Its digital business also improved.

Analysts said the growth at WPP had been driven by North America, which makes up 39 percent of revenue, and digital.

"We continue to believe that WPP remains best-positioned strategically vs. peers and their long-term growth should slightly outperform given the company's business and country mix," said Wieser.

WPP's performance should help Sorrell when he appears before a potentially fractious annual general meeting in June where investors will vote on his pay package.

Sorrell, who has run WPP for more than 30 years, said his remuneration was linked to the firm's performance. He also rejected suggestions from a BBC Radio interviewer that he should be embarrassed by the scale of his pay.

"I'm not embarrassed about the growth of the company from two people in one room in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1985 to 190,000 people in 112 countries and a leadership position in our industry.

"They (the shareholders) will vote as they see fit."

($1 = 0.6864 pounds) (Reporting by Kate Holton; editing by David Clarke, Sarah Young and David Stamp)
An recent incident in which a British Airways was struck by an object while in the air above Heathrow airport probably did not involve a drone as previously thought.

On 17 April, the pilot of a British Airways (BA) flight reported a suspected collision with a drone as it approached Heathrow.

But Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin told MPs on Thursday that it is now believed this was not a drone incident.

BA said at the time that the Airbus A320 landed safely and was examined by engineers before being cleared to take off on its next flight.

An investigation launched by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) has been closed due to lack of evidence.

A spokesman for the AAIB said: "We made initial inquiries but there was insufficient information on what object was involved for us to take it further.

Following the incident police appealed for anyone with relevant information to come forward while officers searched a "wide area in Richmond, south-west London, but did not find anything.

The plane was flying over Richmond Park when the incident occurred.

Transport Minister Robert Goodwill told the Lords European Union Internal Market Sub-Committee last week that reports the airliner was hit by a drone had not been confirmed, saying:

There was no actual damage to the plane and there is indeed some speculation it may have been even a plastic bag or something.

Mr Goodwill added: "The pilot has a lot of other things to concentrate on (when landing) so were not quite sure what they saw.

The Civil Aviation Authoritys Dronecode states that drones should be kept away from aircraft, helicopters, airports and airfields and should not be flown higher than 400ft (122m).

Image credit: Javier Garcia/BPI/REX/Shutterstock
LONDON (Reuters) - Two Britons living abroad lost their bid to take part in June's referendum on European Union membership in a High Court test case over the right of some two million UK expatriate citizens to vote. The case was brought by 94-year-old Harry Shindler, a World War Two veteran who lives in Italy, and lawyer and Belgian resident Jacquelyn MacLennan. They argued they were being unlawfully denied the right to vote as, under law, British people who have lived elsewhere in the European Union for more than 15 years are not allowed to vote. But two judges said in Thursday's ruling that they accepted the government's argument that there were: "... significant practical difficulties about adopting especially for this referendum a new electoral register which includes non-resident British citizens whose last residence the United Kingdom was more than 15 years ago." Lawyers for the two claimants said in a statement that they would appeal "so that all British citizens living elsewhere in the EU can be part of the democratic process to vote in this referendum which will have a very real impact on their lives." Around 46 million Britons are eligible to vote on June 23 on whether Britain should remain a member of the EU or leave a bloc it first joined as then European Community in 1973. Polls suggest the result is likely to be close. (Reporting by Stephen Addison; editing by William Schomberg)
Havana (AFP) - Britain's foreign secretary met Cuban officials on the first such visit to the island since 1959, for talks on boosting trade and tourism ties with the communist state.

Philip Hammond's trip comes a month after US President Barack Obama's historic visit to the Caribbean nation, which is opening up to warmer ties with its old Cold War rivals.

Hammond told reporters in Havana that he was "the first UK foreign secretary to visit Cuba since the revolution" that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959.

His visit also follows meetings in recent months between Cuba's President Raul Castro and other top officials and leaders from the European Union.

Hammond met with his Cuban counterpart Bruno Rodriguez and signed several cooperation agreements with other communist government officials.

They covered areas such as financial services, energy, culture and education, he said.

Hammond said he wanted "enhanced bilateral cooperation underpinned by increased trade, increased investment and more tourists coming to Cuba" from Britain.

Britain was the second-biggest source of foreign tourists to Cuba last year after Canada, with 160,000 Britons making the trip, he said.

His ministry said earlier that he would sign a "bilateral agreement restructuring Cuba's debt to the UK," but Hammond did not comment about that during his news conference later in Havana.

He also met with representatives from Cuban civil society and the British business community in Havana, the Foreign Office said.

- Cuba and Europe -

Raul Castro met with French President Francois Hollande on a visit to Paris in February.

In March, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini became the highest-ranking EU official ever to visit Cuba when she travelled to Havana.

She signed a deal to normalize relations with Cuba, including an agreement on human rights.

Hammond's office said he, too, would broach the sensitive topics of human rights and social and economic reform in Cuba.

Story continues

Cuba's leaders have rejected criticism of their human rights record by the United States and Europe, warning that they will not tolerate meddling in their country's internal affairs.

Britain in 2010 launched a drive to strengthen its ties with Latin America and also backs the EU agreement with Cuba.

"The UK is a strong supporter... of the development of European Union-Cuba relations," Hammond said in Havana.

Britain wants to "strengthen a bilateral dialogue where we're able to raise issues of concern to both sides in the spirit of free and open discussions," he added.

"Britain and Cuba have outlooks on the world and systems of government that are very different," Hammond said in a statement ahead of his arrival.

"But as Cuba enters a period of significant social and economic change, I am looking forward to demonstrating to the Cuban government and people that the UK is keen to forge new links across the Atlantic."

- British exports to Cuba -

British direct exports to Cuba -- mostly dairy, pharmaceuticals and machinery -- increased by nearly a third last year to the equivalent of about $36 million, Hammond said.

Indirect trade via companies based in third countries made the total even bigger, the British embassy in Havana added.

The growth in trade coincided with the historic rapprochement between Cuba and the United States after 50 years of enmity stemming back to the Cold War.

Although the two countries restored diplomatic ties last year, the US trade embargo on Cuba dating to the 1960s remains in place.
Three people with family ties to the two San Bernardino mass shooters who killed 14 people in a mass shooting last December, have been arrested, PEOPLE confirms.



Mariya Chernykh, Tatiana Farook and Syed Raheel Farook were arrested on federal conspiracy, marriage fraud and false statement charges, a Department of Justice press release obtained by PEOPLE states.



According an indictment, also obtained by PEOPLE, all three defendants conspired to make false statements under oath in an application, affidavit, and other documents required by the immigration laws and regulations of the United States.



The press release states that according to official records, Chernykh is married to Enrique Marquez, Jr., who is currently awaiting trial on charges of conspiring in 2011 and 2012 with Syed Rizwan Farook, the male shooter, to provide material support to terrorists.



During their investigation into the San Bernardino shooting, federal investigators discovered that Marquez and Chernykh were married. Investigators allege that Marquez agreed to marry Chernykh so she could obtain immigration benefits that were not available to her because she is a Russian citizen, the press release states.



Syed Raheel Farook and Tatiana Farook allegedly participated in the conspiracy by witnessing the wedding and allegedly taking staged family pictures of the couple to create an illusion that they were a happy couple, the indictment states.



Chernykh is also charged with fraud and misuse of visas, permits and other documents as well as two counts of making material false statements to federal agents. If convicted, she faces up to 25 years in federal prison.



Tatiana Farook, 31, is Chernykh's sister and is married to Syed Raheel Farook, the shooter's brother.



Syed Raheel Farook, 31, has also been arrested. According to records, Syed Raheel Farook enlisted in the Navy from 2003 to 2007, earning several medals during his service.



 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.



Syed Raheel Farook also allegedly helped the couple  Marquez and Chernykh  open a joint bank account and allegedly create a "fictitious lease agreement purportedly establishing a joint residency for [the couple,] according to the court document.



Officials say Chernykh allegedly told FBI agents she and Marquez lived together at Syed and Tatiana Farook's home in Corona, California. However, investigators later discovered that this was not true.



Chernykh allegedly lives with her child and a man who is not her husband, the indictment states.



The three defendants are expected to be arraigned late in the day Thursday.



Last December 2, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik perpetrated a mass shooting at a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. Many of the victims had worked with Farook at the San Bernardino County's Department of Public Health.
Warren Buffett hasnt always been the outspoken Oracle of Omaha. The billionaire CEO and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway was once so shy that hed get physically ill if he had to speak in public. To overcome his fear, he enrolled in a Dale Carnegie course but chickened out. He eventually signed up for another Carnegie course and  the rest is history.

Now some 40,000 people descend upon Omaha, Nebraska, each year to hear Buffetts words of wisdom at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting, which Yahoo Finance will live stream this year.

Some of Buffetts most memorable sayings come from the meetings question-and-answer session. Buffett and vice chairman Charlie Munger field questions from the audience about investing and whatever else comes to mind. The session is totally unscripted and unrehearsed. Anything goesand often does.

As we wait for this Saturday's meeting, heres a look at some of Buffetts most memorable comments from past meetings via BuffettFAQ.com.

1. On Harley stock and Harley riders:

I dont know if Harley Davidson stock is worth $20 or $30. I like a business where customers tattoo their name on their chest - Im not sure you can go around questioning those guys!

Source: BRK Annual Meeting 2010

2. On what qualities they look for in the leadership of companies they acquire:

We also look for three things: intelligence, energy, and integrity. If you dont have the latter, then you should hope they dont have the first two either. If someone doesnt have integrity, then you want them to be dumb and lazy.

Source: BRK Annual Meeting 2005

3. On sleepwalking, Playboy, and what hed do differentlyor not:

You have to find your passion in life. I would choose the same job. I enjoy it. It is a terrible mistake to sleepwalk through your life. Unless Shirley MacLaine is right, you wont have another one. My dad had a business with [investment] books on his shelves, and they turned me on. This was before Playboy. If he was a minister, Im not sure I would have been as enthused. If you have obligations, you have to deal with realities.

Source: BRK Annual Meeting 2008

Story continues

4. On advice for recent grads (and MBAs):

I tell students to go work for an organization you admire or an individual you admire, which usually means that most MBAs I meet become self-employed.

Source: BRK Annual Meeting 2008

5. On knowing what you dont know:

All investing is laying out cash now to get some more back in the future. The concept of a bird in the hand came from Aesop in about 600 BC. He knew a lot, but not that [he lived in] 600 BC. He couldnt know everything. ... If you need to use a computer or calculator to figure it out, you shouldnt [buy the investment]. Those types of [situations] fall into the too-hard bucket. It should be obvious. It should shout at you, without all the spreadsheets. We see something better.

Source: BRK Annual Meeting 2009

6. On the value of first-hand experience (and romance):

Investing on paper is like reading a romance novel vs. doing something else. Youll soon find out whether you like it. The earlier you start, the better.

Source: BRK Annual Meeting 2007

7. On envyand lust

Our experience is that envy is what really drives people. You can give someone a $2 million bonus and theyre happy until they see the next guy got $2.1 million and then theyre miserable. Charlie has pointed out that of the seven deadly sins, envy is the most useless, because you just make yourself miserable and cant sleep. Theres real upside to gluttony  Ive had some great times with gluttony. And we wont get into lust.

Source: BRK Annual Meeting 2006

8. On heroes and marriage:

Choosing your heroes is very important. Associate well, marry up and hope you find someone who doesnt mind marrying down. It was a huge help to me  I can tell you that. (To which the very witty Munger chimed in: Youre not restricted to living people when choosing your mentors. Some of the best people are dead.)

Source: BRK Annual Meeting 2007

9. And, some solid advice on life in general:

Avoiding the dumb things is the most important. Learn more, know limitations, avoid the dumb things.

Source: BRK Annual Meeting 2010

On April 30th, Yahoo Finance will have an exclusive live stream of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Click here for more information.
Ouagadougou (AFP) - A top Burkina Faso court on Thursday cancelled an international arrest warrant for ex-president Blaise Compaore who fled the country after a popular uprising in 2014, the prosecutor general in Ouagadougou told AFP.

The Court of Cassation also withdrew the arrest warrant for the speaker of parliament in neighbouring Ivory Coast, Guillaume Soro, wanted over a short-lived coup in Burkina last year, Armand Ouedraogo said.

Other international warrants were likewise annulled, all of them because of procedural irregularities, he said.

"All the international arrest warrants have today been cancelled by the Court of Cassation on procedural grounds," Ouedraogo said, adding that the warrants had been issued without first being formally requested by the state prosecution.

But he stressed they could be re-instated at any time so long as proper procedure was followed. "These are oversights that can be redressed."

Compaore has been living in Ivory Coast since he was overthrown in a popular uprising in October 2014 after ruling Burkina Faso with an iron fist for 27 years.

Burkinabe authorities issued a warrant for his arrest in December for his alleged role in the mysterious 1987 killing of his comrade, ex-president Thomas Sankara.

Separately, former Ivorian rebel leader and prime minister Soro is wanted by Burkina after telephone wiretaps allegedly revealed he supported a putsch there last September.

The attempted coup was staged by crack troops from a presidential guard loyal to Compaore but was thwarted by street protesters and the army, which attacked the plotters' barracks.

At least 11 people were killed and more than 270 were injured in the demonstrations.

The Ivorian government declined to comment on the lifting of Soro's arrest warrant.

"No comment. It's a decision taken by a sovereign state," government spokesman Bruno Kone said.
OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) - Burkina Faso's president said there may be criminal charges after an audit found the transitional government had improperly awarded land to government members and their families, and misspent $11 million. Voters elected Roch Marc Kabore president of the landlocked West African country in November, ending a one-year transitional government that came to power after popular protests overthrew longtime ruler Blaise Compaore. The prime minister of the transitional government, Yacouba Isaac Zida, and current prime minister Paul Kaba Thieba had both requested the audit, the report said, which was published this weekend. In total, 18 of 52 parcels of land in the upscale neighbourhood of Ouaga 2000 were accorded to people close to the transitional government, including one plot that was given to Zida through his foundation, the audit said. Zida wrote to the national company of urban land management to say he would return the land if the money he had paid for it was reimbursed to him, the ministry of habitat said earlier this month. The High Authority of State Control and the Fight Against Corruption (ASCE) said that 53 percent of public commissions were obtained through opaque means and 6.4 billion CFA francs ($11 million) were misappropriated. The audit said the discrepancies stemmed from spending on fuel and mismanagement of certain accounts. "It is the black mark of the transition and I believe there is something that can be done," Kabore said on television late on Tuesday. "Concerning the government, we have read the audits. We have asked everyone who has been concerned (by it) to respond and when there is a complete report, it is ASCE's responsibility to start the judicial process." It was not immediately clear when the final report would be released. ASCE said in the audit that the opaque manner in which land and contracts were awarded had been ripe for corruption, collusion and budgetary waste. "Preferential treatment was given to certain authorities ... regarding plots of land in Dec. 2015," it read. Nearly half of the population of Burkina Faso, a producer of gold and cotton, live in poverty, according to the World Bank. Many voters cited corruption and economic development as critical issues during last year's presidential vote. [nL8N13M3AZ] (Reporting by Mathieu Bonkoungou; Writing by Makini Brice; Editing by Dominic Evans)
Caitlyn Jenner Donald Trump

Donald Trump made Caitlyn Jenner an offer she couldn't refuse.

The presidential candidate recently said the transgender reality-TV star could use whichever bathroom she wanted in a Trump tower. And that's what she did in a new video posted to Facebook.

"Last week, Donald Trump said I could take a pee anywhere in the Trump facility, so I am going to go take a pee in the ladies' room," she says in the clip as she walks into the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Manhattan.

Jenner then proceeds to ask someone in the lobby where the restroom is. When she passes the men's restroom she says, "Not anymore," before entering the women's room.

Clearly, the video is meant to send a clear message to the Republican field and state lawmakers. Ted Cruz recently endorsed the North Carolina law restricting people to the bathroom corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate, saying it protects them from "predators."

At the end of the video, Jenner comes out of the ladies' room and says to the camera, "Thank you, Donald. I really appreciate it. By the way, Ted, nobody got molested."

NOW WATCH: CRUZ: 'If Donald Trump dresses up as Hillary Clinton, he still cant go to the girls' bathroom'





More From Business Insider


Los Angeles (AFP) - Police in Los Angeles and San Francisco have come under fire after authorities uncovered racist and homophobic text messages and emails in which minorities were referred to as "barbarians" and "wild animals."

Three officers in San Francisco have already left the police department after the messages were discovered and a fourth is facing disciplinary measures, officials said.

On Tuesday, authorities released details of text messages exchanged between the three former officers in which they used the N-word to refer to black people, and described Arabs as "rag heads."

The messages could affect at least 207 criminal cases, including three for murder, San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi told reporters.

He said the slurs were discovered as part of a separate probe over rape accusations against Jason Lai, one of the former officers.

In one of the text messages Lai compares black people to "barbarians" and a "pack of wild animals on the loose."

"It is chilling how casually former officer Lai dehumanizes the citizens he was sworn to serve," Adachi said. "He wished violence upon the very people he was being paid to protect and none of his colleagues turned him in."

In Los Angeles, the county sheriff's chief of staff, Tom Angel, has also come under the spotlight for emails he forwarded in 2012 and 2013 mocking Muslims, blacks, Latinos and women.

Angel at the time was a top police official in the city of Burbank, near Los Angeles.

According to the Los Angeles Times, which obtained a copy of the emails, one message forwarded by Angel on January 7, 2012, lists a series of terrorist attacks attributed to "devout Muslim male extremists" and says "Muslims, gotta love em can't punish em .......?"

Officials at the sheriff's office in Burbank could not be reached for comment but Angel told the Times he did not mean to embarrass or demean anyone and that it was unfortunate his work emails had not been kept private.

"Anybody in the workplace unfortunately forwards emails from time to time that they probably shouldn't have forwarded," Angel told the Times. "I apologize if I offended anybody, but the intent was not for the public to have seen these jokes."
* Canadian dollar at C$1.2573, or 79.54 U.S. cents * Bond prices lower across the maturity curve TORONTO, April 28 (Reuters) - The Canadian dollar strengthened to a nearly 10-month high against its U.S. counterpart on Thursday after unexpected monetary-policy inaction from the Bank of Japan and weaker-than-expected U.S. economic growth weighed on the greenback.

The U.S. dollar weakened against a basket of currencies after a lack of fresh stimulus from the Bank of Japan sent the yen soaring and world equity markets into the red. On Wednesday, the U.S. Federal Reserve signaled it, too, was hitting the policy pause button.

U.S. economic growth braked sharply to its slowest pace in two years as consumer spending softened and a strong dollar continued to undercut exports.

The loonie has rallied more than 16 percent from a 12-year low in January of C$1.4689, helped by better-than-expected domestic economic activity, fiscal stimulus and rebounding oil prices.

Oil prices edged higher on Thursday, holding near their strongest levels for 2016. U.S. crude prices were up 0.22 percent at $45.43 a barrel.

At 9:43 a.m. ET (1343 GMT), the Canadian dollar was at C$1.2573 to the greenback, or 79.54 U.S. cents, stronger than Wednesday's close of C$1.2619, or 79.25 U.S. cents.

The currency's weakest level was C$1.2606, while it touched its strongest since July 1 last year at C$1.2529.

Canadian government bond prices were lower across the maturity curve, with the two-year price down 1.5 Canadian cents to yield 0.687 percent and the benchmark 10-year falling 18 Canadian cents to yield 1.519 percent.

The Canada-U.S. 10-year spread was 1.2 basis points less negative at -34.8 basis points, its smallest gap since Jan. 20 last year, as Canadian government bonds underperformed.

Canada's gross domestic product data for February is awaited on Friday. It is expected to show economic growth declined by 0.2 percent in the month, pulling back from a strong start to the year.

(Reporting by Fergal Smith; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
By Rod Nickel

WINNIPEG, Manitoba, April 28 (Reuters) - Canada may delay implementing new restrictions on the use of foreign workers as farmers and meat processors warn of severe labor shortages in one of the world's biggest agricultural exporters, the employment minister said.

Employers have reported difficulty finding workers despite a 7.1 percent unemployment rate. Many Canadians resist jobs involving manual labor and rural living, a trend that has driven up labor costs and hurt productivity.

Employment Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk told Reuters the Liberal government may delay the July 1 starting date for changes made by the previous Conservative administration, when low-skilled foreign workers can account for no more than 10 percent of an employer's workforce. That is down from 20 percent currently and 30 percent in 2014.

Mihychuk said that timeline may be too ambitious.

"Ten percent has obviously caused a lot of disruption," she said.

The move to 10 percent is part of a "progressive strangulation of the livestock industry" in rural areas, said Ron Davidson, spokesman for Canadian Meat Council, whose members include Cargill Ltd and JBS Canada.

At Sunterra Group, the changes mean some workers would have to leave even though its Alberta pork-processing plant runs at only 70 percent capacity, said president Ray Price.

"They're so happy to be here and they've come from difficult environments," he said. "To see them start to go home makes everybody feel sad."

Even though the government may extend the deadline, Mihychuk said employers should try harder to hire Canadian aboriginals, women and youth.

The Liberals loosened foreign-worker restrictions in March for seafood plants. Mihychuk said then she was not convinced other sectors needed the same help.

But other parts of the program are also creating worker turnover.

Highline Mushrooms lost 73 harvesters last spring, mostly because of a government rule change in 2011 that foreigners who work in Canada for four years must then return home for at least four years.

Story continues

It meant that last year, many Highline mushroom harvesters, including 40 percent of harvesters on one Ontario farm, headed back to Jamaica, Guatemala and Honduras. Some of the crop went to waste because there were not enough workers to pick.

"We take up to a year to train workers and then we know they will have to leave. When someone works for you for four years, they're part of your family," said Highline director of human resources Susan McBride.

The gap between domestic workers and jobs on Canadian farms was 59,000 positions in 2014, of which foreign workers filled three quarters, according to Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council. The gap will expand to 114,000 jobs by 2025, the council said, adding that vacancies currently cost farms C$1.5 billion ($1.19 billion) in lost sales and production.

Legislator Jason Kenney, who handled the file when the Conservatives held power, said foreign workers' stay should be temporary. Since it is not easy to recruit Canadians for many jobs, he said employers should consider boosting wages and benefits.

Saskatchewan grain farmer Kenton Possberg employs six workers from Europe and South Africa, and restarts his search every time a worker times out. He said many farms already pay more than double minimum wage of C$10.50, but bigger paychecks don't overcome disadvantages such as remote locations.

"If we can't find a Canadian to occupy that role, I don't know why we have to go through (hiring) all over again every year."

David Tharle, a beekeeper from Alberta, where numerous oilfield workers are unemployed, said a former employee recently rebuffed his offer to return, saying he would rather serve fast food.

Maple Leaf Foods Inc is short workers at its Brandon, Manitoba pork-processing plant and wants Ottawa to make it easier for foreign workers to become citizens, said Susan Yaeger, senior manager of human resources.

The current system allows some employers to abuse their leverage by keeping workers short-term, said Stan Raper, national coordinator of Agricultural Workers Alliance.

"It's not a humane system," he said.

($1 = 1.2630 Canadian dollars) (With additional reporting by Andrea Hopkins in Toronto; Editing by David Gregorio)
By Rod Nickel WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - Canada may delay implementing new restrictions on the use of foreign workers as farmers and meat processors warn of severe labor shortages in one of the world's biggest agricultural exporters, the employment minister said. Employers have reported difficulty finding workers despite a 7.1 percent unemployment rate. Many Canadians resist jobs involving manual labor and rural living, a trend that has driven up labor costs and hurt productivity. Employment Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk told Reuters the Liberal government may delay the July 1 starting date for changes made by the previous Conservative administration, when low-skilled foreign workers can account for no more than 10 percent of an employer's workforce. That is down from 20 percent currently and 30 percent in 2014. Mihychuk said that timeline may be too ambitious. "Ten percent has obviously caused a lot of disruption," she said. The move to 10 percent is part of a "progressive strangulation of the livestock industry" in rural areas, said Ron Davidson, spokesman for Canadian Meat Council, whose members include Cargill Ltd [CARGIL.UL] and JBS Canada. At Sunterra Group, the changes mean some workers would have to leave even though its Alberta pork-processing plant runs at only 70 percent capacity, said president Ray Price. "They're so happy to be here and they've come from difficult environments," he said. "To see them start to go home makes everybody feel sad." Even though the government may extend the deadline, Mihychuk said employers should try harder to hire Canadian aboriginals, women and youth. The Liberals loosened foreign-worker restrictions in March for seafood plants. Mihychuk said then she was not convinced other sectors needed the same help. But other parts of the program are also creating worker turnover. Highline Mushrooms lost 73 harvesters last spring, mostly because of a government rule change in 2011 that foreigners who work in Canada for four years must then return home for at least four years. It meant that last year, many Highline mushroom harvesters, including 40 percent of harvesters on one Ontario farm, headed back to Jamaica, Guatemala and Honduras. Some of the crop went to waste because there were not enough workers to pick. "We take up to a year to train workers and then we know they will have to leave. When someone works for you for four years, they're part of your family," said Highline director of human resources Susan McBride. The gap between domestic workers and jobs on Canadian farms was 59,000 positions in 2014, of which foreign workers filled three quarters, according to Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council. The gap will expand to 114,000 jobs by 2025, the council said, adding that vacancies currently cost farms C$1.5 billion ($1.19 billion) in lost sales and production. Legislator Jason Kenney, who handled the file when the Conservatives held power, said foreign workers' stay should be temporary. Since it is not easy to recruit Canadians for many jobs, he said employers should consider boosting wages and benefits. Saskatchewan grain farmer Kenton Possberg employs six workers from Europe and South Africa, and restarts his search every time a worker times out. He said many farms already pay more than double minimum wage of C$10.50, but bigger paychecks don't overcome disadvantages such as remote locations. "If we can't find a Canadian to occupy that role, I don't know why we have to go through (hiring) all over again every year." David Tharle, a beekeeper from Alberta, where numerous oilfield workers are unemployed, said a former employee recently rebuffed his offer to return, saying he would rather serve fast food. Maple Leaf Foods Inc is short workers at its Brandon, Manitoba pork-processing plant and wants Ottawa to make it easier for foreign workers to become citizens, said Susan Yaeger, senior manager of human resources. The current system allows some employers to abuse their leverage by keeping workers short-term, said Stan Raper, national coordinator of Agricultural Workers Alliance. Its not a humane system, he said. ($1 = 1.2630 Canadian dollars) (With additional reporting by Andrea Hopkins in Toronto; Editing by David Gregorio)
A Bombardier CSeries100 aircraft is seen prior to a news conference in Montreal, February 17, 2016. REUTERS/Christinne Muschi

Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier just won a blockbuster deal: 75 firm orders for its C-series jet by Delta Airlines.

This is the first deal between Bombardier and a leading North American airline that doesn't have ties to the Canadian government. So it's a major windfall for the until-now slow selling C-series.

The order marks a firm beachhead for Bombardier in the mainline business; the Canadian company has spent most of the past few decades building smaller aircraft.

At list price the order has a value of $5.6 billion  however Delta likely purchased the jets at a healthy discount.

The Bombardier C-Series has struggled over the past few years to win orders from major airlines. Even though the composite-bodied airliner is generally considered to be a fantastic plane with great performance characteristics, it hasn't been able to successfully compete with offerings from Boeing and Airbus.

Earlier this year Bombardier lost two orders from United Airlines to Boeing's 737NG, although the C-Series did pick up a crucial 45-airplane order from Air Canada in February. While the Air Canada sale is seen as a major step forward for the C-Series program, critics of the deal cite the close relationship of the airline and the airplane maker with the Canadian government as the driver for the deal. As a result, industry observers believe Bombardier still needs to land another order from a major North American airline for the C-Series to gain market validation.

Delta Airlines MD88

Delta will likely use the CS100 airliner to expand its network, as well as help replace its aging fleet of McDonnell Douglas MD88 jets.

In January, out-going Delta CEO Richard Anderson sent shares of Bombardier soaring when he expressed interest in the C-Series.

"We actually think for the right price, it's quite an impressive airplane," Anderson said in January during the company's earnings call. "So we are taking a very serious look at it."

Story continues

Bombardier C Series

Anderson was particularly impressed with the C-Series' highly efficient Pratt & Whitney PW1500G geared-turbofan-engines.

"The geared turbofan is really the first true innovation since the Boeing 787 Dreamliner revolutionized composite structures for airplane fuselages," Anderson said. "It's an impressive plane, particularly given the engine technology."

The Bombardier C-Series is expected to enter service later this year with SWISS.

NOW WATCH: Take a tour of the $66.5 million private jet that everyone is waiting for





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Key Takeaways from Canadian National Railway's 1Q16 Results

CNIs 1Q16 earnings

Canadian National Railway (CNI), the only transcontinental freight railroad in North America, announced its 1Q16 earnings on April 25, 2016. Wall Street analysts estimated a quarterly GAAP EPS (earnings per share) of $0.92 Canadian, whereas the company delivered a GAAP EPS of $1.00 Canadian.

The companys 1Q16 earnings rose by 16% from $0.86 Canadian in 1Q15. Considering the almost flat movement in CNIs stock, it seems that market has already priced in CNIs financial performance in 1Q16.

Rail stocks since 2016

Railroad stocks started on a negative note in the beginning of 2016. However, as the year progressed, indications of some positive sentiments beginning in February 2016 boosted railroad shares. Rail stocks have seen buoyant price movement, and Canadian National is a no exception.

Since the beginning of 2016 until April 25, 2016, Canadian National Railway returned 17.9% to the investors. Well go through where its peers fare in terms of returns to investors:

Canadian Pacific (CP) returned 13.3%

Kansas City Southern (KSU) returned 29.8%

CSX (CSX) returned 4.5%

CSXs Norfolk Southern (NSC) delivered a return of 8.0%

Union Pacific (UNP) returned 12.0%

Genesee & Wyoming (GWR) returned 19.3%

Investors looking for a pure play in US-specific rail stocks can invest in the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (VIG). All the US-originated Class I railroads make up the portfolio holdings of VIG.

2016 outlook

Canadian National Railways (CNI) management has issued a downward revision of the companys financial outlook in 2016. This was mainly due to weaker-than-anticipated freight demand in some markets and the strengthening of the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar.

According to the company, CN now aims to deliver 2016 EPS in line with last years adjusted diluted EPS of C$4.44 (compared with its Jan. 26, 2016, financial outlook calling for mid-single digit EPS growth this year).

Story continues

Series overview

The entire railroad industry is reeling under the pressure of plummeting coal volumes. In some cases, the carriers saw coal volumes being swept away by almost 50%. In the light of this environment, investors should know that CNIs exposure to coal business is very limited compared with the peer group, including rival CP. Plus, the company has upped its proposed capital spending in 2016, an exception among all the Class I railroads in the US.

In this series, well cover Canadian National Railways (CNI) main freight segments performance in 1Q16 and the managements outlook. Well also provide conference notes and Wall Street analysts perception toward CNI after its 1Q16 earnings.

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
The ex-CEO of Sprout Pharmaceuticals, which developed "the female Viagra," announced Wednesday she is launching a new venture with a focus on solving problems for women.

Called "The Pink Ceiling," the company will offer seed investing or consulting to start-ups that want to improve women's lives.

The Pink Ceiling's first partnership is with Undercover Colors, a North Carolina-based start-up developing wearable nail technology to detect date rape drugs in drinks.



"Whether these advances break down social barriers or bust through ceilings to create new categories, our goal is to fuel the solutions that put the power of choice in women's hands," Cindy Whitehead, The Pink Ceiling founder and CEO said in a release.

Whitehead co-founded and served as CEO of Sprout Pharmaceuticals. Last year, Sprout Pharmaceuticals made headlines when it created the first ever FDA-approved drug for low sexual desire in women, Addyi, dubbed the "female Viagra."

"My driving passion is identifying real solutions that can become catalysts for meaningful change for women," Whitehead said.

Interested entrepreneurs can pitch to Pink Ceiling on its website.





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SILVERDALE, WA / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / CGrowth Capital, Inc. (OTC Pink: CGRA) (the "Company") is pleased to update shareholders on the progress of its corporate initiatives and projects. Having recently received its initial subscriptions from its wholly owned subsidiary, CGrowth Capital Bond, Ltd., via the 15,000,000.00 British Pounds Sterling ("GBP") bond offering, the Company has been undergoing changes and taking the necessary steps to properly deploy its capital.

In deploying the bond funds, the Company's wholly owned subsidiary, Powder River Resources, Inc., has begun a series of strategic hires and equipment purchases to begin mobilizing in the 3,400-acre oil and gas project in Wyoming. Coming out of historically low oil prices and being in a position with capital, we are able to capitalize on deeply discounted equipment and the availability of highly qualified oil field personnel, in moving Powder River into a profitable enterprise. The Company is beginning to bring online an initial series of wells (up to 12) with another dozen being evaluated for workover and production. The first well brought back online after the winter shut in, known as the 182H (seen on our Facebook page), produced an initial push of 61 barrels of oil in its first 18 hours of operation.

The Company's real estate holdings, known as Chewelah Properties, LLC, has previously announced a series of lucrative leases to legalized cannabis producer/processors at its Washington state facility. Chewelah Properties has completed the 21-day appeals period on its SEPA approval without further comment, cementing the approval for the F-1 manufacturing facility for legalized cannabis production and processing. In addition, the facility has in hand its required building permits for its tenant, Wildfire Cannabis Company, and is anticipating final inspection upon a few minor items being wrapped up. In conjunction with the permitting, Wildfire has informed the Company that they are submitted for State inspection and are awaiting notification from the Eastern Washington LCB inspector of the final inspection and the activation of approved active license status.

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As part of an effort to rebrand and bring current information to its shareholders, the Company is releasing a new version of its website at http://www.CGrowthCapital.com. The site will provide information on the Company's projects and initiatives, up to date shareholder information, and current news from the Company. The new site is expected to go live before close of business Friday at its current web address.

About CGrowth Capital, Inc.:

CGrowth Capital, Inc. The Company continues to serve as a holding company for businesses and assets focused on all aspects of mining, minerals, exploration, and commercial real estate. The processing of metal ore mining, mineral and specialty rock extraction, as well as oil and gas production, are multi-billion dollar market opportunities which is capitalized on through processing, sales, contracting and licensing of assets. CGrowth Capital's services and solutions are designed to assist land owners with monetizing undervalued assets by bringing commodities such as gold, silver, oil and gas, and other commodities to market. CGrowth Capital will focus on acquiring or land assets, while also providing partners and affiliates with management services, capital, contract management and logistical services necessary for the successful execution of operations.

For more information about CGrowth Capital, visit their website: http://www.CGrowthCapital.com

https://www.facebook.com/CGrowthCapital

http://www.CGrowthCapitalBond.com

Investor Inquiries:

CGrowth Capital, Inc.

360-536-4500

Safe Harbor

Statements about the Company's future expectations and all other statements in this press release other than historical facts, are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The Company intends that such forward-looking statements be subject to the safe harbors created thereby. The above information contains information relating to the Company that is based on the beliefs of the Company and/or its management as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company or its management. When used in this document, the words "anticipate," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "plans," "projects," and similar expressions, as they relate to the Company or its management, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect the current view of the Company regarding future events and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including the risks and uncertainties noted. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein as anticipated, believed, estimated, expected, intended or projected. In each instance, forward-looking information should be considered in light of the accompanying meaningful cautionary statements herein. Factors that could cause results to differ include, but are not limited to, successful performance of internal plans, the impact of competitive services and pricing and general economic risks and uncertainties. The Company disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

SOURCE: CGrowth Capital, Inc.
Visiting US Defense Secretary Ash Carter gestures during a joint press conference with his Filipino counterpart Voltaire Gazmin (not pictured) at the presidential palace in Manila April 14, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

In the choppy waters of the South China Sea, China and the United States are entangled in a complex power struggle. The two major powers have accused each other of "militarizing" the South China Sea disputes. In the crosshair of this power struggle is the Philippines. As China's neighbor and the US' long-time ally, the Philippines has been strategic in its unique role.

According to China, the US is the main source of militarization in the South China Sea. This has resulted in disputes because of the US' regular deployment of advanced American aircraft and warships pursuing "freedom of navigation operations" in the region. So far, the US has conducted two major "freedom of navigation operations" in the South China Sea using guided-missile destroyers USS Lassen in October 2015 and USS Curtis Wilbur in January 2016. The US Navy has also strengthened its military presence in the region and its warships have made port calls to Asian allies, particularly the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Australia.

The US and the Philippines recently conducted their annual joint military exercise, called Balikatan 2016(Shoulder-to-Shoulder 2016). The primary focus of the drill was to help the Philippine military improve its capability for "territorial defense" against the backdrop of rising tensions in the South China Sea. This year's drill was the 32nd Balikatan between the two allies, but it also involved two other US military allies, Japan and Australia.

The Philippines has been the main focus of the US since it's the only Washington ally that has a dispute with China in the South China Sea. The Philippines is also the US' front line state in the pursuit of enacting the US policy in the South China Sea, because it provides the US military effective access to the waters as Washington implements its "rebalance to Asia" strategy.

For the US, its increased military presence in the South China Sea is essential to fulfill its security commitments to its allies, particularly the Philippines. Though Washington publicly declares that its increased naval and air presence in the South China Sea is not aimed at confronting Beijing militarily, China regards the US military presence as a form of strategic encirclement of the country. The fear of US encirclement, in turn, has prompted China, too, to increase its presence in the South China Sea by building islands on the seven reefs of Nansha Islands (called Spratlys in the Philippines). The US is convinced that China's "artificial" islands in the Nansha Islands can have no other but military purpose.

China and the US have recently intensified their power struggle in the South China Sea because of their competing security interests and strategic outlooks. Though the South China Sea is not yet a military problem, increased military activities by the two major powers have increased the risk of unintended military conflicts in the area.

Manila has a pivotal role to play, in preventing or exacerbating the possibility of an unintended military conflict between the two giants. To repair its damaged ties with Beijing, Manila has to resume direct bilateral talks by reopening channels of communication at the highest levels of decision-making. Though public opinion in the Philippines continues to reject Chinese buildup in the Nansha Islands, Filipinos continue to admire China's culture, civilization and economic prosperity as evidenced by the growing number of Filipino visits and investments in China. In fact, most of the presidential candidates for the May 2016 Philippine elections say they would improve Manila's relations with Beijing if elected.

But if the Philippines fails to improve its relations with China while continuously enhancing its defense alliance with the US, it can become a catalyst for the proverbial "Thucydides trap" in the vast sea where China and the US could collide.

The author teaches international studies at Miriam College in Quezon city of the Philippines, and is director of the Center for Intelligence and National Security Studies. Source: chinausfocus.com
Chazz Palminteri was offered $1 million for the rights to "A Bronx Tale." He turned it down when they wouldn't agree to make him the star. It was a gamble that paid off, sealing the deal on his fame and fortune. Now, "A Bronx Tale: The Musical" is headed to Broadway, directed by his longtime friend Robert De Niro and stage veteran Jerry Zaks. Palminteri recently parlayed his celebrity into the business world, with Chazz Paliminteri Ristorante Italiano in mid-town Manhattan and BiVi Vodka, the first vodka brand imported from Sicily. Here, he talks about his success and offers advice for others hoping to make it in any industry.

Who is the one person that changed the course of your life/career?

My parents put me on the right road, but the one person who changed my career, that was Robert De Niro. He came in and saw me do my one man show, "A Bronx Tale," [off Broadway] and said "Let's go partners." And the rest is history. It was the rocket ship that changed everything. I went from an unknown doing [bit parts in] "Hill Street Blues" to starring in a film with Robert De Niro.

There was one other person. I was working as a doorman at a fancy club in Beverly Hills and this nasty guy wanted to get in and I wouldn't let him. He warned me that if I didn't get out of his way, he'd have me fired in 15 minutes. The owner came out and it turned out the guy was Swifty Lazar, the biggest talent agent in the world. I got fired. And that's when I started writing "A Bronx Tale."







What's the biggest obstacle you've had to overcome in your career?

The biggest obstacle was actually me being in the movie "A Bronx Tale." When I wrote it, I decided that I was going to play the lead. I was offered $1 million to sell the script and let someone else star in the film. Everyone wanted to be in itbut I kept refusing. (P.S. I made a lot more than $1 million!)

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What was the best business decision you ever made?

Turning down a million dollars and taking a chance. I absolutely do not recommend this for everyone.





What's it like bringing "A Bronx Tale" to Broadway as a musical? How emotional a journey is it?

I love it. It's my life story. Watching people pay homage to my father is amazing. Hoping we can get there [to Broadway] in October. We just need to find an available theater. The one person that made the musical happen is one of the great entrepreneurs, Tommy Mottola [the music mogul.] I have to give him credit. He made it happen.

What is your advice to young people just starting out?

Be the best that you can be and be well liked and you can't fail. It makes doors easier to get into. People want to push others up if they like them, if not, you better be so damn brilliant they can't afford to lose you. That's my advice in life. Just be good at what you do and be well liked. That's the secret right there.

What is the best advice you have ever received  and who was it from?

The best advice I received was from my shrink who told me, "Don't ever read reviews." And I don't. I haven't read a review in 25 years.





How did you get into the restaurant business?

I used to go to the Empire Steak House and my friend introduced me to the owners, the Sinanaj brothers. Every time I went there, I noticed how they were always on top of things. I'm a perfectionist. When I'm directing a movie, everything has to be right. They were like that. I got to meet and talk with them. I said I always wanted to get involved in the business. This went on for year. Finally, they said, "We really want to do this." And I said, "OK."

How do you make your restaurant stand out? What's your special sauce?

What you really need is experience. Every day you're putting out a fire. You need the best help; the chef has to be right. It's not a business you can just jump into. It's like telling someone to walk into a hospital and perform an operation. That's why nine out of 10 restaurants fail. People jump in who don't know how to do it. With the Sinanaj brothers there's consistency. People will come once because of my name, but they're not coming back unless the food is great.





You recently lauched BiVi Vodka. What's the story there?

It's from Messina, my mother's hometown in Sicily. There's never been a Sicilian vodka brand before. We have a tradition at the restaurant, where we serve BiVi [from beve which means drink in Italian] and we share the olives. It's something I learned from Frank Sinatra. I was with Frank at his house in Malibu. We were there alone, staring at the water. He was just finishing a martini. We were talking about life and the movies. He finishes his martini, takes out the toothpick with the olives and says, "Share my olive." I took one off the toothpick and he says, "I love you." Turns out it was a Rat Pack tradition.

If you could do one thing over again in your career, what would it be?



I turned down a movie role because I was going to be directing another film. The movie was "Donnie Brasco" with Robert De Niro. They wanted me to play Simon Black. Michael Madsen took the part. It was a great movie. I wish I was in it.

Commentary from Chazz Palminteri, an actor, writer, director, restaurateur and entrepreneur . Follow him on Twitter @chazzpalminteri.



For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.







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Netflix has unveiled the official key art for Chelsea, its long-in-the-works talk show in which host Chelsea Handler tackles todays tough issues with the same acerbic wit and fearless curiosity you know and love.

Premiering May 11, the streaming services first talker will cover topics ranging from international cultures, alternative lifestyles, education, health to sports, parenting politics and more. Handler will span the globe  from Russia, Japan, and Mexico City, across the U.S. and back to Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City to tape live before a studio audience.

The 30-minute show will stream every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday with no commercials. Here is the poster:

Chelsea_Key Art

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Beijing (AFP) - China's Communist-controlled legislature passed a controversial law Thursday imposing new restrictions on foreign non-governmental organisations -- a measure met with "deep concern" in Washington.

The law gives police wide-ranging powers over overseas charities and bans them from recruiting members or raising funds in the country.

"The United States is deeply concerned that China's new Law on the Management of Foreign NGO Activities will further narrow space for civil society in China," US National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.

"We urge China to respect the rights and freedoms of human rights defenders, journalists, business groups, development professionals, and all others who make up civil society, including by protecting the ability of foreign NGOs to operate in China," he added.

The new law was approved almost unanimously by a committee of the Communist-controlled National People's Congress (NPC), spokesman He Shaoren told reporters, with 147 votes in favour and only one against.

At least 1,000 foreign NGOs are thought to operate in China, including development charities such as Save the Children, advocacy groups including Greenpeace, chambers of commerce and university centres.

The law, which comes into force in January, gives police the right to approve the registration of all foreign NGOs, according to a text distributed by the NPC.

Police will revoke the registration of any organisation which "damages national interests" or "threatens society's interests," it said.

Any groups committing actions deemed "separatist" or "subverting of state organs" will also be banned, as will those which "spread rumours".

"There have been some foreign NGOs which have planned or carried out activities threatening the stability of society and national security," NPC official Zhang Yong told reporters at a briefing. He did not give details.

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The law does not give a clear definition of an overseas NGO but is likely to cover foreign charities and business associations, and also applies to groups based in Hong Kong and Taiwan, although international schools and hospitals are exempt.

"Our initial reaction is disappointment that the public security agencies in China are going to be managing the registration process for NGOs," said Jake Parker, vice president for China operations at the US-China Business Council.

The law comes as President Xi Jinping oversees a crackdown on civil society, which has seen scores of lawyers, academics and activists detained and dozens jailed.

Several have been imprisoned on charges of "subverting state power," or "separatism," for what their advocates say is merely expressing opinions critical of the ruling party.

At the NPC briefing, official Guo Linmao dismissed concerns over police supervision, saying: "Ordinary folk have a saying: If you have a problem, call the police, if you haven't broken the law, what are you afraid of?"

- 'Very real threat' -

Overseas NGOs will have to hand annual work plans and financing details to a Chinese government agency, and will be forbidden from recruiting "members" in mainland China, barring special permission from the State Council, China's cabinet. They will also be banned from fundraising in mainland China.

China's state-run media in recent years have accused foreign organisations of undermining national security and trying to foment "colour revolution" against the ruling party.

China in January arrested and deported a Swedish human rights activist who had trained Chinese lawyers, and foreign NGO staff working on legal issues report an increasingly restricted environment.

Foreign diplomats have previously written to China's government to express fears over the law.

"We are also deeply concerned about the provisions in the draft Law on Foreign NGO Management," Hans Dietmar Schweisgut, the European Union ambassador to China, wrote in a letter earlier this year seen by AFP.

"Unless the law undergoes serious revision... it is likely to hinder people to people contacts, academic exchanges and commercial activities, all crucial elements of our bilateral relationship," he added.

Rights groups decried the law's passage on Thursday.

"The authorities - particularly the police - will have virtually unchecked powers to target NGOs, restrict their activities, and ultimately stifle civil society," said William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International.

"The law presents a very real threat to the legitimate work of independent NGOs and should be immediately revoked."
Panasonic said on Thursday it recorded solid annual profits boosted by televisions and household appliances, though a sales slowdown in China sapped momentum.

One of Japan's mainstay companies and most recognisable abroad for electronics, Panasonic has shifted to lesser-known businesses such as energy and an auto division that makes products for vehicles, including stereos and navigation systems.

Panasonic has also undergone a huge restructuring in response to toughening competitions from Asian rivals in recent years in an effort to close the door on record losses.

The Osaka-based company said its net profit for the past year to March rose 7.7 percent to 193.3 billion yen ($1.78 billion), while operating profit rose 8.8 percent to 415.7 billion yen.

Sales, meanwhile, edged down 2.1 percent to 7.55 trillion yen.

The figures were largely in line with its downgraded forecasts, released in February as a slowdown in Chinese and other emerging markets were expected to weigh on the bottom line.

Panasonic cited improving profitability in televisions and strong sales of household appliances, known in the industry as "white goods".

But sales of solar panels for household use struggled, while the company downsized foreign television operations to focus on profitability rather than sales volume, it said.

"Positive performances in white goods and a recovery in its TV sector contributed to profit gains for the past fiscal year," said Yasuo Nakane, senior analyst at Mizuho Securities.

"But a sales slowdown in China and developing countries as well as a decline in the currencies of emerging economies led negative factors for the past fiscal year and will remain concerns for the current fiscal year," he told AFP.

For the year to March 2017, Panasonic said it expects net profit of 145 billion yen and operating profit of 310 billion yen. Sales are seen at 7.6 trillion yen.

"Now that Panasonic has completed its restructuring, it's time for the company to review what business it intends to focus on," Nakane said.

"Mergers and acquisitions are also regarded as an option to expand its businesses."
(Reuters) - Baidu Inc, sometimes referred to as China's Google, reported a 24.3 percent jump in quarterly revenue as more advertising money flowed into its core search engine business.

The company's shares rose nearly 5 percent to $194.69 in extended trading on Thursday.

Baidu's online marketing revenue rose about 19.3 percent to 14.93 billion yuan ($2.31 billion) in the first quarter.

The company has been investing heavily to diversify away from search advertising, its mainstay so far, as customers increasingly use smartphones rather than personal computers for browsing the web.

Advertisers typically pay less for ads on mobile devices than for those on computers.

The net income attributable to Baidu fell about 19 percent to 1.99 billion yuan, while total revenue rose to 15.82 billion yuan. Baidu said its mobile business accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total revenue.

Excluding items, the company earned 6.80 yuan per American depositary share.

Total operating costs rose 28.8 percent to 13.61 billion yuan.

Baidu forecast revenue of 20.11 billion yuan-20.58 billion yuan for the second quarter.

(Reporting by Paul Carsten in Beijing and Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila and Kirti Pandey)
(Reuters) - Baidu Inc , sometimes referred to as China's Google, reported a 24.3 percent jump in quarterly revenue as more advertising money flowed into its core search engine business. The company's shares rose nearly 5 percent to $194.69 in extended trading on Thursday. Baidu's online marketing revenue rose about 19.3 percent to 14.93 billion yuan ($2.31 billion) in the first quarter. The company has been investing heavily to diversify away from search advertising, its mainstay so far, as customers increasingly use smartphones rather than personal computers for browsing the web. Advertisers typically pay less for ads on mobile devices than for those on computers. The net income attributable to Baidu fell about 19 percent to 1.99 billion yuan, while total revenue rose to 15.82 billion yuan. Baidu said its mobile business accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total revenue. Excluding items, the company earned 6.80 yuan per American depositary share. Total operating costs rose 28.8 percent to 13.61 billion yuan. Baidu forecast revenue of 20.11 billion yuan-20.58 billion yuan for the second quarter. (Reporting by Paul Carsten in Beijing and Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila and Kirti Pandey)
BEIJING, April 28 (Reuters) - Chinese automaker BYD Co Ltd , backed by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc, forecast on Thursday a five-fold jump in first-half net profit, citing strong demand for its electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.

The Shenzhen-based company forecast a 382 percent to 425 percent rise in net profit for the first half to 2.25 billion to 2.45 billion yuan ($347.29 million-$378.16 million), according to stock exchange filings.

For the first quarter, BYD reported 851 million yuan ($131.35 million) in profit, a seven-fold increase year-on-year and in line with its forecast last month of a 495 percent to 644 percent rise.

The automaker reported a similarly large rise for 2015 full-year net profit last month as overall new-energy vehicle sales in China more than quadrupled thanks to aggressive government policies including subsidies, tax incentives and more leeway in awarding license plates for green cars.

That surge has carried through to this year with sales of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles doubling in the first quarter.

The auto division of BYD, which is also a major producer of batteries for personal electronics, focuses on making electric and hybrid vehicles such as its best-selling Qin plug-in hybrid sedan.

The government sees such vehicles as the domestic auto industry's best shot at closing a competitive gap with more experienced global rivals and as a method to curb pollution.

Buffett's company owns 9.1 percent of BYD. ($1 = 6.4788 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Jake Spring; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
Chinese conglomerate HNA will buy US-based Carlson Hotels, owner of the Radisson brand, the companies announced, as it looks to build its presence in the American market.

It is the third overseas acquisition announced by HNA in as many months and the latest in a long line of foreign forays by cashed up Chinese companies.

It also comes after a failed $14 billion bid by another Chinese company, financial conglomerate Anbang, to buy Starwood Hotels.

HNA Tourism Group has agreed to buy Carlson Hotels, including its majority 51.3 percent stake in Brussels-based Rezidor Hotel Group, from parent company Carlson Hospitality Group, a joint statement said.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Carlson, headquartered in Minnesota, has 1,400 hotels in operation and under development in 115 countries and territories. Rezidor is its master licensee with hotels in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

HNA Hospitality Group chairman and chief executive officer Bai Haibo said in the statement the acquisition aimed to "establish our presence in the US market and expand our footprint in hospitality internationally".

HNA is best known as a parent of Hainan Airlines but it also has interests in tourism, hotels, financial services and real estate.

In February, HNA bought US technology distributor Ingram Micro for $6.0 billion and earlier this month it made a $1.5 billion offer for Swiss airline catering company Gategroup.

Its latest transaction has been approved by the Carlson board and is expected to close in the second half of this year, said the statement, posted on Carlson's website Wednesday.

HNA must decide whether to launch a mandatory public tender offer for the remaining shares in Rezidor or sell down its ownership to below 30 percent, the companies added.

China has encouraged its domestic firms to look overseas for deals that improve their balance sheets and strengthen their operations as the economy slows at home.

State-owned China National Chemical Corp. (ChemChina) in February offered $43 billion for Swiss pesticide and seed giant Syngenta, which will be the biggest-ever overseas acquisition by a Chinese firm if completed.
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - A unit of China's HNA Group has agreed a deal to buy Carlson Hotels, the owner of the Radisson hotel chain, the firms said in a joint statement late on Wednesday, continuing a spree of overseas deals by Chinese firms.

HNA Tourism Group Co Ltd, a division of aviation and shipping conglomerate HNA Group Co Ltd [HNAIRC.UL], will buy 100 percent of Carlson Hotels Inc for an undisclosed sum, including its 51.3 percent majority stake in Rezidor Hotel Group AB.

Chinese firms have been snapping up hotels and hospitality brands around the world, from Fosun International Ltd's purchase of France's Club Mediterranee to Anbang Insurance buying up the famous Waldorf Astoria in New York.

HNA Tourism's CEO Bai Haibo said the firm would build on the well-known Radisson brand to help "establish our presence in the U.S. market and expand our footprint in hospitality internationally."

Carlson Hotels has 1,400 hotels in operation spread through 115 countries and territories, and employs around 90,000 people worldwide.

After the deal HNA will have to decide whether to sell down its holding in Rezidor Hotel Group to below 30 percent or launch a mandatory public tender for the remaining 48.7 percent of the company, the firms said in the statement.

Chinese companies more widely have been splurging on foreign acquisitions to sidestep slowing domestic growth. The total value of Chinese outbound acquisitions topped $1 trillion for the first time last year.

The Carlson deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close in the second half of 2016.

(This version of the story has been refiled to correct presentation of Reuters Identification Code in second paragraph)

(Reporting by Adam Jourdan; Editing by Richard Pullin)
* HNA launched some $8 bln worth of outbound deals in 2016

* Rezidor has market value of $690 mln

* Carlson deal expected to close in calendar 2016 (Adds previous deals, HNA profile, Reuters code for Rezidor)

By Adam Jourdan and Denny Thomas

SHANGHAI/HONG KONG, April 28 (Reuters) - A division of Chinese aviation and shipping conglomerate HNA Group has agreed to buy the owner of the Radisson hotel chain in a deal that will nearly quadruple the number of its hotels around the world.

HNA Tourism Group, part of HNA Group Co Ltd, will buy 100 percent of U.S-based Carlson Hotels Inc for an undisclosed sum, including its 51.3 percent stake in Rezidor Hotel Group AB, the companies said late on Wednesday.

The deal will give HNA hotel brands including Radisson, Park Plaza, Country Inns & Suites and 1,400 hotels in 115 countries, adding to HNA's current portfolio of 500 hotels.

The companies did not disclose the deal value, though Bloomberg said last month Carlson could fetch about $2 billion.

Chinese companies have been on a buying spree this year, targeting assets from hotels to chipmakers to chemicals firms as they diversify out of their slowing home market.

Announced outbound Chinese mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have already reached $94.8 billion this year, compared with the record $103.6 billion for 2015, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Prior to HNA's deal, Fosun International Ltd bought France's Club Mediterranee while Anbang Insurance Group acquired the famous Waldorf Astoria in New York.

HNA Tourism CEO Bai Haibo said the company would build on the well-known Radisson brand to help "establish our presence in the U.S. market and expand our footprint in hospitality internationally".

Carlson Hotels employs about 90,000 people worldwide.

After the deal HNA will have to decide whether to sell down its holding in Rezidor Hotel Group to below 30 percent or launch a mandatory public tender for the remaining 48.7 percent of the company, the firms said in the statement.

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Rezidor shares were up 6.2 percent at 1210 GMT on Thursday.

Under the stewardship of co-founder and Chairman Chen Feng, HNA has grown into a group with nearly $100 billion in assets.

Founded in 1993, it operates more than a dozen airlines including flagship Hainan Airlines Co Ltd and has launched at least $8 billion of overseas M&A so far this year.

The Carlson Hotels transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close during 2016.

Morgan Stanley was the financial adviser to Carlson Hotels, while J.P. Morgan advised HNA Tourism Group.

(Editing by Richard Pullin and David Clarke)
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's parliament passed a controversial law governing foreign non-government organizations, Xinhua state news agency said on Thursday, giving wide powers to the domestic security authority and prompting criticism from Amnesty International. The law is part of a raft of legislation, including China's counterterrorism law and a draft cyber security law, put forward amid a renewed crackdown on dissent by President Xi Jinping's administration. The law, which is set to come into effect on Jan. 1, 2017, grants broad powers to police to question NGO workers, monitor their finances, regulate their work and shut down offices. Earlier drafts of the law had faced criticism from NGOs and foreign governments, which said it was too vague in its definition of what constituted actions that harmed China's national interests and could harm the operations of social and environmental advocacy groups, besides business organizations and academia. That ambiguity largely remained in the final version of the law, and officials who briefed reporters on the implications of the law on Thursday would not provide specific examples of actions by NGOs that constituted such violations. "If there are a few foreign NGOs, holding high the banner of cooperation and exchange, coming to engage in illegal activities or even committing criminal acts, our Ministry of Public Security should stop it, and even enact punishments," said Guo Linmao, an official with the National People's Congress Standing Committee, in a briefing. The law also includes complex registration requirements for foreign NGOs that critics have said are meant to stifle the groups' ability to work. The White House said on Thursday it was "deeply concerned" about the law, and urged China to respect the rights and freedoms of defenders of human rights, journalists and others. The law could "further narrow space for civil society in China," Ned Price, a U.S. National Security Council spokesman, said in a statement, adding it may constrain contacts between individuals and groups in the United States and China. Amnesty International called the law fundamentally flawed. "The authorities - particularly the police - will have virtually unchecked powers to target NGOs, restrict their activities and ultimately stifle civil society," William Nee, a China researcher for the group, said in a statement. The German Embassy in Beijing said the law adopted some positive changes including the deletion of an expiry clause on registration licenses. But it said overall it remained too restrictive. "The law continues to focus strongly on security and contains numerous approval and documentation requirements, as well as other norms restricting activities," it said in a statement. Chinese officials said Beijing welcomes law-abiding NGOs to work in the country, but intends to punish those which harm Chinese security interests or social stability, without defining what that could mean. "I'll use a colloquial expression," Guo said. "If you're in trouble, ask the police for help - if you haven't broken the law, what are you afraid of?" (Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington; editing by Nicholas Heath, Nick Macfie and G Crosse)
* Q1 net jumped over 300 pct after a unit took over 2 firms

* 2015 net down 80.5 pct on sluggish demand

* Contribution of sales outside China continue to rise

BEIJING, April 28 (Reuters) - Chinese heavy machinery maker Sany Heavy Industry Co reported a more than 300 percent jump in its first-quarter net profits on Thursday.

It did not give an explanation for the spike but said one of its subsidiaries took control of two firms in January.

Company executives could not immediately be reached for comment.

Sany said it made a net profit of 90.2 million yuan ($13.93 million) in the first three monts of the year, up from 20.6 million in the same period last year.

Annual earnings were down 80.5 percent last year at 138.6 million yuan.

Heavy equipment makers in China are struggling with unsold product, idle factories and tumbling earnings in a severe market downturn following years of strong growth after Beijing launched a $644 billion stimulus package in 2008.

Rival Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science and Technology Co reported a record quarterly loss earlier this month.

Sany has opened a bank, detailed plans for a weapons-making unit and even called upon employees to buy company shares, in efforts to counter the downturn.

Amid the slump, the company has lost about half of its market value in the last 12 months and now has a market capitalisation of about $6.4 billion.

As part of its efforts to tackle falling earnings it has also invested aggressively overseas, announcing last October it would invest $3 billion to develop 2,000 MW of renewable energy projects in India. Sales outside China contributed 44.2 percent of its overall sales in 2015, compared with 32.3 percent in 2014 and 6.5 percent in 2010, according to company data.

Rival Zoomlion has already added snow ploughs, fire-fighting vehicles, tractors and harvesters to its product range in a diversification drive. It is also bidding to buy U.S. crane maker Terex Corp for about $3.4 billion to gain access to the North American market.

($1 = 6.4773 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Fang Yan and Matthew Miller in Beijing; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree and Greg Mahlich)
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Citigroup has put its Asia credit card payment processing business on the block as part of an ongoing global plan to exit non-core operations, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Citi's Credit Card Merchant Acquiring business provides credit and debit card payment processing services to thousands of merchants in Asia and generates around $400 million in gross revenue, the people added. About 70 percent of the business comes from Hong Kong, Singapore and India, they added. Final bids are due in about three weeks. Citi started exiting its merchants acquiring businesses in other regions starting in 2005, and Asia is the last remaining market where it still provides this service. Citi generated $2.6 billion in revenue in Asia 2015 from its credit card business. Citi declined to comment, while the people declined to be identified as the sale process was confidential. (This story has been corrected in headline and first paragraph to clarify that the unit for sale is Citi's credit card payment processing business, not its payment processing business. The penultimate paragraph has been corrected to make clear that revenue is for its Asia credit card business) (Reporting by Denny Thomas; Editing by Lisa Jucca)
In an effort to fight natural selection, a city in Germany is embedding traffic lights onto the pavement so that pedestrians on their phones won't walk into oncoming traffic. God bless the human race.

The city of Augsburg installed red traffic lights into the ground so that people absorbed in their smartphones would have an indicator as to when it's not safe to keep walking, BBC reported.

The decision was made in response to a tragic accident. A 15-year-old girl died after being struck by a tram  she didn't see the red light go on indicating the oncoming tram because she was looking at her smartphone, N-TV reported.

These lights are reportedly a pilot project to address the "smombie" issue  "smombie" is the portmanteau for smartphone zombie, according to the Local, and was voted the "hippest" German word in 2015.

Source: Ben Margot/AP

What's not hip is walking into traffic because you are refreshing your Instagram feed  but a lot of us are guilty of such iFoolishness. According to the National Safety Council, 11,000 people have been injured due to distracted walking since 2000, PIX11 reported.

And while Germany is remodeling urban infrastructure for the smombies, some states want to ban the hopeless head-craning habit altogether. State lawmakers in Hawaii are trying to pass a bill "which would prohibit pedestrians from crossing a street, road or highway while using an electronic mobile device," KHON 2 reported.

So if you do plan on staring at the ground while you mosey through bustling roads, might you consider investing in this urban periscope? That Instagram photo is not worth a trip to the hospital.
CHICAGO, April 28 (Reuters) - Two futures traders in the United Arab Emirates banned from U.S. commodity markets last month for the disruptive practice known as "spoofing" faced additional penalties from CME Group Inc on Thursday.

The Chicago-based futures exchange operator fined traders Nasim Salim $100,000 and Heet Khara $90,000, and permanently barred both from its markets for placing orders in gold and silver futures contracts last year that they intended to cancel before execution.

They could not immediately be reached for comment.

Placing bids and offers without intending to execute them is prohibited because it can create an illusion of demand, driving price moves that otherwise might not occur.

The illegal practice has been fingered as a key contributor to the 2010 Wall Street "flash crash." The U.S. government in 2015 won its first criminal case against a trader accused of spoofing.

Last month, a federal court in New York fined Salim and Khara each more than $1.3 million to settle civil charges of spoofing, and also permanently banned them from trading.

The traders did not admit or deny the allegations, according to court filings.

Last month, a British judge approved a U.S. request for the extradition of a London-based trader, Navinder Sarao, accused of contributing to the 2010 Wall Street "flash crash" with spoofing tactics similar to those Salim and Khara allegedly used.

(Reporting by Tom Polansek; Editing by Paul Simao)
Colgate-Palmolive Co. CL reported strong first-quarter 2016 results, wherein earnings came in flat with expectations and sales topped the same. The quarter also marked the companys first sales beat in eleven quarters and the achievement of a milestone adjusted gross margin rate of 60%. However, Colgate continued to battle macroeconomic headwinds in various countries and lingering currency woes during the quarter.



Quarterly adjusted earnings of 63 cents a share were in line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate, but declined 4.5% year over year. On a currency-neutral basis, adjusted earnings rose by double digits.

Colgate-Palmolive Company (CL) Street Actual & Estimate EPS - Last 5 Quarters | FindTheCompany



Including one-time items, the company posted earnings of 59 cents per share, flat with the year-ago quarter.



Deeper Insight



Total sales of $3,762 million decreased 7.5% from the year-ago figure of $4,070 million, but surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $3,734 million.



The company stated that excluding divested business and the effects of the previously announced deconsolidation of its Venezuelan operations, the benefits of 3.5% growth in unit volume and a 1.5% rise in prices were more than offset by a negative impact of 8% from currency fluctuations.



On an organic basis (excluding foreign exchange, acquisitions, divestitures and the deconsolidated Venezuelan operations), the company recorded sales growth of 5%, mainly driven by a 7.5% sales improvement in emerging markets.



Adjusted gross profit margin was 60%, up 110 basis points (bps), backed by benefits of cost-saving initiatives under the companys funding-the-growth and 2012 Restructuring Program, along with better pricing. These were partly offset by increased packaging and material expenses stemming from higher currency translation costs.



In the reported quarter, adjusted operating profit of $922 million declined 4% from the year-ago quarter. However, adjusted operating margin improved 90 bps to 24.5% on enhanced gross margin and partly offset by a 10 bps increase in selling, general & administrative expenses as a percentage of revenues.



On a year-to-date basis, Colgates market share of manual toothbrushes reached 33.5%. Further, the companys share in the global toothpaste market continued to grow, reaching 43.8%.



Segment Discussion



North America sales (21% of total sales) rose 1.5% in the reported quarter, driven by a 4% improvement in unit volume, offset by a 2% fall in pricing and negative foreign exchange impact of 0.5%. On an organic basis, sales grew 2%.



Latin America sales (23% of total sales) slumped 22% year over year as the benefits of a 2% improvement in unit volumes and 7% increase in pricing were offset by a negative impact of 19% from foreign exchange. Volume growth contributions were led by Brazil, Mexico and Colombia and excluded the companys deconsolidated Venezuelan operations. On an organic basis, sales rose 9.5%.



Europe/South Pacific sales (18% of total sales) fell 7.5% year over year due to a negative impact of 3% from lower pricing and 4.5% from foreign currency translation. However, unit volumes for the quarter were flat with last year. Excluding the divested businesses, volumes grew 4% driven by the strength noted in France, Australia and Poland. Europe/South Pacific organic sales inched up 1%.



Asia sales (17% of total sales) dropped 2.5%, attributable to flat pricing and a negative impact of 6.5% from foreign exchange, partly compensated by a 4% jump in volumes. Volume growth was primarily attributed to gains in the Greater China region, India and the Philippines. On an organic basis, sales rose 4%.



Africa/Eurasia sales (6% of total sales) declined 9% year over year due to a negative impact of 17% from foreign currency exchange, partly compensated by an 8% increase in prices. However, volumes in the quarter remained flat with last year. Volume gains in Russia and the Gulf States were somewhat compensated by declines in South Africa and Ukraine. Organic sales for Africa/Eurasia advanced 8%.



Hills Pet Nutrition sales (15% of total sales) increased 2.5% year over year. During the quarter, positive impact from 3.5% volume growth and a 1.5% increase in pricing were offset by a 2.5% negative impact from foreign exchange. Unit volume improvements were backed by gains in the U.S. and Western Europe. On an organic basis, sales rose 5% year over year.



Other Financial Details



Colgate ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $1,014 million, total debt of $6,580 million, and shareholders equity (excluding non controlling interests) of ($370) million.



Net cash provided by operating activities came in at $614 million for the first quarter of 2016.



Outlook



Colgate anticipates macroeconomic and currency headwinds to linger throughout 2016. However, even in the face of these challenges, management expects another year of robust organic sales growth on the back of new products across categories and geographical regions.



Consequently, excluding the Venezuelan operations from its 2015 and 2016 results, Colgate envisions 2016 earnings per share to witness double-digit growth (on a currency neutral basis). As of the existing spot rates, management expects gross margin to expand in 2016 and adjusted earnings per share in dollar terms to remain flat with 2015.



The aforementioned guidance excludes all charges associated with the 2012 Restructuring Program.



Zacks Rank



Colgate currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stock in the same industry are The Clorox Company CLX, Church & Dwight Co. Inc. CHD and Unilever PLC UL, each with a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



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UNILEVER PLC (UL): Free Stock Analysis Report



COLGATE PALMOLI (CL): Free Stock Analysis Report



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To read this article on Zacks.com click here.
By Keith Coffman

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - The man accused of fatally shooting three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado last year thought, before he opened fire, that the FBI was tracking him, a police detective said in court on Thursday.

Robert Lewis Dear, 58, told police he believed 10 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were following him the day of the shooting and that his neighbor and girlfriend worked for U.S. authorities, Colorado Springs Police Detective Jerry Schiffelbein said under questioning by Dear's attorney.

Schiffelbein, who interviewed Dear after his arrest, said there was no indication the FBI ever followed or monitored Dear.

The testimony was presented at a hearing in Colorado Springs, site of the shootings at the nationwide abortion provider's clinic, to determine whether he is mentally competent after he made courtroom outbursts in December and sought to dismiss his lawyers.

Dear faces multiple charges of murder and attempted murder in connection with the Nov. 27 shooting, in which three people died and nine others were wounded.

El Paso County District Judge Gilbert Martinez, in response to a question from prosecutors on Thursday, acknowledged his order for a competency hearing, handed down in December, began with a limited scope to decide if Dear was competent enough to fire his lawyers.

But Martinez said he is now seeking to determine whether the accused shooter is fit to stand trial.

State psychologist Jackie Grimmett also took the stand at Thursday's hearing, testifying that she concluded after interviewing Dear he suffered from delusional disorder.

"I do not believe Mr. Dear is competent to stand trial," she said.

Dear interrupted Thursday's proceedings with increasing frequency as the hearing went on.

At court in December, Dear declared he was guilty and called himself a "warrior for the babies."

If Martinez rules Dear mentally unfit, the case will be suspended while he undergoes treatment with the goal of restoring him to competency. It was not clear if the judge would make any ruling on Thursday.

Story continues

Dear, who police said was armed with several rifles and opened fire in the parking lot of the clinic before storming the building, told detectives after his arrest he was upset with Planned Parenthood for performing abortions and what he said was the "selling of body parts," the documents showed.

He has been held without bond at the El Paso County jail since he surrendered to end the five-hour siege.

(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and James Dalgleish)
From Good Housekeeping

A Tennessee police force has a lot to answer for after arresting 10 elementary school students earlier this month. The officers handcuffed multiple children between the ages of 6 and 11 after an off-campus fight - but the kids weren't even involved in the scuffle. The Murfreesboro police actually charged them for failing to intervene.

Apparently, a video of the fight caused the officials to issue arrest warrants for the young bystanders. Parents later revealed the official charge was "criminal responsibility for conduct of another," which according to state law is when a "person fails to make a reasonable effort to prevent" an offense. But asking grade school kids to get involved in a physical fight (and place themselves in harm's way) just goes against common sense.

"This is absolutely unjust, and this is scary," said Reverend James McCarroll, a local pastor. "We cannot sit by and allow this to happen to our kids."

While the police chief has since apologized for the incident, there's been no indication that the charges will be dropped.

[h/t Mashable]
Florence (Italy) (AFP) - Disgraced skipper Francesco Schettino Thursday began his battle to avoid prison for the 2012 cruise ship disaster off Italy in which 32 people died, his lawyers arguing that others should shoulder the blame.

Schettino was sentenced in February 2015 to 16 years and one month in jail after a judge ruled his recklessness caused the giant Costa Concordia to hit underwater rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio.

The 55-year-old career seaman, who has not yet begun his sentence, says he has been made the solitary scapegoat for the disaster and will seek to overturn his manslaughter conviction in an appeal which opened Thursday and will run through May at least.

The prosecution is simultaneously appealing last year's sentence, asking Thursday that he go down for 27 years and three months.

"We believe there are serious responsibilities which cannot be ascribed to Schettino and we hope to be able to show that," lawyer Saverio Senese told journalists outside court.

Senese said there were problems with some of the technical evidence: "we need to look more deeply... to find what really caused the accident."

- Media hounding -

During his first, 19-month, trial, Schettino was accused of showing off when he steered the ship too close to the island while entertaining a female friend.

He was convicted of multiple manslaughter, causing a maritime accident and of leaving his boat before all passengers and crew were evacuated.

He was dubbed "Captain Coward" by the international media and his lawyers said he was not in court Thursday because of the press hounding during the first trial.

"He hopes this trial can return to what it should be, a process focused on the search for the truth and not an analysis of his person. He will be in court should the court request his presence," Senese said.

Schettino was given 10 years for manslaughter, five for causing a disaster that led to the biggest salvage operation in maritime history, and one for abandoning ship.

Story continues

His lawyers insist the deadly accident was primarily due to a failure of organisation for which the ship's owner Costa Crociere, its Indonesian helmsman and the Italian coastguard should share the blame.

"We cannot say the blame lies with others. It also lies with others, but that does not clear Schettino," prosecutor Alessandro Leopizzi told the court.

Lawyers for survivors insisted Costa Crociere had got off lightly to date.

"Justice has begun to be served, but there is something important missing from the dock; the company behind Schettino's acts," lawyer Massimiliano Gabrielli said.

The judges in Schettino's first trial ruled that the company must share civil responsibility for the disaster with the disgraced skipper.

The company was ordered to pay just over seven million euros ($8 million) in compensation to the survivors and the region.

- Disappeared 'into thin air' -

The company sidestepped potential criminal charges in 2013 by accepting partial responsibility and agreeing to pay a one-million-euro fine.

Five of its employees received non-custodial sentences after concluding plea bargains early in the investigation.

They included the ship's Indonesian helmsman, who could have averted the disaster but did not understand an order given by Schettino to change course just before the collision.

The ex-captain's lawyer said he would have liked the man at the helm to be questioned further "but he cannot be found, he has disappeared into thin air".

The region of Tuscany and the island of Giglio were awarded 300,000 euros each -- a tiny fraction of what they were seeking for damage done to the sea bed and tourism.

Survivors of the disaster who had rejected Costa's initial compensation offer and become civil parties in the Schettino case were awarded an average of 30,000 euros.

Civil parties lawyer Massimiliano Gabrielli said they would "of course ask for more money, and continue to ask for justice. We also want the question of responsibility to be widened, notably concerning Costa Crociere."

On top of his prison term, Schettino was banned from public office from life and from working as a ship captain for five years.
By Renee Dudley (Reuters) - A U.S. congressman called on the Department of Homeland Security to address whether foreign students are cheating on the SAT to get into American universities and illegally qualify for U.S. visas. In a letter dated Wednesday and sent to the Homeland Security department, Representative Matt Salmon cited a March report by Reuters that detailed the widespread practice of strategic cheating on the SAT by test preparation centers in Asia and what he termed the passive approach of the tests owner  the College Board  to stop cheating overseas. Salmon, a Republican from Arizona and a member of a House committee on education, wrote in the letter that certain foreign students could fraudulently gain the upper-hand in college admissions by high test scores due to being prepared by these dishonest test-prep centers, thus limiting the options of those students who took the test honestly. Thousands of U.S. colleges use the standardized test to help select applicants. "I am concerned that under-qualified students are being admitted to U.S. schools under false pretenses, Salmon wrote. About 761,000 degree-seeking foreign students currently study in the United States, according to the Institute of International Education. With such a generous foreign student system, Salmon wrote, it is important that we take every effort to ensure its integrity. Homeland Security requires visas for international students to study in the United States. A prospective student must be admitted to a U.S. school before applying for a student visa, and Salmon asked the department whether it had any estimates on how many students may have entered the U.S. with faulty test scores. In an interview Thursday, Salmon said that he wants to ensure that we're not encouraging a bunch of cheats to come and study in our schools. The College Board, the New York-based not-for-profit that owns the SAT, did not respond to requests for comment. Gillian Christensen, deputy press secretary for Homeland Security, said the department will respond to Salmons letter. In an email, she said the department is committed to ensuring the integrity of the student visa system, while protecting the freedoms and openness that are the hallmarks of our country. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will aggressively pursue those who seek to exploit and corrupt Americas legal immigration system for personal gain, Christensen wrote. Reuters reported in March that the College Board has often reused tests overseas after first giving them in America months or years earlier, even after some test questions began circulating online. College Board officials have said they are unable to assess how many test-takers have seen actual exam material before taking the SAT. But Reuters found students who had attended test-preparation centers in China and who said they had seen questions ahead of time from SATs they subsequently took. Reuters identified 14 times since late 2013 when parts of an SAT given internationally had been publicly exposed before the exam was given overseas. A confidential PowerPoint presentation, prepared by College Board officials in June 2013, revealed that parts of nine of 18 exams in the organizations global inventory had been compromised. Even so, College Board officials confirmed that some portions of those tainted tests were later administered overseas. In his letter to Homeland Security, Salmon wrote: I was greatly disturbed by recent news reports regarding The College Boards passive approach to preventing and addressing cheating on the SAT test abroad. (Edited By Blake Morrison)
Lyle Denniston, the National Constitution Centers constitutional literacy adviser, looks at the Supreme Court arguments in the McDonnell corruption case and an age-old problem of the separation of powers.

The facade of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.

The facade of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.

THE STATEMENT AT ISSUE:

Its not because Im in favor of dishonest behavior. Im against it.My problem is the criminal law as the weapon to cure it. And if the criminal law is the weapon that goes as far as [the Department of Justice wants], there are two serious problems. One, political figures will not know what theyre supposed to do and what theyre not supposed to do, and thats a general vagueness problem. And the second is, Id call it a separation of powers problem. The Department of Justice in the Executive Branch becomes the ultimate arbiter of how public officials are behaving in the United States  state, local and national.Now, to give that kind of power to a criminal prosecutor, who is virtually uncontrollable, is dangerous to the separation of powers.This case is as fundamental a real separation of powers problem as Ive seen.

 Comment by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, during a Supreme Court hearing on Wednesday as the Justices reviewed the public corruption conviction of former Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell.

WE CHECKED THE CONSTITUTION, AND

If men were angels, no government would be necessaryA dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the need for auxiliary precautions. So wrote James Madison in Federalist Paper 51, explaining why the new government needed to have its powers separated among branches that would act as checks upon each others powers. One such check exists in the power of an independent court system to monitor how government prosecutors use the criminal law.

The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, spent an active hour examining an age-old problem of the separation of powers: when do federal prosecutors in the Executive Branch go too far in the use of the criminal law to deal with corruption of elected officials? It seemed quite clear that most of the Justices were troubled, some deeply, by a high-profile corruption case that Justice Department prosecutors won against a former Virginia governor, Robert F. McDonnell.

Story continues

McDonnell and his wife were convicted under a handful of laws that make it a crime to take money or other valuable things in return for the exercise of official acts in government, at the national, state or local level. Congress, in passing those laws, however, did not specify what official acts would be covered. Sorting that out is the task the Justices agreed to take on in reviewing the former governors guilty verdict (his wifes separate case is on hold, awaiting the outcome of McDonnels appeal).

The governor and his family, according to prosecutors, took about $170,000 worth of money, loans, luxury goods or expensive parties and outings from a Richmond, Va., businessman who wanted the governors help to get state agencies to take steps that would promote the businessmans product, a health supplement made from tobacco leaves.

The prosecutors persuaded the jury in McDonnells trial that it was a crime if he took the money, gifts and favors in return for arranging meetings or holding events that could work in his benefactors business interests. McDonnell has taken his case to the Supreme Court to get a ruling that official acts, under the criminal laws at issue, must involve a direct use of governmental machinery or a direct attempt to influence that machinery.

It is not enough, his lawyers contended, for an official to have obliged his benefactor with the kind of courtesies that an elected official quite normally provides for citizens or political supporters. McDonnell has support for that argument from an impressive array of former government officials, including a list of former chief staff lawyers in the White House during Republican and Democratic administrations, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., tellingly brought up that support in Wednesdays argument. It was, Roberts said, extraordinary for those lawyers of differing political persuasions to join in arguing that the McDonnell verdict was a threat to representative democracy.

That could well have been the theme of the entire argument before the Justices. Along with the Chief Justice, Justices Breyer and Anthony M. Kennedy went searching for ways to limit these criminal laws in a way that would not raise a legal risk for the ordinary communications or gestures of service for constituents in which elected officials engage. As Breyer pointed out, there was no sympathy on the Court for dishonest behavior. But there clearly was sympathy for the former Virginia governments complaint that he had no chance to escape a guilty verdict, given the sweep that federal prosecutors had provided in the phrase official acts. Said Breyer: Were worried.

Kennedy, for example, suggested that the prosecutors approach might have made it a crime for a school janitor to accept a bottle of beer for giving a clean-up priority to a particular classroom. It was an exaggerated hypothetical, but it nonetheless did convey the breadth that some members of the Court saw in the McDonnell prosecution.

The Chief Justice noted, ominously, that if the laws are in fact as broad as the prosecutors had made them in this case, they might risk being struck down as unconstitutionally vague.

The court, if during its deliberations in coming weeks does come to the conclusion that the McDonnell verdict was flawed, the laws at issue might not necessarily be struck down entirely. An alternative would be to try to spell out what several Justices referred to as a limiting principle. Neither of the two lawyers who argued the case on Wednesday seemed to have satisfied the Justices with what each advocate thought official acts should  or should not  encompass.

From here on, it will be up to the Justices using their own legal perceptions to find a way to avoid handing over to the Executive Branch the unchecked role of keeper of political morality in America. That wont be a simple endeavor.
amanda bradford, the league, sv100 2015

The League, the controversial dating app dubbed the Tinder for elites, is kicking off an aggressive expansion plan with a launch in Los Angeles.

But more important than the new cities is The Leagues imminent attempts to make money off the app. The app has reached a do-or-die moment, and the next few months will show whether it has actual customers  or just people who were curious what all the internet fuss was about.

The core function of The League is similar to Tinder, but it restricts its pool of singles to those who are ambitious young professionals, determined by an algorithm that examine things like LinkedIn connections. To say that goal has rubbed some people on the internet the wrong way would be an understatement.

The launch in LA marks only the third city The League has moved into (besides San Francisco and New York City). CEO Amanda Bradford tells Business Insider this is because the startup spent most of the last year rebuilding its app from the ground up because it wouldnt scale properly.

We decided to pull the band-aid off now, Bradford says. The League migrated all its users over to the new platform in February. After LA, The League plans to launch in more major cities around the US and the world.

The expansion coincides with The League's first major attempt to make money.

groups the league

Ads arent feasible for us, Bradford explains. Her plan is to institute a freemium model where users can pay for extra features that resemble an online members-only club. The League has already begun to roll out things like events and groups to bring singles together in ways that arent a one-on-one date. Bradford talks about it like a post-university extension of the kind of mingling that happens  for students of certain persuasions  at elite colleges like Stanford, where she got her MBA.

The question is whether users find enough value in the community The League is trying to build to pay for it. Bradford clearly realizes that with the low number of users (by design), The League will have to convert far more of its free users to paying ones than the average freemium app. If that's not possible, it's bad news for The League, Bradford says.

Story continues

If our members dont want to pay, we will have to open it up, Bradford says.

And then the Tinder for ambitious young professionals will become just, well, Tinder.

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(Corrects headline, bullet point and first paragraph to show 50 percent of northern coral is dead or dying, not entire reef) By Colin Packham SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists said on Wednesday that just seven percent of the Great Barrier Reef, which attracts around A$5 billion ($3.90 billion) in tourism every year, has been untouched by mass bleaching that is likely to destroy half of the northern coral. 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 one of the strongest El Nino weather systems in nearly 20 years, scientists believe climate change is the underlying cause. "We've never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before. In the northern Great Barrier Reef, it's like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once," said Professor Terry Hughes, conveyor of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, which conducted aerial surveys of the World Heritage site. "Our estimate at the moment is that close to 50 percent of the coral is already dead or dying," Hughes told Reuters. The Great Barrier Reef stretches 2,300 km (1,430 miles) along Australia's northeast coast and is the world's largest living ecosystem. "There were some who said that the worst had passed. We rejected that, and they were wrong," Environment Minister Greg Hunt told reporters. "Let it be known that this is a significant event. We take it seriously." U.S. President Barack Obama embarrassed Australia 18 months ago by warning of the risk of climate change to the reef during a G20 meeting. UNESCO's World Heritage Committee last May stopped short of placing the Great Barrier Reef on an "in danger" list, but the ruling raised long-term concerns about its future. Australia is one of the largest carbon emitters capita because of its reliance on coal-fired power plants for electricity. Despite pledging to cut carbon emissions, Australia has continued to support fossil fuel projects, including Adani Enterprises Ltd's proposed A$10 billion ($7.7 billion) Carmichael coal project in the Galilee Basin in western Queensland. "Its not good enough for them to say they care about the reef while they keep backing the coal industry and avoid tackling climate change, said Shani Tager, a Greenpeace campaigner. The findings will likely place pressure on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ahead of an expected federal election on July 2. Turnbull is an advocate of carbon trading and supports progressive climate policies, but has left some disappointed over a failure to strengthen his party's commitment to addressing climate change. ($1 = A$1.28) (Additional reporting by James Regan; Editing by Nick Macfie)
For now, embattled Chancellor Linda Katehi has been removed from her post at UC Davis, where scores of student activists have demanded her ouster in recent months.

Some critics lost faith in Chancellor Katehi in 2011, when she presided over the brutal pepper-spraying of Davis undergraduates lawfully assembled on a campus quad. Others fault her for a costly, ill-conceived attempt to scrub the incident from Web searches. Still others say she ignored a clear conflict of interest when taking a lucrative position on the board of a company that publishes college textbooks.

Until this week, University of California President Janet Napolitano had publicly stood by her subordinate, even as members of the state legislature called on Katehi to resign. But Wednesday, Napolitano placed Katehi on 90 days paid leave while ordering an investigation into her conduct. Put another way, Californians will pay Katehi roughly $106,000 in salary to fulfill zero responsibilities for three months while investigators figure out whether she should be fired. Katehi earns $424,360 per year.

The letter informing Katehi that shes being placed on leave airs several new allegations against her:

First, questions have been raised about the employment of some members of your family, including whether employment actions related to your daughter-in-law and son violate University conflict-of-interest policies and requirements related to the employment of near relatives. Your daughter-in-law, who directly reports to one of your direct reports, has received promotions and salary increases over a two-and-a- half year period that have increased her pay by over $50,000 and have resulted in several title changes.

During that same period, you put forward a pay increase of over 20% and a title change for your daughter-in-laws supervisor.

More recently, it appears not only that the academic program in which your son holds a paid research position was moved into the same department in which your daughter-in-law is employed, but also that the program was placed under her direct supervision. It does not appear that appropriate steps were taken to address, document or obtain approval for the fact that your son now reported to your daughter in-law, who, in turn, was supervised by one of your direct reports.

The independent investigation also will determine whether the employment status of your daughter-in-law with respect to supervising the research center that employed your son violated requirements regarding the proper use of Student Service Fee revenue. See Regents Policy 3101  University of California Student Fee Policy and implementing guidelines. You have verbally assured me that all matters relating to the employment of your husband, son and daughter-in-law have been consistent with policies and procedures, but documents and other information appear contrary to that assurance.

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The letter goes on to question whether Katehi was truthful in her public statements about Davis funds that she spent on public relations. There are concerns regarding whether you have made material misstatements regarding your role in the social media contracts, Napolitano wrote. Despite public statements to members of the media, as well as to me, that you were not aware of or involved with these particular contracts, documents prepared in response to a Public Records Act request indicate multiple interactions with one of the vendors.

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That public records request appears to have been made by the The Sacramento Bee, which reported that an outside contractor has been closely monitoring Katehis image:

Documents released to The Sacramento Bee late Wednesday through California Public Records Act requests show how closely the universitys image consultants tracked coverage of Katehis latest controversies. One email from Sacramento-based IDMLOCO dated March 7 suggested a way of inserting some positive Linda Katehi press into the conversation once the time is right. Other documents showed campus officials received regular reports on how Katehis reputation was being affected by media reports.

The newspaper article went on to report details of the social media monitoring that suggests the student activist strategy of occupying an administration building bore fruit:

Over the weekend, the conversation volume spiked to the highest point since the negative stories about Chancellor Katehi began, a March 16 email from IDMLOCO stated. The conversation spike was surrounding the Mrak Hall 5th floor sit-in that began on Friday, where students protested for the chancellors resignation. Resignation has become the primary theme in the social conversation over the weekend, the email stated, noting that currently, the sentiment is 48 percent negative, 15 percent positive and 37 percent neutral.

Even after departing the administration building, student protesters continued their anti-Katehi activism by airing her metaphorical dirty laundry on a campus quad. Later Wednesday, an attorney released a statement on Katehis behalf challenging the allegations against her and expressing her intention to return to her job.

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The text:

Tonights action is disappointing, unprecedented and, based on the facts, entirely unjustified. Since the day she was hired, the chancellor has given her unwavering devotion to fulfilling the fundamental public mission of UC Davis and doing everything the UC President and Board of Regents have asked her to. By any measureand according to numerous voices throughout the Davis and Sacramento communitiesher leadership has helped put the university on a path to globally recognized excellence and historic diversity. More Californians than ever beforeincluding more women and more students of colorare receiving a world-class education at UC Davis under her stewardship. This smacks of scapegoating and a rush to judgment driven purely by political optics, not the best interests of the university or the UC system as a whole. The Chancellor welcomes an independent, objective investigation and a full release of all relevant documents and public records. Make no mistake: we intend to vigorously defend Lindas professional reputation and her standing as Chancellor of the university she loves.

I cant wait to find out what the investigation uncovers.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Tom Hiddleston is having an "It" moment right now, which is probably why everyone keeps asking the 35-year-old English actor if he'll take over as James Bond after Daniel Craig steps down.

Most famous for playing the villainous Loki in The Avengers franchise, Hiddleston is making a splash stateside with the back-to-back releases of the Hank Williams biopic, I Saw the Light; the science fiction thriller, High-Rise; and the AMC espionage drama, The Night Manager. On the latter, he plays a sexy, confident M16 intelligence officer, leading many to draw parallels between the two spy roles.

"The comparison between Pine and Bond is flattering," Hiddleston tells me as we sit in a conference room at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York City.

Of course, it doesn't help that Craig has expressed his indifference about continuing with the franchise after four films as 007. But Hiddleston is quick to say any conversation -- and it has come up often over the past six months -- is "hypothetical."

"I think any British actor that gets a phone call that says, 'Would you like to play James Bond?' There's no more enticing question than that," he told ET in October of last year. Setting the record straight during our conversation, Hiddleston stresses to me: "I haven't been approached, I haven't asked, I haven't been invited."

While Hiddleston wouldn't indulge in what it would be like to play the iconic character, he did address talk about a black Bond or a gay Bond, saying, "They will make a decision that is best for them."

It's the only time while we're seated across from each other that the actor loses any bit of his happy demeanor. The sheer mention of Bond wipes away his smile as he goes into his thoughtfully trained response.

"I understand that people have made the link. Beyond that, I have nothing to add," Hiddleston says with a short chuckle. And just like that, the conversation switches back to his latest three projects, which have compressed 18 months of work into one month for audiences.

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PHOTOS: Hollywood's Sexiest Shirtless Men

"Talking about them is very peculiar," Hiddleston says with his usual charm, which despite the slight bump over Bond has remained surprisingly intact given his hectic schedule. The actor has been in town, busily promoting his projects after wrapping production on Kong: Skull Island.

A few days prior, he was on hand for the premiere of The Night Manager at the Tribeca Film Festival, where he simultaneously thanked and apologized to the audience for his presence. The actor, who High-Rise director Ben Wheatley says recalls film idols of the '40s and '50s, is far more dashing in person than he is on screen or in Tumblr fantasies.

"I'm so proud of them all. They're very different -- each of them -- and all of them are very different from everything I've done before," Hiddleston says with genuine intent.

To say the roles are different is an understatement.

In High-Rise, an adaptation of J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel about a luxury apartment building's descent into tribal warfare available on demand April 28 and in theaters on May 13, Hiddleston plays Dr. Robert Laing. His character is first seen on screen eating the leg of a white Alsatian on the balcony of his apartment, and later, sunbathes naked on a lawn chair. "It's always odd when you take your clothes off in front of a crew, but I never had a problem with it," Hiddleston adds.

For I Saw the Light, which is in theaters now, Hiddleston ran 10 miles and sang six hours each morning to embody the rail-thin Hank Williams, whose rise to fame in country music was eclipsed by his sudden death at age 29. On The Night Manager, the actor plays Jonathan Pine, the aforementioned spy tasked with infiltrating the inner circle of an arms dealer played by Hugh Laurie.

"He's always very enigmatic," director Susanne Bier said of the actor during a discussion following the premiere of the AMC series, which airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET. "There's always an element I don't know." It was a sincere compliment, a testament to his chameleon-like ability to move from one role to the next.

"The best thing about it is that I feel like I'm not one type of actor," Hiddleston tells me about having all three roles come out at once. "I suppose I'm able to show people that I can do different things, that I'm interested in different things, and I hope people recognize that."

Getty Images

Audiences certainly will take notice -- or at least, they should.

While he's enjoyed commercial success and worldwide fandom for playing Loki, a casual fan probably would not recognize him from behind his slithery scowl and long black hair. "I constructed him so carefully," Hiddleston says of the comic book villain, which he first played in Thor (2011). The origin story about the hammer-swinging Norse god played by Chris Hemsworth was his first major film role, elevating him to the next level of his career beyond small British dramas and various TV movies. "The character's like a costume, in a way. I pick the fabric, I pick the colors and I cut it, and I tailored it to myself. I put it on, and wore it, and expressed something different about me, I suppose."

After three films -- Thor, The Avengers, and Thor: The Dark World -- as Loki, Hiddleston has been absent from the subsequent Avengers films. Though, he's been steadily making a name for himself with films like Crimson Peak and Only Lovers Left Alive. Now, he is set to reprise his role in Thor: Ragnarok, which will start production over the summer.

"I haven't played in the sandbox with Marvel for four years now and I'm about to do it again," Hiddleston says. "I'm interested to see what the experience will be like because four years is a long time. I've lived a lot of life in those four years. Inevitably, what I bring to the table will be different."

PHOTOS: Before They Were Avengers: Your Favorite Marvel Heroes' Early Acting Jobs

That difference largely being he's no longer an ensemble player, hidden behind the Chrises -- Hemsworth (Thor) and Evans (Captain America) -- of the franchise. Planned for a November 2017 release, the third Thor film will come out eight months after Kong: Skull Island, in which Hiddleston takes the lead as Captain James Conrad. While he won't say much about the latest King Kong film, which also serves as the second installment in the new Godzilla-Kong cinematic universe, he jokingly told Rolling Stone that his co-star, Oscar winner Brie Larson, will not be playing the famed ape.

The upcoming part will be his most high-profile role to date, positioning the character actor as Hollywood's new leading man, possibly joining Matt Damon, who can still blend into the background, yet -- and probably most importantly -- open a film. In fact, it's Damon whom Hiddleston points to as example of the kind of career he hopes to obtain for himself. Though, he's careful to even say the Oscar winner's name for fear that people think he's trying to emulate any one person. (But then again, Damon has his own Bond-like franchise, The Bourne Identity.)

"The actors I've enjoyed watching are the ones who keep going into new territory, and investigating, and surprising everybody, including me," Hiddleston says, also mentioning Ralph Fiennes, Daniel Day-Lewis and Joaquin Phoenix as other examples "that everyone thinks are great."

And for now, Hiddleston seems to be focused on giving the audiences characters they want to see on screen. "I hope they see Loki, I hope they see Jonathan Pine, I hope they see Doctor Laing, I hope they see Hank Williams," he says. As long as they are fully realized, Hiddleston will be satisfied with whatever happens.

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Http%3a%2f%2fi.blueprint.mashable.com%2fncgajjahcwaphiise_00928fmhs%3d%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f73730%2flarper-photobomb

Ah, engagement photos  gorgeous snapshots that perfectly capture the love between you and your significant other, maybe a pet and, of course, some friendly neighborhood larpers.

Reddit user Onileo uploaded a photograph casually entitled, "My girlfriend's photoshoot got bombed by some larpers," which as you can probably guess, is a stunning visual that captures romance and live-action role players.

SEE ALSO: Ziggy the 250-pound piggy crashes his human's engagement photos

In the comments section, Onileo explained that his girlfriend  wedding, portrait and lifestyle photographer of Alexandria Photography  was photographing the couple in the park for their engagement shoot when the very animated larpers showed up.

Allegedly, the photograph was not staged, and the couple's dog seems to be the only one aware of the surprise visitors in the photograph.

The photographer's significant other commented on the post to share his thoughts on the future of the larpers, and we agree completely.

Comment from discussion My girlfriends photo shoot got bombed by some larpers. [OC].

Some wedding and honeymoon pictures being photobombed by the larpers would definitely be a great start to this marriage.

Mashable reached out to the photographer for comment, and will update this article when we receive a response.
MIAMI, FL / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / Creative Management Partners LLC: Announced today by Danny Espinosa, Managing Partner of Espinosa Law Group, his firm was retained by the Ballester family nearly four years ago to represent their interest against Citizens Property Insurance Company. Attorney Espinosa is a client of Beverly Hills' literary agent Alan Morell, THE CREATIVE MANAGEMENT AGENCY, Creative Management Partners LLC for his upcoming book-to-film with James Goldberg: "Exposing the Wall Street Boys Club."

Said Attorney Espinosa, "When an insurance company fails to settle a claim it could and should have settled, Florida law allows the insured to sue an insurance company for breach of the insurance contract and, if successful, then sue the insurance company for bad-faith claims handling for an amount that exceeds policy limits. However, Citizens Property Insurance Corporation is immune from bad-faith lawsuits. Consequently, Citizens routinely denies legitimate claims and engages in scorched-earth litigation when suit is filed - knowing full well it has no bad-faith exposure."

Said Agent Alan Morell, "Danny Espinosa impressed me with not only his tenacity and integrity as a consumer advocate, but also with his zealous legal representation in the James Goldberg case, and this is reaffirmed with the overwhelming success his minority trial law firm has had, including the recent victory for the Ballester family."

ACCORDING TO PUBLIC COURT RECORDS PROVIDED BY ESPINOSA LAW GROUP:

Mr. and Mrs. Ballester, whose property was damaged when their neighbor's home exploded on September 22, 2012, had their property insured with Citizens. Shortly after reporting their claim, Citizens denied it without anyone from Citizens even inspecting the property. The Ballesters were forced to retain trial attorneys that specialize in property insurance claims to represent them on a contingency-fee basis against Citizens due to their inability to afford counsel. For three years, Espinosa Law Group battled Citizens, who clearly was determined to wage a war of attrition designed to deter pursuit of the claim. Meanwhile, Mr. Ballester valiantly battled his fight with stage four terminal cancer. Citizens retained five separate large law firms to represent its interests and finally brought in its trial horse from Tampa, Florida, who makes a living trying cases for Citizens. Conversely, the Ballesters' claim was prosecuted by three young, minority trial lawyers from Espinosa Law Group: Danny Espinosa, Jorge Padilla, and Federico Dumenigo.

After the fourth law firm Citizens hired was sanctioned for bad-faith conduct and instructing witnesses not to appear for depositions, Citizens hired a fifth law firm, Hamilton, Miller & Birthisel, to scare off the Ballesters and their attorneys. This battle finally came to a head on April 11, 2016, when a jury rendered a verdict for the Ballesters after a seven-day trial. "This trial had all the elements of a John Grisham novel: a David; a Goliath; a powerful insurance company with unlimited resources; the best defense witnesses money could buy; and, a bitter-sweet end, as Mr. Ballester's health continues to deteriorate," said lead trial counsel, Danny Espinosa. "For all the money that Citizens spent attempting to avoid its promises under the insurance contract, the jury, to their apparent dismay, learned that Citizens never saw fit to have anyone inspect the Ballesters' roof even though we were seeking damages to the roof from the inception," said Jorge Padilla. In fact, the jury learned that Citizens' main expert witness, whose company was paid $5.4 million dollars by Citizens in the last three years, alone, inspected the Ballester residence - for the first time - during trial.

That the jury was offended by Citizens was evident from the amount it awarded the Ballesters. "We were seeking approximately $105,000.00 in damages, and the jury awarded $150,000.00 in damages," said Federico Dumenigo. However, to obtain that result, the Ballesters incurred over one million dollars in attorney's fees and $149,477.60 in costs, which will be the subject of the next battle between Espinosa Law Group and Citizens. Regardless of the outcome of that battle, one thing is for sure: Citizens will pass the bill onto its consumers (the public) to pay for its reprehensible and irresponsible conduct.

For further information, go to:

www.EspinosaLawGroup.com

CONTACT:

Danny Espinosa, Esq.

ESPINOSA LAW GROUP

10625 N. Kendall Drive

Miami, Florida 33176-1501

Telephone: 305.655.1501

despinosa@espinosalawgroup.com

SOURCE: Creative Management Partners LLC
Sending your kids off to school is difficult enough as a parent, but imagine finding out that while at school, theyre being bullied to the point where they end up in the hospital.

Thats the position Christopher Cooper found himself in when he decided to confront his kids bully.

ALSO SEE: Mom responds to criticism for allowing her 7-year-old on a motorcycle

A year ago, the 37-year-old dad from Wales moved his two kids Mille and Braiden to a new school where they became the victims of the schools resident bully.

He and his little gang  threw Millie to the floor and then stood around her kicking her in the ribs. Upset she removed her glasses to wipe her tears  the bullies response was to tell a younger child to stamp on her glasses  breaking them, Cooper says in a Facebook post.

He then goes on to outline the abuse of both kids, including an incident where his 9-year-old son was assaulted at a shop near the school and then later attacked again, this time resulting in a broken arm that required surgery. And how after the first incident went unpunished, his daughter was kicked and punched and had drinks poured over her at a school party.



Braiden in the hospital with a broken arm. (Facebook/Christopher Cooper)

Both have been so emotionally affected that Im concerned Millie is on the verge of having an eating disorder, Braiden has been caught physically making himself sick to avoid going to school.



When Cooper approached the school about the situation he was told that nothing could be done as the first few incidents happened off school property. He then approached the parents of the bully who threatened to take legal action against him for coming to their home.

As a father Ive been left devastated by all of this, watching their personalitys (sic) change, their love for school diminish, watching the fear as my son was put to sleep, to undergo surgery, the lack of support from both Cumbria police and North Walney Primary school to effectively deal with this bully who not only bullies my children but also others within the school.



Story continues

11-year-old Millie poses with NYPD officers in Times Square on a recent trip to New York City. (Facebook/Christopher Cooper)

Feeling helpless, he did the only thing left to do: he (along with his daughter) approached the bully himself.

I will be honest  I told [my daughter] to pin him up against the fence, knee him in the balls and tell him not to touch you again, sadly she didnt, because she feared of repercussions from his gang. Instead it was left to me to challenge him, I told him straight to leave my kids alone or their would be consequences. I didnt touch him, I certainly didnt threaten him, although trust me how I didnt do either I dont know. The result  I am now under investigation by the police, and at risk of losing my career.



ALSO SEE: Toronto police officer dyes hair pink to fight bullying and homophobia

Cooper has since withdrawn both kids from the school in an effort to protect them from further abuse. His Facebook post is a plea for help with this difficult situation.

Please feel free to share and repost. Maybe someone at North Walney Primary School, Cumbria Education, Ofstead or even Cumbria Police, might finally sit up, take note, and protect my children. All we want is them to be safe, enjoy their education, and enjoy their childhoods.



What do you think of the repercussions this dad is facing after approaching his kids bully? Let us know your thoughts by tweeting to @YahooStyleCA.
(Adds Eni, Viacom, KeyCorp and Bilfinger)

April 28 (Reuters) - The following bids, mergers, acquisitions and disposals were reported by 2000 GMT on Thursday:

** Abbott Laboratories said it agreed to buy medical device maker St. Jude Medical Inc for $25 billion as it looks to add heft to its heart devices business.

** French drugmaker Sanofi went public with a $9.3 billion offer to buy Medivation on Thursday, setting up what could be a lengthy takeover fight after the U.S. cancer firm rebuffed its approaches.

** AbbVie Inc said it would buy privately held oncology company Stemcentrx in a deal valued at $5.8 billion to expand its portfolio of drugs to treat cancer.

** Comcast Corp, the owner of NBCUniversal, said it would buy DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc for $3.8 billion in cash.

** Three major European utilities are lining up rival bids for a big chunk of Italian oil major Eni's retail gas and power business, sources said, in a deal that could be worth up to $3.4 billion and reshape the Italian retail energy industry.

** Evergrande Real Estate Group Ltd said it would buy an additional 17.28 percent stake in Shengjing Bank for 10.02 billion yuan ($1.54 billion), after the commercial bank was granted a consumer finance license.

** Viacom Inc has narrowed the number of bidders for a minority stake in its Paramount Pictures movie studio from more than 40 to a handful and expects to begin negotiations late next month, Chief Executive Philippe Dauman told analysts on Thursday.

** Anglo American has agreed to sell its niobium and phosphates businesses in Brazil to China Molybdenum for $1.5 billion in cash, it said, as it seeks to cut debt in a radical restructuring of the global mining group.

** Citigroup has dropped out of the group of banks providing a $1.5 billion bridge loan to Gulf-based Adeptio for its planned purchase of a majority stake in Kuwait Food Co (Americana), three sources aware of the matter said.

Citigroup has put its Asia credit card payment processing business on the block as part of an ongoing global plan to exit non-core operations, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

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** Cleveland-based KeyCorp and First Niagara Financial Group Inc will sell 18 First Niagara branches in and around Buffalo, New York, to resolve antitrust concerns tied to KeyCorp's planned acquisition of First Niagara, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.

** European tourism group TUI has agreed a deal to sell its Hotelbeds unit to private equity group Cinven and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for 1.19 billion euros ($1.35 billion) in cash, it said.

** Cnova, the e-commerce arm of French retailer Casino, said on Thursday that it was reviewing the possibility of merging its business in Brazil with Via Varejo S.A, the consumer electronics business of Brazilian retailer Grupo Pao de Acucar (GPA) PCAR4.SA.

** Italy's biggest retail bank Intesa SanPaolo is in final talks to sell its payments unit Setefi to banking services firm Istituto Centrale delle Banche Popolari (ICBPI) in a deal worth more than 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion), a source familiar with the matter said.

** A division of Chinese aviation and shipping conglomerate HNA Group has agreed to buy the owner of the Radisson hotel chain in a deal that will nearly quadruple the number of its hotels around the world.

** A century after an American founded Australia's biggest underwear brand Bonds, the label is set to return to U.S. ownership after its parent company Sydney-listed Pacific Brands Ltd accepted a A$1.1 billion ($836 million) buyout by clothesmaker HanesBrands Inc.

** Chipmaker Cypress Semiconductor Corp said it agreed to buy Broadcom Ltd's Internet of Things (IoT) business and related assets for $550 million in cash.

** Canadian oil and gas producer Suncor Energy Inc said on Wednesday it has agreed to pay about C$937 million ($745.96 million) to acquire an additional 5 percent stake in its Syncrude oil sands joint venture from Murphy Oil Corp's Canadian unit.

** Oracle Corp said it would buy cloud-based payment management services provider Textura Corp for $663 million in cash.

** German engineering services group Bilfinger is nearing a decision on the future of its Building and Facility unit after the field of serious contenders has narrowed to one, several people familiar with the matter said.

** Norwegian rig firm Seadrill Ltd has sold its 8.2 percent stake in Malaysia's Sapurakencana Petroleum Bhd for $198 million, according to a term sheet seen by Reuters on Thursday.

** Polish state-controlled coal miner JSW said it had sold combined-heat-and-power (CHP) company PEC to gas firm PGNiG for 190.4 million zlotys ($49 million).

** British private-equity firm 3i Group Plc said it would sell its Mayborn Group unit to Chinese chemical products maker Shanghai Jahwa United Co.

** Russia-focused gold miner Petropavlovsk said it had entered into an agreement with Russian businessman Musa Bazhaev to acquire Amur Zoloto, a gold mining company with assets in Russia's far eastern Khabarovsk region.

** Barclays said it had agreed to sell its Barclaycard consumer payments business in Portugal and Spain to Bancopopular-e, pressing ahead with the disposal of unwanted assets under new Chief Executive Jes Staley.

** Hedge fund Snow Park Capital Partners has taken a 4.6 percent stake in Ashford Hospitality Prime Inc, according to a person familiar with the matter, and plans to push the company to move more quickly with a stock buyback plan.

** Vale SA is considering spinning off its fertilizer assets into a joint venture controlled by Apollo Global Management LLC if they succeed in a joint bid for Anglo American Plc's fertilizer operations in Brazil, three sources with direct knowledge of the plan told Reuters on Wednesday.

** TPG Growth, the growth capital arm of U.S. private equity firm TPG, has taken a majority stake in staffing business Frank Recruitment Group, the company said.

** Italian private equity group Investindustrial has bought a majority stake in the country's fourth-largest hotel group with a view to expanding in southern Europe, it said. (Compiled by Arunima Banerjee and Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru)
From Esquire

Tuesday night was a terrific night for two prominent Democratic politicians: the president and Senator Chuck Schumer. In two vital Democratic senatorial primaries, in Pennsylvania and Maryland, their preferred candidates held off what were supposed to be very strong challenges from candidates located various distances to their left. In Maryland, Congressman Chris Van Hollen held off his colleague, Donna Edwards, and Pennsylvania Democratic voters went strongly for rookie candidate Katie McGinty over perennial candidate Joe Sestak. (The most intriguing result in that campaign was that of John Fetterman, the outspoken Sandersite mayor of Braddock, who managed 20 percent of the vote in a hotly contested three-way race. This is not bad at all.) In both cases, as you might expect, the races depended vitally on local concerns.

In Maryland, for example, a late ad buy that sought to link Van Hollen to the NRA seems to have backfired severely on Edwards. (Troll Point: Only Hillary Rodham Clinton can pull that off.) McGinty's win in Pennsylvania was by a wider margin than was expected and that margin probably owed a great deal to the fact that, over the past decade, Sestak has alienated too many centers of power in the state.

Now, of course, winning back the Senate for the Democrats, which is the grand project of the November election, is completely on the White House and on Schumer, whose deep meddling in the Pennsylvania process was the subject of more than a little resentment on the ground there. (McGinty was Schumer's second choice after Josh Shapiro, the chairman of the Montgomery County Commission, passed on the race.) It's their party now, at least for the moment.

All commenting will now take place through the official Esquire Politics Facebook page. Click here to respond to this post with other readers.


A new climate tax on red meat will soon be up for discussion by the Danish government, after the Danish Council of Ethics overwhelmingly favored the measure, according to the Independent.

The council said the tax's mission is to deter people from consuming red meat  which it called an "ethical problem"  and help the country live up to "climate-sustainable" standards set by the , the Independent reported.

Source: Giphy

" esponse to climate-damaging foods that will also contribute to raising awareness of climate change must be united, which requires that society sends a clear signal through regulation," Mickey Gjerris, Danish Council of Ethics spokesman said in a press release, according to the Local.

At first, the tax will be set on beef  the planet's "inarguably most destructive" food  but will eventually extend to other unsustainable foods.

Source: Giphy

The Danish Agriculture and Food Council was quick to oppose the bill.

F spokesman Niels Peter Nrring argued that the tax would be i to address climate change, while causing trouble for the food industry and public sector, according to the Local.

Under the Paris Agreement, over 160 countries  including Denmark  are fighting to prevent global temperatures from increasing more than two degrees within the next century.
Frankfurt (AFP) - Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest lender, on Thursday warned that 2016 would be a difficult year, even if it performed better than expected in the first three months.

The first quarter "was one of the most difficult" for the bank, chief financial officer Marcus Schenck told a telephone conference with analysts.

And in the current context of global economic uncertainty, Deutsche Bank's revenue situation "will remain difficult for the whole of 2016," he said.

Nonetheless, the group's first-quarter performance still largely beat analysts' expectations.

Deutsche Bank said its net profit fell to 214 million euros ($243 million) in the period from January to March, down from 544 million euros a year earlier.

That represented a drop of 58 percent, but analysts had been pencilling in a bottom-line loss for the bank in the three-month period.

Underlying or operating profit plunged by 60 percent to 579 million euros on a 22-percent drop in revenues to 8.1 billion euros.

"Financial markets were challenging during the first quarter, largely reflecting concerns about the outlook for the global economy," said chief executive John Cryan.

"This uncertainty led to a decline in client activity in the capital markets, and our revenues fell from the prior year, most notably in our trading and corporate finance businesses," he said.

"Our results reflect these challenging conditions as well as the impact of our strategic decisions to exit or reduce significantly selected businesses," Cryan added.

- Major restructuring -

As part of wide-ranging restructuring plan, Deutsche Bank is shutting down 200 high-street branches in Germany, selling off its Postbank subsidiary and pulling out of a number of countries.

The CEO nevertheless insisted that the bank had made progress on a number of fronts including the modernisation of its IT platforms.

The operational separation of Deutsche Postbank was "almost complete," he said.

Story continues

Deutsche Bank was pressing ahead with the disposal of non-core assets "and the ongoing closure or downsizing of our operations in selected countries."

Cryan said that 2016 would mark "the peak year for our restructuring efforts."

The stake in China's Hua Xia Bank would be completed in the second quarter, helping to strengthen the bank's core capital ratio.

"For too long, a critical and necessary restructuring was postponed and we don't want to repeat that," said CFO Schenck.

"We continue to upgrade our technology, strengthen our control environment, and work towards resolving outstanding litigation matters," the CEO added.

Deutsche Bank is currently entangled in a web of legal woes, facing as many as 6,000 different litigation cases, the provisions for which helped push it to a record loss of 6.8 billion euros last year.

In a newspaper interview the day before, co-CEO Juergen Fitschen had said that the bank was hoping to settle some of the major lawsuits by the end of this year.

- Cleaning up its act -

The bank's provisions for litigation in the first three months amounted to just 187 million euros compared with around one billion euros for each quarter in 2015.

Investors were clearly pleased by the fact that Deutsche Bank had turned in a profit in the first quarter and not a loss as anticipated.

The group's were one of the only three gainers in a generally weaker market on the Frankfurt stock exchange, adding just over three percent while the overall DAX 30 index was down by more than one percent.

Expectations for the first quarter had been "very low," said Equinet analyst Philipp Haessler, who insisted that Deutsche Bank was "pursuing the right strategy."

LBBW analyst Ingo Frommen agreed that the first-quarter figures wree "sobering. The start to the year confirms the management's view that 2016 will be a very challenging year."

Deutsche Bank's efforts to clean up its reputation and engender a different corporate culture nevertheless appears to be the source of some tension on its supervisory board.

According to newspaper reports, some members feel that the group's legal counsel, Georg Thoma, is being over-zealous in his response to the scandals.
Leading contract driller Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc. DO is expected to report first-quarter 2016 earnings on May 2.



In the last quarter, the companys earnings of 89 cents per share surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 53 cents and grew 23.6% from the year-ago earnings of 72 cents. Lets see how things are shaping up prior to the announcement.





Earnings Whispers



Our proven model shows that Diamond Offshore Drilling is likely to beat earnings because it has the right combination of two key ingredients.



Zacks ESP: Earnings ESP, which represents the difference between the Most Accurate estimate and the Zacks Consensus Estimate, is +11.11%. This is because the Most Accurate estimate stands at 30 cents, while the Zacks Consensus Estimate is pegged at 27 cents. This is very meaningful and a leading indicator of a likely positive earnings surprise.



Zacks Rank: Diamond Offshore Drilling carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Note that stocks with Zacks Ranks #1 (Strong Buy), 2 (Hold) or 3 have a significantly higher chance of beating earnings.



Conversely, the Sell-rated stocks (Zacks Rank #4 and 5) should never be considered going into an earnings announcement.



The combination of Diamond Offshore Drillings favorable Zacks Rank and a positive ESP makes us confident about an earnings beat.



Factors Likely to Influence This Quarter



Diamond Offshore Drilling remains in good financial health and has a track record of disciplined capital outlays and financial conservatism. As of Dec 31, 2015, Diamond Offshore Drilling had approximately $119 million in cash and cash equivalents, while long-term debt totaled $1,994.7 million.



Diamond Offshore Drilling stresses on operational performance to survive amid the prolonged downturn in the oil and gas industry. We expect the companys operational efficiency to have a favorable impact on the upcoming earnings as well.



Notably, the company cancelled its quarterly dividend of 12.5 cents per share, effective immediately. This is expected to lead to annual savings of $69 million, which in turn, could be used to repay debt.



The company aims to increase its footprint in emerging markets (such as Brazil, Australia and West Africa) to benefit from the recent discoveries of deepwater fields. Also, gradual improvement in the Gulf of Mexico drilling market (especially after the deepwater drilling ban was lifted), along with better bidding activity, will prove beneficial for Diamond Offshore Drilling.



However, as an offshore drilling company, Diamond Offshore Drilling relies heavily on the volume of capital expenditure by the exploration and production sector. The current volatility in the oil and gas prices has put pressure on the activity level of the companies from sector, thereby affecting the profit levels of Diamond Offshore Drilling.



Stocks to Consider



Here are some companies from the same space which, according to our model, have the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter:



Chesapeake Energy CHK has an Earnings ESP of +9.09% and a Zacks Rank #3.



Ensco plc ESV has an Earnings ESP of +6.25% and a Zacks Rank #3.



ConocoPhillips COP has an Earnings ESP of +1.84% and a Zacks Rank #3.



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ENSCO PLC (ESV): Free Stock Analysis Report



DIAMOND OFFSHOR (DO): Free Stock Analysis Report



CHESAPEAKE ENGY (CHK): Free Stock Analysis Report



CONOCOPHILLIPS (COP): Free Stock Analysis Report



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How Did the Crude Oil Inventory Report Affect Crude Oil Prices?

(Continued from Prior Part)

Gasoline inventory

The EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration) reported that the US gasoline inventory fell by 100,000 barrels to 239.7 MMbbls (million barrels) for the week ending April 15, 2016, compared with the previous week. The gasoline inventory fell for the eighth time in the last nine weeks. The US gasoline inventory is 6.2% higher than in the same period in 2015 and is higher than the upper part of the five-year range.

Gasoline production, imports, and demand

The government agency reported that the weekly US gasoline output rose by 17,000 bpd (barrels per day) to 9.7 MMbpd (million barrels per day) between April 8 and April 15. The US gasoline output is at the same level as in the corresponding period in 2015. Gasoline imports also rose by 0.22 MMbpd to 0.79 MMbpd between April 8 and April 15. In contrast, gasoline demand fell by 189,000 bpd to 9.4 MMbpd for the same period. This is 3.3% more than in the same period in 2015.

Impact of the fall in the gasoline inventory

The rise in gasoline exports led to the fall in the US gasoline inventory. The ups and downs in the US gasoline inventory influence gasoline prices. For more on gasoline prices, read the previous part of this series.

High gasoline prices support US refiners like Phillips 66 (PSX) and Tesoro (TSO). High crude oil prices benefit the margins of oil and gas producers like Ultra Petroleum (UPL), PDC Energy (PDCE), Cobalt International Energy (CIE), Swift Energy (SFY), and WPX Energy (WPX).

ETFs and ETNs like the PowerShares DWA Energy Momentum Portfolio (PXI), the DB Crude Oil Double Short ETN (DTO), the iShares Global Energy ETF (IXC), and the VelocityShares 3x Inverse Crude Oil ETN (DWTI) are affected by the ups and downs in oil and gas prices.

In the next part of this series, well look at US distillate inventories.

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
Paris (AFP) - Salah Abdeslam is sitting on a potential goldmine of information as the last surviving member of the Paris attacks terror squad.

The 26-year-old, accused of playing a key logistical role in the attacks, has promised to "explain himself" to French investigators, but it remains to be seen how much he will reveal.

His Belgian lawyer Sven Mary has sought to portray Abdeslam, who was charged with terror crimes in Paris on Wednesday, as someone with the "intelligence of an empty ashtray" -- possibly to suggest he was only a bit player in the attacks.

- What is he sitting on? -

To investigators and victims' families, the Islamic State jihadist holds the key to making sense of the carnage that left 130 people dead, and Mary described his potential testimony as "worth gold".

Abdeslam was a close friend of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a known ringleader of the attacks and member of the team of gunmen who targeted Paris cafes and restaurants.

Abaaoud was killed in a police raid five days after the attacks.

Questions abound: How were the attackers recruited? Who provided the weapons? Who financed them? Are there other ringleaders?

Abdeslam, who rented cars and hotel rooms and bought components for explosives, could have many of the answers.

Another mystery is why he decided not to blow himself up like the rest of his team.

Abdeslam has also been linked to several jihadists directly involved or implicated in the Brussels attacks on March 22 -- four days after his arrest.

Belgian investigators believe the perpetrators of the two attacks belonged to the same terror cell -- Abdeslam could help unravel their tangled ties.

A key question is what he knew about the Brussels attack.

Belgian prosecutors have said the group had originally intended to strike France again but, under pressure from police after Abdeslam's arrest, had switched plans.

Most crucially, investigators hope to learn whether other accomplices are out there waiting to strike.

Story continues

- What has he said? -

Abdeslam has been questioned at least twice by Belgian investigators, but has given little information and has lied on at least one point.

He confirmed he was in Paris on the night of November 13, and said he had been meant to blow himself up at the national stadium, but changed his mind.

He also admitted renting the cars and hotel rooms, but said he had only done so at the request of his brother Brahim -- who went ahead with his suicide mission.

He said Abaaoud was "the leader" of the killings, but that he had met him only once even though they are known to have ties stretching back to childhood and were convicted together for a robbery in 2011.

- Will he seek to minimise role? -

His Belgian lawyer has certainly given this impression, calling him a "little moron, more a follower than a leader" and saying he did not have the intelligence to orchestrate anything.

"He has every interest in minimising his role because, considering the seriousness of the charges, he can't hope for any reduction in sentencing," said a source close to the investigation.

On Wednesday Abdeslam promised investigating judges he would "explain himself" at a later stage, and his first hearing will take place on May 20.

Another source close to the investigation worried that he would end up simply "revealing a few elements which are already known."

"He doesn't have the personality and charisma of someone who wants to appear as a hero for the jihadist cause," the source said.

- Cross-border probe -

Aside from his hearing on May 20, Abdeslam faces numerous interrogations. These could take place at the Paris courthouse or via videolink to his prison.

Complicating investigators' task is that the probe involves other suspects linked to the attacks who are currently held in Belgium, Turkey and Austria.
Donald Trump may be the only Republican presidential candidate who can realistically hit the magic 1,237 number for the majority of delegates, but according to a senior Republican National Committee official that does not mean he will become the GOP presidential nominee.

Curly Haugland, a longstanding RNC official and an unbound delegate from North Dakota who will be on the convention rules committee in July, told CNBC that attaining 1,237 during the primaries does not secure the nomination.

"Even if Trump reaches the magic number of 1,237 the media and RNC are touting, that does not mean Trump is automatically the nominee," Haugland said. "The votes earned during the primary process are only estimates and are not legal convention votes. The only official votes to nominate a candidate are those that are cast from the convention floor."

Haugland explained the primary number is really an estimate. That's because the eligibility of some delegates in how they are voted in could be questioned and their status may not be considered valid, Haugland said.

"Remember every state has a different delegate allocation process," he said. "Delegates are picked up in state contests that can be winner take all, open primaries, and remember there are seven states that allow the candidates to pick their own delegates. Until those delegate challenges are settled, there is no 1,237."

Haugland said he expects the delegates won in winner-take-all states to be most likely challenged.



Hitting 1,237 in the primaries does not mean the candidate would automatically become the GOP presidential nominee.

"You become the presumptive nominee when you get 1,237 bound delegates," RNC spokesman Lindsay Walters told CNBC. "You officially become nominee when you have 1,237 votes on the floor of the convention."

Trump has been contesting the delegate appropriation methods, accusing the Ted Cruz campaign of stealing delegates in Louisiana and Colorado. The Trump campaign has said it is considering challenging the seating of the Colorado delegation at the July convention. In March, a Trump senior adviser confirmed the campaign was moving on its plan to contest delegates in Louisiana after Trump won the state's primary but received fewer delegates than Cruz.



Story continues

The Trump campaign did not immediately return a request for comment about Haugland's assertions.







More From CNBC


Making fun of the foreign-policy speech Donald Trump gave yesterday is easy. He said, America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration, thus borrowing the slogan of those Americans who opposed Americas entry in World War II. Then, three sentences later, he praised Americas victory in World War II. He warned that, our friends are beginning to think they cant depend on us while simultaneously vowing to be unpredictable and threatening to pull out of NATO. He called for a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam while vowing to destroy ISIS very, very quickly.

But in evaluating Trumps incoherence, its worth remembering that the more serious Republican foreign policy candidates whom he toppledmen like Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Lindsey Grahamwere incoherent too. Trumps just incoherent in a different way.

The standard, post-9/11 Republican foreign policy speechdelivered by men like Rubio, Bush, Graham, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryangoes something like this:

America is a force for good. But the world contains evil regimes and movements: Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, Syria, Cuba, radical Islam. These evildoers are on the march because America has pulled back from its global commitments. It has pulled back because Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton dont believe America is a force for good. But when Im president, America will believe in itself again. Well rebuild our military and confront our evil enemies and America will once again win great victories for freedom, as we did under Ronald Reagan.

Recommended: ISIS and the 'Loser Effect'

This may sound more serious than what Trump says, but strategically, its absurd. Strategy requires matching ends and means. When establishment Republican candidates describe every American adversary as evil, and propose confronting them all simultaneously, they are outlining ends that America utterly lacks the means to achieve. Theres no way America can simultaneously take a more aggressive stance against Chinese expansion in the South China Sea, Russian intervention in Ukraine, Iranian intervention in Iraq and Syria, Iran and North Koreas nuclear programs, and ISIS. America cant do that because its military and economic resources are limited and because effective foreign policy requires tradeoffs. Take a harder line against China in the South China Sea and it may be less cooperative in containing North Koreas nuclear ambitions. Take a harder line against Russia in Ukraine and it may be less cooperative in containing Iran. Try to roll back the influence of Russia, Iran, and radical Islam in Syria and youll be fighting against almost everyone there who matters.

Story continues

Reagan was wiser than his disciples. Contrary to GOP myth, he didnt try to roll back communism. In his first term, he ratcheted up pressure on the Soviet Union while continuing Americas rapprochement with communist China. But this prioritization of threats is wholly absent from the rhetoric of the establishment Republicans who invoke his name.

Reagan was wiser than his disciples.

Trumps incoherence is different. If the standard Republican battle cry is: Evil countries and movements are on the march but Ill defeat them, Trumps is everyone is ripping us off, but Ill cut a better deal.

Establishment Republicans assess regimes based on their support for American hegemony. Regimes that support it deserve unstinting support, and are praised as freedom-loving, democratic or, at least, moderate. Regimes that oppose American hegemony deserve unstinting opposition. Thats what conventional Republicans mean by moral clarity.

Recommended: Why So Many Smart People Arent Happy

Trump, by contrast, assesses regimes based on whether theyre taking advantage of America. And in his view, they pretty much all are (Israel excepted). Some are taking advantage by building, or trying to build, nuclear weapons (North Korea, Iran), some are taking advantage by sending America their rapist immigrants (Mexico), some are taking advantage by stealing American jobs (China), and some are taking advantage by making America pay for their defense (most of Europe). Because Trump focuses as much on economic threats as on military ones, he doesnt divide the world morally the way standard Republicans do. In his speech, he didnt utter the words freedom, liberty, or tyranny. (In his big 2011 foreign policy speech at the Citadel, by contrast, Romney used variations of those words 20 times.) Trumps one reference to a dictator came when he scolded the United States for overthrowing one in Libya. The only time he praised democracy was when he praised Israel. Every other time he mentioned democracy, he chastised American leaders for promoting it in the Middle East.

According to Trump, democracies dont behave much differently from dictatorships. Governments, regardless of type, are like businesses: They pursue their self-interest. And Americas government has been doing a lousy job of pursuing its own.

Conventional Republicans say theyll vanquish Americas adversaries by using, or threatening to use, military force. If America arms rebels in Ukraine and Syria, threatens to bomb Iran, intensifies the war against ISIS, and warns China against regional expansion while expanding military deployments in East AsiaAmericas enemies will knuckle under.

Recommended: The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck

Trumps threat is different: Either other countries treat America more fairly, or the United States will take its marbles and go home. If Western Europe and Japan wont pay more for their own defense, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves. If America cant make a deal to cooperate with Russia in the Middle East, then we will quickly walk from the table. If China wont reduce its trade surplus, we can both go our separate ways.

The conventional Republican vision is of an America that, by threatening war, can expand its hegemony on all fronts. Trumps is of an America that, by threatening isolation, can enjoy globalizations benefits without its costs. Both wildly overestimate American power. Both deny that foreign policy involves painful tradeoffs in a world that America cannot bend to its will.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Screen Shot 2016 04 28 at 3.17.48 PM

Donald Trump again chastised John Kasich for his now widely publicized eating habits during a Thursday rally in Evansville, Indiana.

Speaking as if he were Kasich, he said that he wanted to hold a press conference "right around me as I stuff pancakes down my throat."

"Seriously, did you ever see a guy eat like this?" he asked the crowd.

"Every time you see him, he's eating," Trump continued. "He's stuffing his face. I've never seen. The pizza. He ate a piece of pizza  I'm telling you, it was 4 or 5 inches long by 4 or 5 inches  and he couldn't get it in his mouth. And he's pushing it in with the fork and he's got 20 cameras around."

Trump previously railed on what he called "disgusting" eating habits from Kasich during a Monday rally in Rhode Island.

"This guy takes a pancake and he's shoving it in his mouth," Trump told the crowd. "It's disgusting. Do you want this guy for your president?"

Kasich's chief strategist, John Weaver, told Business Insider in an email that he "didn't see any pancakes" at Kasich's Monday diner stop, which was what Trump was referencing.

Kasich, the Ohio governor, is one of two Republican rivals remaining for Trump, along with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

NOW WATCH: CRUZ: 'If Donald Trump dresses up as Hillary Clinton, he still cant go to the girls' bathroom'





More From Business Insider


BERLIN (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier cautioned on Thursday against piling pressure on Britain in the run-up to the country's referendum on European Union membership in June. "I don't think we'd be well advised to issue threats from Europe," Steinmeier said in Berlin. "There's no doubt that the Brits know what their interests are and they are aware of the economic disadvantages that would result from leaving the EU." Global economic bodies have in recent weeks spelled out what they calculate to be the financial consequences of an exit, while U.S. President Barack Obama said last Friday Britain would be "in the back of the queue" for a trade deal if it left.. Despite the chorus of warnings, polls suggest the June 23 referendum could still go either way. Steinmeier's tone also differed from that of lawmakers in Chancellor Angela Merkel's governing coalition, who stressed on Tuesday that Britain should not get special treatment from the EU in the event of Brexit. The German government has repeatedly made clear it wants Britain to remain, a stance Steinmeier, a member of the co-governing Social Democrats, echoed on Thursday. "I don't want to imagine a Europe without Great Britain," he said. (Reporting by Andreas Rinke; Writing by Michelle Martin; editing by John Stonestreet)
Beirut (AFP) - At least 38 civilians were killed and dozens more wounded in fresh violence in Syria's second city Aleppo on Thursday, a monitoring group said.

Rebel rocket and artillery fire on government-held neighbourhoods killed 18 civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Two children were among the dead, and about 40 people were wounded.

Regime air strikes on rebel-held districts, including the heavily populated Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood, killed 20 civilians, the Observatory said.

An upsurge in fighting in Aleppo, Syria's pre-war commercial hub, has killed at least 186 people since Friday, the Britain-based group said.

An AFP correspondent in the city said the barrage of air strikes began at around 10 am (0700 GMT) and was carrying on into the afternoon.

Rescue workers in the city -- known as White Helmets -- said they were exhausted by the escalation in violence.

"We were still working on the air strikes from last night in the Sukkari neighbourhood," one volunteer told AFP.

Overnight raids on the rebel-held neighbourhood hit a hospital and a nearby block of flats killing at least 30 people, the White Helmets said.

Among the dead was the last paediatrician still working in rebel areas of the city.
Limoges (France) (AFP) - A flight from Liverpool to Alicante was forced to land in France on Thursday after two drunken British nationals began fighting on board.

The captain said he decided to divert to the central French city of Limoges as he felt the incident was endangering the other passengers on board.

Both men were taken to a local police station.

"They are being held while they sober up, and between them being drunk and the language barrier, it is difficult to be certain about their reasons for the fight and going to Spain," said a police spokesman.

"The two men will be heard later in the day, when an English-speaking interpreter is present."

The Boeing 737, carrying just over 180 passengers, was able to resume its flight to Spain.
(Adds quote, background)

April 28 (Reuters) - Dry weather in Brazil may reduce the country's winter corn crop by 5 million to 10 million tonnes, resulting in a similar drop in exports from the world's No. 2 supplier of the grain, Bunge CEO Soren Schroder said on Thursday.

Brazil's second corn crop, known as the safrinha crop, is in its crucial pollination stage when hot, dry conditions can hurt yield potential. Analysts and forecasters had expected a record-large crop as recently as last month, but an early halt to summer rains has eroded prospects and prompted some to cut estimates.

"It could be anywhere from 5 to 10 million tonnes of reduction and that comes straight out of exports and will therefore have to be supplied by the U.S. and/or the Black Sea, Ukraine in particular," Schroder said.

Brazil last week scrapped import duties on corn from countries outside the Mercosur trade bloc in an effort to curb record domestic prices and boost supplies of feedstock. The grain market also is abuzz with speculation Brazil bought its first major cargo of U.S. corn in two decades.

U.S. corn export sales soared to their highest level in four years last week, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data on Thursday.

(Reporting by Karl Plume in Chicago; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Paul Simao)
Duke Energy Corp. DUK, an electric and natural gas utility based in Charlotte, NC, is set to report first-quarter 2016 results before the opening bell on May 3. Last quarter, Duke Energy recorded a 7.45% negative earnings surprise. Lets see how things are shaping up for this quarter.









Factors at Play



Duke Energys stable regulated operations, systematic capital investment program and renewable asset expansion will likely provide tailwinds. The company has undertaken several projects and plans to invest about $25 billion to $30 billion in growth projects over the 20162020 time frame. It must be noted here that the company anticipates capital investment of $9.225 billion in 2016, along with additional investments, to support its targeted earnings growth rate of 46% through 2020.



During its fourth-quarter 2015 call, Duke Energy provided 2016 earnings per share guidance of $4.50$4.70. The company stated that its international business was still under pressure, as it expects earnings of 30 cents per share, which is down from the 2015 level. This reflects deteriorating demand for electricity in Brazil as well as unfavorable foreign currency volatility, which could dampen international earnings.



Adding to its woes, the milder-than-usual winter might adversely hurt its first-quarter sales.



Earnings Whispers



Our proven model shows that Duke Energy is likely to miss the Zacks Consensus Estimate in the first quarter. That is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), #2 (Buy) or #3 (Hold) to be able to beat estimates. However, that is not the case here, as you will see below.



Zacks ESP: The Earnings ESP for Duke Energy is -1.74%, as the Most Accurate estimate stands at $1.13, while the Zacks Consensus Estimate is pegged at $1.15.



Zacks Rank: Duke Energy has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). As it is, we caution against stocks with a Zacks Ranks #4 or #5 (Sell-rated stocks) going into the earnings announcement, especially when the company is seeing negative estimate revisions.



Stocks to Consider



Here are a few operators in the electric utility space worth considering instead, as our model shows that they have the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter:



Pattern Energy Group Inc. PEGI has an Earnings ESP of +466.67% and a Zacks Rank #3. The company is expected to release first-quarter 2016 results on May 5.



Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. HE has an Earnings ESP of +2.7% and a Zacks Rank #3. The company is expected to release first-quarter 2016 earnings on May 4.



Consolidated Edison, Inc. ED has an Earnings ESP of +0.82% and a Zacks Rank #3. The company is expected to report first-quarter 2016 earnings on May 5.



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 >>



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HAWAIIAN ELEC (HE): Free Stock Analysis Report



CONSOL EDISON (ED): Free Stock Analysis Report



DUKE ENERGY CP (DUK): Free Stock Analysis Report



PATTERN ENERGY (PEGI): Free Stock Analysis Report



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The beauty world lost its collective mind yesterday when British technology company Dyson  of genius hand dryer and vacuum fame  announced it had created a hair dryer. The Dyson Supersonic is really, really different from any hair dryer youve ever seen.



Yep, thats a hair dryer. And the tiniest motor ever. (Photo courtesy of Dyson)

What we found really interesting is that the Dyson engineering team all attended beauty school to better understand how hair dryers are used, which is an idea so simple that its genius. We talked to U.K.-based engineer Annmarie Nicolson, who has been hands-on with the Supersonic from day one, in her role on the new-product development team.

How did attending beauty school inform the creation of the Supersonic?

We are experts in all things airflow, fluid dynamics, hardware  all things engineering. But we surely arent style experts. Having a group of young engineers attend styling classes made them see the end benefit of this machine and how the hair dryer can truly be improved.

Did you make any major changes afterward?

Actually, Heat Shield technology was born from the beauty school process. Our engineers were trying to change out attachments as they styled hair and kept burning their fingers. Thats when they figured out they could create a kind of sheath around where the hot air comes out so that our attachments never felt hot to the touch.



Photo courtesy of Dyson.



How did working with celeb stylist Jen Atkin have an impact on creating the hair dryer?



Jens role was educating our Dyson engineers on styling techniques and how the everyday woman styles her hair. What sort of tools are needed, products, and really working with her to get her feedback for the future Dyson hair category. We really wanted to understand what professionals expect from a hair dryer.



Were super curious  how is the Supersonic different?



Conventional hair dryers often have large motors, and because of their size, they have to be put in the head of the machine. As a result, they can be bulky, and they can blast air at extreme temperatures, all with the risk of hair being sucked into the filter and being trapped. This traditional hair dryer design hasnt advanced in more than 60 years.

Story continues

When Dyson goes into a new category, we always think about how we can make it better. We created our own Dyson digital motor V9. Its small enough to be positioned in the handle rather than the head, so its engineered for balance in the hand. We also have intelligent heat control, helping to ensure hair isnt exposed to excessive heat and never goes above the temperature selected. A glass bead thermistor measures the temperature 20 times a second and transmits this data to the microprocessor, which intelligently controls the patented double-stacked heating element.

Photo courtesy of Dyson



We have to ask: Did any of her famous clients get the chance to try it out?



Not just yet! Jen had to keep the product very much under wraps until launch day, so shes only now just starting to use it in public. Shes told us that she thinks her clients will go crazy for it though.



Lets get down to the important stuff. Why do we have to wait until September for the release? Its about to be frizzy-hair season!

Its always frizzy-hair season here in the U.K.! I have to blow out my hair almost every day. We released Supersonic in Japan first, as theyre such early adopters of new technology. Since demand is so high, youll have to wait a bit to get it in the U.S., but itll be there just in time for Fashion Week!

How does it work? Well let you know as soon as we get our hands on one.

Read This Next: Celeb Stylist Jen Atkin Announces Line of Hair Extensions


Today in One Paragraph

Ted Cruz named Carly Fiorina his running mate. Donald Trump pledged to put America first in an uncharacteristically formal address on foreign policy. Bernie Sanderss campaign started laying off members of its staff in the wake of a series of defeats in the Northeast. Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for a bank fraud case linked to sexual-abuse allegations. The U.S. Supreme Court appears to be leaning toward overturning former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnells corruption conviction. And the White House announced that President Obama will visit Flint, Michigan, next week.

Top News

Cruz Picks His Running Mate. Ted Cruz announced former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential pick, calling her a woman of extraordinary intelligence and deep principle. Cruz also touted Fiorinas respect for the Constitution and her understanding of the threats facing the United States. (Jonathan Karl, Jessica Hopper, Ben Gittleson, and Veronica Stracqualursi, ABC News)

Recommended: John Boehner on Ted Cruz: 'Lucifer in the Flesh'

Trump Promises America First. Coming off a five-state win in Tuesdays primaries, the Republican front-runner laid out his foreign policy agenda in Washington, where he called for a stronger U.S. military, blasted President Obamas nuclear deal with Iran, and vowed to put American security first. Trumps prepared remarks, which were a departure from his usual off-the-cuff speeches, will be the first in a series of policy addresses. (Jeremy Diamond and Stephen Collinson, CNN)

Sanders Campaign Takes a Turn. The Vermont senators campaign began letting field staff go after Tuesdays primaries left him trailing Hillary Clinton by an even greater margin. We're 80 percent of the way through the caucuses and primaries and we make adjustments as we go along, said Sanders's campaign communications director Michael Briggs. This is a process that weve done before of right-sizing the campaign as we move through the calendar. (Gabriel Debenedetti, Politico)

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Former House Speaker Sentenced. A federal judge sentenced Dennis Hastert to 15 months in prison, along with a $250,000 fine and two years of supervised release after violating bank regulations in an attempt to cover up allegations that he sexually abused teenage boys during his tenure at Yorkville High School. Nothing is more disturbing than having serial child molester and speaker of the House in the same sentence, said the judge. (Aamer Madhani, USA Today)

Recommended: How to Save the Republican Party

SCOTUS Hears McDonnell Appeal. The Supreme Court appeared to be considering reversing the corruption conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell. During oral arguments, several of the justices seemed unsatisfied with the standard to use when deciding whether political actions are corrupt or routine. The justices will vote on the case Friday, and a ruling is expected in June. (Nina Totenberg, NPR)

Obama to Visit Flint. White House officials announced that the president will travel to Flint, Michigan, on May 4 to hear firsthand from Flint residents about the public health crisis, receive an in-person briefing on the federal efforts in place...and deliver remarks to community members. (Todd Spangler, The Detroit Free Press)

Tomorrow in One Paragraph. Ted Cruz is campaigning in Indiana. John Kasich will be in Oregon. And Donald Trump will campaign in California.

Follow stories throughout the day with our new Politics & Policy page. And keep on top of the campaign with our 2016 Distilled election dashboard.

Top Read

For even the savviest of presidents, the relationship between a commander in chief and his military is famously fraught, an intricate dance of egos and agendas, worldviews and bureaucracies. A President Trump, however, could usher in a clash of historic proportion. The Huffington Posts Andy Kroll on how the U.S. military is preparing for the prospect of a Trump presidency.

Top Lines

Commonwealth in Crisis. Puerto Ricos debt now totals over $70 billion and Congress does little. The Atlantics Vann Newkirk writes that no state has recently faced such dire straits as Puerto Rico, even during the Great Recession. Will Congress help them?

Recommended: Donald Trump and the GOP Tradition of Foreign-Policy Incoherence

Meet Melania. Donald Trumps wife, an ex-model from Slovenia, moved to New York City to make it big, but her next stop might be even bigger: the White House. (Julia Ioffe, GQ)

Top Views

Re-evaluating the White House Race. Check out these delegate charts to see where each presidential candidate stands after Tuesdays nominating contests. (Kevin Schaul and Samuel Granados, The Washington Post)

We want to hear from you! Were reimagining what The Edge can be, and would love to receive your complaints, compliments, and suggestions. Tell us what youd like to find in your inbox by sending a message to newsletters@theatlantic.com.

-Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey)

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BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai police charged eight people with sedition and computer crimes on Thursday, part of fresh wave of arrests as Thailand cracks down on online dissent before a referendum on a military-backed draft constitution. The eight were detained by troops on Wednesday over Facebook comments criticizing the draft, which has been denounced by groups on both sides of Thailand's political divide ahead of the Aug. 7 referendum. Police said the eight had been charged over comments critical of the junta and the constitution. The charges follow arrests over the past week of anti-junta activists who have held gatherings around the Thai capital amid growing criticism of the draft charter. Critics say the charter entrenches the military's political influence. Among other things, it proposes an unelected upper house Senate to include a handful of top military and police commanders. The military seized power in a May 2014 coup. Thailand has been torn apart by more than a decade of on-off protests and political instability since the army ousted billionaire former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006. (Reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre, Panarat Thepgumpanat and Pracha Hariraksapitak; Editing by Nick Macfie)
By Sharon Bernstein SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - California politics got a bit more racy on Wednesday, as producers and actors in the adult film business said they had formed a political action committee, or PAC, to fight a ballot initiative to require the use of condoms when shooting explicit sex scenes. The move by an industry association representing California's busy pornographers - a $4 billion industry in California whose loss could cost the state tens of millions in tax revenues and up to 20,000 jobs - is the latest chapter in a years-long skirmish with public health advocates over how best to prevent sexually transmitted disease among performers of pornography. Los Angeles, and especially the San Fernando Valley area, has historically been a hub of porn production. A number of high-profile X-rated performers in the area have suffered HIV infections, shaking the industry and local health officials. Nearly a dozen performers were infected with the HIV virus between 2004 and 2014, according to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which is backing the ballot initiative. The group's measure, which will appear on the November ballot, would require the use of condoms and lubricants on adult film sets. It requires producers to provide the condoms and to offer free vaccinations and tests for sexually transmitted diseases to all performers. The measure also would allow performers or other individuals residing in California to ask for a state investigation into whether a particular adult film or video was made using condoms. If the state declines to investigate, that person can sue. Porn producers have focused on that section, saying it would lead to the harassment of actors. "It opens up the door to extortion and harassment of a predominantly female performer base and small business owners by those outside the industry," said Mike Stabile, a spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition, the porn industry association. The new PAC, dubbed Californians Against Worker Harassment, is just beginning to raise funds, Stabile said. State records show that no contributions have yet been reported for its cause. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which is backing the initiative, has already contributed $1.5 million to promote it to the public, state records show. Los Angeles County passed a local ballot initiative also backed by AIDS Healthcare Foundation requiring condom use on porn shoots in 2012. But even though it has proven difficult to enforce, Stabile said the measure has led producers of sexually-explicit movies to film elsewhere. (Reporting by Sharon Bernstein, editing by G Crosse)
elizabeth warren

US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) got to one of the most important unanswered questions about Valeant Pharmaceuticals when its executives and major shareholder, Bill Ackman, testified before the Senate on Wednesday.

It's a question that the company has been avoiding since the Senate starting asking questions about its controversial drug-pricing practices last fall. The question is: What is with Valeant's patient-assistance programs?

Why does Valeant have those programs instead of just lowering prices?

Those high prices made Valeant a darling of Wall Street for a time, until the government noticed and started digging into the company's business model of combining low R&D spending with aggressive acquisitions followed by drug-price hikes.

So again, why are their patient-assistance programs instead of plain-vanilla price cuts?

At the hearing, Warren raised her hand and let the entire class know that she had the answer.

"You double the price, even if you get a waiver to the customer, you make a lot of money," Warren said. "What is the return on investment to Valeant on the money you're currently putting into the patient-assistance programs?"

Valeant CEO Michael Pearson, who was on hand along with former CFO Howard Schiller, said that he didn't know what the return was. But one thing's for sure: Patient-assistance programs allow Valeant to keep prices high but keep saying that they're serving patients. At the hearing, Pearson pointed to them as a positive feature of Valeant's business model over and over again.

Access and price

Unfortunately, though, as we learned in the hearing, tons of patients don't qualify for these programs. In fact, Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Indiana) pointed out during the hearing that even the largest Catholic hospital system in the world couldn't use Valeant's "volume based" assistance program.

That is why Warren was not amused, or confused, by Pearson's explanation. She said that she read in Bloomberg that drug companies spent $7 billion on patient-assistance programs, and there had to be a reason for that:

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Don't tell me you've never done the analysis ... By doing this you ... keep the patient on the more expensive drug and then you ... recoup whatever from the insurance company. What I'm saying is that this must be a profitable ... for you ... You're making more money ... You haven't done that analysis?

Pearson said that he had not.

Warren asked why these programs can't be used on government insurance and then answered her own question: It's "because it's illegal," she said.

Government agencies know that the patient-assistance programs are just a way for drug companies to maintain price, Warren declared, and demanded immediate action looking into these programs.

Expect drug companies to push back. Doing away with patient-assistance programs may force them to give in on price, and that's business school 101: You never give in on price.

NOW WATCH: Watch Hillary Clinton threaten to 'go after' one of the most controversial drug companies in America





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(Adds comments by judge and lawyers, details from court hearing)

By Tom Hals

April 28 (Reuters) - Energy Futures Holdings Corp's plan to sell its Oncor power distribution business for about $19 billion to fund its exit from bankruptcy will not close as expected, a company lawyer told a U.S. Bankruptcy judge on Thursday.

The lawyer said Texas' largest power company will present an alternative plan for exiting bankruptcy and hopes to have that plan confirmed by the court in the coming months.

The Oncor deal required financing from a group of investors in order to close by April 30. While Oncor is considered a crown jewel asset, the Public Utility Commission of Texas imposed conditions for approving the deal that have discouraged the investors.

"We now know that the investor group is not going to fund," Marc Kieselstein, a Kirkland & Ellis attorney for Energy Future Holdings, told the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware.

"This is a surprise to me," said U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Sontchi.

The complex Oncor deal, which involved converting it into a real estate investment trust, ended more than a year of expensive litigation over the best path for getting Energy Future out of bankruptcy.

A lawyer representing the investor consortium behind the Oncor deal, Tom Lauria of White & Case, disputed Kieselstein's assessment and said his group continues to try to close the Oncor deal.

He said his group has a hearing in front of the Public Utility Commission next week and it will urge the commissioners to reconsider their ruling.

If the deal does not close by April 30, Energy Future would be free to pursue an alternative path for exiting bankruptcy, which was filed two years ago.

The company was forced into bankruptcy by weak electricity prices and $42 billion in debt, much of it taken on to finance a leveraged buyout of what was then known as TXU Corp by KKR & Co, TPG Capital and an affiliate of Goldman Sachs.

Energy Future plans to unveil a proposal next week to get the company to a hearing in 90 days to confirm an alternative bankruptcy exit plan, Kieselstein said.

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He said the confirmation process could be accelerated because many of the settlements among creditors remain in place even if the Oncor deal collapses.

An attorney for senior creditors said his clients may file their own plan for bringing Energy Future's power plants and retail power business out of Chapter 11 quickly under their control, leaving Oncor behind.

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's largest state insurer and its pension fund together bought about one-sixth of the bonds issued by regional governments for their power companies last fiscal year, a minister said on Thursday.

A bail-out plan launched last year for money-losing power companies, reeling under a debt of more than $60 billion, provides for states to convert up to three-fifths of the total debt held by their utilities into bonds to revive the companies.

Bond traders had been looking for data on buyers of the utility bonds to gauge appetite for debt tied to the utilities as more such offerings are expected this year.

Power and Coal Minister Piyush Goyal told parliament that the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), which manages around $100 billion in savings, bought 118.48 billion rupees of the so-called Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY) bonds, while the Life Insurance Corp (LIC) bought bonds worth 43 billion rupees.

Banks, as expected, bought the majority of the debt totalling 995.41 billion rupees in the fiscal year that ended on March 31.

($1 = 66.5142 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Neha Dasgupta; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
Brussels (AFP) - The EU's top court on Thursday overturned free quotas for the bloc's carbon market up to 2030, a key part of strategies to curb global warming emissions.

The European Commission in Brussels was given ten months to draw up new figures by the Luxembourg-based Euyropean Court of Justice.

The ruling came in a case brought by a number of companies including Esso and Dow against national authorities in Italy, the Netherlands and Austria.

"The court declares invalid the maximum annual amount of free allowances for greenhouse gas emissions determined by the Commission for the period 2013-2020," the court said in a statement.

The court said the European Commission, the executive arm of the 28-nation EU that sets the quotas, had used figures given by some countries that should not have been included.

The EU's Emissions Trading System (ETS), the world's largest, puts a cap on carbon dioxide emitted by large factories and other companies.

The firms can trade in quotas of these emissions -- the idea being to provide a carrot to improve energy efficiency or switch to cleaner sources so that they keep within the ceiling.

A large part of the quotas are free, partly to help European companies against international competitors.
BERLIN (Reuters) - The European Union should take a tough stance in dealing with China in a dispute over low steel prices, German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Thursday.

European steelmakers have been hit by a plunge in steel prices which they blame largely on a surge in cheap exports from China, where overcapacity has been exacerbated by declining domestic demand.

India's Tata group announced plans last month to quit its entire British steel operation.

"What is really at stake in the EU is whether we have the courage to take an aggressive position against China," Gabriel said in the German Bundestag lower house of parliament, adding that he would be in favour of taking such a stance.

Gabriel said he was in favour of the EU actively defending itself but he acknowledged concerns about a possible trade war with China: "No one wants a trade war and no one wants anti-dumping measures either," he said.

The Bundestag passed a motion from the coalition, which called for better protection of the steel industry in Germany.

Gabriel suggested using the recognition as a market economy status that Beijing is seeking as a means of putting pressure on China.

"China can't get market economy status if China does not stick to the rules of a market economy," he said, adding that those who do not respect the rules of free trade could not be guaranteed free trade themselves either.

If the Commission granted China market economy status, as Beijing wants, it would make it harder for Europe to impose anti-dumping duties on Chinese goods sold at knock-down prices, changing the criteria for determining a fair price.

The United States has said Beijing needs to cut overcapacity or face possible trade action from other countries.

Gabriel said that the EU should work with the United States on tackling cheap imports from China.

He also said that in view of the consolidation of the global steel industry, Germany and France should work more closely together.

He added that he had agreed with his French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron and Germany's IG Metall engineering union to again use so-called 'steel moderators' which Germany used in the 1980s to create cross-company cooperations in Europe.

(Reporting by Gernot Heller; Writing by Michelle Martin; Editing by Toby Chopra)
LONDON (Reuters) - The European Commission is taking Poland to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg for breaking EU environment law when exploring for shale gas, the EU executive said on Thursday. Poland's law only requires impact assessments for drilling to a depth of more than 5,000 meters. But the Commission says that clashes with EU legal requirements to assess the risks to water, air quality and biodiversity of much shallower drilling (more than 1,000 meters) in the shale and mining sector. "The high threshold introduced under Polish law does not take into account all relevant criteria and standards," the Commission said in a statement. Environment campaigners and lawyers welcomed the announcement and said it signaled the Commission's determination to act more widely to protect the environment in Poland. Aside from shale gas and mining, campaigners in Poland are especially concerned about the environmental impact of government plans to increase logging in the Bialowieza Forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Commission said it is looking into those plans. "The Commission's decision is very important in the context of our complaint to the EC about illegal logging in Bialowieza Forest," ClientEarth lawyer Agata Szafraniuk said. "It shows how seriously the Commission treats any breach of the legal obligation to carry out a proper environmental impact assessment." The European Court of Justice has to consider the Commission's case and if it agrees with it, Poland could face a fine for each day it is in breach of EU law. (Reporting by Barbara Lewis; editing by Susan Thomas)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission on Thursday stepped up its challenge to Germany's planned road toll on the grounds that it discriminates against foreign drivers, raising the prospect that the matter could eventually be settled in court. German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt's toll, which the German parliament approved in March last year, would charge foreign drivers up to 130 euros (101) a year to use Germany's Autobahn motorways, which until now have been free. They could also buy short-term passes costing up to 30 euros for 10-day to two-month periods. German drivers would also pay the toll, which was set to start this year but was postponed after Brussels launched a challenge in June. However, Germans would receive a corresponding reduction in automobile taxes. The Commission said that contravenes EU rules on equal treatment because German drivers will de facto not pay the toll and the price for short-term passes is disproportionately high for certain vehicles. "The European Commission calls on Germany to bring its legislation into line with EU law within two months," it said in a statement. "Otherwise, the Commission may decide to refer the case to the Court of Justice of the EU." (Reporting by Julia Fioretti; editing by Robert-Jan Bartunek)
By Alastair Macdonald BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The deputy head of the European Commission insisted on Thursday that the EU executive would not lower its standards to offer visa-free travel to Turks in exchange for Turkey's help in preventing migrants reaching Europe from its shores. "We will not play around with those benchmarks," First Vice President Frans Timmermans told the European Parliament, referring to 72 criteria Turkey must meet if its citizens are to be allowed to travel to the EU without obtaining a visa first. "The onus is on Turkey. They say they can do it." A Turkish minister said all necessary legislation would be completed on Monday. The Commission is due to decide on Wednesday whether to recommend that member states approve by the end of June the visa waiver scheme which the bloc offered Ankara as part of a deal in March by which Turkey is now taking back refugees and migrants who take boats to Greek islands from its nearby coast. EU officials and diplomats said they expected the Commission to send a recommendation that Turkey should be given a visa waiver to the EU Council of member states, though it may include conditional elements as Ankara is unlikely to have completely met all the benchmarks by Wednesday. Among sticking points has been Turkey's treatment in its own visa waiver system for Cypriot citizens, due to its refusal to recognize EU member Cyprus. Timmermans noted concerns raised by lawmakers during the session about curbs on media freedoms and human rights in Turkey but argued that opening further discussions on eventual Turkish membership of the EU -- another element of the migrant deal -- would be a way to engage Ankara and convince it to change tack. "If they want to come close to the European Union so badly let them prove that they can," the former Dutch foreign minister said. "The distance between us and Turkey is not decreasing, it is increasing because of human rights, the media and what is happening in civil society." The prospect of easing visa rules for 75 million Turks has stirred unease in Europe at a time when governments are under pressure to curb immigration. Envoys from the 28 member states met in Brussels on Thursday to discuss the issue. France and Germany have proposed inserting a mechanism into visa waiver deals, diplomats said, to give the EU a rapid legal means of suspending the freedom if, for example, there were an unexpected surge in people arriving from a country. The envoys weighed how governments might respond to a Commission recommendation to facilitate travel for Turks at the same time as they review similar pending recommendations made for Georgians and Ukrainians. "So, 125 million people possibly entering the EU without a visa - is that an easy message to convey to European citizens in the current context?" one diplomat said of the discussion. Timmermans stressed that the agreement with Turkey had been essential to reducing a chaotic inflow of migrants and refugees and said a Turkish visa waiver program could improve, not weaken, European security by obliging Turks to use machine-readable, biometric passports to benefit from the scheme. "The agreement with Turkey in my view is the only way forward to solve that problem. Those who criticize the agreement have never ever given me an alternative we could work with." (Additional reporting by Paul Taylor, Robert-Jan Bartunek and Julia Fioretti; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Eva Mendes older brother sadly lost his battle to throat cancer.

Juan Carlos Mendez was diagnosed with cancer a year and a half ago and died on April 17 at the age of 53. The Mendez family celebrated the father of twos life on Tuesday at the Church of the Recessional in Glendale, California.

Evas younger brother, Carlo, remembered Juan Carlos as a funny charming genius comedian creative hot tempered crazy calm person in a touching Instagram post.

I have no idea how to cope with him being gone but I want to thank you all who have reached out to me and believe me when I say your messages make me feel a little bit better. My life will never be the same without him. Thank you all, Carlos wrote.

WATCH: Ryan Gosling Gushes Over Eva Mendes: Theres Nothing Else Im Looking For

The 2 Fast 2 Furious actress has shared her own sweet posts about her brother, including a throwback photo of Juan Carlos alongside which she wrote, Sending him so much love today as he continues his battle with cancer. I love you big brother.

Earlier this month, she shared a photo of them together and captioned it simply with a heart.

When Carlos announced the tragic news, he said that Juan Carlos passed peacefully. He fought with all his might and power and gave cancer one hell of a fight. He leaves behind a 13-year-old and a 5-year-old, Carlos wrote. I love you my brother may god bless you and Ill see you once again.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to support Juan Carlos children. You can donate here.

Meanwhile, Eva and fiance Ryan Gosling, who are proud parents to 17-month-old daughter, Esmeralda, are reportedly expecting baby No. 2. Find out more in the video below.

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By Saeed Azhar

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore on Thursday charged a former wealth manager at Swiss-based private bank BSI with cheating and obstructing justice, in a case related to a money laundering investigation linked to Malaysia's troubled state fund 1MDB.

Singapore's investigation is looking at bank accounts linked to 1Malaysian Development Berhad (1MDB), which is at the center of a multi-billion-dollar graft scandal, with transactions that have triggered investigations across three continents.

Yeo Jiawei, a 33-year-old Singaporean and former employee of BSI in Singapore, was first briefly arrested in March and again on April 15, and charged with receiving ill-gotten funds.

At a hearing in the Singapore State Court on Thursday, Singapore prosecutor Kwek Mean Luck urged the court to extend Yeo's custody with an additional charge of obstructing justice.

Singapore's white-collar crime unit was dealing with one of its most complex cross-border investigations ever, Kwek said.

"Investigations reveal that this accused has had a significant role in the movement of large amounts of money and the concealment of transactions," the prosecution said in its charge sheet.

Investigations were "very much alive and continue to involve the accused," it added.

Yeo's lawyer, Philip Fong, objected to further remand for his client as a breach of his right to counsel and against the presumption of innocence.

Yeo, who appeared in the courtroom via video link, wearing an orange T-shirt, was remanded to custody for another week, until May 5.

The prosecutor charged Yeo with cheating BSI, by concealing from his former employer that he would be receiving $1.6 million a year from Brazen Sky Ltd, a financial vehicle owned by 1MDB which was holding fund units at an account with BSI Singapore.

Another former BSI banker faces a criminal investigation linked to 1MDB.

(Writing by Anshuman Daga; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
By Paul Taylor and Noah Barkin

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union would insist on completing a swift divorce with Britain before starting to forge any new relationship if UK voters decide in June to leave the 28-member bloc.

Two EU sources familiar with the bloc's latest thinking on a possible Brexit told Reuters on Thursday there was no appetite to grant any extension of the two years provided by the EU's Lisbon Treaty for negotiating a withdrawal, while any new trade partnership would take many more years to conclude.

The stark view from Brussels means Britain could initially be cut adrift without any preferential relationship with its biggest trade partner. It contrasts with suggestions by "Leave" campaigners that London could secure a special status preserving market access before it formally leaves the EU.

Top EU officials say they are still confident that Britons will ultimately vote in a June 23 referendum to stay in the community they joined in 1973, despite opinion polls showing a close race.

However in case of a "Leave" vote, the European Commission has tentative plans to hold a rare Sunday meeting on June 26 to set its strategy, one source told Reuters.

EU leaders would hold a brief summit with Britain two days later, at which London would be expected to give formal notice to quit. The 27 other states would then meet without British representatives to decide how to conduct the withdrawal negotiations and take the union forward, based on proposals from the executive Commission.

"It is in our interest to do the divorce as quickly as possible. There's no appetite for negotiating new terms in the first two years," one source said.

Another source said: "The shorter the better. No one wants to go beyond the two years. The show must go on."

Both sources spoke on condition of anonymity because of the acute political sensitivity of any contingency planning for a British departure.

SPEEDY SEPARATION

The first source said the initial two-year negotiations would cover only issues such as residual EU budget payments to and from Britain, the pensions of British EU civil servants and relocation of EU agencies based in the UK.

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The EU treaty says exit talks can be extended by unanimous vote among all the member states, but both sources said London's partners would want a speedy separation.

Britain would probably leave on July 1, 2018, and become a "third country" in EU parlance. Formal negotiations on some form of trade and partnership agreement could begin only then, the first source said.

In Britain, the officially designated "Out" campaign said such comments indicated European officials were detached from reality.

"Only Commission officials detached from reality could suggest something that would both not be in their power and would quite obviously harm a euro zone economy already teetering on the brink," said a spokesman for Vote Leave.

"Britain is the worlds fifth largest economy and the EUs biggest export market. A vote to leave would start a set of discussions about a trade deal that would be in the mutual interest of both the EU and the UK. Theres a free trade zone from Iceland to Turkey and outside of the EU we would be part of that."

In case of a vote to remain, the Commission has kept in place a small UK Task Force which helped to craft a deal negotiated by Prime Minister David Cameron in February to meet British concerns on migrant workers' welfare rights and relations with the euro single currency zone.

The seven-member team led by British EU official Jonathan Faull would oversee smooth implementation of the agreement.

That deal lapses automatically if Britain votes to leave, and the first source said a completely different team would be appointed, probably led by a German or French official, to handle exit negotiations.

German and French politicians have warned that London would get no special favours and should expect tough talks in case of a Brexit. EU partners would want to discourage other members from trying to renegotiate membership terms or withdraw.

"Out means out!" Volker Kauder, leader of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative group in parliament said this week.

British Europe minister David Lidington, who supports the "Remain" camp, said on Thursday it was doubtful whether Britain would get any trade agreement with the EU within 10 years.

However, "Leave" supporters have argued that the EU would have to conclude a quick free trade deal with London since the continent has a big trade surplus with the UK and stood to lose exports if tariff barriers were introduced.

Richard Tice, a co-founder of Leave.eu, another British Out campaign, said the likely roadmap sketched by EU sources was "exactly the sort of scaremongering that we have expected from the Remain camp.

"(It) reminds us of the threats people made if we did not join the euro. Brussels has a track record of bullying and denying democracy, but they underestimate the fighting spirit of the British people," Tice said.

(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald and Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt and Andrew Heavens)
By Chris Kahn NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than half of American voters believe that the system U.S. political parties use to pick their candidates for the White House is "rigged" and more than two-thirds want to see the process changed, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. The results echo complaints from Republican front-runner Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders that the system is stacked against them in favor of candidates with close ties to their parties  a critique that has triggered a nationwide debate over whether the process is fair. The United States is one of just a handful of countries that gives regular voters any say in who should make it onto the presidential ballot. But the state-by-state system of primaries, caucuses and conventions is complex. The contests historically were always party events, and while the popular vote has grown in influence since the mid-20th century, the parties still have considerable sway. One quirk of the U.S. system - and the area where the parties get to flex their muscle - is the use of delegates, party members who are assigned to support contenders at their respective conventions, usually based on voting results. The parties decide how delegates are awarded in each state, with the Republicans and Democrats having different rules. The delegates' personal opinions can come into play at the party conventions if the race is too close to call - an issue that has become a lightning rod in the current political season. Another complication is that state governments have different rules about whether voters must be registered as party members to participate. In some states, parties further restrict delegate selection to small committees of party elites, as the Republican Party in Colorado did this year. 'SO FLAWED' "Id prefer to see a one-man-one-vote system," said Royce Young, 76, a resident of Society Hill, South Carolina, who supports Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. "The process is so flawed." Trump has repeatedly railed against the rules, at times calling them undemocratic. After the Colorado Republican Party awarded all its delegates to Ted Cruz, for example, Trump lashed out in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, charging "the system is being rigged by party operatives with double-agent delegates who reject the decision of voters." Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has dismissed Trumps complaints as rhetoric" and said the rules would not be changed before the Republican convention in July. Trump swept the five Northeastern nominating contests on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The New York billionaire has 950 delegates to 560 for Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, and 153 for Kasich, the Ohio governor, according to the Associated Press. A total of 1,237 delegates are needed to secure the Republican nomination. On the Democratic side, Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, has taken issue with the party's use of superdelegates, the hundreds of elite party members who can support whomever they like at the convention and who this year overwhelmingly back front-runner Hillary Clinton. Clinton has repeatedly emphasized that she is beating Sanders in both total votes cast and in pledged delegates, those who are bound by the voting results - rendering his complaints about superdelegates moot. On Tuesday, the former secretary of state won Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut, while Sanders won in Rhode Island. Clinton leads Sanders by 2,141 delegates to 1,321, according to the AP, with 2,383 needed to win the nomination. Sanders has also criticized party bosses for not holding enough prime-time television debates and said before a string of primaries open only to registered Democrats this month that independents have lost their right to vote, referring to a voter block that has tended to favor him. A Democratic National Committee official was not immediately available to comment. 'ARCANE RULES' Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said the U.S. presidential nominating system could probably be improved in a number of areas, but noted that the control wielded by party leadership usually became an issue only during tight races. "The popular vote overwhelms the rules usually, but in these close elections, everyone pays attention to these arcane rules," he said. Some 51 percent of likely voters who responded to the April 21-26 online survey said they believed the primary system was "rigged" against some candidates. Some 71 percent of respondents said they would prefer to pick their partys nominee with a direct vote, cutting out the use of delegates as intermediaries. The results also showed 27 percent of likely voters did not understand how the primary process works and 44 percent did not understand why delegates were involved in the first place. The responses were about the same for Republicans and Democrats. Overall, nearly half said they would also prefer a single primary day in which all states held their nominating contests together - as opposed to the current system of spreading them out for months. The poll included 1,582 Americans and had a credibility interval of 2.9 percentage points. (Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Leslie Adler)
By Julia Harte WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal agents who patrol the U.S. border with Mexico want 23 more miles (37 km) of fences, better radios and more aerial drones to tighten the southern frontier, according to an unpublished U.S. government study that influences budget requests. The modest scope of the requirements, details of which were contained in internal emails seen by Reuters and described by Border Patrol officials in interviews, contrasts sharply with calls by Republican presidential candidates for more drastic measures to secure the border. Front runner Donald Trump and rival Ted Cruz have both pledged to build a border wall, a project that could cost several billion dollars. The extra fences sought by agents in Texas and California would be the first major fencing addition to the nearly 2,000-mile-long southern border in five years. They would cost about $92 million based on the costs of previous fences, though experts say that cost has risen. Border Patrol has not asked its parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), to request funding for any new fences so far. Border Patrol Chief Ronald Vitiello told Reuters that he is aware that some of his agents require "handfuls" of miles of additional fencing, though he declined to comment on the number of additional miles required. The 653 miles of fencing currently along the southwest border is a mix of wall-like fences and more basic vehicle barriers. About half of it was built for $1.2 billion in the four years after 2007, when Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) a mandate to fence the most vulnerable sections of the 1,954-mile border. Building those fences required the department to waive 36 environmental and tribal sovereignty laws, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and mired the government in costly litigation with property owners. The CBP has for the past three years used the internal study to gauge border agents' most urgent needs and inform Border Patrol funding requests, though the agents' specific requirements are not spelled out in budget documents. The study also uses a border visualization and threat simulator built by Johns Hopkins University researchers who have run similar programs for the U.S. military, according to Vitiello. The new fencing that agents require is for three sectors of the border, and would mainly consist of metal or concrete bollards clustered closely enough to prevent people from squeezing through, according to a March email between Border Patrol officials. Apprehensions of people trying to cross illegally into the United States over its southwest border have mostly declined since the 1980s and 1990s, and they hit a nearly four-decade low in 2011. After a small rise, they dipped to near 2011 levels again last year. Agents have also identified more reliable radios, handheld surveillance drones and all-terrain vehicles as resources they need urgently to close border security gaps, Vitiello said. VIRTUAL BORDER The Border Patrol has been doubling down on a "virtual wall" of drones, blimps and tower-mounted cameras, an approach that has produced mixed results. The bulk of the CBPs current $447 million annual budget for fencing, infrastructure, and technology goes toward surveillance towers, unmanned aircrafts, retired military blimps, and other advanced technological equipment. After jumping to $1.5 billion in 2007 following the Congressional mandate to build hundreds of miles of new fencing, that budget decreased for several years, but has been rising steadily since 2013. A Senate appropriations committee spokesman confirmed that "border security remains the biggest investment area" in the DHS appropriations bill, but he and his House committee counterpart declined to speculate on future funding levels. The DHS, which oversees the CBP, had taken ownership of more than 3,900 items of excess equipment from the U.S. Defense Department as of a year ago, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection presentation obtained by Reuters. That included "Marcbots" - wheeled robots that detect tunnels - and advanced radar surveillance systems. But watchdog agencies and the Border Patrol agents' union have criticized DHS and CBP for neglecting their stocks of basic equipment, such as radios, and not effectively demonstrating how new acquisitions improve border security. DHS pledged to improve its equipment investment policies following several such reports. A senior official with the department's inspector general said the internal review of border security gaps will help CBP "re-assess where all the risk is and then re-allocate the resources to the greatest risk areas." The Government Accountability Office said it is about halfway done reviewing Border Patrol's ability to address border security gaps as part of a review requested by U.S. lawmakers on homeland security committees. It expects to release those findings in the latter part of the year. (Reporting by Julia Harte; editing by Stuart Grudgings)
Apache's 1Q16 Results to Be Released: What Can We Expect?

Apaches 1Q16 revenue estimates

Apache (APA) will release its 1Q16 earnings on May 5, 2016. The companys 1Q16 revenue estimates stand at ~$1.1 billion, and its revenue in 1Q15 was ~$1.8 billion. In 4Q15, Apache reported adjusted revenue of ~$1.2 billion. The consensus Wall Street estimate for revenue was ~$1.4 billion. Apaches 4Q15 revenue was ~57% lower than its 4Q14 revenue of ~$2.9 billion.

Apaches 1Q16 earnings per share estimates

Apaches (APA) estimated 1Q16 loss per share is ~$0.87. APAs 4Q15 loss per share was $0.06 versus the consensus Wall Street estimate of a ~$0.49 loss per share. The companys 4Q14 EPS (earnings per share) totaled $1.07.

In the image above, we can see that analysts have expected APAs earnings to come in significantly lower than they were over the previous four quarters. In fact, APAs earnings mostly beat estimates in these four quarters. It will be interesting to see how things play out for the company in its 1Q16 earnings release.

APAs peers Cimarex Energy (XEC), Concho Resources (CXO), and Newfield Exploration Company (NFX) are expected to report 1Q16 earnings per share of -$0.39, $0.01, and -$0.10, respectively. These companies make up ~11% of the iShares US Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (IEO).

Apaches fiscal 2015 revenue and earnings recap

For fiscal 2015, APA reported an adjusted loss per share of $0.34. The comparable earnings in 2014 were $5.90 per share. APAs 2015 revenue came in at ~$6.4 billion, whereas its revenue in 2014 was ~$14 billion.

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What Can Investors Expect from Boston Scientific's 1Q16 Earnings?

(Continued from Prior Part)

Analysts estimates

Boston Scientific (BSX) accounts for ~0.14% of the total holdings of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY). Boston Scientific exceeded analysts earnings estimates for the last several quarters. However, the revenue estimates were a miss in 4Q15. Deviation of the companys actual results from analysts estimates generally impacts the share price movement. Stock prices usually move up if the companys results beat analysts expectations and vice versa. In 4Q15, Boston Scientific beat analysts EPS (earnings per share) estimate of $0.25 as well as the company guidance.

According to analysts estimates, the companys 1Q16 EPS is expected to come in at about $0.24. Boston Scientific expects to report fiscal 2016 EPS of $1.03$1.07. This represents an adjusted EPS growth of 11%15%. This compares to the 11% EPS growth registered in 2015.

The adjusted EPS for 2016 is expected to be impacted negatively by currency headwinds of $0.06 with a pronounced impact in 1H16 amounting to around $0.02 per quarter for 1H16. Also, the acquisition of AMS is expected to impact the companys 2016 EPS. The deal accretion is estimated to contribute ~$0.03 to the companys adjusted EPS.

Profit margin estimates

For 1Q16, Wall Street projected a decline in Boston Scientifics net profit margin. Its expected to be around $330.5 million. The estimate represents ~17.3% of the total revenuecompared to an ~11.7% net profit margin reported in the previous quarter. On a YoY (year-over-year) basis, the 1Q16 net profit margin is expected to rise by ~70%compared to the ~10.6% margin reported in 1Q15. Boston Scientific expects to generate an annual operating margin of 23.5%24.5% in 2016.

In 1Q16, Boston Scientifics peers such as St. Jude Medical (STJ) and Abbott Laboratories (ABT) reported an EPS decline of 4.8% and 45.2%, respectively. Zimmer Biomet Holdings (ZBH) is expected to register EPS growth of 30.7%.

Story continues

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What to Expect from Concho Resources 1Q16 Earnings

Concho Resourcess 1Q16 revenue estimates

Concho Resources (CXO) will release its 1Q16 earnings after the Market closes on May 4, 2016. The companys 1Q16 revenue estimate stands at ~$544.38 million, and its revenue in 1Q15 was ~$580.7 million. In 4Q15, Concho Resources reported adjusted revenue of ~$578.6 million. The consensus Wall Street estimate for revenue was ~$597 million. CXOs 4Q15 revenue was ~16% lower than its 4Q14 revenue of ~$692.4 million.

Concho Resourcess 1Q16 earnings per share estimates

Concho Resources (CXO) 1Q16 EPS (earnings per share) estimate is ~$0.01. CXOs 4Q15 adjusted EPS came in at -$0.07 versus the consensus Wall Street estimate of EPS of ~$0.03. CXOs 4Q14 EPS came in at $0.88. Lower crude oil prices have weighed heavily on the upstream energy sector, pulling down realized prices and hurting earnings.

CXOs 4Q15 loss came in worse than expected in 4Q15, unlike the previous three quarters, when earnings came in better than expected. Investors will watch to see if this trend continues in 1Q16.

CXOs peers Cimarex Energy (XEC), Newfield Exploration (NFX), and Diamondback Energy (FANG) are expected to report 1Q16 EPS of -$0.39, -$0.10, and -$0.04, respectively. These companies make up 8% of the iShares US Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (IEO).

Concho Resources 2015 revenue and earnings recap

In 2015, CXO reported adjusted EPS of $0.91, as compared to $4.0 in 2014. CXOs 2015 revenue came in at ~$2.4 billion, as compared ~$2.7 billion in 2014.

In the next part of this series, well look at CXOs production guidance for 2016.

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Extra Space Storage Inc. EXR is slated to report first-quarter 2016 results on May 2, after the closing bell.



This self-storage real estate investment trust (REIT) came up with in-line results in the prior quarter. Over the trailing four quarters, the company beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate in three out of four quarters, with a positive average surprise of 2.05%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for first-quarter funds from operations (FFO) per share is currently pegged at 84 cents.







Lets see how things are shaping up for this announcement.

Factors to Consider This Quarter



Headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT, Extra Space Storage is a notable name in the self storage industry. The company offers a vast array of well-located storage units to its customers including boat storage, recreational vehicle storage and business storage. In first-quarter 2016, the company is expected to benefit from steady demand in the self storage industry. Same-store revenues are expected to benefit from growth in rates.



However, occupancy levels are unlikely to post any robust growth. Also, the decent benefit from discount reductions that the company enjoyed in earlier quarters is not expected to repeat itself. Moreover, intense competition, new supply and economic weakness are anticipated to have kept the growth momentum range bound in the to-be-reported quarter.



Earnings Whispers



Our proven model does not conclusively show that Extra Space Storage will beat on earnings this quarter. This is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), 2 (Buy) or 3 (Hold) for this to happen. That is not the case here as you will see below.



Zacks ESP: Both the Most Accurate estimate and the Zacks Consensus Estimate stand at 84 cents. Hence, the Earnings ESP, which represents a difference between them, is 0.00%.



Zacks Rank: Extra Space Storage has a Zacks Rank #2. While a favorable rank increases the predictive power of ESP, a 0.00% Earnings ESP makes surprise prediction difficult.



Note that we caution against stocks with a Zacks Rank #4 or 5 (Sell rated) going into the earnings announcement, especially when the company is seeing negative estimate revisions.

Stocks to Consider



Here are a few stocks in the REIT sector you may want to consider, as our model shows that they have the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter:



Host Hotels & Resorts, Inc. HST has an Earnings ESP of +2.63% and a Zacks Rank #3. The company will report first-quarter 2016 results on Apr 29.



Taubman Centers, Inc. TCO has an Earnings ESP of +3.53% and a Zacks Rank #3. The company will release results on May 2.



Vornado Realty Trust VNO has an Earnings ESP of +0.81% and a Zacks Rank #3. The company will report first-quarter 2016 results on May 2.



Note: FFO, a widely used metric to gauge the performance of REITs, is obtained after adding depreciation and amortization and other non-cash expenses to net income.



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Zacks Investment Research
COPENHAGEN, April 28 (Reuters) - Denmark should buy 28 of Lockheed Martin's F35 Lightning fighter jets to replace its present F16 jets, an expert group formed by the Danish Ministry of Defence has recommended to the government, according to local radio.

The group found that the Lightning was better than Eurofighter's Typhoon and Boeing Co's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet in four priority areas: military combat, economy, strategics and Danish industrial cooperation with the producer, Radio24syv said citing sources close to the negotiations.

The expert group recommended that Denmark should buy 28 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin, it said.

Denmark's decision will be closely watched, as several other nations also have to decide whether to replace their aged warplanes with Lockheed Martin Corp's brand new F-35 or play safe with cheaper, older-generation planes such the Super Hornets.

Now it is up to the government and the political parties supporting the purchase of new fighter jets to decide which one to pick.

Denmark's Defence Ministry did not reply to requests from Reuters. Spokesmen from various political parties declined to comment.

(Reporting by Erik Matzen; Editing by Dominic Evans)
LONDON (Reuters) - It will be up to British voters on June 23 to decide whether the country stays in the European Union, but international bodies and foreign leaders have joined the debate, mostly to urge the country not to the leave the bloc. Below is a summary of comments ranging from institutions such as the International Monetary Fund to China's premier. U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA Obama told Britain on April 22 that it would go to "the back of the queue" for trade talks with Washington if it left the EU. He combined the blunt warning with praise for Britain's influence within the 28-nation bloc, something Washington considered important to its own interests. U.S. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton also wants Britain to stay in the EU. U.S. REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE DONALD TRUMP The Republican front-runner for the White House said on March 24 that Britons would probably decide to leave the EU because of concerns about high levels of migration. "With the craziness that is going on with the migration, with people pouring in all over the place, I think that Britain will end up separating from the EU," he said. GERMAN FINANCE MINISTER WOLFGANG SCHAEUBLE Schaeuble said on March 3 that it would be extremely difficult or even impossible for Britain to negotiate a "special deal" on trade with the EU if it left the bloc. "Imagine the negotiations that would have to take place after a Brexit decision. For the years to come all this bureaucratic stuff. Good luck!" he said. FRENCH ECONOMY MINISTER EMMANUEL MACRON Macron said on April 15 that Britain would need to continue to pay into the EU budget if it wished to continue with tariff-free access to the bloc's single market after a Brexit. "Those who pretend that passporting will be preserved exactly following the same rules without any contribution to the budget, are making a big, a big mistake," Macron added. INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND The global economy watchdog made an unusual incursion into a national political issue on April 12 when it said a Brexit could "do severe regional and global damage by disrupting established trading relationships." ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT The OECD said Britons would face a "Brexit tax" if they left the EU, equivalent to a month's salary by 2020, given the likely hit to the economy. Its secretary general urged Britons to think carefully about how they would fare outside the 28-country bloc. "Britain, look at yourself in the mirror, naked. Do you like what you see? Mostly I hope you come out saying: not too much," Angel Gurria said. CHINESE PREMIER XI JINPING China, which is sensitive to comments from abroad and usually does not talk about other countries' domestic affairs, issued a veiled call on Britain to stay in the EU when its leader Xi Jinping visited the country in October. "China hopes to see a prosperous Europe and a united EU, and hopes Britain, as an important member of the EU, can play an even more positive and constructive role in promoting the deepening development of China-EU ties," Xi said. GROUP OF 20 ECONOMIES Finance ministers and central bank governors from 20 of the world's leading economies put Brexit on their list of dangers to the world economy when they met in February. G20 officials said Brexit was added on the insistence of Britain. SILENT SO FAR Supporters of Britain remaining in the EU have said that a decision to split the bloc would be welcomed by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a weakening of the West. So far, Putin has not commented on the Brexit debate. "Russia is being dragged into the domestic debate on Brexit," the Russian embassy in London said in a statement in March. "Why is the wicked Russia thesis used to explain a government policy?" In Brussels, European Commission economists have been banned from researching the impact of Britain leaving the bloc, or even talking about it publicly, for fear of getting embroiled in the debate, officials have said. (Writing by William Schomberg; Editing by Dominic Evans)
The family of a teenage girl who died after a fight in the bathroom of her Delaware high school has released a statement warning against online scammers who have opened phony fundraising accounts.



Amy Joyner-Francis, 16, a sophomore at Howard High School of Technology in Wilmington, was killed last Thursday.



In the statement, which was released by the Wilmington Police Department, Amy's brother Anthony wrote, "We want everyone who is truly concerned for us not to fall victim to the scams going on out around the Internet."



Anthony stated that he is the only member of the family currently on social media and that all other accounts are fake.



Anthony claimed that a number of fake accounts have been created, including one claiming to be Amy's sister. In reality, Amy did not have a sister.



"We have not set up and will not set up any fundraisers or GoFundMe accounts, they are fake pages and accounts [and] are spreading hateful lies," Joyner wrote.



 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.





Police Chief 'Charges Will be Filed'

Multiple news outlets have reported the bathroom fight at Howard High School of Technology began over a boy. The alleged assailants have not been publicly named because they are minors.



According to WPVI, a witness said that Amy hit her head against a sink.



There were at least three girls involved in the fight. They were suspended from school the day of the fight, a spokesperson from the superintendent's office tells PEOPLE.



Wilmington Police Chief Bobby Cummings said at a press conference Monday, "We know that charges will be filed," adding, "Individuals will be held accountable for their actions.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / Far Resources Ltd (CSE: FAT) ("Far Resources" or the "Company") is pleased to announced that it has entered into an agreement to option the Zoro I claim (the "Zoro I Claim") located in the Snow Lake area in Manitoba (the "Agreement").

The Zoro I Claim

The Zoro I claim covers approximately 52 hectares near Wekusko Lake in western Manitoba. The Zoro I Claim covers a number of known lithium pegmatite occurrences, one of which contains an historic "reserve" based on 1956 drilling on the "Principal Dyke" of 1.727 million tonnes grading 0.94% Li2O.

The mineral reserve cited above is presented as an historical estimate and uses historical terminology which does not conform to current standards, and as such should not be relied upon. Although the historical estimates are believed to be based on reasonable assumptions, they were calculated prior to the implementation of National Instrument 43-101. These historical estimates do not meet current standards as defined under sections 1.2 and 1.3 of NI 43-10 and therefore should not be relied upon.

Zoro Option Agreement

The Company has entered into the Agreement with Top Notch Marketing Ltd., R. Ross Blusson and Double-U-Em Investments Ltd. (collectively, the "Optionors") effective as of the date of this news release. Under the terms of the Agreement the Company can acquire a 100% interest in and to the Zoro I Claim (the "Option") upon meeting the following requirements:

1. upon the execution of the Agreement, Far Resources must pay each of the Optionors $16,666.66 in cash and issue to each of the Optionors 333,333 Common shares;



2. on the first anniversary of the date of the Agreement, Far Resources must provide the Optionors with aggregate consideration of $300,000 which, at the election of the Optionors, can be satisfied by either (i) paying each of the Optionors $50,000 in cash and issuing each of the Optionors that number of Shares worth $50,000 at the time of issuance, based on the Average Price (defined below); or (ii) issuing each of the Optionors that number of Shares worth $100,000 at the time of issuance, based on the Average Price; and



3. on the second anniversary of the date of the Agreement, providing the Optionors with aggregate consideration of $600,000 which, at the election of the Optionors, can be satisfied by either (i) paying each of the Optionors $100,000 in cash and issuing each of the Optionors that number of Shares worth $100,000 at the time of issuance, based on the Average Price; or (ii) issuing each of the Optionors that number of Shares worth $200,000 at the time of issuance, based on the Average Price.



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The Average Price means the average of the Common shares' closing prices for the 10 consecutive trading days immediately before the date in question. Far Resources must satisfy all of the condition above to be deemed to have exercised the Option.

Financing

The Company also wishes to announce a financing of up to 10 million units (the "Units") at a price of $0.05 per Unit (the "Financing") to raise an aggregate total of up to $500,000. Each Unit consists of one common share (the "Shares") in the equity of the Company and one half of one share purchase warrant (each, a "Warrant"). Each whole Warrant will entitle the holder to acquire one additional Common Share at an exercise price of $0.10 for a period of 24 months from closing of the Financing, provided that, in the event that the closing price of the outstanding Common Shares on the Canadian Securities Exchange (the "CSE") is greater than $0.15 for a period of 20 consecutive trading days at any time following the closing of the Financing, the company may, at its option accelerate the expiry date of the Warrants by giving written notice to the holders of the Warrants and in such case the Warrants will expire on the earlier of: (i) the 30th day after the date on which such notice is given by the Company; and (ii) 24 months from the closing of the Financing.

A finder's fee, in accordance with the policies of the CSE, may be payable in cash and warrants from the proceeds of the proposed Financing. All securities issued pursuant to this Financing will be subject to a 4-month and one day hold period from the date of closing. The Financing is subject to regulatory approval.

Resignation

The Company is also announcing that Mr. Derek Huston has resigned as a director of the Company. The Company wishes to thank Mr. Huston for his service and offers its best wishes for success in his future endeavours.

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Lindsay Bottomer, P.Geo., an independent director of Far Resources Ltd. and a Qualified Person under NI43-101.

About the Company

Far Resources Ltd. is an exploration company, publicly traded on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol FAT, focused on the identification and development of high potential mineral opportunities in stable jurisdictions.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF

FAR RESOURCES LTD.

Keith C. Anderson, President

keith@farresources.com

The Canadian Securities Exchange has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this news release and accepts no responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy hereof.

This news release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. Readers are cautioned that these forward looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those expected. All of the forward-looking statements made in this news release are qualified by these cautionary statements and those in our continuous disclosure filings available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances save as required under applicable securities legislation. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell securities and the Company is not soliciting an offer to buy 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.

This news release, required by applicable Canadian laws, is not for distribution to U.S. news services or for dissemination in the United States and does not constitute an offer of securities for sale in the United States. These securities have not and will not be registered under United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold in the United States or to a U.S. Person unless so registered, or an exemption from registration is relied upon.

Not for dissemination in the US or to US wire services.

SOURCE: Far Resources Ltd
By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. judges will be able to issue search warrants giving law enforcement agents power to access computers in any jurisdiction, potentially even overseas, under a controversial rule change likely to be approved by the Supreme Court by May 1.

Magistrate judges can normally only order searches within the jurisdiction of their court, which is typically limited to a few counties.

The U.S. Justice Department, which is pushing for the rule change, has described it as a procedural change needed to modernize the criminal code for the digital age, and has said it would not permit searches or seizures that are not already legal.

Google, owned by Alphabet Inc, and civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Access Now, contend the change would vastly expand the ability of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hack into computer networks. They say it could run afoul of the U.S. Constitutions protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Should the Supreme Court approve the change, it will take effect later this year unless both chambers of Congress act to reject or amend it, a move seen as unlikely given gridlock in the legislature ahead of the U.S. presidential election.

The proposed amendment is to Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure, a text governing the judicial branch that is regularly updated. It was at the center of two court opinions issued this month throwing out evidence gathered by FBI sting operations targeting child pornographers who relied on the anonymous Internet browser called Tor network.

Federal courts in Virginia and Oklahoma said the FBIs use of a warrant to deploy a network investigative technique on computers outside the geographic bounds of the issuing judges district was invalid.

A Justice Department spokesman pointed to those cases as reason for why changes to Rule 41 are necessary.

Though it has been several years in the making, the effort to widen warrant jurisdiction has not garnered the level of attention of other recent clashes over government access to digital information, such as the FBIs standoff with Apple over encryption.

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Congress would have until December 1 to reject or amend a change to Rule 41.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has vowed to mobilize opposition to the Rule 41 update. Sources familiar with his plans say he is expected to announce he is working on legislation to block the changes if they earn approval from the Supreme Court.

This rule change could potentially allow federal investigators to use one warrant to access millions of computers, and it would treat the victims of the hack the same as the hacker himself, Wyden said during a speech last month at a digital rights conference in San Francisco.

HISTORY OF DEFERENCE

Proposed changes to the criminal procedure rules go through several layers of vetting by committees comprised of lawyers and judges before reaching the Supreme Court.

The review of the Justice Departments Rule 41 proposal, which was first drafted in 2013, led to it being pared back to only apply in situations when a suspect can be shown to be using technology to conceal the location of his or her computer or for an investigation into a network of hacked or infected computers, such as a botnot.

The Supreme Court rarely rejects such proposals to change federal rules, according to lawyers familiar with the process.

Google and other opponents say the Rule 41 proposal amounts to a substantive change to the rules, and therefore should be properly debated in Congress.

The change raises a number of monumental and highly complex constitutional, legal, and geopolitical concerns, Richard Salgado, Googles director for law enforcement and information security, wrote in public comments submitted in February 2015.

(This version of the April 27 story was corrected to say that the rule does not need congressional approval, instead of that it would have to pass both chambers of Congress in paragraph 5)

(Reporting by Dustin Volz, additional reporting by Joan Biskupic. Editing by Jonathan Weber and Andrew Hay)
While FC Dallas has maintained its place among the MLS elite, the New York Red Bulls are finding last season's accomplishments difficult to duplicate.

The defending Supporters' Shield winners did show signs of a breakthrough last time out, a development they hope carries over into Friday night's home match with league-leading Dallas.

New York edged Dallas on goal differential to claim last year's Supporters' Shield after the clubs tied for a league-best 60 points. The Red Bulls had 62 goals and a plus-19 margin - both league highs - but have been among the worst in both categories during a disappointing 2-6-0 start.

They looked much more like last year's edition in Sunday's somewhat controversial 3-2 victory over Orlando City SC, netting three second-half goals within a 10-minute span to overcome an early deficit and snap a four-game losing streak.

New York had been outscored 7-1 during the skid.

"You just have two options: you either get frustrated and throw in the towel or you keep going," said midfielder Mike Grella, who had the first goal and set up Bradley Wright-Phillips' go-ahead score. "And credit to the guys, credit to this group that I have so much faith in. We just kept going and kept knocking on the door, and finally it was like the heavens opened and finally some goals started pouring in."

Wright-Phillips, the 2014 Golden Boot recipient and second in shots on goal this season, recorded a brace to end a season-opening seven-game goal drought.

New York's breakout came moments after Orlando City's Cyle Larin was pulled down on a breakaway that the Lions felt warranted a red card. The Professional Referees Organization publicly concurred that a red card should have been issued, but added that Larin was offsides on the play.

There was no dispute over Dallas' latest result, Saturday's 3-0 defeat at Vancouver that ended a six-game unbeaten stretch (4-0-2) for Oscar Pareja's club, whose 17 points are one ahead of Colorado for the league lead.

Story continues

After falling behind on an own goal in the 35th minute, FC Dallas (5-2-2) conceded two in the second half in its second straight game without captain and top defender Matt Hedges.

"Unfortunately, we were not sharp, especially in those last 20 minutes," Pareja said.

While Hedges is expected to miss at least two more weeks recovering from left knee surgery, Dallas did get Mauro Diaz back from a four-game absence in Saturday's loss. The key midfielder, tied with New York's Sacha Kljestan and Real Salt Lake's Joao Plata for the league lead with four assists, played 19 minutes in his return from a leg injury.

The teams played to a scoreless draw in their lone 2015 meeting. Dallas is 0-5-1 in its last six at New York since a 2-1 victory at Giants Stadium on May 24, 2006.
Federal agents arrested the brother of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook on charges of lying to government investigators and marriage fraud, authorities said.

Syed Raheel Farook and his wife, Tatiana Farook, were taken into custody Thursday and charged in a five-count indictment accusing them of entering into a fraudulent marriage. Also arrested was Farook's sister, Mariya Chernykh, and her husband, Enrique Marquez Jr., who face the same charges.

Read: New Photo Shows San Bernardino Shooters Entering America as Newlyweds

Marquez had earlier been charged with providing a weapon used by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife during their deadly December attack at the Inland Regional Center in California. He pleaded not guilty in that case.

While investigating the terror attack, federal agents said they discovered Marquez was paid money to marry Chernykh, who wanted to gain legal entry to the U.S., according to the Los Angeles Times.

FBI agents questioned her after the terror attacks and she lied to investigators, saying she lived with Marquez when she was really residing in a different city, according to the indictment.

This is the latest step in the comprehensive investigation into the horrific attacks in San Bernardino last year that took the lives of 14 innocent Americans and deeply affected so many more, U.S. Atty. Eileen M. Decker said in a statement.

Read: San Bernardino Shooters Were a Married Couple With a 6-Month-Old Daughter

As I have said previously, we owe the victims, and the entire community of San Bernardino, a thorough investigation that uncovers all criminal activity surrounding these events, she said.

Husband and wife Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot to death 14 people in a conference room, where they had gathered for a holiday party.

Watch: San Bernardino Shooting Survivor Emotionally Returns to Work

Related Articles:
REUTERS - Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV is in late-stage talks with Alphabet Inc's self-driving car division for a technology partnership, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the discussions.

The talks have been ongoing for several months, the Journal reported, as Alphabet seeks industry partnerships, offering a deal to sell self-driving car technology.

Alphabet and Fiat Chrysler declined to comment.

Fiat Chrysler has been talking with many players outside the car sector about possible collaborations, as car technology has become a prime area of interest for Silicon Valley companies including Alphabet's Google, which has built a prototype self-driving car.

(Reporting by Ankit Ajmera in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
ECB Stimulus, Brexit, and 12 Europe-Focused Mutual Funds

(Continued from Prior Part)

Performance evaluation of the Columbia European Equity Fund

The Columbia European Equity Fund  Class A (AXEAX) fell 3.7% in 1Q16, making it a below-average performer among the 12 funds in this review. In the past one year, the fund fell 7% but still emerged as an above-average performer in its peer group. Meanwhile, from the end of December 2015 until April 25, 2016, AXEAX rose 1.0%. In the graph below, you can see its performance against two ETFs: the Vanguard FTSE Europe ETF (VGK) and the iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF (EZU).

Lets look at what contributed to AXEAXs below-average performance in 1Q16.

Portfolio composition and contribution to returns

Financials, the joint largest invested sector of AXEAX, was the biggest negative contributor to the funds returns in 1Q16. UBS Group (UBS) led negative contributors, which included ING Groep (ING), Intesa Sanpaolo SpA (IITSF), and Prudential (PUK). The absence of any sizable positive contributor ensured that negative contributors had their say in directing the sectors returns.

Healthcare was a distant second to financials in terms of negative contribution. Novartis (NVS), Bayer (BAYZF), and Roche Holding (RHHBY) were among the major detractors from the sector. Although Fresenius Medical Care (FMS) contributed positively, the amount proved inconsequential.

Fund managers decision to increase exposure to consumer staples helped, and the sector emerged as the biggest positive contributor. Unilever (UL) powered the sector ahead along with British American Tobacco (BTI). There were no major detractors, which worked well for the fund in general and the sector in particular.

Industrials also helped reduce the drag on AXEAXs returns. KONE Oyj and Sandvik were among the sizable positive contributors.

Investor takeaways

Negative contribution from financials, consumer discretionary, and healthcare outdid positive contributions from consumer staples and industrials. This resulted in a below-average quarter for AXEAX.

Story continues

The fund underperformed VGK, with stock picks from only the consumer staples sector being able to do better than those comprising VGK.

AXEAXs portfolio turnover is quite high. If the fund managers are doing this on purpose, then their strategy hasnt paid off yet. On the other hand, it may reflect the fact that theyre still searching for securities, which would gel well with their investment strategy. Existing investors could look for other options to invest in the Eurozone.

Lets move on to the next fund in this review: the Brown Advisory  WMC Strategic European Equity Fund  Investor Shares (BIAHX).

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
ECB Stimulus, Brexit, and 12 Europe-Focused Mutual Funds

(Continued from Prior Part)

Performance evaluation of the Vanguard European Stock Index Fund

The Vanguard European Stock Index Fund  Investor Shares (VEURX) fell 2.4% in 1Q16. This placed it in the middle of the pack of the 12 funds in this review. In the past one year, the fund has fallen 7.9%, putting it below average among its peers. Meanwhile, from the end of December 2015 until April 25, 2016, the fund has risen 2.4%. In the graph below, you can see its performance against two ETFs: the Vanguard FTSE Europe ETF (VGK) and the iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF (EZU).

Lets look at what contributed to VEURXs below-average performance in 1Q16.

Portfolio composition and contribution to returns

We should state at the outset that unlike any of the other 11 funds in our review, VEURX isnt actively managed. Its sectoral performance can give you an idea of the performance of the European stock market in general and its underlying benchmark, the FTSE Developed Europe All Cap Index, in particular. So this can serve as a broad benchmark to the performances of all other funds.

You may have noticed in the above graph that VEURX and VGK have very similar performances. This is because VGK is the ETF version of VEURX. It means they have the same portfolio composition for the most part. The only difference is that one is a mutual fund and the other is an ETF. The difference in performance is due to the lower fee charged by the ETF.

Financials was the biggest negative contributor to VEURXs returns in 1Q16. HSBC Holdings (HSBC) and Barclays (BCS) drove down the sectors returns. They had help from Credit Suisse Group (CS), Deutsche Bank (DB), and several others.

Healthcare helped financials drive down the funds returns. The sector contributed negatively due to stocks such as Novartis (NVS), Roche Holding (RHHBY), and AstraZeneca (AZN), among others.

Had it not been for positive contributions from the industrials and consumer staples sectors, VEURX would have done far worse in 1Q16. Siemens Aktiengesellschaft (SIEGY) was the biggest positive contributor from the industrials sector, while consumer staples was led by British American Tobacco (BTI).

Story continues

Investor takeaways

We cant analyze VEURXs stock level composition since its an index fund. But we can say that it provides access to all sectors and major European securities. Its large asset size reflects the fact that lots of investors have taken the index mutual fund route to invest in European equities. If you want exposure to European stocks without having to worry about the issues related to active management, this fund could be a potential investment.

Lets move on to the last Europe-focused mutual fund under review in this series: the Virtus Greater European Opportunities Fund  Class A (VGEAX).

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
Photos released on Wednesday by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission show some concerning clues about the July 24 disappearance of two Tequesta teens.



Longtime friends Perry Cohen and Austin Stephanos, both 14, set out from Florida's Jupiter Inlet on a boating excursion that afternoon and were never seen again.



Crewmembers of the Edda Fjord, a Norwegian freighter, spotted Stephanos's 19-foot Seacraft capsized and floating in a shipping channel about 100 miles off the Bermuda coast last month, nearly nine months after the boys vanished. Before packing the boat into a shipping container now in transit to Florida's Port Everglades, the crew took a series of photographs, including several that show the boat's battery switch and ignition key in the off position.





First Photos Inside Capsized Boat of Florida Teens Lost at Sea Could Suggest Foul Play, Says Mom| People Scoop, Real People Stories



According to the Cohen family's attorney, Guy Rubin, that's concerning because the location of the battery switch makes it difficult to reach and near-impossible to be activated or deactivated by a storm or passage of time. This indicates that the switch likely was disabled intentionally, either by one of the boys or possibly another party that may have accessed the boat since the disappearance.



The photos bolster a suspicion of foul play, based on a line in a lawsuit filed on Monday by Pamela Cohen, Perry's mother.



"Plaintiff will continue to suffer irreparable harm if the iPhone is not properly handled as material evidence in a possible maritime crime or homicide," reads the complaint, which sought unsuccessfully to block the FFWCC's return of Austin's iPhone to the Stephanos family.



"We do know for sure that boat was disabled intentionally because the battery switch, which is very difficult to get to, was in the off position. That can't be maneuvered by the passage of time, the current, and other events," Rubin told WPBF. "The key in the ignition was in the off position."



"If the storm came and capsized the boat, the battery switch and the key would not be in those positions," Rubin continued. "We want forensic experts in accident reconstruction to look at the boat and tell us what happened. I'm not trying to be an alarmist, but I'm also trying to take it from a scientific approach."





Story continues

First Photos Inside Capsized Boat of Florida Teens Lost at Sea Could Suggest Foul Play, Says Mom| People Scoop, Real People Stories



Still, Guy Bennett Rubin, Cohen's attorney, is hesitant to offer any speculation on just what story the photographs may tell.





First Photos Inside Capsized Boat of Florida Teens Lost at Sea Could Suggest Foul Play, Says Mom| People Scoop, Real People Stories



"We don't have any specific details about how the boat was taken from the vessel that picked it up to the process when it was then documented with photographs and put into a cargo container for shipment back to Port Everglades," he told PEOPLE Wednesday. "This is still yet to be determined. So, we are drawing some possible conclusions from the photographs with the caveat that we just don't know enough to make any determinative statements. This is the nature of investigative work and why it needs to be done methodically, carefully and by professionals. There is a lot from the photographs that tell the story and I'm going to let the professionals tell us what they mean from their perspective."





First Photos Inside Capsized Boat of Florida Teens Lost at Sea Could Suggest Foul Play, Says Mom| People Scoop, Real People Stories



Meanwhile, FFWCC law enforcement spokesperson Robert Klepper confirmed to PEOPLE that Austin's iPhone has been turned over and is now in the hands of the Stephanos family, despite the lawsuit and motions for emergency injunctions filed against the agency and the Stephanos family with the Palm Beach County Courthouse earlier this week.





First Photos Inside Capsized Boat of Florida Teens Lost at Sea Could Suggest Foul Play, Says Mom| People Scoop, Real People Stories



On Tuesday, Pamela Cohen had agreed to drop the lawsuit pending written consent by the Stephanos family allowing the FFWCC to keep the iPhone until a full forensics investigation could be completed. That consent was never given.



"We're considering our next steps," Rubin told PEOPLE on Wednesday while heading to meet Cohen and husband, Nicholas Korniloff, Perry's stepfather.





First Photos Inside Capsized Boat of Florida Teens Lost at Sea Could Suggest Foul Play, Says Mom| People Scoop, Real People Stories



Earlier Wednesday, Pamela Cohen posted a statement on Facebook, further stating her family's case for an independent investigation of the iPhone's contents and defending the decision to take her pleas to a public forum:



"The past 8 and a half months have been the most grueling and life shattering anyone could imagine," she wrote. "Two beautiful boys went out for a day of fun never to return or be heard from again. As Perry's mother  I have no choice but to do whatever is humanly possible to obtain any bit of information to what happened to him on that fateful day."



"Some of you may not agree with our choice to take this into the public forum or to fight to keep the phone with authorities; and that is ok," she continued. "All I want is the information available, if there is any, pertaining to the fateful day of their disappearance. I am not interested in exploiting the private and personal photos, which may be recovered  this has never been our intention.



"I ask you, if you kissed your child goodbye, and never saw them again, without any information  I would believe that if evidence that could contain some answers to what happened to your beloved child were found, you would want a neutral party to properly and thoroughly investigate that evidence. This is what I will fight for until I can no longer fight. I will take my last breath fighting for my darling son Perry if it is necessary."
TOKYO, April 28 (Reuters) - Automaker Mitsubishi Motors Corp (MMC) says it used non-compliant fuel economy testing methods in Japan for as long as a quarter of a century.

Following are some details on the cheating scandal:

* What did MMC do, and why?

It rigged test data to overstate fuel economy readings of four mini-vehicle models sold in Japan by up to 10 percent. It says it did this to get a better fuel economy certification.

Executives say developers may have been pressured into cheating as rivals including Daihatsu Motor set high fuel economy levels.

MMC used a higher speed U.S. coasting test to measure fuel economy, ignoring 1991 changes in Japanese regulations to use tests that better reflect stop-and-go urban driving.

In a January 2001 test, MMC compared readings using the two coasting tests, and found the difference was never more than 2.3 percent.

* Which cars are affected?

Test manipulation involved 625,000 mini-vehicles produced since mid-2013: Mitsubishi's eK Wagon and eK Space, and 468,000 cars it made for Nissan, which markets them as the Dayz and Dayz Roox. All were sold in Japan.

MMC has stopped making and selling these models.

* Who discovered the cheating, and what are investigators focusing on?

Nissan, which has a mini-vehicle venture with MMC since 2011, found a discrepancy in test data in November while updating the Dayz.

MMC has set up an external committee to look into the affair. It will report in three months.

Japan's transport ministry will test the fuel economy of Mitsubishi cars next week, and announce results on the first four models in June. It has found irregularities in mileage data on other MMC models, too, and wants an explanation by May 11.

The ministry also has a taskforce to examine all Japanese automakers' fuel economy data.

* How much could all this cost MMC?

Estimates vary and there's still uncertainty as to how widescale the cheating was. It's so far limited to Japan, where MMC sells just 10 percent of its cars.

Story continues

MMC is likely to have to compensate drivers for the extra fuel used, repay government tax benefits, compensate Nissan and face potential legal suits and fines.

Nomura puts the potential bill at close to $1 billion, or as much as 166,000 yen per car.

* Can MMC withstand the fallout?

MMC, which has lost around half its market value, or $3.7 billion, in just over a week, had over $4 billion in cash deposits at end-2015, and relatively little debt. Its cash-flow could suffer if its bruised branding hits sales. MMC has said orders for its cars in Japan have already halved.

MMC produces 1 million vehicles a year, with one third of those sold elsewhere in Asia. It sold just 95,342 vehicles in the United States last year. It says its cars for the model years 2013 to 2017 sold in the U.S. have correct mileage ratings.

(Reporting by Naomi Tajitsu; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)
Hillary Clinton's opponents are willing to use some pretty vile rhetoric to attack her. But somehow it just got even worse.

Earlier this week, the GOP Executive Committee Chairman of Broward County, Florida, Bob Sutton, raised the bar on egregious comments when discussing Clinton's chances in a general election against Trump.

"I think when Donald Trump debates Hillary Clinton, she's going to go down like Monica Lewinsky," Sutton said, according to the Washington Post.

Um, excuse us?

Sutton's comments come in the midst of what the Post calls "a contentious debate about gender politics and sexism" set off, in part, by Trump's recent claim that Clinton was playing the "woman card."





The secretary of the Broward County Republican Party, Kristin Matheny, told the Sun Sentinel that "as a woman, as a Republican, it's not what I would have said. ... I don't endorse it in any way."

Matheny said that Sutton "absolutely" needs to apologize, the Sentinel reported, but did not say whether she would ask for his resignation. "My head's kind of spinning right now."
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The families of two Florida teens who vanished off the coast of Bermuda last summer are hoping for answers from a recently recovered cellphone, according to CBSMiami and the Associated Press.

PHOTOS: Stars  They're Just Like Us!

Perry Cohen and Austin Stephanos, both 14, left on a boating trip together from Jupiter Inlet on July 24, 2015, and never returned. Lengthy searches by the Coast Guard and private pilots failed to find the teens or their bodies, CBSMiami reports. The Coast Guard called off the search July 31, and the families suspended their private search efforts August 8. This March, a Norwegian cargo ship spotted and recovered the teens 19-foot boat and were able to recover Stephanos iPhone and some personal belongings, according to the local news station.

The families of the two boys feuded over the waterlogged iPhone after Austin's father, Blu Stephanos, refused to give the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation permission to investigate the mobile device. He later explained his reasoning in an April 25 Facebook post, citing the recent case in which the government filed suit against Apple to force the tech company to break into the San Bernardino shooters iPhone and the desire to avoid media attention. We didnt want to do anything publicly to jeopardize the cooperation of the manufacturer. Unfortunately, I feel the recent publicity and wild speculation may have done just that, Blu wrote in the statement. This phone represents a connection with my son, so I thank you all for your continued support.

Celebrity Health Scares

On the other hand, Perrys family believed the phone could provide clues as to what happened and filed a lawsuit to force Blu to hand over the phone to the FWC. Perrys mother, Pamela Cohen, spoke out against Blus decision and posted a statement on Facebook on April 23. In a nearly miraculous turn of events, we now have what may be the key to answering so many questions we all have about that fateful day. As a mother, I owe it to Perry to fight for him when he cannot, she wrote.

Story continues

PHOTOS: Stars at Court

Just a few days later, Perrys family issued a statement on Tuesday, April 26, stating they are dropping the suit in the interest of cooperation and they are satisfied that Austins family will share whatever information is found on the phone. We accept the offer of Blu Stephanos to share the contents of the iPhone with us and the FWC, the Cohen family said in a statement, according to WPBF 25 News. Pamela also posted an April 26 statement on Facebook confirming that she had turned over all of Perrys electronic devices to authorities.



As CBSMiami reported, on the morning of the boys disappearance, Perry sent a text to his mother, saying, Mom, its Perry. My iPad is dead, Ill text you in a little. Love you. His mother wrote back, OK. I wanted you to sleep home tonight, I miss you. We leave Sunday morning for New York. What about your work? Perry assured his mom he had done his homework and wrote, But I was going to sleep at,,,. He never finished the message.

The families are hopeful the contents of Austins phone might give them further answers about what happened.




By Bernie Woodall

DETROIT (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co (F.N) reported first-quarter net income that more than doubled thanks to robust deliveries of pickup trucks in North America and a profit rebound in Europe, but cautioned that results in the second half of the year would likely not be as strong.

The automaker's net income of $2.45 billion, or 61 cents per diluted share, in the first quarter through March 31, was up 113 percent from $1.3 billion, or 29 cents per diluted share, a year earlier.

It reported record operating margins globally and in North America, and enjoyed its most profitable quarter in Europe since 2008.

During a conference call with analysts, Chief Executive Mark Fields said the automaker would be competitive with longer-range electric vehicles, and said Ford was developing such a vehicle, but he did not say when it would be introduced.

In December, Fields said Ford would spend $4.5 billion to expand its plug-in and hybrid electric vehicles by 2020.

Developing a longer-range vehicle is part of that effort, said Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks.

Excluding one-time items, Ford's earnings per share of 68 cents easily beat Wall Street expectations of 48 cents a share.

Shanks said on Thursday the second half of the year is not expected to generate as much profit as the first half. This was largely due to downtime for production plants in Europe and North America for normal summer and end-of-year shutdowns.

Shanks said the company maintained its forecast for a North American profit margin for 2016 of 9.5 percent or better, after reporting a 10.2 percent margin last year.

Ford also kept its full-year forecast for pretax profit that is expected to meet or exceed last year's record $10.8 billion.

The company's shares were up 3.9 percent at $14.20 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange, against a wider market that was little changed. GM shares were up nearly 1 percent.

Fields said the company "could" curtail production of sedans as those traditional car models were not selling as well as SUVs and trucks. But he said he wanted Ford to have a "full family" of vehicles in case of changes in consumer demand and if fuel prices rise from their current low levels.

Story continues

RECORDS

In North America, Ford had a record operating margin of 12.9 percent. This compares with rival General Motors Co (GM.N)'s first-quarter operating profit margin of 8.7 percent, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCHA.MI) (FCAU.N)'s 7.2 percent in North America.

However, GM included in its calculations for operating margin an expense for attribution of union workers in the United States, which Ford did not. The exclusion of that cost would raise GM's North American margin to 9.5 percent.

Ford beat GM in both revenue and profit in the quarter, mainly because of stronger results in North America and Europe.

Ford's quarterly revenue of $37.7 billion edged past GMs $37.3 billion. GM last week reported a first-quarter net income of $2 billion, while Ford's net income was $2.5 billion.

Ford reported $3.08 billion in pretax profit for North America, outpacing GMs $2.3 billion for the quarter. In Europe, Ford earned a pretax quarterly profit of $434 million, while GM broke even.

The company's global operating margin was 9.8 percent, while global pretax profit was a record $3.8 billion in the quarter.

Ford more than doubled profit in the Asia-Pacific region to $220 million, from $105 million a year ago. But it lost money outside of its China joint ventures.

The company's equity income from its joint ventures in China was $443 million, up from $360 million, for a quarterly operating profit margin of 16.4 percent.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum)
Net income more than doubled at Ford Motor (F), which also reported its highest-ever quarterly operating margins on Thursday, thanks to robust pricing of its F-150 pickup trucks in North America and improved profit in Europe.

Ford's net income of $2.45 billion, or 61 cents per diluted share, in the first quarter through March 31, was up 113 percent from $1.3 billion, or 29 cents per diluted share, a year ago.

Excluding one-time items, Ford's earnings per share of 68 cents easily beat Wall Street expectations of 48 cents a share.

Ford CEO Mark Fields said the company would continue to deliver great results, noting that Ford reaffirmed guidance that puts the automaker on track to perform as well as, or better than, it did last year.



"Hopefully, at some point, the market will recognize us for that, but we're going to keep focusing on the fundamentals of the business," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box."

Demand for SUVs and trucks offset lower sales in South America. U.S. sales of the Ford Explorer SUV rose 39 percent in the first quarter.

Ford is seeing a shift to SUVs not only in the United States, but around the world, according to Fields. He said Ford is well-positioned to take advantage of the trend.

He noted, however, that Ford would invest $4.5 billion in electrified vehicles over the next four years with the goal of electrifying 40 percent of its autos by the end of the decade.

The company also reported company records for global and North American operating margins.



Fields said Ford's average transaction price for its vehicles was more than double the industry's. He attributed the feat to "understanding the customer, what they value."

The company's shares were up nearly 2 percent at $13.90 in premarket trading and were the most actively traded on the New York Stock Exchange. (Get the latest quote here.) (F)

In North America, Ford had a record operating margin of 12.9 percent. This compares with rival General Motors' (GM) first-quarter operating profit margin of 8.7 percent, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles 's 7.2 percent in North America.

Story continues

Ford beat GM in both revenue and profit in the quarter, mainly because of stronger results in North America and Europe. Ford's quarterly revenue of $37.7 billion edged past GM's $37.3 billion. GM last week reported a first-quarter net income of $2 billion, while Ford's net income was $2.5 billion.

Ford reported $3.08 billion in pretax profit for North America, outpacing GM's $2.3 billion for the quarter. In Europe, Ford earned a pretax quarterly profit of $434 million, while GM broke even.

The company's global operating margin was 9.8 percent, while global pretax profit was a record $3.8 billion in the quarter.

Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks told reporters the company did not change its forecast for a North American profit margin for 2016 of 9.5 percent or better, after reporting a 10.2 percent margin last year.

Ford maintained its forecast for 2016 of a pretax profit that will equal or improve upon a record $10.8 billion last year.

Shanks said the second half of the year is not expected to generate as much profit due largely to downtime for production plants in North America for summer and end-of-year shutdowns.

He said the company would "tweak" production downward at some plants during the second half. He did not specify which plants would be affected, but said that cars are not selling as well as trucks and SUVs.

Ford more than doubled profit in the Asia-Pacific region to $220 million, from $105 million a year ago. But it lost money outside of its China joint ventures.



The company's equity income from its joint ventures in China was $443 million, up from $360 million, for a quarterly operating profit margin of 16.4 percent.

 CNBC's Tom DiChristopher , Reuters, and The Associated Press contributed to this story.
By Saeed Azhar

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore on Thursday charged a former wealth manager at Swiss-based private bank BSI with cheating and obstructing justice, in a case related to a money laundering investigation linked to Malaysia's troubled state fund 1MDB.

Singapore's investigation is looking at bank accounts linked to 1Malaysian Development Berhad (1MDB), which is at the centre of a multi-billion-dollar graft scandal, with transactions that have triggered investigations across three continents.

Yeo Jiawei, a 33-year-old Singaporean and former employee of BSI in Singapore, was first briefly arrested in March and again on April 15, and charged with receiving ill-gotten funds.

At a hearing in the Singapore State Court on Thursday, Singapore prosecutor Kwek Mean Luck urged the court to extend Yeo's custody with an additional charge of obstructing justice.

Singapore's white-collar crime unit was dealing with one of its most complex cross-border investigations ever, Kwek said.

"Investigations reveal that this accused has had a significant role in the movement of large amounts of money and the concealment of transactions," the prosecution said in its charge sheet.

Investigations were "very much alive and continue to involve the accused," it added.

Yeo's lawyer, Philip Fong, objected to further remand for his client as a breach of his right to counsel and against the presumption of innocence.

Yeo, who appeared in the courtroom via video link, wearing an orange T-shirt, was remanded to custody for another week, until May 5.

The prosecutor charged Yeo with cheating BSI, by concealing from his former employer that he would be receiving $1.6 million a year from Brazen Sky Ltd, a financial vehicle owned by 1MDB which was holding fund units at an account with BSI Singapore.

Another former BSI banker faces a criminal investigation linked to 1MDB.

(Writing by Anshuman Daga; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
By Steve Bittenbender LOUISVILLE, Ky. (Reuters) - Former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear on Wednesday accused his successor Matt Bevin of threatening lawmakers and said such actions may be the target of a federal investigation. Beshear's remarks, made at a press conference in the state capital of Frankfort, are the latest in a burgeoning political war between the two politicians. Beshear, a Democrat, accused Bevin, a Republican, of threatening cancellation of road projects in Democratic lawmakers' districts unless they switched parties. "He demanded that Democratic legislators switch parties and threatened to cancel road projects in their districts if they didnt comply," Beshear said of Bevin, according to a transcript of his speech. "When they refused, he said he would destroy them. "I understand that the FBI may be looking into that kind of conduct," he added, according to the transcript. Beshear's spokesman, Dan Hassert, confirmed the former governor's comments. David Habich, a spokesman for the FBIs Louisville office, said he could not disclose whether Bevin is being investigated. Bevin is currently in Europe on an economic development trip. Jessica Ditto, Bevins communications director, said in a statement that Beshear was trying to protect himself by throwing out baseless accusations. Last week, Bevin called for a probe into how Beshear's administration awarded state contracts and solicited campaign contributions. Bevin's accusations came shortly before a former Beshear official pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges. On Wednesday, Beshear said Bevin was the one using intimidation, accusing the governor of threatening the jobs of state employees if they did not accuse the previous administration of wrongdoing. Kentuckys House of Representatives has been in Democratic control since 1921, but the party only has a 53-47 edge. Two members did switch after Bevin won election in November. The hostilities began before Bevin took office in December after the term-limited Beshear appointed his wife to an unpaid seat on the state horse park commission during his final days in office. Meanwhile, the former governor has launched a campaign against Bevin's healthcare initiatives. In addition, Beshear's son serves as the state's attorney general and has sued Bevin over cuts he ordered in higher education funding. Beshear on Wednesday said he hopes his successor stops with the accusations and moves forward with leading the state. But if he wants a food fight, you know which he's had so far, then Im going answer any unfounded allegations that he keeps throwing out there, Beshear said. (Reporting by Steve Bittenbender, Editing by Ben Klayman)
BERLIN (Reuters) - A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard on trial in Germany over accusations that he was an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people is on Friday expected to have a statement read out by his lawyers in court. Holocaust survivors, who detailed their horrific experience at the trial which opened in February, have pleaded with Reinhold Hanning to break his silence. Hanning showed no emotion on the second day of his trial on Feb. 12 as three survivors spoke of the smell of burnt bodies and piles of corpses at Nazi Germany's Auschwitz death camp. He was heard only once in court in the western town of Detmold when asked how he was doing by judge Anke Grudda. "Fine," he replied. Accused by the prosecutor's office in Dortmund as well as by 40 joint plaintiffs from Hungary, Israel, Canada, Britain, the United States and Germany, Hanning is said to have joined the SS forces voluntarily at the age of 18 in 1940. Although Hanning was not directly involved in any killings at the camp, prosecutors accuse him of facilitating the slaughter in his capacity as a guard at the camp where 1.2 million people, most of them Jews, were killed. More than a dozen people have testified in the trial and a verdict is expected on May 27. A precedent for such charges was set in 2011, when death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk was convicted. Germany is holding what are likely to be its last trials linked to the Holocaust, in which more than six million people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis. In addition to Hanning, one other man and one woman in their 90s are accused of being accessories to the murder of hundreds of thousands of people at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. A third man who was a member of the Nazi SS guard team at Auschwitz died at the age of 93 this month, days before his trial was due to start. (Reporting by Elke Ahlswede; Writing by Joseph Nasr, editing by Ed Osmond)
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Four University of Georgia students were killed and another was critically injured after their car veered into oncoming traffic on a state highway, authorities said on Thursday.

The five women were traveling north in Oconee County near the university in Athens late on Wednesday when their car entered the southbound lane for unknown reasons, the Georgia State Patrol said in a statement.

The car was then hit on the passenger side by another vehicle, the patrol said. Alcohol was not suspected as a contributing factor in the crash.

Authorities identified the victims as Kayla Canedo, 19; Brittany Feldman, 20; Christina Semeria, 19; and Halle Scott, 19. All were from Georgia.

Three of the students were pronounced dead at the scene. Two others were taken to a hospital, where one died, the patrol said. The driver of the other car also was taken to the hospital with injuries, according to the patrol.

(Reporting by David Beasley; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Bill Trott)
By Parisa Hafezi ANKARA (Reuters) - President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may have sharply ideological differences but the fragility of Iran's economy has forced them into an uneasy alliance at least for the time being. In the past, the two powerful figures had offered contrasting visions for the Iranian economy with the conservative Khamenei calling for self-reliance and the pragmatist Rouhani urging cooperation with the world. But now, after having achieved a nuclear deal with the West, both leaders have a vested interest in setting aside their differences to secure their political futures and turn the economy round. "Rouhani's political career depends on this issue. If he fails to improve the economy, he will lose the leader's support and will turn into a lame-duck president," said a reformist former official, who is close to Rouhani. "His failure in the economic field, will lead to his political failure." While allaying the fears of Iranian hard-liners against any detente with the West, Khamenei cautiously backed Rouhani's efforts to reach a nuclear deal with the United States and other major powers in 2015, aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear program in return for lifting crippling sanctions. Rouhani will be protected by Khamenei against his hard-line critics so long as he is taking steps to improve the economy a senior official said, on condition of anonymity. But Khamenei's patience is being strained because of a lack of tangible economic benefits since sanctions were lifted in January. Some U.S. restrictions on Tehran remain in place. "For the leader Khamenei, the most important issue is to safeguard the interests of the nation and the country. That is why he backed the president's nuclear policy," said an Iranian diplomat close to Khamenei's office. HONEYMOON THREATENED Some point out that Khamenei's protection of Rouhani will stretch only as far as there is an economic dividend. "But now, the question is what was the use of reaching a deal if it cannot improve people's lives," the diplomat said. Khamenei's core support comes from lower-income people, who have socially, politically and economically invested in the Islamic Republic, analysts say, but this group has yet to benefit from the easing of sanctions. "Hard-liners are concerned that they might even lose the backing of their core supporters who were against any rapprochement with the West but remained silent because of Khamenei's support of the deal," political analyst Hamid Farahvashian said. Rouhani is in a constant power struggle with the countrys influential hard-liners and has even faced accusations of undermining pillars of the 1979 Islamic revolution, including "hostility towards the United States". This makes the alliance with Khamenei and his protection more valuable than ever to Rouhani's survival. "Rouhani is passing through a very sensitive period of his political career," said the first official. "It does not matter whether his allies did well in the elections in February." Rouhanis chances for re-election in 2017 are far from guaranteed despite a strong showing for his allies in February parliamentary polls and for a clerical body with the power to appoint or dismiss the supreme leader. Iranians will vote in a run-off parliamentary election on Friday for 68 of parliament's 290 seats, which will determine the makeup of the assembly as the February vote failed to give a majority. The current parliament is dominated by Rouhani's hard-line rivals. The onus is on the president to attract investors, justify Khamenei's political investment in him and to deliver economic prosperity to ordinary Iranians who have suffered for decades because of the sanctions imposed over the nuclear program. Pressure mounted on the Iranian leadership when U.S. and European restrictions drastically cut oil exports that are the engine of Iran's economy, and social unrest threatened. Rouhanis failure to improve Irans economy will be end of his honeymoon (with the leader)," said a security official. "The establishment is well aware of dangers of economic hardship and shortcomings." INVEST IN IRAN Iran's hard-liners have criticized Rouhani's economic policies and the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has demanded a bigger role in the economy, seen as a challenge to a government trying to attract foreign investment and open Iran's markets. Any increase in IRGC economic involvement could scare away foreign investors, as many of its members and front companies remain under U.S. sanctions. The IRGC runs a powerful business empire as well as being in charge of elite armed forces. Its profitable economic interests could be threatened by more competition from abroad. But Khamenei is convinced of the value of foreign partners. Iran is in desperate need of foreign investment ... I cannot recall the leader meeting any visiting European leader in the past years but he met (Italian Prime Minister Matteo) Renzi in April, said Tehran-based analyst Saeed Leylaz. The unprecedented meeting had a message, which was invest in Iran, he added. In domestic politics, Rouhani cannot always be sure of the support of Khamenei, who since succeeding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, has ensured that no group gains enough power to challenge his authority. Rouhani's popularity has alarmed Khamenei's hard-line allies, who are wary of losing their status within Iran's complex power structure. They have blocked, for example, Rouhani's attempts to relax social restrictions. The president's second term will very much depend on Khameinei's blessing and this in turn will depend heavily on a favorable economic outcome. Some analysts said that there are still very limited chances for more social and political freedom in Iran, where hard-liners control the judiciary, security forces and state media, despite Rouhani's successes. Rouhani is a regime insider," a pro-reform politician said. "He is clever enough to avoid confrontation with the leader. Leylaz disagreed, saying Rouhani might adopt more aggressive policies if re-elected. "But of course it might cause a backlash, bringing more limitations." (Writing by Parisa Hafezi; editing by Peter Millership and Giles Elgood)
PARIS (Reuters) - Some cars on French roads do not meet carbon dioxide limits, but the French government said on Thursday it had not found any equipped with software to cheat pollution tests.

French Ecology minister Segolene Royal ordered tests on a random sample of about 100 diesel cars last year after Germany's Volkswagen admitted that 11 million of its diesel vehicles had "defeat devices" which allowed them to meet emissions rules in test conditions.

"Tests conducted in France on 52 vehicles from 15 different brands showed no cheating device. However, the tests highlighted significantly higher emissions (in CO2 and Nox) in real traffic conditions," the Ecology ministry said.

The ministry said the vehicles that had failed to comply fully with French emissions regulations were made by Renault, Fiat, Mercedes, Volkswagen, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Nissan, Opel and Ford.

(Reporting by Matthias Blamont; Editing by Alexander Smith)
On Wednesday night's Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, writer Franchesca Ramsey took down "failed CNN host Piers Morgan" and his series of tweets Tuesday night regarding Beyonce's emotional and political visual album Lemonade. Morgan had tweeted in defense of his Daily Mail column in which he wrote Beyonce was "inflammatory" and played "the race card."

Ramsey was not buying it, finding Morgan's criticisms unwarranted and incorrect in the way they addressed Beyonce's album.

"You also have to realize that this album isn't about you, that's why Beyonce featured an ultimate black girl squad including Serena Williams," Ramsey said. "If Lemonade was about you, Piers Morgan, it would've been called Metamucil."

Source: Comedy Central

To Morgan complaints of Beyonce's "politically/racially charged video," Ramsey said...

To clarify, I love @Beyonce & Lemonade's a great album. I just didn't like the politically/racially charged video that went with it.

"Piers is mad because the music video for the song 'Freedom' includes the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown," Ramsey said. "It's a sad but powerful moment in a song about overcoming the odds and fighting for what's right. And apparently advocating for black lives gets Piers' knickers in a twist."

To Morgan's tweet that while he's always been against gun control, Beyonce has "suddenly turned political," Ramsey said...

I've always been consistently against gun control. Beyonce's suddenly turned political. There's a difference.https://twitter.com/marclamonthill/status/724957001973796864 ...

"First of all, music's always been political. Ever heard of Bob Marley or John Lennon or Bill Clinton playing sax at Arsenio. As far as I'm concerned, Beyonce's music has always been political," she said, listing out how Beyonce has done benefit concerts for Haiti, donated to Katrina victims and also bailed out Black Lives Matter activists.

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To poor Morgan being confused if he's even allowed to listen to Lemonade because he's white, Ramsey said...

Am I even allowed to listen to @Beyonce's new album given my white skin colour? I'm confused.

"Look, Piers, it's like if you tried to wear a pair of Apple bottom jeans," she said. "Sure, you could get them on, but without a big booty, they might not fit that well. It doesn't mean you can't wear them but you might have a hard time feeling totally comfortable because they weren't made for your comfort. So if you're cool with that, go ahead and get into formation, and if you're not then in the words of Beyonce, 'Please, suck my balls.'"
SANTIAGO, April 28 (Reuters) - Unionized workers at Chilean copper mine El Abra, controlled by Freeport-McMoran Inc, accepted a wage contract offered by the company, union President Juana Mejias said on Thursday.

Tensions between the union and Arizona-based Freeport, the world's biggest listed copper producer, have been high since the company scaled back El Abra's operations last year and laid off 650 workers.

"We finished (negotiating) with the company and we're in the process of reconciling with the workers," Mejias said in a phone interview, without providing details of the agreement.

Freeport, which owns a 51 percent stake in the mine in northern Chile, also confirmed that it had reached an agreement with the union, but did not provide further details.

El Abra produced 147,200 tonnes of copper last year, according to state copper commission Cochilco.

(Reporting by Fabian Cambero; Writing by Anthony Esposito and Peter Cooney)
Paris (AFP) - Two dozen police officers were injured, three of them seriously, as violence flared in mass protests across France against a hotly contested labour reform bill.

Security forces in Paris responded with tear gas as masked youths threw bottles and cobblestones, leaving three policemen with serious injuries, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said, adding that 24 police were injured overall.

Clashes between police and protesters also erupted in the cities of Nantes, Lyon, Marseille and Toulouse, with 124 people arrested nationwide, Cazeneuve said.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls strongly condemned the unrest, which he blamed on "an irresponsible minority". "They will be brought to justice. Support to the police," he wrote on Twitter.

Cazeneuve criticised what he called the excesses of those who sought to exploit the violence on the fringes of the protests after visiting injured policemen in hospital.

In Paris, security forces fired tear gas and stun grenades early Friday to disperse hundreds of people who had refused to leave Place de la Republique after a night-time rally.

Police gradually pushed the protestors back into adjacent streets, with several arrested, an AFP journalist saw.

Two buses and two scooters were torched a few hundreds metres (yards) from the site.

The clashes came as at least 170,000 workers and students took to streets nationwide Thursday in a new push for the withdrawal of the proposed labour law.

"We have always condemned violence," said Jean-Claude Mailly of the Force Ouvriere trade union, arguing that the violence occurred "outside of the protests".

William Martinet, leader of the biggest student union, the UNEF, condemned the rioters but also denounced a "disproportionate use of force by the police".

The demonstrations as well as work stoppages, notably in the aviation and public transport sectors, were the latest actions in a wave of protests that began two months ago and has proved a major headache for the government.

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Opponents of the labour reform, billed as an effort to reduce chronic unemployment, which stands at 10 percent, say it will threaten cherished rights and deepen job insecurity for young people.

"Be Young and Shut Up!" read one banner at a protest in southwestern Toulouse, highlighting the frustration of youths facing an unemployment rate of 25 percent.

- Bill expected to pass -

The unions and student organisations plan to pile on the pressure with further protests on Sunday to mark the May Day labour holiday, as well as next Tuesday, when parliament begins debating the bill.

Christophe Sirugue, the Socialist lawmaker who is presenting the bill to parliament after it was reviewed in committee, said Thursday that several points still needed "clarification" but that he expected the bill to pass.

Among the remaining issues are measures to make it easier to lay off workers in lean times, and whether employers should still be allowed to shed workers if conditions are depressed in their overseas operations and not just in France.

Another is a proposed surtax on short-term contracts aimed at getting employers to hire more people on permanent contracts, Sirugue told reporters.

Young people have been at the forefront of the protest movement, with many young workers stuck on short-term contracts or internships while hoping to secure a permanent job.

Protests against the reform kicked off on March 9, culminating in massive demonstrations on March 31 that brought 390,000 people onto the streets, according to an official count. Organisers put the number at 1.2 million.

The CGT union said Thursday's marches and rallies drew half a million people.

The protests spawned a new youth-led movement called "Nuit Debout" (Up All Night), which has seen advocates of a broad spectrum of causes gather in city squares at night for the past four weeks to demand change, though attendance has been dwindling in recent days.

With little more than a year left in his mandate, France's deeply unpopular President Francois Hollande has been banking on the labour reform as a standout initiative with which to defend his record.

But in the face of the protests his Socialist government has watered down the labour reforms -- only to anger bosses while failing to assuage workers.
COLOGNE, Germany (Reuters) - British heavyweight world champion Tyson Fury has accused Wladimir Klitschko of being a boring, no-risk fighter as he stoked the flames ahead of their rematch in July. Fury stunned Ukrainian Klitschko in Dusseldorf in November to win the WBA, WBO and IBF belts, although he has since relinquished the IBF title, which was then claimed by fellow Briton Anthony Joshua. "Wladimir is a no risk fighter," Fury, who will put his belts on the line when he faces Klitschko in Manchester on July 9, told a news conference on Thursday. "He doesn't want to take any risks so he might talk a good game that he is going to come and try fight but I'm yet to see him do it in all of his fights. The only entertaining one he ever had was when he lost by a knockout. So that's what happens when he tries to fight." Klitschko had been world champion since 2006 when he was beaten on points by Fury, who is unbeaten in 25 professional fights -- 18 of them won by knockout. The Ukrainian has previously referred to Fury as a clown, a slur the Briton dismissed. "I just want to address what Wladimir said about the clown thing," he said. "Call me a clown, call me circus act, call me fat, ugly, bald. Even call me Sue if you want but don't call me Wladimir Klitschko because that's an insult." (Writing by Toby Davis in London; Editing by Frank Pingue)
(Repeats story from Wednesday)

* Genel in talks with Turkish state-backed firm on stake in fields

* Deal would help Turkey diversify supplies after Russian dispute

* Could help Genel and Chairman Hayward regain investor confidence (Recasts, adds details, background)

By Ron Bousso

LONDON, April 27 (Reuters) - Genel Energy, chaired by former BP head Tony Hayward, is betting on a major deal with Turkey to jointly develop gas fields in Iraqi Kurdistan which will help Ankara reduce its reliance on Russian supplies after relations soured with Moscow.

The deal, if it goes through, could help London-listed Genel regain investor confidence after it steeply downgraded its oil reserves two months ago - leading to it losing a third of its market value, contributing to its biggest-ever annual loss and piling pressure on Hayward.

The company, which owns most of the Bina Bawi and Miran fields, is in talks to sell a stake to TEC, a joint venture that includes the international arm of state-owned Turkish Petroleum, according to several sources involved in the negotiations.

"(TEC) want to invest in the entire value chain of the project," one source said. The sources did not disclose the size and price of the stake being discussed.

The deal would provide a new source of gas for Turkey, which has scrambled to find alternatives after relations with major supplier Russia deteriorated sharply after the Turkish airforce downed a Russian warplane late last year.

Entering the partnership, which would also include the construction of a pipeline and storage facilities to connect the field to Turkey, would also reinforce ties between Ankara and Iraqi Kurdistan, two neighbours battling Islamic State.

Genel hopes to complete the negotiations with the partner by the end of the year, Chief Executive Murat Ozgul said at the company's annual general meeting in London on Wednesday. He did not name the partner.

Genel, one of the main oil producers in Iraqi Kurdistan, has made no secret of plans to bring in a partner for the fields, which it operates and holds an 80 percent stake in.

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Its growing focus on Turkey was underlined when Turkish renewable energy company Bilgin Enerji bought a 10.5 percent stake in the company this month to become its second largest shareholder after Turkish billionaire Mehmet Karamehmet.

Genel plans to export up to 20 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year from the fields, located some 300 km (186 miles) from Turkey and with gas reserves of around 11 trillion cubic feet. It has said it expects the fields to take around three years to develop and to start production in early 2020.

Turkey currently consumes approximately 50 billion cubic metres of gas per year, of which more than half is provided by Russia, according to Genel's website.

(Editing by Jane Merriman and Pravin Char)
TBILISI (Reuters) - The security service in the former Soviet republic of Georgia said on Thursday it had detained five Georgian citizens who were trying to sell $3 million worth of radioactive uranium. Security service officers did not say whether the group had a buyer for the uranium, nor where the group had acquired it. World leaders have been concerned about the security of Soviet nuclear weapons since the Soviet Union's demise in 1991. Concern has also grown that radical groups are seeking material with which to make a 'dirty bomb'. "The detainees were planning to sell nuclear material with total weights of 1 kilogram and 665 grams, which contained two radioactive isotopes - Uranium-238 and a small amount, 0.23 percent, of Uranium-235," security service investigator Savle Motiashvili told a briefing. Motiashvili added that given the gamma ray emission, direct and long-term exposure to the substances was dangerous for life and health. A Tbilisi city court put the group into pre-trial custody. They face five to 10 years in prison if found guilty. Georgia's security service has foiled several attempts to sell uranium or other radioactive materials. Earlier this month, they detained six Georgian and Armenian citizens who were trying to sell $200 million worth of the uranium-238 isotope. In 2006, a resident of Russia's North Ossetia region was arrested for trying to sell weapons-grade uranium for $1 million to agents he thought were radical Islamists. He was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison. (Reporting by Margarita Antidze; Editing by Vladimir Soldatkin and Toby Chopra)
Http%3a%2f%2fi.blueprint.mashable.com%2ffybwkf-564o8iefj9-ss59lmgxg%3d%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f74224%2fgirlbodyshamedatprom

After spending time meticulously picking out the perfect dress, styling your hair and putting on make up, you'd expect to a have a good time at prom.

Unfortunately, prom night can be a wildly disappointing night for many people  especially one young woman named Amy who was told to cover up what she thought was a classy and pretty prom dress.

SEE ALSO: Woman is body shamed buying bikini, responds in empowering way

The mom of one of Amy's friends, Tiffani Taylor, posted Amy's story on Facebook.

Image: facebook, tiffani taylor

"She was told she could go in if she wore the vice principal's tux jacket, which mind you, did not cover her chest. She was told by a teacher repeatedly "Us big girls gotta cover up". This young girl was SHAMED for having breasts," Taylor wrote.

Sharon Anglim, a representative of Maryville City Schools, told WATE 6 in Tennessee that "there is no specific prom dress policy in place. No other girls at the event were called out for similar reasons."

Commenters have expressed their upmost support for Amy, many saying how they all thought she looked "beautiful" and "elegant."

Leave the haters behind at graduation, Amy. Summer is just around the corner.

UPDATE Thursday, April 27, 5:25 p.m. EST: Amy's father noted to WATE 6 that the added lace at the top of the dress, which was added to make the dress more conservative, accidentally broke off between the taking of her photo and her arrival at prom.

Her neckline was "several inches lower and wider than in the picture. Thats when a teacher asked her to wear a jacket," says WATE 6.

Amy and her parents have not made a complaint to the school about the incident.
As a Child, Vidali Suffered Terrible Burns from an Exploding Bottle of Gasoline

LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / Giulio Vidali is pleased to announce that he is scheduling a life changing overseas surgery. Vidali will soon travel from his home in Malaysia to the United States so he can undergo an intricate face transplant surgery.

As Vidali explained, when he was only 4 years old, a bottle of gasoline exploded and showered his small face and body with fire. He was burned on over 60 percent of his body, and suffered a great deal of damage to his face.

Over the years, Vidali traveled between Italy and the United States for a total of 48 reconstructive surgeries. Although his childhood and the multiple surgeries were difficult, Vidali said he always tried to be strong.

Now 31 and living in Malaysia with his wife Veronica and their two children Samantha and Christian, Vidali said he is ready to take another step to give him back a face that is free from scars and burns.

"Every time I go with my kids to a party I see other people staring at me, wondering what happened," he said.

"And now my daughter is big enough to understand and I would like to avoid her friends asking what happened to her daddy. So I think it's time for a change."

After consulting with his longtime surgeon Dr. Jan Jackson, Vidali was delighted to learn that there are many new methods to help burn victims like him--including a face transplant surgery.

In order to raise enough money to pay for the costs associated with the innovative surgery, Vidali has launched a fundraiser on Indiegogo. He hopes to use crowdfunding to raise $5,000 to help Dr. Jackson fix his burned face.

To learn more about Vidali and his upcoming facial surgery and trip to America, and/or to make a donation to his fundraiser, please visit https://goo.gl/uHhLov.

About Giulio Vidali:

Giulio Vidali is an inspiring man who's looking to come to America to receive a face transplant surgery. His reason for that is at four years old, he was close to the fireplace, and a bottle of gasoline exploded and burned over 60 percent of his body. He moved to Malaysia to find a new life, and now has two wonderful kids. His daughter who is six is named Samantha, and his son who is three is named Christian, and the mother of his children is an amazing woman named Veronica. He hopes to raise enough funds to move the U.S. and undergo Face Transplant surgery so he will have a second chance for a normal life with his family. People can find his project on Indiegogo, and support and contribute to the big change he's looking to make.

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Contact:

Myrtle Hayes

admin@rocketfactor.com

(949) 555-2861

SOURCE: Giulio Vidali
The family of a Vietnamese woman who was shot to death by a Greensboro police officer will get to see the video of that fatal shooting. City officials say the former officer involved in that shooting has given permission to release the video captured by the officers body camera. Bill ONeil has the story from Greensboro.
(This April 20 story has been corrected in headline and first paragraph to show that 50 percent of northern coral is dead or dying, not entire reef) By Colin Packham SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists said on Wednesday that just seven percent of the Great Barrier Reef, which attracts around A$5 billion ($3.90 billion) in tourism every year, has been untouched by mass bleaching that is likely to destroy half of the northern coral. 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 one of the strongest El Nino weather systems in nearly 20 years, scientists believe climate change is the underlying cause. "We've never seen anything like this scale of bleaching before. In the northern Great Barrier Reef, it's like 10 cyclones have come ashore all at once," said Professor Terry Hughes, conveyor of the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, which conducted aerial surveys of the World Heritage site. "Our estimate at the moment is that close to 50 percent of the coral is already dead or dying," Hughes told Reuters. The Great Barrier Reef stretches 2,300 km (1,430 miles) along Australia's northeast coast and is the world's largest living ecosystem. "There were some who said that the worst had passed. We rejected that, and they were wrong," Environment Minister Greg Hunt told reporters. "Let it be known that this is a significant event. We take it seriously." U.S. President Barack Obama embarrassed Australia 18 months ago by warning of the risk of climate change to the reef during a G20 meeting. UNESCO's World Heritage Committee last May stopped short of placing the Great Barrier Reef on an "in danger" list, but the ruling raised long-term concerns about its future. Australia is one of the largest carbon emitters capita because of its reliance on coal-fired power plants for electricity. Despite pledging to cut carbon emissions, Australia has continued to support fossil fuel projects, including Adani Enterprises Ltd's proposed A$10 billion ($7.7 billion) Carmichael coal project in the Galilee Basin in western Queensland. "Its not good enough for them to say they care about the reef while they keep backing the coal industry and avoid tackling climate change, said Shani Tager, a Greenpeace campaigner. The findings will likely place pressure on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ahead of an expected federal election on July 2. Turnbull is an advocate of carbon trading and supports progressive climate policies, but has left some disappointed over a failure to strengthen his party's commitment to addressing climate change. (Additional reporting by James Regan; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Heineken brew master

Heineken's Global Brew Master thinks that the beer industry is changing for the better.

"Were starting to talk about beer," Willem van Waesberghe told Business Insider, on the question of the beer industry's biggest changes over the last 20 years. "Brewers are very happy that were finally talking about beer again."

That's right  the biggest change in the last two decades in the world of beer is that brewers are no longer the only people who care about what they are drinking. Increasingly, the average consumer wants to know more about the process behind and the ingredients in the brews they are buying. Van Waesberghe says that this growing interest in learning more about beer, as well as a preference for variety and transparency, has been one of the most gratifying changes to occur in the more than 15 years he has worked at Heineken. The shift, he says, can be partially attributed to craft beers popularity.

"We like the craft world in that way," says van Waesberghe.

Heineken Bottles Film Independent Spirit Awards

The rise of craft is one of the most important influences on the beer industry in 2016.

Often, major brewers find themselves in opposition to craft beer. Craft brewers like BrewDog see mega-corporation like Budweiser and Guinness parent company Diageo as unimaginative and passionless, to use BrewDogs language.

"We support craft, and craft breweries should be independent, not bastardized by megacorporations who will compromise the quality of the beer to cut corners, cut people, and make a profit," Sarah Warman, BrewDog's head of marketing, told Business Insider.

The emphasis on staying small in craft is one that Heineken  which is family-owned and emphasizes the authenticity of its three-ingredient beer recipe  finds to be misleading.

beer

"What I dont like about the craft world is its a commercial concept blocking out by size," says van Waesberghe. "A brewmaster in Heineken has the same craftmanship as a brewmaster [at a craft brewer]."

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While bigger breweries and craft brewers may butt heads, its impossible to downplay how much craft brewers are shaping major beer companies.

Budweiser and Heineken have discussed taking marketing tips from craft brewers, with an increased emphasis on stunts, social media, and authenticity.

Recognizing craft as competition has also resulted in a number of acquisitions of craft brewers by major companies. In December 2015 alone, Anheuser-Busch InBev acquired craft brewers Arizona's Four Peaks Brewing Company, the UK's Camden Town Brewery and Colorado's Breckenridge Brewery  a series of purchases that rubbed many craft brewers the wrong way.

Lagunitas Brewing Company

"Acquisitions go against the very nature of craft beer  by commoditizing it, big companies are pulling the wool over customers' eyes," Warman said.

Heineken is trying to avoid such criticism by balancing growth with a dedication to craft.

"In my mind only one Brewer stood out as truly global, family-owned and still brewers first; Heineken," Lagunitas founder Tony Magee wrote in a blog post after Heineken acquired a 50% stake in the California-based craft brewer. In them we met a global brewer who uses no adjuncts in their flagship beer; malt only. We met a brewer that is still controlled by its founders great-granddaughter. We met a brewer whose CEO/Chairman understood the details of the brewing process."

Heinekens most recent marketing campaign similarly puts the beers authenticity front-and-center. The ad shows van Waesberghe discussing the simplicity of Heinekens recipe with actor Benicio Del Toro  and, ultimately telling the star "no f---ing way" when he suggests adding some new, trendy ingredients to the brew.

NOW WATCH: It's National Beer Day  here are 8 ways to open a beer without a bottle opener





More From Business Insider


If youre attending this years Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, BRK-B) annual shareholders meetingor watching Yahoo Finances live stream coveragetheres a good chance youll see scores of shareholders wandering around while munching on lots of goodies. One of the tastier snacks will be Dairy Queen ice cream, which many attendees look forward to eating year after year.

Berkshire Hathaway acquired Dairy Queen in 1997, and the restaurants ice cream has quickly become one of legendary investor Warren Buffetts absolute favorites. Known for its iconic Dilly Bar and fully-loaded Blizzards, Dairy Queen has been serving soft-serve ice cream since 1940, when its first store opened in Joliette, Illinois. Now, there are more than 6,000 Dairy Queen locations worldwide.

And Buffett is known to be a "regular" visitor to Dairy Queen in Omaha, Nebraska. He told Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy Serwer that its a tradition he shares with his great grandchildren.

What I usually get is a sundae. I get the small sundae for the ice cream and the extra large sundae for the topping. So I mean, I just smother in the cherry topping and then pour a lot of nuts on it, chuckled Buffett. When asked if its a Buffett special, the Oracle of Omaha said that its available to anyone who wants to pay for it.

Dairy Queen will have a booth at this years annual shareholders meeting in the 200,000-square-foot exhibit hall, next to other Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries, including Fruit of the Loom, Brooks, and Sees Candies.

On April 30, Yahoo Finance will live stream the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting exclusively. You can find out more information here.
LONDON (Reuters) - Investment advisory group Hermes EOS said it will oppose the appointment of Schroders (SDR.L) ex-Chief Executive Michael Dobson to the position of Chairman at the fund firm, describing the plan as a breach of corporate governance best practice.

"While we recognise the significant contribution that Michael Dobson has made in his tenure as CEO, we are not able to support the decision to appoint him as Chair," Hermes said in a statement on Thursday.

"Although we recognise some of the key client, regulator and strategic partner relationships he holds, we do not believe that these justify a breach of a fundamental principle of UK corporate governance and best practice that a CEO should not become Chair of the company."

Hermes said it had advised its clients to vote against the re-election of the senior independent director who led the chairman selection process, but was supportive of the appointment of Peter Harrison to CEO that Dobson vacated earlier this year.

Schroders is due to hold its annual investor meeting on Thursday.

(Reporting By Sinead Cruise, editing by Carolyn Cohn)
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Hero the diabetic alert dog sensed something was wrong with her 4-year-old human friend Sadie and did what she's trained to do: alert Sadie's parents.

The catch: Sadie  a Type 1 diabetic  was more than five miles away at school, reports KUTV.

While Sadie's parents know it's highly unlikely that Hero could detect their daughter's blood sugar levels from so far away, they remain amazed by their labrador retriever's intuition.

SEE ALSO: 25 dogs who clearly love hugs

Hero's shining moment came back in December 2015, while Sadie was off at school in Cedar Hills, Utah. Though her mother Michelle says Hero rarely acts up, she says the dog began to whine.

"He's normally a very quiet dog. Whining is not in his protocol. But he just started whining and he would not stop," she told KUTV.

Michelle called the school to ask that a staff member test Sadie's blood sugar, and though her levels were initially normal, within half an hour they dropped to near dangerous levels. Sadie's parents credit Hero with alerting them just in time.

"That's why we're thankful to have Hero, he's the one who saves her more times than not," Sadie's father told KUTV.
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A family dog became the hometown hero when it led firefighters to two children trapped inside a house fire.

The fire occurred in Longwood, Florida, at the home of Margo Feaser, a Florida Sheriff's Department Investigator. Fortunately, Margo, her husband Brent and their 2-year-old and 4-year-old children all made it out of the blaze alive, and are recovering in the hospital, Today reports.

The fire began at approximately 11:20 p.m. Monday evening. The family's neighbors, Chip Dover and son Andrew, who were outside when it started.

SEE ALSO: 'Hero' dog dies rescuing people after devastating Ecuadorian earthquake

"We were outside with my telescope, looking at Jupiter with my next door neighbor," Dover told Today. "We were getting ready to come in when we heard a big explosion, and the house just blew up. We ran over there immediately and it was burning like crazy, and then we realized the family was still inside."

Image: SEMINOLE COUNTY FIRE DEPARTMENT VOLUNTEER PHOTOGRAPHER, NORM REYBURN

So the Dovers leapt into action, and broke the home's front windows with a chair on the front porch in order to get the family out of the burning building.

Margo was pulled to safety from the window, and when firefighters arrived they were able to break down the front door to rescue her husband Brent, who suffered severe burns, Today reports.

Fortunately, the family's German shepherd Maxx was there to lend a helping paw. The firefighters say that the dog led them to the children's bedroom, which was difficult to find thanks to heavy smoke from the blaze.

Image: SEMINOLE COUNTY FIRE DEPARTMENT

The family members are all currently being treated for burns and smoke inhalation, however, they are all in stable condition with their status ranging from serious to critical. Maxx the dog was also treated for smoke inhalation at a local vet, according to a press release from the SCSD. The dog is expected to make a full recovery.

Story continues

Image: SEMINOLE COUNTY FIRE DEPARTMENT

We are grateful to the neighbors who jumped into action, and we especially thank the firefighters who selflessly entered the burning structure and risked their lives for the Feaser family, said Sheriff Don Eslinger in the press release. There is a long road of recovery and rebuilding ahead, but our Sheriffs Office family will be with Margo and her family every step of the way. We know our community is behind them too, and we appreciate the tremendous outpouring of support the family has received.



According to the State Fire Marshals preliminary investigation, the fire was accidental, and started in the home's back porch.

A GoFundMe campaign has been set up to aid the family, who's home was completely destroyed in the fire. At the time of writing, the campaign has raised $27,993 of the targeted $75,000 goal.

Image: GoFundMe
After the perfect dress and spending hours on her hair and makeup, Amy, a Maryville, Tennessee, high school student, didn't even make it through the door of her senior prom. According to a now-viral Facebook post, school administrators told Amy her off-the-shoulder gown was "too revealing," which sent her to the bathroom in tears.

In the spirit of compromise, administrators offered her a trade-off, and told her she could go to her prom if she wore the vice principal's tuxedo jacket over her dress, according to the Facebook post.

"She was told by a teacher repeatedly, 'Us big girls gotta cover up,'" wrote Facebook user Tiffani Taylor in her post explaining the incident. "This young girl was SHAMED for having breasts."

Source: Tiffani Taylor/Facebook

According to local news station WATE 6, the piece of lace on the bodice of the dress broke off after photos were taken, causing the dress to be "more revealing" when she arrived at prom. Even so, Amy is just one of hundreds of girls who are told their bodies are "distracting" or "inappropriate."

And it only gets worse around prom season: Earlier this month, a high school in North Carolina created a video giving female students guidelines for how they should dress at their upcoming prom.

A representative from Maryville City Schools told WATE 6 that there was no such dress code for Amy and her peers. But she was singled out for it anyway, Taylor said.

"Her excitement during this memorable time of her life turned into embarrassment at the hands of adults who are supposed to be leading her," said Taylor. "SHAME on YOU, Maryville."

h/t NYMag
The only candidate on the attending list for a forum hosted by the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies Leadership Network is Hillary Clinton, according to Reuters. Also scheduled to appear at next week's event: President Barack Obama, who's giving the keynote.

"We are a vote that is becoming increasingly powerful," California Rep. Judy Chu, a Democrat, told Reuters. "In this election we are the swing vote in the swing states." Chu will be introducing Clinton at the reception.

Hillary Clinton meets with Rep. Judy Chu in January.

Out of the five presidential hopefuls vying for a spot in the general election, the Democratic frontrunner was the only one to accept the network's invitation. According to Reuters, Clinton's opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, "did not commit," nor did Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump "was unlikely to attend," the network said, while Ohio Gov. John Kasich "did not respond."

Asian-American voters tend to cast their ballots for Democrats  the Washington Post has attributed this to alienating racial rhetoric from GOP candidates, who've implied that U.S. citizens of Asian descent are not quite as American white voters. Maybe a show of support for 5.6% of the national population could help ease that feeling of being excluded? Just a thought.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday to address a joint meeting of Congress when he visits Washington in June, an unusual show of warmth for a foreign leader. "This address presents a special opportunity to hear from the elected leader of the worlds most populous democracy on how our two nations can work together to promote our shared values and to increase prosperity," the Republican leader of the House of Representatives said in a statement. The invitation is a sharp turnaround for Modi, who was once barred from the United States over massacres of Muslims. Opportunities to address the House and Senate are considered a great honor. There have only been two in the past year: Pope Francis, on Sept. 24, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, on April 29, 2015. When Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies swept India's elections in 2014, there were initially questions about whether he would qualify for a visa. President Barack Obama quickly dismissed the issue by inviting him to the White House when he called to congratulate him on his victory. In 2002, when Modi had just become Gujarat's chief minister, more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in sectarian riots in the state. The administration of President George W. Bush denied Modi a visa in 2005 under a 1998 U.S. law barring entry to foreigners who have committed "particularly severe violations of religious freedom." Modi denied any wrongdoing. India's Supreme Court ruled in 2010 he had no case to answer. Washington sees its relationship with India as critical, partly to counterbalance China's rising power. Obama has called it "one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century." (Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Richard Cowan; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Frances Kerry)
By Khaled Abdelaziz KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Unidentified gunmen shot dead a Sudanese student on Wednesday during a university campus demonstration and his funeral turned into an anti-government protest involving hundreds of students, eyewitnesses said. "Killing of a student, killing of a nation, down down with military rule," the students chanted. Earlier gunmen in plain clothes had opened fire on around 200 students as they protested against government plans to sell off buildings belonging to the historic Khartoum University, the eyewitnesses said. They identified the dead student as 20-year-old Mohammed al Sadek. Police could not be immediately reached for comment on the shooting and no other details were immediately available. President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who took power in a 1989 coup, brooks little dissent in Sudan, which has been suffering from an economic crisis since South Sudan seceded in 2011, costing Khartoum more then 70 percent of its oil revenues. Bashir is wanted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court to face charges of masterminding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes during Sudan's Darfur conflict. He denies wrongdoing. Last week Amnesty International called for a thorough and impartial investigation into violent attacks against students after an 18-year-old student was shot dead. (Writing by Amina Ismail; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Taipei, April 28 (CNA) The U.S. dollar fell against the Taiwan dollar Thursday, shedding NT$0.066 to close at NT$32.279 as the local currency recouped its earlier losses on the back of the strength of other regional units, in particular the Japanese yen, after the Bank of Japan (BOJ) refrained from further easing its monetary policy, dealers said.
LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / Lundin Law PC announces that a class action complaint has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, against Teekay Corporation ("Teekay" or the "Company") (TK). Investors who purchased or otherwise acquired shares between June 30, 2015 and December 17, 2015, inclusive (the "Class Period"), are encouraged to contact the Firm prior to the May 2, 2016 lead plaintiff motion deadline.

For more information or to participate, please contact Brian Lundin, Esquire, of Lundin Law PC, at 888-713-1033, or via email at brian@lundinlawpc.com.

No class has been certified in the above action. Until a class is certified, you are not considered represented by an attorney. You may also choose to do nothing and be an absent class member.

The complaint alleges that the Company made materially false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) Teekay's repeated assurances that it would maintain a quarterly dividend of at least $0.55 per share were baseless; (ii) Teekay was aware that it could not support future dividend payments in excess of $0.55 per share; and (iii) the cash flows from the Company's master limited partnerships ("MLPs") - Teekay LNG Partners LP ("TGP") and Teekay Offshore Partners LP ("TOO") - could not withstand these high dividends.

Lundin Law PC was created by Brian Lundin, a securities litigator based in Los Angeles.

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules.

Contact:

Lundin Law PC

Brian Lundin, Esq.

Telephone: 888-713-1033

Facsimile: 888-713-1125

SOURCE: Lundin Law PC
On January 25, 1972, Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to the United States Congress, announced her candidacy for president in a stump speech that sounded very much like those of todays presidential candidates. She told the Brooklyn crowd, I am not the candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests. I stand here now without endorsements from many big name politicians or celebrities or any other kind of prop. She also stood there without the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, which she helped found the previous year. The reason? Some of the CBCs members thought Chisholms focus on gender and outreach to other groups subverted the caucuss mission and explicit focus on race.

Four decades later, Representative Donna Edwards sought to become the first black senator from Maryland and only the second black woman ever elected to the body. Like Chisholm, she also did not enjoy the explicit support of the CBC. Edwards confronted CBC members, and they cited her difficult nature and failure to establish good relationships as reasons for not endorsing her. On Tuesday, Edwards lost her bid for the Senate seat in a close primary race that may have turned out differently if shed received the endorsement from more members of the nations most powerful body of black legislators.

Among young African Americans, there is a growing sense that there are significant generational differences with the CBC and that the organization may have lost its conscience. Hillary Clinton has taken heat for the 1994 crime bill that led to the disproportionate incarceration of black people, but the bill was only assured passage once the CBC withdrew its opposition. CBC members have clashed with Black Lives Matter protesters. And activists have criticized the CBC Political Action Committee, a separate but associated group, for the boards ties to private prisons and big tobacco.

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While some of these criticisms are valid, there is little question that the CBC is of immense value to African Americans and the nation at large. For decades, its been the organ through which the concerns of black Americans have entered the halls of Congress and the means by which policy victories have been delivered for disenfranchised minority communities. There is simply no doubting that the interests of black America remain central to the caucuss aims. But there is also little doubt that the black electorate is changing, and the CBC will have to keep pace with this evolution if it wants to remain relevant to black Americans.

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The Congressional Black Caucus was formed as a nonpartisan body in early 1971 to rally the collective influence of its 13 members and ensure that issues facing African Americans were raised and debated in Congress. Its guiding principle, set forth by Representative Bill Clay of Missouri, was direct and concise: Black people have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies  just permanent interests.

It didnt take long for the group to make national headlines. When President Nixon refused to meet with black legislators, they boycotted the State of the Union. The caucus declared that Nixons unwillingness to meet with black members of Congress was emblematic of his disinterest in the concerns of African Americans. Shortly thereafter, the president conceded to a meeting, and the CBC received extensive media attention for its victory.

Protest is very much a part of the CBCs charactermany of todays CBC members are contemporaries of the civil-rights movement. It would seem that todays protest movements would be fertile ground for CBC goals. But many of todays black activists are not as interested in what they see as respectability politics or dressing in their Sunday best for protests like their civil-rights-era predecessors. They are taking the stage whenever they choose and demanding that presidential candidates hear them. They are challenging leaders from previous generations, and some of those leaders dont necessarily like it. In the black community, where eldership is revered, the boldness of todays protesters has rubbed some CBC members the wrong way. Many black activists dont care; they are less concerned with paying homage to elected officials and more interested in expedient policy outcomes.

Recommended: How to Save the Republican Party

If the CBC is to remain the voice of black America, it must find a way to incorporate these new leaders into its work and do a better job of hearing and addressing the concerns of young black Americans, including and especially Black Lives Matter protesters. This should not be difficult; the organization has successfully employed this strategy in the past. In the latter part of the 1970s into the late 80s, the CBC helped orchestrate the Free South Africa Movement protests. The movement included sit-ins and student protests, and was even featured on popular television shows such as A Different World. The group combined these popular efforts with a successful legislative strategy, leading the passage of sanctions on South Africa and defeating President Reagans ensuing veto. This is the power and value of the caucus.

But political circumstances have changed. African Americans are still an electoral monolith, tending to vote in predictable ways that are similar to others in their demographic group. But they are also increasingly politically diverse. This is a function of expanding intra-racial inequality and a wider variety of lived experiences among blacks, including disparate health outcomes and susceptibility to violent crime. But the CBC can be resistant to the changing politics, lives, and preferences of black America. The caucus has high incumbency rates, and its part of an institution where seniority is a qualification all its own. It is also closely tied to party prioritiesit has effectively become the most reliably Democratic entity in Congress.

If the caucus wants the best outcomes for black children, it should champion good ideas regardless of party.

This stifles debate about policy options. Studies show substantive and significant differences emerging between economic classes of blacks on issues like government spending on crime-reduction and anti-poverty programs. As a group, African Americans consistently rate education as a top concern, but have varying opinions on how to secure solid schooling for black childrenwhether through increased investments in the public-school system or more school-choice options for black parents, including private-school scholarships or homeschooling. The latter are programs favored by Republicans, like Senator Tim Scott and Representative Mia Love, but anathema to the Democratic policy platform. The CBC should be a venue for debate about these approaches. The caucus wants the best outcomes for black children, but it should champion good ideas regardless of which party favors a certain policy. If partisan allegiances undermine this flexibility, the CBC cannot effectively fulfill its mission. While individual members have responsibilities to their constituencies and their party, the CBC does not.

Shedding this veil of partisanship is critical because it will help the caucus improve its image as an honest broker for policy deliberations. Membership in the CBC is open to all black members of Congress. But of the seven black Republicans who have served in Congress since the CBCs creation, only three have joined. Only one of the three currently serving black Republicans are members. And though the CBC PAC aspires to increase the number of African Americans in the U.S. Congress, if its expenditures are any indication, this only holds true for black Democratic candidates and not Republicans like Will Hurd, the 2014 congressional candidate Erika Harold, or even Representative Love, who is a current CBC member.

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The caucus also misses out on an opportunity to expand its influence by excluding white representatives with substantial black populations in their constituencies. Steve Cohen represents a Tennessee Congressional District that is 60 percent black and includes parts of Memphis, which has the sixth-largest black population out of all American cities. But because he not black, he cannot be part of the CBC. His record, however, shows he has the interests of his black constituents at hearttake, for example, his introduction of and leadership in passing a House resolution that apologizes to African Americans for slavery. While most CBC members have not endorsed black Republicans or even some of its Democratic members like Donna Edwards, they have endorsed Cohen over black candidates challenging his seat in congressional primaries. Yet they cant officially welcome him into their ranks.

The Congressional Black Caucus remains black Americas best hope for having a voice in Congress. No matter what person or party occupies the Oval Office, controls Congress, or the demographic makeup of the Supreme Court, the CBC will be the primary mechanism through which black people can be heard. But this will only be true if the CBC resolves not to become mired in the partisan politics that have stalled Congress, instead giving primacy to the interests of black Americans. The caucus has proven its ability to deliver on policies, but it will need to evolve if it is to usher the nation towards the place where equality and opportunity are available for all. The criticism it receives for not supporting women like Chisholm and Edwards will likely pale in comparison to the damage thats done by losing the support of the next generation of black Americans.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India said on Thursday it had asked Britain to deport Vijay Mallya, the liquor tycoon who flew to London last month as bankers pressed him to repay about $1.4 billion owed by his defunct Kingfisher Airlines.

The Ministry of External Affairs has written to the British High Commission seeking Mallya's return so that "his presence can be secured for investigations against him" under India's anti-moneylaundering law, spokesman Vikas Swarup told reporters.

The liquor tycoon and Formula 1 boss has not disclosed his whereabouts since flying first class from Delhi to London on March 2, leaving the Indian government and bankers red faced as they try to crack down on high-profile defaulters.

The foreign ministry last Sunday revoked Mallya's diplomatic passport that he carried as a member of parliament's upper house. The move was a step towards launching a bid to bring home Mallya, who is the subject of a non-bailable warrant issued by a special judge in Mumbai.

The Enforcement Directorate, a government agency set up to fight financial crime, has accused Mallya's UB Group of using 4.3 billion rupees ($64.5 million) of bank loans to Kingfisher to buy property overseas.

Creditors, led by State Bank of India (SBI.NS), have rejected an offer of partial repayment by Mallya, who had given a personal guarantee for the Kingfisher loan. They have demanded that the former billionaire attend a hearing in India's Supreme Court.

Mallya, traced by Indian reporters to a country residence in Hertfordshire, has said he would comply with the law.

The British Home Office, which adjudicates in such cases, declined to comment. A spokesman said its policy was neither to confirm nor deny that extradition requests have been made.

(Reporting by Krishna N. Das and Douglas Busvine; editing by Susan Thomas)
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India said on Thursday it had asked Britain to deport Vijay Mallya, the liquor tycoon who flew to London last month as bankers pressed him to repay about $1.4 billion (960 million) owed by his defunct Kingfisher Airlines. The Ministry of External Affairs has written to the British High Commission seeking Mallya's return so that "his presence can be secured for investigations against him" under India's anti-moneylaundering law, spokesman Vikas Swarup told reporters. The liquor tycoon and Formula 1 boss has not disclosed his whereabouts since flying first class from Delhi to London on March 2, leaving the Indian government and bankers red faced as they try to crack down on high-profile defaulters. The foreign ministry last Sunday revoked Mallya's diplomatic passport that he carried as a member of parliament's upper house. The move was a step towards launching a bid to bring home Mallya, who is the subject of a non-bailable warrant issued by a special judge in Mumbai. The Enforcement Directorate, a government agency set up to fight financial crime, has accused Mallya's UB Group of using 4.3 billion rupees (44.3 million) of bank loans to Kingfisher to buy property overseas. Creditors, led by State Bank of India, have rejected an offer of partial repayment by Mallya, who had given a personal guarantee for the Kingfisher loan. They have demanded that the former billionaire attend a hearing in India's Supreme Court. Mallya, traced by Indian reporters to a country residence in Hertfordshire, has said he would comply with the law. The British Home Office, which adjudicates in such cases, declined to comment. A spokesman said its policy was neither to confirm nor deny that extradition requests have been made. (Reporting by Krishna N. Das and Douglas Busvine; editing by Susan Thomas)
India's top court on Thursday rejected a French woman's challenge against extradition to Chile, where she is wanted over the assassination of a key supporter of General Augusto Pinochet's military regime.

Chile is seeking the extradition of Marie-Emmanuelle Verhoeven, aged in her mid 50s, for her alleged role in a conspiracy to kill Senator Jaime Guzman Errazuriz on April 1, 1991.

Indian police arrested her on February 16 last year as she entered the country overland from Nepal, and she has been held in New Delhi's high security Tihar Jail ever since.

Verhoeven, who has told authorities she was visiting India on a Buddhist pilgrimage, had challenged a treaty between India and Chile allowing for extradition.

Lawyers argued that the treaty dating back to the 1800s was not constitutional because it was not ratified after partition of India in 1947.

But the Supreme Court in a written judgement on Thursday ruled in favour of the Indian government which argued it was still valid, her lawyer Ramni Taneja said.

"This is a big blow and means the extradition proceedings can continue to go ahead. This has been very devastating for her," Taneja told AFP.

Extradition proceedings which had been on hold in another Delhi court are now expected to resume in the coming days, Taneja said.

The Supreme Court in November rejected Verhoeven's request for release on the grounds that her arrest and detention were illegal.

She was arrested in India on the basis of an Interpol notice for her detention issued at Chile's request, but Interpol later cancelled the notice.

The Delhi High Court in September ruled in favour of Verhoeven's immediate release, saying the extradition request was illegal, but shortly afterwards she was re-arrested in prison after a fresh request from Chile.

Verhoeven, a native of Nantes in western Frances, was arrested in the German city of Hamburg in January 2014 and detained for four months.

But Germany rejected Chile's request to extradite her -- something her Indian lawyers had pointed to as they tried to thwart her extradition.

Verhoeven lived in Chile from 1985 to 1995 and worked to promote human rights there, before returning to France.

She says she is the victim of a "political vendetta" against her.
New Delhi (AFP) - A group of hardline Hindu activists and police stormed a church in central India and stopped a wedding midway after accusing the pastor of forcefully converting the bride to Christianity, an official said Thursday.

It comes as India's Christian minority has sounded the alarm over a recent rise in attacks on churches and members of the faith, fuelling tensions over religious freedom in the diverse, secular country.

As the wedding got under way at the Church of God in India in Madhya Pradesh state, men belonging to the fringe Hindu outfit Bajrang Dal barged in accompanied by police, who arrested ten people, a church spokesman said.

Right-wing Hindu groups accuse churches and missionaries of targeting tribal people and other poor groups with the aim of converting them to Christianity, claims denied by the clergy.

"They said it is a matter of forceful conversion and arrested the bride, the groom, their parents as well pastors of two churches who were present there," Mariyosh Joseph, a spokesman for the church in Satna district told AFP.

"How can you storm into a religious place and stop a ceremony like this? You will never see such a thing happening at a temple or a mosque," he said.

The area police superintendent said the wedding was stopped because the girl was a Hindu and not yet 18, the legal age for women to marry in India.

"The girl is a Hindu and she is 17. We acted on a complaint made by the bride's uncle. The matter is under investigation," Mithilesh Shukla told AFP.

The Indian Express daily said the couple had converted to Christianity four years ago, but district authorities were not informed -- a crime under state laws.

The church insisted the couple were Christians and accused the police of "hiding behind excuses" to justify their conduct.

It follows a series of attacks on Christian religious sites. In March, three men were arrested in neighbouring Chhattisgarh state after they vandalised a church during Sunday mass.

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Last year, vandals wrapped a dog chain around the neck of a statue of the Virgin Mary in the northern tourist city of Agra.

Priests and other Christian leaders have blamed the attacks on religious hardliners, who they say have become emboldened since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's right-wing government swept to power in 2014.

A series of mass conversions of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism, allegedly influenced by Hindu hardliners sometimes promising financial incentives, have also raised concern.

Around 80 percent of India's 1.2 billion population is Hindu, but it is also home to large numbers of Muslims, Christians and Buddhists.
ECB Stimulus, Brexit, and 12 Europe-Focused Mutual Funds

(Continued from Prior Part)

Performance evaluation of the Invesco European Growth Fund

The Invesco European Growth Fund  Class A (AEDAX) fell 0.9% in 1Q16. But it still ranked second-best among the 12 funds in this review. In the past one year, the fund rose 0.6%, again the second-highest among its peers. Meanwhile, from the end of December 2015 until April 25, 2016, AEDAX rose 0.8%. In the graph below, you can see its performance against two other ETFs: the Vanguard FTSE Europe ETF (VGK) and the iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF (EZU).

Now lets look at what contributed to AEDAXs superior performance in 1Q16.

Portfolio composition and contribution to returns

The healthcare sector was the biggest negative contributor to AEDAXs returns in 1Q16. German biotech company MorphoSys was the biggest negative contributor among AEDAXs holdings from the sector. Other major negative contributors included Roche Holding (RHHBY) and Smith & Nephew (SNN). There was no help from any stock from the sector that could have reduced the negative contribution.

Financials, the joint highest invested sector, was close on the heels of healthcare in terms of negative contribution. UBS Group (UBS) led negative contributors, which included Lloyds Banking Group (LYG). Although Turkish conglomerate Hac Omer Sabanc Holding and the preference shares of Sberbank of Russia helped reduce the drag quite substantially, the sector still emerged as a sizable negative contributor.

Industrials did a lot to reduce AEDAXs negative returns in 1Q16. Irish group DCC was the biggest positive contributor from the sector in the period. French industrial group Bollore and Britains Ultra Electronics Holdings dragged on the sectors contribution, but positive contributors helped the sector post gains.

While one of the joint biggest sectoral holdings was the second-biggest negative contributor, the other was the second-biggest positive contributor. Consumer discretionary was led by a positive contribution from Kuoni Reisen Holding, which almost singlehandedly powered the sector ahead. There were small contributions from Publicis Groupe (PUBGY) and RELX (RELX) as well. A substantial drag from Sky, William Hill, and Next held back the sectors performance.

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Materials were led by Syngenta (SYT), with Israel Chemicals (ICL) contributing positively as well.

Investor takeaways

AEDAX did better than VGK in 1Q16 due to its stock picks from consumer discretionary, financials, and industrials doing better than those of passive VGK. Although AEDAX declined in 1Q16, it was the least decliner for the period. Coupled with low portfolio turnover, it shows fund managers ability to choose the right stocks and believe in them enough not to turn them over quickly.

Existing investors may decide to stay with AEDAX. Those looking to invest in Europe through active funds might consider AEDAX as a possible contender for their money.

Lets move on to the second fund in this review, the Columbia European Equity Fund  Class A (AXEAX).

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
From Town & Country

For Sumner Redstone, it's hard to say which aspect of his life at 92 is more tangled these days: his legal docket or his neural network.

The famously contentious Boston native-known to his grandkids as "Grumpy"-built his personal fortune, worth $5.3 billion at the latest count, by leveraging his interest in his father's three drive-in theaters into larger and larger stakes in bigger and bigger companies. The result of his remarkable series of takeovers and acquisitions is that he is now the controlling shareholder in CBS and Viacom. Through it all, he has been guided by his own motto: Content is king.

At present, Redstone (or, more accurately, those currently named by the court to oversee his medical care) is being sued by his former companion, 51-year-old Manuela Herzer. She hopes to regain control of his health care, a position from which she was removed by a directive that allegedly emanated from Redstone himself.

But Herzer says that when this directive was first enforced last October, Redstone was not mentally competent to make such a decision. Her testimony about his capacities at the time was embarrassing: Redstone, despite suffering from a digestive insufficiency that required him to get his nutrition through a feeding tube, wanted to eat steak every day. He made equally fanciful demands to engage in daily bouts of sexual activity.

It should not come as a surprise that Redstone's final act should play out like an episode of Game of Thrones.

Herzer's suit against those overseeing Redstone's medical decisions (Redstone's 62-year-old daughter Shari recently replaced Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman in that capacity) has been joined by the 34-year-old Keryn Redstone, the media mogul's granddaughter. Keryn is the child of his estranged eldest 66-year-old son, Brent, who sued his father in 2006 for a bigger role in the company as well for access to his one-sixth share in Redstone's privately held controlling company, National Amusements, a family business that his sister Shari had been tapped to run.

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Is your head spinning yet? Keryn's petition to join the suit included testimony about witnessing "five or six people operating a larger shredder" during a surprise visit to her grandfather's home in Beverly Park, an exclusive Los Angeles enclave. She also related arguments at Grumpy's hospital bedside about his longterm care. Keryn testified that Shari said "If he gets sick, don't take him to the hospital. Let him die at home." At which point, Redstone himself chimed in, "I don't want to die."

It should not come as a surprise that Redstone's final act should play out like an episode of Game of Thrones. The life expectancy of a typical Viacom CEO-or at least their career longevity-has often been brutish and short, as the onetime darlings Frank Biondi (1987-1996), Mel Karmazin (2000-2004), and Tom Freston (2004-2006) all faced the chopping block in quick succession.

Redstone's daughter Shari, although never directly involved in legal action against her father, seems to share her father's contentious demeanor, keeping her spokespeople busy explaining how none of the many claims made against her have any merit. But she is also, like her father, a survivor. The current vice chair of CBS and Viacom has repeatedly turned down billion-dollar buyout offers (exactly the sort her estranged brother seems to have accepted); instead, she has kept her right to succeed her father at the helm of the family company, perhaps voiding sizable payments to his former live-in girlfriends, Herzer and the still younger Sydney Holland, 44, in the process.

Will the Herzer case ever come to trial? At present the court date is set for May 6 and previous settlement offers have been rejected. If prior testimony is any indication, a protracted public trial will be a great embarrassment to Redstone, or at least his legacy, and might even unearth potentially actionable revelations that could put the publicly-held Viacom in a compromising legal position.

One thing is certain: if Showtime (a thriving Viacom property) ever decides to turn the Redstone saga into a series, there should be no shortage of sex, conflict, betrayal, and legal maneuvering all in the service of a tremendous fortune.
By Dmitriy Rogovitskiy MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian volleyball player Alexander Markin was cleared to compete at the Rio Olympics if selected after the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB) rescinded a ban imposed over a positive doping test for meldonium. Meldonium was added to the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) list of banned substances on January 1. However, on April 13 WADA said it was unable to establish how quickly meldonium cleared the human body. Hence, WADA deemed that the "the presence of less than one microgram of meldonium" in samples provided by athletes before March 1 was acceptable. This allowed Markin, 25, a member of Russia's national team and the Dynamo Moscow club, to be cleared to compete in the August 5-21 Rio de Janeiro Games. "Just 15 minutes ago I got a message from the international federation that everything has been lifted," Markin said on Thursday in an interview with the R-Sport news agency. In January Markin helped Russia qualify for the Olympics after winning a tournament in Berlin. Last week a number of Russian sportsmen had their bans lifted, including five-times world champion speed skater Pavel Kulizhnikov, Olympic short-track speed skating gold medallist Semion Elistratov and 2015 European short-track champion Ekaterina Konstantinova. (Reporting by Dmitriy Rogovitskiy; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
From Cosmopolitan

In January 2015, Bobbi Kristina Brown was found unconscious in a bathtub in her Roswell, Georgia, home. After spending nearly seven months in a medically induced coma, Brown died July 26, 2015. Her autopsy report, which was released on what would have been her 23rd birthday on March 4, revealed that she died from a mixture of drugs, alcohol, and drowning - conditions that caused pneumonia leading to her death.

The extent of her then-fiance Nick Gordon's involvement in the tragic incident has been the subject of intense scrutiny since her death, and he is still facing a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Bedelia Hargrove, the conservator of Bobbi Kristina's estate. Hargrove's suit claims Gordon abused Brown and injected her with a "toxic cocktail" of drugs before placing her in the tub of their shared home.

Ahead of an appearance on The Dr. Phil Show this week, Gordon is opening up about what precisely happened on that January night. "I went out with a couple of buddies of mine earlier that day and we were out having a good time. Krissy thought I was with some other females and that's when she got upset. She called and said I had to come home," he told the Daily Mail. He said that when he got back at around 4 a.m., he saw that she was "clearly messed up."

"She was upset, we got into a little argument and then we made up and went upstairs and lay on the bed for about 45 minutes and did what adults do," he said. He said he then went downstairs to play some video games, while Bobbi Kristina was getting dressed and "doing her own thing." At around 10 a.m. the following morning, the cable guy came by, along with his friend Max, whom he invited to make sure the cable guy wasn't "stealing anything or taking pictures."

According to Gordon, Max was the one who then found Bobbi Kristina in the bathtub and alerted him. "I ran to my room and then I saw my girl on the floor," he said. "It was so traumatizing. I dropped to my knees and kept giving her chest compressions and blowing into her mouth."

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Gordon also alleges that something very similar had occurred at the Beverly Hills Hilton in February 2012. Bobbi Kristina almost drowned then, he claims, when she fell into an intoxicated sleep in the bathtub only for her mother Whitney Houston pulled her out. The next day, Whitney Houston herself was found dead from drowning in the hotel bathtub.

Gordon claims Brown's drug abuse got much worse after her mother's death. He also revealed that Brown suffered from two miscarriages that contributed to her depression. Still, he rules out the possibility that her death was a suicide. "We wanted to get clean, settle down, get married, have kids."

Follow Diana on Twitter.
MAYFIELD HEIGHTS, OH / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / Materion Corporation (MTRN) will host a conference call and live webcast to discuss the results of first quarter 2016, to be held Friday, April 29, 2016 at 9:00 AM Eastern Time.

To participate in this event, dial 877-407-0778 domestically, or 201-689-8565 internationally, approximately 5 to 10 minutes before the beginning of the call. Additionally, you can listen to the event online at www.investorcalendar.com/IC/CEPage.asp?ID=174874 as well as via the Materion Corporation website (www.materion.com).

If you are unable to participate during the live webcast, the event archive will be available at www.investorcalendar.com or www.materion.com.

You may access the teleconference replay by dialing 877-660-6853 domestically or 201-612-7415 internationally, referencing conference ID # 13634124. The replay will be available beginning approximately 2 hours after the completion of the live event, ending at midnight Eastern on May 13, 2016.

About Materion Corporation

Materion Corporation is headquartered in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. The Company, through its wholly-owned subsidiaries, supplies highly engineered advanced enabling materials to global markets. Products include precious and non-precious specialty metals, inorganic chemicals and powders, specialty coatings, specialty engineered beryllium alloys, beryllium and beryllium composites, and engineered clad and plated metal systems.

SOURCE: Investor Calendar
FORT WORTH, TX / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / Range Resources Corporation (RRC) will host a conference call and live webcast to discuss the results of the first quarter 2016, to be held Friday, April 29, 2016 at 9:00 AM Eastern Time.

To participate in this event, dial 877-407-0778 approximately 5 to 10 minutes before the beginning of the call. Additionally, you can listen to the event online at www.investorcalendar.com/IC/CEPage.asp?ID=174849 as well as via the Range Resources website (www.rangeresources.com).

If you are unable to participate during the live webcast, the event archive will be available at www.investorcalendar.com or www.rangeresources.com.

You may access the teleconference replay by dialing 877-660-6853, referencing conference ID # 13633410. The replay will be available beginning approximately 2 hours after the completion of the live event, ending at midnight Eastern on May 29, 2016.

About Range Resources Corporation

RANGE RESOURCES CORPORATION (RRC) is a leading U.S. independent oil and natural gas producer with operations focused in Appalachia. The Company pursues an organic growth strategy targeting high return, low-cost projects within its large inventory of low risk development drilling opportunities. The Company is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. More information about Range can be found at www.rangeresources.com.

SOURCE: Investor Calendar
By Nina Chestney LONDON (Reuters) - Electric utilities should undergo stress tests to show how their business models are in line with limiting global warming, a global network of investors said on Friday. In a guide published on Friday, a network of more than 270 institutional investors with assets worth more than 20 trillion euros ($23 trillion) said they were concerned that utilities' strategies are not consistent with a global target to limit the planet's average temperature rise, compared with pre-industrial times, to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). With renewable energy generation expected to increase, and overall demand low due to efficiency improvements and modest economic growth, traditional centralized power generation is being pushed out of the merit order. The report said such plants would ultimately need to be shut down or retained to provide emergency backup in return for state payments. New entrants such as Google are emerging as competitors with power management solutions. So electric utilities need to design new business plans and focus on cleaner energy, networks, new services and keeping customers, it said. "As investors, we need to know how electric utilities will deal with the vast shift already underway within their industry, how they will address the considerable risks posed by these trends and how they plan to profit from emerging opportunities," the report said. Utilities need to set long-term strategies for managing climate-related risks and opportunities, it added. Even though fossil fuels would continue to have a role in power generation for years to come, utilities needed a clear long-term strategy for lowering their emissions and dealing with a future higher carbon price. "It is vital that utility companies undertake comprehensive under 2 degree stress testing of their business activities and disclose to investors how their business model will fare in the face of climate change," said Emma Herd, chief executive at the Investor Group on Climate Change Australia and New Zealand. (Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
By Michelle Nichols and Louis Charbonneau UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iran asked U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon on Thursday to convince the United States to stop violating state immunity after the top U.S. court ruled that $2 billion in frozen Iranian assets must be paid to American victims of attacks blamed on Tehran. Iran's Foreign Minister Javid Zarif wrote to Ban a week after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, calling on the Secretary-General to use his "good offices in order to induce the U.S. Government to adhere to its international obligations." Zarif's appeal comes amid increasing Iranian frustration at what they say is the failure of the United States to keep its promises regarding sanctions relief agreed under an historic nuclear deal struck last year by Tehran and six world powers. In the letter, released by the Iranian U.N. mission, Zarif asked Ban to help secure the release of frozen Iranian assets in U.S. banks and persuade Washington to stop interfering with Iran's international commercial and financial transactions. "The U.S Executive branch illegally freezes Iranian national assets; the U.S Legislative branch legislates to pave the ground for their illicit seizures; and the U.S Judicial branch issues rulings to confiscate Iranian assets without any base in law or fact," Zarif said. Ban's spokesman and the U.S. mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the letter or the accusations made against the United States. Zarif told Ban he wanted to "alert you and through you the U.N. general membership about the catastrophic implications of the U.S. blatant disrespect for state immunity, which will cause systematic erosion of this fundamental principle." The U.S. Supreme Court found that the U.S. Congress did not usurp the authority of American courts by passing a 2012 law stating that Iran's frozen funds should go toward satisfying a $2.65 billion judgment won by the U.S. families against Iran in U.S. federal court in 2007. "It is in fact the United States that must pay long overdue reparations to the Iranian people for its persistent hostile policies," Zarif wrote, citing incidents including the shooting of an Iranian civil airliner in 1988. Last week Zarif met several times with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in New York to discuss Iranian problems accessing international financial markets. Tehran has called on the United States to do more to remove obstacles to the banking sector so that businesses feel comfortable investing in Iran without fear of penalties. (Editing by James Dalgleish)
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Iran told the United Nations on Thursday that it reserves the right to take "counter-measures" in response to a US court decision to use Tehran's frozen assets to compensate US victims of terror attacks.

In a letter to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Iran said the Supreme Court ruling last week was "outrageous robbery disguised under a court order."

"It is in fact the United States that must pay long overdue reparations to the Iranian people for its persistent hostile policies," wrote Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Iran "reserves the right to take appropriate lawful action, including necessary and proportionate counter-measures, to restore and protect the rights of Iranian people against such persistent unlawful conduct by the United States," he said.

The Supreme Court ruled on April 20 that Iran must hand over nearly $2 billion in frozen assets to the more than 1,000 survivors and relatives of those killed in attacks blamed on Tehran.

The attacks included the 1983 bombing of US Marine barracks in Beirut and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.

Zarif described the court ruling as "fake and phony and a travesty of justice in every sense of law, jurisdiction, merit, fact and process."

The foreign minister cited US involvement in the 1953 Iran coup, US backing for Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq war and the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US missile in 1988 as grounds for US compensation to Iranian nationals.

He urged Ban to press the United States to release all frozen Iranian assets in US banks in line with the nuclear agreement reached last year.

The Supreme Court ruling came after a New York tribunal in March ordered Tehran to pay $7.5 billion to victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- and $3 billion to insurers over related claims -- after ruling that Iran had failed to prove that it did not help the bombers.

Zarif called the claim of Iranian involvement in the 9/11 attacks "absurd," saying it contradicts "even public statements as well as findings -- open or sealed -- of investigations by the US government and US Congress."
Reet Jurvetson has been identified as Jane Doe #59. (Photo: LAPD)



On the afternoon of November 16, 1969, a birdwatcher spotted the body of a young woman tangled in dense brush off of Los Angeles scenic Mulholland Drive. The victim, who had no identification on her, had been stabbed in the neck 150 times in what police believe was a rage killing.

It was personal, says Los Angeles Police Department cold case detective Luis Rivera. It was a maniacor love gone wrong.

The timing and the MO of the murder  just three months earlier actress Sharon Tate and several others had been viciously stabbed to death by the Manson Family a few miles away  fueled speculation that the victim could be connected to Charles Manson and his followers.

LAPD detectives interviewed Charles Manson (seen here in 1970) about Jane Doe #59, but the imprisoned cult leader did not give them any clues. (Photo: CSU Archives/Everett)

A caretaker at Spahn Ranch, the notorious Manson Family hangout, told police that the young woman looked like a hippie named Sherry from Simi Valley who spent time at the ranch.

But police were unable to identify the woman, who became known as Jane Doe #59, and her identity remained a mystery for 46 years.

Now, police know who she is and are working to determine who killed her.

PEOPLE exclusively reveals in this weeks issue that Jane Doe #59 is Reet Jurvetson, who was born in Sweden, grew up in Montreal and was 19 when she died.



Manson claims there are other victims, says retired LAPD detective Cliff Shepard who reopened the case in 2003. She could have been someone who was at Spahn Ranch.

In October, Rivera and his partner, detective Veronica Conrado, interviewed Charles Manson at Corcoran State Prison to see whether he recognized the dead woman. No new leads were learned, he says. But, he adds, We cant rule out that the Manson Family was involved.

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Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.

The break in the case came last June when a friend of Reet searching crime websites saw her post-mortem photograph and called Reets sister, who then contacted law enforcement. DNA taken from Jane Doe #59s bloody bra matched her sister.

A caretaker said she saw the victim at Spahn Ranch, a notorious hangout of the Manson Family. (Photo: Ralph Crane /The Life Picture Collection/Getty)

Police learned that Reet flew to L.A. in the summer of 1969 to visit a man named John, or Jean, with the French pronunciation, she met in a Canadian coffee shop. She was smitten by him, says Rivera. After she arrived, she sent her family a postcard to let them know she was happy, and had a nice apartment.

In 1969 there was a lot of peace, love and flower children, says Shepard. L.A. was the place to go for young people.

But, after the postcard, her family never heard from her again.

As incredible as it seems, my parents never thought to report Reet missing to the police, her sister Anne wrote in a family statement. They thought that she was just living her life somewhere and that eventually news from her would turn up.

Anne described her sister as free-spirited and happy, with a taste for adventure and freedom.

Although our family continuously hoped that one day Reet would return home, I eventually came to the conclusion that she had probably passed away, Anne wrote.

It is such a sad, helpless kind of feeling to always question, to never know. After all these years, we are faced with hard facts. My little sister was savagely killed. It was not what I wanted to hear.

Rivera says he is determined to solve Reets murder, and identify the mysterious man named John, or Jean.

He is the best lead we have, he says, adding: No one deserves what happened to her. Someone might be out there who is responsible and it is our job to find out who it is and bring them to justice if we can.

For much more on Jane Doe #59 and the search for other possible victims of the notorious Manson Family, pickup this weeks issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.


Jerusalem (AFP) - Growing safety fears surrounding Israel's largest but ageing atomic research centre have provoked fresh questions over its future and a dilemma over the secrecy of the country's alleged nuclear arsenal.

Israel, believed to be the Middle East's sole nuclear power, has long refused to confirm or deny that it has such weapons.

The Haaretz newspaper reported on Tuesday that a study had uncovered 1,537 defects in the decades-old aluminium core of the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert of southern Israel.

The defects at the centre, where nuclear weapons were allegedly developed, were not seen to be severe and the risk of a nuclear outbreak is very limited, the report said.

However, there are growing calls for new safeguards and even a new research centre -- which could present the country with a decision on whether to acknowledge for the first time that it has nuclear weapons.

The US-based Institute for Science and International Security estimated in 2015 that Israel had 115 nuclear warheads.

At the same time Israel has strongly opposed other regional powers, most notably its arch-foe Iran, obtaining nuclear weapons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was also one of the most vociferous critics of the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that was implemented in January, leading to the lifting of international sanctions on Tehran.

Officially the Dimona centre focuses on research and energy provision.

But in the 1980s nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at the centre, alleged to a British newspaper that it was also used to create nuclear weapons.

He was later jailed for 18 years for the revelations.

- 'Waiting for disaster' -

The core of the Dimona reactor was provided by France in the late 1950s and went online a few years later.

Common practice is that such reactors are used for only 40 years, though this can be extended with modifications.

Uzi Even, a chemistry professor at Tel Aviv University who was involved in the creation of the reactor, is concerned about the safety of the site and has campaigned for a decade for it to be closed -- "so far, to no avail".

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He called for it to be shut off for security reasons. "This reactor is now one of the oldest still operating globally," he said.

Michal Rozin, a lawmaker with the leftwing Meretz party, has called for a radical shakeup in policy in the light of the safety worries.

"The nuclear reactor has no supervision besides the body that runs it, the Israel Atomic Energy Commission," she wrote in a letter, seen by AFP, to the parliamentary foreign and defence committee.

"We don't need to wait for a disaster to make a change."

- 'Political matter' -

Israel's atomic energy agency said in a statement that the country had the "highest international standards" of security and safety, adding that many reactors can last for far longer than 40 years.

While a challenge, safely closing a nuclear reactor and opening a new one is far from impossible, Arthur Motta, chair of Nuclear Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, told AFP.

"Technically it is not a difficult problem," he said. "Nuclear energy is so dense, the volume of a reactor that provides a whole city with energy is just (the size of) a building."

"It is more a political matter."

And there are a number of political reasons why the site has remained open, not least the thousands of jobs at risk, Even said.

Building a new site could also see Israel pushed to officially declare its nuclear capabilities.

While Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, officials do not formally confirm or deny the claims -- a policy often dubbed deliberate ambiguity.

As such, the country has yet to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty -- which would require its sites to undergo regular inspection of its facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Motta explained. The IAEA declined to comment.

"I don't think we have the capability to build a new reactor (alone)," Even said. "And no one will sell us a reactor before we sign the non-proliferation agreement."

Writing in the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, investigative journalist and security specialist Yossi Melman called it a "strategic dilemma of the first order".

"If it were to sign the treaty (Israel) would be able to obtain nuclear reactors."

"But it would also have to declare and reveal what it has, nuclear-wise, and the monopoly it allegedly has on this in the Middle East."
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel on Thursday reiterated its opposition to a planned French peace conference, calling instead for direct and unconditional negotiations with the Palestinians.

"The best way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct, bilateral negotiations," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement.

"Israel is ready to begin them immediately without preconditions. Any other diplomatic initiative distances the Palestinians from direct negotiations."

The statement comes after French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced Paris would organise a ministerial meeting on May 30, ahead of a potential peace conference.

The proposal has been welcomed by the Palestinians, who suspended a planned UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements to focus on the bid.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas encouraged support for the French proposal on a recent tour of Europe.

Senior Palestinian leader Saeb Erekat condemned the Israeli statement on Thursday.

"The Israeli government's call for 'bilateral negotiations' is not a call for the achievement of the two-state solution, but an attempt at legitimising its settlement enterprise," he said.

"We call upon the French government and the rest of the international community to take immediate steps in order to give peace a chance."

But Israel has consistently argued that peace can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the two sides, rather than international forums.

The last serious attempt at peace negotiations broke down two years ago.

The May 30 meeting will include representatives from 20 countries, plus the European Union and the United Nations, but not the Israelis or Palestinians.

Paris is currently preparing invitations for the event, diplomatic sources said.

If successful, the meeting would lead to an international conference later this year in the presence of both Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

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Israel has not explicitly ruled out involvement in the conference.

The French attempt comes at a time of polarisation and high tensions in Israel and the Palestinian territories, with 203 Palestinians and 28 Israelis killed since October 1.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, Israeli authorities say.

Peace talks have been frozen since a US-brokered initiative collapsed in April 2014, after a year of intense shuttle diplomacy by US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Both sides blamed the other for the talks' failure.
Japan is abandoning a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar satellite it sent to study black holes, disappointed space scientists said Thursday, after spending a month trying to save it.

The ultra-high-tech "Hitomi" -- or eye -- was launched in February to find X-rays emanating from black holes and galaxy clusters.

But shortly after the expensive kit reached orbit, researchers admitted they had lost control of it and said it was no longer communicating, with agency scientists saying it could have disintegrated.

Bosses at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) set dozens of their brightest minds on the task of salvaging the satellite.

But on Thursday they acknowledged defeat and said they were going to have to abandon it.

"We concluded that the satellite is in a state in which its functions are not expected to recover," Saku Tsuneta, director general of JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, told reporters.

"I deeply apologise for abandoning operation" of the satellite, he said.

JAXA officials think the solar panels that provide power for the precision instruments might have come adrift, leaving millions of dollars worth of technology drifting uselessly in space.

The satellite, developed in collaboration with NASA and other groups, was intended to help unlock the mystery of black holes, phenomena that have never been directly observed.

Scientists believe they are huge collapsed stars whose enormous gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape.

The announcement in February that gravitational waves had been detected for the first time added to evidence of their existence.

The next launch of a similar satellite is scheduled in 2028 by the European Space Agency.

Tsuneta said the loss of the device, which cost 31 billion yen ($273 million), including the cost of launching it, was not only a disappointment for Japan but for overseas astronomers as well who held out high hopes for its success.

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"We're sorry we cannot respond to the expectations," he said.

News of the mission failure was met with gloom in Japan.

"It's disappointing," read one tweet. "But I hope they'll learn a lesson and do their best next time."

The satellite was launched by the country's mainstay H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.

Japan has a massive space programme and has achieved successes in both scientific and commercial satellite launches while also sending astronauts on space shuttle and International Space Station missions.
A Japanese tourism board has called on foreign tourists to refrain from public "belching or flatulence" in an etiquette guide which was hastily rewritten, reportedly after complaints from a Chinese resident.

The Hokkaido Tourism Organization, which represents Japan's northern-most island, published a downloadable brochure on its website, with polite instructions on everything from public bathing to using a Japanese toilet.

Helpfully, it even dedicated an entire section to protocol for avoiding bodily functions.

"Japanese etiquette is based on avoiding causing discomfort or nuisance to others," the guide points out.

"Accordingly, Japanese will avoid bodily functions such as belching or flatulence in public entirely, or perform bodily functions as discreetly as possible."

However, the Chinese-language guide -- originally entitled "Common Sense When Travelling in Hokkaido" -- upset a Chinese resident who angrily claimed the diagrams featuring examples of bad tourist behaviour were offensive, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported.

The complaint prompted a new, foreigner-friendly version with softer explanations of Japanese customs.

In the updated guide available in Chinese and English, gone are the large 'X'-marks next to cartoon illustrations of tourists committing, from a Japanese perspective, embarrassing gaffes, such as putting used toilet paper into the waste bin -- the general custom in China -- instead of flushing it away.

According to The Japan Times newspaper, the original booklet was first published last August and was targeted at Chinese tourists, including a reminder not to open products before buying them when shopping, a habit also seen in China.

China has said it will monitor the behaviour of unruly tourists abroad and punish them on their return home after being shamed by a string of well-publicised incidents in recent years.

Research by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch found that more than 100 million Chinese tourists went abroad in 2014, spending some $164 billion.

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But reports of disruptive behaviour have tarnished their reputation, such as passengers scalding a flight attendant with hot water and noodles or a holidaymaker fined in Thailand for washing her feet in the wash basin of a public toilet.

Media in Japan have carried a spate of reports of alleged uncouth behaviour by Chinese visitors, though some local commentators have urged understanding, recalling that the emergence five decades ago of Japanese tourists as a force in global travel was often met with complaints about their behaviour.

Around 85,000 copies of the Hokkaido tourist brochure have reportedly been printed in Chinese and English, to be distributed to hotels and tourist attractions across the island.
(Adds detail, executive comment)

By Jeffrey Dastin

April 28 (Reuters) - JetBlue Airways Corp will start six round-trip flights per weekday between New York's space-constrained LaGuardia airport and Boston in October, seeking to capture business travelers on the heavily trafficked route, the company said on Thursday.

JetBlue said it would move some of its LaGuardia-Florida flights to nearby Newark Liberty airport to free up take-off slots for the new Boston flights, now that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has made it easier for airlines to grow at Newark.

The moves take aim at United Continental Holdings Inc , which has a grip on Newark air service, and more crucially Delta Air Lines Inc and American Airlines Group Inc, which operate hourly flights from LaGuardia to Boston.

Atlanta-based Delta is the largest airline at LaGuardia, scheduling more than 40 percent of its flights including the "shuttle" service to Boston, Washington and Chicago that business travelers like for the airport's proximity to Manhattan, relative to distant Kennedy airport, and for the flights' frequency and amenities.

JetBlue said earlier this week that corporate travel demand is stagnant, although it has gained share of the lucrative market. While the likes of Delta still have long-standing corporate contracts and more LaGuardia flights, JetBlue hopes to attract business and leisure travelers who would have traveled from other airports or by train.

"The FAA's decision to ease slot restrictions at Newark allows us to bring more low-fare, award-winning service to Newark, and clears the way for a long overdue alternative between LaGuardia and Boston for those who have been priced out of air travel and onto the roads and rails by high-fare legacy carriers," JetBlue Chief Executive Officer Robin Hayes said in a news release.

JetBlue said its extra Newark flights to five airports in Florida will begin on Oct. 30, when the FAA's action takes effect. Its LaGuardia-Boston flights will start the following day, with one-way fares beginning at $49 compared to round-trip tickets on Delta and American for $281 or more.

(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in Atlanta; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Frances Kerry)
A JetBlue pilot is accused of flying a plane from Florida to New York while under the influence of alcohol.

Dennis Murphy Jr., 44, from New Jersey, was picked for a random alcohol test after landing an airliner carrying 151 passengers at John F. Kennedy International Airport in April last year, according to federal prosecutors.

Read: Woman Chugs $200 Bottle of Cognac After Airport Staff Say She Can't Take it on the Plane

He allegedly failed the breathalyzer test, according to the federal complaint, which was made public on Wednesday. His blood alcohol content was allegedly 0.111, which exceeds the legal limit. When he took the breathalyzer test again 15 minutes later, it read .091, according to the federal complaint.

He allegedly suggested the high results could be a result of the gum he was chewing.

Before he was stopped, Murphy had flown to Orlando carrying 119 passengers. He then returned to JFK with 151 on board.

His co-pilot allegedly told authorities that he saw Murphy "drinking an unknown beverage from a cup" before and during the flights.

Murphy, who joined the company just three months before the alleged incident, was arrested at his New Jersey home on Wednesday morning and was later released on $50,000 bond.

When reporters asked him outside a Brooklyn court on Wednesday if he had been drinking, Murphy said "no comment," CBS NY reported.

Read: Flight Forced to Divert Because of Drunk Passenger Who Shouted: 'We Are All Going to Die!'

A spokesperson for JetBlue told InsideEdition.com that the company has a "zero tolerance" drug and alcohol policy.

"Following last years incident, the crewmember was removed from duty and is no longer employed at JetBlue," it said in a statement.

If convicted, Murphy could face 15 years in prison.

Airlines can carry out random alcohol and drug tests on its pilots, under federal law.

Watch: Trouble at 10,000 Feet! Skydiver's Jumpsuit Gets Stuck to Plane

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Its safe to say that Ted Cruz shouldnt be counting on an endorsement from former House Speaker John Boehner anytime soon. The longtime Ohio representative who left Congress in October of last year appeared at Stanford University on Wednesday and said that while he would support either billionaire frontrunner Donald Trump or his home state governor, John Kasich, if either of them won the Republican nomination, he would not cast a vote for the senator from Texas.

Asked for his thoughts on Cruz, Boehner was unsparingly derisive.

Related: Cruz Picks Fiorina as His VP Running Mate in Desperate Move to Stop Trump

Lucifer in the flesh, he called him. I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.

Boehners antipathy toward Cruz is easily understood. In 2013, as a newcomer to Congress, Cruz was the architect of a shutdown that closed non-essential federal services for 16 days in a dispute over government spending and Obamacare funding. The senator actively courted the most conservative members of the House to back his effort. He persuaded them to break with Boehner on the spending bill, denying leadership enough votes to pass a bill approved by the Senate unless anti-Obamacare language was restored.

The resulting shutdown was wildly unpopular with the American public, and though Cruz may have benefitted from the drama, the GOP took the majority of the blame.

Related: Trump Scoffs at Cruzs 30 Percent Solution in Indiana

Cruzs role in the fight made him deeply unpopular with Republican leadership in both chambers, not least of all because the effort to defund the ACA was largely symbolic. Much of the funding for the law was already in place and was not dependent on the bill in question. The insurance exchanges that serve as the backbone of the plan actually launched during the shutdown.

Cruzs penchant for high-profile showboating  like his 21-hour Obamacare filibuster in 2013, in which he ostentatiously read his daughters Green Eggs and Ham from the Senate floor  did little to advance his stated cause, but much to raise his public profile in advance of his presidential run. That has always aggravated his fellow lawmakers.

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Related: To Beat Hillary, Trump Has to Agree to a Presidential Makeover

The Texas senator is also fond of drawing not-very-subtle parallels between himself and President Ronald Reagan, a conservative icon. Without mentioning Cruz by name, Boehner also tweaked members of his party who have mythologized Reagan into a doctrinaire Cruz-like conservative. Those who really remember the Reagan years, Boehner suggested, recall a very different figure.

Well, you know Im a big fan of Ronald Reagan, Boehner told the Stanford crowd. But I love all these knuckleheads talking about the party of Reagan. He would be the most moderate Republican elected today.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Johnson & Johnsons 1Q16: Which Segments Led Its Earnings Growth?

(Continued from Prior Part)

Johnson & Johnsons profitability

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) reported a rise in revenue by 0.6% during 1Q16. However, its margins were negatively affected for the quarter, partially due to the Venezuela currency devaluation, restructuring costs, and increased spending on research and development.

Profit margins

JNJs net profit margin fell to 24.6% in 1Q16 compared to 24.9% in 1Q15, following increased spending in research and development.

JNJs gross margin fell by 0.3% to 69.2% in 1Q16 compared to 1Q15, due to a rise in the cost of products sold in response to the negative impact of transaction currency. JNJs operating profit margin fell by 0.9% to 31.2% in 1Q16 compared to 32.1% in 1Q15.

JNJs selling, administration, and marketing expenses fell by 3.3% of revenue in 1Q16, while its research and development expenses rose by over 6.0% as a percentage of sales. This rise was due to higher spending on late-stage pipeline products and milestone payments for the pharmaceuticals segment.

JNJ received other income of $39 million during 1Q16 compared to income of $348 million during 1Q15. Other income includes special items.

In 2015, JNJs revenue fell by ~5.7% to $70.1 billion compared to $74.3 billion in 2014. Its net profit margin rose by 0.3% to 23.3% in 2015 compared to 23.0% in 2014.

Changes in 2016 financial guidance

JNJ revised its 2016 sales guidance to $71.2 billion$71.9 billion due to changes in current foreign exchange. Venezuelas currency devaluation will not have a major impact on the company, as Venezuela contributes less than 1% of its total sales. JNJ also revised its adjusted earnings per share guidance to $6.53$6.68 for 2016.

Abbott Laboratories (ABT) Humira competes with JNJs Stelara. Dendreons (DNDN) Provenge competes with JNJs Zytiga. Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) and Pfizers (PFE) Eliquis competes with JNJs Xarelto.

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Investors can consider ETFs such as the iShares US Pharmaceuticals ETF (IHE), which holds 9.3% of its portfolio in JNJ, or the Fidelity MSCI Healthcare Index ETF (FHLC), which holds 8.8% of its portfolio in JNJ.

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
By Lisa Richwine LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The trial over media mogul Sumner Redstone's advance healthcare directive should be open to the public, a California judge tentatively ruled on Wednesday in a lawsuit brought by an ex-girlfriend. But although Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Cowan ruled that the public has a right to view the proceedings in a trial that will revolve around the mental competency of the 92-year-old billionaire, Cowan said some testimony could be shielded from the public. Attorneys for Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Viacom Inc and CBS Corp , had asked the judge to keep part of the trial behind closed doors to protect Redstone's right to medical privacy. Redstone's ex-girlfriend, Manuela Herzer, filed a lawsuit asking to be reinstated as the person in charge of Redstone's healthcare if he becomes unable to make decisions on his own. Herzer argues that Redstone lacked the mental competency to remove her from his advance healthcare directive last October. Viacom and CBS shareholders have closely followed the lawsuit for what it could reveal about Redstone's condition. Lawyers for Redstone argue that Herzer is seeking financial gain after Redstone revoked a part of his estate plan that would have given her a $70 million inheritance. At Wednesday's court hearing, in saying that the public has a right to view the proceedings, the judge also said it would not be practical to conduct part of the trial in private. Cowan added, however, that he wanted to have a "dignified" trial. He said either side could request to shield specific testimony from the public during the proceedings. Cowan also said he would carefully examine Redstone's medical records and limit the information entered as evidence. "Just because there is a trial doesn't necessarily mean that all of his medical records have to end up on the Internet," Cowan said. The judge deferred a decision on Herzer's request for Redstone to appear as a witness. Her attorneys previously said they would not call him to testify. Pierce O'Donnell, an attorney for Herzer, on Wednesday said he wants to call Redstone because his lawyers "are not answering the most important questions." Those questions are: "What did he know? When did he know it? Who told him? And when did he act on the information" in October? O'Donnell told reporters. Redstone's attorneys say he was fully aware of his actions when he named Viacom's chief executive, Philippe Dauman, as his designated healthcare agent. Earlier this month, Redstone made another change, naming his daughter, Shari, as his healthcare agent instead of Dauman. The case is set to go to trial May 6 unless the two sides reach a settlement. Earlier settlement talks fell apart. (Reporting by Lisa Richwine; Editing by Leslie Adler)
No pot allowed

The party may be over for some California stoners before its officially begun.

With speculation mounting that the Golden State will legalize recreational marijuana, a California lawmaker has introduced a bill that would allow landlords to ban tenants from smoking weed within their own homes, according to The Sacramento Bee.

What a buzzkill! But the legislation wouldnt just affect those lighting up for funit would also ban the use of medical marijuana, which is legal in the state.

The bill would lump in pot with tobacco products, which California landlords can already bar tenants from smoking on the premises. The measure sailed through an Assembly committee earlier this week, but has not come up for a vote yet.

This is about protecting families that live in close proximity to others, Jim Wood, a Democratic assemblyman who introduced the bill, said in a statement. Secondhand smoke can be a real problem, especially for families who live in apartments or other multifamily residences.

But even if the law passes, landlords could have a tough time cracking down on tenants bearing a doctors note, say attorneys.

Renters who smoke cannabis to alleviate a medical condition could sue and claim their rights are being violated under Californias Fair Employment and Housing Act, says housing attorney Scott Moore, a partner at Baird Holm in Omaha, NE. And they just might win.

The act bars housing discrimination based on someones disability.

However, the federal government still considers marijuana illegalso tenants couldnt fall back on the national Fair Housing Act.

Not that taking the matter to a state court would guarantee victory, Moore says. A judge could say that renters who smoke in their apartment are violating the rights of other nearby tenants, if they are subjected to secondhand smoke.

Just because somethings legal doesnt mean the apartment complex has to let them do it, Moore says.

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The post Just Because Its Legal Doesnt Mean Tenants Can Smoke It appeared first on Real Estate News and Advice - realtor.com.





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Floods Wash Away Kansas City Southern's Carloads in 1Q16

(Continued from Prior Part)

Chemicals share in revenues

In the previous part, we discussed the Industrial and Consumer Freight segment revenues and its prospects. Here, well analyze Kansas City Southerns (KSU) Chemicals and Petroleum division. KSUs chemical revenues in 1Q16 were $117.3 million, up by 2% on a year-over-year basis.

Chemical volumes

The chemical carloads went up by 3% in the first quarter of 2016, compared with the corresponding period last year. Despite the floods in Texas and the Southeastern US, this freight source recorded a favorable contribution in 1Q16. The strength in the companys Petroleum and Plastic business offset the fall in volumes due to the floods.

Chemicals include plastics, industrial chemicals, and petroleum refined products. KSU transports these products to the Midwest, Southeast, and Northeast US markets. It also transports these products throughout Mexico through interchanges with other railroads.

Management outlook

Kansas City Southern has planned to build an SIT (storage-in-transit) yard near the Sasol Chemicals LLCs facility in Louisiana. The company has entered into an agreement with Sasol to construct and initiate a long-term lease of an SIT rail yard. This should support the latters new ethane cracker and derivatives project in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

KSU further expects the SIT yard to bring other chemical plants business in KSUs domain. The reforms in the Mexican energy markets are expected to be operational in 2017. KSU anticipates higher volumes of petroleum refined products and specialty chemicals from the US Gulf Coast moving into Mexico. Over the next few years, the company foresees gains in the growth in plastics production centered in Gulf region.

Uncertainties in revenue growth have impacted railroads capital spending in recent years. Kansas City Southern (KSU) recorded a 3% rise in capital expenditures in 2015. KSUs close competitor, Union Pacific (UNP), registered a 7% growth in the same period. The revenue growth for the rest of the peer group follows:

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Norfolk Southern (NSC): 12.6%

CSX Corporation (CSX): 4.6%

Canadian National Railway (CNI): 17.8%

Canadian Pacific Railway (CP): 5%

Genesee and Wyoming (GWR): 12.1%

Investors opting for broad-based exposure to the transportation sector can invest in the SPDR S&P Transportation ETF (XTN). This ETF holds 12.8% in all US-originated Class I railroads.

In the next part of this series, we will consider the reasons behind the rise in agriculture and minerals revenues in 1Q16.

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
Students transfer colleges for many reasons. For example, they may want to transition from a two-year community college to a four-year institution; experience a change of scenery; or seek an academic concentration not offered at their current college. Regardless of the reason, students should consider finances and prepare themselves before making the big leap.

First, you should see how the net price of your current institution stacks up to that of the school to which you want to transfer. Depending on your financial situation, this may be a large factor in whether transferring makes sense for you.

You also should consider whether your credits will be transferrable to the new institution. Retaking classes or having to take a whole new set of required core courses may set you back financially and delay your graduation date.

Once you've done your research and decided that transferring is the right choice, take these steps to ensure you will get the most bang for your buck and can keep any current aid or scholarships you're receiving.

-- Contact the financial aid office: Get in touch with the school you'll be transferring to and ask some key questions, like what kind of merit aid is available, and see what other financial support the college can offer or that you can apply to. You can also coordinate with the office if you will have to transfer any outside scholarships to the institution, and learn about filling out a new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.

In your discussions, ask about any scholarships the school offers specifically for incoming transfer students.

For example, the University at Buffalo--SUNY offers the two-year Transfer Student Merit Scholarship to New York state transfer students who will be applying as full-time undergraduates. Those applying for transfer admission are automatically considered with no additional application required for the scholarship. However, students must be U.S. citizens, have a 3.5 GPA and have completed 45 college credits to be considered.

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Similarly, the University of Maryland offers a Transfer Academic Excellence Scholarship that covers full tuition for up to four consecutive semesters. Students must be Maryland residents at the time of applying and have a GPA of 3.5; there are also specific credit-completion requirements.

Scholarships like these exist at a great number of institutions -- so make sure to check.

[Find morescholarships for transfer students.]

-- Contact current scholarship providers: Another important step for transfer students is to make sure that the eligibility requirements for keeping scholarships won't be put into jeopardy by switching institutions.

Some scholarships require you to live in a certain area, attend a specific college or have a certain major, and this could cause you to lose that money if you move or change your academic concentration. If you're able to transfer colleges without violating any eligibility requirements, talk to your scholarship provider and college financial aid office about the process to change the institution to which your funds will go.

[Learn howtransferring schools can affect student loans.]

Transfer students can also apply to more scholarships meant just for them or that transfer students are eligible for. This can be especially important for students transferring to an institution with a higher net price than the college they are already attending.

Check out awards like the Pearson Scholarship for Higher Education, which is open to Phi Theta Kappa members transferring to a four-year institution from a community college. Each year, 10 scholarships worth $5,000 each are awarded.

Another one to check out is the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship. The foundation awards up to $40,000 each year to around 85 community college students seeking to transfer to a four-year institution.

Without the proper preparation, transferring colleges can end up being both difficult and expensive. Do your research ahead of time to make sure it's the right choice for you, and set yourself up for financial success when you reach your new campus.

Liz Chereskin is the content manager for College Greenlight, a leading college and scholarship resource for first-generation and underrepresented students. College Greenlight helps students find colleges that match them and scholarships to fund their education and is a service of Cappex.com.
A screaming hairy armadillo gave Kelly Ripa headlines this morning at the expense of her soon-to-be-ex co-host Michael Strahan  and, of course, the armadillo  on Live with Kelly and Michael.

Wildlife pitchman Peter Gros trotted out the little animal, who began to shriek, which we know from that time National Wildlife Federation rep David Mizejewski took one to entertain Conan OBriens late-night audience, is something they only do when they are really really freaked out, which we dont want to do.

I want to take him into contract negotiations with me, Ripa snarked of the screaming animal, as Strahan looked uncomfortable and reporters began writing snappy lines about Ripa having so winningly thrown shade him  though his discomfort might have had more to do with compassion for the animals obvious distress than with Ripas pointed crack.

Disney-ABC announced a couple weeks ago Strahan was leaving Live to join ABC News Good Morning America full-time in the fall  a development first conveyed to Ripa about half an hour before the press got it. Ripa reacted to the dis by going MIA for a few days. She returned to the show this past Tuesday, saying her walk-off had triggered a conversation at the company about respect in the workplace. It also triggered ABC-Disneys decision to pull Strahan off Live earlier than they had announced days earlier, to get his replacement settled in ASAP, what with Ripas contract coming up in 2017 and the star so clearly miffed with management. Todays armadillo joke would seem to suggest Ripa has more where last weeks walk-off came from.

He always gets his way with the predators, Gros joked to Ripa of the armadillo, to help her joke along, still brandishing the terrified creature.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PxZiHdO7iE&w=620&h=340]

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Billy Bush Presumptive Nominee For 'Today' 9 AM Slot As 'Live With Kelly And Michael' Loses Michael Strahan

Daytime Emmy Nominees Kelly Ripa & Michael Strahan Not Attending Ceremony
By Duncan Miriri NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya Airways pilots called off a strike on Thursday after the carrier met some of their demands, the Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA) said, adding they would fully resume work on Friday. KALPA's members took the industrial action earlier on Thursday to push for the removal of the airline's chief executive, prompting Kenya Airways to cancel all but two of its evening flights up to 2300 GMT (07:00 p.m. EDT). Kenya Airways, which is one of the largest carriers in Africa and ferries 10,000 passengers a day with a fleet of Boeing and Embraer jets, had already canceled 10 other flights. KALPA General Secretary Paul Gichinga said the airline had made some management changes that met the pilots' minimum demands, without giving more details. "We are happy with the information they have given us on the management changes we demanded but that is not for us to announce," he told Reuters. The pilots had taken the action despite an agreement reached a day earlier to defer the strike until June 1. The strike lasted from midday until late on Thursday, but for practical reasons full flights will resume on Friday. Pilots oppose Chief Executive Mbuvi Ngunze's planned measures to turn around the loss-making carrier, which is 26.7 percent owned by Air France KLM, and have demanded his immediate resignation. The association said they would operate as normal while talks continue until June 1 over the rest of their demands. Kenya Airways was not immediately available to comment. Instead of turning up for work on Thursday, scores of pilots attended a meeting of the association. The pilots later voted to go ahead with the strike. The airline said the strike had gone on even though it had obtained a court order the previous day barring any industrial action and the pilots' union agreeing to delay the strike. KALPA issued a two-day notice to the carrier on Tuesday saying its members would stop flying planes until Ngunze resigned over what it called "questionable" turnaround measures. The airline has been selling assets, including planes, and plans to lay off 600 people as it tries to stay in operation after three and a half years of financial losses. Transport Minister James Macharia and Dennis Awori, chairman of the airline's board had met with KALPA on Thursday but their pleas not to ground the airline's fleet were rejected. (Additional reporting by Humphrey Malalo and George Obulutsa; Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Alexander Smith)
Washington (AFP) - US Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday used a meeting with diplomats' children to lobby for a more comfortable plane to carry his team around the world.

Kerry and his dog Ben met the kids at the State Department on "Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day" and fielded a range of questions from the audience.

"On your plane, do they have like beds and stuff?" asked nine-year-old Vivian.

"Well, you're opening a very, very sore subject, because yes, there's is a bed, one bed, and you can probably guess who gets it," Kerry replied.

The secretary paid tribute to the Air Force, which operates the 20-year-old Boeing 757 jet that carries him, his staff and journalists around the world.

But he could not resist the chance to make a pitch for a newer model, with more space and comfort.

"I've flown more than a million miles since I've been secretary and we've been to 81 countries," he said.

"But I have to tell you it's an old plane and it's tough on the staff, because the seats aren't so modern and don't fold back so you can lie down.

"So, hopefully, over time we can fix it up a little bit, but there is one bed," he said, referring to the fold-out sofa in his onboard office.

US officials have privately expressed frustration with the age of Kerry's plane in the past.

In 2014 it was grounded on four separate occasions with technical glitches and Kerry was twice forced to fly home on commercial jets during maintenance.
Kim Kardashian is strongly criticizing the Wall Street Journal a week after the paper ran a controversial ad downplaying the Armnenian Genocide.

The reality star did not mince her words in taking the paper to task for its responsibility in allowing the ad to run.

Advocating the denial of a genocide by the country responsible for it  thats not publishing a provocative viewpoint, thats spreading lies, she said on her website on Wednesday. Its totally morally irresponsible and, most of all, its dangerous. If this had been an ad denying the Holocaust, or pushing some 9/11 conspiracy theory, would it have made it to print?

Also Read: Wall Street Journal Runs Ad Denying Armenian Genocide (Photo)

She also wrote: For the Wall Street Journal to publish something like this is reckless, upsetting and dangerous. Its one thing when a shitty tabloid profits from a made-up scandal, but for a trusted publication like WSJ to profit from genocide  its shameful and unacceptable.

The paper already got in hot water on social media for running the ad, which features a hand with the Turkish flag making a peace sign, while two hands crossing their fingers have the Russian and Armenian flags on them.

Readers are furious that the WSJ placed an ad directing people to FactCheckArmenia.com. Once youre on the site it reads: False: The events of 1915 constitute a clear-cut genocide against the Armenian people.

Also Read: Directors Slam Russell Crowes Water Diviner Over Armenian Genocide Denial (Guest Blog)

The site continues to say that there is no legal consensus to support the Armenians attempts to portray these actions as a willful, deliberate attempt to commit genocide of the Armenian people  a specific crime defined by international law.

The genocide involved the Ottoman governments systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects inside their historic homeland, which lies within the present-day Republic of Turkey.

Kardashian has been outspoken on the topic, and the anniversary of the genocide has been featured on her show Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

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The nation's 55.5 million Medicare beneficiaries receive comprehensive health care coverage, but their benefits come at a price. Medicare Part A, which pays for hospitalizations and inpatient care, has a $1,288 deductible in 2016 plus co-insurance costs for stays exceeding 60 days. Those who want outpatient care, covered by Part B, have additional deductible and coinsurance costs, plus they typically pay a $104.90 premium each month.

"Some folks can't cover that premium," says Sabra Matovsky, executive vice president of Integrated Health Partners in San Diego. Fortunately, help is available for some people. Those with limited income and assets may be eligible for Medicaid to pay the monthly premium and other out-of-pocket costs associated with Medicare. Here are five things you should know about getting dual coverage.

[See: 10 Things You Need to Know About Medicare.]

Your Medicaid and Medicare eligibility is determined separately. The first thing to understand is that Medicaid and Medicare eligibility and enrollment are handled separately. "Everyone who is eligible for retirement [Social Security benefits] is entitled to Medicare," says Ginalisa Monterroso, CEO of Medicaid Advisory Group. Those who are disabled may also be eligible for Medicare.

While Medicare is a federal program with the same eligibility standards across the country, Medicaid is state-administered. That means each state may have slightly different requirements for who is entitled to benefits, although all states must meet a federal mandate to cover certain groups of people, such as those who have limited assets and an income that's less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level. What's more, while Medicare beneficiaries only have to apply for benefits once, most Medicaid programs require recipients to submit documentation on a regular basis to remain eligible.

There are several levels of Medicaid coverage. Not everyone who is eligible for Medicaid will get the same level of coverage. There are four programs for dual- eligible beneficiaries who receive both Medicaid and Medicare. Depending on your circumstances, you could fall into one of the following categories:

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-- Qualified Medicare beneficiary. Offering the highest level of coverage, these beneficiaries may pay for Part A and Part B premiums, deductibles, co-insurance and co-payments.

-- Specified low-income Medicare beneficiary. People in this category receive Medicaid coverage for their Part B premiums.

-- Qualifying individual. This program also helps pay for Part B premiums.

-- Qualified disabled working individual. Limited to those who are disabled but still working, this Medicaid program helps pay for Part A premiums.

[Quiz: Test Your Medicare Knowledge.]

"Ideally, becoming dual eligible should enhance access to health care," says Colin LeClair, senior vice president of product development for ConcertoHealth, which specializes in assisting dual enrollees. It should reduce or eliminate cost-sharing, although some people may only receive partial coverage.

Managed care plans come with pros and cons. When it comes to receiving benefits, dual enrollees may have the option of receiving benefits straight from the government or through a managed care plan. Managed care plans are often structured as HMOs or PPOs, although LeClair says some companies are looking into newer models of care such as Accountable Care Organizations and Patient Centered Medical Homes.

Regardless of their structure, these plans often come with supplemental services that may include dental, vision or even transportation services. Medicare Advantage plans that offer supplemental services may have higher premiums, but Medicaid beneficiaries don't pay extra for a managed care plan. That doesn't mean there aren't drawbacks. "Typically, a beneficiary has to make a trade," LeClair says. "They may have access to a narrower list of providers."

Limited provider access is one reason Monterroso says people should think carefully before opting for a managed care plan. "There is a gatekeeper that can say yay or nay [to services or providers]," she says. However, by receiving benefits directly from the government, beneficiaries may be able to go to any physician or facility that accepts Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Some organizations specialize in helping dual enrollees. It's not always easy for dual enrollees to understand their benefits. "It's a full-time job to figure out what you're entitled to," Matovsky says.

One option to simplify the process is to select a health care plan that combines both Medicare and Medicaid benefits under one policy. Another may be to work with a health center or organization that offers case management services to dual enrollees. "Coordinating benefits on your own and submitting paperwork can be overwhelming," LeClair says. Using a case management service may not only eliminate some of this burden, but also help people make the most of their benefits.

Even if you're not eligible for Medicaid now, you could be later. Those who aren't immediately eligible for dual enrollment should know it's not unusual for seniors to eventually reach the point where they are able to receive Medicaid. "Once people spend down their assets and are old enough, it's not like they are going to come into money," Matovsky says.

[See: 10 Medical Services Medicare Doesn't Cover.]

Seniors and their relatives may want to contact their state's social services department in advance to learn more about Medicaid eligibility requirements. Then, when and if a person reaches that income and asset level, an application can be submitted to begin benefits as quickly as possible.





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Part of an OZY series on Historys Forgotten Women.

Video by Charlotte Buchen

The history of piracy is full of cliches. Yet the worlds most successful buccaneer might have been Chinese  and a woman. Ching Shih, also known as Cheng I Sao, instilled fear in the hearts of merchants across the China Sea in the early 19th century. During her relatively short run as a pirate lord  about a decade  this ruthless and cunning woman went from being a prostitute to commanding the infamous Red Flag Fleet and sending hundreds of thousands of men into battle.

At the height of her success, Ching Shihs pirate armada boasted 1,600 ships, and she commanded more than 70,000 male and female pirates, spies and suppliers. Her sphere of influence stretched from the waters of the South China Sea through much of Guangdong Province, and she even had spies working within the ruling Qing Dynasty.

The Qing emperor, Jiaqing, raised a large fleet of ships against her to no avail. Ching Shih was eventually offered amnesty by Jiaqing, and went on to retire at the ripe age of 35. The queen of the pirates then had a child, opened a brothel and lived a comfortable life until she died, at age 69, a wealthy aristocrat. Her name has been largely forgotten, but her legacy still lives today on the pirate-infested waters of the South China Sea.

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Ahead of his hosting gig at Saturdays White House Correspondents Dinner, Comedy Centrals The Nightly Show host Larry Wilmore already has won over the crowd, calling it the most narcissistic room ever invented: journalists, politicians and Hollywood. And the president.

The room could explode from the narcissism alone, Wilmore told CNNs John Berman today in a taped interview.

Wilmore, who was Jon Stewarts Senior Black Correspondent on The Daily Show, said the nerd-prom hosting gig was something he really wanted to do for this president. He has been critical of Obama in the past and joked he voted for Obama because of his policy of being black. In the CNN sit-down, Wilmore he gave Obama high marks on that count, saying he has increased the policy of blackness in particular over the past year and a half  he has released the black-en.

A game of Candidate Word Association provided a good idea where Wilmores going to go on Saturday:

Bernie Sanders: Scrappy.

Ted Cruz: Creepy.

Hillary Clinton: Trying to find it.

John Kasich stumped Wilmore  which he said is the problem with Kasichs candidacy. Dont expect jokes about the Ohio governor Saturday night.

Donald Trump: Unbelievable. In every way.

Wilmore also said he will not pull his punches in re Obama at the dinner, though POTUS will be sitting with him on the dais. I have to keep it 100  and what are they doing to do? Theres not enough time to sic the IRS on me.

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L gn. Cut50, a bipartisan coalition seeking to safely reduce the number of jailed people in the U.S. by 50% in the next ten years, is slated to hold a press conference Thursday in Washington D.C. on the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, aimed at reforming federal sentencing laws.

In Cut50's press release, the coalition write that they want to start a "conversation about the ongoing negative impact federal sentencing policies have on communities  and the need to advance sentencing reform."

"Formerly incarcerated individuals who were sentenced to life for low-level drug offenses will share their stories of redemption, discuss their advocacy work, and how the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act could provide relief for thousands," Cut50 write.

Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois and Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah will be joined by McGorry of Orange is the New Black, Hill Harper of CSI: New York, Melissa Fitzgerald of The West Wing and Terrence J of 106 and Park.

Advocates of the cause have been shedding light on the disproportionate stat by tweeting "America is home to 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners. We need #JusticeReformNow!"

America is home to 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners. We need #JusticeReformNow!http://goo.gl/z96Wzn

US has 5% of world's population US has 25% of world's prison population We need #JusticeReformNow!https://cards.twitter.com/cards/g9u82/1oy8i ...

America is home to 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners. We need #JusticeReformNow!http://goo.gl/z96Wzn

America is home to 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners. We need #JusticeReformNow!http://goo.gl/z96Wzn

America is home to 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners. We need #JusticeReformNow!http://goo.gl/z96Wzn

America is home to 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners. We need #JusticeReformNow!http://goo.gl/z96Wzn

America is home to 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners. We need #JusticeReformNow!http://goo.gl/z96Wzn

The Washington Post reported in 2015 that the U.S. population as of July 4, 2014 was about 319 million  about 4.4% of the world's population of 7.1 billion, according to the U.S. Census. Moreover, the Washington Post reported that "there were 2.24 million prisoners in the United States as of Dec. 31, 2011," which was about "22% of the global prison population of 10.2 million."
By Daniel Wiessner

(Reuters) - A lawsuit accusing PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP of violating U.S. discrimination law by hiring a "stunningly low" number of people over the age of 40 to maintain a youthful culture has been filed in San Francisco.

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in federal court, said the London-based accounting company does virtually all of its recruiting for entry-level jobs on college campuses to stock its workforce with millenials. Federal law bars employers from discriminating against workers and job applicants who are 40 and older.

The lawsuit was brought by Steve Rabin, 53, a certified public accountant who said he was turned down for an accounting job at PwC because the company uses recruiting programs that weed out older applicants.

"PwC's culture and practice has distributed the benefits of its enormous success unequally  systematically favoring younger applicants at the expense of their older counterparts," the lawsuit said.

The company did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday.

Rabin is backed by the group AARP, which often gets involved in age bias cases. William Rivera, the group's senior vice president for litigation, said in a statement that "there is no justification for hiring based on unfounded age stereotypes."

Rabin is seeking to represent a class of PwC job applicants that could include thousands of people. The company has more than 46,000 U.S. employees, according to its website.

The average age of a PwC worker in 2011 was 27, according to a report the company released that year, and two-thirds of its workers were in their 20s or early 30s.

The median age of U.S. accountants and auditors is 43, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The number of age discrimination lawsuits filed spiked during the recession when many companies laid off workers who claimed they were targeted because of their age, and has fallen in the last few years. The issue has been a particular concern for tech companies.

Story continues

Facebook Inc in 2013 agreed to settle claims by a California state agency that it violated the law by posting job ads seeking recent college graduates. Lawsuits making similar claims are pending against Google Inc and Twitter Inc.

IBM lost a bid in November to dismiss a proposed class action lawsuit claiming it lied about needing to downsize so it could replace older workers with recent graduates.

The case is Rabin v. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:16-cv-02276.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi)
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanese soldiers killed an Islamic State leader on Thursday in the mountainous border region with Syria, Lebanon's army said. The army command said Fayez al-Shaalaan, known as Abu Fawz, was killed when the army attacked an Islamic State position on the edge of the town of Arsal in north Lebanon. It described Shaalaan as the militant group's leader in the Arsal area, confirming an earlier report from a security source. Fighting between Islamic State and al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front militants often spills over Lebanon's mountainous northern border with Syria, where conflict has been raging for five years. Fighters briefly overran Arsal in 2014 before withdrawing to the hills after clashes with the army, which stages regular operations against Islamic State and Nusra Front in the area. The army statement said a Syrian named Muhammad Mustafa Mawsali, also known as Abu Melhim, was killed alongside Shaalaan. Three Lebanese soldiers were also wounded in the clashes, the army said. (Reporting by Lisa Barrington and Tom Perry; Editing by Dominic Evans)
I graduated high school when I was 17, and I ready for the next step. I was practically packing my bags as soon as my acceptance letter to an East Coast school came in the mail. I was beyond ready to leave my small rural hometown behind, determined to escapebecause the last thing I wanted was to be 'stuck' in my farm town in Colorado like everyone else.

When I left for college at the end of summer, I kissed my hometown goodbye! I told everyone, "I will NEVER come back here!" I secretly felt that moving back home meant that I'd failed. That I became nothing. That I was nothing.

I spent so much of my 20s traveling, moving from city to city. I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, worked in New York City, and moved to Anchorage, Alaska with a company I had been working for. I also lived in Denver, Colorado.

But I absolutely loved city life in NYC. I adored the museums, nightlife, the concerts, and endless options for food and fun. I breathed the city in. I walked on the streets like I was a part of them. Everything inside of me breathed excitement and endless opportunity. Because we're told opportunity only lives in cities.

Living in the city did provide me with many opportunities. For one, I snagged my dream internship in NYC. I worked with famous actors and musicians and I made amazing friends that gifted me the opportunity to travel and see new things. I was living an everyday adventure.

But the older I became, and the closer I got to my 30s, something changed. I started to hate living in the city. I hated the trafficespecially the long, cramped commutes to work. I despised going out, fighting crowds to get a table or even get a drink. And I especially hated my hair smelling of hot dog vendors, smoke, and smog. I began wanting a bit more freedom, something the city could no longer give me.

I started to dream about moving back home.

I spent quite a bit of time wrestling with my own inner demons over these thoughts. Why did I want to move home? And why did I feel ashamed about it? What were my friends going to think?

Story continues

I started casually bringing the idea up to those around me. First I mentioned it to my significant other. He responded with, "What am I supposed to do there? Be a farmer?" Needless to say, he was against the idea. My friends replied with sarcasm and disgust: "Why?! There's nothing to do there!"

Despite what they said, I felt stuck and uninspired in the big city, despite how magical NYC is supposed to be. I desperately wanted to be near family, for one, but I also secretly wanted to have some of the things I had growing up, like access to nature. I wanted blue skies and starry nights. I wanted a quiet life. NYC just didn't provide that for me anymore. I missed friendly faces. I wanted to wave to peopleeven strangers and smile and engage in conversations. I also wanted to hear birds in the mornings, have shorter commutes, and see the mountains and trees.

So, I did it. I moved home, despite all the disapproval. I left my good job, my relationship, my talent agency, and the endless opportunities.

Some people questioned me: "Why did you move back?" It was hard at first to admit that I liked being home, and that, actually, I didn't prefer NYC (as so many people do). But after time, it became easier and less of an issue.

"I lost touch with the other parts of myself, never quite realizing that the quiet country life provided that to me."

So, I was honest with everyone. And when they asked me why I moved home, I confidently said, "Because I wanted to." Many people welcomed me back into the community.

The first few months home were the most relaxing of my life. Every day I wake up to birds chirping, and the cool air and sunlight coming in from the window. No traffic sounds, car alarms, or people screaming on the streets. It sounds like a damned Disney movie, but it's so true!

There is something about the air hereit's clean. It smells good. I can also see the Grand Mesa (the largest flat-top mountain in the world) from my bedroom window. My work commute is a four-minute car ride. And on summer nights, my favorite thing to do is watch the sunset from my porch because it's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

I've been home for almost three years now, much to the surprise of my friends and some family. Some friends even made bets on how long 'this' would last. So far, I'm winning. But since I've been home my life has flourished. I realized that home, for me, is a place that inspires me. A place to dream and aspire. Because before, in the city, I felt like I had to compete with everyone to get ahead. Many times, forgetting what I was 'fighting' for, I was clouded in competition and not passion. I lost touch with the other parts of myself, never quite realizing that the quiet country life provided that to me.

By coming home, I found myself again, the true me. The me that made things happen, that didn't expect a city to give her opportunities because I could make my own.

What matters is that you are happy where you are, that you feel inspired by your surroundings. And from there, everything else falls into place.
Lego billionaire Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen has admitted that the Danish toymaker's refusal to sell bricks to dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was a "mistake".

The company found itself at the centre of a social media storm last year after Ai said Lego had refused his order of the famous children's building blocks as they would be "used for political works".

Lego's deputy chairman, the grandson of the company's founder, said the decision to deny the artist a bulk order had been due to "an internal mistake."

The order, which Ai planned to use for a show in Australia, had been rejected "very low in the organisation by our consumer service department," Kirk Kristiansen told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published Thursday.

In January, Lego said it would no longer ask what its bricks would be used for when making bulk sales, and that customers displaying their Lego creations in public would instead be asked to make it clear "that the Lego Group does not support or endorse the specific projects".

Ai has been targeted by Chinese authorities for his advocacy of democracy and human rights as well as other criticisms of the government.

Meanwhile, the family-owned Lego group moved to hand over more power to fourth-generation heir Thomas Kirk Kristiansen, who will take over from his father Kjeld as deputy chairman.

"I am very pleased to say that we are now ready to take certain important steps toward the smooth generational handover that will continue to maintain active family ownership of the Lego Group," Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen said in a statement Wednesday.

His 37-year-old son will also replace him as chairman of the Lego Foundation, which owns 25 percent of the Lego Group, but he will remain chairman of family holding company and majority owner Kirkbi.

Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen is ranked the world's 65th richest man according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated fortune of about 11.4 billion euros ($13.1 billion).
By Jan Strupczewski

BRUSSELS, April 28 (Reuters) - Greece and its international lenders are almost in full agreement on a package of reforms that has been negotiated for months, but a set of contingency steps requested by euro zone ministers last Friday still needs work, a top EU official said.

Euro zone finance ministers pencilled in an extraordinary meeting on Thursday to sign off on the deal with Athens and discuss Greek debt relief, but the meeting was cancelled because of insufficient progress towards a deal.

European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs Pierre Moscovici told reporters that discussions with Athens were in three areas -- the reform package agreed under the bailout programme, the contingency reform package requested by lenders last Friday and debt relief.

"We are 99 percent of the way there, we have converged on almost all aspects," Moscovici said on the original reform package, which includes a pension and income tax reform, a way to deal with bad loans and setting up a privatisation fund.

This original reform set is to generate 3 percent of GDP savings for Greece.

But because of a difference in forecasts of Greece's primary surplus in 2018 between euro zone lenders and the International Monetary Fund, euro zone ministers asked Greece last Friday to prepare a set of contingency steps to be implemented only if Athens misses targets.

The contingency package is to provide 2 percent of GDP savings -- the difference between the IMF and euro zone forecasts -- has to be legislated up-front and kick in automatically if Greece does not meet targets.

Greece argues that its laws do not allow it to pass contingency laws and offered to legislate an automatic mechanism for across-the-board spending cuts if it falls short of goals.

"This deserves to be looked at, given due consideration," Moscovici said.

"We have a few proposals on the table, which go in that direction, but we need to work on that," he said, adding the mechanism of contingency steps had to be compatible with Greek laws.

Story continues

He said the decision to postpone the meeting of euro zone finance ministers to next week or the week after that, depending on progress in negotiations was good, because having a meeting only to announce lack of agreement would send a bad signal.

"The decision to postpone today was wise, we should not give a signal that we were not successful," he said.

"We are 99 percent there on the first package. As for the contingency mechanism, which is in our view is not really justified by data, but politically necessary, let's work on that," he said.

(Reporting By Jan Strupczewski)
Students at Foothill High School in Palo Cedro, California want their favorite lesbian couple to serve side-by-side as prom queens  and they'll fight any high school "traditions" that stand in their way.

In a viral Facebook post, Hayley Lack, one half of the same-sex couple nominated for prom court, wrote that the school administration is refusing to let her and her girlfriend serve on prom court, despite the fact that they were nominated by members of the student body.

I don't think I've been more disappointed in Foothill. This is crap.pic.twitter.com/riGTopY6xr https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChExeFsWUAAwaKL.jpg:large

In a Twitter direct message to Mic, Lack wrote that she believes she and her partner are being discriminated against based on their sexual orientation.

"Couples are always nominated by the students. Me and Jenna were nominated as a couple alongside two other straight couples by the student body vote... The way this is set up is insinuated to vote for couples," Lack said.

"Now that a lesbian couple was nominated together, they have decided to say that it isn't about couples at all, but instead individuals, which is just their way of discriminating... All my girlfriend and I ask for is for anyone, regardless of gender, to be nominated under king or queen, whichever is chosen by popular vote."

School officials are insisting that prom court election rules won't allow a lesbian couple to be prom king and queen, even though a lesbian couple received the most nominations.

"They [the girls] are both able to run separately, but we don't nominate as couples. It's not fair to the boy gender," Principal Jim Bartow said in a phone interview with Mic.

Bartow said the school has always elected the prom court categories based on gender, not as a couples. "That would discriminate against those without a partner," Bartow said. "I'm not against their [the lesbian couple] relationship."

Story continues

When asked why the students are outraged if individual nomination is the way it's always been, Bartow said, "they are unhappy because they [the couple] probably see themselves as a king and queen...I don't think there's anything I can do about that."

If our prom voting system prevents same sex couples from being nominated then CHANGE THE SYSTEM INSTEAD OF HIDING BEHIND IT???

Regardless of how long these gender categories have actually been in place, students want to change them immediately, and they're refusing to accept the administration's verdict. Lack is now seeking help from American Civil Liberties Union, with the support of her mother.

Meanwhile, fellow students are circulating a petition in support of the same-sex couple. Bartow said he's met with one of the nominated girls and the student body, but so far hasn't made any plans to address the students and engage them in a broader discussion. "We're going to craft an email for parents," he said.

if you're interested in signing a petition to not let "tradition" dictate prom royalty at foothill, ask @megancoweepic.twitter.com/bRDuJL4R9B https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChI0o97WkAAtgWC.jpg:large

These California teens aren't the only lesbians at the center of a prom controversy this year. Just last week, students at Niwot High School in Colorado nominated a lesbian couple as joint prom princesses and faced similar resistance from school officials.

"[The teacher] said that it was untraditional...for a lesbian couple to be the prom junior princess and prince," Zander Born, a sophomore on Niwot's student council, told local TV station KDVR News. After receiving negative media attention, the school reportedly changed its tune and allowed the same-sex couple to participate in prom elections.

Days later, Niwot student council's Instagram page congratulated the long-time couple on being crowned the prom "prince" and princess.

A photo posted by Niwot Student Council (@niwotstuco) on Apr 25, 2016 at 8:52am PDT

Only time will tell if student activism and media scrutiny will also convince Foothill High School to change its policy. Either way, the students have shown just how much they support and want to honor the couple  and their camaraderie is an inspiring example of how prom can be much more than just another cliche high school event.

h/t Record Searchlight

Correction: April 28, 2016

A previous version misstated the location of Foothill High School. The school is located in Palo Cedro, California.
The intersection of Wall Street and Hollywood Boulevard hasn't been showing the best side of the investment world -- whether giving us Leonardo DiCaprio howling at the high-finance moon in "The Wolf of Wall Street," or the cynical, cold-blooded capitalism that fueled the housing crisis in "The Big Short."

And if you stop to think about it, those wolves weren't exactly female, were they? Nor were the big shots in "The Big Short," though in one memorable scene, a woman plays the spineless, clueless Standard & Poor's gatekeeper.

[Read: How to Choose Between a 401(k) and an IRA.]

In an investment world lambasted -- and in many cases, rightfully so -- for its unmitigated greed and moral corruption, women are often shunted to the side as though they could never prove effective, let alone corrective. For them, the glass ceiling might as well be a dark tinted, bulletproof funhouse mirror.

"I realized a few things early on starting out in this career: It is male dominated and most of the men are white," says Francesca Federico, co-founder and principal of Twelve Points Wealth Management in Boston. Back then, she was 21; the only other women in her Morgan Stanley office (there were just three) were older than 50.

"It's an old boys' club, usually with men pulling other men in," Federico says. "When I ask most advisors how they got into this business, I usually expect the same answers: My father was in it, a college alumnus helped me, a relative helped me. I think women have had a hard time breaking in because there have never been that many to begin with."

The stories women tell about their attempts to rise in the investment milieu tell a collective tale of long odds and short ends of the stick. Still, some such as Federico have managed to find their footing and achieve a measure of success. Here, seven women share their observations and experiences on the way to beating Wall Street expectations.

Learn to clear the confidence fence. Many aspects of the working world have achieved a level of gender equality, so why isn't investment one of them? "A huge factor is simply confidence: Most women don't have it," Federico says. "Typically, women are shy and aren't as loud or outgoing as the men. And if they are, they sometimes get seen as too aggressive."

Story continues

[Read: 4 Tips for Women to Overcome Their Financial Fears.]

Don't give in to grave expectations. Female investment neophytes have to prepare for maddening obstacles that sometimes border on the bizarre. Last year, Laurie C. Kamhi was recognized by Private Asset Management magazine as one of its 50 most influential women in private wealth. But the current director and partner at HighTower's LCK Wealth Management had to sidestep curious rejections first. "While interviewing for jobs early in my career, two top investment banking firms brought me in after looking at my resume and assuming that Laurie was a nickname for Lawrence," says Kamhi, who is based in the New York City area. "Once I arrived and they saw I was a woman, the interviews were over."

Turn the boys' club on its ear. At the desk of a male financial advisor, a husband-wife meeting too often turns into a triad where the woman gets left out. "When asked, the vast majority of women say that they are financially illiterate," says Binney Wietlisbach, president of Haverford Trust in the Philadelphia area. "But women advisors may have an advantage when advising female clients as usually women appreciate the softer relationship skills that female FAs often possess. Additionally, women FAs may be less intimidating and threatening while trying to engage the female client in conversation around financial matters."

Hold your ground. It's a lot more common for men to talk down to women in the financial world than the other way around. Katalin Takacs-Haynes, an associate professor of management at the University of Delaware, tells of reviewing a messy venture capital funding deal during her time in the private sector, only to conclude that the investment bankers pushing it didn't have their numbers straight. "I told them at a meeting that their numbers were off and that funding this deal was not in the best interest of my employer," she says. That's when one banker raised his voice and questioned her credentials. "I told him to back off and that I knew what I was doing. He then said, 'Did I ruffle your feathers, young lady? Venture capital is a tough business and you'd better get used to it.'"

Remote work raises remote chances. Despite gains in sharing the division of labor, "Women still tend to be the primary caregivers in their personal lives," says Allison Alexander, a certified financial planner with Savant Capital Management in Rockford, Illinois. "Wealth management is not conducive to taking breaks or sabbaticals from the workforce for purposes of child rearing or caring for aging parents." Enter the Internet: "The job offers an enormous amount of flexibility to work outside an office setting," she says. "With the exception of face-to-face meetings, much of the work can be done remotely."

[Read: Why Fine Art Can Beautify Your Portfolio.]

Crunch a different set of numbers. At first glance, the digits don't look encouraging. "Women are nearly 50 percent of the workforce, yet still only represent less than 25 percent of the investment industry," says Kathleen A. Grace, managing director at United Capital and based in Boca Raton, Florida. She also experienced pay discrimination while working at an investment and private banking firm -- when a younger male colleague with the same title and position, and producing less revenue, was paid more. But she cites encouraging numbers from a decades-long study by Terrance Odean at the University of California, Berkeley. "Single female investors outperformed single men by 2.3 percent, female investment groups outperformed male counterparts by 4.6 percent, and women overall outperformed men by 1.4 percent," Grace says.

Why break the glass ceiling when you can make your own way? Beth Blecker, the CEO of Eastern Planning Inc. in Pearl River, New York, manages about $300 million. You'd think that for any woman, that kind of standing would earn unconditional respect. "But on Wall Street, women need to be better than their male counterparts in order to be considered good," she says. "It is a male-dominated world that women can only break through by working harder and doing more -- and even then acceptance is not guaranteed."

Yet while the movies of the day portray Wall Street as cutthroat and carnivorous, "the same trait that makes women vulnerable on Wall Street -- their compassion -- can make them very successful as true wealth managers, especially if they are willing to explore the independent channel." Blecker should know: Much of the money she manages comes from high-net-worth women.





More From US News & World Report


The intersection of Wall Street and Hollywood Boulevard hasn't been showing the best side of the investment world -- whether giving us Leonardo DiCaprio howling at the high-finance moon in "The Wolf of Wall Street," or the cynical, cold-blooded capitalism that fueled the housing crisis in "The Big Short."

And if you stop to think about it, those wolves weren't exactly female, were they? Nor were the big shots in "The Big Short," though in one memorable scene, a woman plays the spineless, clueless Standard & Poor's gatekeeper.

[Read: How to Choose Between a 401(k) and an IRA.]

In an investment world lambasted -- and in many cases, rightfully so -- for its unmitigated greed and moral corruption, women are often shunted to the side as though they could never prove effective, let alone corrective. For them, the glass ceiling might as well be a dark tinted, bulletproof funhouse mirror.

"I realized a few things early on starting out in this career: It is male dominated and most of the men are white," says Francesca Federico, co-founder and principal of Twelve Points Wealth Management in Boston. Back then, she was 21; the only other women in her Morgan Stanley office (there were just three) were older than 50.

"It's an old boys' club, usually with men pulling other men in," Federico says. "When I ask most advisors how they got into this business, I usually expect the same answers: My father was in it, a college alumnus helped me, a relative helped me. I think women have had a hard time breaking in because there have never been that many to begin with."

The stories women tell about their attempts to rise in the investment milieu tell a collective tale of long odds and short ends of the stick. Still, some such as Federico have managed to find their footing and achieve a measure of success. Here, seven women share their observations and experiences on the way to beating Wall Street expectations.

Story continues

Learn to clear the confidence fence. Many aspects of the working world have achieved a level of gender equality, so why isn't investment one of them? "A huge factor is simply confidence: Most women don't have it," Federico says. "Typically, women are shy and aren't as loud or outgoing as the men. And if they are, they sometimes get seen as too aggressive."

[Read: 4 Tips for Women to Overcome Their Financial Fears.]

Don't give in to grave expectations. Female investment neophytes have to prepare for maddening obstacles that sometimes border on the bizarre. Last year, Laurie C. Kamhi was recognized by Private Asset Management magazine as one of its 50 most influential women in private wealth. But the current director and partner at HighTower's LCK Wealth Management had to sidestep curious rejections first. "While interviewing for jobs early in my career, two top investment banking firms brought me in after looking at my resume and assuming that Laurie was a nickname for Lawrence," says Kamhi, who is based in the New York City area. "Once I arrived and they saw I was a woman, the interviews were over."

Turn the boys' club on its ear. At the desk of a male financial advisor, a husband-wife meeting too often turns into a triad where the woman gets left out. "When asked, the vast majority of women say that they are financially illiterate," says Binney Wietlisbach, president of Haverford Trust in the Philadelphia area. "But women advisors may have an advantage when advising female clients as usually women appreciate the softer relationship skills that female FAs often possess. Additionally, women FAs may be less intimidating and threatening while trying to engage the female client in conversation around financial matters."

Hold your ground. It's a lot more common for men to talk down to women in the financial world than the other way around. Katalin Takacs-Haynes, an associate professor of management at the University of Delaware, tells of reviewing a messy venture capital funding deal during her time in the private sector, only to conclude that the investment bankers pushing it didn't have their numbers straight. "I told them at a meeting that their numbers were off and that funding this deal was not in the best interest of my employer," she says. That's when one banker raised his voice and questioned her credentials. "I told him to back off and that I knew what I was doing. He then said, 'Did I ruffle your feathers, young lady? Venture capital is a tough business and you'd better get used to it.'"

Remote work raises remote chances. Despite gains in sharing the division of labor, "Women still tend to be the primary caregivers in their personal lives," says Allison Alexander, a certified financial planner with Savant Capital Management in Rockford, Illinois. "Wealth management is not conducive to taking breaks or sabbaticals from the workforce for purposes of child rearing or caring for aging parents." Enter the Internet: "The job offers an enormous amount of flexibility to work outside an office setting," she says. "With the exception of face-to-face meetings, much of the work can be done remotely."

[Read: Why Fine Art Can Beautify Your Portfolio.]

Crunch a different set of numbers. At first glance, the digits don't look encouraging. "Women are nearly 50 percent of the workforce, yet still only represent less than 25 percent of the investment industry," says Kathleen A. Grace, managing director at United Capital and based in Boca Raton, Florida. She also experienced pay discrimination while working at an investment and private banking firm -- when a younger male colleague with the same title and position, and producing less revenue, was paid more. But she cites encouraging numbers from a decades-long study by Terrance Odean at the University of California, Berkeley. "Single female investors outperformed single men by 2.3 percent, female investment groups outperformed male counterparts by 4.6 percent, and women overall outperformed men by 1.4 percent," Grace says.

Why break the glass ceiling when you can make your own way? Beth Blecker, the CEO of Eastern Planning Inc. in Pearl River, New York, manages about $300 million. You'd think that for any woman, that kind of standing would earn unconditional respect. "But on Wall Street, women need to be better than their male counterparts in order to be considered good," she says. "It is a male-dominated world that women can only break through by working harder and doing more -- and even then acceptance is not guaranteed."

Yet while the movies of the day portray Wall Street as cutthroat and carnivorous, "the same trait that makes women vulnerable on Wall Street -- their compassion -- can make them very successful as true wealth managers, especially if they are willing to explore the independent channel." Blecker should know: Much of the money she manages comes from high-net-worth women.

A former longtime staff writer, editor and columnist at the Chicago Tribune, Lou Carlozo writes about investment for U.S. News & World Report, and personal finance for Money Under 30 and GOBankingRates. He is based in Chicago. Connect with him at linkedin.com/in/loucarlozo.
Level 3 Communications Inc. LVLT reported weak financial results in the first quarter of 2016 wherein both the top and the bottom line lagged the Zacks Consensus Estimate.

On a GAAP basis, net income in the reported quarter was $124 million, or 34 cents per share compared with net income of $122 million, or 35 cents per share in the first quarter of 2015. Quarterly earnings per share of 34 cents were well below the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 45 cents.

Level 3 Communications Inc. (LVLT) Street EPS & Surprise Percent - Last 5 Quarters | FindTheCompany

First quarter total revenue was $2,051 million, flat year over year but short of the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2,078 million.

Segment-wise, Core Network Services (CNS) revenues came in at $1,947 million, up 2.3% year over year. Wholesale Voice Services and Other revenues totaled $104 million, down 17.5% year over year.

Geographically, North America generated $1,604 million in CNS revenues, up 4% year over year. Europe, the Middle East and Africa accounted for $191 million of revenues at CNS, down 5% while Latin America contributed $155 million, down 5%.

Total operating expenses in the reported quarter were $1,689 million, down 2.8% year over year. Operating income came in at $362 million, up 14.6%. Adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) was up 14.5% to $710 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 34.6% from 30.5% in the prior-year quarter.

In the first quarter of 2016, Level 3 Communications generated $410 million of unlevered cash from operations compared with $293 million in the year-ago quarter. Free cash flow in the reported quarter was $324 million compared with $188 million in the prior-year quarter.

At the end of the first quarter of 2016, the company had $1,004 million of cash and cash equivalents and $11,651 million of outstanding debt compared with $854 million and $11,009 million, respectively, at the end of 2015. Meanwhile, the debt-to-capitalization ratio was 0.51 compared with 0.52 at the end of 2015.

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Guidance

For 2016, Level 3 Communications expects adjusted EBITDA to grow 10% to 12% on a year-over-year basis. Free cash flow is estimated at $1 billion to $1.1 billion.

Zacks Rank & Other Stocks to Consider

Level 3 Communications currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in this sector include ADTRAN Inc. ADTN, Finisar Corp. FNSR and DISH Network Corp. DISH. All three stocks currently carry a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

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Aled Rhys Jones captured the dramatic moment a plane appeared to be stuck by a lightning near Londons Heathrow Airport on Wednesday, April 27. At least three planes flying over London were hit by lightning on Wednesday.

A passenger on a British Airways flight from Prague to London told The Evening Standard she heard a huge light and crack. British Airways said flight BA857, which had departed from Prague, landed safely.

This video shows lightning strike a plane flying over west London. Credit: Aled Rhys Jones
Equity Residential EQR reported normalized funds from operations (FFO) per share for first-quarter 2016 of 76 cents, in line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate but down from the prior-year quarter figure of 79 cents. We expect the earnings release to lead to stock movement.



Quarterly results at this residential real estate investment trust (REIT) were primarily driven by higher same store net operating income (NOI) and NOI from non-same store properties presently in lease up. However, the positives were marred by the dilution impact from the companys 2016 asset sales.



Total revenue generated during the reported quarter was $619.1 million, reflecting a decline of 7.1% from the prior-year period. The figure also missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $648 million.



Quarter in Detail



Same-store revenues (includes 73,222 apartment units) increased 4.6% year over year to $547.7 million, while expenses remained flat at $162.7 million. As a result, same-store NOI grew 6.6% year over year to $385.0 million.



The company experienced a 4.6% increase in average rental rates to $2,500 per apartment unit, while occupancy edged down 10 basis points year over year to 95.9% for the same-store portfolio.



Equity Residential exited first-quarter 2016 with cash and cash equivalents of $368.0 million, up from $42.3 million at 2015-end.



Portfolio Activity



Importantly, during the first quarter, Equity Residential accomplished the sale of 23,262 apartment units to controlled affiliates of Starwood Capital Group for $5.365 billion. The move helped the company to generate an economic gain of around $2.0 billion and an unlevered internal rate of return (Unlevered IRR) of 11.3%.



Moreover, the company sold eight other consolidated apartment properties (2,900 apartment units) for a total of around $950.0 million. Together, these dispositions led to an economic gain of $2.4 million and unlevered IRR of 11.8%.



The assets sales led the company to pay a special dividend to shareholders of $8 per common share, aggregating around $3.0 billion, in the first quarter. Moreover, the company used the proceeds from asset sales to retire around $2.0 billion of existing debt, a large part of which was slated to mature in 2016 and 2017.



On the other hand, Equity Residential purchased a property each in Seattle, Los Angeles and Brooklyn, NY for a total of $204.1 million.



2016 Outlook



For second-quarter 2016, Equity Residential expects normalized FFO per share in a range of 7478 cents. The Zacks Consensus Estimate is currently pegged at 78 cents.



For full-year 2016, Equity Residential projects its normalized FFO per share in a range of $3.05$3.15 against the prior guidance of $3.00$3.20. The Zacks Consensus Estimate of $3.12 falls within this range.



Full-year 2016 guidance is backed by physical occupancy of 95.9% (prior guidance was 96.0%), revenue change of 4.55.0% (4.55.25% guided earlier) and NOI change of 5.06.0% (against the prior projection of 5.06.5%) at its same-store properties.



Our Viewpoint



For Equity Residential, the assets sales are expected to help in focusing exclusively on its core, high-density urban markets. However, the earnings dilution impact from such a move is impossible to avoid in the near term. Moreover, the rise in supply in the East Coast remains a concern.



Equity Residential currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Investors interested in the apartment REIT industry may consider stocks like Essex Property Trust Inc. ESS, Mid-America Apartment Communities Inc. MAA and Select Income REIT SIR. All these stocks carry a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



Note: FFO, a widely used metric to gauge the performance of REITs, is obtained after adding depreciation and amortization and other non-cash expenses to net income.



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There is a bookstore in south Mumbai that has a special section, separate from history, politics or literature. One simply titled Writings by and about Mahatma Gandhi. India loves this founding father; in almost every city, you will find a road named after him.

But one particular founding fathers legacy is slightly more complicated for the country. Plenty of streets carry his namesake too, but there is no section of that bookstore named for B. R. Ambedkar  the man who led the writing of an independent Indias constitution, who didnt often get along with Gandhi. To find the inheritors of Ambedkar, you have to rifle around a bit. Look for them under the category of Dalit Literature  Dalit refers to the untouchable caste, the one referring to people so low on the social strata that they were officially not even included in the four rungs of the Hindu caste system. They span the many languages  Hindi, Bangla, Telugu  and the religions, since even converting away from Hinduism hasnt saved many from their stigma. There are poets and novelists and essayists and theorists; there are more available on the shelves than there once were, though still the numbers are small.

S. Anand, founder of anti-caste publishing house Navayana, says that after more than 10 years in the business, his outfit  the go-to for most texts on caste in the country  is sustainable at last. The odd book, he says, sells over 10,000 copies. (In India, a huge divide remains between literary and commercial fiction  the latter sells in the millions; the former in the thousands.) You can see Dalit voices springing up more, at a time when India is embroiled in debates over institutionalized discrimination, and as the horrifying statistics estimated by human-rights groups persist (each week, 21 Dalit women are raped, 5 Dalit homes are burned and 13 Dalits are murdered). It seems inevitable that literary voices would emerge to make sense of it all. The awareness is increasing, definitely, says Anand Teltumbde, a left-of-center writer and columnist who often comments on Dalit issues in the Indian press.

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He dates that kind of Harlem Renaissance in Dalit literature to the 1960s and 1970s in Maharashtra  the state that houses Mumbai  and the rise of radical groups like the Dalit Panthers, modeled after the Black Panthers.

The presence of Dalit voices isnt new; indeed, some of Indias richest literary traditions come from Dalit writers, like Bhakti, devotional poetry, says Anand. But Dalit work is appearing in a new manifestation, says acclaimed Dalit Hindi-language writer Ajay Navaria, whos also had his work translated and published in Australia. Navaria, author of Unclaimed Terrain, among other books, tells OZY over email (though his spoken English lacks any audible flaw, he preferred to communicate in his second language in writing) that the first iteration of Dalit literature was about rural realities and atrocities. Today, more urban-dwelling writers are emerging, ones who Navaria believes can stage a protest in a stronger fashion. Some authors of this next generation, he writes, havent faced untouchability or physical violence as the previous generation had faced. There are cops and courts and human-rights groups; educated and progressive non-Dalits also support them. But in cities, one can feel that there is a disguised kind of hatred, he adds. (In many villages, Jim Crowstyle rule of law remains the norm, with Dalits kept segregated and abused for crossing implicit boundaries, Anand says.)

To offer an American parallel, this storyline of the evolution of Dalit literature sounds not unlike the tumbling on of Black literature  from slave narratives that were political just by virtue of being written to the rise of urban poets and playwrights in the Harlem Renaissance to today, when even discussing Black literature as a monolith seems clearly problematic. Anand dates that kind of Harlem Renaissance in Dalit literature to the 1960s and 1970s in Maharashtra  the state that houses Mumbai  and the rise of radical groups like the Dalit Panthers, modeled after the Black Panthers. A few decades later, in the 1990s, Anand says the country started to remember Ambedkar at the 100th anniversary of his birth, and the writings and biography of this founding father whose eloquence and careful fury both bear some resemblance to James Baldwin became a rallying point. Before, the government had reduced him to postage stamps, Anand says.

Bash them, kick them,

skin these bastards alive!

God is one, they claim

but build a different temple on each street.

We are all Gods children, they say,

yet they shrink from us holeya as if were snakes.

No entry for us to their inns, their wells, their houses.

But dogs that lick our shit may share their rooms.

They eat what we grow, take the sweat of our brow.

Its only us people they shun

excerpted from A Song, by Karnataka poet Siddalingaiah, which appeared in Steel Nibs Are Sprouting: New Dalit Writing from South India

Its fitting that one of Navayanas bestselling projects, Anand says, is an Ambedkar text, specifically, a seminal, uncompromising, radical speech he was never able to deliver in real life, called The Annihilation of Caste, which Navayana released with meaty annotations and commentary from Booker Prizewinning novelist Arundhati Roy. Unfortunately, Anand says, because a similar venture by a Dalit author doesnt capture people in the tens of thousands yet, even to get people to Ambedkar, you need Arundhati Roy.

And some might say that even getting people to read Ambedkar  a historical figure, no longer around to lead the troops himself  or to write with Ambedkar coursing through their veins is not enough. The political realities of protection for Dalits, or lack thereof, says Teltumbde, are patchwork. And literature? Yes, literature is there, he says. But I dont think any impact is there  only that it makes you weep. Teltumbde worries too much Dalit literature is poetry, which he calls a sophisticated way of crying over your situation. Dalits, he says, need to introspect and relate to the soil that theyre standing on.

The good news, in his view, is that prose can do this  essays, fervent, relatable stuff. Which recalls what Ambedkar wrote in Annihilation: The entire destiny of a country depends on its intellectual class  and, we might add, what they have on their bookshelves.

Related Articles
From Delish

For most kids, a lemonade stand is a fun way to make a few bucks on a hot summer day, but a young boy from Springfield, Missouri was hoping for much more when he set up his stall. Nine-year-old Tristan Jacobson started selling cups of lemonade, bottled water and cookies last weekend in hopes of raising money to fund his own adoption.

Tristan had a tough upbringing from the time he was a baby-his biological mother was allegedly involved with drugs and his father was sentenced to 22 years in prison on a federal gun charge. After years of neglect, the boy was dropped off at a local homeless shelter at age 4, and Donnie Davis has been taking care of the boy since with help from her husband Jimmy.

After living with Davis over the last five years, Tristan considers her to be his mother, but expensive legals fees have made it difficult for the Davis family to move forward with an official adoption. Tons of people from the community stopped by Tristan's lemonade stand over the weekend, and Fox61 reports that, along with a yard sale, the stand raised about $7,100-it's safe to say, many people paid more than $1 per glass. Thanks to attention from the media, an additional $21,000 has also been donated through a crowdfunding page on YouCaring.com. Davis says that the extra money will go toward his college education.

She posted a message on Tristan's Adoption Fund fundraising page to express her gratitude to all the donors:

WOW.... This past week has just been amazing... I want to say thank you to each and every person that has helped us with our adoption. I can't believe that this is real. I'm just speechless (and that doesn't happen often :-) ) Tristan did an interview this morning and they asked him, why is the adoption important to you. He responded saying.... This is my dream, I love my mom.

Let's raise a cold glass of pink lemonade to Tristan and his family-we love a story with a sweet ending! And if you ask us, this one is definitely more newsworthy than the lemonade that Beyonce is selling.

[h/t CNN]

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Lego-lead

If you're a LEGO fan and have been lucky enough to travel overseas, you'll notice the company's certified stores are an incredible mecca to the popular toy brick.

Decked out with a large range of sets, plus a section with all the LEGO pieces you need to make your dreams come true, it's a fantasy that has only played out as a foreign romance.

SEE ALSO: Sneakers made of only legos are perfect for playtime and game time

Now, it's finally Australia's turn. The country's first certified LEGO store will be at Gold Coast theme park Dreamworld, with construction to begin in July 2016 and an opening slated for November in the same year. Praise the LEGO gods.

lego

Image: lego

The new store will cover an area of 350 square metres and be the theme park's largest retail outlet, which you can access from inside and outside the theme park. No need to ride a rollercoaster to get your LEGO fix.

A LEGO lover's paradise, you'll not only be surrounded by people who are as obsessed with the toy brick as much as you are, but the store will also hold workshops so you can elbow small children out of the way to get your fix.

The official LEGO outlet will also stock exclusive sets and the knick-knacks that are hard to come by at other toy stores. Think key rings, books and the shirts that will make one's LEGO addiction all too real.

Undying LEGO fandom, here we come.
John Boehner represents "everything wrong and corrupt in Washington," Ted Cruz told reporters Thursday, striking back at the former House speaker, who said Cruz was "Lucifer in the flesh."

"I've never had any substantive conversation with Boehner in any respect," the GOP presidential hopeful said at a news conference in Indiana.

"So when he says I'm the worst guy he's ever worked with, he's never worked with me. John Boehner's remarks reveal everything that's wrong and corrupt about Washington, everything you're angry with. When John Boehner calls me Lucifer, he's not directing that at me. He's directing it at you."

Cruz's comments came a day after Boehner shared some choice words about the presidential candidates during an appearance at Stanford University.

When asked about the Texas senator, fellow Republican Boehner said: "Lucifer in the flesh," according to The Stanford Daily. "I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life."

Boehner also impersonated Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton , saying, "Oh I'm a woman, vote for me." Boehner called Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders a nice guy and said this about John Kasich : The Republican governor of Boehner's home state "requires more effort on my behalf than all my other friends  but he's still my friend, and I love him."



Boehner, who retired from Congress last fall, didn't leave himself out of the name calling: "You can call me boner, beaner, jackass, happy to answer to almost anything," he said, according to the Daily. He said would vote for "texting buddy" Donald Trump if Trump wins the GOP nomination.



Boehner's speaking agency and the Clinton and Kasich campaigns did not immediately reply to CNBC's request for comment.

















More From CNBC


HAMBURG (Reuters) - Germany's biggest airline, Lufthansa (LHAG.DE). confirmed its 2016 earnings forecast as slightly ahead of last year's, Chief Executive Carsten Spohr told investors at the company's annual general meeting.

Partially boosted by low jet fuel prices, Lufthansa had a good start into the new year, Spohr said, but added that costs at the German unit, Lufthansa German Airlines, were still too high and had to be reduced.

Spohr also said that a planned joint-venture with Air China has not yet come to an agreement.

(Reporting by Peter Maushagen; Writing by Tina Bellon, editing by Vera Eckert)
Nikhil Puthran

Mahindras Bolero Pik-up gets a new sibling  the Big Bolero Pik-up which has been launched at Rs 6.15 lakh (BS-III variant) (ex-showroom, Pune). Its BS-IV trim has been introduced at Rs 6.30 lakh. As the name suggests, this is indeed a larger cargo carrying variant of the regular Bolero Pik-up.



The new Mahindra Big Bolero Pik-up has a cargo bay measuring 2,765mm which is about 485mm longer than the regular variant. The Indian automaker has offered the vehicle in two payload options  1,250kg and 1,500kg. Moreover, it is available in CBC (Cowl Body Chassis) variant which allows customers to build the cargo area as per needs.



The Mahindra Big Bolero Pik-up is powered by a 2.5-litre MDI diesel engine which is mated to a five-speed manual transmission. The engine generates two different power outputs - 62bhp of power at 3,200rpm in the BS-III variant and 70bhp at 3,200rpm in the BS-IV variant. The Big Bolero Pik-up is not available in four-wheel drive option for now. The company has offered 3 years, unlimited km warranty for the Big Bolero Pik-up BS-III variant, while the BS-IV variant gets an engine immobilizer and comes with a 1 year, unlimited km warranty.



For convenience, Mahindra has offered a power steering for easy navigation. As for the interiors, the new Mahindra Big Bolero Pik-up gets a decent amount of upgrades in form of bucket seat with sliders, magazine pocket, recliners and headrests, mobile holder and a charging point. Seat belts have been provided for both the driver and the co-occupant.

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Ninad Ambre

Mahindra & Mahindra has started exporting their KUV100 to right-hand drive markets like South Africa, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Over 400 units of the rugged-looking hatchback have been shipped.

Mahindra had earlier confirmed that the KUVs demand in different countries will determine the volume of exports. Currently, South Africa seems to be the volume-spinning market as export data shows that 220 units have been shipped there this month. We can expect more cars to be exported from the Bombay Port, as the carmaker had ramped up the production of the KUV100 to 8,500units in February. The increase in the production is to support the internal and export demand.

Mahindras plan of boosting the KUV100s sales has worked well. The vehicle has found a good demand not just in the domestic market but overseas as well. The unique proposition of a sporty looking car competing with the hatchbacks and the crossovers paved the way to success for the KUV100. The aggressive price of the car further increased the demand and gave the sales numbers a good momentum.

Mahindra exports KUV100 to right-hand drive markets

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Mallinckrodt plc MNK is set to report second-quarter fiscal 2016 results on May 3.

The companys track record has been impressive so far. It has beaten estimates in all of the last four quarters, with a positive average earnings surprise of 12.2%. Lets see how things are shaping up for this announcement.

Factors Influencing this Quarter

Concurrent with its first-quarter earnings call, Mallinckrodt upped its 2016 outlook for adjusted earnings per share to the $7.85$8.30 band from the previous projection of $7.70$8.20.

Acthar is projected to grow around the lower end of the mid-single to low double-digit range. On the reimbursement front, the company is working to increase the commercial coverage of Acthar with major payers, which, in turn, will boost sales. The commercial coverage for Acthar currently stands at about a third of the total eligible patient population in the U.S., as per the contract with key payers.

Growth rate for Inomax will be higher for fiscal 2016 on a year-over-year basis.

Meanwhile, Mallinckrodt has integrated Therakos into its hospital franchise, and expects significant commercial and development synergies from the transaction. We note that the company acquired Therakos Inc. in Sep 2015 in a bid to broaden its footprint in hospitals. This is the first full quarter, wherein Therakos will contribute to performance. The company expects historical rates of high single-digit revenue growth to continue in the near term, as the integration moves ahead.

Ofirmev volumes had experienced a trough in May 2015, but later rebounded. Mallinckrodt expects long-term annual net sales of at least $500 million from Ofirmev. The company signed a few contracts in fiscal 2015 and hence does not expect negative pricing impact on growth rates in fiscal 2016. In fact, Ofirmev is projected to rebound to year-over-year revenue growth in the second half of fiscal 2016 driven by penetration into existing accounts, along with new account gains and the recapture of volume and formulary status in other key accounts.

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Moreover, the acquisition of hemostasis drugs  Recothram Thrombin topical (recombinant), PreveLeak, and Raplixa (fibrin sealant)  from The Medicines Co. MDCO will diversify Mallinckrodts pain management franchise and strengthen its growing hospital portfolio. The company expects to launch PreveLeak and Raplixa in the second half of 2016.

We also expect investor focus on pipeline candidate, terlipressin injection, which being evaluated for the treatment of Hepato-Renal Syndrome Type 1 (HRS 1). The company currently plans to initiate the study later this year.

However, the company expects seasonality to continue in fiscal 2016, which would hurt gross profit.

What Our Model Indicates

Our proven model does not conclusively show that Mallinckrodt is likely to beat earnings this quarter. That is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), #2 (Buy) or #3 (Hold) to be able to beat estimates. However, that is not the case here, as you will see below.

Zacks ESP: The Earnings ESP, which represents the difference between the Most Accurate estimate and the Zacks Consensus Estimate, is -1.74%. This is because the Most Accurate estimate currently stands at $1.69, while the Zacks Consensus Estimate is pegged higher at $1.72.

Zacks Rank: Mallinckrodt currently has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). As it is, we caution against stocks with Zacks Ranks #4 or #5 (Sell-rated stocks) going into the earnings announcement, especially when the company is seeing a negative estimate revision momentum.

Stocks That Warrants a Look

Here are a couple of health care stocks that you may want to consider instead, as our model shows that both have the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter:

The Earnings ESP for Sanofi SNY is +4.17% and it carries a Zacks Rank #2. The company is scheduled to release first-quarter results on Apr 29.

AstraZeneca PLC AZN has an Earnings ESP of +5.00% and a Zacks Rank #3. The company is set to report first-quarter earnings results on Apr 29.

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Someone's been eating out of my bowl!

Read: Meet Beryl, The 9-Month-Old Cow That Broke Into a Home and Made Herself Comfortable



When Nik Godhani from New Jersey peeked out his window at 6:15 a.m., he was shocked to see a bear helping himself to a quick meal in the bird feeder.



Godhani told InsideEdition.com that he normally sleeps with his windows open and awoke last week to the sound of a gate being opened. He originally expected he would see a person.

He walked down to his kitchen to investigate the noise, when suddenly he came face-to-face with the intruder, who was pressed against the sliding glass door.



"That's when I discovered our pretty big friend -- a huge black bear on two feet eating from the bird feeder hanging from the deck," Godhani told IE.com, joking, "he was getting the 'bear' essentials."

Though the man said the bear looked friendly, his cat sure didn't seem to agree. He told IE.com that by the time he spotted the bear, his cat was already making the mad dash to hide in his bedroom.

Godhani hung around anyway to take photos of his furry neighbor.

He said he's seen bears before, but only during hikes, and never in the neighborhood he has lived in for two years.

"There's no way I can get to work on time," he remembered his brother Rik saying when he woke up to the bear.

Read: Bear Leads Cops On Wild Chase Across Busy Roads And A College Campus

As for the bear, Godhani watched him destroy the bird feeder from inside the Denville house for about five or 10 minutes before he scurried away on his own.

But Godhani's love for birdwatching continues. He told IE.com that even though the bear ruined their bird feeder, he has already bought a new one to put up once he is sure the bear has left the neighborhood.

Godhani is even going to change the seed mixture in the hopes it will not be as tempting to unwelcome wildlife.

Watch: Mama Bear and Her Cubs Have the Time of Their Lives as They Take a Dip in Backyard Pool

Story continues

Related Articles:
(Adds details on device, condition of suspect)

April 28 (Reuters) - A man wearing a white panda suit who allegedly made a bomb threat at Fox Television's Baltimore affiliate on Thursday was shot and wounded by police outside the building, authorities said.

Three Baltimore police officers opened fire on the man as he emerged from WBFF and ignored police orders to take his hands out of his pockets, police spokesman T.J. Smith told a news conference. The suspect was in serious but stable condition at a hospital.

Smith said the man had "displayed something that appeared to be wires and some other things inside his jacket that appeared to be some kind of explosive device." The device turned out to be composed of harmless materials, including chocolate candy bars wrapped in tin foil, he said.

WBFF reported on its website that the suspect, described by police as a 25-year-old man from Howard County, Maryland, broke into the station demanding that it cover a story about an unspecified government conspiracy. The station said the suspect made a bomb threat during the incident.

WBFF, which is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, said a bomb robot scanned the man for nearly an hour before officers removed his clothing, picked him up and carried him to an armored police vehicle.

Station News Director Mike Tomko said on the station's website that the man was wearing a white, one-piece panda suit with a surgical mask and sunglasses.

"He had a flash drive, said he had information he wanted to get on the air. He compared it to the information found in the Panama Papers," Tomko said, referring to a massive leak of offshore financial data. "Apparently he had made some threats before."

A brief video on the station's website showed the man walking out of the station. No police or station employees were injured.

The station said it evacuated the building after the bomb threat and a car fire outside. It said firefighters put out a fire in the gas tank of the car, which authorities said was associated with the suspect, in the station's parking lot.

Authorities have not determined a motive for the suspect's behavior and said he was not cooperating with the police investigation.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington; Additional reporting by Curtis Skinner; Editing by Leslie Adler and Peter Cooney)
Mexican rock superstars Mana will perform at the White House on May 5, at the presidential Cinco de Mayo celebration.

The Mexican superstars, who are up for seven prizes at the Billboard Latin Music Awards tonight (April 28), have been outspoken critics of presidential candidate Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant policies over the past year. The members of Latin rock's most successful band showed their support for the undocumented population in the United States by recording a version of Los Tigres del Norte's immigrant anthem "Somos Mas Americanos," which is included on the group's latest album, Cama Incendiada.

Mana kicks off its "Latino Power Tour" Sept. 9 in San Diego. The musicians will travel throughout the U.S. until just after election day in November. The tour is being billed as a call to vote for Latinos nationwide.

The Cinco de Mayo performance will be the group's third appearance playing for Obama; they last performed at the President's inaugural ball in 2013.
Baltimore City Sate's Attorney Marilyn Mosby changed the course of the national debate about race and police misconduct last year after bringing swift and severe charges against police officers in connection with the police in-custody death of Freddie Gray. Their trials are still ongoing. In an exclusive interview with the 11 News I-Team, Mosby spoke about her ongoing efforts to tear down the barriers of mistrust between the community and police.
It looks like the aftermath of an air disaster but this huge dent on the nose of a plane actually occurred after it collided with a bird.

And while it may look pretty bad, none of the 156 people onboard the American Airlines flight to Texas were seriously hurt after the incident at roughly 3.30pm yesterday.

But the flight was cancelled and the Airbus 321 abandoned plans to travel to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, instead travelling back to Seattle Airport.

Describing the incident to air traffic control, the pilot reportedly said: Looks like we hit some birds after takeoff. Were gonna need to go back and have the airplane looked at.

American Airlines has since confirmed that Flight 2310 was forced to make the unexpected landing at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport due to a bird strike, which struck the nose of the aircraft.

Spokesman Ross Feinstein said: Our maintenance team is currently evaluating the aircraft.

The passengers onboard were eventually taken to Texas on another aircraft.
Donald Trump

"Today" show host Matt Lauer confronted Donald Trump over his recent comments on Hillary Clinton "playing the woman's card," asking on Thursday if he cares that most women in the US view him negatively.

Lauer suggested that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz might be trying to appeal to female voters by announcing former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his running mate if he were to win the Republican nomination for president.

"You, on the other hand, seem to continue to say things that alienate women voters," Lauer said, citing Trump's recent comments accusing Clinton, the all-but-certain Democratic nominee, of "playing the woman's card" as she campaigns for her party's presidential nomination.

"Seventy percent of women in this country say they have a negative view of you," Lauer said, referring to a Gallup poll. "Do you even care?"

"Of course I care. Nobody respects women more than I do. And I wasn't playing the woman's card, it's true," Trump said.

He continued:

I mean, she is playing the woman's card. Everything she says is about the woman's card. And, frankly, all I'm doing is bringing out the obvious. And without the woman's card, Hillary would not even be a viable person to even run for a city-council position.

Lauer asked Trump if he thought that women in the US vote based simply on gender.

"Well, I don't think they vote on gender, no. I think they vote for security, I think they vote for jobs, and that's why I'm doing so well," Trump said.

He cited exit polls showing him leading with female voters, though those surveyed only Republicans who went to the polls.

Cohost Savannah Guthrie cut in and told Trump that him saying Clinton would get only 5% of the vote if she were a man suggests that the only thing she has going for her is that she's a woman.

"Not that she was a former senator, a former secretary of state, and a lawyer," Guthrie said. "Do you understand why some people find that to be kind of a demeaning comment?"

Story continues

Trump responded:

No, I find it to be a true comment. I think that the only thing she's got going is the fact that she's a woman. She has done a terrible job in so many different ways. You look at Libya, you look at some of the things that she's done are just absolutely disasters. Now I would say the primary thing that she has going is that she's a woman and she is playing that card like I have never seen anybody play it before.

Trump is the undisputed frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Cruz and the other Republican candidate still in the race, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, won't be able to secure the nomination through state-primary contests alone.

They're both hoping for a contested convention, which could happen if no candidate reaches the necessary 1,237 delegates before July. In that case, many convention delegates would become "unbound" to Trump in later rounds of convention voting, giving Cruz or Kasich a potential boost in support.

Here's the full interview on NBC's "Today" show:





More From Business Insider


Mead Johnson Nutrition Company MJN reported first-quarter 2016 results with adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of 87 cents beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 3.6%. Adjusted earnings, however, deteriorated from the prior-year quarter number by 20%.

Including the impact of certain one-time items, reported net earnings came in at $72.7 million or 39 cents per share, down 64.9% or 61.8% year over year, respectively.

Net Sales

Net sales in the reported quarter totaled $962.1 million, down 12% year over year (down 6% at constant exchange rate or CER). The top line however comfortably beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $945 million.

Volume adversely affected sales in the reported quarter by 8%. Foreign exchange also hurt sales by 6%. However, pricing had a positive impact of 2% on first-quarter sales.

Segments in Detail

Currently, the company has three reportable segments  Asia, Latin America and North America/Europe.

Sales in Asia (representing 52% of total sales) declined 14% year over year (down 9% at CER) to $500.6 million. While volume affected this segments revenues by 9%, foreign exchange impacted sales by 5%. More challenging market dynamics and market share losses experienced in the second and third quarter of 2015 primarily affected results at this segment. In China, increased price-based promotion and a shift in consumer preferences over the prior year have also impacted sales.

In Latin America (19%), sales dropped 22% year over year (down 6% at CER) to $160.3 million. Foreign exchange hurt growth at this segment by 16% while volume had a 13% impact. However, pricing gains in the overall segment contributed 7% growth to this segments sales, which partially offset the negatives. Higher sales of premium infant products in most markets also contributed to this segments sales growth of 7%; excluding Venezuela.

In North America/Europe (28%), sales dropped 3% (down 1% at CER) to $301.2 million, on account of foreign exchange that marred sales growth by 2% and volume had an impact of 1%. Market share pressure and increased competitive activities in the U.S. primarily affected this segments performance.

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Margins

Adjusted gross margin during the reported quarter was 64.1%, in line with the prior-year quarter figure as decline in cost of sales was offset by a lower sales figure.

Adjusted operating margin deteriorated 180 bps year over year to 25.4%, on account of a 5% rise in adjusted advertising and promotion expenses. However, adjusted selling, general and administrative expenses fell 15% and adjusted research and development expenses contracted 2%.

Balance Sheet and Cash Flow

Mead Johnson exited the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $1.70 billion, in line with the equivalent figure at the end of 2015. Long-term debt was $3.02 billion, compared with $2.98 billion of Dec 31, 2015. As of Mar 31, 2016, the company generated operating cash flow of $160.1 million, against the year-ago quarters equivalent of $274.5 million.

Updated Guidance

Mead Johnson reiterated its guidance for full-year 2016. The company expects to deliver adjusted EPS of $3.48$3.60, based on the current exchange rates. Meanwhile, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for EPS is pegged at $3.51, within the company's guided range.

At the top-line front, the company expects year-over-year sales growth of 0-2% at CER. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for revenues lies at $3.89 billion.

Our Take

Mead Johnson embarked on a promising journey this year, posting square beats in the first quarter of 2016. However, the company performance disappointingly on a year-over-year basis with each of its segments registering a sales decline. The companys business in Venezuela was a particular drag.

On a brighter note, management seemed encouraged with Mead Johnsons progress in its Chinese business during the quarter, with the company's fully imported product line accounting for 45% of total sales in China. However, on account of the adoption of a product innovation strategy, the company had to incur higher advertising and promoting expenses in the nation. Foreign currency exchange also had a significant impact on Mead Johnsons first-quarter results, particularly in China, Mexico and Argentina.

Zacks Rank & Key Picks

Mead Johnson presently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Better-ranked medical stocks are NuVasive, Inc. NUVA, Orthofix International N.V. OFIX and Boston Scientific Corp. BSX. While Nuasive and Orthofix sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), Boston Scientific carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

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A man who says he was Melania Trumps first ever boyfriend has given a glimpse of her humble teenage years in Slovenia.

It was my first love, Peter Butoln told INSIDE EDITION of Melania. My first real love.

Melania was born in the small town of Sernica -- population 5,000 -- but met Butoln when she moved to the capital city, Ljubljana, to attend an elite high school when she was just 17.

Read: Could Melania Trump Be the 'Jackie O of the 21st Century'?

Butoln told IE that he approached Melania after spotting her walking in the city center.

I saw her in a crowd of girls and she was the most beautiful girl, he recalled.

When they spoke, he continued to be impressed. She was very calm, very peaceful, very modest, he said.

They hung out at Melanias modest apartment in a government housing project. Butoln took IEs Steven Fabian to the building, which today looks drab.

The apartment has since been renovated into a modern living space  but it is still a far cry from Melania's life of luxury at Trump Tower.

Butoln said his relationship with Melania ended when he left for the army. They never saw each other again.

The last he heard from her was in 1987, when she sent him a postcard shortly after their split.

I send you this postcard with nice warm regards from the seaside, she wrote on the card, which Butoln has kept.

A spokesperson for Melania Trump says he was never her boyfriend.

Read: 'First Women' Author: Melania's Modeling Past Could Help The Trump Campaign

After Butoln went away to the army, Melania was discovered by a photographer. She dropped out of college to become a model and traveled to New York, where she met Donald Trump at a party in 1998.

They returned to Slovenia, where Trump asked Melanias father for permission to marry her as they dined at a luxury lakeside hotel in her hometown. A photo of the couple is proudly displayed in a glass case in the hotel.

Story continues

Melania  born Melania Knauss in 1970 -- lived in a 4th floor, 3-bedroom apartment in the town with her parents and sister. Her neighbors and former classmates speak fondly of their famous former resident, recalling her talents for art and fashion.

Now they wonder if her journey will take her to the White House.

Watch: The Most Surprising Things From Melania First Solo Interview

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(Adds comment from Merck)

By Brendan Pierson

April 27 (Reuters) - A federal judge has granted preliminary approval for a lawsuit accusing Merck & Co Inc of underpaying female sales representatives to go forward as a collective action.

The lawsuit is seeking at least $250 million in damages.

U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp in Trenton, New Jersey, on Wednesday granted conditional certification to a proposed class of current and former representatives under the federal Equal Pay Act, which requires women and men to be paid equally for the same work.

The complaint alleges that Merck systematically paid female sales representatives less than their male peers, denied them promotions and subjected them to sexual harassment and an otherwise hostile work environment.

Employees who become pregnant or have children were often pressured to leave the company, the complaint says.

A collective action under the Equal Pay Act requires potential class members to opt in, unlike a traditional class action in which class members must opt out. Shipp's order allows notices to be sent to potential members so they can opt in.

The class includes women who worked in certain sales representative positions going back to 2009. It would still require final approval later in the case for class members to win damages.

However, Shipp ruled that the four former sales representatives who brought the lawsuit had already made a "modest factual showing" of how Merck's policies affected them and other employees similarly.

"We're glad that women across the country are going to have an opportunity to join this case," said Russell Kornblith, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

"We remain confident that this case lacks merit," Merck said in a statement emailed by spokeswoman Lainie Keller. "The company will continue to vigorously defend itself, and remains fully committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all employees."

The lawsuit, filed in 2013 in New Jersey U.S. District Court, also includes claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The plaintiffs are seeking to bring those claims as a class action, though no class has yet been certified.

The case is Smith et al v. Merck & Co Inc, U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey, No. 3:13-cv-02970.

(Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by David Gregorio)
Mexico City (AFP) - Three federal police officers and two soldiers will face trial on torture charges after a video surfaced showing a woman being nearly suffocated with a bag, authorities said Wednesday.

The case is the latest allegation of torture against the country's security forces amid a relentless drug war.

The video, which circulated on social media, shows a policewoman placing a bag over the woman's head while she is being interrogated.

A female soldier also points the muzzle of her assault rifle on the head of the woman, who sobs as she sits barefoot on a dirt floor.

Officials say the video captures an incident that took place in February 2015 in the town of Ajuchitlan del Progreso, in the southern state of Guerrero.

The defense ministry, which arrested the two soldiers on charges of disobeying orders, says it only learned about it last December.

In addition to the policewoman, two male officers were charged, the attorney general's office said in a statement.

The defense ministry has said that the troops were an army captain and the female soldier.

The heads of Mexico's military and National Security Commission, which oversees the federal police, issued rare apologies over the incident.

Rights groups say the video shows that torture remains a technique for authorities to obtain coerced confessions.
Mexico City (AFP) - Mexico's head of criminal investigations faced calls to be fired as the attorney general's office launched a probe into his handling of a crime scene in the disapperance of 43 students.

The inspector general opened an investigation on Wednesday into officials present at a river in southern Guerrero state on October 28, 2014, the attorney general's office said in a statement on Thursday.

Tomas Zeron, the head of the criminal investigations agency, was led that day by a suspect to the San Juan river, in which the burnt remains of students were allegedly tossed by a drug gang.

Foreign experts who aided the investigation slammed Zeron's conduct, saying his failure to make a written report about the visit, including the discovery of a bone, went against the "minimum international standards of investigation."

The experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights also said medical reports show that the suspect had injuries that strongly indicate he was tortured.

The lawyers from Colombia and Chile, along with a Spanish psychologist, called for Zeron's actions to be investigated prior to the official announcement.

Parents of the students and opposition lawmakers demanded that Zeron be fired.

"It was Tomas Zeron who obstructed the process, who falsified all the evidence, who made people testify without they lawyer, which violates human rights," said Marko Cortes, who leads the conservative National Action Party in the lower house of Congress.

Local human rights organizations issued a statement on behalf of the parents, saying that Zeron should be sacked "to allow an investigation into obstruction of justice."

It was the latest condemnation of the government's handling of the case, which has caused outrage in Mexico and abroad, while President Enrique Pena Nieto's approval rating has dropped.

- Investigator defends himself -

Zeron vehemently denied any misconduct late Wednesday, saying his visit to the river site was legally sound.

Story continues

He released a video showing that he was indeed at the location with a suspect on October 28 but he said no crucial evidence was found that day.

He said the bone that was discovered turned out to be that of a bird, and that a human bone was only found on October 29.

Prosecutors say Iguala city police abducted the students and delivered them to a drug gang, which killed them, incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump in the nearby town of Cocula, and tossed the remains in the river.

While the experts say an official picture shows that a bag containing a bone belonging to one student was marked "October 28," Zeron said it was a mistake by a forensic investigator and that the picture's metadata, which cannot be altered, is dated October 29.

Zeron said the presence of two officials from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights seen near the site in his agency's video showed that he was not hiding anything.

But the UN office issued a statement saying that the two officials were never taken to the river and were never aware that a suspect was there.
Mexico City (AFP) - Mexico's head of criminal investigations denied that authorities misrepresented key evidence in the disappearance of 43 students after foreign experts denounced "severe irregularities" in the case.

Tomas Zeron, head of the criminal investigations agency at the attorney general's office, on Wednesday rejected assertions that the discovery of a human bone was made at a different date than stated in official documents.

It is the latest twist in the government's much-criticized investigation into the disappearance of the 43 young men in the southern city of Iguala on September 26, 2014.

Prosecutors say police abducted the students and delivered them to a drug gang, which killed them, incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump in the town of Cocula, and tossed the remains in the nearby San Juan river.

The authorities have said that plastic bags were found in the river on October 29, 2014, containing a human bone that was later identified as belonging to one of the students, Alexander Mora.

But the experts released a scathing report on Sunday questioning the entire investigation, including "severe irregularities" regarding the handling of evidence at the river.

The commission's experts released a television reporter's video showing Zeron being led by a suspect to the river on October 28.

Zeron admitted that he was at the scene on October 28 but he insisted that the bag was found by a navy diver the next day.

The experts also released a picture, taken by the attorney general's office, showing one of the bags open with a card placed on top by investigators with the date October 28.

But Zeron said a forensic investigator wrote October 28 by mistake and that the picture's metadata, digital information that cannot be altered, shows that the photo was taken on October 29. He said authorities will examine why the card was misdated.

"The video presented by (the experts) has generated suspicions about my actions," Zeron said, adding that his actions on October 28 were legal. "Nothing is better than evidence to counter speculation."

A spokeswoman for the experts told AFP they would hold a press conference on Thursday.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / Mezzi Holdings Inc. ("MEZZI", "MEZZI BRAND GROUP" or the "Company") (TSX-V: MZI, FRA: 0MZ) is pleased to provide an update on production for its MEZZI Smart Luxury division.

As previously mentioned in its March 3, 2016 news release, MEZZI placed a summer production order for its Smart Luxury collection of tech-integrated handbags. This represents the largest single order in the Company's history and will restock some existing styles as well as produce two all-new styles. This production run is to be completed in May with a planned early June launch.

Forty stockists in North America now carry the MEZZI Smart Luxury collection and recently the brand hosted its first ever pop-up shop in Vancouver. This one-day temporary store sold out the limited remaining inventory in several of its styles and generated nearly $15,000 in sales. Based upon the success of this event, MEZZI is planning additional temporary locations in North America this summer.

MEZZI Arranges Loan Facility

The Company is pleased to announce that it has arranged a loan facility in the principal amount of $125,000. The loan is repayable within twelve months and bears interest at a rate of twelve percent per annum, payable on maturity. As partial consideration for the loan, the Company has agreed, subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange, to issue to the lenders a total of 333,333 common shares. The shares will be subject to a four-month-and-one-day statutory hold period. Use of proceeds of the loan facility includes inventory costs.

About MEZZI BRAND GROUP

MEZZI Brand Group is a Vancouver-based consumer accessory brand management company. We believe that great brands are built one great product and one valued customer at a time. We have gathered a group of young talented experts ranging from accessory design, product development, marketing, branding, e-commerce, digital media and PR to build and scale our millennial-customer focused brands. A well-defined, strategic philosophy and clear mission statement promotes and protects MEZZI Brand Group's most valuable assets - our brands - MEZZI Smart Luxury, Capital Eyewear and MLine Cases.

Story continues

For further information, please contact:

Mr. Keir Reynolds

CEO

Tel: (778) 998-9242

Email: keir@mezzi.com

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Keir Reynolds

Chief Executive Officer

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.

This news release may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors discussed in the management discussion and analysis section of our interim and most recent annual financial statement or other reports and filings with the TSX Venture Exchange and applicable Canadian securities regulations. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable laws.

SOURCE: Mezzi Holdings Inc.
Thanks to Festival Walk, Gateway Plazas solid rental uplifts.

Mapletree Greater China Commercial Trust (MGCCT)s FY16 net property income climbed 21% YoY to $277.5m, thanks to robust rental uplifts from Festival Walk (FW) and Gateway Plaza (GP).

According to a report by OCBC, MGCCT also enjoyed additional income contribution from Sandhill Plaza (SP), and the appreciation of HKD and RMB against SGD. However, the increases were partially offset by higher finance costs and management fees.

MGCCTs FY16 DPU jumped 10.8% to 7.248 S cents while gross revenue accelerated 19.7% to $336.6m. For Q4, DPU surged 10.4% YoY to 1.923 S cents on back of a 15.2% spike in gross revenue to $87.8m.

Further, MGCCT posted strong rental reversions of 37% at Festival Walks retail segment and 25% for Gateway Plazas office segment in Q1.

Of its three properties, FW and SP are fully occupied, while GPs occupancy was high at 96.8%. This put overall portfolio occupancy at 98.6%, which OCBC asserts is relatively stable from end Dec 2015s 98.7%.

Meanwhile, tenant sales and shopper traffic at FW fell 5.3% and 3.3% to HK$5.3b and HK$40.4m for FY16, respectively. Besides industry headwinds, this decline can be attributed to ongoing renovation by a new cinema operator at the mall, with operations slated to begin June this year.

Moreover, a combination of lower total borrowings and increased total assets on a sequential basis, MGCCTs aggregate leverage ratio eased 41.4% as at 31 December 2015 to 39.5%.

Looking ahead, MGCCT has already hedged more than 70% of its expected distributable income for 1HFY17 (comprising both HKD and RMB), a reflection of managements prudent approach, reports OCBC.





More From Singapore Business Review


Fox News host Megyn Kelly has added Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas and former O.J. Simpson lawyer Robert Shapiro to her Fox broadcast special, Megyn Kelly Presents.

You can expect Kelly to ask Douglas, who has battled oral cancer, about the current state of his health. This will be Shapiros first TV interview since being portrayed by John Travolta in the FX series, The People V. OJ Simpson.

The special will also feature Kellys first extensive sit-down interview with GOP frontrunner Donald Trump since the August 2015 Fox News debate that made headlines when the real estate tycoon didnt like a question from Kelly.

Also Read: Fox News' Chris Wallace: Hillary Clinton Will Be 'Great Unifier' for Divided GOP

For the first time ever, Kelly will explore how events unfolded with Trump after the encounter. She will also examine Trumps campaign for the White House to date and his role in one of the most bizarre presidential runs in modern times.

Mr. Trump and I sat down together for a meeting earlier this month at my request, Kelly said. He was gracious with his time and I asked him to consider an interview. I am happy to announce he has agreed, and I look forward to a fascinating exchange  our first sit-down interview together in nearly a year.

During the August debate, Kelly asked Trump about comments he has made over the years about women being fat pigs, dogs and disgusting animals. Trump mounted a social media offensive after the debate, calling her derogatory names and even asking for a boycott of her show, but her ratings and fame continued to rise.

Also Read: 17 Potential Donald Trump Running Mates, From Chris Christie to Sarah Palin (Photos)

Fox News boss Roger Ailes defended Kelly, even issuing a snarky, out-of-character press release regarding the situation. Trump eventually skipped a Fox News debate last fall before reuniting with Kelly for the most recent Fox News debate.

Kellys first broadcast special will air on May 17 at 8 p.m. ET. Extended portions of Megyn Kelly Presents will air on The Kelly Fileon May 18 on Fox News.

Story continues

Related stories from TheWrap:

Megyn Kelly to Interview Donald Trump for Fox TV Special

Glenn Beck Slams You-Know-Who in Megyn Kelly Letter

Chris Hayes Says Donald Trump Attacks Only Boosted Megyn Kelly's Career (Video)
The Future of Microsoft: Life after Missed Earnings in Fiscal 3Q16

(Continued from Prior Part)

Microsofts scale in the systems software space

As weve already discussed in this series, Microsoft (MSFT) recently announced its fiscal 3Q16 results. Now lets look at the value proposition of the company among select software companies in the United States.

As of April 21, 2016, Microsoft is the largest software player by market capitalization on a global scale. Its followed by Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM), Adobe (ADBE), Red Hat (RHT), ServiceNow (NOW), and Tableau Software.



Microsofts EV-to-EBITDA multiple

Now lets look at Microsofts EV-to-EBITDA (enterprise value to earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization) multiple beside that of select software players in the United States.

Microsoft was trading at a forward EV-to-EBITDA multiple of ~10.55x on April 21, 2016. This metric was lower than Red Hats and Adobes EV-to-EBITDA multiples of ~16.98x and ~16.61x, respectively. The same metric for Oracle (ORCL) and IBM (IBM) were ~9.46x and 8.80x, respectively, as of April 21.

Microsofts dividend yield

Microsofts forward annual dividend yield was ~2.6% as of April 21. This was lower than IBMs forward dividend yield of~3.5% as of April 21. Oracles forward dividend yield, by comparison, stood at ~1.5% as of April 21. Red Hat and ServiceNow do not pay dividends.

You can invest in the PowerShares QQQ Trust, Series 1 ETF (QQQ) to gain exposure to Microsoft. MSFT accounts for 8.4% of QQQ. Investors looking for application software exposure might also consider QQQ. Application software accounts for ~28.4% of QQQ.

In the next and final part of this series, well check in with what analysts are recommending for Microsofts stock.

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
By Susan Taylor TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's Goldcorp Inc on Thursday said its computer network had been compromised and the gold mining company was working to determine the scope and impact of the data breach. Vancouver-based Goldcorp's internal security team and independent technology security firms are gathering facts and informing affected employees, but Chief Executive David Garofalo said he was not overly worried. "The extent of the data breach is not of significant concern for us because we're a public company and anything of a material nature has to be in the public domain by law anyways. So we really don't have any material undisclosed information," Garofalo said in an interview. Day-to-day operations are unaffected by the hack, he added. Security teams are working on an action plan that includes preventative modifications to computer processes and increased network security at the world's third-biggest gold producer by market value. Garofalo would not say what material had been mined or whether hackers had been in contact with the company. "I don't think it's personal. I think there's a criminal element out there, unfortunately, that is making a living doing this - where they hack into computer systems globally in order to try to extort money," he said. The Daily Dot website reported on Wednesday that hackers had claimed to have "badly hacked" Goldcorp and dumped private company and employee data online. The data included what appeared to be correspondence with employees on their performance and pay rates, bank account information, budget information for 2016 and international contacts, the Daily Dot reported. Hackers are preparing more Goldcorp data dumps, the online newspaper said. "If something gets dumped, the police will look into it and we'll go from there," Garofalo said, referring to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Shares of Goldcorp, which reported better-than-expected quarterly results on Wednesday, were 5 percent higher in late session trade on Thursday. (Reporting by Susan Taylor; Editing by Andrew Hay)
(Reuters) - Authorities in Minnesota obtained a search warrant in connection with the death of pop star Prince and also won a court order to keep the findings secret, documents showed Thursday. Chief Deputy Jason Kamerud of the Carver County, Minnesota, sheriff's office cited intense media scrutiny surrounding the death of the 57-year-old performer, in his request for a state district court judge to seal the warrant. Prince, whose full name was Prince Rogers Nelson, died at his home, a compound known as Paisley Park, in suburban Minneapolis on April 21. Authorities investigating the death found prescription opioid medication on him, according to news outlets on Wednesday including CNN, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and others that cited anonymous law enforcement sources. According to documents released by Kamerud on Thursday, the search warrant was for the Paisley Park compound, where Prince also had a recording studio. In an email to Reuters, Kamerud said the search had been conducted on April 21, the day Prince's body was found. In a court order dated Thursday, state District Court Judge Eric Braaten approved sealing the results of the search for 180 days or until the beginning of court proceedings, whichever comes first. Also on Wednesday, court records showed that a judge appointed a bank to safeguard Prince's estate. (Reporting by Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento, California; Editing by Bill Trott and Cynthia Osterman)
From ELLE

Welcome to Talking Body, a series where we have honest conversations with women about their bodies. Up this week: Chelsea St. Claire. The Northwestern grad was discovered on the street by a doorman at Ford Models in Chicago, has since modeled for Lands' End, and is now a full-time med student at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine in addition to being a model. Here, the JAG face talks about being tokenized as a biracial model, dealing with having to alter her body at a shoot, and her hopes of using her experience in modeling to help young girls once she's a doctor.

I never really imagined I would start modeling. It was always something where I didn't think I had the body type for modeling. I'm in between sizes, and that's something where I just never saw a market for it as a realistic possibility. I always thought it would be fun and something I might like to try, but never actually went for it because I always thought a model was supposed to look a certain way, "straight-sized," and if you didn't fit that you didn't have a chance to model.

One of the biggest things for me during casting is when you go and you're cast for something and they want you to wear padding and do all this stuff to make you look like you're bigger than you are. If they want you to fit "plus," they'll put padding on you to make you look "plus." It's kind of just like, Well, why can't you just take me how I am? Do you know how many people out there look like me and have my body type? Why is it not okay to just have me model in the clothes like that? But there's nothing you can do about it because that market just isn't big enough. It's been frustrating at times when they don't want to take you as your body type.

You hear a lot of ads now telling people "Just be confident" or "Confidence is sexy." But, for many people, I think that's the hardest part, being confident, because starting at a young age the ideal beauty standards were so rigid. You only saw one beauty and if you didn't fit that mold, genuine self-confidence was really hard to have for many people. Telling someone to be confident is not easy. It's not easy for them to genuinely show that they are confident if they don't see people like themselves out there. How are they supposed to be confident? I think the only way to get people genuinely confident about themselves is to see more people with different body types and skin colors represented in the media and to see diversity celebrated and considered beautiful.

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I like everything about me, and it wasn't always like that growing up in a suburban, white community.

I like everything about me, and it wasn't always like that growing up in a suburban, white community. I think I compared myself a lot to people. I had a lot of petite friends. I was tall, I was always heavier than they were, and I always compared myself to them. I even went as far as putting relaxer in my really naturally ringlet-curly hair when I was younger. I did not at all think that my uniqueness was beautiful in high school. It wasn't until I got to college at Northwestern University that I was in the city with more diversity, and people noticing your uniqueness and things you didn't get celebrated for before really helped. That was when I really started getting confident in who I was.

I think it's hard to fight back clients [when they try to make me look a certain way] because a job's on the line, but you feel sometimes that you're being type-casted when they see you're a mixed girl. They want to make your hair extra curly or they say, "We only like it with your hair straight." It's like they don't want to see you with your hair natural. So you're always going to get some of that either way.

I follow a lot of the campaigns that are talking about self-love now. I liked Lane Bryant's campaign and different hashtags like #everybodyisbeautiful, and the people that are behind those have been really inspiring. They're promoting more body diversity and racial diversity and I think that's something that hasn't been around a lot before. It's just saying so much of the population looks like this and we're putting them in a beautiful light and we're going to represent that and call that beautiful because nobody else is doing that. So following those blogs, seeing those beauty standards come to life in the media from those companies, has really given hope that this can be a global movement and not just part of a campaign.

So much self-doubt and so many psychological issues could be fixed just by what's considered beautiful in the media

Oftentimes I think society is hypocritical about self love. We're told to be proud of who we are, but not too proud. Take Instagram or Facebook, for example. People won't say anything negative if you show your love for a beautiful sunset or an exotic location or post a picture of your boyfriend or your food you had for lunch. But a picture that shows self-love or confidence, you get backlash for being a person that thinks highly of themselves. It's just a really tough place to be in, for young girls especially, and to think that so much self-doubt and so many psychological issues could be fixed just by what's considered beautiful in the media. It's crazy.

Companies want to appeal now to Americans, and who makes up America? Those "token" people. It's so diverse and good to see, but sometimes it's like, Oh, that's definitely their "token" person in this ad and that ad. But what's the alternative? Not having it at all? It doesn't bother me quite as much because I think the alternative is worse: having no diversity. I think it would be nice to see people being celebrated at the size that they're at and not having to be considered straight-size or plus-size. How about this person is in between and this person is a person! There's tons of us my size out there in America and that's why we're representing this person because she isn't a size. She is a person.

I just want to make sure I'm encouraging young women that they are beautiful and their uniqueness does make them beautiful

Medical school was always the plan and I just really want to take the opportunity that I have with modeling and everything I've learned from body image and just incorporate that into my practice when I am a future doctor. I just want to make sure I'm encouraging young women that they are beautiful and their uniqueness does make them beautiful and what they think are flaws are just more things that set them apart and make them diverse. Sadly, young women just aren't feeling that like they should be and it starts from day one.

I'll be able to use my platform of medical knowledge and let patients know there's not one body type that is healthy. "Healthy" does not mean, "This is what your body has to look like." "Healthy" is making sure your arteries aren't clogged and your fat percentage is low. You can still be considered healthy and be within a wide range of body types. So, encouraging health is not encouraging one body type and that's something that hopefully, when I'm a physician, I can make clear. That would prevent so many psychological issues and worries that young girls have.
Like so many women who are bombarded with stories about how celebs "got their bodies back" after giving birth, this Australian mom felt the typical pressure to "drop the baby weight"  until a health scare gave her some much-needed perspective and made her thankful for her body just the way it is.

In an epic post on her Facebook page on Wednesday, blogger Constance Hall shared her story. "I used to be obsessed with my weight. I thought skinny was beautiful. My least favorite part of being a mum was losing the baby weight."

But that all changed when Hall discovered a lump on her breast. "I was so scared that I wouldn't be granted the privilege to raise these perfect children of mine," she wrote. "That week, I couldn't eat, yet my weight was the furthest thing from my mind."

Source: Facebook

Thankfully the lump was a cyst, and not cancer  but the frightening experience reminded Hall that losing weight shouldn't be the most important thing in her life. "When the doctor told me it was a cyst and not cancer, I was flooded with relief," Hall wrote. "I grabbed my kids so tightly and we all went out for a huge lunch with loads of food and hugs and laughter ... I was embarrassed for placing so much importance on my weight for so many years."

"Now I realize that not losing your baby weight isn't a sign of letting go, it's a sign that this queen has evolved  she's realized that life is not about a number on a scale, happiness is about gratitude and love and the privilege that is life." Hall also shared a smiling photo of herself rocking just a bra.

Hall's post clearly hit home for many  as of Thursday afternoon, it had been shared more than 7 thousand times and had thousands of comments from women sharing similar stories.

Hall blogs about parenting, body image and relationships at QueensOfConstance.com.
LONDON (Reuters) - Monarch Airlines [MONA.UL], the British airline owned by investment firm Greybull Capital, is considering acquisitions, its boss said on Thursday.

Chief Executive Andrew Swaffield told an industry audience the airline had also received interest from possible suitors but was not for sale.

"We've got our eyes open on potential acquisitions that we might be able to make ourselves with Greybull's support and we haven't denied the fact that there has been interest in us from potential acquirers," he said.

"But the 'for sale' sign is not up and as far as we're concerned our focus is on delivering a successful and sustainable profitable business."

Earlier this month Greybull appointed bankers to examine options for the airline.

There were also media reports that easyjet (EZJ.L) was considering a bid for Monarch and that Monarch was itself eyeing bid targets including Air Berlin, TuiFly (TUIT.L) and Thomas Cook Airlines (TCG.L).

(Reporting by Sarah Young, writing by James Davey; Editing by Susan Fenton)
* Moody's served notice in Hong Kong Court of Appeal this week

* Tribunal decisions are rarely taken to Court of Appeal

* Appeals typically must show the law was wrongly applied

* Court case could impact research activities in Hong Kong (Adds details, context)

HONG KONG, April 28 (Reuters) - Moody's Investor Services said on Thursday it was appealing against a tribunal decision that partly upheld regulatory action imposed for a report on Chinese companies, a rare move that could ultimately redefine the boundaries of public research reports.

A spokesman for Moody's Corp said the credit-rating firm had served notice with the Hong Kong Court of Appeal this week to overturn a March 31 ruling by the Securities and Futures Appeals Tribunal (SFAT) upholding the securities regulator's claim that Moody's broke rules governing how regulated firms should behave.

Any ruling by the Hong Kong court could redefine the limits around what can be written in research reports on public companies, potentially curtailing the activities of research firms in the financial centre.

The SFAT determined last month that Moody's breached the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) code of conduct through the publication of the July 2011 report that raised corporate governance concerns over 49 Chinese companies, contributing to a fall in their Hong Kong share prices.

The SFC alleged that Moody's had failed to ensure the accuracy of the report which it said painted a misleading picture of the companies. It was the first time the SFC had taken action against a credit-rating firm since it started regulating rating activities in June 2011

The tribunal did not uphold all of the SFC's claims against Moody's, more than halving the regulator's proposed HK$23 million ($2.97 million) fine to HK$11 million. It also directed the SFC to re-draft its public reprimand against the agency.

Only a handful of SFAT decisions have ever been appealed in the Hong Kong courts, according to lawyers. Moody's did not elaborate on the grounds for appeal, but appeals must typically make the case that the law was wrongly applied in the first instance, the lawyers said.

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One of the arguments Moody's made in its defence was that the report did not constitute a credit rating and was therefore not subject to the SFC's jurisdiction, but the SFAT did not accept this.

Hong Kong investor and corporate governance activist David Webb in a blog last month said SFAT's ruling imposed "deeply disturbing" restrictions on free speech and set too high a threshold for accuracy in research reports.

The ruling "will have a chilling effect on negative criticism of companies in Hong Kong," he said.

(Reporting by Michelle Price; Editing by Ryan Woo and Christopher Cushing)
Data compiled by Gallup shows that public approval of Congress has been stuck in mid-teens for a while, last reaching 20 percent in February 2015, shortly after Republicans took control of both chambers.

The disapproval isnt spread equally, though.

Related: Did the War for the U.S. Senate Just Tip in Favor of Democrats?

A new survey by Morning Consult finds that despite an abysmal grade for Congress overall, some senators, at least, are actually quite popular in their home states. The extensive poll asked 62,000 people in all 50 states what they thought about the job their senators are doing and found some earned high marks from their constituents, while others, unsurprisingly, did not.

Here are the top five most popular senators in America:

Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Despite of his increasingly bitter clashes with Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary  or is it because of them?  Sanders is the most popular senator in the country, with an 80 percent approval rating. He received the same amount of love in November.

Susan Collins (R-ME). One of the last remaining centrist Republicans left in the upper chamber, Collins enjoys 79 percent approval among Maine voters.

Related: Why a Trump Candidacy Threatens the GOP Majority in Congress

John Hoeven (R-ND). A popular former governor, Hoeven was elected to the Senate in 2010, crushing his Democratic opponent, 76 percent to 22 percent. The new survey found a similar level of support, with 74 percent backing Hoevens job performance.

Angus King (I-ME). Matching Hoeven with 74 percent approval, King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, is known for reaching across the aisle and working with the GOP on national security matters.

Patrick Leahy (D-VT). He trails Sanders, his Vermont colleague, in the popularity race, but 73 percent of Vermonters like Leahy, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Related: The Five Most Endangered Senate Republicans

And here are the five least popular senators in America:

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Mitch McConnell (R-KY). One of the Obama administrations best-known opponents, McConnell remains the most disliked senator in America, even among his own constituents. He won reelection with 56.2 percent of the vote in 2014, but his disapproval rate is now at 49 percent.

Pat Roberts (R-KS). Roberts squeaked past a primary challenger in 2014 and went on to beat an independent challenger to win a fourth term in office. But Kansans clearly have a long memory; only 40 percent approve of him, while 42 percent disapprove.

John McCain (R-AZ). The five-term senator and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee has had issues in his home state in recent election years. In 2014 the Arizona GOP censured the man who had been the 2008 Republican presidential nominee for his disastrous and harmful record. McCain is facing a primary challenge this year and 42 percent of Arizonans disapprove of him.

Orrin Hatch (R-UT). The most senior GOP senator and the Senate President Pro Tempore has 49 percent approval and 41 percent disapproval among his home-state voters.

Harry Reid (D-NV). Forty-five percent of constituents approve of the retiring Senate Minority Leader, while 41 percent disapprove.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
A grieving mother has been reunited with her long-lost son in China - more than two decades after he was snatched by human traffickers.

Zou Qixou, 50, had spent several years looking for son Yuan Dan, after he was abducted in the winter of 1994 from a public square in their hometown of Chaoyang County, in Central Chinas Hunan Province.

He was aged just four - leaving Zou and her husband wondering whether they would ever see him again.



The couple later had two more daughters and a second son - meaning they were unable to extend efforts to find their son.

But the familys tragic tale was to take yet another sad twist in 2001 - when Zous husband died of liver cancer without ever finding the truth about his boy.

Zou said: My husband and I were not educated; we never went to school, so we could only go from street to street searching for our son.



But after my husband died, our familys pillar collapsed, and I was left to look after our three children.

It wasnt until the beginning of this year that Zou was contacted by volunteers from a leading missing persons organisation, who told her that they may have found her son.

The organisation was initially contacted by Yuan, now 26, who found the courage to face up to the reality of his past.

Yuan said: I remember clearly the moment I was taken by kidnappers.

I thought about looking for my birth parents in the past, but I never wanted to hurt the feelings of my foster parents.

'They treated me so well over the years.

But he changed his mind in 2014 when he had his own son and realised the anguish his mother must have been going through since his disappearance.

He then contacted volunteers from Baobei Huijia and provided DNA samples, which were later matched with missing persons reports filed by Zou.

The story represents another successful ending for missing persons organisation Baobei Huijia, which has been instrumental in reuniting thousands of relatives over recent years.


MAPUTO (Reuters) - Mozambican security forces deployed on the streets of the capital Maputo on Thursday after rumors of planned anti-government demonstrations circulated on social media, witnesses said. Several anonymous messages spread via SMS and Whatsapp said groups were planning to march on Friday against government corruption, in particular secret borrowing that could cripple the economy in one of the world's poorest countries. Armored vehicles packed with police armed with automatic weapons were stationed on major street corners although there was no sign of unrest, two witnesses told Reuters. Police on Wednesday told the public not to do anything to unsettle "harmonious coexistence" in the war-scarred former Portuguese colony. "We will not tolerate any conduct that undermines the order, security and public tranquillity," a police statement said. At the root of the public anger is as much as $1.35 billion in loans taken out in secret by state companies, one of which is owned by the interior and defense ministries and state security agency. On Thursday, Britain followed the IMF and World Bank in suspending aid payments in light of a "serious breach of trust" created by the recently disclosed borrowing, which analysts say could ultimately trigger a debt default. Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario told a news conference that total foreign debt now stood at $9.89 billion, an increase of $250 million from previous estimates that takes total external borrowing to around 80 percent of GDP. According to the AIM state news agency, Rosario also said that information on the loans "should have been shared in good time with the Mozambican people and with the international cooperation partners, including the IMF and the World Bank". He blamed the previous administration of President Armando Guebuza for failing to come clean on the extent of foreign borrowing, as well as political tensions after Guebuza stepped down last year. Mozambique's currency, the metical, plunged more than 4 percent amid concerns the aid withdrawal could contribute to an already yawning current account deficit and even hinder Maputo's ambitions to develop vast off-shore gas-fields. The metical had fallen to 55 to the dollar by 6.31 a.m. ET, close to a lifetime low of 58.34 hit in late November, according to Thomson Reuters data. (Reporting by Ed Cropley and Joe Brock,; Writing by Joe Brock; Editing by Ed Osmond and Andrew Heavens)
MAPUTO (Reuters) - Mozambican security forces were deployed on the streets of the capital Maputo on Thursday after rumours of planned anti-government demonstrations circulated on social media, witnesses said. Several posts on social media in recent days said new groups were planning to demonstrate on Saturday to vent popular anger at secret government borrowing which could cripple the economy in one of the world's poorest countries. Armoured vehicles packed with police were deployed on major street corners in Maputo although there was no sign of civil unrest, two witnesses told Reuters. Police on Wednesday warned the public not to do anything to unsettle the "harmonious coexistence" in Maputo. "We will not tolerate any conduct that undermines the order security and public tranquillity," a police statement said, referring to rumours of demonstrations. The International Monetary Fund said on Saturday that Mozambique had admitted to having over one billion dollars of undisclosed debt. [nL5N17Q0CK] The World Bank suspended aid to Mozambique pending an analysis of the country's debt sustainability, a spokesman said on Wednesday. [nL5N17U8BD] (Writing by Joe Brock, editing by Ed Osmond)
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Mozambique has $9.89 billion in foreign debt, a slight increase from previous estimates of $9.64 billion, state media quoted Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario as saying on Thursday. Rosario also admitted the government should have come clean to the public, International Monetary Fund and World Bank about two loans totalling $1.157 billion to state firms Proindicus and Mozambique Asset Management, the AIM agency said. (Reporting by Ed Cropley; Editing by James Macharia)
Mubi, the curated subscription video on demand service, is seeking an upstream move into film production. It will also seek new funding of over $100 million.

The company was founded 10 years ago in Silicon Valley by Efe Cakarel and has evolved a unique business model where its platform offers only curated movie content, largely art-house, independent and festival titles. Movies are added one per day and play for only a month before being removed. Not only does that sharply reduce content acquisition costs, it also creates a a different menu from larger VoD services which license content on long term deals.

We will invest in our own produced content. It is the only way to get new content. Because if we talk to our studio partners they cannot give us their new films quickly. They have output deals with pay-TV platforms worth hundreds of millions of dollars, said Cakarel on Thursday, speaking at the APOS conference in Indonesia. To do this we plan to raise $30 million to $50 million through an off-balance sheet fund.

Cakarel said that the company currently has 100,000 subscribers, but is now growing fast and expects to reach over 2 million within a period of three years.

By 2017 we will need to raise more than $100 million of growth capital, said Cakarel. The good news is that there is plenty of capital available for fast-growing media companies. Existing shareholders include Silver Lake Capital and Working Title co-founder Eric Fellner.

Mubis movie selection process is curated by a team of human programmers in the U.S. and U.K. In all other territories selection is by computer algorithm, guided by subscriber usage data and feedback.

Earlier this year the company announced a joint venture and $40 million funding partnership with Dong Pings Huanxi Media in order to launch into China.

Cakarel said that Mubi China expects not to be tripped up by the Chinese regulatory restrictions that have recently tripped up both Apple and Disney. They are bringing their own content into China. Thats why Netflix will find it difficult to enter China, said Cakarel. You have to have a China-specific strategy, and so we will focus on Chinese content.

Story continues

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International Exec You Should Know: Mubi's Efe Cakarel

Mubi to Launch Curated VoD Service in China

Film Review: 'Junun'
Harvard Universitys graduation ceremonies could be affected by a mumps outbreak, according to a report by the schools student newspaper.

An outbreak of mumps that began in March has risen to some 41 cases as of Thursday, according to the Harvard Crimson, and health officials at the school are concerned that it could impact the schools May 26th graduation.

Health officials at Harvard have been working in conjunction with local and state health departments to keep the community informed, but Paul J. Barreira, director of Harvards Health Services, told the Crimson that he is alarmed at the high number of confirmed cases at the Cambridge, Massachusetts school.

Im actually more concerned now than I was during any time of the outbreak, Barreira told the Crimson. Im desperate to get students to take it seriously that they shouldnt be infecting one another.

Mumps is a contagious disease caused by a virus, NBC News explains, and it exhibits mild flu-like symptoms in some but can cause more serious complications in others.

Harvard is not the only school in the area reporting cases of the mumps, as Boston University, the University of Massachusetts and Tufts University have all reported cases.
By Timothy Mclaughlin and Aung Hla Tun YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar has banned lucrative logging operations as the newly-elected government of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi steps up a battle on deforestation, an environment official said on Thursday. Myanmar's rich forests are among its most valuable natural resources, but they have been plundered by logging that helped fund the former military regime that ran the country for 49 years, before reforms began in 2011. In April 2014, Myanmar banned export of raw timber logs to slow deforestation and boost its own production. By 2010, forest cover had shrunk to 47 percent of land area from 58 percent in 1990, Forestry Ministry data show. Despite the ban, illegal logging has thrived in northeast Myanmar, where valuable teak and rosewood are smuggled over the border to neighboring China, forest watchdog the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has said. "We have been reducing timber extraction, and now we have decided to stop logging completely," said John Swe Ba, a managing director at Myanmar's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation. "This measure will cover teak and other hardwoods all across the country," he added. Legal logging has also played a major role in ravaging the environment. State-owned Myanma Timber Enterprise (MTE), overseen by Swe Ba's ministry, has a monopoly on the formal timber sector, but subcontracts work to numerous companies. That body was targeted by United States sanctions until 2014, when the Treasury Department gave it an initial one-year waiver to work with the U.S.-based International Wood Products Association, extended in July 2015 for two more years. "Methods of over-harvesting include felling a greater number of logs of a particular tree species and extracting logs smaller in diameter than recommended," said the EIA, which is based in Britain. "As such, the legal forest sector practices in Myanmar are a significant contributor to deforestation and forest degradation," the watchdog added in its 2015 report. Measures are needed to save the jobs of more than 17,000 employees in government departments working on timber production, Swe Ba added, without saying what they might be. "We cant afford to let them be out of jobs overnight," he said. (Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
By Hnin Yadana Zaw and Timothy Mclaughlin (Reuters) - Hundreds of demonstrators, including Buddhist monks, denounced the United States for its use of the term Rohingya to describe Myanmar's stateless Muslim community during a protest outside of the U.S. embassy in Yangon on Thursday. The Rohingya, most of whom live in apartheid-like conditions, are seen by many Myanmar Buddhists as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and the term is a divisive topic. The demonstration was sparked by a statement from the embassy last week expressing condolences for an estimated 21 people, who media said were Rohingya, who drowned off the coast of Rakhine State and came just a day after President Htin Kyaw accepted the credentials of the new U.S. Ambassador, Scot Marciel. "Today, we, from here, want to declare to the U.S. embassy and the ambassador to Myanmar, to all the other countries, that there is no Rohingya in our country," Parmaukkha, a monk and member of the hardline Buddhist group Ma Ba Tha, told about 300 people who gathered on a busy road across from the embassy compound. "If the U.S. accepts the term 'Rohingya,' you (U.S.) should take them back to your country." The previous government referred to the group as Bengalis, implying they were illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, despite many having lived in Myanmar for generations. Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the ruling National League for Democracy party and state counselor, has drawn criticism from rights groups for avoiding using the term Rohingya and not doing enough to address their plight. Thousands have fled persecution and poverty in the country. Some 125,000 Rohingya remain displaced and face severe travel restrictions in squalid camps since fighting erupted in Rakhine between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012. Zaw Htay, spokesman at the state counselor's office, said on Thursday that the name issue was being handled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and would be addressed in a "diplomatic way" but did not provide further details. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy said the United States supports the right to demonstrate and added that "around the world, people have the ability to self-identifty". Lt. Col. Kyaw Htut, head of the western Yangon region police, said the protest organizers would face charges for holding the demonstration in an unapproved location. (Additional reporting by Aung Hla Tun; Editing by Nick Macfie)
By Timothy Mclaughlin

YANGON, April 28 (Reuters) - Scaffolding around the 139-year old Burma Railway Headquarters, a red-brick colonial relic at the centre of a half billion dollar property development in central Yangon, hasn't seen much action since the project was announced four years ago.

Serge Pun, the 63-year-old project developer and one of Myanmar's richest men, says his Landmark development - which includes office, residential and hotel space - has been strangled by red tape and costly delays all because of his adherence to clean business.

It's a frustrating contrast to the luxury and high-end property boom in other parts of the Myanmar's commercial capital.

"It has been a very long and arduous red tape road," Pun said in an interview.

"Good governance always has a price to pay and the price we are paying is a delay."

Companies and international agencies have long identified corruption and a lack of transparency as major obstacles to doing business in Myanmar.

Pun's grievances underscore the challenges the newly-elected National League for Democracy (NLD) faces as it seeks global investment for urgent development needs.

And despite his own clean credentials, Myanmar's complicated business environment means Pun has at times dealt with internationally blacklisted entities with key market positions.

Landmark, a 10 acre development, was first announced in 2012 and is one of the country's most high-profile international investments.

Despite prominent backers - including the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank that finances private ventures; Asia Development Bank and Mitsubishi Corporation - the project hasn't yet broken ground.

The latest deadline for lease extensions from the Ministry of Rail Transport, which owns the land, was missed at the end of March.

A senior ministry official said refurbishment of the old building is in progress but needed to be carried out "without affecting the heritage values."

Story continues

The official didn't comment on the status of the lease extension or explain why it had yet to be granted.

Vikram Kumar, IFC's Myanmar manager, said the lease extension delays significantly impact the project's financial viability for both debt and equity investors.

GO-TO PARTNER

For investors keen to break into the frontier market, Pun serves as a go-to partner to help navigate local complexities, notably international sanctions still in place on many Myanmar nationals and businesses.

Pun built his conglomerate, Yoma Strategic Holdings , from scratch and his business empire includes real estate, banking, aviation and cars.

Over three decades, he has become one of Asia's richest men while cultivating a reputation as "Mr Clean" in a country long known as anything but. Neither he nor his companies have been subject to international sanctions.

Companies from American fast-food chain KFC to Indonesian healthcare operator Lippo Group have partnered with him.

However, the business reality in Myanmar means some otherwise straightforward business ventures run through blacklisted companies.

One of KFC's Myanmar outlets, for example, is at the new Yangon airport terminal, which was built and run by businessman Steven Law, who is on the U.S. sanctions list.

Pun said that the deal doesn't violate sanctions because it was done through Yoma, not KFC, and that it complies with Yoma's code of conduct. U.S.-based Yum! Brands, which owns KFC, did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

U.S. Treasury said it doesn't comment on the "existence or possibility of sanctions violations."

The NLD is yet to release a plan addressing remaining sanctions, but recently slapped curbs on the value of gifts officials can accept, a small step to fulfilling its pledge to eliminate graft.

For now, U.S. sanctions still create headaches, often indirectly tying up Myanmar-related bank transfers, even if they don't involve blacklisted entities.

"When you actually try to do business, everybody doesn't understand whether you are a jade miner or not - they just say it is too troublesome to transact your fund remittance," Pun said.

(Editing by Sam Holmes)
(Adds quote from IFC representative in the 15th paragraph)

By Timothy Mclaughlin

YANGON, April 28 (Reuters) - Scaffolding around the 139-year old Burma Railway Headquarters, a red-brick colonial relic at the centre of a half billion dollar property development in central Yangon, hasn't seen much action since the project was announced four years ago.

Serge Pun, the 63-year-old project developer and one of Myanmar's richest men, says his Landmark development - which includes office, residential and hotel space - has been strangled by red tape and costly delays all because of his adherence to clean business.

It's a frustrating contrast to the luxury and high-end property boom in other parts of the Myanmar's commercial capital.

"It has been a very long and arduous red tape road," Pun said in an interview.

"Good governance always has a price to pay and the price we are paying is a delay."

Companies and international agencies have long identified corruption and a lack of transparency as major obstacles to doing business in Myanmar.

Pun's grievances underscore the challenges the newly-elected National League for Democracy (NLD) faces as it seeks global investment for urgent development needs.

And despite his own clean credentials, Myanmar's complicated business environment means Pun has at times dealt with internationally blacklisted entities with key market positions.

Landmark, a 10 acre development, was first announced in 2012 and is one of the country's most high-profile international investments.

Despite prominent backers - including the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank that finances private ventures; Asia Development Bank and Mitsubishi Corporation - the project hasn't yet broken ground.

The latest deadline for lease extensions from the Ministry of Rail Transport, which owns the land, was missed at the end of March.

A senior ministry official said refurbishment of the old building is in progress but needed to be carried out "without affecting the heritage values."

Story continues

The official didn't comment on the status of the lease extensions or explain why it had yet to be granted.

It remains a crucial issue for the project.

"The lease extensions have a significant impact on the project's financial viability both from a debt and equity perspective," said Vikram Kumar, IFC's Myanmar manager.

GO-TO PARTNER

For investors keen to break into the frontier market, Pun serves as a go-to partner to help navigate local complexities, notably international sanctions still in place on many Myanmar nationals and businesses.

Pun built his conglomerate, Yoma Strategic Holdings , from scratch and his business empire includes real estate, banking, aviation and cars.

Over three decades, he has become one of Asia's richest men while cultivating a reputation as "Mr Clean" in a country long known as anything but. Neither he nor his companies have been subject to international sanctions.

Companies from American fast-food chain KFC to Indonesian healthcare operator Lippo Group have partnered with him.

However, the business reality in Myanmar means some otherwise straightforward business ventures run through blacklisted companies.

One of KFC's Myanmar outlets, for example, is at the new Yangon airport terminal, which was built and run by businessman Steven Law, who is on the U.S. sanctions list.

Pun said that the deal doesn't violate sanctions because it was done through Yoma, not KFC, and that it complies with Yoma's code of conduct. U.S.-based Yum! Brands, which owns KFC, did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

U.S. Treasury said it doesn't comment on the "existence or possibility of sanctions violations."

The NLD is yet to release a plan addressing remaining sanctions, but recently slapped curbs on the value of gifts officials can accept, a small step to fulfilling its pledge to eliminate graft.

For now, U.S. sanctions still create headaches, often indirectly tying up Myanmar-related bank transfers, even if they don't involve blacklisted entities.

"When you actually try to do business, everybody doesn't understand whether you are a jade miner or not - they just say it is too troublesome to transact your fund remittance," Pun said.

(Editing by Sam Holmes)
The Nantucket Film Festival has revealed several additional honorees and programming for its upcoming 2016 edition, which is set to run June 22-27.

Molly Shannon, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady are among some of the honorees added to the roster, with Bennett Miller due to also present the Screenwriters Tribute Award to Oliver Stone.

Shannon, whose film "Other People" will screen at the festival, will receive the Compass Rose Acting Award, while directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady will receive the Special Achievement in Documentary Storytelling Award, with their documentary "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You " to be shown as the festival's centerpiece.

Sian Heder will also receive the New Voices in Screenwriting Award -- joining the ranks of Leslye Headland, Michael Arndt, Ben Zeitlin, and Lucy Alib -- with her film "Tallulah," starring Ellen Page and Allison Janney, also scheduled to screen at the festival.

The event has added three feature films to its 2016 lineup, according to The Hollywood Reporter -- Andrew Neel's "Goat," Barbara Kopple's documentary "Miss Sharon Jones!" and Alex Gibney's "Zero Days" -- in addition to its eight short film programs and virtual-reality experiences.
NASA is considering launching another orbiter to Mars in the next decade.

The space agency is asking American companies to suggest design ideas for the possible robotic Mars orbiter. Launching in the 2020s, it would capture high-resolution imagery and provide increased data-relay capabilities from surface vehicles back to mission control on Earth.

"Our success in exploring Mars, to unravel the mysteries of the Red Planet, depends on having high-bandwidth communication with Earth and overhead imaging," former astronaut John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. [Occupy Mars: History of Robotic Red Planet Missions (Infographic)]

"Currently, we depend on our orbiting science missions to perform dual service in making measurements and acting as communication relays, but we can't depend on them to last forever," Grunsfeld added. "This new orbiter will use cutting-edge technology to revitalize our ability to continue to explore Mars and support transformative science, including a potential sample-return mission in the future."

NASA currently has three operational spacecraft in orbit around Mars: Mars Odyssey, which launched in 2001; the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which lifted off in 2005; and MAVEN (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), which headed toward the Red Planet in 2013.

The space agency plans to award $400,000 design-study subcontracts for the new orbiter in June; these studies would be completed four months later, NASA officials said.

The new orbiter would add to an already bustling fleet of robotic Mars spacecraft. Odyssey, MRO and MAVEN are joined in orbit by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft and India's Mangalyaan probe, and NASA's Opportunity and Curiosity rover are trundling across the Red Planet's surface.

The first phase of the European-Russian ExoMars mission launched last month, blasting the Trace Gas Orbiter and a landing demonstrator toward the planet; phase two will launch a life-hunting Mars rover in 2018, if current schedules hold.

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And NASA will launch the InSight lander to probe Mars' interior structure in 2018, and a life-hunting, sample-caching rover in 2020. The space agency said it aims to bring the 2020 Mars rover's samples back to Earth for analysis at some point, though there is no mission on the books that will do this.

And that's just the robotic side of things. NASA also aims to get astronauts to the vicinity of Mars by the end of the 2030s. This ambitious effort will require considerable international cooperation, agency officials have said.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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Netflix has acquired global rights to David Pablos Las Elegidas from Mundial, the joint sales venture of Stuart Fords IM Global and Canana, the production-sales company of Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna and Pablo Cruz.

Produced by Cruz, Pablos breakthrough movie recently scored 13 nominations for Mexicos Ariel Academy Awards. The Chosen Ones was also the first Spanish-speaking title to be announced last year for the Cannes Festival, where it screened in Un Certain Regard. It will bow on Netflix from May 8. Global deal obviously does not not include territories licensed by Mundial. ARP Selection, one of Frances premier art-house distributors, acquired French rights to The Chosen Ones in the run-up to Cannes last-year, for instance.

Written by Pablos  with Pedro Peirano, the screenwriter of Pablo Larrains Oscar-nominated No and co-scribe on Sebastian Silvas The Maid serving as a script consultant  The Chosen Ones followed on Pablos debut, The Life After, a teen brother road movie that, remarkably for a graduation film, played Venice Horizons in 2013. Shot in Tijuana, Pablos native town  the films leads, Oscar Torres, and Nancy Lourdes Talamantes are locals  The Chosen Ones turns on 15-year-old, Ulises, groomed by his father to enamor young girls, tricking them into prostitution. But he falls for Sofia, his first victim, whos just 14. To save her, his father demands he seduces a second girl, entangling Ulises in the world of juvenile prostitution that he was trying to avoid. Escape from it comes at a very high price.

Though set in the world of juvenile prostitution, this is a film about characters, the relationship between Ulises and Sofia, how its transformed, Pablos told Variety.

He added: The storys seen from the masculine point of view. What moved me was to have someone born into a specific context, where hes obliged to do certain things because of family tradition, suddenly question the world hes in and doubt what hes doing.

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Pablos and Cruz are now teaming on an adapatation of Roberto Bolanos The Savage Detectives, for many the towering achievement of recent Latin American literature, with Pablos writing and set to direct and Cruz producing for Canana.

Deal typifies Netflixs M.O. of linking with top players in foreign territories as it drives to build catalogue, sometimes facing off with fierce and far more established local players, with a far higher percentage of local product.

Headed by V.P. Cristina Garza, and dedicated sales operation for movies from Latin America, the Latino U.S., Spain and Portugal, IM Global/Cananas Mundial has cherry-picked many of the regions top titles, both high-profile plays  Edgar Ramirez starrer Libertador, Carlos Morenos  and key fiction debuts: Brazilian Fernando Coimbras Wolf at the Door, and Mexicans Alonso Ruizpalacios Gueros and, more recently, Alejandra Marquez Abellas Semana Santa. Mundial also taps titles from Canana itself whose credits include Gerardo Naranjos Miss Bala, Cary Fukunagas Sin Nombre and the Luna-directed Abel, Cesar Chavez and Mr. Pig, selected for Sundance this year.

IM Global/Canana also moved waves at 2014s AFM striking for Mundial an exclusive output deal for Spanish-language titles from Alex Garcias AG Studios, a film production-financing empire with companies in Mexico, the U.S., Colombia and Brazil.

Though Netflix strives for 100% global first TV rights on series, as it builds catalog, it looks to be taking a more flexible position on movies, boarding early to acquire global or at least international rights or on finished movies, taking outstanding unsold territories. Paying top dollar, its offer is often one which neither producers nor sales agents want to refuse.

Related stories

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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Pay Jumps 50% in 2015, to $16.6 Million
By Jee Heun Kahng and Ju-min Park SEOUL (Reuters) - Like more than half of South Korean mothers, Kim Ju-yeon spent two weeks recuperating and relaxing in a health care center with her newborn after she gave birth last June. But her baby boy caught latent tuberculosis during their stay, one of 30 infants who was infected by a nursing assistant. "I never thought my baby could get sick," said Kim, 36, who sued the center's owner, seeking compensation, along with the families of 79 other babies similarly infected or treated to prevent infection. Growing concern over infection risks in such facilities has prompted South Korea to propose tighter regulation of the sometimes luxurious centers, which usually put babies in nurseries with other newborns, separate from their mothers. The care centers have caught on so dramatically, since emerging in the late 1990s, that entrepreneurs are taking the business model overseas, an effort backed by the government. The center where Kim stayed is run by YK Dongrami, South Korea's biggest postnatal care brand, which has 16 domestic centers and five in China. Following the incident involving Kim's baby, the company is working to create a safer, cleaner environment, it told Reuters. In August, it apologized on its website for the incident. South Korea had 610 for-profit postnatal facilities last year, up from 377 in 2007. But the health ministry says the centers are vulnerable to infection and hamper mother-child bonding. The government says 265 babies caught infections, from respiratory to diarrheal diseases, in the first half of 2015, the latest data available. That figure compares with just 88 in all of 2014. Another center suspended operations this year after 15 babies caught rota virus, which can cause diarrhea. No deaths have been traced to South Korea's post-natal centers in recent years. APART AND TOGETHER Two weeks' stay at a center typically costs $2,000 - with the plushest rising to $20,000 - and includes massages for the mothers, and sometimes yoga, along with baby care lessons. At feeding time, nurses bring babies to their mothers or put them together in special rooms. Most of the time, nurses look after the babies grouped about 10 or 20 in a room, though the World Health Organization advises that mother and child share a room, to promote bonding. Clustering newborns together heightens infection risks, say experts and officials. "Newborns have a weaker immune system, so post-partum care centers are even more vulnerable," said Chey Myoung-jae, a pediatrics professor at the private Inje University Sanggye Paik Hospital in Seoul. The industry acknowledges shortcomings, but points to the expense of additional care givers. "If a mother stays with her baby all the time, and an individual caretaker is attached to each mother, then it makes services too expensive," said Kim Jeong-uk, director of the Korea Postpartum Care Centers Association. MODERN TRADITION The centers have evolved from South Korea's tradition of "sanhujori," in which experienced mothers or mothers-in-law help new mothers care for their infants. The government's new rules will encourage shared rooms for mothers and babies, and mandate tuberculosis tests for new hires. "We are supplementing current laws to send a strong message for the safety of the postpartum care centers from infections," health ministry official Woo Hyang-jae told Reuters. Postnatal care company Dongrami says requiring mothers and babies to share a room might "restrict customers' right to choose" services. Some mothers said the centers are the only affordable, accessible choice for postnatal care nowadays. We dont have any family living nearby. Realistically our only option was to go to a care center," said Jeong Bo-mi, 37, who is among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Her baby was treated as a preventive measure, and eventually tested negative for latent tuberculosis. (Editing by Tony Munroe and Clarence Fernandez)
Athens (AFP) - The next meeting of eurozone finance ministers to discuss Greece's massive bailout will be held in Brussels on May 9, Athens said Thursday.

"Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem has informed Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos that the meeting will take place on May 9," the government said in a statement.

It added that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras spoke by telephone Thursday with European Commission chairman Jean-Claude Juncker and US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew.

Dijsselbloem's spokesman confirmed the date of the Eurogroup talks on Twitter.

The meeting was initially scheduled for Thursday but was cancelled earlier this week amid disagreements between Athens and the International Monetary Fund, which has demanded more reforms from Greece.

The cancellation of the meeting prompted fury from Athens, with Tsipras calling EU President Donald Tusk on Wednesday to demand a summit of eurozone countries if things didn't progress on a ministerial level.

The talks have already suffered months of delays and Greece wants to wrap them up as quickly as possible so that it can unlock the next tranche of its 86-billion-euro ($95 billion) bailout, ahead of a huge European Central Bank payment due in July.

To resolve the row, eurozone ministers agreed last Friday in principle to a package of "contingency measures" that would be imposed if Greece misses its spending targets in 2018.

Tsipras is furious over the fresh demands, but Athens desperately needs to complete the so-called first review of its bailout so that it can meet the ECB payment and start talks on debt relief.

Tsipras, who swept to power in January 2015 vowing an end to austerity, went on to sign Greece up for its third bailout in five years in exchange for more tough reforms, including a painful pensions shake-up.

The EU's top economic official warned earlier Thursday that the talks need to wrap up quickly to avoid heaping further harm on Greece's debt-wracked economy.
Can Sibanyes Fundamentals Support Its Post-1Q16 Price Rally?

(Continued from Prior Part)

Aquarius Platinum acquisition completed

Sibanye Gold (SBGL) completed its Aquarius Platinum acquisition on April 12, 2016. Aquarius Platinums operations will be consolidated starting in the June 2016 quarter.

The company also disclosed Aquariuss operational details for the quarter, and its production increased to 90,843 ounces.

More acquisitions in store?

During its 4Q15 results, Sibanyes management had mentioned that it sees numerous consolidation opportunities in platinum. The gold prices remain buoyant and Sibanye has a relatively ungeared balance sheet. Moreover, the shareholder support seen for the platinum transactions should encourage Sibanye to pursue similar acquisitions in the future.

In terms of timing, Sibanyes management mentioned during its 4Q15 results call that it doesnt need to bid down the Aquarius and Rustenburg acquisitions before making the next move. According to the companys management, it had an organizational structure in place to facilitate further acquisitions and that they have a limited window of opportunity.

Speaking at the European Gold Forum in Zurich on April 20, Sibanyes CEO, Neal Froneman, reiterated that the company is actively considering acquisitions.

Froneman added, There are some seriously distressed companies out there. I dont think well be going to Australia or North America. We are sub-and southern-African focused when we talk of outside South Africa, and wed want to buy producers.

Sibanyes outlook on PGM prices

Sibanye Gold (SBGL) believes that the PGM (platinum group metals) fundamentals remain positive. It flagged substantial industry-wide capex and production cuts, which should keep the supply in check.

Despite the diesel market concerns, the company believes that globally, autos still support PGM (PALL) (PPLT) demand. The company contends that in the near-term, the PGM pricing headwinds could persist. Limited trading liquidity, Volkswagen (VLKAY) fallout and excess above ground PGM stocks could impact the prices in the short-term.

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Stillwater Mining (SWC), on the other hand, is more positive on palladium than platinum .

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
Abuja (AFP) - Nigeria and France on Thursday signed an agreement on closer military cooperation, including intelligence sharing, to strengthen the fight against Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region.

Nigerian Defence Minister Mansur Dan Ali said the agreement was evidence of a "growing partnership" between Abuja and Paris, as he met his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian in the capital.

France has provided satellite images and surveillance footage from Rafale fighter jets based in Chad's capital, N'Djamena, which have flown over the main conflict area in northeast Nigeria.

Some 2,000 surveillance images have been shared and Nigerians have also been trained by French military intelligence in how to interpret them, French officials indicated.

Nigeria's neighbours, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, are all former French colonies where Paris continues to have influence and its support is vital, Dan Ali acknowledged.

Relations between anglophone Nigeria and its francophone neighbours have often been tense but Dan Ali said the French army can act as an intermediary for dialogue.

Boko Haram, whose insurgency has killed some 20,000 in Nigeria since 2009, has been pushed out of captured territory over the past year, leading to more cross-border attacks.

- Greater co-operation -

Le Drian for his part said France was primarily concerned with "the common fight against terrorism and particularly against Boko Haram".

Maritime security is also a key factor in cooperation, he added, with incidences of piracy in the Gulf of Guinea off Nigeria's oil-rich south increasing sharply since the turn of the year.

Both armies signed an operational cooperation document detailing 28 areas to be tackled before the end of the year, including training against improvised explosives and combat rescue.

Cross-border military exercises and joint maritime operations with other countries are also included.

A regional security summit is scheduled to take place in Abuja on May 14 with French President Francois Hollande in attendance, as well as representatives from Britain and the United States.

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Britain and the United States have provided military personnel to the counter-insurgency in the form of special forces advisors in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, and training.

Some 300 US troops have been sent to Cameroon's remote north, where Washington is operating a drone base for surveillance flights above Nigerian territory.

- Regional force -

Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin have agreed to set up a new regional force against Boko Haram with African Union backing but the deployment of its 8,700 troops has been severely delayed.

The troops were supposed to have been operational in July last year, commanded by a senior Nigerian officer from N'Djamena, where France has a base for anti-Islamist operations in the Sahel region.

"It (the regional force) is far from being perfect but it's starting to function," said one French military source.

"By speaking to one another they'll end up cooperating and understand their common interests are more important than their differences," he added.

Nigeria has struggled to acquire military hardware for troops fighting Boko Haram, with Western governments reluctant to provide arms and ammunition because of its army's poor human rights record.

A former national security advisor is currently on trial over a multi-billion arms deal scandal, in which cash earmarked for weapons procurement was allegedly diverted for political ends.

But French sources said Abuja could consult them about their requirements.
From Woman's Day

When Kathi Hovey had severe chest heaviness and went to the E.R. with her husband, Larry, the doctor on call told her she was having a panic attack. She insisted that wasn't the case. Larry told the doctor at the Texas hospital that Kathi, then 56, wasn't one to exaggerate and asked him to call a cardiologist for a second opinion. The doctor refused, but Larry persisted, and the cardiologist had Kathi admitted. The next day, an angiogram showed a significant blockage, and a stent was inserted.

Kathi's story highlights what experts call medical gender bias, which is when women are treated differently than men who have similar symptoms and conditions, or when they're treated inappropriately for gender-specific conditions. While bias isn't more likely to happen in the E.R. than in a doctor's office, it can have devastating effects when decisions must be made quickly.

About one in five adults in the United States go to the emergency room at least once a year, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And women are more likely than men to make an E.R. visit, so it's imperative that you understand the ins and outs of what might happen so you can protect yourself.

1. BEFORE YOU WALK IN THE DOOR...

You're already up against built-in bias

Here's a bitter pill to swallow: Many E.R. standards of care are tailored to men. "For decades, women were excluded from research in part because scientists didn't want to endanger a pregnancy or their reproductive ability during a test for a new drug or procedure," says Marianne Legato, MD, director of the Foundation for Gender Specific Medicine in New York City. It wasn't until 1990, and the establishment of the National Institutes of Health's Office of Women's Health, that scientists began to include women in studies and examine how diseases affect them uniquely. But many protocols for conditions that bring women to the E.R. today are still based only on male research.

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"For decades, women were excluded from research in part because scientists didn't want to endanger a pregnancy or their reproductive ability during a test for a new drug or procedure."

For example, "the classic heart attack model, where the large heart arteries are clogged and you feel chest pain and heaviness, is more common in men," says Alyson J. McGregor, MD, director of the Division of Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine at Brown University. Women may have classic symptoms, but they are more likely to also develop nausea and back pain and report that they "just don't feel right." That's because the blood vessels around a woman's heart are smaller than those around a man's, so heart disease develops differently.

Even the tests used to diagnose heart attacks may be better for men. Take the EKG, which looks at the heart's electrical activity to check for damage. "It's a great tool to show an obstruction in a major artery," says Dr. McGregor. "But because women have smaller arteries and smaller hearts, some changes won't necessarily show up on the EKG.

TAKE- CHARGE TIP: Memorize this question: "Does this test [or treatment] work well for women?" in the hospital and in your doctor's office. Although physicians may not know if a test or drug has been studied extensively on women, they should know, based on their experience, if it's effective and safe.

2. ONCE YOU ARRIVE...

You- and your doctors- may not realize bias is affecting your care

Most of the gender bias that takes place in E.R.s is thought to be subconscious- healthcare personnel aren't aware they're engaging in it. Scant research has been done examining the reasons, but some believe the bias is likely an extension of a culture that has unfairly stereotyped women as complainers, overly emotional or anxious. "In high-stress situations, busy doctors and nurses may fall back on deeply rooted automatic patterns of response," says JoAnn Grif Alspach, RN, EdD, editor of Critical Care Nurse journal.

Needless to say, it's usually not a malicious or conscious decision on the doctor's part. "The last thing anyone who goes into medicine wants is to treat only half of their patients well," says James R. Miner, MD, chief of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis.

Yet research shows the bias exists. One study published in Stroke found that women who came to the E.R. because of a stroke waited 11% longer than men to see a doctor and 15% longer to get brain imaging, even when they had similar symptoms. And separate research found that after a stroke diagnosis, women are up to 30% less likely to be given one of the main treatment drugs, rtPA, which dissolves blood clots. Another study in the journal Surgery revealed that severely injured women were 15% less likely than severely injured men to be sent from a non-trauma hospital to a trauma center.

TAKE-CHARGE TIP: Be concise and assertive. This is not the time to question yourself. You know what you're feeling better than anyone, and the doctors are there to care for you. Resist the urge to downplay your symptoms, and zero in on the main problem right away. This will help your doctor focus on what's most important immediately.

3. DURING DIAGNOSIS...

Your pain could be taken less seriously

When Lauren Barnhorst, 37, of New York City, went to the E.R. in October 2005 with severe abdominal pain, the first doctor to examine her poked her roughly in the abdomen. "I yelped, and she said, 'Oh, it's not that bad. Talk to me after you've had kids.'" The doctor then told Lauren it was probably period cramps and left to run some tests. Four hours later, still in significant pain, she was examined by another doctor. "He told me, 'What you have is ovarian torsion: It's rare and it's extremely painful.' I said to him, 'Can you please say that again... to her?' I wanted the first doctor to know that my pain was real."

Doctors removed the torsion-causing cyst and saved Lauren's ovary, but the experience left her rattled. "I felt betrayed," she says. "If my pain had been believed earlier, I may have been diagnosed sooner."

"If my pain had been believed earlier, I may have been diagnosed sooner."

Lauren's story underscores a serious issue: Doctors sometimes underestimate women's pain. "Research shows that women get less pain medicine than men," says Dr. Miner. This is despite the fact that women have a greater sensitivity to pain and express pain more readily than men. A study published in Academic Emergency Medicine found that women admitted to the E.R. for abdominal pain were up to 25% less likely than men to receive pain relievers such as morphine. The inequity could have to do with the imperfect way pain is assessed: The only measurement is asking a patient to rate their pain. But another culprit may be communication style. Women tend to focus on storytelling (i.e., what led to their visit), whereas men are fixated on the pain and what they want, says Dr. Miner. There's also the chance that some E.R. personnel simply stereotype women and assume their pain is exaggerated, as in Lauren's case.

TAKE-CHARGE TIP: Spell it out. If you've been given a pain medicine and it's not working, say, "That treatment helped, but it wasn't enough-I need another medicine." Or, tell your doctor, "I may appear anxious, but I am actually in pain."

4. AFTER YOU LEAVE...

Experiencing bias can have lingering effects

Being told by a doctor that nothing is wrong-even when you feel like something may be amiss-can affect how you respond in the future.

Maria Quinn, 32, of Rogers, MN, went to the emergency room for chest pains in May 2015, thinking she might be having a heart attack. "My mother had eight heart attacks, and her symptoms began around my age," she says. This was Maria's second E.R. visit. The first time, in 2013, the doctors wrote it off as anxiety, telling her she was too young to have a heart attack. "This time my pain was worse, but again, the doctors told me it was anxiety and discharged me," she recalls. The pain persisted, so Maria returned at 11 p.m. "I told them I had a family history of heart disease-something they never asked." They did a blood test, which came back normal, then sent her away without a recommendation to see a specialist or any solutions.

Maria eventually received a stress test that ruled out a heart attack, but she's still searching for the cause of her pain, and can't shake the feeling of being dismissed as an overly emotional woman. Since her 2015 E.R. visit, she's experienced minor chest pains numerous times, but she's resisted the E.R. "I don't trust myself anymore," she says.

Kathi Hovey, whose heart problems in 1999 were discovered because her husband spoke up, has since had several heart-related incidents that sent her to the E.R. But the decision to go wasn't easy. "You play a game: Should I go or not? You want to believe that nothing is wrong, but you can't mess with your heart."

TAKE-CHARGE TIP: Call in backup. Having another person speak on your behalf can help. If you're alone and your doctor isn't available, request the services of a patient advocate or a patient representative. Many hospitals employ them to help patients communicate with medical staff.
A No Trump Anytime sign is seen below the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles on Tuesday. (Photo courtesy of Plastic Jesus)

The California presidential primary is still more than a month away, but the anti-Trump movement has already arrived.

Fake parking signs bearing the message No Trump Anytime have been spotted all over Los Angeles this week.

The signs are part of an ongoing installation by Plastic Jesus, the British-born, L.A.-based street artist who was behind that heroin-shooting Oscar statue and those No Kardashian signs, among other controversial public works.

A No Trump Anytime sign at the corner of Clinton Street and North La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles on Wednesday. (Photo courtesy of Plastic Jesus)

I do a lot of street art  some is political, some is cultural, some is based on news stories, the artist told Foxs Los Angeles affiliate. I try and do pieces on anything that affects culture in a negative way.  But this is certainly a political statement.

A No Trump Anytime sign near a bus stop in Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy of Plastic Jesus)

The No Trump signs have been illegally placed in other cities, including Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., where one was seen across from the site of the real estate moguls forthcoming Trump Hotel.

A No Trump Anytime sign outside the future site of Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy of Plastic Jesus)

Its just my statement about [Donald] Trump, the artist continued. I think if Trump gets elected, itll be devastating for the country. It will really set the country back decades.

He added: I try and come up with something thats vaguely controversial but wont really, you know, piss people off too much.



Plastic Jesus told KTLA that his next installation has nothing to do with American politics.

Im working on a piece at the moment which is about corruption in soccer and FIFA, he said. Its taken nearly six months to produce but should be ready in a couple weeks.
(Clarifies April 19 story in paragraphs 7 and 8 to say that proanthocyanidins specifically in cranberry are thought to prevent bacterial adhesion, and 36 mg per day is the dose for prevention of UTI) By Madeline Kennedy (Reuters Health) - Taking cranberry supplements has long been recommended to prevent urinary tract infections (UTI), but its important to choose the right products, researchers say. Tests of seven popular cranberry-pill brands in the U.S. showed that most contained too little of the key bacteria-fighting ingredient to have any effect. There is a lot of variability in quality and efficacy of cranberry supplements, making it difficult for consumers to know which ones will work for them, said lead author Dr. Bilal Chughtai, assistant professor of urology at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. UTIs affect some 8 million people each year in the U.S. Approximately half of all women will experience one at some point, Chughtai and his colleagues write in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. UTIs are caused by bacteria and usually treated with antibiotics, but antibiotic overuse and resistance are problematic, so finding effective ways to prevent UTIs is important, the authors write. Cranberry juice and supplements have long been used to stave off UTIs. They were once thought to prevent the infections by affecting the acidity of urine, the researchers note. More recent investigations show that cranberries or cranberry juice may actually work because they contain proanthocyanidins  antioxidant flavonoids like those found in blueberries, grape seeds and chocolate - which also prevent bacteria from sticking to the bladder wall. Past studies have shown that to prevent recurrent UTIs, cranberry products need to contain a dose of at least 36 milligrams of proanthocyanidins per day, the researchers note. Herbal medications like cranberry supplements are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and so many brands may not contain the needed amount of proanthocyanidins or even any at all, Chughtai told Reuters Health by email. He and his colleagues analyzed seven over-the-counter cranberry supplements, testing each product in cultures of bacteria and red blood cells to see how effectively it prevented bacterial growth. Only one supplement studied contained more than the needed amount of proanthocyanidins, with 175 mg of the compounds per gram of product. That supplement also prevented bacterial growth in culture. Another supplement contained 25 mg/g of proanthocyanidins and also showed activity against the bacteria, while the other four supplements contained less than 5 mg/g of proanthocyanidins and had no effects against the bacteria. The report does not identify the brands. Chughtai noted that cranberry powders may be made from dried juice or from dried skins left over from the juicing process. Supplements made from juice act much faster and are more effective than those made from skins, he said. But since supplement manufacturers are not required to list which parts of the cranberry are in the supplement, all forms of powdered supplements (whether from juice or skins) are able to call themselves cranberry, Chughtai said. "Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are very common, particularly in women, and result in major costs related to antibiotic use, hospitalizations as well as time lost from work," said Dr. Deborah Wing, a gynecology professor at University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the study. "Approaches to either prevent or treat UTIs which are based on use of food products could reduce some health care costs and minimize human pain and suffering," Wing told Reuters Health by email. Overall, Wing said, cranberry may be better for prevention than for treatment. To treat a UTI, she said, people should consume cranberry products daily and in frequent doses throughout the day, which may be very hard to do. She also noted that other compounds in cranberries might work with proanthocyanidins to treat UTIs. For this reason, it may be more effective to take supplements made from cranberry juice rather than other extracts. SOURCE: bit.ly/1Nb4a3H American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, online April 5, 2016.
New York City will be returning stolen Buddhist sculpture , which depicts the "footprints of the Buddha" back to Pakistan, according to Gothamist.

Japanese ancient artifacts dealer Tatsuzo Kaku was going to sell the $1.1 million relic  which dates back to the second century  to the Maitreya Inc. Gallery for Asia Week New York. But on March 14, after tracking a string of emails between Kaku and a rival dealer, officials recovered the artifact from from the Mark Hotel in Manhattan and arrested Kaku.

Tatsuzo Kaku dodges jail, pleads guilty to smuggling #greed #Antiquity http://rehs.com/blog/2016/03/tatsuzo-kaku-dodges-prison-for-smuggled-1m-statue/?contemporary=N ...pic.twitter.com/C1YgBscK7h https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CeZKWD2W8AIephI.jpg:large

K region, where ancient relics are protected as "cultural property," according to Gothamist.

"[Buddhapada] and others like it are so much more than commercial property  they represent ancient pieces of history and culture that should be celebrated and vigorously protected," Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said in a statement.
As part of its to make the justice system more humane, the Obama administration is putting pressure on states to amend their laws, particularly when it comes to solitary confinement. Currently, f s c in the absence of compatible reforms at the state level; like in the case in January, when President Obama banned solitary confinement for juveniles. This reform had no effect on the practices of state-run prisons.

Approximately 100,000 prisoners in the U.S. are held in isolation . "This country stands alone among Western nations in its widespread and routine use of extreme and prolonged isolation  commonly called solitary confinement  throughout its penal system," an article on in the Yale Law Journal explained.

Obama visits a federal prison. He is the only sitting president who has done so.

The emergence of super-maximum security prisons designed to facilitate solitary confinement "is the most troubling development in U.S. corrections in recent decades," Human Rights Watch warns.

This comes as part of the administration's ongoing efforts to make incarceration  and life afterward  more just. "Too often, Americans who have paid their debt to society leave prison only to find that they continue to be punished for past mistakes," Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a speech on Monday, according to the New York Times.

Source: Saul Loeb/Getty Images

Lynch announced efforts would be made to mitigate the marginalization of former prisoners when it comes to housing, jobs and voting, with the aim of reducing recidivism rates. Until the federal and state laws are better aligned when it comes to the justice system, a real national overhaul will likely not be possible.
Washington (AFP) - In the twilight of his presidency, Barack Obama has moved to defend his economic legacy and handling of the 2008 crisis, saying the financial system is now "substantially more stable."

Obama, in an interview published Thursday in The New York Times Magazine, also dismissed the "fantasy" economic platforms of Republican presidential candidates vying to succeed him at the November general election.

The financial sector "is bigger, absorbs more resources and maybe most importantly, more talent than I would like to see," the president admitted.

"I would like folks who are really good at math to be going into engineering and the sciences more than theyre going into trying to build algorithms to beat the market and to work arbitrage.

"But there is no doubt that the financial system is substantially more stable."

Obama suggested that calls by Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate and senator who has called for big banks to be broken up, were unrealistic.

"It is true that we have not dismantled the financial system, and in that sense, Bernie Sanderss critique is correct," Obama said.

"But one of the things that Ive consistently tried to remind myself during the course of my presidency is that the economy is not an abstraction. Its not something that you can just redesign and break up and put back together again without consequences."

And Obama, who leaves office in January, also gave a withering assessment of what he sees as the unrealistic economic pledges of Republican hopefuls in the race for the White House, led by billionaire businessman Donald Trump.

"They dont simply defy logic and any known economic theories, they are fantasy," Obama said.

"Slashing taxes, particularly for those at the very top, dismantling regulatory regimes that protect our air and our environment, and then projecting that this is going to lead to five percent or seven percent growth, and claiming that theyll do all this while balancing the budget...

"Nobody would even, with the most rudimentary knowledge of economics, think that any of those things are plausible."
By Guy Faulconbridge and Kate Holton LONDON (Reuters) - Opponents of Britain's European Union membership have edged into the lead over the past two weeks, according to a YouGov poll which indicated President Barack Obama's intervention failed to swing support behind "In" vote in a June 23 referendum. The online survey for The Times taken on April 25-26 showed support for the Out campaign had risen 3 percentage points to 42 percent since a similar survey on April 12-14, while support for the "In" campaign had risen 1 percentage point to 41 percent. President Barack Obama on Friday warned Britain would be "in the back of the queue" for a trade deal with the United States if it dropped out of the EU, an unusually strong intervention into British politics that "In" campaigners welcomed. "Some have portrayed Obama's intervention as backfiring - I wouldn't go that far but this poll does suggest that Obama hasn't given the remain team a boost at all," Anthony Wells, director of political research at YouGov, said by telephone. "It hasn't been a game changer, it hasn't shifted opinion - it hasn't really made much difference at all," said Wells. "We have had a neck and neck for months now and nothing seems to be moving that." Beneath the headline figures, the YouGov poll indicated the In campaign was ahead on the economic arguments after a series of warnings about the dangers of leaving from the British Treasury, the Bank of England and even the OECD chief who asked British people to reflect on their own nakedness. While opinion polls, which failed to predict Prime Minister David Cameron's victory in Britain's 2015 national election, have cast the referendum as too close to call, betting odds have indicated a strong probability of a vote to remain. Betfair odds on Thursday indicated a 71 percent probability of an In vote. After Obama's intervention, the implied probability of Britain voting to remain, moved over 10 percentage points to as high as 75 percent on Monday. A British exit would unleash volatility in foreign currency, stock and bond markets, undermine post-World War Two European efforts towards integration and raise questions about the 21st Century fate of the world's fifth largest economy. "UP IN THE AIR" The YouGov poll, of 1,650 people and with a margin of error of about 2-3 percent, comes after three other polls taken during or after Obama's visit: * ORB telephone poll, April 20-24: Out on 43 percent versus In on 51 percent, 6 percent don't know. * ICM online poll, April 22-24: Out on 46 percent versus In on 44 percent, 10 percent don't know. * Survation telephone poll, April 25-26: Out on 38 percent versus In on 45 percent, 17 percent undecided. After Obama's warning and similar comments from German politicians this week, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier cautioned on Thursday against piling pressure on British voters. "I don't think we'd be well advised to issue threats from Europe," Steinmeier said in Berlin. Martin Sorrell, CEO of the world's biggest advertising company, said that the referendum looked finely balanced and that some companies, which he did not name, were putting off investment ahead of the referendum. "The whole situation is up in the air," Sorrell, the pro-EU chief executive of London-headquartered WPP, told Reuters. Obama's intervention enthused younger voters who are more pro-European but traditionally less likely to vote, he added. The YouGov poll also suggested a big boost for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), whose anti-EU leader Nigel Farage was trusted by 23 percent of people on Europe while Prime Minister David Cameron was trusted by just 20 percent. Though the Out campaign was in the lead, 35 percent of voters said they trusted Obama on Europe. "The British people like Obama but that is not enough to change their opinion," said Wells at YouGov, adding that it was unclear if Obama's comments would add to the overall perception that major leaders all wanted Britain to remain in the block. (Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Dominic Evans)
Washington (AFP) - Once a year, the US president attends a party he can't avoid and is asked to make Washington laugh.

When Barack Obama steps onto the stage of the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday, he will carry out that ritual for the eighth and final time.

The clips will be played again and again and endlessly dissected by pundits -- so finding the right tone and jokes are key.

"This is one of the hardest speeches of the year," said 35-year-old Cody Keenan, who leads a team of speechwriters at the White House.

"Other than the State of the Union address, this is probably the speech we start earliest, just because humor is so difficult," he added.

"It's also the biggest team working on any speech other than the State of the Union address."

This year, the team member with "the pen" and tasked with making Obama funny is 34-year-old Tyler Lechtenberg.

"Jokes in general are some of the most nerve-racking parts of speeches," he said. "With a joke, there is more vulnerability to it. If it flops, that is something that we can take personally too."

One of the first steps in the writing process is developing a broad list of potential topics, which is circulated both inside and outside the White House.

Former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and David Axelrod are among those consulted this year.

Listening to other people "is a big part of the process" said Lechtenberg. "Every idea in the brain storming stage is a good idea."

But then comes the tough task of whittling all those ideas down.

"We'll probably have maybe 100 jokes total and bring them down to 20-25 by the end," said Keenan. "You've got to have a thick skin because most of your jokes are going to get cut."

Lechtenberg describes the process as having a "herding cats" feel.

- Self-deprecation is key -

There will be some digs at political opponents and some at his hosts and the journalists who cover the White House and have invited all the guests.

Story continues

But the most important element might be self-deprecation.

"He will spend a good chunk of time making fun of himself," said Keenan. "It's critical."

"You have to show that you are willing to poke fun of yourself to build a little credibility with the audience," he added.

"If you just go out there and rip on everybody else, that's not fun."

One president who shone in that task was Bill Clinton, who in 1993, at the outset of his administration, was lying low in the polls.

"I don't think I'm doing so bad. I mean, at this point in his administration, William Henry Harrison had been dead for 68 days!" he joked.

When it comes to roasting others, there is a fine line between humor and humiliation, especially when the person doing the roasting is the most powerful on the planet.

Obama takes a very hands-on role in crafting his speeches.

"If there was ever something in a speech that's too hurtful, he would take it out," said Keenan.

"We don't want anyone to leave the dinner feeling hurt."

- Taking on Trump -

But in 2011 Obama tested the boundaries of that dictum when he poked fun at Donald Trump, a man now vying to be his successor.

For months, the controversy courting businessman had fueled rumors that Obama, the first black American president, was not born in the United States.

At one point Obama even released his birth certificate, while admonishing theorists and the press: "We do not have time for this kind of silliness."

A few days later, he took advantage of the presence of the extravagant billionaire at the dinner to let loose.

"Now, I know that he's taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald," Obama began.

"And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter - like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?"

The roast continued as Trump sat among a sea of laughing guests.

Trump, the Republican frontrunner in the race for the White House, has said he will not attend Saturday's dinner, suggesting that the media would misreport his mood.

"I don't think we have ever held back before so I would not expect anything radically different this time," said Keenan in previewing this year's speech.

What will be different is that it is both Obama's and Keenan's last.

"It's very daunting to think about what I will do after this that has the same sense of purpose to it," he said.

"The notion that I might have peaked at 35 is terrifying," he said with a laugh, adding "it has been a blast."
Shares of Ocwen Financial Corp. OCN declined nearly 18% in the after-market trading, following the release of its first quarter 2016 results. Adjusted loss of 57 cents per share was wider than the Zacks Consensus Estimate of a loss of 48 cents.



A fall in servicing and sub-servicing fees pressured revenues, which remains a major concern. However, a reduction in operating expenses was a tailwind.



Ocwens results were adversely impacted by several significant items. After including these, net loss was $111.2 million or 90 cents per share, as against net income of $34.4 million or 27 cents per share in the prior-year quarter.



Performance in Detail



Total revenue slumped 35.2% year over year to $330.8 million. Lower servicing and sub-servicing fees and other revenues resulted in a reduction in revenues. Also, the figure lagged the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $354 million.



Operating expenses fell 13.1% from the year-ago quarter to $328.7 million. All expense components, except professional services cost declined, reflecting the progress in ongoing cost improvement efforts.



Net other expenses increased 16.8% year over year to $104.2 million, mainly due to lower net gains on sale of MSRs and interest income.



As of Mar 31, 2016, Ocwen recorded a cash balance of $280.5 million, up from $257.3 million as of Dec 31, 2015. Total assets were $7.41 billion, up from $7.38 billion as of Dec 31, 2015.



Our Take



Ocwens initiatives to restructure its servicing portfolio and strengthen its balance sheet by reducing corporate debt are impressive. We believe the company will be able to suitably leverage the opportunities available for streamlining its servicing portfolios, going forward.



However, we remain concerned about the impact of mounting compliance and monitoring expenses, apart from the endless regulatory probes into the companys near-term financials.



Currently, Ocwen carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).



Among other mortgage investment firms, Garrison Capital Inc. GARS is expected to report on May 3, while American Capital, Ltd. ACAS and Ares Capital Corporation ARCC will report on May 4.



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(Corrects minimum commitment to $200,000 from $500,000 figure given by UBS on Wednesday)

ZURICH, April 27 (Reuters) - A $471 million UBS venture fund aims to generate annual returns "north of 10 percent" for its European and Asian investors by financing new cancer drugs, helping speed them from the lab to the point where drug companies buy their rights.

Mark Haefele, global chief investment officer at the Swiss bank's wealth management unit, said on Wednesday its UBS Oncology Impact Fund was working with Boston-based MPM Capital to identify investment targets.

It plans to make between 10 to 20 investments over five years, with initial investments around $10 million. Promising compounds or projects could get additional cash.

Oncology is the fastest-growing area of pharmaceutical research, thanks to advances in understanding genetic and biological drivers of the disease. The push has been augmented by U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden's "moonshot" bid to find cancer cures and treatments.

Haefele said the UBS fund aims to fill what he called a financing gap between early development of promising compounds and when drug companies are sufficiently convinced of their merits to pledge financial support.

"In that first critical stage, where you go from the university to forming a company around these compounds, drug companies aren't particularly good at that," Haefele told reporters at a presentation in Zurich.

"That's why they partner with MPM and a few other early-stage firms to develop that pipeline to the stage where they (drug companies) would be interested in investing and then taking the development even further."

The fund, which UBS announced last year, includes a social component that promises to donate performance fees and a share of royalties from successful drugs. It will help fund research and cancer care for families in developing countries.

UBS did not name individual investors in the fund, which is closed, but said the minimum commitment was $200,000.

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MPM Capital, with around $2 billion in assets, is already working with drug companies on funding health-care startups, including a venture fund it closed last year at $400 million that included Swiss drugmaker Novartis and France's Astellas Pharma as investors.

Investors in the new UBS fund have agreed not to withdraw their money for five years.

"Over the long term, we hope this collaboration will add significant value in the field of oncology and in ongoing efforts to finance its development," MPM Capital co-founder Ansbert Gadicke said in a statement.

(Reporting by John Miller)
By Kim Palmer

CLEVELAND (Reuters) - A 15-year-old boy pleaded guilty on Thursday to shooting and wounding four students at a southwestern Ohio high school in late February and will be held in a juvenile facility until he is 21, a county prosecutor said.

James Austin Hancock, who was 14 at the time of the shooting, entered the equivalent of a guilty plea - called a "true" plea - to four counts of attempted murder and one count of inducing panic, Butler County prosecutor Michael Gmoser said in a telephone interview.

Hancock had denied the charges at a March appearance in Butler County court's juvenile division in Middleton, Ohio.

Charles Rittgers, Hancock's attorney, could not be reached for comment.

Authorities said Hancock, who was a student at Madison Jr/Sr High School in Middletown, about 38 miles (61 km) north of Cincinnati, entered the school's cafeteria on Feb. 29 and began shooting.

Hancock shot four students - Cameron Smith, 15; Cooper Caffery, 14; Brant Murray, 15; and Katherine Doucette, 14 - and then threw a .380 caliber semiautomatic handgun away and ran before being later caught, officials said. All four teenagers suffered only minor injuries.

Because Hancock was charged as a serious youthful offender, under Ohio law the judge could add time in an adult facility after his 21st birthday if he commits a violent offense while in the juvenile facility, Gmoser said.

Butler County Judge Ronald Craft, at a May 13 hearing, will set a potential sentence of up to 11 years in adult prison if Hancock does not avoid trouble in the juvenile facility, Gmoser said.

(Reporting by Kim Palmer; Editing by Ben Klayman and Leslie Adler)
By Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton

TULSA, Okla. (Reuters) - The Oklahoma volunteer reserve deputy who fatally shot an unarmed suspect being subdued by regular deputies last year was found guilty of manslaughter on Wednesday by a jury that recommended he serve the maximum of four years in prison.

Prosecutors told jurors that Robert Bates, 74, an insurance executive who volunteered as a reserve sheriff's deputy, deserved to be sent to prison for thrusting himself into the situation when there were several qualified deputies on the scene who could subdue the man.

It took the jury about three hours to reach a verdict.

Lawyers for Bates contended that he mistakenly thought he had a Taser in hand when he shot Eric Harris, 44, not realizing he had a pistol.

Bates is white and Harris was African-American. The shooting, captured on video, was one in a series that raised questions of racial bias in U.S. policing.

Harris was fleeing from deputies last April in Tulsa during a sting targeting illegal gun sales.

"You can expect human error," defense lawyer Clark Brewster told the all-white jury. "It is not a mistake one goes to prison over."

Prosecutor Kevin Gray told jurors in closing arguments that Bates made the decision to leave his car, join the deputies and draw a weapon on Harris, who was on the ground.

"People make mistakes all the time, but to equate the shooting of Eric Harris with that is absurd," he said.

In a video seen previously in the media and played in court at the start of the trial a week ago, a Tulsa County deputy subdues Harris and a voice identified as Bates' says, "Taser, Taser."

A gunshot is then heard. A man Oklahoma authorities identified as Bates is heard saying "Oh, I shot him. I'm sorry."

Harris is heard screaming, "He shot me. Oh my God."

A deputy replies, telling Harris to "shut up," and shouts a profanity at him.

Harris, who said in the video he was having trouble breathing, later died at a Tulsa hospital.

The incident prompted the suspension of the reserve deputy program, a grand jury investigation of the sheriff's department and the Nov. 1 resignation of Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz.

(Reporting by Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton, writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by David Gregorio, Toni Reinhold)
By Lenzy Krebiel-Burton TULSA, Okla. (Reuters) - An Oklahoma state legislator has apologized after saying in the legislature last week that Native Americans are pre-disposed to alcohol abuse, officials said on Thursday. State Representative Todd Russ, a Republican, made the apology in a statement issued by his office this week, his office said on Thursday. During floor debate last week on a measure to amend Oklahoma's liquor laws, Russ said: "The white man took advantage of the Native American people at the rim of an alcohol bottle. "We see the effects of that today in society because they are predisposed physically. Scientifically we know the truth that they cannot process that like other people," he said. Russ, whose western Oklahoma district includes a portion of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes' jurisdictional area, urged members of the legislature's Native American Caucus to vote against the bill, which would allow supermarkets and convenience stores to sell beer and wine. Instead, he received a rebuke for his comments. He may not have intentionally done this, but disparaging Native Americans is an uncalled for, inappropriate comment on the House floor," Representative Dan Kirby, a Republican and a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation said during the debate. In his apology, Russ offered contrition "for the unintended pain I have caused Native Americans by my statement that was based upon outdated information." (Reporting by Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton; Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by David Gregorio)
- South Korean athletes at the Rio Olympics will wear long-sleeved training kit impregnated with mosquito repellant to protect them from the Zika virus, the national Olympic committee said Thursday. Brazil -- the epicentre of the mosquito-borne Zika virus outbreak -- hosts the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro from August 5 to 21. The South Korean training kit and uniforms for the opening and closing ceremonies will cover most of the body and be infused with repellant, a spokeswoman of the Korean Olympic Committee said, but competition kit could not be similarly treated, due to strict regulations. "But we will distribute mosquito-repellant sprays to the athletes and will also vaccinate them against other diseases that can be spread by mosquitoes just in case," the spokeswoman said.

AFP
Diversified energy company, ONEOK Inc. OKE is scheduled to report first-quarter 2016 results on May 3, after the closing bell. Last quarter, the company reported a negative earnings surprise of 2.17%. Lets see how things are shaping up for this quarter.

Factors to Consider

ONEOK continues to work on its new projects, which are located mainly in the Williston Basin, Permian Basin and other mineral-rich areas, through ONEOK Partners, L.P. OKS, thereby creating opportunity to accelerate growth in long-term fee-based earnings.

The company continues to expect the partnership's natural gas liquids volumes gathered to increase in 2016, primarily from the Williston Basin and the West Texas LPG system. It plans to add nearly 250350 well connections this year in a bid to bring additional volumes to the system.The Natural Gas Liquids segment is expected to contribute $995 million to operating income and earnings in 2016.

ONEOKs contract restructuring efforts and controlling operating costs should continue to boost margins.

However, a sharp decline in commodity prices has slowed down drilling plans of ONEOKs producer customers. As a result, demand for midstream services may not improve as much as expected.

Surprise History

The above chart indicates that ONEOK was able to generate positive earnings surprises in one of the last four quarters. The average negative surprise was 5.86%.

Earnings Whispers

Our proven model does not conclusively show that ONEOK will beat estimates this quarter. That is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), #2 (Buy) or #3 (Hold) for this to happen. But that is not the case here, as you will see below.

Zacks ESP: The Earnings ESP, which represents the difference between the Most Accurate estimate and the Zacks Consensus Estimate, is -4.65%. This is because the Most Accurate Estimate stands at 41 cents, while the Zacks Consensus Estimate is pegged higher at 43 cents.

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Zacks Rank: Though ONEOKs Zacks Rank #3 increases the predictive power of ESP, the companys negative ESP makes surprise prediction difficult.

Note that we caution against stocks with a Zacks Ranks #4 or #5 (Sell-rated stocks) going into the earnings announcement, especially when the company is seeing negative estimate revisions.

Stocks to Consider

Here are a couple of operators in the oil and gas pipeline space worth considering on the basis of our model, which shows that they have the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter:

Enable Midstream Partners, LP ENBL has an Earnings ESP of +21.05% and a Zacks Rank #1. The company is expected to report first-quarter 2016 results on May 4 before the market opens.

Spectra Energy Partners, LP SEP has an Earnings ESP of +2.27% and a Zacks Rank #2. The company is expected to report first-quarter 2016 results on May 4 before the market opens.

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Oscar de la Renta is heading to Sydney, Australia, courtesy of Etihad Airways.

The UAE's national airline announced Thursday that it has inked an agreement with WME | IMG to become the first multinational, multiyear airline to sponsor the industry's fashion weeks. It's a major move for Etihad, considering past fashion week sponsors have typically been car companies including Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and Cadillac.

Etihad Airways will support fashion weeks held around the world including New York, London, Milan, Berlin, Mumbai and Sydney, where ODLR will showcase its summer 2016 collection at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia on May 20. Executive vp Eliza Bolen will rep the fashion house down under.

"This is a landmark deal because it goes beyond traditional sponsorship and is a world-first agreement for an airline group," Etihad Airways president and CEO James Hogan said in a statement. "As a result of our business model, Etihad Airways Partners will collectively unveil a wide range of exciting new fashion initiatives for guests in our home market of Abu Dhabi and throughout the world."

Etihad Airways and its partners - which include Alitalia, Jet Airways, airberlin, Air Serbia, Air Seychelles, NIKI and Etihad Regional - also will be part of the airline's agreement with WME | IMG, which also owns IMG Models and The Wall Group, and will help the fashion industry travel between key events throughout the year.

The Abu Dhabi carrier will debut its presence in Sydney and continue to sponsor five additional events in 2016 before expanding to a total of 17 men's and women's fashion events in 2017.

Looks like the sky's the limit when it comes to fashion.

See More: About Last Night: Demi Moore Does All Black; Malin Akerman's Chic Harness
Ancient Romans thought that jolting the temples of headache sufferers with electric shocks from live torpedo fish would make the pain vanish. Its not clear whether zapping a person with fishy electricity was helpful or if it simply gave the victim another source of agony to focus on. But it didnt take humans long to discover other sources of pain relief. By 1300 B.C., the Inca in Peru had discovered that coca leavesthe source of cocainecould numb pain when chewed or applied to wounds. By that time, people in Asia and Egypt had learned to extract opium from the poppy plant, creating the earliest version of an opioid pain drug, similar to what we use today (think hydrocodone and oxycodone). We have (mostly) moved beyond electric fish to other treatments that can alleviate or reduce pain. Heres our overview of some common pain management treatments and the conditions for which they work best.

Acetaminophen

Found in more than 600 prescription and over-the-counter products, medicine such as Tylenol and its generic versions are among the most often used drugs in the U.S. Acetaminophen isnt as effective at relieving pain as drugs like ibuprofen (Advil and generic) or naproxen (Aleve and generic), according to an analysis by Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs. But it wont put you at risk for stomach bleeding and a heart attack or stroke the way those two drugs do. In fact, its easier on the gut and is a good option for those who suffer from acid reflux or ulcers. But its overuse is the leading cause of liver damage, sending almost 80,000 people per year to an ER. That can happen if you take only slightly more than the Food and Drug Administrations maximum recommended dose of 4,000 mg in a 24-hour period, and is especially worrisome if youre a heavy drinker or if you have liver disease. Our medical experts say limit use to no more than 3,250 mg within 24 hours.

Acupuncture

Legend has it that in 200 B.C., a Chinese soldier shot with an arrow noticed a good side effect: His pain from a previous injury disappeared. But acupunctures exact origins remain a mystery. And theres still uncertainty about its ability to treat pain. Some evidence suggests that it can ease lower back, neck, and knee pain, and reduce the frequency of headaches and migraines. Multiple studies have compared real acupuncture, in which thin needles are inserted into specific points on the body, with sham acupuncture, in which the needles dont break the skin or are inserted in random spots on the body. A few studies have suggested that real acupuncture was sometimes slightly better, but many found that the sham procedure was just as effective, and both were more effective than no treatment at all. This pain management treatment should be done only by a licensed practitioner who uses sterile needles.

Story continues

More on Pain Relief

 Pain Relief: What You Need to Know

 Addictive Pain Medication: How to Protect Yourself

 Does Medical Marijuana Work?

 Treating Neck and Shoulder Pain

 Treating Joint Pain

 How to Get Rid of Lower Back Pain

 Migraine Treatment, Prevention & Relief

 Tension Headache: Treatment and Prevention

Aspirin, Ibuprofen, and Naproxen

On any given day, about 17 million Americans take one of those pain relievers, which are called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Available from big brands (Advil, Aleve, Bayer) as well as in generic versions, they work by blocking the production of substances called prostaglandins that trigger pain and inflammation. Both over-the-counter and prescription versions of NSAIDs work best on tension headaches, mild migraines, lower back pain, osteoarthritis, and pain associated with muscle soreness or swelling. If you take an NSAID more than 10 days in a row, ask your doctor for an alternative, because taking too much or taking them too often can cause bleeding in the intestines, kidney failure, heart attacks (though naproxen possibly poses less risk for that), stomach ulcers, and stroke. Aspirin is the exception; when used for pain relief, it can cause stomach bleeding even at low doses.

Biofeedback

The theory is that you can control pain by using such techniques as deep breathing or muscle relaxation to consciously control or monitor otherwise involuntary bodily functions such as heart rate, skin temperature, muscle tension, or blood pressure. The jury is still out on whether biofeedback works, though experts think it might help people by simply teaching them how to relax. And several large reviews have found it works best for conditions sometimes brought on by stress, such as backaches, migraines, and tension headaches. One advantage is that biofeedback is generally free of risks and side effects.

Botox Injections

At very low doses, this powerful natural toxin temporarily blocks nerve signals and paralyzes muscles, preventing them from contracting. The treatment is FDA-approved to help prevent migraines in people who have 15 or more each month. It requires undergoing up to 31 injections in different areas of the head and neck every three months. But studies have found that the results are modest. People getting Botox shots had one or two fewer headache-days per month than those getting placebo injections. Some doctors also treat tension headaches and less frequent migraines with Botox, but the American Academy of Neurology doesnt recommend it for those cases because large-scale studies show it doesnt help.

Chiropractic Care

This hands-on therapy, in which a persons spine and other parts of the body are manipulated to alleviate pain and promote healing, dates back to ancient China and Greece. Modern chiropractors perform adjustments, which use a strong, controlled force to manipulate the spine or joints to improve alignment and restore mobility. Theres good evidence that chiropractic care helps alleviate lower back pain, including some suggesting that it works as well as medication. A 2010 comprehensive review found that the therapy may be helpful with joint, neck, and shoulder pain, and tension headaches. In a 2011 online survey of more than 45,000 Consumer Reports subscribers, 65 percent of those who had chiropractic care said it helped.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Several large studies show that CBT can help prevent migraines and neck pain, and ease chronic low back pain. This form of psychological counseling, or talk therapycombined with behavior changeshelps ease pain by teaching coping and relaxation skills. Most important is instruction on how to short-circuit negative thoughts, which can intensify pain sensations. Negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, and fear stimulate chemicals in the brain involved in pain perception, so reducing them not only helps you feel better mentally but also helps you hurt less.

Glucosamine and Chondroitin

These popular supplements, often used in combination, are said to help protect cartilage and ease joint pain and swelling. But theres little evidence that they ease arthritis pain or improve joint function. And they could pose risks, including increased blood glucose (sugar) levels. Other side effects can include a heightened risk of bleeding when taken with blood thinners, worsening high blood pressure, or possibly triggering abnormal heart rhythms. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons doesnt recommend glucosamine or chondroitin.

Massage

Tomb paintings show that ancient Egyptians used massage as part of their medical practices, and some massage schools still use Chinese instructional texts dating to 2700 B.C. A few studies have shown that massage helps alleviate headaches and muscle or joint pain in the back, hip, knees, and neck. Before trying it, confirm with your doctor that it wont be harmful for your condition. Your massage practitioner should be licensed by your state and certified by a national organization, such as the American Massage Therapy Association.

Muscle-Pain Creams and Patches

Popular drugstore products such as Bengay and Icy Hot contain chemicals called counterirritants (such as capsicum and methyl salicylate) that can create a feeling of heat, and menthol, which triggers a cooling sensation. In both cases, the active ingredients inflame the area near the pain, which stimulates the nerves and creates a milder sensation, distracting you from the pain youre trying to treat. Theres little evidence they actually address the underlying pain, though some people still might find relief. This isnt the same as using ice, which can reduce inflammation.

Muscle Relaxants

Prescription medications such as cyclobenzaprine (Fexmid and generic) and metaxalone (Skelaxin and generic) are used to treat back and neck pain, and other conditions caused by muscle spasms. But studies have failed to show that they work well for chronic pain management. Reserve muscle relaxants for acute, severe neck or back spasms, or muscle spasticity associated with cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, or a stroke. For short-term pain, they can be an option if you have liver disease or cant tolerate acetaminophen or ibuprofen. People ages 65 and older should steer clear of muscle relaxants because theyre associated with an increased risk of falling.

Oxycodone and Hydrocodone

These opioid narcotic painkillers (OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin, and their generics) work by attaching to receptors in the brain, spinal cord, and elsewhere in the body and blocking pain signals sent to the brain. But they dont directly treat the problem causing the pain. And the drugs can be highly addictive. An analysis of 39 studies involving people with chronic pain who took opioids found that the drugs didnt relieve their pain over the long term but did increase their risk of overdose, compared with those who took a placebo. If you must take an opioid, limit it to just a few days for short-term pain reliefafter surgery, for example. Otherwise, skip them. Even when used for a short period, opioids can cause side effects including abdominal cramps, constipation, nausea, sedation, and vomiting.

Physical Therapy

In the early part of the 20th century, therapists began to exercise the limbs of bedridden polio patients to rehabilitate them and relieve their pain. During World War II, wounded soldiers were treated with electrical stimulation, massage, and hydrotherapy. Today, physical therapists use similar hands-on techniques such as massaging muscles and moving joints through their range of motion, along with exercises to improve strength and flexibility. Multiple studies have shown that physical therapy can help relieve joint pain as well as chronic lower back and neck pain when it includes an exercise component.

Steroid Injections

For lower back pain, corticosteroids are injected into the spine between the vertebrae and the protective covering of the spinal cord (the epidural space), to temporarily reduce inflammation around an irritated nerve. But theyre not approved by the FDA for that use, though doctors can still use it. The shots can also offer modest, short-term relief for neck and shoulder pain, and back pain that also travels down a leg. Theres a risk of an epidural abscess (which can cause incontinence, urinary retention, fever, and paradoxically, back pain), and the FDA warns of rare but serious side effects, including vision loss, a stroke, paralysis, and even death.

Sumatriptan and Rizatriptan

Those drugs (Imitrex and Maxalt), known as triptans, can fight migraine pain by temporarily narrowing dilated blood vessels, and can relieve severe pain in about 2 hours. But they arent recommended for people with uncontrolled high blood pressure, heart disease, chest pain, or peripheral vascular disease because they can worsen those conditions and possibly cause a heart attack.

TENS

A modern version of the Ancient Romans use of electric fish, TENS, or transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, is available without a prescription. A small battery-operated device sends electrical currents through electrodes placed on areas that hurt. It appears to be safe, but whether it reduces pain is still up in the air. Some research suggests it helps, but others havent found a benefit.

Editor's Note: This article and related materials are made possible by a grant from the state Attorney General Consumer and Prescriber Education Grant Program, which is funded by the multistate settlement of consumer-fraud claims regarding the marketing of the prescription drug Neurontin (gabapentin).

This article also appeared in the June 2016 issue of Consumer Reports magazine.





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Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright  2006-2016 Consumers Union of U.S.
A Pakistani man who used a kitchen knife to murder his sister told AFP on Thursday he flew into a rage after catching her using a mobile phone, the latest "honour killing" in the deeply patriarchal country.

Hayat Khan, aged around 20, attacked his sixteen-year-old sister Sumaira at their home in the low-income Orangi Town neighbourhood of Karachi on Wednesday, senior police officer Azfar Mahesar said.

He later threw her out of the house where she lay on the steps as neighbours gathered to help.

A woman using a mobile phone, in particular to speak to a male non-relative, is seen as highly taboo among conservative elements in Pakistani society.

Speaking to AFP from his jail cell, Hayat said: "She was talking to someone at the entrance of the house, I asked her who was there and she replied why are you bothered it's none of your business, I am free to talk to anyone.

"I just wanted to scare her off with the knife but it hurt her fatally," he said, adding: "Of course it is very sad, I wish I could also die."

Mobile phone footage shot by an unknown onlooker showed several men and boys standing around Sumaira, who was seen dressed in a red tunic and orange headscarf and draped in a blanket as she writhed in pain.

A young boy is shown fighting back tears as one man says in Pashto: "Let's take her to a hospital in a car," and another man replies: "It's almost here, it's coming brother."

The video then pans to Hayat, dressed in a purple shirt and blue jeans, who stares directly at the camera.

Abdul Hakeem, a local resident, told AFP: "She was taken by car to a private hospital but she died before she arrived."

- Legal loophole exploited -

Officer Mahesar told AFP that police had taken the unusual step of making themselves the complainants in the case, in order to avoid a loophole in the law that allows the relatives of the victim to forgive the killer.

"We have registered the case on behalf of the state as we don't want to give the family the option of settling the case outside court," he said.

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The move came after Inayat Khan, Hayat and Sumaira's father, had told local media "what is done is done" and said he forgave his son.

Hundreds of women are murdered by their relatives in Pakistan each year on the pretext of defending family "honour".

"A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness" -- a film telling the story of a rare survivor of an attempted "honour killing" -- won the Academy Award for best documentary short in February.

Pakistan amended its criminal code in 2005 to prevent men who kill female relatives escaping punishment by pardoning themselves as an "heir" of the victim.

But it is left to a judge's discretion to decide whether to impose a prison sentence when other relatives of the victim forgive the killer -- a loophole which critics say remains exploited.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed to eradicate the "evil" of honour killings in February but no fresh legislation has been tabled since then.
By Julia Love

(Reuters) - Music streaming service Pandora Media Inc gave a full-year revenue forecast above expectations, helped by rising advertising sales, sending its shares up 11 percent late on Thursday.

The strong quarterly performance comes at a pivotal time for Pandora, whose stock has fallen sharply year amid concerns about stiffening competition in music streaming from rivals such as Apple Inc's Apple Music and Spotify. The company recently named a new chief executive, co-founder Tim Westergren, hoping to build goodwill in the music industry as it negotiates for licenses to launch an on-demand product.

Mike Herring, Pandora's president and CFO, said he is enthusiastic about the early progress the company has made under Westergren.

"We have the team in place, we have the enthusiastic spiritual leader at the helm in Tim and everything is full speed ahead," he said in an interview.

First-quarter revenue rose to $297.3 million from $230.8 million. Pandora shares rose as much as 11 percent in after-hours trading, compared with their close of $9.44.

The company raised its full-year revenue guidance to between $1.41 billion and $1.43 billion, up from $1.40 billion to $1.42 billion. Analysts had been expecting full-year revenue of $1.41 billion on average, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

The company said the number of active listeners in the first quarter was 79.4 million, up slightly from the same quarter last year, with total listener hours of 5.52 billion. Analysts on average had expected 79.9 million active listeners and 5.41 billion listener hours, according to market research firm FactSet StreetAccount.

Advertising revenue, which accounts for 74 percent of total revenue, rose about 23 percent in the first quarter ended March 31.

Herring attributed the gains to the company's focus on local advertising and the robust market for mobile advertising.

"It speaks to the broader strengths of the mobile advertising market and how it continues to grow," he said.

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Pandora forecast current-quarter revenue of between $345 million and $355 million.

The company lost 20 cents per share on a non-GAAP basis, wider than the loss of 12 cents per share in the same quarter last year, which Herring attributed to the rising cost of music royalties.

Analysts on average had expected a loss of 31 cents per share on revenue of $286.49 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

(Reporting by Julia Love in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
One of the world's biggest private art collections, amassed by French billionaire Francois Pinault, is to be housed in a new Paris museum a stone's throw from the Louvre, the city's mayor said Wednesday.

Luxury goods mogul Pinault, who also owns the auction house Christie's, is taking over the domed Bourse de Commerce in the centre of the French capital to show his 1.4-billion-dollar (1.2-billion-euro) collection of modern masters.

Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who negotiated the deal, described the museum as "an immense gift to the heart of Paris".

Pinault, 79, has collected an enormous trove of work, from Mark Rothko to Damien Hirst, which he now shows at his private museums in Venice after failing for decades to find a suitable home for them in Paris.

"I am delighted, this is a great day for the city," Hidalgo told AFP, pointing out that the new museum is also only a few hundred metres from the Pompidou Centre, which houses Europe's biggest contemporary art collection.

She praised Pinault and his great business rival, France's richest man Bernard Arnault -- who opened his own Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton Foundation for his art collection 18 months ago -- for helping put Paris back on the modern art map.

"It is great to have our captains of industry helping to fly our colours. With this and the FIAC art fair, Paris is regaining its place in contemporary art," she added.

- 1-billion-euro facelift -

Pinault told reporters that he wants the galleries in the historic rotunda -- whose dome the US founding father Thomas Jefferson once compared to St Peter's in Rome -- to open in 2018.

But even Pinault admitted that it might be a bit tight.

"The advantage, however, of having someone who is enthusiastic and a bit crazy, is you can seize the opportunity when it arises," he said.

The former corn exchange is also part of a one-billion-euro urban renewal project to give what Hidalgo calls a "new beating heart" to the city's Les Halles district.

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Paris's magnificent 19th-century central market was bulldozed in the 1970s to make way for an airless underground shopping complex and transport hub which many Parisians loathe.

But a vast new steel-and-glass canopy unveiled this month by Hidalgo to put a lid on the problem has also been derided, branded a "custard-coloured flop" by the British daily The Guardian.

Under the terms of the deal for Pinault's collection, the entrepreneur and his family will be given a 50-year lease on the building, which they must also renovate.

It was not revealed how much the work would cost or how much rent he will pay.

- Spectacular -

The Japanese architect Tadao Ando will convert the building which was decorated with spectacular frescos representing trade with the five continents in the 19th century after a fire destroyed the original dome in 1802.

Asked if he was going to his expand his collection -- which already comprises 3,500 artworks -- to fill the new space, Pinault said, "When you see a new work you have to know when to jump on it. The big public institutions cannot do that.

"We are a museum in movement and (will be) very complementary to the existing institutions," he added.

In 2001, Pinault handed the reins of his empire -- which includes the Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Puma and Balenciaga brands -- to his son Francois-Henri, who is married to the Mexican Hollywood star Salma Hayek.

Since then the man once described as "the most powerful in the art world", has mostly dedicated himself to his art collection, installing it in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and two other historic buildings there.

The Venice venues will work in tandem with the new Paris gallery, which will open in 2018, sources close to the collector told AFP.

Pinault had tried for years to build a museum on the site of an old Renault car factory on the Ile Seguin in the middle of the Seine west of Paris, but gave up in despair in 2005 over planning delays.

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The college student population has become increasingly diverse in the last few decades, but white students are still the majority of undergrads who study abroad.

Only 8.3 percent of Hispanic college students and 5.6 percent of black undergrads typically study abroad, according to the Council on International Educational Exchange. About 300,000 students of all backgrounds study abroad each year, the council stated in a recent report.

Lack of money and familiarity with college study abroad programs are often obstacles for many minorities who want to enroll in an academic program overseas, experts say.

[Learnwhich campuses are the most ethnically diverse.]

"About 72 percent of our students are first-generation-to-college students," says Joseph Castro, president of California State University--Fresno, which is a Hispanic-serving institution. The federally designated HSIs have a Hispanic student enrollment of at least 25 percent.

"Over 60 percent of our students receive Pell Grants," says Castro. Pell Grants are doled out by the federal government for college students with financial hardship.

To help more students of color see Asia, Europe and other continents, the Council on International Educational Exchange has partnered with the Center for Minority Serving Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Education to assist undergrads from minority-serving institutions in studying abroad. Through the partnership, which was announced in March, the council and Penn will also build strong relationships with leaders from these minority-serving schools.

They will send students overseas using a three-year strategy, which includes workshops and trainings for school leaders to better support students who want a global learning experience.

The two organizations will "commit to training college presidents, college faculty and then providing full scholarships for students to be able to participate in rich international programs each year," says James Pellow, president and CEO of the Council on International Educational Exchange.

Story continues

[Decideif a historically black college is a good fit.]

The partnership came about after a November workshop in which Penn, the council and college presidents from 10 minority-serving institutions gathered to discuss the importance of international study and how to provide more of their students with such an opportunity.

Penn will select 10 students each school year from various institutions who will receive scholarships for a four-week stint in another country. The ideal recipient is a rising sophomore who can study abroad the summer after his or her freshman year.

"Students need to demonstrate strong academic ability and character, and they have to be nominated by their university or college president," says Pellow.

Castro, who was at the November meeting, has spent much of his time as president at California State University--Fresno fundraising to increase the number of students who can afford to study abroad.

[ConsiderHispanic-serving institutions for an academic and cultural experience.]

"This year we had about 485 of our students study abroad, and that's about a 34 percent increase over two years ago, which is when I became president," he says.

About 21,000 undergrads attend the university. One of those undergrads who recently spent time overseas is Edzvan Carranza Duran. The 22-year-old, second-year student spent September through January in Japan, studying Japanese and the culture of the island nation.

"It was sort of a crazy experience to be taken out of the usual," says Duran, who's of Mexican descent. California, where his family resides, is full of Hispanics, but he didn't recall running into Latinos in Japan, he says.

Duran says he didn't really know other people with a similar background who also studied abroad before he started traveling for school. During his first year, he visited Japan for two weeks as part of a class, he says. His most recent and longer visit was especially memorable.

"It was fantastic," he says, and he and other students traveled to different places, went to festivals and participated in karaoke.

Other minority-serving institutions are removing logistical barriers that prevent students from seeing different countries.

"We're providing passports free of charge to our students who want to travel," says Elmira Mangum, who also attended the November meeting and is president of the historically black Florida A&M University. An adult's passport costs $110, according to the Department of State.

While studying abroad can be costly, and maybe even scary if it's someone's first time, the benefits are long lasting, experts say.

Students can deepen their knowledge of other cultures and have a more competitive resume when it's time enter the job market.

"Leadership in America and around the world requires a deeper understanding of different cultures," says Castro.

Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.

Delece Smith-Barrow is an education reporter at U.S. News, covering graduate schools. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at dsmithbarrow@usnews.com.
Madrid (AFP) - A DNA test has proved that bullfighter Manuel Benitez "El Cordobes" did father another matador who long claimed to be his son, the younger man's lawyer said Thursday.

Benitez, 79, who revolutionised Spain's conservative bullfighting world in the 1960s with his acrobatic style, has long denied that popular matador Manuel Diaz, 47, who also uses the nickname "El Cordobes", is related to him.

But a court in the southern city of Cordoba agreed to hear the paternity case after Diaz presented the results of DNA tests carried out on a restaurant napkin used by Benitez that was picked up by a private detective.

The court then ordered an official DNA paternity test to be carried out and the results, presented in court on Thursday, show there is a 99.9 percent probability that Benitez is the father of "Cordobes Jr.", Diaz's lawyer Fernando Osuna told AFP.

"When the DNA result is of this percentage, there is nothing more to discuss," said Osuna.

The court is expected to give its ruling next week. Benitez did not appear at Thursday's hearing.

The case has gripped Spain, with the two men featuring regularly in the country's gossip magazines.

The scandal broke in February when Diaz told "Hola!" magazine he had filed a paternity suit against Benitez after trying in vain to form a relationship with him.

"The straw that broke the camel's back was the day when he was asked about me during a television interview. Benitez turned away from the camera as if I were the devil. My children asked me, 'Why doesn't your father want to talk about you?'" Diaz told the celebrity magazine.

Diaz says he does not want to make any claims on Benitez's estate and just wants to claim a lineage that he is proud of.

Benitez has five other children and reportedly met Diaz's mother when she was working as a maid in Madrid.

His rise from an illiterate youth who was caught by police stealing chickens to top matador was narrated in the 1967 best-selling book "Or I'll Dress You in Mourning: The Extraordinary Story of El Cordobes".
Washington (AFP) - The US military's secretive Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) is working to destroy the Islamic State group's Internet connections and leave the jihadists in a state of "virtual isolation," Pentagon chiefs said Thursday.

In what he described as the command's "first major combat operation," Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said CYBERCOM is playing an important role in the US-led military operation against the IS group in Iraq and Syria.

"The objectives there are to interrupt ISIL command and control, interrupt its ability to move money around, interrupt its ability to tyrannize and control population, interrupt its ability to recruit externally," Carter told lawmakers at a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting, using an acronym for the IS group.

"We're bombing them, and we're going to take out their Internet and so forth as well.

Carter's top military advisor General Joe Dunford, who is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the goal was to cut off the jihadists' lines of communication.

"The overall effect we're trying to achieve is virtual isolation. And this complements very much our physical actions on the ground, and the particular focus is external operations that might be conducted by ISIL," Dunford said.

The two top Pentagon officials were grilled for nearly three hours in a hearing on America's progress in the campaign.

The United States launched an anti-IS international coalition in August 2014, after the jihadists caught the West off guard and stormed vast bands of Iraq and Syria -- slaughtering residents and local troops as they went, and then imposing harsh Islamic laws.

Lawmakers have repeatedly voiced frustration. About two years after their lightning assault, IS jihadists still control the key cities of Raqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

The committee chair, Republican Senator John McCain, said Carter's ideas to quicken the war's pace were "intellectually dishonest" because they did not include the option of creating a 100,000-strong ground force -- comprising Sunni nations and Western troops -- to recapture Mosul and Raqa.

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"That would be a highly desirable circumstance to be in," Carter responded, adding that he had seen "no indication from those countries, despite a lot of effort, of a willingness to do that."

Carter and President Barack Obama have long insisted the only way to defeat the IS group is by training and arming local fighters to do the job, saying the presence of US combat troops would fuel new calls for jihad.

To the consternation of ally Turkey, the United States is training Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, though officials say US-friendly Syrian Arabs will ultimately need to recapture Raqa because locals would not welcome a Kurdish liberating force.

CYBERCOM is charged with protecting America's military and some civilian networks from attacks. By 2018, it will have more than 6,000 military and civilian technical experts working across 133 teams.

One such team, comprising about 65 people, today works in the Middle East and carries out cyber operations against IS networks.
Peru cocaine drug seizure

Peru has been one of the world's top cocaine producers for decades, and as a part of the fight against drugs, the country reinstated a discarded law allowing the shooting-down of suspected drug planes, a move that worried human-rights defenders.

Though no planes have been shot down yet, Peruvian authorities now claim that the law has forced traffickers to change their behavior  but that doesnt mean they arent still moving drugs.

"Drug traffickers are using other routes to transport drugs, we've seen that in recent months," Prime Minister Pedro Cateriano said at a press conference, citing police intelligence, according to Reuters.

"Now, for example, the trafficking is fluvial and there's more antwork transportation, that is, backpackers."

Reliance on water and foot traffic to move the drug had resulted in a glut in coca leaf supply, Cateriano added, causing its price to drop.

Peru is the second-largest cocaine producer in the world (Colombia passed it in 2015) and most of that cocaine comes out of the rugged Apurimac, Ene, and Mantaro River Valleys (VRAEM). Political and law-enforcement officials have also been implicated in Perus drug trade.

According to the US State Department, small aircraft bound for Bolivia are the main transport method for cocaine produced in Peru. Ten percent of the cocaine seized in the US in 2014 was from Peru, the Drug Enforcement Administration said in 2015.

Peru VRAEM region drug trafficking

Peru enacted strong anti-drug-trade efforts in the 1990s, under then President Alberto Fujimori (who is currently jailed for human-rights abuses), which included shoot-down polices; those efforts drove down cocaine production in the country, according to Mike Vigil, the former chief of international operations for the DEA.

Story continues

According to UN data, coca production in Peru dropped from 53,700 hectares in 2007 to 42.9 hectares in 2014.

But the shoot-down policy was rescinded in 2001, after the Peruvian military, working with the CIA, downed a plane carrying missionaries, killing an American woman and her child, Reuters notes. After that, Peru focused on destroying the secret airstrips used by the aircraft, an effort that was frequently undercut by traffickers ability to rebuild the strips in a matter of hours.

After nearly 15 years, however, the Peruvian government passed legislation in August 2015 authorizing the shoot-down of suspected drug plans, providing there is reasonable suspicion the plan is carrying contraband.

Drug plane seized Honduras

Peruvian officials said at the time that the US had lobbied to stop the laws passage, but, according to Reuters, the US has not said the policys return would affect joint anti-narcotics programs it has with Peru.

Aerial transport is a common feature of the drug trade, and other countries have enacted policies to allow suspected drug planes to be shot down. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Paraguay, and Venezuela all have laws on the books permitting shoot-downs.

In some of those countries, those policies have attracted criticism, and their use has strained relations with the US.

NOW WATCH: EX-DEA AGENT: What I did when a drug dealer tried to bribe me with $3 million





More From Business Insider


The hot word of the moment is disruptive. Every new technology, or business plan, seems aimed at disrupting the orderly way we presently do or see things. As if the elections werent disruptive enough.

In that context, I have been attending demonstrations of intriguingly disruptive technologies that deliver virtual reality and mixed reality. This week I also got a glimpse of a new Videri system designed to alter the reality of visiting a Starbucks or a movie theater. Its going to be difficult in the future to see things as they are, or used to be.

Peter Bart Column Badge

Videris process would enable us, at the press of a button, to instantly change our visual surroundings at the office or home or hotel room as well as affording businesses a perpetually changing advertising landscape. The constantly shifting canvasses, some interactive, are being tested in select theaters, hotel rooms, subway stations in New York and in many Starbucks stores.

Why should we live with the same art in our homes or offices day to day when, with a touch, we can alter that reality? asks Arnold Rifkin, a producer and ex-president of the old William Morris agency who now is a principal in the new visual reality disrupter. Participating in the tests are Videri, which controls the hardware, and Outfront Media, formerly CBS Outdoor.

Rifkin, for one, has always been attracted to the big idea. As the maverick young president of the Triad talent agency, he put together a formidable client list including Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt and Daniel Day-Lewis, then sold Triad to William Morris, soon becoming its president. At that moment ICM and UTA were also devouring the remnants of the Intertalent Agency and the agency business was in turmoil.

After a five-year run, Rifkin and his key client, Willis, next moved into production, forming a 23-year relationship spanning Die Hard and 15 other films. Rifkin later established a co-production deal with distributor Chris Eberts that ended in a swamp of litigation (Eberts last year was sentenced to a four-year prison term for money laundering and wire fraud).

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A forceful presence at age 70, Rifkin says he has a slate of indie-funded films in production in such locations as Mexico, Russia and the Dominican Republic and also is active in TV and graphic novels. All these efforts, he says, are synergistic with his work with Videri, devoting his considerable energy to finding future partners for the company.

Videri

According to its chief business strategist Dan Glasser, a former DeLuxe topper, Videris key innovation is in providing users with a low-voltage, ultra-thin digital canvas that is driven by an app architecture. Hence content can be instantly changed based on smart apps or data feeds and cannot be pirated because of what Glasser describes as a highly secure ecosystem that leverages state of the art digital rights management, encryption and and other hardware components.

Hence a movie exhibitor could constantly change his digital posters to reflect shifts in multiplex bookings or new campaigns or the demands of new advertisers. The same precept would govern subway or outdoor advertising.

The upshot could be, at the least, pleasing aesthetics. Or smart marketing. Or just plain disruption.

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Pharma giant, Pfizer Inc. PFE is scheduled to report its first-quarter 2016 earnings results on May 3, before the opening bell. In the last reported quarter, Pfizer had posted a positive earnings surprise of 1.92%. Lets see how things are shaping up for this announcement.



Factors at Play



Pfizer will continue to face headwinds in the form of genericization, unfavorable currency movement including the impact of the Venezuelan financial crisis and the expiration of a few co-promotion agreements.



Pfizer has been struggling to deliver top-line growth in the face of genericization of key products. Products like Celebrex, Lipitor, Norvasc, Protonix, Camptosar and Zoloft are all facing declining sales due to generic competition.



Alliance revenues are also under pressure with the expiry of collaboration for products like Enbrel. However, core products like Lyrica and new products like Ibrance should drive revenues. Eliquis, the Prevnar franchise and Xeljanz should also contribute to growth. Moreover, the Hospira acquisition has significantly expanded Pfizer's sterile injectable and biosimilar capabilities. Pfizer has also gained access to Hospiras lucrative biosimilar portfolio of both marketed and pipeline assets.



Meanwhile, cost-cutting efforts and share buybacks should help Pfizer achieve its earnings guidance.



On the first quarter call, focus will remain on the performance of new products, the companys pipeline progress including biosimilars and immuno-oncology and plans for cash utilization now that the Allergan AGN deal has been terminated. Pfizer should also arrive at a decision regarding the splitting of its business by year end.



Surprise History



Pfizers performance has been pretty good with the company beating earnings expectations consistently. The average earnings beat over the last four quarters is 7.84%.



Earnings Whispers



Our proven model does not conclusively show that Pfizer is likely to beat estimates this quarter. That is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), #2 (Buy) or #3 (Hold) to be able to beat earnings. That is not the case here as you will see below.



Zacks ESP: The Earnings ESP, which represents the difference between the Most Accurate estimate and the Zacks Consensus Estimate, is 0.00% since the Most Accurate estimate is in line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 55 cents per share.



Zacks Rank: Pfizer carries a Zacks Rank #3. Pfizers Zacks Rank #3 when combined with an ESP of 0.00% makes a surprise prediction difficult.



We caution against stocks with a Zacks Rank #4 and #5 (Sell-rated stocks) going into the earnings announcement, especially when the company is seeing negative estimate revisions.



Stocks That Warrant a Look



Here are some large cap pharma stocks that you may want to consider, as our model shows that these have the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter.



The Earnings ESP for Sanofi SNY is +4.17% and it carries a Zacks Rank #2. The company is scheduled to release results on Apr 29.



The Earnings ESP for AstraZeneca, plc AZN is +5.00% and it carries a Zacks Rank #3. The company is scheduled to release first-quarter results on Apr 29.



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MANILA (Reuters) - A Philippine anti-money laundering body has lodged a complaint against owners of a remittance firm it called a "cleaning house" to hide the trail of $81 million looted from a Bangladesh bank, in one of the biggest cyber heists in history.

Philrem Service Corporation muddied the process and washed the stolen funds via a web of transfers and currency conversions around Philippine bank accounts, before moving it into Manila casinos and junket operators, the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) said in the filing dated Wednesday.

Philrem has denied wrongdoing.

Unidentified hackers infiltrated the computers at Bangladesh Bank, the central bank, in early February and tried to transfer some $951 million from its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

All but one of the 35 attempted transfers were to the Rizal Commercial Banking Corp in the Philippines. Most were blocked, but $81 million went to four fictitious accounts at one RCBC branch in Manila.

Most of the stolen money was consolidated into one account and quickly transferred to Philrem, which hand-delivered and remitted the funds to casinos and gambling agents in Manila,

"Philrem acting as a remittance agent co-mingled the funds and acted as a 'cleaning house'," AMLC said in its 17-page complaint filed with the Department of Justice.

AMLC said the services of Philrem were unnecessary and its role was to "conceal the money trail".

Howard Calleja, a lawyer for Philrem, declined to comment because he said he had yet to see the complaint.

In a March 17 statement, Philrem said it was following instructions from the "branch manager of the bank in question", the same bank that "assured us that these transactions were valid and there were no irregularities".

"Given the assertion, coupled with our company's respect and long-standing relationship with the bank in question, we had been assured of the validity of the transactions. Therefore, we carried on with the transaction following due process," Philrem said in the statement.

Story continues

The Philippine Senate, which has launched an investigation into how the stolen money ended up with the casinos and gambling operators, will resume its probe on May 12.

The inquiry has led to the recovery of close to $10 million from a Chinese casino boss and junket operator called Kim Wong, who received almost $35 million.

Wong told the hearing that $17 million of the $81 million stolen money was with Philrem, a claim the owners of the remittance firm deny.

Progress in the Senate investigation has been hamstrung by strict banking secrecy laws and anti-money laundering legislation that does not cover casinos and cannot compel them to disclose information.

(Reporting by Karen Lema; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Philippine warplanes on Thursday attacked Islamic militants holding 20 foreign hostages on a remote southern island, but there was no sign of the captives, the military said.

Government forces said they rained artillery fire on Abu Sayyaf gunmen on a mountainous area of Jolo island, as planes and helicopters flew low over the jungle terrain dropping bombs.

President Benigno Aquino on Wednesday vowed to "neutralise" the militants, who have declared allegiance to the Islamic State group, a day after the severed head of Canadian hostage John Ridsdel was dumped near Jolo's city hall.

"As a result of the bombardments... they were able to occupy the former places occupied by the Abu Sayyaf that resulted in the recovery of (Ridsdel's) torso," military spokesman Colonel Noel Detoyato told reporters in Manila.

He said local civilians told authorities that 14 gunmen were killed, but no bodies were reported to have been discovered and his tally could not be independently verified.

Detoyato said the offensive, targeted at veteran one-armed Abu Sayyaf commander Radullan Sahiron, was proving a success.

"What is important here is that operations are continuing and we are gaining headway and our troops are determined," Detoyato said.

However he said there had been no sightings of the remaining hostages, and that the militants had apparently escaped the area that had been the target of the attacks.

Aquino said Wednesday the hostages, including a Canadian, a Norwegian and a Filipina abducted with Ridsdel from yachts at a southern Philippine marina seven months ago, were being held by Sahiron on Jolo.

The militants are also holding 18 Indonesian and Malaysian sailors kidnapped from waters south of the Philippines over the past month, as well as a Dutch bird watcher abducted in 2012.

The Abu Sayyaf is a radical offshoot of a Muslim separatist insurgency in the south of the mainly Catholic Philippines that has claimed more than 100,000 lives since the 1970s.

Story continues

It is believed to have just a few hundred militants but has withstood repeated US-backed military offensives against it, surviving by using the mountainous, jungle terrain of Jolo and nearby islands to its advantage.

Abu Sayyaf gangs have earned many millions of dollars from kidnapping foreigners and locals since the early 1990s.

Although the Abu Sayyaf's leaders have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, analysts say they are mainly focused on their lucrative kidnappings-for-ransom rather than setting up an Islamic caliphate.

The Abu Sayyaf is also blamed for deadly bombings, including an attack on a ferry on Manila Bay in 2014 that claimed 116 lives in the country's deadliest terror attack.
Evan Sharp

For a long time, the majority of Pinterest's users were in its home market: the United States.

On Thursday, Pinterest announced that finally  about six years after the visual discovery and pinning platform first launched  it has tipped the balance. Now, just over half of its more than 100 million monthly active users are international.

But it has taken a while to monetize that user base. For example, despite hiring its first employee in the UK (its largest market outside the US) in 2013, the company started selling advertising there  its "promoted pins" format  only at the turn of this month.

Now, Pinterest is firmly turning its attention toward growing its business  in both revenue and users  internationally.

On Thursday, Pinterest announced two firsts:

Pinterest is launching a new feature in the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil (where all of its international offices are located) first, called Featured Collections. Those Featured Collections appear when you first hit the search button and are a set of pins, users, boards, and searches hand-picked daily by Pinterest's country editors and local "tastemakers" and brands. In the UK, launch partners include celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, TV presenter Fearne Cotton, model and TV star Alexa Chung, Burberry, and Topshop. (Featured Collections is also launching on Android and web first.)

Pinterest is launching its first advertising campaign in the UK. The TV, outdoor, and digital campaign includes more than 100 different creative executions that aim to show how Pinterest can show some useful ideas to solve everyday problems. The campaign was created in-house but localized by the creative agency Stinkdigital and the media agency MediaCom.

Pinterest needs to overcome some 'misperceptions.' Misperception No. 1: It's mostly just for women

Speaking with Business Insider in a London hotel earlier this week, Pinterest cofounder Evan Sharp acknowledged that there were a few big misperceptions about the platform among both its potential user base and customers.

Story continues

When Business Insider took a deep dive into Pinterest's ad-sales operation earlier this year, a former member of Pinterest's sales team described the platform's audience as "a lot [more] lower-income, middle-America people on Pinterest than you do on other sites, and it's very female-centric."

But Sharp says Pinterest isn't just a women's service  it's for everybody.

Pinterest Featured Collections

"We don't talk much about specific demographic information, but we're not trying to hide anything," Sharp said.

"There's a perception that it's for women. There is some truth to the fact that women love it, but it's equally as valuable for me. I mean, I'm a guy  I use Pinterest. Pinterest is great for men's fashion, cooking, if you're into carpentry, there's a spectrum of ideas I use for carpentry, if you're into motorcycles, there's something for you there, so there's nothing inherently one-gender about Pinterest."

Misperception No. 2: Pinterest isn't accommodating of advertisers

Back in January when we took a look at Pinterest's approach to advertising, some advertising executives expressed frustration that Pinterest had not yet become a "slick" sales operation compared with its Silicon Valley counterparts like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. A former Pinterest sales staffer said the company didn't move quick enough to close some big deals, so those partners moved on.

Sharp said: "The reality of any startup is that you can only grow so fast, which means you can only do so much. The only thing worse than not servicing a partner is to do it poorly, and I think that was the risk that we had.

"We still have that in some markets: We can't work with every partner in the world. It's not because we don't value them, but it's because we literally can't scale to the size we need to have that kind of relationship with them and do it well in a way it's valuable. I think that's just the nature of startups and hypergrowth."

Pinterest employees

Pinterest grew revenue by "5X" from 2014 to 2015, and Sharp tells us the company has another "very ambitious goal for revenue this year." While he won't share exact numbers, he says "it will be something that will be on or near record pace for a company scaling revenue."

Documents leaked to TechCrunch last year suggested Pinterest was forecasting revenue of $169 million in 2015, though the company has declined to confirm these numbers.

Sharp said the benefit to advertisers of working with Pinterest was users' frame of mind when visiting the platform. They are looking for inspiration and ideas, so the insertion of advertising is not something separate and distracting but instead is useful.

Additionally, he said: "We know probably more than anybody about what's trending and what's interesting right now. Both at a macro level around the world, but also at a country level."

The company has also made several advertising product announcements in recent months, most recently including its international advertising launch and opening up its self-serve ads-manager platform to all businesses.

The biggest misperception: Pinterest is a social network

Pinterest often gets lumped into comparisons with companies like Facebook or Twitter. The better comparison is probably with Google Search.

"What's different about Pinterest is that it's not a social service," Sharp said. "It's not really about sharing with friends at all. It's a personal service. It's about ideas for your future. What do you want to eat? Where do you want to travel? What do I want to do in my life?"

That's where the advertising campaign comes in. There's a relatively high level of awareness of the brand, but Sharp said the company needs to do a better job telling the story of why Pinterest is a distinct discovery platform and how it can fit into people's everyday lives, whether through recipe ideas or ways to furnish their houses.

facebook f8 roadmap

At Facebook's F8 developer conference this year, the social-media company unveiled its 10-year road map. The next three years involves Facebook's own ecosytems, the next five years will focus on its family of apps such as WhatsApp and Messenger, and the 10-year game involves its more ambitious technology efforts, such as artificial intelligence and connectivity offerings.

We asked what Pinterest's 10-year plan looked like.

Sharp was keen to point out that Facebook (his former employer) was a "very different business": a mature public company with research-and-development arms across a spectrum of products.

Pinterest, meanwhile, is a strong contender to go public one day, having raised $1.3 billion in funding at an $11 billion valuation. But it's not there yet.

Evan Sharp

"We are more like where Facebook was in 2008 maybe, where they had a similar number of users and a similar number of employees," Sharp said. "And so I'd say for us, 10 years out is probably too ambitious  actually that's the wrong word. We have more uncertainty and less financial certainty in order to place bets at the level Facebook can."

Instead, the focus is very narrow: Growing the core product internationally and aiming to build "the best, most local, most personalized experience for people based on where they live, what device they're on, and what they're interested in."

Sharp added: "If we can nail that, I think we are going to grow a very large, useful business and we can start thinking about other bets and other long-term strategies that can help grow our mission outside the core product."

NOW WATCH: 4.2 million Americans could be displaced by rising sea levels this century  see if your county is at risk





More From Business Insider


These incredible images show the moment a plane landing at Heathrow Airport was struck by lightning in mid-air.

The plane, that was apparently flying in from Reykjavik, was struck as it made it way past Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea FC.

It was flying just below a large dark cloud at the time of the strike, which came as London was hit with wintry weather.

Incredibly, the Icelandair plane managed to land safely - but those on board at the time were shocked by the sudden noise they heard from inside the cabin.

Passenger Catherine Mayer told the Evening Standard that the strike was sudden and loud and very bright and unmistakable for what it was.

She added: I think all the passengers were too shocked to react but when we landed everybody was talking about it.

Struck: The lightning hit the plane as it flew over London (Twitter/@hi_flyer7)

Shock: The plane landed safely at Heathrow (Twitter/@version3point1)

The captain came on the Tannoy and said, laconically, that we may have noticed a lightning strike and people laughed.

The flight was seemingly not the only plane that was struck by lightning, with a British Airways flight also hit.

A spokesman for British Airways told Metro: Lightning strikes are fairly common, and aircraft are designed to cope with them.

Top pic: Rex
Passengers reported lightning strikes on planes around London on Wednesday night, including on a British Airways plane flying into Heathrow airport, according to passengers and a photographer who captured the moment. Flight BA857, which had departed from Prague, landed safely in the London airport, but not before passengers were left in shock by a sudden loud noise and bright light.
On April 27, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in McDonnell v. United States, an important case in which Bob McDonnell, a former governor of Virginia, is challenging a criminal conviction under federal public corruption law.

Joining We the People to discuss the issues at stake are two legal experts who filed briefs on opposite sides of the case.

Noah Bookbinder is the Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. CREW filed a brief in support of the government.

Judge Nancy Gertner is a Senior Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She co-authored a brief in support of Gov. McDonnell.



Download this episode (right click and save)

This show was engineered by Jason Gregory and produced by Nicandro Iannacci. Research was provided by Josh Waimberg and Danieli Evans. The host of We the People is Jeffrey Rosen.

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PPL Corporation PPL reported first-quarter 2016 adjusted earnings of 67 cents per share, falling short of the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 75 cents by 10.7%.

On a GAAP basis, the company reported earnings per share of 71 cents in the quarter compared with 96 cents a year ago. The difference between GAAP and operating earnings in the reported quarter was due to 4 cents of special after-tax benefits.



Total Revenues



PPL Corp.s total revenues of $2,011 million missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2,213 million by 9.1%. Revenues also decreased 9.8% year over year.



Segment Results



UK Regulated: Adjusted earnings decreased by 11 cents on a year-over-year basis to 39 cents per share. The decrease was attributable to the beginning of the new eight-year price control period (RIIO-ED1), lower sales volumes due to unfavorable weather, and the effect of changes in British pound sterling to U.S. dollar exchange rates.



Kentucky Regulated: Adjusted earnings were on par with the prior year. This was primarily due to higher base electricity rates effective Jul 1, 2015, and lower operation and maintenance expense, offset by lower sales volumes due to unfavorable weather and higher financing costs.



Pennsylvania Regulated: Adjusted earnings in the reported quarter increased by 1 cent per share to 14 cents, driven primarily by higher base electricity rates for distribution effective Jan 1, 2016, and higher transmission margins, partially offset by lower sales volumes due to unfavorable weather and higher operation and maintenance expense.



Corporate and Other: It includes unallocated corporate-level financing and other costs and was flat year over year.



Operational Highlights



PPL Corp.s total operating expenses decreased 11.3% year over year to $1,188 million in the reported quarter.



The company reported an operating income of $823 million, down 7.5% from $890 million a year ago.



Interest expenses rose 7.2% to $224 million from $206 million a year ago.



Financial Position



As of Mar 31, 2016, PPL Corp. had cash and cash equivalents of $814 million compared with $836 million as of Dec 31, 2015.



Long-term debt (excluding debts due within one year) was $18,074 million as of Mar 31, 2016, compared with $18,563 million at the end of 2015.



In the first three months of 2016, net cash flow from operating activities (continuing operations) was $557 million compared with $673 million in the prior-year period.



Guidance



PPL Corp. reaffirmed its 2016 adjusted earnings guidance in the range of $2.25 to $2.45 per share with the midpoint at $2.35.



The midpoints of the adjusted earnings guidance for UK Regulated, Kentucky Regulated and Pennsylvania Regulated are pegged at $1.43, 57 cents and 47 cents, respectively, for the year.



The company expects annual earnings growth of 56% through 2018, off a 2014 base.



Upcoming Peer Releases



Pinnacle West Capital Corporation PNW is slated to release first quarter results on Apr 29, 2016. The Zacks Consensus Estimate is 13 cents.



Consolidated Edison, Inc. ED is slated to release first quarter results on May 5, 2016. The Zacks Consensus Estimate is $1.22.



Pattern Energy Group Inc. PEGI is slated to release first quarter results on May 5, 2016. The Zacks Consensus Estimate is 3 cents.



Our View



PPL Corporations earnings per share and revenues were lower than expectation, as unfavorable weather adversely impacted demand in its service territories.



However, the significant investments planned by the company to strengthen its existing infrastructure will help it to provide reliable services to its customers and at the same time boost its performance over the long term.



PPL Corp. currently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



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The following are the top stories on the business pages of British newspapers. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

The Times

Dominic Chappell, the twice-bankrupt former racing driver who owned retailer BHS for only a year before it collapsed into administration, is trying to buy it back with the help of American investors. (http://bit.ly/1SLcLtg)

Naz Shah, a Labour MP from Bradford West, who backed calls to transport all Israelis to America, has been suspended by Jeremy Corbyn after a revolt from within his party. (http://bit.ly/1NBiq6c)

The Guardian

Mounting urgency has returned to Greece with the country's financial predicament igniting fears of a re-run of last summer's nail-biting drama. Rejecting a Greek request for an extraordinary EU summit to discuss its troubled bailout programme, European Council President Donald Tusk instead urged euro zone finance ministers to resume talks that would avert further turmoil. (http://bit.ly/1NBiFOr)

UK factories produced 443,581 cars in the first three months of the year, up 10.3 percent from the same quarter last year, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. It was the strongest first-quarter performance since 2004. (http://bit.ly/1NBiO4G)

The Telegraph

Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc bosses are seeking to eke out even bigger savings from the embattled engineering business, according to a secret internal report. Consultants from Bain & Company are understood to have delivered a study to top executives at the FTSE 100 group, saying it could boost profits by 1 billion pounds ($1.45 billion).

International investment into UK commercial property has stalled as widespread market uncertainty ahead of the Brexit vote takes hold, new research has warned, with more than a third of those surveyed blaming the referendum. (http://bit.ly/1NBjFlV)

Sky News

MPs probing the collapse of retailer BHS will summon the entrepreneurs who bought BHS for 1 pound. The Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee will announce on Thursday that it wants to examine the level of due diligence that Retail Acquisitions Limited was legally required to undertake before buying BHS from Philip Green just over a year ago, Sky News has learnt. (http://bit.ly/1SLchn8)

Story continues

UK growth slowed in the first quarter, according to official figures, as a leading economic think-tank warned of the potential impact of Brexit. (http://bit.ly/1SLctTo)

The Independent

Standards of living in Britain lag behind the European average, according to a Glassdoor study. UK ranks 10th in an analysis of 18 European countries, behind Switzerland, Denmark and Germany, according to the study. (http://ind.pn/1NBkvPl)

($1 = 0.6880 pounds) (Compiled by Ismail Shakil in Bengaluru)
(Adds Breakingviews link, analyst comment, background; updates shares)

By Sweta Singh

April 28 (Reuters) - Priceline Group Inc said on Thursday that Chief Executive Darren Huston has resigned, effective immediately, after an investigation found that his personal relationship with an employee violated the company's code of conduct.

The investigation into Huston's relationship with the employee, who was not under his direct supervision, determined that he had engaged in activities inconsistent with the board's expectations for executive conduct, Priceline said.

The travel website operator said the 50-year-old Huston, who has been the company's CEO since January 2014, had acknowledged his misconduct and expressed regret.

Priceline named chairman and former CEO, Jeffery Boyd, as interim CEO.

"Despite this surprising news, we remain constructive on Priceline shares," RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney wrote in a note to clients.

"Having former CEO Jeff Boyd return as interim CEO will provide continuity, experience, and leadership," he added.

Priceline's shares were down 1.2 percent at $1,337.58 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq, amid a slight dip in the broader market.

The investigation and Huston's resignation was not related in any way to the company's operational performance or financial condition, Leslie Cafferty, a company spokeswoman, told Reuters in an email.

Priceline said Huston will also step down as CEO of Booking.com, a unit of Priceline, and be replaced by Chief Operating Officer Gillian Tans.

He will not receive any severance payments and forfeit a portion of his equity-based awards, Priceline said in a regulatory filing. His annual compensation was close to $22 million for 2014, according to a company filing.

Huston joined the company in September 2011 and one of his first major moves after becoming CEO was to acquire restaurant reservation website operator OpenTable Inc for $2.6 billion to broaden Priceline's services outside the increasingly competitive online travel industry.

Story continues

Priceline, Expedia Inc and other travel companies have been facing increased pressure in their hotel bookings business from the rise of apartment-sharing startups such as Airbnb.

One of Huston's last deals was to sign an agreement with TripAdvisor Inc in October last year, allowing Booking.com customers to directly book hotel rooms on the travel review website operator.

The company's revenue has increased nearly 36 percent since Huston became CEO in January 2014.

Since then, Priceline's shares have risen about 16.5 percent through Wednesday's close, outperforming a 13.4 percent increase in the benchmark S&P 500 index.

Huston's resignation comes a week before the company is scheduled to report second-quarter results on May 4.

(Reporting by Sweta Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva and Savio D'Souza)
Despite some reports to the contrary, the Drug Enforcement Administration is not involved in the Prince case, an official with the Carver County sheriff's office told The Hollywood Reporter.

"The DEA is not part of this investigation at this time," Jason Kamerud, spokesman for the sheriff's office, told THR.

A search warrant was issued on Thursday for the case, but it has been sealed, meaning specifics of where the search will take place and what is found will not be made public at this time.

In new documents released by the sheriff's office, data show authorities were called to Prince's home for medical calls on Aug. 9 and again on Sept. 6 of last year. The exact nature of the medical calls is unclear.

On Wednesday, NBC News reported that the legendary musician allegedly had pain killers in his possession at the time of his death. The network also reported that the sheriff's office had enlisted the help of the DEA in its investigation.

Prince was found dead a week ago at his Paisley Park home. He was 57. His autopsy - which took longer than normal due to the thoroughness of the exam - was completed the following day.

There is no ETA on when test results will be back, but authorities did say there were "no obvious signs of trauma" to Prince's body, and they had "no reason to believe at this point that this was a suicide."

On Thursday, the coroner's office told THR speculation from media outlets over the cause of Prince's death was just that - speculation.

Prince was cremated, and a small, private service was held last weekend at an undisclosed location for his family and friends. Prince will be honored at a public memorial service on May 6 outside Los Angeles City Hall.

Read More: Prince's Estate to Be Temporarily Managed by Trust Company
Despite some reports to the contrary, the Drug Enforcement Administration is not involved in the Prince case, an official with the Carver County sheriff's office told The Hollywood Reporter.

"The DEA is not part of this investigation at this time," Jason Kamerud, spokesman for the sheriff's office, told THR.

A search warrant was issued on Thursday for the case, but it has been sealed, meaning specifics of where the search will take place and what is found will not be made public at this time.

In new documents released by the sheriff's office, data show authorities were called to Prince's home for medical calls on Aug. 9 and again on Sept. 6 of last year. The exact nature of the medical calls is unclear.

On Wednesday, NBC News reported that the legendary musician allegedly had pain killers in his possession at the time of his death. The network also reported that the sheriff's office had enlisted the help of the DEA in its investigation.

Prince was found dead a week ago at his Paisley Park home. He was 57. His autopsy - which took longer than normal due to the thoroughness of the exam - was completed the following day.

There is no ETA on when test results will be back, but authorities did say there were "no obvious signs of trauma" to Prince's body, and they had "no reason to believe at this point that this was a suicide."

On Thursday, the coroner's office told THR speculation from media outlets over the cause of Prince's death was just that - speculation.

Prince was cremated, and a small, private service was held last weekend at an undisclosed location for his family and friends. Prince will be honored at a public memorial service on May 6 outside Los Angeles City Hall.

This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter
Officials have allegedly found prescription painkillers in Princes possession and at his home near Minneapolis, according to a Wednesday NBC News report.

Its currently unclear if the reportedly found painkillers played a role in the music icons death. Also according to the report, the county sheriff has asked for the help of the Drug Enforcement Administration in investigating Princes death. The DEAs role will be to determine where the drugs came from, and what prescriptions Prince had obtained.

Variety has reached out to the Carver County Sheriffs Office, which is investigating Princes death, for comment.

An autopsy for Prince was conducted last Friday, but it will likely be weeks before results of toxicology tests are delivered. A cause of death has yet to be determined. Officials have ruled out suicide and the rest is under investigation, said Sheriff Jim Olson at a press conference last Friday. There were no visible signs of foul play.Prince may have suffered an overdose days before his death at the age of 57 last Thursday. His plane made an emergency landing in Moline, Ill., less than a week before he died. His reps said at the time that Prince was struggling with the flu and had to make the landing due to a medical emergency.

TMZ reported, however, that Prince was using the painkiller Percocet to treat hip pain associated with a 2010 surgery. Authorities are continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding his death.

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Prince's Sister Says Musician Had No Will

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Prince's Paisley Park Estate to Become Museum
The soft-spoken, tentative voice saying hello on the other end of the phone is Andre Cymone. Prince's closest childhood friend and first bassist is calling Billboard late Tuesday afternoon (April 26) to talk about his memories of the enigmatic talent.

The call comes after a series of emails with Cymone, whom the magazine reached out to during the days following Prince's death. Cymone wrote back over the weekend, saying he would love to talk but was "still processing this new reality. It's truly a tough time right now." Then with no advance notice, the songwriter/producer graciously called and spent nearly 50 minutes reminiscing.

As diehard Prince fans are well aware, Cymone was the bass guitarist for Prince's pre-Revolution touring band. A fellow Minneapolis native, Cymone first met Prince -- who eventually moved in with Cymone's family -- in seventh grade. Immediately bonding over music, the pair quickly began gigging as the band Grand Central (whose members included Prince's cousin Charles "Chazz" Smith and future Time member Morris Day). Cymone joined Prince's touring band after the release of the artist's 1978 Warner Bros. debut album For You.

More From Billboard's Prince Tribute: Prince, the Greatest Artist of His Generation | Prince's Defining 'Dirty Mind' Album | 'Purple' Rain Style Exclusive | Prince's Career Control | Prince's Female Muses | Prince's Life as a Jehovah's Witness | Prince's Final Show Set List | Superfan Tracy Morgan on What Prince Taught Him | Sheila E. on Her Love for Prince | Jimmy Jam on Getting Fired by Prince | Former Warner Bros. CEO Mo Ostin on Prince's Fearlessness | Rob Light on Prince's 'Creative Genius' | Prince's Quirkiest Stories

Working with Prince up to 1981's Controversy, Cymone left the band that year reportedly over creative differences with the artist. Offering insight into Prince's creative mindset while making the pivotal 1980 album Dirty Mind, Cymone otherwise shied away from a deeper discussion about his and Prince's professional career together. Recalling Grand Central's aborted first brush with fame -- Isaac Hayes was to mentor the group -- Cymone says in a frank tone, "After that, Prince got his record deal and that became what that became."

Story continues

Cymone launched his own solo career in 1982 with Livin' in the New Wave. Two more albums followed, 1983's Survivin' in the 80s and 1985's AC -- the latter of which featured the Prince-penned single "The Dance Electric," a top 10 R&B hit. Since then, Cymone has written and produced songs for other artists, including his former wife Jody Watley. Nearly 30 years would elapse before Cymone released a new album, 2014's The Stone.

Laughter begins to punctuate the conversation as a once-reticent Cymone warmly recalls the special bond he had with Prince. "What I remember most is his personality," he says. "There was just a lot more to him than what people saw."

We first met in 7th grade. Part of the reason why I haven't gotten into this stuff is because I would never presume to talk about somebody else's reality. But obviously under these circumstances I know he's got tons and tons of fans and people who really love him. They would probably appreciate hearing from somebody who knew him from my perspective.

My mom was able to move our family to a different neighborhood because we definitely came from the other side of the tracks. So I had to go to a new school and didn't know anybody at all. They did roll [call], gave me the classroom and then told me to stand against the wall. I look at the whole wall of guys I don't know and have to go stand next to somebody. I look and see this kid who kind of reminds me a little bit of myself. So I thought, "Let me stand next to him." So I did.

"Hey, how you doing? My name is Andre." "My name's Prince." We start talking. I was a pretty aggressive kid, so I was like, "What do you do, what are you into?" He says, "I play music." "Wow, so do I." He asks, "What do you play?" I say, "I play horns, guitar and bass." He says, "I play piano and guitar." We hit it off. He seemed to be really passionate and I was very passionate. I started talking about how I'm going to be this. And he's yeah, me too. Next thing you know we became best friends.

Prince said, "Listen, do you want to go jam? My dad has equipment and we can go jam." So we went over to his dad's house and sure enough his dad had this beautiful piano and guitar. He had this Gibson that he kept in pristine condition. He let Prince play it but he would only let him play it at his [the dad's] house. But anyway, we jammed. And he was phenomenal then. He played The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the Peanuts theme song.

A Look Back at Prince's Quirky, Idiosyncratic Paisley Park Records

We got to know each other. As I was sitting there, it was a really strange thing. He was telling me a little about his dad, who had a lot of pictures on the piano. I looked at a picture of a combo that he had and I asked Prince about one of the guys in the picture. He told me to ask his father as he'd be home soon. When his dad came home, he's looking at me like who is he and what is he doing here? Prince introduced us. His dad had a really booming deep voice. So I asked him who is that, pointing to the guy playing bass in the picture. He looked at the guy in the picture, looked at me and just busted out laughing. I was like, "What?" "You're Fred Anderson's son." I said yeah. Then he said, "Oh my God"; he must have said that six times. Prince and I are looking at each other like, why is he saying that? He said, "You guys used to hang out when you were kids. Me and your dad played in a band together. Your dad was like this phenomenal bass player" and blah blah blah blah . He goes into this whole thing. "I'm like, what, really?"

It turns out they were in a band together and we had no idea. So it was very ironic that I just happened to pick Prince to stand next to. That's how we met.

We started the band together right around the same time. Maybe within the week or month, we said we should put a band together. It eventually became Grand Central; we had a few names going on there before.

Prince's 'Family' Tree: See the Purple One's Musical Universe

Obviously, I don't want to get into me if this is about Prince. But if I'm speaking from my perspective  Some of the things I did as the kid I was at the time that wound up having something to do with him coming to live with my family. But I'll give you a little bit of what that was about.

I was a very wild kid. I was from the projects. I was a hustler. Everything was about trying to do stuff. I was always talking about we gotta do this, do that, we gotta make some money. He was more laid back. When we put the band together, I was still hustling. I'd be stealing cars, bikes  I was into a lot of crazy stuff. We had moved into a really nice sort of upper middle-class neighborhood and parents didn't want their kids hanging around me because I was a little rough around the edges. I think the final straw for his mom was when I pulled up in a brand new Cadillac trying to get Prince to come out and go for a joyride. She forbid Prince to hang out. So every time I'd try to come by and ask can Prince come out and jam, she'd say no. She made him do all kinds of other stuff, anything other than to play with me. I think what happened is eventually he ran away.

He came to our house and asked, "Can I stay here?" I said I'll have to talk to my mom. I asked her and she was like, "Yeah, but I have to call his mom and let her know that he's here." So she called his mom to let her know and they worked it out. So his mom said, "He can stay there if he wants to." So a day turned into a week, week turned into a month, month turned into a year and a year turned into about five or six years, something like that.

We were playing cover songs and originals. We did everything from Earth, Wind & Fire to War and Mandrill, Jimi Hendrix, Billy Preston, you name it. We were just doing a lot of covers. Another local band, Flyte Tyme, was a phenomenal band. They had been playing and we were just starting out. But Flyte Tyme at that time was Terry Lewis, not Jimmy Jam because he was in another band called Cohesion. Flyte Tyme was Terry, David Island, Jellybean was the drummer and one of the horn players was Kid. I remember one of our first battle of the bands: they weren't going to let us play because we really didn't have the kind of equipment for the venue. We only had this teeny amp: It was just the three of us: me, Prince and his cousin Charles. Charles' drums didn't have drum heads on both sides. We were kind of rag-tag.

But I went to the leader of one of the other bands that had fabulous equipment and I said [adopting a high voice]: "Please, can we play on your equipment? We're not really that good. We're just little guys." So they felt bad for us and said, "Oh, go ahead." And we went on and won. I think we played a Hendrix song and a Santana song. It might have been "Fire." I know we played "Out of Space" because Prince played the organ. I think we played three songs: the Hendrix song, an original then "Out of Space." And when we won, they let us play another song or two; I think we wound up playing  [he starts singing the lyrics to the Four Tops' "Ain't No Woman Like the One I've Got"]. I know our drummer [Charles] was into stuff like that. When you're in a band, you kind of have to let everybody pick a song to do and that song was a little out of character for where we were at. At the time, because he was the oldest, he was kind of the leader of the band which was interesting. We'd come up with different names for the band and when we'd win, we'd think we'd lost. They'd say the winner is  Phoenix. And we'd be like, "Oh, man." Charles would be like, "We won." And Charles would say, "Oh yeah, I changed the name." That's the kind of stuff that would happen.

That battle of the bands I'm talking about, one of the prizes that was a big deal for us was studio time at one of the local recording studios. That was the first time we actually went in the studio and wound up recording some demo songs. We recorded "Love Unlimited," that Barry White song. I think we recorded the Carole King song "It's Too Late." Then an original song by Prince and one by me.

What Will Happen to Prince's Memoir?

I think me and Charles had a falling out. We weren't really getting along. It's really ironic that Morris [Day] happened to sort of come in. Morris would always come to me and say, "Man, I'm a drummer and want to play in your band. I can play." I'm like, "Dude, we have a drummer." We'd do a gig and I'd see Morris on the side. "Man, can I play in your band?" Finally, after moving up from junior high to senior high and Morris, being a little older than me, was going to that school. I'm walking down the hallway and hear "Andre, you gotta hear me play the drums. I'm really good." So we go into the band room and he started playing. The drum set didn't have a carpet under it so when he started playing, the drums are sliding. So he's trying to play and keep the drums from falling. Eventually the drums fell off the riser and rolled down. I left and he calls me, saying, "You've got to come to my house and hear me play." So I went over to his house and he put on Tower Of Power's "What is Hip" and played it lick for lick. Completely blew me away. He was left-handed and I'd never heard anybody play like that ever. I'm like, "Oh shit, you're in."

He brought his drums over. I told Prince, "You've got to hear this guy." Charles was still a good friend. But I just felt we could take our whole thing to another level. Morris came, Prince heard him and we all jammed. Morris also had a white Fender Telecaster bass that sort came with the situation [laughs]. Anyway, that's how Morris came to the band. This would have to be maybe 1973 or 1974, right around there.

Prince and I were very dedicated, both very passionate. That was one of things right away that drew me to him. He had the same passion. He wanted it as bad as I wanted it. I knew other musicians but no one ever really took it all that serious. I was deadly serious. Anybody who would listen to me, I'd tell them I'm going to be a star one day. Michael Jackson, I wanted to challenge him and the Jackson 5 to a duel. I was very aggressive; it's hard for me to put in any other way. I was very cocky and confident. I practiced all the time. I wasn't the bass player, I was the saxophone player. But my father was a bass player and he had an upright that I played all the time. So I knew how to play the bass. But we originally had another guy in the band playing bass. He quit because of one of my shenanigans. That's how I wound up stepping in and playing bass. I used to have to borrow a bass  it was interesting. Eventually my mom got me a bass and I practiced and that helped things out.

There was a sixth sense between the two us, absolutely. When you find somebody else who has the same passion, drive and competence, especially at that age because you're going through all kinds of stuff like girls -- this is what we both were meant to do. It's something that doesn't happen, I don't think, very often where you find two people come together who are really passionate about what they do at a time when they're both growing and learning while still trying to find a way to make that a reality. I played a lot. He played a lot. When he moved in, we'd sit in the kitchen and just play. We spent literally hours and hours doing that. It really is no accident when I think about how things eventually evolved. When you practice and play as much as we did and are as dedicated, you reap the rewards that can bring you.

We literally saw each other every day for maybe 4-5 years straight before all the fame. When you have that kind of a closeness, you kind of know what the other person is thinking without even having to speak. And when you start talking about music, it's the same thing. There are gigs and pictures where I'm playing the bottom end of the bass and he's playing the finger board; that doesn't really work unless you're really on the same page.

Read Prince's In-Depth Billboard Cover Story From 2013

Our first brush with fame was kind of a false start. Morris' mom was beautiful, a gorgeous woman who reminded me of Pam Grier. I was completely and utterly in love. She could say, "We're doing a gig on the moon" and I'd be early, which was rare for me. But she somehow knew people like Redd Foxx and Isaac Hayes. She got in touch with Hayes and said she was managing this group with her son and would he be interested in getting involved. I think she must have sent him one of our demos. He said yes and was going to help us become superstars. She told me that and I quit school, telling everyone we're going to have tutors and all that kind of stuff. Prince was smart. He kept going to school.

So all this stuff was supposed to happen [through Isaac Hayes] and then somebody showed me a copy of Jet magazine with a story that about Isaac Hayes filing for bankruptcy. I thought, "OK, guess I have to go back to school." That was the first brush I can recall. After that, Prince got his record deal and that became what that became.

The last time we played together was at this place called The Sayers Club. He had reached out and said, "Listen, I'm playing at The Sayers Club, love for you to come down." So I went there and he asked if I wanted to come up and do "The Dance Electric." I was like, "I haven't played that song in a long time; I don't know the words." He's like, "Don't worry, I have a teleprompter." Ok, fair enough, so I did that.

The Inside Story on Designing Prince's Paisley Park: Exclusive

Then it might have been a few months after that. He was doing a show in Anaheim, Calif. He asked me if I wanted to come; that he was doing a gig with 3rdEyeGirl and wanted me to check them out. He called me the night of the gig. I was in a meeting with my manager and my wife, who is also my manager, and we were having a meeting about finishing my album at the time. I said, "Guys, you want to go to a Prince show?" My manager I think said he'd never been to a Prince show. I said you might want to check it out as he's pretty phenomenal.

So we go to the show. Maya Rudolph and all kinds of people were there. I'm given a cool spot to hang out in. Prince was always super cool when I came to his shows. For one show, he even gave me my own dressing room even though I wasn't playing. He heard I was coming and put my name on one of the dressing rooms. For this particular show, he has a guy come and take me to his dressing room. We sat there and talked for a while. He asked me how things were going; I told him about my kids and all that stuff. I told him maybe he should come out to L.A. and live there for a while. He's like, "No way." We chitchat for a while and he asked me where I wanted to sit -- either by the sound booth or on a couch by the stage. So the show gets ready to start and a guy escorts me, my manager and wife to the couch. And it turns out the couch is literally on the stage; I'm like 2-3 feet away from the guitar player. I remember my wife saying, "I can see the crowd. And if I can see the crowd, the crowd can probably see me" [laughs].

Sitting there was unbelievable. The show was just beyond-belief fantastic. Then as Prince would do, because he knew I would leave early as I usually don't like to hang around too long, he had a guy come get me and take me to the other side of the stage. Prince is like, "Come on the stage." I think he was doing "Housequake" and playing the piano. I go out on stage thinking he's going to give me a guitar, bass or something. Instead I go onstage and I'm just standing next to him while he's playing. He's talking me, telling me about the next chord he's going to hit. Like, "Check out this one." I'm standing out here looking like Lurch, wondering why am I here. He's just got me standing there next to him mostly because he didn't want me to leave. It was the last song.

Right after that, he says, "I want you to meet my band." So I wind up meeting the band. He tells everybody, "Hey, this is my first bass player." I'm like, "Yeah and this is my first guitar player" [laughs]. Anyway, that was the last time I saw him perform. It wasn't that long ago. Maybe not last year but maybe the year before? I think that's the last time I actually saw him. We had a great time. We drank a bottle of Cristal and he introduced me to all the people around. We hung out for awhile.

The last time we corresponded was when I heard about the plane [which had an emergency landing because of Prince getting ill mid-flight on April 15]. I reached out to get a hold of him. I called a bunch of different people. I called his sister and she said she'd try to give him the message. I called Bobby Z and he said he'd try to get him the message. Finally, Bobby got a hold of him and he sent a text to me. Bobby pasted it and sent it to me. Prince said, "I'm OK. When I get to L.A., we'll hook up."

That was it. And I guess maybe five days later he was gone.

Prince, Minneapolis, and a Public Wake: Finding the Man in the Stories of a City

His legacy? I think his music is his immortality. That sums it up. It's hard to say; he did so much. He recorded so much music. What I remember most is just his personality. There was just a lot more to him than what people saw. I've heard people say it; everybody who really knew him knows he was a funny dude. Very funny. He had a very interesting sense of humor. As kids we had a lot of fun. To be able to do what we loved and be able to actually be successful at it, especially at the age we were at, it was like a dream come true I'm sure for him and definitely for me.

We always threatened to get together and do some stuff. The last time I saw Prince, he said, "Man, we've got to get together. We've got do something, we gotta play, we gotta jam." The one regret I have is that I never really took him up on that.

-- As told to Gail Mitchell
The Company Specialises in Helping its Clients Navigate the World of Cash Flow Positive Property

SOUTH YARRA, AUSTRALIA / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / Smart Property, an Australia-based company that utilises market and property data to help investors obtain ideal property assets, recently announced its launch. To correlate with its launch, Smart Property also unveiled a new and informative website, which serves as a place for customers to learn more about its services, strategies, and investment tools.

According to an article available on Smart Property's website, the company believes that investing in outperforming properties is one of the best ways to build a diverse portfolio. For example, choosing to invest in an outperforming property with a seven percent growth rate versus an average property with a five percent annual growth rate could mean a difference of $1.6 million over a 30-year period. Through the use of data and research, Smart Property develops key strategies that help clients identify outperforming property assets, allowing them to reach their goals with ease and confidence.

Smart Property uses a specific framework to ensure the success of each client. The company makes sure the properties are purchased via the ideal legal entities and spends time ensuring all associated loans support long-term success. However, most importantly, Smart Property focuses on finding the right properties--those that have a strong chance of outperforming the market in the medium- to long-term.

Clients who have used Smart Property's services have spoken highly of its work.

"Smart Property was able to recommend a property that was in line with my goals," said Matthew McDonald in his review of the company. "By restructuring my finances, I was able to purchase two properties instead of one, both of which are cash flow positive and in growth regions where I have already seen solid equity gains."

Individuals interested in learning more about Smart Property and its services can visit the company's website for additional information. Smart Property offers free property investment strategy sessions upon request.

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About Smart Property:

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By Siva Govindasamy

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Australia's Qantas Airways Ltd (QAN.AX) plans to keep its Airbus Group (AIR.PA) long-haul A380 aircraft in service beyond 2020, when many will be around 10 years old, a senior executive said, even as it conducts talks with Airbus rival Boeing Co (BA.N) on the latter's next-generation B777X jets.

"The A380s do a great job on the markets that they operate," said Gareth Evans, head of the company's international business, speaking to Reuters in an interview on Thursday. Qantas currently operates a fleet of 12 of the jumbos.

"They are big units on big thick routes like Los Angeles and London, flying into slot-constrained airports," said Evans. "You want to have a fleet that is simple, but you need to have vehicles that do the right job for you."

With the latest variant of Boeing's popular 777 aircraft not due to enter into service until early next decade, Qantas remains in talks with both the American aircraft manufacturer and its Airbus about their latest aircraft, Evans said.

While an order is not imminent, Evans said, conversations with Boeing revolve around the "scope and capability" of the 777X, which will have two variants, a 777-8 that will have a longer range, and a 777-9 that will be able to carry more passengers but have a slightly shorter range.

"It does look interesting though because of its range capability, said Evans. "When you are an airline that is based in our part of the world, those are things that are important to you, an aircraft that can reach major cities around the world out of Australia is attractive."

In the meantime, exercising additional options for Boeing's 787, beyond the eight that the airline ordered in August 2015, will depend on how the international airline market grows, said Evans.

The eight 787-9s will initially be deployed on services to North America and Asia, even though the plane can reach points in Europe non-stop from Perth in Western Australia.

(Reporting by Siva Govindasamy; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)
From Esquire

Jeans are supposed to be comfortable. And yet for months-even a year or so-raw, selvage denim is decidedly not. Meaning men (us included) go out and essentially buy a self-imposed war of attrition to encase their legs and groins. Why? We posed the question to Scott Morrison, an early pioneer of modern selvage denim and the proprietor of the great ready-to-wear and bespoke selvage emporium 3x1, to defend not just the physical value of selvage, but the metaphysical as well.

ESQ: What about your world view and the way you see things leads you to believing that selvage denim is better than any other sort of denim?

Scott Morrison: Let's go back in time. In the late 1800s through the 1950s, the only way to produce denim itself was on a shuttle loom. The modern-day projectile loom, rapier loom, air-jet loom technology-all of that yarn-spinning and weaving technology-really hadn't been created in the way that we know it today. That happened in the fifties and sixties, when jeans became really popular and manufacturers tried to focus on manufacturing efficiency and getting costs down. The quality to some degree lessened as a result of that. But a shuttle loom is a lot more unforgiving. It takes a lot longer, and it produces almost half the quantity. And that's what selvage denim is made on. So when I think about selvage denim, I think about: one, it's the way denim was made 120 years ago; and two, it requires the best quality cotton to produce.

Do you apply that thinking to all of your purchases, though? With cars or whatever else?

You know, candidly, I love technology. [Laughs] I'm sitting here and charging my iPad Pro and my iPhone 6. I have not thrown out my computer and I do not only use a typewriter. But there are very few things in our life that we can say that the best way to make them is the same way people did 120 years ago. I've got a pair of V2 jeans that I've been wearing since 2000. My wife would probably point out that it's not the most flattering fit on me. But it's still a great pair of jeans that's fully stood the test of time. I can probably wear them for another ten or fifteen years.

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But is there a way people can know the cotton might not last as long, just by going into a store?

Typically, you get what you pay for. Yes, there are a lot of very expensive jeans that probably aren't using the best quality process or cotton or construction and weaving. But it's very difficult to make a cheap selvedge product. It's less expensive to make wide-width fabrics-using really small, compact yarns that are kind of bottom of the barrel, so to speak-to make super-stretch denim or high-recovery yarns, which typically aren't made on a shuttle loom.

Is there something beyond price point that people can look to, though?

The side seam. Selvage fabrics create a "self edge": it's a clean, finished edge on either side of the fabric. You can't do it with a rapier loom or an air-jet loom or any of the more modern-day weaving instruments. That's the first thing I look for, personally. Then, it's the overall construction: Do those stitches seem broken? Does the wash or treatment look like some kind of bad bleach job or like it was spray-painted on? But I think if it looks cheap and is cheap, it's probably not really great quality.

It can be that simple.

Yeah. If you're buying a $200 pair of jeans, you're probably going to get something pretty good. And if you take the investment a step further-a $265 or $285 selvage product-you are getting something with a real sense of history and something potentially more beautiful than even what you're getting at $200.

What's the beauty?

It's the most personal way to wear a pair of jeans, to buy them in raw form with all of the starch. The starch is what makes the fabric so stiff, and the starch chips off with the indigo the more you wear it and it becomes softer and softer and the indigo becomes less and less, and as that happens, you are personalizing your jean in a way that really could never be done by anyone else. I think inherently you look back after a year of wearing that product and it's just a love affair.

Which of your pairs are your past lovers?

The jean I'm wearing right now is literally the first pair of jeans that I have from when we started the brand. I can think back fondly to setting up the shop. Most people don't know this, but I had four or five sewing machines in my second bedroom of my apartment. I had a crack team of one pattern-maker, one sample-sewer, myself, and my girlfriend at the time, who's my wife now. We were making jeans for four months before we opened the shop-perfecting the fit, and the patterns, and really trying to figure out the details. So it brings me back, and it's still one my favorite pairs we've ever made, for sure. I also have a pair of jeans that reminds me of my first trip to Japan. I remember eating raw calf's liver for the first time on that trip, which is a delicacy. And I remember wearing my cut-off army shorts instead of my jeans, because it was so hot out, when I went to a fabric appointment. When I walked into this big office, probably 150 employees stood up and bowed, which I thought was really weird and eerie. I walked into the meeting room and five minutes later, in walked the CEO of the company. The reason everyone stood up to bow was because that day was the first day the CEO of the company had ever been to their floor. And he came to learn about the American premium-denim market. He'd heard it was starting to explode. But they hadn't given me a heads up. So there I was, meeting the CEO of this, I don't know what it was-9, 10, 12 billion dollar company-in ripped army shorts and vintage T-shirt, and sweaty, and gross. It was amazing. [Laughs] Every time I wear that pair, I'll remember that story, for sure.

Do you wish you'd worn them?

I wish I'd worn a suit.

But the stuff still-well, it's painful.

[Sighs] It can be. It can. But we have a fabric here from Kaihara, Japan. It's basically a supima-cotton selvage denim that's brushed back with these metal picks. What that does is break down the threads to make them extremely soft. And we don't put any starch on the finished product. So this particular fabric, it's selvage, but it's as soft as a cashmere sweater. You don't have to buy 15- or 16- or 18-ounce denim and break it in over a year and really pay your dues. There's a lot of things you can do in the middle. There's a lot of great stretch-selvedge denims. There is this kind of selvage denim that couldn't be made 60, 80, 100 years ago, too.

There's your mix, then: authenticity and technology.

Yeah, absolutely. You don't have to be so single-minded.
(Adds that Port Authority declined to comment)

By Hilary Russ

April 28 (Reuters) - Securities regulators are in discussions with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey over a "potential resolution" of their investigation into multiple road and tunnel projects, according to the authority's bond document for potential investors dated on Wednesday.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's probe is part of a sprawling web of investigations that began following the so-called Bridgegate controversy, the politically motivated closure of several lanes at the George Washington Bridge in 2013.

The scandal opened up the Port Authority to accusations that political interference had compromised its integrity. Federal criminal investigators in New Jersey and the Manhattan District Attorney also launched investigations into Bridgegate itself and other matters.

An ex-Port Authority official appointed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Christie's former deputy chief of staff are awaiting trial for allegedly orchestrating the lane closures.

The SEC's probe includes an examination of the cancellation of the Access to the Region's Core project in 2010 by Christie.

The project would have created a new commuter rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Christie canceled it because of concerns about cost overruns.

It is also examining whether the Port Authority improperly diverted its own money, which is supposed to be used to benefit regional projects, to New Jersey road and bridge projects instead, including the Pulaski Skyway.

A Port Authority spokesman said the agency had no comment.

(Reporting by Hilary Russ; Editing by Tom Brown and Meredith Mazzilli)
By James Oliphant INDIANAPOLIS (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, in a last-ditch bid to slow front-runner Donald Trump's momentum, named former business executive Carly Fiorina on Wednesday as his vice presidential running mate should he win the nomination. After crushing losses to Trump in five nominating contests in the Northeast on Tuesday, Cruz praised Fiorina, a former presidential rival, as a principled fighter for conservative values who would be a valuable ally on the campaign trail. "Carly is a vice presidential nominee who I think is superbly skilled, superbly gifted at helping unite this party," the U.S. senator from Texas told a rally in Indianapolis, the capital of Indiana. The Midwestern state is the next battleground for selecting the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates for the Nov. 8 presidential election and is shaping up to be Cruzs best - and perhaps last - chance to block Trumps march to the nomination. Cruz acknowledged it was unusual to choose a running mate so early in the race. Traditionally, the winners of the Republican and Democratic nominating races announce their running mates in the period between clinching the nomination and summer's national conventions. "I think all would acknowledge this race, if anything, it is unusual," said Cruz, 45, adding he wanted to give voters a clear choice and offer a rebuttal to media suggestions the Republican race was over. At a nearby rally in Indianapolis afterward, Trump was scornful of Cruz's move, calling his rival "desperate." In the Democratic race, Hillary Clinton, 68, won four of Tuesday's five contests, building a virtually insurmountable lead over rival Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old U.S. senator from Vermont, who vowed to keep fighting until the July convention. In tapping Fiorina as his No. 2, Cruz was apparently trying to recover from Trump's landslide primary wins on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The victories made the uphill climb toward the nomination even steeper for Cruz. "I've had tough fights all my life," Fiorina said after Cruz introduced her. "Tough fights don't worry me a bit." Fiorina, 61, dropped her own White House bid in February after a seventh-place finish in New Hampshire. She endorsed Cruz a month later and has been a sharp critic of Clinton. Fiorina and Cruz both said they had grown close since her endorsement, and she sang a few verses of a song she said she sings to Cruz's two daughters on their campaign bus. The choice of Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard Co chief executive who, like Trump, has never held elective office, could help Cruz with women voters, a group that Trump has had difficulty winning over to his outsider campaign. It also could offer Cruz a boost in the June 7 primary in California, where Fiorina won the Republican primary in 2010 for the U.S. Senate. She was defeated in the general election by incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer. Fiorina now lives in Virginia. Trump has amassed 987 of the 1,237 Republican national convention delegates he needs to secure the nomination, to 562 for Cruz and 153 for Ohio Governor John Kasich, 63, the third remaining candidate, according to the Associated Press. If Cruz can win a large share of Indiana's 57 delegates, it will increase the chances that Trump will not be able to win the nomination on the convention's first ballot. After that, many delegates will be free to turn to Cruz, Kasich or a dark-horse establishment candidate on a second or subsequent ballot. A loss to Trump in Indiana would effectively cripple Cruzs bid, and increase pressure on the party to rally around Trump as the prospective nominee. 'WASTE OF TIME' Trump called Cruz's decision to pick a running mate "a pure waste of time" and "a desperate attempt to save a failing campaign by an all-talk, no-action politician." "He is the first presidential candidate in the history of this country who's mathematically eliminated from becoming president who chose a vice presidential candidate. ... It's a record," the New York billionaire and former reality TV star told supporters in Indianapolis on Wednesday. Trump vowed to campaign extensively in the state between now and Tuesday's nominating contest. "I'm not playing games with Indiana," he said. "You are going to get so tired of me." "We're going to win it," he said. Trump was introduced at the rally by famed college basketball coach Bob Knight, who led Indiana University to three national championships. Cruz said Fiorina had already proven her mettle in standing up to Trump last year after he insulted her looks in an interview. "Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?" Trump had asked, only to be sternly rebuked by Fiorina in their next presidential debate. "She's faced challenges a lot worse than someone bellowing and yelling and insulting her face," Cruz told the Indianapolis crowd. A breast cancer survivor who lost a stepdaughter to drug addiction, Fiorina served as Hewlett-Packard chief executive from 1999 to 2005. She was forced to resign amid weak earnings as the company struggled to digest a $19 billion merger with Compaq Computer Corp. About 30,000 layoffs took place during her tenure. Fiorina's campaign never took off in the original 17-member Republican presidential field, and she was mostly relegated to the early second-tier debates for low-polling candidates. Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party, said Cruz would have been better off picking an experienced politician who could help him secure delegates in a fight at the convention. "It's a real head-scratcher," he said. But some conservatives applauded Cruz's choice. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect political candidates who oppose abortion rights, said Fiorina was the "ideal" choice. "She will take Hillary Clinton head-on," Dannenfelser said in a statement. (Reporting by James Oliphant in Indianapolis and Emily Stephenson, Jeff Mason, Megan Cassella, Alana Wise and Timothy Ahmann in Washington; Writing by John Whitesides; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Peter Cooney)
By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Republican political donor said on Wednesday he would spend "seven figures" on a targeted digital campaign backing two senators who support clean energy policies, which could help tip the balance in their tight November re-election races. Jay Faison, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based executive of an audio-vision equipment company, said he would endorse Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire for re-election. Portman is a co-sponsor of a bipartisan energy efficiency bill, while Ayotte is one of the only Republican supporters of President Barack Obama's plan to cut carbon emissions. Both are running in swing states. Faison wants to defend conservatives who have led on clean energy issues. He will use what he calls a "digital first" approach focused on direct online marketing, social media and data mining to target swing voters who care about climate issues and tailor political messaging, methods he said Republicans have been slow to adopt. "For right or wrong, the Republican Party is branded as non-environmental, which we want to help fix," Faison said in an interview. In February, Faison launched a Super PAC that will spend around $5 million to support congressional Republicans who support clean energy and environmental protection. Faison did not say who else he plans to back. The PAC (political action committee) complements the work of Faison's foundation, ClearPath, which he launched last June with $165 million to shift Republicans' skeptical view of climate change and clean energy. "In these races and a handful of other House and Senate races, we're going to play offense around candidates that take a stand on these issues," Faison said. Faison said support of clean energy could sway blocks of "persuadable" voters who are growing in influence - millennials and non-whites - in tight races. In a survey conducted by ClearPath of Republican voters, Faison said 73 percent said they want a candidate with a clean energy strategy. "These persuadable voters perceive candidates who check the box and take the party line every single time as someone not necessarily watching out for their best interests," Faison said. The digital strategy ClearPath will use will benefit Republican party leaders who have been reluctant to make digital marketing the centerpiece of their campaign spending, Faison said. "We are going to test that theory. The Democrats are way ahead of us here," he said. (Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Richard Balmforth)
Headquartered in Miami, FL, Restaurant Brands International Inc. QSR came into existence with the merger of Tim Hortons Inc. and Burger King Worldwide Inc. Restaurant Brands is now the parent company of these two iconic quick service restaurant brands. These independently operated brands have been serving their customers for more than 50 years.

Restaurant Brands International Inc houses these two big brands, with a combined market value of roughly $19 billion. With a combined system sales of $23 billion, the new company now has over 19,000 restaurants in around 100 countries.



Investors should also note the recent earnings estimate revisions for QSR, as the consensus estimate has declined. Restaurant Brands has posted a positive earnings surprise of 6.45% in the last quarter. Revenues, however, beat expectations marginally by 0.5%.



Currently, QSR has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) but that could change following Restaurant Brands earnings report which was just released. We have highlighted some of the key stats from this just-revealed announcement below:



Earnings: QSR beat on earnings. Our consensus earnings estimate called for EPS of 20 cents per share, and the company reported EPS of 30 cents. Investors should note that these figures include stock based compensation expenses.



Revenues: QSR reported revenues of $918.5 million. This beat our consensus estimate of $914 million.



Key Stats to Note: Tim Hortons comparable sales increased 5.6% and Burger King comparable sales increased 4.6%.



Check back later for our full write up on this QSR earnings report later!



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As one of Marvels most valuable leading men, Robert Downey Jr. frequently uses his superhero connections for good. He visits fans at childrens hospitals, invites special guests to attend movie premieres with him, and the Captain America: Civil War and Iron Man star seems happy to share his wares with his own kids, including son Exton, 4.

When PEOPLE caught up with Downey Jr. and his Civil War rival Chris Evans (a.k.a. Captain America) recently for a lively chat about finding humor in their superhero status, Downey Jr. revealed that hes a big Captain America and Chris Evans fan, something he shares with his son.

I was tucking my boy in last night when he fell asleep and I put a Captain America blanket on him, Downey Jr. told Evans.

Did you? Evans asked in disbelief.

Yeah, so thats the last time I saw your face, Downey Jr. said. Keeping my kid safe.

Altogether: Aww.

Robert Downey Jr Chris Evans

And lest you think the compliments were one-sided, Evans spent plenty of time talking about his Civil War costar.

People know Downey as a phenomenal actor, but hes a really great writer too, he really is, admitted Evans. Its just crazy working with him.

My characters name isnt in the title, Downey Jr. playfully interjected.

But its just nuts working with someone like Downey where youre just kind of like, Youre Downey! Youre Downey! What am I supposed to say? Evans added.

Robert Downey Jr Chris Evans

Downey Jr. said Evans has come into his own over the last few years, becoming more comfortable with his fame and place in Hollywood  even if he might not admit it outright.

Evans plays very low status, hes extremely shrewd, he said. Youre very shrewd. You cant see it right now.

Captain America: Civil War hits theaters May 6.

For more from Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE , on newsstands Friday.

 Kara Warner
BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romania's President signed into law on Thursday a bill that enables property buyers to walk away from mortgages, setting it on a potential collision course with commercial banks, the central bank and the European Commission.

The bill, which critics at home and abroad say poses serious risks to the economy, initially set no financial criteria for beneficiaries.

President Klaus Iohannis sent that version back to parliament, and lawmakers watered it down by capping the loan value at 250,000 euros ($284,000) and exempting a state subsidy programme for first-time buyers.

But the law as it now stands still applies retroactively, which contravenes EU rules.

Some observers had hoped Iohannis would challenge the amended version in the constitutional court, but he told reporters: "I believe the bill in its current form is alright."

Romania's central bank has said the bill would drive banks to raise the required down payment for mortgage loans to unsustainable levels and could trigger a ratings downgrade, raise funding costs for sovereign debt and lead to lower economic growth.

The International Monetary Fund, European Commission, European Central Bank and ratings agency Standard and Poor's have echoed those warnings.

Backers of the law argued it would help impoverished borrowers and that no wholesale ditching of mortgages will occur. Romania holds local elections in June and a parliamentary poll in November or December.

Central bank data has shown there were 495,000 mortgages or other loans with real estate guarantees worth a total of 70.8 billion lei ($18.0 billion) at the end of 2015.

($1 = 3.9326 lei)

($1 = 0.8806 euros)

(Reporting by Luiza Ilie; editing by John Stonestreet)
Comedian Will Ferrell is set to play Ronald Reagan in an upcoming biopic on the president and many are not thrilled about the casting.

Read: Saying Goodbye to Nancy: Casket Carrying Former First Lady Arrives at Reagan Library

Ferrell, who has spoofed President George W. Bush on Saturday Night Live and on Broadway, has been tapped to play the 39th president in a comedy called Reagan.

The film will spoof Reagans second term in office when some say, he was already showing signs of the Alzheimers disease that eventually killed him.

His oldest son, Michael, denies that is father had Alzheimers in the White House and hes outraged by the movie's theme.

He tweeted:

What an Outrag....Alzheimers is not joke...It kills..You should be ashamed all of you. https://t.co/GNzqR5vjrX  Michael Reagan (@ReaganWorld) April 27, 2016

In an open letter to Ferrell, Reagan's daughter, Patti Davis, wrote: "Perhaps you have managed to retain some ignorance about Alzheimer's and other versions of dementia. Perhaps if you knew more, you would not find the subject humorous."

Screenwriter Jon Spaihts announced the project on YouTube, saying: When Ronald Regan falls into dementia at the start of his second term an ambitious intern is tasked with convincing the Commander-in-Chief that he is an actor playing the president in the film."

Gail Hodges-Burke, who was Nancy Reagan's social secretary during her time in the White House, spoke to IE about the film.

"I am a big fan of Will Ferrell's but the subject matter is not a funny subject matter," she said. "Look, I am not a comedian, I don't know how you blend all of those emotions together. I would guess it would be very difficult."

Read: Staff Remember Nancy Reagan's Devotion To Ronald: 'We Should All Be So Lucky To Have a Love So Deep'

Story continues

Hodges-Burke said she did not see any signs of the disease in Reagan while he was in office.

Ronald Reagan, who famously traveled from Hollywood into politics, wasn't officially diagnosed with Alzheimers until 1994, five years after he left the White House. He died in 2004.

Watch: Former Presidents, Hollywood Stars Gather to Say Goodbye To Nancy Reagan

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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia on Thursday denied its planes were responsible for air strikes that destroyed a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo, saying it had carried out no air strikes there in recent days. The al-Quds hospital was hit by air strikes overnight, killing at least 27 people, monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The Russian Defence Ministry suggested another country was responsible. "According to our information, on the evening of April 27, for the first time after a long break, there was a plane over Aleppo that belonged to one of the so-called anti-Islamic State coalition countries," it said in a statement. (Reporting by Lidia Kelly and Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Mark Trevelyan; Writing by Lidia Kelly)
Moscow (AFP) - Moscow will join the global battle against tax evasion and other illicit activities by signing up to an international scheme to stamp out fiscal cheating, Russia's finance minister said Thursday.

It follows in the wake of the "Panama papers" scandal which shined a light on the vast offshore holdings of individuals close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that Russia will sign the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development agreement on automatic sharing of tax data at a meeting in Beijing in May.

Moscow hopes to be a full member of the OECD's information exchange system by 2018, according to Russian media.

A close Putin confidante was implicated in a series of global reports that revealed how a Panamanian law firm set up offshore entities to help the world's wealthy stash their assets.

Reports based on the leaks linked Putin's close friend, cellist Sergei Roldugin, to shell firms that shuffled at least $2 billion (2.3 billion euros) and made money out of thin air from questionable deals with Russian state companies.
Moscow (AFP) - Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky went on trial Thursday for setting fire to the door of the country's security service headquarters, a charge that risks three years in prison.

Pavlensky, 32, doused the door with gasoline and set it on fire in November 2015 in a performance he called "Threat".

He has explained his act as an attempt to challenge the FSB, the successor to the KGB, which he says is an institution that imposes total control and terrorises Russia.

The gaunt-looking Pavlensky, who is best known for nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square in another performance, smiled as he was escorted into the courtroom in handcuffs, accompanied by three guards and a dog.

During the closed-door hearing ahead of the full trial, the judge extended Pavlensky's detention in Moscow's Butyrka jail to October 20, defence lawyer Olga Dinze told journalists.

The prosecution initially charged him with vandalism motivated by ideological hatred, however they later reclassified his crime as damage to a cultural heritage object.

Both charges could lead to a prison term of three years.

In previous appearances before a judge, Pavlensky has called for the offence be tried as terrorism and has refused to speak in court.

Dinze ridiculed the definition of a door as a cultural object, saying the one at the FSB building in central Moscow was installed only in 2008.

"We agreed more with the charge of (vandalism) motivated by ideological hatred, because it is impossible to feel anything else toward the (former KGB headquarters)," she said.

"Documents show how many people were jailed there, how many people were killed there," she said referring to the building, where many people are known to have been shot during Stalin's purges.

She said the defence is trying to persuade retired KGB officers to agree to testify in the case and talk about what the organisation does.

The artist is also being tried on a separate case in Moscow after another performance that saw him set car tyres on fire in his home city of Saint Petersburg in 2014 in a nod to the pro-Western rallies in Kiev where protesters toppled the pro-Russian government in February of that year.

In that case, which will not lead to jail time, Pavlensky brought sex workers into court Wednesday to give evidence -- in an apparent bid to expose the court system as unethical and corrupt.

"Pavlensky treats this trial as a farce. But our goal is to get him acquitted," Dinze said.
Washington (AFP) - Democrat Bernie Sanders is laying off hundreds of campaign workers after a string of losses to frontrunner Hillary Clinton, focusing his forces on the last big presidential primary in California -- and on the battle for the party's platform.

The move, the clearest signal yet that his White House bid is essentially over, comes as Clinton has taken a virtually insurmountable lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"We do not need workers now in states around the country" that have already held primaries, Sanders, a US senator from Vermont, told The New York Times in an interview.

He said his campaign would "allocate our resources to the 14 contests that remain, and that means that we are going to be cutting back on staff."

Sanders's nationwide paid staff amounted to more than 1,000 people in late January, shortly before the first presidential nominations contest in Iowa, campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told The Washington Post.

Citing the campaign, CNN reported that the number recently shrank to about 550.

In a statement, Briggs said the campaign would likely drop further, to a bit more than 300 people.

"That's unheard of" for a campaign still in the thick of a primary battle, Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, told AFP.

"They can explain it in any which way they want, but obviously the top brass and probably Sanders himself has accepted reality; he's not going to be the Democratic nominee."

In public, the 74-year-old Sanders continues to assure his supporters that he still has a shot at the nomination, even though the path is a narrow one. And he still could win upcoming primaries. Indiana votes on Tuesday.

But his delegate shortfall is so immense that he not only would have to take the remaining primaries by large margins, including California on June 7, but also win over the hundreds of super-delegates already in Clinton's camp.

Story continues

The roughly 700 super-delegates are members of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic members of Congress and state governors. Of those, 500 have already declared their support for Clinton.

The former secretary of state is only about 215 delegates short of the 2,383 delegate majority need to win the nomination. And more than 1,000 delegates are up for grabs in the state nominating contests between now and mid-June.

- Uniting the Democrats -

Clinton is already working to reunite the Democrats after months of increasingly acrimonious political warfare with Sanders, a self-styled democratic socialist whose call for a "political revolution" has energized young, independent and white blue-collar voters.

Apart from their policy differences, Sanders has suggested that Clinton has been corrupted by donations from lobbyists and executives for banking and financial interests, who have contributed heavily to her campaign.

But the enmity between the two rivals does not appear to have reached the levels of 2008, when Clinton dueled with Barack Obama for the White House nomination.

Former president Bill Clinton in particular was so irritated by what he considered the young black senator's hypocrisy that he was unable to control himself, and his attacks escalated at rally after rally.

On the evening of the last primary, despite having been defeated, Hillary Clinton stunned observers by refusing to concede. It wasn't until several days later that she formally threw in the towel.

"In 2008, there was quite a serious concern as to whether disgruntled Clinton supporters actually would get on board with Barack Obama," said Jennifer Lawless, a professor of government at American University.

"She made a very impassioned case that they should once she was out of the race, and they did. Which is part of the reason why I feel like, given the intensity of that race compared to this one, there's no question that the Sanders people will ultimately support Clinton."

- Sanders future role -

Defeated candidates often lose clout. But some, like Pat Buchanan for the Republicans in 1992 and 1996, or Howard Dean on the Democratic side in 2004, manage to retain their influence after their defeats.

Sanders, who spent his political career as an independent and not a Democrat, appears determined to anchor the Democratic Party on the left.

He has said repeatedly that he will go to the convention in Philadelphia in July, where the party's platform will be hammered out.

He intends to fight for adoption of a $15 an hour minimum wage (Clinton prefers $12), a ban on hydraulic fracking, and the creation of a carbon tax.

Clinton, for her part, desperately needs the support of young Democrats. About 80 percent of those aged 18 to 29 have voted for Sanders.

"Clinton clearly needs the Sanders votes, and she needs the Sanders enthusiasm," said Sabato. But he added: "November is a long time away. And conventions often act as a reunifying factor."

Another reason why Sanders will be a player: his war chest.

"At this point, the big question with the Sanders campaign is that he still has a lot of money, he has the ability to raise a substantial amount of money. So what he does with his money is a bigger question," said Robert Boatright, a political science professor at Clark University.
Is the end in sight for Dr. Callie Torres on Greys Anatomy?

Sara Ramirez, who has played Callie since season two on Greys Anatomy, posted a message on Twitter this week, which led to speculation that she could depart the long-running ABC medical drama.

Thanking viewers for an unforgettable ride and tweeting thats a wrap has many of Ramirezs Twitter followers posting comments of concern, speculating that the actress may have announced her upcoming exit via the tweet. However, Ramirez did include the hashtag Season 13, which could signal her return, as Greys Anatomy has been renewed for a thirteenth season.

Ramirezs contract on the show is up this June. While insiders close to the show confirm to Variety that the actresss deal for future seasons has not been closed, a source cautions that Ramirezs tweet is not necessarily a red flag  she could simply be celebrating wrapping the current twelfth season. In fact, Ramirez has tweeted similar messages when past seasons have come to a close. (And fans reacted the same way, in response to those tweets.)

ABC declined to comment, as the network does not comment on contract negotiations.

Story continues

Ramirezs exit would seem shocking, as her character is a beloved staple on the show, but Callie leaving could fit into Greys storyline  her partner, Penny (Samantha Sloyan) is eyeing a move to New York and Callie has expressed interest in joining her, along with her daughter with Arizona (Jessica Capshaw).

The departure of major characters is not at all foreign to Greys Anatomy, which has seen the exits of numerous series regulars throughout its decade-plus run. Most recently, star Patrick Dempsey left the show with his character Derek Shepherd killed off in season eleven. Sandra Oh, Katherine Heigl, Eric Dane, Isaiah Washington and T.R. Knight are among major characters who have also been written off the Shondaland hit.

Ramirez first appeared in Greys Anatomy season two and was upped to a series regular in the third season.

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Metallica played a special old-school set at a San Francisco area record store earlier this month on Record Store Day, marking their roles as Record Store Day Ambassadors. The gig also coincided with the release of reissued editions of their first two records.

Record Store Day 2016: See Photos of Metallica and More

The band's song selection for the Rasputin Music show in Berkeley resembled what they would have played in the early to mid-Eighties: cuts from their thrash-defining debut, 1983's Kill 'Em All, and its more intricate follow-up, 1984's Ride the Lightning, as well as a cover of a tune by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal group Diamond Head. Metallica have posted video of the set  which runs "Helpless," "Hit the Lights," "The Four Horseman," "Ride the Lightning," "Fade to Black," "Jump in the Fire," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "Creeping Death" and "Metal Militia"  as a YouTube playlist.

Although the group formed in Los Angeles, it relocated to San Francisco early on (the hometown of bassist Cliff Burton) and has stayed there ever since. The band previously made an in-store appearance at another Rasputin Music, in nearby Mountain View, California, in 2008 on the first Record Store Day.

This year, the group also put out a special live CD as a Record Store Day exclusive, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, Metallica! - Live at Le Bataclan. Paris, France - June 11th, 2003. The band said it would donate proceeds to benefit Fondation de France's Give for France charity.

Related
By Aleksandar Vasovic BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia will re-run voting at 15 polling stations after days of bickering among the ruling and opposition parties over alleged irregularities in Sunday's election, a move that could significantly affect the outcome. Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, who wants to take Serbia into the European Union, won the election with 48 percent of the vote, unchanged from 2014. But his Progressive Party's majority in parliament was reduced as more parties attained the five percent vote threshold needed for seats. A day after the vote, left-wing and ultra-nationalist opposition parties teamed up to demand a recount, claiming election fraud. Vucic responded by accusing the opposition of attempting to rig the vote and influence the Election Commission, and also demanded a recount. Scattered abuses were reported including missing or vandalized ballots, more votes cast than voters, people voting without identification and one case where a drunkard smashed ballot boxes. International observers, including rights bodies Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said fundamental freedoms were respected although there was biased media coverage, undue advantage for incumbents and a blurring of state and party activities. After considering the complaints, the Election Commission said late on Wednesday the vote would be repeated within a week at 15 polling stations around the country, totaling 16,678 voters, although there would be no nationwide recount. Counting of valid votes, still going on after the election, is expected to be completed on Thursday, the commission said. While the affected polling places comprise a tiny proportion of the 8,549 voting stations nationwide, the impact could be significant because two political groups are a whisker above the five percent threshold needed to enter parliament. Those two are the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS)/Dveri, an ultra-nationalist grouping that media reports say is just 48 ballots above the threshold. A leftist alliance grouped around former president Boris Tadic is also just above it. The partial re-run could reinforce their position or push them below the threshold, in which case their seats - around 13 in each case - would be shared out proportionally among the other parties in parliament. That would give Vucic's conservative Progressives - currently in line to get 131 seats in the 250-seat assembly - a more comfortable majority. If DSS-Dveri gets in to parliament, it would bring another pro-Russian, anti-EU voice into the assembly, in addition to the Radicals of Vojislav Seselj, who was recently acquitted of war crimes by the U.N. tribunal in The Hague. "This is a dangerous gamble by the opposition parties because they can lose what they already have and it could also erode trust in the system," said Milos Damljanovic, head of research at the Belgrade-based BIRN Consultancy. Vucic has said he will decide on the make-up of the new Serbian government after his party meets on May 28. (Editing by Adrian Croft/Mark Heinrich)
(Adds details from conference call and context)

MEXICO CITY, April 28 (Reuters) - Shares in Carlos Slim's America Movil slumped more than 9 percent on Thursday, a day after the telecoms company posted results which missed expectations by a wide margin, prompting analysts to downgrade their ratings.

Profit dropped more than 40 percent in the first quarter, the company reported on Wednesday, saying mobile competition in Mexico from rivals like AT&T Inc. intensified and it shed subscribers in Brazil.

The company's share price was down 9.09 percent at 12.4 pesos per share at 10.35 a.m. local time (1535 GMT).

In 2013, Mexico passed a telecoms law aimed at curbing America Movil's 70 percent mobile market share by forcing it to share cell towers and other equipment with rivals, and letting them connect calls to its network for free.

The company's margin on earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) at home has fallen every quarter since the reform was fully implemented. It hit a new low of 35.7 percent in the first quarter.

Analysts at brokerages Intercam and Banorte Ixe both downgraded their ratings on the company to "sell" after the results.

America Movil's Chief Executive Officer Daniel Hajj said on a conference call on Thursday that competition in the Mexican market had become much more aggressive in recent months, with prices now much lower than in the United States.

"Eventually things are going to be more rational in terms of promotions," Hajj said. He added that he expects the company to lose market share in Mexico wireless over the next few years.

Mexico's telecoms regulator is currently reviewing the measures in place against the company under the law, but will not present results until November.

(Reporting by Christine Murray; Editing by David Gregorio)
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Mario Licato may have a black eye and several stitches, but at least he also has an voicemail from Shia LaBeouf?

The New York City man was headed to a bar on the Lower East Side last weekend when he was unceremoniously punched in the face, sending him tumbling down a set of subway stairs.

"This is because you look exactly like Shia LaBeouf!" cried the attacker as he fled. Guess he didn't like Even Stevens, then.

SEE ALSO: Shia LaBeouf is occupying an elevator at Oxford University because Shia LaBeouf

After Licato posted a photo of his injuries to Instagram, he was inundated with messages  well-wishes, incredulity, you name it.

Oh, and also a message from LaBeouf himself.

Image: instagram/mariolicato

Licato isn't sure how LaBeouf got his work number, but it was true: a voicemail there was.

"It was a pretty long voicemail," Licato told Cosmopolitan. "He was like, 'Hey, this is Shia LaBeouf  I just read an article that you were punched in the face because you look like me?" And he was like, 'Aw, man. That sucks. I'm so sorry. But I get it. It's happened to me before.'"

When Licato spoke to Cosmo, he hadn't called LaBeouf back yet. But judging by his most recent Instagram photo, he may have taken the plunge Wednesday evening.

We hope Shia knows what the attacker's beef was.
(Reuters) - Shire Plc (SHP.L) won just enough support for its director remuneration report at the drugmaker's annual general meeting on Thursday.

Shire said 50.55 percent of its shareholders at the meeting in Dublin voted to approve the resolution.

The vote follows shareholder concerns over executive pay at blue-chip companies such as HSBC Plc (HSBA.L), Anglo American Plc (AAL.L) and BP Plc (BP.L).

Shire, which is in the process of buying Baxalta Inc (BXLT.N), said it acknowledged the vote and has engaged extensively with its major shareholders.

(Reporting by Mamidipudi Soumithri in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza)
Having worked as a data analyst, Darren Forsythe is a self-professed data guy. He has also suffered for years from debilitating pain and muscle spasms caused by multiple sclerosis. Hes been on and off a long roster of prescription drugs that have helped relieve his symptoms only to leave him in a despondent fog.

After a drug interaction sent him to an emergency room, he decided to replace his meds with medical marijuana. Its legal in Colorado, where he lives. But because its still illegal at the federal level, doctors cant formally prescribe the drug. Nor can they say which varieties might work for which patients, at what amount, or even how it should be used (smoked, eaten, inhaled as vapor, or in a spray or topical cream).

To figure out what might work for him, Forsythe drew on his analytical skills and did an experiment in which he was both lead investigator and sole research subject, testing various marijuana-based products. Weve used a spreadsheet to keep track of which strains work against which symptoms, his wife, Joy, says. The couple discovered that one strain, Orange Kush, works well during acute sclerotic attacks; another, Gumbi, can banish a specific kind of pain. Forsythe now uses multiple marijuana-based products, taking care to rotate them. Otherwise, he says, hes learned that tolerance builds and efficacy wanes.

More on Pain Relief

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Good Drug, Bad Drug

Marijuana has an unusual medicinal history. For almost a century, the plant was a legal elixir thought to work against a range of maladiesuntil changing social mores and bad publicity helped spur its gradual criminalization.

Story continues

In 1942 the drug was removed from the U.S. Dispensatory, a federal list of approved medications. Congress classified it as a Schedule I substance in 1970a category that includes heroinmeaning that it had no medical value and a high potential for abuse. And research on the drug would have to be tightly controlled.

Today, marijuana remains a Schedule I drug, but there are signs of change: Federal agencies are considering reclassifying it so that it can be prescribed.

But at the state level, the plants status has already evolved. Laws implementing medical-marijuana programs have been passed in 23 states plus the District of Columbia, and for recreational use in four states and D.C., with initiatives pending in several more.

The impetus for that shift depends on whom you ask. Proponents cite mounting evidence of marijuanas therapeutic value; critics point to public relations campaigns funded by wealthy marijuana entrepreneurs. The two sides are sharply divided over how to regulate the drug. But on this much everyone agrees: Our complicated relationship with marijuana has entered a new and confusing moment.

The discord between state and federal policies has created a morass for patients and doctors. Medical-marijuana products sold to consumers at dispensaries arent approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And without federal guidance or oversight, individual states have struggled to establish the kind of quality-assurance protocols that exist for FDA-approved drugs. Also, research into marijuanas therapeutic value has been hampered. And doctors have been reluctant to step into the fray.

Those shortcomings have forced consumers like Forsythe to take their chances on a product that can be mislabeled or contaminated with pesticides. And it can come with other serious downsides, including panic attacks, cardiac problems, and accidents related to being under the influence. Marijuana use sent about 376,000 people to emergency rooms in 2009, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Its also addictive for as many as 9 percent of adults and 16 percent of adolescents who use it frequently. And theres strong evidence that it can trigger early-onset schizophrenia in frequent users who are genetically predisposed.

A Problematic Plant

Marijuana differs from traditional pharmaceuticals in ways that make it difficult for scientists to study. The plant has more than 400 distinct chemical compounds, including about 70 different cannabinoids (chemicals that help produce the high), compared with just one or two active ingredients for most FDA-approved drugs. Not only do those cannabinoids have their own individual effects, but they also interact with each other in an untold number of ways. Different ratios of the same compounds can produce significantly different results. And studies of the individual compounds tell us almost nothing about whole-plant medicine.

But to study the whole plant, scientists have had to clear a bureaucratic thicket far denser than for other prospective medications. Not only must the FDA approve the proposed research plan, but the Drug Enforcement Administration also needs to issue a Schedule I license and the National Institute on Drug Abuse has to agree to supply the actual plant materials.

Any one of these agencies can stop a research project in its tracks, says J. Michael Bostwick, a psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic who has studied the history of marijuanas use. As a result, he says, high-quality research has been at a near standstill for almost half a century.

Thats not to say that research hasnt been done. In fact, there are thousands of studies and reviews on marijuanas medical efficacy. But according to a recent editorial in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), studies to support its use for state-approved conditions are of mostly poor quality; they fail to meet FDA standards. The authors noted that the few credible studies suggest that marijuana can treat pain syndromes, the pain and muscle spasticity from multiple sclerosis, and the nausea caused by chemotherapy drugs. But almost every state that has legalized medical marijuana has cleared it for a longer list of conditions. For example, five states have approved it for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder even though the evidence supporting it is weak or nonexistent.

Flying Blind

Prescription drugs are regulated by the FDA to ensure that theyre safe, effective, consistently produced, and accurately labeled. There arent always such guarantees with medical marijuana. At least four states dont require testing for potency or for contaminants like metals, pesticides, or microbials. Other states that have legalized it have a wide range of policies.

In a study published in 2015 in JAMA, researchers tested edible cannabis from three major metropolitan areas. They found that most product labels were inaccurate. More than half of the products had significantly less of the cannabinoid tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) than was stated on the label; others had significantly more. Its an issue that experts say extends to all forms of medical marijuana.

A Maze of Regulations

Because marijuana is still currently classified as a Schedule I drug, a patient cant get an actual prescription for it. Doctors only certify that a patient suffers from a condition for which the drug is approved. Patients then must register with their state to obtain a marijuana-patient ID card. Then they can buy the drug from a dispensary or, in some states, grow their own.

But the protocol can vary widely from one state to another. For a recent study in the journal Health Affairs, Columbia University researchers evaluated state-run marijuana programs. They looked at basic medical criteria, such as whether physicians were required to complete a full medical exam before certifying prospective patients, or whether the program made use of prescription-drug monitoring systems and 30-day refill limits like those used for other controlled substances. They found that out of 24 programs, only those in nine states and the District of Columbia met enough of the standards to qualify as medical.

The lack of standards has made some doctors reluctant to even certify prospective marijuana patients. My malpractice insurance only covers me for the use of FDA-approved medications and treatments, Alan Berkenwald, M.D., an internist at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Mass., wrote in a recent editorial for The Daily Hampshire Gazette.

In 2002 the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that doctors who merely recommended marijuana to their patients were protected by the right to free speech under the First Amendment. The attorney general took the additional step of announcing in 2009 that as long as state laws were followed, the federal government wouldnt penalize doctors or patients for participating in medical-marijuana programs. But those assurances havent relieved the concerns of every doctor.

In 1972 and again in 2002, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws unsuccessfully petitioned the federal government to remove marijuana from the list of Schedule I substances. The American Medical Association has suggested that the drug be re-evaluated and possibly reclassified. Although the federal government is considering rescheduling marijuana, it has yet to issue a decision. In the meantime, individual states will continue to chart their own course.

Editor's Note: This article and related materials are made possible by a grant from the State Attorney General Consumer and Prescriber Education Grant Program, which is funded by the multi-state settlement of consumer fraud claims regarding the marketing of the prescription drug Neurontin (gabapentin).

This article also appeared in the June 2016 issue of Consumer Reports magazine.





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Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright  2006-2016 Consumers Union of U.S.
Hungry happiness heralded the hallways as students and their parents funneled in from the gray-cast skies and the persistent morning drizzle trailing rainy rivulets along their multicolored umbrellas, parkas and galoshes. As they filed through the Linden Elementary School doors at 7:30 a.m. the smiles on the students faces rendered a sense of enthusiasm and excitement in the air.

Such keen smiles might be hard to imagine for some, considering that another school day had just commenced. However, thanks to an annual program called Rise, Read and Write arranged by the schools staff every spring, not even cold wet rain possessed enough dreary gloom to smear those delighted faces, as they bustled in hand-in-hand with their parents.

Its all tied to literacy, Principal Greg Borland said. And having parents involved in their childs education is key. Kids can only do so much. I look at education as a 50/50 play in a game, in the way that we can give kids the tools and the education but we need parents to help with reinforcing it at home  and this event helps tie all that together.

Rise, Read and Write engages parents in their childs education. The parents join their student(s), at school for about 45 minutes in the morning and listen to him or her read. It might be Dr. Seuss, or it might be Maurice Sendak; it could even been an original piece creatively penned by the child; when it comes to reading and writing the possibilities comprise a universe limited only by interest and imagination.

Linden school falls under the Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The act provides financial support for schools with high levels of child poverty.

Title one is basically designed to help level the playing field for schools that are in poverty. And in order to do that you need parents involved in childrens education, Borland explained.

Rise, Read and Write serves as a way for Linden to meet the qualifications of the Title 1 Act.

Besides the sense of enthusiasm, other incentives await parents and children. A table of bananas, Danishes, juice and coffee awaited the families as they filed through the hallways on their way to a classroom.

We provide them the pastry, the fruit and those kind of things just as an incentive ... but I think they would come even if we didnt do that, Borland affirmed. And we also make sure that every kid walks out with a free book.

More than anything Borland emphasized that the event allows parents the opportunity to experience their childs work first hand.

It really encourages parents to come in and really look and see what their childs work looks like in the moment.

Borland illustrated that parent involvement and student achievement interlace in a direct relationship. Throughout the morning that connection became visibly apparent.

Its cool to see how (my children) progress, Ashley Wolsleben said as she sat with her son Jonathan and Emillie, leafing through the assignments, books and creations that Johnathan spent the year working on.

And the smiles continues as Charlie Cusick and his daughter Julia Jane Cusick, shared the immersion of a good book over a Danish and some apple juice.

From those type of parent/child interactions, inspired through education, the value and the work put into organizing Rise Read and Write materializes for any random observer.

Borland venerated the teachers, staff and volunteers at Linden for their part in the preparation and promotion of the event.

The teachers do a phenomenal job of getting kids excited about it, Borland said.

In the end it all comes back to the children and the values and sense of accomplishment that such an event can impart in a young child who might just be learning to read and write.

Kids are excited to show their work. Theyre proud of what they learned. And thats the beauty of elementary school: at this age, kids are still wanting to please their teacher, Borland said. They still have that intrinsic feeling of wowing their teacher and their parent.
Hatchers_walk_sign

LONDON  On a random street in Boston in England, there's a deeply odd mystery brewing.

For a reason unknown to the local council, a prankster appears to have developed a vendetta against a street sign.

SEE ALSO: 15 Provoking Works of Street Sign Art

On two different occasions, the Fydell Court street sign (ie. the real one) has been removed and replaced by a sign for "Hatchers Walk".

This can't just have been a spur-of-the-moment type prank, either.

In a press release sent to Mashable, Boston Borough Council explained that street signs are secured with 12 metal rivets. Someone would have needed a drill and a fair bit of time (not to mention a different street sign, which aren't exactly easy to come by) to make the switch.

Someone has gone to an awful lot of trouble, not to mention expense," a Boston Borough Council spokesperson said. "The signs have been tidily riveted in place."

Image: Boston borough council

All in all, it's a pretty weird one. Boston Borough Council have contacted their usual sign-maker, but he said he hadn't been asked to make the Hatchers Walk sign. Apparently the sign does show signs of wear, though, which has led to them thinking it may have been stolen from somewhere else.

But a quick Google search doesn't show up much.

Image: Google maps

For now, at least, the mystery remains unsolved.

"There is a serious side to this," the spokesperson continued.

"For one thing it is illegal to interfere and change street signs without lawful permission  you cannot just rename a street. And then there is the delay which could be caused if emergency services were looking for the address and were confused by the wrong name.

"It wouldnt be such a joking matter if someone suffered as a result.
Tokyo (AFP) - Sony posted a $1.4 billion annual profit Thursday, boosted by strong sales of its PlayStation console, but analysts warned that slowing smartphone demand could hit a lucrative business that makes key parts for mobile devices.

The company's full-year profit -- only its second since the 2008 global financial crisis preceded years of eye-watering losses -- may be a sign that things have finally turned around for Sony.

Under former US games boss Kazuo Hirai, the company has been clawing back to profitability with a painful restructuring that included layoffs and selling of assets, including its Manhattan headquarters and a laptop division.

Sony, along with rivals Panasonic and Sharp, has struggled in the consumer electronics business that built its global brand, including losing billions of dollars in televisions over the past decade as it was hammered by competition from lower-cost rivals.

Struggling Sharp has been bought out by Taiwan's Foxconn, while Panasonic has been reporting better earnings as it focuses on lesser-known divisions that make more money.

On Thursday, Sony said its net profit came in at 147.8 billion yen ($1.4 billion) for the fiscal year to March, reversing a 126.0 billion yen loss a year earlier.

Operating profit for the fiscal year quadrupled to 294.2 billion yen, although sales edged down 1.3 percent from a year ago.

Sales of its PlayStation 4 console reached 36 million units worldwide in early January since its launch three years ago.

The unit has seen the fastest and strongest adoption since the first generation of the console was introduced in late 1994.

Games have taken on a key role in Sony's turnaround, along with movies and music.

Sony's businesses include a music label and Hollywood studio, while it also operates a profitable but lesser-known financial unit.

"Sony has regained its strength," said Rakuten Securities analyst Yasuo Imanaka.

"The company's game and device sectors have spearheaded the revival, and they've stopped the bleeding in money-losing businesses."

Story continues

Sony bought Toshiba's image sensor business which it hopes will boost its position as a global leader in the key components found in smartphones and other mobile devices.

But slowing global smartphone demand was a red flag for what has become a big profits driver at Sony.

"The prospects for its device sector have been clouded as demand for image sensors -- which is Sony's growth engine -- is slowing," Imanaka said.

"Sony is likely to stay profitable this year, but its bottom line will depend on that business."

Sony delayed giving a forecast for the current year as it assesses the impact of this month's deadly quakes in southern Japan, which led to some temporary factory closures.

"The impact of the earthquakes on Sony's consolidated results for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2017, continues to be evaluated," it said.
South Korean athletes at the Rio Olympics will wear long-sleeved kit impregnated with mosquito repellant to protect them from the Zika virus, the national Olympic committee said Thursday.

Brazil -- epicentre of the mosquito-borne Zika virus outbreak, which is blamed for birth defects in babies -- hosts the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro in August.

The South Korean training kit and uniforms for the opening and closing ceremonies will cover most of the body and be infused with repellant, a Korean Olympic Committee spokeswoman said.

Competition clothing cannot be mosquito-proofed due to strict regulations, she added.

"But we will distribute mosquito-repellant sprays to the athletes and will also vaccinate them against other diseases that can be spread by mosquitoes just in case," the spokeswoman said.

The committee will also train athletes on ways to avoid mosquito bites.

There is no vaccine or cure for the Zika virus, which in most people causes only mild symptoms -- a rash, joint pain or fever.

Brazil has reported around 1.5 million Zika infections out of a global total of 2.0 million.

The South Korean team is seeking at least 10 golds in Rio and a top-10 spot in the medals table.

One of its best prospects, Ki Bo-Bae, who won individual and team women's archery golds at the London 2012 Games, said she was relaxed about the Zika scare.

"I went to Brazil twice for training and people there didn't seem too concerned about it and the athletes didn't experience any discomfort.

"So no, I don't feel uneasy," Ki told AFP.

And national archery team coach Moon Hyung-Cheol was equally untroubled -- although he was also reassured by the anti-mosquito clothing.

"By the time we go, there will be no mosquitos because there weren't any when we went last September," he said.

"Also, our team uniform is completely mosquito repellent," he added.
This years Sundance Film Festival hit Southside With You has all the hallmarks of a great date movie  that is, if youre interested in one of the most important first dates in modern American history. Southside dares to drop in on the early romance of a young Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson as they wander Chicago during one hot summer day in 1989.

Related: Sundance Report: Southside With You Reimagines the Obamas Delightful First Date

As the first trailer above reveals, the charming, modest drama from first time writer-director Richard Tanne has more in common with the walk-n-talk romance Before Sunrise than with any political biopic. We meet Michelle (Tika Sumpter), a successful young lawyer whos getting ready to go to a community meeting with her firms new summer associate. The outing is firmly not a date, as she keeps telling her skeptical parents. (Barack Owhat? her father asks when he hears her potential suitors name.) This version of Barack (Parker Sawyers) still smokes, drives a rusting Datsun, and has a thing for Janet Jackson. Hes also doing all that he can to persuade the reluctant Miss Robinson to spend the day with him. Will he succeed? Spoiler alert: yes. But its still a campaign worth watching. Southside With You hits theaters in August.

Related: 2016 Summer Movie Preview: The 35 Must-See Movies


By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force will save 40 percent by buying a GPS satellite launch from Elon Musks SpaceX compared with what United Launch Alliance has been charging, the head of the Space and Missile Systems Center said on Thursday.

The Air Force on Wednesday awarded SpaceX an $83 million contract to launch the satellite, breaking the monopoly that ULA partners Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co had held on military space launches for more than a decade.

The disclosure of the cost gap between SpaceX and ULA highlights the challenge the latter will face in competing for future launch business.

"We believe ... the awarded price for this mission is about 40 percent cheaper than (the) government estimate for previous missions, Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, head of the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, told reporters.

ULA is responding to competition from SpaceX and other startups by slashing costs and overhauling its lineup of rockets. The venture is upgrading its workhorse Atlas 5 rocket, cutting launch prices to less than $100 million per flight, and dropping its costly Delta 4 rocket line, ULA executives have said.

The Colorado-based firm plans to eliminate 875 jobs, or about one-quarter of its workforce, by end-2017, so it can better compete against SpaceX and other rivals, including the Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin, ULA Chief Executive Tory Bruno told Reuters recently.

SpaceX and ULA are the only two companies certified to fly high-value national security and military payloads. Greaves said the Air Force received a second bid for the GPS 3 launch contract awarded to SpaceX, but would not elaborate.

ULA did not bid for the GPS 3 launch contract, but said on Thursday it intended to compete for future military launches.

"ULA is eager to respond to future national security launch opportunities," company spokeswoman Jessica Rye said in a statement.

"SpaceX is honored to have been awarded the first competitively sourced national security mission in over a decade," SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said.

Story continues

Greaves said the Air Force is reviewing the GPS launch service solicitation and assessing feedback from industry before releasing its next request for launch service proposals in May or June.

The Air Force had relied solely on United Launch Alliance to launch satellites for the past decade, but decided to open up competition for a series of nine satellite launches to be awarded by 2018.

(Editing by Joseph White and Matthew Lewis)
Madrid (AFP) - Spanish authorities and the family of the late poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was killed during the civil war, are engaged in a fierce battle over what to do with his archive.

The latest twist in their tug-of-war came this week when Spain's culture ministry declared the archive to be of special cultural interest, which prohibits it from being sold abroad.

Secretary of state for culture, Jose Maria Lassalle, said the goal was to ensure that Spain's most acclaimed 20th century poet remains in the country and is not "scattered".

A source close to talks between the state and the Federico Garcia Lorca Foundation, which owns the archive and is led by the writer's great-niece, said the government feared the foundation could be tempted to sell part of the valuable documents to clean up its debts.

But in an angry response, the foundation said it had been "neither consulted nor informed" of the government's decision to ban the archive's export.

The archive comprises some 19,000 documents, including over 2,000 sheets of original manuscripts, as well as photographs and letters belonging to the poet who was executed at the outset of Spain's 1936-39 civil war.

The government move comes after the foundation refused to transfer the archive from its current location in a Madrid students' residence where he once lived to the newly built Garcia Lorca Centre in the southern city of Granada where the poet was born in 1898.

The centre, built in part with public money and a donation of four million euros ($4.5 million) from Norway under the direction of the foundation, was inaugurated with great fanfare in July 2015 but stands mostly empty as the row continues.

The foundation says disagreements over who will supervise the centre and over what its role in the institution will be are behind its refusal to transfer the archive.

But it is also in conflict with the government and construction firms over millions of euros in debts accumulated by the foundation related to the construction of the centre.

Story continues

Legal proceedings are underway, and the poet and playwright's great-niece Laura Garcia Lorca last year reported the former manager of the foundation for alleged forgery and embezzlement.

Garcia Lorca was 38 when he was killed by firing squad in August 1936, a month after General Francisco Franco's rebellion against a republican government sparked Spain's civil war.

The poet and playwright, whose works include "Blood Wedding" and "The House of Bernarda Alba", is believed to have been buried in an unmarked grave near Granada.

His poems and plays, which deal with themes such as love, death, passion, cruelty and injustice, are widely studied at universities.
Sprint Corporation S  a leading telecom operator in the U.S. is scheduled to report third-quarter fiscal 2016 financial numbers on May 3, before the market opens.

Last quarter, the company delivered a positive earnings surprise of 22.30%. However, the companys bottom line has surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate in only two of the past four quarters, with an average beat of 3.82%. Lets see how things are shaping up for this announcement.



Factors Likely to Influence this Quarter

Sprint finalized its cost cutting framework with the projection to save around $1 billion. The plan involves a few operational overhaul and layoffs.

Sprint has been poaching the subscriber base of its rivals AT&T Inc. T and Verizon Communications Inc. VZ in order to increase its own customer base. Recently, it offered lucrative credits to its rival carriers customers for switching to Sprints network. Additionally, it has been offering attractive device leasing plans to its customers.

Earnings Whispers

Our proven model shows does not conclusively show thatSprint is likely to beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate this quarter. This is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESPand a Zacks Rank #1, 2 or 3 for this to happen. Unfortunately, that is not the case here as elaborated below.

Zacks ESP: Sprint has an Earnings ESP of 0.00%. This is because both the Most Accurate estimate and the Zacks Consensus Estimate stand at a loss of 13 cents.

Zacks Rank: Sprinthas a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) which increases the predictive power of ESP. However, the companys 0.00% ESP makes earnings prediction difficult.

A Stock to Consider

Here is a company you may want to consider, as our model shows it has the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter.

Synopsys Inc. SNPS has an Earnings ESP of +7.27% and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

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kendall collins appdynamics cmo algoria

Google is great and all, but it has some limitations, when you stop to think about it.

It's fabulous at searching the whole web at once  there's nobody better at trawling humankind's vast combined storehouse of knowledge to quickly tell you how to make a hamburger.

But it's less great at searching within any individual website or app. Sure, you can use Google to search within a site, but really it's just going back out to Google's master index, and then back to you.

It's slower than it has to be, and it's not really applicable to searching inside, say, your own text messages on your own phone.

Enter Algolia, a San Francisco-based startup that gives developers and businesses the tools to build their own search experience, their own way, for their own sites and apps.

So far, Algolia has raised $21 million from investors including Accel Partners, the Y Combinator and 500 Startups accelerator programs, and Docker founder Solomon Hykes. And customers like Medium, Twitter's Periscope, and Microsoft's soon-to-be-discarded calendar app Sunrise are using Algolia's tech to power search in their own services.

Today, Algolia announces that Kendall Collins, the former CEO of Salesforce Cloud and current CMO of $1.9 billion startup AppDynamics, has signed on to its board to guide the company towards the future and help bring the product to bigger businesses.

Building blocks

Google casts a long shadow over the world of search, it's true. But Algolia cofounder and CEO Nicolas Dessaigne says that there are lots of reasons why developers crave the ability to build their own search tech.

"Increasingly, people want building blocks," not a total prepackaged solution, says Collins. He likens it to hot Silicon Valley startups Stripe and Twilio, which provide access to payment and phone services, respectively.

For starters, even if you're using Google's own Site Search tool to let people search your own website, you're not seeing any of Google's data on which links they're clicking, or how they're finding those links. It means a developer can't get insight into how their customers are moving through their site.

Story continues

"That information is critical to running a good business," Dessaigne says.

nicolas Dessaigne algolia ceo

Furthermore, you can't exactly embed Google within a mobile app. If you're building the next big shopping app for the iPhone, you can't just drop a Google search bar in there for your customers to look for products.

But search is "really intensive," Dessaigne says. If you don't have Google time, Google money, and Google resources, you're not going to build a search feature that works half as well as Google, even if you decide to build your own.

This is Algolia's sweet spot: Providing an easy way for developers to build a smarter search straight into their apps and customizing it to their whim, letting Algolia itself handle the hard part of making it all hum. Your app gets a better, smarter search that helps customers find what they want, and Algolia gets paid.

The Algolia service is hosted out of 36 global data centers, so it's kept highly reliable. Plus, customers get all of that critical data to help run their businesses. Collins praises both the speed and relaibility of the service, as well as the fact that Algolia built their tech from the ground up.

Periscope up

A major side benefit of this approach, Dessaigne says, is that customers can do funky things with search once they're given access to Algolia's underpinning engine.

For instance, Twitter's Periscope live video app uses Algolia to make a real-time map of its broadcasters' locations, Dessaigne says. All you see is a map, no search bar in sight, but Algolia is cruising Periscope's data behind the scenes.

Otherwise, Algolia is used by "one of the top five enterprise software companies and one of the top five retailers," says Dessaigne. Going forward, the company wants to launch Google-style personalized search, which has clear applications to online customers.

Behind the scenes, Algolia knows that it can't out-Google Google, having 50 employees  considerably fewer than the search giant's 50,000-some-odd. So instead, it's just focusing on making its core search features as good as it possibly can, while making sure developers are happy with the Algolia service.

"You want to be loved by developers," Dessaigne says. "It's all about focus."

NOW WATCH: Google Earths time-lapse tool shows you 28 years of change in a few seconds





More From Business Insider


From Esquire

Stephen Colbert took on the spate of so-called "bathroom laws" that have passed in various (southern) states recently, and he seemed to come to one conclusion: They got the wrong ones.

North Carolina, for instance, passed the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, often known as HB2, which, according to CNN, "bans individuals from using public bathrooms that do not correspond to their biological sex." (It also outlawed local governments and cities from passing anti-discrimination statutes to protect LGBT people.) Mississippi passed something similar. But in Colbert's view, they missed the real point, which is that sharing a bathroom with anyone is awful.

"I don't care if you're male or female, what sex or gender identity someone is," he said. "I-and I mean this sincerely-don't want to share a bathroom with anyone."

Colbert's first instinct seemed to be to ban shared bathrooms altogether. But given the likelihood of that, he suggests some Bathroom Laws of his own, some of which you may be familiar with-or even follow already:

The Reality Show Rule: "No chit-chat. I'm not there to make friends."

The Time-and-a-Place Rule: "If you're a fan of mine, that's wonderful. Please do not try to shake my hand in there, because I know what you just shook."

The Every-Man-Is-an-Island: "If there are a bunch of open stalls, don't take the one next to me. It's not the buddy system."

Those are all better rules than North Carolina's, which is rooted primarily in fearmongering about transgender people sexually assaulting women and children in bathrooms. Some studies show that as many as one in two transgender people are actually the victims of assault, while the idea that putting the "right" sign on the door would stop an abuser is fairly absurd anyway.

In the end, Colbert nailed it: "To all those lawmakers out there who are so obsessed with who's using what bathroom and what plumbing they've got downtown, newsflash: You're the weirdos."
The British actor Stephen Merchant is set to star alongside Hugh Jackman in "Wolverine 3", according to Deadline.

The co-creator of the original "The Office", "The Ricky Gervais Show" and "Life's Too Short", Stephen Merchant has joined the cast of "Wolverine 3". He will join Hugh Jackman in the title role, Richard E. Grant and Patrick Stewart, among others.

"Wolverine 3" will be the last that sees Jackman unsheathing his famous claws. An official title has not yet been announced, but the movie is scheduled for release on March 3,2017.
By Ivy Josiah

Last month, an eight-year-old student was allegedly forced to snip off the tip of his tongue with a pair of scissors, egged on by five other students.

That same day, a shocking video emerged of a boy who was made to kneel down while being screamed at by a classmate. The video showed a female student scolding a boy kneeling in front of her, after the latter allegedly dropped her calculator.

She screamed, Im a nice girl and I never raise my voice to anyone in school, not even to the teachers but I need to do this to defend whats mine.

Please forgive me, begged the kneeling boy as he wiped off his tears.

On April 9, it was reported that a student fell unconscious and sustained a neck fracture, allegedly after a beating by a senior student. Police are investigating this incident.

These three incidents of bullying in schools occurred in different parts of Malaysia. Almost immediately, on 27 March (after the tongue snipping incident), Education Minister Mahdzir Khalid announced that a special meeting on the procedures would be held soon between myself, the Director-General of Education, and ministry officials to draw up standard operating procedures on handling indiscipline and bullying among school children.

My question is, were there no SOPs on school bullying until now?

Malaysia has addressed this issue in the past; in 2009, a Safe Schools Programme was introduced, supported by UNICEF in partnership with Malaysias Ministry of Education and HELP University College.

UNICEF Malaysia states that as early as 2004, a University survey showed that 80% of primary school students have been bullied and the majority happened in the classroom.

The study was conducted in the state of Perak and involved a total of 2,528 primary school children from 29 schools. Dr Noran Fauziah Yaakubs executive summary Bullying among Malaysian Elementary School Children revealed enough to help formulate policy and action that should have taken place at least 10 years ago.

Story continues

The findings included:

Majority of those surveyed fell within the psychological-physical victim category (79.4%), followed by children who were involved in both types of bullying (53.2%), victims of both types (49.4%), non-bullies (14.5%) and finally, non-victims (8.6%).





The two forms of psychological or indirect bullying that these children were more involved in were name-calling and teasing. Fighting with other students was the most frequent form of direct or physical bullying, while threatening to hit and kick others were the least frequent.





More boys were involved in both forms of bullying, and also made up the bigger number of victims of direct and indirect bullying. Almost half of the school bullies were boys and the majority of them were older than the victims.





About 20% of bullying involved girls.





About a third of the boys admitted to bullying girls.





A large majority (88.7%) did not feel easy seeing other children being bullied, while 11% admitted to having no feelings when seeing others being bullied.



As for the bullies, a large majority (60%) felt guilty after bullying others, while about a third symphatised with the victims. A small number said they felt great after bullying others.





A high percentage of bullying occurred in the classroom (40.9%), mainly before teachers came for classes (25.8%). High incidents of bullying also took place on the way home from school (23.9%). There were not many cases of bullying in computer and science labs.



The 2004 study had proposed that the Ministry of Education (MOE) take action and put in place long-term plans to address the issue, which obviously impacts students in dangerous ways. However, if you type in the word bullying in the search function of MOEs website, it just takes you to the complaints page.

The problem is that these agencies work in silos  a study here, a pilot project there, while the MOE operates on its own without drawing on existing studies, programmes or from their foreign counterparts.

School bullying is a worldwide phenomenon and several countries have put in place institutional practices  including annual nationwide school campaigns  that have successfully addressed the problem. The ministries of education in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and the UK have excellent resources online. In the USA, the first Monday of October is designated Blue Shirt Day  World Day of Bullying Prevention.

We need to both empower and train teachers to intervene and take an active approach to reduce bullying. The first line of defence is the teachers, and they must learn to react quickly and take action, not take sides.

Our MOE could go beyond just coming up with a set of protocols, which presumably will provide teachers with a clear referral system. Ongoing training for teachers should start at the pre-service training stage while online resources should be made available for students, parents and the community. Federal resources should be employed to fund annual anti-bullying campaigns in every school. Private schools, too, should commit to adopting an anti-bullying policy. Stopping bullying does not happen without strategic long-term planning led by the MOE.

Children are not born bullies, but the environment and cultural values shape them into becoming violent. We can all contribute towards ensuring a safe learning environment, which is every childs right.

Ivy Josiah was formerly Executive Director of Womens Aid Organisation(WAO), one of Malaysias leading womens rights organisations. She is currently WAOs fundraiser and host of the web-based talk show, The IvyGram.



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By Khalid Abdelaziz KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Police fired tear gas at hundreds who gathered in central Khartoum and outside the city's main university on Thursday, protesting against the killing of a student at a campus demonstration a day earlier, witnesses said. Crowds chanted: "Killing of a student, killing of a nation, down with military rule," at the rare rally in the center of the heavily-guarded Sudanese capital. Protesters later blocked a road and set fire to tires outside Khartoum university. Police fired tear gas canisters and used batons to beat protesters who hurled rocks back at them. Students had initially demonstrated on Wednesday against government plans to sell off Khartoum University buildings, before witnesses said gunmen in plain clothes opened fire on them, killing 20-year-old Mohammed al Sadek. Anti-government-protests erupted at his funeral later on Wednesday. The government said on Thursday that unnamed armed groups were trying to undermine security at Sudan's universities - long centers for political activism and debate. "The government will not allow any disruption to the stability of universities," President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's aide, Ibrahim Mahmoud, told the Sudanese Media Centre, an agency which is close to Sudanese security services. Bashir, who took power in a 1989 coup backed by the army and Islamists, brooks little dissent in Sudan, which has been suffering from an economic crisis since South Sudan seceded in 2011, costing Khartoum more then 70 percent of its oil revenues. The former army officer is wanted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court on charges of masterminding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes during Sudan's Darfur conflict. He denies wrongdoing. "I remain concerned about a number of human rights issues in the country," Aristide Nononsi, the United Nations Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in the Sudan, said in a statement on Thursday. "I continue to hear about cases of arbitrary arrests and detention, as well as allegations of ill-treatment and travel ban on human rights defenders and political activists by security forces." (Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - Suncor Energy Inc , Canada's largest oil and gas company, reported a first-quarter operating loss on Wednesday as sagging crude prices outweighed record production at the company's oil sands operations in Northern Alberta. Excluding one-time items, Suncor reported an operating loss of C$500 million ($397 million), or 33 Canadian cents per share. That is compared with an operating profit of C$175 million, or 12 Canadian cents per share, in the year-ago period. Thousands of workers have been laid off and producers have slashed capital spending in the oil sands regions where Suncor mainly operates, helping drive down production costs over the last two years. Net profit rose to C$257 million, or 17 Canadian cents per share, in the first quarter of 2016, compared with a loss of C$341 million, or 24 Canadian cents per share, boosted by a non-cash foreign exchange gain on debt revaluation. Oil sands production rose to a record 453,000 barrels per day (bpd), compared to 440,400 bpd a year earlier, while cash operating costs for oil sands operations dropped to $24.25 per barrel, down 15 percent from a year ago, Suncor said. Suncor's total upstream production, meanwhile, rose to 691,400 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d), from 602,400 boe/d a year ago, buoyed by the takeover of rival Canadian Oil Sands Ltd earlier this year. The Calgary-based company separately said it had reached a C$937 million ($744.2 million) deal to buy Murphy Oil Corp's 5 percent stake in the Syncrude oil sands project, boosting Suncor's share in the joint venture to 53.74 percent. The latest deal follows Suncor's all-stock acquisition of Canadian Oil Sands Ltd, ending a bitter hostile takeover battle that had been raging since October. Chief executive Steve Williams said in a statement that the company will "continue to look for opportunities to grow our business through acquisitions, by adding assets that fit strategically at competitive valuations." (Reporting by Julie Gordon and Nia Williams; Editing by Leslie Adler and Christian Schmollinger)
Omkar Thakur

The 14th edition of the Desert Strom rally was flagged off from Noida with over 200 participants fighting in different categories. After the seven gruelling seven days of racing in the desert heat for over 2000kms, team Maruti Suzukis Suresh Rana and co-driver Ashwin Naik emerged as overall winners in the Xtreme category. Indian motorcycle rally ace CS Santosh added another win to his kitty after dominating the competition on two wheels.

The 2016 Desert Storm had a slightly modified format to make the Ndure and Xplore categories more approachable to rallying aficionados with an aim of encouraging participation. Along with the Xplore Dawn and Xplore Dusk stages for the amateurs, there was a special competitive night stage to spice up the Desert Storm.

The first two days of the competition saw Abhishek Mishra with his navigator PV Srinivas Murthy hold the lead in their heavily modified Suzuki Grand Vitara keeping rally veteran Rana and Naik at bay in the second position. Manpreet Ahluwalia and Virender Kashyap, in their souped-up Gypsy, were holding fort against the Vitara brigade in the third position. Owing to a mistake on the Leg 5 of the rally, Abhishek Mishra had to retire form the lead after his car rolled over. Suresh Rana went ahead to win the 2016 Desert Storm followed by Manpreet Ahluwalia and Niju Padia (co-driver Nirav Mehta).

In the two wheeled fight, CS Santosh led from the outset on his Suzuki to complete the race course in 11_19:28s followed by Aravind KP (11:28:06s) and R Nataraj (12:25:30s). Rajasthan boy Jes David put up quite a show fighting with Santosh and Aravind in the initial stages. Interestingly, CS Santosh incurred a 60 minute penalty for missing a passage control section that ate into his 44 minute overall lead until that stage. However, on the last stage, the seven minute gap between Santosh and Aravind was still too much for the latter to pose a real challenge.

In the Ndure category, participants ran the same course as the Xtreme category but in the TSD format. While it may sound easy, the desert heat can get the better of you over the 2000km course in the rally cars. SK Ajgar Ali with co-driver MK Mohammed Mustafa won the Ndure category while the Xplore class winner was Pratap with his co-driver Nagarajan.

For more news,reviews,videos and information about cars, visit CarWale.com.

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susan sarandon

Susan Sarandon's relationship with Hillary Clinton has seen some ups and downs over the years.

The actress, who's an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter in the current presidential election, was once friendly to Hillary Clinton.

When she was on Stephen Colbert's "Late Show" Wednesday, the host showed a photo of happier times between Sarandon and Clinton.

susan sarandon hillary clinton

"I know. Look how happy we were. And then I had to break up with her," Sarandon said.

The photo evidently predates the 2003 Iraq invasion that Hillary Clinton voted for as a Senator, and when asked about why she turned on the politician, Sarandon brought up the war.

"I told her, don't go in Iraq. I'm very upset about that," Sarandon said, also citing Clinton's record on fracking, which she is not entirely against, and her association with agricultural biotech company Monsanto.

"Who is this person? I can't trust her," Sarandon said.

The Oscar winner also went on to explain her support for Bernie Sanders, who she says has had consistent principles throughout his career.

Watch Susan Sarandon explain her Hillary Clinton breakup below:

NOW WATCH: 'Hamilton' just won a Pulitzer Prize  watch Obama's private performance from the show 6 years before it hit Broadway





More From Business Insider


Geneva (AFP) - A key suspect in the New Year's Eve mass sexual assaults in Cologne was spotted shoplifting in southern Germany and arrested across the border in Switzerland, authorities said Thursday.

The 19-year-old Moroccan national was arrested Wednesday in the Swiss border town of Kreuzlingen, the Swiss justice ministry said.

German police in the city of Konstanz said they were awaiting his extradition.

The Cologne attacks, committed in a crowd of mostly North African men, shocked Germany and heightened public concern about an influx of migrants, many of them Syrians fleeing their country's civil war.

Prosecutors received more than 1,100 criminal complaints, including over 480 accusations of sexual assault.

The attacks sparked widespread anger, with far-right groups railing against "sex jihadists" and "rapefugees".

The 19-year-old suspect was arrested on Wednesday after he and a 24-year-old man were allegedly spotted stealing cigarettes and groceries worth 24 euros ($27) from a supermarket in the frontier city of Konstanz.

An undercover security worker at the shop followed them on foot across the Swiss border, then contacted German police, who in turn alerted the Swiss Border Guard.

"One of the border guards present thought he recognised the (19-year-old) man as an alleged main perpetrator of the events of New Year's Eve in Cologne," said a German police statement.

"Subsequent verification of his personal details by German authorities revealed that the 19-year-old was indeed subject to a European arrest warrant due to these events issued by Cologne prosecutors."

The man was questioned Thursday morning by regional authorities in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, and had accepted to be extradited to Germany, the Swiss justice ministry said in a statement sent to AFP.

It would not say when the extradition would take place, but it was expected to happen quickly.

A 33-year-old Moroccan went on trial earlier this month in Duesseldorf accused of sexual assault during New Year's celebrations in that city.

In Cologne, three people were convicted of theft during the year-end celebrations, but police there have admitted that most perpetrators of the sexual attacks may never be caught.
April 28 (Reuters) - Symantec Corp, best known for its Norton antivirus software, cut its fourth-quarter profit and revenue forecast below analysts' estimates, and said its Chief Executive Michael Brown will step down.

The company cut its revenue forecast to $873 million from a range of $885 million-$915 million, and lowered its adjusted profit to 22 cents per share from 24-27 cents per share.

Analysts on average were expecting a profit of 25 cents per share on revenue of $901.2 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Brown will continue as CEO until a successor has been appointed, the company said.

(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)
Aleppo (Syria) (AFP) - The United States and the United Nations Thursday condemned an air strike on a hospital in Syria's Aleppo, with Washington demanding that Russia restrain its Syrian ally.

UN officials also voiced alarm at the "catastrophic deterioration" of the situation in Syria and appealed on world powers to salvage a February 27 truce.

But in Aleppo on Thursday, fighting between rebels and regime forces killed 53 civilians -- the highest toll for a single day in a week of violence that has cost more than 200 lives, according to a monitor.

The Syrian army was meanwhile poised to launch an offensive against rebels who control part of the northern city.

Secretary of State John Kerry expressed "outrage" over Wednesday's air strike that hit Al-Quds hospital in Aleppo's rebel-held Sukkari neighbourhood.

He said it appeared to be "a deliberate strike on a known medical facility" and said Russia, which backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, must restrain the Damascus regime.

"Russia has an urgent responsibility to press the regime to fulfil its commitments under UNSCR 2254, including in particular to stop attacking civilians, medical facilities, and first responders, and to abide fully by the cessation of hostilities."

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said attacks that target civilians are "inexcusable" violations of humanitarian law.

"There must be accountability for these crimes," he said.

The city's last remaining paediatrician and three children were among the 20 people killed in the air strike overnight on the Al-Quds hospital, which was supported by Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

A civil defence group known as the White Helmets told AFP 30 people were killed in the strike on the hospital and a nearby block of flats.

- Truce 'barely alive' -

The Aleppo violence has raised fears for the ceasefire in other areas of Syria and called into question the future of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva that have now gone into recess.

Story continues

UN envoy Staffan de Mistura warned that the hard-won February 27 ceasefire was now "barely alive" and could collapse "any time".

Speaking late Wednesday after a third round of Syria peace talks fizzled out, De Mistura also urged its co-sponsors Russia and the United States to take action to rescue it.

He said the United States, which supports some rebel groups, and regime ally Russia needed to act, calling on them to organise a high-level Syria meeting before negotiations resume.

UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien further raised the alarm on Thursday in remarks made at the UN Security Council.

"We must all be ashamed this is happening on our watch," said O'Brien, urging world powers to salvage the truce.

"You must not squander the opportunity presented by talks in Geneva and by the cessation of hostilities to put an end to the massive human suffering in Syria," he said.

And the UN's Jan Egeland, who heads an international humanitarian taskforce for war-ravaged Syria, spoke of a "catastrophic deterioration" of the situation in the country.

"The stakes are so incredibly high," Egeland told reporters in Geneva, and warned that "the lifeline to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people... may be broken."

- 'Humanitarian disaster' -

Rebel rocket and artillery fire on government-held neighbourhoods on Thursday killed 22 civilians, including two children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Regime air strikes on rebel-held districts, including Bustan al-Qasr, killed 31 civilians, including three children, said the British-based monitor.

An AFP correspondent said every building in sight in the Bustan al-Qasr district had had its windows blown out.

"It is the worst day in Aleppo in five years. The regime did not spare a single neighbourhood," said one resident.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned that Aleppo city was "on the brink of humanitarian disaster".

The pro-government Al-Watan newspaper and a Syrian regime source meanwhile said the army was preparing to take the whole of Aleppo.

"Now is the time to launch the battle for the complete liberation of Aleppo," the paper said, adding that it "will not take long to begin, nor to finish".

A regime source told AFP that "the army is preparing a huge operation in the coming days to push the rebels away from the city by encircling it and creating a security zone".

Rebels have controlled eastern districts of Aleppo city since 2012, while western neighbourhoods are held by the regime.

Control of the surrounding province is divided between a myriad of armed groups -- jihadists of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, Kurdish militia and various rebel factions as well as the army.

Further north in the province, rebels including the powerful Islamist Ahrar al-Sham group and Kurdish forces fought fierce battles Wednesday and early Thursday that left 64 fighters dead, a monitor said.

More than 270,000 people have been killed in Syria and millions forced from their homes since the conflict erupted in 2011.
By Kizito Makoye DAR ES SALAAM (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When the international forest conservation scheme known as REDD+ first came to Tanzania in 2008, it brought hopes of slowing deforestation and curbing climate change. But according to a recent report, funding for the program is drying up, threatening the future of the East African country's efforts to safeguard its forests. REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is a U.N.-backed push to reduce climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions through having developed countries pay poorer nations to protect their forests, which store carbon. Richer countries buy credits for CO2 emissions reductions, and the money is used to keep tropical forests standing and to support forest communities. But a report last month from a forest finance tracking initiative called "REDDX", run by non-profit group Forest Trends, said financing to prepare for REDD+ in Tanzania had stagnated, with no new funding announced since 2010. As a result, pilot REDD+ projects in Tanzania, including forest conservation activities and land-use planning, have been shuttered, it said. "The lack of new donor funding is a matter of serious concern for the sustainability of the REDD+ initiative in Tanzania," the report added. When REDD+ was launched in Tanzania, Norway was its biggest donor, committing $80.2 million in 2009, or around 85 percent of all REDD+ funding for the country, to be paid over five years. Other backers included Finland, Germany, Britain, Belgium, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, the multilateral UN-REDD program and the government of Tanzania itself. The money was used to develop an action plan with 10 priority areas, including identifying and tackling the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, and accurately measuring and recording emission levels. But according to the REDDX report, the flow of funds from Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative has declined significantly since the program began. "Following a jolt of funding from Norway that jump-started Tanzania's REDD+ process in 2009, progress has now come to a standstill," Brian Schaap, REDDX senior program associate, said in a statement. REVERSING DAMAGE Norway's involvement with the REDD+ initiative in Tanzania has had its detractors. In 2012, it drew criticism when green group WWF was embroiled in allegations of misappropriating NOK25 million ($3.07 million) of Norwegian REDD+ money. The WWF Tanzania country director, Stephen Mariki, denied the accusations, but later resigned. And with only 18 percent of the REDD+ funding going to the government, according to the report, there is concern that too much money is going to NGOs and academic institutions, and not enough into building state capacity. But Norwegian officials stand by the country's role in REDD+, saying some of the projects have already started to reverse the damage done to Tanzania's forests. According to officials from the Norwegian embassy in Dar es Salaam, the drop in funding for the REDD+ projects is, in fact, a sign of success. The annual amount of funds has decreased along with the progress of projects under the REDD+ portfolio as most of them have been completed, and consequently the annual spending is less than at the start of the partnership, said Berit Tvete, councillor on environment and climate change. Some pilot and research projects were completed in the last two years, and have delivered new knowledge and valuable lessons, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by email. According to Tvete, the embassy is still implementing its original plan, which was extended to 2016 since not all the funds had been committed. Two projects are ongoing, and a third is still being drafted, she added. Across many parts of Tanzania, poor households look to forests as a source of income, harvesting trees to supply a growing market in charcoal and timber. That activity has contributed to the loss of 420,000 hectares (around 1 million acres) of rainforest every year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization's 2012 State of the World's Forests report. So far, one Norway-funded project has trained 50,000 local people in sustainable forest management, while another has established land-use plans for 82,754 hectares of land, said the REDDX report. The REDD+ initiative has also helped establish carbon monitoring for seven types of trees and reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, it added. BIG INVESTMENT Norway intends to fulfill the promise it made in 2008 and support the rest of the projects through completion, Tvete said. "The intention of the current support is to make it possible for Tanzania to participate in results-based REDD+ funding schemes," she said. But there are no concise plans for additional REDD+ funding from Norway, Tvete added. Faustine Ninga of the independent Tanzania Natural Resources Forum is confident Norway won't abandon its investment in Tanzania's forest-saving efforts. He pointed to another REDD+ project, the National Carbon Monitoring Centre, one of the projects funded by Norway, which is being set up to measure, report and verify carbon levels in the country's forest ecosystems. "Since this is a big investment, it would be futile to let it go," he said. But without an official commitment from Norway of further funding, the future of REDD+ in Tanzania remains uncertain. For now, according to the REDDX report, the government is working with the World Bank to secure around $3.5 million to consolidate its REDD+ preparation efforts and make sure the good work done so far doesn't go to waste. "Unless donors renew their commitments to support forest conservation in the country, the progress made early on will begin to erode," said Schaap. ($1 = 8.1480 Norwegian crowns) (Reporting by Kizito Makoye; editing by Jumana Farouky and Megan Rowling. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)
LONDON (Reuters) - Tata Steel is not prepared to split up its main British assets, such as its Port Talbot steel plant, as part of a plan to divest its UK steelmaking operations, UK CEO Bimlendra Jha told a committee of lawmakers on Thursday. "We would not deal with ... somebody saying leave alone Port Talbot and give us the rest - that is not a solution that's acceptable," said Jha. He added that the company might consider selling off small independent assets individually. (Reporting by William James, editing by Elizabeth Piper)
Thor is feeling a little left out.



Chris Hemsworth took to Facebook on Wednesday to point out one major flaw in the upcoming film Captain America: Civil War  he's not in it.



"Where was the invite for me and Hulk?" said Hemsworth, 32, as he flexed his muscles while doing pull-ups. "Just leave two of the strongest, biggest Avengers out of this one did you?"



Hemsworth said without Thor and Hulk, the battle between Captain America and Iron Man is basically a "kids' fight."







"Let us know when you're done messing around and the big boys will step in," he said, dropping an arm to show off his single-handed pull-ups.



And if there was any questions whether or not Thor is in shape enough to fight, just take this video as evidence.



"I've still got it," he said as he catches his signature hammer with ease. "It's still very, very, light."



In case mesmerized fans might have missed his entire message due to excessive drooling, the actor also hammed it up for the camera when he stopped by The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Wednesday.









The actor  who plays a lovably doofus secretary in the upcoming Ghostbusters reboot  flaunted his good looks when he surprised one lucky fan with an office drop-in to celebrate Administrative Professionals Day.



And the surprised fan basically did what any Hemsworth die-hard would have done: asked him to take his clothes off.



When the actor began massaging her back, she jokingly asked, "Can we get naked?"



Watch the hilarious encounter above.
Even a tech giant like Apple isnt invincible: The Cupertino-based companys quarterly revenue declined for the first time in 13 years during the first three months of this year, according to its fiscal Q2 of 2016 earnings report. Weakening iPhone sales were a major factor causing the decline, but the company also blamed ongoing international economic uncertainties. Our team executed extremely well in the face of strong macroeconomic headwinds, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.

Here are the numbers in a nutshell: Apple generated $50.6 billion in revenue during its fiscal Q2 of 2016, which ended on March 31. This is below the $58 billion Apple clocked during the same quarter last year, and notably below analyst expectations: The analyst community had expected Apple to post revenue of $52 billion. The companys net profit came in at $10.5 billion, compared to $13.6 billion during the same quarter a year ago. This equals earnings of $1.90 per diluted share, compared to $2.33 a year ago.

Analysts had expected $2.00 earnings per share. Apples stock was down 8 percent in afterhours trading.

The company sold a total of 51.2 million iPhones during its most recent quarter, compared to 61.2 million during the same quarter last year. iPhone sales declined by 16 percent, and revenue was down 18 percent year-over-year. Thats a significant decline, as the iPhone has been Apples biggest money maker for years.

But in light of continued uncertainty in overseas markets and the emergence of budget-priced competitors from companies like Xiaomi, appetite for the flagship device seems to be slowing down. Apple seems keenly aware of this trend, and introduced the budget-priced iPhone SE at the end of March. The introduction was too late to still make a dent in the quarters numbers, but Cook said during the companyts earnings call that demand for the iPhone SE currently exceeds supplies.

Speaking of China: The country also saw some of the biggest year-over-year decline in revenue, with Apple generating $12.5 billion in revenue in greater China. A year ago, that number still stood at $16.8 billion. Cook blamed much of this on economic weakness in Hong Kong.

Story continues

Another weak spot in Apples earnings report was the iPad. Sales of the tablet have been declining for some time, and Apples attempt to turn around this trend with the plus-sized iPad Pro doesnt seem to have made a dent just yet. Apple sold a total of 10.3 million iPads during its fiscal Q2, which is below the 12.6 million it sold during the same quarter last year. iPad revenue and unit sales both declined by 19 percent.

SEE MORE: Steve Jobs Vision Is Still Alive in the iPad Pro: It May Just Be Wrong

The company doubled down on the iPad with a new 9.7 inch iPad Pro it introduced in March. The model may have come too late to make a significant dent in the quarters numbers, but Cook suggested that it may be able to boiost iPad sales in the coming quarter. We continue to be very optimistic for the iPad business, he said.

Cook highlighted services as a positive spot for Apple during the companys earnings call, stating that Apple Music now has more than 13 million paying subscribers. Total service revenue was up 20 percent year-over-year, with Apple generating close to $6 billion during its most recent quarter with all of its services combined. Apple also increased sales of its Watch, with Cook saying that it exceeded internal expectations. However, the company has yet to break out sales of the gadget.

Related stories

GoPro Hires Veteran Apple Designer to Lead Hardware Design Group

Steve Jobs' Vision Is Still Alive in the iPad Pro: It May Just Be Wrong

Feds Claim to Have Broken Into San Bernardino iPhone, Won't Need Apple's Help
By Dustin Volz and Mark Hosenball WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI has provisionally decided not to share an iPhone unlocking mechanism used by a contractor to open the phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters because the agency does not own the mechanism, two U.S. government sources said on Tuesday. The FBI is expected within days to write to the White House explaining why the agency cannot share the unlocking mechanism with other government agencies, Apple or other third parties, said the sources, who asked to remain anonymous. Several U.S. government sources said the FBI contractor that unlocked the shooter's phone was a foreign entity and did not give U.S. authorities details of the mechanism. Without that, the FBI could not share it even if it wanted to, sources said. Reuters reported on April 13 that the unnamed contractor had sole ownership of the method it used, making it unlikely that the government could share it. A day later, the FBI warned Apple of a separate flaw in its iPhone and Mac software, the company told Reuters on Tuesday. It was the first time the government had alerted Apple to a vulnerability under a White House interagency procedure, known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, for reviewing technology security flaws and deciding which ones should be made public, the company said. The FBI's provisional decision means that the unlocking mechanism used on the San Bernardino iPhone will not be referred to the interagency procedure for review. Earlier on Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey said his agency was assessing whether the mechanism would go through the review. We are in the midst of trying to sort that out," Comey said. Officials have said that the interagency review process leans toward disclosure of technological flaws. But it is not set up to handle or reveal flaws which are discovered and owned by private companies, sources have told Reuters. Comey's comments appeared to confirm the FBI did not own the method used to crack the county-owned work phone belonging to Syed Farook, who with his wife opened fire in December on a San Bernardino, Calif., holiday party, killing 14 and wounding 22. The method instead belongs to a still-unidentified third party that the FBI said came forward due to the attention received from its public pursuit of a court order to compel Apple's assistance in unlocking the phone. Apple's refusal to comply prompted a high-profile standoff and fueled a long-simmering debate over security, privacy and law enforcement access to encrypted technology. The government withdrew its case after it said the hacking method worked. Comey has said the method works on a narrow slice of iPhone 5c devices running iOS 9. An Apple senior executive told reporters earlier this month that it was confident the flaw used by the third party would have a "short shelf life" and be patched through the firm's ongoing efforts to improve the security of its devices. (Reporting by Dustin Volz and Mark Hosenball in Washington, additional reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Cynthia Osterman and Bernard Orr)
No delegate lead? No problem.



Ted Cruz is behind in the delegate count in the race for the Republican presidential nomination  but that's not stopping him from selecting a running mate.



On Wednesday, Cruz announced that former Hewlett-Packard CEO and former 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina would be his running mate  if he receives the Republican nomination.



Vetting vice presidential picks is something "any responsible candidate for president" should do, Cruz said at a rally, and went to say that he valued an understanding and experience dealing with national security, job creation, and good judgment in a vice president.







"Over and over again, Carly has shattered glass ceilings," he said, calling his potential VP a woman of "extraordinary intelligence" and "deep principle."



"Carly knows, from running one of the 20 biggest countries in America, where jobs come from," he said.



After a lengthy introduction, Cruz welcomed Fiorina to the stage.



She began with a call to action for her fellow Republicans: "This is a fight for the soul of our party and the future of our nation," she said. Fiorina went on to discuss Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and the supposed similarities between them.



"They're not going to challenge the system," she added. "They are the system."



There has been murmurings that Cruz's campaign has been vetting choices for his vice presidential pick since last week, which campaign staffers themselves confirmed. From the get-go, Fiorina was the most-talked about of his picks.



"He is vetting a number of solid candidates, and certainly Ms. Fiorina is absolutely one of them," Chad Sweet, Cruz's campaign chairperson, told CNN. "She's one of the most talented business leaders of modern times."



It seems that Cruz hasn't been deterred by the numbers in making his announcement. After losing every state in Tuesday's Acela Primary (in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut), he's trailing Donald Trump by nearly 400 delegates. At this point, he's mathematically eliminated from getting the needed number of delegates (1,237) to clinch the Republican nomination.



Cruz addressed this improbability, alluding to the possibility of a contested convention this summer.



"I'm not getting to 1,237 delegates, and Donald J. Trump is not getting to 1,237 delegates," he said.





What You Need to Know About a Contested GOP Convention





The upcoming California primary (scheduled for June 7) could be a reason for the announcement's timing: Fiorina lives in the state and previously ran for the United States Senate in the state. She's also set to speak at this weekend's California Republican Party convention, just hours after Ted Cruz himself.



Fiorina's own campaign started gaining traction after a strong showing at the first Republican debate back in August, bumping her up in the polls. Ultimately, she suspended her own campaign after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary  she came in seventh.



At the time of her campaign suspension, she said, "While I suspend my candidacy today, I will continue to travel this country and fight for those Americans who refuse to settle for the way things are and a status quo that no longer works for them."
Fox Digital Studios teen comedy movie Mono, with a cast that includes several big social-media stars, is slated for July 8 release on Netflix and digital sell-through platforms like iTunes.

The film stars Sam Lerner, Ty Parker and Sarah De La Isla, along with digital media influencers Christian DelGrosso (7.5 million Vine followers), Brandon Bowen (3.3 million Vine followers), Jake Paul (5 million Vine followers) and Eric Ochoa (2.3 million YouTube subscribers).

Its the latest movie aiming to leverage the power of digital celebs, in the hopes they can rally their millions of Internet fans to .

In Mono, a mono virus outbreak at Highland Park High takes out the most popular kids for two months, allowing the outcasts to rule the school. Three social rejects  Ivan (Lerner), Wyatt (Parker) and JP (De La Isla)  become heroes after they start throwing parties and invite everyone whos escaped the epidemic. But when some of the cool kids come back to class after testing negative for mono, it turns out the group will stop at nothing to preserve their newfound status  even if that means manually spreading the virus themselves.

Mono combines todays brightest storytelling voices and emerging talent with some of the biggest stars in digital media, said Fox Digital Studio senior VP of production David Worthen Brooks. Were excited to bring this hilarious movie to audiences this summer and to introduce opportunities to engage with our casts fans around the film.

The film is directed by Jarrett Lee Conaway, produced by Steven Johnson and David Brooks, and written by Ronan MacRory and Bryan Madole.

Mono is the fifth feature film from FDS, 21st Century Foxs multiplatform content studio, following previously releases Tenured, Parallels, How To Be a Man starring Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes and ETXR.

In addition to Netflix, Mono is currently set to be available on Apples iTunes, Google Play, VHX, Amazon Instant Video and Sony PlayStation. More info is available at MonoTheFilm.com.

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Pictured above: Brandon Bowen (left) and Ty Parker

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Last week was all about earnings in the telecom sector. Several major sector participants revealed their first-quarter 2016 financial numbers. AT&T Inc. T, T-Mobile US Inc. TMUS and Comcast Corp. CMCSA reported strong financial results wherein both the top and the bottom line outpaced the respective Zacks Consensus Estimate. However, Verizon Communications Inc. VZ and Crown Castle International Corp. CCI came out with a mixed bag.

Despite solid results, AT&Ts subscriber growth rate dwindled. The companys U.S. postpaid wireless subscriber addition of 129,000 was down a significant 70.7% year over year. Consumer Mobility postpaid churn rate was 1.24% compared with 1.20% in the year-ago quarter while Business wireless postpaid churn rate was 1.02% compared with 0.90% in the year-ago quarter. In the reported quarter, AT&T lost 382,000 U-verse customers but gained 328,000 satellite TV customers. Total broadband connections at this segment were 14,291,000, down 1.7%. Total wireline voice connections were 12,113,000, down 11.4%.

In contrast to AT&T, another leading national wireless operator T-Mobile US continues to add an impressive number of subscribers. In the reported quarter, the company added net 0.877 branded postpaid phone customers, 0.164 branded postpaid mobile broadband customers, 0.807 branded prepaid customers and 0.373 wholesale customers. Total net customer addition was 2.221 million, signifying the 12th successive quarter of over one million net customer additions. Out of this, net postpaid customer addition was 1.041 million, signifying the 7th straight quarter of over one million of net postpaid customer addition.

Meanwhile, leading cable MSO (multi service operator), Comcast, witnessed surprising customer additions for triple-play video, high-speed data and voice services. The company added a net of 438,000 high-speed Internet customers, 102,000 voice customers and 53,000 video subscribers in the reported quarter. Comcast gained 99,000 triple-play subscribers, 125,000 double-play subscribers and 45,000 single-play subscribers, in the reported quarter.

On the other hand, Verizons top line lagged the Zacks Consensus Estimate while the bottom line managed to meet the same. During the reported quarter, the company added 0.64 million postpaid customers (up 13.3% year over year) while the prepaid customer count decreased by 0.177 million (down 5.9% year over year). Verizon also added 36,000 FiOS video subscribers, 98,000 FiOS Internet customers and 46,000 FiOS digital voice residential connections. However, high-speed Internet connection tally dropped 16.5% to 2.086 million.

Additionally, a leading wireless tower operator, Crown Castle International reported mixed financial numbers in the first quarter of 2016, wherein the top line lagged the Zacks Consensus Estimate while the bottom line surpassed the same.

Apart from earnings releases, a leading international wireless tower operator American Tower Corp. AMT recently completed its acquisition of a 51% controlling ownership interest in Viom Networks Ltd., a major wireless tower operator in India.

Read the last Telecom Stock Roundup for Apr 21, 2016.

Recap of the Weeks Most Important Stories

1. In the first quarter of 2016, AT&T reported net income of $3,803 million or 61 cents per share in comparison with $3,263 million or 63 cents per share in the year-ago quarter. Quarterly adjusted earnings per share came in at 72 cents, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 69 cents. Quarterly total revenue increased 24.4% year over year to $40,535 million, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $40,493 million (read more: AT&T Earnings, Revenues Beat; Slack Customer Growth).

2. GAAP net income of T-Mobile US, in first-quarter 2016 was $467 million or 56 cents per share as against a net loss of $63 million or a loss of 9 cents per share in the year-ago quarter. Quarterly earnings per share of 56 cents came in significantly above the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 18 cents. Total revenue increased 10.6% year over year to $8,599 million in the first quarter, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $8,446 million (read more: T-Mobile US Tops Q1 Earnings & Revenues, View Up).

3. GAAP net income of Comcast in the first quarter of 2016 came in at $2,134 million or 87 cents per share compared with $2,059 million or 81 cents in the prior-year quarter. Notably, quarterly adjusted earnings per share of 84 cents were ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 79 cents. Quarterly total revenue was $18,790 million, up 5.2% year over year and ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $18,632 million (read more: Comcast Beats on Earnings as Customers Increase).

4. In first-quarter 2016, Verizons adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.06 in the reported quarter. Quarterly GAAP net income was $4,430 million compared with $4,338 million in the year-ago quarter.Quarterly total revenue increased 0.6% year over year to $32,171 million. The Zacks Consensus Estimate was pegged at $32,406 million (read more: Verizon Posts Mixed Q1: Earnings In Line, Revenues Lag).

5. Crown Castle International reported first-quarter 2016 earnings per share of $1.18, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.09. However, GAAP net income fell over 67% year over year to $36.8 million. Net revenue in the reported quarter increased 3.8% year over year to $934.4 million but lagged the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $937 million (read more: Crown Castle Q1 Earnings Top, Revenues Lag; View Up).

Price Performance

The following table shows the price movement of the major telecom players over the past week and the last six months.

Company Last Week Last 6 Months VZ -0.12% 14.54% T 0.00% 19.69% S -3.16% -24.59% TMUS -1.12% 1.74% VOD -1.16% 2.62% CHL 2.74% -3.47% AMX 0.00% -6.99% CMCSA -0.26% 0.49% DISH 5.40% -19.20%

Over the last five trading sessions, share price movement of the major telecom stocks was mostly negative. Sprint Corp. S lost the most (3.16%) while DISH Network Corp. DISH was the biggest gainer (5.40%) in the last five sessions. Over the last six months, the price performance of most of the key telecom stocks showed a mixed trend. Among the stocks that depreciated were Sprint (24.59%) and DISH Network (19.20%). On the other hand, Verizon (14.54%) and AT&T (19.69%) gained substantially over the last six months.

Whats Next in the Telecom Sector?

We expect a lot of activity in the telecom sector over the next week as big names like Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications, BCE Inc., Level 3 Communications, Cablevision Systems, CenturyLink, Sprint, Frontier Communications and American Tower will release their first-quarter 2016 financial results. Outside the U.S., Telefonica and Grupo Televisa are also slated to report their first-quarter 2016 financial results. The markets will keep a watch on these quarterly results to assess industry dynamics and growth prospects.

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* Q1 OIBDA 379 mln euros vs Reuters poll avg of 410 mln

* Sees more than half of E-Plus synergies this year

* Shares down 3.7 pct at bottom of sector index (Adds CEO, analyst comment, shares)

FRANKFURT, April 28 (Reuters) - Telefonica Deutschland said on Thursday its core profit dropped in the first quarter as a result of integration and marketing costs, while mobile service revenues were down.

The company, which is majority-owned by Spain's Telefonica , said first-quarter operating income before depreciation and amortisation (OIBDA) fell 4.2 percent to 379 million euros ($428.7 million).

That missed even the most pessimistic expectation of 393 million euros in a Reuters poll, with an average of 410 million euros.

Telefonica Deutschland said it had stepped up its marketing campaign to promote its O2 brand in Germany and that it booked 23 million euros in restructuring costs for the integration of E-Plus, which it bought from KPN for 8.6 billion euros in 2014.

Excluding special items and the impact of divestments such as the sale of the yourfone brand in 2015, OIBDA rose 6 percent to 401 million euros in the first quarter.

The telecoms operator said it still expected OIBDA to rise by a low to medium single-digit percentage in 2016, while mobile service revenues, which dropped 1.3 percent in the first quarter, are expected to be stable or slightly lower.

Chief Executive Thorsten Dirks said the group was well on track to reach synergies from the E-Plus acquisition, expecting to reach more than half of synergies this year of the 800 million euros that are pencilled in for 2018.

Telefonica Deutschland shares were down 3.7 percent by 1030 GMT, the worst performer in the STOXX Europe 600 Telecommunications index.

"While there may be some disappointment over Q1 EBITDA growth, we remain optimistic on fundamentals," said UBS analyst Polo Tang, adding that he expected increased investments to be offset by growing mobile data usage and notable price rises.

($1 = 0.8840 euros) (Reporting by Harro ten Wolde, editing by Ed Osmond)
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has signed a bill that lets mental health counselors deny treatment to patients depending on the particular counselor's set of personal or religious beliefs.

"As a professional I should have the right to decide if my clients' end goals don't match with my beliefs  I should have the right to say somebody else can better serve them," the Republican governor told the Associated Press. "Lawyers can do that, doctors can do that. Why would we take this one class of professionals and say you can't do that?"

Those who support the legislation believe it protects the rights of mental health counselors, allowing discretion.

The controversial bill was also met with much criticism, including comments from the American Counseling Association, which called the law an "unprecedented attack," AP reported.

"We're just profoundly disappointed in the governor's decision and very disheartened by the fact that this was even passed by a legislative body anywhere in this country in the 21st century," Art Terrazas, ACA director of governmental affairs, told A .

Critics also say it unfairly discriminates against members of the LGBT communities, in a similar vein as the controversial "Bathroom Bill" in North Carolina.

Source: Jason E. Miczek/AP

h/t Associated Press
Last week, Tennessee legislators passed a budget bill denying $436,700 of state funds to the University of Tennessee-Knoxville's office for diversity and inclusion. Officially known as House Bill 2248, the legislation also stipulates that the state government will not fund any campus initiatives promoting the use of gender neutral pronouns, inhibiting the celebration of religious holidays or supporting the college's "Sex Week," a program designed to spark discussion about sex, sexuality and gender identity.

Instead, 25% of the money  in other words, $109,175  will go to UT Knoxville's producing decals bearing the national motto "approved by the United States Congress in 1956." If you're thinking "E pluribus unum," think again.

The decals, which will go on the vehicles of local and state law enforcement agencies, will read "In God We Trust."

A UT-Knoxville student protest last week

According to the Huffington Post, Tennessee governor Bill Haslam hasn't yet decided whether he will sign the bill into law, but hundreds of UT Knoxville students are fighting to have it vetoed.

On Tuesday, almost 300 students and faculty members staged a mass walkout in protest of the legislation while others held a demonstration this past Sunday and nearly 2,000 signed a petition to "defend diversity."

The bill states the remaining 75% of the money stripped from the Office for Diversity and Inclusion will go to the university's minority engineering scholarship program. However, representatives from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education emphasized in a statement that the bill represents a larger problem for United States universities.

The association's statement read, "Defunding such offices ignores the important role of diversity and inclusion operations across the country in leading change, and addressing the lingering effects of past discrimination in this country, and solving societal problems and evolving challenges in a culturally informed and ethical ways."
Up to 80 percent of people suffer from an occasional tension headache: a dull pain across the forehead, temples, or around the back of your head. Anxiety, eye strain, fatigue, and stress can all trigger a tension headache by causing muscles to tighten in the neck and scalp. New research also suggests a link between tension headaches and changes in certain brain chemicals, similar to what happens with a migraine.

Treat It First With

Drink water, if youre dehydrated. A 2004 study found that people who drank one-half to three-quarters of a liter of water lessened their headache pain. If after an hour or so youre still suffering, you can turn to an over-the-counter pain reliever like acetaminophen (Tylenol and generic), ibuprofen (Advil and generic), or naproxen (Aleve and generic). Taking a hot or cold shower and resting in a quiet room with a cool cloth on your forehead may also help. (Find out whether acetaminophen or ibuprofen is better for a headache.)

If That Doesnt Work

Check with your doctor to determine whether you have migraines or theres another cause. Jaw clenching and teeth grinding in your sleep, for example, can trigger a tension headache. If you suspect your bite is to blame, see your dentist.

More on Pain Relief

 Pain Management: Which Treatment Is Right for You?

 Pain Relief: What You Need to Know

 Addictive Pain Medication: How to Protect Yourself

 Does Medical Marijuana Work?

 Treating Neck and Shoulder Pain

 Treating Joint Pain

 How to Get Rid of Lower Back Pain

 Migraine Treatment, Prevention & Relief



Get to an Emergency Room

If you have a headache that comes on suddenly, is severe, and persists, or you have speech, vision, or movement problems or a loss of balance, you should act. If you have a headache after a head injury, it could be a sign of a concussion.

Never Do This

Dont take OTC pain relievers more than a few times per week because that could cause more headaches. (The same is true if you have migraines.) Also avoid CT scans. A severe headache may make you think you have a brain tumor, but thats rarely true. Doctors can usually diagnose your pain based on your symptoms and a physical exam. If the exam results are abnormal or your doctor still cant identify the cause of your pain, an imaging test can make sense. In most cases, an MRI is better than a CT scan, which can expose you to unnecessary radiation. That advice is supported by the American College of Radiology.

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Prevent It in the First Place

Watch your alcohol intake because chemicals like sulfites and flavonoids can trigger headaches (and migraines). Control stress with meditation or other relaxation techniques. Getting enough sleep can also prevent headaches; so can staying hydrated.

Good posture can relieve neck stress and help avoid headaches, too. A 2015 Danish study found that people who suffered from tension headaches also had decreased muscle strength in the necks extensor muscles. That can cause the flexor muscles to overcompensate and pull the head forward, triggering a headache.

If you have headaches more than 15 times per month, your doctor may suggest a daily antidepressant such as amitriptyline (generic only), which has been found to help prevent chronic headaches but can also cause side effects such as drowsiness, weight gain, dry mouth, constipation, or blurred vision.

Editor's Note: This article and related materials are made possible by a grant from the state Attorney General Consumer and Prescriber Education Grant Program, which is funded by the multistate settlement of consumer-fraud claims regarding the marketing of the prescription drug Neurontin (gabapentin).

This article also appeared in the June 2016 issue of Consumer Reports magazine.





More from Consumer Reports:

How to raise your good cholesterol

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8 Ways to Save on a Gym Membership





Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright  2006-2016 Consumers Union of U.S.
Photos: Mel Evans/AP, Carolyn Kaster/AP

The day after Donald Trump swept five primaries this week and tightened his grip on the Republican nomination for president, both he and the other most prominent Republican politician in the country were speaking the language of populism.



Were going to get rid of these politicians, Trump said in his opening remarks during an hourlong appearance on Fox News on Wednesday in which Greta Van Susteren and a studio audience in Indianapolis lavished him with praise, sometimes in the form of questions.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., sounded a similar note. Ryan said at Georgetown University: We do not believe we should be governed by our betters, that elites in Washington should make all those big decisions.

The similarities between Trump and Ryan, however, end with their recognition of antiestablishment sentiment. In fact, these two men have come to represent powerful and opposing wings of the Republican Party  perspectives that are on a collision course. The tension between the two men will become all the more evident if and when Trump clinches the nomination, and a clash would be all but unavoidable should Trump defy what appear to be high odds and defeat likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

And regardless of whether Trump wins or loses, the fight between his faction and Ryans will continue beyond this election.

Trump has come to represent not just a pugnacious, take-no-prisoners style but a group of voters whose animating principle is that they want to blow up the existing order in Washington, D.C., and dont care who they alienate along the way. Ryan, meanwhile, has emerged as the most formidable Republican leader arguing for rebuilding the party by rejecting the path of damn-the-consequences Trumpism.

The contrasts between the two couldnt be more stark. Trump lacks a coherent political ideology. Ryan has spent most of his adult life honing conservative philosophy and ideas. Trump rose to power through celebrity (and money). Ryan did it with ideas (and the power of an important House chairmanship). Trumps candidacy is fueled by anger and disillusionment with government. Ryan is trying to repair public trust in Congress. Its approval rating has risen six points in Gallups regular tracking poll since Ryan became speaker at the end of October, but it is still a dismal 17 percent.

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Audience members take photos of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump before a campaign rally at West Chester University in West Chester, Pa., on Monday. (Photo: Matt Slocum/AP)

Many Trump supporters see in his business success and outsize personality the answer to a government they view as sprawling, stumbling and corrupt. To them, he is a strongman who can knock heads, hire the best people and make things work again by dislodging entrenched special interests and reducing the size of government. To that end, Trump has promised to take on lobbyists and political insiders, and often boasts that he is not taking money from wealthy donors. But close scrutiny of his proposals shows they would vastly increase the size of government and do almost nothing to reduce the national debt.

Ryan also wants to restore confidence in government  but by reforming it and reducing its size and scope. In that effort, he has spent the last decade working inside the system and with Democrats. He spent the first half of the Obama administration pushing a plan to reform Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, with an eye to reducing long-term government debt. Since the 2012 election, when Ryan was the GOP vice presidential nominee, he has increasingly spoken about the needs of Americans stuck in cycles of poverty and crime.

Trump, meanwhile, has promised not to change the entitlement programs that, along with demographic trends, are a driver of long-term debt. He even blamed Mitt Romneys 2012 loss on his selection of Ryan as his running mate.

The coming confrontation between Ryan and Trump  and the poles of the party they represent  has been building all year, with Ryan speaking out against Trump more often as the year has gone on. This month, he said Trump had disfigured American values with his call to ban all Muslims from the U.S., and that foreign heads of state in the Middle East had thanked him for repudiating Trump when the businessman announced his proposal in December.

When a young Republican student at Georgetown University told Ryan Wednesday that he was dismayed by the presidential election, Ryan smiled wryly and joked, Why is that? The audience laughed. And when the student asked Ryan reasons he could give to be optimistic, Ryan responded by talking about the policy agenda he is promoting in the House for Congress, and said: Look at the policies, not the person necessarily.

Ryan spoke at Georgetown and answered questions from students as part of an ongoing effort on his part to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party. He opened his remarks by joking about the partys lack of appeal to young people. Why support Republicans? he asked, and paused as the audience laughed in response, and applauded. Im going to go out on a limb and Im going to assume that the thought has not been occurring to most of you recently.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan during a town hall on Wednesday at the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters)

Ryans remark was an offhand way of acknowledging that Trumps candidacy has not been winning over very many converts among young voters. But he sought to persuade the students that the GOP actually stands for a vision of the future that is radically at odds with the message that has come from Trump. The America that you want is the America that we want: open, diverse, dynamic, Ryan said.

But Ryan has also resisted calls for him to openly disavow Trump, and has maintained he will support whoever emerges as the Republican nominee. He has been mocked for doing so, but if Trump were to win the presidency, Ryan would loom as the largest counterbalance to Trumps nativist and authoritarian approach. Most recently, Trump has said he would change the rules of the Republican primary nominating system. Its something far easier said than done, but indicates the degree to which Trump has no use for the checks and balances inherent in American democracy since the nations founding.

Ryan has made clear that one of his top five priorities in Congress next year is to dramatically reduce the power of the president. He reiterated this at Georgetown on Wednesday.

We need to restore the Constitution and Article 1 in the Constitution. What that means is the laws we live under should be written by we, through our elected representatives. Right now we dont really have that, Ryan said. Weve got this fourth branch of government  unelected bureaucrats  writing our rules, writing our regulations that govern our society, that determine how our businesses run, how our schools work. It determines almost everything we do.

Ryan blamed both President Obama and previous Republican presidents for expanding executive power. And he added: We believe in self-determination. We believe in government by consent of the governed. We are losing that. So we have a lot of ideas for restoring that.

Earlier in the day, Ryan said hed spoken with Trump about his agenda for next year, and said all had been supportive.

I said here is what were doing, heres where were going. Heres why were doing it. We decided this last year before the presidential election got even started. And yes, we had a very pleasant conversation, Ryan said on CNN.

Of course, around the same time that Ryan and Trump had that conversation, Trump also publicly threatened Ryan during a press conference. Paul Ryan, I dont know him well, but Im sure Im going to get along great with him, and if I dont? Hes gonna have to pay a big price, OK? Trump said.

Ryan this week indicated there is a high degree of uncertainty about how Trump would conduct himself as president. Asked by CBS Charlie Rose how Trumps brand of Republicanism would differ from his own, Ryan responded: Well find out.

Ryans aggressive and omnipresent media efforts  TV and print interviews, a social media presence and constant video content out of his office  are seen by the press as signs of pure political ambition. But its more than that. Ryan is also an institutionalist, who believes Congress has to be trusted to work.

Ryans media operation is part of an attempt to restore faith in government. By communicating clearly and often Congress goals and how they will be accomplished, Ryan is seeking to reverse a growing pattern in which lawmakers have overpromised to get elected and then underdelivered on their pledges, from ending the war in Iraq to repealing Obamacare.

Ryans most immediate political concern is to maintain a Republican majority in the House. Its a growing concern that with Trump at the top of the ticket, the GOP could lose its 30-seat advantage, which had been thought impregnable. The GOPs four-seat edge in the Senate is slim in comparison.

Ryan wants to give Republican candidates in competitive states or congressional districts a positive, forward-looking message to run on, rather than the grievance-based politics of Trump.

Instead of playing the identity politics of our base and their base, Ryan said recently, he thinks the GOP should seek to unite people around ideas and principles.

Republicans, Ryan said, should not just oppose someone or something but should instead propose a clear and compelling alternative.

And when we do that, we dont just win the argument. We dont just win your support. We win your enthusiasm, he said.

If Ryans vision of what the GOP should be is to win out over Trumps, it will have to do just that.
With just three days to go until May, the traditional start of summer in Ireland, hail, rain, and low temperatures were making people across the country wonder if warmer weather would ever arrive.

The social media team at Ireland West Airport, in Knock, Mayo, did little to raise hopes when it shared footage on Thursday, April 28, showing snow blanketing the area. If you were having second thoughts about that sun holiday time to think again  this is the airport right now, they tweeted. Despite the adverse weather, the airport remained fully operational, and within an hour of the snow storm, the skies were clear. Two seasons in one hour! the airport told Storyful. Credit: Facebook/Ireland West Airport
Los Angeles (AFP) - The FBI arrested three people, including the older brother of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook, on charges of marriage fraud and lying to investigators, authorities said.

Syed Raheel Farook, 31, was arrested in the early morning at his home in the California town of Corona, along with his wife Tatiana Farook, also 31.

Mariya Chernykh, Tatiana's 26-year-old sister who lives in the nearby town of Ontario, was also arrested.

The five-count indictment against the trio centers on Chernykh's alleged sham marriage to Enrique Marquez, who is awaiting trial on charges of aiding the December 2 attack carried out by Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik.

The pair were later killed in a dramatic shootout with police.

"This is the latest step in the comprehensive investigation into the horrific attacks in San Bernardino last year that took the lives of 14 innocent Americans and deeply affected so many more," US attorney Eileen Decker said in a statement.

"As I have said previously, we owe the victims, and the entire community of San Bernardino, a thorough investigation that uncovers all criminal activity surrounding these events."

The trio appeared in federal court after their arrest on Thursday and entered not guilty pleas, a Justice Department official said.

They were all given bail but were ordered to turn in their passports and banned from traveling outside Southern California pending their trial which was set for June 21, the official told AFP.

If convicted, they face up to five years in prison on a charge of lying to immigration officials. Chernykh also faces up to 25 years in prison on charges of fraud and misuse of visas as well as lying to federal agents.

Marquez told investigators after his indictment in December on charges of buying weapons used in the San Bernardino assault that he had entered into a fake marriage with Chernykh in November 2014 and had lied about living with her.

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Chernykh and her sister are both from Russia and Syed Raheel Farook's marriage to Tatiana has also come under scrutiny.

Investigators have executed several search warrants at his house since the massacre, the deadliest terror attack on US soil since September 11, 2001.

Syed Raheel Farook served in the US navy between 2003 and 2007 and is a decorated veteran.

His attorney Ron Cordova underlined before the judge at Thursday's hearing that the case against Syed Raheel Farook and his wife was about a "misrepresentation in an act of marriage, it's not about an act of terror."

Several neighbors expressed surprise at the couple's arrest on Thursday telling local media that they were pleasant and minded their own business.

"This is a family that has suffered much, particularly by reason of the horrible, horrible acts of a family member who is no longer living," Cordova told reporters after the hearing. "But those acts should not be attributed to the family."

The probe into the massacre is ongoing and the FBI last month dropped a pitched legal battle with Apple after managing to hack into the iPhone used by Syed Farook without the tech giant's help.
Windows 10 upgrade

If you're not running Windows 10, Microsoft seems determined to remind you, interrupt you and beg you to upgrade at the worst possible moments. There's even a word for it: nagware.

Proof of this was just broadcast live on TV on Iowa's KCCI 8.

Meteorologist Metinka Slater was warning residents of a Thunderstorm on a live broadcast on Wednesday when Microsoft struck.

She handled it with humor. "Microsoft recommends upgrade to Windows 10, what should I do? Don't you love when that pops up?" Slater joked.

Someone backstage must have quickly dismissed Microsoft's recommendation because instead of an upgrade and reboot, the message disappeared and citizens of Iowa were able to get the rest of their weather report.

Here's the full video:

NOW WATCH: How to find out your Uber passenger rating





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Bogota (AFP) - Colombia became the fourth South American country to allow same-sex marriage when the constitutional court definitively legalized it on Thursday.

The Catholic country follows Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in formally recognizing the rights of same-sex couples to marry.

"The judges affirmed by a majority that marriage between people of the same sex does not violate constitutional order," presiding Judge Maria Victoria Calle told the court.

"The current definition of the institution of marriage in civil law applies to them in the same way as it does for couples of different sexes."

Although previous rulings allowed gay couples to formalize their unions before notaries and judges, same-sex marriage had remained a legal gray area and appeals had been launched against it.

Many officials had refused to register such marriages since congress had failed to pass legislation enshrining equal marriage rights in law, prompting protests from gay rights campaigners.

On April 7, the constitutional court dismissed a petition against equal marriage rights for heterosexual and homosexual couples.

That paved the way for Thursday's ruling, which definitively establishes that the constitution guarantees such equality, giving gay couples the legal right to marry.

The decision is set to be recorded as an irrevocable constitutional ruling within a month, making it legally valid.

Six of the court's nine judges approved the ruling that "all people are free to choose independently to start a family in keeping with their sexual orientation... receiving equal treatment under the constitution and the law."

State judges, notaries and clerks "must ensure that citizens' fundamental rights are observed and that they are all granted equal treatment," the court ruled.

- Honeymoon at last -

Some 70 unions previously registered only as civil partnerships will now be automatically converted into full marriages under the new ruling, the judge who presented the motion, Alberto Rojas, told reporters.

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Same-sex marriage supporters applauded the decision.

"Today we can say with certainty that the Colombian courts have approved equal marriage rights," Marcela Sanchez, leader of the campaign group Colombia Diversa, told AFP.

"We are very happy because Colombia has taken a step toward diversity," said Adriana Gonzalez, who had campaigned for the right to marry her female partner.

"These have been difficult years of uncertainty and frustration, but at last we are going to have the honeymoon we have longed for."

The constitutional court had already ruled last year that same-sex couples may adopt children even when neither member is the biological parent.

Argentina became the first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage in July 2010 with a vote in parliament.

Lawmakers in Uruguay followed in 2013.

Brazil authorized same-sex marriage under a court ruling the same year.

In Mexico, gay marriage is legal in the capital and a handful of states. The Supreme Court there has also offered its de facto backing by declaring it unconstitutional for Mexican states to ban same-sex marriage.

Same-sex marriages are also legal in various other countries including Britain, Canada, South Africa and the United States.

Australia's attorney-general said last month that the government would hold a plebiscite on legalizing same-sex marriage this year if re-elected.
Bordeaux (AFP) - French culinary favourite Pierre Gagnaire is to take over from the world's most Michelin starred chef Joel Robuchon at the luxury hotel and restaurant La Grande Maison in Bordeaux, wine magnate Bernard Magrez said on Thursday.

Gagnaire's appointment comes just two weeks after a surprise announcement by Magrez that he and Robuchon, 71, were ending their collaboration at the opulent establishment in southwestern France.

Magrez chose Robuchon to take the helm at the eaterie -- housed in a 19th century mansion -- when it opened in December 2014 and it duly picked up two Michelin stars in early 2016.

But the pair were going their separate ways, Magrez said in a statement on April 15, amid "a difficult economic environment with a slow down in tourism linked to the 2015 (Paris) attacks".

Following in Robuchon's footsteps will be the 66-year-old Gagnaire, the owner and head chef of his three-starred Pierre Gagnaire restaurant near Paris's Champs-Elysees.

"When it came to finding a new chef for La Grande Maison... the name of Pierre Gagnaire became an obvious one," Magrez said in a statement.

Gagnaire told AFP he was "surprised" and "honoured" to be chosen, pledging to "understand the city, to pay hommage to the local producers, without forgetting the nearby Spanish gastronomic culture".

Robuchon's high-priced eateries around the world have collectively earned him more Michelin stars than any other chef.

A pioneer of molecular gastronomy, he at one point in his career had 28.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you, and thank you to the Center for the National Interest for honoring me with this invitation.

I would like to talk today about how to develop a new foreign policy direction for our country  one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace.

It is time to shake the rust off of Americas foreign policy. It's time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold.

The direction I will outline today will also return us to a timeless principle. My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make.

America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.

But to chart our path forward, we must first briefly look back.

We have a lot to be proud of. In the 1940s we saved the world. The Greatest Generation beat back the Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists.

Then we saved the world again, this time from totalitarian Communism. The Cold War lasted for decades, but we won.

Democrats and Republicans working together got Mr. Gorbachev to heed the words of President Reagan when he said: tear down this wall.

History will not forget what we did.

Unfortunately, after the Cold War, our foreign policy veered badly off course. We failed to develop a new vision for a new time. In fact, as time went on, our foreign policy began to make less and less sense.

Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, and this led to one foreign policy disaster after another.

We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obamas line in the sand in Syria. Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos, and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper.

It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western Democracy.

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We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism; thousands of American lives, and many trillions of dollars, were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill the void, much to their unjust enrichment.

Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster.

No vision, no purpose, no direction, no strategy.

Today, I want to identify five main weaknesses in our foreign policy.

First, Our Resources Are Overextended

President Obama has weakened our military by weakening our economy. Hes crippled us with wasteful spending, massive debt, low growth, a huge trade deficit and open borders.

Our manufacturing trade deficit with the world is now approaching $1 trillion a year. Were rebuilding other countries while weakening our own.

Ending the theft of American jobs will give us the resources we need to rebuild our military and regain our financial independence and strength.

I am the only person running for the Presidency who understands this problem and knows how to fix it.

Secondly, our allies are not paying their fair share.

Our allies must contribute toward the financial, political and human costs of our tremendous security burden. But many of them are simply not doing so. They look at the United States as weak and forgiving and feel no obligation to honor their agreements with us.

In NATO, for instance, only 4 of 28 other member countries, besides America, are spending the minimum required 2% of GDP on defense.

We have spent trillions of dollars over time  on planes, missiles, ships, equipment  building up our military to provide a strong defense for Europe and Asia. The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense  and, if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.

The whole world will be safer if our allies do their part to support our common defense and security.

A Trump Administration will lead a free world that is properly armed and funded.

Thirdly, our friends are beginning to think they cant depend on us.

Weve had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies.

He negotiated a disastrous deal with Iran, and then we watched them ignore its terms, even before the ink was dry.

Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon and, under a Trump Administration, will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

All of this without even mentioning the humiliation of the United States with Irans treatment of our ten captured sailors.

In negotiation, you must be willing to walk. The Iran deal, like so many of our worst agreements, is the result of not being willing to leave the table. When the other side knows youre not going to walk, it becomes absolutely impossible to win.

At the same time, your friends need to know that you will stick by the agreements that you have with them.

President Obama gutted our missile defense program, then abandoned our missile defense plans with Poland and the Czech Republic.

He supported the ouster of a friendly regime in Egypt that had a longstanding peace treaty with Israel  and then helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in its place.

Israel, our great friend and the one true Democracy in the Middle East, has been snubbed and criticized by an Administration that lacks moral clarity. Just a few days ago, Vice President Biden again criticized Israel  a force for justice and peace  for acting as an impediment to peace in the region.

President Obama has not been a friend to Israel. He has treated Iran with tender love and care and made it a great power in the Middle East  all at the expense of Israel, our other allies in the region and, critically, the United States.

Weve picked fights with our oldest friends, and now theyre starting to look elsewhere for help.

Fourth, our rivals no longer respect us.

In fact, they are just as confused as our allies, but an even bigger problem is that they dont take us seriously any more.

When President Obama landed in Cuba on Air Force One, no leader was there to meet or greet him  perhaps an incident without precedent in the long and prestigious history of Air Force One.

Then, amazingly, the same thing happened in Saudi Arabia -- it's called no respect.

Do you remember when the President made a long and expensive trip to Copenhagen, Denmark to get the Olympics for our country, and, after this unprecedented effort, it was announced that the United States came in fourth place?

He should have known the result before making such an embarrassing commitment.

The list of humiliations goes on and on.

President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands even further with its nuclear reach.

Our president has allowed China to continue its economic assault on American jobs and wealth, refusing to enforce trade rules  or apply the leverage on China necessary to rein in North Korea.

He has even allowed China to steal government secrets with cyber attacks and engage in industrial espionage against the United States and its companies.

Weve let our rivals and challengers think they can get away with anything.

If President Obamas goal had been to weaken America, he could not have done a better job.

Finally, America no longer has a clear understanding of our foreign policy goals.

Since the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union, weve lacked a coherent foreign policy.

One day were bombing Libya and getting rid of a dictator to foster democracy for civilians, the next day we are watching the same civilians suffer while that country falls apart.

We're a humanitarian nation. But the legacy of the Obama-Clinton interventions will be weakness, confusion, and disarray.

We have made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before.

We left Christians subject to intense persecution and even genocide.

Our actions in Iraq, Libya and Syria have helped unleash ISIS.

And were in a war against radical Islam, but President Obama wont even name the enemy!

Hillary Clinton also refuses to say the words radical Islam, even as she pushes for a massive increase in refugees.

After Secretary Clintons failed intervention in Libya, Islamic terrorists in Benghazi took down our consulate and killed our ambassador and three brave Americans. Then, instead of taking charge that night, Hillary Clinton decided to go home and sleep! Incredible.

Clinton blames it all on a video, an excuse that was a total lie. Our Ambassador was murdered and our Secretary of State misled the nation  and by the way, she was not awake to take that call at 3 o'clock in the morning.

And now ISIS is making millions of dollars a week selling Libyan oil.

This will change when I am president.

To all our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be a reliable friend and ally again.

Were going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests, and the shared interests of our allies.

We are getting out of the nation-building business, and instead focusing on creating stability in the world.

Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the waters edge.

We need a new, rational American foreign policy, informed by the best minds and supported by both parties, as well as by our close allies.

This is how we won the Cold War, and its how we will win our new and future struggles.

First, we need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam.

Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States.

Events may require the use of military force. But its also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War.

In this were going to be working very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence.

We should work together with any nation in the region that is threatened by the rise of radical Islam. But this has to be a two-way street  they must also be good to us and remember us and all we are doing for them.

The struggle against radical Islam also takes place in our homeland. There are scores of recent migrants inside our borders charged with terrorism. For every case known to the public, there are dozens more.

We must stop importing extremism through senseless immigration policies.

A pause for reassessment will help us to prevent the next San Bernardino or worse -- all you have to do is look at the World Trade Center and September 11th.

And then theres ISIS. I have a simple message for them. Their days are numbered. I wont tell them where and I wont tell them how. We must as, a nation, be more unpredictable. But theyre going to be gone. And soon.

Secondly, we have to rebuild our military and our economy.

The Russians and Chinese have rapidly expanded their military capability, but look whats happened to us!

Our nuclear weapons arsenal  our ultimate deterrent  has been allowed to atrophy and is desperately in need of modernization and renewal.

Our active duty armed forces have shrunk from 2 million in 1991 to about 1.3 million today.

The Navy has shrunk from over 500 ships to 272 ships during that time.

The Air Force is about 1/3 smaller than 1991. Pilots are flying B-52s in combat missions today which are older than most people in this room.

And what are we doing about this? President Obama has proposed a 2017 defense budget that, in real dollars, cuts nearly 25% from what we were spending in 2011.

Our military is depleted, and were asking our generals and military leaders to worry about global warming.

We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. It is the cheapest investment we can make. We will develop, build and purchase the best equipment known to mankind. Our military dominance must be unquestioned.

But we will look for savings and spend our money wisely. In this time of mounting debt, not one dollar can be wasted.

We are also going to have to change our trade, immigration and economic policies to make our economy strong again  and to put Americans first again. This will ensure that our own workers, right here in America, get the jobs and higher pay that will grow our tax revenue and increase our economic might as a nation.

We need to think smarter about areas where our technological superiority gives us an edge. This includes 3-D printing, artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare.

A great country also takes care of its warriors. Our commitment to them is absolute. A Trump Administration will give our service men and women the best equipment and support in the world when they serve, and the best care in the world when they return as veterans to civilian life.

Finally, we must develop a foreign policy based on American interests.

Businesses do not succeed when they lose sight of their core interests and neither do countries.

Look at what happened in the 1990s. Our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked and seventeen brave sailors were killed on the USS Cole. And what did we do? It seemed we put more effort into adding China to the World Trade Organization  which has been a disaster for the United States  than into stopping Al Qaeda.

We even had an opportunity to take out Osama Bin Laden, and didnt do it. And then, we got hit at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the worst attack on our country in its history.

Our foreign policy goals must be based on Americas core national security interests, and the following will be my priorities.

In the Middle East, our goals must be to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change. We need to be clear-sighted about the groups that will never be anything other than enemies.

And we must only be generous to those that prove they are our friends.

We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes. But we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests. Russia, for instance, has also seen the horror of Islamic terrorism.

I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia  from a position of strength  is possible. Common sense says this cycle of hostility must end. Some say the Russians wont be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we cant make a good deal for America, then we will quickly walk from the table.

Fixing our relations with China is another important step towards a prosperous century. China respects strength, and by letting them take advantage of us economically, we have lost all of their respect. We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit we must find a way, quickly, to balance.

A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China. We can both benefit or we can both go our separate ways.

After I am elected President, I will also call for a summit with our NATO allies, and a separate summit with our Asian allies. In these summits, we will not only discuss a rebalancing of financial commitments, but take a fresh look at how we can adopt new strategies for tackling our common challenges.

For instance, we will discuss how we can upgrade NATOs outdated mission and structure  grown out of the Cold War  to confront our shared challenges, including migration and Islamic terrorism.

I will not hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative. But if America fights, it must fight to win. I will never send our finest into battle unless necessary  and will only do so if we have a plan for victory.

Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war and destruction.

The best way to achieve those goals is through a disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy.

With President Obama and Secretary Clinton weve had the exact opposite: a reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy  one that has blazed a path of destruction in its wake.

After losing thousands of lives and spending trillions of dollars, we are in far worse shape now in the Middle East than ever before.

I challenge anyone to explain the strategic foreign policy vision of Obama-Clinton  it has been a complete and total disaster.

I will also be prepared to deploy Americas economic resources. Financial leverage and sanctions can be very persuasive  but we need to use them selectively and with determination. Our power will be used if others do not play by the rules.

Our friends and enemies must know that if I draw a line in the sand, I will enforce it.

However, unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct. You cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy. A superpower understands that caution and restraint are signs of strength.

Although not in government service, I was totally against the War in Iraq, saying for many years that it would destabilize the Middle East. Sadly, I was correct, and the biggest beneficiary was Iran, who is systematically taking over Iraq and gaining access to their rich oil reserves  something it has wanted to do for decades. And now, to top it all off, we have ISIS.

My goal is to establish a foreign policy that will endure for several generations.

That is why I will also look for talented experts with new approaches, and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war.

Finally, I will work with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions. Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everyone shares, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.

These are my goals, as president.

I will seek a foreign policy that all Americans, whatever their party, can support, and which our friends and allies will respect and welcome.

The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends, and when old friends become allies.

To achieve these goals, Americans must have confidence in their country and its leadership again.

Many Americans must wonder why our politicians seem more interested in defending the borders of foreign countries than their own.

Americans must know that we are putting the American people first again. On trade, on immigration, on foreign policy  the jobs, incomes and security of the American worker will always be my first priority.

No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Both our friends and enemies put their countries above ours and we, while being fair to them, must do the same.

We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism.

The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down, and will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs.

NAFTA, as an example, has been a total disaster for the U.S. and has emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs. Never again. Only the reverse will happen. We will keep our jobs and bring in new ones. Their will be consequences for companies that leave the U.S. only to exploit it later.

Under a Trump Administration, no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of foreign countries.

I will view the world through the clear lens of American interests.

I will be Americas greatest defender and most loyal champion. We will not apologize for becoming successful again, but will instead embrace the unique heritage that makes us who we are.

The world is most peaceful, and most prosperous, when America is strongest.

America will continually play the role of peacemaker.

We will always help to save lives and, indeed, humanity itself. But to play that role, we must make America strong again.

We must make America respected again. And we must make America great again.

If we do that, perhaps this century can be the most peaceful and prosperous the world has ever known. Thank you.
By James Oliphant INDIANAPOLIS (Reuters) - Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton rapidly turned their fire on each other with an eye toward November's presidential election after rolling up strong wins in Northeastern states. The New York billionaire easily defeated rivals John Kasich and Ted Cruz in all five states that held party nominating contests on Tuesday - Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. He had a margin of victory rivaling that of New York state a week ago and was on course to win the vote in every county in each state. Clinton, already in control of the Democratic race, defeated challenger Bernie Sanders in Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Her only loss of the night was in Rhode Island. The race now pivots immediately to Indiana, which is shaping up to be Cruzs best, and perhaps last, chance to slow Trumps momentum toward capturing the Republican presidential nomination for the Nov. 8 general election. If Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, can win a large share of the states 57 delegates on May 3, it will boost the chances that Trump will not be able to amass the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination before the partys convention in July. That could give Cruz a shot at convincing delegates to back him for president instead. Cruz's campaign has begun hinting that he could name a vice presidential running mate as soon as this week, a move that would seek to consolidate more Republican support and create an image that he will be the nominee. Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who made a failed presidential bid, is among the potential picks being vetted. Trump, pressing his point that he views the nominating race as essentially finished, criticized that as a potential Cruz pick. "I think it would be a bad choice, not because she's a woman but because she did not resonate at all with people." "It's too early to do it. And frankly, he's wasting his time because he's not going to be the nominee," Trump said. A loss to Trump in Indiana would effectively cripple Cruzs already faltering bid, and increase pressure on the party to rally around Trump as the prospective nominee. As Trump has moved from longshot candidate in a crowded field last year to clear front-runner, he has sparked despair among many in the Republican establishment both for his aggressive and sometimes insulting style and for campaign pledges such as slapping a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country, and building a wall along the border with Mexico. Katie Packer, head of the anti-Trump political-action committee Our Principles, said her organization would be active in Indiana with TV, mail, phones, digital, all of it. Were going to be playing in a lot of different congressional districts, Packer said. The Club for Growth, a conservative pro-business group, has bought $1.5 million worth of anti-Trump TV ads in the state. Both groups worked to hand Trump a defeat at the hands of Cruz earlier this month in Wisconsin. "Tonight, this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain," Cruz said in Knightstown, Indiana on Tuesday. 'DEAL ME IN' Back on the East Coast, Trump and Clinton used victory rallies to snipe at each other, a taste of the kind of back and forth that will take place should they win their party's nominations and face off in the general election campaign. "I think she's a flawed candidate and she's going to be easy to beat," Trump told a news conference at New York's Trump Tower. In an interview on Wednesday morning with ABC's "Good Morning America," he said he was not concerned that supporters of his Republican rivals would not back him against Clinton. "They're going to come over," said Trump, a real estate magnate and former reality TV star. "I've watched it all my life. They are angry, they're confused, and they don't know how all of this has happened, then all of a sudden it turns into love. Anger turns into love." Trump was due to give a big foreign policy speech in Washington on Wednesday. He criticized Clinton's record as secretary of state and her vote as a U.S. senator from New York in support of the Iraq war. He said her only advantage was her bid to be the first woman U.S. president. "Frankly if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote," he said. Clinton, in a victory speech in Philadelphia, took aim at Trump for accusing her of trying to "play the woman card." "Well if fighting for women's healthcare and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in," she said to cheers. Of 118 committed delegates available on Tuesday, Trump took 105, raising his total delegates to 950. Kasich, the Ohio governor, won five, all from Rhode Island, and Cruz one, with seven delegates still to be assigned, according to the Associated Press. Pennsylvanias 54 unbound delegates will become clearer later. Clinton's strong showing in the Democratic race added to the pressure on Sanders to get out of the race or ease his criticism of her. In her speech Clinton was careful, however, to avoid criticizing Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, as she spoke of the need for party unity. "Whether you support Senator Sanders or you support me, there is much more that unites us than divides us," she said. Clinton's victories on Tuesday brought her total count to 2,141 delegates, according to the AP, pushing her closer to the 2,383 needed for the nomination. Sanders, who has accused Clinton of being in the pocket of Wall Street and pledged to do more than she would to address social inequality, showed no signs of getting out of the race. He is expected to campaign in Indiana. "The people in every state in this country should have the right to determine who they want as president and what the agenda of the Democratic Party should be. Thats why we are in this race until the last vote is cast," he said in a statement on Tuesday night. (Reporting by James Oliphant in Indianapolis and Emily Stephenson, Jeff Mason, Megan Cassella and Alana Wise in Washington; Writing by Steve Holland and James Oliphant; Editing by Peter Cooney and Frances Kerry)
By Richard Cowan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Thursday won endorsements from two more U.S. Congress members as he battled to be his party's nominee. Of the 300 Republicans in Congress - 246 in the House of Representatives and 54 in the Senate - Trump now had the explicit support of 11 with the newly announced public backing by Representatives Jeff Miller of Florida and Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania. Trump, a billionaire businessman, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Governor John Kasich were vying for the nomination to represent the Republican Party in the Nov. 8 general election. "Donald Trump is the only person who has what it takes to shake up the status quo and entrenched bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.," Miller said in a statement. Miller, who will retire from the Republican-controlled Congress at year's end, capping 16 years in the House, has chaired the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Shuster, also in his 16th year in the House, has chaired a powerful transportation committee. Trump backers in Congress have argued that many more lawmakers privately expressed support for Trump, but still have to run in primaries and so have publicly remained neutral. Representative Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who endorsed Trump this month, said in an interview that the Trump campaign was cranking up its outreach to Congress. Cruz, a small-government Tea Party favorite, has snared more endorsements from Congress members. The most prominent U.S. Republican lawmakers to publicly endorse Trump was Senator Jeff Sessions, who has been advising the campaign on foreign policy. The others were U.S. Representatives Chris Collins, Duncan Hunter, Tom Marino, Tom Reed, Scott DesJarlais, Lou Barletta and Renee Ellmers. (Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Jonathan Oatis)
So that is what a presidential Donald Trump looks like.

The Republican frontrunner delivered the most scripted, and stilted, speech of his 10-month presidential campaign on Wednesday. He used a teleprompter. He spoke softly and deliberately. And at different points in the nearly 40-minute address, he pledged as president to develop a foreign policy that would both be unpredictable and consistent.

A day after declaring himself the GOPs presumptive nominee, Trump wanted to show the club of political insiders who have long snubbed him that, yes, he could give a sober, considered address on his vision for the world. Yet by design or not, the awkwardness of Trumps presentation made clear that this was not the freewheeling anti-politician who has won the votes of more than 10 million Republicans over the last four months. There was no rapturous crowd of thousands to hear him at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, just a couple hundred people who responded to a few of his punchier declarations with meek applause. And while the address neatly summarized the various foreign-policy positions Trump has taken in interviews and at campaign rallies, it did not eliminate their inherent contradictions.

Those began right at the top.

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Trump heralded the military might of Americas past, recalling the defeat of the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II and its victory over Soviet Communism in the Cold War. Yet for the major and overriding theme of his foreign policy, Trump chose America Firsta slogan made famous by the aviator Charles Lindbergh and other opponents of U.S. intervention in World War II.

Trump later elaborated on his criticism of NATO, saying that U.S. allies are not paying their fair share.

The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defenseand, if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.

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In the next breath, however, Trump said that under President Obamas leadership, our friends are beginning to think they cant depend on us.

Weve picked fights with our oldest allies, and now theyre beginning to look elsewhere for help, Trump said in a reference to Israel, mere seconds after he seemed to pick his own fight with U.S. allies in NATO. He listed a series of humiliations the nation had suffered because of Obama, beginning with the presidents ill-fated 2009 trip to Copenhagen in a failed, last-ditch effort to win the Olympics for Chicago. He repeated his long-running critique of the administrations nuclear deal with Iran and bemoaned the fact that when Obama landed in Cuba for his historic visit earlier this year, there was no Cuban leader there to greet him as he departed Air Force One. If President Obamas goal had been to weaken America, Trump said, he could not have done a better job.

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On the whole, Trumps address was long on vision and short on detailsin that sense, it was not all that different from most candidate speeches. The lack of specifics, he suggested, was intentional. We have to be unpredictable, and we have to be unpredictable starting now, Trump said. He pledged to defeat ISIS both militarily and philosophically, but dont ask him how. I have a simple message for them, Trump warned. Their days are numbered. I wont tell them where and I wont tell them how. He then pledged to rebuild the depleted military. How much would he spend? Whatever is needed.

Their days are numbered. I wont tell them where, and I wont tell them how.

In other ways, Trumps address edged him closer to the mainstream of American foreign policy. His pronouncements on the use of military force, for example, could have been uttered verbatim by any recent president. I will not hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative, he said. But if America fights, it must fight to win. I will never send our finest into battle unless necessaryand will only do so if we have a plan for victory.

Our goal, Trump continued, is peace and prosperity, not war and destruction.

The ritual mocking of Trump from the Beltway establishment began before his speech even ended. Not sure who is advising Trump on foreign policy but I can understand why hes not revealing their names, tweeted Senator Lindsey Graham, Trumps onetime rival and erstwhile troll. He continued:

Question #1 for Trump: Are we sure the guy running the teleprompter has the pages in the right order? #notmakinganysense  Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 27, 2016

Question #2 -- Did teleprompter guy actually write the speech? #notmakinganysense  Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 27, 2016

Trump speech is pathetic in terms of understanding the role America plays in the world, how to win War on Terror, and threats we face.  Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 27, 2016

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, picked up on Trumps mispronunciation of Tanzaniahe called it Tan-ZAY-nia. Apparently the phonetics are not included with the TelePrompter, Earnest said. Hillary Clintons campaign took the speech more seriously, deploying former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Senator Tim Kaine to respond in a conference call with reporters later Wednesday afternoon.

Recommended: Donald Trump and the GOP Tradition of Foreign-Policy Incoherence

For Trump, the speech appeared to be an altogether uncomfortable experience, the kind of forced attempt at looking presidential that he has frequently scoffed at while campaigning. At times, he ad-libbed a Not good! or Bad! or A mess!as if to signal to his fans that it was really him speaking, not some low-energy impostor with a battery missing. Trump concluded with a few extra platitudes, vowing to make America strong and reliable and, yes, great again. When he was done, the crowd applauded politely and Trump walked slowly off stage, finally done with a formal speech he seemed painfully unaccustomed to delivering.

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This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
By Dave Graham

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Embarrassed by Donald Trump's rhetoric against Mexico, former World Bank President Robert Zoellick said on Wednesday it is time to "remake" the case for free trade in the United States.

The U.S. presidential race has been peppered with promises to rework trade policy in the United States' favour, and many of the strongest attacks have been against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a trade accord between the United States, Mexico and Canada that took effect in 1994.

Regarded by Mexican policymakers as a milestone in the country's economic modernisation, NAFTA has been vilified by Republican front-runner Trump and Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders as a job-killing betrayal of U.S. industry.

Zoellick, a Republican who also served as U.S. Trade Representative under President George W. Bush, said Mexican officials had understandably been unsettled by Trump's rhetoric and flagging U.S. congressional support for free trade.

"The bigger issue in the U.S. will be a need to remake the case for trade," he said in a phone interview.

That meant more than the traditional corporate lobbying in Congress, said Zoellick, who was World Bank chief from 2007-2012.

"This is now going to need a broader public push. Part of this will be a challenge to get the Facebooks, the Googles the Apples and others to not only make the case in Washington, but actually use social media, use big data resources and others to explain this to coming generations of Americans," he said.

While noting that some Americans had good reason to feel concern about the pace of change and unfettered immigration, Zoellick said Mexico, a "significant, modernizing economy", ought to be integrated further into U.S. thinking.

"If it were up to me, I would bring Canada and Mexico into the TTIP negotiations with Europe," he said, referring to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a planned trade deal between the United States and the European Union.

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After China and Canada, Mexico is the United States' third biggest trade partner, accounting for bilateral commerce worth around $500 billion annually. The United States is also home to an estimated 35 million people of Mexican origin.

Claiming Mexico is "killing" the United States on trade and sending rapists and drug runners north, Trump has threatened to impose tariffs against Mexico and vowed to build a wall to stop illegal immigrants crossing the border.

To make Mexico pay for the wall, he has threatened to block billions of dollars in remittances sent home by Mexicans in the United States, a plan Zoellick described as "outrageous."

"As an American, frankly, I'm embarrassed by his statements," he said. However, he noted the Mexican government had to "walk a fine line" in countering Trump without stoking more tensions.

A number of serving and former Mexican officials believe their government could have been more active in persuading U.S. businesses and politicians to make the case that both countries will lose out if Trump's talk becomes reality.

Zoellick said, however, it was a shared responsibility.

"Depending on one's perspective, this is really ... the U.S.'s burden to bear. And so while I concur that one would welcome assistance from Mexico, in some ways we've got to get our own act cleaned up in the U.S. first," he said.

(Reporting by Dave Graham; Editing by Simon Gardner, Bernard Orr)
By Dave Graham MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Embarrassed by Donald Trump's rhetoric against Mexico, former World Bank President Robert Zoellick said on Wednesday it is time to "remake" the case for free trade in the United States. The U.S. presidential race has been peppered with promises to rework trade policy in the United States' favor, and many of the strongest attacks have been against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a trade accord between the United States, Mexico and Canada that took effect in 1994. Regarded by Mexican policymakers as a milestone in the country's economic modernization, NAFTA has been vilified by Republican front-runner Trump and Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders as a job-killing betrayal of U.S. industry. Zoellick, a Republican who also served as U.S. Trade Representative under President George W. Bush, said Mexican officials had understandably been unsettled by Trump's rhetoric and flagging U.S. congressional support for free trade. "The bigger issue in the U.S. will be a need to remake the case for trade," he said in a phone interview. That meant more than the traditional corporate lobbying in Congress, said Zoellick, who was World Bank chief from 2007-2012. "This is now going to need a broader public push. Part of this will be a challenge to get the Facebooks, the Googles the Apples and others to not only make the case in Washington, but actually use social media, use big data resources and others to explain this to coming generations of Americans," he said. While noting that some Americans had good reason to feel concern about the pace of change and unfettered immigration, Zoellick said Mexico, a "significant, modernizing economy", ought to be integrated further into U.S. thinking. "If it were up to me, I would bring Canada and Mexico into the TTIP negotiations with Europe," he said, referring to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a planned trade deal between the United States and the European Union. After China and Canada, Mexico is the United States' third biggest trade partner, accounting for bilateral commerce worth around $500 billion annually. The United States is also home to an estimated 35 million people of Mexican origin. Claiming Mexico is "killing" the United States on trade and sending rapists and drug runners north, Trump has threatened to impose tariffs against Mexico and vowed to build a wall to stop illegal immigrants crossing the border. To make Mexico pay for the wall, he has threatened to block billions of dollars in remittances sent home by Mexicans in the United States, a plan Zoellick described as "outrageous." "As an American, frankly, I'm embarrassed by his statements," he said. However, he noted the Mexican government had to "walk a fine line" in countering Trump without stoking more tensions. A number of serving and former Mexican officials believe their government could have been more active in persuading U.S. businesses and politicians to make the case that both countries will lose out if Trump's talk becomes reality. Zoellick said, however, it was a shared responsibility. "Depending on one's perspective, this is really ... the U.S.'s burden to bear. And so while I concur that one would welcome assistance from Mexico, in some ways we've got to get our own act cleaned up in the U.S. first," he said. (Reporting by Dave Graham; Editing by Simon Gardner, Bernard Orr)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers a foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., April 27, 2016. (Photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)

After rolling over its opponents in all five Eastern seaboard primaries, the Trump juggernaut entered Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, where the victorious candidate gave a speech intended to add gravitas to his scattershot positions on foreign policy and national security. As he edges closer to becoming the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump field-tested a new bumper sticker to describe his unique brand of economic populism and trade protectionism, anti-immigrant nativism and a neo-isolationism that eschews foreign entanglements: America First!

The direction Im outlining will return us to a timeless principle  always putting the interests of the American people and American security above all else. It has to be first, Trump said. That will be the foundation of every single decision that I make. America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.

Putting America first hardly seems a controversial idea for a U.S. president, but the phrase has a long lineage in Republican politics dating back to the isolationist, noninterventionist wing of the party in the 1930s and 1940s. The America First Committee of the 1930s was established to keep the United States out of the approaching Second World War, and its noninterventionist agenda was embraced by Republican Sen. Robert Taft, who ran for his partys presidential nomination in 1948 and 1952. Many Republican foreign policy experts in particular worry that, coupled with Trumps strongman persona and what many see as his strong-arm instincts, the America First agenda would amount to a rejection of the United States outsize role in protecting the liberal international order put in place after World War II.

Under his America First conceit, Trump recited a familiar litany of foreign policy positions and criticisms of the Obama administration and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He once again suggested a moratorium on Muslim immigration and opposed the Obama administrations senseless immigration policies that import extremism. He threatened to punish U.S. companies that move jobs overseas and to quickly reverse the countrys lopsided trade imbalance with China by using economic coercion. He promised to rebuild depleted U.S. military power but also to use it sparingly, eschewing nation-building or democracy promotion overseas. In the early days of his administration, a President Trump would hold summits with European and Asian allies and demand that they pay America more for its security umbrella, or else he would be willing to close it and walk away from those alliances.

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Going further than just bashing the free-trade agenda, Trump denigrated multilateral agreements and international institutions that undergird a rules-based international order and the dynamic of globalization that has been a driving force in spreading liberal economic and political values for decades.

No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Our friends and enemies put their interests above ours, and we must start doing the same, Trump said. Insisting that nation-states remain the foundation of happiness and harmony, he voiced skepticism of international unions that tie us up, and bring America down. Under my administration we will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs.  No longer will I surrender our people to the false song of globalization.

Arguably not since Patrick Buchanan in 1996, and possibly not since Taft in 1952, has a serious Republican presidential hopeful embraced such an isolationist platform or called into question an international order based on free markets and international institutions, and both of those previous Republican candidates ultimately lost the nomination.

In Trumps telling, his agenda is not isolationist, but rather a sign of strong leadership. Allies and adversaries alike will respect Americas newfound strength and determination, in his view, and respond to border walls, trade tariffs and demands for more burden-sharing by quickly getting into line. What worries many Republican foreign policy experts is that that expectation doesnt comport with reality as they understand it.

Donald Trump is no Taft-style isolationist, because while Taft was clearly wrong, he was a decent and thoughtful man that you could never accuse of disrespect for the Constitution, said Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic studies program at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a former counselor in George W. Bushs State Department. Contrast that stance, he said, with Trumps dubiously constitutional intentions to ban Muslims from entering the country, to torture suspected terrorists and kill their families.

His promises to make allies pay more for our support also shows that he thinks of American foreign policy the way a mobster thinks about protection rackets, said Cohen. He has similarly shown an affection for strongmen like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and has surrounded himself with people who are cozy with Putins crowd, which is quite sinister. Youd have to be delusional to believe that all that demagoguery is fake, and now Trump is somehow going to pivot and become very presidential.

In early March, Cohen helped organize a letter signed by roughly 50 Republican foreign policy experts united in their opposition to a Trump nomination, calling his vision of American power wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle and predicting that as president he would act in ways that make the country less safe. The letter has garnered more than 120 signatures and counting.

Since 1948, there has been a foreign policy tradition in the Republican Party of free and open trade, a reliance on alliances and a conservative internationalism to uphold the global order that the United States created after World War II, and Trump has taken positions in opposition to all of those things, said Eric Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey who served as a senior official in the Defense and State Departments during the George W. Bush administration. Edelman is one of the signers of the letter opposing Trumps nomination. Trump is clearly not conservative, and he is barely a Republican, and to convince many of us that he is really serious about foreign policy would require that he repudiate almost every position he has taken. Add in his lack of mastery of policy issues and his willingness to use mob psychology to whip up crowds in ugly ways, and I conclude he would be a threat to the constitutional order.

As the ultimate outsider candidate, of course, Trump has worn the nearly unprecedented repudiation of the Republican foreign policy establishment as a badge of honor. When Trump earlier announced his kitchen cabinet of foreign policy advisers, it amounted to five names that most Washington observers had never heard of, including a former Pentagon inspector general and a 2009 graduate of DePaul University who specialized in energy issues involving Cyprus, Greece and Israel.

In his speech Wednesday, Trump argued that Washington could use some new blood and officials not associated with past failures. My goal is a foreign policy that will endure for several generations, he said. Thats why I have to look for talented experts with new approaches, rather than surround myself with people with perfect resumes who have little to brag about except failed policies and continued losses in war. We have to look to new people, because many of the old people frankly dont know what they are doing, even though they look good writing in the New York Times or appearing on television.

One of those old Republican foreign policy experts is Kurt Volker, executive director of the McCain Institute and former U.S. ambassador to NATO. Unlike many of his former colleagues in the Bush administration, Volker did not sign the letter opposing Trumps nomination, precisely because it seemed likely to reinforce the argument that the Republican establishment is united against his candidacy. Also, if Donald Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States, Volker figures the commander in chief will need all the good advice he can get, from wherever he can get it.

Trump has tapped into a huge frustration in the country from a public that believes the political and foreign policy elite in Washington have really messed things up, and theres some truth to that. So hes their change agent to turn the situation upside down and start over, Volker said in an interview. Trump is also clearly a very forceful personality, and he could conceivably channel that into strong American leadership. The problem is whenever Trump opens his mouth and praises Putin, or denigrates Muslims, or threatens to pull out of our alliances, our friends around the world dont see a strong American leader. They see someone to fear.

James Kitfield is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress.
Berlin (AFP) - Germany on Thursday criticised Republican White House frontrunner Donald Trump's "America first" prescriptions for US foreign policy as doomed to failure in today's globalised world.

In restrained diplomatic remarks, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier described Trump's radical proposed overhaul of US diplomacy and defence policy presented Wednesday as "not without its contradictions".

"'America first' -- the key question is what does that mean for America's foreign policy engagement," Steinmeier told reporters when asked about Trump's closely-watched policy speech.

"The world's security architecture... cannot be organised in a unilateral way. No American president will be able to ignore this changed reality, so 'America first' actually cannot be the answer."

Steinmeier questioned the logic of "saying on the one hand 'we're going to make America strong again' and on the other, emphasising America's retreat from the world".

"The two don't quite seem to go together," he said. "It doesn't really seem thought through."

In a major foreign policy speech short on specifics, Trump warned that Europe and Asia may have to defend themselves, and vowed to tear up trade deals, retool NATO to oppose migration and "radical Islam" and put US national interests ahead of all other considerations.

Trump's remarks came just days after US President Barack Obama wrapped up a trip to Europe in Germany, which he hailed as a major trade partner, NATO ally and political anchor of stability in a crisis-racked EU.

While Obama praised Chancellor Angela Merkel's welcoming stance toward asylum seekers as being "on the right side of history", Trump has blasted Germany's decision to let in hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees as "insane".

During a joint press conference with Obama on Sunday, Merkel declined to comment on the prospect of Trump winning the White House in November, saying only that she was following the US campaign "with interest".
By Karolin Schaps

LONDON (Reuters) - Oil and gas producer Tullow Oil (TLW.L) has cut its annual capital expenditure plans by $100 million (69 million pounds) to $1 billion and may reduce spending further as it adjusts its balance sheet to cope with weak oil prices.

The Africa-focused company also said its lenders had agreed to extend a revolving loan facility by a year and increase flexibility on another, showing banks were willing to support it during the oil market downturn.

Tullow said that as of the end of April, its net debt was about $4.5 billion and that it had unused debt facilities and free cash of roughly $1.3 billion.

Cutting costs has been the main defense of oil firms against a 60 percent drop in oil prices since mid-2014 with billions of dollars worth of projects being delayed or cancelled.

Tullow reported lower than expected output in the first quarter as a technical issue at its flagship Jubilee oil field in Ghana has interrupted production there.

The company's West African production averaged 59,200 barrels per day (bpd) and, as previously stated, Tullow said it would have to reissue full-year production forecasts once the Jubilee issue had been resolved.

"I would like to think next week we can restart production," Tullow Chief Operating Officer Paul McDade told Reuters, adding that the resumption was subject to a new operating procedure running smoothly.

Tullow, which is venturing into oil and gas production in East Africa, said its appraisal programme in Kenya showed fields there could hold as much as 1 billion barrels, if more exploration is carried out.

"Today's announcement adds further value through the Kenya news and partially mitigates some of the risk associated with the balance sheet," said analysts at Macquarie.

Shares in Tullow were trading up 4.8 percent at 0902 GMT.

(Editing by David Clarke)
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish legislation to meet European Union criteria on visa liberalization will be completed on Monday, Turkey's minister for EU affairs, Volkan Bozkir said on Thursday. Bozkir also told broadcaster NTV he expects the EU Commission to recommend the lifting of visas for Turks traveling to Europe in a report next week. In return for agreeing to take back migrants from Europe under a landmark deal, Turkey has won aid, the prospect of accelerated EU accession talks and, critically for Turkish voters, the promise of visa-free travel to Europe. (Reporting by Orhan Coskun and Ece Toksabay; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Nick Tattersall)
Ankara (AFP) - An Istanbul court on Thursday sentenced two prominent Turkish journalists to two years behind bars for illustrating their columns with a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed originally published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

The sentence handed to columnists Hikmet Cetinkaya and Ceyda Karan, both columnists with the opposition Cumhuriyet daily, intensified alarm over press freedoms in Turkey under strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has made Islam the cornerstone of his politics.

"The two journalists were sentenced to two years each in jail," said their lawyer Bulent Utku. "We will appeal the ruling at the appeals court," Utku told AFP following a hearing at Istanbul's criminal court.

The pair, who went on trial in January last year, were acquitted of "insulting religious values" but convicted on charges of "inciting public hatred".

They were sentenced to three years in jail, which was reduced to two by the court on technical grounds.

- 'Erdogan's family among plaintiffs' -

The state-run Anatolia news agency said the case was brought by a total of 1,280 plaintiffs including Erdogan's daughters Esra and Sumeyye, his son Bilal and his son-in-law, Energy Minister Berat Albayrak.

The Erdogan family was represented by a lawyer in court, it added.

After the verdict, members of the public who had brought the complaint and were present in court shouted "Allahu Akbar", Cumhuriyet reported -- Arabic for 'God is greatest'.

On January 14, 2015, Cumhuriyet had published a four-page Charlie Hebdo pullout translated into Turkish marking the French satirical weekly's first issue since a deadly attack on its Paris offices by Islamist gunmen earlier that month.

The edition did not include the controversial front cover featuring the Prophet Mohammed, but a smaller version of the cartoon was included twice inside the newspaper to illustrate columns on the subject by Karan and Cetinkaya.

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Most other media in Turkey had refrained from publishing the cover.

When the edition was published, the daily received threats and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu condemned the publication of cartoons of the Muslim prophet as an "open provocation".

Days before Cumhuriyet's special edition, Davutoglu had joined dozens of world leaders in a march through Paris, in memory of the 17 victims killed in three days of attacks at Charlie Hebdo's offices and elsewhere in the French capital.

- 'Shameful, unbearable'-

Cumhuriyet, which staunchly opposes the Islamic-rooted government of Erdogan, has been regularly targeted by prosecutions as concerns grow over freedom of speech in Turkey.

Its editor-in-chief Can Dundar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul are currently on trial on charges of revealing state secrets and could face multiple life sentences if found guilty.

Writing on Twitter, Karan lashed out at the Turkish government, saying: "Let our two-year sentence be a gift for our liberal fascists #JeSuisCharlie."

In the controversial cartoon, the prophet sheds a tear and holds a sign with the viral slogan "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie").

Most Muslims consider portraying the prophet in images to be blasphemous.

There has been growing concern about the numbers of journalists currently facing legal proceedings in Turkey, many on accusations of insulting Erdogan.

Trials for insulting Erdogan have multiplied since his election to the presidency in August 2014, with nearly 2,000 such cases currently open.

Reporters Without Borders slammed Thursday's verdict on its Twitter account as "shameful" and "unbearable".

In a show of solidarity, women's rights group Femen published on its Turkish Twitter page a picture of a topless activist holding a Charlie Hebdo cartoon with "Karan and Cetinkaya are not alone" written on her torso.

The case also comes as the government denies accusations it is seeking to wipe out the secular status of the overwhelmingly Muslim republic in a planned new constitution.

Europe is also looking to Ankara to implement a key deal to curb the flow of migrants seeking to reach the European Union from Turkish shores.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who spearheaded the agreement, has been accused of compromising on the EU's basic values on press freedom to win Turkey's cooperation.
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's military returned fire on Islamic State positions in northern Syria on Thursday, killing 11 members of the militant group, military sources said. The military returned fire after its artillery near the border town of Karkamis was hit by mortars, the sources said. Seven militants firing mortars were killed and four more were killed in a vehicle, the sources said. Karkamis is just across the border from the Islamic State-controlled Syrian town of Jarablus. It is also about 100 km (62 miles) east of the Turkish border town of Kilis, which has been frequently hit by rocket fire from Islamic State-controlled Syrian territory in recent months, killing civilians. Turkey has repeatedly fired back at Islamic State positions from its border with Syria, but has said it needs greater support from Western allies, citing the difficulty of hitting moving targets with howitzers. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying this week that the United States would deploy a rocket launcher system near the stretch of border that has come under attack. A senior U.S. military official has confirmed the matter was under discussion but declined to comment further. In the latest attack on Kilis, one person was killed and 26 injured when rockets pounded the town on Sunday. (Reporting by Tulay Karadeniz; Writing by Ece Toksabay; Editing by David Dolan)
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish police have detained 15 people over a suicide bombing in the northwestern city of Bursa where a woman injured eight bystanders as she blew herself up near the city's main mosque, Turkish media said on Thursday. The TRT and CNN Turk television stations quoted Interior Minister Efkan Ala as giving the total and saying evidence pointed to a link with a militant group, but gave no details. The attack on Wednesday was the fifth suicide bombing in a major urban center in Turkey this year. "Fifteen people have been detained in connection with the Bursa attack. There are strong indications that it is related to a group," the broadcasters quoted Ala as saying. Some of those detained were brought in from outside of Bursa and were being questioned at the provincial police headquarters, CNN Turk said. No group has claimed responsibility. Two attacks this year in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city, have been blamed on the radical Islamic State movement. Two in the capital Ankara were claimed by a Kurdish militant group. Turkey has also faced attacks from far-left groups, mostly targeting police and security forces. The Bursa attack came a day after the United States warned American citizens in Turkey about credible terrorist threats to tourist areas. Bursa is Turkey's fourth-largest city, an industrial hub directly south of Istanbul across the Marmara Sea. While not one of the country's biggest tourist destinations, it draws some foreign visitors with its Ottoman-era architecture. (Reporting by Daren Butler and Tulay Karadeniz; Editing by David Dolan and Tom Heneghan)
LONDON (Reuters) - Two men and a woman have been charged with terrorism offences in the central English city of Birmingham, local police said on Thursday. The West Midlands police said in a statement that the three had been charged with offences related the financing or preparation of "acts of terrorism". British police arrested five people last week as part of an investigation which a security source said was linked to the attacks in Paris and Brussels. Four were arrested in Birmingham, central England, and one at London's Gatwick Airport. (Reporting by Elizabeth Piper, editing by William James)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S.-led military coalition targeted Islamic State in Iraq and Syria with 22 strikes on Wednesday in its latest daily attack on the militant group, the coalition leading the operations said. In Iraq, one strike near the Islamic State-held Mosul hit an Islamic State weapons facility, the Combined Joint Task Force said in a statement on Thursday. Fourteen other strikes near five other cities hit six of the militants' tactical units, a logistics facility, a bunker and various weapons and fighting positions, it said. Seven strikes in near Ayn Isa, Mar'a and Washiyah hit six Islamic State tactical units, among other targets, according to the task force. (Reporting by Washington newsroom)
By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Thursday approved a rule change that would let U.S. judges issue search warrants for access to computers located in any jurisdiction despite opposition from civil liberties groups who say it will greatly expand the FBI's hacking authority.

U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts transmitted the rules to Congress, which will have until Dec. 1 to reject or modify the changes to the federal rules of criminal procedure. If Congress does not act, the rules would take effect automatically.

Magistrate judges normally can order searches only within the jurisdiction of their court, which is typically limited to a few counties.

The U.S. Justice Department, which has pushed for the rule change since 2013, has described it as a minor modification needed to modernize the criminal code for the digital age, and has said it would not permit searches or seizures that are not already legal.

Google, owned by Alphabet Inc, and civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Access Now contend the change would vastly expand the Federal Bureau of Investigation's ability to conduct mass hacks on computer networks.

They say it also could run afoul of the U.S. Constitution's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

While Congress can reject amendments to the rules that govern federal courts, it rarely exercises that authority and is not expected to do so during a heated election year. And few lawmakers have shown interest in the subject.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, condemned the rule change as having "significant consequences for Americans privacy," and vowed to introduce legislation to reverse it.

"Under the proposed rules, the government would now be able to obtain a single warrant to access and search thousands or millions of computers at once; and the vast majority of the affected computers would belong to the victims, not the perpetrators, of a cybercrime," Wyden said in a statement.

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The Justice Department's quest to broaden warrant jurisdiction has not drawn as much attention as other recent confrontations over government access to digital information. These included the FBI's standoff with Apple over encryption arising from the agency's effort to unlock an iPhone used by one of the shooters in December's San Bernardino massacre.

A Justice Department spokesman said the change was necessary because criminals increasingly use "anonymizing" technologies to conceal their identity online, and remote searches are often the only way to apprehend such suspects.

The change does not authorize any new authorities not already permitted by law, the spokesman said.
GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations mediator called on Thursday on the leaders of the Russia Federation and the United States to salvage the "barely alive" two-month ceasefire in Syria and revitalize the damaged peace process. U.N. Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura spoke to reporters in Geneva after briefing the Security Council by video-link at the end of a two-week round of talks. The main opposition High Negotiations Committee pulled out of the formal talks a week ago, in protest of intensified fighting and slow aid deliveries. Referring to the two powers, he said: "There is no reason that both of them which have been putting so much political capital in that success story and have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war should not be able to revitalize what they have created and which is still alive but barely." (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay and Shadia Nasralla)
BEIRUT (Reuters) - United Nations Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said on Thursday he did not believe the targeting of a hospital hit by air strikes in Aleppo overnight was by mistake, Arabic-language Al Arabiya al Hadath television reported. De Mistura made the remarks in an interview with the channel that was dubbed into Arabic. He did not elaborate or comment on who might have been responsible. (Reporting by John Davison; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Strategic Command said on Thursday it had tracked two attempted missile launches by North Korea since Wednesday evening, neither of which posed a threat to North America. Army Lieutenant Colonel Martin O'Donnell, a STRATCOM spokesman, said Strategic Command detected and tracked "what we assess were attempted North Korean missile launches at 4:43 p.m. U.S. central daylight time (2143 GMT) on Wednesday and at 5:24 a.m. central daylight time (1024 GMT) on Thursday. "The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) determined the missiles launched from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America," O'Donnell said in a statement. South Korea's defense ministry said North Korea fired what appeared to have been an intermediate range ballistic missile on Thursday but it crashed seconds after the test launch. (Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Writing by David Alexander; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said Thursday it is working to cut off revenue streams to North Korea by targeting remittances from its overseas workers, after recent nuclear and missile tests by Pyongyang. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a House of Representatives hearing that the United States is working "relentlessly" to get countries to cut off businesses sending money back to North Korea. He also said Washington is working to encourage the sending home of North Korean diplomats not engaged in diplomatic activity and to make sure that people did not travel to North Korea, including for the May 6 congress of the ruling Workers Party. "What we are focused on, besides the implementation of the (U.N.) Security Council resolutions, is relentlessly building pressure on North Korea, working principally with our key allies Japan and (South) Korea," Blinken said. "We are working in various ways to cut off all the revenues going to the regime. For example, they have ... overseas workers whose remittances are not going back to their families, but are going to the regime. Were working to cut those off." Estimates of North Korean workers abroad vary widely but a study by South Korea's state-run Korea Institute for National Unification put the number as high as 150,000, primarily in China and Russia, sending back as much as $900 million annually. North Koreans are known to work abroad in restaurants and on construction sites, and also as doctors. The United States is also working to make sure North Korean officials are not invited to travel abroad and to ensure North Korean ships and aircraft are not allowed to dock or land in other countries, Blinken said. The senior U.S. diplomat for Asia, assistant secretary of state for East Asia, Danny Russel, said last week that another North Korean nuclear test could trigger new sanctions including an effort to choke off hard currency earnings by its overseas workers abroad. North Korea has conducted a series of missile launches, in violation of U.N. resolutions in the run-up to the Party congress and experts believe it may conduct a new nuclear test before this convenes. (Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Alistair Bell)
By Julia Harte WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A revised criminal justice reform bill moved closer to a full U.S. Senate vote on Thursday when it gained support from more Republicans after being stalled for months in Congress. In a legacy-shaping issue for President Barack Obama, the measure's sponsors announced four new Republican co-sponsor senators and a new version of the bill at a press conference in the Senate. The measure now has 37 co-sponsors, according to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley. Grassley said he had been waiting for the bill to be finalized before asking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to bring it up for a full Senate vote, but that "it is time for those discussions to start right now." As revised, it still lowers mandatory minimum sentences for some non-violent federal drug offenders, but it no longer applies to anyone convicted of a serious violent felony. That change was a response to conservative critics of the bill, which is central to Obama's efforts to overhaul the country's federal criminal justice system and reduce prison overcrowding. That effort has been a rare example of Republican and Democratic agreement in the polarized Congress. The bill's advocates have said they hope the revisions and new co-sponsors, such as Republican senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Steve Daines of Montana, will convince McConnell to bring up the bill for a Senate vote. Daines and Kirk lent their support after adding minor requirements, including a provision that savings from it go toward purposes such as fighting gangs of national significance. After a group of conservative Republican senators led by Tom Cotton of Arkansas claimed in January the reforms would release violent felons, the bills authors began excising parts of the proposal that eased the sentences of violent criminals. The bill now includes a new mandatory minimum sentence for crimes involving the opiate fentanyl, mirroring parallel sentencing reforms that await a floor vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. The House legislation is likely to contain changes to "mens rea" laws that govern criminal intent, said Senator John Cornyn, a sponsor of the Senate bill, at Thursday's press conference. Mens rea reform was excluded from the Senate measure because its authors were divided on the issue. Democratic lawmakers generally oppose strengthening mens rea requirements on the grounds it would enable more corporate malfeasance as it is difficult to prove the "intent" of a corporation. To exclude violent criminals from the Senate bill, the authors removed a section that lowered minimum sentences for unlawful gun owners with three prior convictions for violent felonies or serious drug offenses, known as armed career criminals. Such criminals represent nearly a fifth of the 12,908 current inmates who would have been eligible for resentencing under the old bill, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. (Reporting by Julia Harte; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and James Dalgleish)
By Brendan O'Brien

(Reuters) - The chancellor of the University of California, Davis was placed on administrative leave on Wednesday over claims the school spent $175,000 to quash negative Internet posts.

University of California president Janet Napolitano said she would investigate whether the chancellor, Linda Katehi, violated school policies.

"I am deeply disappointed to take this action," she said in a statement.

Katehi has come under scrutiny since the Sacramento Bee published documents on April 13 it said showed the university paid consultants at least $175,000 to quash negative posts about the school, and her after campus police pepper-sprayed student protesters in 2011.

Katehi, who has not commented on the newspaper report, has also faced questions over her acceptance of paid seats on the boards of DeVry Education Group and textbook publisher John Wiley & Sons.

A number of state legislators have asked her to resign.

Napolitano said an independent investigator would look into the school's employment of some of Katehi's family members, Katehi's accounts of her involvement in contracts related to managing of both the campus and her personal reputation on social media, and the use of student fees.

"The serious and troubling nature of these questions, as well as the initial evidence, requires a rigorous and transparent investigation," Napolitano said.

In March, Katehi, who has been chancellor since 2009, apologized in a letter to students for her role at DeVry, saying it violated UC policy and that she had resigned the seat.

She said her time between 2011 and 2014 on the board of John Wiley & Sons, however, did comply with university policy.

About 33,000 students attend the university in Davis, about 15 miles (25 km) west of Sacramento.

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; editing by John Stonestreet)
travis kalanick uber

Tipping won't be coming to the Uber app any time soon.

In a blog post Thursday, the ride-hailing company reiterated that "tipping is not included, nor is it expected or required."

Why? Uber says it is better for "riders and drivers to know for sure what they would pay or earn on each trip  without the uncertainty of tipping."

All the debate around tipping comes from an impending settlement the company reached in California and Massachusetts. As part of the agreement, Uber must clarify its language around tipping. Previously the company said there was "no need" to tip  although that's not the same thing as saying a tip is included.

As a result, many riders thought tip was already included in their ride. Drivers could (and can still be) rated lower by passengers who felt it was uncomfortable to have "please tip" signs in the back of a car.

As part of the settlement agreement, Uber is clarifying, but not rectifying tipping for drivers. While its competitor Lyft has tipping built in, Uber is arguing that adding tips would lead to bias from riders to drivers. In addition, it could incentivize drivers to "spend more time where tips are likely to be highest  typically the wealthiest neighborhoods" and not service the whole town.

None of these arguments negate the fact that riders are allowed to do this anyways by just tipping cash. If drivers are looking for cash tips, they might be going to these neighborhoods anyways. As CNN's Ethan Wolff-Mann writes, the company is focusing more on user growth than finding a way to take care of its drivers:

But citing racism for not adding a tip-screen, when the company has already acknowledged that gratuity is not included, is a transparent ploy to focus less on the drivers, and more on its endgame of user growth. Adding a tipping screen would undoubtedly increase tipswhich users wouldnt have an outward problem withbut it would creep into the consumers mind that an Uber trip isnt quite so cheap as advertised, raising the barrier for consumers to use it.

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Despite the pushback, the company has started sending out letters to its riders in certain cities to clarify the tipping policy. As Uber general manager for NYC Josh Mohrer wrote in an email to NYC riders, "Today, riders tell us that one of the things they like most about Uber is that its hassle-free. And thats how we intend to keep it."

NOW WATCH: Uber is making customers pay for having drivers wait





More From Business Insider


By Heather Somerville and Dan Levine

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Uber's proposed settlement of a high-profile class-action lawsuit last week has drawn opposition from some drivers and other concerned parties as the ride-hailing service seeks to avoid reclassifying drivers as employees.

The settlement, which still must be approved by a San Francisco federal judge, provides for a $100 million payout to drivers, who could get as little $12 apiece or as much as a few thousand dollars, depending on how many miles they drove.

The deal contains a number of caveats and contingencies, however, such as making $16 million of the payout to drivers dependent on Uber Technologies Inc's [UBER.UL] future valuation increasing by 150 percent.

Moreover, the settlement's non-monetary provisions are set to expire in two years, although Uber may choose to keep them in place after that.

"If there were going to be any teeth to this settlement, (the expiration) wouldn't be there," said Christian Perea, an Uber driver and writer for The Rideshare Guy, a popular blog and podcast for drivers.

The sunset clause is a way for Uber to protect itself from long-term costs and annoyances, said Jack Schaedel, a labor and employment attorney at the Dykema law firm, who is not involved in the case. If any of the concessions ends up "being totally unwieldy and Uber totally hates it, Uber can get rid of it," he said.

Uber declined to comment.

A Rideshare Guy post explaining the terms of the settlement drew more than 100 comments, many of them blasting the proposed deal. Uber drivers expressed dissatisfaction for a range of reasons, including that the settlement leaves unresolved the central issue of whether the law requires that drivers be qualified as employees.

Among the non-monetary provisions of the settlement are a new policy governing driver termination, including an appeals process for drivers terminated by Uber, and an agreement that the privately-held company will clarify that drivers do not automatically receive gratuities from their fares and allow them to solicit tips.

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The company also agreed to assist with the creation of a drivers' association.

OUTSIDE OBJECTIONS

Lawyers representing Uber drivers in another class-action case have said in court filings they may object to the settlement because drivers covered by it would no longer be able to participate in their case, which challenges Uber's alleged use of credit reports during driver background checks.

The lawyers also object to Uber's request to omit details from the settlement that would allow drivers to better evaluate the deal.

The company has asked U.S. District Judge Edward Chen to redact key figures in court filings, including an estimate of the total potential value of drivers' legal claims had they won in a jury trial.

The redacted information "is critically important to any analysis of whether the proposed settlement is fundamentally fair, adequate, and reasonable," the lawyers wrote in a court filing.

Uber has said the figures are trade secrets and would damage the company if made public. In an order on Wednesday, Chen told both sides to further explain their positions, given the importance of the information.

In a similar lawsuit against Lyft, Uber's chief competitor, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria denied that company's request to keep secret similar information. Chhabria ultimately rejected the proposed $12.25 million settlement offer because it represented only about 9 percent of the potential value of drivers' claims, a deal that he said "short-changed" drivers.

While he will gladly cash a settlement check if one comes his way, driver Perea said the deal with Uber provides little solace.

"We were hoping for a more definitive answer on what the on-demand economy would look like in the future, and a sense that this whole new economy that was taking off would work," he said.

A hearing on the deal is scheduled for June.

(Reporting by Heather Somerville and Dan Levine; editing by Sue Horton and G Crosse)
London (AFP) - A British World War II veteran living in Italy on Thursday lost his legal challenge against a rule barring long-term expatriates from voting in Britain's European Union referendum.

High Court judge David Lloyd Jones rejected claims by Harry Shindler, 94, and his co-claimant, Belgium resident Jacquelyn MacLennan, that the rule restricted their rights to freedom of movement under European law.

The judge told London's High Court that the 2015 referendum act "is not a restriction on the rights of free movement."

Lawyers acting for the expats said they will seek leave to appeal the decision.

The ruling is a relief for the government, whose lawyers argued that a decision in favour of the claimants could have made it impossible to hold the membership referendum on June 23, as planned.

Britons who have lived abroad for more than 15 years are prohibited from voting in British general elections and as a result cannot participate.

Irish people and citizens of Commonwealth countries living in Britain, as well as inhabitants of Gibraltar, are allowed to vote.

Lawyers from Leigh Day solicitors argued that Brexit would mean the claimants were no longer EU citizens and therefore no longer afforded the rights of free movement which flow from EU citizenship.

"The 15 year rule is neither an express restriction on free movement nor is it in substance a disguised or inherent restriction on free movement," Lloyd Jones concluded.

He also rejected claims that the 15-year time limit was arbitrary.

"In attempting to identify a point at which extended residence abroad might indicate weakening of ties with the United Kingdom, a bright line rule is required, drawing the line at a specific point."

Leigh Day lawyer Richard Stein said they would take the legal battle to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, "so that all British citizens living elsewhere in the EU can be part of the democratic process to vote in this referendum, which will have a very real impact on their lives.

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"We believe that there is precedent for fast-track legislation being put through parliament in a matter of days in response to court judgement, so there would be no need for the referendum to be delayed if the Supreme Court rules in our favour."

- 'Speechless' -

Shindler, who fought in Italy during World War II and retired to the country in 1982, lost a challenge to the 15-year general election rule at the European Court of Human Rights in 2013.

"It leaves us speechless to think anyone can stand up in parliament and deny another Brit the right to vote," Shindler said before the judgement.

An estimated 1.2 million Britons live in other parts of the European Union, according to a parliamentary report, and many are concerned about the impact that a so-called Brexit would have on their rights.

Leigh Day claimed that up to two million people could be affected.

A government spokesman said the franchise issue had been "debated, considered and agreed" by parliament.

A petition to allow all British expatriates to vote in the referendum, launched in November, has attracted over 18,000 signatures.
LONDON (Reuters) - Business Secretary Sajid Javid said on Thursday the government was not prepared to take more than a 25 percent equity stake in Tata Steel's UK assets and he wanted to see them sold as soon as possible. "Twenty five percent was the limit that I thought was necessary to show that on the one hand you're serious about helping ... but also not to put off potential investors by saying this is something the government seeks to control," he told a committee of MPs. (Reporting by William James, editing by Elizabeth Piper)
London (AFP) - A British court on Thursday jailed a security guard for five years for sending thousands of tweets glorifying the Islamic State (IS) group after failing in a bid to travel to Syria.

Mohammed Moshin Ameen, 23, admitted using 42 different Twitter profiles to send 8,000 messages between March and October last year, 250 of which were found to be extreme.

One post included a link to an IS propaganda video targeting young British men.

"You had a not insignificant following on your accounts, and at the time this case is concerned, you were thoroughly radicalised," said judge Richard Marks as he handed down the sentence.

Ameen, from east London, had befriended well-known radical figures, some of whom were later convicted of terror offences.

Police first became aware of Ameen in December 2013 during a raid at an address in London, where they found him with a one-way ticket from Luton to Istanbul.

Prosecutor Christopher Amis said Ameen's Twitter activities "amount to a sustained effort indirectly to encourage others to engage in terrorism".

Ameen posted a picture of masked IS assassin "Jihadi John" holding a knife and called jihadists "role models".

At a hearing at London's Old Bailey in March, Ameen pleaded guilty to five counts of encouraging the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism on Twitter.

He admitted another charge of inviting support for Islamic State and of disseminating a terrorist publication.

Ameen's lawyer Tim Moloney said radicals had taken advantage of his client's "below average intelligence".
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Britain is withholding all financial aid payments to Mozambique following Maputo's admission of as much as $1.35 billion of previously undisclosed borrowing, much of it for maritime security. "This appears to be a serious breach of trust, so we are working closely with other international partners to establish the truth and coordinate an appropriate response," Britain's Department for International Development said in a statement. (Reporting by Ed Cropley; Editing by James Macharia)
BERLIN (Reuters) - Britain may need more than 10 years to negotiate a trade agreement with the European Union if it decides to leave the bloc, David Lidington, the UK's Europe Minister, said during a visit to Berlin on Thursday. "I think it would be fraught with difficulties to complete this within 10 years," he said. "I certainly do not believe it would be possible to get access to all the free trade agreements that the EU has with third countries until we have sorted out the terms of our future relationship with the EU," he added. Britain will vote on June 23 whether to leave the 28-member group, with polls suggesting it could still go either way. (Reporting by Andreas Rinke; Writing by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Michelle Martin; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - An Indian-flagged oil tanker on Wednesday was added to a UN sanctions blacklist for illegally carrying crude from Libya.

The Distya Ameya vessel was headed for Malta after leaving on Monday from eastern Libya, where rival authorities were behind the sale of the crude.

The decision would mean that port authorities in Malta or in any other destination country would have to impound the tanker on arrival, diplomats said.

The UN sanctions committee said the vessel may have been sold recently and its name changed to Kassos. On Tuesday, the tanker was north of Al-Bayda, Libya and headed in the direction of Malta.

A Security Council diplomat said the tanker's final destination could be the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and that the cargo was in violation of a ban on oil revenues to entities other than Libya's new unity government.

The tanker was listed for "transporting crude oil illicitly exported from Libya, based on information received from the government of Libya", the sanctions committee said in a news release.

Libya was left with two rival administrations after a militia alliance took over Tripoli in mid-2014, but a new UN-backed government of national unity is seeking to assert its authority in the country.

The new government is working to tighten control over the country's oil revenues with the National Oil Corporation and the central bank both throwing their support behind the new authorities earlier this month.

Libya has been in chaos since the overthrow of Moamer Kadhafi.
Kuwait City (AFP) - The UN's Yemen envoy on Thursday hailed the "positive atmosphere" at crucial peace talks between the country's warring sides, as negotiations in Kuwait entered their second week without a major breakthrough.

UN special envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed has held several rounds of talks with Shiite Huthi rebels and a government delegation over the past two days focussing on key issues.

Besides discussing ways to firm up an ongoing ceasefire, delegates also tackled "the issues related to the withdrawal of armed groups, handover of heavy weapons, resumption of the political transition and the release of prisoners and detainees," Ould Cheikh Ahmed said in a statement.

He said a "positive atmosphere" prevailed during talks but warned that differences remained.

"The divergence of views is to be expected in a country witnessing war. It is crucial that all parties make concessions... in order to reach a comprehensive political agreement," he said.

More than 6,800 people have been killed and around 2.8 million displaced in Yemen since a Saudi-led Arab coalition began operations in March 2015 against the Iran-backed Huthis, who have seized swathes of territory including the capital Sanaa.

After the start of the latest round of negotiations was delayed as the rebel delegation sought guarantees, Ould Cheikh Ahmed has managed to get the two sides to approve the agenda and has begun debating key issues.

Sources close to the negotiations however said the two delegations have not yet met face-to-face.

The government delegation proposed a mechanism on how to implement the withdrawal of the rebels and handover of heavy arms, a Yemeni official said.

"We are optimistic over the prospects of an agreement being worked out by the UN envoy," Mani al-Matari, the press advisor to Yemen's foreign minister, told AFP.

The main sticking point remains that the rebels want to discuss a political settlement before surrendering arms while the government delegation insists on the implementation of UN Security Council resolution 2216.

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The resolution states that the rebels must withdraw from seized territories and disarm before talks can progress.

The government delegation also submitted a letter of "strong protest" to the UN envoy over alleged rebel ceasefire violations, especially in third city Taez, Matari said.

Ould Cheikh Ahmed said the negotiations have no timeframe.

The 15-member UN Security Council on Monday stressed the importance of agreeing on a "roadmap" to implement security measures including the withdrawal of heavy weapons from Yemen.
United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The UN Security Council on Thursday lifted the last remaining sanctions on Ivory Coast and said it would shut down its mission there next year.

It was the latest sign that the West African country has bounced back from turmoil.

French Ambassador Francois Delattre has described the move to end the 12-year sanction regime and wind down the mission as a "success story" for the United Nations in Africa.

The world's top cocoa producer, Ivory Coast was torn by crises during president Laurent Gbagbo's rule from 2000 to 2011.

After Gbagbo refused to recognize the victory of Alassane Ouattara in elections in 2010, fighting broke out, leaving 3,000 dead in five months.

The 15-member council unanimously adopted two French-drafted resolutions that lift the remaining restrictions of an arms embargo imposed in 2004 and scraps assets freezes and travel bans on six people.

These include Gbagbo, his wife Simone Gbagbo -- both of whom are on trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague - and youth leader Charles Ble Goude.

In 2014, the council had lifted a ban on the diamonds trade in Ivory Coast.

The UN mission in Ivory Coast will be gradually drawn down from its current strength of 4,000 to some 2,000 in August before shutting down altogether in June 2017.

Ivory Coast's UN Ambassador Claude Bouah-Kamon thanked the countries that contributed troops to the mission, which he said was "perfectly successful" in achieving its goals.

Bouah-Kamon said his country was mindful that it faced important tasks with the planned departure of the UN mission, including plans to modernise the military and security forces.
What the Fed's Latest Decision Is Doing to Precious Metals

(Continued from Prior Part)

Physical demand stays flat

As weve discussed previously in this series, gold has increased by a whopping 17.4% YTD (year-to-date), but silver has been the top performer among precious metals, rising by ~25%. Platinum and palladium have meanwhile seen returns of 13.7% and 7.6%, respectively, YTD.

With such a surge in prices, precious metal may seem expensive for physical investors. According to a GFMS report, global gold demand tumbled by 24% YoY (year-over-year) to 781 tons in the first quarter of the current year. This is the weakest quarter in seven years.

Gold demand in India rose as jewelers returned to business after a long strike. But gold continued to remain at a discount compared to the global benchmark.

Rising bets on precious metals

The surge in metals has been crucial to miners and mining funds, including Sprott Gold Miners (SGDM) and Market Vectors Junior Gold Miners (GDXJ), which have seen gains of 67.9% and 80%, respectively, YTD.

Mining shares that rose tremendously include Harmony Gold (HMY), AngloGold Ashanti (AU), and Gold Fields (GFI), which saw returns of 242%, 103%, and 42.5%, YTD.

According to the data by US CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), hedge funds and money managers raised their bullish position in silver contracts and recorded a high during the past week. Bets on gold futures and options also increased to their highest levels in three and a half years.

In the next and final part of this series, well check in with South African miners.

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
The Story Behind Quest Diagnostics' Valuation-Driving Strategies

Valuation multiples

On April 26, 2016, Quest Diagnostics (DGX) was trading at a forward PE (price-to-earnings) multiple of about 13.7x. Since January 1, 2016, the company has traded at a PE multiple in the range of 12.2x13.7x.

Quest Diagnostics is currently trading at a premium multiple compared to Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (LH) and at a significant discount to peers Davita Healthcare (DVA) and IDEXX Laboratories (IDXX).

The new rule

On September 25, 2015, the CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) proposed a rule related to MCLFs (Medicare Clinical Laboratory Fee Schedule) under PAMA (Protecting Access to Medicare Act) of 2014. The rule requires clinical laboratories to report the payment rates they charge to commercial health insurers.

A report by Department of Health and Human Services has claimed that in 2011, in the case of certain tests, Medicare payment rates to laboratories were higher than those paid by private insurers by about 18%20%. Hence, from January 01, 2017, CMS plans to set the Medicare reimbursement rates to laboratories in line with those of private health insurers.

If this rule becomes effective, its expected to adversely affect the profit margins of the entire clinical laboratory industry. With Medicare accounting for about 14% of Quest Diagnostics net revenues in 2015, investor sentiment for the company has already been weak. This has culminated into low share prices and valuation multiples for the company.

PAMA progress

In March 2016, a small minority (27 members) of the US Congress moved to block the implementation of the MCLF under PAMA. Industry associations such as American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association believe that the rule could be updated based on the opinions of various hospitals.

If the delay continues, it should prove beneficial for Quest Diagnostics profits. This could also boost share prices of the Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLV). Quest Diagnostics makes up about 0.41% of XLVs total portfolio holdings.

Story continues

Now lets explore Quest Diagnostics revenue growth strategy in 2016.

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
Some men simply don't like the way they look without their shirt on. But one man in Germany who went to doctors with concerns about his appearance had a more unusual reason for wanting to avoid being seen bare chested, a new case report suggests.

The 60-year-old man went to see a surgeon because he was dissatisfied with the gnarled and bulging appearance of his chest more than 50 years after he had part of his esophagus  the tube that connects the back of the throat to the stomach  removed.

Back when he was just a 7-year-old boy, a portion of the man's esophagus was burned after he ingested an alkali substance, resulting in a completely narrowed section of this important passageway, according to the surgeons at the University of Freiburg in Germany, who published a report on the man's case Wednesday (April 20) in The New England Journal of Medicine.

He probably swallowed a type of substance called a caustic lye, such as bleach, which can eat away at the lining of the esophagus, said Dr. David Hackam, a surgeon-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore, who was not involved in the man's case.

Back in the day, when this man underwent the original operation to bypass this damaged area, removing a part of the esophagus was considered a pretty aggressive surgery, Hackam said. The procedure would have involved removing the middle part of the esophagus and leaving the upper part behind, he said. [11 Surprising Facts about the Digestive System]

Then, surgeons would have taken a part of the man's intestine and moved it up into the neck region, using it to create a pouch and attaching it to the remaining part of the upper esophagus, Hackam said. Next, the doctors would have hooked up the lower end of the esophagus to the small intestine, he said.

By doing the procedure this way, the surgeons are basically rearranging the plumbing and making a pipe, Hackam told Live Science.

Over time  which, in this man's case, meant more than five decades  the section of the intestine that was placed into the man's neck grew, swelled and became twisted, Hackam explained. By age 60, the man's bare chest revealed the twists and turns of his remodeled esophagus and intestine, clearly visible under the surface of his skin.

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Reconstructed esophagus

This photograph is a very unusual, graphic and revealing look at his restructured intestine, Hackam said. "Doctors don't see this every day," he added. [16 Oddest Medical Cases]

"It's an interesting picture, and a good warning to doctors not to do this particular operation this way any longer," Hackam said. Nowadays, physicians generally use other treatments for a burned esophagus, such as using medicines that can help heal the lining, he said.

Even in cases requiring surgery, the kind of operation this man had as a young boy is not done much anymore. These days, surgeons are more likely to perform what's known as a "gastric pull-up" instead, Hackam said.

A gastric pull-up involves bringing up the stomach from the abdomen into the chest area, and attaching it to the remaining portion of the esophagus, Hackam said. But because the stomach is brought into the chest near the heart, it is a very difficult  and very risky  operation, he said.

The case report revealed that the man had cosmetic concerns about his previous surgery and didn't like its appearance. But the report also said that a test showed that he had no problems with swallowing.

The man was found to have a hernia, an area in which his small intestine was bulging through a weak spot in his abdominal wall, according to the case report. After his surgeon explained the risks and benefits of repairing the hernia, the man decided not to go through with this operation, the report said.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - United Overseas Bank (UOBH.SI), the smallest of Singapore's three listed banks, posted a 4.4 percent fall in first-quarter net profit, in line with expectations, after lower wealth management fees and trading income hit non-interest income.

UOB's net profit came in at S$766 million ($568 million) in the three months ended March, versus S$801 million a year earlier and compared with an average forecast of S$764 million from five analysts polled by Reuters.

The bank blamed softer investor appetite due to volatile market conditions as the reason for the decline in wealth management and trading income.

UOB reported a 30.7 percent decline in provisions for bad loans, even though it took some specific provisions for commodities-related exposure.

Weak commodity prices have hit energy services firms and in turn are affecting asset quality at Singapore banks, with more deterioration seen in 2016.

(Reporting by Saeed Azhar; Editing by Richard Pullin)
The U.S. invested nearly $760 million to boost primary and secondary education in Afghanistan over 12 years but cant figure out whether all those taxpayer dollars have had any impact, according to a new federal watchdog audit.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State and Defense Departments collectively spent approximately $759.6 million on 39 education programs between fiscal years 2002 and 2014, according to an analysis released on Thursday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

Related: 7 Ways the US Screwed Up Rebuilding Afghanistan

USAID spent the most, $617.9 million, while the Pentagon dished out $141.7 million for dozens of education programs. State picked up the rest.

While USAID had a defined strategy, DOD and State did not, the study notes. DOD officials stated that its primary focus was the counterinsurgency mission, and any efforts to develop Afghanistans education system were intended to further the counterinsurgency mission.

Meanwhile, leaders at State told the watchdog they recognized USAID as the primary U.S. agency implementing primary and secondary education programs and deferred to USAID for strategies related to these efforts. But the department does not specifically follow USAIDs strategy.

As a result, the three agencies have not adequately assessed their efforts to support education in Afghanistan, according to SIGAR.

Related: U.S. Taxpayers Paid Millions for Shoddy, Unsafe Buildings in Afghanistan

For example, in 2014 USAID cited Afghan government data that showed student enrollment skyrocketed from 900,000 students in 2002 to 8 million in 2013.

However, the agency wasnt able to prove how its specific education programs are linked to these Afghan-reported results and cant verify whether the data is even reliable.

Both the Afghan Ministry of Education (MOE) and independent assessments have raised significant concern that the MOEs education data may not accurately reflect the true number of students enrolled in Afghanistan, the audit states.

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Therefore, SIGAR says, USAID may be portraying an inaccurate picture of what its programs have contributed to the education sector in Afghanistan.

Related: How Millions of Taxpayer Dollars Were Wasted on Afghan Mining Projects

Since SIGAR was established in 2008, the office has produced more than 200 audits, inspections, letters and reports scrutinizing how the U.S. has spent $113 billion in reconstruction funds in the war-torn country since fiscal 2002.

The new audit shines light on yet another opaque aspect of Washingtons mad dash to bring Afghanistan into the 21st Century following the fall of the Taliban government.

To try to get a better handle of how much bang U.S. taxpayers are getting for their buck, SIGAR recommends, among other things, that USAID, and its mission in Afghanistan, update its education roadmap to better define each agencys role and increase accountability; and that when it does provide progress reports, the office should be candid about the source and reliability of data.

The agency agreed with the suggestions and will have a contractor using independent evaluators conduct a sector-wide assessment of the agencys efforts to support Afghan education, the audit states.

The watchdog also urged the Pentagon and State to assess the extent to which the education efforts have led to improvements in education or increased stability in Afghanistan.

Its worth noting that while DOD agreed with the recommendation, State rejected it, arguing that its contribution accounted for less than 1 percent of the $760 million and that it reviews education programs individually.

Regardless of the amount State invests, SIGAR maintains that the department should do an overall assessment of its projects, SIGAR admonished. If State has looked at its various efforts then the department has relevant data with which to compile those evaluations into an overall assessment.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Washington (AFP) - The United States expressed outrage Thursday over an air strike on a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo and demanded that Russia restrain Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Secretary of State John Kerry said the strike matched a pattern of Syrian government attacks targeting health workers that he said have left hundreds dead.

And he called on Moscow to press its ally in Damascus to respect a cessation of hostilities between regime and rebel forces that has been enshrined in a UN Security Council resolution.

"We are outraged by yesterday's air strikes in Aleppo on the al-Quds hospital supported by both Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which killed dozens of people, including children, patients, and medical personnel," Kerry said.

"While we are still trying to gather the facts surrounding the circumstances of this attack, it appears to have been a deliberate strike on a known medical facility and follows the Assad regime's appalling record of striking such facilities and first responders.

"These strikes have killed hundreds of innocent Syrians," he added.

"The United Nations today assessed the situation in Aleppo to be catastrophic, and the regime's most recent offensive actions there - despite the cessation of hostilities - compound the violence and undermine the cessation of hostilities.

"Russia has an urgent responsibility to press the regime to fulfill its commitments under UNSCR 2254, including in particular to stop attacking civilians, medical facilities, and first responders, and to abide fully by the cessation of hostilities."

The United States and Russia are co-chairs of the International Syria Support Group, a 17-nation body formed to promote an end to Syria's five-year-old civil war through a ceasefire and peace negotiations.

But a two-month-old ceasefire is already in tatters and Assad's government appears to be readying an assault on the divided city of Aleppo following a series of strikes -- some of which, US officials allege, were supported by Russian war planes.
Baghdad (AFP) - US Vice President Joe Biden held talks in Baghdad Thursday during an unannounced visit to Iraq, whose leadership has been locked in a protracted political crisis even as its forces battle jihadists.

"The vice president has arrived in Iraq for meetings with (the) Iraqi leadership focused on encouraging Iraqi national unity and continued momentum in the fight against ISIL," his office said, using an acronym for the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group.

Biden met with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi shortly after stepping off the C-17 military transport plane that flew him to Baghdad.

Abadi and Biden discussed political, security and economic developments, the premier's office said.

Biden's visit comes at a time of political crisis that has seen Iraq's fractious political class squabble over Abadi's efforts to replace the current government of party-affiliated ministers with a cabinet of technocrats.

Political turmoil surrounding Abadi's US-backed reform drive has sparked chaos in parliament, with lawmakers brawling in the chamber, staging a sit-in and throwing water bottles towards the premier.

Thousands of supporters of prominent Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have also protested in recent days outside the fortified "Green Zone" -- where Biden and Abadi met Thursday -- ostensibly to lend mass support to the reform process.

The political shambles has further discredited politicians who are widely seen as corrupt and pursuing only the interests of their parties, clans or sects.

- Praise for Abadi -

A US administration official travelling with Biden praised Abadi, whom many, including within his own party, have criticised as a weak leader.

He said that Abadi "has been a very effective prime minister. He's really pulled the country together."

"The vice president will also be discussing steps the international community can take to promote Iraq's economic stability and further regional cooperation," the statement from Biden's office said.

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Baghdad is grappling with a damaging budget crunch, caused largely by the drop in the price of oil, which accounts for more than 90 percent of Iraq's revenue.

The United States heads an international coalition of countries providing Iraq with arms, military training and a limited number of combat forces to help it battle IS, which overran large areas in 2014.

US forces have in recent weeks further deepened their involvement by setting up a base south of Mosul, which is Iraq's second city and the jihadists' main hub in the country.

The US official said Biden would not venture a timetable for a much-anticipated offensive on Mosul, which is likely to involve a myriad different -- and sometimes competing -- forces.

"We have to be realistic. We are at the end of April. Once we get into July and August, it starts to get pretty hot in Iraq and things start to slow down," the US official said, suggesting a big push on Mosul was still months away.

- Mosul plan -

Abadi vowed in February that IS in Iraq would be fully defeated by the end of the year.

"Its very important that the Iraqis decide on a clear plan for what forces are going to take Mosul, under what arrangements so that everyone is clear about the circumstances that will lead up to liberation and set the conditions for the day after," the US official said.

"What you don't want is a race to Mosul from a bunch of different forces that end up getting in each other's way or clashing with each other," the official said.

Biden's visit is the highest-ranking by a US official to Iraq since he travelled to Iraq in 2011.

With the US election campaign in full swing and President Barack Obama due to leave office having served two terms, Biden's visit is also likely to be his last to Iraq as vice president.

"The vice president has been the point person on Iraq for the administration since the beginning," the US official told reporters on Biden's plane.

"He's been itching to get back for a while -- looking for an opportunity. This seemed like a good moment to do it," the official said.

Biden also met parliament speaker Salim al-Juburi but the White House did not immediately disclose his full programme in Iraq.
Upstream energy partnership Vanguard Natural Resources LLC VNR is set to release its first-quarter 2016 results after the closing bell on Monday, May 2.

In the preceding three-month period, the Houston, TX-based oil and gas finder reported a massive positive earnings surprise of 226.67%. Coming to earnings surprise history, Vanguard Natural Resources has a mixed track record. The company beat estimates in two of the last four quarters.

Lets see how things are shaping up for this announcement.

Factors to Consider This Quarter

Vanguard Natural Resources is a firm in the oil and gas exploration and production industry, which makes its earnings vulnerable to the weak commodity price fluctuations. Oil price during the JanMar 2016 period hovered mostly around $33 per barrel. This was considerably below the prior-year quarter level of around $41 per barrel. Therefore, quite predictably, Vanguard Natural Resources has been able to extract less value for its products. Hence, we expect the groups first-quarter profit margins to remain under pressure.

However, the company has hedged the majority of its production for 2016 at promising prices. The company has hedged 67% of oil at $67.5 per barrel and 78% of gas at $4.15 per million cubic feet equivalent. This should cushion the company from the current volatile pricing environment.

Also, Vanguard Natural Resources has worked hard to improve the well economics through meaningful reductions in well cost and better rate of return. This might also boost the upcoming results.

Earnings Whispers

Our proven model does not conclusively show that Vanguard Natural Resources will beat estimates this quarter. That is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), 2 (Buy) or 3 (Hold) to be able to beat estimates. That is not the case here as you will see below.

Zacks ESP: Earnings ESP, which represents the difference between the Most Accurate estimate and the Zacks Consensus Estimate, is -100%. This is because the Most Accurate estimate stands at breakeven, while the Zacks Consensus Estimate is pegged higher, at 3 cents.

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Zacks Rank: Vanguard Natural Resources has a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). Though a Zacks Rank #1 increases the predictive power of ESP, a negative ESP makes surprise prediction difficult.

Note that stocks with a Zacks Ranks #1, 2 (Buy) or 3 (Hold) have a significantly higher chance of beating earnings. We caution against Sell-rated stocks (Zacks Rank #4 or 5) going into the earnings announcement, especially when the company is seeing negative estimate revisions.

Stocks to Consider

While earnings beat looks uncertain for Vanguard Natural Resources, here are some companies you may want to consider on the basis of our model, which shows that they have the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter:

Enable Midstream Partners, LP ENBL has Earnings ESP of +21.05% and a Zacks Rank #1. The company is expected to release earnings on May 4.

AmeriGas Partners LP APU has Earnings ESP of +4.74% and a Zacks Rank #2. The partnership is anticipated to release earnings on May 2.

Bill Barrett Corp. BBG has Earnings ESP of +9.09% and a Zacks Rank #2. The company is likely to release earnings on May 5.

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Vatican City (AFP) - A clean-up of the Vatican bank has been completed, with the final tally of suspect accounts that had to be closed nearing 5,000, the Holy See's financial watchdog said Thursday.

Unveiling the 2015 annual report of the Financial Information Authority (FIA), its director Tommaso Di Ruzza said a three-year examination of the scandal-hit Institute of Religious Works (IOR), as the bank is officially known, was now finished.

"We took a very strict line towards any accounts that were not in compliance (with Vatican legislation) and now finally the process of closures is done," Di Ruzzo told a Vatican press conference. "A total of 4,935 were closed and that is a final figure."

The FIA was established in 2010 by now-retired Pope Benedict XVI to bring the Vatican's financial institutions into line with international standards designed to reduce the risk of accounts being used for nefarious purposes.

IOR account holders in the past have included mafia figures and it became notorious around the world because of a 1980s scandal centred on the death of banker Roberto Calvi, whose corpse was discovered hanging under Blackfriars bridge in London.

At the same time as it established the FIA, the Vatican signed up for external evaluation by Moneyval, a European body that combats money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

Moneyval reported in December that the Vatican had addressed most of its structural weaknesses.

But it also questioned why no indictments or prosecutions had ensued as a result of the evidence of wrongdoing gathered and handed to prosecutors.

In its latest report, FIA said it had been alerted to 544 suspicious transactions last year, mainly involving possible tax evasion.

That was more than three times the number registered in 2014 (147) but FIA President Rene Brulhart said the spike was likely as a result of more zealous monitoring.

- Insider trading -

"In a process like this you always set a low threshold for reporting to create awareness. I hope in 2016 the figure will be back to normal. Of course ideally we would like a zero figure but that is not realistic."

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The 544 suspect transactions resulted in 17 reports being handed over to Vatican prosecutors, including at least one which included evidence of insider training on a major stock market.

Prosecutors believe Calvi's 1982 death was linked to money laundering via the Vatican bank.

It emerged nearly 30 years later that the Vatican still had no idea of the identity of thousands of IOR account holders and that some accounts were held by people with no apparent connection to the Church or its charitable works.

Others contained secret slush funds used for off-the-books spending by Vatican departments, according to books published recently by two Italian journalists, who are now on trial for conspiring in the leak of classified documents.

Vatican efforts to put its finances in order initially accelerated after Pope Francis's election in 2013. But an economic reform commission he established has since been disbanded and three of its members are currently on trial with the journalists.

Moves to have all the Vatican books externally audited have also been a start-stop affair.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) were appointed in December to do the job by powerful Australian cardinal George Pell, the head of the Vatican's economic secretariat.

But PwC's $3-million contract was suspended last week on the orders of a rival department, the secretariat of state, leaving Pell "a little surprised."
"There is strong interest from around the world" in Paramount Pictures, and Viacom expects "a compelling result" in a deal to sell a minority stake by mid-year, executive chairman and CEO Philippe Dauman said Thursday on the company's earnings conference call.

The deal will be "both a strategic driver" and "reflect the significant value of Paramount, which after all is one of the greatest studios in Hollywood with a 100-plus-year history."

The process to sell a minority stake in Paramount "is continuing" with the company "on track" to secure a deal by mid-year, he said, highlighting that "the strategic and valuation possibilities are compelling." Said Dauman: "A strong strategic partner for Paramount, particularly one that provides international and/or technological clout and expertise, will provide important benefits to both Paramount and Viacom."

The company is in the process of looking at how to best use the proceeds, he said. Dauman also outlined the next steps in the process to find a deal partner. "We are in the final stages of winnowing down [the list of suitors] from over 40 companies that expressed interest to a handful of strong players," he said. "They will be receiving management presentations from this period until mid-May, after which we will get into detailed negotiations, discussions, diligence, all with a view to entering into an agreement ... by the end of June."

Acknowledging "disappointing" Paramount results in the quarter, Dauman highlighted such "promising" upcoming releases as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Star Trek Beyond, Jack Reacher 2 and Ben Hur. But management said due to the $136 million film unit loss in the latest quarter, Viacom will record a film loss for the current fiscal year.

Dauman on Thursday focused on the upside opportunities for the company, saying it continues to make "substantial" content investments and expects solid single mid-digit growth in 2017 and beyond in affiliate revenue after a temporary slowdown. He also highlighted the company's international businesses as underappreciated. "Viacom's international media networks performance continues to be strong with even more growth on the horizon," he said.

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"Our entire management team is completely focused on putting the building blocks for growth in place this year. We have a smart strategy and are investing in our properties in the U.S. and around the world, setting us up to become a growth story in fiscal [year] 2017 and beyond," concluded Dauman.

The company's film unit posted a $136 million quarterly loss, while its TV networks posted lower-than-expected U.S. advertising and affiliate fee revenue.

Viacom earlier this month struck a new distribution deal with Dish Network for 18 channels, including some that will go on Dish's skinny-bundle offering, Sling TV. Some analysts said if Viacom had lost the Dish carriage deal, it would have cost the conglomerate $800 million a year in profit. "The continuing strength of our brands was validated by our recent renewals with Dish and Frontier on attractive terms," Dauman said in a release, and on the call called the deal an "important moment" for the company.

Read More: Paramount to Expand Slate to 15 Films in 2016 From 13
Viacom said it will try to help advertisers figure out how the dynamics of audiences watching TV favorites via broadband-delivered video by teaming up with streaming-video player Roku Inc.. The move is the latest in Viacoms efforts to offer measures to Madison Avenue residents seeking methods of tracking consumers interacting with video with new ways.

Under the pact, Viacom will gain access to audience data from Roku that will allow advertisers to send customized messages to particular audience segments. Viacom said it is the first programmer to gain access to Rokus information.

With this partnership, we can deliver more relevant messages to Roku consumers for products and services that interest them, said Kern Schireson, executive vice president of data strategy and consumer intelligence at Viacom, in a prepared statement. This is the first time dynamic, one-to-one advertising will be possible as part of a larger linear TV buy. Advertising experiences like this are more impactful for both consumers and marketers.

Roku can deliver full-screen video for advertisers, while allowing them to tap into the digital realms interactivity and targeting, said Scott Rosenberg, Rokus vice president of advertising. Were committed to helping our publishers more effectively monetize in OTT, he said in a statement.

Viacom in recent months has worked to collect a wide array of different kids of data in hopes of putting together new deals with marketer seeking to track audiences migrating from TV sets to mobile devices and streaming video. The New York owner of networks like Comedy Central and MTV has also entered into pact with instant-messaging service Snapchat and measurement company ComScore.

The effort comes just weeks before the start of TVs upfront marketplace, when U.S. TV networks try to sell the bulk of their ad inventory for the coming programming cycle.

Related stories

Viacom Chief Expects Paramount Stake Sale Agreement by June

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Viacom Q2 Revenue Dips 3% on Ad Shortfalls, Film Unit Operating Loss

Comcast Predicts Strong TV Upfront for NBCUniversal
victoria's secret bralette

Victoria's Secret is changing its ways.

The company is heavily promoting its bralettes  bras without padding.

Advertisements for these padding-free bras are all over the company's Facebook and Instagram pages. The company is pushing a more natural aesthetic.

For years, Victoria's Secret was known for its push-up bras. The company's advertising made it seem like the ample padding could give customers the chest shape of its iconic Angels.

Now, the company is racing to meet customers' growing demand for bras with less padding.

Victoria's Secret has been writing next to its Instagram posts featuring bralettes "#AllMe," as if to say, "No padding is necessary."

Unfortunately for Victoria's Secret, the bralette category is a lot more competitive.

Gabriella Santaniello, analyst and founder of A-Line Partners, told Business Insider:

The bralette is the hot piece of intimate apparel right now, and it puts Victoria's Secret in an unfortunate position because it takes absolutely minimal design and know-how to manufacture a bralette ... [so] there's a lot more competition. You can go to Urban Outfitters, Express, American Eagle  a lot of other retailers are introducing [the] bralette.

There are also a number of lingerie startups offering bralettes.

"There are no barriers to entering in the bralette game," Santaniello said.

Cool for the summer. #AllMe A photo posted by Victoria's Secret (@victoriassecret) on Apr 15, 2016 at 10:28am PDT on Apr 15, 2016 at 10:28am PDT

The overall move toward bralettes from padded bras is not just limited to Victoria's Secret, though.

"Push-up bras ... they're slipping a little bit out of favor. People are wanting less padding and breezier materials and all that," Cora Harrington, lingerie expert and founder of The Lingerie Addict, told Business Insider in March.

This could be linked to a greater shift in the way women think about themselves.

After all, there's been a clear trend toward accepting all body shapes. Aerie, for example, has challenged retailers to show real, un-Photoshopped women in lingerie ads  and Sapna Maheshwari of BuzzFeed points out that Aerie is known for its bralettes, too.

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Lace. Prints. Strappy details. Triple threat. #AllMe A photo posted by Victoria's Secret (@victoriassecret) on Apr 13, 2016 at 8:56am PDT on Apr 13, 2016 at 8:56am PDT

As a result, some of Victoria's Secret's marketing practices have come into question, particularly as millennials' values fail to align with Victoria's Secret's imagery.

Still, the bralette fails to hit on a few points regarding the body-positivity movement. Like Victoria's Secret's other bras, it's not available in larger sizes. In fact, it doesn't work for curvy women at all. Harrington told Business Insider that it's not possible to have a "flimsy laced-triangle bralette in a J-Cup."

NOW WATCH: This model was dropped from her agency for her sizenow she's the face of Victoria's Secret's top competitor





More From Business Insider


By Ho Binh Minh HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam on Thursday banned the sale and distribution of non-living aquatic products in its central region, following inconclusive efforts to explain why huge numbers of dead fish washed ashore. The ban tackles fears of a health threat along 200 km (124 miles) of the coast, after the government said the fish could have been killed by toxic discharge caused by humans or "red tide", when algae blooming at an abnormal rate produce toxins. On Wednesday, the government said there was no evidence that discharge from a new Taiwanese-built steel plant, a unit of Formosa Plastics, was to blame for the fish deaths. Vietnam exports $7 billion of seafood a year, mostly from waters off its southern coast, but industry has yet to feel the impact. Fish and shrimp from the affected region are chiefly consumed at home, an industry official told Reuters. Deputy Prime Minister Trinh Dinh Dung ordered officials in four Vietnamese provinces to seize and destroy dead aquatic products washed ashore or raised along the coastline. "The use, collection, transport, trading of dead aquatic products as food for people and feed for livestock is strictly prohibited," the order said. Seafood exports from January to April are estimated to have risen 3.8 percent from a year ago to $1.93 billion, compared to a fall of 15.6 percent in 2015. Vietnam's biggest markets are the United States, Europe and Japan. On Thursday, Facebook users called for peaceful protests to highlight food security and environmental concerns sparked by the deaths, while a petition on the White House website urging help from the United States drew close to 100,000 signatures. Signers want President Barack Obama to raise the issue with the government when he visits Vietnam next month, and sought help in doing an independent environmental impact assessment of the steel plant. Tests of seawater in Thua Thien-Hue, one of the affected provinces, showed higher than normal levels of some pollutants, the province's environment department has said. Vietnam has a four-day holiday ending Tuesday, and many people had booked tours to beaches in Quang Binh, neighboring the province of Ha Tinh. The latter, 400 km (250 miles) south of Hanoi, is where dead fish began washing up on April 6. Seafood markets have been deserted and tourist firms are receiving cancellations, state media reported. (Reporting by Ho Binh Minh; Additional reporting by My Pham; Editing by Martin Petty)
Viola Davis is staying put at ABC Studios.

The How to Get Away With Murder star has inked a new two-year overall deal with ABC Studios, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

Under the deal, Davis and her husband Julius Tennon's JuVee Productions has tapped Andrew Wang to oversee the company's TV development. Together, the trio will create and develop new projects for broadcast, cable and streaming services via ABC Studios and its cable arm, ABC Signature.

Wang, who will serve as head of TV development and production, comes to JuVee from Bravo, where over his four-year tenure he launched the NBCUniversal-owned cabler into scripted series with Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce, My So-Called Wife and Odd Mom Out.

Read More: Emmys: Viola Davis Becomes First Black Lead Actress Winner

"Viola Davis' award-winning work in theater, film and television has provided a powerful foundation to advocate for greater opportunities for communities that are traditionally underrepresented in film and television, and to tell the stories that haven't but need to be told," said Wang. "Viola and Julius' determination to provide these opportunities, and to tell these stories, through new voices and fresh perspectives, in any format, is what excited me about joining the team at JuVee Productions. We're thrilled to be working with our partners at ABC Studios to bring JuVee's vision to life  finding new storytellers and bringing their distinct points of view and character journeys to the screen."

JuVee currently is developing legal drama Conviction for TNT with Debra Martin Chase and writer Ayanna Floyd (Empire). The project is inspired by the life of Kym Worthy, the chief prosecutor of Wayne County, Mich., who is known as the toughest woman in Detroit.

"We started JuVee because we wanted to see narratives that reflected our multiethnic and multifaceted culture," said Davis. "We wanted to be a part of classic storytelling, and we didn't want to wait."

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Added Tennon: "Our goal has always been to champion bold, authentic and courageous voices, and Andrew Wang is just that. Andrew has an outside-the-box mindset and the experience to propel our vision forward, and we couldn't be more excited to welcome him to our team."

JuVee is repped by CAA.

Davis joins fellow Shondaland stars Ellen Pompeo and Kerry Washington with overall deals with the studio behind Grey's Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder. All three series are produced by Shonda Rhimes, who has her own massive overall with the studio.
SANTA MONICA, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 28, 2016 / Today, Esse Nutrition, LLC announced their launch of VITAGURL, a new brand of women's beauty & lifestyle supplements. The boutique vitamin line designed by women, for women focuses on being ageless, with a variety of premium quality supplements targeted to the Gen X woman.

While the VMS industry is huge and growing in the U.S., there has been little focus on approaching the category from an anti-aging beauty angle, specifically targeting optimum health for women.

As noted in recent Datamonitor research, China and Japan are setting the trend for using women's supplements for beauty from the inside out, and are leading this segment's market growth.

With social media and lifestyle health & wellness becoming more and more important for the younger generation, Vitagurl is coming at the right time.

"Women from our generation are interested in living longer and healthier," says Kristin Chadwick, founder of Vitagurl. "We know that if you feel good, you look good. We want to spread the word about optimum health not only through our supplements, but through fun, exciting inspiration that supports a positive outlook on life."

Vitagurl plans to launch online, through social channels at facebook.com/vitagurl and instagram.com/vitagurl, influencers and women's events. To learn more, visit us here or contact support@vitagurl.com.

About Vitagurl:

VITAGURL is a new, premium line of beauty supplements that are designed for women, by women. The "Be Ageless" line consist of soy-free, gluten-free and non-gmo formulas that focus on optimum health including supporting memory, digestion, sleep, mood, weight management and beauty. The VITAGURLS, based out of Santa Monica, CA promote messages of health, fitness, beauty and all things positive.

SOURCE: Vitagurl
WOLFSBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Volkswagen Group's (VOWG_p.DE) finance chief said the auto maker is once again in a position to issue bonds, now that the company has released audited full year results.

"We have taken an important step with the issuance of audited results, we will now consider timing," Frank Witter said, adding that he did not think the company would issue a new bond before the end of May.

Speaking at a conference to discuss full year results, Witter further said he expected the VW brand to swing to an operating profit in the first quarter after recording a 127 million euros ($144 million) operating loss in the final quarter of 2015.

Separately, Volkswagen's Chief Executive Matthias Mueller said the VW brand had been using discounts and incentives to prop up sales.

Discounts have risen by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2016, compared with the final quarter of 2015, but incentives still remain 10 percent below those offered by competitors, Mueller said.

(Reporting by Edward Taylor; Editing by Tina Bellon)
Still reeling from the fallout of its emissions scandal, Volkswagen (VW) CEO Matthias Mueller told reporters that "rules were broken and boundaries overstepped it's very painful and we apologize sincerely."

VW is accused of manipulating emissions test data on its diesel vehicles in the U.S. and Europe. The beleaguered carmaker is facing a $9 billion buy back of its diesel vehicles.

"We know that we have disappointed many people  people who have placed their trust in Volkswagen. We stand by our responsibility. And we are doing everything in our power to regain trust," Mueller told an annual financial conference Thursday in Wolfsburg, Germany.

The newly installed boss of the German auto-making giant assured that, "this will remain our most important task until the very last vehicle has been put in order."







Last week, on the back of so-called "Dieselgate," the German automaker reported heavy losses for 2015, with net loss for last year at 1.582 billion euros ($1.77 billion).

Volkswagen sold 9.9 million vehicles to customers in 2015, 2 percent fewer than in the previous year.



The group is in the process of a major realignment of the company and said it was making good progress with this. "2016 will be a year of transition for us, a year in which we will accelerate the transformation" said Muller, adding that the company aims to have a more efficient structure by 2017.



He also said that the group is planning to launch over 20 additional models by 2020.







Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook.


WOLFSBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) will strengthen cooperation with Qatar, its third-largest shareholder, Chief Executive Matthias Mueller said, as Europe's biggest carmaker struggles to overcome the emissions scandal and reposition its business.

"In future there will be closer cooperation in different areas," Mueller told Reuters TV after the carmaker's earnings press conference on Thursday.

The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) holds a 17 percent stake in Volkswagen (VW) and two seats on its supervisory board.

"I very much welcome the role of Qatar," Mueller said, adding VW's top management was in "very constructive" talks with the QIA.

Since the emissions scandal broke last September, there have been reports in the German media saying the QIA had urged VW's top management to scale back the role of labour leaders who have balked at efforts by management to increase cost savings.

"I have no knowledge of this," Mueller said when asked whether he knew of plans to increase the supervisory board's six-member steering committee to grant a seat to QIA.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported earlier this month that Qatar wanted a seat on the steering committee.

(Reporting by Andreas Cremer and Reuters Television; Editing by Maria Sheahan)
WOLFSBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Volkswagen will strengthen cooperation with Qatar, its third-largest shareholder, Chief Executive Matthias Mueller said, as Europe's biggest carmaker struggles to overcome the emissions scandal and reposition its business. "In future there will be closer cooperation in different areas," Mueller told Reuters TV after the carmaker's earnings press conference on Thursday. The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) holds a 17 percent stake in Volkswagen (VW) and two seats on its supervisory board. "I very much welcome the role of Qatar," Mueller said, adding VW's top management was in "very constructive" talks with the QIA. Since the emissions scandal broke last September, there have been reports in the German media saying the QIA had urged VW's top management to scale back the role of labor leaders who have balked at efforts by management to increase cost savings. "I have no knowledge of this," Mueller said when asked whether he knew of plans to increase the supervisory board's six-member steering committee to grant a seat to QIA. Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported earlier this month that Qatar wanted a seat on the steering committee. (Reporting by Andreas Cremer and Reuters Television; Editing by Maria Sheahan)
WOLFSBURG, Germany, April 28 (Reuters) - Volkswagen is not currently contemplating selling any of its brands or units to help pay for the costs of its diesel emissions test cheating scandal, its finance chief told a news conference on Thursday.

Frank Witter said Europe's biggest carmaker believed it had provisioned adequately for all known risks, although there were naturally uncertainties given the scope of the issue.

"We believe in our multi-brand group, so we don't have brand or unit sales on the agenda at all," Witter said.

In its annual report published earlier, Volkswagen said that as yet unknown future financial liabilities could lead to assets having to be sold.

(Reporting by Edward Taylor; Writing by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Ludwig Burger)
By Suzanne Barlyn

(Reuters) - The head of a brokerage industry watchdog says he will leave behind at least one piece of unfinished business when he retires this year: improving access to data so that regulators can more quickly halt problem brokers, and investors can avoid them.

In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, Richard Ketchum, chairman and chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), mentioned several ways data should be better collected and used by regulators and investors. He plans to present at least one of them to FINRA's board of governors before he leaves.

"There's no doubt in my mind that the future of regulation is going to be about data analytics," said Ketchum. "We need to have an environment where there is more access to more data for regulators so that we can react more quickly."

A top priority is getting more and better information onto FINRA's BrokerCheck website, a free database where investors can research professional histories of brokers and firms. Ketchum said he plans to discuss this with FINRA's board, although changes would have to be made through a rulemaking process that could take about a year.

FINRA, which is funded by the industry, also wants to use data to identify the most problematic brokers and firms, Ketchum said. That could be done by looking at which ones push risky investments, or where there are high concentrations of brokers with bad behavior on their records.

"It's very important for us to know, relatively speaking, who's active in structured products, who sold a lot a lot of Puerto Rican bonds," he said.

"The other piece  which we're very focused on now  is the question of how, out of the 600,000-plus registered advisers, you identify the 200 to 300 that are really dangerous from the standpoint of likely to kill again' in the short term," he added, in reference to brokers who repeatedly bilk investors.

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Ketchum, 65, has been running FINRA since 2009, having spent much of his early career at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and other market regulators. He announced his planned retirement last October. A replacement has not yet been named.

The use of data in regulation was a recurring theme as Ketchum discussed FINRA's future role in tracking activity across a growing number of market participants and venues.

Last year, FINRA decided against proceeding with a controversial proposal to collect customer account data that Ketchum said would allow for better analysis of trading activity, asset movements and other areas of surveillance.

The industry and some lawmakers balked at the plan, saying it could infringe on customers' privacy and could become a ripe target for hackers seeking to steal the identities of investors. Brokerages also complained that the plan would have been burdensome and costly.

FINRA does not plan to revive the proposal, known as "Comprehensive Automated Risk Data System," or CARDS, said Ketchum, who expressed some regret about its failure. But he said another planned database unveiled by the SEC on Wednesday might help plug the information gap.

The database, known as a "consolidated audit trail," would track equity and options trades. It could help reconstruct events like the 2010 flash crash, and "more efficiently identify and investigate potential misconduct," SEC chair Mary Jo White said in prepared remarks.

FINRA is one of three organizations bidding to run the database. It might be able to use information from the audit trail for the same purposes it had planned for the CARDS database, Ketchum said.

As far as BrokerCheck goes, FINRA will consider displaying the percentage of brokers with various complaints and regulatory problems at each firm, Ketchum said.

FINRA is also considering making the underlying data available to the public or for licensing, he said. The regulator has long restricted access to the data because of concerns that firms would use it to mislead investors about competitors, among other reasons, Ketchum said.

(Reporting by Suzanne Barlyn; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra and Andrew Hay)
Warren Buffett is universally admired for his wide-ranging wisdom. His sage insights on investing, as well as pithy quips on everything from leadership to marriage to Harley Davidson, have been quoted countless times.

Adding to the library of books mining the Berkshire Buddhas wise investing principles is a new one that aims to draw parallels between Buffetts philosophies and Jewish teachings.

In Values Investing: An Omaha Rabbi Learns Torah From Warren Buffett, Rabbi Jonathan Gross, who served as a rabbi of the only Orthodox synagogue in Omaha from 2004 to 2014, says he became a student of Warren Buffett, but not in the financial sense. I have read his teachings looking for deeper meaning and I have found lessons about morality, ethics, and character development that are consistent with the values of the Torah and Jewish tradition.

In 1996, the Berkshire chairman issued a booklet entitled An Owners Manual to Berkshires shareholders, the purpose of which was to explain the companys broad economic principles of operation. I set down 13 owner-related business principles that I thought would help new shareholders understand our managerial approach, Buffett wrote. Coincidentally (or not), 13 is a meaningful number in Judaism: the great Jewish medieval philosopher Maimonides authored The 13 Principles of Jewish Faith, which boils the religions vast teachings down to 13 fundamental principles (e.g., the belief in the existence of God; the belief in Gods non-corporeality). So the book basically wrote itself, says Gross, 38.

Grosss relationship with Buffett began with a chametz sale in 2012. During the eight-day Jewish holiday of Passover, observant Jews are required to rid their homes of all chametz, which includes anything made from major grains, like wheat, rye, barley, oats and spelt (more background here). This means they cant eat it or own it. Most Jews do a thorough house cleaning and sell any chametz inadvertently left over to a non-Jew. So while he was working as rabbi of Beth Israel Synagogue in Omaha, Gross had an idea: Every year in his annual shareholder letter, Buffett invites people to reach out to him if they have investment ideas they want to share. In 2012, Gross wrote the Berkshire chairman a letter on behalf of him and his congregation, saying, before Passover were desperate to get rid of chametz so the price is low; a week later were craving bread, cookies and pasta, so the price would be high. Its a risk-free arbitrage thats been working for thousands of years.

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The idea is simple. Buy low, sell high. A great short-term investment. I figured Warren Buffett should be able to relate to that, Gross explained in his blog at the time. His idea was to sell Buffett the bulk food from the members of his synagogue who had gotten rid of it in preparation for Passover  and which he was going to donate to the local food bank  and ask Buffett if he would kindly donate the chametz that he just acquired to the food bank. Two days later Buffetts secretary emailed Gross and invited him to the Berkshire office. We sold our chametz to Warren Buffett. It was kind of a publicity thing for the local food bank. He would buy our chametz three times, and he would also donate [the food] and money to the food bank, Gross says. He was so generous with his time; he acted like I was the most important thing on his agenda.

Gross was inspired by Buffetts wisdom and his extraordinary ability to relate those principles in a manner that is succinct, entertaining, compelling and easily understood often employing the use of aphorisms and parables  and saw similarities in Jewish religious texts.

Theres so much value in what he says, and I thought a lot of it meshed with the ethical teachings of Judaism, says Gross, whose book is being sold at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder conference this weekend in Omaha.

So where are the connections between Buffetts investment wisdom and Torah wisdom? Gross, who is now rabbi of Beth Tfiloh Congregation in Baltimore, gives some examples from his book.

Salad Oil

One is the Salad Oil scandal of 1963. It was a major corporate scandal that ultimately caused over $150 million (more than $1 billion in todays dollars) in losses to companies including American Express. Amex CEO Howard Clark released a statement saying that though American Express  said to be at the risk of insolvency  wasnt legally obligated to the creditors, it feels morally bound to do everything that it can to see that such excess liabilities are satisfied. Buffett, then a 35-year-old fund manager, did some sleuthing and concluded that American Express was not going under, and that its name was one of the great franchises in the world (according to Roger Lowensteins book on Buffett). Buffett purchased a 5% interest in the ensuing fire sale for $13 million, and the investment turned out to be a winner.

Gross writes: Where everyone else saw foolishness, Warren Buffett saw wisdom. He took 40% of his own available capital and he purchased a 5% interest in American Express. Before the scandal Amex was in possession of large reserves of salad oil that had a definite and easily calculable market value. Post scandal, they had nothing but their good name The market preferred good oil to a good name, but thousands of years prior, King Solomon wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes, A good name is better than good oil.

Amex didnt have the oil to back up the loan, but they had an ephemeral asset: their reputation. And Buffett banked on the fact that American Expresss reputation was more valuable than the tangible asset. He bet the farm on that. And King Solomon says that explicitly, says Gross.

Another parallel comes from Buffetts 2015 shareholder letter. In it Buffett noted a few of the things that should matter most to investors. He wrote: At Berkshire, we much prefer owning a non-controlling but substantial portion of a wonderful company to owning 100% of a so-so business; its better to have a partial interest in the Hope diamond than to own all of a rhinestone.

Gross writes that philosophy is perfectly echoed in a saying of the Rabbi Matya, who lived in the second century: Be a tail to lions, rather than head to foxes. Meaning, being the head  or the big fish in a small pond  isnt always valuable, Gross writes: It depends on what you are the head of. Its better to be attached to, and surround oneself with, people and things that are superior and that challenge us.

Value investing

Perhaps what Buffett is most known for is his emphasis on value. He searches for bargains, which is ultimately an attempt to get the full value of your money spent. It demonstrates an understanding that money is only a means, writes Gross. He goes on to say that this concept is well illustrated in a famous story about the great Rabbi Elijah of Vilna.

In 1796 when Rabbi Elijah became ill, he called for his family and his students. When they arrived he took hold of his tzitzit, the Biblically mandated fringes that hung from his garment, and he held them up and said, This garment that I bought for a few pennies, by wearing it each day I was able to attain a valuable reward for fulfilling the word of God. In the world to come, even so simple a deed will not be possible. As he left this world for the world to come, he wept because he was leaving behind the investment opportunities that only exist in this world.

Gross writes: Throughout life we make choices of where to spend our time, money, and energy. That is the price we pay. The consequence of our life choices is the value we get. The principles that guide those choices are our values.



On April 30th, Yahoo Finance will have an exclusive live stream of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Click here for more information.


Weight management service provider Weight Watchers International Inc. WTW is scheduled to release first-quarter 2016 results on May 4. In the last reported quarter, the company had posted a loss of 3 cents per share as against the Zacks Consensus Estimate of earnings of 2 cents.



However, on an average, Weight Watchers has surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 42.5% over the last four quarters.





Lets see how things are shaping up for this announcement.



Factors at Play



Weight Watchers expects to report adjusted loss of about 20 cents in the first quarter of 2016. An unfavorable foreign exchange rate and lower starting active base are expected to affect the quarters results.



Total global paid weeks are expected to increase in the low single-digits in the quarter. North America revenues are expected to be flat on a year-over-year basis, while U.K. revenues are likely to decline in the low double-digits in the first quarter. In CE, revenues are expected to be down in the low double-digits.



Weight Watchers expects gross margin to contract 150 basis points in the first quarter, due to changes in product mix as well as shifts in the promotional calendar.



Although the strategic partnership with Oprah Winfrey provided the company free publicity, the deal is yet to prove accretive toward subscriber growth, an important metric to watch out for. At the end of 2015, Weight Watchers had approximately 1.4 million active online subscribers (down 13.3% from 2014) and 1.0 million active subscribers (down 16.7% from 2014) on its monthly commitment plans.



Earnings Whispers



Our proven model does not conclusively show that Weight Watchers is likely to beat estimates this quarter. That is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), 2 (Buy) or 3 (Hold) for this to happen. That is not the case here as you will see below.



Zacks ESP: Weight Watchers has an earnings ESP of 0.00%. That is because both the Most Accurate estimate and the Zacks Consensus Estimate stand at a loss of 18 cents per share.



Zacks Rank: Weight Watchers carries a Zacks Rank #3 which increases the predictive power of ESP. However, the companys 0.00% ESP makes surprise prediction difficult.



Meanwhile, we caution against stocks with a Zacks Rank #4 or 5 (Sell-rated stocks) going into the earnings announcement, especially when the company is seeing negative estimate revisions.



Stocks to Consider



Here are some companies you may want to consider as our model shows they have the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter:



PRA Health Sciences PRAH, with earnings ESP of +3.51% and a Zacks Rank #1.



Adaptimmune Therapeutics ADAP, with earnings ESP of +9.09% and a Zacks Rank #2.



Cardica CRDC, with earnings ESP of +4.26% and a Zacks Rank #2.



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 >>



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CARDICA INC (CRDC): Free Stock Analysis Report



PRA HEALTH SCI (PRAH): Free Stock Analysis Report



WEIGHT WATCHERS (WTW): Free Stock Analysis Report



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To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment Research
From Veranda

Update 04/27/2016: We're one step closer to living under the sea.

Last year, Dubai-based real estate and property management company Kleindienst Group announced plans to build "The Heart Of Europe," an archipelago of more than 125 floating villas located 2.5 miles off the coast of Dubai, according to The Daily Mail. Thanks to new images released this week, we now know what they're going to look like.

The development will consist of six islands of hotels and resorts inspired by different countries. Amenities of note include a members-only floating yacht club, a nightly fireworks spectacular, and the world's first climate controlled streets, which let you experience the same rainy streets and snowy plazas you would in Europse, all year round. So, basically, this place is Disney World for the 1%.

The first of "The Heart of Europe" properties, "The Floating Seahorse," is set to open on December 15th of this year, and the renderings are pretty mind-blowing. According to a press release, 42 villas will be available for rent. The master bedroom and bathroom of each unit will be completely submerged under water, offering pretty incredible views of the sea. The remaining villas will be rolled out through 2019.

Dubai is no stranger to insanely luxurious design  the Emirates first-class airport lounge boasts a cigar bar and in-lounge designer boutique, and development firm Meydan Group announced plans to build an over-the-top leisure, retail, residential, AND hotel complex that will break five world records when it's completed in 2020.

Take a look at "The Floating Seahorse" below.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Previously: When it comes to eclectic real estate developments that range from innovative and cool to borderline bizarre, Dubai is unquestionably the leader. Case in point: A new project called "The Heart of Europe" encompasses six islands off the coast of Dubai, and each one "takes inspiration from some of Europe's most captivating locations," according to the Kleindienst Group. The development, which sounds like a fancier, gaudier Epcot Center, includes a resort that features 42 three-story floating villas with a $1.36 million price tag. The lower level of the 1,700-square-foot villas is underwater and includes kitchen, dining room, living room, and bathroom. The second level has a master bedroom and bathroom, and there's a roof deck terrace on the third level. And in case you get bored sunning yourself on the roof deck and crave an authentic European experience, don't worry -- The Heart of Europe features the world's first climate-controlled outdoor areas, so you can stroll through (artificially) rain and snow-lined streets.

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Via Elite Daily

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Get ready for the best four years! Ariel Winter is heading to college at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Modern Family star shared news of her acceptance on Instagram on Wednesday, April 27.

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Its an AMAZING DAY! Im going to UCLA- thank you to everyone who has been there for me on this journey! #bruinsbaby, the 18-year-old captioned a photo of the schools admissions website showing that she had accepted her offer.

PHOTOS: Stars  They're Just Like Us!

Winter previously revealed she applied to 15 schools throughout California and the East Coast, and shes interested in studying business or law, according to E!. You never know if somethings not going to work out, if one day acting is, like, No, we dont like you anymore! You gotta have something else you can do. Ive always been interested in law, so I think itll definitely be something that Ill love to do and also go to school for, she told the website in 2015.

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By going to school in L.A., the actress will still be able to play Alex Dunphy on the hit sitcom that shes starred in since she was 11. Fans have watched her grow up both on and off the screen over the past seven years. Shes recently become an ambassador for positive body image after showing off her scars from a breast reduction surgery on several red carpets, including the 2016 SAG Awards in January. Shes also come to the defense of other celebs who have been body-shamed and starred in an anti-bullying campaign for Cosmopolitan.com, where she transformed herself into iconic mean girls such as Regina George and Blair Waldorf.






With the disclosure that he is scaling back his campaign organization by 200 or more workers, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Wednesday began shifting from a Democratic presidential candidate to how to place his distinctive liberal stamp on the partys platform this summer.

Just a day after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton soundly defeated Sanders in four out of five important primary contests in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic and all but sewed up the nomination, Sanders told The New York Times that his goal was to beef up his delegate count to enhance his standing at the convention.

Related: Bye-Bye, Bernie? Sanders Vows Hell Keep Fighting, but Clinton Is Moving On

Sanders said that if he could somehow beat out Clinton in delegate-rich California in the primary finale June 7, it will send a real message to the American people and to the delegates that this is a campaign moving in the direction it should, he told The Times.

The tactical contrast between the Sanders and Clinton campaigns at this point couldnt be sharper: Clinton and the Democratic party have begun preparing for an almost certain bruising general election battle this fall with Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump while Sanders and his advisers are charting ways to maximize their influence in policy making at the July national convention in Philadelphia.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that Clintons campaign has teamed up with state and national Democratic organizations in the three key battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia to organize thousands of volunteers, register tens of thousands of voters and raise money to combat the GOP nominee this fall. With her big wins this week in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland and Delaware, Clinton currently holds 2,165 of the 2,383 delegates she needs to secure the nomination, while Sanders has only 1,357.

Aides to Sanders reportedly have been pressing Democratic party officials for a major role in writing the platform for the convention, including strong liberal planks on issues like breaking up too big to fail Wall Street banks, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 a hour, providing free college tuition at public universities and colleges, expanding Social Security benefits and banning natural gas fracking.

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Related: Sanders Electrified the Young. Can Dems Keep them Charged Up?

Since the start of the campaign last year, Sanders, a democratic socialist seeking a major political revolution to end income inequality and crack down on the excesses of Wall Street, has forced the more moderate Clinton to move significantly to the left on many of her positions  sometimes at variance with the policies of her chief patron, President Obama.

There are deep divisions within the party over policy issues, and many of Sanders more youthful and ideologically committed supporters have said there is no way they could support Clinton in the general election  even against Trump. Sanders will be guaranteed a prime time slot to make a major address to the convention, and will be given substantial leeway in setting the tone of the gathering.

Clinton will have little choice but to accommodate Sanders on many key issues, to prevent some liberals from protesting or even walking out of the convention. But while party unity will be an important goal, Clinton also must be careful not to shift so far to the left that she will be saddled with untenable positions on spending, taxes, and campaign reform that puts her at a major disadvantage during the fall campaign.

Related: What Bernie Sanders Gets Right

If necessary, the Clinton forces will be in a strong position to block any policy proposals that would be difficult to defend in the general election campaign. In January, the party chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, appointed dozens of Clinton supporters to the three standing committees of the convention, including platform and rules. Of 45 potential members submitted by Sanders, she appointed just three.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, a top Clinton supporter, was tapped as co-chairman of the policy-writing platform committee, while former Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the co-author of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation and a sharp critic of Sanderss Wall Street reform proposals, will be the co-chair of the rules committee, which governs floor procedures at the convention.

The Democratic convention can and should be more than a coronation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the liberal magazine The Nation, recently wrote. With the rules and platform committee already stacked with Clinton supporters, it will be important to make sure the issues that Sanders has injected into the debate are fairly reflected in the partys agenda.



Sanders bridles at suggestions by the news media that he should drop out of the race now and throw his support to Clinton, or at least dramatically soften the tone of his criticism of her judgment, to avoid handing Trump more ammunition to use against her this fall.

Related: Sanders to Clinton: Heres What My Support Will Cost You

Trump in fact has begun quoting Sanders at campaign events and press conferences, saying that he agrees with the Vermont senator that Clinton has shown bad judgement on Iraq and other areas.

Sanders dismissed the notion that he was helping Trump and the Republicans by feeding them lines about Clintons integrity and judgment as a national leader, saying during an interview Thursday with Chris Jansing of MSNBC that the GOP has plenty of opposition-researchers and they dont need my speeches to talk about Hillary Clinton. They will go after Hillary Clinton, by the way, in ways that I have never, ever gone after Hillary Clinton.

This is called a democracy, Sanders said in defending his continued tough attacks. Why am I running for president, what should I do? I should be talking about what I believe and the differences of opinion I have with Hillary Clinton.

Now if the question is, are my views much closer to Hillary Clintons than to somebody like Donald Trump, of course they are, he added. Now I will do everything that I can  I think Hillary Clinton and I agree on this  that we will do everything we can to make sure a Republican does not win the White House.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
The story of National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden captivated the U.S. in 2013 and now Snowden is getting the Hollywood treatment, as the trailer for Oliver Stone's "Snowden" was released on Wednesday. Snowden is played by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and is seen going from military training to joining the CIA before uncovering the NSA's extent of spying on the American public and handing the information over to journalists. The film is due in theaters on September 16. Snowden, 32, whose supporters say he boldly exposed government infringements of privacy, fled the United States in May 2013 and now lives in Russia where he was granted asylum. The U.S. government filed espionage charges against him for leaking intelligence information.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said on Thursday the United States is "deeply concerned" that China's new law on management of the activities of foreign non-governmental organizations will narrow the space for civil society in China. China's parliament passed a law governing foreign NGOs, state news agency Xinhua reported. The law is part of a raft of legislation, including China's counterterrorism law, put forward amid a new push to crack down on dissent by President Xi Jinping's administration. The White House urged China to respect the rights and freedoms of human rights defenders, journalists, business groups, and others, "including by protecting the ability of foreign NGO's to operate in China," Ned Price, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner, editing by G Crosse and Alistair Bell)
Reading, writing, and arithmeticfor centuries, the three Rs have been seen as the basic foundational skills needed to function in society. Now, a new petition to Congress is giving a signal boost to the modern-day push to add computer science to the essential public school curriculum.

Seattle-based nonprofit Code.org and the Computer Science Education Coalition, a national consortium of businesses and nonprofits, asked Congress to allocate $250 million in federal funding for every student in every school to have an opportunity to learn computer science. Doing so would amplify and accelerate the local efforts in classrooms, unlock opportunity in every state, and give an answer to all the parents and teachers who believe that every student, in every school, should have a chance to learn computer science.

But who will teach those studentsand how theyll be taughthas emerged as a concern among some education experts.

If Congress passes this funding opportunity, we really need to focus on how to prepare existing teachers who have no computer programming experience on how to integrate computing into math and science education, Harry Cheng, the director of the Center for Integrated Computing and STEM Education at the University of California, Davis, told TakePart.

RELATED: 'Girls Who Code' Combats the Gender Gap in Computer Sciences

The petition comes on the heels of President Obamas championing of computer science education in his final State of the Union address in January. In his speech, Obama announced his new Computer Science for All Initiative, which calls for offering every student the hands-on computer science and math classes that make them job-ready on day one.

Supporters of computer science education see it as key to maintaining the nations economic edge. Not only does computer science provide every student foundational knowledge, it also leads to the highest-paying, fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. economy. There are currently over 500,000 open computing jobs, in every sector, from manufacturing to banking, from agriculture to healthcare, but only 50,000 computer science graduates a year, the petition reads. A White House fact sheet on Computer Science for All states that by 2018, 51 percent of all STEM jobs are projected to be in CS-related fields.

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It is the largest category of job growth and wage growth in the countryin every state and in every industry, and it is crucial to national security, Hadi Partovi, the founder and CEO of Code.org, wrote in an email to TakePart. Solving this problem is no longer optional for our country, its mandatoryfor growth, for opportunity, and for security. Sixteen percent of all future wages are in computing occupations.

Along with backing on social media from tech industry giants such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Bill Gates, the petition kicked off with the support of 28 governors14 Republicans and 14 Democrats. The petition also notes that 90 percent of American parents support computer science being taught in schools, with roughly 100,000 educators already teaching it in one form or another.

RELATED: Can Americas Schools Really Teach Every Kid to Code?

The $250 million would go toward training a workforce of public school teachers who can teach introductory computer science concepts, Partovi wrote. Thats significantly less than the $4 billion to train teachers and expand access to instructional materials that Obama requested for Computer Science for All.

Rafranz Davis, a nationally known education technology expert and executive director of professional and digital learning for the Lufkin Independent School District in Lufkin, Texas, is among the nearly 24,000 people who have signed the petition since its launch.

Despite her support, Davis is worried that the funding wont go toward addressing the challenges schools, particularly under-resourced ones, are having getting high-quality computer science education programs up and running. Nearly three-fourths of the roughly 9,000 students in Lufkin come from economically disadvantaged homes, and just over 70 percent are kids of color. If money were our only barrier, we would have figured this out a long time ago, Davis wrote.

What do we expect kids to do, with minimal support, beyond drag-and-drop programming games? We havent answered that well just yet. Also, what does this mean for teachers? We have questions...and not enough teachers in this discussion, she wrote.

Some critics have raised the question of what constitutes a tech or computing job and have suggested that the nation doesnt need every child to learn computer science. Davis acknowledged that an enormous hurdle for adopting computer science in schools is the lack of trained educators. To implement computer science education, schools would need to hire a technology teacher or rely on the free curriculum that Code.org provides.

In Lufkin, Davis has overseen giving teachers certain tools so that kids could take advantage of early learning. For us, that was Code.org. She wrote that students in Lufkin begin using Code.orgs online lessons in first grade and manage themselves, because it is self-paced.

But when classrooms in Lufkin are ready to move beyond what Code.org offers, Davis wrote, its up to us to provide the access to do it, even when we barely have the technology to connect or the internal knowledge to do so. If there is funding, I hope that it provides flexibility to choose what this looks like and the support to make it happen. It cant be on our classroom teachers alone, though.

The petition, Partovi wrote, doesnt say we need every child to learn CSand one certainly wouldnt need that to fill the jobs. We do need every child to be prepared for a world thats changing with technology, and we do need every school to teach computer science, for the children who wish to pursue it.

RELATED: A 15-Year-Old Tech Genius Is Using Her Coding Skills to Curb Cyberbullying

Partovi wrote that he is committed to ensuring that the $250 million the petition asks for is spent on building teaching capacity, not on buying computer hardware. One model of how to build that capacity can be found at Chengs Center for Integrated Computing and STEM Education.

Over the past decade, Cheng has developed a program that equips existing math and science teachers in the Golden Statemost of whom have no previous computer science experiencewith the knowledge and skills to teach their students programming.

We cannot rely on recruiting new computer science teachers, he said. Schools are competing with Google and IBM for new computer science graduates. We cannot compete with them. So we have to develop existing math and science teachers.

Teachers enrolled in Chengs program typically take either a two-day or a weeklong course at a cost of up to $750. This year the program has been rolled out in about 200 schools in California, and the center provides ongoing support and professional development to about 500 K12 educators, Cheng said.

This integration has an added bonus: It boosts students mathematical abilities and helps more deeply engage them in computer science because they see how to apply computer science and robotics to solve real-world problems, Cheng said.

That real-world applicability is evidenced by the fact that Samuel R. Allen, the CEO of John Deere, signed the petition. Because even the world of agricultural manufacturing is being turned upside down by technology. Todays tractor trailers are autonomous vehicles, and tomorrows farmers need to have a basic understanding of computer science too, Partovi wrote.

Given the widening gap in resources between schools that serve kids from more well-off, whiter backgrounds and those charged with educating communities of color, some folks might worry that black and brown kids will end up getting Heres how to build an app courses or watered-down digital literacy classes that may be passed off as computer science for all.

RELATED: Why Black Women Are the Real Unicorns of the Start-up World

Partovi pointed out that the petition has also been signed by prominent groups that advocate boosting the number of women and people of color, including the NAACP: They all recognize that computer science is core to diversity in our future workforce.

Cheng said his program has been successfully adopted in several schools that serve under-resourced populations, enabling kids from diverse backgrounds to learn common programming languages such as C++. In Lufkin, Davis wrote that her team is redesigning our entire CS program with targeted learning starting in elementary [thats] no different than how we structure any other subject.

But, she cautioned, schools must look at what they offer kids, when they offer it, and where they want to go. Then they must make sure that the programming is vertically aligned so that it is truly CS for all...by choice. If not, then were starting yet another initiative with no plan to get there.

For Partovi, if the petition successfully spurs congressional action, the focus of the spending should be on schools that need it most, he wrote. Then again, The exact how of this is too early to speculate about.

Take the Pledge: If We Dont Act Now, Who Will Teach Our Kids?

Related stories on TakePart:





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Original article from TakePart
Investors are always looking for stocks that are poised to beat at earnings season and AstraZeneca PLC AZN may be one such company. The firm has earnings coming up pretty soon, and events are shaping up quite nicely for their report.

That is because AstraZeneca is seeing favorable earnings estimate revision activity as of late, which is generally a precursor to an earnings beat. After all, analysts raising estimates right before earningswith the most up-to-date information possibleis a pretty good indicator of some favorable trends underneath the surface for AZN in this report.

In fact, the Most Accurate Estimate for the current quarter is currently at 63 cents per share for AZN, compared to a broader Zacks Consensus Estimate of 60 cents per share. This suggests that analysts have very recently bumped up their estimates for AZN, giving the stock a Zacks Earnings ESP of 5.00% heading into earnings season.

Why is this Important?

A positive reading for the Zacks Earnings ESP has proven to be very powerful in producing both positive surprises, and outperforming the market. Our recent 10 year backtest shows that stocks that have a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) or better show a positive surprise nearly 70% of the time, and have returned over 28% on average in annual returns (see more Top Earnings ESP stocks here).

Given that AZN has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) and an ESP in positive territory, investors might want to consider this stock ahead of earnings. Clearly, recent earnings estimate revisions suggest that good things are ahead for AstraZeneca, and that a beat might be in the cards for the upcoming report.

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ASTRAZENECA PLC (AZN): Free Stock Analysis Report



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What Could Impact Williams Companies' Upcoming 1Q16 Earnings?

(Continued from Prior Part)

Williams Companies market performance

Williams Companies (WMB) is one of the most talked about companies in the midstream energy sector after its merger agreement with Energy Transfer Equity (ETE). WMB has lost 25.8% of its market value since the beginning of 2016 and 63.2% in the past one year. WMBs loss can be attributed to uncertainties surrounding the pending merger. WMB forms 0.89% of the iShares North American Natural Resources ETF (IGE).

Below are the series of events that have taken place since the merger announcement in September 2015.

The fall in energy prices has raised questions over the timing of the deal.

ETEs replacement of its CFO (chief financial officer) Jamie Welch, the main architect behind the ETE-WMB deal, raised concerns over the prospects of the merger. Later, Welch reportedly called WMB shareholders and urged them to vote against the deal in its current form.

There has been speculation that ETE wants to pull out of the deal.

ETE has lowered the expected merger synergies.

Williams filed a lawsuit against ETEs private offering. Williams won a motion in a Delaware Court to expedite litigation against ETE.

ETE said in an S-4 filing that the transaction might not qualify as an exchange but rather a reorganization, which might result in tax liabilities for WMB shareholders.

Williams Partners market performance

WMBs midstream MLP subsidiary Williams Partners (WPZ) has returned -0.2% since the beginning of 2016. WPZs peers EnLink Midstream Partners (ENLK) and Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) have returned -14.3% and 5.2%, respectively, in 2016. However, WPZ has rallied 55.9% in the past one month.

WPZs recent rally could be attributed to the following positive updates on its organic projects:

The partnership announced FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) approval for Transcos Garden State Expansion Project serving customers in New Jersey.

WPZ reached an agreement with Shell Offshore and Nexen Petroleum Offshore to provide deepwater gas gathering services to the Appomattox development.

Story continues

Williams Partners Constitution Pipeline

Snapping its month-long rally, WPZ fell ~4% on Monday, April 25, 2016, after NYSDECs (New York State Department of Environmental Conservation) decision to deny the Section 401 Water Quality Certification for the Constitution Pipeline Project. However, the partnership remains committed to complete the project. The Constitution Pipeline is a 125-mile pipeline project proposed to connect domestic natural gas production in northeastern Pennsylvania with northeastern markets during the second half of 2017.

In the next part of the series, well see what analysts are recommending for Williams before it announces its 1Q16 earnings.

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
ECB Stimulus, Brexit, and 12 Europe-Focused Mutual Funds

(Continued from Prior Part)

Performance evaluation of the T. Rowe Price European Stock Fund

The T. Rowe Price European Stock Fund (PRESX) fell 4.5% in 1Q16, making it a below-average performer among the 12 funds in this review. In the past one year, the fund has fallen 7.5%, putting it in the middle of the pack of our 12 funds. Meanwhile, from the end of December 2015 until April 25, 2016, the fund has risen 1.0%. In the graph below, you can see its performance against two ETFs: the Vanguard FTSE Europe ETF (VGK) and the iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF (EZU).

Lets look at what has contributed to PRESXs below-average performance in 1Q16.

Portfolio composition and contribution to returns

Financials, PRESXs joint largest invested sector, was the biggest negative contributor to the funds returns in 1Q16. Credit Suisse Group (CS) and Intesa Sanpaolo SpA (IITSF) were primarily responsible for the sectors poor showing. Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS), Aviva (AV), and a few others contributed as well.

The negative contribution by IT (information technology) stocks was quite substantial. IT followed financials at the second spot, even though the sector formed less than 8% of the assets. Wirecard and SimCorp combined drove the sectors returns down.

Novartis AG (NVS) pushed the healthcare sector down, with Roche Holding (RHHBY) and AstraZeneca (AZN) contributing a sizable chunk to the sectors overall negative contribution.

Industrials and consumer staples were quite close in terms of positive contribution for 1Q16. However, the positive contribution from industrials was reduced due to individual negative contributors from the sector.

Investor takeaways

Financials and healthcare stocks from Europe have generally had a hard time in 1Q16. So it was no surprise when these sectors emerged among the biggest negative contributors to PRESXs returns for the period. However, it was its stock picks from the information technology sector that drove down the funds performance to below average. Although consumer staples and industrials emerged as positive contributors, their contribution was unspectacular.

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PRESX was beaten by passively managed VGK in terms of total returns for 1Q16. PRESXs stock picks from the consumer discretionary and healthcare sectors contributed less negatively to the fund compared to VGK. But all other sectors in the passive fund did better than its active counterpart.

RESX has certainly seen better days than this. Investors with a long investment horizon may choose to do nothing. But investors nearing the end of their investment horizon may decide to diversify if their losses arent big and if theyre still making a profit.

Well look at the Franklin Mutual European Fund  Class A (TEMIX) in the next part of this series.

Continue to Next Part

Browse this series on Market Realist:
Police are seeking information about a woman who they say was involved in an assault outside of a Philadelphia Starbucks, where a cup of hot coffee reportedly was thrown at the victim.

Read: Cop Who Tried to Sue Starbucks for $750,000 Shows Picture of Crater in His Leg from Coffee Burn



According to the Philadelphia Police Department, a black woman wearing pink pants and carrying a pink handbag was at theStarbucks on 1600 Arch Street on Monday morning when she allegedly threw a coffee stirrer at the 54-year-old victim.

Police told IE.com that the cause of the original argument is unknown.



When the two women exited the chain coffee shop, they were caught on security camera reportedly continuing their dispute.

The suspect, who police believe to be in her mid-40s, can be seen approaching the victim, who backed up from the confrontation.

The suspect can then be seen physically attacking the victim and appeared to throw the fresh coffee in her face. In the following scene, the suspect was against a planter at the top of the steps.

In a statement, police reported that "the suspect then grabbed the complainant by her hair pulling her to the ground where she continued punching her."

Finally, a passerby appeared to separate the women and lifted the victim up off the ground.

Officer O'Brien from the Philadelphia Police Department told IE.com that while the victim appeared to have coffee thrown at her face, she did not require hospitalization or any transportation to medical care.

Though Starbucks has not yet responded to IE.com's request for comment, O'Brien said it is the company's decision whether or not they will get involved since it happened off their property.

Police said they do not yet have any suspects in custody, and they encourage anyone with leads on the 5'10", 130-pound woman to contact them anonymously.

While O'Brien said they have not received any other leads regarding the incident, the Philadelphia Police Station hopes that posting the incident on social media will help them come closer to arresting a suspect.

Story continues

"We've cleared above and beyond close to 500 jobs [with] the public's assistance," O'Brien told IE.com. "It's a good use of social media, and posting on our website."

Watch: Mom Who Confronted Starbucks Worker For Stealing: 'Everyone Needs to Know What She Did'

Related Articles:
Women influence almost 80 percent of car buying decisions, but only 16 percent make it to managerial positions in the automotive industry, according to a report on gender diversity by Ernst & Young.

In a survey of 350 business leaders from 51 countries around the world, which included 50 from the auto sector, 56 percent of leaders acknowledge women as a critical source of underutilized talent. For example: Among the 50 largest publicly held auto company suppliers in North America, less than 10 percent of business leaders are women.

Meanwhile, 90 percent of auto companies believe they need to change their approach to attracting, retaining and promoting talent dramatically, while only about 22 percent of auto companies surveyed have structured programs to identify and develop women's careers.

The report's sole focus on the automotive industry stems from the findings that the most insufficient diversity of thought and experience exists in this sector at 38 percent, followed by oil and gas at 44 percent and power & utilities at 52 percent.

"The speed of disruption in automotive is accelerating at a historic pace," Randall Miller, EY's Global Automotive and Transportation Sector leader said in a press statement. "Having the right talent in place to support this disruption is mission critical. With a billion women joining the economy for the first time by 2020, advancing gender diversity can be a major competitive advantage to auto industry players."

The advantage is seen in tackling ongoing volatility in the auto industry. Digitization, regulations, evolving customer needs and new competitors are some of the disruptive trends impacting the business landscape in the automotive industry. This industry lacks diversity and hence business leaders surveyed by EY believe that diversity of thought and experience will be key to navigate the challenge of disruption.





The report also points to the challenge that men and women don't see the need for gender diversity in the same way. There is a significant gap between what women find valuable in helping them attain leadership positions and what men think women would find valuable. However, an increasing number of automotive companies are now offering leadership positions exclusively for women.

Story continues

"There is a lot of talk about inclusive cultures," Victoria McInnis, Vice President, Tax and Audit at General Motors, told E&Y in the report. "What it really comes down to is this: do you feel authorized to speak as freely as anyone else? Do you think your opinion is valued as much as anybody else's?"

European diversity

However, it is no secret that there are still very low numbers of women making it to boardrooms. In a similar report on the progress of women on the boards of 600 largest European-listed companies published by European Women on Boards (EWoB), Sweden tops the list in terms of gender diversity, followed by Norway, Belgium, Finland and France, where women make up over 30 percent of board members.

Telecommunications Services make it to the top in board gender diversity in the list of sectors, followed by financial utilities, consumer staples and consumer discretionary sectors.





The results also show that women have increased their presence as independent non-executive directors, therefore enabling them to exert critical influence over the strategic decision-making of corporations. It analyses the Stoxx 600 companies over the period spanning 2011-2015, which includes leading companies from 17 European countries. The analysis found that the presence of women on boards has increased from an average of 13.9 percent to 25 percent in five years.

While the differences in the development of board of gender diversity in individual industry sectors are smaller, significant gender disparity exists on boards on a country-by-country basis that point to specific factors such as quotas and targets being the key drivers. Out of the 12 largest European markets, five (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Norway) now have mandatory quotas on female board membership and ten have either an optional quota or a comply-or-explain best practice recommendation concerning board gender diversity, the report says.

"I look forward to the day when we no longer have to say, 'She's the first'. That's when society  and people  will have moved on," Birgit Behrendt, Vice President, global programs and purchasing operations at Ford told E&Y in the report.





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Indias Thazhathangady Juma Masjid mosque is one of the oldest in the country. (Image via Wikipedia)



For the first time in its 1,000-year history, one of Indias oldest mosques opened its doors to women. So thousands of Muslim women flocked to the religious site in Kerala on Sunday, reports the Times of India, making their way into the Thazhathangady Juma Masjid to view its historic architecture and ancient wooden carvings: A local tourism site likens it to a kings palace due to elements like an inner courtyard, an exquisitely carved gabled roof, and lovely latticed windows.

Related: Family Welcomes 1st Baby Girl Since 1914

The women were not, however, permitted to pray or worship and were not allowed to enter the mosque while men were inside, reports Time. A second day of visitation has been set for May 8. Muslim women in the right attire can enter the mosque only on the two days as decided by the committee, chief Imam Moulauddeen Sirajjuddeen Hasni says.

Related: Paralyzed Bride Cut Ties With Friend Who Pushed Her in Pool

The committee is entertaining the idea of permitting women to pray, India Today reports, but they would not disrupt the prayer schedule for men and so at least for now women can only visit, and there are stipulations there, too.

Outsiders cannot enter. Only Muslim women can and about women praying inside, we will discuss in future, the mosque committee president says. Says one woman: I had always wanted to enter and offer worship. But I was afraid of even expressing that desire. I am happy that such an opportunity has come now. (On the subject of Indian treasures, the country wants its unlucky diamond back.)

By Elizabeth Armstrong Moore

More From Newser:

2-Year-Old in Backseat Shoots, Kills Mom

Cosmetic Trend for Teen Girls: Labia Surgery

This article originally appeared on Newser: Women Enter 1K-Year-Old Building for First Time
A , world: Researchers may have just confirmed the existence of a new kind of wolf. As Madhu Chetri, a graduate student at Norway's Hedmark University College, and a research team suggested in a recent paper, the Himalayan wolf is likely a separate species from the other wolves with which it has long been classified. Otherwise known as the "woolly wolf," this rare has likely been genetically distinct for some 800,000 years, National Geographic reported.

Study highlights distribution, vulnerability of Himalayan wolf http://upi.com/6296353t via @upi

Chetri first saw the animal in Nepal and was struck by how unwolflike the apparent wolf looked, according to National Geographic. It was smaller in size than the typical gray wolf and slimmer, with white blotches near the neck. Following on the heels of two early 2000s studies on the Himalayan wolf's DNA, Chetri wanted to see if and just how much it differed from its wolfish peers, National Geographic reported.

He set about collecting the animals' poop, gathering four usable samples from which he could extract mitochondrial DNA. The results aligned with those of the two previous studies, indicating "the Himalayan wolf was significantly different from any other wolves and is likely a distinct species," in National Geographic's words.

Source: Giphy

While a new, wolflike species is an exciting prospect, there is a downside: Fewer than 350 of these creatures are thought to exist, meaning they're critically endangered and "deserve special conservation attention," to quote the paper.

They'll also need a formal species name, and while Chetri and company haven't yet settled on what that should be, we recommend they not put it up for a public vote; Wolfy McWolf-face is a mouthful.
The Future of Microsoft: Life after Missed Earnings in Fiscal 3Q16

(Continued from Prior Part)

Analyst views of Microsoft

Already in this series, weve looked at Microsofts (MSFT) recently announced fiscal 3Q16 results. We explored the performance of its various operating segments as well as the factors that impacted the companys growth. We explored the companys forward dividend yield compared to that of peers like Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM), Adobe (ADBE), Red Hat (RHT), and ServiceNow (NOW), as of April 21, 2016. We also looked at the forward EV-to-EBITDA (enterprise value to earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization) multiples of these players.

Now lets take a look at Wall Street analysts views of the company. Of the 39 analyst recommendations on Microsofts stock, 62% were buy as of April 21, 2016. About 28% were hold recommendations, and 10% were sell recommendations. Notably, analyst expectations have improved slightly on Microsofts stock after its recent fiscal 3Q16 earnings release.



Microsofts price performance

Microsofts stock price movement during the past month has been positive. As of April 21, 2016, the companys stock has risen by 5.5%. The Wall Street consensus target price for Microsoft is $58.48 per share. The median target price was $60 as of April 21, 2016. Microsofts closing price was $55.78 on the same date.

Investors looking to gain exposure to Microsoft might consider investing in the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK). XLK invests ~10.5% of its holdings in Microsoft. It also has ~33% exposure to application software.

For related analysis, keep checking in with Market Realists Tech, Media, and Telecom page.

Browse this series on Market Realist:
By Felix Onuah ABUJA (Reuters) - The World Bank's managing director and Nigeria's president on Wednesday discussed how the multilateral lender could help Nigeria overcome its economic crisis and repatriate more than $300 million stolen by a former military ruler. On her second day of meetings with Nigerian officials, World Bank Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer Sri Mulyani Indrawati held talks with President Muhammadu Buhari which centred around plans to stimulate the flagging economy with a record 6 trillion naira ($31 billion) budget. The economic crisis in Africa's top oil exporter has been caused mainly by a sharp fall in crude prices eating into its oil revenues, which make up about 70 percent of national income. Nigeria will have to borrow 1.8 trillion naira from abroad and at home to help fund the budget, which has been delayed by several months and wrangling with parliament, if it goes ahead. Although Nigeria has held talks with the World Bank over a possible loan or credit facility in recent months, Indrawati did not address this when speaking to reporters after the meeting. "We would like to know how we can help Nigeria to make the very important decisions, whether on micro economic policy and other sectoral policy, that will make this economy move forward to become a strong middle income country," she said. Nigeria's economy, the largest in Africa, grew by 2.8 percent last year, its slowest pace since 1999. Indrawati, who met Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun on Tuesday, said she and Buhari discussed the government's "commendable goals to improve tax collection and crackdown on corruption". During the meeting, Buhari urged the World Bank to assist in the repatriation of $320 million stolen by former military leader Sani Abacha, which is being held by authorities in Switzerland, his office said in a statement. One of the conditions given by Swiss Authorities for repatriation of the funds was that the money should be used for social welfare programmes, which is to be monitored by the World Bank. "We are as concerned as the World Bank about accountability. If such repatriated funds have been misapplied in the past, I assure you that the same will not happen with us," said Buhari, who won an election last April on an anti-corruption ticket. The statement added that $320 million was "a lot of money" which would "help to ease the current economic hardship facing the country". (Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram, editing by Ed Osmond)
Aden (AFP) - A suicide bomber targeted the police chief of Yemen's second city Aden on Thursday in the latest attack against senior officials in the base of the Saudi-backed government, a security official said.

The bombing came after loyalist forces backed by a Saudi-led military coalition seized the key southeastern port city of Mukalla and the nearby airport and oil facilities from Al-Qaeda, ending a year-long occupation by the jihadists.

General Shallal Shayae escaped unharmed from the attack but one guard was wounded when the bomber blew up a vehicle packed with explosives, the official said.

A witness said the bomber, dressed as a woman, was stopped at a checkpoint on the perimeter of the compound around the general's house, where he blew himself up.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, but Shayae has survived attacks by jihadists more than once.

In February, suspected Al-Qaeda militants opened fire on a convoy carrying Shayae and Aden governor Aidarus al-Zubaidi, but they escaped unharmed.

Shayae and Zubaidi also survived a car bombing that targeted their convoy in Aden on January 5 killing two of their guards.

The port city has seen a growing jihadist presence since loyalist forces backed by the Saudi-led coalition drove Huthi Shiite rebels out of the city in July.

For the first 12 months of the intervention that the coalition launched in March last year, it focused its firepower on the rebels, creating a power vacuum that was exploited not only by Al-Qaeda, but also by rival jihadists of the Islamic State group.

As a ceasefire with rebels went into effect on April 11, the loyalists and their allies turned their guns on the jihadists, driving them out of a string of southern provincial capitals and imposing heavy losses.

Washington regards Al-Qaeda's Yemen-based branch as its most dangerous and has waged a drone war against its commanders since 2002.
Miami (AFP) - It's no secret that good genes can explain why some people age well. But researchers said Thursday they have identified a specific gene variant that can make people look about two years older than their actual age.

Scientists already know that the gene in question, known as MC1R, is responsible for producing red hair and pale skin, according to the report in the journal Current Biology.

But now they have identified a variation in this gene that seems to age people faster.

"For the first time, a gene has been found that explains in part why some people look older and others younger for their age," said researcher Manfred Kayser of Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Previous research has shown that a person's genes and environmental factors contribute equally to how old a person looks.

Perceived age is also important because it can be linked to a person's actual health and their risk of dying prematurely, other research has suggested.

For the current study, scientists examined the genomes of more than 2,600 elderly Dutch Europeans "for DNA variants associated with differences in perceived facial age and wrinkling as estimated from digital facial images," the report said.

"The strongest hits for perceived facial age were for DNA variants in the MC1R gene."

Researchers said they were able to confirm their finding in two other large European studies.

The influence of the MC1R gene variant was not swayed by age, sex, skin color, or sun damage.

MC1R is also known for its role in inflammation and DNA damage repair, processes that may influence how youthful a person appears, researchers said.
By Matt Siegel and Swati Pandey SYDNEY (Reuters) - Apple Inc expanded its Apple Pay digital wallet in Australia on Thursday after ANZ became the country's first bank to support the mobile payment service, executives at the pair told Reuters. Apple Pay allows users to register credit cards on devices such as iPhones, and pay for goods and services by swiping the devices over contactless payment terminals. Apple charges card providers for transactions via the service, which it introduced to Australia last year with American Express Co. The latest partnership extends the service to ANZ customers and represents the culmination of months of talks with the bank and three bigger peers. Of the four, ANZ and Westpac Banking Corp have already agreed to support rival Android Pay from Alphabet Inc unit Google. Collectively, the four banks account for 80 percent of all credit cards that consumers have linked to mobile payment systems, in a country with a relatively high rate of contactless payment. The partnership also coincides with Apple's first-ever drop in iPhone sales during a quarter in which services such as apps, music and payment emerged as the firm's second-largest business. "Our customers ... are much closer to being able to leave their wallets at home," Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay, said in an interview. Apple has partnered with a bank widely seen as trailing its three bigger peers in digital technology, a situation ANZ's new Chief Executive Shayne Elliott has set out to change with Apple Pay, as well as by hiring Google's Australia managing director. "It would be pretty hypocritical of me to ... do all this hoo-ha about digital banking and then not be at the forefront of change," Elliott said in an interview. Shares of ANZ rose over 0.5 percent early on Thursday, more than other banks as well as the broader market. For Apple, the partnership is a "coup" as it would increase pressure other banks to follow suit, said Foad Fadaghi, managing director of technology researcher Telsyte. "The similar forces that drove other numerous banking corporations in say the U.S. or Europe to get onboard will probably start to also kick in Australia as well," he said. Analyst David Ellis at Morningstar said one partnership does not automatically entail success because the big four banks have such dominance over payment systems. "It's a different market here in Australia to the U.S. and to other global economies ... but who knows," he said. "iPhones have the highest market share in Australia of smartphones, so the banks won't want their customers being put at any disadvantage to competitors within their peer group." (Reporting by Matt Siegel and Swati Pandey; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
From Popular Mechanics

"Whip" antennas-those long metal rods that used to extend from our cars-look pretty cool in a Smokey and the Bandit kind of way. But for military vehicles, they're not such a great solution.

Troops in the field communicate using relatively low frequency radio signals. The upside is that they don't require much power and can travel long distances. But to operate efficiently, antennas need to be at least one-quarter the length of the radio waves they transmit. Since military comms use the HF band where radio waves can range from 10 to 100 yards in length, big antennas are better. But putting huge antennas on a Humvee or an armored personnel carrier or a tank just isn't practical. Short antennas, meanwhile, are inefficient, operating in a narrow bandwidth and dissipating as much as 90 percent of input power as useless heat instead of useful broadcast radio signals.

"If a large metallic structure is there, why not take advantage of it?"

But what if you could effectively enlarge antenna size by using the vehicle itself as an antenna? That's what University of WisconsinMadison engineers are seeking to do as part of a project supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). "We're basically looking at using the 'antennas' traditionally mounted on military vehicles as a means of exciting the platform itself," says Nader Behdad, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UWMadison. "If a large metallic structure is there, why not take advantage of it?"

The team aims to design "coupling structures" that, when strategically placed on a vehicle, allow it to transmit or receive signals at low frequencies. The structures act as electric or magnetic dipoles "exciting" the main structure-that is, making it resonate at frequencies comparable to its size and shape. They can "tune" the vehicle to work as an antenna across a range of frequencies.

Story continues

"Think of an armored personnel carrier for example," Behdad says. "The dimensions are generally about 10 meters long. Some natural resonate modes of the structure resonate very efficiently at HF frequencies with different [stimulative] current distributions and radiation patterns. With the scale model we used, we showed that this works."

The scale model they made was merely a simple metal box paired with rudimentary loops as coupling structures. The project is only two months old, but over the course of the next two years the researchers wantto scale up to a full-size vehicle. Behdad says they've found that the shapes of the coupling structures matter less than their placement, but that if energy is efficiently coupled to the platform, wide band antenna operation at low frequencies around 10 MHz is possible. Conveniently, the process doesn't require changing the vehicle structures themselves. "We're not going to cut or alter the platform, we're just going to put coupling structures on," Behdad emphasizes.

"You could hear signals from the other side of the world."

Bandwidth is important. Current military vehicles use separate transmitters handle internet data, Bluetooth connections, and cellphone calls because each signal uses a particular bandwidth. If a truck-as-antenna has enough bandwidth can capability to send and receive multiple types of information, it can dispense with multiple antennas, becoming more stealthy and less prone to damage. "If you increase the volume over which your radiating current is distributed, you have increased bandwidth. Because the platform is the antenna, you get more bandwidth than with a whip antenna mounted on it and tuned to the same frequency," Behdad says.

The team's goal is to achieve a bandwidth of 25 KHz at 2 MHz and a larger range at 10 MHz. Such bandwidth could allow for data transmission rates up to 100 Kbps, sufficient for voice and text data if not video or images.

In this era of high-speed, high-frequency broadband technology, it's an oddly simple solution. "When I was younger, I used to listen to short-wave radio stations using a small transistor radio. You could hear signals from the other side of the world. That was amazing to me. I tell my students that if our infrastructure breaks down for some reason, HF radio is going to be the only reliable means of long range communication."
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn said Thursday he had sold his entire stake in Apple Inc , citing the risk of China's influence on the stock. Icahn, in an interview with cable television network CNBC, also said he was "still very cautious" on the U.S. stock market and there would be a "day of reckoning" unless there was some sort of fiscal stimulus. Icahn had been a huge cheerleader of Apple, acquiring a stake in the company almost three years ago, repeatedly calling the investment a "no brainer." In an open letter to Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook in May 2015, Icahn had argued that shares of the iPhone maker were worth $240, about 90 percent more than they had been trading. At $240 a share, Apple's market cap would be $1.4 trillion, Icahn asserted. But Icahn, who owned 45.8 million Apple shares at the end of last year, said China's economic slowdown and worries about how China could become more prohibitive in doing business triggered his decision to exit his position entirely. "We no longer have a position in Apple. Tim Cook did a great job. I called him this morning to tell him that and he was a little sorry, obviously. But I told him it's a great company," Icahn said. "In Apple today as opposed to six months or a year ago, in this one, theres no need for activism because I think they have a great management. But you worry a little bit, maybe more than a little, about China's attitude." The Chinese government could "come in and make it very difficult for Apple to sell there ... You can do pretty much what you want there," Icahn said. Earlier this month, China shut down Apples iTunes movies and iBooks stores within the country, following Beijing's introduction of regulations in March imposing strict curbs on online publishing, particularly for foreign firms. Asked when he might get back in, Icahn replied: "I dont think its the price point. I think it's my opinion about what is happening with China. I think the stock is very cheap on a multiple basis. China could be a shadow for it, and we have to look at that." Icahn, who suggested that he made roughly $2 billion off the Apple trade, said he was in Apple for about three years and "if you bought the stock then, you got a 48 percent to 50 percent total return. We obviously made a great deal of money, but it was no surprise that we got out of some in February." Apple shares came under further selling pressure during Icahn's television interview, as did the Dow Jones industrials with Apple closing down over 3 percent at $94.83. The Dow ended down by 210 points. Apple on Tuesday posted its first decline in iPhone sales as well as its first revenue drop in 13 years. The company's sales fell by more than a quarter in China, its most important market after the United States, and it forecast another disappointing quarter for global revenues. Apple shares have now declined more than 10 percent this week. (Reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by James Dalgleish, Jennifer Ablan and Bernard Orr)
From Popular Mechanics

A small drone took off near Homestead National Monument in Nebraska and started dropping incendiary bombs, creating a blaze that engulfed 26 acres of prairie. This was not the signal for the start of the robot uprising, though (as far as we know.) This demonstration from earlier this week was meant to show off how drones could become firefighters.

Sometimes you have to start a fire to stop a fire, and these so-called prescribed burns are beneficial to the environment and reduce the risk of uncontrolled fires. For small areas, prescribed fires can be set by hand. For larger areas helicopters are used, but setting fires from a low-flying helicopter can be a dangerous business, and they are expensive to boot. So a team from University of Nebraska-Lincoln set out to find a better way.

The Nebraska Intelligent MoBile Unmanned Systems ("Nimbus") Lab has drone projects for surveying, water sampling, and starting fires. Their Unmanned Aerial System for Firefighting (UAS-FF) is a hexacopter drone fitted with hopper containing up to fifty "ignition spheres" the size of ping-pong balls. The drone injects each sphere with ethylene glycol to start an incendiary reaction before releasing it. Seconds after it hits the ground, the ball bursts into flame and ignites anything in contact. The big challenge was making the apparatus small enough to fit on a rugged portable drone, and then building software for an operator to monitor and control everything from a distance.

The UAS-FF can carry out a mission without human assistance, flying on a pre-planned path guided by GPS and dropping ignition spheres according to a specified pattern. The UAS-FF can start fires in complex patterns and is useful for interior ignition, where a fire is started inside another perimeter fire. Obviously, such a task may be hazardous to carry out by hand.

In the test at Homestead this week, a team of fifteen firefighters lit the perimeter fire with torches, while the drone dropped its spheres to execute the interior. Even when flying its assigned route, the UAS-FF is fitted with thermal sensors and can avoid flying into dangerous updrafts created by the fire. "The idea is that it can light patterns humans can't," Brittany Duncan of the Nimbus Lab told the Omaha World-Herald , "and it keeps humans doing the things they do while keeping them safe."

Flying drones around fires is still a tricky business. Last summer firefighting helicopters were grounded during a fire in California because there were several hobby drones filming the event from the air. The Nimbus test was cleared with all the relevant authorities, including NASA.

Prescribed fires are likely to be just the start of drone firefighting. The UAS-FF's low cost and obvious capability may also make it suitable for burn out or back burning, in which fires are deliberately created in the path of a wildfire to control it, yet another kind of operation that is extremely dangerous to carry out by hand. The drone's eye-in-the-sky viewpoint and its expendability should make it a useful ally for firefighters. Even if the idea of a fire-starting drone does sound alarming.
A spokeswoman for the FBI told Reuters on Thursday that three new warrants have been served in Corona and Ontario, California in relation to the mass shooting that occurred in San Bernardino last December.

READ MORE: Apple issues statement following apparent suicide at Cupertino headquarters



First reported by the Press-Enterprise out of Riverside, the warrant in Corona was served to Syed Raheel Farook, the brother of Syed Rizwan Farook, who opened fire on the Inland Regional Center with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killing 14 people.

Laura Eimiller, the FBI spokeswoman, was able to confirm that warrants had been issued, but said that the U.S. Attorney's office would provide more details later in the day. Reuters was not able to reach the U.S. Attorney for a comment.

ABC News reports that a federal grand jury in California's Central District issued a five-count indictment on Wednesday against Farook as well as Mariya Chernykh of Ontario, California and her sister Tatiana Farook of Corona.

Syed and Tatania are both accused of taking part in the conspiracy. If they are convicted, they could spend up to five years in jail. Mariya, on the other hand, is the wife of Enrique Marquez, a friend of Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife who has been accused of providing weapons and other items to the couple. If she is convicted of the charges leveled against her, she could face 25 years in prison.

"Last years tragedy in San Bernardino showed yet again how our nations legal immigration system can be subverted and exploited," Joseph Macias, the head of Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles, said in a statement.

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The newest Star Wars villain, Kylo Ren, has appeared in various spoofs following the release of last years massive hit Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But what youre about to see probably takes the cake so far: fake, but hilarious outtakes from the movie. And yes, youll grow fond of Stannis Baratheon soon enough because he's apparently a rebel of sorts.

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Comedy duo Auralnauts came up with this brilliant video that focuses on various scenes from the movie. But while the footage is unaltered and still fresh in our minds, the dialogue has been slightly modified.

For example, Captain Phasma  whos played by Gwendoline Christie, the actress who brings to life the Brienne of Tarth character in Game of Thrones  is used to link the two universes. Thats how Kylo Ren first hears about Stannis, who appears to be a pretty bad guy. Captain Phasma tells Kylo Ren that he was murdered by a shadow with the face of Stannis Baratheon. Stannis does other crazy stuff throughout the clip, but we won't spoil it for you.

A can you hear me now sketch follows later into the clip, with Kylos helmet interfering with his orders. And hearing Kylo Ren singing Rihanna's Work as a torture technique will make your day.

The final scene of The Force Awakens isnt spared either, and Han and Leia get a similar spoof treatment as well. Sadly, Kylo Ren doesn't appear in these scenes.

Check out the full video, which is embedded below. Note that if you haven't yet seen The Force Awakens, the video contains spoilers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFicXlvJBdo

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By Eveline Danubrata JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesian online retailer PT Bhinneka Mentari Dimensi is planning an initial public offering (IPO) in 2018 to widen its reach, one of its directors said on Thursday, as the e-commerce battleground heats up in Southeast Asia's biggest economy. The e-commerce market in the country of 250 million people is ripe with potential but it is fragmented and comes with complex regulatory and logistical barriers. "Our objective to go public is for scaling," director Andi Boediman said, adding that the company plans to expand its store network and strengthen its supply chain while investing in technology and marketing. The company operates online through Bhinneka.com, with customers able to have purchases delivered to their homes or its physical stores, which also serve as retail outlets for the electronic goods specialist. Bhinneka is in a good position to attract investors, Boediman told reporters on the sidelines of a conference in Jakarta. "We are an online retailer that is focused and reasonably sizeable," Boediman said, adding that revenue "at least doubled" last year and that he expects a strong performance in 2016. Bhinneka decided to pursue an IPO in Indonesia because it can be a dominant player on its home ground, Boediman added. He declined to disclose how much the IPO is expected to raise or the company's financial figures. The company's domestic rivals include SoftBank-backed Tokopedia, Blibli and Indonesian conglomerate Lippo Group's MatahariMall.com. Lippo is also considering an IPO for its e-commerce business, a director said in February. The Indonesian market is still growing while being supported by a large consumer base, said David Rimbo, managing partner for transaction advisory services at Ernst & Young in Indonesia. "I think the timing is right for Indonesian players to actually realize basically decent valuations," he said. (Editing by David Goodman)
Following the deadly assaults on Europe in late 2015 and early 2016, reports emerged suggesting that ISIS has an army of organized hackers who can provide consistent, round the clock support to foot soldiers. However, new information on the matter seems to suggest that ISISs remaining hacking arm is nothing more than a propaganda machine capable of dealing minor hits, if any, to enemies. But ISIS is showing more interest in expanding its hacking capabilities.

The news comes at a time when the U.S. government has declared cyber war on the Islamic paramilitary organization.

DONT MISS: Apple issues statement following apparent suicide at Cupertino headquarters

A report from Flashpoint called Hacking for ISIS: The Emergent Cyber Threat Landscape, first seen by Ars Technica, says that ISIS in April merged four independent pro-ISIS cyber teams into a single group called the United Cyber Caliphate. The group is made of the Sons Caliphate Army, the Caliphate Cyber Army, the Ghost Caliphate Section and Kalashnikov E-Security Team.

These sound like rather scary organizations, but Flashpoint says they cant do that much harm as they lack the expertise to conduct sophisticated digital assaults.

Until recently, our analysis of the group's overall capabilities indicated that they were neither advanced nor did they demonstrate sophisticated targeting, Flashpoint co-founder and Director of Research & Analysis for the Middle East and North Africa Laith Alkhouri said. With the latest unification of multiple pro-ISIS cyber groups under one umbrella, there now appears to be a higher interest and willingness amongst ISIS supporters in coordinating and elevating cyber attacks against governments and companies.

The report reveals that British citizen Junaid Hussain, who was killed in a raid in August 2015, was the leader of ISIS's former Cyber Caliphate Army. Known as TriCK and part of a well-known black hat hackers group called TeaMp0isoN, Hussain joined ISIS in the summer of 2014. Since then, he has tried to recruit other colleagues into his team, but he hasn't been very successful.

Story continues

ISIS was able to take over social media accounts, defame websites (including CENTCOM and Newsweek), and attack the sites of certain cities, although it hasn't accomplished any major hack.

Rather than coming up with its own hacks, the unified UCC group  not to be confused with the US Cyber Command fighting ISIS hackers  is likely going to employ malware as a service exploit sites and other tools that can be purchased off hacker forums. The UCC would still be able to conduct propaganda operations and cause damage to soft targets. So their capabilities, while limited, shouldnt be completely ignored.

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A British Airways plane with 132 passengers and five crew on board was hit by an object on its final descent into London's Heathrow airport on April 17 (AFP Photo/Pascal Pavani) (AFP/File)

London (AFP) - An object that hit a British Airways jet as it was coming in to land at London's Heathrow Airport is not believed to have been a drone, as was first thought, the British government said Thursday.

The pilot of the Airbus A320 with 132 passengers and five crew on board initially reported that the jet had been hit by a drone on its final descent into Europe's busiest airport on April 17.

But Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin told MPs on Thursday that an investigation concluded it "was not a drone incident".

"We made initial inquiries but there was insufficient information on what object was involved for us to take it further," said a spokesman with the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB).

Police searched a "wide area" under the plane's flight-path in Richmond, south-west London, but did not find any evidence of a drone strike.

A BA spokesman said the plane had been examined after landing and was cleared to operate its next flight.

Robert Goodwill, a minister with the transport department, last week revealed that the object may have been a "plastic bag or something."

"The pilot has a lot of other things to concentrate on (when landing) so we're not quite sure what they saw," he said.

The UK Airprox Board, an air safety agency, said last month there were 23 near-misses between drones and aircraft in the six months between April and October last year.

In one incident on September 22, a Boeing 777 reported passed close to a drone as it was taking off.

Investigators concluded that the drone was at the same height as the aircraft and within 25 metres of it.

A drone then came within a few metres of an Airbus A319 landing at Heathrow only a few days later on September 30.

Under British legislation, drones cannot be flown near aircraft or airports, or at an altitude of over 400 feet (122 metres).
Samsung might have one of the most accessible virtual reality headsets on the market with its Gear VR, even if you need a Samsung phone to use it. But that system doesnt come close to more robust headsets like the PC-powered Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, or Sonys upcoming PlayStation 4-powered PlayStation VR.



So whats Samsung going to do about that? Build its own high-end VR system.

According to Variety, Samsungs head of research and development for software and services Injong Rhee announced that the company is, working on wireless and dedicated VR devices, not necessarily working with our mobile phone. Rhee also said the company is also developing hand- and gesture-tracking, both of which the Gear VR lacks.

The fact that the company is developing VR headsets that dont require Samsung smartphones is big news. It also means that the headsets will likely be more expensive than the $100 Gear VR, as they will need to include their own displays and processors rather than rely on users smartphones as screens and for computing power.



As Variety correctly points out, the fact that Samsung is building one or two dedicated VR headsets means that it will be competing directly with Facebooks Oculus and its Rift headset. That sounds like it could get messy, as Oculus provides the software that powers Samsungs Gear VR.

That said, while Oculus is keen on selling the Rift headset, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told Yahoo during an interview at CES 2016 that he sees Oculus as more of a virtual reality platform, much as Googles Android is a platform for smartphones and tablets.

via: Variety

Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
REUTERS - Symantec Corp, best known for its Norton antivirus software, estimated fourth-quarter profit and revenue below analysts' estimates, and said Chief Executive Michael Brown would step down. The company's shares were down 16.4 percent at $15.13 before the bell on Thursday. Symantec estimated revenue of $873 million for the quarter ended April 1, lower than its forecast of $885 million-$915 million. Analysts on average were expecting revenue of $901.2 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. The company estimated an adjusted profit of 22 cents per share, below the average analyst estimate of 25 cents. The company had earlier forecast profit, excluding items, of 24-27 cents. Brown, who has been the CEO for more than one-and-a-half years, will continue in his post until a successor has been appointed, the company said. The security software maker said it formed an "office of president" to focus on the company's strategic priorities as it continues its search for Brown's successor. The company said Ajei Gopal, who is also going to be part of the office, is rejoining Symantec as chief operating officer. Mountain View, California-based Symantec has been facing headwinds as slowing sales of personal computers hurt demand for its security software, which comes bundled with computers. As the demand for traditional antivirus software falls, the company has been making software that have multiple layers of security, especially for businesses looking to protect themselves against increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. (Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee and Rishika Sadam in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Maju Samuel)
By Malathi Nayak (Reuters) - Verizon Communications Inc said it had presented a revised and "final" contract proposal to unions representing nearly 40,000 striking workers, who walked off their jobs in mid-April after talks over a new labor agreement hit an impasse. The company on Thursday said it was now offering a wage increase of 7.5 percent over the term of a new contract, up from its previous offer of a 6.5 percent raise. "We are putting our last, best final offer on the table," Verizon's Chief Administrative Officer Marc Reed said in a statement. "The ball is now in the unions' court to do what's right for our employees." Verizon 's proposal comes ahead of the expiration on Saturday of healthcare coverage for striking employees. Workers from network technicians to customer service representatives in Verizon's Fios Internet, telephone and TV services across several U.S. Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, including New York and Virginia, walked off the job on April 13 in one of the largest U.S. strikes in recent years. The strike was called by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Sticking points in contract negotiations include job relocations, pensions, healthcare coverage and the offshoring of call center jobs. In its proposal, Verizon said it will continue to match retirement saving contributions and offer pensions with increases over three years. It also laid out job security and buyout terms and some healthcare costs it wants employees to bear beyond the company's coverage. At meetings on Thursday, "executives refused to back off of callous proposals that would hurt working families and destroy middle class jobs," the CWA said in a statement. "The company also failed to budge on the issues facing Verizon Wireless workers." The union said it was considering how to move forward. Verizon, the No. 1 U.S. wireless company, has shifted its focus in recent years to new efforts in mobile video and advertising, while scaling back its Fios TV and Internet service. It has stopped expanding its old landline phone network and the wireline unit generated about 29 percent of company revenue in 2015, down about 60 percent since 2000. The company has said it has trained thousands of non-union employees over the past year to ensure no service disruption. If the strike continues for an extended period, it could impact 2016 earnings, Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo has said. More than a thousand union workers have returned to work since the strike began and more are expected to follow, the company said in a statement. The strike "has had minimal impact to its operations," it said. (Reporting by Malathi Nayak and Narottam Medhora in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirti Pandey, Alan Crosby and Tom Brown)
A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Riceville. Visitation will be one hour prior to services at the church.
NOVA Chemicals Corporation, 1000 Seventh Avenue S.W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2P 5L5

www.novachemicals.com | 403.750.3600 tel | 403.269.7410 fax

Calgary, Alberta (April 27, 2016) - Statement from Bill Greene, senior vice president:

"At approximately 9:00 a.m. MDT on Wednesday, April 27, there was an industrial accident at our NOVA Chemicals PE1 Expansion Project construction site at our Joffre Site manufacturing facilities. While working on a stationary crane at the construction site, a contractor came in contact with equipment resulting in severe trauma. NOVA Chemicals Joffre Site emergency personnel responded to the incident and rescued the worker from the crane. Paramedics transported the worker to the Red Deer Regional Hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.

Occupational Health and Safety and the Blackfalds RCMP responded to the incident.

Work was suspended at the PE1 construction site and the site was secured and investigation has begun. No other injuries or operational impacts have been reported in relation to this incident. We are collaborating fully with the regulatory authorities as they carry out their investigation.

This is an extremely sad day at NOVA Chemicals. Our belief is that every employee and contractor must go home safely - today that didn't happen. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family, friends and co-workers of the worker. As we recognize that during a difficult time like this, distractions can easily happen, we want to encourage employees to remain vigilant and look out for one another.

Our first priority is always the safety of our employees, contractors and the community."

About NOVA Chemicals Corporation

NOVA Chemicals develops and manufactures chemicals, plastic resins and end-products that make everyday life safer, healthier and easier. Our employees work to ensure health, safety, security and environmental stewardship through our commitment to sustainability and Responsible Care. NOVA Chemicals, headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC) of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Visit NOVA Chemicals on the Internet at www.novachemicals.com.

# # #

Media inquiries, please contact:

Pace Markowitz

Director, Communications

E-mail: pace.markowitz@novachem.com

NOVA Chemicals' logo is a registered trademark of NOVA Brands Ltd.; authorized use.

Responsible Care is a registered trademark of the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada.
CLEARWATER, Fla., April 27, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On April 22nd, environmental speakers, activists, and concerned citizens joined together to acknowledge those protecting the Earth and encouraged renewed efforts at the Earth Day reception held at the Historic Bank of Clearwater, Downtown Clearwater from 6-8pm.



Focusing on the issues of soil re-mineralization and water purity, Ms. Jay McFall and Mr. Winston Kao (both leaders in their fields) spoke to the attendees about the decline of these natural elements and its effect on ones health. They also spoke of initiatives one can engage in to address these problems.

Ms. Tanya Cranton, Executive Director of the Way to Happiness Association Tampa Bay, shared the activities that their association has undertaken to safeguard and improve the environment.

Our activities include regular community clean ups and beautification projects from cleaning the beach on World Environment day, to neighborhood clean-ups, and picking up litter on the Pinellas Trail, stated Cranton, We also work to educate the community of the importance of keeping the environment clean.

The Way to Happiness, a non-religious, non-political, common sense guide written by Mr. L. Ron Hubbard, Humanitarian, Horticulturist, and founder of the Scientology Religion.

The idea that one has a share in the planet and that one can and should help take care for it may seem very large and, to some, quite beyond reality, wrote Mr. Hubbard, But today what happens on the other side of the world, even so far away, can effect what happens in your own home.

The Earth Day Reception at the Historic Bank of Clearwater is the first of its kind at the Center, bringing together environmentally conscious individuals. The event provided a platform for collaboration, said Center Manager, Amber Skjelset.

Since the centers opening on July 11th 2015, the Center has welcomed some 8,000 visitors to the Information Center which provides a destination in Downtown Clearwater where anyone can visit and get their questions answered about Scientology and attend community events.

There are hundreds of events happening all over the community in honor of protecting Earth, stated Amber Skjelset, Manager of the Scientology Information Center, and the events emcee. The Church of Scientology applauds these activities and especially recognizes those who work to protect it 365 days a year.

Award-winning composer, filmmaker, and artist, Mr. Neal Fox entertained the guests with his original piano songs throughout the event.

Upcoming events in the Information Center are:

April 29th: Special Open House Reception for Blast Friday Concert Attendees

May 1st : Upscale Piano Concert in honor of Mothers Day

May 11th : Local Business/Chamber of Commerce Reception

May 18th : East Coast Golden Age Theatre, Old-Time Radio Style Fiction Readings

May 27th : Special Open House Reception for Blast Friday Concert Attendees

For more information or to attend future events please contact Amber Skjelset (Manager) at 727-467-6966 or e-mail her at amber@cos.flag.org.

About the Church of Scientology:

The Scientology religion was founded by humanitarian and philosopher,

L. Ron Hubbard. The first Church of Scientology was formed in the United States in 1954 and has expanded to more than 11,000 churches, missions and affiliated groups, with millions of members in 167 nations. Scientologists are optimistic about life and believe there is hope for a saner world and better civilization, and actively do all they can to help achieve this. Based on L. Ron Hubbards words, A community that pulls together can make a better society for all. the Church of Scientology regularly engages in many humanitarian programs and community events.
SEOUL - The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Thursday fired what was believed to be a Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile, but it appeared to have failed, South Korea's defense ministry said.

A Defense Ministry official told Xinhua on the phone that the DPRK launched a projectile, estimated to have been a Musudan missile, at about 6:40 am local time from the Wonsan area in northeastern DPRK.

The official said the launch appeared to have failed as the projectile was believed to have crashed several seconds after liftoff.

The projectile flew up just hundreds of meters, detected by US reconnaissance satellite but not seen in South Korean military's radar, according to Yonhap news agency report.

It was estimated to have crashed in waters off the east coast as it disappeared several seconds after take-off.

If confirmed, it would mark the DPRK's second test-firing of a Musudan missile after the launch on April 15. South Korea's military saw the April 15 launch as failure as the missile exploded in mid-air several seconds after liftoff.

The DPRK had allegedly deployed two Musudan missiles in the Wonsan area. There has been no more Musudan missile found in the region.

The Musudan missile, known to be capable of hitting part of the US territory such as Guam and the outer reaches of Alaska, has been deployed by the DPRK since 2007.
Estonian English

Estonia, 2016-04-28 07:00 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The reporting quarter was successful for the Harju Elekter Group. Despite the fact that the economic environment was unstable, we were able to reach the goals we set for ourselves.

January - March Year 2016 2015 2015 Revenue (thousand euros) 11,757 10,945 60,656 Gross profit (thousand euros) 2,069 1,698 10,299 EBITDA (thousand euros) 780 388 4,819 EBIT (thousand euros) 390 29 3,276 Profit for the period (thousand euros) 311 10 3,186 incl attributed to Owners of the Company (thousand euros) 324 16 3,190

In the accounting quarter, the Groups consolidated revenue was 11.8 (2015 Q1: 10.9) million euros. Sales revenue of the reporting quarter increased by 7% or 0.8 million euros in relation to the comparison period. 89% of revenue was earned from the Manufacturing segment, Real Estate and Unallocated activities contributed 11% of the consolidated sales volume. The sales of electrical equipment accounted for 94% (Q1 2015: 91%) of the sales revenue of the Production segment and 84% (Q1 2015: 81%) of the sales revenue of the whole Group. The sale of electrical equipment was up by 11% or 935,000 euros. The increase of rent revenue was mainly due to the completion of the production building in Allika Industrial Village in June 2015, due to which rental revenues have increased 8% (38,000 euros) in Q1 2016.

The Finnish market, which is the Groups largest, has grown by 20% or 1,235,000 euros year-on-year. In the reporting quarter, 63% of the Groups products and services were sold on the Finnish market (Q1 2015: 56%). Most of the Groups enterprises have managed to grow their sales volumes on the Finnish market. According to the estimates made by the Groups management, the share of the Finnish market is set to increase even further in 2016.

Sales to the Swedish market have grown by 160% or 487,000 euros year-on-year. While the operations of the Swedish company Harju Elekter AB have been suspended, AS Harju Elekter Elektrotehnika has been working towards increasing its sales volumes on the Swedish markets.

During the reporting quarter 26% (Q1 2015: 28%) of the Groups products and services were sold on the Estonian market.

In the reporting quarter, the operating expenses increased by 4%. The cost of sales increased by 5% up to 9,688,000 euros. In the reporting quarter, the distribution costs increased by 39,000 euros to 723,000 euros, the rate of distribution costs to revenue accounted for 6.1% (Q1 2015: 6.2%). Administrative expenses were 79,000 euros lower than the indicator for the comparable period, and the rate of administrative expenses to revenue accounted for 8.1%, having decreased by 1.3 percentage points.

The optimisation of production, which started in the second half of 2015 in the Groups Estonian enterprises, involved staff reductions. In Q1 2016, the average 453 people worked in the Group  on the average by 14 persons less than in the reference period; employee wages and salaries totalled 2,374,000 (Q1 2015: 2,388,000) euros. The average wages per employee per month amounted 1,747 (Q1 2015: 1,705) euros. The labor costs decreased by 4.5% to 2,950,000 euros and the share of labour costs in sales revenue from 28% in Q1 2015 to 25% in the reporting quarter.

In the reporting quarter, profits as well as profit margins have improved compared to the reference period. In the first quarter the gross profit of the Group was 2,069,000 (Q1 2015: 1,698,000) euros. The gross profit margin was 17.6% (Q1 2015: 15.5%).

The Groups operating profit of Q1 2016 was 390,000 (Q1 2015:29,000) euros and EBITDA 780,000 (Q1 2015: 388,000) euros. Return of sales for the accounting quarter was 3.3% (Q1 2015: 0.3%) and return of sales before depreciation 6.6% (Q1 2015: 3.5%).

Overall, the consolidated net profit of the Q1 2016 was 311,000 (Q1 2015: 10,000) euros, of which the share of the owners of the Company was 324,000 (Q1 2015: 16,000) euros. EPS in the Q1 was 0.02 euros.

During the 3-months period, the Groups investments to non-current assets totalled 49,000 euros (Q1 2015: 1.04 million euros). Major investments in the Group are planned to H2 2016.

Post-balance events

At its 5 April 2016 meeting, the Supervisory Board of AS Harju Elekter decided to merge the metal factories of the Groups Estonian subsidiaries - AS Harju Elekter Elektrotehnika and AS Harju Elekter Teletehnika, consolidating the sheet metal processing resources of the entire Group into AS Harju Elekter Teletehnika. The outcome of restructuring is significant economy in terms of manufacturing as well as labour costs. The merger of factories will be realised over the course of 2016.

The general meeting of shareholders of PKC Group Oyj, held on 4 April 2016, decided to pay dividends amounting to 0.70 euros per share. Dividends were transferred to the bank accounts of shareholders on 15 April 2016. AS Harju Elekter owns 1,094,641 of PKC Group Oyj shares. The dividend income of 766,000 euros is reflected in the profit and cash flow from investment activity for Q2 of 2016. The 15% income tax on dividends, withheld in Finland, accounted for 115,000 euros. The cash flow from investment activity (PKC Group dividends) accounted for 651,000 euros.

The Management Board of AS Harju Elekter called an annual general meeting of shareholders on 28 April 2016. The Board will propose to the AGM to pay a dividend of 0.05 (2014: 0.15) euros per share for the year 2015, totalling 877 (2014: 2,610) thousand euros. The Management Board also supports the Supervisory Boards proposals to amend the articles of association and the reduction of share capital to 11.2 million euros, involving an additional disbursement of 0.07 euro per share to the shareholders.

In April, a preliminary contract was concluded with Stera Technologies Oy, manufacturer of mechanical and electromechanical assemblies, for the construction and subsequent rental of production facilities in Allika Industrial Park, which belongs to the Group. The total size of the production facilities is 8400 m2 and they will be delivered to the lessee in two stages, in April 2017 and October 2018.

Andres Allikmae

Managing director/ CEO

+372 674 7400

For more information: Interim report 1-3/2016

AS HARJU ELEKTER BALANCE SHEET, 31.03.2016 Unaudited Group EUR'000 ASSETS 31.03.16 31.12.15 Cash and cash equivalents 5 513 5 711 Trade receivables and other receivables 7 982 6 678 Prepayments 375 278 Prepaid income tax 56 28 Inventories 8 094 7 148 TOTAL CURRENT ASSETS 22 020 19 843 Deferred income tax asset 57 57 Other long-term financial investments 19 476 20 188 Investment property 12 868 12 990 Property, plant and equipment 7 816 8 010 Intangible assets 5 466 5 491 Total non-current assets 45 683 46 736 TOTAL ASSETS 67 703 66 579 LIABILITIES AND OWNERS' EQUITY Interest-bearing loans and borrowings 222 296 Trade payables and other payables 7 725 6 043 Tax liabilities 886 944 Income tax liabilities 146 146 Short-term provision 9 34 TOTAL CURRENT LIABILITIES 8 988 7 463 NON-CURRENT LIABILITIES 912 912 TOTAL LIABILITIES 9 900 8 375 Share capital 12 418 12 418 Share premium 804 804 Restricted reserves 17 335 18 047 Retained earnings 27 141 26 817 TOTAL OWNERS' EQUITY 57 698 58 086 Non-controlling interests 105 118 TOTAL EQUITY 57 803 58 204 TOT.LIABILIT.AND OWNERS' EQUITY 67 703 66 579 INCOME STATEMENT, 1-3/2016 Unaudited EUR000 GROUP Q1 2016 Q1 2015 NET SALES 11 757 10 945 Cost of goods sold -9 688 -9 247 Gross profit 2 069 1 698 Marketing expenses -723 -684 Administrative expenses -947 -1 025 Other revenue 10 54 Other expenses -19 -14 Operating profit 390 29 Finance income 1 14 Finance costs -6 -7 Profit from normal operations 385 36 Corporate Income tax -74 -26 Profit for the period, attributable to 311 10 owners of the Company 324 16 non-controlling interest -13 -6 Basic earnings per share (EUR) 0,02 0,00 Diluted earnings per share (EUR) 0,02 0,00

Tiit Atso

CFO

+372 674 7422
San Francisco, April 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Global paint protection film market is anticipated to reach USD 1.48 billion by 2022 owing to the rapid development of automotive industry together with increasing consumer awareness concerning car protection and security. Besides, increasing the scope for applications across end-use industries including aerospace & defense and electrical & electronics is anticipated to influence further growth.

Shifting preferences in style and design of vehicles along with changing lifestyles is expected to fuel demand. Technological improvements resulting in new developments including internet equipped cars coupled with rising per capita income is anticipated to trigger growth in automotive sales. This factor, in turn, is expected to impact paint protection film market in the next seven years.

Browse to access In-depth research report on Global Paint protection film market with detailed charts and figures: http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/paint-protection-film-market

Automotive contributed to over 75.0% of the overall demand in 2014 and emerged as the leading application. It is estimated to grow at a CAGR of over 7.0% over the forecast period owing to rising demand for heavy vehicles on account of the long lasting shelf life of these films. Growing at a CAGR exceeding 5.0%, demand for the product in 2014 was estimated at over 5,000.0 thousand square meters.

Increasing investments in the defense sector in developing countries such as India, Russia and China is expected to remain a driving factor for growth. Defense & Aerospace contributed to over 7.0% of the overall market by volume in 2014. It is projected to grow at about 5.0% over the next seven years.

Asia Pacific dominated the market and constituted for one-third of overall demand in 2014. Increasing demand for vehicles and large-scale automotive production in China is expected to drive growth over the forecast period. The robust increase in demand for superior passenger cars in South East Asia and India shall further propel growth in this region.





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The market is mainly identified by advancement in electronics segment. The product is widely used in electronic devices such as tablets, display screens, and mobile phones to conserve the design and aesthetic appeal. This market is expected to experience significant growth owing to rising consumer awareness regarding cost-benefit ratio in emerging economies such as India, Brazil, South Africa and China.

There is also a strong presence of incorporated companies in the business that are engaged in manufacturing TPU films with various downstream applications. Some of these companies include Lubrizol and Eastman Chemical Co. and DuPont.

The global paint protection film market is characterized by the presence of domestic companies and multinational businesses. Major companies include Avery Denison, 3M Company, SunTek Films, Agrotec, PremiumShield, Premier Protective Films International, XPEL, Vanzetti Engineering S.R.L and Solar Gard.





Browse related reports by Grand View Research:





Grand View Research has segmented the paint protection film market on the basis of application and region:

Global Paint Protection Film Application Outlook (Volume, Thousand Square Meters; Revenue, USD Million, 2012 - 2022)

Automotive

Electrical & electronics

Aerospace & defense

Others

Global Paint Protection Film Regional Outlook (Volume, Thousand Square Meters; Revenue, USD Million, 2012 - 2022)

North America U.S

Europe Germany France UK

Asia PacificCentral & South America India China Japan

Central & South America

Middle East and Africa





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LOS ANGELES, April 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) and the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering have teamed up to establish a new home for advanced research in optical materials and nanophotonic devices.

The new organization  the Northrop Grumman Institute of Nanophotonics and Nanomaterials (NG-ION2)  will be based on the USC campus in Los Angeles. It will bring together research teams from the university and the aerospace industry to explore the properties of tiny structures and materials that exist only at the atomic level.

Nanophotonics is the study of the behavior of light on the nanometer scale and of the interaction of nanometer-scale objects with light. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. A sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.

"The collaboration between USC Viterbi and Northrop Grumman has a long, productive and impactful history," said USC Viterbi Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. "NG-ION2 will enhance our common ties and contribute significantly to the advancement of photonics, an area of historical strength at USC, and of critical importance to technological evolution."

Under the agreement, Northrop Grumman will contribute $500,000 to NG-ION2 in 2016. This funding will help foster interdisciplinary research by material scientists, electrical engineers, physicists and chemists to develop novel materials for optical devices.

"The creation of the institute is based on the shared recognition that technological innovation begins with fundamental science discoveries," said Tom Pieronek, vice president, basic research, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. "Breakthroughs in optical materials can lead to disruptive changes in how we approach missions of global significance. We're looking forward to a sustained and productive relationship with USC."

Historically, industry has played a critical role in enabling the transition of nanomaterials from academic research into commercial devices. NG-ION2 will support fundamental, interdisciplinary science research that will accelerate innovation as nanomaterials become increasingly complex.

NG-ION2 will also enable regular exchanges between USC and Northrop Grumman researchers working across projects. USC Viterbi will grant Northrop Grumman scientists visiting researcher positions, a strategy that will allow them to work collaboratively on campus with their Institute counterparts to advance science in nanomaterials and integrated photonics.

Professor Andrea Armani, of USC Viterbi and Jesse Tice, senior scientist and nanomaterials group lead, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, will serve as NG-ION2's co-directors. Professor Armani leads a research group at USC focused on integrated photonics.

The Northrop Grumman/USC Viterbi team has selected a wide range of projects for initial support in 2016. These projects include theoretical and experimental studies on 2D materials, plasmonics and nonlinear optics. The team will select additional projects for support later this summer.

About USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Engineering Studies began at the University of Southern California in 1905. Nearly a century later, the school received a naming gift in 2004 from alumnus Andrew J. Viterbi, inventor of the Viterbi algorithm, now key to cell phone technology and numerous data applications. One of the school's guiding principles is engineering+, a term coined by current Dean Yannis C. Yortsos to use the power of engineering to address the world's greatest challenges. USC Viterbi is ranked among the top graduate programs in the world and enrolls more than 6,500 undergraduate and graduate students taught by 185 tenured and tenure-track faculty, with 73 endowed chairs and professorships. http://viterbi.usc.edu/.

About Northrop Grumman

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.
NEWARK, N.J., April 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arkados Group, Inc. (OTCQB:AKDS), a global provider of scalable and interoperable Internet of Things (IoT) solutions focused on industrial automation and energy management, today announced its consolidated financial and operational results for the three months ended February 29, 2016, which represent the Companys Third Quarter Fiscal 2016.



Financial Highlights:

Quarterly Revenues grew at a rate of 427% year-over-year, from $142,200 to $749,083;

The Software segment revenues came in at $260,590, up from $142,200 in the same period in fiscal 2015 and $175,457 in the second quarter of fiscal 2016, representing growth of 83% and 49%, respectively;

The Energy Conservation Services segment contributed $488,493 in sales for the quarter, mainly derived from LED lighting retrofit services;

Company-wide Gross Margin increased to 50% from 34% in the second quarter due to a higher revenue contribution from our Software segment;

Income from operations increased $561,006 to $68,260 for the third quarter of fiscal 2016 from a loss of $492,746 in the third quarter of fiscal 2015, as a direct result of an increase in gross profits and reduction in operating expenses.

Operational results reflect a strengthening in our business. Emerging from the R&D phase in fiscal 2014 and fiscal 2015, we are now bringing to market valuable, state-of-the-art solutions that reduce costs, increase productivity and conserve energy. Although these results demonstrate improved performance over prior years, we believe that better performance is yet to come, commented Arkados Chief Executive Officer, Terrence DeFranco.

Mr. DeFranco continued, The synergy of our operating segments is progressing as customers for our energy conservation services use our technology solutions to deliver higher ROI. We look forward to continuing to work with these customers, bringing them superior value and building channels that will accelerate our growth. Additionally, our strategic partnership with Tatung advances as we collaborate on innovative products and new sales opportunities. The Internet of Things is among the most explosive growth areas in technology in the last 20 years, and it is exciting for Arkados to be a part of it.

The Companys Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the three month period ended February 29, 2016 is on file with Securities and Exchange Commission. To access the report, click here.

In a November 2015 press release, Gartner estimates that the Internet of Things (IoT) will support total professional services (defined as external providers that design, install and operate IoT systems for businesses under contract) spending of $235 billion in 2016, up 22% from 2015, and that connectivity services (through communications service providers) and consumer services will grow at an even faster pace. Another more recent Gartner report estimates IoT deployment in commercial buildings is on track to reach just over 1 billion in 2018.

Verizons The Internet of Things 2015 report revealed that among organizations having integrated IoT into their operations, 82% reported increased efficiency; 49% saw enhancements in product quality; and 45% claimed IoT technology has increased customer satisfaction.

About Arkados Group, Inc.

Arkados Group, Inc. through its subsidiaries is a global provider of scalable and interoperable Internet of Things (IoT) solutions focused on industrial automation and energy management. The Company's solutions are uniquely designed to drive a wide variety of wireless and powerline communication (PLC)-based products, such as sensors, gateways, video cameras, appliances and other devices. By utilizing the Company's solutions, Arkados' customers can bring numerous sophisticated, full-featured products to market faster at a lower overall development cost. Arkados is a registered trademark of Arkados Group, Inc. For more information about Arkados, please visit: http://www.arkadosgroup.com.



Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events or performance, and underlying assumptions and other statements that are other than statements of historical facts. These statements are subject to uncertainties and risks including, but not limited to, insufficient working capital, product and service demand and acceptance, changes in technology, economic conditions, the impact of competition and pricing, government regulations, and other risks contained in reports filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All such forward-looking statements, whether written or oral, and whether made by or on behalf of the company, are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and any other cautionary statements which may accompany the forward-looking statements. In addition, the company disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof.
NEW HAVEN, Conn., April 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Woodbridge International, a global mergers and acquisitions firm, is pleased to announce the sale of its client van der Hagen Enterprises, Inc. to Universal Beauty Products, Inc.



Based in Liberty Hill, Texas, van der Hagen manufactures and sells a branded line of traditional wet shave kits and accessories. The Company sells its products to over 30,000 retail doors across the country. Customers include nearly 100 different mass-market, drugstore and supermarket chains, as well as e-commerce companies.

Universal Beauty Products, headquartered in Glendale Height, Illinois, serves the health and personal care products markets. The companys product portfolio includes lines such as Bald Guyz, which provides special products created for the sensitive skin of the head and face of bald men.

Universal viewed the transaction as synergistic with their focus on the over-the-counter (OTC) personal care products. They were attracted to van der Hagens well established brand, wide mass-retail distribution and loyal customer following.

Headquartered in New Haven, CT, Woodbridge International, a global M&A firm, was founded in 1993 and has 11 offices in the U.S. and 22 offices abroad.




HAMILTON, Bermuda, April 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bermuda Business Development Agency (BDA) will lead a team of industry and regulatory experts to Toronto next month to detail the benefits to Canadian corporations of setting up captive insurance companies in Bermuda.



A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/2d851ff7-0e29-42f5-9098-e2d015bdd1d8

The panel will host an informative Executive Forum in downtown Toronto Tuesday, May 10, in which representatives will outline the advantages of Bermuda-based captive insurance companies to self-insure a variety of risks, from healthcare and employee benefits to cyber disruptions. To register, go to: http://conta.cc/1VdNmfk

Bermuda offers Canada corporations a pragmatic, cost-effective solution in a blue-chip jurisdiction to manage the many complex risks facing todays global businesses, said Jereme Ramsay, BDA Business Development Manager. We hope this presentation will highlight Bermudas strengths as a partner jurisdiction, and we welcome questions or requests for one-on-one meetings while were in Toronto.

Bermuda has been of growing interest to Canadian corporations following the June 2010 signing of the Canada-Bermuda Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA), which allows Bermuda subsidiaries of certain Canadian corporations with international operations to be eligible for Canadian tax benefits, including the tax-free repatriation of certain dividends to Canada.

The forum, scheduled for 8:30 am11:30 am at the Shangri-La Hotel, features two sessions, moderated by Joe DaSilveira, Senior Vice President of Liberty Mutual Management. The first, Captive Solutions & Strategies, will explain what a captive insurer is, a captives structure, key reasons to set up a captive, along with common risks insured, citing several case studies. A second session will focus on tax and regulatory considerations.

Industry speakers include: Oceana Yates, Vice President, Captives of R&Q Quest Management; Mark Allitt, Advisory Services Manager, KPMG (Bermuda); Leslie Robinson Assistant Director, Corporate Authorisations, Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA); Christiane Kenny-Post, Corporate Manager, Consultant, Compass Administration Services/ASW Law; and David Downie, Partner, Tax, Financial Services KPMG (Canada).

Canada and Bermuda have a long-standing relationship, which has resulted in many successful Canadian entities establishing a Bermuda presence, noted panellist Oceana Yates. As such, we are delighted with the opportunity to share our experience and present about captives, addressing critical issues and highlighting some of the benefits that Canadian corporations typically look to achieve with a captive.

The well-established historical ties between Canada and Bermuda were reinforced by the signing of the Canada-Bermuda TIEA, she added, and this has further enhanced business opportunities between the countries.

BDA will return with a team of Bermuda insurance industry representatives to Canada this fall to attend the Risk & Insurance Management Society (RIMS) Canada conference in Calgary September 1114.

CONNECTING BUSINESS

The BDA encourages direct investment and helps companies start up, re-locate or expand their operations in our premier jurisdiction. An independent, public-private partnership, we connect you to industry professionals, regulatory officials, and key contacts in the Bermuda government to assist domicile decisions. Our goal? To make doing business here smooth and beneficial
Boise Family Surprised with One Year of FREE Groceries

LISLE, Ill., April 28, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Eckrich, the makers of naturally hardwood smoked sausage and savory deli meats, partnered with Albertsons and Operation Homefront, a national nonprofit whose mission is to build strong, stable, and secure military families, to honor a Boise, Idaho military family on Thursday.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/16efe2dc-ead4-43c4-b04c-63527906d62a

Eckrich hosted a special presentation outside an Albertsons store in Mountain Home to honor, thank and support the Davis family. The family was surprised with a gift of free groceries for one year at Albertsons, courtesy of Eckrich.

As part of the event, crowds of shoppers were treated to samples of delicious Eckrich smoked sausage and deli meat, live country music and an appearance by Boise country radio station 104.3. In addition, Eckrich provided local military service members and their families with $25 Albertsons gift cards to thank them for their service.

Captain Marshall Davis, US Army, Ret. was an artillery officer in the Army National Guard for 17 years. He deployed to Iraq twice. His wife, Melanie, is his caregiver and a member of the Hearts of Valor program through Operation Homefront. The Davis family has 10 children.

"We are very humbled to represent the soldiers of Idaho and are truly grateful to receive this gift from Eckrich," said Marshall Davis. "When companies like Eckrich and Albertsons support individuals like this, I think it helps encourage everyone to support each other in any way they can."

The surprise is part of the ongoing campaign by Eckrich to honor, thank and support military families through its partnership with Operation Homefront. The Davis family is supported by Operation Homefronts Hearts of Valor program, a network of caregivers for wounded, ill or injured service members. Operation Homefront supports these caregivers through annual retreats, support groups and online communities.

Eckrich, entering its fifth year of partnership with Operation Homefront, has donated more than $2 million to the organization since 2012. Eckrich is a brand of Smithfield Foods.

Eckrich continues to thank, support and honor our military families across the country, said Chuck Gitkin, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Smithfield Foods. These families make great sacrifices and we appreciate Albertsons partnership and support for military families. Today, we were proud to thank the Davis family for their service and to present them with one year of free groceries.

For more information about Eckrich, please visit www.eckrich.com.

About Eckrich

Founded by Peter Eckrich in 1894, Eckrich has a rich heritage starting from a small meat market in Fort Wayne, Ind. Through it all, Eckrich meats have been recognized for their great taste and supreme quality, craftsmanship, care and pride. For more information, visit www.eckrich.com.

About Smithfield Foods

Smithfield Foods is a $14 billion global food company and the world's largest pork processor and hog producer. In the United States, the company is also the leader in numerous packaged meats categories with popular brands including Smithfield, Eckrich, Farmland, Armour, Cook's, John Morrell, Gwaltney, Nathan's Famous, Kretschmar, Margherita, Curly's, Carando and Healthy Ones. Smithfield Foods is committed to providing good food in a responsible way and maintains robust animal care, community involvement, employee safety, environmental and food safety and quality programs. For more information, visit www.smithfieldfoods.com.

About Operation Homefront

A national nonprofit, Operation Homefront builds strong, stable, and secure military families so that they can thrive in the communities they have worked so hard to protect. With more than 3,200 volunteers nationwide, Operation Homefront has provided assistance to tens of thousands of military families its inception shortly after 9/11. Recognized for superior performance by leading independent charity oversight groups, 92 percent of Operation Homefronts expenditures go directly to programs that provide support to our military families. For more information, go to www.OperationHomefront.net.
Revenue at 691 million, up +1% at historical exchange rates and flat at constant exchange rates

Strong head start in Government Programs, Machine-to-Machine, Enterprise and Payment fully offsets softer markets in Latin America and Asia and lower sales to mobile network operators

2016 outlook confirmed

Revenue variations are at constant exchange rates except where otherwise noted.

All figures presented in this press release are unaudited.

Amsterdam, April 29, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gemalto (Euronext NL0000400653 - GTO), the world leader in digital security today announces its revenue for the first quarter of 2016.

Main segments Main activities

First quarter 2016

( in millions)



Total Payment

&

Identity



Mobile Embedded

software

& Products (E&P) Platforms &

Services

(P&S) Patents

&

Others Revenue 691 433 258 468 222 0 Year-on-year variation at constant exchange rates = +17% (20%) (8%) +22% n.s. Year-on-year variation at historical exchange rates +1%

Olivier Piou, Chief Executive Officer, commented: "The revenue for the first quarter 2016 illustrates the success of Gemalto's diversification strategy and the resilience of its business model. Strong performances in Government Programs, Machine-to-Machine, Enterprise and Payment have offset lower revenues from SIM and related services. We continue to focus our efforts and investment on our higher growth businesses, and confirm the improvement in our gross margin this quarter towards achieving our 2016 and 2017 objectives."

Basis of preparation of financial information

Segment information

The Mobile segment reports on businesses associated with mobile cellular technologies including Machine-to-Machine, mobile secure elements (SIM, embedded secure element) and mobile Platforms & Services. The Payment & Identity segment reports on businesses associated with secure personal interactions including Payment, Government Programs and Enterprise. The SafeNet acquisition in 2015 is part of the Enterprise business.

In addition to this segment information the Company also reports revenues of Mobile and Payment & Identity by type of activity: Embedded software & Products (E&P) and Platforms & Services (P&S).

Historical exchange rates and constant currency figures

The Company sells its products and services in a very large number of countries and is commonly remunerated in other currencies than the Euro. Fluctuations in these other currencies exchange rates against the Euro have in particular a translation impact on the reported Euro value of the Company revenues. Comparisons at constant exchange rates aim at eliminating the effect of currencies translation movements on the analysis of the Group revenue by translating prior-year revenues at the same average exchange rate as applied in the current year. Revenue variations are at constant exchange rates and include the impact of currencies variation hedging program, except where otherwise noted. All other figures in this press release are at historical exchange rates, except where otherwise noted.

Adjusted income statement and profit from operations (PFO) non-GAAP measure

The consolidated financial statements are prepared in accordance with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

To better assess its past and future performance, the Company also prepares an adjusted income statement where the key metric used to evaluate the business and make operating decisions over the period 2010 to 2017 is the profit from operations (PFO).

PFO is a non-GAAP measure defined as IFRS operating profit adjusted for (i) the amortization and depreciation of intangibles resulting from acquisitions, (ii) restructuring and acquisition-related expenses, (iii) all equity-based compensation charges and associated costs; and (iv) fair value adjustments upon business acquisitions. These items are further explained as follows:

Amortization and depreciation of intangibles resulting from acquisitions are defined as the amortization and depreciation expenses related to the intangibles recognized as part of the allocation of the excess purchase consideration over the share of net assets acquired.

Restructuring and acquisitions-related expenses are defined as (i) restructuring expenses which are the costs incurred in connection with a restructuring as defined in accordance with the provisions of IAS 37 (e.g. sale or termination of a business, closure of a plant,), and consequent costs; (ii) reorganization expenses defined as the costs incurred in connection with headcount reductions, consolidation of manufacturing and offices sites, as well as the rationalization and harmonization of the product and service portfolio, and the integration of IT systems, consequent to a business combination; and (iii) transaction costs (such as fees paid as part of the acquisition process).

Equity-based compensation charges are defined as (i) the discount granted to employees acquiring Gemalto shares under Gemalto Employee Stock Purchase plans; (ii) the amortization of the fair value of stock options and restricted share units granted by the Board of Directors to employees, and the related costs.

Fair value adjustments over net assets acquired are defined as the reversal, in the income statement, of the fair value adjustments recognized as a result of a business combination, as prescribed by IFRS3R. Those adjustments are mainly associated with (i) the amortization expense related to the step-up of the acquired work-in-progress and finished goods assumed at their realizable value and (ii) the amortization of the cancelled commercial margin related to deferred revenue balance acquired

These non-GAAP financial measures are not meant to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for comparable IFRS measures and should be read only in conjunction with our consolidated financial statements prepared in accordance with IFRS.

In the adjusted income statement, Operating Expenses are defined as the sum of Research and Engineering expenses, Sales and Marketing expenses, General and Administrative expenses, and Other income (expense) net.

EBITDA is defined as PFO plus depreciation and amortization expenses, excluding the above amortization and depreciation of intangibles resulting from acquisitions.



General information

Main segments Main activities

First quarter 2016

( in millions) Total Payment &

Identity Mobile Embedded software

& Products Platforms

& Services Patents &

Others Revenue 691 433 258 468 222 0 As a percentage

of total revenue 100% 63% 37% 68% 32% 0%

For the first quarter of 2016, total revenue came in at 691 million, up +1% at historical exchange rates and stable at constant exchange rates. Payment & Identity, representing 63% of total Company revenue, posted sales of 433 million, up +17% year-on-year.

Embedded software & Products revenue of 468 million was (8%) lower compared to the same period last year due to lower sales to mobile network operators and to a lesser extent to lower sales to banks in China. Embedded software & Products activity for Government Programs and Machine-to-Machine continued to show strong positive trends during the quarter. Platforms & Services activities, representing 32% of first quarter Company revenue, posted sales of 222 million, an increase of +22% year-on-year, supported by the expansion in payment issuance services and data protection solutions.

The effects of currency movement in the first quarter of 2016 are minimal compared to the first quarter of 2015, resulting in a difference of less than 1 percentage point between revenue growth at historical and constant exchange rates. The hedging program, which aims at partially neutralizing the impact of sudden currency variations on the Company's profit from operations, produced a 0.1 percentage point difference compared to the same period last year.

The first quarter revenue of 2016 in the Americas region is stable compared to the same period in 2015. North America continued to grow despite the high comparison basis in Mobile sales last year, fully offsetting the soft market environment in Latin America. Revenue variations by region, at constant and historical exchange rates, are presented in Appendix 1.

Segment information

Payment & Identity

 in millions First quarter

2016 First quarter

2015 Revenue 433 369 Year-on-year variation at constant exchange rates +17%

The Payment & Identity segment's revenue came in at 433 million, increasing by +17% compared to the previous year.

Embedded software and Products revenue was up by +7% at 261 million. The segment's Platforms & Services revenue came in at 172 million, growing by +35% compared to the same period last year.

The Payment business grew +12% year-on-year, reaching 233 million. The Americas continue to post the largest growth with strong sales of EMV payment cards and issuance services in the United States offsetting lower sales in Asia.

The Enterprise business revenue increased to 103 million, up +14% on the same period in 2015. The trend in revenue mix within the business continues to move towards a higher proportion of software services.

The Government Programs business was up +34% versus a flat first quarter in 2015, at 97 million. The revenue increase stems from strong deliveries of previously won projects in all regions, and 6 million from the addition of Trub AG, acquired in the second quarter of 2015.

Mobile

 in millions First quarter

2016 First quarter

2015 Revenue 258 316 Year-on-year variation at constant exchange rates (20%)

The Mobile segment posted revenue of 258 million, (20%) lower at constant exchange rates compared to the first quarter of previous year.

Embedded software & Products revenue for the segment came in at 207 million. SIM sales were lower by (34%) at 133 million due to the tail-end effect of the U.S. operators mobile payment service 2015 closing announced earlier and to lower demand in Latin America and Asia. The Machine-to-Machine business continued to grow, by +12% year-on-year on top of a strong +25% increase a year ago, at 75 million driven by the expanding global demand of connected devices and embedded secure elements (eSE) for the Internet of Things (IoT).

Platforms & Services revenue for the segment came in at 50 million, reduced by (9%) year-on-year as Mobile Financial Services revenue decreased year-on-year, also due to last year's U.S. operators mobile payment service closing.

Patents & Others

 in millions First quarter

2016 First quarter

2015 Revenue 0.4 0.6 Year-on-year variation at constant exchange rates (29%)

Patents & Others revenue was 0.4 million this quarter versus 0.6 million during the same period in 2015.

Additional information

Gemalto has been chosen by the National Police Board in Finland to supply the country's new ePassport, which will enable secure and faster border crossings. The new travel document has advanced security features and is fully compliant with ICAO1 requirements. Gemalto is already responsible for Finland's polycarbonate electronic ID (eID) and resident permit cards. Under the new multi-year contract Gemalto will produce and personalize hundreds of thousands of Sealys ePassports and eID cards each year. These will be issued to citizens within days or even hours, via a convenient nationwide network of trusted retail outlets and delivery points.

Gemalto released the latest findings of the Breach Level Index, revealing that 1,673 data breaches led to 707 million data records being compromised worldwide during 2015. The Breach Level Index (BLI) is a global database that tracks data breaches globally and measures their severity based on multiple dimensions, including the type of data and the number of records compromised, the source of the breach, and whether or not the data was encrypted. According to the Breach Level Index, more than 3.6 billion data records have been exposed since 2013 when the index began benchmarking publicly disclosed data breaches.

Gemalto and PROSA, one of the largest payment processors in Latin America, announce a partnership to bring mobile payments to Mexico. PROSA has operations in eight Latin American countries and will provide mobile payment services to all customers, which include 95% of credit, debit and prepaid card issuers in Mexico. Gemalto's Allynis Trusted Service Hub (TSH) enables easy new customer onboarding, which allows banks to swiftly launch their own NFC mobile payment wallets utilizing host card emulation (HCE). Another important feature of Gemalto's TSH is its ability to provision payment wallets from device manufacturers and mobile network operators as they launch in Mexico.

Gemalto announces its leading edge Cinterion Cat. 1 LTE M2M module is Verizon certified to connect to the largest and most reliable 4G LTE network in the U.S. M2M and IoT device manufacturers currently using 2G or 3G technologies will now have a ruggedized industry connectivity solution for devices that require the performance and longevity of 4G networks. Machine to Machine (M2M) device makers leveraging the Verizon 4G LTE network have access to a future-proof Category 1 solution enabling highly efficient, cost optimized LTE connectivity and a quick go-to-market roadmap.

Gemalto and Bridge Alliance demonstrated a solution for multi-country deployment of IoT devices at the Mobile World Congressusing Gemalto's LinqUs On-Demand Connectivity (ODC) subscription management solution. Bridge Alliance is a partnership of 35 leading operators in Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, serving over 750 million customers. This demonstration, based on the GSMA interoperable standards, shows how hermetically sealed M2M and IoT devices such as connected cars or smart meters can securely connect to any Bridge Alliance Member Operator using remote 'over-the-air' provisioning.

Gemalto and Jasper, a global Internet of Things (IoT) platform leader, today announced a partnership to simplify global deployment of IoT devices and services through on-demand subscription management. Integrating Jasper's IoT service platform with Gemalto's LinqUs On-Demand Connectivity removes the complexity of deploying connected services worldwide  for mobile operators, device manufacturers, and application providers. Customers can provision and manage subscriptions on devices remotely via a single embedded SIM (eSIM), resulting in more efficient and cost-effective deployment models while enabling rapid distribution and device activation.

Outlook

For 2016, with the positive trends in Enterprise, Government Programs, Machine-to-Machine and the US EMV ramp-up effort completed, Gemalto expects to generate a +1.5 percentage point gross margin increase, accelerating its profit from operation expansion towards its 2017 objectives.

Live Audio Webcast and Conference call

Gemalto first quarter 2016 revenue presentation will be webcast in English today at 3pm Amsterdam and Paris time (2pm London time and 9am New York time).

This listen-only live audio webcast of the presentation and the Q&A session will be accessible from our Investor Relations web site:

www.gemalto.com/investors

Questions will be taken by way of conference call. Investors and financial analysts wishing to ask questions should join the presentation by dialing:

(UK) +44 203 367 9457 or (US) +1 855 402 7762 or (FR) +33 1 7077 0939

The accompanying presentation slide set is also available for download on our Investor Relations web site.

Replays of the presentation and Q&A session will be available in webcast format on our Investor Relations web site approximately 3 hours after the conclusion of the presentation. Replays will be available for one year.

Calendar

Gemalto N.V. will hold its 2016 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders (AGM) on Thursday, May 19, 2016 at the Hyatt Place Amsterdam Airport Hotel, Rijnlanderweg 800, 2132 NN Hoofddorp (Haarlemmermeer), the Netherlands at 2:00 p.m. CET.

The first semester 2016 results will be reported on Friday August 26, 2016, before the opening of Euronext Paris.

Stock Exchange Listing

Gemalto N.V. is dual listed on Euronext Amsterdam and Paris, in the compartment A (Large Caps).

Mnemonic: GTO

Exchange Dual listing on Euronext Amsterdam and Paris

Market of reference Euronext Amsterdam

ISIN Code NL0000400653

Reuters GTO.AS

Bloomberg GTO:NA

Gemalto has also established a sponsored Level I American Depository Receipt (ADR) Program in the United States since November 2009. Each Gemalto ordinary share is represented by two ADRs. Gemalto's ADRs trade in U.S. dollar and give access to the voting rights and to the dividends attached to the underlying Gemalto shares. The dividends are paid to investors in U.S. dollar, after being converted into U.S. dollar by the depository bank at the prevailing rate.

Structure Sponsored Level I ADR

Exchange OTC

Ratio (ORD:DR) 1:2

DR ISIN US36863N2080

DR CUSIP 36863N 208

Investor Relations Corporate Communication Media Relations Agency

Winston Yeo

Isabelle Marand

Suzanne Bakker M.: +33 6 2947 0814 M.: +33 6 1489 1817 M. : +31 6 1136 8659 winston.yeo@gemalto.com isabelle.marand@gemalto.com suzanne.bakker@citigateff.nl

Sebastien Liagre

M.: +33 6 1751 4467

sebastien.liagre@gemalto.com



About Gemalto

Gemalto (Euronext NL0000400653 GTO) is the global leader in digital security, with 2015 annual revenues of 3.1 billion and customers in over 180 countries. We bring trust to an increasingly connected world.

Our technologies and services enable businesses and governments to authenticate identities and protect data so they stay safe and enable services in personal devices, connected objects, the cloud and in between.

Gemalto's solutions are at the heart of modern life, from payment to enterprise security and the internet of things. We authenticate people, transactions and objects, encrypt data and create value for software  enabling our clients to deliver secure digital services for billions of individuals and things.

Our 14,000+ employees operate out of 118 offices, 45 personalization and data centers, and 27 research and software development centers located in 49 countries.

For more information visit

www.gemalto.com, or follow @gemalto on Twitter.

This communication does not constitute an offer to purchase or exchange or

the solicitation of an offer to sell or exchange any securities of Gemalto.

This communication contains certain statements that are neither reported financial results nor other historical information and other statements concerning Gemalto. These statements include financial projections and estimates and their underlying assumptions, statements regarding plans, objectives and expectations with respect to future operations, events, products and services and future performance. Forward-looking statements are generally identified by the words "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates" and similar expressions. These and other information and statements contained in this communication constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of applicable securities laws. Although management of the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, investors and security holders are cautioned that forward-looking information and statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of the Company, that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied or projected by the forward-looking information and statements, and the Company cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those estimated by the forward-looking statements contained in this communication include, but are not limited to: trends in wireless communication and mobile commerce markets; the Company's ability to develop new technology and the effects of competing technologies developed; effects of the intense competition in the Company's main markets; challenges to or loss of intellectual property rights; ability to establish and maintain strategic relationships in its major businesses; ability to develop and take advantage of new software, platforms and services; profitability of the expansion strategy; effects of acquisitions and investments; ability of the Company's to integrate acquired businesses, activities and companies according to expectations; ability of the Company to achieve the expected synergies from acquisitions; and changes in global, political, economic, business, competitive, market and regulatory forces. Moreover, neither the Company nor any other person assumes responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of such forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements contained in this communication speak only as of the date of this communication and the Company or its representatives are under no duty, and do not undertake, to update any of the forward-looking statements after this date to conform such statements to actual results, to reflect the occurrence of anticipated results or otherwise except as required by applicable law or regulations.



Appendices

Appendix 1

Revenue by region

 in millions First quarter

2016 First quarter

2015 Year-on-year variation at

constant exchange rates Year-on-year variation at

historical exchange rates EMEA 299 282 +6% +6% Americas 274 270 = +1% Asia 118 134 (13%) (12%) Total revenue 691 686 = +1%

Press Release (PDF): http://hugin.info/159293/R/2008126/742638.pdf
VERB-ING MODIFIERS PART 2

RULE SET #2

SIMPLE EXAMPLE

Mary

made

releasing

releasing

Understanding Intended meaning is the key:

OFFICIAL EXAMPLE

official example

12#133  Choice B

requiring turtle-excluder devices on shrimp nets is protecting adult sea turtles

Intended meaning:

local shrimpers

held

their compliance with laws

requiring

is protecting

AN INSTANCE IN WHICH VERB-ING IS NOT CORRECT

arachnids to persuade an ant specialist at the university to advise him and to publish

STEP 1: (Intended) MEANING ANALYSIS

STEP 2: ERROR ANALYSIS

biologist Glauco Machado

gathered

STEP 3: POE

Correct

Incorrect.

Incorrect.

APPLYING THE RULE SET TO GMATPREP QUESTION

GMAT Prep Question:

most of them as large or larger than Jupiter, which circle

MEANING ANALYSIS:

ERROR ANALYSIS:

astronomers

have detected

which

circle

, most of them as large or larger than Jupiter,

POE:

Incorrect

Incorrect.

Correct.

Incorrect.

Incorrect.

Verb-ing Modifier Article 2.pdf [438.05 KiB]

Downloaded 4093 times

To download please login or register as a user



In our first article on verb-ing modifiers, we discussed function of this modifier when used with a comma. In this article we will explain the function of the verb-ing modifier when the modifier is placed after the clause and is NOT preceded by a comma. To refresh your memory, in a sentence there are three general places where this modifier appears. In each placement, the modifier plays a specific role. These places are:1. Placed after a clause PRECEDED by a comma (explained in the first article)2. Placed after a clause NOT PRECEDED by a comma (explained in this article)3. In the beginning of a clause followed by a comma (Please view the Verb-ing concept in the free trial)The placement of the verb-ing modifier after a clause without a comma brings us to the second rule set for this modifier.Lets understand the application of this rule set through simple examples first.a beautiful bouquetdivine aroma.In this sentenceis a verb-ing modifier that is not preceded by a comma. In this construction, releasing modifies the preceding noun bouquet. The sentence means that Mary made a beautiful bouquet and that bouquet releases a divine aroma. So the modifier describes the noun "bouquet".As you would have noticed, the key to deciding whether to use a verb-ing modifier, and if to use one, whether to use one with a comma depends on the intended meaning of the sentence. If the logical intended meaning is such that the verb-ing modifier should modify the preceding noun or noun phrase, then we should use the verb-ing modifier without a comma. On the other hand, use the verb-ing modifier with the comma if the authors intention is to express additional information about the preceding clause or the result of the preceding clause. Either way, to make this distinction its important to understand the logical intended meaning. View the free concept on if you need further clarification (and audio visual representation).Lets now take anand apply the tools that we have learned so far. Note that in this example we will only analyze the sentence with regards to the verb-ing modifier. The sentence construction for choices A and B is same as it pertains to the usage of verb-ing modifier.Last week local shrimpers held a news conference to take some credit for the resurgence of the rare Kemp's ridley turtle, saying that their compliance with lawsTo decide whether the usage of verb-ing modifier make sense, lets understand the authors Intended Meaning.To understand the intended meaning, we will split the sentence into clauses to understand its structure. Take the Sentence Structure concepts in the free trial if you have trouble in splitting the sentence into clauses and phrases. Lets continue. Last weeka news conference to take some credit for the resurgence of the rare Kemp's ridley turtle, saying thatturtle-excluder devices on shrimp netsadult sea turtles.This sentence says that last week local shrimpers called for a news conference. They did so to take come credit for the resurgence of the rare Kemps ridley turtle. They informed in the conference that they comply with laws that require turtle-excluder devices on shrimp nets. This action is protecting adult sea turtles.The verb-ing modifier requiring is not preceded by a comma and hence correctly modifies the preceding noun laws. The meaning is clear - these laws require the shrimpers to use turtle-excluder devices on shrimp nets. Therefore, the sentence is correct as it is.We will now take an example in which Verb-ing is not correct. This example is from the exercise of the previous article.In three months, biologist Glauco Machado gathered enough information about large numbers of a relatively unstudied order ofhis first scientific paper.A. arachnids to persuade an ant specialist at the university to advise him and to publishB. arachnids, persuading an ant specialist at the university to advise him and publishingC. arachnids persuading an ant specialist at the university to advise him and publishingLets use the tools to determine whether verb-ing modifier makes sense.The sentence says that in three months Machado gathered enough information about a huge number of comparatively unstudied order of arachnids. He gathered all information with two purposes in mind:a. he wanted to persuade an ant specialist at the university to advise himb. he wanted to publish his first scientific paper In three months,enough information about large numbers of a relatively unstudied order of arachnids to persuade an ant specialist at the university to advise him and to publish his first scientific paper.This sentence has just one subject-verb pair, meaning it has only one clause. The SV pair is accounted for. The purposes of gathering all the information have been correctly written in to verb form. These two purposes are also correctly joined with and. Hence, there is no error in this sentence. The sentence is correct as is.Let us now do the POE to see what makes the other two choices incorrect.A. arachnids to persuade an ant specialist at the university to advise him and to publish:as we discussed during error analysis.B. arachnids, persuading an ant specialist at the university to advise him and publishing:Here both the verb-ing modifiers are preceded by comma, implying that they modify the entire preceding clause. Hence, now the sentence means that Machado gathered all the information and this action resulted into two things:a. he persuaded the ant specialist, andb. he published his first scientific papers.This is certainly not the intended meaning of the original sentence. The original sentence talks about purpose. Per this choice, Machados gathering information actually led to the persuasion of the ant specialist and the publication of the first scientific paper. Hence, this choice is grammatically correct but certainly alters the intended meaning and is thus incorrect.C. arachnids persuading an ant specialist at the university to advise him and publishing:In this choice, the verb-ing modifiers appear without comma. Here, both persuading and publishing modify the preceding noun arachnids. Now, per this choice, the sentence means that Machado collected information on certain arachnids and these arachnids did the jobs of persuading the ant specialist and publishing first scientific paper. This is absolutely illogical. This is a case where verb-ing modifier without a comma does not make sense.Ok, so now that we understand how to use the new tools that we have learnt, lets add them to our arsenal and use the 3 step process to solve a GMAT PREP question.In the past several years, astronomers have detected more than 80 massive planets,other stars.A. most of them as large or larger than Jupiter, which circleB. most of them as large or larger than Jupiter and circlingC. most of them at least as large as Jupiter, circlingD. mostly at least as large as Jupiter, which circleE. mostly as large or larger than Jupiter, circlingLet us now apply the three-step process to solve this one. We will begin with the first step that is:The sentence says that in the past few years, astronomers have detected more than 80 massive planets. These massive planets are either as large as Jupiter or larger than Jupiter. These massive planets also circle other stars. In the past several years,more than 80 massive planets, most of them as large or larger than Jupiter,other stars.This sentence uses a mix of two idioms  as X as and X larger than  in the form of as large or larger than. This is incorrect. We must use the idiom correctly in its entirety to present the correct comparison.Notice the modifier  which circle. This relative pronoun modifier modifies the noun 80 massive planets. Some of you may wonder that which circle modifies the closest noun Jupiter. This is not correct. And this is where logical meaning and understanding the sentence structure comes to our aid.Notice that most of them as large or larger than Jupiter is a modifier that provides additional information about the 80 massive planets. This modifier is encapsulated in a comma pair. So even if we remove this modifier from the sentence, the meaning will not be altered. So for the sake of our discussion, lets remove this modifier: In the past several years, astronomers have detected more than 80 massive planetswhich circle other stars.Now as you can see, which circle modifies the noun phrase 80 massive planets. Remember that the comma that precedes which does not separate which but is part of the comma pair that separates the modifier "most of them" from the rest of the sentence.We will now find the correct choice from the remaining 4 choices.A. most of them as large or larger than Jupiter, which circle:for reasons discussed above.B. most of them as large or larger than Jupiter and circling:i. This choice repeats the idiom and parallelism errors of choice A.ii. A modifier is not separated from the entity it modifies by using and.C. most of them at least as large as Jupiter, circling:This choice corrects the error of choice A by using the correct idiom at least as large as Jupiter to convey the intended meaning.Furthermore, notice the use of modifier - circling . This modifier modifies the noun entity that precedes it  more than 80 massive planets. As we discussed in the sentence structure discussion for choice A, this modifier does not modify the immediately preceding noun "Jupiter". This is a verb-ing modifier that is not separated from the preceding clause by a comma and hence modifies the preceding noun entity.At this time we should also pay attention to the logical meaning of the sentence. We have determined already that circling modifies 80 massive planets from grammatical standpoint. From logical standpoint also, circling must modify 80 massive planets because it is a universal fact that Jupiter revolves around the Sun and no other star. Hence, there is no logical way that circling can modify Jupiter. It should modify 80 massive planets.D. mostly at least as large as Jupiter, which circle:Use of mostly is incorrect here. Now it is an adverb that refers to the adjective following it at least as large as. This is non-sensical.E. mostly as large or larger than Jupiter, circling:i. Repeats the same mostly error of choice D.ii. Repeats the idiom error of choice A._________________




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In April 2016, Columbia became one of the first top MBA programs to announce its new essay topics and recommendation questions. Columbia has also revealed that its online application will be available in May 2016. This means that you can submit your application to Columbia as early as May. Whether you are applying to the full-time MBA program in the January-Start, Early Decision (August start) or Regular Decision (August start) pools, you can submit your Columbia GSB application as soon as the application is live!Many reapplicants are thrilled at the idea that they can try again at Columbia. In our experience at .com, Columbia is very receptive to reapplicants as long as the reapplicant took steps to address the perceived weakness(es) of their application or credentials. We have many success stories every year of candidates who gain admission to Columbia just months after they were rejected when applying on their own.But the very idea of applying only months after a prior rejection makes some reapplicants nervous. What if they applied to Columbia in February 2016 and were rejected, but try to reapply to Columbia in May or June of the same year  just months later! Isnt it impossible to show they have fixed the problem or had growth or improvement in their candidacy since last applying? No, its not impossible! It is, in fact, very possible to show you have fixed the problem in such a short time and we have helped candidates to do this countless times.For one thing, one of the main weaknesses of your application could have been the timing of your submission. If you had a flaw, such as a 640 GMAT score, the Columbia admissions committee might have considered you favorably as a January-start candidate (because that program is easier to get into), but they did not view your candidacy favorably in February, after they had already given out hundreds upon hundreds of seats and far fewer places remained. If you correct the timing of your application  either applying early in the August-start pool or applying for January-start, you may have a different outcome largely based on timing! (For any reapplication, however, make sure that your next application is in tip-top condition, to convey that you really, really want Columbia!)Also, your application itself may have been the problem that caused your rejection, not your candidacy. Did you state an unrealistic short-term goal? Were your essays mediocre? Did you have one flat recommendation? When there was a problem with the application and not your qualifications, that is very good news because you can fix your application fast! Fixing the application will be what you need to do in order to gain a different outcome and thus applying in May or June will work as long as you are submitting a stronger application.As for showing growth since your last application when the last application was only months prior, some candidates are concerned. But, you naturally would have taken on different aspects of a work project even if the project did not change. You may also have done a new extracurricular project. You may have completed more research about Columbia since last applying. All of these things demonstrate growth. We at .com have never seen a candidate who has not been able to identify areas of growth, even if they were reapplying to Columbia within months of a rejection.Because Columbia operates with rolling admissions, the earlier you apply the more seats will still be available, and thus the better your odds will be of securing one of those MBA seats. Therefore, submitting your application in May or June may be to your great advantage.Even better, when you submit early, you will likely hear your outcome within 2-6 weeks. Therefore, if you submit in May you could learn by June whether you have admission!Best wishes,Email: info@mbaadmit.com _________________
Plans for a new 77-story mixed-use tower at 247 Cherry Street on the Lower East Sidepractically next door to Extell's 80-story One Manhattan Squarewere met with anger by nearby residents Wednesday night.

The glass and terracota brick tower aims to bring 600 new rental units to the neighborhood, but despite plans for 150 affordable units, the absence of a poor door, renovations to a nearby senior center, and a new 4,600 square foot community center, the tower's backers faced "contentious" pushback from "a battle-hardened crew sick of constant construction at their doorstep," according to Bowery Boogie.

Two Bridges Neighborhood Council helped broker the deal with JDS Development. Residents at the meeting reportedly shouted down TBNC president Victor Papa at every opportunity, accusing him of being a "liar" guilty of accepting kickbacks from developers.

There is no more space on the Lower East Side to develop affordable housing, except this [project], which makes it very attractive for us to do," Papa told The Lo Down, which broke the news of the 247 Cherry Street tower.



Rendering by SHoP Architects

The planned tower would be situated behind Extell's One Manhattan Square on a site currently co-owned by the Two Bridges Council and Settlement Housing Fund.

JDS paid a total of $51 million for the property, which will have a total footprint of approximately 9,000 square feet and will soar 900 feet. SHoP Architects, the firm responsible for the Barclays Center, a proposed $5.3 billion facelift to LaGuardia, the revamped Domino Sugar Factory, the giant residential towers at 626 First Avenue, and just about every other high profile NYC development you can think of, designed the project.

Rental units will include studio, 1-bedroom, and 2-bedroom apartments, with designated affordable units evenly dispersed throughout the tower. Outdoor terrace space will be built in the middle of the skyscraper and its top floor will feature amenities accessible to all residents. On its ground floor the tower will house retail and a public plaza. Construction on the new tower is not slated to begin until at least 2018.

Construction of the new tower will require razing a small community center on Cherry Street. The building will cantilever over part of the Pathmark Pharmacy property and nearly touch the nearby senior center.

Other high-rise projects by JDS Development include the in-progress American Copper Buildings along the East River and a 1,000-foot tower in Downtown Brooklyn destined to become the borough's tallest building.
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The rarefied class of decision makers behind the 2.4 acre, $130 million dollar elevated park above the Hudson River designed and largely funded by a billionaire with almost no public input whatsoever have been given permission to break ground.

The City Club of New York had sued to prevent Barry Diller and his wife Diane von Furstenberg from building the park at Pier 55 on the Hudson Rivernot for treating public land like a private asset, because these things happenbut because they argued that the 300 columns the park has to drive into the Hudson would irreparably disturb the environment, which is a marine sanctuary and spawning ground for striped bass.

A judge dismissed their suit earlier this month. Yesterday, the Army Corps of Engineers cleared the final hurdle for construction to begin as early as this summer. The City Club says they will appeal.

We are excited to be in a position to start construction, Madelyn Wils, the CEO of the Hudson River Park Trust, said in a statement.

Wils and the trusts chair, Diana Taylor (who happens to be Michael Bloombergs girlfriend) were some of the only people to see Dillers early plans for the park, which began with him spending $33 million and eventually grew to $113 million. The city and the state will contribute $17 million and $18 million respectively.

Hudson River Park itself is only 72% finished (not enough funding, you seewhere are all the generous billionaires?) but the trust has promised that when it is, money from its commercial ventures will help maintain Pier 55 for the duration of its 20-year lease.

Plus there will be income from Pier 55's three event spaces and their promise of high-quality arts programing.

Finally, a place to see outdoor performances in New York City.
After pleading guilty last month, a former correction officer at the Manhattan Detention Complex has been sentenced to six years in state prison for smuggling narcotics, cell phones, tools, tobacco, and more into the Lower Manhattan jail commonly known as "The Tombs." Patricia Howard, 44, worked as a correction officer for nearly 20 years, and was arrested a year ago along with three others as part of a 10-month undercover operation by the Department of Investigation and the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

When Howard was arrested in May 2015, she was found with a shopping bag that contained cocaine, marijuana, cell phones, tobacco, and rolling papers, among other things. In a guilty plea, Howard admitted to conspiring with her co-defendantsinmate Tommy Davis, his sister, Velver Jean Davis, and his niece, Khalilah Mattocksto smuggle in such contraband between December 2014 and May 2015.

At the time of her arrest, officials said that this went undetected in part because of lax screening at MDC. Howard was reportedly able to walk through the staff entrance carrying gift bags, which wouldn't be sent through the X-ray machineand when they did go through the machine, the drugs and other contraband she was smuggling weren't detected.

Howard worked in the mailroom, and the investigation found that this position allowed her to receive contraband from Mattocks and give it to Davis, who was awaiting trial for murder charges. Howard would then receive a payment of up to $1,000. When investigators searched the mailroom, they found a handwritten, unsigned note that read, "Thanks for your support 'Jail Shopping Network.'" The note was addressed to Howard.

Last month, Howard was arraigned on new charges, the NY Post reported: while she was an inmate at Westchester County jail in Valhalla, she allegedly gave another inmate a folded piece of paper containing cocaine. Her defense attorney said that she maintains she was innocent in that incident.

Mattocks pleaded guilty on Tuesday, according to the Manhattan DA, and is expected to be sentenced on May 5th.

In a statement, DOI Commissioner Mark Peters said that "this Correction Officer not only leveraged the authority her position afforded for personal financial gain, but compromised the safety of her fellow officers by engaging in this corruption. DOI remains fully committed to ending the underground contraband rings fueling violence and instability at our Citys jails." Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance added that "the security of City jails is only as sound as the integrity of those who operate them."
Donald Trump might be a classless bigoted misogynist, but he's a very popular classless bigoted misogynist, and he's on track to win the most primary votes of any GOP candidate in modern history. Sad!

The NY Post spoke with Eric Ostermeier, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of the Smart Politics blog, who confirmed Future President Merkin has about 10.1 million votes right now, and with big states like Indiana, California and New Jersey on the horizon, he'll more than likely top George W. Bush's modern record of 10.8 million votes. In an election cycle with a high Republican turnout, his numbers are rising, even more so now that theres only three candidates," Ostermeier told the tabloid.

It's scary to think that this man is convincing enough to get 10.1 million people to vote for him, but considering the competition, it's not surprising. Ted Cruz, whom former Speaker of the House John Boehner recently described as "Lucifer in the flesh" and a "miserable son of a bitch," has merged his evil forces with Carly Fiorina. Planned Parenthood has appropriately dubbed them the "most loathsome pair in America," and if you're wondering what their malevolent spawn would look like, note that the Internet is full of wonders.

And while John Kasich seems like the more reasonable choice, his record proves he's not really just an affable adventurous eater, plus his first State of the Union speech would probably bore the entire country to death.

So Trump will probably be the GOP nominee, and even establishment Republicans are starting to like him more and more, based on the results from Tuesday's primary. Could be worse? Maybe? Oh well, at least the world will have to end at some point, right?
On April 17th, 37-year-old Edson Thevenin was fatally shot by a police officer in Troy, New York. He was driving at about 3:15 a.m. when the officer, Sergeant Randall French, attempted to pull him over, according to local authorities. Thevenin allegedly fled in his car, and when police caught up with him, they say he drove into French, who'd gotten out of his vehicle. Pinned between the police car and Thevenin's car, French is said to have fired eight shots at Thevenin through the windshield. Thevenin died, and French sustained minor leg injuries.

By Friday, April 22just five days after the shootingRensselaer County District Attorney Joel Abelove had already convened a grand jury, which declined to indict French, having determined that the officer's "use of deadly physical force was justifiable under the law."

But it seems that Abelove may have overstepped his authority in convening a grand jury so quickly. Last July, Governor Cuomo appointed Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to serve as a special prosecutor on police-killing deaths. For months, relatives of New Yorkers killed by police officers had been asking for this, after a grand jury declined to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for fatally choking Eric Garner. Some suspected that the grand jury was simply acting according to the Staten Island District Attorney office's wishes.

Schneiderman's office sent representatives to the scene on the day of Thevenin's death and told Abelove that they were looking into whether or not the shooting should fall under the AG's jurisdiction. Now, Schneiderman is suing Abelove, saying that he violated Cuomo's executive order by convening that grand jury.

Per Cuomo's order, if there is "significant question as to whether the civilian was armed and dangerous at the time of his or her death," Schneiderman can investigate and prosecute the case. Last Tuesday, his Special Investigations and Prosecutions Unit requested the investigative files from the shooting that killed Thevenin, and told Abelove that they were trying to determine whether Schneiderman should have jurisdiction over the case. But Abelove told reporters quite the opposite, saying that "it was relayed to me by [assistant attorney general Paul] Clyne that the attorney general ... is not going to be claiming jurisdiction in this case." He later told Schneiderman's office that he'd been misquoted, though according to the Albany Times Union, his remarks were recorded.

According to the lawsuit, Schneiderman's office told Abelove "at least three times" that he was interested in the case. It also notes that Cuomo's order "expressly and unequivocally required District Attorneys to get prior authorization from the Attorney General to make grand jury presentations where a civilian was 'unarmed' or where there is a significant question whether a civilian was 'armed and dangerous.'"

"District Attorney Abelove's actions not only violate the law, but directly undermine the public's confidence in law enforcement, making the jobs of police officers and district attorneys throughout the state more difficult," Schneiderman said.

Abelove's office declined to comment.

Since Schneiderman was appointed special prosecutor last July, his office has investigated four cases involving civilians who were not armed or dangerous, including the shooting death of Miguel Espinal in Westchester and the cell death of Raynette Turner in Mount Vernon. The latter case is closed, with the AG ruling that there was no criminal culpability in Turner's death, but he is still investigating Espinal's death, as well as a case in Putnam County and a case in the Bronx, according to the New York Times.

According to Schneiderman's office, this is the first time that a DA has violated Cuomo's order by attempting to exercise jurisdiction over a case that could fall under the special prosecutor's authority. It's also the first time that Schneiderman is suing to compel a DA to comply with the executive order.

It's worth noting that the AG has not yet decided whether he will investigate and prosecute Thevenin's deathrather, he's challenging the fact that the DA convened a grand jury before Schneiderman could determine whether or not Thevenin was armed and dangerous when French shot and killed him.

Thevenin is survived by his wife, Cinthia, and two children, ages four and eight. His family has said they would like the Attorney General to investigate his death, as they don't think that the Troy police have been consistent in their statements.
A Manhattan-based developer has acquired the necessary permits to install a floating power plant the size of a luxury yacht in a narrow channel along the southern end of Kent Avenue in Williamsburg, near the South Williamsburg East River Ferry terminal. First reported by the Brooklyn Paper, the deal is awaiting approval from the Army Corps of Engineers, which has pledged to accept comments on the proposal until April 30th.

Robert Perris of Brooklyn's Community Board 2 told us today that he heard about the proposal secondhand, in early Aprileven though Sef Industries (a.k.a. NYC Energy LLC) filed an application for the barge's installation back in 2013. "This might have flown under the radar without any discourse about whether it's appropriate or not," he said. "We weren't provided with any information [by the Army Corps of Engineers]."

The proposed 220-foot-by-100-foot barge would fill approximately half the width of Wallabout Channel on the northeastern edge of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and rise six stories, according to a notice posted in late March by the Army Corps of Engineers. (For the less-imaginative, Brownstoner whipped up a rendering.) It would be moored on steel pipe piles, and would require the installation of 750 feet of utility pipeline about 40 feet below the low-tide line.

The floating 79.9 MW power plant would provide emergency electricity in the case of a "catastrophic loss of power" in New York City prompted by a natural disaster or terrorist attack, according to Sef's 2013 application [PDF]. Sef also made the case that the floating plant would displace "less efficient, higher polluting" generators elsewhere. But locals have countered that the barge will generate noise and air pollution. A similar barge exploded in Sunset Park in August of 2012.

The plant would produce enough energy to power about 79,000 homes, according to Brownstoner. But at 79.9 MW, it's just below the 80 MW threshold that triggers a lengthy environmental review process.

A coalition of locals called Stop The Barge won a lawsuit against Sef back in 2001, over a similar proposal for a barge in the Wallabout Channel. The proposal was tabled after the coalition made the case that Sef hadn't done an adequate environmental review.

There's also the NIMBY aspect, as the barge would be within sight lines of the yet-to-be-developed Domino Sugar Factory. "Imagine being in a building when you have power plant stacks in front of your window," Stop The Barge member Kathleen Gilrain told the Brooklyn Paper this week.

Senator Daniel Squadron, Councilmember Steve Levin and other local pols sent a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers earlier this week, asking for an extended comment period on the barge, and a public hearing to discuss its implications.

"The concerns raised by the idea of placing a floating power plant in this location go on and on, and the amount of information available is disturbingly limited," said Squadron in a statement.

Sef could not be immediately reached for comment. The Army Corps of Engineers did not immediately respond to a request either, but their public notice on the proposal says the permitting decision will consider "impacts of the proposed activity on the public interest." The corp's Manhattan office is accepting feedback through Saturday.
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A 57-year-old man arrested for his seventh drunk driving offense at first denied driving to a North Montana Avenue store on Tuesday night even after deputies reportedly watched him stumble from his pickup truck.

"But when asked how the vehicle got to Bob's Valley Market, the defendant stated 'well it wasn't ferries,'" court documents say.

Prosecutors say the accused, Wyoming-resident Stephen Warren Pennington, has at least six prior DUI convictions. He faces a felony DUI charge and is jailed on $25,000 bond.

At about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, authorities received a report of an intoxicated, belligerent man who was later located in the parking lot of the market, 7507 N. Montana Ave. Court documents say the seemingly impaired driver, Pennington, was verbally abusive to the deputy and refused to perform field sobriety tests.
A 41-year-old Helena woman faces two felony charges on accusations she shot an ex-boyfriend and her son with a BB gun.

Janette Frances Stubbs is accused of shooting her son in the ear and nearly hitting her ex-boyfriend with a BB that broke out the back window of his pickup truck. Deputies arrested Stubbs on two charges of felony criminal endangerment on Tuesday afternoon.

Authorities say the son and his father went to pick up Stubbs in order to have dinner together on April 17. When they arrived at Stubbs' home on the 1700 block of Lincoln Road East, she "came out of the house with a pink colored BB gun," according to court documents filed Wednesday.

The two victims remained in the pickup. The son was struck in the ear by a BB that entered the truck through an open window, the documents note.

Court documents do not say if the son was injured.
Last year, as the school bathroom wars were heating up, I asked a group of college students how they'd feel if they had to share a toilet with people of a different gender. Nobody seemed to mind; indeed, some of them were doing so already.

Then I asked how they felt about the National Security Agency possibly monitoring their phone or computer records. A few students objected, but most of them shrugged. They assumed it was happening already.

Welcome to the complicated world of privacy and young Americans, who continue to criss-cross our traditional political lines. On the bathroom issue, they're overwhelmingly liberal: for most young people, it's NBD (No Big Deal). But when it comes to the domestic surveillance by the government, they're similarly blase. And that puts them in the same camp as hawkish conservatives, who want to beef up surveillance even at the cost of civil liberties.

A growing number of colleges have established unisex bathrooms to accommodate transgender students, who often feel uncomfortable in a gender-restricted facility. In North Carolina, which recently set off a national firestorm by requiring people to use bathrooms based on their gender at birth, at least four colleges feature unisex restrooms in some of their buildings.

And as best we can tell, most young people are OK with that. They're also fine with letting transgender people use whatever bathroom they choose. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week, two-thirds of Americans ages 18 to 29 said transgender people should be allowed to use restrooms corresponding to their current gender identity; by contrast, just a quarter of respondents over 60 agreed with that.

Earlier this year, meanwhile, a Los Angeles high school established a gender-neutral restroom in response to a petition signed by 700 students. The decision made national news and raised hackles among far-right critics, who protested outside the school last week and hurled anti-gay slurs.

The students then staged a counter-rally, featuring rainbow flags and signs reading, "Keep Calm, It's Just a Toilet." Like other supporters of transgender rights, the students mocked the much-heard claim that unisex restrooms would allow "peeping Toms" to spy on members of different genders.

Across the country, however, young people don't seem too worried about the government spying on them. In a 2015 survey by the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of the 18-29 cohort had a "favorable" view of the National Security Agency. The older they were, the less support respondents expressed for the NSA; among Americans over 65, only 40 percent had a favorable view of it.

Maybe that's because older Americans remember how security agencies illegally spied on members of the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s. Or perhaps it's because older people simply follow the issue more closely than younger citizens do. In a different Pew poll, back in 2013, 33 percent of Americans over 50 said they were following news about the government tracking phone records "very closely"; in the 18-29 bracket, just 12 percent said they were doing so.

That mirrors overall trends of youth political engagement, which has plummeted over the past few decades. Back in the 1970s, young people followed the news at about the same rate as other Americans. But in 2012, only 13 percent of young Americans said they regularly read a print or digital newspaper.

Not surprisingly, they also know much less about national news than their elders. In 2011, when 43 percent of Americans could name John Boehner as the speaker of the House, only 21 percent of Americans under 30 could do so. Even among college students, only one-third recognized John Roberts as chief justice of the United States. But over 90 percent recognized Miley Cyrus! Our students might not know much about politics, but they're experts on pop culture.

Maybe that's another reason why the bathroom issue has energized young people, while the NSA issue hasn't. Across the airwaves, celebrities have lined up to lambaste the North Carolina bathroom law. A few big-name musicians, including Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr, have even canceled concerts in the state to protest the measure.

Another factor might be the NSA's announcement -- in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks -- that it would stop routinely collecting the domestic phone records of U.S. citizens. But the agency retains the power to authorize phone data collections for "ongoing investigations," whatever that means. Nobody knows what kind of leeway that gives the NSA to snoop on us.

We should know. Many of our young people, raised in the digital era, seem to think that anything on their computers or phones is fair game for spying eyes. I'm proud of them for letting people of different genders into their bathrooms. I just wish they'd be more vigilant about letting the government into the rest of their lives.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author of "Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know," which will be published in August by Oxford University Press. He wrote this for The Dallas Morning News.
BILLINGS - Two brothers driving through West Yellowstone on Tuesday night struck an adult bison, killing the animal and likely totaling their vehicle, according to the Montana Highway Patrol.

What happened is actually somewhat normal in this area, MHP Trooper Marcus Cook said. Theyre black on a black road, Cook said of the bison at night.

According to Cook, the brothers, 26 and 17, were northbound on US Highway 191 in a 2005 Chrysler 300 when they struck a bison near mile marker 3.8 at around 10:15 p.m.

The vehicles pretty well smashed to bits. Luckily they were wearing their seatbelts and the airbags deployed, Cook said. No injuries at all.

The brothers told Cook they believe they struck the animal in the rear, but he could not confirm it. Cook said that when bison are struck by drivers, asphalt tends to rip their hair off as they tumble down the road, making it hard to determine where the animal was struck by the vehicle.

Cook guessed that the 26-year-old driver was near the 65 mph night speed limit judging by the lack of skid marks and the fact that they were able to walk away from the incident uninjured. According to Cook, the driver was negotiating a slight left uphill curve when he struck the bison.

The vehicle came to a stop in the northbound lane, near where the bison came to rest in the southbound lane.

In the past month or two, Cook said MHP has responded to several incidents of vehicles striking bison in the area, including one instance where a semi-truck struck multiple bison.

The National Park Services Yellowstone National Park website says the bison is the largest land mammal in North America. Adult female bison can reach up to 1,000 pounds, and adult males can grow up to 2,000 pounds.
DECATUR  From the moment the audience walks into Millikin University's Pipe Dreams Theatre, they will feel like part of the play What I Didn't Learn in College.

Although the scene is set in 1979 Chicago, it is a coming-of-age story reminiscent of many young adults.

This weekend kicks off the student performance of the play. It will be the first production of the show written by New York playwright Rich Orloff. The Pipe Dreams artistic team found it and decided it was a show they would love doing, said stage manager, Brittany Schmidt.

The raunchy comedy follows a recent college graduate after he moves into a house with three other young men. He is considered conservative compared to his roommates. It is about a bunch of guys just out of college trying to live in the adult world and still be college-y, said actor Elizabeth Pillow. They drink a lot of beer and party all the time, but they still get their work done.

Although the show has suggestive aspects, the audience can still relate. Everyone ends up learning something from each other, said director, John Farina. Any audience will be able to relate at least one character in the show.

To help the audience find a connection with the story, Farina has the audience walk through the stage to find their seats. I wanted the audience to be absorbed in it right away, to make them feel like they are sitting in the living room with the characters, Farina said. I want them to feel as involved as possible.

The show fits the niche the production company uses to provide new experiences for the artists to play and experiment. We get a chance to learn new things that they might not get a chance to do with the Millikin main stage shows, Schmidt said.

The cast keeps the audience on edge with quick banter and fast flowing conversations. As an understudy actor, Levi Ehrmantraut has the opportunity to watch every rehearsal. The show is a new thing every night, he said. I don't get bored with it.

The students of Pipe Dreams Studio Theater Company decide on the plays. Although they will receive instruction from Millikin faculty and instructors, they create the performance. What I didn't learn in College is a production the cast is sure the audience will find familiar.

The show is crude, but it is reminiscent of the old ideas and thoughts you might have had in college, said actor, Kyle Kite. Even to an older audience, they can laugh about it and have fun. At the same time, they get to watch who they are and how they became that person.
DECATUR  After missing a series of previously scheduled court appearances in Decatur, a Normal man came up with an old-fashioned way to make sure he was there Thursday for his latest one.

Ronald Blalock II rode horseback from LeRoy to arrive with plenty of time to spare for a morning hearing at the Macon County Courts Facility.

The horse waited on the lawn outside while Blalock, 38, went inside for a bond hearing stemming from charges of driving on a suspended driver's license.

Blalock didn't think he would receive a welcome reception while in Decatur with the horse, which is named Rooster, based on a character in a John Wayne movie. However, Blalock said everyone he encountered, from security officers to the judge and assistant state's attorney, were friendly.

I thought I'd be in trouble, Blalock said. Now I know they won't be so hard if you show up.

With family living out of state and friends from the area at work, Blalock didn't have anyone who could drive him to Decatur. Blalock, who has worked as a truck driver, has been without his driver's license for nearly four months, he said.

So he decided to make the trip from a farm near LeRoy with Rooster, who only has one good eye, which Blalock said raises his other senses, such as hearing.

They set out about 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, arriving in Forsyth about 9:45 p.m. for a stop at McDonald's and to rest overnight. While there, Blalock ate a quarter-pounder and Rooster enjoyed munching on the lawn along with some sliced apples from the restaurant.

The journey didn't go entirely smoothly, as the pair encountered heavy rain and lightning. Blalock brought a sack with supplies to protect them from the elements, but he still got wet while pitching a tarp. The Tennessee Walking Horse didn't seem to mind, though, as Blalock said Rooster lay on the ground, tired from the long walk.

Making it through the night and remaining determined to resolve his legal matters, Blalock left Forsyth about 6 a.m. Thursday and walked alongside the horse through town, thinking he needed to be at the courthouse by 8:30 a.m. He found out he was early, as the hearing wasn't supposed to happen until 10 a.m. but it was able to proceed ahead of schedule.

Meanwhile, Rooster was drawing attention while tied to a tree on the lawn outside and enjoying a shady spot to eat some of the grass and weeds. Curious courthouse staff and visitors entering the building took photos, with some starting to catch attention on Facebook.

Michael Tarczan, an investigator with the Macon County Public Defender's Office, watched from his office window, waiting for Blalock to return outside. Tarczan told him that the innovative approach to appearing for a court date should be an inspiration to others.

It can be a lesson, Tarczan said. Some guys can't seem to make it, and they live two blocks away.

Blalock decided to do what was necessary as he tries to get his driver's license back. He still needs to take care of issues in McLean County before he will be able to do so, but he was relieved to have the matter resolved in Macon County.

Blalock was ordered to pay a fine, plus court costs, as the case was closed.

Blalock didn't mind spending the time with Rooster, who he's been riding for three years.

I trust my horse, Blalock said. He's a good old horse. This is like a big dog, my friend.

The pair planned to return to LeRoy by today, likely spending another night camping out. Blalock looked up at the clearing sky, hopeful that the weather will be better for the return trip.
DECATUR  Cloudy skies did not deter the devoted following who turned up at Scovill Zoo for Tilly the wolf's birthday party Wednesday.

It was a moment that 3-year-old Charlotte Broderick has been looking forward to since last year's celebration.

I videotaped it on my phone, said her mom, Bailey Broderick. I think we've watched it two to three times a week, all year.

One could see why the event would make an impression. Zookeepers Grace Erker and Mindy Weaver played guitar and saxophone during the singing of Happy Birthday and a special song to the tune of Bingo. Tilly got to enjoy a meat cake topped with hot dogs, while her guests were served cupcakes.

The party also served as a belated welcome for Timber, who was adopted from an animal shelter last fall as a companion for Tilly and whose bloodline is thought to contain some wolf.

Broderick even picked up her 6-year-old son Cooper from school early so that he could join Charlotte and Oliver, 5, to share the event together.

I wish they would do (birthday parties) for all the animals. My kids love it, she said. They know that it's Tilly's birthday  like, they think that it's a big deal.

This was Tilly's sixth brithday, but her second party. The event was introduced last year because she was alone after her fellow wolf Mowgli died, and keepers were looking for ways to give her more enrichment.

We were trying to increase the amount of enrichment we were putting in her environment, just because we knew she was by herself and probably a little lonely, said keeper Heather Purdeu. It was so positive last year that we actually had people ask us if we were doing it again this year.

Both animals seemed to enjoy the extra attention, frequently heading up to the glass window the exhibit to peer at the excited visitors. Keepers also gave them papier-mache balloons with treats inside.

Amir and Rebecca Lilienthal brought their three children: Jordan, 4, Henry, 2, and Benjamin, 13 weeks.

The two older boys often use the nearby playground, said Rebecca Lilienthal, so they have been able to see Tilly and Timber through the fence, even when the zoo is closed.

What kid doesn't love a good birthday party? she said.
New Braunfels, TX (78130)

Today

Generally cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 89F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Rain showers this evening with mostly clear conditions overnight. Low 57F. SW winds shifting to NW at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Higher wind gusts possible.
This isnt the first time that Marineh Sargsyan has been forced to leave her native village of Talish, in Artsakh, due to war.

The same story, like a bad dream, has repeated. Ive been forced to flee Talish twice, says Sargsyan who left Talish in 1992 for Yerevan, with her grandparents, when she was just 14.

This reporter met up with Sargsyan, a mother of four in Yerevan.

I went to school here for three years and graduated, she tells me.

In the early 1990s, after Talish was liberated, Marineh returned to the village and married Aram, also from Talish.

Her son Mher, 18, has been serving in the army for the past ten months. Hes stationed in Askeran. Her husband is a contract soldier and is currently serving in Talish.

Marineh, and in fact all Talish residents Ive had a chance to talk to, are content with conditions in the village. We were living well. We had our animals, cows, pigs and chickens. We got by on our own, says Marineh.

The mother of two boys and two girls describes the night of April 1 when the Azerbaijani military started shelling Talish.

The shelling was constant. There was no electricity. I dressed the kids with whatever I could grab and took them to a neighbors house. We crouched in a basement until 5:30 the next morning. The kids were freezing because they werent wearing socks.

Talish residents then assembled at the village municipal building. The shelling continued. The village mayor then ordered for the women and children to be evacuated.

On April 2, Marineh made it to Yerevan with three of her children. Theyre temporarily staying at her mothers place.

We found a house in Masis to live. The kids will go to school there until we decide what to do next, says Marineh.

When I visited Marineh, her eldest daughter was at a local hospital waiting to be operated on. The mother said medical expenses had been covered by the Mission Armenia organization.

When I asked Marineh what she needed at the moment, she replied, I only want peace, nothing else.

Photos and video: Narek Aleksanyan
ARTS

For nearly 40 years, bassist Fred Schrank has watched the MSO get bigger and better
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People attend a climate discussion at the U.S. pavilion during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015.
After helping set a Guinness record in China for the worlds largest display of cheese varieties, a Wisconsin trade delegation helped convince that countrys northernmost province to boost its imports of state agricultural products, a delegation official said.

Wisconsin exporters of frozen semen and embryos, farm equipment and feed all have opportunities to take advantage of Heilongjiang provinces plan to invest $200 million on livestock expansion over the next three years, said Sandy Chalmers, assistant deputy secretary for the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

Wisconsin and Heilongjiang Province have been sister states for more than 30 years, and what unites us is our common interest in dairy, said Chalmers, who led the delegation.

Province officials announced the plan this week after the state trade delegation of businesses and professionals attended the 2016 China International Dairy Expo and Summit April 22-24 in the provinces capital, Harbin.

The expos record-seeking organizers enlisted the help of workers from Wisconsin-based Ellsworth Cooperative Creamery and UW-River Falls to help Wisconsin businesses and DATCP to identify and gather more than 500 varieties of cheeses from Wisconsin, the Netherlands and China showcased at the record-breaking display, Chalmers said.

The state also showcased 417 cheese varieties and products from 24 of its cheese producers/distributors along with other state produced products in a Wisconsin Pavilion coordinated by DATCP for the expo, Chalmers said.

Because this event was covered by both national and provincial media, it was a unique opportunity to introduce Chinese consumers to Wisconsin cheese, Chalmers said. China is becoming a nation of consumers, and they are interested in purchasing high-quality Western foods, including dairy products.

The delegation that included representatives from six state businesses also promoted other Wisconsin agribusinesses and encouraged trade and educational exchanges at the expo, which was attended by business representatives from dozens of countries from around the world, Chalmers said.

DATCP economic development consultant Jennifer Lu, who was part of the state delegation, said relationship-building is a big part of doing business in China. Meeting face to face not only creates the opportunity to build awareness of Wisconsin products, services and expertise, it also sets Wisconsin apart, she said.

The delegation also met with researchers from the Fuli Food Science Institute of Zhejiang University and Zhejiang Agricultural Academy of Sciences in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, to explore potential educational exchanges and to gain a better understanding of Chinas food safety issues, especially with regard to dairy and infant formula.

China imported $222 million worth of Wisconsin ag products in 2015, ranking it behind only Canada and Mexico. Products in demand were hides and skins, whey, lactose, lumber, ginseng and bovine semen.

When a country does something like what China just did, thats a big thing, said Bob Tramburg, the president and chief executive officer of VitaPlus, a Madison-based livestock feed company. It should improve their ability to feed their population, and thats a good thing.
One of three men arrested for allegedly spraying white supremacist symbols near the UW-Madison campus will be charged with hate crimes.

Timothy Arnold, 21, Madison, allegedly was the primary suspect in the spree that resulted in 10 to 15 buildings and walls getting sprayed or marked Downtown and near campus, Madison police said Friday.

Three charges of graffiti against Arnold, including two carrying hate crime enhancers, have been referred to the Dane County District Attorney's Office.

"The hate crime enhancers are for graffiti left on a concrete wall outside of the Jewish Experience of Madison and for graffiti found on signs posted near the Kappa Alpha Sorority where there are many Jewish members," said police spokesman Joel DeSpain.

The Jewish Experience is located at 233 Langdon St., and the sorority is at 108 Langdon St. The street is known as Greek Row, where many fraternities and sororities for UW-Madison are housed.

Two other suspects, Frank Horton, 21, of Madison, and Adam Ritchie, 21, of McFarland, also have been arrested in the graffiti spree.

None of the three are students or on the UW-Madison staff, UW-Madison Police Lt. Aaron Chapin said.

The incidents include eight cases in which the symbol known as the Wolfsangel, an ancient symbol incorporated by the Nazis and more recently the Aryan Nation, or another symbol called the Valknut, was found in a number of locations around campus and off campus.

Chapin said police were investigating whether the vandalism on campus amounted to a hate crime.

A UW-Madison spokeswoman said the university received multiple hate/bias incident reports about the graffiti after it appeared on campus.

Arnold was arrested by UW-Madison Police. Ritchie and Horton were arrested by Madison police.

Arnold fought with an officer when found Wednesday night sleeping at Vilas Hall, Chapin said.

He said the damage caused by Arnold was estimated at $2,600.

The graffiti wasnt part of the $4,000 in damage attributed to Denzel McDonald, a UW-Madison senior arrested April 14 by campus police on suspicion of tagging multiple campus buildings with anti-racist, anti-white establishment messages.
A Madison man who police said earlier this week tried to burn down the house where he had rented a basement room has been charged with attempted murder and arson.

James T. Riendeau, 38, was charged on Wednesday with lighting fires outside a house where he lived last year until the homeowner had to take out a restraining order against him because he threatened her, according to a criminal complaint.

The homeowner, Tatiana Rudolph, told police that it appeared that Riendeau set the three fires outside her house so that they would burn the bedroom where she slept and the room where her computer often sits at night, according to a criminal complaint filed in Dane County Circuit Court.

Riendeau appeared in court on Wednesday to face charges of attempted first-degree intentional homicide and arson and was jailed on $10,000 bail. He is also charged with violating a restraining order, a misdemeanor. He is scheduled to return to court next week for a preliminary hearing.

According to the complaint:

Rudolph told police she was asleep just after midnight Sunday at her home in the 1100 block of Sunridge Drive on Madisons Southwest Side when she opened her eyes and saw light that appeared to be moving coming from her kitchen.

She went to the kitchen and saw fire outside her sliding glass door, and used water to put it out. She immediately called 911. The fire melted some siding on the home.

Two separate areas of damage also found outside the home included a wooden fence on the southwest corner of the house and a shrub on the southern side of the house.

Police officers and firefighters smelled an accelerant at each location. Rudolph told police that she has an injunction against Riendeau, to whom she had rented a basement room off and on for about three years. He left her home for good in November after an incident there that prompted her to get a restraining order.

Rudolph said that on April 11, she had been told by police that Riendeau had made a threat about burning her house down.

Police found Riendeau a short distance away, and he went with them to the West District station to speak with them. He was carrying a 10-inch lighter in one pocket.

At one point, he decided to stop talking to police, who let him leave. But as they were taking his backpack from the trunk of a squad car, an officer noticed a white plastic bottle, with the word Kingsford, protruding from the backpack. The bottle contained charcoal starter fluid. Riendeau was arrested.

At the time, Riendeau was free on a signature bond for a separate matter but was wearing a GPS bracelet from the Dane County Bail Monitoring Program. Looking at tracking data, a BMP worker could see that Riendeau had been behind Rudolphs house just after midnight on Sunday and left the area a few minutes later.
Authorities seized about 35 firearms, along with thousands of rounds of ammunition and suspected drugs, from a house in the town of Lowell on Wednesday, the Dodge County Sheriff's Office said.

The stash of weapons was found after executing a search warrant around 6 a.m., the Sheriff's Office said.

Kirk Lupton, 56, was arrested on a tentative charge of possession of a firearm by a felon. Another person in the house, Richard Nutter, 34, was arrested on an alleged probation violation.

The Sheriff's Office said it had been investigating the house at N3315 Highway J with the help of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The Milwaukee Bomb Squad was brought out after a suspected explosive device was discovered. The device was found to be safe and posed no threat to the public, the Sheriff's Office said.

Lupton and Nutter were both taken to the Dodge County Jail.
An indicted De Pere businessman who owes the states job-creation agency more than $1.2 million has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Ron Van Den Heuvel filed for bankruptcy on behalf of Green Box NA Green Bay in Wisconsins Eastern U.S. District Court on Wednesday. Such a filing allows companies to reorganize while paying off debts.

The filing shows the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. as one of 21 creditors. It says Green Box has less than $50,000 in assets and owes between $10 million and $50 million.

WEDC loaned the company more than $1.2 million in 2011-12 to help create 116 jobs as part of a more than $13 million project to turn fast-food wrappers and other waste paper into synthetic fuel and paper products while producing zero waste.

Last week a judge issued an arrest warrant for Van Den Heuvel after he was found in contempt of court for selling company machinery to someone in another state and not being able to repay creditors.

He was also charged with 13 counts of federal bank fraud last week for an alleged scheme dating back to 2008 and 2009. He is due in court May 6.
Some say electronic cigarettes can help wean smokers off tobacco, as little risk to their health. For others, both of those assertions are false. A 2011 appellate court decision confirming that e-cigarettes were to be regulated by the FDA was really a victory for American smokers. Why? 1. The decision guaranteed that e-cigarettes would remain on the market. 2. It assured that e-cigarettes would be subjected to general controls that would promote the marketing of safe and quality-controlled products. 3. It allowed pharmaceutical companies to develop more satisfying nicotine medicines that could be used as recreational (and low risk) alternatives to cigarettes.

Cigarette smoking has become significantly less popular in the U.S. over the past decade, it still remains a public-health scourge. Smoking accounts for more than 480,000 deaths every year in this country, or about one of every five death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while an additional 16 million Americans live with a smoking-related disease. Clearly more needs to be done to get Americans to quit smoking.

An event at The Heartland Institute on Wednesday, April 20 was all about E-cigarettes and vaping as a low-risk alternative to tobacco products. The youtube video of the program can be viewed here. E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that vaporize a mixture of water, propylene glycol, nicotine, and flavorings. They are activated when the user inhales through the mouthpiece of the device, delivering a small dose of nicotine without any of the carcinogens derived from the combustion of tobacco that occurs in cigarettes.

Guest speakers Brian Foitak and Vitoria Vasconcellos present the pro-stance side

Featured speakers at Heartland's event were Brian Fojtik and Victoria Vasconcellos. Both guest speakers took a pro-stance position on e-cigarettes as a safe and effective smoking cessation aid.

Fojtik's career includes work in both the public and private sectors. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his law degree from Loyola University of Chicago. Presently Mr. Fojtik is a Senior Fellow for the Reason Foundation, a free market think tank.

Victoria Vasconcellos is a former long-time smoker and owner of Cignot Inc., established in 2009. Ms. Vasconcellos is also a founding member of the Illinois Chapter of the Smoke-Free Alternatives Trade Association. SFATA is the Voice of the Electronic Vapor Industry. Vasconcellos's mission is to insure that smokers receive support and affordable access to what she considers a life changing option to smoking. As a pathway for CASAA to expand its networking opportunities, in March of 2015 Ms. Vasconcellos was appointed as one of ten individuals to the newly created external CASAA Board of Advisors.

Introduced by moderator Jim Lakely, Communications Director at the Heartand Institute, Brian Fojtik wasted no time in praising Brad Radu, Heartland's own Senior Fellow, who holds the Endowed Chair in Tobacco Harm Reduction Research at the University of Louisvilles James Graham Brown Cancer Center. Radu's research focuses on the substitution of safer tobacco products by smokers who are unable or unwilling to quit smoking with conventional cessation methods because of their addiction to nicotine. Five of Rodu's excellent, informative articles will be shared at the end of Part 2. All are noteworthy and well worth the extra time to read.

Also highly recommended by Mr. Foitik was Dr. Michael Siegel, a well-known and very highly respected professor at the Boston University School For Public Health. Dr. Siegel is regarded as a tobacco control expert. Siegel is further recognized as a strong voice for taking a stand against the sham methodologies of anti-vaping groups who deceitfully deploy scare tactics to misinform the public about e-cigarettes. In this article Dr. Siegel stands up to anti-vaping shams.

As one who smoked for 28 years before vaping, Brian Fojtik spoke of preferring flavors to tobacco and menthol, noting that those bothered by the fun flavors associate them with flavors children might find fun to use.

Health risks associated with E-cigarettes are discounted

Available evidence support the view that e-cigarettes are reasonably safe and far less risky than cigarettes. As exaggerated health concerns about e-cigarettes sound sensational, they are covered that way widely by the press. Early reports suggested that e-cigarettes produce formaldehyde. Since the formaldehyde component of cigarette smoke has been estimated to raise smokers' risk of cancer by less than 1 part in 1,000, the amount found in e-cigarettes is indeed insignificant, as e-cigarettes release far less formaldehyde than tobacco cigarettes.

These health risks often associated with e-cigarettes were discounted by Fojtik in light of the staggering death toll related to tobacco-related smoking:

It is the combustion of tobacco and the 4000 chemical substances that are produced when smoking cigarettes that are harmful to health of smokers, not the nicotine. As such the U.S. Surgeon General and other experts have linked the vast majority of diseases associated with smoking to the combustion products of smoke, not to the nicotine that is present.

The dangers of electronic cigarettes are considerably lower than those of tobacco. From analysis of the constituents of e-cigarette vapor, e-cigarettes can be expected to be at least 95 to 99% safer than smoking tobacco cigarettes in terms of long-term health risks.

The vapor exhaled from e-cigarette users is highly unlikely to be harmful to bystanders; nicotine concentrations in exhaled vapor are too low to have pharmacological effects on bystanders. The vapor produced by e-cigarettes is simply not comparable to the thousands of toxic agents formed when tobacco is burned.

Randomized controlled trials show that e-cigarettes are effective in smoking cessation and studies of the use of e-cigarettes in real world settings show that they are more effective than other means for stopping smoking, including Nicotine Replacement Therapy.

No studies have been done relating to long-term daily exposure, but smokers shouldn't wait to vape

Check this article by Clive Bates in which he presents 24 arguments related to e-cigarette science, policy, and politics in a Question and Answer format which supplements preceding bullet points.

Clive Bates was cited by speaker Brian Fojik as an importance e-cigarette pro voice. Clive Bates, as was guest speaker Victoria Vasconcellos, was appointed to the newly created external CASAA Board of Advisor. In the past Bates served as a Director General with the Welsh Government and also in its Department of Energy and Climate Change. In September of 2014, Clive Bates contributed this fine article to the "Pharmaceutical Journal" (A Royal Pharmaceutical Society Publication): Stop demonizing a potentially useful product for smokers.

Needless to say, even when scientific studies so far have concluded that e-cigarette are safe, those who are against e-cigarettes will bring up the "risks to the population" argument. Often the result will be to ban the product until it can be proven safe. The gate-way argument that an e-cigarette smoker will get hooked on nicotine and start smoking tobacco cigarettes has been disproved. Most individuals who use e-cigarettes do so to move away from combustible tobacco, not toward smoking.

Part 2 will be based on The Heartland Event about e-cigarettes and vaping, but it will also give additional insight into the controversy over e-cigarettes v. tobacco products. Questions addressed include: What does England have to say about e-cigarettes? How did the war on vaping get started? Why FDA approval of new products are prohibitive in cost and timely to receive and thus out-of-reach for the vaping community? How pharmaceutical companies receives breaks in taxes? and How is Chicago dealing with e-cigarettes?
Ladies and gents, and those who have yet to make up their minds...

By Mary Young Oct 20, 2022
Small Group of the Global Coalition To Counter ISIL

Kuwait - The Small Group of the Global Coalition to counter Daesh met today in Kuwait at the invitation of His Excellency, Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled al-Jarallah to further refine and synchronize our efforts in Iraq and Syria, and to reinforce our determination to defend our populations and homelands against Daeshs global terrorist activities.

We express our gratitude to our host, the State of Kuwait, for its important role in the Coalition and as a leader in the area of humanitarian support to the Iraqi and Syrian people, recognizing that it has to date hosted three donor conferences for Syria, co-hosted the 4 February 2016 donors conference for Syria in London and pledged $200 million for humanitarian aid in Iraq.

We welcome the momentum we have witnessed in recent months against Daesh in Iraq and Syria. Daesh continues to lose territory as well as control of strategic resupply routes and resources. When we last met in Rome in February, Iraqi Security Forces had seized Ramadi. They have now advanced up the Euphrates River Valley, liberating Hit and pressing on to end the Daesh siege of Haditha. They are attacking Daesh simultaneously in Anbar and Ninewa provinces. Since the Rome conference, Shaddadi, a critical Daesh supply route between Raqqa and Mosul has been retaken from Daesh, the al-Tanf crossing point on Syria-Iraq border was cleared of Daesh elements, and moderate Syrian opposition forces liberated additional towns along the border with Turkey. Daesh has retreated in other areas of Syria, as well.

Daesh continues to be degraded in other significant ways. It has been losing its leaders at a high rate and has lost large numbers of fighters. Its resource base is drying up as Coalition strikes have lowered Daesh oil production by at least 30 percent and destroyed millions of dollars stored in bank vaults and other locations. As a result of its deteriorating financial situation, Daesh has relied more on generating revenue through taxation, imposition of rents and sale of confiscated property, including vehicles, heavy equipment, and construction materials. Fighter pay has been cut by half in some areas, and desertions are increasing. Daesh is resorting to conscription to fill its ranks, recruiting children to conduct suicide attacks and is less able to mount offensive operations.

Our work goes beyond the military realm. We are supporting security and stabilization programs in areas liberated from Daesh, including those covered by the UNs Funding Facility for Immediate Stabilization and its new Funding Facility for Expanded Stabilization, both of which help local partners to set the conditions for the return of displaced residents and promote the economic revival of their communities. Clearing explosives in liberated areas and training police forces to secure local communities are prerequisites for sustainable recovery and represent important priorities for our Coalition.

We continue to be deeply concerned about the growing humanitarian needs resulting from the conflict in Iraq and Syria. While the unprecedented response of international donors at the February 2016 London Conference will help address Syrias overwhelming humanitarian needs, we urge countries to follow through immediately with all pledges. The urgent needs of civilians in Iraq set out in the UN's 2016 Iraq Humanitarian Response Plan call for further life-saving funding and additional efforts to guarantee protection and humanitarian access for all civilians in need, including in areas where they are trapped by Daesh. The international communitys coordinated efforts to deliver aid and assistance should be intensified over the coming months.

While Daesh is clearly on the defensive and losing ground, it is still dangerous. We take seriously the threat Daesh still poses, and we understand its lasting defeat will require a long, difficult effort. The recent attacks in Tunisia, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Belgium reinforce our determination to eliminate Daesh and its distorted ideology and to help the communities it has devastated. We stand with the countries victimized by these acts of terrorism, including the host of this conference, Kuwait. We are fully committed to supporting civilian and military operations to set the stage for liberating areas in Iraq and Syria now under Daesh control and ensuring its lasting defeat. As we prepare to liberate more territory from Daesh, we must focus intensively on stabilization efforts to improve the lives of the people who suffered under its terror.

We underscore our support for international frameworks  UNSCRs 2178, 2199, 2253  along with institutions such as the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum and Financial Action Task Force, to block Daesh and foreign-terrorist-fighter travel, financing and illicit trade. We will continue to strengthen our cooperation to detect, monitor and interdict foreign terrorist fighters, while disrupting facilitation networks. We are determined to disrupt Daeshs ability to generate, move and use funds, building on the success of our coordinated efforts to reduce its revenues. We are likewise resolved to keep Daesh completely cut off from international financial channels and to eliminate its ability to maintain financial links with its affiliates outside Iraq and Syria. We welcome the creation of diverse Coalition counter-messaging centers now collaborating to counter Daeshs propaganda at increasing pace and at scale. We encourage support for initiatives such as the Sawab Center in the United Arab Emirates that strengthen cooperation in countering Daeshs on-line and social media messaging and undermine its claims to legitimacy and strategic success.

Our support for Iraq extends beyond its security needs. The Coalition supports the Iraqi governments commitment to pursue reforms and comprehensive dialogue to achieve inclusiveness and national reconciliation. As military operations continue to progress against Daesh, the Coalition will continue its support to the Government of Iraq in ensuring not only the safety and security of Iraqis, but also their livelihoods and economic well-being. Iraq is experiencing a triple economic shock of low oil prices, incurring the costs of combating Daesh, and caring for internally displaced persons and refugees seeking safety. We reaffirm our continuing support for Prime Minister Abadi and the Government of Iraq as it manages these issues at the national and provincial levels. We further reaffirm our continuing support for the Government of Iraq as it works to promote stability in areas liberated from Daesh, decentralize certain federal authorities to the provincial level and address corruption.

The Coalition stands with the Syrian people and supports processes under way to achieve a genuine political transition based on the 2012 Geneva Communique and UNSCR 2254, aimed at establishing an inclusive, pluralistic and non-sectarian government that represents the will of all Syrians. We urge full adherence to the Cessation of Hostilities which, for the first time, has opened the door to a reduction of violence and greater focus on ending the conflict and pursuing the fight against Daesh. We call for the end of indiscriminate bombing and actions deliberately intended to block humanitarian assistance, for which the Syrian regime bears the primary responsibility. These actions undermine the UN-sponsored negotiations in Geneva aimed at a political transition and the pursuit of a lasting solution that unites Syrians and reverses the tide of extremism. We call on all the parties to commit constructively to the political dialogue under United Nations auspices as the only means to achieve peace and preserve the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria.

In Libya, we are encouraged by the Government of National Accords entry into Tripoli on 30 March and the steps it has taken to unify Libyan institutions and begin its work in the capital. We stand ready to assist the Government of National Accord, including through the new Stabilization Facility for Libya, in its efforts to establish peace and security for the Libyan people and defeat Daesh. We will continue our attention to Libya and the threat posed by Daesh.

Mindful of the many challenges Daesh poses in diverse regions, we remain committed to sustaining momentum of the Global Coalition to Counter Daesh, and we look forward to the ministerial meeting of the Small Group planned for July 2016 in Washington.
Mitsubishi used fuel economy testing methods that did not comply with Japanese regulations for 25 years, much longer than previously known.

An EPA spokeswoman declined to say if the agency suspects Mitsubishi of wrongdoing in the United States or if EPA plans to conduct its own testing.

By Reuters: The US Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday it ordered Mitsubishi Motors Corp to provide additional information and conduct new tests of US vehicles after the Japanese automaker's admission that it did not properly follow fuel economy test procedures in Japan since 1991.

Mitsubishi said earlier on Tuesday that it used fuel economy testing methods that did not comply with Japanese regulations for 25 years, much longer than previously known.

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ALSO READ: Mitsubishi Motors admits to cheating on fuel economy test

EPA spokeswoman Laura Allen said the agency has instructed Mitsubishi to "provide additional information regarding their US vehicles. The agency will be directing the company to conduct additional coast down testing for vehicles sold in the US"

Mitsubishi, Japan's sixth-largest automaker, has lost half its market value, some $3.9 billion, since it admitted last week to manipulating test data for four domestic mini-vehicle models, including two it produced for Nissan Motor Co.

An EPA spokeswoman declined to say if the agency suspects Mitsubishi of wrongdoing in the United States or if EPA plans to conduct its own testing.

ALSO READ: Mitsubishi Electric opens transportation-systems factory in Bengaluru

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said last week it is also seeking information from Mitsubishi. NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said on Friday that the Mitsubishi issue "is brand new. So right now we're just collecting data."

In 2015, Mitsubishi sold 95,342 vehicles in the United States, up 22.8 per cent, accounting for 0.5 per cent of US auto industry sales, according to Autodata Corp. Mitsubishi US sales are up 6 per cent in the first three months of 2016.

In Japan, Mitsubishi said aggressive internal targets may have put pressure on employees to overstate the fuel economy of its vehicles, and that it would set up an external committee to investigate the matter.

ALSO READ: Mitsubishi eX concept to debut at 44th Tokyo Motor Show

Mitsubishi has also said that more models may have used tests noncompliant with Japanese standards, prompting concern about ballooning potential compensation costs and fines. Japanese authorities have raided one of the company's research and development facilities.

Mitsubishi said on Tuesday it used appropriate testing methods on vehicles sold in the United States, and had no indications of data manipulation in vehicles sold in other overseas markets. A spokesman for Mitsubishi North America could not immediately be reached for comment.

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Isuzu Motors India has begun operations at their new plant located at Sri City, in Chittoor. The D-MAX V-Cross, which garnered attention at Auto Expo 2016, will be manufactured at the facility.

By Simran Rastogi: Isuzu Motors India enters a new phase of their India operations with the inauguration of a manufacturing plant at Sri City, in Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh. The plant was inaugurated by Shri N Chandrababu Naidu, CM, Andhra Pradesh in the presence of Masanori Katayama, president, Isuzu Motors Ltd and other top ranking Isuzu officials and government dignitaries.

Production of the D-MAX V-Cross has begun at Isuzu's plant in Chittoor.

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The Sri City plant has been set up with an investment of Rs 3,000 crore and is spread over 107 acres. Production capacity as it stands is 50,000 units, scalable up to 1,20,000 as per demand. This marks the fourth production facility for Isuzu, apart from their plants in Japan, Thailand and the US.

Also Read: Isuzu Motors India appoint Hitoshi Kono as new Deputy MD

The big news is the rolling out of the first India-made D-MAX V-Cross. The V-Cross caused quite a stir at the Auto Expo 2016, where it was first revealed for the Indian market. Christened an Adventure Utility Vehicle by the company, the V-Cross builds on the ruggedness of the D-MAX range of pickups while likely adding polish and comfort. The entire current Isuzu Motors India range from the D-MAX to the MU-7 will be manufactured here, with up to 70 per cent localisation for the D-MAX series to start with. Bookings for the new D-Max V-Cross are expected to start soon across Isuzu dealerships in the country.

Isuzu D-MAX Single Cab.

Established in 2012, Isuzu Motors India first brought in their D-MAX pickup range and MU-7 SUV as CBUs from Thailand. Further, a contract manufacturing agreement was signed with Hindustan Motors Limited in 2013 to assemble these two vehicles as CKDs.

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The centre would support Yamaha's business by ensuring smooth supply of quality spare parts in South India as well as other parts of the country.

Currently, India Yamaha Motor has 20 spare parts distributors in 15 states and more than 3,000 spare parts retailers across the country. (Picture for representational purpose only)

By India Today Web Desk: India Yamaha Motor on Wednesday inaugurated a new spare parts centre in Tamil Nadu, with an investment of Rs 580 million.

Top officials from Yamaha Motor and Mitsui and Company participated in the inauguration, located within the premises of Yamaha's manufacturing plant near here.

ALSO READ: Yamaha launches all new Cygnus Ray-ZR scooter; priced at Rs 52,000

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"The new centre will play a significant role in achieving India Yamaha Motor's goals. It will contribute to the profit by strengthening the business foundation and supply chain management operation," India Yamaha Motor's Managing Director Takashi Terabayashi told PTI.

The centre would support Yamaha's business by ensuring smooth supply of quality spare parts in South India as well as other parts of the country, he said.

ALSO READ: Yamaha Saluto RX launched for Rs 46,400

"In the present industry scenario, customer satisfaction is the key to sustenance and growth. Timely supply of genuine spare parts to the customers is the key to success," Chairman, Yamaha Motor India Group Companies, Hiroaki Fujita said.

Currently, India Yamaha Motor has 20 spare parts distributors in 15 states and more than 3,000 spare parts retailers across the country, the statement added.

ALSO READ: Seven things to know about the new Yamaha Saluto RX

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The institutes in Kota shine again in the recently declared JEE Main 2016. The students especially from Allen Career Institute, Career Point Institute Kota, Motion IIT Academy and others have performed really well.

By India Today Web Desk: The institutes in Kota shine again in the recently declared JEE Main 2016. The students especially from Allen Career Institute, Career Point Institute Kota, Motion IIT Academy and others have performed really well. Around two lakhs successful aspirants of this year will sit for JEE Advance on May 22.

Topper in Rajasthan: Utkarsh Gupta, says Ashish Sharma

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Chief Executive Officer of Resonance Eduventures Private Limited, Ashish Sharma said their student Utkarsh Gupta was the topper in Rajasthan with a score of 335 marks and the second topper Sidhant Kar is also from their institute with a score of 327 marks.



Words of wisdom by the Director of Allen Career Brajesh Maheswari:

Director of Allen Career Institute, Brajesh Maheswari told HT , Shaswat Aggarwal tops from the institute with a score of 325 marks while three of their students Aman Bansal, Ankit Dhankad and Syamantak Kumar scored 320 marks and 25 students have scored 300 marks each.



Cut off marks of the year 2016

This year the cut off marks for the JEE (Advanced) examination have been changed. The JEE Advanced (2016) cut off marks for the general category students is 100 marks less than the last year (2015) which was 105. However this year the cut off marks for scheduled caste category increased from 50 to 52 and 44 to 48 for the scheduled tribe category students. The cut off marks for the other backward castes students remain same this year, 70.



Read, IIT JEE Main results declared, all super30 students qualified for JEE Advanced.



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Under the Indian Wireless Telegraph Act, all mobile phones will have a pre-installed panic button and GPS: Read to know more.

By India Today Web Desk: The Union government has mandated the installation of a built-in panic button and global positioning system (GPS) in all mobile phones from January 1 2017 and 2018, respectively.

The government has directed all mobile device manufacturers under the Panic Button and Global Positioning System in Mobile Phone Handsets Rules, 2016 under Section 10 of the Indian Wireless Telegraph Act, 1933.

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Here are some key points you must know:



The panic button will allow users to instantly alert the emergency services including police, hospital and other emergency contacts

All smart phones will have this feature, which would be activated by short-pressing the power button three times

In case of a feature phone, long press on 5 or 9 button will do the trick

This feature will be available in all mobile phones manufactured after January 1, 2017

The satellite-based GPS will be added in phones manufactured after January 1, 2018

The manufacturers would need to incorporate the software that would connect the panic calls to emergency contacts and concerned authorities.





Do you know that the government can confiscate your phone if you don't follow the Indian Wireless Telegraph Act, 1933?

Here are some points you need to know about the Indian Wireless Telegraph Act, 1933:

Interested in General Knowledge and Current Affairs? Click here to stay informed and know what is happening around the world with our G.K. and Current Affairs section.

To get more updates on Current Affairs, send in your query by mail toeducation.intoday@gmail.com.



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The Uttar Pradesh Police has released the admit card for the Computer Operator post. The exam will be held on May 19.

By India Today Web Desk: The Uttar Pradesh Police has released the admit card for the Computer Operator post. The exam will be held on May 19.



The candidates need to download the admit card from the official website, www.uppbpb.gov.in.



Exam Pattern:

The paper is of 200 marks consist of 160 multiple choice questions with duration of two and half hours. There is no negative marking.



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Admit card: Points to note:

Candidates are advised to read the instructions properly having the details of date, time and venue of examination. The candidates need to come with admit card without which no one would be allowed in the examination centre to give the exam.



Steps to Download the Admit card:



Visit the official website of UP Police Board, www.uppbpb.gov.in

Click on 'Admit card for Computer Operator'

Enter the required fields then press the submit button

Admit card will be displayed on the screen

Download admit card and take a printout of it for future reference.

Date of Exam: May 19



About Uttar Pradesh Police:



It was formed in 1863 as the Office of the Inspector General of Police, Uttar Pradesh under the Police Act of 1861. It is the law enforcement agency of the state, responsible for maintaining the law and order.



Click here for more result related news.

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The results of the Vellore Institute of Technology Engineering Entrance Examination (VITEEE) examination held by the Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) University have been declared at the official website of the university.

By India Today Web Desk: The results of the Vellore Institute of Technology Engineering Entrance Examination (VITEEE) examination held by the Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) University have been declared at the official website of the university. In order to check the results, candidates need to check the official website, www.academics2.vit.ac.in

The VITEEE examination commenced on April 6 and will conclude on April 17. As many as 2 lakh candidates have appeared for the examination this year.

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The examination was conducted online in three sessions each day - 9 am to 11:30 am, 12: 30 pm to 3 pm and 4 pm to 6:30 pm. English section was added for the first time in the computer based test (CBT) while the rest of the sections were physics, chemistry and mathematics/biology.

After the results will get declared, all the selected candidates need to appear for the counseling process in order to get admission in various programmes. Till now, the university has notified that the counseling will start in the month of May.

Steps to check the results:

All the candidates need to log on to the website, www.academics2.vit.ac.in

Click on VITEEE 2016 Results

Enter the application number and date of birth

Click on submit button

The VITEEE results will appear on the screen

Then download the result and take printout for further reference.



For any other query, candidates need to visit the official website.

Check: HP Board Class 12 Results here

Get latest updates on exam notifications and scholarships across India and abroad here.



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Chris Gayle returned to India after his partner Natasha Berridge gave birth to the couple's baby daughter, who was named Blush.

By India Today Web Desk: Chris Gayle is back! Days after his partner gave birth to their baby girl in the West Indies, the big-hitting Jamaican returned to resume Indian Premier League duties with the Royal Challengers Bangalore.

RCB have had a torrid time this season, losing three of their five matches. Gayle, who played in the first two, scored a solitary run before flying back to the Caribbean to be with Natasha Berridge for the birth of their baby girl, who Gayle named Blush .

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But poor form and concerns over a poor season were put to rest at least for one evening as RCB gathered to celebrate fatherhood for Gayle. Known for his dancing skills, the burly West Indian southpaw led the way and shook a leg as Shane Watson, led the chorus and strummed the guitar.

Gayle was joined on the dance floor by Virat Kohli, who has been in outstanding form this year. After sensational performances in Australia, at the Asia Cup T20 and the World T20, Kohli has amassed 367 runs, including his maiden T20 hundred in the IPL.

Kohli has gone on record to say that he does not like emulating anyone at the batting crease, but he certainly tried to copy Gayle's rhythmic moves on the dance floor. Kohli might be the boss on the field but Gayle had complete control where the party was.

Royal Challengers Bangalore, currently languishing at seventh spot, will take on Sunrisers Hyderabad on Saturday. Will Gayle come to the party again when it really matters?

.@henrygayle IS BACK WITH A BANG! This is a video you just don't want to miss! Coming soon #PlayBold @imVkohli pic.twitter.com/VF3qc9VWnD Royal Challengers (@RCBTweets) April 28, 2016

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By PTI: Panaji, Apr 27 (PTI) Over seven kilograms of gold, found abandoned in a toilet on a Qatar Airways plane, was seized by Customs sleuths at the Goa airport today.

"When the Qatar Airways aircraft (after landing at Goa airport) was searched today, the Air Intelligence Wing found one duty-free plastic bag in the dustbin of the rear left toilet of the aircraft," Commissioner of Customs, Goa division, K Anpazhakan told reporters.

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"An inquiry was made with crew members of the aircraft which had arrived from Qatar. They informed that they were not aware of the owner of the bag," he said.

The bag was opened at the international arrival hall of the airport and it was found to be carrying jewellery weighing 7.124 kgs.

"The correct value of jewellery would be known only after an approved valuer is approached. Inquiries were made with the arrival passengers but no one was having any knowledge about it," the Commissioner said.

Anpazhakan said this is the second seizure of gold by Goa Customs in a week.

"Another seizure of two kilograms of unclaimed gold bars was made by officers in the same flight on April 24. The bars were hidden inside the pouch in the life jacket which was attached below a passengers seat," he said. PTI COR DK KIS

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The activists were due to attend a high-profile meeting of Chinese dissidents and exiles in Dharamsala on April 28. Earlier this week, a Uyghur exile, Dolkun Isa, who was scheduled to speak at the same meeting, said his electronic tourist visa was revoked.

By Ananth Krishnan: Two Chinese activists said on Thursday they had been barred from travelling to India after being denied visa. While activists told India Today they believed "Chinese pressure" was a factor behind the cancellations, the Indian government said they had applied for the wrong category of visa.

The activists were due to attend a high-profile meeting of Chinese dissidents and exiles in Dharamsala on April 28. Earlier this week, a Uyghur exile, Dolkun Isa, who was scheduled to speak at the same meeting, said his electronic tourist visa was revoked.

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The Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday said of Isa's case that he had applied for the wrong category of visa. A conference visa is required for those attending meetings, while electronic tourist visa is allowed only for tourism and "casual" business meetings. The MEA said information about the conference "was suppressed in the visa form and that the tourist visa does not permit".

On Tuesday, Lu Jinghua, a well-known Tiananmen activist and former 1989 protest leader, and Hong Kong activist Ray Wong, both said their electronic visas had been denied. Lu said she was about to board an Air India flight from New York when she was told her visa had been denied.

"At the airport, the Air India staff told me simply that I couldn't board as my visa was cancelled," she told Mail Today from New York.

While Lu suggested that "Chinese pressure on the Indian government" was to blame, officials said as in Isa's case, Lu and Wong had also applied for a wrong tourist visa despite travelling for a meeting. The officials explained that electronic tourist visa is issued automatically, but can be cancelled if applications are found to suppress information.

The MEA said it "would caution against meanings being read, either on visa being given to Mr Isa or its subsequent cancellation".

But despite the Indian government's explanation, the cancellations had sent a ripple through the community of Chinese dissidents and exiles, said activist and former Tiananmen leader Rose Tang, who has in the past travelled to India. Sources in Dharamsala said it had been common for participants to travel to India in the past on tourist visa because of the difficulty of obtaining a conference visa which requires MHA clearance, adding that the clampdown was new.

"I am very concerned by the denial of the visa to Jinghua", said Tang. "Now countries like Thailand, Vietnam have already became unsafe for Chinese dissidents. I am worried that India is becoming one more country not on the list of countries I can travel to."

On Isa's case, the MEA said it had also come to its attention that an Interpol Red Corner Notice had been issued in Isa's name. This is thought to have been done at China's behest, as Beijing regards him as a "terrorist" responsible for bombings carried out in his native Xinjiang in the 1990s. Isa denies the charges, pointing out he has been awarded in the west for his human rights activism and has been a German citizen since 2006.

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Questions are also being raised over the Modi government's handling of the probe concerning the scam in the last two years. Has the NDA government also been lax in its response to the AgustaWestland issue?

By India Today Web Desk: Continuing his party's relentless attack on Sonia Gandhi over VVIP chopper scam, BJP president Amit Shah today demanded that the Congress chief must clarify who received the bribe in the chopper deal.

"All I want to ask her is that those who gave bribe are in jail in Italy, then where are those who received the kickbacks? Who were in power at that time? They are responsible and they should bring out the truth. It should be disclosed before the people of the country," he said.

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Taking a jibe at Sonia over her remarks yesterday that she does not fear anybody, Shah said she is "right" and that is why such "scams" keep coming out in the open.

"That is why when the National Herald corruption case happens, you say you do not fear anybody. When the AgustaWestland case occurs, you say you do not fear anybody... I want to tell her that we in Bhartiya Janata Party are afraid of the Constitution, rules and public norms," Shah said.

However, questions are also being raised over the Modi government's handling of the probe concerning the scam in the last two years. Has the NDA government also been lax in its response to the AgustaWestland issue?

What precisely does the Italian judgment in the AgustaWestland case suggest about Sonia Gandhi and other Congressmen? Are the references incriminating or can they be otherwise explained? And beyond that could PM Modi have met Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the UN in 2015 because both men were together in New York at the same time for President Obama's peace keeping summit?



Big Questions Do references suggest an incriminating case? What does AgustaWestland judgment suggest? Does Michel's letter suggest Sonia was bribed? Govertment's specific focus on Sonia justified? Inconsistency or contradiction in BJP's stand? Could there be some truth in Michel's claim? Translation Milan judgment reliable? Does Orsi's note suggest Manmohan Singh took bribe? Is Michel's handwritten budget sheet genuine? Michel's statement weakens claims against Sonia?

Speaking to Karan Thapar on his his show To The Point, national security editor of The Hindu Josy Joseph pointed out that it will foolish to make conclusions on the basis of observations made by the Italian court.

"What is required now is that our agencies do time bound investigation. We are fumbling because our agencies are not able to make any breakthrough. All of us are speculating on the basis of the judgment of an Italian court," Joseph said.

BJD MP Pinaki Misra rubbished allegations made against Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

"None of us have seen a certified copy of the judgment of Italian court. Also, the Indian investigators have conducted themselves very shabbily. They have arrested only one person - Gautam Khaitan - and also by the ED and not by the CBI. Why no action has been taken against Tyagi brothers?" Misra said.

BJP's Sudhanshu Mittal justified his party's attack on Sonia Gandhi and said the BJP is stating only what the Italian court has observed.

Congress's Abhishek Manu Singhvi contended that there is no ground for the CBI to interrogate Sonia Gandhi or other top Congress leaders reportedly named by VVIP chopper deal middleman James Christian Michel.

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"It was former Defence Minister AK Antony who said that yes, bribes were given and taken. From that to extrapolate that bribes were only gone to a particular person is pure sensationalism," Singhvi said.

"It is just an idea to keep the political pot boiling," he added.

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Travelling between the countries is about to get easier as the Canada based airline is set to launch direct flights between Delhi and Vancouver.

By India Today Web Desk: Seems like the world is becoming a smaller place for globetrotters. And if you are planning to visit Canada towards the end of this year, Air Canada will be there to make your journey more comfortable. According to recent media reports, the Canada based airline is planning to launch non-stop flights between Vancouver and Delhi on October 20, around the time of Diwali celebrations.

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The flight will operate thrice a week, and is going to be the second non-stop flight between the two countries after the Delhi-Toronto flights that were launched last year. Reports suggest that Air Canada will use the 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft on this particular route. This aircraft will have 30 business class pods, 21 premium economy seats and 247 economy class seats.

The non-stop will complete the journey in 16 and a half hours. Also read: Travel hacks: 7 ways to survive a long-haul flight

Apart from being convenient for those who have been already planning a visit, this might inspire more Indian tourists to plan their holidays to Canada during the Diwali holiday season. After all, Canada is a beautiful place to travel to -- especially during the fall.

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Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has ordered officials to issue an advisory to people not to light fire between 9 am and 6 pm and observe 'havan' and puja before nine in the morning.

By India Today Web Desk: Stung by fire incidents in various parts of Bihar, the state government has come up with a bizarre solution - no cooking, no puja in the morning.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has ordered officials to issue an advisory to people not to light fire between 9 am and 6 pm and observe 'havan' and puja before nine in the morning.

Summer at its peak and accidents happen due to fire-Vyasji, Principal Secy, Disaster Management(Bihar) pic.twitter.com/BSPl8EzrS8&; ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

Bihar Govt issues advisory that there should be no cooking or puja between 9 am and 6 pm to avoid fire accidents&; ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

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Kumar asked Principal Secretary, Disaster Management, to issue an advisory to this effect while reviewing cases of fire in the state, an official statement said.

After facing floods and droughts for several years, Bihar is reeling under a different calamity this year: fire.

Over 60 people have been killed and property worth lakhs of rupees gutted across the state which is experiencing unprecedented heat wave these days.

--- ENDS ---
The latest attack on the "nationalist" school of historiography, accused by the Rightwing to be synonymous with the "Congress school", has been stirred by none other than the family members of Bhagat Singh.

Bhagat Singh's family, including grandson Yadvinder Singh Sandhu (encircled), has appealed to the present government that references like "terrorists", though "revolutionary", in Bipan Chandra's book India's Struggle for Independence, were derogatory and

By Siddhartha Rai: Late historian Bipan Chandra's book on Indian freedom struggle is caught in political cross winds for calling Bhagat Singh, Surya Sen, etc, "terrorists", though "revolutionary" nearly three decades of being in print.

The latest attack on the "nationalist" school of historiography, accused by the right wing to be synonymous with the "Congress school", has been stirred by none other than the family members of Bhagat Singh.

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While the issue was also raised by the BJP in Parliament on Wednesday, the co-authors of the book - India's Struggle for Independence - have come out with a terse clarification. The clarification pointed that Chandra had dropped the terminology from his later works due to the recent connotations of the term "terrorism". They claimed Chandra intended to revise this book but died before he could and that its co-authors would do so. One of the academics alleged it was an attempt to get the book off the shelves.

Bhagat Singh's family has appealed to the present government that such references were derogatory and hence, must be dropped.

Singh's kin met the vice chancellor of Delhi University Yogesh Tyagi to press for their demand for dropping the book or the references therein. The family has also written to MHRD Minister Smriti Irani.

Irani had on Tuesday called the text of the book an "academic murder" of sacrifices of individuals. "It is extremely unfortunate that martyrs and freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh continue to be denigrated as "terrorists".

We have come to associate the word with something which the revolutionaries were the opposite of. This is not the way to treat the nation's martyrs. We demand an immediate removal of the book from the syllabus of the history department," said Singh's grandson Yadvinder Singh Sandhu.

"We demand an ordinance stating that all such derogatory references to the revolutionary freedom fighters be dropped immediately," Singh told Mail Today.

While BJP's Anurag Thakur raised the issue in Parliament, demanding a debate on the educational curricula across the country, DU VC Tyagi maintained that the book was taught in the history department as a "reference book" and not as a "text book".

In a rejoinder, co-authors Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee and Sucheta Mahajan claim that a "deliberate misrepresentation" of Chandra's views was underway.

It said: "In fact the first time the term 'revolutionary terrorism' is used in the book on p 142, Chandra, who wrote two chapters on the Revolutionary Movement, clearly said it is "a term we use without any pejorative meaning and for want of a different term".

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In his later writings, Chandra stopped using word terrorism as it had aquired a negative meaning in recent years. For example, in his introduction to Bhagat Singh's Why I am an Atheist, published in 2006, Chandra does not use terrorism and says, "Singh was not only one of India's greatest freedom fighters and revolutionary socialists, but also one of its early Marxist thinkers and ideologues."

(Quoted from The Writings of Bipan Chandra: The Making of Modern India, From Marx to Gandhi, Orient Blackswan, 2012, p. 465).

"He had also wanted to make the change in India's Struggle for Independence and had said so publicly. However, due to ill health and failing eyesight he could not revise the book as he had planned. The coauthors had planned that the volume in its revised version will use the formulation that Bipan Chandra himself made in his later writings."

--- ENDS ---
In a six-page report circulated among all BJP MPs, it listed follower counts of all MPs, the number of tweets and retweets they received and the status of their profiles. The most important column of the report addressed whether party MPs propagate the work of the government or not.

By India Today Web Desk: The Bharatiya Janata Party's digital cell recently tracked social media profiles (Twitter and Facebook) of all its 282 MPs, on instructions from Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In a six-page report circulated among all BJP MPs, it listed follower counts of all MPs, the number of tweets and retweets they received and the status of their profiles. The most important column of the report addressed whether party MPs propagate the work of the government or not.

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Graphic: These are the best and worst BJP social media performers



When it comes to star performers, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj topped the list with 5 million Twitter followers and the comment - "ideal activity, worth following". Surface transport minister Nitin Gadkari has 8.4 lakh Twitter followers. The comment for him read "he is an example of how to run social media, though he can be more interactive."

Apart from these two, ministers like Gen V K Singh, MoS external affairs Kalraj Mishra, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore and

Dr Mahesh Sharma were also praised for their Twitter and Facebook activity.

The report revealed that, much to BJP's dismay, a majority of its minsters and high-profile MPs left a lot to be desired on the social media front. Ministers like Maneka Gandhi, Santosh Gangwar, Dr Ram Shankar Katheria, Sanjeev Balyan, Niranjan Jyoti, Nihalchand, Haribhai Chaudhary and Hansraj Ahir are hardly active on these platforms. It also highlighted the fact that majority of MPs lagged behind when it came to highlighting "government achievements " online.

The report also dubbed newly appointed Uttar Pradesh BJP president Keshav Prasad Maurya as inactive, but there has been a surge in activity on his Twitter and FB accounts of late.

Ironically for PM Modi, the worst usage patterns have emerged from both the state he comes from (Gujarat) and the state he represents in Lok Sabha (Uttar Pradesh). In Gujarat, 15 of 26 MPs are either not on Twitter or Facebook or have multiple inactive accounts or have abysmally low engagement.

Same is the case with Uttar Pradesh, where 43 of 71 BJP MPs are "inactive" on social media.

Most ministers and MPs mentioned in the report declined to comment, but former Mumbai police Commissioner and BJP MP from Baghpat, Satyapal Singh, called this a very good exercise that enables MPs to explore digital communication. "It's good to be on Twitter. It not only allows us to put out what the government is doing but it also lets us tell our side of the story in case of a misrepresentation by the media, which is happening a lot these days," he said.

Dr Jitendra Singh, MoS PMO, agreed with him. "Under the guidance of our Prime Minster, (social media) helps us put great initiatives like Jan dhan, beti bachao, etc, in front of everybody."

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With 19.6 million Twitter followers, PM Modi himself is quite active on social media. The second most followed world leader on Twitter has hailed these digital platforms for contributing to his mammoth victory in the 2014 general elections.

Since its election win, the government has given increasing importance to social media.

Earlier this year, at a get-together at Dr Mahesh Sharma's residence, party president Amit Shah told MPs that one of the key criterion in ticket distribution for UP assembly was whether the concerned person had 25 thousand followers on Twitter and Facebook or not.

All party MPs have also been told to download the Narendra Modi app and refer to posts from transformingindia.mygov.in.

The "digital report" is being seen as an exercise to map the presence of elected BJP MPs on social media and to bridge this digital divide that's proving to be the biggest challenge for the BJP.

--- ENDS ---
They argued they were being unlawfully denied the right to vote as, under law, British people who have lived elsewhere in the European Union for more than 15 years are not allowed to vote.

By Reuters: Two Britons living abroad lost their bid to take part in June's referendum on European Union membership in a High Court test case over the right of some two million UK expatriate citizens to vote.

The case was brought by 94-year-old Harry Shindler, a World War Two veteran who lives in Italy, and lawyer and Belgian resident Jacquelyn MacLennan.

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They argued they were being unlawfully denied the right to vote as, under law, British people who have lived elsewhere in the European Union for more than 15 years are not allowed to vote.

But two judges said in Thursday's ruling that they accepted the government's argument that there were: "... significant practical difficulties about adopting especially for this referendum a new electoral register which includes non-resident British citizens whose last residence the United Kingdom was more than 15 years ago."

Lawyers for the two claimants said in a statement that they would appeal "so that all British citizens living elsewhere in the EU can be part of the democratic process to vote in this referendum which will have a very real impact on their lives."

Around 46 million Britons are eligible to vote on June 23 on whether Britain should remain a member of the EU or leave a bloc it first joined as then European Community in 1973.

Polls suggest the result is likely to be close.



--- ENDS ---
By PTI: May-end

New Delhi, Apr 28 (PTI) Come October and all construction permits in Delhi and Mumbai will be only through online, doing away with human interface.

The government is all set to do away with the manual process for obtaining construction permits in the national capital by next month, making the entire system online as part of its plan to provide hassle-free public services delivery mechanism.

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New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) will stop accepting manual applications for building permits by May 15, while three other civic bodies of Delhi will adopt the system by the end of May.

NDMC Chairman Naresh Kumar and Commissioner of South Delhi Municipal Corporation Punit Goel informed about this initiative while making a presentation at a workshop on Ease of Doing Business for Construction Permits in Delhi, an official release said.

The countrys financial capital, Mumbai, will also accept only digital applications for construction works from October 2.

"From October 2, 2016, all construction permits in Delhi and Mumbai would be only through online mechanism. There will be no man to man contact," Union Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said on the sidelines of the workshop.

Addressing the workshop, Naidu expressed concern over what he called the "paradox" of India being the fastest growing economy of the world but perceived to be the most difficult place to do business and invest in.

Stating that improvement in ease of doing business in urban areas of the country would lift millions out of poverty, the minister urged other cities and towns to follow the online application and sanction systems being introduced by the urban local bodies in the national capital.

"Despite being a vibrant democracy, legislatures not passing Bills in time on certain occasions is another paradox and such situations should be resolved to enable the country emerge as an economic power that it deserves to be," he said.

Naidu said the simplified online application and sanction systems being introduced in Delhi and Mumbai would be implemented in all cities and towns in a phased manner. PTI MP SMN PAL SMN

--- ENDS ---
The Congress MP upped his ante against the BJP and accused it of targeting the Congress for political gains.

By India Today Web Desk: At a time when the political temperature over the AgustaWestland chopper scam continues to rise, it is Congress MP Ahmed Patel who finds himself in the eye of the storm.

Ahmed Patel, whose name allegedly figured in an Italian court order on Thursday, rebutted BJP's accusations of his and party president Sonia Gandhi's involvement in the chopper scam during the UPA regime.

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Talking exclusively to India Today Television, Ahmed Patel termed the allegations as baseless and denied having any role in the case.

Referring to the March 2008 letter, in which Christian Michel mentioned Sonia as the driving force behind the chopper deal and blamed AP and Fam for taking bribery, Patel said that there was no concrete proof to justify his role in the case. He also denied knowing Christian Michel.

"How can you say that the name AP in the letter refers to me? It can be referred to someone else too. I have never met Christian Michel, I can't even pronounce his name," he said.

Instead, the Congress MP upped his ante against the BJP and accused it of targeting the Congress for political gains.

"The BJP accepts David Headley's version despite knowing that he is an accused. This is because they know it is going to help a particular leader and not the national security," Patel said.

"The probe into the chopper scam began during the UPA regime. The ED had even filed a chargesheet. Why is the present government finding it so difficult to come out with the truth?" he asked.

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO HERE:



Also read:

Chopper scam: Supreme Court to hear plea seeking FIR against Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh

AgustaWestland: Congress shields its last bastion





--- ENDS ---
The incident that involved Indian medical students led to one being stabbed with a knife, who was rushed to hospital after suffering a serious injury.

Students have been warned of stern action against such activities in future.

By Ananth Krishnan: A fight broke out between two student groups - comprising Indian students - in the Three Gorges University in Yichang, a city in central China's Hubei province. The students were armed with knives.

The incident that involved Indian medical students led to one being stabbed with a knife, who was rushed to hospital after suffering a serious injury.

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The university expelled all the students involved in the clash.

The impact appears to be far-reaching as the violence prompted the Indian government to send a strong advisory to all students in China. There are as many as 14,000 Indian students studying in China, most of them in medical colleges.

The advisory, issued by the Indian Embassy and consulates this week, said, "Incidents involving any kind of violence or ill-behaviour to create a negative image about Indians in China will not be encouraged. Although the overwhelming number of students is law-abiding, the actions of a few are detrimental to the interests of all Indians in China. The Embassy and Consulates will have zero tolerance in all such cases."

China has increasingly replaced eastern Europe as a popular and cost-effective alternative for a medical education, triggered by the high costs and limited seats in India. While China has several reputed world-class universities, other lesser known colleges have also sought to cash in on the booming market, even building India-tailored dormitories and canteens.

This incident has alarmed officials, and has served as another reminder of the troubles many students face in China, which range from dealing with some lesser-known schools that fail to adequately prepare students for the Medical Council of India examinations to students struggling to adjust to a life where few speak English.

--- ENDS ---
The stabbing of a local trader by unknown assailants earlier this week, has caused a lot of unrest among the residents.

By Mail Today: The Dakshina Kannada district administration in coastal Karnataka has imposed prohibitory orders owing to communal tension in the region after a Minority was stabbed in Ullal near Mangaluru.

The police arrested Shivaraj (19), an electrician, in connection with the stabbing incident and the search is on for 4 other accused.

Ibrahim, a trader, was stabbed by unknown assailants earlier this week.

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Later in another incident three people from a Minority group were stabbed.

This has led to unrest in Ullal prompting the police to deploy additional forces.

On Wednesday, the police identified the miscreants and one of them was arrested.

The police conducted a peace meeting and assured the people involved in the unrest that the culprits would be caught soon.

--- ENDS ---
Escalating land prices, encroachment, urbanisation and population are constricting the city's cemeteries and at many of these facilities auctions now decide who gets to rest in peace.

This graveyard at ITO in central Delhi is among dozens in the city that are filled to capacity.

By Astha Saxena: Finding a home in Delhi can be maddeningly expensive but securing a final resting place is harder still with graveyards running out of room, forcing the dead to jostle for space.

Escalating land prices, encroachment, urbanisation and population are constricting the city's cemeteries and at many of these facilities auctions now decide who gets to rest in peace.

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The cost of burial at most Muslim graveyards in Delhi begins at Rs 5,000 and can go up to Rs 15,000, depending upon availability. At the historic Mehndiyan cemetery behind Lok Nayak Hospital in central Delhi, the cost ranges between Rs 50,000 and Rs 1 lakh.

"Due to a space crunch, the prices go up and whoever is willing to pay a higher amount is allotted the burial space," said Munna Singh, a caretaker who has been looking after the Delhi Gate graveyard for 35 years.

A public notice put up by the authorities of the Paharganj cemetery

A burial at a Christian cemetery costs between `3,000 and `10,000. But the price is higher at some facilities. With a spike in complaints, the Delhi Minorities Commission will begin a survey on the city's graveyards within a month.

"There is no space in our area to bury the dead. The Muslim population here is more than 50,000 and there is not even a single graveyard," said 40-year-old Abdul Wahid Qureshi, a resident of northwest Delhi's Inderlok.

"We have been writing to various authorities, asking for land where we can peacefully bury the bodies." Qureshi, like many others, had approached the commission.

"We are working on the matter. Recently, groups of people from west and east Delhi came to us, complaining about the shortage of graveyards in their respective areas. Residents of Aya Nagar in south Delhi have also highlighted the shortage of cemeteries in their area," Qamar Ahmad, chairman of Delhi Minorities Commission, told Mail Today. The first-of-its-kind study will be outsourced to a private agency and will have minute details about the graveyards.

"The number of graveyards or cemeteries has not increased in proportion to the population for the last three decades. So, there is a shortage for both communities," added Ahmad.

Residents say they have been repeatedly writing to authorities on the space crunch

The Muslim population in Delhi is estimated to be around four million and Christians about 8,00,000. Migration from other states has also spurred the city's population growth.

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"When there is no space, how are we going to accommodate the dead? Relatives of the dead also erect concrete structures over the burial site," said Jyotsana Thomas, a resident of east Delhi's Mayur Vihar.

Apart from the space crunch, poor maintenance is adding to the woes of these graveyards. Encroachment, construction of concrete tombs, non-allotment of land for new cemeteries and a huge demand for burial grounds attached to dargahs and mosques are the biggest problems.

"There is no space left for expansion. All the nearby land has been acquired by colonies," Ahmad said.

Officials say even rural pockets in the Capital now have multi-storey buildings and offices. Agricultural land is being turned into commercial and residential land, with scores of colonies mushrooming in the past decade, leaving no space for the dead.

The commission earlier reported the matter to the Delhi government, but no action was initiated. Sources in the government said paucity of land in the city is a major roadblock.

The Muslim graveyards in the Capital are managed by a clutch of committees comprising six to 12 members each. For the Christian community, burial grounds are managed by two organisations - the Delhi Cemetery Committee and Indian Cemetery Committee.

--- ENDS ---

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As Trump and Clinton, fresh off big wins in Northeastern state primaries on Tuesday, circle each other for a potential match-up in the November 8 US presidential election, his comments portended what could be a nasty campaign.

Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers a foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on April 27, 2016.

By Reuters: Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump waded into politically risky territory this week when he accused Democrat Hillary Clinton of exploiting her gender to win votes and said she would have little support if she were not a woman.

As Trump and Clinton, fresh off big wins in Northeastern state primaries on Tuesday, circle each other for a potential match-up in the November 8 US presidential election, his comments portended what could be a nasty campaign.

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Trump's remarks, while appearing to break a taboo against gender stereotypes, energized Democrats.

"Keep talking, Donald Trump, keep talking," Democratic Committee National Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz told CNN. "Every single day when Donald Trump opens his mouth, he does more to alienate women."

Trump has consistently polled poorly with women. Democrats and Republicans both accuse Trump of sexism over his verbal attacks on Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and on former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, whose looks Trump insulted.

On Wednesday, Trump's closest Republican rival, US Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, announced that he was choosing Fiorina as his running mate should he win the Republican nomination.

But US Representative Renee Ellmers of North Carolina said she believed Trump could overcome his unpopularity with women voters with straight talk and a plan of action.

"This is an election unlike any other election," Ellmers said. "To me, this is breaking all the rules, this is going against any of the typical history books and elections of the past."

Trump's top aide and other supporters said the focus on Clinton's gender was part of Trump's emerging strategy for the general election and that he had no intention of hewing to traditional rules of political campaigns.

"When he is attacked, he will respond," Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told Reuters in an interview. "The campaign is going to proceed under the mantra, which we've had in this campaign from Day One, which is: Let Mr. Trump be Mr. Trump."

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this month showed a big gender gap for Trump. About two-thirds of women have an unfavorable view of the billionaire businessman. By contrast, 54 percent of men had a negative view of Trump - a high number but significantly lower than the negative views among women.

Gearing For A Fight

In taking aim at Trump's comments, Clinton appeared to be relishing the fight.

"Well if fighting for women's healthcare and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in," she said in a victory speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday night.

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Clinton has in her political career at times benefited from missteps by male candidates. Her 2000 US Senate rival, New York Republican Rick Lazio, came off as a bully when he stepped close to her on stage during a debate to demand she sign a pledge.

Early in her first presidential campaign in 2008, Clinton accused her male opponents of "piling on" and said that would prompt more women to support her. Then-Senator Barack Obama's comments during a presidential debate in New Hampshire that year that she was "likable enough" was seen as a factor in helping her win the state's primary.

If Trump wins the nomination, his willingness to raise Clinton's gender and other issue could make for one of the most contentious general election campaigns in recent history.

"I don't think there's going to be any taboos with Donald Trump," said James Pethokoukis, a scholar with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "He's not going to treat her with any sort of kid gloves."

--- ENDS ---
"We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of a young and talented coworker," the company said.

By AP: An Apple employee that the company described as "young and talented" was found dead in a conference room inside the company's headquarters in Cupertino on Wednesday, authorities said.

Sgt. Andrea Urena of the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office said the death of the male employee was an isolated incident and that no foul play is suspected.

Deputies were called about 8:35 a.m. Wednesday for a report of "a person down" at 1 Infinite Loop and found a dead man, she said. "They determined there were no other individuals involved and they believe it was an isolated incident and that there was nobody else on campus or in the public at risk," Urena said.

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The Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner's Office will determine how the man died, she said.

Urena wouldn't comment on the circumstances of the death. "I can't confirm any information regarding a manner or cause of death, or any weapons," she said.

Apple said in a statement it is working to support the people who worked with the "young and talented" man. It declined to identify him.

"We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of a young and talented coworker," the company said. "Our thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends, including the many people he worked with here at Apple."

--- ENDS ---
Total revenue rose to $5.38 billion from $3.54 billion, with ad revenue increasing 56.8 per cent to $5.20 billion.

By Reuters: Facebook Inc's quarterly revenue rose more than 50 per cent, handily beating Wall Street expectations as its wildly popular mobile app and a push into live video lured new advertisers and encouraged existing ones to boost spending.

The company's shares rose 9.5 per cent in after-hours trading on Wednesday to $118.39, setting it on track to open at a new high on Thursday, at nearly triple its initial public offering four years ago.

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Facebook also announced it will create a new class of non-voting shares in a move aimed at letting Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg give away his wealth without relinquishing control of the social media juggernaut he founded.

The company plans to create a new class of non-voting shares, which would be given as a dividend to existing shareholders. That would allow Zuckerberg, who wants to give away 99 per cent of his wealth, to sell non-voting stock to fund philanthropy and keep the voting stock that assures his control.

Alphabet Inc passed a similar proposal in 2014 that ensured its founders' control by creating new non-voting shares.

Some 1.65 billion people used Facebook monthly as of March 31, up from 1.44 billion a year earlier. Zuckerberg said users were spending more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, a huge amount of time given the millions of apps available to users.

Advertisers are shifting money from television to web and mobile platforms, and Facebook is one of the biggest beneficiaries. It faces fierce competition in the mobile video market, where rivals Snapchat and YouTube also garner billions of video views every day.

Facebook recently expanded its live video product, rolling out several new features and making it more prominent on the app to encourage users to create videos and share them. The quarterly results showed success attracting advertisers with the move, and the company was able to expand its operating profit margin to 55 per cent from 52 per cent a year earlier.

"The company consistently 'warns' about higher spending, but they consistently manage their spending to deliver earnings upside. They're an impressive company, and they leave very little room for criticism," said Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who called the operating margin a good surprise.

Facebook did not offer details on sales of its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, but emphasized that it was early days and said that sales would not significantly impact 2016 revenue.

The results come after disappointments for investors from several major Silicon Valley firms.

Also Read: Apple Falls: First-ever revenue decline in 13 years

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"After Intel and IBM last week, and then Twitter and Apple yesterday, this is by far the best number I've seen in technology," said Daniel Morgan, senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust Company which owns about $40 million worth of Facebook shares, commenting specifically about Facebook ad revenue.

Facebook has not begun advertising on some of its most popular apps. "They haven't yet turned on the monetization spigot for Messenger or WhatsApp, so there should be significant headroom still," said Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research.

The company's net income attributable to common shareholders nearly tripled to $1.51 billion, or 52 cents per share, in the first quarter from $509 million, or 18 cents per share, a year earlier.

Excluding items, the company earned 77 cents per share, beating Wall Street's 62-cent consensus.

Total revenue rose to $5.38 billion from $3.54 billion, with ad revenue increasing 56.8 per cent to $5.20 billion. Mobile ad revenue accounted for about 82 per cent of total ad revenue, compared with about 73 per cent a year earlier.

Analysts on average had expected revenue of $5.26 billion.

If the stock proposal is approved - and Zuckerberg has a majority of voting stock - the company will effectively carry out a 3-for-1 stock split, issuing two shares of non-voting Class C capital stock as a one-time stock dividend for each share of Class A and Class B common stock.

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Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced last year that they would give away 99 per cent of their Facebook shares to fund charitable endeavors.

Investors said they were not concerned that Zuckerberg would have increasing control, pointing to the company's consistent ability to grow and exceed expectations.

"I honestly don't think anyone cares if he has more power, since he's done everything right since they went public," said Pachter.



Also Read: Chinks in Apple's armour: 9 reasons why Apple revenue is down

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Ace designer Ashish N Soni lets his discerning eyes take the lead on a holiday.

Eat and explore like a local, says Soni. Picture courtesy: Mail Today

By Lipla Negi: Your idea of a perfect holiday?

The beach.



One holiday destination that you keep going back to?

Thailand for food and hospitality of the locals.

What do you like to do while on a holiday?

I love spending time with my kids and exploring gourmet restaurants.

What's your favourite fashion destination? Why?

London. It has the best street fashion and possibly the best high-street shopping because of which one witnesses a lot of trends while sitting and having a cup of coffee on the street.

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A destination that's on your bucket list?

Lapland in Finland. I want to see the northern lights.

What's your favourite shopping destination?

Outlets in Florence. They give me better value for money.

A city you recently explored?

Barcelona. We stayed by the harbour at the Arts Hotel. Gaudi's architecture is simply mesmerising! 'Tickets Bar' is a must place to see, possibly the best restaurant in Barcelona. Also, Bueno Bonito Bormuth is the best place for tapas and absolute value for money.

What's your travel plan for 2016?

Holidaying in Europe during summer.

Your best travel advice?

Definitely do something the locals do.

How to pack like a pro?

Keep a few things that work from evening to nights. Carry poly viscose clothing, which doesn't crush. Fold clothing so that minimal ironing is required. Pack for the number of days you are travelling for.

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Vin Diesel has begun shooting for the next instalment of Fast and Furious series in Cuba.

Vin Diesel in a still from Fast And Furious

By India Today Web Desk: Vin Diesel has begun shooting for the next instalment of Fast and Furious series in Cuba.

ALSO READ: XXX The Return Of Xander Cage - Deepika Padukone in action mode, Vin Diesel wraps up shoot



The 48-year-old actor shared a video on Instagram with director F Gary Gray, from Cuba where the Fast And Furious team is currently shooting.

A still from the upcoming film, Fast 8

The Fast And Furious team has begun shooting for the eighth instalment

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"Right now I'm with my director F Gary Gray. We worked together maybe 17 years back...and we are at the place that nobody thought would be possible..We are in Havana, Cuba," says Diesel.

The channeling of Dom begins here in Cuba. Gracias por todo mi Gente! @fgarygray #F8 A video posted by Vin Diesel (@vindiesel) on Apr 27, 2016 at 1:21pm PDT

The task to shoot the film in Cuba will be difficult for the Fast And Furious team. As the US and Cuba governments had imposed an embargo on each other in 1960 and since then, there has been no economic or commercial trade between the two countries.

It was only in 2015 when US President Barack Obama tried to re-establish ties with Cuba and ease restrictions on American travel to the island. Fast And Furious has opened up new possibility to shoot films in Cuba.

Moreover, the Vin Diesel team may face difficulties as the Havana film industry is not that well-equipped.

Director F Gary Gray, who is known for Straight Outta Compton, has finalised many exotic locations such as Russia and Iceland to shoot the film.

The film's star cast includes Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jason Statham, Michelle Rodriguez and Kurt Russell.

Vin Diesel shared a photo with Fast And Furious co-star Michelle Rodriguez on Facebook

As we all know, audience will miss Paul walker, who died in an unfortunate car accident in November, 2013. In an attempt to fill that void, Fast And Furious team has brought on board Mad Max Fury Road's Furiosa aka Charlize Theron and Scott Eastwood.

The film will be released in North America on April 14, 2017.



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Even before the cancellation of the VVIP helicopter deal on January 1, 2014, the IAF kept aside 11 Mi17V5 helicopters for upgrade.

By Jugal R Purohit: Notwithstanding the scuttled acquisition process for VVIP helicopters and the drama surrounding the saga, the Indian Air Force (IAF) has once again asked the government to acquire specialised helicopters to ferry VVIPs.

Signalling the end of an ambitious experiment of retrofitting helicopters into VVIP role, top Defence Ministry sources confirmed the IAF's representation to the government where it has expressed its discomfort over the 'stop gap' arrangement it has been forced into. The matter now lies at the doorstep of the Cabinet Committee of Security (CCS).

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Even before the cancellation of the VVIP helicopter deal on January 1, 2014, the IAF kept aside 11 Mi17V5 helicopters for upgrade. While those upgraded choppers are being tested, the IAF has opined that they can at best be used temporarily. With this, an ambitious attempt to indigenously retrofit the medium lift Russian helicopters has reached a dead end.

"We have mooted a proposal so that this arrangement can end. It can hardly be called healthy," said a source. A top functionary aware of the development explained, "Converting a medium lift chopper into a VVIP configuration is not just about putting better seats and better air conditioning. We cannot divulge our exact objections with the retrofitted Mi17V5 given that VVIPs are involved. However, there is no doubt anymore that this experiment needs to be curtailed as a temporary measure. The government has been made aware. They have to decide."

IAF's Chandigarh based 3rd Base Repair Depot (BRD) was entrusted with the task of retrofitting the planes early in 2014 following a detailed study.

"A sizeable team of technicians have worked on it and have sought several certifications again since the task has been modified. Needless to say, there can be no chances taken given that VVIPs will be using these planes," added a source.

While it was informed that 'some' of the retrofitted helicopters were already being used, a source said, "By June this year, at least five helicopters will be made available to the Communications Squadron which is the one that ferries the VVIPs. Progressively all 11 will be delivered to them."

The helicopter wing of the Communication Squadron is manned by a mix of obsolete Mi8 helicopters and Mi17 V5s. A hard-pressed IAF is running the show 'somehow'. The Mi8s were inducted in the IAF 1971 onwards have long exhausted the extended lives. It was anticipating the lapse of extended shelf life that the IAF had initiated the process of acquiring helicopters for VVIP travel way back in 1999, following the Kargil war.

VVIP chopper saga: A Timeline

August 1999: IAF, which relied on Mi8s for VVIP travel sought replacements as the helicopters couldn't carry out night flying apart from throwing up several other constraints.

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March 2002: Global RFP issued for VVIP travel helicopters in which EC225 of Eurocopter of France emerged as the only suitable aircraft. However, owing to an intervention by the PMO in 2003, a review was done and Operational Requirements modified.

September 2006: Fresh RFP issued in which AW101 emerged as the only suitable aircraft.

January 2010: Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) gave the go-ahead.

February 2010: MoD concluded a contract for 12 AW101 helicopters with AgustaWestland.

February 2012: Reports emerged indicating the presence of middlemen in the deal.

February 2013: Giuseppe Orsi, CEO, Finmeccanica (parent firm of AGUSTAWESTLAND) arrested upon which the MoD asked the CBI to initiate an inquiry.

January 2014: MoD terminates contract, seeks the return of the sum paid.

Also Read:

Chopper scam: Supreme Court to hear plea seeking FIR against Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh

Agusta scam: Govt junks middleman's claims, says no deal between Modi, Italian PM

What is AgustaWestland chopper deal? Why is Sonia Gandhi under attack for it?



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By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 28 (PTI) Government today said there will not be sugar shortage in the country in the 2016-17 season starting October despite lower domestic output, as the total availability at 30-31 million tonnes would be suffice to meet the demand.

The governments supply estimate for 2016-17 comes amid reports that India, the worlds second biggest sugar producer after Brazil, might become a net importer due to likely fall in domestic sugar output in the wake of expected decline in cane production due to two consecutive years of drought.

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"As such, notwithstanding any shortfall in sugar production during 2016-17 sugar season (estimated 23-24 million tonnes), the total availability in India (30-31 million tonnes) would be sufficient to meet the domestic consumption," the Food Ministry said in a statement. About 7.3 million tonnes will carried forward for the 2016-17 season. "There is, therefore, likely to be no shortage of domestically produced sugar in India," it said.

In the ongoing 2015-16 season, India had started with a carryover stock of 9 million tonnes of sugar. The production this year is estimated at about 25.3 million tonnes, as against the demand of 25.5 million tonnes. "Exports this year being low at about 1.5 million tonnes, the stock position at the close of the current sugar season will stand at 7.3 million tonnes which will be carried forward for the next sugar season 2016-17," it added. It may be noted that sugar production in the ongoing 2015-16 season (October-September) is estimated to be lower at 25.3 million tonnes, as against 28.3 million tonnes in the previous year. As per the industry data, mills have manufactured 24.3 million tonnes of sugar till April 15 of this season. PTI LUX MKJ

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By India Today Web Desk: Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranaut have been walking the country through one of Bollywood's nastiest battles. Over the last three months, any mention of either of the two has not been without speaking about the ugliness between them. Legal notices, allegations and statements from both Hrithik's and Kangana's sides have flooded the media over the last few months. However, seems like both the actors have now decided to bury the hatchet and move on.

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ALSO READ: Kangana did black magic on him, says Ranaut's ex-boyfriend Adhyayan Suman

ALSO READ: Welcome to the circus, my friend - Aditya Pancholi warned me about Kangana, says Adhyayan Suman

ALSO READ: Kangana's obsession with Hrithik began during Kites, says Adhyayan Suman

ALSO READ: Hrithik's ex-wife Sussanne speaks out about his leaked photo with Kangana

On Thursday (April 28), a statement issued from Kangana read, "We would like everyone to know that some common people have started intervening in the matter and want the matter to be resolved amicably. Therefore, to end the matter on a positive note we shall not be giving any further statement to the media on the said matter, as the same has also been assured from their side."

The statement from Kangana comes a day after her team supposedly leaked a photo in which Hrithik was seen hugging Kangana, allegedly in an attempt to prove that the two shared something more than just a professional relationship. After the photo from Kangana went viral on the internet, Hrithik's team released a bunch of snaps clicked at the same party, from December 2010. It was pointed out by Roshan's team how the first photo was taken out of context to make it look like something it was not.

Hrithik's team, his friends and ex-wife Sussanne Khan were all unanimous in saying that his photo with Kangana was a photoshopped one, leaked to create an untrue image in public.

To this, Ranaut's lawyer said, "First and foremost, I need to know who is representing Hrithik Roshan as an advocate on record, as the advocate seems to have been changed. The new advocate should come forward and give a proper statement in his name, so that we do not see legal statements being issued on public domain by anonymous persons."

"Besides, what do they mean by stating that the image is photoshopped or doctored? Do they mean that it is not Kangana in the image or is it not Hrithik or is it their claim that the expressions or the body language of either Kangana and Hrithik have been altered? They need to be specific because the photograph was meant to prove a point that Hrithik had blatantly lied not knowing my client Kangana socially at all. That point has been sufficiently proved in all respects and therefore we need to move on and stop arguing uselessly," added Siddiquee.

The mudslinging began when Kangana, in an interview to Pinkvilla in January this year, hinted at Roshan being her 'ex' who did 'silly things to get people's attention'. Following that, both sides have slapped legal notices on each other, with no resolution whatsoever in sight. However, seems like the two are now ready to let bygones be bygones and move on with their respective lives.

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By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 28 (PTI) India and Mongolia today reviewed entire gamut of bilateral ties and explored ways to further deepen their relationship in diverse areas including trade and investment.

Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh and Mongolian Foreign Minister L Purevsuren, at the 5th meeting of India-Mongolia Joint Committee on Cooperation, deliberated on range of issues and agreed to further step up engagement.

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Purevsurens visit is part of the intensified bilateral exchanges following upgrading of ties to the level of strategic partnership during the historic visit of Prime Minister Modi to Mongolia in May last year.

Progress in utilisation of the Line of Credit of USD 1 billion announced by India to Mongolia during Modis visit was also discussed.

During that visit the relationship was upgraded to Strategic Partnership and a series of important agreements including in the defence and security fields were signed.

Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan had visited Mongolia this month.

The two sides also reviewed implementation of important understandings reached during Modis visit and deliberated on on regional and global issues of mutual interest.

Progress towards utilisation of the Line of Credit of USD 1 billion announced during Modis visit was also discussed.

"We attach importance to further strengthening and deepening bilateral ties with Mongolia. Visit of Foreign Minister Purevsuren will make positive contribution towards this objective," said the Ministry of External Affairs. PTI MPB ZMN

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By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 28 (PTI) An agreement to utilise Indias line of credit of USD 1 billion to Mongolia for developing railways and infrastructure projects was signed between the two countries after they held extensive talks covering entire gamut of ties.

Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh and Mongolian Foreign Minister L Purevsuren, at the 5th meeting of India-Mongolia Joint Committee on Cooperation, deliberated on range of issues and agreed to further step up engagement.

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The USD 1 billion credit was announced by India during Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to that country in May last year.

The two sides also signed protocol on the exchange of instrument of ratification of the treaty between the two countries on the transfer of sentenced persons. The deal will facilitate serving of sentence by convicted persons in their home countries.

Purevsurens visit is part of the intensified bilateral exchanges following upgrading of ties to the level of strategic partnership during the historic visit of Prime Minister Modi to Mongolia in May last year.

During that visit the relationship was upgraded to Strategic Partnership and a series of important agreements including in the defence and security fields were signed.

Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan had visited Mongolia this month.

The two sides also reviewed implementation of important understandings reached during Modis visit and deliberated on on regional and global issues of mutual interest.

"We attach importance to further strengthening and deepening bilateral ties with Mongolia. Visit of Foreign Minister Purevsuren will make positive contribution towards this objective," said the Ministry of External Affairs. PTI MPB ZMN

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A shocking clash between two groups of Indian students on a Chinese campus has sparked a strong advisory from the Indian government.

By Ananth Krishnan: The incident was out of a movie: two groups of students, armed with knives, fighting each other on a campus.

Only the students were from India, and the unlikely location: the Three Gorges University in Yichang, a city in central China's Hubei province known only for its proximity to the famous Three Gorges dam.

The incident in the second week of April between two groups of Indian medical students led to one being stabbed with a knife and rushed to hospital after suffering a serious injury. The university expelled all the students directly involved in the clash.

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Its impact appears to be even more far-reaching. The violence prompted the Indian government to send a strong advisory to all students in China. There are as many as 14,000 Indian students studying in China, most in medical colleges.

The advisory, issued by the Indian Embassy and consulates this week, said incidents "involving any kind of violence or ill behaviour create a negative image about Indians in China".

"Although the overwhelming number of students is law-abiding, the actions of a few are detrimental to the interests of all Indians in China. The Embassy and Consulates will have zero-tolerance in all such cases."

Medical destination

China has increasingly replaced eastern Europe as a popular and cost-effective alternative for a medical education, triggered by the high costs and limited seats in India.

The incident this month April alarmed officials, and has served as another reminder of the troubles many students face in China, which range from dealing with some lesser known schools that fail to adequately prepare students for the Medical Council of India exams, to some students struggling to adjust to life where few speak English.

Yet despite the challenges, more and more have turned to China to study, with numbers doubling this past decade to 14,000.

The advisory suggested some troubles are also self-inflicted: one cause for worry is a string of cases of new students, already struggling to adjust to life in China, complaining of harsh "ragging" from older Indian students.

It told students, "Ragging in a criminal offence" and asked them to report any incidents to the embassy and consulates, which will report cases to authorities in India. The advisory warned them to "not indulge in any form of violence or mental and physical abuse of any nature on or off the university campus".

The advisory added, "Such actions will invite severe action by University or police authorities, and is likely to result in suspension by the University, and detention or deportation by Chinese authorities. If the University provides proof that an Indian student has violated their regulations, and takes disciplinary action including expulsion, the Indian Embassy will not intervene."



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The Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System comprising seven satellites would be able to provide navigation system with much better accuracy and targeted position.

By India Today Web Desk: With the successful launch of IRNSS-1G from Sriharikota space station in Andhra Pradesh today, India took a step further towards having its own navigation satellite sytem. Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated ISRO scientists on the achievement.

"In space science, our scientists have achieved many accomplishments. Through space science lives of people can be transformed. I want to congratulate all ISRO scientists and the entire team. I also congratulate the people of India," the PM said.

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"With this successful launch, we will determine our own paths powered by our technology. This is a great gift to people from scientists. In space science, our scientists have achieved many accomplishments. Through space science lives of people can be transformed," he added.

Here is all you need to know about the IRNSS-1G



An Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket lifted off successfully on Thursday afternoon with the country's seventh and final navigation satellite, IRNSS-1G, from the rocket port in Sriharikota. The PSLV-XL standing 44.4 metre tall and weighing 320 tonnes, tore into the afternoon skies at 12.50 pm breaking free of the earth's gravitational pull. Just over 20 minutes into the flight, the rocket would put IRNSS-1G into orbit at an altitude 497.8 km. Named the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), it consists of a constellation of seven satellites. Six satellites - IRNSS-1A, IRNSS-1B, IRNSS-1C, IRNSS-1D, IRNSS-1E and IRNSS-1F- have already been put into orbit. The seventh satellite in the series - IRNSS-1G - weighing 1,425 kg has joined the other six today. The satellite's life span is 12 years. The Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System comprising seven satellites would be able to provide navigation system with much better accuracy and targeted position. According to ISRO officials total cost of all the seven satellites was Rs 1,420 crore. The 51.30 hour countdown for the launch of IRNSS-1G began at 09.20 hours on Wednesday.

WATCH ISRO launches IRNSS-1G



#WATCH ISRO launches IRNSS-1G to complete India's own navigational satellite system from Sriharikota.https://t.co/yZfB01lLsU&; ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

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The document revealed the details of Mohammed Emwazi's route from Britain to Syria to join the terrorist group in Raqqa.

By Press Trust of India: The Islamic State (ISIS) has released a document detailing how slain British extremist Mohammed Emwazi fled the UK and passed through six countries to reach Syria and become the dreaded Jihadi John.

The document revealed the details of Mohammed Emwazi's route from Britain to Syria to join the terrorist group in Raqqa.

Emwazi, dubbed Jihadi John after he murdered Western hostages, posed as a migrant to leave the UK.

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The Times quotes ISIS' monthly magazine 'Dar al-Islam' as saying that Emwazi and another unnamed individual opted for a migrant route to leave the UK in the summer of 2012 and were smuggled out in the back of lorry to avoid checks and made their way across the English Channel.

Emwazi was able to make the journey despite being on terrorism watch-lists.

The 27-year-old was killed in a US-led drone strike last year. His unnamed companion said they travelled through six countries to reach the ISIS stronghold in Raqqa.

He mocked UK intelligence services for not capturing him, and complained about mosquitoes along the way.

The account, which uses Emwazi's assumed name Abu Muharib al-Muhajir, runs to almost 8,000 words, the newspaper reports.

As Emwazi was known to British intelligence, he did not want to risk flying out of France.

The duo got to Brussels in Belgium and bought flights to Albania "without fear that British services are alerted".

The pair travelled on British passports but also carried two fake French passports and 30,000 euros in cash.

They shaved their beards in Brussels, where they had breakfast in a cafe in a Muslim area.

Emwazi went on to appear in a video in August 2014 in which he beheaded US journalist James Foley.

He emerged again in other videos, including those in which the US reporter Steven Sotloff and the British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning were murdered.

He was later identified as a Kuwaiti-born computer programming graduate from London.

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By PTI: Sricity, Apr 27 (PTI) Isuzu Motors India today opened its manufacturing plant here and rolled out its India-made D-Max pick-up.

The facility was inaugurated by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu.

The initial production capacity of the plant is 50,000 units per annum and can be scaled up to 1,20,000 units, Isuzu Motors President Masanori Katayama said.

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"We are very happy to start our local manufacturing operations in India. India is one of the biggest automobile markets and also one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. India is a key part of Isuzu Motors global growth strategy," he said.

"This new plant in India will not only cater to requirements of the growing Indian market, but will serve as a key manufacturing hub for Isuzus global operations."

Isuzu had earlier committed an investment of Rs 3,000 crore for the Indian project.

Ambassador of Japan to India Kenji Hiramatsu was present.

With its existing operations in the US, Japan and Thailand, this plant in India is expected to provide a manufacturing leg-up to Isuzu globally.

A statement from Isuzu said the new generation of Isuzu D-Max pick-ups will be manufactured at the plant, with 70 per cent localisation at the start of production, which will be stepped up.

Isuzu will also consider export of vehicles manufactured at this facility at a suitable time in future.

"This state-of-the-art manufacturing plant will follow Isuzu global manufacturing standards and Isuzu Manufacturing Management (IMM) practices. The plant will also focus on safety, quality and Isuzus commitment to environment," it said. PTI GDK GK SRK ARD

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Italy has been spared deadly attacks by Islamist militant groups such as those seen in recent months in France and Belgium, but authorities are nevertheless carrying out regular arrests of suspects, some of whom they accuse of plotting assaults.

By Reuters: Italian police have arrested four people suspected of conspiring to join Islamic State in the Middle East in a probe that revealed a plan to carry out a militant attack in Italy, a Milan prosecutor said on Thursday.

Italy has been spared deadly attacks by Islamist militant groups such as those seen in recent months in France and Belgium, but authorities are nevertheless carrying out regular arrests of suspects, some of whom they accuse of plotting assaults.

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As part of the same investigation, police also issued arrest warrants for two fugitives -- a Moroccan man and his Italian wife -- who left Italy and headed towards Iraq and Syria last year.

Investigators believe one of the suspects asked another to plan an attack in Italy and mentioned Rome, Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli told a news conference.

"The new aspect here is that we are not talking about a generic indication (of an attack) but a specific person being appointed to act on Italian soil," Romanelli said.

"Rome attracts attention because it is a destination for Christian pilgrims," he said.

Last month, police in southern Italy arrested a 22-year-old Somali imam and asylum seeker on suspicion he was planning an attack in Rome.

The four arrested on Thursday were another couple living near Lake Como, a 23-year-old Moroccan man, and a female relative of the fugitive couple, police said.

The couple and the Moroccan man were planning to travel together to join Islamic State on its territory in Syria and Iraq, and the woman had helped put the two couples in contact with each other, police said.

The Moroccan man's brother was expelled from Italy last year on suspicion of having fought for the group, according to police.

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"Your video poem, The Printing Machine, was both powerful and thought-provoking," wrote Melinda Gates.

By India Today Web Desk: If there's one Bollywood star we can look up to who is as loud as a trumpet when it comes to addressing the various issues that plague the 'fairer sex', it's Kalki Koechlin.

Also read: Kalki Koechlin's powerful poem sends out a strong message for the Indian media and its audience

From poetry and panel discussions to YouTube videos, Kalki unabashedly adapts to the medium she experiments with, and bashes partiarchy. Her poem, The Printing Machine, went viral not because of her star persona but because of her soul-stirring and satirical rant that called out the culture of voyeuristic news consumption.

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And, it seems like Kalki's work is winning her fans internationally as well. Feminist icon Melinda Gates--the Co-Chair and operator of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation--who's been vocal about everything from women in technology to the pay gap to contraceptives for females, sent the actress a personalised letter appreciating Kalki's poem. A seemingly excited Kalki took to Instagram to share a picture of the letter, accompanied with the caption, "Came in the post this morning (sic)."

In her letter, Melinda Gates even thanked Kalki for her efforts towards bringing attention to "violence and discrimination against women." Her letter reads:

Also read: Kalki Koechlin on theatre, death, racism and how she feels creatively threatened

"Dear Ms Koechlin:

I appreciate your taking time to join me in a discussion on empowering women and girls in India. Your video poem, "The Printing Machine", was both powerful and thought-provoking.

Thank you for bringing attention to violence and discrimination against women. Your voice helps bring much needed attention and support to these issues - and I am grateful for your efforts.

It was a pleasure meeting you during my visit.

Sincerely,

Melinda Gates."

Picture courtesy: Instagram/@kalkikanmani

The two had met during Melinda Gates' visit to India last month while participating in a TV debate on a news channel.

We are just thinking what they can create if Kalki gets on board the India wing of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Picture courtesy: Instagram/@kalkikanmani

ICYMI, here's Kalki's poem that got Melinda Gates' attention.

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With the recent twists in the tale, many have already started doubting Kangana Ranaut's intentions. And the shocking revelations by her ex-boyfriend Adhyayan Suman has only added fuel to the fire. The Jashnn actor, who dated Kangana back in 2009, has finally broken his silence on the legal spat and says that Kangana had started eyeing Hrithik when they started working on Kites.

By India Today Web Desk: Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranaut's legal battle seems to be getting murkier with each passing day. After Kangana's e-mails to Hrithik became public, her lawyer tried to give a befitting reply by sharing a picture of Kangana and Hrithik from a party in 2010 to 'prove' their relationship. But soon enough Hrithik's team released a bunch of photos from the same party that also show his ex-wife Sussanne Khan in attendance.

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ALSO READ: Hrithik's ex-wife Sussanne speaks out about his leaked photo with Kangana

ALSO READ: I'm not ashamed of my past or my affairs, says Kangana Ranaut



With the recent twists in the tale, many have already started doubting Kangana's intentions. And the shocking revelations by her ex-boyfriend Adhyayan Suman has only added fuel to the fire. The Jashnn actor, who dated Kangana back in 2009, has finally broken his silence on the legal spat and says that his sympathies are with the Mohenjo Daro actor.

In a recent interview to DNA, the 28-year-old actor spoke about Kangana's obsession with Hrithik and how he can identify with Hrithik.

"I felt a sense of deja vu as I could identify completely with what's happening to Hrithik. I can understand the pain that he is going through. I have been there. It's not about physical pain, but how emotionally tortured you feel. I feel bad for Hrithik. The experience of going through something like this is harrowing. I hope the truth comes out. My sympathies are majorly with him and his family. I can imagine what they must be going through," Suman told the daily.

Suman, who shared screen space with Ranaut in 2009 film Raaz- The Mystery continues, isn't too amazed with the fact that Kangana apparently sent 50 mails a day to Hrithik. In fact, he reveals that Kangana was obsessed with the Dhoom 2 actor ever since the two shared screen space in 2010 film Kites.

He adds that he saw Kangana had sent 50-70 messages to Hrithik. "I knew she was eyeing him from back then, from the time she went to Las Vegas for Kites. Hrithik had hurt his arm and she had gone to see him. I knew her desperation to get to know him well. I asked her about these messages. She said that he was her co-star and she had to talk to him like that. She made me believe that all those texts to him were casual. And I could believe that because whenever I met Hrithik and her together, he always maintained his distance," says the Heartless actor.

"I never saw any feelings from Hrithik's side. So, these stories about Kangana's obsession with him had begun back then of her wanting to get him. Those messages made me realise that I had to get out of this relationship and fast," adds Suman.

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With this new revelation, it doesn't look like the case is getting any less messy any time soon.



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A bench headed by Chief Justice TS Thakur was hearing a plea filed by Katju seeking quashing of resolutions passed by both Houses of Parliament in March last year condemning his tweets calling Mahatma Gandhi "a British agent" and Netaji Bose "a Japanese agent".

By Harish V Nair: Former Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju, who of late triggered several controversies with his comments on the social media on sensitive issues, came under fire in the Supreme Court on Wednesday for the first time for one such statement.

A bench headed by Chief Justice TS Thakur was hearing a plea filed by Katju seeking quashing of resolutions passed by both Houses of Parliament in March last year condemning his tweets calling Mahatma Gandhi "a British agent" and Netaji Bose "a Japanese agent".

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"Such statements (maligning Gandhi and Bose) are coming from a retired judge of the Supreme Court, a former constitutional authority who is greatly respected. Millions of people are impressed by what he says.

Parliament by passing a resolution wants to say please do not get impressed," Senior advocate Fali S Nariman , amicus curiae (lawyer to assist the court in an issue) in the case said arguing against quashing of the resolutions.

"Even otherwise the resolution is only an expression of strong disagreement by the Parliament and was not even in the nature of censure," Nariman said.

Senior lawyer Gopal Subramaniam, who appeared for Katju, argued that he was condemned without being given an opportunity to be heard and it curtailed his right of free speech and harmed his reputation.

But in a setback to Katju, Chief Justice Thakur also endorsed Nariman's views and said he prima facie felt that the resolution was only a strong expression of "condemnation" which "did not infringe any of his fundamental rights".

During the last hearing, Thakur had said that that "he should be mentally prepared for his own criticism if he criticises others".

The court has however not taken a final stand and said it would hear the views of Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi in the matter on Thursday.

"We feel it is nothing but a collective expression of opinion. It is merely a condemnation. They have not gagged you. They did not say you cannot say it again and nor did they seek your prosecution," CJI Thakur told Subramaniam.

When Subramaniam argued that "freedom of speech was protected even inside parliament", CJI Thakur had several pointed questions to ask. "You mean to say one can say anything he wants and nobody can condemn? You mean to say an ordinary citizen can condemn but parliamentarians cannot jointly? By the way what right of yours has been violated with this disagreement?" the CJI asked Subhramaniam.

"The MPs simply disagreed with you just like you disagreed with the devotees of Gandhi and Bose who say such statements were not proper as they have done so much for the country," CJI Thakur told Katju's lawyer.

Also read: 90 per cent Indians can relax, Markandey Katju exits social media



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Kejriwal's letter, a copy of which has been accessed by India Today, is in response to CIC's query whether details about his educational qualification should be released.

By India Today Web Desk: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has asked the Central Information Commission (CIC) to make public details of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's educational qualification. In a letter to the CIC, the Delhi CM has requested the agency that information about PM's educational degrees should be brought in the public domain to eliminate any confusion over the issue.

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Kejriwal's letter, a copy of which has been accessed by India Today, is in response to CIC's query whether details about his educational qualification should be released.

"According to some reports (details are attached), Prime Minister Narendra Modi is preventing the concerned department from releasing details about his educational qualification. Allegations are being made that the PM has no qualification and degree at all," the letter in Hindi stated.

"The people of this country want to know the truth. Why are you not releasing the documents related to Modis educational qualifications? This is wrong," it added.

Kejriwal, in his letter addressed to Central Information Commissioner Professor Madabhushanam Sridhar Acharyulu, has also raised questions about the central panel's working. "You want all details about my educational qualifications but information about the PM's degrees are being kept secret. This certainly raises questions over CIC's autonomy," it said.

In his election affidavit, PM Modi had claimed that he completed a distance education course in political science from Delhi University in 1978. Earlier this month, the Delhi University had also rejected an RTI plea seeking information on Modi's bachelor of arts degree.

Earlier, Gujarat University had refused to divulge information related to the PM's masters degree, saying that the marksheet and other details were personal information.

Also Read:

Choice between Delhi model that works and Gujarat model that cheats: Arvind Kejriwal



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India has written to the United Kingdom on deportation of liquor baron Vijay Mallya, the MEA said.

Vijay Mallya's diplomatic passport has already been revoked by the government.

By India Today Web Desk: The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) today wrote to the United Kingdom High Commission in New Delhi, requesting the deportation of beleaguered liquor baron Vijay Mallya, who is facing money laundering charges in India.

"The MEA has written to the British High Commission for his deportation. Similar note verbal will be issued by our High Commission to the UK government," MEA spokesperson Vikas Swarup said, adding that there is a Red Corner notice against the 60-year-old businessman.

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Mallya's diplomatic passport - he is also a Rajya Sabha MP - has already been revoked by the government, which is the first step of a deportation.

Last month, Mallya fled to London shortly before the Enforcement Directorate sought a stay from the Supreme Court on him leaving India. On Wednesday, Attorney General Mukul Rohtagi told the apex court that Mallya is a fugitive from law in India.

Earlier this week, the apex court had also directed that details of his, his estranged wife, and children's overseas assets be given to the consortium of banks, seeking the recovery of the over Rs 9,000 crore loaned to his now-grounded Kingfisher Airlines.

The Supreme Court directive came after Mallya's lawyer told the court that he won't come to India to be arrested.

Asking Mallya to indicate the amount he is prepared to deposit before the top court to show his bonafide for a meaningful negotiation with the bank consortium, headed by the State Bank of India, the apex court by its April 7 order had asked him to disclose the details of all his properties - movable, immovable, tangible, intangible, shareholdings - held by him, his wife and children.

Mallya's now defunct Kingfisher Airline owes the consortium a whopping Rs 9,000 crores, including compound interest over the remaining combined loans of Rs 7,800 crores borrowed between 2004-12 before it was grounded and shut down subsequently.

ALSO READ | Reveal all foreign assets owned by Vijay Mallya, family: SC to banks



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"The documents are in Italian. For the government it is a time consuming process to translate documents, may be not for the Opposition," Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said.

By Gaurav C Sawant: The Ministry of Defence has sought a status report on the Finmeccanica probe from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) before deciding the next course of action against the arms major.



"Since July 2014 all procurement and acquisitions in the pipeline with Finmeccanica group of companies were put on hold by then defence minister Arun Jaitley," top sources told Mail Today.

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The government will consider the next course of action against Finmeccanica for allegedly bribing top politicians, bureaucrats and IAF personnel in the now scrapped 12 VVIP AgustaWestland copter deal after the CBI files its report.

"An Italian appeals court passed an order indicting the bribe givers in the case and we want the CBI to give us details of investigations to know if the probe has revealed the role of bribe takers,'' sources said.

The government denied allegations of delay in investigations by the CBI saying 90,000 pages of documents had to be translated from Italian to English and that too took time.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an event Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar took a dig at Congress chief saying, "The documents are in Italian. For the government it is a time consuming process to translate documents, may be not for the Opposition.''

An aggressive Parrikar also countered Congress' claims of having blacklisted AgustaWestland. "Ask them to check and give the date when was the firm was blacklisted and the truth will be out,'' he said.

The CBI had registered a case no 2172013A0003 dated 12.3.2013 to probe alleged criminal wrongdoing in the procurement of the VVIP helicopters. "The MoD put on hold until further orders all procurement and acquisitions in the pipeline with M/S AgustaWestland International Ltd UK & M/S Finmeccanica, Italy and its group of companies including subsidiaries and affiliates,'' sources said.

"But putting on hold, black list or ban on Finmeccanica is not the main issue. The alleged bribe of Euro 30 million (Rs 125 crore) is the main issue. Did those named in the Italian court verdict - politicians, bureaucrats and IAF personnel actually receive a bribe? That is of primary importance, the CBI needs to probe,'' sources added.

Parrikar has sought all details of the deal and investigations so far and is expected to make a statement in Parliament in the next eight to 10 days.

The government also defended Finmeccanica being at Defexpo claiming there was no bar on the company displaying its wares.

"There is a bar on procurement. Except for an enemy country all are welcome to display their products in India,'' claimed an official.

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The Congress hit back at this claiming that then defence minister AK Antony had "initiated the process" of blacklisting Finmecannica even though the process bore fruit post elections when the NDA government came to power.

Also read:

What is AgustaWestland chopper deal? Why is Sonia Gandhi under attack for it?

Agusta scam: Govt junks middleman's claims, says no deal between Modi, Italian PM



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By PTI: scholars

New Delhi, Apr 28 (PTI) Mongolia today conferred its highest civilian award "North Star" on two noted Indian scholars-Lokesh Chandra and Mansura Haider-for their contribution to Mongolian studies.

Mongolian Foreign Minister Lundeg Purevsuren conferred the award on Lokesh Chandra, president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), and Mansura Haider, former academic adviser at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), at ceremony at the Mongolian embassy here which was also attended by Union Minister Kiren Rijiju.

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This year being the 60th Anniversary of Indo-Mongolian diplomatic relations, the award has been presented to two Indian scholars for their outstanding "contributions to the development of friendly relations between India and Mongolia and promotion of Mongolian studies".

"India and Mongolia are two of the earliest nations in Asia, with their friendship as old as Buddhism. The two countries are intertwined with spiritual cultural and spiritual bonds based on which our governments have established diplomatic relations," Purevsuren, who is on an official visit to India, said at the ceremony.

The minister also recalled the contributions of professor Raghu Vira, Lokesh Chandras late father and a renowned scholar who invited students and scholars from Mongolia and revived the cultural and scientific ties between the two countries even before diplomatic relations were established.

In his acceptance speech, Chandra said, "North Star is called Sudarshan in Sanskrit and goes back to a very ancient period of Mongol History. My father was among the first to travel to Mongolia as they were the first Asians to conquer Europe."

Mansura Haider, who was a professor and former dean of the faculty of arts in Aligarh Muslim Universitys history department, said was the first to give the Mongols an identity was misrepresented in history.

"Khan was misrepresented in history because the contemporary aggrieved historian whose land was attacked exaggerated the tales of tyranny allegedly inflicted on their country. But Mongolians regard for the land of Gautam Buddha and Indian culture and religion is exemplary".

To reassess the contribution of Genghis Khan, ICCR is going to organize an International conference in Mongolia on "Genghis Khan, his legacy and Indian culture" concurrently with "International Mongolian Congress" in Ulaanbaatar in August. PTI GJS RG

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Modi today took his place alongside other world leaders including Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Francoise Holland at Madame Tussauds in London.

By Press Trust of India: Prime Minister Narendra Modi today took his place alongside other world leaders at Madame Tussauds in London.

The Indian leader's new wax figure arrived at the Baker Street attraction fresh from Delhi, where Modi had a private viewing with his likeness last week.

The figure is featured in the famous attraction's popular "World Leaders" enclosure alongside present day leaders Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Francoise Holland, as well as political heavyweights of the past including Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

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Modi was closely involved in the creation of his figure and was delighted with the final results, declaring that the Madame Tussauds team are "exceptional at what they do".

WATCH: PM Narendra Modi's wax statue unveiled at Madame Tussaud's Museum(London)https://t.co/iEE3aOxr1G&; ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

General Manager of Madame Tussauds London, Edward Fuller, said, "We are delighted that Mr Modi was able to see this very figure in India last week, and to welcome him to Madame Tussauds London today."

"It's wonderful that our visitors now have the chance to get up close to this influential leader, who is the source of so much public interest. It's not every day you get to stand alongside the statesmen and women shaping our world and we think guests will relish the chance to rub shoulders with Mr Modi," he said.

Modi's figure is dressed in his signature kurta in cream with jacket and he is featured in a traditional pose making a namaste gesture.

London's figure is one of four created of the statesman, with the other three taking up residence at Madame Tussauds attractions in Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok.

Each figure took a team of artists four months and cost 150,000 pounds to create.



ALSO READ | Wax you very much: What happened when Modi met Modi



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By PTI: From Yoshita Singh

United Nations, Apr 28 (PTI) India has called on the United Nations information department to increase interaction with media in developing countries in order to reduce disparities that exist in free flow of information.

Minister in Indias UN mission, S Srinivas Prasad, said that Department of Public Information (DPI) could also look at giving specific coverage to the UN designated days like the International Days of Yoga and Non-Violence through its media platforms as this would highlight the importance of the designated days as well as project the UNs efforts in "celebrating important values and activities."

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"We would also like to urge DPI to increase interaction with media in developing countries to reduce existing disparities in information flow and ensure a free flow of information at all levels," Prasad said at a session of the Committee on Information here on April 26.

Prasad welcomed UN Radios continued weekly delivery of topical adaptation of main broadcast in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali which he said enables the message of the UN to reach a large population in the South Asian sub-continent.

He added that while Hindi, Urdu and Bengali are the major languages of the South Asian landmass, there are still millions of speakers of other major languages within the sub-continent.

In this context he suggested that DPI could look at setting up a language development centre based in India to reframe content in other major South Asian languages in order to reach a more wider and diverse audience in the sub-continent.

Acknowledging DPIs close co-operation with UNs Department of Peacekeeping Operations, he said India is appreciative of the DPIs efforts to highlight the work of UN Blue Berets in some of the most difficult situations in the world.

"We urge the DPI to fast track its plans of highlighting this contribution on media platforms, both in the troop donor countries as well as worldwide," he said.

He also noted that UN TV featured in its long running series-United nations in Action- the inauguration of a solar park in Gujrat State by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon during his visit to India last year in April.

He pointed out that as part of the 70th anniversary celebrations of the UN last year, India had participated in the Turn the World UN Blue global campaign by lighting up the iconic Chhatrapati Shivaji Rail Terminus in Mumbai on United Nations Day.

He said the iconic landmark had been subjected to terrorist attack in November 2008, leading to the loss of life of many innocent citizens.

"Keeping in view the UNs message of international peace and co-existence, the choice of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Rail Terminus for the campaign was therefore apt," he said. PTI YAS PMS

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By PTI: From Shirish B Pradhan

Kathmandu, Apr 28 (PTI) One person has died and 52 others have been hospitalised, 22 of them serious, in Nepal after suspected food poising after they attended a birthday party, police said today.

Food poising is suspected behind the mass illness of the people who attended the feast in the Kahu village of Nuwakot on Tuesday, police said.

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All those who fell ill have been admitted to the local hospital and the condition of 22 is serious.

The villagers who attended the birthday party had complained of vomiting, diarrhoea, and muscle pain.

Some of the local people have also attributed unhygienic drinking water for the illness as the people of the area use the common stream for drinking water since safe source of drinking water in the villages dried up after last years devastating earthquake. PTI SBP AJR AKJ AJR

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Top US lawmakers have expressed concerns over Obama Administration's decision to sell eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, saying the aircrafts could be used against India and not in combating terrorism.

By Press Trust of India: Top US lawmakers have expressed concerns over Obama Administration's decision to sell eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, saying the aircrafts could be used against India and not in combating terrorism.

They have also urged the Obama Administration to review its decision in this regard.

"Many members of Congress, including me, seriously question the judgement and timing of such a sale. Additionally, Indo-Pak tensions remain elevated and some question whether the F-16s could ultimately be used against India or other regional powers, rather than the terrorists as Pakistan as asserted," Congressman Matt Salmon said during a Congressional hearing yesterday.

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Salmon was joined by several other lawmakers during the Congressional hearing on Afghanistan and Pakistan convened by the Subcommittee on Asia and Pacific of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wherein the Obama Administration was represented by the Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Olson.

"We've got to be concerned what military assistance and whether the F-16s constitute the least expensive, most efficient way for the Pakistani air force to go after the terrorists and the least disruptive weapon system to the balance of power between India and Pakistan," Congressman Brad Sherman said.

"We need to offer to Pakistan those weapon systems well-crafted to go after terrorists and not crafted for a war with India," Sherman said.

The US Senate has currently put a hold on the decision of the Obama Administration to give eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan at an estimated cost of USD700 million.

Salmon asked Olson to clarify the underlying purpose and timing of the intended sale and how is it in the best interest of the United States.

"Despite giving Pakistan enormous amounts of counter-terror assistance over the years, over USD25 billion since 9/11, terrorist organizations continue to operate with impunity in Pakistan.



"Pakistan has used terror as a tool of statecraft and terrorist proxy groups, for the Pakistani military have carried out fatal attacks inside India," he alleged.



The subcommittee chairperson, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen too expressed concerns over sale of F-16 to Pakistan.

"I think that we need to leverage our military sales to Pakistan in order to get some more cooperation within the region.

Also Read

US issues formal notification for sale of F 16 jets to Pakistan



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By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 28 (PTI) Power shortage was at 2.1 per cent -- the lowest level in a single year -- in last financial year, Parliament was informed today. "During 2015-16, the energy shortage was 2.1 per cent, which is the lowest ever in a single year," Power Minister Piyush Goyal said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.

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The minister further stated that India is importing power only from Bhutan at present.

The imported power is mainly Bhutans surplus power from hydro stations commissioned in Bhutan with the assistance from the Government of India. During 2015-16, energy imported from Bhutan was about 5 billion units (BU), the minister added.

During 2014-15, electricity shortage, when total demand outstrip supply during peak hours, was 3.6 per cent whereas it was slightly higher at 4.2 per cent in 2013-14 and 8.7 per cent in 2012-13.

In another reply, the minister said that during the 12th Plan period, a target of 88,537 MW excluding 30,000 MW of Renewal Energy source, was fixed for capacity addition. Against this, cumulative capacity addition of 84,990.7 MW has been achieved as on March 31, 2016.

In a separate reply to the house, the minister said that at present, there is no shortage of coal in the country. None of the coal-based power generation plants across the country has reported any loss of generation due to shortage of coal during 2015-16.

The minister further stated that at present, as on April 21, 2016, coal stock at power plants has been reported to be more than 37 Million Tonne (MT) by power utilities which is sufficient for operation of power plants for about 25 days.

However, he said that at present, there is some deficit in availability of domestic gas.

"Due to government initiative, the scheme of utilisation of RLNG (Regassified Liquefied Natural Gas) helped in improving the generation from gas based power stations. During 2015-16, the growth of generation from gas based power station was 14.6 per cent over the same period last year," he said. Enhanced availability of domestic coal has offset shortage of gas and has resulted in growth in overall thermal generation from coal & gas based power plants to 7.4 per cent during the year 2015-16 as well as reduction of 10.6 MT import of coal by power sector, he added. PTI KKS MR

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Mall authorities are considering moving the High Court against the order. They are also planning to file an appeal to the Principal Secretary of the Industries Department.

In a major setback to filmmaker Prakash Jha, the Bihar government has cancelled the allotment lease of the land on which his mall had been constructed in Patna. The closure order by the Bihar Industrial Area Development Authority (BIADA) was issued on April 20.

Prakash's P&M Mall, the first mall in Patna which opened five years ago, was given a repossession order after a dispute between the two parties over the subleasing of shops and outlets. Later, a row over revenue generation broke out between the two parties.

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As per an order, issued on February 7, 2012, by the BIADA, the mall is liable to pay 10 per cent of the revenue to the government agency, if it chooses to sub lease the space in the mall to another party.

According to mall authorities, the amount calculated from the date the order was passed, till the present, amounts to Rs 40 lakhs. Authorities claim that they tried to pay the BIADA, which refused to accept the amount. The BIADA is claiming an amount of Rs 2.14 crore.

Mall authorities maintain that BIADA's calculation is with retrospective effect starting 2009 to 2013-14. Following the differences over the amount to be paid, the BIADA issued a notice to cancel the land lease to the mall.

Bihar Industries Minister Jai Kumar Singh said, "The issue of pending payments against P&M Mall came up during a review meeting of the department around two months ago. Only P&M Mall has not been singled out. Almost 57 cases are there against whom order of cancellation of land allotment has been made. It was decided that thw lease should be cancelled. P&M mall could face closure very soon after the process is complete".

However, mall authorities are considering moving the High Court against the order. They are also planning to file an appeal to the Principal Secretary of the Industries Department.

"We tried to make the entire payment for taking the land on lease from BIADA. In 2012, the BIADA ordered us to make a payment against sub-leasing the outlets in the mall. We agreed to make the payment from the date of order which is Rs 40 lakh but according to their calculation the due amount is Rs 2.14 crore. This is wrong", said a top official in the mall, on the condition of anonymity.

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Known to have a great rapport with children, Prince Harry was recently asked about his take on not becoming the king anytime soon--to which the royal responded in a rather admirable way.

By India Today Web Desk: Prince Harry who is fifth in line for being Britain's next King, seems to be pretty comfortable with his position.

Known to have a great rapport with children, Prince Harry was recently asked about his take on not becoming the king anytime soon--to which the royal responded in a rather admirable way.

Recently at an elementary school in Berkshire, England, while taping a children's television show, a nine-year-old boy quizzed the Prince about his prospects of becoming Britain's King.

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Also Read: Is Prince Harry's new love this Greek princess?

"Are you ever going to be king?" Harper's Bazaar quotes the boy asking Prince Harry.

To which Prince Harry responded by saying, "That's the question everybody wanted, let's be honest! You'll be glad to know, probably not!"

Also Read: Kate Middleton, Prince William, Prince Harry talk about the importance of mental health in this delightful video

On hearing the response, the 9-year-old was obviously and evidently sad--until Prince Harry came to the rescue and said, "Oh, look at that disappointment! I love that! I'm going to give you a high-five."

Ensuring that everyone in attendance had a great time, Prince Harry showed off some killer dance moves and managed to charm everyone!









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In the last un-researched part of Antarctica, the scientists have spotted a huge lake. If its existence is confirmed then it will open the possibility of finding unique life forms that may have existed in isolation.

A satellite view of Antarctica is seen in this undated NASA handout photo obtained by Reuters February 6, 2012. (Reuters)

By India Today Web Desk: There might be a large lake under the heavy ice sheet of Antarctica, showed the data presented at the European Geo sciences Union meeting in Vienna this week.

This will be second in size to Lake Vostok, Antarctica's vast lake that was sealed off from the rest of the world for 14 million years.

A lake would be an interesting find because it would open the possibility of finding unique life forms that may have existed in isolation. The new lake is much closer to a research station, making it easier to be studied in detail compared to the gigantic Vostok.

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Scientists have presented radar data that identified grooves on the ice surface similar to those present on other known sub-glacial lakes and channels.

The team that located the lake has said that the lake is around 100 kilometres long by 10 kilometres wide and is ribbon-shaped.

The lake seems to extend from the continent's eastern coast in Princess Elizabeth Land and if confirmed, will only be 62 miles from the nearest research base.

"It's the last un-researched part of Antarctica, so it's very exciting news, but it's still tentative pending full confirmation," a member of the team said.

A group of researches from China and the U.S. flew over the area recently to collect ice-penetrating radar images. The confirmation of the existence of the lake will come only after the data is reviewed.

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By India Today Web Desk: The greatest invention of the 21st century which has helped people reach the peak of narcissism--the glorious selfie stick. However, the photograph above paints a totally different picture.

"1934 Selfie, with a stick," reads the caption to the photo which was uploaded to Imgur on Wednesday.



There are two possible explanations for the picture:

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1 The man is possibly using the stick to hit button on the camera which is positioned on a tripod.

2 He might have been simply poking the photographer with a stick for fun.

In less than three hours the picture went viral with more than 2,111,086 views and is currently the hot topic of discussion on the Reddit Front page.

Either way, this picture shows us that the idea of selfie stick is not something new. So, has it been a trend since 1934 or maybe even before that?

Here's a brief history of the selfie stick- the cornerstone of our pop culture

This is even before the word selfie was coined, the first ever selfie stick was invented by in 1980s Hiroshi Ueda, an engineer for the camera company Minolta. It was called , "telescopic extender for supporting compact camera."

And didn't look fancy at all:

Speaking to BBC Hiroshi Ueda said, "When I was in the Louvre Museum in Paris, I asked a child to take a photo of us, but when I stepped away, the child ran away with my camera." This is one of the main triggers for his innovation.

Ueda's patent ran out in the year 2003, after which another inventor, Wayne Fromm from Canada, brought the selfie stick back. His hand-held extendable selfie stick called Quick Pod became widely popular.

The selfie stick has now turned into such an alarming annoying fad that many stadiums, concerts and museum don't allow people to carry one.

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By India Today Web Desk: Kangana Ranaut is all over the news these days, thanks to her legal battle with Hrithik Roshan and all else that has come along with it. In the last few months, both Hrithik and Kangana have stooped to firing numerous accusations at each other, including several legal notices.

ALSO READ: Kangana's obsession with Hrithik begun during Kites, says ex-boyfriend Adhyayan Suman

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ALSO READ: Hrithik's ex-wife Sussanne speaks out about his leaked photo with Kangana

On Tuesday (April 26), a photo of Hrithik hugging Kangana tightly made its way to social media, and went viral. Reports have claimed that the photo in discussion was leaked by Kangana's team. The immediate repercussion of this was Hrithik's team hitting back at Kangana with more snaps from the same party, which gave people a new perspective altogether on the entire case. Last evening, Hrithik's ex-wife Sussanne Khan took to Twitter to say how she supported her ex-husband and that the photo with Kangana and Hrithik that had gone viral was photoshopped.

While the grapevine is busy debating who is in the wrong and who is using whom for whatever, Kangana's ex-boyfriend Adhyayan Suman, son of veteran actor Shekhar Suman bared his heart out in an interview to DNA. Adhyayan spoke at length about how Kangana abused him, hit him, got violent and began 'eyeing Hrithik' while she was in a relationship with him.

Suman's interview also mentions how he was told that Kangana was doing black magic on him. Suman said, "Kangana took me to another astrologer called Pallavi who always gave positive news to Kangana and negative ones to me. She said my time wasn't right and if I did certain pujas I would be fine. I didn't believe in all this but Kangana insisted I listen to her. One day, Kangana called me at home in the night to do some puja. I reached at 11.30 pm as the puja was to start at 12. She had a small guest room in her apartment and she had covered it in black, including black curtains. There were some random statues of God, fire all around, some scary things (kept) puja. She asked me to chant some mantras, and locked me in. I was terrified. I didn't do it and I came out and told her that I had. Then she started taking me to Pallavi frequently. One day, Pallavi said go to the graveyard at 12 am and throw these certain things. I was chilled to the bone! I didn't go."

On being asked whether he was talking black magic, Suman said, "Yes. Being a metropolitan kid studying in London and New York, I was always away from things like astrology and black magic. I remember going to my Tarot reader after she (Kangana) started making me doing pujas. She told me she sensed a woman from pahadi region doing black magic on me. I knew only one person back then, my girlfriend Kangana, who used to go to Himachal for certain pujas there. My Tarot reader said she saw something really bad happening and warned me to get out of the relationship. She told me, "You feel you want to come out of it and every time you make a decision of wanting to come out, you fail and are back at it again." My career stopped completely. I had a successful film Raaz 2 behind me but nobody wanted to talk about me. I started seeing this decline. My films were shutting down while she was achieving more success. Even talking about it scares me now...."

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He continued, "My mother was very worried and she called the family's Panditji to come home and meet me. The first thing he asked me was: "Khana banati hai tumhare liye?" When I said yes, he said, "Apna impure blood milati hai khaane mein black magic ke liye." I didn't want to accept anything against her. I would tell people who said anything negative about her to f*** off. ... The same Pandit later on came on Salman's Dus Ka Dum also and he looked at Kangana in the middle of the show and said "Aap Pisachini (demoness) hai." She treated it as if it was a joke. It's there on national TV."

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Adhyayan and Kangana had begun dating while working together for the film Raaz The Mystery Continues, which hit the screens in 2009. The two parted ways after a year-long relationship.

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The CBI had in 2013 registered a case in connection with alleged bribes paid by the firm to Indians to clinch the deal for 12 helicopters to ferry VVIPs including the President and Prime Minister.

By India Today Web Desk: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has launched an all-out war against the Congress and its boss Sonia Gandhi, whose name has been dragged by the ruling party in the AgustaWestland chopper deal. Continuing his party's relentless attack on Sonia Gandhi, BJP chief Amit Shah said she must clarify who received the bribe in the chopper deal.

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"All I want to ask her is that those who gave bribe are in jail in Italy, then where are those who received the kickbacks? Who were in power at that time? They are responsible and they should bring out the truth. It should be disclosed before the people of the country," he said.

Taking a jibe at Sonia over her remarks yesterday that she does not fear anybody, Shah said she is "right" and that is why such "scams" keep coming out in the open.

"That is why when the National Herald corruption case happens, you say you do not fear anybody. When the AgustaWestland case occurs, you say you do not fear anybody... I want to tell her that we in Bhartiya Janata Party are afraid of the Constitution, rules and public norms," Shah said.

"I have done nothing wrong. The government is there for two years, an inquiry is there. Why don't they complete it as early as possible and impartially?" Sonia told reporters yesterday. According to reports, Sonia is named in documents that were reviewed by an Italian court before it decided bribes had been paid to some Indians in the chopper deal.

Senior BJP leader and now Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy is leading the government's charge in the VVIP chopper scam by raising the issue in Parliament for a second straight day today. On Wednesday, he had named Sonia Gandhi in his speech with the Speaker immediately ordering that the remarks be expunged.

The CBI had in 2013 registered a case in connection with alleged bribes paid by the firm to Indians to clinch the deal for 12 helicopters to ferry VVIPs including the President and Prime Minister.

Meanewhile, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) next week seeking police action against Sonia Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia's political advisor Ahmed Patel for allegedly receiving bribes in the AgustaWestland chopper scam.

Chopper scam: Supreme Court to hear plea seeking FIR against Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh



--- ENDS ---

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This country's vice president has announced that civil servants should come for work only on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Venezuela Electricity Minister Luis Motta looks at the massive Guri Dam, virtually dry because of the drought (Photo: Reuters)

By India Today Web Desk: A two-day working week for public sector workers has been imposed as a temporary measure to combat the serious energy crisis in Venezuela.

Vice-President Aristobulo Isturiz has announced that civil servants should come for work only on Monday and Tuesdays until the crisis is over.

Venezuela for the first time since 1969 is facing a major drought from three consecutive years. Such a long span of drought has brought nearly all primary reservoirs across the country to critically low levels. In fact, at its main hydroelectric dam the water level has dramatically reduced.

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Ecosocialism and Water Minister Ernesto Paiva had in January, 2016 cited El Nino and other climactic factors as the cause.

But the opposition has accused the government of mismanaging the crisis.

The measures announced by the vice president will affect two million public sector workers. "There will be no work in the public sector on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, except for fundamental and necessary tasks," he said.

2.8 million state employees were already given Fridays off during April and May to cut down on electricity consumption.

Even Venezuela's president announced that the country had been badly hit by the El Nino weather phenomenon and would return to normal when it started raining again.

"We are requesting international help, technical and financial aid to help revert the situation," he said. "We are managing the situation in the best possible way while we wait for the rains to return."

Other South American too are affected by the drought, caused by El Nino. But Venezuela has the highest domestic consumption of energy.

The Venezuela government has adopted a number of measures such as reduction of opening hours of shopping centres and they were even asked to generate their own energy.

--- ENDS ---
Lobsang Sangay made the statement after he was re-elected prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile in voting held last month after defeating his only rival, Penpa Tsering.

Lobsang Sangay, the incumbent prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, speaks to media after being re-elected for second term in office in Dharamsala on April 27, 2016.

By AP: Lobsang Sangay has been re-elected prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile in voting held last month, officials announced Wednesday, with Sangay saying the election shows that Tibetans in exile "are practicing democracy, whereas China is not."

Tibetan election officials announced the result in Dharamsala, the headquarters of the government-in-exile. Sangay, 47, defeated his only rival, Penpa Tsering, receiving about 58 per cent of the 58,740 votes cast.

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It was the second election since the Dalai Lama stepped down as head of the government-in-exile in 2011 to focus on his role as the Tibetans' spiritual leader. Tibetans living in exile cast their votes in 40 countries.

China says Tibet has historically been part of its territory since the mid-13th century, and the Communist Party has governed the Himalayan region since 1951. But many Tibetans say that they were effectively independent for most of their history, and that the Chinese government wants to exploit their resource-rich region while crushing their cultural identity.

The Dalai Lama and his followers have been living in exile in Dharamsala since they fled Tibet after a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.

China doesn't recognize the Tibetan government-in-exile, and hasn't held any dialogue with the representatives of the Dalai Lama since 2010.

"This election sends a very clear and powerful message to the Chinese government and the country, China," Sangay told reporters after the result was announced. "It is a clear statement that even exiled Tibetans are practicing democracy, whereas China is not."

Sangay said his government would continue to fight for basic freedoms and genuine autonomy for Tibetans living under Chinese rule in Tibet.

Last month, he called for China to engage in dialogue on autonomy for his people's homeland. Stressing that a dialogue with China would be his main initiative, he said he hoped that Chinese President Xi Jinping would look at the Tibetan issue and take the initiative to hold talks with Tibetan exiles.

On Wednesday, Sangay called the results of the election "the consolidation of democracy" and said an increased participation of Tibetans in the voting process reflected their maturity.

"By democratic standards, the exile Tibetan democracy is now a full-fledged, consolidated democracy," he said.

The international community, he said, should look at his administration as a legitimate democratic identity. He said the exiled government "in many ways" reflected the aspirations of Tibetans inside Tibet.

Tibetan officials in exile say at least 114 monks and laypeople have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule over their homeland in the past five years, with most of them dying. US government-backed Radio Free Asia puts the number of self-immolations at 144 since 2009.

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Beijing blames the Dalai Lama and others for inciting the immolations and says it has made vast investments to develop Tibet's economy and improve the quality of life.

--- ENDS ---
By Press Trust of India: Goa's Feni is all set to go places as the state government gets ready to amend the four-decade old Excise Act to give the traditional brew a 'Heritage Spirit' tag.



"The state government will move an amendment to the Goa Excise Duty Act, 1964, which will save Feni from being tagged as country liquor and instead would be classified as Heritage Spirit," Commissioner of Excise, Goa, Menino D'Souza said.



"We want to place Feni alongside tequila and scotch, which used to be country liquor once," D'Souza added.



The amendment is likely to be moved during the upcoming monsoon session of the Goa Assembly scheduled for July. The move is expected to open up markets for Feni across the country.



The Feni distilling industry has been demanding the removal of the country liquor tag as the brew has already won the Geographical Indication recognition.



Goa Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar recently announced the decision to accord Feni the status of a Heritage Spirit.



Feni marketing has hit a roadblock due to the country liquor label as its sale is not allowed in any other state except Daman.

--- ENDS ---

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Trump's remarks came on a day when lawmakers questioned the rationale of the Obama administration to give billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan without desired results.

By Press Trust of India: Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump today hinted at seeking help from India and others to address the "problem" of what he described as a "semi-unstable" nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Trump's such a remark came at a town-hall in Indianapolis in response to a question on how he would deal with countries like Pakistan which has sometimes "double dealt" with the US.

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"We've given them (Pakistan) money and they've double dealt us," the interviewer said.

"Yes, but the problem with Pakistan, where they have nuclear weapons, which is a real problem," Trump said.

"The single biggest problem we have is nuclear weapons, you know, countries with them. And it's not only a country, you have nine countries right now with nuclear weapons.

"But Pakistan is semi-unstable. We don't want to see total instability. It's not that much, relatively speaking. We have a little bit of a good relationship. I think I'd try and keep it," said Trump.

"It is very much against my grain to say that, but a country, and that's always the country, I think, you know, we give them money and we help them out, but if we don't, I think that would go on the other side of the ledger and that could really be a disaster," Trump said, without explaining what that disaster would be.

"At the same time, if you look at India and some of the others, maybe they'll be helping us out, because we are going to look at it. We have many, many countries that we give a lot of money to and we get absolutely nothing in return and that's going to stop fast," Trump said.

Trump's remarks came on a day when lawmakers questioned the rationale of the Obama administration to give billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan without desired results.

"Despite giving Pakistan enormous amounts of counter-terror assistance over the years, over $25 billion since 9/11, terrorist organisations continue to operate with impunity in Pakistan. Pakistan has used terror as a tool of statecraft and terrorist proxy groups for the Pakistani military have carried out fatal attacks inside India," Congressman Matt Salmon said during a Congressional hearing.

State Department has requested $742.2 million in aid to Pakistan for 2016-2017 including $472.4 million in civilian assistance and $269.8 million in security assistance.

"Pakistan is a nation of 180 million people with a history of terrorist activities, roughly 100 nuclear weapons and a very confused body politic," said Congressman Brad Sherman.

"We need to offer to Pakistan those weapon systems well-crafted to go after terrorists and not crafted for a war with India," he said.



--- ENDS ---

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Several people gathered outside the dargah to demand equal rights for men and women and extend their support to Trupti Desai.

By India Today Web Desk: Angry protesters tried to enter activist Trupti Desai's car on Thursday during her bid to enter the Haji Ali dargah in Mumbai, prompting the police to whisk her away to another location. While a defiant Desai was planning another attempt to enter, crucial time was lost and the dargah was shut down for the day.

An angry Desai now plans to go to the Chief Minister's residence to voice her protest on being denied entry to the dargah.

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The activist, who has entered a number of places of worship that had barred women from the sanctum sanctorum, had resolved to enter the dargah - one of the most recognisable landmarks of Mumbai. "When I reached Haji Ali dargah, the protesters tried to enter my car. The police immediately took me to another place," she told reporters.

The Bhoomata Ranragini Brigade president had launched a forum 'Haji Ali For All', along with several other women, NGOs and social groups, to campaign for women's entry into the shrine. After battling for women's right to worship and enter temples like Shani Shingnapur in Kolhapur and the Trimbakeshwar temple, Desai brought her protest for women's rights to the Haji Ali dargah.

Meanwhile, several people gathered outside the dargah to demand equal rights for men and women and extend their support to Trupti Desai.

Earlier in the day, AIMIM had threatened to smear ink on Desai if she tried to enter the dargah. Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat has also warned Desai not to touch the mazar-e-sharif at the dargah.

In February, the Maharashtra government had supported the entry of women to the dargah. However, the Haji Ali dargah Trust justified its stand on the ground that allowing women to the shrine would be against the religion.

--- ENDS ---
Two sanitation workers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library were arrested yesterday for stealing a dagger gifted to the former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru by Saudi Arabia.

By Indo-Asian News Service: Two sanitation workers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library were arrested yesterday for stealing a dagger gifted to the former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru by Saudi Arabia.

Ram Chander and Sandeep were arrested on Wednesday night for stealing the gold-coated dagger, which was recovered from them.

"We have arrested two sanitation workers of the Nehru Memorial Museum for stealing the dagger gifted to former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru", Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Ravindra Yadav said.

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The dagger was reported missing on Monday from the museum.

Sources in the museum said the dagger was put in a glass frame in the gift gallery, which is a few steps from the bedroom where Nehru breathed his last on May 27, 1964.

After Nehru's death, his house was turned into a museum which is situated on Teen Murti Marg in the posh Lutyen's zone.

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Hyderabad, Apr 28 (PTI) A drug smuggling racket was today busted by the city police with the apprehension of two inter-state drug peddlers and seizure of 2.7 kg opium from their possession.

Kaium Ul Huq and Chandan Naveen were nabbed from Hussaini Allam here by the Commissioners Task Force (South Zone) team.

The accused duo allegedly indulged in procuring opium from West Bengal for supplying it to customers in Hyderabad, Commissioners Task Force Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police N Koti Reddy said.

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During the interrogation, it came to light that Chandan, a native of Madhya Pradesh and Kaium, who hails from West Bengal, arrested in separate cases, met in Chanchalguda jail here and became friends, police said.

They had met another accused Saleem from West Bengal, who is now absconding in the case.

"After the release from jail, Chandan contacted Kaium and asked him to supply opium to sell it in Hyderabad. Kaium in turn asked Saleem, who procured 2.7 kg opium at West Bengal and handed it over it Kaium," Reddy said.

Today, while Kaium Ul Haq reached Puranapool Darwaza here for the supply to Chandan, the duo were apprehended, he said.

The accused and the seized material were handed over to Central Crime Station, a wing of Hyderabad Police for necessary action against them, Reddy added. PTI VVK NP PVI

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: New Delhi, Apr 28 (PTI) Stressing on gender equality in the workforce, Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) has asked women candidates to apply in greater numbers for the civil services examination (CSE).

"Government strives to have a workforce which reflects gender balance and women candidates are encouraged to apply," UPSC said in a notification issued for CSE 2016.

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UPSC conducts CSE annually in three stages -- preliminary, main and interview -- to select candidates for the prestigious Indian Administrative Service, Indian Foreign Service and Indian Police Service, among others.

The preliminary examination this year will be held on August 7. A total of 1,079 vacant posts in various government services will be filled up through CSE 2016. The result of CSE 2015 is yet to be declared.

Candidates are required to apply online on website -- www.upsconline.nic.in. The online applications can be filled up to May 27, 2016 till 11:59 PM after which the link will be disabled, the Commission said. PTI AKV GVS SK GVS

--- ENDS ---
The US is placing the 11 countries on a "priority watch list" that subjects them to extra scrutiny and could lead to sanctions if the US brings cases to the World Trade Organization.

By AP: China, Russia and India are among 11 countries targeted by the Obama administration for leaving American producers of music, movies and other copyrighted material open to rampant piracy.

The US is placing the 11 countries on a "priority watch list" that subjects them to extra scrutiny and could lead to sanctions if the US brings cases to the World Trade Organization.

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Also on the list again are Algeria, Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, Kuwait, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela.

Ecuador and Pakistan were removed from the list this year. Ecuador reinstated criminal penalties for large-scale counterfeiting. Pakistan set up intellectual property courts.

The United States studied 73 trading partners for the annual Special 301 Report. In addition to the 11 countries on the priority list, another 23 made the "watch list" and need to address problems protecting intellectual property rights, the US Trade Representative's office said.

Switzerland, for example, "is generally a strong partner" on intellectual property issues, but has become a haven for websites that sell counterfeit goods.





--- ENDS ---
Asaduddin Owaisi's party AIMIM's leader Haji Rafat Hussain said, "If she (Trupti Desai) tries to enter Haji Ali Dargah forcefully we will smear black ink on her."

By India Today Web Desk: AIMIM has threatened to smear black ink on Bhoomata Ranragini Brigade's Trupti Desai who has announced to enter Mumbai's Haji Ali Dargah today. Haji Ali dargah does not allow women to enter into the inner chamber of the dargah.



Asaduddin Owaisi's party AIMIM's leader Haji Rafat Hussain said, "If she (Trupti Desai) tries to enter Haji Ali Dargah forcefully we will smear black ink on her."

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Desai along with members of her brigade have planned a protest at Haji Ali Junction demanding equal rights for worship. "We will hold a protest and will enter the dargah till the area where they allow women. I don't think they will have a problem in allowing us to pray where our Muslim sisters pray. We are not breaking any rule, we want to go where women are allowed to stand and pray, what's wrong in it?" said Desai.

Earlier this week, Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat had warned Desai not to touch mazar-e-sharif at Haji Ali dargah.

"Islam does not allow women to touch the mazar-e-sharif in a dargah. We strongly condemn what Trupti Desai is saying. We won't allow her to enter the inner sanctum of the Hazi Ali Dargah. I will be the voice of my religion and will not allow her to touch the mazar-e-sharif," Haji Arafat had said.

Meanwhile, the dargah Trust has decided to allow Trupti Desai and others till the point where usually women pray. "If they come respectfully we will welcome them and will allow them to pray at a separate section that has been created for women. But if they try to enter the dargah forcefully then we will ask police to look into the matter." said Trust member Suhail Khandwani.

Also read:

Trupti Desai will be hit with slippers if she enters Haji Ali Dargah, says Shiv Sena leader



--- ENDS ---
The incident comes against the backdrop of rising anger against sexual violence in the country since December 16, 2012, when a 23-year-old medical student was brutally gang-raped, and killed, by six men inside a private bus in south Delhi.

By Ajay Kumar: A woman was allegedly drugged and gang-raped by 20 men in rural Gurugram, though she denied the incident before a magistrate, purportedly under pressure from village elders and the accused's families.

A senior police officer told Mail Today all the accused have been named in an FIR and a medical examination confirmed rape. The woman, reportedly in her early twenties, and her husband left the village this week and went to their native place in Haryana's Rewari district.

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The incident comes against the backdrop of rising anger against sexual violence in the country since December 16, 2012, when a 23-year-old medical student was brutally gang-raped, and killed, by six men inside a private bus in south Delhi.

Cases of sexual assault were also reported from Haryana during the violent Jat protests in February. According to the police report, the woman was asleep at home on April 23 with the door open because of the oppressive summer heat. Three of the accused entered the house around 11pm and covered her face with a handkerchief.

As she started to lose consciousness, they tied her mouth and legs and took her to an isolated place where the others were waiting. They took turns to rape her till about 4am.

"After she was released, she narrated the entire incident to her husband," said a neighbour of the woman. "When they finally decided to file a complaint at the police station, villagers organised a panchayat to put pressure. But the woman and her husband went to the police."

Activists say a rape takes place every 25 minutes in India, but only 10 per cent of sexual violence cases are actually reported to police.

The mounting numbers and growing public outrage forced the central government to amend the existing law, doubling prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalising voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women.

The law, passed by Parliament in March 2013, also makes it a crime for police officers to refuse to open cases when complaints are made.

"Local police conducted a medical examination of the victim, which confirmed rape. However, under what circumstances the victim became hostile before the city magistrate is yet to be ascertained," said Hawa Singh, ACP (crime) and spokesperson of Gurugram Police.

Many of the villagers, however, denied the allegations, saying the panchayat was organised over a minor incident of theft and there was no sexual assault.

"The woman's husband was threatening to lodge a complaint against two youths of the village. We advised him to not go for legal proceedings," said Sukhdev Dayma, a village elder.

Also read:

Haryana goons dragged stranded women to fields, gangraped them near Murthal

Haryana admits to 'possibility' of Murthal rapes during Jat agitation



--- ENDS ---

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Australia's Fairfax Media said the woman, Saw Ler Htu, gave birth during the flight from Singapore to Myanmar, with the help of the crew and three doctors on board the flight, and as way of thanks, named her child Saw Jet Star.

By Indo-Asian News Service: A woman who gave birth on a Jetstar flight has named her son after the airline, the media reported on Thursday.

Australia's Fairfax Media said the woman, Saw Ler Htu, gave birth during the flight from Singapore to Myanmar, with the help of the crew and three doctors on board the flight, and as way of thanks, named her child Saw Jet Star.

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Jetstar, a subsidiary of Australia's national airline Qantas, allows pregnant women to fly up until the end of their 40th week of the pregnancy for flights shorter than four hours, but passengers were surprised when a woman went into labour midway through the flight, Xinhua news agency reported.

The airline took to social media to announce the news overnight, and praised the crew for their quick thinking, which helped "ensure the safe delivery of our youngest ever passenger on a flight".

"The happy arrival of baby Jet Star was met with a round of applause from other passengers on the plane, so we're sure it's not a moment they'll ever forget either," the statement said.

"The baby boy weighed six pounds, seven ounces and is the first baby to be delivered on a Jetstar Asia flight."

The airline said it would also be contributing $750 worth of baby supplies to the family.

--- ENDS ---
The Kejriwal government had claimed that fire at some of the landfills in Delhi was part of conspiracy hatched by the BJP against the ongoing odd-even scheme.

By India Today Web Desk: The Arvind Kejriwal government has made yet another U-turn. Days after it claimed that the BJP was trying to fail the 'highly successful' odd-even vehicle rationing scheme, the AAP government has taken a complete different stand over the issue.

The Kejriwal government had claimed that fire at some of the landfills in Delhi was part of conspiracy hatched by the BJP against the ongoing odd-even scheme. The government had even constituted a committee to probe the reason behind the fire at landfill sites.

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The committee has submitted its report to the government. The report has failed to establish any conspiracy angle behind the fire at Delhi's dumpyards. However, it mentions several discrepancies in the functioning and monitoring of landfill sites.

The report further pointed out that there was no unprecedented increase in fire calls between April 1 to 24 negating Transport Minister Gopal Rai's claims that the fire department recorded a substantial increase in distress calls since April 15, the date second phase of odd-even started. Talking to reporters today, Rai denied any conspiracy behind landfill fires.



Gopal Rai had earlier claimed that the incidents of fire in a forested area behind Raj Ghat and at municipal landfill sites was a "conspiracy to sabotage" the second phase of the odd-even scheme in Delhi in a "planned way".

Last week, CM Kejriwal had alleged that BJP and RSS were working to "sabotage" the vehicle rationing scheme when auto unions had called a day-long strike. The strike, however, was later called off.

ALSO READ | Delhi's Odd-even rocks Parliament as lawmakers violate scheme



--- ENDS ---
The new model will probably be called Xbox II. It should come with many design changes.

By Sahil Mohan Gupta : Microsoft has trailed Sony in this console generation. To change things around a bit, the Redmond-based tech giant is reportedly going to launch an upgraded version of the Xbox One console. In addition, the company is also going to launch a refreshed Xbox One controller according to a report by Paul Thurrot, who is an expert on Microsoft.

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The update is actually going to be quite a big one as Microsoft could actually call it Xbox II. The design of the controller is also slated to change as Microsoft will adopt a white colour scheme while retaining the layout of the current controller.

According to Thurrot, Microsoft is exploring on extending the capabilities between the PC and the console. For the uninitiated, both the Xbox One and the PCs run on the same operating system - Windows 10, and Microsoft has facilitated game streaming on the PC from the console. This could be further extended claims the report.

Microsoft is looking at creating experiences which Sony can't emulate with the PlayStation, taking advantage of the fact that both the Xbox and PCs run on Windows. This could also mean taking advantage of apps that can be run on PCs.

This announcement could also be a counter to the PS4K, which has been rumoured for sometime and could come to fruition at E3.

Brad Sams who writes about gaming says that this may not be a direct competitor to the PS4K but could be something different altogether.



"The company also has something else up its sleeve that I still don't have all the details on but it's a much bigger deal than an updated standard controller. While the rumours of a PS4K have been running rampant, and I don't know yet if this new device is set to take on that console, they will have another, much larger hardware related announcement, at E3 this year," Sams said.

"I had previously heard that they were working on a new Elite console, they recently announced an Elite bundle, but I am not sure if this is an update to that product or something brand new."

Also Read: Sony PS4.5 (Neo): No, it's not time to throw away your PS4s yet

--- ENDS ---
LIMEWOOD: How to use predictive analytics to fight negative phenomena in life insurance portfolios and monitor the real quality of production in the sales channel

Lapses represent a significant business risk for all life insurance companies, because of their negative impact on the cash flow and costs. Often, lapses even represent fraudulent behaviour of the clients or members of the sales force.



"Our research shows that within the first 5 years, on average 35% of life insurance policies typically lapse and 20% of life insurance policies are cancelled due to unpaid premiums. It means that, on average, more than 50% of the portfolio is gone after 5 years and leaves unsolved issues in the accounting and relationships with sales force. Hence, knowing reasons of lapses is very important for mitigating risks of negative impacts as well as for fine tuning of the product portfolio and compensation schemes", LIMEWOOD representatives explained.





Figure 1 - Management dashboard with contract status broken up by geography (map), distribution channel (treemap bottom left) and the contract status for the selected geography (with relative contribution by the channel selected in the treemap)



"Under these conditions, it is inevitable for the management of the insurance company to know the reasons and see ahead of the curve. The actions to be taken have to be supported by relevant data which are actual and precise. The problem resembles us with finding the needle in the hay stack. It is obvious that for a quick managerial reaction the classical approach of statistical analysis is not further sufficient, since managers expect quick, reliable and explainable answers to their problem and not a hard to understand output of statisticians resulting form a time consuming itterative process", LIMEWOOD representatives added.



Due to the recent advances in the analytical tools and technologies, leveraging big data technologies, it is now possible to connect the whole production portfolio with real time analysis using the predictive logic based on advanced statistics and forecasting models. This enables management to visualize and understand the phenomena in life insurance portfolio and sales networks on fly and take corrective actions instantly, the company pointed out.





Figure 2 -Visualization of the lapse impact on the portfolio by individual product (individual tile represents a product, tile size represents number of lapses relative to total lapses, tile colour represents total lapsed premium in mil Eur)



How can insurers address lapses using the Big data technology? According to LIMEWOOD, the combination of new technologies enables a radically different approach, which includes:

Instant analysis of the whole contracts portfolio, i.e. no sampling, using in-memory technologies. This means avoiding the time gap between rising the request and processing the answer using traditional statistical approach;

In depth analysis using multi-correlation models and matrices in real time, which enables the deployment of unlimited internal and external factors, such as the structure of the sales force, macro-economic data etc.;

Identification of outliers and trouble making factors with one click of the mouse;

Advanced managerial statistical reports at hand, available for users without statistical know how using friendly compiled visualization objects such as treemaps, heatmaps, geomaps, network diagrams etc.;

Decision trees for numerical and categorical variables to identify factors influencing negative phenomena;

Outputs for product design to fine tune the life insurance products based on multiple criteria as defined by the output of the main risk factor analysis common for the whole portfolio;

Outputs to adjust compensation schemes of sales force based on relevant underlying data defining the behavior if the particular sales force or particular agent.

Figure 3 - Example of a decision tree model grouping the portfolio by individual factors influencing lapsation relative to their impact, analysis performed in real time on the whole portfolio



"The outlined set of tools, method as well as the whole approach, enables a radically different strategy to manage the insurance business, by providing deep actionable insight in real-time, so measures can be taken to positively impact the bottom line instead of extensive approaches targeting only the production quantity without understanding the real impact of channels, markets and individual salespeople on the business profitability", LIMEWOOD representatives explained.



More details about LIMEWOOD's solutions, as well as information regarding the company's activity and further plans can be found out directly from LIMEWOOD's representatives, who will participate between May 15th and May 19th at FIAR - The International Insurance-Reinsurance Forum. LIMEWOOD supports this year's edition of the event as a Partner and its representatives will be available for discussions throughout the event.



FIAR 2016 takes place between May 15 - 19 in Brasov, Romania. More details are available here





Author: Adina TUDOR on 28.04.2016





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Mr Night Owl's expression doesn't change if he is

happy or sad. For those unfamiliar, the AmeriKat can confirm

that this is his "excited face" in response

to the House's passage of the Defend Trade Secrets Act.





The US Senate only just unanimously passed S.1890 (see AmeriKat report here ) three weeks ago. Following the Senate vote, the Obama administration called the DTSA "important protection" for American business and industries. Why is the DTSA so important? It provides trade secrets owners with the possibility of filing civil claims for trade secrets misappropriation within the federal court system (necessary given the ease and speed with which misappropriated trade secrets can cross state borders). The DTSA also provides for a seizure order to prevent the destruction or dissemination of misappropriated trade secrets. See the recent post by trade secrets expert, James Pooley.





Senator Hatch (Republican-Utah) who introduced the DTSA with Senator Coons, stated

"Im pleased the House has followed the Senates lead and passed the Hatch-Coons Defend Trade Secrets Act. Enacting this bill into law will help address the critical problem of trade secret theft, which stifles innovation and costs American companies billions of dollars annually. I hope our success in acting to protect trade secrets will serve as a springboard for additional Congressional action to safeguard other forms of intellectual property."

"Todays passage of the Defend Trade Secrets Act in the House means that this bill can soon become law and finally provide the critical federal legal protection for trade secrets that U.S. companies deserve in Delaware and across the country. Im thrilled that Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and now the House to pass this bill, demonstrating the truly bipartisan nature of this legislation and its broad coalition of support from American businesses. I look forward to seeing President sign this bill into law soon."





Both pieces of legislation were not without their critics. Some declared that the DTSA's ex parte seizure orders were akin to 1990s style In what will surely be remembered as "The Year of Trade Secrets", the DTSA follows on the heels of the European Parliament's passage of the EU Trade Secrets Directive two weeks ago (see guest post by Mark Ridgway ( A&O here ). The consolidated version of the agreed text of the Directive was published last night in the Council Register and can be found here Both pieces of legislation were not without their critics. Some declared that the DTSA's ex parte seizure orders were akin to 1990s style Anton Piller orders in the UK (they are not, as explained here ). In Europe, media reporting timed during the Panama Papers fallout exclaimed that the EU Trade Secrets Directive would chill whistleblower protections (although the Directive provides for safeguards and public policy exceptions for such disclosures are present in many Member States's trade secrets and confidential information laws).





The DTSA will now head to President Obama's desk for signing into law.





For more information on the House vote see

Watch Senator Hatch's comments on the DTSA head of the House Passage on the House vote see Reuters on the DTSA head of the House Passage here

For more information on the DTSA see previous IPKat articles

To listen to what the AmeriKat will now be falling asleep to, click see previous IPKat articles here and the recent Fordham IP panel session here be falling asleep to, click here

and rumbles of thunder, completely distracted the AmeriKat from some big news from D.C. Only after a fellow night owl jostled her did the AmeriKat snap upright to alert readers that, as predicted, the House of Representatives has just passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act in an incredible 410-2 vote. Congressman Justin Amash ( Republican- Michigan ) and Congressman Thomas Massie ( Republican-Kentucky ) voted against the DTSA (see here ).Senator Coons (Democrat-Delaware) continued:
Specifically, the article reacted to the White Houses announcement that it had directed the Department of Energy to purchase 32 tons of heavy water produced by the Islamic Republic, at a total cost of 8.6 million dollars in taxpayer money. In the view of Western Journalism contributor Yochanan Visser, this move effectively causes the American people to subsidize Irans violation of the nuclear deal.

That is, the provisions of the agreement restrict Irans stockpiles of nuclear material including low-enriched uranium and heavy water, but the American purchase has been described as helping the Islamic Republic to get its current heavy water stockpiles back down below this limit. The Obama administration is evidently content with Iran exceeding that limit as long as it believes that a good faith effort is being made to offload the surplus. But meanwhile, some critics of the Obama administration, including much of the Republican-dominated Congress, believe that Iran shouldnt be producing any heavy water at all.

Furthermore, Visser emphasizes that the heavy water issue is substantially connected to a slightly earlier criticisms of the White Houses Iran policy, namely the prospect that Iran might be granted access to the US financial system. The article notes that administration officials have failed to specify how the US will make payment to Iran for the heavy water. If the money comes directly from US banks or is provided in dollars, it will effectively legitimize congressional concerns that the administration is planning to change existing Treasury Department rules that prevent direct interchange between the American and Iranian financial systems.

This could in turn add additional fuel to broader criticisms of the policies of the American executive. An editorial that appeared at Huffington Post on Tuesday gave voice to some such criticisms, saying that recent Obama administration policies signify a clear tilt toward Tehran. The article claims that in the last few months, every [illicit] action from Iran [was] either ignored by the Obama administration with no comments from the White House, or justified by the White House [with the argument] that Iranian leaders were taking actions to address those issues.

The Western Journalism article clearly counts heavy water production among these illicit Iranian activities, with the White House justifying overproduction on the basis of the Iranians looking for a buyer and ultimately finding one in the US itself. And while this gives the Islamic Republic room to maneuver on the nuclear deal, the Huffington Post article claims that by urging US allies to limit their confrontations with Iran, the Obama administration is giving it room the maneuver on regional issues such as its involvement in the Syrian Civil War.

That room to maneuver may explain IranWires observation on Tuesday that Iranian military and government officials had recently been publicly boastful of their role in the defense of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Although there have been varied claims about the extent of Irans participation in the fighting, it has long been understood that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was playing a lead role in directing pro-Assad fighting forces, which are comprised of the remnants of the Syrian army, plus Shiite militias that were largely recruited and trained by Iran, albeit from a variety of national backgrounds.

But in early April, Iranian state media began to acknowledge that some fighters had been dispatched to Syria from Irans regular army. It was the first time that the army, which operates separately from the Revolutionary Guards, had been deployed for foreign combat operations since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

However, IranWire also notes that later in April, Iranian media began to walk back these reports, no longer boasting about the growing involvement of multiple Iranian forces, but instead remaining vague about the nature and extent of Irans involvement. While it may be easy to imagine that this change in tone would come in response to foreign scrutiny or US-led punitive measures, this does not appear to be the present case.

Indeed, the US has given Iran an ever-greater role in the political talks over the future of Syria, regardless of the extent of Irans military involvement, and even regardless of the apparent Iranian violations of a partial ceasefire that had been negotiated in Geneva.

IranWire suggests that Irans shift in tone was a response to the potential domestic fallout of a rising Iranian death toll in the Syrian conflict. This potential is perhaps made worse by the fact that the ceasefire may have reduced the activity of supportive Russian forces, which had used their air power to improve Iranian outcomes against moderate rebel forces on the ground.

The divergence of Iranian and Russian levels of involvement may continue over the long term, according to an article that was published by Reuters on Tuesday and claimed that the Russian-Iranian alliance, which has apparently deepened considerably in the midst of the Syrian Civil War, is merely tactical and could never be strategic. That is, there are strong ideological differences between the two countries, and different interests in the region, especially where Israel is concerned.

If this is the case, then the danger of losing Russian support may have convinced Iran to change its media narratives in Syria. In this sense, one might say that the leading constraints on Irans regional behavior are coming not from its traditional adversary the United States but from its Russian allies.

The uncertainty of that Iranian-Russian alliance has also been showcased in the context of military development. Russia recently began the long-delayed delivery of an advances S-300 missile defense system to Iran, but it has not been quick to respond to Iranian interest in purchasing additional weapons, including tanks and fighter jets.

In the meantime, Iranian officials have sought to content themselves with boasting of their domestic development, claiming for instance that a recently released line of tanks is comparable to Russias T-90. But in reality, Irans military capabilities are suffering from a lack of access to advanced foreign equipment, as indicated by a Business Insider article on Tuesday that described Irans new main battle tank as a mashup of Chinese and US tanks from the 1960s with no radar or active defense modules, the trend now in ground combat vehicles.
According to the Associated Press, Iranian state television quoted the president on Wednesday as saying that the forthcoming seizure of two billion dollars worth of assets for approximately 1,300 terror victims and their families constitutes blatant theft and is an example of Washingtons continued hostility against the Iranian nation.

Similar accusation of hostility have been behind Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khameneis criticisms of the implementation of the July 14 nuclear agreement, which resulted in broad-based sanctions relief but has not had the effect on the Iranian economy that some anticipated. On Wednesday, the supreme leader reiterated these criticisms, saying that the US was honoring the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action only on paper. In practice, they scare banks in such a way that they would not dare come near Iran, he said.

But the Obama administration has simultaneously come under fire from American legislators for specifically moving to address these concerns, as by finding workarounds for Irans isolation from the US financial system and even arranging to buy 32 tons of surplus Iranian nuclear material, ostensibly to show foreign businesses that Iran is no longer a global pariah and that it is safe to do business with it.

Last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry met with his foreign counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on two separate occasions to discuss the issue of improving Irans outcomes following implementation of the nuclear deal. But President Rouhanis comments on Wednesday seemed to indicate that these efforts had not had a noticeable impact on the pace of anti-Western rhetoric coming out of Tehran in general, or the Rouhani administration in particular.

The extent of Rouhanis rhetoric was arguably left up to the imagination of the listener. That is, the Associated Press points out that he did not elaborate after saying that the US would have to face all the consequences of this illegal action. It is possible that this commentary on the Supreme Court decision was meant only to reiterate the earlier threat that Iran would take the US to the International Court of Justice to fight the ruling. But it may also have been meant to evoke the more transparently belligerent rhetoric of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and others.

It is the IRGC that was responsible for five ballistic missile tests that have taken place since the conclusion of nuclear negotiations. Each of these tests  three of which took place back to back in March  were widely regarded as flouting United Nations Security Council Resolutions banning or calling upon the Islamic Republic to avoid work on missiles capable of carrying a nuclear weapon.

More than that, the defiant tone of the tests was understood to be deliberate, especially in light of the fact that they were accompanied by state media broadcasts of the nations missile stockpiles, as well as statements by IRGC officials and the supreme leader boasting of the strength of the Iranian military and vowing to never compromise over missile development. When the US passed new sanctions in response to the first of the five tests, Rouhani joined in this rhetoric, directing his defense minister to greatly expand the ballistic missile program.

A recent commentary at Voice of America placed this missile dispute alongside the issue of access to the US financial system, and now the conflict over the Supreme Court decision, calling all of them major obstacles to US-Iran reconciliation and the long-term success of the nuclear deal. The article made no definitive judgment about which side is in the wrong on these conflicts, but it did provide some analysis of the would-be legal dispute.

VOA points out that the effort to seize Iranian assets is in tension with the principle of sovereign immunity, a principle that is safeguarded in US law mainly in order to avoid giving other countries pretense to seize American assets as well. However, the principle is not without its exceptions, and Iran is one of three. In 2012, Congress passed a law allowing for assets seizure in cases dealing with nations that are listed by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism. Currently, the list is comprised of Iran, Syria, and Sudan.

While this cleared the way for the Supreme Court decision, international law remains as a potential obstacle. Economy Watch noted on Tuesday that Iranian officials are supposedly considering mounting a legal challenge in the ICJ that is based on a 1955 economic treaty between the two countries, called the Treaty on Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights.

That treaty, however, has not been enforced by either country, as it was signed long before the 1979 Islamic revolution brought a new government to Iran. Nevertheless, it may present a viable legal challenge, but Economy Watch also pointed out that many believe Tehran is not serious about taking the US to court, but is merely bluffing and using the incident as an opportunity to score political points.

On this view, Rouhanis comments on Wednesday were little more than rhetoric, although that rhetoric presents a serious challenge to the future of US-Iran relations, especially seeing as it comes from the supposedly moderate wing of the Iranian government.


Watch this video on YouTube

Richardson was more upbeat than many other US politicians, including the vast majority of the Republican Party, regarding the prospects for long-term success on the agreements basic goals of limiting Irans progress toward acquisition of a nuclear weapon. Nevertheless, he also cautioned Western policymakers against excessive optimism regarding the possibility of that deal leading to a more general warming of relations with the Islamic Republic.

Breitbart published excerpts from his interview on the same day, noting that he said Irans behavior is not changing internally in the wake of the January implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Richardson emphasized that significant tension persists between Tehran and Washington, and that the White Houses apparent tilt toward Iran had also invited tension between the US and its traditional Gulf Arab allies.

Implying that Arab anxiety is justified on the basis of Irans destabilizing influence in the region, Richardson added, I still think the nuclear deal was good, but anyone that expects a betterment of relations in the short run, its not going to happen.

This sentiment has been supported by a range of incidents since the July 14 conclusion of JCPOA negotiations. Many commentators have observed a marked increase in anti-Western rhetoric coming out of the office of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and to a somewhat lesser extent from the administration of President Hassan Rouhani, who spearheaded the nuclear agreement on the Iranian side.

Apart from speeches and propaganda broadcasts, the regimes persistent anti-Western ideology has also been expressed through the arrest and imprisonment of journalists with supposed links to the West, through the January incident in which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps seized two small American naval vessels and held 10 sailors prisoner for a day, and through a series of ballistic missile tests accompanied by Tehrans declared refusal to abide by UN Security Council resolutions calling on the Islamic Republic to avoid work on weapons capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

On Thursday, CBN News pointed out that both the US and Russia, a close partner of Iran, had indicated that they believe an April 19 Iranian launch, which authorities claimed was an attempt to send a satellite into orbit, was actually another ballistic missile test. If so, it was the sixth recorded launch since the conclusion of nuclear negotiations, following on that took place in October, one in November, and three in March. The provocative nature of the March launches was included by the inclusion of messages on the side of the missiles saying Israel must be wiped out.

President Rouhani and other Iranian government officials have made it clear that they refuse to compromise on Irans missile development. Supreme Leader Khamenei went even further in the wake of the JCPOA, directing his subordinates to avoid all negotiations with the West on issues unrelated to the existing agreement. However, this has not kept Iran from participating in international talks on such issues as the Syrian Civil War, although Tehrans delegates have arguably abided by Khameneis orders in the sense that they have steadfastly refused to discuss key points such as the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Tehran has maintained that it considers the removal of the Assad government to be a red line, even though international sentiment has largely turned against that government and in favor of moderate rebels groups, following accusations that Assad used chemical weapons early in the conflict, followed by the recurring use of barrel bombs on civilian populations, causing most of the 250,000 deaths and millions of displacements that have occurred so far during the five-year conflict.

Apart from resisting a negotiated solution during international talks in Geneva, the Iranian regime has also taken a leading role in the active defense of Assad, deploying its own Revolutionary Guards to the Syrian battlefield and also recruiting and directing Shiite militias to participate in the conflict alongside the remnants of the Syrian army. This expansion of Iranian influence has also been observed in the civil war in Yemen, on route to which three shipments of Iranian arms have been intercepted in as many months.

All of this provides support for arguments from Governor Richardson and others, claiming that the Iranian regimes internal behavior and desire for regional dominating havent changed. Furthermore, some staunch critics of that regime insist that its behavior has considerably worsened under the presidency of so-called moderate Hassan Rouhani and since the conclusion of nuclear negotiations.

Throughout that time, the exiled Iranian resistance group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran has been tracking the nature and extent of Iranian military involvement in the Syrian Civil War. The NCRI has noted a steady increase in deployments of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, such that several thousand fighters are in Syria today, where their activities no doubt go well beyond Tehrans official claims regarding advisory missions to the Syrian military.

But along with some global security analysts, the NCRI has also observed escalations in the Iranian regimes tactics for recruiting fighters to join the fight in something other than an official IRGC capacity. Initially, these efforts seem to have focused on appealing to religious sentiment by asking people to defend an important Shiite shrine in Syrian. Later, however, Tehran began offering promises of monetary compensation and Iranian permanent resident status to impoverished Afghan refugees, as well as recruiting directly from Afghanistan and Pakistan to form divisions made up entirely of these ethnic groups.

Now, the NCRI concludes that even these efforts have been inadequate to keep up with the levels of recruitment that the regime needs in order to continue its nearly unilateral defense of the Assad government. On Thursday, the resistance organizations website reported that Iranian state media had begun broadcasting a video produced by the propaganda arm of the IRGCs Basij civilian militia, which featured a group of children singing in praise of Iranian operations in Syria, as part of an apparent effort to recruit children to participate in the war.

The NCRI translated several lines of the song, including, On my leaders orders I am ready to give my life, and my path is through the sacred shrine but my goal is to reach Jerusalem.

Shahin Gobadi of the NCRIs Foreign Affairs Committee said of the video, After having attempted to deploy its IRGC forces and foreign militias including Afghans, Lebanese and Iraqis, and even its regular army units, the regime has resorted to recruiting children to the war fronts, adding, the regime has already used up all its strategic resources, and it is in a far more fragile state.

The apparent child recruitment drive joins a range of other indicators that have been cited in recent months to support the notion of worsening behavior on the part of the Iranian regime. Perhaps most prominent among these are reports of a skyrocketing rate of executions within the Islamic Republic, accounting for nearly 1,000 hangings in 2015 alone, and approximately 50 since April 10.

In the midst of unprecedented state visits among Iran and several European nations, a variety of international human rights organizations have raised this and other Iranian human rights issues in order to urge Western governments to limit their pursuit of closer relations with Iran until such time as the regimes behavior improves.

The NCRIs Shahin Gobadi told The Washington Times on Friday that the recruitment pitch for teenagers is the first time Tehran has turned to children volunteers since its long war with Iraq in the 1980s.

In the Iranian regimes lexicon, defending the sacred shrine is the equivalent of deploying the forces of the IRGC and, more recently, the regular army to Syria to defend the Assad regime as it massacres the people of Syria. This is while the majority of the Iranian regimes casualties are near Aleppo, which is several hundred kilometers away from the holy Shiite shrines near Damascus, Gobadi said.
The regimes prosecutor in Golpayegan, Najafali Alyan, reported by state-run Serat News Agency on April 27, stated that the woman received these lashes as a punishment for having an affair with another man. The woman is presently imprisoned for her involvement in the murder of her husband in July 2012.

It must be remembered that the Iranian regimes judiciary is notorious for handing down draconian verdicts without due process, and it has been repeatedly condemned by international human rights organizations, said the NCRI report.

It stated that this is the first report in state media of a woman being publicly flogged in Iran for a several years.

Human rights activist and member of the NCRI, Farideh Karimi, strongly condemned the flogging and said that this is a new and misogynist measure taken by the Rouhani government in order to supress women. Karimi said it is extremely disturbing and abhorrent and female Western politicians visiting Iran should reconsider such outreaches and their impact in emboldening the regime in its attitude.

Karimi called on womens rights organisations and activists to speak out against the misogynist policies of the regime.

This public flogging is another step towards supressing women. Last week, women were targeted by morality police over what they call improper veiling.
[April 27, 2016] Anritsu Adds Tools to VNA Families that Improve Signal Integrity Testing Capability for Verification of High-speed Designs

MORGAN HILL, Calif., April 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Anritsu Company continues to address the test needs of signal integrity (SI) engineers with the introduction of options for its VectorStar and ShockLine vector network analyzers (VNAs). The VectorStar Eye Diagram and ShockLine Advanced Time Domain (ATD) options are part of the expanding SI capabilities offered by Anritsu and provide SI engineers with improved tools to conduct channel diagnostics and model validation of high-speed digital circuit designs. "As data rates continue to increase, signal channel characterization becomes increasingly challenging. The result is that VNAs are becoming more of a staple in signal integrity measurements, however, additional capabilities in processing and visualizing data are beneficial. For these reasons, more tools have been added to the VectorStar and Shockline VNA families that can help signal integrity engineers be more efficient in analyzing their designs," said Dr. Jon Martens  Fellow at Anritsu. The VectorStar and ShockLine VNA families provide complementary capabilities that enable SI engineers to meet their measurement needs. VectorStar is Anritsu's highest performance VNA and is often used by SI engineers with the most challenging design requirements. For example, some designers want their test systems to be able to include up to the 5th harmonic of their system clock. VectorStar offers 2- and 4-port broadband configurations from 70 kHz to 70 GHz, 110 GHz and 145 GHz with a single coaxial connection, supporting the latest digital data rates, including 25/28 Gbps and 43 Gbps. Anritsu's ShockLine VNA family also has excellent performance, but less capability at a lower price for less demanding SI applications. This makes ShockLine VNAs well suited for lower data rate systems or manufacturing applications.

VectorStar Eye Diagram

VectorStar is well suited for SI engineers responsible for the design of high-speed data transmission requirements critically needed to support emerging network systems, such as 5G and IoT. The new Eye Diagram option updates the VectorStar display via a trace-based process rather than a conventional file-based method, eliminating the nee to manually transfer .SnP files. Unlike other VNAs, there is no need to store the S-parameter performance in a file and then recall the file to observe the eye diagram. It greatly improves measurement efficiency, analysis, and tuning of a data transmission signal path, allowing users to see the results of circuit changes in near real-time.



With this innovative approach, engineers can observe the likelihood of bit errors due to effects such as level compression, jitter, slew, and edge distortion while tuning for improved performance. This is particularly valuable in identifying data stream SI issues that may occur within a given transmission path and can help conduct accurate subsystem fault location analysis. The new option, coupled with the industry leading performance of the VectorStar, provides SI engineers with the ability to monitor transmission quality of digitally modulated signals. VectorStar now provides the unique ability to display all key parameters, such as eye diagram, time domain/TDR, and S-parameters, on the same channel while continuously sweeping.

Advanced Time Domain for ShockLine VNAs

Designed for the MS46522B/MS46524B performance series VNAs, the ATD option provides tools for SI engineers building circuit models and conducting validation measurements on them, as well as troubleshooting SI issues. The ATD option includes a subset of popular SI capabilities, including the ability to plot eye diagrams, determine single-ended or differential near-end crosstalk (NEXT) and far-end crosstalk (FEXT), and apply various equalization techniques. With the ATD option, engineers can select among several IEEE and OIF specifications and compare the power sum of coupled noises, insertion loss crosstalk ratio (ICR), insertion loss, insertion loss deviation (ILD), and integrated crosstalk noise (ICN). It also features a plot TDR, TDT and Skew utility that converts S-parameter data into an impedance profile, a time domain reflection (TDR) with an open end or a TDR/time domain transmission (TDT) with matched terminations. SI Solutions

With the introduction of the VectorStar Eye Diagram and ShockLine ATD options, engineers now have a more complete set of tools to meet SI design and channel modeling requirements. Whether the application calls for the highest performance, full featured capability of the VectorStar VNAs or good performance at a lower price offered through the ShockLine family, Anritsu offers a wide range of solutions for today's and tomorrow's SI challenges. About Anritsu

Anritsu Company is the United States subsidiary of Anritsu Corporation, a global provider of innovative communications test and measurement solutions for 120 years. Anritsu's "2020 VISION" philosophy engages customers as true partners to help develop wireless, optical, microwave/RF, and digital solutions for R&D, manufacturing, installation, and maintenance applications, as well as multidimensional service assurance solutions for network monitoring and optimization. Anritsu also provides precision microwave/RF components, optical devices, and high-speed electrical devices for communication products and systems. The company develops advanced solutions for 5G, M2M, IoT, as well as other emerging and legacy wireline and wireless communication markets. With offices throughout the world, Anritsu has approximately 4,000 employees in over 90 countries. To learn more visit www.anritsu.com and follow Anritsu on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150410/197878LOGO

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/anritsu-adds-tools-to-vna-families-that-improve-signal-integrity-testing-capability-for-verification-of-high-speed-designs-300258485.html SOURCE Anritsu Company

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[April 27, 2016] Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, noted hacker Kevin Mitnick join BBVA Compass Bright Perspectives series

HOUSTON, April 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BBVA Compass is putting two individuals who embody technology's full potential and also its perils on the roster of speakers for the bank's Bright Perspectives forums, with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and renowned former black-hat hacker Kevin Mitnick alternating as headliners for the series of client events starting Thursday in Denver. The series is part of the bank's efforts to bring leading minds and fresh insights to clients on topics such as business, economics and technology, and previously featured former President George W. Bush and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Mitnick and Wales will stop in several cities across the U.S. to share their thoughts on cybersecurity's new frontiers and how open content and open-sourced technology is changing society and how businesses must adapt in order to compete. Mitnick will be performing live demonstrations of the latest threats hackers are using to compromise organizations. "Jimmy Wales and Kevin Mitnick are going to be speaking on ideas that are consuming the thoughts of business-builders everywhere  how to stay open in a society that demands it, and how to stay safe at the same time," said BBVA Compass Chairman and CEO Manolo Sanchez. "These are two of the best possible sources to capture the zeitgeist of this moment in American business." Wales co-founded Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that's supported by a collection of grassroots volunteers, in 2001. The site epitomizes the open-source platform  anyone can create, add or edit a Wikipedia entry  and it logs multiple billions of visits each month. Wales has become one of the most vocal, eloquent advocates for free speech and Internet freedom. Once one of the FBI's ost Wanted because he hacked into 40 major corporations just for the challenge, Mitnick is now a trusted security consultant to the Fortune 500 and governments worldwide. He and his team now maintain a 100 percent successful track record of being able to penetrate the security of any system they are paid to hack into using a combination of technical exploits and social engineering.



"The financial industry itself is undergoing an intense, rapid digital transformation," said Sanchez. "BBVA Compass is on the forefront of that change, and we're using that focus to enhance our clients' perspectives through our Bright Futures campaign." Wales and Mitnick join BBVA Compass' newest brand ambassador and self-made entrepreneur Sandra Lee as keynote speakers in this year's Bright Perspectives events.

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 673 branches, including 345 in Texas, 89 in Alabama, 75 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 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-noted-hacker-kevin-mitnick-join-bbva-compass-bright-perspectives-series-300258546.html SOURCE BBVA Compass

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[April 27, 2016] Technavio Announces Top Six Vendors in the Global Sweet Spreads Market for 2016-2020

Technavio has announced the top six leading vendors in their recent global sweet spreads market report. This research report also lists 20 prominent vendors that are expected to impact the market during the forecast period. Competitive vendor landscape "Rapidly changing consumer demands and preferences are contributing to the demand for differentiated products in the food and beverage industry, especially in the healthy lifestyle segment. Vendor performance in the global sweet spreads market may be impacted by changing consumer spending patterns due to increased disposable incomes and changing lifestyles," says Vijay Sarathy, lead analyst at Technavio for food research. Request sample report: http://goo.gl/OUJsHM Key vendors Andros Andros is engaged in the production and retail of food products, which include yogurt, jam, and fruit spreads. The company is a leading vendor in Europe in the fruit processor segment. The brands of the company are Pierrot Gourmand, Chef Dessert, Solo Italia, Andros, fruitForce, and Bonne Maman. The company functions in the global sweet spreads market through its offerings under the brands Bonne Maman and fruitForce. Ferrero Ferrero was founded in 1946 and is headquartered in Alba, Italy. The company is a manufacturer and distributor of chocolates. The company's product portfolio includes chocolates, cream spreads, sugar confectionery, and drinks. The company is controlled by Ferrero International and operates through various subsidiaries situated worldwide. The company functions in the global sweet spreads market through its offerings under the Nutella brand. Nutella was incorporated in 1956. The production of Nutella takes place in various facilities. In New Zealand and Australia, it is manufactured in Lithgrow, New South Wales. In North America, te company has manufacturing plants in San Jose Iturbide, Guanajuato, Mexico, and Brantford, Ontario, Canada.



Hero Hero was founded in 1886 and is headquartered in Lenzburg, Switzerland. It distributes and manufactures consumer food products, including baby fruit drinks and food.

The company primarily focuses on the production and sale of consumer food products in the areas of infant and nutrition, fruit, and other consumer foods (cereals and decorations). Hershey Hershey was founded in 1894 and is headquartered in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, US. The company manufactures chocolate, sugar confectionery, baking ingredients, gum and mint refreshment products, toppings, snack items, and beverages. It sells its products under the brands Hershey's, Kit Kat, Kisses, Reese's, Twizzlers, Ice Breakers, Jolly Rancher, Snackbarz, Heath, Bliss, Breathsavers, Twizzler, York, Whatchamacallit, Almond Joy, Pieces, Brookside, Good & Plenty, Payday, Lancaster, Rolo, and Whoppers. Hormel Foods Hormel Foods was founded in 1891 and is headquartered in Austin, Minnesota, US. The company manufactures and markets a wide range of meat and other food products. This diverse portfolio of products includes meat spreads, hams, sausages, franks, stews, bacon, canned luncheon meats, chilies, hash, shelf-stable microwaveable entrees, and salsas. Hormel Foods' products are sold in the US through sales personnel, independent brokers, and distributors. Apart from this, the company operates 40 manufacturing and distribution facilities and 26 sales offices located across the US. The J.M. Smucker Company (Smucker) The J.M. Smucker Company was founded in 1897 and is headquartered in Orrville, Ohio, US. The company offers a wide variety of food products such as fruit spreads, syrups, retail packaged coffee, peanut butter, sweetened condensed milk, ice cream toppings, frozen sandwiches, shortening and oils, condiments, and health and natural foods and beverages. The company offers a range of fruit spreads like jams, jelly, and preserves, which are available in different fruit flavors. Browse related reports: Global Syrups Market 2016-2020

Global Cheese Market 2016-2020

Global Sandwiches Market 2016-2020 Purchase these three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact [email protected] with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform. About Technavio Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies. Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users. If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at [email protected]. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160427005096/en/

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[April 27, 2016] Fitch Affirms University & Community College System of Nevada Lease Revs at 'AA-'; Outlook Stable

Fitch Ratings has affirmed the following Nevada System of Higher Education, formerly known as University and Community College System of Nevada (the university system) obligation: --$4.93 million taxable lease revenue bonds, series 2002, at 'AA-'. The Rating Outlook is Stable. The 'AA-' rating reflects the strength of the lease-rental agreement, credit quality of the counterparties, likelihood of continued payments by a strong lessee (the U.S. federal government), as well as the expectation that the university system (certificates of participation rated 'AA'/Stable Outlook) will continue to maintain the leased premises to the standards required under the lease. KEY RATING DRIVERS Low Complexity, Minimal Cost Risk The university system is required to maintain the building in good repair to avoid cancellation of the lease by the lessee. Through over 10 years of operations, there have been no instances of maintenance falling below the standards of the lease. The U.S. Government General Services Administration (GSA (News - Alert)) pays a share of the operating costs as a component of its annual rent. (Cost Risk - Stronger) Abatement Risk Well-Contained Lease payments are subject to abatement in the event of damage to the building preventing or limiting occupancy by the lessee. The maintenance of property and casualty insurance, rental interruption insurance, and a lease bond (to cover rent in the event it is not paid in full by the GSA) mitigate the risk of abatement. (Revenue Risk - Stronger) Legal Structure Provides Adequate Protections The fixed-rate bonds are secured by GSA lease rental payments sufficient to cover interest and mandatory sinking fund payments. The lease may only be cancelled under certain limited conditions, including failure by the university system to maintain the facility in good repair, and inability to reconstruct the facility within two years in case of damage. (Debt Structure - Stronger) RATING SENSITIVITIES Negative- The university system's failure to maintain the building in good repair could result in deductions in rental payments or outright cancellation of the lease, increasing the risk of payment disruption. Negative - Failure to renew or replace the letter of credit (LOC) facility for the lease bond in an amount sufficient to cover two years' worth of debt service would expose the bonds to increased risk of payment disruption due to abatement. SUMMARY OF CREDIT The university system continues to comply with requirements laid out in the lease and bond documents, including operation and maintenance of the leased premises and maintenance of the LOC supporting debt service. These measures have ensured timely and full lease payments by the federal government. Debt service payments have been made in full and on time. The bonds are secured by a stream of monthly lease rental payments, equal to debt service, which are made by the GSA. The pledged payments are a subset of a larger rental payment relating to the lease by the GSA, on behalf of the Department of Energy (DOE), for a portion of a building at the university system's Desert Research Institute. The obligation by the federal government to make lease payments required under the lease is a general obligation, with only limited opportunity to cancel or abate. The lease provides for cancellation only under limited and unlikely circumstances such as damage to the building that the university system cannot repair within two years. The GSA may also cancel the lease, if, in the event of damage, the university system does not provide a plan for reconstruction and execute a related contract within 90 days of the casualty event. Lease payments are subject to abatement, commensurate with the loss of use of the facility, in the event of fire or structural damage.



To mitigate the risk of abatement, the university system maintains rental interruption insurance and the LOC-backed lease bond. Rental interruption insurance is equivalent to the forthcoming year of debt service payments and the lease bond is equal to two years of scheduled rent payments (debt service and GSA's share of operating costs). The LOC on the lease bond expires prior to debt maturity (July 2017) and failure to renew or replace it, would increase the risk of payment disruption. The rating also considers the general credit-worthiness of the university system, as the system is responsible for maintaining the leased facility in good repair, and creating and implementing replacement plans in case of damage to the property. The university system maintains property and casualty insurance equaling the lesser of bond principal outstanding or the building's replacement cost.

Bondholders do not have a security interest in the leased premises, nor does ownership transfer to the lessee at the end of the lease. Fitch considers the leased facility to be important to, but not essential to the federal government as lessee. The DOE uses the building as a repository for Nevada Test Site documentation and records on radiation exposure and nuclear testing, a public information center, and a museum for artifacts and archeological materials found at the site. Federal law requires public access to these documents and collection and curation of the artifacts. The building was designed and constructed for this purpose. Additional information is available on www.fitchratings.com Applicable Criteria Rating Criteria for Availability-Based Projects (pub. 14 Oct 2015) https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=871036 Rating Criteria for Infrastructure and Project Finance (pub. 28 Sep 2015) https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=870967 Additional Disclosures Dodd-Frank Rating Information Disclosure Form https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/press_releases/content/ridf_frame.cfm?pr_id=1003437 Solicitation Status https://www.fitchratings.com/gws/en/disclosure/solicitation?pr_id=1003437 Endorsement Policy https://www.fitchratings.com/jsp/creditdesk/PolicyRegulation.faces?context=2&detail=31 ALL FITCH CREDIT RATINGS ARE SUBJECT TO CERTAIN LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS. PLEASE READ THESE LIMITATIONS AND DISCLAIMERS BY FOLLOWING THIS LINK: HTTP://FITCHRATINGS.COM/UNDERSTANDINGCREDITRATINGS. IN ADDITION, RATING DEFINITIONS AND THE TERMS OF USE OF SUCH RATINGS ARE AVAILABLE ON (News - Alert) THE AGENCY'S PUBLIC WEBSITE 'WWW.FITCHRATINGS.COM'. PUBLISHED RATINGS, CRITERIA AND METHODOLOGIES ARE AVAILABLE FROM THIS SITE AT ALL TIMES. FITCH'S CODE OF CONDUCT, CONFIDENTIALITY, CONFLICTS OF INTEREST, AFFILIATE FIREWALL, COMPLIANCE AND OTHER RELEVANT POLICIES AND PROCEDURES ARE ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE 'CODE OF CONDUCT' SECTION OF THIS SITE. FITCH MAY HAVE PROVIDED ANOTHER PERMISSIBLE SERVICE TO THE RATED ENTITY OR ITS RELATED THIRD PARTIES. DETAILS OF THIS SERVICE FOR RATINGS FOR WHICH THE LEAD ANALYST IS BASED IN AN EU-REGISTERED ENTITY CAN BE FOUND ON THE ENTITY SUMMARY PAGE FOR THIS ISSUER ON THE FITCH WEBSITE. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160427006789/en/

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[April 28, 2016] Introducing the Gumstix Poblano 43C Single Board Computer

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Gumstix, Inc., the leader in design-to-order embedded systems, today announced the release of a new single board computer, the Gumstix Poblano 43C. Designed in GeppettoDesign-to-Order (D2O) platform by Gumstix engineers and priced at $199, the Poblano features Texas Instruments' powerful Sitara AM438 Processor, a 3D graphics processor, multi-touch, WiFi, a parallel connector compatible with the Caspa family of cameras and embedded NAND flash storage. The Gumstix Poblano 43C is a spicier and more robust single board computer compared to its predecessor, the Gumstix Pepper 43C. Sporting an ARM Cortex-A9 core, improved graphics processing and increased on-chip memory, the Poblano's AM438 Processor is faster and more powerful than the Pepper's Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 based Processor. "Poblano shows off the features of the AM438 Processor and makes it simple to customize for dedicated applications," said W. Gordon Kruberg, president and CEO of Gumstix. "At Gumstix, our goal is to create hardware and offer a simple and complete online design-to-order solution so that any designer can launch innovative marketable products." With its support for a multi-touch Newhaven LCD monitor, a 27-pin parallel connector for a Caspa Camera and Texas Instruments' low-power stereo audio codec, the Poblano can break out video and audio embedded projects. In addition, the 11 x 7.5 cm Poblano single board computer features:



8 gigabytes of eMMC memory

Gigabit ethernet

802.11 b/g/n WiFi with access point mode

Bluetooth BLE

A 9-axis internal motion sensor

A 20-pin GPIO header, two flip-side LEDs

A flip-side push button

A power connector and backup battery

A bootable Micro-SD card slot

Two USB hosts connections

A Micro-B USB device connections and

A USB console Using Geppetto D2O within their browser, customers can clone and drop the Gumstix Poblano 43C single board computer into the Geppetto D2O workspace to jumpstart their design and choose from a library of hundreds of different models in Geppetto to customize the Poblano board design. Once customers are satisfied with their expansion board designs in Geppetto D2O, engineers at Gumstix will test and validate the board design, manufacture and ship the production-ready board 15 days from order, reducing both the production and development time for the customer. All Gumstix products and quantity discounts are available at www.gumstix.com

About Gumstix, Inc.

As a global leader in design-to-order hardware and manufacturing solutions, Gumstix gives its customers the power to solve their electronic design challenges with Geppetto D2O -- the online design-to-order system -- and a broad portfolio of small computers and embedded boards. In addition to engineers and industrial designers, Gumstix helps students, educators, and makers unlock their creative ideas to bring them to market. Since pioneering the concept of an extremely small computer-on-module (COM) with a full implementation of Linux in 2003, the company has grown to support over 20,000 diverse customers. Our systems have launched some of the world's coolest products - from phones to drones - on commercial, university, and hobbyist workbenches in over 45 countries. For more information, visit www.gumstix.com About the Texas Instruments Design Network

Gumstix, Inc. is a member of the TI Design Network, a premier group of independent, well-established companies that offer products and system-level design and manufacturing services complementing TI's semiconductors to a worldwide customer base to accelerate product innovation and time-to-market. Network members provide product design, hardware and software system integration, turnkey product design, RF and processor system modules, reference platforms, software development, proof-of-concept design, feasibility studies, research, certification compliance, prototyping, manufacturing, and product life cycle management. For more information about the TI Design Network, please visit http://www.ti.com/designnetwork. Contact: [email protected] Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160426/360213 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/introducing-the-gumstix-poblano-43c-single-board-computer-300258212.html SOURCE Gumstix, Inc.

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[April 28, 2016] Fire Protection Systems Market Worth 98.24 Billion USD by 2022

PUNE, India, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The report "Fire Protection Systems Market by Technology (Active, Passive), Product (Fire Detection (Sensors & Detectors, RFID), Management (Fire Sprinklers, Extinguishers), Fire Analysis & Response), Service, Vertical, and Geography - Global Forecast to 2022", published by MarketsandMarkets, the market size is expected to grow from USD 47.96 Billion in 2015 to USD 98.24 Billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 10.1% between 2016 and 2022. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302)

Browse 111 market data Tables and 101 Figures spread through 215 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Fire Protection Systems Market".

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/fire-protection-systems-market-1018.html Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report. As a result of the increase in fire hazards, government agencies across the globe are implementing stringent measures to reduce the losses from fire. The increase in fire-related spending by a number of enterprises and SMEs across the globe is driving the demand for fire protection systems. There has been a tremendous amount of advancements in the facilities management environment of developing nations over the last several years, especially in the area of building automation. Various security aspects of building automation include monitoring & control systems such as HVAC, power production, lighting, safety, and security systems and elevators among others. Passive fire protection systems market expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period The market for passive fire protection systems is expected to grow at the highest rate during the forecast period in the fire protection systems market. The passive fire protection systems work on the principle of strengthening building structure and helping in leveraging the profitability by reducing the damages involved in the fire accidents and one of the vital features of the passive fire protection systems is a cluster of codes and regulations to be followed. Fire management systems held the largest market share of the fire protection systems market based on products in 2015 The fire management systems held the largest market share of the global fire protection market based on products in 2015 and are expected to dominate the market till 2022. The fire management systems such as sprinklers and extinguishers are expected to be used extensively in the commercial vertical during the forecast period. The market for fire analysis software is expected to grow at the highest rate in the fire protection systems product market during the forecast period.The high growth rate of fire analysis software is estimated due to the increasing need for sophisticated fire analysis which helps in proper decision making and fire prevention.



Commercial vertical expected to hold the largest market share by 2022 The commercial vertical is expected to hold the largest share of the fire protection systems market by 2022, while the fire protection systems market for the oil, gas, and mining vertical is expected to grow at the highest rate between 2016 and 2022. The reason for the high growth rate of the oil, gas, and mining vertical is the high risk of fire associated with the same.

North America expected to hold the largest market share, while Europe expected to witness the highest growth rate North America is expected to hold the largest market share and dominate the fire protection systems market between 2016 and 2022, owing to the increased awareness of the installation of fire safety systems and government fire safety regulations. In this region, there are numerous fire protection systems and equipment manufacturers that offer different fire protection systems such as smoke detectors, flame detectors, heat detectors, sprinklers, extinguishers, fire alarms, sirens, control panels & interfaces, fire analysis software, and many other products along with the fire service providers. The scope of the report covers detailed information regarding the major factors influencing the growth of the Fire Protection Systems Market such as drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities. Detailed analysis of the key industry players has been done to provide insights into their business overview, products and services, key strategies, new product launches, mergers & acquisitions, partnerships, agreements, collaborations, and recent developments associated with the fire protection systems market. Inquiry Before Buying: http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=1018 The major players in the fire protection systems market include Honeywell International Inc. (New Jersey, U.S.), Johnson Controls (Wisconsin, U.S.), Siemens AG (Munich, Germany), Tyco International Plc (Cork, Ireland), and United Technologies Corporation (Connecticut, U.S.) among others. Browse Related Reports Fire Sprinkler Market by Type (Product (Wet, Dry, Pre-action, Deluge), Service (Installation, Inspection & Managed)), Component (Fire Sprinkler Head, Alarm Bell), Application (Commercial, Industrial, Residential), and Geography - Forecast to 2020 http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/fire-sprinkler-system-market-3646511.html Flame Detectors Market by product (Single IR, UV, Dual UV/IR, Triple IR (IR3), Multi IR), Service (Engineering, Installation & Design, Maintenance), Industry (Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Mining, Energy and Power), and Geography - Global Forecast to 2020 http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/flame-detector-market-213130921.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 info graphics 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:

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[April 28, 2016] Researchers and Industrial Cybercrime Sleuths Confront Cyber Fraud and Extortion at Toronto Conference

Global cybercrime-fighting association APWG is hosting its eCrime 2016 program June 1-3 in Toronto, Ontario, mustering world-leading industry cybercrime responders and university researchers to plot global strategies to neutralize the menace of cybercrime, a threatscape growing seemingly unchecked in scope and virulence in recent years. Industrial and academic researchers will probe the mutation of ransomware and other crimeware, the evolution of online scam schemes, bitcoin abuses, and the character of crimes against financial institutions - and different cultures - during this event. "Amidst the gathering chaos, it can get pretty grim in this space, but the efficiencies in managing cybercrime the researchers discover and share gives us all hope at conference time that cybercrime can, and will be, a predictable and manageable risk like other," said APWG Secretary General Peter Cassidy. Most all of the presentations, however, will describe practical approaches at hand for the detection, investigation and suppression of cybercrime through advanced research techniques and technical approaches, as developed by expert professionals and academic investigators working at the dark, lonely edges of the cybercrime experience. Program discussions will include: Mutation and Extortion: Ransomware's Evolutionary Path

Scam Affiliates Redirecting to Google (News - Alert) Play and iTunes Store

Differences and Niches in Global Criminal Undergrounds

Enabling DNS Big Data Applications

Data Exchange - Forge for Unified Responses to Cybercrime

Defensive approaches for ESPs to prevent account hijacking

Mapping Criminal Merchants and Networks

Analysis of CryptoLocker Ransoms in Bitcoin eCrime 2016 combines the APWG members' meeting and research conference and a one-day workshop on cybercrime on Tuesday, May 31, "Examining Cybercrime 2: Financial Edition" to examine the vocational aspects of managing cybercrime in a financial services environment, from a number of professional perspectives. Working Agenda:

http://apwg.org/apwg-events/ecrime2016/agenda Registration

http://apwg.org/apwg-events/ecrime216/registration



Venue and Accommodations

http://apwg.org/apwg-events/ecrime2016/venue About the APWG (www.apwg.org)

The APWG, founded in 2003 as the Anti-Phishing Working Group, is a global industry, law enforcement, and government coalition of more than 1,800 institutions working to unify the global response to electronic crime. Since 2004, the APWG has developed and curated one of the world's largest NGO-managed clearinghouses of cybercrime event data enabling the sharing of this data to protect consumers and businesses alike. APWG's directors, managers and research fellows advise and correspond with national governments; global governance bodies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, International Telecommunications Union and ICANN; hemispheric and global trade groups; and multilateral treaty organizations such as the European Commission, the G8 High Technology Crime Subgroup, Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime, United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Europol EC3 and the Organization of American States. APWG is a member of the steering group of the Commonwealth Cybercrime Initiative at the Commonwealth of Nations. Membership is open to qualified financial institutions, online retailers, ISPs and Telcos, the law enforcement community, solutions providers, multi-lateral treaty organizations, research centers, trade associations and government agencies. The APWG's <www.apwg.org> and <education.apwg.org> websites offer the public, industry and government agencies practical information about phishing and electronically mediated fraud as well as pointers to pragmatic technical solutions that provide immediate protection. APWG is co-founder and co-manager of the STOP. THINK. CONNECT. Messaging Convention, the global online safety public awareness collaborative <https://education.apwg.org/safety-messaging-convention/> and founder/curator of the eCrime Researchers Summit, the world's first peer-reviewed conference dedicated specifically to electronic crime studies <www.ecrimeresearch.org>. Among APWG's corporate sponsors include: AhnLab, Area 1, AT&T (T), Afilias Ltd., Avast!, AVG Technologies, Axur, Baidu Antivirus, Bangkok Bank, BBN Technologies, Barracuda Networks (News - Alert), BillMeLater, Bkav, Blue Coat, BrandMail, BrandProtect, Bsecure Technologies, CSC Digital Brand Services, Check Point Software Technologies, Claro, Cloudmark, Comcast, CSIRTBANELCO, Cyber Defender, Cyveillance, DigiCert, Domain Tools, Donuts, Easy Solutions, eBay/PayPal (EBAY), eCert, EC Cert, ESET (News - Alert), EST Soft, Facebook, FeelSafe Digital, FEBRABAN, Fortinet, FraudWatch International, F-Secure, GetResponse, GlobalSign, GoDaddy, Google, GroupIB, Hauri, Hitachi Systems, Ltd., Huawei Symantec, ICANN, Infoblox, IronPort (Cisco), ING Bank, Infoblox, Interac, Internet.bs, IT Matrix, iThreat Cyber Group, iZOOlogic, LaCaixa, Lenos Software, MX Tools, MailChannels, MailJet, MailChimp, MailShell, MarkMonitor, M86Security, McAfee (MFE), Melbourne IT, MessageLevel, Microsoft (MSFT), MicroWorld, Mimecast, Mirapoint, NHN, MyPW, nProtect Online Security, Netcraft, Network Solutions, NeuStar, Nominet, Nominum, NZRS Limited, Public Interest Registry, Panda Software, Phishlabs, PhishMe, Planty.net, Prevelent, Prevx, Proofpoint (News - Alert), QinetiQ, RSA Security (EMC), Rakuten, Return Path, RiskIQ, RuleSpace, SalesForce, SecureBrain, SendGrid, S21sec, SIDN, SilverPop, SiteLock, SnoopWall, SoftForum, SoftLayer, SoftSecurity, SOPHOS, SunTrust, SurfControl, Symantec (SYMC), Tagged, TDS Telecom, Telefonica (TEF), TransCreditBank, Trend Micro (TMIC), Trustwave, Vasco (VDSI), VADE-RETRO, VeriSign (News - Alert) (VRSN), Wombat Security Technologies, Yahoo! (YHOO), and zvelo.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428006667/en/

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MATTOON -- Police officers made five arrests following a reported fight Wednesday morning at 17th Place Apartments and are seeking a sixth suspect.

A Mattoon Police Department press release reported that officers responded at 9:51 a.m. to a 911 call regarding numerous subjects fighting on the sidewalk at 2200 S. 17th Place Apartments. They subsequently made the following arrests.

Quanesha R. Ivy, 26, of Charleston was charged with aggravated battery and mob action for allegedly fighting and disturbing the peace.

Xavier I. McCray, 28, of South Holland was charged with aggravated battery, mob action, and being a fugitive from justice. McCray is reportedly wanted on a no-bond warrant of arrest from the Lake County, Ind., sheriffs office for aggravated assault.

Rynell W. Frazier, 28, of Champaign was charged with aggravated battery and mob action. Parole violation charges are pending. Those charges allege that Frazier took part in the fight while he was on parole from prison for aggravated battery to a police officer.

Quintaria S. Gray, 24, of Charleston was charged with aggravated battery and mob action for allegedly fighting and disturbing the peace.

Anthony L. James, 27, of Charleston was charged with criminal trespass to property. Those charges allege that James was present on the property after being banned by management.

The ban stemmed from James April 4 arrest at the apartment complex for obstructing justice for allegedly attempting to prevent the apprehension of a suspect who stabbed a man within the apartments on that date.

In that April 4 case, James was released from the Coles County jail on his own recognizance without being required to post bond. James posted bond for the latest offense and is scheduled to appear in court.

Brittany L. Townsend, 25, of Chicago allegedly fled the scene Wednesday morning prior to the arrival of police. She is wanted for questioning in regard to the fight, and for trespassing on the property.

Townsend had also been banned by management on April 4 after her arrest for stabbing a man at the apartment complex. In addition, Townsend is wanted on a warrant of arrest from the Lake County, Ind., sheriffs office for assault.

Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Townsend is asked to contact the Mattoon Police Department at 217-235-5451.

Several suspects received minor injuries during the altercation Wednesday morning. One person was treated and released at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center. With the exception of James and Townsend, all suspects were taken to the Coles County jail.
Rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson and his Oklahoma counterpart are trying a different strategy to halt legal marijuana in Colorado.

This month, the two states asked to be added as plaintiffs in a case being considered by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

That appeal combines two separate cases: one brought by a group of county sheriffs from Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas, and the other on behalf of a Pueblo County couple who own land near a recreational marijuana growing facility.

Nebraska and Oklahoma argue they have "unique sovereign interests" in preventing marijuana from crossing their borders, and that they shouldn't be left out as the court considers the issue.

Those interests wouldn't be represented by the current plaintiffs, who are focused on "removing marijuana from the streets of Colorado," Peterson and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt say in their motion to intervene in the appeal.

"Because the people of Nebraska and Oklahoma have determined that marijuana is harmful and should be illegal, Nebraska and Oklahoma have a duty to protect their citizens from the continuing harms resulting from Colorado's illegal activities, by taking action to ensure that Colorado marijuana does not enter their sovereign boundaries," the states' lawyers wrote.

The court has given no timeline for addressing the request, but allowed lawyers for Nebraska and Oklahoma to make merit-based arguments in briefs due May 23.

That means the states can argue the marijuana issue itself, almost as if Nebraska and Oklahoma were already part of the case, rather than restating their reasons for wanting to join as plaintiffs.

"When they said we could be heard on the merits issue ... that's what we wanted to hear," Peterson said Thursday.

It's a different response than the states received from the U.S. Supreme Court last month when it rejected Nebraska and Oklahoma's case without considering the merits.

Then-Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning and Pruitt had petitioned the high court to intervene in 2014, the same year Colorado launched recreational marijuana sales.

Lawyers for Pueblo County, named as a defendant in the 10th Circuit case, wrote in response to the new request that Nebraska and Oklahoma are trying to bypass standard procedure and "short-circuit the process" after being denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Peterson, who took office in 2015, said the potent pot being imported from Colorado is stronger than the strains people used in the 1960s and 1970s and comes in forms ready-made to market to children, such as candy and cookies. That burdens Nebraska law enforcement and endangers young people, he said.

His office would rather join an existing case than file new action that could get stuck behind an ongoing appeal, Peterson said.

"To me it's a matter of judicial economy. ... It just makes sense."
There's no evidence a female mountain lion prowling along the Missouri River in Southeast Nebraska is pregnant with kittens, a state wildlife biologist says.

Nebraska Game and Parks Commission officials have known about the big cat for more than a year, but they didn't know it was a female until genetic testing of a small amount of blood found in a paw print in January determined the cat's gender.

It's the first confirmation of a female mountain lion in Southeast Nebraska in modern time.

Young males are more likely to stray from their usual breeding grounds in northwest Nebraska's Pine Ridge, Niobrara River Valley and Wildcat Hills, although cougars are native to the state and probably roamed Southeast Nebraska before being wiped out by settlers, said Sam Wilson, the commission's carnivore program manager.

Wilson spent his Jan. 5 birthday tracking the female mountain lion through the snowy bluffs along the Missouri River. The blood from the print yielded no information beyond the cat's gender, he said.

"It's not certain the animal will stay here or reproduce," he said Wednesday. "It could move. It could have already moved."

There's also a chance kittens have already been born.

"If we got pictures of two animals together or kittens, that would be the evidence we are looking for," Wilson said.

Trail cameras on public and private land in Nemaha and Richardson counties have been capturing footage of at least one cougar in the area that includes Indian Cave State Park since early last year. The most recent known sighting was March 20, Wilson said.

"I don't know that it's the same animal, although it certainly could be."

The footage has spanned a "pretty good distance," Wilson said, noting that cougars being tracked with GPS elsewhere in the state have home ranges of about 42 square miles.

Hunting mountain lions is not allowed in Nebraska this year.

The state's first and only cougar season was in 2014, when hunters killed five big cats and 11 others died from illegal hunting, traps or being hit by vehicles. Ten of the 16 killed that year were females.

State lawmakers gave Game and Parks authority to set mountain lion seasons in 2012. Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, who was out of office that year due to term limits, has fought to ban the hunting since shortly after he returned to the Legislature in 2013.

He failed to get the ban passed again this year, but he convinced his colleagues to make mountain lion conservation license plates available for vehicles beginning Oct. 1. The cost of the plates includes an extra $5 fee that will go to support education efforts by Game and Parks.
Lincoln City Libraries will celebrate Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month in May with free public events at Bennett Martin Public Library, 136 S. 14th St.

On Sunday, Asian-themed storytime begins at 1:30 p.m. and will include crafts and a cultural display. From 2 to 2:30, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Korean Traditional Dance Club will perform and teach Korean phrases.

On May 15, from 3 to 4:30 p.m., the Lincoln Chinese School and VietStar Dance groups will perform, Karen artifacts will be on display and activities will include calligraphy, origami and henna design.

Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month celebrates two milestones: the arrival in the U.S. of the first Japanese immigrants on May 7, 1843, and the contributions of Chinese workers to the building of the transcontinental railroad, completed May 10, 1869.

More information on Lincoln City Libraries, lincolnlibraries.org.
The League of Women Voters of Nebraska thanks the editors of the Journal Star for their solid, factual endorsement of LB 580, the Redistricting Reform Act ("A veto for politics as usual," April 20). The legislation was co-sponsored by Senator John Murante, a Republican, and Senator Heath Mello, a Democrat. Governor Pete Ricketts vetoed the act and Senator Murante subsequently did not seek an override. If Governor Ricketts had checked with his counterpart in Iowa, he would have found that Iowa has successfully relied on an independent redistricting commission for decades. Final approval of the maps has always been done by a vote of their legislature, meeting the constitutional requirement.
Sen. Deb Fischer expressed caution and concern Thursday about the deployment of up to an additional 250 U.S. military personnel, including special forces, to Syria to help in the fight against Islamic State jihadists.

"I don't disagree that we have to fight ISIS," Fischer said during a conference call from Washington.

"My concern is with adding 250 more Americans who will be embedded on the front lines. That's a big step.

"We need to make sure we know what the mission is and what the goal is, (and) I don't see this administration has an overall plan."

President Barack Obama announced the additional deployment to Syria this week during a speech in Germany.

About 50 U.S. special operations forces already are deployed in Syria.

Fischer is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The Hitchcock County Sheriff's Office says the shootings were reported early Wednesday morning. Sheriff Bryan Leggott says the two men's names won't be released until family members are notified about the deaths. No other information about the shootings has been released.
They were forged by blacksmiths, sold to fur companies and fur traders, and put to work in a younger and wilder America.

These traps took muskrat and wolf and fox but mostly beaver, supplying the country -- and the world -- with fur for fashion and warmth.

But that was two centuries ago -- in some cases, nearly three. The handmade traps carried by mountain men and pioneers would become relics and rarities, and dozens would eventually become the property of the Museum of the Fur Trade near Chadron.

And this week, some of them could have become yours.

Like a massive wolf trap with foot-long jaws that could have been used for bear.

Or a rare single-spring design that dates to the 1750s.

Or a French Canadian trap with a solid cannon ball attached as the drag.

Or a beaver trap with a hand-built chain and low-arched jaws that was popular during the early 1800s, the peak of the mountain man era in the North American Rockies (think Leonardo DiCaprio and The Revenant).

The private museum has been gathering fur trade-era traps -- and tools, guns, utensils, blankets, blades and other provisions -- for 60 years. And over time, its ended up with duplicate pieces, said director Bill Armstrong. Some more desirable than others.

There are things that have been on exhibit that we have better versions of now, he said. Theres no point in having one thats not as exquisite as the one weve acquired.

So museum staff recently selected 30 surplus traps and put them up for sale, announcing their availability in the spring issue of Museum of the Fur Trade Quarterly. Some of them are missing pieces and parts, but all of them are old, authentic and historically important.

Its a pretty mundane-looking object but, quite honestly, if you know the history of westward expansion, its the tool that created a lot of that discovery, Armstrong said. Thats one of the reasons theyre so collectible -- theyre so symbolic.

Fur trappers and traders blazed the trails later followed by settlers, and the traps for sale reflect that movement.

Some of the oldest traps, for example, were used in the Great Lakes and the Old Northwest -- Ohio and Indiana -- in the 1700s. The traps from the early 1800s helped open the mountain west.

With help from an apprentice, a good blacksmith could make a trap in a half a day and sell it for about $10, a high price two centuries ago. And most mountain men would be packing three to six traps. But not all blacksmiths were good, and chains would break and springs would fail and the traps would disappear.

So these remaining traps are more than symbolic. Theyre rare, and theyre priced accordingly. The museum is charging between $75 and $500 apiece, although most are $250 and $300.

They are so unusual to have around, Armstrong said. Theyre iron, theyre forged, they spent their lives submerged in water.

Theyre also selling fast. The museum already packed up 20 of the 30 traps this week.

Ive got collectors, other museums, calling me, he said. Its a big deal.
OMAHA  Police say a child has been shot in north Omaha and taken to a hospital with injuries.

Omaha police Lt. Matthew Lippold says a child, who is thought to be 1 year old, was shot around 5 p.m. Wednesday and taken to the Nebraska Medicine.

Police did not provide any additional details, saying it was still early in the investigation.

A person was seen being led by police in handcuffs shortly after 5 p.m.

The shooting happened on 34th Street, next door to the home where 71-year-old Merlin Prinz was killed Monday.
RACINE  Dustan Balkcom thinks of Racine, seemingly often under a wave of criticism from its residents and others, like a beleaguered child.

If a parent is screaming at their kid and telling their kid what a failure they are and all the things that are wrong with them, youre probably going to call Child Services on that parent, Balkcom said. But yet, thats the way we often are about our city.

As a way to combat that negativity, Balkcom, a local building manager, created the Ask Me Why I Love Racine Facebook page about 18 months ago as a forum for residents to promote positive thoughts and actions toward the city. On Monday, Balkcom took his efforts to a new level when he and a few volunteers created a giant chalkboard on a construction enclosure at the intersection of Third and Main streets Downtown.

People are ready to share their love for this city, but there hasnt necessarily been a great forum for it all to be underneath one banner, he said. The goal of Ask Me Why I Love Racine is really to build a common thread where people can demonstrate it in a big way.

That giant chalkboard has, quite literally, been that big way. Not only does the display have several dozen responses scrawled on it, but the timelapse video of the chalkboards creation has gone borderline viral, attracting 10,000 views and reaching 21,000 people on Facebook (Balkcom said his posts on the page usually reach 400 to 800 people) in the first 24 hours.

What thats saying is that people are ready to love their city and sometimes people just dont even know how, or how to show it in a way that will make a difference, he said.

Joining the positive team

One of the people to write on the wall, Colleen Patterson, said she loves Racine because of DP Wigley. Patterson lived in Chicago before moving to Racine in 1995 and said the neighborhood atmosphere which DP Wigleys staff fosters would be impossible in a big city.

Theyre a mom-and-pop store, literally, Patterson said. They are very diversified in what theyre offering. They have adapted what theyre selling for their clientele.

Pattersons praise would put her on what Balkcom calls the positive team. That team, which appreciates and focuses on the good things about its city, according to Balkcom.

In Racine and probably in many cities across the world, the negative team is winning because theres a lot of bad things going on, he said.

Through the Facebook page and chalkboard, its Balkcoms goal to turn the tide.

The negative team is winning in most cities and I think its because the positive team is not well organized, he said. With Ask Me Why I Love Racine, our goal is to better organize the positive team.
RACINE  A request to rezone seven parcels at the southeast corner of Ohio Street and Washington Avenue to make way for a 24-hour CVS pharmacy will head to the City Council without a recommendation from the Plan Commission.

Following a lengthy public hearing and debate on the request, the Plan Commission voted Wednesday 3-1 against a motion from Alderman Dennis Wiser, who sits on the commission, recommending that the zoning be denied.

The end result is that request will head to the City Council  potentially as early as next week  without any recommendation from the commission, staff said.

About eight people spoke during the public hearing. Five of the speakers  most of them property owners living close to the proposed CVS site  objected to the zoning change.

The traffic is going to be unreal, said Dorothy Jarveld, who lives on Virginia Street. And I have another question: When is all this voting going to cease?

Those who spoke in favor of the rezoning request included Richard Donner, an attorney representing CVSs developer TMC, who assured those gathered that his client is still very interested in pursuing the project.

TMC still has the properties under contract and CVS is still interested in continuing to invest in the City of Racine and in building a neighborhood pharmacy at this location, Donner said.

The votes

Regardless of the message it may send to aldermen, the Plan Commissions vote could have little impact on how a final City Council vote on the rezoning question shakes out  whenever that may happen.

The councils two newest members  14th District Alderman Jason Meekma and 4th District Alderman Tracey Larrin  said Wednesday they werent sure yet how they would vote on the question. But, even if they ultimately vote in favor of the zoning request, it may not be enough to grant the change.

Under state statute and city ordinance, if at least 20 percent of property owners living directly opposite the land proposed for rezoning oppose the change, it requires a three-quarter majority vote to be approved.

On Wednesday, Maricela Lopez, whose parents bought 1228 Virginia St., one of the properties directly opposite the area, said her family has signed a petition opposing the rezoning.

We had no idea this was going on when we bought the house, Lopez said following the meeting.

The CVS question

But it wasnt comments from property owners that seemed to trouble the Plan Commission.

The question that seemed to dog most commissioners is whether they could effectively separate the rezoning request from the CVS pharmacy proposal.

Although the council had been advised by city staff to send the rezoning request back to the City Plan Commission to make sure the new property owner at 1228 Virginia could be made aware of the proposal, interim city Development Director Matt Sadowski said Wednesday the commissioners should only consider the rezoning request itself  not the proposed CVS project. Changing the zoning at the corner to B-2 Community Shopping District would be detrimental to the neighborhood, he added.

But Commissioner Molly Hall said she found it hard to divorce the two issues.

I find it difficult to consider the request in the abstract, Hall said before casting her vote against Wisers motion.

Donner also took issue with Sadowskis statement.

It is being presented tonight that the council itself is requesting this rezoning as opposed to, or separate and apart from, TMCs application, Donner said. This is confusing, because the city has increasingly asked, since this happened, what TMCs intentions were: Whether it still wanted to build at that site, and, whether it still had the properties under contract. All that information has been given to the city.
MADISON  Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, a conservative whose opinions helped solidify a series of controversial changes in state law in recent years but also known for his physical confrontation with a colleague, announced Wednesday he would retire in July.

Prossers retirement comes after 18 years on the court and five years before his term ends. Gov. Scott Walker will need to appoint a justice to replace Prosser, part of the courts 5-2 right-leaning majority.

State law requires Walkers appointee to serve until the next spring election that does not have a Supreme Court justice on the ballot, according to Walker spokesman Jack Jablonski, which is 2020.

It has been a tremendous honor to serve the people of Wisconsin in various capacities for more than 40 years. During this time, I have had the exceptional privilege of working in all three branches of state government, including 18 years as a representative in the State Assembly and 18 years as a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Prosser said in a statement. He did not agree to be interviewed.

Jablonski said Walker has not yet begun the appointment process.

In a statement, Chief Justice Pat Roggensack described Prosser as an exceptionally bright and thoughtful jurist whose presence on the Court will be greatly missed.

Prosser, 73, was appointed to the states highest court by Republican former Gov. Tommy Thompson in 1998, replacing former Justice Janine Geske. He was elected to a 10-year term in 2001 and re-elected 2011, defeating State Appeals Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg.

Prossers retirement comes after the April election of Justice Rebecca Bradley, whom Walker appointed last fall after the death of Justice N. Patrick Crooks in September.

In his resignation letter to Walker, Prosser did not cite specific reasons for his retirement but said it is time to start a new chapter.

Trying times

Prossers retirement comes amid a period of turmoil on the court, during which Prosser was accused by liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley of putting her in a chokehold after she ordered him to leave her office in June 2011.

Prosser, in defending himself against a complaint filed with the Supreme Court about the altercation, said Bradley charged at him with her fists clenched and he put his hands up in reflex, touching her neck.

The incident occurred as six of the seven justices were debating whether and when to release the courts split decision upholding Wisconsins collective bargaining law, which had sparked weeks of protest at the Capitol.

In Judicial Commission investigative records about the matter, Prosser described a long-simmering rivalry with Bradley.

The state Judicial Commission also reviewed an incident in which Prosser called former Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, a member of the courts liberal minority, a derogatory term and threatened to destroy her.

Prosser told the commission the chief justice had for years been seeking to destroy or emasculate him by recruiting candidates to run against him and allegedly upstaging him at ceremonial events.

Reaction

Roggensack in her statement on Prossers retirement said his contributions to the court and state government are unlikely to be matched by anyone.

Prosser also served in the state Assembly from 1978 through 1996, during which he served two years as Assembly Speaker.

Marquette University Law School professor Ed Fallone, who unsuccessfully ran against Roggensack in 2013, said Prossers legacy can be divided into two pieces: his time on the court and his involvement in the courts recent turmoil.

He served for a long and honorable time on the court and earned respect as a reasonable jurist, but much of that has been overshadowed by his personal interactions with his colleagues in more recent years, said Fallone. Observers who watch the Wisconsin Supreme Court have long recognized that Justice Prosser often saw himself as an opposition to Justice Abrahamson ... I think that personality clash has led some people to view (the court) in partisan overtones.

Fallone also said despite being categorized as part of the courts conservative majority, Prosser could be unpredictable in his rulings.

Justice Prosser was often viewed as a justice who would sometimes surprise in terms of where he would come down on issues and sometimes viewed as a justice the liberal wing of the court could win to their argument, said Fallone. He certainly, for much of his earlier career, was seen as someone who was perhaps more unpredictable and in the middle in terms of his approach to the law, but I think in more recent years with interpersonal problems on the court, that became much less frequent.

Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel of the conservative legal group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said Prosser brought an atypical and valuable background as a former legislator to the court.

I think he was an excellent justice, said Esenberg. He brought a unique perspective to the court. Theres this misconception (that) to be on the Supreme Court, one should have been a circuit court judge before ... and I think there was value for some people to have that perspective on the court. He understood the strengths and weaknesses of the legislative process in a sort of fundamental way that maybe not everyone would.

Prosser brought a certain amount of candor to the court, Esenberg said, in not being afraid of calling out his colleagues when he thought he needed to do that.

Esenberg also said he didnt believe Prosser contributed to the perception of the court being partisan.

Its very, very difficult to assign blame when there is discord in a group  its always hard for someone outside the group to know exactly why thats happening, said Esenberg.

Esenberg said there were periods of time in which there wasnt discord and rancor on the court, noting Prosser often departed from the so-called conservative majority on the court.
The application process is now open for those vying to replace Justice David Prosser on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Gov. Scott Walker announced Thursday he will accept applications, which include a resume, cover letter, judicial application and writing sample until 4 p.m. on May 19.

Based on discussions with sources since Prosser's Wednesday announcement, here's a shortlist of likely contenders for the seat on the high court:

Judge Brian Hagedorn, Wisconsin Court of Appeals, District II

Hagedorn was appointed to the Court of Appeals, his first judicial appointment, by Walker in 2015. He previously served as the governors chief legal counsel from 2011 to 2015. He clerked for Justice Michael Gableman in 2009 and served as an assistant attorney general in the state Department of Justice for one year, from 2010 to 2011. He earned his law degree from Northwestern University School of Law in 2006, where he was president of the Federalist Society, a student group that promotes conservative and libertarian legal principles. Hagedorn is active in defending Act 10 in the courts and has said his faith informs his approach to the bench. Here is the application he submitted for his Court of Appeals position. He did not return a call for comment Thursday.

Judge Jim Troupis, Dane County Circuit Court

Troupis was appointed to the Dane County Circuit court by Walker last year, and has already said he does not plan to run for reelection when his term expires in August. Troupis is a longtime Madison attorney who worked with Republican legislators on redrawing the state's legislative district maps in 2010. Those maps are now being contested in federal court. He also represented Prosser during the justice's campaign recount in 2011. He earned his law degree from Northwestern University School of Law. WisPolitics has reported that Troupis will apply. He did not return a call for comment Thursday.

Judge Randy Koschnick, Jefferson County Circuit Court

Koschnick ran unsuccessfully to unseat Justice Shirley Abrahamson in 2009 and told the Cap Times he plans to apply for Prosser's seat. His daughter, Katie (Koschnick) Ignatowski, currently serves as Walker's chief legal counsel. Randy Koschnick said his daughter has told him she will remove herself from the selection process. Koschnick has been a judge in Wisconsin for 17 years, since 1999. He is a circuit court judge in Jefferson County and has served as the chief judge for District 3, which includes Jefferson, Waukesha and Ozaukee counties, for three years. Before becoming a judge, he served as a public defender in Jefferson County for 14 years. He was involved in the effort to require mandatory e-filing for courts statewide, which the state Supreme Court adopted in February. He earned his law degree from Hamline University School of Law in Minnesota.

Judge Thomas Hruz, Wisconsin Court of Appeals, District III

Hruz was appointed by Walker to the Court of Appeals bench in 2014. He was a private practice attorney and partner at Meissner Tierney Fisher & Nichols, S.C. in Milwaukee and clerked for Prosser at the state Supreme Court. At the time of his appointment, Prosser praised Hruz and said he "will quickly be recognized as a great judge. Hruz has written on voter fraud and is a former fellow at the conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. Hruz earned his law degree from Marquette University School of Law. He did not return a call seeking comment.

Judge Mark Gundrum, Wisconsin Court of Appeals, District II

Gundrum, a former Republican state representative, was appointed to the Court of Appeals in 2011. He served in the Assembly from 1999 until he was elected as a trial court judge in Waukesha County Circuit Court in 2010. He reportedly commuted with Walker to Madison during their time in the Legislature. He was featured on the Netflix documentary "Making a Murderer" for his involvement in creating a criminal justice reform bill after Steven Avery was exonerated for a 1985 crime. WisPolitics has reported that Gundrum will apply. He did not return a call for comment Thursday.

Mike B. Brennan, Attorney, Gass Weber Mullins

Brennan is a private practice attorney at Gass Weber Mullins in Milwaukee and also serves as chairman to Walker's Judicial Advisory Selection Committee. Brennan served as a Milwaukee Circuit Court judge for nine years and was also a Milwaukee County assistant district attorney. He earned his law degree from Northwestern University School of Law. He has written extensively on legal issues, including a piece on personal responsibility for the Marquette University Law Review and judicial activism for The Federalist Society. He charges $400 for mediation services, and is a member of the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals, a trade association for professional mediators. Brennan did not return a call for comment Thursday.
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BNAC raises serious concern at the arrest of Kanak Mani Dixit

Britain-Nepal Academic Council (BNAC) has issued a press statement on Thursday expressing its serious concern at the arrest of Journalist Kanak Mani Dixit by the Commission for the Investigation of the Abuse of Authority (CIAA).
CG Holdings plans to build four hotels in next five years

Chaudhary Group (CG) Holdings has announced developing four hotels in the next five years, with formal acquisition of Tigerland Safari Resort and Lodge in Chitwan on Wednesday.
Channing Tatum got a horse for his birthday

Actor Channing Tatum received a horse from his wife and actress Jenna Dewan Tatum for his birthday.
CIAA finds illegal appointments in health sector

The Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority said on Wednesday that it has found appointments of office bearers at various councils that govern the health sector to be illegal.
Prahlad Rijal is a business reporter at The Kathmandu Post, focusing on the energy sector. Before joining the Post, Rijal was an online reporter at The Himalayan Times.
Dixits wife moves court

Shanta Dixit, wife of arrested Sajha Yatayat Chairman Kanakmani, moved the Supreme Court on Wednesday demanding the release of her husband.
DPM Thapa holds high level political meetings in London

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Fake engineering degree racket busted, five held

The Metropolitan Police Crime Division (MPCD) on Wednesday made public five individuals, including three engineers, who were arrested on charge of producing and possessing fake engineering degrees.
Four killed in inferno

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House at Thapa Gaun catches fire

A fire which broke out this morning at a house in Thapa Gaun at Naya Baneshwor area of the capital city has caused minor damages with no human casualty.
House to have a lot on plate as session starts

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Humla drought: Winter crops wilt in farms

Winter crops in Humla are dying out because of prolonged drought. As Humla has not received enough rainfall for the past several months, there has been a widespread crop failure in the district.
IBN drafts marketing document to attract FDI

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Jeep fatally rams 21-year-old

A pedestrian succumbed to injuries after being rammed by a jeep at Maurighat of Lalmatiya -5 along the East-West highway on Wednesday night.
Kabir Khan denies protest in Karachi, asks media to ignore

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Kusawaha gets 10 yrs for killing fellow UML leader

The Bara District Court on Wednesday sentenced former CPN-UML lawmaker Ram Chandra Pyasi Kusawaha to 10 years in prison after finding him guilty of murdering fellow party leader Mohammad Alam.
'Laser walls' activated along India-Pakistan border to plug gaps in vigil

A dozen "laser walls" have been made operational along the India-Pakistan international border in Punjab to plug the porous riverine and treacherous terrain and keep an effective vigil against intruders and terrorists exploiting the frontier areas to cross over.
Madhesi-Janajati alliance submits memorandum

The Madhesi-Janajati alliance on Wednesday submitted a memorandum to the District Administration Offices across the country, calling on the government to redraw the federal boundaries carving two provinces in the Tarai plains.
One dies, 52 hospitalised after attending birthday party

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PAC directs govt to forward national identity card issuing process

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PM Oli expresses concern over delay in finalising parliamentary regulations

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Pramod Mishra is a biweekly columnist for The Kathmandu Post. He is the department chair of English Studies at Lewis University in the United States.
Punishing heat wave causes misery in Tarai

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Quake survivors urge govt to rope in development partners

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SC issues show-cause notice to CIAA, Commissioner Karki & police over Dixits arrest

The Supreme Court (SC) has issued a show-cause notice to the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA), Commissioner Lokman Singh Karki and Police Headquarters over the arrest of journalist and Shajha Yatayat Chairman Kanak Mani Dixit.
Syria conflict: Deadly air strike on Aleppo hospital kills 14 patients, 3 doctors

At least 14 patients and three doctors have been killed in an air strike on a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo, the charity Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) says.
The rights approach

Its best to allow Truth and Reconciliation Commission process complete autonomy
Two held with fake Indian bills

A special team of the Mid Regional Police Office arrested two persons on Wednesday with counterfeit Indian bills with a face value of IRs 300,000 at Kalaiya-8 in Bara.
US returns stolen ancient Buddhist sculpture to Pakistan

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Yes, its hard to to tell when one enters the city limits

Yes, they will make the city more inviting

Maybe ... does it really matter?

No, the signs in place are fine

No, it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars

Vote

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Uganda Investment Authority Executive Director Dr Frank Sebbowa has challenged Ugandans to take advantage to the countrys numerous opportunities for both local and foreign investment.

Government through the Vision 2040, ear marked tourism, infrastructure development, and human capital development as key priority areas towards socio-economic transforming.

In an interview with K-FM, Dr. Sebbowa says an enabling environment has been established to attract investment in target projects.

The projects are part of the 2nd phase of the National Development Plan covering the period between 2015/16 and 2019/2020.
Government is exploring the possibility of housing the new radiotherapy machine in the existing bunker to quickly restore the modality of treatment to the patients in need.

The cobalt 60 radiotherapy machine, installed at Mulago hospital in 1995, broke down beyond repair last month.

Its replacement is not due for at least one year due to the absence of a bunker to house a new one.

However, in an interview with the Daily Monitor Health Minister Dr. EliodaTumwesigye said they were trying to get a technical assessment of whether the existing bunker can be able to house the new machine in the coming weeks.

He adds that the assessment report will be discussed at a meeting to be held later this week.

However, according to the director of the Uganda Cancer Institute, Dr. Jaskson Orem the existing bunker is not safe to house the new cancer machine.

Uganda would also be going against recommendations by the International Atomic Energy Agency against using the old bunker.

Radiotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses beams of intense energy to kill cancer cells, delays in replacing the machine have left about 2000 cancer patients with unbearable pain.

Story By Emanuel Ainebyona
Cabinet has cleared the Anti-Pornography Act, 2014 for implementation.

The Anti-Pornography law was intended to deal with pornographic material which is corrupting public morals and fanning dangerous sexual behaviors.

According to the Information and National Guidance minister, Jim Muhwezi, this was after careful scrutiny with a view to addressing its ambiguity to ease its applicability in Uganda.

Muhwezi says the Ministry of Ethics and Integrity has now been asked to formulate clear regulations to operationize it.

Also approved are the Anti-Pornography Regulations, 2015, which is intended to ease the implementation of the Anti-Pornography Act, 2014.

Among others, the new guidelines specifically bar obscene publications and staging of erotic and nude drama and/or dances in Uganda.

The guidelines also prohibit broadcasting of sexually explicit material, in form of still pictures, video footage and vulgar presenter utterances on our media air-waves.

Cabinet has also authorized the Minister of Ethics and Integrity to issue a Statutory Instrument to gazette the Anti-Pornography Regulations, 2015, so that enforcement can commence immediately.
The Constitutional Court is today expected to make a ruling on the objections by Lwemiyaga County MP Theodore Sekikubo challenging a decision of a magistrate to refer a ruling for interpretation an election matter.

Last month, Masaka Chief Magistrate, Samuel Munobe petitioned the court seeking interpretation whether his order directing the Electoral Commission not to gazette Sekikubo was beyond his powers.

Through his lawyers, Sekikubo is challenging the magistrates decision to make an order on an issue which did not form part of the pleadings.

The case resulted from an earlier petition that sought to overturn Sekikubos election victory without giving him a hearing.

Patrick Nkalubo petitioned the court in Masaka seeking a vote recount of the Parliamentary Elections ballots.
TOPS knives recently introduced its newest bush-craft knife, designed with a jungle theme.

The Brakimo -- pronounced BRAH-key-moe -- is named it in honor of the Matis Indian tribe of the Amazon jungle.

Joe Flowers, who designed the blade, is the owner of Bushcraft Global, a survival school that often leads him into the jungle. Lacking a flagship knife for his company, Joe fashioned the Brakimo to fit that need.

The Brakimo is intended for use as backup to a machete or main camp knife. It has a fairly wide blade profile combined with TOPS modified Scandi grind that gives it great cutting and splitting power.

The tip of the 5.25-inch 1095 carbon steel blade narrows dramatically, making it useful for fine work such as drilling holes for bow-drill fires  if you need to go that native. It also features a green canvas Micarta handle.

Read the full article here on Recoil Magazines webpage.
The Houston Public Library has been awarded a Legacy Community Collaboration grant from SELCO (Southeastern Libraries Cooperating) to bring books out to the public this summer with a Library Book Bike.

With kids schedules so full in the summer, parents cant always fit in a trip to the library, library director Liz Gibson-Gasset said. The obvious solution is to take the library to them at events in the community. Our Book Bike will be at summer recreation practices and games, Wednesday night music at Trailhead Park, and other local events.

Local artist Nate Bailey will donate his time and many parts to create the bike, and the Friends of the Library will provide new materials for kids that will go out exclusively with the Book Bike this summer. Patrons will be able to obtain library cards and check books out with a laptop and Wi-Fi hotspot that will be obtained with grant funds.

Other community partners for the book bike project are the Friends of the Houston Public Library, Houston Summer Rec Program and the Houston Arts Resource Council.
HOLMEN  Dave Braun and Troy Amdahl want to change the world with a word: Oola.

The authors of the international bestseller Oola: Finding Balance in an Unbalanced World visited with hundreds of students, parents and staff Thursday at Prairie View Elementary. They spoke about the need to live a balanced life, accept differences and pursue goals.

Its really important to live a balanced life, Amdahl told the students. Youre designed for awesome, not average.

The staff at Prairie View read the book more than a year ago, Principal Patrice Tronstad said. The staff thought it would be awesome to share its message with students, too.

Braun and Amdahl came up with the idea for the book after Braun lost his Oola, he said. He promised Amdahl that if regained the balance in his life he would write about it.

Since the books release in 2012, the two have been touring the country, sharing their message of Oola. Wisconsin is the 19th state they have visited, asking students to share their Oola dreams on stickers plastered all over their Volkswagen bus.

Oola is based on seven key areas of life: fitness, finance, family, field, faith, friends and fun. Brett Eiken, a school counselor at Prairie View, said students have learned about all of the areas, sans faith and finance, as well as the Oola wheel, path and plan in units and activities the school uses to combat bullying, promote diversity and help kids find balance in their life.

It is a great way to put all of the things the students learn together, Ekern said. The Oola guys decided to visit Holmen on their #Ooladreamtour after seeing the way students embraced the concept, Eiken said.

Oola is about finding what is unique in your life and going for it, the two Oolaguys told students. Just like fingerprints and snowflakes, everyone is different and has unique gifts, they said.

The students also need to avoid Oola blockers  feelings and external influences that keep people from pursuing their goals and dreams. Fears, doubts, anger and jealousy can all be blockers, and people need to fearlessly pursue their dreams, the two said.

The world looks at wealth and the accumulation of stuff as the measures of success, Amdahl said, which can trip people up and cause them to lose their balance. The two said they want to redefine success as living a good life, being happy and healthy, and having good relationships with family and friends.

You have this crazy Oola inside you that is huge, Amdahl said.
MADISON  When legendary Funky Drummer Clyde Stubblefield was faced with $90,000 in medical bills after suffering bladder cancer in 2000, local musicians rallied and staged benefit concerts to help him out.

Then came a call from Princes people.

Prince, the musical innovator and international superstar who died last week at his Paisley Park compound outside Minneapolis at age 57, paid Stubblefields remaining hospital debt  but asked that the deed be kept quiet, Stubblefields wife, Jody Hannon, said this week.

Hannon went public with the story after Princes death on April 21 shocked the world.

Hannon still gives a shout out to the Madison musicians who raised about $10,000 to help her husband  who earned his Funky Drummer nickname playing with James Browns band in the 1960s  during his illness 16 years ago.

Clyde wasnt yet Medicare age, and he did not have insurance, Hannon said in an interview Wednesday.

The medical bills were just climbing, climbing close to $90,000. But even with help from the local community, we were worrying about how we would deal with the rest of this. I got a call from Clydes manager at work and she said, These people want you to call them back.

Hannon did.

It was Princes people and they said, Prince wants to take care of the complete balance of your medical bills. Clyde is one of his drumming idols.  Just name the number, and we will send it to the hospital.

I was going to say $20,000, which already seemed like a lot to me, but I just finally said the bills are 70, 80 thousand, Hannon recalled. And they immediately transferred that and had the bill taken care of.

Along with an outpouring of grief and admiration for Prince from around the world, tributes to the late musician have included tales of his anonymous, behind-the-scenes generosity  five-figure checks that benefited schools and programs for low-income youth, music education, and the nations first full-service, free public library open to African Americans, Western Branch Library in Louisville, Ky.

Combining elements of rock, jazz, pop, funk and R&B, Princes music defied genres. But both the star and critics acknowledged the influence of The Godfather of Soul James Brown.

A drummer since he was a child, Stubblefield got his big break when Brown pulled him into his band and featured him in some of his biggest 1960s hits. Stubblefields groove is legendary on tunes such as Cold Sweat, Say It Loud (Im Black and Im Proud), Ive Got the Feelin  and the seminal Funky Drummer.

Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., Stubblefield moved to Madison in 1971, and the city claimed him as its own.

Now 73, the drummer continues to perform from time to time despite losing part of his right index finger and thumb last year. The Clyde Stubblefield All Stars play a monthly happy-hour show at the High Noon Saloon to benefit a youth scholarship fund established in Stubblefields name and will share the stage with Sonny Knight & the Lakers on June 10 at the Majestic.

Stubblefield also plans to be at the Memorial Union on June 25 when the radio show Michael Feldmans Whadya Know?, where Stubblefield was a musical regular for 20 years, has its last broadcast.

Recently Stubblefield, along with fellow James Brown band drummer John Jabo Starks, was ranked No. 6 on Rolling Stone magazines list of 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time. His drumsticks have been on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and were named to the list of 100 objects that define Madison by the Wisconsin State Journal.

Stubblefield once recorded with a band in Princes Paisley Park studios, he said, and on that day caught a glimpse of the younger artist standing outside the studio in a hallway. But musically, Stubblefield knew Prince only from his hit single Purple Rain.

I still dont believe it, Stubblefield said of Princes quiet gift to him in 2000, but Im honored.
Faculty members from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and three other UW System schools will work together to create an educational doctoral degree in student affairs administration and leadership.

The new doctorate prepares student affairs professionals for leadership positions at colleges and universities. Courses will only be offered and are designed for those who already hold a masters degree in student affairs or higher education and who have more than three years of professional experience in higher education.

After approval from the UW System and the Higher Learning Commission in 2015, UW-L, UW-Green Bay, UW-Oshkosh and UW-Stevens Point met this spring to begin development of the degrees courses. The student affairs administration program will begin accepting applications in fall 2016.

The doctorate will be offered at UW-L for the first time in 2017 and is one of two doctorate degrees offered at the university. The other is in physical therapy.
WASHINGTON  Donald Trump has decided that sexism in the quest for victory is no vice.

Trumps supporters have regularly asked why his long string of primary successes has not led his Republican opponents to accept him as the presumptive nominee, the phrase he used about himself Tuesday night. The candidate helpfully answered the question by showing that there is nothing normal about his campaign for the presidency.

A candidate on the verge of taking it all is usually gracious about his foes inside the party and conscious of the need to broaden his appeal beyond it. But graciousness is not a Trumpian concept.

On his most glorious night so far, he again showed Republicans why choosing him would produce an avalanche of Democratic votes from American women  and from many men who respect women more than Trump seems to.

If Hillary Clinton were a man, I dont think shed get 5 percent of the vote, Trump said of a woman who happens to have been, among other things, secretary of state and a twice-elected U.S. senator from New York. The only thing shes got going is the womans card. And the beautiful thing is, women dont like her.

But nothing is more likely to bring women her way than attacks from a brute, and Clinton made no effort to disguise her eagerness to join the brawl Trump started.

If fighting for womens health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, she said with a broad smile, then deal me in!

Far from backing away on Wednesday from his gender war, Trump escalated it, I havent quite recovered  its early in the morning  from her shouting that message, Trump said on Morning Joe. And, yes, Trump said, he knew he was courting charges of sexism. I know a lot of people would say you cant say that about a woman, he added, because of course a woman doesnt shout.

Its helpful when your opponent underscores your own talking points.

For good measure, Trump took a preemptive shot on Good Morning America at Carly Fiorina, even before Ted Cruz announced that she would be his vice presidential running mate. Trumps criticisms of her, of course, were not because shes a woman.

Trump is the champion of subliminal messaging. He loves to remind us that his candidacy depends on the regular mobilization of intolerance.

All this is why  despite his big wins on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island, despite his large delegate lead, and despite the manifest weaknesses of his two remaining opponents  Trump is still no sure thing for the GOP nomination. Next Tuesdays primary showdown in Indiana is crucial. So are the still widespread fears among Republicans that a Trump nomination would lead to a November bloodbath for their party.

For all the talk of hard feelings between Bernie Sanders and Clinton, whose four wins this week effectively sealed her nomination, the Republican Party is more divided ideologically and less sanguine about its front-runner.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this month found that while 78 percent of Democrats said they could see themselves supporting Clinton, only 61 percent of Republicans said this of Trump.

Trump consistently loses to Clinton in hypothetical matchups because of her 20- to 30-point margins among women. Trump seems determined to make that gap even wider.

And if Sanders strong showing among young voters defines a Clinton problem for the fall, Trump is the obvious solution. A poll of 18- to 29-year-olds released on the eve of Tuesdays primaries by Harvards Institute of Politics showed that among voters under 30, Clinton received 61 percent to 25 percent for Trump.

Trump has exposed the timidity of the GOPs leadership class and the bankruptcy of an old conservative ideology that can no longer rally the faithful. For their part, Ted Cruz and John Kasich arent doing a very good job of cooperating even though their survival depends upon it.

But Trump has yet to kick his habit of reinforcing for all but his most loyal supporters how unsuitable he would be as a nominee. He made another stab Wednesday at looking presidential with an America first foreign-policy speech offering bits of specificity that most serious candidates would have put forward months ago.

The fact that Hillary Clinton is beaming is why so many in Trumps party are frowning with apprehension. There remains one man who can beat the front-runner. His name is Donald Trump.
Former Sen. Russ Feingold still isn't saying who he voted for in Wisconsin's presidential primary on April 5, but he signaled on Thursday that former Hillary Clinton is likely on her way to being the Democratic nominee.

"Hillary Clinton, she knew how to do this in 2008  she fought as hard as she could, and when it was clear that the handwriting was on the wall, she did the right thing," Feingold told reporters Thursday after a WisPolitics.com luncheon in Madison. "Bernie Sanders, if he ends up not winning, is going to do the same thing. Ive seen this time and again. Ive seen it the way he was speaking last night and this morning. He will do the right thing when the time is right."

Feingold argued nothing positive can come from him sharing the details of his ballot and said he hasn't even told his wife who got his vote.

His goal, he said, is to unify supporters of both the former Secretary of State and the Vermont senator. He also said his opponent, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, has every right to keep his vote a secret as well.

The Democratic primary will "work out fine," Feingold said, taking a swipe at the instability of the Republican contest.

"There is no big hurry. People have to take time to get their feelings out about the differences," Feingold said of the Democratic race. "There are differences. There are a lot of young people that are invested in Sen. Sanders campaign, and what he did was great. And what hes doing is great. He helped make Hillary Clinton a better candidate, and what he did on his own, raised issues that frankly Ive been raising for decades, that needed to be raised about the power of big money in politics, and the dominance of Wall Street."

Asked whether it's clear Clinton is the party's presumptive nominee, Feingold said he doesn't know and it's not important for him to weigh in on the issue.

Feingold leads Johnson among Wisconsin voters, 47 percent to 42 percent, according to a Marquette University Law School poll released last month.
Farm safety programs have a long history in this region of the state. Many Extension employees and community members have participated in safety programs that have included small camps at county fairgrounds, workshops at local schools and tractor safety training for teenagers. These programs are designed to reduce the tragic accidents and incidents that regrettably come with living in farming country.

One of the most successful programs to date is the farm safety day camp run for fourth graders in both Fillmore and Houston counties. This program was developed over a number of years and stands as a great example of cooperation between public entities and community members. This year, University of Minnesota Extension has chosen to honor the work that Jerry Tesmer put into this program by renaming the program The Tesmer Farm Safety Day Camp. Jerry was a long-time Extension educator in this region and the safety camp we know today would not have been possible without his commitment to the project. We not only would like to thank Jerry, but all those who have supported the development of this program which has improved the safety of the children in our region.

This years safety camp is being held Tuesday, May 17, at the Mabel Steam Engine Grounds. This year, we have more than 500 students signed up to attend the camp. Thank you to all of the schools who have signed up for this program. Your continued support brings significant safety education to a vulnerable group in our local communities. Sessions this year include electrical safety, tractor PTO safety, basic first aid, lawn mower safety, ATV safety, grain drowning, general farm safety, tractor rollover, livestock safety, bicycle safety, nutrition, a 911 call simulator and fire safety. New to the camp this year are sessions on plant identification and horse safety. As in past years, all students will be supplied with safety materials to take home including activity books and T-shirts.

Thank you to all of the community members who support this program. The farm safety camp is completely funded through local donations and many local business, community groups and individuals give their time to this program every year. A special thanks to the Fillmore County Pork Producers who are cooking lunch this year and to all commodity groups who donate food, equipment and their expertise. Feel free to contact the local Extension office if you are interested in participating in this program.

We are looking forward to having another great camp on May 17 and wish everyone a safe farming season this year.
The United States has increasingly carried out what have been called freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea.

This month, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited a warship in the South China Sea in an effort to show Americas commitment to security in the area.

The exercises involve Navy ships and military aircraft. In a freedom of navigation operation, they are sent to areas where other countries have tried to restrict flights or shipping. The aim is to demonstrate that the international community does not accept such restrictions.

The freedom of navigation operations have brought strong reactions from China.

Now, some U.S. lawmakers have called on the Obama Administration to carry out more operations close to artificial islands China is developing in the disputed waterway.

Bob Corker of Tennessee is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He expressed his ideas on Wednesday.

He spoke before Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with the committee.

Corker said the freedom of navigation exercises have not slowed Chinas land reclamation efforts in the South China Sea.

Neither the rhetoric nor the freedom of navigation operations have deterred or slowed down Chinas land reclamation activities, including the stationing of military-related assets on these artificial islands.

He said that China could take further actions if an international court rules against it in its maritime territorial dispute with the Philippines. And he warned such a ruling could place American interests at risk.

But merely managing differences with China is not a successful formula, particularly when such management cedes U.S. influence and places American interests at risk in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

In his comments, Blinken said the number of freedom of navigation operations carried out by the U.S. military has increased. He added that they will continue.

Recent news reports, notably in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, say China may be considering plans to develop other areas beyond the Spratly Islands.

The reports say the U.S. Pacific Command has sent warplanes close to Scarborough Shoal, west of the Philippines. China is believed to have carried out survey work in that area. Those U.S. flights brought a sharp response from China.

China claims most of the South China Sea as its territory. However, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei have competing claims to different parts of the area.

Nanjing University security expert Zhu Feng said he could not rule out Chinese construction of a lighthouse or a maritime monitoring post on Scarborough Shoal. However, he said a large land reclamation would there would be out of the question. The Wall Street Journal reported his comments.

Im Mario Ritter.

Victor Beattie reported this story for VOA News. Mario Ritter adapted it for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

_____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

artificial  adj. not natural, man-made

maritime  adj. related to the sea or ocean

formula  n. a plan or method for doing something

monitor  v. to observe or watch

navigation  adj. of or related to the watching and controlling the movement of a vehicle from one place to another

commitment  n. a duty or responsibility

deter  v. to prevent or stop


Apple may have had a decline in iPhone shipments for the first time since launching the first model in 2007. But Apple wasnt the only company to see a slump in smartphone sales: According to a new report from IDC, the smartphone market only grew by 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2016, with total shipments of 334.9 million, up from 334.3 million during the same period in 2015.

Thats the smallest amount of year-to-year growth since IDC started tracking smartphone sales, and the research firm figures its because of market saturation in developed countries (most people who want a smartphone already have one, and may not feel the need to upgrade to a new model frequently).

But things are still rapidly changing in China  and thats led to a big shakeup in the top 5 list of smartphone makers (as measured by device shipments).

Samsung, Apple, and Huawei continue to take first, second, and third places, respectively. But Lenovo and Xiaomi have fallen off IDCs top 5 list.

Theyre replaced by Oppo and Vivo companies that have become big names rather quickly in China (and to folks who read sites like Liliputing, which cover Chinese phones from companies Vivo and Oppo from time to time), but which dont yet sell devices globally. Vivo is primarily focused on China for now, while Oppo offers phones in its home country and also in other Asian markets and a few other regions. Neither company is targeting the US yet.

But with shipments of 18.5 million phones in the first quarter of the year, IDC puts Oppo in fourth places with a 5.5 percent market share, while Vivos 14.3 million units puts the company in 5th place. Both companies more than doubled their shipments from the same period a year earlier.
Google may have sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo only a few years after acquiring the company. But the company held onto a number of key patents and Google also apparently liked some of the leadership team.

Recode reports that Google has hired former Motorola CEO Rick Osterloh to head up a new hardware division.

Osterloh will report to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, but hell basically be in charge of all of the companys hardware products.

That puts him over the teams responsible for a wide range of products including the Pixel line of Chromebooks and tablets, the Nexus line of tablets, phones, and TV boxes, the Chromecast media streamer, OnHub router program, Google Glass wearable computer, and the ATAP team responsible for working on experimental new products like the upcoming Project Ara modular smartphone.

Osterloh left Motorola in March as Lenovo announced a reorganization of its mobile, PC, and data center businesses.
Millward Brown's Best Liked Ads list celebrates South Africa's favourite TV commercials.

These are the ads that have been rated as the best liked by the South African audience whom we believe to be the most important critic - the person who ultimately chooses to buy your brand or not. Babies, cute kids and celebs are still engaging audiences, and the local is lekker trend continues and becomes even more emotive; with local humour and authenticity hitting the mark with slice of life stories that tap into fundamental human truths.




The Ministry of External Affairs has written to the British High Commission seeking the extradition of liquor baron Vijay Mallya, ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said on Thursday. The move comes days after the ministry revoked the diplomatic passport of Mallya after he failed to turn up for a probe into a Rs.9,000 crore default of loans from Indian banks.

Mallya is currently in Britain.

Four days after MEA revoked the liquor baron's passport, ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said, "The ministry has written to the High Commission of the UK in Delhi requesting the deportation of Vijay Mallya so that his presence can be secured for investigations against him under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002."

He further said that Indian High Commission in the UK will also be issuing a similar note verbale to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

"Mallya's passport was revoked last week in view of these (PMLA) investigations and non-bailable warrant issued by the Special Judge, Mumbai. We will continue to pursue this matter with UK authorities," Swarup added. Earlier this week, a consortium of banks on Monday alleged in the Supreme Court that Vijay Mallya, who has been in United Kingdom, is not ooperating in the investigation of cases lodged against him and was averse to disclosing foreign assets.

Further, in the rejoinder to the affidavit filed by the beleaguered businessman, the consortium said that disclosure of overseas assets by him and his family is significant for recovering the dues.

Last month, Mukul Rohatgi told the Supreme Court citing CBI sources that Mallya had left the country on 2 March.

After many years of dilly-dallying it was 8 March that 13 banks moved the Supreme Court seeking to block Mallya from leaving the country. The banks were worried that he may leave the country without repaying the huge amount of loan as he expressed his wish to move to the UK last week.

Mallya announced his intention to shift to the UK in a statement issued after his deal with Diageo to step down from the chairmanship of United Spirits, a company he sold to the UK major three years back. He was to get Rs 515 crore or $75 million from Diageo as severance package.

We will continue to pursue this matter with the United Kingdom authorities: Vikas Swarup, MEA #VijayMallyapic.twitter.com/SeIwR4cSlQ  ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

With inputs from Agencies
New Delhi: The Cabinet will soon take up the proposal to permit 100 per cent foreign direct investment

(FDI) in food processing sector through government approval route, sources said.

The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) had proposed to allow FDI in marketing of food products produced and manufactured in India after approval from the FIPB.

Sources said that the government will not impose any conditions on the foreign players investing in the sector. The government is also likely to permit business-to-consumer online selling of food products produced and

manufactured domestically. "The DIPP has sent the proposal for the consideration of the Cabinet. They want to make the policy simple," the sources added.

The government has said FDI in food processing will benefit farmers, reduce wastage of fruits and vegetables, give impetus to the industry and create vast employment opportunities.

During April-December, FDI into the country grew by 40 per cent to USD 29.44 billion.
Around 93 percent of students from B-Schools in India are unemployable, said an Assocham study. Was the study skewed in lumping the creamy layer of IIMs, and other top notch B-Schools with the many, many that have mushroomed around the country to slake the thirst of those individuals who want the MBA tag?

The survey has taken the B and C grade colleges as part of its study and hence these results, says Dr. Debashis Sanyal, Dean, Narsee Monjee Insitute of Management Studies (NMIMS).

Sanyal points out that the overall package offered to B-school graduates in 2015 was 32 lakhs per annum. We had the lowest package at Rs 17.09 lakh last year at NMIMS and the topper got Rs 23 lakhs, said Dr Sanyal refuting the survey that only 7 percent B-School graduates are employable. The top institutes in the country, be it in Tier 2 towns like Bhubaneswar too have 100 percent placement.

The same thought was echoed by the official at Xavier School of Management, XLRI, Jamshedpur. We have no problem with placements, said Sunil Varughese, Chief Brand and Sustainability Officer, XLRI. He says that the problem arises when students do not qualify for good B-Schools or are not equipped for the grueling course studies at B-Schools that do not have good faculty. If anyone then believes a corporate will offer placements at Rs 15 or Rs 18 lakh packages, then it is far-fetched, says Varughese.

The Assocham survey should have been ideally done by the AICTE, for it is the regulatory body for all technical courses in India. The AICTE grants approval for starting new technical institutions, for introduction of new courses and for variation in intake capacity in technical institutions. The technical institutions under the AICTE include post-graduate, under-graduate and diploma in the whole spectrum of technical education covering engineering/technology, pharmacy, architecture, hotel management and catering technology, management studies computer applications and applied arts and crafts.

Time and again surveys are done on the efficacy of high performance-centric and much sought-after engineering, B-School graduates and they reveal the almost same results  dismal performance of students, colleges and the unemployability of students in the corporate sector.

A professor from a top B School in the country mentioned that the issue is about the greed for an MBA tag from any college, never mind its reputation. The Assocham survey says that India has around 5,500 B-schools, which is a lot when compared to 4,000 in China and 7,000 in the US. However, one has to factor in the large population in India as well. But are we catering to the students with the right faculty, resources, etc? Are all the 5,500 B-Schools doing that?, he asks.

In the US, an aptitude test is taken when you seek admission for a B-School, says Anirudh Motwani, co-founder of CollegeSearch.in, an online portal that provides information to students about educational institutions across the country. He points out that many times a students interest and his capability may not be the best fit.

Almost everyone chases an MBA and because they believe the degree will take them to a better life. You could be an engineer, a pharmacist, a fashion designer who believes that an MBA degree will open the career doors for you. However, employability is about your readiness to work and the training you have received. You may be lacking that in ill-equipped B-Schools you have enrolled in, points out Motwani.

Sanyal says that if a survey on B-Schools collates information about top B-Schools in the country and also factors in the numerous others that run these courses, then it is not presenting the right picture. He states that all top B-Schools in the country have 100 percent placements. "You will not find a student in these top colleges failing to get placement. The packages may differ though. However, the industry average offered to students in B-schools last year was around Rs 32 lakhs. We had an average of Rs 23 lakhs offered to our top students and an average package of Rs 17.09 lakhs at NMIMS," he said. He says that would be the case too in a tier 2 city like Bhubaneswar. "Now that would depend on what the survey considers Bhubaneswar to be -- a city or not," he added.

However, Prof. Debabrata Chatterjee, Dean (Administration), IIM Kozhikode, says that the survey highlights a concern with regard to the quality of higher education in the country. The report should open a dialogue regarding the nature of the problem, its causes, and steps that need to be initiated to correct the situation.
New York: Facebook is crushing it: the company nearly doubled revenue from last year, and tripled its profit. Facebook on Wednesday posted a 52 percent surge in first quarter revenue, bucking a gloomy tech trend that has seen Apple, Twitter, Microsoft and Google disappoint investors this earnings season.

The blowout results drove Facebook stock up more than 9 percent in after-hours trading to above $119.

In the first quarter, Facebook reported earnings per share, on a non-GAAP basis of 77 cents, significantly beating the consensus forecast for 62 cents. Revenue rose to $5.38 billion, just above the average analyst estimate for revenue of $5.3 billion, and up from $3.5 billion in the same quarter the year before. It made $1.51 billion in net income, a big jump from the $512 million it made in the same period last year.

Facebook Users Exploding in India, Brazil

The world's largest social network has 1.65 billion monthly active users, and nearly a billion people use Facebook on their mobile devices every day. People are spending a lot of time reading posts and watching videos.

Over the last two years, the bulk of Facebooks user growth has come from outside the U.S., Canada and Europe in countries like India, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico. As Facebook's second largest market, India is home to over 108 million users, behind the United States with over 151 million users, according to data from Facebook's advertising platform.

Facebook India Managing Director Kirthiga Reddy has steadily grown the numbers in India by innovating around live videos, 360 degree videos, and introducing formats that work on low-bandwidth phones. Facebook launched a special slide show ad unit format for India, which lets people take a series of pictures and play it like a video.

Facebook won't say how many people have completely left the service worldwide but quitting is evidently tougher than breaking most bad habits.

"It's like quitting smoking," said Matthew Milan, a 38-year-old marketing executive, who set up a website, QuitFacebookDay.com.

"It's easy to relapse  you have the habits, the experience, and the comfort of having it be a regular part of your life," added Milan.

Mobile Ad Sales Surge

At any rate, Facebook's 1.65 billion monthly users have pulled in the advertisers.

"Facebook and Instagram are the two most important mobile ad platforms out there," Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, said during the company's quarterly earnings report.

And the numbers reflect that: Through the first three months of 2016 Facebooks advertising revenue ballooned by 57 per cent year-over-year to hit $5.20 billion. And its mobile ad revenue rocketed at an even steeper clip, increasing by 76 per cent year-over-year to hit $4.26 billion and account for 82 percent of the periods ad revenue.

Video ads are also gaining momentum in India as companies shift funds from their print and television budgets to pay for Facebook ads.

"We are seeing adoption of this format by large advertisers in India like Hindustan Unilever, as also small and medium businesses who use Facebook to reach people," Reddy told "Economic Times" ahead of the earnings announcement on Wednesday.

"We are helping brands use mobile videos to connect with their customers in a relevant way. Two of the brands that we worked with could see that the video platform was instrumental in increasing their reach; it was greater than what even television could do," said Reddy.

Facebook is now investing in Instagram and video to drive growth, while search and Facebooks two messaging apps, Messenger and WhatsApp, are expected to power the companys growth in five years. In 10 years, advanced projects in virtual reality and artificial intelligence will take center stage. Facebook launched the Oculus Rift headset last month, though a component shortage is delaying pre-orders.

Zuckerberg Tightens Control

Facebook announced it is proposing to create a new class of nonvoting capital stock, known as the Class C capital stock. The move is aimed at ensuring Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs leadership role at the company while he pursues his charitable giveaways.

Zuckerbergs voting control has fallen from 67.2 percent to 60.1 percent in the past two years. He pledged last December to give away 99 percent of his stock to fund health, education and environmental causes before he dies as part of the Chan Zuckerberg initiative launched with wife Priscilla.

On the earning's call, Zuckerberg built the case for the move arguing that being a founder-led company had helped Facebook focus on its mission.

This structure has helped us resist the short-term pressures that often hurt companies, said Facebook, pointing to his decision to turn down acquisition offers from the likes of Yahoo and to acquire Instagram for $1 billion, as moments when he was able to take risks that shareholders might have vetoed.

Zuckerbergs salary remained $1, but the value of his total compensation which includes security and travel expenses  fell 19 per cent to $5 million.

Meanwhile, Sheryl Sandberg saw the value of her total pay rise 20 percent to $18.7 million on the back of higher pay, bonus and security costs. Sandberg is so crucial to Facebook and its future that Facebook spent over $1.2 million to protect her by getting her a security detail.
New Delhi: Tobacco farmers and small retailers today held a protest march in the national capital demanding roll back of 85 per cent pictorial warning on tobacco products.

From April 1, the 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.

The members of Federation of All India Farmer Associations (FAIFA) and Akhil Bharatiya Pan Vikreta Sangathan (ABPVS) held a protest march and also submitted their demands to Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well as Health Minister J P Nadda, said a statement issued by FAIFA.

"We appeal to our Health Minister and Prime Minister to stop this visible example of undemocratic legislation and immediately roll back 85 per cent warnings till comprehensive livelihood solutions are provided to marginalized and displaced stakeholders like retailers and farmers," it said. They demanded a detailed investigation to unearth real motives behind the new rule to implement 85 per cent warnings on tobacco products.

The implementation of larger Graphic Health Warnings is neither practical, nor is in the interest of either consumer,

retailer, farmer or government, it added.

Since cigarettes are the most smuggled item in India after gold, the FAIFA said, "The smuggled cigarettes do not have Graphic Health Warnings, and therefore consumers also prefer them, as many of them believe that Indian cigarettes are more harmful."

There are 45.7 million people dependent on the tobacco industry in India and the government did not consult them

while framing rules, it added.
The Vijay Mallya-saga has evidently emerged beyond the definition of a typical bankerborrower dispute. With the Narendra Modi-government revoking the passport of the liquor-baron and the Supreme Court stepping up pressure on Mallya, the whole episode has gained more political attention.

For Indian banks too, this case is critical in the backdrop of the big bad loan problem the industry faces.

At least 11 per cent of the total loans given by lenders are currently in the stressed category (meaning they have gone bad or have been recast) and, more importantly, majority of these bad loans have emerged from the loans given to corporations. To be sure, the Rs 9,000 crore Kingfisher loan is just one of the large-ticket bad loan cases.

There are several other accounts where banks have been struggling for years to recover money and the chances of recovery is almost nil. Bringing Mallya before the law and making him pay back the last penny to banks will send a strong message to other defaulters that there isnt any free-lunch with public money anymore. Thats precisely the reason why there is tremendous media attention on this case.

On Thursday, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said it has already written to the UK government for the deportation of Vijay Mallya. But, the challenge before the government, as Firstpost has highlighted in this article , is to make a watertight case against Mallya to nail him in the court of law, even if the government manages to get Mallya deported from UK. Mallya left the country on March 2, shortly before non-bailable arrest warrants have been issued against him by separate courts. If one takes a closer look at the Mallya case, there are several lesser known facts:

One, Vijay Mallya is shown to have funneled around Rs 3,251.85 crores from 2005-2014 to the Kigfisher Airlines Ltd through 62-odd companies. Though some of these companies work for the infrastructure development, much of the fund came from Mallyas own companies. How did Mallya acquire so many companies across the country? The CBI investigation came across an interesting story. During Morarji Deasais time when there was a total prohibition, Vajay Mallyas father,Vittal Mallya, acquired 50-odd companies dealing with beverages across the country. That was the time when manufacturers of liquor and beverages were involved in distress selling of their assets. Others losses proved to be Vittal Mallyas gains in subsequent year when the prohibition was lifted. In less than four decades of his opulence accrued by policies of a prime minister from Gujarat, Mallya seemed to have frittered away his wealth and goodwill at a time when India is once again ruled by a man from Gujarat. The clock seems to have turned full circle.

Two, On July 29, 2015 when the CBI filed a case against Mallya of suspected fraud, sleuths were confident of getting support from top bankers. But soon they realized that they were hitting against a wall. Bankers consistently refused to carry out forensic audit of Mallyas account which is commissioned to an outside agency. Of the 8 lakh accounting entries sifted through by sleuths, they are still tentative to arrive at a conclusion. As far the bankers are concerned, they still maintain that Mallyas episode is bonafide case of bad decisions by bankers. The government however does not agree with this view and unleashed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to find out diversion of fund to foreign land.

Three, In one of the helicopter purchase from the United States, the CBI requested cooperation of the federal bureau of investigation (FBI) to trace the trail of money. The FBI conducted its own investigation and gave a clean chit to Mallya. At the end of it, the agency could not find anything dubious in the deal.

Four, is the enforcement directorates (ED) argument that it has found a huge sum of money was salted away to abroad from the Rs 900 crore IDBI loan, strong enough to stand in the court of law? There have been several cases in which the ED makes tall claims that fall flat in the court of law. This is the precise reason why the success rate of the ED is very low. What gives strength to such belief is the fact that the ED is at present headed by an IPS officer Karnail Singh on temporary basis. This is the first time that the ED has a police officer as its head.

Five, Anil Sinha, director of the CBI, was keen to freeze Mallyas foreign accounts. During the proceedings, the CBI is learnt to have been directed by the court not to initiate any such procedure unless criminality in the case is proven through evidence. This is the precise reason why the CBI has decided to go ahead with the plan to send letter rogatory (formal request letters) to UK,Ireland, France, US and Hong Kong in order to seek cooperation in the ongoing investigation. Till then, the CBI still calls it a suspected fraud. As of now, the sifting through accounting entries has not revealed any diversion of funds to foreign countries.

Six, Till March 2, 2016 when Mallya took flight abroad, the CBI had been deliberately keeping the case at a very low profile. Mallya was returning to India quite frequently and appearing before the agency to assist in the investigation. The case is learnt to have become high-profile when a top official of the PMO started getting routine briefings from chiefs of the CBI and ED regularly and gave directions to launch a vigorous campaign. As of now, top sleuths in the agency feel that the entire case may recoil on the government in absence of a credible evidence to arraign Mallya in the bank fraud. Obviously the agencies seem to be working more for perception management than investigating the truth.

The logical questions are these: Did the government act in haste by revoking Mallyas passport even before gathering foolproof evidence in this case? Does the ED have strong evidences against Mallya that would stand in the court of law?

One needs to wait and watch how the case evolves from here.

(Updating with latest developments)
Facebook Inc (FB.O) said on Thursday that government requests for account data increased by 13 percent in the second half of 2015, with the United States and India topping the list.

Government requests for account data increased to 46,763 from 41,214 in the first half of the year, the company said in a biannual report. The number of requests jumped 18 percent in the first half of the year. (bit.ly/23a3ptS)

Government access to personal data from telephone and internet companies has become a bone of contention since former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified details of a program to collect bulk telephone metadata in 2013.

Governments often request basic subscriber information, IP addresses or account content, including people's posts online.

Facebook has about 1.65 billion regular users, or about one in every four people in the world.

Facebook said about 60 percent of requests in the United States had a non-disclosure order prohibiting the company from notifying the user of the government request.

This was the first time Facebook has included details on non-disclosure orders since it started issuing the global requests reports in 2013.

(Reporting by Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
 

         

                     ,  ,    ,       ,   .
Trupti Desai has reached Haji Ali Dargah, which is reportedly massively secured, and will only go up to where women are allowed, according to CNN-News18. Desai plans not to enter the sanctum sanctorum, the channel adds.

Desai's plans to lead a movement for equal rights  Haji Ali Sabke Liye  have only angered All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM) leader Haji Rafat Husain, who according to PTI, said that his party will not let Desai enter the sanctum sanctorum.

To quote ANI, Hussain said, "We will not tolerate this. This will be an attempt to spoil the environment of Mumbai."

If she tries to enter Haji Ali Dargah forcefullty we will smear black ink on her: Haji Rafat Hussain on Trupti Desai pic.twitter.com/vnlTXOfJEr  ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

Hindustan Times reports that the protesting members will take forward the march even without police permit at 4 p.m., outside Haji Ali.

The opposition comes at a time when the Maharashtra government favoured the entry of women into the dargah in February. Till 2011, however, women were allowed to enter the dargah's inner sanctum, reports CNN-News18. According to PTI, the Dargah Board had said that the sanctum sanctorum houses the grave of a male saint and is a sin for women to touch a male saint in Islam.

PTI also quotes Hussain as saying, "Women are barred from entering graveyards and shrines. She cannot be allowed to play with Islamic traditions for cheap publicity gimmicks. Our women volunteers will be at the shrine to prevent her entry there."

Desai was the activist who spearheaded the campaign, earlier this year, to allow women entry into all places of worship. She led a successful march to the Shani Singapur Temple, and performed an aarti at the sanctum  what can be considered as a breakthrough in striving for gender equality.

The threat to the Bhumata Ranragini Brigade president doesn't just come from Hussain. On 23 April, a local Shiv Sena leader said that he'd hit her with "slippers" if she tried to enter the Dargah, even as Desai plans to continue unblinkingly, in the face of hate and violence against women. However, on Thursday, PTI reports that Sena spokesperson Neelam Gorhe rejected the previous statement and even warned of action against the said leader.

She has also asked Bollywood stars for support in this regard, reports ANI and adds, "I think Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan should state their stand on what we are trying to achieve here, on our cause... That way I believe that their fan following will join us and support us in our fight for equality."

Desai has not restricted her campaign to just places of worship: she even demanded that the RSS allow women to become its members. "The Bharatiya Janata Party was elected to power on the basis of women's votes. Women should be allowed to join the RSS to which the BJP is affiliated," she said, in an earlier report in Firstpost. Although Desai was not part of the campaign to the Trimbakeshwar temple, she along with other activists offered their prayers at the inner sanctorum.

For the Haji Ali campaign, Desai is not alone. According to a report in Firstpost, "Over 20 outfits, NGOs and human right activists on Wednesday, announced formation of 'Haji Ali Sabke Liye' to peacefully campaign against the ban on entry of women into the interiors of the 15th century Sufi shrine, located on a small islet in the Arabian Sea and visited by hundreds of people everyday."

Violence against women isn't a novel concept. Neither is barring women from entering places of worship nor is prescribing 'appropriate' dress codes for different places (basically to be 'decently' clothed in the presence of men). Desai on 13 April, apparently 'defied the dress code' of the Kolhapur temple and wore salwar kameez inside the 'girbh griha' of the temple, instead of a sari.

It might be heartwarming for Desai to know that she has apparently inspired Trikal Bhavanta, a woman seer, who entered a pit to take 'Samadhi' on Tuesday to demand the right for women to take 'Shahi Snan' during the Simhastha Kumbh. Predictably enough, Bhavanta was arrested the following day.

Desai's no-holds-barred approach seems like a victory to women world-over. But how short or long-lived will this be? For now, one hopes that her rally opens doors to sanctum sanctorum's everywhere.
NEW DELHI India has instructed an Indian-flagged oil tanker not to discharge its cargo of oil from Libyas rival eastern government and await instructions from the United Nations, a senior Indian government official said on Thursday.

Libyan U.N. Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi wrote to the 15-member sanctions committee on Monday asking for the Distya Ameya tanker to be blacklisted, a letter seen by Reuters showed. The ship left Marsa el-Hariga port late on Monday and was blacklisted on Wednesday.

Deepak Shetty, director general of shipping with Indias Ministry of Shipping, said he had told the vessels operator and separately the charterer to instruct the captain not to discharge the cargo at all, anywhere. The ship was currently near Malta.

"They will wait for the guidance from the U.N., Shetty told Reuters.

"They are now staying put ... no oil will be discharged even if the charterer wants them to. They will wait for the U.N. to tell us where the vessel will have to go."

(Reporting by Nidhi Verma, writing by Jonathan Saul, editing by Dale Hudson)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
LONDON An Indian-flagged oil tanker is returning to Libya, the North African country's rival oil corporation said on Thursday, after its failed first attempt to export crude oil led to the ship being blacklisted by the United Nations Security Council.

The Distya Ameya tanker is heading to the western Libyan port of Zawiya, said Nagi al-Maghrabi, chairman of the National Oil Corporation (NOC) set up by Libya's rival eastern government in parallel to the Tripoli-based NOC. The Tripoli NOC is recognised internationally as the legitimate seller of Libyan oil.

Magrabi told Reuters he would continue to fight for the right of the eastern NOC to export crude, describing the situation as "a legal issue and we will work on it."

The Tripoli NOC and its international backers say that if the eastern government succeeds in its long-held aim of selling oil independently, it would undermine a U.N.-backed unity government that arrived in Tripoli last month and put the political and economic future of Libya at risk.

The U.N. Security Council Libya sanctions committee blacklisted the Distya Ameya on Wednesday after receiving a request from the Libyan U.N. ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi. This requires states to ban it from entering any port.

The ship left Libya's Marsa el-Hariga port late on Monday carrying 650,000 barrels of crude and was currently near Malta. A source close to the situation said the cargo was to be offloaded at Zawiya and processed for use within the country.

Deepak Shetty, director general of shipping with India's Ministry of Shipping, said he had told the vessel's operator and the charterer to instruct the captain not to discharge the cargo "at all, anywhere."

"They will follow the U.N. guidance which will come to them through us," Shetty said. "They are now staying put ... no oil will be discharged even if the charterer wants them to. They will wait for the U.N. to tell us where the vessel will have to go."

However, the U.N. spokesman's office in New York said the U.N. Libya mission was not involved in the issue at all.

Under U.N. Security Council resolutions adopted since 2014 on the illicit export of Libyan oil, it is up to states - not the United Nations - to direct designated vessels "to take appropriate actions to return the crude oil, with the consent of and in coordination with the Government of Libya, to Libya."

(Additional reporting by Nidhi Verma in NEW DELHI, Libby George in London, Michelle Nichols and Louis Charbonneau at the UNITED NATIONS and Aidan Lewis, writing by Jonathan Saul and Michelle Nichols, editing by Dale Hudson and Marguerita Choy)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
New Delhi: Forty cities will be selected for the second phase of the Smart City Mission, which is likely to be announced by June, Rajya Sabha was told on Thursday.

The first batch of 20 cities, including Bhubaneshwar, Pune, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bhopal and NDMC area of Delhi, were selected for Narendra Modi government's flagship smart city project in January.

"It is expected that the results of the next phase will be announced by May/June," Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said in written reply.

Assured water and power supply, sanitation and solid waste management systems, efficient urban mobility and public transportation, IT connectivity, e-governance and citizen participation are some of the highlights of the smart city project.

Under the Smart City Mission, 100 cities across the country will be developed as smart cities by 2019-20 with the Union government providing financial support to the extent of Rs 48,000 crore over five years--on an average Rs 100 crore per city per year for five years.

An equal amount will be contributed by the state/urban local body and the balance funds would be mobilised through various sources such as public private partnership and municipal bonds.

Around 54 cities, including Varanasi, Nagpur, Muzaffarpur,Ghaziabad, Agra, Kanpur, Kota and Gandhinagar will compete to find a place in the second list of 40 cities for the smart city projects.
New Delhi: In its first official statement on the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal, the defence ministry on Thursday said the primary issue is corruption and it will "leave no stone unturned" to bring out the truth.

The statement also said investigation agencies are pursuing all aspects, including the arrests and extradition of "foreign nationals" Carlo Gerosa, Guido Haschke Ralph and Christian Michel James. All three are alleged to be middlemen in the over Rs 3,000 crore deal with AgustaWestland for 12 VVIP helicopters inked in 2010.

A day after Congress accused the government of trying to help blacklisted AgustaWestland and asked why action was not taken, the statement said "questions have been raised on certain trivial technicalities, which appear to be intended to distract attention from the core issue of corruption."

"Publicly available information on the procurement of AgustaWestland helicopters clearly shows that the core issue in the matter is corruption."

"The present government has taken effective action to bring out the truth and will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case. The time taken is largely because some of the key perpetrators of this misdeed are outside the country," it said.

"Some of the facts are being highlighted here to put the issue in correct perspective."

The statement gave out the details of the scam that led to cancellation of the deal for VVIP choppers and said the contract for 12 helicopters signed with AWIL on 8 February, 2010 was terminated on 1 January, 2014.

The main reason was breach of the provisions of the pre-contract 'Integrity Pact' and breach of terms of contract by AWIL. However, the company was not debarred by the order. Various bonds and bank guarantees were invoked, the statement said.

It added that it was the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, in an order on 3 July, 2014, "put on hold" all procurement and acquisition cases in the pipeline of six companies figuring in the FIR registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The firms are -- AgustaWestland International Ltd., UK, Finmeccanica, Italy and its group of companies, including subsidiaries and affiliates, IDS, Tunisia, Infotech Design System (IDS), Mauritius, IDS Infotech Ltd., Mohali and Aeromatrix Info Solution Pvt. Ltd, Chandigarh.

"No new capital procurement has been made thereafter from these companies in the tenure of the present Government," the statement clarified, a day after Congress alleged the Narendra Modi government was trying to help the tainted company make its way back.

The Congress on Wednesday alleged India's Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) gave final approval to Indian Rotorcraft Limited (IRL) - a joint venture between AgustaWestland and Tata - to produce upgraded versions of the AW119 reconnaissance and surveillance helicopter in India.

"A mention has been made regarding clearance of a joint venture involving AgustaWestland by the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. This proposal was approved on September 2, 2011 based on an application by Indian Rotorcraft Ltd., a joint venture of Tata Sons with AgustaWestland NV, Netherlands. This was later changed to AgustaWestland S.p.A, Italy due to re-organisation within the group. On 7 February 2012, an industrial licence for the manufacture of helicopters was granted by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion to Indian Rotorcraft Ltd," the statement said.

"However, the validity of the licence has since expired," it added.

The statement also said that "on the core issue of corruption", the CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) are "vigorously pursuing" all aspects of the investigation, including the arrests and extradition of three foreign nationals, Carlo Gerosa, Guido Haschke Ralph and Christian Michel James.

"Red Corner Notices were issued in December 2015 and January 2016 through Interpol under Prevention of Money Laundering Act and Prevention of Corruption Act. Extradition request has also been made for Christian Michel James. One of the agencies (Enforcement Directorate) has arrested an Indian national and attached approximately Rs.11 crore of property belonging to Indian nationals and to Christian Michel James," the statement added.
A few days after six people were killed in two separate incidents of fire in Bihar's Lakhisarai and Darbhanga districts, the state government on Thursday issued an advisory telling people not to cook or conduct any puja, havan or any religious activity between 9 am and 6 pm in rural areas.

PTI reported that the advisory asked people "not to light fire between 9 am and 6 pm and observe 'havan' and puja before nine in the morning."

"Summer at its peak and accidents happen due to fire," ANI quoted Vyasji, Principal Secretary, Disaster Management, as saying.

"The advisory has been issued for those living in rural areas not to cook food, offer puja or even burn wheat crop leftovers on agricultural fields after 9 am and before 6 pm because the intense heat wave blowing during this period stokes fire," The Hindu quoted an official of the state's Disaster Management Department as saying.

Reacting to this government decision, Satender Bind, who lost his hut in a fire in a village in Bihar's Jehanabad district, told NDTV, "It sounds fine but I wonder how many people will follow it. There are practical difficulties. But yes... I did lose my home in a fire and it started from someone's cooking."

Over 700 houses had been gutted due to the Darbhanga fire.

Four children were charred to death after fire broke out at Pokhrawan village under Kajra police station of Lakhisarai district, Kajra police SHO Ranjit Kumar had said.

The fire was caused by an electrical spark at a villager's home during cooking which also spread to neighbouring Ranjit Thakur's home, the SHO had said.

The flames were so severe that all the four children including goods were reduced to ashes and that's why the bodies could not be recovered, he added.

With inputs from PTI
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on 28 April when Trupti Desai first made an effort to enter the Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai. In light of Friday's Bombay High Court ruling that allows the entry of women into the inner sanctum of the Haji Ali Dargah, this piece is being republished.

Recent developments about women from different faith backgrounds demanding equality over the right to religious worship are extremely important and should be seen as historical. Given that patriarchy draws sustenance from customs, traditions and practices purportedly based on religion, these latest moves by women assume tremendous significance. Indian women are coming out in the open demanding justice and challenging the male hegemony over religion. They have seen through the age-old game of male orthodoxies appropriating religion and planting themselves as sole custodians of places of worship thereby excluding anybody who doesnt blindly accept their authority. Women can participate in Pujas in temples and Urs in dargahs so long as women agree to abide by rules and regulations devised by male patriarchs. But women questioning the discriminatory rules and traditions is out of the question!

The Haji Ali Sabke Liye is a heartening step as it signifies a larger churning in Indian society for a just and fair world order where women are treated as equal human beings. It signifies that Trupti Desai is not alone in this fight. It signifies that Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan is not alone in this fight. More significantly, it means that women are not alone in this fight. There are men in large numbers who support this struggle for justice and equality. It signifies that hindu women and men are speaking out in support of muslim women and vice versa. It signifies that sizable number of muslim men are willing to stand up to defend the rights of their sisters from all faiths. This is a historic movement with long-term significance for Indian democracy and for the future of religion in the modern world.

Exclusion of women in the name of religion has been the case world over and particularly in South Asia. Sati, dowry, widow ostracisation, triple talaq, servile bahudom [daughter-in-lawhood] are all unjust practices based on some or the other myth invented within the religious framework. The source can be invented at will from the Puranas or manusmriti or concocted ahadis  they are all meant to misguide society and force the women into unquestioning submission. What better way to further the male superiority fable other than customs based on religion! While some of these issues are very much real even in modern India, the exclusion of women from places of religious worship  temples and dargahs  in particular stands out.

For centuries male hegemonies have owned or presided over places of religious worship be they churches, temples, dargahs, mosques etc. This control over places of religious worship is key to the larger hegemony over women and thereby whole communities. So, when the temple trust decides that women are impure and cannot enter the chabutra [inner sanctum] an exclusionary practice becomes the norm. Suddenly in 2011 the Haji Ali Trust decided that women cannot be allowed into the mazaar [sanctum where the Pir lies buried] and this was meant to become the norm. This diktat overnight declares us women as impure and inferior and therefore we are barred from entering the mazaar and offering the chadar with our own hands.

It is another matter that till 2011, we had been going right into the mazaar and offering our prayers. Can these arbitrary rules and regulations be accepted? Would not every believer, every human being, every Indian, every muslim, every hindu question it?

What we are witnessing presently is this questioning of male hegemonies, be it the Shani Mandir, Sabarimala or Haji Ali. Fortunately, there are enough number of citizens of India, both hindus and muslims who are not willing to accept such misogynist practices in the name of religion. For one, it is a violation of religious tenets of justice and equality. Secondly, it is also a violation of the Constitutional principles of justice irrespective of gender and sex. Places of religious worship are public places and they cannot be permitted to violate the rights of citizens on account of their gender or sex.

The courts are upholding the highest principles of justice and equality and they are a great source of inspiration for all who believe in equality of the sexes. It is heartening that Haji Ali Sabke Liye has citizens from all faith backgrounds  hindus, muslims, Christians, Sikhs, parsi  men and women who have decided to join the fight for justice. It includes citizens from all sections of society - activists, writers, thinkers, film makers, scholars, academics, business persons, students, lawyers, IT professionals, shop owners  a slice of our multi-cultural multi-religious society! Along with Trupti Desai and her group these citizens have decided to stand up and be counted for womens equality in religion.

All power to Indian citizens in this quest for a just and fair world!

Zakia Soman and Noorjehan Niaz are co-Founders of Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan
Sriharikota: India on Thursday afternoon successfully put into orbit its seventh and final navigation satellite  IRNSS-1G  with its own rocket in copy-book style.

With this, India successfully completed putting into orbit all the seven navigation satellites to complete the system in the sky.

Exactly at 12.50 pm, the PSLV rocket standing 44.4 metres tall and weighing 320 tonnes tore into the afternoon skies with fierce orange flames at its tail.

At the rocket mission control room, scientists were glued to their computer screens watching the rocket escaping the earth's gravitational pull.

Just over 20 minutes into the flight, the PSLV rocket ejected its sole passenger  IRNSS-1F  at an altitude of 488.9 km.

Soon after this, the satellite's solar panels were deployed.

The satellite's control was then taken over by the Mission Control Facility (MCF) at Hassan in Karnataka.

The MCF will manage the satellite's orbit raising operations firing the on-board motors till it is placed in its slotted orbit.

Simply put, the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) is similar to the GPS (global positioning system) of the US, Glonass of Russia and Galileo of Europe as well as China's Beidou.

While GPS and Glonass are fully functional global systems, the Chinese and the Japanese systems offer regional coverage and Europe's Galileo is yet to be operational.

India will formally join the select group of nations owing such system once IRNSS is declared operational after checking the systems - space (satellites), ground (ground stations) and the user-end signal receivers.

Only after the system is declared operational, will user-end signal receiver makers seriously get into the manufacture of equipment for use at the retail end, industry officials told IANS.

According to Indian space agency, the applications of IRNSS are: terrestrial, aerial and marine navigation, vehicle tracking and fleet management, terrestrial navigation for hikers and travellers, disaster management, integration with mobile phones, mapping and geodetic data capture and visual and voice navigation for drivers.

In other words, IRNSS could be said to be the "Indian GPS".

Apart from the civilian applications, the IRNSS will be used for defence purposes as well.

Immediately after the 1,425 kg IRNSS-1G satellite was ejected by the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C33) rocket, scientists at the mission control centre clapped their hands happily.

"The launch was successful," Isro chairman A S Kiran Kumar said soon after. The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) will raise the satellite to its home slot over the next couple of days.

The satellite, with a life-span of 12 years, has two payloads for navigation and ranging.

The navigation payload of IRNSS-1G will transmit signals to the users on the L5-band and S-band. A highly accurate rubidium atomic clock is part of the navigation payload.

The ranging payload consists of a C-band transponder (automatic receivers and transmitters of radio signals) which facilitates accurate determination of the range of the satellite.

An Indian-owned satellite navigation system is crucial to get positional accuracy during war or a war-like situation as the country may be denied such information by countries owing similar systems during such times.

The system will provide accurate position information service to users across the country and the region, extending up to an area of 1,500 km. The full system comprises of nine satellites  seven in orbit and two on the ground as standby.

Each satellite costs about Rs 150 crore, while the PSLV-XL version rocket costs about Rs 130 crore. The seven rockets would entail an outlay of about Rs 910 crore.

The total project cost including other facilities is around Rs 1,420 crore, said Isro officials.

"The Indian system provides positional accuracy of 10 metres. For civilian usage to bloom and costs to come down, more manufacturers have to start making the navigation signal receivers. That will happen once the IRNSS is formally declared operational," AS Ganeshan, retired programme director of Isro's Satellite Navigation Progamme, told IANS.

Ganeshan said once the IRNSS is ready then there will be more development of application software that would be useful for different segments.

"The Indian government should mandate the use of indigenous satellite navigation systems by various government agencies and the emergency service providers so that the signal receiver makers are enthused to get into accelerated production mode," Ganeshan added.

He said once the mandatory usage is there, more software applications could be developed, thereby widening the usage.

Agreeing with him, S Purushotham, director, Accord Software & Systems Pvt Ltd told IANS: "If there is a mandate then it will give a big fillip for the receiver makers' Make in India efforts."

"The IRNSS is a new system. We will wait and see how the market evolves so that we can decide on getting into manufacture of the receivers," S Rangarajan, CEO of Chennai-based Data Patterns (India) Pvt Ltd, told IANS.

An ISRO official told IANS that it may take three to four months for the space agency to check and cross-check all the systems before IRNSS could be d eclared operational

The first satellite IRNSS-1A was launched in July 2013, the second IRNSS-1B in April 2014, the third on October 2014, the fourth in March 2015, and the fifth, sixth and seventh on 20 January, 10 March, and 28 April, 2016.

Once IRNSS passes all the tests, India need not be dependent on other platforms.

According to Isro, even with the operationalisation of six IRNSS satellites, the proof of concept of an independent regional navigation satellite system over India has been demonstrated for the targeted position accuracy of better than 20 metres over 24 hours of the day.

With the operationalisation of the full system, far better positional accuracy will be provided, Isro said.

Indian space agency officials said IRNSS system is unique as it consist only seven satellites while other systems in the world have more than 20 satellites.

However, while most other systems are global, the Indian system is regional in nature.

The IRNSS will provide two types of services  standard positioning service and restricted service. The former is provided to all users and the later is an encrypted service for authorised users.
JNU, financed by the national exchequer, is being massively misused, with total impunity, as a spring-board to launch a heinous sabotage for another partition of India.  A JNU Professor in 1996

Two decades ago, when Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student union president Kanhaiya Kumar and his comrades were still learning the basics of algebra, unaware of the grammar of politics, a professor of their future alma mater was writing a letter highlighting anti-national activities taking place in the JNU campus; something for which Kumar would be accused of, exactly 20 years later.

On 7 February, 1996, Badal Ghana Chakravorty, Associate Professor, Department of German, wrote a letter to the registrar of JNU with a subject matter  'Rampant anti-national activities of the agents of Pakistan on JNU campus  that gives an eerie sense of deja vu.

The text of the letter is alarming for the allegations made in it. In the letter, Chakravorty wrote, The agents of Pakistan have become vigorously assertive on the issue of Kashmir in recent times. The valley of Kashmir, following total physical liquidation of all the non-Muslims, has practically become an all-Muslim territory. This has emboldened the agents of Pakistan on the J.N.U campus to intensify their vicious campaign for a full-scale secession of Kashmir from India,"

"A seminar was held on 15 November, where a full-throated declaration was made for another partition of India. According to my information, armed terrorists, staying as guests in Aravali and Gomti, were present with arms hidden on their persons. Some terrorists are staying unauthorised in different hostels even today. Kindly press I.B. into immediate action, Chakravorty wrote.

The letter forms a part of compilation of proofs to stress on how JNU has been a centre of intense anti-national activities for a long time and how the university administration had turned a blind eye to it.

The dossier put together by a group of teachers of JNU was submitted to the university administration last year. It consists of articles, speeches made by some JNU faculty and students, posters of the numerous events and seminars, and also press releases by Delhi police highlighting the presence of anti-national elements on campus".

One such press release, dated 10 April 1991 reads, The Delhi police has uncovered a major international conspiracy involving persons based in UK, Canada, USA, and Nepal, working at the behest of elements in Pakistan, of funding militancy in J&K. The Delhi police arrested Ashfaq Hussain Lone, a top ranking operator of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, in Delhi and Sahabuddin Gori, a JNU student using the cover of Human Rights activists. Gori was acting as a conduit for funds and communications with terrorists in Kashmir. Rs 16.27 lakhs and incriminating documents have been recovered. The money and the documents were intended to be delivered to terrorists in the valley for expanding their subversive activities.

The question of some students misusing the tax-payers money fomented strong reactions during the entire debate following the 9 February incident. But Chakravortys letter is much more scathing than the assertions made by certain sects of the civil society in last few months.

He writes, Madam Registrar, I am writing these lines more in anguish than in anger. JNU, financed by the national exchequer, is being massively misused, with total impunity, as a spring-board to launch a heinous sabotage for another partition of India.

While some of the papers and articles in the dossier smacks of strong prejudices as it makes baseless and salacious allegations against some eminent professors of the universities, letters like that of Badal Ghana Chakravorty, however, points to the fact that allegations of JNU being the hub of anti-national activates is nothing new.

One of the articles talks about an incident that took place in the year 2000, which can be corroborated by a notice issued by the dean's office condemning the incident, that has also become a part of JNU folklore.

In April 2000, an Indo-Pak Mushaira was organised in JNU campus ostensibly as a poetic event, but actually to malign and belittle the Indian victory in the Kargil war of 1999. Two army majors (in civilian dress) who were visiting their friends in JNU were witness to pro-Pakistan slogans. The two army majors, who had just fought in the Kargil heights against Pakistan reacted to such slogans and got beaten up by the student mob that was instigated by anti-national elements in JNU , the article read.

While the dossier, for the major part, puts together several documents to show how events like that on 9 February have been a routine rather than an aberration.

Some of the posters, photocopies of which are part of the dossier, read, Tum Kitne AFZAL maarogay, ghar ghar se AFZAL niklega. On the first martyr day of Shahid Afzal Guru. Mashaal Jaloos. 8 Feb(Saturday) from Ganga Dhaba 9pm and protest march :DSU.

Kashmir needs no 'sensitivity' Kashmir demands Azadi  the final report submitted by the group of interlocutors for J&K reeks of Indian states big nation chauvinism. Article 370 or special status can no longer contain Kashmir's aspirations for freedom, read the poster.

JNU Dossier Story by Firstpost

Apart from targeting the students, the dossier also made serious allegations against some of the faculty members of JNU. The dossier has a photocopy of the news report titled  'Two day-International Kashmir conference begins in Muzaffarabad'.

Also included are reports that state that attendees included Professor Anuradha Chenoy, and has a remark written on it which read, Government of India employees and officers not allowed to enter into Muzaffarabad (POK). But how professor Anuradha Chenoy and Kamal Chenoy visa were alloed(Sic). It adds, "Prof Chenoy involved in anti=national activities (Sic)."

The dossier also claims that some eminent professors like Nevedita Menon, Ranjani Mazumdar, Kumkum Roy are engaged in anti-national activities by getting involved in seminar for free Kashmir.

Close reading of these papers makes it clear that the allegations made are not backed by documented proofs, but rather are based on assumptions and subjective readings of the political positions of these faculty members.

What is most striking in the collection is a paper that makes serious allegations against students in JNU. It reads, Over 300 Kashmiri and north-east separatist activists are staying illegally in the hostels of JNU. They are the main force behind organising (anti) India activities, protest demonstration, talks and lectures by separatists leaders in JNU campus. Beef eating festival, Mahishaswar Diwas and hate campaigns are a regular feature in hostel activities and various seminars/lectures organised by known anti-India elements.

Of late, the focus of DSU, AISA etc has been to highlight the cause Azadi (independence) for Kashmir, mass grave and enforced disappearances, martyrdom of Maqbool Bhat and Afzal Guru, recently on 9 February, 2014 a huge Mashal procession was organised in JNU campus in the evening by Prof Ayesha Kidwai, Prof Anuradha Chenoy and Prof Kamal Mitra Chenoy through their front organisations (DSU,AISA),"

"These three faculty members have recruited over hundred students (for instance Ms. Deepti Tamang, Ms Priyadarshini, Rauf, Umar Khalid, Iqbal Majeed Bhat, Dawa Sherpa, Rona Wilson Shehla Rashid... are the most vocal slogan raisers) and activists by feeding then with funds, alcohol and other facilities like placements in different NGOs, civil society groups, institutes that are run in India with the funding of Ford Foundation, foreign agencies, Action Aid, Oxfam etc, the paper read.

The most serious allegation made by the paper was about how few academics like Ayesha Kidwai, Prof Kamal Mitra Chenoy and Prof Anuradha Chenoy are misusing JNU and their coveted position of senior teachers in the university for propagating secessionism in Kashmir and North-East, legitimising and rationalising terrorist activities in these states, stoking the fires of hate and anti-national sentiments by organising seminars, lectures, issuing pamphlets, posters, publications and nukkad nataks, rallies demonstrations, sit ins, hunger strikes and strikes in JNU for several years without any fear.

The reason attributed for doing all this in the paper is to attack Indian sovereignty in Kashmir, North-East and to keep the Indian state as a destabilised state. And the paper goes on to say that they are doing so by recruiting young minds in JNU campus and elsewhere by addicting them to night parties/revelries, alcohol and cash payments to carry forward their agenda.

The article concludes, And in this process JNU has become a den of organised sex racket in which some hostel karamcharis, maid servants, beauty parlours run in Munirka village and the activists of DSF, DSU, AISA and other rouge elements are coordinating their activities.

Hari Ram Mishra, Assistant Professor, Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies, who helped compile the dossier says, We compiled these papers over the time just to highlight the fact that how badly the campus has been affected by anti-national activities. We just wanted that this campus, which is known for its great academic work, is cleansed of any wrong activities.

When asked who is the author of the article that talks about JNU as a den of organised sex racket he said that he "has no idea who wrote it.

After the JNU administration rusticated Anirban Bhattacharya and Umar Khalid and imposed fines on Kanhaiya Kumar and others on Monday, a second round of struggle by students has already started. While all JNU student and teacher associations defended Kumar and the other accused students in the entire episode, some of the revelations made in the dossier do raise serious questions on the nature of politics in the campus.
New Delhi: JNU students who have been punished by the university in connection with the controversial 9 February event on Wednesday began an indefinite hunger strike to demand revocation of punitive action.

JNU Students' Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya along with other students started the hunger strike at night and said they reject the findings and recommendations of the high-level inquiry committee that probed the incident.

Kanhaiya, Umar and Anirban Bhattachayra were arrested on the charge of sedition in February in connection with an event on campus against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised. They are out on bail now.

"We have been maintaining right from the beginning that we have no faith in the probe committee. We are all sitting on hunger strike against the arbitrary punishments given to us.

The inquiry was a sham and students have rejected it in our general body meeting. We will not abide by the punishment given to us," JNUSU General Secretary Rama Naga said.

The students took out a march late night from Ganga Dhaba to administration block against the action. While Kanhaiya has been slapped with a penalty of Rs 10,000 on grounds of "indiscipline and misconduct", Umar, Anirban and Kashmiri student Mujeeb Gatoo have been rusticated for varied durations.

Fourteen students have been imposed financial penalty, hostel facilities of two students have been withdrawn and university has declared the campus out of bounds for two former students.

ABVP member Saurabh Sharma, who was complainant in the case lodged over the event, has also been slapped with a penalty of Rs 10,000 for blocking traffic.

Five members of ABVP have been sitting on hunger strike since yesterday, alleging that the university is "criminalising" patriotism. The university officials, however, maintained that the decision has been taken after thorough investigation by a five-member probe panel and are in accordance with varsity norms.
Negligent administration, poor water management, extreme weather events, inadequate rainfall have been blamed for the drought in Marathwada. Help has trickled in, but not enough to make a difference. Trains with 50 wagons carrying 25 lakh litre water to Latur have been ceremoniously named Jaldoot Express. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has assured more water rakes for drought-hit Latur. Even Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had promised help when the first train was sent to Latur. But the number of farmers' suicides reported in the first three weeks of April in Marathwada reveals that relief is nowhere in sight.

As many as 65 farmers in Marathwada have committed suicide in April, reported The Times Of India. It further said that the highest number of suicides was reported from Beed - 60, followed by Aurangabad and Nanded. Latur reported 44 farmer suicides. Burdened with crippling debt and three years of drought, over 300 farmers have ended their lives this year. Farmer suicides were also reported from Osmanabad, Jalna, Parbhani and Hingoli districts.

District administration officials have instructed health care workers and doctors to extend help to distressed farmers and "boost the morale of farmers." Officials told The Times Of India that 146 cases are eligible for compensation, 117 cases are pending and around 75 claims have been rejected so far.

Meanwhile, central teams will study drought-affected areas in the country till June this year and prepare a long-term plan of possible actions to tackle the calamity. The Central Water Commission (CWC) and Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) teams have been asked to analyse the causes leading to drought in these areas and identify water resources management challenges.

The teams will also figure out gaps in water information and plans to recharge, long-run solutions and suggest measures for protection, management and restoration of water bodies, the statement said.

According to a DNA report, two new water rakes would be deployed on a shorter route to Latur. Water from Dudhana river will be sent to Latur via Partur instead of Miraj.

The Aurangabad Bench of the Bombay High Court on Tuesday ordered 50 percent water cuts for breweries in Marathwada from 10 May. A bench of Justices SS Shinde and Santeetrao Patil said that it was inhuman that breweries were enjoying a lavish supply of water, when people had not seen water for days.

Apart from breweries and distilleries, the court has also increased the water cut for other industrial units by 5 percent from the initial 20 percent starting 20 May.

With inputs from PTI
In a decision that can impact lakhs of medical aspirants, the Supreme Court on Wednesday told the Centre to implement the National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) from the academic year 2016-17 itself. The decision comes in the wake of the 11 April verdict in which the bench headed by Justice Dave recalled the 2013 directive scrapping the NEET, and directed the Centre to administer it for admission into all medical colleges across the country.

The apex court bench headed by Justice Anil R. Dave gave its nod to two-phase holding of the NEET by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), as it declined the submission by certain states and associations of private medical colleges not to thrust NEET on them.

The decision has had a impact on the All India Pre-Medical Test (AIPMT), which is conducted for admission into many MBBS and Dental colleges across India. The court approved the CBSE schedule for holding NEET exams on May 1 and July 24, the declaration of results on August 17 this year, and counselling and admissions later. AIPMT will be considered as the first phase.

The Supreme Court was hearing a petition filed by an NGO called Sankalp Charitable Trust. "A student seeking admission in a medical college has to shell out lakhs of rupees in taking an examination and most of the tests are not conducted in a fair manner. There is no impediment in way of implementing NEET after the Constitution bench verdict and the Centre should be directed to enforce the order in association with MCI and CBSE," The Times of India quoted advocate Amit Kumar as saying.

From 2013 onwards, private and minority medical institutes had their own entrance exams. This was made possible after a group of institutions, including the Christian Medical College in Vellore, moved the Supreme Court, contending that having a common entrance test violated the rights of minority institutions to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice, as guaranteed under Article 30 of the Constitution. The hearing in the case, resulted in the Supreme Court quashing a notification by the MCI for the 2013 NEET.

With the NEET back, the competition for securing the 52,000 plus seats in the MBBS course may get a lot tougher for lakhs of students across the country.

With inputs from Agencies.
Nainital: The Congress Chief whip on Thursday told the Uttarakhand High Court that the nine rebel MLAs had neither in their plea challenging their disqualification nor before the Speaker had said they were willing to support another Congress government under a different chief minister.

The submission was made before Justice UC Dhyani by advocate Amit Sibal who contended that the rebel MLAs were not

denied natural justice and that the Speaker's order was not filed in haste.

"They have not said in their writ petition or before the Speaker that they were willing to support another Congress government under another Congress CM," he said rejecting the argument of the MLAs in the court that they had not left the Congress and were prepared to support a government of the party if Harish Rawat was removed as chief minister.

He also said that the Attorney General had yesterday told the Supreme Court that the nine MLAs voted against the appropriation bill but the counsel for the rebels, who was there in the court, "did not deny it".

Sibal said the nine have moved a transfer petition in the apex court to transfer the disqualification matter there but the plea has not been listed for hearing due to 'office objections' and has not even been mentioned before the apex court.

"They are keeping it pending to keep their options open," Sibal said, to which the judge said "this court is not concerned with that petition".

Sibal also said that all documents, including the joint memo sent to the Governor, relied upon by the Speaker were provided to the dissident Congress MLAs during the disqualification proceedings.

"They pretended to not know what joint memo Speaker was talking about in the show cause notice," he said and added "they were the author of the joint memo".

Meanwhile, advocate Rajeshwar Singh, appearing for the nine MLAs, said the joint memo was not filed by the complainant.

He also said there was more than one joint memo and it was not clear which one the Speaker was referring to in the show-cause notice.

Singh also argued that the joint memo which the Speaker had relied upon was given to them only on 25 March.

Responding to this argument, Sibal said there was only one joint memo to the Governor.

After the brief arguments, the court listed the matter for further hearing on 9 May.
Akbar once drew a line and asked Birbal to make it bigger without touching it. Birbal immediately drew a shorter line next to it, making the original bigger in comparison.

Faced with an embarrassing problem of lack of intellectuals in its camp, the right wing in India appears to be following Birbal's formula: If you can't rise to the level of others, try and drag them down to yours.

Nowhere is this stratagem more visible than on the Indian campuses, where the RSS-BJP combine is dreaming of breeding a generation of dullards raised on government propaganda, pseudo-nationalism, myth masquerading as science and the drivel of an imagined past. Free thinking, critical enquiry, dissent, debate  almost every practise that led to the growth of human intellect  is being discouraged, even penalised.

Consider the latest directive of the Gujarat government to its scholars. In a global first, the state government has dictated to varsities a list of 82 topics for doctoral theses.

According to The Times of India, the government has directed that each university should ensure doctoral students opt for at least five subjects from this list. These include Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pet project 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan', Gujarat's model schemes like Kanya Kelavani, Gunotsav and MA Yojana and several other government projects and initiatives.

Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong if a student decides to research a government scheme. But, in this case, the government has decided to dictate to scholars what they should study for their theses, treating them like intellectual slaves. So, while their counterparts outside the state will have the freedom to research latest developments in science, arts and literature, students in Gujarat would have to study things like how many tonnes of garbage has been lifted from Ahmedabad's roads, or how many girls have access to PM's welfare scheme.

Pity a student whose creative and intellectual freedom is constrained by such diktats. The purpose of education is to expand the horizons of mind, explore new ideas and concepts. But the Gujarat government wants to draw a small circle around their intellect.

In 1999, the Wachowaski Brothers introduced us to the world of The Matrix through their Hollywood blockbuster. In the film, machines control the minds of humans by imprisoning them in an artificial reality called the Matrix.

If the RSS-BJP combine has its way, the youth of tomorrow would look eerily like people caught in the Matrix, imprisoned in a world of myths, arcane concepts, dead languages, forced morality and ultra-conservatism. All this through manipulation of the education environment.

A few days ago, HRD minister Smriti Irani directed IITs to introduce the learning of Sanskrit to "facilitate the study of science and technology as reflected in its literature." It would be interesting to know how many of the current BJP politicians, including the HRD minister, have an iota of knowledge of Sanskrit. But, that is besides the point?

This obsession with a language that died centuries ago makes a mockery of the knowledge dynamics of the world. In today's competitive environment, age of global economy, the focus is on learning languages that are in wide circulation  English and Mandarin, for instance.

The Sangh and its foot soldiers do not understand a simple fact: if they wish for the students, the outside world to discover the hidden secrets in our Vedic literature, it would be much more beneficial and pragmatic to get them translated in the lingua franca of students. Instead they want to force on students a language that has absolutely no practical use and do not open up employment opportunities. All this to help them to learn bogus ideas like how our ancestors flew Pushpak Vimans, fitted the heads of elephants on decapitated boys and bred children through the simple expedient of Ashwamedha Yajna or invoking gods through mantras.

While an attempt is being made to tinker with the curricula, campuses are being turned into battle grounds against students resisting the BJP-RSS ideology. Recent examples of JNU, Hyderabad Central university show Indian universities are in the grip of an epidemic of competitive sycophancy. A mad race is on to please the BJP-Sangh and do its bidding, manifest in collective cries of VCs for implementing banal decisions like flying the Tricolor on campuses to promote desh bhakti.

A lot has already been said about the JNU sedition case and its management's decision to suck up to the government by punishing students even when courts are hearing cases against Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and other students. By stoking a dying fire, the government stooges in JNU have given a second wind to Kanhaiya and his comrades, whose rejection of the punishment and resultant agitation is bound to add to the government's criticism and the administration's embarrassment.

Instead, consider a recent dossier by right wing "intellectuals" from JNU that indicts students, faculty and staff of debauchery, sex trade and drunken orgies.

"Over one thousand boys and girls (sic) students have been fined from Rs 2,000 to Rs 5,000 for consuming alcohol, for indulging in immoral activities in their hostels. On a casual glance at the gates of the hostel one can see hundreds of empty alcohol bottles. Sex workers have been openly employed in hostel messes, where they not only lure JNU girls into their organized racket but also pollute the boys. How come big and high brand cars are moving around the hostels particularly in the night hours. Some security staff is (sic) also involved in this racket. Freshers are particularly inducted in this ring of vice by luring through money, sex, drugs and alcohol, so that they become tied up with the cause of foreign agencies, says the dossier compiled by 11 JNU teachers considered close to the BJP.

The dossier is a classic example of the intellectual squalor of the right wing. In it sweeping allegations have been made against JNU, but without a shred of evidence. All of it is based on hearsay, imagined reality and slights and based on regressive ideas of morality and value judgments, steeped in misogyny (some women in messes are sex workers).

This demonisation of JNU as a symptom of the burning desire to vilify independent thinkers and ideological opponents of the Sangh. The strategy is simple: defame such institutes so much that sanskari parents would think twice before sending their children to such institutes. Perhaps the right wingers want the next generation to grow up in the stifling, regressive environment of Shakhas.

Controlling the mind of the youth has always been the holy grail of all totalitarian regimes, the fantasy of despots and dictators. The moment a population is deprived of the ability to analyse, question and interpret independently, it turns into a willing victim of propaganda. Intellectual slavery also guarantees that regimes would be not be resisted because opposition would have been wiped out through mental conditioning.

Unfortunately for politicians, the human mind is extremely difficult to control and pacify. Efforts to brainwash the youth and manipulate their intellect often fail, as the fate of Nazi propaganda reminds us. In India too, the RSS-Sangh will never succeed in imposing its agenda on varsities and schools. Had this been possible, their Shakhas would have been overflowing by now with youth willing to imbibe their ideology.

In the Matrix, the creators talk about how humans became restive when the machines conjure a utopia  a perfect world without pain or suffering, based on perennial happiness  for them as an artificial reality. But nobody accepts it.

If the human mind finds it difficult to accept manufactured perfection, what chance does the BJP-RSS have of foisting their imperfect ideologies and suffocating agendas of bigotry, conservatism, misogyny and imagined glory?

It is inevitable that free-think, liberal students would continue to offer bigger, better ideas, making the line drawn by right wingers look extremely small in comparison.
New Delhi: Subramanian Swamy, who triggered huge protests from Congress on Wednesday over his attempts to drag Sonia Gandhi in the AgustaWestland helicopter row, on Thursday again made some controversial remarks in Rajya Sabha which the Chair immediately expunged and warned him of action for "unnecessarily provoking" members on the other side.

Expunging Swamy's reference to the Constitution of another country that triggered vociferous protests from Congress members, Deputy Chairman P J Kurien also ordered media not to report the remarks.

Trouble broke out after Chaudhary Munavver Saleem (SP) in a Zero Hour mention referred to Swamy being part of the movement in 1970s to protect the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).

Swamy got up to clarify saying he had no objection to minority education institutions but the Constitution prohibits the State from financing them.

He was countered on this by the opposition to which he responded by dragging the name of another country, a reference that led to agitated Congress members rushing into the Well.

Kurien said he was expunging the reference to the Constitution of another country but that did not satisfy the Congress members who continued to shout slogans against Swamy.

The BJP MP, who took oath only on Monday, insisted that since his name has been taken by another member, he has a right to reply and again went on to refer to the country, drawing sharp rebuke from the Chair.

"I will take action against you. Subramanian Swamy you are unnecessarily provoking. I will have to take action against you... you are provoking," Kurien said.

Observing that what Swamy said would not go on record, he said "what has been expunged should not be reported by media."

Congress members sought action against Swamy with Jairam Ramesh saying he was "needling and provoking" by bringing in reference to another country. "This is deliberate."

With Congress members continuing to protest, Kurien asked them to return to their seats and said it was a deliberate attempt to subvert the Zero Hour.

Asked by the Chair what the problem was when the remarks have been expunged, Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said "the problem is the new gift of BJP. Problem is not on this side."

He said Swamy is just two days old in the House and his remarks have already been expunged twice. "There are 365 days in a year, how many times are you going to expunge his words," he asked the Chair.

Azad said Swamy does not know the difference between street language and parliamentary words. "He does not allow his hair to grey so he can learn and mature."

As Kurien asked Congress members resume their seats, they wanted the Chair to ask Swamy to take his seat first. "You cannot direct me like that. You are shouting on nothing. I have expunged (the remarks) then and there. It cannot be reported, it cannot come on TV channels," Kurien said.

With the protests continuing, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi twice went up to Swamy to convey something.

Kurien then called Naqvi to his chair and spoke to him about the continued pandemonium. Naqvi then went up to Swamy who then resumed his seat. Azad also went up to the agitating party members and prevailed upon them to resume their places.

As Congress members returned to their seats, Swamy was up on his feet again. Kurien asked him to resume his seat. "You sit down now. Come and meet me in Chamber later."

Earlier soon after new member Navjot Singh Sindhu took oath and listed papers laid, Swamy again tried to raise the VVIP helicopter deal but Congress members shouted him down.

"I am not going to mention that lady's name," Swamy said in apparent reference to him yesterday dragging Sonia Gandhi.

When Kurien asked Swamy under what rule was he raising the issue, Swamy said he wanted to raise a matter of public importance under rule 167.

Kurien then told the BJP MP that Rule 167 is for discussion in House, the procedure for which is that once notice is given, the Chairman decides whether to allow a discussion on the matter raised.

If Chairman selects the notice, the member is informed, he said asking Swamy to contact the office of the Chairman on fate of his notice.

Order was then restored and Zero Hour taken up.

Saleem in his Zero Hour mention sought continuation of minority status of AMU and said this should be decided on the floor of Parliament rather than in courts.

Earlier during their protest against Swamy, Congress members shouted 'CIA Agent' to counter him while the BJP member shot back chanting 'ISI, ISI'.

Amid protests from Congress, Kurien said shouting in Well will not produce results.

When Anand Sharma (Cong) asked how Swamy was allowed to speak on a pre-approved Zero Hour mention by another member, Kurien said if a members name is mentioned, he has a right to explain his position.

Azad however said his party had no objection to the clarification but what Swamy said was "totally out of context." Naqvi countered Azad's use of words against Swamy, saying "we have been headmasters of the school they (Congress) go to."

Later in the Zero Hour, when Deputy Chairman P J Kurien asked JD(U) member Pavan Varma to speak on the issue he wished to raise, Naqvi stood up to say that it should have been Swamy's turn as his name was there on the list.

"His name is there on the list, how can it be changed at the last minute," Naqvi asked the Chair.

Kurien replied that the list Naqvi was referring to was not the final one.

Not satisfied with the reply, Naqvi said it is not expected that the Chair would discriminate between members and said the BJP member has the right to speak.

Kurien then responded by saying that "ministers should not make such complaints" and added that they should rather find out the factual position. "I know the factual position better," Kurien added.

However as Naqvi continued to persist, Kurien remained firm and said "if you or Subramanian Swamy have complaints, you can approach the chairman."

Naqvi said he was just requesting the Chair as Swamy's name was there in the list.

Kurien responded by saying that there appeared to be a "communication gap" between him and the minister, even as he proceeded to ask JD(U) member Varma to raise his issue.
Tinsukia (Assam): Four persons were injured, two of them seriously, in a bomb blast at Debipukhuri Panchali area of Tinsukia town in upper Assam on Thursday night, the police said.

The explosive, kept in a dustbin, went off with a deafening sound in the centre of the town in the evening, injuring four persons, the sources said.

The injured persons were admitted to Tinsukia Civil Hospital from where the people who were seriously hurt were referred to the Assam Medical College Hospital in neighbouring Dibrugarh district.

The area has been cordoned off and investigations are on, they added.

Early on Thursday morning, a hand grenade exploded at Duijan near Tinsukia adjacent to a CRPF camp but none was injured. Those responsible for the explosions were yet to be ascertained, police said.

On Wednesday, a hardcore ULFA militant, self-styled Sergeant Major Rongmon Asom alias Mecuri, was killed in an encounter with army in Tinsukia district.
A PIL on AgustaWestland will be admitted and heard in Supreme Court in the first week of May, CNN News 18 reported.

CBI chief Anil Sinha briefed Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on the VVIP chopper scam investigation on Thursday. Parrikar later asked CBI to expedite the investigation.

According to media reports, the Defence Ministry will reply on AgustaWestland scam in first week of May.

The Defence Ministry in a statement on Thursday said that the government will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case.

Refuting the Congress claims that the Anglo-Italian helicopter maker AgustaWestland was blacklisted by the UPA

government, it said it was the NDA, on 3 July, 2014, that had actually put on hold all procurement and acquisition cases in

the pipeline of six companies involved in the VVIP chopper scam.

CBI and Enforcement Directorate are vigorously pursuing all aspects of the investigation, including the arrest and extradition of three alleged middlemen of the deal - Carlo Gerosa, Guido Haschke Ralph and Christian Michel James.

"Publicly available information on the procurement of AgustaWestland helicopters clearly shows that the core issue in the matter is corruption. The present government has taken effective action to bring out the truth and will leave no

stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case," a statement

released by the ministry said.

With inputs from PTI
What prevented Bhumata Ranragini Brigade head Trupti Desai from marching right into the sanctum sanctorum of Mumbai's famous Haji Ali Dargah on Thursday? Desai's decision to not enter the innermost sanctum was baffling, as when it comes to breaking age-old traditions of banning women from entering the most sacred part of some of India's most famous religious shrines, she has of late become a phenomenon.

Earlier this year, when Trupti Desai successfully marched into the Shani Singapur Temple and performed an aarti at the inner sanctum, she debunked a 400-year-old custom. In an earlier story in Firstpost, it was reported that the trust of Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra had finally allowed women to enter the temple. Similarly, she was instrumental in securing the rights of women to enter the Trimbakeshwar Temple (even though days later some women were allegedly manhandled by a group while trying to enter the inner sanctum).

On 20 April, NGOs and activists formed the 'Haji Ali Sabke Liye' campaign, lead by Desai, to protest against the ban on entry of women into the sanctum of the Haji Ali Dargah, a 15th Century shrine in Mumbai. However, till 2011, women were allowed to enter the inner sanctum, reported CNN-News18.

Feminism naturally has its enemies. And Desai isn't certainly short of them. Her proposed march to the Dargah's inner chambers angered an All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM) leader. According to ANI, Haji Rafat Husain, threatened to smear black ink on her. Another from the Shiv Sena threatened to greet her with slippers.

But nothing could deter her. With her mind on a "peaceful march", Desai set forth to Haji Ali and arrived at 4 p.m., when she suddenly changed her mind. Desai wouldn't enter the inner shrine as she had initially planned to. What went wrong? Was it because Desai was a Hindu and the place she had decided to enter, belonged to Islam? Or was it because she was intimidated by the group of men who had assembled in front of the Dargah to stop Desai from entering? Was the problem patriarchal or communal? Perhaps, Trupti Desai can only best answer these questions.

The hegemony of patriarchy has long dictated what women should and should not do, eat, think, behave, dress... It sometimes takes a peaceful protest to shake things up. But what is the point of feminism if it's foot soldiers and leaders change their mind halfway and turn back? Where do we go from there?
New York: There is bad news for marine life as a new study has found that loss of oxygen in oceans due to climate change which is already discernible in some parts of the world should be evident across large regions of the oceans between 2030 and 2040.

Large scale ocean deoxygenation could leave fish, crabs, squid, sea stars, and other marine life struggling to breathe.

"Loss of oxygen in the ocean is one of the serious side effects of a warming atmosphere, and a major threat to marine life," said lead author of the study Matthew Long from US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

"Since oxygen concentrations in the ocean naturally vary depending on variations in winds and temperature at the surface, it's been challenging to attribute any deoxygenation to climate change. This new study tells us when we can expect the impact from climate change to overwhelm the natural variability," Long pointed out.

The study was published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

The entire ocean - from the depths to the shallows--gets its oxygen supply from the surface, either directly from the atmosphere or from phytoplankton, which release oxygen into the water through photosynthesis.

Warming surface waters, however, absorb less oxygen. And in a double whammy, the oxygen that is absorbed has a more difficult time traveling deeper into the ocean. That's because as water heats up, it expands, becoming lighter than the water below it and less likely to sink.

To investigate the impact of climate change on deoxygenation , the research team relied on the NCAR-based Community Earth System Model.

The scientists used output from a project that ran the model more than two dozen times for the years 1920 to 2100 on the Yellowstone supercomputer, which is operated by NCAR.

Using the simulations to study dissolved oxygen gave the researchers guidance on how much concentrations may have varied naturally in the past.

With this information, they could determine when ocean deoxygenation due to climate change is likely to become more severe than at any point in the modeled historic range.

The research team found that deoxygenation caused by climate change could already be detected in the southern Indian Ocean and parts of the eastern tropical Pacific and Atlantic basins.

They also determined that more widespread detection of deoxygenation caused by climate change would be possible between 2030 and 2040.
Beijing: Yoga may have a beneficial effect on symptoms and quality of life in people with asthma, according to research conducted in India, Europe and the US. "Our findings suggest that yoga exercise may lead to small improvements in asthma quality of life and symptoms," said Zuyao Yang from Chinese University in Hong Kong.

"However, it is unclear whether yoga has a consistent impact on lung function and we do not yet know if yoga can reduce people's medication usage, or if there are any side-effects of yoga for people with asthma," said Yang.

Asthma is a common chronic disease affecting about 300 million people worldwide. The many typical symptoms of asthma include wheezing, coughing, chest tightness and shortness of breath, researchers said.

Yoga has gained global popularity as a form of exercise with general life-style benefits, and recent studies have investigated the potential of yoga to relieve asthma-related problems, they said.

The new study summarised the results of randomised trials and found evidence that practicing yoga might be able to improve asthma quality of life and symptoms to some extent. Researchers found 15 randomised controlled trials which involved 1,048 men and women. Most of the trials were conducted in India, followed by Europe and the US.

The majority of participants had mild to moderate asthma for six months to more than 23 years. Six studies looked into the effects of breathing alone during yoga exercise, while the other studies assessed the effects of yoga that included breathing, posture and meditation, researchers said.

Most people continued to take their usual asthma medication while participating in the studies. The studies were conducted over a time period of two weeks to over four years, they said.

Researchers found some moderate quality evidence from five studies that yoga exercise reduces the impact of asthma on people's quality of life.

However, evidence about yoga's impact on the participants' lung function is more uncertain because the

results varied, researchers said. The findings were published in the journal Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
A Rajas telecommunications ministry handed out spectrum licences on a first-come-first-serve basis to a favoured few who came armed with prior information and predated demand drafts. That was the genesis of the 2G scam in 2008. Apparently, that was not a use-and-throw modus operandi in the UPA years.

Incriminating documentary evidence has surfaced of a similar cosy arrangement between policymakers and builders in Haryana during the chief ministership of Bhupinder Singh Hooda leading to windfall gains for builders.

During his roughly 10-year stint as chief minister, Hooda came out with as many as three master plans for Gurgaon  2021, 2025 and 2031.

For each plan, a draft plan was circulated and huge changes of immense commercial benefit to builders were first disclosed privately and later made public once suitable changes had been incorporated in the final plan.

Hoodas master plans

Investigations by Firstpost have revealed new details of how certain builders were further accommodated, not just through these frequent changes in the plan, but additionally through the blatant flouting of its own re-scripted plan guidelines.

Arvind Walia, the promoter of the Ramprastha Group  who owns a clutch of roughly 60 companies and is also Hoodas nephew Sukhinder Singh alias Monus business partner  became a key beneficiary of insider information and laid-down norms after the grant of Group Housing licences was violated to accommodate his commercial interests. Arvind and Monu are partners in Pheonix Infrastructure and Millenia Hospitality Pvt Ltd. Interestingly, both these companies were incorporated on 14 July, 2005 and 27 August, 2007 after Hooda assumed office.

On 4 September, 2012, a draft Development Plan 2031 for the Controlled Areas of Gurgaon-Manesar Urban Complex was notified. The final Development Plan 2031 was published on 15 November, 2012.

On the very next day  16 November  the first day of submission of licence applications, Ramprastha and its associate companies Imperial Buildmart, Auster Infracon, and Silver Oak Real Con, applied for six licences within 15 minutes of the opening of the counter. These applications effectively gave the builder access to a whopping 73 acres of land or roughly 95 percent of the total 78 acres of total permissible density under group housing in Sector 95 A and 95 B in Gurgaon. These sectors were earlier designated as a Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in the 2021 and 2025 master plans.

Two licence applications filed by Ramprastha  LC-2766 and LC-2778  were not approachable by a mandatory 22-foot road at the time of application. Instead of rejecting these invalid applications, the then state government went ahead to give these LoIs to Ramprastha. The company did not respond to questions emailed by Firstpost.

DLF Ltd, under the lense for its suspect deals with Robert Vadra which first surfaced in October 2012, was also privileged to be in a position to file two license applications for roughly 33 acres in Sector 79B on 16 November, itself. This used to be agricultural land that was converted to residential land use in the master plan 2031 which resulted in the value of the land appreciating three-fold.

Documents with Firstpost further show that another builder, Raj Buildwell Pvt Ltd, who willfully allowed the expiry of his licence dated 28 June, 2008 to develop an IT Park on 10.89 acres of land, was not penalised by having his licence revoked, but rewarded with windfall gains. Kanwar Singh Tanwar, the promoter of Raj Buildwell, who was in the Congress Party at the time, is now a BJP MP in the Lok Sabha.

Tanwars licence expired on 28 June, 2010. He kept ignoring notices from the government for two years. But suddenly, five days before the notification of the 2013 master plan, he applied for the conversion of his licence for an IT park into Group Housing. This was strange since the governments move to delete the space earlier marked for public and semi-public purposes in Sector 71, Gurgaon, was only made public on 15 November. This move was strategic since it effectively served to raise the density for that sector (as housing is allowed more density than commercial).

By receiving insider information of what was to come, Raj Buildwell became a key beneficiary of the raised density. Further, the government accepting, rather than rejecting his request of 10 November, made before the announcement of the plan, ensured that no other builder could apply, since this single application exhausted the enhanced density created in the sector.

The de-licencing of Raj Buildwell from an IT project that had no takers, to a far more lucrative Group Housing project  in which the change of land use helped to instantly double the land value  was done even though there was no provision under the Haryana Development & Regulation of Urban Area Act 1975/policy to accommodate such delicensing, thereby rendering the licence illegal. The company did not respond to questions emailed by Firstpost.

Thats not all

In the 2031 plan, roughly 18 acres of land in Sector 16, earlier meant for the building of a college/institution, was designated as a special zone. On 7 February, 2013, the Vatika Group applied for a licence to develop a commercial colony on roughly 12.13 acres of land in this zone. The Hooda-led government first admitted the application, and only later, on 6 August, 2013, a Council of Ministers meeting was held which approved the conversion of the land use of the special zone into commercial colony. The LoI was given to Vatika on 11 August, 2014 enabling it to launch one of the largest shopping mall projects in Gurgaon.

While avoiding answering how the Vatika Group was able to apply for a licence for commercial colony in this special zone, well ahead of the conversion of special zone to commercial colony, Vatikas cryptic response was: The said area of 12.13 acres was part of special zone approved in the final Development Plan of Gurgaon Manesar Urban Complex 2031 and is still covered in the same special zone.

However, the truth is that a special zone consists of four components, namely, recreation; commercial; group housing and institutional area in a 20:30:40:10 ratio. Deviating from its own policy, the Hooda government made a special exemption to make Vatikas land 100% commercial.

Hoodas largesse to Vatika also involved overlooking the fact that there was no approach road to the plot which is a mandatory requirement for a commercial licence.

Undeterred in his intent, Hooda used his power as chairman, Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) to give HUDA land for the approach road to Vatikas site. This is evident from a file noting which states: CA, HUDA vide letter dated 09.07.2014, while forwarding the proposal approved by CM, Haryana-cum-Chairman, HUDA, has directed Administrator, HUDA/Estate Officer-I, Gurgaon to execute the approved proposal at site and entered into an agreement with the coloniser for transfer of this land to HUDA & allowing construction of 24-metre-wide road on HUDA land within 15 days.

Affordable Housing

The Hooda government then went on to announce its Affordable Housing Policy on Gurgaon-Manesar Urban Complex on 19 August, 2013.

The scheme was conceived in order to corner more land for builders since the density of 20 percent reserved in each sector under Group Housing Colonies had been exhausted in Gurgaon. In the Affordable Housing Policy, a density of five percent was now additionally reserved in all sectors with a cap of 10 acres.

Documents with Firstpost reveal that on the very next day  20 August, 2013  as many as 58 companies applied for licences in various zones of Haryana. And within 15 days of announcing the policy, another 25 companies applied for the licence.

The documents further show that these applications were accompanied by backdated demand drafts which go back 10 days to 2 months prior to the date the policy was announced:

The application from Sunrays Heights Private Ltd is stamped on 20 August, 2013. But the date of demand draft is 10 August, 2013.

Though the Department of Town and Country Planning, Haryana, received 141 licence applications, it issued 48 licences and 8 Letters of Intent (LoIs), of which as many as 16 licences and 5 LoIs were found to have been submitted with backdated demand drafts (see table below).

Questions emailed to Nani Resort & Floriculture Pvt Ltd went unanswered.

Dark history

Hooda is already under probe by the Justice SN Dhingra Commission for his role in the illegal grants of licences to hundreds of private companies, including Robert Vadras land case, involving his company Skylight Hospitality and DLF.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/behind-robert-vadras-fortune-a-maze-of-questions/article3975214.ece

This expanding body of evidence makes Hoodas motivation in licencing a staggering 24,825 acres of land across Haryana, including 9,204 acres in Gurgaon during his 10-year tenure increasingly suspect. The licensing activity looks especially suspicious considering that in the 23 years preceding Hoodas tenure, licences for just a total of just 8,550.32 acres were granted.

Though the state administration has claimed otherwise, this 150 percent rise in land licensing activity during Hoodas term was clearly not motivated by a desire to drive planned development as policies were scripted and timed in the interests of builders while overlooking the needs of the middle class by discontinuing cooperative housing societies and neglecting Information Technology projects. The IT sector  that accounted for a mere 409.21 acres  got the lowest share of land in Hoodas tenure, despite it being an employment generator. This is because the margins on IT projects have lower margins.

These commissions and omissions in the states land matters between 2005 to 2014 will increase the heat on Hooda, already under probe, because he had assumed complete control over all land-related matters after becoming chief minister. He had retained the portfolios of Town & Country Planning (TCP) (the real estate licensing arm), HUDA (the urban development authority) and the Haryana State Industrial Development Corporation (HSIDC), which is the industrial wing.
New Delhi: Cash seizures in five poll-bound states have crossed Rs 113 crore till now with Tamil Nadu recording four times more interceptions than other states.

According to latest data compiled by the Election Commission (EC), surveillance and expenditure monitoring teams deployed by it in Tamil Nadu have seized a total of Rs 68.31 crore cash till now.

"The Income Tax department is doing the maximum number of big seizures here. In the last one week only about Rs 12 crore cash has been seized on suspicion and information that it could be used as an illegal allurement to induce voters," a senior IT department official said.

The 234-seat Assembly of the state will go to polls in a single phase on 16 May.

The seizures of cash in the south Indian state are at least four times more from the other four poll-bound states with Rs 17.84 crore seized in Kerala till now followed by Rs 14.56 crore in West Bengal, Assam Rs 12.33 crore (polls ended) and Puducherry Rs 71.53 lakh.

"The total progressive figure for cash seizures in the poll-bound states is Rs 113.76 crore. In some cases, the cash is being released after ascertaining the bonafide and legitimate purpose of the cash," the official.

He added the Central Board of Direct Taxes has also asked IT department's field investigation offices in Tamil Nadu to remain extra cautious and alert in the wake of the huge seizures being made in the state and the fact that the polling is about a fortnight to go now.

Keeping in mind the abuse of money power in Tamil Nadu, the EC last week had also issued some special instructions to be followed by observers and members of the surveillance teams deployed in the state.

The Commission has sought a "stepped up vigil" across Tamil Nadu to detect and intercept all such instances of illegal cash and other inducements being used to lure voters and ensure that a level playing field is maintained.

While the two-phased Assembly polls have concluded in Assam, in West Bengal the fifth and sixth phases of polls are scheduled for 30 April and 5 May.

Single phase polls will be held in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry on May 16. The counting of votes in all the five states is slated for 19 May.

All the seizures have been made by EC-appointed special flying squads and surveillance teams and by officials drawn from the Income Tax department, Customs and Excise and police.

The Model Code of Conduct came into force on 4 March after the Commission had announced the schedule for the Assembly polls here.

The Commission, in its recent directive to authorities deployed in Tamil Nadu, had directed all enforcement agencies in unequivocal terms that they should come down heavily on the offenders in all such cases.

"The Commission has directed vigilance and monitoring to be stepped up across the state in the run up to the elections and number of such search and seizure actions will be further intensified to curb any such unaccounted money gaining access to the electoral process.

"Movement of cash, liquor and gift items will be strictly monitored. Strict action will be taken against persons attempting to induce voters by bribing," the EC had said.

The Commission had also asked the officers deployed for these vigilance tasks to ensure a high and honest conduct.

"Prejudiced conduct of any member of election expenditure monitoring team will also be viewed very seriously and strict action will be taken against such erring personnel," the fresh directives had said.

In order to ensure a fair playing ground in the state during the polls, the EC has ordered increase in the number of flying squads and surveillance teams, inclusion of officials from the central government and central PSUs in the flying squads, deployment of central police forces among others.

Teams of the IT department and others have conducted a number of search operations in the state since polls were announced and in one such incident in Karur district it seized Saris, dhoti and similar items worth Rs one crore recently.

"Teams of special observers have been deployed in the state to review the preparedness. Further, the number of expenditure observers has been increased several times.

"Probationary officers of the Indian Police Service will also be deployed in each district to actively participate in expenditure monitoring and operation of the flying squads," the EC had said.

A total of 702 flying squads and 712 surveillance teams are operating in the state for curbing the use of black money at the hustings.

"The Commission has also directed to mount the campaign for ethical voting and encourage members of political parties, candidates and voters at large to take pledge for ethical voting," it had said.
New Delhi: There is no privilege notice against HRD Minister Smriti Irani, Chairman of Rajya Sabha's Privileges Committee P J Kurien said on Thursday, dismissing reports that the panel decided to seek explanation from her over some remarks made during a House debate on the JNU row.

Addressing the media a day after the Committee members had met in Parliament House, he said it was "not a meeting" of the committee as it did not meet the quorum requirement of at least five committee attending it.

"We met but five members were not present. So it was not a committee meeting. Moreover there is no notice of privilege against Irani before the committee. So it is wrong to say that the panel has decided to seek an explanation from her over her remarks. There is no such decision," he said.

"Yesterday there was no meeting. There was some informal discussion. Whatever we informally said has been reported by the media as a decision of the committee. A member saying something is not a decision of the committee," Kurien said.

He said a notice of CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechury regarding his having received threat calls after participating in a debate on JNU row is under consideration of the committee.

In his letter to the Rajya Sabha Chairman last month, the CPI-M leader had written that the minister had made "baseless allegations" against him "imputing motives that are completely false".

Yechury had also enclosed pages from internet (in Telugu) suggesting threats to him and stated that considering "grievous nature of the allegations". Since they are made on the floor of the House and recorded as part of proceedings, the

intervention of the Rajya Sabha Chairman was sought said.

He said that Yechury had given a privilege notice but that was about threat calls and not against Irani.

Regarding the deposition of VHP leader Sadhvi Prachi before the panel yesterday about her controversial statement on "terrorists in Parliament", Kurien said she appeared as a witness and it is not necessary to have a meeting of the committee to call a witness.

He, however, declined to go into what was the response of Prachi when she appeared before the committee.

After meeting the panel yesterday, Prachi had remained defiant and stuck to her remarks.
Chandigarh: Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday raked up farmers' suicide issue in Punjab and claimed people of the state, which goes to polls next year, are "yearning" for a change.

"Farmers are committing suicide and recently a farmer and his mother committed suicide," Kejriwal, who was here to attend a Bar Council programme, said.

He said the next Assembly election will not be just another election but a "revolution" which would uproot the "corrupt" and "non-performing" Akali-BJP regime.

"We want to see a Punjab which is prosperous..let us make Punjab where no farmer commits suicide," he said.

Notably, unable to pay a loan, a farmer and his elderly mother committed suicide on Tuesday at Jodhpur village allegedly when a commission agent, alongwith police and revenue officials, was trying to take possession of his land.

The Delhi Chief Minister was here to distribute licences to young law graduates of Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh to practice law. It was for the first time that a chief minister from other state attended such a ceremony of the Bar Council of Punjab and Haryana.

Until now, only the CMs, the Governors, other minister of Punjab and Haryana, judges or legal luminaries have been coming to attend such events of the Bar Council.

He claimed that in Punjab assembly polls next year, AAP's performance will be good and "Congress will go to zero while Akalis will be reduced below 10 seats".

Seeking to project a pro-farmer face of his government in Delhi, Kejriwal said when crops were damaged due to rains in the national capital earlier, some farmers had approached him and he immediately accompanied them to their fields.

He claimed more and more people are accepting the AAp's model of governance and trying to replicate it and added if polls were to be held today in Delhi, AAP will win all 70 seats.

Kejriwal claimed (AAP) has adopted zero tolerance towards corruption, adding a handful of corrupt people have made the entire system corrupt, which needs a "broom" to clean itself.

"Although majority of citizens of the country are honest, a few corrupt people have ruined the system of largest democracy. To revamp the system God has given us 'broom' to clean it. Enough is enough, we have to stand up against corruption," Kejriwal told the gathering of lawyers.

About the working of the AAP government in Delhi, Kejriwal said "We have laid emphasiss on Education and Health as we know that an educated and healthy society is an asset in nation building to achieve new height of developed India."

"We have changed the face of government schools, Mohalla Clinics opened by the Delhi government are being praised not only in India but in US too," Kejriwal claimed.

He said the 'Odd-Even formula' is being appreciated by public to save environment and claimed now "China is adopting the same formula".
Prime Minister Narendra Modi can relax for a while. Till 11.30 am on Wednesday, he used to be the staple fodder for Congress's line of fire, name calling, slogan shouting, etc. Enter Subramanian Swamy.

Following his appointment to Rajya Sabha, everything changed. It took him only 15 seconds to hit the headlines and send the political temperature soaring.

From 'BJP vs Congress' or 'Modi vs Congress', it has now suddenly become 'Swamy vs Congress'. Sample some of the headlines in major print publications:

"On Day 1, Swamy sets Rajya Sabha on fire", "Its Swamy versus Congress battle in Rajya Sabha", "Congress braces itself for a slugfest as Subramanian Swamy enters the limelight", "Swamy Takes Oath in Upper House, Puts Gandhis on Notice", " Agusta issue: Swamy fulfilling PM's 'muck raking' agenda, says Cong", "Won't lie low: Swamy rocks Rajya Sabha over AgustaWestland on first day".

Thanks to Swamy's 15 second speech on day one, and equally brief intervention on day two, we know that words like Sonia Gandhi and the Italian Constitution can't be said in Rajya Sabha. These words have been taken as provocative innuendos pointed as Congress benches and have been expunged from the records.

The ordinary citizens so far had known that unparliamentary words (all comprehensively complied) couldn't be taken in either House of Parliament. Then comes the headline, "Swamy Unnecessarily Provoking, Says Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman."

On Wednesday, Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien had told him, "I am not admonishing you as this is your first speech in the House (after being nominated to the Upper House), But the name is expunged."

The sum and substance of the last two days of proceedings is simple  'Swamy rocks', no matter how one may look at it. In his twitter account, he introduces himself as "Former Union Cabinet Minister & five term MP, Harvard Ph.D in Economics, Professor, BJP member, I give as good as I get."

A known Nehru-Gandhi family baiter, the three-day old parliamentarian  in his current avatar as Upper House member  is living true to his punch line personality profile, "I give as good as I get."

Swamy has the singular distinction of being expelled from Rajya Sabha and then getting elected to Parliament for five more terms. In 1976, when he was a first term MP on a Jan Sangh ticket from UP, he was expelled after a parliamentary panel found his conduct derogatory to the dignity of the House. Following this, he got elected for five more terms  Thrice as MP Lok Sabha (twice from Mumbai North-East and once from Madurai on Janata Party ticket) and twice as Rajya Sabha MP (Once from UP on Janata Party ticket and currently as nominated member).

For his expulsion from parliament in 1976, he blames Indira Gandhi's dictatorial attitude. The then Lok Sabha member HG Mudgal was the first to be expelled from the Lower House in 1951. Swamy was the second.

Though he is a nominated member, he sits in the front rows of the BJP benches  right behind the two rows reserved for ministers. He also attends the BJP parliamentary party meetings. When he rose to speak in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday about the AgustaWestand VVIP chopper deal, and today on AMU, he rose to speak as a BJP member. It's a different matter though that on both the occasions, he could only speak for a few seconds. On both occasions, the moment he rose to speak, the Congress members went on alert mode, ready to pounce on him orally.

See what Swamy had to say in the last two days. Yesterday, he began by saying, "Now, before coming to my notice, it was touching to see the Leader of the Opposition relying on Mr Michel for what he said orally. But the High Court of Italy has recorded a letter written by Mr Michel stating that is the main...", and all hell broke loose. Congress members entered the well of the House and went berserk, so much so that the marshals had to be called to keep the situation under control.

Today, he stood to respond on the Aligarh Muslim University status row. He began by saying "I have no problem with a minority institution, but article 27 and several other articles prohibits a state from financing minority institutions." As the Congress members raised objections to his statement, he referred about Italian Constitution to them. What followed was total pandemonium in the House. It was perhaps too much for the Congress to tolerate.

Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said, "We had no objections to Swamy's clarification. We have a problem with his reference. It is only his second day, and in two days you have expunged (him) twice. How many times are you going to expunge his words? He doesn't know the difference between street words and parliamentary words."

Azad's party colleague in Congress, Jairam Ramesh, said, "In the process of making a clarification, Dr Swamy needlessly and provocatively has brought into the reference the constitution of a European country. It is needless and deliberate."

As disturbances continued, Vice Chairman Kurien made some strong observations against him.

But Swamy is relishing his moments of glory. He took to twitter saying:
New Delhi: A strong plea to bring back the Kohinoor diamond from Britain was made by a BJD member in Lok Sabha on Wednesday, which got instant support from several members including those from the Akali Dal.

Raising the issue in Zero Hour, Bhartruhari Mahtab dismissed the talk that the diamond was given as a gift to the British and insisted that it was taken by them as forcibly from Duleep Singh, son of noted Sikh ruler Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

Mahtab said the situation in which the diamond went to the British after the 1849 Ango-Sikh war was vividly described in a letter written by the British political agent stationed in Lahore to Governor General Lord Dalhousie.

Noting that Kohinoor was the prestige of the nation, he said the way it had gone to the Queen of England was an "act of cheating" and a "surrender under duress".

He said the British had committed untold plunder during the colonial rule.

He said the Maharaja wanted to donate the diamond to the Puri temple like he had made gifts to the Golden Temple and Kashi Vishwanath temple.

Making a strong plea, he said the calligraphic material detailing the situation under which the diamond was taken away should be retrieved by the government from archieves.

He claimed that Kohinoor was the 'syamantak mani' associated with Lord Krishna.

Mahtab said India should impress upon the U K to give the diamond back notwithstanding their Prime Minister's statement that the British Museums and treasury would be empty if it returned all its treasures.

In an obvious reference to Vijay Mallya, he recalled that the sword of Tipu Sultan was brought back to the country from the "tainted money of a liquor baron whose passport has recently been revoked."

Prem Singh Chandumajra (SAD) attacked the Culture Ministry for its stand in the Supreme Court and wanted steps to bring it back. He wanted the House to pass a unanimous resolution in this regard.

He said that historians of the era believe that the British, which claim to be champions of human rights, had acquired the diamond from 11-year-old Duleep Singh through a fraud.

Asaduddin Owaisi (AIMIM) remarked that Kohinoor came from the Golconda mines which fall in his constituency.

Meenakshi Lekhi (BJP) said the government has not taken any stand on the issue of return of Kohinoor and whatever has appeared in the media is wrong.
Subramanian Swamy, on Wednesday, enraged the Opposition by dragging Sonia Gandhi's name in the AgustaWestland chopper deal row. He took potshots at the Congress and said, "you only know the Italian constitution." Following his comment, the Rajya Sabha saw uproar from Congress members. Swamy faced backlash from Ghulam Nabi Azad, Jairam Ramesh as well as PJ Kurien

Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien immediately expunged his remarks and gave him a warning against his "unnecessary provocation." He also ordered the media to refrain from reporting his remarks.

Here's some other important updates from the Parliament session on Thursday -

Navjot Singh Sidhu was sworn-in as a member of Rajya Sabha.

Jyotiraditya Scindia raised the Pakistan issue and said that we must not base Indo-Pak relations on emotions. In response, Uma Bharati said that the Congress is more concerned about Pakistan than Ganga.

AK Antony raised the AgustaWestland issue and said, "Govt must speed up CBI enquiry which we ordered, find out

the truth, middlemen and punish them"

KC Tyagi suggested that Bhagat Singh must not be referred to as a "terrorist" in Delhi University textbooks. Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi agreed to his suggestions and the House said "amendments should be made" in this regard.

JIT probe into Pathankot attack was raised in the Rajya Sabha. General VK Singh seems composed while answering questions during the question hour and even acknowledged Pakistan's "cooperative attitude". He said, "It is the government's job to do whatever it takes to get the work done. The JIT's visit to India was the first cooperative effort from Pakistan."
Kolkata: Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday alleged that voters in West Bengal were not being able to cast their votes freely because of the 'imposition' of Section 144 CrPC in certain areas during the ongoing Assembly poll.

"An unprecedented terror has been launched during the poll with the use of Section 144 of the CrPC in areas to stop people from voting," Banerjee alleged during a roadshow in the city.

She continued, "But don't be afraid. Please cast your own votes. Don't get intimidated by all those tricks,"Banerjee said.

Banerjee said the CPI(M)-Congress alliance was only interested in spreading canards against the state government.

"They can't see the development that has taken place in the last five years, because their mindset is negative."

The roadshow, was also attended by TMC candidates Javed Khan, Aroop Biswas, Shovandeb Chattopadhya, and they covered large parts of the Kasba, Tollygunge and Jadavpur constituencies.
Singur (WB): Even eight years after the shifting out of Tata Motors 'Nano car project' to Gujarat, land and industrialsation continue to be the main issues in this Assembly election at Singur which goes to poll on 30 April.

The bare structure of the Nano plant still stands on the side of National Highway-2 as a mute spectator to the political turmoil triggered by the agitation spearheaded by Mamata Banerjee against 'forcible' land acquisition policy of the previous Left Front government which acted as a catalyst in bringing Trinamool Congress to power in West Bengal.

Apparently to remind the people of Singur that they have missed out on the bus to progress and development with the shifting of the Nano project, the candidate of CPI(M)-Congress alliance, Rabin Deb, campaigned riding on a Nano.

TMC has fielded 83-year-old Rabindranath Bhattacharya, fondly called 'Mastarmoshai' (teacher), who had won the seat defeating his CPI-M rival by nearly 35,000 votes in 2011. TMC had an alliance with the Congress during the 2011 polls.

Keeping in mind that land continues to be a sensitive issue here, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during her campaign

in Singur spoke of her government's commitment to return land to the 'unwilling' farmers. Countering her statement, CPI-M state secretary Surya Kanta Mishra said that it was not possible to return the land.

"If our alliance comes to power we will withdraw the case and set up industries here to provide employment to the youth," he stated.

Poll statistics of the 2011 Assembly poll and 2014 Lok Sabha indicated that TMC is better placed in this constituency.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, TMC candidate Ratna De Nag had secured over 90,000 votes from the Singur Assembly constituency against her nearest CPI(M) rival Pradip Saha who got 60,655 votes.

Riding on the Modi wave, BJP bagged over 24,000 votes in Singur while the Congress nominee managed to bag a little over 3,600 votes. Even at the panchayat level, the opposition has a meagre presence in Singur. The BJP has fielded Suren Patra from the constituency this time for the polls.

Although TMC faces corruption charges in the wake of Narada sting operation, Bhattacharya has a clean image. "The people here know me. They know what I have done. I am an MLA from here since 2001. I have nothing new to say," he said.

Bhattacharya said, "We also wanted the Nano project but protest was made against the aggressive policy of the CPI(M) and the way they had acquired farmland. Singur has seen a lot of development during the TMC rule," he said.

Poll observers say that one thing which might pose some problem for Bhattacharya is the infighting within the party in the area. They say that Bhattacharya does not enjoy good equation with TMC Singur block president and minister Becharam Manna.

The CPI(M) argues that by driving away the Nano project, entire Bengal has lost an opportunity for industrialisation.

"If Nano project was set up here, not only Singur but entire Bengal would have got the benefit of industrialisation," CPI(M)-Congress alliance candidate Rabin Deb has said.

Deb is leaving no stone unturned to wrest the seat from TMC holding meetings and door-to-door campaign. CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury also campaigned in this constituency.

CPI-M's electoral ally Congress also threw its weight behind state party president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury by holding campaign meeting here.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi had also addressed an election meeting in support of the Congress and Left candidates at Srirampur, not very far away from Singur.
Washington: The Taliban must "face the consequences" for calling off peace talks with the Afghan government, the US said on 28 Apr as it once again asked Pakistan to go after terrorists that threaten its neighbours."

"Unfortunately, the Taliban have refused to come to the table, so it is our view that they should face the consequences of that decision," Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Olson told members of the US House Foreign Relations Committee during a hearing.

"We've long expressed our concerns to the Pakistanis about their reluctance to go after terrorists that threaten their neighbours with the same degree of assiduousness that they go after their own terrorists. We think that they are at a moment of needing to make a very strategic and fundamental choice," Olson answered when asked what Pakistan is doing to bring the Taliban to the negotiation table.

"Their (Pakistan's) stated policy, which we agree with, is not to discriminate among terrorist groups. We believe there is considerable room for improvement in the application of that policy on the ground and we believe in particular that Pakistan has not taken as vigorous action against groups that threaten its neighbours as it has against those that threaten it domestically," he noted.

"So Pakistan has also been very helpful in the reconciliation process, but I do believe that there is a strategic choice right now. With the Taliban having refused to come to the table, it seems to us that it is time to address more robustly the question groups that threaten Afghanistan," Olson said.

The US, he said, has pressed the Pakistan government on its commitment not to discriminate among terrorist groups.

"We believe across regions there must be zero tolerance for safe havens," he said.

America's relationship with Pakistan, a growing country with more than 190 million people, a nuclear arsenal, terrorism challenges and a key role to play in the region, will remain a critical one, he added.

"In Pakistan, we see the government in a concerted and difficult fight against terror groups that threaten Pakistanis. But unfortunately, Pakistan does not take equivalent steps against groups that threaten its neighbours," Olson voiced.

"Our core initiatives in Pakistan, include promoting economic growth, countering terrorism, fostering regional stability and promoting the consolidation of democratic institutions. Let me emphasise, we have repeatedly and frankly underscored with most senior leaders of Pakistan that the Haqqani Network must be part of their wider counter terrorism operations in order to keep their commitment not to discriminate between terrorist organisations," Olson said.
SEOUL Kim Dan-bi's brother is the model of the establishment North Korean: an army veteran and member of the ruling Workers' Party, he is now a manager at a state enterprise.

But when he has the time, according to Kim, a defector now living in South Korea, her brother helps trade goods such as TVs and bedding smuggled from China, a sideline lucrative enough for him to have recently bought a car.

"Being in the Party doesn't really help financially," she said. "It is even burdensome to those who are running their own businesses."

His story illustrates the challenge posed to ruler Kim Jong Un by the nascent grey market economy that has taken hold in the isolated and authoritarian country, as his government prepares for a rare Workers' Party Congress set to begin on May 6.

For the thousands of delegates who will gather in Pyongyang, attendance at the event will affirm their status among the ruling class. For a growing number of North Koreans, however, money has overtaken Party membership when it comes to getting ahead, according to defectors who have fled to rival South Korea.

"If you join the Party, you lose free time which could be spent selling in the markets because of the Party events you're obliged to attend," said a former Party member and senior state official from Pyongyang who defected in 2014.

"Ordinary people think: this has got nothing to do with me," he said, referring to the preparations for next month's event.

He declined to be to be identified by name to protect family members still in North Korea.

PARTY CULTURE

Workers' Party culture remains omnipresent in North Korea, where most villages have a building where lectures are delivered by Party officials on Saturdays, often to distribute centralised propaganda in areas out of reach of traditional state media.

Some members, fearful of losing their membership card, keep it in a crimson pouch emblazoned with the gold hammer, sickle and paintbrush motif of the Party. One pouch obtained by Reuters was designed to be worn like a concealed gun holster, with an elasticated band across the chest that pulls the card close to the wearer's heart.

Party members are also obliged to attend Wednesday lectures after work, said Seo Jae-pyoung, who belonged to the Party before leaving North Korea in 2001 and maintains regular contact with sources inside the country.

The lectures have become more strictly controlled under Kim, he said, with a campaign under way to mobilise people ahead of next week's Congress. Kim used the Party's 70th anniversary last year to promise to introduce a "people-first" politics.

Once a regular event, the Workers' Party Congress was last held in 1980.

Some Pyongyang-watchers take the meeting as a sign that young leader Kim is transforming a country his father Kim Jong Il ruled through back-channel dealings into a more "normal" state, where formal Party processes are ingrained.

But defectors and academics say the importance of membership has dwindled since the devastating famine of the 1990s, which paved the way for a bottom-up and informal network of markets that now provides for most North Koreans in place of the state.

"The difference between being a Party member or non-member used to be the difference between being treated like a human or not," said Seo, who works with defectors in South Korea.

"The pride people got from being a member of the Party has weakened. People only care about money now."

MONEY AND POWER

No data on party membership in North Korea is available, although estimates have put the number at between 3 million and 4 million out of a population of roughly 25 million.

Party membership used to be the key to better jobs and status in North Korea, defectors said.

Obtaining a coveted place in the hierarchy often entailed shows of loyalty, such as cleaning the areas around statues of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, the current leader's grandfather and founder of the state, or planting flowers at revolutionary or historical sites.

For the few at the top, membership can now be a route to riches as, fearful of losing its traditional grip over society, a Party that still officially espouses a Soviet-style command economy is starting to embrace the market.

"At the top end of the economic scale, Party people are among those making the most money - using their political connections to get access to resources," said Christopher Green, a researcher at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, specialising in North Korea's economy.

But for the majority, getting on in private business is more important than working your way up the Party ladder.

One defector who was a doctor and Party member in North Korea and arrived in Seoul in 2014, said medics at the Party-controlled hospital where he worked were not formally paid, but received bribes for treating patients.

He supplemented that income by trading small electronics and jewellery smuggled from China in his off-hours, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"At hospitals, doctors work out their shifts so half of them can go out to sell things, and half can stay to treat patients," he said.

(Editing by Tony Munroe and Alex Richardson)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
A country where the predominant religions identify a same sex lover as a sinner, the law of the land as a criminal; social norms as a pervert; culture as imported-how should life be for LGBTs in Bangladesh? For me, its like living in a comfortable closet. Comfortable because it is actually easy when it comes to doing it; the culture and social norms are so focused on preventing heterosexual acts between unmarried couples: man-to-man or woman-to-woman sexual acts go almost unnoticed.

This is what Xulhaz Mannan, the brave editor/publisher of Bangaldeshs first print gay magazine Rupban wrote in the Pink Pages, an Indian LGBT e-zine in an article ominously titled  Confronting The Comfortable Closet. Obviously Xulhaz Mannan didnt realise that Islamic State or or Al-Qaeda is particularly focussed on people like him they want out of the territory of Dar-Ul-Islam He paid for it this week when he and a Hindu Bangladeshi friend, Tanmoy Mazumdar were hacked to death open;y on the street two days ago..

The signs were bad right from the beginning. My organisation, the Humsafar Trust, lost a fair bit of money when the Dakha ICAAP (International Conference of AIDS in Asia and the Pacific) was postponed without much ado and was held in fits and starts by its very brave organisers. who brazened it out despite the warnings of both Indian and Bangladeshi intelligence that there was real danger to the participants from Islamic militants.

Mercifully, everyone was careful but not very casual about it. Bangladeshi participants and conference organisers were very careful with it came to high visibility and things ran smoothly.for ICAAP.

But there were warnings. For people like Mannan, there was that easy Bangla way of life, close-knit sexual networks in Dhaka, that still had not been disrupted by the growing rise of Islamist terror that had threatened others and, in many cases, paid for in blood

He called it the Comfortable Closet and it was possibly so because just a few months ago our advocacy officer, the daring dyke Sonal Giani had visited Dakha for a film festival and reported that the atmosphere was easy going with no trace of tension in the air. Therefore Xulhaz was definitely describing the reality in Bangladesh.

Yet the trends were not all that comfortable because there has been a constant stream of Bangladeshis who have been quietly migrating to the West with the help of the Indian gay networks. There has been considerable tension between the Indian and Bangladeshi gay activists as Indian gay groups have been giving shelter and notes to the US State Department that Bangladesh was not safe for out of the closet homosexuals while their Bangladeshi counterparts differed because they said if they could stand and fight so would other gay men.

This tension exists in India too to a smaller degree. I constantly get emails and phone calls from either immigration lawyers representing gay men ir lesbians to the effect that they would like us to give affidavits saying it was unsafe to be gay in India. With a thriving gay sub-culture in most metros and state capitals, india is definitely safer than Bangladesh and Pakistan where Islamist groups have made life miserable for all minorities, including LGBT.

Bangladeshi famous Bandhu Social Welfare Society, Rupban, Boys of Bangladesh, Shambhbab (the lesbian network), Vivid Rainbow of Khulna, have been following a different path than the Indian LGBT movement ever since the Bangladesh government recognised hijras as a third gender in 2013. The same year Xulhaz reported that the Bangladesh government recognised that there was an LGBT community in the country at the meeting of the UN in Geneva.

However, unlike in India, the LGB movement separated from the transgender and Hijra groups because of the recognition given to hijras and TG and refusal to acknowledge the male and female invisible sexual minorities. It is this movement that Xulhaz called the comfortable closet in the country.

The reason, of course, was that the Islamists were more comfortable with the third gender but not with gay men and lesbians. And Xulhaz battle was for their recognition. He was scheduled to come for the Mingle Leadership training workshop in Bombay next month when tragedy struck.

The question is how do we in India extend support to the Bangladeshi LGBT movement. One way is to see that any immediate danger is averted by getting LGBT activists out of Bangladesh into West Bengal. But they are sitting duck for Islamists who are strong in the Indian State too. They managed to get Taslima Nasreen driven out of West Bengal and any high profile LGBT activist will meet the same fate.

We could get them to Delhi or Bombay or even Bangalore. But will they be given refugee status with the present close ties between the two governments? How can we get the present Bangladeshi government to assure security before panic sets in and the exodus starts? These are some questions that stare us in the face.

Xulhaz was working for the US Consulate in Dakha and still met this horrendous fate. What happens to those less fortunate and more vulnerable LGBT members in the country? Is India safer than Bangladesh? If so, how safe is it anymore with the rise of all religious fundamentalists in India?

The answer is that what happened in Dakha is some sort of rehearsal and warning for all LGBT in the sub-continent. The rising tide of religious intolerance threatens us all to some or other degree. Indian activists feel safe in numbers and their open channels with the government because of the huge HIV/AIDS prevention program and the activism around Section 377 when the LGBT movement built close links with mainstream organisations of lawyers, womens groups, rights groups of all kinds and other NGOs. The Bangladesh LGBT movement was more modest and hence more cloistered from the mainstream in its comfortable closet.

The Indian activists have worked with all political parties, including the right wing BJP and hence is making its presence felt in the social and political landscape. I think we can put out a helping hand to get our Bangla brothers and sisters out if necessary.

That is the bottom line.
Days after New Delhi cancelled the visa granted to Uyghur political leader Dolkun Isa, media reports suggest that the Indian government has cancelled the visas of two prominent activists who were supposed to travel to Dharamsala to attend a high-profile meeting of Chinese dissidents and exiled leaders.

Lu Jinghua, a prominent Tienanmen activist and Ray Wong, a Hong Kong based activist have claimed that their electronic visas were found to have been cancelled. "At the airport, the Air India staff simply told me that I couldn't board as my visa was cancelled," Lu told India Today.

According to the same report, MEA officials claimed that the two activists had applied for a tourist visa, while a special permission is required for attending conferences. Not providing complete information can also lead to cancellation of E-visas, the officials said.

ANI quoted sources as saying that Lu Jinghua's documents were 'illegible.' Further, the sources are also reported to have said that visas were not issued to both the leaders, and so the question of revoking it did not arise.

Lu Jinghua's docs were illegible& there was inconsistency with purpose of her visit,in Ray Wong's docs,there was data inconsistency: Sources  ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

This cancellation comes at a time when the Modi government is under fire for allegedly buckling under Chinese pressure and revoking the visa issued to Dolkun Isa, a prominent Uyghur leader.

"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 the due obligation of relevant countries," PTI quoted the Spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry as saying.
BEIJING China's parliament passed a controversial law governing foreign non-government organizations, Xinhua state news agency said on Thursday, giving wide powers to the domestic security authority and prompting criticism from Amnesty International.

The law is part of a raft of legislation, including China's counterterrorism law and a draft cyber security law, put forward amid a renewed crackdown on dissent by President Xi Jinping's administration.

The law, which is set to come into effect on Jan. 1, 2017, grants broad powers to police to question NGO workers, monitor their finances, regulate their work and shut down offices.

Earlier drafts of the law had faced criticism from NGOs and foreign governments, which said it was too vague in its definition of what constituted actions that harmed China's national interests and could harm the operations of social and environmental advocacy groups, besides business organizations and academia.

That ambiguity largely remained in the final version of the law, and officials who briefed reporters on the implications of the law on Thursday would not provide specific examples of actions by NGOs that constituted such violations.

"If there are a few foreign NGOs, holding high the banner of cooperation and exchange, coming to engage in illegal activities or even committing criminal acts, our Ministry of Public Security should stop it, and even enact punishments," said Guo Linmao, an official with the National People's Congress Standing Committee, in a briefing.

The law also includes complex registration requirements for foreign NGOs that critics have said are meant to stifle the groups' ability to work.

The White House said on Thursday it was "deeply concerned" about the law, and urged China to respect the rights and freedoms of defenders of human rights, journalists and others.

The law could "further narrow space for civil society in China," Ned Price, a U.S. National Security Council spokesman, said in a statement, adding it may constrain contacts between individuals and groups in the United States and China.

Amnesty International called the law fundamentally flawed.

"The authorities - particularly the police - will have virtually unchecked powers to target NGOs, restrict their activities and ultimately stifle civil society," William Nee, a China researcher for the group, said in a statement.

The German Embassy in Beijing said the law adopted some positive changes including the deletion of an expiry clause on registration licenses. But it said overall it remained too restrictive.

"The law continues to focus strongly on security and contains numerous approval and documentation requirements, as well as other norms restricting activities," it said in a statement.

Chinese officials said Beijing welcomes law-abiding NGOs to work in the country, but intends to punish those which harm Chinese security interests or social stability, without defining what that could mean.

"I'll use a colloquial expression," Guo said. "If you're in trouble, ask the police for help - if you haven't broken the law, what are you afraid of?"

(Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington; editing by Nicholas Heath, Nick Macfie and G Crosse)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Rome: Italy is to introduce the fingerprinting of migrants crossing the Mediterranean as soon as they are picked up by rescue boats, officials say.

The move could help to reduce mounting tensions between Italy and its EU partners over the large numbers of migrants who arrive in Italy but are not registered here and then travel on to northern Europe.

If they are not registered in Italy, neighbouring countries like Austria and France and popular destination states like Germany and Sweden do not have the option of sending them back to Italy.

In theory, they should be able to do this under the EU's Dublin convention rules governing asylum claims.

The Italian move follows talks on Wednesday between Interior Minister Angelo Alfano and EU migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos in Sicily, where most migrants arrive and are processed at "hotspot" reception centres.

"With this we will now have hotspots at sea," Alfano said.

It was not clear if the policy will be applied systematically -- migrants picked up at sea are often in a traumatised state and asylum seekers from Eritrea notably generally refuse to have their prints taken because they want to make their applications elsewhere.

Italy was warned last year by the European Commission that it must make its registration procedures more efficient. But Italian officials say the country cannot cope alone with the migrant influx.

More than 350,000 people from all over the world have reached Italy on boats from Libya since the start of 2014, as Europe battles its biggest migration crisis since World War II.

Alfano said that after problems in 2014, the process of identifying migrants was now working "100 percent".

With Austria on the verge of introducing anti-migrant checks at its border with Italy in the Alps, there is mounting concern in Rome that the country's overcrowded reception facilities could soon have to deal with tens of thousands of additional asylum seekers.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi warned Austria not to go ahead with the border closure. "It would be a flagrant breach of European rules, as well as being against history, against logic and against the future."

The tensions have given added urgency to attempts to find a lasting solution to the crisis and Italy is pushing a plan to introduce NATO naval patrols off Libya in time for the peak summer season for people smuggling.

Modelled on an existing NATO operation in waters between Turkey and Greece, the plan has been backed by US President Barack Obama and is expected to be approved by alliance leaders at a summit in Warsaw in July.

Italy has also proposed offering an EU-funded scheme to offer African countries cash to cooperate with the fast-track repatriation of migrants deemed to have no claim to asylum in Europe.
Washington: Top US lawmakers have expressed concerns over the Obama Administration's decision to sell eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, saying the aircrafts could be used against India and not in combating terrorism.

They have also urged the Obama Administration to review its decision in this regard.

"Many members of Congress, including me, seriously question the judgement and timing of such a sale. Additionally, Indo-Pak tensions remain elevated and some question whether the F-16s could ultimately be used against India or other regional powers, rather than the terrorists as Pakistan as asserted," Congressman Matt Salmon said during a Congressional hearing on Wednesday.

Salmon was joined by several other lawmakers during the Congressional hearing on Afghanistan and Pakistan convened by the Subcommittee on Asia and Pacific of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wherein the Obama Administration was represented by the Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Olson.

"We've got to be concerned what military assistance and whether the F-16s constitute the least expensive, most efficient way for the Pakistani air force to go after the terrorists and the least disruptive weapon system to the balance of power between India and Pakistan," Congressman Brad Sherman said.

"We need to offer to Pakistan those weapon systems well-crafted to go after terrorists and not crafted for a war with India," Sherman said.

The US Senate has currently put a hold on the decision of the Obama Administration to give eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan at an estimated cost of USD700 million.

Salmon asked Olson to clarify the underlying purpose and timing of the intended sale and how is it in the best interest of the United States.

"Despite giving Pakistan enormous amounts of counter-terror assistance over the years, over USD25 billion since 9/11, terrorist organizations continue to operate with impunity in Pakistan.

"Pakistan has used terror as a tool of statecraft and terrorist proxy groups, for the Pakistani military have carried out fatal attacks inside India," he alleged.

The subcommittee chairperson, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen too expressed concerns over sale of F-16 to Pakistan.

"I think that we need to leverage our military sales to Pakistan in order to get some more cooperation within the region.

"Can you please update us on the status of the F-16 sales and how would you describe our ability to leverage our aid to Pakistan?" she asked.

Olson strongly defended the decision of the Obama Administration saying that this is in the best interest of the United States.

"The administration is supportive of the F-16 sale to Pakistan. This is been developed between our military coordinating groups over the course of time that is consistent with our overall program of support for the Pakistani military, which is based on counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism. The Pakistanis have developed a precision strike capability that they use in the F-16s they have right now to take out targets," he said.

"These are principally the Pakistani Taliban, but we think that that is a good thing. The Pakistani Taliban has been involved in attacks against Americans at Chapman in Afghanistan in 2009 and, indeed, in supporting the Times Square bomber," he said.

"So we applaud the actions that the Pakistanis have been taking against their domestic terrorism threat, even as we call upon them to take more robust action against those groups that threaten their neighbours," he argued.

The Pakistan Air Force reports having flown thousands of sorties, dropping more than 800 US-provided Guided Bomb Units (GBUs), and killing more than 1,700 terrorists.

The use of precision munitions has greatly minimized collateral damage, including civilian casualties, he said.
Washington: Donald Trump on Thursday said that halting the spread of radical Islam would be a "major goal" for the US if he is elected president, as the Republican presidential front-runner laid out the vision of his foreign policy asserting that the days of ISIS are "numbered".

In a speech outlining his foreign policy, Trump did not mention about India, and said that his administration would seek to improve ties with Russia and China.

"I'd like to talk today about how to develop a new foreign policy direction for our country, one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace," Trump said, asserting that it is time to "shake the rust off" America's foreign policy.

In his first major foreign policy speech, a day after he declared himself as a "presumptive nominee" when he won primaries in all the five States, Trump said, "Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States and indeed, the world."

"Events may require the use of military force, but it's also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War. In this, we're going to be working very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence, attacks and everything else. It is a dangerous world, more dangerous now than it has ever been," he said.

"We should work together with any nation in the region that is threatened by the rise of radical Islam. But this has to be a two-way street," he said.

The real-estate tycoon underlined that sending troops overseas would be his last option and would depend on diplomacy and the country's economic power.

"To our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be reliable again. It's going to be a great and reliable ally again. It's going to be a friend again.

"We're going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests and the shared interests of our allies," he said.

"We're getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world. Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the water's edge. We need a new rational American foreign policy," he said.

On the ISIS, he said that the dreaded terror outfit's days are "numbered".

"I have a simple message for them (Islamic State). Their days are numbered. I won't tell them where and I won't tell them how. We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything. We're sending troops. We tell them. We're sending something else. We have a news conference. We have to be unpredictable. And we have to be unpredictable starting now," Trump said.

"They're going to be gone. ISIS (Islamic State) will be gone if I am elected president. And they'll be gone quickly. They will be gone very, very quickly," he said.

He said in the Middle East the US' goals must be to "defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change."

"We need to be clear sighted about the groups that will never be anything other than enemies. And believe me, we have groups that no matter what you do, they will be the enemy," he said.

Trump said that if he is elected president his administration would seek to improve ties with Russia and China.

"We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes, but we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests," he said.

"I believe easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible. Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries," he said.

"Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we can't make a deal under my administration, a deal that's great  not good, great  for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table. It's as simple as that. We're going to find out," he cautioned.

Fixing US relations with China is another important step, he said.

"China respects strength and by letting them take advantage of us economically, which they are doing like never before, we have lost all of their respect," he said.

"We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit that we have to find a way quickly, and I mean quickly, to balance. A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China, better than we have right now. Look at what China is doing in the South China Sea. They're not supposed to be doing it," Trump said.

Trump said if he is elected president he would call for a summit with the NATO allies and a separate summit with Asian allies.

"In these summits, we will not only discuss a re-balancing of financial commitments, but take a fresh look at how we can adopt new strategies for tackling our common challenges," he said.

"For instance, we will discuss how we can upgrade NATO's outdated mission and structure, grown out of the Cold War to confront our shared challenges, including migration and Islamic terrorism. Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war and destruction," the Republican front-runner said.

Trump said he would not hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative.

"But if America fights, it must only fight to win. I will never sent our finest into battle unless necessary, and I mean absolutely necessary, and will only do so if we have a plan for victory with a capital V," he said.

Demanding that allies contribute more to global security, he said, "the whole world will be safer if American allies do their part to support its common defence and security."

Outlining his foreign policy, he said "under Trump administration, Iran will never, ever be allowed to have nuclear weapon."

"Our friends are beginning to think they can't depend on us. We've had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies, something that we've never seen before in the history of our country.

"He negotiated a disastrous deal with Iran, and then we watched them ignore its terms even before the ink was dry. Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, cannot be allowed. Remember that, cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon," he said.
Washington: After a clean sweep in five state primaries, Republican front-runner Donald Trump outlined an America First foreign policy during a speech here.

Its time to shake the rust off Americas foreign policy, he said during his speech at the Mayflower Hotel on Wednesday night.

My foreign policy always puts the interest of the American people and American security above all else. Has to be first. Has to be. That will be the foundation of every single decision that I will make."

"America first will be the major and overriding theme of my administration, the Time magazine quoted the business mogul as saying.

Trump first used the phrase America first-which is associated with 1930s-era isolationism-in an interview with the New York Times in March.

In the speech, he criticised President Barack Obamas nuclear deal with Iran and his trip to Cuba, said he would fight the Islamic State terror group by being more unpredictable and also called for upgrading the US nuclear arsenal.

In his speech, Trump also offered an olive branch of sorts to Muslim allies of the US in rare remarks pointing to the ways in which America can have constructive relations with the Muslim world.

"We're going to be working very closely with our friends in the Muslim world, which are all at risk for violent attacks," he said.

Trump said he would also aim to hold talks with Russia to seek common ground, possibly over Islamist extremism.

"Some say the Russians can't be reasonable," he said. "I intend to find out."

China, he said, "respects strength, and by letting them take advantage of us economically like they are doing, we are losing all their respect". He said he would seek to "fix our relations with China" but did not suggest how.

The foreign policy speech is the second major speech in which he has sought to establish his bona fides for the Republican Establishment, analysts said.

In March, he gave a speech a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in which he mostly stuck to the script.

Trump won the Republican primaries in Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Rhode Island on Tuesday, putting him closer to clinching the nomination.

The wins decreased the odds for a contested convention this summer in Cleveland, a scenario his rivals had banked on to stop him from securing the Republican nomination.

"This to me was our biggest night," Trump said in his victory speech. "I consider myself the presumptive nominee."
United Nations: Kashmir issue must be resolved in the context of the "domestic and political" environment

between India and Pakistan, the head of the UN peace building commission has said as he underlined the need for respecting the primacy of the political situation on the ground.

"The Indian Kashmir issue (with) Pakistan is an old issue. It has been there for a very long time. It will be resolved in the context of the local, domestic, political environment between Pakistan and India," Peacebuilding Commission Chair Macharia Kamau told reporters at a news conference at the UN on Wednesday.

Asked by a Pakistani journalist on how any peacebuilding in the area can go forward without resolving outstanding issues

like Kashmir, Kamau said that the peacebuilding commission will be looking to see that "we respect the idea that they must sustain peace, so that the situation cannot be allowed to deteriorate."

Outlining the expectation and ambition that the commission has for the issue in the region, he added that the "primacy" of politics, "the fact that we have to respect the local, political conditions that drive the negotiations has to be respected and we reach out to as many of the institutions within the subcontinent to support this process moving forward.

"That is the ambition that we would have for that process on the subcontinent," he said.

He said while such an approach will "absolutely" compliment the process it will "unlikely" have an "overnight fundamental impact" that will change everything on the ground.

"That is unlikely precisely because the situation on the ground is driven by different forces other than the ones that we are looking to ourselves to address," he said.

On whether the outcome of any resolution on Kashmir will be dependent on India's willingness to talk to Pakistan, Kamau asserted that this is not the case.

"I wouldn't go as far as to say that. What I want to say is that the situation on the ground has to be respected and it isn't about any one country. It is about all the political players on the ground that is the issue," he said.

When asked that the UN resolution on Kashmir has been there for decades, will its objectives ever be met, he said "we never say never in our business. That is not the way in which one approaches the pursuit of peace.

"The whole idea of pursuing peace is to always seek solutions and to look for the historical moments and opportunities that will avail you the opportunity to engage and to bring the instruments that are now available to us in the context of these resolutions to bear on the situation keeping in mind that we have to respect the primacy of the political situation on the ground."
Salah Abdeslam's last lawyer described him as a "little moron" who brought him nothing but trouble.

Now French lawyer Frank Berton is taking up the baton, by agreeing to take on the daunting task of defending the Paris attacks suspect.

The 53-year-old lawyer based in the northern city of Lille added Abdeslam to his client list after he was extradited on Wednesday from Belgium where he has been held since his capture last month.

Defending the last known surviving member of the terror squad that killed 130 people in Paris in November will be no easy feat, but those who know Berton say this will not put him off.

"He loves challenges (and this is) the biggest challenge of his career," said Jean-Luc Romero, who headed an association supporting Frenchwoman Florence Cassez whom Berton helped free from a Mexican jail after she was convicted of membership of a kidnapping gang.

"He is someone who has a sense of a lawyer's role, and in a democracy you also need lawyers to defend suspected terrorists, even if he knows he will take hits and risks by defending someone who is considered public enemy number one."

Berton takes over from Belgian lawyer Sven Mary, who gave a lengthy interview with the French daily Liberation in which he details how he has been the victim of physical and verbal attacks since taking on the case.

"This case has brought me nothing but troubles," said Mary, explaining how police have had to escort his two young daughters to school on several occasions.

Mary has said he is unsure whether he will continue to defend Abdeslam on the terror charges he faces in Belgium over the Paris attacks.

Just days after Abdeslam's arrest, suicide bombers who have been linked to him carried out attacks in Brussels that left 32 dead.

"There have been moments when I thought of giving up. If I had known about the Brussels attacks, maybe I would never have taken this case," Mary said.

He described his client as a "little moron from Molenbeek, more a follower than a leader. He has the intelligence of an empty ashtray."

However he believes that as a defendant, Abdeslam is "worth gold" and was willing to cooperate and communicate.

In his first chat with his new client Berton said this too was his impression, with Abdeslam claiming he was "anxious to explain himself."

Whether he will do so remains to be seen.

Chasing the spotlight

With his slicked-back hair, cigarette clamped between his lips and grumpy demeanour Berton cuts a uncompromising figure but he is also "sentimental and a bon vivant", Romero said.

He was admitted to the Lille bar in 1989, after a childhood marred by a violent father, and shot into the public sphere in 1999 when he defended an Islamist involved in the 1995 bombings in Paris.

He took part in other high-profile trials such as the Outreau affair, a paedophile case in which several people were jailed and later acquitted after it emerged the children involved and several witnesses had lied.

Eric Dupond-Moretti, another Lille lawyer who worked with Berton on the Outreau case, said: "A guy who is defended by Frank Berton will be defended well."

In 2015, he defended Dominique Cottrez, in France's worst-ever case of infanticide. She received a prison sentence of only nine years after admitting she killed eight newborns.

In this case Berton was "extremely professional from start to finish," said a magistrate in the court.

Despite Cottrez's surprise confession, and admission that she lied about being raped by her father as a child, Berton "never abandoned her or defended her badly," Dupond-Moretti said.

Some colleagues disparage Berton's love for high-profile cases.

If it is the media spotlight he craves, with Abdeslam he has hit the jackpot.
SEOUL Like more than half of South Korean mothers, Kim Ju-yeon spent two weeks recuperating and relaxing in a health care centre with her newborn after she gave birth last June.

But her baby boy caught latent tuberculosis during their stay, one of 30 infants who was infected by a nursing assistant.

"I never thought my baby could get sick," said Kim, 36, who sued the centre's owner, seeking compensation, along with the families of 79 other babies similarly infected or treated to prevent infection.

Growing concern over infection risks in such facilities has prompted South Korea to propose tighter regulation of the sometimes luxurious centres, which usually put babies in nurseries with other newborns, separate from their mothers.

The care centres have caught on so dramatically, since emerging in the late 1990s, that entrepreneurs are taking the business model overseas, an effort backed by the government.

The centre where Kim stayed is run by YK Dongrami, South Korea's biggest postnatal care brand, which has 16 domestic centres and five in China.

Following the incident involving Kim's baby, the company is working to create a safer, cleaner environment, it told Reuters. In August, it apologised on its website for the incident.

South Korea had 610 for-profit postnatal facilities last year, up from 377 in 2007.

But the health ministry says the centres are vulnerable to infection and hamper mother-child bonding.

The government says 265 babies caught infections, from respiratory to diarrhoeal diseases, in the first half of 2015, the latest data available. That figure compares with just 88 in all of 2014.

Another centre suspended operations this year after 15 babies caught rota virus, which can cause diarrhoea.

No deaths have been traced to South Korea's post-natal centres in recent years.

APART AND TOGETHER

Two weeks' stay at a centre typically costs $2,000 - with the plushest rising to $20,000 - and includes massages for the mothers, and sometimes yoga, along with baby care lessons.

At feeding time, nurses bring babies to their mothers or put them together in special rooms.

Most of the time, nurses look after the babies grouped about 10 or 20 in a room, though the World Health Organisation advises that mother and child share a room, to promote bonding.

Clustering newborns together heightens infection risks, say experts and officials.

"Newborns have a weaker immune system, so post-partum care centres are even more vulnerable," said Chey Myoung-jae, a pediatrics professor at the private Inje University Sanggye Paik Hospital in Seoul.

The industry acknowledges shortcomings, but points to the expense of additional care givers.

"If a mother stays with her baby all the time, and an individual caretaker is attached to each mother, then it makes services too expensive," said Kim Jeong-uk, director of the Korea Postpartum Care Centers Association.

MODERN TRADITION

The centres have evolved from South Korea's tradition of "sanhujori," in which experienced mothers or mothers-in-law help new mothers care for their infants.

The government's new rules will encourage shared rooms for mothers and babies, and mandate tuberculosis tests for new hires.

"We are supplementing current laws to send a strong message for the safety of the postpartum care centres from infections," health ministry official Woo Hyang-jae told Reuters.

Postnatal care company Dongrami says requiring mothers and babies to share a room might "restrict customers' right to choose" services.

But mothers will continue using the centres, given a lack of affordable options, said Kim, who must wait until her son is five to learn if he is free of tuberculosis.

"Even if you don't want to, the reality is you can't help but go to a care centre," she said.

(Editing by Tony Munroe and Clarence Fernandez)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
New Delhi: As many as three Indian origin persons have been named among 100 highest-paid CEOs globally with PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi and LyondellBasell's Bhavesh Patel making it to the top ten list compiled by Equilar.

Chemicals company LyondellBasell Industries' top executive Bhavesh V Patel was ranked sixth on the list with a total compensation of USD 24.5 million, while Nooyi, the Chief Executive of PepsiCo was ranked eighth on the list with a total pay of USD 22.2 million.

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft was ranked 26th on the list of 100 highest-paid CEOs with a total compensation of USD 18.3 million.

The overall list was topped by Mark V Hurd and Safra A Catz of Oracle Corp with both boasting a total compensation of USD 53.2 million.

Others on the top 10 include, Robert A Iger of Walt Disney (USD 43.5 million), David M Cote of Honeywell International (USD 33.1 million), General Electric's Jeffrey R Immelt (USD 26.4 million), Randall L Stephenson of AT&T (USD 22.4 million), Rupert Murdoch of Twenty-First Century Fox (USD 22.2 million) and James P Gorman of Morgan Stanley (USD 22 million).

This list is a snapshot of companies that file annual proxy statements before April 1 and aims to provide an early look at CEO pay trends for 2015.

The report further noted that the median pay for Equilar 100 CEOs was USD 14.5 million in fiscal year 2015, up 3 per cent from the previous year.

Interestingly, eight CEOs on the list are female, and they far outpace the median pay for the Equilar 100 as a whole. "Median compensation for these eight women was USD 20.0 million in 2015, while average pay was USD 22.7 million," Equilar said.

Catz tied with her colleague Hurd as the highest paid individual CEO in the Equilar 100, was the highest paid female with USD 53.2 million.

Apple is the largest company by revenue on the list, totalling USD 233.7 billion in 2015, followed by Berkshire Hathaway with USD 210.8 billion.

"Notably, Tim Cook of Apple was paid below the median (USD 10.3 million) and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway was by far the lowest-paid CEO in the Equilar 100, earning USD 470,244 in total compensation last year," it added.
SEOUL/WASHINGTON North Korea test-fired what appeared to be two intermediate range ballistic missiles on Thursday, but both failed, the U.S. military said, in a setback for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ahead of next week's ruling party congress.

The isolated nation has conducted a series of missile launches in violation of U.N. resolutions ahead of the Workers' Party congress which begins on May 6. South Korea also says North is ready to conduct a new nuclear test at any time.

China said the U.N. Security Council was working on a response to North Korea's latest missile tests, while U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Pyongyang to cease "further provocative actions."

Thursday's tests looked to have been hurried, according to a defense expert in Seoul, and follow a failed launch of a similar missile earlier this month.

The first launch, at about 6:40 a.m. local time (05:40 p.m. EDT Wednesday) from near the east coast city of Wonsan, appeared to have been of a Musudan missile with a range of more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles) which crashed within seconds, a South Korean defense ministry official said.

Later, at around 7:26 p.m., the North shot a similar intermediate range missile from the same area, but the launch was also understood to have failed, the official added.

The U.S. military's Strategic Command said it tracked two attempted launches, neither of which posed a threat to North America.

"NOT SUCCESSFUL"

"Initial indications reveal the tests were not successful," said Lieutenant Colonel Martin O'Donnell, a STRATCOM spokesman..

The Musudan missile theoretically has the range to reach any part of Japan and the U.S. territory of Guam. It has never been successfully flight-tested.

A similar missile launched on the April 15 birthday anniversary of Kim's late grandfather, North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung, exploded in what the U.S. Defense Department called a "fiery, catastrophic" failure.

Some experts had predicted that North Korea would wait until it figured out what went wrong in the previous launch before attempting another, a process that could take months.

Yang Uk, a senior research fellow at the Korea Defence and Security Forum and a policy adviser to the South Korean navy, said the North Koreans appeared to be in a rush to demonstrate a success head of the party congress.

"They need to succeed but they keep failing," he said "They didn't have enough time to fix or technically modify the system, but just shot them because they were in a hurry."

U.S. and South Korean officials have expressed concerns that North Korea could attempt a fifth nuclear test in a show of strength ahead of the congress.

"Signs for an imminent fifth nuclear test are being detected ahead of North Korea's seventh Party Congress," South Korean President Park Geun-hye said at a national security meeting on Thursday.

The 15-member U.N. Security Council met to discuss the latest missile tests at the request of the United States. China's U.N. Ambassador Liu Jieyi, president of the council for April, said: "We're looking at a response from the Security Council."

Diplomats said the council was likely to issue a statement condemning the latest missile tests.

Japan's U.N. Ambassador Motohide Yoshikawa, also a council member, said that during the closed-door meeting "everybody condemned the latest failed launches."

Ban's spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, called the actions "extremely troubling."

Yonhap said the first missile was not detected by South Korean military radar because it did not fly above a few hundred meters, and was spotted by a U.S. satellite.

On Saturday, North Korea tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile, which traveled about 30 km (18 miles) off its east coast.

The tests have come in defiance of U.N. Security Council sanctions which were strengthened after North Korea's last nuclear test in January and a space rocket launch the following month.

(Editing by Mike Collett-White and Alistair Bell)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Islamabad: Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry said that there was no breakthrough in talks with his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar on his recent trip to New Delhi.

The foreign secretary, who was in Delhi on Tuesday to attend the Heart of Asia Senior Officials meeting, held talks with his Indian counterpart on bilateral issues, including resumption of the peace dialogue, Dawn online reported on Thursday.

It was expected that the talks might lead to progress towards the start of the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue which was agreed by the two countries in December last year.

https://twitter.com/ANI_news/status/725639708735365120

I would not say there is a breakthrough, but we conveyed our concerns forthrightly", Chaudhry said at a media briefing here on Wednesday.

https://twitter.com/ANI_news/status/725641822303850496

He said he had stressed the need for a structured, sustained and result-oriented comprehensive dialogue process, resolving the Kashmir dispute and conducting a fair trial in the 2007 Samjhauta Express attack case.

He also expressed concern over the involvement of alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, in subversive activities in Pakistan and said such acts undermine efforts for normalisation.

He said the Indian foreign secretary did not indicate any date for his visit to Pakistan for discussing a timetable of the comprehensive dialogue.

The two secretaries were to meet in mid-January in Islamabad, but the sitting had to be postponed because of the Pathankot attack. The two countries have not so far been able to reschedule the meeting.

https://twitter.com/ANI_news/status/725640251692208128

Pakistan is ready for dialogue, whenever India agrees to it, Chaudhry said.
Islamabad: Pakistani authorities are looking for a group of suicide bombers who allegedly entered from Afghanistan to target different locations , a media reported said on Thursday.

The tip-off came after the deadly bombing in Kabul last week which killed 64 people and for which Afghanistan blamed the Pakistan-based Haqqani network.

The Dawn reported that as many as 11 suicide bombers entered from Afghanistan some 22 days ago, and two of them blew themselves up in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recently.

According to the sources, the bombers were affiliated with Sajna Group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. The information about them and their entry in the country was gathered by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and shared with the authorities concerned, they added.

"They may strike in the Punjab, especially in Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Lahore," the sources revealed. The agency has advised the authorities concerned to improve security in and around hospitals, shopping centres, markets, parks, food streets and malls to prevent any terrorist activity, the officials added.

Intelligence agencies have kept an eye on slums and rural areas for possible presence of terrorists, he added. "An information-based operation is being conducted by agencies and Rangers in these areas," he added. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan in the past blamed each other that militants were using their soil to carry out attacks.
Washington: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been invited to address a joint meeting of the US Congress on 8 June during his visit, Speaker of the US House of Representative Paul Ryan said on Thursday.

"The friendship between the United States and India is a pillar of stability in an important region of the world," Ryan told reporters during his weekly press conference. "This address presents a special opportunity to hear from the elected leader of the world's most populous democracy on how our two nations can work together to promote our shared values and to increase prosperity. We look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi to the US Capitol on 8 June," he said.

Modi, who was invited by President Barack Obama for a bilateral visit when he was here for the nuclear summit, will be the fifth prime minister of India to address a joint meeting of Congress, and the first since 2005. Earlier, Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh (19 July, 2005), Atal Bihari Vajpayee (14 September, 2000), P V Narasimha Rao (18 May, 1994) and Rajiv Gandhi (13 July, 1985) addressed the joint meeting of the US Congress.

The tradition of foreign leaders and dignitaries addressing Congress began with the Marquis de Lafayette of France, who spoke in the House chamber on 10 December, 1824. Ronak D Desai, a Fellow at New America and an Affiliate at the Belfer Center's India and South Asia Program at Harvard University, said, "an invitation to Prime Minister Modi to address a Joint Meeting of Congress is significant, given past US policy towards Modi during his time as Chief Minister of Gujarat."

Modi's visit is likely to be the last official meeting between the two leaders during President Obama's final year in office.
Port Moresby (PNG): With a focus on developing strong relations with Pacific Island nations, President Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday arrived in the capital of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, the first ever visit by an Indian head of state since India established diplomatic ties with the country in 1975.

Mukherjee arrived Port Moresby on Thursday morning on the first leg of his two-nation visit and was given a warm welcome. He was received by Deputy Prime Minister of PNG Leo Dion.

The President inspected a guard of honour as a 21-gun salute was accorded to him.

The visit of the President is seen as a diplomatic move to counter China's growing influence in the Pacific Island nations.

Before his departure from India, his Press Secretary Venu Rajamony had said the visit was a natural extension of India's 'Look East' policy.

India is looking to enter the health market of the island nation. Ahead of his visit in Port Moresby, the Indian government had approved the signing of an agreement between the two countries, seeking cooperation in the field of healthcare and medical sciences.

The pact will encourage cooperation between the Health Ministries of both the nations through joint initiatives in the sector.

The visit is likely to give push to Indian pharmaceutical companies to set up businesses in the Pacific nation after the local government withdrew a ban in January.

With a population of 7.38 million, diseases like HIV and AIDS are listed as quite rampant in this Pacific nation.

The life expectancy in the country is also less because of high cost of medical care.

Mukherjee, on 30 April, will travel to New Zealand as part of the second leg of his tour.

India and New Zealand will explore prospects for cooperation in agriculture, dairy, food processing, education and skill development as well as high technology during the visit.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key had visited India in 2011 and its Governor General in 2008, 2009 and 2011.

The last high-level visit from India to New Zealand was by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1986.
INDIANAPOLIS U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, in a last-ditch bid to slow front-runner Donald Trump's momentum, on Wednesday named former business executive Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential running mate should he win the nomination.

After crushing losses to Trump in five nominating contests in the Northeast on Tuesday, Cruz praised Fiorina, a former presidential rival, as a principled fighter for conservative values who would be a valuable ally on the campaign trail.

"Carly is a vice presidential nominee who I think is superbly skilled, superbly gifted at helping unite this party," the U.S. senator from Texas told a rally in Indianapolis, the capital of Indiana.

The Midwestern state was the next battleground for selecting the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates for November's general election and was shaping up to be Cruzs best - and perhaps last - chance to block Trumps march to the nomination.

Cruz acknowledged it was unusual to choose a running mate so early in the race. Traditionally, the winners of the Republican and Democratic nominating races announce their running mates in the period between clinching the nomination and summer's national conventions.

"I think all would acknowledge this race, if anything, it is unusual," said Cruz, 45, adding that he wanted to give voters a clear choice and offer a rebuttal to media suggestions the Republican race was over.

In the Democratic nominating race, Hillary Clinton, 68 won four of Tuesday's five contests, building a virtually insurmountable lead over rival Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old U.S. senator from Vermont, who vowed to keep fighting until the July convention.

In tapping Fiorina as his No. 2, Cruz was apparently trying to recover from Trump's landslide primary wins on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The victories made the uphill climb towards the nomination even steeper for Cruz.

"I've had tough fights all my life," Fiorina said after Cruz introduced her. "Tough fights don't worry me a bit."

Fiorina, 61, dropped her own White House bid in February after a seventh-place finish in New Hampshire. She endorsed Cruz a month later and has been a sharp critic of Clinton.

Fiorina and Cruz both said they had grown close since her endorsement, and she sang a few verses of a song she said she sings to Cruz's two daughters on their campaign bus.

The choice of Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard Co chief executive who, like Trump, has never held elective office, could help Cruz with women voters, a group that Trump has had difficulty winning over to his outsider campaign.

It also could offer Cruz a boost in the June 7 primary in California, where in 2010 Fiorina won the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. She was defeated in the subsequent general election by incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer. Fiorina now lives in Virginia.

Trump has amassed 987 of the 1,237 Republican national convention delegates he needs to secure the nomination, to 562 for Cruz and 153 for Ohio Governor John Kasich, 63, the third remaining candidate, according to the Associated Press.

If Cruz can win a large share of Indiana's 57 delegates, it will increase the chances that Trump will not be able to win the nomination on the convention's first ballot. After that, many delegates will be free to turn to Cruz, Kasich or a dark-horse establishment candidate on a second or subsequent ballot.

A loss to Trump in Indiana would effectively cripple Cruzs bid, and increase pressure on the party to rally around Trump as the prospective nominee.

'WASTE OF TIME'

Trump poured scorn on Cruz's decision to pick a running mate, calling it "a pure waste of time" and "a desperate attempt to save a failing campaign by an all-talk, no-action politician."

"Cruz has no path to victory. He is only trying to stay relevant," the New York billionaire and former reality TV star said in a statement.

Cruz said Fiorina had already proven her mettle in standing up to Trump last year after he insulted her looks in an interview. "Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?" Trump had asked, only to be sternly rebuked by Fiorina in their next presidential debate.

"She's faced challenges a lot worse than someone bellowing and yelling and insulting her face," Cruz told the Indianapolis crowd.

A breast cancer survivor who lost a stepdaughter to drug addiction, Fiorina served as Hewlett-Packard CEO from 1999 to 2005. She was forced to resign amid weak earnings as the company struggled to digest a $19 billion merger with then-rival Compaq Computer Corp. About 30,000 layoffs took place during her tenure.

Fiorina's campaign never took off in the original 17-member Republican presidential field, and she was mostly relegated to the early second-tier debates for low-polling candidates.

Some conservatives applauded Cruz's choice. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect political candidates who oppose abortion rights, said Fiorina was the "ideal" choice.

"She will take Hillary Clinton head-on," Dannenfelser said in a statement.

(Reporting by James Oliphant in Indianapolis and Emily Stephenson, Jeff Mason, Megan Cassella, Alana Wise and Timothy Ahmann in Washington; Writing by John Whitesides; Editing by Frances Kerry and Jonathan Oatis)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Searing temperatures will cost emerging economies up to 10 percent in lost daytime working hours, if countries do not cut planet-warming emissions further than they have promised so far, U.N. agencies and international labour bodies said on Thursday.

Global temperatures are predicted to rise by at least 2.7 degrees Celsius if emissions-reduction pledges made by nearly 190 nations for the new global climate change deal are met.

The Paris agreement, however, sets a goal of keeping average temperature rise to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.

If the world continues with its current level of emissions, the impact on working hours - and lost GDP - is likely to be even worse, according to a joint report by the U.N. Development Programme, International Labour Organization, Climate Vulnerable Forum and other agencies.

"Excessive heat puts exposed working populations at greater risk from heat-induced stresses and undermines growth by compromising productivity," Cecilia Rebong, ambassador and permanent representative of the Philippines to the United Nations, said in a statement.

"Vulnerable groups need significant support to tackle rising heat in the workplace," Rebong added.

Countries likely to be worst affected by rising temperatures include India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Cambodia, Pakistan, Burkina Faso and parts of West Africa, the report said.

India is in the grip of an early-summer heat wave that has killed more than 100 people, forced schools to close and halted outdoor work like construction, government officials said last week. Temperatures have risen above 40 degrees Celsius in some states.

In the 1990s, several developing countries were already losing up to 3 percent of daylight working hours to intense heat. Since then, global temperatures have risen, according to the report which studied a sample of countries from each region.

In West Africa, the number of very hot days per year has doubled since the 1960s, with an extra 10 hot days every decade, the report said.

"Imagine working in a shoe manufacturer in Vietnam or a clothing factory in Bangladesh when it is 35 degrees Celsius," said Philip Jennings, general secretary of UNI Global Union.

"Governments and employers have to take this issue of the cauldron of a warming planet seriously and develop some effective policy responses and practical measures to protect workers," he added.

Countries like Bangladesh stand to lose the most as the planet heats up, said Saleemul Huq, advisor to the Climate Vulnerable Forum and director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development.

"If we are to take sustainable development seriously, we have to scale up climate action across the board and fund real ways of adapting communities to these new everyday extremes," he said.

(Reporting by Alex Whiting, Editing by Megan Rowling; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
MOSCOW Russia on Thursday denied its planes were responsible for air strikes that destroyed a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo, saying it had carried out no air strikes there in recent days.

The al-Quds hospital was hit by air strikes overnight, killing at least 27 people, monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Russian Defence Ministry suggested another country was responsible. "According to our information, on the evening of April 27, for the first time after a long break, there was a plane over Aleppo that belonged to one of the so-called anti-Islamic State coalition countries," it said in a statement.

(Reporting by Lidia Kelly and Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Mark Trevelyan; Writing by Lidia Kelly)

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Islamabad: A delegation from the Afghan Taliban's political office in Qatar arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday to discuss the restarting of peace talks with Kabul, militant sources said.

Their visit to Karachi came a day after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani threatened diplomatic reprisals against Pakistan if it refused to take action against Taliban leaders, a new hardline stance after a brazen insurgent attack killed 64 people in Kabul.

A senior Afghan Taliban source based in Pakistan told AFP the three-member team would "soon begin initial contacts with Pakistani and Afghan officials".

"The main purpose of the visit is to explore ways and means to bring peace in Afghanistan," the source, who is based in northwest Pakistan, told AFP.

"It is an initial stage and formal peace talks have yet to begin. They have arrived on Pakistan's invitation," he added.

Two other Afghan Taliban sources confirmed the arrival of the negotiating team, though Pakistani and Afghan officials have yet to formally comment.

Qari Yousuf, one of the Taliban's official spokesmen, said he was unaware of the visit.

Direct peace talks between Kabul and the Afghan Taliban began in Pakistan in July 2015 but were scrapped after the belated revelation that Mullah Omar, the group's founder, had died two years earlier. The disclosure sparked infighting within the militant group.

A four-member group comprising Afghanistan, the United States, China and Pakistan has been attempting since January to revive the talks. But the lack of progress has left many frustrated, as the Taliban ramp up their insurgency which began in 2001 after they were deposed from power by a US-led invasion.

Ghani angrily denounced Pakistan for failing to rein in the Taliban. Islamabad recently admitted, after years of official denial, that the Taliban leadership enjoys safe haven inside Pakistan.

"I want to make it clear that we no longer expect Pakistan to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table," Ghani said in a sombre address to both houses of the Afghan parliament.

"But we want Pakistan to fulfil its promises... and take military action against their sanctuaries and leadership based on its soil. If they can't target them they should hand them over to our judiciary."

The Taliban have repeatedly said they will not negotiate until their demands are met, including the departure of 13,000 foreign soldiers deployed to train and advise their Afghan counterparts.

The 19 April bombing in Kabul, which also wounded nearly 350 people, was seen as the opening salvo in this year's Taliban offensive  widely expected to be the bloodiest in 15 years.
SINGAPORE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The world's largest canned tuna company, Thai Union Group PCL ,announced on Thursday it would eliminate recruitment fees for its workers - a move that will prevent workers from racking up debts to job brokers and from being exploited and abused.

The vast majority of migrant labourers in Asia have to pay sizeable fees to brokers and agencies to land jobs abroad, often borrowing money and starting their new jobs deep in debt.

When they start work, they are often not paid for six months to a year as their salaries go towards paying those debts, leaving them vulnerable to trafficking and broker exploitation.

The "zero recruitment fees" policy of Thai Union - with brands such as Chicken of the Sea, John West and Petit Navire - takes effect immediately for future recruitment of all workers in its factories and processing plants - most of them from Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, the company said in a statement.

"That's something that Thai Union sees as essential to make sure that workers aren't in debt bondage before they start work," Darian McBain, Thai Union's global director of sustainable development, said at Trust Forum Asia, a slavery and trafficking forum in Singapore hosted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"We'll cover the costs of all the agency fees, so that people aren't burdened with the debt that they can sometimes build up on the way to coming to employment in Thailand," she said in a panel discussion on tackling slavery in supply chains.

Activists commended the policy and said they hoped other companies would follow suit.

"100 percent of the costs of recruitment is falling on workers. This is completely unacceptable. Companies should be paying to recruit workers, or at least they should be taking a very fair share of the burden," said rights activist Andy Hall, an advisor to the non-profit Migrant Worker Rights Network (MWRN).

"It's the main issue leading to human trafficking, debt bondage and slavery these days," he said, adding that Thai Union "has realised that it's their responsibility to ensure that their recruitment supply chain - to get the workers into the factory - is clean."

Thailand's multibillion-dollar seafood industry has come under fire in recent years after numerous investigations by journalists and rights groups showed widespread slavery, trafficking and violence on fishing boats and in onshore food processing factories.

Thai Union, with annual sales exceeding $3.5 billion and more than 46,000 employees worldwide, has been working with MWRN and Hall to strengthen relationships with recruitment agents in Cambodia and Myanmar, and map out recruitment processes in order to reduce costs and complexities, the company said.

McBain, an expert on sustainable supply chains who joined Thai Union last July, said the company once viewed NGOs as outsiders that raised issues and caused alarm, but now sees local organisations in particular as "a vital part of our work".

Thai Union is also working closely with the non-profit Issara Institute, which started a multilingual hotline for the company's workers to raise concerns and give them a voice.

Issara Institute is now developing a helpline app for mobile phones, McBain said.

"We found out 93 percent of workers in our factories have a smartphone, so that is enormous potential for how they can access these remedy situations," she said.

The company can provide the app to workers on shore, as well as at sea on vessels equipped with satellite or wifi connectivity "so workers can have access to a voice at sea as well."

(Reporting by Alisa Tang, editing by Tim Pearce. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, womens rights, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org to see more stories)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
KIEV A senior Ukrainian diplomat was headed to the Russian border on Thursday morning to help the sister of jailed Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko after Kiev accused Russian border guards of seizing her passport and preventing her from leaving Russia.

Vira Savchenko was in a Ukrainian diplomatic car trying to cross back into Ukraine when she was stopped at the Russian border and guards seized her passport, Ukrainian officials said.

Savchenko had been told by a Russian border guard that she was on a federal wanted list, without giving a reason, said Yarema Dukh from Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's press service.

"Vira to stay in the car, which is Ukrainian diplomatic car, until this issue to be clarified," Dukh said.

Poroshenko has alerted Ukraine's international partners about the incident, Poroshenko's office said.

It comes hours after the Russian news agency RIA reported that a procedure to extradite Nadezhda Savchenko had begun, quoting one of her lawyers.

A Russian court sentenced Savchenko to 22 years in jail on March 22 after finding her guilty of involvement in the killing of two Russian journalists during the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine. She has denied any involvement.

"Vira Savchenko and our consul locked themselves in the diplomatic car. Russian authorities block the car ignoring its diplomatic status," Dmytro Kuleba, a spokesman for Ukraine's foreign ministry, wrote on Twitter.

"I hope the detention of Vira Savchenko doesn't mean Russia is taking a new hostage and we won't have to apply #FreeSavchenko to both sisters," Kuleba said.

Savchenko, 34, is regarded in her homeland as a national hero and symbol of resistance to Russia, which annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in March 2014 after a Moscow-backed president was toppled during street protests in Kiev. Russia has also backed separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.

Posters demanding her release are visible in many parts of Ukraine, including at Kiev's international airport and in parliament.

But many in Russia see Savchenko as a Ukrainian nationalist with the blood of civilians on her hands. She was captured by pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine in June 2014 at the height of fighting there between Ukrainian forces and the separatists.

Poroshenko has said he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed a framework for a deal to secure the release of Savchenko from prison.

The sentencing of two captured Russian servicemen in Ukraine earlier this month has fuelled speculation that they might be swapped for Savchenko.

Vitaly Moskalenko, Ukraine's Consul General in the Russian port city of Rostov-on-Don, was expected to reach the border at around three in the morning local time (0000 GMT), Dukh said.

(Reporting by Matthias Williams; Editing by Andrew Hay, Toni Reinhold)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Collectively, the four account for 80 per cent of all credit cards that consumers have linked to mobile payment systems, in a country with a relatively high rate of contactless payment.

Apple Pay allows users to register credit cards on devices such as iPhones, and pay for goods and services by swiping the devices over contactless payment terminals. Apple charges card providers for transactions via the service, which it introduced to Australia last year with American Express .

Apple is expanding its Apple Pay digital wallet in Australia after ANZ became the country's first bank to support the mobile payment service, executives at the pair told Reuters.

ANZ will no longer offer American Express cards in a response to the cap on interchange fees. Credit:ANZ

ANZ confirmed the deal with Apple on Thursday morning. ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott said in a statement the introduction of Apple Pay "is a significant milestone in our strategy to use digital technology to provide our customers with a superior experience and will be a watershed moment in the adoption of mobile payments in Australia."



He added ANZ is confident the convenience, security and privacy of the service would be well received by customers. It is understood demand from ANZ customers for Apple Pay has been huge. More than 60 per cent of all card transactions in Australia are now contactless, far more than rates in the US.

"With the high adoption rates of contactless payments in Australia, our customers will be world leaders in their ability to use their mobiles to make the vast bulk of essential payments," Mr Elliott said.

The partnership coincides with Apple's first-ever drop in iPhone sales during a quarter in which services such as apps, music and payment emerged as the firm's second-largest business.

Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay, said in an interview that the tech giant's "customers ... are much closer to being able to leave their wallets at home."
Rather, he said, the shares are an acknowledgment of what he and the other employees have put into Chobani. "It's better than a bonus or a raise," Lake said. "It's the best thing because you're getting a piece of this thing you helped build." The transfer of money by Ulukaya touches on a hot-button economic issue: the rapidly expanding gap in pay between executives and average workers. The United States has one of the widest pay gaps, and the topic has played a prominent role in this year's presidential race, particularly among the Democrats. Some other executives have also taken this issue on themselves. A founder of Gravity Payments, a Seattle-based credit card payment processing firm, last year promised to pay a minimum wage of $US70,000 to his 120-person staff within three years. Chobani, whose yoghurt is sold in Woolworths and Coles supermarkets, also has production in Australia, having bought a dairy plant in Dandenong South from Bead Foods, the makers of Gippsland Dairy products, in 2011.

From Ulukaya to you The shares given to Chobani employees are coming directly from Ulukaya. The shares can be sold if the company goes public or is bought by another business, neither of which seems imminent. Employees can hang onto the shares if they leave or retire, or the company will buy them back. The unusual announcement comes before TPG Capital, whose $US750 million loan helped bail out Chobani, can buy a stake in the company. Tension between Ulukaya and TPG about the direction of the company emerged shortly after the loan deal. TPG has warrants to buy 20 per cent or more of Chobani's shares, depending on targets set in the original deal it struck. But that percentage would now be calculated from the 90 per cent of the remaining shares, after the 10 per cent given to the employees, essentially diluting TPG's potential stake. TPG declined to comment Tuesday.

In addition, a year ago Ulukaya settled a lawsuit with his ex-wife, who had sought a stake in the company. The terms of the settlement were not released. Uncommon move This sort of transfer of shares to employees is rare in the food industry. In one of the few notable examples, Bob Moore, the founder of Bob's Red Mill, a grains and cereals company, handed control of the company to its employees in 2010 with the creation of an employee stock ownership program. Technology startups often pay employees partly in shares to help recruit them or to compete in a company's early days for in-demand workers. Early employees of Google and Facebook became overnight multimillionaires thanks to such compensation. But unlike many of those tech companies, Ulukaya is giving his employees a piece of the company after its value is firmly established.

"It's very uncommon and rare, especially in this industry, for these kinds of programs to be rolled out," said Jessica Kennedy, a principal at Mercer, the large human resources consulting firm that worked with Chobani on the new program. Ulukaya has played a hands-on role in the company since 2005, when he bought a defunct Kraft yoghurt plant here with an $US800,000 loan from the Small Business Administration. Two years later, he began selling Greek yoghurt, setting off a heated competition in what had been one of the sleepier refrigerated cases in grocery stores. Chobani pays employees above the minimum wage and offers full-time employees health benefits and other benefits. Early on, Ulukaya established a pension plan for employees and pushed them to participate. "I preached and nagged and tried to force them to do it," he said. "Unfortunately, not all did, and I've continued to worry about them in retirement." A few years ago, though, the company ran into financial problems after spending almost half a billion dollars to build the largest yoghurt processing plant in the world, a 1-million-square-foot facility in Idaho. The new plant allowed the company to expand into new products, like a children's yoghurt packed in a tube and tiny cups of dessert-like yoghurts.

Back from the abyss But the company struggled to get lines up and running smoothly, and public health officials identified mold contamination in some products. "It was a wake-up call for us," Ulukaya said soberly. "It made me realise that I needed to get this right, and so I'm glad it happened." The company had to close lines and invest in improving its food safety regimens. It also took the loan from TPG Capital to help build operations better suited to the billion-dollar business Chobani had become. In a presentation to investors, though, TPG boasted about how it had waited until the last minute to come to Chobani's rescue with the loan, thus allowing it to negotiate better terms in a deal that it estimated could increase the company's value to as much as $US7 billion. In addition, rumors circulated that TPG wanted to replace Ulukaya with a new chief executive, which rankled him.
Port Arthur. Those two words still haunt the survivors, the families of victims and all who remember the tragic events of April 28, 1996.

Yet 20 years on, a new generation is hearing, perhaps for the first time, the terror of the Port Arthur massacre.

The 20th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre should remind Australians that gun laws matter. Credit:Cathryn Tremain

How what psychiatrists called "an intellectually handicapped and personality disordered" man without a driver's licence or gun licence could drive to the Tasmanian site, and use one of the many semi-automatic weapons he had purchased, to murder people who initially thought it was a historic re-enactment.

How tourist Carolyn Loughton lay on her 15-year-old daughter Sarah to protect her from the gunman  and was shot herself  only to discover later that Sarah was dead.
1. Aid worker kidnapped

An unfolding case in Afghanistan where a Western woman, believed to be an Australian aid worker, has been kidnapped.

I spoke to former BBC and now freelance journalist Bilal Sarwary (who is worth a follow on Twitter and Instagram for his beautiful photos of the "Afghanistan you never see") who gave us some more details about the case, including the fact that the kidnappers were wearing uniforms belonging to the ASNF - the Afghanistan National Security Forces.

The issue is being covered locally.
"Donald Trump is truly oblivious," said Marcy Stech, a spokeswoman for Emily's List, a group supporting Democratic female candidates who back abortion rights. "It's decades of offensive comments that have brought him to unprecedented lows among women. As with all of these outrageous comments, Trump's words speak for themselves. And given that he turns more women away every day, Trump is doing a lot of our work for us."

If Clinton secures the nomination, she would be the first female presidential nominee from either major US party. Democrats are building a strategy around the premise that Clinton's gender and some of Trump's past disparaging statements about women would be a built-in advantage for Clinton in terms of the woman's vote. In attacking her squarely on the gender issue, Trump signalled that he doesn't buy those assumptions - or that he believes he still has plenty of time before November to change how women perceive him.

Hillary Clinton directly addressed Mr Trump's assertion she was playing the 'woman card' on Tuesday night. Credit:Bloomberg

Clinton, who on Tuesday defeated her own primary rival, Bernie Sanders, in four of the five states, has been preparing for Trump's line of attack. Addressing her supporters before Trump spoke, she noted that earlier Trump had "accused me of playing the, quote, woman card". Clinton said that "if fighting for women's health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in".

Trump already appears to face an uphill fight to win women voters. He angered many women last August when he said Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever" after she asked him about derogatory comments he'd made about women. Gallup's daily tracking poll for March showed that Trump is viewed unfavourably by 70 per cent of US women and 58 per cent of men, and that his unfavourability rating with women has been climbing since last summer.
A new exhibition celebrating the life and works of French painter and sculptor Edgar Degas will open tomorrow in the MGM Art Space as part of the Fun for Everyone Campaign. It is being held in collaboration with Le French May, the annual arts festival that aims to promote French art and culture in Macau and Hong Kong.

The exhibition, entitled Edgar Degas  Figures in Motion, presents 74 pieces of bronze sculpture which have never been shown in Asia before, according to organizers, including the famous Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.

Curated by Dalit L. Durst of the M.T. Abraham Foundation for Visual Arts, visitors will have the chance to explore the exhibition with the aid of interactive guides.

One room in the exhibition features a zoetrope, a pre-film animation device that produces the illusion of motion through

a sequence of still pictures. It projects a succession of photographs of a horse and jockey that, through the sequence of images, creates the illusion that the animal is jumping. The room connects Degass fascination with motion with the title of the exhibition.

He [Degas] took lovely photographs, said Durst at the media preview to the exhibition. Not only of horses, but of women and men in locomotion. He was fascinated by human and animal locomotion and movement.

French artist Pierre-

August Renoir, a contemporary of Degas, had this to say about the artist and his ability to convey motion: Degas found the means to express the ailment of our contemporaries. I mean motion [] before him, only the Chinese had found the secret of motion [in Tai Chi]. This is Degas greatness: motion in French style [sic].

However, the exhibition mostly features bronze sculptures by the Parisian artist. What is interesting in respect to these is that they were never intended to be shown to the public, rather they were designed to aid Degas in rendering the figures and animals in his paintings in more realistic perspective and proportionate terms. Thus the collection of his bronze figurines, representing a variety of wholesome and sometimes exaggerated poses, granted Degas a custom set of desk-sized references for his other works.

One of Degass most renowned sculptures, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is on display in another room. Standing one-meter tall, the sculpture portrays a posing ballerina girl, wearing a corset and tutu that contrasts with the bronze of the rest of the statue.

He used ready-made materials [] for example a real tutu that served as the skirt for the dancer and real human hair [on the sculptures head], explained the curator.

[But] the visitors hated her, emphasized Durst when speaking to reporters. Why? Because first of all she didnt look very classic. They called her a monkey or an opera rat. She was not pretty, she was rigid and they simply hated her.

Edgar Degas, born in 1834, is renowned for his renditions of dancers, bathing women and racecourse subjects, and is regarded as both one of the founders of the Impressionist movement as well as a pioneer in abstract art. Despite this, Degas rejected the aforementioned categorization, preferring to consider himself a realist.

Asked about what drew her personally to Degas, exhibition curator Durst told the Times that although the artist held disreputable opinions, she nevertheless thinks his life story is interesting and that he has made a significant contribution to art.

He was a bit of a misanthrope, she said. He was an anti-Dreyfusard during the Dreyfus trial [] and was never sorry for having condemned captain Dreyfus. He did not like women very much, although he pictured them and portrayed them.

Yes, he was a well- known misogynist, she added, [which means] he had very contradictory qualities. But I think that his art is fascinating because he was an innovator and a modernist for his time.

The exhibition will not feature any of Degas paintings; it is almost entirely composed of the bronze works designed to aid the artist.

This collection of 74 works belongs to the foundation [] and unfortunately we dont have any of Degass paintings. We could not get paintings from museums in China on time it was complicated, said Durst. Of course it would have been ideal to have paintings amongst the works that would serve as dialogues with the sculptures. Maybe next time, she jokingly proposed.

The exhibition opens on Friday and will last until November 20. It is open between 12 p.m. and 9 p.m. except on Mondays when it is closed. Admission is free. Daniel Beitler
Harry Wu, a former political prisoner who dedicated his later life to exposing abuses in Chinas brutal prison labor camp system, has died. He was 79.

Wu died yesterday (Macau time) while on vacation in Honduras, Ann Noonan, administrator with Wus Laogai Human Rights Organization, told AP. The cause of death wasnt immediately known, and Wus son Harrison and former wife China Lee were traveling to the Central American nation to bring home Wus remains.

Wu was born into a prosperous family in Shanghai that saw most of its property confiscated following the civil war in 1949. He studied geology at university but fell afoul of the authorities for his criticism of the Soviet Union, Chinas then-ally, and was sentenced in 1960 at age 23 to reform through labor.
West Africas Cape Verde defense official said yesterday police has captured the suspected killer of 8 soldiers, 3 civilians at military barracks.

The former Portuguese colonys president, Jorge Carlos Fonseca, said earlier on his Facebook page that investigations into the slayings are proceeding at a good and positive pace.

The government said a disgruntled soldier who has gone missing is suspected of gunning down eight other soldiers and three civilians, including two Spaniards, early yesterday [Macau time]. It did not name him.

By then, the suspected soldier was missing but there were strong indications he was behind the slayings, the former Portuguese colonys government said in a statement on its website.

The statement said personal motives inspired the attack, ruling out an attempted coup or any connection with violence associated with drug trafficking that has recently plagued the archipelago.

People are advised to remain calm and serene, the statement said.

However, it also said officials had seized nine weapons and ammunition. It didnt elaborate on that find, nor did it say how it might be connected to the killings.

The three civilians killed included two Spanish technicians on assignment in Cape Verde, according to the government. The dead were all men aged between 20 and 51.

It said authorities are investigating what happened at the barracks that housed soldiers protecting a hilltop communications hub where the Spaniards and a Cape Verdean were reportedly working on repairs.

The government placed security forces on red alert at the international airport in Praia, the capital, and at the islands ports after the attack, the online service of newspaper Expresso das Ilhas said.

A policeman came across the bodies around midday, Cape Verde Television said.

The Cape Verde archipelago, some 600 kilometers off Senegal, is made up of 10 islands. Around 500,000 people live there.

Authorities in Cape Verde, which is classified as a developing nation, have received praise and financial aid from international bodies for their commitment to democracy and economic development.

However, the country has recently been fighting international drug rings attempting to smuggle cocaine into the country. Police last week seized 280 kilograms of cocaine from a yacht, and officials have linked two recent armed attacks against public figures to that battle.

A new government took office last Friday after winning a March election and vowed zero tolerance in the fight against crime.

Fonseca said in his social media post yesterday that he is canceling an official trip to one of the countrys 10 islands so he can follow the investigation.

Local newspaper A Semana reported a heavy police presence in the capital Praia, with some 40 police in its main square. MDT/AP
Joint Electronic Teller Services (JETCO) launched a peer-to-peer inter-bank platform in Hong Kong on Tuesday, a mobile application that enables cardholders of three banks to transfer money to other individuals through their smartphones.

China CITIC Bank International and Shanghai Commercial Bank are already offering the service while Wing Lung Bank will launch the service in May. According to JETCO chief executive officer Angus Choi, a total of 14 banks are expected to join the platform by the end of the first half of 2017.

Meanwhile, Choi revealed that JETCO is in discussions with Macau regulators to expand the service to the region. However, he added that there are no plans to offer the Macau service in Yuan or US dollars.

Any individual with a Hong Kong bank account can receive funds, provided that they have the JETCO Pay P2P Collect app, which is available for both Android and iOS devices. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has set the maximum amount for the app at HKD3,000 every two days.

Choi said the firm wants to develop Hong Kongs mobile payment market and is seeking opportunities to cooperate, revealing that the companys next step is to add the peer-to-merchant service to the peer-to-peer platform to enable clients to pay for online shopping,

Meanwhile, according to a South China Morning Post report, Hong Kong has been conservative in financial technology despite the expansion of the financial technology industry (fintech) in the mainland and elsewhere.

Chief executive at Partners Capital International Ronald Wan emphasized that there are numerous rules and regulations in Hong Kong.

Its a problem left over from history. Investors, regulators, and companies can hardly walk even an inch in the fintech industry, he said. If you dont relax the rules, local firms are hardly able to compete with mainland peers such as Alibaba or Tencent.

macau pass with new payment platform

Macau Pass has launched M + Pay, a third-party online payment platform. According to a report by Macao Daily News, from now on Macau Pass users can charge their cards directly through their personal accounts or through a bank account that is connected to M + Pay. Each user account is limited to a balance of MOP5,000. The report also advised that the platform can be used to pay for online purchases and bill payments. M + Pay is supported by a webpage and an Android and iOS based application, which will all be available by the end of May. Users who intend to use this service can sign up for an account using their current phone number. Lao Kin Keong, deputy general manager of Macau Pass, revealed that cooperation with mainland online shopping companies, including Taobao, is currently under negotiation. He expects to reach an agreement later this year.
The Marine and Water Bureau will adjust the citys water bill by the end of this year, according to a report by TDM. Susana Wong Soi Man, the bureaus director, explained earlier this week that the adjustment is because of the mainland, which increases the fees every three years. Mainland China will increase their bills in 2017 by around 10 percent, informed Wong. According to her, and based on the balance calculated during the last accounting period, the average cost of water stands at MOP6.68 per cubic meter, a price which she expects to reach MOP7.00. However, this cost does not account for the construction of the fourth water pipe and for the water treatment plant in Seac Pai Van.

Zhongshan Macau yacht scheme without start date

The opening date for the Free Yacht Travel Scheme remains uncertain, according to a report by Jornal Cheng Pou. The infrastructure will open after a complete check of the inspection building on the Zhongshan side. The opening date of the yacht scheme was postponed several times last year, with the authorities first attempting to schedule the opening for the middle of that year, and arranging a 24-hour checkpoint at Coloane Pier. The scheme was agreed upon between the two regions in July 2014.

Myanmar exhibition to kick off on Saturday

A five-day Myanmar gems and jewelry exhibition will kick off at the Macau Fishermans Wharf on Saturday. Around 60 exhibition stalls will be arranged to present handcrafted products, such as jade colored gemstones, made in Myanmar. There will also be a Myanmar-style performance for visitors. Last years exhibition attracted over 25,000 visitors, and, most noticeably, led to the sale of products worth over three million patacas. The organizer, the Myanmar-Macao Exhibition and Trade Promotion Association, this year expects 30,000 visitors and more than five million patacas in sales.
CHINA A Tibetan male character from the Doctor Strange comic books presented such a political minefield to Marvel that in the film version they cast a Caucasian woman in the role, reflecting the pressures Hollywood movie makers perceive when trying to appeal to the Chinese market.

TAIWAN Scores of Taiwanese fishermen protest outside Japans representative office in Taiwan to demand an apology over the seizure of one of their fishing boats by the Japanese coast guard.

NORTH KOREA Facing mounting international pressure over its nuclear and missile ambitions, North Korea has set a date for its biggest political convention in decades next week that is expected to bolster young dictator Kim Jong Uns grip on power.

THAILAND Animals at Bangkoks zoo are being fed special frozen fruit pops. People are flocking to shopping malls just to soak up the air-conditioning. Authorities are telling people to stay out of the blazing sun to avoid heat stroke. April is typically hot, but this years scorching weather has set a record for the longest heat wave in 65 years.

THAILANDs military government yesterday turned up the pressure on its opponents, filing a legal complaint against critics of a proposed new constitution and detaining 10 people in connection with social media postings.

AUSTRALIA The fate of hundreds of asylum seekers being held in a detention center in Papua New Guinea is in limbo as the countrys prime minister announces the facility will close in response to a court ruling that Australias detention of the men on the island nation is illegal.

MYANMAR Two German tourists and their local guide are recovering from wounds suffered when they accidentally set off a land mine in eastern Myanmar.

CAMBODIA An overloaded truck carrying Cambodian garment workers swerved and flipped over after a tire exploded, leaving 64 passengers injured including several in critical condition.

ABU DHABI Etihad Airways announced profits of USD103 million in 2015 off total revenues of $9.02 billion, marking a fifth year in the black on its strategy of partnering with other carriers. The Abu Dhabi-owned carrier, which is the United Arab Emirates national airline, said its continued profitability showed the value of its approach of taking minority equity stakes and codeshares outside of traditional airline alliances.
KING HILL  Watching a distant boat through binoculars, Dustin Masin narrates the movements of sturgeon anglers around the next point of the Snake River.

In the drivers seat of their 20-foot inboard jet boat, Clint Rogers writes the actions and times in his pocked-sized notebook: Cast @ 1134  Dark T-shirt & Dark ball cap  3 rods.

A guy in long-sleeve flannel plaid is working one of those poles, though, Masin says.

If the man in the ball cap is casting for his fishing companions, Rogers and Masin want to find out whether hes getting paid for that  and whether he has the outfitters license to make it legal. A suggestive detail: Their boat is the same brand as a boat trailer the officers saw downstream at the King Hill boat launch  hitched to an Idaho vehicle but parked near two out-of-state vehicles.

Only one outfitter is licensed to guide sturgeon anglers on this stretch of the Snake River between King Hill and the Bliss Dam. Its one of south-central Idahos most popular river stretches for white sturgeon fishing  which in Idaho is catch-and-release only  because its one of the few where the huge fish still reproduce naturally.

On this April 16 patrol for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Rogers and Masin are checking anglers fishing licenses and their tackle. Are they using the barbless hooks and sliding sinkers Idaho requires for sturgeon fishing? Is the line to the sinker a lighter test than the line to the hook?

But Rogers, a district conservation officer, and Masin, a senior conservation officer, are watching for signs of more nefarious wrongdoing, as well. The agency has heard reports of people illegally harvesting eggs from sturgeon. And the possibility of unlicensed outfitters is always on their minds.

On the boat around the point, a woman in a light-colored jacket picks up a rod cast by the man in the ball cap.

So we know the female needs to have a license, Rogers says. So do mister ball cap and mister flannel. So far, a man in a cowboy hat and a woman in flannel havent touched a pole.

Masin still wants to see the man in flannel handle a pole for longer than a few seconds, but already the man in the ball cap has looked and pointed toward the officers jet boat. Its unmarked, but no sturgeon rods are sticking out the back.

Theyll figure us out pretty quick, Rogers says.

Their plan: Masin will check licenses while Rogers separates some members of the fishing party to ask how they know each other.

Theyre looking at us, so our games probably up, Rogers says, starting the motor.

  

Earlier on this morning, working their way upstream from King Hill, Masin scans the canyon walls as Rogers weaves through rapids, flushing ducks, a kingfisher and a great blue heron.

At a 27-foot-deep sturgeon hole dubbed Pump Hole, they spot five sturgeon rods on a bank high above the water. Masin  in uniform, badge and gun belt  steps onto the bow and hails the fishing party as Rogers maneuvers the boat up to the rocks.

Its a party of at least six adults and five children, with a camper, a couple of tents and a canopy that shelters portable tables and a grill. Theyve frequented this spot for years.

Just having a good old time, says Bill Stranger of Challis, coming back to camp with his crawdad traps. The traps are empty except for a piece of hot dog and a piece of pickled herring. I dont know if my baits no good.

The pickled herring, however, is doing the trick on the sturgeon. Keegan Meyer, a Challis angler with a long, dark beard, offers a sniff from his herring jar as he baits a hook. Its got a real distinct flavor. My hands, too, probably.

Yesterday, he says, the group landed five sturgeon and lost one.

All roughly 4 to 5 feet long, Meyer says. When I get home and tell everybody, theyll be 6 feet by then.

Urged by the officers, Meyer prepares to demonstrate a cast. Success isnt a certainty, because the reels on these rods tend to backlash.

The blowups are spectacular, Stranger says.

But Meyers bait and sinker soar in a beautiful arch, plopping into the Snake River far from the bank and earning cheers from both officers and fishing buddies.

He just needs an audience, Rogers says.

As the officers head back to their boat, Rogers high-fives a girl in colorful sunglasses whos eating a doughnut. Have fun in kindergarten this year, he says.

Back behind the wheel, Rogers confides that Meyer did better than he would have.

Those level wind reels like that are really difficult to cast.

  

When Rogers talks about the excitement of fighting these monsters, he uses the same calm, quiet tone in which he explains fishing regulations or river patterns. But his smile betrays something more.

I hardly fish for anything else, he says, now that Ive fished for sturgeon.

At Cabin Hole, Rogers falls into easy conversation with Tina Metzler of Carey, a slender woman with a red-blonde ponytail pinned up on the back of her head.

Im addicted to the sturgeon, Metzler says. Her rapid-fire anecdotes include a Pillar Falls sturgeon longer than the 11-foot boat her dad and uncle fished in. Sturgeon feature in the older family lore, too.

Her fishing buddy has been buying their weights online.

I think all 20 of them are out there, Metzler says, pointing into the fishing hole. We donated a lot of lead on the rocks.

Metzler figures the 9-footer she caught in Hells Canyon was just as impressive as the 111-inch sturgeon that earned a Boise woman the new state record in early April. But nobody took her picture.

Rogers has his own sturgeon tale. He points to the opposite bank, where he fought one for two hours.

We never could get the advantage, he says.

  

Downstream of Bliss Dam is nasty Peg Leg Rapid, where Rogers once took a boat and wont again. So the churning hole below the rapid is the turnaround for this patrol.

Its kind of a tight hole, Rogers says, struggling to maneuver close to the bank. Ive never had anyone fishing there before.

But today two sturgeon anglers have their lines snagged here. Masin scrambles across the steep banks rocks to reach the men, then returns to report that neither is carrying his license.

Tyler Forbushs license is in a truck parked on the rim high above, and brother Todd Forbush says his is back at Bliss Dam. Masin is willing to climb the rocks and treacherous loose dirt to check Tylers license, but Todd gets a fix-it ticket  a citation that will be dismissed if he shows up at court with a fishing license issued before today.

Thanks for taking it well, Masin tells him. If theyre telling the truth, anglers dont pay anything for fix-it tickets, but some dont like to get a piece of paper anyway.

Tyler used to fish for sturgeon in Washington but recently moved to Meridian. For a couple of weeks hes been needling Todd, from Idaho Falls, to take him fishing. They were at Bliss Dam this morning when someone recommended this spot.

The depth of that hole is crazy deep, Tyler says while Masin does the paperwork for his brother. Its got to be 40 to 50 feet deep, dont you think, Todd? That hole is awesome.

  

Not everyone on the river this morning is out for sturgeon.

A Seattle Seahawks flag flutters from the back of a boat where Elko, Nev., gold miner Travis Hagenah and his wife, Emily, are listening to the Mariners-Yankees game on the radio while preparing to fish. Son Cooper leans over the edge of their boat, trying to reach the water with his toy pole. The baby wears a Seattle hat.

Were transplants from the Tri-Cities, Hagenah explains.

The next time officers come across this boat, Rogers says in parting, maybe theyll see a sturgeon rod.

Next year you will, for sure, Hagenah replies.

Cooper waves as the officers pull away. Buh-bye, he calls happily.

  

Some moments on this patrol are a good deal more tense  like the officers approach to the boat where the man in the dark ball cap is casting for the man in flannel plaid and the woman in a light-colored jacket.

But soon Rogers can see what Masin couldnt through the binoculars: Under the ball cap is, indeed, Justin Johnson of Jerome, the only sturgeon outfitter licensed on this stretch of river.

Johnson understands immediately the officers suspicions. He, too, is perturbed about illegal operators stealing business from him.

I got one guy Im trying to run off, Johnson says.

Rogers can help with that, he tells Johnson, and Masin hands Johnson a business card.

You guys should have been down here two weeks ago, Johnson tells the officers. There were so many people down here it was unreal.

Johnsons clients today include third-time customer Blaine Jackson of Preston, the guy in the cowboy hat. Hes an outfitter himself: mainly deer and elk hunting in the Jarbidge Wilderness.

So why hire an outfitter today? Jackson looks like its the craziest question hes ever heard.

Look at this country and this boat ride. How could you beat that? he says. After a pause: And we usually find a fish or two.
RUPERT  The three people nabbed by the Mini-Cassia Drug Task Force in a methamphetamine sting in Paul will appear at the Minidoka County Magistrate Court on May 11 for preliminary hearings.

Julie Marie Dewitt, Ozvaldo Ramirez and Douglas John Nelson were arrested in Paul on April 19 after police say Dewitt sold  pound of methamphetamine to an undercover officer outside a Chevron gas station.

All three were charged with conspiracy to traffic methamphetamine and failure to purchase a drug tax stamp.

In court on Wednesday, Ira Dillman, an attorney for Dewitt, asked for her $25,000 bond to be reduced, but Minidoka County Prosecutor Lance Stevenson said the amount of methamphetamine was significant and that the only way to ensure the publics safety is to deny that motion.

I respect (the attorneys) opinion, but the reality of it is this is a significant crime, he said.

On April 19, Dewitt called an undercover officer and said she could get  pound of methamphetamine for $3,300, court documents said. She arrived at the gas station in a white Dodge Stratus with Ramirez and Nelson, who had a $100,000 warrant out of Twin Falls for trafficking methamphetamine, unlawful possession of a firearm and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Dewitt sent a text message to the officer from inside the gas station the officer pulled up on the south side of the Chevron, court documents said.

Dewitt walked up and sat in the passenger side of the officers vehicle and handed over the methamphetamine, court documents said. The officer then gave her $3,300 in cash before Dewitt went inside the store.

A few minutes later, Dewitt, Nelson and Ramirez drove west on Ellis Street and were pulled over by detectives. Police reported finding $500 cash in Dewitts purse along with $2,800 next to the front passenger seat.

The three were taken to the sheriffs office, where Dewitt told Mini-Cassia detectives she has used Nelson and Ramirez in the past to purchase methamphetamine to be sold, court documents said.

Nelson told a detective he was there in case something went bad and that his payment for the drug deal was beer, court documents said.

In court on Wednesday, Judge Rick Bollar said he did not want to reduce Dewitts bond when it would only benefit her bondsman. With additional charges possible, Bollar said, that discussion might be better at a later date.

For her best interest, Ill deny the motion today, he said.

All three are held at the Mini-Cassia Criminal Justice Center. Dewitts bond remains at $25,000 while Nelson is being held on $100,000 bonds from Twin Falls and Minidoka counties. Ramirezs held in lieu of $50,000 bond from Minidoka County and $75,000 bond out of Gooding County.
The U.S. government claims the right to eavesdrop at will on your email when youre writing to someone who lives abroad. Now it wants to be able to use those emails to convict you of a crime.

Thats whats happening to Aws Mohammed Younis al-Jayab  and hes not the only one. The legal basis is the 2008 Amendment Act to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which says the government may monitor communications from within the U.S. to foreigners abroad, or vice versa, without first obtaining a warrant to authorize the surveillance.

No court has yet reviewed the laws constitutionality because until 2013 the government didnt tell anyone that it had been doing this. The Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that no one had legal standing to challenge the law based merely on the speculation that it might be applied to them.

Jayab is different. The government can charge him with a crime only by using evidence gathered from his intercepted emails. So its put him on notice that it intends to rely on material collected without a warrant per the FISA. That gives Jawab standing to challenge the law.

Rightfully, Jayab should win  and the details of his case show why. Its one thing for the government to intercept communications with foreigners for intelligence-gathering purposes. I would consider that a close debate. But its quite another to use those intercepts as evidence at trial. Such use badly erodes our Fourth Amendment protections, especially in an era when so much electronic communication spans the globe and where we move across borders frequently.

The alleged facts of Jayabs case are telling. The Sacramento, California, resident came to the U.S. as a refugee from Iraq in 2012. According to the government, while living in Arizona and Wisconsin, he emailed with jihadists in Syria about going there to fight. The emails indicated he had been there before. And sure enough, in 2014, Jayab traveled to Turkey and from there crossed into Syria to fight alongside several groups, allegedly including Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish jihadi group that has since merged with Islamic State.

In theory, Jayab could be charged with material support for terror if it could be proven that he really fought with Ansar al-Islam, a designated terrorist group for purposes of that law. But either the government doesnt want to charge him with that crime for tactical reasons, or its afraid it doesnt have enough direct evidence to prove it.

Instead, the government called Jayab in for an interview with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services after his return to the U.S. in 2014. They asked him whether hed been a member of a rebel group or supported terror. He said no, and claimed to have done nothing more than visit his grandmother in Turkey on the trip.

The government then charged Jayab with the crime of lying to government officials. Its evidence comes from his emails to Syria when he was in the U.S. and responses he received. Obtained under the FISA without a warrant, they are the heart of the governments case.

To be sure, in the light of the Paris and Brussels attacks, the U.S. needs some way to lock up potential jihadi terrorists who may have been trained abroad to commit attacks here. But relying on warrantless wiretapping isnt it.

There is a reason that warrantless wiretaps usually are inadmissible in court. They count as searches for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Requiring a warrant before law enforcement is allowed to listen in is a basic element of our modern right to privacy.

Once we relax that right by allowing evidence obtained in a warrantless search, theres no easy stopping point. It would seem arbitrary if we could convict one criminal who called an associate outside the U.S., but not another whose associate was inside our borders. Once the former is permitted, well start thinking about how to allow the latter.

Whats more, the Constitution doesnt say that my privacy stops when I am speaking to someone who happens to be outside the U.S. The Framers surely wouldnt have exempted letters sent from abroad if they were read within the U.S.

The Fourth Amendment provides for the right of the people to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. That need not apply to persons outside the U.S. But it should apply to everyone who is here, and we shouldnt lose our privacy rights just because were talking across borders.

Its harder to say with certainty that the government should always be barred from such intercepts when theyre made purely for intelligence purposes. Say the government is listening to the phone of someone in Syria and that person gets a call from the U.S.  the government shouldnt have to stop listening.

But charging a U.S. resident in U.S. court on the basis of warrantless searches of communications while the resident was in the U.S. goes too far. The government should find another way to hold Jayab if he is dangerous, such as charging him with a crime that can be proved without violating his rights  and ours.
By Emmanuel Vitus, Lome

Togo marked the 56th anniversary of its independence on Wednesday in colorful celebrations chaired by President Faure Essozimna Gnassingbe.

A military and civilian parade, church services and concerts in the capital Lome marked the celebrations of the West-African nations independence from France in 1960.

On the eve of the celebrations, President Faure Gnassingbe vowed, in a speech, to end poverty.

After 56 years of independence, a new outlook is being drawn up for Togo, this beautiful country that we share, Faure Gnassingbe said on the national television.

Our aim is to move to a new level in the fight against poverty by reaching out to people in rural areas that are not enough served by basic infrastructure as well as social and economic services.

He explained that the goal is to promote inclusive growth so as to speed up the reduction of social inequalities

Last week, Faure Gnassingbe inaugurated Chinese motorcycle assembly plant in Notse city, 96 km north to the capital Lome. The plant of the Chinese Dayang group will produce over 3,000 Leopard labeled motors per year and will help reduce unemployment challenge in Togo.

On Monday he also inaugurated a new terminal at Lome Airport which cost $150 million. The two-floor 6000 m building is equipped with new state-of-the-art material including fifty check-in counters three of which are automatic.

According to UN, more than half of the West African nations population live below two dollars per day with a majority from rural areas.
About 7 persons have so far been reportedly killed by some Fulani herdsmen in south eastern Nigerias Enugu state, local government and police said on Wednesday.

The incident took place barely 24 hours after stories filtered out that several heavily-armed Fulani herdsmen sneaked into communities to launch an attack.

The attackers raided a farming community in the state with guns and machetes forcing residents to flee to neighboring villages, AFP reported.

According to state police spokesman Ebere Amaraizu, seven corpses were recovered and six people were injured.

Local media put the toll higher, saying between 20 and 48 people were killed and dozens injured and that scores of homes were destroyed.

Two months ago, In February, hundreds of people were reportedly killed in clashes between Fulani herders and Christian farmers in the Agatu area of Benue state.

According to the Igbo Youths Movement, IYM, Fulani herdsmen have killed 710 other Nigerians excluding the 48 Agatu people in Benue State in the last 10 months without the Federal Government addressing the issue.
The Angolan Government on Wednesday said it will restructure the state oil firm Sonangol to increase efficiency and profitability.

According to the countrys oil Minister Jose Maria Botelho de Vasconcelos, Sonangol will continue to focus on exploration and production while two new entities will be responsible for regulation and administration.

Jose Maria Botelho de Vasconcelos explained that so far the National Fuel Society (Sonangol) has the responsibility to represent the state in the oil sector, at the same time it is also an operator in this area. We intend to separate these two functions, he said.

Angola is Africas second largest oil exporter but imports around 6 million cubic meters of refined products a year, according to national statistics.

Oil sales account for 95 percent of Angolas foreign exchange earnings, making Sonangol the biggest source of state funding.

In 2015, Sonangols net debt soared 41 percent year-on-year to $7.8 billion and revenues plummeted due to falling crude prices.

Angolas economy has grown rapidly since a 27-year civil war ended in 2002, peaking at 12 percent three years ago, but a sharp drop in oil prices has sapped dollar inflows, dented the kwanza and prompted heavy government borrowing.
A spider-shaped pericyte, seen here in light blue, encircles a capillary, helping maintain the blood-brain barrier. The gene FOXF2 seems to affect pericytes, leading to small vessel disease. Image courtesy of XVIVO Scientific Animation

Each year, stroke kills nearly 129,000 Americans, according to the American Stroke Association. It is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States and the top neurological cause of death and disability.

Scientists have associated a number of genes with a higher risk of stroke, especiallyand predictablygenes involved with atherosclerosis and blood clotting. But they know little about the genes' biological mechanismshow they actually work in the body and lead to stroke.

A study published in April 2016 in Lancet Neurology takes the link between genes and stroke one step further. The study not only identifies a gene called FOXF2 that is associated with stroke, but it also offers preliminary evidence on how the gene may cause stroke: by affecting pericytes, a type of cell on the walls of small arteries and capillaries. This insight is important, because pericyte damage is suspected to play a major role in Alzheimer's disease as well.

"It's exciting because this finding is important for both stroke and dementia, the two major neurological scourges of mankind," says senior author Sudha Seshadri, a Boston University School of Medicine (MED) professor of neurology, whose work is funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), the National Institute on Aging, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. "These results have given us a lot of interesting stuff to look at."

"Stroke is really a major public health issue," adds Stephanie Debette, MED adjunct associate professor of neurology and also professor of epidemiology and neurology at the University of Bordeaux, who is the corresponding author on the study. "The known risk factors only explain a limited portion of the disease. It's important to unravel novel risk factors and mechanisms."

Seshadri says that scientists have discovered relatively few genes associated with stroke, as compared to other common diseases, and most have been the obvious contenders, affecting things like cardiac function and fat deposits. Hoping to find some "novel biology," as she says, Seshadri and colleagues at the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) Consortium, where she leads the neurology working group, combined data from 18 previously published studies on stroke. They then analyzed the nearly 90,000 pooled casesincluding about 4,300 stroke victimsusing a technique called genome-wide association, which compares the genomes of stroke victims against those of healthy people and looks for significant genetic differences.

The analysis pointed to several interesting genes, including one called FOXF2. Seshadri, Debette, and colleagues also looked forand foundevidence of FOXF2 malfunction in another large patient database through collaboration with the NINDS-funded Stroke Genetics Network, which contains more than 70,000 people, including 19,000 stroke victims.

"This was a surprising find," says Debette. "This was not a gene we had thought of; it was not known as a risk factor for people with stroke." FOXF2 has several functions. During fetal development, it helps build the blood-brain barrier, which separates circulating blood from cerebrospinal fluid, protecting the brain from neurotoxins. In adults, FOXF2 is also present in pericytes enveloping the small blood vessels that feed the brain. Scientists don't fully understand the pericytes' role but know that they help maintain the blood-brain barrier.

The team decided to follow the trail further. Coincidentally, Seshadri and Debette had begun to collaborate with other scientists studying FOXF2 equivalents in mice and zebrafish bred to have no copy, or a non-functioning copy, of the gene. Talking to these other scientists, they learned that both mice and fish developed small vessel disease, a condition in which the lining of small arteries and capillaries is damaged and the vessels become more porous. This discovery also matched up with reports of rare cases of small vessel disease in children, related to malfunctioning FOXF2. Although small vessel disease is an important cause of stroke, responsible for 20 to 30 percent of cases, scientists had not known about any genetic risk factors for common forms of the disease, and there is currently no treatment. "We know a lot about preventing and treating heart disease and atherosclerosis," says Seshadri, "but not much about preventing or treating small vessel disease."

Also, adds Debette, small vessel disease had been implicated in the tiny, "silent strokes" that contribute to a gradual decline in balance, memory, and cognition in many older people. The next research steps, she says, are detailed genetic sequencing to discern which variations of FOXF2 lead to the disease and more animal studies to refine these results.

"If we can better understand the biology of small vessel disease, maybe we'll find drug targets that could ultimately lead to treatments," says Debette. "If we could find a way to prevent the disease, it could have a major public health impact."

Explore further New gene responsible for stroke discovered

More information: Identification of additional risk loci for stroke and small vessel disease: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies, Journal information: Lancet Neurology Identification of additional risk loci for stroke and small vessel disease: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies, dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(16)00102-2 thelancet.com/journals/laneur/  rticle/PIIS1474-4422 %2816%2900102-2/abstract

Provided by Boston University School of Medicine
Beauty companies should focus on older women's desire to look good, not young.

Companies promoting beauty products should reconsider current methods when targeting older women as few claim to use cosmetic products to look younger. The majority say they use them to look good and feel confident.

This is one of the findings of a study by Dr Carolyn Mair and Soljana Cili, from the London College of Fashion, who will present their research this week at the British Psychological Society's 2016 Annual Conference in Nottingham.

Over 500 women (aged 40 - 89) took part in an online survey with questions on their use of make-up, how they viewed advertisements aimed at their age group, how they perceived advertising and the impact of this on their self-worth.

The results showed that 62 per cent used make-up daily and that only 3 per cent used it to look younger. The majority used it to look good (52 per cent) and feel confident (28 per cent). Generally the participants viewed their representation in advertising negatively with over a third saying it made them feel bad about their appearance and nearly half found it annoying.

Carolyn said: "Middle-aged and older women feel underrepresented or not represented realistically in the media which affects their confidence and feelings of self-worth. They also dislike the young, airbrushed, or cosmetically-altered models used as they struggle to relate to them and consequently, to the products.

"It would be a step in the right direction if advertisers could reconsider some of their marketing strategies and focus less on how a product makes a women look younger and more about how the product can make her feel good about herself. Using older models would also make these women feel valued and less invisible in Society."

Explore further Facebook's effect on how we feel about ourselves

More information: Poster title: 'The influence of advertising for cosmetics on middle-aged and older women: An Online Survey'

Provided by British Psychological Society
Credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers

A new study shows that black raspberry extract can significantly lower a key measure of arterial stiffness-an indicator of cardiovascular disease. Black raspberry intake was also associated with increased levels of circulating endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which help repair and regenerate damaged arteries, according to the study published in Journal of Medicinal Food.

Han Saem Jeong, Sohyeon Kim, and coauthors from Korea University Anam Hospital (Seoul) and Gochang Black Raspberry Research Institute (Korea), describe the results of a randomized controlled trial in which they compared two groups of patients with metabolic syndrome. One group received 750 mg/day of black raspberry extract, and the other received a placebo for 12 weeks.

In the article "Black Raspberry Extract Increased Circulating Endothelial Progenitor Cells and Improved Arterial Stiffness in Patients with Metabolic Syndrome: A Randomized Controlled Trial," the researchers present the changes recorded in the radial augmentation index (a measure of arterial stiffness), blood pressure, circulating EPCs, and various markers of inflammation for the two groups of patients.

Explore further Scientists find aphid resistance in black raspberry
Credit: KU Leuven

Specific regions of the brain are specialized in recognizing bodies of animals and human beings. By measuring the electrical activity per cell, scientists from KU Leuven, Belgium, and the University of Glasgow have shown that the individual brain cells in these areas do different things. Their response to specific contours or body shapes is very selective.

Facial recognition has already been the subject of much research. But what happens when we cannot recognize an animal or a human being on the basis of a face, but only have other body parts to go on? The mechanism behind this recognition process is uncharted territory for neuroscientists, says Professor Rufin Vogels of the KU Leuven Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology.

"Previous research in monkeys has shown that small areas in the temporal lobes - the parts of the brain near the temples - are activated when the monkeys look at bodies instead of objects or faces. Brain scans tell us that these regions of the brain correspond to the ones activated in human beings. But that only tells us which regions are active, not which information about bodies is passed on by their cells."

The KU Leuven scientists measured the electrical activity of individual cells in one of the brain areas responsible for body recognition in rhesus monkeys. Vogels explains: "We showed the monkeys images of bodies of both animals and human beings, while covering up specific body parts. We usually left out the faces, because other brain cells are responsible for recognizing those. With a method developed at the University of Glasgow, we then examined each cell to see which body parts activated it."

"We found that these individual cells in themselves are not body detectors: they respond to specific, frequently found characteristics of bodies, such as the curve of an elbow or a part of a leg. And they divide the work. Each cell has its own speciality and screens the incoming information for certain characteristics. The brain recognizes a body by combining all the pieces of the puzzle: all the bits of information registered by the different cells in a particular region of the brain. The brain cells, in other words, collaborate to solve the puzzle."

In their next project, the scientists want to expand their study to include a number of other brain areas that are also active for body recognition. "If we improve our understanding of how our brains recognize bodies, we can use that knowledge for disorders whereby that particular mechanism is disrupted, such as autism, or for the development of facial-recognition software."

Explore further Researchers examine how a face comes to represent a whole person in the brain

More information: Ivo D. Popivanov et al, Stimulus features coded by single neurons of a macaque body category selective patch, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2016). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Ivo D. Popivanov et al, Stimulus features coded by single neurons of a macaque body category selective patch,(2016). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1520371113
Experts at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are recommending that surgeons and anesthesiologists consider cutting back on the number of take-home opioid pills prescribed to patients after surgery. The nonmedical use of opioid drugs costs the U.S. economy more than $70 billion annually. Credit: Robert J. Boston/School of Medicine

Bolstering new federal guidelines that advise primary care doctors to carefully weigh the prescribing of opioid painkillers, two experts at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are recommending that surgeons also consider cutting back on the number of take-home opioid pills prescribed to patients after surgery.

In a commentary published in the April issue of the journal Anesthesiology, anesthesiologist Evan D. Kharasch, MD, PhD, and surgeon L. Michael Brunt, MD, suggest new approaches for administering and prescribing pain medications to surgery patients.

Their recommendations coincide with newly released federal guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the agency that oversees public health.

"There is a massive quantity of unused opioids in the community," said Kharasch, the Russell D. and Mary B. Shelden Professor of Anesthesiology and professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the School of Medicine. "Most patients get prescriptions for pain medications after surgery, but when they don't take all of the drugs, the remaining pills can be misused by people for whom they weren't prescribed."

Kharasch said it's not unusual for a surgery patient to be sent home with dozens of pills, many of which get relegated to the medicine cabinet.

"One approach to the problem may be to prescribe fewer pain pills," he said. "Another is to encourage pharmacies to take back unused opioids so that people can get the drugs out of the house and away from others who may want to misuse them."

He and Brunt also are encouraging anesthesiologists and surgeons to re-evaluate how pain-killing drugs are used not just after surgery but during operations.

"There has been a trend to use opioid medications that wear off more quickly in surgery patients," Kharasch said. "But what if we were to use longer-duration drugs during surgery so that patients were more comfortable for a longer time after an operation? Would that mean they would need fewer pain pills when they go home? That's something that needs to be studied."

The nonmedical use of opioids has a huge price tag. The CDC estimates that misuse of such drugs costs the U.S. economy more than $70 billion annually, including health-care costs, lost time at work and criminal justice costs.

About 5 million Americans misuse prescription opioid pain relieversa number that has risen in recent years. Many of the abused drugs initially are prescribed by doctors and then taken from medicine cabinets.

"We, as surgeons and pain specialists, need to evaluate our current practices and adjust our discharge pain medicine practices to more accurately reflect usage and at the same time should consider alternative strategies to simply prescribing opioids for helping patients adequately address their pain after surgery," said Brunt, a professor of surgery. "About half of the operations performed in this country are outpatient or short-stay surgeries, so if we can somehow lower the number of pills those patients are prescribed, we have an opportunity to make very strong and positive gains in addressing the current oversupply of opioids."

Brunt and Kharasch believe that limiting the supply of prescription opioids in the community could result in big benefits, by reducing the number of people who abuse those drugs or become addicted. It also could lower rates of heroin use because as more people have become dependent on prescription opioids and as opioids have gotten more expensive, many of those users have switched to heroin.

Kharasch also directs the Center for Clinical Pharmacology, a new research center jointly operated by St. Louis College of Pharmacy and the School of Medicine. Its initial focus is on translational and clinical research to better understand and improve pain treatment, to look for better ways to use existing drugs such as prescription opioids, and to develop and identify new painkilling medications.

Explore further Researchers show rising opioid prescriptions following low-risk surgeries

More information: Kharasch ED, Brunt LM. Perioperative opioids and public health. Anesthesiology vol. 124 (4), April 2016. Journal information: Anesthesiology Kharasch ED, Brunt LM. Perioperative opioids and public health.vol. 124 (4), April 2016.
Micrograph showing cortical pseudolaminar necrosis, a finding seen in strokes on medical imaging and at autopsy. H&E-LFB stain. Credit: Nephron/Wikipedia

A transitional stroke clinic developed by doctors and nurse practitioners at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center reduced 30-day readmission rates by 48 percent, according to a study published in the April 28 online issue of the journal Stroke.

The study's goal was to determine if a structured transitional stroke clinic led by nurse practioners could reduce 30-day and 90-day hospital readmission rates.

"The needs of patients discharged directly home after suffering a stroke are often complex," said Cheryl Bushnell, M.D., director of the Stroke Center at Wake Forest Baptist and lead author of the study.

"Patients are faced with physical and cognitive limitations, complex medication regimens, new diagnoses of chronic conditions and lack of social support. These barriers challenge independence and stroke recovery and leave patients at high risk for readmissions."

The study evaluated 510 stroke or transient ischemic attack patients who had been discharged to their homes over a three-year period. The Wake Forest Baptist transitional care model included follow-up phone calls within a week of discharge and follow-up clinic visits within two to four weeks of discharge.

The researchers found that a visit to the stroke clinic was associated with a 48 percent lower risk of 30-day readmissions compared to patients who did not attend the follow-up clinic visit. A clinic visit did not affect 90-day readmission rates. A limitation of the study was that only readmissions at Wake Forest Baptist were included.

"A lot of stroke programs are doing follow-up phone calls to patients, but our data shows that phone calls alone are not good enough to reduce readmissions," Bushnell said. "It is really important for patients to be engaged in their own stroke recovery, and part of that involves coming to clinic and making sure they get all the services they need."

Bushnell also said that primary care doctors caring for stroke patients should be alert to changes that are hallmarks of stroke: patients not thinking as clearly as they used to, memory problems, limited ability to use their hands or overall mobility issues, as well as depression and social isolation.

"We are at the forefront of a trend that really emphasizes the initial transition phase in post-stroke care," Bushnell said. "The next steps include expanding our model to include community services and individualized electronic-care plans."

A clinical trial is now being implemented across the state of North Carolina to determine if this model of care will improve stroke patients' functional status and reduce caregiver burden 90 days post-stroke, Bushnell said. The trial is funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

Explore further Study identifies risk factors for hospital readmissions
Film in Georgia: Hollywood filmmakers learn about cash rebate program

Hollywood film companies and industry experts from the United States (US) are learning about Georgia, its lush landscape and the state cash rebate program for filmmakers who choose to film in Georgia.A team of Georgian film experts are in holding meetings in the US  the home of Hollywood  to entice the filmmakers to explore Georgia and reap the benefits of filming there.Over the coming days, representatives from some of the largest film companies including Disney and the Motion Picture Association of America will hear about the opportunities to cooperate with Georgian partners, as well as the opportunities of producing a film in Georgia.A Georgian team of industry insiders began a five-day business trip today. The team is being led by managers from Enterprise Georgia, the official body organising the cash rebate program, and the Georgian National Film Centre.While abroad, they will meet people from the US cinema field and promote the Film in Georgia incentive that includes returning up to 25% of filming expenses to producers.The visit will also see the Georgian side present Georgian film production companies to potential partners and a photo exhibition of possible filming locations in Georgia.Film in Georgia has already attracted interest from international film producers.In the first of the three stages of promoting the cash rebate program, representatives from Georgia's state offices met filmmakers from India, who showed great interest in the scheme. Indian filmmakers are expected to visit Georgia next month to study filming locations for their upcoming works.Meanwhile, following the meetings in the US, the Film in Georgia team will meet producers in Europe to demonstrate the advantages of producing in the post-Soviet country.Film in Georgia launched earlier this year as part of the state program Produce in Georgia.In line with filming incentives, state agencies in the country also planned to launch a film commission to reduce the level of bureaucratic procedures for producers in Georgia.
Diplomatic corps and media shown how ministry controls house arrests

By Messenger Staff

The Minister of Corrections of Georgia has hosted representatives of the diplomatic corps and the media at the newly-established Electric Monitoring Centre of the National Probation Agency, which carries out remote control of juvenile convicts under house arrest.Minister Kakha Kakhishvili told the guests that through relevant devices, the Centre successfully controlled juvenile convicts without sending them to prisons.The minister praised the new practice of monitoring house arrests which was launched in Georgia from January 1 2016, and said the Ministry planned to increase the number of convicts - not only juveniles - who would be able to serve their sentences at home.Kakhishvili said that house arrest, in cases of minor crimes, decreased the number of inmates in prisons, was safe for public as relevant bodies controlled such convicts and enabled offenders to continue their previous activities without the need of post-prison re-socialisation.The Minister announced his body planned to purchase a special server soon through which the Centre would control the 1,000 convicts under house arrest simultaneously.The guests could also view handicrafts and different items made by prisoners with suspended sentences, who could produce the objects at a wood processing plant located in one of prisons areas.The inmates were paid for their jobs, as the Ministry sells everything they produce.Kakhishvili said the approach also helped prisoners, as they would be able to easily find jobs in the future and successfully reintegrate into society.The approach that Georgia is gradually introducing is good for the state and also for convicted criminals.With this step, the Government will also reduce expenses for reintegration programmes and psychological assistance.One of the biggest problems for former prisoners in Georgia is finding a job after release; they suffer from social stigma and the simple lack of jobs.The Government will also have to settle both of these problems for Georgia to have a markedly improved situation in its penal sector.
Interior Minister says some try to discredit police

By Messenger Staff

Caption: Georgias Interior Minister Giorgi Mgebrishvili By Messenger Staff Interior Minister of Georgia Giorgi Mgebrishvili says police are being intentionally discredited in the country."I, as the Minister of Internal Affairs, declare that the countrys police are being intentionally discredited. I will not allow any attempt to degrade our police officers. I will not let it happen to my colleagues, people who risk their own health and lives every day and conscientiously fulfil their mission in order to protect the security of us all. They are ready to become victims of systematic attack and moral harassment, the official statement read.The Minister said the police announced an uncompromising fight against crime and in this battle police officers were ready to sacrifice their lives for citizens' safety.Unlike during the past, the Ministry of Internal Affairs does not fight crime at the expense of human rights, Mgebrishvili said.The Minister said he declared with full responsibility that the Interior Ministry has never been so oriented towards standards. He said after the new government came to power, the values of the country have been fundamentally changed.The police have been depoliticized and fully subjected to internationally-recognized standards, which was proved by a number of international organizations as well.It is part of Western values and civic responsibility to respect and support the police of your country, Mgebrishvili said.However, he said that recently, attacks on the police have become more frequent. Mgebrishvili said one of the clearest examples was a recent media report. The minister said that through the released video footage, a journalist of one of Georgia's TV channels was trying to convince their audience that the police used violence against a citizen.It is noteworthy that the video does not reflect the current period. It was recorded before the re-branding of patrol police. The video clearly shows that the officers wear old uniforms, says the Minister.According to him, each alleged case of police misconduct is under his personal attention and control.The impartiality and fairness of the police are crucial for a democratic state. It should be noted that the previous government should be credited for reforming the police. However, the former authorities gradually started changing the country into a police regime.People should be able to trust the police and the current Government of Georgia must do its utmost in this regard.There is some speculation amongst the public that the crime rate has increased in the country or that the police are not as tough on crime as they once were.Such speculation must not exist; the police must be fair and intolerant to crime and violations of the law.If the media releases unchecked information or deliberately tries to discredit such an important institute as the police, such an outlet must also be held accountable for its actions.
The News in Brief

Phone conversation held between UN Secretary General & Georgian Prime Minister



Georgia is a good example for many countries, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in a phone conversation with Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvil.



According to the Governmental Administration, the UN Secretary General called the Georgian PM today and expressed regret over the sudden change in his agenda, due to which he had to cancel his visit to Georgia.



"Ban Ki-moon is ready to visit Georgia this year in order to familiarize with the country's democratic and economic reforms on the ground, the Governmental Administration said.



The UN Secretary General expressed readiness for further UN involvement in the Geneva talks, for which the Prime Minister of Georgia thanked him.



Kvirikashvili expressed readiness to host Ban Ki-moon any time in Georgia.



Both sides expressed hope that the meeting will also be held within the framework of the UN General Assembly.

(IPN)







Georgia plans total ban on tobacco ads, other strict measures



The government of Georgia is preparing an anti-smoking bill. It is not yet known when the law will come into force.



Amiran Gamkrelidze, the head of the National Center for Disease Control, says he hopes that the new regulations will come into force from autumn.



He told DFWatch that the draft bill, which will have to be approved by Parliament, will make designated smoking areas obligatory before 2018.



He explains that the amendments will concern five laws. This includes amendments to laws concerning advertisements, as well as a complete ban advertisements for tobacco products. There will be a radical increase in the fines for smoking in a no-smoking area. This fine is currently 20 lari, though it may be doubled or tripled.



Gamkreidze said the enforcement of the law is currently too weak, and the amendments will include measures to address this problem.



Under the current laws, the Interior Ministry is obliged to monitor how the regulations of the law about tobacco control are followed in the country, but often the fine was symbolic, being just from five to 20 laris. If we consider that the MIA has lots of other, more important work to do, controlling tobacco has naturally not been a priority, he told us.



He said that according to the draft, the control mechanism will be divided according to professional sector.



For example, if the offence is in the healthcare system, the Health Ministry is obliged to monitor all tobacco-related activity. Restaurants and cafes will be monitored by another ministry, and so on.



Stricter control of tobacco is part of a five-year plan which was approved by former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili in 2013 and concerns the years from 2013 to 2018.



By decree of Ivanishvili, the goal of this plan is to protect people, especially Georgia's youth, from the harmful effects of tobacco.



The decree also offers statistics which shows that tobacco kills about six million people around the world every year. More than 600,000 of them die from passive smoking. More than 1.2 billion people globally are addicted to smoking.



Georgias performance is one of the worst in Europe in this regard. According to the World Health Organization, from 9,000 to 11,000 people die of smoking every year in Georgia. About 3,000 of them die from passive smoking. In addition, a total of 10 billion cigarettes are sold annually (0.5 billion packs), which amounts to about 0.58 billion laris.



According to WHOs 2010 study, 30.3 percent of Georgians smoke. 55.5 percent of men smoke and 4.8 percent of women.



A study conducted by NCDC with the support of the International Development Research Center of Canada showed that Georgia does not have proper legislation to restrict smoking.



The report says that 92 percent of shops and other outlets sell tobacco products. In 2 percent of cases, the tobacco is sold in the same section as childrens products, while 85 percent of facilities closer than 50 meters from a school sell tobacco.

(DF watch)







Second meeting of EU-Georgia Parliamentary Association Committee scheduled



The second meeting of the EU-Georgia Parliamentary Association Committee will be held in the European Parliament on April 25-26.



As InterpressNews was told by the Parliament, the ten-member delegation, led by the EU-Georgia Parliamentary Association Committee Co-Chairman Zviad Kvachantiradze will leave for Brussels.



The session will be attended by government officials and representatives of EU institutions. Traditionally, Georgia EU relations, the implementation of the Association Agreement and other issues of common interests will be discussed at the session.



The committee sessions are held twice a year in Tbilisi and in Brussels. Final statements and recommendations are adopted at the sessions to promote the implementation of the Association Agreement.

(IPN)




via @learyreports

U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, chairman of the VA committee, today endorsed Donald Trump, the latest sign that the GOP front-runner is beginning to pick up support from Washington.

"Donald Trump is the only person who has what it takes to shake up the status quo and entrenched bureaucrats in Washington D.C.," Miller said in a statement. "I am more and more convinced that he has the ability to reach in and right the wrongs in the Department of Veterans Affairs once and for all.

America needs Donald Trump and his conservative agenda to shore up and secure our borders and to rebuild our military. I stand today with Donald Trump, and l support his candidacy for President.

Miller recently attended a Capitol Hill meeting with Trump. The longtime panhandle lawmaker has said he will not seek another term.

--ALEX LEARY, Tampa Bay Times
In a bi-partisan push -- and a shared ghost writer -- three Orlando-based state representatives and one from Ocala added their voices to the chorus of opposition to the Florida Department of Corrections' decision to close down the Broward-based Bridges of America work release and transition program for inmates at the end of their sentence.

Reps. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, Rene Plascencia, R-Orlando, Randolph Bracy, D-Orlando and Victor Torres, D-Orlando, sent identical letters to Corrections Secretary Julie Jones on Wednesday urging her not to close down the facility that is run by the Bridges of America organization, which is based in Orlando.

Rep. Dana Young, R-Tampa, also sent a letter with the same word-for-word plea but she also included a scolding of Jones for reducing the overall number of transition beds, rejected Jones' promise that the inmates will be accommodated in other parts of the state, and suggested it was an about-face from the commitment Jones has made to legislators when she was confirmed by the Senate earlier this year.

Bridges has filed a administrative law challenges against the action and FDC spokesman McKinley Lewis said he could not comment on a pending legal matter.

Here is our post on Young. Here are the letters and the boilerplate from them: Download Letter_RepTorres, Download Letter of Spport for Bridges of America_Plasencia. Download Bridges.Baxley, Download Letter_Bridges of A_Bracy:

It has come to my attention that the Department intends to close the Pompano Work Release/Program Center in Broward County (the Broward (Pompano) SATREC Program) in order to utilize the facilities for more office space. I, along with many of my colleagues in the Florida Legislature, am a strong proponent of these types of facilities and programs, believing that our best chance to reduce recidivism and enhance public safety is to release rehabilitated, treated, and well-prepared inmates back into our communities following their sentences.

Further, I have come to believe that community-based providers do an extraordinary job in partnering with the State to accomplish these goals. Madame Secretary, I urge you not to shut down this vital program. Understanding the important role you play as Secretary in ensuring the safety of our State and the rehabilitation of our inmates, I hope you will agree that a decision as drastic as to close down such a facility is one worth discussing and vetting with key stakeholders. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.
Even John Thrasher wore a bow tie.

The iconic neckwear was out in full force in Tallahassee Tuesday night as the Florida State University community honored former FSU President Sandy D'Alemberte. The occasion was the 15th anniversary of FSU's Center for the Advancement of Human Rights, which D'Alemberte and others started with a big financial boost from the evening's other honoree, lawyer and FSU alumnus Bob Kerrigan.

The center, which will be rebranded featuring D'Alemberte's name, works to reduce human trafficking and provides free legal help to victims of torture and people seeking political asylum throughout the world, working out of a nondescript rented building near the FSU law school. A proposed rendering of a new two-story center was shown, but that costs money -- so Thrasher urged the crowd to write the checks to make it happen.

The crowd of about 250 at FSU's Alumni Center included former Gov. Buddy MacKay and his wife Anne; Supreme Court Chief Justice Jorge Labarga and Justice Ricky Polston; former justices Major Harding, Joseph Hatchett and Harry Lee Anstead; former First Lady Donna Lou Askew; former Gov. Reubin Askew's chief of staff, Jim Apthorp; former state university system chancellor Charlie Reed; Steve MacNamara, a close friend of D'Alemberte's who was chief of staff to Thrasher as House speaker; Florida Democratic Party chair Allison Tant, and lawyer Martha Barnett, who cited D'Alemberte's habit of recruiting others to help his causes.

"His smile, it's a magnet," Barnett said. "It pulls you in."

As speaker, with D'Alemberte in the FSU president's office, Thrasher secured state money to start FSU's College of Medicine nearly two decades ago. D'Alemberte is a Democrat and FSU President Thrasher is a Republican, but they share a devotion to all things garnet and gold.

"He cares about the right things that make America strong," Thrasher said. "I wish I could be more like him."

D'Alemberte, 82, has been a state legislator, member of a statewide Constitution Revision Commission, president of the American Bar Association, dean of the FSU law school and school president. D'Alemberte and his wife and law partner Patsy Palmer will soon embark on another of their extended trips around the world.
@PatriciaMazzei

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio asked his Senate colleagues Wednesday to extend sanctions leveled against Venezuelan government officials that are set to expire.

"There will be an effort here, I hope, in the next day or so, to extend those sanctions for another three years," Rubio said on the Senate floor.

"Sanctions -- we have imposed sanctions on human rights violators, not sanctions on the people of Venezuela, not sanctions on the government, on human rights violators. Many of whom steal money from the Venezuelan people and invest it in the United States," he said. He then cited a Miami Herald story about a Venezuelan behind a Miami condo development.

"In my hometown, in my home state. You travel to Florida, you come down there, you let me know, any of my colleagues, and I will show you where these people live and I will show you the money they have stole[n] from the Venezuelan people and are living the highlife on weekends in Miami. You see them everywhere. And that's why we impose sanctions on them."

He gave a lengthy speech on Venezuela's political and economic crisis, which he again referred to as a "coup d'etat."

Politico reported Wednesday that the sanctions against Venezuelans could get extended as part of a deal that would allow for the confirmation of Roberta Jacobson as U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Rubio had been one of the key Republicans blocking her confirmation, in large part because of Jacobson's involvement in normalizing diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
via @learyreports

WASHINGTON - Members of Florida's Congressional delegation will meet this morning to address a major concern at home: heroin.

Delegation co-chairs Vern Buchanan and Alcee Hastings convened the meeting that will feature a number of panelists, including Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., sponsor of H.R. 953, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015.

A Miami resident currently in recovery from heroin addiction will also speak.

Im hopeful that we can gain a better understanding of the heroin crisis in Florida and identify specific actions needed to address it, Buchanan said. Its clear that Congress must act to help control an epidemic that is destroying lives in Florida and across the country.

Buchanan represents Manatee County, which in 2015 had more heroin overdoses than any other county in Florida. The problem has spread, generating headlines across the state.

Other speakers during the Thursday meeting are Frank Rabbito, senior vice president of WestCare Foundation and Melissa Larkin-Skinner, CFO of Centerstone.

--ALEX LEARY, Tampa Bay Times
Fishing for walleyes was fun and interesting last week on Canyon Ferry Reservoir. Downrigger Dale and Allan Tabish from Missoula joined me for a few days on the water. The fun part was pulling Berkeley flicker shad lures 1.8 miles per hour and catching walleyes in 2-5 feet of water. We caught a lot of males that were in the area for the walleye spawn on the south end of the lake by Pond One. The largest walleye that we caught was only 16 1/4 inches long and many of the fish were smaller, in the 12- to 13-inch length.

The interesting part of the trip was the opportunity to meet up with FWP fishing technicians Adam Strainer, Chris Hurley, and Casey Jenson. They were kind enough to let us tag along while they checked a couple of their fish traps located on the east and west sides of the lake.

Strainer explained to us that because of the prevailing northwest winds, the walleyes like to spawn on the east side of the lake because the wave action keeps the gravel cleaner. The traps were in place on the reservoir April 4 and will be removed on May 10. These are live traps that are checked every 48 hours and all fish are released after they are studied.

These two traps can tell some very interesting stories, not only about what the walleyes are up to, but also about what else lurks about in the waters of Canyon Ferry Reservoir. As they pulled up the nets in the first trap on the east shore, we saw a rare sight. It was a large burbot or ling, as many folks call it. Strainer also pulled out a small stone catfish and held it in the palm of his hand, a fish I had never seen and had no idea existed in Canyon Ferry.

There were a few male walleyes in the net, which they tagged and released. Strainer said the number of walleyes caught in the nets this year has been lower than usual. He suspected that the unusual warm temperatures in February got the fish biological clocks to start ticking sooner than normal. Therefore the walleye spawn started before it was possible for the FWP to be able to place the fish traps out in water.

Also found in the nets were several nice-sized rainbow trout, carp, suckers, perch and, to our surprise, a blue gill, another fish I had no idea existed in Canyon Ferry. To view pictures and a video taken from the trip, please log onto montanaoutdoor.com

The Montana Walleye Gov Cup has filled. The 200 two-person team tournament, which takes place July 7-9, filled over two months early. Last year the tournament filled in late June, Lisa Koski, executive director from the Glasgow Area Chamber, thinks that the success that they had last year helped with registrations this year: Some folks were left out last year so many of those entered early and with all those early entries it looks like they helped the process along.

The fishing has been picking up for walleyes with Todd Young catching some nice walleyes last weekend in the dry arm of Fort Peck. The lake trout fishing by the dam has been very good with some anglers picking up a Chinook salmon now and then while they target the lake trout.

***

Mark Wards statewide Montana Outdoor Radio Show airs Saturdays from 6 to 8 a.m. in Missoula on KGVO 1290 AM and 101.5 FM. Email Ward at captain@montanaoutdoor.com.
A photo on Ellen Leahys wall shows the Missoula Environmental Health Department staff of 1974, with newly hired Jim Carlson on the steps of the county courthouse.

Now Im looking at that picture and hes the last man standing out of 31 people, said Leahy, the City-County Health Department Director. Im going to be spending a few weeks walking down to his office to ask a question before I remember hes gone.

This Friday, Carlson retires after 41 and a half years defending the Missoula Valleys air and water quality, its restaurant kitchen safety standards and its animal control, its septic systems and junk vehicles. He helped create the nations first municipal air quality regulations to control wood-stove pollution. He guided local response to the Mount St. Helens volcano blast in 1980, when clouds of ash pushed the pollution needle literally a thousand times beyond the danger level.

Weve been able to get this community where its on a lot of the lists for being a best place to live instead of one of the worst, said Carlson, 65. Back when I started, Missoula had been fairly stigmatized as one of the worst air pollution communities in the country. When youre trying to attract business and people to come here, you cant get past the first gate if you cant get past that reputation. I like to think that was relatively non-political. We had the business community, the liberals and conservatives alike pulling together. Everyones interested in health for themselves, their children and the economy.

Carlson was helped  or challenged  by some of Missoulas unique features. The ring of mountains around the valley encloses one of the smallest air sheds of any city this size in the United States. And its underground water supply has even more unusual characteristics.

This is the most unique aquifer on the planet, said Mountain Water chief legal counsel Roger Miller, who chairs the City-County Board of Health. One of the things Jim had done before I came along was get EPA sole-source aquifer designation for Missoulas water. That created all kinds of funding and granting opportunities to do research on our aquifer. I was a part of that as a graduate student at the University of Montana, and Jim had his hand in all that stuff.

Thousands of years ago, gigantic glacial ice dams held back enough meltwater to fill the Missoula Valley more than 1,100 feet deep. Occasionally the water would float the glacier, causing catastrophic floods that would empty the lake in about 10 days. Miller said its possibly the largest flood in the planetary record  big enough to wobble the Earth on its axis.

And big enough to transport channels of boulders the way smaller rivers move deposits of sand. Most underground aquifers seep slowly through those sand pockets. Missoulas sloshes through loose jumbles of rock at speeds and volumes unseen virtually anywhere else.

The same properties that make this aquifer unique in the world, also makes it incredible vulnerable, Miller said. At the same time, just upstream of this resource, you had the largest Superfund site in the U.S. (the Butte and Anaconda mine wastes in the Clark Fork River basin). Any contaminants spilled at the surface readily make their way down to the aquifer.

The health department and Jim were very instrumental overseeing the cleanup efforts and regulatory efforts, and making sure the state understood this is an incredibly unique resource. Jim put his life into water resources for environmental health of the whole community.

Pushing environmental health issues often meant asking people to change big, expensive parts of their lives. In the 1970s, nearly half of all Missoulians used wood fireplaces for at least part of their home heat. That air pollution was compounded by the large swaths of town networked with dirt instead of paved roads. And the drinking water was full of material leeching from thousands of private septic systems.

You cant go to a timber community like we were in the 1970s with an energy crisis and propose people not burn their wood stoves without generating a great deal of controversy, Leahy said. Jim didnt shy away from being a lightning rod, but he didnt present in a the-sky-is-falling sort of way. His arguments were always based in science.

Thats how we got a dozen different neighborhoods and parts of town sewered, while Jim has been on duty here. Look back at how controversial that was. Going on city sewer meant annexation and tax changes. But if we hadnt sewered, how much nitrates would be leaching into our aquifer now? All those things take a lot of time, and hes just steadfast. What other people view as a failure, Jim just views as a setback.
Principals for Cold Springs and Paxson schools will be chosen from the three candidates who met the community Wednesday afternoon.

Of the 51 who applied for the two principal positions, three remained at the meet-and-greets Wednesday.

Susan Daniel, Poinciana Elementary School principal (Naples, Florida)

Peter Halloran, Butte Central Schools Spanish teacher and director of marketing (Butte)

Kacie Laslovich, Washington Middle School assistant principal (Missoula)

Cold Springs Principal Jill Sheridan's resignation takes effect at the end of the school year. She cited "personal reasons" for her departure. She has served at the school's helm the past two years.

Paxson Principal Kelly Chumrau announced in December that she would retire at the end of the school year. She and husband Brad Chumrau, a fourth-grade teacher and coordinator of the International Baccalaureate program at Lewis and Clark Elementary, accepted positions at the International School of Dakar in Senegal next year.

MCPS executive regional director Roberta Stengel said the principals may be announced late this week or early next week.

***

Daniel said she's been applying for several years to work in Montana.

She's the principal of a 650-student elementary school in Florida. She's been an administrator 12 years, all at the elementary level, and she's worked with a variety of children: from a 99 percent economically disadvantaged school to a more affluent school.

Parents wanted to know how each principal would take learning to the next level, and encourage staff to jump on board.

She encouraged the use of parent surveys so there's definitive answers to some of the issues parents are having with the school, and taking that information to create solutions. Daniel said it's important for the principal to set expectations  and then make sure there's follow-through.

She's the fourth principal in five years at her school, and she emphasized the importance of building relationships with staff, students, parents and the community.

"I met individually with every teacher, and from there met with every para (paraeducator), every custodian, every cafeteria worker," she said. "It's been a five-year process. I don't want to come in and  wham!  change everything."

With a new school building on the horizon, parents wanted to know how the principal would keep everyone informed. Daniel said parent meetings are essential, getting everyone involved in the decision-making and taking ownership of their school.

***

Laslovich is a Cold Springs parent. She's worked in Missoula County Public Schools for 11 years, and currently serves as assistant principal at Washington, a school of 650 students. She also taught at Meadow Hill Middle School and Lowell School.

Students come home with too many worksheets, parents said, telling the candidates their students need to be more engaged.

"It comes down to when I'm in a classroom, noticing how many students are engaged during this lesson, what is happening," Laslovich said. Are hands-on experiences taking place? Are they using critical thinking and problem-solving skills? If its worksheet after worksheet, thats not necessarily engaging.

But she pointed out that homework depends on each teacher's personal philosophy. As a sixth-grade teacher, she said she didn't believe in giving a lot of homework  but for each teacher, they should make sure if they're giving homework, that it's meaningful.

That's where the teachers' professional learning communities come in, she said, giving them opportunities to collaborate and think outside the box for students' needs  both traditional and outliers.

Laslovich agreed that parents need to be involved in the new building process. She said shed invite parents to the school and PTA meetings, send out monthly newsletters and consistently update the school website.

***

Halloran's past is eclectic: from teaching in Salt Lake City to being principal of a high school for adjudicated young women to now being the principal of a private elementary school in Butte.

His plan for the new building was similar: get parents involved.

"I think we often don't realize when we're talking about the physical structure of the school, how much down the road that can actually affect the teaching and learning within that school," he said. "I think having parents and the community at large be a big part of that process and having probably something like a group of parents on the committee thats deciding what that school needs to look like, not necessarily drawing blueprints, but to have a committee of community members and parents and teachers who meet on a regular basis and talk about some of the needs of the students and how that relates to the building structure itself.

Its your school. Its a public school. The school doesnt belong to the teachers, it doesnt belong to the administration. It belongs to your children."

Teachers often get stuck in silos, he said, locked into their own teaching style. PLCs allow them to collaborate with their fellow teachers and develop new strategies.

"My view on worksheets is that they stink," he said. "It's just not engaging. Students learn when they are actively engaged, and that means hands-on, that means collaborative, that means project-based learning."
A Missoula man who assaulted his girlfriend in May 2015 by slamming his knee into her face and breaking her jaw was sentenced to prison for felony aggravated assault.

On Wednesday, Missoula District Court Judge John Larson sent 28-year-old Daniel James Martin to the Montana State Prison for 12 years, with eight years suspended.

You could have broken her neck just as easily as breaking her jaw, Larson said. You hit her, and you hit her hard.

In his own statement during the sentencing hearing, Martin blamed his action on his use of hash oil, saying he started smoking it a month before the attack, after using marijuana for pain from a 2011 car wreck. He also said he pinned her to the ground to stop her from assaulting him and that he broke her jaw with his knee after she tore a piece of skin off his back.

Martin was arrested in late May 2015 following a fight with his girlfriend. According to a court affidavit, he became jealous when she was talking to another man at a bar. When Martin went outside and sat in his truck, she came out and tried to talk to him, but he rolled up his window, trapping her arm inside. When she yelled, he released her arm and left.

When the woman got home to where they lived, Martin was inside smoking hash oil, something she had told him she didnt want him to do in her home. The victim testified during Wednesdays sentencing hearing that she slapped the hash oil pipe out of Martins hand, called him names, spit at him and bit his arm before the attack in which he broke her jaw.

The woman later told police that blood was pouring from her mouth and nose, that her jaw was moving freely and the pain made her vomit. She said Martin took her to the hospital, dropped her off at the emergency room and left.

Days after the assault, when the woman put all of Martins possessions outside and told him to come get them, he showed up and became angry, kicking at the door in an attempt to gain entry before she called 911. When interviewed, Martin denied any such assault had happened, saying he went home the night of the attack and found the woman holding her bleeding face.

In court Wednesday, Martins attorney Mat Stevenson asked the woman to testify. She said she is still in a relationship with Martin and was hoping to continue that relationship if a court-ordered no-contact policy was lifted. She said Martins demeanor changed when he used hash oil, and that she agreed he was holding her down to restrain her before he slammed his knee into her face.

I really dont think he thought it was me laying on the ground, she said. Hes a great person, hes a great father, thats not who he is.

Stevenson recommended that Martin receive a three-year deferral of sentence for the crime.

Deputy County Attorney Brian Lowney asked the woman if she felt she deserved the attack. She said she did not, but later said she didnt know whether Martin was acting in self-defense or not.

She said after the assault, when she had to have her jaw wired shut, Martin left for a weekend, taking his kids with him. She agreed with a question from Lowney that he likely had done it to prevent the kids from seeing her state and reporting it to their mom.

Martin pleaded guilty to the felony as part of an agreement with prosecutors at the end of November, when a misdemeanor for partner or family member assault was dismissed. That plea agreement called for a ten-year, all-suspended sentence with the Department of Corrections. Just over a week after agreeing to it, prosecutors filed a motion to revoke his release, saying he violated the terms of the agreement after he was caught with marijuana.

After he was sentenced Wednesday, Martin looked over at his victim, who was crying in the court gallery, as he was handcuffed and taken into custody.

In addition to the prison sentence, Martin also must pay more than $7,000 in restitution and fees. Larson said he will recommend that Martin be screened for the boot camp program.
The Missoula Food Bank has unveiled designs for the brand new two-story, 22,500-square-foot headquarters the nonprofit expects to have completed by this time next year. A groundbreaking ceremony for the $4.5-million facility will be Saturday at 11:30 a.m. at the new location, the corner of Wyoming and Catlin streets.

We are extremely excited about it, said Aaron Brock, executive director of the Food Bank. Our overarching goal is to create a building that is functional, welcoming and helps us provide a dignified service to those who need it.

The new home will include space for nutritional classrooms and a partnership with the University of Montanas spectrUM Discovery Area, which is a hands-on science museum geared toward kids. The new site also will have 42 dedicated parking spots, whereas the old spot had basically no off-street parking.

From the currently cramped home on South Third Street, the Food Bank saw 18,414 separate individuals walk through the doors in 2015, roughly one in every six residents of the county. The design of the new Food Bank and the imminent construction is the culmination of years of hard work and battling the constraints of the current site, Brock said.

We are so limited in our current space just to provide the basic programs that we do, he explained. Just providing groceries to those who need them requires duct tape and a can-do attitude every day. We are going to be able to better do that in our new facility. Well be able to serve more folks and eliminate some of the long waits.

The current buildings tight confines create natural pinch points that cause frustration and lead people on busy schedules to go hungry some weeks, Brock said.

Every single week there are families who walk out our doors without food because they had to wait too long, he said. We have sometimes 50 families waiting in line. Recently, a family left early because the mom had to get to her job. They didnt even get the groceries they came to get. That breaks all of our hearts. We cant be OK with that. We need a space that provides services to those that need it. So we really intentionally designed the new space to serve more people concurrently and reduce wait time.

***

Brock pointed out that while people may look at the high construction costs and think that theyre building a high-end, $200-per-square-foot building, the reality is that the costs include several factors.

That $4.5-million number includes a lot of expense in freezer and refrigerator equipment, he explained. There is also a fair amount of expense in the spectrUM partnership, but there is funding available to specifically help with that piece of the building.

The Food Banks Board of Directors has voted to contribute about $1.1 million to the new building, and the organization is anticipating about $1 million in new markets tax credits from the Montana Community Development Corporation. In a capital campaign that started in October, the nonprofit also raised around $3 million from private donors.

The outpouring of support from friends and neighbors in this community has been incredible, Brock said. On Saturday we will kick off the public phase to raise the remaining half-million dollars. We are asking people to consider giving, whether its $10,000 or $10, to make this a reality. There is a funding gap. We have designed a plan B if the bottom drops out, but at the same time were very confident that the community will step forward in this way that they have so many times before.

The total cost of preparing the new site and moving buildings is around $6 million.

Rick Wishcamper, the co-chair of the One in Six Missoula capital campaign, said he feels optimistic that the public will step up and donate to complete the project.

"I'm entirely confident that it's going to be successful," he said. "The private campaign was awesome, particularly in how fast we raised the $3 million. People have been incredibly responsive and supportive."

***

The new space will be geared toward erasing the stigma that comes with going to a public place for food assistance, Brock said.

No one comes to a food bank for fun, he explained. People come because they need a service that we provide. We are excited about a nice place that is going to let us go deeper as far as our programs. We are going to offer cooking and nutrition classes, and well have a designated child nutrition space. Well offer summer lunchtime programs and snack programs. We will invite folks and work to break down the barriers of stigma.

Brock said the goal is to make sure people dont feel embarrassed about having to get snacks for kids because there isnt anything in the fridge at home.

We want to create a space that is fun and where there is no stigma, he said. We want to create a place where a kid wants to come there after school when they need a healthy snack or whether they just want to play for 20 minutes. Especially for young people, our goal is to create a space where stigma is less of a part of the equation than it has been in the past.

More than 65 percent of visitors came in just three times or fewer last year.

Almost 40 percent came in just once, Brock said. These are individuals or families on a tight budget, but theyre making it, and then an event happens. There is a temporary job loss or the car breaks down. As they are digging out of that hole, they walk through the doors so their kids get to eat dinner or breakfast before going to school. The vast majority of folks do get their feet underneath them, and we are just a stopgap measure.

The celebration on Saturday will feature volunteers sharing their memories of the old building as well as new neighbors talking about the relocation. There will be light snacks, beer and live music. For more information visit the Missoula Food Bank Facebook page.
HAMILTON  A Ravalli County sheriffs deputy and Montana Highway Patrol Trooper are being credited with saving the life of a suicidal Missoula woman two weeks ago.

Kaitlyn Fay Rocco, 26, was charged last week with two felony counts of criminal endangerment and four counts of negligent endangerment after she allegedly fired a Rossi snub nose .38 Special pistol while the officers were attempting to pull away from her.

The Ravalli County 911 Center received a report from the Missoula Police Department at about 7 p.m. on Sunday, April 17, that a woman was threatening to commit suicide.

A Missoula police officer made phone contact with the woman and determined her approximate location in the Sweeney Creek Trail area southwest of Florence.

Ravalli County Sheriffs Deputy Jason Jones responded to the call. On the way to the scene, he requested assistance from Montana Highway Patrol Sgt. Scott Bennett, who was closer to Sweeney Creek at that point.

Bennett found Rocco shortly before Jones arrived and engaged her in a conversation. According to a charging affidavit, Rocco said she would shoot herself if he came any closer.

That conversation continued after Jones reached the scene.

Rocco was sitting about two feet away from the edge of a cliff that was several hundred feet high. She had a revolver sitting next to her on a rock.

She was talking on her phone and continued to tell the officers that if they came any closer she would jump or shoot herself.

At some point, she became aware that other law enforcement officers and emergency responders were approaching the scene.

Rocco told Jones and Bennett that if any other law enforcement people arrived, she would kill herself.

Jones told those arriving on the scene to stage farther down the hill and to remain out of sight.

Over the course of an hour, Jones and Bennett continued to talk with the woman, asking her to move away from the cliffs edge and offering her help. The woman finally moved away from the cliff edge and sat down to text her sister.

The handgun remained fairly close to her.

After watching the scene unfold, the two officers agreed that the woman had reached the point that she was going to end her life, and they saw an opportunity to attempt to take her into custody.

When they rushed her, Rocco rolled over on top of the handgun and a struggle ensued, the affidavit said. Bennett got his hands on the firearm with it still pinned in Roccos hands.

Rocco told the officers that she had the pistol in her hands. She then stated that I will fire it, the affidavit said.

Bennett yelled back: Dont fire it. You will hit one of us.

Rocco fired a round. At that point, Jones head was less than a foot away from the firearm. He saw the muzzle blast that indicated the gun had fired away from the three on the cliffs edge.

Jones was treated later for an injury to his knee that occurred during the struggle. He did not suffer any serious injury to his inner ear.

Rocco was not injured in the incident. She was seen by mental health professionals once she was in custody.

Ravalli Sheriff Chris Hoffman credited Jones and Bennett with saving the womans life.

Jones told Hoffman that he relied on his Crisis Intervention Team Training during the incident. The training program is used in a number of states to help law enforcement officers react appropriately to situations involving mental illness or developmental disability.

Hoffman commended both officers for acting with patience and courage. He said both used their training to recognize the valid nature of the threat and respond to it positively when given the opportunity.
KALISPELL (AP)  State officials are proposing a floating boat dock be installed at Wild Horse Island in Flathead Lake in order to reduce injuries.

The Flathead Beacon reports that Montana State Parks is accepting public comments through May 30 on the proposal to place a 60-foot-long dock in Skeeko Bay.

Wild Horse Island draws about 16,000 visitors each year despite not having a public dock anywhere on the 2,163 acre island. According to state officials, more than 60 percent of those visitors access the island through Skeeko Bay.

Currently, state officials say visitors often beach their boats and climb over the bow, leaping to shore. Officials say this kind of access can be hazardous.
When asked about Mr. Devines remarks, the senators wife, Jane Sanders, pushed back in a MSNBC interview. No, no. We assess on an everyday basis, Ms. Sanders said. Even if he had a string of wins, like eight in a row or hes won states by landslide victories, nobody in the media and certainly not The New York Times has ever said he has a chance to win.

Stu Loeser, who owns a media strategy firm and was a longtime spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, said he had seen this sort of back and forth in campaigns involving Mr. Devine before. During Vice President Al Gores presidential campaign, Mr. Devine had a reputation as a strategist who would be upfront with the candidate.

Every elected official needs two kinds of loyalists close to them. One kind are the people who are with them no matter what, agree with them no matter what, and help them execute their vision, Mr. Loeser said. And the other is an adviser who is able to stand up and tell the candidate what he or she needs to hear regardless of whether the candidate wants to hear it. Tad Devine had that role with Gore in 2000.

Mr. Sanders has started to talk more openly about the possibility of not winning the Democratic contest. During a rally in Indiana he talked not just of his path to victory but discussed what he might do if he lost.

He stressed he was in the race to win and become the Democratic nominee. But he also said if he did not succeed he would try to get as many delegates as possible and put together the strongest progressive agenda any political party has ever seen.

Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Mr. Sanders, said in a statement that the campaign would keep on staff more than 300 workers focused on the remaining contests.
WASHINGTON  The first appropriations bill taken up this year by the Senate  in what was supposed to a be a new spirit of bipartisan cooperation on financing the government  crashed and burned on Wednesday because of a dispute over an amendment that Democrats and White House officials said would undermine President Obamas nuclear accord with Iran.

The amendment, offered by Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, would bar the United States from purchasing heavy water  which is used in producing nuclear energy and nuclear weapons  from Iran. Under Mr. Obamas nuclear accord, Iran must reduce its supplies of heavy water.

The United States and Russia are the worlds largest purchasers.

Mr. Cotton, in a floor speech on Wednesday, said the United States should not be subsidizing the Iranian governments nuclear program and noted that nothing in the agreement requires the United States to buy heavy water from Iran.

Mr. Cotton said that he had such great confidence in the merits of his amendment that he had encouraged Democrats to subject it to a 60-vote threshold for approval, even though it could have passed with a simple majority vote.
Dora took Melidas FARC history in stride. My daughter is married to a policeman; another is with a soldier, she said. Javier is with an ex-guerrilla. The only thing were missing in this family is a paramilitary.

One day Melidas birth control implant failed and she became pregnant.

Dora pulled Melida aside. I told her, Now you have something to fight for thats not the revolution. 

Her daughter, Celeste, was born last year.

The daily tasks of motherhood consumed Melida for weeks. But the anger remained.

She told me she was raised for war, not to care, not to be a lover, Javier said. She would tell me, I love you, but understand my life hasnt been easy. 

One day, Javier returned to find that Melida and the baby were gone.

Days before, Melida had mentioned returning to rebel territory to see her sister, but now Javier thought it was a ruse to return to the FARC fold.

It wasnt the case. Instead, her bus had been stopped at a checkpoint by rebels who questioned each of the passengers.

I thought they would catch me again, said Melida, who realized then she did not want to go back, at least not that day.
An Iranian refugee set fire to himself on Wednesday on a remote Pacific island where Australia sends people who try to reach its shores by sea, apparently to protest that policy and conditions on the island.

The man, 23, whose name was not released, was listed in critical condition, and officials on the island nation of Nauru said they had requested his immediate evacuation to Australia for treatment.

Nauru is one of two offshore locations where Australia sends people who have tried to reach the country by boat. That policy, which Australia says is meant to discourage migrants from attempting the dangerous voyage, has been criticized by the United Nations and by human rights groups.

A detention center at the other site, on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, will be closed, that countrys prime minister, Peter ONeill, said on Wednesday. Papua New Guineas Supreme Court had declared the center illegal the day before.
LONDON  In the face of mounting criticism over inaction on episodes of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn reversed himself on Wednesday and suspended a party lawmaker for endorsing anti-Israel posts on social media before she became a member of Parliament.

The legislator, Naseem Shah, 42, also known as Naz, was elected last year in Bradford West, unseating George Galloway, a sharp critic of Israel who has himself been accused of anti-Semitism.

Ms. Shah emerged from a tough childhood in Bradford that included a forced marriage, and has been considered a rising star in the Labour Party. As the scandal built, she resigned on Tuesday as parliamentary private secretary to John McDonnell, the partys spokesman on the economy.

Mr. Corbyn has been accused of not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism from Labours far left. He met earlier on Wednesday with Ms. Shah, who he said had issued a full apology for comments that caused upset and hurt to the Jewish community.
LONDON  The British bank Barclays said on Thursday that it had agreed to sell its Barclaycard credit card business in Portugal and Spain to the Spanish online bank Bancopopular-e.

The sale is the latest in a series of exits by Barclays from Continental Europe, as the bank seeks to improve its prospects by accelerating the sale of businesses it does not consider core operations.

Barclays has agreed to sell its retail banking businesses in Italy, Portugal and Spain, and it said on Wednesday that it was in discussions with the private equity firm AnaCap Financial Partners about the potential sale of its retail operations in France.

As part of a revamp under the new chief executive, James E. Staley, Barclays is focusing its strategy around two divisions: the British consumer bank, and the corporate and investment bank.
ORIGINAL NOTICE

EUNICE T. ESSIEN HART,

Petitioner,

vs.

WILLIAM ALBERT HART,

Respondent.

TO THE ABOVE-NAMED RESPONDENT:

You are notified that a petition has been filed in the office of the clerk of this court

naming you as a defendant in this action, which petition prays for dissolution of marriage. The attorney for the Petitioner is Brian J. Metcalf, whose address is 126 West Second Street, Muscatine, Iowa 52761. That attorneys phone number is 563-263-9494; facsimile number 563-263-7824.

You must serve a motion or answer on or before the (2) 1st day of June, 2016, and

within a reasonable time thereafter, file your motion or answer with the Clerk of Court for Muscatine County, at the courthouse in Muscatine, Iowa. If you do not, judgment by default may be rendered against you for the relief demanded in the petition.

If you require the assistance of auxiliary aids or services to participate in court

because of a disability, immediately call your district ADA coordinator at 563-263-6634. (If you are hearing impaired, call Relay Iowa TTY at 1-800-735-2942).

Jeff Tollenaer

Clerk of Court

Muscatine County Courthouse

Muscatine, Iowa 52761

IMPORTANT

YOUR ARE ADVISED TO SEEK LEGAL ADVISE AT ONCE TO PROTECT

YOUR INTERESTS.

STATE OF IOWA JUDICIARY

Case No. CDCD036954

County Muscatine

Case Title EUNICE ESSIEN-HART VS WILLIAM ALBERT HART

THIS CASE HAS BEEN FILED IN A COUNTY THAT USES ELECTRONIC FILING.

Therefore, unless the attached Petition and Original Notice contains a hearing date for your appearance, or unless you obtain an exemption from the court, you must file your Appearance and Answer electronically.

You must register through the Iowa Judicial Branch website at

http://www.iowacourts.state.ia.us/Efile and obtain a log in and password for the purposes of filing and viewing documents on your case and of receiving service and notices from the court.

FOR GENERAL RULES AND INFORMATION ON ELECTRONIC FILING, REFER TO THE IOWA COURT RULES CHAPTER 16 PERTAINING TO THE USE OF THE ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM:

FOR COURT RULES ON PROTECTION OF PERSONAL PRIVACY IN COURT FILINGS, REFER TO DIVISION VI OF IOWA COURT RULES CHAPTER 16: http://www.iowacourts.state.ia.us/Efile

Scheduled Hearing:

If you require the assistance of auxiliary aids or services to participate in court because of a disability, immediately call your district ADA coordinator at (563)328-4145. (If you are hearing impaired, call Relay Iowa TTY at 1-800-735-2942.)

Date Issued 04/18/2016 02:02:38 PM

District Clerk of Muscatine County

/s/ Traci Harper
Muscatine was selected as the last stop on the 2016 Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa this spring. Riders will dip their tires in the Mississippi River along the Muscatine riverfront. Information about the dip site, as well as other details about the thousands of riders and support team members who will be in Muscatine on July 30, will be provided at the meeting.
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 []
MyBroadbands latest broadband survey shows that Axxess, Afrihost, and Webafrica are the best Internet service providers in South Africa.

For the survey, MyBroadband partnered with Dr. Liezel Korf to ensure accurate results and high-quality research.

The Q2 2016 broadband survey was completed by 4,267 South African broadband subscribers  2,732 of whom used an ADSL or fibre ISP.

To avoid duplicate entries and survey manipulation, a unique token system was used which only allowed invited users to complete the survey.

The surveyed users are all part of the MyBroadband community, and are therefore typically IT professionals and tech-savvy individuals.

ISP with the most loyal subscribers

To test subscribers satisfaction with their ISP, they were asked one question: How likely is it that you would recommend your current ISP to a friend or colleague?

A 10-point scale was used to rate the likelihood of a user recommending their service  where 0 is not at all likely, and 10 is extremely likely.

This is known as the Net Promoter Score, and the results of this question provide a good measure of the loyalty of consumers towards their providers.

The table below provides a summary of the results of the survey.

ISP No. people surveyed Standard Deviation Mean Score Axxess 238 1.785 8.52 Afrihost 753 1.889 8.39 Webafrica 221 1.943 8.24 Crystal Web 120 2.989 8.20 Vox Telecom 264 1.868 8.12 Cybersmart 49 1.908 7.94 Internet Solutions 28 2.393 7.61 OpenWeb 31 2.880 7.19 MWEB 395 2.392 6.63 Telkom Internet 633 2.712 5.98 Totals 2,732 2.468 7.51

More on broadband

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South African broadband speeds  2007 to 2015
Pinnacle Africa has been awarded sole distribution rights for the Alienware brand in Southern Africa.

Dell launched Alienware in South Africa on 1 October 2010, but the products disappeared from retailers shelves around the end 2015.

Dell Alienware is considered to be the premier gaming brand in the world, offering exceptional design and performance for the most demanding users, said the Dell brand executive at Pinnacle Africa, Rory Green.

Stock of standard Alienware configurations will be in SA during early May, and Pinnacle Africa said it will hold stock locally for fast delivery.

You will also have the ability to custom build your Alienware product.

This will allow resellers to offer their customers custom-builds with a lead time of approximately 4 weeks for delivery.

Requests for information, custom builds, or pre-orders can be sent to the Dell team via email at [email protected]

More on Alienware

Alienware Alpha Steam Machine gets SA pricing

Best laptops you can buy in South Africa

Steam Controller confirmed for South Africa

Alienware M14X gaming laptop launched in SA
Almost 300,000 motorists have taken the 60% discount on their outstanding e-toll bills, said the Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) company.

ETC said there has been a last-minute rush from e-toll users to take up the offer of a discount on tolls incurred from 3 December 2013 to 31 August 2015.

Motorists have until 2 May 2016 to qualify for the discount.

In addition to implementing the governments plan to encourage e-toll payment, Sanral has also stepped up its collection efforts.

Sanral sending out court summonses

Outa recently issued a statement confirming that several of its members had received High Court summonses for outstanding e-toll bills ranging between R400,000 and R8 million.

Outas lawyers have filed notices of intention to defend these matters with the North Gauteng High Court and a trial of this nature could possibly take years to finalise, said Outa.

It said Sanral decided to issue summonses against less than 0.3% of e-toll defaulters, despite the fact that over 2 million motorists refuse to pay for the scheme.

Outa said this is nothing short of state coercion and victimisation.

ETCs phones ringing off the hook

The ETC said its call centre for the 60% discount offer has seen an increase of 110% in incoming calls compared to the average daily calls taken in March.

It usually receives 1,300 telephone calls and makes 2,250 outbound calls per day.

On 26 April it received 2,500 calls thanks to the last-minute rush, it said.

While the ETC would not disclose how much the 300,000 motorists have paid, it said that payments for the first 27 days of April exceeded those for March by 39%.

The collection activity is based on varying degrees of certainty and settlement figures change daily.

More on e-tolls

Less than 2% of e-toll discounts taken

E-toll dodgers will face legal action in two weeks

Massive e-toll discounts are here

See how much you owe in e-tolls  how to check your bill online
An estimated 300 metered taxi drivers and owners marched to the Durban City Hall on Thursday to complain about Uber.

KwaZulu-Natal Metered Taxi Alliance spokesperson Sizwe Mvubu told News24 they gathered at the Durban Christian Centre in Berea and marched to the city hall where they handed their memorandum to a city official.

Mvubu alleges metered taxi drivers are losing clients to Uber due to what he believes to be unfair competition. He added that another issue affecting metered taxi drivers in KZN was that Uber drivers, in his view, did not have as much costs as they do.

When you buy a meter, that meter has to be mounted by the Metro police and you have to pay for that service. Uber drivers do not have that cost. We brand our vehicles and they dont. We also have to have special permits to operate and we have many more costs to operate, he said.

We want to know how could our government allow an international company to take away our livelihood just like that?

In the past there has also been protests against Uber among metered taxi drivers in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

News24

More on Uber

Taxify relaunched in South Africa to take on Uber and metered taxis

Some Uber drivers boycotting the app in South Africa
Outa has disputed Sanrals claims that there is a rush of motorists taking up the 60% e-toll discount.

The real question is, what is the value of the collected amount from the total R5.9 billion ring-fenced debt? said Outa.

Outa said that according to Sanrals recent comments, less than R100 million, or 2% of the defaults, benefited from discounts offered during the first five months of the dispensation.

Outa said that according to its calculations, there were less than 400,000 active, paying members out of roughly 2.5 million average monthly users of the Gauteng freeway network by the end of March 2016.

Outas statement comes after the Electronic Toll Collection company told media that almost 300,000 motorists had taken the 60% discount for their outstanding e-toll bills.

ETC said there has been a last-minute rush from e-toll users to take up the offer of a discount on tolls incurred from 3 December 2013 to 31 August 2015.

Motorists have until 2 May 2016 to qualify for the discount.

Sanral has also started sending out summonses for outstanding e-toll bills, with Outa reporting that several of its members have received notices.

More on e-tolls

This is how many people have taken Sanrals 60% e-toll discount

Less than 2% of e-toll discounts taken

E-toll dodgers will face legal action in two weeks

Massive e-toll discounts are here

See how much you owe in e-tolls  how to check your bill online
The Microsoft Imagine Cup South Africa leg finals took place at the CSIR on 26 April, where 15 teams battled for top honours.

Imagine Cup is an annual competition sponsored by Microsoft, and asks young technologists to help solve some of the worlds toughest challenges.

The South African leg of the Imagine Cup was open to all universities, and the University of Johannesburg excelled  with 8 of the top 15 teams.

Two UJ teams won in their respective categories:

Team Forensic  with a voice stress analysis project in the Innovation category.

 with a voice stress analysis project in the Innovation category. Team Kriterion  with a tender procurement system in the World Citizenship category.

From here, these two teams will compete in their respective categories at the regional semi-final in the MEA region during May, each for a chance to participate at the World Wide finals in Redmond in July, said UJ.

More on education

Over 300 hacking attempts on Gauteng school application system

Free d6 School Communicator data on MTN
A lady who had the guts to call the late First Lady Lucy Kibaki ugly, has received an angry backlash from social media users.

When news of Lucy Kibakis demise broke, Linet Awuor took to her Facebook page to post, She was the ugliest first lady in the whole world. May her soul rest in peace.



Well, she did not expect what ensued later. A social media user unearthed her photos and posted them on social media comparing her to Mama Lucys at her 20s.



What followed was a tirade of insults, shaming and never ending trolling by angry Kenyans who felt her sentiments were disrespectful.

We have sampled some below:

Tess Kabungu: 

Margaret Nyoike: 

Kirika Githaiga: 

Gladys Murebeh: 

Phoebe Muchugia Mutisya: 

Ginah Rey: 

Higgs John: 

Joe Mithamo: 

Sandrah Njoki: 

Simon Irubu: 

John Mwaura Gitau: 

Dennis Kangethe:

Before her account was deactivated, someone captured this screenshot.


SAN FRANCISCO  California officials say they will seek more than $90 million in firefighting costs from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. after finding that a deadly 2015 fire was sparked by a tree that came into contact with a power line.

The amount is the largest recovery sought by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which released a report Thursday detailing the cause of the fire that scorched remote Calaveras and Amador counties, about 125 miles east of San Francisco.

The blaze that started Sept. 9 burned for three weeks, killing two people and destroying more than 900 structures, including about 550 homes. The 110-square-mile fire caused an estimated $300 million in insured losses and is the seventh-most destructive wildfire in state history.

Cal Fire said the states largest utility and its contractors failed to provide proper maintenance after removing two gray pine trees from a stand in January 2015, exposing a weaker, skinnier interior tree.

The 44-foot-tall gray pine tree grew taller, seeking the sun, but it eventually slumped into a power line, according to the report.

The finding did not surprise Steve Campora, a Sacramento attorney who represents roughly 900 people suing San Francisco-based PG&E for fire-related losses. He said about 17 law firms throughout the state are representing about 1,800 people whose claims include loss of enjoyment of land and loss of treasured collections, including a telephone collection.

One family has been on the property since 1862, and it burned. Luckily, the family home survived, but it burned 900 acres, he said.

In a statement, a PG&E spokesman said the company was reviewing Thursdays report. We cooperated fully with Cal Fire in its investigation on the source of the ignition for the Butte fire. We are committed to doing the right thing for our customers and will respond in the normal legal process, Matt Nauman said.

This is not the largest amount sought or recouped by an agency for wildfire costs. The U.S. Attorneys office that covers the eastern district of California collected $102 million from Union Pacific Railroad in 2008 for a wildfire that torched Plumas and Lassen counties in 2000.

The Calaveras County Board of Supervisors issued a statement Thursday saying it would seek hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from the utility. The board said it will also ask the California Public Utilities Commission, which oversees the company, for an investigation and penalties.

Public Utilities Commission Chairman Michael Picker said last year that the utility continued to rack up accidents, some of them fatal, and questioned whether PG&E lacked a culture of safety that made the utilitys leadership accountable.

In 2010, a natural gas pipeline explosion rocked San Bruno, a suburb of San Francisco, killing eight people and destroying more than three dozen homes. The explosion resulted in a record $1.6 billion state penalty against the company.

Cal Fire has spent $400 million this fiscal year battling wildfires.

Until Thursday, the agencys largest civil recovery effort was for a pair of 2007 wildfires in San Diego County, Cal Fire spokeswoman Janet Upton said.

The state sought to recover $25.5 million and settled for just over $22 million.
LONDON

Lucian Freud portrait could fetch $29 million at Christies

Christies is selling a Lucian Freud painting of his pregnant daughter as part of a sale representing centuries of British portraiture.

Ib and her Husband, painted in 1992, is valued at about $29 million.

Works by Freud, who died in 2011 at 88, have sold for as much as $56 million.

The painting is part of a June 30 Defining British Art sale, announced Thursday, marking the 250th birthday of Christies auction house.

Other lots include Joshua Reynolds 1778 Portrait of Lucy Long, valued at up to $4.4 million and Lord Leightons Golden Hours from 1864. It is valued at up to $7.3 million.

The works will be exhibited in London, Hong Kong and New York before the sale.

GUATEMALA CITY

Rescuers search for survivors in deadly Guatemala trash slide

Hundreds of rescue workers picked through a Guatemalan garbage dump Thursday looking for bodies or possible survivors a day after a massive slope of trash collapsed, killing at least four people.

The National Civil Police reports that 18 people may still be missing, while Guatemalas national disaster response agency puts the figure at five.

Dozens of people seeking loved ones who were unaccounted for were also at the scene Thursday.

Marta Julia Davila said she was looking for her grandfather who works as a guajero, or garbage picker.

She said we have not seen him since yesterday ... since the slide.

Recent rains may have contributed to the slide. Authorities say about 1,000 people worked in that area of the dump and had been asked to evacuate, but some resisted.

LONDON

U.K. police charge 3 with terrorism offenses in Birmingham

British police charged two men and a woman from Birmingham with terrorism-related offenses in a probe that began after the extremist attacks on Paris and Brussels.

West Midlands Police said Thursday the three have been charged with a variety of offenses. They are Mohammed Ali Ahmed, 26, Zakaria Boufassil, 26, and Soumaya Boufassil, 29. They were among five people arrested April 14-15 in Birmingham and at Londons Gatwick Airport.

The arrests were made one week after Belgian authorities arrested a prime suspect in the deadly March 22 attack on Brussels Airport. That suspect, Mohamed Abrini, was also wanted in the Nov. 13 attacks on Paris.

One European security official told The Associated Press that Abrini had made multiple trips to Birmingham last year, meeting with other suspected extremists.

JERUSALEM

Israel rejects French peace effort proposal

Israel rejected a French initiative aimed at restarting peace efforts with the Palestinians, saying direct negotiations are the best way to reach a final agreement between the sides.

Paris is to host an international meeting in May of 20 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to discuss the peace process. Israel and the Palestinians have not been invited.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement Thursday that Israel adheres to its position that the best way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct, bilateral negotiations. Israel is ready to begin them immediately without preconditions.

The Palestinians have welcomed the French proposal.

The last round of Israeli-Palestinians peace talks, mediated by the U.S., collapsed in 2014.

MARSEILLE, France

Strikes, protests in France against disputed labor reforms

Protesters clashed with police in several French cities on Thursday over proposed reforms to the countrys labor rules and strikers have forced cancellations and delays at two airports serving Paris.

Thousands of demonstrators marched in Paris, and violence broke out when several dozen people, many with their faces covered, started throwing objects at police. Police used tear gas to disperse protesters.

French television also showed clashes in the southern city of Marseille, and Nantes and Rennes, in western France.

An air traffic controllers strike canceled 20 percent of all flights at Paris Orly Airport and caused delays at Charles De Gaulle, according to a notice on the Paris airport authority website Thursday.

France has seen a series of strikes and protests against the labor reform bill, which is aimed at encouraging companies to hire. Critics on the French left say the reforms will compromise Frances hard-won worker protections without curbing the countrys stubbornly high unemployment rate.

The bill will be debated at Frances lower house of parliament next week.

BERLIN

Germany: Teens who bombed Sikh temple were IS sympathizers

German authorities say two teenagers suspected of carrying out a bombing on a Sikh temple in the western city of Essen were sympathizers of the Islamic State group.

Three people were wounded in the blast April 16, one of them seriously. The interior ministry of North Rhine-Westphalia state told regional lawmakers Thursday that one of the two 16-year-old suspects had been in a violence prevention program aimed at Islamic extremists.

German news agency dpa quoted a ministry spokesman saying the boy once threatened to break a Jewish fellow students neck.

Essen police chief Frank Richter called the attack an act of terror.
This past weekend was all about Prince when it came to music, and the Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood concert in Columbus, Ohio was no exception.

Just give me everything purple you got! declares Garth, as the stage is bathed in purple. In fitting tribute, Trisha dons a Prince-esque purple jacket before the pair discuss Prince.

We have done a lot of Prince in our soundchecks, but weve never had the nerve to do it live Yearwood admits, before inviting the wall of sound to join her on stage as they honor the purple one. She says that the song must be done in his key, in Princes key, of course.

Despite her nerves to do Prince proud, were positive that hed love Trishas Garth-assisted version of Purple Rain.

Watch Trisha Yearwoods gospel-inspired take on Purple Rain:

https://youtu.be/R7LmJQInfQ4
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed Albanian President Bujar Nishani to NATO Headquarters on Thursday (28 April 2016) to discuss preparations for the Warsaw Summit. Speaking at a joint press conference with President Nishani, Mr. Stoltenberg praised Albania for its contributions to Allied security and for its role in strengthening stability in the Western Balkans.

The Secretary General commended Albania for its continued contributions to NATO missions in Afghanistan and Kosovo, as well as its strong support to NATO partners, including Ukraine. He also welcomed Albanias contributions to the Global Coalition against ISIL, with equipment and Special Forces trainers to Iraq. Highlighting Albanias key role in the Western Balkans, the Secretary General added that Tiranas cooperation with its neighbours helps build stability closer to home.

Mr. Stoltenberg also praised Albanias support for NATOs Open Door policy and the integration of the Western Balkans into the Euro-Atlantic family. He noted that the Alliance will take an important step next month, with the signature of the Accession Protocol for Montenegro. Albanias political and practical efforts help to keep NATO strong, as we face the most challenging security environment in a generation, Mr. Stoltenberg said.

In their talks, President Nishani and the Secretary General addressed key issues on NATOs agenda ahead of the Warsaw Summit and progress on key capabilities, such as NATOs Ballistic Missile Defence. Mr. Stoltenberg also welcomed Albanias decision to increase defence spending this year.
President Nishani, very much welcome to NATO headquarters. Its great to have you here and great to see you again. We last met in Tirana not so many months ago. And its really an opportunity I appreciate very much to be able to further strengthen our relationship and expand our cooperation.

And I am very grateful for Albanias strong commitment to our Alliance and your contributions to NATO missions and operations. I welcome your continued contributions to our missions in Afghanistan and in Kosovo.

You also provide strong support for our partners, including contributions to our Trust Funds for Ukraine, helping with cyber defence and military career transition. And Albania plays an important role in the fight again ISIL, contributing equipment and Special Forces trainers to Iraq.

All of this is just some few examples of how you are playing a key role in helping NATO deliver on its different commitments.

Albania also helps build stability closer to home, by promoting cooperation throughout the Western Balkans. You are a strong advocate for NATOs Open Door policy, and for integrating your neighbours into the Euro-Atlantic family. Next month, we will take an important step, with the signature of the Accession Protocol for Montenegro. Then Montenegro has made yet another important step towards full membership. Once all Allies have ratified the Protocol, Montenegro can become the 29th member of the Alliance.

Albanias political and practical efforts to help to keep NATO strong, as we face the most challenging security environment in a generation, is something we appreciate very much.

Our Alliance is responding to the new security environment. Today we discussed how far we have come and what we still have to do. At the Warsaw Summit in July, we will enhance our forward presence in the eastern part of our Alliance. We will make progress on key capabilities, like NATOs Ballistic Missile Defence, and our surveillance drone programme. And we will also step up our support for partners in the east and in the south.

To the east, we help Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova strengthen their defences, and run transparent, effective security ministries. To the south, we are training Iraqi officers, and supporting Jordan and Tunisia.

But NATO can do more, because in fighting terrorist groups like ISIL, building our partners capacity is one of the best weapons we have. Twenty-first century challenges require twenty-first century defence.

So I really appreciate that Albania has decided to increase defence spending this year. And I encourage you to continue to do so and to continue to increase your investments in defence. This will help keep the people of Albania safe and help keep NATO strong.

So President Nishani, thank you again for coming here and thank you excellent discussions, and for being here at NATO headquarters.

QUESTION (ABC Albania): Secretary General, Albania is a not a big country, but Albanias human contribution has been highly appreciated in important NATO missions, like in Afghanistan and in Iraq. The courage to face high-risks, and an openness to locals. But right now, NATO and the EU are facing new challenges. How do you see the role of Albania in counter-terrorism? And what are your expectations from that?

I know NATO is preparing for the transformation of its operation in the Mediterranean Sea? If you could develop a little bit. What kind of transformation can NATO do in order to counter the migration crisis?

SECRETARY GENERAL: The president and I spent quite a lot of time during our meeting discussing how we can enhance and reinforce our joint efforts to fight terrorism. We addressed the challenges related to foreign fighters, especially their return. Albania has already done a lot to address those risks and challenges and I welcome Albania doing so. We underlined the importance of improving the ways we share the intelligence. It is important that we enhance both the collection of intelligence and sharing amongst NATO Allies. This is something we have been working on for quite some time. We have seen results, but we have to stay vigilant. We need to continue to adapt the way we work related to intelligence.

Then, I think that the main message is that we need to stay united as an Alliance when we address the root causes and to work together on how we can stabilize our neighbourhood, countries which are suffering from violence and turmoil: Iraq Syria, North Africa.

NATO cannot do this alone. We are working with other nations, EU and others. We are constantly addressing how we can project our stability beyond our borders. Not going into big military combat operations but by building local capacity, as we do now in Iraq, where we train the local Iraqi officers, helping them to stabilize their own country.

We also work with Jordan, Tunisia and other countries. That is in a way an important part of our fight against terrorism. For example, Afghanistan, has been our biggest military operation ever, and the reason why we are there, also with forces from Kosovo, is to fight terrorism, to prevent that Afghanistan once again becomes a safe haven for international terrorism. It was a direct response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

When it comes to our maritime presence in the Mediterranean and Aegean. First of all, I think from what we have seen in the Aegean is that NATO contributes in a very useful way to the efforts of the European Union, of Greece and Turkey to cope with the migrant and refugee crisis. We conduct surveillance, monitoring. We gather information and then we share this information in real time with the Greek and Turkish coastguards and also with the EUs border agency Frontex. And we see how they take action, upon the information they have received from NATO ships in the Aegean. And add to that, just the presence of NATO ships creates an additional platform for enhanced cooperation between the EU and NATO and also between Greece, Turkey and the EU. So for instance I visited the German flagship in the Aegean and on that flagship there was a naval officer from Turkey and a naval officer from Greece working together and this is important in itself.

We are now in the process of transforming our naval operation Active Endeavour, which was actually established after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We are now in the process of transforming that into a broader maritime security operation. The details are not yet decided, but, in principle, such a broader maritime security operation can do many different tasks, like situational awareness, uphold freedom of navigation, conduct interdiction tasks, support maritime counter-terrorism and contribute to capacity-building. So we are now in the process of doing exactly that, transforming Active Endeavour into a broader security operation and we are in dialogue with the EU, with Italy and other EU members on how NATO can support, assist, help the efforts of the EU. We already do that in the Aegean Sea and then we are considering what more we can do in other parts of the Mediterranean.

That was a very short answer, to a very precise question.

QUESTION (Albanian Public TV): Secretary General, do you foresee a greater contribution of Albania in NATO. If so, how can it be outlined?

SECRETARY GENERAL: Yes, I expect Albania to make good on the promise we all made at our last Summit with heads of state and government in Wales in 2014, to increase defence spending. I welcome the decision of the Albanian government to increase defence spending in 2016. But still there is a way to go to reach the guideline of spending 2 percent of GDP on defence. Of course, by increasing defence spending in Albania, you are making the defence, the armed forces of Albania, stronger. But by doing so, you are also making NATO stronger. So my main message is that we all have to invest more in our collective security in times where we see that we live in a more dangerous world. And Albania has some key capabilities, you have some experience, you have some capacities which are of great importance in the Alliance. But I would like to see more Albania in NATO. Therefore, I expect and am looking forward to Albania investing more in defence in the coming years.
Internationally acclaimed Israeli jazz saxophonist, composer and bandleader, Eli Degbiri, will be performing at the 2016 International Jazz Day Global Concert, hosted by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at The White House.The concert will be broadcast nationally on ABC on April 30thInternational Jazz Dayand streamed across the globe by the United Nations and UNESCO. A remarkable list of artists and living legends will take the stage along with Degibri, including, Sting,, Aretha Franklin,, and of course,, whom Degibri toured with when he was just 19 years old.It would be a great honor just to be invited to play with any single one of the amazing musicians that are performing that night, let alone to be with all of them at The White House and in front of President Obama who I also have so much admiration for. I am so grateful and humbled to have been invited." -Eli DegibriEli Degibri has recorded and performed extensively since the mid-1990s. Bill Milkowski of JazzTimes Magazine calls Eli, an exceptionally melodic improviser with a big, bold tenor tone." Jazz icon Herbie Hancock added that Degibri is, a very talented composer, arranger, and performer", whose music, treads uncharted waters."Degibri, has recorded seven albums as a leader, and toured and recorded with notable veterans such as Herbie Hancock,, and the Mingus Big Band. His latest album, Cliff Hangin, was released in the US earlier this year. This is Eli's second time participating at the Global Jazz Day Concert, having also performed at the inaugural event in 2012 at the United Nations in New York City For interview requests and more information, visit degibri.com or contact [email protected]
Berkshires Jazz, Inc. has announced that tickets are on sale, and moving briskly, for the May 14 memorial concert in honor of the late alto saxophonist. To take place at Barrington Stage , in Pittsfield, Mass., the tribute will be performed by a gathering of the NEA Jazz Masters quintet, with(trumpet),(piano),(bass) and(drums), along with Woods protegeon alto saxophone.A native of Springfield, Massachusetts, Woods career spanned more than 65 years. He performed as a leader or guest artist with the royalty of jazz, fromtoto, plus wide-ranging leaders like Michel Legrand, among others. He was also heard on a variety of recordings with popular artists like Paul Simon and Billy Joel. He was the recipient of four Grammy awards, and in 2007 was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. He died on Sept. 29, 2015 at the age of 83.Woods introduced the 14-year-old saxophone prodigy Grace Kelly to Berkshires audiences at the second annual Pittsfield CityJazz Festival in 2006, when he was guest soloist with the U.S. Army Jazz Ambassadors big band. Having mentored Kelly at a jazz workshop, Woods invited her to the stage, an event that has become part of jazz lore. In a moment that has become part of jazz lore, Woods removed his trademark leather cap from his head, placed it on hers, an iconic passing-the-torch moment. The clip has had nearly 150,000 views on YouTube.The moment gave rise to a Grace Kelly composition and recording, Man With the Hat, on which Woods appeared as guest soloist. The May 14 gathering in Pittsfield will be the first reassembly of his legendary quintet with Kelly in the alto chair. The concert will take place at the Boyd-Quinson main stage at Barrington Stage Co., and is sponsored in part by a grant from North Coast Brewing Co., which supports live jazz events nationwide.In addition to Kelly on saxophone, the band includes:Bill Goodwin, an almost completely self-taught drummer who attributes his early interest in the drums to Shelly Manne's playing on the movie soundtrack of The Man with the Golden Arm. In addition to serving as drummer for the Phil Woods ensemble, Goodwin is a renowned recording executive, having produced Phil Woods recordings since 1980, including: Grammy Award winning albums More Live and At The Vanguard", 1992 Grammy nominee All Bird's Children", and Dizzy Gillespie Meets the Phil Woods Quintet. Goodwin appeared at the 2011 Pittsfield CityJazz Festival with Kelly and Woods on their Man With The Hat tour.Steve Gilmore, who made his home in the Poconos in 1971, where he became associated with drummer Bill Goodwin. Together they formed the rhythm team for several bands including The Chamber Jazz Quintet, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, Tom Waits, Mose Allison and The National Jazz Ensemble. In February, 1974 Gilmore and Goodwin both joined The Phil Woods Quartet at its inception, and they anchored the quartet (and later quintet) for its duration. With three Grammy awards under his belt, Gilmore frequently appears at Dizzys Coca-Cola Lounge in New York City.Trumpeter Brian Lynch, who also leads his own quintet as well as touring with Latin Master Eddie Palmieri and the special memorial edition of the Jazz Messengers. The Grammy winner is a graduate of two of the jazz worlds most distinguished ensembles, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and the Horace Silver Quintet. As a bandleader and recording artist, Lynch has released 19 CDs featuring his distinctive playing, composing and arranging.Pianist Bill Mays, who spent two decades as a mainstay on the southern California jazz scene, before relocaing to New York in 1984. He is noted as a first-rate leader, accompanist, and soloist, and is well-known for his compositional and arranging talents. He has contributed music to the libraries of a wide array of artists, from chamber ensembles to full orchestras and big bands, as well as to Phil Woods. He tours and records in many varied configurations, and has appeared in Pittsfield as a solo performer.Ticket information and other details are available at BerkshiresJazz.org or 413-236-8888.Berkshires Jazz, Inc. is a 501c3 non-profit organization whose twofold mission is to present jazz events and encourage jazz education in Berkshire Count. Its year-round programming is highlighted by the Pittsfield CityJazz Festival, spanning 10 days in mid-October. The longest-standing jazz festival in the Berkshires, the Pittsfield CityJazz Festival is a signature cultural event of the fall foliage season in western Massachusetts and the Albany , New York region.
More than 550 people have been recognized as injured party within the framework of the criminal case into the aggression which Azerbaijan unleashed against the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh), starting on April 2.

Artsakh prosecutor Karen Gabrielyan told Armenian News-NEWS.am that, in accordance with the petition received from the NKR Defense Army, criminal cases were opened on April 4, and subsequently, they were merged into one proceeding.

The criminal cases are instituted pursuant to several articles of the NKR Criminal Code.

The injured parties are being questioned, Gabrielyan added. The investigation into the criminal case continues.

The NKR Police are conducting an investigation.

In addition, the Karabakh side has evidence attesting to the Azerbaijanis ridiculing the dead bodies of Armenian military servicemen, and torture.

The Azerbaijani side continues violating the ceasefire arrangement on a regular basis, including the shelling of settlements in Artsakh.
Thomas Jeffersons School of Law hosted a lecture on the Armenian Genocide and rights 101 years later. The lecture was organized by the Association of the Armenian students of the school, as the School reports.

The report was made by an expert in criminal law, Mark Geragos, who had previously submitted a lawsuit against New York Life Insurance and AXA Corporation to implement insurance policies issued to the Armenians in the early twentieth century.

The chairman of the association of the Armenian law students Meline Grigoryan made a closing speech.

While we acknowledge the past , we can prevent the crimes against humanity in the future ," she said.
Money talks, and right now it's talking shit, wrote a well-known socialite and actress Kim Kardashian on her personal webpage.

My family and I are no strangers to BS in the press. Lies make good headlines, good headlines make great covers, great covers sell magazines. We've learned to brush it off. But when I heard about this full-page ad that ran in the Wall Street Journal denying the Armenian genocide, I couldn't just brush it off.

According to Kardashian it was the Turkish Platform that paid for the ad. The platform involves a network of ads stating that the historians exaggerate the number of the Armenian victims and blaming Armenians for that.

For the Wall Street Journal to publish something like this is reckless, upsetting and dangerous. It's one thing when a shitty tabloid profits from a made-up scandal, but for a trusted publication like WSJ to profit from genocideit's shameful and unacceptable, she continued.

Reminding the reply of WSJ to Gawkers inquiry she stated that advocating the denial of a genocide by the country responsible for itthat's not publishing a provocative viewpoint, that's spreading lies. It's totally morally irresponsible and, most of all, it's dangerous. If this had been an ad denying the Holocaust, or pushing some 9/11 conspiracy theory, would it have made it to print?

Many historians believe that if Turkey had been held responsible for the Armenian genocide, and reprimanded for what they did, the Holocaust may not have happened. In 1939, a week before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Hitler said, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" We do. We must. When we allow ourselves to be silenced by money, by fear and by power, we teach our children that truth is irrelevant. We have to be responsible for the message we pass on to our children. We have to honor the TRUTH in our history so that we protect their future, she concludes.

The Wall Street Journal placed an ad of Fact Check Armenia  an anti-Armenian group. The group rejects the mass massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the WWI. The ad hints that allegedly Armenians have a share of responsibility in what had happened.
There is no military solution to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Mark Toner, Deputy Spokesperson of the US Department of State, stated the aforesaid calling on the conflict parties to return to the negotiating table, according to Armenian News-NEWS.am.

Weve seen the fragile ceasefire put in place. We were encouraged initially that it appeared to be holding, but obviously tensions remain on the ground, Toner stated. The Secretary has reached out to leaders of both countries, Azerbaijan and Armenia. Our chairman of the Minsk Group  co-chair, rather  has visited the region. We have remained in contact with both governments, all sides in this conflict.

Our message has been consistent, which is that we condemn in the strongest possible terms any violence along the Nagorno-Karabakh line of conflict, and we need to see the peace process back up and running and as soon as possible. There is no military solution to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.
STEPANAKERT.  The adversary continued to intensively shell along the Line of Contact between the Karabakh and Azerbaijani opposing forces, from late Wednesday night to early Thursday morning.

During this time the Azerbaijani armed forces fired more than 240 missiles at the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh) Defense Army positions, and by way of tanks, mortars, cannons, reactive rocket propelled howitzers, and Grad missile launchers.

The NKR Defense Army informed Armenian News-NEWS.am that there was more intense firing in easterly, northerly, and northeasterly directions of the Line of Contact.

In addition Mataghis village of Artsakh was shelled from Grad missile launchers.

To neutralize the adversarys aggressive actions, however, vanguard units of the NKR Defense Army took preventive actions that are consistent with the development of the operational situation.

The situation is relatively calm at this time, the respective statement reads.
YEREVAN.  Twenty-three incidents of ceasefire violations were recorded from late Wednesday night to early Thursday morning, at the northeastern sectori.e. Tavush Province of Armeniaof the Armenia-Azerbaijan border.

The Republic of Armenia Ministry of Defense (RA MOD) informed Armenian News-NEWS.am that during this time the Azerbaijani side mostly fired irregular shots at the Armenian position-holders, and by way of rifle and sniper weaponry.

[But] vanguard units of the RA AF [i.e. Armed Forces], exercising restraint, took actions in response solely when absolutely necessary, and they confidently control the border situation, the respective MOD statement reads.
Grigori Hajyan from the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh), who captured first place in an international wushu tournament, devoted his victory to his father who had died during the four-day war which Azerbaijan unleashed in early April.

I dedicate this victory of mine to the bright memory of my father, who fell during the defense of Artsakh, Grigori said, according to Artsakhpress news agency. I want to become world championand I will, so I can wave Artsakhs triumphant flag everywhere.

Grigoris father, Norayr Hajyan, had fallen in the early morning hours on April 5, during the self-defense battle in NKR Talish village.

National teams from Armenia, NKR, Georgia, and Iran competed in the aforementioned tournament, which was held in Armenias capital city of Yerevan.
The Kristiansand Dyrepark zoo had put down the zebra and publicly fed to the tigers.

According to the Daily Mail newspaper, the Norwegian zoo provoked parents' fury after feeding a whole dead zebra to its tigers in full view of visitors. Officials at Kristiansand Dyrepark have admitted that the healthy zebra had been put down because they had too many of them.

The employee of the zoo, vet Rolf-Arne Olberg said that the decision to provide to predators such food which is typical for natural conditions.

I understand people's reactions, but it is quite normal for a tiger or lion to eat their prey, he stated, TASS reported.
The roofs of the houses were damaged, and the windows were broken as a result of the Azerbaijani shelling of Mataghis village, in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh), at night, Mataghis school principal Gegham Aghajanyan told Armenian News-NEWS.am.

It [i.e. the shells] hit the walls of seven houses, damaged the roofs of some [houses], he said. And windows of the 70 percent of homes are broken.

In Aghajanyans words, over 30 shells were launched toward the village, but most of them had the surrounding hills.

As reported earlier, the adversary continued to intensively shell along the Line of Contact between the Karabakh and Azerbaijani opposing forces, from late Wednesday night to early Thursday morning.

During this time the Azerbaijani armed forces fired more than 240 missiles at the NKR Defense Army positions, and by way of tanks, mortars, cannons, reactive rocket propelled howitzers, and Grad missile launchers.

In addition, Mataghis village of Artsakh was shelled from Grad missile launchers.
WASHINGTON, DC  Non-recognition of Armenian Genocide gives rise to impunity and the recurrence of genocides.

US Congressman Ed Royce, who is Chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, stated the aforesaid during an evening event at the Capitol Hill, the Armenian News-NEWS.am reporter informed from Washington, DC.

Royce stressed that the international community has failed to hold Turkey accountable creating an air of impunity, and that we are witnessing the unleashing of this very impunity in the region.

In his words, arguing over the fact of the Armenian Genocide is useless, since the evidence and facts prove its reality.

The Congress member stated that we need to become a part of this heritage, and added that he will continue the tradition of Armenian Genocide recognition, which former US President Ronald Reagan had laid the foundation of.
WASHINGTON, DC  It is useless to dispute the fact of Armenian Genocide, since it is fully proven.

US Congressman Robert Dold noted the abovementioned during an Armenian Genocide remembrance evening at the Capitol Hill, the Armenian News-NEWS.am reporter informed from Washington, DC.

Dold noted that one just needs to shed light on the facts of history, and that there are facts, photographs, and evidence as well as eyewitness accounts from real people and families who have survived the Genocide.

The Congress member added that the US is obligated to recognize the Armenian Genocide, since its non-recognition holds a risk of recurrence of this crime.
YEREVAN.  Advisor to the Chairman of Armenias Investigative Committee Sona Truzyan stated that the Committee continues the investigation of the bus explosion on Halabyan street in Yerevan on April 5.

Truzyan mentioned that the investigation is underway. Based on the interests of the investigation, the information will be provided periodically, she said in an interview with the correspondent of Armenian News - NEWS.am.

Respecting the public's right to information, it will be periodically provided, without endangering the further course of investigation, she said answering the question whether it has already become clear where the alleged suspect got large amount of explosives.

T passenger bus exploded on Halabyan street in Yerevan on April 5. Ten people were in the bus at the time of explosion: nine passengers and the driver. Two people were killed.

According to the investigators, the alleged perpetrator of the explosion has quarreled with relatives and intended to blow up them. Traces of explosive were found on the samples from the scene and later found in the suspects house.
WASHINGTON, DC  The direct link between the Armenian Genocide and the atrocities by Azerbaijan is apparent.

US Congressman Frank Pallone stated the aforesaid during an Armenian Genocide remembrance evening at the Capitol Hill, the Armenian News-NEWS.am reporter informed from Washington, DC.

Pallone stressed that clear parallels can be drawn between the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the recent Azerbaijani atrocities, which Armenian military servicemen and civilians were subjected to.

The US Congress member added that he is very concerned by what occurred in Nagorno-Karabakh. He noted that the representatives of Karabakh and Armenia were for a long time pointing to the military rhetoric of Azerbaijan, especially its president, and the biggest clash occurred just recently.

Frank Pallone stated that the US needs to bridle Azerbaijan, and make it return to the negotiating table. Subsequently, as per the US congressman, a peaceful settlement needs to be achieved, and this will enable Karabakh to either join Armenia, or establish as an independent country.
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The US Congressman Adam Schiff, a descendant of Jews who survived Holocaust, said that he understands the pain of the Armenian people who survived the genocide, reports Armenian News -NEWS.am.

"Several days ago I was talking to my uncle. He is 90. He recalled our relatives who had been lost during the Holocaust. We were thinking about whether they had been killed or managed to escape; whether they moved to Israel or to America. Do we have relatives? Where are their descendants? Likewise are the Armenians... But the pain of the Armenians is very special. What makes it special is the fact that the genocide remains unrecognized by Turkey as well as by my own government," said Schiff in his speech in the Congress on the evening dedicated to the memory of Armenian Genocide victims.

According to Schiff, non-recognition of the Armenian Genocide nowadays creates new crimes." That is what is happening in Syria, where a genocide is taking place ( of Christians and Yazidis - ed. ) since Turkey does not close borders before the foreign mercenaries , does not want to lose petrodollars and trafficking revenues. In addition, with the assistance and encouragement of Turkey there took place the Azerbaijani aggression against the Armenian people," said Schiff .

According to the US Congressman, in order to resolve the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh , the US government needs, first of all, to give up the policy of equivalent approaches.

"When one puts an equal sign between two sides  between the victim and the aggressor -- still referring to both , s/he pushes the aggressor to new aggressive actions, since s/he knows that s/he will not be brought to justice," said Schiff. According to him, a group of Congressmen plans to restore prohibition of the provision of any US military assistance to Azerbaijan in the nearest future .
The France-Karabakh Friendship Circle expressed its support to Marlene Mourier, Mayor of Bourg-les-Valence commune of France, who was subjected to open threats by Azerbaijan.

It continues to remain unclear for the Circle as to why these open threats by Baku remain unanswered by the French authorities, said Francois Rochebloine, heads of this circle.

The France-Karabakh Friendship Circle recalled that on April 22, and at the request of the Azerbaijani embassy in France, a document of warning was submitted to Circle member, Bourg-les-Valence Mayor Marlene Mourier, whereby French MPs are forbidden to visit Nagorno-Karabakh, and it is demanded that the charter of friendship, which was signed between Bourg-les-Valence and Shushi town of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh), be declared null and void.

The Circle noted that it plans to contact the respective ministers to receive a proper response for this blatant interference by Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan had also demanded that the aforesaid French commune call off relations with Shushi.

But Mayor Mourier supports the Nagorno-Karabakh authorities will to self-determination, and she is not giving in to threats.
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Stratfor intelligence company wrote an article on future developments on the Karabakh issue.

The experts predict higher than usual level of diplomatic activity on the Nagorno-Karabakh in the coming weeks.

Low-level clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan persist amid a flurry of diplomatic activity by larger powers such as Russia, Turkey and the West, the article says.

The analysts warn that larger conflict may erupt at any moment, although the talks can be expected to gain renewed momentum. Meanwhile, a broader settlement on he status of Karabakh will remain elusive.

Reminding of numerous visits and meetings held by Armenian and Azerbaijani officials with Russian colleagues as well as Azerbaijani-Turkish contacts, the experts conclude that the string of visits illustrates the geopolitical complexity of the Caucasus. The relationships of external actors there influence not only the governments that rule the region, but also the people who live there.

In Armenia, for example, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Yerevan on 13 April to protest Russias weapons sales to Azerbaijan. (Though Moscow is strategically aligned with Armenia and has a military base in the country, it also maintains active political and security ties with Azerbaijan) The demonstrators claimed that the weapons significantly contributed to the recent flare-up in fighting  an accusation that is not without merit, since Azerbaijan would have been less inclined to launch operations against the regions fortified defences without having heavily invested in its own weaponry over the past decade, the article reads.

The diplomatic activity will continue in the weeks ahead, the analysts write, adding that Yerevan wants to maintain the status quo in Nagorno-Karabakh. It is not clear that Russia wants to change the status quo in the disputed region either, they argue.

Instead, Moscow may be more interested in perpetuating a managed conflict, neither frozen nor hot, in which Russia plays the role of primary arbiter between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Such a scenario would strengthen Moscows influence in both countries, the authors write.

In the coming weeks, the level of diplomatic activity on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue will continue to be higher than usual as regional actors exert pressure on Armenia and Azerbaijan to hold peace talks. But a broader or even partial settlement to the dispute is unlikely to emerge in the near or medium term; there are simply too many complicating factors and parties with an interest in blocking a deal. As a result, military escalation will continue to be a possibility in Nagorno-Karabakh, with effects that reach far beyond the bounds of the small contested territory.
The Henry Luce Foundations Higher Education Program recently awarded the Laney Graduate School (LGS) a special grant to pilot a new project for developing global skills in doctoral education.

The project, "Global Skills: New Rubrics, New Structures," will be led by co-principal investigators LGS Dean Lisa A. Tedesco and David Nugent, professor of anthropology and director of the LGS Masters in Development Practice (MDP) program. Carla Roncoli, associate director of the MDP program, will also contribute to leading the project.

The project seeks to address a gap in current academic training, which often leaves graduate students unevenly prepared for the central role culture, values and beliefs play in shaping everyday understandings and decision-making processes of people across the globe.

There is growing interest among students, faculty, administrators, policymakers and the general public to see higher education as transformative in addressing complex problems," Tedesco says.

Though universities are increasingly seeking to develop understanding and impart skills needed to participate effectively in todays globalized world, university structures can present barriers.

Longstanding disciplinary and departmental boundaries can make it sometimes difficult for students to develop the conceptual or analytical tools they need to address todays global problems," Roncoli notes.

Nugent agrees. Doctoral students are not often provided with practical experience in working with organizations that seek solutions to global poverty, food security, climate change, population displacements and health threats, he says.

Building a "community of practice"

To overcome these challenges, LGS will pilot an innovation in the field of global education in the form of an interdisciplinary "community of practice," or COP. One goal of this pilot is to help students to recognize the applications for their expertise and to learn to deploy it more broadly outside of their scholarly fields.

The COP will transcend program, department and school by including students from the MDP program, which trains development practitioners, as well as students from Emorys other professional masters programs and PhD students from across the humanities, social sciences, public health sciences, and the natural and biomedical sciences.

Comprised of 16-20 students, the COP will also include representatives from partner organizations that are involved in cutting edge development practice, applied research and capacity building, such as CARE, The Carter Center, Habitat for Humanity, and the Nature Conservancy. The COP will work under the supervision of faculty who have interests and expertise in problems that have global orientations.

The pilot COP will bring to the table students with significantly different needs, interests and capacities in terms of their positioning along the academic/applied and utilitarian/cultural divides," Nugent explains.

Adds Roncoli, In addition to affording students the opportunity to learn from one another, the COP structure will present them with the challenge of working across disciplinary divides, linking theory and practice to address complex, globally-based problems  skills that are highly valued in professional and academic worlds.

Focus on fieldwork and assessment

The pilot COP will operate for 18 months and will involve fieldwork to address practical problems in the Global South. Team members will go to the field and implement the project they plan during the academic year in collaboration with a partner organization.

Upon returning from the field in the fall, the student team will participate in a return seminar: With guidance from participating faculty, the team will engage in a structured critique and reflection of every stage of the project, from planning to implementation, and will develop recommendations for improvement. At the conclusion of the pilot, the team will produce a final assessment of their efforts, which will inform the work of subsequent COPs.

The novel activities of the COPs will make it possible to identify important new understandings that are necessary to transform graduate education, so that it is in tune with the needs of the present era," Nugent says.

Assessment will be a key part of the pilot, Tedesco says.

We plan to develop a rubric that will allow us to assess our efforts to help scholars at varying ]stages of their careers develop skills and understandings that are informed by a global perspective," she says. "Because these skills and understandings will emerge out of the activities of the COPs, we expect the rubric for global skills to evolve, through experience.

Addressing "the world's most pressing problems"

Keen on monitoring this project as it unfolds is Emorys Office of Global Strategy and Initiatives, responsible for implementing Emorys global strategy, including innovative advances for international programs, curricula and research.

This project represents an innovative approach to internationalizing doctoral training that meets the criteria of Emorys mission to create, preserve, teach and apply knowledge in the service of humanity," says Philip Wainwright, vice provost for global strategies and initiatives. "We look forward to working with project leaders as they implement this creative training model.

The Henry Luce Foundation sees value in this project beyond Emory.

Dean Tedesco and Professor Nugent recognize the important contributions that can be made by humanists and social scientists to solving the worlds most pressing problems, says Sean T. Buffington, Luce Foundation vice-president. The Foundation is proud to support them and Emorys Laney Graduate School as they seek to empower new scholars to do so.

The project will launch in fall 2016.
17:40

Intensifying his attack, BJP President Amit Shah today targeted Congress chief Sonia Gandhi once again over the VVIP chopper scam asking her to explain a "number of relaxations" given to AgustaWestland which, he alleged, compromised India's interests.





Posing questions to Gandhi before the media, he said reports of bribery in the deal appeared in the Italian media soon after the it was finalised but the then UPA government went ahead with it instead of invoking a tender clause, which enabled it to be put on hold.





The deal was "put on hold" only in 2013 after corruption was "proved", he said adding the Congress chief should answer who was behind the delay.





Shah said the tender for the purchase of choppers allowed only original equipment manufacturers (OEM) but AgustaWestland was allowed to compete even though it was not an OEM.





"I want to ask the Congress President as to who was behind the change? Who ensured that the company was found technically qualified? Who was behind the changes in the tender conditions?" he asked at a press conference.





Raising another question, he said when the deal was done, one of the conditions was that the field evaluation trial of the choppers would be carried out in India but it was later changed and the firm was allowed to do so in its premises.





"Conditions were changed abruptly. Did it not play with India's interests? Did it not compromise the seriousness of trial? Did the then Defence Minister give the permission? On whose behest did it happen? Sonia Gandhi should answer it too," he said. \





He also refuted the claim of Congress that all the money given by AgustaWestland under the ban guarantee has returned to India and said only a part of it has been encashed.





"Congress chief should herself answer these questions be appearing before people, by appearing before the media," he said. The Congress should come out of the mindset of "thief scolding a cop".





Yesterday, Shah attacked Gandhi and asker to name the bribe takers in the Rs.3,600 core chopper deal but Congress hit back saying his demand was a "no confidence vote" in the Modi government which has "failed" in its job of investigating it properly in last two years.
China's targets for industrial production capacity cuts are far below market expectations and will be of little help in solving structural problems, a central bank monetary policy committee member was quoted by finance magazine Caixin as saying.The current policy emphasises mergers and acquisitions to reduce capacity, instead of bankruptcies, said Huang Yiping, who is also a professor at Peking University. That will only push responsibility for dealing with layoffs and non-performing assets to other companies, Huang was cited as saying in an article published by the magazine on Wednesday.China, which produces half the world's steel, has said it has cut 90 million tonnes of steel capacity and plans to cut another 100-150 million tonnes through 2020.However, a rapid rise in steel prices this year has seen mills restart production. The market estimates that more than 40 million tonnes of capacity out of the 50-60 million tonnes that were shut last year have returned to the market.The market should determine which companies are shut down, and capacity reductions should be market driven, Huang said, adding that it will be difficult for the market to accept a process driven by the central government pushing targets down to local governments."Government, specifically the central government, should take responsibility and set up effective market mechanisms", Huang said.REUTERS CJ CS1536 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-705197.Xml
Maharashtra's Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar has said that he has full faith in the economic system that is in place both at the central level and at the level of state government, and added that overall, the nation is developing under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Participating in ETV's popular "The J C Show" in Mumbai, Mungantiwar told Head, ETV News, Jagdish Chandra, "I have full faith on the economic system. I have full faith on people working in this sector (economic and finance sector), but, this system should always be strengthened and we are paying full attention to this. The country is continuously developing under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi." Targetting the opposition Congress party, Mungantiwar told ETV's Mr. Chandra, "The Congress has given us loss in heritage." He was candid in admitting that as far as the economy of Maharashtra was concerned, there have been a "few highs and lows witnessed in share market and the construction business due to recession. But now the market is rising. Mumbai is lagging behind in revenue." Commenting on the state debt of Rs.330, 000, the Maharashtra Finance Minister said he is confident about the economy rebounding and moving northward. "We have announced concessions on crops, on cancer-related drugs, concessions to sugar cane traders, concessions on items related to children's use. We have raised expenses in a few sectors to bring and ensure uniformity," Mungantiwar told ETV's Mr. Chandra. (ANI with ETV inputs)
Maharashtra's Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar has rejected all charges and allegations that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is remote controlled by its parent body, the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh (RSS). Participating in ETV's popular "The J C Show" in Mumbai, Mungantiwar told Head, ETV News, Jagdish Chandra, candidly that the BJP-led government in the state is facing challenges, but is moving forward under the able leadership of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. "Some innocent people say the BJP is remote-controlled by the RSS. The Sangh has never told to appoint anybody even when I was (Maharashtra) Pradesh president (of the BJP). The RSS never applies pressure," Mungantiwar told ETV's Mr. Chandra The Maharashtra Finance Minister described BJP president Amit Shah as an able organiser. He told ETV's Mr. Chandra, "Our party (BJP) belongs to the poor, to the farmers. The ideology of the party is linked to the people. The party believes that the organisation is over and above the government. Even a farmer can rise in this party. In contrast, you need to take birth in the Gandhi family to go ahead in the Congress (party)." Mungantiwar also made a mention of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his vision for a better India. "PM (Prime Minister) Modi is a leader who left is family for the nation; otherwise people leave the nation for their families. Our love is not for the red beacon, power will come and go, but we have only one motive, 'Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas'. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis is doing a very good job. He works taking together everyone. The state cabinet will soon be expanded," the Maharashtra finance minister said. Referring to himself personally, he said, "When I became a minister, I just believed that I needed to serve my folks, so that people would recognize my work. My parents also taught me to stand by the people and just serve them." (ANI with ETV inputs)
Maharashtra's Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar has strongly come out in defence of fellow ministerial colleagues Pankaja Munde (state rural development minister) and Vinod Tawade (state education minister), saying both were being unfairly and unnecessarily criticized by the opposition as well as key ally, the Shiv Sena. Participating in ETV's popular "The J C Show" in Mumbai, Mungantiwar told Head, ETV News, Jagdish Chandra, "It is a deliberate attempt to create controversy in the cases of Education Minister Vinod Tawade and Rural Development Minister Pankaja Munde." Mungantiwar was referring to the controversies surrounding Pankaja Munde being accused of siphoning off Rs. 206 crores with the help of her associates and supporters, a charge that Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has also rejected. Munde was accused by the Congress of being involved in a "scam" to clear purchases worth Rs.206 crores on a single day instead of inviting tenders in violation of the norms. The purchases related to host of items, including snacks, mats, dishes and books for children under the Integrated Child Development Services by the Women and Child Development Ministry which Munde then headed. Munde has been emphatic in denying any wrongdoing, and Chief Minister Fadnavis had said that, "Prima facie there appears to be no wrong-doing. If needed, we will probe the issue. Pankaja called me and she said she had not committed any irregularity and is ready to face any inquriy." The Congress, on the other hand, has called for an inquiry either by the Central Bureau of Investigation and the ACB, and repeatedly demanded Munde's resignation. Munde, daughter of the late BJP leader Gopinath Munde, had then claimed that she had not broken any rules, but had taken some "dynamic decisions to reduce corruption." She said that she was in the state government to do the best she could for those kids and women that needed help and would continue to do so. She said that her she was confident about her decisions and intentions. Munde recently courted another controversy when she clicked a selfie of herself in drought-hit and parched Latur District of Maharashtra after a train had brought several million liters of water to provide relief to the people of the area. She drew considerable political and social media flak from all quarters for clicking the selfies. Key ally, the Shiv Sena, criticised Maharashtra's Rural Development and Water Conservation Minister, saying, that ministers should watch their actions before doing such things. "Maharashtra is facing severe drought in the state. Women and even kids are going far away for getting water. Even the Shiv Sena is also doing lot of work in those drought-hit areas. And in such a serious situation, the ministers are clicking selfies," Shiv Sena leader Manisha Kayande had told ANI then. "It is unfortunate that a minister went and clicked selfies in drought-hit Latur. I think they should watch their actions before doing such things. I think that Pankaja Munde should have avoided this," Manisha added then. On her part, Munde had clarified that she clicked those pictures to appreciate the work done by the local administration in this hour of crisis. Taking to micro blogging site Twitter, she said, "This pics are work done by govt n ppl participation it's my dept n I was working from day 1sence of satisfaction if it rains we are ready." She said that she had posted a series of selfies on Twitter while reviewing the efforts on water conservation in drought-hit Latur. Her selfies with the hapless farmers had gone viral on the social media for which she is also trolled by the users. As per government's norms, any purchase above Rs 3 lakh has to be done through e-tendering. Mungantiwar told Mr.Chandra that the case against Vinod Tawade, Maharashtra's Education Minister, in connection with an alleged row over educational qualifications, seemed a brazen attempt on the part of the opposition, most notably the Congress, to maintain pressure on Chief Minister Fadnavis and his state government without any semblance of proof. Maharashtra's Medical Education Minister Vinod Tawde courted controversy when opted to move away from the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), which is based on the CBSE syllabus, and instead continue with MH-CET for another year on the grounds that the state government would have to upgrade its HSC syllabus first to allow Maharashtra to join NEET from 2017. The Maharashtra Government had made the request to the Indian Medical Council (IMC) not to conduct the admissions to medical and dental courses through NEET. The Supreme Court had on April 11 recalled its controversial judgment of scrapping the single common entrance test for admission to MBBS, BDS and PG courses in all medical colleges and restored the NEET. Mungantiwar told ETV's Mr. Chandra that, "Nothing is to be proved here. Here, the controversy is of coal, 2G, while Vinod and Pankaja are only targeted. Nothing has been proved and no one has gone to court, nor has any proof been submitted over the allegations on these ministers. All this is a deliberate attempt. Mountain is being made of a molehill." As regards, the BJP's relationship with the Shiv Sena, Mungantiwar said, "We have good relations with Shiv Sena. Some ideological differences are there, which we will resolve also. We are tied since 25 years and still united." (ANI and ETV inputs)
Last weekend I watched a lovely film, Nil Battey Sannata. I must confess that adult education, which I was told was the theme of the film, isn't really what senior citizens like my wife and I would think of as ideal weekend watching. And, I am afraid many thought like me because the theatre was barely half full. But, I am so glad we bought our tickets and watched the film. Nil Battey Sannata needs to be seen by all. The film is moving but not depressing, and it was all the more rewarding to see Swara Bhaskar essaying the role of the protagonist Chanda with aplomb. I first met Swara when she was a young school girl living in Princes' Park in central Delhi. Swara's father Commodore Uday Bhaskar worked with me as PRO Navy when I was Director Public Relations in the Ministry of Defence. Little did I know that the little girl was a dynamo of talent! The film depicts Chanda who encourages her young daughter Apeksha to dream big, to work hard, and to not give up. And to this end, Chanda learns the ropes herself on the encouragement of one of her employers, a role played by Ratna Pathak Shah. It reminded me of my own childhood. Studying in a small school in a small town -- Karkala -- in southern Karnataka, I secured double promotion and was admitted to the fourth class though I was hardly eight year old. The mathematics class used to be at 2 pm. every afternoon. My teacher was 'kind' and allowed me to enjoy my siesta during class. Suddenly, from a quick learner, I was at the bottom of the class, and ended up with a zero in my mathematics paper. I lost my confidence and the desire to succeed, quite like Apeksha. My mother, Seetha Ratna, who had studied till her matric exam (class ten for those who are unfamiliar with the term), decided to teach me mathematics and helped me get over my fear of numbers. Her determination to battle the odds and her struggle to make sense of the numbers on my slate must have triggered something. I did not look back. I topped my class, passed my Matric exam at the age of 14 and the Board of Education gave me an exemption. Mothers can play a huge role in motivating children, giving them the confidence that poor marks are not red lines that kill dreams. Apeksha from the film reminded me of young me struggling with my books and taking the degree examination, which enabled me to take the civil services exam, just like her. But I felt a sense of kinship with Chanda too. In 1984, I was appointed as Director News Services Division All India Radio. I had a lot of experience in drafting press releases for the armed forces for several years, but I was not trained to be in charge of radio news bulletins. But this new assignment brought with it complications of its own. Government media departments are not as aggressive in news gathering or keen to break news. Reporters have a tendency to play safe, their bosses play safer and there is almost no desire to excel, let alone compete. The lethargy in the newsroom was something I wanted to change and there were some competent officers who were keen to improve their skills. Quite like Chanda, in Nil Battay Sannata, I sought help to guide my flock. Senior Editor C.V. Raman and Chief Reporter Manohar Trakru chipped in. I requested a former Chief News Editor Ramiah to conduct classes in drafting bulletins from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the afternoon between major bulletins. I would attend the classes with the reporters and editors. Government officers have a natural inclination to consider themselves experts in all that they do! And an inherent hostility to outsiders coming in to teach them the ropes. But with the boss in the room, there was little scope for dissent. I learnt the basics of reporting for the radio, in a formal manner. Ramiah, on my request, even brought out a handbook for editors in All India Radio on the lines of the BBC handbook. I am told people at the grand old building still refer to an updated version of that. A few months after learning to run a newsroom with all the complications of it being a state run media, I headed to a broadcasting seminar in Manila. At the Asian Institute of Broadcast Development- conducted seminar, I made a presentation of how news is 'produced' in a developing country like India, in a state run media department. The AIBD invited me to conduct a course for newsmen working for Radio Voice of Vietnam (North Vietnam). The Democratic Republic of Vietnam was known as North Vietnam, which later became The Socialist Republic of Vietnam. I was in North Vietnam for a month teaching professionals how to prepare news bulletins. I learned that the government there did not want a British or American media professional and had told the AIBD that an Indian would be most welcome. And, I felt welcomed all through my days there. A delegation of news persons came to the All India Radio newsroom a few months later for a workshop. They had learned the lesson that I have been learning all my life. It is never too late to learn. Never too early to teach. Mr. I. Ramamohan Rao is a former Principal Information Officer of the Government of India. He can be reached at raoramamohan@hotmail.com. (ANI)
Life returned to normal in the historic Lal Chowk and adjoining areas where restrictions were imposed early yesterday to prevent "Nimaz Jinazah" in absentia of one of the founder members of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) Amanullah Khan, who passed away at Rawalpindi in Pakistan on April 26.Police said there were no restrictions in any part of the city today. However, funeral prayers in absentia for Amanullah was offered at different parts of the Valley.Shops and business establishments were reopened and traffic was plying on all routes normally this morning. Banks, educational institutions and office, which remained closed due to restrictions, were also functioning.A large number of security forces and state police personnel, however, remained deployed in and around Lal Chowk, the nerve centre of Srinagar where Darbar Move, seat of the government, including the office of Chief Minister and her cabinet colleagues, will reopen on May 9 after closing in Jammu on April 29.The busy Amira Kadal bridge, which had been closed with barbed wires for pedestrians, has also been put through. Traffic on Residency road which had been diverted to Moulana Azad road from Regal chowk was also plying normally. Authorities have also lifted restrictions from Maisuma, where the headquarters of JKLF and its chairman, are located.JKLF and other separatist organisations had announced to hold "Nimaz Jinazah" of Amanullah in absentia at Lal Chowk yesterday.Amanullah is father-in-law of separatist-turned-politician Sajjad Gani Lone, a cabinet minister in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coalition in Jammu and Kashmir. However, despite taking oath, Mr Lone has not attended his office following some differences over portfolio. All separatist and majority mainstream leaders have expressed condolence over the demise of Amanaullah.UNI BAS YSS SW 0945 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0101-704647.Xml
With just over a week left, the authorities reviewed the arrangements for the pre-independence biannual Darbar Move, the shifting of seat of the government, including the offices of Chief Minister cabinet colleagues and bureaucrats, from winter capital, Jammu to the summer capital, Srinagar. An official spokesperson here today said Srinagar Deputy Commissioner Srinagar, Dr Farooq Ahmad Lone conducted an extensive tour of Civil Secretariat, Srinagar and Estates Colonies to take stock of the arrangements for Annual Darbar. ''The Deputy Commissioner was apprised about the facilities for move employees besides sanitation and cleanliness measures being taken in all the Estates Colonies in coordination with Srinagar Municipal Corporation," he said. ''Dr Lone gave necessary directions to the officers concerned to ensure completion of all repair and renovation work well before opening up of annual Darbar and ensure proper sanitaion in estates colonies including Sanat Nagar, Barzulla, Chanapora and Badshah flats," he added.UNI BAS YSS SW RAI1030 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0153-704645.Xml
Reiterating that India cannot become 'Congress-free' unless it becomes 'drought-free', Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut on Thursday advised Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit Bundelkhand and Marathwada to witness the agony faced by the people. Raut had yesterday in Rajya Sabha said that BJP cannot realise its dream of keeping India free of Congress until it finds a solution to drought, floods, poverty and other such problems faced by the people. "Yesterday there was a discussion on drought. We said that as long as nation becomes drought-free, it is not possible to make it Congress-free. The prime Minister is a world leader. He visits so many nations. He should take some out and visit drought-hit areas," Raut told ANI this morning. "He should visit there, meet the suffering people and listen to their problems. He will then realise the kind of pain and agony they are facing," he added. In a fiery editorial in its mouthpiece Saamana, Shiv Sena said, ''Prior to elections, Narendra Modi had promised a 'Congress-mukt Bharat'. We achieved that in the general elections. All this poverty, drought and unemployment is the legacy of the Congress. The country will not be free of Congress until we get rid of all these.'' Earlier, Maharashtra's Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar squarely blamed the Congress party and the governments that it ran in the state for the ongoing drought that has left hundreds of thousands of people in various districts parched and hapless. Participating in ETV's popular "The J C Show" in Mumbai, Mungantiwar spoke on the crisis brought on by the drought as well on several other important issues related both to the BJP and the government it runs in Maharashtra under the leadership of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. Coming specifically to the drought-related crisis that has ravaged most parts of Maharashtra, Mungantiwar told Head, ETV News, Jagdish Chandra, that the state government is taking all necessary steps to provide enough water to the people and is particularly focused on all irrigation-related matters. (ANI)
Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chief Mohammad Yaseen Malik and of moderate Hurriyat Conference Chairman Mirwaiz Moulvi Omar Farooq and dozens of other separatists were released from detention and house arrest. However, there was no relief for hardline Huriyat Chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani and another senior separatist leader Shabir Ahmad Shah besides Dukhtaran-e-Millat (DeM) chief Asiya Andrabi. Malik was taken into custody early yesterday to prevent him from attending funeral prayers in absentia at historic Lal Chowk for the founder of the front Amanullah Khan who died at Rawalpindi in Pakistan on April 26. Later dozens of other front leaders and activists were also taken into custody when they tried to march towards Lal Chowk, where restrictions had been imposed and nobody was being allowed to enter there. A front spokesman told UNI that Malik and others were released last night. Mirwaiz Moulvi Farooq, who was also put under house arrest on April 26 evening to prevent him from participating in a condolence meeting at amalgam headquarters yesterday. Advocate Shahidul Islam told UNI that security forces and state police personnel deployed outside the Nigeen residence of Mirwaiz were withdrawan and he was released from house arrest. However, Mr Geelani remained under house arrest since his return from New Delhi on April 6, amalgam spokesman Aiyaz Akbar said. He said security forces and state police personnel remained deployed outside his Hyderpora house and he was not being allowed to move out. He said Huriyat General Secretary Shabir Ahmad Shah, who heads Democratic Freedom Party (DFP) also remained under house arrest since his release from police station Rajbagh after a month. DeM chief Asiya also remained under detention in police station Rambagh alongwith another activist Fahmeeda Sofi. They were taken into custody to prevent them from going to Handwara in Kupwara, where five persons, including a woman, were killed in security force firing after massive demonstrations against the alleged molestation of a girl by a soldier recently. Asiya is on bail in a case filed against her under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act for hoisting Pak flag on Pak Independence day last year. UNI BAS SW RAI1257 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0153-704822.Xml
A portion of under construction mosque at Kalyan was collapsed last evening. Disaster Control Cell of the Kalyan-Dombivali Municipal Corporation (KDMC) chief Anil Laad told UNI that portion of 80-year-old structure was collapsed at around 1730 hrs at Bail Bazar locality. No casualty has been reported in the incident. He said repair work to the portion of the three storied structure was in progress and the portion under repair came down.As luck would have it those who were to offer the evening Namaaz were preparing to get into the mosque when it crashed and upon seeing the structure crumbling they ran away as were the workers who also sensed trouble.However, he said the mishap occurred when no one was present inside and it was a miraculous escape for the devotees else there would have been a major tragedy. The corporation engineers' are inspecting the structure, he added.UNI XR ST SW 1315 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0169-704884.Xml
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has todayreleased Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending , forseeking comments/views from all interested parties and generalpublic. The Consultation paper outlines the pros and cons ofregulating the sector and proposes a suitable framework forregulating this activity, which includes minimum capital, permittedactivity, governance requirements, fair practices code for customerdealing and data security. The suggestions/comments on the Paper may be emailed or sent bypost to the Chief General Manager, Department of Non-BankingRegulation,Reserve Bank of India, Central Office, 2nd Floor,Centre-1, WorldTrade Centre, Cuffe Parade, Colaba, Mumbai-400005 onor before May 31, 2016. Peer to Peer lending is a form of crowd-funding which can bedefined as the use of an online platform that matches lenders withborrowersin order to provide unsecured loans. The borrower caneither be an individual or a business requiring a loan. The lendercan also be a natural or a legal person. Fee is paid to the platformby both the lender as well as the borrower.There are many variants of Peer to Peer lending platforms in termsof the nature and extent of services provided by them and globalregulatory practices also vary. At present, there is no clearregulatory framework in India governing the functioning of the Peerto Peer lending platforms. It may be recalled that that in the First Bi-monthly MonetaryPolicy Statement - 2016-17, it was stated that a Consultation Paperwill be put up on the Reserve Bank's website for public comments andbased on the feedback, the contours of regulating Peer to PeerLending will be decided in consultation with the Securities andExchange Board of India (SEBI).UNI JS SM1313 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0169-704931.Xml
Police spokesman Gajanan Kabdule said here today that PSI Santosh Sonawane had abducted 20-year-old girl from Pune with promomise to marry her. He brought her to Mumbra and raped her on several occasion.

An FIR has been registered against Sonawane under Indian Penal Code at Kalwa police station.

The accused was already married. He developed friendship with the girl and promised her that he would help her in her education of B.Pharm.

He met her at several places and allegedly raped her at her house and the different places.

He also threatened her that he would commit suicide if she fails to take back her complaint.

Once she landed at Kalyan he tied Mangalsutra around her neck to confirm that he had married her, the girl told the police and added that he also did not not want her to reveal to her parents about her whereabouts.UNI XR ST SW 1351

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0169-704962.Xml
Among the women who were rescued is one working for a call centre, while another was student of hotel management, police said.

A team from the special cell of Pune city police was working on specific inputs about a prostitution racket in MHADA (Maharashtra Housing and Development Authority) colony in Viman Nagar. The team was working on the input for more than a week.

A policeman was sent as a decoy customer last night following which cops raided the place, Police said here today.

The accused have been identified as Deepak Warali, Shiva Kohle and Simran. The special cell team rescued two women. One of them works for a call centre and another is a graduate in hotel management working for a hotel. Both had got into the profession for quick money, said a senior police officer. The officer added, to avoid being caught, the suspects used to send these women only to what they called trusted and old customers or people who came through their reference.

An FIR has been registered at Viman Nagar police station last night under relevant sections of the Prevention of Immoral Trafficking Act (PITA), police said. UNI SP SM CJ CS1455

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0169-705067.Xml
: Describing the Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu as a brand ambassador of corruption, YSR Congress Party, the main opposition in the State, today said that it was the TDP chief, who has been bringing a blot on the brand image of Andhra Pradesh and not the YSRCP supremo, YS Jaganmohan Reddy. Talking to newspersons here, YSRCP MLA RK Roja said the stupendous success of 'Save Democracy' at New Delhi has been an eyesore to TDP, and Mr Naidu has been resorting to false propaganda that Mr Jaganmohan Reddy has been spoiling the brand image of Andhra Pradesh, while her party has successfully exposed the corruption charges against the Chief Minister in the national capital with ample evidence. Ms Roja, the actor-turned politician said the brand image of Andhra Pradesh took a beating, when Mr Naidu had failed to fulfill all the poll promises and resorted to large-scale corruption that the YSRCP have highlighted in a book that was distributed in New Delhi, which has become a subject matter of discussion among all circles. The MLA said, unable to bear the success YSRCP leaders trip to New Delhi, TDP leaders went berserk and are levelling baseless allegations and, top it all, Mr Naidu stated that people who went to jail have been speaking of corruption, but the fact is that the chief minister has joined hands with his political adversary and the AICC president Sonia Gandhi and filed cases against Mr Jaganmohan. However, undaunted by the reverse, the YSRCP supremo faced the inquiry with utmost courage and conviction, she pointed out. \\ She said Mr Naidu should volunteer for a CBI probe on the charges and emerge clean, instead of passing irrelevant comments. The evidence the YSRCP received would be given to the investigating authorities and not to TDP leaders, she reasoned. Rubbishing the charge of linking efficiency to keeping the flock together, Ms Roja said many MLAs have left the TDP founder-leader N.T. Rama Rao, TRS chief K. Chandrasekara Rao and 32 legislators have already deserted Mr Naidu. Ms Roja said the adverse remarks made by Mr Naidu against Mr Jaganmohan is only to cover up his failures and to divert the attention of the people, who are vexed with his anti-people policies. It may be recalled that the YSRCP MLA was suspended for one year from the assembly in December last, following her derogatory comments against Mr Naidu in the House. Most of the leaders who left are, party hoppers, who jumped from Congress, PRP and YSRCP, she said, adding, those who are with Mr Jaganmohan right from the beginning are committed to the party and have full faith in his leadership.UNI KNR KVV AK 1635 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-705192.Xml
Ram Chander, 32, and Sandeep Kumar, 30, were arrested on Wednesday night for stealing the dagger, which was recovered from them.

Police said the burglary took place on Monday when the museum was closed it being the weekly off.

Chander, who has been working as housekeeping staff at the museum since 2008, informed police that he along with his associate Kumar made the plan to steal the precious item.

Kumar has been working at the museum since 2010.

"Chander asked Kumar to keep watch from outside. He entered the museum from the exit gate, broke open the door and showcase, stole the precious gold dagger, came out of the museum and handed it over to Kumar for safe custody," Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Ravindra Yadav told IANS.

The officer said the accused were arrested after the questioning of over 100 people housekeeping staff and security guards.

Sources in the museum said the dagger was put in a glass in frame in the gift gallery, which is a few steps from the bedroom where Nehru breathed his last on May 27, 1964.

After Nehru's death, his official residence, situated on Teen Murti Marg in the posh Lutyen's zone, was turned into a museum.

--IANS rak/sd/dg

( 251 Words)

2016-04-28-18:16:10 (IANS)
Jammu and Kashmir Director General of Police K Rajindera today lauded the border residents for their contributions in the prevailing security situation. "People of border areas are working with Jammu and Kashmir Police and other security agencies shoulder to shoulder for maintaining peace in the areas and are contributing in prevailing security," the DGP said while addressing a meeting of police officers at District Police Lines Kathua during his daylong visit to the border districts. Discussing the security scenario in border areas, the DGP emphasised to ensure coordination and communication with other security agencies and maintain vigil in sensitive areas. He said that proper supervision by the field officers at lower level will make the efforts fruitful. Public cooperation is mandatory to get desired results from the efforts put in by police at different levels. "Polite attitude at the lowest level is the key to get cooperation from the people in making professional policing a success," the DGP added. The meeting was convened to take stock of overall security, law and order situation in the border districts of Samba and Kathua. Police functioning in the twin districts was also discussed in the meeting.After obtaining details from the concerned Districts Superintendents of Police, Mr Rajendra asked to work with greater synergy to ensure efficient policing with special focus on crime detection, security, maintenance of law and order, besides drug trafficking. He stressed the need for further improvements in police functioning to eradicate crimes from the society. "Investigation of the cases need to be taken on modern lines to bring the culprits to justice," he said adding that cyber crimes and drug smuggling is posing a great challenge to the investigating agencies and it is our priority to take joint efforts and eradicate the crimes. The Police Chief said that drug abuse is root cause of crimes besides affecting capabilities and energies of our youth. "We have to take along other stakeholders and work for the eradication of growing menace from the society," he added. Mr. Rajendra exhorted upon the field officers including SDPOs and SHOs, who were present in the meeting to prevail secure and crime free atmosphere within their jurisdictions. He said that the situation should be reviewed periodically at district level and all required steps to be made to gear up the men and machinery for result oriented policing.UNI VBH JW RJ 1658 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0364-705412.Xml
Signing a free trade agreement with Qatar is a major goal for Turkey, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said today.Davutoglu, on an official visit to the Gulf nation, made the comment in a speech at a business forum. He also said that Turkish defence companies were in talks with Qatari counterparts as part of a drive to increase cooperation between the countries.REUTERS CJ BD1830 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-705619.Xml
: Despite YSR Congress Party president Y S Jaganmohan Reddy's campaign against defections at national level, two more YSRCP MLAs joined the ruling Telugu Desam party here today. In a programme here today, YSRCP legislator of Srisailam in Kurnool district, B Rajasekhar Reddy and MLA of Araku Valley constituency in Visakhapatnam, Kidari Sarvesvara Rao joined the TDP in the presence of Chief Minister and the TDP supremo N, Chandrababu Naidu. The MLAs were formally admitted into the TDP by wrapping a yellow scarp. As many 16 YSRCP MLAs and an MLC have quit the YSRCP and joined the TDP during the last three months. Addressing the gathering on the occasion, Mr Naidu said that he is committed to develop the backward Rayalaseema region. Many industries were being established in the region, he said and vowed to provide water to each and every acre of the drought prone region. The chief minister also dismissed YSRCP corruption charges against his government. The newly joined MLA Rajasekhar Reddy said that he had quit the YSRCP and joined the TDP after realising that development is possible only under the able leadership of Mr ababu Naidu. Former MLA Gandi Babji also joined along with other MLAs. Significantly, senior Congress party r leader and former Minister Gade Venkata Reddy announced that he would join the TDP tomorrow at Guntur before Mr Naidu.UNI DP KVV AK 1810 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-705540.Xml
Manipur fire service department has been rendering its service with the motto "We Serve to Save" to the people of the state saving precious lives and properties worth several crores of rupees from the clutch of fires and other man made and natural calamities and accidents, State Directorate of Information and Public Relations (DIPR) said today. During 2015-16, Manipur fire service handled 230 fire incidents. Out of which 85 were major incidents, causing loss of Rs one lakh above, 18 were medium incidents, causing lost of Rs 50,000 to Rs one lakh and 127 were small incidents, causing loss of below Rs 50,000. The incidents involved residential buildings, shops, commercial establishments, educational institutions, offices, tea stalls, vehicles, unauthorized oil, LPG stores and forest fire. It was added that Manipur fire service has a fire station at Imphal and 15 fire sub-stations at Moirang, Churachandpur, Thoubal, Moreh, Jiribam, Kakching, Ukhrul, Singngat, Mayang Imphal, Bishnupur, Sugnu, Kangpokpi, Tamenglong, Senapati and Chandel. Recently, the government of Manipur has sanctioned for opening of six new fire sub-stations at Yairipok, Wangjing, Tadubi, Saikul, Noney and Nambol. To make people aware of fire services the Manipur fire service department observes fire service week every year in a befitting manner commencing from April 14. The observation of fire service week through a series of lectures, demonstrations, radio & tv talks, group discussion and publicity through posters, banners, leaflets, prints and electronic media is to generate fire safety awareness to the general public, students, NGOs and concerned employees. The main objective for observance of fire service day and week is to commemorate and pay homage to the 66 firemen and officer's who have lost their lives while fighting a major fire in a ship 'Fort Stikine' on April 14, 1994. The functioning of this department was managed in the past two three decades with great difficulties both valley and hills. After the recent earthquake in the state, fire service department has geared up for rescue and disaster management in war footing. The ever-increasing populations on one hand and rapid industrialisation/ constructions of high rise buildings in urban areas on the other, upgradation of fire service organisation in the state is called for. UNI NS AKM RJ AN1740 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0213-705431.Xml
Police seized 3,000 litres of country-made liquor from Madarpur village under Ganga bridge police station in Vaishali district late last night. Police said here today that acting on a tip off, raid was conducted at a hideout in Madarpur village, where 3,000 litres of liquor was seized. Owner of the building managed to escape from the spot, but one Ramashankar Rai was arrested during the operation, who was being interrogated in this connection. As it is, a huge quantity of liquor was seized from Darbhanga and Kishanganj yesterday and 10 people were arrested in this connection.UNI XC-KKS AKM RJ CS1741 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0213-705468.Xml
Gujarat High Court today granted bail to three close aides of Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) convenor Hardik Patel in sedition case. The court gave bail to Dinesh Bambhania, Chirag Patel and Ketan Patel, on the condition of not leaving Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar for next six months. A lower court in Ahmedabad had rejected bail plea of Dinesh, Chirag and Ketan despite having given written assurance to the court that they would not involve in any sort of activities related to on-going pro-quota agitation of Patidars. Challenging the lower court's order, the pro-quota leaders had filed their bail application before the Gujarat High Court. On October 21, 2015 the police had arrested Dinesh and Chirag from Gujarat High Court complex. Later the same day, police also nabbed Ketan on similar sedition charges. The Ahmedabad Crime Branch (ACB) had registered a case against Hardik and his associates under IPC sections 124(A) (sedition), 121 (A) (conspiracy to wage war against the government) and 120 (b) (criminal conspiracy) for their role in the violent stir in which 11 people lost their lives including a police constable. In another sedition case registered in Surat, a local court had granted bail to Chirag Patel and Vipul Desai on Rs. 25000 bond. Advocate of Patel and Desai argued in the court that Desai was to commit suicide, hence he shouldn't be made accused in the case. The advocate also said there were inadequate evidences against Chirag. He further told the court that as both belong to Surat they would present before the investigation agencies whenever required. Meanwhile, jailed PAAS convener Hardik Patel was also presented before a local court in Surat in connection with one of the two sedition cases against him today. UNI ND PY SB 2133 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-706036.Xml
The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) today deeply mourned the death of former school education minister Kanti Biswas, a veteran Communist leader.Biswas died after a month's treatment at a private hospital last night. He was 84.He left behind a son and a daughter. The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) conveys its deep condolences to Biswas son and daughter, a party statement said here.Biswas was born in a poor peasant family of Faridpur in undivided Bengal. He was a brilliant student and later started to teach in a college in the then East Pakistan. He was associated with Communists in East Pakistan and a police warrant was issued against him. He came to India in 1960 and started working as teacher in a school in Banga in 24 Parganas. He earned CPI(M) membership in 1967. He was also associated with the activities of Kisan Sabha, UCRC and DYF. Biswas was elected to the state assembly as a CPI(M) candidate from Gaighata in 1977. He became the minister in charge of youth services in First Left Front government (1977 to 1982). Later he served as minister of school education in successive Left Front governments from 1982 till 2006. He, thus, became the longest serving Primary Education Minister in any state government in the country. He was elected to CPI(M) state committee in 1981. In 2012, he was elected as Chairman of Party's state control commission and continued to discharge this responsibility till death. Biswas was attached with the Party in North 24 Parganas district.UNI BM SB BD2228 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0214-706145.Xml
The resolutions, adopted on Wednesday, reaffirmed the role of the Peace-building Commission (PBC), a subsidiary body to the General Assembly and the Security Council, in bringing a strategic approach and coherence to peace-building efforts, Xinhua news agency reported.

"The adoption of these comprehensive resolutions simultaneously by the General Assembly and the Security Council sends a powerful signal," said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a statement released by his spokesperson.

"The United Nations system will work more strategically with governments and on the ground, in stronger partnership with others, not only to prevent the recurrence of conflict, but to prevent conflict from breaking out in the first place."

The resolutions also asked the PBC to work more flexibly and serve a bridging role among the General Assembly, Security Council and the Economic and Social Council; meanwhile, they called for closer coordination and cooperation between the PBC and the Security Council on peace-building issues.

Peace-building is an intervention that is designed to prevent the start or resumption of violent conflict by creating a sustainable peace.

The PBC is an intergovernmental advisory body that supports peace efforts in countries emerging from conflict, and is a key addition to the capacity of the International Community in the broad peace agenda.

--IANS pgh/

( 244 Words)

2016-04-28-05:52:10 (IANS)
Papua New Guinea and Australia will hold urgent talks about the fate of 900 asylum seekers after PNG announced the closure of the island detention centre holding them, leaving Australia's tough immigration policies in disarray in the midst of a general election campaign.PNG's High Commissioner to Australia Charles Lepani said tomorow talks would take place early next week, but responsibility for what to do with the men rested with Australia which has remained firm against taking any of the detainees.PNG's decision to close the facility on Manus Island, which follows a ruling by its Supreme Court that the centre is unconstitutional, is a significant blow to Australia's hardline immigration policies.The number of asylum seekers trying to reach Australia is small compared with those arriving in Europe, but border security has long been a hot-button political issue and will likely be a key feature in campaigning ahead of the country's July elections.Measures such as intercepting and detaining boats of asylum seekers at sea, and returning them to their point of origin or transferring them to offshore centres like Manus while refusing them settlement in Australia, have been strongly criticised by the United Nations and international human rights agencies.But such measures have played well with much of the electorate, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's predecessor Tony Abbott winning a landslide election in 2013 on the back of his "Stop the boats" slogan.Lepani said the Manus centre, where detainees include around 400 men who have been deemed to be genuine refugees, was never intended to be a long-term holding facility and accused Australia of allowing things to "drag on"."This was the original proposal, to process these people, not have them detained for such a lengthy place of time," Lepani told Australian Broadcasting Corp Radio. "This is Australia's responsibility."Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said there was capacity for the detainees, mostly refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East, Afghanistan and South Asia, at another facility on Nauru. However, he said negotiations continued with PNG about resettling the men within PNG or at a third country."Not ever before have we had an election that is so important in terms of national security' Dutton told reporters. "We need to make sure that we have strong, secure borders."Australian Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs said Australia was increasingly out of step with international norms and PNG could bring Australia before the International Court of Justice to sort out the matter."The conditions on both Manus and Nauru are dangerous and unsustainable for legal and ethical reasons," Triggs said.Nauru already houses about 500 people and has been similarly criticised for harsh conditions and reports of systematic child abuse. A 23-year-old man from Iran set himself on fire at the centre in recent days to protest his treatment.Broadspectrum Ltd, which runs the detention centres on Manus and Nauru, declined to comment. REUTERS PS PR0437 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0137-704557.Xml
A spat between presidential contender Keiko Fujimori and her younger brother over the future leadership of the political movement they inherited from their ex-president father could cost her key votes in Peru's tight June 5 run-off election.Keiko Fujimori threatened to throw Kenji Fujimori out of her political party after he stoked fears that the family harbors dynastic intentions by saying he will run for president in the next elections in 2021 if she loses this year.Keiko Fujimori had vowed that no one with the Fujimori surname would seek the presidency in 2021 before her brother declared on Twitter: "the decision is mine.""I've spoken with him...for us this chapter is closed" Keiko Fujimori, a 40-year-old former congresswoman, said yesterday.Critics said the dispute has laid bare a rift at the heart of their center-right party, Fuerza Popular, as patriarch Alberto Fujimori languishes in prison for corruption and human rights abuses committed during his 1990-2000 government."Fujimori and her brother are fighting about who will get the piata in 2021!" Fujimori's rival Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a centrist economist, told reporters. "Peru is not a piata."Kenji Fujimori, a 35-year-old lawmaker, has defended Alberto Fujimori more stridently than his sister and is widely seen as leading his father's hardline loyalists.Keiko Fujimori has striven to distance herself from her father's authoritarian rule and seized on her brother's defiance to shore up her democratic credentials."Fuerza Popular rejects any attempt to alter the processes of internal party elections with a self-proclaimed candidacy 5 years before an election," Fujimori said.But the damage may have already been done, especially among middle-ground voters wary of the family's dominance, said Alfredo Torres, the director of pollster Ipsos in Peru."I think Keiko reacted very well, she put Kenji in his place...but the balance is negative," said Torres. "It's going to be harder for her to win over undecided voters."Fujimori and Kuczynski have been virtually tied in recent opinion polls. She was seen winning 39 percent of votes to Kuczynski's 43 per cent in an Ipsos survey published Sunday, with 18 percent of uncommitted voters still up for grabs.Keiko Fujimori is popular in rural districts where her father is celebrated for building schools and cracking down on guerrillas, but she faces stiff opposition from those who consider him a corrupt dictator.Kuczynski, a 77-year-old former World Bank economist and prime minister of Peru, has scant support among poorer voters or in areas outside the capital Lima.REUTERS PS PR0722 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0137-704573.Xml
Like more than half of South Korean mothers, Kim Ju-yeon spent two weeks recuperating and relaxing in a health care centre with her newborn after she gave birth last June.But her baby boy caught latent tuberculosis during their stay, one of 30 infants who was infected by a nursing assistant."I never thought my baby could get sick," said Kim, 36, who sued the centre's owner, seeking compensation, along with the families of 79 other babies similarly infected or treated to prevent infection.Growing concern over infection risks in such facilities has prompted South Korea to propose tighter regulation of the sometimes luxurious centres, which usually put babies in nurseries with other newborns, separate from their mothers.The care centres have caught on so dramatically, since emerging in the late 1990s, that entrepreneurs are taking the business model overseas, an effort backed by the government.The centre where Kim stayed is run by YK Dongrami, South Korea's biggest postnatal care brand, which has 16 domestic centres and five in China.Following the incident involving Kim's baby, the company is working to create a safer, cleaner environment, it told Reuters. In August, it apologised on its website for the incident.South Korea had 610 for-profit postnatal facilities last year, up from 377 in 2007.But the health ministry says the centres are vulnerable to infection and hamper mother-child bonding.The government says 265 babies caught infections, from respiratory to diarrhoeal diseases, in the first half of 2015, the latest data available. That figure compares with just 88 in all of 2014.Another centre suspended operations this year after 15 babies caught rota virus, which can cause diarrhoea.No deaths have been traced to South Korea's post-natal centres in recent years.APART AND TOGETHERTwo weeks' stay at a centre typically costs 2,000 dollars- with the plushest rising to 20,000 dollars - and includes massages for the mothers, and sometimes yoga, along with baby care lessons.At feeding time, nurses bring babies to their mothers or put them together in special rooms.Most of the time, nurses look after the babies grouped about 10 or 20 in a room, though the World Health Organisation advises that mother and child share a room, to promote bonding.Clustering newborns together heightens infection risks, say experts and officials."Newborns have a weaker immune system, so post-partum care centres are even more vulnerable," said Chey Myoung-jae, a paediatrics professor at the private Inje University Sanggye Paik Hospital in Seoul.The industry acknowledges shortcomings, but points to the expense of additional care givers."If a mother stays with her baby all the time, and an individual caretaker is attached to each mother, then it makes services too expensive," said Kim Jeong-uk, director of the Korea Postpartum Care Centers Association.MODERN TRADITIONThe centres have evolved from South Korea's tradition of "sanhujori," in which experienced mothers or mothers-in-law help new mothers care for their infants.The government's new rules will encourage shared rooms for mothers and babies, and mandate tuberculosis tests for new hires."We are supplementing current laws to send a strong message for the safety of the postpartum care centers from infections," health ministry official Woo Hyang-jae told Reuters.Postnatal care company Dongrami says requiring mothers and babies to share a room might "restrict customers' right to choose" services.Some mothers said the centres are the only affordable, accessible choice for postnatal care nowadays."We don't have any family living nearby. Realistically our only option was to go to a care centre," said Jeong Bo-mi, 37, who is among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Her baby was treated as a preventive measure, and eventually tested negative for latent tuberculosis.REUTERS DS RAI0958 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0177-704651.Xml
Pakistan Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry has acknowledged that there was no breakthrough in talks with his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar in New Delhi earlier this week. "I would not say there is a breakthrough, but we conveyed our concerns forthrightly," Mr Chaudhry said yesterday at a media briefing on his India visit. The foreign secretary, who had gone to Delhi on Tuesday to attend the Heart of Asia Senior Officials' meeting, held about an hour and half long talks with his Indian counterpart on bilateral issues, including resumption of the peace dialogue. It was expected that the talks might lead to progress towards the start of the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue which was agreed by the two countries in December last year. He said he had stressed the need for a "structured, sustained and result-oriented comprehensive dialogue process", resolving the Kashmir issue and conducting a fair trial in the Samjhauta Express attack case. Mr Chaudhry said the Indian foreign secretary did not indicate any date for his visit to Pakistan for discussing a timetable of the comprehensive dialogue. The two secretaries were to meet in mid-January in Islamabad, but the sitting had to be postponed because of the Pathankot attack. The two countries have not so far been able to reschedule the meeting. "Pakistan is ready for dialogue, whenever India agrees to it," Mr Chaudhry said. In reply to a question, he said Indians also did not deny the importance of the dialogue for resolving outstanding issues. UNI XC AT 1337 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0177-704977.Xml
France's lower house of parliament voted in favour of lifting European Union sanctions against Russia today, in a non-binding vote that went against the Socialist government's recommendation.French deputies voted by 55-44 in favour of the resolution to lift the sanctions slapped on Moscow by the 28-member EU after Russia annexed Crimea and tension escalated with Ukraine.Former president Nicolas Sarkozy's Republicans party, as well as centre-right and far-left groups voted for lifting the sanctions. The Socialists and Greens voted against the resolution put forward by conservative lawmaker Thierry Mariani."(The sanctions are) totally ineffective today to solve this international crisis and are dangerous for France's interests," Mariani, who represents French residents in eastern Europe and Russia, said.The European Union, along with the United States, imposed economic sanctions on Russia in July 2014, targeting its energy, banking and defence sectors. Sanctions expire in July and can be extended."The purpose of these sanctions is to have leverage to get back to negotiations," said Junior Minister for Europe Harlem Desir, who had called on the National Assembly to dismiss the resolution.REUTERS CJ AN1637 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-705360.Xml
Myanmar has banned lucrative logging operations as the newly-elected government of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi steps up a battle on deforestation, an environment official said today.Myanmar's rich forests are among its most valuable natural resources, but they have been plundered by logging that helped fund the former military regime that ran the country for 49 years, before reforms began in 2011.In April 2014, Myanmar banned export of raw timber logs to slow deforestation and boost its own production. By 2010, forest cover had shrunk to 47 percent of land area from 58 percent in 1990, Forestry Ministry data show.Despite the ban, illegal logging has thrived in northeast Myanmar, where valuable teak and rosewood are smuggled over the border to neighbouring China, forest watchdog the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has said."We have been reducing timber extraction, and now we have decided to stop logging completely," said John Swe Ba, a managing director at Myanmar's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation."This measure will cover teak and other hardwoods all across the country," he added.Legal logging has also played a major role in ravaging the environment. State-owned Myanma Timber Enterprise (MTE), overseen by Swe Ba's ministry, has a monopoly on the formal timber sector, but subcontracts work to numerous companies.That body was targeted by United States sanctions until 2014, when the Treasury Department gave it an initial one-year waiver to work with the U.S.-based International Wood Products Association, extended in July 2015 for two more years."Methods of over-harvesting include felling a greater number of logs of a particular tree species and extracting logs smaller in diameter than recommended," said the EIA, which is based in Britain."As such, the legal forest sector practices in Myanmar are a significant contributor to deforestation and forest degradation," the watchdog added in its 2015 report.Measures are needed to save the jobs of more than 17,000 employees in government departments working on timber production, Swe Ba added, without saying what they might be."We can't afford to let them be out of jobs overnight," he saidREUTERS CJ SB CJ -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-705438.Xml
Hundreds of demonstrators, including Buddhist monks, denounced the United States for its use of the term Rohingya to describe Myanmar's stateless Muslim community during a protest outside of the U.S. embassy in Yangon todayThe Rohingya, most of whom live in apartheid-like conditions, are seen by many Myanmar Buddhists as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and the term is a divisive topic.The demonstration was sparked by a statement from the embassy last week expressing condolences for an estimated 21 people, who media said were Rohingya, who drowned off the coast of Rakhine State and came just a day after President Htin Kyaw accepted the credentials of the new U.S. Ambassador, Scot Marciel."Today, we, from here, want to declare to the U.S. embassy and the ambassador to Myanmar, to all the other countries, that there is no Rohingya in our country," Parmaukkha, a monk and member of the hardline Buddhist group Ma Ba Tha, told about 300 people who gathered on a busy road across from the embassy compound."If the U.S. accepts the term 'Rohingya,' you (U.S.) should take them back to your country."The previous government referred to the group as Bengalis, implying they were illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, despite many having lived in Myanmar for generations.Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the ruling National League for Democracy party and state counsellor, has drawn criticism from rights groups for avoiding using the term Rohingya and not doing enough to address their plight.Thousands have fled persecution and poverty in the country.Some 125,000 Rohingya remain displaced and face severe travel restrictions in squalid camps since fighting erupted in Rakhine between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012.Zaw Htay, spokesman at the state counsellor's office, said on Thursday that the name issue was being handled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and would be addressed in a "diplomatic way" but did not provide further details.A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy said the United States supports the right to demonstrate and added that "around the world, people have the ability to self-identifty".Lt. Col. Kyaw Htut, head of the western Yangon region police, said the protest organisers would face charges for holding the demonstration in an unapproved location. REUTERS CJ RK1738 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0400-705516.Xml
Two men and a woman have been charged with terrorism offences in the central English city of Birmingham, local police said today.The West Midlands police said in a statement that the three had been charged with offences related the financing or preparation of "acts of terrorism".British police arrested five people last week as part of an investigation which a security source said was linked to the attacks in Paris and Brussels. Four were arrested in Birmingham, central England, and one at London's Gatwick Airport. REUTERS PY BD2255 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0298-706175.Xml
BEIJING, April 28, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Liu Yunshan (L), president of the Party School of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, presents diplomas at the 2016 spring semester graduation ceremony of the Party School in Beijing, capital of China, April 28, 2016. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing)

BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) -- Senior Communist Party of China (CPC) leader Liu Yunshan attended a graduation ceremony at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee on Thursday.

Liu, president of the school and a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, presented diplomas to 554 graduates of the 2016 spring semester.

The graduates agreed that their studies had expanded their viewpoints, enriched their knowledge and boosted their abilities to observe, research and solve problems, and that they have consolidated their loyalty to the Party and their sense of clean governance and responsibility, according to a statement released after the ceremony.
SINGAPORE, April 29, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin (R) and Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs of Singapore Chee Wee Kiong attend the 22nd China-ASEAN Senior Officials' Consultation press conference held in Singapore, April 28, 2016. China and ASEAN countries have the will, ability and means to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea, Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said here on Thursday. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey)

SINGAPORE, April 28 (Xinhua) -- China and ASEAN countries have the will, ability and means to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea, Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said here on Thursday.

Liu made the remarks at a press conference of the 22nd China-ASEAN Senior Officials' Consultation, an important annual meeting for diplomats from China and 10 ASEAN nations.

Liu and senior diplomats from ASEAN countries exchanged in-depth views on implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of the Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), promote cooperation and enhance consultations on the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea (COC) under the framework of the DOC.

China and ASEAN countries' common interests have far outweighed the differences no matter on regional cooperation or on South China Sea, the vice foreign minister said.

He noted as the current situation of the South China Sea has drawn lots of attention, he and his ASEAN counterparts have exchange views on how to control differences, strengthen maritime pragmatic cooperation as well as enhance consultation on COC.

"There is consensus at yesterday's meeting that under the current situation, DOC remains the common basis which China and ASEAN countries jointly uphold to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea." said Liu.

Liu stressed that it's necessary to ensure full and effective implementation of the DOC, deepen practical maritime cooperation and enhance mutual trust, adding "deviation from the DOC will lead to negative consequences."

He revealed that China has come up with a proposal that foreign ministers of China and ASEAN nations issue a joint statement on full and effective implementation of the DOC in July.

Liu said that China has put forward a draft statement, the main elements of which include confirming the parties' commitment to the DOC, underlining the status and role of the DOC, reaffirming the parties' recognition of the main principles and spirit of the DOC, maintaining peace and stability, upholding freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea, insisting that disputes should be solved through negotiations between the parties directly concerned.

The 22nd China-ASEAN Senior Officials' Consultation, held here from Wednesday to Thursday, is the first meeting organized by Singapore since it replaced Thailand to become the coordinator for China-ASEAN relations.

The two-day meeting also focused on advancing China-ASEAN relations and regional cooperation in East Asia and preparing for a commemorative summit on the 25th anniversary of the establishment of China-ASEAN dialogue relations in September.

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The Helping Hand

Former president of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), Professor Compton Bourne, says he sees nothing wrong with Government making use of advice from the IMF and the World Bank although this country does not have a formal programme with the IMF.

Bourne, a former executive director of the Caribbean Centre for Money and Finance (CCMF), a regional think-tank based on the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), says accepting the helping hand of the international agencies did not mean the skills of local expertise is being ignored. Both may be complementary, he tells Business Day.

I think that those agencies have a quite considerable pool of expertise and diverse international experience which can be drawn upon. It does not mean that Trinidad and Tobago doesnt have skills but it means you have the option and opportunity to supplement those skills and have a wider set of technical opinion available to you and then as a government you can make a decision based on what is said to you by the various sets of experts, Bourne observes.

He adds, I think a country should not close itself against outside opinion.

Disagreeing with comments on the issue made in the House of Representatives on Monday evening during the debate on an order to approve taxes on luxury vehicles, in which one MP charged that the Government had mortgaged the country to the IMF, Bourne says, The country has not been mortgaged to the IMF. There has not been any IMF programme.

Accepting advice is not the same as accepting funding, he notes. First of all when you enter into an IMF programme, there will be conditionalities and any time you access financial resources from any agencies whatever, be it an international agency or a foreign government, or a regional development bank like the CDB, there are some issues that they will want addressed and so there are elements of conditionality, but those are matters that are subject to negotiation and its normal business, Bourne explains. He adds that he thought the discussion on the issue has been rather alarmist.

Bourne stresses that there is absolutely no sense in closing oneself to other points of view and other sources of information and knowledge.

It does not mean that one is going to ignore what comes from local experts but it means that what local experts say will be part of the mix available for an intelligent decision by people who have the responsibility to make those decisions, he says. Its almost protectionist in one sense when someone says dont ask anyone else outside your own country or nationals. Its a kind of intellectual protectionism, so I dont agree with that.

Asked about the role of the Economic Development Advisory Board chaired by economist Dr Terrance Farrell, Bourne says the board has a lot of expertise, competence and experience among its members but that didnt mean they had a monopoly on knowledge and insight.

So I think their position would be very useful and I might imagine that a government having such a body, having received other opinion, would seek the views of that body on some or all of the opinions they have received. In other words, the Economic Development Advisory Board should be a useful consultative body for the Government in double checking anything they have heard from anywhere else but it doesnt mean that they must be the gatekeepers.

Economist Dr Roger Hosein, who is also on the UWI faculty, shared Bournes view. He sees nothing wrong with the Minister of Finance seeking advice from the World Bank and the IMF providing it is available free of charge.

What the Minister of Finance needs to balance this advice with is relevant advice from his technocrats at the Ministry of Finance, other technocrats in the other ministries and also local technocrats who know this economy very well and have been here basically all their lives, says Hosein.

He observes that sometimes the IMF and the World Bank rely on standardised methodologies and they sometimes give directives which do not always yield the desired outcomes in specific economies. Thus the country needs to know if there is any cost to having the IMF team in the country, who the local experts are working with the IMF/World Bank team and how the advice from the IMF/World Bank team would be incorporated into the Governments plans together with that from the local experts.

Referring to comparisons between the current situation and the difficulties faced by the administration of the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) from 1986 to 1991, Hosein says the current period is not the same as what the country experienced in the 1980s.

In the 1980s we had a prolonged fall in economic activity

between 1982 and 1983 of about ten percent and consistent negative growth for a few years. We are not exactly there yet but if the negative growth in Trinidad and Tobago continues we will see an increase in the unemployment rate, a worsening of the fiscal balance, a potential worsening of the current account balance and so in that regard, the minister by acting heavier up front is certainly correct in my mind. However, he emphasises that there is sufficient local technocratic capability of people who are very familiar with the Trinidad and Tobago economy who should perhaps be formed into a small team of local experts to work in parallel with the IMF/World Bank so that the local flavour and the local content is not missed by these people from Washington.

This, Hosein says, is not the same as Farrells Economic Development Advisory Board which he explains is designed more for longer term planning rather than economic restructuring. Hosein finds it puzzling that Government chose to request advice from the IMF/World Bank rather than make use of the services of someone of Farrells capabilities, adding that Farrell would be an excellent choice to lead the local economic restructuring programme.

Another UWI economist, Dr Anthony Birchwood, compares Trinidad and Tobagos situation to Jamaica in the 1950s when that island experienced what he termed a huge economic boom with average annual growth of eight percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That was during the period when Jamaica was fetching high prices for its bauxite until aluminium prices collapsed and demand for bauxite declined and the Jamaican economy went into a tailspin. Birchwood adds that during this period unemployment began to rise in Jamaica and the government resorted to make work schemes to maintain employment levels but with limited success. He says eventually, the government was forced to reduce subsidies.

Urging that Trinidad and Tobago take a lesson from the Jamaican experience, Birchwood says the price of oil could rebound but it would not rebound to the high levels the country enjoyed before.

While he expresses optimism that the same thing would not happen to this country, Birchwood says if this country is not careful we could possibly be facing the same kind of situation and ran the risk of repeating the mistakes made by Jamaica.

For Birchwood it made perfect sense to talk to the IMF/World Bank because if the country experiences economic difficulties it would have to resort to dealing with the same bodies.

Also the IMFs typical advice is about austerity so they will advise us to cut subsidies. Of course, we dont want to cut all the subsidies at once because some of the subsidies are important to the sustenance of our economy. He adds that in addition to the infamous and much talked about fuel subsidies, this country also had education subsidies and many others which the country would not want to be cut at the same time.

But definitely we want to be able to bring expenditure closer in line with our revenue and one of the ways of doing that is to bring it closer in line with tax revenue.

He observes the Government has admitted that expenditure is way above tax revenues and the State cannot support its revenue purely from taxation and so had to be dependent on rising oil prices and higher levels of oil production in order to sustain that level of expenditure.

Now, thats not easy to do when you want a balanced budget and to cut expenditure is very hard because people grow accustomed to a high level of expenditure, says Birchwood. He adds the country also had to follow the advice it received from the IMF because we have to be concerned about the sustainability of the expenditure of the economy. We cannot be spending money way above the revenue earning capability of the economy and this is what the United National Congress (UNC) had done. In fact, he says while spending way above the tax earning capability of the economy, the UNC administration had cut taxes by suspending the Land and Building Taxes because it was a very populist move.

And they somehow thought that we could actually survive without paying all these taxes because it was a very populist move. They did not take into account the fact that oil prices would not be over $144 a barrel and the state of the economy would change.

Booms and depressions are features of the capitalist system and in a commodity-dependent economy such as Trinidad and Tobago, Birchwood notes, it would suffer boom and bust cycles and the country is currently at the bust stage of the cycle.

Our economies would never boom forever.
End this inequity

Total cash compensation for the former executive of the HDC of around $98,000 per month compared with, say, the total cash compensation of the Prime Minister of around $75,000 requires a look at what compensation packages are like in the state sector for executives and for board members.

This is especially so when we hear about alleged per Diem of US$9,000 allocated for a former official of Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago. There is also the situation at HMB concerning Board fees which require some investigation into the exorbitant nature of the fees as well as travel benefits. There are also the exorbitant salaries at the Central Bank and the Unit Trust Corporation that raise all manner of concern during a time of a downturn.

Is $100,000 cash compensation per month justified? Were we getting value for money from our regulators when the financial collapse of the Clico conglomerate occurred? Where was the Central Bank and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) when the questionable and possibly illegal activity at First Ciitzens Bank (FCB) was taking place? How can state enterprise executives, who face a fraction of the burden a sitting Prime Minister encounters, justify these salaries? What about the Deposit Insurance Corporation (DIC), where travel to far off destinations appear for which the airline tickets per trip exceed $70,000? In fact, the very lucrative travel benefits that seem to be part of so many state institutions in this country need to be investigated. It would appear the practice at these institutions are far more pernicious. Are the licensed financial institutions aware of this? What is the net benefit from these expensive fees and jaunts to the organisation implementing them, and to the wider public as taxpayers? Are we as a public getting value to compensate for the salaries that are being paid? In these times of economic hardship, so grave that there are reported incidents of suicides among retrenched workers who have had to face the rigours of the breadline, we need to ask the public sector and state enterprises to account for these glaring inequities. Indeed, at the meeting in Davos earlier last year, the issue of inequality was identified as a major issue facing the globe. Inequality has a deleterious impact on economic growth. We can hope that the powers that be realise the need for data to properly recalibrate their policies if they harm the poor or worsen inequality.

We need the Gini coefficient - that formula that provides information on the levels of inequality in a country - from the Household Budgetary Survey to know the extent to which we have slipped.

There is the suspicion that this has risen over the past 10 years Certainly in the public sector a clear wage policy and rationalisation of compensation are required. It appears to us in the public that a few highly placed individuals get access to very cushy jobs and exorbitant rates which bear no reflection to skill or experience. It would appear that both the present and past government contributed to exorbitant salaries received by some persons. It may be inappropriate to start calling names but certainly action is required urgently to address very questionable compensation practices.
Beaten man, 63, dies at hospital

I feel is alcohol caused this, said Melissa Ramkhalawan.

He was a very humble and quiet person, but liked to drink. He was drinking and liming with some friends when this happened. Relatives explained that Arjoon was at his home on Nelson Street liming with friends on Monday night, when a man showed up for the lime but was turned away by Arjoon.

Relatives said the man began to beat Arjoon, kicking, cuffing and stamping on him even as he collapsed to the ground where he lay helplessly.

Other limers managed to pull the enraged man off of Arjoon and he was led away.

Arjoon later complained that he was not feeling well and his friends took him to bed.

On Tuesday afternoon, when friends went to check on Arjoon, they found him on the bed with blood dripping from his mouth and ears.

He was barely alive. He was rushed to the Couva Health Centre where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

An autopsy is expected to be performed today at the Forensic Science Centre to ascertain cause of his death.

Central Division detectives were yesterday searching for the man who beat
Bullets to chest, then robbed of gold chain

Without warning, the gunman fired at Solomon, striking him four times in the chest.

As he fell to the ground,the gunman pulled off a gold chain from Solomons neck and he and his accomplice jumped into a car parked nearby which sped off.

He was rushed to hospital and underwent emergency surgery.

Up to press time he remained warded in critical condition.

No arrest has been made and investigations are continuing
Leave granted for Goodyear hearing

Michael Murrell who is before Magistrate Gail Gonzales in the Port-of-Spain Magistrates Court has been granted leave by Justice Robin Mohammed to challenge a decision of the magistrate not to hold a Goodyear hearing in his case.

Murrell has been before the courts since he was charged with possession of marijuana in August of 2011. In December of last year, Gonzales ruled against providing a Goodyear indication on the grounds that magistrates are not so empowered.

At the Port-of-Spain High Court judge, Mohammed granted leave to Murrell and has stayed his magisterial proceedings, which comes up again on May 11. In his claim before the courts, Murrell is contending that he was desirous of a sentence indication in the event he pleaded guilty to the offence for which he was before the court.

He is also asking the court to declare the magistrates decision to not give a Goodyear indication to be improper, irregular and unreasonable.

Murrell is represented by Keith Scotland, Sheriza Khan and Reza Ramjohn in his claim.

The matter comes up again for hearing on June 14.
Judge rules against helicopter company

Justice Frank Seepersad yesterday threw out the companys judicial review claim against the TT Civil Aviation Authority of a decision in March, not to grant it a temporary permit to operate.

The company claimed if it was not granted the temporary permit, pending the approval of the AOC, it will experience financial ruin and had already lost one contract with an energy company and stood to lose other contracts with major energy companies in Trinidad and Tobago.

PHI Americas (Trinidad) further contended that there were significant delays on the part of the Civil Aviation Authority to consider its AOC application. In his ruling yesterday, Seepersad held that having reviewed the evidence, he could not conclude that there were periods of unnecessary or unreasonable delay as contended by PHI.
Leave granted to seek info on Jwalas firing

Leave was granted yesterday to Heeralal by Justice Carol Gobin in the Port-of-Spain High Court.

The matter comes up again for hearing on June 10.

The attorney filed the application for leave for judicial review of both parties handling of his requests under the Freedom of Information Act made following Rambarrans dismissal in December last year.

n the lawsuit, Heeralal claims he made the requests as the matter was one of public interest which required transparency and accountability.
Child sex crimes on rise in West

Head of Western Division, Ag Snr Supt Basdeo Ramdhanie disclosed this yesterday at the police weekly press briefing at Police Administration Building, Portof- Spain.

He said that for the period January 1 to April 27, last year, the Division recorded 15 murders while for the same period this year, the division has recorded seven.

This he says, is the largest reduction in murders in the country.

Asked what advice would he give to senior officers in other divisions he said, they need to target the priority offenders and persons of interest.

They need to have their intelligence gathering machinery going, and they need to partner with the community so the information can be shared. On sexual offences, Ramdhanie said the Western Division received 27 reports of sexual offences against children for this year so far, compared to last year when the division received 17, for the corresponding period, adding that most of the cases were solved while the rest are actively being pursued.

He said most of the crimes were committed when children were unsupervised.

He appealed to parents to ensure children are properly supervised by responsible, trusted individuals as some of the crimes have been committed by relatives.

The Western division has also seen a 22 percent reduction in serious crimes compared to last year.

Ramdhanie said his officers has seized 37 firearms to date with nine being seized in the last week.

However, he identified areas they can improve on in the division.

I want to mention reports of burglaries, break-ins in the St James district, in the Carenage district and in the Four Roads district in particular.

Most of these break-ins are committed on private dwelling homes and I have some advice, I would like home-owners to secure their homes properly. Ask your neighbour to throw an eye on your premises when you are not in, perhaps buy a dog to assist with the security, he said.

Meanwhile, Public Information Officer at the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) Michael Pierre said there have been 151 murders for the year so far compared to last years figure of 128.

Asked whether the police was concerned he said, of course, every murder draws a serious concern to the police service because one murder means a lot of stress, heartache, bereavement, and we are putting in all our resources in terms of solving these murders.
FFOS want talks on state lands

The Fire Services have been rendered powerless because of the magnitude and multitude of fires, FFOS said.

The problem is exacerbated because our own people are slashing and burning the rainforest and claiming these sensitive ecosystems as their own personal property, while government after government have continued to allow public lands to fall into the hands of land grabbers and opportunists, the release said.

FFOS said that land grabbing of state property by grassroots as well as the well-to-do middle and upper-class citizens is evident along many of our roads all over Trinidad.

FFOS is calling for public consultation on the need to sustainably manage our state lands, especially in areas with biodiverse tropical rainforests, the release said.
Girl, 3, stung by scorpion

Anxious relatives were told there is no scorpion anti-venom to treat little Nicola and therefore medication is being administered to treat reactions to the venom such as acute vomiting.

Nicolas mother Annie Arietas remained at her bedside all of Tuesday monitoring her condition.

Yesterday, doctors said the childs condition has improved but she is still in a serious condition as her little body continues to fight the effects of the venom.

Arietas said that Tuesday there was a power outage at her Belmont home so she decided to take the child to Maraval to spend the day with relatives.

She said Nicola began to cry and when she checked on her, the mother noticed the childs right eye beginning to swell and appear blood red in colour. When another relative removed a sheet on the ground, where Niocola was playing, they found a scorpion in the sheet. The arachnid was placed in a bottle.

Nicola was taken to the Maraval Health Centre where her mother was told there was no doctor or ambulance available.

They were told to go elsewhere but luckily, a security officer was able to make contact with someone at Port-of-Spain General Hospital and an ambulance was sent to the Maraval Health Centre for little Nicola.

While at the hospital, doctors advised she be taken to the EW MSC in Mt Hope and placed at the Intensive Care Unit.

Yesterday, Arietas said she was told that Sangre Grande Hospital was contacted but doctors there said there was never any scorpion anti-venom, only anti-venom for the four known poisonous snake species in this country.

However, Arietas said she was grateful for the round-the-clock treatment her daughter received from doctors and nurses at the EW MSC, special attention she feels, went a long way in stabilising Nicolas condition and possibly saving her life.

I am happy and very relieved that my daughter is alive and recuperating. The doctors and nurses have been doing their best in treating with her, Arietas said.

Chairman of the Eastern Regional Health Authority (ERHA) Dr Rameshwar Maharaj told Newsday as far as he is aware Trinidad and Tobago has never been in receipt of any antidote for scorpion stings.

Only two species of scorpions can inflict stings which result in death to humans, the Israeli deathstalker (Leiurus quinquestriatus) and the Brazilian yellow scorpion (Tityus serrulatus). Antivenom exists for both species stings.

In February 2013, two-year-old Faith Henry was fatally stung by a scorpion at her Chatham Village home. On Thursday January 26, 2012, three-year-old Israel Brown died at the San Fernando General Hospital, a day after he was stung by a black scorpion.
Murder in the market  who shot Pumpkin?

Noel, 33, of Monte Grande, Tunapuna was placing his produce including pumpkins and provisions on a stall when he was approached by a man dressed in black Muslim garb, with a mask over his face.

The man shot Noel twice in the back. As Noel slumped to the ground, the gunman ran south, crossed the Priority Bus Route and escaped.

Officers led by Assistant Commissioner of Police Surujdeen Persad and including Snr Supt Rajkumar, Inspectors Vetus Hernandez, Ramnath and others along with District Medical Officer Dr Ramroop, visited the scene and Noels stall was cordoned off. Investigators received key information yesterday and were working on certain leads.

Market vendors told Newsday that Noel used to sell illegal drugs but turned his lifestyle around and began selling vegetables and provision for another market vendor.

Vendors said Noel was making great progress in staying on the right path. Another market vendor claimed Noel was a gambler and may have owed the wrong person money.

Pumpkin was not a bad person, in fact he was just trying to make ends meet in these hard times and look at what happened to him.

No one is safe anymore, said a vendor. Noels body remained on the ground next to his stall in the market for close to three hours before it was removed to the Forensic Science Centre (FSC) in St James.

Four spent shells were recovered from the scene.

Yesterday, Patsy Thomas was at the scene sobbing uncontrollably as she was comforted by other relatives.

Through her tears, Thomas said her son did not deserve to die the way he did. Thomas declined further comment saying she was too shaken to speak. At the FSC, other relatives described Noel as a cool, non-confrontational person.

My cousin wouldnt be on anybody.

If someone came around him, then you might hear his mouth but that is about it. He didnt bother anyone. He didnt jumbie nobody. I was home sleeping and my aunt called my mother on the phone crying. When I found out what happened, I just jumped out of my bed and went to the scene, said a relative who asked not to be named. Brother Andy Noel told Newsday the victim had recently started selling at the market.
TTs forgotten children

Hundreds of orphans  whose parents were victims or perpetrators of crime  have fallen through the cracks at all levels of the States protection systems, a Parliament committee yesterday heard. Officials warned that another generation of criminals was, in the process, being bred.

In its first-ever public hearing, the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights, Equality and Diversity heard of hundreds of cases of children being left behind in harrowing circumstances.

Yet, the State, and its many arms, have no coherent plan to tackle this issue.

Chairman of the committee, Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly, said the new committee decided to make the issue  which engages the rights of the child, among others  the first issue on its agenda.

Are we  by not paying attention to these children, who are described as the forgotten victims of crime; orphans of justice  fuelling the next generation of crime? she said in a committee room at the International Waterfront Centre, Portof- Spain.

In an opening statement to the committee, Jacinta Bailey- Sobers, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Social Development, said more mechanisms were needed for collaboration between state agencies.

Unless we have a robust system in place and all the agencies are collaborating to ensure that children dont fall through the cracks, we will have a situation where we will have children not only in school but also children who have dropped out of school ending up in St Michaels and all these other institutions, the permanent secretary warned.

She cited the case of Osmond Baboolal, whose family was murdered by Dole Chadee and eight members of his gang in 1994.

Baboolal, in 2010, was charged with attempted murder and at one stage was sent to St Anns Hospital for psychological observation. He was later deemed fit to plead.

YOUTH AT RISK I remember some years ago we had that young man whose parents were killed by the Dole Chadee gang, said Bailey-Sobers.

That young man was very young at the time. His sister and himself survived that attack. But because of the systems, he, in particular, was left alone. And we know the end of that story. Harrilal Seecharan, the Chief Education Officer, told the committee there were 283 students in the education system whose parents were either victims of or perpetrators of crime.

But there may be more.

All the possible cases may not be coming to us, he cautioned.

Sharifa Ali-Abdullah, the Director of the Childrens Authority, said 180 children on the agencys database were victims of crime.

Of these, 105 had parents who were both victims and perpetrators; 41 had parents who were perpetrators and 34 had parents who were victims. Gadsby- Dolly, the Minister of Social Development, estimated the total number of those affected to be 118. None of the committee members could reconcile these figures or say if there was overlap.

The committee heard that there were no studies on the problem. There were no special programmes, in schools, in ministries, at the Authority or under the Police Service.

Research funding for the issue was deemed woefully inadequate.

In one case, $200,000 was allocated when the cost of a study with a robust sample would be $1 million.

At the same time, the MPs heard startling evidence of the trauma suffered by these children, based on live research recorded at the Authority. Vandana Siewsankar-Ali, Assessment Manager (Ag) at the Authority, gave a detailed account of these reports. We have found that for the most part the findings are very similar across all these children, Siewsankar- Ali said.

It tends to include a range of internalising disorders including clinical diagnoses such as depression; anxiety. We tend to see a lot of children having difficulties coping in the school environment because they are withdrawn. DYSFUNCTION IN TT The official continued, You tend to see a lot of acting out and externalising behaviours  which is very instructive given the type of issues that we are seeing in our schools. We see aggression and beyond control behaviours, children who have a lot of difficulty managing their anger, a lot of difficulty with destruction of property, minor crimes that these children also engage in. Siewsankar-Ali further said, We see a lot of difficulties in terms of attachment because the offending or non-offending parents are not available or unresponsive to address the needs of the children. The manager said instances where children get caught up in rows between parents are also doing harm.

We are seeing an increase in the types of issues associated with cases where children become triangulated in the violence in the parents home, Siewsankar-Ali said.

We are seeing children taking on more responsibilities within the home. We are seeing where children become pitted  emotionally  against one parent. That is a very difficult situation when you have the fences up. The committee also heard that from May 2015 to April 2016 the Child Protection Unit of the Police Service examined 2,123 cases, seven percent of which related to incest.

The Childrens Authority handled 5,300 cases  more than fivefold its projected workload  in its first few months of operation.

The committee heard of some children currently in custody being pregnant, suicidal, and silenced by trauma.
Jenny to get report

The OSHA is already on the case investigating the circumstances that led to Mr Mitchells death, Baptiste-Primus told Newsday.

A report will be submitted and where necessary, appropriate action will be initiated. The Minister extended condolences to Mitchells family.

I extend to relatives of Mr Charles Mitchell my heartfelt condolences, she said. May God grant them courage, strength and faith to overcome their grief at this time. No further details were released by Petrotrin on the incident yesterday.

On Monday, before Parliaments Joint Select Committee on State Enterprises, Petrotrin President Fitzroy Harewood said the company was not satisfied with its safety performance. We are not happy with our safety performance, he said.

We think that we have had a number of issues in the past, we have had fatalities. We have had a significant number of loss time injuries. We have a frequency rate that suggests that we should be expecting twenty-something persons being injured every year.

We think that is unacceptable for this business. We think that is going to affect our ability to run the company in the future. The Petrotrin President continued, And so we are very focused on improving our safety performance and we have identified that we need to push our beyond compliance culture within the organisation. He further said more than $5 billion was needed to get assets up to scratch. Asset integrity is in a poor state, he said. We are running with some very old infrastructure and we are challenged with our asset integrity.

Each day, we are concerned with what we have in front of us and whether we will hear something has leaked.
Roget dissatisfied with operations

If workers are in unsafe environment, they have every right to remove themselves from that environment. But when they do that, the company penalizes them by not paying them. The company attempts to prosecute, suspend, discipline and fire workers for standing up for their rights, Roget said. He was speaking to reporters at Lowkie Trace in Penal, where the accident took place.

Roget warned if appropriate action is not taken, there would be in the near future, another fatality. Petrotrin has been not filling vacancies in critical operational and technical areas. What they do is not fill vacancies and focus on Human Resource where they bring in their friends. We have already unearthed that there was one (person) short in this crew. Preliminary report is that the worker was struck by a crank arm of the pumping jack, Roget noted.

On Tuesday, Mitchell who was a Craftsman II of the companys Production Operations Department, was crushed in the gearbox area of the oil well at about 11.30 am while in the company of six co-workers at Lowkie Trace.

Mitchell of Papourie Road, Inverness, Barrackpore succumbed to his injuries at Petrotrins Medical Facility at Clarke Road, Penal.

Police believe mechanical failure was responsible for the accident.

He lived with two adult siblings and was not married.
Nun: We are a cable TV society

Hall is the chairperson for the local Jubilee Year of Mercy Committee of the Catholic Church. The committee, along with other Christian churches will host a week of prayer in the southern city. Hall, who was giving her views on the increased violence among youths, went on to blame television and social media for the problems and made a call for an all hands on deck approach in dealing with the problem.

In some ways, we have just allowed children to their own devices, not only literally, but also figuratively because they are living on their devices and, in doing that, they are just descending into what they are seeing, Hall said.

But she noted that while some want to blame problems at home for the breakdown, Hall believes it is important to look at what children are being fed daily on the television.

She continued: So we have become a society of cable TV, not that I am condemning it, because it is all about choice. But what are they being fed? She feels it is not the time to throw our hands up in the air instead Hall believes there must be a structural and systematic approach to the youths to deal with a problem which began many years ago.

We are now seeing the fruits of it (problems) in our society, said Hall who also told her audience that the society has become bogged down by the anxieties of an economic downturn, an escalating crime rate and a rise in violence and aggression amongst our youth.

Halls hope is that the upcoming week of prayer (May 9-13) in San Fernando, which will be shared by members of different Christian faiths, will inspire Christians to pray and play a more active role in making Trinidad and Tobago into a more merciful society.
Gate accident victim laid to rest

Joseph, San Fernando home was yesterday described as a gem that cannot be replaced by his father. Addressing mourners at his sons funeral service at the familys home, Vishnu Mangalsingh said that his son was loved my all. Darren was born with a gift to touch the hearts of all he came in contact with, Mangalsingh said.

He told the gathering that there was nothing that was not a challenge for Darren.

He had a trait that many of us dont have and he was born with that gift of touching the lives of others. The grieving father urged parents to spend more time with their children.

Enjoy whatever time you have with your children. How much time is enough you be the judge of that, he said. The service was packed to capacity as family members, friends, and residents all came to pay their final respects. Last Friday morning, Darren was leaving his Third Street home, when an iron gate located to the front of the house fell on him, crushing him. He was rushed to the San Fernando General Hospital where he later died. An autopsy performed at the San Fernando Mortuary revealed Mangalsingh died as a result of chest asphyxiation. Delivering the eulogy, Darrens brother Dinelle, described his brother as helpful and generous. Other friends described Darren as a self-driven individual who always motivated others to do their best. Pundit Christendath Ramdhanie Sharma who officiated the service said that many would have questions about Darrens death. Even I would question why, but who am I to question God? Although I would not get the answer, I would still ask why, Ramdhanie Sharma said.

He said Darren was loved by all as he did not know any person who did not love the young man.

Darren was cremated at the Mosquito Creek Shore of Peace.
Woman, 82, missing

The worried relatives then contacted the Belmont Police Station and filed a missing persons report.

Newsday was told that while the woman was a very lucid and healthy woman, she had gone missing once before. During that incident, she was found by Belmont police officers and taken to the station where she was collected by family members.

Any persons with knowledge of her whereabouts can contact the nearest police station, or contact relatives at 763-2464.
Aviation Authority assures public

The Authority stated this in a press release published in todays newspapers as they responded to media reports on April 18, 2016 about an incident which occurred on July 2, 2015.

The incident involved two aircraft that were in the Piarco airspace.

The TTCAA explained that on that date there was an operational incident involving the gradual degradation of Piarco RADAR data and the subsequent airprox between the two aircraft.

An airprox is a situation in which the distance between aircraft as well as their relative positions and speed have been such that the safety of the aircraft involved may have been compromised, the Authority explained.

That incident was investigated and it was found that the Piarco RADAR track symbols or targets on the Piarco RADAR display gradually degraded and the air traffic controller failed to detect that the situation was occurring and take corrective action.

The TTCAA noted that while degradation to any RADAR system can occur with any Air Traffic Management System, an air traffic controller is trained and provided with the requisite skillset and alternative recovery methods to detect and recover situations of this type, in order to maintain safety through maintenance of the required separation between aircraft.

The Authority further explained that following any incident that may have had the potential to compromise safety, an air traffic controller is provided with counselling, leave and relevant training to regain competence.
Govts $1M gift to Integrity Commission

Mark, a former House Speaker, sat on Parliaments Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC) to probe an IC team led by Registrar Jasmine Pascall. The PAAC learned of $500,000 being given for the IC to set up a Whistleblower Unit and another $500,000, to review the Integrity in Public Life Act (IPLA).

Independent Senator Melissa Ramkissoon initially asked Pascall the cost to set up the Whistleblower Unit, but Pascall could not answer as there had been no consultation with stakeholders and no discussion on costs. An incredulous Mark then asked, You said no consultation on Whistleblower legislation, yet allocations are there for $500,000 to establish a Whistleblower Unit? Minister of Public Administration Maxie Cuffie also queried the two allocations, asking if the Whistleblower sum should be defined as recurrent expenditure or PSIP, and if the IPLA sum is to pay attorney fees. Pascall agreed that the latter was for attorney fees and public consultations. Cuffie interpreted a remark by Pascall to mean the IC has no system to ensure its own compliance in transparency of expenditure. Pascall said she had misinterpreted that question and promised a written reply to follow.

She later said the IC has no internal auditor but merely shares an auditing assistant with the Office of the President. Energy Minister Nicole Olivierre, asked how a $500,000 allocation could be set, ahead of any talks on the ICs needs.

Pascall replied, It was not a request from the IC but from talks between the Office of the Attorney General and the Ministry of Planning. PAAC Chairman Speaker Bridgid Annisette-George pressed Pascall if she was saying the $500,000 for Whistleblower Unit was a gift from the AGs Office and Ministry of Planning/Ministry of Finance, and if the $500,000 for IPLA reform was a gift. Pascall replied, That too was a gift. Asked by the Speaker if the IC has a statutory role to draft laws, Pascall said no.

Mark said a body would usually submit a development plan to the Ministry of Planning or Finance and asked, Is it a normal habit of any administration to offers gifts.

I just find it strange you can be imposed with a sum of money without your requesting it. Im just asking you, if you could share with this body, whether this is an unusual development or is it a normal practice you have experienced over the years where you have not requested an allocation but you are given an allocation. I am shocked to hear you didnt ask for a Whistleblower allocation but you are given. And you have just given the Chair another instance where the reform of the IC, you didnt ask for an allocation, but was given an allocation of $500,000. Is this a normal practice? Is this a normal way the IC receives money or allocation from the Ministry of Planning and the Ministry of Finance? Pascall replied, I cant say that, sir. Im not sure. I was recently attached to the IC and I cant say. Ill have to do research for that answer. Asked later by Newsday on the two allocations, Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi said he had not yet heard the Registrars remarks. I will have to get further and better particulars to clarify the position before I give you a full response, Al-Rawi said. He added that as AG he has not asked the IC to do anything at all, saying, The Whistleblower legislation came under my tenure as AG. Im not aware of any request made of the IC to draft Whistleblower legislation. I did my own draft, thats now before the joint select committee (JSC). The IC submitted comments, as did other members of the public. Asked if any allocation of $500,000 had been made for IPLA review, the AG said this information could come from the Ministry of Finances Director of Budgets.

He said the IC, like any other body, is free to do such a review of its governing legislation, IPLA.
Garcia backs partnering with private sector

Speaking yesterday at the opening of the MIC Institute of Technology Symposium, Unlocking your true professional potential, at UWI, St Augustine, Garcia said, I was somewhat taken aback by the insistence of the president of the Trinidad and Tobago Unified Teachers Association (Devanand Sinanan) where he was posturing that we should not encourage public/private partnerships. In other words, he was posturing that we must do it alone. At TTUTAs 37th anniversary function at Centre Point Mall, Chaguanas, on April 22, Sinanan called on Garcia to review the Concordat  which defines the relationship between the church and State because it is inimical to the development our country and perpetuates a class differential. He was also quoted as saying that the church/ State arrangement was naked privatisation disguised as a partnership. Responding to the remarks, Garcia said, I share a different view. My view has been spawned over years of experience. Regardless of how much one believes that one knows as much as one believes, one cannot do it alone.
What you need to know about the Octagon Art Festival on Sunday in Ames

news
Arizona woman faked cancer to get $6K taxpayer funded abortion, embezzled $35K from veterans charity

An Arizona woman who faked stage-4 cancer to obtain a costly, late-term abortion in April 2010 was convicted on Monday by the Maricopa County Superior Court on 11 criminal charges including theft, identity theft, attempted theft, forgery and fraudulent schemes.

Chalice Renee Zeitner, 30, from the Phoenix area, told her OB-GYN she had carcinoma, and that her baby had been harmed by the cancer treatments which she had received, which purportedly included chemotherapy and radiation.

Zeitner said that she scheduled to have several tumors removed in her lower abdomen and lower spinal area in Boston. She claimed the pregnancy put her life at risk, and even faked documents proving her cancer diagnosis.

Testing performed by a specialist showed the baby was healthy, but Zeitner did not give up on her scheme. Instead, she forged a letter from Dr. Graham McMahon recommending she receive an urgent abortion in order to save her life, according to court documents.

Woman forges letter to obtain late-term abortion

As a result, her OB-GYN aborted the 4-month old baby.

The documents Zeitner forged gave sufficient proof for the doctor to cite two of the four medically necessary reasons Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System required to perform her $6,346.48 taxpayer-funded abortion, according to AZ Central.

The fraud was only discovered when the same OB-GYN delivered a new baby Zeitner conceived one year later with her boyfriend at the time and grew suspicious after noticing a lack of evidence to substantiate the womans cancer claims, according to prosecutors on the case.

Unable to find signs of the cancer treatments Zeitner claimed to of had, the baby doctor contacted Dr. McMahon, of Massachusetts, who stated he did not know Zeitner and had never treated her.

The OB-GYN then filed a report with Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, which worked in conjunction with the FBI, and the Ariz. Attorney Generals Office to bring charges against the fraudster.

Defense: My client genuinely believed she had cancer

Zeitners attorney Adam Schwartz argued in court that his client genuinely believed she had cancer and did not intend to deceive anyone, but he failed to offer an explanation as to why she thought she had cancer.

Zeitner, who has a lengthy criminal history, is no stranger to elaborate schemes, it turns out. Her past criminal offenses include drunk driving, drug abuse, forgery, and fraud. The 30-year-old woman is accused of embezzling tens of thousands of dollars from a veterans charity.

Prosecutors allege Zeitner fraudulently obtained the personal information of the founder of Veterans Hope charities and his family in July 2012 than used it to open a credit card account under their names without their consent and charged about $25,000, according to ABC 15 News.

Stealing from war veterans

Zeitner allegedly contacted the Veteran Tickets Foundation and said she was working with Veterans Hope and Armed Forces Racing and asked them to sponsor an ad on a race car to be presented at a gala in Washington.

She took $10,000 in sponsorship money for the non-existent gala and deposited it into her personal bank account. The money was never returned to the Veteran Tickets Foundation.

Police arrested Zeitner in Georgia in May 2015 where she was living under an alias. She has remained incarcerated since then. Her court date pertaining to the money she allegedly ripped off from veterans is scheduled for May 25.

Her sentencing for faking cancer to obtain a taxpayer funded abortion is set for May 26 at 9:30a.m.

Sources:

AZCentral.gov

DailyMail.co.uk

DailyMail.co.uk

ABC15.com

Science.NaturalNews.com

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FDA fast-tracks risky flu vaccine for seniors which was banned in Italy for causing 19 deaths

Definitions are important. Like, for example, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), what does that really mean? Or the Federal Drug Administration (FDA). Our societys increased disease rates and pharmacological drug pushing point to but one logical conclusion. The CDC is controlling the schedule for release of the next big disease. And the FDAs job is to ensure pharmaceutical concoctions are force fed from a Federal level. By the way, the word pharmaceutical comes from the Greek word  or pharmakeia. In the book of Revelation, pharmakeia is defined as employment of drugs for any purpose: sorcery, magic, enchantment.

Framing it from this context, why wouldnt the FDA fast track an experimental squalene adjuvanted flu vaccine named MF59 or Fluad for seniors over 65? So what if nineteen people died in Italy after taking the injection? Who cares if the Novartis shot was temporarily banned? Since genocide is the goal, maybe the Federal Death Administration were hoping for a higher kill rate. But what exactly does squalene adjuvanted mean? What are the added risks? Health activist and blogger Erin Elizabeth describes it this way:

Science teaches that oil and water dont mix. However, the Food and Drug Administration just fast-tracked Novartis oil-in water, squalene adjuvant flu shot for approval in individuals 65 and older Adjuvants are added to vaccines to hyper-stimulate the immune system. They are designed to remain in the body for a prolonged reaction. New adjuvants are composed of phospholipids which are part of the membrane of every cell. When injected, these adjuvants cause the body to mount an autoimmune attack (i.e., antiphospholipid syndrome) against its own cells. Its a game of Russian Roulette resulting in unpredictable adverse side effects ranging from heart attacks, stroke, myelitis and blindness to cognitive disfunction, skin disorders, miscarriages and fetal death.

Additionally, Ms. Elizabeth reminds us of the prior usage of squalene adjuvanted shots, including those experimental injections during the First Gulf War which led to devastation results:

In 1991, the squalene adjuvanted anthrax vaccine was first experimentally given to tens of thousands of Gulf War soldiers which resulted in severe, permanent injuries. Squalene antibodies caused a cascade of autoimmune reactions known as Gulf War Syndrome (GWS). Symptoms included severe headaches, nausea, muscular pain, joint swelling, short term memory loss, night sweats, depression. Autoimmune conditions ranged from fibromyalgia, lymphadenopathy, Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, autoimmune thyroid disease, chronic fatigue syndrome to malar rashes, chronic headaches, non-healing skin lesions, musculoskeletal disorders (ALS), among others. More than twenty years later thousands of veterans are still ill.

I have a friend who was encouraged by President Ford to get the swine flu shot in the 1970s. Within a few years, she was wheelchair bound after severe bouts with Gullain Barre Syndrome. She is not alone.

You may have your own story; if you were betrayed my tears are with you and I pray you will be strengthened. For those looking to protect their loved ones from influenza, there are many powerful foods, herbs and methods to combat it.

Remember, this particular flu shot was targeted to persons over 65. This means that your mom, dad, grandmother or grandfather and other older relatives are in their sights. Do all you can to educate them. If they have an appointment, try to go with them. Because one of the first questions theyll be asked is; Have you had your flu shot? Be like this group of nurses. Just say no. You can punctuate your remarks with this statement:

Flu shots are conjured up by sorcerers.

Sources:

(Photo credit: brokelyn.com)

BibleHub,com

BibleStudyTools.com

NVIC.org

FierceVaccines.com

HealthNutNews.com

GBS-cidp.org

YouTube.com

HealingFoodReference.com

Cassingram.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalSociety.com

NatureOfHealing.org

Science.NaturalNews.com

FoodForensics.com

Submit a correction >>
Federal judge tells left-wing activist attorney general of California she cant have access to conservative groups donor list

(Freedom.news) Federal District Court Judge Manuel L. Real ruled Thursday that the Virginia-based conservative group Americans for Prosperity Foundation does not have to turn over a list of its donors to California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

Reals permanent injunction bars Harris from seeking the groups list of donor names and address, and further directs her office to accept that AFP Foundation is in full compliance with the states charitable registration requirements.

In his decision, Real cited testimony from numerous AFP witnesses who had suffered public threats, harassment, intimidation, and retaliation once their support for and affiliation with the organization becomes publicly known.

Real added that, while none of the threats had led to actual violence, this Court is not prepared to wait until an AFP opponent carries out one of the numerous death threats made against its members.

Harris has promised to appeal the decision.

In a press release, AFP Foundation CEO Luke Hilgemann called the ruling, an important victory for free speech.

Donors to organizations, regardless of their views on public policy matters, should be free to support causes they believe in without fear of retaliation, harassment, or intimidation by powerful government figures, Hilgemann said. The Courts ruling confirms what we have known all along  that AG Harris has no right to police the beliefs of individual Americans, or causes they choose to support.

The Internal Revenue Service requires tax-exempt groups such as AFP Foundation to file a Form 990, outlining income and expenses, as well as a Schedule B, on which groups are required to list the names and addresses of donors who give $5,000 or more.

The IRS keeps the donor information included on Schedule B confidential.

As with many states, California requires nonprofit groups to register and to file copies of the IRS Form 990 with local authorities before allowing them to solicit contributions from residents.

But Harriss office went further, demanding that AFP Foundation file its donor list along with its tax form with the state. AFP Foundation sued Harris in federal court in 2014, claiming this requirement violated its First Amendment rights.

AFP Foundation is not the only conservative group battling an attorney general over access to its donor list. The Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute is currently fighting subpoena from Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker seeking documents and donor information relating to the groups work on climate change policy.

CEIs general counsel, Sam Kazman, told AMI Newswire that the group is awaiting a response from the Virgin Islands AG before deciding on our course of action in court.

We believe our contentions regarding donor confidentiality are supported by a line of Supreme Court decisions and rulings from lower courts, Kazman said. [The] decision against the California AG certainly adds to that body of case law.

Not all legal observers are confident the California ruling settles the matter of donor privacy.

Nonprofit attorney Mark Fitzgibbons told AMI Newswire that, while Reals opinion in the AFP Foundation case is as good a written opinion as [AFP] could have gotten in the 9th Circuit, the judges ruling only applies to them, and no one else.

This ruling doesnt help CEI at all in its legal battle with the Virgin Islands attorney general, said Fitzgibbons. It may offer them some comfort, but the ruling is very narrow, and Harris is appealing. She is very comfortable with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has previously taken a dim view of the First Amendment argument AFP Foundation used to protect its donor list.

The fight over donor privacy is far from over, Fitzgibbons said.

(c) 2016 American Media Institute.

Freedom.news is part of the USA Features Media network.

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Monsanto hired the infamous mercenary firm Blackwater to track FOOD ACTIVISTS around the world

Millions of Americans remember the private mercenary force known as Blackwater for its involvement in an unprovoked attack that left scores of Iraqi civilians dead in 2007, but most have no idea that the firm had a business relationship as well with Monsanto.

As we reported in May 2013, the relationship between the worlds largest bio-ag company and producer of genetically modified foods and seeds and Blackwater was described by blogger Randy Ananda as a death-tech firm weds a hit squad.

As further reported by The Nation magazine, it appears that Monsanto hired Blackwater shortly after the Iraq incident to protect the Monsanto brand, which meant essential conducting intelligence operations against anti-Monsanto activists and their allies.

Sign up for the 5th Annual Food Revolution Summit now  click here!

Through Total Intelligence and the Terrorism Research Center, Blackwater also did business with a range of multinational corporations, the magazine reported. According to internal Total Intelligence communications, biotech giant Monsantothe worlds largest supplier of genetically modified seedshired the firm in 200809. The relationship between the two companies appears to have been solidified in January 2008 when Total Intelligence chair Cofer Black traveled to Zurich to meet with Kevin Wilson, Monsantos security manager for global issues.

After that meeting, Black then sent an email to other executives of Blackwater, writing that Wilson understands that we can span collection from the Internet, to reach out, to boots on the ground on legit basis protecting the Monsanto [brand] name Ahead of the curve info and insight/heads up is what he is looking for.

In addition, Black noted that Total Intelligence would develop into acting as the intel arm of Monsanto. He further stated that Monsanto officials were concerned about animal rights activists and they also discussed how Blackwater could have our person(s) actually join [activist] group(s) legally. Black said that initial payments to Total Intelligence would be paid from Monsantos generous protection budget but eventually would become a line item in the companys annual budget. In the email he estimated that potential payments to Total Intelligence would be between $100,000 and $500,000. According to documents obtained by The Nation, Monsanto wound up paying Total Intelligence $127,000 in 2008 and another $105,000 the following year.

In following up, the magazine said it contacted Wilson to inquire about the meeting with Black in Zurich, but Wilson initially stated, Im not going to discuss it with you. In a subsequent email to the magazine, however, he confirmed that he met with Black in Switzerland and that his company had hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and worked with the company until early 2010.

Wilson denied that he and Black discussed infiltrating animal rights groups, saying there was no such discussion (in direct contradiction of Blacks email to his people). He claimed further that Total Intelligence really only gave Monsanto reports about the activities of groups or individuals that could pose a risk to company personnel or operations around the world which were developed by monitoring local media reports and other publicly available information. The subject matter ranged from information regarding terrorist incidents in Asia or kidnappings in Central America to scanning the content of activist blogs and websites. Wilson further asserted that Black told him Total Intelligence was a completely separate entity from Blackwater.

What is crystal clear, however, is that anyone who dared to challenge the GMO producer over its continued effort to dramatically alter the worlds food chain was a target  for intimidation, for silencing, for discrediting. And the company hired mercenary thugs to do its dirty work.

Thankfully, there is a way around this abysmal and pathetic gerrymandering of our food  the 5th Annual Food Revolution Summit.

Beginning April 30 and running through May 8, you can attend this virtual seminar, for FREE, where you will hear from dozens of health, nutrition and food experts about how you can prevent heart disease, cancer, diabetes, fatigue, poor sleep, and other health challenges, just with food alone.

Our world is in desperate need of a food revolution. Pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, GMOs, and untested chemicals are spreading like a virus through our food supply, and corporations like Monsanto are responsible for it all. Dont let them win. Hear the most up-to-date research and information about your food, nutrition, disease prevention, and environmental stewardship.

To sign up for the 5th Annual Food Revolution Summit now, click here!

Sources:

FoodRevolutionSummit.com

NaturalNews.com

Science.NaturalNews.com

TheNation.com

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HALF OF 2015 MURDER INCREASES CAME FROM THREE CITIES



By Chuck Baldwin

April 28, 2016

NewsWithViews.com

A recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice shows that more than half of all of the murder increases in the United States were centered in just three cities: Baltimore, Maryland; Chicago, Illinois; and Washington, D.C. Thats an incredible statistic when you stop and think about it. Over half of U.S. murder increases came from just three cities.

During 2015, there were 344 homicides in Baltimore, 465 in Chicago, and 162 in D.C.

Of course, the Brennan Center report mostly blames economic factors for the increase in murders in these cities: These serious increases seem to be localized, rather than part of a national pandemic, suggesting that community conditions remain the major factor. Notably, these three cities all seem to have falling populations, higher poverty rates, and higher unemployment than the national average. This implies that economic deterioration of these cities could be a contributor to murder increases.

The report confirms that crime rates remain at historic lows nationally, despite recent upticks in a handful of cities.

See the report.

In other words, take out the huge spike in crime in Americas major cities, especially Baltimore, Chicago, and D.C., and the national crime rate would barely be a proverbial blip on the radar screen.

Besides falling populations, higher poverty rates, and higher unemployment, what else do these three cities have in common? You know the answer: STRICT GUN CONTROL.

Baltimore has an assault weapons ban, as does the entire State of Maryland. Chicago and the District of Columbia do too.

Writing for Breitbart.com, AWR Hawkins notes, Chicago has a violence tax that raises the price of every gun sold at retail in the city, and DC has a registration program which is broken down into six steps and requires more than a full page of explanation from the Metropolitan Police Department. The steps include multiple paragraph explanations for satisfying gun safety requirements, certifying that you are not legally blind, and paying a total of $94 to the DC Treasurer, none of which will impact or hinder criminals in the least.

So the gun control in all three cities continue, even though the extra murders there were so high in 2015 that they represent more than half the overall increase in murders in the U.S.

Overall, the gun-control laws in these three cities are among the strictest in the nation. Obviously, the criminals in those cities paid those laws no heed. DUH!

The unreported part of this story is the fact that nationwide (with the exception of a handful of radical anti-gun states such as Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California, etc.) more and more states are recognizing a citizens right to keep AND BEAR arms, which is the primary reason why the national crime rate is falling like a rock.

More Americans are armed in their everyday lives today than at any time in modern memory. And that trend is increasing exponentially. 2015 set an all-time record (previous record being set in 2014, and the record before that being set in 2013, etc.) in gun sales nationwide. Gun ownership in America is skyrocketing. And more importantly, the numbers of Americans BEARING arms is skyrocketing.

On April 15 of this year, Mississippi became the tenth State to enact a Constitutional-Carry law enabling citizens to carry a concealed handgun without having to obtain a permit. The other nine states allowing for Constitutional Carry are Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

See the report here.

The editors of the above report add: Over 99% of Montana also enjoys Constitutional Carry. Thats because 99% of the State of Montana is rural, in which case State law allows for Constitutional Carry. CCW permits are only required for incorporated cities in Montana. (The Montana House and Senate passed a Statewide Constitutional Carry bill during the last legislative session, but it was vetoed by Democratic Governor Steve Bullock. We aim to correct that problem at the polls this November.)

Readers might be surprised to learn that one in twenty adults have a CCW permit in this country. And, again, there is no question whatsoever that this fact is directly proportional to the decrease in crime nationally.

See the report.

The Gun Owners of America has also documented the fact that Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year--or about 6,850 times a day. This means that each year, firearms are used more than 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.

Of the 2.5 million self-defense cases, as many as 200,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse.

See the report here.

The surge in both gun purchases and Concealed Carry Weapon (CCW) applications can be largely attributed to women arming themselves. Pistol-packers are no longer just males. More women in America are armed today than at any time in our nations history. And as a warning to would-be attackers of women, ladies seem to be more naturally accurate with a handgun than most men. And if you think for a second that a mother would hesitate to defend herself or her children with a deadly weapon, you are dumber than a box of rocks.

Sadly, one of the biggest pro-gun-control blocs across the country is Americas pastors and churches. Not all, thankfully, but far, far too many pastors and churches across America have bought into the gun-control agenda hook, line, and sinker. This is especially true among the countrys megachurches, most of which are located in major cities, of course.

Back in 2013, when President Obama and Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced their nationwide assault weapons ban, a host of pastors were telling their parishioners that they had no need to own an assault weapon (or any other firearm, for that matter) and that the Bible instructed them to disarm if civil law required it. These pastors repeatedly used verses such as Thou shalt not kill, They that take the sword shall perish with the sword, etc., to push the gun-control agenda to their congregations. And the vast majority of pastors who were not vocally supporting Obamas gun-control agenda were absolutely SILENT on the subject.

Thankfully, pro-Second Amendment Republicans AND Democrats rallied against Obama and Feinsteins bill and it didnt even make it out of the then Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate. No thanks, however, to a host of pastors and churches.

It was at that point that my constitutional attorney son and I wrote what I believe is a classic treatise on the Biblical Natural Law right and DUTY of men and women to be willing and able to defend themselves. I say it plainly: the right of self-defense is not just a right (as in the Second Amendment); it is a God-ordained DUTY. We have a God-ordained duty to defend ourselves with or without the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment merely recognizes the duty given to us by our Creator.

The title of our book is To Keep Or Not To Keep: Why Christians Should Not Give Up Their Guns.

As the title suggests, the book is written primarily to people who call themselves Christians. It is not so much of a constitutional analysis (which, thankfully, has already been accomplished with countless research) but of a Biblical analysis. Frankly, I am sick and tired of hearing my fellow pastors use the Scriptures (such as the ones referenced above) as justification for gun control or even disarmament. The Bible teaches nothing of the sort.

Therefore, our book is a SCRIPTURAL refutation of gun control and a theological affirmation of mans Natural and divine right of self-defense. In the book, we take the combined body of scriptural evidence and categorically prove that self-defense is a Natural right given mankind at Creation and a moral duty given mankind by Revealed Law.

For any Christian who is confused about the scriptural teaching on the subject of lawful self-defense or who goes to a church where this issue is not addressed and clarified or who has Christian friends who do not understand the Scriptures approbation of armed self-defense, this book is MUST-READING (if I do say so myself).

To order our book, To Keep Or Not To Keep: Why Christians Should Not Give Up Their Guns, click here.

Nationwide, Americas crime rate is at historic lows because so many more people (including ladies) are arming themselves. Crime rates in Americas major cities are still much higher than in average-sized or smaller communities. And in virtual gun-free cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., the increase of crime (especially homicide) is at historic highs. Again, HALF of the nations homicide rate increase in 2015 came from THESE THREE CITIES.

If anything, these three cities prove the lunacy of gun control and the wisdom of Americas Founding Fathers to encapsulate our Creators Natural Law principle of self-defense into our Bill of Rights.

P.S. People who are relatively new to firearms often ask for my personal preferences regarding which firearms I like and why. I have put these preferences on a distinct web link, which can be viewed here.

Mind you, I am not a firearms expert, and these are merely my personal preferences and suggestions in order to help people get a head start in understanding the distinctions and nuances of the wide assortment of firearms that are available to the American people today. If anything I suggest is helpful, great. If not, thats great too. There really is no best or right choice. Like beauty, the right or best firearm is in the eyes of the beholder. And please remember: no matter what choice you make, you must practice. Whatever firearm you choose is no better or worse than your ability to handle it. I also STRONGLY suggest that people receive training from a professional firearms instructor.
Ramez Naam has an analysis of how cheap electric cars can get

Electric Vehicles, like virtually all other manufactured goods, are likely to have a learning curve, meaning that greater production will mean reduced price. Batteries, a large fraction of the cost of EVs, appear to have a learning rate of around 21%, meaning that every doubling of scale will reduce costs by 21%.

What about whole vehicles? The Ford Model T had a learning rate of around 16%. Lets use that for the entire vehicle, including the battery. That gives us a conservative estimate of the cost improvement rate.

Last year, EVs grew at around 60% annually, to around 1 million total EVs ever sold. Sources in China tell me they expect several hundred thousand EVs to be sold there in 2016 alone. Growth could easily be 60% again in 2016. Even so, growth will eventually slow. Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects 30% long term growth. Lets use that for now, to be conservative.

Those assumptions lead to a world where, by roughly 2030, EVs with a 200 mile range are cheaper than the cheapest car sold in the US in 2015.

A few days ago Telsa claims that the cost of their battery packs is down to $190 per kwh. This should go down 30-50% when the Gigafactory reaches full production levels

On Cost-Per-Mile, EVs Win Even More

Electric vehicles, today, have lower total costs per mile than equivalent gasoline-powered vehicles, due to lower energy costs of electricity and the lower maintenance costs. At 30% growth rate, EVs will have roughly half the up-front cost of gasoline-powered vehicles in roughly 10-12 years, around 2027 or 2028. At that point, the total cost per-mile-driven of EVs will also be roughly half the cost of gasoline powered vehicles.

In 2014, Nextbigfuture had discussed the possibility of a battery singularity. The Battery singularity would be the electric car singularity as Ramez is also discussing. Batteries (and electric engines) that replace gasoline (and combustion engines) but at lower lifetime costs have the potential to completely replace combustion engines. I believe the costs will be brought down and the factory construction and scaling of the supply chain will take until about 2025. We could get to 10 million electric cars per year by about 2020 and then to 100 million by 2025.

This would likely mean that Tesla with its large lead in electric cars would likely be selling as many cars as Toyota now and possibly 2 to 3 times as many. This would be 10 to 30 million cars. Tesla would be worth $300 billion to $2 trillion depending upon the price earnings multiple.

Other Analysis of Battery and Electric Car Improvement and future costs

Jefferies analyst Dan Dolev predicts that Tesla battery costs could fall by 50%+ through the use of new battery chemistry and large scale production via the Gigafactory. Most industry observers have predicted that general acceptance of electric cars wont happen until the $100 per kWh barrier broken.

Dolev estimates Teslas current Model S battery cost to be $250 per kWh and thinks the company can drive costs down to $88 per kWh primarily through battery chemistry changes and economies of scale. A few days ago Telsa claims that the cost of their battery packs is down to $190 per kwh.

Teslas use of an efficient nickel cobalt aluminum cathode (i.e. the positive electrode), use of a silicon synthetic graphene anode (i.e. the negative electrode) that has 2-6 times the lithium ion storage capacity of todays standard graphite anode, and a possible use of water-based anode solvent, are key advantages.

Our analysis details a potential path to a 30% cell-level cost reduction to ~$88/kWh by using a more efficient lithium-rich nickel cobalt manganese cathode (vs. NCA), doubling the percentage of silicon in the synthetic graphene anode, replacing the liquid electrolyte with an ionic gel electrolyte which eliminates the need for a separator, and using a water-based electrode solvent for the cathode.

At $88 per kWh, a 60 kWh battery for the forthcoming Tesla Model 3 would cost $5,280. Thats only a third of what the same battery would cost today and makes the prospect of an affordable electric car with at least 200 miles of range far more credible.

Is Dolev too optimistic? No one at Tesla Motors is promising anything close to his projection.

Materials Today  Li-ion battery materials: present and future [June 2015]

The Li-ion battery has clear fundamental advantages and decades of research which have developed it into the high energy density, high cycle life, high efficiency battery that it is today. Yet research continues on new electrode materials to push the boundaries of cost, energy density, power density, cycle life, and safety. Various promising anode and cathode materials exist, but many suffer from limited electrical conductivity, slow Li transport, dissolution or other unfavorable interactions with electrolyte, low thermal stability, high volume expansion, and mechanical brittleness. Various methods have been pursued to overcome these challenges.

There is a chart depicting average electrode potential against experimentally accessible (for anodes and intercalation cathodes) or theoretical (for conversion cathodes) capacity.

This allows the reader to evaluate various anode and cathode combinations and their theoretical cell voltage, capacity, and energy density. The chart can also be used to identify suitable electrolytes, additives, and current collectors for the electrode materials of choice.

The acronyms for the intercalation materials are:

LCO for lithium cobalt oxide,

LMO for lithium manganese oxide,

NCM for nickel cobalt manganese oxide,

NCA for nickel cobalt aluminum oxide,

LCP for lithium cobalt phosphate,

LFP for lithium iron phosphate,

LFSF for lithium iron fluorosulfate, and

LTS for lithium titanium sulfide.

Approximate range of average discharge potentials and specific capacity of some of the most common (a) intercalation-type cathodes (experimental), (b) conversion-type cathodes (theoretical), (c) conversion type anodes (experimental), and (d) an overview of the average discharge potentials and specific capacities for all types of electrodes.

New types of Lithium ion approaches are delaying any shift to Lithium sulfur and other types of batteries

SOURCES  Materials Today, teslarati, Ramez Naam, Tesla
HNA Group, the fast-expanding Chinese tourism conglomerate, has entered into an agreement to acquire Carlson Hotels - one of the world's biggest hotel groups.

The Quorvus Collection, Radisson Blu, Radisson RED, Radisson, Park Plaza, Park Inn by Radisson, and Country Inns & Suites by Carlson are among the brands included under the Minnetonka-based hospitality company Carlson Hotels' umbrella. The amount that the Chinese firm is paying for the deal is not clear.

HNA Tourism Group has agreed to buy Carlson Hotels, including its majority 51.3 percent stake in Brussels-based Rezidor Hotel Group, from parent company Carlson Hospitality Group, a joint statement said.

Shearer makes fascinating Benitez observation after Newcastle hold Manchester City

He said: "I am happy for him because it's not easy to score 100 goals in the amount of games that Sergio did it". A game always against a good team like Liverpool will be tough but hopefully we will see the same reaction.

Carlson Hotels operate 1,400 hotels across 115 countries and employs approximately 1 million employees through its hotel chains. It also controls Carlson Wagonlit Travel, a travel management business that operates in more than 150 countries.

Under Swedish takeover rules, HNA Tourism is required to make a tender offer for the remaining 48.7% of Stockholm-listed Rezidor within four weeks of the transaction being completed, if HNA doesn't reduce its stake in Rezidor to less than 30% before then, according to the statement.

In a statement Carlson said that "The combination of HNA Tourism Group and Carlson Hotels will have increased ability to accelerate growth through investments in areas such as digital, owned assets in major gateway cities, building of Radisson Red and other new brands".

Azerbaijan violates ceasefire at Armenia-Azerbaijan state border

Units of the Artsakh Defense Army are said to have returned fire, thus suppressing the Azerbaijani shelling. Armenia also requires "assurances that these kinds of violations will not happen again", he added.

"Hospitality is in our hearts, which made this a hard decision", said Diana Nelson, Carlson Board chair and granddaughter of Curt Carlson, who founded the family company in 1938.

It has recently gone on an acquisition spree by offering to buy Swiss catering and hospitality company Gategroup for $1.5 billion in April, struck a deal in February to buy USA electronics distributor Ingram Micro Inc for about $6 billion and paid $2.73 billion to buy airport luggage handler Swissport International Ltd.
The Indiana primary will be the first test of the alliance between Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich against Trump - a hastily assembled effort by the two trailing campaigns to divide up some of the remaining states in order to try to block the front-runner from steamrolling them. On Tuesday, he was still vowing "to fight all the way to the Philadelphia convention".

Sanders captured Rhode Island but Clinton scored wins in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Maryland. ". They should get out of the race, and we should heal the Republican Party".

She applauded Sanders for challenging Democrats to focus on campaign finance accountability and closing the income gap. "Not only did we get all five, we got in the 60s". "We will beat Hillary so easily", he said.

Trump won big on Tuesday, pulling in more than half the vote in all five states and topping 60 percent in DE and Rhode Island, according to unofficial returns. Establishment Republicans wring their hands, beat their breasts and wail about how terrible Trump is, how uncouth, how unacceptable as the presidential candidate of the party of Lincoln - and then, when pressed, meekly say they'll support him if he's the nominee.

"Tonight, Donald Trump is expected to have a good night", Cruz told a a packed crowd here, who booed. His own campaign plan is more straightforward: win the nomination ahead of the convention.

Clinton and Trump had big nights in Tuesday's East Coast primaries, making themselves look more like their parties' respective nominees.

Pellegrini optimistic of Champions League progress despite David Silva blow

We wondered if either team would go for the jugular, but neither was prepared to risk defeat in the search for victory. "I'll wait for the next match", he said in Portuguese, apparently while talking to other players.

The Cruz-Kasich pact comes at the 13th hour.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will make "a major announcement" at 4 p.m. ET at the Pan American Pavilion in Indianapolis, he told reporters Wednesday morning. The GOP challengers struck a deal to allow Cruz free rein in next week's in primary and Kasich in later races in OR and New Mexico.

Cruz can not get the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the GOP nomination but he's trying to prevent Trump from crossing the delegate threshold and push the Republican race to a contested convention.

While Trump doesn't yet have the 1,237 delegates he needs to lock down the Republican presidential nomination, he doesn't seem to have much doubt left that he will get there. "Like the trees in MI, the hoop is just the right height in IN, and Hoosiers will see Donald Trump for the fraud he is".

Mr. Trump remains a polarizing figure with sky-high negatives who offers only vague policy positions on a wide range of issues. He didn't lose a single county, anywhere. The Vermont senator was leading by a small margin in Rhode Island, media projections said.

Wright State University political scientist Lee Hannah said the Cruz-Kasich cooperation is about a month too late. The last two have no mathematical path to reach the 1,237 delegate count before the GOP Convention in Cleveland in July. That is what it has come down to. About half of men and women said they would definitely not vote for Clinton.

Neuvirth's incredible performance leads Flyers past Caps

The Capitals will move on to what should be a classic conference semifinal series against Pittsburgh. Defensively, the Capitals are yielding 2.3 goals and ranking 3rd in penalty kill with 85.1 percent.

"The night before the election I set up a robocall", Worthington said.

John Kasich, at a campaign stop in Rockville, Md., on Monday, explained why Republican voters aren't buying what he's selling.

McKee and other campaign volunteers camped outside polling places and handed out cards paid for by the Trump campaign featuring Worthington, Casper and Sean Shute.

"We went to work right at that point planning our caucus strategy", Diehl said. Including superdelegates, the former secretary of state has crossed the 2,000 delegate threshold and is nearly 90 percent of the way to the 2,383 delegates needed to secure the nomination.

Her challenger, Sanders, remains in the race through the June primaries.

The comments also sparked speculation that Trump could move to replace Priebus as RNC chief if he won the party's nomination.

Prince Takes Top Two Slots in "Billboard" 200

The last time an artist hit no. 1 and no. 2 at the same time was Nelly in 2004 with his dual release, Sweat and Suit . Prince's music is dominating the official album chart, now holding every position in the Top 5.

Additionally, 77 percent of voters in Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania said they voted for their candidate, not against an opponent, according to an early exit poll. The billionaire also reiterated his criticism of the deal Cruz and Kasich have struck to split three upcoming primaries, calling it a "very weak signal".
Trump also captured the majority of women Republican primary voters in Maryland, Pennsylvania and CT, though by slightly smaller margins.

"This was, to me, our biggest night", Mr Trump said after winning the nominating contests in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

Hillary Clinton got off to a hot start on Northeast Super Tuesday, picking up projected wins in the Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania primaries. He also said beating Clinton will be easier than the beating the several candidates who ran for the Republican nomination. In response, Clinton fired back at Trump during her victory rally, saying that if she was playing the "women's card", she was happy to be dealt a hand. Cruz has mounted an especially sophisticated operation to fill delegate slates with sympathetic activists who could desert Trump in later rounds of voting in Cleveland should the billionaire fall short on the first ballot.

During an interview with the The Hill last July, Trump said "The RNC [Republican National Committee] has not been supportive". Top aide Tad Devine said that after Tuesday's results were known, "we'll decide what we're going to do going forward".

How did President Obama mourn Prince's death?

Freed said Prince made a brief appearance but that he didn't have one-on-one time with the musician that night. An autopsy was completed earlier today, though preliminary findings weren't immediately released.

"I am going to do everything I can to unify our country over all the lines that divide us", Clinton said in Mishawaka, Indiana, on Tuesday.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Cruz will focus his campaign on next Tuesday's Indiana's primary, while Kasich will channel his efforts into OR and New Mexico.

Sen. Ted Cruz, after some key losses in Tuesday's primaries, called GOP front-runner Donald Trump a "New York liberal" during a speech to supporters in IN, a state that's friendlier ground for his campaign.

Trump's biggest victories came in Rhode Island (63.0 percent) and DE (60.8 percent).

Ranieri reveals secret of Leicester's success: letting players rest

After an astonishing season they sit seven points clear at the top of the table, with just five games left. Sometimes there is a bad forecast and you have to stay together and fight together".

Mrs Clinton and Mr Trump are gearing up for a possible showdown against one another in November's White House election.

The Clinton campaign has been bracing for "personal attacks" from the Trump camp, BuzzFeed News reported in March.

Mr Sanders has vowed to stay in the race until voting ends in June. Trump needs a victory to get closer to the 1,237 delegates required to win the nomination. The challengers have even taken the rare step of announcing plans to coordinate in upcoming contests to try to minimize Trump's delegate totals. While she can't win enough delegates to officially knock Sanders out of the race this week, she can erase any lingering doubts about her standing.

The former secretary of state had an nearly insurmountable lead of 275 pledged delegates heading into Tuesday's contests, and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid told reporters he did not think Sanders, a USA senator from Vermont, had a realistic path to winning the nomination.

New York Islanders Win And Move To Second Round Of Playoffs

Tavares scored the goal that tied Game 6 against the Florida Panthers at 1-1 with 53.2 seconds left in regulation. The Panthers have now lost their last five playoff series dating back to 1996 when they defeated the Penguins.

"I applaud Sen. Sanders and his millions of supporters for challenging us to get unaccountable money out of our politics and giving greater emphasis to closing the gap of inequality".
A woman whose death was feared to be connected to the Manson family slayings was identified late a year ago as a Canadian teenager, but Los Angeles police detectives still have no concrete evidence linking the vicious stabbing death to the series of slayings carried out by Charles Manson and his followers in 1969, LAPD investigators said Wednesday.

Now, People reports that Jane Doe No. 59 has been identified as Reet Jurvetson-born in Sweden, raised in Montreal, and just 19 when she died.

Jurvetson's body was discovered by a birdwatcher on the afternoon of November 16, 1969, in dense brush off of Mulholland Drive, a scenic 21-mile road the cuts through the Hollywood Hills.

Though detectives haven't found any concrete link between Jurvetson's murder and the Manson family killings, they can't rule it out either, Rivera said, pointing how she was killed, where she was found, and the timeframe.

Police made the identification using DNA after Ms Jurvetson's sister recognised a photo of the woman's body posted online. Her message includes a series of photos of Reet "in the hope that they might prompt someone's memory and help those who had contact with Reet to remember what she looked like at the time".

Junior doctors in all-out strike

It was likely that over 110,000 outpatient appointments and over 12,500 operations would be cancelled over the two days, he added. The strike is in protest at the imposition of a new contract by the government which aims to create a so-called "seven-day NHS".

The 73-year-old described the "sad, helpless kind of feeling" of not learning what had become of her sister until 46 years after her death. She said that her family received a postcard from Reet saying that she was fine and that she was happy where she was. He knew Reet Jurvetson in Montreal before he moved to Los Angeles. She said her sister was stabbed more than 150 times. But they never heard from her again. She had been killed just a few miles from the place where several other Manson family murders happened.

Rivera said the best lead detectives have is a man named "John", whom Jurvetson met in Toronto before flying to Los Angeles to see him the summer of 1969. "My little sister was savagely killed", Anne told People.

Manson was interviewed by LAPD detectives but the "encounter with Manson did not produce anything fruitful and the investigation remains open and ongoing", the LAPD said, according to the newspaper.

She added they thought "eventually news from her would turn up".

"As months and then years passed, we imagined that she was making a new life for herself", Anne told People.

Supreme Court Split In Fight Over Obama Immigration Case

A 2013 survey found almost four million of Florida's residents were born overseas , or about one in every five people. The administration and immigration advocates say Obama's orders are neither unprecedented nor even unusual.

Last year, a friend of the Jurvetson family was looking on the NamUs website, the USA government's missing and unidentified people online database.

Anne Jurvetson said her free-spirited and naive sister went to Los Angeles after becoming smitten with "John".

According to CBS, there are believed to be other Manson victims that have never been found. Manson was convicted of killing seven people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, the wife of director Roman Polanski. But sadly, we did not know how to find someone on the other side of the continent, in another country, if that was even where she still was.

"She had one all along, but no one knew", Anne said in the statement.
English edition of Asharq Al-Awsat - the world's premier pan-Arab daily.

Israeli prosecutors on Monday charged seven young Jews in connection with a wave of so-called "price tag" attacks targeting Palestinians and Arab Israelis and their property, the justice ministry said. She was accused of intending to stab Israelis.

Sanders on Saturday said that the worst areas of Baltimore resemble the dire living conditions of some Palestinians in the West Bank.

Mitsubishi Motors says it did false mileage tests since 1991

The inconsistent information regarding the models were brought up by Nissan, which led to the investigation of the company's past. The company just admitted that they have been falsifying fuel economy tests for the last 25 years . "All I can do is apologize".

"Maybe she had a knife when they arrested her but she is just a child", Umm Rashid, al-Wawi's mother told +972. The number of Palestinian children held in Israeli prisons has soared over the past six months, including a growing number of girls. In response, the judge ruled that she could be released after two and a half months rather than four and a half.

Al-Wawi was greeted by her family, relatives and Palestinian officials and seemed to be perplexed by the situation. The Israeli police have handed all of the unharmed goats to Jerusalem's animal control department.It added that the military prosecution fears a "media circus" surrounding the soldier's trial, especially since a large part of the Israeli masses sympathise with him and do not believe there is a problem with executing a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian. "This entity is above all human rights laws and principles of worldwide human rights laws".

Al-Wawi was among at least 438 Palestinian minors now serving time in Israeli jails, 98 of whom are under 16, according to prisoners' rights group Addameer.

Polling places set to open for Pennsylvania primary

All Cecil voters, regardless of party, can vote in elections for School Board in council districts 1 and 2 (Elkton). The Republican party in DE narrowly bested its historic turnout record for primary elections on Tuesday.

Abd el-Hamid Mohammed Abu Sarur, 19, a resident of Beit Jala in the West Bank, was identified as the bomber according to a police statement, which referred to the bombing as a "suicide attack".

The family were also fined 8,000 shekels ($US2,100), and her father, the family's sole source of income, was sacked from his job in Israel.

A video that was broadcasted yesterday showed Al-Wawi's being arrested as she walked towards the entrance of the settlement dressed in her school uniform.

CHARLES HURT: Donald Trump wins over voters, and that's who counts

To even keep his flame flickering, Cruz must overtake Trump in IN next week and forge a miraculous late-inning comeback. John Kasich will look further out on the political calendar to OR for someplace to show viability.

"The security guard at the settlement stopped me, he had a gun and told me to lie on the ground and tied my hands with plastic [zip-ties]".
Billionaire Donald Trump swept all five presidential primaries held on Tuesday (April 27), strengthening his grip on the Republican race, while Democrat Hillary Clinton distanced herself from rival Bernie Sanders with almost as strong a showing.

Trump won all five of the delegate-rich GOP primaries in Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Rhode Island. While he remains the only candidate with viable chance to win nomination, nonetheless he has still to get around 300 delegates to cross the 1,237 mark. In Pennsylvania, exit polls showed almost 4 in 10 GOP voters said they would be excited by Trump becoming president, but the prospect of the real estate mogul in the White House scared a quarter of those who cast ballots in the state's Republican primary.

Hillary Clinton, who was looking to finish off rival Bernie Sanders, claimed the Democratic primaries in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. As of Wednesday, Clinton has a total of 1,640 delegates to Sanders' 1,331 as she moved even closer to the 2,383 threshold to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination.

On the Democratic side, Clinton has more than 90 percent of the delegates needed to win the party's nomination.

JetBlue pilot charged with flying drunk from Orlando to New York

Murphy resigned ahead of his JetBlue investigatory meeting and was stripped of his medical certification that is required to fly. In a statement, JetBlue said it has a zero tolerance drug and alcohol policy, and that Murphy no longer works there.

Her wins Tuesday put her fewer than 250 delegates away from the Democratic nomination.

Trump also was expected to extend his formidable lead in the bruising Republican race, even as rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich mounted a hasty - and already fraying - tag team effort to block him.

Some of Sanders' Jewish supporters have suggested ways of carrying out this vision.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - In a front-runner's rout, Republican Donald Trump roared to victory Tuesday in five contests across the Northeast and confidently declared himself the GOP's "presumptive nominee". He is likely to win the vast majority, if not every delegate, in CT and Maryland.

Trump's transgender bathroom comments spark new debate among presidential candidates

Trump on Thursday said that the measure is causing unnecessary problems for the Tar Heel State. The theme is what Cruz deemed the "leviathan" of the federal government.

Mr Cruz spent Tuesday in IN, which votes next week.

Following her remarks, Clinton spokeswoman Jen Palmieri seemed to all but call the primary over tonight -- telling reporters that the campaign is preparing for the general election and that they see the primary winding down in the coming weeks.

Former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, a Trump supporter, said the deal between Kasich and Cruz would backfire because it smacks of the type of backroom politics that people are rejecting. "They will go and take on Clinton in a way that I have chosen not, in areas I have chosen not to go". Top aide Tad Devine said that after Tuesday's results were known, "we'll decide what we're going to do going forward". "If we are sitting here and there's no sort of mathematical way to do it, we will be upfront about that", Sander's senior adviser Tad Devine told the New York Times before Tuesday's round of primaries. "However, this is incredibly misleading, and whether intended or not, it essentially serves to strengthen Clinton's campaign against Sanders". "But at a minimum, they are just not going to vote". The state was well-suited for the former secretary of state: a closed primary where only Democrats could vote and a sizable nonwhite electorate.
U.S. 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 old alliance.

Ultimately, Obama says, it's up to the Iraqi people to make decisions about who leads their government, not the United States or Iran.

But the White House is threatening to veto the bill because they believe it would seriously jeopardise bilateral relations and damage United States attempts to persuade the Saudis to play a more active role in the fight against Isis.

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.

Closing out a brief trip to Saudi Arabia, Obama also warned that a fragile cease-fire in Syria is on the verge of collapse, but he offered few hints about any alternative USA strategy if it does.

Obama's fourth and likely last visit to the world's top oil exporter has been overshadowed by the Gulf Arab exasperation with his approach to the region, and doubts about Washington's commitment to their security.

U.S. stages 25 strikes in Iraq, Syria against Islamic State - statement

The United States has already been working with this force to attack Islamic State fighters in Syria, the defense official said . Gersten would not say where the rocket system, known as HIMARS, would be deployed in Turkey citing operational security.

During the visit Mr Obama warned that the ceasefire in Syria - that the USA and Russian Federation brokered - was under "tremendous strain", blaming President Assad's forces in part for what he said were repeated violations.

During the U.S. -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-Qaida, and reduce regional and sectarian tensions that fuel instability, said a White House statement.

"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 destabilising activities", Obama said in the news conference.

Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors accuse Iran of widespread interference throughout the region, where they support opposite sides in conflicts in Yemen and Syria.

President Barack Obama opened a brief trip to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday with a one-on-one meeting with King Salman in Riyadh.

Obama said the fragile cessation of hostilities there is under "tremendous strain" and he decried continued violations, but made the case for sticking to the US strategy of using diplomatic talks to pursuing a political transition for Syria.

Midwest sees 2nd day of storms but no major damage

McIntosh County Emergency Manager Harry Trottier said a tornado ripped through the middle of the town of Checotah, Oklahoma. In Missouri, high winds downed trees and snapped power lines, the service said based on local reports .

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.

"I think they both agreed that it was good to essentially have this opportunity to clear the air", he said.

The countries pledged to help rebuild infrastructure in areas of Iraq reclaimed from Islamic State (IS).

Iran's emergence from global isolation following the nuclear deal has anxious the Gulf monarchies, which fear Tehran will be emboldened to seek a still bigger regional role. On Thursday, Carter pleaded for greater Gulf financial and political involvement in Iraq, which is battling an economic crisis as well as the extremists.

GCC members were upset by Mr 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 Teheran.
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 U.S. overtures to their regional rival Iran.

US President Barack Obama said Thursday 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 extremists.

Years of frustration among Gulf countries, aggravated by more recent stumbles, may make Saudi Arabia and its regional allies less receptive to Obama on his fourth and most probably final trip to the kingdom. 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 said even with the deal, the USA and its Gulf partners had "serious concerns" about ongoing Iranian behavior, including arms shipments that have been interdicted.

Emerging from a two-and-a-half hour meeting between Obama and Salman, U.S. officials described a productive session they claimed reduced some of the awkwardness that had seeped into the bilateral relationship.

Saudi King Salman sent a message to President Barack Obama the moment he stepped off the plane earlier this week to participate in the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Priceline CEO resigns after probe into employee relationship

Boyd served as Priceline CEO from 2002 to 2013 and was succeeded by Huston in January 2014 after a lengthy, planned transition. The company appoints former CEO Jeffrey Boyd to return to the position on an interim basis while it looks for a replacement.

The regional conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq were discussed during the meeting in Saudi capital Riyadh.

"On the core issues, there's agreement about where we want to go", Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, told reporters at a briefing in Riyadh.

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.

The leaders said it was understood that Iran must act in accordance with principles of "good neighborliness, strict non-interference in domestic affairs, and respect for territorial integrity, consistent with global law, including the United Nations Charter", according to the press release.

"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.

India formally asks United Kingdom to deport Vijay Mallya

Speaking to the press, MEA spokesperson Vikas Swarup said they haven't heard from the United Kingdom high commission yet. Mallya, who is now in Britain, has already got his diplomatic passport revoked.

Mr. Obama said the United States would also continue to increase its security cooperation with GCC countries. He also worked to convince leaders to provide more resources to opposition fighters in Syria, and to lend firmer backing to a political transition process in the civil war-torn country.

"Right now in Baghdad, there's some big challenges", Obama said. The U.S. and the GCC states stressed their support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an worldwide agreement reached on July 14, 2015.

Obama has played down those fears, saying that Iranian leaders will feel compelled to use the money from the deal to bolster their failing economy and that "most of the destabilizing activity that Iran engages in is low-tech, low-cost activity".

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.

Obama's policy has led the Kingdom to break with its long tradition of quiet diplomacy and behind-the-scenes maneuvers. Besides Saudi Arabia, the GCC includes the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain.
Real estate mogul Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tightened their grips on the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations on Tuesday, sweeping through Northeastern states packed with delegates ahead of critical primaries in May.

Trump, 69, declared himself the "presumptive" Republican nominee after posting big wins in Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. But in a primary dominated by voters who feel disenfranchised and betrayed by their party, it's hard to envision anything more likely to engender backlash than Republican leaders deciding to nominate someone who's won fewer votes than Trump - or none at all - based on the vagaries of delegate math. Depending on what the final vote tally looks like in the state, Clinton will make the path to the nomination even more unlikely for rival Bernie Sanders.

Democrats award delegates proportionally, which allowed Clinton to maintain her lead over Sanders even as he rattled off a string of wins in previous contests. Sanders was in West Virginia, which holds a May 10 vote, where an enthusiastic crowd of thousands cheered him.

"It was really unusual when I saw these two get together".

Barbara Boxer is Not Fan of Cruz-Fiorina Ticket

Fiorina dropped out of the race in February and endorsed Ted Cruz in March. "Over and over again, Carly has shattered glass ceilings".

"I think the only card she has is the women's card", Trump said. The business tycoon now has 77 percent of the delegates he needs to become the Republican presidential nominee.

He said he was winning independent voters and some Republicans and added: "That is a point that I hope the delegates to the Democratic convention fully understand". The Democratic front-runner is now 90 percent of the way to her party's nomination after four solid victories of her own Tuesday.

Kasich is not campaigning In Indiana, while Cruz is not campaigning in the States of New Mexico and OR as part of this strategic alliance.

Sanders, the other victor of Tuesday's primaries, gained little ground against Clinton, who now has 1,618 delegates to Sanders' 1,267.

Cruz channels Reagan in early pick of Fiorina as vice president

Fiorina , who joined Cruz for the announcement , said she was honored and humbled to be selected as the senator's running mate. As a plus, Fiorina had already tangled with Trump before when the mercurial real estate tycoon made fun of her face.

He pointed to his campaign's success coming from relative obscurity to seriously challenge the Clinton juggernaut.

Pennsylvania was the biggest prize of the night, with 189 Democratic delegates and 71 GOP spots up for grabs. According to the AP count, Clinton now has 2,141 delegates while Sanders has 1,321. That's why we are in this race until the last vote is cast. While he remains the only candidate with viable chance to win nomination, nonetheless he has still to get around 300 delegates to cross the 1,237 mark.

To win the nomination, Sanders would essentially have to win all of the remaining pledged delegates and pick up the support of a dozen or so superdelegates, either from those already supporting Clinton or the approximately 160 superdelegates who haven't publicly backed a candidate.

As the polls closed at 8 p.m. ET, all of the broadcast and cable news networks made four fast calls-declaring wins in four of the "Acela primary" states.
Following his meetings with Gulf leaders, Obama planned to depart Saudi Arabia late Thursday for Britain and Germany, the final two stops on his trip.

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.

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 states to keep up the pressure.

Obama, finishing his brief trip to the kingdom, said he and the Gulf leaders had agreed about ways to move forward in the campaign against the Islamic State group, with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council agreeing to "increase their contributions to the fight".

The president said reports of strains in the US relationship with the Sunni monarchies of the GCC - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman - had been overblown, adding that disagreements generally have centered on mainly Shiite Iran.

Saudi King Salman also spoke positively, stressing the GCC's commitment to developing ties with the USA "in order to serve common interests and security and peace".

Turkey's Erdogan needs thicker skin, EU's Tusk says

She explained that "Our goal is not only to stop illegal migration, but for refugees to have more opportunities near their home". Human rights groups say some of the camps have been attacked and are pressing Ankara to give the refugees shelter inside Turkey.

Nearly 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.

He referred to Iran's "destabilising activities" in the region but said: "None of our nations have an interest in conflict with Iran".

Iran's emergence from global isolation following the nuclear deal has anxious the Gulf monarchies, which fear Tehran will be emboldened to seek a still bigger regional role.

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. He warned that the paralysis is impeding U.S.-led efforts to defeat the Islamic State group and reconstruct war-damaged Iraq. But U.S. 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.

Mr Ben Rhodes, a close adviser to Mr Obama, said there were also "political steps that can be taken", as Iraq would need assistance to hold on to and rebuild areas reclaimed from ISIS.

In a morning session of talks, the leaders expressed cautious optimism about a nascent ceasefire in Yemen and the prospects for peace talks opening in Kuwait Thursday, the White House said. Jihadists, including the local branch of Al Qaeda, have exploited the Yemen conflict to strengthen their presence in the country's south.

Will Ferrell to Play Ronald Reagan in Alzheimer's Comedy 'Reagan'

In addition to starring, Ferrell will also produce the project under his Gary Sanchez Productions outfit. Mike Rosolio's screenplay tracks Reagan at the beginning of his second term.

Obama and Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz walk to the USA president's motorcade after meeting at Erga Palace in Riyadh.

Speaking to reporters, the president said the United States and its Arab partners are working to have "institutionalized communication at every level of government" to ease unintended friction in a region that remains "fraught" with political strife. "My personal view is that America has changed", he said.

But work remains, the president said.

"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. Obama said the pact didn't reflect a shift in USA allegiances, however, citing longstanding efforts to bolster the security of Middle East allies.

"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.
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Egyptian police have arrested an Egyptian human rights advocate who is advising the family of the Italian doctoral student found dead in February near Cairo with torture marks on his body.

Ahmed Abdullah, head of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, who assisting Giulio Regenis family in the death case of the Italian student was reportedly arrested on Tuesday at dawn from his home.

Egyptian authorities say his arrest is not connected to his work with the Italian family but that he is being investigated for violating Egypts strict protest law, which criminalizes any demonstrations that take place without police permission.

Regenis family has called for his immediate release, saying that Abdullah was helping them to in the legal issues related to the investigation in the death of their son.

A colleague of Abdullah, Duaa Mustafa, was quoted by the media as saying that Abdullah faces ten charges including belonging to a terrorist organization, spreading false news, statements and rumors aimed at interfering with the regime and inflicting damage to people and public interest.

Regeni, a doctoral student from Cambridge University was found tortured to death in February near Cairo after being seen for the last time on January 25, the fifth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. Egyptian authorities had banned demonstrations and deployed thousands of security forces in the street of Cairo.

Egyptian security forces have been accused of the death of the Italian student. Regenis death and the alleged failure by Egyptian authorities to collaborate with their Italian counterpart in the investigations have poisoned ties between the two countries.

Rome has recalled its envoy to Cairo in protest against Egyptian authorities reluctance.

Regenis death is not solved yet, that a young engineer, holding British and Egyptian citizenships, was killed in London in an alleged arson.

Sheriff Habib, 21, was reportedly found caught in a car set ablaze in a garage, in Southall early Monday. He succumbed to his burns later at a hospital in Essex.

Habibs decease angered Egyptians who link his death to Regenis.
UNSMIL Chief Martin Kobler Wednesday condemned the death of 12 Egyptians and 3 Libyans at Bani Walid the previous day following undetailed incidents.

I strongly deplore these terrible killings and call on those with authority on the ground in Bani Walid to ensure that the incidents are investigated and to prevent any further killings, Kobler said.

The men were killed on Tuesday at Bani Walid, 150 km from Tripoli. The location is said to be controlled by militiamen loyal to the new unity government.

The incident sparked following the killing of three Libyan migrant smugglers, reported the London-based Qatari media, The New Arab, quoting Egyptian sources. Relatives of the three Libyans retaliated killing 16 migrants, mostly Egyptians.

Another group of 14 migrants from other nationalities including Syrians were also killed, The New Arab reports.

Thousands of Egyptians live and work in Libya. IS last year in February aired a five-minute video showing the terrorist group beheading a group of Coptic Christians on the beach in its stronghold of Sirte.

The 21 victims were killed for their faith as the terrorists referred to them as the people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian Church.

The Serbian government in a separate report announced Wednesday its citizen Miroslav Tomic abducted on Saturday was released.

We have confirmed information he was released from captivity. We have been informed he will appear at his workplace tomorrow, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said.

Tomic, a maintenance engineer has been working for a German company in Libya.

Libya descended into chaos since 2011 following the overthrow of the countrys ruler Muamar Gaddafi.
Photo: David Bro//California DMV/ZUMA/Corbis

The brother of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook was arrested Thursday in California. The brother, Syed Raheel Farook; his wife, Tatiana; and his wifes sister, Mariya Chernykh, were charged with conspiracy to commit marriage fraud and lying to investigators, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The charges stem from the alleged sham marriage between Mariya Chernykh and Enrique Marquez, a friend of the San Bernardino gunman, who was charged with providing weapons and material support to Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. Investigators discovered that Marquez had gotten paid to marry Chernykh because she was a Russian citizen and wasnt in the U.S. legally. Chernykh had allegedly been paying Marquez $200 per month to keep up the ruse. They both claimed they lived together, though Chernykh apparently resided in Ontario. Marquez had already been charged with marriage fraud in the case.

Authorities allege Raheel Farook and his wife were complicit in the fraud because they told investigators that both Marquez and Chernykh were living together when authorities began questioning them in connection to the San Bernardino attacks. The Farooks allegedly forged a lease to make it seem like the other couple was staying together in their home, and took and posted staged photos of the pair.

Investigators discovered these irregularities while looking into the December 2015 attack that left 14 people dead at a San Bernardino social-services center, but none are being charged with terrorism-related crimes.
Baltimore, one year ago today. Photo: Copyright Ken Cedeno 2015

Good morning and welcome to Fresh Intelligence, our roundup of the stories, ideas, and memes youll be talking about today. In this edition, Baltimore police shoot an eighth grader, Dennis Hastert becomes speaker of the big house, and Ted Cruz sets Carly Fiorina up to fail a second time. Heres the rundown for Thursday, April 28.

WEATHER

Fifteen tornadoes  and counting  have been reported in the last 24 hours, including one touching down in an urban area in Omaha. Luckily, today should be tornado-free, but there will be extreme weather in the form of thunderstorms heading east across the Ohio and Tennessee valleys and to the coast. That includes New York City, where we can expect clouds and plenty of rain. [Weather.com]

FRONT PAGE

One Year After Riots, a Police Shooting

Baltimore police shot and injured a black 13-year-old boy yesterday. The boy was carrying a toy gun, which two plainclothes police officers believed to be real. He ran from the officers, and they chased him before shooting him once in the leg and once in the shoulder. The eighth grader was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, and his mother was taken in for questioning. In what PR types describe as poor optics, while the shooting took place, across town the mayor was hosting a ceremony to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the riots that rocked Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. [The Atlantic]

EARLY AND OFTEN

Bernie Sanders Streamlines His Operation

The Bernie Sanders campaign is laying off hundreds of staffers and focusing his energies on California  the most populous state in the country  whose primary is in June. Firing staffers isnt usually a good sign for a campaign, and this time is no exception. Sanders is basically acknowledging that the Democratic race is over, but he still plans to make his progressive influence felt in the Democratic party.

Newt Gingrich Now Second-Worst Speaker of the House in History

Dennis Hastert, the one-time Speaker of the House who molested at least four children while working as a high-school wrestling couch, is going to jail. No, not for the molestation  that was so long ago  but for illegally structuring bank withdrawals, which he used to pay off his victims. He was sentenced yesterday to 15 months behind bars.

Ted Cruz Overcomplicates Dropping Out of Race

Ted Cruz went out and got himself a woman card. The Texas senator tapped failed presidential candidate and paper pusher Carly Fiorina for vice-president yesterday. Fiorina appeared on TV to assure everyone that all the nasty things she said about Cruz were not true and that theyve since bonded  probably over their shared conservative values and love for making people uncomfortable.

Trump Foreign Policy Designed to Fit on Hat

Donald Trump gave his first foreign-policy speech yesterday. It was called America First, and it stuck pretty closely to that theme. Trump explained how he would take the Mexican-wall approach to foreign policy: Build up the military, but make other countries pay for it. Madeleine Albright described the speech as simplistic slogans and contradictions, while Lindsey Graham said it was isolationism surrounded by disconnected thought. [Reuters]

THE STREET, THE VALLEY

Facebook Shares, Now With Lucrative Double Meaning

Facebook blew away Wall Street analysts yesterday when it announced its quarterly revenues were up by more than 50 percent. It also unveiled a new method of structuring its stock, which is similar to Googles and which has been described as Zuckerberg consolidating his power. In related news, Facebook stock rose 9.5 percent. [Reuters]

FBI Values Its Privacy, Sees No Irony

The FBI has no problem with secrets, as long as theyre its own. The agency has said it will not submit the methods it used to unlock the iPhone that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters to a government review. The review was intended to determine whether the FBI should share its hack with Apple, so that solves that. [Bloomberg]

Authorities Must Have Warrant for Search, America Begins to Catch Up to Law & Order Version of Itself

The Email Privacy Act has unanimously passed the House of Representatives. The act states that authorities must have a warrant to search emails even if theyve already been opened, and that a warrant is still necessary for electronic information even if its more than half-a-year old. Apparently that was not always the case. [The Verge]

Carmaker Has Trouble Car-making

Theres really no way to sugarcoat this: This week alone, Ford has recalled 300,000 vehicles for five separate mechanical issues. Were not sure if it makes things better or worse, but none of the five issues are related. So far no one has been hurt. [CNet]

MEDIA BUBBLE

Job Opening for Man in Washington

Michael Regan, the top government-affairs official for 21st Century Fox, is quitting. Regan is considered one of Rupert Murdochs closest confidants and is often described by journalists as Murdochs man in Washington. This guy has seen some stuff  hell be taking a job as a Fox consultant. [Politico]

Arianna Huffington to Double-Task

Huffington Post namesake and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington is joining the board of directors at Uber. But dont worry  she will no longer write about Uber on her news service. [WaPo]

Comcast Uses Earnings Spike to Treat Itself

Yesterday was a very exciting day for Comcast, the largest cable company in the world. First, the company announced earnings that beat analyst estimates across the board. Then, it announced what it would do with all that money: Buy DreamWorks. The cable giant is in talks to acquire the production company for more than $3 billion. [WSJ]

PHOTO OP

Boycott Beyonce

Check out Beyonces new tour merchandise: so confounding, it must be cool. Wed rather boycott air.

Beyonce is selling BOYCOTT BEYONCE t-shirts as tour merch  pic.twitter.com/zjD3HcV7XG  Beyonce Australia (@BeyonceAUS) April 27, 2016

MORNING MEME

Oh My God, She Sings

How did this race get even more hallucinatory? What is this song? Did she write it? Get Cruz up there and theyd look like an animatronic band from one of those weird pizza places.

OTHER LOCAL NEWS

Aliens Run Amok

A huge, mysterious column of smoke was spotted over Area 51 yesterday. As were sure you know, Area 51 is the secret military base where the U.S. government keeps all the aliens it has apprehended. Well, now it looks like those aliens have escaped and are leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. That, or something else was on fire. [Express]

Los Angeles Bus Accident Terrifying, Confounding

Somehow a Los Angeles school bus carrying eight special-needs students managed to impale itself on a railroad crossing arm. No one was hurt, but will someone please explain to us how this is even possible? It looks like a school-bus kebab. [UPI]

HAPPENING TODAY

You Can Now Buy Wine on eBay, Please Forgive Tomorrows Typos

Today, eBay is launching its wine section in partnership with the wine app Drync. The new section will work like regular eBay but for wine instead of scrimshaw and monogrammed cuff links. Now you have a reason to shop online before you get drunk. [Forbes]

Commerce Department Releases First-Quarter Report

The Commerce Department will release its initial estimate on the economys first-quarter growth today. Nobody is really expecting any surprises, as the figure should be fairly low  most likely in the ballpark of one percent. [NYT]

GUYS, DROP EVERYTHING

We dont understand it, but were not complaining. Krispy Kreme has invented a new holiday: Apparently today is Super Hero Day. All you need to know is that if you purchase a dozen donuts  like you do every day, were sure  then you get another dozen free. This is not a drill! Enjoy your 24 donuts. [Time]
More like JetBooze.

Did you fly on JetBlue flight 583 from New York to Orlando, or from Orlando back to New York on flight 584 on April 21 last year? If so, you may want to know that your pilot mightve been trashed.

According to a federal complaint made public yesterday, Dennis Murphy Jr. was subject to random alcohol testing when he landed in New York and blew a .111, which drunk-driving enthusiasts will remember is well above the legal limit. When he took the test again 15 minutes later he blew a .091, which is technically legal.

In case you think this might be some kind of mistake, Murphys co-pilot claims he was red-faced and drinking an unknown beverage from a cup before each flight as well as while he was flying. The pilot also became erratic during the test, rapidly chewing gum and asking why he wasnt being tested for drugs, too (which, okay, good question). For his part, Murphy claims he was not drunk and blames the gum he was chewing  that Bacardi liquid-center gum will get you every time.

Murphy was arraigned in Brooklyn yesterday and released on a $50,000 bond, although if found guilty hes facing up to 15 years in prison. He has since quit JetBlue in what we imagine was one of those Youre not firing me  I quit! situations. Luckily for the 270 passengers on his flights, the computers that actually fly planes these days are impervious to alcohol.
Thomas Gilbert Jr. Photo: Jefferson Siegel/NY Daily News via Getty Images

Thomas Gilbert Jr., the Princeton grad who is accused of killing his hedge-fund dad, will get another psychiatric evaluation to determine if hes competent to stand trial. Gilberts attorneys, making their case, told the judge that Gilbert believes hes being slowly poisoned by batteries on Rikers.

His attorneys also said that Gilbert had tried to get in touch with the head of Cablevision because, according to the New York Post, he doesnt have cable in his jail cell. Previously, court-appointed psychiatrists had said Gilbert suffered from paranoid delusions in the past, including one where he believed Saturday Night Live characters were making fun of him through the television.

This is the latest in a back-and-forth to figure out if he can stand trial in the alleged killing of his father. In September, those two court-appointed psychiatrists said Gilbert definitely was unfit for trial. But then in December, a judge sided with the prosecution and their expert, who testified that Gilbert was competent and had functioned normally in society before the crime. Gilbert was deemed mentally fit. Now the judge will hear testimony from two new court psychiatrists on Gilberts mental state and review the question of his competency at a hearing in June.

The New York Times notes that Gilbert made a rare court appearance Wednesday; he usually doesnt attend hearings in person, instead writing letters to the judge. (Hes apparently a big fan of snail mail; he also reportedly wrote a letter to the Manhattan DA last year, touting his academic credentials.) Gilbert is accused of shooting and killing his dad, Thomas Gilbert Sr., in January 2015. The murder was allegedly provoked by Gilbert Jr.s anger over his fathers decision to reduce his allowance.
Dont look now, but the Trump campaign may be catching up fast to the Cruz campaigns delegate-selection tricks. Photo-Illustration: Photos: Getty Images

On April 19, NBC News reported the Cruz campaign was bragging that its organizational wizardry would enable the Texan to pick up a lot of Pennsylvanias 57 unbound delegates on April 26  delegates that were elected at the congressional-district level with no indication on the ballot of their presidential-candidate preferences. Indeed, Cruzs Keystone power was supposedly why he was spending the evening of April 19 in that state rather than personally witnessing his drubbing in New York that night.

Hell be in Philly for his watch party tonight, NBCs Hallie Jackson said. Thats indicative of where he and his campaign see this race going, to Pennsylvania, where they are looking to make a play for these unbound delegates. Even if they come in a distant third, a top campaign aide tells me, they will still, they believe, pick up more than half the delegates there.



Theyre looking at more than 30, she reported.

Well, as it happened, Cruz did better than a distant third in Pennsylvania yesterday. He was a distant second to Donald Trump with about 22 percent of the vote to Donald Trumps 57 percent and John Kasichs 19 percent. As expected, Trump won all 17 of the statewide delegates. But at the congressional-district level, Cruz did not win more than half the unbound delegates, and certainly didnt win more than 30. According to another NBC report after the primary, Cruz won two. And the big winner was the organizationally inept  or so it was thought  Mr. Trump.

NBC News reached out to all 54 delegate winners after the polls closed Tuesday night. Interviews reveal that as of Wednesday afternoon 35 said they intend to support Trump on the first ballot at the convention  a number that could rise north of 40 when the final ten delegates are reached  Eight delegates remain uncommitted to any candidate. They have until the first ballot at the convention to decide their vote (and any of the 54 could technically change their minds any time before that first vote).

There was a lot of talk going into primary day in Pennsylvania that a lot of candidates for these unbound and unidentified delegate slots were promising to vote for their district winner. Is that how Trump rolled up his shocking number of pledges? Not really:

Of the 35 delegates who said theyd support Trump, 25 won their election to be delegates Tuesday openly supporting the Republican front runner, reflecting the popular vote results in the state. This group of pro-Trump delegates are critical in the instance of an open convention and if no candidate wins a majority on the first round of voting. The pro-Trump delegates will ensure Trump has support among the most volatile group of delegates.

So only ten of these 35 Trumpsters  and again, the numbers are likely to rise before the countings done  are backing him only because he won their districts. Unless it was all a bizarre coincidence, most of them won because somehow or other voters figured out, without any information being on the ballot, that they were with the Donald. That would suggest it was Trump, not Cruz, who had the superior organization in Pennsylvania, by a goodly margin.

Perhaps the narrative that Cruz was limiting Trumps odds of a first-ballot victory by winning all the unbound delegates in the land was a bit premature, eh? Beyond that, you have to wonder if Team Trump is catching up in the secondary game of getting its own people into delegate slots already bound to him by primary or caucus results, making a second-ballot Cruz win a bit less likely in case Trump fails to get to 1,237 before Cleveland. Anyway you look at it, Trumps big night on April 26 is getting bigger by the moment.
Check your female privilege. Photo: Joey Foley/Getty Images

Donald Trump has 99 problems, but female voters are the main one. Were it not for the Nineteenth Amendment, the price of Canadian real estate would be much higher than it is today: A recent NBCWall Street Journal poll found that Trump leads Hillary Clinton by 3 points among men, but loses to her by 23 points among women. That same poll showed 69 percent of women respondents expressing an unfavorable view of the Donald. Clearly then, fashioning a new, female-friendly message should be the top priority for the Trump campaign as it pivots to the general election.

Without the womans card, Hillary would not even be a viable person to run for City Council positions, the mogul informed Savannah Guthrie on the Today show Thursday morning. The comment echoed remarks Trump made after sweeping the Acela primaries Tuesday night, in which the he declared, Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I dont think shed get 5 percent of the vote.

Trump has hammered this point relentlessly for the past 72 hours, playing the womans card card in every major interview. It appears to be his primary line of attack against his presumptive fall opponent: Trumps apparent strategy for winning over women voters is to remind them of their female privilege.

Mr. Trump, for you to say that if she were not a woman she would be getting 5 percent suggests the only thing she has going for her is that she was a woman, not that she was a former senator, former secretary of State, and lawyer, Guthrie explained to the Republican front-runner. Do you understand why people find that to be kind of a demeaning comment?

I find it to be a true comment, Trump replied. I think the only thing she has got going is shes a woman. She has done a terrible job in so many different ways  Shes playing that card like I have never seen anybody play it before.

Maybe Trumps new team of veteran campaign strategists conducted exhaustive research into the attitudes of undecided female voters and discovered that they all long for a candidate with the balls to argue, Women have an easier time attaining positions of power in America than men do. Maybe what these voters want to hear most is that any success they have in life is due, at least in part, to the unearned advantage of their anatomy. Maybe they all checked strongly agree next to the statement It is cool and good for a male presidential candidate with no experience in government to suggest a female former secretary of State lacks the credentials to run for City Council.

Or maybe misogyny is Donald Trumps core ideology, male supremacy his one unwavering conviction. Maybe fear of female power is so fundamental to his psyche, he literally cannot stop himself from whining about how hes going to have to listen to Hillarys shouting for the next five months. And maybe this is the reason hes never going to be president.

We report, you decide.
Photo: Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty Images; David Becker/Getty Images

The universal headline summary of Donald Trumps prepared foreign-policy speech yesterday was that it lacked details. Trumps campaign encouraged this conclusion by leaking in advance that it would contain few specifics, and media correctly primed to think of Trump as an ignorant blowhard covered it as such. But the speech, in fact, contained an important and somewhat-curious idea: The United States should form a closer relationship, even an alliance, with Russia. To get the thrust of Trumps point, it has to be read in full context, which he presented in counter-position with his policy toward China:

We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes, but we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests. Russia, for instance, has also seen the horror of Islamic terrorism. I believe an easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible. Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries. Some say the Russians wont be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we cant make a deal under my administration, a deal thats great  not good, great  for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table. Its as simple as that. Were going to find out. Fixing our relations with China is another important step  and really toward creating an even more prosperous period of time. China respects strength and by letting them take advantage of us economically, which they are doing like never before, we have lost all of their respect. We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit that we have to find a way quickly, and I mean quickly, to balance. A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China, better than we have right now. Look at what China is doing in the South China Sea. Theyre not supposed to be doing it.

In the broad thematic sense, Trump is treating Russia and China the same: promising vaguely to make great deals with them. A slightly closer read, however, reveals that he is proposing virtually opposite policies toward them. Trump identifies ways in which China is acting against American interests: by running a trade surplus with us, and by expanding into the South China Sea. Trump proposes to mend relations with China by standing up to them and forcing them to respect us as equals, after they have supplied unilateral concessions to us.

His depiction of American relations with Russia is completely different. Trump does not identify any hostile Russian behavior that must change. This is telling since, having singled out Chinas muscle-flexing in the South China Sea, he ignores Russias much more flagrant bullying of its neighbors, such as Ukraine, whose territory it has gobbled up. Instead he identifies shared interests with Russia  opposition to Islamic terrorism  and proposes to end this horrible cycle of hostility. Describing American-Russian relations as a cycle of hostility assigns the blame to both sides, rather than to Putins aggressiveness.

So Trump is signalling a clear turn in American policy, which under his administration would ramp up hostility toward China and wind down hostility toward Russia. This is in keeping with Trumps long-standing views on both countries (not just China, which he has mocked and taunted, sometimes in pidgin, from the outset of his candidacy.) Trump has deep affection for Russia and its corrupt, misogynistic dictator. I think I would just get along very well with Vladimir Putin, Trump announced in July. Last December, after Putin praised Trump, the Republican front-runner returned the favor: It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond. When asked about his embrace of a dictator who has murdered journalists, Trump replied last year, Its never been proven that hes killed anybody. So, you know, youre supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.

Comments like this are merely the superficial manifestation of a deepening alliance. Franklin Foer has a long and fascinating report for Slate on Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager (and long-standing confidant) who has also worked to undermine Putins enemies in Ukraine. And, as Michael Crowley details in Politico magazine, Russia Today, the Kremlin propaganda organ, routinely lionizes Trump. Both stories depict sides of the same phenomenon: Russias campaign to cultivate influence in the West by corrupting members of the American media and political Establishment.

To the degree they have attacked him on foreign policy, Trumps critics in both parties have mostly confined themselves to the themes that are digestible extensions of his personal style  he is ignorant, inconsistent, temperamentally unfit to lead, and a danger to blunder the country into war. All of those charges are true, yet they manage to deny something that, in a candidate without such flamboyant drawbacks, would itself be a campaign-threatening scandal: Trump is Vladimir Putins stooge.
Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/Getty Images

Time and again, health research offers up the same cruel paradox: You have to choose, in so many cases, between health and enjoyment, between more time on Earth and more time just doing whatever the hell you want. (If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking, and loving, you dont actually live longer, the British writer Clement Freud once quipped. It just seems longer.) And researchers from Oregon State and Colorado State Universities just added to the pile with a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, arguing that a longer life and a longer working life go hand in hand  and that, conversely, early retirement may mean fewer years to enjoy it.

The authors looked at data from 2,956 people collected by the Health and Retirement Study between 1992 and 2010. All of the subjects retired sometime within that window; 1,934 of them were designated healthy retirees, meaning that health wasnt a major factor in their decision to exit the workforce. Over the course of the study, 12 percent of the healthy retirees and 26 percent of the unhealthy retirees died (234 and 262 people, respectively). After controlling for the advantages of the healthy group  whose members were more likely to be wealthier and better educated  they found that an additional year of work lowered the risk of death for both groups, by 11 percent for the healthy subjects and 9 percent for the unhealthy ones.

Heres the thing, though: Dig hard enough  and really, not very hard  and youll find research showing any number of conclusions about age of retirement and age of death. A 2013 study in the Journal of Health Economics laid out the case for each side: Leaving employment may involve reduced stress and greater enjoyment of life, suggesting that early retirement enhances longevity, the authors wrote. However, it may also lead to reduced mental and physical activity, loss of social networks, and health-adverse habits, suggesting that later retirement may extend expected lifespan.

That particular study, as it turned out, found no causal link between retirement age and longevity in either direction. Ditto with a 2007 study of older Israeli adults, once the researchers controlled for their reasons for leaving the workforce. A long-term study of former Shell Oil employees, meanwhile, found a higher mortality rate among people who retired at age 55 than those who called it quits at 60 or 65, and a 2001 paper written for the Social Security Administration found a link between early retirement among men and earlier death. On the other hand, in 2009, researchers analyzed data from a German health-insurance company to show that retiring early may actually confer an advantage. (They also gave their study a title worthy of a Bond-villain monologue: Time to Retire  Time to Die?)

More effective than pitting work against retirement, then, might be looking at the individual things that each can offer: social support, intellectual engagement, a sense of purpose. An employee who has a fulfilling job and a thriving social network at the office may find herself lonely and bored once she leaves it for good; conversely, a worker whose job is high on stress and low on reward may find new hobbies, interests, and friends once he no longer has to clock in each day.

In that regard, the authors of this latest study do offer some nuance: The findings seem to indicate that people who remain active and engaged gain a benefit from that, researcher Robert Stawski, a professor of health studies at Oregon State, said in a statement. We see the relationship between work and longevity, but we dont know everything about peoples lives, health, and well-being after retirement that could be influencing their longevity.
For mom.

A kicky umbrella, anything Elena Ferrante, and other gifts your mom will love, courtesy of our editors.

Izzy Grinspan, Senior Editor, the Cut

Odette New York Studs from Steven Alan

Things my mom loves: stripes, bright colors, tying a cardigan around her shoulders, well-crafted nearly flat shoes. Shes preppy without being too Lilly Pulitzer about it, and she likes a good retail experience, so I felt like I was performing a good deed (okay, were talking about my mother  I was performing a mitzvah) when I introduced her to Steven Alan, Brooklyns own master of stripes and flats. The jewelry is particularly to her taste, since its all very simple and understated. I especially like these lapis studs by Odette New York  and I think she would too. And although theyre small, that Yves Klein blue packs a punch.

$160 at Steven Alan

Jackson McHenry, Associate Editor, Vulture

Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay and Diaries

A few years ago, in the grips of a perfectly normal obsession with Jane Austen movies, I stumbled on Emma Thompsons set diaries from her time writing and starring in Sense and Sensibility. Dishy, witty, and with just enough British restraint, this is the perfect gift for a mom who loves costume dramas, or maybe just had fun watching The Great British Bake Off one time. I gave a copy to my mom, and she kept texting quotes from the book to me for months afterward. Then I realized I could give copies to other peoples moms, and to friends of mine, and to former professors. Every single person has loved the book. In fact, it is possible that Emma Thompsons set diaries are too good of a gift. Use the power well.

$18 at Amazon

Alan Sytsma, Editorial Director, Grub Street

Nespresso Pixie Espresso Maker, Electric Titan

When I bought my parents their first Nespresso machine, I didnt know it would become the all-time-greatest family gift, one that would inspire them to buy a steady stream of new machines, and something theyd also give as a gift. But Id say it took all of a day for them to get completely hooked on the little multicolored capsules that, with a push of a button, whir and churn and deliver a fine  not great, but fine  shot of espresso in the intensity of your choosing. And the pods, when you need refills, can be delivered right to your house. Anyway, Mom loves it, especially with a little warm milk for a kind of makeshift latte. When she recently visited New York and stayed at my place, I woke up and offered her a cup of single-origin beans from somewhere-or-another, lovingly cold-brewed overnight and mixed with just enough milk. She took a sip and looked at my own Nespresso machine. I knew what coffee she really wanted  and it only took about 20 seconds to make it happen.

$184 at Macys

Dayna Evans, Staff Writer, the Cut

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante (boxed set, Kindle Edition)

This may seem terribly basic, but a year ago I bought my mom the first two novels in the Neapolitan series by Elena Ferrante and I couldnt be more surprised to learn that Ferrante is Mom-approved. She would text me details from the lives of Lila and Elena as if they were people we knew, and I would occasionally have to stop to make sure they werent. Maybe its a mother-daughter thing, or maybe its because my great-grandparents are from Naples, but the Neapolitan novels ended up being a verified hit with my mom. She didnt wait for me to get her the final two books in the series, but thanks to a box set that came out last October, you can deliver them to your mama all in one go.

$40 at Amazon

Stella Bugbee, Editorial Director, The Cut

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante (on Kindle)

My mom has a masters in English and reads more than any person Ive ever met. We are in a book club for two that doesnt meet formally. I love a book, I tell her to read it. She loves a book, she tells me to read it. We discuss. For months I havent been able to shut up about these epic novels about life in postwar Naples and the friendship between two women. I would have given her my hard copies but shes been practicing the KonMari method since before I was born and would never want a stack of books, so she reads the Kindle editions.

$10 each at Amazon

Emma Barrie, Writer, Vulture

Wild Medicine Crystal Soap

Ill just say it: I dont know your mom. But I do know that almost no one doesnt like soap, and even fewer people dont like crystals. Remember those candles youd burn down that had little gifts inside when the wax melted? This is like that, but the soapier, more beautiful version that has beneficial essential oils and healing crystals, and exfoliates. You can pick a soap based on your moms personality, or if your mom is kind of all over the place, like mine, you can get her a few!

$22 at Urban Outfitters

Abraham Riesman, Senior Writer, Vulture

Joan Nathans Jewish Holiday Cookbook

My mother is converting to Judaism sometime later this year. Despite technically being an Episcopalian of Scot-Irish descent, shes long been obsessed with Jewry, and for some reason, shes decided to make it official. Thats why Im thinking about getting her a copy of Joan Nathans Jewish Holiday Cookbook. My sister and I were raised in the Jewish tradition (our dad is 100 percent Jewish, but still struggled to compete with our moms unofficial Jewishness), so we know as well as anyone that food is the cornerstone of any Israelite celebration. This guide is chockfull of holiday recipes from various branches of Judaism  North African, Eastern European, contemporary American  and written in lighthearted, cozy prose. If your mom is Jewish or just Jew-ish, thisll make a great addition to her culinary library.

$24 at Amazon

Lindsay Peoples, Associate Market Editor, the Cut

KitchenAid Mixer

I plan to buy my mom a mixer because every single time Im home, we are baking. Whether its a holiday and were making cakes for dessert, or just making cookies for fun, its something weve always done together and bonded over. This KitchenAid mixer (its the version my mom has commented on when weve been out shopping together) will make it a lot easier to get the batter going so I can spend more time licking the bowl.

$450 at Macys

Susan Rinkunas, Health Editor, the Cut

Frank Lloyd Wright Tree of Life Umbrella

My mom loves Frank Lloyd Wright. She has lamps, books, and bookmarks all bearing the architects designs. Shes been to Fallingwater and other houses he designed whose names I dont even know. So last year I got her this umbrella because, duh, and also because printed umbrellas are a small joy on dreary days. Umbrellas with paintings on them are cool, too, I guess, but the neutral colors here will match almost anything.

$36 at Amazon

Rebecca Ramsey, Style Director, the Cut

The Middle Eastern Vegetarian Cookbook, by Salma Hage

One of my favorite things to do whenever I head back home to Detroit is eat Middle Eastern food with my mom. We catch up on work, family, and really everything while sharing plates of mjuderah, eggplant salad, fresh juices, and the most delicious garlic spreads at places weve been going to since I was a child. Salma Hages new book, a follow-up to her best seller, The Lebanese Kitchen, presents my mom (a lifelong healthy eater and brand-new vegetarian) the opportunity and challenge of re-creating some of our favorite dishes, entirely meatless now, or any of the 150 recipes in the book, with the enjoyment of eating at home. And, since I dont make it home as much as I would like, I plan to get a copy, too, so we can compare notes and still share a Middle Eastern meal, now over the phone.

$34 at Amazon

Alexis Swerdloff, Strategist Editor

Tata Harper Aromatic Stress Treatment

My mother loves a tiny little scent to carry around in her purse, and this year, I am going to get her a small bottle of Tata Harpers Aromatic Stress Treatment. Its about the size of a tube of Chapstick, and sits next to my computer screen. Approximately three times a day, when Im feeling fidgety and anxious, I rub a little bit of this on my wrists, inhale it, smile, and then keep on working. I inherited my fidgety anxiousness from her, and I think she will love it.

$80 at Bergdorf Goodman
Minder, Ishqr, and a host of new Muslim dating apps. Photo: Getty Images

When Humaira Mubeen graduated from college in 2012, she fumbled around for a place that felt true to her. A pop-culture-and-tech-savvy millennial with liberal values and a strong attachment to her Islamic faith, shes a hybrid of different identities. But then she discovered a group of like-minded friends on a tiny listserv called Mipsterz  Muslim Hipsters  and began to create a community of her own.*

The listserv started as a joke, she says  but it soon became much more. Everyone was super open-minded. We talked about everything. There was a lot of dialogue about relationships: How do you go about finding someone who is like you?

A year later, those conversations led Mubeen to create the website Hipster Shaadi, its name playing off the Indian matrimonial site shaadi.com, a favorite platform of immigrant parents wanting to fix up their American children with nice Muslim prospects back home. For millennial Muslims of South Asian extraction, Shaadi  with its tone-deaf profiles in awkward English and requests for wheatish or fair complexions only  is usually invoked as a punch line.

But when sign-ups flooded in, Mubeen realized that her lighthearted, jokey personal project, with its sweet mustachioed logo, had become a mecca for modern, hybridized Muslims like herself. Last May, her team released an iOS version of the app called Ishqr, billed as a platform to connect young and multifaceted Muslims.

Ishqr joins a host of new Muslim dating apps. They include Halaler, Muzmatch, Salaam Swipe, Half Our Deen (after the Koranic verse When a man marries, he has fulfilled half of the deen, deen being Arabic for religion), Muslima, Crescent, and Minder. With around 67 percent of American Muslims under the age of 40 and the Muslim portion of the total U.S. population projected to double by 2050 (its currently 3.3. million, according to Pew Research), this slice of the American pie is growing increasingly vibrant. For its members, many of whom grew up in small towns with few Muslims, dating apps help solve the problem of how to find each other.

Twenty-six-year-old Amer (his name and some others in this article have been changed) is from an Indiana farming community home to just eight Muslim families. It wasnt until college that he was thrown in with other Muslims his age. But the first girl he dated was so socially conservative that their relationship had to be kept strictly on the DL. It was stressful, and things didnt work out.

Unfortunately, his college towns tight Muslim community yielded a dearth of prospects: Everyone was either engaged or married, or too young for me. But, in Minder, a swipe-right-or-left app described as the Muslim Tinder, he found the connective medium he needed. After a couple of months of matching and messaging, he swiped right on Virginia-based Leyali. They progressed from messaging to texting to phone calls and FaceTime dates to a coffee date in Ohio  and strong feelings soon developed on both sides. The rest is history: After a brief period of halal dating (defined by Amer as dating for the purpose of marriage), Amer and Leyali married.

Haroon Moktarzhada, a dot-com veteran who co-founded Minder, explains the apps appeal this way: If youre a Muslim limiting yourself to dating Muslims, your pool is small  mosque, school, and work friends. You meet two or three people and marry one of them instead of taking the time to meet many people and get an understanding of what you like. Minder is a platform to do that.

He adds that hes seen a lot of divorces among young Muslims who rushed into something after meeting a promising prospect and feeling family pressure to close the deal.

In America, the expectation of what a marriage is is very different than in more traditional, conservative societies, he says. One of the things we tried to do with the app is be unapologetically progressive. With this view, Minder requires profile photos (Ishqr hides pics until a match has been accepted) and avoids restrictive religious features: We didnt want it to be a religious thing. Im on an actual mission to create a culture shift around whats considered appropriate.

The story of Bliss Marriage App  a halal dating app with the tagline The right person for you can be a mosque away  is also instructive. Originally marketed with a guardian feature that required a family member to be carbon-copied on messages between users, Aneesa Memon, the apps 26-year-old founder, says the feature wasnt included in the apps final release because it became apparent that it wasnt necessary. Partners could determine for themselves if their families would approve or not approve.

Bliss is currently on hiatus (Memon says it found more traction in the Middle East than in the U.S.) but Minder 2.0 will be released later this year, and Ishqr is partnering with therapists and clinicians to build knowledge and resources around relationship issues specific to American Muslims. Both Moktarzhada and Mubeen see the stigma around Muslim dating slowly eroding: Minder boasts more than 100,000 users and 1.8 million matches, while Ishqr takes credit for six marriages and 18 engagements.

Still, online dating comes with the usual pitfalls. In a very funny monologue performed at a Muslim Writers Collective open-mic event in February, 27-year-old New Yorker Nadia Iqbal describes the string of feckless suitors she encounters in her quest to find a Muslim mate. In a bit that brings the house down, she lampoons one digital Casanova who tries to lure her with the promise to treat her like a princess:

Inside of my head, I was like, that sounds awful! What are you going to do, lock me in a tower? Curse me with eternal slumber until an interested man kisses me? Allow the paparazzi to invade every aspect of my life until it ends in a car crash that kills me? Burn out my candle at age 39? I was like, Nah, dude, Ive got shit to do. I aint got time to be treated like a princess.

For multifaceted Muslims like Nadia progressive, independent-minded, open to other lifestyles and worldviews, and fiercely attached to their own free will  its all part of the process. She knows that modern romance requires that you kiss a few proverbial frogs before you match with the right person.

Apps are just another way to meet other people, she says. Ive gone on some terrible dates, but theyve made for great stories.

*This posted has been corrected to show that Humaira Mubeen was one of the first members of the Mipsterz listserv, but was not a founder.
"I'm never going to watch that show. I'm exhausted"



lmao

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local news everybody

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this was very educational, now i know why it's called vocal fry.

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what kind of hard-hitting journalism

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brb sending this to my speech path sister

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gonna need to buy some ear plugs in the future then

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I guess some Heffas just want to watch the world burn.

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mariah carey cant hit the octaves of my voice, cause im the most attractive woman on the planet

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i have a deeper voice naturally and i've always been self-conscious abt it :(

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women with deeper voices sound very classy, calm and mature imo. I'm jealous.

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"sound very classy, calm and mature"



lol

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same but I think it's part of the Kardashian personality where they uptalk as well that is the issue. Don't shame your sultry voice!

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i have a bit of a scarlett johansson/ selena gomez voice and i used to HATE when i was younger.

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me too. except my customer service voice which then becomes unnaturally high.

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I am so attracted to women with deep voices

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Own it! I feel like women with deep voices have always been considered sultry~ like Lauren Bacall

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I do too, I started liking it in my 20s. It fits me, I'm basically Daria.

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same but i just like to think that i sound like a phone sex operator and then i love my voice lol

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Me too I think I sound monotone and manly. I also tend to lisp a bit :(

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Mine is all over the freaking place. I didn't talk a lot as a kid and I believe as a result, my vocal cords are under-developed. Sometimes when I talk, my voice cracks like a kid going through puberty and can go from Minnie Mouse-high pitched to more low and...idk, womanly in a single sentence. Bugs the crap out of me.

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Me too a bit, but I know that in the end, with my gender-neutral name, if I do a phone interview for a job, I'll at least get pretty far before they realize i'm not a man. Hopefully I can negotiate a salary over the phone too.

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same. I hate hearing my voice.

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Same :(

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I have a slightly deeper voice, it sounds like Taylor Swift's and I feel like it makes me sound unfeminine/boring/uptight/~not like other girls~ even tho it's a totally unconscious thing :/

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same i sound like scarjo and i hate it

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im fine with my morgan freeman voice as long as i don't have to hear it recorded but that's everyone lol



one time a bunch of boys in my class (i was like 10) made fun of my low voice and asked if the guys in my country talk in high pitched voices instead bc my voice is so low... like seriously, some a+ humor right there smh.

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God, me too. When I answered the home phone as a kid people on the other end frequently thought I was a young man. And while I was at the height of awkwardness in middle school - wearing shapeless clothes, no makeup, and mid-length hair pulled back in a low ponytail - I actually had a boy ask me to my face whether I was male or female. He wasn't trying to be mean, he just really wasn't sure because their weren't enough physical clues and my voice sounded male. I burst into tears.



I'm used to it now, but if I were given the choice it would still be the first thing I'd change about myself.

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Women with deep voices sound amazing

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I do too and I've always wanted a more "girly" sounding voice

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I have a deep voice but it's monotone and I have vocal fry and ugh I hate it :( It's kind of a strain tbh, which is probably why I have the fry thing; maybe I need to use a higher voice, idk.

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As someone with a pretty high voice I'm super jealous. I'm almost 30 and I very frequently get asked to put a parent on the phone if I have to call a utility company or something. I actually was hung up on once because the guy at the cable company didn't believe me when I said I was an adult.

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I've noticed a couple of guys who have vocal fry. This one guy I know and his girlfriend both have vocal fry and I want to stab myself in the ears whenever we hang out. Great ppl, but I just wanna die a little if we are having a conversation together.

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yikes

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can we stop this bulshit theory that vocal fry is a female problem? it's annoying yes, but it's telling that only women get flack for it when men aren't any less likely to have it.



nobody's out here saying men with vocal fry sound unprofessional or ditzy.







Edited at 2016-04-28 02:32 am (UTC)

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tell em miss reynolds

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ia

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And I'm pretty sure I read somewhere the vocal fry is more common in men, especially in the UK. But for them it's a sign of hypermasculinity.

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i was about to comment the same thing!

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i can't think of how this would sound. is it like a guy who goes "oh, yeah, ri-i-i-ght?" is that an example of it?

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Go in.

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Truth. I know a guy with vocal fry who is getting a promotion and no one looks down on his voice. It's at a huge corporation too so it's a place where you need to be super professional.

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mte there was a this american life (?) podcast about it

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thank you. i remember this american life did a story on it because so many people wrote in complaining about the women producer's vocal fry, and ira glass pointed out that he also does it and literally no one has written him about it.

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The article (or the OP's notes on it) says vocal fry is supposed to make women sound ~professional~ tho

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Gay vocal fry and theater talk are just as annoying

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yeah, there's no male equivalent of "valley girl"

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I live in a wealthy city with a lot of suburban dudebros and this is so true

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yes! those two guys on snl who do that california bro sketch use vocal fry all the time

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It's just another thing to mark down women for. Lately it's been really getting to me that to be perceived as professional, I need to straighten my wavy/slightly frizzy hair, wear make-up, wear different clothes and heels or heel-like shoes (ankle boots). Meanwhile, my male counterparts can roll up in a button up, blazer and jeans and be cool.

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josh hartnett has the WORST vocal fry voice in the history of the world. so. its definitely a male prob.

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it's just another way to try and put down women. now even the way we talk is annoying!!



no one gives a shit when a man has vocal fry.

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thank you

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Ugh, my friend recommended a podcast that should be right up my alley, and I could not make it past the 5 minute mark of the first episode. The guy hosting it spoke so low, with such bad vocal fry, that I was seriously straining to understand what he was saying. Men do it just as often, and in my experience it's usually a lot more unpleasant than when women do it.

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Britney's impacT

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met

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guys have vocal fry too but lol they've been claiming this for years like LOL DIMWITTED WOMEN WANT 2 SOUND LIKE KARDASHIANS ISN'T THIS SO WACKY THEY'RE DESTROYING THEIR VOICES



b4 they were bitching about vocal fry, they were whining about uptalk



like must we rly police everything about women down to the way we fucking speak

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lol thank you. i loved the episode they did about it on "this american life" where Ira Glass mentioned a lot of his female co-workers getting emails about it from fans, but no one complained about his vocal fry.

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lol damn, I should have refreshed the page, my comment below yours has the situation backwards.

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I can't remember if it was NPR or some other radio program, but I remember there was this huge to do about a woman who took over a program for a bit and all of these dudes came out of the woodwork to criticize her vocal fry. She responded like, "you can't stand my vocal fry, but you won't bat an eye with the likes of Ira Glass on the radio?" I wish I could remember who it was/the whole situation.

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So irritating.

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But why? Kim Kardashian has one of the most unpleasant voice ever.

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right? before the kardashians, people were saying britney was the cause of this

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What exactly is vocal fry? I don't really watch (or pay attention when I did catch like a scene or two of) KUWTK so like can someone give me an example?

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do the tina belcher groan. that creaky sound from low in your throat? that's vocal fry.

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OMG. I totally get it now. Tina coming through as always!



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I only do that when I need to take a sick day.

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Think like a low, kind of creaky note in the voice.

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Britney Spears singing "I think I did it again" in Oops



And like a lot of other songs tbh



Edited at 2016-04-28 02:43 am (UTC)

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its like a husky voice?

ex: scarjo, emma stone, zooey deschanel etc.



but tbh i cant rly distinguish between vocal fry and a 'regular' speaking voice so i could be wrong..

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wish there were more characters because it really looks like 2 small gangs fighting in a parking lot

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it definitely does.

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I agree. One of my favourite parts of the movie :)

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Yes! I also appreciate it was in broad daylight and you could see clearly who was fighting who and what exactly they were doing... unlike some movies that like to film in the dark with poor camera work *cough* BVS *cough*

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I've been calling it Civil Gangfight in my head ever since the first trailer tbh.

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Not seen Civil War. I liked BvS. I don't get the bad reviews.

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Same here.

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Civil War is absolutely incredible. I can't wait for it to be out on Bluray.

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ikr soooo good.



It was straight up fan fiction in that it used overarching political plot to drive a very interpersonal story.



Stucky is made. Stucky/Wilson/Tasha

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I saw it yesterday and it was SO GOOD. I am so happy we have the Russos because they made an amazing movie <3

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It needs to be on Blu-Ray now!

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Haven't seen CW but the Russos are brilliant so I imagine it's pretty good. I really liked BvS, too. Minority opinion tho.



Edited at 2016-04-28 03:59 am (UTC)

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BvS was really enjoyable tbh. There were a few flaws which Civil War does address better, but honestly most movies have flaws. I think it's a solid 7/10

I wanted to see more Batmobile since it's an amazing feat of engineering.

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Ia, I really liked it as a comic book movie but I do get where a lot of the critics are coming from. It has its problems, but overall I was satisfied. And I'm definitely here for more Bat tech, and more world building in general!

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i thought that was SUPER OBVIOUS the moment Cap 3 and BvS were announced for the same month...



booked my tickets for civil war tomorrow night tho whoooooo

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that doesn't surprise me. the russos kept saying cap 3 wasn't gonna be civil war and then bam it was. i was one of the ones outraged about it on here but they seemed to have done a good job going by the reviews. i'm excited to finally see it next week

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I thought they were trolling at the time.

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Wasn't RDJ always involved? Like i remember him being involved then all the rage because he demanded bigger role? I think they wanted to do something like Civil War but on smaller scale than this.

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the writers were working on an entirely different script

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It is such an awesome movie!! Hopefully you will love it :)

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ONTD, how did Civil War make you feel?



I felt everything and nothing at the same time... because I haven't seen it yet.

I felt everything and nothing at the same time... because I haven't seen it yet.

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lol same

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Lol this beautiful dumbass did such a good job but for the love of god control your derpy face

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Shhh i haven't seen the movie yet but his derp faces are the greatest thing ever lmao

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lmaoo god i love him sfm.

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Lmao

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lol same

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I wish it were a wider scope and had more superheroes but I'm so here for Civil War. I've been doing so good too. No spoilers, haven't even watched clips available.



It still amazes me that some people give that whole "You're expectations were to high" excuse for BVS. Its fucking Batman and Superman. Movie wasn't as great as I wanted it to be. It was so bad. Oh well. (Now I'm off to cash the check Marvel gave me for saying BVS sucks...that $5 check is burning a hole in my pocket.)

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Overall BvS was enjoyable, mostly because of WW and Batfleck. That crossfit scene tho

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I was kind of annoyed at the gratuitous scene of Lois in the bathtub...and then the gratuitous CrossFit scene happened and I was like 'okay, fine, I'll shut up.' I'm just asking for equality in my hilariously pointless nudity!

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omg I had the same thought process! I was like wow, why do we need to look at her in a bathtub? then DAYUM BATFLECK!!!

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The scene of Lois in the tub was the opposite of gratuitous though....



If she'd been sipping on a bottle of champagne, with her legs hanging out as well as her tits and her hair hair perfectly coiffed instead of the lank, wet hair she had in the scene, I'd get what you're saying. But she was clearly traumatised from what had happened to her in 'Africa' and contemplative about the bullet, and the most we saw of her body was her shoulders. And maybe a glimpse of cleavage before Clark pounced on her because even in her brooding, weary, bedraggled state - he found her irresistible.

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Wonder Woman was flawless and her theme music was better than any music in Civil War

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the crossfit scene alone made BVS worth it. i'd watch that on loop for hours.

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Haven't seen Civil War yet because I live in flop America, but I was not super-fond of BvS. However, it was entirely worth it for the We Hate Movies episode, to which I am again telling you to listen ASAP. I was genuinely crying with laughter, in public. Do yourself the favor.

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I really liked BvS but that episode was amazing. I listened to it at work and I kept bursting out in laughter everyone was getting annoyed and asking me what I was listening to.

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I listened to it on a four hour flight (so it took up half of it) and was loling in my seat like a weirdo, but it was totally worth it.

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I always listen to them on the train or bus and laugh to myself like a weirdo.

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i just listened to their old She's All That ep, and omg, they are so mean to Paul Walker



it was obviously recorded long before he died, but still, weird listening experience

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Oh no. Well, now I gotta listen to that; I loved that movie unironically back in the day.

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I enjoyed BvS a lot and I'm excited for the Director's Cut when it comes out on Blu-Ray.



And I haven't seen Civil War yet, but it's already destroyed me. Just a week to go!

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...

Well all right then

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I had so many feelings about civil war. I felt like the movie kept making references to current issues in America but never fully addressed them. I liked the battle between 'ideal' American ideals and 'modern' American ideals.

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I really need to see it again.

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I liked BvS, I need to see it again

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The cast list is like a list of everyone who was a C list celebrity in the '00s.



Also I know everyone here hates her, but I have a soft spot for Jessica Alba and I'm always sad her acting career tanked so hard.

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I miss her sometimes, too.

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Same tbh. I think its bc of Never Been Kissed bc I'm the same way with a lot of that cast

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I'm like that with Drew, Leelee and Marley, heh

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Ever since Dark Angel I've stanned her. I will continue to stan her until she becomes truly problematic.



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There's something about her that makes her seem really cute and genuine, which makes me want her to succeed but yeah she hasn't chosen the best of movies...

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She is the biggest bitch I have ever met

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I'll always love her because of dark angel

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Lol don't feel bad, she's worth hundreds of millions from her organic baby line. She's fine.

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I miss late '90s Luke Wilson so much



I didn't even know Ione Skye was still acting

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No to all of this.



I drove out here to San Diego from Virginia in February. Didn't really care to enjoy it just wanted to get here so bad. Living here is the best!

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I drove from Toronto to San Francisco two Christmases ago and it was epic. It helped that we drove through Memphis though. The drive back was so depressing cos I was saying goodbye to the beach and sunshine.





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My last road trip was my move from Michigan to Philly. It was emotionally and physically exhausting, but the route we took was beautiful.



This might be a cute movie my mom would enjoy seeing.

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Fucking clove with her knives



And or fucking orphan with her one big knife

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She's a very good actress. It's sad that her career has succumbed to.. this.

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My last road trip drove from VA to New York for my birthday, it was annoying but soo worth it. I love New York.

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My siblings & I took a road trip from Texas to Missouri with our grandparents to visit family up there. It was actually a great experience because I got to spend so much time with them and I learned way more about them & their relationship than I ever had just hanging out with them at their house.

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i def want to go on a national park roadtrip one of these days. i blame national geographic's instagram.



unless i'm forgetting something my last roadtrip was CT to Montreal a few years ago



Edited at 2016-04-28 04:09 am (UTC)

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NatGeo's IG is so flawless. I check it religiously and read the long-ass essays under each pic.



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I find her incredibly stunning but so fucking boring.

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God the acting looked so bad in the trailer alone

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I am moving to Michigan from LA this summer. Wish me luck. The longest I've been in a car is from San Diego to Vegas and I did not enjoy it.

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Good lord, why are you moving here? I'm trying to get out! LOL

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Lmao. I'm so glad I moved out of LA like two years ago. I wanted to love it (I was in denial cos of being there/visiting there in the 90s was amazing etc) but it was godawful so fuck LA tbh. Crying etc etc. RIP

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lol I'm moving because I'm in a LDR and that is where my boyfriend lives! I'm excited to leave California, though. I was born and raised in San Diego and have lived in LA for the past 6 years. I'm ready for a slower pace and real seasons. :)

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I did that in 2010. My sister and I made a trip out of it and stopped at a bunch of places on the way to LA. It's still one of my favorite memories. Good luck in LA!

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Omg, I didn't think she wanted to act anymore. I'd watch this.



My last road trip was from CT to Philly a while ago. My friends and I want to do a huge cross-country trip one summer.

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lol why is this chick still in movies. stick to pimpin baby wares

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her eyebrows need to be darkened a shade or two tbh





I want to buy my mom something for her hair. I tried to take a quiz for her to figure out what kind of curl she has I think it was like 3B?? she curls her hair every day and it's also naturally curly and I found out she doesn't use any heat protector on it but idk what kind to get her.

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My mom always straigthens her hair and she prefers the traditional/widely-known brands for hair products, GHD and John Frieda. No idea if they have good heat protection spray, though.

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living proof makes a lot of really great curl products and some heat defense stuff!

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came into this post to say this. i hate when lighthaired people don't darken their eyebrows. it messes with the structure of your face and makes you look weird and washed out (i say this as someone with the lightest eyebrows you will ever see)

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i love devacurl's products but they're so damn expensive even when i buy them from my hairdresser. i been using sally's new curl line and i like it

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Get her heat protector!!!



omg for a solid like 15 years my mom got a perm and full color on a regular basis and her hair ... did not resemble hair. It looked somewhere between hay and shredded newspaper, like just terrifying. She stopped doing that over 10 years ago and it's juuuust now starting to look like hair again.

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She just might be a real life Becky with good hair. It might be thin but when she had that bob, it was everything. I know so many people irl who tried for that look.



And, not buying my mom an actual gift. I'm going to treat her out to breakfast with the whole family if she wants, so that's enough imo.

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I took my mum out too (in the UK we've already had mother's day). She had a great time!

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Aw, I'm glad you had a good time! Breakfast/lunch/dinner is always a good bet.

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Yeah we take my parents out to dinner cos they're impossible to buy for most of the time.

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My mom is gone now, unfortunately, but when she was alive we used to go out to brunch for Mother's Day, especially after I became a mom. It was always wonderful.

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she's really out of touch with reality huh? or maybe im just poor

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She's not catering toward the average person.

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i find LV so tacky, its like the "Von Dutch" of luxury brands



LOL sweatpants for $300! i felt bad paying 30 for Marvel sweatpants



Edited at 2016-04-28 08:31 am (UTC)

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ya icon! is that Elyas M'Barek?

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Her sweatpants are sold out too lol



I thought free city was bad at $125

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free city reminds me of 2006 it girls tbh

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Plus LV is not real leather so they can uck off

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the LV pattern is so fucking tacky

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I bought Superdry sweats for $80 and I regret it

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Seriously. Who the fuck buys sweats for $300? Do people lose their minds when they get some money?

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it must be nice to live in the fantasy world she lives in.

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It's not a fantasy for her, just for "poor" people.

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Beyond not having to worry about food/shelter/bills, I bet she's not actually any happier tbh

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You're absolutely right. There's a study that says beyond having enough money for essentials in life, a little on the side for entertainment (vacations, movies, etc) people are not happier. I think the figure was $75,000 per year. Making more than that doesn't significantly improve a person's day-to-day happiness.

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Her guides are for fellow rich people aren't they? Not us plebs with loans.



I'm just gonna call my mom, I'm too far away to do anything else.

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Yeah. Goop is infamous for overpriced bullshit, and a lot of middle class women buy into it. It's her shtick, and she's good at it.

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Rich people don't get their advice from Gwyneth Paltrow.

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I was super confused for a second, thinking a set of luggage for $115 was actually a pretty good deal. Then I realized I skipped the "tag" part of that sentence.



And now I'm confused why anyone would spend that kind of money on a fucking luggage tag. Rich people are weird.

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Same I was thinking well I got 1 good quality suitcase for $40 half price, so is this really so extreme? Then I saw your comment, lord

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Wow, this is surreal.

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anyone who buys this is a fucking moron

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Lol, the only way that price tag makes any sense would be if there were a tracking device in it so I knew where my luggage could be found if it got lost.

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lmao what

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But you can write both destination and home address.. MUST.BUY.NOW

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This is one of those things where even if you're rich and money doesn't matter, just why? You can find one just like it at Target for $5 I bet.

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My Mum would be so disappointed if I told her I bought her a $10,000 gift that ended up being binoculars

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Right? My mom would be expecting a used car or a storage unit that's been paid off for the next X-amount of years. Or even and endless supply of popcorn. lol

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My mother is getting a card & dinner this year.



Goop is seriously not living on this earth if she thinks a $500 passport holder makes going through customs easier. I'm sure customs looks at that tag & wonders what they could have done with that money. I know that's what I'd be thinking.

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An agent dude at immigration was like "there's something on your passport", took off my passport cover and tossed it at me. Last time I used a cover, lmao.

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Well that's worse because she's basically rubbing in people's faces that she's so rich she can afford that useless over priced crap.

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damn this becky with the good hair thing is turning into a meme

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so over the becky meme.

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mte

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I feel a bit bad for ppl named becky atm

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LOL good point

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can the real becky pls stand up so we can be done with this shit

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ontd always overdoes it

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it's a matter of days and we've killed it

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ontd runs everything into the ground in 2 seconds. The whole internet is doing it too this time but this site is too much with shit like that.

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Must be nice being rich?

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I just think that people misunderstood , her GOOP site was never meant to be for the low to middle class people. It was made for the people as rich as her who spend their week-end in their second house in the Hamptons .

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I disagree. I think it was supposed to be for middle-upper middle class people. Like people who were willing to drop $80 on a t-shirt. And that still stands today except she's less apologetic about it.

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Why does she need to apologize? She's not really hurting anyone

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True. I know a person who's really obscenely rich and she or her family wouldn't be caught dead getting lifestyle ideas from a Hollywood star. That's for us hoi polloi.

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Doesn't mean we can't point and laugh at a $115 luggage tag or whatever ridiculous excuses rich people make up for blowing their money instead of giving it to someone who needs it. Like seriously, if you have thousands of dollars burning a hole in your pocket, leave a tip at a restaurant or buy used stuff off craigslist, buy textbooks for a random student or whatever. #broke

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I think it was more aspirational for the dreaded poors that anything - people who are that rich don't give a fuck about what Gwyneth Paltrow wants to sell them

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I would like to be able to take my mom to Hawaii. She's always wanted to go, and she deserves it.



But I'm poor, so I'll probably get her a new bottle of perfume and take her to dinner.

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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected a whopping $500 billion loss in revenue for the Gulf nations in 2016, which is 30 percent more than the $390 billion lost in 2015. The massive shortfall has crippled the gulf economies, which are facing record budget deficits and seeking external funding to overcome it.

Many experts believe that $100 per barrel oil prices are history, and we might not revisit those prices for more than a decade. It implies that the recent crisis will not end as quickly as the downturn in 2007-2009. The oil-dependent nations will have to figure out how to survive on low oil prices for a long time.

2016 is year number two in a multi-year adjustment process to reach balanced budgets, said Masood Ahmed, director of the IMFs Middle East and Central Asia Department. Likewise, The Wall Street Journal reports that Probably another four to five years of action will be needed both on spending and on revenues before reaching a comfortable fiscal situation for many countries. Related: China Stockpiling Oil At Highest Rate In Over A Decade

The oil-dependent economies in the gulf enjoyed the benefits of high oil prices for more than a decade. Easy money from oil stunted the growth of the other sectors as they were neglected, because ample money flowed into the coffers from oil sales.

We have developed an oil addiction in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, among everyone, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, second in command to the throne, said. That is dangerous, and that is what has hampered the development of many different sectors in recent years.

The plunge in oil prices has forced the gulf nations to cut subsidies and introduce tough reforms to initiate the transition away from oil. The efforts havent gone unnoticed, as the IMF has hailed the major steps initiated by the gulf nations to survive the crisis.

"I do see in a number of countries action to address the budget deficit. That gives us encouragement and comfort, said Mr. Masood in an interview. Related: Saudi Arabia Releases Ambitious Plan To Diversify Economy

Though the shift from oil dependence will not be a quick fix, the gulf nations will have to act quickly, because the IMF believes that the gulf region will have approximately 10 million youth looking for jobs by 2020. Without reforms, it is expected that around 3 million of them will be jobless, bringing back memories of the Arab Spring.

The Gulf nations are desperate enough to seek foreign loans. Qatar completed a $5.5-billion loan borrowing in January, and Oman obtained a $1-billion loan. These loans were priced at 110 and 120 basis points above the London interbank offered rate (Libor).

Similarly, Saudi Arabia is finalising a $10-billion loan at 120 basis points above Libor. "The deal is very successful, with very competitive pricing," said Elyas Algaseer, deputy regional general manager at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. "There was immense market appetite." Related: Oil Prices Fall On Unexpected EIA Barrel Build

It brings a big sigh of relief to the banks in Saudi Arabia, which were straining to lend to the government to fund the deficit. The three-month Saudi Interbank Offered Rate, rose to 2.004 percent, crossing 2 percent for the first time since 2009.

The recently announced Saudi Vision 2030 has laid out plans for the new Saudi economy--an economy which, in theory, would be less dependent on oil. Though the plans are short on details and experts doubt that the transformation will be as easy and quick as the Saudis expects, there is no doubt that it is the first step in the right direction.

By Rakesh Upadhyay for Oilprice.com

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Once again its earnings season and the first quarter is likely to be one of the most closely watched in a long time since it encompasses a period of time in which oil prices were at their lowest.

WTI and Brent dropped below $30 per barrel in January and February, hitting their lowest levels in more than a decade. The oil industry had posted a sea of red ink in prior quarters, but the first three months of 2016 had the ingredients to be much more painful.

So far, the results have been a mixed bag, with several companies doing better than expected. BP reported an 80 percent decline in earnings, a staggering fall in revenue from a year ago. The British oil giant posted a $2.6 billion profit in the first quarter of last year, but only a net profit of $532 million in 1Q2016. Worse, that excludes charges related to the Macondo well blowout in 2010, which forced the company to take another $917 million in pre-tax charges in the first quarter. When including those charges, BPs result flips to a quarterly loss of about $485 million. Related: Has the Oil Price Rally Gone Too Far?

But BP also performed much better than market analysts had anticipated. Investors agreed  BPs stock shot up by more than 5 percent on the news. Also, shareholders are hoping the worst is over. Oil prices are starting to rise, and BP won approval from a court in March to settle all outstanding federal and state claims related to the 2010 disaster.

Norways Statoil also posted a net profit for the quarter of $607 million, beating the $115 million loss that analysts expected. The modest profit comes a year after a net loss of $4.58 billion, made worse by huge impairment charges. We are radically improving our project break evens and we are on track to re-set costs and thereby impact the parameters that we can control", Statoils CEO Eldar Stre said in a statement. Related: First Illegal Shipment Of Oil Leaves Eastern Libya

French oil company Total also exceeded expectations, posting a $1.64 billion profit for the first quarter, although that figure was down by 37 percent from 1Q2015. Analysts expected a profit of just $1.25 billion. The result stems from the fact that Totals upstream unit benefited from the lowest technical costs among the majors, the companys CEO Patrick Pouyanne said in a statement. Total says that it produced oil with costs at $23 per barrel last year, whereas its rivals spent between $26 and $44 per barrel. Total also managed to raise oil and gas production to a record high of 2.48 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. Total expects to trim another $2.4 billion from its spending plans this year relative to 2014 levels, and also raise $4 billion in asset sales.

There was a similar trend that emerged from the group: the quarterly performances would have been much worse if not for downstream earnings. Refining has been much more stable during the oil price downturn, as higher margins offset the losses from exploration and production. Earnings from Totals refining and chemicals division were up thanks to a record-high utilization rate of 94 percent and favorable petrochemicals margins, Pouyanne said. The oil majors are extremely large, integrated companies that rely very heavily on refining. Smaller upstream-only companies, particularly in the U.S. shale patch, do not have this security, which is why many of them are faring much worse these days. Related: Can Oil Continue To Rally Like This?

Still, there are serious questions regarding the oil majors ability to keep up high dividend payouts, which executives have fiercely protected even while taking savage cuts to spending. But all of them insist that there are no plans at this point to touch the dividend policies. Total says that at $60 per barrel, the company can generate enough cash flow to fully fund the dividend through 2017 without needing to take on debt to do so.

The better-than-expected results thus far  which stem from improving refining margins and aggressive cost cutting  suggests that the remaining companies (namely Shell, Chevron, Eni and ExxonMobil) could beat estimates too. It seems the cost reduction has been implemented better than expected by the companies, Alexandre Andlauer, an analyst at AlphaValue SAS in Paris, told Bloomberg. Its now more than probable the others will beat estimates too.

Exxon, Chevron, and Eni will announce on April 29 while Shell will announce on May 4.

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com

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Russia and Saudi Arabia have been (relatively) quietly fighting for market share in China ever since oil prices started their downward spiral in mid-2014now the battle is heating up, and teapot refineries are what could tip the balance.

Though the Saudis had historically been Chinas biggest oil supplier, Russia managed to take the top spot several times during that period, thanks to the so-called teapot refineries. This has now forced the Saudis to do something theyve never done beforetarget teapots on the spot market in order to regain lost market share. Related: Why Saudi Arabia Will Not Win The Oil Price War

Teapot refineries rose to fame due to their greater processing flexibility as compared with state-owned Chinese oil giants. Last year, they finally won import quotas for crude, most of which they then export in the form of oil products.

Russia was quick on the uptake and until recently was the leading supplier to these teapots. Now, however, the Saudis have stepped up their game and have offered teapots spot oil contracts. Thats very unusual for Saudi Arabia, which prefers to trade its oil on the futures markets and at a fixed price--but the stakes seem to be high enough to justify this move.

However, life is not all easy for the teapots, either. Last year, they faced tightened credit requirements from local banks, who got worried about falling returns. The independent refiners found a solution to this problem this year, when 16 of them agreed to ally in order to improve their purchasing power. Related: This One Number Just Changed The Outlook For Global NatGas

The China Petroleum Purchase Federation of Independent Refineries was formed in early March with the ambition of covering the whole chain of imports, processing and exports. According to shipbroker Gibson, teapots could come to account for 20 percent of all Chinese crude oil imports this year.

In March, the country imported a total 32.61 million tons of crude, up by more than one-fifth on the year. Over the first quarter, imports reached 91.1 million tons, up 13.4 percent on the year. Teapots were the driver of this increase, so its understandable why they are drawing so much attention from the worlds top two exporters.

And yet, they might prove a losing bet. Related: Big Oil Surprises Analysts, Is The Worst Behind Us?

Despite the new alliance, teapots are still in a worse position than the state companies when it comes to securing credits. Oil prices are climbing and this will additionally aggravate the situation for teapots. Of course, both Russia and Saudi Arabia could decide to sell at a discount. But how much of a discount can they feasibly afford?

Ultimately, it could prove to be a war of patience and financial resilience.

By all means, Saudi Arabia has the upper hand in the latter, but Russia has a history of being patient and its used to tightening belts when times call for it, unlike the Saudis. Perhaps it could be a better idea for both to relax and look for other destinations of their oil, such as India. Before Iran gets there first.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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The German Language and School Society of Wisconsin (DSSV) will celebrate its 60th anniversary this weekend with its annual awards ceremony held on Sunday, May 1 at Marquette University High School.

The awards ceremony begins at 3 p.m., and is free and open to the public.

Serving as a special speaker at this year's ceremony is Germany's Consul General Herbert Quelle, who has worked in the German Foreign Ministry for 35 years, including posts on multiple continents, has been head of the German Consulate General in Chicago since July 2014. Also scheduled to speak at the event is Milwaukee native Joseph Wippl, a former CIA officer with 30 years of experience in the National Clandestine Service  including several years in Germany  as well as 10 years as a Practice of International Relations instructor at Boston University.

In addition to the two special speakers, Sunday's ceremony will award more than $10,000 to outstanding high school learners of German based on the National German Exam of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG). Over the last three years, the DSSV has awarded more than $20,000 in scholarships and prizes to deserving high school learners of German based on taking part in the DSSV's annual essay contest, as well as the National German Exam.

The DSSV also helps select nominees for the AATG/PAD Study Trip Award, sending dozens of high school students to Germany on multi-week study trips. Mukwonago High School sophomore Joseph Washburn is this year's winner of a three-week study trip.

Established in 1956, the DSSV's primary goal is to promote and stimulate interest in and understanding of the German language and culture.


Carly Fiorina & Ted Cruz

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Say its not so! Senator Ted "Mini-Me Trump" Cruz has gone and done the deed. Yep, the man who gets his campaign messages from the Holy Book has gone and done a John McCain on us. So now in US Presidential Campaign History, er, drum roll please, we now have John McCain II -- The 2016 GOP Circus starring Ted "Trust Ted" Cruz as the GOP war hawk, John McCain, (he never saw a war he did not like) and Carly "Miss HP" Fiorina as Sarah Palin.

And just when we thought that this reality TV political circus could not get any better. Cruz is really desperate. He needs help. So much so it's clouding this judgment. How else in Sam Hill can you decide with 400 delegates behind Donald Trump that your "running mate" will be a candidate whose relationship with the truth is elastic at best and rubbery at worse?

Ted, Ted, you did not vet the former Hewlett Packard chief. If you did you would have known that her tenure there is regarded as an absolute failure. She fired a bunch of people and nearly run the company into the ground. And too, she had a jack-booted approach to management -- it was her way or the highway. Kinda like you, Ted, so I'm just curious to understand just how you two will get along. She's also known to hold a grudge and you did ignore her during her flash-in-the-pan-go-nowhere campaign. You did not defend her against The Donald's sexist attacks.

I wonder what John "Me Too" Kasich is saying about this tonight? Maybe the Indiana bromance is over before it started. But pray tell, exactly what does the vegetable-like Fiorina bring to the table? Is she the anti-Hillary candidate? People are asking: can a CEO who laid off thousands, botched a merger big time, and "left" the company with $21 million become a feasible and acceptable Vice President? And she did lose her bid for the U.S. Senate in California. She was totally rejected by the people. So as a three-time loser (aaaah I'm sounding like Donald Trump!) what DOES she bring to Team Cruz? Inquiring minds what to know.

And from many accounts Carly has had a very adventurous if not ambivalent relationship with the truth. She's known to make s**t up sometimes for no real reason. Maybe it's an inferiority complex and she wants to be "one of the boys." You must remember the infamous Planned Parenthood hit job of a tape that Carly swore was true, the real deal, and unimpeachable? She even "dared Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain."

Trouble with all that? She was lying through her teeth. None of what she described ever happened in the heavily edited videos. Nada. Nothing. The unadulterated quintessence of nihility.

She also repeatedly claimed that she was not fired from her job at Hewlett-Packard because of performance, corporate speak for "incompetence. Fact Check! In February 2005, Fiorina was dismissed from her post as CEO of HP by a board of directors that she's since called "dysfunctional." The Times also pointed out at the time that although Fiorina wrote in her memoir that HP missed its numbers on her watch only three times, "in fact, the company fell short at least nine times on either revenue, profit or both." Ouch!

On foreign policy Carly's a real doozy. You remember Iran and how the U.S. banned "trading with that enemy?" Yet Carly did the dirty deed, Ted, and then spun it as if it was not true. Carly told Fox News (that bastion of Republican soothsaying and creative truth telling) host Chris Wallace that Redington Gulf -- a private company that distributes information technology - was "not honest" with HP about selling HP products to Iran, a potential violation of US-Iran sanctions.

But the fact is that Redington Gulf was open about its sales of HP products to Iran from the get go and Carly knew about it. The company issued a press release in 2003 saying that its relationship with HP began in 1997 to focus on "one market--Iran." There again is Carly's relationship with the truth -- positively and completely elastic.

The point of all this? Carly Fiorina is an exceedingly poor choice, even by Republican standards, as a vice president running mate. I never, ever believed that I would be saying this but if you put Carly's record as a manager against Sarah Palin, the doofus former governor of Alaska, Sarah wins hands down and she was really, really bad as a VP running mate.

So what the hell were you thinking Ted? Did you wake up this morning grumpy because you did not "get some" last night? Or maybe someone put moonshine in your ice tea? This woman is an unmitigated walking disaster and far from wooing women to your side she'll do the opposite. I can't wait to see Hillary Clinton's political juggernaut spin about the Planned Parenthood ad and the multitude of Carly's fibs. It will be a bloody blast!

Now the big question is this: what's John Kasich thinking now? Maybe he thinks you have finally gone completely bonkers, gone off your rocker, and finally fell victim to Trumfulenza -- a disease caused by too much exposure to Donald Trump the first symptom of which is to play nice with the host and then try to emulate and morph into a version of "Trump Lite better known as Mini-Me Trump."

Maybe the good governor has concluded, the good Christian that he is, that you have finally gone as daft as a mud hen. Or that the Devil has done his thing on you. Point is for most sane people (and insane ones too) this pick is not just a surprise but a shock. Even the usually verbose Donald Trump was slow to react and did not call you "Lying Ted" or drum up some funny name for Carly who he once told to "shut up" on national television -- where you stood by and grinned and did not defend your future VP.

What this tells me is that you came to this decision hastily and might have been reacting to Donald Trump's "major foreign policy speech" since he's been sucking the oxygen out of the campaign and hogging the media after your comprehensive flogging last Tuesday. I don't know but you might have been better off with "Little Marco" Rubio; at least he's got about 147 delegates and is the GOP Establishment darling while you're not.

Carly brings nothing to your campaign, man. She's an inexperienced dead weight. But wait, maybe it's to show your new-found "I love for women." Again, I would have picked Marco, but the immigrant thing might have given you pause -- two children of Cuban immigrants might not play well with the American voters. I know, I know you see immigration as a "black and minority" thing, fair (almost white) skinned people like you are not immigration violators.

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Bernie Sanders in the South Bronx March 31st 2016 by Michael Vadon

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Some of your family and friends, and even some Bernie fans, will increasingly pressure you to support Hillary Clinton. They'll expect you to abandon the considerable political leverage the Sanders campaign has created. They'll ask you to transfer your vote to her, without reward.



Bernie himself would be discarding his 55-year demand for deep change, and alienating those who demand change with him, were he to endorse a candidate who has defied what we have worked for.



Cautious liberals who want mild reform without risk or inconvenience will argue that Trump is too crazy, too racist, too sexist, too dangerous. They will warn of his thugs, walls, deportations, and insults.




Reprinted from Wallwritings

The ugliest, meanest, primary-caucus season in modern history, is over.

History will record the ending came when Republican champion Donald Trump swept five states in Tuesday's primaries while Democratic winner Hillary Clinton won four out of five primaries.

Other primaries will continue through June 7, but the winners have been chosen: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the insult bully and the Israel Lobby's favorite war hawk, will face off in the General Election, November 8.

Our Hillary a war hawk? How can this be?

Her record is out there. Her preference for military solutions was never more obvious than in the New York primary debate, Thursday, April 14.

Asked about his earlier statement that Israel had a "disproportionate response" to Palestinian rocket fire against Gaza, Bernie Sanders responded on behalf of an embattled people under occupation.

Clinton's response, in sharp contrast, was pure AIPAC, a perspective that merges her pro-Zionism with her militarism.

Below are 10 minutes of the debate in which Clinton emphasizes Israel's "need" for military force in its relationship to Palestinians, in both the West Bank and Gaza.

She tries to bolster her case by using long-refuted Israeli lies, including Israel's "departure from Gaza," and Yasir Arafat's rejection of a non-existent "offer on the table" from Israel.

Clinton also refers to Hamas as a terrorist group, rather than as the political party which won a monitored 2006 election against Fatah, a Palestinian party backed by Israel and the U.S.
Between 1952 and 1992, every president of the United States was a veteran of World War Two. Eisenhower commanded Allied forces in Europe. JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Ford served in the Navy in the Pacific. Jimmy Carter entered the Naval Academy in 1943, graduating too late to see combat. Ronald Reagan joined the US Army Reserve in 1937; due his fame as an actor he was kept out of combat, instead heading up War Bond drives and producing more than 400 training films. George H.W. Bush was the youngest US Navy pilot in the war.

Then the worm turned. In 1992, Bush was defeated by alleged Vietnam draft dodger Bill Clinton, who also defeated wounded World War Two vet Bob Dole in 1996. In 2000 and 2004, alleged Air National Guard deserter George W. Bush defeated Vietnam veterans Al Gore and John Kerry. In 2008, Barack Obama defeated Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war John McCain.

In the two election cycles since then, neither major party has seriously considered nominating a military veteran. Rather odd, since exaltation of the US armed forces and veterans began a resurgence from post-Vietnam lows in 1991 with Desert Storm and has been the de facto national religion since 9/11.

America has a complicated relationship with its veterans. Those of us who served in the military sport a suicide rate more than twice that of the civilian population. We're 10% of the population and 16% of the homeless. Apparently we're a pretty screwed up demographic. Yet our opinions, especially on politics, enjoy a measure of nearly automatic respect. I often see news stories in which veterans are specifically identified as such to bolster their credibility when they express positions or register complaints (janitors, truck drivers and cooks rarely enjoy such deference).

This bothers me, in part because it tempts me. Anecdotally, it seems to me that veterans are over-represented in my own political ponds, the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party. It's tempting to assume that that's because, like me, many other veterans see how wasteful and deadly big government can be and perhaps want to do penance for the body counts we've contributed to. But then there are lots of veterans who ardently support big government as well. What gives?

The temptation to ascribe special status to the opinions of veterans is something I think we should resist. Opinions may be right or they may be wrong. That the person expressing them once wore a uniform and collected a government paycheck doesn't, at least in cases not directly related to military matters, seem like a good indicator of which.

If you really want to honor veterans, treat us like you treat everyone else. That means requiring us to prove, rather than merely assert, our political arguments.
Reprinted from The Guardian

When it comes to Syria, "no boots on the ground" was something of a mantra for Barack Obama. He has repeated it dozens of times, but not anymore. On Monday, he told the world at least 250 US troops would soon be fighting inside the country. With American military members now slowly streaming into multiple countries in the Middle East, we're entrenched in yet another war and it's unclear how we'll get out of it.

To much less fanfare last week, the White House also reportedly loosened the military engagement rules in Syria, so that US servicemen are allowed more leeway to kill civilians as collateral damage in pursuit of Isis. Rightwing Republicans have been clamoring for this policy change for months, despite the risk of it completely backfiring on the US and creating many more terrorists than it kills. At the time, Democrats criticized the likes of Ted Cruz for demanding such a policy. Now there is near silence as the Obama administration has made it a reality.



As he's broken his promise involving ground troops in Syria, can we expect the same about-face in Libya? "There's no plan for ground troops in Libya," Obama said at a press conference in London during his European tour last week. He added: "I don't think that's necessary. I don't think it would be welcomed by this new government. It would send the wrong signal."

One can imagine it's only a matter of time before that statement is proven false. Libya is now engulfed in chaos and the number of Isis members is skyrocketing, largely thanks to the US and allies bombing the country and overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi five years ago. There are already drones flying over the country and special forces have already been in and out in the past year to conduct special forces missions. You can picture administration members soon arguing: we must invade the country to save it from the last time we bombed it.

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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Declaring that he is "in this campaign to win and become the Democratic nominee," U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday told a rally at Purdue University that he is the Democrats' best hope to defeat Donald Trump in November.

"If you want the candidate who will be the strongest nominee, you're looking at that candidate right now," Sanders told 2,267 cheering supporters at the rally in a student center. "The reason I am the strongest candidate is that our campaign is appealing not just to Democrats but to independents all over this country and even some Republicans."

In poll after poll, Sanders fares much better than Hillary Clinton in matchups with Trump and other Republican White House hopefuls.

Sanders' appeal to independents was evident on Tuesday when he won by 12-points in Rhode Island, a state with an open primary where independents could vote. That outcome should send a message to delegates going to the Democratic National Convention this summer, he said.

"What I hope delegates understand is that the national election is an open process. Guess what? Independents vote in that process. And it turns out that we are overwhelmingly winning the independent vote." SEN. BERNIE SANDERS

Sanders acknowledged that Clinton currently leads in the number of delegates headed to Philadelphia, but he said sees a narrow path to victory as voters in Indiana go to the polls next Tuesday and nine more states have elections on the calendar before the primary process comes to a close in June.

"We are behind today. But you know what? Unusual things happen in politics," he said. "With your help, superdelegates may reach the conclusion that Bernie Sanders will be the strongest candidate against Donald Trump or any other candidate."

Sanders was headed later Wednesday to another rally in Bloomington, Indiana, before flying to Oregon, another state where voters have yet to weigh in on who should be the Democratic Party nominee for president.


Boiling Frog

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What would happen if the CIA staged a coup in America? The CIA wouldn't be able to stage a coup through a color revolution, kill or remove the elected leader and install a more ameliorable leader. No, it would have to be more like boiling frogs in America, gradually increasing the heat so that by the time the people realize what has happened they are already being boiled to death.

A recently declassified 1944 CIA manua l called "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" describes how to destabilize and overthrow foreign governments through bureaucracy. The article made me think about the state of America today.

In the CIA's Field Manual they describe using operatives which they call a "curious breed of citizen-saboteurs" to disrupt and demoralize elected government and police eventually turning the government into a dysfunctional mess. But what if instead of citizen saboteurs, the CIA used political saboteurs and media saboteurs?

Pivotal to overthrowing the government is controlling the media. Looking back at the history of the protections provided to ensure an independent fourth estate in America two examples come to mind. First there was the Communications Act of 1934 and the Fairness Doctrine of 1949.

The Fairness Doctrine was eliminated by the Federal Communication Commission in 1987 and the Communications Act of 1934 was replaced with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Since 1987 the consolidation of the media with a synchronized message has dumbed down Americans to such a degree that 30% of Republicans want to bomb a fictional country called Agrabah.

In a Public Policy Poll of 532 likely Republican primary voters, 30% would support bombing Agrabah, a fictional country in Disney's Aladdin. The media monopoly along with the political duopoly have birthed a government in America wherein the three branches not only violate the constitution continually but commit treason with no accountability.

For example since 2008 a Turkish religious movement funded 200 trips to Turkey for congressional members and their staff, which is a violation of House Rules and quite possibly Federal law. The religious movement is led by Fethullah Gulen, who coincidentally operates charter schools across the United States.

Because of legislation like Bush's No Child Left Behind and Obama's Race to the Top, public schools have been closed to fund charter schools. Gulen schools are the largest charter network in the U.S. and receive about $150 million a year in taxpayer money. Not a bad return of their congressional investment.

And while American teachers lose their jobs the majority of teachers in the 130 Gulen schools are from Turkey. Not only are the teachers from Turkey but the contracts for construction and operations go to Turkish businesses.

Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel who served as Barack Obama's Chief of Staff was pivotal in passing the Race to the Top legislation. As Chicago's Mayor, Emanuel closed 54 public schools diverting funds to charters many affiliated with Gulen. The FBI is currently investigating the nearly $1 million paid to contractors for work at three of the Gulen Concept Schools in Chicago.

Fethullah Gulen who is on Turkey's most wanted terrorist list along with ISIS said in a sermon "You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers " until the conditions are ripe."

And ripe the conditions are. So I wonder why the CIA has declassified the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" and why now? Is it because as Fethullah Gulen says, the conditions are ripe, or is it because the frogs are already boiling.

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By Dave Lindorff



A Sanders-Stein Green dream ticket or just a dream? Activists working to make it happen

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Philadelphia -- Bernie Sanders, to the consternation of critics in the Democratic Party, pundits in the corporate media, and purists on the hard left, has accomplished an amazing thing. Up against Hillary Clinton, surely the biggest, best-funded corporate-backed candidate the Democratic leadership has run since Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan in 1984 over three decades ago, the once obscure independent Vermont senator has battled Clinton to almost a draw, down by only some 319 delegates with nearly 900 to go (not counting the corrupt "super delegates" chosen for their fealty to party leaders, not by primary or caucus voting.)

By doing this well, as a proudly declared "democratic socialist" who on the stump has been denouncing the corruption of both the US political and economic systems, and as a candidate who has refused to take corporate money or money from big, powerful donors, instead successfully funding his campaign with only small two and three-digit donations from his supporters, Sanders has exposed not just his opponent, Hillary Clinton, but the entire Democratic Party leadership and most of its elected officials as nothing but hired corporate tools posing as progressive advocates of the people.

But now Sanders faces a truly momentous choice. Defeated by the combined assault of a pro-corporate mass media and by the machinations of the Democratic Party leadership -- machinations both long-established with the intent of defeating upstarts and outsiders, like front-loading conservative southern states in the primary schedule, and current, like scheduling only a few early candidate debates and then slotting them at times (like opposite the Super Bowl) when few would be watching them -- Sanders knows that barring some major surprise like a federal indictment of Clinton, a market collapse, or perhaps a leak of the transcripts of Clinton's highly-paid but still secret speeches to some of the nation's biggest banks, he is not going to win the Democratic nomination.

So does he, after spending months hammering home the reality that Clinton is the bought-and-paid candidate of the the banks, the arms industry, the oil industry and the medical-industrial complex, and after enduring endless lies about his own record spouted by Clinton and her surrogates, go ahead and endorse her as the party's standard bearer for the general election? Does he walk away and return quietly to Vermont? Or does he instead continue to fight for his "political revolution" by another route?

The first and even the second option would mean the demise of his so-called "political revolution." A Sanders endorsement of Clinton at this point would be a pathetic betrayal of all the energy and money that his fired-up backers have poured into this extraordinary campaign, and it would send a message that fighting against the nation's ruling elite is impossible, at least through the ballot box. It would also be pointless. Some 25-30 percent of Sanders backers, according to pollsters, have made it clear that they will not support Clinton no matter what -- including if Sanders were to endorse her. That in itself could be enough to doom her candidacy. Furthermore, after all his well-grounded attacks on the corrupt funding of her campaign, and of her horrific record as senator and secretary of state, any endorsement he made would be seen as a joke. He would spend the next three and a half months of the general election running from reporters asking him if he "takes back" the things he had said about her earlier -- her crooked speech fees from Goldman Sachs and other big banks, her default advocacy of disastrous wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, etc. Most seriously, endorsing Hillary after all that earnest, heartfelt campaigning, would be a huge blow to his millions of backers and his "movement."

Just shutting up and going home, with no endorsement for Clinton, would be almost as bad, leaving his movement leaderless and thoroughly demoralized, and he'd still be besieged by journalists seeking to have him either diss or endorse Clinton.

The third option Sanders has though, is to continue his run for president, but not as a Democrat. And that option could be explosive and even revolutionary this election year, depending on how he did it.

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: This website will be taking May Day off. The next post will be on Tuesday, May 3rd. Tom]

In a Greater Middle East in which one country after another has been plunged into chaos and possible failed statehood, two rival nations, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have been bedrock exceptions to the rule. Iran, at the moment, remains so, but the Saudi royals, increasingly unnerved, have been steering their country erratically into the region's chaos. The kingdom is now led by a decrepit 80-year-old monarch who, in commonplace meetings, has to be fed his lines by teleprompter. Meanwhile, his 30-year-old son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has gained significant control over both the kingdom's economic and military decision-making, launched a rash anti-Iranian war in Yemen, heavily dependent on air power. It is not only Washington-backed but distinctly in the American mode of these last years: brutal yet ineffective, never-ending, a boon to the spread of terror groups, and seeded with potential blowback.

Meanwhile, in a cheap-oil, belt-tightening moment, in an increasingly edgy country, the royals are reining in budgets and undermining the good life they were previously financing for many of their citizens. The one thing they continue to do is pump oil -- their only form of wealth -- as if there were no tomorrow, while threatening further price-depressing rises in oil production in the near future. And that's hardly been the end of their threats. While taking on the Iranians (and the Russians), they have also been lashing out at the local opposition, executing a prominent dissident Shiite cleric among others and even baring their teeth at Washington. They have reportedly threatened the Obama administration with the sell-off of hundreds of billions of dollars in American assets if a bill, now in Congress and aimed at opening the Saudis to American lawsuits over their supposed culpability for the 9/11 attacks, were to pass. (It would, however, be a sell-off that could hurt the Saudis more than anyone.) Even at the pettiest of levels, on Barack Obama's recent arrival in Saudi Arabia for a visit with King Salman, they essentially snubbed him, a first for a White House occupant. All in all, a previously sure-footed (if extreme) Sunni regime seems increasingly unsettled; in fact, it has something of the look these days of a person holding a gun to his own head and threatening to pull the trigger. In other words, in a region already aflame, the Saudis seem to be tossing... well, oil onto any fire in sight.

And in a way, it's little wonder. The very basis for the existence of the Saudi royals, their staggering oil reserves, is under attack -- and not by the Iranians, the Russians, or the Americans, but as TomDispatch energy specialist Michael Klare explains, by something so much larger: the potential ending of the petroleum way of life. Tom

Debacle at Doha

The Collapse of the Old Oil Order

By Michael T. Klare Sunday, April 17th was the designated moment. The world's leading oil producers were expected to bring fresh discipline to the chaotic petroleum market and spark a return to high prices. Meeting in Doha, the glittering capital of petroleum-rich Qatar, the oil ministers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), along with such key non-OPEC producers as Russia and Mexico, were scheduled to ratify a draft agreement obliging them to freeze their oil output at current levels. In anticipation of such a deal, oil prices had begun to creep inexorably upward, from $30 per barrel in mid-January to $43 on the eve of the gathering. But far from restoring the old oil order, the meeting ended in discord, driving prices down again and revealing deep cracks in the ranks of global energy producers. It is hard to overstate the significance of the Doha debacle. At the very least, it will perpetuate the low oil prices that have plagued the industry for the past two years, forcing smaller firms into bankruptcy and erasing hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in new production capacity. It may also have obliterated any future prospects for cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC producers in regulating the market. Most of all, however, it demonstrated that the petroleum-fueled world we've known these last decades -- with oil demand always thrusting ahead of supply, ensuring steady profits for all major producers -- is no more. Replacing it is an anemic, possibly even declining, demand for oil that is likely to force suppliers to fight one another for ever-diminishing market shares. The Road to Doha Before the Doha gathering, the leaders of the major producing countries expressed confidence that a production freeze would finally halt the devastating slump in oil prices that began in mid-2014. Most of them are heavily dependent on petroleum exports to finance their governments and keep restiveness among their populaces at bay. Both Russia and Venezuela, for instance, rely on energy exports for approximately 50% of government income, while for Nigeria it's more like 75%. So the plunge in prices had already cut deep into government spending around the world, causing civil unrest and even in some cases political turmoil. No one expected the April 17th meeting to result in an immediate, dramatic price upturn, but everyone hoped that it would lay the foundation for a steady rise in the coming months. The leaders of these countries were well aware of one thing: to achieve such progress, unity was crucial. Otherwise they were not likely to overcome the various factors that had caused the price collapse in the first place. Some of these were structural and embedded deep in the way the industry had been organized; some were the product of their own feckless responses to the crisis. On the structural side, global demand for energy had, in recent years, ceased to rise quickly enough to soak up all the crude oil pouring onto the market, thanks in part to new supplies from Iraq and especially from the expanding shale fields of the United States. This oversupply triggered the initial 2014 price drop when Brent crude -- the international benchmark blend -- went from a high of $115 on June 19th to $77 on November 26th, the day before a fateful OPEC meeting in Vienna. The next day, OPEC members, led by Saudi Arabia, failed to agree on either production cuts or a freeze, and the price of oil went into freefall. The failure of that November meeting has been widely attributed to the Saudis' desire to kill off new output elsewhere -- especially shale production in the United States -- and to restore their historic dominance of the global oil market. Many analysts were also convinced that Riyadh was seeking to punish regional rivals Iran and Russia for their support of the Assad regime in Syria (which the Saudis seek to topple). The rejection, in other words, was meant to fulfill two tasks at the same time: blunt or wipe out the challenge posed by North American shale producers and undermine two economically shaky energy powers that opposed Saudi goals in the Middle East by depriving them of much needed oil revenues. Because Saudi Arabia could produce oil so much more cheaply than other countries -- for as little as $3 per barrel -- and because it could draw upon hundreds of billions of dollars in sovereign wealth funds to meet any budget shortfalls of its own, its leaders believed it more capable of weathering any price downturn than its rivals. Today, however, that rosy prediction is looking grimmer as the Saudi royals begin to feel the pinch of low oil prices, and find themselves cutting back on the benefits they had been passing on to an ever-growing, potentially restive population while still financing a costly, inconclusive, and increasingly disastrous war in Yemen. Many energy analysts became convinced that Doha would prove the decisive moment when Riyadh would finally be amenable to a production freeze. Just days before the conference, participants expressed growing confidence that such a plan would indeed be adopted. After all, preliminary negotiations between Russia, Venezuela, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia had produced a draft document that most participants assumed was essentially ready for signature. The only sticking point: the nature of Iran's participation. The Iranians were, in fact, agreeable to such a freeze, but only after they were allowed to raise their relatively modest daily output to levels achieved in 2012 before the West imposed sanctions in an effort to force Tehran to agree to dismantle its nuclear enrichment program. Now that those sanctions were, in fact, being lifted as a result of the recently concluded nuclear deal, Tehran was determined to restore the status quo ante. On this, the Saudis balked, having no wish to see their arch-rival obtain added oil revenues. Still, most observers assumed that, in the end, Riyadh would agree to a formula allowing Iran some increase before a freeze. "There are positive indications an agreement will be reached during this meeting... an initial agreement on freezing production," said Nawal Al-Fuzaia, Kuwait's OPEC representative, echoing the views of other Doha participants.

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In the recent New York primaries, Bernie Sanders experienced some very cold water thrown in his face. Not only did he lose, and soundly, but he was served a major lesson about one of the primary deficiencies in his campaign.



While the pundits joined his campaign organizers in attributing Hilary Clinton's victory to her past as Senator from the state, most have ignored the problem the this defeat laid bare: Sanders' campaign is weakest among people of color and, among black people, it has virtually no constituent support.



In today's United States, you can't become the Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party without that support. Bernie doesn't have it and probably won't get it and so those of us who support his candidacy -- which merits support for his integrity, thinking and progressive commitment -- are left to analyze why and observe with frustration what could have been. Had Bernie Sanders done a few things differently, he could well have been our next President.



Bernie Sanders at Tindley Temple Chapel in Phila

(Image by rob kall) Details DMCA



The tale of woe spins on a problem that will plague the Democratic Party from now on if it doesn't make the needed adjustment, an adjustment that movements of struggle all over this country have been trying to make for the last 15 years. It starts by answering a simple question: What exactly is the role of people of color, particularly those of African descent, in American politics and how does a progressive campaign like Bernie's recognize and address that role?



There's an old saying leaders in movements of color use in talking about the white-dominated sections of the U.S. left: "When do we get to sit at the table?" It refers to the ritual among left-wing movements in which white people, mainly men, get together around an issue, formulate the strategy and positions, and then start searching for a "representative" person of color to join their leadership. It has been the norm in some movement politics for almost a century. In fact, it continues today among many movements including those around technology and the protection of Internet rights and, well, Bernie's campaign.





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Whos winning Oregons money race?

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton , Bernie Sanders?

By Taxpayer Association of Oregon PAC

OregonWatchdog

We looked at the total donations and number of donors for each of the Presidential candidates coming from Oregon. This data is just a large snap shot sample (of the total amounts) with limitations. Our sample results are very illuminating.

The total Oregon donation shows that Ted Cruz has been effectively working Oregon, almost better than all the Presidential candidates combined.

Surprisingly, Bernie Sanders has outperformed Clinton in funds raised in our sample.

Bernie Sanders also received nearly twice as many donations as Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders continues to have one of the best grassroots fundraising operations of all the Presidential candidates.

On the Republican side Ted Cruz and Ben Carson did extremely well at recruiting individual donations in Oregon. The numbers reflect a unique connection voters had with the retired surgeon that nearly dwarfed other opponents combined such as Rand Paul, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush).

Note: The numbers are limited due to time (as recorded since last March 2016), source (not all corporate donations captured and not all individuals could be verified are also not captured) and size (smaller donations not recorded because they are not publicly recorded).
Nawaz Sharif directed federal ministers to pay full attention to development projects

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has directed federal ministers to pay full heed towards ongoing development projects instead of wasting their energies in giving replies to their political opponents.



The cabinet has in principal given approval for the commission which would to be constituted for the probe into the Panama leak papers. The PM issued instructions to the Finance Ministry to speed up the development work in the constituencies of MNAs and MPAs hailing from PML(N).



While speaking to the Federal Cabinet, the Prime Minister said that no compromise would be made on the development of the country . The political opponents were trying to obstruct Pakistans progress. They know that their politics would be buried in 2018 when the PML(N) government would tackle the energy crises. The opposition is afraid of the development as well as the success of the government. All the international institutions are praising the fiscal policies of Pakistan. Gwader port would be the centre of the development of the country. In the past no government after 1999 succeeded to invest in the energy sector, the government brought the investment of 34 billion dollars in this sector, which is not a debt, he added.



The Premier said that he was very satisfied upon the production of electricity from coal in Thar. The government has set standards regarding transparency in development projects. He said that the government was ready to take all the challenges faced by the country. We will manage the deficiency of gas during our tenure. The PML(N) government would fulfil its manifesto, Sharif added.



The cabinet also agreed to evolve a practical and effective strategy to counter the drive against the government in the media.



Many ministers complained to the Prime Minister that only the Interior Ministry was given the budget of Rs 14.58 billion, whereas the original budget allocation for the ministry was Rs 12.33 billion.



The Ministry of Finance adopts a biased behavior with other ministries while earmarking the budget. On the other hand only two months are left in closing of the fiscal year but several ministries were given only 40 per cent of the budgetary allocations. The development projects could be halted if the Finance Ministry would not release funds, the minister complained. Reacting to this the PM issued directives to Finance Ministry to issue funds to all the ministries without any discrimination.



The cabinet meeting also discussed the matters regarding the probe into the Panama leaks, the current political situation of the country, the ongoing development projects and the next budget. The Prime Minister also sought the budget proposal from the federal ministers.



The cabinet members expressed their full confidence in the Prime Minister regarding the investigation of the Panama leak papers. The cabinet also ratified all the decisions of the prime minister, especially after noting that the PM presented himself before the Chief Justice for an enquiry into the Panama leak papers.



The meeting was also briefed on the projects of two motorways for which the Chinese Council has approved 4.5 billion dollars. Under these projects two motorways would be constructed from Sukkur to Multan and Havellian to Thakot.



During the meeting Federal Finance Minister, Ishaq Dar, briefed the cabinet about the upcoming budget, financial policies of the government, ongoing development projects and the future strategy to deal with the energy crises.



Dar told the cabinet that it would be proposed in the next budget to fix the target of Rs 3600 billion of tax revenue. In the budget new taxes of Rs. 100 billion would be levied. These taxes would be imposed on ending of different tax holidays.
Led by Mr. Nontacha Ketwetsuriya, Store Manager of the IKEA Pick-up and order point in Phuket, IKEA has made public the performance of its Pick-up & order point during its first five months, and has persuaded southern people to make every meal special with IKEAs dining range.



Mr. Nontacha said, Since arriving in Phuket last November, we are very delighted that our customers in Southern Thailand have given a warm welcome to the IKEA Pick-up & Order Point during its first five months. After reviewing the stores performance, we are still confident that Phuket has great potential, with considerable consumer purchasing power and consistent business growth. By monitoring the total number of customers at the IKEA Pick-up and Order Point, we know that 75% of shoppers are foreigners and 25% are Thai. Over 90% of our Thai customers are from Phuket, and 4% from Phang-nga.

Most customers buy an average of 5,900 THB per receipt, which is equal to an average purchase at IKEA Bangna. We have also found that, after placing an order at the IKEA Pick-up and Order Point, 75% of our customers opt to collect items themselves. They do so in order to save time and travel expenses, while experiencing benefits such as improved access to a wider range of well-designed, good quality, functional home furnishing items and solutions.

This coincided with the launch of an inspirational campaign to invite everyone to make every meal special for their family members and loved ones by setting their tables with IKEAs dining range and furniture, featuring various functional designs at affordable prices.

The NORDEN series of extendable tables can be adjusted according to various needs. The RISATORP trolley meets the needs of homemakers and makes everything they store easier to see and access. DINERA is an 18-piece dinnerware set that gives a sophisticated and functional feel to any familys table, big or small. These and other items will be on display in the store, from March through May. In our bright, new showroom, you can find creative and inspiring ways to make your home more comfortable for you and your family.

IKEA is looking forward to greeting all customers from Southern Thailand, with over 9,500 decorative items and furniture seen in the IKEA catalogue and online. IKEA would also like to invite everyone to enjoy tasty, wholesome, Swedish-style food and drink. Customers living in Southern Thailand will enjoy the same promotions offered at IKEA Bangna, such as various products at special prices, and interest-free installment payments. Get ready for the many exciting activities and events that the IKEA Pick-up and Order Point and Phuket plans to hold in the near future. For more details, visit www.IKEA.co.th

Most popular products at the IKEA Pick-up & order point in Phuket:

Five most-loved items: 1. Soft toys, 2. Kitchen sets, 3. Sofas, 4. Bedroom furniture items, and 5. Dining chairs & tables.

Most popular items at the IKEA Bistro: 1. Hotdogs, 2. Meatballs, and 3. Marinated salmon wrap.
Any system in thermodynamic equilibrium is known to satisfy perfectly balanced forward and backward transitions between any two states. It is therefore impossible, for instance, to drive a windmill to do work by using only thermal fluctuations. The new research shows how living systems violate this principle. Thus, even stochastic fluctuations in such living systems could be used to drive such a small-scale windmill. Credit: C. Hohmann and M. Leunissen

Inside every living cell, internal structures are continuously moving about. Under a microscope, organelles such as the nucleus, mitochondria, transport vesicles, or even external flagella wobble and twitch. This may happen spontaneously as these tiny structures are passively jostled inside a cell. But that's not necessarily all there is to it. Often a cell invests extra energy into these motions to enhance cell functions in ways we don't yet understand.

At the microscopic scale, particles in a fluid or a gas can move about in response to bombardment by the surrounding molecules. Such passive, thermally-induced motions are often very hard to distinguish from actively driven movements, and it can be impossible to tell just by looking whether particular motions inside a cell are simply thermal or pushed by some extra input of energy.

Now scientists at MIT, the University of Gottingen, Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, the Free University Amsterdam, and Yale University have developed a noninvasive data analysis technique that can discern whether an object's random motion is actively or thermally driven. After tracking the conformations or locations that a structure within the cell or a particle passes through as it moves, and observing how the particle transitions back and forth between such states, the researchers apply a fundamental principle of statistical physics to determine whether the random motions are active or thermal.

Nikta Fakhri, assistant professor in MIT's Department of Physics, says the results will help scientists to uncover "hidden" active processes that drive a cell's constituents to move in seemingly random ways.

"We want to see if particular dynamics in living systemsbe those cells or tissues or whole organismsthat look at first glance like random thermal motion are indeed actively driven," says Fakhri, who is a first co-author on the paper. "This is important because there must be a vital function connected with the process if the cell spends energy on it. Our work provides a practical experimental method to identify active, nonequilibrium processes in observations of biological systems."

Fakhri and her colleagues have published their results today in the journal Science.

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a noninvasive technique that distinguishes active from passive fluctuations inside cells. Credit: Melanie Gonick/MIT

Shaking things up

Observations of the movements of microscopic particles date back to 1827, when Scottish botanist Robert Brown was looking through a microscope at pollen grains in water. He noticed that the grains contained tiny particles that jiggled vigorously, and at first glance believed that their motion meant the particles were somehow alive and moving on their own. Eventually, Brown retired this theory when he observed the same jiggling with inert particles from rocks, realizing that just seeing a particle moving doesn't necessarily mean it is alive.

Scientists now know that such particles are being pushed around by even smaller water molecules, which themselves are jiggling. At elevated temperatures, water molecules possess kinetic energy and can remain forever restless. At microscopic scales, these tiny molecules and atoms can "bombard" other much larger particles. This phenomenon is now known as Brownian motion. Scientists today are so used to seeing Brownian motion that they often assume that a particle moving in a random fashion is likely to be at thermal equilibriuma state in which a system is not dissipating any energy, and therefore inanimate.

In living cells, of course, many organelles or particles tend to move in a "ballistic" fashion, traveling across some distance, with a clearly directed or oscillatory trajectory. These types of motions, Fakhri says, represent an animated state that must be out of equilibrium, requiring a system to expend energy. What is interesting, however, are situations where particles jiggle randomly and seem to be in equilibrium, but in reality move actively.

Frame by frame

Fakhri and her colleagues set out to develop a statistical physics technique that would enable them to tell, just by imaging a particle, whether its random motions are thermal or active in nature.

Using video microscopy, they studied, frame by frame, the oscillatory motion of the flagellum of a Chlamydomonas algae. They deconstructed the backbone of the flagellum into a series of shapes, thus creating a phase space of the states the flagellum passes through as it completes an oscillatory cycle. They then counted the transitions between states. In thermal equilibrium, the back-and-forth transitions between all states must be balanced. However, they observed a clear imbalance in these transitions, confirming the already known fact that the flagellum expends energy for this active oscillatory motion.

Next, they analyzed the motions of a kidney cell's ciliuman antenna-like appendage that at first glance appears to be jiggling back and forth passively. By tracking the cilium's orientation and curvature, and counting transitions between states, they observed a slight imbalance in the transitions, pointing to an unexpected active process that drives the cilium, despite its passive appearance.

Fakhri says the new method will help scientists to uncover new ways in which cells dissipate energywhich, ultimately, is the key to sustaining life. After all, as the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger noted, "Living matter evades the decay to thermal equilibrium."

"Almost a century later, through the work of this collaboration, we can now go further and find out how cells budget their energy and particularly why they often expend a lot of energy to create these apparently random motions," Fakhri says.

Explore further Partitioning by collision

More information: "Broken detailed balance at mesoscopic scales in active biological systems" Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aac8167 Journal information: Science "Broken detailed balance at mesoscopic scales in active biological systems"
The Arabic text from the report of SN 1006 of Ibn Sina in al-Shifa from the Arabic edition by Madkur et al. (1965), page 73. The relevant text starts in the middle of the second line from the top and ends almost at the (leftmost) end of the 3rd-to-last line from the bottom of the main text. The writing in the left margin is the Arabic line number 15. The 4th line (line 14) reads (starting from the right) for the 2nd to 4th word kawkab min al-kawakib , i.e. a star among the stars, and at the end of that line it specifies the year (the leftmost word is hijra). The lines at the bottom indicate variant readings in different manuscripts, none of which change the content and meaning of the relevant text about the new star: the words for long and hijra are missing in one or two manuscripts. Credit: arXiv:1604.03798 [astro-ph.SR]

(Phys.org)A trio of German researches has uncovered evidence of the Arabic scholar Ibn Sina's sighting of supernova 1006 (SN 1006). The new evidence will sit alongside that of others around that globe that reported details of what has been described as the brightest stellar event ever recorded by human beings. In their paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, Ralph Neuhaeuser, Carl Ehrig-Eggert and Paul Kunitzsch describe the text under study, their translation of it and the relevance of the information recorded by the ancient skygazer.

Ibn Sina was a Persian scientist and philosopher, who as part of his observations, traveled a lot and wrote about what he saw, along with his interpretations of subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy. It was one of those texts, called Kitab al-Shifa, about physics, meteorology, and especially astronomy that caught the attention of the researchersmost particularly a section that described a bright object appearing in the sky in the year 1006. The section had been studied before, but the account had been attributed to a discussion of a comet. In this latest look, the researchers suggest that the description was actually that of SN 1006. In addition to the timing, the detailed description, they note, sounds more like the sudden appearance of an exploding star. In their translation, Sina describes an object that was very bright and that changed color over time before fading awayeven noting at one point that the object threw out sparks.

SN 1006 was noted and described by others around the world, from places as far-flung as Morocco, Japan, Yemen and China, but none of those descriptions included information about the object changing colors. Sina wrote that the object started out as faint greenish-yellow, that it twinkled a lot, especially at its brightest, and that it became whitish before it disappeared altogether.

Most modern astronomers believe that SN 1006 was not just a Ia supernova (which occur when a white dwarf is pulled into another star causing it to blow up due to the overabundance of matter), but that it was the result of two white dwarfs colliding. This new information from an ancient part-time astronomer, the researchers suggest, may help to better understand an event that occurred over a thousand years ago.

Explore further New study suggests long ago brightest star explosion was rapid type Ia supernova

More information: An Arabic report about supernova SN 1006 by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) arXiv:1604.03798 [astro-ph.SR] An Arabic report about supernova SN 1006 by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) arXiv:1604.03798 [astro-ph.SR] arxiv.org/abs/1604.03798v1 Abstract

We present here an Arabic report about supernova 1006 (SN 1006) written by the famous Arabic scholar Ibn Sina (Lat. Avicenna, AD 980-1037), which was not discussed in astronomical literature before. The short observational report about a new star is part of Ibn Sina's book called al-Shifa', a work about philosophy including physics, astronomy, and meteorology. We present the Arabic text and our English translation. After a detailed discussion of the dating of the observation, we show that the text specifies that the transient celestial object was stationary and/or tail-less ("a star among the stars"), that it "remained for close to three months getting fainter and fainter until it disappeared", that it "threw out sparks", i.e. it was scintillating and very bright, and that the color changed with time. The information content is consistent with the other Arabic and non-Arabic reports about SN 1006. Hence, it is quite clear that Ibn Sina refers to SN 1006 in his report, given as an example for transient celestial objects in a discussion of Aristotle's "Meteorology". Given the wording and the description, e.g. for the color evolution, this report is independent from other reports known so far. Journal information: arXiv

 2016 Phys.org
Car manufacturer Mitsubishi recently disclosed that it overstated the fuel efficiency on four types of its petrol-powered small cars sold in Japan, by up to 10 percent, affecting more than 600k vehicles.

It has also admitted that since 1991 it has been using fuel economy testing methods that were not compliant with Japanese standards.

Close similarity to VW scandal

The scandal has also alarmed US regulators such as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which played an important part in exposing the Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal; the EPA has asked the Japanese automobile manufacturer to submit additional information on cars sold in the US.

In 2015, UK buyers purchased 22,693 new Mitsubishi cars, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

City's Professor of Energy Systems, Professor Keith Pullen, says this latest scandal bears close similarity to the last year's problems at VW, and "shows the lengths to which manufacturers are willing to go in order to get around legislation controlling vehicle emissions". He says the difference, in this instance, is that Mitsubishi's falsification of fuel economy data affects the emissions of CO2 gas which is detrimental to global warming, but is not toxic as is the case with VW and other examples where this has been demonstrated.

Unreal figures

Professor Pullen believes that EU regulations governing the fuel emission testing of new cars entering the UK market are not robust enough. In his view, there has been a legal loophole which car manufacturers have used for years: The the official NEDC test cycle differs substantially from 'real world' driving and gives low emission figures which are unreal as the test avoids high accelerations  the precise instances in which toxic pollutants are emitted due to turbo lag and high engine temperatures.

He adds:

"It is well known that real car emissions are far higher than the legislated values would indicate, since the methods of testing are highly misleading and many would argue intentionally so, to the point of this being a scandal in itself with legislators colluding with manufacturers. Since the EU is in charge of the regulations, this has implications about the integrity of those in charge of administering the testing regime. Would it be any better under direct control of a UK test regime? This is a difficult question to answer."

Definition:

Turbo lag

Turbo lag is the delay from when a driver steps on the accelerator until the extra power generated by the turbocharger arrives. A turbocharger is driven by exhaust gases, so there is a lag before a greater amount of exhaust gas causes a turbine wheel to draw more fresh air into the engine and generate more power.

Explore further Diesel emissions inquiry findings should shake up car industry
Soon you can find out what your cat's meow, purr, growling or hissing means. A new research project will investigate how cats talk with us humans  and how we speak to them.

Humans and cats have lived together for 10,000 years; during that time, a kind of communication has developed between us. But still little is known about what this communication looks like.

This will be remedied through the new "Meowsic" (Melody in humancat communication) research project. By studying communication between approximately 30 cats and their owners, researchers hope to get answers as to what the melody (or prosody) in cats'  and their owners'  speech looks like. Linguist Robert Eklund is doing his best to "scrape together" cats and cat owners for the project. The cats should preferably live in different areas of the country, as Mr Eklund believes that cats also speak dialects.

"There is research showing that finback whales have dialects  they found six different dialects in northern Norway alone. As regards cats, it's likely because they mimic their owners, but we don't know. Yet," says Mr Eklund, reader in computational linguistics and senior lecturer in language, culture, and phonetics at Linkoping University.

The cats that participate in the project will be filmed in their homes together with their owners. Since cats are curious creatures, the cameras will be set up a few days before recording so that they will get acquainted with the equipment. Then everyday situations such as feeding and play will be recorded.

"We'll also challenge the cats a little bit, for example by petting them so they make contented sounds, and then pet them a little harder to see how they communicate when they become irritated," Mr Eklund says.

They will also study how cats communicate with each other and how that differs from communication with people. Another part of the project consists of studying how cat owners' speech sounds, and how that affects the cats.

From wildcats to housecats

Strictly speaking, it was wild cats that were the focus of Mr Eklund's research as a linguist. But when he met Susanne Schotz, reader in phonetics from Lund University, at a conference he realised that between the two of them they could contribute to research into the cries of cats. Mr Eklund has studied things such as the purr of wild felines, the roar of lions, and the agonistic ("angry") cries of leopards. Ms Schotz, on the other hand, was entirely focused on the communication of the housecat.

Mr Ekluns argues that the knowledge they bring in through the project could be used in a range of contexts. How cats express themselves is important knowledge for veterinarians; cats are also being used to an ever greater extent in health care  retirement homes, for example  and by better understanding cats, we will also know what they want.

The data gathered over the course of the project will be collected in a sound database open to those who are interested.

Will your own cats participate in the project?

"No, I'm allergic. I don't have any cats. I take a lot of allergy pills. But it's worth it."

Read more about the project: vr.humlab.lu.se/projects/meowsic/index.html

Explore further Do you understand what your cat is saying?
This April 2016 photo released by the Waterbury Public Schools shows Jahana Hayes in Waterbury, Conn., a history teacher at John F. Kennedy High School who was selected as the National Teacher of the Year announced Thursday, April 28, by the Council of Chief State School Officers. She will be recognized by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony on Tuesday, May 3. (David Therault/Waterbury Public Schools via AP)

A Connecticut high school history teacher chosen as the National Teacher of the Year on Thursday says she was surrounded by poverty, drugs and violence as a child but imagined other possibilities for her life with help from educators.

Jahana Hayes, who teaches at John F. Kennedy High School in Waterbury, was selected for the honor by the Council of Chief State School Officers. She will be recognized by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony on Tuesday.

Hayes, 44, grew up in a Waterbury housing project and became a teenage mother while still in high school. She said the influence of her own teachers taught her that a school's job sometimes overlaps with the job of parents, and she wants her students to know there are no dead ends.

"No matter where you are or how bad you think it is, there's always opportunities for growth and opportunities for improvement," she said. "I think too often, especially at the high school level, people deal in absolutes and students get the message that, 'If I mess up or I don't do everything exactly right right now, that that's the end of my story.'"

At an urban school with a widely diverse student body, she said she has found teaching is a lifestyle that extends beyond the contracted hours. She finds herself serving not only as a teacher but also as a counselor, a confidant and a protector of her students.

Hayes has won praise for her emphasis on community service and development of a service learning curriculum.

"A lot of my students, they feel like they have nothing to give, which is a very defeating attitude," she said. "I've had students who live in shelters, and they're out with me working with Habitat for Humanity. It is empowering for them because they know no matter where they are right now, there's opportunity for improvement. So many people have helped them along the way, it just feels good for them to help somebody else."

Hayes was selected from among four finalists named in January. The other three teachers hail from Washington state, California and Oklahoma. Hayes will spend a year traveling the nation to represent educators and advocate on behalf of teachers.

"Daily, Jahana gives back to the community which didn't give up on her," Waterbury schools superintendent Kathleen Ouellette said.

Explore further Race biases teachers' expectations for students

 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This map shows the geography of all patent infringement litigation filed by Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs) against publicly traded firms in the United States from 2005-2015, tabulated by U.S. Federal Court District. Non-Practicing Entities are firms that derive the majority of their income from litigating patents. Credit: Cohen et al., Science (2016)

Research to be published in Science on April 29, 2016 shows how cash-hungry patent trolls are squelching innovation when the American economy depends on it more than ever. What should be done?

The new study, co-authored by Professor Lauren Cohen of Harvard Business School, Professor Umit Gurun of the University of Texas at Dallas, and Dr. Scott Duke Kominers, a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows, examines the sharp rise in patent litigation in the United States during the past decade, with 2015 marking one of the highest patent lawsuit counts on record.

In theory, the rise in patent litigation could reflect growth in the commercialization of technology and innovation, as lawsuits increase proportionately as more and more companies turn to intellectual property (IP) protection to safeguard their competitive advantages. In reality, however, it's a very different story. The authors point out that the majority of recent patent litigation has been driven by "nonpracticing entities" (NPEs)firms that generate no products but instead amass patent portfolios just for the sake of enforcing IP rights.

Cohen, Gurun, and Kominers discuss new, large-sample evidence adding to a growing literature that suggests that NPEsin particular, large patent aggregatorson average act as "patent trolls," suing cash-rich firms, seemingly irrespective of actual patent infringement.

Patent trolling has a negative impact on innovation activity at targeted firms. Cohen, Gurun, and Kominers estimate that after settling with NPEs (or losing to them in court), companies on average reduce their research and development (R&D) investment by more than 25 percent. These results, Cohen, Gurun, and Kominers say, indicate a need to change U.S. intellectual property policy, particularly to screen out trolling early in the litigation process.

Although since 2010 the U.S. Congress has considered more than a dozen bills aiming to reduce patent trolling, most of the proposed policy changes focus on after-the-fact punishments for bringing lawsuits that are declared to be frivolous (or "extraordinary") after court proceedings.

For example, H.R. 9, the "Innovation Act," which is currently on the docket, provides for mandatory fee-shifting for patent lawsuits that the courts determine are not "reasonably justified." In reality, however, the average costs of patent litigation are large ($1 million to $4 million) and the process is drawn out. Even with the prospect of post-trial fee shifting, patent litigation targets may thus find it cost-effective and less disruptive to simply settle with NPEs, even in unfounded lawsuits. According to the authors, this is not a sufficient solution.

So what should be done? Cohen, Gurun, and Kominers say that policies should screen out trolling at or before the time of patent assertion. The authors recommend advance review procedures that would provide preliminary evaluation as to whether the plaintiff's infringement claims are reasonable and whether the asserted patents are of high quality. Such advance review could cripple trolling, they conclude; pre-litigation review can separate good NPEs (and, more generally, good patent lawsuits) from bad. Legitimate infringement claims will be encouraged, whereas trolling will be screened out. This would greatly benefit innovative companies and help them propel the U.S. economy to greater heights.

More information: "The growing problem of patent trolling," Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aad2686 Journal information: Science "The growing problem of patent trolling,"
For Immediate Release

An overnight airstrike on a Syrian hospital in Aleppo killed dozens of civilians, patients, and doctors, including one of the last pediatricians working in the area. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is appalled by such a brazen attack on health care workers, patients, and facilities, affirming today that any intentional strike on a hospital is a war crime and the systematic nature of the attacks in Syria constitutes crimes against humanity.

This catastrophic attack not only claimed dozens of lives, but it deprived countless Syrians of critical medical care just as attacks on Aleppo's civilians are intensifying, said PHR Syria researcher Elise Baker. Even wars have rules. International humanitarian law is meant to protect doctors, medical workers, and patients, and yet again and again the Syrian government has placed them in the crosshairs throughout this conflict. Theres no reason for a strike like this other than slaughtering and terrorizing the innocent.

A wave of airstrikes shortly before midnight Wednesday repeatedly hit the al-Quds field hospital, the most advanced pediatric care center in Aleppo. The attack comes as Aleppo and other Syrian cities have endured increasing attacks by Syrian government forces, backed by Russian airpower. A fragile two-month truce has nearly disintegrated, and peace talks in Geneva meant to put an end to the bloodshed have stalled.

Innocent Syrians are now paying the price for inaction, said PHRs Baker. The cost of political impasse is death and destruction in Syria. If Syrias leaders and the international community cannot reach a peace accord, theres no doubt attacks on health care will continue, and the consequences will be deadly for everyday Syrians. How many more doctors and patients have to die before the international community musters the will to end this bloodshed?

PHR has documented attacks on health care facilities and workers in Syria since the conflict began in 2011. As of this March, PHR has recorded the deaths of 730 medical workers and 359 attacks on 256 separate medical facilities. According to PHR's data, this is the third strike on the al Quds hospital.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is a New York-based advocacy organization that uses science and medicine to prevent mass atrocities and severe human rights violations. Learn more here.
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MECHANICVILLE | DeCrescente Distributing Co. will begin distributing New Belgium Brewing brands as of May 16, the company announced this week.

New Belgium, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, is 100 percent owned by its employees and is known for its Fat Tire, Ranger IPA, Citradelic IPA, Rampant Imperial IPA, Heavy Melon, Glutiny Pale Ale and Glutiny Golden Ale beers, according to a prepared statement.

We are very excited that New Belgium Brewing has chosen DeCrescente Distributing as its wholesaler in the Capital Region, said company President C.J. DeCrescente. New Belgiums portfolio of award-winning beers will make a great addition to our wholesale offerings and helps us in our goal to be the craft beer distributor of choice in Upstate New York.
MURRAY HILL, N.J. | C.R. Bard will host an investor conference at 4:30 p.m. on May 23 in New York City.

The conference will be hosted by Chairman and CEO Timothy M. Ring and will include an update on Bards product pipeline, according to a prepared statement.

A live broadcast of the conference will be available online at crbard.com, by clicking on the investors tab. The webcast will also be available for replay after the conference.

With its headquarters in Murray Hill, C.R. Bard employs approximately 750 at its facility on Bay Road in Queensbury.
HEBRON  An ambitious plan to buy a former summer camp and turn it into an institution for youthful offenders who would attend Salem school is generating concern among local officials.

There are still a lot of questions to be answered, and that is making me and others uneasy, said David Glover, Salems superintendent of schools. We are not really equipped for that many students to come in with that level of need.

Glover said Salem has 286 students in grades 7 to 12, and his understanding is that Brand New Beginnings would start with about 30 students and expand to 50.

That would create a real challenge for us. We have plenty of physical space, but we would need more staff, and that would come at a cost, he said.

He understands the students are already in the state system, Glover said: It sounds like this is their last chance before incarceration.

Hebron does not have a high school and sends most of its students to Salem.

Andrew and Jesse Brand, cousins from Long Island, said this week they have an option on the property and plan to develop Brand New Beginnings Youth Center. The center would take youths 13 to 18 from various counties and put them through a seven- to 12-month program, during which they would earn additional privileges based on their behavior.

At first, the center would take 14 boys and eight girls, Jesse Brand said. Their criminal justice involvement could be for crimes such as illegal drug and alcohol use, fire-setting and sexual assault. The companys GoFundMe page calls for accepting up to 48 youths.

Camp Hebron, located at 191 Presbytery Lane, had been operated for decades by Albany Presbytery. It ceased operations a few years ago and the Presbytery put the site up for sale.

Last year, Hebron officials discussed whether part of the property could be used for community recreation or to host conferences, but that plan has apparently fallen through.

Part of the 426.8 acres owned by the Presbytery will be sold off to Mapleland Farms. About 90 acres, which includes the camp buildings and pool, make up the parcel Brand New Beginnings would use.

Hebron Supervisor Brian Campbell said the Brands met with a group of local and county officials early this month, and he came away unimpressed.

It was just a horrible presentation. They didnt really have anything ready, said Campbell, who noted the Town Board has already voted in opposition to the sale.

But, he said, the town cannot block the project if the Brands buy the camp and get state approvals.

If they buy it, then they can do what they want, Campbell said. I think we all should be concerned.

Campbell said he does not expect the camp can be up and running as quickly as the founders hope.

Its going to take the better part of a year for the sale to go through, because it is owned by the church, and that requires state approval, Campbell said.

Campbell said there have been several rumors in the past about possible buyers, but nothing has come to fruition.

In addition to the pool complex, other buildings at the site are the main lodge/dining hall, retreat center, two bunkhouses, directors house and a maintenance barn.

Step by step

Jesse Brand said the centers programs will be set up in phases, allowing students to take a step-by-step approach to improving their social and personal skills. He said students will earn privileges for success at each stage. When they come in, they are in the White Phase, which focuses on their life skills; then it moves to Red, which includes obstacles and rope courses; then Blue, where they put it all together and get ready for adulthood, Brand said. Brand New Beginnings would incorporate ideas from Green Chimneys, a program in Brewster, which focuses on outdoor programs and having youths work with animals, he said. Wed like to set up some programs where our youth could go out and work with animals at local farms, he said. Brand said he and his cousin are military veterans and have both seen success come from earning privileges. You dont give them something, he said. They earn it. That means so much more.
Warren County emergency officials want to make sure they have enough help when the next Hurricane Irene hits the region.

The county has agreed to a contract with Tetra Tech Inc., a Virginia-based company that will provide manpower to supplement the countys Office of Emergency Services staff when disasters like floods, windstorms or hazardous materials spills occur.

While the company is based out of state, it has a number of employees in the region, some as close as Washington County, county Emergency Services Director Brian LaFlure said.

We know a number of their employees already, he said.

The company, Tetra Tech Inc., will also put together a continuity of operations plan for the county that spells out the role of different county agencies and steps to be taken if different types of disaster hit a county building, such as a fire at the Municipal Center or public works garage or loss of office space because of flooding or hazardous material exposure.

The 2007 fire that closed Warren County Municipal Center for nearly three days exposed some of the issues that should be planned for ahead of time, LaFlure said. The county was not prepared to deal with the loss of the center for an extended period.

What happens if there is a hazmat spill in my office and we lose all of our radios? LaFlure asked. Where am I going to set up my office? Schoharie County lost everything in (Hurricane) Irene. You can come up with a lot of what-ifs.

Tetra Tech will be paid $75,000 to put together the continuity of operations plan, which will be submitted for the approval of the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The companys employees will be paid on an hourly basis for emergency assistance only if they are brought in to help LaFlures office during disasters. All of its staff members are trained in municipal response to disasters, many having worked for municipalities in the past.

If we have a disaster and we have to call them, then and only then will they get paid, said Amy Hirsch, the countys deputy director. They provide people to assist us in the field and provide experience.

The company also provides staff trained in documenting damage for federal and state reimbursement during disasters, which is a time-consuming and arduous process, LaFlure said.
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
According to Angela Kyeremanten-Jimoh, cloud computing is cheaper than traditional hardware storage systems, hence provides a cheaper and more effective tool for data storage.

Cloud is Cheaper. The days of putting so much resources into buying hardware are long gone. Instead of investing loads of money on physical hardware that will take physical space and energy, cloud computing is simple and easily accessible.

One other benefit of cloud computing as revealed by the IBM Country Director is its scalability.

 It is easy to acquire more cloud storage space as and when you need more. This is in contrast with what usually happens when using hardware storage systems, where you must invest in the hardware that you may not readily need or have to acquire a new whole hardware when you need more space.

READ MORE: Microsoft Ghana improves education in Ghana through Cloud Computing

The third benefit, according to Angela, is the business adaptability.

 Cloud makes it easier through the help of some apps, to adapt to the needs of your customers in real time and provide better service delivery.

Cloud computing is not devoid of challenges though. The country director mentioned inadequate internet connectivity, inadequate amounts of local expertise to manage cloud computing and Security.

IBM, however has taken steps to educate the public on the proper and effective cloud management techniques and urged other multinationals to help train local expertise in cloud computing.
 The One Note Classroom allows educators to better interact with their students, share notes, access assignments and generally better interact with their students.

He made this known in his address to the gathering of ICT players at the International Conference on Advance in Trends in ICT and Management-ICAITM organized by the BlueCrest College in Accra, aimed at discussing the many possibilities of cloud computing for sustainable development in Africa.

For students, the country director of Microsoft Ghana said One Note Classroom create a better learning experience.

 For students, it creates a better way of learning which is more productive, as it provides the opportunity to collaborate with other students all over the world to share knowledge.

Microsofts values include a strong commitment to the privacy of their clients, and the safety of their opportunities.

With this background of strong commitment to ICT ethics, Microsoft Ghana sees cloud computing as very much a part of the future and a force the presents many opportunities for improving lives.
The conference is aimed at bringing together Africas greatest minds in ICT to discuss the immense opportunities of cloud computing for sustainable development in Ghana.

READ MORE: BlueCrest to facilitate gathering of top African IT minds

According to BlueCrest College, organisers of the confrerence, Ringier Ghana, the media partner for the occasion has played a major role in disseminating information in relation to the conference and its opportunities for players in the ICT space, as well as streaming the session live online.

The award was received by Co-Product Manager of Pulse.com.gh, Philippe Greinacher, on behalf of the company.
He said universities should look at innovative ways to fund themselves.

Currently, government provides funds for the running of various public universities through the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) and other direct allocations.

Starr FM reports he said future developments could compel government to channel such resources into other sectors of the economy.

As we develop, other needs will come and at some point, the GETFund will have to stop and that is the place where the crisis will occur.

"So we need to anticipate and prepare for the future of no GETFund because we may need the fund to do other things in environment, climate change and so on and therefore the university will be put in a position that it has to rely on its own devices."

He also used his opening address to charge African universities to develop critical ideas for the continents development and challenge the traditions that impede progress.

He said Ghana's public universities have not taken seriously the impacts of globalisation and technological changes.

He said African universities could not afford to stand still in the face of globalisation because they risked being overtaken and would eventually lose their relevance, the Ghana News Agency reported.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur stated that statistics from Ghanas public universities suggested that the lessons of globalisation and the impact of technological change had not been taken seriously.

He said African universities were subject to the new information-driven global economy with the expectation for them to survive and thrive as market-like organisations, like their counterparts elsewhere.
With Shatta, I knew he could make it. He always had that drive... So when I saw him resurface and going in hard, I was like, I knew this was coming. Big up Shatta. Ill say Bisa is very authentic and original because highlife music has been there for a long time but for him to just put a different spin on it When you hear his record, you know this is Bisa. And for me, that is a very good thing to do so big up Bisa Kdei, Reggie said on Live FMs Live Breakfast Club.

On his part, Bollie said, I got the opportunity to meet Shatta once at Labadi beach. And when I saw him I said to myself thats the kind of energy you want to put into your music. His passion is very crazy and with such a person, hell always get there. Even though you might have started very rugged, in the end youll get there. And hes someone who pushes for what he believes in so big up Shatta.

Shatta Wale after rebranding from Bandana has become a household name. He has released a number of songs which have enjoyed airplay.

Bisa Kdei, on the otherhand, has dominated the highlife music scene for some time now by releasing quite a number of good songs.
A statement signed by the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mr Emmanuel A. Bossoh, the Administrator of the Ghana Police Hospital, and copied to the Ghana News Agency, said the decision is part of the routine measures to decongest the Police Hospitals morgue.

The statement added that the burial would take place 21 days after the announcement.

The hospital is therefore asking the public to contact the Pathology Department of the hospital for identification of persons who they had not seen for some time.
Scores of unemployed nurses on Wednesday, April 27, hit the streets to protest against delays in their postings.

According to the aggrieved nurses, the Ministry of Health has delayed the processes involved in getting them cleared and posted to the various health facilities for the past eight months.

However, President Mahama, who is in the Brong Ahafo region with his Accounting to the People tour said his administration has began the process of recruiting the bonded nurses.

"Every year financial clearance is given for the number of nurses based on a survey of what the need is and so every year we take in those nurses but I have asked that we give priority to the nurses who are trained in public institutions.
The third goal that of good health and wellbeing, can be challenging for many countries to progress.

Now, a new partnership between GE and Santa Clara Universitys Miller Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, will contribute to this by supporting social entrepreneurs working on maternal and child health innovations. Applications are open, and interventions must focus on sub-Saharan Africa.

The healthymagination Mother & Child programme is aimed at social enterprises focused in the following areas:

Qualified leaders of for-profit, non-profit or hybrid enterprises need to apply online by 18 May 2016, in order to be considered.

Finalists will be announced after a formal review and interview process by a panel of judges from both GE and the Miller Centre, on 20 June, and will be invited to pitch directly to active investors in February 2017.

Thanks to the programme, more women in the region will experience better quality healthcare thats also more affordable and accessible. At the same time, social enterprises addressing maternal and child health will be able to strengthen their business models, refine business plans, and measure their impact.

The healthymagination Mother & Child programme uses Miller Centers Global Social Benefit Institutes practice of helping social entrepreneurs fulfil their promise of solving big social problems.

We share GEs healthymagination vision for coming up with new ways to address global health challenges, said Thane Kreiner, executive director at Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. This partnership will help social entrepreneurs improve maternal and child health in a region that has limited access to skilled health care providers he adds.

This unique collaboration is an opportunity to increase the access and familiarity of GE solutions in Africa, said Jay Ireland, President and CEO of GE Africa. The healthymagination Mother & Child program will empower sub-Saharan African social enterprises with skills training and economic development needed to improve maternal and child health across communities.

GE has previously supported innovative entrepreneurs, including through the Power Africa initiative for off-grid energy solutions, such as solar-powered grain mills and electric bicycles.
The duo made the official announcement in the X-Men Tour's TVC. "Hello everybody...I just recorded a song with someone you can never, never even imagine on a record before,"Sarkodie said in the TVC. "I am about to release a song with Sarkodie. You will never believe that!,"Prince Kofi Amoabeng grinned cheerfully in the TVC.

The title of the song and the genre which is unknown will be premiered at X-Men Tour on Saturday, April 30 at the Great Hall, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

The maiden edition of the empowerment summit, dubbed, X-Men Tour, is aimed at motivating and inspiring the youth to achieve greatness by bringing together the most influential and successful people in Ghana to share their experiences.

Prince Kofi Amoabeng and Sarkodie will use the platform to share their leadership experiences and foster productive discussions with students of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). I will be hosted by Anita Erskine.
The deceased are Sedem Hodo Nana Kofi Asare Boamah, Boison Kobby Junior, all level 100 students of the University

According to an eye witness who disclosed the information to Pulse.com.gh the unfortunate incident occurred at the main gate of the university college when an ash VW car with registration number ER 228-14 collided with a trotro car.

About Central University College

Central University College was founded by the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) in Accra, Ghana. It started off as a pastoral training institute in 1988. It was then known as the Central Bible College by June 1991.
I was in Rwanda two years ago when they marked the 20th anniversary of the Genocide that the world wants to forget but the Rwandan people want to remind us of so neither they nor any other country have to ever go through it again. In a few articles I wrote from there titled generally as "Kigali Chronicles", I detailed the very fantastic work that the people of Rwanda have done since that dreadful episode in their country. In the last 22 years Rwanda has transformed from a war-torn country whose streets were littered with dead bodies to a beautiful nation with an impressive economic outlook and a people proud of who they are. Indeed Kigali is one city I will love to live and work in.

Back to Kwibuka 22

Kwibuka is the Kinyarwanda word for remember and describes the global commemoration framework for Rwanda over the years as they seek to let their past strengthen them.

I was at the Kigali Genocide Memorial around this same time 2 years ago. It's a beautiful building in that lovely city. From the entrance as be enters, you may not get the faintest idea of what to expect. Yes, it's a memorial so you will think of seeing imagery of the Genocide and all that. The expectation when met with the reality will blow anyone off their feet. Such is the inherent power and spirit encapsulated in the museum.

I was in the company of Arsenal legend Tony Adams and some of my colleagues from work and none of us, including those who were visiting the memorial for the 2nd and 3rd time walked out the gates the same. The solemnity that hit us seemed to have made us all vow on our silence, "NEVER AGAIN". As I listened to tour guides some of whom had lost relatives narrate the genesis of the Genocide - and it didn't start in 1994; the grounds of this started decades before - it dawned on Mr that my beloved Ghana may not be too far from this if we do not re-think what we do in the name of securing some measly political points.

The Rwandan people define what they call the Genocide ideology as any deliberate act, committed in public whether orally, written or video means or by any other means which may show that a person is characterized by ethnic, religious, nationality or racial-based with the aim to advocate for the commission of Genocide and support it.

Now think about it....

How many times have we not heard and seen politicians on radio, TV, and campaign platforms carelessly set up one tribe against the other? Some have proudly said that "NPP is an Akan party and they don't care about any other tribe folk except themselves", or have we not heard people say "even if you place a goat on the ticket of the NDC in the Volta Region it will win". Have we also not heard and seen some people use religion as as a tool to score political points?

These are some of the seemingly harmless things we allow people vying for political office to throw about carelessly. We allow them on our airwaves and we can't stop some because they own the dawn airwaves. One of the triggers of the 1994 Genocide was a call to action by a Hutu on radio. In our parts, our people give absolute regard to whatever they hear on radio, and it's such a powerful tool I hope we realise this. We should not allow politicians and their followers to take the peace we are enjoying for granted. It is is a big deal and let's not forget that the line between love and hate, peace and violence, a hug and a stab are all very thin indeed.

I remember vividly the look on the faces of my colleagues and Tony Adams as we went through the Genocide Memorial. You could literally hear us promise collectively with our hearts saying in unison, never again should the world allow this to happen again. Ghana should not even entertain the seeds of such sickening thoughts and carnage.
The 44th anniversary ceremony featured messages from Mr Ivor Kobina Greenstreet, presidential candidate of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) and Mr Opon Fosu, Minister of State, Office of the President, on behalf of the Government and people of Ghana, the Ghana News Agency reported.

Six wreaths were laid at the Nkrumah Memorial Mausoleum on behalf of the Government and People of Ghana, the Nkrumah family, CPP party, women, youth and the Socialists Forum of Ghana.

Greenstreet noted that the ideals and ideas of Nkrumah were still relevant in todays political and economic development adding that he was laying a solid foundation for economic liberation of Ghana.

He described Nkrumah as an incorruptible, hardworking, visionary and outstanding thinker who was committed to serving Ghana and Africa, the GNA reported.

Fosu, on behalf of President John Dramani Mahama, said Nkrumah dedicated his life not only for the development of Ghana and Africa but for humanity in general.

Fosu said: The country should resolve never to reduce and antagonise the image of any personality. Irrespective of our political affiliations we are one people with a common destiny.

Nkrumah led Ghana to independence from British colonial rule in 1957 and served as Ghanas first prime minister and president.

In February 1966, while on a state visit to North Vietnam and China, his government was overthrown in a military coup.

He lived in exile in Conakry, Guinea as the guest of President Ahmed Sekou Toure, who made him honorary co-president of the country.
The exercise is aimed at capturing the details of Ghanaians who have turned 18 since the last election in 2012.

The EC estimates to register about 1.2 million Ghanaians who have turned 18 including people who would want to register for the first time.

According to Ruth Asiam,

People who have lost their ID cards and want a new card is another challenge the officials in some polling stations are managing.
The Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Mr. John Kudalor, who made this known at a meeting held with the chairpersons and general secretaries of the various political parties said the move forms part of security arrangements being initiated to ensure a peaceful electioneering process.

He indicated that party executives were allowed to make inputs to decide the kind of security details they would want to be assigned by the Police.

However, at an IEA Forum in Accra on Wednesday, the police noted that several weeks after that said meeting, the political parties have failed to take advantage of the offer.

Director of Operations of the police Dr Benjamin Agbodzor warned that the police will impose personnel on the various flagbearers at the end of May if political parties refuse to choose the kind of security detail they wanted.

"In the past, we have had some of them making choices that have caused us to transfer some of them from one region to the other. And we are ready to do that one more time, because this is your personal detail and you must have confidence in the one you are working with.

"We are still waiting for those names and no political party has submitted names to us yet. Which means that at a point in time, maybe from 15th May onwards, we may begin to impose, and that is not what we want to do. Please I'm using this forum to appeal to all political parties to give us the names of persons they want, and we will deal with that," he added.

The security arrangement follows the controversy which surrounded the three ex-South African police officers who were brought in by the NPP to train the security detail of the flagbearer of the party.
Reports indicate that the turnout is very encouraging, Parry told Pulse.com.gh

He also stated some centres exceeded the expected daily turnout.

Parry said before the exercise began the EC expected to process about 38-40 applicants a day at each centre.

However, today being the first day, indications show some centres registered as many as 45.

The EC had announced it expected 1.2 million applicants to register over this period, which Parry said could be exceeded.

By statistical service analysis, they indicated to us that we should expect between 1.2 to 1.3 million applicants and that is what we are targeting to capture. If exceeds the targeted figure and they are all genuine applicants, there wouldnt be any problem.

How genuine the applicants are will come from the registration centres. We have registration officials and party representatives who are to ensure that people who go through the process at the centres satisfy the requirement. If someone doesnt satisfy the requirement, theres the challenge process we have told them to initiate so that such people will be investigated. So if at the end of the day, somebody is not challenged, it is presumed that the person is eligible to be put on the register.

Finally, Parry said security is not an issue since the period is a long one. According to him, security focus is mostly given to the general election.

It is not the practice that we send security officers to registration centres unless theres absolute need for it. Unlike voting that takes place in a day where we can deploy a large number of security personnel just for 24 hours, the registration exercise is going to last for some 10 days so it will be difficult to say that you will be able to find enough men for the registration centres throughout the period.
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!
Sinzu who was formerly managed by Tee Billz wrote about the drama on his Instagram account. "It saddens me to see someone i had love for going thru it and keepin my mouth shut. I dont do this social media bullshit. I mind my own business and handle my own business. So many things happen behind closed doors, so many secrets will come out to the open, so many disappointments will happen even with the ones you truly love" wrote the rapper.

Sinzu further wrote "What brings true happiness is finding yourself, being true to urself and worrying less about how others feel about u. To say the least, being selfless is the key. I havent talked to my bro @teebillz323 In over 4 yrs nor have i seen him or cared to see him.

"But i must admit it saddens me to see him in such state. I coulda got ur fone number, email or whatever thru many means but id rather do it this way. This is the only time i will use social media to express myself on this issue. None of these rants come as news to me. A lotta people will try to put dirt on your name and make u look bad at this tough time, do not break, All i have to say is whatever demons u fighting my G, come out on top. Wish u the best."

Tee Billz stopped managing Sinzu circa 2012. Tee Billz helped Sinzu break into the Nigerian market in 2006. After managing Sinzu he went on to work with Tiwa Savage. Tee Billz stopped being his wife's manager sometime last year.

In his rant Tee Billz claimed that Tiwa Savage's mother is a witch who frustrated her own husband. "I'm sorry Olabisi, Gaetano. Onah and jamil. All daddy wanted to do is be a good father and take care all of you but they won't let me. I have been fighting this spiritual battle since I was a kid my mother and father can testify. Went from family battle to mother inlaws battle. @tiwasavage ask your mother to confess what she's done to me."

ALSO READ: When Tee Billz proposed to Tiwa Savage

Tiwa Savage has not responded to Tee Billz's rants on Instagram. Yesterday, Tiwa Savage released a brand new video'If I Start To Talk' featuring Dr. Sid.
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!
The Metropolitan Police said that Awotunde was sentenced on Monday, 25 April, 2016, after pleading guilty to the following charges:

- possession of heroin with intent to supply - seven years' imprisonment;

- possession of crack cocaine with intent to supply - 7 years' imprisonment (to run concurrently);

- possession of a bladed article - nine months' imprisonment (to run consecutively);

- driving without insurance - disqualified from driving for 3 years;

- driving not in accordance with a licence - no separate penalty.

He was arrested after the car he was driving was forced to a halt by marked police cars as it travelled north on the M11 between Harlow and Bishops Stortford, after he had previously failed to stop for police.

On searching him, officers found a package containing 104 wraps of crack cocaine and 37 wraps of heroin. He was also found to be in possession of a lock knife and after analysing his mobile phone, text messages were found which appeared to show people contacting him with a view to purchasing drugs from him.
Akinbile-Yussuf stated this at a press briefing to mark the first of Governor Akinwunmi Ambode's regime.

Akinbile-Yussuf explained that the 150 reported cases of sexual abuse were officially recorded, as there are many of such cases that were not reported.

The Commissioner further stated that 85 suspected rapists and paedophiles had been taken to court while the cases were still pending.

Apart from the rape cases, Akinbile-Yussuf said 31 babies, comprising 19 females and 12 males, abandoned by their parents, and were rescued in the last one year on the streets of Lagos.
According to Punch reports, the incident which happened at the Badarawa Kwaru and Ungwan Yero communities in the Kaduna North Local Government Area, was said to have been sparked off after two men from the neighbouring communities fought over a married woman, leading to youths from opposing parts taking sides as it degenerated into a free for all.

Before the fight, it was gathered that even the state Governor, Nasiru el-Rufai, had visited the community and begged them to maintain peace.

According to an eyewitness, the fight started in the night of Sunday, April 24, when a man from the Kwaru community went to Unguwar Yero to see his alleged lover, who is married to another man there.

The witness narrated th genesis of the crisis:

The woman was the girlfriend of the Kwaru man, who used to give her money when they were dating. But the lady in question married another person. But after the marriage, the lady and her ex-boyfriend were still dating.

On that Sunday evening, the Kwaru man came as usual to look for his concubine. They met as usual, but the husband, who was already suspecting his wife, trailed her to where they were standing. So, when he accosted them, the Kwaru man stabbed his concubines husband in the stomach.

The man later died before he could be rushed to the hospital. But what got people of the area angry was that when Governor Nasir el-Rufai visited the place, he begged the people to be patient, without taking any action to bring the culprit to book.

That was why Unguwar Yero people also started attacking people suspected to be Hausa-Muslim.

The State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), DSP Zubairu Abubakar, has confirmed the incident, saying that several suspects had been arrested in connection with the crisis.
According to the Eyitayo's family lawyer, the 39-year-old suspect who was said to have assisted his friends, Rilwanu Jamiu and Balogun Stanley Oyewole, in the scam, was in the custody of the DSS opeartives instead of that of the police, where he was allegedly killed.

His family is also alleging foul play in his death, while asking the DSS to explain how it happened. They have also refused to collect the body of the deceased for burial from the DSS until the circumstances of his death are clear.

According to the family, the late Eyitayo was arrested at midnight on April 4 by DSS operatives, who were on the trail of a syndicate that had allegedly cloned Governor Ambodes mobile number, and taken to the DSS office at Shangisha area of the state, where he reportedly died during interrogation.

It was gathered that the DSS operatives were on the trail of Jamiu, said to be Eyitayo's friend, and that led to the arrest of the late Eyitayo at his residence at 37, Aje Street, in Iyana Ipaja.

The operatives reportedly broke into the late Eyitayos apartment while he was asleep, beating him up and chaining his hands and legs.

In a press statement released by the family, a resident who witnessed the assault on the young man, told them:

I overheard Eyitayo telling the DSS people that the person they were looking for did not stay with him. He told them the suspect was his friend and only visited him the previous day.

But, his explanation did not convince them. They beat him mercilessly till blood came out of his face. We could not recognise him again.

The DSS operatives were said to have moved to other apartments in the building, beating occupants and searching their rooms for the suspect and after three hours, whisked Eyitayo away to their Shangisha office.

The late Eyitayos neighbours and friends who had been going to the DSS office for his bail, were kept in the dark about his death and on April 6, two days after his death, the DSS Director invited his landlord, Pa Taiwo Sobiye, to help the agency look for his family members.

Pa Sobiye said:

When I got there, the Director called me to his office and told me Eyitayo died during interrogation. He said they tried to stabilise him medically but he eventually died. The Director asked me to help find his family members, but I told him I did not know anybody with him.

The DSS copied out five numbers from the late Eyitayos phone and gave me to call. I could not reach any of them except one man, who had been coming to the house as his brother.

I could not tell him his brother is dead. Some 19 days after, we eventually met with the family members. We all went to the DSS office together and they heard the news from the DSS themselves. We were told the body had been taken to the mortuary.

The bereaved family is therefore accusing the DSS of torturing their son to death, wondering why he would be chained and tortured when he did not know anything about the crime.

The family head, Joseph Oluokun, swore they would get to the root of the matter:

We have been told how Damilare was chained and tortured for hours before he was taken into custody. The DSS told us that he fell as he attempted to escape.

How is it possible for somebody whose hands and legs were chained to attempt to run? We are yet to be told the truth about the death of our son. This is why the government must help us to get justice.

The family, through their lawyer, has requested a coroner inquest to be set up to ascertain the cause and manner of the victims death.
According to Punch, not less than 21 people have fell victim to Owoyale's deception. The people were said to have given him money to secure teaching jobs.

Owoyale reportedly began the fraudulent trick on March 16, 2016, in Agbado, Ogun State.

There he announced to unsuspecting victims that a senator in Abuja gave him 50 appointment letters to sell to people who are interested in teaching in Federally owned secondary schools.

Punch also reported that the appointment letter stated that the victims will resume work on May 9, with an annual salary of N845,200.

The letter read, You are therefore posted to the Federal Government College, Odogbolu, Ogun State, with effect from May 9, 2016, and you are placed on level 07 of the Federal Government Educational Policy and your new salary will be N845,200 per annum,

One of the victims, Mrs. E.O. Oluborode, reported the case to the police due to some inconsistencies in Owoyale's message.

Oluborode was said to have bought appointment letters for her two children, in-law and three others by paying a sum of N360,000.

She said, I bought the appointment letters for my two graduate children, my daughters husband and helped my brothers wife, my sons friend and a friends son to buy one each."

"I paid him N360,000 altogether. About 15 others also showed interest in the appointment letters and had given him part payments."

After closely observing the messages he sent to me, it occurred to me that I must have been defrauded."

"I alerted the police yesterday (Tuesday) and called him on the phone to come down to Kola bus stop to collect N190,000 balance of those that had not fully paid."

"He was arrested at the bus stop and taken to Panti.
According to Punch, a man conducting a building project in the area paid an undisclosed amount of money to one of the groups.

This led to a disagreement, as they could not agree on the fraction for distribution among themselves.

One of the groups, said to be for vigilance engaged the other in a gun battle that led to the death of Olanrewaju.

The intervention of the police had no effect on the crisis, as the groups were reported to have ignored their presence. The police however arrested two suspects.

A woman, Comfort Udoh, who is a resident in the area said she had to lie down face down in her one room apartment along with her children to avoid getting hit.

She said, We learnt that the leader of the vigilance group, Ezekiel, was greedy. His attitude caused the fight. The other group wanted him to share the money equally, but he refused.

The money is owo omo onile (land speculators levy) which landlords pay before putting up any structure on their sites."

"People later said Ezekiels group shot dead one person belonging to the other faction. Some other people said the person killed was an innocent resident.

A police source explained that they faced quite a challenge when they attempted to pacify the situation.

When the policemen realised that the hoodlums could not be pacified, they started shooting into the air to disperse them."

"The Rapid Response Squad and the Area B Command were called for reinforcements in the area.

SP Dolapo Badmos, the Lagos State Police Public Relations Officer, confirmed the incidence along with the death of a youth.
The suspect, according to reports, had been found packaging the drugs at the apartment he keeps at Aston Place flats in Kempton Park in Ekurhuleni.

EMPD spokesman, Chief Superintendent Wilfred Kgasago, confirming the incident, revealed that they had acted on a tip- off.

"We received reliable information about a drug dealer operating from a flat in Long Street. The EMPD Drug Enforcement Unit acted on that information. It resulted in the arrest of a man found in possession of the drug cat estimated to be worth about R300 000 on the streets."

Kgasago adds that the bust had been part of the EMPD operation called, Bumper to Bumper.

"Surveillance of the suspect was carried out over a period of three days. The opportune time to pounce on the drug dealer presented itself on Thursday. The man was found in his room unpacking a huge quantity of the illicit substance that was mostly in block form."
The story of the toddler, Abubakar Usman, had been shared on Facebook by a concerned citizen named, Musa Saqafa, early in January.

Saqafa had commented on the photo:

Posting on his Facebook page, Saqafa who wrote in Hausa, said:

"Oh Allah, we are begging you in the name of your son, deliver us from those we know and those we do not know.

This little boy's eyes were plucked by people who are by all means and in the most atrocious way, in Zaria.

Do not allow them to have peace of mind in this world. Let them meet their doom like in the days of Prophets Shuaibu, Salihu and that of Nuhu.

May you also heal this boy, give him good health and guide him, Amen."

Usmanwho had been admitted to the Ahmadu Bello University where he was treated for the severe injuries he sustained, now appears well and fully healed.
According to reports, the woman who later confessed to being an habitual thief, had stuffed her underwear with some stolen items including beverages and was about walking out of the store when the security men noticed her awkward movement and stopped her for a search.
This episode of Purple 50/50 seeks to address this, and find out how people deal with the idea of a woman making more than her man. The Purple 50/50 Challenge was created to challenge these sort of stereotypes and to enlighten Nigerians about gender issues.Courtesy of the Purple 50/50 organisers, Pulse team visited Kano, Kaduna, Lagos and Enugu, asking people the same question: "Is it OK for women to earn higher than their husbands?"Watch video below to see the replies.This is a feature by Purple.You can visit www.iampurple.ng for more information.
This is contained in a statement issued in Kaduna on Wednesday by the governor's spokesman, Samuel Aruwan.

It said that the directive was part of the agreement reached during the 15th session of the State Security Council Meeting.

The statement noted that saving lives was more critical than waiting for a formal police report and warned that any hospital that failed to abide by the decision would be held for criminal neglect.

Lives must be saved first, before the formalities of demanding Police Reports from victims.

"After saving lives, hospitals and other agencies can start making inquiries regarding how the gunshot wounds and other injuries were sustained.

 We consider it a gross abdication of responsibility if any hospital leaves injured patients unattended to because of the absence of Police report.

What is important is saving lives. There is no reason for an innocent citizen who has survived armed robbery and needs treatment for gunshot wound to be denied the medical attention he requires.

The hospitals can comply with reporting requirements to the police after providing the care the patient needs.

This is the unanimous resolution of the Kaduna State Security Council.

"As governor, I have communicated this decision to the Kaduna State Ministry of Health and Human Services and other concerned agencies operating in the state.

"All our healthcare agencies have been advised that it will amount to criminal neglect to deny or delay critical care to such patients.

It stated that the decision was endorsed by representatives of the Army, Police, Air Force, Navy, DSS, Civil Defence, FRSC, NDLEA and Customs.
WHOs Country Representative in Nigeria, Dr Rui Gama Vas, made the call in Port Harcourt when he visited Rivers Governor, Chief Nyeson Wike.

The WHO representative expressed the readiness of the world body to provide necessary technical assistance to the state in critical areas of public health administration.

He also appealed to the state government to sustain all ongoing immunisation programmes aimed at tackling child-killer diseases.

In his speech, Wike said his administration has a robust healthcare programme that would reposition healthcare delivery system in the state.
Buhari made the disclosure in Ibadan on Wednesday, April 27, 2016, when she visited Olubadan of Ibadan, Oba Salisu Adetunji, in his palace.

She said that the screening had become necessary as it would enable them to know their health status early and improve their health.

She said breast and cervical cancer, blood pressure, diabetes and malaria were major killer diseases across the global and could be prevented or managed through regular check-ups.

Buhari said she was in the state to introduce her programme on Women and Children Health Screening Initiative, which started last year with a view to improving their health.

The Presidents wife said the programme which would be introduced in all states of the federation, had begun in some states.

She said that she wanted the programme to be replicated in the state so that women and children could have access to free medical screening.

Earlier, Governor Abiola Ajimobi said Buhari had exhibited a quality similar to what a former First Lady of the U.S., Mrs Roseline Carter, did by contributing to development of women and children in the country in a short time.

He described Buhari was a great ambassador of Nigeria.

On his part, the Olubadan commended the presidents wife for choosing Ibadan as the centre to launch the programme in the Southwest Zone.
"Life as an IDP is not easy. When I left Michika as a result of Boko Haram attacks life was hell on earth until when God rescue me by given be a hand work that I am currently doing. When I started making profit, the first thing that came into my mine was how to help fellow brothers and sisters who have equally gone back to their towns and villages to start life afresh, Mazila said.
A statement issued in Abuja by the Presidents Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, said the President particularly condemned Monday's attack on Ukpabi Nimbo in Enugu State

The President assured all Nigerians of his administration's continued commitment to ensuring the safety of lives and property in all parts of the country.

"President Buhari unreservedly condemns the attack on Ukpabi Nimbo and other such acts of extreme violence against communities in other states of the federation.

"Acting on the President's directive, the Inspector-General of Police IG) and heads of the nation's other security agencies are already taking urgent steps to fully investigate the attacks, apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

"Ending the recent upsurge of attacks on communities by herdsmen, reportedly armed with sophisticated weapons, is now a priority of the Buhari administration's agenda for enhanced national security.

"The Armed Forces and Police have clear instructions to take all necessary action to stop the carnage, the statement said.

According to the statement, the IG, the General Officer Commanding the 82nd Division of the Nigerian Army and the Director of the Department of State Security in Enugu State have visited Ukpabi Nimbo to personally oversee investigations into the attack on the community and ongoing efforts to apprehend the culprits.

The statement said that Buhari would be meeting with Gov. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu State to receive further briefing on the attack on Ukpabi Nimbo and discuss additional measures to forestall similar attacks and restore public confidence.
Mr. President, who was represented by the Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole said this at the opening ceremony of the 56th Annual General Conference and delegates meeting of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), which held in Sokoto on Wednesday, April 27, 2016.

Buhari said While this administration will not deny anyone of his or her fundamental human rights, we will certainly not encourage expending Nigerian hard earned resources on any government official seeking medical care abroad, when such can be handled in Nigeria, Buhari said, according to a statement by the Director, Media and Public Relations, Ministry of Health, Mrs. Boade Akinola.

He also said We have seen the hazards that this unfortunate and highly preventable problems have caused to the quality of health care delivery in Nigeria. May I implore members of NMA to always imbibe the spirit of team work to ensure harmonious relationship with other health professionals, no profession can effectively and efficiently function without the other.

The Federal Government also undefinedwhen embarking on official trips.

See Pulse Photo-News gallery below.
The Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) made the declaration on Wednesday, April 27, at a closed-door meeting led by the Governor of Zamfara state, Abdulaziz Yari.

Yari, who spoke to newsmen after the meeting, said that the Governors convened to discuss intensively about the economy, as they are all groaning in pain.

If you look carefully at this months federation account, its the worst ever in the last six years, so definitely we had to come to a round table, he said.

We were elected under different party platforms to perform, not just to pay salaries. It is worse not to be able to pay salaries, so the issue is very, very serious that we are coming back to discuss it and if we have the opportunity we will come back to see our leader, Mr. President.

Yari further said that the Governors want not just bail-outs, but a permanent solution to the problem.

We are looking for a short term formula for you to live, at least survive before the long term. So on diversification, we are looking on agriculture, which is supposed to be the major focus long time ago but has been neglected by the past administrations, Yari said.

Now that we found ourselves in this situation we are working harder to diversify the economy and to look forward to a more permanent solution should oil go out of existence but at the same time we have to look for a short-term solution.

In his comment, Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose, said that he is comfortable that everybody is concerned about the dwindling economy and we must as leaders of this country come together to find solutions and I agree with all the positions.

The Governor of Akwa Ibom state, Udom Emmanuel, noted that current economic crisis is not peculiar to Nigeria but a global issue.

Its a global issue, so you cant just at one meeting of about two hours fashion out entire solution for the country. We troubleshoot some points, we discuss those points and we have to weigh the impact of those points both the positive, negative, the extreme, the mid-point, he said.
Punch reports that the Reps passed a resolution saying The House is also worried that in spite of that intervention, the shortfall, instead of being wiped out, has continued to escalate at the rate of about N15bn per month (equivalent to N500m daily), rising to a total -market shortfall ofN400bn as of December 31, 2015.

The resolution also added that Market shortfall is a disincentive action for new investors to venture into the Nigerian electricity market, the implication being that the projected generating capacity expansion is an illusion since any increment in generating capacity would further escalate the market shortfall.

Also concerned that the Discos, which collect revenues, fail to remit in full to other market participants, without any measures put in place by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission to block the leakages and there are no sanctions/penalties for defaulters.

Disturbed that despite there has being no noticeable improvement in the electricity sector, either in the area of generation, transmission or distribution, tariffs have been increased twice since 2013.

Reports say the Federal Ministry of Power/Works and Housing is supposed to float the bonds through the Nigeria Bulk Electricity Trading Company.

Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola has also revealed that his children are suffering the effects of the poor power situation in the country.

See Pulse Photo-News gallery below.
The Daily Sun reports that the farmers were allegedly kidnapped by the Fulani herdsmen around 6 am, but were later released by 1pm.

A youth leader in Obiaruku, Chika Uwabuofu said For some time now, Fulani herdsmen have been harassing our men and women in their farms, eating the food in their barns and using their cows to destroy their crops.

On account of this, we have been reporting their activities to the police and a meeting was held by the council chairman, some top government functionaries and the state chairman of the Fulani herdsmen where they were given three days to leave the community.

40 people were also reported dead after an attack by suspected Fulani herdsmen in Uzo- Uwani Local Government Area of Enugu state on Monday, April 25, 2016.

President Muhammadu Buhari has however ordered the Inspector-General of police (IGP), Solomon Arase and security agencies to stop the killings by suspected herdsmen across the country.

This is coming after Nigerians criticised Buhari for failing to respond to attacks by Fulani herdsmen in some states of the country.

See Pulse Photo-News gallery below.
The 70-year-old politician had been rumoured to be planning to join the Ogun State governorship race in 2019.

The Ogun State Police Public Relations Officer, Muyiwa Adejobi, who confirmed the incident said that the Police got the report of her abduction on Wednesday evening.

Yes. We have the report that the senator was kidnapped this evening by some armed men," Adejobi said.

The State commissioner of police, CP Abdulmajid Ali , has despatched teams to the area, Ilaro, for the rescue operation. We want to assure the Public particularly her relations and those concerned that we will rescue her unhurt soon and the perpetrators will be apprehended.

We have embarked on scientific investigation on the kidnap case. And we are optimistic that the Senator will be rescued very soon.
In the agreement, signed by Tambuwal and UNICEF's Chief of Field for Sokoto, Mr. Mohammad Mohiuddin, Sokoto government will contribute the sum of N1, 083,384,750 while UNICEF will provide the sum of N1, 006,865,500.

"The agreement has the following key objectives: improved access to, and use of high quality and high impact health, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene interventions for women and children; and improving access to quality basic education by the most vulnerable boys and girls, and increased school retention, completion and achievement rates for all," the statement quoted Mohiuddin as saying.

According to Tambuwals spokesman, Imam Imam, both parties agreed that the status of the socio-demographic and development indicators carried out in Sokoto between 2013 and 2015 need to be improved upon.

"At the moment, both infant mortality and under-five mortality rates are high (89/1000 and 185/1000 respectively). 55.3% of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition, 35% of under-five children are underweight, and 10.3% of under-five children are wasted, while exclusive breastfeeding for children 0-5months is only 10.3%.

"In education, out of school children accounts for 66.83% of total school going children, net attendance ration at primary level is 39.8% for boys and 24.6% for girls, while gender parity index for primary level is 0.55," Mohiuddin added.

He said while there are proven interventions already on ground to address the challenges, what is required now is a strong government political commitment, release of financial resources and collaboration with development towards implementation of the work plan.

In his remarks, Tambuwal said his administration appreciates the need to turn around the negative statistics, and will work assiduously with UNICEF and other development partners to buck the trend.
The group has also issued a 30 day ultimatum to the Federal Government, asking them to stop the attacks of the herdsmen in Igbo land or face the wrath of the easterners.

MASSOB said Again, we are warning Fulani herdsmen and their sponsors to withdraw from Biafra land. They should count Igbo land out of their Islamisation policy.

This is coming on the heels of an attack in Uzo Uwani Local Government Area of Enugu State by suspected Fulani herdsmen that reportedly left 40 dead.

The Daily Sun reports that MASSOBs National Director of Information, Sunny Okereafor said MASSOB is worried that Fulani herdsmen have become very daring in their attacks since President Buhari came to power.

We are not saying Buhari is their sponsor, but his silence over the attacks is suspicious. MASSOB is giving Buhari a 30-day ultimatum to stop the attacks or face our wrath.

He also said We are also warning Ndigbo to remain on alert, as these Fulani herdsmen are terrorists posing as herdsmen. Soon, they will pay for all their atrocities against the people of Biafra.

President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered the Inspector-General of police (IGP), undefinedacross the country.

See Pulse Photo-News gallery below.
For today, April 28 2016:

THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER

Buhari meets Ugwuanyi, orders probe of herdsmens violenceIn an apparent move to douse nationwide anger and mounting criticism of his governments alleged indifference to the menace, President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday ordered the Chief of Defence Staff, Major-General Abayomi Olonishakin and the Inspector General of Police, Solomon Ehigiator Arase, to arrest and prosecute all those involved in the killing of innocent people and destruction of villages across the country by heavily armed herdsmen. READ MORE

Intrigues, confusion as LASU eases out professorsWhen in January Governor Akinwunmi Ambode named Olanrewaju Adigun Fagbohun, a professor of environmental law as the new vice chancellor of the Lagos State University (Lagos), Ojo, many who are abreast of the checkered history of the institution hailed the governor for deploying the master stroke, which they believed had the ability to cure the school of its diseased past. READ MORE

Government to save $4.5b yearly through local steel productionBy supporting growth of local steel producing facilities through capacity expansion and creation of a conducive business environment, Nigeria will be saving about $4.5 billion yearly in cost expended on 25 million tonnes of processed steel, aluminium products and associated derivatives, the Federal Government has said. READ MORE_______________________________________

VANGUARD NEWSPAPER

EFCC detains bank MD over alleged Diezanis $115 m cashManaging Director of a leading Nigerian commercial bank has been detained by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, for allegedly helping former Petroleum Minister, Diezani Allison-Madueke to launder $115 million cash. READ MORE

Budget impasse: Deputy Speaker leads 10-man Committee to harmonise budget MondayABUJA  THE Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yussuf Lasun, is to lead the 10-man National Assembly Committee to interface with another 5-man committee from the executive to harmonise all the grey areas pointed out by the Presidency on the 2016 budget. READ MORE

Saraki files fresh application to disqualify CCT chairmanABUJA  The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, has filed another application to disqualify Danladi Umar, the chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, from continuing to preside over his trial. READ MORE_______________________________________

THE NATION NEWSPAPER

Buhari orders Defence chief, IG to stop attacks in communitiesPresident Muhammadu Buhari has ordered Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Abayomi Olonishakin and Inspector General of Police Solomon Arase to immediately secure communities under herdsmens attacks. READ MORE

Labour demands N56,000 minimum wageORGANISED labour has presented a new minimum wage of N56,000 to the Federal Government ahead of Sundays May Day celebration. READ MORE

Revealed: INEC chiefs got Diezanis N23.3b for pollThere seems to be more trouble for embattled former Petroleum Resources Minister Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is probing her involvement in a $115m (N23, 299,705,000billion) 2015 election bribery scandal. READ MORE

BUSINESS DAY NEWSPAPER

Nigeria still unsure as Saudi, others plan for life after oilNigeria is once again being left behind as Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest oil producer, and other oil rich nations seek alternative sources of revenue. The sale of five percent of Saudi state-owned oil corporation- Aramco, and raising non-oil revenue are impending steps Saudi Arabia which has 28.8 million people, five times less than Nigerias READ MORE
One of the soldiers who spoke under anonymity lamented that their colleagues that went for peace keeping after them under UN had been paid their allowances.

"This development is affecting our morale. AU needs to intervene as affected soldiers are really worried." the soldier said.

He urged relevant authorities to investigate the matter if it was a case of monumental corruption still ongoing in the system.

"We fought in Guinea Bissau between 2014 and 2015; they promised to pay our allowances immediately we arrived in Nigeria but when we returned they sent us to Jaji for training and promised to pay us before the end of the training.

"Soon after the training, we were posted to fight in Yobe and Borno and nobody is talking about our allowances any more", the soldiers said.
Sarakis lawyer, Ajibola Oluyede presented an application before the tribunal, calling for the withdrawal of the CCT chairman from the Senate Presidents trial.

Oluyede based his argument on the fact that the CCT chairman is currently being investigated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

Justice Danladi was accused of allegedly receiving N10m from a former Nigerian Customs officer, Rasheed Taiwo.

Oluyede also argued that the move by the EFCC to clear Justice Umarof any misdeed, is further proof that he is biased.

He said Your lordship should not be sitting on this case because of the negative impression it would give to reasonable onlookers."

Adding that All these problems originated from the EFCC. How could EFCC write and say that they have circumstantial evidence against a judge on the bench?

Why is EFCC holding a sword of Damocles over your lordships head? Why cant they just write the attorney-general that they have exonerated you?

Oluyede also tendered a letter written by the former EFCC boss, Ibrahim Lamorde on the CCT chairmans bribery investigation.

In the letter, Lamorde reportedly said "There are indications that the tribunal chairman might have demanded and collected money from the complainant through his said personal assistant.

However, efforts made to recover the telephone handset used by Justice Umar proved abortive, as he claimed that he had lost the telephone in 2012.

This has made it impossible to subject it to independent scientific analysis with a view to corroborating the allegation. In the same vein, the complainant could also not make available his telephone set for analysis on the grounds that he had lost it.

Justice Umar also admitted that he met privately with the complainant in his chamber at the tribunal. This is a most unethical and highly suspicious conduct on his part.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has however d

See Pulse Photo-News gallery below.
Prof Soyinka made the comment on Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in an address to the National Conference on Culture and Tourism, PM News reports.

I have yet to hear this government articulate a firm policy of non-tolerance for the serial massacres have become the nations identification stamp. I have not heard an order given that any cattle herders caught with sophisticated firearms be instantly disarmed, arrested, placed on trial, and his cattle confiscated, he said.

The nation is treated to an eighteen-month optimistic plan which, to make matters worse, smacks of abject appeasement and encouragement of violence on innocents.

Let me repeat, and of course I only ask to be corrected if wrong: I have yet to encounter a terse, rigorous, soldierly and uncompromising language from this leadership, one that threatens a response to this unconscionable blood-letting that would make even Boko Haram repudiate its founding clerics.

It is now close to a year since I attempted to utilize the Open Forum platform of the Centre for Culture and International Understanding, Oshogbo, to launch a national debate on the topic  SACRED COWS OR SACRED RIGHTS.

The signs were already clear and the rampage of impunity was already manifesting a cultic intensity of alarming proportions. For reasons which are too distasteful to go into here, the forum did not take place.

We were already agreed that General Buhari be invited to give a keynote address, based on his long experience in such matters as former head of state, and as a cattle rearer himself who might be able to penetrate the mentality of this post-Boko Haram pestilence, Soyinka added.

Meanwhile, former aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode has accused Buhari of silently endorsing the attacks.

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The Interior Minister, Abdulrahman Dambazau, made the declaration in a statement issued by the Permanent Secretary of the ministry, Bassey Okon Akpanyung on Thursday, April 28.

According to the Minister, Nigerian workers' resilience, hard work and commitment to the Change Mantra of President Muhammadu Buhari is commendable.

He urged them to continue to support the President's anti-corruption fight and his desire to ensure security of lives and property, and to stabilize the economy.
Today it's all about the hit Spanish telenovela "All About Camila," which once kept all novella lovers awake, entertained and excited.

What do you remember about the hit series? Here are some interesting facts about the series:

ALSO READ: undefined

1. The telenovela revolved around Camila Montes de Alba, an Economics student who had to work in an exclusive club as a waitress after her family was left bankrupt.

2. Her love interest was Alejandro Novoa, a lawyer by profession and heir to a hotel empire.

3. "All About Camila" had its love triangle between Camilia, Alejandro and a mean and calculating business man, Eduardo Bonfil.

ALSO READ: undefined

4. Who remembers the opening theme? Every telenovela has a unique soundtrack, and "All About Camila" wasn't an exception.

5. Camila was sentenced to life imprisonment for 'stealing an European Queen's ring,' which Eduardo had proposed to her with.

ALSO READ:undefined

6. Eduardo Bonfil ended up in prison with one gorged eye, all thanks to Camila.

7. Just like every love story with a happy ending, Camila finally got married to Alejandro. They also had a baby girl together.
"Bukas and Joints" is hosted by media personality Olisa Adibua, and features him traveling around Nigeria in search of the most authentic Bukas and Joints.

ALSO READ: undefined

In an upcoming episode, Olisa joins 2Face Idibia and Dj Jimmy Jatt at their favorite joints. They take Olisa on a personal journey to their favorite restaurants, and show Olisa what makes these Bukas unique and dear to them.

According to the producers, the show is aimed at capturing the very essence of the universal language of food, kicking off with one of Nigeria's largest cities, Lagos.

The 13-episode series, with each episode running for half an hour, is set to take viewers on several interesting and mouth-watering food adventure across 50 eateries in the first season of the show.
He made the appeal in Abuja on Thursday, April 28, at the partys 70th National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting.

"Many of us who are founding members of PDP will not leave the PDP and the PDP will never die. We will continue to be in PDP," Jibrin said.

"Whatever mistake that is there in the party, we must be there to correct it and make our contribution, leaving PDP is not the answer.

"I will like to appeal to everyone who intends to leave PDP to stop that, we must unite and all work together in order to build PDP.

"PDP is within a very good marking and I do not think I see anything wrong with PDP.

"Every party has its own problems and we should use our own problems positively.

"Am sure soon, the whole problem in PDP will be resolved," he assured.

Also speaking at the meeting, the Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu, said that as the national convention approaches, it is expected that there would be disagreements.

He urged members to resolve such disagreements without delay.

"So I like to appeal to our party men and women that we must find a way of resolving our differences in the best interest of our party.

"PDP is the only party in Nigeria which we can say belongs to everybody and to nobody.

"The time is now for us to make sacrifices and to show compromise so that the party will remain strong.

"It is also a time for us to show alternative to what is going on in the country currently, so that Nigerians can trust us again with governance in 2019," Ekweremadu said.
This was disclosed by the Chairman of the Labour Party (LP), Alhaji Abdulkadir Abdulsalam, who spoke on behalf of the parties, at a press briefing in Abuja on Wednesday, April 27, 2016.

We want to put it on record that we are solidly behind President Muhammadu Buharis fight against corruption; a fight that we believe is crucial to the survival of our country, he said according to Punch.

We however wish to note that this is not the first time that a President of this country would be declaring a war against corruption. In fact, the reason corruption is still a primary issue for the Buhari administration is that previous attempts have not been as successful as they should be," he added.

The political parties also urged the Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), Danladi Umar, whos presiding over Sarakis trial, to step aside due to allegations of bias levelled against him.

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This is following the dissolution of the union by the school management last week.

On Tuesday, April 26, at a press conference, the students said they were exploring legal and political solutions to the impasse with the university authority.

As students and social engineers who have been taught by professors, Ph.D. holders and a plethora of intelligent academics, we find it illegal and draconian that the University of Lagos management would suspend the University of Lagos Students Union on the basis that we peacefully agitated for our rights, the students body said.

Quite succinctly, Section 40 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended) grants the right to peaceful assembly and association.

We, therefore, find the managements assertion that the union was suspended because of violence that erupted out of the peaceful protest, unacceptably misleading.

The senate has directed that all academic activities in the school should resume on May 2. However, students were asked to sign an undertaking and parents indemnity forms before they would be allowed to return to the school.

The students union body described the conditions as ridiculous, PremiumTimes report.

It is laughable that students are being coerced into signing certain preposterous undertaking forms, while already frustrated parents are equally being left with no option as they sign the indemnity forms, they said.

We understand the plight of our parents and we want to, at this juncture reassure them that this struggle is in the best interest of their children/wards.

Let us state unequivocally that no student was expelled, suspended or rusticated as a consequence of our peaceful protest. Hence, we find it shocking that the school management has decided to re-absorb/re-admit already matriculated students.

The students union advised those who had signed the undertakings to also obtain an affidavit that shows they were made to sign the forms under duress.

They also challenged the school management to present evidence that facilities were damaged during their protest weeks ago.

To the entire public, we must resonate that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, the statement continued.

Today, the gross injustice that we suffer from the hands of the University of Lagos Management is a threat to the entire public.

Very sadly and unfortunately, the, University of Lagos, being an Ivory Tower is hell bent on churning out insufficiently equipped graduates.
Speaking at the launch Shola Adekoya, Konga CEO said, Konga is launching KongaPay payment solution because we want Nigerians and Africans at large to experience the best of service at their convenience. This means we constantly evolve to be more relevant to customers and society.

He added, We are extending KongaPay to other consumers outside of the Konga.coms platform because it is designed to be fast, reliable, secure, flexible and above all provides a best-in-class financial solution to Nigerians and Africa at large."

A first, KongaPay is pioneering something the company is calling me-Commerce. With KongaPay, users will be able to take a photo of any item they want to sell and it'll generate a payment QR code for you.

Once that is done, you will be able to share the QR code on your favorite social media sites. The company says it is excited to provide a unique gateway for local entrepreneurs to reach both local and international markets through social media.

As part of the launch, KongaPay is starting off with the following offerings to the Nigerian market;
Tit-for-tat attacks between President Pierre Nkurunziza's security forces and his opponents escalated a year ago when he announced a disputed bid for a third term as president. He won re-election in July.

The United Nations says more than 400 people have been killed since then and more than 250,000 have fled the country.

"Some 31 people have been killed in attacks so far in April, compared to a total of nine people in the last month," U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein said in a statement.

In the latest incident, gunmen on Monday killed a brigadier general who was a senior adviser to the first vice president, along with his wife and bodyguard.

The international war crimes court said this week it would investigate the violence in Burundi.
Miroslav Tomic, a maintenance engineer employed by a German company, was kidnapped on Saturday as he travelled to inspect an oil field around 1,200 km (750 miles) east from the capital Tripoli.

Tomic was taken in a region not under effective control by any of Libya's governments. A new U.N.-backed unity government has barely established itself in Tripoli, and a self-declared government in Tripoli, a rival government based in the east and various armed factions are vying for power.
Hundreds of people had gathered outside the headquarters of Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) to celebrate the holiday and the party's founding in 1951. The day is celebrated with carnival-like dances in the streets.

Brima Koroma, an SLPP administrator, said the party had been denied the permit. The police had fired tear gas and live rounds, he said.

"They also ransacked our party office, roughed up and arrested some of our members," Koroma said.

Neither he nor the police said how many arrests had occurred. Police did not confirm that they had fired live rounds.
Several posts on social media in recent days said new groups were planning to demonstrate on Saturday to vent popular anger at secret government borrowing which could cripple the economy in one of the world's poorest countries.

Armoured vehicles packed with police were deployed on major street corners in Maputo although there was no sign of civil unrest, two witnesses told Reuters.

Police on Wednesday warned the public not to do anything to unsettle the "harmonious coexistence" in Maputo.

The International Monetary Fund said on Saturday that Mozambique had admitted to having over one billion dollars of undisclosed debt.
A roundup of legislative and Capitol news items of interest for Wednesday, April 27, 2016:

180,000 AND GROWING: Sen. Wally Horn, D-Cedar Rapids, asked the Legislative Services Agency to estimate how many times he has cast votes during his 44 years in the Iowa Legislature. He got his answer Wednesday: more than 180,000 times. That estimate was based on an average of about 60 days of legislative action each year with an average of about 68 votes each day of active session on bills, amendments, minutes, rules and motions in committee and on the Senate floor. Thats really something, said Horn, who served five terms in the Iowa House from January 1973 to January 1983 and has served as a state senator since then with two years left on his current term.

CLEMENCY REVIEWS: Gov. Terry Branstad and Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds announced Wednesday they are conducting a review of four executive clemency applications to streamline the process and find government efficiencies. Branstad-Reynolds administration officials say they have completed the review of the voting rights application and will be releasing the new applications for firearms restoration, a pardon, and a commutation of a life sentence in the upcoming months. Branstad and Reynolds released a one-page streamlined application form Wednesday for those seeking a restoration of their voting rights that reduces the number of questions from 29 to 13. With this new application form, Iowas already simple voting rights restoration process will become even more efficient and convenient, according to the administration. The new application for restoration of voting rights is now available for use and can be found at the governor.iowa.gov.

ANOTHER MEDICAL CANNABIS VOTE: House Democrats made a failed attempt to make eligible for consideration a Democratic-designed proposal to expand Iowas limited medical cannabis program. Democrats requested a vote to move the Senate-passed medical cannabis expansion bill out of committee to make it eligible for debate, but the motion was defeated on a 54-44 vote, with only two House Republicans  Reps. Peter Cownie and Quentin Stanerson  supporting the move. Earlier this week, House Republicans proposed a far more limited expansion proposal, which was defeated with no support from House Democrats and divided support from Republicans.

CERTIFIED DEVELOPMENT SITE: The Iowa Economic Development Authority announced Wednesday that Forest City Rail Park is the latest industrial site to achieve certification through the Iowa Certified Site Program. It joins 11 other sites in the state that have been designated as project-ready. The Forest City Rail Park is a 68-acre site in Hancock County adjacent to 3M and Winnebago Industries. Rail service to the site is provided by Iowa Northern Railway and is ideally suited for a trans-load, distribution or logistics facility, according to EDA officials. The state agency established the certified site program-- an independent, third-party certification program that uses a nationally recognized site selection firm  in May 2012 to address a lack of project-ready industrial sites in the state. The next round of applications will be accepted in July. More information about the Iowa Certified Site Program is available at iowaeconomicdevelopment.com.

INVESTMENT RESTRICTIONS: The Iowa Senate voted 38-9 to approve House File 2331, a bill restricting the investment of state funds in companies that are engaged in a boycott of Israel. Nine Democrats opposed the bill, with Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, expressing concern the legislation would create bureaucratic headaches for retirement funds via the Board of Regents, IPERS and others that would have to research thousands to companies connected with mutual funds to comply with the bill. HF2331  which is similar to restrictions the Legislature has approved on the investment of public funds in Iran and Sudan  was intended to counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement that is trying to encourage countries, governments and companies to boycott Israel and Israeli companies. According to the Legislative Services Agency, the bill will not impact the state general fund and the impact on the retirement funds cannot be determined.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Iowans are still doing it. Thats the irony, that you can collect them, I guess, and have them for whatever purpose, to admire them. And I think people get tired of looking at their collection and dispose of them in the same way they get rid of the American flag: they burn them.  Sen. Bill Dotzler, D-Waterloo, commenting on a bill that would legalize consumer fireworks in Iowa.
Susan Wenzel, of Rapid City, was watching MSNBC when the news broke of music superstar Prince's death last week.

"My heart felt like it was going to stop," said Wenzel, 62. "I thought of all of his music, how willing he was to share it with other artists, and the pictures I had of him in my head."

Wenzel wasn't speaking about experiences of seeing Prince in concert or worshiping him as one of his millions of fans.

She had a far more intimate, professional relationship with the late pop icon.

Wenzel was one of the nine makeup artists and hairstylists credited on Prince's 1984 film "Purple Rain," and her memories of the film and its star flooded back upon hearing the news of the musician's death.

Prince died in his Minnesota home at age 57 last Thursday.

Wenzel's memories of Prince go back far further than "Purple Rain" however, in fact all the way back to the beginning of his career.

In the late 1970s, Wenzel worked with The Ad Company in Minneapolis. Co-owner Owen Husney was a local music promoter, working with artists ranging from Billy Joel to Bonnie Raitt. Wenzel recalled a teenager coming in one day with a package for Husney.

"He would come by twice a week to sit in our waiting room and ask if Owen had listened to the tape yet," Wenzel said. "One day Owen screamed from his office, 'Come in here, everybody, now!' and he played Prince's tape. It amazed all of us, because he played all of the instruments and sang. To lay out those tracks himself ... it required so much talent."

Husney went on to manage Prince and help him sign a recording contract with Warner Bros. Wenzel would later move to Los Angeles and work on several music videos in the early 1980s before being called up in 1983 to work as an assistant makeup artist on "Purple Rain."

Wenzel did "fantasy makeup," or spectacular designs on the bodies and faces of extras, and she was only allotted five to 10 minutes per performer to create a look.

"There were 70 people to go through, so it's doing hundreds of artworks a day," Wenzel said. "And it is actual artwork: seascapes, sailboats, sunsets, which you can see on video in the crowd."

Wenzel got a bigger assignment when extra shooting was needed, doing makeup for Prince and lead actress Apollonia for the famous scene in which the actress jumps into Lake Minnetonka.

"He did remember me from The Ad Company, but he was a very shy man, almost reticent," Wenzel said. "But he loved the extras because they were all people invited in for free concerts who were excited to be there. We all were. We grew to love the album."

When production wrapped, Wenzel left with a fair amount of memorabilia: call sheets for actors, fantasy makeup photos and mock-ups, scripts, and, notably, her neck-brace from an accident early in production, which was signed by much of the cast and crew, though not Prince.

"He didn't want to sign anything or do autographs," Wenzel said. "My feeling was that he felt if he gave autographs or memorabilia or photos, he'd lose part of himself."

Wenzel also remembers Prince's much-publicized battle with Warner Bros. in the 1990s, in which he released albums under the name of an unpronounceable symbol at a fast rate to escape his contract.

"He wanted to do things his way and do them right, with music or on the set of the film," Wenzel said. "It doesn't surprise me that he wanted to control everything. He had so much talent."

Wenzel later would go on to work in Los Angeles for 20 years as a makeup artist on independent films and music videos, most notably the Sarah Jessica Parker film "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."

Wenzel moved back to Rapid City in 2001, having lived here for five years in her youth. Though currently on medical leave, she has worked with the Dahl museum and the YMCA, and was a member of the Dakota Artists Guild. She has worked as a painter and currently focuses on Phlatt People, miniature colorful people hung on walls. She said that she remains shy about talking about her experiences on "Purple Rain," but that the work itself was joyous.

"It was mesmerizing, absolutely mesmerizing," Wenzel said. "The crew was great, the secondary bands were great, Prince's band was great. We were like a family. But when you're doing a movie, you're a family for a little while before you move on to the next thing."
Two men accused of killing Russian Coca-Cola plant director found guity

ST. PETERSBURG, April 28 (RAPSI, Mikhail Telekhov)  Jurors on Thursday unanimously found Denis Chkhitauri and Vyacheslav Finogenov, two defendants in the case on the murder of Dmitry Soshnev, the director of Coca-Cola plant near St. Petersburg, guilty, RAPSI reports from the St. Petersburg City Court.

Soshnev went missing in November 2014.

Investigators have established that Soshnev met with Chkhitauri and Finogenov, who had a murder record, on December 28, 2014. The suspects lured him to a garage area in the Frunzensky District, where Finogenov allegedly shot Soshnev with a shotgun.

The defendants took the victims money (about 160,000 rubles or $2,500) and his BMW registration documents, which they planned to sell for 1 million rubles ($15,400), according to the Investigative Committee.

Chkhitauri and Finogenov were charged with murder, assault with intent to rob, document theft and trafficking in drug and weapons.
Russian government will not extend capital amnesty  Minister of Finance

MOSCOW, April 28 (RAPSI)  Russian government doesn't have a plan to extend capital amnesty expiring on July 1, 2016, Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov told journalists on Thursday.

Earlier, 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.

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.
James R. Olsen

Age: 69

Party: Democrat

Hometown: Corpus Christi, Texas (graduated high school). My father was a naval aviator, so we moved  10 schools K-12.

Experience: When I told a retired general that I had led a large defense program on-time, on-budget, as originally bid, he said I was the only one he had met that could say that. This experience led me to develop a company that goes beyond profit to contribute to community:

 Hosted the Composite Lumber Company startup attempt.

 Found co-investor, bought and remodeled Emmas House.

 Produced Hamilton Performing Arts Series for a season.

 Provided practical support and microloans for local small businesses.

 Presented a business plan showing the feasibility of a community mental health crisis center, West House.

 Co-created BISON Cafe  For people recovering from mental illness to interact with the community.

My career was driven by the idea of how to organize people working on something too complex for a single person to understand, programs costing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, programs that start with paper and deliver a system to the user. The secret: the manager is the student  learn from the people on the program and organize what you learn into a program.

By the time I pinned on U.S. Air Force lieutenant bars in 1970, I had been working for six years, putting myself through college. I always saw honor in whatever work I was doing, from bagging groceries to working in a lumber yard. My 12-year military career can be summarized as hi-tech cold war systems and operations. I then went to work for Raytheon, engineering and leading the development of defense systems. On the side, I developed consumer products for license, including Patent 4130871.

In the early 90s I married Mary Byers, a Bitterrooter, and moved here and kept working for Raytheon through 2000. I was active in Friends of the Bitterroot and Vice-Chair of SAFE, seeing SAFE grow from a half-time employee to what it is today.

In 2001, my company began consulting, primarily with Raytheon. We deployed teams to defense jobs, including Bitterrooters we trained, providing a $7 million payroll through 2010.

Government appointments/invitations:

 Frazier Draw Timber Sale Consensus Committee

 Highway 93 Citizens Advisory Committee

 Rocky Mountain Lab Citizens Advisory Committee

 West House Advisory Committee

 Hamilton Impact Fee Advisory Committee

In 2011, both me and my company were sued. The accusations were never true. Although we won, we were driven into bankruptcy with $154,000 of legal fees added to debt. The company came out of bankruptcy. We currently have a wholesale native plant nursery and rental properties.

Why are you running?

Partisan politics takes good people and puts them in a world where too many people:

 Say whatever they need to say to win, true or not,

 Denigrate the opposition,

 Disenfranchise the opposition.

The campaign is different: we will stick to the truth as best we can, admit factual mistakes, and listen to opposing views with respect.

Why are you the best candidate?

Montana has hard things to do. I get things done that are hard to do. I do it by working with Democrats, Republicans, nonprofits, businesses and government.

What are the issues youd like to focus on?

Stop rape. Coordinated justice and care for the victim is the starting point and the way it works in Ravalli County is a good starting point. We need to go further. Why do some males think its OK? This needs answering and needs fixing.

Lawsuits: Much cheaper, abuses stopped and available to the impoverished. It is possible.

Jobs program: Make labor cheaper for the employer; pay more to wage earners. Pay a minimum of $15/hour; give a $7/hour credit straight off the companys tax bill so that labor only costs the company minimum wage. How to replace lost taxes? See below.

Marijuana: Put drug lords out of business. Legalize it; regulate it; tax it. A 25 percent tax should provide the taxes to offset the jobs program tax credits.

Get rid of business killers: Quotas on restaurant beer and wine licenses, 8 p.m. closing time for breweries.

Coal: A new way  1. Phase out 2. Invent a new business that keeps each employee with the same pay, living in the same place 3. Invite the existing business to own the new business. It can be done.

Specifics coming on our website www.YourGrandAm.com. All ideas welcome. An open exchange of ideas makes our community work.

Tell us something about yourself.

I have always been interested in the history of the Christian religion and scripture. In the past few years, I have studied other religions as well. The more I learn, the more meaning the words of Jesus Christ have for me.
BILLINGS - A coffee kiosk barista was robbed at gunpoint Wednesday afternoon in Billings, according to a news release from the Billings Police Department.

A man wearing a black ski mask approached from an alley behind the kiosk, showed a black handgun and demanded money from the barista of the Latte Central coffee kiosk at 1306 Central Ave. at around 12:20 p.m., according to the BPD.

"The clerk stated she had no money and the suspect climbed through the north window of the kiosk," BPD Sgt. Mitch Hart said in the news release.

"Once inside, the suspect grabbed the victim's purse, taking her wallet and makeup bag," Hart said. "The suspect then climbed out the south window of the kiosk fleeing on foot."

The suspect is described as male, white, 5 feet 6 inches tall, with a skinny build and wearing a black ski mask with green lines under the nose area. He was wearing black running pants and a white hoodie, Hart said.

A customer pulling up to the kiosk as the suspect fled on foot followed the man and reported that the man got into an older model tan pickup with no tailgate. The customer called 911 and lost sight of the man before the police arrived.

BPD's search of a surrounding neighborhood discovered the pickup unoccupied at the corner of Harney Drive and South Plainview Street. The pickup was impounded pending a search warrant.

One nearby resident called The Gazette to say that fearing the suspect, she would be locking her doors.

There have been seven reported armed robberies this April in Billings, with the last occurring Tuesday when a man wielding a pellet gun robbed the Zip-Trip gas station near the intersection of Shiloh Road and Central Avenue.

Between April 4 and April 11 armed criminals struck five Billings businesses, including three casinos, one bar and one convenience store.

Central Latte opened up in October and was purchased on April 7 by two new owners, brothers Cordell Bird and Travis Bird.
Political Practices Commissioner Jonathan Motl made quick work of a complaint filed last week by Rep. Theresa Manzella, R-Darby.

Calling the complaint frivolous, Motl officially dismissed it eight days after it was filed.

In the complaint filed April 18, Manzella claimed that her Democratic opponent, A. Jo Young, misrepresented her voting record in a profile that appeared in the Ravalli Republic.

The newspaper is running profiles on all county and legislative candidates in contested races, including Manzella.

Manzella claimed that Young violated state law by making statements about her voting record without providing the proper attribution required by state law.

In Motls ruling, he states that Montana has a long standing law that requires attribution of the name and address of a person or organization that paid for advertisements that promote or attack candidates or ballot issues. The Montana Legislature recently added a requirement of attribution on any election communication that mentions the voting record of a candidate.

Since Young criticized some of Manzellas votes during the 2015 session in her candidate profile in the Ravalli Republic, Manzella asserted the text violated state law because it didnt included detailed attribution, including a reference to the exact vote that was criticized.

Motl said the law only pertains to paid advertisements.

The Ravalli Republic candidate profile article is a news story prepared and printed by the newspaper for the benefit of the community, Motls ruling read. Candidate Young did not prepare or pay for the news article. The article is not a paid election communication requiring attribution. Instead, the article is a bona fide news story exempt from attribution.

Motl noted that Manzella sought news coverage of the complaint before it was accepted and posted to the states website.

There is perhaps some basis to argue that the law was new and misunderstood, leading to the unintentional filing of a meritless complaint, Motl wrote. The intentional use of the complaint for campaign purposes takes that argument away.

Motl said he was designating Manzellas complaint as frivolous and filed for the purposes that do not serve the public trust inherent in election for public office in Montana.

Young said she was happy with the ruling.

Im glad the Commissioner of Political Practices recognized that this was a frivolous complaint on the part of my Republican opponent and that comments in a newspaper are clearly protected by the First Amendment, Young said. Im disappointed my opponent would resort to filing a bogus complaint in an effort to avoid answering her constituents questions about her terrible voting record. Im sorry the commissioner of political practices had to be bothered with this complaint and look forward to continuing my campaign.

Manzella didnt agree with the commissioners decision to reject her complaint based on the fact Young didnt prepare or pay for the news article.

If she didnt prepare it, who did? Manzella said. Her comment in her response was the Democratic Party did. Should she not be accountable for confirming the information. I guess that the lesson to be learned is that as long as you dont pay for the publicity, its okay to lie and slander.
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.
Speculations and negotiations are underway about the content of the draft resolution on the Sahara that the Security Council is scheduled to adopt this Thursday, April 28, except last minute blip.

In the corridors of the United Nations in New York, there are already leakages of the highlights of the first sketch of the draft resolution drawn by the US diplomatic mission to the United Nations.

The draft text stresses the urgency for MINURSO to immediately resume its full duties in Western Sahara, according to diplomatic sources who got informed about the content of the first draft, as prepared by the United States, the penholder within the Group of Friends of the Sahara. The group also includes France, Spain, Russia and the UK.

The US draft also calls for the extension of the MINURSO mandate for a further sixty days and calls on the UN Secretary General to submit to the Council a new report on the situation in the Sahara, after these two months.

The draft resolution, which will take its final shape after it is debated and possibly amended by the other members of the Security Council, also recommends that the parties to the conflict resume negotiations in good faith and without preconditions and respect the cease-fire agreement.

Concerning negotiations, the attempt of Venezuela, supported by New Zealand and Uruguay, to make public the briefing session scheduled on Wednesday at the Security Council, was aborted by Moroccos friends, namely France, Senegal and Egypt.

Another maneuver by Angola also failed. Angola tried to have some international NGOs hostile to Morocco attend a Security Council informal meeting held on Tuesday afternoon during which the AU envoy Joachim Chissano presented a report on the situation in the Sahara. Angolas request was rejected because only States are admitted to such meetings.

According to well-informed sources from the United Nations, the shadow of the Algerian diplomatic machine is everywhere especially in the sphere of English-speaking African countries, to tip the balance of negotiations in favor of the Polisario and its mentor, Algeria, at the expense of Morocco, the Algerian regimes eternal enemy.
Seguin, TX (78155)

Today

Mixed clouds and sun with scattered thunderstorms. Potential for severe thunderstorms. High near 90F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms early, then becoming mostly clear after midnight. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 56F. SSW winds shifting to NW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
 Lots of discussion of felon disenfrachisement after Virginia Gov boldly restores voting rights | Main | Candidate Clinton promises to "institute gender-responsive policies in the federal prison system and encourage states to do the same" 

April 28, 2016

Oklahoma joins long list of "red states" enacting significant sentencing reforms

As reported in this local article, headlined "Criminal justice reform bills signed into law by Oklahoma governor," another state known for its conservative politics should now also be known as another state that has enacted significant reforms intended to soften its sentencing system and reduce its prison population. Here are the details:

Four criminal justice reform measures were signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin on Wednesday. The action comes at a time when the states prison system is operating at 122 percent of capacity. We want to be tough on crime, but we want to be smart on crime, Fallin said. The criminal justice reform bills she signed Wednesday are: House Bill 2472, which gives prosecutors discretion to file charges for crimes that are not subject to the 85 percent rule as misdemeanors instead of felonies. The 85 percent rule requires that those convicted of certain crimes, including rape and murder, serve at least 85 percent of their sentences before they can be considered for release.

HB 2479, which reduces the mandatory minimum sentence for drug offenders charged only with possession.

HB 2751, which raises the threshold for property crimes classified as felonies to $1,000 from $500.

HB 2753, which would broaden defendants eligibility for drug courts and community sentencing. The measures are designed to curb the growing prison population. These measures are just the beginning, said Rep. Pam Peterson, R-Tulsa, the House author of the bills. Fallin said it costs just under $20,000 a year to incarcerate an offender and about $5,000 a year for one defendant in drug court. House Speaker Jeff Hickman, R-Fairview, said the state still has a crisis in corrections and incarceration. This is not the end of the mission, he said, adding that other criminal justice reform bills are working their way through the legislative process. Former Tulsa County District Attorney Tim Harris attended the bill signing in the Blue Room at the Capitol. The measures give the state more options to prevent Oklahomans from becoming convicted felons and help them get the treatment they need, Harris said. It is not soft on crime, he said. It holds criminals accountable without breaking the bank. It is cost neutral to the taxpayer right now. Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater said the state needs to take steps to move mental health and substance abuse treatment to the front end. With measures like this, I do believe that ultimately we will see a decrease in the prison population while not increasing violent crime, and actually this will have a positive impact, I believe ultimately, on public safety, Prater said.

April 28, 2016 at 10:35 AM | Permalink

Comments

I do need your help.. . please.

My man was arrested a year ago now & it was only a possession charge that was under an ounce of stuff. They filed as Trafficking although he had no other bags, no scales no extra baggies, & it was just one single bag & he never expected to be bothered while he was at the store.



He worked a job which paid well & now they are trying to offer him 20 years & I am becoming pretty convinced it

He has been incarcerated in County Jail for a year now already on what should of been lowered to a possession at some point. I have looked up many cases & they do it constantly with those who have multiple drugs in large quantities when arrested & he does not have all those factors as most them did!

What can I do because I am not going to let him be in prison for 20 years because he dont deserve that & he already been in county a year.

Case # CF-2018-4243

Stacy Privett

405-625-8927

.



Posted by: Stacy Privett | Aug 18, 2019 5:02:17 PM

Post a comment


Scottish-born actor Alan Cumming, who lately has been doing his best American accent as Eli Gold on the final season of The Good Wife, returned to the live stage in 2014 to reprise the role of the Emcee in Cabaret, a role that helped earn him wide fame and a Tony Award when he first played it on Broadway 16 years earlier, in 1998. Then, following that run, he opened at the Cafe Carlyle in New York in the spring of 2015 with a limited engagement of a highly personal cabaret act dubbed Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs  a recording of which you can find on iTunes now. Now, he's taking the show on tour, and he'll be performing those sappy songs at the Castro Theatre on June 30, the week after Pride Weekend.

The New York Times praised the show last year calling him a "formidable all-around entertainer" who "is completely at home onstage."

Cummings' selection of songs shows some whimsy as well as a diversity of taste  in the Carlyle performances he did both a Katy Perry-Lady Gaga-Adele medley called "Someone Like the Edge of Fireworks" as well as a wittily mashed-up Sondheim medley called "No One Is Alive While Im Around." He covers Billy Joel and Rufus Wainwright, too, and does his own rage-filled take on the late Elaine Stritch's signature song, "The Ladies Who Lunch" from Sondheim's Company.

And his newfound television fame is likely to fill the seats of the grand Castro, in this show being produced by NY nightlife impresario Daniel Nardicio, in association with Feinsteins at the Nikko.

Tickets can be found here, and range from $35 to $150 for VIP.
Correction: An earlier version of this post ran under the headline "Protesters Block Valencia Street After Chief Suhr Cuts Short Meeting." Chief Suhr did not attend the meeting, and the headline was inaccurate. SFist regrets the error.

"How do you spell racism?" a protestor shouted through a megaphone outside the Mission Police Station on Valencia last night at around 8 p.m.

"S-F-P-D" his fellows called out in response.

"How do you spell Murder?" he shouted back to the crowd.

"S-F-P-D" the group chanted back.

This all happened on the site of an ongoing hunger strike with the stated goal of removing SFPD Chief Suhr which has, as of today, lasted a week. The strike, led in part by vocal Ed Lee critic and Bay Area rapper Ilych "Equipto" Sato, comes in response to the shooting of Luis Gongora, a homeless man, whom SFPD fired on and killed at 19th and Shotwell on April 7th.

That killing, along with the shootings of black and brown men like Mario Woods, whose death Mayor Lee described as "horrifying," and Amilcar Perez Lopez, who was shot in the back according to witnesses, has been a rallying cry for protestors alleging police misconduct. Their argument is heightened by a backdrop of revelations that more bigoted texts were sent between police officers. While a Department of Justice investigation into the San Francisco Police Department is ongoing, its focus will be broad, an evaluation of training and policy.





The rally Tuesday night, which closed two blocks as police set up barriers to traffic, was sparked by a monthly community meeting at the station that was concluded after just a few minutes according to Mission Local.

Initially, Edwin Lindo, a hunger striker and candidate for David Campos's supervisor seat, suggested the meeting be held outside to accommodate the massive turnout. When his request, which he clarified was a demand, was declined, the assembled protestors began to shout "Fire Chief Suhr." The police chief captain leading the proceedings said he could not continue the meeting over the shouting, and he departed as the meeting was disbanded.

We are on the right side of history, Lindo said outside the station, rallying protestors. He alleged that he's received personal words of encouragement in the hunger strike effort from current police officers whom he did not name.

Mission Local now puts the number of those engaged in the hunger strike at nine, and among them is Sato's mother, Maria Cristina Gutierrez, age 66.

"This has grown into something unbelievable, Sato said to the paper. "Celebrate these small victories, because its not going to happen overnight You see, I get it from my mama: We are not going anywhere.

Previously: Hunger Strike Grows Outside Mission Police Station Calling For Chief Suhr's Resignation
Deal to allow 99 year old Iris Canada to stay in her SF home hits snag when landlord asks for courtroom apology. pic.twitter.com/ZsIGvqgF5v  Juan Carlos Guerrero (@JuanCarlosABC7) April 19, 2016

Iris Canada, a 99-year-old woman who has lived in her Western Addition home on Page Street since the 1940s, can stay put until her death, a ruling that follows a brief reprieve granted by a judge earlier this month. There's a catch. She has to pay the apartment owners' legal fees of $100,000, or else agree to a condo conversion. Bay City News reports that a Superior Court Judge made the ruling yesterday.

Canada holds not a lease but a lifetime estate, part of a deal brokered during a 2002 remediation with the owners, who are Peter Owens, Carolyn Radisch, and Steven Owens, a married couple and a pair of brothers. Under those terms, Canada pays $700 a month  terms that also state she can't have others live with her, such as caregivers, or live elsewhere for extended periods of time.

Allegations that Canada has left the apartment and neglected it lead the owners to attempt the eviction, but while Canada does not deny that she has spent time away dealing with medical issues, such as a stroke, she maintains that she has kept up the apartment throughout.

In the building where Canada resides, the other five unites are tenancies-in common, all ready to convert to condominiums. But to complete the process, they'll need Canada's signature, which she has refused to give.

Attorney Andrew Zacks says the condo conversion dispute is at the root of the current situation, and that Canada's family members, particularly her niece and de facto spokesperson Iris Merriouns, are preventing her from doing so. What we have here is exploitation of Ms. Canada by her family members, Zacks said.

The Chronicle appears to have been in the room during an "often-rancorous" phone exchange between Merriouns and Peter Owens: While Owens will waive the legal fees, which Merriouns indicates Canada is likely unable to pay, the niece isn't having it.

"Why should we trust someone who says one thing publicly but does another thing behind closed doors? Merriouns contends to Bay City News. If Peter Owens is a man of his word then he will drop the $100,000, she said, referring to the attorneys fees."

The controversy has had repercussions for Peter Owens, a Vermont resident who resigned his position as Burlington Community Economic and Development Office Director. His departure was planned according to the Burlington Free Press, but occurred sooner than expected due in part to the scandal in San Francisco

Previously: 99-Year-Old Western Addition Woman Granted One-Week Reprieve From Eviction
There's been a second arrest in the San Francisco Police Department's alleged rape/racist text scandal: This time it's the Lieutenant who oversaw the alleged rapist/racist texter who now faces charges of obstructing the investigation into his underling's alleged sexual assault.

The clouds of witness have been gathering over former Taraval Station Lieutenant Curtis Liu since August, 2015, when a woman being treated at San Francisco General Hospital for injuries from an alleged sexual assault said then-officer Jason Lai was the man responsible.

By the end of August, an internal affairs investigation revealed that "a fellow officer at the Taraval Station and friend of the accused, compromised the investigation" and that he intentionally interfered with a felony sexual assault investigation both by lying to the officers investigating the incident and by contacting the suspect directly to inform him of the progress of the investigation," a search warrant used to seize both officer's phones.

By March of this year, the "fellow officer" was identified as former Lieutenant Curtis Liu, who retired as the investigation into his activities continued. Lai was arrested  not for the rape, as the District Attorney's office deemed the evidence insufficient  but for two misdemeanor counts of unlawful possession of local criminal offender history Information and four misdemeanor counts of misuse of confidential Department of Motor Vehicles Information.

And the investigation into Liu continued, with the DA's office announcing in March that based on evidence from their seized cell phones, Liu and Lai had exchanged texts characterized by the DA as racist, homophobic, and bigoted.

We got a look at Lai's side of the conversation (as well as a number of his other remarks) Tuesday, when Public Defender Jeff Adachi released page upon page of Lai's vile texted remarks. Just a day after that, the DA's office announced in a statement, Liu was arrested "charged with obstructing a rape investigation involving another San Francisco Police Officer by making false and misleading statements and withholding key information from officers who were investigating the rape allegations."

According to the DA's office, after the rape report was made "Then-Lieutenant Liu contacted a San Francisco Police Officer who worked at his station, and who had the same name as the reported rapist. Lieutenant Liu discussed the allegations with the Officer, and the Officer provided Lieutenant Liu with information that confirmed that the Officer was, in fact, the person that the rape victim was referring to."

"Instead of reporting this information to his fellow officers, Liu engaged in a series of actions designed to keep the investigation from focusing on the Officer," The DA's office alleges. "These actions included lying to his subordinates and superior officers about the fact that he had contacted the suspect-Officer, and permitting the police report regarding the rape to be filed with the suspect listed as 'unknown,' when Lieutenant Liu knew that the proper suspect was the Officer."

A willingness to cover up allegations of a crime as serious as rape is not an acceptable quality in any police officer, District Attorney George Gascon said via press release.

But the fact that such a void of principle was demonstrated by a leader makes this behavior that much more concerning.

A statement sent Wednesday night by SFPD confirms the details of the case, and adds that it was SFPD's Internal Affairs investigators who made yesterday's arrest and booked Liu into San Francisco County Jail.

The Associated Press reports that Liu has retained lawyer Tony Brass to defend him, but an effort to reach Brass to confirm this was unsuccessful as of publication time. Brass also defended at least two of the SFPD officers in the department's last racist texting scandal in 2015, so it's safe to assume that he knows his way around a disgraced cop case.

Additional lawyers who specialize in disgraced law enforcement officers might soon find themselves with more on their plate, as Lai and Liu aren't the only cops under scrutiny in this case. Also involved in this newest texting scandal are former Officer Keith Ybarreta, who along with Lai and Liu left the department over the course of the investigation, and a fourth, unnamed officer who the Chron says is "awaiting a disciplinary hearing in front of the Police Commission and faces possible termination." That mystery man was suspended as of October, 2015, SFPD Chief Greg Suhr says, but obviously there's at least one more shoe left to drop.

Liu, who according to a San Francisco Sheriff's Department spokesperson has "bonded out" and is no longer in custody, has been "charged with one count of violating California Penal Code Section 118.1 (Making a False Statement in a Police Report), a felony, and two counts of violating California Penal Code Section 148(a)(1) (Delaying or Obstructing a Peace Officer), both misdemeanors," the DA's office says. The date of his arraignment has yet to be set.

Previously: Seven Months After Alleged Sexual Assault, SFPD Officer To Finally Face Some Music

More Racist SFPD Texts Were Uncovered During Sexual Assault Investigation Of Officer

Newest Batch Of Racist SFPD Texts Might Be Worse Than The Last One, 207 Cases Under Scrutiny


The entire value and convenience propositions of using Uber could soon be out the window as it's becoming increasingly obvious that drivers would like to be getting cash tips, and as Uber announces today that they're contemplating cutting the allowable wait time from five minutes to two minutes  meaning drivers can charge a fee if you don't find the car and get in it within 120 seconds. As CNet reports, the company is testing out the two-minute limit in New York, New Jersey, Dallas, and Phoenix right now, and it's all in an effort to cut down on drivers' unpaid time.

Fair enough, however I'd argue that the company should simply be paying drivers more  and they just coughed up $100 million in order to avoid, for now, a legal battle over whether drivers ought to be deemed employees and not contractors. Not to mention the fact that "tip is included" was a promise from the outset that now appears to have been a lie, or at least an early policy the company has quietly tried to disown in the last year or two. As part of that same settlement last week, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Uber agreed to soften its stance on tipping and allow drivers to post signs in their cars telling passengers that tips aren't included  and implying that cash tips would be welcome, since the app still does not allow for electronic tipping the way Lyft does. Already, anecdotally, tipping Uber drivers in cash is pretty commonplace in Los Angeles, even though drivers still aren't allowed to ask for tips. And as we learned in SF recently via SFist's Eve Batey, regular tipping gets you much closer to a perfect 5.0 rating.

So, pretty soon we can say goodbye to the days of smoothly jumping in and out of Ubers without the hassle of fumbling with wallets, realizing you don't have correct change, and dealing with the awkwardness around that whole exchange  arguably one of the cornerstones of Uber's success in stealing business away from the traditional taxi industry. Uber made us all feel like we could travel our cities, cash-free, in luxury  and you may recall the company's original, now abandoned, tagline was "Everyone's Private Driver."

Cutting the wait-time limit to two minutes is less egregious, however it's another sign that major growing pains are arriving for this very fast-growing company, and they're finally giving in to demands from their underpaid legion of drivers. In general, I'm always out the door or on the curb and getting in the car in about a minute, however there are those times when I call a car from home on a weekend evening, they show up faster than I expect them to, and it takes me an extra couple minutes to get out the door and down to the street. If I now have to pay a fee for that extra minute or two, AND get lower ratings and passive aggressive remarks if I don't have any cash for a tip, I will finally have reached my limit when it comes to drawbacks in using the app  not the least of which could be encountering a sketchy driver who nonetheless passed a lax background check.

I predict backlash over the tipping thing will finally encourage them to add a tipping function within the app, and one can assume prices won't stay so low for too long either, meaning that UberX rides won't be any cheaper than traditional cabs. And as apps like Flywheel come along to let you more easily hail those cabs, Uber's market share could finally take a hit.

And then what happens when labor lawyers decide to file a class-action suit in a labor-friendly city to declare drivers employees? The business model, as Uber knows it, could be on some very shaky ground in the coming years.

Previously: What's Your Uber Passenger Rating? (Here Are Ours)

Last Night, My Uber Driver Said He Was Going To Rape And Kill Me


A couple of weeks earlier than usual, Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer has unveiled his Top 100 Restaurants in the Bay Area  a longstanding Chron tradition that serves as a kind of locally sourced Michelin Guide, albeit with Bauer bias. Unlike in previous years when the list has been hidden behind the paper's dumb paywall for a few days, and/or teased out and released in print only at first, they finally just decided to drop the entire thing online on Wednesday, ahead of the Sunday print edition that will go to subscribers. And given what a stellar year 2015 was for new restaurant openings  with a record-setting seven brand new spots earning Michelin stars in their first few months of business  it stands to reason that Mr. Bauer had to make some serious room and cull some fat on the new ranking. In total, 19 new additions were made, a few of which are not new restaurants but are newly excellent in Bauer's eyes, and 19 spots had to drop off, including a few that were newly added last year.

As he puts it, while 100 "seems like a lot of restaurants... in San Francisco that number barely covers the creme de la creme."

The restaurants that hit the list in 2015 and already lost their spots  for reasons Bauer may elaborate on later  are Monsieur Benjamin, Molina (in Mill Valley), and The Dock at Linden Street (in Oakland).

More notably, perhaps, Bauer's longstanding passion for pizza finally takes a backseat for some more ambitious cuisine. A couple of longtime Top 100 mainstays, Bauer fave Gialina and Oakland's Boot and Shoe Service both got the axe, as did Piccino in Dogpatch where pizzas are a centerpiece of the menu. While Boot and Shoe's sister spot, Pizzaiolo, remains on the list because he says the menu often features more ambitious fare, and they take reservations. And, apparently stealing Gialina's spot, the newly open Del Popolo on Nob Hill gets the add.

Six of the seven new Michelin star earners all have spots on the list, with two already having been added in 2015 (AL's Place and Mourad); Octavia, Lord Stanley, Omakase, and Californios all were obvious adds. And restaurants Bauer raved about as soon as they opened like Petit Crenn, Trestle, Cala, and Ninebark were all predictably included as well  as well as Rasa in Burlingame, which he recently proclaimed "the Bay Area's best Indian restaurant."

And returning to the list after a significant absence is downtown speakeasy-tavern Bix, where Bauer writes, "The food masterminded by Bruce Hill has taken a huge leap forward with the addition of [chef] Emmanuel Eng."

Among the surprise cuts are longtime favorites like Chez Panisse Cafe  though he seems to have just rolled it under the Chez Panisse umbrella, praising both restaurants in one listing  AQ and Barbacco, which were all high in Mr. Bauer's praise in years' past.

Below, the full list of additions and subtractions. See the entire list, alphabetical and with photos, right here.

The New Additions

Belga

Bix

Cala

Californios

Commis

Del Popolo

Little Gem

Lord Stanley

Ninebark

Octavia

Old Bus Tavern

Omakase

Petit Crenn

Rasa

Shed Cafe

Trestle

Village Sake

Volta

Z and Y

The Cuts

AQ

Barbacco

Bocadillos

Boot and Shoe Service

Bouchon

Cafe at Chez Panisse

Central Kitchen

The Dock at Linden Street

Gialina

Hopscotch

Monsieur Benjamin

Molina

Maven

Nojo*

Nido

Piccino

Sante

Scopa

* Changed hands in 2015 and became a ramen spot.

Previously: Bar Tartine, Sons & Daughters Pruned From Chron Top 100; Lazy Bear, Liholiho and (Finally) Atelier Crenn Added
Was it a Russian Hill altercation attempted mugging, or just a weird interaction that turned violent? The San Francisco Police Department is (quite rightly) unwilling to speculate on motive, but confirms that as of this morning, a dastardly mug thief continues to roam the streets of SF.

According to police, a 30-year-old man was standing at the corner of Green and Polk Streets Wednesday at 12:53 in the afternoon when a man in his 40s to 50s walked up and asked him for a cigarette.

When the younger man said he didn't have any, the older fellow "became agitated," police say, and "tried to take" the younger guy's backpack.

Things heated up when the smoke-seeker punched the backpack wearer in the face, police say, and they ended up "fighting on the ground." The scrum ended when the older man "snatched" his victim's "silver coffee mug" and fled east on Green Street.

The victim, police say, wasn't injured in the brawl. As of Thursday morning, the whereabouts of the mug thief remains unknown.
Stranded seal saved by @SFPDTaraval today; officers protected it from crows & off-leash dog til @TMMC arrived. #SFPD pic.twitter.com/3IRouQXvr2  San Francisco Police (@SFPD) April 27, 2016

Officers from the San Francisco Police Department say they kept a stranded seal safe from the perils of Ocean Beach's shore Wednesday, until a rescue crew arrived to take the pup into their care.

Bay City news reports that by 6 a.m. Wednesday, Sausalito's Marine Mammal Center had received multiple calls from people "including members of the public, police and National Park Service staff" reporting a stranded seal on Ocean Beach near Noriega Street.

According to a tweet from SFPD's Taraval Station, officers protected the young Guadalupe fur seal "from crows & off-leash dog" until rescuers arrived. According to MMC spokesperson Giancarlo Rulli, the seal likely needed their help, as it was "very malnourished and lethargic" and "emaciated."

Guadalupe fur seals like this one are more commonly found in Southern California and Mexico, Rulli says, but we've been seeing more up here lately: Last year, BCN reports, the MMC took in 32, a record number in the rescue organization's history.

The seal, which Rulli says weighs only 15 pounds, is definitely in need of veterinary care and will be examined today "to determine more about its condition, gender and prognosis," BCN reports. An update on the pup's condition wasn't available at publication time, but we're rooting for you, little buddy!
The six films to watch this summer

1. "Captain America: Civil War" -- Filled with more superheroes than you probably know, it has the kind of action we expect from a summer blockbuster. Pass the popcorn.

2. "Finding Dory" -- A hit when she was helping Marlin find Nemo, the blue fish with memory problems searches for her family in this sequel. Expect tears (and a great performance from Ellen DeGeneres as the voice of Dory).

3. "Jason Bourne" -- Matt Damon said he wasn't going to revisit Bourne and, then? He changed his mind. Now, a sleek Damon is racing around the world trying to save his life. It should be good.

4. "The BFG" -- The combo of talents can't be beat. Steven Spielberg directs Mark Rylance as a giant in this Roald Dahl story about acceptance. Expect families in droves.

5. "Ghostbusters" -- Women get the roles in this follow-up to the hit film from way back when. Considering its largely the cast of "Saturday Night Live" that should bode well. Plus, director Paul Feig always does right by Melissa McCarthy

6. Star Trek Beyond -- The new old gang is back, this time facing off with a villain that's pretty juicy. Considering Idris Elba plays him, that should be reason enough to re-up.
SOUTH SIOUX CITY | Space issues at many of South Sioux City School Districts facilities and a more focused attention to student achievement at all levels is the driving force behind a proposed $38-plus million bond issue.

The bond  divided into two proposals  will go before district voters on May 10.

Superintendent Vernon Fisher said Proposition A is for just shy of $28 million. That calls for building a new school for fifth- and sixth-graders that would emphasize Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM). It would also provide additions to Cardinal and Harney Elementary, as well as building renovations to Dakota Elementary.

In addition, a vacant building owned by the school district just off the Highway 77 bypass would be turned into a career center for high school students.

Proposition B  for $10.5 million  calls for building a new early childhood center. Fisher said the new facility would help prepare 4-year-olds for kindergarten.

While the votes are separate, Fisher said the only way the early childhood facility item will pass is if the first question is approved.

If prop A passes, the tax levy will increase by $.085 per $100 of valuation. If prop B passes, the total tax levy increase will be $.148 per $100. That means if both measures pass, taxes on a $100,000 home will increase by $147.90 per year, and $85.20 should just prop A pass.

The bond is slated for 25 years.

Fisher said the district is bringing forth multiple projects for a variety of reasons. Overcrowding, he said, was a big factor in the urge to address some of the facilities.

The middle school was built with an occupancy of 596 students. Currently 823 students are enrolled in the building. Cardinal Elementary has a student body of 394 students, with a capacity of 291. The high school and remaining three elementary schools are also over the constructed occupancy.

The middle school currently has two portable units that provide an additional 4 classrooms.

Under the new arrangement, seventh and eighth grade will remain in the middle school building, fifth and sixth grade will have its own building at 39th Street and Bennet Avenue, and the high school will stay freshman through senior.

Middle School Principal Tom McGuire said the chance to alleviate some space issues in the school is imperative.

"Right now, we are way over capacity," he said. "Even though we could build more rooms on the building, the hallways are just not big enough for the amount of kids going through it."

He added that the fifth and sixth grade facility will help South Sioux City continue its exploration into science and mathematics.

"I think when you build it, it creates excitement and I think that will bring people to settle in South Sioux City," he said.

Additional classroom space will be built at Harney and Cardinal schools.

A community survey, polling of the teachers and staff in the district and various other feedback from a number of stakeholders showed that there was a desire to address overcrowding in many of the schools, as well as help prepare students for college and post-education careers.

McGuire said the career center resonated with the business and industry community as well as community members between the ages of 42 and 60, while the early childhood center struck a chord with younger voters under 40.

The comprehensive look, extensive planning and a thorough analysis of the districts facilities, he said, appealed to the voters.

They appreciated the fact we didnt jump into a project, and the school district took its time to take a good look at all facilities and bring a reasonable solution to the community for them to consider, he said.

Fisher added that, if approved, the bond would help bring the South Sioux City district up to speed with other schools around Siouxland, as well as across the state of Nebraska.

I think that its important that our community understands that South Sioux City schools, along with the city, continues to grow and we have to keep pace not only with growth but also with the demands of society that range from preparation of students for college and career but also placing them in environments that expose them to the experiences that prepare them for college and career, he said.

The early childhood center, he said, would help decrease the gap that underprivileged students often face when formal schooling begins.

Kids that come from homes of poverty, they dont have the same experiences as children who come from more affluent families, he said. Everything from vocabulary to real world experiences  the learning experiences are different and the gap widens before they even get to kindergarten.
SAC CITY, Iowa | A man charged with vehicular homicide for the deaths of two teenage girls has chosen to have a judge rather than a jury decide his fate.

Trevor Feauto, 19, of Clarksville, Iowa, on Thursday waived his right to a jury trial and instead asked that his trial be heard by a judge.

Feauto has pleaded not guilty to two counts of vehicular homicide -- recklessness and two counts of homicide by vehicle -- intoxication. He is scheduled to stand trial May 10 in Sac County District Court.

Feauto had pleaded guilty to the recklessness charges in November, but on the day he was to be sentenced, a plea offer made to him was withdrawn and his guilty plea vacated.

Sac County Attorney Ben Smith said then that he withdrew the plea agreement because family members of the crash victims didn't believe it provided adequate justice and preferred to see the case go to trial with the hope that Feauto will be found guilty of all four charges.

Feauto is charged in an Aug. 23, 2014, crash near Breda in which his Ram truck hit a Chevrolet Impala driven by Bailey Jacobsen at a rural intersection. Jacobsen and her passenger, Lindsey Quirk, both 16, were killed.

According to the Sac County Sheriff's Office, Feauto had a blood-alcohol level of 0.133 percent when tested after the crash, above Iowa's legal limit of 0.02 percent for minors under age 21. Jacobsen's blood-alcohol level was 0.057 percent, sheriff's deputies said.
I'd like to buy a vowel

VERMILLION, S.D. | University of South Dakota police are looking for leads after nine letters were noticed missing from one of the campus entrance signs earlier this week.

Tena Haraldson, director of communications at USD, said staff and employees noticed the missing letters as they arrived at work Monday morning. The sign, at the intersection of Clark and Pine streets, is one of three at the university.

Haraldson said one of the letters was found lying in the grass near the sign, but the rest have not been found. Campus police are still determining whether the vandals were USD students or community members, Haraldson said. She added that similar incidents have happened in past years.

"University police indicated to me that its something that tends to happen in the spring," she said.

Haraldson said the campus facilities management department had enough spare letters on hand to replace all but the "H" in "South."

She said campus authorities are asking whoever has the letters to return them. Anyone with information is encouraged to call campus police at 605-677-5342 or fill out the Silent Witness form on the school's website.

Leave the drugs at home next time, OK?

SIOUX CITY | A man is facing numerous drug charges after police say they found several kinds of illicit substances in his vehicle during a traffic Thursday.

At 10:34 p.m., Sioux City police pulled over Ricky Jackson, 37, of Sioux City near 2700 Correctionville Road for improper plate lamps.

Jacksons license was found to be suspended. A K-9 unit was called in to perform a search of the vehicle and indicated illegal substances were in the car.

A search was performed, turning up .6 grams of synthetic marijuana, several empty packets of synthetic marijuana, .6 grams of real marijuana, four small bags of meth and 20 pills without a prescription, court documents state.

Jackson was charged with possession of drugs, possession of marijuana, possession of prescription drugs, driving while his license is suspended, illuminated license plates and parole violation.

He was booked into Woodbury County Jail on $36,000 bond.

This is not what they mean by 'playing with house money'

OMAHA | A former casino worker has been charged in federal court with taking approximately $15,000 from a Winnebago, Nebraska, casino.

Mark Hannan, 19, of South Sioux City, was indicted last week in U.S. District Court in Omaha of theft by an employee of a gaming establishment on Indian lands.

According to court documents, from Nov. 1 through Feb. 15, Hannan worked at the Native Star Casino, which is owned and operated by the Winnebago Indian Tribe of Nebraska. On several occasions, he withdrew money from the casino cashier's cage totaling approximately $15,000 and used the cash for his own personal use, court documents said.
Cyber crime is on the rise and small businesses are increasingly becoming the target of hackers.

New data from Symantecs 2016 Internet Security Threat Report shows that small businesses have become a big target for phishers. Last year, phishing campaigns targeted small businesses (PDF) 43 percent of the time. Thats up 9 percent over 2014 and a stark contrast to the mere 18 percent of attacks that focused on small businesses in 2011.

Cyber Attacks Target Small Business

Symantecs report shows that about 1 in 40 small businesses are at risk of being the victim of a cyber crime. That pales in comparison to the 1 in about 2 large businesses which are targeted every year  multiple times  with a cyber attack.

Still, the report indicates that hackers are indiscriminately choosing their victims. Its not a matter of who theyre targeting but what theyre targeting  your money.

These phishing attacks target employees largely responsible for the finances of a small business. Malicious email messages sent to these employees that are opened could hijack an entire companys financial information and gain access to funds and personal information.

Furthermore, Symantec also notes in its Internet Security Threat Report that ransomware attacks are also on the rise and targeting not only employees but any devices connected to a companys hacked network. Symantec says it has instances on the record in 2015 of attacks on the Internet of Things, too. That includes attacks on smartphones, smart watches, and a smart television. In these attacks, there is a demand for some type of payment before a device may be freed by its attacker.

Digging a little deeper into the data from Symantecs report reveals a 55 percent increase from 2014 to 2015 in the amount of spear-phishing campaigns that target employees of a business of any size. Symantec classifies small businesses as any with up to 250 employees.

Small Businesses Need To Prepare for Cyber Attacks

So, what should small business owners do with this information? Be prepared is the simple advice.

Its clear that hackers will continue to target small businesses with phishing attacks. And since these attacks are targeting employees mostly, implementing a proper training and informational program on phishing schemes within your company is prudent. This type of training will hopefully help reduce the likelihood that an employee of yours will open a suspicious email by helping to better identify one.

Since cyber attacks target small business, its more likely your small business will become the target or victim of a phishing attack. Develop a plan for dealing with such a situation. Consult with your IT team or an IT expert on a comprehensive plan for mitigating the impact of a phishing or other cyber attack against your company.

Finally, with the rise in attacks on devices connected to your companys network, its best to limit the amount of those devices  employee smartphones and other IoT devices  you allow on it.
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
WASHINGTON (April 27, 2016)Three southern Maryland-based teachers from Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Washington are being honored for their excellence in teaching and commitment to Catholic education. They will be recognized by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, on Wednesday, May 11 at the eighth annual Golden Apple Awards dinner at the Mayflower Hotel in Northwest Washington.



The local 2016 Golden Apple Award winners are:



 Maureen Mullen Detrick, Father Andrew White School, Leonardtown, middle school religion & English teacher;



 Tricia Morrison, St. Mary's School, Bryantown, first grade teacher; and



 John Olon, St. Mary's Ryken High School, Leonardtown, theology teacher.



The teachers were nominated by their colleagues, students and school parents for exemplifying the best in instructional strategies, Catholic identity and knowledge of curriculum. The award recipients receive a $5,000 prize along with a golden apple and certificate.



The awards were announced by surprising the teachers at their respective schools this last week. Students, fellow teachers, administrators, parents and family members were on hand as representatives from the Catholic Schools Office of the Archdiocese of Washington came to the schools to personally inform them of their selection.



The Golden Apple Award was created by the Pittsburgh-based Donahue Family Foundation whose founders, Jack and Rhodora Donahue, sent their 13 children to Catholic schools. Eager to express their deep appreciation to Catholic school teachers, the award was created to honor teachers for providing a quality academic and faith-filled education.
Vivien Keller, a woman often characterized as putting others interests ahead of her own, passed on Sunday, April 24. She was 90.

Known to her friends as simply, Miss Vicky, Keller was active in several South Florida organizations, adding input as a straight ally as well as performing as an actor and musician.

You can name a bar in the 80s and 90s that was open in Fort Lauderdale and Vicky played it, said Jodi Fischer, a longtime friend, who served as Kellers care giver during her final years. She always had her finger on the pulse of what was happening in the community.

Keller helped launch two important organizations  AIDS Center One and Womynsong Lesbian Chorus. For many years she lent her talents in a leadership role for Pride South Florida.

It was never about her, said Miik Martorell, a Pride Fort Lauderdale team member. It was always about what she could do for someone elsefor the community.

Martorell said Kellers presence at Pride board meetings typically brought about order and respect to what were often contentious meetings.

She didnt get involved in the politics and evilness of it, Martorell said. For board members who were stressed out it was good to hear her talk.

The wisdom Keller offered was returned with gratitude when she fell on hard times last year. Through the help of a GoFundMe account, nearly $10,000 was raised to help Fischer manage Kellers care after her rent was unexpectedly raised.

Over the weekend, Keller was moved to Holy Cross hospice, Fischer said, where she lived her final days.

A community iconrest in peace, sleep well and wake up smiling, wrote Jodi Reichman on SFGNs Facebook page. You deserve a great ride to your next location where you will be welcomed with open arms.

Congregation Etz Chaim is hosting a memorial service for Keller on May 3 at 7 p.m. inside building B at the Pride Center at Equality Park. Martorell said he expects the service to be an emotional one as Miss Vicky touched so many people.
Zika Epidemiology NASA

NASA is assisting public health officials, scientists and communities to better understand Zika virus and try to limit the spread of the disease it causes.



Image: A risk-assessment map shows Aedes aegypti potential abundance for July and the monthly average number arrivals to the U.S. by air and land from countries on the Center for Disease Control Zika travel advisory. Red dots represent areas with potentially high abundance, while yellow dots represent potentially low abundance areas. Shaded regions represent the approximate maximum range of Aedes aegypti.

Credits: UCAR

Scientists at the agencys Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, have partnered with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and other institutions to forecast the potential spread of Zika virus in the United States.

The research team looked at key factors  including temperature, rainfall and socioeconomic factors  that contribute to the spread of Zika virus to understand where and when a potential outbreak may occur. Their final product, a Zika risk map, can help government agencies and health organizations better prepare for possible disease outbreaks related to the spread of the virus. The researchers described their findings in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Current Outbreaks.

This information can help public health officials effectively target resources to fight the disease and control its spread, said Dale Quattrochi, NASA senior research scientist at Marshall.

To determine the potential risk in the mainland United States, Morin, Quattrochi and their colleagues applied methodology being employed in their current vector-borne disease project to potentially identify and predict the spread of Zika in 50 cities across the U.S. in or near the known range of the species. The team has studied this mosquito species for years, because it also transmits the dengue and chikungunya viruses.

The research team found that the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is spreading the virus, will likely increase in number across much of the southern and eastern U.S. as the weather warms across those regions in the coming months. Summertime weather conditions are favorable for populations of the mosquito along the East Coast as far north as New York City and across the southern tier of the country as far west as Phoenix and Los Angeles.

The results generally confirmed many of our suspicions about the relative risk of Zika virus transmission in the U.S., said Cory Morin, a NASA postdoctoral program fellow with Marshalls Earth Science Office. However, there were some surprises, such as the northern extent of Aedes aegypti potential survival during the summer months. This suggests that the mosquito can potentially survive in these locations if introduced during certain seasons, even if it hasnt or cant become fully established.

While the virus is not new, its presence in the Americas is. Officials in Brazil reported the first case of human infection in the region last spring. Since then, it has spread throughout South and Central America, and the Caribbean. No locally-transmitted Zika cases from mosquitoes have been reported in the continental U.S., but cases have been reported in travelers returning from areas where Zika virus is present and in U.S. territories. As Zika virus continues to spread, the number of cases among travelers visiting or returning to the continental U.S. is likely to increase.

Knowledge is one of the most effective barriers to disease transmission and can alleviate unnecessary concern, Morin added. By identifying the key risk factors and producing forecasts of disease transmission, we can enable citizens canto take effective actions that will greatly reduce their risk of disease.

Over the past three decades, NASA has partnered with various world health organizations to use remotely sensed observations to help develop predictive models for the spread of vector-borne diseases such as Malaria, Plague, Yellow Fever, West Nile virus, Lyme disease, Rift Valley fever and onchocerciasis, or River Blindness.

NASA is also part of the Office of Science and Technology Policys National Science and Technology Task Force on Science and Technology for Zika Vector Control, which includes partners at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and NASA. Funding was also provided by the Marshall Space Flight Center Innovation Fund. The National Science Foundation sponsors the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Learn more about NASA Earth Science at: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/index.html
Parnal's Lasers ESO

On 26 April 2016 ESOs Paranal Observatory in Chile hosted an event to mark the first light for the four powerful lasers that form a crucial part of the adaptive optics systems on ESOs Very Large Telescope.

Attendees were treated to a spectacular display of cutting-edge laser technology against the majestic skies of Paranal. These are the most powerful laser guide stars ever used for astronomy and the event marks the first use of multiple laser guide stars at ESO.

ESO staff were present for the event, along with senior representatives of the companies that have manufactured the different components of the new system.

The Four Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF) shines four 22-watt laser beams into the sky to create artificial guide stars by making sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere glow so that they look just like real stars [1]. The artificial stars allow the adaptive optics systems to compensate for the blurring caused by the Earths atmosphere and so that the telescope can create sharp images. Using more than one laser allows the turbulence in the atmosphere to be mapped in far greater detail to significantly improve the image quality over a larger field of view.

The Four Laser Guide Star Facility is an example of how ESO enables European industry to lead complex research and development projects. The fibre laser used by the 4LGSF is also one of the most successful transfers of ESO technology to industry.

TOPTICA, the German main contractor, was responsible for the laser system and provided the oscillator, the frequency doubler, and the system control software. Wilhelm Kaenders, president of TOPTICA, said: TOPTICA has enjoyed the collaboration with ESO tremendously. It is not only the personal thrill of being engaged with astronomy, an old passion, again, and working with very clever ESO technologists; it is also the inspiration that we have received for our own commercial product development. [2]

MPBC of Canada provided the fibre laser pumps and Raman amplifiers, which are based on an ESO licensed patent. Jane Bachynski, President of MPB Communications Inc. said: MPBC is proud to have worked with ESO in the development of Raman fibre amplifiers to much higher powers, allowing MPBC to bring this technology to the stars. This event marks the culmination of many years of hard work on behalf of all involved. [3]

TNO in the Netherlands manufactured the optical tube assemblies, which expand the laser beams and direct them into the sky. Paul de Krom, CEO of TNO, said: TNO valued the cooperative working environment during the development of the optical tube assemblies and looks forward to the opportunity to work with ESO and the other partners in the 4LGSF project in the future. [4]

The 4LGSF is part of the Adaptive Optics Facility on Unit Telescope 4 of the VLT, designed specifically to provide the adaptive optics systems GALACSI/MUSE and GRAAL/HAWK-I with four sodium laser guide stars. With this new facility, Paranal Observatory continues to have the most advanced and the largest number of adaptive optics systems in operation today.

The 4LGSF lasers were developed by ESO with industry and have already been procured, among others, by the Keck Observatory (which contributed to the industrial laser development cost along with the European Commission) and the Subaru Telescope. In the future these industrial lasers will also feature on the telescopes at the Gemini Observatory and will be the preferred choice for several other observatories and extremely large telescope projects.

The new techniques developed for the Four Laser Guide Star Facility pave the way for the adaptive optics system of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), the worlds biggest eye on the sky.

Notes [1] The 4LGSF is the second generation laser guide star facility, built by ESO for the Adaptive Optics Facility on the UT4 VLT telescope. The two critical long-lead items for the 4LGSF, the laser system and the optical tube assemblies for the laser launch telescope systems have been procured from industry. The fibre Raman laser technology, on which the 4LGSF laser system is based, has been developed at ESO, patented and licensed to industry.

[2] This project has allowed TOPTICA to extend its products into a new wavelength and output power regime. It now produces the SodiumStar 20/2, which is recognised as a quasi-standard for existing and planned telescopes around the world. All next generation extremely large telescope projects, for example, use the SodiumStar laser as their baseline. During the seven years of collaboration with ESO the company has grown from 80 people to more than 200 today.

[3] MPBCs collaboration with ESO has also generated an additional benefit, in the form of an offshoot product line of single frequency amplification products at virtually any wavelength, supporting novel applications for the scientific and commercial research community.

[4] The developments by TNO also involved contributions from many suppliers from the Netherlands (Vernooy, Vacutech, Rovasta, Schott Benelux, Maxon Motor Benelux, IPS technology, Sensordata and WestEnd) and other international companies (RMI, Qioptiq, Laser Components, Carl Zeiss, GLP, Faes, Farnell, Eriks and Pfeiffer). The knowledge and technologies advanced by working with ESO feed into TNOs Dutch and European partners, in fields including astronomy, communications, semiconductor manufacturing, medical devices, space science and Earth observation.

More information

ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the worlds most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the worlds most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the worlds largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become the worlds biggest eye on the sky.
Gamma-Ray Sky around the Blazar PKS B1424-418 NASA/DOE/LAT

Nearly 10 billion years ago in a galaxy known as PKS B1424-418, a dramatic explosion occurred.

Light from this blast began arriving at Earth in 2012. Now, an international team of astronomers, led by Prof. Matthias Kadler, professor for astrophysics at the university of Wrzburg, and including other scientists from the new research cluster for astronomy and astroparticle physics at the universities of Wrzburg and Erlangen-Nrnberg, have shown that a record-breaking neutrino seen around the same time likely was born in the same event. The results are published in Nature Physics.

Neutrinos are the fastest, lightest, most unsociable and least understood fundamental particles, and scientists are just now capable of detecting high-energy ones arriving from deep space. The present work provides the first plausible association between a single extragalactic object and one of these cosmic neutrinos.

Although neutrinos far outnumber all the atoms in the universe, they rarely interact with matter, which makes detecting them quite a challenge. But this same property lets neutrinos make a fast exit from places where light cannot easily escape  such as the core of a collapsing star  and zip across the universe almost completely unimpeded. Neutrinos can provide information about processes and environments that simply arent available through a study of light alone.

Recently, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole found first evidence for a flux of extraterrestrial neutrinos, which was named the Physics World breakthrough of the year 2013. To date, the science team of IceCube Neutrino has announced about a hundred very high-energy neutrinos and nicknamed the most extreme events after characters on the childrens TV series Sesame Street. On Dec. 4, 2012, IceCube detected an event known as Big Bird, a neutrino with an energy exceeding 2 quadrillion electron volts (PeV). To put that in perspective, its more than a million million times greater than the energy of a dental X-ray packed into a single particle thought to possess less than a millionth the mass of an electron. Big Bird was the highest-energy neutrino ever detected at the time and still ranks second.

Where did it come from? The best IceCube position only narrowed the source to a patch of the southern sky about 32 degrees across, equivalent to the apparent size of 64 full moons. Its like a crime scene investigation, says lead author Matthias Kadler, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Wrzburg in Germany, The case involves an explosion, a suspect, and various pieces of circumstantial evidence.

Starting in the summer of 2012, NASAs Fermi satellite witnessed a dramatic brightening of PKS B1424-418, an active galaxy classified as a gamma-ray blazar. An active galaxy is an otherwise typical galaxy with a compact and unusually bright core. The excess luminosity of the central region is produced by matter falling toward a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the mass of our sun. As it approaches the black hole, some of the material becomes channeled into particle jets moving outward in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. In blazars one of these jets happens to point almost directly toward Earth.

During the year-long outburst, PKS B1424-418 shone between 15 and 30 times brighter in gamma rays than its average before the eruption. The blazar is located within the Big Bird source region, but then so are many other active galaxies detected by Fermi.

The scientists searching for the neutrino source then turned to data from a long-term observing program named TANAMI. Since 2007, TANAMI has routinely monitored nearly 100 active galaxies in the southern sky, including many flaring sources detected by Fermi. Three radio observations between 2011 and 2013 cover the period of the Fermi outburst. They reveal that the core of the galaxys jet had been brightening by about four times. No other galaxy observed by TANAMI over the life of the program has exhibited such a dramatic change.

Within their jets, blazars are capable of accelerating protons to relativistic energies. Interactions of these protons with light in the central regions of the blazar can create pions. When these pions decay, both gamma rays and neutrinos are produced, explains Karl Mannheim, a coauthor of the study and astronomy professor in Wrzburg, Germany. We combed through the field where Big Bird must have originated looking for astrophysical objects capable of producing high-energy particles and light, adds coauthor Felicia Krau, a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nrnberg in Germany. There was a moment of wonder and awe when we realized that the most dramatic outburst we had ever seen in a blazar happened in just the right place at just the right time.

In a paper published Monday, April 18, in Nature Physics, the team suggests the PKS B1424-418 outburst and Big Bird are linked, calculating only a 5-percent probability the two events occurred by chance alone. Using data from Fermi, NASAs Swift and WISE satellites, the LBA and other facilities, the researchers determined how the energy of the eruption was distributed across the electromagnetic spectrum and showed that it was sufficiently powerful to produce a neutrino at PeV energies.

Taking into account all of the observations, the blazar seems to have had means, motive and opportunity to fire off the Big Bird neutrino, which makes it our prime suspect, explains Matthias Kadler.

Francis Halzen, the principal investigator of IceCube at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and not involved in this study, thinks the result is an exciting hint of things to come. IceCube is about to send out real-time alerts when it records a neutrino that can be localized to an area a little more than half a degree across, or slightly larger than the apparent size of a full moon, he concludes. Were slowly opening a neutrino window onto the cosmos.

But this study also demonstrates the vital importance of classical astronomical observations in an era when new detection methods like neutrino observatories and gravitational-wave detectors open new but unknown skies.

###

TANAMI (Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with Austral Milliarcsecond Interferometry) is a multiwavelength monitoring program of active galaxies in the Southern sky. It includes regular radio observations using the Australian Long Baseline Array (LBA) and associated telescopes in Chile, South Africa, New Zealand and Antarctica. When networked together, they operate as a single radio telescope more than 6,000 miles across and provide a unique high-resolution look into the jets of active galaxies.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, built into a cubic kilometer of clear glacial ice at the South Pole, detects neutrinos when they interact with atoms in the ice. This triggers a cascade of fast-moving charged particles that emit a faint glow, called Cerenkov light, as they travel, which is picked up by thousands of optical sensors strung throughout IceCube. Scientists determine the energy of an incoming neutrino by the amount of light its particle cascade emits.

NASAs Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

Original Paper:

Coincidence of a high-fluence blazar outburst with a PeV-energy neutrino event. Kadler, M.; Krau, F.; Mannheim, K.; Ojha, R.; Mller, C.; Schulz, R.; Anton, G.; Baumgartner, W.; Beuchert, T.; Buson, S.; Carpenter, B.; Eberl, T.; Edwards, P. G.; Eisenacher Glawion, D.; Elssser, D.; Gehrels, N.; Grfe, C.; Hase, H.; Horiuchi, S.; James, C. W.; Kappes, A.; Kappes, A.; Katz, U.; Kreikenbohm, A.; Kreter, M.; Kreykenbohm, I.; Langejahn, M.; Leiter, K.; Litzinger, E.; Longo, F.; Lovell, J. E. J.; McEnery, J.; Phillips, C.; Pltz, C.; Quick, J.; Ros, E.; Stecker, F. W.; Steinbring, T.; Stevens, J.; Thompson, D. J.; Trstedt, J.; Tzioumis, A. K.; Wilms, J.; Zensus, J. A. 2016, Nature Physics, DOI 10.1038/nphys3715.
When Ritual Coffee Roasters founder Eileen Hassi opened her flagship coffee shop on Valencia Street in San Francisco, in 2005, specialty coffee wasnt really a thing yet. People still ardently defended Peets Coffee & Tea as the Bay Areas best coffee, Blue Bottle Coffee amounted to just a handful of farmer market stalls and a kiosk, and the majority of the citys specialty coffee heavyweights were distant bubbles floating across the collective coffee brain. We were fighting with people to try our coffee, Hassi says, we had to be talking about how we were different from the norm because aside from, like, Peets, we were alone in the coffee scene.

Almost a decade later, San Francisco has, to put it modestly, changed. Today, the City by the Bay is one of the worlds premier specialty coffee destinations, a breeding ground for exceptional roasters and cafes, a mecca for coffee enthusiasts, and a petri dish for new ideas and concepts in the specialty coffee world. And as San Francisco has expanded and evolved, so has Ritual. On Tuesday, April 26, Ritual opened their newest cafe, their sixth location, and the first to open since 2011, on a stretch of Haight Street Hassi has taken to calling Central Haight, across from the sloping grass of Buena Vista Park. Along with the new cafe, Hassi and Ritual will introduce the first rebrand of their iconic logo since the shop first opened. And though Ritual has never stopped progressing and tweaking and adapting, the new cafe and the new branding represent a new, somewhat different approach to spreading their passionate belief in the joys of spreading specialty coffee to the masses.

The coffee culture in San Francisco and in the United States is so different now, Hassi says, and if Ritual was an upstart punk trying to tear down the norms of commodity coffee in 2007, now, well, its a foundational part of the booming American specialty coffee industry. When we opened, Hassi says, we were acting like kids, testing our boundaries and, well, we dont have to do that anymore. It starts with the new cafe. Rituals flagship store on Valencia (which went through an extensive remodel in 2015) was built as an altar to specialty coffee, a place, as the companys name implies, for devotees of good coffee to come and worship. People walk into our Valencia shop, and are like, what is this? Hassi says, Everything about Haight Street is more humble, no one is going to walk into the Haight Street store and not know exactly what it is.

Which is to say the Haight Street store, designed by Envelope A + D, is a more traditional-feeling neighborhood cafe, one with huge light-filled windows that look out onto the park, beaming succulents, platters of croissants and other pastries, and a convivial atmosphere that draws people in. Im very picky about location, Hassi says and ultimately I chose this spot because it feels like a place I want to drink coffee in the morning. This cafe is easy to sit in and feel like youre going to have a good day because you started it off on the right foot. Hassi worked with her architect to make it feel like youre in the park, lining the tops of the walls with huge mirrors that reflect the bright green of Buena Vista into the cafe. The mirrors are also a nod to the European cafes of the 1930s, as Hassi says, This is a spot that looks back on its history not forward to whats next, so it felt right to reference cafes of the past.

Its been almost five years since Hassi and her team opened their location in the Hayes Valley Proxy Project, a renovated storage container in a parking lot, and both Hassi and the company havent been sitting idle. Hassi herself has gotten married and had a kid (I took five years to have a personal life), then remodeled the Valencia store, but shes also dedicated herself to improving the infrastructure of the company. We needed to figure out all the things that made this place a great place to work, she says, we needed our people to feel secure in their jobs and knowing what those jobs were before we could take another step. Beyond that, Hassi believes in opening her stores organically, when it feels right. I really want to have the people to do the project before I decide to take on the project, she says, If I have to look for people from the outside its probably not worth it because itll invariably change the culture.

A change that can be seen, somewhat in the companys subtle shift in their branding. If Haight Streets white walls and soft light are the quieter, more recognizable balance to the high ceilings and harsher angles of Valencia Street, then the new design, by Good Stuff Partners (with assistance from designer Emily Craig), I realized that our branding didnt reflect us anymore. Though the iconic star and cup Ritual is recognized by isnt going anywhere, the almost militant-feeling red, black, and white of the original design have been softened, and paired with an organic-looking white and gold honeycomb pattern (which adorns the front of the new stores three-group Synesso Hydra MVP espresso machine).

For the first few years, Hassi says, [the original design] felt like usaggressive. I mean one of our famous things was a frequent buyer card that said, Youre an asshole without coffee. The new design features a more welcoming font, one that still pops from the front of their bags (now made entirely with compostable material), but is more spaced out, and doesnt have the fist-shaking verve of the former. Its a friendlier, almost more trusting design, for a company that now has a vast and very trusting customer base, a company that doesnt need to change the state of coffee, because, well, its already done that.

A new font and a new neighborhood cafe doesnt imply that Ritual has changed though, as Hassi says, I think its easy to look at us and say, Theyre getting old. But its more nuanced than that. Ritual hasnt lost its edge, its just found a modicum of comfort in a San Francisco scene they helped to created. Our customers trust us now, Hassi says, Were in this whole blossoming scene in San Francisco that people know about worldwide and wanted to do something more approachable because, well, we dont have to yell anymore.

Noah Sanders (@sandersnoah) is a Sprudge.com staff writer based in San Francisco, and a contributor to SF Weekly, Side One Track One, and The Bold Italic. Read more Noah Sanders on Sprudge.
"Regardless of what happens in Indiana, Trump should make a big push in Nebraska for its 36 winner-takes-all delegates. A win in Nebraska combined with a sweep in West Virginia almost guarantees him the nomination," Waters maintained.

Five of the remaining states are winner-takes-all, and these include Trump's two strongest remaining states, West Virginia and New Jersey, Waters stated.

"We can add 85 automatic delegates to his count from West Virginia and New Jersey, which brings him to 1,072  which means he needs an additional 165 out of the remaining states' 417 delegates."

Indiana holds its primary next Tuesday, while West Virginia and Nebraska hold their primary contests on May 10. Oregon will hold its primary on May 17, Washington on May 24 and California, New Jersey, Montana, South Dakota and New Mexico on June 7.

"Three Great Plains/Rocky Mountain states are winner-takes-all and this is Trumps weakest region: He could lose all 92 delegates. That means he needs to win 165 out of 325  basically half. That is harder."

Republican primary rules in Oregon, Washington and New Mexico are not winner-takes-all, but are proportional, which helps Trump, he added.
According to a survey by University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, Snowden revelations forced internet users to avoid websites with information about al-Qaeda, jihad, Iraq, or nuclear enrichment.

The researchers discovered that 48 Wikipedia pages devoted to terrorism issues have seen a decline in internet traffic by some 30 percent since the 2013 leaks, the report reads.

To arrive to the conclusions, the team analyzed the terms the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses to monitor social media.
The video of the French musician and the former CIA agent was recently released online and is now available for all of Snowden's fans.

The composition was recorded by the two during Jarre's visit to Moscow.

For Jarre, it was fun to work with Snowden on the new music project. The former CIA agent has been "a source of inspiration" for him, the musician said.
"The Islamic world should not stand still on such key issues as the eradication of hunger , the development of agriculture, the provision of food security. The OIC member states could make a huge contribution to the provision of food security, if join their efforts," Nazarbayev said in a welcome address to the participants of the IOFS session, as read out by the country's prime minister, Karim Massimov.

Nazarbayev added in his address that he was sure that all the members of the OIS would join the IOFS in future.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  According to the Khaama Press news agency, citing the Afghan Defense Ministry, the operation took place overnight. There is no information about casualties among the Afghan soldiers.

The security situation in Afghanistan has significantly worsened in the last months, with the violent Islamist group Taliban carrying out offensives on the countrys big cities.

In late September, the militants briefly captured the provincial capital, Kunduz  home to some 300,000 people  and attempted to seize the city of Ghazni, south of Kabul, in October.
BEIJING (Sputnik)  The fifth CICA conference took place in the Chinese capital on April 27-28.

"A declaration of CICA foreign ministers was adopted as the general outcome," Wang told the final press conference of the event, adding that the session attended by 42 delegations took place in harmony.

According to the top Chinese diplomat, the document calls for the need to ensure security and peace in the region through dialogue and consultations, as well as to create a secure environment that would meet the interests of all countries on the basis of good neighborly relations. It also urges respect for all religions, strengthening of mutual understanding and strict adherence to international law.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  If confirmed, this would be the second failed launch of the Musudan missiles (also known as Rodong-B or BM-25) this month. Seoul accused Pyongyang of launching the same type of missile on April 15.

"The projectile, presumed to be a Musudan, was fired around 6:40 a.m. [21:00 GMT] from the vicinity of Wonsan, but it appears to have plunged to the earth a few seconds later," the Yonhap news service said, quoting a military official.

The unnamed South Korean military official assessed that "it is highly likely that the launch failed."
Keeping rare and exotic breeds of dog will no longer be easy for Indian pet lovers from now on as the Government has banned the import of dogs for breeding as well as other commercial purposes.

Animal rights activists and environmentalists have welcomed the Government of India's decision, according to which only pet dogs with a valid pet book and other documents transferred in the name of the importer will be allowed. Defense and police forces can import dogs to be deployed for internal security. Importing dogs for research and development will be allowed only with the recommendation of the Committee for the Purpose of Supervision of Experiments on Animals.

The Law Commission, in its 2015 report stated, "many animals do not survive the trauma of being transported in small cages without adequate water or food, and estimates suggest that, overall, 40% of animals die in captivity or transportation."
ANKARA (Sputnik)  In January 2015, Cumhuriyet carried four pages of images taken from the special issue of Charlie Hebdo that appeared after the terrorist attack on the magazine but decided not to publish the cover page, which contained cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. However, Hikmet Cetinkaya and Ceyda Karan put small images of the cartoons in their articles.

An investigation of the case was initiated after 1,280 individuals filed complaints. The Prosecutor's Office in Istanbul asked for a sentence between 1.5 and 4.5 years in jail for both journalists for "insulting religious values" and "inciting people to hatred and enmity." The court found Cetinkaya and Karan guilty and sentenced both of them to two years behind bars.

On January 7, 2015, the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, known for publishing controversial caricatures of religious figures, was attacked by Islamist gunmen who killed 12 people and wounded 11, after the magazine published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  In recent weeks, reports have emerged that North Korea is preparing for a fifth nuclear test . When asked if the White House could confirm these reports, Earnest said that at the moment, the administration had no new assessment to share.

Recently, North Korea has been carrying out a series of nuclear tests. In response to Pyongyangs actions, Washington and Seoul launched large-scale military drills in the region, while the UN Security Council and the United States both imposed more sanctions on the country.

"US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) systems detected and tracked what we assess were attempted North Korean missile launches at 4:43 p.m. CDT April 27, 2016, and at 5:24 a.m. CDT, April 28, 2016," the statement said on Thursday.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, an anonymous South Korean military official said that Pyongyang had fired a midrange ballistic missile, Musudan, on Thursday afternoon, but it is most likely to have failed the test it was set. The source added that South Korea and the United States were conducting a detailed assessment of the incident.

According to the Chosun news portal, the second launch was carried out less than an hour after the first missile was fired.

In mid-April, South Korean media reported that North Korea had allegedly deployed one or two Musudan missiles from a location on its eastern coast. Shortly afterwards, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said that the North appeared to have tried another missile test, which had ended in failure.
The aircraft are capable of flight at medium altitude, have long-lasting endurance, and Chinas low production costs, making them more affordable than their international competitors.

"We believe most of our users would use the drones to patrol borders, reconnoiter targets and hit terrorist or insurgents, who usually own small anti-aircraft weapons capable of striking planes flying about 3,000 meters above the ground," Shi said.

"Therefore the 5,000-meter altitude is high enough to ensure the safety of our drones."

Facing a serious competitor in the global arms market, experts in the United States have already downplayed the effectiveness of the Cai Hong drones.

"Without looking at what is contained under the hood, one cannot be sure how lethal this class of UAVs really is," Robert Michelson, head engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, told Defense News.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The Indian military employs over 900 Russian warplanes, including the MiG-21 Fishbed supersonic jet fighters, the MiG-29 Fulcrum twin-engine jet fighters with its carrier-based version, the Su-30MKI Flanker-H air superiority fighters, as well as transport and refueling planes.

"The Technodinamika holding company won tenders in 2015 for the supply of components in the amount of 1.6 billion rubles in 2016-2017 to the Indian Air Force. The company has already started the delivery of the components within these agreements," the companys press service told reporters.

Technodinamika, part of the state technologies corporation Rostec, registered its service center in India last year. India has signed 44 defense contracts valued at $5.8 billion last year to procure military hardware, according to its defense ministry.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  US media corporation Comcast is acquiring DreamWorks Animation in a $3.8 billion deal, NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said in a press release on Thursday.

"DreamWorks will help us grow our film, television, theme parks and consumer products businesses for years to come," Burke stated.

The animation studio stockholders will receive $41 for each share of DreamWorks Animation common stock, according to the press release.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Monday, another round of talks between the United States and the European Union on the TTIP deal, aimed at reducing barriers to trade in goods and services between Europe and North America, started in New York. The same day, US President Barack Obama said, while on a visit to Germany, that TTIP should be finalized by the end of this year.

"I think there will be no Transatlantic Agreementthis agreement will not be secured, no one will vote for it because in all European countries the increasing amount of lawmakers worry, because we see that the proposed deal is not equal I will say frankly Obama's statement is counter-productive," Thierry Mariani said when asked to comment on Obama saying TTIP would be signed before the end of his term.

According to the lawmaker, he personally is also "against this deal."
"Europe is expected to be a big market for American gas. The shale-gas boom has transformed the energy landscape in the US, and the country is now expected to become a net gas exporter in 2017," Georgi Kantchev and Miriam Malek of the Wall Street Journal reported

Of course, Houston-based Cheniere Energy's LNG shipments are not yet a game-changer, but many more of them are on the horizon, according to Mark J. Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan's Flint campus.

"With five US LNG terminals under construction with a combined export capacity of roughly 10 billion cubic feet per day, many more LNG shipments are on the horizon. After all the export facilities become operational, the United States will become the third largest liquefaction capacity holder in the world after Australia and Qatar," he wrote in his analysis for the Hill.

"Earlier this year consulting firm Wood Mackenzie issued an estimate, projecting that 55 percent of US LNG volumes, or about 32 million tons per year, will be sent to Europe by 2020," Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com energy news site underscored.

The US' LNG is also pretty reasonably priced: it costs $4.30 per million British thermal units (Btu), while Gazprom currently sells natural gas to Europe for $5.80/MMBtu, on average.

So, does this spell trouble for the Russian gas giant? It's unlikely, analysts note.

"Pipeline gas can be cheaper than LNG, because that gas has to be liquefied, shipped and re-gasified at arrival," Kantchev and Malek remarked, referring to the fact that, hypothetically, Gazprom can drop its gas price below $3.00/MMBtu.
A year later Angela Merkel has provided startling confirmation of this.

Invoking an obscure nineteenth century Bismarck era law Angela Merkel's government has authorised a prosecution of a German comedian who recited on German television a satirical poem about Turkish President Erdogan.

This poem though sexually explicit does not offend religious sensibilities in the gross way cartoons that regularly appear in Charlie Hebdo often do.

The prosecution therefore violates the right of free expression set out in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. To add to the absurdity Chancellor Merkel practically admits as much saying the law under which the prosecution is being brought will soon be repealed.

Why in that case is this prosecution being brought at all?

The German authorities defend it on the grounds that they are merely carrying out the law.

That is an absurd claim. Not only is there always a degree of discretion in the way the criminal law is administered  especially in a case where the law clearly violates Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and is therefore itself unlawful  but by that argument prosecutions should be brought in Germany to defend every foreign head of state  not just President Erdogan  whenever they are insulted.
Schaefer was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to 33 years in jail after numerous victims filed lawsuits against him, testifying at trials that they were, for all intents and purposes, enslaved by colony leaders.

Steinmeier acknowledged that the German embassy in Chile "did too little for the protection of their fellow citizens in this colony." He also announced, at a screening of a documentary about the sect, that files on the colony, dating from 1986 to 1996, will be declassified for the sake of transparency and research.

In 2008 the German parliament released funds for projects supporting the reintegration into society of former commune members.

The former Colonia Dignidad facility still exists, but has been renamed Villa Baviera ("Bavarian Village"), and its current residents have turned it into a tourist site, a move disgusting to the site's former victims.

"It is something of a tourism center with aspects of the 60s, where a strange mix of Chilean farmers, German migrants, victims and culprits, exist," former resident and victim Winfried Hempel told German's Deutschlandfunk radio. "This is as if you had put a McDonald's into [former concentration camp] Buchenwald."

Schaefer died in a Chilean prison in 2010 at the age of 89.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  According to the Pew Research Center 2010 estimation, over 4.1 million of Muslims were living in Germany in 2010, while majority of migrants who have recently arrived to the country also adhere to Islam.

"If the majority of Muslims here were Shiites, this would be relatively easy because their denomination has official theological authorities. The Sunnis, in contrast, who provide the majority of the Turks and Arabs living here, lack a consistent structure and thus also a spokesperson. So who would receive the revenues of such a tax?" Martin Neumeyer commented on the recent Christian Social Union (CSU) party initiative.

According to the German Catholic Bishops Conference, the tax amounts to 8-9 percent of the total income tax and is paid by every church member registered as Catholic, Protestant or Jewish. Mosques and Islamic kindergartens across Germany are funded by foreign countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which Radwan proposed to ban.
Marseille's top Jewish leader Zvi Ammar said Tuesday that the Or Thora synagogue has been sold, as the 250-capacity site has not been used often.

Ammar remarked that there are some 58 synagogues in the city, and local Jews have recently been moving away from the city center into the suburbs.

"For the past 20 years or so we have seen the shift of the Jewish community to other neighborhoods," he told AFP, adding that the deal should be regarded in a positive way, "We all have the same God, the main thing is for this to proceed in harmony."
Earlier in the day, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said Armenia violated the ceasefire deal on the frontline in Nagorno-Karabakh 117 times in the past 24 hours, while the Azerbaijani forces retaliated with 121 artillery strikes.

On April 2, tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azerbaijani breakaway region with a predominantly Armenian population, escalated. Baku and Yerevan accused each other of provoking the hostilities, however, the sides succeeded in reaching a ceasefire agreement on April 5, which has been followed by near-daily reports of truce violations.
RHODES (Sputnik)  The Aegean Sea is one of the main transit routes for refugees heading for Greece from the Turkish territory, however, recently the inflow of refugees has slowed to a sto.

"There are almost no refugees on Rhodes Island at the moment. The inflow of migrants has stopped. I want to draw [your] attention to the fact that the security level on the Dodecanese islands, including Rhodes, is always high regardless of whether there is an influx of refugees or not," Papavasileiou told Russian reporters.

According to Papavasileiou, the refugee influx has stopped following the closure of EU borders, as refugees have realized that they will not be able to move further to Europe from Greece and that they will be sent back to Turkey.
On the whole, Finland will contribute about 600 troops to the BALTOPS war games, which are to be held on Finnish soil for the first time since they began more than 40 years ago. Additionally, Finland, which has taken part in the BALTOPS maneuvers since 1993, will be represented by the minelayer FNS Uusimaa and the Uusimaa Brigade marine infantry unit located in Dragsvik, a Navy statement specified.

This year's edition of BALTOPS will feature a total of 49 vessels, 61 aircraft and three submarines. Prior to BALTOPS, Finland and Sweden plan to engage in a bilateral exercise dubbed SWEFINEX 2016 in May in the vicinity of the Swedish island of Gotland, which is set for a thorough militarization following Sweden's apprehension of a "Russian invasion."

In all, these international exercises will cost Finland's Navy about 1.3 million euros, and they will replace all national exercises.
ROME (Sputnik)  According to the Ansa news agency, Italian police arrested a married couple who are suspected of intending to depart for the Syrian-Iraqi border, a 23-year-old Moroccan, and three more people who had previously been in touch with a married couple from Italy's Lecco province that left for the Syrian-Iraqi border in February 2015.

The operation, coordinated by the district attorney of Milan in agreement with Italy's national anti-mafia and anti-terrorism prosecutor, was conducted in various locations in Lombardy and Piedmont.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The first non-Austrian to address the national parliament, Ban spoke a day after Austrian lawmakers passed strict asylum laws that would declare a state of emergency in case of an extraordinary influx of migrants. The amended legislation allows Austria to reject asylum seekers at the border and send them to neighboring countries.

"I am concerned that European countries are now adopting increasingly restrictive immigration and refugee policies. Such policies negatively affect the obligation of member states under international humanitarian law and European law," The Guardian daily quoted Ban telling Austrian lawmakers in Vienna.
The Austrian government Wednesday passed a law that would give its authorities the right to turn away migrants at its border within an hour if it believed public order would be at risk. It also threatened to erect a razor wire fence along its border with Italy.

The law, which is expected to pass quickly and unchallenged in the parliaments upper chamber, allows the federal government to declare a state of emergency and drastically curtail the right to seek asylum at Austrias borders.

.@giannipittella: There cannot be any bargaining on the issue of human rights, media pluralism or respect of minorities. #EUTurkeyDeal  S&D Group (@TheProgressives) 28 April 2016

The move was immediately condemned by Gianni Pittella, the Italian leader of the S&D group in the European Parliament, who told EurActiv.com that the Austrian move was a "serious mistake".
ROME (Sputnik)  According to earlier media reports, six suspected extremists were arrested in the northern region of Lombardy. The detainees allegedly planned to join jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq.

"They had very bad intentions, they were considering opportunities to carry out terrorist attacks in Italy," the minister told the Italian Canale 5 television channel.
Workers, students and at least seven trade unions are today engaged in a "day of action" against a draft bill put forward by Frances Minister for Labor  Myriam El Khomri  which many see as being unfairly weighted in favor of employers.

#Rennes #LoiTravail Plusieurs milliers de manifestants au depart de l'esplanade Charles de Gaulle pic.twitter.com/RJHCFwbA8S  France 3 Bretagne (@france3Bretagne) April 28, 2016

Todays action follows similar protests held during March and April, all of which have been geared towards the parliamentary debate due to begin next week. Essentially, the bill is intended to allow more flexibility on the part of employers, particularly regarding working hours and redundancy, but it has been vehemently opposed by the unions.

President Hollande has also signaled a desire to increase workers hours above the existing cap of 35 hours  in lieu of any union agreement or compensation package, as well as restricting pay-outs to employees who are fired.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On April 22, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that an armed OSCE police mission would arrive soon to provide control over the ceasefire in the countrys east, as well as controlling the Ukrainian-Russian border currently not under Kievs control.

"The Ukrainians have to table a proposal in Vienna and I need a consensus by everybody including the Russian Federation, the US, everybody in the OSCE. There is no way we can deploy an armed police component under the current mandate. We need an addition to the mandate or a separate mandate, which has to be adopted by consensus," Zannier said.
"This is not only wrong  it is also dangerous. If we dont stand by our democratic principles and tackle our problems while fully respecting human rights then the situation will only get worse," Jagland said.

Reference was also drawn to the current gaps that exist in some member states practices and laws, which are impacting basic human rights, free speech and privacy.

"At the same time, we still see many important gaps in the laws and practices that our member states have in place, and basic human rights including free speech, freedom of assembly and the right to privacy are increasingly being restricted," the Secretary General said.

These comments come a just a day after the Council of Europe decided to investigate Poland for controversial laws that are considered by some to infringe peoples human rights and freedom of expression.
KIEV (Sputnik)  Savchenko was sentenced in late March to a 22-year jail term in Russia for her part in killing Russian journalists in eastern Ukraine. She subsequently refused to appeal the ruling. The Ukrainian authorities, however, have been trying to find ways for her possible return to her homeland, including through an exchange for Russian nationals held in Ukraine.

"Indeed, Nadezhda Savchenko received extradition documents yesterday Savchenko began filling them out," Mark Feygin told reporters.
Activate hotspots at sea, Italian minister Alfano says to EU  ANSAMed.it https://t.co/BoVdvOTprF  Niels W Frenzen (@MigrantsAtSea) April 28, 2016

Proposals that rescue boats could be equipped with fingerprinting machines on the Mediterranean to screen migrants before they set foot on Italys territory was announced by Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano following talks with EU migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos in Sicily  where the majority of migrants are processed at "hotspots".

"With this we will now have hotspots at sea," Alfano said.

Fingerprinting hotspots are intended to speed up the process of identifying and registering refugees and are supported by the European asylum office (EASO), Frontex and Europol  the EUs border and law enforcement agencies.
"We can't continue to lose sales because of migrant business!"  Puissesseau said, as cited by AFP.

The wall will be four meters high and have police officers on duty at certain spots to prevent the refugees from climbing over the fence.

Although the wall will be built in France, the British government will fund the project, AFP said.

The project should start "before the end of May" and be completed "before the summer." The cost of building is expected to be around 8 million euros ($9 million).

According to AFP, there are currently between 3,500  5,000 refugees living in Calais and its surrounding areas, hoping to reach Britain.
"Daesh has raised its ambitions," Lari Nyroos, chief analyst at the Swedish Security Service's department for counterterrorism, told Expressen . According to him, security services across Europe are now poised with a problem of numerous approaches to terrorist attacks, from the simplest to the most complex.

Last year, Daesh managed to carry out 60 attacks in a dozen countries outside the war zones in Syria and Iraq, he noted, citing various attack patterns, ranging from single actions to craftily masterminded operations.

According to Nyroos, home-bred European radicals who fail to to get to Syria or Iraq may instead shift to preparing attacks on the home turf or support terrorist activities otherwise.
Officials at Kristiansand Dyrepark admitted that the zebra had been put down and was fed to the tigers because the zoo had too many of them.

Outrage erupted after a parent visiting the zoo took a picture of the slaughtered zebra and posted it to Facebook with the caption: Took a look at the tigers today. What met me was a little macabre.

The incident was described as horrid and traumatic for young children by other visitors.
"We cannot ask Greece to take additional measures. This would mean that some 'hawks' want to kill Greece and we cannot allow this blackmail. The stakes are too high for Europe. We should all work to prevent a crisis in Greece in the run-up to the British referendum, especially now that  under extraordinarily difficult conditions  Greece has over-performed on its primary balance target for 2015."

We can't let 'hawks' blackmail Greece. We need an extraordinary #EuroSummit to avoid new euro crisis @giannipittella https://t.co/2xSuS4fGYL  S&D Group (@TheProgressives) 27 April 2016

He called for an extraordinary Euro Summit next week if the Eurogroup is not able to come up with a way out. "If the Eurogroup cannot find a way out, despite the efforts of the European Commission, then the political leadership of Europe should take the lead at an extraordinary Euro Summit next week. We want a fair deal for Greece which also includes a discussion on debt relief," Pittella said.

Deadlock

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras Wednesday called European Council President Donald Tusk to demand an urgent summit amid further failures to agree to a new tranche of funding for Athens as part of its third bailout agreement.

Tusk immediately summoned all the Eurozone finance ministers to an emergency meeting, telling reporters: "We have to avoid a situation of renewed uncertainty for Greece. We need a date for a Eurogroup meeting in the not distant future. In days, not weeks".

Tsipras had asked Tusk to call a meeting of all the EU leaders, but Tusk rebuffed his suggestion.

We have to avoid situation of renewed uncertainty for Greece. We need date for Eurogroup meeting in not distant future. In days, not weeks  Donald Tusk (@eucopresident) April 27, 2016

Eurozone finance ministers were due to meet on April 28 to discuss the Greek reforms needed to unlock the next tranche of money under the bailout deal, but the meeting was called off because of what sources said was a lack of agreement between Athens and its creditors.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Friday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that he expects OSCE to deploy a police mission in the near future to control the ceasefire in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

"It is necessary to understand what we are talking about. Either this is a certain force component of light firearms provided for current observers, or it is a separate armed element that will provide security for elections. Then, it will be a completely different mission[the presence] of armed monitors will increase tension between the conflicting sides, so monitors can potentially become targets for provocations," Lukashevich told reporters.

An agreement on the matter may only be reached once all parties understand what is at stake, he added.
Although the emergency situation of last autumn, when tens of thousands of asylum seekers poured in daily, has improved, the side effects of the influx will be felt in years to come. At present, Sweden's Migration Board is still struggling with some 170,000 asylum cases, of which over 140,000 are still pending for a decision. This is a huge number of people for a country of 10 million, specifically considering that all the asylum seekers need to have their daily needs met during the waiting period.

"Municipalities, authorities and the society in general are also facing challenges, both in regards to asylum seekers who stay in Sweden and those to be ejected. The number of appealed asylum cases is bound to increase dramatically in coming years, as well as the number of people who need to return. At the same time, society needs to create long-term prerequisites to accommodate those who are allowed to stay in Sweden," Ribbenvik concluded.
Germanys Federal Labor Minister Andrea Nahles is pressing for a change to the law to limit social benefit claims of foreign workers from other EU countries drastically, by barring such claims for the first five years of working in the country.

Tweet: "We have to stop immigration into the social security system."

"We have to protect local authorities from having to bear the costs of unlimited assistance for destitute EU foreigners" Nahles told the Rheinische Post newspaper.
"As a result of violence 43 law enforcement officers were injured, 19 of them asked for help from doctors, and five were hospitalized sustaining various injuries," Deputy Chief of the General prosecution of the General Inspectorate of Police Grigore Moga said at a press conference.

Chisinau has been swept in rallies since September 2015, when the coalition of opposition forces demanded the resignation of the Moldovan president, the prime minister and the chief prosecutor, as well as prompt action to tackle corruption.
GMBs Thursday response followed a series of attacks on Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale earlier this week by Scottish parties who described Labours position on Trident as "confused" and a "farce."

In a Wednesday interview with Scottish Television News, Dugdale said she was prepared to "guarantee" the jobs of those employed at the base even if the Trident program was not renewed, but when pressed could not say how many jobs that would be.

In a statement, Scottish Green Partys Europe spokesman Ross Greer agreed that the Trident program must be scrapped but accused Labour of lacking a coherent policy on it.

"Yet again Labour are totally unable to come to anything like a coherent position on Trident. These weapons of indiscriminate slaughter are not just morally unacceptable, they are financially unjustifiable," Greer said Thursday.

"Scottish Greens are proud to have brought about the Scottish Parliaments first vote against the nuclear weapons system, and we are equally proud of our opposition to the NATO nuclear club," Greer added.

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson went further on Thursday, accusing Labour of proposing to "wreck" the UKs defenses.

"Scottish Labour's position on Trident is a complete farce," Davidson said in a statement. "It is lining up alongside the SNP [Scottish National Party] with an unworkable proposal which would only wreck our nation's defenses."

Currently, the Scottish Green Party, the SNP and Scottish Labour oppose the renewal of Trident, which could cost between $44 billion and $240 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime. However, the SNP and Scottish Labour back only the removal of Trident out Scotland and not the decommissioning of the nuclear weapons system.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is an intergovernmental organization aimed to provide security, conflict prevention and peace-building; the organization also promotes human rights, freedom of speech and fair elections.

"European security needs to fixed, adjusted. Recent conflicts in Georgia and Ukraine showed that something in the current system of security isn't right, since it was built 25 years ago," Rahr said during the 5th Moscow conference on international security.

Rahr wasn't happy that many officials from the European Union chose not to attend the security conference in Moscow, despite the fact that during this particular conference a lot of security issues would be discussed.
STOCKHOLM (Sputnik)  Paul Moreiras "Ukraine, les masques de la revolution" ("Ukraine, The Masks of the Revolution") examines the role of extreme right-wing paramilitary groups in the deadly violence leading to the ouster of Ukraines former President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.

"The documentary division of SVT will wait to screen the purchased picture Ukraine, The Masks of the Revolution," the SVT broadcaster said of the investigative film that aired in the French Canal+ channel on February 1.

A group of Ukrainian migrants requested the Swedish outlet to scrap the documentary from its schedule, arguing that it distorts the perception of their country, without an accompanying discussion to "put into perspective" the presented viewpoints.
Junior doctor Prianka Padmanathan says public support for #JuniorDoctorsStrike here in Bristol has been "fantastic" pic.twitter.com/wSMzzGSsE1  Claire Hayhurst (@clairehayhurst) April 26, 2016

Compared with industrial action in other sectors though, the UK public has been very supportive of junior doctors strikes, with four out of five YouGov polls showing support for current action. On top of that, polling suggests there is a growing tendency to blame the government for the breakdown in negotiations leading to this point.

Public increasingly blame government in junior doctors dispute  https://t.co/r1ibMeP7vn pic.twitter.com/EATUa5bjNS  YouGov (@YouGov) April 27, 2016

The polls also show a shift in support for striking doctors since February, with more people now backing their opposition to the new contract  more people also appear to support continued strike action.

Despite dire warnings by the Government that industrial action would place patients lives in danger, early reports have suggested that hospitals throughout England coped well during the initial strike, which the BMA insisted had been carefully planned in order to minimize disruption to patient care. The BMA told Sputnik that the current strikes were short term disruption, to protect patient care in the longer term.

Further industrial action is yet to be confirmed, but is likely, given that the government still shows no signs yet of backing down on its demands.
The same report showed that the number of arrivals from Germany dropped 17 percent amid a deteriorating security situation in Turkey.

Turkey has been hit by a series of terrorist attacks since last year, including in its capital Ankara and the largest city of Istanbul, where 12 Germans were killed in January alone.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Wednesday, Austrian media reported, citing federal state police, that Austria was planning to construct a fence of up to 400 meters (some 1,300 feet) in height at the Brenner Pass in the Alps, on its border with Italy, as the country was seeking to prevent the arrival of undocumented migrants.

"This is not only against the EU rules on free movement but it is against logic and common sense <> Our job is to convince our Austrian partners of the senselessness of their behavior," Alfano told Canale 5 television channel.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi immediately condemned the move, deeming it a "blatant violation" of European law.
I find its absolutely inappropriate to distribute among our children miniatures representing members of criminal military formations, Andrzej Zawystowski, the head of the Institutes public education desk, wrote in a letter to the management of COBI, the Polish-based makers of knockdown toys, including the Battle of Berlin collection.

NKVD is the name of political police who committed numerous crimes against the Soviet people and the peoples of other countries occupied by the Soviet Union, Zawystowski wrote.

He added that NKVD was partly responsible for the violent death of hundreds of thousands of Poles during the Polish Operation of the NKVD political police in 19371938, for the Katyn executions, the deportation of Poles to Siberia and the August Sweep [when around 25,000 soldiers, including 300 officers of the Armia Krajowa were reportedly arrested, disarmed, and interned] and which he described as the biggest crime against the Polish people committed after the end of WW2.
The book contains more than 3,500 scientific annotations and extensive explanatory introductions to each chapter and is designed "to thoroughly deconstruct Hitler's propaganda in a lasting manner and thus to undermine the still effective symbolic power of the book," according to the Institute for Contemporary History.

The opinions of the German politicians on the issue are divided. While Germany's Minister for Education Johanna Wanka earlier argued that the annotated version should be introduced to all classrooms across Germany to ensure that

"Hitler's comments do not remain unchallenged," representatives of the Jewish community in Germany have opposed the move.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The European Union is now negotiating visa-free travel with four countries: Georgia, Peru, Ukraine and Turkey.

"Current migration and refugee trends make it necessary to have an efficient mechanism in place to suspend visa liberalization," the document dated Wednesday reads.

Visa-free travel with Turkey is one of the key provisions of the EU-Turkish refugee swap deal according to which Ankara has to take back migrants who entered the European Union illegally and in return the bloc will accept Syrian refugees from camps in Turkey.
"A Life of Its Own"

Now, however, veteran investigative journalist Hans Leyendecker, who works for the Suddeutsche Zeitung, has told Deutsche Welle that Schindler presided over an agency that was dysfunctional, with a silo mentality, conflicts of loyalty and some operations of which Schindler was unaware.

He said the agency "has always tended to have a life of its own".

"This agency is different because it employs spies. And some of these people have always acted on their own accord, even, at times, acting against the direct commands of their superiors. There are many people there who are doing a good job, but it's in the very nature of a foreign intelligence agency to employ a certain type of person. And that's why really all of the presidents have had difficulties  because these people are the way they are," Leyendecker said.

He said Angela Merkels own office was made aware of the problems within the agency some time ago.

"The chancellery had been tipped off that things were amiss, but it never followed up. That is surely a big problem," he said.

"There are conflicts on all levels. It's hard to get five intelligence agencies at one table and then find a common line. There are different interests, there are also portfolio interests, at one time there were 13 departments that were then reformed into 12 departments. The one department that was then no longer a department rebelled. These kinds of tensions are nothing new of course, but they are much more excessive in an intelligence agency," he said.
Karan and Cetinkaya, for their part, used small versions of the most controversial caricature of the Prophet Muhammad which has caused global resonance.

During her testimony, Karan explained that she was guided by such notions as professional honor, ethics, solidarity and respect for human values when publishing the cartoon in her article.

In an interview with Sputnik, Karan also stressed that the court's decision has been of a "political nature."

"The freedom of speech and expression covers the publication of any articles or pictures that do not carry with them an offensive sense or incite to violence. In a country where the legal system is based on a secular basis, this can't be seen in another way," the journalist said.

At the same time, the other newspaper's columnist Cetinkaya, speaking during the court, said: "I spent 50 years speaking defending democratic values and freedoms, the right for free expression. I totally deny the charges against me."

"My colleagues and friends know what views I have. I am not afraid to fight for the truth. I was guided by the voice of conscience when posting this cartoon. This caricature has cursed and condemned terrorism in France. Terrorism is a crime against humanity. It has no religious or ethnic affiliation. Any terror, be it right or left, is always a terror, and it can't be justified," the journalist said.
All the families will be permitted to stay in Great Britain for five years with an opportunity to receive UK citizenship.

That is the second group of refugees resettled to Northern Ireland after 51 Syrians arrived in the country in December in line with the UK-wide Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme under which Britain is going to admit about 20,000 asylum seekers by 2020. The UK Home Office allocated more than $16,100 per refugee to cover the program's first year cost.
After 90 reboots, the virus encrypted and locked the PC, demanding that the user wire $189 to a PO Box in Panama.

By that time, computer viruses were known to both the users and PC security experts. But nobody had ever tried to make money by spreading malicious software. So AIDS has become the first example of ransomware  programs that either block or encrypt user files and blackmail the user.

The story got even more interesting when investigators found the author of the AIDS Trojan. According to accounts in the British press, Doctor Joseph Popp, an anthropologist who had worked within the HIV research community, had mailed about 20,000 floppy disks containing the malware to his colleagues. Media suggested that Popp might have suffered a mental breakdown shortly before that, after being turned down for a World Health Organization job. Some research centers claimed to have lost a decade worth of HIV research material as result of the attack. Popp was arrested by New Scotland Yard and transferred to Brixton prison. However, he was pronounced unfit to stand trial for wearing a cardboard box on his head, putting curlers in his beard to ward off the threat of radiation, and simply acting weird.

Even though modern-day hackers would definitely get harsher punishment for spreading ransomware, there is no need for them to put themselves in danger by sending out floppy disks, using land lines and PO boxes in Panama. With the help of anonymous crypto currency  the bitcoin, those who create modern-day Trojan horse programs are pretty much safe from prosecution.

The most troubling trend in ransomware distribution is the use of mobile devices. According to one Wired magazine article, the authors of Malware frequently target visitors of porn sites. Heres how Wired journalists describe the typical modern ransomware attack:

An erotic enthusiast finds that access to porn isnt as mobile as he likes. So he ponders that 21st century question: Is there an app for that? A dubious message from the FBI appears: suspicious files have been found on his phone. He has accessed forbidden porn sites. A penalty of $500 is demanded. Hes told that if he makes any attempts to unlock the device on his own  its against the law.

Over the course of just a few months in 2013, the computer security software vendor McAfee collected over 250,000 unique samples of ransomware  more than double the number it had obtained just a year earlier.

Some users get rid of unwelcome programs by simply using anti-virus software, while others prefer to pay the ransom, fearing that the Trojan authors knew too much about their online activities.

With just one Trojan called Cryptowall bringing more than $18 million to its authors, the dark industry of ransomware is expected to grow in the coming years.

So if youre surfing the internet often and dont want to fall victim to cyber extortion  use common sense, avoid strange websites, keep your personal and financial information safe, and install antivirus software.
On April 16, Ecuador was hit by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, with its epicenter located near the town of Pedernales in Manabi province. Over 640 people died as a result and more than 12,000 were injured.

Over 300 aftershocks have been registered after the initial quake, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The Daesh terrorists also obliged each family in Raqqa to pay 2,000 Syrian pounds ($20) to close the streets of the city with dense material. Such measures, the witnesses claim, are implemented so that the foreign aviation could not reveal the location of the militants in the city.

The northern city of Raqqa is considered de facto capital of the Daesh group. It was overran by the jihadists in 2013. The Syrian army, as well as the Kurdish militias, are currently carrying out offensives to liberate the city and the eponymous province from the Daesh, which is outlawed in many countries, including the United States and Russia.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Ranjha, who had spent eight years in a US jail, departed the United States on Monday from the state of Texas under escort by deportation officers. He was turned over to authorities in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, the release noted.

"Aliens living in the United States, who are engaged in or suspected of supporting terrorism, are a direct threat to our countrys national security," ICE Director Sarah R. Saldana stated in announcing the deportation of financier Saifullah Anjum Ranjha on Wednesday. "As such, they are our highest priority for removal."

With the United States nervous over recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, the US state of California and elsewhere, foreign-born terrorist supporters living in the country have become a top priority for deportation.
ANKARA (Sputnik)  A female suicide bomber blew herself up at the Grand Mosque in the western city of Bursa on Wednesday, injuring 13 people. No militant group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

"Fifteen people have been arrested in connection with the terrorist attack in Bursa. There is significant evidence of their involvement in a terrorist organization. We will announce details when everything becomes clear," Ala told reporters.

He added that he will visit Bursa in the near future.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  At least 14 people were killed in an airstrike on a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo, the international humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, said Thursday.

.@MSF-supported hospital in #Aleppo destroyed, at least 14 patients and staff killed, toll expected to rise. Hospitals are #notatarget.  MSF International (@MSF) 28  2016 .

It said at least three doctors, "including one of last pediatricians" were among the people killed in the direct hit.

The charity did not indicate whether the Syrian government or rebel forces were behind the attack on the hospital.
BEIRUT (Sputnik)  Around 40 civilians have been hospitalized with injuries over the past day, the source said.

"Al-Nusra Front terrorists and its allies again violated the cessation of hostilities. The Meridien district was hit by a rocket attack, a man and his wife were killed when a building collapsed on them A number of mortar attacks in other districts killed 10 people," the source said.
GENEVA (Sputnik)  The envoy added that 52 percent of Syrians in besieged areas had been reached in the first four months of the year, as compared with 3 percent in the same span of last year.

"The stakes are so incredibly high because so many civilian lives are at stake, so many humanitarian health workers and relief workers are being bombed, killed, maimed at the moment that the whole lifeline to millions of people is now also at stake," Egeland told reporters.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, the international humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres ( MSF ), or Doctors Without Borders, said that at least 14 people were killed in an airstrike on a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

The ICRC said that it and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) have been supporting most of Aleppos medical facilities with medicines, equipment and clean water.

"The recent attack on the ICRC-supported Quds hospital is unacceptable and sadly this is not the first time the lifesaving medical services have been hit. We urge all the parties to spare the civilians. Don't attack hospitals, don't use weapons that cause widespread damage," Valter Gros, the head of the ICRC mission in Syria, said in a statement.
ANKARA (Sputnik)  Turkey built a multi-purpose military base for its air force and navy in Qatar, which will become home to some 3,000 soldiers. Alongside the US, Ankara now has a site for military deployment in the small Gulf nation.

The new outpost will allow Turkish troops to participate in military operations in the Red Sea, Northern Africa, and the Persian Gulf. Thus, for the first time since 1950 the Turkish navy will have access to the Pacific.

"Today, an agreement was signed on military cooperation, in accordance with which the Turkish Armed Forces' military base in Qatar started its work," Davutoglu said.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The US-led coalition against Daesh carried out 22 airstrikes on Wednesday on the terrorist groups positions and infrastructure in Syria and Iraq, the Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve said in a press release.

In Syria, coalition military forces conducted seven strikes using attack and ground-attack aircraft against ISIL targets, the release said on Thursday. Additionally in Iraq, Coalition military forces conducted 15 strikes coordinated with and in support of the Government of Iraq using bomber, ground-attack, and fighter aircraft against ISIL targets.

In Syria, the coalitions airstrikes were waged near three locations, Ayn Isa, Washiyah, and Mara, and destroyed a Daesh bunker, two fighting positions, one command and control node as well as multiple vehicles.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Monday, US President Barack Obama announced that Washington would "deploy up to 250 additional US personnel in Syria including special forces. They are reportedly expected to train the Syrian Democratic Forces.

The White House asserts that the deployment of Special Forces is intended to repel Daesh terrorists.

On Wednesday, about 150 US soldiers arrived in the Kurdish-controlled town of Rumeilan in northeastern Syria, according to a Kurdish security source. According to the source, part of the arrived contingent immediately headed to the north of the Raqqa province.
BEIRUT (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, media reported that a Syrian government airstrike against the Al Quds hospital in the northern city of Aleppo killed dozens of people.

"Reports on bloodshed as a result of a [Syrian Army] airstrike against a hospital in the Sukkari district of Aleppo broadcast by several media are not true. Such reports are an attempt to cover terrorist offenses," the statement reads.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Moscow has achieved its political goals in Syria with a limited use of military, US Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Senator John McCain stated on Thursday.

"Despite predictions of a Russian quagmire, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has instead used limited military means to achieve distinct political goals," McCain said. "Vladimir Putin is playing a weak hand economically and demographically, but he is consistently playing it better than we are playing ours,"

The US-led coalition of more than 60 nations has been carrying out airstrikes in Syria and Iraq against Daesh since the summer of 2014. However, the coalition has acted in Syria without the approval of the countrys government or an authorization by the UN Security Council.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Assad said that terrorist actions all across the globe highlighted the need for real international cooperation not only in the fight against terrorism but also against the Wahhabi ideology behind it, according to the SANA news agency.

Black in turn said that it was necessary to show the US people the real situation in Syria despite disinformation that some parties at the US administration practiced.

The US senator also called for lifting economic sanctions imposed on Syria that violated international law.
BEIRU (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, a Syrian military source told RIA Novosti that al-Nusra Front artillery and mortar shelling of civilian neighborhoods of the Syrian city of Aleppo led to the deaths of 12 people in the past 24 hours, with two more people killed in a terrorist sniper attack.

"According to our data, at least 25 people have been killed. More than 100 have been wounded, dozens are in serious condition. Our hospital received many children and women," the official told RIA Novosti in a phone call.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  On Monday, US President Barack Obama announced sending additional 250 US troops to help train local forces in Syria to fight the terror group.

"Ultimately, the purpose  and the reason the president [Barack Obama] has given us the authority to increase our numbers there  our objective of course is to collapse ISILs [Daesh's] control over Raqqa," Carter said when pressed about the mission of the newly deployed US troops.

The recently deployed US military personnel in Syria will act as a hub to integrate European and Gulf special forces into the US-led coalition against Daesh, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said at a congressional hearing on Thursday.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Some Western media outlets earlier claimed, citing Doctors Without Borders group, that a Russian combat plane delivered an airstrike on a hospital in Aleppo killing at least 14 patients and staff. However, the charity did not indicate whether the Syrian government or rebel forces were behind the attack on the hospital.

"Russian combat aircraft have not carried out missions in Aleppo Area in the past few days," ministry's spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov told reporters.

"According to our data, an aircraft belonging to a country from the so-called "anti-Daesh coalition" was operating in the skies over Aleppo on April 27," Konashenkov added.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Kirby said that the facts around the incident are still being reviewed, but all indications suggest the strike was carried out solely by Syrian forces.

"Ive seen absolutely no indication that the coalition was in any way involved in this airstrike that were talking about on the Doctors Without Borders facility," Kirby told reporters.

Earlier on Thursday, the international humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders (MSF) announced that at least 14 people were killed overnight in an airstrike on the al-Quds hospital in Aleppo.
However, none of the propositions gained enough traction, and all are set to face serious obstacles in the forthcoming rounds of talks. Radio Sputnik discussed the issue with Tim Anderson, author of The Dirty War in Syria, and senior lecturer of political economy at the University of Sydney.

There are big differences between the ways that Washington and the way that Moscow is talking about the opposition, he said.

The nature of the problem lies with the fact that Washington is saying that these are moderate rebels and political opposition in some sense but essentially these are the master pieces of the armed groups.

Anderson further spoke about what according to him the United Nations will do about these rebel groups.

The most effective alternative is for the armed groups to engage in political process but they havent shown any sign of doing that. They simply want the Syrian governments surrender. There are a lot of political opposition groups in Syria and they had their candidates but who will decide who these opposition groups are is the unresolvable question in Geneva, but I dont think any political solution for Syria will come out of Geneva.
Two women approached the roadblock asking for water, the Haaretz newspaper reported, citing Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). One of them pulled out a knife and tried to stab an IDF service member, but was shot.

The second woman fled into the bushes and was arrested. The outlet said they were also carrying a syringe and a suicide note. The wounded woman was taken to a hospital.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Russia and India have agreed to hold the Indra-2016 joint military exercises and will decide on their dates in May, the head of the Russian Defense Ministrys Eastern Military Districts press service said Thursday.

A joint protocol was signed in Vladivostok on the first planned conference of the Indra-2016 joint exercises, Capt. 1st Rank Roman Martov said.

He said consultations would be held in May in India where the dates of the exercises would be specified.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Lebanon's defense minister on Thursday called on the international community to organize a process for intelligence exchange to assist in countering terrorism.

"Confrontation in Lebanon was also escorted by the acts of terror inside the country similar to those that took place in Sinai of Egypt and in Belgium. The Lebanese army continues to fight on every front. Terrorists continue their attacks and intelligence activities. Actually, we also watch them carefully. We try to identify the members of the terrorist cells and bring them to justice. In this case, it is necessary to start exchange of the intelligence information between the countries," Samir Mokbel, who also serves as the country's deputy prime minister, said in an address to the Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS).

Countries across the globe have been boosting their security measures following a series of terrorist attacks, including the downing of a Russian airliner in the Sinai Peninsula on October 31, 2015, attacks on Beirut on November 12, 2015 and on Brussels on March 22. Militants affiliated with Daesh, outlawed in Russia and many other countries, claimed responsibility for all these violent attacks.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Acting Afghan Defense Minister Mohammed Stanekzai on Thursday told Sputnik that he had discussed joint efforts to fight terrorism, drug trafficking and military cooperation during a meeting with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

"We are a part of the same region, we have the same common threats which are terrorism, drugs, economical issues. These are the most important issues that we have discussed with the Russian defense minister. It was more on the cooperation on the counter terrorism, on military cooperation that will help to boost our ability to jointly defeat terrorism in the region," Stanekzai, who is currently attending the fifth Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS), said.

The agenda of the MCIS includes international terrorism, as well as security challenges in the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Central Asia.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Benham reportedly characterized the intercept as "safe and professional," explaining that intercepts between the US and other militaries "occur often."

"On April 21, a U.S. Navy P-8 Maritime Patrol reconnaissance aircraft flying a routine mission in international airspace was intercepted by a MiG-31 Russian jet in the vicinity of the Kamchatka Peninsula," Cmdr. Dave Benham told the Washington Free Beacon.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  On Wednesday, about 150 US soldiers arrived in the Kurdish-controlled town of Rumeilan in northeastern Syria, according to a Kurdish security source. The source also said that part of the arrived contingent immediately headed to the north of the Raqqa province.

"[The US military forces] will also serve as a hub to incorporate partner special forces from both European and Gulf partners that will augment our coalitions counter-ISIL [Daesh] efforts there," Carter told the US Senate Armed Services Committee.
NEW DELHI (Sputnik)  On April 8, an Italian court found guilty of international corruption Giuseppe Orsi, the ex-head of the Finmeccanica industrial group, and AgustaWestland chopper division head Bruno Spagnolini, and sentenced them to 4.5 and four years in jail, respectively, in the case of selling 12 helicopters to India.

"Publicly available information on the procurement of Agusta Westland helicopters clearly shows that the core issue in the matter is corruption. The present Government has taken effective action to bring out the truth and will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case," the press release reads.
After additional analysis, US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) assesses that both launch attempts of presumed Musudan intermediate range ballistic missiles occurred from Wonsan, the release said. Initial indications reveal the tests were not successful.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command determined Pyongyangs launches did not pose any threat to North America, it added.
"We can hold our noses, buy RD-180s until that situation is created and fly Atlases with RD-180s," said Carter. The alternative is to fly our payloads on Delta, which is technically feasible, but much more expensive. And so that is the choice, Carter said before a Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee. "And we have chosen the choice of going Atlas, recognizing the distasteful fact that it necessitates purchases of up to 18 more RD-180 engines."

The Defense Secretarys embrace of the RD-180 represented a direct challenge to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain (R-AZ). The Arizona Senator has made it a personal mission to eliminate US purchase and use of the highly reliable RD-180, in order to "send a message to Vladimir Putin."
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Wednesday, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif, who is also attending the MCIS, said that Russia could play a leading role in the stabilization of the Middle East and Central Asia, while Western involvement has only exacerbated problems in the regions.

Afghanistan is experiencing political, social and security instability, as the Taliban Islamic movement and other radical extremist organizations, such as Daesh, which is prohibited in many countries including Russia, continue to stage attacks against civilian and state targets.

Formed in the 1990s, the Taliban seeks to enforce Sharia law in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.
Moscow has repeatedly dismissed the Ukraine-related accusations leveled at it, warning that increased NATO activities near the country's borders could undermine regional and global stability.

"If we talk about military activities in Europe, especially in the context of relations between Russia and NATO and Sweden's neutrality, we are not interested in fomenting any kind of confrontational military activity," Lavrov said in an interview with the Swedish Dagens Nyheter newspaper.
The ghastly civil war is raging just a mile away, projectiles are being heaved back and forth, and bullets are flying overhead ripping the air apart. But the youth of Damascus have adapted to the piercing sound of explosions as well as to the metastases of fierce battles and suicide bombings across Syria. Under the government of President Bashar Assad, branded "dictator" by Western media, they are enjoying the sweets of secular life, uncommon in the Middle East.
"Ten, nine per day, we are getting to one every 25 minutes, civilians," de Mistura said.

Russias Proposal on Expanding Syria Terrorist Group List Discussed at UNSC

Russias proposal to include Ahrar ash-Sham, Jaish al-Islam in the Syria terrorist group list was discussed at UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Misturas briefing to the UN Security Council.

"This was discussed with the Security Council now, I do not reveal the secret here. And the reply was by the SC [Security Council] was that this list of terrorist groups is a prerogative of the SC By now, it is al-Nusra and Daesh [Islamic State]," de Mistura said.

Syria has been mired in civil war since 2011, with government forces fighting numerous opposition groups, including the Western-backed allegedly moderate factions, as well as terrorist formations.
UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik)  The UN Security Council is set to hold a session on the situation in Ukraine's east on Thursday at Kiev's initiative.

"We circulated a very simple draft press statement reiterating the need to implement the Minsk agreements and also calling for an investigation of the tragic events in Odessa on May 2, 2014, when 48 people were burnt to death. So it would be interesting for us to see what the reaction of the members of the UN Security Council could be," Churkin told journalists.
In 2014, the United States partially lifted the embargo on lethal weapon deliveries to Vietnam by allowing for the future transfer of maritime security-related defense articles to the country.

The United States maintains an arms embargo on weapon sales to Vietnam, which has been enforced since the Vietnam War ended in 1975.
BEIJING (Sputnik)  On Tuesday, reports emerged of North Korea preparing to launch another medium-range ballistic missile later in April.

"China fully complies with the UN Security Council resolution on North Korea We stand for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, call for maintaining peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, stand for resolving problems through dialogue," Xi Jinping said on Thursday.

In early January, North Korea successfully carried out a hydrogen bomb test, putting a satellite into orbit a month later, in violation UN Security Council resolutions. In March, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution that imposes additional sanctions on North Korea, aiming to affect multiple sectors of the countrys economy. That same month North Korea conducted multiple short and medium-range rocket launches.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik), Leandra Bernstein  Gabbard criticized the US alliance with Syrian moderate rebels which she described as "completely intertwined" with Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Nusra Front) and al-Qaeda.

"There are two wars that the US is waging in Syria right now, one is the war to overthrow the Syrian government of Assadthe other war is to defeat ISIS [Daesh]," Gabbard said on Wednesday.
"The accumulated experience should enable to stop the dangerous development of the situation on the Korean Peninsula, to return to the six-party talks, to find solutions that would guarantee its full denuclearization and reliable security for all countries in Northeast Asia,"  Lavrov said, speaking at the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA).

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.
Obama made the announcement earlier this week while in Germany. The troops are meant to boost Washington's local allies in their fight against Daesh. These troops, according to the US president, will not be taking part in combat, but will rather be on a train and assist mission.

The White House has lately been at pains to emphasize that sending special ops to a war zone is not equal to deploying thousands of conventional troops, but for Maloof this differentiation is artificial.

"There is no difference. Boots are on the ground," the analyst said. "You talk to Special Forces guys  they are taking fire, they are boots on the ground, they are in a combat mode." US troops set to be deployed to Syria "are going to carry guns. They are going to be firing; they are going to be shot at," he added.

Obama's latest announcement, Maloof noted, points to mission creep and things will only get worse in the sense that the US will inevitably increase its military presence in the region.
Relations between Russia and Europe went downhill in 2014, when Brussels accused Moscow of fueling the Ukrainian crisis and imposed several rounds of sanctions on it. The restrictions targeted Russia's banking, energy and defense sectors.

The Russian authorities have refuted the allegations, warning that the Western sanctions are counterproductive. In response to the Western restrictive measures, in August 2014, Russia announced a food embargo on some products originating in states that imposed sanctions against it.

It should be said that there is a huge lack of culture [in Europe] and this is where the roots of Russophobia come from that you can see in the media and from some essayists, which, in my opinion, dont know the question. So I think that this Russophobia is ungrounded because Russia and France are two large European countries that are extremely important for the balance in Europe, Chevenement elaborated.

Russian, French Positions on Level Before Common Enemy

Russia and France hold the same positions when faced with a common enemy like Daesh, which is prohibited in numerous countries including the United States and Russia, Jean-Pierre Chevenement said.

Our positions on Syria are undoubtedly coming closer. We know that we have a common enemy, which is Daesh, terrorism, and jihadism.

Syria has been mired in civil war since 2011, with government forces fighting numerous opposition groups, including the Western-backed allegedly moderate factions, as well as terrorist formations.

"I want to visit Russia in the near future, but the dates have not been determined yet. I will discuss it with our foreign minister, Mr. [Jean-Marc] Ayrault," Chevenement told RIA Novosti.

According to Chevenement, he plans to hold a number of meetings with the "usual interlocutors."

"I would also like to address in part our cultural and education exchange, not only industrial issues, the resolution of which is currently blocked to some extent," Chevenement added.
The resolution proposed by the opposition calls on the French government to protest extension of EU sanctions against Moscow.

A total of 101 lawmakers took part in the vote, with 55 voting in favor of the resolution.

Adoption de la resolution sur la levee des sanctions contre la Russie. Votant: 101. Majorite: 50. Pour: 55. Contre: 44. 2 Abst. #DirectAn  Assemblee nationale (@AssembleeNat) 28  2016 .

Adoption of the resolution on the lifting of sanctions against Russia. Voting: 101. Majority: 50. In Favor: 55. Against: 44. 2 Abstained.
ATHENS (Sputnik)  According to the source, Italy, France, Germany and Austria support the removal of the sanctions against Russia and believe it is worth doing so now and not waiting for the results of the presidential elections in the United States.

"There will be no veto. Greece will try to act in a different way We will look at the atmosphere and spirit of the summit and how other countries act and Greece will proceed from these things," the source said, commenting on a scenario where the European Union decides to prolong the anti-Russia sanctions.

According to the source, many countries in the European Union have connected the removal of sanctions with the implementation of the Minsk Agreements, however, this mood is changing and member states have started to realize that it is Kiev who should implement the deal.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  According to the diplomatic source, de Mistura and Lavrov will discuss the outcome of the intra-Syrian talks and the likelihood of future rounds of meetings in Geneva.

Were in favor for the talks to be renewed and that they continue smoothly, but for this to happen a constructive atmosphere by all of the participants is needed and there should be an inclusive character in these talks, the source added.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  It comes a day after Karzai said at the MCIS that cooperation between the United States and its international partners and allies, including Russia, India and China, is the only way to effectively defeat terrorism and extremism.

The former Afghan president has repeatedly voiced support for Russia and China increasing their role in Central Asian security. In a 2015 interview with Chinese television, Karzai said that Afghan security and sovereignty is best guaranteed by regional powers rather than the United States.

"The most important issue is a wide vision of cooperation, that is why the ex-president [Hamid Karzai] was talking about the role of Russia and other Central Asian countries and regional powers such as India, China, Iran in the region. Their consensus and political will to achieve the result are the most important elements that will help us to defeat terrorism and its financing," Stanekzai, who is currently attending the fifth Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS), said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, the French National Assembly passed a resolution to lift sanctions against Russia. Out of the 101 lawmakers, 55 voted in favor of the resolution. The resolution is not legally binding.

Adoption de la resolution sur la levee des sanctions contre la Russie. Votant: 101. Majorite: 50. Pour: 55. Contre: 44. 2 Abst. #DirectAn  Assemblee nationale (@AssembleeNat) 28  2016 .

Adoption of the resolution on the lifting of sanctions against Russia. Voting: 101. Majority: 50. In Favor: 55. Against: 44. 2 Abstained.

"I was surprised with the outcome. In fact, many members of the parliament who are friends of Russia came today to support the resolution," Thierry Mariani said in English.
The Ground-Based Radar Prototype is one of the key components of the US National Missile Defense (NMD) system. The radar , according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), can acquire, track, and identify targets as well as provide fire control support and kill assessment for the NMD.

Earlier, aerospace researcher and analyst Charles P. Vick told the NRK that the new radar at Vardo would be part of the Space Fence, a US space surveillance system. MIT Professor Theodore Postol suggested that the radar could be used to gather intelligence on Russia, particularly the country's missile tests.

Local residents have not been happy with the recent developments. "Many Norwegians in Northern Norway don't want to provoke Russia, while a new radar system in Vardo that's been shrouded in secrecy is making some local residents nervous," Views and News from Norway reported earlier this month.
Referring to the data from a Levada Center survey, the newspaper noted that 69% of Russians supported the Kremlin's policy towards Ukraine.

Most of Russians "follow a long tradition of protecting their country and compatriots from external threats", the article said.

The anti-Russian sanctions were first implemented in 2014 after Brussels joined Washington in accusing Moscow of fueling the Ukrainian crisis. The sanctions have been prolonged several times despite the fact that Russia has repeatedly denied the allegations of its involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.

The restrictive measures have been repeatedly criticized by European entrepreneurs, as they affected not only Russian, but also European economy. 35 percent of German residents call for a complete withdrawal of sanctions, while 36 percent back up the idea of their easing, Reuters reported, citing German newspaper Internationale Politik.
BEIJING (Sputnik)  The Russian foreign minister also conveyed warm greetings to Xi from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is set to visit the Chinese capital in June.

"We are preparing proposals in all areas of our cooperation to further deepen our cooperation in political, economic, and humanitarian spheres," Lavrov told Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
PARIS (Sputnik)  The international community, including Russia, the United States and key European and Middle Eastern states, is undertaking steps to end the Syrian conflict and put an end to the violence. In February, Russia and the United States reached an agreement on a ceasefire in Syria, which took effect the same month.

On Wednesday, Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General for Syria Staffan de Mistura said that the ISSG, which Russia and the United States co-chair, should meet in the near future to discuss the progress made at the Geneva peace talks.

There are more and more blatant ceasefire violations occurring and I call for a meeting of ministers for the International Support Syria Group as soon as possible, Ayrault said in a statement.
Earlier in the day, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that Abe would visit Russia during his May 1-7 European tour in order to discuss the issue of a peace treaty between Moscow and Tokyo, among other issues.

Earlier in April, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that a meeting with Abe was scheduled for May 6 in Sochi.
"As a result, both Russia and the West have sustained major losses," the media outlet noted. "In this respect, many European countries, including Germany, have expressed a wish to improve relations with Moscow and lift anti-Russian sanctions."

A major step in this direction was made on Thursday when the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament, backed a resolution calling for the lifting of the restrictive measure imposed on Russia. Nicolas Dhuicq, a member of the National Assembly's Defense Commission, described the vote as "a miracle and a great victory" in comments to Sputnik.

Xinhua singled out the US as an obstacle that is preventing Russia and Germany from sorting things out without intermediaries. Instead, Berlin "is forced to coordinate its stance on Russia with Washington." This leaves the G7/G8 as the only forum that could bring Russia, Europe and the US closer to each other.

Germany, according to the agency, also wants to increase the group's global influence at a time when some say the forum is losing its relevance. The country's former Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor Joschka Fischer called it the "irrelevant seven" last year, adding that the G7 "represents a dying order."

In June 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared the G7 to a "hobby club" noting that the group has shown a lack of interest toward any alternative views. Last week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted that reviving the G8 was not on Russia's agenda as the country was more interested in cooperating with the G20 nations.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Tuesday, Russia requested to add the two groups operating in Syria to the UN sanctions list that already containsDaesh and al-Qaeda. The opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) delegation to the Syria proximity talks includes representatives of both militant groups.

"If Russia were to consider them as terrorists, and airstrikes were to be carried out against their positions, despite their obligation to adhere to ceasefire, the HNC would have a concise, clear position, the peace process may terminate completely, a new page of violence in Syria would be opened," Bashar said.

Bashar said he believed adding these groups to the UN sanctions list would be a great mistake as they accepted a political resolution to the Syrian crisis and were ready to cooperate.
PARIS (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, 55 lawmakers of the National Assembly voted in favor of a resolution which calls on the French government to oppose the extension of anti-Russia sanctions. As many as 44 parliamentarians voted against the measure.

"We have taken note of the National Assembly adopting a resolution calling on the government to abolish the restrictive measures taken by the European Union against Russia," Nadal told a briefing adding that the lifting of the EU sanctions was tied to implementation of the Minsk agreements on Ukrainian reconciliation.
Europe, disillusioned with German leadership, is now seeking out new leader.

Alas, Britain, France and Spain do not suit since they have recently been bogged down in their own domestic issues.

Incredible as it may seem, Italy is an obvious candidate for this role, according to Kaletsky.

"Italy is resuming its historic role as a source of Europe's best ideas and leadership in politics, and also, most surprisingly, in economics," he underscores, pointing to remarkable achievements of the European Central Bank's (ECB) President Mario Draghi, energetic Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and his team.

According to Kaletsky, Italy is leading a "quiet rebellion" against the pre-Keysenian economics of Berlin and the European Commission.

Indeed, after more than a decade of stagnation and repeated financial crises Italy's economy has emerged from recession. Under Renzi, the country has kicked off labor, pension, and administrative reforms that were merely unthinkable in the past.

"For the first time in at least three years, there are hopes the Italian economic cycle is changing for the better and that the improvement can be sustained," James Politi of the Financial Times wrote a year ago in his article "Italy: Back on its feet."
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, 55 lawmakers of the National Assembly voted in favor of a resolution which calls on the French government to oppose the extension of anti-Russia sanctions. As many as 44 parliamentarians voted against the measure.

The French Foreign Ministry said through a spokesman later it has "taken note" of its adoption.

"The French government will suffer the worst consequences if it doesn't take into account the resolution's results," Thierry Mariani said in a video link organized by the Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  During the hearing, Senator John McCain said the United States could send 10,000 ground troops in a 100,000 international contingent to liberate the Iraqi cities of Raqqa and Mosul from Daesh.

"With respect to the option of a 9 to 1 ratio of international forces to US forces, that would be a highly desirable circumstance to be in," Carter stated. "I have no indication from those countries despite my a lot of effort of willingness to do that."

The US-led coalition of more than 60 nations has been carrying out airstrikes against Daesh in Syria and Iraq since summer 2014.
However, substantial discussions ended without having started. On Monday, April 18, rumors spread that the Saudi-backed opposition was going to leave the talks over the ongoing fighting in Syria that they blamed on the government , until the ceasefire violations stop. Later on Monday, both HNC General Coordinator Riyad Hijab and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia arrived in Geneva, which meant that the HNC was preparing for some major announcement.

On Tuesday, Hijab said that the HNC was suspending its participation until fighting in Syria ends, in protest over ceasefire violations by Damascus, lack of progress on humanitarian issues and the continuation of sieges in a number of areas.

The HNC delegation appeared to expect that the ongoing round of peace talks would be stalled, the discussion of real aspects of the political transition would be postponed indefinitely, as it is already more than five years that fighting in Syria is going on, and that the HNC would look as the only defender of Syrian people and peace in the country.

Nevertheless, the talks continued as scheduled.

HNCs Internal Split

Other delegations  the Moscow-Cairo group, the internal opposition platform, or Hmeymim group, and the Damascus delegation grasped the window of opportunity to promote their agendas.

Even the UN Special Envoy, who always stays neutral in the tense talks, called the HNC move "an act of pressure" and continued meeting with those who were willing to meet with him.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The US defense secretary noted, however, that Ankara has started to do more along the border with Syria.

"I have wanted them [Turkey] to do more for some time," Carter stated. "They can make a larger contribution."

For months, Turkey's southern districts have been subjected to shelling from the territories in Syria that are occupied by Daesh militants.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Wednesday, UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura closed April round of talks and summarized commonalities between the parties' positions.

"I think this round was good and I feel hope. I think good steps have been built in this round. Now we have the new vision of the opposition expressed, the one which is 'in the middle,' and it's good. They began to listen to us, because we are those who are inside Syria and who have a vision 'in the middle'," Krydee said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Last week, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced that ministers of 20 countries would take part in a meeting in Paris on May 30 aiming to relaunch the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian officials will be attending the event.

"Israel adheres to the position that the best way to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct, bilateral negotiations. All other political initiatives distance the Palestinians from the negotiating table," Netanyahus office said in a statement, as quoted by the Jerusalem Post newspaper.

In late January, Ayrault's predecessor, Laurent Fabius, outlined plans to arrange an international conference in the coming months to help resume the stalled Israeli-Palestinian talks, stressing that France would be prepared to recognize Palestinian statehood if the talks yielded no results amid the new wave of violence in the region in late 2015.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The defense secretary emphasized that the United States does favor NATO involvement in the global coalition against Daesh.

"I think NATO as NATO could make a contribution. Thats being discussed with the Secretary-General [Stoltenberg] right now," Carter told the US Senate Armed Services Committee.
The resolution isn't legally binding and the French government doesn't have to act on, according to the French constitution.

Nonetheless, the resolution "expressed the will of the parliament and that will was clear," Lambert said.

Now with the parliament passing the resolution, the government will have to discuss the issue within the next few weeks.

"France's vote on the matter is clear. It's against the sanctions and now the government needs to meet within weeks to discuss sanctions against Russia," another French lawmaker, Thierry Mariani, told Sputnik earlier today.

Mariani, a member of the Union for a Popular Movement Party, also warned that if the government fails to recognize the resolution, the Hollande administration will suffer the "worst" political backlash.

As for Lambert, he hopes that the sanctions will be lifted soon.

"Personally, I hope France will vote for the lifting of the sanctions and it will then convince its [European] partners to do the same," Lambert told Sputnik.

Relations between Russia and the EU went downhill in 2014, when Brussels joined Washington in accusing Moscow of fueling the Ukrainian crisis and imposed several rounds of sanctions as a punitive measure.

The Russian authorities have refuted the allegations, warning that the Western sanctions are counterproductive and taking restrictive economic measures in response.

The next EU leaders summit is scheduled for June 28-29. Extending the EU economic sanctions against Russia, which are due to expire in July, is likely to be on the summit's agenda.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura closed the April round of intra-Syrian talks on Wednesday after 11 days of his mediation. HNC suspended its participation last week over ceasefire violations and lack of progress on the humanitarian track, for which it blamed the Syrian government.

"Round 3 of Geneva talks could have been better if the regime respected the truce, if there was an implementation of [UN Security Council Resolution] 2254 I believe we could have witnessed a better round if the regime was serious," Meslet said.

The official echoed the platforms previous calls for Russian President Vladimir Putin to "put pressure" on Syrian President Bashar Assad to undertake its side of the commitments.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Prison sentences against two Turkish journalists who published Charlie Hebdo cartoons is yet another "serious setback" for freedom of expression in the country, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europes (OSCE) Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic said in a statement on Thursday.

I am concerned by the fact that journalists can face imprisonment in Turkey for expressing their views and solidarity with the killed Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. Publishing materials that may offend a part of the society does not justify censorship, let alone imprisonment, Mijatovic said.

The media freedom representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) made her statement after an Istanbul court had sentenced two columnists of the Turkish opposition Cumhuriyet daily Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Cetinkaya to two years of imprisonment for inciting public hatred and insulting religious values.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Earlier on Thursday, the international humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said that at least 14 people were killed in an airstrike which struck the al-Quds hospital in Aleppo. According to rights groups, the number of those killed in the attack has already reached 27.

However, the Syrian Armed Forces said in a statement that media reports of airstrikes carried out by the Syrian Air Forces against a hospital in Aleppo are detached from reality.

"Russia has an urgent responsibility to press the regime to fulfill its commitments including in particular to stop attacking civilians, medical facilities and first responders, and to abide fully by the cessation of hostilities," Kerry stated.
However, Saudi Arabia's vocal discontent with Washington's revamped relations with Tehran is only half the story.

"The 'best friends falling apart' scenario owes its existence to multiple failures that both, as allies, have had to face on various fronts in the Middle East," the expert narrates, referring to a string of events that aggravate tensions between the two longstanding partners.

Washington's failure to topple Bashar al-Assad, the Obama administration's "flirting" with Iran, as well as the emergence of the US shale oil industry are adding fuel to the fire of the House of Saud's dissatisfaction with Barack Obama.

Although Riyadh is still the largest buyer of American military hardware, "their mutual friction is real and the cardinal purpose of Obama's visit is to reduce it," Sheikh stresses.

But not only Riyadh is demonstrating its growing disappointment: Washington also has enough reasons to criticize its ally. In his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, Obama used the term "free riders" to describe some of America's allies, most notably Saudi Arabia.
Earlier this month, US European Command (EUCOM) accused two Russian Su-24 bombers jets of flying over the US Navy destroyer Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea in manner that resembled an attack and ignored safety advisories. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the bombers swerved away from the US warship once it was identified.

"Our planes were carrying out completely legitimate training flights in the international airspace. They saw that a US destroyer with powerful armaments was coming towards our military base and decided to check it out. As soon as they saw who it was, which happened at a safe distance, they turned around and continued their flight."

Following the incident, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said that the US military expected Russian senior leaders to discourage the countrys military pilots from conducting dangerous flyovers of US ships because it could lead to a confrontation.

US State Secretary John Kerry, in turn, expressed his strong objections to Lavrov over the incident.
Opposition members who are sitting in Qatar, Turkey or the United States must say the truth if they are patriots. Opposition should not fear the United States or Europe. They must unite around the incumbent President to return their own people which is dying of starvation, Kadyrov told journalists during the tourist exhibition Visit Chechnya in the village of Benoy.

Kadyrov pointed out that the Syrians should not follow the scenario proposed by the West but build their lives themselves. The Chechen leader noted that the bloodshed in Afghanistan is still going on despite the extended western military presence.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Since 2014, NATO has been building up its military presence in Europe, particularly in eastern European countries bordering Russia, using Moscow's alleged interference in Ukraine as a pretext for the move.

Moscow has repeatedly dismissed the Ukraine-related accusations leveled at it, warning that increased NATO activities near the country's borders could undermine regional and global stability.

"As for the thesis that significant combat forces will not be deployed on the territory of new [NATO] states  we started drawing the attention of our NATO colleagues to the fact that they are constantly creating bases, including missile defense bases in Poland, the Czech Republicwe asked how this correlates to their obligation not to deploy substantial combat forces. They replied that these are not substantial forces, not permanent, and that they will be rotated," Lavrov told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
"It is expected that large banks of the two countries will soon start bilateral cooperation," the ambassador told the Russian Kommersant newspaper in an interview.

The diplomat also expressed hope that the central banks of Russia and Iran would "take effective steps toward national currencies exchange" to promote the development and extension of trade and economic ties between the countries.
Putin arrived at Vostochny for its first launch, scheduled to take place at 5:01am Moscow time (02:01GMT) on Wednesday. However, automatic systems canceled the launch of the Soyuz-2.1a space rocket less than two minutes before liftoff.

The Soyuz rocket eventually lifted off at 5.01 am on Thursday carrying the Mikhailo Lomonosov research satellite and two small secondary payloads.

Speaking after the launch, Putin, said it could have been carried out on Wednesday, if it was not for the technology "trying too hard."

They say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and to prove that a cosmodrome is ready for work you need to have a first launch. You made it and I congratulate you, the President said.
The Zaliv plant in Kerch is a one-of-a-kind facility with slipways and a dry dock you wont find anywhere else in Russia. The whole issue of Mistral orders would have never come up if we had a plant like this five years ago, Vasyuta said.

The 360mx60m dry dock is big enough to build several ships all at the same time. The plant can also construct large ships like Mistrals.

All we need is the knowhow and concrete projects to work on, the Minister added.
Andrei Ionin dismissed as totally untrue a widespread opinion that Vostochny Cosmodrome was meant as an alternative to the veteran space launch center at Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan is our closest partner in the Eurasian Economic Union and having a cosmodrome there is an obvious plus enabling us to build up high-tech cooperation with Astana, Ionin emphasized.

Vostochny is a Russian spaceport under construction in the Amur Region of the Russian Far East. When completed in 2018, it intends to reduce Russias dependency on the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The first launch from Vostochny took place on Thursday when a Soyuz rocket lifted off at 5.01 am carrying the Mikhailo Lomonosov research satellite and two small secondary payloads.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  In January, Mariani told Sputnik that a delegation of French lawmakers who visited Crimea last year intend to visit the Black Sea peninsula again in 2016 on the National Navy Day in Russia, the last Sunday of July.

"I usually keep my promises, and that is why I will spend the last week of July in Crimea. I promised my friend [CIS and Russian Diaspora Relations State Duma Committee head] Leonid Slutsky that I will spend [the Russian] Navy Day in SevastopolLast year, ten members of parliament came with me, this year, 36 lower and upper house lawmakers are asking to take them with me," Mariani said during a Moscow-Paris teleconference at the Rossiya Segodnya international news agency.

In July 2015, a group of French lawmakers, headed by Mariani, visited Crimea, reporting afterward that the Black Sea peninsula residents, who are predominantly ethnically-Russian, appear to be happy to have the autonomous republic rejoin with Russia. The lawmakers said what they saw in Crimea was completely different from what Western media portrayed.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier media reports had suggested that the launch of the latest version of the Proton-M rocket might be postponed from May 17 until late May or early June.

"The launch may be shifted to May 28 at the client's request," the source said.
"Our silicon-based DNA synthesis platform offers unmatched scale and product quality that vastly accelerates the ability to write DNA at a cost enabling data storage," Dr Emily Leproust, CEO of Twist Bioscience said following the announcement of the partnership.

Big Data Meets DNA

DNA data storage could last up to 2,000 years without deteriorating, according to research carried out by the American Chemical Society.

A single gram of DNA can store almost one trillion gigabytes of digital data.

However using synthetic DNA to store data is still in its embryonic stages and it is unlikely there will be a commercially viable product for a couple of years.

"The initial test phase with Twist demonstrated that we could encode and recover 100 percent of the digital data from synthetic DNA" Microsoft researcher Doug Carmean said.

According to EMC Corporation, the digital universe is doubling in size every two years and will multiply tenfold by 2020, from 4.4 trillion gigabytes to 44 trillion gigabytes.

Super exciting to work with Twist Bioscience! https://t.co/HhEiq40YEv  Luis Ceze (@luisceze) April 27, 2016

Putting that into perspective, if a byte of data was a gallon of water, in just ten seconds there would be enough water to fill a house  by 2020  it would take only two seconds to fill up.

It might well be the start but synthetic DNA data storage could one day become a solution to future proofing the worlds virtual data.
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"Id prefer to see a one-man-one-vote system," said Royce Young, a South Carolinian who supports Clinton. "The process is so flawed."

Part of the problem stems from the overwhelmingly complex nature of both parties nominating processes. Varying from state to state, the process can be difficult to follow, and individual states form their own rules about who, exactly, is eligible to vote.

The poll showed that 27% of likely voters did not have a full grasp of the nominating process, while 44% did not understand the need for delegates.

Nearly 71% of those polled said they would prefer to select their partys nominee with a direct vote, eliminating the delegate process altogether.

Over half also said they would prefer holding all primaries in a single day, rather than spreading them out over several months.
"We are poised to end our reliance on Russia to get our astronauts to space," Bolden told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Wednesday.

On April 19, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Logistics Frank Kendall said that the US armed forces would also need to buy Russian RD-180 engines for Atlas rocket boosters to send satellites into space for at least another five years.
"Since the New York primary [on April 19], Trump has been consistently above 50 percent in every race and that is a real change. He had never reached these levels of support among Republican voters before," Schirach noted.

It was now likely, Schirach pointed out, that Trump would win the additional delegates he needed to confirm the Republican presidential nomination in the remaining primary races in such states as Indiana, Oregon and California.

"The efforts of the Cruz-Kasich cabal to block Trump in the last stages of the race have failed irrevocably across the board. There is nothing there."

Even if Trump failed to reach the needed 1,237 number of delegates before the convention, he would have such a lead over Cruz, his nearest rival, that his case for the nomination would be unanswerable, Schirach continued.

"Trump may get to Cleveland still short of that 1,237 delegates figure. But even if he fails to reach it, he will not be very far short: It will be a matter of only 20 delegates or so, not 200 delegates short."
"Trumps five-state win this week makes it clear even to Republicans for whom he is not their preferred choice that the only alternative to rallying behind him is chaos and a Hillary [Clinton] victory."

Jatras also assessed Cruzs choice earlier on Wednesday of former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential running mate was a desperate ploy to try and revive his diminishing campaign.

Usually presidential candidates from either main US political party do not choose their vice presidential partners until they themselves have secured their parties nominations.

Also, Fiorina never won even as much as 10 percent of the vote from Republicans in any of the primary contests she entered and never generated any significant support at all, Jatras pointed out.

"Senator Cruz's announcement of Carly Fiorina as running mate appears what it is, an act of desperation."

Jatras also noted that Trump was offering American voters a real choice on foreign as well as domestic policies to break away from widely discredited and unpopular previous positions that had led to costly and unsuccessful wars.

"Trump's speech on foreign policy [on Wednesday] shows that Americans have for the first time in a long while a sober, national-interest based alternative to the disastrous policies of Republican Party neoconservatives and Democratic Party liberal interventionists."

Trumps foreign policy positions, along with his "America First" trade and immigration policies, would generate huge appeal across the US political spectrum, Jatras concluded.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The United States has been relying on Russia-made RD-180 rocket engines to put its national security satellites into orbit, despite efforts to reduce dependence on Russian technology in the use of launch vehicles.

"[Im] aware of the need to end our reliance to Russian rocket engines, but not at the expense of the required of assured access," author of the amendment, Republican Congressman Mike Coffman from the state of Colorado, said as quoted by The Hill.

Coffman stressed ahead of a voice vote to allow the purchase of 18 RD-180s instead of nine that "assured access to space is indispensable for our national security."
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The authorities took into custody Syed Raheel Farook, a brother of one of the San Bernardino shooters, his wife Tatiana Farook and her sister Mariya Chernykh, both from Russia, the Los Angeles Times reported citing a law enforcement official.

The law enforcement authorities have accused the three people of lying to US federal investigators and engaging in marriage fraud, according to media reports.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Mariya Chernykh, a woman with family connections to a terrorist involved in the December 2015 San Bernardino attack, can spend 25 years in jail over a fraudulent marriage, the US Justice Department said in a press release on Thursday.

"The indictmentcharges Chernykh with fraud and misuse of visas, permits, and other documents; perjury; and two counts of making material false statements to federal agents," the release stated. "These four charges carry a combined statutory maximum sentence of 25 years in federal prison."

Mariya has been married to Enrique Marquez, who bought weapons used in the San Bernardino terrorist attack. In 2015, the US authorities accused Marques of receiving money for marrying the woman, who lived separately in Ontario.
"Someone came into the front of the building and they apparently said that they had some information they wanted to get on the air," News Director Mike Tomko told reporters.

"I came down at one point not knowing the person was in the lobby, near the vestibule area. He talked to me and was wearing what appears to be a full body white panda suit, surgical mask and sunglasses. He had a flash drive, said he had information he wanted to get on the air. He compared it to the information found in the Panama Papers. I told him, 'I can't let you in, you're going to have to leave the flash drive here and slide it through the opening.' He wouldn't do that. Apparently he had made some threats before."

Immediately following the shots fired, reporters on the scene stated that law enforcement said he was likely shot with bean bags, and that he was alive.

At a news conference shortly after 3:30 PM, T. J. Smith, the media relations director for the department, confirmed that the man was in fact shot by a counter sniper and that it was not a less lethal round.

As of 3:40 PM he was still on the ground with his hand in his pocket and still refusing to comply with officer demands. Due to his refusal to comply, the department was unable to provide immediate medical assistance.

The plan, according to Smith, was to send in a robot with arms to manipulate his body and attempt to get his hand out of his pocket and away from any potential detonator or weapon that he may have.

Around 4:00 PM a second robot that was brought in retrieved the man's vest, and at 4:15 PM he was placed into the back of an armored vehicle and removed from the scene.

He is expected to survive and the device he was wearing was reportedly made from chocolate bars and wires.

 Mary Bubala (@MaryWJZ) April 28, 2016
Retired Navy Capt. Jim Fanell was less measured in his criticism of the incident.

"The 50-foot closest point of approach by Russian Far East Mig-31 Foxhound interceptors to a US Pacific Fleet P-8 reconnaissance flight is an indicator the Russian Navy has likely transferred their first Dolgorukiy-class SSBN [submarine] to the Pacific fleet," he claimed, according to the Free Beacon.

"This clearly represents another clear and present danger to US national security," he declared. "[The] nation needs more ballistic missile and fast attack nuclear submarines, and fast."

Earlier this month, the Pentagon accused a Russian Su-27 of flying too close to another US spy plane operating in the Baltic, again a stones throw away from Russias borders. The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged the incident, but denied unsafe that maneuvers were performed.

"The reports of foreign media saying that a Russian Su-27 allegedly flew in dangerously close proximity to a US RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft in the skies over the Baltic Sea on April 14 are not true," ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov told reporters.
Currently, the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program makes Afghans who have worked with the FBI, State Department, or with other military and support operations, eligible to apply for US visas, if their lives were placed at risk.

The latest version of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act in the House of Representatives would change that however, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

If this becomes the law of the land, in all intents and purposes there will not be an SIV program anymore, Matt Zeller, a former Army captain who runs the interpreter advocacy group No One Left Behind, told the Beacon. And we will be outright turning our backs on a group of people we have made a fundamental promise to.
"It is clear that in Washington he has aligned himself with foreign policy advisors that are not the usual neocons. So thats good news, to a degree. Thats why you have so much gnashing of the teeth in Washington," McAdams, of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, tells Loud & Clear, referring to billionaire Donald Trump.

"On the other hand, the people that he does have around him are realists, to a degree, but that is not super satisfying to a non-interventionist and an anti-war person because realistslack the philosophyof avoiding war and avoiding entangling alliance."
According to a US defense official, the Pentagon had little warning of the mobile launch on March 18, when Pyongyang fired two Nodong missiles into the Sea of Japan.

Using machine intelligence to track sites globally, single out TELs and alert analysts of the threat would assist the Pentagon in having prior knowledge of missile launches.

TELs on the ground are hard to identify, especially when disguised as semi trucks or shipping containers. Bill Gattle, president of Harris Corp.'s Space and Intelligence Solutions division, says the key is teaching the machines to distinguish between the normal and abnormal protocols and procedures of surveillance targets.

"If Bob always goes to that restaurant every morning and eats breakfast and today he didn't, he met a little white van off the to the side of the street corner, we want to know that," Gattle said. "We want it to trigger us that, Hey, something different from the normal just happened.'"

According to Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, this type of automation would be most beneficial at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which snaps pictures from US spy satellites, processes the images and hands the data to the military and intelligence community.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, the FBI arrested Syed Raheel Farook, a brother of a terrorist involved in the December San Bernardino attack, his wife Tatiana Farook and her sister Mariya Chernykh, both originally from Russia.

"The detained [women] will receive all the needed consular assistance, like all Russian citizens do in such cases," the consulate stated.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Local media reported earlier that the suspect entered the lobby of the FOX-45 television station in Baltimore and told employees that he was carrying a bomb.

The unidentified man was shot by officers after leaving the building and subsequently trying to advance on police outside the station.

The suspect also intentionally set a car on fire in the stations parking lot, Smith added.
"The Syrian problem. A common goal of the international community is to resolve the current situation [in the country] as soon as possible," Xi said at the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA).

The international community, including Russia, the United States and key European and Middle Eastern states, is undertaking steps to end the Syrian conflict and put an end to the violence.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Wednesday, Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General for Syria Staffan de Mistura said that the ISSG, which Russia and the United States co-chair, should meet in the near future to discuss the progress made at the Geneva peace talks.

"If there is a need to convene a meeting at the ministerial level, we are ready to consider such a possibility, taking into consideration that there will be an understanding of the issues up for discussion and, most significantly, what results can be achieved [at the meeting]," the source said.

The source added that at the moment Moscow and Washington are cooperating on the issue withing the framework of two working groups that focus on a number of humanitarian and ceasefire issues.
Driver Bob McClure celebrated a career milestone on Wednesday night (April 27) at The Raceway at the Western Fair District as he reached the coveted 1,000-win mark.

Entering the evening's program, McClure needed just a pair of wins to hit the mark, which became within reach after he guided three-year-old pacing filly Deucette ($2.10) to a dominant 2:00.1 score in the seventh race for trainer Tim Jacobson.

The 25-year-old reinman celebrated the milestone in his very next drive as he steered the Paul MacDonell-trained My Rhythm Of Rhyme ($2.30) to a 1:58.2 hard-fought victory in the ninth race.

McClure sent the three-year-old Shadow Play filly to the lead and fended off Sandy De Vie and driver Alfie Carroll in a two-horse breakaway to prevail by half a length.

McClure is coming off his best season to date as he posted career-high statistics in 2015 with 340 wins (third-best in all of Canada) and over $2.1 million in purse earnings.

He currently ranks second nation-wide in 2016 behind The Raceway's leading driver Alfie Carroll for wins with 146. In fact, the resident of Elora, Ont. has cracked Canada's top 10 driver standings this year for wins, earnings ($723,602) and UDRS (.368).

Carroll enjoyed a stellar night at the track as well, with wins in half of the evening's 10 races. Among his winners was Eve Marie Seelster ($4.80), who was victorious in the featured $10,000 Fillies & Mares Preferred 2 Handicap Pace.

The eight-year-old Artiscape mare had won her first six Western Fair starts of the year and is now seven-for-nine at the London oval. She was backed as the 3-5 favourite despite two recent misses and rewarded her following as she rallied four-wide from next-to-last and blew by pacesetter Doo Wee Rusty in a season's best 1:56.2 winning effort. Trailer Pinky Tuscadero and Mike Horner also closed late, finishing half a length behind in second-place.

Victor Puddy trains Eve Marie Seelster for owner Keith Cassell of Smiths Falls, Ont.

To view Wednesday's harness racing results, click on the following link: Wednesday Results - Western Fair.
A competitive conditioned trot at The Meadows Wednesday turned into something unusual when the pocket-sitting horse found room late, hit the wire first and rocked the tote board, scoring at 220-1.

For a $2 across-the-board ticket, Our Rail Fantasy returned a cool $769.60.

Owner/driver Tom Svrcek guided Our Rail Fantasy to the pocket, where he followed Xtatic Hanover until mid-stretch. He edged away late to defeat Xtatic Hanover by a neck in 1:55.1. Tom Davis conditions the 10-year-old Beat The Rail-Fantasy Hanover gelding, who extended his career bankroll to $147,549.

In Wednesdays feature, the $22,500 Winners Over $10,000 Life/Preferred Handicap Trot, Call For Justice followed cover willingly, then blazed through the lane to score in 1:53.3 -- a lifetime mark.

Call For Justice was away seventh for Dave Palone but picked up live cover from the first-over Classicality, who relentlessly wore down the leader, Tamarind. Call For Justice tipped off cover around the final turn and blew by Classicality, downing him by 1-1/4 lengths. I Know My Chip finished third. Ron Burke trains Call For Justice, a four-year-old son of Justice Hall-Mikas Mazurka who now boasts $187,454 in career earnings, for Burke Racing Stable and Weaver Bruscemi LLC.

Jim Pantaleano, Dan Rawlings, Burke and Palone each enjoyed a double on the 13-race card.

(with files from The Meadows)
The Italian Amateur Friendship Challenge officially kicked off with a gala dinner hosted by the mayor of Naples Italy, Luigi de Magistris on Thursday (April 28).

Pier Luigi De Angelo, the principle owner of Agnano racetrack in Naples, guided the invited the amateur American drivers to the event, which was held at the elegant Belvedere Carafa Museum in downtown Naples, Italy.

The people and the food are over the top and the majesty and history of this area goes back thousands of years, team correspondent Steve Oldford said.

Festivities will continue when Team America will dine with their Italian counterparts prior to the racing action, which will begin on Friday afternoon. The racing will continue through Sunday, when track will host a $500,000 trot, the Grand Premio Lotteria.

Theres no doubt that amateur racing is moving to a new level and we hope the events here in Naples will continue to promote amateur racing at a world-wide level, noted Team USA captain Joe Pennacchio.

When the races get underway Friday at Agnano, Pennacchio and Oldford will be joined by Mike Mitchell, Dein Spriggs and Hannah Miller. The five outstanding American amateur drivers will compete against the best that the Naples area has to offer.

Two events are slated for Friday. There will also be a race on Saturday and one on Sunday  the day of the Gran Premio Lotteria, where the attending crowds will be in the tens of thousands.

(With files from NAADA)
The winner of the 2015 O'Brien Award of Horsemanship has returned from Florida loaded for bear with a six-pack of pacers set to make seasonal and Canadian debuts this Saturday night.

Dr. Ian Moore hasn't made many starts in 2016, but those few starts have been sensational. Six starts, two wins and four seconds reads the summary, resulting in a staggering 0.703 UTRS. He put up a record of 63-30-25 from 199 starts in 2015, with $2.15 million in purses earned and a 0.442 average. His starts, wins, purses and UTRS were all personal bests en route to his first individual O'Brien Award.

This coming Saturday night, Moore will look to bolster those strong numbers with six horses in at Mohawk Racetrack. Saturday's $34,000 Preferred Handicap will feature 2013 O'Brien Award winner Arthur Blue Chip (PP5, Chris Christoforou listed), who has put up a 2-3-0 record in five seasonal starts at Pompano for Moore and co-owners R G McGroup Ltd. and Serge Savard.

Also involved in that contest, making his first start of 2016 is State Treasurer. Canada's reigning Horse of the Year has been assigned the outside post nine with Arthur Blue Chip and seven other standouts brave enough to drop in the box. State Treasurer's first mile of 2016 was a jaw-dropping 1:49.4 qualifier at Southern Oaks Training Center with Moore at the controls.

"I used to drive as you know and I've had a lot of horses pulling on me but I've never had one pull quite like him," Moore told Trot Insider after the qualifier. "When he decides he's going, he's going."

Owned by Sally & Paul MacDonald, State Treasurer won nine of his 19 starts in 2015, banked more than $986,000 and swept older pacing horse honours in Canada and the U.S.

Here's the field for Saturday's Preferred Handicap Pace, slated as Race 10 on the card:

1. Idole Duharas (James MacDonald/Sean Mehlenbacher - 9/1)

2. Mohawk Warrior (Jonathan Drury/Richard Moreau - 10/1)

3. The Rev (Doug McNair/Gregg McNair - 12/1)

4. Cool Rock (Rick Zeron/Rene Bourassa - 12/1)

5. Arthur Blue Chip (Paul MacDonell/Dr. Ian Moore - 9/1)

6. Nickle Bag (Trevor Henry/Bill Robinson - 3/1)

7. Ellis Park (Randy Waples/Tony O'Sullivan - 9-2)

8. Boomboom Ballykeel (Sylvain Filion/Richard Moreau - 5/1)

9. State Treasurer (Chris Christoforou/Dr. Ian Moore - 7/2)

Moore will also add his share of competition to the second leg of The Diplomat Pacing Series, sending out Some Gold (PP2, Paul MacDonell) in the first division as well as Worthy Art (PP3, Randy Waples) and Sutton Seelster (PP5, Phil Hudon) in the second. Henry is also slated to drive stakes winner Rockin In Heaven (PP1, Trevor Henry) in the evening's fourth race. The four-year-old son of Rock N Roll Heaven, who counted the Empire Breeders Classic and a division of the Somebeachsomewhere among his stakes victories as a sophomore, made his seasonal debut on April 10, finishing second at Pompano.

To view the full entries for Saturday night's card at Mohawk, click the following link: Saturday Entries - Mohawk Racetrack.
Trot Insider has learned that Donald Thomas Lowes of Princeton, Ont. passed away on Tuesday, April 26 at the Brantford General Hospital surrounded by the love and support of his family. He was in his 77th year.

Much loved partner of Annette Jacobson. Predeceased by his wife Jacqueline Rita Lowes (nee. Atlee) in 1999 and daughter Pamela Lowes - Delaney (2010). Beloved father of Robert Lowes and his partner Debbie Bonney of Paris and Donald J. Lowes and his wife Kerry of Princeton. Cherished grandfather of Jeffrey (Tanya), Donna, Sarah and Zachary. Great-grandfather of Averie and Tyler. Loving brother of Margaret Somerville and the late Jim Lowes (2010). Don will be dearly missed by his extended family and many dear friends.

Don was a member of the Royal Canadian Navy in the early 1960s for five years. Don started his career as a Stationary Engineer with the Brantford General Hospital, where he worked for 10 years. He then moved to the W. Ross MacDonald School for the Blind in Brantford, where he worked for 20 years and retired in 2000. He was a longtime member of the Royal Canadian Legion Branch #90 in Brantford and the Navy Club of Brantford.

Don had a love for harness racing and was a proud member of the Ontario Harness Horse Association. After retiring from engineering, he returned to his passion of racing Standardbreds. He jogged his horses at the Paris Fairgrounds, where he enjoyed coffee time with the other horsemen. His stable included pacers Deuces And Jacks (1:51.2), Future Champion (1:51.3) and his homebred pride and joy Future Million (1:50.3).

His kindness and generosity will be remembered by family and friends.

Friends will be welcomed at the Dwayne D. Budgell Funeral Home, 1105 Rest Acres Road, on Friday from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Funeral service will be held in the Funeral Home Chapel on Saturday, April 30 at 10 a.m. The funeral service will begin with a Royal Canadian Legion Service under the auspices of RCL Branch #90. In accordance with Dons wishes, cremation will follow the funeral service. Immediately following the service, the family invites you to join with them at the R.C.L. Branch #90, 21 Oak Street in Brantford, for a time of refreshment and sharing. In Don's memory, donations to the Canadian Cancer Society would be appreciated by the family. Online condolences may be made at www.budgellfuneralhome.ca.

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Don Lowes.
Emerging Scholars Provides a Pathway to Success to Top Colleges for Underserved Students in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia

Contact: Edda Collins Coleman, Emerging Scholars , 703-896-7629, edda@the316group.com ARLINGTON, Va., April 28, 2016 / Standard Newswire / -- Scholars from Emerging Scholars' Cohort 5 will attend the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities this fall. Emerging Scholars is a non-profit organization that offers academic preparation and financial support to bright, promising students who otherwise would not have the opportunity to reach their true potential."We are incredibly proud of our Cohort 5 scholars," says Emerging Scholars Executive Director, Ruth Hazel Little. "Over the past eight years, our students have worked extremely hard, have persevered and defied the odds to brighten their own futures and that of their families. For many of our scholars, they are the first from their family to attend college, so their hard work has completely paid off. We could not be more excited for them as they begin the next chapter in their lives."Cohort 5 scholars have been accepted into esteemed colleges such as Boston University, Campbell University, Clemson University, Hampton University, Harvard University, High Point University, Howard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Miami University, Morgan State University, North Carolina Central University, Northwestern University, Purdue University, Old Dominion University, Temple University, College of Wooster, University of Mary Washington, University of Maryland College Park, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, University of Missouri, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Greensboro, University of North Carolina Pembroke, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester, University of Virginia, The College of William and Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Tech University, George Mason University and West Virginia University.100% of Emerging Scholars students who attend independent schools are accepted into college, versus 50.9% of underserved families nationally.To learn more about the work Emerging Scholars is doing in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, please visit www.emergingscholarsprogram.org About Emerging ScholarsFor families with bright children facing economic challenges, Emerging Scholars provides an intensive program of academic enrichment, life skill development and family support. Emerging Scholars is dedicated to providing opportunities that change the educational trajectory of students with high potential. Our team of professional educators and community supporters delivers confident scholars with the leadership skills for academic and social success.For Media Inquires:Edda Collins ColemanEmerging ScholarsTel: 703-896-7629Email: edda@the316group.com
America Helped Australia in Battle of the Coral Sea - Australia Calls World to Pray for America

Contact: Warwick Marsh, 61-418-225-212UNANDERRA, Australia, April 28, 2016 / Standard Newswire / -- The team behind Australia's National Day of Prayer & Fasting is calling the nations of the world to pray and fast for six days for USA from this Saturday 30 April - 5 May 2016. Watch this promo video Australia has done this for the last 3 years so this will be our fourth year praying for America. The 30 April 2016 is the USA Day of Repentance and 5 May 2016 is the USA National Day of Prayer Warwick Marsh from Australia said, "On the morning of 7 May 1942, Admiral Fletcher, commander of the US fleet gave orders to his scouting pilots to find the enemy fleet. Suddenly at 8:15 a.m. his fighter pilots spotted the enemy. In warfare surprise is everything. It is our belief that this sighting was an answer to prayer."Within a few hours the US aircraft carrier, the Lexington, and the Yorktown launched 80 Dauntless Dive Bombers, Torpedo Bombers and Fighters. The Naval squadron attacked the Japanese aircraft carrier Shoho at 11 a.m. The carrier was hit by 13 bombs and up to 7 torpedoes, she sank at 11:35 a.m. with a loss of 638 lives."The Battle of the Coral Sea was a strategic victory for the United States and Australia because the Japanese invasion landing force was turned back permanently. Yet the cost of victory was high. 656 Americans paid the ultimate price in the fight against tyranny. Here is an Australian-produced documentary about the Battle for the Coral Sea."This story is very relevant to us. In several days' time, we in both Australia and America will celebrate the 64th anniversary of that historic battle on the 4-8 May 1942. Many military historians would assert that the Battle of the Coral Sea was the turning point in the Second World War."Right now the USA is in a spiritual battle for its very survival as a nation under God. Secular forces have taken prayer out of school and progressively waged war against family, faith and religious freedom. It is time for Australia and the people of the world to join with our brothers and sisters in Christ in the USA in this battle for their nation."Marsh continued, "We are praying for revival and transformation for America according to 2 Chronicles 7:14. We in Australia are grateful for the protection that America gave Australia during World War II. American blood was poured out in the Coral Sea for Australians. It is time for us to return the favour and get on our knees and pray for America. It is time for us to call the nations of the world to stand in the gap in prayer for America."Often the prayer part of God's army is likened to the air arm aspect of modern warfare. The Battle of the Coral Sea was fought and won in the air. We believe the battle for both Australia and America will be fought and won on our knees. So we encourage whoever can to pray and fast in whatever way you can between Saturday 30 April and 5 May 2016. Together we can make a difference!"For more information phone: Warwick Marsh 61 418 225 212See this Australian prayer video of how God answered prayer & Fasting for America in 1746.See the Australian prayer video of Abraham Lincoln's "Presidential Proclamation of a Day of Prayer, Fasting and Humiliation" 30 April 1863.
One incumbent is running in the five-candidate race for two open seats.
Prosecutors have elevated the murder charge against Brandon Wright, who now would face a mandatory life prison sentence if he is convicted of the 1994 slaying of Robert Bushey of Kelso.

Prosecutors originally charged Wright, 44, with first-degree murder. This week they increased that to first-degree aggravated murder. Prosecutors also added two weapons enhancements for the knife with which he allegedly stabbed Bushey 53 times and the hammer with which he hit him over the head.

If convicted of aggravated murder, Wright would serve life in prison. First-degree murder can carry lesser sentence. Wright was supposed to enter a plea Tuesday, but the matter was put off a week due to the amended charges.

According to police, Wright walked into the Salt Lake County Jail on Easter Day March 27 and confessed to the murder of 45-year-old Bushey, a welder and pipe fitter.

Prosecutor Ryan Jurvakainen said he boosted the murder charge for two reasons: the murder was premeditated and Wright allegedly killed Bushey while burglarizing the victims travel trailer in Kelso. Wright was staying inside a shop on Busheys property near the Kelso airport, according to police.

Premeditation in this case does not carry its common meaning. Washington law defines premeditation in murder cases as a choice that transcends more than a moment in (a) point of time. Jurvakainen said because Bushey and Wright fought after Bushey allegedly walked in on Wright inside the trailer, Wright had time to decide whether to kill Bushey.

Hypothetically, if you have two people fighting, obviously you have the ability to make a conscious decision to stop or continue, or walk away or kill. In more than a moment in time, (youre) essentially making a conscious decision to murder somebody, he said.

The initial charge was necessary to get Wright extradited from Utah to Washington. But as the investigation has evolved, so has the charge.

Obviously this is a case that were investigating from scratch, one because (none of the same people) were in the (prosecutors) office in 1994 and few people from 1994 are still in the Kelso Police Department, Jurvakainen said.

He said his office didnt elevate the charge in order to pressure Wright to plead guilty.

Its just a charge thats consistent with what we believe the evidence will show, he said.
KALAMA  Its small, but Cowlitz County is getting its first significant link to Puget Sounds aerospace industry.

Port commissioners Wednesday signed a three-year lease with specialty metals manufacturer Aero-Vac Alloys & Forge Inc., which will bring about 15 new jobs to the area. The company plans to move its headquarters from Orange County, Calif., to Kalama over a period of three months, with full operation here in rented space in May.

Aero-Vac manufactures parts for companies in the aerospace and defense industries. Its customers include Boeing, General Electric, the U.S. Department of Defense and Eaton Aerospace. The companys products are used for helicopters, rockets, airplanes, weapons and aircraft engines.

Co-owner Tim LuMaye said Washingtons tax environment and the ports facilities were major draws to Kalama. He and his wife, Tiffany, wanted to raise their two young children in a smaller town with access to nature. Kalama offered that while still being within an easy drive of the nations second-biggest aerospace hub, the Puget Sound.

We want to tap into the Seattle market without being in Seattle, LuMaye said.

Kalama had the best facility at the lowest price, he added.

About nine of Aero-Vacs current employees will move to Washington. LuMaye will hire an additional four to five employees. That includes one machine operator with a base salary of $18 to $20 per hour and additional entry-level employees with a base salary of $12 to $15 an hour.

Aero-Vac will move into a 23,000-square foot port-owned building that formerly housed a storage facility for Bennu Glass. The building had been vacant for about two years.

Port Executive Director Mark Wilson said the port had been searching for a tenant that would lease the entire space instead of just portions of it.

This was a great solution to that, Wilson said.

For the first year, the company will pay a base rent of $7,520 per a month, which will bump up to $9,400 per a month the following year. There are options to extend the lease two more years. Its possible the company may move the business into Ridgefield, where the LuMayes said they plan to build a house.

The company plans to invest $45,000 to upgrade electrical systems and a freight dock for trucks.

The LuMayes started the business in his living room in 2008, when he was working as a purchasing agent for a metal broker and noticed a need in the industry for large, flat steel bars. Aero-Vac has grown every year, pulling in $9.8 million in sales in 2015, LuMaye said. He added that the company uses only steel made in the U.S.
An effort to prevent shipping bottlenecks on the Columbia River is in jeopardy after Port of Portland declined to contribute to construction. But the Port of Kalama on Wednesday night took action to try to save it.

Four Lower Columbia ports had planned to each contribute about $167,000 toward construction of three new stern buoys at Rainier, Kalama and Vancouver. A local funding match was needed for the ports to qualify for a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The ports of Longview, Vancouver and Kalama each approved the funding with the expectation that the fourth partner, Port of Portland, would do so as well.

Stern buoys are chains linked on one end to floating buoys and the other end to steel plates embedded in the river. Ship waiting out in the river channel for an open dock can tie up to them and remain stable despite shifting tides and currents. A recent corps analysis found that the Lower Columbia needed the additional stern buoys, and supporters said the project would decrease air pollution because ships could remain stable without help from tug boats.

Yet the Port of Portland, struggling with lower cargo activity, said it couldnt spare $167,000 for the project from its $295 million budget.

The port considered these additional costs and direct benefits and decided against supporting this version of the plan at this time, said Port of Portland spokesperson Kenny MacDonald.

That likely killed the project. On Tuesday, Port of Longview commissioners declined to offer more money on top of what it already has pledged.

The Export Grain Terminal in Longview said the added buoys are needed especially during the busy grain harvest season. However, Longview commissioners said it wasnt fair to pay for something that benefits the entire river system without help from Portland.

Im very disappointed in the Port of Portland, said Jeff Wilson, Port of Longview commissioner. When we made the decisions, we made it based on the environmental effects on the river.  We are all in the same basket together. If someone is not in the same basket on this, then (the Port of Longview cant be either).

Commissioner Bob Bagaason questioned how much it would really help Longview customers.

I had difficult time swallowing this the first time around, that we couldnt make sure that these particular buoys werent for our particular companies or EGT or the grain terminals down in Kalama, Bagaason said. Im adverse to doing anything.

However, the Port of Kalama commissioners Wednesday night agreed to pitch in up to $300,000 to the project, which would cover its share of the local match and all but about $34,000 of Portlands share. It will approach Vancouver and Longview in an attempt to rescue the project. It also would consider adding fewer buoys to reduce costs.

The ports have until Friday to come up with the funds; otherwise they will lose the Corps grant opportunity.

The original anchorage system along the river was designed decades ago, when ships were smaller and could be anchored closer to shore without swinging into the deep-draft channel, according to the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association.

MacDonald said Port of Portland was the original sponsor of the Corps analysis, and contributed to previous stern buoy projects. MacDonald also said the port contributes to the river system in other ways, such maintaining a dredge for the river on behalf of the Corps and running an online forecasting tool on river levels.
An incident where soldiers attacked their officers was dismissed as a minor incident by the Indian Army, but a report has revealed the soldiers ran riot after the senior officers severely assaulted one of their colleagues and their Commanding Officer.

While the army dismissed the 10 May incident as being a "scuffle in an artillery unit during field firing", an Indian Express report states that the enraged soldiers conducted search operations throughout the Nyoma town looking for the officers who had beaten up and severely injured one of their colleagues.

The incident was reportedly sparked by the personal valet of a Major in the unit entering a bathroom where the officer's wife was bathing and on realising his error ran out.

The lady, who did not complain about it immediately, reportedly spoke of the incident during lunch which the Major and three other officers present there took offence to the incident and summoned the soldier. They assaulted him resulting in the soldier sustaining serious injuries, the Jammu and Kashmir police has noted in their report.

The soldier, Suman Sarkar, was reportedly left unattended for hours and when the other soldiers returned to the camp they were upset on hearing of the incident. Some officials reportedly informed the Commanding Officer Colonel Prasad Kadam.

However, when Colonel Kadam reprimanded the errant officials they reportedly assaulted him as well which resulted in him being injured and falling into a pit. It was the final straw for the soldiers who began throwing stones at the officials and took their Commanding Officer to an army hospital.

Rumours of the assaulted soldier, Sarkar, having succumbed to his injuries also added further fuel to the protests with the soldiers taking iron rods, sticks and knives and ransacking the officers mess, where they suspected the Majors were hiding. The officials fled but the soldiers continued to search for them despite the darkness.

The soldiers ransacked other buildings where they suspected the officers to be hiding but were unable to find them. They however did not assault any civilians or damage any property.

The soldiers continued to search for the missing officers and it was only when in the early hours of the morning that two army officials from different army units reached the camp was order restored. Initially the soldiers refused to let the officials enter the camp until they were assured that their colleague was alive.

The officials who ran to escape the soldiers were found in two groups, one near the camp near Nyoma, and the others almost 25 kilometres away.

The army has already instituted a court of inquiry to probe into the matter.
Anirudh Regidi

When compared to Apple's earnings in Q2 2015, the earnings in Q2 2016 are significantly lower. In terms of pure numbers, Apple's earnings fell from $58 billion to $50.56 billion and profits fell from $13.6 billion to $10.5 billion. Apple is still making a lot of money, more than Microsoft and Google combined (around $40 billion), but the drop in earnings is indicative of deeper troubles for Apple.

This is the first time since 2003 that Apple has reported a year-on-year drop in earnings and the first year-on-year drop in iPhone sales. Considering that over 60 percent of Apple's income comes from the latter, it's no wonder that earnings have fallen.

The smartphone market is stagnating however, and, even if Apple maintains its current earnings, that's still 250 million devices sold and over a $100 billion in revenue just from the iPhone.

2007: The iPhone

It wasn't till 2007, when the first iPhone was introduced, that Apple earned its first billion and transformed into a cultural phenomenon. What was the iPhone really? A well-built phone with a touch-screen? Nokia had touch-screen phone in 2004, as did others, but those devices paled in front of the, arguable, elegance of the iPhone.

The first iPhone was nowhere near as good as it is today, copy-pasting and forwarding messages were added later on for example. But the phone transformed everyone's expectations from a mobile device. Apple showed the world that a touch-screen doesn't need a stylus, that phones can have large, gorgeous screens (3.5 inches was large at the time) and that a phone might just double as a portable computer.

2008: The MacBook Air and App Store emerges

2008 was a big year for Apple. Steve Jobs pulled the MacBook Air out of an envelope, the iPhone 3G was released and along with it, came the App Store. Again, Apple transformed our expectations from our devices. The MacBook was a netbook-sized device with the power of a regular laptop, the App Store gave developers a common platform for publishing their games and apps. Combined, these innovations effectively doubled Apple's income that year.

Android development started this year.

2009-10: The iPad and first Retina display announced

The next two years saw rapid growth for Apple. The iPhone 3GS was the first of the S series phones, announced in 2009 and 2010 saw the release of the first iPad and the completely redesigned iPhone 4. People fawned over the iPhone 4's Retina display and the pixel density (ppi) wars were born.

The iPad was, again, a game-changer. By itself, the first iPad didn't amount to much and people called it a stretched iPod Touch. But with the iPad, Apple introduced something more than just another large-screen device. It introduced a brand new way of consuming content. It was still not as significant as the iPhone in terms of sales, but it contributed significantly to Apple's bottom line.

2011: The end of an era

Steve Jobs passed away in 2011 and a great many Apple staples followed him to the grave. There is a select group of people who feel that with the passing of Steve Jobs, Apple lost some essential, defining element and arguably, kicked Apple into a spiral of irrelevance.

2011 was a tough year for Apple's new CEO, Tim Cook, but he did manage to push out iCloud services and the iPhone 4S. The iPhone 4S brought an incomplete Siri and the disastrously bad Apple Maps platform, but that didn't stop Apple from increasing their earnings by almost 50 percent.

Significantly, 2011 was the year that Samsung and Google released the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus S. Both devices caused a shake-up of the mobile space, offering competitive hardware and features at a comparatively low price. This was the year Android came of age (with 2.3 Gingerbread). The Galaxy Nexus marked the beginning of an Android onslaught that would consistently shake Apple's beliefs and its confidence in the market.

2012: A new direction

2011's Nexus lineup and a sudden surge in the availability and demand for large-screen phones forced Apple to rethink its iPhone. Suddenly, 3.5-inches just wasn't enough. Apple's answer? The 4-inch iPhone 5. Apple also refreshed its Mac lineup with a Retina MacBook Pro. In all honesty, 2012's product launches weren't that great, the iPhone 5 was, after all, just a larger iPhone 4S and it showed. Apple's earnings the next year were higher than in 2012, but only by 8 percent.

We also saw the Mac Pro that year. A revolution in computer design that resulted in a trash can size device capable of putting most high-end PCs to shame.

2013: Android eats away at Apple, so does China

Large screen phones are everywhere and 5-inch phones are becoming the norm. Apple, stubbornly sticking to its "4-inches are enough for everyone" strategy, refused to do more than release the iPhone 5S and the iPad Air. Considered in isolation, the iPhone 5S was a massive bump over its predecessor. The move to a 64-bit processor and a massively improved iSight camera were major upgrades.

In the long term, Apple's introduction of TouchID was significant, but it didn't do much for the iPhone 5S. Apple lost a huge chunk of the smartphone market to Android.

Still, people wanted larger iPhones and regardless of how good the 5S was, it simply wasn't enough. At the same time, the iPad Air, a newer, much lighter iPad, gained some traction thanks to its low weight. However, it came at the start of the decline of the tablet market and didn't amount to too much.

A redesigned iOS, which arrived in the form of iOS 7, received more flak than praise, especially from Apple purists.

It was around this time that Chinese smartphone makers started making their presence felt. Companies like Xiaomi ushered in the age of the budget flagship and a small, expensive iPhone just wasn't significant anymore.

In the end, a growth of 6 percent was all that Apple could manage. Do note that 6 percent for Apple still translates to over $10 billion or total earnings of over $180 billion.

2014: Finally, a larger iPhone

Caving in to public demand, Apple was almost forced into releasing the completely redesigned iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices with a 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screen respectively. The response was staggering, for Apple at least. People left Android in droves and the devices sold out almost as fast as they could be made.

Apple had finally made a mark again. Jony Ive's design for the iPhone wasn't particularly well-received, but a larger iPhone was what people wanted and most didn't bother with much else. The introduction of the 5K iMac was just the cherry on the cake!

Beats was also acquired for $400 million this year.

2014's launches saw Apple's earnings cross the $200 billion barrier in 2015, a growth of over 30 percent.

2015: A Chinese prop

Let's just be nice and call this the year that Apple ran out of ideas. We saw the diminutive MacBook, the underwhelming Apple Watch, the ridiculously fast iPhone 6S and 6S Plus and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Work also started on Apple's Car project and the Apple Music subscription service was launched.

Sure, they launched a lot of products and one can argue that the Apple Watch is, at least, something new. But as with the launch of the first iPad and the first Macbook Air, the response has been less than tame. Oh, the Watch did sell, but when you're a company selling 250 million iPhones every year, for which the Watch is a perfect companion, 12 million Watches doesn't amount to much.

The 6S and 6S Plus, while major upgrades to the iPhone platform, were identical to their predecessor and in terms of real-world performance, didn't offer much of an upgrade.

To add to those woes, the smartphone market was already stagnating, the economy was struggling and people just didn't see why they needed to spend upwards of Rs 60,000 just to upgrade a fully-functional phone.

More than the devices, the real coup for Apple was a tie-up with China's China Mobile, resulting in an expanded userbase that potentially encompassed over 800 million users. Together with China, India also contributed significantly to Apple's bottom line this year.

The result? $233 billion revenue in one year alone. Staggering.

2016: ?

January to March 2016 saw the launch of a replacement for the iPhone 5S in the form of the iPhone SE and a smaller iPad Pro. Insignificant launches that would obviously not do much for a company like Apple. With nothing new on the horizon, people unwilling to upgrade perfectly functional devices and a smartphone market that was tapped out, where could Apple's sales go but down?

It's also not like they were the only company affected and if you'll notice, Apple still made billions of dollars in profit and there's still half a year left. Sales of iPhones, Macs and iPads did decline, but they've declined everywhere. Apple Music and the Apple Watch even went so far as to make a profit, however insignificant they are to the larger picture.

The future doesn't look any brighter for Apple though. At least, as far as the iPhone is concerned. Apple needs a new product to shake things up all over again and it doesn't look like the Watch is the one to do it.

However, you have to consider that Apple has consistently grown for more than a decade and is currently the most valuable company in the world. The pace at which Apple has grown is unprecedented and a slow down is to be expected.
Anirudh Regidi

Docoss Multimedia Pvt. Ltd. is a company that's become quite popular since Wednesday. Like Ringing Bells, the company is claiming to offer a 3G-ready, 4-inch smartphone for under Rs 1,000. Unlike Ringing Bells and its Freedom 251 however, the company is offering to take pre-orders on 29 April and ship the phones just 4 days later, on 2 May.

If you look at the specifications of the device and compare it to the Freedom 251, you will notice that they're largely similar. You get a slightly lower resolution screen and rear camera on the X1, but it makes up for it by offering dual-SIM support. At 4GB, the internal storage is also very lower than on the Freedom 251, but you do get a microSD slot.

Freedom 251 Docoss X1 Display 4.0 inch IPS 4.0 inch IPS Resolution 960x540 800x480 RAM 1GB 1GB Processor 1.3GHz dual-core 1.3GHz dual-core Storage 8GB 4GB Camera (F/R) 3MP / 0.3MP 2MP / 0.3MP OS Android 5.1 Android 4.4 Battery 1450mAh 1300mAh SIM Single (3G) Dual (3G+2G)

We're pointing out the specs because we want to examine the Bill of Materials (BoM) and since the two devices are largely similar, we can expect the BoM to be in the same ball park.

In an earlier story, we spoke to Vijay R. K., GM  Technology, Operations, Pre-sales at Sakri Group, who mentioned that a more typical BoM of a phone like the Freedom 251 would run to Rs 2,000 to Rs 2,500. This doesn't include tax, shipping and handling and other such extras. But he did add that economies of scale and Make in India would eventually push prices down to the Rs 1,000 range.

What this means is that Docoss will need to find a way of shaving upwards of Rs 1,000 from just the cost of manufacturing each device if they hope to sell it at Rs 888.

Ringing Bells claimed to be relying on economies of scale and "Make in India" policies to bring the cost of the Freedom 251 below Rs 1000. They also claimed to be reliant on "outside investors" to supply the Rs 200  500 crores that they'd need to bring the cost down to Rs 251 per deviceassuming they're actually going to sell 50 lakh devices by June, which they claim they will.

In theory, it's possible that Docoss has managed to bring the price of the device down to below Rs 888. Considering that they're planning to accept pre-orders on April 29 and ship by May 2 however, we don't see how they've taken advantage of economies of scale unless they already have thousands of units in stock and are prepared to ship at the drop of a hat. If the folks behind the Docoss X1 did indeed put this much thought into planning the launch, it's disturbing to see how unprepared they actually are.

Docoss has not had an extensive advertising campaign, the first ads appeared in papers on April 27 and even the domain wasn't registered till a little before 3PM on the same day. The website, docoss.co, couldn't be accessed and none of the 15 listed call-centre numbers that we tried seemed to work. The website does seem to be live today, though we can't seem to be able to place an order for the device just yet. Even the company was only registered March.

Giving Docoss Multimedia Pvt Ltd the benefit of doubt, I think we can say that it's actually is possible to sell and ship a smartphone like the X1 at Rs 888.

However, considering that they plan to do all of that in just 4 days with no apparent preparation, something certainly does indeed smell very fishy.

We've reached out to industry experts for comment and will update the story as and when something happens.
tech2 News Staff

Now that Freedom 251 has a competitor in what now appears to be a "sub Rs 1000" category of smartphones, there is some more news emanating from TechRadar that throws some light on the company, which popular media seems to have forgotten.

According to the report, Ringing Bells will begin shipping its first batch of Freedom 251 smartphones to its customers (backers) starting May. Good for the lucky owners who will receive them. For the rest of those who registered and helped build the hype, there has been not a single email from the company. The company was supposed to send across a link to customers within 48 hours. It's been a good two months now. The government did promise to take action if Ringing Bells failed to deliver the Freedom 251 to its 30,000 customers who paid up.

Turns out Ringing Bells wants to keep things hush hush to avoid controversies from building up once again. More over, there is speculation that the smartphone maker is also planning on introducing newer models in the near future as well, which is a bit odd since the first one has yet to be delivered.

The last we heard about Ringing Bells, it was Adcom (Advantage Computers) who threatened to sue the smartphone maker over damage to its brand name. The Economic Times reported that Ringing Bells somehow managed to purchase 1000 Adcom smartphones that were priced at Rs 3,600 each and sent them out as a demo pieces to a number of publications and customers, claiming that it was a Freedom 251.

After that a first information report (FIR) was registered on Tuesday against Goel and company president Ashok Chaddha under Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) as well as the Information Technology (IT) Act on a complaint filed by BJP leader Kirit Somaiya. The court said that the FIR was premature. Post this there was complete media silence about Ringing Bells.

As of today, the company website shows a "bookings closed" status with a note thanking its patrons for their support with no other details. The only sign of hope for its customers is this statement on the homepage, "We are in the process of compiling the emails and issuing these to first 25 Lacs registrations very soon.".

Let's just hope that the country has learned from the whole Ringing Bells fiasco and has not given in to the upcoming one from Docoss. Docoss Multimedia Private Limited from Jaipur has put up ads in newspapers with a promise to deliver a smartphone that features 4-inch IPS display, a 1.3GHz dual-core Cortex A7 chipset, 1GB RAM and 4GB of internal memory (expandable to 32GB) for little under Rs 1,000. Priced at Rs 888, we are pretty sure there's going to be a lot questions being asked pretty soon.
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Smartphone maker Huawei and its sub-brand Honor on Thursday welcomed government's decision to make a panic button mandatory for all mobiles phones from next year.

The move aims to help improve security of women and assist law enforcement agencies, it said.

"Our research and development center in Bengaluru innovated this functionality and today, Honor smartphones sold in the Indian market already come embedded with a SOS feature," the company said in a statement.

"All our smartphones are equipped with in-built GPS systems to provide assistance to our customers at any given time. Last year, we introduced SOS feature in all our smartphones to ensure women safety. The SOS feature which sends instant messages to three pre-set numbers," Allen Wang, president of consumer business group, Huawei Telecommunication India said.

Other phone makers such as LeEco and Karbonn seem to echo the sentiment.

According to Atul Jain, COO, smart electronics business at LeEco India, this is a welcome step not only for the safety of women but also for every citizen who may be in distress and it is feasible for the manufacturers to re-configure the upcoming devices with panic button.

I think it is possible for manufacturers to have a panic button for new phones that are going to be launched in the next year, Jain told IANS. If you have a mobile phone, you can either press numeric key 5 or 9 to invoke emergency call.

In a statement, Karbonn Mobiles said that the decision by Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad is a step towards harnessing the full potential of mobile devices which could be a potent tool in ensuring womens safety.

Karbonn Mobiles has already been working on developing a mobile SOS app for women which we would be unrolling for Karbonn customers over the next few months, the smartphone maker said.

With inputs from IANS
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In a bid to make a mobile phone handset an effective tool for self protection, especially for women, the government has said no such device will be sold from next year without a single key panic button to connect the nearest redressal agency. This follows a similar move for one emergency '112' number for availing services of police, ambulance and fire department.

"Technology is solely meant to make human life better and what better than using it for the security of women," Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said here on Monday. "I have taken a decision that from January 1, 2017, no cell phone can be sold without a provision for panic button, and from January 1, 2018, mobile sets should also have Global Positioning System inbuilt," Prasad said.

The notification did not specify which agency would connect the number, but sources in the ministry said the decision will be taken soon. The Gazette of India notification said from January 1, 2017, no mobile phone handset manufacturing company shall sell in India: "The feature phones without the facility of panic button by pressing 'numeric key - 5' or 'numeric key - 9' to invoke emergency call."

It also said: "Smartphones without the facility of emergency call button by pressing the same for long time to invoke emergency call or the use of existing power on or off button, when short pressed thrice in quick succession." The notification added: "With effect from January 1, 2018, no mobile phone handset manufacturing company shall sell the new mobile phone handset in India without the facility of identifying the location through satellite-based GPS."

The notification defined a feature phone as one that can access the Internet and play music but lacks provisions of an operating system feature of a personal computer. Smart phone, on the other hand, has all features of a personal computer system. Some of the leading smartphone makers like Vivo, Xiaomi and Karbonn whom IANS tried to contact for a reaction declined to comment on the notification as of now.

In March this year, the government had proposed that people will have to just dial "112" for emergency help from police, ambulance or the fire department. The telecom watchdog had proposed that all existing emergency numbers -- such as 100, 101, 102 and 108 -- be retained as secondary numbers, which would then be re-routed to the single emergency number 112.

IANS
tech2 News Staff

So, it is true after all. The smartphone market is stagnating across the globe or at least the most recent figures from IDC say so. According to the new report, a total of 334.9 million smartphones were shipped worldwide in the last quarter, which is just 0.2 percent increase from the 334.3 million units seen in Q1 2015. It is being recorded as the smallest year-over-year growth.

We've already seen that Apple has witnessed its first ever sales drop in nine years. However, Samsung is believed to continue to dominate the space. The report claims that Samsung shipped more than smartphones than Huawei and Apple combined.

Take a look at this IDC chart for a clearer view of the numbers.

The report also shows how Lenovo and Xiaomi have slipped from their positions, and do not come within the top 5 smartphone brands. They have been replaced by Chinese vendors Oppo and Vivo.

"Outside of China, many of these brands are virtually unknown and the ability of these rapidly growing Chinese vendors to gain entry into mature markets such as the United States and Western Europe will be essential if they have aspirations of catching Apple or Samsung at the top," said Anthony Scarsella, research manager with IDC's Mobile Phone team.

"Huawei has proven that it can sell increasingly premium devices. In China, Huawei is already recognized as a premium brand, but it is now going toe-to-toe on build quality with premium devices like the Nexus 6P that are available worldwide. While Huawei is furthest along in terms of international recognition, selling equally impressive volumes outside of China remains a challenge for many of these brands, whether it is Xiaomi, Lenovo, OPPO, or vivo. Their ability to drive local growth no longer applies when it comes to international expansion, where premium branding quickly turns to price competition," Scarsella adds.
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Internet traffic to Wikipedia pages summarizing knowledge about terror groups and their tools plunged nearly 30 percent after revelations of widespread Web monitoring by the US National Security Agency, suggesting that concerns about government snooping are hurting the ordinary pursuit of information.

A forthcoming paper in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal analyzes the fall in traffic, arguing that it provides the most direct evidence to date of a so-called "chilling effect," or negative impact on legal conduct, from the intelligence practices disclosed by fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Author Jonathon Penney, a fellow at the University of Toronto's interdisciplinary Citizen Lab, examined monthly views of Wikipedia articles on 48 topics identified by the US Department of Homeland Security as subjects that they track on social media, including Al Qaeda, dirty bombs and jihad.

In the 16 months prior to the first major Snowden stories in June 2013, the articles drew a variable but an increasing audience, with a low point of about 2.2 million per month rising to 3.0 million just before disclosures of the NSA's Internet spying programs. Views of the sensitive pages rapidly fell back to 2.2 million a month in the next two months and later dipped under 2.0 million before stabilizing below 2.5 million 14 months later, Penney found.

The traffic dropped even more to topics that survey respondents deemed especially privacy-sensitive. Viewership of a presumably "safer" group of articles about US government security forces decreased much less in the same period.

Penney's results, subjected to peer-review, offer a deeper dive into an issue investigated by previous researchers, including some who found a 5.0 percent drop in Google searches for sensitive terms immediately after June 2013. Other surveys have found sharply increased use of privacy-protecting Web browsers and communications tools.

Penney's work may provide fodder for technology companies and others arguing for greater restraint and disclosure about intelligence-gathering. Chilling effects are notoriously difficult to document and so have limited impact on laws and court rulings.

More immediately, the research could aid a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Wikipedia's nonprofit parent organization and other groups against the NSA and the Justice Department.

The year-old suit argues that intelligence collection from backbone Internet traffic carriers violated the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches.

Reuters
Counter-terrorism cell round the clock

BD, US to fight together

Staff Reporter :

In the wake of recent killings, the home ministry is going to open a crime control cell which will work round the clock in a bid to fight terrorism across the country.

The additional secretary of the Home Ministry, Abu Hena Muhammad Rahmatul Munim will act as the chief of the counter-terrorism cell, sources in the home ministry said.

"We are going to set up counter-terrorism cell round the clock in order to fight terrorism across the country," Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told reporters at his Secretariat office on Wednesday.

Asaduzzaman Khan earlier had a meeting with the US ambassador Marcia Bernicat and discussed with her various issues specially relating to recent killings of USAID official and LGBT magazine editor Xulhaz Mannan and his friend Mahbub Tonoy and Rajshahi University professor AFM Rezaul Karim Siddiquee.

They also discussed the murder of a Bangladeshi couple Golam Rabbi and his wife Shamima Rabbi at San Jose of California in the United States.

After the meeting the US ambassador Marcia Bernicat told journalists that she just met with the Home Minister and the heads of the police forces to discuss the latest killing incidents.

"They are our strong partners. But they can't do this job alone, none of us can. We all have to do this together," she said.

"We are working very hard in line with our counter-terrorism cooperations principle and I can assure you that my government wants to help Bangladesh," she said.

US ambassador said that the US wants to make sure that the country has all the tools its needs for this fight.

She termed the killings as barbaric saying, "I want to say to you all today that no human being deserves the death he got. It doesn't matter what you believe, it doesn't matter what you write, it doesn't matter who you love and it certainly doesn't matter whether you pray to a god or not. You don't deserve to be killed."

Asaduzzaman Khan said that "I urged the US ambassador to share any information they had, be it intelligentsia or any other kind of information, with the Bangladesh government."

The Home Minister informed the US ambassador that they are expanding units of police force to increase efficiency.

"I also told her (Marcia Bernicat) to arrange training for our officers, so that we can work together," he said, adding Bernicat had welcomed the proposal and assured of necessary supports. The US ambassador mourned the brutal killing of USAID official and LGBT magazine editor Xulhaz Mannan and his friend Mahbub Tonoy on Monday and said the embassy family offered their prayers for Xulhaz before they visited his cemetery.
Pre-polls clash leaves 1 dead in Kushtia

Kushtia, Apr 28 (UNB)-An activist of Awami League was killed and 15 other people were injured in a clash between the supporters of the ruling party-backed chairman aspirant and a rebel candidate over the ensuing union parishad elections at Dahakula village in Alampur union of Sadar upazila on Thursday morning. Police arrested 15 people in connection with the clash. The deceased was identified as Masud Karim Laltu Molla, son of Sohrab Uddin Molla of the village. Quoting locals, police said supporters of the incumbent chairman, Aktaruzzaman Biswas, attacked men of AL-rebel candidate Sheikh Siraj Uddin, a former chairman of the union, after they gathered in front of a tea stall in the area around 10:00am, leaving 15 people injured. The attackers also hacked Laltu Molla, who with grievous injuries was rushed to Kushtia General Hospital, where he died later. The fourth phase UP elections are scheduled to be held on May 7.
Air strikes on Aleppo hospital kill 20: observatory

Civil defence members carry a casualty after an airstrike at a field hospital in the rebel held area of al-Sukari district of Aleppo, Syria April 27, 2016. Reuters/Abdalrhman Ismail

Reuters: Air strikes hit a hospital in a rebel-held area of Syria's Aleppo, killing 20 people, including three children and the last pediatrician in the city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Thursday. Two other doctors were also among those killed, the Britain-based war monitor said. In a statement on its Facebook page, the Civil Defence rescue service in rebel-held areas of Aleppo put the death toll at 30. The Observatory said in the past six days in Aleppo 84 civilians had been killed in government air strikes and 49 civilians were killed in rebel shelling of government-held areas. Fighting in Aleppo began to escalate on April 22 and a Feb. 27 cessation of hostilities agreement, which initially reduced violence in many areas of Syria, was described by the United Nations as being "barely alive" on Thursday.
N Korea rushes to re-test intermediate missile, fails again: South Korea

North Korea initially tried to test a Musudan on April 15, but the exercise ended in failure

Reuters, Seoul :

North Korea fired what appeared to have been an intermediate range ballistic missile on Thursday but it crashed seconds after the test launch, South Korea's defense ministry said, the second such failure in the run-up to next week's ruling party congress.

Isolated North Korea has conducted a flurry of missile launches, in violation of U.N. resolutions, and tests of military technology ahead of the Workers' Party congress that begins on May 6, and Thursday's launch looks to have been hurried, according to a defense expert in Seoul.

A South Korean defense ministry official told Reuters that the launch at about 6:40 a.m. local time (2140 GMT Wednesday) from near the east coast city of Wonsan appeared to have been of a Musudan missile with a range of more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles). It crashed within seconds, the official said.

"They are in a rush to show anything that is successful, to meet the schedule of a political event, the party congress," said Yang Uk, a senior research fellow at the Korea Defence and Security Forum and a policy adviser to the South Korean navy.

"They need to succeed but they keep failing. They didn't have enough time to fix or technically modify the system, but just shot them because they were in hurry," he said. Thursday's apparent failure marks another setback for the North's young leader Kim Jong Un. A similar missile launched on the April 15 birthday of his grandfather, the country's founder, Kim Il Sung, exploded in what the U.S. Defense Department called a "fiery, catastrophic" failure.

Some experts had predicted that North Korea would wait until it had figured out what went wrong in the previous failed Musudan missile launch before attempting another, a process that could take months and a sign that Thursday's firing was rushed.

However, South Korea's Yonhap news agency had reported on Tuesday that the North appeared to be preparing the second launch of a Musudan, which theoretically has the range to reach any part of Japan and the U.S. territory of Guam. According to South Korea, the missile has never been successfully flight-tested.
Trump vows to spearhead `America-first` policy if elected

US Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally.

AP, Washington :A day after sweeping primaries across the Northeast on his march to the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump sought to boost his commander-in-chief credentials with a speech promising to dramatically upend U.S. foreign policy."'America first' will be the major and overriding theme of my administration," Trump said on Wednesday in Washington, reaching back to a World War II-era isolationist slogan. As president, he pledged, he'll "develop a new foreign policy purpose for our country, one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace. It's time to shake the rust off America's foreign policy."Trump's address relied on broad assurances and political rhetoric, covering much of the world without addressing the complexities that one promise introduced to another. His speech, in which he didn't unveil policy specifics, tied his anti-interventionist and world-wary views to his immigration restrictionism and anti-trade policies, which have been staples of his campaign during his rise in the Republican race."Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster. No vision, no purpose, no direction, no strategy," he said, identifying as one problem U.S. interventions, such as in Iraq and Libya, based on "the dangerous idea that we could make western democracies out of countries that had no interest" in representative government."The Trump administration will lead a free world that is properly armed and funded-and funded beautifully," he said, saying he'd boost military spending and focus on combating "radical Islamic terrorism."Trump's proposals-which include temporarily banning the entry of Muslims to the United States, forcing Mexico to pay for a wall along its U.S. border, and making Persian Gulf states pay for a "safe zone" in war-torn Syria-have been scorned by many foreign governments and policy experts, yet proven popular with conservative voters.Leading up to the address, given at the Mayflower Hotel, Trump faced pressure to identify who gave him foreign policy advice, and announced a team in March led by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Last month on MSNBC, Trump described himself as his chief foreign policy adviser "because I have a very good brain."After Tuesday's voting, Trump has more than three-quarters of the delegates he needs to win the Republican nomination outright, according to Associated Press estimates.Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is now about 90 percent of the way there. Her experience as President Barack Obama's top diplomat until 2013 helps make her a formidable opponent on the issue of foreign policy: A recent George Washington University Battleground Poll found that even though a generic GOP candidate has an advantage of 48 to 44 percent over Democrats on foreign affairs, Clinton leads Trump by a margin of 60 to 33 percent in that category among voters nationally.
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Tanvir, Peya Bipasha together in TV ad

Sheikh Arif Bulbon :Promising model and TV actor Tanvir Khan got the opportunity to work under renowned advertisement makers like Afzal Hossain, Amitabh Reza in their TV commercials. His performances in those TVCs were highly appreciated to all. For the first time, Tanvir Khan worked together with Peya Bipasha in a TVC. They performed together in a TVC of a multinational companys topper. The TVC was made by Masud Jakaria. From last week the TVC is being aired in different satellite channels. While talking about to share his experiences in the TVC Tanvir told this correspondent, The TVC is being aired in different channels for few days but I am getting huge response from the viewers. Earlier I could not realize the work with Peya Bipasha would become popular to all. I give thanks to the ad-maker for making a nice TVC.Peya Bipasha shared her feelings by this way, I am really impressed to work in the new TVC. Though it was my first work with Tanvir Bhai we had a better understanding between us while working in the TVC. I am really getting positive response from the viewers about the TVC.Under Amitabh Rezas direction Tanvir Khan worked as a model in a TVC of Banglalink, while Peya Bipasha performed as a model in the TVC of Polar Ice-cream under Dhrubo Hasans direction. From next month Peya Bipasha will become engaged with shooting of Azizur Rahmans movie titled Mati in Canada. On May 13 her acted and Jafar Sayem directed movie Rudro - The Gangster is scheduled to be released across the country. She has already finished shooting of Rakibul Alam Rakibs movie Moner Raza. On the other hand, in TVC arena, Tanvir Khan worked against popular actresses like Diti, Moushumi, Purnima, Bidya Sinha Mim, among others. Tanvir Khans a serial titled Life In A Metro is being aired on ATN Bangla now. On the occasion of coming Eid-ul-Fitr, he is taking preparation to work in several numbers of plays. He will go to Maldives to take part in shooting of Eid plays under Maniks direction, he said.
BNP questions police role over recent killings

UNB, Dhaka :BNP on Thursday questioned the role of police over the recent killings, including Kalabagan double murder and Gazipur jail guard, saying what the law enforcers are doing to deal with the situation.Speaking at a milad mahfil, party senior leader Gayeshwar Chandra Roy also criticised the government for what he said its efforts to shift blame on the opposition for any murder incident in the country. "BNP-Jamaat are being blamed after any incident of killing, enforced disappearance and rape. If BNP-Jamaat does everything, then what are you doing? What are police doing to rein in the crimes?" he said pointing at the government.BNP and its associate bodies arranged the milad mahfil on the ground floor of its Nayapaltan central office seeking early recovery of its ailing senior leader Tariqul Islam. Tariqul has been undergoing treatment at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore for kidney problems. The BNP leader said the government will not be able to confuse people by blaming opposition only to hide its failure to ensure their security.
Ban Ki-moon condemns EU migrant curbs

BBC Online :UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has criticised "increasingly restrictive" policies on migrants in Europe.In a speech to the Austrian parliament, he said such curbs ran counter to member countries' international duties.He was speaking a day after Austrian MPs approved a draft law restricting asylum rights and allowing most claims to be rejected at the border.The European Union, including Austria, is struggling to cope with a huge influx of mainly Syrian migrants.More than a million people arrived in Europe last year sparking the worst refugee crisis on the continent since World War Two, and creating division in the EU over how to deal with it. "I am concerned that European countries are now adopting increasingly restrictive immigration and refugee policies," Mr Ban told MPs in Vienna."Such policies negatively affect the obligation of member states under international humanitarian law and European law."Mr Ban did not name any country but, given the venue, the speech has been widely interpreted as being aimed at least in part at Austria, correspondents say.The country's new bill would allow the government to declare a "state of emergency" over migrants and to reject most asylum-seekers, including those from Syria.It also limits any successful claim to asylum status to three years. Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said Austria had no other choice as long as "so many other EU members fail to do their part" to limit the influx.The legislation, which now goes to the upper house, has been condemned by rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Court`s proceedings may more complicate the return of money

THE globally publicized US$81-million money-laundering scandal has created an international embarrassment for us and the Philippines. The least the Philippine Government can do now is to return the money as fast possible without legal complications. Bangladesh has expressed concerns that the return of the money stolen by hackers from its central bank - which found its way into a local bank, and then was transferred to local casinos - could be delayed. Bangladeshi Ambassador John Gomes told a local daily of his hope that by April or May the money could be returned since most of it has been accounted for. He was specifically concerned about "delays that could be avoided," considering the long legal process involved in forfeiture cases.Under existing laws, the Anti-Money Laundering Council has to file a civil forfeiture case and secure a court order before the government can turn over to Bangladesh the recovered funds. The Bangladesh government, in turn, has to formally intervene in the case and claim ownership of the money so that the court can order the return of the funds to it. That is the advice we have received from our Ambassador in Philippines. But this aspect needs to be legally examined from our end. The Department of Justice (DOJ) assured the Bangladeshi Ambassador that the money stolen by hackers from the Bangladesh Bank will be returned to its government as soon as possible but procedures have to be followed. Otherwise, the money will be declared a property of the Philippines. According to Ambassador Gomes, the Embassy, on behalf of the Bangladesh government, is submitting the papers to formally claim the surrendered and confiscated amounts as well as the remaining funds believed to be still in the country. We cannot believe that the money so stolen through computer hacking from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is so clearly admitted that it should require lengthy legal proceedings if our relationship with Philippines is strong and friendly. Our Ambassador told us what he was advised in Philippines. It cannot be true that Bangladesh has not formally claimed the money. Our own view is that Bangladesh should act in conjunction with Federal Reserve Bank of New York. There is nothing to prove that the money belongs to Bangladesh. If the formality is to lodging a claim, the claim must have been made with concerned authorities in Philippines.Our fear is that court proceedings could not be as simple as filing a claim in court on behalf of Bangladesh. We are also not sure that the matter is expertly handled. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York should be our most effective partner in securing the stolen money back.
Concern over decline of expatriates' remittance

THE decline in the expatriate workers remittance in the past several months is a matter of grave concern to the nation. The Finance Minister's statement to Parliament showed the country had received Tk. 7,487 crore in remittances in the last six months of the last FY 2014-15 but it declined Tk. 7482 crore in the first six moths of the current fiscal 2015-16. The Finance Minister said manpower exports increased this time in comparison to the past. It is not clearly understood if the manpower exports has increased why remittance will come down, it raises a big question as to why it may happen. As most of our migrant workers belong to poor families in the rural areas, the decline of remittance will surely have adverse effects on the families and the rural economy with declining consumption and well-being of the people as a whole.

Remittances, sent by more than eight million Bangladeshi migrant workers abroad, plays a crucial role in the economic development of the country, helping the country to improve the poverty situation, accelerate economic development and maintain a healthy balance of payments. Bangladesh received nearly $15 billion in as remittances in the last fiscal, making it the world's eighth largest remittance corridor. Yet the manpower sector, which is a pivotal factor to the country's economy; is facing numerous problems including ill practices by unscrupulous recruitment agencies in one hand and lack of well-ordained government initiatives for recruitment and easy way of sending money to families. Our workers abroad may be encouraged to send more of their earnings through formal channels offering higher exchange rates and reducing gap between inter-bank and market-based exchange rates. It is important as a substantial part of remittances still come through unofficial channels where higher exchange rates will encourage reversing their routes. The banking arrangements should also be made faster and easier to reach money to the beneficiaries. Exorbitant charge of remittance transfer takes away a big chunk of money midway. In the experts' opinion, serious government steps may allow more remittance to come through competitive banking channels and in one estimate it may save at least one billion dollar annually, which is going through private operators hands now.

As the country depends substantially on the remittances sent by its overseas workers the fall in the remittance, particularly when more workers are claimed to have gone abroad during the period deserves careful screening. What may be wrong in the process is the big question. Moreover when employment is not enough at local level, Bangladesh is eyeing on robust remittance through exporting more workers to new markets we must ensure exporting skilled and trained workers abroad to avoid stiff competition from others.
Diploma nurses go on hunger strike

Unemployed diploma nurse staged demonstration wearing burial clothes in city reiterating their demand to recruit them on the basis of seniority and merit. This photo was taken on Thursday.

M M Jasim :The unemployed diploma nurses staged indefinite demonstration in front of the National Press Club for the 25th day on Thursday, demanding cancellation of test-based recruitment.They resorted to hunger strike unto death the same day at the same place. They also brought out a procession wearing coffins.Bangladesh Diploma Bekar Nurses' Association (BDBNA) President Rina Akhter told The New Nation on Thursday that the nurses under the banner of BDBNA and Bangladesh Basic Graduate Nurses' Society (BBGNS) have been demanding the government to press home their demand, but the government did not pay heed to their demands. Now they have nothing but to go on hunger strike," she said. General Secretary of Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) Shirin Akhter in the rally on Thursday expressed her solidarity with the nurses' ongoing demonstration and said: The nurses' demonstration is logical. "Your demonstration will not be failure. I will talk to the Parliament members on the issue. Even I will talk with the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. I think that she will take initiative to resolve the crisis," she said. Earlier the Public Service Commission decided to appoint the diploma nurses through examinations instead of existing system. The circular was published in different national dailies on November 25. On March 28, a circular advertising recruitment of 3,616 senior nurses through examinations frustrated unemployed nursing graduates who were hoping to be recruited on the basis of year of graduation, merit and seniority.Since then the unemployed diploma nurses have been holding various programmes in front of the National Press Club, Central Shaheed Mina, and some other places in a peaceful manner. At least 40 nurses were injured on that day after police charged batons, lobbed tear gas canisters, and used pepper spray and water cannons on the demonstrators at the Shahabah intersection of the capital. The nurses also gheraoed the office of the Directorate of Nursing Services at Agargaon in Dhaka on April 2. They submitted two memorandums to the Prime Minister and the Health Minister on April 3.M Iqbal Hossain Sabuj, a leader of the organization, said, the new rules could prevent qualified, senior nurses from getting jobs as they were likely to be out of consideration for theory presented in nursing books for student nurses."We want the government a recruitment policy based on batch, seniority and merit like the past," Faruk Hossain, secretary general of the nurses association," he said. Mousumi Akter, one of the demonstrating nurses, said, "We will be on the street till our demands are met. If required, we will soak our white dresses with our blood and then we will return home."President of BBGNS Rajib Kumar Biswas said, the BDBNA and BBGNS have been observing a peaceful demonstration jointly with the sole demand of recruiting on the basis of batch, merit and seniority for a long period, though no hope has so far been provided by the government yet".He said, "Earlier, the nurse friendly government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina recruited about 6,500 nurses in two phases according to batch, merit and seniority. At present, the number of unemployed nurses holding diploma-in-nursing and BSC-in-Nursing degrees is almost 2,100, though there is a huge shortage of nurses in the public sector. At present, 10,000 posts are vacant for nurses, though available vacant posts are only 3,728. 89pc of these 13,728 posts should be filled with registered nurses with diploma-in-nursing degrees and 11pc posts should be filled with registered nurses with basic BSC-in-Nursing degrees according to batch, merit and seniority. Recruitment advertising for 616 'senior stuff nurse' published by Bangladesh Public Service Commission (PSC) should be cancelled for the greater interest."
'Bangladesh suffers lack of media freedom'

newsnextbd .com :

A global research organisation has said press freedom in Bangladesh was hampered extensively because of the intimidation from both state and non-state factors, including suspected Islamist militants, in the Muslim-majority South Asian country.

The Freedom House, a pro-democracy group, in its annual Global Press Freedom report 2015 downturned Bangladesh from its "party free" status to "not free" status. Continued legal harassment of media outlets and press freedom advocates, government-imposed economic pressure on certain outlets and attempt to censor social media on the on hand and murders of bloggers and a publisher by Islamist militants, threats and nonfatal attacks against other writers have made the country's status downgraded. The annual report said Bangladesh is among the countries that experienced the largest decline in regards to freedom of expression in the year.

Turkey, Burundi, France, Serbia, Yemen, Egypt, Macedonia, and Zimbabwe are substantially suffered the decline status after Bangladesh in terms of media freedom. Bangladesh's media atmosphere faced major setbacks in 2015, said the survey adding that the year was substantiated by fatally attacks against bloggers and a spate of politically motivated legal cases against journalists.

Growing concerns over state censorship-including of internet-based content-also had a chilling effect on freedom of expression, the report pointed out. At least four bloggers and a publisher were killed by extremists in Bangladesh in 2014. The bloggers had produced content which was critical of religious fundamentalism, the report mentioned. Many other writers are being threatened and injured in similar attacks regularly, the report said. The writers also felt compelled to go silent, relocate, or flee away the country in fear of it.

The authorities temporarily blocked social media sites on security grounds, allegedly forced the suspension of a popular political talk show, the research said. They threatened dozens of people with contempt of court charges for signing a letter in support of a British journalist who had been convicted on similar charges in late 2014.

The government also reportedly put high pressures on private companies to withdraw advertising from two critical newspapers.




Don't wait for humanitarian parole asylum, this is rare

Staff Reporter :

Diplomats of the US Embassy in Dhaka have suggested the Bangladeshis not to wait for humanitarian parole asylum in the United States, as the advantage is rare in that country.

Two diplomats of the US told the journalists on Thursday that the humanitarian parole is being used 'sparingly' to bring someone who is otherwise inadmissible into the US for a temporary period of time due to a compelling emergency.

Counsellor for Political and Economic Affairs at the US Embassy in Dhaka Andrea Brouillette-Rodriguez and Consul General of the Embassy Elizabeth Gourlay were talking to a group of journalists at the Embassy on the US 'humanitarian parole asylum' issue.

The two diplomats said that the humanitarian parole asylum is the last resort for those who are in extreme danger.

Andrea Brouillette-Rodriguez said that the US Embassy has no control on humanitarian parole. "Those who want to apply can courier their documents directly to the DHS. The details are available on the website."

Echoing the same, Elizabeth Gourlay said, "The process takes time. So don't wait for it. If you are in danger, go to a different country, or another city within your country, where you feel safe."

Elizabeth Gourlay further said that it was 'very rare' to approve such parole. In her 30-year career she herself found one case that has been approved by the DHS. Brouillette-Rodriguez said that she found two cases in her 20 years of service. "This rigorous process can take more than 120 days. Those who are in extreme danger must not wait for such a long time," she said.

The two diplomats called upon the government and people of Bangladesh to work together and reject extremists' ideology.

After the latest killing of LGBT rights activist Xulhaz Mannan and his friend Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy, the US Department of State has said giving shelter to those in danger "is an option under consideration". But it depends solely on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that is responsible for the humanitarian parole approval, the State Department had earlier said.
US should know the distinction between their blogger culture and our crisis

US Ambassador Marcia Bernicat's comments that killers are getting away with murders which she made after meeting with Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan on Wednesday is not something new. But the US government's reaction to the killing of USAID official and LGBT magazine editor Xulhaz and his friend Tonoy is understood as he was also a former protocol officer of Bernicat's predecessor Dan W Mozena and popular to Embassy employees. We must say that the US Envoy's loud reaction on killing of Rajshahi University Professor Rezaul Karim Siddiquee has equally echoed the sentiment of the peace-loving people of Bangladesh. These are barbaric killings and everybody support her call that the government must come out of the culture of impunity. Secretary of State John Kerry's personal condolence and praise for Xulhaz Mannan that he was 'embodying the spirit of Bangladesh' and US State Department spokesman's characterisation that he was a 'courageous advocate for LGBT rights' which is known as homosexuality, equally speaks of the US government anger that follows the twin killing. Although Bangladesh is totally opposed to homosexuality in the society instead of the fact that it embodies the spirit of the nation, we can't tolerate the killings; it is awful and killers must be punished. It is our belief that the US government does not care to know the reality in Bangladesh. Our government should know more about the bloggers if they are working to serve a foreign agenda to create unnecessary crisis. The USA is not eager to distinguish between their culture of gay political crisis. It is a shame. Violence and lawlessness in Bangladesh are linked every way with bureaucratic police, abuse of power for corruption and a sense of political impunity among few connected with the government. For public the police discipline and efficiency are badly affected. Otherwise we would have an efficient and smart police force to better serve the people. It is admitted that we have no politics and political opposition. BNP is a family party and not a political party with any political commitment. That makes people more helpless.
A bid to require movie theaters across Louisiana to install metal detectors has been rejected by the House Criminal Justice Committee.

by The Associated Press

A makeshift memorial in front of the Grand Theatre in Lafayette, scene of a fatal shooting last July Photo by Robin May

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  A Shreveport lawmaker's bid to require movie theaters across Louisiana to install metal detectors has been rejected by the House Criminal Justice Committee.

Rep. Barbara Norton, a Democrat, proposed a mandate that every theater-goer be scanned for weapons after a Lafayette movie theater shooting in July that left three people dead and nine wounded.

Lawmakers on the House committee voted 6-5 Wednesday to shelve Norton's bill. Rep. Tony Bacala, a Prairieville Republican, made the motion to reject the measure, saying he had several concerns including that metal detectors might create a "false sense of security."

Rep. Terry Landry, a New Iberia Democrat, successfully pushed an exemption for people with a concealed handgun permit. That wasn't enough to win support for the bill.
The reason I put up that "Zen of Fishing" post yesterday was because of something Ken Tanaka saidhe pointed out that if we were going to talk about "the ones that got away," we should also talk about the pictures we get because of serendipityessentially, luck. In photography, you miss a lotyou have tobut you also get lucky sometimes, and that makes up for it. In the nice video of the truly great National Geographic photographer William Albert Allard that Joseph Brunjes contributed to the discussion, Bill Allard elaborates on the same theme. He knows what he's talking about, of course, as anyone who is familiar with his work knows.

So for this post, I tried to find some pictures of mine that came about by getting luckythings I just happened to see because I was "out and about" with a camera and happened to come across them. But of course half my boxes are still in the barn from my move at the end of last summer, and I couldn't put my hands on the prints I needed. Don't know what I am going to do about that.

Everybody has different ways of practicing photography. Everybody has different aims and goals, and different ideas of success. That's okay, of course. And I never mean to dictate to anyone how they ought to work or how they ought to feel about things. A common leitmotif of writing about photography is that people jump to the assumption that we're asserting status-oriented claims about what's good and what's badas if, when we dispute it and settle it between ourselves, it would matter. It doesn't. You should have strong ideas about where you standI guarantee almost every artist doesbut other people are going to go right on doing whatever it is they do. Even if their ideas are all wrong and they don't know a teakettle from a teacup. :-)

But if I can get back on topic, my idea of photographing really is that it's very much like fishing, if you can ignore the ethical and qualitative differences between "catching a prize fish" and "making a great photograph." It's not the metaphor of the end result but the metaphor of the process of getting to the end result that's rich. Photography essentially is serendipity. You put yourself in the middle of your story, in Bill Allard's fine phrase, but even then you really don't know what you're going to find, what pictures you're going to be able to come up with. The question of why some photographs work and other, similar photographs don't work seems simple enough, but only on a superficial level. Go to a deep enough level and it is profoundly a mystery.

Well, I've just taken ten times too many words to say what Ken and Bill said much more simply. Yeah, we miss a lot of shots sometimesbut then other times, we get something great that we didn't expect couldn't have foreseen. So it goes both ways.

Sorry I can't show you my modest examples.

Mike

(Thanks to Ken, Joseph and, indirectly, William Albert Allard)

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

Featured Comments from:

Steve Rosenblum: "'Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits prepares' Louis Pasteur. Translation: "In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind." It's easier to be lucky if you are prepared to take advantage of your luck. In my opinion, this is undeniably true in almost every discipline whether it be artistic, scientific, or otherwise."

Jeff Buttel: "A friend of mine studied with Harry Callahan in the '60s, and shared this quote with me. 'I'm a very lucky photographer. And the more photographs I take, the luckier I get.'"

Bruce Bordner: "I have one 'lucky catch' that perhaps is less impressive without the story. Look first: I'll wait. OK, nice shot, but...? Complex story; sorry. August 2010, Quebec lower city, simultaneous French Heritage and Pirate festivalsa target-rich environment. I was stalking the group of pirates for a while. (Nikon F100, Fuji Velvia 100?, Nikon 1835mm) The crowd was very dense in the narrow streets, so I could only see heads. The locals were mostly costumed, but we tourists were anti-photogenic.... Suddenly the group of French Ladies appeared from the other direction, and the Pirates went in for a taste. My camera was on my face without thinking... Just as the two groups merged, the crowd parted and click and then it all dissolved and we all went our separate ways. As you've said, one's memories of the event add more to our own appreciation of a shot. To me, this is one of my best images, but perhaps not for artistic reasons."

Dennis Dunkerson: "Perhaps because I do both, I am hooked on the fishing analogy. There are several parallels. Some fish to hang their capture on the wall (Artists); some eat their capture (Professional or Starving Artist?); while others put them back (masses of unseen digital photos). Then there are those that do not really fish that much but prefer to collect thousand dollar rods, lures, fly tying equipment, boats and special fishing clothing. Somehow a good analogy never seems to end."

Yonatan K: "One of my favorite pictures was exactly as you (and Ken) describe. I was out for a walk with my son and a camera and we saw a bunch of pigeons behind a local grocery store (I've had a pigeon picture fetish since childhood). The resulting photograph was a collaborationmy son charged the pigeons and as they took flight, I snapped the photo. I don't know that I would describe it as great in any objective sense, but I like it (in no small part because of the collaborative aspect)."

Mike replies: I like it too. (I did a project in art school, part tongue-in-cheek like most things I did back then, called "The Great Pigeon Safari.")

Manuel: "I discovered William Albert Allard about a year ago, and he became one of my favourite photographers instantly. The video you linked to is quite an inspiration, but when I look at some of W. A. Allard's best pictures, I see the outcome of careful preparation and more than a little bit of patience. In particular, Mr Allard has a keen eye for composition, and it's clear he knows how to wait until everything falls into place to form a significant composition. Sometimes you have to wait for that 'decisive moment' to happen. It might take several minutes, or it can occur in an instant; sometimes it happens right in front of your eyes, sometimes you just have to look for it. Either way you have to be properly trained in order to recognize such scenic organization when it happens. I guess this can only come out of experience. It has little to do with luck: even when it looks like a fluke, it really isn't: you were there, and you were ready to see that significant composition forming in your viewfinder. Joseph Brunies' quotation of Seneca says it all."
CARBONDALE  Two of the four individuals alleged to be involved in the March 27 shooting that resulted in the death of Carbondale musician Tim Beaty and the injury of another man pleaded not guilty Thursday at a preliminary hearing.

Travis Tyler and John Ingram, both 21 and of Cape Girardeau, were each indicted April 21 on charges of aggravated battery with a firearm, a Class X felony, and aggravated discharge of a firearm into an occupied building, a Class 1 felony. The defendants pleaded not guilty on Thursday.

During the hearing, defense attorney Bryan Drew alleged that Tyler and Ingram acted in self defense.

He also told the court that the defendants do not have criminal histories, they both have concealed carry permits from the state of Missouri, and are exceptional students at Southeast Missouri State University.

Drew motioned for a reduction in bonds, but was denied by Judge Kimberly Dahlen.

"One million (dollars) is too much," Drew said.

Casey Bloodworth, representing the Jackson County State's Attorney's Office, reminded the court that the individuals had been indicted under Class X and Class 1 felonies, alleging that the pair shot across the street, striking and injuring Nehemiah Greenlee.

Bloodworth also rebutted Drew's other arguments.

"Illinois does not recognize Missouri carry licenses," he said. "They have zero ties to the community other than the incident. Bonds should be set to the safety of the public."

The charges allege that on March 27, both men acted together in committing a battery causing injury to Greenlee and that the two knowingly discharged a firearm at, or into, a building on West Walnut Street at a time when the building was occupied.

Beaty, 41, was fatally shot inside the residence.

Dahlen also granted a motion for the use of blood and saliva samples in the case.
MARION  IHOP is taking another step forward in becoming a reality for Southern Illinois residents.

The Marion City Council approved the execution of a Tax Increment Financing, or TIF, agreement between the Pancake Holding Company, LLC and the city.

IHOP has yet to begin construction, said City Administrator Gail West, but the companys plans have been approved. She didnt say when the company plans to begin building.

They are on their way, she said.

The contract says the IHOP building will have an address of 2607 Blue Heron Drive, near the Holiday Inn Express in Marion.

The TIF agreement has a $2,050,000 cap on benefits. The estimated TIF eligible costs include land acquisition for $1.6 million, professional fees  architectural, engineering, legal and accounting  is $75,000 and interest costs at $375,000.

The contract states that the city shall reimburse the developer  IHOP  70 percent of the annual net increment increase in real estate tax generated over the base year of eligible costs. The developer will continue to receive 70 percent of the new base value throughout the life of the TIF district or when the benefit cap is reached. The TIF district ends in 2026.

A TIF district is created by creating a boundary area with an equalized assessed value of all the property. Once that base is set, any improvements made in that area that facilitated an increase of the value of an individual property creates a tax increment.

A tax increment is the difference between the base value when the property is originally assessed and the new assessment after redevelopment. If a project doesnt end up creating any improvement in real estate taxes, the developer will not receive any reimbursement.

West has said in the place that TIF isnt just free money given to a developer to improve a site.

The developer has to incur all the costs. Our TIF is just a reimbursement, she said. They have to provide all of their receipts, checks and everything to show they done what our redevelopment agreement says.

In Carbondale, Interim City Manager Gary Williams said construction has begun on the IHOP, which will be next to Staples.

He said he was not made aware of the official timeline, but said he said the company hopes to be open by the time the fall semester starts at Southern Illinois University.
A former postal carrier for the Carbondale Post Office pleaded guilty Thursday to two counts of mail theft, according to a news release from James L. Porter, acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois.

Michelle L. Leggans, 36, of Murphysboro will be sentenced Aug. 10. She faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000, and up to three years of supervised release.

During her plea hearing, Leggans admitted that while she was working as a postal mail carrier in 2012, she stole two items of mail. One item was gift card from Kohls Department Store; the second item was a parcel from eBay.

 The Southern
Brian S. Barringer, 44, of Marion was sentenced April 28 in Saline County Court to 10 years in prison, three years mandatory supervised release and a $4,000 fine after he pleaded guilty to unlawful possession with intent to deliver methamphetamine, a Class 1 felony. Barringer also forfeited $3,813 in U.S. currency to Illinois State Police.

On Aug. 1, 2015, Illinois State Troopers responded to a three-vehicle accident on Illinois 45 in Saline County. During the accident investigation, eight bags of suspected methamphetamine were found in close proximity to $3,813 in cash. Two bags contained 3.15 grams of methamphetamine, while the other six contained .9 grams.

Charges were based on the individually packaged bags and the large amount of cash found. Class 1 felonies normally are punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison and fines of up to $25,000.

 The Southern
CARTERVILLE  John A. Logan board and trustees voted Tuesday to recall several employees after approval of 55 faculty and staff layoffs March 2.

According to Ron House, JALC president, the recommended positions  consisting of full-time employments for dean for academic affairs, building maintenance, dean for financial operations and a director for term faculty instruction, executive director of integrated technology, and part-time employment for CHEC observer  are all internal positions voted back on because of the college's needs.

"We call back people and laid off people in accordance to the need of the college, House said.

According to Larry Peterson, interim vice president for administration, the positions are a basis for introductory stages of reorganization.

"We have to set about a structure to where there are checks and balances in that structure, and reporting lines in that structure that we think can best serve the college going forward," Peterson said. "Based on this new reality of reduced state funding and enrollment on the rebound and things like that, its just a complex process, and we want to make sure that we give that some good thought."

Peterson also explained in a follow-up interview that the positions will be filled by those recalled  because of approved retirements.

However, Matt Garrison, an English instructor and chief negotiator for the Faculty Association, said that staff with indirect monetary values affected by the reduction in force have issues regarding the recall process.

As a result, Garrison said, the association plans to present the board with a proposal "to anticipate some of the common situations that impact recalls if they agree to specific processes for those situations, therefore asserting transparency and responsibility on all sides."

According to Garrison, full-time faculty struggled to come to terms with many issues regarding why the board enforced the cuts. He also reiterated the "devastating blow" that remain for those involved.

Barbara Jane Summers, a retired employee, also spoke on the matter presenting the board with encouragement.

"Take stopgap funds as an opportunity to establish a transparent and fair relationship between the board, trustees and their staff," she said.

As you consider whatever recalling might be possible, please consider carefully how you might do it. ... Dont fight the wrong fight, or pick the wrong enemies.
I read with interest Leonard Pitts' article (The Southern 4/12/16) regarding the tragic loss of innocent lives in war. He opened his column by recalling the March 1945 fire bombing of Tokyo by 334 U.S. B-29 Superfortresses. Tens of thousands of civilians died that March morning.

My Uncle Bob was there. He was a tail-gunner in one of those aluminum killing machines which at any moment could be his flying coffin. At 19 years old he was man enough to squeeze the trigger of his 50 caliber machine-guns but wasn't old enough to vote nor buy a beer in his home state of Missouri.

Uncle Bob is now 90. He still is one of the toughest, no nonsense people on the planet. And, he is the only WW II veteran left alive in our family. For years I had no clue as to what my three uncles nor what my father did in "The Big War". Then one day as a kid of about ten, my cousin Johnny and I were snooping around in our uncle's attic. We found a dust covered green canvas suitcase. It was Uncle Bob's B-29 flight bag. Stenciled in neat rows on one side of the bag were 35 white bombs representing his bombing missions. Each bomb was labeled with the month, the year, and the name of a Japanese city. Several of the bombs bore the city name "Tokyo", including one with March 1945.

By the time his wave of planes flew over the target that March day, the city of Tokyo was engulfed in fire. The upward heat draft was so intense that it nearly knocked him unconscious and almost shook the plane to pieces. Burning timbers from the inferno below were sailing up past the plane at 2,500 feet.

Unlike the tens of thousands below him and the 570 crew members of the 57 planes lost, Uncle Bob survived that misson as he did 34 others. But, to him, he had a "cause". He was fighting "the good fight", just like my dad at Okinawa, my Uncle John as he steered landing crafts full of marines toward the beaches of Tarawa, Guadalcanal, and Iwo Jima. And, as did my Uncle Charlie who was killed in action along with over 10,600 other American soldiers, 200,000 Japanese troops and as many as 140,000 civilians in the battle for the island of Luzon.

I have never questioned the decisions military leaders made to end World War II. I do know that my father and uncles were probably going to be some of the first American forces to invade the Japanese homeland. I read that the War Department had ordered 500,000 Purple Hearts in anticipation of the staggering numbers of casualties expected. Maybe my dad and uncles would have made it through the final battle unscathed. Or, maybe they would've joined my Uncle Charlie in a sea of white crosses in a land far away from home.

All were caught in a time warp of unparalleled and unimaginable death and destruction. Most survived, millions didn't. And, why? Was it fate or karma? Or, was it the result of an unavoidable, self-destructive basic flaw in human nature?

I just don't know...
State Sen. Margie Bright Matthews, D-Walterboro, will deliver Denmark Technical Colleges commencement address at 1 p.m. on May 7 in the William L. McDuffie Student Services Center.

More than 200 students will be graduating this year from the assorted associate degree, diploma and certificate programs that DTC offers. The event is open to the community and the public is invited to attend.

As an advocate for the voiceless, Sen. Bright Matthews is an exceptional role model not only for the class of 2016, but also for our community, said Dr. Leonard A McIntyre, president of DTC.

The knowledge she can impart to our students is enormous. We are honored to have her as our 2016 commencement speaker, he said.

Bright Matthews has her own law firm representing people in the Lowcountry in personal injury, wrongful death, workers compensation and criminal defense cases. In addition, Bright Matthews is a certified circuit court mediator and has been certified by the National Institute of Trial Advocacy.

Bright Matthews served as president of the Colleton County Bar Association from 2007 to 2015; a former member of the Board of Governors of the South Carolina Bar Association; a former member of the Board of Governors of the South Carolina Association for Justice, a state delegate to the America Association for Justice, a member of the S.C. Women Lawyers Association and a member of the Walterboro Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Bright Matthews active involvement extends beyond her professional associations. She has served as a member of the S.C. Commission on Indigent Defense, S.C. Reinsurance Facility, Colleton County Resource and Development Board, Walterboro Rotary Club, Sea Island Comprehensive Health Care Board and Public Defender Corporation, and the Lowcountry Community Action Agency Policy Council.
All three districts in Orangeburg County are in the market for new high school principals for the upcoming school year.

Lake Marion High School and Technology Center Principal Rose Pelzer and Edisto High School Principal Dr. Shannon Gibson announced their resignations this week.

Last week, Dr. Stephen Peters resigned as principal of Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School.

All three principals will continue to serve until July 1.

Pelzer is resigning in order to take a new position.

At his time, Ive got an opportunity to move to Lower Richland High School, a AAA institution in Richland One, a high school which is in a very progressive area, she said. At this time in my career, I want to take that opportunity and have that experience.

Pelzer said she feels Lake Marion has shown academic progress during her tenure. She was also involved in combining two high schools into Lake Marion High School and Technology Center.

Ive been in this district since 2004, she said. I had the privilege of working as supervising principal when the schools were Elloree High School and Holly Hill Roberts High School and to move them into this facility.

To serve the families and children here has been a most rewarding experience for me. I think weve made a lot of gains.

Pelzer said Orangeburg Consolidated School District 3 is still home and shes not deserting it.

Even though Im moving to another institution, I will still be heavily involved in whatever manner they need me here, Pelzer said. I feel like, even if Im not principal, I can have a positive role in other avenues to help the district and I plan to do that.

OCSD3 Superintendent Dr. Jesulon Gibbs Brown said the district is in the process of looking for a new principal to replace Pelzer.

Gibson said he appreciates the opportunity Dr. Newman and the Board of Trustees afforded me in this task. I am resigning for personal reasons, and my family and I will relocate to our home in the upper state.

Gibson took over as principal of Edisto in July 2015 after the retirement of Dr. David Damm. He came to Orangeburg Consolidated School District 4 from High Point Academy, a public charter school in Spartanburg where he spent a year as principal.

Superintendent Dr. Tim Newman says the district is actively searching for applicants for the vacancy, and plans to fill it by July 1.

Peters was named superintendent of Laurens School District 55.
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Azerbaijan`s first lady, President of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Mehriban Aliyeva has today met with Co-Founder and Representative of the Community of San Patrignano Letizia Moratti, who is attending the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations.





President of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Mehriban Aliyeva said she was happy that Letizia Moratti participated in the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, and stressed the importance of this forum in terms of expanding international cooperation.





They discussed opportunities for cooperation between the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and the Community of San Patrignano, particularly in preservation and restoration of historical monuments, coexistence in inclusive societies, and social projects.




Breakout Session Fostering Inclusiveness and Integration through Global Education offered the opportunity to explore the different kinds of global education that are helpful in fostering inclusiveness and integration with the goal of creating inclusive societies.





The session`s moderator was Ekaterina Chimiris, Education Officer, Russian International Affairs Council.





Speakers included Tariq Ali Al-Ansari, Director, International Technical Cooperation Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Qatar, Ahmed Salim,





Managing Director 1001 Inventions, Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Senior Adviser to Secretary-General, KAICIID, Olga Kuznetsova, Head of International Cooperation Administration, Siberian Federal University, Firidun Qurbanov, Deputy Minister of Education of Azerbaijan.





At the breakout session, university officials from Russia discussed the role of educational establishments in civilizational dialogue. They shared their experience of integrating foreign students and a vision for better understanding between nations via educational exchanges.





Other speakers spoke on the role of international cooperation in development of education, education for sustainability, the potential and challenges of e-education in the promotion of global education, human rights education and education for conflict and peace resolution.




Armenia is playing with fire by violating the ceasefire, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, TV channel TRT Haber reported Apr. 28.

He said that the recent developments on the contact line of the troops once again demonstrated Azerbaijani army's superiority over the Armenian army.

Armenia is gripped by panic and fear, Erdogan 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 director of the Institute of History of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), MP Yagub Mahmudov has recently uttered the idea at a meeting of the Presidium of ANAS that the history of Derbend, Borchali should be studied again. Following this proposal, a smear campaign was launched in the Armenian press against the Azerbaijani historian.

Various Armenian mass media spread the information saying that, the Institute of History of ANAS makes territorial claims against Russia and Georgia . The Armenian media outlets made insults, posting on their websites sheep image next to the name of the Institute of History of ANAS.

Yagub Mahmudov, commenting on the smear campaign, stated that this confirms that the Armenians are not engaged in science. The statement further reads: Instead of to accept the historical facts, they are exposing these pictures and show the low level of their science and culture.

At a meeting of the Presidium of ANAS, I spoke about the actual problems of Azerbaijan history and, in particular, I have repeatedly emphasized that Azerbaijani state admits the internationally recognized territories of other states and the Azerbaijani nation is the owner of its internationally recognized territory.

Every nation has its own history. Azerbaijanis as a nation have settled in different areas. In particular, they historically live in the Russian Federation - in Derbend and its surroundings, in Georgia  in Borchali region. Russia is our northern neighbor and we do not have any territorial claims against this state. And we do not have any territorial claims against Georgia . However, Armenians are trying to drive a wedge in our relationship with Russia and Georgia . In Russia , live many Azerbaijanis, therefore, it is natural that when writing the history of our people we talk about our scientists, poets, doctors living in this country. Unlike Armenians, we have - a great nation, we are 60 million, and our compatriots live in many countries, giving the world many prominent and influential personalities. For example, the world science luminary Lotfi Zadeh lives in the United States , so we enter his name in our history. No matter in which country of the world Azerbaijanis lived, we will write their history.

However, the country under the name of Armenia has never existed in history. Armenians deny the fact that Armenian state was created on ancient Azerbaijani lands  on the territory of the former Iravan khanate. And these lands never belonged to Armenians. Historically, these lands have always been ours. The essence of my speech at the meeting of the Presidium of ANAS was the fact that we, as the people of Azerbaijan , not making territorial claims to anybody, should study our history.

The Armenian falsifiers, seeking to sow discord in the relations of Azerbaijan with Russia and Georgia , have resorted to the lies traditional for them. Armenian historians and ruling circles are well aware of the fact that the Armenians were moved to our lands. Until the 1827-1828 years Armenians did not live in the South Caucasus . They were resettled on the territory of Iravan khanate by the Russian Empire. On May 29, 1918 under strong external pressure, Azerbaijan was forced to cede Iravan and the surrounding lands- an area of ??9000 square kilometers to Armenians. We granted Armenians the opportunity to self-determination on our own territory, recognized them this right, which allowed them to establish their own state.

So let Armenian historians leave the epithet sheep for themselves. And let them objectively examine the history, then they will be obliged to recognize the fact that up to May 29, 1918 in this area has never existed Armenian state. Armenians created their state in our lands, in the territory of Iravan khanate. Let them answer me, we gave them an area of ??9000 square kilometers, our ancient city of Iravan, then what are they doing now in the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan - in Karabakh? Armenian troops must get out of Karabakh. At one time we gave the Armenians 9000 square kilometers of our territory, after which they seized Zangazur as well. Therefore I, as director of the Institute of History demand from them to clear off from the occupied Azerbaijani lands, and to abandon their attempts to falsify history.

We have written the history of Iravan, Nakhchivan and Garabagh. If they can, let them refute at least one fact. But they will not be able to do this.

Armenians have no right to lay claim to any territory. In ancient times they lived on the Balkan Peninsula . Over the centuries they lived in those or other foreign lands, and now, after they have created for themselves a state in the Azerbaijani territory, they want to seize other our lands.




Azerbaijan's foreign ministry has revealed another false statement from Armenia regarding confrontations on the contact line of Azerbaijani and Armenian troops.

Hikmat Hajiyev, spokesman for the Azerbaijani foreign ministry, told Trend April 28 that Yerevan's official statement on damaged done to the civilian population and facilities in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan under Armenia's control, is a lie.

"There are no civilians in these areas," Hajiyev said.
A total of 15 suspects were detained as part of nationwide police operation after a deadly blast in Turkey's northwest, Interior Minister Efkan Ala said, according to Anadolu Agency.





The detentions came a day after a suicide attack at the entrance of a historic bazaar in Bursa in northwestern Turkey that killed one person.





"There are strong signs of an organization. [...] There are findings. When the organization is finalized, I will explain, 15 people are in detention. I cannot say which provinces at the moment," Ala told reporters in Ankara ahead of a meeting.





Earlier, local police sources said 12 suspects were detained in operation in Bursa, Istanbul, western Afyonkarahisar and southeastern Sanliurfa provinces.





The suicide blast injured 20 people at the entrance of a historic bazaar in Bursa, Turkeys fourth-largest city, on Wednesday afternoon.





The Bursa Governor's Office said a female suicide bomber was involved in the attack.




Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) has announced the launch of Gate Avenue at DIFC, a first-of-its-kind urban living development that will create a unique cultural experience in the region.



Convening the worlds most coveted retail brands, culinary concepts and art events, Gate Avenue at DIFC is an integrated and vibrant lifestyle community that enhances synergies to create a uniquely-curated mix of experiences, said a statement from DIFC.



Located in the heart of Dubai, the development will connect the entire financial district, which will aesthetically and artistically link all building podiums within DIFC.



Incomparable to any project in the region, Gate Avenue at DIFC will offer 660,000 sq ft of built-up area, incorporating all aspects of living, including business, leisure and residential, it stated.



A continuation of the DIFCs success story, which has already positioned the centre as a premium business destination, the new retail offering will add a new dimension to the district, creating a holistic experience for professionals, residents and visitors alike, said the statement.



The new destination will integrate the essential elements that make DIFC a remarkably rich international environment, and boast more than 150 of the regions most distinctive and sophisticated dining, shopping and cultural experiences - all encapsulated in one iconic setting, it added.



According to DIFC, the project is set to emerge as a premium lifestyle destination offering vibrant and world-class amenities to the financial centres diverse community of professionals, residents and visitors.

Gate Avenue at DIFC will also provide seamless connectivity to all building podiums within the district.



Speaking on the launch, Essa Kazim, the DIFC governor, said: "The announcement of Gate Avenue at DIFC is a significant step towards accomplishing our 2024 growth strategy that paves the way for the sustained development of the Centre."



"The project will be a significant value-add for professionals and residents currently working and living in the district, and create an even more attractive proposition for prospective clients and tenants, as we build on our already world-class infrastructure platform," stated Kazim.



"This, in turn will elevate DIFCs status as one of the most sought-after destinations in the world," he added.



Gate Avenue at DIFC will amplify the financial centres lifestyle offering with its aesthetic appeal that seamlessly connects three integrated zones. Each zone will feature distinctive elements, connected by an open-air Promenade Level.



The North Zone will offer access from DIFCs popular Marble Walk at the Gate Building, and serve as a meeting point for professionals within the district, featuring exclusive retail offerings, high-end stores and luxury outlets.



Transitioning from the North Zone, the Central Zone will feature a plethora of high-street brands, a variety of beautiful indoor restaurants as well as sumptuous al fresco eateries. With easy connections to the Financial Centre metro station, the Central Zone will also comprise convenience retail stores to cater to the metro traffic.



Primarily tailored to the residents of the financial district, South Zone will focus on the community within DIFC and feature family amenities that help foster the community-living experience. Visitors can experience kids edutainment and leisure activities, or enjoy family-friendly dining areas, said the top official.



Providing the ideal platform for Dubais art and culture scene, Gate Avenue at DIFC will host a series of art and design installations, live music performances, visual activations and festivals  ensuring a whole new experience at every visit,. he added.



According to DIFC, the project will link a network of residential and commercial buildings across the 110-acre financial district.



Visitors and residents will be able to enjoy a leisurely walk across the refreshing walkway on the Promenade Level, or through the beautifully-designed air-conditioned avenue that bridges the district.



In addition, the development will bring together a diverse, multicultural community, as well as leading retail brands, culinary concepts and art events.



The central location, in the heart of Dubai, will allow visitors ease of access by public transport  supported by a convenient link to the Financial Centre metro station  or by car. The development will provide additional parking spaces around Gate Avenue at DIFC, to accommodate high volumes of visitors to the district, said the statement.



Central to the Promenade Level will be an emblematic mosque, a beacon of modern Islamic design that will host a total of 500 worshippers daily and for Friday prayers, it added.



An integration of aesthetics and functionality, lush greenery will adorn the facades of niche retail outlets located along the 1-km-long Promenade Level pathway.



The unique parkland setting of the Promenade Level will also reflect a rising crescendo of energy levels  from the premium, sophisticated vibe of the North Zone to the vibrant, social setting of the Central Zone, through to the high-tempo, family-friendly environment of the South Zone.



Miniature Gates, built in the image of the iconic Gate Building will be located along the walkway, framing unique aspects of the Dubai skyline and serving as a canvas for digital projections.



With construction expected to begin this year and set for completion by the end of 2017, Gate Avenue at DIFC is set to become the much sought-after destination for businesses, professionals, residents and visitors.-TradeArabia News Service
Oman government is looking for an international consultant to provide advisory services for boosting the sultanate's water production capacity through new utility projects, said a report.



The state-owned Oman Power and Water Procurement Company (OPWP) has floated a tender in this regard. The last date of bid submission has been set at June 5.



The selected consultant will advise the government on economic, financial/commercial and legal areas for the development of a revised process for the future contracting of water capacity by OPWP and the initial implementation of the process to a contracting round aimed at securing capacity from 2022, reported the Times of Oman.



The OPWP, the sole procurer of new power generation and water desalination capacity, recently signed an RO100 million ($258 million) agreement with a consortium to establish Myah Gulf Oman Desalination Company to build a water project in Sohar.



The project is one of the biggest of its kind in the Al Batinah North Governorate and is expected to meet about 80 per cent of water demand in Al Batinah North, it stated.



Demand for potable water in Omans northern region, which include Muscat governorate, is projected to grow by six per cent per annum in the next four year horizon to 349 million cu m in 2020, said the report.



This is mainly due to the population growth and industrial development in addition to the tourism project boom, it added.
Bahrain-based Nass Asphalt said it has been awarded a contract by the Ministry of Works and Municipalities Affairs and Urban Planning for the management and operation of the national quarry located in Hafeera area of the kingdom.



Under this new agreement, several new procedures and controls have been introduced in co-ordination with the ministry, including on financial, security and safety issues.

The ministry said there will be changes in the prices of materials and in the system of quarry operation as part of the government initiative to optimise the utilisation of valuable and non-renewable resources in the country.

The ministry called upon companies interested in purchasing quarry materials to register with Nass Asphalt and obtain information on the new procedures and prices.

The full resumption of operations of the quarry will start on May 2, it added.-TradeArabia News Service
Henley & Partners, a global leader in residence and citizenship planning, has announced the call for nominations for the annual Global Citizen Award.



The award recognizes individuals who have made extraordinary contributions towards improving the global community and creating a more understanding, more tolerant world.



The winner of the 2016 Award will be honoured at the annual gala fundraising dinner for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in London on November 11. Henley & Partners has partnered with the UNHCR to assist with the registration and documentation of those at the other end of the global mobility spectrum.



Marco Gantenbein, managing partner of Henley & Partners in the Middle East, said: We are very pleased to be launching the second annual Global Citizen Award nominations, a joint effort with our partner, the UNHCR. Last years event, held at the Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai, was a great success, and we look forward to further driving mobility through this global initiative.



Leigh Foster of the UNHCR said the committee is looking for inspirational individuals who demonstrate extraordinary vision, courage and commitment. Ideally we want to honor those whose work is innovative and visionary. A candidates work should also have a positive impact on the lives of the most vulnerable in society, explained Foster.



The selection process is confidential and made by a majority decision. The award itself consists of a specially made commemorative medal, an Award Certificate signed by the President of the Award Committee and a $50,000 monetary prize, of which $25,000 is donated to UNHCR.



Last year, the Global Citizen Award was presented to German entrepreneur Harald Hoppner. Harald is the founder the refugee aid project Sea Watch, a non-profit organization which has rescued thousands of refugees from capsized boats during their patrols of the Mediterranean Sea.  TradeArabia News Service
HSBC Bank Middle East and the British Council hosted their second workshop in Manama, Bahrain recently, as part of the youth development programme Taqaddam.

Over 200 students from 10 schools participated in the workshop which is the culmination of a seven-week programme designed to equip young Bahrainis with a wide set of enduring personal and professional strengths and skills that will enable them to lead successful and fulfilling lives.

Capping the programme is the Future Ideas competition, which asks the students to devise an innovative idea that addresses key global challenges related to the environment, health or community well-being.

We have been so proud to see the development and growth of the students who have participated in this pilot programme, said Sabrin Rahman, head of corporate sustainability Mena from HSBC.

Our aim has been to provide these young people with an opportunity to develop personal skills and capabilities that will enable them to successfully transition from school into the next stage of their lives. It is vital for employers to be a part of this journey from early on and this is why we hope a practical programme such as Taqaddam helps increase their confidence and motivation on many different levels, she added.

This weeks workshop highlighted several life-changing topics and areas of development, including how to take initiative, critical thinking and effective communication.

Local teachers have been helping to drive the programme and supporting the students throughout, by facilitating weekly strength discussions in their classes and monitoring the students progress as they go.

The content for Taqaddam, which means Move Forward in Arabic, has been delivered by Spark and Mettle, a youth development charity based in London that supports and enables young people to identify, articulate and improve key character strengths, while also building their soft skills for a brighter future.

Good life skills help young people to get along with others, contribute to society, and have the confidence to believe I can, said Gail Campbell, director education at British Council, Mena.

Taqqadams students will not only feel more confident, they will also be able to clearly track and measure their evolution via an online portal. Ultimately, this is about guiding students to be effective and responsible citizens, and encouraging them to be life-long learners, she added.

The youth development programme Taqaddam is the result of a partnership between HSBC Bank Middle East and the British Council. It is being delivered in eight countries across the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region to help youngsters acquire a broad set of life skills that will serve them and their communities in the future.  TradeArabia News Service
More than 150 experts from the district cooling sector called for establishment of a sustainable and renewable cooling infrastructure at a key industry summit in Dubai, UAE.



The fourth annual district cooling (DC) stakeholders summit was held at the Sheraton Dubai Creek Hotel and Towers, Dubai.



The annual gathering of elite panellists and solution providers from across multiple sectors kicked off with an opening address from Dr Matar Hamed Al Neyadi, the undersecretary at the UAE Ministry of Energy.



The summit, which was hosted by top events organisation Fleming, was witness to several interactive discussions and reviews involving C-level officials and solution providers from across regions.



On the opening day, George Berbari, the chief executive of DC Pro Engineering, UAE, held a keynote presentation on 'The transition from traditional electric cooling to renewable district cooling in UAE' followed by Fatima Al Foora Al Shamsi, the assistant undersecretary (Electricity  Clean Energy and Desalinated Water Affairs) at the UAE Ministry of Energy, who spoke on 'Regulatory Perspectives: The Way Ahead' besides a presentation by Ali Alsuwaidi, Mefma  board member, executive director, Ejadah  Dubai Properties.



The day concluded with, the speakers and officials engaging themselves for a 'DC Round Table Discussion', which discussed about 'The Renewable Energy Aspects', 'The Regulatory Aspects', 'The need for effective energy efficiency'.



The summit also witnessed presentations from the UAE Ministry of Energy, Dubai Municipality, DC Pro Engineering, Emirates Green Building Council, Supreme Council of Energy, Ejadah - Dubai Properties, and the Public Work Authority - Qatar.



Day Two witnessed a wide range of expert discussions on key topcis such as 'Renewable Energy for a smart choice', 'Technology for the next level' and 'DC with Trigeneration  The Future?'.



These beneficial discussions summed up the summit, and paved a clear way to ensure that the district cooling market in the UAE will be clear of obstacles that hinder its growth, said the organisers.



The summit helped create better - and possibly the best - opportunities for the market to bloom in its current form, it added.



Leading players in the region including Emirates GBC, Johnson Controls, RSS, Ramboll, Lakos, AuCom, IGEL Electric, Greenergy, SWEP, Watco Group, Kelvion, +GF+, Hepworth, Hamon Cooling Tower Company, Frost & Sullivan, Rohr Rein Chemie, Alfa Laval, Aggreko, Ion Exchange and Tasleem Metering and Payment Collection took part.-TradeArabia News Service




Dassault Aviation, a leading global provider of business jets, is presenting its long range Falcon 900LX at the ongoing fifth International Marrakech Air Show, in Morocco.



Dassault's front-line Rafale fighter is being featured at the show, which opened yesterday (April 27), and will conclude on April 30, as part of a French Air Force exhibit.



The 4,750 nm (8,800 km) Falcon 900LX is the most advanced version of the proven and highly capable Falcon 900 trijet line, which has set records for reliability, versatility and fuel economy since it was first introduced, said a statement from the company.



Equipped with advanced winglets that reduce drag and optimise climb performance, the Falcon 900LX can fly non-stop from Rabat to Dubai, Delhi or Washington, or from Marrakech to Johannesburg or Rio, it said.



It is the only jet in its class capable of landing with nearly a full fuel load enabling, for example, a takeoff from Rabat with a stop in Marrakech for additional passengers before continuing to intercontinental destinations without refuelling, it added.



Since it was first introduced, the Falcon 900 family has evolved into six different versions, the latest of which is the 900LX, certified in 2010. It is equipped with the most advanced equipment on the market, including Dassault's second-generation award winning EASy II flight deck and FalconCabin HD+ cabin management system. Its three engine configuration - unique to Dassault - offers improved runway performance and added safety margin when flying over oceans and hostile terrain.



Gilles Gautier, vice president, Falcon sales for Dassault Aviation, said: In addition to performance and cabin comfort, aircraft efficiency has become a decisive factor in choosing an executive jet.



"And the Falcon 900LX is the most efficient business jet in its class, offering 40 per cent better fuel economy than any competing aircraft, he said.



Qualities like this, added to the legendary robustness of Falcon jets which are designed and built to the exacting standards of Dassault fighters, make them top performers in North Africa which has more than a dozen Falcon aircraft currently in operation.



"We are extremely bullish over prospects here," said Gautier.



"With its buoyant agricultural and petrochemical sectors and fast growing financial industry, the regional market appears poised for solid long term growth, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
OCP, Moroccos national company for the mining of phosphate, has planned an increase in production of phosphate-enhanced fertiliser to meet overall rising demand, a report said.



The extra provisions is expected to double the companys mining capabilities, added the Morocco World News report.



OCP, which also participates in Meknes International Exhibition of Agriculture, said the firm was one of the first African companies interested in reducing the carbon footprint from its activities by reducing its emissions of polluting gases and adopting an environmentally responsible way to manage waste, it said.



In 2014, the Moroccan company recycled more than 19 tonnes of metal waste. The companys strategy to improve its operational use of water includes the firms desalination plant Jorf Lasfar and initiatives in many Moroccan cities.



The company said its plans to continue green practices correspond with King Mohammed VIs Green Morocco programme, which employs farmers in the kingdom and other African countries through its soil study, which has gathered 26,000 samples from 6.8 million hectares of land to evaluate the farmlands fertiliser needs.



Mostafa Terrab, CEO of the OCP, said earlier this year that his company would be the worlds largest producer of fertilisers by the year 2017 as result of contributions from four new complexes tasked with creating the product essential for the worlds agriculture industry, added the report.
Sharjah Airport International Free Zone (SAIF Zone) was recently recognised with an Excellence in GIS Implementation (EGI) Award during the GISWORX 2016 gala dinner, held at Al Bustan Rotana Hotel in Dubai, UAE.



The award was bestowed upon SAIF Zone after a review by the independent EGI Award Committee, as part of GISWORX 2016, the 11th annual GIS Workshops & Exhibitions, said a statement from the company.



Wafa Balaswad, marketing manager of SAIF Zone received the award during the ceremony, on behalf of free zone, it said.



The award is given to organisations that foster innovation and experimentation in the area of GIS implementation, and to honour outstanding GIS implementation programmes. Since its birth in 2007, EGI has become the most known and prestigious award given to organisations which use GIS in unique and innovative ways in the UAE and GCC, it added.



The Geographic Information Systems in SAIF Zone helps the clients to make quick decision on business planning and studies. An authorised user can access GIS to find out the availability of warehouses, plots and other required information. They can also book warehouses or plots and send feedbacks, said the statement.



Saud Salim Al Mazrouei, director of SAIF Zone and Hamriyah Free Zone, said: It is a honour to receive this award, and we would like to thank GISWORX and the EGI Award Committee for its recognition.



We have been developing and growing GIS within the SAIF Zone. Today, it is an integral part of our operations and it helps our investors/clients a lot including in decision making and business planning. This award endorses our excellence in GIS on par with the latest international standards, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
UAE-based Gulf Craft, a leading superyacht shipyards, was recognised with the 2016 Best Asian Motor Yacht Builder award, during a private event held at the recently concluded Singapore Yacht Show.



The annual Asia Boating Awards recognise global and regional yachting brands that have consistently demonstrated exceptional achievement in Asia throughout the year.



After meticulous evaluation by a panel of experts in the leisure boating industry, the award is presented to an Asia-based builder that has continuously delivered outstanding quality across its portfolio, and that has proven its ability to expand in the market.



Gulf Craft has an impressive track-record with the Asia Boating Awards, receiving an accolade in 2013 for the second-largest superyacht in its collection, the Majesty 135, as well as the Best Asian Yacht Builder award (15m to 24m) in 2014, and the Best Asian Built Yacht award in 2015 for the Majesty 122.



Gulf Craft is listed as one of the top ten superyacht shipyards in the 2016 edition of the industry leading publication, the Superyacht Intelligence Annual Report. Through its ongoing investment in research and development, the company continues to put the UAE on the map for the timeless design and production of powerfully engineered, world-class luxury yachts and leisure boats.



The company is renowned for its capacity to meet the diverse needs of its clientele through its wide range of seaworthy craft, including its luxury fly-bridge Majesty Yachts, its oceangoing Nomad Yachts series, as well as its Oryx sport yachts and cruisers, and Silvercraft fishing boats and family cruisers.



The distinguished builder is a market leader for leisure craft across the Middle East, and continues to solidify its presence in South East Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific, having served the region for more than two decades.



We are truly honoured to have received this prestigious recognition, and we will continue to deliver on our values of customer service excellence and premium craftsmanship, said a Gulf Craft spokesperson.



We do not rest on our laurels and believe that boating will continue to evolve globally, and that is why innovation lies at the core of everything we do  from concept formation to design and engineering. Through our concerted efforts, we hope to continue making our clients seafaring dreams come true and creating memorable cruising experiences, the spokesperson concluded.  TradeArabia News Service
Rolling out an "America first" foreign policy, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has vowed that if he were elected president, US allies in Europe and Asia would have to fend for themselves if they did not pay more for the US defence umbrella.



Trump's speech, delivered with a teleprompter in a staid Washington hotel ballroom, was an attempt to show he can be more presidential and move past the rancorous rhetoric that he routinely uses on the campaign trail.



"It is time to shake the rust off of America's foreign policy," he said in a speech that savaged the foreign policy of Democratic President Barack Obama as a disaster.



The New York billionaire spoke the day after victories in five Northeastern states that moved him closer to capturing the Republican Party presidential nomination for the November 8 election.



But the message Trump delivered appeared contradictory at times and was largely devoid of details.



He spoke of building up the US military as a deterrent to US adversaries, but said American allies in Europe and Asia would have to pay more for US defences provided by Washington.



While issuing that stern message on paying for defence, Trump said the US under his leadership would be "a reliable friend and ally again."



Trump was sharply critical of immediate past presidents, both Republican and Democratic, for getting Americans involved in military conflicts abroad, but said the US may well need to use force to defeat Islamic State militants.



In perhaps his most specific policy prescription, Trump said he would organise two summits, for Nato allies and Asian allies, to discuss "rebalancing" the alliances to ease the financial burden to the US.



"The countries we defend must pay for the cost of this defence. If not, the US must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves. We have no choice," Trump said.



Trump's speech was panned by his nearest rival for the Republican nomination, US Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who said in a tweet: "Donald's speech is the most dramatic evidence thus far that he fails the presidential test."



Also critical was US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a hawkish Republican who was a presidential candidate until dropping out early this year.



"It's isolationism surrounded by disconnected thought, demonstrates lack of understanding threats we face," Graham wrote on Twitter. "Not sure who is advising Trump on foreign policy but I can understand why he's not revealing their names."



Trump has gone from outsider last year to party front-runner with a plain-talking campaign that has often appealed to working-class voters who feel let down by globalisation, free trade and the decline of American manufacturing in recent decades.



His foreign policy speech echoed that populist message - depicting a need to ease the US financial burden overseas, focus more on nation-building at home and make sure American companies pay a price for outsourcing jobs to countries where labor is cheaper.



"My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make," Trump said. "'America first' will be the major and overriding theme of my administration."



GERMANY REACTS



Niels Annen, foreign policy spokesman of the Social Democrat party group in the German parliament, criticised Trump's speech in a statement to Reuters.



"Trump's campaign gives America's friends a feeling of uncertainty. At least he seems to have realized that as a candidate for the White House he would have to have a coherent foreign policy concept," Annen said.



Political pundits quickly pointed out that "America First" was a slogan first developed by famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who pushed a non-interventionist policy before the US entry in World War Two.



If Trump wins the nomination and runs against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, he will be up against a former secretary of state steeped in foreign policy.



Clinton adviser Madeleine Albright, herself a former secretary of state, said Trump's address was centered on "simplistic slogans and contradictions."



"I've got to say, I've listened to a lot of foreign policy speeches over the years, and have given a lot myself, and I was hoping it would make some sense," Albright said.



'SELLING A DREAM'



Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, said Trump's speech did not contain enough details to call it a strategy.



"Ultimately, he's selling a dream and he's still not offering a plan. He's representing the sales office, but he's given no clue of who will be the architect and who will do the construction," he said.



Trump did not stray from the ideas that have helped put him close to winning the Republican presidential nomination. He would build up the US military but would use it only when necessary and would be unpredictable in using force, as in the case of Islamic State.



"Their days are numbered. I won't tell them where and I won't tell them how. We must, as a nation, be strong and resilient. They're going to be gone," he said.



Trump said US leaders had allowed the American nuclear arsenal to atrophy and that it was in desperate need of modernisation. The Obama administration is pushing a $1 trillion refurbishment programme over the next 30 years.



Trump was particularly withering in his critique of Obama's foreign policy, saying the president had let China take advantage of the US and not been able to persuade Beijing to rein in North Korea.



"We have the leverage. We have the power over China, economic power," he said.



According to social media analytics firm Zoomph, Twitter reaction to the speech was more positive than negative, with roughly 100 posts per minute mentioning the Republican front-runner.



Walid Phares, a Trump foreign policy adviser, said Trump received input for his address from a variety of advisers, such as US Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama. - Reuters
Leading practitioners in digital advertising were honoured excellence in the use of digital technology and media during the recently held Mena Digital Awards in Dubai, UAE.



The third edition of the event followed the success of the fifth Digital Media Forum, which was held earlier that day.



The highly successful staging of the Mena Digital Awards this year continues the standard set in its two previous editions in terms of recognising the very best digital marketing activities and strategies in the region, said Najla Semaan Mazboudi, CEO of SpotOn Media Services and Events and founder of the Digital Media Forum and Mena Digital Awards.



Having been established back in 2014 to promote best practices in creativity, effectiveness, innovation and planning and ultimately acknowledge excellence and success across the digital marketing sector, the MDA are now rightly considered as the benchmark ceremony for the top digital marketing talent in the region.



Joseph Ghossoub, who was the founder of The Holding Group, now known as MenaCOM Group was awarded with the Lifetime Achievement Award in the Advertising Industry for his contribution in the regions adverting and media sector for the past four decades.



In addition, the Mena Digital Awards featured 20 categories, under the clusters of six groups: Performance, Mobile, Social Media, Integrated, Special and the new addition this year, Digital Assets. The group of 23 jurors also awarded the Grand Prix, Agency of the Year and Network of the Year.



Ghossoub said: "It is an honor to receive the lifetime achievement award from the Mena Digital Awards 2016. It has been a tremendous journey over the last four decades and to see how the industry has progressed over the years in this region makes me proud to have been a part of it. The future is brimming with possibility and I can't wait to see what the next generation will do with it."



The Mena Digital Awards 2016 rounded off this years Digital Media Forum, which was held under the banner: The Future Re-Starts. It was the fifth and latest instalment in the DMF programme since its inception in 2011 and followed on from only the second-ever staging of DMF Cairo in November last year.  TradeArabia News Service
Emirates and Dubai Health Authority (DHA) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in order to promote medical tourism in Dubai and fulfill the emirates goal of attracting 500,000 medical tourists by the year 2020.



HH Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, President of the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority and Chairman and Chief Executive of Emirates Airline and Group and Humaid Mohammad Al Qatami, chairman of the board and director-general of DHA signed the MOU on the sidelines of the Arab Travel Market on Tuesday.



The aim of the MoU is to cultivate Emirates' international status and widespread travel routes to fulfil the medical tourism project, Dubai Health Experience (DXH), launched by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum , Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Executive Council.



As part of the MoU, Emirates packages and tickets can be booked through DXHs website www.dxh.ae, which is a first-of-its-kind website that has all the relevant medical tourism information including: medical tourism packages, tickets and hotel booking etc. under a single portal.



The medical services include but are not limited to surgery, orthopedics, ophthalmology, dental, treatments and specialised tests, to name a few.



Sheikh Ahmed said: Emirates remains committed to government and private sector initiatives that promote Dubai as a global hub for trade, tourism and sport. We are pleased to be working with DHA to make Dubai the preferred destination for medical tourism through our extensive global network covering the six continents."



Al Qatami said Emirates is DHAs strategic partner, adding that the airline is one of the main supporters of the authoritys objective to revitalise medical tourism and make Dubai the preferred destination for medical tourism.



He also said that the MoU reflects the unlimited support of Sheikh Ahmed towards the authorities projects and objectives stressing that Sheikh Ahmads support is considered an important incentive to the success of the project. - TradeArabia News Service
Hilton has topped the list of the world's most valuable hotel brands with a value of $7.8 billion, up by a third on last years value of $5.8 billion.

The list, released by leading brand valuation and strategy consultancy Brand Finance, scrutinises thousands of the worlds top brands and evaluates and ranks to determine which are the most powerful and valuable.



Hilton is also the most valuable group in the Brand Finance Hotels 50 table with six Hilton Worldwide brands featuring in the top 50, totalling $13.3 billion. Its brand value stands at over $200 million.



Marriott joins in at second place with a brand value of $5.3 billion. Although its group has even more brands in the top 50 than Hilton (eight in total), their combined value is lower, at $12 billion.



Having already acquired the Delta group of hotels, Marriott is attempting to merge with Starwood - the third most significant group by brand value - with six brands being valued at $6.7 billion.



This move would create the worlds biggest hotel group with the most valuable brand portfolio. However Marriott continues to be frustrated and outbid by Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese insurance conglomerate.



David Haigh, chief executive of Brand Finance, said: As disruptors such as Airbnb create an ever more challenging environment for traditional operators, a new wave of investment from the likes of Anbang Insurance Groups is to be welcomed, however frustrating it may seem. Brand investment in particular is key in this fast-changing environment. - TradeArabia News Service
Sharjah Commerce and Tourism Development Authority (SCTDA) has launched a new destination campaign at the Arabian Travel Market, currently being held at Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre.



The announcement was made during a press conference organised by the authority at its ATM stand in the presence of Khalid Jasim Al Midfa, chairman of SCTDA; Hana Al Suwaidi, chairperson of the Environment and Protected Areas Authority (EPAA); Ahmed Al Qaseer, COO of Sharjah Investment and Development Authority (Shurooq); and Aisha Deemas, director of executive affairs at Sharjah Museums Department; among others. The conference highlighted the details of the campaign launched by the authority to support the family tourism sector and strengthen Sharjahs position as a leading destination for family tourism in the region.



Al Midfa described family tourism as one of the major sectors and a key contributor to the growth of this industry in prominent destinations around the world.



He added that family tourism represents 12.5 per cent of the global tourism market, recording a total value of $1.7 trillion in 2012. Family tourism is expected to achieve 4.8 per cent annual growth worldwide, according to Crescentrating, the Singaporean website specialised in the field of travel and tourism.



Al Midfa pointed out that the leading status of this sector in Sharjah is the outcome of the concerted efforts and integrated approach of all partners to achieve the common goal of promoting Sharjahs events and festivals as well as its mega projects as major family attractions.



As a result of all these efforts and initiatives, the hotel sector in the emirate recorded 100 per cent occupancy during the spring holiday in the Gulf region. Significant tourist inflow has been witnessed from the Saudi market, which has emerged as the most important source of family tourism in the region, HE Al Midfa added.



As part of SCTDAs pursuit to build on the achievements in the family tourism sector and develop it further, we are launching today the Sharjah My Family Destination campaign to strengthen cooperation between the Authority and all our partners in the emirates tourism sector, Al Midfa said.



Speaking on the occasion, Al Suwaidi said the authority has opened several new environment tourism projects that offer innovative facilities for families in various cities of Sharjah, enhancing the emirates position as an ideal tourist destination for families. She noted that these centres have received more than half a million visitors in the past year, most of them families.



Al Suwaidi explained that Wasit Nature Reserve, a wetland which opened recently, is an ideal family destination that offers educational and cultural classes and facilities such as observation platforms. The Al Hefaiyah Mountain Conservation Centre preserves the mountain environment and provides unique opportunities for families to closely understand nature in a fun-filled manner, she added. Al Suwaidi pointed out that the EPAA will contribute to raising Sharjahs share in the family tourism market at a time when the emirate is witnessing a key stage in the growth and development of its tourism sector.



Al Qaseer said: Shurooq has successfully implemented pioneering solutions in multiple tourism projects such as eco-tourism projects, archaeological tourism projects and cultural tourism projects. He said projects such as Al Majaz Waterfront, Al Qasba, Al Montazah Amusement and Water Park, Al Noor Island and the Mleiha Archaeological and Eco-tourism project have made Sharjah one of the leading destinations for families and family tourists."



Sharjah My Family Destination initiative is the closest we can get to the significance and importance which family tourism plays in the development of our societies and businesses. Sharjah My Family Destination will position the emirate as one of the leading cities in the world to focus on family tourism, and will open new doors for pioneering solutions that will sustain the emirates family-friendly environment, Al Qaseer stated.



He added that Shurooq will play a key role in supporting the initiative, and will study multiple objectives with SCTDA to explore new strategies and plans related to this campaign.



Deemas said Sharjah Museums Department has 16 museums under its management, all of which collectively aim to deliver the highest museum standards to preserve collections and enhance an appreciation of culture and learning through exhibitions, educational and community programmes.



Our museums focus on providing unique discovery and learning experiences to all of our visitors, including community groups such as school and university students, various residents who may visit with groups of friends and family, as well as tourists who are looking for a cultural experience. One of our main aims is to cater to the vital area of family tourism. We achieve this through a wide range of activities including gallery talks, cultural discussions, interactive workshops, academic programmes and much more, Deemas said.



We are committed to ensuring that all of our main museums, including Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah Science Museum, Sharjah Maritime Museum and others, provide an element of interactive activity to enhance the family experience. We believe that giving access to these opportunities that everyone can get involved in provides memorable experience that results in repeat visitors and positive feedback, Deemas added.



The Sharjah My Family Destination campaign aims to introduce new tourism offers and packages by tour companies, hotels and leisure destinations for families visiting Sharjah from within and outside the country. It will establish direct communication with the public and family tourists through the authoritys social media channels in order to learn about their requirements and enhance the development of Sharjahs family tourism sector.



SCTDA is launching this campaign in cooperation with Sharjah Investment and Development Authority (Shurooq), Sharjah Museums Department, travel agencies, hotels and resorts as well as shopping malls. - TradeArabia News Service
Jannah Burj Al Sarab won the 'Best for Technology' award at the first Leaders in Hospitality Awards 2016 by Hotel News Middle East Magazine held in St. Regis Dubai last week.



The Leaders in Hospitality Awards recognizes exceptional elements of properties, campaigns and people across the Middle East.



Jannah Burj Al Sarab, launched in 2015, had a vision to find a balance between innovation and comfort. The 18-storey hotel boasts having the fastest hotel internet in the world at 1.2Gb per second, which is 10 times faster than the average speed.



Aside from this record-breaking unique selling point, the hotel also applies smart applications for its systems that reduce power consumption in all 318 luxury rooms and suites. This technology controls the cooling system as well as generates solar power.



The entire hotel runs on LED lights saving up to 75 per cent of power in comparison to traditional lighting. Additionally, all corridor lights are automatic and self-controlled. Jannah Burj Al Sarab also uses an energy efficient BMS system to regulate indoor temperature.



The water heaters use solar energy generated from boards installed on the hotel ceiling. Linens and fabrics that need to be laundered, are transferred through pipes, thus saving power from not using elevators.



Jannah Hotels & Resorts chief operating officer Martin Persson said: Jannah Hotels & Resorts strive to always be at the forefront of technological advancements in terms of product. We are grateful for this award which will spur us to continue raising our standards. - TradeArabia News Service
German airline Lufthansa wants to take part in much-needed industry consolidation in Europe so carriers can compete better with US and Asian rivals, chief executive Carsten Spohr said on Thursday.



Spohr told an annual shareholders meeting in Hamburg on Thursday that the five largest airlines in the US have an 80 per cent share of the market, while in Europe the top five have just 40 per cent.



"Consolidation is a part of what needs to happen in Europe in order to make the sector more competitive when compared to the United States and Asia," Spohr said.



"As Europe's largest airline, we want to take part in consolidation, not just be a bystander," he told investors.



Lufthansa said late on Wednesday it was looking at ways to bring part-owned Brussels Airlines under its low-cost Eurowings brand, though the Islamic State attacks in Brussels have pushed back the deadline for a decision to August.



Sources have also told Reuters that Lufthansa is considering partnerships, or even takeovers, of Scandanavian carrier SAS and Condor, the airline that belonged to Lufthansa for decades before being bought by Thomas Cook.



Lufthansa is already one of the few European airlines to have driven merger activity in the region, snapping up Swiss, Austrian and bmi several years ago.



But the restructuring of Austrian proved time consuming, while Lufthansa eventually sold British Midland to British Airways parent IAG in 2012, meaning not all shareholders are in favour of further merger forays.



"The desire for size has not always suited Lufthansa," Ingo Speich, portfolio manager at shareholder Union Investment, told the meeting.



"Instead of casting an eye over Brussels, Condor or SAS, Lufthansa should invest the capital into its balance sheet, restructuring and renewing its fleet," Speich said.



IAG too has been on a buying charge, adding Vueling and Aer Lingus to a stable that started with British Airways and Iberia.



British holiday carrier Monarch said on Thursday it was considering acquisitions too, while Qatar Airways said on Wednesday it had increased its stake in IAG to 12 percent.



But several analysts and sector bankers have told Reuters they feel there are few major deals to be done, with small deals or cooperation agreements instead more likely.



Ryanair, set to overtake Lufthansa as Europe's largest carrier this year in terms of passenger numbers, has also said it prefers to grow organically, while Air France-KLM is grappling with a restructuring. - Reuters
Meet award-winning artisans and buy their products at Kerala Arts and Crafts Village
Charlie Scott, Wyomings longest-serving state lawmaker, said he is seeking another term in the Senate.

My first priority for the next four years will be to present important state services without increasing taxes, Scott, a Republican, said in a statement. The last thing people need in these tough economic times is a tax increase.

Scott seeks re-election in Senate District 30, which comprises the Natrona County communities of Bar Nunn, Midwest and Edgerton and includes the Casper neighborhoods of north Casper, Paradise Valley and Oregon Trail.

Scott, a Harvard graduate who ranches southwest of Casper, is the powerful chairman of the Senate Labor, Health and Social Services Committee. He has led the fight in the Senate against Medicaid expansion, a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would extend the Medicaid program to about 20,000 low-income adults.

Gov. Matt Mead, also a Republican, urged the Legislature to expand in the 2016 session, saying it would bring the state $268 million over the next two years at a time when the economy is in a downturn due to weaker energy prices and production.

Scott argued on the Senate floor in February minutes before the Legislatures upper chamber defeated the measure for the fourth consecutive year that hospitals and doctors would perform more expensive procedures to maximize the money they could get from Medicaid, which reimburses at lower rates than private insurance. He said research shows peoples health doesnt meaningfully improve under Medicaid  an argument supporters of expansion say is untrue.

Scott said about half of the people who would qualify for expansion currently pay for private insurance. If they canceled their policies, that would hurt insurance. That contention is also disputed. The income limit for a family of three to receive Medicaid under expansion is $532 a week, earnings that make it tough for many to afford insurance.

What youve done is create a system that tends to hold people in bondage, Scott said to his colleagues in the Legislature. Bondage, Mr. (Senate) President. Its a welfare bureaucracy of the health department.

Scott didnt return a message Thursday to discuss whether his views on Medicaid expansion have changed with the states worsening economy.

His statement said the Legislature needs a good education system and should maintain the states favorable business climate to spur economic diversification. He also believes the state needs new outdoor recreational opportunities to make Wyoming an attractive place to live. Scott has championed the creation of a statewide system of bicycle pathways to lure new tourists and provide residents more recreation.

Scott, 70, served in the Wyoming House from 1979 to 1982. He has been in the Senate since 1983.
A suspect in a killing outside of a South Dakota casino last week led troopers on a high-speed chase through western Nebraska before his tires were taken out and he was arrested in Wyoming, authorities said.

Jared Stone, 21, surrendered without incident late Wednesday about 10 miles west of Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, the Wyoming Highway Patrol said. He remained jailed Thursday in Laramie County, Wyoming, and is wanted in the killing last Friday of 28-year-old Baptiste White Eyes outside of a Sioux Falls casino. White Eyes was shot in the head.

According to the Nebraska Highway Patrol, at around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, a trooper spotted a car matching the description of one sought in White Eyes killing heading west on Interstate 80 near Lodgepole, Nebraska. The trooper attempted to stop the car, but the driver sped off after stopping briefly to let out two women and an infant.

Stone led troopers on a 65-mile chase that reached speeds of up to 100 mph, firing shots at the patrol cars trying to stop him. The troopers didnt return fire, the patrol said.

The Nebraska troopers notified the Wyoming Highway Patrol, which set up tire-deflation sticks on Interstate 80 at the state line.

With multiple tires flattened, Stone stopped the car just after 10 p.m. but remained in the car for about 25 minutes before surrendering, according to the Wyoming Highway Patrol.

Sioux Falls police havent commented on the relationship between Stone and White Eyes, other than to say they knew one another and dont believe the shooting was random.

Police in Iowa on Tuesday arrested a woman believed to be an accessory in the Sioux Falls killing.
ROCK SPRINGS  The Wyoming Legislatures Joint Judiciary Committee discussed Wednesday how to define edible marijuana in a way that helps law enforcement.

Legislators are considering whether law enforcement should weigh edibles or measure the potency of the marijuana they contain. Theyre also considering what standard should be used to determine misdemeanor and felony amounts of THC.

Sweetwater County Attorney Dan Erramouspe, speaking on behalf of the Wyoming Prosecuting Attorneys Association, recommended maintaining the 3-ounce marijuana edible standard for felony arrests. He said Wyoming is not able to test the quantity of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, in any edible product.

We need to deal with this in a rational, reasonable way with what we already have on the books, Erramouspe said.

A bill that would have made it a felony to possess more than 3 ounces of marijuana edibles died in the past legislative session. Sen. Dave Kinskey, R-Sheridan, said legislators couldnt get past the possibility of sending a college student to prison for a pan of brownies.

When a suspect is stopped, the edible is tested and weighed at the scene. If it tests positive for marijuana, the initial charge is determined by that weight.

Erramouspe said if law enforcement is required to wait for THC test results, which could take a week or more, then the arrest might be delayed or not happen at all.

While most of the committee members agreed testing was in the future, logistics and specifics were harder to nail down.

Byron Oedekoven, executive director of the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police, said many labs can test but not to a legal standard helpful to law enforcement. The current focus is labeling and serving size.

Rep. Kendell Kroeker, R-Evansville, suggested increasing the felony amount to 3 pounds of an edible.

Rep. Nathan Winters, R-Thermopolis, said he thought the issue was weight vs. potency and wanted to know which was more useful for law enforcement. Erramouspe said he had no answer for that because THC concentrations vary by product.

Testimony

Dr. Elina Chernyak, who is in charge of inpatient detoxification at Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County and outpatient drug treatment, told legislators about the effects of marijuana use and the testing process.

Chernyak said testing edibles was impossible because the THC typically isnt evenly distributed.

She also cautioned against legalizing marijuana. Chronic daily marijuana users exhibit impaired psychomotor functions and have irreversible loss of brain function and increased risk of psychosis, she said.

Chernyak said cannabinoid, the therapeutic chemical in marijuana, is much different than THC, the hallucinogenic chemical. It can help with nausea in cancer patients. However, she said there are new drugs that are considered more effective.

Much of the testimony presented to the committee spoke in favor of legalizing medical marijuana.

Sweetwater County resident Casey Fletcher said he has struggled with depression and is bipolar, and prescription drugs made him feel worse. However, he said once he started smoking cannabis in flour form, he changed for the better.

Ive never felt so normal, he said.

Amber Sparks, public relations officer for several Wyoming pro-cannabinoid groups, praised the benefits of CBD oil  for pain and cancer relief and for the regeneration of brain cells. She called it a viable medicine and suggested that the production of hemp in Wyoming could bring in much-needed revenue.

Sen. Larry Hicks, R-Baggs, recommended the committee take up marijuana edibles as a standalone issue at its next meeting. The committee also asked to hear from the states crime lab about testing.
The upcoming opening of two stores by a national big-box retailer could lure more shoppers across the border to Tucson.

Bealls Outlet  whose name is pronounced like bells  offers discount prices on department store items such as clothing, accessories, shoes and home furnishings and has two stores under construction in the local market.

Grand openings will be held at both Tucson locations on June 2, said Bill Webster, director of public and government affairs for Bealls Inc.

The outlet stores will be in the Tucson Place Shopping Center, at First Avenue and Wetmore Road, and at the Marana Marketplace at Orange Grove and Thornydale roads.

There may be a third store here in the future, according to Andy Seleznov, director of leasing for landlord Larsen Baker LLC, but it is not yet confirmed.

While Bealls Outlet has more than 20 locations throughout Arizona, including about 15 in the Phoenix area, the only Southern Arizona stores are in Green Valley and Willcox.

Webster said the Green Valley location is doing well, and having a few stores in Tucson will only add to the outlets success in Southern Arizona.

The skys the limit as far as what we can do in Tucson, considering the population, Webster said.

The regional Tucson market is a destination for people who cross the border into the U.S. to buy various goods.

Seleznov said outlet stores bring more Mexicans to Tucson, thereby helping the economy through buying merchandise and eating at local restaurants. Shoppers often come in groups and stay in hotel rooms, further expanding their economic impact.

I think theyd be well-received in Tucson, Seleznov said of the Bealls Outlet stores.

Mexican shoppers are a key retail demographic with Tucsons proximity to the border.

Webster said Bealls didnt move here specifically for the Mexican market, but it will just be a cherry on top.

Big box retailers like Bealls attract more Mexican shoppers than smaller retailers due to customers desire to purchase many items at once, said J. Felipe Garcia, executive vice president of Visit Tucson.

They have a limited amount of time, so they want to maximize their duration, Garcia said, so these big boxes, they will definitely be another reason to bring them here to Tucson.

Garcia offered retailers some insight into how Mexican shoppers do business:

 Customers start shopping early in the morning and stay until stores close (some, like Ross, have extended hours, especially on the weekends).

 They use mainly cash to buy things.

Visit Tucson has an education program for retailers and local businesses called 15 Steps to be Mexico Ready, which teaches business owners and staff about 15 simple cultural nuances that can help them successfully interact with the Mexican shopper. For example, place cash and receipts in the shoppers hand, not on the counter.

Some shoppers spend the night in Tucson or stay a few days, while others get all their shopping done in one day, Garcia said.

Mexican shoppers are only officially counted as tourists if they spend the night, but millions come here for a day and contribute greatly to the local economy, Garcia said.

Even if they dont stay overnight, he said, retail tourists pay sales taxes, which goes toward the citys general fund, which in turn goes toward infrastructure such as emergency services and road repair.

Garcia said Tucson and its city government values Mexican shoppers and their contribution to the economy.
Raytheon Co. on Thursday reported a lower first-quarter profit of $429 million, but both its earnings and revenues beat Wall Street estimates and it raised its profit forecast for 2016.

The companys Tucson-based Raytheon Missile Systems business unit posted net sales of $1.72 billion, up 17 percent, while its operating income slipped 7 percent.

The Waltham, Massachusetts-based parent company had net income of $1.43 per share, compared with earnings of $1.78 per share in first-quarter 2015.

First-quarter earnings were cut by 8 cents per share for accounting adjustments related to the acquisition of cybersecurity products maker Forcepoint.

The defense contractor posted revenue of $5.76 billion in the first quarter, up 9 percent from the same period a year ago.

Analysts on average had forecast earnings of $1.37 per share on revenues of $5.45 billion.

Raytheon shares were down about 2 percent in midafternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Raytheon said it expects full-year 2016 earnings to be $6.93 to $7.13 per share, up from an earlier forecast of $6.80 to $7 per share. The company maintained its projection of annual revenue in the range of $24 billion to $24.5 billion.

Raytheon said the increase in net sales at Missile Systems was mainly driven by higher sales of Paveway guided-bomb kits and Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAMs).

The decrease in Missile Systems operating income compared with first-quarter 2015 was mainly due to higher net program efficiencies and a favorable resolution of a contractual issue in 2015, along with lower incentive fees on a missile defense program in the first quarter of 2016.

During the quarter, Missile Systems booked $646 million for AMRAAM for the Air Force, U.S. Navy and international customers, $272 million for the Standard Missile-6 for the U.S. Navy and $225 million for Paveway for the Air Force and foreign allies.
In Tucson, it's actually very difficult to marinate slivers of pork shoulder in a fragrant red adobo paste for two days and then slow-roast it on a rotating spit topped with a pineapple.

The local health department usually frowns on these sort of things, and when Leopoldo "Polo" Moreno applied for a permit to open an al pastor restaurant three years ago, he was rejected. So he took his trompo down to the Tohono O'Odham Swapmeet, a weekend market near Casino del Sol where vendors sell everything from Salvadoran pupusas to pig skin boiled in copper pots.

Polo is from Michoacan and Mexico City, where spit-roasted al pastor is very common. After the style developed in the early 1900s from the skewered lamb shawarma of Lebanese immigrants, it spread throughout Mexico and became sort of a national dish. You can find the spits all the way up in Sonora, spinning like lighthouses guiding your way to late-night taco trucks in Rocky Point ... drippy monoliths of meat in Nogales, smooth and fatty or small and flappy.

But seventy miles across the border, they're practically nonexistent. Yes lots of Tucsonans claim they serve al pastor, but unless it's cooked on the spit it's really just pork adobada, Polo says. (Although I did recently spot a miniature spinning trompo downtown at Street Taco & Beer Co.) Usually the difference between al pastor and adobada is rather subtle. But real taco lovers, they can tell.

Even though the cards were stacked against him, the former Arizona miner kept trying to get his permit to operate in Tucson ... and finally it paid off. Polo opened his brick and mortar restaurant Polo's Taqueria earlier this month in a little west-side shopping center next to a gun shop and a dry cleaner. For the grand opening, he wheeled in an old karaoke machine and blared Mexican cumbias into the empty parking lot.

Inside, the space is actually pretty spiffy. The kitchen has been opened up since its days as a burrito buffet joint, so you can see the stately al pastor spinning around a backdrop of stainless steel paneling. The trompo is electric powered, and features a sanitary hood to keep out stray particles.

Polo prepares the pork shoulder himself every day, slicing the hunks into thin slivers and then slathering each with a paste of pasilla chiles, vinegar, orange, garlic and other spices. The meat must marinate for two full days before it's ready for the skewer. Then Polo props it up, placing a whole onion on the bottom for fragrance and then adding meat, onion slices, meat, onion slices ... In classic style, the pineapple goes on top so that it drips its sugary juices onto the roasting pork.

The heat coils on the trompo actually broil the meat from the outside, so that you're only cooking one layer at a time. Polo makes a quick cut about a quarter of an inch deep, and then slaps some pineapple on top. It's not an exact science: Our first order of al pastor tacos was cut fresh from the spit and came out a little softer. The second order of the day (yeah, we went back for more) had been crisped up on the flattop so it was crunchy and crackly.

I ate my al pastor in corn tortilla tacos, in lush corn masa sopes topped with salty queso and crema, and also in a fat puck of a burrito (a true Sonoran hybrid). I loved it all. The wisps of meat are completely infused with the peppery sauce, but have a delightful springy texture that sets them apart from adobada.

There are two special salsas made for the al pastor, which are both quite outstanding. A hit of the smoky red morita sauce brings out the tartness of the pork's vinegar marinade, making it a heavier affair. The pork gets lightened up with a droplet of gorgeous salsa verde. An uncooked salsa, it smacks of green tomatoes and fresh cilantro, creamy and viscous with just a hint of avocado.

The new space features an expanded menu with Mexico City favorites like shredded chicken tinga, the mixed meat torta Cubana and housemade masa sopes. There's also the Sonoran recipes like burros and vichis courtesy of Polo's wife Marisa, who is from Hermosillo. The restaurant serves carne asada, cabeza, birria and even tripe. They're probably great, but I wouldn't know ... I have fallen hard for the al pastor. Let's just say, I'm stuck on it.
The UA Police Department is investigating a report Wednesday night of shots fired near the Keating Bioresearch Building, near the corner of East Helen Street and North Warren Avenue.

Although no suspects were found, UAPD said officers found shell casings and blood in an outdoor patio area outside the Keating Building.

Police are searching for a man seen running from the area.

In it latest update, the UAPD said anyone inside the Keating Building who wants to leave should use the front door and meet with UAPD officers, the department tweeted.

Both UAPD and Tucson police officers were searching an area near the UA College of Pharmacy and on the west side of Banner-University Medical Center.

UAPD said officers were searching for a man about 5 feet, 10 inches tall, with spikey hair, wearing a white shirt, khaki pants and a Chicago Bulls hat. The man was carrying a backpack.

Later reports said a shooting victim was dropped off by a car at Tucson Medical Center, but it wasn't immediately known if this person was connected to the shooting.

UAPD Officer Rene Hernandez said the reports of shots fired were called in at about 8 p.m.

Latest UAPD tweets are here
PHOENIX  State lawmakers are moving to give Gov. Doug Ducey a chance to put two more justices on the Arizona Supreme Court.

Legislation awaiting a Senate vote would expand the states high court to seven, the first boost in more than half a decade. Rep. J.D. Mesnard, R-Chandler, who is behind HB 2537, said its about good government.

Im a strong believer in spreading power out, not concentrating power in the hands of a few, he said Wednesday. More minds is better than fewer minds.

And the fact that the legislation is coming with a Republican governor in power, he said, is just a bonus.

I trust and am comfortable with who would be his choices, Mesnard said.

But the whole issue has become more complex and is now wrapped up in some closed-door political wheeling and dealing.

Chief Justice Scott Bales is on record as saying neither the states population nor the caseload justifies two more justices and the costs that go along with that.

Heather Murphy, the courts press aide, repeated that assertion Wednesday. And she said the other four justices, all of them Republicans, share that view.

But Murphy said there was a split vote of the Arizona Judicial Council, composed of judges, attorneys and laypeople, directing Bales to try to cut a deal with lawmakers: The court would accept the two justices he says are not needed in exchange for some additional funding he says the court does need.

So Bales did just that.

Only thing is, the deal that the council agreed to take is not what lawmakers put into the budget.

Murphy said the council sought some funds for needed automation and an immediate 3 percent increase in pay for all judges in the state. The budget instead has a 3 percent raise, but phased in over two years. And instead of the automation, lawmakers are offering to provide additional probation officers in exchange for the new justices.

Bales would not comment Wednesday after the spending side of the plan  complete with the language making it contingent on Mesnards bill becoming law  was approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee. Murphy said talks continue.

His position is he will continue to work with members of the Legislature and our legislative staff to come to something that might be a workable compromise, she said.

That still leaves the question of why the push.

The bill was not driven by any particular court opinion or indictment of anything theyve done, Mesnard said. But he said there is a desire by some to have the high court review more cases.

The Arizona Supreme Court is like the U.S. Supreme Court: Most petitions for review are summarily disposed of in orders upholding the opinions of lower appellate courts.

Cases that do get reviewed can involve situations where the justices think an appellate court got it wrong. And, at both the federal and state level, the high court weighs in when different appellate court reach conflicting conclusions.

Thats the case with two cases the state Supreme Court is hearing next month where one appellate court said the smell of marijuana is insufficient for police to get a search warrant while another appellate panel reached exactly the opposite result.

Mesnard said opening up two new positions also could increase diversity on the bench. There are currently four white males and one white female.

He acknowledged, though, that Ducey, in the one appointment he has gotten to make so far, chose Clint Bolick, another white male. But Mesnard said thats not necessarily the governors fault, pointing out the Arizona Constitution requires the governor to fill vacancies from a nomination list prepared by the Commission on Appellate Court Appointments.

To evaluate his desire for diversity based on one court appointment I dont think is fair, Mesnard said. I dont think Im going to judge him on one appointment  who I actually thought was a good appointment.

As it turns out, Mesnard said he does not support the move by his colleagues to link the issues of the courts financial needs with expanding the bench. And he was particularly critical of the idea of linking providing the courts with additional probation officers to his legislation.

But Mesnard said he recognizes that a deal may be necessary for each side to get what it wants.

Im open to compromise.
Richard Smith lost his left leg to diabetes a year ago and is starting to feel loss of sensation in his other leg.

At age 72, the retired maintenance worker kept ending up on the floor in his apartment. The 6-foot-1-inch, 230-pound man was too big to lift for his wife, who stands at 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 120 pounds.

So Geri Smith, 53, would pick up the phone and repeatedly call 911 for help to get her husband back up on his scooter, recliner or bed.

Now, Smith is safe and living at Villa Maria Care Center. His physical therapy and long-term care at the center was navigated for the couple with the help of Brad Chilcote, a Tucson Fire Department firefighter who is a member of Tucson Collaborative Community Care, or TC3.

The departments pilot program began in November and connects at-risk individuals with social services and health-care services.

Fire Capt. Mike Bishop manages the program, and his crew consists of firefighter and emergency medical technician Chilcote and paramedic Sue Rizzi, who both joined Bishop in February.

Bishop, a nearly 20-year veteran of the Fire Department, worked the program alone traveling for three months in a red pickup truck going to homes on nonemergency visits with people who were referred to the program by fire crews.

The crews recognized further services were needed for patients once they responded to their homes after receiving 911 calls. The firefighters then put the people into a referral system, Human Services and Referral Program, that was set up in 2008.

Bishop and his crew do follow-ups and make sure the clients needs are met by walking alongside them, if necessary, to get services. This is a component the earlier referral program lacked.

Bishop said he found people, who were lost on how to receive social services and health and behavioral care.

They were using 911 for their general health-care needs because they did not know how to access the system for medical care, or had money to pay for costs or transportation to get to where they needed to go, explained Bishop.

Many of the 911 callers had personal emergencies in their living situations that were not true medical emergencies, he said.

The TC3 team, which rides in a Fire Department pickup or sedan, gets peoples needs met so they then no longer need to call 911 for nonemergencies, which automatically sends an engine crew and paramedics to a scene.

Bishop and his crew connect with people who need to go to doctor visits, behavioral health appointments and to get their medications. They also can make sure the homeless get services through a network of resources.

When he worked alone, Bishop handled 30 cases, and with Chilcote and Rizzi, the team is now up to 70 cases total since November. They have completed 50 cases and are working to complete 20 more, Bishop said.

The TC3 program is paid for out of the Fire Departments general fund and is set through August 2017.

The team will collect data on the cases and the cost-saving measures to the department, hospitals and insurance companies in hopes that the TC3 crews will grow and be incorporated into the Fire Departments dispatch system.

We are working to be aggressive in preventing medical emergencies through this mobile integrated program, said Fire Chief Jim Critchley. This is a community effort, and I am excited about the work everybody is doing.
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!)
Help India!

By Maulana Waris Mazhari

(Translated from Urdu by Yoginder Sikand)

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Hindus and Muslims have been living together in India for over a thousand years. Yet, they are still plagued by misunderstandings about each other and mutual hatred. A principal reason for this is that they have not sought to understand each other sincerely. Undoubtedly, there have been individuals among them who were deeply conscious of, and strongly opposed to, the enormous gulf that divides them, and they tried, in their own ways, to transform this hatred into dialogue and reconciliation. However, in the face of stiff opposition, their efforts did not yield much fruit.

The most salient factor for hatred and conflict between Hindus and Muslims is historical memoryof the former being dominated by the latter for centuries. The earliest Muslims came to India as traders and enjoyed peaceful relations with the local Hindus, and, as in Kerala, spread Islam using peaceful means. However, their place was rapidly taken over by invading armies so that the relationship between Muslims and Hindus was rapidly transformed into that of conquerors and the conquered. Obviously, the Hindus did not take kindly to this. This is why they considered Muslims to be foreigners and their inveterate foes.

This gulf between Hindus and Muslims was further promoted by the biased and hardly impartial rule of Muslim Sultans, for which they sought religious legitimacy. A striking instance of this was the imposition by many Muslim rulers of jizyah on their Hindu subjects. No matter what justification they sought for this, it was obvious that for the Hindus this caused much opposition and ill-feeling.

It must be noted that, despite the claims of the Delhi Sultans, and, after them, the Mughal Emperors, their rule was not, strictly speaking, Islamic or in accordance with Islamic commandments and principles. The political and social rules of Islam were applied, if at all, only in name. Yet, in order to fill the royal coffers the Sultans imposedjizyah on the Hindus in the name of Islam. They could have, had they wanted to, followed the practice of the third Caliph, Umar, who levied a general tax instead ofjizyah on the Banu Taghlib, a Christian tribe who felt that the jizyah was a sign of subjugation and degradation. However, a complete lack of proper insight, a rigid adherence to the prescriptions of the books of classicalfiqh, and a distressing dependence on the court ulema and their fatwas prevented the Sultans from following a more enlightened policy in this regard.

The Mughal period, particularly the reign of Akbar (1556-1605), was perhaps a more enlightened one in terms of state policies vis-a-vis the Hindus. This period saw increasing interaction between Hindus and Muslims at various levels. Following in the footsteps of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mamoon (786-833), Akbar arranged for the translation of numerous books on the religion, culture and history of the Hindus. This proved to be a major milestone in promoting a more objective understanding of the Hindus among Muslims, and a significant step in facilitating dialogue between the two.

The Revolt of 1857 that marked the formal end of the Mughal Empire witnessed impressive efforts to unite Hindus and Muslims to combat the encroaching British. Were it not for the tragic Partition of India, it is possible that major progress could have been made to improve Hindu-Muslim relations through dialogue. It should have been among the topmost priorities of our leaders after Independence to bring Hindus and Muslims closer together, but this did not happen. On the contrary, the gulf between them only further widened and the conflicts between them are becoming ever more deadly.

The Relevance of Dialogue

Recent and ongoing political developments at the regional and global level, particularly conflicts between Muslims and others and the heinous actions of some radical groups in the name of Islam, have had a major and enormously debilitating impact on Hindu-Muslim relations in India. These developments have further emboldened anti-Muslim Hindutva forces in India, which have enabled them to make even further inroads among those Hindus who otherwise have nothing against Muslims. On the other hand, the existence of extremist elements among the Indian Muslims cannot be denied. They cannot be excused, legitimised or sought to be explained away as a reaction to virulently anti-Muslim forces. One wrong action cannot legitimize another as a reaction to it. But, at the same time, it must be admitted that such extremist elements are only a very small, fringe minority among the Indian Muslims, an isolated exception.

A major problem afflicting Muslims, particularly in north India, where the bulk of the community is concentrated, is the miniscule Muslim middle-class, which could have, if it were more numerically strong and confident, played a key role in promoting Hindu-Muslim dialogue. The existing Muslim middle-class is simply too cut off from the masses and immersed in mindless pursuit of consumerist luxury to take the issue of Hindu-Muslim dialogue and reconciliation seriously. On the other hand, the ulema, who enjoy strong organic links with the Muslim masses, lack sufficient foresight and an understanding of the complexity of many contemporary issues, which are essential for serious and meaningful inter-religious and inter-community dialogue. Despite this, it is crucial that the ulema, especially those who work in the leadingmadrasas, play a leading role in promoting inter-communal dialogue. These ulema have a large network of supporters throughout the country, and if they get involved in serious dialogue with Hindus, it can have a powerful multiplier effect that can reverberate across the rest of India. Because the ulema enjoy the support and respect of a large section of Muslims, if they were to take an active role in inter-community dialogue, it can have a very positive impact on the Muslim masses as well.

Hindu-Muslim dialogue is really the need of the hour. Two leading Indian Muslim organizations, the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board and the Jamiat ul-Ulema-i Hind, attempted some years ago to undertake dialogue initiatives with Hindus, but, unfortunately, this was looked upon with suspicion by many Muslims and so nothing came of it. Perhaps another reason for the failure of this effort was that these organizations were seen as becoming too politically involved.

Muslim groups need to reach out to, and dialogue with, not just secular-minded Hindus, who are already convinced of the need for inter-communal harmony, but also with other Hindu groups as well. They need to address the concerns and misunderstandings of the latter, too. It is erroneous, as some Muslims contend, that for Muslims to seek to dialogue with extremist Hindu groups is tantamount to surrendering to them. It is with such groups, too, that we need to dialogue. After all, the real need for dialogue is with such groups, not with groups who are already convinced of the need for peaceful inter-communal relations.

At the global level, most Muslim-sponsored dialogue initiatives have sought to promote links with Christians and Jews, or what are referred to as People of the Book, or adherents of what are called the Semitic religions. Not much effort has been spent on dialoguing with people of other faiths, including Buddhists and Hindus, who form a major proportion of the worlds population. This lacuna urgently needs to be addressed.

Hurdles in Dialogue

Some of the major hurdles in the path of dialogue between Hindus and Muslims relate to our traditional thought and practice. Till these hurdles are addressed and overcome, a conducive environment for dialogue cannot be created.

The biggest intellectual challenge facing dialogue between Hindus and Muslims is the belief that the two are wholly different, indeed contradictory, in terms of religion and culture. Obviously, as long as this belief persists serious dialogue between them, based on their commonalities, is impossible. Islam is based on pure monotheism, while most Muslims think that Hinduism is based on undistilled polytheism. While Muslims think that Islam is the only true religion, many Hindus believe that there exist different, equally legitimate, paths to the Truth, all of which are worthy of respect. Hindus thus believe that the Muslims understanding of divine truth is narrow and confined. Muslims consider Hindus to be wallowing in polytheism and to follow absurd superstitions and inhuman caste rules in the name of their religion. On the other hand, Hindus think of Muslims as violent iconoclasts, as obsessed with sex, and as intolerant fanatics. In short, they regard each other as sub-humans.

These generalizations can be very misleading. The fact of the matter is that not all Hindus are idol-worshippers and nor do all Muslims consider breaking idols an integral part of their faith. Social hierarchy, caste and superstitious beliefs and practices in the name of religion are to be found among both Hindus and Muslims.

It is striking to note that these issues that set Muslims and Hindus apart from each other and lead to such misunderstanding have less to do with religion as such and much more to do with social practice and historical events. As I mentioned earlier, anti-Muslim prejudices among Hindus have much to do with the history of Muslim rulers in India and the tragic Partition of the country. Likewise, anti-Hindu sentiments among many Indian Muslims have much to do with the continuing anti-Muslim violence in India and the virulent anti-Muslim propaganda of Hindutva forces. In reaction to Hindutva aggression, extremist tendencies took root among a fringe section of the Indian Muslims, and they began dreaming of establishing what they called the Islamic system. They began to denounce secularism and democracy as allegedly against Islam, and, using fiery and emotionally-driven slogans, sought to exploit the simple-minded religiosity of the Muslim masses. Clearly, this is unacceptable and must be denounced.

It is true that many Hindus and Muslims, including some of their religious and political leaders, consider inter-religious or inter-communal dialogue as meaningless and useless. They are bound to stridently oppose such initiatives. While we must be constantly aware of this possibility, it must be borne in mind that the number of Hindus and Muslims who would support such efforts would greatly outnumber their opponents. We must also remember that, despite their claims, rabble-rousing Hindutva ideologues are not the accepted leaders of all, or even most, Hindus, and nor are rabid Muslim characters the leaders of the majority of Muslims. Hindu-Muslim dialogue must be promoted no matter what the opposition such efforts meet from such elements.



Maulana Waris Mazhari is the editor of the New Delhi-based monthly Tarjuman Dar ul-Uloom, the official organ of the Graduates Association of the Deoband madrasa. He can be contacted [email protected]

Yoginder Sikand works with the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion at the National Law School, Bangalore.
Help India!

By Mahtab Alam, TwoCircles.net,

Have read or heard of the book Who Killed Karkare?, I asked an avid reader and friend of mine. The one, written by Mrs. Kamate?, she questioned instead of answering. No, the book Who Killed Karkare: The Real Face of Terrorism in India is written by former IG Police of Maharashtra, SM Mushrifthe person known for unearthing Telagi Scam, I replied back. But I have not read about this book in mainstream media, neither found at display of any book stall, she complained. There wasnt any reason to disagree with her, since what she was saying was true. Like my friend, even I have not read anything substantial about this book in mainstream print media leave alone the coverage in electronic media. But why, both of us wondered.

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In October 2009, one month before the first anniversary of terrorist attack on Mumbai famously known as 26/11, Delhi-based publishing house, Pharos Media published the book Who Killed Karakare? The book deals with the issues related to bomb blast investigations, role of intelligence agencies and the entire episode of the Mumbai terror attack and its investigation at length. Unlike popular belief of involvement of Islamic Terrorists in all the cases of terror attack in India, the book argues on an altogether different plane. The author claims the role of Brahmanist lobby in all cases as he concludes, My research tells that all the above-mentioned issues are correlated and interconnected. The main players in this game have been the Brahmanists  a very small section amongst Brahmins and also some highly-indoctrinated non-Brahmins, the Brahmanist-dominated IB, and a section of the media controlled by the Brahmanists (P.14). The book is based on the authors experience in the Police service and on the reports published in newspapers and periodicals in respect of communalism and terrorism during the last few years.







Well, come to the main issuewhy mainstream media preferred to blackout such a provocative book? Why media is afraid to discuss the contents of the book, serialise or publish the most important parts in their publications even after an offer by the publisher of the book? Subhas Gatade, a senior freelance journalist and an expert on issues related to communalism and terrorism in India, has some very important and interesting points to make, which in a way or other answers the questions raised by this reporter. Gatade says, The mainstream media preferred to ignore this book because, first of all, it has lot to do with mainstream media. In fact, in a way it has exposed the real face of mainstream media. Secondly, the book raises some very uncomfortable questions about the investigation of the cases of bomb blasts and talks about the nexus between mainstream media and security agencies.

Third edition of the book has already been in the market; in fact publishers will be soon bringing the fourth one. Till now, Urdu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam version of the book is also on stand and Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati and Marathi version will be hitting the stand soon. Mazin Khan, publisher of the book is satisfied and he has reason for it. We are yet to reach the common readers, which was our prime intention to publish this sort of book, he says in a concerned tone while his colleagues are busy dispatching the book ordered by readers from different parts of the country. We are dispatching, on an average, 10 to 20 copies of the book everyday, Mazins colleague Kausar informs this reporter. Kausar is just back from Hyderabad NCPUL Book Fair, where the book has been taken by hand to hand by visitors and made record sales but not a single mainstream media house bothered to report about this book being available while covering the book fair leave alone reporting its being hot-cake or bestseller.

What is most surprising, the mainstream alternative publication also followed the mainstream media houses. Both Tehelka weekly and Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) did not bother to share the information about this book with their readers. In fact, a Mumbai based journalist sent a review to EPW but when it was not published, the reviewer sent the same to a lesser known web-portalHimal Times, where it was published. Its really unfortunate, says Mazin. The multi-edition Urdu daily Rashtriya Sahara also followed the same line. It can be excused, if book have been only in English or any other language except Urdu. Moreover, I am also unable to understand, why the same Sahara Urdu, which took altogether different stand not following their counterparts on the Mumbai terror attack and other cases of terrorism, did not bother to spare some columns to discuss important parts of the book, asks Mazin.







Contrary to the book Who Killed Karkare?, the book To the Last Bullet, written by Vinita Kamte, wife of the ACP Ashok Kamte, who was killed in Mumbai terror attack, was much publicised. English weekly magazine, The Week did a cover story making this book a lead. It would be unfair to say that, Mrs. Kamtes book is not something worth reading. However, when you compare this book with Who Killed Karkare, the latter would be preferred. The reason, while S M Mushrifs book essentially deals with politics of terror, loopholes in investigations, etc, Mrs. Kamtes book is more focused on life and works of Ashok Kamte along with her harsh experiences with Mumbai police while obtaining details about circumstances in which her husband was killed.

Mazin has all reason to worry as publisher but I have good news for him. Though, like Delhi I could not find the book at stalls, neither any at book stalls of Railway stations between Delhi and Bangalore nor at Banagalore Airport bookstall however, I must confess, a number of people I met both in Bangalore and Mangalore (most of them are either journalists or activists) during my recent visit, had a copy of the book in their bookshelf. Hence, it can be said that the book Who Killed Karkare? might have been killed by mainstream media but it is becoming bestseller as once listed as bestseller in Vijayawada edition of The Hindu daily.

Link:

http://whokilledkarkare.com/


Help India!

By Dr. Shah Alam Khan,

Across the length and breath of human history there are instances when a person can get away with murder but being an anti-national (as defined by popular sentiment) is a crime of the highest order. In Hollywood or in Bollywood, treason is the ultimate epitome of a villainous character.

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Arundhati Roys recent essay on Maoists of Dhantewada has more or less opened a Pandoras Box. More than the debate on subject, the conventional and the alternative media (read internet) is busy in pronouncing her guilty of treason, a charge not easy to prove or refute. In wake of what I consider as one of the most poignant pieces of honest evaluation, Ms. Roy has come under significant attack from both the right and left ends of political and intellectual class. Many have written her off as an anti-national about whom India and Indians should not worry. She has been labeled as a fanatic bohemian. She has been disregarded as an author who has a habit to describe the problem emotively without offering a solution. In a nutshell she has been criticized, spited and even threatened. Of all the comments on her platter, her being labeled as a rabid, anti-national is the one which makes interesting read.





Arundhati Roy



George Orwell had once said, by nationalism I mean the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled good or bad. Good or bad? Nationalist or Anti-national? The vernacular sounds familiar. As a young boy growing in a Muslim ghetto, I had heard this vocabulary on more than a single occasion. Growing up in a middle class, secular Muslim Indian household, my sensitivity to nationalism had been nurtured and grown into a robust beast, ready to devour any signs of sedition, treason and subversion. It was very late in life when I realized that nationalism does not necessarily mean accepting all that the state says, commands and orders. Nationalism also means asking the correct questions at the correct time even if this compromises the states own interests.

We all practice what can safely be labeled as insulated nationalism. A kind of nationalism which is kept free from external influences and affections. Pure and unadulterated. Insulated nationalism carries the smell of blood. It attracts beasts of all kinds. Human history is full of disastrous effects of insulated, thoughtless nationalism. Nationalism gave birth to Hitler. In the early nineties, it was nationalism cooked with a pinch of Hindu religion which saw the rise of right wing fascist parties in our country. Taliban and their machinery of jihadism is the end product of nationalism mixed with tenants of Islam. Jingoism post 9/11 incited the American people not only to re-elect an incumbent and incompetent George W Bush but also to support his so called war against terror. Insulated nationalism is one of the most perfect weapons of mass destruction human mind has ever discovered. A missile which can be fired without any payload; from any distance. Its an unmanned drone which causes unprecedented destruction in its wake.

The rhetoric of insulated Nationalism can be most dangerous when the people fed on it are half literate, half hungry, half clothed and all in all half human. This half human does not realize that even his nationalism is half baked in the fire of vested interests. Day in and day out his mind is controlled by the jingoism which appears on television, radio, newspapers and other sources of state outlet. The ability to ask questions, the power to raise a finger, the insight to evaluate a plot, are all burnt in the fire of this insulated nationalism. The story doesnt end here. The insulation of nationalism is further fortified by straps of religion, caste, and region. So, if you are a Muslim you cannot question the violation of human rights in Kashmir. If you are a dalit you cannot condemn the governments credibility on reservation policies. A Christian cannot raise the issue of Orissa carnage on an International Human Rights forum. And on similar lines, an Arundhati Roy cannot raise a voice against the misfortune of adivasis and the tribal of Dhantewada without being labeled anti-national.

Nationalism is an innate trait which we acquire growing up in a society. The components of nationalism cannot be forced but felt. Nationalism means assimilation and integration of people on a common social stage. What kind of nationalism can we expect from the dalit survivors of Kherlenji massacre or the lucky ones from the Gujarat and Delhi (1984) pogroms? None. Their perception of nationalism and the concept of nationhood have been blurred (or should we say clarified) by their experiences of the microenvironment they lived in. The insulation from their nationalism has been ripped apart, exposing the rawness to factors around them. In fact it would be outright ridiculous to expect quantum of nationalist packages coming out from such underprivileged and downtrodden sections of the society which has been denied justice in cold blood. Strangely it would not be surprising if we see the perpetrators of these crimes berate nationalist slogans from roof tops. Insulated nationalism is surely a strange weapon.

As for the likes of Arundhati Roy, who could be more nationalist than the one who has the ability and courage to raise voice against injustice, inequality and discrimination of her own people? Who could be more patriotic than the one who fights for the rights of those whom we consider inconvenient road blocks in the agenda of OUR progress. It is frightening to see the insect definition of George Orwell being applied with impunity. Nationalism with insulation is like fire without warmth, like a bird without wings. It is time that we remove the insulation from our nationalism so that our raw nerves could be exposed to what is happening around us and with us. The mist of breath and the warmth of blood spilled next door can only be felt if we have this raw nerve.



Dr. Shah Alam Khan blogs at http://www.indiaandbharat.blogspot.com
Help India!

By TCN News,

Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) has rejected the Ministry of HRD proposal for National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for the admission in MBBS course.

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NEET test is to be introduced from 2013 and will cover MBBS and MD courses offered by 271 medical colleges, 138 govt-run and 133 private. As minority instuttions both Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) are eligible for 50% seats to be reserved for minorities. Administrations of both universities have sought clarification that becoming part of NEET will not mean giving up quota for minorities.

Talking to TwoCircles.net, Rahat Abrar, spokesperson of AMU confirmed that this decision was taken by the Executive Council yesterday.

The decision is a historic step, said Prof. Razaullah Khan, President of the Millat Bedari Muhim Committee (MBMC), Aligarh. He pointed out that compelling AMU to adopt the said test will amount interference in the internal matter of University and that will not be tolerated at all. He was addressing an emergency meeting of MBMC called to hail the decision of AMU Executive Council at Media Centre Aligarh.

Secretary of MBMC Jasim Mohammad said that AMU must not concede the orders of the ministry. He said that the issue of minority character is also held up and the previous Vice-Chancellor Dr. P. K. Abdul Azis totally failed in carrying on the issue. He even could not send the pleader of University to attend date in Court.

Member AMU Court & Eminent Scientist Prof. Humayun Murad pointed out that AMU is historical University with a special purpose to educate Muslims and to achieve that target; it should be declared a minority institution by legislation.

Hailing the decision of EC, Ex President of AMU Student Union Dr. Syed Mohsin Raza said that AMU community on local and global level must come forward to demand Minority Character for AMU and should urge upon the present vice-chancellor Lt. Gen. Zameer Uddin Shah to sincerely pursue the matter.

MBMC passed a resolution demanding that NEET should not be implemented in Aligarh Muslim University and the Central Government must bring legislation to Amend Article 30 for declaring AMU a minority education institution. In another resolution, the Vice-Chancellor, Lt. Gen. Zameer Uddin Shah has been hailed for his farsightedness and assured full support.
Help India!

By TCN News

Member of Parliament and AIUDF chief Badruddin Ajmal raised the issue of floods in Assam during the Zero Hour of the Lok Sabha on April 27, and asked the central government to announce a relief package of Rs 1,000 along with the deployment of the NDRF team.

Even as large parts of Central and West India have been suffering from drought, the North East has received a lot of unseasonal rainfall, causing extensive damage in Ajmals constituency Dhubri along with Barpeta, Nagaon, Sivasagar, Jorhat, Tinsukia, Dibrugarh along with the Cachar Hills region and the Barak Valley. Landslides were reported in parts of Cachar Hills especially Haflong, while Karimganj and Hailakandi have been threatened with flood-like situation since early April. The rains have thrown the Badarpur-Lamding train service out of gear.







Badruddin Ajmal (file photo)



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Ajmal also requested the Centre to declare the floods and erosion problems in Assam as a national calamity and prepare a mechanism to fight the problem and find out a permanent solution. This is not the first time that Ajmal has made similar demands. In December 2015 also, the AIUDF chief and Dhubri MP Badruddin Ajmal raised the issue flood and erosion in Assam in the Parliament and urged the House to finalise sort of permanent solution to this problem.

We are with the flood-affected people of Chennai and Tamil Nadu. We want the government of India to provide all kind of necessary help. But here I would like to mention that as I am from Assam, even our union home minister for state affair Kiren Rijiju is also aware of the fact, this problem (flood and erosion) has become a part of our destiny, Ajmal had said.

Heavy rains have also affected parts of Arunachal Pradesh, especially the Anjaw district and Tawang. In Meghalaya too, unseasonal rains have done extensive damage in the region of West Jaintia Hills.

Related:

Continuous rains in April leave residents of West Jaintia Hills flummoxed and counting losses
Help India!

By Umair Azmi for Twocircles.net

An opinion piece in the Indian Expresspublished on April 22 asks Indian Muslims to flout the fatwa of the Darul Uloom (Deoband) Islamic seminary. Doing so is the democratic right of the author, but the arguments make for an interesting reading, especially if the position held by the authorof a IAS officeris also kept in mind.

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The first paragraph itself resorts to a lie, by claiming that the fatwa states that only a human can give birth to a human and therefore, the country cannot be called mother No such statement is to be found in the fatwa. But it makes one wonder- what was the need for this concoction at all? Could the argument not have been made without resorting to such underhand tactics? Or is it just a matter of habit: after all, as the cases of numerous Muslims incarcerated in jails on terror charges show, the officers of investigating agencies are more proficient in manufacturing facts than in investigation.



Something more sinister may possibly be at play. The Jamiat Ulama e Hind has been at the forefront in providing legal help to those incarcerated under fictitious terror charges. Though the organisation is independent of the Darul Uloom seminary, owing to the common faces (Maulana Arshad Madani, head of one of the factions, is also a teacher at the seminary), people often conflate the two. Could this be one of the reasons why the seminary happens to be in the cross-chairs of the investigating agencies? One should not be surprised if that is indeed the case.

One also wonders about the editorial judgment of the newspaper that publishes opinion pieces on a text, but never publishes the complete text in question.

The writer states that The role and duty of the leadership of a community should be to give solutions and bring clarity to issues. Is that not what this fatwa does  bring clarity to the question, whether the slogan is consonant with the Islamic creed? That the clarity is not to the liking of the author is another matter.

Over the years, they have weakened the position of Muslims as citizens and made them suspect in the eyes of others. In the eyes of whom? The general masses of India? If so, is it not more an issue that the masses need to ponder over as to what sort of depraved mentality reduces patriotism to a mere slogan? Or is it his own fraternity  the investigating agencies  that the author has in mind? If so, should it not be a cause to call for a change in the unprofessional attitude of the officers who operate based on prejudices against certain communities?

The author also claims that they have come up with a straitjacketed theory that if a Muslim chants the slogan, he would lose his religion. Another slander. While it may not immediately be obvious to non Muslims, every Muslim with even a rudimentary interest in his religion knows too well the difference between an act being against Islamic precepts and an act causing one to go outside the fold of Islam, i.e., lose his religion. As an illustration, almost every average Muslim would, if asked regarding movies, would answer that considering the usual contents, watching it goes against Islamic principles, and would constitute a sin. But no one would claim that watching a movie causes one to lose the religion. On the other hand, for one who denies one of the fundamentals of the faith, such as the Unity of God, or the Last Day, he/she would be considered outside the fold of Islam. In other words, such proclamations would be considered to cause one to lose the religion. That the author mixes them up, points to his ignorance, or worse, deceit.

It is ironical that the author says that historically, the political and religious leadership of Muslims in India has not helped them to come to terms with the changing times. For if he had any sense of history, he would not have ignored that Bharat Mata ki Jai is a substitute for Vande Mataram, nor would he have ignored the fact that the later stanzas of the song explicitly equate the motherland with the goddess Durga. He would also not ignore the virulently anti-Muslim theme of the novel that popularised the song, Anandamath. Did it ever occur to the author, that people who are not at all concerned with how the matter stands vis-a-vis Islam, but who do have a sense of history and context, may also object to the slogan?

In normal times, a caged parrot delivering homilies on the sense of citizenship, history, etc. would sound comic. But with people who idolize fascists in power, such love songs to the powers that be should be a sign of grave concern.

Umair Azmi is a computer engineer by profession, with a masters degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He lives in Gurgaon.
Help India!

By Raqib Hameed Naik, TwoCircles.net

As a debilitating drought enters its thrird successive year in Marathwada region of Maharashtra, Mohammad Yousuf, 45 a farmer from village Waranga in District Hangoli recollects how they have been struggling to find potable water to survive on.

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This is the worst ever drought I have seen in my life. All the wells and nearby canals have dried up in my village. People here are struggling for drops of water. Cattles are dying and our crops are already in ruins. Government tankers only arrive once in a week, whose water is dirty and frothy and unfit for human consumption, thus leaving us prone to various health related ailments, said Yousuf.



Marathwada is one of the five regions in Maharashtra containing eight districts, reeling under severe drought since last three years and is the most water-deprived region of Maharashtra. The rivers, canals, ponds and nallas have dried up. The poor population is forced to buy water at inflated prices from water mafia. The failing crops have forced farmers to attempt suicides.

In 2013, thousands of miles away from India, a US-based Indian organization, Indian Muslim Relief & Charities (IMRC) worried about the climate change in India leading to hot summers and scarcity of rains leading to shortage of drinking water took an initiative, Water Well Project to build and install bore wells, hand and electric pumps in rural area of India.



In the three drought-affected districts of Marathwada viz. Nanded, Hingoli and Parbhani, IMRC has installed 50 hand pumps since January 2016.

Sunil Chaure, 42 from village Manatha in Nanded District, Marathwada used to buy a bucket of water for Rs 2-5, which was eating up one third of his monthly income but he is now relived after IMRC installed a hand pump in his village.

After the installation of hand pump, there is a sigh of relief in our village. We are very happy that our Muslim brethren are coming forward to help us and others should take cue from them and come forward to help every drought affected village in Marathwada, said Chaure.



Younous Ahmed, IMRC volunteer, who is looking after the Water Well Project in Marathwada region, said, People are struggling for drops of water. The governments drilling machines usually digs up to 200 meter and stop if they dont find any water. But when we started drilling we found that water was available at 500-700 feet deep in the earth and started drilling at such depths.

Government tankers usually supply water once in four or eight days which is less than sufficient for the poor families to survive. The water crisis is so intense that people fight each other for just few liters of water.

Whenever a government water tanker arrives, the people fight among themselves to get more water. Sometimes water is put in the dried wells, where fights have proved fatal leading to deaths by falling in the wells, said Vishwanathan Patil from Village Warwat in Nandel, Marathwada.



IMRC has build and installed more than 400 bore wells and hand pumps across six Indian states since 2013.

In year 2013, IMRC built 54 water wells and 40 hand pumps, in 2014, 57 bore wells and 75 hand pumps whereas in 2015 the numbers has touched 200.

In last three years we have built and installed more than 400 tube wells and hand pumps. These wells are specifically built centrally in a village to give access of water for the entire community, regardless of anyones faith, says Waheed Qureshi, Manager of Sahayata Trust, the India partner of IMRC through which its projects are implemented.

Besides the drought affected regions, the bore wells and hand pumps have been installed in the rural areas suffering from neglect of their governments, having deficiency of rains, recurring droughts, having unsafe source of drinking water and where people had to walk miles to fetch water. The water projects have also benefitted, the families living below poverty line, widows & orphans, women and children who used to bring water on a cycles and shoulders after walking several kilometers.

In Madhya Pradesh, the bore wells and hand pumps were installed in different villages like Chatrukhedi, Mau, Barukhedi, Burakhedi, Magrana, Dhanora, Manglaj, Banskheda, Sherpura, Khujner.

In Maharashtra the areas covered are Bhogaw, Girgaw, Khurgaw, Chingaw, Kamtha, Taroda, Daitna, Parbhani, Babulgaw, Balapuri and more bore wells are expected to be completed soon.

In Bihar, the areas covered are Harnabuzrug, Chakdarab, Fatimachak, Raypura, Parsotipur, Arajiparsotipur, Babura, Aabdachak, Nanduchak, Dhayharna.

In Jharkhand, the areas covered are villages in Chatra and Palamu district.

In Andhra Pradesh, the areas covered are, Pileru, Kalkiri, Rajuvaripalli, Kalluru, Gadi, Ellankivaripalli, Sodum, Madalcoloni , Muhammadiyulapalli, Kuppam.

In Telangana, the areas covered are, Syednagar, Qasimnagar, Venkatadripet, Uppugal, Thatikonda, Khanpur, Kandalgudem, Torrur, Ontimamidipalli.

We have installed 114 hand pumps till November 2015 in dozens of villages in Bihar and Jaharkhand.The local people where the handpumps were installed have expressed joy and immense gratitude for having local access to potable water. People from all the faiths are benefitting from IMRC water projects, said Wahid Nadvi, the IMRC volunteer looking after water projects in Bihar and Jharkhand.

The IMRC has also completed installing 35 out of 50 tube wells across different villages and mohallas in Sumbal Sonawari belt of Kashmir to provide the local populace with access to clean drinking water.

We were badly suffering because we had to fetch water from Nallah which is two Kms from my home. The quality of water in Nallah is very bad and very dangerous for health. But thanks to IMRC that they installed tube well in our village and made clean water accessible to us, said Shahbaz Hussain, 40 a teacher from Bathipora, Sonwari. The work on remaining 15 tube wells is expected to be completed soon.
Sitting around the campfire on New Zealands palm-fringed beach in the Kahurangi National park, a Kiwi friend mentioned that she "could not conceive of a real live snake." Travellers in New Zealand do not need to worry about snake encounters, as there are none outside of zoos. My friend was so afraid of snakes that she refused to visit Africa. She explained that her fear of snakes would only spoil the experience.

Snakes are foreign to urban lifestyles

Africa is not the only place with dangerous snakes, but most people live away from Nature as the trends are toward urban lifestyles.

It is doubtful there are too many poisonous snakes roaming the streets of New York or London. When travellers think of Africa, they hope they will see lions, not snakes. They read tips on travel about insect repellent and malaria, crime, and AIDS, rather than tips on snakes.

Keep those zips closed

Not all snakes are dangerous to humans, but if you dont know what kind of snake is under your camp bed, it may not be the best time to debate species identification. A top tip is to make sure the tent you buy has a fine mesh inner and that all the zips work. Make zipping up your tent a habit. A black mamba slithered between our flysheet and the inner lining in Zululand one day when we were taking a siesta.

Without the zip that mamba would have ended up inside our small tent, and we would have been the losers.

Snakes in trees

Trees harbour snakes that blend in beautifully with the green leaves and the browns of bark and branches. People who are not used to snakes lurking in their orange tree back home need to bear in mind that some snakes not only lurk invisibly amongst the foliage, but are capable of launching themselves out of the tree when they are disturbed.

Foraging around trees to collect flowers, seeds, or interesting fruit is inadvisable behaviour.

The dreaded toilet snake

The dreaded toilet snake is not a myth in Africa. In the wildlife parks, toilets are often the favorite hideout of snakes. They particularly enjoy curling up behind the cistern and around the S pipe underneath the toilet.

Smaller snakes have been found beneath the toilet lid. Flash hotels and five-star safari camps are probably cleaned well so you need not stress about snakes in the toilet, but campsites are a different story. Always check behind the cistern, underneath the toilet, and under the lid before sitting down.

Snakes in the shower

Reeds often enclose shower facilities in Africa. Reeds look rustic but they are also attractive to snakes. Snakes love to hide in the layers of reeds and wait for passing lizards. Snakes that learn this behaviour can pass it on for generations. In 2001, a vine snake latched onto my jacket sleeve as I undressed. In 2015, another vine snake in the same shower struck at my husbands hat as he walked past.

The solution is to beat the reeds with a stick before entering the shower. If you shower with one eye open, dont feel silly; everyone does it.

Campfire snake encounters

Campfires provide another opportunity to encounter snakes. Wood stacked on the ground looks like a handy hiding place to a snake. Experienced campers will kick at the bundle before picking up firewood. Pick each stick it up with your fingers and bang it on the ground to get rid of stinging insects and small snakes.

Snake magnets

Snake magnet shoes and luggage must not be overlooked. Before you rummage through a pack, check carefully for snakes. Keep your luggage strapped up and if you leave your boots outside your tent, turn them upside down and bang them on the ground before putting them on.

Apart from snakes, a variety of insects enjoy the smell of sweaty feet.

What to do about a snake

Snakes usually take off as fast you do, but call on a campsite official if you are not sure what to do. Snakes are territorial, so sometimes it is best to give up your spot to nature and find an alternative site, especially if the snake is identified as being venomous.
Chinese companies helping Ecuador Updated: 2016-04-28 08:40 By Zhong Nan(China Daily)

Chinese companies are deploying more manpower and resources for post-earthquake relief efforts in Ecuador to help the country recover, the Ministry of Commerce said on Wednesday.

China National Petroleum Corp and Huawei Technologies have not only purchased a large amount of lifesaving goods, but also encouraged their employees to donate personal belongings to people who have suffered heavy casualties and financial losses.

Wang Haijing, vice-president of the Red Cross Society of China, said three Chinese rescue teams with 330 kilograms of goods have arrived in Ecuador since Sunday. They recruited 15 translators, medical and construction professionals, for the mission.

A 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit coastal Ecuador on April 16, killing more than 500 people and injuring thousands.

Powerchina International Group, the international arm of Power Construction Corp of China, said power generating equipment in Ecuador's Coca Codo Sinclair project - China's largest hydropower project in South America - were working normally after the earthquake.

"This equipment has been tested many times under many different circumstances including extreme hot and cool weather, as well as under earthquake conditions," the company said.

Power Construction Corp of China has increased its generating capacity every day following the earthquake, and has sent medical equipment and supplies to Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city.

China also sent its first round of humanitarian aid including medicine, water-purification products, tents and lifesaving equipment to Ecuador on Tuesday night, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
Indonesia calls China key partner Updated: 2016-04-28 08:37 By Li Xiaokun(China Daily USA)

Jakarta seeks to boost political, security cooperation, official tells Premier

"Indonesia views China as its most important cooperation partner," a senior Indonesian official told Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday.

Luhut Panjaitan, Indonesia's coordinating minister for political, law and security affairs, told the premier that Jakarta wants to expand its political and security ties with Beijing.

Luhut also proposed increasing fishery cooperation and welcomed Chinese investment, when he met with Li in Beijing at Zhongnanhai, headquarters of the central government.

Li spoke of the broad benefits of close relations between the two countries.

"The sound and stable development of the bilateral ties not only greatly benefits the two peoples and China's relations with ASEAN, but also sends a signal of peace and stability to the region," Li said.

Luhut was visiting China to attend a meeting with State Councilor Yang Jiechi.

Earlier this month, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said that China regards Indonesia as a priority in its neighborhood diplomacy.

Luhut's visit comes at a time in which Beijing seeks to broaden the mutual understanding and communication with ASEAN countries.

A ruling by an international arbitration body in a process unilaterally launched by the Philippines challenging China's territorial sovereignty in the South China Sea is expected to come within weeks.

China has repeatedly said it will neither accept nor participate in the process.

Jia Duqiang, a Southeast Asian studies researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Indonesia, ASEAN's largest member country, shares with Beijing the goal of maintaining stability in the South China Sea and across the region.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Saturday, at the end of a Southeast Asian tour, that China has reached consensus with Brunei, Cambodia and Laos that the territorial disputes in the South China Sea are not an issue between China and ASEAN and should not affect their relations.

lixiaokun@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 04/28/2016 page3)
As succession strategy goes awry private equity buys family firms Updated: 2016-04-28 16:53 By Bloomberg(China Daily USA)

Smaller consumer and retail firms are buyout targets, but technology and education still stay out of investors' reach

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.

It's a tectonic shift in a market where the likes of Carlyle Group LP and KKR & Co have traditionally been forced to forgo controlling stakes in order to enjoy the spoils of China's breakneck growth, ever since the country opened up to private equity firms in 1994.

Buying control will allow buyout firms to apply the model they've honed over decades in developed markets: Acquire undervalued companies and turn them around by cutting costs, replacing management and overhauling their strategies - unencumbered by resistance from entrenched founders.

"It's indisputable that the control approach in China works better and returns more," said Derek Sulger, a partner at Lunar Capital.

He said it's still hard to find large deals, especially in hot sectors such as technology and education, so private equity firms are focused on transactions involving smaller companies in the consumer and retail industries.

Deals involving a change of control accounted for 34 percent of the total value of private-equity transactions in China last year, more than double the share in 2014, according to Asian Venture Capital Journal.

Excluding so-called arbitrage deals, which typically involve delisting companies and taking them public in markets where multiples are higher, "control" deals jumped to a record $6.8 billion last year from $4.9 billion in 2014, the private equity research firm estimates. That's still just 13 percent of the total deal value.

Sulger said he is holding buyout talks with at least 10 Chinese companies whose founders or managers are looking to retire and sell controlling stakes.

Among them is a snack-food maker in Shanxi province whose founder's son went to university in Canada, did a stint at an investment bank in Hong Kong and is now working at one of the large accounting firms in the city.

"How can you expect the kid who left China during adolescence, grew up in Richmond in Vancouver, and then went to the University of Toronto, and then came back to run the family business in a rural part of Shanxi, to be happy?" Sulger said.

"These founders are very proud people" who want to see their companies continue to prosper even if their children don't want to take over, he said.

"What they are really looking for is a solution to the succession problem that they know they are going to face," said Sulger.

CITIC Capital Holdings Ltd is in discussions with a 20-year-old textile company which dyes cloth and exports mainly to West Asia, said Eric Xin, a partner at the private equity firm in Hong Kong. With the business squeezed by a combination of falling sales, rising labor costs and the yuan's appreciation in recent years, the 46-year-old owner wants to sell out completely and move to the United Kingdom, where he plans to educate one of his sons.

"It's an industrial company in a polluted industry," said Xin. "The kids don't want to be in these sunset industries. They want to be bankers and financiers."

In many cases, it's purely economic factors that are pushing China's entrepreneurs to sell out. CITIC Capital bought control of King Koil Shanghai Sleep System Co, a mattress maker, in 2014.

When CITIC Capital was first introduced to the company in late 2013, its biggest shareholder wasn't seeking an outright sale, Xin said.

Six months later, as sales to the hotel business deteriorated, stocks piled up and profit margins eroded, the owner changed his mind.

Sulger of Lunar Capital said he's hunting for fundamentally sound companies that are facing challenges that can be resolved with professional management.

Chinese snack food companies, for example, typically have net profit margins of 4 percent to 6 percent, roughly half of what overseas competitors boast, Sulger said.

In the early years after China opened up to buyout firms, they had to pay more in the rare instances when they were able to gain control.

As more companies have become available, the median enterprise value of deals involving a change of ownership has dropped to 7.2 times trailing 12-month earnings, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, from 11.6 times in 2014 and more than 17 times in 2013.

Business owners are getting more willing to acknowledge that they need help from private equity in weathering the slowdown and developing new skills in areas such as marketing, branding and research and development, Sulger said.

Many small business owners have never had to deal with the need to cut costs or implement sweeping changes, said Weiwen Han, co-head of Bain & Co's regional private equity practice. "It's about cost reduction, operational efficiency, changing the business model and transforming themselves. They've never done it."

Conversely, many buyout firms haven't developed the skills required to take over and overhaul Chinese companies, compared with the more passive role they're used to playing.

"They also need to invest in their own capability, to really understand how a mid-sized private founder-led business operates," Han said.

In Hangzhou, Yao said his decision to sell control of Yaotaitai, for an undisclosed sum, allowed him to focus on areas he is good at - such as where to buy the nuts, preserved fruits and additives that go in to the products. Among the changes Lunar Capital brought is an e-commerce platform, which Sulger said could generate as much as 20 percent of sales in the future.

For some of China's entrepreneurs, the primary motivation for selling out is their own quest for a quieter life.

Sulger said he is talking to two companies whose owners want to retire and focus on spiritual pursuits, such as Buddhism.

"Because China is a little slower now, you have to run businesses smarter. You have to focus more on things like cost and e-commerce," he said. "There is an enormous lifestyle issue emerging in China. A lot of these founders want to live and work in Vancouver, lots of them want to devote their life to other things like Buddhism, and lots want to simply retire."

Workers make snacks in a duck meat processing factory in Zouping, Shandong province. Dong Naide / For China Daily Three Chinese students take a selfie with an iPhone at their graduation ceremony in Columbia University, New York. China tops other countries in sending international students to the US, accounting for about 31 percent of the total. Wang Lei / Xin Hua A Chinese woman selects a handbag at a mall in Paris during the French discount sales season. Getty Images

(China Daily USA 04/21/2016 page15)
Texas nurtures investment links to China Updated: 2016-04-28 11:39 By May Zhou in Houston(China Daily)

Chinese Consul General Li Qiangmin (right) talks with Bernard Harris, president of the US China Innovation Alliance, at a news conference in Houston on Wednesday. May Zhou / China Daily

US and Chinese business leaders on Wednesday announced the first US China Innovation and Investment Summit will take place May 16-18 in Houston.

The international business conference is designed to connect US technology companies, especially those in and around Texas, with potential investment partners from China.

Li Qiangmin, consul general in Houston, citing President Xi Jinping's speech at a top university three days ago that China will depend on innovation for further development, said that the US innovation will be commercialized and scale up faster with Chinese investment.

Li said that there is unprecedented demand from Chinese companies to seek technology innovation through mergers and acquisitions, as well as establishing new research centers overseas.

"This event will help improve the efficiency of innovation collaboration and cross-border merger and acquisitions between the two countries," Li said.

Dr. Bernard Harris, former astronaut and president of the US China Innovation Alliance, one of the host organizations, said that there is a need for opportunities to connect, especially between China and the southern part of the US, by creating forums for exchange. Harris himself is involved in the process of helping two US companies closing two deals of this nature between China and the US.

According to James Chen, Asia-Pacific director of the Office of the Governor of Texas - Economic Development and Tourism Division, Texas is rich in innovation and exports more high tech than California.

"Chinese has made a lot investment in manufacturing and the oil industry in the past, and now I see more and more Chinese companies coming here to explore opportunity in tech industries," Chen said.

Water Ulrich, president and CEO of the Houston Technology Center, another of the host organizations, said that there are many important technologies in the South. However, they don't get funded as quickly, he said.

"We would like to see more Chinese investment in the Southwest, especially in Texas, to help the startups here flourish, Ulrich said.

The inaugural event is expected to draw 200 US technology companies and 150 Chinese investors, including executives from top venture capital and private equity firms, and industry leaders and administrators from China's top industrial parks and development zones.

mayzhou@chinadailyusa.com
China will never allow war or chaos on Korean Peninsula, Xi says Updated: 2016-04-28 11:00 By ZHANG YUNBI and AN BAIJIE(chinadaily.com.cn)

President Xi Jinping said China, a close neighbor to the Korean Peninsula, will "never allow the Peninsula to have war or chaos" because "it will be no good for anyone in the event of such situations".

Xi made the remarks when addressing the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Beijing on Thursday.

Xi said all parties should hope to continue exercising restraint, and they are urged "not to stimulate each other or flare up contradictions".

Instead, parties should "make joint efforts in dragging the Peninsula nuclear issue back, at an early date, on the track of resolving through dialogue and negotiation" and "push for realizing long-lasting peace and stability in Northeast Asia", Xi added.

The President noted that the Peninsula situation has experienced tension since the beginning of the year.

He said China "has dedicated great efforts in controlling, managing the situation and pushing forward dialogue and negotiation among the parties".

China upholds the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, safeguarding its peace and stability, and resolving the issue through dialogue and consultation, Xi said.

"As a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China implements the relevant UN Security Council resolutions in an all-out and integral manner," Xi said.
Texas hopes to attract Chinese money with innovation Updated: 2016-04-28 11:23 By MAY ZHOU in Houston(chinadaily.com.cn)

Chinese Consul General Li Qiangmin talks with Bernard Harris, president of the US China Innovation Alliance, at a news conference in Houston on Wednesday. MAY ZHOU / CHINA DAILY

US and Chinese business leaders on Wednesday announced the first US China Innovation and Investment Summit will take place May 16-18 in Houston.

The international business conference is designed to connect US technology companies, especially those in and around Texas, with potential investment partners from China.

Li Qiangmin, consul general in Houston, citing President Xi Jinping's speech at a top university three days ago that China will depend on innovation for further development, said that the US innovation will be commercialized and scale up faster with Chinese investment.

Li said that there is unprecedented demand from Chinese companies to seek technology innovation through mergers and acquisitions, as well as establishing new research centers overseas.

"This event will help improve the efficiency of innovation collaboration and cross-border merger and acquisitions between the two countries," Li said.

Dr. Bernard Harris, former astronaut and president of the US China Innovation Alliance, one of the host organizations, said that there is a need for opportunities to connect, especially between China and the southern part of the US, by creating forums for exchange. Harris himself is involved in the process of helping two US companies closing two deals of this nature between China and the US.

According to James Chen, Asia-Pacific director of the Office of the Governor of Texas - Economic Development and Tourism Division, Texas is rich in innovation and exports more high tech than California.

"Chinese has made a lot investment in manufacturing and the oil industry in the past, and now I see more and more Chinese companies coming here to explore opportunity in tech industries," Chen said.

Water Ulrich, president and CEO of the Houston Technology Center, another of the host organizations, said that there are many important technologies in the South. However, they don't get funded as quickly, he said.

"We would like to see more Chinese investment in the Southwest, especially in Texas, to help the startups here flourish, Ulrich said.

The inaugural event is expected to draw 200 US technology companies and 150 Chinese investors, including executives from top venture capital and private equity firms, and industry leaders and administrators from China's top industrial parks and development zones.

After the Houston conference, the Chinese delegations will continue on satellite tours to Austin, Dallas or Atlanta to explore similar opportunities.

mayzhou@chinadailyusa.com
China stresses Putin's expected visit Updated: 2016-04-28 22:18 By Zhang Yunbi(chinadaily.com.cn)

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Antalya, Turkey, Nov. 15, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

President Xi Jinping told visiting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that China attaches great importance to Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to China later this year.

"I expect to embark on an in-depth exchange of views with President Putin about strengthening China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination," President Xi said on Thursday in Beijing.

Xi asked Lavrov to convey his greetings to Putin, and Lavrov conveyed greetings from Putin to Xi.

The two sides should strengthen two-way strategic and political mutual trust, and boost bilateral pragmatic cooperation, especially the cooperation on the major projects, Xi said.

The two sides could further strengthen communication and coordination upon major international and regional issues. The two sides should jointly promote the political settlement process of relevant issues, and contribute wisdom and solutions so that China and Russia can ensure peace and stability in the region and the world, Xi said.

Both China and Russia hope to strengthen cooperation within the framework of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, and push various parties for implementing the Security Outlook on Asia, Xi said.

Lavrov said Russia is ready to deepen the two-way ties, further promote high-level exchanges, deepen economic and cultural cooperation, and advance the relevant major projects.

Also, Russia is ready to enhance coordination and cooperation in international and regional affairs and within multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Lavrov added.
Teen's 'nuclear-free' poster honored Updated: 2016-04-28 11:39 By Lia Zhu in San Francisco(China Daily)

Michelle Li (left), a 15-year-old high school student, and her tutor Yunhua Fang tell the story behind her award-winning artwork Peace in Our Hands of the UN Poster for Peace contest at Fang's studio in Saratoga, California on Tuesday. Lia Zhu / China Daily

Michelle Li said she wanted to inspire world peace by nuclear disarmament with her entry in the UN Poster for Peace contest.

"My drawing illustrates that the world can work together to build long lasting peace with our very own hands," the teenager said.

Michelle, 15, won the second prize for her poster Peace in Our Hands that shows a pair of crossing hands in the foreground that cast a dove-shaped shadow in the background. Beneath the hands is a shattered missile.

A student at Dougherty Valley High School in San Ramon, California, Michelle said she used three symbols of a dove with olive branch, a nuclear missile and hands representing peace, nuclear weapons and taking actions.

The hands were not depicted with any individual racial color but with continents, representing the world taking actions against nuclear weapons.

"Through world efforts and our efforts, we can create this lasting world peace," she said. "A necessary step for that is nuclear disarmament, basically through getting rid of nuclear weapons."

Seventy years ago, the United Nations General Assembly established the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and all weapons of mass destruction in a resolution on Jan 24, 1946.

In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the resolution, the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs organized the Poster for Peace contest to raise awareness of the need for nuclear disarmament and to inspire citizens to use their artistic talents to promote a world free of nuclear weapons.

From Oct 24, 2015, to Jan 24, 2016, the contest attracted 4,149 entries from 123 countries. The contest's website received 200,000 page views from more than 180 countries, according to an earlier press release posted on the UN website.

Winning artwork will support the UN message on disarmament and will be presented in various platforms such as exhibits, banners, postcards and calendars, according to the UN.

Next month, 11 of the contest's award winners will be invited to the UN headquarters, where they will meet Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, General Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft and United Nations Messenger of Peace Michael Douglas. Michelle will join via video.

The first place and third prizes go to Ivan Ciro Palomino Huamani from Lima, Peru, and Anjali Chandrashekar from New York with an award of $3,000 and $1,000, respectively.

As to the award, Michelle said she would use it for college savings.

"I'm interested in going into life science because for our generation environment is really a problem that we should address," she said. "On the other hand, I'm also interested in studying art."

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com
I was interviewed recently by Michael A. Burstein for the Jewish Advocate, for an article about Doctor Who, role-playing, and summer camp.

Speaking about the study, Rabbi Barenblat noted, I love the idea of using Doctor Who to help kids battle depression. Connecting with fictional characters can help kids feel less alone, and hes a wonderful character, resilient and kind. Anyone can benefit from identifying with a heroic archetype, and the Doctor -- like the Biblical archetypes we meet in Tanakh -- is both wonderful and flawed... which makes him, like the Biblical figures, relatable and (although he is a Time Lord) very human. 

Read the whole thing here: 'Dr. Who' to the rescue. Thanks for including me, Michael!
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Kiosk of Vietnamese company at the Asia-Pacific Food Expo 2015 in Singapore. Twenty-four Vietnamese enterprises are participating in the 2016 Global Seafood Expo in Brussels, Belgium, on April 26-28.  VNA/VNS Photo Le Hai

HA NOI  Twenty-four Vietnamese enterprises are participating in the 2016 Global Seafood Expo in Brussels, Belgium, on April 26-28.

Hoping to increase seafood exports to the EU, the enterprises have brought famous Vietnamese products, including tra, basa fish and shrimp, to the event. Tran Van Dung, representative of the Viet Nam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP), said Vietnamese seafood businesses have prepared equipment and processing technologies to further penetrate the European market once the EU-Vietnam free trade agreement (EVFTA) comes into effect.

Alexis Fergay, general director of French seafood company NEPTUNE, told Vietnam News Agencys correspondent in Brussels that he was a loyal customer of Vietnamese seafood enterprises. He said he particularly enjoyed Viet tra and basa fish and was hoping to further expand his business partnership with Vietnamese enterprises, especially once the EVFTA was enforced.

Karakou Pheni, a customer from Cote dIvoire, said Vietnamese catfish was his favourite. He said the seafood dishes presented at the expo tasted wonderful and hoped he could buy these items at supermarkets in Belgium soon

The Vietnamese Trade Office in Belgium also organised a workshop on the EUs seafood market and opportunities for Vietnamese enterprises during the event.

Nguyen Ngoc Oai, deputy head of the Viet Nam Directorate of Fisheries, said Viet Nam had improved its legal framework and institutions for fishery management following the European Commissions proposals.

According to statistics from VASEP, Viet Nam earned US$1.4 billion from seafood exports in the first quarter of 2016, a year-on-year rise of 9 per cent.

Together with the United States and Japan, the EU is an important importer of Vietnamese seafood, accounting for 18 per cent of the countrys total export volume.  VNS
The Hanoi Telecom JSC received the Prime Ministers decision approving its transformation from a Business Corporation Contract (BCC) to become Vietnamobile Telecommunication JSC in Ha Noi on Tuesday.  Photo saigondautu.com.vn

HA NOI  The Hanoi Telecom JSC received the Prime Ministers decision approving its transformation from a Business Corporation Contract (BCC) to become Vietnamobile Telecommunication JSC in Ha Noi on Tuesday.

The decision was granted at a ceremony to celebrate the companys 15th anniversary of establishment.

The new company will have three shareholders. Hanoi Telecom JSC will hold 50 per cent of the charter capital, Hutchison Asia Telecom will hold 49 per cent, and Hanoi Telecoms General Director Trinh Minh Chau will hold the remaining one per cent.

With the transformation, Vietnamobile has become the only telecommunication company in Viet Nam operating with investment from a foreign firm.

Being a partnership between Hutchison Telecom Group and Hanoi Telecom, Vietnamobile becomes a member of Hutchison Asian Telecom which comprises mobile telecommunications operations in the emerging markets of Indonesia, Viet Nam and Sri Lanka.

A representative of Hanoi Telecom said that when becoming a joint stock company, besides setting the benefits to customers on top, Vietnamobile would continue introducing new packages and applications with a competitive price to provide the best experience for its users.

Targeted at young customers, Vietnamobile will focus on upgrading its coverage as well as developing infrastructure to become "the door" for entering the world of multi-media and social networking.

Vietnamobile ties its mission to connecting the younger Vietnamese generation with the world through mobile Internet to enhance knowledge as well as providing access to recreational activities such as music and sports, said the representative.

Pham Ngoc Lang, Chairman of Hanoi Telecom, said that the companys goal by 2020 is to become a strong telecom corporation with annual revenue growth of between 20 and 30 per cent.

The chairman also revealed that Vietnamobile would focus on investing in 3G technology and was ready to upgrade to 4G in certain areas where customer requirements were high.

Speaking at the ceremony, Lang said Hanoi Telecom has ceaselessly strived to stake its position in the countrys telecom market from being a small telecom company.

Besides the telecom sector, Hanoi Telecom also does business in network security and space security to serve the duties of protecting the nation.

Speaking at the ceremony, the Deputy Minister of Information and Communications, Phan Tam, also asked Hanoi Telecom to boost the business transformation in accordance with the Prime Ministers decision so that Vietnamobile would be operated under a new model, while determining strategies and plans to develop 4G to consolidate its position in the broadband market.  VNS
The newly-appointed Minister of Industry and Trade talks with Vietnam News Agency about his actions to improve efficiency of the ministrys activities from 2016 to 2021, and create favourable conditions for enterprises during international integration.

The people expect to have an active government from 2016 to 2021. What will the ministry do to contribute to the national socio-economic development during this period?

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said the key tasks that Government will accord priority to stability of the macro-economy and the creation of favourable conditions for developing the nation.

The Government will continue completing market regulations to create good business, production and investment environments for attracting more sources that will contribute to the national socio-economic development in the future.

Therefore, this year the ministry will focus on implementing directions of the government to stabilise the macro-economy and build a legal environment according to the requirements of international integration.

The ministry will also follow the market closely to implement the State policies efficiently and create the most favourable conditions for enterprises and producers to improve efficiency in production, business and exports, and integrate efficiently into the international market.

Viet Nam is in the process of integrating into the international economy. What solutions will the ministry have so that the nation could gain the most efficiency from joining free trade agreements (FTAs)?

Viet Nam has had several plans approved by the government to reach the most efficiency from FTAs and the nation must give maximum priority to implementing legal regulations related with commitments in the integration process.

For instance, Viet Nam has completed negotiations and signing of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), and the nation must now institutionalise integration commitments, while State management offices must also implement the commitments such as requirements in deadlines and contents to create synchronisation.

With the new favourable conditions from the TPP, the first priority is to provide information about those conditions for the economic sectors, enterprises and consumers in order to take business and investment opportunities, expand production and business and approach the international market.

The ministry is one of the representatives of the State to extend support to enterprises and the people in accepting integration opportunities from markets, transferring technology, training the workforce, and building the brand, in addition to protecting local producers and consumers.

Apart from that, the ministry will also promote restructuring and reforms for economic sectors of the industry and trade sectors to develop further in the future.

The restructuring and reforms in the mining industry, energy industry, and import and export, apart from local trade activities, is scheduled to be implemented this year and beyond.

The ministry will support start-up businesses to grab production and business opportunities from the market.

It will also set up growth targets in industrial production, import and export. To gain those targets, it must solve the problems of export enterprises and producers, and have trade defence measures to protect legitimate interests of enterprises and customers.

In the new position, how do you expect to improve efficiency of the Ministry of Industry and Trade in co-ordination with other ministries to solve socio-economic problems?

The Minister of Industry and Trade will have the responsibility of implementing directions of the Government in socio-economic development.

With experience in implementing legal policies, the ministry will closely combine with other ministries and relevant agencies to review all regulations of the local legal systems for ensuring efficiency of the State management while ensuring the interest of the people and enterprises.

Especially, this year, the ministry will work with other ministries such as those of agriculture and rural development, and of health, to change State-managed activities with regard to food safety issues and implement the Governments directives about the food safety month.

With the role of the State management office, the ministry will meet the demand in food safety of customers and also ensure international requirements on that issue.  VNS
HA NOI  A concert to promote the new action movie Truy Sat (Tracer) will take place tonight in Ha Noi, gathering actors and actresses participating in the film.

Tracer is a new project from actress and producer Truong Ngoc Anh and Vietnamese-Canadian director Cuong Ngo. It tapped foreign actors and filmmakers in an effort to make a name for Vietnamese action flicks. The film will show at cinemas with English subtitles.

The film features a female detective and her comrade, who fight hard to bring a gang of drug traffickers to justice. It stars Truong Ngoc Anh and Vinh Thuy

The concert will reenact some action scenes on-stage. It will also feature pop stars like Thu Minh, Van Mai Huong and ong Nhi.

The film concert will start on 5.30pm at the Ha Noi University of Science and Technology, 1A Le Thanh Nghi Street, Ha Noi. Its open for free to filmgoers who bring their ticket stubs.

The similar concert will be held on May 6 in a Nang. The film crew will grant scholarships to poor students in the locality.  VNS
HA NOI  As many as 200 objects and historic photos are on display at the Ho Chi Minh Museum in downtown Ha Noi featuring Ho Chi Minh and Viet Nams first National Asembly elections.

The exhibition covers several topics: President Ho Chi Minh and the first general election in 1946, and National Assembly elections as well as Peoples Council members elections at all levels between 1960 and 2016.

On January 6, 1946, Vietnamese citizens above 18 cast the first ballots in history to vote for the first National Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam.

The exhibition aims to raise peoples awareness of the upcoming elections for the lawmakers organisations at all levels scheduled to take place on May 22 and the 126th birthday anniversary of the President (May 19).

The exhibition will run at the Ho Chi Minh Museum, 19 Ngoc Ha Street, Ba inh District till the end of May.  VNS
by James Stefanuto

There have been echoes from local media that Hollywood was making another King Kong feature film in the agrarian outcrop of Tam Coc. If you need a reason to escape Ha Noi for the weekend, then having the new home of King Kong only two hours away by motorbike is more than enough for most.

Fill the tank up and you have all you need to make the 105km journey and then some. All you need for the overnighter is a small back pack and around US$40 between you and your companion for food, drinks and a wonderful trip through the gorges and limestone caves. Ha Noi, in all its crazy glory, can make you crave some fresh air and luscious landscapes.

Follow Giai Phong Road out of Ha Noi and at this point the road will become Ngoc Hoi Road. The railroad will guide you all the way to the main town of Ninh Binh, where theres a right turn to Tam Coc. The beauty of this region unfolds a little more after every ten kilometres. Once you are truly clear of Ha Noi, the awe-inspiring structures begin to appear in the distance. It is only once you reach the first large bridge that you begin to see the ancient monoliths and waterways carved out of the landscape. Dont trouble yourself over the weather; with or without the sun, the shades of green are still just as numerous. For $7, each of us had a dormitory bed to ourselves at a homestay with breakfast included.

On arrival I felt like I was on the set of Jurassic Park and not King Kong, but you can see why Hollywood used this pristine landscape. The homestay is located in a village named Ninh Thang. It is situated only a kilometre or more from the entrance to the main attraction.

When you take your bike up the main road you arrive at what could be mistaken as a Vietnamese-Venetian canal, but the palm trees and jungle-covered mountains make this very much a one-of-a-kind place. From here you can take a boat and float along, but we chose to walk for a few kilometres and began our journey through the caves near the old temple.

As you walk along you can see human nature in perfect harmony with nature itself. The human eye is able to see the colour green better than all others and this is the perfect place to see that. The internet is filled with pictures of this wonderful place but you need to see it through your own lens.

From underneath the shadow of each of these mega-structures, you can see people living far away from the digital world. There is no noise other than the sound of the wind cascading through the steep valleys. There are families living deep inside these waterways and you can catch a view of life from an ancient era. The beauty of the hard working men and women, perpetually at work will remind you of who you are and why youre there.  VNS
Chen's Empty and Full uses both painting and sculputure to show the crossover between new and traditional in art. Rheagan's Pieces, Parts, Place is a series of photographs abstracting urban architecture.

Empty and Full, a selection of paintings and an installation by Albuquerque-based artist Xuan Chen. Empty and Full comprises three bodies of work with flowing color combinations, hard-edged patterns and hybrid forms of painting and sculpture. These series of vivid abstract works show the crossover between new technologies of image making and traditional painterly practice.

Chen begins each process by constructing colorful 3D drawings on her computer. Based on digital drawings, Chens Light Threads paintings explore transparency and luminosity. These dimensional acrylic paintings made with bright embroidery threads capture and reflect light. Empty and Full is a series of paintings created by meticulously arranging strips of poured vinyl paint on wood panels. Her large-scale installation incorporates sewn fabrics, mylar film, felt, wood and paint.

Born in Qingyang, China, Chen moved to the United States to complete a PhD in materials science and engineering at the University of California in Berkeley. She then received her MFA in studio art from the University of New Mexico. Chen has won the Miami University Young Painters Competition, the Reggie Gammon Memorial Award from the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque, and a WorkingArtist.org grant.

In the project room is Pieces, Parts, Place, a series of photographs by Hayley Rheagan, who plays with abstracting urban architecture by using the cameras tendency to flatten space. With her keen eye for symmetry and color, Rheagan transforms naturally found geometric patterns into vibrant compositions. Originally from New Mexico, Rheagan currently lives and works in St. Petersburg, FL.
Authorities collects fish samples for test in the central region.  VNA/VNS Photo Tran Tinh

By Thu Van

Over the past three weeks, the incidents of massive fish die-off along Viet Nams central coastal provinces, and the reactions from concerned parties have been pretty upsetting to me.

Of course, I have to say that what is happening to nature and its consequences for local residents whose livelihoods depend so much on the sea is a disaster. But as a reporter, I tend to first take a look at how the incident has been reported to readers.

What I witnessed was a wave of anger (which is understandable), and then, something almost like an accusation of the Taiwanese conglomerate Formosa for causing the incident, even before any official scientific proof is provided.

Local media coverage has been making guesses about the possibility of a 1.5km wastewater pipeline that runs directly from Formosas multibillion-dollar steel plant in Ha Tinh Province discharging untreated wastewater into the ocean.

Some reporters tried diving under the water to take a look at the wastewater pipeline. Others conducted tests to show people that fish died some minutes after being put into water taken from the sea near the factory.

Stories on Facebook were shared, liked and commented on with rapid speed. Everybody is talking about it, blaming Formosa for it, and asking the company to leave Viet Nam. It also seems to me that everybody has decided that Formosa is the culprit in this case.

This reminds me of my education in journalism. I remember well the words of one of my professors who said, The true calling of the job is to simply to inform without bias or favour. It is a constant search to arrange the varied aspects of an argument and present them, not according to your own judgment of right or wrong, but for the consideration of others.

Finding the cause of the massive fish death and imposing strict punishments if violations of environmental regulations are discovered is definitely important. It must be done. But it needs to be done in a professional way, with the participation of those specialised in that field.

In a meeting yesterday between relevant ministries and scientists, which was the first meeting about the case between central and local managing bodies and scientists, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment told the media that they had identified two possibile groups of causes for the massive death of fish recently. The first potential cause is the impact of poisonous chemical substances discharged by humans from the mainland or in the sea. The second possible cause is an abnormal natural phenomenon combined with human impacts, resulting in a phenomenon called "water bloom" or "red tie". They also said that to date, theres no evidence to prove that theres a connection between Formosa and other factories and the massive fish death.

That might be a disappointment for those who have been waiting for the promised conclusion. But I agree that before we can come to a conclusion, we need to know exactly what poisonous heavy metals, if any, caused the fish to die? Where did these factors come from? Who is responsible for it? All these questions need to be answered with scientific tests and evidence, not guesses and suspicion. In the meantime, what reporters can do is report in a balanced and unbiased manner, and not act as opinion makers.

What else I see is that while the cause still remains unknown, the spreading of such suspicions has already had sad consequences. Fishermen are not going offshore to fish during this time because no one will buy their fish, and tourists have been canceling their trips to these provinces. You can all imagine how difficult it is for them now. Now what caused this, if not for the unproven guesses that the mass media has been spreading over the past weeks?

A friend of mine, a Vietnamese scientist who is living in the US, said while warnings to people are essential, only specific data can be used as evidence.

Government reaction

What upsets me more about this is the reaction from the Government. In fact, we didnt see any reaction at all in the first two weeks after information about the massive fish death went public.

As the fish started dying, the Government had no reaction, and thus the mass media has been guiding public opinion. However, fish have been dying in massive numbers in many other countries since March this year. Sixty-five tonnes of fish have died in the waters of Kampong Thom, Cambodia, 40 tonnes of fish have died in a lake in Nalgonda district, India, 70 tonnes of dead fish were found in a river in Magdalena Department, Colombia, 4,000 tonnes of sardines washed up in Araucania, Chile, and the list goes on. These countries have been working to find out the cause, as well.

When the fish died, the local authorities did not act promptly enough to clean up the beaches. It was only until April 24 that the Government started to call on scientists to work on the case, and called for support for affected local residents. Too much time has been wasted.

Only until yesterday, Thua Thien-Hue Province became the first to announce the cause of mass fish deaths in its area - but still not the specific one. Local authorities blamed a strong toxic substance in water.

Deputy director of Thua Thien-Hue Provinces Department of Natural Resources and Environment , Nguyen Huu Quyet, said at the meeting that the water samples taken from local sea showed that the level of Ammonium and Chromium all excess legal levels.

This is an incident that should ring alarm bells for both the Vietnamese Government and the people in other aspects.

Throughout the proceedings of this case, we realised that the Government has a rather loose management of wastewater treatment. Reports showed that while Formosa did have a wastewater treatment system, local authorities had no way of ensuring the system was working properly. All we have is a commitment to do good for the environment! As much as I protest the environmental problems that multinational companies like Formosa cause their host countries, I truly hope they have been acting according with their commitments - because if not, the consequences might be terrible and mind-blowing.

We also need to take a look at the capability of our domestic scientific institutions. Why does it take so long for results to become available? Why dont we have an independent institution that can act promptly without waiting for permission or for proof that they have the right idea? After all, what we all need is to find the cause of the fish death so that we can figure out our next steps  not simply the wish to punish someone for our own satisfaction.

After all, if Viet Nam wants to grow green, its leaders really need to sit back and consider what Chou Chun-fan, Formosa Ha Tinhs external relations manager, told the State-run VTC14 television channel: You cannot have both. You need to choose whether to catch fish and shrimp or to build a state-of-the-art steel mill.

After all, we shouldnt have to wait for such a massive fish die-off to raise the problems of environmental degradation. We should have been tackling it long before. But its better late than never. Balancing between economic development and guarding the environment has never been easy  our leaders need to choose. They can choose to be brave enough to address an arising problem before it becomes a true crisis.

And the people also need to make a choice today. Have you been teaching your children to use reusable bags and love nature? Have you been switching off the lights as you leave a room? Have you been classifying your waste? It all starts with the small stuff.  VNS
Party General Secretary and President of Laos Bounnhang Volachith sent a letter to Vietnamese leaders at the end of his Viet Nam visit yesterday to thank them for their warm reception during his visit from April 25-27. VNA/VNS Photo

HA NOI  Party General Secretary and President of Laos Bounnhang Volachith sent a letter to Vietnamese leaders at the end of his Viet Nam visit yesterday to thank them for their warm reception during his visit from April 25-27.

In the letter, addressed to Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and President Tran ai Quang, the Lao leader expressed his belief that the visit would contribute to fostering friendship, solidarity and cooperation between the two Parties, States and peoples.

He wished that the fraternal Vietnamese people, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Viet Nam, will have continued success in national renovation, construction and development, particularly in realising the resolution adopted by the 12th National Party Congress, towards building Viet Nam into an industrialised country by 2020. VNS


HA NOI  The Party, State and people of Viet Nam attach importance to strengthening the neighbourly friendship and comprehensive co-operation with Chinese counterparts, Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong said yesterday.

Talking to Secretary of the Party Committee of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China, Peng Qinghua, during a reception in Ha Noi, the Party General Secretary also laid stress on Guangxis significant role in Viet NamChina ties.

He suggested Guangxi and Vietnamese localities focus efforts on effectively realising common perceptions reached by the two countries leaders and further improve the efficiency of their collaboration across all areas.

The Party official of Guangxi briefed his host about the development of ties between Guangxi and Viet Nams border localities, affirming that the authorities and people of the Guangxi Zhuang region wished to strengthen economic connectivity and practical partnerships with Viet Nams border provinces, thus building a borderline of peace, friendship, stability and prosperity between the two countries.

During an earlier reception for the Chinese guest, head of the Party Central Committees Organisation Commission, Pham Minh Chinh, called for stronger links between Vietnamese localities and Guangxi across the fields of the economy, trade, investment, infrastructure connectivity, cultural exchange and tourism.

More balanced trade

Also yesterday, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc suggested the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China encourage the import of agro-forestry-fishery products from Viet Nam, particularly rice, for a more balanced trade between the two countries.

At the reception for Peng Qinghua yesterday, the PM also called for stronger coordination between the two countries in border management and in executing the agreements on cooperation in protecting and exploiting tourism resources at Ban Gioc water fall and on free navigation at the Bac Luan river mouth.

The two sides should accelerate the opening and upgrading of pairs of border gates as already agreed, to promote trade-economic and tourism exchanges in border areas as part of efforts to build a borderline of peace, stability, cooperation and development, PM Phuc said.

He noted that Viet Nam-China ties have maintained a development trend, with important common perceptions and major orientations for bilateral ties reached by senior leaders of the two countries during high-level visits, particularly the China visit by Party General Secretary Trong and the Viet Nam visit by Party General Secretary and President Xi Jinping in 2015.

PM Phuc particularly pointed to the importance of Guangxi to the friendship and cooperation between the two countries, adding that the Party and Government of Viet Nam always support mutually beneficial cooperation schemes between localities of the two countries, especially those along the border such as Guangxi.

For his part, the Guangxi official hailed the deepened cooperation between Guangxi and Vietnamese localities, noting that with 12 pairs of border gates between Guangxi and Vietnam, cross-border trade is growing rapidly.

He proposed that the two countries speed up the implementation of plans on joint economic zones including Dong Hung (China)  Mong Cai (Viet Nam) and Pingxiang (China)  ong ang (Viet Nam).

The one check point  one stop customs model and the two corridors one economic belt strategy should also be accelerated to boost bilateral trade, he said.

Peng Qinghua hailed Viet Nams potential and expressed the wish for comprehensive cooperation between Guangxi and Vietnams ministries and localities, while taking joint measures to maintain a peaceful, stable and prosperous borderline between the two countries.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh also hosted a reception in Ha Noi yesterday for Peng Qinghua.

He asked Guangxi to make thorough preparations for meetings between the two countries leaders during the 13th ASEAN-China Expo in Nanning, and the eighth conference of a joint working committee between Vietnams northern border provinces of Cao Bang, Ha Giang, Lang Son and Quang Ninh, with Guangxi.

The host called for boosting cooperation in economics, trade, tourism and infrastructure connectivity, partly by encouraging Guangxis investment in Vietnams infrastructure and importing more Vietnamese goods.

He urged effective enforcement of three agreements on Viet Nam-China border management, the protection and exploitation of tourism resources at Cao Bangs Ban Gioc waterfall, and free navigation in the Bac Luan river mouth.

Peng Qinghua, said Guangxi attaches importance to friendship and co-operation with Vietnamese localities.

He expressed his wish for realising common perceptions reached by the two countries leaders and agreements on deepening agreements on friendly exchanges with Vietnams border provinces, contributing to strengthening the China  Viet Nam comprehensive strategic co-operative partnership. VNS
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc receives Secretary of the Guizhou Provincial Party Committee Chen Miner in Ha Noi yesterday. VNA/VNS Photo

HA NOI  The Vietnamese Government always treasures and encourages ministries and provinces to step up cooperation with Chinas localities, highlighted Prime Minister Phuc during a reception for Secretary of the Guizhou Provincial Party Committee Chen Miner yesterday.

Viet Nam persistently pursues a foreign policy of independence, self-reliance, peace, multilateralisation and diversification of relations, while attaching much importance to consolidating and enhancing friendship and relations, as well as comprehensive collaboration with China, the prime minister said.

Prime Minister Phuc said the cooperation between Guizhou Province and Vietnamese localities across the fields of economics, trade and investment, has not been on par with the two sides potentials, hence it should be strengthened in the times ahead.

He asked Guizhou Province to boost imports from Viet Nam, especially agro-forestry-fishery products, encourage its enterprises to invest in Viet Nam, as well as facilitate business activities of Vietnamese companies in the province.

For his part, Chen Miner underscored that the result-oriented relations between Viet Nam and China will give momentum to strengthen Viet Nam-Guizhou collaboration.

He said education cooperation with Viet Nam was Guizhous top priority, adding that the province will continue to offer scholarships and create favourable conditions for Vietnamese students to study in the province.

Four universities in Guizhou Province have set up relations with Vietnamese universities, helping promote the two sides collaboration in the field, he added.

Expressing his delight over the rapid trade growth between Vietnam and Guizhou, Chen Miner said that the province will speed up the construction of a highway connecting Kunming and Nanning provinces in the coming time to enhance comprehensive cooperation between Vietnam and the Chinese province.  VNS
An increase in the number of students in the Central Highlands province of ak Nong are posing challenges for the education sector as the demand for school facilities and teachers increases.  Photo tuoitre.vn

AK NONG  An increase in the number of students in the Central Highlands province of ak Nong are posing challenges for the education sector as the demand for school facilities and teachers increases, said Nguyen Van Hoa, deputy director of the provincial Department of Education and Training.

Even given the limited state budget, the province has managed to build more classrooms so that students would no longer have to take turns, studying in one of three shifts due to classroom shortages, Hoa was quoted by Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper as saying.

A number of districts are not able to pay their teachers, he said.

As the number of students increases every year, schools have had to hire more teachers while reimbursement takes a long time, Hoa explained.

Hoa attributed the growth of students to the growing number of migrants coming from northern provinces.

Most of them are ethnic minority people who lack awareness of family planning, he said.

By the end of first semester, the province has 156,165 students in the 2015-16 school-year, an increase of 50,000 compared with the same period last year.

ak Glong and Tuy uc districts have the highest growth rate of students, schools and teachers.

Phan Minh Tuan, deputy head of ak Glong Districts education and training division, said the quantity of students have increased threefold since 2005, to 15,000 students.

The existing educational facilities in the district failed to meet the demand of the rapid expansion of students despite 27 more schools having been built, Tuan said, adding that it was in need of 23 teachers for primary schools and kindergartens.

A similar situation was also reported in Tuy uc District.

Pham Quoc Trong, deputy head of the districts Education and Training Division, said about 1,000 students joined the schools every year.

The division now owes over VN5.3 billion (US$237,700) in salaries for their staff, he said.

To have enough teachers, Hoa said, the provincial Department of Education and Training has proposed the local authorities to employ 241 teachers on the government pay roll and the department was waiting for approval.

It was necessary to mobilise funds from local residents to build temporary classrooms to ensure that every student has chance to go to school, he said.

In addition, individuals and organisations should be encouraged and helped to open private schools.

The provincial Department of Education and Training plans to reorganise the education system from now towards 2020 to meet the demands of the population, which will include practicing thrift so as to have more investment for developing the educational system.  VNS
HA NOI (VNS)  The Ha Noi Sewage and Drainage Company has announced three scenarios to reduce heavy flooding in the city during the upcoming rainy season.

According to the first plan which was released at a meeting on Wednesday, if moderate rain up to 50mm per two hours occurs, the company will mobilise workers to the low-lying areas. The employees have already been cleaning the drainage system often to avoid flooding.

In the second scenario, when there is heavy rain of 50mm to 100mm per two hours, the company will appoint workers to supervise and control the flooding by using pumps to force the flow of water and collect obstacles that hinder its path. In addition, the Yen So pumping station will be operated at its highest capacity.

When the rain exceeds 100mm per two hours, along with the earlier measures in the second plan, all the workers will be mobilised to deal with the flooding. The company will work with relevant agencies to temporarily evacuate residents from flooded areas if necessary.

The companys director, Vu Tien Hung, said the construction of 17 traffic projects and waste gathering places near the mouth of the drainage systems had affected the water flow, leading to flooding at 16 sites in the city.

Vice-director of Ha Noi Department of Construction Vo Nguyen Phong said the construction of new sewage systems to collect domestic wastewater and repairs on existing sewers and drains were underway. However, the city had only invested in a drainage system along the To Lich River, so some sites would still experience flooding even after the project was finished in June.  VNS
HA NOI  Along the canals andr lakes in Ha Noi and HCM City, passers-by are used to men gathering in large groups for hours with their fishing rods, patiently waiting for the fish to come.

Sometimes, the street corner is crowded with cheerful noise and claps when someone has a big catch. Their fishing occurs day and night despite big warning signs nearby saying fishing is banned.

Ngo Thi Yen, a resident of Ha Nois Tay Ho District, said that hundreds of residents around West Lake make a living by catching fish. Some even catch up to ten kilograms of fish every day.

The illegal fishing poses possible risks to passers-by. When fishermen cast their fishing lines, passers-by might be injured by the hook.

Fishermen need to spend VN500,000 (US$23) per month to buy a ticket for fishing at Thu Le Park in Ba inh District in order to legally catch fish there.

A fisherman at the park said that he could earn about VN300,000-400,000 (US$13-17) per day from catching fish. Sometimes the profit can reach VN500,000.

Fishermen like him find it very relaxing. Fishing brings them income so he is ready to pay for the fishing fee every month, he said.

A Cau Giay District resident, Nguyen Van Nhien, who often runs around the park, said that after the catch, the fish are sold right next to the lake.

These fishermen do not regard fishing as a leisure activity. They are professional and go fishing every day to increase their income, he said.

Meanwhile, the involvement of authorised agencies seems to end with the putting up of fishing banned signs. Their appearance can hardly be seen in these areas.

A similar situation is easily spotted along the Nhieu Loc-Thi Nghe Canal in HCM City. Once filled with sewage and filth, the canal has been cleaned up while local authorities have released fish into the canal to adjust its eco-system and purify the water.

However, illegal fishing and garbage dumping in recent years might turn the canal back into its previously polluted state, local authorities predicted.

A recent survey conducted by the Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper of over 80 locals living near the Nhieu LocThi Nghe Canal showed that three-fourths of the interviewees find the illegal fishing pressing but do not raise their voice.

Nguyen ac Tho, 72, living in District 1, used to remind young men not to catch fish in the canal. What he received back was threats from these men who said, It is none of your business. Since then, he has chosen to stay silent.

Truong Quang Lam, from District 3, told the Tuoi Tre reporter that local police have reminded them for some time but nothing has changed. Reminders are only for people to gain awareness, otherwise, violators must be penalised.

In addition to catching fish, many people also bring chairs, tables and old mattresses to sit and relax while enjoying the leisure of fishing, Nguyen Van Khai from District 3 said.

The citys authorities have come up with measures such as confiscating fishing rods and asking violators to release their catches back into the canal, however, there are not many positive changes.

A Phu Nhuan District resident named Nguyen Ngoc Anh suggested that local authorities make frequent inspections and confiscate fishing rods for first time of violations. In case of repeated violations, administrative fines must be applied.  VNS
Central Hue City has been selected to join 45 other cities worldwide in a global social media campaign called We Love Cities, part of World Wildlife Funds Earth Hour City Challenge. Photo huedisan.com.vn

HA NOI  Central Hue City has been selected to join 45 other cities worldwide in a global social media campaign called We Love Cities, part of World Wildlife Funds Earth Hour City Challenge.

The campaign aims to use an engaging social media platform to connect citizens with local leaders so that they can work together to build climate resilient cities.

For the next eight weeks, people across the globe are invited to vote for their favorite cities, and to share what they love about them through photos and videos on Twitter and Instagram. Voters can also submit suggestions on additional actions they believe cities can take to make a mark on sustainability.

The digital voting lasts from 26 April to 19 June on the campaigns official site www.welovecities.org. Languages of the participating nations are available, including Vietnamese. The winner of the We Love Cities campaign, along with the national and global winners of the Earth Hour City Challenge will be announced on June 22, 2016.  VNS
Borderguard force rescued a victim from human trafficker in northern Lao Cai Province.  Photo phapluatplus.vn

LAO CAI  Trafficking of women and children has been on the rise in recent years in the northern border province of Lao Cai, making it a hotspot for this crime.

Over the first four months of 2016, the provincial Border Guard has discovered and handled 13 cases of human trafficking and rescued 25 victims.

During the 2014-25 period, the provincial Border Guard uncovered 67 cases, arresting 92 individuals and rescuing 214 victims.

Among the cases detected last year, the Border Guard discovered and quashed an interprovincial women trafficking ring that also operated in An Giang, Kien Giang, Hau Giang, Binh Thuan and Can Tho. As many as 15 victims were rescued and reunited with their families.

In the latest case last month, the border guard at the Border Station of Lao Cai International Border Gate rescued a five-year-old girl, who was being smuggled into China.

According to Head of the provincial Border Guards Drug and Criminal Department Nguyen Van Thai, human trafficking has become more complicated now compared with previous years.

The criminals use more sophisticated ways to lure women and children, and the victims come from many localities.

The offenders make use of information technology, such as social media, to approach and get acquainted with women. They seduce them, pretending to love them, and invite them to visit their families or other places. The traffickers then take the victims to remote locations along the border and force them to cross it.

This year especially, a group of young men from various ethnic minority groups took advantage of their relationships with women and children to sell them to traffickers in other countries.

Most of the victims are aged between 15 and 30 and live in remote, rural or mountainous areas; they are typically uneducated and have a limited understanding of the law. They are also often unemployed and face economic difficulties.

Victims rescued by border guards will be sent to a centre established by the provincial Department of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, where they will receive preliminary assistance and support before being reunited with their families. For instance, they will receive vocational training or be taught to read and write; they will also learn basic life skills.

To help deal with the problem, the provincial border guard has actively worked with their Chinese counterparts to fight against human trafficking, while local authorities have promoted campaigns and increased information dissemination to raise peoples awareness of this kind of crime, particularly among those from ethnic minority groups, so they will not be tricked by traffickers.

It is estimated that 400-500 trafficking cases involving almost 1,000 victims are discovered in the country each year, according to the Ministry of Public Security. - VNS
HA NOI  Demographic changes in Asia and the Pacific region are occurring at unforeseen rates. An explosion in the working age population and a fall in birth rates - changes that are expected to take a century in Europe and North America - could occur here in just 30 years.

If countries do not start planning for the demographic change, they will miss out on opportunities to boost growth and investment in the future, said Bakhodir Burkhanov, United Nations Development Programme Deputy Country Director in Viet Nam, at the launch of the 2016 Asia-Pacific Regional Development Report yesterday.

The report, entitled Shaping the future: How changing demographics can power human development, found that Asia-Pacific countries now have more working-aged people and fewer dependents than at any other point in history, providing a springboard for growth.

About 68 per cent of the regions population is at working age, and only 32 per cent are dependents.

When countries have a greater share of people who can work, save and pay taxes, they have the potential to transform their economies and power investment in health care, education and other building blocks of future prosperity, said Thangavel Palanivel, lead author of the report.

The report called for an immediate response and outlined actions for sustainable development.

As Viet Nam is at the end of the middle stage of transitioning to an ageing demographic, the countrys biggest challenge is to capitalise on its remaining demographic dividends and prepare for the demands of an ageing population, experts at the meeting said.

Richard Marshall, Policy Advisor for the UNDP, said Viet Nam should focus on improving productivity and creating quality work.

He suggested that the country mobilise savings, invest in productive sectors and ensure gender equity within labour market.

It is necessary for the Vietnamese Government to accelerate social protection reform, especially pensions, he said.

He advised the Government to focus not only on technology transfer, but also wider education, skills training and health care reforms.

Dr Nguyen Quang, Programme Manager of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme in Viet Nam, said despite the fact that urbanisation was considered low in Viet Nam compared with other countries in the region, much attention should be paid to the management of cities.

Once cities are well-managed, it would be a great source for the countrys development, bringing about high production values and productivity as well as more employment, he said.

Although the country is benefiting from the golden age population, it will last a short period of time. Therefore, Viet Nam should prepare for an ageing population. The country should invest more in healthcare and education, and create jobs for young people, he said.
TIEN GIANG  Doctors of My Tho Citys health centre in the Mekong Delta province of Tien Giang saved 16 local workers from food poisoning yesterday.

Patients from the My Tho City-based Choi & Shins Vina Ltd. Co. were hospitalised after eating lunch at the companys kitchen.

According to witnesses, many workers showed symptoms of dizziness, vomiting and diarrhea. Some workers even lost consciousness immediately after eating the lunch. Of those affected, 16 workers with serious symptoms were taken to the health centre.

Doctor Vo Phuc Hau, chief of Tien Giang Provinces Health Departments food hygiene and safety office, said samples were sent to a testing centre to determine the cause of the food poisoning.

Choi & Shins produces garment products for export. The companys kitchen in co-ordination with the citys An Phu Service and Commercial Ltd. Co. supplies 1,000 rations to workers every day.  VNS
HA NOI (VNS)  The Vinaconex Water Supply Joint Stock Company (Viwasupco) has decided to relieve Bui Minh Truong of his post as director of the a River Water Pipeline Projects second phase.

Truong had to hand over work, documents and other assets related to the post to staff who were assigned to take over the position, Viwasupco said on Tuesday. However, it did not give any specific reason for the dismissal.

Concerns have been raised by the public over the quality of the project, as well as the reason for choosing the Chinese contractor, Xingxing Corporation, as the pipe has broken 17 times since the completion of the first phase in 2009.

Last Monday, the company appointed Le Minh Quy as deputy director general and director of the Project Management Board for a five-year period.

According to the company, Quy was assigned to bear the responsibility for the operations of the projects management unit, which supplies water to nearly 200,000 households in Son Tay, Hoa Lac, Xuan Mai and Mieu Mon, as well as Ha Noi and Ha ong. He was supposed to ensure that the project was carried out effectively in accordance with State regulations.

As the main investor for the a River Water Pipeline Projects second phase, Viwasupco opened bids between August 2015 and March 2016 to seek suppliers for the projects ductile iron water pipelines and spare parts. On March 21, the company announced that Xingxing Corporation had won the contract with a bid price 11.8 per cent lower than the approved price.

The Ha Noi Peoples Committee proposed that Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc ask the developer of the project to postpone signing a contract with the Chinese contractor. Phuc agreed with the request, directing Viwasupco to delay the signing to clarify information after concerns from residents.

In a related development, Viwasupco said it has hired legal advisors to assess the possible consequences of canceling the contract.

In July last year, seven officials including two from a River Pipeline project management board were prosecuted for breaches in the pipeline.

The seven officials were charged with committing violations that resulted in serious consequences." More specifically, they were charged with causing the a River water pipeline to break 10 times, costing the state more than VN9.3 billion (US$417,000).  VNS
VOSTOCHNY, Russia  Russias new Vostochny cosmodrome hosted its first rocket launch on Thursday, the Roscosmos space agency said, after a last-minute delay a day earlier led to President Vladimir Putin criticising the programmes officials.

The Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying three satellites took off at 11.01am local time (0201 GMT), the national space agency said in a statement, after the countdown was automatically halted for technical reasons 24 hours previously.

"The rocket launch was carried out successfully. All three satellites are now in orbit," Roscosmos said in a statement.

Russian television showed the Soyuz 2.1a taking off into a blue sky in light winds, though foreign media organisations were not allowed to enter the new space centre.

Putin was present for the event, having travelled to Russias far east to witness the first attempt at take-off.

The postponement of Vostochnys inaugural launch led the president to scold space chiefs  despite delays worldwide being relatively frequent, with a European launch from French Guiana having to be put off three times last week before finally taking place on Monday.

"Despite all its failings, Russia remains the world leader in the number of space launches," Putin told a televised meeting of officials.

"But the fact that were encountering a large number of failures is bad.

There must be a timely and professional reaction."

The new spaceport, located in the Amur region, has been hailed by the president as the countrys biggest current building project with a budget estimated at between 300 and 400 billion rubles ($4.5 to $6 billion).

Some 10,000 workers have since 2012 been building 115 kilometres of roads in the immense, sparsely populated region, as well as 125 kilometres of railways and a town with housing for 25,000 people.

The Kremlins goal is to ease Russias dependence on space launches in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

But Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the space and defence industries, said that Russia would continue to use Baikonur to launch manned missions until 2023, and the Soyuz 2.1a would be the only launch from Vostochny in 2016.  AFP
HA NOAI (VNS)  Cambodia does not have any new agreements regarding the South China Sea (East Sea) issue with China, the countrys Secretary of State and Spokesman for the Council of Ministers, Phay Siphan, has said.

He made the statement yesterday while answering Vietnam News Agency reporters questions about Chinese media quoting a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson as saying that China had reached an agreement with Cambodia, Laos and Brunei that the parties directly concerned in the East Sea dispute should deal with China individually, rather than as a bloc.

The points of the agreement were that the dispute was between individual nations, rather than China and ASEAN as a whole; that those countries should be left to settle the dispute by themselves; that they should do so without use or threats of force; and that China and the ASEAN nations should cooperate to ensure peace in the East Sea.

Chinese press outlets, including China Central Television (CCTV), quoted the spokesperson on April 22, on the occasion of a visit to Cambodia by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi from April 21-22.

However, Phay Siphan stressed there has been no agreement or discussions relating to this issue, just a visit by a Chinese foreign minister.

He clarified his countrys stance that Cambodia wants the parties concerned to fully and effectively implement the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea, which was reached between China and the ASEAN nations in 2002, when Cambodia held the ASEAN chairmanship.

Cambodia wants the countries involved in the East Sea issue to resolve the dispute peacefully, and that all ASEAN countries should strive to expeditiously finalise a code of conduct in the waters, he added.

At a joint press conference with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi following a bilateral meeting on April 22, Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhon said Cambodia maintains a neutral stance on the East Sea problem and has always appealed to all sides involved to make efforts to solve the dispute through peaceful means.  VNS
Observing that there is a valid and binding extradition treaty between India and Chile, the Supreme Court today dismissed a plea of a jailed French woman facing extradition to Chile for her alleged role in the murder of a senator there in 1991.

A bench comprising justices M B Lokur and N V Ramana directed the trial court to proceed with extradition proceedings.

"On the basis of material available on record, we find that there is a valid and binding extradition treaty between India and Chile. We direct the magistrate at Patiala House Court to continue with the extradition proceedings. The petition stands dismissed," the bench said.

Earlier on October 9 last year, the Supreme Court had sought response from the Centre on the plea of a jailed French woman challenging her arrest and the ongoing extradition proceedings at the request of Chile for her alleged involvement in 1991 assassination of a senator there.

Besides seeking "immediate release" of Marie Emmanuelle Verhoeven, the plea filed through lawyer Ramni Taneja, had also sought a direction to the External Affairs Ministry, which is pursuing the extradition proceedings on behalf of Chile, to quash the ongoing inquiry before the magisterial court.

The plea had also sought quashing of the extradition request, made on March 24, 2015 by the Government of Chile through the Ministry before the court here.

Verhoeven, arrested on February 16 last year from Uttar Pradesh on the basis of a red corner notice issued against her, is alleged to have participated in a conspiracy leading to the assassination of Chilean Senator Jaime Guzman Errazuriz on April 1, 1991.
Labor warned energy prices to rise by up to 50 per cent in 2023 A source told Sky News Australia in the lead-up to Tuesday's federal budget the conflict in Ukraine was "99 per cent" responsible for the looming increases in the cost of energy.

Sydney soaked by wettest October ever recorded A Sky News Australia meteorologist has predicted how much rain Sydneysiders can expect for the rest of 2022 as two weather systems lash almost every inch of New South Wales.

Jurors in rape trial make request amid ongoing deliberations The 12-member jury of the Bruce Lehrmann rape trial have requested extra time to come to a unanimous decision on whether the former Liberal staffer sexually assaulted Brittany Higgins.

Lambie prays for Netball Australia after sponsorship mess Senator Jacqui Lambie has thrown her support behind Gina Rinehart as she slammed Netball Australia for losing a major sponsor while local sports clubs struggle to stay alive.
A roundup of legislative and Capitol news items of interest for Wednesday, April 27, 2016:

House Democrats made a failed attempt to make eligible for consideration a Democratic-designed proposal to expand Iowas limited medical cannabis program. Democrats requested a vote to move the Senate-passed medical cannabis expansion bill out of committee to make it eligible for debate, but the motion was defeated on a 54-44 vote, with only two House Republicans  Reps. Peter Cownie and Quentin Stanerson  supporting the move. Earlier this week, House Republicans proposed a far more limited expansion proposal, which was defeated with no support from House Democrats and divided support from Republicans.

Rail site OKd

The Iowa Economic Development Authority announced Wednesday Forest City Rail Park is the latest industrial site to achieve certification through the Iowa Certified Site Program. It joins 11 other sites in the state designated as project-ready.

The Forest City Rail Park is a 68-acre site in Hancock County adjacent to 3M and Winnebago Industries. Rail service to the site is provided by Iowa Northern Railway and is ideally suited for a trans-load, distribution or logistics facility, according to EDA officials. The state agency established the certified site program an independent, third-party certification program that uses a nationally recognized site selection firm  in May 2012 to address a lack of project-ready industrial sites in the state. The next round of applications will be accepted in July. More information about the Iowa Certified Site Program is online at iowaeconomicdevelopment.com/SiteLocation/CertifiedSite.

Israel funds

The Iowa Senate voted 38-9 to approve a bill restricting the investment of state funds in companies engaged in a boycott of Israel.

Nine Democrats opposed the bill, with Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, expressing concern the legislation would create bureaucratic headaches for retirement funds for the Board of Regents, IPERS and others that would have to research thousands to companies connected with mutual funds to comply with the bill.

Similar to restrictions the Legislature has approved on the investment of public funds in Iran and Sudan, the bill is intended to counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement that encourages countries, governments and companies to boycott Israel and Israeli companies. According to the Legislative Services Agency, the bill will not impact the state general fund and the impact on the retirement funds cannot be determined.

Lots of votes

Sen. Wally Horn, D-Cedar Rapids, asked the Legislative Services Agency to estimate how many times he has cast votes during his 44 years in the Iowa Legislature. He got his answer Wednesday: more than 180,000 times.

That estimate was based on an average of about 60 days of legislative action each year with an average of about 68 votes each day of active session on bills, amendments, minutes, rules and motions in committee and on the Senate floor.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff & Paducah Public Schools

Apr. 28, 2016 | PADUCAH, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff & Paducah Public Schools Apr. 28, 2016 | 07:17 AM | PADUCAH, KY

Tilghman juniors Jose Roberto Dos Remedios, Tyran Fitzgerald, Trevor Williams and sophomore Emma Johnson have been selected as participants in the 2016 Governor's School for the Arts (GSA). Students audition for various art disciplines for GSA. Fitzgerald was chosen for Musical Theatre, Dos Remedios was chosen for Instrumental Music, Williams was chosen for Dance, and Johnson was chosen for Vocal Music.

Six Tilghman students were chosen as alternates for Governor's Schools for the Arts: Zane Birdsong, Christopher Chumbler, Reagan Davidson, Will Denton, Anna Grace McGee, and Alec Wadley.

Governors School for the Arts provides hands-on arts opportunities for promising high school sophomores and juniors in nine different arts disciplines: Architecture, Creative Writing, Dance, Drama, Instrumental Music, Musical Theater, New Media, Visual Art and Vocal Music. The three week program is hosted by Centre College.

Jose Roberto Dos Remedios is a member of the PTHS Choir, Prime Rib, Academic Team, Mock Trial, National Honor Society, and Beta Club. Dos Remedios serves on the youth missions council at Concord United Methodist Church. His parents are Bob and Julie Dos Remedios.

Tyran Fitzgerald is a member of the PTHS Band, Jazz Band, Choir, Prime Rib and Cross Country. He is a member of the Paducah Symphony Orchestra youth choir and participates in the music ministry at Harrison Street Missionary Baptist Church. His parents are Sharla Wilson and Jewel Wilson.

Emma Johnson is a member of the PTHS Choir and Concordia. She takes dance at Beverly Rogers Academy of Dance and voice from Clinton Warf. She is an actor at Market House Theatre. Her parents are Elizabeth and Wayne Johnson.

Trevor Williams is a member of the PTHS Choir. He takes dance at Beverly Rogers Academy of Dance. His parents are Jennifer Baird and T.L. Williams.

1700 students auditioned for the program this year at four sites across Kentucky. Approximately 250 students are selected for GSA, an honor which includes: full tuition, room and board to attend the school; the opportunity to learn in a supportive community of distinguished master-teachers; the chance to audition for scholarships before the nations top colleges and universities; and participation in the Student Performance Festival at the conclusion of the program.


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If youre looking to try out an online casino, there are several things that will help you make a decision. Heres what you should look for when choosing an online casino

 Are they regulated? A lot of the larger ones have licenses issued by the authorities in their respective regions, so its worth checking this first.

 Do they offer games from different software providers? Some casinos just use one software provider and limit your selection. This is fine if you like playing those types of games but you may want to check other casinos as well.

 What does their payout percentage look like? The payout rate refers to how much money you can expect to win after every bet. A high payout rate means youll be able to play more often without having to worry about losing all your money. Its also important to know the minimum and maximum bets allowed on each game. If youre going to play roulette, for example, then you probably dont want a casino with a minimum bet of less than $2.50 or even lower than that.

The players used to play the game slot online in the land based casinos in the past time. But now with time after the invention of the online casinos players play the game slot online. Online platform provide the players with the convenience in playing and even better winning. Even after keeping a good percentage of the profits, they distribute good funds to players.

 How many games do they offer? There are lots of different types of games to choose from. Roulette, blackjack and poker are some of the most popular options, but you might find slots, video pokers, video bingo and others as well. You can usually filter these games down to only show the ones that interest you best, so make sure that your list isnt too long!

 Is there a bonus offer? Many online casinos offer free bonuses as part of their welcome package  which includes new players being awarded 100% up to $10 instantly, for example. These offers are great but not everyone has access to them all the time (and some require you to deposit real money). If youd prefer to avoid paying a fee, some casinos offer no-deposit bonuses where you can get a certain amount of funds before you need to put any actual money into the account. These are usually offered alongside welcome bonuses, so make sure you read both parts of the terms and conditions carefully before signing up.

 Does it offer live dealer games? Live dealers are much preferred by many over regular virtual versions, so it pays to check this option out too. Most online casinos now offer live dealer games in addition to their regular offerings, allowing you to experience the thrill of the real thing without needing to leave home.

Now that youve got an idea of what to look for when choosing an online casino, heres some tips for making the right choice

It really comes down to personal preference. No two people are exactly alike, so everyone has an opinion on what they like and dislike about each casino. That said, here are some things to consider in order to narrow down your choices

 Popularity. Check out reviews, forums and Facebook pages to see what other people think of the casino. Also, ask around at work or friends houses who they would recommend to you. You could always take a look at the casinos website too, to see what kind of information they provide about themselves.

 Reputation. Find out what the general public thinks about the casino. Check out any customer reviews on sites like Trustpilot, Amazon and Google Play to find out more. As far as gaming goes, you can also check out the Better Business Bureau to see whether there have been any complaints against the casino.

 Security. Make sure the casino uses SSL encryption to secure its transactions, meaning that your private data stays safe during transactions. Other than that, look for security seals on the site itself and verify that theyre legitimate. You can also check out the casinos privacy policy to see how they handle confidential information.

 Payment methods. Its good to have multiple payment options available, especially if you plan to play frequently. Its also nice to find a casino that accepts cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. If youre worried about safety, you can always opt for a credit card or PayPal instead.

With all those criteria in mind, heres our top picks

Betway:

Betway is a relatively new UK casino offering online gambling to residents of the United Kingdom and European Union. They offer hundreds of games across both land based and digital platforms, with plenty of top software providers like Net Entertainment, Microgaming and Yggdrasil Gaming Network. With a generous welcome offer that gives players 100% up to 100, you really cant go wrong with Betway.

Coral Casino:

Coral Casino is operated by the same company that runs the famous Caribbean casino, Grand Reef. Like many casinos, Coral Casino offers a wide variety of games, including plenty of video slots and table games. New players can benefit from a huge 100% match bonus up to 1000, while existing customers enjoy 25% cash back on deposits made within 48 hours of opening an account.

Ladbrokes Casino:

Ladbrokes Casino is owned by the same company as the famous bookmaker that started life in 1921. With more than 500 games from leading software providers such as Amaya, NetEnt and Microgaming, you wont be disappointed by the quality of the games here. New players get a 200% match bonus up to 500, while existing customers can claim 35% cashback on their first three deposits.

Paddy Power Casino:

Paddy Power is another Irish-owned casino that operates throughout Europe. Not only does Paddy Power Casino offer traditional casino games like blackjack, roulette and slots, but it also provides a full range of sports betting, including football, tennis, boxing and horse racing. New players can receive a massive 100% match bonus up to 200, while existing customers can claim 35% cashback on their first three deposits.

William Hill Casino:

William Hill Casino is one of the biggest names in the industry, operating in Europe, Asia and North America. Founded in 1984, this online casino has more than 400 games to choose from, including slots and table games, with a wide array of software providers like WagerLogic, Big Time Gaming and Rival.

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If youre interested in trying out an online casino but arent quite ready to commit to one, why not try out one of the many no deposit casinos weve reviewed? You can test drive various casinos completely risk-free, so you can feel confident about your choice before you make a single penny deposit.
Apr 28, 2016 | By Alec

Over the past year or so, Canon has been working hard to expand into the 3D printing market. These efforts have been led by subsidiary Canon Europe, who has emerged as an important reseller of 3D Systems 3D printers throughout Europe. Those efforts have apparently been quite successful, as the global imaging solution provider has just revealed that they will make their full 3D Systems 3D printer catalogue available throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

This announcement is surprising because it breaks from a somewhat predictable pattern in Canons 3D printing activities. Since signing a distribution agreement with 3D Systems in early 2015, the company has slowly but steadily been rolling out a reselling and support structure throughout Europe. Supported are a wide range of 3D Systems 3D printers, including the ProJet 1200, 3500 series, 4500, 6000 and 7000. After taking root throughout Western Europe, the company finally reached Austria earlier this month.

That slow and steady process is now replaced by a full expansion across the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) market. As the company explains, their efforts to provide 3D printing technology to their clients over the past year has been met with a very positive response. It has helped clients, they say, expand their product lines, decrease prototyping times and increase product development efficiency.

Whats more, Canon has seen a significant rise in the demand for innovative technological solutions, like 3D printing, in their main markets. Vertical markets such as AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) and education industries are characterized by an increased demand for speed, flexibility and more options. Collaboration with their clients, Canon says, has allowed them to provide quality 3D printing advice and enabled them to help clients develop their products and services.

According to Chris Blake, Canon Europes Sales & Marketing Director, their expansion efforts are a logical result of the growing 3D printing market. That market is expanding exponentially, as clients are seeing exactly what commercial opportunities are being created by 3D printing. he says. Theres no better time to invest in 3D printing. It provides the means for ambitious companies in the AEC and making industries to fully exploit their potential. We will continue to build on our successes in 3D by focusing on maximizing client opportunities.

Posted in 3D Printer Company

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Apr 28, 2016 | By Benedict

Rick Pollack, founder and CEO of 3D printer manufacturer MakerGear, has met with US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss additive manufacturing. Ohio Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor organized the meeting at Hannover Messe, a trade fair for industrial technology.

Photo: Christian Charisius

Hannover Messe, one of the worlds largest technology fairs, takes place each year in Hannover, Germany, and its 2016 edition is being seen by some as a milestone in German-US relations. Every year, a leading industrialized nation is selected as the Partner Country of Hannover Messe. In 2016, for the first time in its history, the fair is welcoming the United Stateswhose delegation consists of more than 390 businesses and organizationsas its chosen Partner Country.

One company taking full advantage of the US being placed center stage at Hannover Messe is Ohio-based 3D printer manufacturer MakerGear, which is demonstrating, amongst other products, its latest open-source desktop 3D printer: the M2. To demonstrate the power of the M2, the company is displaying a number of 3D printed items made with the flagship machine, such as product packaging, dental models, prosthetic limbs made by high school students, and a heart printed for pediatric research.

MakerGear M2 3D printer

Despite the exciting display of 3D printing technology and 3D printed items on display at the MakerGear stand, it was perhaps not the hardware itself that has had so many visitors talking about the company today. The M2 certainly looks impressive, but a meeting between MakerGear CEO Rick Pollack, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and US President Barack Obama drew a great deal more attention to the 3D printing company than anything at its stall did.

President Barack Obama, the first President of the United States to attend Hannover Messe, delivered a speech at the opening ceremony about transatlantic trade, the importance of the European Union, and areas of technology on which the US is currently focused, including 3D printing, which Obama has previously described as a revolutionary tool. Obama addressed the top priorities the United States government has in the technology sector, including "next-generation manufacturing," 3D printing and electric vehicles.

Given this nod to additive manufacturing, it seemed fitting that the leader of the free world was invited to talk with an important figure in the American 3D printing scene. "To be able to share our story with President Obama and Chancellor Merkel is such a rare opportunity, Pollack commented. President Obama has taken additive manufacturing seriously, and he sees the positive effect it is having on so many different industries.

Lt. Governor Mary Taylor, who used some serious political clout to make the three-way meeting happen, expressed her pride at MakerGears success. "MakerGear is leading the industry in additive manufacturing, and I'm glad they are able to showcase their successes here in Ohio to the rest of the world, she said.

President Obama is no stranger to 3D printing, having been involved with the opening of several manufacturing hubs and witnessed the power of 3D printed prosthetic devices at the 2015 White House Science Fair.

Posted in 3D Printer Company

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Holly Case in the Boston Review:

Last September an article on the front page of a leading Hungarian daily began, The story of the ever-deepening refugee crisis is taking ever more unexpected turns. A prominent Hungarian intellectual and former dissident, Gyorgy Konrad, had come out in support of the efforts of the Hungarian government to build a wall to keep out newcomers and to cast them as economic opportunists rather than political refugees. In another corner of the Hungarian media, pundits were citing passages from The Final Tavern (A vegso kocsma), a 2014 book by Holocaust survivor and 2002 Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz, who passed away last month. In the book, Kertesz was sharply critical of liberals welcoming attitude toward Muslim refugees and migrants. His and Konrads statements were registered with incredulity in the liberal press and with undisguised relish on the right.

Anyone who has followed the serpentine trajectory of Hungarian politics since the controlled collapse of state socialism in 1989 might be forgiven for throwing their hands up in confusion. For more than two and a half decades, Hungarian political life has been a story of reversals. The party of the Young Democrats (Fidesz), founded in 1988 by a few-dozen college students, has mutated from a member of the Liberal International to the torchbearer of right-wing populism in Eastern Europe. Hungarians who once described themselves as liberal, including the current prime minister and Fidesz leader Viktor Orban, have shed the epithet. Already in 1994, Orban favored replacing it with free-thinking. Twenty years later, his metamorphosis was complete when he wondered whether being part of the European Union was an obstacle to the reorganization of the state into an illiberal nation state within the EU.

More here.
From PhysOrg:

Scientists in Spain on Wednesday they had created human sperm from skin cells, a medical feat which could eventually lead to a treatment for infertility. The researchers said they were working to find a solution for the roughly 15 percent of couples worldwide who are unable to have children and whose only option is to use donated sperm or eggs. What to do when someone who wants to have a child lacks gametes (eggs or sperm)? asked Carlos Simon, the scientific director of the Valencian Infertility Institute, Spain's first medical institution fully dedicated to assisted reproduction. This is the problem we want to address: to be able to create gametes in people who do not have them.

The result of their research, which was carried out with Stanford University in the United States, was published Tuesday in Scientific Reports, the online journal of Nature. They were inspired by the work of Japan's Shinya Yamanaka and Britain's John Gordon who in 2012 shared a Nobel prize for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells. Simon and his team managed to reprogramme mature skin cells by introducing a cocktail of genes needed to create gametes. Within a month the skin cell was transformed to become a germ cell, which can develop into sperm or an egg, but it did not have the ability to fertilise, they found. This is a sperm but it needs a further maturation phase to become a gamete. This is just the beginning, Simon said. It is a step further than that reached by Chinese researchers who earlier this year announced they had created mice from artificial sperm.

More here.
Jennifer Oullette in Gizmodo:

Wikipedia is a voluntary organization dedicated to the noble goal of decentralized knowledge creation. But as the community has evolved over time, it has wandered further and further from its early egalitarian ideals, according to a new paper published in the journal Future Internet. In fact, such systems usually end up looking a lot like 20th century bureaucracies.

Even in the brave new world of online communities, the Who had it right: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

This may seem surprising, since there is no policing authority on Wikipediano established top-down means of control. The community is self-governing, relying primarily on social pressure to enforce the established core norms, according to co-author Simon DeDeo, a complexity scientist at Indiana University. He likens the earliest Wikipedia usersmost of whom hailed from the ultra-nerdy Usenet culture of the 1990sto historical figures like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson. But what happens when a tiny Thomas Jefferson Libertarian fantasy has to grow up? he told Gizmodo.

To find out, he and Indiana University undergraduate Bradi Heaberlin decided to examine the emergence of social hierarchy and online behavioral norms among the editors of Wikipedia.

More here.
editor's note: This article was cowritten by Dr. Mark Ebell, who was a member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) from 2012 to 2015 and currently serves as a consultant to the USPSTF. This article does not necessarily represent the views and policies of the USPSTF. Dr. Ebell is deputy editor for American Family Physician (AFP) and cofounder and editor-in-chief of Essential Evidence Plus, published by Wiley-Blackwell, Inc. The POEMs described in this article stem from work that Dr. Ebell and his colleagues have been doing for the past two decades. Medical journals occasionally publish an article summarizing the best studies in a certain field from the previous year; however, those articles are limited by being one person's idiosyncratic collection of a handful of studies. In contrast, this article by Drs. Ebell and Roland Grad is validated in two ways: (1) the source material (POEMs) was derived from a systematic review of thousands of articles using a rigorous criterion-based process, and (2) these best of the best summaries were rated by thousands of Canadian primary care physicians for relevance and benefits to practice.

Because of Dr. Ebell's dual roles and ties to Essential Evidence Plus, the concept for this article was independently reviewed and approved by a group of AFP's medical editors. In addition, the article underwent peer review and editing by four of AFP's medical editors. Dr. Ebell was not involved in the editorial decision-making process.Jay Siwek, MD, Editor, American Family Physician

The authors thank Wiley-Blackwell, Inc., for giving permission to excerpt the POEMs; Drs. Allen Shaughnessy, Henry Barry, David Slawson, Nita Kulkarni, and Linda Speer for their work in selecting and writing the original POEMs; the academic family medicine fellows and faculty of the University of MissouriColumbia, for their work as peer reviewers; Pierre Pluye, PhD, for his work in codeveloping the Information Assessment Method; and Maria Vlasak for her assistance with copyediting the POEMs for the past 22 years.
Co-founder of Passare company hosts educational discussion at networking event.

About Passare

Passare is an innovative, Cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that helps funeral service professionals connect and collaborate with families anytime, anywhere, from any connected device. The company was founded in 2012 to meet the changing needs and preferences of todays funeral consumers. Passare offers funeral homes increased efficiency and accuracy while enhancing the customers buying experience. Through the cloud-based funeral arrangement platform, families are able to collaborate with one another and their funeral director. By mid-2015, Passare transitioned from a tech start-up into a fully operational company, growing its customer base by over 300% in six months. Passare is redefining and reinvigorating one of the last industries to be transformed by the digital revolution.

Steve McKee, Co-Founder of Passare

In addition to being the co-founder and member of the board of directors of Passare, Steve is president of McKee Wallwork + Company (MWC), Advertising Ages 2015 Southwest Small Agency of the Year and the firm out of which Passare emerged. He is the author of When Growth Stalls: How it Happens, Why You're Stuck and What To Do About It, and Power Branding: Leveraging the Success of the World's Best Brands. His firm specializes in revitalizing stalled, stuck and stale brands across the U.S. and made the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America its first year of eligibility. A marketing strategist for nearly thirty years, Steve has held executive positions at several notable international agencies. He was a popular Businessweek.com columnist for more than a decade and currently writes a monthly column for SmartBrief on Leadership. He has been published or quoted in The New York Times, USA Today, Forbes.com, Investor's Business Daily, the Los Angeles Times and is a frequent contributor to Albuquerque Business First. A popular speaker at corporate and association events, he has appeared on CNBC, ESPN2, CNNfn, Bloomberg, and network television affiliates across America.
This summary of the American Cancer Society Prostate Cancer Survivorship Care Guidelines targets primary care physicians who coordinate care of prostate cancer survivors with subspecialists. Prostate cancer survivors should undergo prostate-specific antigen screening every six to 12 months and digital rectal examination annually. Surveillance of patients who choose watchful waiting for their prostate cancer should be conducted by a subspecialist. Any hematuria or rectal bleeding must be thoroughly evaluated. Prostate cancer survivors should be screened regularly for urinary incontinence and sexual dysfunction. Patients with predominant urge incontinence symptoms, which can occur after surgical and radiation treatments, may benefit from an anticholinergic agent. If there is difficulty with bladder emptying, a trial of an alpha blocker may be considered. A phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitor can effectively treat sexual dysfunction following treatment for prostate cancer. Osteoporosis screening should occur before initiation of androgen deprivation therapy, and patients treated with androgen deprivation therapy should be monitored for anemia, metabolic syndrome, and vasomotor symptoms. Healthy lifestyle choices should be encouraged, including weight management, regular physical activity, proper nutrition, and smoking cessation. Primary care physicians should be vigilant for psychosocial distress, including depression, among prostate cancer survivors, as well as the potential impact of this distress on patients' family members and partners.
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.
Blackmores Limited (ASX:BKL) (OTCMKTS:BLMMF) is Australia's leading natural health brand. Its quality range of vitamin, minerals, herbal and nutritional supplements, and continued support of the community and environment, are among the many reasons Blackmores is the most trusted name in natural health.
99 Wuxian Limited (ASX:NNW) is pleased to provide a business update for the months of February and March 2016. The Company has secured a number of new clients during the period, as well as extending its relationship with existing clients.
Lithium Australia NL (ASX:LIT) aspires to 'close the loop' on the energy-metal cycle. Its disruptive technologies are designed to furnish the lithium battery industry with ethical and sustainable supply solutions. Lithium Australias technology comprises the SiLeach(R) and LieNA(R) lithium extraction processes, along with superior cathode material production courtesy of VSPC Ltd (a wholly owned subsidiary of Lithium Australia) and enhanced recycling techniques for battery materials. By uniting resources and the best available technology, Lithium Australia seeks to establish a vertically integrated lithium processing business.


MYOB AGM Presentation and Addresses

Sydney, April 28, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Myob Group Ltd ( ASX:MYO ) ( 7MY:FRA ) has been an innovative software company since 1991, and provides tools to over a million enterprises and accountants to help improve their business performance and effectiveness. Through innovation, MYOB has been able to consistently grow and maintain its position as a market leader in Australia and New Zealand.



Our operations are divided into three segments. The SME Solutions division provides accounting software to 1.2 million SMEs across Australia and New Zealand and delivered 63% of 2015 total group revenue. Our Practice Solutions division provides practice management software to more than 40,000 accountants and delivered 25% of group revenue. Enterprise Solutions provides enterprise software to more than 7,000 medium to large sized businesses, contributing 13% of total group revenue.



As the adoption of online solutions gathers pace within the accounting market, our strategy is to maintain a domestic, ANZ focus as we believe this represents the best return on capital employed (ROCE) and the best opportunity for future growth.



FY15 FINANCIAL RESULTS



2015 delivered compelling pro forma financial results that either met or exceeded our prospectus forecasts.



The full details of MYOB's results for the 2015 financial year were provided in our results and Annual Report, both published on 25th February 2016. Therefore, I will just provide an overview of the results today.



Pro forma revenue was up 10% year on year at $328 million, of which 95% was recurring in nature. 87% of our EBITDA converted to cashflow, after working capital and capital expenditure.



Our 1.2 million clients are the backbone of our high cash-generating business. They provide us with the vital industry feedback we need, in order to build best in class technology solutions best suited to the wide spectrum of business owners who use our solutions to make business life easier.



Pro forma EBITDA and NPATA grew 19% and 22% respectively, while pro forma NPATA Earnings per Share was at 14.7c.



FINAL DIVIDEND



On the back of these strong financial results, the Board was pleased to declare a final dividend of 5.0c per share for the year, representing a total of $29 million returned to shareholders. We set expectations in the prospectus that we would start paying dividends from the second half of 2015 and this dividend falls in the middle of the range that we set, being 60-80% payout of statutory NPATA.



In a world where the market often divides between "growth stocks" and "yield stocks", MYOB offers both.



Before concluding my remarks, can I thank you, our shareholders, for your support. Your company is in excellent shape, within an exciting growth space and I am confident about its future.



I would also like to thank my fellow Directors who do an excellent job and the MYOB management team who are committed to delivering optimal results and maximum return for you, our shareholders.



(Justin Milne, Chairman)



To view the presentation, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/81K4M8WX





About Myob Group Ltd





MYOB Group Ltd (ASX:MYO) is a leading provider of online business management solutions. It makes business life easier for approximately 1.2 million businesses and accountants across Australia and New Zealand by simplifying accounting, payroll, tax, practice management, CRM, job costing, inventory and more. MYOB operates across three core segments  Clients and Partners (business solutions to SMEs and Advisers); Enterprise Solutions (larger businesses) and Payment Solutions. It provides ongoing support through client service channels including a network of over 40,000 accountants, bookkeepers and other consultants. It is committed to ongoing innovation, particularly through its Connected Practice Strategy and through the development of the MYOB Platform. For more information, follow @MYOB on Twitter or visit https://investors.myob.com.au/Investors
Distribution of company announcements to the professional platforms, finance portals and syndication of important corporate news to a wide variety of news aggregators and financial news systems.
Michael Savoy, senior shareholder at Santa Monica-based firmGumbiner Savett, is being honored with the Humanitarian Award at the National Jewish Health and Los Angeles Professional Services "Black and White Ball," the firm announced this week. The event will be held June 4, at the Skirball Cultural Center, in West Los Angeles.

[IMGCAP(1)] The Humanitarian Award recognizes those who have made "significant civic and charitable contributions to the community and are distinguished leaders in their fields," per the event's website.

I am very excited and proud that Michael is receiving this incredible honor said Valerie Colin, a fellow shareholder at Gumbiner Savett, in a statement. I have known Michael for almost 40 years and he embodies all of the qualities that this award salutes.

Savoy is a former board member of a privately held, not-for-profit, day school in Northridge and served as the treasurer of the school for 6 years. He is also a past president and current board member of the California Board of Accountancy.

Savoy also serves on the board of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce as their Treasurer, as well as being a member of the AICPA, the California Society of Certified Public Accountants (CalCPA), and the Employee Stock Ownership Plan Association.

For more on this year's Black and White Ball, head to the event'ssite here.
The Internal Revenue Service reported that the average annual tax gap has increased to $458 billion for tax years 2008-2010, compared to $450 billion for tax year 2006.

The voluntary compliance rate was 81.7 percent for tax years 2008-2010, compared to 83.1 percent in tax year 2006. The IRS periodically estimates the tax gap, which provides a broad view of compliance with federal tax laws. The report found there has been no significant change in the amount of the tax gap or the rate of compliance since the last report was issued for tax year 2006.

The figure of $458 billion doesnt account for the revenue brought in through enforcement activities, such as audits and document matching, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said during a conference call with reporters Thursday. After factoring in those activities, the average net tax gap for this period is estimated to be $406 billion per year. This continues to show that both solid taxpayer service and effective enforcement are needed for top-notch tax administration.

Koskinen noted that factors such as third-party information reporting and withholding tend to increase the compliance rate. The compliance rate is very high for income that is subject to third-party information reporting, and higher still when you also have withholding, he said. The study found that when there is information reporting, such as 1099s, income is underreported only about 7 percent of the time. That number drops to 1 percent for income subject to both third-party reporting and withholding. But the number jumps to 63 percent for income not subject to any third-party reporting or withholding.

The small increase in the estimated size of the tax gap and small decrease in the voluntary compliance rate are largely attributable to improvements in the tax gap estimation methodology, and do not represent a significant change in underlying taxpayer behavior, according to the IRS. The changes also reflect the overall decline in the nations tax revenues due to the severe recession during the time period covered by the study, as well as changes in the mix of income sources that have different compliance rates.

Koskinen acknowledged there has been a small drop in the voluntary compliance rate for 2008-2010 since the earlier study for 2006, but the IRS doesnt believe this represents a change in underlying taxpayer behavior.

Instead, this likely reflects factors such as the overall decline in the nations tax revenues due to the severe recession, as well as improved estimation techniques, he said. I would note that since the last tax gap estimates for 2006, new data have become available, and these have been used in developing the current estimates. So the measurement methods are improving.

However, Koskinen pointed out that the IRS is continuing to look for other ways to keep the voluntary compliance rate high. These include such things as our educational efforts aimed at preparers and taxpayers; ongoing efforts to improve compliance in the international tax arena; and working with businesses on employment tax issues, he said. The IRS also continues to work with Congress on providing new tools to help address compliance issues, such as the legislation enacted last year to provide W-2s to us earlier in the filing season.

He believes those initiatives will help the IRS collect the correct amount of tax and encourage voluntary compliance. The importance of voluntary compliance cannot be overstated, said Koskinen. A one-percentage-point increase in the level of voluntary compliance brings in about $30 billion in tax receipts. So its critical for us to do everything we can to maintain a high level of voluntary compliance with our tax laws, to help ensure taxpayer faith and fairness in the tax system. Those who dont pay what they owe ultimately shift the tax burden to those who properly meet their tax obligations.

Koskinen acknowledged that it is impossible to completely eliminate the tax gap. Even with these and other efforts, I would note that it is not possible to eliminate the tax gap completely. In designing enforcement programs, we must take into account both the burden on taxpayers and the limits of our resources, he said. Getting to 100 percent tax compliance would require a huge increase in audits, and significantly greater third-party reporting and withholding than we have now. Realistically, that wouldnt work, because the burden on taxpayers and the strain on IRS resources would be too great.

Koskinen also warned that cuts in the IRS budget are likely to exacerbate the tax gap in reports to come. The IRS endured five years of budget cuts until it received an increase for this year earmarked toward improving taxpayer service and cybersecurity and fighting identity theft, but the agency has been forced to reduce its enforcement personnel.

While we continue to pursue many different angles to address the tax gap, reductions to the IRS budget over the last several years have had a negative impact on these efforts, he said. Our funding is now $900 million below what it was in 2010, and we have 15,000 fewer full-time employees. Additional resources are essential for us to continue making progress in reducing the tax gap.

He warned that the impact of the underfunding might not show up until the IRS releases a tax gap study for tax years 2011-2013 in 2019, and by then it might be too late. "Ive tried to get Congress to understand were playing with fire when we underfund the agency so we provide less effective taxpayer service and less effective enforcement," he said.

The tax gap study basically aids the IRS and the federal government in planning for future tax revenues.

Understanding the tax gap and its components helps government make better decisions about tax policy and the allocation of resources to tax administration, said Koskinen. Research on the extent of noncompliance and its sources helps the IRS devise cost-effective ways to increase compliance with our tax laws. For example, it helps us improve our audit-selection tools. We are committed to applying our limited resources where they are useful in reducing noncompliance while ensuring fairness, observing taxpayer rights, and reducing the burden on taxpayers who comply.

Koskinen explained how the IRS needs time to process the tax collection numbers so the study does not take into account the impact of more recent initiatives such as matching of information from credit and debit card transactions on Form 1099-K information returns, as well as the various Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Programs and FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which was included as part of the HIRE Act of 2010.

The voluntary disclosure program has operated primarily after this period, he said in response to a question from Accounting Today. About 55,000 people have paid us about $8 billion. To the extent that we wouldnt have collected that $8 billion, thats going to have an impact. We think with FATCA, its like the 1099-K. The fact that people now know weve had all this settlement with the Swiss banks and 220,000 foreign financial institutions are sharing with us information about Americans bank accounts, it should have an impact. We already can see a substantial increase in the filing of foreign asset-holding account reports, the FBARs as theyre called. Weve tracked that once FATCA passed and once we were negotiating agreements with Swiss banks, we in some cases got twice as many information returns about people revealing foreign accounts that they held. I would think in the next report from 11 to 13 we would hope to see the impact of the 1099-K information returns and the impact of FATCA.

In reaction to the tax gap report, Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., urged the IRS to put a system in place to identify the sources of corporate tax avoidance, evasion and noncompliance.

"It is absolutely unacceptable that the country has lost more than $400 billion dollars over the past ten years from corporations dodging their tax payments, said Wyden in a statement. This is money that could be put to good use shoring up critical programs such as Medicare. Its time the IRS put an effective tracking and auditing system in place to locate this lost money.
A Fuzzy Diagnosis

It is not easy to make an ADHD diagnosis. Unlike diabetes or heart disease, ADHD cant be detected with a blood test or scan. Like other psychiatric diagnoses, the boundaries of ADHD are fuzzy, so clinician judgment plays a big role, says Joel Nigg, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry, pediatrics, and behavioral neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that there is little formal training on ADHD in medical school. Most professionals do not have sufficient information about how to assess ADHD and treat it, says Thomas Brown, Ph.D., an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine.

So what is the best way to get an accurate diagnosis? While there is no single test to check for ADHD, there are several assessments that can guide a skilled clinician to making an accurate diagnosis.

[The Building Blocks of a Good ADHD Diagnosis]

Erika Merrill Braga, 45, can remember having problems with her attention span since she was a child. I can remember back to third grade, she says. I was messy and all over the place. Erikas parents took her to several counselors to figure out why she was having difficulty in school, but no one was able to pinpoint a medical problem. They said I wasnt motivated enough or was lazy.

The problems continued into adulthood. Erika, who lives in Westport, Massachusetts, had trouble completing tasks at work and staying organized at home. She spoke to several psychologists and physicians, even presenting them with the idea that she may have ADHD, but they all believed she was had a mood disorder. My primary-care physician told me that adults dont have ADHD, she says.

Persistence paid off, however, when Erika found a licensed mental health care provider at a public clinic to see her. After a two-hour evaluation, Braga was told she had ADHD inattentive-type. I felt like someone had given me a million-dollar check, she says. It was validation.

Start Here

In many cases, a family doctor is the first person to consult with if you suspect that you or your child has ADHD. He or she can do some initial testing to rule out medical conditions that act like ADHD, such as low iron levels and thyroid imbalances. Make sure your child is healthy before you see an ADHD expert, says Nigg.

Dont pressure your doctor to make a diagnosis. That is how incorrect diagnoses get made. Parents insist on something being done, so the pediatrician feels that he needs to act, adds Nigg. If your physician starts to write a prescription for ADHD medication, stop him and insist on a follow-up with an expert in diagnosing ADHD.

[Who Can Diagnose ADHD?]

Finding a qualified ADHD expert isnt easy. If your physician cannot suggest someone, contact your local chapter of CHADD (chadd.org) for advice on the best local experts. The best ADHD specialist  whether he or she is a psychiatrist, psychologist, pediatric neurologist, behavioral M.D., or something else  will have had years of experience in diagnosing and treating ADHD. Adults need an expert who has experience with adult ADHD, which can be harder to diagnose. Theres a lack of trained people to talk to adults, says William Dodson, M.D., a psychiatrist from Denver, Colorado.

The first meeting with an ADHD expert should be lengthy. It should start with a long discussion to help her get to know you or your child, and it should take a detailed look at the problems and challenges that brought you to her office.

The best tool for a clinician is a well-conducted interview with the patient and parent, says Brown. An expert will want to find out about how the child does in a range of activities. (For a list of questions to expect, see Interview with the Patient.)

Its important to be honest and open when answering questions. Its always difficult for a clinician if the parent wont admit that the home life needs improvement, says Nigg. A recent family event, a move or divorce, for example, can cause behavior problems in a child that have nothing to do with ADHD. Based on this interview, each expert may use a different set of tools to further evaluate a child and whether his difficulties indicate an ADHD diagnosis.

Guides, Books, Rating Scales

The American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the standard reference guide for mental health disorders. This book provides a checklist for health-care providers to use in assessing someone for ADHD. The newest version of the DSM checklist contains two categories, inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity, each with a list of nine symptoms that a person with ADHD may exhibit. According to the DSM-V, a child under the age of 18 with ADHD will display six or more of the symptoms in either category for at least six months, noticeably before age 12.

The DSM checklist is a guide, but I wouldnt make a diagnosis based on it, says Brown. There are some people with ADHD who are not going to have all six of the symptoms required by the DSM for diagnosis.

[Free Download: What Every Thorough ADHD Diagnosis Includes]

For adults, the DSM is less helpful.An ADHD diagnosis in adulthood emerges only from a careful clinical interview. Experts agree that an adult needs to meet only four of the nine criteria to signal that he may have ADHD. The DSM is an inadequate tool to diagnose an adult, says Dodson.

The DSM-V finally addresses ADHD in preschoolers, opening the door for an ADHD diagnosis in children as young as 4. For younger children, you want to take the diagnosis process slowly, with someone who specializes in treating that age group, he says. Thanks to the new guidelines in the DSM-V, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) now recommends evaluating and treating children for ADHD beginning at age 4, and starting with behavioral interventions for treatment in younger children.

For children under the age of 16, a clinician may use a standardized rating scale to make a further assessment. There are various rating scales available, but they all consist of long surveys to be completed by the parent, the childs teacher, and, sometimes, the child himself. The goal of these rating scales is to compare everyones opinion of a childs abilities in a structured way. Rating scales help a clinician assess whether a child has ADHD, its severity, and whether the child has an additional disorder that affects his or her performance in the classroom.

Susan Scarpiello first saw her pediatrician when her son, Frank, began having difficulty following directions and interacting with his peers, at the age of 7. After discussing her sons problems, Scarpiello filled out a rating scale, and it was quickly determined that Frank did indeed have ADHD. Without hesitation, the pediatrician prescribed stimulant medication.

Medication didnt help, however. The three medications they tried all left Frank spacey, withdrawn, and pale. After the third medication, we had enough, says Scarpiello.

She decided it was time to find someone who specialized in ADHD. She believes that her son has a secondary disorder, as well as ADHD. He must have ADHD, but there has to be another piece to it, she says.

This wouldnt be unusual. Over 80 percent of kids with ADHD have a second disorder, which really complicates the diagnosis of ADHD, says Russell Barkley, Ph.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina. Anxiety, mood disorders, and learning disorders often go along with ADHD.

Disorders That Come with ADHD

As Scarpiello is finding out, determining whether a child with ADHD has a secondary disorder isnt straightforward. Evidence of a secondary disorder may become apparent during the screening interview, and can be explored with additional questions and standardized rating scales for mood disorders, anxiety, or other conditions.

The steps to address a secondary disorder are the same  pursue the possibility through a clinical interview and standardized rating scales, says Nigg, The biggest challenge is not mechanical but mental. The clinician should not prematurely exclude other conditions when he thinks he sees ADHD.

Even if a secondary disorder is not apparent, a clinician should ask questions about its possibility, such as a family history of mental-health issues, anxiety over routine tasks, or a history of mood disorders. If a clinician suspects a cognitive problem, he may check for a learning disability by testing intelligence, memory, and reading ability. A good clinical interview and evaluation will consider these comorbid conditions routinely, says Nigg.

High-Tech Tools to Diagnose ADHD

In July 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new medical device, based on brain function, for the diagnosis of ADHD. The device, called the Neuropsychiatric EEG-Based Assessment Aid (NEBA), records electrical impulses that are given off by the brain.

In clinical trials, the NEBA system has shown that the ratios of particular brain waves are different in children with ADHD. The device has not been tested on adults, and many experts doubt the tests utility. The field has been through a number of these machines that purport to work, but anyone whos been in this for a while will always be skeptical, says Dodson.

If a NEBA test appears abnormal for a child, there is a high chance he or she has a problem that needs to be addressed, but there are people with ADHD who wont show up as abnormal, says Barkley. And this new test is expensive. Most important, its not going to diagnose ADHD, says Dodson. The test is just going to say that its a little more likely in a given child.

Forms of brain imaging, such as SPECT imaging scans, may also be suggested as a way to look at the brain for evidence of ADHD, but they are also expensive, and many experts are pretty sure that they wont help. There is no imaging test that can make a diagnosis of ADHD, says Brown. They are just snapshots of the brain, showing just a second of brain activity. ADHD happens over time.

Computer-Based Tests: Do They Help?

Computer-assessment tests for ADHD, such as TOVA and the Quotient ADHD Test, score children on their ability to follow along with simple computer games. While these tests are good at measuring attention to a particular game, Brown worries that some children with ADHD are good at playing games. Ive seen 1,000 children and adults with ADHD who have no difficulty playing video games, but they cant sit still in math class, he says.

Though their accuracy is doubtful, scores from these neuropsychological tests are sometimes required by school districts when a child applies for special education or assistance in the classroom. So, if you take these tests, and you get a normal score, disregard it, says Barkley. And if you get an abnormal score, you still need the interview process to find out whats really wrong.

The Bottom Line

As Braga and Scarpiello found out, there is no quick test for ADHD, but a proper diagnosis is crucial. As Scarpiello continues to seek help for her son, she is hopeful that someone will be able to piece together all of the clues to get him a proper diagnosis. Its not getting any easier, she says.

Finding the best ADHD expert in your area is the most important step toward getting an accurate diagnosis of ADHD. It may take several appointments, but the clinician should use all the information at his disposal to assess you or your child and to guide a treatment plan.

Now that I understand what ADHD is, everything else makes sense, says Braga.

Experts agree that there is no single test that can diagnose ADHD. The most crucial part of an evaluation is an extensive conversation among the ADHD expert, parents, and child.

Expect your first appointment with a clinician to be long  at least two hours. The conversation should cover your childs medical history, and his or her abilities both inside and outside of the classroom. If these subjects are not addressed at your initial appointment, insist on it or at a follow-up, or find a new doctor.

Here are some questions you can expect to be asked:

What are the problems you are seeing? Are they recent problems, or have they been going on for a while?

Which types of activities are easy for your child? Which are more challenging?

What does your child do for fun?

Is your child getting enough sleep? Exercise?

Is there a history of ADHD in the family? Is there a relative who has similar attention problems?

Whats the emotional tone at home? Have there been any changes in the family? Is there any new stress in the childs life?

What are you hoping we can do here today?

A clinician may address these questions to the parents and the child, depending on his age, to get both viewpoints. Something that seems like a big deal to a parent may not be the biggest problem for the child. Teachers opinions and school records may also be brought into the conversation to help the clinician get the whole picture of a childs behavior.
After a long trip to camp from the airport, a young camper got out of the van, threw his head back, spread his arms, and said, Ahh, Im home. John Willson, executive director for SOAR, which operates summer camps for children with ADHD in Balsam, North Carolina; Dubois, Wyoming; and internationally, likes to tell this story to drive home the fact that kids should feel excited about attending summer camp, as if it were a second home.

You want camp to be like that for kids, he says. Thats what parents are looking for  a safe place where their kids learn, grow, and do fun things that will help them when they go back home and start the school year.

Summer camps for kids with ADHD and LD come in every size and shape  from day camps to short- and long-term stay-away camps. There are also adventure and travel camps, each offering its own special experiences. Determining which camp best suits your childs needs is challenging. A childs age and level of independence are key considerations, as well as how well he reacts to the stress of being away from home. Some campers are ready, thirsty for the opportunity, as Willson describes it. Or maybe theyre not ready, but they definitely need the opportunity.

I talked with Willson and two other directors of summer camp programs to find out what parents should look for in ADHD camps.

[Get This Free Guide: Choosing the Perfect Summer Camp for Your Child]

The Application Process

Parents dont have to go it alone in deciding what experience will be best for their camper. The application process should guide them toward the perfect fit. A camp that specializes in ADHD should have an extensive application. Gene Bell, executive director at Summit Camp and Travel Programs, in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, explains his camps process.

Theres a lengthy questionnaire that we ask the family to complete, as well as a questionnaire that we ask the potential campers teacher to complete, says Bell. If your youngster has been involved in any kind of therapeutic relationship with a psychologist or social worker or social skills group, we ask for an evaluation from that professional or professionals. If theres been a recent psychological or neuropsych evaluation, we request a copy of that as well. We use all that, plus our conversation with the family, to determine if we would be a good match.

Trevor Dunlap, executive director of Camp Nuhop, in Perrysville, Ohio, explains why a thorough application process is important. We want to know as much as possible about each child, so that we build a program that fits his needs, says Dunlap. We want to put a child with kids hell have a good experience with, so they can build good, solid friendships. Many parents hope that a camp will do that, among other things.

The behaviors that are challenging at home and school may be issues at camp. Camps designed for kids with learning and attention issues should have a higher staff-camper ratio, which means more one-on-one attention. This results in less problematic behavior.

The staff-to-camper ratio is important, when you think about our kids need for transitions from activity to activity, says Dunlap. If you dont have things structured and organized in a format thats going to work for our kids, then theyre going to find something to do. And thats where behavior problems occur. At our camp, one of the staff members will make sure everything is ready for the next activity, so that when a child is done with one activity, it will be game on when he or she attends the next session.

When problems occur, more staff means more individual attention. Lets say little Billys having trouble, says Dunlap. The staff member that has the best rapport with that child can do some one-on-one exercises with him without taking away from the experience of the group.

[Click to Read: ADDitudes ADHD Camp Guide]

Staff Training and Development

When thinking about which camp best fits your child, ask the director about the training of the staff who will be working there. All three camp directors stressed the importance of a well-educated and trained staff that has at least a basic knowledge of ADHD to handle meltdowns and crisis situations. A staff needs to be well-versed in protocol, camp routines, structures, and goals.

Were very specific about the staff we hire, says Dunlap. We recruit staff who are studying in the fields of education, social services, and psychology. When they come here, we have a camp culture, a way of working with kids. In our 10-day in-service training, staff members learn that approach and our belief in unconditional acceptance of every kid for who they are, where they are.

Dunlap says the camp helps staff become certified in the skills they may need while working at the camp. We bring in experts to help with this. One of our trustees was one of our staff members in the 1970s. Now he has a doctorate, teaches at a university, and is one of the leading researchers on families who have children with special needs. He visits the camp and gives them non-violent crisis intervention (CPI) training. Our staff leaves with CPI certificates.

Our staff training takes from 2  to 3  weeks, depending on how you will be working with the kids, says Willson. We begin the training with an overview of the types of kids who attend camp, their gifts, strengths, and abilities. We teach that first because that comes first. We believe there are tremendous, amazing, bright things about these kids. Lets find them and accentuate them. Then we talk about common areas of challenge. The rest of staff training is spent learning how to facilitate this idea.

When people visit us, it looks like a camp, says Summits Bell. They dont see the higher ratio of staff, they dont see the background and skills and credentials of the staff. They see kids having fun.

Kids with ADHD see the school year as a time of negative experiences and constant struggles. Camp should be a place that focuses on strengths, fostering a sense of confidence and empowerment, says Willson.

Were focused on catching kids doing right, he says. So when we need to give corrective guidance, it comes after having praised them a lot. We structure our environment so that kids can succeed. The biggest challenge for ADHD students is to transition from one activity to another. We help kids manage the transitions. We say, This is whats about to happen. Does anyone have any questions? Lets go ahead and do that.'

We reframe what teachers and, perhaps, parents see as negative traits by finding positives in them, says Dunlap. Lets say, a child is out on a hike, and he has a keen awareness of everything around him. He may be as slow as molasses and very methodical. Our staff members accept that. Theyre not pushing him to hurry because they have to get to the next exercise. They understand that this kid perceives things differently. We let that child spend an extra 15 minutes on the trail where he found the coolest bug in the world. We allow kids to be who they are.

At dinner, when we acknowledge and praise our campers, a staff member might say, Johnny was a great contributor to our nature hike today. He was our naturalist, and really in tune with nature. That habit might drive his mom and dad or teacher nuts because Johnny cant transition, but we celebrate it. We have the opportunity to see, and help our campers see, those traits as abilities, not disabilities.

Discipline Approaches

These kids have often had a lot of discipline, Willson says. What they need most is a vacation from failure. A good camp can handle problem behavior in a positive way. When there are incidents of challenging behaviors, we handle those in a compassionate way. We see it as a chance to problem-solve, not to say that the child messed up. One thing I teach my staff is that if you are in conflict with a student, try to understand where hes coming from and help the child find a solution.

Growing Friendships

Our kids find it hard at a neurotypical camp because of their organization issues, peer communication issues, and a range of social skills that require cueing and redirecting, says Bell. These kids peers dont call them or invite them to fun activities. They are usually left out, and they feel as if most kids in school dont like them. The kids are skilled on their computers and their electronic devices, but they find it challenging to interact with and relate to their peers.

A big benefit of summer camps is that a child shares his day-to-day experiences of living with learning and attention issues with other kids. Add this to a positive, nurturing environment, and staffers who help a child navigate the murky waters of friendship, and something magical happens.

Dunlap shares his favorite takeaway from summer camp. What parents are most pleased with when they come to pick up their child is seeing him walking arm in arm with another child.

[Read This Next: 11 Summer Brain Builders]
The Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI), under the aegis of the AAAI Prowess initiative, has announced a one-day workshop titled Digital Hackfest  How to Power-up Brands in the Digital Space, scheduled for May 26, 2016 in Mumbai at the AAAIs Training Centre at Lower Parel. This workshop will be led by Meera Sharath Chandra, Founder, CEO & CCO of Tigress Tigress.

Today, it is not about brands wanting to go digital, but brands deepening their connect and co-creating experiences with their consumers across interesting and emerging digital apertures. Digital is more than a medium. It is a way of life. A whole new sphere where brands can sharply define their mission, personality, positioning and conversations with consumers. How can the digital strategy seamlessly dovetail with the brand intent? How can it be the heart of a totally integrated experience? How can we better understand the art and the science of digital engagement?

The workshop will be in four parts. The first part will look at how our digital and physical worlds collide. The second part will examine how brands can leverage the online space in impactful and meaningful ways. The third part will seek to understand the role and power of social media. The fourth part will join the dots to create a holistic brand story. Every session will conclude with a fun hack on the theme.

An integrated creative professional with 35 years of global experience, Meera Sharath Chandra has handled both MD and ECD responsibilities. Her agency Tigress Tigress specialises in integrated communication with digital at the heart of the experience.

Chandra has over two decades of specialisation in the digital and integrated space. She has been an award winner and jury member at Cannes Lions, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Art Directors Club and New York Fest among others. She has worked in the US, the UK, Hong Kong and India. As an entrepreneur, Chandra has earlier run an Intel-funded dotcom enterprise servicing clients in the US, Europe and Hong Kong, leading a 250-strong team. She has been a member of global task forces on brands such as Nestle, Unilever, Ford and Citibank. She has specialised in UI/UX from the University of Marylands Human Computer Interface Lab.

Chandra is invited to speak regularly at various international forums such as the Latin American Advertising Festival- Rio, Eurobest  Amsterdam and WHO - Geneva. She is also a pro bono contributor towards the WWF Save The Tiger initiative. She is a mentor at the School of Communication Arts, London.
Kimberly-Clark (K-C), global leader in hygiene products, in association with not-for-profit partner Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) India, launched the Toilets Change Lives campaign today at a primary school in Chandanhola, New Delhi. This campaign is part of K-Cs global sanitation initiative under the aegis of the Kimberly-Clark Foundation and is being implemented in partnership with CAF India. Under the project over 100 toilets across schools and anganwadis in Delhi/NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, West Bengal and Maharashtra will be restored. With a focus to fix dysfunctional toilets rather than build more toilets, the company aims to positively impact the lives of nearly 1 million people directly and indirectly across these states.

In a country where ~600 million people still practice open defecation, construction of ~ 10 million new toilets with toilet facilities in~ 90 per cent schools in one year, is no small feat. However reports suggest that 4 out of these 10 school toilets are non-usable or dysfunctional due to lack of regular maintenance. In rural India, 1 out of 2 toilets in schools is unusable leading to continued open defecation. India reports the highest number of diarrheal deaths among children under-five, open defecation being the main reason. Further research suggests that ~ 23% girls drop out of school on reaching puberty and access to safe & hygienic toilets can increase their attendance by up to ~11% .Through Toilets Change Lives Kimberly-Clark is taking a unique approach of repairing dysfunctional toilets in schools to restore hygiene, safety and dignity for children.



At the inauguration of the program , Achal Agarwal, President Kimberly-Clark Asia Pacific Region said, Sanitation is inherently linked to the nature of our business and in response to global sanitation crisis, we developed a multi-country program Toilets Change Lives to provide access to sanitation across Latin America, Africa and India. In India, since much progress is being made by the Swacch Bharat campaign in building new toilets we decided to address the lacuna of dysfunctional or unusable toilets. Further we will focus on school toilets as it not only impacts childrens attendance and quality of education, but also influence their families and reduce the incidence of open defecation in communities at large.

Meenakshi Batra, Chief Executive, CAF India, said, We are proud to be associated with Kimberly-Clark as a partner in Toilets Change Lives and we would like to laud them for considering the sanitation issue beyond just building new toilets. Maintenance of toilets and generating awareness among students, parents, community representatives and teachers are equally important components, which will help in long-term sustainability of the program and contribute to the behaviour change aspect of the Swachh Bharat campaign. Initiatives like these highlight how socially responsible organisations like Kimberly-Clark are willing to go the extra mile to address gaps that exist in the sanitation infrastructure.

In its endeavor to focus on children as future change agents, K-C and Huggies is addressing specific barriers children face in using existing toilet facilities. These range from fixing a door latch for privacy, attaching soap dispensers in wash basins or replacing broken commodes to more fundamental interventions like paving the floor to prevent slips and falls, changing the water pipes that bring the water to the basins, removing water clogging, repairing flushing systems or regular cleaning of septic tanks. K-C is engaging school authorities, deploying resources for specific repairs or renovation and setting up hygiene clubs where children learn and advocate good toilet habits.

Kimberly-Clark Professional took its first step in 2014 to build household toilets in Karjat, Maharashtra, India in partnership with Habitat for Humanity. Further, Kimberly-Clark is also a cofounder and key member of the Toilet Board Coalition, which is working towards building a self-sustaining demand-based sanitation model in Orissa.


Minister of State for Information & Broadcasting, Col Rajyavardhan Rathore, has said that with changing communication paradigm, the global community was existing in a borderless world. The advent of Internet, online news, social media and satellite communication had completely overhauled the communication and information space.

The Minister stated this while delivering his address at the 65th convocation ceremony of Diploma Course in Development Journalism at IIMC, New Delhi.

Elaborating further, Col. Rathore said that communication had been a critical component of the Governments outreach strategy through people centric initiatives and innovative approaches. Citing the example of Mann ki Baat programme and My Gov portal, the Minister said that innovative use of such two-way communication platforms had helped the Government solicit the views from people for better governance and to also understand their communication needs and perspective.



Earlier, during his visit to IIMC, Col Rathore also interacted with IIS Officer Trainees currently undergoing training at IIMC. He urged the Officer Trainees to develop skills, aptitude and understanding of media landscape in taking forward the Government communication roadmap.

He also launched the social media platforms of IIMC and a memento as a part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the Institute, which was established in 1965.




Beale selected for Resilient Energy Demonstration Initiative

The Air Force has selected Beale Air Force Base, California, as the lead site for its Resilient Energy Demonstration Initiative (REDI) to develop and deploy innovative energy resilience technologies and business models, and then apply the results to other missions and installations across the Air Force enterprise.



A team of representatives from the Air Force, Department of Energys national labs, and other outside experts will visit Beale AFB for a site visit and assessment May 3. The team will conduct interviews with mission owners and evaluate opportunities for energy projects. Once the visit is completed, the REDI team will develop a plan to provide resilient, cost-effective, cleaner power to the installation, and begin implementing that plan by the end of 2016.



We selected Beale AFB because of its critical missions, the opportunity to collaborate with regional industry and government partners leading the way in resilient energy solutions, and the leadership and experience of Beales team, said Gen. Hawk Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command.



Policymakers and national security officials have voiced the need to build a more resilient electric grid, and mitigate cyber and physical threats to critical infrastructure. After Beale AFBs energy resiliency plan is developed, the REDI team will issue a request for information to energy developers and partners to determine market interest and industry capabilities for energy resilience projects.



REDI will help ensure Airmen can execute their missions, like remotely piloted aircraft, which rely on uninterrupted access to electricity, said Miranda Ballentine, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and energy. Our team is looking at distributed energy resources, like renewable energy generation and energy storage, which can provide strategic energy agility for our Airmen when they need it most.



Though Beale AFB will be REDIs lead project, the team will be helping shape other energy resilience projects across the Air Force.



Our Airmen continue to develop innovative ways to maintain our base and meet the mission demands of providing global intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to national decision makers, said Col. Christopher Stricklin, the 9th Reconnaissance Wing vice commander. Team Beale is excited about our role in this collaborative effort to build more energy resilience and potentially shape the future of the Air Force.
Separated from family, students chalk up their emotions

Azmeralda Poole pushes the chalk down on the ground and draws two dots inside a circle, cracking a grin as she sketches a smiling face. She points to her creation as she looks up at Nicole Flores, her Vogelweh Elementary School counselor.



"This is me, the student says. I'm happy right now!"



The young girl was participating in a therapy session for children who were ordered to leave Turkey by the Defense Department on March 29 due to security concerns there. Flores had them draw out their thoughts and feelings, and for Azmeralda, there were manyt.



"I had to leave Dad alone for a while," she said. "In the middle of the night, Mom and I came over to Germany and I knew nobody here. Some of my friends came with me to Germany, but a lot of them left to America."



As she said, some families were moved to Ramstein Air Base but some went back stateside. According to Flores, it's been an eventful first few weeks, as she and other school staff members help the dozens of families settle in.



"We got a call out of the blue ... we ended up with 65 kids from Turkey," Flores said. "It happened so fast, but we've kept our minds and arms open to these kids the entire way."



Despite the influx of over 60 students, the teachers have had no problem with taking more of them. If anything, according to Flores, the response has been incredible.



"A lot of teachers wanted as many students as possible," Flores explained. "Also, we have a program where these students have sponsors in the school that show them around and get them adjusted to the new environment. They become their new best friends, and they start feeling like they've been here all year."



It's not been an easy time for these kids and their parents, according to Flores. However, they've never been alone. The parents were provided sponsors to help settle them into the community, while their children were also given sponsors in the form of their peers.



"These kids are so spectacular," Flores said. "To see them getting along so well with students that have lived here, it's amazing."



Flores rounds up the students for their next classes. She takes a glance at the drawings across the playground. Smiley faces and frowning faces crowd the small playground turf. One scribbled face expresses a look of uncertainty with the word "Meh" chalked above its head.



She looks down at the students' faces. One girl has a doll with a photo of her dad's face on the head, clenched tightly in her hands.



"Did we get our emotions out today?" Flores asks her students, who answer with nodding heads.



"I know you all miss your moms or dads, but I want you all to leave your emotions here on this playground, kids," she says. "I want all the sadness, confusion and unhappiness to stay here, chalked in the ground."



The only emotion she wants them to carry to their next home is their happiness and positivity. Flores will only spend two more months with the students, as they and their parents will return stateside once the kids finish the school year.



"I'm going to miss these kids when they leave," Flores said. "They're part of our family now."
F-35 program accelerating, at 'pivot point,' program chief tells Congress

The program executive officer of the F-35 Lightning II aircraft program said the rapidly changing, growing and accelerating program is at a "pivot point" as officials address a number of challenges.



The F-35 program, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter program, is of vital importance to U.S. security, Lt. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan told the Senate Armed Services Committee during an April 26 hearing on the program.



Progress is being made, he said, noting development and flight tests will finish in late 2017. Efforts will then transition to a "leaner, more efficient follow-on modernization program," the general added.



Production will grow from delivering 45 aircraft in 2015 to delivering more than 100 airplanes in 2018, and up to 145 by 2020, he said. In addition, in the next four years, the program will continue a standup of 17 new operating F-35 bases across the world.



"However, the program is not without risks and challenges, as these come with any program of this size and complexity," Bogdan said. "But I'm confident the current risks and issues we face can be resolved, and we'll be able to overcome future problems and deliver the F-35's full combat capability."



Steady progress



The F-35 program has made "steady progress" over the past four years under Bogdan's leadership, according to Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.



F-35 costs and development have remained within the baseline, Kendall said, noting that production costs have steadily decreased, meeting the independent cost estimate each year.



"While I do continue to monitor progress monthly and conduct annual program deep-dive reviews, the F-35 is no longer a program that keeps me up at night," Kendall told lawmakers.



According to Kendall, the F-35 is a "game-changing, state-of-the-art weapons system."



Since potential adversaries are not idly standing by, threat advances in areas like integrated air-defense systems, air-to-air weapons and electronic warfare must be continuously countered, he said.



Software, maintenance challenges



Both Kendall and Bogdan discussed the challenges in the F-35 program. While Kendall noted there are some design issues that need to be resolved, he said he would be surprised if a "major" design problem popped up.



The program is progressing, Bogdan said, but "sometimes slower than I'd like, but moving forward and making progress, nonetheless."



The general said risks include stability issues with the aircrafts software. Other issues, he said, include the development of the next version of the maintenance system known as the Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS, version 2.02.



"However, we believe we have identified the root cause of these problems, and have tested solutions in the lab and in flight tests, and are now completing our flight test with these solutions," Bogdan said.



Bogdan said he and his team take very seriously the responsibility of delivering the best possible weapons system.



"We never forget that someday, your sons and daughters, your grandsons or granddaughters, will take an F-35 into harm's way to defend our freedom," he said.


Air Force officials name SARC of the year

An Air Force captain earned the services 2015 Exceptional Sexual Assault Response Coordinator Award during a ceremony April 28 at the Pentagon.



Capt. Elizabeth Belleau, a behavioral scientist, earned the award for her work both as the SARC at Kadena Air Base, Japan, and while deployed as the SARC for the 435th Air Expeditionary Wing, U.S. Africa Command.



We have a lot of SARCs doing amazing things to support our Air Force family, but Elizabeths dedication to the Airmen she serves and her consistent record of innovation to improve victim services made her the clear choice for this recognition, said Maj. Gen. James Johnson, the director of the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) Office.



The award recognizes the Air Force SARC whose work has been particularly noteworthy and demonstrates outstanding service in support of service members.



As the only deployed SARC within AFRICOM, Belleau led 42 victim advocates at 15 geographically separated operating locations, to support more than 7,000 joint force service members. She established evacuation procedures from locations that lacked a certified provider for victims in need of forensic exams.



Belleau also adapted provider pre-deployment training requirements while deployed, limiting the medical airlift need for sexual assault victims, saving evacuation costs, preserving forensic evidence, and improving victim care.



While at Kadena AB, Belleau led 68 victim advocates, serving 35,000 Airmen. She created new sexual assault prevention and response initiatives specific to Kadena AB that affected the entire community.



Her efforts led to a SAPR prevention summit, two leadership panels, a photo campaign, quarterly combat Airman fitness events, quarterly victim advocate performance awards, and quarterly outreach events for Airmen housed on the base.



Elizabeth and the Airmen she leads perform a valuable role in keeping our Airmen ready to fly, fight and win, Johnson said. Leaders and innovators like her shape the future of our force and develop the teamwork that enables us to succeed.
By: Shoji Matsumoto, Professor of International and African Comparative Law, Japan

Moroccos permanent representative at the UN has informed the United Nations Secretary General and members of the Security Council, that Morocco expressed its strong opposition to any implication or role of the African Union on the issue of the Sahara, and expressed consequently its strong rejection of repeated attempts by the African Union to discuss the issue before the Security Council.

Rabat estimates that The African Union has already taken position in favor of one party. Thus, the African cannot be a judge and a party,

The Letter sent to the UNSG, and the Security Council explains that The credibility of the African Union on the issue of the Moroccan Sahara is compromised given its position, which prejudged, in a biased manner, the outcome of the political negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations, by admitting, within its membership, an entity that has no attribute of sovereignty,

Moroccan reaction comes just after the AUs special envoy for the Western Sahara Joaquim Chissano told some members of the Security Council during an informal meeting on Tuesday that Moroccos eviction of United Nations peacekeeping staff sets a very dangerous precedent for U.N. missions.

In this informal meeting boycotted by several Council members, such as France, Spain, Senegal and Egypt, Chissano criticized Moroccan decision to expel civilian members of the mission, and considered it as  very dangerous precedent.

Last month, Morocco has expelled over 84 civilian UN staffers as a political response to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moons inaccurate behaviors and statements, such us Greeting the flag of a virtual and non-member state of the UN, or his use of the term occupation to describe Moroccos presence in the Western Sahara.

Two years ago, Morocco has rejected the appointment of Chissano, to the faked diplomatic position and called on the Security Council to ignore AUs decision.

The AU at a Loss: the Requirements of International Responsibility of an International Organization 

Normally, an international organization like the AU is established to achieve attentive objectives. If it has become apparent that the objectives cannot be achieved, the organization should be fundamentally reconstructed or dissolved. Otherwise, the organization would serve different objectives and become dysfunctional. The AU as we know it today is not an exception.

Fundamentally, one of the objectives of the AU shall be to: (a) achieve greater unity and solidarity between the African countries, whether they are members or not. Another objective is to (c) accelerate the political and socio-economic integration of the continent, not only that of the members. But the AU has not attempted to convince Morocco why and how the appointment of special envoy for Western Sahara is necessary to achieve greater unity and solidarity with Morocco, and to accelerate the political and socio-economic integration with Morocco. As Morocco has already rejected few years ago the appointment, the decision of the AU to appoint the special envoy for Western Sahara precludes any possibility to achieve greater unity and solidarity between the African countries, and to accelerate the political and socio-economic integration of the continent Consequently, the decision is in breach of the obligations under the Constitutive Act of the African Union (AU Act).

Intrinsically, the AU is not competent to deal with the Western Sahara conflict. A conflict would come under the jurisdiction of an international organization only when all the parties are its members. The AU Act itself stipulates the peaceful resolution of conflicts among Member States of the Union as one of its principles. The conflict is not a conflict for the AU to be resolved through such appropriate means as may be decided upon by the Assembly (AU Act, art.4 (e)). In fact, one of the backgrounds of the taking over the conflict by the UN from the OAU was the withdrawal of Morocco from it.

If based on the Draft Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations, adopted by the International Law Commission in 2011 and submitted to the UN General Assembly, every internationally wrongful act of an international organization entails the international responsibility. The breach of an international obligation by such an act of an international organization having a continuing character as the appointment by the AU of special envoy for Western Sahara extends over the entire period during which the act continues and remains not in conformity with that obligation (art. 12 (2)). Thus, the AU i is under an obligation to cease the internationally wrongful act of the appointment, and to offer appropriate assurances and guarantees of non-repetition (art.30). The AU has to re-establish the situation which existed before the wrongful act was committed (art.35). Morocco may take countermeasures against the AU in order to induce it to comply with its obligations (art.51(1)). A non-injured third State is also entitled to invoke the responsibility of the AU (art.49).

It was wise if the AU had not appointed a special envoy in breach of its own objectives, at lest it might play e key role in achieving the objectives in conformity with the law of international responsibility of international organizations. The AU is recommended, as its highest priority, to do all kinds of things to tie in well with Morocco.
Stung by fire incidents in various parts of Bihar due to searing heat conditions, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has ordered officials to issue an advisory to people not to light fire between 9 AM and 6 PM and observe havan and puja before nine in the morning.

Kumar asked Principal Secretary, Disaster Management, to issue an advisory to this effect while reviewing cases of fire in Patna division comprising six districts-Patna, Nalanda, Bhojpur, Rohtas, Buxar and Bhabua, an official statement said.

He also instructed the Power Secretary to change loose electricity wire from various areas as a preventive step.

On Sunday, RJD president Lalu Prasad also laid emphasis on curtailing use of fire to avoid accidents in view of soaring heat condition in the state. Kumar ordered the officials to provide compensation to family of victims of fire.

The CM also directed to submit proposal for purchase of additional fire equipment immediately.

Reacting to this government decision, Satender Bind, who lost his hut in a fire in a village in Bihars Jehanabad district, told NDTV, It sounds fine but I wonder how many people will follow it. There are practical difficulties. But yes I did lose my home in a fire and it started from someones cooking.

Over 700 houses had been gutted due to the Darbhanga fire.

Four children were charred to death after fire broke out at Pokhrawan village under Kajra police station of Lakhisarai district, Kajra police SHO Ranjit Kumar had said.

The fire was caused by an electrical spark at a villagers home during cooking which also spread to neighbouring Ranjit Thakurs home, the SHO had said.

The flames were so severe that all the four children including goods were reduced to ashes and thats why the bodies could not be recovered, he added.

Starting today, the CM would hold review meetings of division, to take stock of fire incidents and also status of implementation of total liquor ban in the state, the statement said.

The meeting observed that water level has gone down in Patna division in comparison to that in the last two years.

On this, the CM ordered to ensure supply of drinking water through tankers in affected areas and also get the handpump repaired.

(With Agency Inputs)
Victims should come forward to register complaints irrespective of whether police takes action or not says activists.

A report by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), revealed only about 50 percent of crimes and about 12 percent of sexual harassment cases are reported to Mumbai and Delhi police. The CHRI along with the Indian Statistical Institute and Nielsen India Pvt. Ltd. released its report on Crime Victimisation and Safety Perception. The report was based on a year-long survey carried out between July 2014 and June 2015 in Mumbai and Delhi.

This survey also said percent of crimes get reported to police in Mumbai the percentage stood at 41.8 percent while in Delhi, its little higher 46.8 percent. Even the rate of lodging a sexual harassment case was very low in both the cities  only 7.5 percent cases were registered in Delhi, while in Mumbai, the rate was a bit higher with 11.1 percent. The report said that most of the sexual harassment cases registered was related to passing of vulgar and sexual comments.

On not reporting the crimes, CHRI director Maja Daruwala said: One reason which came out in our survey was that the victims didnt want to be caught up in police or court matters. The second reason which came into light was that the victims didnt feel there was enough evidence to take the case forward, she added.

Senior advocate Abha Singh said, The common people have lost faith in the police. If they file FIR then police doesnt take action against the accused and shield them. Most of the time sexual harassment is being done by a person known to the victim and they try to resolve the matter themselves. If girl tries to file a complaint then she is being threatened.

Special Public Prosecutor Rohini Salian said, Police only comes into picture after filing of complaints. They cant do anything if victim doesnt file complaint. So citizens have to come forward to register complaints irrespective of whether police take action or not. 

BJP leader Shaina NC said, Several languages are spoken in India. When a victim is assaulted then police should file FIR and not give more importance to language. After conducting thorough probe police should take action against the accused if he is proved guilty. Language should not become a barrier towards delivering justice to victims. Police should remain sensitive while investigating crime cases.

Former ACP, Vasant Dhoble said, Whenever victim approaches the police they dont cooperate with them and file a case. Sometimes action is not taken despite serious offences are being committed. Language is not a barrier as people know Hindi and if a person comes from rural area then he gets some assistance from persons who are aware about the language spoken by him. Sometimes women dont come forward to file complaint and dont cooperate with the police while conducting investigation. Police should also try to regain their confidence and ask them to come forward to file complaints so that there will be reduction in crime rates, he added.

Sankalp Bhudhesiya Seva Sanghatna President Ajay Bhavsar said, We have urged people to file a complaint with the police whenever they are being victimised then only crimes will be reduced. If police fails to take action despite filing complaints then they can be held responsible. People are facing problems while filing complaints due to language barrier.

A separate department should be established for addressing this issue. Awareness must be created among citizens about this issue. Earlier women used to face huge problems while reporting about sexual harassment cases as male cops used ask them uncomfortable questions but now women constables are there to assist them. If women files a written compliant then it makes the police departments task easier, he added.

The maximum cases registered with police were related to theft, which was followed by sexual harassment and assault cases. Cases of mobile phones being stolen were highest among all in both the cities. The report also said that about 36 percent of complainants in Delhi and 51 percent in Mumbai were satisfied with the police response.

The report said the residents of Mumbai generally perceive police in a more positive light and felt safer than those residing in Delhi. Further it stated that non-Marathi speakers in Mumbai and non-Hindi speakers in Delhi were comparatively more vulnerable to crime. Only about 50 percent of crimes and about 12 percent of sexual harassment cases are reported to police in Mumbai,
The revised draft development plan (RDDP) for Mumbai which has proposed floor space index (FSI) alterations for residential and commercial structures has drawn sharp reactions from town planners and political quarters, who have dubbed it as an attempt to destroy open spaces in the megapolis.

BMC chief Ajoy Mehta had on Wednesday presented RDDP-2034 for Mumbai and proposed a uniform FSI of 2 for residential buildings and FSI of up to 5 for commercial structures, thus paving way for sky-scrapers across the city.

The FSI is the ratio of a buildings total floor area to the size of the piece of land upon which it is built.

While Congress and NCP, the main opposition parties in BMC, termed the draft as an unfortunate attempt to destroy Mumbais open spaces.

In the name of development, BMC is setting out to destroy Mumbais remaining open spaces. Its a very unfortunate move by Sena-BJP that too just a year ahead of the municipal polls, former Union Minister Milind Deora said.

The ex-MP from South Mumbai also lambasted the proposal to increase FSI, saying the increase in FSI is without an impact assessment study which all cities around the world conduct before arbitrarily raising FSI.

However, BJP hailed the plan, saying it would turn congested Mumbai into comfortable Mumbai, while its ruling ally in the civic body Shiv Sena said all the aspects of the plan would be considered before final approval.

This proposal has been brought to solve the woes of lakhs and lakhs of people living in chawls and slums. Its an effort to uplift their conditions and convert congested Mumbai into comfortable Mumbai, Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar said.

With this balanced draft policy having an environment friendly initiative and meticulous planning, No-Business Mumbai has will be pushed towards becoming a Business-Incentive Mumbai, Shelar said.

Shiv Sena group leader in BMC Trishna Vishwasrao said if there were mistakes in the draft policy, it would be corrected.

Let all go in the fine print of the draft policy. It would come up in the House next month and then objection and suggestions from the public would also be invited. We will consider all the aspects before finally sending it to the government for the final approval, she said.

In RDDP-2034, the civic body has also proposed to remove restrictions in No Development Zone (NDZ) areas and divide it in three parts 33 per cent for open spaces, 33 per cent for affordable housing and 34 per cent for owners to construct saleable buildings.
The government requested United Kingdom authorities to deport liquor baron Vijay Mallya for investigation in a money laundering case, foreign ministry spokesperson Vikas Swaroop said on Thursday.

The move comes two days after the troubled industrialists lawyers told the Supreme Court he was unlikely to come back to India as he feared arrest on arrival.

Mallya is facing proceedings in the top court by a consortium of 17 banks seeking repayment of over Rs. 9,000 crore in loans to his now-collapsed Kingfisher Airlines.

In a separate case last week, a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court in Mumbai issued a non-bailable warrant against Mallya after the enforcement directorate alleged the industrialist invested around half of a Rs. 950 crore loan from IDBI bank  taken by his Kingfisher Airlines  in properties outside the country.

Mallya left India in March, triggering outrage as he is under probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the ED for defaulting on loans taken by KFA.

As of today, the ministry has written to the high commission of the UK in Delhi requesting the deportation of Sri Vijay Mallya so that his presence can be secured for investigations against him under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002, Swaroop told journalists.

The move indicates the Centre is stepping up its efforts to get back Mallya, who has till date appeared unfazed by debt recovery pressure from banks and central probes.

But the deportation request will hinge on the UKs response and the government is worried that Mallyas case may go the same way as that of former IPL boss Lalit Modi, who managed to stay back in Britain despite corruption charges.
Pakistan has admitted that the recent Foreign Secretary-level talks held between the Asian neighbours on the sidelines of the Heart of Asia-Istanbul conference in New Delhi could not achieve any major breakthrough as the latter refused to give any timeframe for the start of comprehensive bilateral dialogue.

Pakistans Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry and his Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar met in New Delhi as part of latest efforts to break the impasse in bilateral ties.

After his return from New Delhi, Chaudhry indicated that no headway was made as far as the formal start of the composite dialogue with India was concerned.

India has not given any date for the meeting of foreign secretaries, the Express Tribune quoted Chaudhry as saying.

He said that no major breakthrough was achieved during the talks although India agreed that dialogue was the only way forward to resolve all outstanding issues.

When asked to identify the obstacles in the resumption of peace talks, the Foreign Secretary said the question should be put before the Indian Government.

Pakistan believes in sustained and structured dialogue. We will welcome whenever India is ready for the dialogue, he said.

The arch-rivals had agreed to resume comprehensive bilateral dialogue in December last year after Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj met Prime Ministers Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz.

Following the meeting, the Foreign Secretaries of both nations were to meet in January and discuss issues of mutual interest. However, the dialogue process derailed after militants stormed Indias Pathankot airbase near the border with Pakistan in January this year.

India held Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad responsible for the attack. Pakistan condemning the attack formed a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) to help India probe the incident.

The team recently visited the incident site in India and the final report on it is yet to be made public. However, initial foreign office reaction suggested that limited access to the Pakistani side was provided.

Asserting that Pakistan firmly but politely raised all issues of its concerns with India in an open and frank manner, the Foreign Secretary said Islamabad clearly informed India that Kashmir remains the core dispute between the two countries and called for early commencement of bilateral dialogue, including people-to-people contact and water issues.

The Foreign Secretary said that he also conveyed Pakistans concerns over the activities of Indian intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), in the internal affairs of Pakistan.

Chaudhry said that Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and the US under the banner of Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) remained engaged in facilitating the talks between the Afghan Government and the Taliban representatives.
WASHINGTON, April 27, 2016 - EPA received the brunt of the criticism from farm group representatives at a House Agriculture subcommittee hearing today focusing on the factors affecting the cost of producing the nations food.

And there was plenty of criticism.

Jay Vroom, president of CropLife America, told the Subcommittee on Biotechnology, Horticulture, and Research that the agency has elevated political science above actual science. In particular, he mentioned both the April 19-21 meeting of a Scientific Advisory Panel convened by EPA to assess the value of epidemiological studies on chlorpyrifos exposure, and a finding by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization, that glyphosate probably causes cancer in humans.

On chlorpyrifos, which has been used for decades as Lorsban or Dursban, EPA is relying on a study by the Columbia Center for Childrens Environmental Health that suggests a correlation between adverse health outcomes for some children allegedly exposed to the pesticide in cities. But, he added, Columbia will not publicly release the raw data.



At the same time, he said, EPA is pushing aside the findings of long-standing verified laboratory studies and important new toxicological data that do exist about chlorpyrifos, all of which are available and subject to public scrutiny and demonstrate that the product is safe for agricultural use. Vroom faulted EPAs Office of Research and Development, telling Agri-Pulse after the hearing that ORD favors the Columbia study.

And on glyphosate, a widely used herbicide, Vroom told the panel, chaired by Rodney Davis, R-Ill., We believe that theres an agenda in the ORD to try to take this important tool away from farmers.

After the hearing, Vroom said that the U.S. government representative on the IARC panel that made the carcinogenicity finding was from ORD, not, as precedent would have dictated, from EPAs Office of Pesticide Programs.

That representative didnt say a word in the two weeks of the public sessions, Vroom said. We can only surmise that theres an agenda there.

Vroom said EPAs actions are part of a trend at the agency towards using less robust science and allowing decisions to be guided more by prevailing political winds.

For example, he said employees within OPP have told CropLife America that they feel pressure from social media  Facebook moms and teens on Twitter  when they are making decisions.

Other witnesses were equally critical of the agency. Dale Murden, president of Texas Citrus Mutual, blasted the agency for putting out a press release on its pollinator risk assessment for imidacloprid that said the neonicotinoid shows a threat to some pollinators, and indicates that imidacloprid potentially poses risk to hives when the pesticide comes in contact with certain crops that attract pollinators.

In contrast, EPA's partner in the assessment, Health Canada, put out a very different message resulting in Canadian news coverage stating, regulatory reviews show slim risk to bees from imidacloprid,  Murden said.

There were no EPA witnesses at the hearing. Asked for comment afterward, an EPA spokesperson said: We are using science to guide our decision-making. EPA collaborates among our offices, as well as our state, federal and international partners, in making decisions to protect the public and the environment while ensuring agriculture has the necessary tools to address pest issues.

Watching for more news about the EPA and agriculture? Sign up for an Agri-Pulse four-week free trial subscription.





Another hot-button issue addressed at the hearing was GMO labeling. Chuck Conner, head of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, said negotiations are very, very active in the Senate to try to iron out differences between Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and ranking member Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.

Davis said the labeling issue didnt become partisan till it got over (to the Senate) and expressed frustration that the House may have to take up the issue again, provided the Senate can reach a compromise.

The House passed a bill last summer that would block states from requiring GMO labeling. On July 1, Vermonts GMO labeling law is scheduled to take effect, which in the absence of federal action has led major food companies such as Campbells to announce they will begin disclosing the presence of GMOs in their products.

Other subjects addressed at the hearing included implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act, the H-2A visa program for seasonal farmworkers, agricultural research, and decaying USDA infrastructure. The testimony is here. A video of the hearing is here.

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The organizations also are rejecting a proposed broad definition of biotechnology that would include gene editing, going well beyond the traditional technique of inserting genes from one species into another. In joint comments on the plan to USDA, trade groups that represent companies such as Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Cargill Inc. that export grain, oilseeds and other products said that the proposal was premature and potentially harmful to U.S. agriculture because of the possible impact on trade. The USDA plan, outlined in a 14-page document published in February, is intended to accelerate the development of new crop traits that USDA believes pose little risk to the environment, with the side benefit of making it easier for public researchers and small companies to get their ideas to market. The new system USDA envisions would end or at least curtail what scientists consider unnecessary, redundant reviews of essentially the same traits. The document, prepared by USDAs Biotechnology Regulatory Services, a unit of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), lays out in broad terms a new two-step process for analyzing new crop traits and deciding which ones would be subject to regulation. Although the definition of biotechnology is broad, the expectation is that some techniques would be exempted from regulation. The grain and oilseed traders have been pushing the administration for months to ensure that any changes in regulation are coordinated with other countries, citing the impact of Chinas rejection of imports after discovering a Syngenta corn variety that hadnt been approved there. In the joint comments, the Corn Refiners Association, National Grain and Feed Association, Corn Refiners Association, National Oilseed Processors Association, North American Export Grain Association and the North American Millers Association said going forward with the overhaul nolw could harm U.S. agriculture. To create a truly workable biotech regulatory framework for the future, APHIS necessarily must take the necessary time and make the necessary effort to address the challenge of achieving regulatory coherence and compatibility in the global market, the groups said. An APHIS spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the industry's concerns. With the China experience in mind, the grain and oilseed traders also asked APHIS to create a new approach for safeguarding exports through creation of a conditional deregulation category for products that dont present a plant pest or noxious weed risk but lack necessary approvals in export markets. The category also would cover novel crop traits that could result in disruptions to domestic or export markets. Biotech companies that receive such conditional approvals would have to implement stewardship plans to manage the products and take responsibly for them if the plans fail to protect the value of U.S. crops. In other comments, the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives pushed USDA to exempt gene editing techniques from the definition of biotechnology, saying they offered significant opportunities for crops that have not benefited from genetic engineering before. New gene editing tools offer a precise alternative to mutagenic techniques, which have been safely used by plant breeders for almost a century, to create novel alleles (alternative forms) of native genes, NCFC said. The Biotechnology Industry Organization, which represents Monsanto Co. as well as many smaller companies, said in its comments that the definition was very broad and had no articulated connection to actual risk." The agency has no legal authority to regulate biotech products unless they are considered plant pests, noxious weeds or could lead to the introduction of a plant pest or noxious weed, BIO said. The group said the broad overhaul being proposed was unnecessary. APHIS should instead make surgical changes focused on addressing specific issues, rather than by proposing or undertaking a radical departure from the current system, BIO said. The American Seed Trade Association echoed many of BIOs concerns. The biotechnology definition would require pre-market regulatory review of many modifications that could be achieved through conventional breeding, the group said. Critics of biotechnology don't think the departments proposal goes far enough. Some comments pressed the agency to take into account the impact of biotech crops on organic producers. Friends of the Earth, for example, said biotech companies should be held liable for contamination of non-GMO crops. The group also called for mandatory safety testing of all genetically engineered organisms. The Center for Food Safety, which has frequently challenged USDA biotech approvals in court, applauded the broad definition of biotechnology, but the group said APHIS failed to use the definition as a regulatory trigger. CFS says that all genetically engineered organisms should be regulated as plant pests or noxious weed risks. The group also said the agency should pay special attention to herbicide-resistant (HR) crops. Based on the continuing large number of field trials and recent deregulations of HR crops with resistance to multiple herbicides, this class of GE crops will also dominate the future of agricultural biotechnology. Food and Water Watch submitted a petition that also emphasized the concerns about herbicide usage and the impact on organic farming. The USDA document lays out four alternatives for future regulation, the second of which is the plan APHIS outlined to interest groups last fall. The other alternatives are essentially throwaway plans. One would leave the current system unchanged, another would replace it with a much more stringent system, and the third would essentially deregulate biotechnology. The USDA docket on the EIS, with public comments, is here. #30
April 28, 2016

After the US Supreme Court ruled April 20 that families of victims of a 1983 terrorist attack in Beirut are allowed access to $2 billion of funds belonging to Iran in a New York bank, officials from the administration of President Hassan Rouhani blamed the previous administration for the oversight and poor management.

"Under the previous administration, it was decided that a part of the Central Bank's resources be managed in Europe," said Vice President Eshag Jahangiri on April 23 regarding the US Supreme Court ruling. "Therefore, with complete poor planning, $2 billion of American bonds were purchased and kept in a European bank, so the Americans were able to easily block the bonds and then confiscate it."

Iran's vice president was not the only official from the administration of President Hassan Rouhani to point fingers at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was president from 2005 to 2013. Hamid Baeidinejad, director general for political affairs at the Foreign Ministry and a nuclear negotiator, wrote a response to the ruling on his Instagram page April 23. Baeidinejad criticized the former head of the Central Bank for purchasing the bonds of a "hostile country" and said that it was not in line with the general policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Baeidinejad also wrote that not removing the funds in 2006 when it was expected there would be a round of sanctions on Iran was "clear negligence" on the part of the officials at the time. He added that not removing the funds in 2007 when it was clear that the lawsuit, which the Supreme Court recently upheld, sought Iran's funds was another example of "negligence."

The head of Iran's Central Bank, Valiollah Seif, also blamed the Ahmadinejad administration, saying April 23, "Unfortunately, under the previous administration, despite the warnings of experts and managers of the Central Bank to avoid investing in dollar-based securities, they bought these bonds. Seif also accused previous diplomatic officials of not taking any action to retrieve the money.

Ahmadinejad rejected the accusations against his administration and blamed the Rouhani administration as the main cause for the funds' seizure. An April 27 statement released by Ahmadinejads office accused the Rouhani administration of "continuous attacks" in the last three years and of blaming the previous administration for the Rouhani administration's own "weaknesses, inabilities and failures." The statement continued that the US Supreme Court ruling, which was referred to as a "robbery," was just another excuse to attack the Ahmadinejad administration.

In an attack on the Rouhani administrations compromise on the nuclear program in order to reach a comprehensive deal with the six world powers that would reduce international sanctions, the statement asked rhetorically, "Is not this robbery [US Supreme Court ruling] the result of showing the nation of Iran as weak on the international scene?" The statement continued that the ruling was issued at a time when Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry  the two men who led the negotiations on behalf of their countries  and said this timing is simply a "continuation of the scenario of humiliating the Iranian people and government."

The statement, however, did not address why the Central Bank invested $2 billion in US bonds during Ahmadinejad's presidency.
April 13, 2016

GAZA CITY  Amid the difficult political and financial situation facing Hamas, voices began to emerge within the movement in May 2015, calling for direct negotiations with Israel to avoid conditions being set by middlemen and the latters inability to compel Israel to abide by any agreement.

Hamas does not object to direct negotiations with Israel from a religious or ideological point of view. Inside Israeli prisons, long-standing negotiations have been undertaken between Palestinian prisoners and the Israeli Prison Service. These are ongoing on a daily basis to secure the rights of prisoners to education, medical treatment and visits by families and to calm tensions.

Tawfiq Abu Naim  director general of Gaza's security apparatus and a former member of the High Commission of Hamas Prisoners while jailed in Israel  was released in the 2011 exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. He told Al-Monitor, We negotiated with the Prison Service for many years, and we do not have qualms about conducting direct negotiations with Israel on matters that affect the lives of citizens. Regarding political negotiations, on the other hand, Israels demands have a very high price. Israel wants to be recognized as a state, to have security coordination, to maintain its control over the crossings and preserve [the Palestinians] economic dependency. Yet, we will not pay any price, due to the previous experiment in which Israel failed to abide by the agreements reached with the PLO. One such agreement is the 1994 Paris Protocol.

Hamas and Israel had reached an agreement in October 2011 through Egyptian-mediated negotiations for Shalit's release in return for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners being freed. The negotiations took place in two separate rooms, with each party occupying one and Egyptian intelligence chief Raafat Shehata shuttling between them to convey demands and replies.

Ahmed Yousef, who along with fellow Hamas Shura Council member Ghazi Hamad advocates direct talks with Israel, told Al-Monitor that the head of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office had initiated direct communications with Hamas leadership following the war on Gaza in summer 2014 to open a direct hotline for talks aimed at avoiding future wars. Yousef said, For the first time ever, Hamas demonstrated flexibility in dealing with these contacts, on the condition that it be made public, though it remained skeptical about the seriousness of any direct negotiations in light of the current balance of power.

Mohamad Hamadeh is another prisoner freed in the Shalit deal and a researcher at the As-Salam Center, which follows Israeli media. He told Al-Monitor, Hamas still does not have enough political experience after its direct negotiations with Israel on daily Palestinian issues  such as electricity and the crossings  without a mediator. The idea of negotiations has its supporters and continues to be floated behind the scenes. The last war on Gaza in 2014 was a golden opportunity to begin direct talks to lift the siege and agree on a long-term truce. Yet, Hamas was wary about Israels failure to abide by previous agreements entered into with the Palestine Liberation Organization throughout the years.

Hamas members negotiate with Israel on a daily basis on local issues through representatives affiliated with the Ramallah government's ministries in Gaza. The issues primarily revolve around agriculture and fisheries.

In a statement to Al-Monitor, Hatem Oweida, undersecretary of the Ministry of National Economy said, Raed Fattouh communicates with the Israelis on behalf of the Ministry of Economy, while the Ministry of Agriculture is represented by Talaat al-Tallouli, both of whom are located in Gaza and have daily contact with the Israelis concerning issues affecting the lives of the Strips inhabitants, such as those relating to goods, plants, pesticides, soil and fisheries.

Tallouli told Al-Monitor, We agreed [on April 3] with the Israelis to expand the fishing zone to nine miles for a two-month trial period in a geographical area that lies in the Gaza Strips territorial waters.  Coordination will be initiated with Hamas naval police to inform them about any trespasses by Palestinian fishermen.

Bassem Naim, head of Hamas international relations, told Al-Monitor, We have no problem dealing with the Israeli occupation in matters that affect the lives of citizens, such as medical treatment and border crossings. The problem lies in political negotiations. Through Egyptian mediation, we conducted bold and successful negotiations to free Shalit. But during the last war, Turkish-Qatari-French-mediated negotiations under the United States auspices failed to secure an early cease-fire. I believe that in light of regional developments, direct negotiations would be futile considering that the Israelis are reneging on and failing to abide by past agreements.

Naim further stated, We announced our acceptance of a state along the 67 borders, but Israel is not interested in achieving peace in the region, and the international community is not pressuring Tel Aviv to accept that option.

In a March 16 interview with France 24, Hamas political bureau head Khaled Meshaal reiterated Hamas acceptance of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders. He also said, As a part of the National Agreement signed in 2006, we, as Palestinians, agreed on a common national political program predicated on the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, the end of the occupation, the withdrawal of Israel from Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and the right of return. The Arabs endorsed that agreement, but Israel thwarted these efforts many years ago. The project remains in place, but maybe soon  out of desperation about international will in that regard, and out of despair about achieving palpable developments in favor of the Palestinian people  that solution might be withdrawn, with Israel bearing the responsibility for it.

For now, given the recent discovery of new tunnels into Israel from Gaza, perhaps the Israelis will seek direct negotiations with the movement in order to reach a political and military truce with the hope of guaranteeing that Hamas stops rearming and digging tunnels and to avoid a new military confrontation. Failing in that, Hamas might agree once again to negotiate with Israel through a mediator, but one that could guarantee the parties commitment to any agreement.
April 28, 2016

TEHRAN, Iran  Earlier this month, Brig. Gen. Ali Arasteh, deputy chief liaison of the Iranian army's ground force, for the first time publicly spoke about Irans military operations against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria. He told Iranian reporters, Brigade 65 is a part of our armys ground force and we are dispatching soldiers from Brigade 65, as well as other units, as advisers to Syria. This dispatch is not limited to commandos of Brigade 65, as advisers of Brigade 65 are already there.

With the exception of the 1980-88 war with Iraq, the army had not conducted foreign operations since Irans 1979 Islamic Revolution. Only the Quds Force, the external operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Fatehin Brigade, made up of Iranian volunteers, had conducted advisory and ground operations in Syria and Iraq. The army is solely responsible for defending Irans borders, though if ordered by the commander in chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it can also undertake assigned foreign missions.

Brigade 65, also known by the abbreviation Nohed, is a special airborne force, and one of Irans most elite military units. It was formed prior to the Islamic Revolution, and had a very successful record during the war with Iraq. Its original core was formed in the 1950s, when the army sent 10 senior officers to France. In the ensuing years, two new brigades responsible for hostage rescue missions, irregular warfare, psychological warfare and support were added to the airborne force while Brigade 65 was created. Improved training alongside successful combat experiences  such as at the Manston Dhofar military base in Oman in the 1970s, and reportedly even in the Vietnam War  led this unit to become one of Irans best, alongside the Imperial Guard, by the end of the Pahlavi era.

Brigade 65s participation in operations in Oman was official. This apparently was not the case in Vietnam; however, before his death, Gen. Alireza Sanjabi shared a memory with this author about how he had served as a sniper in Vietnam. Sanjani added, Before the revolution, most of the training of this brigade was done in the form of joint operations with the British SAS. Indeed, Brigade 65s power increased so much that during the early days of the Islamic Revolution, certain members of parliament urged its dissolution since they feared it might attempt a coup. However, it was not dissolved and remains as strong as ever. In the 1990s, there was a mock military operation in Tehran where airborne forces were asked to take hold of all important military and political centers in the capital. Despite fierce resistance put up by the security forces guarding these centers, the powerful Ghost Forces were able to occupy the capital in two hours. Ever since, these army green berets have been known as the Powerful Ghosts.

Prior to its current deployment, Brigade 65 had not conducted foreign operations since the war with Iraq, as far as is officially known. There are, however, certain unconfirmed reports indicating that members of this brigade conducted reconnaissance missions in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While the IRGC has been in charge of providing support for the Syrian government since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the army during the past two years has taken pre-emptive measures in the fight against IS in order to neutralize any possible attack on Tehran. Last year, the commander of the armys ground force, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Reza Pourdastan, mentioned operations involving the deployment of troops to the Iran-Iraq border and cross-border artillery strikes. He also said that a rapid response unit as well as specialized sniper training schools have been formed during the past few months. In addition, advanced military equipment has been delivered to these forces to prepare them to confront any threats.

Iranian classifications put the size of brigades at about 6,000 to 7,000 troops. Thus, it is probable that about 100 to 200 Brigade 65 commandos have been deployed to Syria. News of this deployment was heavily covered by Iranian media outlets. Indeed, only a few days after the deployment, reports of four Brigade 65 fatalities in Aleppo shocked public opinion. Pourdastan quickly described the situation to the press, During an attack conducted by a few thousand takfiri [militant Salafi] forces and forces of Jabhat al-Nusrah on south Aleppo  four dear members of the [Iranian] ground forces were martyred. In this confrontation, a number of tanks and armored personnel carriers of the terrorist group al-Nusrah were destroyed and 200 terrorists were killed as well. Based on the latter, it appears likely that the Iranians were the target of a surprise attack.

Following the wave of intense reactions to the deaths of the four Iranian commandos, army commander Maj. Gen. Ataollah Salehi said that the regular forces have no responsibility to render advisory services to Syria, and that there is an organization in Iran that carries out related measures. Salehi said that some volunteers have been dispatched to Syria under the responsibility of that organization and that there may have been some members of Brigade 65 among them. He added that due to the strict rules of the army, it seems very unlikely that its officers would enter Syria on their own and that they had probably done so under the orders of the armed forces' general staff. This statement conveys Salehis dissatisfaction with the presence of army forces in Syria.

The Syrian civil war appears poised to enter a new and more serious phase in the coming months. While Russia is reducing its military presence in Syria, Iran is trying to make up for that by deploying its own special forces. Considering the small number of Iranian troops that have been deployed, this may not be an important development from a military standpoint. However, it clearly shows that Iran is determined not to let the balance of power be disturbed in Syria. In the past few months, Iran has participated in the UN peace negotiations, clearly showing that it is not willing to capitulate to its regional rivals, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, after five years of having its soldiers injured and killed and having spent billions of dollars. Thus, it is possible that if the Syrian government is threatened more seriously, even more army forces will be deployed in Syria alongside the IRGC.
April 27, 2016

BAGHDAD, Iraq  Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is seeking to form a government of independent technocrats away from the quotas system, the political process that Iraq has grown accustomed to over the past 13 years. Under the system, the political positions are divided according to the quotas distributed among the main components of the country  Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. However, the steps that the prime minister is taking in forming the government of independent technocrats has faced obstacles, most notably political and popular demands for him to leave the Islamic Dawa Party with which he is affiliated.

Abadi became prime minister of Iraq on Aug. 11, 2014, when President Fuad Masum assigned him to form a government, after the Iraqi political blocs refused to grant his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, a chance to get a third term, forcing him to waive his third term in favor of his fellow party member, Abadi.

On March 2, Hanan al-Fatlawi, member of parliament (MP) and head of the Irada block  an independent block that has no governmental position and only one parliamentary seat  demanded that Abadi, her former colleague in the State of Law coalition, should either resign from his position as head of the government or declare a state of emergency and ask the parliament to vote on it.

She noted in a press statement, "Abadi came up with the ministerial change to distract the Iraqi street and waste time until the end of the current election round. The current ministers in the Iraqi government are not working seriously, and the ministries are almost paralyzed because of the anticipated ministerial change sought by Abadi."

Meanwhile, MP for the Kurdish Change bloc, MP Risan Sheikh, told Al-Monitor, "Abadi intends to form a government of technocrats, and this is a positive step toward reform, but it is difficult for Abadi to head this government as long as he insists on remaining affiliated with the Dawa Party. This is a fallacy and a negative point against the democratic political process."

She also said, "Abadi has to abandon his party for his presiding over a technocrat government to be convincing and positive; he cannot have partisan affiliations and look for independent ministers. It is necessary to withdraw the vote of confidence from Abadi and elect someone who is strong and capable of putting an end to the quotas system in the country and saving it from the crises that plague it.

Against this background, protesters organized a demonstration at Tahrir Square in Baghdad and called on Abadi to become independent and announce his resignation from the Dawa Party.

One of the protesters at Tahrir Square, Suad Ali, told Al-Monitor, Iraqis are protesting to demand Abadi to resign from the Dawa Party and to set an example for a government of independent technocrats. If he stays affiliated with the party, I do not see how he could be able to positively head the government or even obtain political and popular support. A technocratic government should be headed by a person who has no affiliation with any party. His sense of belonging and loyalty should only be to Iraq so that he can [properly] serve the Iraqi people.

In a press conference held at the parliament on March 2, a number of MPs for the National Alliance called on Abadi to resign from his party as part of the reforms that he wants to carry out.

MP Ali al-Badri, who participated in the press conference, said, "Public opinion is being misled when it comes to the reforms that are going to save the country from destruction and corruption just by changing ministers. Some blocs want a partial Cabinet reshuffle while others want a technocratic Cabinet."

He noted, "The major issue in the country is not only the ministers, but also the undersecretaries and general managers in the ministries, who are subject to the quotas system," adding, "Even if the prime minister brought ministers as wise as prophets, the competent parliamentary committees are the ones that monitor their work; how can a minister work with a monitoring committee that follows the quotas system?"

Badri stressed the importance of "a reform program that is built on solid foundations and not only based on the Cabinet reshuffle. The program must start with the prime minister himself; he should abandon his party and show Iraq that he is a prime minister for all Iraqis."

Ihsan al-Shammari, a political analyst and head of the think tank Iraqi Centre for Political Thought, told Al-Monitor, "The demand made by the political powers for Abadi to submit his resignation from the Dawa Party bears a political dimension, which is part of the obstacles impeding the reform project that he put forward and which targeted the center of influence of leaders and political parties, prompting them to find obstacles for this shift toward the use of [competent personnel] in the management of the state and its institutions."

He added, There is a constitutional cover for [Abadi] to remain within the scope of the political system; Article 78 of the Iraqi Constitution points out that the president shall assign the candidate of the largest parliamentary bloc, and the constitution does not state that the prime minister shall be independent or be obliged to choose the ministers of any title, whether they are independent or technocrats.

Shammari stressed that the demands for Abadi to resign from his party are part of the struggle and political revenge between parties that do not want to leave the partisan, sectarian and nationalistic quotas system and are still holding onto the power and its luster.

Perhaps those demanding Abadi to resign from the Dawa Party will not stop here; they might even demand him to resign from his position as prime minister or even call on the parliament to withdraw the vote of confidence, should he insist on staying affiliated with his party. However, Abadi might be surprised by a step similar to the one that surprised parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri on April 14, when about 171 MPs staged a sit-in at the parliament building and voted to dismiss him and his two MPs Humam Hamoudi and Aram Al-Sheikh Ali.

The political crisis in Iraq has affected the entire political system, which is still searching for a way out. This comes amid disputes that cannot easily be resolved, especially after an angry public has already taken a stance.
April 27, 2016

During a speech April 27, Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all foreign policy decisions, delivered one of his most critical assessments of what he considered US duplicity in removing sanctions on Iran post-nuclear deal.

Sometimes the Americans complain from afar that why are you pessimistic toward us, Khamenei said. Well, the issues that cause pessimism, we see them and cannot close our eyes to them. Referring to the remaining US banking sanctions that prohibit Iran from conducting business with other countries in US dollars, Khamenei said, Why are the big banks not ready to work with Iran? The reason big banks are not ready to work with Iran is Iranphobia, which the Americans created and continue.

Khamenei said that on paper the United States claims banks can conduct business with Iran but in reality different steps are taken that create Iranphobia. As an example, Khamenei said, The Americans say that Iran is a state sponsor of terror and because of their support of terrorism they may be sanctioned. Khamenei asked, What message does this send to banks and foreigners? It sends the message to not conduct trade with Iran. As a result, the banks and foreign investors become fearful of cooperating with Iran.

On April 22, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States was trying to clear up uncertainty for businesses outside of the country that wish to invest in Iran. He added that the United States was not opposed to foreign banks dealing with Iran. However, since the nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers was implemented in January, many European and Asian companies have been advised to steer clear of all transactions with Iran for fear of undermining American sanctions. While the European Union removed most sanctions on Iran, the United States kept its own non-nuclear sanctions in place.

President of Irans Central Bank, Valiollah Seif, discussed the banking issues on April 24, saying that small banks and mid-sized banks have not had problems in establishing a relationship with Iran. However, he added, Due to fines that are imposed by the Americans large banks are fearful and have doubts about establishing banking relations with Iran.

As another example of the United States promoting Iranphobia and creating obstacles for foreign investors and banks, Khamenei said, They claim that foreign countries do not work with Iran because of the domestic situation in Iran, while domestically there is not a place safer in the region than Iran. It is safer than America, where every day a number of people are killed.

Khamenei also said that statements by US officials that the sanctions regime must stay in place is another example of Iranphobia meant to scare investors. Khamenei said, We are facing this type of enemy and for any activity that we engage in, we must take this enmity as granted. He said that in the last 37 years, since the Islamic Revolution and the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iran has progressed and if this enmity lasts for a 100 years, in spite of them we will progress for those 100 years.
April 28, 2016

The holiday of Passover is also known as the Festival of Freedom. The traditional Seder dinner sanctifies and glorifies the Jews exodus from Egypt as an escape from bondage into liberation. Its a religious holiday with a positive universal message. You could say that the Passover Hagaddah text is an ancient edition of the story of the Holocaust and the revival of Jewish statehood, with the addition of miracles God did for our ancestors.

The practical lessons that Israeli children  ultra-Orthodox, national-religious and secular  receive from the Israeli education system are as follows: The Jewish people has been the victim of persecution since time immemorial; the land of Israel was given to the people of Israel along with the Torah; theres a god, and he chose us out of all the nations. Its not customary to spoil such religious rites and national myths that pass down from generation to generation with ''heretical speculation''  like the total absence of the exodus from Egypt  a major regional event  from Egyptian writings from the Pharaonic era. In addition, dozens of archaeological missions from all over the world have searched in vain for the presence of a multitude of people at Kadesh-Barnea, the place where, according to the biblical story, the people of Israel encamped on their way from Egypt to the land of Canaan. The problem is that these myths, the likes of which are common in all religions, have been translated in recent years into a political platform and have become a kind of legal deed of ownership.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pointed to the existence of ancient synagogues on the Golan Heights as proof that the Golan was and remains part of the land of Israel. The narrative of the exodus from Egypt contains even more ancient proof that the Jewish people obtained ownership of the land of Canaan so many generations ago. In this story, no other people have any right to any part of the Holy Land. The problem is especially serious when the Ministry of Education, which is responsible for the curricula, is in the hands of a religious politician from the radical right. It is even more serious when this politician, who has ambitions of leading the nation, builds political power by disseminating nationalist, fundamentalist sentiments.

The minister of education and chairman of HaBayit HaYehudi, Naftali Bennett, makes sure to speak in one breath about the combination of instructing Jewish and Zionist values and instilling universal values (as he did in a speech on Feb. 29 at the first annual conference for policy-makers in the humanities, held at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem). However, when Bennett speaks of Jewish values, he means the Orthodox Judaism from his fathers home. For instance, according to the new curriculum in Israeli Jewish culture for public schools that the minister presented last week, the main topic taught in the fifth grade will be the attachment of the people and the land. Students will learn about the Jewish prayer book and teachers will emphasize the fasts marking the destruction of the Jerusalem temples. Orthodox organizations, run by associates of HaBayit HaYehudi, received 95% of the budget allocated to support Jewish culture. Pluralistic organizations, like Zehut and Panim, which offer critical perspectives on Jewish history and secular Jewish culture, are left to gather up the crumbs and beg schools to let them in.

Its not only for the sake of heaven the Bennett is making sure to invest the publics hard-earned money in education that conforms to his vision. He knows that todays students will be tomorrows voters. In time, hell joyfully reap the seeds hes so carefully sowing in the education system. Its not for nothing that the ultra-Orthodox parties, Yahadut HaTorah and Shas, run independent school systems and conduct all-out war against attempts to insert core subjects  obligatory classes in the public system like math, English and science  into their curricula. Ultra-Orthodox Knesset members Yakov Litzman and Aryeh Deri also know the political dangers lurking in instruction of the natural sciences. God forbid that their children hear about the existence of the theory of evolution. The Likud, Labor and recently even Yesh Atid dare not provoke the ultra-Orthodox parties, fearing that election day will turn into a day of vengeance. The price is paid by tens of thousands of children who will reach adulthood without learning basic life skills.

Last October, an organization of former ultra-Orthodox Jews, Out for Change, filed a unique civil lawsuit against the government. In the name of 52 young people, the organization claims that the state allowed the schools and yeshivas in which they studied to shirk their responsibility to provide them with the ability to learn a profession and make an honest living. As a result, they received only the most basic education in critical subjects like math, English and science. The state has denied responsibility and even announced to the court last week that it intends to sue the parents of the plaintiffs and the dozens of ultra-Orthodox schools and yeshivas where they studied. That is, the state intends to sue parents who sent their children to educational institutions that it itself allows to operate as well as the institutions that it funds.

The defense's argument in this case returns us to Bennetts Israeli Jewish culture curriculum. The defense claims that the former ultra-Orthodox plaintiffs and their parents had the freedom to choose from a variety of available schools. And indeed, theoretically a resident of the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood Meah Shearim who wishes to ensure his children receive a comprehensive education within the public education system is allowed to register them in a public religious or secular school. On the other hand, a parent who wants his children to learn Jewish culture undiluted by religious messages is forced to find another institution outside the public school system.

In the course of negotiations to form the government, it was publicized that Bennett demanded one of two prestigious ministries  foreign affairs or defense. It seemed that the leader of HaBayit HaYehudi had to make do with the Ministry of Education  at first glance. In fact, at age 44, hes in no rush. For hundreds of years Jews have turned their eyes to the east, to Rebuilt Jerusalem. Bennett can wait a few more years in the Ministry of Education on Jerusalem Haneviim Street with his eyes to the west, to the prime ministers residence on Balfour Street.
April 27, 2016

Congress and the Barack Obama administration are once again on a collision course over missile defense aid for Israel as lawmakers begin to mark up their Defense bills for the next fiscal year.

The House Armed Services Committee on April 27 took up an annual Defense bill that would authorize $332 million for Iron Dome and other defensive systems, more than double the $145.8 million included in the Department of Defense request. Meanwhile, the purse-string holders in the Senate have made it clear that they will seek a substantial increase over the Pentagon's request, which is on top of the $1.3 billion in annual military assistance to Israel under a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that expires in 2018.

"For the past three years, we've been spending about $600 million to help their missile defense program," Senate Defense Appropriations panel member Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Al-Monitor. "I want to lock that in if we can."

Last month, 30 members of both parties signed on to a letter to Defense appropriations leaders Thad Cochran, R-Miss., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., urging them to meet and exceed Obama's budget request. The letter was spearheaded by Sens. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

"In recent years, Congress has appropriated funding for these programs that met our ally's needs, even when that exceeded the president's budget request," they wrote. "We ask that you again consider funding these programs at a level that will meet Israel's national security needs."

And this month, Graham spearheaded his own letter to President Obama informing him of lawmakers' intention to beef up missile defense assistance. The letter, co-authored by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., garnered 83 signatures, including those of both Senate leaders and top appropriators, indicating broad bipartisan support.

"We intend to consider increasing US funding in FY17 for cooperative missile defense programs," the lawmakers wrote, "much as we have done over the past several years."

Like the March letter to appropriators, this one cites threats to Israel from Tehran, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamic State in the Sinai as key concerns justifying increased support for missile defense assistance.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter defended his department's request in a hearing before the Senate Defense Appropriations panel on April 27.

"To continue to meet our commitments and enhance our cooperation with our friends and allies in the region, especially Israel, the budget makes critical investments  including $146 million to support Israel in FY 2017," Carter wrote in his prepared testimony. "This reflects our unshakeable commitment to Israel and its security, with funding for Iron Dome, David's Sling, Arrow and other cooperative defense programs  not only ensuring that Israel can defend itself, but also preserving and enhancing Israel's qualitative military edge, which is a cornerstone of our defense relationship."

Lawmakers think that's not near enough. The annual House Defense authorization bill, which is expected to pass the House Armed Services Committee overnight, would authorize up to $62 million for the short-range Iron Dome system and $150 million and $120 million, respectively, for the David's Sling and Arrow 3 systems, for a total of $332 million.

Congress is likely to prevail, if past performance is any indication.

Last year, the Pentagon asked for $158 million for Israel missile defense and Congress appropriated $487 million. And in FY 2015, lawmakers turned the department's $273 million request into a $620 million appropriation, according to the Congressional Research Service. Lawmakers were even more generous in FY 2014, appropriating $729 million for the program.

The budget battle comes as the Obama administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are negotiating a new 10-year MOU. Some advocates for increased aid have suggested continuing to keep missile defense out of the MOU to avoid bogging it down since Congress will likely continue to fund it separately, but some lawmakers are keen to see the funding stream institutionalized.

"I think we ought to have a Memorandum of Understanding that meets the reality of the Israeli defense needs," Graham said. "But it's up to the Israelis and the [Obama] administration."

Asked about the Defense Department's low-ball request, Graham said the Obama administration can present a lower budget while knowing that Congress will fill any needs.

"This is a game they play," Graham said. "We're far more realistic about Israel's defense needs than they are. And they know we're going to meet them."
April 28, 2016

A lot of speculation has arisen over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus meeting in Moscow April 21 with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The last time the two leaders met was Nov. 30. Since then, both have accumulated enough issues to discuss in person, while recent regional developments added the flavor of urgency to the talks.

There were numerous grounds for the speculation: The meeting came three days after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas visited Russia; many observers are alarmed by reports in recent weeks of potential clashes between Russian forces and Israeli aircraft; and the Israeli government had its first recent field session in the Golan Heights.

Putins press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, denied allegations in the Israeli press that the meeting focused on incidents between Russian and Israeli military planes. The reports were far from whats really happening, Peskov said. Yet Netanyahus description of the visits objectives  strengthening coordination  in the security area, so as to avoid mistakes, misunderstandings or incidents  suggests the problem wasnt left out of the discussion entirely.

Indeed, since the beginning of the Russian mission in Syria, Moscow and Tel Aviv have showcased their successful coordination of military flights there. Even though Russian airplanes maneuvers technically violated Israeli airspace repeatedly, Tel Aviv didnt perceive them as threatening and thus wasnt prone to taking action similar to that of Ankara, which shot down a Russian fighter jet in November.

But both Israel and Russia seem to agree on the importance of ensuring smooth coordination. According to a member of the Israeli delegation, the talks produced real results in that area.

The meeting also touched upon an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, but the topic did not seem to dominate the agenda, sources said. Russia sees that Abbas is touring around Europe to promote Frances idea for a big conference on the Middle East that could, among other things, improve Palestinians favor in Arab-Israeli negotiations. Netanyahu, however, recently rejected Frances effort.

Although Russia and Israel value each others cooperation, the Russians continue to follow the Soviet tradition of sympathizing with the Palestinian agenda. Some experts in Moscow  including in the diplomatic corps  believe such thinking reflects a Cold War mentality where the Arab world is an ally of Russians while Israel is the American stooge. They believe it not only contravenes more complicated modern-day dynamics, but also clips Moscows wings in its relations with Israelis, who didnt join in Western sanctions against Russia, and who possess technologies Russia needs to modernize various areas of its economy. Nevertheless, Russia is inclined to support the creation of an independent Palestinian state  which would mean, according to Netanyahu, that a number of Israeli settlements on the West Bank could find themselves existing illegally in a foreign territory, with all due consequences.

The central issues of the Netanyahu visit, however, were Russias position on the Golan Heights and arms deliveries to Hezbollah, a Russian journalist with insights into Netanyahus closest circle told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity.

The recent Syrian parliament elections, which Bashar al-Assads party swept, further marginalized the united Syrian opposition concept supported by the West.

What reportedly made Israel seek support in Moscow in the first place was the Syrian opposition groups hope of using their Washington ties to pressure Tel Aviv regarding Israels claim on the Golan Heights. Israel took control of the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 and annexed the area in 1981. Internationally, however, the annexation has never been accepted.

Assad would certainly want to see the Golan Heights as part of Syria again, but he knows he is not well-positioned to make such a demand under current conditions.

Just as certainly, Israel would in no way agree to that, but even a mere recognition of the Golan Heights as a subject for talks would enable Syrian opposition leaders to package it as a grand diplomatic victory. Statements from the US Department of State and the German Foreign Ministry that the status of the Golan Heights should be determined through negotiations sounded worrisome to Netanyahu.

Some of the more radical rumors surrounding the visit suggested Tel Aviv would ask for Moscows recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory in exchange for Israels recognition of the Crimean Peninsula as part of Russia. However, theres little evidence that such a deal was discussed at the top level. Instead, Moscow believes Israel wants to ensure that the transition period Syria appears to be entering poses no imminent threats to Tel Aviv. In this case, Netanyahu would have been satisfied with a mere recognition of the current borders and lethal consequences of their potential revision. He believes that should the Geneva accords call for acknowledging the Golan Heights as part of Syria, it would make Israel look like a party to the war in Syria  which is in no ones interests.

Stemming from Netanyahus belief that Russia is a major force in the Geneva talks, Israels prime minister was positive Putin was the best person to ensure that doesnt happen. Building on his personal ties with the Russian president allows Netanyahu to secure more understanding of, if not sympathy for, the Israeli standpoint. Indeed, Putin and Netanyahu, both offspring of their countries security services, have known each other for 20 years and their personal ties have come in handy in the past.

For Moscow, aligning its pragmatic interests with Syria and Israel  which formally still remain in a state of war  helped build a reality where the main enemy for all three is the Islamic State and other extremist forces. The Kremlin does see that Israel remains fairly vulnerable politically, so Moscow stands firm against whatever front might unite parties against the Zionist aggressor. The task for Moscow is thus to project an alignment of these interests into the diplomatic sphere.

Netanyahu also wants some guarantees that Russia will help keep its weapons out of Hezbollahs hands. Netanyahus message sounded strong: Israel will continue to destroy Russian weapons that fall into the wrong hands in Syria. Although Moscow denies arming Hezbollah directly, some of the weaponry it supplies to Assad without a doubt goes to the Shiite group. Israel perceived Russias presence in Syria, in part, as a way to restrain the influence of Iran and Hezbollah in the country, as a tactical partnership in the fight against Islamists.

Israel has reportedly lost more than 100 soldiers and 50 tanks since the campaign of 2006 in its fight with Hezbollah, a pundit close to the Russian Defense Ministry told Al-Monitor. So Israel is worried that Hezbollah can acquire weapons that would enable the group to launch offensive operations against Israeli forces.

After the talks in Moscow, the Israelis said they had the impression that Russia understands their goals, which made some conclude Netanyahu was given some kind of reassurances.

The degree of military cooperation between Russia and Israel has increased significantly over the course of the Syrian war. Moscow perceives Tel Aviv as critical to its Middle East policies, but it is well aware of the potential shortcomings of a full-fledged partnership. Both will continue to navigate within a narrow channel of opportunities while making sure they dont alienate other partners in the region  which means more meetings of this kind will be taking place in the near future.
April 28, 2016

TINDOUF, Algeria  Since Moroccan authorities expelled United Nations personnel in March, a 25-year cease-fire has grown tenuous and the Sahrawi people seem to have lost hope for a peaceful resolution to their quest for independence.

The Sahrawi liberation movement, the Polisario Front, is attracting recruits  especially younger ones.

Walad Bujama, 21, joined the Polisario Front in 2015. His father lost his eye during the guerrilla war that the Sahrawi people unleashed against Morocco in 1975. His uncle died fighting the Moroccan invasion of Western Sahara in 1985. Despite the current danger, Bujama said, the long wait for a solution that could determine his future has made him ready to take up arms.

I no longer believe the UN can reach a solution. I see war as the only remaining option, he told Al-Monitor.

Bujama is a soldier of the fronts 7th Military Sector, based in the tiny town of Aghwinit. Polisario units are spread throughout the rocky hills that stand steady in the vast Sahara Desert. The region has been under Polisarios control since the cease-fire.

Bujamas division patrols the area surrounding Aghwinit on the border with Mauritania. It takes him five days to get to the refugee camp where his parents and two sisters live. Their house is made out of mud bricks.

Walad Bujama, a soldier of the Polisario Front's 7th Military Sector, directs a machine gun in Aghwinit, Western Sahara, April 23. (photo by Ramsak Rok)

Many Sahrawi youth have lost hope for a peaceful solution, he said, adding, Most of my friends have joined the military recently."

A portable building near the base is used as a hospital to treat people who live in the Aghwinit area. Omar Albachir sits under the shadow of its walls to avoid the blazing sun. Albachir is a representative for young soldiers at the Sahrawi Youth Union, UJSARIO. His mission is to relay the concerns of young people in the military to the Polisario leadership to consider when making decisions.

He conducts monthly tours to listen to young peoples perspectives. I believe that what has been taken by force can only be restored by force, Albachir told Al-Monitor.

According to Albachir, young people represent 70% of the Sahrawi population in the camps. He was among the young people who met UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during his March visit to the camps.

The Sahrawi youth have reached the point that they are all prepared to be martyrs, he said. When asked why, he said the targeting of Sahrawi people cannot be excused. He gave as an example the February killing of a Sahrawi cameleer, which Ban cited in his recent annual report as a possible violation of the cease-fire by Moroccan soldiers.

Ban presented his report April 19 to the United Nations Security Council, recommending that UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara  known by its French acronym, MINURSO  be extended. It is due to expire at the end of April.

Ban has repeatedly called for negotiations without preconditions between Morocco and the Polisario Front, but the UN focus has been more on restoring its mission in the region after its civil and political representatives were expelled when Ban visited the Sahrawi refugee camps March 5. The conflict has been in a stalemate, and there has been no indication of a solution yet.

During the last decade, there has been a major turning of events in the geopolitical map of North Africa as it became more susceptible to violence after the collapse of Libyan President Moammar Gadhafis rule in 2011. Western Sahara was no exception. The movement established the Gdeim Izik camp, among others, to demand socio-political rights and soon raised the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) flag calling for Independence. It took a month for Moroccan authorities to disperse the camps, which were estimated to hold 20,000 people at that time, according to media activist Hamdi Mayara, who helped build the camps.

Should violence erupt again, Albachir said the Sahrawi people have the right to respond to anyone who tries to interfere. No one will be excepted if war takes place, including France and Spain, he told Al-Monitor.

France has been a strong ally of Morocco in the Security Council and has been supporting the Moroccan monarchys proposal for Western Saharas autonomy rather than independence. Spains foreign minister recently suggested that the MINURSO mandate should be extended for two months. According to Albachir, no one can predict what will happen if the peace process ends, as there will be many mercenary groups waiting to work for the highest bidder.

Recently, Libya has seen the creation of many such entities that have been forming serious obstacles [to security], he added.

The liberation movement isnt just attracting young people  its attracting young, educated people. Sidahmed Jouly, who holds a masters degree in politics from Hassiba Ben Bouali University in Chlef, Algeria, has chosen to enroll in a Polisario military preparatory school.

I can only follow the path of those who have sacrificed their lives for us, he told Al-Monitor.

Thousands of Sahrawis have studied in Algeria, Cuba, Libya and European countries  mostly Spain. After a recent call on Sahrawi national radio, which airs in the refugee camps and the Moroccan-occupied territories of Western Sahara, many educated youth have decided to start their careers as soldiers after graduating and finding no job opportunities in the camps. Jobs are scarce despite the potential wealth of mineral-rich Western Sahara. Billions of dollars' worth of resources, especially in fish and phosphates, are controlled by Morocco.

In the meantime, most of the Sahrawi refugees who have created a state system in exile volunteer for their cause in the harsh conditions of the Hammada desert.

We are supposed to reconquer our land by any means, Jouly told Al-Monitor.
April 27, 2016

ALEPPO, Syria  In a strange scene full of contradiction, President Bashar al-Assad's government held parliamentary elections April 13 in a country that has been crumbling under the weight of shelling, battles and displacement for five years in a row.

The elections were only held in areas controlled by the regime, which according to Omran for Strategic Studies constitute only 17% of Syria's land area, while the Islamic State (IS), Kurdish nationalist Democratic Union Party (PYD) and opposition forces control the rest of the country.

The war in Syria has sent about 5 million people fleeing to neighboring countries and elsewhere, but the recent elections were held in a peaceful atmosphere, as if no war has been plaguing the country.

Even in provinces completely outside the regime's control, such as Deir ez-Zor, Idlib and Raqqa, lists of candidates were formed and voters headed to polling stations designated for them in regions under the regimes control.

The decline in the number of Syrian voters was clear through the statistics issued by the regime, despite the Feb. 25 constitutional amendments whereby the military and security forces were granted the right to vote. The number of eligible voters inside Syria in the 2016 elections dropped to fewer than 8.84 million compared with 10 million in 2012.

The number of polling stations also dropped from 12,000 in 2012 to roughly 7,200 this year, which strongly suggests that the area controlled by the regime is substantially shrinking.

In a press conference on the eve of the parliamentary elections, Mark Toner, a US State Department deputy spokesman, called the elections illegitimate and said they do not represent the will of the people. This position was shared by France and Britain.

The opposition in Syria and abroad harshly objected to the elections.

The regimes affiliated media outlets had another opinion and described the elections as a triumph of democracy  a description Syrians heard for decades in reference to elections that end with a landslide victory for the ruling Baath party, which has been in power since the military coup of March 8, 1963.

Al-Watan, a daily Syrian newspaper close to the regime, described the atmosphere prevailing over the elections at the Tartus University polling center. It was more like a celebration. Patriotic songs were heard aloud in a festive atmosphere reflecting the triumph of democracy, the April 14 article said.

The Baath newspaper, issued by the regime, went a bit further. In its article published on the same day as the elections, the newspaper said, Our people are heading toward elections with hope and confidence that the result will improve constitutional life, the democracy experience and national unity.

This "democratic experiment," as it was described by the regimes media, led as usual to the Baath Party winning the majority of 250 parliament seats.

The election results, announced April 16, showed the victory of the entire 200-member National Unity list published by the Baath Party a few weeks before on March 23. This list is made up predominantly of Baath Party members in addition to limited seats for parties led by the Baath Party through the so-called National Progressive Front formed in 1972.

Mahmoud al-Wahab, a former member of parliament for the Syrian Communist Party (Unified), told Al-Monitor, There are no real elections in Syria at all.

He added, It's a farce in every sense of the word. When Hafez al-Assad came to power following the military coup [in 1970], freedoms were repressed, but he made up the so-called National Progressive Front electoral lists  corresponding today to the National Unity electoral list. Democratic elections were canceled and the Baath leadership imposed its trusteeship over these lists, whose members were chosen based on their absolute loyalty to the authority and the Baath Party.

Bashar al-Assad's regime still deals today with the Syrian revolution the same way it did when the battle began in 2011. The regime started by denying all demonstrations demanding freedom and justice. It claimed that the videos recorded by activists on their mobile phones were altered and manipulated by the Qatari news channel Al Jazeera. It then resorted to the security and military option, while insisting on staying in power and through the Baath Party.

Indeed, many critics believe the timing of the parliamentary elections, coinciding with the Geneva negotiations between the opposition and the regime, confirms that the regime is not serious about reaching a political solution and is disregarding UN Security Council Resolution 2254 underlying the Geneva III peace talks.

The resolution, issued Dec. 18, states that the Security Council expresses its support for free and fair elections, pursuant to the new constitution, to be held within 18 months and administered under supervision of the United Nations.

Wahab added, The regime is exploiting the reluctant and soft positions by the great powers influencing the decisions of the United Nations to [send] a message by holding the parliamentary elections that [Assad] is staying in power and maintaining his policies and approaches in dealing with the Syrian people. At the same time, the regime is putting a spoke in the wheels of UN Resolution 2254 and hampering the Geneva negotiations.
April 27, 2016

WASHINGTON  Reading from a teleprompter, Republican presidential front-runner Donald J. Trump addressed the Washington foreign policy establishment at a speech at Washingtons Mayflower Hotel on April 27, calling for a less interventionist US foreign policy that values stability over democracy, and which would put America first.

In the Middle East, our goals must be to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change, Trump said in the rare foreign policy address, hosted by the Center for the National Interest, a Washington think tank associated with the Nixon administration, and its journal, The National Interest.

Restating his opposition to President George W. Bushs 2003 invasion of Iraq, Trump said President Barack Obama and his first-term secretary of state  and Trumps presumed 2016 Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton  had pursued reckless military interventions against tyrants in the Middle East that had opened up a vacuum into which had flowed the so-called Islamic State (IS) and chaos.

It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy, Trump told the Washington audience that included a few rows of supporters and advisers, the board members of the host think tank and several dozen journalists.

We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed, Trump said. Civil war, religious fanaticism; thousands of American lives, and many trillions of dollars, were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that [IS] would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill the void, much to their unjust enrichment. Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster.

Although not in government service, I was totally against the war in Iraq, saying for many years that it would destabilize the Middle East, Trump said. Sadly, I was correct, and the biggest beneficiary was Iran, who is systematically taking over Iraq and gaining access to their rich oil reserves  something it has wanted to do for decades. And now, to top it all off, we have [IS].

Trump criticized the Obama administration for not walking out of the Iran nuclear deal talks as a negotiating tactic to get a tougher deal, but notably he did not say that he would tear up the deal were he to be elected. He also repeated several times the quite conventional assertion that Iran could not be allowed to get a nuclear weapon.

In negotiation, you must be willing to walk, Trump, most famously the author of "The Art of the Deal," said. The Iran deal, like so many of our worst agreements, is the result of not being willing to leave the table. When the other side knows youre not going to walk, it becomes absolutely impossible to win.

But Trump did not say he opposed a negotiated deal in principle to restrict Irans nuclear program.

Similarly, while criticizing the Obama administration for not being tougher in its stance, Trump seemed to share Obamas skepticism about military interventions, especially in the Middle East.

Were getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability on the world, Trump said.

Trump also said that while he was willing to use US military force if necessary, he would be willing to try to improve relations with Russia.

We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China, Trump said. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes. But we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests. ... I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia  from a position of strength  is possible.

Some say the Russians wont be reasonable, Trump said. I intend to find out. If we cant make a good deal for America, then we will quickly walk from the table.

Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war and destruction, Trump said.

Trump took no questions after his hourlong address. Seated among the first rows of invited foreign policy guests was Harold Rhode, a former Pentagon official who during the Bush administration had been involved in a controversial back channel to a CIA blacklisted Iran-Contra era figure, Manucher Ghorbanifar.

Asked if he was dismayed by Trumps disdain for the regime change ambitions that had fueled the Bush administrations intervention in Iraq and the back channel with Ghorbanifar, Rhode said he was not. I think he is going to be our next president, Rhode said to Al-Monitor of Trump.

Among other Trump foreign policy supporters in attendance was Walid Phares and John Hajjar, a Quincy, Massachusetts-based attorney, who after the address praised Trumps speaking out on behalf of the Middle Easts Christians and in opposition to radical Islam.

We have made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before, Trump said in his address. We left Christians subject to intense persecution and even genocide. Our actions in Iraq, Libya and Syria have helped unleash [IS]. And were in a war against radical Islam, but President Obama wont even name the enemy.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, the head of the Washington office of the National Council of the Resistance of Iran  the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq's political wing  attended the Trump speech April 27. Asked afterward what he thought of it, he said he was still digesting it.

It was also notable the Republican foreign policy heavyweights who were not in the audience, many of them veterans of the Bush/Cheney administration, some of whom have expressed alarm about the Trump candidacy as being anathema to more interventionist, neoconservative foreign policy values.

Trump, for his part, indicated he would not be looking to the establishment to fill the ranks of his administration. My goal is to establish a foreign policy that will endure for several generations, Trump said. That is why I will also look for talented experts  not people on TV and writing in The New York Times with a history of foreign policy failures.

Trump also reasserted in a somewhat toned-down way his previous call to halt the immigration of Muslim refugees to the United States because of security concerns.

We must stop importing extremism through senseless immigration policies, Trump said. A pause for reassessment will help us to prevent the next San Bernardino or worse  all you have to do is look at the World Trade Center and September 11th.

Trump said he would defeat IS quickly if elected president, but said he would not spell out the details how so that he would be unpredictable to the terror group.

I have a simple message for them, Trump said of IS. Their days are numbered. I wont tell them where and I wont tell them how. We must, as a nation, be more unpredictable. But theyre going to be gone. And soon.
April 26, 2016

ADEN, Yemen  Israel's success last month in covertly getting 19 Jews out of Yemen has raised some speculation among the press and Yemeni people about the successive waves of migration of Yemeni Jews from their homes in the southern Arabian peninsula to their alternative homeland of Israel.

The very existence of Yemeni Jews has been associated with the political conflict that has been fluctuating in Yemen for quite some time. However, Jewish migration to Israel, especially that which took place in March, aroused resentment among the Yemeni public and politicians alike.

Deeming the step as a kind of "declared complicity" with the settlement of Jews in Palestine, many Yemenis opposed the Houthis' accommodation of the Jewish Agency's request to facilitate the departure. Houthis are now in control of the capital, Sanaa.

While the migration of Jews to Israel has been successful over the years, many people associate it with shady dealings. While some of these deals are well known, others remain shrouded in mystery. Yemeni political researcher Nabil al-Bakiri does not rule out the possibility that secret political deals have been made for decades with successive Yemeni governments.

Bakiri told Al-Monitor that the Jewish migration to Israel created a kind of rapprochement between Yemen's royalist authorities and the Zionists, especially following the formers approval of the movement of at least 50,000 Jews to Israel in 1949 and 1950.

Israel kept this in mind and had its aircraft support royalist forces in their war with the Egyptian-backed republican forces during President Gamal Abdel Nassers rule, Bakiri added.

He pointed out that the regions dealings with Yemens Jews shows the significance of this issue. The Houthis, who have been leading an insurgency against the internationally recognized government of Yemen for more than a year, have recently facilitated the Jews emigration to Israel. He indicated that this has occurred in order to build relations with the international community in a bid to rescue [the Houthis] from the military campaign waged by the Saudi-led Arab coalition in support of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadis authorities.

Bakiri also told Al-Monitor that despite the ongoing confusion in the region regarding the Houthi Shiite minority, US and Israeli support for it seems clear. This explains why the Houthis established communication channels for the "Magic Carpet 2" operation last month.

The first wave of Jewish immigration from Yemen to Israel took place in 1882, when 150 migrants arrived in Jerusalem following a trip described as "onerous," as told by several historical sources. Some 25 years later, between 1907 and 1909, another wave of mass immigration sent Jews from northern Yemen to Israel.

The Magic Carpet operation of 1948 is the most famous collective Jewish migration operation and it continued for two years, during which thousands of Jews from various Yemeni regions left during the reign of Imam Ahmad bin Humaid Al-Din, who reportedly approved the migration of Jews from his country in return for money. Also, these Jews properties were given to the imamate. About 52,000 Jews were sent to Tel Aviv in the operation.

The displacement of Yemeni Jews came back to the forefront in the 1990s, as about 800 Jews were allowed to migrate to Israel between 1992 and 1995 during the rule of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

According to the Jewish Agency, following the outbreak of the war between government forces and Houthi rebels in Saada in northern Yemen, about 200 Yemeni Jews left the country in recent years amid increasing attacks on Jews.

Together with the emergence of the Iran-backed Shiite group in northern Yemen, a hate campaign against the Jewish minority began. Subsequently, in 2007, the Shiite group expelled "the Jews of Al Salem" from Saada province to Sanaa; the group distributed leaflets in the Jews' village, giving them only a few days to leave before they would be killed.

The Jewish communitys concerns grew deeper because of Yemens sluggish security system. Fouad al-Alawi, a journalist who specializes in Jewish affairs in Yemen, also said Jews suffered great marginalization at all levels. This marginalization was further exacerbated by the Houthi rebels' incitement against them.

The Yemeni journalist explained that for more than half a century, Yemeni Jews did not receive any official attention, as they remained isolated from the successive governments that ruled the country. All the state did was "provide homes for the Jews who were displaced from Saada, the Houthi stronghold, thus facilitating the arrival of help from some charities in the country."

Alawi pointed out that they suffered from marginalization in education. "Unlike other Yemenis, they were deprived of their right to a government job. In addition, their suffering recently increased given the presence of a group that permits their killing and does not recognize their right to exist in their own country."

As a result, the Jews of Yemen found that their departure from the country would be the only solution for them to live and have access to education and to the citizenship rights that they lost in their homeland.

Alawi told Al-Monitor that he met with some Yemeni Jews who told him they were "not happy in Israel, as they felt alienated."

"It is hard for them to be religious in light of the emancipation taking place in Israel," he said, pointing out that those Jews believe Yemen is the most appropriate country for them to maintain their religiosity and preserve the traditions that they were brought up with. They are conservative and religious by nature, and they want to stay in their original homeland, Yemen, Alawi said.

There are other motives behind the Yemeni Jews' emigration to Israel. Chief among these is religion, given Jews' deep desire to see and die in the Promised Land. Also, some Jews believe the coming of the Messiah is imminent and wish to be in the Promised Land at the time of salvation.

The second motive is economic. These Jews sought to escape the drought that had gripped Yemen. They migrated to look for a decent living standard in Israel, which in turn was seeking to replace Palestinian laborers through the immigration of Yemens Jews, most of whom worked in the fields of crafts and agriculture.

With the alarming decrease in the number of Yemeni Jews as they migrate to Israel, Yemen will apparently face the same scenario that most Arab countries ended up facing: It will be completely devoid of this minority, of which only scores are left. This would turn the page on an era of significant religious diversity in Yemen, of which the Jews were an important pillar.
Monaco

Monaco at Bridge Street Town Centre. (monacopicturesusa.com)

Monaco Pictures at Bridge Street Town Centre in Huntsville will unveil extensive renovations this year just in time for the 2016 blockbuster holiday season.

Cinemark Holdings said it plans to revamp the Monaco to include an upgraded concession stand with expanded food options, a remodeled Scene restaurant and lounge, a Cinemark XD: Extreme Digital Cinema auditorium, and 4K digital projection with RealD 3D capability.

The theater will also feature new "Luxury Loungers," which Cinemark describes as electric-powered, plush, oversized recliners with footrests and cup holders.

"We're excited to take the movie-going experience to the next level by offering guests Luxury Lounger recliners in all auditoriums as well as a new Cinemark XD auditorium," Cinemark CEO Mark Zoradi said in a statement. "The upgrades to the auditoriums, lobby and restaurant will enable Cinemark to offer our guests the highest levels of comfort and technology for years to come."

Multiple attempts to reach Cinemark were unsuccessful. It is unclear when the renovations will be finished or how much the company is investing in the project.

Cinemark, which operates 513 theaters in 41 states, Brazil, Argentina and 12 other Latin American countries, is partnering with Illinois-based Miller Capital Advisory, Inc. on the renovations.

The Monaco isn't the only Huntsville-area movie theater to take on renovation projects recently. Touchstar Cinemas began work last year on a $3 million remodel of the Madison Square 12 on University Drive.

The theater near Madison Square Mall features new leather reclining seats, providing a more comfortable viewing experience for movie goers across north Alabama. Karishma Dattani, owner of Touchstar Cinemas, said they have been pleased with the community support so far.

"I think the movie industry has constantly needed to find new ways to bring customers out to watch a movie rather than sit at home and watch it on DVD or Netflix or what have you," she said. "This is definitely one of those things that is going to change throughout the nation."

Madison Square 12 is in the process of improving its concession stand to offer food beyond popcorn, hotdogs, nachos and Milk Duds. Dattani said the theater will offer items like hamburgers, chicken tenders, fries, onion rings and pasta.

The concession expansion should be complete in the next couple of months.

"There will be a lot more options than just the basic traditional theater foods like popcorn and candy," she said. "So the customers will actually be able to have dinner and a movie and fill their stomachs up with real food versus the traditional junk food you would get in the theater."

Other development projects are underway at Bridge Street, including a new Kona Grill next to Belk's flagship store. The 7,000-square-foot, new-to-Alabama restaurant is set to open this fall.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide also announced this week it will launch a 150-room Element Huntsville at Bridge Street by early 2017. The facility will share a pool, fitness center and parking with the 210-room Westin.

Jared the Galleria of Jewelry is under construction across from Barnes and Noble in the far parking lot toward Old Madison Pike, while ADS LLC will begin moving into its new space in the former PINZ bowling alley above H&M and Chico's during the next two weeks.
Two bishops who formerly presided over the United Methodist Church in Alabama, and now work in North Carolina, have taken a stand asking the state to repeal a law blocking transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice.

House Bill 2 was passed March 23 and requires transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender at birth.

Retired Bishop William Willimon, who presided over the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church from 2004-2012, and Bishop Larry Goodpaster, who led the Alabama-West Florida Conference from 2000-2008, have both signed a letter opposing the law.

Willimon and Goodpaster at one time presided over all the United Methodist churches in Alabama, comprising the second-largest denomination in the state after Southern Baptists.

Bishop Larry Goodpaster has led the Western North Carolina Conference since 2008. Before that, he led the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church from 2000 to 2008.

Here is the letter from the bishops of North Carolina:

April 25, 2016

Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus Christ.

We write to you to express our deep gratitude for life together in the United Methodist Church here in the state of North Carolina. With you, we love our state and yearn for our lives to reflect the more excellent way described by Paul in I Corinthians 13.

We share your deep concern in regard to the increasingly divisive nature of life in North Carolina. We urge United Methodist people to cultivate community that is welcoming and nurturing to all people.

Our founder, John Wesley, described the humility that is appropriate for life together when he said that "Methodists may not think alike but that we do love alike." It is essential that we live into the world with the willingness to engage, to listen and to speak the truth in love. We are called to live the hospitable welcome of God in a world with increasing boundaries, borders, fences and walls.

Our faith gives us courage to trust the power of grace, mercy and love. We dare not add to the increasing levels of fear, suspicion and divisiveness in our state and in our nation. Our calling to welcome, to forgive, and to love both God and neighbor is our powerful gift to the world.

We observe the hurried passage of House Bill 2 (HB2) and its resultant harm to North Carolina - to individuals, to our economy, to our engagements with other states and nations, and to our future. We call for the repeal of HB2 as the legislature returns to Raleigh today.

We urge all United Methodists to engage in prayer, in study of the issues, in patient listening and persevering conversation with others who hold differing opinion, and in courageous advocacy for what is right, just and good for all people in North Carolina.

With gratitude for our life together,

Bishop Larry Goodpaster, WNCC

Bishop Hope Morgan Ward, NCC

Bishop Ray Chamberlain, Retired, Winston-Salem

Bishop Charlene P. Kammerer, Retired, Lake Junaluska

Bishop Lawrence McCleskey, Retired, Lake Junaluska

Bishop C. P. Minnick, Jr., Retired, Raleigh

Bishop Thomas Stockton, Retired, Winston-Salem

Bishop William H. Willimon, Retired, Durham
Pope Francis

Pope Francis' mantle is blown by a gust of wind during his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, Wednesday, April 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

(Alessandra Tarantino)

Theologian Fr. Hans Kung is pictured in his office in Tubingen, Germany, in a 2008 file photo.

Theologian Hans Kung, a Catholic priest and professor emeritus of Tubingen University in Germany, said this week Pope Francis responded positively to his request for an open discussion of the dogma of papal infallibility.

Kung issued an appeal to Pope Francis on March 9 to permit an open and impartial discussion on the issue of papal infallibility, according to National Catholic Reporter.

Papal infallibility was defined by the First Vatican Council of 1869-70 as a dogma that when the pope speaks "ex cathedra," from the chair of St. Peter, in defining a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, that he is preserved from the possibility of error.

The pope rarely issues such declarations. The most famous example is the 1950 declaration of the Assumption of Mary. Pope Pius XII made Mary's bodily entry into heaven at the time of her death an article of faith.

The idea of papal infallibility in setting church teaching rests on the belief that Jesus gave Peter and the apostles his authority on earth: Matthew 16:18 ("You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church") . . . "He who hears you hears me" (Luke 10:16), and "Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven" (Matt. 18:18). Catholics believe the pope is a direct successor to Peter and that bishops are the successors to the apostles.

Kung, a prolific and well-respected author, has long been known for his opposition to the dogma of papal infallibility. He questioned papal infallibility in his 1971 book, "Infallible? An Inquiry," and in 1979 Pope John Paul II stripped him of his license to teach Catholic theology. Kung continued to teach ecumenical theology at the University of Tubingen until he retired in 1996.

In a statement issued this week, Kung summed up his response to the pope's letter, which he said he would keep confidential.

"On March 9, my appeal to Pope Francis to give room to a free, unprejudiced and open-ended discussion on the problem of infallibility appeared in the leading journals of several countries. I was thus overjoyed to receive a personal reply from Francis immediately after Easter. Dated March 20, it was forwarded to me from the nunciature in Berlin.

In the pope's reply, the following points are significant for me:

The fact that Francis answered at all and did not let my appeal fall on deaf ears, so to speak;

The fact that he replied himself and not via his private secretary or the secretary of state;

That he emphasizes the fraternal manner of his Spanish reply by addressing me as

That he clearly read the appeal, to which I had attached a Spanish translation, most attentively;

That he is highly appreciative of the considerations that had led me to write Volume 5 of my complete works, in which I suggest theologically discussing the different issues that the infallibility dogma raises in the light of holy Scripture and tradition with the aim of deepening the constructive dialogue between the "

Francis has set no restrictions. He has thus responded to my request to give room to a free discussion on the dogma of infallibility. I think it is now imperative to use this new freedom to push ahead with the clarification of the dogmatic definitions, which are a ground for controversy within the Catholic church and in its relationship to the other Christian churches.

I could not have foreseen then quite how much new freedom Francis would open up in his post-synodal exhortation, Amoris Laetitia. Already in the introduction, he declares, "Not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium."

He takes issue with "cold bureaucratic morality" and does not want bishops to continue behaving as if they were "arbiters of grace." He sees the Eucharist not as a reward for the perfect but as "nourishment for the weak."

He repeatedly quotes statements made at the episcopal synod or from national bishops' conferences. Francis no longer wants to be the sole spokesman of the church.

This is the new spirit that I have always expected from the magisterium. I am fully convinced that in this new spirit a free, impartial and open-ended discussion of the infallibility dogma, this fateful key question of destiny for the Catholic church, will be possible.

I am deeply grateful to Francis for this new freedom and combine my heartfelt thanks with the expectation that the bishops and theologians will unreservedly adopt this new spirit and join in this task in accordance with the Scriptures and with our great church tradition."
Minimum wage lawsuit filed

On Thursday, April 28, the Alabama National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Greater Birmingham Ministries filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court over Birmingham's blocked minimum wage ordinance. They claim that HB 174 - a bill that was fast-tracked through the state legislature in February and signed by Bentley - is tainted "with racial animus" and violates the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. (Kelsey Stein | kstein@al.com)

A federal civil rights lawsuit has been filed claiming Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley illegally blocked Birmingham's minimum wage increase, nullifying a measure that would disproportionately affect black residents.

On Thursday morning, the Alabama National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Greater Birmingham Ministries filed the suit in U.S. District Court. They claim that HB 174 - a bill that was fast-tracked through the state legislature in February and signed by Bentley - is tainted "with racial animus" and violates the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

In February, a dispute between the Birmingham City Council and the Alabama Senate over the minimum wage culminated in the passage of a bill blocking cities from setting their own wage.

"Unfortunately this is the latest chapter in the long history of the state of Alabama where a white legislature overrides the authority of a majority-minority city council," said Richard Rouco, a Birmingham attorney representing the plaintiffs.

The council voted in 2015 to raise the wage floor citywide to $10.10 through incremental increases. The Republican super majorities in the House and Senate put the bill on the fast track, prompting council members to expedite the local measure. Their efforts proved fruitless when the law ultimately voided the local ordinance.

"This lawsuit is really about a political dispute between the Birmingham City Council and the Alabama legislature," Attorney General Luther Strange said. "Nevertheless, the Attorney General's Office will vigorously defend Alabama law."

As pressure mounted and the two governing bodies raced to enact their plans, the state and the issue drew national attention.

Rouco also questioned why state legislators intervened in Birmingham's minimum wage discussion but have yet to take action after the city of Oxford this week passed an ordinance making it illegal to use a public bathroom that differs from the gender on a person's birth certificate.

"The hypocrisy of this legislature is in full view when not a single member of the majority of the legislature has said a single word about city of Oxford's recent transgender bathroom ordinance, which blatantly discriminates against LGBT community, but they were so concerned about the city of Birmingham," he said.

The suit also claims that the bill specifically targets an ordinance that Birmingham's black community and its city council strongly supported.

"It's also ironic that the governor has seen fit to provide an increase in salary and bonuses to his own staff, but still when the people in the trenches, the people who need the raise the most - not to get rich but just to increase their standard of living - he quickly signed the bill that overturned the decision of the citizens and the city of Birmingham," said Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP. "Over 70 percent of the people that would have benefited from this raise are African-American, poor, minorities. We think there's some racial intent there to overturn the decision of city government in Birmingham, to keep minorities and African-Americans poor."

The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction prohibiting the state from enforcing the bill or preventing the increase from taking effect. They are asking for declaratory and injunctive relief - no monetary damages - that would allow the city ordinance to take effect immediately.

"The exercise of complete control over regulation and policy pertaining to wages, leave or other employment benefits can be directly traced to provisions in the racially discriminatory 1901 Constitution that deprives black citizens the right to regulate such matters of central concern to their daily lives," the suit argues. "Such provisions that grant exclusive authority to the State legislature to override any and all local ordinances are vestiges of race discrimination and HB 174 disproportionately impacts African American residents who live and work in the City of Birmingham."

Scott Douglas, the executive director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, questioned Rep. David Faulkner's intentions for sponsoring the bill.

"Adding insult to injury, one of the lead sponsors is a white legislator from one of Alabama's richest suburbs, Mountain Brook," Douglas said. "That's not just an irony. That's really an atrocity."

Marnika Lewis, 23, of Birmingham, is a plaintiff in the case. She works at Moe's Restaurant and is paid $7.75 an hour.

"Despite working hard for the same restaurant for three years, I've only gotten one 25-cent raise," Lewis said in a news release. "I can't afford to feed my son or heat my home on the $270 I'm paid each week, so I have to rely on public assistance just to scrape by. If the legislature and governor hadn't illegally stolen my raise, I would have had money to pay for my son's child care."

Alabama is one of five states - all in the South - that have not set their own minimum wage. Officials in 29 states and at least 31 cities and counties have raised the wage floor above the federal standard.

In February, several local groups formed a coalition called Raise Up Alabama to support minimum wage increases like Birmingham's through rallies, online action, phone banking, letter writing and community organizing.
U.S. Department of Justice lawyers on Wednesday asked a judge to shut down a number of Birmingham area tax preparation businesses after they say its owner and employees caused the federal government to lose more than $2.6 million in understated taxes and/or fraudulent refunds.

The DOJ filed the lawsuit in Birmingham federal court against Jessica Leverett, also known as Jessica Harris, and her tax preparation businesses Tax Money Now, Dynamic Tax Services, Dynamic Tax Solutions, and Express Money Tax.

Leverett lives in Cobb County Georgia, according to the complaint.

"Leverett's customers have been harmed by her actions because they paid fees to prepare proper tax returns, but Leverett and her business(es) have prepared returns that substantially understated their customers' correct tax liabilities or created or inflated improper refunds," according to the lawsuit. "Many customers now face large income tax deficiencies and may be liable for sizable penalties and interest."

Leverett and those she employs harmed the federal government because the returns they prepared misreported their customers' tax liabilities and claim refunds those customers are not entitled to receive, the lawsuit states.

Leverett and her employees prepared returns that fabricate self-employment businesses and business losses to offset their customers' taxable income from other sources and to increase their customers' Earned Income Tax Credit, the DOJ stated in a press release. For customers with small business Leverett and her associates mischaracterized the business income as household employee wages in order to avoid paying the required self-employment tax, the DOJ alleges. The lawsuit also claimed Leverett and her businesses claim education credits that customers were not entitled to receive.

The IRS examined 264 returns prepared by Leverett's businesses for tax years 2011 through 2013 and determined that 206 understated the tax owed in the total amount of $876,096, the lawsuit states.

The IRS also identified 699 returns that report household employee wages of at least $5,000 without a corresponding Form W-2 with an estimated potential loss to the government on self-employment tax from the returns as high as $1.2 million, the lawsuit states.

And the IRS identified 430 returns that claimed education credits for which no Form 1098-T was received. The unsupported education credits claimed on these returns exceed $600,000, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also asks the court to order Leverett to turn over a list to DOJ lawyers all of the tax returns she and her businesses have prepared since January 2011.
Like many of his fellow West Coast musicians,was proficient on multiple instruments. He could play alto and tenor sax, but tended toward the clarinet and the flute for most of his recording career. His solo records were as light and effortless as most jam form the West Coast tended to be at the time, and they are very pleasant, if a bit toothless at times. There's no doubt that Collette was a main figure of the West Coast scene and this set collects some fine work.Calm, Cool, and Collette from 1957 features Collette backed by his working trio of Dick Shreve on piano,on bass, and Bill Dolney on drums, none of whom became particularly well- known. The album is awash is light-footed tracks that generate congenial warmness without much heat. This feathery approach is fine for skippy numbers like "The Continental" and a melancholy "If She Had Stayed," but too docile for "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and a "Night in Tunisia" handled with kid gloves. Still, this is Collette at his best, playing mild, appealing jazz with more sax that is usual for him.Marx Makes Broadway is a session led by pianist and arranger Dick Marx which features, predictably, Broadway tunes. Collette is on flute exclusively for this session and joined by eitheroron guitar in the front line. There are some inspired choices, suck as the unlikely "Cool" from West Side Story delivered with the right mix of detachment and foreboding, and an amped up "Guys and Dolls." The complete session is the happiest of jazz albums, as Marx sticks to the up-tempo crowd pleasers and avoids the dramatic numbers.A Nice Day With Buddy Collette from 1956 is Collette's finest record. Although there's a lack of consistency due to different rhythm sections on multiple sessions, top-notch playing from the likes ofandprove that Collette is a tougher customer than we've come to expect. "A Nice Day" and "Buddy Boo" are engaging holdovers from Collette's time with, and the unusual arrangement of "Moten Swing" and the lightning tempo of "Change It" show that Collette can go outside the lines and also be fleet fingered. There probably isn't a better song for Collette than "Over the Rainbow," and it's one of Collette's finest performances. The album is evenly balanced among Collette's four instruments, and features captivating performances throughout.The Polyhedric Buddy Collette was recorded in Italy with local musicians after a jazz festival there afforded him some time to stay in Milan for a few weeks to gig. This record was the result. Predictably none of the Italian musicians become known in the States, but had soaked up enough jazz records from overseas to develop their chops. There's a merry-go-round of musicians on these session, and the presence of a second horn on many tracks makes it sound like a Shelly Manne record from the time. There's some clattering percussion on a few numbers to give a Latin edge to a couple of tracks, but the real focus here is on Collette's compositions, and his finest writing can be seen on lovely tracks like "Paddi" and "Pickford Street." This obscure record is a treat, and it's good to finally get the chance to hear it.
           2005     ..        




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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]
Thursday 28

Huangs World (Viceland 8pm) Chef Eddie Huang, creator of ABCs semi- autobiographical sitcom Fresh off the Boat, lands himself one of those cushy, celebrity travel shows.

Friday 29

Special Correspondents (Netflix Streaming Anytime) British comedian Ricky Gervais writes, directs and stars in this remake of the 2009 French MSM satire of the same name. Eric Bana, Vera Farmiga, Kelly Macdonald, Benjamin Bratt and America Ferrera costar.

Saturday 30

Jazz at the White House (KOAT-7 7pm) President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama host a concert featuring Herbie Hancock, Sting, Aretha Franklin, Trombone Shorty, Diana Krall, Al Jarreau, Hugh Masekela, Buddy Guy, Wayne Shorter and Pat Metheny.

2016 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction (HBO 6pm) Its the one in which N.W.A. got inducted and all the white people got really uptightincluding Steve Miller, who may just have been in a bad mood because he couldnt get any more free tickets to the show. Is this the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony or a monthly board meeting at your parents crank-filled retirement community?

God Told Me To (TCM 12:15am) Larry Cohens eerie 1976 thriller finds a bunch of random New Yorkers killing people or committing suicide because the Voice of God told them to. What the heck is going on?

Sunday 1

American Country Countdown Awards (KASA-2 7pm) This venerable awards show has been around since 2014 and hands out statues based on the acts that have sold the most albums and gotten the most radio play. (Finally, these rich, successful superstars are getting the reward they deserve!) Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan, Florida Georgia Line and Martina McBride are among the performers.

Monday 2

The Loud House (Nickelodeon 3pm) Nicks newest tween toon concentrates on the sole boy in a house packed with 10 sisters.

Houdini and Doyle (KASA-2 8pm) In this 10-episode British-Canadian series, magician Harry Houdini and Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle team up to solve crimes.

Live from the Red Carpet: The 2016 Met Gala (E! 8:30pm) Cameras arent allowed inside this annual celeb shindig, a fundraiser for the New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art. But E! sends a bunch of reporters to stand on the red carpet and ogle our betters as they traverse from limo to museum door.

Tuesday 3

Car Hunters (History 8pm) Ordinary people go shopping for their dreams muscle cars and must choose between three likely vehicles. Its like House Hunters, but with cars. ... Scratch that: Its exactly House Hunters with cars.

Wednesday 4

Little Women: NY (Lifetime 8:02pm) Lifetimes groundbreaking Little Women: LA proved that little people reality stars are just as insufferable and overprivileged as any average-sized real housewife. Now, Lifetime travels to New York to prove that little people reality stars in New York are exactly like the little people reality stars in Los Angeles. In fact, throw any adjective or city you want into the mix, and Lifetime will strive to show you how annoying people can be when cameras are pointed in their direction.
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Riding With Reedus

AMC is giving Daryl Dixon from The Walking Dead his own spin-off. But zombie lovers should probably temper their enthusiasm. The show is actually a documentary travel show featuring fan fave actor Norman Reedus. Ride With Norman Reedus allows the zombie-killing, motorcycle-riding star to travel the American roads exploring biker culture and celebrating the best and brightest collectors, mechanics and craftsmen around the country. Each one-hour episode will feature Reedus with a special riding companionincluding celebrity bikers such as Peter Fonda and Robert Rodriguez. Destinations for this first season include North Carolina, Florida, California, Nevada, Texas and Louisiana. If youre into custom bike shops, tattoo parlors and roadside smokehouses (not to mention Reedus sensitive bad-boy demeanor), this is looking like the show for you. The series is set to premiere on Sunday, June 12.

Musical Encore

Disney Channel is obviously moving ahead with plans for a High School Musical 4. The network announced it will host an in-person, open call audition at the Anaheim Convention Center on Sunday, May 15. Members of the general public are invited to sing and dance their way into the new made-for-TV movie, American Idol-style. The producers are looking for young actors, age 14 to 17. Most of the tweenage fans of the original 2006 film have probably aged out of the series and are more concerned with hanging out at clubs these days, but if theres one thing Disney know how to do its beat a dead horse. The film will be directed and choreographed by Jeffrey Hornaday (Disney Channels Teen Beach Movie and Teen Beach 2). Dan Berendsen (Hannah Montana: The Movie) and Peter Barsocchini (who penned all three High School Musical movies) are writing it. No word on when the film will be aired or if any of the original stars will be making cameos. (Dont hold your breath for Zac Efron or Vanessa Hudgens. Ashley Tisdale is a Facebook maybe. Corbin Bleu? Hes got a very clear schedule. Call him.)

The Doctors New +1

The BBC has announced the newest companion for Doctor Who. With the departure of Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman)last seen sneakily bopping around the universe with immortal Viking tween Ashildr in a time-traveling dinerthe BBC is keen to tease us with The Doctors newest partner in time. Unknown actress Pearl Mackie (who appeared in a single episode of the medical soap Doctors) is climbing on board the TARDIS as Bill. The new seasons teaser trailer features The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and Bill running from Daleks. Footage from the trailer isnt actually from an upcoming episode, but features some good banter between the two characters and gives us some clue what their relationship will look like. Bill will presumably be introduced in this years Christmas episode, set to materialize on BBC One and BBC America sometime in December. The new season of Doctor Who will show up in early 2017.
Dateline: England

Despite the fact that the name garnered an overwhelming number of votes in an online poll, Britains science minister says it is unlikely his countrys newest polar research vessel will be christened Boaty McBoatface. The Natural Environment Research Council said it was looking for a name that would reflect on the 200 million-pound ($284 million) ships mission and celebrate British naval history when it asked for the publics input. Surprising no one who actually uses the internet, the write-in name Boaty McBoatface quickly rose to the top of the online poll, garnering 124,109 votes. Thats three times more than its closest competitor. Earlier this month, however, Science Minister Jo Johnson said imaginative suggestions would be reviewed, but insisted the vessels ultimate name should capture the spirit of scientific endeavor.

Dateline: New Zealand

A small town police station is reviewing procedures after an attempt to destroy some seized marijuana left customers at a nearby store feeling groovy. Radio host Adam Green of New Plymouth-based Radio Taranaki posted a video to Instagram and Facebook, showing a plume of smoke drifting from the Turangi Police Station to the parking lot of a supermarket across the street. That smoke coming out of the chimney is wafting over, straight into the New World carpark and man does it smell like the old ganja over there, Green can be heard saying in the video, which was posted on April 14. The local police have apologized for the early 4/20 present to local residents, which came from a recently acquired hoard of illegal marijuana plants being disposed of in the buildings incinerator. Unfortunately ... given the conditions [and] the wind, I understand the smoke did drift further than anticipated, Taupo Area Commander Warwick Morehu told stuff.co.nz. I apologize on my staffs behalf to the community and we have already taken measures to change our practices and procedures going forward into the future. It is certainly not our intention to cause harm or alarm to our people in Turangi.

Dateline: France

A naked statue of classical Greek demigod Hercules has now been fitted with a special detachable penis after the famous member went missing one too many times for local officials. The three-meter statue, located in the Parc Mauresque in Arcachon in southwestern France, was erected in 1948. Sculptor Claude Bouscau was forced to shorten Hercules unclothed club twice after residents in the town called it shockingly big. The statue has gained even more notoriety in recent years with tourists sharing selfies of it on social media. To make matters worse some pranksters have taken to stealing the statues stone phallus. I wouldnt wish anyonenot even my worst enemiesto go through what has been inflicted on this statue, town Mayor Yves Foulon told the Sud-Ouest newspaper. Hercules new removable member will only be attached during special ceremonies and public events. Considering Hercules fragile manhood, weve chosen to give him a removable prosthetic that we can add to the statue before each ceremony, explained Deputy Mayor Martine Phelippot.

Dateline: Oklahoma

Police in Oklahoma City caught a time-traveling bacon thief after responding to a complaint of robbery by force or fear at a fast food restaurant on April 15. At approximately 10:45am, officers spoke with employees at a Carls Jr. who said a man had walked into the establishment and began screaming and demanding food. Employees eventually convinced the man to leave, at which point he walked across the street to Arbys. The Arbys manager told police the man leaped up on the counter and demanded food. He then jumped behind the counter and allegedly grabbed the manager. The manager told police the man snatched up a handful of bacon and chicken and walked out of the business. The alleged perpetrator, later identified as 36-year old Dante Rashad Anderson, was spotted by witnesses crossing the street and eating bacon. He allegedly kicked and damaged several cars before being found lying on the ground outside a Taco Mayo restaurant by police. He jumped up like he was Chuck Norris and just kicked the crap out of my car, businesswoman Patricia Beedle told KOKH. Oklahoma City Police Master Sgt. Gary Knight told the station the suspect, was possibly under the influence of some sort of narcotic or intoxicant, or suffering from some type of break with reality. He did mention that he is from four years in the future and that is how people get food during that period of time. Anderson was taken to the Oklahoma County Jail where he faced complaints including robbery by force or fear, assault and battery, and destruction of property.
Albuquerque City Councilors didnt waste any time dealing with the April 18 regular meeting agenda. After deferrals and postponements, Councilors got their job done in under three hours, even with Councilor Brad Winter absent.

Future Votes

The Council postponed putting four proposed questions on the November ballot. In general, the ballot questions address fair and ethical campaigns including one to increase the amount of public financing from about $1 per vote to about $2 a vote. Candidates can choose the capped public campaign money or choose to raise their own campaign funds. Councilor Don Harris sponsored that bill, saying whether a candidate chooses to raise his own money or take the public money, the amounts spent should be roughly the same.

New Top Watchdog

David T. Harper was chosen to be the new Inspector General by the Council to take on the tough job of sniffing out fraud, waste and other bad behaviors at City Hall. Harper beat out two other applicantsretired Air Force Col. Joseph Grasso and former prosecutor Robin Hammer. Harper is not new to the job of being a government watchdog. He retired from the Air Force where he investigated fraud and other money funny business. My passion has been protecting the public trust, Harper said. He said he conducted a major fraud investigation at Kirtland Air Force base about 15 years ago. The Inspector General does not report to the mayor or the Council but reports directly to a five-member Accountability in Government Oversight Committee. Albuquerque has not had a permanent IG for several years since the last one, Neftali Carrasquillo, resigned, claiming he was not being allowed to do his job.

Bus Riding Buddies

Companion animals are now allowed to ride the city buses, at no additional charge. This allows car-less folks with pets to be able to get to and from veterinary appointments. The six-month pilot project requires cat and dog handlers to have control of the animal at all times. The critters are not allowed to sit in a seat. Cats must be in a crate, dogs can ride the bus in a crate or with a leash and muzzle. And it kind of goes without saying that any messes must be cleaned up immediately. Our furry friends can ride any time during the weekends but only between 9am and 4pm and after 6:30pm on weekdays. This is a good try at something useful, Councilor Trudy Jones said.

Other Action

Councilors doubled the amount of a contract with the law firm that advises the Police Oversight Board. Mayor Richard Berry asked for the increase because the high number of pending cases against the police department requires more work. Peifer, Hanson and Mullins, P.A., will get a bump from $75,000 to $150,000.

Next Time

Councilors postponed amending Angels Law, the citys dangerous dog ordinance which would allow for the immediate seizure by the City of dogs that attack and kill without provocation.

It is budget time at City Hall. Mayor Berry has proposed a $524 million fiscal year 2016-2017 budget. This is up more than $14 million from last year. Expect to hear lots of public comment, Council discussion and other chitchat over how to tax and spend city money.
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. Armenpress news agency presents upcoming news for 28.04.2016.

Government of Armenia will discuss the issue of giving permission to Iranian Sanir company to carry out construction of Iran-Armenia 400kV power transmission line during the upcoming Government session on April 28. The company has rich experience in implementation of energy projects in different countries, as well as in Armenia. The Armenian Government also will compensate the damage caused to the Koti community residents of Tavush district as a result of military operations committed by the adversary in summer 2015. In this regard, Government will allocate 8 million 935 thousand drams to the Tavush Governorate.

This year is the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the Byurakan Observatory named after V. Hambardzumyan. Within the framework of this event the Observatory will organize a press conference and study tour in the office of V. Hambardzumyan for journalists. The administration will inform about the scientific journalism contest which will be devoted to the 70th anniversary of the foundation of Byurakan Observatory.

World Bank Country Manager for Armenia Laura Bailey and World Bank Task Team Leader of the Project Arthur Kochnakyan will present the details of Armenia  Power Sector Financial Recovery Program-For-Results $30 million program.

Famous conductor Vladimir Spivakov is in Armenia. He and the Orchestra Moscow Virtuosi will host a concert at Aram Khachaturian Grand Concert Hall on April 28 and 29.

Award ceremony of Peoples friendship international child creativity contest- festival will be held. The competition is comprised of Dancing, Singing and Chorus art categories. Gala concert of the contest-festival will be held at the National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet after Alexander Spendiarian on April 29.

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STEPANAKERT, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. The Azerbaijani armed forces continued fiercely bombarding Karabakhi positions overnight April 27-28 by firing mortars, artillery, TR-107 and MM-21 multiple rocket launchers. More than 240 shells were fired at Karabakhi positions.

The Defense Ministry of Karabakh says savage bombardments occurred in the eastern, northern and northeastern directions of the contact line. Azeri forces bombarded the Mataghis civilian settlement with MM-21 multiple rocket launchers.

The Armed Forces of Karabakh took countermeasures to suppress the Azeri aggression.

Currently the situation is relatively calm.
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. The Defense Ministry of Armenia informs that 23 ceasefire violations were recorded in the northeastern part of Armenian-Azerbaijani state border in the night of April 27.

The Armenian Defense Ministrys statement reads. On April 27 and throughout the morning of April 28 23 ceasefire violations were recorded in the northeastern part of Armenian-Azerbaijani state border. The Azerbaijani side fired irregular shots from various caliber weapons at Armenian positions.

The Armenian Armed forces exercised restraint and conducted response actions only in case of strict necessity and confidently maintain control of the situation.

According to the information provided by the NKR Defense Army the Azerbaijani armed forces continued fiercely bombarding Karabakhi positions overnight April 27-28 by firing mortars, artillery, TR-107 and MM-21 multiple rocket launchers. More than 240 shells were fired at Karabakhi positions. The Defense Ministry of Karabakh says savage bombardments occurred in the eastern, northern and northeastern directions of the contact line. Azerbaijani forces bombarded the Mataghis civilian settlement with MM-21 multiple rocket launchers.

The Armed Forces of Karabakh took countermeasures to suppress the Azerbaijani aggression.

Currently the situation is relatively calm".
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura called the Presidents of Russia and the United States to salvage the "barely alive" ceasefire regime in Syria and revitalize the damaged peace process, Reuters reports. De Mistura summarized the results of the regular round of negotiations over Syrian issue.

"There is no reason that both of them (Putin and Obama) which have been putting so much political capital in that success story and have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war should not be able to revitalize what they have created, he said.

De Mistura, asked whether Assads future was discussed, replied: "We didnt get into names of people... but actually how to change the current governance. And I must say that the concept of a new government and a political transition with a new constitution is quite a lot already in terms of preparing of what could be the next steps."

He issued a document saying the two sides remain far apart in their vision of a political transition, but shared some "commonalities," including the view "that the transitional governance could include members of the present government and the opposition, independents and others."

De Mistura said the new round of negotiations will be held after the full restoration of ceasefire regime.
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. Prominent US-Armenian TV star Kim Kardashian published a statement in her official site where she strictly condemned the anti-Armenian advertisement denying the Armenian Genocide published recently in the Wall Street Journal.

My family and I are no strangers to BS in the press. We've learned to brush it off. Lies make good headlines, good headlines make great covers, great covers sell magazines. But when I heard about this full-page ad that ran in the Wall Street Journal denying the Armenian genocide, I couldn't just brush it off.

The ad was paid for by Turkic Platform. I won't list the group's website, as I don't want to give them the traffic, but basically they say that not as many people died as historians say, and that the Armenians were to blame.

For the Wall Street Journal to publish something like this is reckless, upsetting and dangerous. It's one thing when a shitty tabloid profits from a made-up scandal, but for a trusted publication like WSJ to profit from genocideit's shameful and unacceptable. Why is it that every time we take one step forward, we take two steps back?, Kim Kardashian writes.

She stated that in response to the question asked the Wall Street Journal why they would run an ad like this, their response was: "We accept a wide range of advertisements, including those with provocative viewpoints. While we review ad copy for issues of taste, the varied and divergent views expressed belong to the advertisers."

"Advocating the denial of a genocide by the country responsible for itthat's not publishing a "provocative viewpoint," that's spreading lies. It's totally morally irresponsible and, most of all, it's dangerous. If this had been an ad denying the Holocaust, or pushing some 9/11 conspiracy theory, would it have made it to print?

Many historians believe that if Turkey had been held responsible for the Armenian genocide, and reprimanded for what they did, the Holocaust may not have happened. In 1939, a week before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Hitler said, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" We do. We must. We must talk about it until it is recognized by our government because when we deny our past, we endanger our future. When we allow ourselves to be silenced by money, by fear and by power, we teach our children that truth is irrelevant. We have to be responsible for the message we pass on to our children. We have to honor the TRUTH in our history so that we protect their future. We have to do better than this, Kim Kardashian concluded.
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. Armenian tankers won a T-90S tank as a prize in the Tank Biathlon  2014 International competition. The 2015 made tank has been transported to Armenia on April 27 and will be added to the arsenal of Armenian Armed Forces, Press Service of Armenian Defense Ministry told Armenpress.

Armenian tankers finished 2nd at the Tank Biathlon-2014 international competition which was held in the Alabino military college in Russia, and as a prize a T-90S tank was presented by the Russian Defense Ministry. Unlike the participating teams of 12 countries, the Armenian team also included conscripts.
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. World Bank country manager for Armenia Laura E. Bailey says the World Bank has not yet evaluated the impact of Nagorno Karabakh escalations on the economy of Armenia.

Our experience shows that continuation of such situations impacts trust, which in turn affect the volumes of foreign direct investments. We are going to conduct a monitoring in this direction. However, such affect is not yet observed.

Bailey expressed regret over the events happening in Nagorno Karabakh and said that it has put Armenian families and communities in a difficult situation. She noted that the World Bank has not suspended any of its programs in Armenian provinces.

We do not have any programs in Karabakh, but we have a number of educational, healthcare, agricultural programs in Tavush and Syunik. None of the abovementioned has been suspended, the programs are continuing, said Bailey.
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. The President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan and RPA Faction MPs hold a meeting on April 27 which was mainly devoted to the discussion of the draft Electoral Code. Parliament President Galust Sahakyan informed journalists that they have also discussed issues on the Parliament activity and its future plans during the meeting.

Parliament President rejected the talks that the President of Armenia reprehended several MPs.

In response to the question whether RPA Faction had a gaps during this period, Galust Sahakyan stated that one of the gaps was the law which didnt pass in the last reading. He said no one expected that at the end opposition would unite and did not participate in the voting.

He did not agree with a view that his absence is the reason that RPA Faction did not work well and stated that almost all MPs work more intensively.

Parliament President stated that there were no discussions on the recent dismissals of high-ranking military officials during the meeting. He also added that currently there are no talks on new dismissals.
New details unearthed about how cybercriminals stole $81 million out of a Bangladesh Bank account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provide insight into how the theft occurred, some of the vulnerabilities that were exploited and what banks can learn from the incident.

The results of the investigation so far leave questions around how criminals were able to pull off such a feat and what other institutions can do to protect themselves.

Following is a breakdown of what we know, what we don't, and what it means.

What We Know

After hackers broke into Bangladesh Bank, they used a cunning piece of malware that helped them hide the traces of their cyberheist. The software that was mostly likely used is capable of not only bypassing validation checks and deleting traces of fraudulent transactions from computers, but also generating fake confirmation receipts and directing a local HP printer to print them, according to new details published on BAE's blog on Monday.

The malware works by registering itself as a service and operating within an environment running Swift's Access Alliance software and an Oracle database. That allows the malware to monitor activity for useful information related to Swift transactions. The program modifies Swift software to bypass validity checks.

"By modifying the local instance of Swift Alliance Access software, the malware grants itself the ability to execute database transactions within the victim network," the blog states.

The malware can also delete transactions and modify a bank's account balance in the Oracle database, thereby erasing all traces of fraudulent activity. It even prints out fake confirmations. The doctored copies help cover up the fraud.

Swift said in a statement that the mandatory software update it issued this week will help members "enhance their security and to spot inconsistencies in their local database records." The organization also urged members to step up their security and anti-malware efforts to protect their systems, especially those used to access Swift.

But it wasn't just the program that allowed criminals to steal so much  there was also a significant amount of human error.

The Wall Street Journal published a timeline of the attack and blamed "bankers' hours" for the execution of four fraudulent wire transfers, which ended up being used to buy gambling chips at casinos in the Philippines.

The hackers timed their attack to exploit the weekend, which falls on Friday and Saturday in Bangladesh. On Thursday, Feb. 4, the New York Fed approved five transaction requests that appeared to come from the Bangladesh bank, according to the Journal's timeline.

Later that night, the Fed sent the Bangladesh Bank queries about another 12 transfer requests from the hackers. At 11:30 that night, Bangladesh Bank officials found their Swift interbank-messaging terminal wasn't working, likely because it was disabled by the hackers.

The next day (Friday), after 4:00 p.m., the Fed sent new messages to Bangladesh Bank questioning the transfer requests, including four of the five it had put through and 30 it had blocked that day. Because of its computer problems, the Bangladesh Bank didn't see those messages from the Fed until 12:30 p.m. Bangladesh time, which was 1:30 a.m. in New York. Between 2:31 a.m. and 7:03 a.m. Eastern on Saturday, Bangladesh Bank sent three emails and a fax to the New York Fed, trying to get the payments stopped; those messages went unanswered. Bangladeshi officials also called the Fed office in New York several times, to no avail.

On Sunday, Feb. 7, Bangladeshi officials started up a backup server and saw dozens of messages from the Fed asking Bangladesh to reconfirm requests to transfer up to $950 million. By then, $101 million had already been wired out of the account to Sri Lanka and the Philippines. (One of the transactions was blocked by the routing bank, Deutsche Bank, which became suspicious when the hackers requested funds be transferred to the "Shalika Fandation." The misspelling of "foundation" prompted the bank to seek clarification from Bangladesh's bank, which immediately stopped the fraudulent transaction.)

What We Don't Know

The most important questions  how did hackers break into Bangladesh Bank computers in the first place, how did they create and send the Swift transactions, and who are the perpetrators  have yet to be fully answered.

By all accounts, Bangladesh Bank was running light security. Bangladesh police told Reuters the bank used $10 routers with no firewalls. This would make it relatively easy for hackers to break in and steal Swift credentials.

The Brussels-based Swift network, which is owned by 3,000 financial institutions and used by 11,000, is private, and most banks set up their accounts to only allow transactions with certain parties. This means it should be hard for someone outside a bank to attack the network. But if a hacker breaks into a member bank, the cybercriminal can access its Swift software and authorized access to the Swift network.

Swift requires the use of a one-time password generated by a hardware token before authorizing a payment message. Experts say that generally, hackers know how to game this security method.

"One-time passwords generated by hardware tokens have been beaten for years by the fraudsters," said Avivah Litan, vice president at Gartner. "They've even beaten dual authentication, when two separate users have to enter hardware token-generated one-time passwords by compromising those two separate user accounts in a similar manner."

Hackers can divert the one-time password to themselves and enter it, and give the actual user a message telling them to come back later because the system is having problems.

"It's frankly inexcusable to still rely on a one-time password alone to protect a high-risk account," Litan said.

What This Means for Banks

The tools, techniques and procedures used in the attack may allow the group behind this cyberattack to strike again, the BAE blog said. "All financial institutions who run SWIFT Alliance Access and similar systems should be seriously reviewing their security now to make sure they too are not exposed."

Obviously, strong firewalls and tough authentication procedures would be high on the list. Air-gapping computers used for Swift transactions could also help.

Jonathan Sander, vice president with Lieberman Software, said banks need to be aware of counterparties' security practices.

"If a new partner is using $10 routers and no firewalls to run critical IT systems that you will now be directly dependent upon, wouldn't you want to know that before signing any contracts?" he said. "Basic cybersecurity practices will soon become as common sense to businesses partnerships as basic insurance coverage is today."

As Litan noted, dual-factor authentication with a one-time password may no longer be enough to secure large transactions. Someday, biometrics or some other high-test authentication technology may be needed to secure international payments. And having staff check in on weekends about international wire transfers may also become a best practice.

Editor at Large Penny Crosman welcomes feedback at penny.crosman@sourcemedia.com.


The United States has a pretty good track record at winning wars, but there is only one important conflict in recent memory where we also won the peace. Fortunately, this singular victory occurred in conjunction with the largest of them all, World War II.

The postwar peace was the result of an extraordinary work of American statecraft. It occurred because a very serious and smart group of men realized that, if the fruits of the hard-won victory were not to turn rotten again, the flaws in the world system that had led to the global conflagration needed to be corrected. So they created two critical institutions. The first was the Western alliance, later formalized as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to provide for collective security of the democratic world, and thereby decisively deter any future totalitarian aggression. The second was a system of international free trade, formalized as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, later renamed the World Trade Organization), to enable global economic recovery and prosperity, thereby ensuring the continued stability and growing strength of the democracies themselves.

These two pillars of the postwar order -- NATO and GATT -- lay the foundation of a world so much more peaceful and prosperous than the prior chaos that one its leading architects, Truman administration secretary of state Dean Acheson, titled his memoir Present at the Creation.

The creators of the postwar order built on the basis of hard-won knowledge. Free trade is necessary for economic prosperity for the same reason that long distance transport is. Everyone understands that advances like the Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad greatly accelerated American economic development by cheapening internal transportation costs. But imagine that the government put a tax on movement via such systems so that they cost more to deliver goods than previous methods of transportation. In that case, the great canals and railroads would be rendered as useless as if they had been physically destroyed, and U.S. economic development would have been crippled. Similarly, international tariffs do as much harm to the world economy as would be done by a sinking all the most advanced merchant ships. Thus it was the trade war, initiated by the U.S. Smoot-Hawley tariff bill and similar measures taken by foreign governments that made the Great Depression great.

The creators learned from this. Similarly, they also learned from the debacle of the 1930s what happens when democracies abandon their collective security arrangements and allow tyrants to start picking off their weaker members one at a time. So they put in place something that was called the Free World, within which enterprise and trade could prosper, without fear of either excessive intergovernmental interference or external attack. The result was the greatest period of economic growth that the world has ever seen. America was transformed from poverty-riddled depression America to suburbia America, with a vast middle class owning homes, cars, and televisions and sending their children to college. Europe and Japan were completely rebuilt, with South Korea, Taiwan, and numerous other previously undeveloped countries lifting themselves out of hunger and desperation as well. Furthermore, despite the continued existence of two very dangerous totalitarian potential adversaries, the general peace was preserved.

As a result of this profound success, whatever the differences between the two major parties may have been on other issues, these two fundamental bedrock principles underlying the creation and continuation of the post-1945 world order have remained uncontroversial among serious political leaders for the seven decades ever since.

Unfortunately, this has now changed. In both major parties, powerful figures have arisen who are challenging this long-held consensus. Among the Democrats, the chief usurper is the Marxian socialist Bernie Sanders. Among the Republicans, it is the national socialist Donald Trump. Both would gut the Western alliance. Both would wreck the system of global free trade. Both would cause a global depression. Both would unleash the dogs of war. While their rhetoric is quite different, on the central issue of defending or betraying the Pax Americana, the program of both is the same.

It is to be expected that a rabid left-wing socialist like Bernie Sanders would support such a program, and one must be thankful that the remaining Atlanticist forces within the Democratic Party appear to have him and his faction in check  at least for this election year. But what can one say of the Republicans and allegedly right wing radical Donald Trump? National Review founder William F. Buckley used to say that conservatives should support the most conservative electable candidate. Hillary Clinton would continue the Obama administrations deleterious liberal policies for four more years. So she is certainly no conservative. But Donald Trump would destroy the Western alliance and the world economy. On the basis of that comparison, if the two were to face off in November, as incredible as it may seem, William F. Buckley would have no choice but to vote for Clinton. Surely we can do better.

Is the Pax Americana worth preserving? Do we prefer the world as it has been since 1945 to the world as it was before 1945? Will the Republican Party still fight to help preserve and improve that world? Or will its epitaph be Present at the Destruction?

Dr. Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy of Lakewood, www.pioneerenergy.com Colo., and the author of The Case for Mars. The paperback edition of his latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, was recently published by Encounter Books.
Remember Robert Fulghum's phenomenal #1 NYT bestseller, All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? Well, all I needed to know about bullies, I learned in junior high school watching Larry and Butterball at the school bus stop.

We Pumphrey, Maryland black students were bused to the mostly white, recently integrated Brooklyn Park Jr/Sr High School in Linthicum, Maryland.

Larry was a gentle giant fat kid. Butterball was a shorter and thinner jerk. Butterball bullied Larry every morning as we waited for the school bus, slapping and punching Larry for fun. I asked Larry why he never hit Butterball back. Larry said he was afraid that Butterball would get angry and beat him up. I said, Larry, he is beating you up every day!

Folks, I feel the exact same frustration with how we conservatives are told we must respond to Leftist activist bullies. Patriots are told that we dare not express any disagreement or shine-a-light-on Leftist activists' daily hate-fueled stealth attacks on our culture. Heaven forbid that we make them angry causing them to really come after us. Standard Leftist activist procedure is to have their enforcers in the mainstream media drag disobedient rebels into the public square. Then, brand an H for hater on their forehead. Thus, deterring further rebels from refusing to enthusiastically embrace the Left's anti-American, anti-God and anti-traditional principles and values agenda.

Frankly folks, I have had enough! I am sick of having the corny-good-stuff that I believe in being spat upon, kicked, slapped, and punched by Leftist activist bullies every day. Equally annoying is having fellow conservatives and Christians constantly cautioning me about not coming across as mean in my opposition.

The truth is, fear of the MSM calling traditionally thinking Americans mean, passivity, and allowing the MSM to tell us what to think has gotten our nation into the mess we are in today. Folks, how wimpy and ridiculous is it that America's men have allowed themselves to be bullied into putting their daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, and grandmothers at risk by allowing men into women's restrooms? How did Americans get conned into accepting the lie that keeping men out of ladys restrooms is extreme, bigoted, and hateful?

To show you how crazy things have become, what I am about to say is now deemed bigoted, mean and hateful by Leftist activists. Brace yourself. I am proud to be a man!

My dad taught my two younger brothers and me to be men. Being a man meant when taking a young lady on a date, you protect her at all cost. Real men always try to do the right thing and stand up for what they believe is right. Respect is something you earn. I know. I know. Concepts such as right and wrong are outdated in today's America.

One morning at the school bus stop, Larry put-a-hurtin' on Butterball. The bullying ended.

No, I am not advocating violence. I am saying if we passively continue to allow proven principles and values to be steamrolled into the ground, we are done as a great nation. Kiss American exceptional-ism good-bye.

Conservatives have been bringing olive branches to gun fights. I cringe whenever I hear Christians lecture and accuse other Christians of not showing enough love and tolerance to LGBT activists. I feel like saying, Excuse me, but in case you have not noticed, these people have openly expressed a desire to cut off our heads and urinate down our throats. I realize that sounds harsh. But it is the reality, folks.

Though falsely portrayed as hateful monsters by the Left/MSM, most Christian opposition to the LGBT agenda is expressed lovingly. God said with loving-kindness have I drawn thee. However, Christians/Conservatives must understand the blood-coming-out-of-their-eyes rage and hate that we are dealing with. Leftist activists are relentlessly seeking to shut down churches, turn our kids into homosexual activists at war with their parents, silence and jail non-compromising Christians.

I am continuously blown away by Leftist activist's over-the-top disproportional rage at anyone supportive of traditional wholesome values. Why are these activists who claim they only seek tolerance so intolerant of opposing points of view? Check out this disturbing video exposing physical assaults on young people for simply holding signs in public in support of traditional marriage.

No matter how Conservatives/Christians wrap their opposition to the LGBT agenda in love with a bow on it, Leftist activists respond with insane hatred and rage. Still, my conservative homeys caution me, Lloyd, don't go there. You cannot risk making Leftist activists really mad and target you. Apparently, it is one of those well-known universal truths. You don't get Gremlins wet. You don't tug on Superman's cape. You don't make Leftist activists angry. Folks, God simply will not allow me to shut up.

Our cowardly silence, not alerting the public to the depths of the Left's assaults on all things moral and upright has emboldened Leftist activists to continue spitting upon, slapping, and punching traditional American values every day. Consequently, Leftist activists plan to legalize 12 new perversions and trample more cherished values underfoot.

Rush Limbaugh responded to fearful callers to his radio show, cautioning conservatives to keep silent.

What I learned here today is that we have to abandon all of our positions if we are ever going to attract people to our side. Because if we broadcast or announce our positions, we're offending a large part of the voting bloc... It might just be easier, folks, to join them rather than go through the rigmarole of having them join us. I mean, if you're gonna shut up about what you believe hoping that that attracts people to your side, why don't you just give up and join them? Which is the more efficient of the two possibilities?

Folks, the good news is there are more and more signs that Americans are finally waking up, becoming aware of the extreme aggression that we are dealing with. Americans are finding courage like my old schoolmate Larry, getting righteously angry and refusing to take being bullied anymore.

While these efforts may not be huge, they're a start. Americans are finally pushing back.

Almost 500,000 Americans signed a pledge to boycott Target for allowing men to use women's restrooms and dressing rooms in their stores.

Dr. Michael Brown in his book, Outlasting the Gay Revolution says never compromise your convictions.

More and more Christians are coming out of the closet proclaiming, I may lose my job and they may even put me in jail. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Billy Graham said Courage is contagious.

Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American

Chairman: The Conservative Campaign Committee

LloydMarcus.com
I have maintained for some time that there is simply not enough hate to go around, and that supposedly anti-hate groups and individuals are manufacturing phony hate incidents. The psychology involved sometimes is complex, revolving around self-hate, but in other instances, it is purely commercial  the opportunity to raise money, or bullying  the opportunity to intimidate spineless college administrators into meeting demands for (variously) ethnic or sexuality studies programs faculty slots, student centers, or any of the other baubles purchased out of the high tuitions and student activity fees extorted in return for a degree.

The latest outrageous phony hate crime comes from Salisbury State University on Marylands Eastern Shore, a campus fully 25% minority, where black students had previously protested vague forms of racism.

Just before Thanksgiving, the president called a meeting with minority student leaders to discuss race relations on campus. Its a meeting that ended abruptly, with students reading a letter asking for more time, and walking out. As students of color, WE DO NOT point fingers nor cast blame for the lack of awareness and understanding in regards to the black experience here at Salisbury University, keeping in mind that racism and cultural segregation existed long before any of us stepped foot on campus, the letter read. However, we refuse to deny that the current environment on campus takes a huge toll on the psyche of students of color affected by the subconscious oppression.

Subconscious oppression? Exactly whose subconscious? My guess it is the black students themselves. Because:

The students identified as the people behind a recent racist drawing found at Salisbury Universitys library are black, school officials confirmed Tuesday. The image, found April 10 on a whiteboard in Blackwell Library, showed a stick figure being hung and labeled with a racial slur. Underneath was the hashtag #whitepower. The university confirmed Tuesday, April 26, the students involved in the incident were black, spokesman Richard Culver wrote in an email. The university would not provide names of the students, citing the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. This information was first reported in the universitys student newspaper, The Flyer. Since the incident, Salisbury University Police Department has completed its investigation, Culver said. In consultation with the Wicomico County States Attorneys Office, the department has decided to not file criminal charges at this time. The investigation is being turned over to the university and will be reviewed for any possible university policy violations, Culver said. If charged, those students who were involved could face disciplinary action.

Let me ask whether if white students had been the perpetrators, would they have been let off with no legal consequences? Of course, I dont believe that the First Amendment permits prosecution for expression of racial animus, but I do think fake hate ought to be prosecuted exactly as vigorously as real hate. In fact, isnt a fake hate crime an example of real hate?

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit asks, [W]ithout fake hate crimes, would we have any hate crimes at all? Its a good question.
In the weeks before Canada's federal election last October, the Conservative Party promised to crack down on barbaric cultural practices, both at home and abroad:

Conservatives continued to focus on controversial issues of identity politics ahead of tonight's French-language leaders debate, pledging that a re-elected Tory government would establish a tip line for reporting "barbaric cultural practices" to the RCMP and would increase funds to help international organizations fight against forced marriages of young girls. Conservative candidates Chris Alexander and Kellie Leitch said during a news conference in Ajax, Ont., that in addition to a tip line, a Tory government would establish an integrated RCMP task force with units in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal to step up enforcement of the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, which received royal assent in June.

But now according to Jen Gerson, writing mindlessly and recently in the National Post, that was "race-baiting":

By the way, who came up with the phrase "barbaric cultural practices"? Was there to be a barbaric cultural practices tipline logo? Did anyone ever give any thought as to what would go on the barbaric cultural practices informational pamphlets? Some picture of doe-eyed girls and women in hijabs: The words "Do you know of any barbaric cultural practices occurring in your neighbourhood? Call 1-888-BAR-BARIC" printed underneath like like a Maury Povich promo?

Gerson goes on to claim that "[t]his was not some subtle strategy to address culturally specific forms of violence"; instead, "the party was race-baiting for votes[,]" and "[t]o pretend that announcement wasn't targeting Muslims is insulting."

And of course, the Conservative Party  if their recent trend toward weakness continues  will undoubtedly run and hide from such nonsensical criticisms. That is why they lost the election: allowing left-wing commentators to determine your policy directions is a sure way to lose the base, and lose the base the Conservative Party did.

In her article, Gerson quotes the following exchange between Conservative M.P. Kellie Leitch and Rosemary Barton, a low-quality host on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

[Leitch said,] "My intention that day was to make sure that Canadian kids, Canadian women and children, knew that if they had the courage to pick up the phone and to call, that someone would answer." "Isn't that what the police were for?" Barton asked.

Barton, being clueless, clearly fails to appreciate that the tipline was, in fact, an RCMP tip line  which, to translate for CBC hosts and equally clueless National Post commentators, is, indeed, the police. Did Barton and Gerson think calls to the tipline would end up being fielded by Conservative Party M.P.s or something?

Speaking about the proposed legislation and tipline, Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau acknowledged his acceptance of barbaric cultural practices by saying that the name of the "Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act ... could be considered offensive to people who hail from regions where these practices are common." Well, we certainly wouldn't want to offend those engaging in barbaric cultural practices, would we? That just wouldn't be consistent with Liberal Party values, would it?

And far from being "race-baiting," concerns over forced marriages and polygamy are far from unique to Muslims. But don't let reason and the facts get in the way of an incoherent rant.

The public was strongly behind former prime minister Stephen Harper's policies to preserve traditional Canadian values, as evidenced by a poll in 2015 showing that 82% of Canadians (and 93% of Quebecers) supported a requirement that women remove their niqabs or burkas at citizenship ceremonies.

Of course, the Muslim mayor of Calgary in the budding Islamic Petrostate of Alberta didn't like that, but perhaps he's too busy calling the CEO of Uber a "dick" and tweeting at Ezra Levant asking him "[w]hen did you stop beating your wife" to think about what "old stock" Canadian values really are. Someday, Albertans will have to try explaining how they consider themselves a conservative province yet have the highest per capita government spending in Canada and a liberal mayor of their largest city who seems capable only of embarrassing what, a few decades ago, was a respectable city.
Let me agree with Mr. Trump, and supporters, that it's a very bad idea for U.S. companies to move overseas and take those jobs elsewhere.

I have personally seen the consequences of these moves in Mexico.

You can see all of these companies in the industrial sectors of Monterrey, Queretaro, Tijuana, and other Mexican cities.

They are down there hiring Mexicans, from floor sweepers to engineers to lots of people with university degrees. They are hiring professionals from the top schools south of the border.

Again, I don't like it, but what can a U.S. president really do about it? What legal authority does a U.S. president have to stop it?

Back in 2013, Ryder published a great post detailing the reasons why U.S. companies move to Mexico. This is the one that caught my attention:

Duty-free imports, tax credits & incentives: maquiladoras operate in free trade zones, enabling companies to import materials and equipment without paying taxes or duties, then re-exporting finished products.

The Mexican government also offers a variety of incentives, from capital equipment grants and help with infrastructure to real estate grants, the Aerospace Training Center in Queretaro, and tax credits.

How does a U.S. president stop this? He can't unilaterally, no matter how much pressure he puts on the executives not to make the move.

Furthermore, renegotiating NAFTA would mean undoing the economic infrastructure that ties Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. It would likely mean that Congress would be involved because this is how we do it in the U.S.

It takes me back to one point. The best way to keep companies here is to make the U.S. the most profitable place in the world to do business. You can do this with a new tax code and the elimination of many regulations.

Again, any change in the tax code or end of regulations will require Congress again.

Sadly, Trump is raising a lot of expectations rather than proposing solutions to fix the problem of jobs going overseas.

Again, I hate jobs going overseas as much as Trump. All the same, all I've heard so far are slogans rather than solutions. In other words, this is a lot more complicated than we've heard from Mr. Trump.

P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
How would Lena Dunham adjust to working with more than just white people?

Lena Dunham is a popular television writer, producer, director, and actress, according to TIME magazine online. She is also a political activist promoting the candidacy of Hillary Clinton for president.

Dunham has promised that if Trump is elected president, she will emigrate to Canada. And she recently told The Hill that she really means it  she particularly likes Vancouver, British Columbia.

If youve visited Vancouver, you know its a beautiful, ethnically diverse city, including many young Chinese students attending universities in the Vancouver area.

Vancouvers racial mix differs dramatically from Dunhams professional work environment.

Dunham is executive producer, director, writer, and star for the HBO series Girls. Here are the photos of the shows cast. (Allison Williams is the daughter of NBC/MSNBC reporter Brian Williams.)

Note that all the faces are those of white people. So what? you ask. If it were a series on, say, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, youd expect a different photo array. Girls is about four young white girls living together in New York City  or so Im told (I gave up TV for Lent several years ago).

The other three executive producers of Girls are Judd Apatow, Jenni Konner, and Ilene S. Landress (left to right below).

And, theres the co-executive Producer of Girls: Bruce Eric Kaplan. Kaplan is third from the left in this 2012 photo of persons representing Girls at an awards ceremony.

So what? you, and perhaps Dunham,, might say. Dont they provide acting opportunities for others from various ethnic backgrounds, all employed in the one giant showbiz industry?

Well, lets check out the spread of racial diversity emanating from Girls.

The top three projects attributed to producer Apatow at imbd.com are 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and This is 40. An extensive photo gallery of the casts of each production is displayed at the links. Count up the number of non-Anglo faces. It wont take long.

The top three projects for producer Kooner listed at imbd.com are Girls, Bad Mothers Handbook, and Help Me Help You. Count the non-white faces. Itll go quick.

Lastly, the top three projects for producer Landress are The Sopranos, Girls, and I Love You, I Love You Not. The washroom on a Boeing 757 could accommodate the non-Anglo cast members attributed for those productions.

It looks as though Dunhams professional associations lack ethnic diversity. Decidedly so.

Does that make her a racist? No, certainly not.

But it does suggest that Canada would  and will if Trump becomes president  expand the range of Dunhams professional associations beyond just other white folks.
According to figures supplied to Congress by the Department of Homeland Security, more than 20,000 illegal aliens convicted of a crime were released into American communities in 2015.

More than half of that number were convicted of DUI, making them a danger on American roads. But thousands were convicted of assault, while several hundred were convicted of the most serious crimes.

Washington Times:

Between them the aliens notched a total of 64,000 crimes, including 12,307 drunken driving convictions, 1,728 cases of assault, 216 kidnappings and more than 200 homicide or manslaughter convictions, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform ahead of a hearing Thursday. "These are not just numbers. These are individuals in this country illegally who were arrested, prosecuted and convicted. But instead of removing these criminals, ICE put them back on American streets, said Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz. One of those released by ICE in 2015, Haitian illegal immigrant Jean Jacques, would go on to kill a young woman in Connecticut just months later, stabbing Casey Chadwick to death. Her mother, Wendy Hartling, will testify to the Oversight Committee alongside relatives of other victims of illegal immigrants crimes. Jacques had previously served time for attempted murder and was supposed to have been deported after that. But ICE officials said he wouldnt produce documents proving his identity, and Haiti refused to accept him without those documents. ICE said it had to release him instead. Those kinds of releases have been a black eye for the administration in recent years, with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and ICE Director Sarah R. Saldana saying they need to do a better job of keeping serious criminals in custody as they await deportation. And they have made some strides, reducing the number of criminal aliens released from 36,007 in 2013 to 30,558 in 2014, and then cutting the number by more than 10,000 last year.

Well, bully for them. Let me know when the number is at zero, and I'll offer my congratulations.

There is no more visible and risible example of how porous our immigration system is. More than 20,000 people who have no right to be here in the first place, convicted of a crime, and ordered deported are released unceremoniously back into the very same communities they committed criminal acts against in the first place.

You'd have to be brain-dead to find any logic or reason in this.

Testimony from the families of victims of illegal alien crimes is compelling, but what's needed is a new administration  one that takes enforcing the law seriously and looks to protect the rights and safety of citizens rather than the rights of immigration scofflaws.
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of Parliament Galust Sahakyan says Azerbaijan aimed at capturing Nagorno Karabakh territories during the 4-day war.

Our Army acted brilliantly during the military operations, and this is why Azerbaijan failed its goals, he said during a press conference.

Speaking on the Armenian arsenal Sahakyan assured Armenia never had issues regarding armaments.

We did not conduct attacking actions, we just defended our lands, he added.
A three-year study undertaken by the state-funded University of Cincinnati will not be released to the public, because it found no damage at all. This direct contradiction of the goals of many environmentalist groups had to be suppressed. As the lead researcher said:

I am really sad to say this, but some of our funders, the groups that had given us funding in the past, were a little disappointed in our results. They feel that fracking is scary and so they were hoping this data could to a reason to ban it[.]

This is a scandal that goes to the heart of the relationship between science and public policy and the reliability of global warming doomsayers. The scandal was broken in a small town newspaper, the Free Press-Standard of Carroll County, Ohio and only gradually made its way to the national media via Jeff Stier of the National Center for Public Policy Research, Newsweek, and Jazz Shaw of Hot Air.

As Stier wrote at Newsweek: Geologists at the University of Cincinnati just wrapped up a three-year investigation of hydraulic fracturing and its impact on local water supplies. The result? Theres no evidencezero, zilch, nadathat fracking contaminates drinking water. Researchers hoped to keep these findings secret.

As Russell Cook, a citizen-journalist, has detailed, the global warming fraudsters inevitably revert to the charge that scientists who question their theory are in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, a charge based on no substance at all and is actually 180 degrees different from reality. With billions of dollars annually spent of global warming research that hands to governments enormous power to tax and regulate all economic activity (that depends on energy), the gravy train is on the warmist side. Develop a computer program to explain away the embarrassing failure of data to conform to theiry, and you will be lavished research funds, invited to conferences in exotic locales, and put up at five-star hotels.

We have in Ohio a smoking gun on the repression of one side of the controversy. I hope that the Ohio State Legislature will conduct an investigation:

Rep. Andy Thompson, R-Marrietta, whose district includes Carroll, Harrison and Belmont counties, is calling for the university to release its findings. Thompson noted the study received state funding in the form of an $85,714 grant from the Ohio Board or Regents and federal funding from the national Science Foundation for an isotope ratio mass spectrometer. It is unacceptable that taxpayers have funded this important groundwater study and the findings are being kept from the public, said Thompson. UC still has not produced a full report of their findings, nor has the university issued a press release of their results. Yet, during the course of the past few years, the university has released countless advisories on the multi-year Groundwater Research of Ohio study. I am calling on the University of Cincinnati Department of Geology to release their full findings surrounding this study immediately. The people of Ohio have funded and deserve to know that private water wells in shale counties have not been impacted.

Hat tip: Bryan Demko
The South Korean defense ministry announced that an attempted test launch of a ballistic missile by North Korea ended when it exploded almost immediately after lift-off. The launch was the second test of the Musudan intermediate-range missile in the last few days that ended in failure.

The South Koreans believe that the test was rushed in order to have some sort of technological success prior to a rare meeting of the Party Congress on May 6.

Reuters:

"They are in a rush to show anything that is successful, to meet the schedule of a political event, the party congress," said Yang Uk, a senior research fellow at the Korea Defence and Security Forum and a policy adviser to the South Korean navy. "They need to succeed but they keep failing. They didn't have enough time to fix or technically modify the system, but just shot them because they were in hurry," he said. Thursday's apparent failure marks another setback for the North's young leader Kim Jong Un. A similar missile launched on the April 15 birthday of his grandfather, the country's founder, Kim Il Sung, exploded in what the U.S. Defense Department called a "fiery, catastrophic" failure. Some experts had predicted that North Korea would wait until it had figured out what went wrong in the previous failed Musudan missile launch before attempting another, a process that could take months and a sign that Thursday's firing was rushed. However, South Korea's Yonhap news agency had reported on Tuesday that the North appeared to be preparing the second launch of a Musudan, which theoretically has the range to reach any part of Japan and the U.S. territory of Guam. According to South Korea, the missile has never been successfully flight-tested. North Korea lists South Korea, the United States and Japan as its main enemies. South Korea also says the North is ready to conduct a nuclear test at any time. It would be its fifth nuclear test. "Signs for an imminent fifth nuclear test are being detected ahead of North Korea's seventh Party Congress," President Park Geun-hye said at a national security meeting on Thursday.

Failure is not an option in dictatorships, and two very public catastrophes in as many weeks can't help Kim Jong-un's image with the rank-and-file apparatchiks. Some experts on North Korea believe that Kim will wait until the party congress is underway before conducting the nuke test  a move that would consolidate his position with those charged with maintaining the regime's ironclad control over the population.

Otherwise, Kim seems relatively safe. He has purged the upper levels of the regime of family rivals as well as potential power centers in the military and the party. But would you like to be the officers in charge of those failed missile tests right now?

Like I said, failure is not an option.
Groups opposing the Transfer of Public Lands are waging a war against Western Statehood Equality with the equivalent of rhetorical sticks and stones. Without facts to reinforce their hysterical arguments, they are increasingly reliant upon ad hominem attacks and false narratives.

Like the snake oil salesmen of yore, Utah state [sic] Rep. Ken Ivory has been traveling the country peddling his fraudulent wares, and now he is descending on the unsuspecting people of Washington. This week, Ivory is meeting with local officials across the state to shill for a patently unconstitutional cause: transferring federal lands to state control.

The above is the lead paragraph of an April 24, 2016 op-ed written in the Spokesman-Review, a newspaper out of Spokane, Washington. In this opinion piece, the author, Ann Weismann, director of the Soros-funded Campaign for Accountability, referred to the Transfer of Public Lands as legally unsupportable; unconstitutional; fraudulent wares; and, on more than one occasion, snake oil.

Such assertions are not new. Since 2014, Ken Ivory, spokesman for American Lands Council, the chief advocate for the Transfer of Public Lands, has been a target of the Campaign for Accountability, which has attempted to impede his work on behalf of Public Lands Transfer with accusations of fraud. Yet their efforts have been repeatedly rebuffed by the courts.

The Campaign for Accountability brands itself as an ethics watchdog, but with funding from billionaire George Soros and other left-wing donors, this Washington, D.C.-based organization is hardly objective in which ethics cases it pursues. The potential that their false narratives about the Transfer of Public Lands are based on a longstanding grudge, however, is overshadowed by the fact that Ms. Weismans contentions are starving for facts.

What Campaign for Accountability and other opposition groups refer to as snake oil is, in fact, a legal case exhaustively researched, vetted, and supported by an elite team of national legal scholars.

The Legal Analysis prepared for the Utah Commission for the Stewardship of Public Lands addresses every imaginable aspect of federal-state relationships, the history of public lands, states Enabling Acts, existing legislation, and all relevant clauses in the U.S. Constitution.

The only evidence supporting the complaints in Weismans op-ed is one biased report done by a professor and his assistant at the University of Utah, which completely overlooks the constitutional terms of statehood and other key facts related to public lands.

Those hostile to local governance of public lands conveniently fail to mention the scholarly Legal Analysis. They also fail to mention that Transfer of Public Lands legislation is making its way through several state legislatures, as well as the United States Congress. Finally, these fear-mongering groups ignore the fact that majorities in states including Utah and Montana now favor transferring control of public lands from Washington, D.C. to local and state governments. They rely on the omission of facts as well as falsehoods to frighten constituents into taking their side.

Environmentalist front groups, such as Trout Unlimited and Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, frighten sportsmen and hunters by spreading the myth that Transfer of Public Lands is a sell-off or will result in the privatization of public lands. The use of terms such as seizure and selling of public lands is another scare tactic. Another false narrative is that the public will lose access to public lands should states and local governments take over management.

One cant help but wonder why the hysteria from so-called environmentalist and sportsmen groups, also including the Backcountry Horsemen of America and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, is growing to a fever pitch. The answer is that they fear losing the financial benefits they enjoy from federal grants and big-government liberal donors.

Op-eds disguised as hit pieces, hysteria-based fundraising campaigns, and baseless accusations of fraud make it clear that foes of Transfer of Public Lands fear local control. As Americans learn the truth, these hysterical actors power  and bank accounts  will be diminished.
At least 36 delegates in Pennsylvania who were previously "unbound" to any candidate have pledged their support for Donald Trump, according to analysis by the Washington Times.

The inclusion of those delegates allows Trump to cross several threshholds, including his winning more than 50% of the delegates so far and increasing the possibility that the candidate will arrive in Cleveland with more than the 1,237 delegates needed for a first ballot victory.

I dont think it gets to a second ballot anymore. I think he is the presumptive nominee, said Mike Puppio, the chairman of the Springfield Republican Party who won a seat as a delegate from Pennsylvanias 7th Congressional District, and who said hell now support Mr. Trumpbecause the billionaire businessman won the popular vote in his district. Going into Tuesday, Mr. Trump had won about 45 percent of all delegates awarded. But his massive wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island earned him most of the 172 delegates at stake. He is now nearing 1,000 delegates overall and is more than 400 ahead of Sen. Ted Cruz, his closest competitor. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the third major candidate still in the race, trails far behind with only about 160 delegates. Hes even still behind Sen. Marco Rubio, who has won more than 170 delegates despite having dropped out of the race nearly a month and a half ago. Mr. Trump proclaimed himself the presumptive nominee on Tuesday night, and analysts and activists said hes probably justified after notching the kinds of margins a clear front-runner should be tallying at this point in the race. The fat lady may not be singing, but shes certainly on stage, and Im just waiting for Donald Trump to make fun of her weight, said Charlie Gerow, a GOP strategist in Pennsylvania who ran to be both a delegate and an alternate. He lost the delegate race to a slate of three avowed Trumpsupporters but did earn an alternates post. He said Mr. Cruz does have a chance to derail Mr. Trump in Indiana, which votes next Tuesday, but soon after that the conversation will shift to the inevitability of Mr. Trump. Thats when more free agent delegates will begin to announce theyll support the front-runner at the convention.

There are about 200 unbound delegates who are currently up for grabs. The more Trump wins, the better his case for those delegates backing him on the first ballot to give him the nomination.

I still think it likely that Trump arrives in Cleveland a couple of dozen delegates short of a majority. The primary calendar is moving into some states that won't be as friendly to Trump as those in the northeast. Trump may still win, but he needs more than 50% in many of those states to trigger the "winner take all" rule.

While it's probable for that reason that Trump comes up a little short, it's also probable that the unbound delegates break heavily for him, putting him over the top.

Everybody likes to back the winner, and avoiding a messy floor fight will be one of the things uppermost in the minds of free agent delegates. There may not be much unity at the convention, but at this point, Trump appears in no danger of having the nomination taken away from him.
A huge and embarrassing scandal is rocking the University of California System, the nations largest and most prestigious state university. University president Janet Napolitano has placed on involuntary leave of absence the chancellor of the Universitys Davis Campus, widely considered the worlds pre-eminent agricultural research and teaching facility (its wine research has no peer).

Sam Stanton and Diana Lambert of the Sacramento Bee report:

Citing serious questions about whether UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi violated policies on employment of her family members and the use of contracts to remove negative information from the Internet, UC President Janet Napolitano placed Katehi on leave Wednesday night pending the outcome of a rigorous and transparent investigation. Information has recently come to light that raises serious questions about whether Chancellor Katehi may have violated several University of California policies, including questions about the campuss employment and compensation of some of the chancellors immediate family members, the veracity of the chancellors accounts of her involvement in contracts related to managing both the campuss and her personal reputation on social media, and the potential improper use of student fees, Napolitanos office said in a statement issued Wednesday night. The serious and troubling nature of these questions, as well as the initial evidence, requires a rigorous and transparent investigation. Napolitano said she would appoint an independent investigator to compile a report before the start of the next academic year and that UC Davis Provost Ralph Hexter would fill the chancellors post on an acting basis.

The P.R. contracts to scrub the internet came in the wake of a hugely embarrassing incident in which a university police officer pepper-sprayed demonstrators, which was recorded by cell phone cameras and went viral. The university reportedly has spent at least $175,000 to scrub this, but documents have now revealed that personal P.R. for the chancellor seems to have been part of the deal:

Documents released to The Sacramento Bee late Wednesday through California Public Records Act requests show how closely the universitys image consultants tracked coverage of Katehis latest controversies. One email from Sacramento-based IDMLOCO dated March 7 suggested a way of inserting some positive Linda Katehi press into the conversation once the time is right. Other documents showed campus officials received regular reports on how Katehis reputation was being affected by media reports. Over the weekend, the conversation volume spiked to the highest point since the negative stories about Chancellor Katehi began, a March 16 email from IDMLOCO stated. The conversation spike was surrounding the Mrak Hall 5th floor sit-in that began on Friday, where students protested for the chancellors resignation. Resignation has become the primary theme in the social conversation over the weekend, the email stated, noting that currently, the sentiment is 48 percent negative, 15 percent positive and 37 percent neutral. Another firm, Nevins & Associates of Baltimore, was hired earlier and paid more than $90,000 to repair the image of the university and the chancellor after the pepper-spray incident. In an Oct. 16, 2012, email from company founder David Nevins to Katehi chief of staff Karl Engelbach, Nevins spelled out a plan to highlight the accomplishments of UC Davis and Chancellor Katehi.

At the moment, less is known about the allegations of improperly hiring family members and the acceptance of board seats. That is what the investigation is for.

Higher education is a very big business, and the executives who manage it command vast budgets and are paid very well. Though they may wear academic robes at commencement ceremonies and revel in the prestige of being seekers of truth, they are also executives as self-interested as the mortals who run big corporations.

The scandal unfolding at Davis threatens to reveal just how ordinary are the temptations of the chief executive of a large university campus.
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. A number of buildings, schools and electricity systems were damaged by the Azerbaijani bombardment of the civilian settlement Mataghis in Nagorno Karabakh.

Azerbaijani forces fired 30 shells at Mataghis overnight April 27-28. Homes and schools were damaged, director of the Mataghis School and acting community administrator G. Aghajanyan said.

He added that restoration works are resuming.

The Azerbaijani side continued fiercely bombarding Karabakhi positions overnight April 27-28 by firing mortars, artillery, TR-107 and MM-21 multiple rocket launchers. More than 240 shells were fired at Karabakhi positions.

The Defense Ministry of Karabakh says savage bombardments occurred in the eastern, northern and northeastern directions of the contact line. Azerbaijan bombarded the Mataghis civilian settlement with MM-21 multiple rocket launchers.
Google released Android 6.0 Marshmallow approximately six months ago but this very latest version of Android has so far only reached around 5% of handset penetration, according to Googles statistics. In other words, only one in twenty Android devices out there is running the latest version of Android. Approximately one third of devices are running Android Lollipop, either version 5.0 or 5.1, and another third are running on version 4.4 Kit Kat. The remaining devices are mostly running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, 2.3 Gingerbread or even 2.2 FroYo.

For those customers using a reasonably modern flagship device  something from the last two years  most of these are in the queue to receive the upgrade from 5.x Lollipop to 6.0 Marshmallow. As it happens, the differences between 5.1 and 6.0 are relatively minor in day by day use. Yes; Android 6.0 features very much enhanced standby power management, and there are important changes to how the operating system handles application permissions, but the user interface is very similar. This is very much as expected: as a platform, Android is maturing and there is less for the engineers to fix. Nevertheless, customers are still eagerly waiting for their device to be upgraded to the latest version. Given how similar the last three versions of the operating system look and feel, the upgrade is often something of a let down. Google, however, promote the latest version of the Android platform has having many advantages over the older versions and is therefore highly desirable. Could this promotion be harming the Android platform?

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Lets take a simplified overview of the current Android device update process. There are many stages, starting with Googles engineers releasing a new version of the platform. Next, component manufacturers must decide what hardware the new platform will support, then write the necessary device drivers. Once these have been written, the manufacturers establish what devices could technically receive the update and what devices will. The new version of the operating system is then written and tested (via Google) before being turned over to a carrier, if applicable. The carrier must also test and approve the new software and once the platform has been through these hoops, it is released to the end user. Most Google Nexus devices skip a few stages and software updates arrive considerably quicker on this platform. Currently, Google showcase the new features of a given operating system some months before it is released  Android Marshmallow was first talked about around a year ago. These long delays mean that customers could be waiting a year for a software update to finally arrive on their devices. Of course, one answer to this issue is for customers to buy a Nexus device, but the Nexus smartphones may be high end but typically do not have as many features as other manufacturers flagship devices.

To answer the question: yes, these long delays could be harmful for the platform, especially where some devices and carriers take a controversial decision not to release a software update, or where customers are kept waiting for eighteen months for a now-obsolete upgrade to their device. Google is working on improving the update situation: it has released more and more applications in the Google Play Store so that customers do not need to wait for a software update, a process that started with the release of Google Play Services many years ago. In effect, Googles marketing department has a field day with the dessert-themed names for Android versions and we, as the media, promote the new features of a given operating system upgrade.

However, the smartphone market is changing. In 2015 and thanks in part to the Stagefright exploit, Google is working on releasing monthly patches to the Android operating system. These are not exciting upgrades. Some manufacturers have tried to apply the same security fixes to their devices, although the above upgrade process is still getting in the way. There is another change happening: the smartphone is becoming a commodity item and in some parts of the world, carriers are changing how they sell devices. Traditional cell phone two year plans in North America cost the same almost regardless of the device, which meant many customers opted for a flagship device. This meant that manufacturers were keener to support their flagship models with software upgrades for two years after launch. Owners of mid and lower end devices did not see as many software updates during the life of the contract, despite pressure from Google for manufacturers to support devices for this time. However, 2016s equipment installation plans, whereby the customer pays off the cash purchase value of the device over the two years, means that theres an obvious cost saving to be made should a customer opt for a cheaper device. This means that more mid-range devices are being sold compared with previous years and this in turn, should encourage the device manufacturers to keep less-than-flagship devices updated.

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It is hard to imagine Google giving up on the dessert naming convention behind Android versions. It would also feel strange should the Google I/O conference be less covered and less exciting. Androids device manufacturers are scrabbling to compete with one another as well as the Apple competition, so are going to use those catchy dessert names to promote their latest device: saying it ships with Android Marshmallow sounds better than explaining it ships with the latest version of Android. We are sure there are many more features to be included into Android over the coming years, but these may be less and less exciting as time goes on. Perhaps in the coming conferences, Google will announce a massive change to the way that Android is updated. If Google were to adopt an update process similar to Microsoft takes with its desktop and server operating system and applications, this would likely change Android forever.
Asustek Computer has denied rumours that alleged that it may end up separating its Open Platform business group and its System business group to form two new corporate entities. While rumours about the split have been floating around for a while, they were recently fuelled by the return of Ted Hsu as Asusteks Chief Strategy Officer. As of now, Asustek makes more money from its Open Platform business group than from sales of products like smartphones, tablets and personal computers. The Open Platform business group deals in development, manufacturing and sales of graphic cards, motherboards, monitors and peripheral products and as per Digitimes, is expected to rake in operating profits to the tune of $185 million in the current calendar year. At a time when Asusteks smartphone, tablet and PC sales are struggling amid fierce competition with low-cost Chinese and Korean brands, experts believe that keeping both groups together as a single entity will bode well for Asusteks overall growth. Even if Asustek is planning to separate these business groups, it has decided to keep those plans under wraps now.

Even though the Open Platform business group is performing well, the System business group isnt faring badly either. Between January and August of 2015, Asustek managed to earn overall revenue of $9.12 billion and shipped an impressive 21 million ZenFones in the entire calendar year. The company also recorded an increase in shipments of its new notebooks that came with Microsofts latest Windows 10 operating system. With a view to increase its smartphone sales during the holiday season and in the first quarter of 2016, Asustek also upgraded a number of its phones with Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system like the PadFone S, the ZenFone 2 and the ZenFone 2 Selfie. However, older phones like ZenFone 4, 5 and 6 which had initially launched with Android 4.0 Jelly Bean and had subsequently been upgraded with Android 5.0 Lollipop, missed out on the upgrade.

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With Asustek banking on both product sales as well as sales of components like graphic cards and motherboards to sustain its overall year-on-year growth, separation of both entities could be damaging for either of them or for the group as a whole given the overall macro-economic scenario. The sales of smartphones globally declined from 400 million units in Q4 of 2015 to just 291 million units in Q1 of 2016 and that of tablets has declined by 14 per cent year-on-year, in which cases both product as well as component sales would bank on miracles to match last years numbers.
Back when LG and Samsung were duelling it out over would be FIRST to market with a curved display smartphone, Samsung released the Galaxy Round, which was only ever released in South Korea, and didnt stick around for long. Of course, LG went on to release the G Flex and Samsung the edge series of devices, which started back with the original Galaxy Note Edge, launched with the Galaxy Note 4 a couple years ago. Now, there are rumors that a Galaxy Note 6 Edge could be launching alongside this years Galaxy Note 6.

SlashGear have compiled all the information from their tips and other sources and it looks as though a Galaxy Note 6 Edge could be on the cards, but the majority of their latest story focuses around possible specs for the two new devices. Just like the Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy Note Edge, these two devices would share similar specs, with highlights including 3,100 mAh batteries, 5.8-inch Quad HD displays (5.9-inch in the case of the Galaxy Note 6 Edge) and 12-megapixel rear-facing cameras. Either a Samsung Exynos 8890 CPU or Snapdragon 820 CPU will be paired with a whopping 6GB of RAM and to put the Galaxy Note back on top, Samsung could ship these devices with 64 or 128GB of internal, expandable storage. IP68 dust and water-resistance would be included as well, and its no surprise to see this listed hear again, as it was included in the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge.

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These are specs that are, of course, speculative from SlashGear, so its well worth taking these with some salt. The 6GB of RAM is one particular specification that weve heard over and over again, and considering Samsung make their own memory modules, it wouldnt be too difficult for them to come up with a custom solution for the Galaxy Note. As for the camera however, weve heard rumors of Samsung putting together an even larger sensor for future devices, which could take in the same amount of light but offer a larger resolution of 14 or even 16-megapixels. Still, we have a long way to go before the Galaxy Note 6 launches towards the end of the year, and well no doubt hear more rumors and see more leaks leading up to that.
Strategy Analytics has just put out some figures for Q1 2016, showing us how many smartphones each of the top five manufacturers shipped in the first quarter, in relative to the first quarter of 2015. Now remember that these are shipped models, not those that were sold in the quarter. Whats interesting to see here is that globally, shipments decreased by roughly 10 million. Going from 345 million in Q1 2015, to about 334.6 million in Q1 2016.

Looking at the chart below, youll see something a bit surprising. Samsung actually shipped 3.7 million less in Q1 2016 compared to the year prior. Now this is surprising, because the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge launched in Q1 2016. While the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge launched in Q2 of 2015. Apple also shipped about 10 million less in Q1 compared to the year prior. Which opened up space for Chinese manufacturers Huawei and OPPO to gain some ground. Huawei shipped 28.3 million in Q1 2016 versus 17.3 million in Q1 2015. While OPPO pretty much doubled their shipments from 8.3 million last year to 15.5 million this year. Xiaomi, who is sitting in fifth place for smartphone shipments, actually shipped about .3 million less compared to last year.

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Market share didnt change a whole lot. Samsung is still sitting at the top with 23.6% followed by Apple at 15.3%. Huawei has 8.5%, OPPO at 4.6% and Xiaomi at 4.4% as of Q1 2016. Everyone else accounts for the 43.6% in Others. So while Samsung and Apple have lost a bit of market share, the Chinese manufacturers have gobbled up their losses. Huawei is likely seeing such a big increase due to the Nexus 6P they built with Google, as well as the success of the Honor 5X which was announced at CES in January. Whats interesting about Xiaomi is that while they shipped less smartphones in the quarter, they did increase their market share. Albeit by very little. Going from 4.3% to 4.4%.

Pretty interesting to see how the market share changes from quarter to quarter. OPPO leap frogged Xiaomi in the first quarter of this year. Itll be interesting to see how the numbers change in Q2 2016, especially with more flagships being available, like the Huawei P9, HTC 10 and LG G5.
Google Fiber, the Gigabit internet service from the Mountain View, California-based tech giant, has finally launched in Nashville, Tennessee, fifteen months after the company had originally announced the city as a probable new market. The service was first rolled out in the Kansas City Metropolitan area as an experimental project in February, 2010 and has since expanded to include cities like Provo, Utah; Atlanta, Georgia and Austin, Texas, among others. Meanwhile, even though Google Fiber is now technically open for business in Nashville, it is only available in four apartment and condominium buildings in the city for now. According to the head of Google Fibers Nashville operations, Ms. Martha Ivester, the company intends to scale up its service eventually, and although she refused to divulge more details at the time of the launch, she did say that the companys goal is to connect the lions share of Nashville, with Google Fiber in due course.

Along with its famed Gigabit internet service, Google is also bringing its cable TV and Fiber Phone services to the city. While the entire triple play package including Gigabit internet, 150+ TV channels and unlimited talk on Fiber Phone will cost users $140 (plus taxes and fees) per month, Google is offering 100 Mbps broadband at just $50, while the Gigabit connection comes for $70. Subscribers to the Gigabit plan will also get 1 TB of free cloud storage across Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos. Users will also have their $100 installation fee waived with a one-year commitment from residential customers in single family homes, although apartment dwellers will be spared the one-time charge whether or not they sign-up for the long haul.

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It is important to note here that the 5 Mbps plan Google had been offering earlier is now no longer being offered at new locations. In fact, the company recently stopped offering the service in existing markets like Kansas City, although the company will continue to honor its commitment to users who signed up for the service earlier. As part of the deal, users had to pay upfront or in twelve equal monthly installments, a $300 construction fee, which then entitled them to receive at least seven years of 5 Mbps internet without having to pay any further monthly charges over that period.
As the fourth month of the year comes to a close, many companies have been disclosing their final figures for Q1 2016, and while Apple has suffered quite substantially, Samsung has had a great quarter, LG isnt doing so well. The LG G5 not only launched late, but has failed to experience the same sort of runaway success as the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. While LG Electronics as a whole has posted some operating profit, the LG Mobile Communications department is posting a decline in profits and shipments, so its clear that these figures point LG out as someone not quite able to challenge the likes of Apple and Samsung, or even some of the bigger Chinese names out there.

For Q1 2016, LG Mobile Communications posted a 3% decline compared to the Q4 2015 figures as well as a 19% decline in revenue since Q4 2015. LG says that the advertizing costs for the new G5 had helped the slump in revenue, but also a lack of interest from American networks and the late launch of the G5 itself. All-in-all, LG shipped 13.5 Million smartphones during Q1 2016, a 12% drop from Q4 2015. Its important to remember here that Q1 2016 hasnt seen much of the G5 hit shelves as it launched right towards the end of the January to March period and LG expects the G5 to help boost their Q2 2016 figures into something a little more respectable. LG had to write off roughly $170 Million in costs, which is offset by LG Electronics operating profit of $420 Million. Other factors have attributed to this as well, such as economic instability in Latin America, a region that LG has turned to in the past to drive growth selling budget devices.

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So, all-in-all, LGs mobile division isnt doing quite as well as wed have thought, but the G5 has yet to really get going. Pre-orders started late into the quarter and it didnt hit shelves until the end of the quarter. Hopefully, their modular flagship can help them post better Q2 figures, as right now the South Korean firm doesnt appear to have hit the high targets that analysts had banded around earlier in the quarter and compared to Samsung and Apple, these figures are but a drop in the ocean.
One of the issues virtual reality is facing as an industry, is getting the hardware in potential customer hands. While the industry is one which is seeing a large degree of coverage from the media, virtual reality is one of those things that you have to experience, to truly understand what is on offer and the potential for the industry as a whole. While the higher-end options like HTC Vive is much harder to get customers to test out, Googles Cardboard is far more accessible and affordable. In fact, over the last year a number of third-party businesses have literally been giving away Cardboard viewers to their customers.

Back in November, the New York Times was one of those businesses and in partnership with Google, they gave away one million Cardboard viewers for free. All you had to do to get one was be part of their general physical distribution and it was automatically sent to your address along with your print copy of the newspaper. Today, the New York Times has again announced they will be giving away another batch of Cardboard viewers, although there are a couple of notable differences with this latest promotion.

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Firstly, the number being given away is far less this time round with 300,000 free headsets up for grabs. Secondly, in contrast to the physical print copies of the New York Times, this latest batch will solely be issued to select digital subscribers. The press releases specifically defines the selection of users as the most loyal digital subscribers and will be chosen based on the duration of their subscriptions. Viewers are due to be shipped out to those users next month and the delivery date is designed to coincide with the launch of the latest New York Times VR experience film, Seeking Plutos Frigid Heart which looks to take those tuning in on a flight around Pluto and will be accessible through the NYT VR Android app from May 19th. An app which the New York Times confirms has so far been downloaded 600,000 times since its November 2015 launch. Those interested in finding out more about the latest Cardboard giveaway or the upcoming Pluto VR experience from the New York Times, can do so by heading through the source link below.
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. Artsakh Republic Prime Minister Arayik Harutyunyan received a citizen of St. Petersburg, Karabakhi philanthropist Maxim Atayants on April 28. Atayants visited Artsakh to discuss the restoration and resettlement issues of the settlement adjacent to Arakel community in Hadrut region, Press Service of Artsakh Government told this to Armenpress.

Prime Minister welcomed the continuation of patriotic philanthropy especially in these difficult days in Artsakh. He ensured that M. Atayantss initiative will give a new life to the community and will have a positive impact on its development.

Karabakhi philanthropist informed that till now two apartments were built within the framework of the project, and it is planned to build several apartments which will be given to large families. He said that in addition to the construction of houses, settlement infrastructures will be restored, as well as factory will be established which will provide people employment opportunities.
With his latest round of victories in the primaries held last Tuesday, the New York real-estate mogul, Mr. Donald Trump, is ever closer to getting his partys nomination for the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections this November, much to the consternation of large swathes of observers, voters and political commentators across the country. While Mr. Trump has attained a very strong and loyal group of followers within sections of his own party, not everybody in the country is impressed with the GOP frontrunner. Whats interesting is that its not just the Democrats whore up in arms over the possible nomination of the flamboyant New York billionaire. The high levels of opposition Mr. Trump faces from within his own party establishment is simply unprecedented in mainstream American politics at the highest level in recent times.

With more and more people joining the anti-Trump bandwagon by the day, it is now the turn of a couple of left-leaning groups to petition Google to drop out of its plans to participate at the Republican National Convention at Cleveland, Ohio, this July. Color of Change and Credo Action claim to have already collected 500,000 signatures for their aforementioned petition which they now plan to hand over to Googles executives at the companys Mountain View headquarters later today. The organizations also have a plane flying over the Googleplex displaying a banner that reads Google: Dont Be Evil. #DumpTrump. According to Ms. Heidi Heiss of Credo, Our ask to Google is really simple: Dont put your brand on a Trump-led convention. Theyre legitimizing and normalizing Trumps platform, which is racist, misogynistic and xenophobic. We dont want that platform to be validated by a company like Google.

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It remains to be seen what comes of this initiative, but on its part, Google says that it is planning to attend the convention very much the same way it plans to attend the Democratic Convention a few days later at Philly  as a neutral and nonpartisan observer, not unlike the way media outlets are expected to operate. Google is also expected to provide real-time data insights and information during the convention. Meanwhile, Google is not the only company being asked to reconsider its decision to sponsor the RNC. Color of Money has also reportedly sent letters to AT&T, Cisco, Coca-Cola and Xerox, asking them not to associate themselves with Mr. Trump. So far, however, theres no word on whether any of the companies are considering acting on these requests and petitions.
Samsungs TouchWiz UI has been scorned by many for more than a few reasons over the years, mostly due to the amount of RAM and storage it takes up resulting in devices that arent as snappy as they could be. That has largely changed with the more recent version of Samsungs official Android launcher, but that doesnt mean that Samsung is about to stop striving to make TouchWiz even better. While much of the clutter has been stripped away and the design has been overhauled over the last few versions to resemble something more in line with Googles Material Design guidelines, there is still an opportunity for Samsung to improve upon another very important area. Battery life.

Today at the annual Samsung Developer Conference, the company announced that they were beginning to test a new TouchWiz launcher that is powered by the Vulkan API in attempts to save battery life on devices. While the Vulkan API is going to do some real good in the mobile gaming space to help further the advancements of whats possible with gaming on the platform, Samsung has realized that gaming doesnt have to be the Vulkan APIs only trick, and is currently doing limited tests with this new launcher theyre referring to as TouchWiz-like.

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While there is still likely a lot of work to do on the launcher as Samsung has stated that it doesnt make full use of the Vulkan APIs capabilities, it allows this version of TouchWiz to perform equally or better than the version that is currently installed on Samsungs devices while also consuming less power to do the same tasks. This alone makes Samsungs work with the API and on the new launcher a promising pursuit as it could end up hitting existing devices like the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, and even if it doesnt, it could hit next generation devices that offer up even better battery life without having to restrict the performance of the system and its hardware. Granted, its worth mentioning that Samsung has only tested this new launcher against the current version of TouchWiz for things like scrolling pages and tapping on the app drawer to open it up, which are about as basic as they come, but less power consumption is less power consumption, as Samsung notes a 6% savings on battery life for the same tasks in the TouchWiz that uses GL ES.
As most of you know, Samsung has introduced their new Galaxy S7 flagship smartphones back in February during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. The company had high hopes for these two devices, and were expecting good results in the first quarter of this year. Well, the company has published the Q1 2016 results, and it seems like the estimates were quite accurate, read on.

Samsung is one of the largest tech companies in the world, and they dabble in pretty much everything, but well try to focus on whats important to our site, so well talk mostly about Samsungs Mobile division. The company has reported $24.2 billion in mobile revenue for the first quarter of this year, which is 6.6% more than they reported in the same period last year. As far as operating profits go, Samsung Mobile reported $3.39 billion, and this number is extremely important. Believe it or not, Samsung Mobiles operating profit in Q1 2016 is 42% higher than in the same period last year, which is staggering. The company even mentioned the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge as the main reasons why that is, they said that the demand for their new flagships is really strong, which essentially means that the sales beat the estimates this time around.

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Looking ahead to the second quarter, while demand for smartphones and tablets is forecast to remain flat due to continued weak seasonality, the worldwide rollout of the latest flagship models as well as an increase in shipments of the mid-to-low-end Galaxy A and J series are expected to help the company maintain robust sales momentum and profitAs for the year ahead, Samsung anticipates softening demand in the smartphone market and negative growth in the tablet market. The company will reinforce its leadership in the premium smartphone segment on the back of the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, while continuing to increase volume and improve profitability in the mid-to-low-end segment. In addition, the company will continue to expand the Samsung Pay service to global markets and look into new business opportunities. said the company. It is also worth mentioning that the company reported an operating loss of $237 million in the display panel business, due to the LCD panel earnings decline. The company did, however, say that the demand for their OLED panels will continue, and that more and more companies will include OLED displays in low-to-mid range smartphones. Recent reports even suggested that Apple might be one of Samsungs customers for OLED displays, but well see.

So, it seems like things are looking up for Samsung. As most of you know, the company has faced constant declines in profit until they decided to re-invent the design of their devices, releasing Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge last year was a good start for Samsung, and it seems like the company hit just the right spot when they released the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge two months ago. Well see what happens by the end of this year, and how long will Samsung be able to ride on the success of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. That being said, if youd like to take a closer look at Samsungs sales and operating profit for 2014, 2015 and 2016, check out the image down below.
Samsungs Developer Conference for 2016 recently took place in San Francisco, and needless to say, the Korean tech giant took the opportunity to share ideas and showcase a variety of products, some of which have been labeled as prototypes created by the companys C-Lab division. Samsung discussed its ARTIK cloud platform for the Internet of Things, and to demonstrate the platforms capabilities to a certain extent, the company also took the veil off a personal assistant robot / smart speaker prototype called Samsung Otto, which can be used to connect and control various IoT home devices.

Samsung Otto can be described as a smart speaker, a personal assistant robot, or both, and not unlike the Amazon Echo lineup, Samsung Otto incorporates a speaker, a microphone, and can answer a number of questions including basic queries such as whats the weather? However, unlike the Amazon Echo series, Samsung Otto also includes a small display that can accommodate numerous facial expressions, as well as animations which, for example, can inform the user about the weather at a glance. Furthermore, Samsung Otto is equipped with an HD camera for face recognition, but the sensor can also be used as a remote security camera. Additionally, the robot has the ability to sing and bobble its head, but thats as far as physical animations go, so Sharps RoboHon can rest easy.

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As far as availability is concerned, sadly Samsung Otto is still a prototype and cant be qualified as a real product yet. However, Samsung Ottos main purpose at SDC 2016 was to showcase the ARTIK cloud platform in action from a hardware and software point of view, which means that similar products may be released in the future by companies other than Samsung, who may be interested in creating commercially viable IoT products based on the South Koreans new ARTIK platform. At the moment, Samsung ARTIK consists of three complete IoT hardware solutions (ARTIK 1, ARTIK 5, and ARTIK 10), which can natively communicate with other IoT devices using Samsungs ARTIK Cloud service. Samsung Electronics took an interest in robotics last year, and reportedly the company will work together with the South Korean government for the next three years in order to boost the countrys robotic sector.
Samsung was in attendance in San Francisco today as the company was hosting their developer conference. Needless to say, as this was a developer conference and the bulk of the 4000 strong audience consisted of developers, Samsungs main goal was to communicate to those developers the benefits of developing for Samsung. And that is exactly what they did and while making a number of forward-thinking announcements like the expansion of Samsung Pay and the intent to bring to market a dedicated standalone virtual reality headset, Samsung also looked to appeal to developers by flat out number talking.

It is no secret that Android is the biggest (by volume) operating system and is also no secret that Samsung is the biggest (by volume) Android manufacturer and during the conference, Samsung drew on both the companys current standing and the Android ecosystem as a whole to really drive home that developing for Samsung is the way forward and certainly more beneficial than developing for Apple. Thanks to their increased push into newer fields like virtual reality, Auto, wearables, mobile payments and the general Internet of Things, Samsung tried to get across that the scope of third-party development for Samsung products is only going to grow and widen going forward. Samsungs President of Mobile, Dongjin Koh, looked to further drive home the point by stating there will be close to 21 billion connected devices by 2020 and pointing out that right now there are more connected devices than there are people.

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While some of the talk was very pro-Android due to Samsungs stance as the leading Android manufacturer, the essence of the conference was Samsung and not Android with the company hoping developers will see the benefits of developing for Samsung-specific apps, services, features and whether using Tizen, Android or otherwise. While also hoping the claims of 7.7 billion phones, 3.4 billion smartphones and 5 billion connected devices was enough to highlight the far-reaching capabilities of Samsung. Not to mention, Koh did make it clear that Samsung is a company who is willing to listen to its developers and one which is looking to a more open and collaborative relationship between its software and its developers.
The controversial Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 was finally amended by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday. All 419 members of the House unanimously voted in favor of an amendment which will require law enforcement authorities to obtain a search warrant before accessing old e-mails stored by technology firms.

As of now, the law requires enforcement authorities to access electronic communications like e-mails by producing subpoenas. This way, Microsoft alleges, enforcement authorities abuse the law to prevent the company from informing its users that their e-mails are being accessed by the authorities. The company recently filed a lawsuit against the Justice department, alleging that subpoenas were used frequently by the authorities to prevent users from being informed that their e-mails were being accessed. Even though the amendment passed the House without a single vote against it, it is yet to be voted on by the Senate.

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The bill will be introduced to the Senate by Chuck Grassley, the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman. Grassley will first review the bill, discuss it with his committee and then decide the right time to introduce it to the Senate. However, this being an election year, it seems unlikely that the Senate will get to vote on the bill anytime soon. However, as per Reuters, Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee, two Democratic and Republican senators, have praised the bill, calling it a historical step toward updating our privacy laws for the digital age. The Business Insider claims that the bill already has support of more than a quarter of senators and the prospects of its passage are bright.

In the last year, technology companies have increasingly protested against actions of the Justice department which they termed as direct assaults on individual privacy. Not so long ago, the Justice department decided to invoke an 18th century All Writs Act to force Apple to create a software that would give the FBI backdoor access to a terrorists iPhone. While Apple protested, Google publicly supported Apple by stating that the government must not force companies to compromise the safety and security features that have been developed to keep people safe from identity thieves, hackers, and other criminals. Apple has also received support from a number of other technology companies like Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Cisco, Dropbox, Evernote, Microsoft, Pinterest and Snapchat.

Even though the All Writs Act needs a fresh look, the fact that the House passed an update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act shows that the representatives are concerned about individual privacies and concerns. If the bill is passed by the Senate, users across the country will rest assured that their private e-mails and other correspondence are not being read by someone else without their consent or without a legal warrant.
Attention to Micro-Details Courtesy Photo

Small class sizes and a low student-to-faculty ratio brought senior Chelbee Farnen to Angelo State. ASU then sent her to places she never thought possible.

A biology major from Marble Falls and member of the ASU Honors Program, Farnens most recent excursion in April was to present her microbiology research at the Great Plains Honors Council Conference at John Brown University in Arkansas. She has also presented research at regional and national conferences in Chicago and Oklahoma Cityand she represented ASU at the 2015 Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference in Annapolis, Md.

But the highlight of her ASU experience came last summer when she was accepted into the Revolutions in Biomedicine Summer School at Imperial College in London, England, where she spent three weeks studying and researching advances in global health, immunology, neurology and many other topics.

It was very intensive, Farnen said. There were times we had five lectures in a day over completely different subjects. We mostly had lectures in the mornings, and then most afternoons we had some kind of lab. We did a cystic fibrosis lab and a 3-D printing lab.

For the second week, we designed, performed, obtained data from and then presented a research project, she added. We were in the lab non-stop. I had never done cell culture before, and that was our project, so it was a really awesome experience. The third week, we went back to covering many other subjects, including bio-informatics.

Scenes Around London















But it wasnt all work for Farnen and the 20 other students in her research group who hailed from places like New York, North Carolina, Italy, Spain and China. They stayed in the Wilson House residence hall, which was just a walk across Londons famous Hyde Park from the Imperial College, and got to see a fair bit of their host city.

They had a lot of activities planned for us, Farnen said. I was surprised because a lot of the students didnt take advantage of all of them, but I went to everything. Every weekend, they had our schedule completely packed, and we walked everywhere, which I was not expecting.

I wanted to start somewhere smaller, and I saw on the ASU website that the student-to-faculty ratio was really low, so I decided to try it. And obviously, I never transferred. Chelbee Farnen

Their weekend treks included traditional tourist destinations like the Tower of London, British Museum, Shakespeares Globe Theatre and the London Zoo. But Farnen particularly enjoyed their walk through the East End art district, where they saw the works of famous English graffiti artist Banksy and of Thierry Noir, who became famous for his graffiti on the Berlin Wall.

None of those experiences would have been possible, though, without a leap of faith and some help from Farnens mom.

Despite excelling at Marble Falls High School, Farnen only applied to two collegesASU and the University of Texas at Austin.

I initially came to ASU thinking that if I hated it, I could always transfer to UT-Austin, she said. But I had also heard about UT-Austin classes with 700 people in a lecture hall, and that didnt sound appealing to me. I wanted to start somewhere smaller, and I saw on the ASU website that the student-to-faculty ratio was really low, so I decided to try it. And obviously, I never transferred.

But it wasnt until freshman summer orientation that Farnen discovered the ASU Honors Program. It was bordering on too late to apply, so her mom went to work on program director Dr. Shirley Eoff. Apparently, her mom is persuasive, because Farnen was allowed to submit her application.

Farnen (right) and other members of the Honors Student Association pose with their group's 2015 Rammy Awards.

Getting into the Honors Program has been life-changing for me, Farnen said, because without being an Honors Program student, I would never have been able to have many of my great experiences at ASU.

In addition to the Honors Program, Farnen is a member of the Alpha Chi, Phi Kappa Phi and Tri-Beta national honor societies, the Honors Student Association and Whos Who Among Students at American Universities and Colleges. She is also an Honors Program mentor and microbiology lab assistant, and she even plays intramurals. All that doesnt leave time for much else.

I do try to relax when I can, though, Farnen said, and I do enjoy cooking for my friends. Its therapeutic for me to chop stuff up.

After graduating from ASU in May 2016, Farnen will join the Ph.D. program in integrated biomedical sciences at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, where she will concentrate on infection, inflammation and immunity. Her ultimate goal is to be a university professor.
The 4th Annual Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fair took place on April 26, 2016 at the Rodney Rey MacArthur Auditorium with the purpose of positively promote careers in the Technical/Vocational areas in Anguilla.

A number of public and private establishments on Anguilla partnered in this years STEM Fair and the fair showcased an array of careers in the technical and vocational areas and showed the significance and relevance of Math and Science in many occupations targeting Grade 6  3rd Form students.

For the second time around, the Ministry of Social Development partnered with the Anguilla Statistics Department to engage students in additional activities throughout the day. Students from the various schools attending the fair were given the opportunity to win prizes sponsored by corporate Anguilla.

Trivia questions relating to Math Logic, Data Analysis, and Applied Math were posed to the students. Students were given a question and a duration of one  two minutes to calculate the answer to the question posed. In answering the question they were required to present their answers in writing and also to explain the approach used to achieve the answer.

The winners for this activity were:
NASSAU, The Bahamas  Countries within the region are strategizing ways to ensure sustainability of their respective social security schemes. Minister of Labour and National Insurance, and Minister of the Public Service, the Hon. Shane Gibson, said Wednesday that he was happy the agenda of the 27th CARICOM Heads of Social Security Meeting would focus on advancing social security in the Caribbean. Minister Gibson was delivering the keynote address at the forum, which takes place April 27-29 at Atlantis, Paradise Island.

Participating Countries, including The Bahamas, are Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, The British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Christopher & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & The Grenadines, and the Turks & Caicos Islands.

The meeting also takes into account the global trends in social security and how these fit within the region, and at a national level.

Caribbean nations must find their own unique method to adopt the innovative strategies in management and administration that help to improve communications with stakeholders and citizen engagement, expand benefits, improve compliance levels and strengthen their governance structures; all while ensuring the sustainability of their national insurance funds, the Minister said.

Bahamas Minister of the Public Service, the Hon. Shane Gibson (right) along with other Bahamian officials from the National Insurance Board in that country, stand with delegates

He shared that in The Bahamas, the National Insurance Fund has reserves of approximately $1.8 billion, and that NIB plays a critical role in the Bahamian economy.

In fact, in many instances, NIB has invested in a number of infrastructural projects and private sector equity offerings as a means of stimulating economic activity and ultimately building our economy.

One of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals aimed at building resilient infrastructure, promoting sustainable industrialization and fostering innovation, speaks to the need for investment in infrastructure, including information and communication technology.

Bahamas Minister of the Public Service, the Hon. Shane Gibson (left) along with other Bahamian officials from the National Insurance Board in that country, stand with delegates

This type of investment empowers communities and advances a digital agenda that will improve the ease with which citizens do business, Mr. Gibson said.

In this vein, he shared with delegates that the NIB has reached a significant milestone in its history  the implementation of a state-of-the-art Insurance Administration System software, which will improve its services to the public.

And, by June of this year, the NIB will cause businesses to benefit from these modern facilities when the employer self-service portal is introduced.

Another measure Mr. Gibson shared is the introduction of the NIB Smart Card, which contains encrypted information for the insured, has other security features to prevent fraud, and is the gateway to the governments proposed National Health Insurance plan.

He said however, that the NIB new policies do not allow for undocumented migrants in this case, CARICOM nationals, to be registered as insured people. Consequently, they will not be able to obtain a smart card.

In this vein, contributions of those CARICOM nationals who fall into this category will be available to be pooled in support of their benefit claims in their home country under the CARICOM Reciprocal Agreement on Social Security.

We are pleased that efforts are being made by CARICOM to engage with Haiti with a view to Haiti signing onto the Reciprocal arrangements, Mr. Gibson said.

He said he is looking forward to the discussion on the accession of the CARICOM Agreement on Social Security in respect of Haiti and Suriname and Associate Member States and the outcome, during the meeting.

The 27th CARICOM Heads of Social Security Meeting came on the heels of the Meeting of the Inter-American Conference on Social Security (CAOSA) held April 24 to 27, 2016, which was opened by the Rt. Hon. Perry Christie, Prime Minister, at Atlantis.

By Lindsay Thompson, Bahamas Information Services
FREEPORT, Grand Bahama  One hundred and fifty delegates from 23 countries will converge on Grand Bahama for the 9th UK-Caribbean Ministerial Forum, April 28-30, 2016 at the Grand Lucayan resort, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Immigration, the Hon. Fred Mitchell announced during a press conference on Wednesday.

Prime Minister of The Bahamas, the Rt. Hon. Perry Christie, will officially open the event on Friday evening. The first session of the UK-Caribbean Ministerial Forum, held every two years, was in Nassau in 1998. The last one was held two years ago in London.

According to Minister Mitchell, the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, the Rt. Hon. Philip Hammond, is expected to head their delegation. Delegations from the Caribbean will be headed by the High Commissioners or Ministers of Foreign Affairs. His Excellency, Ed Bethel, High Commissioner of The Bahamas to London, is already in Grand Bahama.

Explaining the purpose of the Forum, the Minister said members of the region will exchange views with the British about their interests in the world, and their concerns in the Caribbean sub-region.

We expect an exhaustive set of discussions over those two days on things which range from energy, security, education, the question of expanded opportunities on employment, development, to exchange views on Foreign Policies.

Minister Mitchell added that there are two things in particular that he thinks will be discussed, and they are: 1) The fact that Financial Services is now front and centre with concerns with the Panama Papers and what is happening in the United Kingdom; and 2) De-risking, which has become an important issue for Caribbean countries where local banks throughout the region are now having difficulties with corresponding banking relationships in developed country markets.

This is imperiling the ability of these banks to be able to survive in trade overseas in foreign currency.

Describing the forum as useful, Minister Mitchell further stated that prior to 1973, the British had the administrative responsibility for The Bahamas, and much of the Caribbean, which has changed. However, in order for countries to progress they must do so within inter-dependent relationships, such as CARICOM, CariForum, and for Britian, the European Union.

He added it is on this platform that they will be meeting in Grand Bahama. It is hoped that the visitors will be able to see what the island has to offer. Minister Mitchell concluded by saying he knows the Ministry for Grand Bahama will pull out all the stops to make the island ready.

Minister Darville noted that the Forum provides members of the Caribbean an opportunity to hold discussions on important bi-national, regional and international issues with the United Kingdom.

This two-day dialogue will cover a range of issues including Global and Regional challenges, the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, Climate Change, Crime and Security, Financial and Economic Issues, Health and Education and Caribbean-UK Cooperation.

Delegates have already started to arrive in Grand Bahama.

Also present at the press conference were Director General of Foreign Affairs, Mrs. Sharon Brennen Haylock; Permanent Secretary of the Ministry for Grand Bahama, Melvin Seymour; and Deputy Chief of Protocol, Terry Archer
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. The Defense Ministry of Nagorno Karabakh says Azerbaijan is deploying military units in populated areas by violating international rights.

The ministrys announcement reads: According to the Geneva Convention all sites depicted in the photos are legitimate targets for the Armed Forces of Nagorno Karabakh.

The Azerbaijani forces have deployed military units in populated regions and adjacent areas by violating the Article 52 of the 1949 Geneva Convention.
(ANSA) - Rome, April 28 - Austria said Thursday it is not going to build a wall at the Brenner Pass to keep asylum seekers out. "There is not going to be a wall or barriers, as has been mistakenly reported," Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said after meeting with his Italian counterpart, Angelino Alfano. "If necessary, there will be controls". Alfano said "we have so far averted a crisis and the closure of the Brenner Pass". Asked if it was definitive, he said "We have to work on it".

Italy opposed the idea of Austrian police checking train passengers on the Italian side of the border, Alfano said. "We said no to that," Alfano said. He added his ministry has requested more police and soldiers to "control (asylum seeker) flows and road and rail routes to the Brenner Pass". He added Austria "is not going to build a wall" and that Italy "will prove to Austria it is wasting money" on the barrier it is setting up at the Brenner Pass. "Preparatory (barrier-building) will continue in case an extraordinary flow (of asylum seekers) were to reach Austria," Alfano said. He also announced the two countries signed a deal for their respective border police to communicate on a daily basis.

Also on Thursday, the European Commission said it is concerned over Austria's plans to introduce border controls. "The European Commission follows all the developments in Europe that go against the schedule to return (to the normal functioning of the Schengen agreement), in this case with serious concern," said EC spokesperson Mina Andreeva, adding that EC President Jean-Claude Juncker will meet Italian Premier Matteo Renzi in Rome next Thursday. "The Commission will evaluate any measures decided or announced by the Austrian government on the criteria of need and proportionality". Renzi said Thursday that Austria's idea of introducing controls at the Brenner Pass to stop it being overwhelmed by asylum seekers, possibly with the help of a fence, is "flagrantly against European rules".


(ANSA) - Beirut, April 28 - Italy is the guest of honour at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, which got underway on Wednesday.

The Italian pavilion presents 16 publishing houses and a large number of authors, including mystery writer Donato Carrisi and Mediaevalist Franco Cardini. There is also a display of ancient texts from Rome's Angelica Library including a Bible in Arabic and a Koran in Latin.

Heinz Beck and Andrea Mugavero are among the celebrity chefs who will present dishes inspired by famous Italian literary characters and their authors. Italy aims to boost cultural, economic and political cooperation with Abu Dhabi through its participation in the book fair.

To this end, culture undersecretary Antimo Cesaro has met with local authorities to explore how Italy can help the Emirates invest in quality tourism particularly with respect to culture and museums. "We can make an important contribution towards cataloguing and valorising the remains that come to light during the archaeological excavations planned by Abu Dhabi," Cesaro said. "In addition, the Institute of Italian Culture in the Emirates will be inaugurated in a few months' time, while the first Italian assistant has taken up a position at Zayed university this year," he added.

photo: crown prince of Abu Dhabi (left)
(supersedes previous) (ANSA) - Milan, April 28 - One of four Islamist terror suspects arrested Thursday allegedly wanted to attack the Vatican and the Israeli embassy in Rome.

Italian police have arrested four people in a foreign fighter investigation, including a Moroccan-born man living in Italy with orders from the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) terror group to carry out attacks in Rome during Holy Year, prosecutors said Thursday. The man allegedly received a message urging him to commit terror attacks in Italy, investigators said. "Dear brother Abderrahim, I send you... the bomb poem... listen to the sheik and strike," was the content of a WhatsApp message to arrested suspect Abderrahim Moutahrrik, the investigators said. The sheik in question may be a reference to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who is usually called caliph, or to another ISIS sheikh, experts said.

Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli told reporters that investigators intercepted the communication from within ISIS-held territory. There was no indication any attacks were imminent and Romanelli said authorities acted quickly to close the investigation, arresting four people and issuing arrest warrants for two others believed to be in ISIS territory.

"This is a new profile, because it was not a generic indication, but an indication given to a specific person who was invited to act within the territory of the Italian State," Romanelli said.

Authorities arrested Moutahrrick and his wife Salma Bencharki, who allegedly were planning to travel from their home in Lecco, north of Milan, to ISIS-held territory with their children aged two and four. Romanelli said Moutahrrick had taken Italian citizenship and was an accomplished boxer.

As well, investigators said Moutahrrick planned to attack the Israeli embassy and the Vatican in the nation's capital. "I want to hit Israel in Rome," he told fellow arrested suspect and Moroccan national Abderrahmane Khachia in a tapped February 6 conversation. Investigators say Moutahrrik said he contacted an Albanian national in order to obtain weapons and that he specifically said he planned to attack the Israeli embassy in Rome.

"For these enemies I swear if I manage to bring my family to safety, I swear I will be the first to attack (...) in this crusading Italy (...) the Vatican with the will of God," Moutahrrik told Koraichi in a March 25 audio message. "My only request to you is my family, you know I want (...) my children to spend some time growing up in the Islamic caliphate".

Khachia, 23, was arrested in the northern city of Varese, prosecutors said. Prosecutors also issued arrest warrants for an Italian-Moroccan couple who left to join ISIS last year with three small children. Romanelli said that man, identified as Mohamed Koraichi, had become an ISIS fighter and had communicated the orders to carry out attacks in Italy while making arrangements for the other family to join the terror group. The fourth arrest was of Koraichi's sister, prosecutors said.

Premier Matteo Renzi used Twitter to thank the authorities involved in the anti-terror operation. "Very important anti-extremist operation in north this morning," Renzi said via his @matteorenzi account. "Compliments to the ministry, intelligence (services), investigators and police forces #alltogether (#tuttiinsieme)".


No Italian troops to Libya, FM Gentiloni tells House Context does not yet warrant military forces

(ANSAmed) - ROME, APRIL 28 - Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni told the Lower House Thursday the situation in Libya still does not warrant Italy sending troops there. "I want to reiterate that the government has no intention of sending troops to Libya outside the context we talked about in recent weeks, and which has not become a reality," he said. If the arms embargo on Libya is eased for anti-terror action "that must be done for the legitimate government of Fayez al-Sarraj," which must be able to use proceeds from oil, Gentiloni also said Thursday. Without these two conditions, he said, a consolidation of the government will be difficult. "We are moving at a bilateral and multilateral level in this direction," he told the House.



Italy is a "decisive" country on Libya, Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni told the Senate Thursday. "Let's not kid ourselves, we're not a superpower, but on Libya we are a decisive country," he said. "From the EU to the G7, it's always Italy proposing a vision".It is "not true" that Italy is set to send some 900 troops to Libya, Premier Matteo Renzi said Thursday.



Gentiloni told the Senate that trying to step in to fight the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) terror group in Libya would be an error. "The different factions in Libya are competing with each other to fight Daesh (ISIS in Arabic)," he said. "Trying to... substitute ourselves in their anti-terror activities would be a big mistake. We must encourage this path, even though it is tortuous and uphill".



Gentiloni told lawmakers that the foreign policy objective is to enable Libyan authorities to combat and defeat Islamist terrorism in their country. (ANSAmed).




YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. President of the National Assembly Standing Committee on State and Legal Affairs Hovhannes Sahakyan does not understand the behaivor of MPs who announce that consensus did not take place over the Electoral Code. During the discussions over the Electoral Code Hovhannes Sahakyan came with a concluding speech at the National Assembly stating that he has such an impression that the National Assembly adopted the Electoral Code without consensus. When our colleagues leave session hall stating that consensus did not take place, it only means that they avoid from the responsibility from their own voters, Sahakyan stated this commenting on statement by the ANC Faction that said consensus did not take place. .

He added that all global suggestions by civil society and the opposition were mainly included in the draft Electoral Code. We said we will include those proposals only in case of finding donor organizations, so it is incorrect to say that there has been no consensus on the Electoral Code, Hivhannes Sahakyan said.

He mentioned that all those political forces who want to have better Electoral Code should participate in the discussions of the Commission works and come up with their suggestions starting from May 2. There is enough time and the Commission is ready to hear new suggestions.
Libya: gov't calls for halt on anti-ISIS Sirte offensive Govt wants advance to stop until a joint command is nomin

(ANSAmed) - ROME, APRIL 28 - Libya's U.N.-supported Presidential Council, led by Fayez al Sarraj, has asked the forces of General Khalifa Haftar and Misrata to stop their anti-ISIS advance towards Sirte "until a joint command for the offensive is nominated".



The council said in a statement that any infringement of the rule would be considered a violation of military law, and that the fight against terrorism should not be used for personal gains. (ANSAmed).




BEIRUT - A Bible in Arabic and a Koran in Latin are among the historical texts being presented by Rome's Angelica Library at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, which has named Italy as its guest of honour this year.

The choices are symbols of dialogue between civilisations and religions that add to several initiatives promoting Italian culture at the event, which will also see Italian chefs cook up meals inspired by literature such as the Montalbano detective series.

Sixteen Italian publishing houses are present at the fair, along with a vast list of authors, including Donato Carrisi who is due to speak about the challenges faced by mystery novel writers nowadays. Medieval history expert Franco Cardini, who has specialised in relations between Islam and the West, will speak about the little-noted influences of Islamic culture on European society.

Italy's pavilion, managed by the Italian Publishers Association, was opened by Italian Under-Secretary for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, Antimo Cesaro. It is accompanied by an exhibition of texts dating to the 14th-18th centuries from the Angelica Library. One of the aims of Italy's participation in the event is to strengthen cooperation on a cultural as well as an economic and political level with Abu Dhabi. Cesaro has had several meetings with local authorities that examined the role that Italy can have in helping to boost the strengths of the Arab Emirates by investing in quality tourism, especially culture and museums.

"We can make an important contribution to the recording and appreciation of artifacts that will come to light during the archaeological campaigns planned in Abu Dhabi. Furthermore, within a few months the Italian Cultural Institute in the Emirates will be inaugurated," said Cesaro.

Chefs that are presenting their skills at the event include Heinz Beck from Rome's 3-star La Pergola restaurant, with dishes inspired by "The art of eating well" by Pellegrino Artusi.

Sicilian chef Andrea Mugavero will come up with receipes inspired by Montalbano author Andrea Camilleri.
Tunisia: use of donor funds needs to be more efficient Carnegie Foundation presents report

(ANSAmed) - TUNIS, APRIL 28 - "The Tunisian State needs to convince its international fund donors that their loans and donations are being used quickly and professionally," said Marwan Muasher, vice-president for the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.



Muasher was speaking at a presentation of a report by the U.S. foundation in Tunis, attended by Premier Habib Essid and other prominent figures of the political and economic life of the country.



The government also needs to "persuade the international community that, without strong development and increase in aid, it will be very difficult for Tunisia to emerge from the situation of deadlock it is going through at the moment," he said.



The report is published in three languages and entitled "Between Peril and Promise: A New Framework for Partnership with Tunisia". It focuses on the misunderstandings between the Tunisian government and international donors, who often complain about the lack of decisive action in implementing projects.



A particular cause of concern is how slowly economic reforms and projects are put into action.



When presenting the study, Muasher explained the aim of the Foundation is to offer complete analysis of the situation of the country so that it can offer useful guidance for investors, identifying the main problems the Tunisian economy faces and offering suggestions to support the Tunisian experience.



Its key advice is to adopt a rapid system to speed up priority economic projects that stimulate economic and social development and create new work.



This vision is shared by Premier Essid, who underlined the need to quickly sign a new social pact to get out of the situation of deadlock. (ANSAmed).




ROME - Italian police on Thursday broke up a suspected jihadist network planning to attack Rome and the Vatican.

Police arrested four people in a foreign fighter investigation, including a Moroccan-born man living in Italy with orders from the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) terror group to carry out attacks in Rome, including the Israeli embassy, and the Vatican during Holy Year. The man allegedly received a message urging him to commit terror attacks in Italy, investigators said. "Dear brother Abderrahim, I send you... the bomb poem...



listen to the sheik and strike," was the content of a WhatsApp message to arrested suspect Abderrahim Moutahrrik, the investigators said. The sheik in question may be a reference to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who is usually called caliph, or to another ISIS sheikh, experts said.



Moutahrrik also told fellow arrested suspect Abderrahmane Khachia in a tapped February 6 conversation that he wanted to attack the Israeli embassy in Rome.



Investigators say Moutahrrik said he contacted an Albanian national in order to obtain weapons and that he specifically said he planned to attack the Israeli embassy in Rome.



He also said he wanted to attack the Vatican, the investigators said. There was no indication any attacks were imminent and Milan Prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli said authorities acted quickly to close the investigation, arresting four people and issuing arrest warrants for two others believed to be in ISIS territory. Authorities arrested Moutahrrick and his wife Salma Bencharki, who allegedly were planning to travel from their home in Lecco, north of Milan, to ISIS-held territory with their children aged two and four. Romanelli said Moutahrrick had taken Italian citizenship and was an accomplished kick-boxer. Another Moroccan man who was planning to travel with them, identified as Abderrahmane Khachia, 23, was arrested in the northern city of Varese, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors also issued arrest warrants for an Italian-Moroccan couple who left to join ISIS last year with three small children. Romanelli said that man, identified as Mohamed Koraichi, had become an ISIS fighter and had communicated the orders to carry out attacks in Italy while making arrangements for the other family to join the terror group. The fourth arrest was of Koraichi's sister, prosecutors said.


NAPLES - They come from distant worlds, but they have tied themselves permanently to their new cities, telling their stories on their blogs, in the verses of their poetry, in videos, or by becoming tourist guides.

Immigrants from across Italy have come together in Naples, in the complex of San Domenico Maggiore, to talk about Italian cities, urban change and social interactions from their perspective.

The event "Tales of the city-world" is organised by cultural mediation group Casba and supported by Naples City Council, the Banco di Napoli foundation, Migrantour Intercultural Urban Routes and AMM Archive of Migrant Memories. These memories are what everyone carries with them and brings to the city they arrive in, in a sort of transfer of traditions, said writer Tahar Lamri, who has Algerian origins but now lives in Ravenna.

"In every city I go to, I immediately look for the sea, a river or a stream of water to throw stones into like I did when I was small in Algeria," said Lamri.

The link with water is also strongly felt in the tales of Italian-Somali poet Cristina Ali Farah. In her latest book "The Captain of the River", she talks about a young Somalian and his difficulties growing up in Rome. "In the cities of arrival each one of us looks for places that we can make our own, to draw our own sentimental map," Farah said.

The relationship between city of origin and city of arrival is also very present in the stories of the intercultural guides of Migrantour, a group of immigrant guides. Those attending the event in Naples included Sara Bent Fathi Jedidi (Turin, country of origin Tunisia), Chitra Aluthwatta (Naples, country of origin Sri Lanka), Emma Herrada (Milan, country of origin Bolivia), Doris Mayela Barragan Zambrano (Genoa, country of origin Venezuela), Zakaria Babaoui (Florence, country of origin Algeria), Mohamed Lamine (Paris, country of origin Senegal), Adelson Hugo Pequeno Pereira (Lisbon, country of origin Brazil), Marta Malgorzata (Rome, country of origin Poland). The guides of Migrantour said they tell stories of European cities from the point of view of those who are nostalgic for the land they are from but also love the place they reach.

"In Florence there is no sea, but looking at the panorama from the hill, the city reminds me of Algiers," said Zakaria, who is studying mechanical engineering and also works as a guide in the multicultural areas of the town. Visits proposed by Migrantour often head to international markets such as Porta Palazzo in Turin or Piazza Vittorio in Rome.
ROME - Austria said Thursday it is not going to build a wall at the Brenner Pass to keep asylum seekers out. "There is not going to be a wall or barriers, as has been mistakenly reported," Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said after meeting with his Italian counterpart, Angelino Alfano. "If necessary, there will be controls". Alfano said "we have so far averted a crisis and the closure of the Brenner Pass". Asked if it was definitive, he said "We have to work on it".



Italy opposed the idea of Austrian police checking train passengers on the Italian side of the border, Alfano said. "We said no to that," Alfano said. He added his ministry has requested more police and soldiers to "control (asylum seeker) flows and road and rail routes to the Brenner Pass".



He added Austria "is not going to build a wall" and that Italy "will prove to Austria it is wasting money" on the barrier it is setting up at the Brenner Pass. "Preparatory (barrier-building) will continue in case an extraordinary flow (of asylum seekers) were to reach Austria," Alfano said. He also announced the two countries signed a deal for their respective border police to communicate on a daily basis.



Also on Thursday, the European Commission said it is concerned over Austria's plans to introduce border controls. "The European Commission follows all the developments in Europe that go against the schedule to return (to the normal functioning of the Schengen agreement), in this case with serious concern," said EC spokesperson Mina Andreeva, adding that EC President Jean-Claude Juncker will meet Italian Premier Matteo Renzi in Rome next Thursday. "The Commission will evaluate any measures decided or announced by the Austrian government on the criteria of need and proportionality". Renzi said Thursday that Austria's idea of introducing controls at the Brenner Pass to stop it being overwhelmed by asylum seekers, possibly with the help of a fence, is "flagrantly against European rules".


ROME- Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni told the Lower House Thursday the situation in Libya still does not warrant Italy sending troops there. "I want to reiterate that the government has no intention of sending troops to Libya outside the context we talked about in recent weeks, and which has not become a reality," he said.

If the arms embargo on Libya is eased for anti-terror action "that must be done for the legitimate government of Fayez al-Sarraj," which must be able to use proceeds from oil, Gentiloni also said Thursday. Without these two conditions, he said, a consolidation of the government will be difficult. "We are moving at a bilateral and multilateral level in this direction," he told the House.



Italy is a "decisive" country on Libya, Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni told the Senate Thursday. "Let's not kid ourselves, we're not a superpower, but on Libya we are a decisive country," he said. "From the EU to the G7, it's always Italy proposing a vision".It is "not true" that Italy is set to send some 900 troops to Libya, Premier Matteo Renzi said Thursday.



Gentiloni told the Senate that trying to step in to fight the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) terror group in Libya would be an error. "The different factions in Libya are competing with each other to fight Daesh (ISIS in Arabic)," he said. "Trying to... substitute ourselves in their anti-terror activities would be a big mistake. We must encourage this path, even though it is tortuous and uphill".



Gentiloni told lawmakers that the foreign policy objective is to enable Libyan authorities to combat and defeat Islamist terrorism in their country. (ANSAmed).
This is a fragile time for the global economy. Expanding trade and investment liberalization and undertaking structural reform are the keys to achieving a more stable growth trajectory for the economies in the Asia-Pacific region. This is the key message that the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) will convey to APEC Ministers of Trade when they gather next month in Arequipa in Peru.

Structural reform promotes good governance. That leads to sound policy and regulation which enhance the flow of trade and investment, spurs new sources of growth such as the services sector, raises productivity and promotes innovation, said Juan Raffo, ABAC Chair 2016. Addressing behind-the-border barriers through regulatory reform reinforces the progress we are making in lowering barriers at the border. It benefits large businesses and assists micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) as well.

We see a high quality, comprehensive and ambitious Free Trade Agreement of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) as an effective vehicle for achieving necessary reforms on both sides of the border. So we will be asking the Ministers to pick up the pace around the pathways towards FTAAP, ratification in the case of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and completion of negotiations of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), said Raffo. Business will also continue to make detailed input to the Collective Strategic Study currently being undertaken by APEC. In particular we want to ensure that an eventual FTAAP remains relevant to business and takes account of constantly evolving circumstances.

Since its inception, ABAC has placed great importance on the role of MSMES in driving entrepreneurship and employment. The Business Council will call on APEC to expand efforts to promote MSMEs access to global markets, new technologies and finance. To emphasize that point, ABAC co-sponsored an E-Commerce in SME Summit on the margins of this meeting that attracted more than 700 participants from the PNG MSME sector.

ABAC has also attached priority to developing the services sector, which is the single biggest contributor to employment (46%) and output (70%) in APEC as well as enabling significant participation by MSMES. Business leaders will convey to Trade Ministers their strong support for APEC initiatives that pave the way for more coherent, transparent and efficient regulatory environments which are conducive to the growth of the services sector.

ABAC members will submit to Ministers detailed recommendations that promote foreign direct investment, strengthen food security, achieve strong and deep connectivity and uphold the rule of law - all of which are fundamental to sustained quality growth.

PNGs Minister of Finance James Marape gave the opening remarks to the Meeting. He outlined PNGs economic prospects and stressed his governments commitment to supporting APEC as PNG prepares to assume the Chairmanship of APEC in 2018.



ABAC was created by APEC Leaders in 1995 to be the primary voice of business in APEC. Each economy has three members who are appointed by their respective Leaders. They meet four times a year in preparation for the presentation of their recommendations to the Leaders in a dialogue that is a key event in the annual Leaders Meeting. ABAC was created by APEC Leaders in 1995 to be the primary voice of business in APEC. In 2016, Under Perus leadership ABAC is pursuing a work program under the theme Quality Growth and Human Development to respond to the challenge of maintaining the economic vitality of the Asia-Pacific Region and ensure it benefits all. There will be four tracks: consolidating progress towards the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific; facilitating MSME development through access to global markets and new technologies; promoting economic growth, diversification and sustainability; and strengthening the rule of law and economic and social sustainability.

ABAC 2016 co-chairs are Hoang Van Dung and Doris Ho, with five (5) working group chairs, namely: Sir Rod Eddington, Regional Economic Integration Working Group (REIWG); Hiroyuki Suzuki, Finance & Economics Working Group (FEWG); Dato Rohana Mahmood, MSME & Entrepreneurship Working Group (MSMEEWG); Bart Peterson, Sustainable Development Working Group (SDWG); and Anthony Nightingale, Connectivity Working Group (CWG).

For further information please contact:
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. Union of Armenians of Ukraine NGO will present the activity, achievements and issues of the Armenian community in the upcoming Diasporas international conference in the European Parliament. As Armenpress reports, the delegation of Union of Armenians of Ukraine led by the head of the NGO Vilen Shatvoryan will participate in A Europe of Diasporas international conference to be held in the European Parliament on May 2.

The most important issues of European Diaspora including the educational needs of Diaspora, historical memory and the spread of cultural heritage, the faith of refugees and the exclusion of discrimination based on nationality will be discussed during the conference.

This event will summarize the results of experience exchange and the strengthening contacts between scientists and activists of European organizations, Armenian, Jewish, Assyrian and other Diaspora organizations.

The format of the conference will give an excellent opportunity to the participants to talk with European leaders, politicians, activists and experts about the role and influence of the Diasporas of Europe.

The event is organized by the Armenian General Benevolent Union, Phiren Amenca volunteer organization, European Union of Jewish Students, as well as Educational, Audiovisual and Cultural Executive Agency of the European Union.

International cooperation became the main development direction of the Union of Armenians of Ukraine since 2013. Union representatives create cooperation platforms with American, European and other organizations.
YEREVAN, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. The coldly calculated plan for the annihilation of the Armenians, conducted by the direct order of Ottoman authorities, was undeniably genocide. It is imperative that we acknowledge it as such. Armenpress reports Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. Representative Ed Royce issued a statement referring the Armenian genocide and U.S. President Obamas statement on it. The statement runs as follows,

It is with great sorrow that we gather to remember the 1.5 million innocent lives taken in the Armenian Genocide over 100 years ago.

The coldly calculated plan for the annihilation of the Armenians, conducted by the direct order of Ottoman authorities, was undeniably genocide.

It is imperative that we acknowledge it as such.

When I was a State Senator I authored a resolution to recognize the Armenian Genocide, with the support of then Governor George Deukmejian. It was the first resolution of its kind passed by any State.

I was honored to attend the commemoration ceremonies in Yerevan two years ago, and to lay a wreath at the memorial for the victims of the genocide.

Recognition is the necessary first step for justice and healing to occur.

That is why I am deeply disappointed again this year that President Obama avoided using the term genocide in his April 24th annual statement.

It is troubling that many of the terms relating to the genocide in his statementsuffering, historical record, and tragedywere also used this year by Turkish President Erdogan himself, a self-proclaimed denier of the genocide.

In fact I believe that aspects of that ethnic cleansing program continue today, specifically the obliteration of Armenian historical and religious sites in Turkey.

As stated by Enver Pasha himself, the Ottomans planned to cleanse their Empire of Armenian religious and historical sites in Turkey.

Since 1915, Armenian burial places have been destroyed or vandalized, and their places of worship confiscated and converted into museums, warehouses or casinos.

The international community has failed to hold Turkey accountable creating an air of impunity under which Turkish authorities continue to seize properties, as we saw this weekend with the historic Surp Giragos church and related lands.

We must continue to oppose all such moves and protect Turkeys Christian heritage.

We must also seek to protect Armenian Christians who today are being targeted for violence and assassination.

I am deeply concerned for the Armenian Christians today in Syria where Armenians have been enslaved, raped, crucified, and tortured in a clearly genocidal campaign.

That is why I supported House passage of a concurrent resolution recognizing those atrocities by ISIS as genocide, and urging the Administration to acknowledge that as well.

Just as those who do not examine the past are doomed to repeat it, those who refuse to acknowledge past genocides are bound to have a blind eye to atrocities happening today.

So tonight, as we remember the victims of the first genocide of the twentieth century, let us renew our commitment to working for the safety and freedom of their descendants.

Only by so doing do we truly honor the memory of the innocent victims of the Armenian Genocide.

Chairman Royce is an active member of the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues. In April of 2014, Royce led a bipartisan delegation to Armenia where the delegation commemorated the 99th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and placed a wreath at Tsitsernakaberd, the national memorial to the Genocide.
STEPANAKERT, APRIL 28, ARMENPRESS. Press secretary of NKR MFA Ani Sargsyan considers the announcement of Azerbaijan that allegedly the NKR Defense Army keeps the Azerbaijani civilian population under fire, an endeavor to justify their failed military aggression against NKR.

As Armenpress was informed from the press service of NKR MFA, in answer to the question of Panorama.am How would you comment on the accusations of the Azerbaijani side that the NKR Defense Army is shelling the civilian population of Azerbaijan? the NKR MFA spokesperson answered, With such statements Azerbaijan has once again demonstrated that its cynicism and zeal to justify the failed military aggression unleashed against the NKR and numerous war crimes being committed by the Azerbaijani army that know no bounds.

Undeniable proofs of the NKR Ministry of Defense that Azerbaijan deploys its military objects in the settlements along the frontline in violation of the norms of the international humanitarian law and thus turning them into firing positions, which threaten the peaceful population of the NKR, demonstrate the utter falsehood of the claims and criminal nature of the tactics of the military-political leadership of Azerbaijan.

We have already stated that in order to guarantee the security of the NKR and its people, as well as to promote peace and stability in the region, NKR authorities will take diplomatic and other measures to ensure the full implementation of the agreements of 12 May 1994 and 6 February 1995, and to exclude the possibility of developments along the criminal scenario planned by the Azerbaijani authorities.
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What does leadership look like? Were seeing an American election which has thrown up new models of presidential presentation: female politicrat, throwback socialist, celebrity blowhard.

In Toneelgroep Amsterdams Kings of War, we see three more, applicable to our own time. Henry V, playboy-turned warmonger; the bedwetter, Henry VI; Richard III, the psycho who no one takes seriously until far too late. Shakespeare is unequalled in his portrayal of leadership and power, says director Ivo van Hove. It is inspiring to discover Shakespeare as a contemporary who is dealing with the type of events we see on the news every day: the dark machinations of the people in power and the violence that their decisions bring about.

His production distils five history plays down to 270 minutes and reboots the tropes of power. Elaborate ceremony bows to viral soundbite, while warmongers can now wreak havoc from their desk. Regime change is here marked by a perfunctory coronation  the new monarch plus any confederates still living march down the corridor and across a red carpet (stored on a roller for convenience). Crown and ermine capelet are plonked on, then tucked back onto the perspex shelving, ready for next time (next time is usually less than an hour away). Jan Versweyvelds set, a windowless bunker, is modelled on Churchills war rooms but equipped like a modern office  monitors, clipboards, trombone quartet. This last adds fanfare or ominous drone to events, while a countertenor (Steve Dugardin) in civil servant suiting hoots his laments unregarded.

CGI rhetoric

Like Toneelgroeps Roman Tragedies (2007), this production has immense cumulative power. A sterile white corridor frames the set, and a camera captures the offtstage conspiracies and assassinations. By setting it in a blanched site of contemporary leadership, he images government in war as a numbers game with hideous consequences, far enough removed for comfort.

Wap bap bap, shouts Ramsey Nasrs bearded Henry V. Were a long way from Oliviers puddingbowl warrior, commanding from the front. Nasr leads from a safe distance, inspiring or intimidating through broadcast and sound effect. He recites once more unto the breach from notes (to judge from the surtitles, the adaptation combines direct translation and pointed paraphrase), then goes off-script and jabs a menacing finger into the camera. Nasr insistently highlights threatened atrocities, extreme images of civilian grief  he bludgeons foes into submission via a kind of CGI rhetoric. When challenged, he blusters. Kings dont do argument.

Everyone is miked, muted to an unrhetorical murmur  the play is shorn of manspreading bravado, but can feel arid. The fractious coalition around Henry VI tends to something more shouty. Muttering conclaves are streamed from the corridor  as are an adulterous post-coital conflab, several assassinations and, most startlingly, Henry shoving through a flock of sheep, envying pastoral freedom from responsibility, a lamb in a world of wolves.

Henry VI is often played as a dissenter from his bloodbolted world. Here, Eelco Smits gawps through big glasses, a bewildered man-child among snarling adults. Even as people scheme around him, he solemnly climbs into his pyjamas, makes his bed like a good boy. He tries to do politics, but crumples in tears during conflict  grasping onto his uncles tweed jacket even as he has him arrested. The mess of it is magnetic.

With so much shaved away from the texts, you pay attention to what remains. Van Hove mostly deletes the rebels or anonymous footsoldiers who intrude upon the mighty. A leaders decisions may affect thousands, but modern government isolates you from sharing oxygen with them. Instead, he examines power grabs among the inner circle: Greys ineffectual attempt to double-cross Henry V; the Duchess of Gloucesters futile coup, which only shoves her family from power; Richards confidant Buckingham reaching the limits of his access. All suggest the isolation and paranoia of the powerful  only a step away from a shafting, never able to relax into friendship.

For many directors of these plays, the grim cycle of history is the determining factor. Recurring images unify the action  Peter Halls council table, Adrian Nobles throne, Michael Boyds sorrowing fathers and sons. Van Hove offers alternative models, but gives the production a cyclical curve as Nasr, who began as Henry V, returns as Richmond, Richard IIIs nemesis and the future Henry VII. Yet Van Hove pursues an idea of the isolation of leadership, even in a tirelessly connected world  isolated from both the consequences of action, from colleagues and citizens, and ultimately from any sense of conscience.

When the York dynasty takes charge, the bunker is briefly restyled as a lobby with leather sofas and a resident DJ. The new queen (Chris Nietvelt, whose roles here run from blowsy to beady) serves up a retro gateau with rosettes of whipped cream rosettes, and the play slows for a chorus of murmuring cake appreciation before a new crisis erupts (Buckingham, once everyone else rushes off, snaffles another slice).

A government of one

You can understand how Hans Kestingss Richard rises without trace. A shuffling bruiser who looks like a dolt, hes hunched and top heavy, his torso looming about legs squeezed into slimline trousers, his stubbled face with a blotchy blackcurrant birthmark. He seems too lumbering for terror. Richard IIIs unholy charm is usually how he plays the audience  reeling us in before cutting us off. Kesting, however, ignores us, reserving his adoration for his mirror. He confides in himself  who else can you trust? Hell sometimes look at the mirror as if checking hes still there.

If Henry VI was the good child, made helpless by correct behaviour, Richard is the little devil making home alone mischief. He plays with the official hotline phones, feigning derisive calls to Obama, Merkel, Putin (Faggot!). He tries on the crown, adopts the classic Crookbacks kinked stance, grabs a rug and runs amok, holding it like a cape as he hurtles and yelps around the stage. Its a shockingly raw need for power. As dictator, he seals the doors and hunkers down, a government of one  and in defeat bellows for A horse! before galloping madly off stage and out of history.

Photos by Tristram Kenton for the Guardian: Hans Kersting as Richard III (top); Eelco Smits as Henry VI and Janni Goslinga as Margaret. More pictures.

Follow David on Twitter at @mrdavidjays
The theoretical basis for what happens seems to have been debated on PNG Attitude for just as long  democracy, the Westminster system, the Melanesian Way and all sorts of variations thereof but none of them seems to be able to explain what is actually happening now.

It is much more than the malaise we have in Australia where people are just too weary of politics to care anymore. It runs deeper than that and seems to be something ingrained in the national character.

On the one hand you have self-serving politicians pillaging the public purse and on the other a meek and ignorant public allowing it all to happen.

There is something fundamentally wrong with Papua New Guinea and its politics but I'm buggered if I can put my finger on it.

IVE been trying to get my head around how politics in Papua New Guinea work for a very long time.

I did a post-graduate degree in politics but theres nothing there that helps me. There must be another model that I just cant see.

Or maybe there isnt. Perhaps Im captive to the western need to put things into tidy theoretical boxes and its working against my understanding?

Peter ONeill and his cronies are breaking new ground in subverting the rule of law, perverting the course of justice and abusing public trust so as to embed corruption deeper and deeper into the national psyche.

In a society that values consensus over individual interest it seems completely out of character.

Why are the people so meek in the face of this blatant manipulation? Dont they know that the meek will never inherit the earth?

Maybe they dont; maybe thats what is wrong. Maybe they are a defeated people?

How do you define the line between individual conscience and social responsibility? How far should an individual go in defending a society and be sure it is worth defending? Why would a society deliberately and knowingly turn a deaf ear on what is going on around it?

I can understand how this meekness worked back in the days when gods and kiaps strode the earth.

In those bygone days, after the kiaps and the police had established their superior firepower, people fell in line and accepted their rule.

With their superiority established, the kiaps mostly ruled with a benevolent but firm hand. Many of us thought we were administering a childlike society that needed protection from the ravages of the modern age.

However, despite this cultural arrogance, we had the welfare of the people firmly in mind and we gladly endured personal privations and put our personal ambitions aside.

Fast forward to the present and the kiaps benevolent rule has been replaced by an opportunist leadership of political elites.

Where those elites might have originally had the welfare of their people foremost in their minds this has morphed into naked personal ambition and insatiable greed. In this they have been heavily influenced by outside sources, most notably predatory capitalists.

While all the while the common people of Papua New Guinea have remained meekly submissive.

This is the part that I dont get. Why havent the people changed to reflect the new circumstances?

Why havent they risen up and put their politicians in their place - servants of the people for the greater good?

Did the kiaps do too good a job in making the people submissive? I dont think so.

Kiap rule was a mutual endeavour, we brought the people along with us on the journey to independence. Thats why we lived out in the sticks where the people lived. We also knew that one day we would be replaced by those very same people.

Then, of course, we had the rug abruptly pulled out from under us.

And what was left was a people still largely submissive to authority, a people who hadnt been given the chance to finish the journey with us.

But, then again, we old kiaps tend to rave too much about what might have been.

Still, until someone comes up with a better theory I might run with that one for a while.

Hopefully someone will explain how wrong Ive got it.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has tapped a seven-member search committee to recommend candidates to replace outgoing New York State Police Superintendent Joseph D'Amico.

Notable members of the committee include Bob Duffy, who served as Cuomo's lieutenant governor from 2011 to 2015 and is a former Rochester police chief, and Ray Kelly, vice chairman of K2 Intelligence and former commissioner of the New York City Police Department.

Two former Cuomo aides  Michael Balboni, who previously served as deputy secretary for public safety, and Mylan Denerstein, who was counsel to the governor  will serve on the panel.

Other committee members include state Sen. Patrick Gallivan, who chairs the Senate Committee on Crime Victims, Crime and Corrections, Deputy Secretary for Public Safety Rachel Small and Rockland County District Attorney Thomas Zugibe, who also serves as president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York.

"The state police plays a vital role in ensuring the safety of New York's families and communities," Cuomo said in a statement.

"Under the leadership of Superintendent D'Amico, the state police have shown remarkable courage and discipline in their service, and I have tasked this search committee with identifying candidates who will build on that record for all New Yorkers. I look forward to receiving their recommendations in the weeks ahead."

D'Amico has served as state police superintendent since 2011  the year Cuomo first took office. He was confirmed by the state Senate on Jan. 31, 2011.

Earlier this month, D'Amico announced his retirement. He will remain in his current position until a new superintendent is appointed.

"I look forward to pursuing other opportunities, but i will truly miss all of those I met along the way, including the members of the public who have always been supportive," D'Amico said in a statement on April 8. "I believe the past six years have seen the state police grow in stature and capacity and thank the governor for his unwavering support."

The governor's office said the search committee will review candidates for the position and make its recommendations to Cuomo in the coming days.

Once Cuomo appoints D'Amico's successor, the nominee must be confirmed by the state Senate.
by Marta Allevato

Sergei Chapnin, former editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, holds this view. In a recent public statement, the bishop and rector of the Sretensky Theological Seminary said that most Orthodox do not view sympathetically dialogue with Catholics, and that most do not see "any real future in the idea of Church ecumenism."

Moscow (AsiaNews)  After the historic meeting in Cuba between Pope Francis and Moscow Patriarch Kirill, an anti-ecumenical movement is developing within the Russian Orthodox Church, with Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov, pictured), rector of the prestigious theological seminary at Moscows Sretensky monastery, as its main proponent, this according to Sergei Chapnin, head of the Dari almanac and former editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate,

Speaking to AsiaNews, Chapnin noted that the Orthodox bishop  widely seen as President Vladimir Putins spiritual adviser  made remarks to this effect to sociology students at the Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Among Russian Orthodox, I do not think that today we can justifiably speak of the dominance of ecumenism, Tikhon is cited as saying by Russian news agency Ria Novosti. For most Orthodox, their Churchs support for ecumenism and Christian unity, is seen unsympathetically. Most do not see any real future in the idea of Church ecumenism.

According to the bishop, there are understandable reasons for this feeling. Ecumenism is closely associated with the ecclesiastical bureaucracy, with Patriarchate officials, and this does not add sympathy. People do not like bureaucrats. It does not matter if they wear the habit or secular clothes."

The theology of ecumenism, Tikhon added, was "invented and lacks natural reasons", whilst the anti-ecumenical theology "is based on the patristic tradition".

Patristics is the term used to describe the position of fundamentalist groups within the Orthodox Church who oppose the Nikodimist line, to which Patriarch Kirill is associated. The latter refers to a relatively new position, and is "named after Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov), who died suddenly during an audience with Pope John Paul I in 1978.

Its distinguishing feature is a lack of fear of the West and, in particular, of the Vatican, and its refusal to see unorthodox Christians as an enemy," Chapnin explained in an article for AsiaNews.

In his address to Russian students, Bishop Tikhon directly attacked Nikodims ecumenical policy during the persecutions of the Khrushchev period. In his view, this was just an ad hoc manoeuvre taken in a "cold and pragmatic way" by the ecclesiastical hierarchy of those years "to try to save the structures of the Church on the territory of the USSR under international coverage."

This is not the first time that Tikhon expresses in public his opposition to ecumenism and dialogue with Catholics. He did the same right after Francis and Kirill embraced, in a homily on 21 February, in which he cited the saint hieromartyr Hilarion (Troitsky, 1886-1929), for whom Catholics are not even a Church; consequently, they are not even Christians, because there is no Christianity without a Church.

More than a month ago, a message was posted online from some Russian Orthodox citizens to State Institutions and the Church hierarchy to restore law and order. The plea said that one of the most serious threats against the security of the [Russian] Federation is the joint declaration made by the Moscow patriarch and the pope during their meeting in Havana.

According to its signatories, the declaration "does not respect true Orthodox teachings and is a defence of the heresy of ecumenism, designed to legitimise the ecumenical movement" at the pan-Orthodox Synod to be held in June in Crete.

The attack was openly directed at Kirill, guilty of having signed the declaration with the head of the Vatican on behalf of the entire Orthodox Church without being duly delegated. By signing, the patriarch acknowledged canonical equality with the pontiff, betraying the Patristic definition of Popism as heretical.

On 15 April, the Communication Service of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate issued two press releases in response to those who view the Cuba meeting as a betrayal of the Orthodox faith, and the upcoming pan-Orthodox synod as the anti-Christ.

The Patriarchate urged people to avoid succumbing to the temptations of the evil one who wants to sow discord in the Church and tries to use every opportunity to create doubts in peoples hearts.

"The Russian Orthodox Church and its Patriarch stand firmly and unshakeably on guard for the Orthodox faith; they feel responsible for the fate of human civilisation; and they defend their position vis-a-vis every difficulty."

The Patriarchate noted that rejecting dialogue with non-Orthodox "would be a crime before God, who commanded his apostles to go and teach all nations."

"If the apostles had remained close-minded, and avoided any contact with other religions, the Gospel would never have gone beyond the borders of the Upper Room," the statement said.

Finally, the two spiritual leaders in Havana did not take part in any prayer or joint liturgy. In their talks, they did not address theological or canonical issues since the meeting was not intended to overcome these differences, nor was any agreement on this reached.
The Apostolic Exhortation contains essential elements for Christian families. It has also elicited positive thoughts among Muslims. For the Chaldean Patriarch, Islam too is waiting for something different on the family and spousal relations. Despite the war, few families have broken down, which is not the case for those who emigrated. Married priests could be a model for the whole Church.

Baghdad (AsiaNews)  Chaldean Patriarch Mar Louis Raphael I Sako spoke to AsiaNews about Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis recent Apostolic Exhortation. which contains two essential elements, for the prelate, namely mercy, which helps prepare others to understand the truth, the value of conversion, and love, and the very positive impact it has had on Muslims, who "are waiting for something different" about the family, love, and marriage.

At present, Having or creating a family is very hard in Iraq. It is a challenge, if we consider the countrys wars and confessional strife. Still, hardships can boost ties. So far, Iraqi Christians have had few broken families; the same cannot be said about those who went abroad, to the West.

The close relationship between bishop, priests, and faithful is a key factor. But, if we have authority, it is not to dominate but to serve, love, help, educate and guide people.

The Chaldean Patriarch is open to the idea of married priests, an ancient tradition in the East, within the universal Church "because there are no contradictions, and over time, "we will go in that direction". In fact, The Gospel is not a tradition; it is the living word for todays men and women. For this reason, we must confront current reality.

Patriarch Sakos interview with AsiaNews follows:

Your Beatitude: How important is the apostolic exhortation for Christian families in Iraq?

This text has two essential elements. The first is mercy, which is even more important in this Jubilee year. Jesus always speaks of mercy, one of the beatitudes that needs to be understood thoroughly because it must serve to prepare  and not destroy  people. It is not enough to forgive; we must help others to understand the value of mercy, which leads to the truth.

The Church must not be afraid; indeed, it must find the courage to improve and renew itself, because if we remain only in a traditional, conservative environment we will end up losing our faithful. Our mission is not to judge people, but to help them live in joy and forgiveness.

Then there is the element of conversion, which teaches us that the truth is love.

To what extent does Amoris Laetitia touch the Muslim world?

I think that this document  a summary of which would be handy  will have a very positive impact on Muslims, and not only here in Iraq. They too are waiting for a message, a different discourse. Take polygamy, for instance. How is it possible, today, to talk about polygamy and love? Marriage is not a baby factory. What matters is preparing and educating men to be fathers, and before that, the relationship of the couple, and the union between spouses. It will be important to spread this exhortation in the right language, i.e. Arabic. This will have a broad echo in the Muslim world, which will become interested in us, in our vision. The issue of the marriage unit, of the absence of polygamy . . . are all elements that touch Islam.

In fact, Pope Francis calls for embracing every one and forgetting no one . . .

Yes, these are words that have great value to us who know the tragedy of war, suffering and abandonment. In recent days, many have asked me why the pope welcomed Muslims at the Vatican on his return from Lesvos. I said that the Gospel does not differentiate between people who need help on the basis to their faith or ethnicity. The pope has made a highly symbolic gesture. He is very open-minded, and his action was appreciated by Muslims here. It was a highly evangelical message.

Your Beatitude: What does it mean to be a family in war-torn Iraq, amid sectarian violence and economic crisis?

Having or creating a family is very hard. It is a challenge, if we think of the political situation and the religious context. Sometimes people cannot even go to church. Economic problems and the lack of security generate great fear, but people, Christians, find strength by living fully their faith, in the Gospel.

The conflict has accentuated family crises. Are there more cases of separation or divorce?

No, on the contrary. We have had a few cases of broken families. Usually, those who go abroad, to the West, are the ones who go through profound crises that lead to break-up. They also learn the societal model in their host country. Here in Iraq, among those who remain, divorce cases are very limited, and the same goes for annulments.

Staying together, united, working and living together, protecting ourselves, being strong . . . This is the basis! For us there is nothing but the family, based on the patriarchal model, with tight and strong relations. This is even more so if we consider our daily interaction with Muslims and the tribal model. This is why for Christians it is essential to maintain strong family ties.

Patriarch Sako: Does the Iraqi Church have special programmes in support of the family?

Of course! We have different programmes. First of all, we have a course to prepare and train couples for marriage. Before the blessing, there is a thorough preparation path to follow. For those who are already married, there are prayer groups, to discuss and address problems.

There are also courses in theology open to couples and lay people in general, as well as opportunities to meet at the end of the Mass and the main services in the liturgical calendar. The faithful can meet in a classroom or outdoors, chat, meet, and help each other to boost community life.

In the parish, people know and visit each other. People do not feel like outsiders; they tend to create ties with each other, greet each other, and talk. The environment is very peaceful and homely.

Our task is to promote unity, teach, help, give a bit of hope, and promote the ministry. We have an expression for a pastor, and that is Abouna, which means father in Arabic. This means that I do not feel like an official. The Church of Jesus wants shepherds, not officials or administrators.

Is the bond between bishop, priests and community something that the Western Church should also rediscover?

I think so, because this relationship for us is essential! The faithful who come to Mass for us are not numbers; they are people. If one person does not come, I ask why he has not come. I make it my interest. I have always done it this way, first as pastor, and then bishop, in Kirkuk.

And then we have the visits to needy families, and now the displaced families*. I have always wondered what could be done to help them, to be close to them. I tell priests to be gentle, humble and serve the needy.

Besides, if we have authority, it is not to dominate but to serve, love, help, educate, and guide people. We have to make sacrifices for them, just as a father does when he goes to work to support his family. This is one of my biggest concerns at the pastoral level.

In the East, there are married priests. Could this practice be extended to the whole Church?

Why not? Today there is a shortage of priests. Why not open up the priesthood to married men. The culture and mind-set have changed. I am convinced that having married priests, as we do, would be a boost, a model for others. This is a choice. One can be a priest celibate or married. I think that over time we will go in that direction.

Of course, preparation is very important. Nevertheless, a family man can ensure good pastoral outreach, be closer to the people. There are no contradictions in this. Unmarried priests can live in the community. For me, living with others, as a priest and as a bishop, was a strength. Community life is a source of enrichment. I do the same today as the patriarch of Baghdad.

These two different types, married and unmarried priests, complement each other; they are not in contradiction. The Gospel is not a tradition; it is the living word for todays men and women. For this reason, we must confront current reality.

* Refugees who fled Mosul and the Nineveh Plain after they were overrun by the Islamic State group.
by Weena Kowitwanij

The Department of Religious Affairs organised an inter-faith forum that brought together leaders of major religions. According Abdulau Nhumsuks, a member of the Bangkok Islam Association, the idea that learning the teachings of other faiths is a sin is old-fashioned and incorrect.

Bangkok (AsiaNews)  Some Muslims think "that learning the teachings of other religions is a sin. Such an idea is old-fashioned and incorrect. Exchanging ideas is an important step to bridge the gap [with others] and lead us to honour one another, said Abdulau Nhumsuk, a Muslim and a member of the Sheikhul Islam Office and the Bangkok Islam Association.

He spoke at a seminar on the Proclamation of Religious Belief in the Society where there are Different Religions organised by the Department of Religious Affairs together with the Ministry of Culture.

Held on Monday in the meeting room of the Department of Cultural Promotion, the event attracted Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian leaders along with government officials and about a hundred members of various organisations in order to promote the peaceful practice of faith, as well as love for the homeland and the king (the guarantor of all religions).

"Thailand is a country full of different creeds, cultures and races who have previously lived together in a happy way, said Culture Minister Vira Rojpojchanarat.

However, At present, controversies in Thai society have been caused by misunderstanding in some issues. Thus, the seminar is a good opportunity for the leaders of five religions to exchange their knowledge on how the various teachings of many religions can bring the faithful to live in harmony.

For some time, the Thai Church has been active in promoting interfaith dialogue. In a significant step, Mgr Andrew Thanya Vissanu Anan, deputy general secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Thailand (CBCT), attended the opening of a mosque on 2 March.

CBCT secretary general Mgr Joseph Chusak Sirisuthi also addressed the seminar. Every religion, he said, tries its best to build peace, not only for Thailand but also for other countries worldwide.

As Christians, We should help solving problems within society and promote the dignity of human life and suffering.

The Christian inspiration centres on the Word of Jesus who said Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God (Mt 5:9). This means that those who bring peace are the children of God, including non-Christians.

For Phraphombandit, a Buddhist monk and member of the Supreme Sangha Council of Thailand, believers have a duty to live the legacy of his or her ancestors by practicing their religious teachings but they must also try to understand those of other faiths.

In the age of facts and information, we should not proclaim information that leads to division and badly influence societys thinking, he said.

In his address, Abdulau Nhumsuk mentioned tensions between Buddhists and Muslims in Thailands four southern-most provinces, scene of violence that has caused 6,500 deaths since 2004.

The situation in the southern provinces, he explained, is a good example of personal interests masked as religious battles caused by ideological extremism.
Chobani Founder Donates 10% Of Company To Employees

Trending News: World's Best Boss Gave His Employees Equity Just Because He Could

Why Is This Important?

Because more companies should work on closing the gap between CEO and worker pay.

Long Story Short

Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya had a nice surprise waiting for his employees tuesday morning  every one of them received an envelope revealing how much equity they were receiving in the company. The longest-tenured employees' shares could be worth as much as $1million.

Long Story

There's a lot of talk about the discrepancy between executive and worker pay in the U.S., which has the largest such gap in the world. Some executives realize this and take measures to make things right. There's the (possibly) Good Guy CEO who made sure every employee at his credit card processing firm was paid at least $70,000. But Hamdi Ulukaya, the immigrant founder of Greek yogurt maker Chobani, is doing his employees one better: Every single one of them just received equity in the company.

Making A Difference: Chobani yogurt founder surprises his employees by giving back to them in a very big way. https://t.co/ajIFfHHhGt  NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) April 26, 2016

Workers arrived Tuesday morning to the upstate New York plant to find white envelopes at the workstations, each containing the number of shares they received. Altogether Ulukaya gave away 10% of the privately-held Greek yogurt maker, valued at somewhere between $3 billion and $5 billion. Shares were divvied up based on tenure, and the most loyal employees shares could be worth as much as $1 million.

Ive built something I never thought would be such a success, but I cannot think of Chobani being built without all these people, Mr. Ulukaya told the New York Times. Now theyll be working to build the company even more and building their future at the same time.

As with all of these seemingly generous executive actions, there's a slight possibility of funny business. As the New York Times notes, Chobani received a loan from private equity group TPG Capital two years ago to the tune of $750 million. The loan didn't buy them any shares, however, and now the group's warrants to buy 20% of the company have essentially been diluted  they're buying 20% of a smaller pie. Whether Ulukaya has an ulterior motive for jettisoning some of his stake is unclear.

Love this. Great to see Chobani sharing its success with the employees who helped make it possible. -H https://t.co/KpGWgpX5rW  Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 26, 2016

It's not unusual for startups to pay their employees in equity, but it's almost unheard of for an established, multibillion dollar company like Chobani to make a move like this. Whatever the reason, a good boss just made a good move in investing in his employees' futures.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

Is there a financial benefit to giving away pieces of the company?

Disrupt Your Feed

And to think, my boss won't even give me a cost of living adjustment.

Drop This Fact

The average Chobani employee's equity package was worth $150,000.
Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb is calling on Gov. Andrew Cuomo to add an Assembly representative to the search committee tasked with recommending a candidate to succeed New York State Police Superintendent Joseph D'Amico.

When Cuomo announced the seven-member search panel Thursday, it didn't include a member of the state Assembly. State Sen. Patrick Gallivan, who chairs the chamber's Committee on Crime Victims, Crime and Corrections and is a former sheriff, is on the panel.

Kolb, R-Canandaigua, said three members of the Republican conference are former police officers. Assemblymen Al Graf and Michael Montesano served in the New York City Police Department. Assemblyman Peter Lawrence, whose from the Rochester area, was a state trooper for nearly three decades.

"I urge the governor to bring their voices into the discussion," Kolb said. "It is disappointing that the search committee announced by the governor neglected to include any representation from the state Assembly."

Former Lt. Gov. Bob Duffy and ex-New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly are members of the search committee. Cuomo also named two former aides, Michael Balboni and Mylan Denerstein, to serve on the panel.

Cuomo's current deputy secretary for public safety, Rachel Small, is on the committee along with Thomas Zugibe, Rockland County district attorney and president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York.

"It's nice to give former staffers a role in the process," Kolb said. "But a decision this important requires perspectives from individuals who have walked a beat, put themselves in harm's way and carry unique perspectives as both law enforcement officers and representatives in Albany."

D'Amico announced his retirement on April 8 after serving for nearly six years as the state police superintendent. He has led the state police since Cuomo took office in 2011.

He will remain as the agency's leader until his successor is appointed.

Cuomo's office said the search committee will submit its recommendations to the governor in the coming days.

Once Cuomo selects D'Amico's replacement, the nominee must be confirmed by the state Senate, not the Assembly.

"Under the leadership of Superintendent D'Amico, the state police have shown remarkable courage and discipline in their service, and I have tasked this search committee with identifying candidates who will build on that record for all New Yorkers," Cuomo said in a statement Thursday.
U.S. Rep. John Katko is speaking out against the state Department of Environmental Conservation's decision to reject a pipeline that would've carried natural gas from Pennsylvania through four New York counties.

Katko, R-Camillus, said he's "disappointed" the state's environmental agency rejected a water quality certificate which is required for the Constitution pipeline project.

"Policy makers at every level of government need to look at all opportunities to lower energy costs and create well-paying jobs," he said in a statement. "I am afraid we missed any opportunity to accomplish both of these objectives."

The DEC said Constitution's application "fails to meet New York state's water quality standards." The company proposed constructing a pipeline that stretched from northern Pennsylvania through Broome, Chenango, Delaware and Schoharie counties.

The 124-mile pipeline would end at the Wright Compressor Station in Schoharie County.

Environmentalists praised the DEC's decision, which was announced on Earth Day.

Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York, called the proposed pipeline an "environmental disaster waiting to happen."

"For years, through a campaign of scare tactics and misinformation, the oil and gas industry has made expanding fossil fuel infrastructure seem like the only choice," he said. "And industry's economic gain has come at the cost of our water, air and health. Fossil fuels make people sick; it's really that simple and clear-cut."

This isn't the first time Katko has criticized the state on energy-related issues.

The fight over the Constitution pipeline may not be over. The company said it plans to challenge the DEC's decision.
Among the shows this year's Chairman of the Boardwalk will get to see at Boardwalk Hall is Justin Bieber, who plays the Hall on July 15.
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Despite the tightening of Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) requirements ,we have seen a continued flow of inbound investment from Asia - in particular China and Malaysia - for broad acre farming properties and agribusiness operations over multiple areas, Allion Legal principal Michael Swift.The low Australian dollar and Australias high quality of product on offer has continued to attract foreign investors.Recent reforms to Australias foreign investment regime, including the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act 1975, came into effect late last year.And, according to Norton Rose Fullbrights global head of energy, Simon Currie, they were generally welcomed - on the basis they simplify the application process and clarify some of the ambiguities previously set out in the FIRBs policies.However, the reforms also provide for some increased scrutiny with respect to acquisitions of land and in the agricultural sector, including agricultural land and agribusinesses.Additionally, the reforms formalise FIRBs ability to review acquisitions and investments by foreign government investors.As of February, all foreign owners of Australian agricultural land had to have registered their holdings with the Australian Taxation Offices (ATO) Agricultural Land Register.The Coalition Government welcomes foreign investment, which plays an important role in the growth and productivity of our agriculture sector, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, Barnaby Joyce, said at the time.However, we have clearly heard and understood the concerns of the Australian community that the Government should have more thorough oversight and more accurate data in relation to foreign investment in agriculture, to properly ensure that such investments are in our long-term national interest.Our agricultural land is one of our nations most valuable assetsso it is important that we have a clear and accurate picture of foreign investment levels in our agriculture sector, and that those investments are subject to appropriate consideration and scrutiny, Joyce said.Treasurer Scott Morrison added that through the Agricultural Land Register, the ATO would be collecting comprehensive information on foreign ownership of agricultural land, as part of the Governments commitment to increasing scrutiny and transparency around foreign investment in Australian agriculture.This is why we have introduced the foreign land ownership register, along with reducing the threshold for Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) scrutiny of private sector foreign purchases of agricultural land from $252 million to a cumulative total of $15 million.The tightening of FIRB requirements has had an impact on sentiment, and it remains an issue that foreign investors (particularly Chinese) ask about up front, Allion Legal principal Jon Cane says.Although in practice there has been minimal impact on the sector with almost all - with a couple of high profile exceptions - FIRB applications being approved.One of those was an application by Chinese investor Moon Lake Investments to buy Tasmanian dairy giant Van Diemens Land Company from the New Plymouth District Council (NPDC) - subject to tax conditions - in February.It was the first application to the first to be subject to new conditions requiring it to comply with Australian taxation law, Australian Taxation Office (ATO) directions to provide information in relation to the investment and to advise the ATO if it enters into any transactions with non-residents to which the transfer pricing or anti-avoidance measures of the tax law may potentially apply, Morrison said in a release.In forming his view, he said, he had carefully considered the national interest test and how it applies to this case, including the likely impact on local jobs and increased investment to support economic growth.The national interest test also considers a range of factors, including national security, the impact on competition, the character of the investor, and the impact on the economy and the community."#pb#Moon Lake Investments have given guarantees that all current VDL employees will be offered ongoing employment with Moon Lake on terms no less favourable than their current employment arrangements, Morrison said.Moon Lake has also committed to undertake a number of investment projects in the VDL farms, which will provide additional economic activity to the Tasmanian economy, and based upon Moon Lakes estimates will result in a near doubling of employment at VDL.This will guarantee more than 140 local jobs, generate an intended additional investment of over $100 million and an expected additional 95 jobs.Moon Lake advised that it intends to continue to supply the milk produced at VDL under the same contractual terms are currently in place, Morrison said.This provides assurance that there will not be an impact on the supply of milk and milk products in Australia. Indeed, the investment that Moon Lake proposes to undertake may result in an increased supply.The land on which VDL operates has important cultural and natural heritage considerations and Moon Lake committed to honour the terms of all environmental and cultural agreements entered into by VDL, including with the local Aboriginal community, Morrison added.Given these considerations, Morrison was satisfied that the Moon Lake proposal to purchase TLC is not contrary to the national interest.It will ensure increased employment and investment in an important industry sector in Tasmania, while the safeguards we have put in place will ensure they pay their tax.Australia continues to welcome and support foreign investment that is not contrary to our national interests. Ongoing foreign investment remains a key part of growing Australias output and employment and, through this, our standard of living.We still see a buoyant sector with significant activity for the year ahead, with Australian assets still seen as world class and much sought after, Cane says.One challenge in the sector for large investors is finding enough agribusiness operations of a significant size to match the demand for large scale operations from local institutional investors and foreign investors, Swift adds.Local sellers may need to think how they market their operations for sale and whether packaging their business with other sellers to achieve sufficient scale may have a mutually beneficial result for all parties.Swift and Canes positive outlook for the sector was reiterated in research released by both Colliers International and Rabobank, which showed brighter predictions for agriculture sector generally in 2016.Commercial real estate firm Colliers International says Australias rural and agribusiness sector is undergoing a revolution as investors begin to recognise the industrys long-term potential.The rural and agribusiness sector is now included in investors long term strategies as the sector develops higher grade assets, Colliers latest Rural and Agribusiness Research and Forecast Report says.Colliers national director of transaction services Shane McIntyre says the falling Australian dollar, free trade agreements with major Asian partners and good food security had a discernible impact on the Australian market, with a number of rural regions and sectors beginning to experience growth in land values.Investors are drawn to rural and agribusiness assets in pursuit of stronger yields, as the market becomes short of opportunities in traditional asset classes, Mr McIntyre says.The spotlight this year is on beef, cotton and water sectors.In its Agribusiness Outlook 2016 research report, Rabobank predicted further depreciation of the Australian dollar will act as a tail wind for Australian agriculture, while low oil prices will help ease input cost pressures but are also likely to weigh on agricultural commodity prices.Further depreciation of the Australian dollar, which is expected to drop to 64US cents by the end of the year, will be a boon for producers  particularly for those commodities at historically low levels in US dollar terms - such as grains and oilseeds, Rabobank Australia national manager country banking Todd Charteris says.Rabobank general manager Food & Agribusiness Research Tim Hunt adds there had been significant devaluation in the currencies of Australias key global competitors, which had muted market signals by encouraging production of agricultural commodities in some regions despite high global stocks and falling USD prices.For example, the Russian ruble has depreciated by around 50 per cent against the US dollar since the beginning of 2014, compared to a 20 per cent depreciation in the Australian dollar over the same period, he said.This has helped to underpin returns for Russian wheat producers despite US prices remaining under pressure. And weve seen a similar dynamic in the Brazilian sugar sector.
DibbsBarker has announced the Canberra office will leave the firm to team up with McInnes Wilson, effective 1 May.



Working with private clients in insurance litigation, insolvency, estate planning and elder law and Government work, Canberra co-managing partner John Buxton said the move to McInnes Wilson is a good fit for the strategic direction of the Canberra office partnership.



The move to an association with McInnes Wilson has been driven by common values and close alignment of market strategies, Buxton said.



McInnes Wilson operates as a full service firm, as we do, and this will produce synergies not only for our firm but most importantly for our clients.

McInnes Wilson is represented across Australia in five sites with plans for further expansion.



We are excited by the opportunities this association will bring for our staff and clients.



Chairman Andrew Saxton said the split is a mutual agreement and that the Canberra office has a different focus to the rest of the firms Sydney and Brisbane offices which merged back in 2010.



Whilst we have had a long relationship, it has become evident over time that the Canberra partners have a different client focus and we very much support this move by them, he said.



The office has operated in Canberra for over 60 years, trading under various names in that time.



Throughout this period the firm has been locally owned and fully independent and will remain so, Buxton said.



The Canberra partnership is proud of our long association with the DibbsBarker group and of our even longer association with the Canberra community.
By James Goldrick, Adjunct Professor in naval and maritime strategy and policy

The Australian government this week committed to spending A$50 billion on a fleet of 12 new submarines, contracted to French company DCNS and to be built in South Australia.

But how will these submarines meet with Australias strategic requirements, particularly beyond 2030, when the first of the new submarines will become operational?

Some have suggested that autonomous submarines might become more prevalent in the future, and may be a more cost effective option. Others have argued that the large expensive DCNS submarines may be obsolete by the time they come on line.

Why buy crewed submarines at all? What role do they play in protecting Australias interests now and into the future?

Projecting uncertainty

Among the long-standing priorities in Australias defence strategy are protecting critical lines of trade and communication for essential national transport and military operations, and denying the use of the sea to a potential adversary.

Because of their unique characteristics, submarines will play an essential role in these endeavours. Their ability to restrict the actions of any would-be aggressor in the maritime domain remains unmatched. And despite the rate of technological change, they are unlikely to be challenged for at least a generation.

Submarines have the ability to operate covertly for extended periods and to attack with devastating lethality without warning. This means they can create uncertainty in the mind of an adversary about where they are and whether it is safe to sail ships or submarines. And the larger the submarine force, the greater that uncertainty.

Their stealth has a pre-conflict value too. In times of tension, such uncertainty can be a vital inhibitor to a would-be aggressor. Submarines can also be used to gather information about other countries capabilities or intentions, providing early warning of an attack.

Submarines can also be used for strike missions, including inserting special forces ashore to target enemy facilities. Submarines equipped with land-attack missiles can also be an effective means to target onshore facilities and this capability may be an option for Australia in the future.

Local waters

According to the governments 2016 Defence White Paper, around half the worlds submarines will be operating in the Indo-Pacific region by 2035.

There are good reasons for this growth in regional forces and they apply to Australia as well. Australias geography and vast areas of strategic interest further shape the operational roles of our submarines, which in turn determine the required numbers, capabilities, endurance and size.

Asia will see even more submarines go to sea in the next few decades. Any maritime rivalries will inevitably have an underwater dimension. An effective submarine fleet adds greatly to a nations military weight.

There is no current substitute for the capabilities that submarines deliver in maritime warfare, and maritime warfare capabilities are important for Australia.

Listen in

While there are claims about the increasing vulnerability of submarines to detection, these must be balanced against the realities of the environment.

The sea is not yet transparent.

The Indo-Pacific sea areas are generally extremely challenging for acoustic sensors, whether passive or active. Other mechanisms for detection are much better at localising a submarine after its approximate position has become known than they are at achieving initial contact.

It is clear that the emerging technologies of unmanned vehicles and pre-positioned sensors will make it more hazardous for submarines to enter certain areas, particularly those close to well-protected enemy bases.

In turn, submarines are likely to employ unmanned vehicles (including air and even surface units) as their own agents of influence and action by sending them into the most high-risk areas to report or even attack.

In high intensity conflict with the threat of cyber-attack, the more valuable will be the ability to control such local networks of unmanned vehicles and operate independently of remote sensors and command and control systems.

No drone, particularly one that is fully autonomous and not reliant on external direction, can presently match a submarines combination of lethality and covertness. Nor can they match the situational awareness and intelligent decision making possible with a human crew. This is unlikely to change in the short- or medium-term.

These considerations shape Australias requirements for its submarines. They must:

be in sufficient numbers to provide sustained operational availability

be fully interoperable with allied forces, particularly those of the United States

have very long range and endurance

be sufficiently covert

have excellent sensors and armament to overcome sophisticated threats, and

be able to operate in tropical waters.

They should also have the capacity to carry and support unmanned vehicles in order to take advantage of this emerging technology.

Propulsion

Submarines are inherently complex. The design requirements for engines, power, fuel, weapon (and unmanned vehicle) capacity and provisions shape hull size and affect the numbers of people needed to operate the boats.

They need to be balanced against each other even more carefully than in surface ships. Any errors in calculating the parameters can be disastrous.

This was recently demonstrated when the Spanish Navy was forced to halt construction of its new boats and begin an extensive reworking of their design to overcome an 80 ton deficiency in their buoyancy.

A key distinction between submarines is their main power source for propulsion. Nuclear powered submarines have the ability to operate for extended periods underwater and at high speed without the need for refuelling.

Diesel-electric submarines, by comparison, are slower although they can achieve very fast burst speeds for limited periods underwater. They also need to recharge their batteries at intervals, requiring the use of noisier diesels and access to air.

During these periods, they are at much greater risk of detection, whether from sensors listening for their machinery, or by radar (or even visual) contact with their schnorkel (air mast).

Air Independent Propulsion (AIP) systems have been developed. The German contender beaten out by DCNS used this system.

But AIP systems take up space and weight and generally provide greater submerged endurance only at low speed. They also use special fuels, which may require specialised facilities to replenish.

In theory, nuclear submarines' superior speeds, unlimited endurance and ability to remain submerged indefinitely make them extremely attractive for a country with Australias strategic requirements.

However, apart from being much more costly than diesel-electric boats (probably well over twice as much per unit, assuming the same sensor and weapon fit), the acquisition of nuclear boats is not feasible for Australia at this time.

Thats because of the range and cost of their support systems  which the country does not possess. Unlike every current nuclear submarine operator, there is no domestic nuclear power industry.

Having to meet the operational requirements with a conventionally propelled boat thus makes a unique, tailored-for-Australia design the only option for our navy, while conventional propulsion is a key factor in our wanting greater numbers in order to achieve the necessary operational effects.

James Goldrick was a member of the Ministerial Expert Panel advising on the development of the 2016 Defence White Paper. He is a Non-Resident Fellow of the Lowy Institute for International Policy and a Professorial Fellow of the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS). He is an Adjunct Professor with SDSC at The ANU and with UNSW at Canberra (ADFA).

Originally published in The Conversation.
Hi all,

So I'm helping my hubby fill out his form 80 and there's a few questions we are stuck on.

I've tried calling immi but they don't seem to want to help .

Recap - applied Feb 2015 recently receive email saying they needed extra evidence on relationship , AFP check and form 80 so they can make heir decision I'm gathering for PR. He is on a bridging visa

So heres my questions..

Question 28 - are you applying for a temporary visa?

Immi told me yes he is but and to tick the yes box but I'm not entirely sure that sounds right since he is already on temporary visa and I'd awaiting PR



Question 34 - what type of visa do you hold in Australia?

He came in on a visitor visa but is now on bridging. They want his arrival date so I'm not sure if I put bridging or visitor? And place of issue do I write Australia? For onshore and US for his previous visitor visa trips? I can't seem to find where I find where it is issued and no longer have the emails for his previous trips where he applied for his visitor visas offshore.

TIA for your help I have 4 days to lodge this horrible form!!
Jokes aside, the R35 GT-R and the Lamborghini Gallardo are probably the two most popular platforms in the world of half-mile drag racing nowadays, so it was only normal for this Nissan to embrace the Lambo assassin role.Heck, thanks to the insane wrap of the Japanese supercar, it also tries to steal the show from Raging Bulls as far as appearance is concerned, but this is another story for another time.Returning to the tech side of things, the twin-turbo V6 under the hood has been heavily modified. To be more precise, the engine now used a stroker kit that takes the displacement from the factory 3.8-liter to a 4.1-liter setup.Nevertheless, the icing on the modding cake comes from a pair of 86mm turbos, which allow the driver to play with 1,342 hp - the turbochargers deliver 40 psi of boost in the setup seen here.As for the Gallardo battles, the GT-R went up against three Lambos during last fall's Texas Invitational event. We are, of course, talking about twin-turbo V10 bulls whose outputs also play in the four-digit league.And since you can't quite trust hp numbers when talking about such monstrous outputs, the vehicles were separated by velocity classes. As for this Nissan, the machine competed in the 175 mph (make that 282 km/h if you prefer the metric system) category.The boosted supercar engaged in half-mile battles using a rolling start, with the trap speed being important here. Check out the piece of footage below to see the GT-R having its way with the Sant'Agata Bolognese beasts.
The swirling camouflage hides a more modern design for the subcompact-sized crossover, one that resembles that of the Cooper 5-Door. Everything from the mesh grille to the oval headlights oozes MINI, while the two tailpipes poking out from each corner of the rear bumper are a tell-tale sign this is a JCW variant.Look more closely and youll also observe more aggressive front air intakes than those of the regular 2017 MINI Countryman. The bigger alloy wheels and the front air dam are other features characteristic of JCW models. As far as the cabin design is concerned, dont expect too much change over the MINI Cooper 5-Door Based on the UKL platform that also underpins the BMW 2 Series Active Tourer and BMW X1, the 2017 MINI Countryman and Countryman JCW will be available with the All4 all-wheel-drive system. Mind you, prepare to pay extra for the added traction. Goodies such as variable damper control will also be offered.Engine-wise, the lineup will consist of three- and four-cylinder gasoline and diesel units. The most performance-oriented option will come in the form of a 2.0-liter turbo-4 with 228 horsepower (231 PS) and 236 lb-ft (320 Nm) of torque. Cog-swapping duties will be handled by a six-speed manual transmission as standard or a 6-speed auto that does a fine job in the fan-bleeding-tastic MINI John Cooper Works Rumor has it a plug-in hybrid variant of the Countryman is also in the works, one that will incorporate an electric motor into the independent Z-axle to drive the rear wheels. We'll have to wait and see if the rumor will come to fruition.
If the Germans at Volkswagen installed defeat devices to fool testers into believing their diesel cars emitted less dangerous particles, Mitsubishi came up with a different method of cheating, even though it was just as deliberate. In order to understand it, we have to be acquainted with the "coasting test" that's part of the procedure to determine a vehicle's fuel consumption.Since the readings are taken in a lab, things such as aerodynamics or mechanical friction of the powertrain can't be factored in, even though they are crucial to a car's fuel efficiency. So, with the alternative being to ignore them completely, the automakers decided to accelerate a car to 80 mph (130 km/h), and then allow it to decelerate on its own. This is called the "coasting test." The data collected is then used to program the dynamometers on which the actual mileage test will be conducted.Mitsubishi thought it was clever to take this data from a "fuel-economy grade" version of its eK Wagon (which was tuned to deliver maximum mileage) and apply it to three other models of the car, including four-wheel drive or turbo ones. The final test results were obviously corrupted, even though nobody can tell exactly by how much.Another thing that's still unclear is whether this technique was used on other models the Japanese company builds, which said that it would look into the problem and release its findings later this week. In the meantime, though, the EPA isn't lying idle and has asked Mitsubishi to supply the agency with more information regarding the models it sells in the US (those would be the Outlander Sport, the Outlander, the Lancer, and the Mirage, plus the I-MIEV electric vehicle). Automotive News says that the EPA has also instructed Mitsubishi to perform additional coast down tests for the vehicles it intends to sell in the North American market. Whatever the case, Mitsubishi needs to sort things out quickly, because it's not the kind of company that can easily go over a major hiccup such as this. It's not Volkswagen. With the share value dropping by 50 percent already, if more models are found to be sporting wrong consumption figures, Mitsubishi could be digging itself a grave no miracle will pull it out of. And even though the brand has been going downhill for a while, it's always sad to see a brand go. Especially one that built the Lancer Evo.
Motor Trend's Jonny Lieberman is a cynical man who "spent his entire life learning how to mock people" according to his colleagues. He flew halfway around the world thinking that he was going to break Aston Martin's heart, yet was completely blown over by how awesome the Lagonda Taraf is.Like the Bugatti Veyron, the Taraf was designed to get a lot of attention for the re-launch of a legendary brand. Originally, it was designed to be sold only in the Middle East, but wealthy customers in the US, Europe, Singapore and South Africa can now get one too.How wealthy? Well, it starts at a cool one million dollars, which is part of the name of the video. That makes it the most expensive production sedan in the world, a title that it's likely to keep for many years.Many positive things are being said about the Lagonda and a few negative ones. For starters, it's much better looking in person than we the inhabitants of the internet believe. It's also a very large sedan built entirely from carbon fiber, which is unique in the automotive industry.While the V12 engine is still naturally aspirated and lacking supercar-killing potential, the fact that it's been paired to a ZF transmission fixes everything that's been wrong about all Astons in the past decade: the jerky robotized gearbox.Is it worth it? Jonny makes an excellent joke about the Russians that explains everything well. It's worth pointing out that taxes are not included in the price, plus that Astons are renowned for their insane servicing costs.
Back in February, we wrote about Akira Nakai, the man behind the RWB project, having flown to LA in order to complete a build . The hostilities took place at RDB LA and the shop has once again welcomed the automotive sculptor earlier this month, with a new project showing up.The images below show the resulting 964-generation 911 in various stages of completion. And while the images that reveal the finished machine are obviously attention magnets, the pic showing how much the rear track has been expanded underneath those beefy fenders, a trademark of the label, might just be our favorite (the pic also includes the master at work).However, the pic showing the two RDB LA Rauh-Welt Begriff builds together comes to show just how diverse the projects that get completed here can be. You see, based on the number of celebrities, as well as less famous individuals, who have their rides customized here, this might just be Los Angeles' favorite tuning location.In fact, we gave you a taste of a typical lightweight-custom project coming from this shop earlier today, so be sure to check out the modded Ferrari F12berlinetta in case you missed it. Mind your volume level though, as the decatted, custom exhaust makes the V12 Maranello machine an overly loud beast.Returning to RWB, the project is all about building communities, not just cars, as owners enjoy driving their air-cooled Zuffenahusen machines together, so we expect this trend to hit Cars and Coffee events and maybe even reach shows such as Jay Leno's Garage.
Given the timing, we would've expected the Woking machine to have shown up at the Top Marques Monaco event that took over the city-state earlier this month, but the P1 GTR took a different path.In fact, we only have two pics of the machine, which come thanks to Raphael Belly Photography . We can see the gas-electric beast being unloaded, but the car seems to be hiding in a Monaco garage - with Monaco's fiscal paradise status, it wouldn't be too much of a surprise if the owner spent plenty of time in the area, and perhaps he feels it's too soon for the Big Mac to show up on the street.Back in March, when we spoke to Lanzante Motorsport, the British specialist who handles the road conversion of McLaren's halo car, they explained four street-legal P1 GT-Rs were headed for Europe, while two had already been delivered - one to Dubai and the other to Japan.To the best of our knowledge, the P1 GTR in these images is the second example that shows its angry fascia to us, with the first one having surfaced last year. Nevertheless, since that one was a mere listing from an exotic car dealer in Italy, the one we have here might just be the only certain spotting done so far.Truth be told, we can't wait to get our hands on the first video of the road-legal P1 GTR in action. We're not saying this thanks to the power of the thing, as the difference from the "standard" P1 isn't all that important.Instead, we expect the melange between the street and the race specs of the machine (more details in the story linked above) to deliver nothing short of a vicious experience.: the hypercar is now out on the street and, thanks to A.R Supercars, we have photo proof (see below).
EV

SUV

They can put all the electric motors in a Ferrari as long as there's still a big V engine in there somewhere. These vehicles are precision tools that don't need to find excuses for not being politically correct, environmentally friendly or fuel efficient. They may not have reached the level of Lamborghini's nihilism, but they're close. If a Lamborghini is a mohawked punk in a leather jacket, the Ferrari is one that's all dressed up for a wedding.Up until now, Ferrari has tried really hard - and mostly succeeded - to stay true to its principles. All the apparent concessions it made all had a very good reason behind them: nobody ever complained about how the FF - the four-wheel drive Ferrari - drove, and we all agree the hybrid technology allows the LaFerrari to do things otherwise impossible. So while these models have been a little hard to digest at first, they've all proven to be very much in that Ferrari vein we all know and love.However, the current automotive landscape has two very clear directions it's going in, and they both collide with Ferrari's way of life: one is the proliferation of the all-electric vehicle, and the other is the redundancy of the driver thanks to autonomous cars. You can now breathe a huge sigh of relief: Marchionne, the CEO of Ferrari, made it clear the Maranello brand will have nothing to do with either of these two.Tesla is doing its best to prove ancan be tons of fun, and it's hard to argue against the facts, but Ferrari is having none of that. And while we could maybe live with an electric Ferrari in twenty years from now (not that there's any plan for one), an autonomous one would probably spell the end of the world as we know it. The second Ferrari launched a self-driving model, it would be time to switch off the lights and go home: the automotive world would have fatally failed.Marchionne is not exactly a likable guy - he has made some dubious decisions in the past and when he took over Ferrari from Montezemolo, a lot of people thought he would be the doom of the much-loved brand. But for all his foibles, he made it very clear that Ferrari would stay away from the autonomous craze. And Ferrari has proven it can go against the flow of the market if it contradicts with its core values, the best example being the absence of a Ferrari("You have to shoot me first," the CEO said about the prospect).Marchionne seems to have the right attitude, he appears to understand what those cars are all about, and he has a clear image of the profile of Ferrari clients. So, no, there will be no Apocalypse on Sergio Marchionne's watch.
Ordering an Uber in Dallas, New Jersey, New York, or Phoenix will mean that you will have to be there on time to meet your driver.If they have to wait more than two minutes for you, you will be charged an undisclosed fee. Uber is likely to announce the fee within the app, as it might be different depending on surge rates and local pricing.Furthermore, if you order an Uber in any of the four cities mentioned above, you only have two minutes to change your mind and cancel the fare while the driver is on their way to your location.In other places, Uber lets users cancel a ride within five minutes of receiving confirmation that a driver is on the way to the specified location.Ubers blog post (and the closest thing to a press release) also mentions that the company will consider expanding the new rules if they find that the measures improve the experience for riders and drivers.Naturally, it's hard to meet the requirements of both parties at the same time, as customers would want not to pay extra for drivers to wait longer than two minutes, while drivers would probably prefer not to waste time waiting for people.Either way, Ubers new rules might make them more money if users do not change their habits. After all, those two-minute rules did not come out of someones imagination, but from statistics. As companies have demonstrated time and time again, statistics are useful if you know how to interpret them for your benefit.In the case of Uber, someone might have figured out a way to make more money with the same number of fares. It is unclear if the drivers will receive full or partial compensation for their wait times. The same goes for the cancelation fees. The two issues mentioned above are probably the things Uber wants to figure out before rolling the new rules worldwide.Of course, we do understand that it is logical for the company to want to make more money, and that it's reasonable for drivers to meet their passengers on time, but in the real world, things do not always happen as expected.
The Swedish automaker renowned for safety breakthroughs over the years, a genuine fact since we have Volvo to thank for the invention of the three-point seat belt, wants to make good on its promise to build cars that will not lead to any deaths or serious injuries by 2020.Autonomous vehicles are a big part of Volvos strategy for safety, and London will have 100 autonomous or semi-autonomous Volvo cars driving on its roads by 2018.In a project called Drive Me London, a limited number of these vehicles will be available for regular users. Instead of testing autonomous cars with engineers on board, Volvo will test self-driving technologies with families on board.Volvos strategy might seem risky, but it shows the companys faith in technology developed in-house. Considering the safety credentials of this brand, we would gladly ride in a self-driving Volvo today.After all, the Swedish company decided to let other automakers use their seat belt technology ever since they patented it, free of charge, in the name of road safety. Many people that have been in accidents in a modern car owe their lives to the safety innovation made by Volvo, but few are aware of this fact.Hakan Samuelsson, Volvos President and Chief Executive, has stated that Autonomous Driving Cars will start saving lives as soon as they get on roads. The automaker says that 90% of all car accidents are caused by driver error or distraction and estimates that self-driving cars will reduce accidents by up to 30%. So leave your phone alone while you are driving, because you might kill people with your car.The Swedish company will collect data and feedback from the users of these self-driving cars, and it will also work with Thatcham, the insurance industrys research organization. The latter knows a thing or two about road safety, and has a keen interest in reducing road fatalities. After all, fewer people dead or seriously injured in car accidents makes for fewer payouts by insurance companies.You can fill in the blanks on this one, as its crystal clear that the insurance industry takes no joy in deaths or injuries and would just prefer to collect their fees and be done with it.
WASHINGTON  Try thinking about the confusing Republican and Democratic primary elections in New York this way:

You're in love with a "handsome devil" who did not exactly  or even inexactly  fit your mother's long-term hopes for you. Not only was he "too good-looking for his own good," as your mother might put it, but he did not come from your neighborhood or, for that matter, from anyplace that even remotely resembled it.

In fact, so far as we know, Mr. Handsome Devil came from someplace far away from your close-knit family and friends, and tended to act as though he had rolled into town not only to save you from unforeseen threats, but to save the whole town from something that only he could truly understand.

I might also mention that, as this little drama was being enacted on a national stage over the past months, I was occasionally watching old movies on TCM. And in that earlier era of American picture-making, I was surprised at how many films were also based upon the outsider who swept into town to put things to right.

I am thinking not only of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," with Jimmy Stewart and his naive ideas about taming Congress, or of "The Music Man," with the lovable con man teaching us that there is always a band playing somewhere, or even of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," with, as it turned out, the man who didn't do that at all.

No, it was a theme so often repeated on the classic American silver screen that one has to appreciate and try to understand these outsiders and their missions.

Indeed, at times the very word "outsider" was itself in danger  of being overused! Or, as Republican hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz said along the way to losing more deeply in New York: "This is the year of the outsider. I'm an outsider. Bernie Sanders is an outsider, both with the same diagnosis but both with very different paths to healing."

If you watched CNN, with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump flat-out winning the Democratic and Republican primary tickets, you would see two pronounced messages.

First, Republican voters cast their votes for outsider claims on the part of Donald Trump. But second, they were, at the same time and often in the same poll or speech, frightened of a Trump presidency.

Until the final figures came out, exit polls repeatedly showed the duality that Republican voters were signaling: They wanted Trump up against the "Republican establishment," and yet, they were also signaling that they were scared of a dominant Trump.

Perhaps the old vaudevillian question about women  "What do WOMEN want?" - should now be reconstructed to "What do AMERICANS want?"

One has to wonder further: How can we as a nation  particularly a nation that still, in its gut, thinks of itself as "the" international leader  rule the world when we are essentially scared to death of the actions of at least one of the two people we seem to be choosing to lead us and inspire that world?

Columnist Frank Bruni posed the problems in The New York Times: "American voters are displeased with the candidates they've been given. They're disengaged from the process that winnows the field. And that process disregards the political center, erodes common ground and leaves us with a government that can't build the necessary consensus for, let alone implement, sensible action in regard to taxes, to infrastructure, to immigration, to guns, to just about anything.

"Make America great again? We need to start by making it functional."

Stories began coming out almost immediately after the votes were counted that Trump, buoyed by his wins, would now seek to appear more "presidential," as his wife and children have reportedly urged upon him. This, if true, might well change the spirit of the contest. Yet, in his brief words after the victory, there was no change at all  just the same themes.

Hillary, on the other hand, at that moment seemed more naturally joyful, more at one with the voters, more (in a way) herself. She seemed a more relaxed candidate, more a woman who, after all these long and intricately complex years, had become a candidate of the creative middle whose ambition has finally been harnessed for what the majority of Americans could want.

So now we wait for the finale with, yes, more understanding as to what each candidate believes  or what each would have US believe that they believe. But perhaps the more important question is not what they believe, but what can, or will, they do?
Photo of Ford F-150 courtesy of Ford.

Ford Motor Co. is recalling approximately 184,000 2011-2012 model-year Ford F-150 trucks and 2012-MY Expedition, Mustang and Lincoln Navigator vehicles in the U.S. because theyre at risk for unexpectedly downshifting.

These vehicles, each equipped with a 6R80 transmission, have a potential problem with the output speed sensor on the transmission lead frame. Under certain conditions, the transmission controls could force a temporary downshift into first gear.

Depending on the speed of the vehicle at the time of the downshift, the driver could experience an abrupt speed reduction that could cause the rear tires to slide or lock up. This condition could result in loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash, according to Ford.

Ford noted its aware of three reports of accidents, but no injuries have been related to this condition.

The Ford F-150 vehicles were built at Dearborn Truck Plant and Kansas City Assembly Plant from Aug. 19, 2011, through March 9, 2012. The Ford Expedition vehicles were built at Kentucky Truck Plant from Aug. 19, 2011, through Dec. 19, 2011. The Ford Mustang vehicles were built at Flat Rock Assembly Plant from Aug. 19, 2011, through Feb. 21, 2012. The Lincoln Navigator vehicles were built at Kentucky Truck Plant from Aug. 19, 2011, through Dec. 17, 2011.

In addition to the vehicles recalled in the U.S., 17,900 vehicles are being recalled in Canada.

Dealers will inspect the powertrain control module for diagnostic trouble codes tied to the issue. If no related diagnostic trouble codes are present, dealers will update the powertrain control module software, which will eliminate the downshift into first gear if an OSS fault occurs, Ford said.

Additionally, as part of the corresponding customer satisfaction program, Ford will provide a one-time replacement of the lead frame at no charge within 10 years or 150,000 miles from the warranty start date.

If related diagnostic trouble codes are present, dealers will update the powertrain control module software and replace the lead frame at no cost to the customer, Ford said.
James Bond may be opting for an eco-friendly car in the future. The world-famous spy may be driving an electric car in his next film.

Aston Martin, the British automaker who has been providing Agent 007 with state-of-the-art rides for several decades, recently hinted that they may feature an electric car in his next movie.

Andy Palmer, Aston Martin CEO, said that electric vehicles are almost as inevitable as death and tax. The executive explained how electric vehicles are bound to continue its popularity rise in the years to come, which also prompts Aston Martin to enter the market.

"What does electric give you? It gives you phenomenal acceleration, phenomenal torque (force)  immediate pick-up, there's no lag, so if you use it well and certainly in the near and medium-term and in our terminology, the long-term, you're going to have at least a combination of battery, electric and gasoline and then you get the best of both worlds, said Palmer in a report by CNBC.

Palmer continued that an electric car would provide the sound and power of a V8 or V12 engine, while the power is supported by the electric motor, which is actually advantageous on both ends. He said that in the future, carmakers have to progress to electric drive, whether they will be using a battery pack or hydrogen pack. He admitted that the idea of electric cars dominating the streets is still a long way ahead, but eventually, everyone has to contribute in eliminating carbon-burning technology.

The executive shared that Aston Martin plans to exist in the next century, so they also have to evolve with the buying patterns of new customers. Considering how SUVs, crossovers and electric cars are becoming quite popular, the company also needs to move into the sector.

Aston Martin recently introduced the DBX Concept, the companys first family-friendly electric crossover vehicle. Although it would seem unlikely that the debonair would be driving a family car, Palmer said that the idea of the fictional spy starting his own family is not completely remote. He said that Aston Martin is more than just James Bond. The brand is about being British, independent, a good craftsman and a good business.

As for James Bonds next ride, the Aston Martin DB5, his most famous car of choice, may be given the full-electric treatment. Currently, the model features a DOHC straight six, 3995 cc engine with 282 horsepower and 280lb-ft of torque. It has a top speed of 142mph and can accelerate from 0 to 60mph in 7.1 seconds.

More updates and details on James Bonds new green car are expected soon.
At the MENA Congress held in Dubai recently, car-sharing tech vendor Vulog has shared the interest in bringing the rising trend to the Middle East. And the company plans to introduce the benefits of the service in Dubai.

Met with piqued interest from potential partners during the MENA Transport Congress and Exhibition which ended Wednesday, Georges Gallais said in an interview that the car-sharing service would need about 2,000 cars in order for it to work, Gulf News reported. Gallais is the co-founder of France-based Vulog Carsharing Technologies.

Although a new, yet trending shared transport service, Gallais said that Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority has also expressed interest in the technology. He also said that the city authorities are updated with what's going on with the rest of the world, and that its young generation is adept with mobility and transport options.

Gallais further explained that the car-sharer (passenger-driver) would be paying a per minute, hourly, or daily rate using a valid credit card, depending on operator fees. Users of the service would be required to undergo thorough screening as well as background checks prior to use of the vehicle. The vehicles are also being manned by a registered service operator.

The operator oftentimes would require a security deposit, not only to ensure liability for any car damages (if it happens) but most importantly, to abide by the service's rules, in a related FX Tribune post. Added safety technology like car-tracking and anti-theft would be integrated into the vehicles. Another bonus would also mean getting blacklisted should users violate policies.

A common scenario for qualified drivers (yes, even those without a car yet) would be when it comes to attending special occasions or events. Gallais added that public transport might be enduring and another option would be to do the car-sharing service as it would save time and effort instead, according to the publication.
file photo

Last week, a drone reportedly hit an Airbus A320 on approach to Londons Heathrow Airport, but so far, there have been no officially confirmed drone strikes involving U.S. aircraft. However, witnesses have told AVweb that a drone did hit a hot-air balloon in flight, during a festival in Vermont in July 2014, causing damage to the fabric envelope. The pilot had just launched, and was about 150 feet off the ground. He landed immediately, and nobody was hurt. It was a brand-new balloon, and the impact damaged eight panels, balloon repairman Paul Stumpf told AVweb this week. There were a lot of little slices in the fabric, but they were small  the biggest one was less than six inches wide.

Nevertheless, repairs had to be made before the balloon could fly again. A second balloon, which was still on the ground preparing to launch, also was damaged, Stumpf said. The drone operator paid for all the repairs, he added. The FAA has been working to get operators to register their drones and to educate them about safety, while NASA has been developing technologies that aim to automate safe separation of manned aircraft and drones in the National Airspace System.
" " Some auto manufacturers, such as Toyota, Audi, BMW and Kia, already use Google to manage navigation, maps and other electronic features in their cars. (Creative Commons/Flickr/.RGB.)

Perhaps the reason Apple and Android have both managed to maintain significant market share with their handheld devices is because they have different approaches, with different appeal. One of the biggest differences between Apple and Android products is that Apple designs and makes its own hardware, because the company wants to control every aspect of the user experience. This is attractive to people who want uniformity in their phones, tablets, computers and music players. Google, on the other hand, hasn't expressed interest in becoming an actual manufacturer of the devices, instead preferring to continually tweak and improve the backbone necessary for the device to run, which is then implemented on phones and tablets made by a variety of other manufacturers. This approach appeals to people who want more control and choice over their own phones -- or to those who find Apple's control-freak personality stifling.

The Open Handset Alliance was established in 2007 to help Google's partners collaborate on these goals (as they applied to smartphones) which helped propel the Android platform to its current status. Google hopes the Open Automotive Alliance will have the same success. If the alliance does succeed, this will be a new use for the Android platform; however, the automakers aren't necessarily starting from scratch -- based on Google's proven track record, car designers can be reasonably confident that Android will provide the safe and reliable technology that's necessary for a passenger vehicle.

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Right now, cars' infotainment systems are all over the place. Some car manufacturers use Linux-based or BlackBerry-based operating systems. Others collaborate with computer companies for custom branded systems -- Ford's partnership with Microsoft for the MyFord Touch interface is a notable example. This is frustrating for companies who develop apps for these cars, because they have to be customized for each brand. The Genivi Alliance, formed in 2009, made attempts to integrate into cars using the Linux open source operating system. That alliance was backed mainly by BMW, General Motors and Intel. Though Android is based on Linux, Android has specific advantages because it's been proven to be adaptable to lots of devices made by a bunch of different manufacturers, and it's familiar to technology companies around the world, too. Since app developers are already intimate with Android, it'll cost automakers less to code and troubleshoot on a familiar platform. Also, some auto manufacturers, such as Toyota, Audi, BMW and Kia, already use Google to manage navigation, maps and other electronic features in their cars.

Google hopes that better integration will be safer for drivers and their passengers. A common platform, the alliance says, will improve safety because it'll be easier to use. There will be less of a learning curve between cars, and people will be more likely to actually use features like wireless and hands-free integration if the system is intuitive. Using Android to run some of the car's electronic features will basically turn the car itself into an Android device (or "ecosystem," if you prefer), reaching new customers and reinforcing the platform's importance with existing customers. When the technology is implemented, it'll be found in literally hundreds of millions of new cars [source: Vance]. In fact, we should begin to see Android-integrated cars by the end of this year.

This all points to the evolution of the car as a computer. We're heading in a direction in which a car's center console will be able to do a lot of the same things a computer or tablet can currently do. Yes, cars are already computer-driven, and have been for a long time. Computers control everything from mechanical functions, like engine timing, to comfort functions, like climate control. But that's quite different from the notion that a car itself should be able to, say, stream music videos, or search for recipes on Pinterest to compile and sync a grocery list. Clearly, though, plenty of car manufacturers and technology companies -- and certainly the OAA -- are preparing for that time to come.
28 April 2016 09:52 (UTC+04:00)

Starting from the evening hours April 27 until 04:00 in the morning April 28 Armenian Armed Forces shelled villages and positions of Azerbaijani army in Terter and Aghdam districts, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry announced on April 28.

At about 23:30 the Armenian forces began shelling the city of Terter and the nearby villages. The firing is conducted by "Grad" rockets, D-30 howitzer and mortars.

One resident of Azerbaijan's Aghdam district was killed, eight people injured as a result of shelling by Armenian armed forces, Head of executive power of the Aghdam district Ragib Mammadov told Trend.

A resident of the Chemenli village of Azerbaijan's Aghdam district Famil Mustafayev was wounded as the result of Armenian troops' shelling and taken to the hospital. Unfortunately, he died.

Among the eight injured, two are in critical condition, namely, a resident of the Chemenli village Ali Huseynov, 1966, and a resident of the Efendili village Elnur Mammadov, 1945. One of the wounded received concussion.

All the wounded were hospitalized.
28 April 2016 11:43 (UTC+04:00)

By Nazrin Gadimova

Armenia, breaching the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, continued targeting Azerbaijans civilians living in the territories adjacent to the front-line area on April 28.

One resident of Azerbaijans Agdam region was killed, while eight injured as a result of shelling from the Armenian side, said Ragub Mammadov, the head of executive authority of the region.

As a result of massive shelling, Famil Mustafayev, a resident of the Chamanli village was wounded. However, not long after he was taken to the hospital he died because of his injuries, Mammadov stressed. Among those injured, two are in critical condition -- a resident of the Chamanli village Ali Huseynov and a resident of the Efendili village Elnur Mammadov. Moreover, one of the civilians got a concussion.

At the same time, more than 100 houses located near the contact line of troops were damaged by the Armenian shelling.

Starting from the evening hours of April 27, till 04.00 of April 28 Armenian units again shelled our positions and residential areas of Terter and Agdam regions with 60, 82 and 120 mm mortars as well as 122 mm D-30 howitzers, Azerbaijans Defense Ministry reported.

Azerbaijani Armed Forces mounted a retaliatory strike against Armenian military positions in accordance with the operational situation, the ministry added.

Immediately after the escalation of the situation, the Ministry said that in case Armenia continues shelling Azerbaijani settlements, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces will inflict retaliatory strikes on Armenias military facilities located in residential areas.

Azerbaijans State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing People said that over 20 houses, 1 administrative building and more than 20 graves were damaged in the Azerbaijani district of Terter as a result of the Armenian strikes beginning from April 26. In addition, private farming lands, as well as the districts electricity and gas lines were damaged.

Considering the situation, the State Commission has informed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) of these acts that are contrary to the norms of international law and rules of war, and called on the Armenian side to avoid doing these actions.

After Russia-brokered ceasefire agreement was reached on April 5, the situation on the contact line of troops of the Armenian and Azerbaijani armies has again aggravated.

Given the situation, Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov has sent letters to the UN and OSCE in connection with the escalation of the situation along the contact line of Armenian and Azerbaijani troops.

Hikmet Hajiyev, the Spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry said that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Chairman of the UN Security Council Louis Michel and Chairperson of the OSCE Permanent Council Pohl Eberhard were informed about the Armenian provocations against Azerbaijan.

In these letters, Mammadyarov urged the heads of international organizations to strongly condemn Armenia for violating the ceasefire agreement reached on April 5 and to demand Armenias complying with the undertaken commitments and withdraw its troops from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

Moreover, Mammadyarov noted that provocative actions of Armenia blow the diplomatic efforts of the OSCE Minsk Group, which is the sole negotiator of the conflict, Hajiyev concluded.

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Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova

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28 April 2016 12:59 (UTC+04:00)

The director of the Institute of History of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), MP Yagub Mahmudov has recently uttered the idea at a meeting of the Presidium of ANAS that the history of Derbend, Borchali should be studied again. Following this proposal, a smear campaign was launched in the Armenian press against the Azerbaijani historian.

Various Armenian mass media spread the information saying that, the Institute of History of ANAS makes territorial claims against Russia and Georgia. The Armenian media outlets made insults, posting on their websites sheep image next to the name of the Institute of History of ANAS.

Yagub Mahmudov, commenting on the smear campaign, stated that this confirms that the Armenians are not engaged in science. The statement further reads: Instead of to accept the historical facts, they are exposing these pictures and show the low level of their science and culture.

At a meeting of the Presidium of ANAS, I spoke about the actual problems of Azerbaijan history and, in particular, I have repeatedly emphasized that Azerbaijani state admits the internationally recognized territories of other states and the Azerbaijani nation is the owner of its internationally recognized territory.

Every nation has its own history. Azerbaijanis as a nation have settled in different areas. In particular, they historically live in the Russian Federation - in Derbend and its surroundings, in Georgia  in Borchali region. Russia is our northern neighbor and we do not have any territorial claims against this state. And we do not have any territorial claims against Georgia. However, Armenians are trying to drive a wedge in our relationship with Russia and Georgia. In Russia, live many Azerbaijanis, therefore, it is natural that when writing the history of our people we talk about our scientists, poets, doctors living in this country. Unlike Armenians, we have - a great nation, we are 60 million, and our compatriots live in many countries, giving the world many prominent and influential personalities. For example, the world science luminary Lotfi Zadeh lives in the United States, so we enter his name in our history. No matter in which country of the world Azerbaijanis lived, we will write their history.

However, the country under the name of Armenia has never existed in history. Armenians deny the fact that Armenian state was created on ancient Azerbaijani lands  on the territory of the former Iravan khanate. And these lands never belonged to Armenians. Historically, these lands have always been ours. The essence of my speech at the meeting of the Presidium of ANAS was the fact that we, as the people of Azerbaijan, not making territorial claims to anybody, should study our history.

The Armenian falsifiers, seeking to sow discord in the relations of Azerbaijan with Russia and Georgia, have resorted to the lies traditional for them. Armenian historians and ruling circles are well aware of the fact that the Armenians were moved to our lands. Until the 1827-1828 years Armenians did not live in the South Caucasus. They were resettled on the territory of Iravan khanate by the Russian Empire. On May 29, 1918 under strong external pressure, Azerbaijan was forced to cede Iravan and the surrounding lands- an area of 9000 square kilometers to Armenians. We granted Armenians the opportunity to self-determination on our own territory, recognized them this right, which allowed them to establish their own state.

So let Armenian historians leave the epithet sheep for themselves. And let them objectively examine the history, then they will be obliged to recognize the fact that up to May 29, 1918 in this area has never existed Armenian state. Armenians created their state in our lands, in the territory of Iravan khanate. Let them answer me, we gave them an area of 9000 square kilometers, our ancient city of Iravan, then what are they doing now in the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan - in Karabakh? Armenian troops must get out of Karabakh. At one time we gave the Armenians 9000 square kilometers of our territory, after which they seized Zangazur as well. Therefore I, as director of the Institute of History demand from them to clear off from the occupied Azerbaijani lands, and to abandon their attempts to falsify history.

We have written the history of Iravan, Nakhchivan and Garabagh. If they can, let them refute at least one fact. But they will not be able to do this.

Armenians have no right to lay claim to any territory. In ancient times they lived on the Balkan Peninsula. Over the centuries they lived in those or other foreign lands, and now, after they have created for themselves a state in the Azerbaijani territory, they want to seize other our lands.

Today the Armenians put forward territorial claims to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. Everywhere they stir up trouble. But Armenian historians should deal with education of its people. At one time we sheltered Armenians in our lands; they lived at our expense, making millions for them, and so let them now to become more sensible, to go on the right path, to restore normal relations with the Azerbaijani people, the Turkic world. But unfortunately, instead of it they are busy with slander and provocation. We have always helped them, and shared a crust of bread with them, but they chose to unite with certain external forces against the Azerbaijani people.

I repeat again, the Armenians should try to improve relations with the Azerbaijani people, to abandon claims to Karabakh, to remove their troops from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, to stop demanding the land from Turkey and Georgia. Only then we will be able to accept friendship from them.

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28 April 2016 17:33 (UTC+04:00)

By Nazrin Gadimova

Over the past two days the situation on the contact line of troops has once again worsened as the Armenian side, breaching all the commitments and international conventions, has shelled Azerbaijani positions and villages adjacent to the frontline area.

In such circumstances, Azerbaijans response was sharp. The Defense Ministry said that as long as the Armenian side continues shelling civil population, the Azerbaijani Armed Forces would continue to strike back at the enemys military positions using appropriate weapons.

There is no doubt that namely Yerevan has once again played the role of the provoker in the recent events.

In response to a journalist's question at the very last press briefing about violation of ceasefire by Armenia the U.S. State Department official said the U.S. condemns in the strongest possible terms any violence along the Nagorno-Karabakh line of conflict.

Our chairman of the Minsk Group  co-chair [James Warlick]  has visited the region, Spokesperson Mark Toner said. We have remained in contact with both governments, all sides in this conflict, and our message has been consistent, which is that we condemn in the strongest possible terms any violence along the Nagorno-Karabakh line of conflict and we need to see the peace process back up and running and as soon as possible.

Toner stressed that there is no military solution to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

If the world community does not want see military solution to the conflict, then they should force Armenia to refuse from destructive policy, to stop shelling civilians and to withdraw its troops from the internationally recognized territories of Azerbaijan.

Armenia, which controls over 20 percent of the Azerbaijani territories, has recently shelled Azerbaijani positions and residential areas of Terter and Agdam regions using 60, 82 and 120 mm mortars as well as 122 mm D-30 howitzers. As a result of military attacks one resident of Azerbaijans Agdam region was killed, while eight injured. Moreover, the Armenian shelling damaged more than 100 houses located near the contact line of troops.

Elkhan Alasgarov, PhD, head of the Baku Network's expert council, believes that the fact that the enemy is firing at these regions is not accidental.

Azerbaijans Agdam and Terter regions are the nearest residential areas to the contact line of troops. Therefore, Armenia tries to create panic and fear among those living in these regions, to force them to leave their homes and then to take advantage of the opportunity, the expert said.

At the same time, Alasgarov recalled Armenian threats to bomb oil and gas pipelines that go through the territories neighboring to Azerbaijans Ganja city. The shortest route to these territories passes through Terter region, he said, adding that therefore, the enemy focuses on these areas.

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Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova

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28 April 2016 18:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Nazrin Gadimova

Azerbaijan has revealed another false statement of Armenia regarding the clashes along the contact line of troops.

Hikmet Hajiyev, the Spokesperson for Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry, said that Yerevans statement about the damage done to civilian population and facilities in the occupied Azerbaijani territories, controlled by Armenia, is a lie.

There are no civilians in those areas, he stressed, adding that this is a result of the ethnic cleansing carried out by Armenia against the Azerbaijanis in the occupied territories.

Azerbaijan shares the concern of the U.S. Department of State and the Russian Foreign Ministry over the escalation of situation on the line of contact between the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, Hajiyev added.

Starting from April 27 evening until 04:00 (GMT + 4) on April 28, the Armenian armed forces were firing at settlements, as well as the Azerbaijani army's positions in Azerbaijan's Terter and Agdam districts, the spokesperson said.

He further stressed that as a result of Armenias grossly violating the international humanitarian law, a resident of Azerbaijans Agdam district was killed, eight people were injured, while a lot of Azerbaijani public facilities and property suffered considerable damage.

The intentional use of cluster munitions by the Armenian troops against the Azerbaijani civilians densely residing along the line of contact, has no military purpose, but targets civilians," Hajiyev added.

The official believes that the Armenian military units attempts to exterminate the civilians using inhumane methods are a part of the systematic policy of terror against Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan has warned international community about new provocations being prepared by Armenia," he said, adding that Yerevan will be fully responsible for the actions of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces taken to ensure the safety of civilians along the line of contact.

The situation on the contact line of Armenian and Azerbaijani troops has again aggravated on April 24 despite the ceasefire agreement that was reached with the mediation of Russia on April 5.

The long-lasting Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict remains unresolved due to the continuation of Armenias occupant policy. Yerevan has not yet implemented the UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

The OSCE Minsk Group acted as the only mediator in resolution of the conflict, proceeding talks based on the renewed Madrid principles. However, the statements promising a sincere contribution to the peaceful resolution of the conflict have become frequent, but declarative in essence.

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Nazrin Gadimova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @NazrinGadimova

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28 April 2016 17:03 (UTC+04:00)

France should suppress its local authorities' attempts of cooperation with the unrecognized regime in Nagorno-Karabakh, Jean-Francois Mancel, member of the French National Assembly, president of the Association of Friends of Azerbaijan in France, told Trend on April 28.

"Relations between Azerbaijan and France have always been at a high level regardless of which political forces are in power in France," he said.

The two countries had such high level of relations during Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency as well, and these relations continue today when Francois Hollande is France's president, added Mancel.

"There is a good legal framework between the two countries, and the political, economic and humanitarian relations between them continue to develop successfully," he said.

Meanwhile, it is not a secret that there is a very strong Armenian lobby consisting of around 600,000 people in France, added Mancel.

According to him, representatives of the Armenian lobby are quite active and seriously affect the French politics by resorting to electoral blackmail in this issue.

"Analyzing the situation, we will see that the French cities and local authorities that have signed agreements on cooperation with the settlements in the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan and providing support to the separatist regime there, are the cities of historical Armenian emigration," said Mancel.

He added that the local authorities of those French cities are mostly subjected to the Armenian influence due to the large number of voters of Armenian origin.

"Of course, a man is free in his thoughts, but if he is holding a leading position, all his actions should be within the legal framework and should not contradict the legislation," noted Mancel.

"Under the French law, the local authorities should not cooperate with unrecognized entities," said the politician. "As part of my activity in the National Assembly of France, I sent a request in 2015 to the country's minister of internal affairs to clarify the situation regarding the "charters on cooperation" signed between local authorities of certain French cities and settlements of the separatist entity created in the occupied Azerbaijani territories."

"The French interior minister clarified the government's stance and provisions of the law, according to which France doesn't recognize the regime in the occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan," said Mancel.

According to Mancel, the minister said France has no relations with the people who call themselves "leaders", and any signed documents on cooperation between local authorities of French cities and the settlements in the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh territory have no legal force.

Mancel said this official stance of the French government was included in a circular signed by the country's foreign and interior ministers July 2, 2015, and sent to all the regions for the French mayors to get familiarized with it.

"France has good relations with both countries - Azerbaijan and Armenia. France is a co-chairing country of the OSCE Minsk Group and has international commitments, but such an illegal activity of its local authorities is contrary to the country's stance on the conflict," he added.

"I admit that the French politics has some shortcomings, mistakes. This is a result of the Armenian lobby's influence on the French politicians," he further said.

Mancel added that France should take a more active stance in resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, use its influence on Armenia, force it to negotiate, demand it to fulfil the UN Security Council's resolutions, and first of all, to withdraw from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

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28 April 2016 10:01 (UTC+04:00)

By Gareth Evans

Chinas adventurism in the South China Sea has prompted a change in Australian policymaking that merits wide international attention. In making maintenance of a rules-based global order a core strategic priority, Australias new Defense White Paper adopts language not often found at the heart of national defense charters. It is all the more surprising coming from a conservative government that is usually keen to follow the United States down any path it takes.

Australia wanted a readily defensible basis for contesting Chinas claims that could not be portrayed as just another reflexive embrace of the American position. For a country trying  as are others in the region  to avoid zero-sum choices between our strategic partner, the US, and our economic partner, China, the White Papers words were astutely chosen and deserve emulation.

Part of the attraction of a rules-based global order is that it would constrain all relevant players. US policymakers, unlike those in most of the rest of the world, dont find the concept inherently attractive. Although they  like everyone else  do pay lip service to it, willingness to be bound by international rules is not part of US officials DNA.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 remains Exhibit A. But there are others, including the overreach (alongside the United Kingdom and France) of the UN Security Councils mandate in Libya in 2011, and what Jessica Mathews has described as the wasteland for multilateral commitments in the US approach to binding treaties, including the Convention on Biodiversity, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Protocol on Torture, and, most relevant to the South China Sea, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

The more immediate sting in the Australian White Paper is for China. Whatever else is going on in the South China Sea, it is not respect for a rules-based global order. Playing by the rules would imply a number of changes to Chinese behavior.

First, it would mean clearly articulating specific sovereignty claims, based on long use or occupancy of particular habitable islands, in the Paracel or Spratly groups or elsewhere. When those claims overlap with claims by other states, as most of them do, China must be prepared to resolve them, preferably by international adjudication or arbitration, which it has so far strongly resisted, or at the very least by genuine give-and-take negotiation.

Second, China would have to abandon its nine-dash line as a basis not only for sovereignty claims relating to land features bounded by it, but also for claims to ill-defined historical waters or traditional Chinese fishing grounds. With Chinese fishing vessels constantly intruding into what have hitherto been others undisputed 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs) under UNCLOS, these claims are now causing real friction with countries like Indonesia.

UNCLOS  now generally accepted as customary international law even by countries that have not joined it, like the US  is the only acceptable framework for resolving these issues. Even if every one of Chinas current sovereignty claims to particular habitable islands were to be accepted, the 12 nautical miles of territorial waters, and the 200 nautical miles of EEZ associated with each of them, would not begin to add up to the 80% of the South China Sea now encompassed by Chinas nine-dash line.

Third, China would need to limit severely its actions relating to reefs and shoals, never previously habitable, where it has been reclaiming land and building airstrips and other installations capable of military use, and seeking to deny others the use of adjacent waters and airspace. International law tolerates some such building  as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia have been doing for years, though on a much smaller scale. But it does not tolerate any military use, or support more than a 500-meter safety zone around such installations  not a territorial sea, EEZ, air defense identification zone, or anything else.

Fourth, China should moderate its position that no foreign ship or aircraft may engage in surveillance or intelligence collection not only within its territorial waters, about which international law is clear, but within its entire EEZ, about which Chinas argument is not at all strong. Adherence to this position sustains a constant risk of inflammatory incidents.

So long as China refuses to play by accepted international rules, others are entitled to push back, including with the fly-by or freedom of navigation sail-by exercises in which the US has been engaging, and which Australia and others should separately emulate. Chinas insistence that it has no intention to disrupt commercial shipping or flight lanes should be believed; to do otherwise would be to cut off its nose to spite its face. But its behavior is testing the limits of regional and global understanding and patience.

The remaining attraction of making a rules-based global order central to Australias policy is the discipline this imposes on Australia itself  as it would on any state that adopts this language. To be taken seriously, we have to put our money where our mouths are, by accepting international duties and responsibilities  like helping to stop atrocity crimes in faraway places  that are consistent with our claims to good international citizenship but serve no immediate traditional national security or economic interest.

In Australias case, this means thinking again about some of our efforts to limit our exposure to the International Court of Justice and certain dispute-resolution mechanisms under UNCLOS. In this imperfect world, there is considerable tolerance for all sorts of imperfect behavior. But hypocrisy always catches up with you. Preaching the virtues of a rule-based order to others, but being coy about some of those rules oneself, is not a good look.

Copyright: Project Syndicate: Playing by the Rules in Asia

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28 April 2016 10:01 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijan`s First Lady, President of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Mehriban Aliyeva met with Co-Founder and Representative of the Community of San Patrignano Letizia Moratti, who was attending the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, on April 28, Azertac reports.

Mrs. Aliyeva said she was happy that Letizia Moratti participated in the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, and stressed the importance of this forum in terms of expanding international cooperation.

They discussed opportunities for cooperation between the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and the Community of San Patrignano, particularly in preservation and restoration of historical monuments, coexistence in inclusive societies, and social projects.

Earlier, Mehriban Aliyeva met with former Prime Minister of France Dominique de Villepin, who was attending the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations.

The sides said the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations was excellently organized.

They noted that the relations between Azerbaijan and France were developing, hailing the Heydar Aliyev Foundation`s contribution to this process.

The sides underlined that the Heydar Aliyev Foundation was implementing a number of cultural projects in France and playing a vital role in the bilateral cooperation between the two countries.

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28 April 2016 10:04 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijan is very major player in international scene, which is promoting dialogue between cultures and working for peace and security in the world, ISESCO Director General Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri told reporters Apr. 27 in Baku.

The director general of the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) is participating in the 7th Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations in Baku.

Azerbaijan helps to promote the culture of tolerance, understanding of living together, said Altwaijri.

"I think Azerbaijan gained this because of its wise leadership," he noted adding that Baku is now a platform for dialogue, conferences, forums, events of great magnitude.

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28 April 2016 11:32 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

An Azerbaijani delegation headed by Defense Industry Minister Yaver Jamalov paid a visit to Pakistan on April 26-27 to participate in the 6th session of Azerbaijan-Pakistan Intergovernmental Commission on economic cooperation.

During the two-day visit, featuring bilateral meetings aimed at developing political, economic, military and humanitarian relations, Azerbaijan's minister was received by Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain and Pakistani Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif.

During the meeting, President Mamnoon Hussain stated that greater cooperation between the two friendly countries in energy, defense and communication sectors contributes for the mutual benefit of the two states. He said the two countries should make coordinated efforts to increase the bilateral trade.

Hussain added that the current trade volume between the two countries was below potential and emphasized the need to enhance it through joint efforts.

He voiced hope that the 6th session of the Azerbaijani-Pakistani Intergovernmental Commission would be helpful in enhancing bilateral trade.

At a meeting with the Pakistani prime minister, Jamalov said Azerbaijan was keen to explore new opportunities to import defense products and raw material from Pakistan.



He extended invitation for Pakistan's participation in the International Defense Exhibition to be organized by Azerbaijan in September, with special reference to the JF-17 Thunder.

The military cooperation is one of the main components of bilateral relations between Azerbaijan and Pakistan. The countries signed a defense agreement in 2013. Later, the naval forces of both countries held consultations on military-technical issues.

Pakistan and Azerbaijan enjoy good relations in various spheres. Pakistan supported Azerbaijan during and after the Nagorno-Karabakh War and it is the only country that does not recognize Armenia.

Azerbaijans expanded military budget has lifted it to the top among its neighbors in the South Caucasus.

The country manufactures the Istiglal sniper rifle, Mubariz rifle, Orbiter-2M unmanned intelligence drones, Gurza armored patrol car, "Matador" and "Marauder" armored vehicles, anti-tank mines, etc.

Last year, the Defense Industry Ministry accomplished work over the creation of night vision devices, prismatic binoculars with a compass, mine fuses of different types and organized their production.

Azerbaijan, which is in war with neighboring Armenia over the latter's territorial claims during more than 20 years, keeps in focus the armament, working closely with leading companies and firms in various fields of military industry.

The country purchased numerous weapons from foreign countries including Turkey, Russia and Israel, to modernize and upgrade its armed forces, and signed military contracts with over 20 countries which envisage a large-scale weapons supply.

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Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



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28 April 2016 15:01 (UTC+04:00)

By Aynur Karimova

The 7th Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), which was held in Baku on April 25-27, was of significant importance for Azerbaijan. This event gave Azerbaijan an opportunity to show the world its tolerance and multiculturalism experience gained for many centuries.

This event also showed that Azerbaijan, being a Muslim country, is a successful model of peaceful coexistence of different religions and ethnic groups. The Forum also was a very good moment to show the world that a Muslim country can be tolerant and embrace the principles and values of coexistence.

Given that 2016 was announced the Year of Multiculturalism in Azerbaijan, multiculturalism is a state policy in the country, what has made Baku an ideal place for holding the 7th UNAOC Global Forum.

The Forum was attended by over 2,500 guests from 120 countries, including UN member states, political leaders, the representatives of international and regional organizations, donor organizations and funds, private sector, as well as media representatives and academicians.

In these three days, the attendees of the Forum on the theme Living Together in Inclusive Societies: A Challenge and A Goal discussed the most challenging issues of the today's global world. The Forum has sent a very important message to the world about stopping conflicts, violence and terror, as well as to live in a world without wars, conflicts and intolerance.

Experts believe that the Forum gives an opportunity to discuss global issues, to find solutions, as well as to get acquainted with Azerbaijan's realities.

Being a Muslim majority country, Azerbaijan is a home to a big Jewish community, to Catholics, Protestants and members of the Russian Orthodox Church. It is a unique example of peaceful coexistence of peoples and it explains why Baku was chosen as the venue for the Global Forum.

The Forum has become a very important event, bringing together many cultures, many civilizations, many countries came in Baku, the pearl of the Caspian Sea. It demonstrated once again that tolerance is the symbol of Azerbaijan.

The milestone of the Forum was adoption of the Baku Declaration by the group of friends of the Alliance of Civilizations, which envisions peaceful initiatives.

According to UN Radio, among the major outcomes from the Global Forum Baku 2016 was the unanimous adoption of the Baku Declaration, a political document that will guide future efforts towards achieving the goals of UNAOC - a body mandated to promote harmony among nations.

The Baku Declaration calls for the implementation of the commitments made there so that the governments, with the support of the civil society, can overcome challenges and move forward towards the goals of living together in inclusive societies for sustainable development.

Through the Baku Declaration, the Group of Friends reaffirmed its support to UNAOC and expressed its conviction that UNAOC plays an important role as a global platform for sharing good practices for living together in inclusive societies, UNAOC High Representative Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser said at the closing session.

The outcome document condemns any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, whether it involves the use of print, audiovisual or electronic media or any other means.

It also stresses the importance of implementing UNAOC's goals at the national level and supports the High Representative in his efforts, including the advancement of UNAOC programming as an instrument to address conditions conducive to the spread of violent extremism.

Maltese President Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca believes that in order to achieve progress in the world, peoples should live in solidarity, in a society where human rights and freedoms are protected and respected.

"People are concerned about the growing inequalities. Fear is sowing the seeds of discord. We should keep social inclusion in our hands as a flag. Baku Declaration will promote the principles of justice and equality," she noted.

Azerbaijan's main message to the participants of the event was clear: Baku is ready to share its experience of tolerance collected for many decades.

Azerbaijan for many years has been a good place where the representatives of various religions, cultures and civilizations coexisted. President Ilham Aliyev said in his speech at the opening of the forum, Azerbaijan is not only a geographic bridge between East and West, but it is a cultural bridge as well.

Azerbaijan is a unique land where tolerance and multiculturalism is a main direction in the foreign and domestic policy. Today, Azerbaijan is a multiethnic and multiconfessional country, where the members of all religions and ethnicities live in dignity and peace.

"This is one of our biggest assets," President Aliyev said. "And we're proud of our history. We are proud of our historical monuments, which reflect the creation of representatives of different cultures."

In 2008, Azerbaijan initiated the Baku Process, which further became the broad platform for international dialogue. Azerbaijan is one of the few countries, which is the member of the Islamic Cooperation Organization and the Council of Europe.

Next year, in 2009, Azerbaijan hosted the ministerial meeting of the ministers of cultures of the Islamic Cooperation Organization in Baku and invited the ministers of culture of Council of Europe. This was named the Baku Process.

Experts believe that this Forum once again approved the increasing prestige of Azerbaijan, its hospitality, its tolerance and multiculturalism experience. By holding this Forum, Azerbaijan once again confirmed its unofficial status of "diplomatic capital of the region" and an important center of intercultural and intercivilizational dialogue.

--

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28 April 2016 17:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

April 28 sees 93rd birthday of Zarifa Aliyeva, an outstanding scientist, spouse of national leader Heydar Aliyev, and mother to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

A prominent ophthalmologist and academician Aliyeva, was born in a beautiful and ancient corner of Azerbaijan - Nakhchivan, in 1923.

Born and raised in a family of prominent statesman Aziz Aliyev, Zarifa Aliyeva absorbed all the rich values of her family.

Aiming to devote herself to the medicine Aliyeva entered in 1942 the Treatment and Prophylaxis Faculty of the Azerbaijan State Medical Institute that she graduated with excellent marks.

It is in these years that she met Heydar Aliyev, a young promising officer, who would soon rise through the ranks to become the head of department at the State Security Committee (KGB) and later lead Azerbaijan.

Zarifa and Heydar Aliyevs led an exemplary family life. They had two children -- Sevil and Ilham. Zarifa was a great women, who could balance in between her family and her career.

She was a prominent scholar, beautiful woman and careful mother.

Zarifa Aliyeva could gain love of millions of her compatriots with her intelligence, beauty, and grace. With a deep sense of devotion to her family and country, she dedicated herself to raising her children.

PhD in medicine Nubar Hashimova, who is also a doctor at the children's department of the National Center of Ophthalmology, shared her memories about Zarifa Aliyeva in an interview with Day.Az.

Zarifa Aliyeva treated her patients by her intellect, urged by strength of character and supported by kindness. The harmonic combination of these important qualities was her power as a doctor, Hashimova said, adding that patients were always pleased with the results of her treatment.

Hashimova recalled huge merits of Zarifa Aliyeva in the development of national ophthalmology.

Zarifa Aliyeva was not just dreaming about the development of the national ophthalmology, but was quite active to realize this vision, she believes.



In those years, the country had very few national ophthalmic specialists. Exactly that time, in 1960s, trachoma, accompanied by inflammation swollen eyes and blindness, caused a lot of suffering to the people in Azerbaijan.

I myself was a witness of this historical event," she remembers. "In the session of the All-Union Ophthalmological society, Zarifa Aliyeva raised the issue of occupational diseases of vision organs for the first time. Prior to that, no scientist was engaged in it in the USSR.

Zarifa Aliyeva was in the forefront of science and despite many difficulties, she made great strides in a very short time. She applied antibiotic treatment methods developed by herself to treat patients and her efforts were rewarded by highest prize in the field of ophthalmology  Academician M.I.Averbakh Prize. Aliyeva became the first female doctor in the Soviet Union to win the prize.

Collecting a wealth of factual materials on the prevention of trachoma, Aliyeva without fear of contacting the disease herself traveled huge distances to examine patients.

Aliyeva is an author of a number of valuable research papers, 12 monographs, textbooks and manuals, about 150 scientific works, one invention and 12 rationalization proposals.

She is one of the authors of a fundamental book Therapeutic ophthalmology, which is regarded as a handbook for every ophthalmologist.



Zarifa Aliyeva is also one of the scientists having studied development of diagnostics of disease in new direction (change in iris, iridodiagnostics) for the first time and written some scientific articles on this subject. She is one of the authors of unique scientific work Fundamentals of iridodiagnostics that is invaluable scientific device to doctors.

She was a very intelligent woman with many talents. Zarifa Aliyeva loved music and was highly skilled on playing the piano. She paid great attention and respect for the arts and was a connoisseur of national and world classic music, inveterate theater-goer, and an art connoisseur.

Unfortunately, Zarifa Aliyeva could not see the present days of our independent Azerbaijan. She died in the 62nd year of her life.

--

Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



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28 April 2016 12:07 (UTC+04:00)

Azerbaijan's foreign ministry has revealed another false statement from Armenia regarding confrontations on the contact line of Azerbaijani and Armenian troops.



Hikmat Hajiyev, spokesman for the Azerbaijani foreign ministry, told Trend April 28 that Yerevan's official statement on damaged done to the civilian population and facilities in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan under Armenia's control, is a lie.



"There are no civilians in these areas," Hajiyev said.

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28 April 2016 16:19 (UTC+04:00)

The 7th Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) is a very important event and it is important that this event was held in Baku, said Tamerlan Vahabov, a politics and international relations expert, speaking at the discussions held by the Baku International Policy and Security Network think tank.

"Baku has always been a famous and important part of multiculturalism, of tolerance. We can actually say that being a Muslim country and in this politically hard and difficult region, Azerbaijan has been able to sustain itself as an icon of tolerance and coexistence among cultures and different religions," said Vahabov.

He noted that many countries sent their high-ranking representatives to the 7th UNAOC Global Forum and this bolsters Azerbaijan's image as a place for peace.

"It is very important thing to hold it [the Forum] especially here, in a Muslim country. It can be a great example for other Muslim countries," added Vahabov.

He said it is now a very good and great moment to show the world that a Muslim country can be tolerant, can embrace the principles and values of coexistence, and Azerbaijan has been able to demonstrate this by holding such an important event - the 7th UNAOC Global Forum.

"Azerbaijan has a lot to demonstrate to the world," he said, adding that being a Muslim country, Azerbaijan has a Jewish community represented in the country's parliament, the Russian orthodox church, Catholics, and Protestants.

"You can see them not only in Baku. You can go to Guba and see the Red Sloboda - the largest Jewish settlement outside Israel in the world. This is an important milestone to show Azerbaijan's multicultural heritage and to share it with the world," he noted.

Vahabov added that the Azerbaijani identity is multicultural.

He said Azerbaijan is one of the rarest former Soviet republics where Russian language is still preserved.

"You can still hear it [Russian] in Baku, in the northern parts of Azerbaijan, in Ganja, in the biggest cities of Azerbaijan. And speaking Russian does not necessarily mean something else. I mean people still preserve their heritage, their Azerbaijani identity, they are proud of it. But at the same time they speak Russian," Vahabov said.

"And this is not just about the people who identify themselves as ethnic Turks, like indigenous people of Azerbaijan, but also [about] the Russians who have lived in Azerbaijan for several generations. They speak their own language - Russian, but at the same time they speak Azerbaijani," he said.

"And they are Azerbaijanis, I mean these are people coming from different cultural backgrounds, but still sharing the same values. And speaking a language is just the issue of convenience. This is another manifestation of tolerance - it is not only religious, it is linguistic, cultural," added Vahabov.

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28 April 2016 17:24 (UTC+04:00)

Ali Hasanov, the Azerbaijani president's aide for public and political affairs, expressed regret regarding idleness of international organizations in connection with the latest developments on the contact line of the country's and Armenian troops.

The OSCE Minsk Group, which is directly involved in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict's settlement, as well as this group's member states didn't express any attitude regarding the heavy shelling of Azerbaijani settlements by Armenian armed forces and the civilians killed as a result of it, Hasanov told Trend on April 28.

Starting from April 27 evening until 04:00 (GMT + 4 hours) on April 28, Armenian armed forces opened fire at settlements, as well as Azerbaijani army's positions in the country's Terter and Aghdam districts. Armenian military was using 60, 82 and 120-millimeter mortars, as well as 122-millimeter D-30 howitzers.

One resident of Azerbaijan's Aghdam district was killed, and eight people got injured as a result of shelling.

An adequate response of the Azerbaijani armed forces on consistent provocations of the Armenian army in early April and as a result of this, the liberation of some territories under occupation, caused a rapid response of most international organizations and individual countries, Hasanov 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.

There were calls to suspend military operations and restore the ceasefire in all appeals and statements, said Hasanov.

The silence of these structures in the current situation gives grounds to say that the international organizations, especially the OSCE Minsk Group, directed all efforts at ensuring the safety of the separatist regime in Azerbaijan's occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region and war criminals who are this regime's leaders, as well as preserving the status quo in the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Hasanov said.

"I think that double standards are applied against Azerbaijan in the most blatant form," he said. "Disrespect is demonstrated to the people of Azerbaijan, international law and the principles of justice."

Hasanov went on to add that the international community, the OSCE and other organizations should take decisive measures in order to put an end to these actions by Armenia against Azerbaijani civilians.

Azerbaijan isn't going to tolerate regular provocations by Armenian leadership and the armed forces of this country, as well as the destruction of settlements, killing of civilians, said Hasanov.

If the international community continues to remain silent, Azerbaijan will have to take decisive measures to protect the civilian population and put an end to provocations, he said. From now on, the responsibility for this situation will lie directly on Armenia and those who turn a blind eye to its provocations, Hasanov said.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 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.

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28 April 2016 13:18 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

Many foreign businessmen seek to find their place on the Azerbaijani market following the governments decision to develop non-oil sector of the country through creating a room for new investors.

The Netherlands has announced its interest in cooperation with Azerbaijan in the sphere of agriculture.



Dutch Ambassador to Azerbaijan Robert Jan Gabrielse said this sector is of great interest for the Netherlands, as the country is the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world.

The main attractive sectors for the Netherlands are water industry and lake water purification, according to the ambassador.

"We cooperate with Azerbaijan's Emergency Situations Ministry in flood prevention," said Gabrielse. "Moreover, we actively cooperate within the lake water purification projects."

The ambassador emphasized that the Netherlands has already had an experience in cleaning Boyukshor Lake, Azerbaijan's second largest lake and the largest lake in the Absheron Peninsula, polluted with the waste from surrounding industrial facilities.

"We have already participated in purification of the Lake Boyukshor near the Baku Olympic Stadium and plan to continue the cooperation in this sphere," said Gabrielse.

Moreover, the Netherlands and Azerbaijan continue to cooperate in the sphere of education - the Maastricht School of Management successfully cooperates with Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, the Dutch diplomat added.

The ambassador pointed out that the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs Henk Kamp will visit Baku on May 10-11 and a Dutch trade delegation consisting of 30 people is also expecting to arrive in the capital on May 17-20.

"During the upcoming visit, our delegation will also become familiar with the conditions created in the agricultural and industrial parks," he added.

A number of the Dutch companies will take part in the agricultural exhibition Caspian Agro 2016, scheduled for May 19-21 in Baku. An exhibition hall of the Netherlands will be organized with support of the Dutch government.

The relations between the Netherlands and Azerbaijan have strengthened over the past years. More than 50 companies with the Dutch capital operate in Azerbaijan in the spheres of shipbuilding, logistics, ecology and banking. A business center, which operates as a coordination center for companies, was created for strengthening business relations between the two countries.

The trade turnover between the two states amounted to almost $44.75 million in the first quarter of 2016 and more than half of these funds accounted for the export to the Netherlands, according to Azerbaijan's State Customs Committee.

--

Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



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28 April 2016 15:34 (UTC+04:00)

By Fatma Babayeva

Specialized companies are in the final stage of evaluating the assets of Azerbaijans methanol plant AzMeCo, which is necessary for transferring the facility to Azerbaijans state state-owned energy company SOCAR in accordance with the decision of the Cabinet of Ministers.

Depending on the results of the evaluation, the assets can be handed over to SOCAR, said Suleyman Gasimov, the vice president of SOCAR on economic issues.

The need to transfer AzMeCo to the state company SOCAR arose due to the debt the enterprise had to state bank - the International Bank of Azerbaijan.

By this means, the government plans to cover the debt in the amount of 344 million manats ($229 million), which the national energy operator Azerenergy owes to SOCAR.

Gasimov clarified that the debt of Azerenergy to SOCAR equaled to 416 million manats ($277 million) as of January 2015. However, the state covered this debt with the help of subsidies. Nevertheless, Azerenergys new debt in the amount of 314 million manats ($209 million) emerged during 2015. In addition, 30 million manats ($20 million) was added to this debt during the first quarter of 2016.

The methanol plants transfer to SOCAR will lead to a unified chain of production, which will increase the efficiency of the enterprise, believes Gasimov. The plant will also operate on SOCARs gas.

AzMeCo is one of the largest investments made in the non-oil sector of Azerbaijan. The enterprise produced methanol from natural gas for the first time in Azerbaijan.

The only methanol producing plant in the South Caucasus and Central Asian region, AzMeCo was commissioned in January 2014.

The main buyer of the methanol produced at the plant is BP. The produced methanol is mainly sold via Georgian Kulevi port.

Currently, methanol is exported to Turkey, Romania, Slovenia, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Annual methanol production capacity of the plant amounts to 720,000 tons. The total cost of the project stands at 350 million manats ($233 million).

AzMeCo is a part of the PNN companies group which combines oil, gas and petrochemical assets, as well as, a number of retail businesses in Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Turkey.

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Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva

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28 April 2016 17:23 (UTC+04:00)

By Fatma Babayeva

The Azerbaijani Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Population and United Nations Development Programme signed a document on new Economic Empowerment for Entrepreneurship and Employment project in Baku on April 28.

This is the next of the series of projects which implemented to facilitate integration of the young generation to the labor market.

The project was undersigned by Salim Muslumov, the Minister of Labor and Social Protection of Population and Ghulam M. Isaczai, UNDP resident representative. It is implemented jointly by the mentioned institutions with the support of USAID.

The total budget of the project amounts to $189,000. Overall, 400 people will benefit from the project.

Economic Empowerment for Entrepreneurship and Employment project aims to support youth employment in Azerbaijan. It is expected to contribute to further reduction of the unemployment rate and strengthen technology based small and medium enterprises in Azerbaijan.

Currently, the rate of unemployment stands slightly above 5 percent in Azerbaijan, while this figure is 10 percent among young generation, said Salim Muslumov during the signing ceremony of the project.

The Minister added that innovative approaches based on international practice are applied during arranging active employment events directed at increasing employment rates among youth.

Moreover, the project will support application of the SYSLAB methodology in vocational training centers of Ganja and Masalli cities.

The concept known as SYSLAB (Systems Laboratory for Innovation and Employment) includes modern job-seeking methods, entrepreneurship, systematic business, person-to-person networking and office skills, etc.

SYSLAB International has been active in Azerbaijan since 2011 when the first center was inaugurated in Baku.

Within the framework of the project that implemented with the support of UNDP and Norwegian SYSLAB company, SYSLAM Training Centers were established in Baku, Sumgayit and Ganja. In total, 452 young people attended the trainings held by these centers, and 358 or 80 percent of them were provided with relevant jobs in public and private sectors.

The focus group for SI Azerbaijan is unemployed persons with higher degrees in various fields which is important to the development of the countrys economy. In general, by reducing the unemployment, the agency helps to prevent brain drain.

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Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva

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28 April 2016 17:41 (UTC+04:00)

By Aynur Karimova

Azerbaijan and Turkey, the two neighboring countries and strategic partners, have a great potential to increase their bilateral trade turnover to $15 billion.

This was stated by Turkey's Economy Minister Mustafa Elitas on April 28.

"The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Turkey increased eight times and stood at $5.1 billion in 2002-2014, but it slightly dropped due to the global financial crisis in 2015 as compared to the previous years," he told Trend.

According to the State Customs Committee, trade turnover between the two countries amounted to $1.476 billion in 2015.

Turkey's export to Azerbaijan stood at $1.9 billion in 2015, while the country's import from Azerbaijan totaled $1.6 billion.

Turkey primarily exports iron and steel products, various finished products, electronics, furniture, plastic products to Azerbaijan.

"Natural gas accounts for 85 percent of Turkey's import from Azerbaijan," he said, adding that aside from the natural gas, Turkey imports non-ferrous metals, chemical industry products, plastic products from Azerbaijan.

Elitas believes that Azerbaijan's important role in the region, the high-level relations between Baku and Ankara make it possible to even more develop the economic and trade relations between our countries.

He said one of the most important missions of Turkish companies is to contribute to the development of Azerbaijan's economy.

Turkey's investments in Azerbaijan reached $7.5 billion by late 2014, while the volume of investments made by Azerbaijan in Turkey's economy stood at $4.2 billion.

The Turkish minister believes that these figures mirrors the level of relations between the two countries.

"But Baku and Ankara should even more develop the bilateral relations," he added.

Azerbaijan-Turkey enjoyed strong relations for centuries due to a common culture and history and the mutual intelligibility of the Turkish and Azerbaijani languages.

Turkey was the first country in the world to recognize Azerbaijan's independence in 1991 and has been a staunch supporter of Azerbaijan in its efforts to preserve its territorial integrity and realize the economic potential that arises from its rich natural resources in the Caspian Sea.

Azerbaijan and Turkey have good and developing economic ties, especially in terms of huge energy projects envisaging the transportation of Azerbaijan's hydrocarbon resources to the European and world markets through the Turkish territory.

Today, Azerbaijan and Turkey are the beneficiaries of all the major projects in the region, in particular the Southern Gas Corridor, which comprises TANAP and TAP projects, as well as the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway.

The partnership between Turkey and Azerbaijan has become a driving force forming policy and economy of the region. The two countries complete each other. The political weight of Ankara is supported by the economic projects implemented at the initiative of Azerbaijan. This unity allows Baku and Ankara to respond all modern challenges.

Azerbaijan's investments in the Turkish economy will reach $17 billion to $20 billion by 2020. Currently, this figure exceeds $6 billion.

Trans-Caspian route

Elitas believes that the crisis in relations between Russia and Turkey increases the relevance of the Trans-Caspian international transport corridor for cargo transportation through Azerbaijan to markets in Central Asia.



He said the Trans-Caspian transport corridor should become a priority when transporting cargoes.

Turkey held meetings with the representatives of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan on effective use of the Trans-Caspian transport corridor.



Customs procedures were simplified for effective use of the corridor, and it was agreed to reduce customs duties, transit quotas for Turkish trucks were increased.

The Trans-Caspian route connects China with Europe via the territory of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia. This is a multimodal corridor which uses railway, maritime and road transport for transportation of goods.

The Trans-Caspian route enjoys an opportunity to become attractive and profitable for consignors from European countries. This route will transport approximately 300,000-400,000 containers by 2020.

This route is attracting the attention of the transport and logistics communities of China, Turkey, Ukraine and European countries, which are looking for new routes of supply of their products to foreign markets.

Being the cheapest and most profitable corridor for freight traffic, the Trans-Caspian route is expected not to have an alternative in the coming decade.

The growing interest in transport infrastructures via Azerbaijan helps the country to become a major transport hub in the region.

Earlier, Azerbaijan Railways reported that Germany and Lithuania have expressed interest in joining the Trans-Caspian route.

Once fully operated, the transport route will have a positive impact on Azerbaijans economy.

--

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28 April 2016 17:55 (UTC+04:00)

Th official exchange rate of Azerbaijani manat against the US dollar was set at 1.5072 manats for April 29, said Azerbaijan's Central Bank (CBA) on April 28.

Manat's rate against the US dollar has decreased by 0.1 percent as compared to the rate on Apr. 28.

The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) sold $32.4 million to 14 banks through the auction held by the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA).

Meanwhile, the CBA obtained $10 million at the auction. SOFAZ offered $50 million for sale through the auction, according to the message.

SOFAZ will continue selling foreign currency through auctions in 2016.

The foreign currency is sold as part of SOFAZ's transfers to the Azerbaijani state budget, which are envisaged to stand at 7.615 billion Azerbaijani manats in 2016.

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U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officers arrested a man Thursday night for starting a fire on the Coconino National Forest within the city limits of Flagstaff.

According to documents filed with U.S. District Court, on April 21 at approximately 10 p.m., Forest Service Law Enforcement Officer Charles Emerson observed the man, later identified as Shawn P. Farnham, 49, quickly walking northbound near the Pipeline Trail in the Paradise Spring area at the base of Mount Elden.

With his night vision goggles, the officer was able to see something in Farnhams hand. The officer, who was approximately 38 yards away, then saw Farnham strike a cigarette lighter multiple times. A small but rapidly growing flame sprAng up about 30 seconds later. Farnham then ran back in the direction from which he had come.

Emerson and another Forest Service officer yelled for Farnham to stop. He was about 50 yards away from the fire when they arrested him. When he stopped, a white BIC lighter fell from his hand.

Farnham stated that he knew he had lit a fire and had left the fire because he is scared, Emerson wrote in his court filing. Farnham stated that he knew the fire was going to continue to grow.

According to the document, Emerson tried to suppress the fire before returning to assist the other officer with detaining Farnham. At that point, it had grown to approximately 5-feet by 5-feet with approximately 4-foot flames spreading up the nearby hillside. The Forest Service has not said how large the fire became before it was extinguished.

The case remains under investigation by Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations.

Emerson and the other officer were at the base of Mount Elden last Thursday night to investigate a series of recent suspicious, human-caused fires in the area of the Pipeline Trail.

Farnham was walking up the trail where multiple fires had been lit over-the past three weeks, he said in the court filing.

According to an April 5 joint press release from Forest Service law enforcement officers and the Flagstaff Police Department, there were at least five suspected arson fires in two days along the popular Pipeline Trail, in addition to another human-caused fire on March 26 close to the Pipeline Trail near North Fanning Drive. The agencies asked for the publics help in finding the perpetrators.

On April 5 between 6 and 7 a.m., fire crews responded to the so-called Barrel and Bottle fires, which grew to about one-tenth of an acre each before they were extinguished. The wildfires were in the same general area as three separate fires Flagstaff Fire Department crews extinguished in a wooded area behind a residential neighborhood near North Fourth Street April 4 between 5 and 6 a.m.

Those fires, named Pipeline 1, Pipeline 2 and Pipeline 3, were in the area of Paradise Springs along the Pipeline Trail. They were a few hundred feet from each other and about 100 yards from the nearest homes, FFD Capt. Kevin Wilson said. They only grew to about a tenth of an acre before fire crews extinguished them.

According to a Forest Service press release Wednesday, although firefighters were able to contain all the suspicious Mount Elden blazes quickly, they posed a concern because they were all within a quarter-mile of Flagstaff houses, schools and churches. These fires are also still under investigation.

The Forest Service and its partners in law enforcement work together to investigate suspicious, human-caused fires, said Forest Service Patrol Captain Jon Nelson. These types of fires not only pose a threat to national forest lands but also to communities and residents.

Forest Service officials were not able to say whether Farnham was suspected of setting any of the fires besides the one last Thursday night.

Farnham was arrested and charged with causing timber trees or grass to burn. He is currently on a U.S. Marshals hold in the Coconino County Detention Facility in Flagstaff. Bond has not been set. Farnhams initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Flagstaff was Tuesday. His detention hearing has been set for 9:30 a.m. Monday, May 2.

He is facing additional charges of aggravated assault of a healthcare professional and disorderly conduct in Coconino County Superior Court for an unrelated incident in August 2015. Court records show his most recent known address was in Flagstaff, although he has previous addresses listed in Phoenix and Massachusetts.
28 April 2016 16:25 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

The Russian Information and Cultural Center in Baku has launched the second phase of the mega project "Echo of Russian and Azerbaijani cities," Trend Life reports.

The first stage of the project covered 2013-2015. A joint meeting of Azerbaijani and Russian students from 40 schools took place in the framework of the project. Together they studied history, economy, culture, and traditions of Russian regions.

During the second stage, students will work together to familiarize themselves with the regions of Azerbaijan with the help of Rossotrudnichestvo representative office and Association of Teachers of Russian-Speaking Educational Institutions in Azerbaijan.

All-Russia Azerbaijan Congress is also likely to join the project soon. They are going to help Russian students to better understand Azerbaijani culture and traditions.

Teachers and students of Azerbaijani schools presented the stands reflecting information about cities and regions of Azerbaijan.

Speakers at the event included the head of Rossotrudnichestvo`s Representation in Azerbaijan,Valentin Denisov, the head of the All-Russia Azerbaijan Congress Nigar Mammadova and chairman of Association of Teachers of Russian-Speaking Educational Institutions in Azerbaijan Lubov Yakunina.

During a gala-concert, organized in the framework of the project, the participants performed Russian and Azerbaijani songs and folk dances.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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28 April 2016 12:42 (UTC+04:00)

By Fatma Babayeva

Azerbaijans state owned energy company SOCAR has finalized the year of 2015 without any losses, although the situation was unfavorable for oil producers in the global market.

Losses of SOCAR due to the low oil prices could amount to 1 billion manats ($662 million) but the company was able to maintain break-even-budget thanks to its assets in U.S. dollars.

The statement was made by Suleyman Gasimov, the company's vice president on economic issues on April 27.

The losses were offset, the companys expenditures were equal to its incomes, Gasimov added.

That was achieved through the difference in exchange rates, as the company receives its revenues in foreign currency.

The government decided to pass to a floating rate of national currency late 2015, which resulted in the devaluation of manat with regard to major currencies.

SOCAR produces oil and gas in Azerbaijan both at the expense of its own funds and together with the foreign partners.

The vice president further added that SOCAR is optimizing its business and restructuring its management systems in order to reduce costs. More than 750 actions are implemented in nine departments of SOCAR together with the audit firm Ernst &Young in order to achieve more effective management and to reduce costs. These measures will help the company to save 350-400 million manats ($231- 265 million) in the next one or two years.

Currently, the number of SOCAR employees exceeds 52,000 people. As much as 30 percent of its employees are engineers and managerial staff and 70 percent are workers. During the last year, the average salary of the employees of the state-owned companies amounted to 857 manats ($568). So, the salary fund of SOCAR accounts for approximately 20 percent of its costs, he added.

Gasimov also said that SOCAR's consolidated debt totaled $6.3 billion. This amount includes companys domestic debt as well.

The debt of the state-owned companies is a sensitive issue and managed by the company in a professional manner, Gasimov said.

The vice president emphasized that the amount SOCAR needs to pay off this year is not so much. The main part of this debt are represented in loans allocated for 5, 10 and 15 years.This debt also includes loans from the State Oil Fund which was used for the purchase of share in Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field and construction of the Baku Shipyard and other small loans.

In addition, the company received some loans from the International Bank of Azerbaijan.

Part of the loans will be covered at the expense of internal funds of SOCAR, and the remaining part by the government, said Gasimov.

SOCAR repaid more than $1 billion on loans for the projects in Turkey, said Gasimov adding that additional $400 million of the company's debt were repaid on eurobonds in the beginning of 2016.

The vice president on economic issues emphasized that the debt of the company is controlled and managed regularly and does not create any problems to activities in the company.

Moreover, SOCAR estimated its income and expenditures at $50 per barrel on average for 2016, Gasimov said adding that oil prices are not only affected by the economic but political factors as well. Azerbaijan has a modest impact on balancing supply and demand in the global market.

After the gathering of the top oil producers in Doha, it was expected that oil prices would fall. However, it was not the case.

The oil prices is projected to reach the level of $50- $60 in 2016. If it happens, it will be very beneficial for SOCAR, said Gasimov.

According to the latest developments in the global oil market, prices of crude oil continues to experience a slight increase.

In NYMEX, the cost of the WTI increased by $1.81 to $44.53 on April 27 while the price of the Brent crude raised by $1.70 to $46.33 at the London ICE.

The price of Azeri Light crude oil per barrel increased by $0.43 to $46.05 on the global oil market.

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Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
28 April 2016 12:06 (UTC+04:00)

By Aynur Karimova

Important directions and prospects of developing the strategic partnership between Moscow and Tashkent were high on the agenda of talks held between Vladimir Putin of Russia and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan.

The discussions were held as part of President Karimov's two-day official visit to Russia on April 25-26, Uzbekistan's national information agency reported.

During the meeting held between the two presidents, the sides mulled the development of cooperation in the political, trade, economic, investment, military-technical, cultural humanitarian and other fields.

They also exchanged views on actual problems of regional and international importance, in particular, the problems existing in Afghanistan, fight against terrorism, extremism, drug trafficking, as well as organized crime.

Karimov said that this visit is an opportunity for comprehensive exchange of views on topical issues of regional and international importance, and it will give a new impetus to further development of relations between the two countries.

Putin, in turn, said that Uzbekistan is a strategic partner and a reliable ally of Russia, and these ties are dynamically developing.

Putin and Karimov also discussed increase of trade turnover between Russian and Uzbekistan, development of investment cooperation, expansion of ties in the transport and transit fields, and exchanged views on the issues of expansion of interaction in the culture, science, education, sport and tourism fields.

Cooperation between Russia and Uzbekistan is based on a solid legal base. Relations between the two countries have been developing within the framework of the signed Agreement on Strategic Partnership (2004) and the Treaty on Allied Relations (2005).

Trade-economic cooperation has a special place in the Moscow-Tashkent ties. Russia is Uzbekistan's second largest foreign trade partner. Uzbekistan exports transport equipment, cotton fiber, tricots, fruit and vegetables, black and ferrous metals, as well as services. Russia, in turn, exports the products of chemical and paper industry, as well as food products.

Currently, over 900 joint ventures established jointly with Russia operate in Uzbekistan. Also, some 85 Russian companies have opened their representative offices in this Central Asian state.

Today, the two countries are developing investment cooperation. In recent years, over $6 billion was invested by Russia in the Uzbek economy.

During the talks, Putin and Karimov agreed to boost the volume and variety of exports of Uzbek fruit and vegetables.

The milestone of Karimov's visit to Moscow was signing of an intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in export of military goods to third countries.

Also, the foreign ministries of the two countries signed a program of cooperation for 2016-2017.

An intergovernmental program of cooperation in cultural and humanitarian fields for 2016-2018, a Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation in the field of physical culture and sports, and an agreement on scientific and academic cooperation between the Bauman Moscow State Technical University and Tashkent Institute of Railway Transport Engineers were among the signed documents.

--

Follow Aynur Karimova on Twitter @Aynur_Karimova

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28 April 2016 14:48 (UTC+04:00)

Asian imports of Iranian oil in March jumped 50 percent from a year earlier as shipments into India and South Korea have climbed since international sanctions were lifted on Iran's disputed nuclear program, Reuters reported on April 28.

The strong exports point to Iran's success in regaining market share in Asia after the sanctions were eased in January.

Before 2012, Iran exported around 2 million bpd, with more than half going to Asia, mainly China, South Korea, India and Japan. Tehran has been banned from selling oil to the United States for decades.

Iran's oil flows to Europe have also begun to pick up after a slow start though the country has struggled to increase oil exports because many of its tankers are tied up storing crude,

some are not seaworthy, and foreign ship owners remain reluctant to carry its cargoes.

Imports by Iran's top four buyers - China, India, Japan and South Korea - came to 1.56 million bpd in March, up 49.9 percent from a year ago, government and tanker-tracking data shows.

Nation Mar-16 Mar-15 yr/yr pct China 590,830 638,600 India 506,100 - Japan 198,355 266,144 Korea 264,452 135,935 Total 1,559,737 1,040,679

India's imports last month totalled 506,100 bpd, the highest in five years, the data showed. The nation's imports from Iran are set to surge to a seven-year high during the fiscal year of 2016/17, industry sources said.

South Korea's imports in March fell slightly from a two-year high in February to 264,452 bpd but were still 94.5 percent higher than a year ago. Imports by China and Japan fell from a year ago.

The following tables show Asia's Iran crude imports in bpd for last month and the year to date.

Nation Jan-Mar 2016 Jan-Mar 2015 China 511,757 547,110 India 299,200 126,000 Japan 209,871 227,990 Korea 251,088 113,911 Total 1,271,916 1,015,011

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28 April 2016 16:47 (UTC+04:00)

By Aynur Karimova

Foreign companies have started preliminary evaluations for presence in the Iranian oil and gas fields within the framework of the newly introduced oil contracts, Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said.

He noted that the draft version of the new contracts called Iran Petroleum Contract (IPC) should be finalized before considering any tender, IRNA news agency reported on April 26.

"While the IPC is not finalized yet, we cannot say when and with which company the contracts will be signed," Zanganeh added.

The IPC is the country's former buyback contracts with some revises. It was introduced a few months ago as a measure to make more out of the lush Iranian oil business.

The model of the contract emphasizes foreign investment that would bring technology to Iran. It also requires foreign investors to work with at least one Iranian partner.

Within the next few weeks, Iran's Oil Ministry will start reviewing the qualification of the foreign companies, which are in talks with Iran on oil and gas cooperation.

Meanwhile, Mehr news agency reported that Iran has held talks with several Canadian and the U.S. oil companies on various contracts for selling petrochemicals, purchase of technology and investment in oil and gas industry.

Over the past several months and after the removal of international sanctions on Iran, a group of the U.S. and Canadian companies have been in talks with Iranian officials to seal deals on launching upstream and midstream oil, gas and petrochemical projects.

The North American companies also eye selling goods and equipment, providing Iran with drilling services and purchasing petrochemical products from Iran.

Companies such as Halliburton Corporation and the General Motors Corporation are likely to reach deals with Iran on drilling. However Marzieh Shahdaei, the Director for projects at National Petrochemical Company of Iran, dismissed the reports suggesting that the U.S. companies have plans to invest directly in Iran's petrochemical industry.

An official document of Iran's Oil Ministry, obtained by Trend suggests that the country needs to attract $501 billion by 2025 for developing its upstream, midstream and downstream oil and gas projects.

--

Follow Aynur Karimova on Twitter @Aynur_Karimova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
 

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The Greater Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce has endorsed Proposition 123, the school funding measure that would increase the amount taken out of the State Land Trust Permanent Endowed Fund for 10 years.

In a letter submitted to the Daily Sun editor, Chamber President and CEO Julie Pastrick said, Prop 123 is the best possible solution with the maximum funding possible allocated. Our governor, the education community and legislative leadership have worked very hard to increase education funding statewide by creating this historic funding agreement.
The Topping Pie Company is to support the Tour de Yorkshire, an international cycle race taking place between 29 April and 1 May.

To celebrate the Tour de Yorkshire riding into the region, The Topping Pie Company has provided special Pie-cycles.

The 450g handcrafted pork pies are made to a family recipe and sandwich delicious chicken breast with diced dried apricots and cranberry in layers of British Red Tractor pork meat baked in rich hot water crust pastry and finished off with a bicycle design top.

The international cycle race begins in Beverley on 29 April, and ends in Scarborough on 1 May.

A showpiece Pie-cycle, handcrafted by chief baker and managing director Roger Topping, will also be on display at the media centre in Doncaster.

Topping said: We are delighted to get behind the iconic bike race with our special cycle-themed pork pies. The region boasts an array of award-winning local food producers, so visiting media will get to feed on a real Yorkshire feast.

The Pie-cycles will also be on sale in Doncaster Market and at the Topping Pie Companys outlet in Doncasters Frenchgate Shopping Centre.

Earlier this month, The Topping Pie Company baked a Queens Pie, which was delivered to Her Majesty on 20 April to celebrate her 90th birthday.
Union GMB is planning to stage a series of protests outside supermarket chains Lidl and Morrisons, over a dispute at Warburtons-owned supplier Giles Foods.

The union said the dispute with Giles Foods, owned by Warburtons, was related to breaks and lunchtimes being reduced, because staff now have to change in and out of work overalls in their own time.

The GMB said that crowded changing facilities and the position of the clocking machine meant the length of lunch breaks was significantly shortened.

Giles Foods is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Warburtons, and manufactures Chelsea buns, croissants and other speciality baked goods, sold as own-label by Morrisons and Lidl.

The first protest is set to take place on 10 May at the Lidl store on Barnfield Road, Swindon.

On 17 March, GMB members at Giles Food presented the management with a collective grievance signed by the affected staff. The dispute has also escalated, as GMB members presented a further petition to the management concerning the suspension of a shop steward.

Looking into it

When British Baker approached Morrisons, it did not want to comment. Lidl said it would be looking into it.

Earlier this month, British Baker reported that Ginsters manufacturer Samworth Brothers remains embroiled in controversy surrounding alleged cuts to pay and conditions, which have been made in a bid to offset the impact of the National Living Wage.
All city of Flagstaff employees will see a raise next fiscal year as the City Council on Wednesday allocated nearly all of the extra $5.1 million in revenue projected for next year's budget.

The council still has about $375,000 left in one-time funds to allocate, and it will vote on the final budget in the next few months. No tax cuts were included in draft budget informally ratified by council Wednesday.

Council directed staff to keep most of the budget proposed by City Manager Josh Copley, with a few tweaks. That proposed budget included a three-year plan to bring all city positions up to the current market level. This would cost approximately $815,000 this year.

Those employees that are outside of the citys current pay structure, either because they were hired at a higher salary, or who have a set pay, would receive at least a 2 percent raise. The 2 percent raise would cost about $555,000. Council also directed staff to put a 2 percent raise for part-time employees who are not eligible for employee benefits in the budget.

Council directed staff to come back with some additional ideas for the remaining $375,000 left in one-time funds. Those funds could be used for other projects or socked away in the citys reserve fund.

Council added $80,000 in ongoing funds from the citys general fund to increase the uniform allowance for police officers and firefighters. The fund was eliminated during the Great Recession and Council has been gradually building it back up over the last couple of years.

Ongoing funds are revenues that city expects to see on a regular basis in the future. One-time funds are typically revenues from an increase in sales tax revenue, the bed, board and beverage tax or roll over funds from the previous years budget.

Council also directed staff to continue a training incentive program for the citys dispatchers and extra pay for firefighters who are also paramedics and fund them with ongoing money, instead of one-time funds.

Council split the cost of additional overtime funds for the Police and Fire departments between one-time ($16,000) and ongoing money ($109,000).

Council also recommended that staff add funding for several local social organizations to the budget including additional funding for the Boys and Girls Club, the Family and Community Teaming for Students program, the Northern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault, the Humane Society and a new after-school program at Siler Homes.

As a hedge against the Arizona Legislature, Council also directed staff to add $30,000 for a metal detector for City Hall and $100,000 in ongoing funds for security officers to man the metal detector.

Arizona Senate Bill 1257 would allow people who have a concealed weapon permit to carry a gun into a public building, such as Flagstaff City Hall or at a public event.

It excludes public buildings and events that are a secured facility, buildings or events that have a liquor license, any law enforcement agency or correctional facility, any area where a firearm is prohibited by federal law and any school, community college, college or university.

The bill which passed the Arizona House of Representatives on Tuesday, defines secured facility as a building or event that has security personnel and electronic weapons screening devices at each entrance or an area that is not open to the public where access is restricted by coded access for employees or by a security guard.

A person entering a secured building or event with a weapon must store the weapon in a secure area provided by the security officer.
After two days of multiple arrests stemming from student protests demanding that NAU's foundation divest in fossil fuel companies, Wednesday's sit-in resulted in no arrests.

Nearly 50 students attended the sit-in at the Babbitt Administrative Center outside NAU President Rita Cheng's office, holding handmade signs and singing a variety of chants.

Karina Gonsalez, a member of Fossil Free NAU, said the students were told Cheng was in a meeting at the time of the sit-in. Cheng did not address the students.

Eight students, including Gonsalez, were arrested in the two days prior and charged with trespassing related to the previous sit-ins. However, when the building housing the president's office closed at 5 p.m. and police told the students to leave or be arrested, all students left the building.

Gonsalez said the group does not have another protest or event scheduled yet. But she said that due to lack of a statement from NAU officials, they will be planning more events in the future.
As a grandparent and business owner, it's hard to stay silent when the Arizona Daily Sun requests its readers wait to watch what happens at the State Legislature before casting a vote for Prop 123. Our schools, especially our teachers, need help now, regardless of what proposals are raised several hundred miles away from our schools in Flagstaff. Teachers are leaving the state in droves, and Flagstaff, with its high cost of living, isnt immune to this crisis. We need good teachers in the classroom now, not more delay in the courtroom and holding out for a single solution for every education issue we can think of. Enough is enough. Lets pass Prop 123, and then continue to find other ways to help our schools.
A St. Petersburg activist and the mothers of the three girls that died when a stolen car plunged into a pond are asking for an investigation into the incident.



According to the Pinellas County Sheriffs Office, the three teenage girls stole the car and were trying to avoid deputies when they drove into the pond early March 31 at the Royal Palm Cemetery.



Laniya Miller, 15, Ashaunti N. Butler, 15, and Dominique M. Battle, 16 died after the car crashed into the pond.



Brother Ali Muhammad, a minister representing Butler's mother said the parents feel sheriff's deputies did not do enough to rescue the girls after the police pursuit and crash.



The call for a further investigation comes after the sheriff's office released dash cam video of the deputies at the pond after the crash.



Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri vehemently defended his deputies, pointing out that you can see the deputies on video walking without their guns and badges, proving they made an effort to go into the pond and rescue the girls.



However, others said that is not what they saw in the video.



Muhammad said not only did the deputies not do enough, they created a smear campaign against the teenagers by discussing their prior criminal records.



"Theres a lot of questions to be answered," Muhammad said. "There should be a level of assumption that they are innocent because of what happened and they should be given the proper handling by law enforcement which is their profession and in this case were seeing that didnt take place.



"It is a direct attack against the families."



Muhammad, along with the girls' mothers, is holding a news conference Thursday to ask the community and the mayor's office to rally together.



Mayor Rick Kriseman's office said they are aware of the tragic events however the sheriff's office is in charge of the investigation, not the city or St. Petersburg police.




A JetBlue pilot was charged with flying under the influence of alcohol after routine testing last year.

According to a criminal complaint released Wednesday, Dennis Murphy Jr. was under the influence when he piloted a flight from Orlando International Airport on April 21, 2015. JetBlue Flight 584 was carrying 151 passengers.

Murphy was selected for testing when they plane landed in New York City. He allegedly had a blood alcohol level of .11. A FFA regulation limits a pilots blood alcohol content to .04.

After Murphy was presented with the test results, he reportedly blamed the reading on the gum he was chewing.

Earlier in the day, Murphy piloted a flight from JFK to Orlando. That flight had 119 passengers on board.

His co-pilot later told investigators he observed Murphy drinking an unknown beverage from a cup before and during both flights.

JetBlue released the following statement regarding the incident:

JetBlue has a zero tolerance drug and alcohol policy. Following last years incident, the crewmember was removed from duty and is no longer employed at JetBlue.

Murphy was released from prison Wednesday on a $50,000 bond after appearing in a federal court in Brooklyn.

If convicted, Murphy faces up to 15 years in prison.
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Days after apologizing for an email she apparently sent in jest referring to March flooding as an "economic development initiative," a Longview-based Sabine River Authority board member has resigned, the governor's office confirmed.

Gov. Greg Abbott, who appointed Kimberly Fish to a six-year term in December 2015, has accepted her resignation, a spokesperson said.

"Ms. Fish has rightly apologized for her inappropriate comments, and our office has accepted her resignation," said Sam Taylor, a deputy press secretary in Abbott's office. "Our office thanks Ms. Fish for her service on the Sabine River Authority."

Fish submitted her resignation by email Tuesday afternoon.

"You were gracious in offering me this opportunity to serve, but due to circumstances beyond my control it's become apparent that to best serve Texas and the Sabine River Authority, I should not continue in this role," Fish wrote.

Last week Fish apologized for sending an email amid the March Sabine River flooding and said it was "not appropriate." She declined to comment further.

"Naturally, I'd like to take credit for the economic development initiative, but we all know I haven't been here long enough to know where the keys to the floodwaters are located," Fish wrote on March 15, when Interstate 10 and the town of Deweyville were under water. "At least everyone knows the river can provide water."

SRA general manager David Montagne, who replied to Fish's email by thanking her for sharing "one positive outcome from flooding," has also apologized.

Montagne said last week he interpreted Fish's email as a joke and that his response was "stupid."

Their exchange, obtained through the Texas public information laws, occurred the same day state officials closed I-10 at the Texas-Louisiana border. Because highways north of the interstate crossing the river were also closed, the state recommended that drivers take Interstate 20, which runs through Longview, to cross the state line.

About 500 homes in Orange and Newton counties sustained at least $17,000 each in damage, according to local officials' latest estimates.

President Barack Obama issued a federal disaster declaration, and millions of dollars in grants and low-interest loans have been approved for Southeast Texans.

Most Deweyville residents were displaced for weeks, and many are still unable to live in their homes. The town's elementary school was ruined, and the district missed 15 days of school before resuming April 11.

Fish's online SRA biography says she is a freelance writer who specializes in marketing, a Republican precinct chair and a trustee for LeTourneau University.

Fish's resignation was first reported by the Longview News-Journal.
Just 30 minutes from the Dallas Fort-Worth area is the "El Milagro," an avid equestrian's dream home.

After hitting the market at $11 million last year, this operating horse ranch in Hickory Creek, Texas, is now listed at $8,495,000.
This month, NorthStar Surgical Center in Lubbock, Texas, is celebrating its 15th anniversary, according to an Everything Lubbock report.

Here are three things to know:

1. Opened in 2001, the ASC has served as the site of more than 122,000 procedures.

2. The physician-owned facility offers surgical services in a wide-array of specialties, including orthopedics, general surgery, podiatry, pain management, gastroenterology, plastic surgery and ophthalmology.

3. John Brock serves as the surgery center's administrator.
CMS has warned St. John River District Hospital in East China Township, Mich., that it will lose its Medicare funding May 7 unless corrections are made at the hospital, according to The Times Herald.

In an April 14 letter to St. John River District, CMS said it had discovered serious deficiencies at the hospital that "constitute an immediate threat to patient health and safety," according to the report.

In an attachment to the letter, CMS said St. John River District had failed to properly monitor a suicidal patient and follow procedures and policies for suicide prevention. According to CMS, a 36-year-old woman who had been admitted to St. John River District for suicidal thoughts committed suicide at the hospital Jan. 8.

St. John River District spokesman Brian Taylor told The Times Herald that the hospital submitted a corrective action plan to CMS.

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Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of CMS, expressed a hopeful view for physicians in Boston Tuesday.

Speaking at the World Medical Innovation Forum, sponsored by Boston-based Partners HealthCare, and in comments to The Boston Globe, he acknowledged that regulators have over-burdened physicians in recent years, but new systems are being developed to better align payments with clinical practice, according to the newspaper.

"When you see what actually does engage physicians, which is more freedom, less control, less burden, it's quite exciting," he said, according to The Boston Globe. "They're quite excited by these new models that accomplish that."

Mr. Slavitt said value-based payment models need more work and that CMS is still in the learning stages, according to the report.

In his talks, he also touched on the soaring costs of drugs and medical treatments. "It's an important thing for us to debate," he said, according to the report. "We have to run some experiments. We have to run some pilots. We have to figure out what works."

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People often try to answer one of life's biggest questions  how to be truly happy  with accomplishments in business, status or wealth. However, research shows accomplishment and intelligence cannot predict happiness, according to Raj Raghunathan, author of If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?.

In his book, Mr. Raghunathan sets out to find why some of the brightest and most successful individuals are so unhappy.

In an interview with The Atlantic, Mr. Raghunathan shared some of his findings on what makes people happy, why successful people have trouble finding happiness and what they can do about it. Here are the key takeaways.

1. After the basic necessities have been met, happiness is a factor of autonomy, belonging, mastery and worldview, according to Mr. Raghunathan. People must have the ability to make their own decisions, have meaningful relationships, be good at their daily jobs and have a positive outlook.

2. For business-minded people, the need to be the "best" may be an obstacle to happiness. Successful business people often have a strong desire for mastery. However, those who seek mastery and do not find happiness may not be taking the right approach, according to Mr. Raghunathan. People who want to be the "best" judge and measure themselves against arbitrary measures, such as number of awards received or salary. However, once a person receives a raise, the happiness associated with that raise eventually wears off, and keeping happy in that fashion can be unsustainable.

3. Instead, people should focus on what they enjoy and what they are good at. Rather than comparing yourself to others, Mr. Raghunathan suggests zeroing in on what you enjoy and what makes you happy. After doing so, mastery  and its associated perks like power and money  are likely to follow.

4. Viewing the world as abundant, not scarce, is also important. A scarcity worldview sees a win as someone else's loss. An abundance approach sees room for everyone to win, according to Mr. Raghunathan. While there is certainly a time and a place for a scarcity worldview, people searching for happiness should try to adopt the other view. "I think that as intelligent beings we need to recognize that some of the vestiges of our evolutionary tendencies might be holding us back," he told The Atlantic.

5. The business world can harmonize with an abundance approach. Though businesses seem to operate in a scarcity world  there can, after all, only be one CEO of a company  individuals must find that intrinsic motivator and passion, according to Mr. Raghunathan. Even as businesses push for corporate social responsibility, we still often measure personal business success on extrinsic factors like wealth and status. "Simon Sinek, in one of his books, makes the argument that businesses and the rules by which businesses operate are structured along the lines of how the military used to operate  very hierarchical and scarcity-oriented," Mr. Raghunathan told The Atlantic. "But he talks about how, actually, if you look a little bit deeper into the best leaders in the military, they tend not to be that way."



Read the full interview here.

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The University of Central Florida College of Medicine in Orlando is teaming up with Osceola Regional Medical Center in Kissimmee, Fla., to launch a new graduate medical education training program this July.

The three-year program for emergency medicine residents is seeking applicants immediately and will eventually grow to host 21 trainees at a time. Osceola Regional's emergency department offers residents the opportunity to treat both children and adults in a diverse community. The ED hosts more than 80,000 patient visits annually, is a designated stroke and chest pain center and is provisionally designated as a Level II Trauma Center.

Through the new program, the organizations hope to train residents who will stay and work in the region.

"Residency programs are part of the promise that was made to this community and an important element in a medical school that will anchor a medical city," Deborah German, MD, UCF vice president for medical affairs and founding dean of the medical school, said in a statement. "If we have more residencies, we'll have more trained doctors in our community because many doctors practice where they complete their residency programs."

The program was accredited by the national Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education this week. The school and medical center are also jointly hosting an internal medicine residency in partnership with the Orlando VA Medical Center that also begins in July.

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Methodist Health System in Dallas has reached a deal to buy the bankrupt Forest Park Medical Center in Southlake, Texas, for $17.6 million, according to a Fort Worth Star-Telegram report.

Here are five things to know about the transaction.

1. Under the deal, Methodist is offering to pay $9 million for the hospital operator's assets and take on $8.6 million in debt, according to the report, which cites court documents. Methodist would own a 51 percent stake in the hospital operation, with the physician investors retaining the other 49 percent.

2. Court records indicate Methodist was the only prospective buyer to sign a formal letter of intent, although at least 13 parties at one time showed interest in buying the 54-bed facility, according to the report.

3. The deal must still be approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Russell Nelms.

4. The hospital hopes to close the deal by late May.

5. At the same time Methodist made the exclusive offer for Forest Park Medical Center in Southlake, it is also pursuing bankrupt Forest Park Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas. According to the report, Methodist has offered at least $107 million for the Forest Park hospital in Fort Worth, and is in a bidding war with Arlington-based Texas Health Resources, which has pledged $112 million, and possibly Nashville, Tenn.-based Hospital Corporation of America.

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As of Wednesday, Hawaii has not accrued any locally acquired cases of dengue fever in 30 days, according to a report from Civil Beat.

While there is no standard timeframe for an outbreak to be declared over, this most recent milestone provides strong indication that the largest proliferation of dengue fever in Hawaii since the 1940s is now over. There have been more than 260 confirmed dengue cases since the beginning of the outbreak in February.

While Gov. David Ige praised the state's response to the outbreak, Department of Health Director Virginia Pressler, MD, warned of vulnerability to future outbreaks.

"It's critical for everyone to understand this is not the end...this is just the beginning of a new phase where we need to be prepared every day for a new mosquito-borne disease outbreak," said Dr. Pressler in a press conference, according to Civil Beat.

The potential mosquito-borne outbreak likely causing state health officials the most anxiety is the Zika virus. The state's emergency proclamation for both dengue and Zika remain in effect.

While Gov. Ige pledged that state mosquito control efforts would not subside, some citizens are skeptical of such promises.

According to the Beat, after an outbreak of dengue in 2001, lawmakers made plans to keep the mosquito population at bay, but within 10 years significant cuts to those efforts were made.

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Plans for the new Grand Central Hotel, Belfast. The Hastings Hotel will be in the old Windsor House site

The commercial property market in Northern Ireland is proving resilient amid the headwind of uncertainty leading up to the EU referendum, a new report has said.

But two-thirds of those quizzed say a Brexit would have a negative impact on commercial property here, according to figures from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

Just 9% of respondents in Northern Ireland believe a vote to leave the UK would have a positive impact here.

But overall, investment in both new retail and office space continued to grow in the first quarter of the year.

However, it was at a slower rate than the end of 2015.

Just one in four Northern Ireland commercial market surveyors said uncertainty in the run-up to the June 23 vote was leading to reduced investment.

That contrasts sharply with elsewhere in the UK, with 80% of those in central London saying investment was being impacted.

"The commercial property sector in Northern Ireland has been relatively strong, with good occupier and investor demand in the office and retail sectors for quality product," said RICS commercial property spokeswoman Tracy Flannigan.

According to the latest figures, office availability fell in the first quarter of the year.

"However, availability in the retail sector remains less of an issue. On the whole, the market remained in recovery mode."

Northern Ireland, and in particular Belfast, has had a resurgence of property development in the last few months.

Belfast Harbour's City Quays development reached full occupancy this month, while work is starting on the City Quays 2 sister development.

And Marriott will take on the new City Quays hotel project in Belfast with its AC Hotels brand.

There are also more than 20 hotel developments in the works.

One of the those is the four-star, 200-bedroom Grand Central Hotel, which will transform the 23-storey Windsor House in Belfast city centre.

Meanwhile, across the UK, 43% of those questioned felt a Brexit would have a negative impact on the commercial property sector, while only 6% said it would be a boost.

The latest paper from RICS on a Brexit shows there has been a steady easing in international demand for office, industrial and retail property in the UK, since the referendum was confirmed a year ago.

"There is no doubt that since the EU referendum became a certainty following the General Election last May, we have seen a decline in interest from overseas investors in UK commercial property," RICS chief economist, Simon Rubinsohn, said.

"At least in the short-term, we know that international retailers and service providers are finding the UK market less attractive.

"But we need not view this as a negative. As a result of the market dampening, business rents are also rising at much slower rates, which suggests that we might soon be seeing more favourable conditions for entry and business growth."

Speaking about the impact ton farmers, RICS rural chairman Gerard Smith said: "In the event of Brexit, farmers will most likely lose access to the EU single market and CAP.

"The question that Government has yet to answer is how much of the current support system they would replace in such an event."
Argos owner Home Retail Group has reported a full year pre-tax loss of 804m after being hit with an 852m exceptional goodwill impairment charge relating to the Sainsbury's takeover of the high street retailer.

Home Retail Group employs around 500 people in Northern Ireland. Sainsbury's currently has 13 of its own stores here, while there are nearly 20 Argos and nine Homebase stores.

Stripping out the charge, annual profit slumped 28% to 94.7m and sales across the group were down 1% to 5.6bn.

The exceptional impairment charge relates to Argos' prior ownership under Great Universal Stores, which acquired the business in 1998.

The group said: "The recommended offer from Sainsbury's for the purchase of Home Retail Group resulted in an exceptional goodwill impairment charge of 852m."

Earlier this year, supermarket Sainsbury's struck a deal to acquire Argos for 1.4bn and the deal is expected to complete before September. Some Argos operations are expected to be moved into Sainsbury stores as part of the deal.

John Walden, chief executive of Home Retail Group, said: "The group ended the year with a cash balance of 623m, which is significantly stronger than previously anticipated.

"The past year has been a landmark period for the group, during which we have completed the sale of Homebase and recommended to shareholders the offer from J Sainsbury for the acquisition of the remaining group, principally Argos."

The group sold Homebase to Australian retail giant Wesfarmers for 340m in January.

Earlier this month, it emerged that the massive 340m deal to sell Homebase was recorded as taking place in Northern Ireland, where the DIY chain's holding company is based.

Experian confirmed that Homebase was incorporated in Northern Ireland as Hampden Group Ltd in 1976.

As well as operating Homebase in the province, Hampden is an investment holding company for Home Retail Group firms.
Banking giant Barclays saw profits tumble by a quarter in the first three months of the year as it was hit by tough trading in its investment banking arm

Banking giant Barclays saw profits tumble by a quarter in the first three months of the year as it was hit by tough trading in its investment banking arm.

The group posted first quarter pre-tax profits of 793m, down from 1.1bn a year earlier, as underlying profits in its corporate and investment banking business dropped 31%.

Barclays also announced talks with AnaCap Financial Partners to sell its 74-branch business in France as boss Jess Staley continues to overhaul the lender.

The group insisted its core business put in a resilient performance, with profits up 18% to 1.6bn, but said this was dragged lower by loss-making parts of the business.

Mr Staley said the results "show a core business performing well in a challenging environment". He added that moves to shed unprofitable divisions are cutting costs "which have a direct impact on our profitability today and mask the true performance of our strong core business".

"This is the work we need to complete," he said.

Barclays said it was "cautious" ahead of the June 23 referendum on European Union membership.

On second quarter trading, it said there had been little improvement for the investment banking business, with income down slightly further on a difficult first quarter, but the group added it was "too early" to comment on overall performance.
Canadian aerospace giant Bombardier has secured a game-changing Delta Airlines deal for its C Series jets.

Montreal-based Bombardier, which employs around 5,000 people in Belfast, have also revealed their financial results for the first three months of 2016 this morning.

Based on the list price of the CS100 aircraft, the firm order is valued at approximately $5.6 billion US.

As we reshape our fleet for the future, the innovative onboard experience of the C Series is a perfect complement for the top-notch service provided every day by Delta people, said Ed Bastian, Deltas incoming chief executive.

These new aircraft are a solid investment, allowing us to take advantage of superior operating economics, network flexibility and best-in-class fuel performance.

Welcoming Delta Air Lines to the C Series family of operators is a watershed moment for our game-changing aircraft. As an industry leader, Delta consistently ranks first with customers, business leaders and its peers - a benchmark for operational performance, said Fred Cromer, President, Bombardier Commercial Aircraft. This order is a resounding endorsement of the CS100 aircraft performance and its exceptionally low operating costs. In addition, its widest aisle, widest seats and largest bins in its class will be attractive features for Deltas passengers.

The production of wings for the C Series is Northern Ireland's biggest-ever inward investment programme, worth 520m.

A shareholders' meeting will also take place in Montreal tomorrow.

The news of the major order was welcomed by Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt.

Mr Nesbitt said: "This will come as a major relief, not just to Bombardier employees, but also to anyone who fears for the future of manufacturing in Northern Ireland. The company is important in its own right. Its presence also makes a statement internationally about Northern Ireland and our economy. It is imperative we continue to host a global player like Bombardier.

Now we need to press on with the challenge of improving the business environment to make Northern Ireland more attractive as a place to do business.

"In that regard, I commend my colleague Danny Kinahan MP for persuading the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee at Westminster to instigate an inquiry into energy costs in Northern Ireland, because our high tariffs pose a serious threat to the future of our manufacturing sector."

Union hopes order will mean planned redundancies can be avoided

Davy Thompson, Unite Regional Coordinating Officer responsible for Bombardier-Shorts workforce, expressed his unions hopes the order from Delta could mean a downward revision of plans for redundancies.

Mr Thompson said: "The last few months have been very challenging for the workforce with a series of lay-off announcements affecting both agency and core workforces, as well as unprecedented changes to the companys longstanding apprentice employment scheme.

"While the companys difficulties are not exclusively caused by the overrun in development costs and delay in orders for the CSeries, the scale of this project is so great that the companys future is dependent on its success in securing large-scale orders.

"We hope that todays good news will be followed up by further orders from other airlines. The CSeries has a huge advantage in terms of fuel efficiency and this contract offers encouragement that other airlines will follow suit.

"While we are hopeful this order  worth $5.6 billion for seventy-five planes and including the option for a further fifty  may allow management to reconsider plans to lay-off a further five hundred workers in Belfast in 2017; we recognise that the company continues to face very challenging conditions due to the depressed private and regional aircraft market and that CSeries represents only a small proportion of the work conducted in Belfast.

"Unite will continue to engage constructively with management to secure our members jobs, pay and conditions, Mr Thompson concluded.

The company has so far received a disappointing level of orders for the narrow-bodied passenger jet, developed in a daring bid to take on market giants Airbus and Boeing.

It's had just 243 orders and hasn't had a firm order since September 2014.

The C Series was launched earlier this year, around $2bn over budget and delayed by three years - and a deal with a major airline like Delta was crucial to its viability.

And it comes as a much needed boost to morale for Bombardier's Belfast workforce. In February, the company announced 1,000 job losses this year and next.

Delta is currently shopping around for 125 narrow-bodied jets - therefore securing an order of that size is a major lift to Bombardier and its Belfast workforce. Sources earlier this month suggested the deal would consist of a firm order on 75 planes and options to buy another 50.

Bombardier is still waiting for the Canadian federal government to confirm if it will follow Quebec's administration in giving the company a financial bail-out.

The regional government in Quebec, where Bombardier is based, has already ploughed $1bn into the C Series programme in return for a 49.5% equity share.
Director-general of the CBI Carolyn Fairbairn warned against rushing out a "poorly thought-through" plan

The Government is being urged to "radically rethink" its controversial apprenticeship levy amid growing concerns in firms about its viability.

The director-general of the CBI will warn ministers about rushing out a "poorly thought-through" plan.

The levy comes into effect in April 2017 at a rate of 0.5% of an employer's pay bill and will apply to firms with salary costs above 3 million, raising an estimated 3 billion a year by 2019/20 to fund three million new apprenticeships.

Carolyn Fairbairn will tell a business meeting that companies are committed to raising skills levels and support the Government's drive to increase the number of apprenticeships.

She will say that the Government has the opportunity to create a "once-in-a-generation revolution" in skills, but it is only likely to deliver another "once-in-an-administration shake-up".

She will say: "Firms across the UK are emphatic that tackling skills shortages is the only way to succeed and create prosperity.

"They want to create quality apprenticeships and they're ready to work with the Government to do this.

"But as it stands that's not what the levy is doing.

"We need to change that, which is why we are calling for a radical rethink.

"The Government has set out a target to create three million apprenticeships by 2020 and it deserves credit for its level of ambition.

"Business shares this goal to raise numbers, yet despite the Government's good intentions the target could have unintended consequences.

"What's being counted is three million started apprenticeships, not three million qualified apprentices. There's a big difference.

"Indeed, measuring success by the number of starts tells us little about whether the system is really delivering and could even drive the wrong outcomes."

Ms Fairbairn will say that the pressure of the Government's deadline means that firms lack crucial information about the levy and a realistic lead-in time to prepare for it, adding: " Today, firms are having to treat the levy as a tax, because the headline cost is all they're certain of.

"Businesses of all sectors and sizes are still in the dark.

"Government needs to work with business to resolve these issues before the levy launches."

Skills Minister Nick Boles said: "Businesses across the country can only grow and compete on the world stage if they have the right people. The apprenticeship levy will deliver the highly skilled workers our businesses are crying out for.

"Our reforms are about putting employers in the driving seat. We are working closely with businesses to determine how the levy will work for them and are giving employers the freedom to purchase the apprenticeship training that best meets their needs.

"We will also be working with businesses in the coming months on the development of the independent, employer-led Institute for Apprenticeships that will ensure employers are at the heart of driving up the quality of apprenticeship training."
There are fears for the future of around 50 jobs in Belfast at security cash-in-transit firm Brinks amid claims the operation is set to close.

The security firm restocks cash points across a range of businesses in Northern Ireland, including Ulster Bank.

The firm's base is at Duncrue Road in the city.

Brinks confirmed in February that it was to cease operations in the Republic with the loss of 200 jobs.

One source told the Belfast Telegraph that while there had been talk of finding a new buyer for its Northern Ireland business, workers would get an update next week on the future of the firm.

He said he expected staff would be told that jobs will be lost and the site could close.

Brinks employs a range of workers here including drivers, administration staff, cash-processors and control staff.

Following the 200 jobs losses in Dublin, Cork and Galway, it was reported the company was negotiating the sale of its operation north of the border.

It said it would continue to operate here and services to local customers wouldn't be affected.

Trade union Siptu reacted with anger to February's decision to close the Republic of Ireland wing of the business after it had reached a restructuring deal with the company to safeguard jobs.

Brinks said at the time that the cash-in-transit market in the Republic had not been profitable in recent years and it did not see opportunities for growth.

Siptu organiser Brendan Carr said staff were extremely disappointed by the move in light of the restructuring deal.

"Unfortunately, despite the sacrifices of its workforce and their willingness to adapt to the company's demands it has still decided to end its operations," Mr Carr said.

"These jobs have been endangered, in part, due to the operation of low cost employers in the security industry. The workers are extremely disappointed by this announcement."

Brinks was Ireland's third largest cash-in-transit carrier, with a market share in excess of 20%. It had warned investors at the end of last year that Ireland was "a tough environment".

Brinks is an American security and protection company headquarted outside Richmond in Virginia.

Its brand and reputation span the globe and its network serves customers in more than 100 countries and employs around 70,000 people. In 2012 it agreed to sell its cash-in-transit operations in Germany and Poland.

No one from Brinks was available for comment.
Canadian aerospace giant Bombardier is expected to reveal today if the company has secured a game-changing Delta Airlines deal for its C Series jets.

Montreal-based Bombardier, which employs around 5,000 people in Belfast, will also reveal its financial results for the first three months of 2016 this morning.

The results had been due to be released tomorrow - but the company confirmed it had brought forward the financial statement by one day.

Analysts have suggested that Bombardier may announce an order for its C Series jets - the wings of which are made in Belfast - as part of the results statement. The production of wings for the C Series is Northern Ireland's biggest-ever inward investment programme, worth 520m.

A shareholders' meeting will also take place in Montreal tomorrow.

A spokeswoman for the company in Belfast said: "Bombardier will announce material agreements if or when any are finalised."

The company has so far received a disappointing level of orders for the narrow-bodied passenger jet, developed in a daring bid to take on market giants Airbus and Boeing.

It's had just 243 orders and hasn't had a firm order since September 2014.

The C Series was launched earlier this year, around $2bn over budget and delayed by three years - and a deal with a major airline like Delta is crucial to its viability.

And it would be a much-needed boost to morale for Bombardier's Belfast workforce. In February, the company announced 1,000 job losses this year and next.

One US-based analyst told the Belfast Telegraph that the situation for Bombardier was "tense".

"Airbus is also claiming victory and I think if Bombardier loses Delta, CSeries is done for, more's the pity."

But another analyst was more optimistic when speaking to Reuters, citing increases in its stock value during April.

But Morningstar analyst Chris Higgins also suggested today was a 'make or break' day.

Mr Higgins said: "With the move in Bombardier's shares and the further jump in the stock, if they do not have a Delta order in their back pocket I would not want to be their management team come Thursday.

"It looks like everyone's expecting it now and them moving the earnings date is also suggestive."

Reuters also said it understood that one of Bombardier's C Series test planes would be at its Atlanta headquarters today.

According to the Montreal Gazette, Delta is set to host media events today, but it would not say if the subject of aircraft orders would be discussed.

Bombardier's full-year results in February coincided with a letter of intent from Air Canada to order up to 75 of the C Series, though that order has not been firmed up.

Delta is currently shopping around for 125 narrow-bodied jets - and securing an order of that size would be a major lift to Bombardier and its Belfast workforce. Sources earlier this month suggested the deal would consist of a firm order on 75 planes and options to buy another 50.

A firm order for 125 planes would be worth about 4.45bn at list prices, although industry analysts believe any deal would be at a discount from the list price of 50% or more.

And Bombardier is still waiting for the Canadian federal government to confirm if it will follow Quebec's administration in giving the company a financial bail-out.

The regional government in Quebec, where Bombardier is based, has already ploughed $1bn into the C Series programme in return for a 49.5% equity share.
Mobile phone users have in the past faced high roaming charges in the EU

Mobile roaming charges within the EU will be significantly cheaper from Saturday when an interim cap comes into effect ahead of a full ban next year.

The cap will make roaming within the EU 75% cheaper during the interim period, the European Commission has said.

From Saturday operators will only be able to charge a small additional amount to domestic prices of up to 0.05 euro (3p) per minute of call made, 0.02 euro (1p) per SMS sent, and 0.05 euro (3p) per MB of data, excluding VAT.

The charges will end altogether on June 15 next year, meaning mobile phone users will pay the same price to make calls, send text messages and use data wherever they are in the EU, as if they were at home.

The new rules aim to prevent consumers receiving huge bills after downloading films or other data while travelling in Europe.

European Commission vice president Andrus Ansip, responsible for the Digital Single Market, said the move was "not only about money, this is about bringing down barriers in the Digital Single Market".

Commissioner Gunther H Oettinger, in charge of the Digital Economy and Society, said the agreement showed that the European Union could deliver tangible results to improve the daily life of Europeans, adding that "roaming charges will be soon old memories".

Consumers have been especially vulnerable to roaming charges since the smartphone market exploded and mobile data consumption soared.

So-called "bill shock" from holidaying in the EU affects more than nine million UK mobile users a year, according to research by comparison website uSwitch.
RBS said the overall financial impact 'is now likely to be significantly greater' than previously thought

Royal Bank of Scotland has warned of a "significantly" greater-than-expected hit from plans to spin-off its Williams & Glyn arm and revealed it may not meet its deadline to offload the business.

The group, which posts first quarter figures on Friday, said there was a "significant risk" that it would not meet the deadline to separate the 316-branch Williams & Glyn business by the end of 2017.

It is now looking at other ways to spin-off the business, adding the "overall financial impact on RBS is now likely to be significantly greater than previously estimated" due to complexities of separating the business.

RBS , which is 73% owned by the taxpayer, has already pencilled in 1.6 billion in costs for the separation of Williams & Glyn, of which it has already spent 1.2 billion.

But the latest update reveals an even greater cost, as the bank battles to separate the business on to its own systems ready for a sale or stock market listing.

It said: "Due to the complexities of Williams & Glyn's customer and product mix, the programme to create a cloned banking platform continues to be very challenging and the timetable to achieve separation is uncertain."

It must sell the network of branches under European Union rules on state aid following the bank's 45 billion bailout at the height of the financial crisis.

RBS has already had to push back the deadline to spin-off the branch business, having originally been due to offload it by the end of 2013.

RBS had planned to sell the branches to Santander, but the deal was called off in 2012.

Joseph Dickerson, equity analyst at Jefferies, said news of the latest set back in the spin-off plan was "negative on two fronts - a potential delay in capital return and also likely higher separation costs".

"Moreover the delays could call into question management execution of RBS's restructuring process," he said.

Bosses at RBS will face questions over the ill-fated plans to separate Williams & Glyn when they unveil first quarter results tomorrow.

The bank is expected to remain firmly in the red amid chief executive Ross McEwan's wide-ranging overhaul of the group.

It is predicted to more than double first quarter losses to 957 million from 446 million a year earlier after seeing income slump in the wake of moves to sell off its Citizens business in the US and dramatically scale back its overseas and investment banking offering.

The City is predicting income to tumble by nearly a third to 2.9 billion, also reflecting the dearth of corporate deals, although it is less exposed than rival Barclays, with investment banking now accounting for only around 15% of the business.

Figures will also reveal the impact of its 1.2 billion payment last month to the Treasury to buy out a crucial part of its 45 billion bailout.

The payment ended a dividend access share (DAS) agreement with the Government that was put in place in 2009 and prevented it paying dividends to any shareholders before the Treasury.

First quarter figures come after a tough 2015 that saw the group rack up its eighth year in a row of annual losses.

The lender posted annual losses of 2 billion in 2015, although this was down on the 3.5 billion reported a year earlier.

It also dealt a blow to long-suffering shareholders as it delayed the prospects of a dividend payout until at least after the first quarter of 2017.

This saw shares plunge on annual results day and the stock is now 32% lower than a year earlier.

RBS also added to the jobs gloom in the sector earlier this month with plans to cut another 600 roles and close 32 branches, while reducing opening hours for hundreds more.
Ryanair says it could have 40 routes operating from Belfast International Airport and four million passengers in the next two to three years.

Yesterday the airline revealed three new routes to Poland, including Gdansk, Wroclaw and Warsaw.

"They will be really strong for inbound tourism. Polish people coming here, yes, because you have a Polish community in Northern Ireland, and people wanting to come and visit Belfast," said Ryanair's chief marketing director Kenny Jacobs.

Speaking about the potential for the airline's Belfast base to grow four-fold, Mr Jacobs said the time frame "would be over the next two or three years".

He said the routes would be both winter and summer.

"Over the next coming three years would be the time frame we would say it's possible to get to around four million customers," he added.

"What it comes down to is three things.

"Have we a good deal with the airport, the second is have we enough aircraft and the third is it working, and do we see local demand?"

Belfast International boss Graham Keddie said passenger numbers could soon push the airport back into the top 10 in the UK.

Ryanair currently operates 11 routes from Belfast, with five daily flights to Gatwick.

Mr Jacobs said the growth for Ryanair in Belfast in just the last few months was "unprecedented" across the company.

Ryanair says bookings for the initial seven routes have been strong, while the new regular Gatwick route is also busy.
London-listed pharmaceuticals giant Shire has become the latest victim of shareholder anger over pay, with 49% of investors voting against chief executive Flemming Ornskov's 25% salary increase.

Dr Ornskov's pay was ramped up to 1.7 million dollars (1.2 million) and his bonus increased last July in an attempt to ensure that he was not poached by a rival. However, the decision was not put to shareholders at the time because Shire was in the midst of acquiring rival Baxalta, which it later agreed to buy for 32 billion dollars (21 billion).

Fund manager Hermes advised shareholders to vote against the Dublin-based company's pay report at its annual general meeting, held on Thursday.

Dr Hans-Christoph Hirt, co-head of Hermes equity ownership, said: "We do not support the increase in salary of 25% for the CEO, particularly given that his overall bonus potential is more than 10 times his basic salary and his total remuneration was over 21 million dollars (14 million) last year.

"We believe that an incremental approach to salary rises is more appropriate and should reflect shareholder value creation over the longer term."

Royal London Asset Management was also among the shareholders to vote against the pay hike.

The result comes amid growing shareholder unease over executive pay.

Earlier this month, shareholders in oil giant BP voted to reject its remuneration report for the last year, which included a pay deal of 19.6 million dollars (13.8 million) for chief executive Bob Dudley.

Mining giant Anglo American has also faced investor protests after 42% of shareholders voted against chief executive Mark Cutifani's 3.4 million pay package for 2015.
An independent panel has been appointed to review the situation at the crisis-hit De La Salle College in Belfast.

Parents have expressed fears over their children's education over an ongoing dispute among the staff since last November.

Large numbers of the west Belfast school's staff have staged protests in the school and called in sick over the handling of a disciplinary matter.

Education Minister John O'Dowd has said there can be "no doubt" the boys' education has been hindered.

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On Thursday, Mr ODowd, announced the appointment of John Corey, former General Secretary of the trade union NIPSA, Ms Marie-Therese McGivern, principal and chief executive of Belfast Metropolitan College and Sir Robert Salisbury, former professor in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham, to the panel.

I consider the panel members to be eminently well qualified and experienced to investigate the circumstances in the school and to make recommendations to ensure the schools future going forward," said Mr O'Dowd.

Work continues to be undertaken by the relevant authorities to address the immediate concerns within the school, including the appointment of an additional associate principal.

My priority continues to be to the pupils at the school and this investigation will give pupils, parents, staff and their representatives and all those involved with the governance of the school the opportunity to express their view.

It is anticipated that the independent panel will report back to the Department of Education with recommendations by early summer.

The NASUWT represents almost half the teachers at De La Salle College in Belfast.

It welcomed the announcement

In a statement, the union said: "The appointment of the three-member-panel should reassure all partners in the De La Salle community that Minister ODowd is committed to finding a robust resolution to the recent period of challenge.

"Nonetheless, it is the terms of reference that will be critical to the success or otherwise of the investigation.

Notwithstanding our support for the investigation, the NASUWT will seek assurances from the panel that their work will not cause any further disruption to teaching and learning as we move forward.

Working with the associate principals, we will remain committed to ensuring that stability and high standards are sustained throughout the examination season.

The strategic plan for renewal and the preservation of high quality education is our immediate focus.
Former Northern Ireland Secretary Lord Mandelson said peace process would be in danger if UK left EU

Former Secretary of State Peter Mandelson has spoken out about what he believes would be the effects of Brexit on Northern Ireland - particularly on border controls and the peace process.

He said: "The risk to Northern Ireland from leaving the EU is wide-ranging and deeply worrying, economically, politically and socially and that risk must be recognised by the rest of the United Kingdom.

"The Leave campaign has yet to explain what the implications of a Brexit are for Northern Ireland's border with the Republic of Ireland.

"They claim, confidently, that there will be controls on immigration into the UK from the EU, but at the same time Northern Ireland Secretary of State Theresa Villiers has claimed there will be no change to the open border between North and South. Meanwhile, Lord Lawson told Andrew Marr: 'There would have to be border controls'.

"The dark memory of border controls along the 310-mile border loom large for those living in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. I know businesses are deeply concerned about the considerable damage any controls would do to their trade.

"To say that any physical barrier between Northern Ireland and the Republic would be damaging to the fragile, hard-won and still emerging accord between communities in Northern Ireland would be an understatement.

"There are still 'peace walls' between divided communities in Belfast and the notion of a barrier between North and South promises to set back the good work done by those who are investing in a lasting peace."

He said the EU had been good for peace and had helped to end violence.

"Northern Ireland has benefited from more than 1bn in EU Peace Programme funding in the last 10 years.

"As part of the EU, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have worked closely under the European Arrest Warrant to undermine terrorist activity and bring those who threaten peace to justice. And we mustn't forget that the Good Friday Agreement has the European Convention on Human Rights at its heart.

"Leaving the EU will force Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to agree on a new relationship in terms of energy, tourism, trade and security and Dr Edward Burke is quite right to warn of 'a protracted consultative and legislative process.'

Lord Mandelson was speaking after a defence think-tank report warned that politicians at Westminster and Stormont have failed to address risks to the region's economy and security.

Mr Burke of the the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) said: "Northern Ireland, with its 300-mile land border, its fractured political structures, weak economy and enduring terrorist threat, requires urgent attention in the debate on a potential Brexit.

"While the debate focuses on trade and English and Scottish issues, inattention in the case of Northern Ireland, particularly on Brexit, is complacent and dangerous; Northern Ireland's departure from conflict remains brittle."

RUSI has argued that crucial EU funding for economic and specialised peace programmes could be hard to replace in the event of a Brexit, putting at risk years of cross-community and mental health work.

Joint EU membership has also helped underpin the Good Friday Agreement which ended decades of sectarian violence, it is claimed.

Mr Burke added: "Any reimposition of border controls on the UK's only land border to restrict 'back-door' immigration from the EU or the introduction of enhanced customs inspections, hindering cross-border trade, would likely see a further deterioration in Northern Ireland's already parlous economic fortunes."
The battle for Foyle will provide the SDLP's Colum Eastwood with the first big electoral test of his leadership as he goes up against one of republicanism's main players in the form of Martin McGuinness.

On the other side of Derry's Walls, unionism is under siege as splits and infighting threaten its only seat in the constituency - the one vacated by Baron Hay of Ballyore, better known as the former DUP Assembly Speaker William Hay.

A total of 16 candidates are contesting the six seats.

Foyle has returned three SDLP, two Sinn Fein and one DUP Member in every Stormont election since devolution was restored.

But there could be change in the Derry air.

Sinn Fein feels it can snatch a coveted third seat from the SDLP, while unionism could be left with no representation at all.

Throw a number of independents into the mix - such as People Before Profit's Eamonn McCann, who polled a respectable 3,916 votes in the 2011 election - and it makes the poll even more unpredictable. This time around Mr McGuinness will join Maeve McLaughlin and Raymond McCartney on the Sinn Fein ticket.

It is the second time the Deputy First Minister has put himself forward as an Assembly candidate in his home city. He was elected in the now defunct Londonderry constituency in 1982, but refused to take his seat.

Following devolution he has been elected an MLA for Mid Ulster since 1998.

The party believes the republican heavyweight could help secure that coveted third seat at the SDLP's expense.

The SDLP could be left red-faced if it cannot hold on in a constituency that former leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume made his party's political heartland.

Mr Eastwood has represented Foyle since 2011 along with colleagues Mark H Durkan and Pat Ramsey. Gerard Diver, a former councillor, was co-opted as an MLA to replace Mr Ramsey when he retired in January.

But in a city where unemployment is a major issue, some nationalist voters have not been impressed by Sinn Fein's backing for benefit and welfare reform.

It won't be plain sailing for the DUP in Foyle this time around either.

Since 1998 Mr Hay secured the votes of unionists, topping the poll in 2011 when more than 1,100 of his 1,600 vote surplus transferred to the SDLP, ensuring that its third seat was safe.

Traditionally, many unionists use their vote tactically and transfer to the SDLP in order to thwart Sinn Fein - just one more variable that might affect the outcome of this election.

But things have been rockier recently for Arlene Foster's party.

A very public spat between it and its councillor Maurice Devenney led to him quitting.

He is now standing as an independent in direct opposition to his former colleague Gary Middleton - a move that could split the vote and potentially cost unionism its only seat in the constituency.

Community worker and 2015 Westminster candidate Julie Kee, representing the Ulster Unionist Party, will be looking to the same voters as Mr Middleton and Mr Devenney.

The DUP has been keen to remind voters that in a constituency where only a quarter of the electorate is Protestant, more unionist candidates means a smaller chance of any of them getting to Stormont. In the unionist stronghold of Nelson Drive in the Waterside, Jonathan Hamilton told the Belfast Telegraph he hadn't made up his mind about who to vote for - or if he would even bother.

"I think it might be a waste of time, because what do we get from voting?" he said.

"For me the key issues are the level of homelessness, the state of the NHS and welfare reform.

"If I do vote I will give Maurice Devenney my number one, then I will vote SDLP, and then I will vote DUP."

Robert Donnell said he was happy to continue voting the way he always had.

He said: "I am voting DUP, but I will use the rest of my votes to vote for the Protestants.

"I don't think they do a lot for anybody, but I have always voted that way."

Caroline Olphert admitted she hadn't studied the manifestos of all of the candidates but was still content with her decision.

She said: "I am going to vote for the DUP because I have always voted for them - but I might give a vote to the SDLP as well to keep Sinn Fein out."

Across the Foyle Bridge in nationalist Shantallow it was issues rather than parties which were key to how people were going to vote.

Jason Johnston said he would be backing local GP Dr Anne McCloskey, a conservative, anti-Agreement republican who is standing as an independent.

"It's something different," said Mr Johnston.

"I don't think any of the Derry politicians are doing much for the town.

"The lack of jobs is the big one here.

"I have friends in their 40s who are out of work and can't get a job anywhere.

"Even the call centre jobs have gone - there is nothing."

Unemployment and welfare reform were the two main concerns for Patricia Moore, who said she was changing the way she traditionally voted because of these issues.

She explained: "I am most definitely going to vote because I was brought up being told how important it is to use your vote, but I think I am going to change who I vote for this time.

"I always voted Sinn Fein but this time I will probably give Colum Eastwood my support.

"The welfare cuts are scaring me.

"I worked all my life but I am on benefits now and I am not even 60 yet, and most likely won't get the pension until I am 67, so I am worried about my future."

Welfare reform was also the reason John Dunlop had decided to vote for SDLP.

Mr Dunlop said: "I am voting for Colum Eastwood. Normally I would vote for Sinn Fein but not this time.

"I think they are not standing beside the people on welfare cuts, which is going to have a big effect on a lot of people here in Derry.

"Then I will vote for McCann, the People Before Profit man."

The majority of people canvassed preferred to keep their voting intentions private, but a significant number said they will not go to any polling station on May 5.
Sinn Fein's first act in the next Assembly term will be to propose legislation to allow same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.

Highlighting the issue as a priority for his party, Martin McGuinness insisted he did not want to be part of a region considered "backward".

Outlining Sinn Fein's manifesto for May's poll, Mr McGuinness also pledged to pursue legislation to enable abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, claiming rival Assembly parties which had "run away" from the contentious issue would have "no hiding place" in the new mandate.

Same-sex marriage has been rejected five times by members of the devolved legislature.

Although the majority of Assembly members voted in favour of introducing gay marriage when it was debated for a fifth time last year, the proposal fell because unionists who opposed the move deployed a controversial voting mechanism to veto it.

Following the Yes vote in last May's referendum on marriage equality in the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK or Ireland where civil marriage is denied to same-sex couples.

Mr McGuinness declared his party the "most progressive" in the Assembly as he outlined a 10-point programme to the electorate. He said the issue of same-sex marriage had to be addressed, claiming people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community had been treated like "second-class citizens" for too long.

"We don't want to be part of a backward region, we want to be part of region that is known to stand up for the rights of people who feel that they are being discriminated against."

In past marriage equality debates, the DUP has tabled a petition of concern voting mechanism that effectively blocks any proposal which is opposed by 30 or more of the 108 Assembly members.

At the election manifesto launch in Londonderry's Playhouse theatre, Mr McGuinness said he hoped the Assembly could reach a point where petitions of concern were deployed in "very rare circumstances".

Abortion laws are far stricter in Northern Ireland than in the rest of the UK, with terminations only permitted when a mother's physical health or mental well-being is at risk.

A bid to enable abortion when there has been a diagnosis of fatal foetal abnormality (FFA) was defeated earlier this year. DUP Health Minister Simon Hamilton instead set up a working group to examine the issue.

Mr McGuinness has left his Mid Ulster constituency to run in his native Foyle in this election. It is part of a Sinn Fein strategy to overtake the once dominant SDLP in the constituency.

Mr McGuinness yesterday said his party could take three seats in next week's vote.
Casement Park GAA stadium in west Belfast, which is to be completely rebuilt

The major redevelopment of the Provincial Stadium at Casement Park could be completed by 2019 despite the catalogue of problems that has stalled the project.

The chairman of the 77m Casement Park Project Board said he hopes to submit the new planning application by autumn this year following a lengthy two-phase consultation process.

Tom Daly said the new fit-for-purpose stadium could be up and running in the next three years.

He made the comments as the Ulster GAA launched the 20-week consultation process, which includes a series of events across west Belfast.

"There are so many inter-related parts of this process that can eat up time, but with things moving well for us we believe we have a prospect of completing it some time in 2019," he said.

"The critical thing for us is that we need, as urgently as we can get it, a fit-for-purpose modern stadium for our own GAA games.

"There is always a big focus on a small number of high-attendance games, but for the rest of the year the stadium will have the function for the GAA and community projects in the city, county and province."

A number of issues has hampered the proposed redevelopment after a safety expert raised concerns about the emergency exits.

The GAA's efforts to develop the old stadium site have been mired in controversy, with initial planning approval for a 38,000-capacity venue quashed by the High Court in 2014 following a challenge by nearby residents. Mr Daly refused to say what the capacity will be in the new planning application, adding that they were letting that "issue rest".

He continued: "The capacity issue will arise much later in the process.

"The first thing we have to do is to ensure that our design team take on board everything that comes out of the consultation process. That will touch on all of the stakeholders, including local residents, the wider community, school community and Gaelic games community. I have no doubt there will be very diverse views and challenging and interesting suggestions as to what can take place in the new facilities."

He also refused the idea of seeking an alternative location, saying that Casement Park will be the home of Ulster Gaelic games.

He added that the GAA sticks by its position that it "aimed for and achieved" the highest provision of safety in the stadium.

"We will want a design that places the highest possible premium on safety, we won't build it if we don't have that. Last year we put 1.6 million people through our turnstiles attending Gaelic games," he said.

The overall cost of the project will be around 77m, with 60m to come from government funding while the rest will come from the GAA.

A series of events will be held at Conway Mill, Andersonstown Leisure Centre and Glen Community Complex to hear the views of interested parties, on May 24, 25 and 26.
The republican event in Roslea has been condemned by First Minister Arlene Foster, whose late father John Kelly survived an IRA murder attempt in 1986

First Minister Arlene Foster has condemned a Sinn Fein-organised event to remember an IRA man she believes tried to murder her policeman father.

Gunman Seamus McElwain was killed by the SAS as he was preparing to ambush a British Army patrol between Lisnaskea and Roslea in Co Fermanagh in 1986.

The 30th anniversary of his death was commemorated at an event in Roslea on Tuesday night which was held, according to Sinn Fein, in the hope of "ensuring Seamus and his dedication to the republican struggle will never be forgotten".

Sean Lynch, who was with McElwain when the SAS opened fire on the pair, was seriously wounded and spent four months in hospital before being jailed for 25 years for possession of explosives and a rifle.

He was released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, and elected a Sinn Fein MLA for Fermanagh and South Tyrone in 2011. He spoke at Tuesday night's event, where more than 200 republicans gathered to remember his friend.

Speaking afterwards, Mr Lynch said: "The large crowd was testament to the impact Seamus' short life had on the local people. We had an in-depth, dignified discussion around Seamus' energy and enthusiasm and nobody disputed his fun-loving personality and his desire for Irish freedom.

"Many members of the crowd were not even born when Seamus was killed and therefore this demonstrated that, like the 1916 volunteers, the 1981 hunger strikers and all of our fallen comrades, the memory of Seamus McElwain will live on around Fermanagh, Monaghan and further afield."

But Mrs Foster has named McElwain as the man she believed tried to shoot dead her late father John Kelly in Lisnaskea in 1979.

Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph, Mrs Foster said: "McElwain was killed by the SAS as he was going out to take innocent life. Had he not escaped from the Maze Prison he would not have been in contact with the SAS.

"The judge who sentenced McElwain described him as a dangerous man. He was a killer.

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"At his funeral he was described as a 'freedom fighter'.

"He was an evil man responsible for the murder of many border Protestants.

"Celebrating the life of McElwain sends a mixed signal to dissidents today. Murder was always wrong. No matter if it was 2016 or 1976."

Kenny Donaldson, the director of South East Fermanagh Foundation, a victims' group based in Lisnaskea, said: "Seamus McElwain was not murdered by the SAS. He along with Sean Lynch were prevented by the SAS from murdering yet more innocent people.

"Because of the actions of Seamus McElwain, supported by individuals such as Sean Lynch and others, very many innocent men and women are no longer in this life.

"Let's be absolutely clear. Seamus McElwain was a terrorist, he was a serial killer who roamed the south Fermanagh area supported by others in search of their next victim. Republicans would have us believe that Seamus McElwain was fighting a war, that he was unavoidably caught up in 'the conflict'."

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Mr Donaldson said there were countless assassination attempts of off-duty and serving security force members and other people in what he said was "a concerted campaign of terror and intimidation of a border community with the end game being their forced removal from the border and from the land".

"There was no war and no conflict in south Fermanagh because the minority community refused to retaliate to the dastardly deeds of the Provisional IRA murder squads. Their code was to their belief in God and to the organs of the State to do right by them," he added.

"As of now they remain failed by the UK State and also the Republic of Ireland State, which provided safe haven for serial killers to operate their campaign of ethnic cleansing."
Delta Airlines has placed a 5.6 billion US dollar (3.84 billion) order for Bombardier's C Series aircraft.

The American aviation giant will buy 75 of the passenger planes - with the possibility of an additional 50. The wings will be manufactured in Belfast.

Deliveries to Atlanta-based Delta are due to begin in 2018.

Alain Bellemare, president and chief executive officer at Bombardier, said: "We are very proud to welcome Delta as a C Series customer and to expand our partnership with such a prestigious airline.

"Given Delta's position as one of the world's largest and most respected airlines, this deal is a strong endorsement of the C Series as the best performing aircraft in the 100-150 passenger class.

"The addition of Delta to our marquee C Series customer list gives us tremendous momentum as we approach entry-into-service this summer."

The innovative carbon-fibre composite technology, developed in Belfast to produce the wings, enables material and aircraft weight savings, contributing significantly to the C Series airliner's stated economic and environmental credentials, Bombardier said.

Delta is taking the smaller CS100 model of the plane.

Bombardier, a Canada-based multinational, has been under financial pressure and invested large sums in its new jet programme, which is crucial to many jobs in Belfast.

In February the firm announced 1,080 job losses at its Northern Ireland plants following delays to the C Series.

Mr Bellemare added: "As a result of this order, the programme is expected to enter into service with a backlog of more than 300 aircraft or up to 800 aircraft including all options and commitments."

The C Series programme received one billion dollars (almost 700 million) from the provincial government in Quebec last year.

Bombardier is one of Northern Ireland's largest employers and supports hundreds of other jobs through its suppliers.

Unions have described the mass redundancies as a cruel blow to a manufacturing sector still reeling from news that JTI Gallahers and Michelin factories in Ballymena are to close.

Michael Ryan, vice-president and general manager at Bombardier Belfast, said: "We're delighted that another customer has placed such a significant order for the C Series aircraft.

"This is a further endorsement of the aircraft's excellent operating economics and environmental credentials, to which we in Belfast are contributing with the production of the advanced composite wings.

"We believe the unique, patented process we've developed represents a step-change in aircraft wing technology, and is strengthening the UK's strategic goal of being the world leader in aircraft wing design and manufacture."

Unite the Union said it hoped the order meant planned redundancies could be avoided.

Regional officer Davy Thompson said: "We hope that today's good news will be followed up by further orders from other airlines.

"The C Series has a huge advantage in terms of fuel efficiency and this contract offers encouragement that other airlines will follow suit."
The 29-year-old woman was said to be under surveillance

A Belfast pharmacist is under police investigation over the illegal supply of stolen prescription drugs to a major street dealer, it can be revealed.

The 29-year-old woman is suspected of being a Belfast drug baron's source of supply of a prescription-only medicine called Lyrica, which has become an increasingly popular street drug.

Lyrica, also known as 'bud', was among a cocktail of drugs taken by tragic west Belfast teen Aaron Strong before he suffered a massive heart attack at the weekend.

The 18-year-old is on life support at the Royal Victoria Hospital after he took the lethal cocktail of alcohol, Lyrica and the pain-killer Tramadol.

He is in a coma with brain damage and complications from kidney and liver failure.

His devastated family have urged other young people to stop risking their lives by taking lethal drugs.

A police operation against the supply of Lyrica across Belfast was launched last month.

The pharmacist at the heart of the investigation was arrested on the Antrim Road on March 16, alongside a 49-year-old man, the PSNI has confirmed.

A PSNI spokesman said the pair were arrested "on suspicion of a number of drugs offences."

The spokesman added that they are both currently on police bail pending further enquiries.

A source close to the probe said that the woman was working at a city pharmacy when she stole boxes of the drug for the dealer over several months.

"She was under surveillance for a while and is suspected of using her position as a pharmacist to access this drug and supply it to a well-known dealer who has been making a lot of money out of selling it on the streets," the source said.

Earlier this week, the Belfast Telegraph revealed that a 'Mr Big' of the Belfast drug scene was making around 3,000 a week selling the addictive prescription drug Lyrica.

He is currently under threat from republican paramilitaries after he failed to pay them a 15,000 'tax' to allow him to keep dealing in north Belfast.

Lyrica, which is used to treat epilepsy, has become a popular street drug. Users take the capsule apart, crush the contents and inject it. It is said to produce a similar effect to Valium.

Its unregulated use on the streets has begun to cause concern for the authorities.

In an article in the Emergency Medical Journal in 2013, health professionals said they had witnessed a recent increase in the number of patients attending the emergency departments in Belfast after recreational abuse of Lyrica. According to the article, from February 2012 to February 2013, 10 patients were admitted to a Belfast hospital following Lyrica abuse. Six of those patients had suffered seizures. Two patients required intubation and ventilation and were admitted to the ICU.

"Patients are either taking tablets whole or cutting and snorting them. 60% of patients in this case series presented to the Emergency Department with seizures and 20% required ICU (Intensive Care Unit) admission," the article said. It continued: "We recommend that patients who present with potential Lyrica toxicity should be admitted for observation, with the treating physician being mindful of the potential for seizure activity."
Former secretary of state Peter Mandelson has warned of economic, political and social fallout in Northern Ireland as a result of Brexit

Northern Ireland's delicate peace process would be damaged if the UK votes to leave the European Union, a defence think-tank has warned.

Politicians at Westminster and Stormont have also failed to address the risks to the region's economy and security, according to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

In a new report published in the RUSI Journal, Edward Burke said: "Northern Ireland, with its 300-mile land border, its fractured political structures, weak economy and enduring terrorist threat, requires urgent attention in the debate on a potential Brexit.

"While the debate focuses on trade and English and Scottish issues, inattention in the case of Northern Ireland, particularly on Brexit, is complacent and dangerous; Northern Ireland's departure from conflict remains brittle."

RUSI has argued that crucial EU funding for economic and specialised peace programmes could be hard to replace in the event of a Brexit, putting at risk years of cross-community and mental health work.

Joint EU membership has also helped underpin the Good Friday Agreement which ended decades of sectarian violence in the region, it is claimed.

According to the report, r emoving a European dimension that "softens the border" between the north and south of Ireland may upset the delicate equilibrium painstakingly constructed since the 1998 peace accord.

Mr Burke added: "A ny re-imposition of border controls on the UK's only land border to restrict 'back-door' immigration from the EU or the introduction of enhanced customs inspections, hindering cross-border trade, would likely see a further deterioration in Northern Ireland's already parlous economic fortunes."

Northern Ireland's two biggest political parties have taken opposite views on the contentious Brexit issue.

The Democratic Unionists have pledged their support for a withdrawal while Sinn Fein has been campaigning to stay within the EU.

Former Secretary of State Peter Mandelson, who supports the 'In' campaign said: "The risk to Northern Ireland from leaving the EU is wide-ranging and deeply worrying, economically, politically and socially, and that risk must be recognised by the rest of the United Kingdom."
In a final act of generosity and kindness, a heartbroken mother has granted permission for her teenage son's organs to be donated to save other people's lives.

Annmarie Strong will allow doctors to perform the operation on her son Aaron, who has been in a coma and on life support since the weekend.

Doctors and the family plan to turn off his life support today, and say the donation could save up to nine other people's lives.

Aaron (18) was rushed to the Royal Victoria Hospital at the weekend having accidentally overdosed on prescription and street drugs he had taken at a friend's house.

He was due to start a new job on Tuesday as a joiner in Bournemouth and would have celebrated his birthday next Monday with twin brother Ryan, who is devastated at his loss.

A keen mechanic, Aaron, from Ballymurphy in west Belfast, was talented with engines and "could take anything apart and rebuild it".

Family and friends of the former Corpus Christi College pupil described Aaron as "kind-hearted and easygoing" and "someone who would do anything for anyone".

"He was always taking things apart, the remote control, motorbikes, engines, anything like that just so he could fix it again," Ms Strong said. "He loved motorbikes. He was always bringing them home, then fixing them up to sell on.

"And he loved kids, he really loved all the kids in the family especially my wee granddaughter Cora.

"He was a very loving person, so he was great with kids.

"Aaron was a lovable kid himself, he never brought any trouble home, none of my sons did.

"He was always really helpful, out with his strimmer cutting grass, everyone knew him and everyone liked him.

"He loved music and there'd be times when I shout up to tell him to turn it down because he had it blaring.

"Or I'd go on at him to do something and have to tell him 20 times. He was very laid-back like that, very easygoing - nothing really bothered him."

Ms Strong, a mother-of-four, said the tragedy had made her feel like her "world has collapsed" and the pain of losing him had left her so bereft she was unsure if she could go on without him.

"I have four kids which I raised on my own, I gave them everything I could," Ms Strong added.

"My kids are my world: I love each one of my sons with my whole heart, but I never, ever thought I'd lose my son to drugs - he never even smoked.

"These drug dealers should be wiped off the face of the Earth - selling dirt to our kids, they're murdering our kids, I am absolutely fuming.

"But I know Aaron is now with my parents, his granny Rebecca and granda Emmanuel, who he just loved, he's with his nanny Eileen too.

"They will have gladly met him with their arms out receiving him to Heaven.

"My God, it's broken the chain of the family, it's completely broken without him, we are all devastated, it's all so sudden.

"I can't see myself living without him, I can't.

"How can I go on? I can't without him.

"He was my child - my son who I love. I feel like I have been completely robbed."

Although heartbroken, the Strong family say they are pleased that Aaron's organs will go on to save other lives as something positive has come out of the horror.

They added that it would have delighted Aaron to know that his death was not in vain that he his final gesture was to help others.

"Aaron was a very giving person, very, very giving," Ms Strong said. "He would have given someone before himself, he was always like that. Anything he could do to help you out, he would.

"I don't know how I managed to even tell the doctors to donate his organs, it just came out, something was in me to say it, but we are pleased that it will help other people. That's what Aaron would have wanted and he would have been pleased to have helped someone else."

Cousin Amy Strong added: "Aaron had the biggest heart of gold, he really did, he would have done anything for anyone."

The family also thanked the hundreds of people who have sent messages and cards of support, prayed for Aaron and lit candles as a vigil.
Workers at Japanese IT company Fujitsu are to be balloted on industrial action to try to prevent compulsory redundancies.

Members of the Communication Workers Union will vote on whether to launch a campaign of action unless compulsory job losses are ruled out at company sites in Northern Ireland.

Assistant secretary John East said: "It's our view that the company's reorganisation plan can be carried out through voluntary redundancies, redeployment and relocation.

"To achieve this, however the company would have to increase the number of alternative jobs on offer, something it could easily do, and also increase the compensation terms.

"We urge the business to sit down and talk seriously with the union about how we can work together to ensure that there is a job for everyone who wants to stay. But, if Fujitsu refuse to do this, then they will leave us with no alternative but to carry out an industrial action ballot."
Many Syrians have fled to other countries for refuge

The UK Government was defeated in the House of Lords on the issue of unaccompanied refugee children in Europe being given refuge in the United Kingdom.

MPs defeated a Labour proposed amendment to the Immigration Bill to allow unaccompanied child refugees to come to the UK from Europe by 294 votes to 276, in a narrow victory for the government in the Commons.

However, when it went to the Lords the bill was rejected and returned to the Commons for further consideration.

The Lords voted 279 to 172 to reject the bill.

The government had wanted to cap the number of children at 3,000 until 2020. Labour peer Lord Dubs proposed an amendment to do away with any restriction on the number.

SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson criticised the Prime Minister for failing to see the comparison between the children at risk in Europe and the Kindertransport scheme, which helped rescue nearly 10,000 mainly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territories in 1938/39.

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Labour peer Lord Dubs was one of 669 children who escaped the Holocaust on trains from Prague organised by British stockbroker Sir Nicholas Winton.

He welcomed government support for refugees, but added: "When all is said and done, the government will still leave thousands of children in Europe.

"Children who are vulnerable, children who are in an unhappy situation, children who are in danger possibly even to their lives and certainly to their wellbeing."

Those opposed to the amendment said they were concerned it would only encourage more refugees to come to Europe.

David Cameron has insisted the UK is not "walking on by" by refusing to take in unaccompanied refugee children from Europe.

Amnesty International described the decision as "a shameful response to the biggest immigration crisis of our time" and called for Northern Ireland MPs to "stand up and be counted" for any revised amendment that may come before the Commons.

How Northern Ireland MPs voted

Of the 18 Northern Ireland MPs in the Commons, six voted.

The DUP's Gregory Campbell and Jim Shannon voted both 'aye and no' - effectively abstaining.

Both the UUP's MPs Danny Kinahan and Tom Elliott voted with the government defeating the amendment.

While North Down independent Lady Sylvia Hermon and the SDLP's Mark Durkan voted in favour of allowing the 3,000 children

Nigel Dodds, Ian Paisley, Jeffrey Donaldson, Gavin Robinson, David Simpson and Sammy Wilson of the DUP did not take part in the vote.

Alastair McDonnell and Margaret Ritchie of the SDLP also didn't take part.

Sinn Fein's four MPS - Francie Molloy, Mickey Brady, Pat Doherty and Paul Maskey do not take their seats and so do not participate in proceedings.

DUP East Belfast MP Gavin Robinson said they abstained because he didn't believe the amendment "quite right" or satisfied with the resources laid out for the children.

And he said he was working with the government to ensure there was a solution.

"There will be a solution, but it will be a solution that best fits the needs of the children," he told the BBC Stephen Nolan show.

The UK government suffered further defeats on the Immigration Bill over the detention of pregnant women in immigration custody and holding people in detention for more than 28 days.

It will now decide whether to try to overturn the latest defeats when the bill returns to the Commons.
Rebel Labour members fighting the Assembly election have denied vote-splitting and putting SDLP seats at risk.

In deciding to stand, the eight candidates are defying the national party, which has historically refused to organise in Northern Ireland and regards the SDLP as its sister party.

But launching their manifesto yesterday, the local Labour branch activists - who risk being expelled - insisted they were more likely to bring out a fresh vote than siphon support from the nationalist party.

Kathryn Johnston, vice-chair of the NI branch, said LucidTalk polls for the Belfast Telegraph showed that 51% of women and 53% of young people did not intend voting for any of the major parties. "We will reach voters the other parties are not," she told the gathering at the Unite trade union headquarters in Belfast. She also set out that Labour significantly differed from the SDLP. "The SDLP are equivocal on marriage equality; on abortion they are pro-life while we are pro-choice of the woman.

"Also, unlike them, we are also in favour of a comprehensive, integrated, secular education system," said Mrs Johnston, whose late husband Liam Clarke was political editor of the Belfast Telegraph.
A new group of Syrian refugees has arrived in Northern Ireland.

The 57 men, women and children - the second group to arrive in Northern Ireland - were welcomed at Belfast International Airport from Turkey on Thursday morning.

Among the 14 families are 20 children.

They will all spend the coming days at a welcome centre before moving to their new homes.

Thursday's new arrivals are a mixture of Arabs, Kurds and Circassians, all Muslim.

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The youngest is two and the oldest aged mid-50s. Several have university-level education.

All bar one family will be housed by the Housing Executive in Londonderry - one will go to the greater Belfast area because a wheelchair user needs accessible accommodation.

Some were plumbers or bakers in their native home - forced by conflict to flee to new houses in Londonderry with barely a word of English.

Speaking ahead of their arrival, Denise Wright, a coordinator for the Refugee and Asylum Forum, said: "Most in the camps don't want to go to Europe. They want to go back to their homes again.

"This is a last resort for many. They are deciding they may never see other members of their family again.

"If they stay in camps they may not make it."

This is the second group accepted in Northern Ireland as part of the UK-wide Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme to resettle around 20,000 by 2020.

The last intake was accepted from a camp near Beirut in Lebanon on December 15, before the snows of winter in Belfast.

One said: "When it snows in camps, children start to die."

A lot of the men had been abducted for ransom by combatants and beaten while being held; one victim did not know who kidnapped him.

The most needy have been targeted for the resettlement programme, women and children, torture victims, those with significant medical needs.

In December some were driving down the motorway from the airport towards Belfast before they realised they were in Northern Ireland rather than London.

This time more information has been sent to the group before their arrival.

All families will be permitted to remain in the UK for five years with the opportunity of attaining citizenship. They have passed all Home Office screening tests for criminality.

The Home Office has provided at least 11,120 per refugee to cover the first year's cost.

Members of the group are not allowed to stray across the border into the Republic. They will be eligible to claim benefits but will have to make the same efforts to find work as everybody else.

None in the last intake have yet found work. The intention is to match them with jobs fitting their skill levels rather than simply taking low paid service industry posts.

They can apply for dependent family members to join them in Northern Ireland but have not yet done so.
Legislation aimed at tackling the "malign threat" of paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland has been fast-tracked through Parliament.

The Northern Ireland (Stormont Agreement and Implementation Plan) Bill, which has already cleared the Commons, was given an unopposed third reading in the Lords and is now set to become law.

The Bill gives effect to commitments in the Fresh Start Agreement reached last November after 10 weeks of cross party talks aimed at shoring up the power-sharing Stormont Assembly.

It implements parts of the political deals struck between the parties, including plans to establish a commission to promote progress towards ending paramilitary activity.

Northern Ireland spokesman Lord Dunlop said there were many issues arising from the agreement that were not in the Bill.

"I'm sure we will return on future occasions to many of these issues raised by peers across the House on how best to deal with the legacy of Northern Ireland's troubled past."

He said the Bill "while not providing all the answers does maintain momentum achieved by the Fresh Start Agreement and marks another significant step forward in tackling the malign threat of paramilitary activity and securing a more peaceful, stable and prosperous future for Northern Ireland".

Lord Dunlop said fast-tracking the Bill would ensure that the "enhanced pledge of office and new undertakings for members of the Assembly" would be in place for the Assembly's return after next week's elections.
A devoted husband has spoken of his relief that a special poem and treasured pictures of his deceased wife stolen in a burglary at his home have been recovered, thanks to the vigilance of neighbours and swift action by police.

Andy Rodgers (54), from Coleraine, revealed the revered family snaps and poignant poetry are of great sentimental value as the prose was penned by his wife Diane just before she tragically passed away from cancer.

The touching seven-verse poem entitled There's Nothing The Matter With Me, tells how a person with illness hopes for the best.

The Rodgers' home at Willowfield Avenue in Coleraine, was targeted in the early hours of last Saturday, just two days before Mr Rodgers and his daughter Jenna (20) and son Shane (18) were due to have marked what would have been Diane's birthday.

With the stress of the break-in hanging over them on Monday, he said their plans to remember Diane were upset as at that stage the personal items had not been recovered.

Mr Rodgers, who is a well-known Elvis impersonator and a part-time chef at Coleraine's Lodge Hotel, told the Belfast Telegraph the stolen items were all returned on Tuesday night and he believed a suspect had been spoken to by police.

Originally from Leeds, Mr Rodgers has been living in Northern Ireland for 26 years.

He was out doing an Elvis tribute gig on Friday night and only returned home about 3am on Saturday and was asleep in his bed when the burglars struck.

Mr Rodgers said: "They took a TV, several possessions and bags, A-Level work my son had, plus my daughter's bag, money and personal things from my deceased wife.

"They took a poem of Jenna's that her mum had written just before she passed away.

"They took the bag with my daughter's purse in it with 25 in it. The poem and photos were in her purse.

"There was a poem Diane had written on a piece of paper which probably means nothing to anybody else, but means so much to my daughter.

"It was very sentimental. And there were photographs which can never be taken again of Jenna and Shane with their mum. Thank God that has all come back."

Mr Rodgers said Diane passed away eight years ago from cancer and would have turned 48 on Monday.

"It would have been her birthday a couple of days after the burglary. We couldn't really think about her birthday and do what we normally do on her birthday because we were that wrapped up with the burglary.

"It really did throw us into a real whirlwind," he said.

He added that the impact of the break-in could last for some time: "We feel as if we are very vulnerable now. Your home is not your castle any more, it has been intruded. To actually walk into your house and do that and take things that are so important."

Mr Rodgers said his neighbours had rallied round and been of great support and he understood an arrest had been made. He said a neighbour's CCTV had been of use and it was believed a suspect made a getaway by stealing a bicycle.

The relieved widower said a woman's car was broken into around the corner at the same time and a handbag was taken.

"Talk about power to the community. The neighbourhood rallied round and that is how we got so much information to the police.

"The police did their bit, don't get me wrong, but it was through the neighbours and everybody else coming forward otherwise we could have been sitting there traumatised for months."

A PSNI spokesman said a 21-year-old man has been charged with burglary and theft and is expected to appear at Coleraine Magistrates Court in May.
Building of the 650 million euro facilities is expected to start soon on the grounds of St James's Hospital in the south inner city

Planning chiefs have given the green light for a new state-of-the-art children's hospital in Dublin.

Building of the 650 million euro facilities is expected to start soon on the grounds of St James's Hospital in the south inner city.

The new hospital will bring together Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin, Temple Street Children's University Hospital and the National Children's Hospital at Tallaght.

It is planned to be opened by 2020.

Eilish Hardiman, chief executive of the new hospital, described the decision by An Bord Pleanala to grant permission for the development as "a watershed day for children, young people and their families".

"We are now firmly on our way to making this long-awaited children's hospital a reality," she said.

"Anyone who deals with paediatric services in Ireland - as a patient, a parent or as a member of staff - fully understands how badly this new facility is needed."

As well as the main hospital buildings in central Dublin, there will also be satellite campuses at Blanchardstown and Tallaght.

The long-awaited development of a new national children's hospital has been mired in controversy for years.

Earlier plans to build it at the site of the Mater Hospital in Dublin were rejected by planning chiefs after objections.

Louis Roden, a parent and long-time campaigner for a new children's hospital, said Thursday's decision was a long time coming.

"For many parents, including myself, this hospital is coming too late for their children to benefit from it but nevertheless, I am delighted that we are now moving forward - and in the right direction," he said.

"It is important that everyone now works together as a matter of urgency and gets behind what will be a fantastic facility.

"Most importantly one that is best positioned to deliver the best clinical outcomes for the children of Ireland."

Caretaker Health Minister Leo Varadkar said: "This is fantastic news for all the children of Ireland - it will produce a state-of-the-art hospital of which everyone can be proud."

Bosses at the three existing children's hospitals in the capital described the go-ahead for the new hospital as "historic and exciting".

"Our staff in the three children's hospitals will be working in a world-class, modern hospital that is custom-built to deliver the best care and treatments available," they said in a joint statement.

"Our doctors, nurses and care professionals have had the opportunity to input into the designs and are delighted that what was a vision and plan is now firmly becoming a reality."

The new hospital will include 380 single in-patient rooms, 42 critical care unit beds and an 18-capacity neonatal critical care unit.

Dr James Reilly, the outgoing children's minister, described the decision as a great day for Ireland.

"This is a great day for all the children of all Ireland. It means that we can look forward to world-class treatment for our children in a world-class environment," he said.

He added: "I look forward with confidence to the future of this facility and to the vital service it will provide."
Independent TD Mick Wallace became emotional when recalling his meeting with a 15-year-old refugee

Independent TD Mick Wallace broke down in tears after discussing the plight of refugees.

Speaking in the Dail, Mr Wallace said the refugee crisis is so stark and Ireland needs to do more.

Could we do something around just minors even? Can Ireland become a champion of minors in the area of refugees, Mr Wallace asked.

The Wexford deputy said there are many Irish families willing to take in refugees and that he would be willing to accommodate one himself.

It wont cost the State a penny, he said.

Mr Wallace and Dublin Fingal TD Clare Daly have recently returned from Calais where they visited refugee camps.

During the Dail debate on the issue on Thursday, Mr Wallace became emotional when recalling his meeting with a 15-year-old child who lost his family on the Iran-Afghan border.

Hes 15 and hed like to come to Ireland or Britain, a tearful Mr Wallace said.

Irish Independent
Would-be victims are getting emails alleging to be from the Department of Transport about car tax renewal

Fraudsters are posing as motor tax authorities to get private bank details from people, transport chiefs have warned.

In the latest so-called phishing scam, would-be victims are getting emails alleging to be from the Department of Transport about car tax renewal.

"These emails are a hoax," said a department spokesman.

"The Department does not send emails requiring customers to send this type of personal information via email or pop-up windows."

The bogus emails ask the recipient for billing information and vehicle details related to their last motor tax transaction.

But the department said car owners are only ever contacted immediately before their motor tax is due for renewal, from the info@motortax.ie email address.

Official emails will have a link to www.motortax.ie, where they can log into a secure site with their Pin and car registration number.

The department said it was only made aware of the scam on Wednesday.

"Any motor tax notifications will come from the email address of info@motortax.ie and anyone who receives an email from any other email address purporting to be from the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, and suspects it to be fraudulent or a scam, should simply delete it," the spokesman added.

"Anyone who provided personal information in response to these fraudulent emails should contact their bank or credit card company immediately."
The Labour Party has suspended Ken Livingstone after the former London mayor defended the actions of an MP suspended over an anti-Semitism row.

Senior figures in the party, including Labour's current candidate for London mayor and two shadow cabinet ministers called for Mr Livingstone to be thrown out after he said Bradford West MP Naz Shah's actions were "over the top" but not anti-Semitic.

And one prominent Labour MP confronted Mr Livingstone - a member of the party's ruling National Executive Committee - outside a Westminster TV studio, accusing him of being a "Nazi apologist".

In a BBC Radio London interview, the former London mayor claimed Hitler had supported Zionism before the Holocaust and insisted he had never heard anyone within Labour be anti-Semitic.

Labour's mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan said: "Ken Livingstone's comments are appalling and inexcusable. There must be no place for this in our party."

And shadow Commons leader Chris Bryant told MPs: "I'm sick and tired of people trying to explain it away and, yes, I'm talking to you, Ken Livingstone."

Bassetlaw MP John Mann confronted Mr Livingstone at the Millbank broadcast studios as both arrived for interviews.

"You're a Nazi apologist, you're rewriting history. Go back and check what Hitler did - the book is called Mein Kampf," said Mr Mann, jabbing his finger at the former mayor as he walked up the stairs, his mobile phone clamped to his ear.

Mr Livingstone said Mr Mann had gone "completely over the top" and started "bellowing" at him while he was conducting a radio interview over the phone.

The former London mayor took to the airwaves to defend Ms Shah a day after her dramatic suspension and the launch of an investigation into allegedly anti-Semitic social media posts she made before becoming an MP.

The party is now undertaking an investigation into her actions, for which she offered a "wholehearted apology".

Mr Livingstone told BBC Radio London: "Her remarks were over the top but she is not anti-Semitic.

"I have been in the Labour Party for 40 years and I have never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic.

"I have heard a lot of criticism for the state of Israel and its abuse of Palestinians, but I have never heard someone be anti-Semitic."

He added: "When Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

"But the simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians."

His comments came soon after Labour MP Rupa Huq warned against "trial by Twitter", saying Ms Shah's social media posts had been a "silly moment" that had happened before she was a public figure.

Ms Huq told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "It's easy to click those buttons - like, share - and I guess we have to be very, very careful what it is we are clicking on. It was at the time when she wasn't a public figure. It's just really unfortunate. If it is career-destroying it seems we are entering a phase where it is trial by Twitter."

Mr Livingstone's comments prompted a wave of calls for his suspension by prominent Labour MPs.

Asked if he should be suspended, shadow mental health minister Luciana Berger replied "Yes".

Former leadership contender Liz Kendall said: "We must not allow Labour's proud history of fighting racism and prejudice to be put at any further risk. Ken Livingstone should be suspended."

Labour former frontbencher John Woodcock backed Mr Khan, saying "this cannot go on".

He said: "Ken Livingstone must be suspended for this. He must actively be seeking suspension and notoriety with these remarks.

"Well said, Sadiq. Ken Livingstone is the chair of Labour's international policy commission - this cannot go on."

Mr Mann told Sky News: "I told him he needs help. The man's gone mad.

"He is peddling neo-Nazi conspiracy theories that even most neo-Nazis don't bother with these days.

"They are the most disgusting remarks, grossly calculated to offend, deliberately timed,. that I have ever heard from any Labour politician.

"Jeremy Corbyn needs to act and throw him out.

"The only person I've seen peddle this kind of rubbish in recent times is David Icke. That's who he is sat alongside as a great historian."

Mr Mann said the party "clearly does" have a wider problem with anti-Semitism.

"His suspension would help draw a line under it for the first time. Perhaps that's the chance now to really get to grips with the problem."

Labour MP Wes Streeting, who has been pushing the party to take action to stamp out anti-Semitic behaviour, said: "Ken Livingstone has form on anti-Semitism and has been tolerated for far too long. He should be suspended immediately.

"Decent Labour members need to decide how to respond to anti-Semitism within our ranks. Silence is complicity. We must all speak out."

Conor McGinn, Labour MP for St Helens North, said: "I've given Ken Livingstone a fool's pardon in recent months. But his comments on anti-Semitism are appalling. We can't allow this to go on."

Former frontbencher Stella Creasy tweeted: "Not in my name #kenlivingstone - he should be suspended immediately without equivocation. Our #labourfamily has no place for such bigotry."

Labour MP Jess Phillips said: "Ken Livingstone must be suspended from the Labour Party."

Mr Mann's spat with Mr Livingstone came as the former mayor was being interviewed by James O'Brien on LBC radio. Listeners could clearly hear the Bassetlaw MP shouting in the background as Mr Livingstone talked.

Before his line went dead, Mr Livingstone told the interviewer: "I've got a violent MP threatening me, sorry about that."

When O'Brien asked him "Are you all right, Ken?", Livingstone replied: "It's just some MP going a bit over the top. I've got a problem here - another one of these Labour MPs going over the top who won't let me talk to you I'm afraid."

His line then went dead.

Labour frontbencher Chi Onwurah told the Press Association: "Ken's comments are unacceptable and there cannot be one rule for him and another for everyone else.

"Anti-Semitism is wrong, full stop, end of story. Naz Shah recognised that in her fulsome apology; Ken has actually made things worse by trying to justify comments she accepted had no justification."

Conservative MP Oliver Dowden said: "Labour have gone from indifference to denial over their anti-Semitism problem. Instead of turning a blind eye, they need to act and now. Jeremy Corbyn needs to suspend Ken Livingstone and stop sections of his party being apologists for anti-Semitism."

Mr Livingstone said he believed the row over his future would "calm down" over the next couple of days.

Asked if he was under pressure, he told BBC Two's Daily Politics: "Not really. I simply said what I believed to be true, which is that Naz is not anti-Semitic."

Pressed about his future on Labour's ruling NEC, he said: "Things erupt. They dominate the news for 24/48 hours. People calm down again when they go back and check what you have really said."

Former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg told Mr Livingstone his actions were "weird".

He said: "I never ever thought I would see the day that mainstream, well-known politicians like you would start raking over Hitler's views in a way that people would simply not understand.

"You are responsible for choosing your words carefully and not entering into this weird contorted maze which allows you to start talking about Hitler in the same breath as the Jewish community in Britain today."

Labour MP David Lammy said: "This is a very sad day for the Labour Party. I simply cannot reconcile being in the same party as someone with these views.

"I am appalled by Ken Livingstone's despicable comments. There is no place in our party for racism, bigotry or intolerance of any sort."

Mr Khan made clear he believed Mr Livingstone must be removed from the party, telling BBC Radio 5 Live: "He's got to be kicked out. These are so serious, these comments, so deeply offensive."

The chairman of the Momentum group of Corbyn supporters, Jon Lansman, said: "A period of silence from Ken Livingstone is overdue, especially on anti-Semitism, racism and Zionism. It's time he left politics altogether.

"Ken Livingstone achieved many good things for London and beyond. But all political lives end in failure and he should now depart voluntarily."

Shadow cabinet minister Jon Ashworth said: "Enough is enough. Ken Livingstone has crossed a line. He does not represent mainstream Labour members like me. He has to go."
Philip Hammond has become the first British Foreign Secretary to visit Cuba since before the communist revolution of 1959.

Arriving in the capital Havana, Mr Hammond said that Britain was keen to forge "new links" with the Caribbean nation.

His visit follows US President Barak Obama's historic visit last month intended to normalise relations between the two countries after decades of hostility.

Mr Hammond will hold a series of high-level meetings to discuss recent social and economic changes, human rights and the fight against global health threats such as the Zika virus.

He will also sign a bilateral agreement restructuring Cuba's debt to the UK, as well as agreeing future co-operation on financial services, energy, culture and education.

"Britain and Cuba have outlooks on the world and systems of government that are very different," Mr Hammond said.

"But as Cuba enters a period of significant social and economic change, I am looking forward to demonstrating to the Cuban government and people that the UK is keen to forge new links across the Atlantic.

"That is why Cuba and the UK are set to reach new cooperation agreements on energy, financial services, education and culture, to the benefit of both our nations.

"As the first British Foreign Secretary to visit Cuba since before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, this is an opportunity to hear for myself what Cuba thinks about its present challenges and where it sees its future."
Home Secretary Theresa May had said the refugees could not come to the UK

Six refugee families who were refused admission to the UK have won their legal action against the Home Office.

The group were among 75 individuals from Ethiopia, Iran, Sudan and Syria who were washed up on the south-west coast of Cyprus in October 1998 after the boat in which they were travelling to Italy foundered.

Recognised as refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention, they have remained in Dhekelia in the British Sovereign Base Areas (SBA) of Cyprus for the past 17 years stuck in a legal "limbo".

In November 2014, the Home Secretary decided that they could not be admitted to the UK and six claimants - the heads of their families - launched a High Court challenge on the basis that the UK was in breach of its obligations under the Convention.

On Thursday in London, Mr Justice Foskett quashed the decision and remitted it for further consideration in the light of his judgment and all relevant up-to-date factors.

Tessa Gregory, of law firm Leigh Day, said: " We are pleased that the court has quashed the Home Secretary's decision. The Government can now avoid further costly legal proceedings by allowing this small group of recognised refugees to resettle in the UK.

"To do so would not create a dangerous precedent or a back-door to the UK, it would simply be a humanitarian response in recognition of the unique circumstances of these families. It is extraordinary that successive UK Governments have allowed this situation to fester for so long leaving the children of refugees to grow up in increasingly hopeless and squalid conditions.

"We hope that the Home Secretary will now do the right thing. Until she does we will continue to seek the only lawful durable solution: resettlement of our clients in the UK."

Lead claimant Tag Bashir said: " We hope that with today's judgment we are one step closer to providing our children with a decent future. I was 26 years old when I came to the SBA and for 17 years I have been trying to work and build a life for my family but there is nothing here.

"I worry every day about my three children and how this situation and the uncertainty is affecting them. I hope the UK Government will finally recognise that we are their responsibility and allow us to come to the UK where our only wish is to work hard and integrate into society."
FILE - In this Oct. 3, 2015 file photo, injured Doctors Without Borders staff are seen near their hospital after it was hit by a U.S. airstrike. Days before the Oct. 3 U.S. air attack on a hospital in Afghanistan, American special operations analysts were gathering intelligence on the facility which they knew was a protected medical site because they believed it was being used by a Pakistani operative to coordinate Taliban activity, The Associated Press has learned. (M?decins Sans Fronti?res via AP, File)

The damaged interior of the hospital in which the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) medical charity operated is seen on October 13, 2015 following an air strike in the northern city of Kunduz. Thirty-three people are still missing days after a US air strike on an Afghan hospital, the medical charity has warned, sparking fears the death toll could rise significantly. AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty Images

In this Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015 photo, the charred remains of the Doctors Without Borders hospital is seen after being hit by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The attack, which killed a number of hospital staff and patients, was intended to back up Afghan forces fighting to dislodge Taliban insurgents who overran the strategic city earlier in the month. (Najim Rahim via AP)

In this Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015 photo, the charred remains of the Doctors Without Borders hospital is seen after being hit by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The attack, which killed a number of hospital staff and patients, was intended to back up Afghan forces fighting to dislodge Taliban insurgents who overran the strategic city earlier in the month. (Najim Rahim via AP)

The damaged hospital in which the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) medical charity operated is seen on October 13, 2015 following an air strike in the northern city of Kunduz. Thirty-three people are still missing days after a US air strike on an Afghan hospital, the medical charity has warned, sparking fears the death toll could rise significantly. AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty Images

The damaged hospital in which the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) medical charity operated is seen on October 13, 2015 following an air strike in the northern city of Kunduz. Thirty-three people are still missing days after a US air strike on an Afghan hospital, the medical charity has warned, sparking fears the death toll could rise significantly. AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty Images

Sixteen US military personnel, including one general officer, have been disciplined for mistakes that led to the bombing of a civilian hospital in Afghanistan last year that killed 42 people.

US officials said the service members received administrative punishments and no criminal charges were filed in connection with the air strike in the northern city of Kunduz.

A number of those punished are US special operations forces.

In many cases, a non-judicial punishment, such as a letter of reprimand or suspension, can effectively end a military career.

The full report on the investigation is expected to be released by the Pentagon on Friday.

Last month, the Associated Press reported that more than a dozen US military personnel had been disciplined in connection with the bombing, and that they were all largely administrative.

The hospital, run by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, was attacked by a US Air Force special operations AC-130 gunship, one of the most lethal in the US arsenal.

Doctors Without Borders called the attack "relentless and brutal".

Last November, the US military said the crew of the AC-130, which is armed with side-firing cannons and guns, had been dispatched to hit a Taliban command centre in a different building 450 yards away from the hospital.

However, hampered by problems with their targeting sensors, the crew relied on a physical description that led them to begin firing at the hospital even though they saw no hostile activity there.

Officials have said the accident was caused by human error and that many chances to avert the incident were missed.

A separate US report on the incident, obtained last autumn by the Associated Press, said the AC-130 aircraft fired 211 shells at the hospital compound over 29 minutes before commanders realised the mistake and ordered a halt.

Doctors Without Borders officials contacted coalition military personnel during the attack to say the hospital was "being 'bombed' from the air", and the word was finally relayed to the AC-130 crew, the report said.

The attack came as US military advisers were helping Afghan forces retake Kunduz, which had fallen to the Taliban on September 28. It was the first major city to fall since the Taliban were expelled from Kabul in 2001.

Afghan officials claimed the hospital had been overrun by the Taliban, but no evidence of that has surfaced. The hospital was destroyed and Doctors Without Borders ceased operations in Kunduz.
US vice-president Joe Biden has described progress towards defeating the Islamic State group in Iraq as "serious" and "committed", despite a crippling political crisis that threatens those gains.

On a visit to the country, Mr Biden met separately with PM Haider al-Abadi and parliament speaker Salim al-Jabouri.

He said he and Mr al-Abadi discussed "plans in store for Mosul and co-ordination going on with all of our friends here".

He said he is "very optimistic", and added that the leaders are "working very, very hard" to put together a new Iraqi cabinet.

Mr Biden is on his first trip to Iraq since 2011. He arrived in the capital Baghdad after a secret, overnight flight from Washington on a military plane.

He was greeted on the blistering hot tarmac by the US ambassador and Lt Gen Sean McFarland, the US commander leading the fight against IS.

His first stop was to meet with Mr al-Abadi at the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's grandiose Republican Palace, which served as US headquarters in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion. They spoke in English as reporters were allowed in briefly for the start of the meeting.

The White House has not disclosed the rest of Mr Biden's itinerary, but said he would meet with other Iraqi leaders to stress national unity and discuss the campaign against IS extremists. Mr Biden also met with US personnel in Iraq.

The visit comes amid a wave of protests and demands for sweeping political reforms in Iraq that have paralysed a government already struggling with a dire economic crisis and IS.

The Obama administration has stepped up its military role with more troops and equipment in a bid to put Iraq on a better path as President Barack Obama prepares to leave office in January.

Though there has been progress in wresting back territory from IS and weakening its leadership, senior US officials travelling with Mr Biden said any lost momentum will likely be due to political unrest rather than military shortcomings.

Chaotic politics are not new in Iraq, but the present infighting risks becoming a distraction, with politicians more focused on keeping their jobs than fighting IS, said the officials.

The turmoil engulfing Iraq's government grew out of weeks of rallies by followers of influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr demanding an end to pervasive corruption and mismanagement.

Thousands have protested just outside Baghdad's heavily guarded Green Zone, calling for politicians to be replaced by independent technocrats and for Iraq's powerful Shiite militias to be brought into key ministries.

At the centre of the crisis is Mr al-Abadi, a Shiite whom the US considers a welcome improvement over his predecessor Nouri al-Maliki.

Yet Mr al-Abadi's failures to deliver on long-promised reforms and manage Iraq's growing sectarian tensions have threatened his ability to lead the country.

Mr Al-Abadi is caught between ordinary Iraqis pleading for government accountability and entrenched political blocks that are reluctant to give up a powerful patronage system widely blamed for squandering Iraq's oil fortunes.

On Tuesday, Iraq's parliament approved half a dozen new cabinet ministers Mr al-Abadi nominated in a gesture to protesters, but the rest of the cabinet line-up remains in contention.

The turbulence has roiled the Iraqi capital. Last month, Mr al-Abadi pulled troops fighting IS on the front lines to protect Baghdad amid the protests. An economic crisis spurred by collapsing oil prices has further compounded Iraq's troubles.

Mr Obama said in Saudi Arabia last week that Mr al-Abadi had been a "good partner", but expressed concern about his hold on power.

Mr Obama said it was critical that Iraq's government stabilises and competing factions unite so it can fight terrorism and right its economy.

"Now is not the time for government gridlock or bickering," Mr Obama said.

It was because of that bickering that Mr Obama emerged from a meeting with Gulf leaders without the promises of financial support for Iraq's reconstruction that he had sought. Gulf countries preferred to wait and see whether Iraq could get its political act together before agreeing to help.

Aiming to build on recent progress in retaking territory from IS, the US this month agreed to deploy more than 200 additional troops to Iraq, bringing the authorised total to just over 4,000, and to send Apache helicopters into the fight.

Although the White House has ruled out a ground combat role, Mr Obama's decision puts American forces closer to the front lines to train and support Iraqi forces preparing to try to take back Mosul.

US officials would not put a timeline on reclaiming Mosul but said they expect progress to slow during the summer.

For Mr Biden and Mr Obama, the next nine months represent their final opportunity to position Iraq for a peaceful future before their terms end.

Though they came into office pledging to end the war and did so in 2011, US troops returned to Iraq in 2014 amid the rise of IS.

Mr Obama now acknowledges that his goal of defeating the militants will not be realised during his presidency.
Prosecutors said an Islamic State fighter ordered a Moroccan-born man living in Italy to carry out attacks in Rome

Italian police have arrested four people in a foreign fighter investigation, including a Moroccan-born man living in Italy who had received Islamic State orders to attack Rome, prosecutors said.

Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli said investigators intercepted the communication from within Islamic State territory ordering attacks in Italy "with particular attention to the city of Rome" and focusing on the Holy Year pilgrimage currently under way.

There was no indication any attacks were imminent and Mr Romanelli said authorities acted quickly to close the investigation, arresting four people and issuing arrest warrants for two others believed to be in IS territory.

He said: "This is a new profile, because it was not a generic indication, but an indication given to a specific person who was invited to act within the territory of the Italian state."

Authorities arrested the Moroccan-born man, identified as Abderrahim Moutahrrick, and his wife, Salma Bencharki, who were allegedly planning on travelling from their home in Lecco, north of Milan, to IS territory with their children, aged two and four.

Mr Romanelli said Moutahrrick had taken Italian citizenship and was an accomplished boxer.

Another Moroccan man who was planning to travel with them, identified as Abderrahmane Khachia, 23, was arrested in the northern city of Varese, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors also issued arrest warrants for an Italian-Moroccan couple who left to join IS last year with three small children.

Mr Romanelli said that man, identified as Mohamed Koraichi, had become an IS fighter and had communicated the orders to carry out attacks in Italy while making arrangements for the other family to join IS.

The fourth arrest was of Koraichi's sister, prosecutors said.

Mr Romanelli said the messages promoting lone-wolf attacks were "very strong, very serious and very efficient".

They indicated that IS's current policy is to push for attacks in locations where foreign fighters are residing "as the best way of creating terror within Western countries", he added.

Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said "there was a serious intention to hit Italy", and while the suspects were not yet involved in the material preparations for an attack, "there was a decision, an accentuated willingness, to proceed".

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi praised the anti-extremist operation as "very important".
I WISH to clarify the terminology used by Brian Ritchie in his letter (Write Back, April 26). He writes that Northern Ireland is a country.

According to Google, a country may be (1) a sovereign independent state, (2) one that is occupied by another state as a non-sovereign, or a formerly sovereign, political division.

The first doesn't hold for Northern Ireland, while the second would be accepted by republicans who would argue that Northern Ireland is in need of liberation, either politically or militarily.

Google understands a statelet to be a state brought into existence by the break-up of a larger political entity, namely under the Act of Union 1801.

The statelet of Northern Ireland will be a country when the Army leaves the statelet and it doesn't rely on a block grant and has its own NI army, along with its own written constitution.

Brian Ritchie sees the future of Northern Ireland as a shared future, but where is this shared future to come from? The statelet has two conflicting heads of state, two conflicting flags and two conflicting anthems.

Such a statelet is a constitutional obscenity that can't endure. So, the future of the statelet can only be one of division, verbal wrangle and dysfunction. There is hope, however, in federalism.

Federalism takes as its ideology togetherness, co-operation and friendly dialogue between peoples, communities, countries, states and nations. And it is opposed to the apartheid of Irish and British nationalisms.

MICHAEL GILLESPIE

Londonderry
By Sharon Mesmer



First, there was the buying of the white dress, white fake fur jacket and white shoes. I recall my mother and me marching up and down Ashland Avenue, the main shopping street in our South Side Chicago neighborhood, in search of something that I would actually deign to wear. It couldnt be too ornate, according to Sister Eleanor, the principal of St. John of God grammar school, but according to me it had to be really, really pretty. (Twelve years ago I actually found the dress as I was cleaning out my moms house, and it really was pretty: sateen with sheer puffy sleeves and seed pearls all over the bodice.) As we shopped around, wed run into other girls and their mothers doing the same thing. Seeing them and comparing notes  Goldblatts aint got nothin good no more, I heard theyre gougin everybody over by 63rd  heightened the feeling of the rituals importance.

The ceremony, on a May morning in 1968, bordered on the pagan: All 60 kids marched slowly, piously, in a procession toward the church, led by the pastor and assistant priests, with altar boys shouldering a large statue of the Virgin Mary on a wooden pallet, her head wreathed in white roses. The streets were packed with our parents, grandparents, godparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles and neighbors, all snapping photos from behind police barricades. We were told by the nuns not to talk to, or even look at, anyone  just keep our eyes focused on the kid directly in front of us, our hands folded in prayer. And yet at almost every step someone was yelling my name  Its Uncle Bob, honey! I wanna take your picture! Sharon! Look at your mother!

As we turned a corner, I could, for the first time, hear the booming sounds of the church organ and the choir. I remember thinking that that was a magical moment: all of us walking toward the thunderous organ playing just for us while the choir of adults sang us in to the tune of a hymn called This Is My Body.

A group of teenage boys stood with their arms folded, watching us; a young mother crouched, put her arm around her little boy, and pointed; an old man doffed his cap. As we walked up the steps of the church, the nuns, like security at a rock concert, waved back the mothers with flowers and dads with cameras. It felt like we were the Beatles.

Now I wonder: Why is it that were lauded and celebrated when weve only just embarked on the journey? Why do we stop marking, ritually, the accomplishments along the way? The hurdles that we overcome?

I think all of us women who are going through menopause should gather together and then two-by-two make a pious procession through streets clogged with our living loved ones and long-dead parents and grandparents (resurrected just for us and calling our names). Whoever we are, whether svelte and wafting Chanel or pouchy with pendulous breasts, I want us to be made much of, cheered, recognized. I want our procession to be led by a bunch of men our age with beer guts pushing their shirt buttons apart, shouldering a statue of whoever our appropriate goddess is  possibly Coatlicue, an Aztec Earth Goddess, or maybe Hillary Clinton.

I want us to be sung to by a choir as we march into a secular temple, possibly some combination of the old Fillmore and the Society for Ethical Culture. Once inside, we gather in a circle around a huge ring of fire and, at an appropriate moment, accompanied by chanting, we reach into our purses and toss into the flames that unused old tampon that weve been carrying around for five years. As we do, the fire changes from red to pure white, tongues of it leap into our hearts, and we receive the ability to heal and bring blessings to our community.

And then theres a party afterward that lasts four days, with enough ice-cold drinks, Ativan and LOccitane Verbena Refreshing Towelettes (chilling in hundreds of tiny personal refrigerators) for us all.

Of course the ritual she is seeking is a Queen Crowning Ceremony!

Queen Mama Donna



* ***

Donna Henes is the author of The Queen of My Self: Stepping into Sovereignty in Midlife. She offers counseling and upbeat, practical and ceremonial guidance for individual women and groups who want to enjoy the fruits of an enriching, influential, purposeful, passionate, and powerful maturity. Consult the MIDLIFE MIDWIFE

The Queen welcomes questions concerning all issues of interest to women in their mature years. Send your inquiries to thequeenofmyself@aol.com.
Part 1:

The time has come for Christians and Muslims to make peace between our communities. Christians and Muslims already make up more than half of the global population, and these numbers are expected to grow in the coming decades; according to the Pew Research Center, by 2050, two thirds of humanity, some 5.7 billion people, will be either Christian or Muslim.

Our planet simply cannot afford another century of misunderstanding and violence between these two communities. The challenges we face as a global human family are profound: ongoing warfare and nuclear proliferation, global poverty and economic inequality, climate change and ecological degradation. How will humanity handle these crises and others if our two largest religious communities are embroiled in constant conflict, if misunderstanding defines our relationship? As contemporary theologian Hans Kung has argued for decades, there will be no peace between our nations without peace between our religions. Now is the time to transform the way Christians and Muslims see and relate to each other.

In an earlier blog on the Huffington Post about the problem of Christian Islamophobia, I argue that Christians have the opportunity to transform the way we see Islam and Muslims by accepting Muhammad as Spirit of Truth.

Historically, most Christian theologiansincluding John of Damascus, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa, and Martin Lutherhave seen Muhammad not as a Spirit of Truth but as a Spirit of Error, a false prophet or heretic. There are many Christians today who respect the Islamic tradition and would never make such an offensive statement about Muhammad.

However, the majority of Christians still maintain a fundamentally Islamophobic position on Muhammad. So I believe that the time has come for peacemaking Christians to contradict this position directly. Changing our view of Muhammadso that we recognize him as a true prophet rather than discredit him as a false prophetwould effectively inoculate Christians against Islamophobia and would help to establish a new paradigm of cooperative Christian-Muslim relations.

In Jesus farewell discourse in the Gospel of John (chapters 14 to 16), Jesus speaks about the coming of the Spirit of Truth or Advocate (in Greek, parakletos). For centuries Muslim interpreters have seen Muhammad as this Advocate, based on Quran 61:6, a verse in which Jesus predicts the coming of a future prophet named Ahmad: O Children of Israel! Truly I am the Messenger of God unto you, confirming that which came before me in the Torah and bearing glad tidings of a Messenger to come after me whose name is Ahmad (61:6, The Study Quran). Ahmad, which is another name for Muhammad, is very close etymologically to the Greek word, parakletos, so it is likely that the Quran is claiming that Jesus farewell discourse in the Gospel of John predicts Muhammad. The major objection to applying these predictions to Muhammad or any other prophet is that Christians normally read them as part and parcel of Jesus promise of the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Jesuss promise of the Holy Spirit is an essential part of the Christian faith and my interpretation of Muhammad as Spirit of Truth affirms this. John 14:16-17 and 14:26 are clearly about the promise of the Holy Spirit: in John 14:16-17, the Advocate or Spirit of Truth is spoken of as an everlasting, invisible, abiding, inner presence; in most manuscripts, this Advocate is even directly called the Holy Spirit in John 14:26. But as Jesus farewell discourse proceeds these titles become multivalent and, in John 15:26-27 and 16:7-15, they begin to refer more to a future prophet than to the Holy Spirit. Some Muslim interpreters who identify Muhammad with the Advocate argue that this title does not refer to the Holy Spirit at alland that the text of John has been corrupted so as to obfuscate its direct link to Muhammad. But I believe that the titles Spirit of Truth and Advocate are used in the Gospel of John, first of all, to speak about the promise of the Holy Spiritand I do not believe that the text has been changed to hide anything. This interpretation of John opens us up to Muhammad as Spirit of Truth in a way that affirms the integrity of the Christian tradition. But before I explain the fine details of my exegesis I want to speak briefly to the big picture of why the Gospel of John, in particular, tells us that Jesus predicts a future prophet.

Part 2:

The Gospel of John is the latest canonical version of the Gospelit was written at least a generation after the synoptic gospels and probably two generations or more after Pauls letters. The author of the Gospel of John, often called the beloved disciple, claims to be the last living witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In a passage at the end of the Gospel he tells a story about an encounter with the risen Jesus that made him and others believe that he would live to see Jesus second coming.

Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus at the supper and had said, Lord, who is it that is going to betray you? When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, Lord, what about him? Jesus said to him, If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me! So the rumor spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. (John 21:20-24, NRSV)

This passage shows us that the author of the Gospel of John is in a different paradigm than earlier New Testament authors insofar as he no longer expects Jesus imminent second coming. Paul, for example, who wrote in the decades immediately following Jesus death and resurrection, believed that Jesus would return while most of the people he was preaching to were still alive. The author of the Gospel of John looks for new meaning in Jesus promise of the Spirit of Truth or Advocate because he realizes he will die before Jesus returns. When his Gospel was published he was likely already dead and his community was looking forward into a longer and more complicated future than originally expected.

The Gospel of John plays a similar role for the New Testament as Deuteronomy does for the Torah. Deuteronomy is the latest text of the Torahit reiterates the Law of Moses as told in the four earlier booksand like the Gospel of John it predicts a future prophet:

I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command.(Deut 18:18-19, NRSV)

Both Deuteronomy and the Gospel of John are reflections on specific revelationsthe Torah and Gospeland both indicate that there is more revelation to come. The Gospel of Johns language for the Spirit of Truth or Advocate is strikingly similar to Deuteronomys: he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come (John 16:13, NRSV).

Like Deuteronomy, the Gospel of John opens up an expectation for future revelation. Johns prophecy is not so specific that it must apply to Muhammad and only Muhammad. But insofar as the Quran makes the claim that Muhammad is the Spirit of Truth or Advocate that Jesus foretold, a strong interpretive option emerges for Christians to receive Muhammad as a prophet that Jesus predicts when he says:

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (John 16:12-15, NRSV)

In this passage, the description of the Advocate or Spirit of Truth is qualitatively different than earlier mentions. Here we see the Spirit of Truth speaking not through the disciples but to them. Earlier, in John 14:17, Jesus says that this Spirit of Truth will abide with his followers and be in them; throughout the Gospel of John the Holy Spirit is spoken of as an abiding, inner presence. Again, in 14:26, Jesus says that the Advocate will remind you of all that I have said to you. In these passages, Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit who helps his followers understand what he has said. Essentially, this would have been the experience of the beloved disciple, the author of the Gospel of John, who was guided by the presence of the Spirit in remembering and interpreting Jesus words and deeds (which he does spiritually rather than literally). However, in John 16:12-15, Jesus is talking about a Spirit of Truth who will bring forth new revelations, who will say the many things that Jesus does not say because his followers cannot bear them now.

The clear distinction is that the Spirit of Truth in John 16 is predicted to declare new revelations not merely remind Jesus disciples of what he already said, as in John 14. The idea that he will declare to you the things that are to come is especially important because it acknowledges the uncertainty about the future that Jesus followers faced, given the fact that he had not returned as soon as expected. Jesus asserts that this future prophet will glorify him by declaring a new revelation that will come from the same source as his message: God. This discourse is designed to open the minds of Christians to receive a future revelation not as something that competes with or diminishes the Gospel, but rather as something that glorifies Jesus. Unfortunately, these words in the Gospel of John have been totally missed by Christians who reject and belittle the Quran; we have for the most part completely ignored the unity of the Gospel and the Quran in terms of their common revelatory source. However, if we take Jesus words seriously, we have the opportunity to receive the Word of God in the Quran in accordance with Jesus promise that the Spirit of Truth will take what is mine and declare it to you. We can accept the Quran as a revelation, not in opposition to the Gospel, but in unity with the Gospel and the will of Jesus.

Part 3:

In the First Letter of John, which was written after the Gospel of John and is very similar to it, we find a continuation of the Gospel of Johns multivalent way of speaking about the Spirit as applying to the Holy Spirit as well as to prophets inspired by the Spirit. In 1 John 3:24 and 1 John 4:13, the author speaks about the gift of the Holy Spirit and how it abides in Jesus followers. But in 1 John 4:1-6, in between these mentions of the Holy Spirit, the author speaks at length about testing the spirits. In these verses the word Spirit is used to talk about prophets and how to tell whether they are true or false:

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. (1 John 4:2, NRSV)

The author contrasts the Spirit of God with the Spirit of Anti-Christ, those who are from God with those who are from the world, and the Spirit of Truth with the Spirit of Error. This discourse, again, is strikingly similar to the discourse in Deuteronomy about future prophets that I quoted above.

In Deuteronomy 18:20-22, after the promise of a future prophet in 18:18 and the commandment to listen to that prophet in 18:19, criteria are laid out to distinguish a true from a false prophet. Deuteronomy threatens that a prophet who speaks for another god or who falsely speaks on Gods behalf shall die (18:20). It also advises the Israelites to ignore prophets who prophecy falsely:

If a prophet speaks in the name of the Eternal but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Eternal has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; do not be frightened by it. (18:22, NRSV)

In the same way, but using different criteria, the author of 1 John defines true prophets and false prophets relative to their allegiance to Jesus, God, and the early followers of Jesus. Part of the dynamic of the early community of Jesus followers was that many claimed the inspiration of the Spirit and prophesied. The author of 1 John is especially worried about Docetic versions of Christianity that had developed denying that Jesus came in the flesh; in these versions of Christianity Jesus was not an actual human being but rather an angelic being that only appeared to be human. Such a version of Christianity, obviously, would have been quite disconnected from the actual teachings and values of Jesus of Nazareth and his earliest followers, who knew him as a real human being. It is worth noting that Muhammad meets these criteria insofar as the Quran affirms that Jesus is the Messiah and that he came in the flesh.

In the history of Christianity, all of the negative terms in 1 John 4:1-6 have been used against Muhammad. He has been identified with the Spirit of Anti-Christ and the Spirit of Error. However, the time has come for Christians to recognize how wrong we have been in these assessments and to correct the record by affirmatively identifying Muhammad with the Spirit of Truth.

When we look at Islam as a world religion, and see that 1.6 billion people and growing are following in the way of Muhammad, the time has surely come to recognize him as a prophet. If Muhammad is not a prophet, who is? It is understandable, really, that so many Christians have been defensive and have reacted negatively to Islam. That kind of group-ego, fear-based response is part of human nature. However, it is absurd for us to continue to see Muhammad as a heretical Christian or false prophet given that Islam has lasted for nearly 1,400 years, has supported monumental cultural, spiritual, artistic, political, moral, and intellectual achievements, and has a tremendous and vibrant global following.

There is no better candidate than Muhammad, no one in fact that comes even close, in terms of fulfilling Jesuss promise of the Spirit of Truth who would bring forth a new revelation from God. I do not have space in this article to explore the many Quranic verses directly addressed to Christians, but if we were to receive them our religion would be transformed for the better and would come into balance with Judaism and Islam.

Jesus knew it would be difficult for us to accept his guidance from another source. But he did not want our fear of the apparent otherness of the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran to separate us from the Way, the Truth, and the Life; that is, the Word of God. This is why he spoke to the disciples reassuringly about the Spirit of Truth, saying, he will glorify me; and, for the same reason, he emphasized the unity of his teaching with the revelations to come, twice repeating the promise, he will take what is mine and declare it to you (John 16:14-15, NRSV).

Based on the promises of Jesus, Christians can encounter the Quran without fear, knowing that it is a revelation which glorifies Jesus and, in a spiritual sense, is from him.

What we have in the Gospel of John is a biblical portal between Christianity and Islam. If we choose to walk through it in faith we will discover that our religions issue from the same divine source; we will discover that we are siblings in faith, meant to bear witness to the truth side by side (John 15:26-27) and collaborate in manifesting Gods will on Earth as it is in Heaven. I invite Christians everywhere to look carefully at our scriptures, search our souls, consider our history, and seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit in answering this question: Has the time come for Christians to see Muhammad as Spirit of Truth?

Rev. Dr. Ian Mevorach is the co-founder and spiritual leader of the Common Street Spiritual Center in Natick, MA, which is an inclusive, love-centered community, rooted in a Christian faith that is open to all faiths.
The heads of major religions in Bangladesh on Thursday told the countrys first conference on inter-faith harmony that they would carry on a dialogue to stop religious extremism and attacks on minorities by zealots.

Describing a spate of machete-killings unacceptable, speakers representing the majority Sunni Muslim and minority Shiite Muslim, Hindu, Christian and Buddhist communities said militants had to be eliminated from Bangladesh where a marriage of all faiths was a thousand-year tradition.

Convened by police and government officials, the conference in Dhaka sought to mobilize inter-faith support for secular writers, teachers, Christians, Hindus, Shiites and LGBT activists whose communities have been targeted in deadly attacks by suspected Islamic extremists over the past year.

In April, five people were killed in machete attacks carried out by suspected militants. The latest killings involved a double-homicide on Monday that claimed the lives of Xulhas Mannan, editor of the countrys first magazine devoted to coverage of LGBT issues, and dramatist K. Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy.

This first-ever religious harmony conference passes a strong message to the extremists that the militants have no place in Bangladesh. We will hold such conferences at the division, district and the upazila levels to counter the threat of the militants, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told the conference at the Krishibid Institution auditorium.

He said Islam prohibited killings, lootings, destruction and torture.

We will protect all citizens, irrespective of faiths, said Khan, a top official in the government that has faced widespread criticism for failing to do enough to shield religious minorities, intellectuals, and secular activists from extremist attacks.

Radicalization blamed

Police Inspector-General A.K.M. Shahidul Haque, who presided over conference, told attendees that the perpetrators of 80 percent of the militant attacks had been arrested.

And in most of the cases, the attackers confessed that they were brainwashed by the leaders. They are repentant now. We need your support to spread the peaceful message of Islam, he said.

Speaker Maulana Farid Uddin Masud, an Islamic scholar, said those who radicalize followers should be blamed for the spate of machete attacks.

An ordinary person is sure to kill anyone if I, as a religious leader, tell him that you will go to heaven if you kill him. So, they are not the problem. The problem is those who radicalize them through misinterpretation of Islam, Masud said.

He said that a campaign was under way to collect signatures of 100,000 Muslim scholars who denounce extremism, violence and attack on minorities.

They are the greatest enemy of Islam. They have portrayed Islam as a religion of terror and barbarism. We have been nourishing religious harmony for thousands of years. It must be protected at any cost, Masud said.

Different faiths, same beliefs

Satya Ranjan Baroi, president of International Society for Krishna Consciousness, told the audience that the Bangladeshi people should come forward to challenge violence against minorities.

For his part, Catholic Archbishop Patrick DRozario said the majority of Bangladeshis were peaceful and the recent attacks on minorities were like a tiny black spot on a white sheet.

Everybody talks about the black spot without considering that the rest of sheet is white. And this is our problem. We have [had] strong religious harmony for thousands of years. We have to protect it, DRozario said.

The archbishop recalled how he visited his home village 25 years ago and saw gates that had been erected within a two-mile stretch of the road leading to it.

No Christian lived within those two miles, DRozario said. Who erected the gates for me? My Muslim brothers did it, my Hindu brothers did it.

He added that more inter-faith dialogue at the grassroots would help maintain religious harmony.

Another speaker, Sanghanayaka Suddhananda Mahathero, echoed the archbishops call.

We have to save the religious harmony we have been nurturing for thousands of years, said Shudhananda, president of the Bangladesh Buddhist Kristi Prachar Federation.

Let us talk among ourselves and then the distance will go, he said, adding that all religions preached love, not hatred or violence.

Shiite leader Syed Ibrahim Khalil Razavi said the militants who carried out bomb attacks on a Shiite procession and Shiite mosque last year had tarnished the countrys image.

Let us join our hands to resist such anti-Islamic activities. They must be punished so that others would not dare to do the same, Razavi said.
Philippine President Benigno Aquino III talks to a soldier who was wounded in a clash with Abu Sayyaf militants, during a visit to a military hospital in Zamboanga City, April 27, 2016.

Top officials from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines will convene in Jakarta on May 5 to discuss maritime security after three acts of piracy in recent weeks by armed groups operating from the southern Philippines.

The meeting will bring together the foreign ministers and military chiefs of the three countries, according to Arrmanatha Nasir, a spokesman for Indonesias Foreign Ministry.

This meeting is expected to produce a joint statement on security and economic activity as well as the movement of people in the region and a memorandum of understanding signed by the three commanders on maritime security, Arrmanatha told reporters at the ministry in Jakarta on Thursday.

Officials intend to ensure that cooperation and economic activity among the three countries are not disturbed by militants based in the southern Philippines, he added.

Fourteen Indonesian and four Malaysian sailors have been taken hostage since late March in acts of piracy in the Celebes and Sulu seas, which surround Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

That area is an important one for economic and trade activities among the three nations, Arrmanatha said.

We hope this meeting will produce concrete results such as joint patrols, he said.

On Monday, Abu Sayyaf beheaded a Canadian hostage it had held since September 2015 after its ransom demands were not met. Groups in the southern Philippines hold about 20 foreigners hostage.

Indonesian initiative

The Indonesia-flagged Brahma 12 tugboat and Anand 12 barge carrying 7,000 tons of coal were hijacked at the same time during a journey from South Kalimantan, Indonesia to Batangas, in the southern Philippines, on March 26. Ten sailors were taken hostage.

The second attack occurred on April 1 when the MV Massive 6, owned by a Malaysian shipping company, was attacked by a group thought to be a splinter faction of Abu Sayyaf.

That boat was plying the Manila-Tawau route, carrying 7,500 tons of coal. The attackers seized four Malaysian crew members but released three from Indonesia and two from Myanmar.

Then, on April 16, the Indonesian tugboat Cristi returning to Indonesia from the Philippines was attacked on the maritime boundary between Malaysia and the Philippines.

Four Indonesian crew members were seized, while six  including one who was shot  were rescued by Malaysian authorities.

Arrmanatha stressed that the Indonesian captives were not on the island of Basilian when a significant battle broke out there between Armed Forces of the Philippines and Abu Sayyaf, which has declared allegiance to the Islamic State. The April 9 encounter left significant casualties on both sides.

Frequent Updates

Meanwhile, Indonesias Foreign Ministry is receiving frequent updates on the conditions of the hostages from its Philippine counterpart.

Our priority is the safety of the 14 Indonesian citizens, Arrmanatha said.

On Tuesday, Indonesian President Joko Jokowi Widodo stressed that his government would not pay a ransom to groups holding hostages.

We never compromise on things like that. We have nothing to do with ransoms, he told reporters at the presidential palace.

Jokowi acknowledged that freeing the hostages would be difficult.

That region is currently surrounded by Philippine soldiers. We also know the hostages have been moved around, he said.

On April 19, Coordinating Minister for Politics, Legal Affairs and Security Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan said the company that employed the 10 sailors snatched on March 26 had agreed to pay the 50 million pesos (U.S. $1.07 million) ransom demanded by Abu Sayyaf.
Inspector General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar, shown at a press conference on May 25, 2015, on Thursday denounced a commission report blaming police for torturing a detainee to death.

Physical force inflicted by police officers on a detainee whose ears were stapled while he was still alive led to the mans death in May 2013, a Malaysian government commission reported on Thursday.

In presenting its findings Enforcement Agency Integrity Commission (EAIC) Chairman Yaacob Md Sam said detainee N. Dharmendran died of physical trauma and sustained 52 bruises, according to a pathologists report.

The pathologist at Kuala Lumpur Hospital, who performed an autopsy on May 22, 2013, determined that Dharmendran died of soft-tissue injuries brought on by blunt force.

The pathologist confirmed the deceased ears were stapled while he was alive, Yaacob told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, adding that officers had altered times on entries logged in a lock-up diary.

Dharmendran was arrested on May 11, 2013, on a charge of the attempted murder of two people in Cheras, Kuala Lumpur. He died 10 days later while in custody.

Four police officers were charged with killing Dharmendran.

On Dec 12, 2014, the High Court in Kuala Lumpur acquitted them, ruling that there was no prima facie evidence to support the case against them. Judge Kamardin Hashim stated then that the prosecution team had failed to prove a motive and had provided only circumstantial evidence.

An Appeals Court later overruled the acquittal and ordered the four to present their defense following an appeal by the prosecution.

Reacting to Thursdays report, Police Inspector-General Khalid Abu Bakar said the EAIC should not have made the announcement because the case is sub judice  meaning it is under judicial consideration and therefore prohibited from public discussion since the officers face a murder trial.

Yaacob Md Sam knows very well that the case against four police officers accused in the murder of the victim will resume from May 25 to 27 at the Kuala Lumpur High Court when they will be called to enter their defense, Khalid said in a statement.

The EAIC was formed in 2011 to handle complaints of misconduct against 19 enforcement agencies including police, immigration and customs.

EAIC: police tried to prevent fair investigation

Along with detailing the cause of Dharmendrans death, Yaacob said there were attempts to fabricate information to prevent a fair investigation.

Among those linked to the cover-up was a senior police officer who instructed a lower-ranking officer to type out a report that contained false information about Dharmendrans condition.

Yaacob urged the attorney generals office to charge those officers.

Khalid challenged Yaacobs statement, saying the new report would lead the public to believe that police failed to take action although a thorough, detailed and transparent investigation was undertaken.

Kuala Lumpur Police Chief Amar Singh Ishar Singh had little to say about the report.

For me to comment now on the matter is not appropriate, Amar told BenarNews.
Von: Von P. RONZHEIMER und G. MOUTAFIS

Tripoli  Be careful, youll catch scabies, a Libyan overseer shouts as I sit down on the ground next to David (20).

Im Fluchtlingsgefangnis von Tripolis Es ist mir egal, ob sie mich totprugeln 03:27

The Tripoli refugee prison. There is a pungent stench in the air. 600 people from Nigeria, Eritrea, and Sudan are cowering together, squashed into two rooms. Between them, there are only a few dirty mattresses on the floor. They are all here because they want to go to Europe by boat.

Lesen Sie auch

They were stopped by Libyan coast guards.

David from Nigeria has been imprisoned for three months now. He has a rash on his arms and is looking at me with desperation in his eyes: Many here are sick. Scabies is spreading. And after you leave, they will probably beat me up again. Just because they can. And because no one is looking. Human rights organisations like Human Rights Watch are reporting hundreds of cases of abuse in the camps.

And this country, Libya, will be decisive for Germany over the next few weeks.

Lesen Sie auch

The government is concerned that, after the deal with Turkey and the closing of the Balkans route, the next wave of refugees will come from here. Some people assume it will be several hundred thousand refugees. Nobody knows exactly how many are on their way.

Auch interessant

Libya is a disintegrated state. The government supported by the EU governs from a sea base. So far, it is unable to go on land, to reach the former capital of Tripoli. Fajr Libya (an alliance of moderate Islamists) is claiming power for itself. And in the east of the country, there is the terror organisation ISIS that has conquered an area of 250 kilometres in length.

This makes it easy for the traffickers to operate. At Garabuli beach, 50 kilometres away from Tripoli, desperate people are waiting in abandoned buildings. They are entirely at the mercy of the traffickers. Dead bodies often lie on the beach, sometimes for days. The morgues are overflowing.

We meet Abdul (45). He has been a trafficker in Libya for 20 years now. He comes from Nigeria, just like many of the refugees. Abdul says: Under Gaddafi, it was much harder to send boats to Europe. But now there is no longer a state. Anyone who wants to can do trafficking. The militia and the Italian mafia are earning their share.

The price for a place in a boat is currently around 1.200 euros. Over 100 people are being transported on a single rubber boat. Wooden boats are even used for up to 800 people. Business for the traffickers is so good that they can keep bribing the government and police. This way, everyone is making money in the end. Again and again, there are outbursts of violence.

The Libyan authorities fighting against these conditions admit to their own failures. The investigator Salim Eghleeb says: For years, we have been asking Europe for help, but nothing happens. It is conceivable that the number of people will rise to over a million. We dont know.

The experts thinks that the planned NATO mission against traffickers is the wrong approach. The problem must be solved at the African borders. We have such big problems in Libya. How are we supposed to cope if, on top of that, millions of refugees end up permanently staying in the country?

This means that the Libyans have few good reasons for really stopping the traffickers at their borders...




First up, Joe Biden is thinking about dropping tariffs against China. But theres a spy in prison this morning that helps us understand why he shouldnt. Ill explain.





Your second brief, If youre looking for a good paying job, you might consider being a CEO for a health insurance company. One executive made $142M dollars last year. Let's talk about that.





And as always, Im keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put this one on your radar. Mexican cartels are grooming American kids online and paying them cash to traffic illegals or run drugs across the border. Ill share details.





If you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief, remember to subscribe and listen daily at podfollow.com/pdb.

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For Immediate Release, April 28, 2016 Contacts: John Mellgren, Western Environmental Law Center, (541) 359-0990, mellgren@westernlaw.org

Katie Davis, Center for Biological Diversity, (801) 560-2414, kdavis@biologicaldiversity.org

Greg Dyson, WildEarth Guardians, (503) 730-9242, gdyson@wildearthguardians.org Win for Wildlife: Court Rules Against Unrestricted Motorized Travel in Santa Fe National Forest Upholds Forest Service Plan to Protect Habitat, Minimize User Conflicts SANTA FE, N.M. In a victory for wildlife and wild places, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday dismissed an appeal by off-road vehicle interests of a federal plan for motorized access to the Santa Fe National Forest. A coalition of environmental groups, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center, had intervened in the case to defend the U.S. Forest Services decision, in its 2012 Santa Fe National Forest travel-management plan, to protect wildlife and irreplaceable ecological, scenic and aesthetic values from damaging, unmanaged motor vehicle use in the forest. Jemez Mountain salamander photo courtesy National Park Service. This photo is available for media use. The plan protected more than 440,000 acres of the Santa Fe National Forest from cross-country motorized vehicle use, and removed motor vehicles and the damage they can cause from more than 5,000 miles of routes, paths and trails. The plan allows motorized vehicle use to continue on more than 2,400 miles of routes in the forest. Allowing motorized travel throughout the forest meant off-highway vehicle operators could gain access to and destroy some of the most remote and sensitive habitat in the Santa Fe National Forest, said John Mellgren of the Western Environmental Law Center. Containing the damage done by OHVs to designated areas is the right decision, and we were happy to successfully defend the Forest Service for making the right call. The decision protects habitat for threatened Jemez Mountain salamanders, Mexican spotted owls, goshawks, Rio Grande cutthroat trout, southwestern willow flycatchers and New Mexico meadow jumping mice. Were happy to see the court acknowledge that general complaints by some motorized recreationists are not sufficient to put a stop to common-sense plans to protect species like the threatened Jemez Mountain salamander, said Katie Davis, public lands campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity. Protecting our wildlife, rivers and natural areas benefits everyone. This ruling affirms that motorized recreation does not belong in many places on our national forests, said Greg Dyson of WildEarth Guardians. Off-road vehicles are fragmenting wild forests, ripping up fragile streams and wildlife habitat and depriving us of the ability to enjoy the quiet that is one of the great values of the national forests that are our common heritage. The Santa Fe National Forest stretches over 1.6 million acres in northern New Mexico, including four wilderness areas and two wild and scenic rivers  the Pecos and the Jemez  prized for their hunting and fishing. A copy of the decision is available here.
Despite recent progress within African countries, there are still significant opportunities provided by immunisation, particularly to help protect against human papillomavirus (HPV) and cervical cancer.

Africa and HPV

An estimated 266,000 women die every year from cervical cancer. Over 85% of those deaths occur among women in developing countries. Without changes in prevention and control, cervical cancer deaths are forecast to rise to 416,000 by 2035; and virtually all of those deaths will be in developing countries.

Cervical cancer is the most common of all cancers in Africa and thus continues to be a significant threat that demands urgent attention in the African region. In 2012, over half a million new cases of cervical cancer were diagnosed worldwide with one in five being in sub-Saharan Africa.

The primary cause of cervical pre-cancerous lesions and cancer is persistent or chronic infection with one or more types of high-risk HPV.

Cervical cancer is a preventable disease. Immunisation, together with screening and treatment, is the best strategy to rapidly reduce the burden of cervical cancer.

Securing the future

We must continue to build on the wonderful momentum we have. It will take a collective, collaborative effort involving governments, donors, patient organisations, healthcare professionals, NGOs, multilateral organisations and others in the private sector  to increase access to life-saving vaccines and to strengthen immunisation programmes," said Farouk Shamas Jiwa, sub-Saharan Africa director for policy and corporate responsibility at MSD

Preventing disease through vaccination is about securing the future - in particular for African women and girls. Our goal is to sustain and improve the quality of life and health of communities and countries across Africa. Our commitment is steadfast as we work to increase access to vaccines now and in the future, he explained.

Making inroads in preventing diseases

Africa has made several gains beyond increasing the reach of immunisation; some diseases have been eliminated through wide-scale programmes. Vaccines are available in public vaccination programmes in the vast majority of African countries, thanks to sustained political will, international support and innovative public/private partnerships.

Vaccines are one of the greatest public health success stories in history. For more than 100 years, our scientists have been discovering vaccines that have been impacting lives. By helping healthy people stay healthy, vaccines remove a major barrier to human an economic development, said Jiwa.

World Immunisation Week, a global awareness campaign launched by the World Health Organisation in 2012 and commemorated in the last week of April, aims to promote the use of vaccines to help protect people of all ages against disease.

For the second year running, the Close the Immunisation Gap campaign will be celebrating the achievements to date with an emphasis on the unmet need amongst adolescents and adult vaccine uptake.
Retailer Pick n Pay will be making a foray into the Nigerian market through a joint venture with AG Levintis.

AG Leventis, which is listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, has nearly 90 years of trading experience in that market.

Pick n Pay CE Richard Brasher said at the companys full-year results presentation on Tuesday that there was a dearth of formal players in that country, which represented an opportunity for Pick n Pay.

"Nigeria is a country and a market which Pick n Pay cannot ignore in its quest for long-term sustainable growth. The challenge, of course, is how to succeed in Nigeria. We can all point to examples which have not worked."

With the largest population on the African continent, Nigeria has for a while been touted as the holy grail within the Africa Rising narrative. However, penetrating the market has proved to be tough for South African entrants, with some cutting their losses and exiting the market. These include Woolworths, Tiger Brands and Telkom.

Woolworths entered the Nigerian market in 2012, opening up three stores. In 2013 Woolworths announced a decision to close all three stores. Woolworths CEO Ian Moir said at the time: "We made a mistake going into Nigeria. We were never going to make money in the next five to 10 years in Nigeria."

Brasher said he had set three preconditions for success in the Nigerian market, namely: a need to understand the local consumer needs; entering a joint venture with a local partner; and achieving growth in a deliberate, planned and unhurried way.

Pick n Pay will hold 51% of the joint venture.

The groups full-year results reflected double-digit growth in profit, driven partly by cost-cutting measures.

Profit before tax rose 26.1% to R1.5bn in the year to end February 2016, with the margin increasing to 2.1%, from 1.8% in the year-earlier period. Turnover climbed 8.2% to R72.4bn.

Headline earnings per share (HEPS) rose 26.4% to 224.04c and the group declared a final dividend of 125.20c per share, bringing the total dividend to 149.40c.

Pick n Pays results came amid tough conditions in the retail sector, not least due to anticipated drought-induced price increases in food. SA is expected to grow less than 1% while consumers are highly indebted and unemployment is at record highs.

"Theyve shown some very good growth. The rise in turnover shows that they are taking market share from somewhere, and that somewhere is probably Shoprite," said Absa Investments retail analyst Chris Gilmour.

Apart from SA, Pick n Pay currently operates in Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique, Mauritius, Swaziland and Lesotho. The group also Pay owns a 49% share of a Zimbabwean supermarket business, TM Supermarkets.
A petition against the eggs used in McDonalds meals in SA has been signed by 16756 supporters so far.

Yolanda Guse of Cape Town started the campaign on change.org demanding that McDonalds "stop the suffering of hens and commit to cage-free eggs".

Beauty without Cruelty SA United Front 4 Animals (UFA) Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute (SAFCEI) and Compassion in World Farming are supporting the campaign.

"Battery cage farms are a living hell for the innocent hens who lay eggs for McDonalds SA" Guse said.

"A battery cage is a wire box the size of an A4 (piece of) paper where hens spend their lives laying egg after egg for human consumption. They will most (likely) never see the sunlight or take a breath of fresh air. Extensive research shows that (battery-bred) hens are frustrated and suffer psychological stress. They also suffer from physical harm including bone weakness and breakage feather loss and diseases. To make matters even worse standard factory-farm practices are inflicted upon them  slicing off parts of their beaks without painkillers and manipulating their laying cycles by starving them."

Supporters of the campaign who signed the petition endorsed the attitude that humane standards should be applied to food production.

Elodi Jansen from Bloemfontein said: "Cruelty to animals for human consumption is simply inhumane and selfish."

"Im signing this petition to stop a brand that inflicts such cruelty upon our animals just to maximise company profits" Jenny Ruiters from Johannesburg said.

In September 2015 McDonalds publicly committed to phasing out battery cages from their supply chain in Canada and the US, albeit over 10 years.

McDonalds SA could not immediately be reached for comment. On its website it answered a range of questions about other issues with the tagline, "Weve heard just about every rumour out there and so have you. So were taking you behind the scenes to see exactly where your McDonalds comes from and how its made."

A statement shared by the animal rights groups attributed to the company states: "McDonalds SA takes note of the moves made by their USA and Canadian counterparts and though we are exploring the viability of expanding McDonalds cage-free policy to SA we cannot, at this stage make a similar commitment as the one made by McDonalds USA and McDonalds Canada."

Guse said the company and the farmers it sourced its eggs from should commit to changing their methods of production.

"Intensive confinement is a horrid reality that our farm animals face on a daily basis  95% of all egg-laying hens in SA are kept in battery cages.... Please ... let McDonalds know that the humane treatment of egg-laying hens is important to South Africans and that McDonalds should adopt a cage-free policy for its supply chain within SA.

"Get McDonalds egg-laying hens out of cruel battery-cages so we can enjoy Egg McMuffins guilt-free."

TMG Digital
A growing taste for premium spirits among an emerging South African middle class has spurred an explosion in boutique gin producers who are using unique local ingredients to flavour their drinks.

About a dozen new craft gins have gone on sale in the country in the past 12 months, according to Lorna Scott, founder and owner of the Inverroche distillery, in Stilbaai, about 340 kilometres southeast of Cape Town.

"At the base of this gin craze is a strong move towards finding flavours that have very strong local roots," she said by phone from the coastal resort town, where she infuses gin with fynbos  plants found only in the region  in batches of a few hundred bottles at a time.

Scott and rival boutique producers are providing increased competition for the likes of Diageo, whose brands including Gordons have long been big sellers in the local gin market.

While all gin is made from a juniper berry base, South African drinkers are developing a liking for the flavours of African ginger and Kalahari truffles in their spirit. In the latest sign of growing popularity, Johannesburg hosts its first two-day gin and tonic festival this week.

Craft operations like Scotts and others, including the Woodstock Gin Company and Musgrave, are seeking to accelerate a switch to gin among more-affluent South Africans. About 5.3 million black adults are middle-class, in households earning as much as 50,000 rand ($3,450), the University of Cape Towns Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing estimates.

That compares with about 2.7-million middle-class white adults, out of a population of 55-million. Gin consumption is forecast to rise by 4.3% to 6-million litres this year, local industry figures show.

Inverroche doubled its production every six months "and we continue to do so," Scott said. "When we started, we did about 100 bottles per month and we are way beyond that now."

The fashion for premium gin has even attracted winemakers, with Blaauwklippen estate producing a range that incorporates flavours from Karoo shrubs and rooibos tea plants. Gins new incarnations have led to a drink that is "sexy and trendy" to South African consumers, Blaauwklippen Cellar Master Rolf Zeitvogel said by phone from Stellenbosch, near Cape Town.

Scott and her peers are also pursuing export markets. Inverroche is available in the UK, where it costs about $50-$56 a bottle, Norway, Denmark , Sweden, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Singapore. Last week saw the first order from Canada.

"We cant supply more than what we produce, so its all limited," Scott said. "Ive got a policy whereby I do 30% exports and 70% local."

Bloomberg
The 5th anniversary of the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the east coast of Japan has come and gone, and, still the whole story hasn't been told.

The cover-up began almost immediately after the 11 March 2011 disaster, and Japanese journalists who dared write about it, risked criminal action.

Besides Japanese pride, there are many reasons for the cover-up. Some include the 2020 Olympic Games, payment of compensation to victims and the negative impact on Japans economy.

Fukushima nuclear power plant after the 11 March 2011 earthquake. Source: creativecommons.org/Digital Globe

Cracks starting to show

However, the smokescreen is beginning to show cracks, and the head of the Japanese nuclear regulatory authority Shinji Kinjo, has just admitted that they have an emergency on their hands. He also criticised Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company), the utility that runs Fukushima, saying: Their sense of crisis is weak.

Death and contamination

Currently if an unprotected person approaches the damaged Fukushima buildings, the radiation level is so high that death could occur in less than an hour. Entering the damaged building, even wearing protective gear, is out of the question, and three remote controlled robots have also failed, due to intense radiation.

Daily over 300 tons of highly radioactive water continues to spill into the Pacific Ocean. Besides poisoning the Pacific and bringing the Japanese fishing industry to a halt, there is growing evidence that radioactive contamination has reached the west coast of America. Tepco now warns that it could take another four years to rectify the problem of leakage into the Pacific Ocean. But to rectify the ocean is incalculable.

Outside opinion

Mycle Schneider is a Paris-based nuclear energy consultant, and advisor to the European parliament on nuclear matters. He is also lead author of The World Nuclear Industry Status Reports and does not mince his words.

He says Japans escalating situation is: "Far worse than we truly know. There are hundreds of issues at stake here," he told the Huffington Post UK.

"Whether it is meltdown temperature, radiation exposure, or the number of people exposed - all of these statistics are flawed. We don't know anything yet."

"This is far worse than what the general public are perceiving. At the moment we are facing the challenge to conquer denial. This is simply organised denial, he said.

Pushing ahead with nuclear development

Yet, even as the Fukushima disaster continues to play out, Japans prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has reaffirmed his commitment to nuclear power and is pushing to restart other nuclear plants. With 70% of Japanese population opposed to nuclear energy, this proposal goes totally against public opinion. While many scientists and Greenpeace are alarmed by the continuing contamination of the atmosphere and of the Pacific Ocean, Abe insists that the situation at Fukushima is under control.

Morality and survival

Fukushima provides a perfect case study for the meltdown of truth. It is beyond reckless and immoral for governments and mainstream media to downplay and cover up such disasters. Besides being well researched on environmental crises, I have written many articles and have aired my views on radio several times.

Not wanting to be branded a scare monger, Im beginning to shift focus from radiation damage to life, to the immorality and hypocrisy that lies behind such disasters.

With such disasters, truth is often the first casualty. Yet truth (in whatever form) is the key to health and survival, especially regarding unprecedented life-threatening disasters like Fukushima.

The South African scenario

South Africa is no different and we are witnessing the collapse of truth on many levels. Besides vested interests, there is no good reason for South Africa to even consider purchasing nuclear power. Our solar energy potential is one of the highest on the planet. And yet the issue of purchasing costly nuclear power plants is shrouded in secrecy.*

Nuclear power simply to boil water

To give the situation further perspective, dangerous and costly nuclear technology is being harnessed simply to boil water. This in turn creates steam to drive electrical generators.

Have we forgotten that with simple, safe technology such as concentrated solar power (CSP) the sun can boil water extremely effectively? If solar energy works so well in Nordic countries, how much better is it suited here, in sunny South Africa?

The dark side of capitalism

Let us not forget that the global economy is ruled by those who control the money system. Multinational corporations, including multi-trillion dollar nuclear industries, seek to monopolise control of the markets, such the energy sector. The way profits are extracted have nothing to do with a healthy environment and humanity.

This is the dark side of capitalism, working systematically to undermine democracy and common sense, as well as the environment and the health of humanity.

*At the beginning of April 2016, minister of energy, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, said in parliament that a deadline in the nuclear procurement programme had been missed. Opposition parties took this to mean that the programme had been mothballed, but this was denied by the government.
Devon Saunders - the star of the popular YouTube channel, Devdondidit - has launched the #WeDidIt Winter Campaign to bring some warmth to homeless Capetonians this season.

The campaign aims to raise awareness about the challenges homeless individuals face in winter and the challenge will see Saunders living on a rooftop in Plumstead, Cape Town from 28 April to 1 May 2016, braving the colder Cape Town weather. His goal is to collect as much as 5,000 items of warm clothing or blankets over this period.

By partnering with the non-profit organisation Faith, Hope and Charity, the Devdondidit actor hopes to tap into the 55,000 strong audience that watches his content across various social media platforms on a weekly basis. The #WeDidIt campaign video was launched on Tuesday, 19 April 2016, with a strong call to action for Capetonians to join in social media activism and support the homeless through the campaign.

The findings of a study, Street People Research 2014/15, indicates that homelessness is a growing area of concern in the Western Cape with as many as 7,383 Capetonians either living on the street or in a shelter.

Groundswell of interest

Although I have not secured sponsors for the #WeDidIt campaign, the groundswell of interest and support from Capetonians has been unbelievable, says Saunders. Ive been fortunate that some of my videos reach well over 100,000 views and I thought I could use my platform, to not only bring a bit of laughter, but also for the greater good to bring warmth to our world.

My vision is to alleviate hunger and poverty in the Southern Suburbs though various initiatives and projects - which are all self-funded," says Michelle McLachlan from Faith, Hope and Charity. "The #WeDidIt Winter Campaign is a fantastic vehicle to assist in bringing in much needed winter clothes and blankets, as well as being the perfect platform to remind Capetonians of the dire living conditions homeless individuals find themselves in - especially in the cold, stormy winter months.

Saunders is encouraging all Capetonians to drop by his rooftop location from 28 April to have a coffee, enjoy some music and drop off some clothing and blankets.

We are looking for Capetonians to show up at 117 Victoria Road, Plumstead between 28 April and 1 May 2016, with donations of blankets, jackets, pants, jerseys, socks, beanies and gloves. I am also encouraging everybody to show some social activism by sharing the video and encouraging their followers and fans to get involved, says Saunders.
Professor Lee Berger, of the University of the Witwatersrand, has been included on 2016's TIME 100, the annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Professor Lee Berger with Homo NalediImage credit: Wits Uniersity

The list, now in its 13th year, recognises the activism, innovation and achievement of the worlds most influential individuals. As TIME editor, Nancy Gibbs, has said , The TIME 100 is a list of the worlds most influential men and women, not its most powerful, though those are not mutually exclusive terms. While power is certain, influence is subtle. As much as this exercise chronicles the achievements of the past year, we also focus on figures whose influence is likely to grow, so we can look around the corner to see what is coming.

Berger is an award-winning palaeo-anthropologist, researcher, explorer, author and speaker from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits University in Johannesburg. His explorations into human origins in Africa over the past two-and-a-half decades have resulted in many new and notable discoveries. This includes the most complete early hominin fossils found so far, which belong to a new species of early human ancestor, Australopithecus Sediba, and, in 2013, the richest early hominin site yet found on the continent of Africa and a new species of human relative, Homo Naledi, announced in 2015.

It is an honour to be included in the TIME 100 and a tribute to the world-class and influential science being produced on the African continent by African scientists and African institutions, such as Wits University. This recognition also reflects on the hard work of my colleagues, who are all critical to both the discoveries being made, as well as the interpretations put forward in the scientific literature, Berger says.

Wits University continues again and again to produce high quality science that reaches and impact on a global audience and I am thrilled to be part of that. New discoveries continue to be made by my colleagues and me at an ever increasing pace, and I hope, and indeed expect, that the research coming out of palaeoanthropology at Wits will continue to have a significant impact on science worldwide.

As the Research Professor in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science at Wits, Berger says he believes that TIMEs decision to recognise the influence of his teams research on world science is partly due to Wits Universitys leadership in open access and open sourcing. The University is a signatory to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in the Sciences and Humanities.

Berger is also a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and the recipient of the National Geographic Societys first Prize for Research and Exploration. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa, a member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa, and a Fellow of the Explorers Club. Among other positions, Berger serves on the advisory board of the Global Young Academy.
If you've been listening to the news lately, you would have heard of a number of companies being affected by ransomware. Organisations and users are concerned about the recent surge in this form of cyber attack and they should be. Ransomware is nasty stuff.

Paul Williams

But with some careful preparation, you can significantly lower your risk of being infected, and reduce the impact on you or your organisation should you get hit.

Ransomware is a form of malware that infects devices, networks, and data centres and prevents them from being used until the user or organisation pays a ransom to have the system unlocked. Ransomware has been around since at least 1989, when the 'PC Cyborg' trojan encrypted file names on a hard drive and insisted users pay $189 to have them unlocked. In the interim, ransomware attacks have become increasingly sophisticated, targeted, and lucrative.

The impact of ransomware is difficult to calculate since many organisations opt to simply pay to have their files unlocked - an approach that doesnt always work. But a report on the Cryptowall v3 ransomware campaign, issued in October of 2015 by the Cyber Threat Alliance, estimated that the cost of that single attack was $325m.

Crypto ransomware

Ransomware generally works in one of several ways. Crypto ransomware can infect an operating system so that a device is unable to boot up. Other ransomware will encrypt a drive or a set of files or file names. Some malicious versions have a timer and begin deleting files until a ransom has been paid. All demand that a ransom has to be paid in order to unlock or release the blocked or encrypted system, files, or data.

On 31 March 2016, the US Cyber Emergency Response Team and the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre issued a joint warning about ransomware following several high-profile infections at hospitals.

According to this alert, infected users often get a message displayed on their devices screen saying something like:

 Your computer has been infected with a virus. Click here to resolve the issue.

 Your computer was used to visit websites with illegal content. To unlock your computer, you must pay a $100 fine.

 All files on your computer have been encrypted. You must pay this ransom within 72 hours to regain access to your data.

In some circumstances, this warning is displayed with embarrassing or pornographic images in order to motivate the user to get it off their system as fast as possible. But in every situation, systems are taken offline, critical data becomes unavailable, productivity is halted, and business operations are harmed.

Ransomware can be delivered in a number of ways, but the most common is as an infected file attached to an email. For example, today I received an email claiming to be from my bank. It had the right logo, links to real bank URLs, and my name. The body of the message explained that they have detected suspicious activity on my account and that I needed to install an attached file in order to verify my credentials. This seemed like a legitimate issue. But it wasnt. It was a phishing attack.

The giveaway to me, of course, was that no bank should ever send a file and ask you to install it - certainly not to validate your credentials. Instead, the attached file was infected with ransomware, which would have loaded onto my system if I had clicked on it.

Drive-by downloading

But email attachments arent the only mechanism for infection. Drive-by downloading is another, where a user visits an infected website and malware is downloaded and installed without the users knowledge. Ransomware has also been spread through social media, such as web-based instant messaging applications. And recently, vulnerable Web servers have been exploited as an entry point to gain access to an organisations network.

Here are ten things you need to do to protect yourself and your organisation from the effects of ransomware:

1. Develop a backup and recovery plan. Back up your systems regularly, and store that backup offline on a separate device.

2. Use professional email and web security tools that analyse email attachments, websites, and files for malware, and can block potentially compromised advertisements and social media sites that have no business relevance. These tools should include sandbox functionality so that new or unrecognised files can be executed and analysed in a safe environment.

3. Keep your operating systems, devices, and software patched and updated.

4. Make sure that your device and network anti-virus, IPS, and anti-malware tools are running the latest updates.

5. Where possible, use application whitelisting, which prevents unauthorised applications to be downloaded or run.

6. Segment your network into security zones, so that an infection in one area cannot easily spread to another.

7. Establish and enforce permission and privilege, so that the fewest number of users have the potential to infect business-critical applications, data or services.

8. Establish and enforce a BYOD security policy which can inspect and block devices which do not meet your standards for security (no client or anti-malware installed, anti-virus files are out of date, operating systems need critical patches, etc.)

9. Deploy forensic analysis tools so that after an attack you can identify a) where the infection came from; b) how long it has been in your environment; c) that you have removed all of it from every device and d) that you can ensure it doesnt come back.

10. This is critical: Do not count on your employees to keep you safe. While it is still important to up-level your user awareness training so employees are taught to not download files, click on email attachments, or follow unsolicited web links in emails, human beings are the most vulnerable link in your security chain, and you need to plan around them.

Heres why: for many of your employees, clicking on attachments and searching the internet is part of their job. It is difficult to maintain the appropriate level of scepticism. Second, phishing attacks have become very convincing. A targeted phishing attack uses things like online data and social media profiles to customise an approach. Third, it is simply human nature to click on an unexpected invoice or critical message from your bank. And finally, in survey after survey, users feel that security is someone elses job, not theirs.

Hopefully, you have a recent backup and you can wipe your device and reload it with an uninfected version. Here are some other things you need to do:

 Report the crime.

 Paying the ransom is no guarantee.

 Contact experts.

 Have a Plan B.

Rise in sophistication

Cybercrime is a for-profit business generating billions in revenue. Like most businesses, cybercriminals are highly motivated to find ways to generate revenue. They use subterfuge, extortion, assault, threats, and enticements to gain access to your critical data and resources. Ransomware is not new. But its recent rise in sophistication and distribution is the latest in an escalating trend to find new and unexpected ways to exploit individuals and businesses that operate online.

Now, more than ever, security is not something you add to your business. It is integral to doing business. Make sure you are partnering with security experts who understand that security is more than a device. It is a system of highly integrated and collaborative technologies, combined with an effective policy and a life-cycle approach of preparing, protecting, detecting, responding, and learning.

Security solutions need to share threat intelligence in order to detect and respond efficiently to threats anywhere across your distributed environment. They need to be woven into your network fabric so they can protect you seamlessly as your networked environment evolves and expands. They need to be able to adapt dynamically as new threats are discovered. And they need to never get in the way of you doing business the way you need to do business.
Weeks after denying that a formal request had been made for a new presidential jet, Armscor - the defence force's acquisition arm - has announced a tender for the lease of an intercontinental VIP aircraft.

Aktug Ates via Wikimedia Commons

The aircraft must be able to transport 15 VIPs in comfort for 10,000km non-stop. This distance will cover a trip to Moscow, Sao Paulo or Hong Kong. The tender was put out on Friday and closes on Wednesday.

Last month, an air force VIP aircraft transporting Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa had to make an emergency landing after developing technical difficulties shortly after take-off.

Armscor spokesman Lulu Mzili said the lease was a matter of urgency. But the DA is outraged, saying the defence force's survival is jeopardised by VIP transport swallowing much of its budget.

DA MP Kobus Marais said whether a new aircraft was procured or leased, the issue of poor aircraft maintenance was not being addressed. He said: "Until this happens you will have the same recurring problems. The Inkwazi (the presidential jet) was purchased in 2004, and with it flying roughly 600 hours annually, it can operate for at least another 30 years. "That is, of course, if proper maintenance is continuously done.

"It's mind-boggling that the government is even considering buying or leasing new aircraft, especially as it will be at the expense of our pilots, troops' safety and the protection of South Africa's sovereignty. "Our current economic circumstances don't allow for such lavish purchases."

Mzili told The Times 10 days ago that there was no requirement for VIP aircraft. She said the request for the aircraft had been made since then.

Mzili also stated that the short time that the tender had been put on offer for was not unusual. "We had already put out a request for information so it's known what's available."

Mzili said leasing was considered because the situation was urgent. "It is an interim measure as acquisitions are lengthy processes."

She declined to comment on the budget, stating that this information would influence the proposals that the department got from bidders.

Source: The Times
New routes for fuel imports to SADC countries are being enabled through the development of several southern African ports. However, energy companies will require local networks of logistics partners to make these imports cost-effective. General manager at logistics specialist Crossroads Distribution, Hennie van Wyk believes there are three vital areas to get right.

Hennie Van Wyk

Until fairly recently, the southern African fuel industry has been based in Durban, Cape Town and Mossel Bay, where imported oil or locally produced gas from offshore fields is refined into various types of fuel and then distributed throughout South Africa and the SADC region. However, the completed expansion of the facilities at Matola, the port of Maputo in Mozambique, along with the on-going expansion of Richards Bay in South Africa, Walvis Bay in Namibia, and the central and northern Mozambican ports of Beira and Nacala, is facilitating a growing trend of SADC countries buying refined fuels on the global market and importing them directly into different SADC regions, such as Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The new ports, with enhanced storage, safety and transportation infrastructure  and the advantage of being a lot closer to various SADC fuel markets  will allow energy companies to serve these markets more cost-effectively. However, in a challenging market that has seen some decline in volumes recently, this cost-efficiency requires a network of both international and local logistics providers to move the fuel from port to distributor. Rail might be useful in transporting fuel from ports to inland depots, but road transport from depots to retail distributors will provide flexibility without the need for multi-modal solutions.

Safety first

Van Wyk believes that there are three criteria a logistics company must fulfil if it is to partner successfully with fuel companies operating in the SADC region. Safety is the most important. Its part of our DNA at Crossroads, and vital to the way we do things, he says. From long experience hauling fuel and other potentially hazardous cargos, the company knows how important it is to maintain an impeccable Safety, Health, Environment and Quality (SHEQ) rating. The ISO 14001 (environmental) and OSHAS 18001 (health and safety) certifications that Crossroads has achieved are partly responsible for their success in the market.

The SHEQ standards extend beyond the design and maintenance of appropriate tankers. Crossroads also invests in continuous driver training, computerised incident reporting and onboard cameras to monitor driver behaviour, and satellite tracking of every cargo at every step of a delivery. Logistics partners need these procedures in place to ensure both the safety and quality of their service.

Capability to do the job

Were very much testing the waters at the moment, with the cross-border partnerships we have already, says Van Wyk. In the fuel sector, wed like to expand into Zambia and the DRC, but these are difficult markets with their own hurdles. As Crossroads expands, the company plans to continue the growth strategy that has proven successful so far.

Its quite a challenge to run cross-border operations all the way up and down the SADC countries, so demonstrating your ability to do the job is the second major factor, Van Wyk adds. We have learnt that customers always feel more comfortable if you have a local presence in the countries youre supplying. He refers here to existing contracts which Crossroads is servicing in Namibia and Botswana, the latter being supplied from Matola.

He believes that Crossroads pickup-to-delivery tracking of loads, strategic logistics software and constant communication with customers, particularly in the event of any glitches, is the kind of capability a logistics specialist needs to offer if they are to compete in this sector. Building on their experience in Botswana and Namibia, the company is now testing the waters in the DRC and Zambia, in partnership with two energy companies, to assess the opportunities for expansion in this market.

Reducing costs

The third criterion Van Wyk mentions is cost. By transporting fuel by road from ports closer to the cargos final destination, energy companies can already save themselves transportation costs. Factor in the clean fuel gap  the fact that the environmental benefits of energy companies switching to greener hydrocarbon sources are reduced, or even negated completely, by the carbon costs of transporting that fuel long distances  and it is clear that regional ports closer to fuel markets make sound financial sense.

However, in order to service the market cost-effectively, it is also important that transporters have a sufficient footprint, both in ports and the destination countries. Logistics companies operating in South Africa also need to achieve a high enough BBBEE rating.

Crossroads has also invested in new tanker technology and an operating model that ensures their cost structure benefits the client. This is something of a niche market, Van Wyk concludes, but a logistics partner that pays attention to SHEQ and their ability to deliver the load on time at a competitive price, through a network of subsidiaries with local expertise, should be able to create several mutually beneficial partnerships as these new fuel channels grow.
Japanese automaker Mitsubishi Motors plans to compensate customers in a bid to limit the fallout from a fuel-efficiency cheating scandal, the Nikkei recently reported.

Authorities raided the company's office this month after the company admitted it had falsified efficiency data for hundreds of thousands of vehicles.

Mitsubishi Motors shares plunged more than 40% in the three days after the news emerged, their worst hat-trick of losses since the company listed in 1988.

The scandal has raised questions about the Japanese carmaker's future, after German giant Volkswagen posted its first loss in 20 years in 2015 because of the fallout from its own huge emissions-rigging scandal.

Mitsubishi Motors plans to offer to cover the extra fuel costs incurred by vehicle owners because their engines were less efficient than advertised, the Nikkei reported.

The move aims to "appease angry customers' nonstop inquiries" and prevent an "exodus" of buyers, the Japanese business daily said, without giving its sources.

Mitsubishi Motors has said it will halt production of more than 600,000 affected vehicle models - mini-cars sold in Japan, including some made for rival Nissan.

But that has not been enough to save off criticism of the company, which was brought to the brink of bankruptcy in 2004 over revelations it covered up defects in its vehicles.

"I can't help but have doubt about the company's basic attitude towards compliance," Japan's transport minister Keiichi Ishii told reporters Friday.

"This is extremely regrettable."

Source: AFP
Professor Sharon Fonn of the Wits School of Public Health, together with Professor Alex Ezeh, executive director for the African Population and Health Research Center in Kenya, have received over R100 million to produce postgraduates and support universities to lead world-class multidisciplinary research in public health.

Professor Alex Ezeh

The R108,15 million (5.25million) was awarded by the Wellcome Trust, through the DELTAS Africa initiative, to the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa+ (CARTA). The grant is a continuation grant. It is the second grant that CARTA has received from the Wellcome Trust, but the first through the DELTAS Africa initiative.

The Wellcome Trust has committed R432 million (21 million) to the DELTAS Africa initiative, which aims to improve health in Africa through research driven by the most urgent regional challenges. The funds were allocated to research teams in the Ivory Coast, Kenya, Senegal and Uganda to conduct world-class health research and train the future generation of the continents scientists.

CARTA, one of four recent research programmes in Africa that have been awarded grants, enrolled it first students in 2010 and seeks to train and produce PhD graduates to lead world-class multidisciplinary research that makes a positive impact on public and population health.

This additional grant allows us to consolidate and extend the gains that we have already made in CARTA, said Fonn.

The consortium comprises nine African universities and four African research centres and selected northern partners enrolled their first cohort of PhD fellows in 2010.

To date, CARTA has a total 140 PhD fellows, 24 of whom have graduated. Most of these graduates are either enrolled in post-doctoral fellowships or have received re-entry grants to allow them to do research when they return to their jobs at universities. Nineteen Wits staff members have won CARTA fellowships and many more of the CARTA fellows are enrolled as PhD students at Wits across five faculties.

We have also worked with over 300 faculty members (librarians, registrars, finance and ICT staff) to promote a research supportive environment at member universities and have held six workshops with 121 supervisors to reinvigorate PhD supervision.

Dr Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust said: Strengthening health research across sub-Saharan Africa is a powerful way to improve peoples lives in the continent and around the world. Health crises such as Ebola and now Zika, and long-standing threats such as malaria, TB, HIV and increasingly the non-communicable diseases, will only be solved with a strong research base to inform public health measures and develop new treatments and vaccines.

By supporting the training of scientists within the continent, DELTAS Africa is seeking to stem the brain drain of the best African scientists and promote the Africa-led development of world-class research leaders to solve the continents most pressing health needs.

Currently, Africa accounts for 15% of the global population and 25% of the global disease burden, but only produces about 2% of the worlds research output. A shortage of skilled personnel - Africa only has 79 scientists and engineers per million inhabitants, compared with 168 for Brazil, 2,457 for Europe and 4,103 for the United States- and limited infrastructure have contributed to the low research outputs.

DELTAS Africa will be handed over to Alliance for Accelerating Excellence Science in Africa in the second half of the year as part of its vision to shift the centre of gravity and decision-making process to the continent.

*See more from the University of the Witwatersrand.
Farmers Cooperative teamed up with two other agricultural entities this month to support the Beatrice Community Food Pantry.

Farmers Cooperative donated $1,000 to the food pantry, and then teamed up with Land OLakes, and the Invest an Acre program to provide a total of $3,000 in support to the Beatrice food bank.

Invest an Acre is a project of the Howard Buffet Foundation and supported by Monsanto to help those people in need. Invest an Acre is available to any farmer wishing to donate to their local food bank. Donated funds will be matched dollar for dollar through the Invest an Acre program.

Farmers are encouraged to support this project and can get more details from their Farmers Cooperative branch or on the web at www.investanacre.com.
The Nebraska Rural Community Schools Association (NRCSA) announced Southern as the recipient of its Closing the Gap Effective School award for achievement in math, according to a press release from Southern.

The award is based on data collected over the last four to six years, comparing the achievement of students who are eligible for free or reduced price lunch with those who are not eligible. The goal of the study is to identify which schools have the smallest gaps between the performance of the two economic groups.
RICHMOND, Va.  Sen. Ted Cruz's former campaign co-chairman in Virginia has traveled to Syria and promised support for the government of President Bashar Assad, who U.S. officials have repeatedly said has lost the legitimacy to rule the war-torn country.

Virginia state Sen. Dick Black's trip to a Middle Eastern country in the midst of a civil war and his comments in the face of official U.S. foreign policy are highly unusual for a state lawmaker.

Black, an outspoken Republican, is a part-time state senator who has no role in official U.S. foreign policy. Still, he has met with Assad government officials and said he would advocate for better relationships between Assad and the U.S., according to the official Syrian news agency.

"I will be Syria's voice," Black said, according to the news agency.

An aide to Black said Wednesday evening that Black resigned as co-chair of the Cruz campaign in Virginia shortly before his trip. In a resignation letter dated April 21 the aide provided to The Associated Press, Black said he was resigning to "avoid any possible distraction" related to his trip.

In the letter, Black said he was traveling to Syria "in an attempt to restore peace and prevent the slaughter of Christians and other minorities at the hands of the armies of terrorists rampaging across the country."

Black has been strong advocate for Cruz and was recently elected to serve as a Cruz-supporting Virginia delegate at the Republican National Committee's convention this summer.

Unlike his GOP rivals, Cruz has been less than eager to use military force to take out the Assad government.

"If we are to defeat our enemies we need to be clear-eyed that toppling a government and allowing radical Islamic terrorists to take over a nation is not benefiting our national security interests," Cruz said at the Republican Jewish Coalition forum in December, referring to President Barack Obama's Syria policy goals. "Putting ISIS or Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood in charge of yet another state in the Middle East is not benefiting our national security."

The Cruz campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Black's trip to Syria.

Black is one of the most vocal social conservatives in Virginia's General Assembly, and has drawn national attention for his opposition to abortion and gay rights. The former Vietnam War veteran and military lawyer dismayed Republican leaders in 2003 by sending fellow lawmakers small, plastic likenesses of a fetus to underscore his opposition toward abortion.

The state senator raised eyebrows in 2014 when he sent a letter to Assad praising him. It was posted on the Syrian president's Facebook page.

Black is expected to meet with Assad during his visit, the Syrian newspaper Al-Watan reported.

Syria's conflict began with mostly peaceful protests in 2011, but a brutal government crackdown and the rise of an armed insurgency eventually plunged the country into a full-blown civil war. The fighting has killed more than 250,000 people, according to the United Nations, which stopped tracking casualties several months ago.

Last year, Black said the Virginia Capitol Police alerted him to a threat against him by the Islamic State for his support of Assad. The state senator was featured in a magazine published by the Islamic state.

Black posted a link on Twitter on Wednesday to article written by an Iranian state-run TV news agency, which quoted Black as saying the Syrian civil war would "come to an end if the U.S. stops training terrorist in Jordan, Saudi Arabia" and other countries.

U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Black "is entitled to his views, but they do not reflect this administration's policy on Syria."

Black met with a Lebanese Christian politician allied with the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group, which is fighting alongside Assad's forces in Syria, the TV news agency reported.

Both the Iranian state-run TV news agency and the official Syrian news agency erroneously referred to Black as a U.S. senator.

Word of Black's travels drew mockery from political opponents.

"Doesn't surprise me one bit," said Virginia Senate Minority Leader Dick Saslaw. He added that Black shouldn't be trying to meddle in foreign affairs and said Republicans "would be raising holy hell if the situation was reversed."
Speaking at the second meeting of the Union Ceasefire Joint Monitoring Committee (UJMC) yesterday, the State Counsellor stressed the need to hold the national peace conference like the historic Panglong Conference concurrently with the nationwide ceasefire.

She said would also make efforts to bring non-signatory groups into the nationwide cease fire deal as a priority.
What we know is that the conference was already held once in 2013. At the conference, the decision was made to hold a Mon National Convention. It is meaningless to summon a conference now. Therefore, we do not plan to participate in the conference, said Nai Layih Tamarh, General Secretary of the Mon National Party (MNP).

Pre-meeting for the upcoming 8th Mon National Conference (Photo: MNA).Pre-meeting for the upcoming 8th Mon National Conference (Photo: MNA). It was decided at the 2013 conference by representatives of political parties and civil society organization (CSO) that a Mon National Convention should take place instead of the Mon National Conference. However, because of the current political situation, the convention wont be held and the conference will take place instead.

We will consider the conference in Japan Well. We will not discuss anything. We will just keep an eye on it. Whether to participate or not, it hasnt been decided. We wont comment on anything they are doing. As a guest, we will decide whether to join. We do not know what they are doing and how they will do it. On those grounds, we will not attend, said General Secretary Dr. Min Nwe Soe, of the All Mon Regions Democracy Party (AMDP).

Representatives from the Womens Party (Mon) will join the conference only if other parties representatives were present, according to Mi Shin Thant, the chairperson of the Womens Party (Mon), previously stated in an interview with MNA.

On April 7, representatives of the MAU and the New Mon State Party (NMSP) met at NMSPs liaison office, in Sangkhlaburi, on Thai-Burma border, and decided at the meeting that they would work towards holding the conference.

The 8th conference will be held in Japan Well Village, in the controlled area of NMSP. About 150 representatives from the NMSP, civil society organizations and others in exile as well as within the country would be invited to the conference, according to the MAU.

At the Mon National Conference pre-meeting on March 26 and 27, members of various political parties presented their personal views.
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The Marion County School Board in Ocala, Florida has voted by a margin of 4 to 1 to implement a ban on transgender bathroom use with no exceptions.

Words apparently have no meaning in Ocala where one member of the school board said the ban is necessary for reasons.

Besides Stacy, the other board members who supported the ban were Carol Ely, Kelly King and Angie Boynton. Board Chairman Bobby James said he did not want to create an official resolution, especially since only a few weeks are left in the school year. Ely said that transgender students should not have the choice of the day in terms of which restroom they will use. I thought about it and that's reverse discrimination, she said.

She "thought about it" and that's what she came up with.

It's "reverse discrimination" against who exactly? Against cisgender students?

Members of the board reportedly said they "did a lot of research" before voting in favor of the ban. That's hard to believe given that there isn't a single documented case of a transgender student assaulting someone in the bathroom anywhere in the entire country. You'd think their "research" would have turned that up unless their study material consisted exclusively of right wing claptrap and propaganda.

Their "research" evidently also did not also clue them in to the fact that these bans are unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment at least as far as the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C. is concerned.
Tips To Remember Before You Donate Your Sperm Basics oi-Denise

Sperm donation has not been made common, unlike blood donation. In India, there are only a few hospitals that encourage sperm donors to donate, and some men resent the idea to make this humble move.

According to recent statistics, there are around a million couples who are childless, and experts state that sperm donation can help a great deal in helping these couples start a new life, a family.

If you are healthy and younger than age 40, we think you should donate your sperm.

Here are some of the other reasons as to why we think you should contribute.

Also Read: 8 Simple Tips to Improve Sperm Count

It helps others raise a family, it makes you figure out the quality of your sperm, it also generates the sperm count and above all, donating sperm helps to ensure if you are in the best of health.

On the other hand, donating sperm also involves a high risk of infection being passed from one generation to another, which is why when you go ahead for the test and screening, doctors will check to see if your sperm is healthy and affordable to be donated.

So, if you want to pass the screening, here are some of the tips to remember before you donate your sperm, take a look:

You Need To Be Healthy: If you want to donate sperm, you should be healthy and fit. A man should stay clear from diseases like HIV, hepatitis B and C, HTLV, syphilis, genital herpes and/or genital warts. You should also be diabetic and cancer free.

Also Read: Factors That Affect Sperm Motility

You Have To Be Heterosexual: Homosexual men are usually rejected when it comes to sperm donation. For the simple reason being homosexual men are more exposed to HIV and various other pathogenic viruses and bacteria, due to the engagement of same to same physical or sex practices.

You Need To Be Younger Than 40: In most of the clinical centres, doctors normally ask for an age. Sperm donors should be less than 40 years of age. This is because, men below the age of 40 are considered to be healthier and more fit, and their sperm is also of a good quality for the impregnation.

You Have To Be Of Good Height: It is medically proved that shorter men have more issues with their sperm when compared to taller men. Many facilities require that their sperm donors be between 5'10" and 6'2''. It is often believed that men who are shorter have genetic problems and that can affect the child, thus leading to a poor nutrition in the child, infections and exposure to toxins too.

You Have To Give A Good Sample: Lastly, after the man has passed the screening test, he has to provide a good sample to the clinic. Donors are asked to abstain from ejaculation (from sex or masturbation) for at least 2 days or 5 days prior to the donation date. This helps in giving a higher count and a better quality of sperm.
Top-shelf municipal bonds remained stronger at mid-session, according to traders, as the last of the weeks new big issues were coming to market.

Secondary Market

The yield on the 10-year benchmark muni general obligation was one to three basis points weaker from 1.65% on Wednesday, while the 30-year muni yield was one to three basis points weaker from 2.61%, according to a midday read of Municipal Market Data's triple-A scale.

U.S. Treasuries were stronger on Thursday. The yield on the two-year Treasury fell to 0.82% from 0.86% on Wednesday, while the 10-year Treasury yield dropped to 1.86% from 1.87% and the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond decreased to 2.70% from 2.72%.

The 10-year muni to Treasury ratio was calculated at 88.5% on Wednesday compared with 86.0% on Tuesday, while the 30-year muni to Treasury ratio stood at 96.5% versus 95.4%, according to MMD.

MSRB Previous Session's Activity

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board reported 40,251 trades on Wednesday on volume of $14.07 billion.

Primary Market

In the competitive arena on Thursday, Rhode Island sold a total of $125.99 million of general obligation bonds in two separate sales.

Wells Fargo Securities won the $112.82 million of tax-exempt Series A consolidated capital development loan of 2016 bonds and tax-exempt Series C 2016 refunding bonds with a true interest cost of 2.39%.

The $58.84 million of Series A bonds were priced to yield from 0.59% with a 2% coupon in 2017 to approximately 3.10% in 2036 with a 3% coupon. The $53.99 million of Series C bonds were priced as 5s to yield from 0.61% in 2017 to 1.34% in 2022.

JPMorgan Securities won the $13.17 million of taxable consolidated capital development loan of 2016 Series B with a TIC of 1.39%. Pricing information was not immediately available.

Both sales are rated Aa2 by Moodys Investors Service and AA by Standard & Poors and Fitch Ratings.

Since 2006, the Rhode Island has sold about $2 billion of debt with the most issuance occurring in 2014 when it issued $336.4 million of bonds. The state sold the least amount of bonds in 2009 when it offered $54.6 million of debt.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch priced the Public Power Generation Agency, Neb.s $136 million of Series 2016A revenue refunding bonds for the Whelan Energy Centers Unit 2.

The issue was priced as 5s to yield from 2.77% in 2032 to 3.10% in 2039. The deal is rated A2 by Moodys and A-minus by Fitch.

Citigroup is expected to price the Mission Economic Development Corp., Texas $198 million of Series 2016B senior lien revenue bonds for the Natogasoline project. The deal is rated BB-minus by S&P.

Bond Buyer Visible Supply

The Bond Buyer's 30-day visible supply calendar increased $968.8 million to $10.30 billion on Thursday. The total is comprised of $5.46 billion of competitive sales and $4.84 billion of negotiated deals.

Tax-Exempt Money Market Funds See Outflows

Tax-exempt money market funds experienced outflows of $3.85 billion, bringing total net assets to $217.75 billion in the week ended April 25, according to The Money Fund Report, a service of iMoneyNet.com. This followed an outflow of $2.73 billion to $221.60 billion in the previous week.

The average, seven-day simple yield for the 315 weekly reporting tax-exempt funds was unchanged from the previous week at 0.05%.

The total net assets of the 909 weekly reporting taxable money funds increased $18.87 billion to $2.476 trillion in the week ended April 26, after an outflow of $31.82 billion to $2.457 trillion the week before.

The average, seven-day simple yield for the taxable money funds dipped to 0.10% from 0.11% in the prior week.

Overall, the combined total net assets of the 1,224 weekly reporting money funds increased $15.02 billion to $2.694 trillion in the period ended April 26, which followed an outflow of $34.55 billion to $2.679 trillion.
DALLAS  The Michigan House signed off on a $54 billion fiscal 2017 budget that provides more money to deal with Flint's water contamination crisis and record spending for kindergarten through 12th grade education.

The Senate is expected to vote on its own version of the budget next week. Once both are passed, the two chambers will resolve their differences in a conference committee. The new fiscal year begins Oct. 1.

The house plan closely resembles the $54 billion package unveiled earlier this year by Gov. Rick Snyder in February, said a spokesperson for House Speaker Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant.

The House plan includes a nearly $39 billion general fund, $8 billion of federal funding, and $16 billion for K-12 education.

Wednesday's vote on the general fund budget was 76-32 with the education budget approved in a 60-50 a day earlier.

"We have worked hard to arrive at a responsible budget that makes the best use of the taxpayer money entrusted to the Legislature," said House Appropriations Chairman Al Pscholka, R-Stevensville, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He highlighted the timely approval of the budget for the sixth consecutive year.

The $39 billion budget plan for general fund spending includes $30 million of additional funding for families in Flint. The state attorney general's criminal probe of the Flint water crisis would receive $2.6 million of those funds.

That funding supplements $67 million of previous funds already appropriated to Flint's water crisis.

"We are at about $100 million now," said Cotter. Lawmakers are meeting with Flint Mayor Karen Weaver "tomorrow for purpose of continuing the discussion." Cotter said he would consider $114 million in supplemental funding to be appropriated in parallel with the budget.

The budget also prioritizes public health and investing in Michigan's transportation infrastructure.

It includes provisions for funding reforms to Michigan's veteran homes, funding for the First Responder Presumed Coverage Fund which assists firefighters who contract cancer due to their employment, and increases funding for Michigan's roads.

The plan proposes a record $4.1 billion in spending for transportation that would be funded by previously approved increases in the state fuel tax and vehicle registration fees that will take effect in 2017. About $1.5 billion would be spent on local road projects, $500 million would go to highways and the rest would be spent on buses, airports and other local maintenance needs.

"This is a record-amount of money that we've spent on roads and bridges in Michigan. It's kind of a big issue  it has been over the last few years," said Pscholka.

Also of note is a record $16.1 billion proposed for school funding for K-12 schools. The House budget plan adopts Snyder's proposal to increase per pupil funding by $60 to $120 per student. The budget proposes to redirect $72 million from Michigan's tobacco settlement proceeds to begin repayment of Detroit Public Schools' debt, which is expected to reach $515 million by this summer.

A DPS restructuring proposal to divide the district into two entities is still awaiting to a hearing from the House Appropriations Committee. The proposal calls for the current Detroit Public Schools to be left intact only to levy taxes and repay its existing bond debts. A new school district, known as Detroit Community District, would own assets and operate the schools.

"The school aid budget also increases program funding for career and technical education for the coming fiscal year," said Rep. Gary Howell, R-North Branch. House Democrats voted against the school budget due to their contention that the plan does little to help most students in Michigan.

"We're pleased to see more funding being put into K-12 schools, but not all districts will see the increase they need to operate effectively, and some areas of the budget seem to focus more on corporate interests. We urge continued consideration of these amendments as the budget moves forward in hopes that our Republican counterparts understand that students must be the priority," said House Democratic Floor Leader Sam Singh, D-East Lansing.
Allies of Puerto Rico Gov. Alexandro Garcia Padilla have turned against an already approved increase in a business-to-business tax and conversion to a value added tax.

Most of the allies had key roles in getting this measures approved for future introduction when they voted for the current fiscal year's budget.

Legislative leaders in the governor's Popular Democratic Party are now promising to support bills overturning the planned revenue generators.

On Wednesday, Sen. President Eduardo Bhatia Gautier, Sen. Jose Nadal Power, House President Jaime Perell- Borras, Rep. Rafael Hernandez Montanez, and PDP gubernatorial candidate David Bernier all announced their opposition to the planned tax changes.

Garcia Padilla will not seek a second term as governor in this year's election.

Nadal Power and Hernandez Montanez are the presidents of the Senate and House of Representatives' committees on the treasury and budget.

There has been controversy and dissension since the governor introduced his plan to convert the current sales and use tax to a value added tax in the winter of 2014-2015.

He got the legislature to approve a rise in the sales and use tax to 11.5% from 7% effective July 1, 2015. The legislature also approved a conversion to a value added tax from the sales tax system provided a special committee to be set up in fall 2015 recommended doing it. The committee ultimately recommended the VAT.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rico introduced a 4% tax on business-to-business consumption Oct. 1. The budget originally scheduled this to increase to 11.5% on April 1. Under pressure from Hernandez Montanez, Bernier and others, the governor agreed to postpone the increase to June 1.

The PDP leaders are calling for legislation to stop the already approved tax changes. The opposition New Progressive Party legislators voted against the measures when they came for a vote in June 2015.

If a substantial number of PDP legislators joined with the NPP legislators in voting to stop the measures, they could overcome a gubernatorial veto. They would need a two-thirds vote in the Senate and House of Representatives.

"The people cannot stand another tax," Bernier said Wednesday. "The VAT would increase the cost of doing business in Puerto Rico."

Hernandez Montanez said Wednesday that the increase in the business-to-business tax would hit small- and medium-sized businesses particularly hard and that this sector is generating 90% of the new jobs in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico Treasurer Juan Zaragoza has said that a VAT tax would be a good way at reducing tax avoidance in Puerto Rico. His department has estimated that 25% of all taxes that should be collected are not collected because of tax evasion in the "underground economy."

The dissention over taxes and tax rates comes amid the Puerto Rico government's much larger financial crisis.

According to the El Vocero news website on Wednesday, the governor affirmed that his government would default on at least some bond payments due Monday. The transition to VAT and the increase in the business-to-business taxes were aimed at increasing the government's revenues this spring and in coming fiscal years.

A member of the governor's press office did not immediately respond to a request for a comment for this story.
Situated in Hoedspruit and with Leading Edge Flight School reachable within 26 km, Nyala Safari Lodge features express check-in and check-out, non-smoking rooms, an outdoor swimming pool, free WiFi... This was like a scene from the movie Out of Africa. This quaint resort was set beside the Olifonts river bed in the African bush. It was very secure with guards standing at the front gate 30kms away. The whole property is fenced off with electric fencing. Our resort was fenced off to keep elephants and large animals from entering the property but smaller ones like bush buck and monkeys could come and go as they please. Our rondavel was AWESOME. Very clean and very roomy. There was no option to have a double bed - all rondavels had single beds which were comfy. We had two showers - one in doors and the other outside under the stars. Because of mosquitoes we never used the outdoor shower. Tea and coffee plus kettle were available in the room. A tiny bar fridge would have been fantastic however the only fridge was on the main living area/lounge/kitchen. There is malaria in the area so an anti-malaria tablet is a good idea. There are no air-conditioners in any of the rooms at Nyala Safaris. The temperature whilst very warm when we arrived did get cooler. The food was home-style cooking. Tasty and just enough. Plenty of fruit and snacks to be had during the day - the policy was help yourself and feel at home. Game drives were amazing. Nicolle was amazing. She really knows her stuff. There was nothing she didnt know. From bugs to plants to animals she knew it all - very knowledgeable and informative. We saw Lion almost every day, Elephant, Giraffe, Zebra and a million different bush bucks from Impala to Kudu to water buck and so many more. The sundowners were a great part of the game drive. Being able to stretch your legs and stand in the African bush was awesome. We also had our laundry cleaned for R50 which was so very affordable. The staff were absolutely amazing. So accommodating and very friendly. Shylot was the main cook - presenting tasty dishes at every meal and always willing to please. The pool is a plunge pool - just enough to get wet.

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Rollins Follow Rollins 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

Each year, citizen legislators from across Nebraska gather in Lincoln to balance the budget and work on important priorities for our state. Last week, the second session of the 104th Nebraska Legislature concluded.

This year, the Legislature and I had a very successful session. We were able to accomplish all four important priorities I laid out for the session in my State of the State address back in January, as well as prevent bad legislation from passing. The work we did together on the budget, tax relief, roads and healthcare will help our state grow and protect our states budget and taxpayers from unnecessary risks.

By law, one of the only requirements the Legislature has to complete in any session is balancing the state budget. While senators and I differed on some of the specifics about how taxpayer dollars should be spent, we were able to cut the rate of growth in state spending significantly. Together, the Legislature and I held the rate of growth in state spending to 3.6 percent, down from 6.5 percent or about half the previous rate of growth. Holding the rate of growth in state spending down is critical to providing opportunities for tax relief in the coming years.

My top priority for this session was providing property tax relief for Nebraskas hardworking families. At the State Fair last year, I began discussions with the Legislatures Education Chairwoman Kate Sullivan and Revenue Chairman Mike Gloor about building a property tax relief package. After hearings, debate, and compromises, the Legislature and I settled on a tax package that provides $20 million in direct property tax credits to farmers and ranchers. It also makes changes to the states education funding formula, increases school aid and allows more schools to become eligible for school aid.

In addition to balancing the budget and providing tax relief, I also worked with the Transportation Committee to develop the Transportation Innovation Act (TIA). This program will help accelerate completion of our states expressway system, provide funds to repair county bridges and dedicate resources to infrastructure projects that will help growing and expanding businesses.

These investments will fund key infrastructure priorities for Nebraska for years to come. Capitol observers who have tracked infrastructure investments over the years described the passage of the TIA as historic and landmark.

In the last few months, the Legislature has prudently voted down several bad pieces of legislation. One of the most significant bills they rejected would have expanded Medicaid under Obamacare in Nebraska. As proposed, this bill would have cost Nebraska taxpayers almost $1 billion in new state spending in the first 10 years.

Additionally, Medicaid spending for our states existing program already makes up a growing share of our state budget, and expansion would have exposed our state budget to unnecessary risk. This is the fourth time the Legislature has wisely decided against expansion in four years, and I will continue to work with senators to protect our states budget in future sessions.

In the coming weeks and months, I will be listening to you as well as meeting and working with my agencies and with senators as I develop new initiatives to pursue in next years session. I am committed to holding the rate of growth in state spending even lower, so that we can continue to provide tax relief for hardworking Nebraskans like you in the coming years. If you have ideas that you would like to share for next year, I hope you will contact my office at 402-471-2244 or email pete.ricketts@nebraska.gov.
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Congress holds the power of the purse. As one of three separate but equal branches of the federal government, legislators are ultimately responsible for administering the financial resources that allow our government to operate.

Because of this, we hold a sacred trust with the American people as guardians of taxpayer dollars. As your senator, I have a fundamental duty to stop waste, fraud and abuse.

This month, the Senate began the appropriations process, which provides members of Congress with the opportunity to direct and allocate taxpayer dollars to federal government programs. This process is the only way our citizens can truly hold their elected representatives accountable. It also allows the American people to see the priorities of the U.S. Senate.

Through my votes on these appropriation bills, I have to decide which government programs to prioritize and which to cut. These are tough choices, but Nebraskans sent me to Washington to make hard decisions.

The appropriations process began with legislation to fund energy and water programs. Recently, I joined Senators Dan Coats of Indiana, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, and Jeff Flake of Arizona to introduce an amendment to the appropriations bill that would target what I see as overspending at the Department of Energy (DOE). This amendment would wind down the DOEs troubled Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program.

In 2009, Congress appropriated $7.5 billion in subsidies to cover $25 billion in loans authorized under the program. Some of these loans went to companies that later filed for bankruptcy and resulted in the loss of millions of taxpayer dollars. The ATVM program continued to struggle, which led the DOE to revise the program in 2014.

To date, not a single loan has been approved since those changes went into effect. Whats more, the Government Accountability Office has recommended eliminating the program altogether. The ATVM program is a clear example of waste, and it reveals the dangers of allowing our government to pick winners and losers in the private sector.

Unfortunately, the amendment I introduced with Senators Coats, Toomey and Flake did not receive the necessary votes to be included in the final bill. While I was disappointed, I remain committed to working with my colleagues on other measures to increase government efficiency and cut waste.

For example, this month, the Senate passed major legislation to update the nations energy policies for the first time in nearly a decade. This bill, known as the Energy Policy Modernization Act, would improve economic opportunities for families in Nebraska and across our country.

As part of the final package, I was able to include my bill, known as the Judgment Fund Transparency Act. The Judgment Fund is used by the Treasury Department to pay claimants who won certain court judgments and settlements against the federal government. Between 2013 and 2015, the federal government paid more than $10 billion in Judgment Fund awards, with scant transparency or oversight.

This fund allocates unlimited resources to cover government liabilities in lawsuits. It is not subject to the annual appropriations process, and the fund is not required to make information on payouts available to the public. My legislation would provide transparency regarding the costs of these lawsuits and who is bringing them against the U.S. government. It would also provide hardworking taxpayers with the ability to see exactly where their tax dollars are going through these litigation expenses.

I was proud to see the Judgment Fund Transparency Act included in the final bill that recently passed the Senate. As we continue the appropriations process this year, I am committed to finding more ways to cut spending and stop government waste. As you can see, the Senate is hard at work, keeping our promise to you and holding the federal government accountable.

Thank you for participating in the democratic process. I look forward to visiting with you again next week.
Producers throughout the Third District stress to me how crucial trade is to their economic success. Not only do trade agreements and memberships in international trade organizations open new markets for Nebraska products, but they can also level the playing field for producers, manufacturers and consumers by ensuring everyone abides by the same set of rules.

A great achievement happened just this month when China dropped some of its export subsidies following a dispute brought by the U.S. to the World Trade Organization. This is a vital step in bringing relief to U.S. industries forced to compete with artificially low-cost Chinese products. The ruling by the World Trade Organization demonstrates our ability to hold our trading partners accountable while increasing market access for U.S. products.

In the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade, we unanimously passed a bill this week called the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act. I am a cosponsor of this legislation to reform the Miscellaneous Tariff Bill, or MTB, process.

The MTB temporarily suspends tariffs on imported goods needed by U.S. manufacturers for which there is no domestic production, reducing their import costs and helping them compete globally. Since 2012, when the last MTB package expired, U.S. companies have been forced to shoulder an annual $748 million tax increase. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, this costs our economy nearly $2 billion annually.

Approximately 50 percent of the last MTB package was targeted toward agriculture products, increasing its importance to the Third District  the top agriculture district in the country. By passing a new MTB, we can help producers throughout the supply chain lower their costs, increase production and create more jobs.

Trade agreements currently being considered by the U.S. also have the potential to break down barriers for Nebraska exporters. Negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) among the U.S. and 11 other countries on the Pacific Rim have concluded, and the agreement is now being reviewed. In Nebraska, 109,000 jobs depend on trade with these countries.

Through my role on the Ways and Means Committee, I am helping to vet TPP while gathering feedback from Nebraska producers and consumers. So far, I am encouraged by the broad support for the agreement throughout the agriculture sector. I am closely monitoring newly proposed domestic support programs for pork and beef in Japan, one of the worlds largest economies, to ensure barriers to Nebraska products would indeed be lowered under TPP.

We have the opportunity to engage in extensive review of TPP and other agreements because Congress passed the Trade Priorities and Accountability Act (TPA) last year, which established a process for scrutiny and congressional oversight. With TPA in place, President Obama cannot simply bypass Congress and the American people and sign TPP into effect. I have consistently supported efforts to achieve the best possible TPP for Nebraska producers and consumers, and I will continue to diligently examine the details of the agreement.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and the European Union are in the process of negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, another trade agreement which provides additional opportunities to combat unscientific efforts which attempt to keep modern agriculture products out of the marketplace.

To maintain U.S. leadership in the global economy, we must be involved in writing the rules rather than leaving this responsibility to China and other growing world powers. I will continue working to ensure Nebraska and our country gets the best possible agreements to help our exporters compete in more markets and drive economic growth.


Ligiea Mare is the second largest body of liquid on Saturn's moon Titan. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell

NEW DELHI (BNS): A new study has found that a large sea on Saturn's moon Titan is composed mostly of pure liquid methane, independently confirming an earlier result.



Scientists had long speculated about the possible existence of hydrocarbon lakes and seas on Titan.



Since arriving in the Saturn system in 2004, the Cassini spacecraft has revealed that more than 620,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometres) of Titan's surface -- almost two percent of the total -- are covered in liquid.



There are three large seas, all located close to the moon's North Pole, surrounded by numerous of smaller lakes in the northern hemisphere. Just one large lake has been found in the southern hemisphere.



The exact composition of these liquid reservoirs remained elusive until 2014, when the Cassini radar instrument was first used to show that Ligeia Mare, the second largest sea on Titan and similar in size to Lake Huron and Lake Michigan combined, is methane-rich.



"Before Cassini, we expected to find that Ligeia Mare would be mostly made up of ethane, which is produced in abundance in the atmosphere when sunlight breaks methane molecules apart. Instead, this sea is predominantly made of pure methane," said Alice Le Gall, a Cassini radar team associate at the French research laboratory LATMOS, Paris, and lead author of the study.



The new study, conducted by NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission, is based on data collected with Cassini's radar instrument during flybys of Titan between 2007 and 2015.



In their research, the scientists combined several radar observations of heat given off by Ligeia Mare. They also used data from a 2013 experiment that bounced radio signals off Ligeia. During the experiment, the radar instrument detected echoes from the seafloor and inferred the depth of Ligeia Mare along Cassini's track over Ligeia Mare -- the first-ever detection of the bottom of an extraterrestrial sea. The scientists were surprised to find depths in the sea as great as 525 feet (160 metres) at the deepest point along the radar track.



The study also found that the shoreline around Ligeia Mare may be porous and flooded with liquid hydrocarbons. The data span a period running from local winter to spring, and the scientists expected that -- like the seaside on Earth -- the surrounding solid terrains would warm more rapidly than the sea.



"It's a marvelous feat of exploration that we're doing extraterrestrial oceanography on an alien moon," said Steve Wall, deputy lead of the Cassini radar team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Titan just won't stop surprising us."


Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The third day of Rail Safety Week targeted a Brandon middle school Wednesday, as CN officials took classes of Grades 5, 6 and 7 students through need-to-know information about how to navigate train tracks in the area.

Const. Joe Jardine, a former Mountie now with the CN Police Service, took students through a frank 45-minute primer on the danger trains present to pedestrians and motorists.

At the end of the presentation, Jardine, Brandon Mayor Rick Chrest and Brandon School Division director of facilities and transportation Mel Clark led the audience in a Rail Safety Pledge.

Tom Bateman/The Brandon Sun From left, CN Police Service Const. Joe Jardine, Brandon Mayor Rick Chrest and Brandon School Division director of facilities and transportation Mel Clark take the Rail Safety Pledge with students at King George School on Wednesday about as part of Rail Safety Week.

Everything thats in this room has probably been on a train at some point, Jardine told the music room full of students.

CN is the only railway that touches all three coasts, so were in 1,100 communities across Canada, and Brandon is an important community for CN, added CN public affairs manager Kate Fenske.

Jardines talk focused on the limited ability of freight trains to stop, and the near-unlimited amount of damage they can inflict in their path.

The main issue with pre-teens is trespassing, Jardine said. He hopes talking to students directly will curb bad habits before they get to be a dangerous problem.

Last year in CNs Prairie Division, which includes Saskatchewan, Manitoba and northwestern Ontario, there were two trespassing accidents  one of which resulted in a fatality.

Prevention is always the best way of doing it, Jardine said. Anytime we can get the message (out) in advance and get some of these important lessons across before something bad happens, its always best.

The message is especially important for pre-teens at King George School, located just north of a set of train tracks in Brandons east end. Chrest, a King George alumnus, told students its especially important for them to avoid the tracks.

Jardine has been collaborating with the city to post signage near tracks that advises: See tracks, think train.

Tom Bateman/The Brandon Sun CN Police Service Const. Joe Jardine speaks to King George School students about trespassing near train tracks as a part of Rail Safety Week on Wednesday.

When you see tracks, you may not see a train, you may not hear a train, but look for one because they do move faster than they appear sometimes, Fenske said.

What has kept Jardine busy in the Brandon area recently is actually driving offences.

People seem to get confused that a flashing red light means stop, he said. For some reason here in Brandon, we seem to think it means accelerate and try and get in front of the train.

 tbateman@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @tombatemann
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An ecstatic Len Isleifson is still letting his historic Brandon East win sink in a week after the provincial election, and admits there will be a steep learning curve as he gets acquainted with his new role.

Both Isleifson and re-elected Brandon West MLA Reg Helwer took a seat around the enormous caucus table on Wednesday, joining premier-designate Brian Pallister and 37 other members of the Progressive Conservative caucus.

The first caucus meeting today to bring us all on board and bring us together as a team has been a tremendous benefit, Isleifson said.

Wayne Glowacki/Winnipeg Free Press Premier-designate Brian Pallister addresses the first full caucus meeting of the incoming Progressive Conservative government at the legislature on Wednesday.

Helwer said it was great to congratulate their colleagues in person, including Pallister.

We havent seen him personally since the election, Helwer said. So its a very exciting time and a wonderful group of people. We see the team coming together behind the scenes. I think Manitoba is going to be very well served, a lot of optimism out there.

The meeting was held in a legislature committee room because there was not enough space in the Tory caucus office, which housed 19 politicians before the April 19 election.

Its great to be part of a caucus of 40 people, Helwer said.

That is just absolutely astounding, great team to work with now and weve heard a lot of great stories about the campaign trail as weve gone ahead.

Pallister and his cabinet will be sworn into office May 3. Hes to spell out his governments agenda in a throne speech May 16 and deliver a budget about two weeks later.

Helwer said looking forward, a major priority for Brandon will be attracting more jobs.

They want to have more employment in the Westman region, more security, and economic development is a platform Ive run on before, he said.

We know that we can work hard to make sure that jobs come to Manitoba.

Isleifson said lower taxes, better services and education are his general priorities.

The future looks bright  we have 40 energized people sitting around the table, ready and willing to work hard for Manitobans and its going to be an exciting time, Isleifson said.

Pallister twice mentioned unity in a short opening speech and touted it as one reason why the party scored a big electoral victory that saw the NDP ousted after 16 years in power.

We had the best campaign Ive ever been part of, ever seen. Tremendous unity, tremendous consistent messaging. A philosophy that came through in the work of each of us as individuals and all of us together, he said.

Pallister also stressed the importance of unity going forward, and contrasted it with infighting in the NDP government that saw Premier Greg Selinger fend off an attempted caucus coup last year.

We must replace dysfunction with unity. We must replace ideology with innovation and we must replace waste with real results for Manitobans.

Unity for the Tories should not be a big hurdle in the immediate future, because party members are happy to be back in government for the first time since 1999, said political analyst Royce Koop.

Keeping the caucus happy in the long run could be a challenge, said Koop, who teaches political science at the University of Manitoba.

Pallister has promised to shrink cabinet and will have more than 25 backbenchers who will not have the prestige or pay of a minister.

The problem with big majorities is that there are more personalities and egos that you have to worry about, and more sometimes-conflicting interests that need to be balanced with each other, Koop said.

It takes more massaging of egos, and this is something that Mr. Pallister has to do.

Pallister said there will be tasks for everyone.

There will be lots of opportunities for people to contribute  and everyone will have a job, I assure you.

Pallister is also looking at the provinces finances and seeing what commitments by the outgoing NDP he is bound by. A fiscal update presented in March revealed the provincial deficit last year had more than doubled to $773 million.

Pallister was unable to say Wednesday whether he is bound by two major NDP hirings earlier this year: former Quebec premier Jean Charest to study rail-line relocation in Winnipeg and former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge to review the provinces balanced-budget law.

All of us are learning every day, he said.

Im getting briefings on a fairly regular basis and well address the issues head on as we need to when we become government.

 jaustin@brandonsun.com, with files from The Canadian Press

 Twitter: @jillianaustin
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This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CALGARY  Employees at Calfrac Well Services Ltd. are being forced to give up pay certainty as low commodity prices hammer the providers of well fracking services credited with creating the current North American oil and gas glut.

In a news release Thursday, the company confirmed that it has joined rivals who have abandoned the previous industry norm of paying a regular salary and moved to variable pay for its Canadian fracturing and coiled tubing field employees.

That means staff are paid only when they and their gear are working. Calfrac also said it has adjusted work schedules to save money.

Calgary-based Canyon Services Group Inc. broke with the tradition last year, increasing the number of its staff receiving variable pay to 74 per cent from just 10 per cent. The largest Canadian provider of so-called pressure pumping services, Trican Well Service Ltd., confirmed in early April that its field staff will go to variable pay on June 1.

On Thursday, Calfrac (TSX:CFW) reported first-quarter revenue of $216 million, down 64 per cent from the same period last year. It posted an operating loss of $11.6 million compared with a gain of $27.8 million in first quarter 2015.

While this downturn has, perhaps, lasted longer than expected, there are many reasons  which lead me to believe that the market will improve in the coming 12 to 18 months, Calfrac chief executive Fernando Aguilar said on a morning call, adding that low demand has prompted predatory pricing by some competitors.

He said variable pay will help Calfrac offset anticipated second-quarter losses due to lower demand in Canada.

Mark Salkeld, president of the Petroleum Services Alliance of Canada, said his members want to both survive and retain key employees.

They call that the mercenary style  just pay them when you need them, he said. There are companies out there that have no debt and theyre burning up cash keeping their payrolls full  so that when it does turn around, theyve got the people. So theres a whole blend of strategies.

In March, Calfrac laid off 500 people for total staff cuts of 2,300 since early 2015, leaving it with 1,200 employees in its Canadian, U.S. and international operations.

In a note to investors, analyst Andrew Bradford of Raymond James said Calfracs adjusted earnings fell $4 million due to restructuring charges, but he praised the company for trying to get a handle on its net debt of $808 million.

Calfrac has 50 per cent of its Canadian fleet and 60 per cent of its U.S. equipment parked. The company plans to cut its capital budget in 2016 by a further $10 million to $40 million.

Trican (TSX:TCW) has cut its staff by 75 per cent in the past 16 months to 1,740 while selling pressure pumping operations in the United States and Russia to pare debt and retreating from positions in Australia, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Colombia to save money.

Meanwhile, family-owned Sanjel Corp., the largest private fracking firm in Canada, has entered court protection from creditors while breaking up and selling its Canadian and U.S. operations.

Only 12 per cent of the Canadian fleet of 677 drilling rigs were working in March, according to the Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors, and that fell this week to only six per cent due in part to spring road bans on heavy equipment.

Pressure pumping crews use truck-mounted equipment to inject liquids and sand under high pressure into underground formations to break up the rock and allow trapped oil and gas to flow into the well.

 With files from Lauren Krugel

Follow @HealingSlowly on Twitter.
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This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MIRABEL, Que.  Bombardier received a major boost Thursday after Delta Air Lines agreed to buy up to 125 CSeries planes, a blockbuster deal that would be the largest for the troubled passenger jet program.

But Alain Bellemare, CEO of the Montreal-based aerospace manufacturer, was quick to dismiss any suggestion that the agreement could diminish the need for federal assistance, saying he remains hopeful Ottawa will come through with its US$1 billion request.

We would welcome the participation of the federal government to add financial flexibility to what were doing in terms of the CSeries, but also our ability to keep investing in aerospace in the future, right here in Canada, Bellemare said in an interview.

Alain Bellemare, left, president and CEO of Bombardier Inc., and Ed Bastian, right, CEO of Delta Air Lines, shake hands in front of a Delta-branded Bombardier C-Series jet in Mirabel, Que., on Thursday, April 28, 2016. Bombardier received a major boost Thursday from Delta Air Lines, which has placed a firm order for 75 CS100 aircraft with options for an additional 50 more in what would be the largest order for the Montreal company's troubled CSeries passenger jet program. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

Delta has placed a firm order for 75 CS100 aircraft with options for an additional 50 more.

Based on the list price, the firm order is valued at approximately US$5.6 billion, Bombardier said. Delivery of the aircraft to Delta, one of the largest airlines in the world, is expected to begin in 2018.

This is a big win, Bombardier CEO Alain Bellemare said earlier during a conference call with investors.

Ed Bastian, Deltas incoming CEO, said Quebecs support of US$1 billion to the CSeries program was essential in his companys decision to purchase the planes.

It gave us a lot of confidence to be able to step forward and make the decision, he said.

The last thing you want to do is take a financial risk around a big investment that were making as a company, not just the manufacturer is making.

Bombardier (TSX:BBD.B) has been at the centre of political controversy in recent months and its banking on the success of its CSeries planes to revive its flagging fortunes.

Earlier this year, the company announced it was cutting 7,000 jobs over two years, including roughly 3,000 in Canada, months after the Quebec government pledged public money for the aircraft manufacturer.

The federal Liberals are considering a request for another US$1 billion in funding for one of Canadas biggest global competitors. Bombardier employs more than 70,000 people around the world and exports roughly 95 per cent of its products.

The governments of Quebec and Ontario, both provinces where Bombardier has an extensive presence, have urged Ottawa to provide financial assistance.

Bombardier has also earned the wrath of Torontos public transit system, which has seen its order for more than 200 streetcars encounter numerous delays.

Bellemare conceded that he is disappointed with the performance of Bombardiers railway division, especially with the Toronto Transit Commission order. But he said he is confident Bombardier will resolve the problem.

Its not about the quality of the products, he said. Its about the challenges we have on the manufacturing side and we will address them.

The CSeries is Bombardiers new generation of aircraft for commercial airlines and has been in development for more than a decade as an alternative to smaller models of passenger jets built by rivals Boeing and Airbus, two companies that also receive hefty state support.

The aircraft is about two years behind schedule and at least US$2 billion over budget.

The Delta order came as Bombardier, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported a first-quarter loss attributable to shareholders of US$161 million or seven cents per share. That compared with a profit attributable to shareholders of US$98 million or five cents per share a year ago.

Revenue for the quarter fell to US$3.14 billion compared with nearly US$4.4 billion in the first three months of 2015.

The Quebec governments first of two payments to Bombardier has been postponed due to unspecified issues including liquidity, according to Premier Philippe Couillard.

In reporting its results Thursday, Bombardier said that with the investment by the Quebec government, it has enough cash to turn itself around, but additional money would increase its flexibility.

We consider that these resources will enable the development of new products to enhance our competitiveness and support our growth; will allow the payment of dividends, if and when declared by the board of directors; and will enable us to meet all other expected financial requirements in the foreseeable future, the company said in its earnings report.

Bellemare declined to answer when asked why taxpayers should pay for the restoration of Bombardier dividends, which were suspended last year.

Bombardier has signed other deals in recent months to sell the planes, including a letter of intent in February where Air Canada would buy 45 CSeries jets, with an option to purchase up to 30 more of the aircraft.

Swiss International Air Lines is scheduled to be the first carrier to put the plane into commercial service in July.

Bombardier will hold its annual general meeting Friday.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

HALIFAX  Capitalizing on export opportunities represented by Chinas burgeoning middle class is one of the keys to growing Nova Scotias economy, says Premier Stephen McNeil.

McNeil announced a new strategy Thursday aimed at increasing the provinces access to the worlds second largest economy.

He said there are no export or job targets included in what amounts to a broad expression of the provinces intent to increase trade.

Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil and Luo Zhaohui, China's ambassador to Canada, meet in Halifax on Thursday, April 28, 2016. The province is working to strengthen trade with China, building on their relationship in the education sector and seafood industries. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

I think the potential is limitless, said McNeil. As we see the growth of the middle class in China there is a hunger for high-quality product and we have high quality product.

China is currently Nova Scotias second largest trading partner after the U.S., with provincial exports totalling $420 million in 2015. The figure lags well behind U.S. exports at $3.75 billion, but is an increase of more than 50 per cent over 2014.

Seafood exports, particularly live lobster, have led the way, growing from $14 million in 2009 to $208 million in 2015.

The strategy puts the provinces focus on its competitive strengths in areas such as seafood, education, IT and tourism. It identifies a need to strengthen relationships within the Chinese business community and to support Nova Scotia businesses which already have access to Chinas market.

The province says it will also seek to generate more formal agreements similar to a memorandum of understanding signed with Chinas education ministry in 2007 and like the recently signed ocean tech agreement between Dalhouise University and Shandong University.

Kevin Lynch, vice chairman of BMO Financial Group, said a concerted effort is needed by business and government to continue to push into the Chinese market.

Its a lot easier to go as a broad-based business community. I think this (strategy) is basically saying its time for the whole business community to actually take on board China.

Lynch said China is open to new relationships and Nova Scotia is well poised to take advantage of that attitude.

McNeil believes one-on-one meetings are important to open the way for provincial businesses to conclude future deals.

He said his office is planning a trip to China in early September. It would be McNeils third trade mission to the country since being elected in 2013.
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.
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HALIFAX - A Halifax-based company has been awarded a $15-million contract to design software for the navy's Arctic offshore patrol ships.

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Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/04/2016 (2371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CALGARY  The death of Hanne Schafer was by any definition a nightmare.

Suffering from the painful, degenerative neurological disease ALS, the 66-year-old could communicate only by typing with some of the fingers on her left hand. Her husband had to regularly suction the saliva out of her throat so she wouldnt choke. He had to lift her onto the toilet so she could go to the bathroom.

She was like a butterfly trapped in a cocoon, recalled Daniel Laurin, who on Wednesday won in court the right to make his wifes name public so he could tell her story. Thats the way that she explained she felt.

As horribly difficult as international travel would have been, the Calgary psychologist had been planning to travel to Switzerland to have a physician-assisted death when she learned Canadas Supreme Court had ordered the federal government to come up with assisted-dying legislation.

Patients were told they could get permission from a judge while that was in the works, so Schafer, her husband, and their friend Mary Valentich, a social worker, started making calls.

She decided to go to court instead of Switzerland, said Laurin. It wasnt an easy thing to do. It was a very difficult and emotional thing for everybody.

Valentich said despite the efforts of a large group of friends, they were unable to find a Calgary doctor willing to help Shafer die. A doctor in Holland finally put them in touch with Dr. Ellen Wiebe, a Vancouver activist who believes strongly in the right to die and who, on Feb. 29, was at Shafers side in the B.C. city when her life came to an end.

Valentich said the hurdles were constant. Getting a pharmacist to fill the prescription for her life-ending drugs was difficult and even finding a lawyer to take on the case was not that straightforward.

When they went to court for permission to have a doctor help end Shafers life, they ran into another snag. She asked for a publication ban on her name, with the intent it would expire at her death.

But Laurin said there was a misunderstanding, and he discovered that after her death the publication ban remained in force. That meant he couldnt even publish her obituary.

Hanne was very well known here, he said. She did a lot of good work, helped a lot of people. She wanted her story told.

On Wednesday, a judge agreed to lift the ban, though the court and medical documents in the case will remain sealed.

Laurin said he was glad to be able to finally talk about his wife, though he said Wednesdays victory does nothing to erase her loss and the terrible months leading up to her death.

It should have been easier, he said. Why does a person have to go through that?

Valentich described her friend as a trailblazer who knew very well that her fight might stand to benefit others after she was gone.

The way in which she was an agent of her own death was really very moving. It was a peaceful death, unlike some of the other deaths Ive witnessed.

Shafers husband agreed.

Hanne was a very bright and very quick lady, he said. Hanne, to me, was a genius. Very, very smart. She knew what she was doing. There was nothing wrong with her brain. She knew how she wanted it done, and when she decided to have it done, she wanted it done as quickly as possible.

He described with unabashed admiration the long hours of work she put into arranging her death, sitting on the computer for hours tapping out emails and searching for information with the few fingers she had that worked.

She should, he said, have been able to die in her own bed.

Now, he looks forward to continuing his wifes fight.

I want to be an activist for people who are sick and who are suffering, he said adamantly. Its not right, the way the government is handling this. Nobody wants to get their hands dirty at all. They all want to give it to a committee, and then the committees going to give it to somebody else.

It was only at the suggestion that she was lucky to have such a loving and supportive husband that Laurin broke down in tears.

Well, he said between sobs, I was lucky I had her.

 by Gwen Dambrofsky in Edmonton
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/04/2016 (2371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A prowler who broke into eight homes  sometimes as residents slept in their beds  and helped himself to belongings and cars is going to be locked up.

But Julius Joseph McKay will have to wait to see how long behind bars hell have to spend as a judge now considers his fate.

The residents were home in some of the cases, asleep, when Mr. McKay broke in, Crown attorney Brett Rach said in court on Monday, quoting a woman whose home was violated.

To think that a total stranger went through my home while I was sound asleep is very frightening, she wrote in a victim impact statement. What would have happened had I awoke and confronted him?

Eighteen-year-old McKay burgled eight homes and stole five vehicles in less than a month, between July 5 and Aug. 2, 2015.

In six cases, residents were home asleep when McKay broke in. In one case, not only were the residents there sleeping, but so were guests.

He took car keys and stole vehicles from four of the residences.

He hit one victim twice. He broke into a Cornell Bay home and stole two sets of car keys. He took a pickup truck from the residence one night, then returned two days later to steal another truck.

McKay drove one of the stolen cars to the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation, picked up friends and drove them to Winnipeg and back.

Electronics were a favourite to take, but the swiped items also included a wedding ring, medications, debit and credit cards, wallets, purses and cash.

Rach said McKay sold the stolen goods to pay for his drug addiction and to buy groceries.

The stolen cars and trucks were driven between Brandon and Sioux Valley and then abandoned in those communities, Rach said.

The Crown asked Judge John Combs to sentence McKay to three to five years in prison, minus 327 days credit for pre-sentence custody.

Defence counsel Philip Sieklicki asked Combs to consider a sentence of two-and-a-half years custody minus presentence credit for his client, whose troubles include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and a childhood of neglect and abuse.

Combs reserved his decision and will sentence McKay on May 24.

 ihitchen@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @IanHitchen
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/04/2016 (2371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Wheat Citys head honcho took jabs from colleagues and old friends during last nights Breakfast for Dinner roast  a fundraiser for the Canadian Diabetes Association.

Mayor Rick Chrest was the guest of honour, after he willingly accepted the invitation.

Im kind of an open book, and thats for good and bad so to speak, he said. Not much humiliates me, and Im pretty good at laughing at myself  Its certainly for a good cause and they tend to be a little bit of fun and Im all for that.

Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun Mayor Rick Chrest smiles as former politician Rick Borotsik gestures while telling a funny story about Chrest during the Breakfast for Dinner Roast of Mayor Rick Chrest at the Victoria Inn on Tuesday evening. Others roasters included Garry Bell, Jeff Fawcett and Scott Hildebrand. Proceeds from the event will go to the Canadian Diabetes Association.

Chrest was teased about his long-winded tendencies, his messy desk and his habit of talking with his hands, among many other zingers.

City manager Scott Hildebrand described a new mayor mobile to help with the citys mosquito abatement program.

This thing would drive up and down the city streets of Brandon and if you had a mosquito problem, of course you start talking to Rick and asking questions. His hands will do all the work for you, Hildebrand said. If youre one of those people that prefer a buffer zone, then you just need to not talk to Rick and hopefully his hands will stay at bay.

Hildebrand asked Chrest to sign off on a waiver at the beginning of the night so he still had a job today.

I think its an important event that the mayors being a really good sport about, Hildebrand said. Well have a good time, well share a few laughs and at the end of the day, were all going to remain friends.

Other roasters included Coun. Jeff Fawcett (Assiniboine), Chrests lifelong friend and retired deputy fire chief Garry Bell and former mayor Rick Borotsik.

Ive known Rick as a child, as an adolescent and as an adult  all in the same day, Borotsik quipped.

I give him full marks, this isnt his first time being roasted, and its for a very good cause. The fact of the matter is, hes prepared to take the shots for that cause, so thats good.

The event was held at the Victoria Inn and presented by NetSet Communications.

It was the brainchild of Coun. John LoRegio (Meadows-Waverly), whose day job is Westman co-ordinator with the Canadian Diabetes Association. Funds raised will go toward the CDA programming in Westman, information sessions, education sessions, etc.

At the end of the night, it was Chrests turn to take aim at the roasters. For Borotsik, he announced that he and council were naming a room in city hall after Borotsik  it will be called the Rotunda.

He teased Fawcett for his unruly hair and flying into meetings five minutes late. But in spite of Fawcetts desire to talk a lot, it was concluded that he loses that prize to LoRegio. He went after Hildebrands extremely neat desk in contrast to his own busy desk and concluded who has the most on the go.

Chrest ended the evening by saying Groucho Marx once said, Ive had a perfectly wonderful evening. Unfortunately this wasnt it.

 jaustin@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @jillianaustin
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Sixties Scoop survivor from Brandon believes a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government will help bring closure for thousands of aboriginals who were taken from their homes and put up for adoption.

Marlene Orgeron, 43, was a toddler when provincial officials, acting on behalf of the federal government through the Adopt Indian Metis program, seized her from her aunts and uncles home in Shoal Lake.

Orgeron, who was taken along with her two older brothers, was adopted into a non-aboriginal family from New Orleans.

File photo Sixties Scoop survivor and Brandon resident Marlene Orgeron, back row second from right, listens to Premier Greg Selinger offer an apology from the people of Manitoba during question period in the legislature in this June 2015 photo.

I think its a long time coming, Orgeron said about the motion that was filed on April 20 with the Court of Queens Bench in Winnipeg and seeks $250 million in damages  $200 million for the government breaching its fiduciary duty and negligence and $50 million for punitive damages.

The lawsuit, which was filed by Koskie Minsky LLP, alleges that Priscilla Meeches and Stewart Garnett were deprived of their aboriginal identity and culture after they were adopted into non-aboriginal families.

Meeches and Garnett are originally from Long Plain First Nation, located southwest of Portage la Prairie along the Assiniboine River.

The lawsuit alleges both plaintiffs suffer from a myriad of problems as a result of their disconnect to their heritage, including mental, emotional, spiritual and physical distress.

Orgeron, who now works as a mental health proctor in Brandon, can relate.

I live my life every day as a productive member of society, but to talk about it, those things dont go away. That hurt doesnt get better, she said while fighting through tears.

For a time in her life, Orgeron soothed the pain inside her with drugs and alcohol. At one point, she wanted to die so the pain would stop.

Every day is still an ongoing healing process.

I think children that were taken from their families without their permission should be compensated for their loss, she said. I know there is a lot of cultural and family loss.

Originally from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation, Orgeron still remembers being ripped from her crying uncles arms in 1978. An official told her uncle, who was Irish, he had no right to the children. Her aunt, who is aboriginal, wasnt home when they were seized.

At 21, Orgeron returned to Manitoba from the United States in a bid to connect with her biological family. Despite several attempts, a chasm between her siblings still exists.

People dont understand what its like to come back and meet a brother who you dont have a connection to, she said.

Last year, the Manitoba government apologized for the provinces role in the practice of taking aboriginal children from their homes and adopting them into white families, often from the U.S. and Europe.

While the practice was dubbed the Sixties Scoop, it continued into the mid-1980s.

The class-action lawsuit, which allows several people to sue on behalf of a much larger group, includes any children placed in the care of non-aboriginal foster or adoptive parents since Sept. 2, 1966.

Its the first such lawsuit launched against the federal government after a Saskatchewan law firm, the Merchant Law Group, filed a motion in 2015.

Lawyer Scott Robinson helped file the statement of claim. He believes the government needs to pay for its role creating the program and the thousands of victims it left in its wake.

Theyve basically been neglected, Robinson said. We believe they have had no access to justice in respect to the wrongs that were perpetrated on them in the past.

In Manitoba, class members  in this case someone affected by the Sixties Scoop  dont have to register with the law firm in order to be compensated should the class be certified and the case won.

Anyone who meets the class definition would be considered a class member, Robinson said.

Manitoba is considered an opt-out province, so typically the onus is on them to be removed from the class action if they want to.

The class is expected to be in the thousands.

Robinson encourages anyone who may have been affected and wants to have a conversation to email the firm at manitoba60sscoopclassaction@kmlaw.ca

This is a prime example of the positive and sometimes social justice role that class action lawsuits can play in society, Robinson said. It would have been incredibly difficult for these persons to litigate these cases on their own, almost impossible  especially when youre going against a public actor like the government which has potentially unlimited litigation resources. It would be a daunting task.

For Orgeron, the case is about more than money. Its about the continued reconciliation between the Canadian government and aboriginals.

Its not just about the compensation, its about the government acknowledging their wrong, Orgeron said. That what they did was wrong and that they are sorry.

 ctweed@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @CharlesTweed
Press Release:

Contact:

Crystal Feldman

govpress@nc.gov

Raleigh, N.C. Governor Pat McCrory, North Carolina Commerce Secretary John E. Skvarla, III, and the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina (EDPNC) announced today that an expansion by Aurobindo Pharma USA, Inc. will bring 275 new R&D and pharma-manufacturing jobs to Durham. The New Jersey-based maker of generic pharmaceuticals plans to invest over $31.7 million in a new state-of-the-art national headquarters for specialty pharmaceutical R&D.said Governor McCrory.Aurobindo Pharma USA is a unit of Aurobindo Pharma Limited, headquartered in Hyderabad, India. The publicly-held parent company (BSE: AUROPHARMA) was founded in 1986. It is a leading maker of semi-synthetic penicillins and offers therapeutics for neurosciences, cardiovascular, anti-retrovirals, anti-diabetics and gastroenterology. In 2015, Forbes Asia named Aurobindo Pharma to its "Fabulous 50" list. The company employs a worldwide workforce of 15,500.said Secretary Skvarla.Aurobindo Pharma USA will establish a new R&D and manufacturing center in Durham. The company currently employs 14 scientists/workers in Raleigh. Among the new employees will be researchers, analytical chemists, production operators, quality control specialists and others. Aurobindo's expanded operations in North Carolina will create a $17.1 million annual payroll impact for Durham and surrounding counties.said Dr. Ninad Deshpanday, President, R&D, Aurobindo Pharma USA, Inc.The company's North Carolina expansion will be facilitated, in part, by an award to the company from the state's Job Development Investment Grant (JDIG) program, which was approved earlier today by the state's Economic Investment Committee. Under the terms of the company's JDIG, Aurobindo Pharma USA is eligible to receive up to $3.8 million in total reimbursements. Payments will occur in annual installments over 12 years pending verification by NC Commerce and NC Revenue that the company has met incremental job creation and investment targets. JDIGs reimburse new and expanding companies a portion of the newly created tax-base with the goal of increasing the overall tax benefit to the State of North Carolina. This JDIG is contingent upon the approval of an appropriate match by local governments or organizations.By law, JDIG-supported projects must result in a net revenue inflow to the state treasury over the life of the award. For projects in Tier 3 counties such as Durham County, 25 percent of the award amount is directed to the state's Industrial Development Fund  Utility Account to help finance economic infrastructure in less populated Tier 1 and Tier 2 counties. Aurobindo Pharma USA's North Carolina expansion could provide as much as $1.2 million in new funds for the Utility Account. Additional information on county tier designations may be found at nccommerce.com Since Governor McCrory took office in January 2013, North Carolina's economy has created more than 270,000 net new private sector jobs.Joining NC Commerce and EDPNC in helping facilitate Aurobindo Pharma USA's expansion is the North Carolina General Assembly, the North Carolina Community College System, Durham Technical Community College, Durham County, the City of Durham, the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce and NC Biotechnology Center.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/04/2016 (2371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VICTORIA  Premier Christy Clark is defending her annual stipend of up to $50,000 from British Columbias Liberal party, on top of her $195,000 annual salary.

Its been publicly disclosed since 1993, Clark told reporters Wednesday about a policy the Liberal party called a long-standing tradition. I guess I would have happily disclosed it last year if youd asked me.

Clark was fending off attacks from NDP Leader John Horgan, who alleged she benefits from donations at high-priced Liberal fundraisers.

Big money is staying in politics largely because the premiers benefiting from it, he said.

We tabled legislation just two weeks ago and the Liberals voted against it. We want union and corporate donations to be gone, Horgan said. Because of her fundraising activities the Liberals have money to top up her salary, and thats wrong.

Quebecs Liberal party had a similar policy but did away with it, he said.

Clark said the NDP also raises money with exclusive soirees and the B.C. Liberals raise money as well.

We all do that under the rules in the province. Weve done it for a long time in British Columbia, she said.

The issue for us is to make sure that we always separate our public duties from any sources of funding for our political party.

The Liberal party and an official in Clarks office said former premier Gordon Campbell received a $90,000 stipend at one point.

Clark declares her premiers allowance on her annual public disclosure documents, but the amounts are not specified.

She has said she attends exclusive fundraising events organized by the Liberal party, but does not know how much people pay to attend.

B.C.s conflict-of-interest commissioner is reviewing separate complaints from New Democrat David Eby and Democracy Watch co-founder Duff Conacher claiming the fundraising events that Clark attends violate policies that prohibit the acceptance of gifts.

Paul Fraser later confirmed in a letter to Conacher that he would investigate both complaints and issue one opinion on the matter.

Eby amended his complaint on Wednesday in a letter to Fraser, saying the allowances Clark receives from the Liberal party are a direct financial benefit.

Simply because the donation money from these private dinners briefly visits the B.C. Liberal Party before ending up in Ms. Clarks pocket does not, for the purposes of the act, eliminate the direct personal, financial benefit she experiences from these large donations, the letter said.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/04/2016 (2371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SASKATOON  A First Nations high school student in Saskatoon is giving the prime minister a failing grade for one of his answers.

Grade 12 student Tahris Bear asked Justin Trudeau at an event at her school Wednesday how hell right the wrongs faced by Canadas indigenous peoples and why he allows them to live in Third World conditions.

Trudeau said Ottawa cant fix the situation on its own, adding that previous, well-meaning federal governments tried, but with horrible consequences.

He said everyone would have to work together.

But Bear said afterward that she didnt think Trudeau answered her question.

She said he didnt offer up any concrete actions for what steps the government would take to make the living conditions better.

His answer, honestly, went into one ear, out the other, said Bear. I was trying really hard to focus on what he was saying, but what he said did not have really, almost anything to do with my question.

Trudeau also talked about renewing the relationship with First Nations people.

Yes, the federal government has a lot of work to do, but indigenous Canadians have a lot of work to do as well and doing it together, in the same direction is going to be how we get through it, said Trudeau.

Earlier this month, a young man in the troubled First Nation of Attawapiskat asked the federal indigenous affairs minister why his community was living in Third World conditions while Canada is greeting refugees with open arms.

Trudeau said April 8 that First Nations communities struggling with persistent Third World conditions should begin seeing some help from Ottawa this year.

The prime minister told Bear that $8.4-billion over five years is planned to help improve conditions for indigenous people.

Its a good start, but this is going to take many more years and many more billions of dollars to fix a relationship that has been broken for centuries, as you point out, he said.
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Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG  How can we create opportunities for our young people, especially those from indigenous communities? What will climate change mean for Manitobas communities and what should they do to prepare?

What types of construction materials are scientifically proven to last in the provinces extreme climate, and how can they reduce the long-term costs of infrastructure? How can we ensure the province has a ready supply of medical isotopes, which are essential in diagnosing cancer? How can we sustain, grow and diversify Manitobas rural and urban communities so they are safe and economically strong?

These are a few of the questions guiding the work of some of the worlds best researchers here in Manitoba. Almost everyone agrees education is integral to future success and prosperity (it was clear from the recent provincial election that education is a top priority for most Manitobans). Post-secondary education is not just about preparing students for future jobs; universities also provide the space and infrastructure to collaborate with government, private and non-profit sectors to solve some of societys most persistent challenges.

University research drives innovation and strengthens the economy. According to Statistics Canada, universities performed more than

$13 billion in research and development in 2014, accounting for 40 per cent of total Canadian R&D. That includes research in the business sector to improve competitive advantages, as well as in the non-profit sector. Sound research can and does improve the quality of life for all Canadians.

Manitoba universities are leaders in working with indigenous communities and building pathways to higher education. Currently, there is a gap between the graduation and employment rates of indigenous and non-indigenous Manitobans. First Nations, Metis and Inuit youth are the fastest-growing population groups in the province and their full participation in society is essential to Manitobas future prosperity.

This is critically important. According to federal government estimates, 70 per cent of jobs created in the coming decade will require some post-secondary education. Our collective path forward includes a skilled and educated indigenous workforce. Manitobas universities are working with indigenous people to accomplish this goal while creating an environment that integrates indigenous history, perspectives and knowledge.

The incoming Progressive Conservative government promoted a vision of a better Manitoba that includes opportunities for young people so they can stay in the province and build their careers while contributing to its economic strength.

As Manitobas economy continues to evolve, graduates from its institutions are able to consistently adapt to ever-changing environments. Our students learn an important set of skills that have immense value no matter where they are applied. In learning how to solve problems and think critically, we are equipping Manitobas graduates to lead, innovate and be successful no matter what changes the future may bring.

Manitobas universities are ready to work in collaboration with the new provincial and federal governments, municipalities, indigenous communities and the private and non-profit sectors to propel Manitoba forward.

 David T. Barnard is the current chairman of the Council of Presidents of Universities of Manitoba and the president of the University of Manitoba. Annette Trimbee is the incoming chairwoman of COPUM and president and vice-chancellor of the University of Winnipeg.
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 28/04/2016 (2370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is a cautious toe in the water. Manitoba Hydro is slowly testing Manitobans taste for exploring new ways of supplying power to their homes and businesses. It is offering subsidies to take some of the sting out of the relatively high cost of installing solar panels, an investment with a lengthy payback time.

It may amount to a token effort, but the state of green energy planning in Manitoba is such that some observers regard it as a welcome development. Energy planning in this province has been left to a Crown utility focused almost entirely on building dams and pushing water over turbines.

Hydroelectricity is renewable, and therefore touted as clean energy, but this strategy now has Manitobans staring at annual rate hikes of four per cent for 20 years to finance a multibillion-dollar capital plan many believe is dangerously flawed.

There was some effort to get wind energy up and running in the early 2000s, but when was the last time you heard the provincial government announce a new turbine? Once a

must-mention in environmental planning, wind energy fell off the NDPs radar, even as outgoing premier Greg Selinger was branding himself David Suzukis best friend last year.

Back in 2005, the provincial government and Manitoba Hydro issued a joint expression of interest to develop 1,000 megawatts of wind energy over the following decade. While there was, eventually, a wind farm constructed and completed in St. Joseph south of Winnipeg in 2011, its only capable of delivering 138 megawatts of power. By comparison, the long-standing set of wind turbines in St. Leon delivers 99 megawatts.

In truth, Hydro officials were never keen on incorporating wind energy  which it had to purchase from private companies  into its existing electrical grid. Not having direct control over the flow of energy was putting the Crown corporation out of its comfort zone.

This became perfectly obvious when Hydro pulled the plug on a proposed 175-megawatt farm near Manitou in 2014, and instead focused its energies on building the Keeyask and Conawapa generating stations. As the Winnipeg Free Press reported two years ago, Hydro stated in filings to the Public Utilities Board that it believes wind generation isnt dependable enough to expand it beyond the St. Leon and St. Joseph wind farms.

Meanwhile, south of the border, wind power production in North Dakota and Minnesota has ramped up impressively. Since 2005, the former has increased its wind power capacity from 98 megawatts to 2,143 MW; Minnesota has been similarly ambitious, going from 745 to 3,235 MW. Manitobas wind capacity sits at a mere 237 MW, with turbines spinning at St. Leon and St. Joseph.

The fact is there is a global awakening to big changes in wind and solar technology, developments that have altered the economics of alternative energies. A new generation of batteries is on the horizon, a development that makes solar energy, particularly, all the more attractive  the sun does not shine to match the rhythm of a busy household. And there are smaller changes that can save homeowners money; new window technology is being developed to better keep the summer heat out and the winter warmth in.

But only policy wonks talk about this stuff in Manitoba, where homeowners and commercial operations are continually told they have (almost) the cheapest rates in North America. And little wonder alternative energy is a sleepy issue. Hydro is in the business of selling hydroelectricity; much of its staff is tied directly to its multibillion-dollar capital plan.

Financing that plan, predicated on projections of domestic need, is based on selling hydro to Manitobans (the export market is not so lucrative anymore). Thats an inherent conflict when it comes to any talk of looking at alternatives, such as using less or shifting to alternative energy sources  an effort Hydro calls demand-side management. Indeed, Hydro has underspent its energy conservation budget by $35 million since 2012.

The provincial government, which takes about $300 million in levies from the Crown corporation annually, also is conflicted in moving people off hydroelectricity. And thats a problem, as alternative energy is becoming more cost-effective. The solar panel that costs $1,000 today gets to look a little more attractive as hydro rates, expected to double in 15 years, rise.

So who speaks for the interests of ratepayers, for environmental planning and positioning the province for that new economy? There is a way to ensure those interests are fed into government policy and Hydros plans. But its not done by a shell game that ostensibly moves demand-side management planning from Hydro into a subsidiary of the corporation, as the NDP had planned.

That job should be given to a new, independent energy authority, an agency that was long ago imagined but never got off the drawing board. Premier-designate Brian Pallister made this an election promise. He should be sitting down with Hydros board soon to plot the way forward.

 Winnipeg Free Press and The Brandon Sun
E-cigarettes are likely to benefit a smokers health, a new report has concluded, writes Ella Pickover and Evelyn Ring

The British Royal College of Physicians report says e-cigarettes should be widely promoted as a substitute to smoking. The authors conclude that smokers can be reassured and encouraged to use the devices. Experts made a series of conclusions about the devices including: E-cigarettes are not a gateway to smoking, use of e-cigarettes are used mostly by those who are already using, or have used, tobacco; There is no evidence that e-cigarettes result in normalisation of smoking; The devices are beneficial in encouraging smokers to quit.
Intel has indicated there will be job cuts here in Ireland

Staff at the company have been told its Irish operations "will be impacted" by its worldwide restructuring plans.
Planning permission has been granted for the new children's hospital on the site of St. James's Hospital in Dublin.

The acting Health Minister Leo Varadkar has called it 'Great news for all the children of Ireland'.

"It will be the single biggest capital project in the history of Irish Healthcare. The outgoing Government approved funding for the project and included it in the Capital Plan 2016-21.

"Enabling works will begin this summer.

The Minister also thanked the St James's Hospital Board for their support and commitment for the project.

"Building a hospital of this size on the St James's campus will inevitably mean disruption but the St James's Board have embraced this project fully. Co-location of these two leading hospitals will result in a campus of clinical, educational and research excellence that can attract the best and brightest across all disciplines. In the future, the development of a new Coombe Hospital on the campus will bring further benefits, with children and young people, mothers and babies all benefiting from the tri-location of adult, maternity and paediatric services."

CEO of St Jamess Hospital has also welcomed the announcement and said he looks forward to working with the Childrens Hospital Group and the NPHDB on the design and location of the hospital.

As well as this, CEO of the Childrens Hospital Group Eilish Hardiman said the news will positively transform how paediatric services are delivered for children and young people here in Ireland.

However opponents to the location say it would be better on a campus off the M50 motorway.

Campaigners from 'Connolly for Kids Hospital', want the new building moved to Blanchardstown, off the M50, to facilitate traffic.

Spokesman Fin Breathnach has asked the acting Health Minister to intervene: The Government have abrogated responsibility in relation to the selection of the site to An Bord Pleanala.

They really should not have been presented with this site, it was the only site they had to consider, there were no other options made available.

We believe it is the wrong site, if you look at McKensies original report, back in 2006, the number one requirement was space.

Because of the lack of space on the Jamess site, literally everything is compromised."
The jurors have now heard all the prosecutions evidence in the trial of 45-year-old David Mahon, who is accused of murdering his stepson in Dublin.

Dean Fitzpatrick died in the early hours of May 26, 2013, from a deep knife wound to the stomach.

It is the States case that his stepfather stabbed him during an altercation over a stolen water bottle outside his apartment at Northern Cross.

The jury has heard that Mahon told gardai he "panicked" and did not realise the seriousness of what happened during a fight with his stepson.

The 45-year-old, who denies murdering Dean Fitzpatrick, claims he ran into a knife he had taken off him at his apartment at Northern Cross in north Dublin.

David Mahon.

The court heard they argued and Mr Mahon told gardai that Dean grabbed a knife from the kitchen and started waving at him.

He said he took it from him, and later confronted him with it on the landing outside his apartment.

He said he showed it to him and asked why he would pull a knife on his father.

He claims Dean then just came at him and while he saw some blood on the knife afterwards, he did not think it was serious.

He said he would have called an ambulance if he did.

Instead he "panicked" and left the apartment with a friend. He said he threw the knife out a car window as they drove around north Dublin.

He told gardai that Dean would self-harm while they were in Spain and seemed to enjoy it, and he thought maybe he wanted to run on the knife.

The trial continues.
A series of protests have taken place around the country to protest at cuts to mental health funding.

Around 300 people attended a protest in Dublin, after 12m intended for mental health was sent elsewhere by the HSE.

Demostrators heard criticism of the poor turnout at a debate on mental health in the Dail on Tuesday evening.

Mental health campaigner Conor Cusack says TDs needed to take more decisive action.

Mr Cusack told protestors outside the Dail: "Martin Luther King once said, in the end it is not the words of our enemies that we remember, but the silence of our friends.

"Generations of our politicians have ensured that Dail Eireann, our citadel of democracy and debate has been a temple of silence when it comes to the emotional wellbeing and mental health of our people."

Protest against mental health cuts outside Leinster House now #IAmAReason @ciara_cham pic.twitter.com/LGfKOGIXEn  Lisa Chambers (@lichamber) April 28, 2016

A number of mental health advocates also addressed the demonstration in Dublin which is being organised by Mental Health Reform and the Union of Students in Ireland (USI).

The director of Mental Health Reform, Shari McDaid, said: "Mental health needs to be a national priority for the next government".

"For far too long mental health services have been overshadowed by other so-called politically sensitive areas of the health service. It is time to demand parity of esteem for physical and mental health".

People also took to social media using the hashtag '#IAmAReason' to vent their anger at the situation.

Similar demonstrations are being held in Cork and Galway today, but Mental Health Reform say the only event being organised by them is the demonstration outside the Dail.
Prominent Independent TDs have said they cannot agree to support a minority Government led by Fine Gael - until they know the details of a deal between them and Fianna Fail.

The latest reports suggest that Micheal Martin and Enda Kenny have decided on a compromise over Irish Water, suspending charges for nine months.

They have also committed to setting up a commission to examine the future of the charging system.

In the meantime Leinster House is attempting to tackle some regular business, including a discussion on the refugee crisis and a meeting of the housing and homeless committee.

But Independent TD for Kerry, Michael Healy Rae, has said they cannot make progress until Fianna Fail and Fine Gael reveal their plans: In the absence of knowing what we would be agreeing to, there are an awful lot of complications involved in running a minority Government.

There are an awful lot of issues from health to environment to all of those other issues that we are concerned with.

Until we see the colour of what they are saying no one can give a clear answer.

Meanwhile, Independent TD Katherine Zappone has said she did not do a deal to support Enda Kenny For Taoiseach in return for the position of Education Minister.

The newly elected TD backed Enda in a Dail vote a fortnight ago and indicated she is ready to serve.

She says if offered the position she will consider it.

And she has said she just wants to represent the people who voted for her: Well what I would like to do is to have a significant influence in order to bring about the commitments that I made, the manifesto that I was elected on in terms of the people of Dublin South West.
Prescription drugs were discovered with Prince when he was found dead in his home, according to media reports.

Citing law enforcement sources, ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN reported that prescription painkillers were found on the 57-year-old and in his Paisley Park home in Minneapolis.

The Star Tribune, also citing unnamed sources, reported that prescription pills were found but that it was not clear whether they had been prescribed to Prince.

Prince died on April 21, and an autopsy has been performed but results are not expected for three to four weeks.

The star's death came less than a week after reports that his plane made an emergency landing in Moline, Illinois, as he returned after performing in Atlanta.

TMZ reported that Prince was treated for an overdose of the painkiller Percocet.

Airport and public safety officials in Moline have refused to confirm that the plane that made an emergency landing in Moline was Prince's aircraft, and heavily redacted incident reports did not identify the person who was treated.

Carver County Deputy Sheriff Jason Kamerud declined to comment on the reports of drugs found at Paisley Park.

He said he strongly disputed reports by several media outlets that investigators had asked the US Drug Enforcement Administration for help in the case.

Mr Kamerud said: "We have not asked them for help, or asked them to be a part of the investigation.

"We might contact them to help us, but that hasn't happened. We don't have the medical examiner's report yet. We don't know to what extent pharmaceuticals could be a part of this."

Long-time friend and collaborator Sheila E said Prince had physical issues from performing, citing hip and knee problems that she said came from years of jumping off risers and stage speakers in heels.
Update 10.30am

Fourteen patients and medical staff are among those killed in overnight air strikes on a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders in Syria, the aid group said.

Opposition activists and rescue volunteers said the death toll from the strikes that hit the Quds hospital and nearby areas in the rebel part of the contested city of Aleppo rose to at least 27 on Thursday.

The Syrian Civil Defence, a volunteer first-responders agency, said six hospital staff were among the dead, including one of the few paediatricians left in opposition-held areas of Aleppo.

The group put the total death toll at 30 while the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 27 were killed.

Update 8.30am

At least 20 people have been killed in a series of air strikes in northern Syria which hit a hospital and nearby buildings in the city of Aleppo, a Syrian monitoring group and rescue workers said.

The victims included three of the hospital's medical staff.

The head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the air strikes took place shortly before midnight on Wednesday and that at least one child was among the 20 killed.

The Syrian Civil Defence, volunteer first-responders in rebel-held areas, gave a higher toll, saying the strikes on the Quds hospital killed 22.

The dead included one of the few remaining paediatricians in opposition-held areas of the contested city.

The Syrian Civil Defence said there were four consecutive air strikes against the hospital and adjacent buildings.

Earlier, the UN envoy for Syria appealed to the US and Russia to intervene to help revive peace talks.

Staffan de Mistura said a recent spike in fighting had overshadowed the talks and put an increasingly fragile ceasefire in "great danger".

Mr de Mistura was speaking after briefing the UN Security Council about the stalled indirect talks between the Western and Saudi-backed opposition and envoys from President Bashar Assad's government, which has the backing of Moscow.

Mr de Mistura said he hoped the talks would resume in May and predicted the process would continue until July.

Criticising the violence, he said: "In the last 48 hours, we have had an average of one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes ... How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?"

Speaking at the end of a third session of Syria peace talks this year, Mr de Mistura said a truce brokered by the US and Russia had pulled off a "miracle" by sharply reducing violence in March, but acknowledged that the renewed fighting has put the ceasefire "in great danger".

He called for a "US-Russian initiative at the highest level" to help reinforce it.

"There is no reason that both of them - who have been putting so much political capital in that success story and have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war - should not be able to revitalise what they created, and which is still alive, but barely," he said.

The talks stalled last week after the Western and Saudi-backed opposition, the High Negotiations Committee, suspended formal participation in the talks with Assad's envoys in protest at alleged government ceasefire violations, a drop in humanitarian aid deliveries and no progress in winning the release of detainees in Syria.

Mr de Mistura suggested work between Moscow and Washington is already under way to reinforce the truce and a revival of it would help bring the two sides back to the table.

"I know that both the Russian Federation and the US are talking among themselves on how to salvage on what has been actually a remarkable success - but needs to be sustained," he said.

If it is revived, he predicted: "It will not be difficult for everyone to come back around the table."

Mr de Mistura said that, after 60 days, the ceasefire "hangs by a thread".

"I really fear that the erosion of the cessation is unravelling the fragile consensus around a political solution, carefully built over the last year," he said. "Now I see parties reverting to the language of a military solution or military option. We must ensure that they do not see that as a solution or an option."

The current effort to end the five-year Syria conflict was largely spearheaded by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, backed by major global and regional powers who formed the International Syria Support Group. It includes 17 countries as well as the United Nations, Arab League, European Union and Organisation of Islamic Co-operation.
A "dirty old man" known as Father Christmas because of his white bushy beard and big belly has been jailed for 22 months in England for grooming two girls in a pub by attempting to bribe them to show him their "privates".

Lawrence Lewis, of Springwood Avenue, Waterlooville, Hampshire, was sentenced at Portsmouth Crown Court, having pleaded guilty to three charges of inciting a girl under the age of 13 to engage in sexual activity.

Sentencing the 57-year-old, Recorder Shamim Qureshi said it was an unusual case which did not fit within normal sentencing guidelines.

He said: "When Father Christmas turns out to be a dirty old man asking to look at their underpants and private parts, we have a very different situation regarding the Sentencing Council."

The judge banned Lewis from playing the role of Father Christmas, for payment or otherwise, for a period of 10 years as part of a sexual harm prevention order which also restricts him from having any interaction with girls under 16.

Lewis was also ordered to sign onto the sex offenders' register for 10 years and told to pay a 100 victim surcharge.

Robert Forrest, prosecuting, said Lewis had approached an eight-year-old girl on two occasions at the Wellington pub in Waterlooville in December last year and January 2016 and offered her money to expose herself to him.

On another occasion, he also made the girl's 11-year-old friend a similar offer.

He said the girls had known Lewis as Father Christmas.

Mr Forrest said: "This defendant was a regular of that public house; he was known by several other regulars as Father Christmas and Santa because of his appearance at the time.

"He said in interview he did look at the time like Father Christmas - he had a white bushy beard, white curly hair and was well-built."

Mr Forrest said that in one incident he asked the younger girl six times to expose herself to him and offered her payment of 3.

The girl complained to her mother and Lewis was arrested.

In an interview he told police he had been drinking for four hours and could not remember what had happened.

Lawrence Lewis.

On the previous occasion, Lewis offered the friend 4 to show him her underwear and to expose herself.

The friend's mother said the incident had left her daughter "suspicious of men and strangers" and the mother of the eight-year-old said her daughter was left "scared".

Mr Forrest said: "This defendant did look like Father Christmas, he was known as Father Christmas and Santa.

"He was known on several occasions to act as Father Christmas.

"Given his convictions for these offences, it would be necessary to stop him acting as Father Christmas for the foreseeable future. It's about risk of harm and we say there is an obvious risk of harm."

Lian Webster-Martin, defending Lewis, who has since shaved his head and beard, said: "He has shaved his beard and wishes to step away from any suggestion he is performing that role irrespective of any orders imposed today."

She added that he was "genuinely remorseful".
Details have emerged of another near miss involving a drone and an airliner in England, as the British Government announced an incident initially believed to be the first collision of its kind probably did not involve a drone.

The co-pilot of an Airbus A320 reported that a drone with a flashing red light passed around 100-150ft beneath the plane shortly after take-off from Heathrow.

A report published by the UK Airprox Board put the incident, which occurred on February 14, in the most serious risk category.

Officials concluded that separation "had been reduced to the bare minimum" and "chance had played a major part" in the objects not colliding.

The flight crew stated that there was "no time to react" to the drone, which was black and around two-to-three feet wide.

In a separate incident on April 17 the pilot of a British Airways (BA) flight reported a suspected collision with a drone as it approached Heathrow.

But the UK's Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin told MPs there on Thursday that it is now believed this "was not a drone incident".

BA said at the time that the Airbus A320 landed safely and was examined by engineers before being cleared to take off on its next flight.

An investigation launched by the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) has been closed due to lack of evidence.

A spokesman for the AAIB said: "We made initial inquiries but there was insufficient information on what object was involved for us to take it further."

Following the incident police appealed for anyone with relevant information to come forward.

Officers searched a "wide area" in Richmond, south-west London, but did not find anything.

Britain's Transport Minister Robert Goodwill told the Lords European Union Internal Market Sub-Committee last week that reports the airliner was hit by a drone had not been confirmed.

He said: "There was no actual damage to the plane and there is indeed some speculation it may have been even a plastic bag or something."

Mr Goodwill added: "The pilot has a lot of other things to concentrate on (when landing) so we're not quite sure what they saw."

The latest UK Airprox Board report also reveals there was a near miss between a drone and two military Tornado jets over Dunbar, East Lothian on January 21.

One of the pilots stated that the drone passed within 500 feet of the aircraft at an altitude of 1,000 feet. No action was required to avoid a collision.

Officials decided that they could not be sure the drone was being flown illegally.
Three people connected to one of the San Bernardino terrorists have been arrested in a marriage fraud conspiracy.

The US Attorney's Office said those arrested at two southern California locations include the brother and sister-in-law of gunman Syed Rizwan Farook.

The third person arrested is the wife of Enrique Marquez Jr, a friend of Farook who has been charged over his alleged role in aiding last year's violence.

The two women arrested are Russian immigrants.

Prosecutors said the three participated in a marriage fraud conspiracy that involved lying under oath to obtain immigration benefits.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller confirmed the warrants were served in the cities of Corona and Ontario

The December 2 shootings carried out by Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik were the deadliest terror strike on US soil since 9/11.

The couple opened fire at an annual training event of Farook's San Bernardino County co-workers.

The 14 people killed and 22 wounded were mainly his colleagues.

Both attackers died in a gun battle with police.
Public health studies major RaaShauna Payne is using her story to encourage students to keep pressing forward despite setbacks.

Statistics College: Health and Human Performance

Health and Human Performance Major: Public health studies with a concentration in community health

Public health studies with a concentration in community health Age: 21

21 Classification/Year: Senior

Senior Hometown: Winston-Salem, NC

Winston-Salem, NC Clubs & Organizations: ECU All Girl cheerleading team

ECU All Girl cheerleading team Hobbies & Interests: Traveling

Favorites Favorite place to eat: Basil's

Basil's Favorite website: Netflix

Netflix Favorite place on campus: ECU Mall

ECU Mall Favorite hangout: ECU Recreation Center

ECU Recreation Center Favorite class: Women Studies

Women Studies Favorite TV show: Anything on BRAVO

Motivations Most Influential Professor: Dr. Craig Becker

Dr. Craig Becker The one thing you cannot live without: My phone

My phone Role Models: Gabrielle Union

Gabrielle Union Dream job: A CEO of a public health facility

A CEO of a public health facility Advice for fellow students: Always try to stay involved with the campus and the community to develop not only connections, but also experiences.

Words of Wisdom "The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do."

 RaaShauna Payne

How did you get involved with the ECU Cheerleading squad?

I've been cheering since I was 5. I'm 21 now, so a long time. I looked up the information and I tried out. There were 160 girls here for 40 spots so I was nervous just like anybody else, but luckily I got the call back that I made the team.

How do you keep the discipline?

A planner. I have a good GPA. The only C I had was in chemistry. My planner is my best friend. I write everything out and I know that at the end of the day (what) needs to be done like two weeks in advance.

What is some advice you have for incoming freshmen?

I always tell students to get involved. That's so important. You feel united with the school and you can meet people and also get those recommendations and (build) relationships with faculty. You meet them by getting involved. I would also tell them to be open to diversity. Don't just be a student who makes great grades. Be a student that can connect with other people. In this world, (employers) are looking for diverse people. I believe being open to diversity can help us come together as a nation.

What is something cool about ECU that you wish you knew during your first year?

I wish I was more aware of the programs at this university that are nationally ranked.

Payne credits her determination to a moment she says helped her to take control of her life. During the first semester of her senior year of high school, she received a rejection letter from East Carolina University, the only university she had set her sights on.She refused to be discouraged. That same year, she applied again  this time after getting serious about her studies and retaking her ACT. And she was accepted.Now, Payne is a Dean's List student who earned a spot on the ECU Cheerleading team, helped fellow students as a resident assistant in Tyler Hall, and works in the university admissions office.Payne's collegiate success did not come without its challenges. During her sophomore year, she got her first and only C- in chemistry, a class that requires at least a C for admittance into the nursing program, Payne's career choice.said Payne.And without that C-, Payne says she never would have discovered her passion for public health.Hoping to make a difference on a bigger scale and reduce health disparity in minority communities, Payne has dreams of opening her own nonprofit. To do so, she plans to obtain a master's in business with a certificate in health administration. She also hopes to earn a doctorate in epidemiology in order to study diseases.she said.Payne will begin an internship with the American Heart Association in Los Angeles in May, just 10 days after graduation.
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Tom Campbell

The writer of Ecclesiastes says, "For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven." During hard times we recognize the need to hunker down and reduce spending. During good times we can spend more and invest.State leaders saw the need to cut spending during The Great Recession; now our state budget has recovered and is healthy. Reliable estimates indicate that a combination of lower spending than was budgeted, coupled with tax revenues exceeding projections, has resulted in approximately $1 billion in available money during this short session. We would never advocate wholesale spending like proverbial drunken sailors but now is the time to invest in areas of greatest need.One of those areas is teacher pay. Lawmakers pay lip service to increasing teacher pay but until last year little was done. In 2014 teachers and state employees received a $750 one-time bonus, an amount that Governor Pat McCrory admitted in an NC SPIN interview was "chickenfeed." Last year's increase of starting salaries for teachers entering the profession was a good step, but only a step.WRAL television in Raleigh aired a documentary this week, "Grading Teacher Pay," reporting that North Carolina raised teacher pay in the 1990s to 19th in the nation, almost the national average. By 2014 our state had dropped to 47th, some $12,000 per year below that average and lower than our neighboring states.Teacher pay now ranks in the bottom quartile, at 42nd. North Carolina reduced education spending, cut teaching assistants, eliminated additional pay for those obtaining Masters degrees and eliminated a Teaching Fellows program that encouraged college students to go into the classroom. The workload for those remaining wasn't cut, merely shouldered by fewer people. No wonder so many are leaving the profession and so few are enrolled in colleges of education. Erick Houck, UNC Professor of Education, said there was a real dollar cost in having to constantly interview, hire and acclimate new teachers.Superintendent of Public Instruction June Atkinson said teachers don't go into the profession to get rich, but neither do they take a vow of poverty. One teacher in the documentary said she would have to work 20-25 years under the current pay schedule before earning $50,000 a year. Another 17-year veteran who recently left teaching said it is obvious that North Carolina doesn't care about teachers.Is that true? Aside from the parent, the teacher is the single most important person in a child's education, but do we really believe that is true? If so, now is a season for lawmakers to put our money where their rhetoric is. Perhaps a 10 percent raise, as Superintendent Atkinson proposed, might be too large a leap, but there is little reason why lawmakers cannot agree to Governor McCrory's proposal for an average 5 percent increase, with the goal to make average pay $50,000 per year.If our children (and their futures) are our most important investment, then excellent, long-term career teachers are essential to their success. Adequate pay makes teachers feel successful and want to stay on the job. Additionally, lawmakers should end the ridiculous practice of one-time bonuses and increase the pay of all state employees.It is past time we take the subject of teacher pay off the table, because when we get distracted by issues like pay - important as they might be - we are not focusing on the most important goal of how to dramatically improve student outcomes.
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Regardless of one's opinion on HB 2, it cannot overshadow or remotely counteract what North Carolina has done legislatively over the last five years to become one of the most attractive places in the country to do business, invest, live, raise a family, and retire. Since Republicans took control of the state legislature for the first time in over a century in 2010, North Carolina legislators and Gov. Pat McCrory (R), who was elected in 2012, have enacted a collection of policy reforms that is more impressive from a free market and limited government standpoint than what any other state accomplished during that time, with the arguable exception of Wisconsin.First there is North Carolina's historic tax reform act of 2013, which relieved the state of the dubious distinction of having the highest personal and corporate income tax rates in the Southeast. Aside from Florida & Tennessee, which do not tax income, North Carolina now has the lowest personal and corporate income tax rates in the region as the result of the tax changes signed into law by Gov. McCrory. Thanks to the tax relief enacted in 2013, individuals, families, and employers across the state get to keep more of their hard-earned income. Going into 2013, North Carolina had the 44th ranked business tax climate in the country on the non-partisan Tax Foundation's business tax climate index. Thanks to the 2013 tax reform act, North Carolina went from only beating six states, to having the 16th best business tax climate in the nation.Despite the doom and gloom Democratic legislators and progressive activists predicted about the 2013 tax cuts, North Carolina has realized budget surpluses for the last two years, which permitted further income tax relief in 2015 bringing the income rate down to 5.499 percent. If revenue targets continue to be met, the state corporate income tax rate will drop from 4.0 to 3.0 percent in 2017. Even Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), former chair of the DNC and one of the most partisan politicians in America, has proposed cutting his state's corporate income tax in response to what North Carolina has done. Imitation is the best form of flattery, the saying goes.North Carolina has been getting a lot of negative press lately, but the state has a good story to tell. Progressive activists, Democrat lawmakers, and Attorney General Roy Cooper want to talk about bathrooms, because talking about the top issues facing North Carolinians is not politically beneficial to them. Their proposals for higher taxes, more government spending, increased bureaucratic intrusion in the private sector, and less school choice for parents and students is a platform that doesn't sell well in most parts of the state. Hence, Democrats will try to keep the discussion about bathrooms. The real story coming out of North Carolina is the impressive record of policy reform over the last half decade, and how it has helped make the Tar Heel State one of the best places in the world to live and do business. If Gov. McCrory & North Carolina Republicans get that story out to voters, they'll do well this fall...
"The crowd loved it and we had big teams hooked together. We had 100 horses on Saturday for the show ring events, with horses which don't plough. That event created a lot of interest. They [entrants] told me it was a bigger show than the Sydney Royal."

More than 4000 people watched the heavy horses raise the dust and throw their weight behind the spectacle.

Sixty-two heavy horses gathered for the Guinness World Records attempt, well short of the 84 needed. Organiser Chris Broers says there were enough for the new Australian record.

A new Australian record for working horses ploughing a field has been set near Yass.

Two years ago Mr Broers led a group of enthusiasts to establish a world record for the highest number of heavy horses ploughing in one field. They had 28 heavy horses, only to have Ireland set a new record last year with 84 heavy horses.

Leading up to the holiday weekend event it looked as if a new record would be set with the required number of horses, but entries from Armidale, the Southern Highlands, and Victoria did not attend.

"Australia is such a big country, to get the horses to one spot is virtually impossible, whereas in Ireland they can ride their horses to the event, from one side of the country to the other," Mr Broers said.

"I don't think I am going to do the Guiness Book of Records again. I might organise some ploughing days again, which are good fun."

Heavy-horse enthusiasts recreated the early days of European settlement in Australia with ploughing competitions, whip cracking and harness awareness. Australian Light Horse Association members and carriage drivers helped commemorate Anzac Day.
What difference does it make if you pay with your phone or smartwatch or your card?

Not much, particularly in Australia where tap and go cards are used more than anywhere else.

ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott, left, and managing director, products & marketing ANZ Matt Boss announce a new partnership with Apple Pay on Thursday. Credit:Jessica Hromas

Estimates of the number of Australians who have used mobile devices to pay is around 8 per cent in Australia. This week Apple CEO Tim Cook updated the usage statistics on Apple Pay, but it wasn't very illuminating: more than five times the transactions of a year ago and 1 million new users every week. But in the context of trillions of transactions on cards, it's a drop in the ocean.

These factors and their market power have allowed Australian banks to resist what insiders have called an arrogant attitude from the tech giant. Until the end of last year Apple was insisting on a big cut of the fees banks get from merchants each time they accept a Visa or MasterCard. This is the model in the US, but in Australia the fees banks take are already much lower.
Commonwealth Bank is defending its sacking of whistleblower and former chief medical officer of its insurance arm, Benjamin Koh, telling an inquiry he was dismissed for "serious and repeated" breaches of customer privacy that involved hundreds of documents being sent to his personal email account.

In a submission lodged with a Senate committee, CBA stands by its claim that Dr Koh, who went public in a joint Fairfax Media and Four Corners investigation into CommInsure, was not dismissed for raising concerns about misconduct in the business.

Dr Koh has filed an unfair dismissal claim against CBA, alleging he was sacked by the bank in August last year for being a whistleblower. He is expected to give evidence to the Senate committee at a hearing in Sydney on Thursday.

The CBA submission provides details of an investigation into what it says were serious breaches of customer privacy by Dr Koh, who had worked at the insurer since 2013.
The tourism and agricultural industries have threatened to make the planned "backpacker tax" an election issue if the federal government fails to alter it as part of the upcoming budget on Tuesday.

Tourism and International Education Minister Richard Colbeck last month said the government was considering changes to the measure, which was introduced in the last federal budget, to ensure Australia didn't lose market share among backpackers to international rivals.

Tourism industry leaders are worried backpackers will head to New Zealand rather than Australia.

If it does not change, from July 1, working holidaymakers would be required to pay 32.5 per cent tax from the first dollar earned rather than having an $18,000 tax-free threshold. They would also have to pay a 35 per cent tax on the employee superannuation contributions they receive when they leave the country. The measure was forecast to raise $540 million over four years.

Working holiday drop
Oil and gas explorer Karoon Gas has run into trouble at its Brazilian exploration venture, with its Colombian joint venture partner filing for bankruptcy protection, throwing an inevitable cloud of uncertainty over its proposed oil project there.

Pacific Exploration and Production Corp, the former Pacific Rubiales, said its subsidiaries would continue operating as normal through a restructuring process, and payments would continue to suppliers and contractors.

Optimistic: Karoon's Bob Hosking expects planned drilling in Brazil to proceed. Credit:Paul Jones

Karoon managing director Robert Hosking sought to reassure investors on the future of the venture with its partner in Brazil's resource-rich Santos Basin.

"While it is unfortunate, the depressed oil price environment has forced the parent company of our JV partner into this situation, at this stage Karoon has no reason to believe our current JV work program in the Santos Basin, Brazil will be impacted," Mr Hosking said.
He also noted: "Today, people around the world spend more than 50 minutes a day using Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. That doesn't even include WhatsApp yet." Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said many marketers had told Facebook that trying to figure out the shift to mobile advertising was like the early days of television. The social network, she said, had made it a mission to help marketers specifically tailor their ads for a mobile world - where things must be shorter and often without sound. Ms Sandberg said Nestle, for instance, tried running both a traditional television ad and a mobile-optimised ad on the site. The mobile version, she said, performed better in engagement and promoting product awareness. Other features, such as auto-captioning, have led people to spend 12 per cent more time with an ad. Big names disappoint In terms of overall earnings results, it's been a different story recently for many of the other big names in Silicon Valley.

On Tuesday, Apple's stock took a dive after it reported soft iPhone sales for the first time and its first revenue drop since 2003. Twitter stock also plunged after it said ad spending by big name marketers were much weaker that it had expected. Last week, profit at Google's parent company Alphabet missed Wall Street forecasts. So, too, did Microsoft, on slowing growth in its cloud business. Broader weakness? Given the glum results from most big tech names and the lone bright spot of Facebook, should tech investors be worried about weakness in the broader sector?

Not so fast, said Sheraz Mian, research director at Zacks Investment Research. He thinks the earnings misses are part of a larger story. "The lack of growth is an ongoing issue, not just in the tech sector but across the board as well," Mr Mian said. Tech firms have been performing a little better than others for the past couple of earnings seasons, Mr Mian said, setting high expectations from analysts. Stock-specific problems Some of the companies also face their own problems, he said, but for different reasons.

Apple's struggles as smartphone growth has slowed have been well documented. Microsoft has also been fighting a long battle, against shifting technologies that have hurt its traditional enterprise business. Google's been criticised for spending too much on long-term bets that haven't paid off yet. "Tech is a diverse universe that shouldn't be painted with one brush. But the risk is there that less sophisticated investors will start avoiding the sector as a whole," Mr Mian said. And Twitter is trying to carve out its own path against Facebook and Google in the ad space, which may explain why its revenue hasn't pleased analysts. "In the case of Twitter, they introduced some new retail products around their buy buttons, and I suspect that these have gained advertisers at a slower pace than anticipated," said eMarketer analyst Yory Wurmser. "This is probably true across social platforms, and probably has less to do with macrotrends and more to do with the learning curve around introducing new ad formats."

Longer view David Kretzmann, an analyst for Motley Fool Supernova, said Facebook and many other tech firms baffled analysts making predictions sometimes because they tended to take a longer view than other firms. "One thing you can tie between all these companies is that they're generally guided by management teams focused on the long term," he said, noting that tech firms to tend to meet their own, internal expectations. "None are going to be overly concerned about one quarter." Facebook has had better success with its mobile ads, managing to keep Wall Street happy with short-term advertising gains that buy it time to make money on its own other bets, such as virtual reality.
Walter Kohn 1923-2016

Walter Kohn was an Austrian-born American scientist and former refugee who shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in chemistry  a subject that he had last formally studied in high school.

Walter Kohn in 2006. Credit:Ana Elisa Fuentes

As a teenager, Kohn had escaped to England from Nazi-occupied Vienna less than a month before World War II erupted, found himself shipped to Canada as an "enemy alien" and later built a long, distinguished academic career in the US, becoming an American citizen in 1957.

When he was awarded the chemistry prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences he was teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He shared the award with John Pople, a British-born mathematician.
The lawyer in Turnbull thinks if he can litigate the issue more expertly than his opponent, the verdict will, naturally, be favourable to him. The egotist in him thinks his "common sense" will automatically trump economic modelling, and electoral support will follow. The mansplainer in him believes that if he can write a detailed enough blog post pointing out the errors in others' research, the congratulations will flow. It's great to have a Prime Minister, finally, who engages with policy, and even (imagine!) understands its technicalities. By dismissing voter concern, and choosing instead to attack both Labor's policy and any economic modelling that disproves his assertions, Turnbull has displayed what the self-helpers call a huge empathy gap.

But Turnbull's focus on detail blinds him to the keen feelings of voters on the issue of the cost of housing. Feelings which, if not addressed at a political level, will harden into resentment. Getting lost in the minutiae of negative gearing policy fails to address the well-founded anxiety which underlies it  that housing has become unaffordable for all but the wealthy or the lucky. So far the cost of housing debate has appeared to divide the electorate into two camps  those who already own property, and accuse those who don't of being lazy or unwilling to make the requisite sacrifices; and those who don't own it, and see a system stacked against them. The latter camp points to insane capital city house prices, the rising house-price-to-income ratio, and what economists call the "deposit hurdle"  that loan deposits are a far bigger percentage of average incomes than they used to be.

The Coalition has aligned itself with the property owners camp, where they believe there is safety in numbers  the 2011 census found nearly 70 per cent of Australians own their home outright or have a mortgage on it. And as the Prime Minister keeps telling us, over a million Australians claim negative gearing deductions. But anxiety over the cost of housing has become too free-floating to be contained by a simple haves/have-nots divide. It is a constant and tedious topic of conversation in all sorts of circles. As my colleague Matt Wade wrote recently, Fairfax-Ipsos polling shows housing has surpassed healthcare and the cost of living in the list of Sydneysiders' concerns. The March Fairfax-Ipsos poll shows a quarter of voters are undecided about changes to negative gearing  that's a huge chunk of the market up for grabs, politically speaking. The electorate is not black and white on this one.

People who own their homes outright worry about their children's inability to ever achieve the same. Others are stuck  they have invested in property but can only afford to do so because they still live at home with their folks. Others (like me) bought a small pad they grew out of, and now rent elsewhere, unable to afford a family home. I have some sympathy for the attitude attributed to Baby Boomers - that they made sacrifices to afford their homes, but today's youth are too entitled to do so. I saved for my deposit by budgeting over many years. My family didn't give me any money, nor did I expect them to. But I also remember the despair of being outbid at auctions by investors, or by fellow young people who were obviously backed by Big Parent dollar. For them, buying a flat was a breezy addition to the portfolio. For me, it was the hope-laden culmination of years of careful plotting. That despair is a feeling, an emotional response ungoverned by economic modelling. No amount of Prime Ministerial mansplaining can assuage it.
The irony is that if the government's power projection ambitions were to be pursued, the nuclear powered version of the advanced Barracuda class would be the ideal platform for the RAN. Yet Defence's requirements have led DCNS to remove the single element in the Barracuda class that provides its overwhelming technological advantage, namely the nuclear reactor, and replace it with an updated version of the diesel electric propulsion that powered Australia's first submarines over a century ago. It's the naval equivalent of removing the engine from a Ferrari and replacing it with a motor from a Citroen 2CV.

An advanced, nuclear powered Barracuda class submarine, with underwater endurance limited to 100 days only by crew resilience and a submerged speed of 30 knots, could claim regional technological superiority. But no conventional submarine (SSK), however advanced, will be technologically superior in the South China Sea in the 2030s, nor will it be safe to send RAN submariners on offensive operations there on such a platform.

It's bad for the Navy because in terms of capability the decision fails to deliver on the objectives set out in the latest Defence White Paper. DCNS' conventional Barracuda class boats will not be "regionally superior" submarines in terms of their technology. By the 2030s, if operating in the South China Sea, they will be confronted by nuclear attack submarines (SSNs), of greatly improved performance compared to current models. The FSMs will not be, as the Prime Minister said, "the most sophisticated naval vessels being built in the world". But on a "bang for the buck" basis, they may well be by far the most expensive with the longest delivery timeline.

The ridiculous corollary of this is that it will cost Australia a lot more to procure the dumbed-down version of the Barracuda submarine than it would have done to buy far more capable nuclear powered Barracudas as a military off-the-shelf (MOTS) purchase from France. If the Navy had acquired, say, four nuclear boats supplemented by six conventional submarines of an existing design to undertake the other roles required of the FSM, the overall cost could have been around $20 billion, as against over $36 billion plus at 2016 prices (the oft-quoted $50 billion represents future inflated costs). The Navy would also have been much better off in terms of capability.

Another benefit of a MOTS purchase is that the new submarines would have been available a decade earlier, thereby avoiding some significant risks. There would be no need to attempt, at high cost, to upgrade the obsolescent Collins class, with a high risk of failure that would leave the Navy without an effective submarine capability for a decade or more. There are also major design risks in a new submarine, particularly in integrating American systems with the French platform and transferring power-hungry systems from a nuclear design with a high availability of electricity. This could delay delivery of the new submarine beyond the current unacceptable timeline and increase the already unacceptable cost.

The implications for industry policy constitute a particularly egregious element in the procurement decision. In this context, we need to remember that the Abbott government showed the door to the car industry. The end of the age of entitlement meant that around $500 million a year, not high by international standards, was too much to pay to support a high technology industry that, directly and indirectly, employed around 200,000 people.

Now the government is keen to support an industry with a cost disability, according to the RAND Corporation, of up to 40 per cent. Given the likely moderate local value added in an industry where all the sophisticated hardware is imported, the effective rate of protection (assistance to value added) will be much higher than this. Indeed a leaked paper from Defence last week suggested an effective rate of protection of 500 per cent would be required to build the submarines in Adelaide. Even at the height of the Fraser government's protectionist excesses in the early 1980s, the effective rate reached "only" 143 per cent for the car industry.

The government justifies a local build on the basis of job creation, building an innovative industry and the ability to undertake through life sustainment of the submarines in Australia. On the Prime Minister's figures, 2,800 jobs will be created directly and indirectly, a far cry from the 200,000 jobs that are related to the car industry. Some early estimates suggest we are looking at a cost of around $4 million for every job created.
"With the thoughts I'd be thinkin', I could be another Lincoln" Let's go back to last September. Turnbull's elevation to the Liberal leadership eight months back was welcomed by moderates on all sides of politics because it seemed to herald a change in tone (and also Tone). Malcolm seemed able to explain complicated things without resorting to empty slogans and angry fearmongering as per Tony Abbott, and this seemed like a welcome change. At the time the plan was a complex national conversation about economics in which our new PM - a former banker with a good head for numbers and a talent for explaining complex things - would explain Australia's financial situation and outline the options available, like grown ups. This didn't happen.

Instead a bunch of things were floated to the public - superannuation reform! GST increase! State income tax! Company tax cuts! Negative gearing changes! - and then immediately taken off the table. So much for our adult discussion. And now we're seemingly set to go to the polls arguing that negative gearing is untouchable and that corporate tax must be reduced, despite all trustworthy advice being contrary to these positions, with Turnbull forced to defend them not on their questionable merits but via angry scare campaigns. And that makes Malcolm Turnbull almost certainly the worst possible leader for the Coalition at this time because the government don't need a smart, articulate advocate to sell their unconvincing arguments. No, they need a blustering moron to yell offensive nonsense, thereby distracting people from objectively terrible policy. And that was Abbott's great talent: turning reasonable disagreement into an us-or-them battle of values where facts were, at best, optional. Just look at the stuff the government are avidly supporting: inertia on climate change mitigation, blocking marriage equality, tax relief for the wealthy, cuts to social services. These are all objectively stupid ideas for a modern, agile, freedom-respecting Australia.

And when you have locked yourself into stupid policies, you really need a stupid person to thrash around like a vomit-covered marionette to ensure that people concentrate on the messenger rather than the message. The more that Turnbull encourages people to think carefully about the government's policies, the more doomed he is. Turds don't become any more palatable when the waiter patiently explains that they're turds. Speaking of which Fortunately the PM has excellent, quick-thinking ministers on his team that can pick up the ball when they see it's being fumbled - like Immigration Minister Peter "sending a text to the person the text is about" Dutton. As we went on about yesterday, the supreme court of Papua New Guinea government has determined that the Manus Island offshore detention centre is illegal.

And so Pete's got this totally under control, surely? After all, he made clear that the ruling "hasn't taken us by surprise We've been anticipating the Supreme Court decision in PNG and we've been planning for this since late last year" on Channel 9's Today on Thursday morning. And sure, this directly contradicted the PM saying that the ruling had been such a surprise that he could not produce a "definitive road map" for his policy on asylum seekers on Wednesday. But still, it's been coming for months: indeed, PNG's Prime Minister Peter O'Neill explicitly called for Manus to be closed while in Australia in March. So Karl Stefanovic was a bit surprised that Duffer has no idea what's happening with the detainees either. "You've been told that this facility's closing and you can't answer the question for what happens to those 850 asylum seekers?" he incredulously asked, before Pete stammered that those found to be genuine refugees would be able to stay on Manus. Unfortunately O'Neill had already made clear that was not an option - and PNG's high commissioner to Australia, Charles Lepani, subsequently reiterated that Dutton's sunny suggestion was "never Papua New Guinea's understanding".

The only positive - if that's quite the word to use - is that Labor are hardly showing leadership on the matter either. Labor start hitting themselves No sooner had Labor's shadow immigration spokesthing Richard Marles demanded that the government offer to pay the PNG government more to keep Manus open than MPs Melissa Parke, Lisa Singh and Sue Lines all broke ranks to suggest that this was an opportunity for Australia to change direction on the matter. "It's inevitable that the government will need to have another plan for what is going to happen and the most logical thing to do is to bring those people to Australia," said the former UN lawyer Parke. "We have caused them enough suffering already. This is a sick game and it needs to end." Duttles was clearly more comfortable talking about how Labor were wrong than, say, what he actually was responsible for doing as minister: "At least in the run up to the 2007 election Kevin Rudd was able to hold his team together until they got into government before they dumped the policies that had stopped the boats." Burn!
Thirty-three lions rescued from circuses in Peru and Colombia are heading to South Africa to live out the rest of their lives in a private sanctuary.

The largest ever airlift of lions was organised and paid for by Animal Defenders International. It will take place on Friday.

The Los Angeles-based group has, for years, worked with lawmakers in the two South American countries to ban the use of wild animals in circuses, where they often are held in appalling conditions.

The lions suffered in captivity.
The fate of about 900 asylum seekers on Manus Island hangs in the balance as Immigration Minister Peter Dutton struggles to explain why the government was ill-prepared for the detention centre's closure.

In a testy exchange with Karl Stefanovic of Channel Nine's Today show, Mr Dutton insisted Tuesday's ruling by Papua New Guinea's Supreme Court and the country's subsequent decision to close the facility "hasn't taken us by surprise".

But he was unable to explain why the government had no immediate solution for the 900 men left in limbo on the island, more than half of whom have been assessed as genuine refugees.
Doctors have declared war on chiropractors amid outrage over an "eye-watering" video showing a Melbourne chiropractor manipulating a newborn baby's spine.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has told its members to not refer patients to chiropractors and is calling for the federal government and private health insurers to stop paying them for questionable treatments.

The powerful group which trains GPs says it has taken a stand against chiropractors this week after a video emerged on YouTube of Melbourne chiropractor Ian Rossborough manipulating a premature baby's spine to treat colic and reflux.

In the video, which has been viewed more than 1 million times since it was posted in January, Dr Rossborough flexes the baby's back before pressing firmly on her spine to produce a cracking sound. The sudden movement causes the baby to cry.
Taxis would become more commonplace on Sydney's streets to ensure passengers who book cabs are picked up more quickly, under a controversial proposal by Cabcharge to scrap the cap on plates.

In a call that puts it at odds with the NSW Taxi Council, Cabcharge chief executive Andrew Skelton said the cap on the number of plates meant a "capacity constraint" had been placed on a part of the market to protect licence-plate holders.

"To arbitrarily go, 'right, no more licences for four more years, you can't grow'  I think that's nuts," he told Fairfax Media.

"Taxis have to be able to evolve and grow into this massive transport opportunity  not at some contrived pace to protect some licence holders. The taxi industry is not licence holders."
The former partner of Bundeena woman Tina Kontozis has been refused bail after facing court on Friday charged with her murder.

Police found Ms Kontozis, 51, dead in her home in Beachcomber Avenue after being alerted by neighbours who heard fighting and screaming about 3.30pm on Sunday.

Stephen Boyd will face court on Friday charged with murdering his former partner, Tina Kontozis.

A much-loved resident of the tightly knit southern Sydney village, Ms Kontozis worked at the local day care centre.
Traffic was still heavy through the Petrie area but expected to return to normal throughout the morning.

The Bruce Highway had mostly cleared while the Gateway Motorway and Gympie Arterial Road were improving shortly after 9am.

Traffic delays north of Brisbane have slowly cleared as drivers finally arrive at work on Friday.

Commuters are suffering through a horror run into Brisbane from the north on Friday morning.

An earlier crash at Murrumba Downs causing long delays along the Bruce Highway was cleared shortly after 6am but the effects were still being felt well into the morning.

Arterial roads through the Redcliffe and Petrie areas were described as "jam-packed" while the Ted Smout Bridge, connecting the peninsula to Brisbane's northern suburbs was a "shocker" about 8.15am.

Traffic was crawling from the Gateway Motorway at Nudgee all the way back to the Bruce Highway and beyond most of the way to Mango Hill.
A north Queensland woman has tested positive to the Zika virus after returning from an overseas holiday.

Tests show the Townsville resident picked up a mild case of the mosquito-bourne virus in Fiji.

A Townsville woman tested positive for Zika virus after returning from a Pacific island. Credit:AP

However, she was no longer infectious when she returned to Australia, health authorities say.

The woman's Condon home has been sprayed for insects as part of precautionary measures.
A much-anticipated review likely to decide the fate of Uber in Queensland looks likely to be brought forward - by one month.

Speaking at an innovation summit in Brisbane, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she wanted to see a long-standing review into the taxi and ride-sharing industry finalised by July instead of the original August deadline.

The comments came a little more than a week after the state's Parliament passed laws to increase fines against Uber drivers and give transport officers more power to catch them.

Taxi drivers applauded the change but Uber Queensland slammed the new legislation, claiming it undermined the review process, which was first announced in October last year.
A small group of people have gathered outside the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital where a refugee who set himself on fire remains in a critical condition.

The 23-year-old, identified as an Iranian man by the name of Omid, was transferred to the Brisbane hospital on Thursday afternoon for treatment at the specialist burns unit. He is believed to have suffered serious burns to a large part of his body.

People have gathered to show their support for an asylum seeker known as Omid who is receiving treatment at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital after setting himself alight in protest on Nauru. Credit:Nauru

He was transferred by Careflight Helicopter from Nauru where the incident occurred. It is understood his wife travelled with him.

A candlelight vigil was held outside the hospital organised by advocacy group GetUp.
Australia's national security service believed Numan Haider was radicalised some time before the Melbourne teenager stabbed two policemen, his inquest has heard.

Where counter-terror police had concerns Haider had become radicalised by September 2014, the Coroners Court heard on Thursday that the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation had formed the view he was, at least four days before he attacked the officers outside the Endeavour Hills police station on September 23, 2014.

Numan Haider was shot dead by police in 2014.. Credit:Facebook

An ASIO intelligence director, giving evidence under the pseudonym Tom McKenzie, told the court that at a September 19, 2014 meeting with police, ASIO officers believed Haider had aligned himself with radical Islam.

"It was my understanding that ASIO formed the view that Numan had adhered to extreme ideology," he said.
A Victorian farming company has been fined almost half a million dollars for major safety violations that contributed to the tragic death of a 15-year-old boy.

Lilford Farms, which grows snow peas near Shepparton, north of Melbourne, pleaded guilty to a criminal safety violation over the teenager's death.

Mooroopna-based Lilford Farms has been fined $450,000 over a workplace death.

The Wangaratta Country Court heard the farm had engaged a labour-hire contractor to supply workers to pick peas at the farm in November 2014.

The owner of the labour-hire company brought his 15-year-old son and his two friends, aged 16 and 17, to help with picking.
A murdered Melbourne grandmother had problems with her business partner and the prime suspect in her death, a court has heard.

Brenda Goudge, 61, and former policeman Paul Callaway were partners in Jay Dee Auto Cables in Bayswater, where Ms Goudge's daughter Rebecca also worked.

On July 8, 2011, Ms Goudge didn't show up for work, so Rebecca and Mr Callaway went over to her Wantirna South home, the Coroners Court of Victoria has heard.

After they climbed a fence to get in, Rebecca looked for a spare key before Mr Callaway found the back door open, she told the court on Thursday.
A Wilson Security guard who was hired to patrol Victoria's police training college at the height of the national terror threat last year has been stood down for intruding into a female police employee's bedroom.

The security breach - detailed in an internal Victoria Police dossier - is among two dozen cases of people gaining unauthorised access to secure areas of police stations and buildings statewide.

An internal Victoria Police dossier has revealed alarming security breaches at stations across the state.

Released to Fairfax Media under Freedom of Information laws, the 2015 security incident register also details a potentially "catastrophic" breach involving a mentally ill man, an attempted safe break-in and a burglary in which thieves stole a police gun.

It does not include the unsolved firebombing of Pakenham police station in March in which a balaclava-clad man threw a molotov cocktail through the front doors of the complex.
A woman was lucky to escape with her life after two gunmen fired at least seven rounds into a brothel in Melbourne's outer south-east.

Police believe an outlaw motorcycle gang was involved in the shooting at the Dandy Belles Gentleman's club on Maxwell Street in Dandenong about 1.50am on Sunday, April 17.

Detectives have released CCTV footage of the shooting, showing a BMW X6 reversing into the car park of the brothel, with the headlights switched off.

Two men can then be seen to step out and fire about seven rounds at the building.
The victim of a fatal shooting in Perth's northern suburbs on Tuesday night had become a father for the first time just three weeks before his death.

Mitchell Finnerty was shot in the driveway of a friend's Banksia Grove home around 10.30pm by an unknown man who remains on the run from police.

His 53-year-old step-father and 24-year-old step-brother were also shot in the altercation, but were released from hospital on Thursday morning.

The 23-year-old's girlfriend, who gave birth to their son Cruz earlier this month, shared her grief in a social media post.
Tourism Council WA has released a report showing a Perth Cable Car would inject at least $30 million in new tourism spending and create 340 jobs across the state.

As he launched the Missing Pieces: Perth Cable Car report on Thursday, chief executive Evan Hall said Perth needed a major attraction to link Elizabeth Quay to Kings Park.

Cable cars have proved popular tourist and transport options around the world, the report says. Credit:Shin Woong-jae

A government feasibility study had showed it would be a private operation that would need no government funding. Estimates showed it would attract about 650,000 patrons annually, he told Radio 6PR.

"I am seeing 2000 hotel rooms coming into the city, airport upgrades, a rail link from the airport, Elizabeth Quay, the stadium," Mr Hall said.
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A gunman fatally shot a man in his Bushwick home on Tuesday, and now police are on the hunt for the perpetrator.

Police say someone gunned down 39-year-old Linden Street resident Angel Pomales some time before 11:50 am.

Authorities responded to a 911 call at his building between Wyckoff and Irving avenues just before noon, where they found Pomales with a bullet wound in his right shoulder, police said.

Medics took him to nearby Wyckoff Hospital, but couldnt save his life, according to a report.

Cops are now looking to question two guys caught on security video walking towards then running away from the scene.

Police ask anyone with information about the incident to call (800) 5778477, submit tips at www.nypdc rimes toppe rs.com , or text 274637 followed by TIP577. All calls are strictly confidential.
On this episode of Nashville, Baby Come Home, Rayna tries to convince Maddie to come home, but Cash has other ideas, Luke promotes Will and risks his own career in the process and one couple reunites while another crashes and burns.

Juliette is back in the saddle, and now that Luke has his tour under control, hes ready to turn his attention to promoting Will. Hes planning a showcase, but his manager/tour director/business partner, Ken, predicts theyre going to have trouble selling an openly-gay Country artist.

Layla and Avery Grow Closer



Professionally, things are going Juliettes way, but shes having trouble worming her way back into Averys heart. He refuses her offer of traveling with Juliette on her private jet, choosing to take a nine-hour bus ride with Layla. Juliette questions Glenn if something is going on between Avery and Layla, and he assures her its all business between the twosome. Unfortunately, Glenn isnt up-to-date on the latest news: Avery and Layla share a steamy kiss while working.

Nashville Recap: Autumn Chase Comes Between The Exes >>>

Where in the World is Maddie Conrad?

Rayna and Deacon are having to put on a happy face in the midst of their family crisis. Rayna is being featured in a huge magazine spread, and she is struggling to keep Maddies absence a secret. Maddie is moving forward with her plans to be emancipated, and Rayna is served with a summons to appear in court.

Deacon is ready to do whatever it takes to get his daughter back, even if it means bashing Cash, but Raynas attorney tells Deacon hes not a factor. Teddy Conrad is listed as Maddies father legally, even if hes away in prison. The fact that Deacon is her biological father will hold no sway with a judge. All Rayna wants to do is talk to Maddie, but that isnt happening unless a judge orders mediation.

Rayna goes to prison to see her ex and explain the latest development with Maddie. Cash has definitely become the fall girl, and Teddy isnt happy to learn that Deacon is partly responsible for bringing Cash into Maddies life. Hes not really in a position to criticize, since part of the problem is that Maddie found out about the Edgehill deal he made that Rayna squashed. Rayna assures him Maddie doesnt know all of the details surrounding it.

Rayna wants Teddy to sign an affidavit agreeing with her side of things, but Teddy plans on speaking to Maddie first. Teddy failed to mention that their daughter would be visiting him. Hes heard Raynas side, and now he wants to hear Maddies.

Maddie may be moving forward, but she appears to be having some second thoughts. However, her attorney thinks shes got a good shot. Maddie had offers on the table from Sony and Edgehill, so she can prove shes able to support herself, and shes signed up to take a proficiency exam to complete her schooling. Cash is suspiciously eager to see Maddie succeed in getting Maddie away from her parents. But Maddie keeps getting texts from Daphne and wants to respond. Her lawyer warns her that it could be her parents trying to trick her and warns her not to speak to any of her family for the time being.

Scarlett has been giving Gunnar the cold shoulder for days, ever since she saw him exiting Autumns hotel room. He finally corners her in an elevator and questions her attitude, but all Scarlett will say is she needs some Gunnar-free time. No sooner do the words come out of her mouth, does the elevator break down, leaving them trapped.

Scarlett breaks out some pricey hooch she got as a gift from Autumn and tears Gunnar a new one for trying to bed her idol. Of all the women in the world, why did he have to go after Autumn? Gunnar tells Scarlett what really went down, and that even though Autumn made a play for him, he turned her down not wanting to jeopardize The Exes.

Hes Just Not That Into You

Avery and Layla have an awkward conversation about their kiss. Hes just not interested in going there with her. Life is just a bit complicated with a young daughter and being on tour with his ex. Layla takes the news respectably well, stating its a shame since they do seem to have something between them.

Juliette purposely runs into her ex and daughter on her way to rehearsal, and Avery questions why Juliette came on tour. She tells him she cant be a mama if she isnt near her daughter. Then she asks if Avery will consider playing guitar for one of her songs. She says the idea is Glenns (it isnt), and Avery says hell consider it. Layla is skulking nearby, and her presence doesnt go unnoticed by Juliette.

Juliette gets busted for her little white lie after Avery calls Glenn and insists that there has to be boundaries between him and his ex. Hes on the tour for Layla, not Juliette. Glenn is concerned, since this type of scheming hearkens back to the old Juliette, but she swears shes got good intentions. Glenn advises Juliette to try being honest with Avery.

Luke has Wills Back



Wills showcase is a bust. Even though Ken invited 50 programmers (all of whom he and Luke have good relationships with) barely any bother to show up. Theyre scared of the backlash of putting a gay artist on the radio. Will is okay with doing a smaller launch, but Luke has a different idea; He wants to go big or go home.

Luke makes an appearance on Good Morning America, but instead of performing himself, he gives Will his spot. Robin Roberts plays herself and talks to Luke and Will about his challenges in Nashville as a gay artist. Luke uses the opportunity to call out all of the Nashville radio stations and urges the viewers at home to phone their local radio stations and demand they put Will on.

Thats a Promise Not a Threat

Rayna gets wind of a meeting that Cash is trying to set up with another record label. The head is a buddy of hers, so Rayna shows up in his place. Maddie isnt there, so Rayna is forced to fight it out with Cash. Cash claims to be Maddies friend, and shes not about to let opportunities slip away from Maddie like they did for her. She also calls Rayna controlling and Deacon crazy.

The usually lovely Rayna doesnt believe for one minute that Cash has Maddies best interests at heart. She promises Cash that Nashville is a small town, and if Cash continues down this path, Rayna will make sure nobody will ever work with the aspiring performer again.

Maddie thinks Teddy will be on her side. He was the one who scored her the Edgehill deal. But Teddy tells Maddie the truth about being blackmailed by Jeff Fordham. He leaves out the more lascivious details, but he does admit there was another woman. Now Maddie is disillusioned with both her parents, calling them liars.

Teddy calls Rayna and agrees to sign the affidavit. Rayna is still convinced if she could talk to Maddie face-to-face they could avoid court altogether. She finally catches her daughter outside of Cashs house. Rayna promises the Highway 65 deal is legit, and she wants to protect Maddie from being exploited. Maddie doesnt know what to believe anymore, but Rayna encourages her to believe in her family. Maddie needs time to think, and Rayna urges her daughter to make her own choices and not to leave her future up to Cash or a lawyer or a judge.

Juliette Makes a Play for Avery



Layla feels shes not only getting snubbed by Avery but by Glenn as well. He promised Layla shed be his top priority, but hes been at Juliettes beck and call. Glenn swears that Juliette being on Lukes tour is the best thing that could have happened to Layla. She has a lot more fan overlap with the diva than with Luke. He also assures her that hes continuing to look out for Laylas business interests back in Nashville. Glenn makes it clear that Juliette is no threat to Layla.

Juliette decides to take Glenns advice and talks to Avery. She shows up at his hotel room and confesses that shes still in love with him. She wants to rebuild what they had, but Avery is convinced shell go back to her wicked ways and break his heart all over again. Their conversation is interrupted by a crying Cadence, and Juliette tells Avery he doesnt have to decide right away, but when he does, he can come find her.

Nashville Recap: Everybody Wants to Be in the Spotlight >>>

Home (Not So) Sweet Home



Maddie expresses to Cash her doubts about moving forward. Shes supposed to play a benefit with Daphne, and she doesnt like the idea of leaving her little sister hanging. Maddie also reveals that she spoke with Rayna who really wants to try to work things out. Cash, determined to keep Maddie on the present course, tells Maddie about her meeting with Rayna.

Maddie surprises her family and shows up to perform with Daphne. After the show, Rayna embraces her daughter, pleased as punch that shes decided to come home. But Maddie has no intention of returning to the family fold. Daphnes devastated, but Maddie assures her no matter what, theyll still be sisters.

Something Old, Something New

Gunnar and Scarlett sing a steamy duet in the elevator, and sparks fly, but just before anything can happen, they get rescued. But after months of foreplay, fans of this couple dont have to wait any longer. They finish what they started in Scarletts hotel room.

Fans of Juliette and Avery are not going to be as pleased. Juliettes pleas to Avery fell on deaf ears, and instead of banging on Juliettes hotel room door, he goes to see Layla.

Nashville airs Wednesdays at 10pm on ABC.

(Image courtesy of ABC)
Sam and Dean meet a pair of hunters who are gunning for the monster theyre hunting in Supernatural season 11 episode 19, The Chitters. Its something new for the brothers, but the others know exactly what theyre after. And with this couple, Sam and Dean get to see hunters who make it to the finish line and hang it up instead of going out via a violent death.

Heres what made Sam and Dean running into other hunters in The Chitters so good.

Supernatural Recap: Sam and Dean vs. the Cicada Monsters>>>

When Cesar Saves Dean, Dean Gets a Taste of Being Told He Wouldnt Believe Who They Are

Deans used to having to give the monsters are real speech, and here, hes in a position where someone thinks he needs it.

Other Hunters Know Who the Winchesters Are  and Have Heard They Died

Its a long, ugly, ugly story, Dean says when Cesar comments they heard they died a couple years ago.

Its a Reminder of How Expansive the Hunting World Is

We know that there are hunters everywhere, but its always fun to hear about them. Weve seen Sam and Dean travel for hunts, and in Jesse and Cesars case, they stick to mostly Mexico, and sometimes Texas, for their hunts.

8 Supernatural Things the Winchester Brothers Have Convinced Us are Real>>>

The Winchesters Are in the Dark About What Theyre Hunting

They may have a whole lot of lore at hand, especially with the Men of Letters library, but this one is something theyve never heard of and Jesse and Cesar have to fill them in on Bisaan, a kind of cicada spirit.

Jesse and Cesar Represent Hunters Who Have Settled Down in a Way

Upon learning theyre married, Dean asks what its like settling down with a hunter. Smelly, dirty. Twice the worrying about getting ganked, Cesar tells him.

A Hunter Seeking Revenge Is Nothing New

Cesar knows it will eat at Jesse if they dont put an end to the Bisaan in the town this time. He has seen it over and over, when someone loses someone at a young age, it never heals. Both he and Dean have seen hunters get their revenge, but as Cesar points out, they are never fixed, are they? That doesnt stop them from seeking that revenge.

When Jesse Talks About Having a Great Brother, Sam Can Relate

No one believed Jesse when he told them what happened to his brother. Even his mother thought he was lying and that he should have done something to save his brother. She and the people in the town couldnt accept that he had been taken by a monster, couldnt accept a lot of things. But his brother did. He was a great brother.

All Hunters Understand the Pain of Losing a Blade During a Fight

Sam and Dean See Jesse and Cesar as Fresh Eyes and Extra Muscle Who Can Help with Amara and Castiel

But Dean Doesnt Ask Upon Learning That Theyre Retiring and Going to Start Living Now That Jesse Got His Revenge

Why Its Time to See More Female Characters on Supernatural>>>

The couple has had a place in New Mexico for years. Theyre going to raise horses. You leave it alone when you come across hunters who make it to the finish line.

Supernatural season 11 airs Wednesdays at 9pm on the CW.

(Images courtesy of the CW)
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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 ...
UBs National Science Foundation fellowship winners at all-time high

UB has seen a dramatic increase in the number of students who have received scholarships as part of of the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

If I could give other students any advice, it would be to really take advantage of this school and try to do as many things as possible. What this school really excels in is having a ridiculous amount of opportunities for students. But you have to go out there and engage yourself in them, and if you do, its amazing.

BUFFALO, N.Y.  Eight University at Buffalo students have won prestigious scholarships and awards in this years National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, one more than all the awards given to students in the rest of the State University of New York system.

The eight UB students include five who are presently UB undergraduates and one graduate student. Two of the winners are UB alumni who are attending graduate school elsewhere.

Fifteen other undergraduate UB students received honorable mention. Both winners and honorable mentions were at all-time highs, according to Elizabeth Colucci, coordinator of fellowships and scholarships at UB, whose office has dramatically increased the number of UB students applying for and receiving national and international scholarships.

In recent years, UB students have won up to four GRFP scholarships and an equal number of honorable mentions, according to Colucci. This years success is another example of how more UB students are successfully competing for scholarships and fellowships against the top students in the nations most prestigious universities.

It was a banner year for these awards, says Colucci. Its a huge marker for success in which we measure ourselves.

UB President Satish K. Tripathi acknowledged how more UB students are successfully competing for prestigious national awards and honors like the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships.

I want to congratulate each of these outstanding scholars, and all of the excellent students who have been nominated to this and other prominent fellowship and scholarship programs this year, Tripathi said. Just being nominated to receive one of these highly competitive awards is an honor in itself  a testament to their scholarly accomplishments, dedication and promise, as well as to the key role that our faculty and staff play in guiding and mentoring our students.

Clearly, these students are taking full advantage of the valuable educational experiences and resources available to them at UB, and they are leveraging these opportunities to open doors that can take them even further. As any of our past honorees can attest, these awards will continue to have great meaning as they move forward in their scholarly and professional pursuits.

As the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the Graduate Research Fellowship Program has a long history of selecting recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. The reputation of the GRFP follows recipients and often helps them become life-long leaders who contribute significantly to both scientific innovation and teaching.

Past fellows include numerous Nobel Prize winners, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Google founder Sergey Brin and Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt.

The most important benefits of these fellowships are to the students, says John J. McGuire, PhD, professor emeritus at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, who has served on the National Science Foundations Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology Panel since 2001.

Winners receive three years of stipend at $34,000 per year, plus UB receives $12,000 to cover student tuition, according to McGuire. In addition, GRFP fellows can participate in international programs for up to one year and receive extra money to cover the costs.

Fellows also join a select group of extremely talented scientists and engineers, says McGuire. Former fellows includes 40 Nobel laureates and 450 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

The GRFP is one of the most prestigious fellowship programs in the U.S., according to McGuire, who said the increase in the number of UB student awards speaks to the high caliber of students attending UB.

Even placing as an honorable mention in this competition is a great accomplishment, McGuire says. Its viewed in students resumes as an indication of great promise in their field.

The GRFP is, I think, unique in that it funds people, not projects, says McGuire. It recognizes those students who have the capacity to be both outstanding scientists/engineers and to be leaders in the broadest sense of that word.

UB should be proud of the increased number of students here who have exemplified these qualities.

As far as UB, part of the increase in winners is because some schools and departments are making increased efforts to encourage their students to apply for the fellowship, McGuire says. The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, for example, made a great showing, he said, and the schools efforts should be recognized by the UB administration.

McGuire also praised Colucci for her tremendous job over the past few years notifying students about the GRFP and other fellowship programs, organizing workshops and providing encouragement and advice  as well as the occasional shove.

My hope is that in the future more deans and department chairs will identify potential applicants early and assist these students in preparing their applications.

Dante Iozzo, a senior with a dual major in physics and math, is one if the five UB undergraduates to receive the GRFP award. Iozzo plans to pursue a doctorate in physics at Cornell University, studying mathematical modeling, which is studying physical phenomenon and describing it mathematically.

Because of this, I have to not only have detailed knowledge of physics and math, I also have to have a very deep knowledge of computer programming and coding as well, says Iozzo, whose hometown is Lewiston. Because there is so much to learn, that is what the NSF is going to help me do.

The main point of the NSF program is you dont have to be a teaching assistant for the first couple of years, says Iozzo. So I can take the time and just focus on gaining this information and jumping into research. One day I would like to be a professor. I have strong connections with the humanities. And I dont want to lose that connection. I love teaching and I want to make sure I get that experience teaching. But the first couple of years I can just focus on learning because of the fellowship, and then later be a TA.

The other five UB students sharing Iozzos honor, their hometowns and their fields of study are: Ryan Patrick OHara (Buffalo), biomedical engineering; Kristina Monakhova (Liverpool), electrical engineering; Andrea M. Martinez (Flushing), a graduate student in electrical engineering; Geoffrey Fatin (Buffalo), physics and astronomy; and Luke Zakrajsek (Windsor), electrical engineering.

The two UB grads receiving fellowships and studying elsewhere are: Ethan Guthman now studying at the University of Colorado at Denver; and Thomas Effland, currently studying at Columbia University.

The students winning honorable mention and their hometowns, where available, are: Nathan Catlin, Alec Cheney, Rachel DeMayo (Youngstown), Andrew Harris (Washington, New York), Dana Havas, Patricia Johnson (Liverpool), Michelle Karker (Cazenovia), Stephanie Kong (East Amherst), Sharon Lin (Schenectady), Francis Mollica, Matthew Morse (Williamsville), Paul Reed (North Tonawanda), Christopher Reinhardt (Mount Kisco), Alexandra Van Hall (Owego) and Lauren Van Gelder (Spencerport).

Iozzo said the support UB gave him was instrumental in his academic success.

If I could give other students any advice, it would be to really take advantage of this school and try to do as many things as possible, Iozzo says. What this school really excels in is having a ridiculous amount of opportunities for students. But you have to go out there and engage yourself in them, and if you do, its amazing.
Campus News

UB medical students provide patient care  and more  in Haiti and Honduras

A group of UB medical students spent spring break in Fontaine, Haiti, tending to the medical needs of residents in this rural village.



By ELLEN GOLDBAUM

There was a day on this trip where every patient I saw was a follow-up patient. I knew them and their medical histories.  Vinny Polsinelli, third-year student Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences

It sounds improbable, but some residents of Fontaine, a poor, medically underserved village in rural Haiti, have come to view UB medical students and faculty as their primary care providers. Thats a result of the medical missions that students and faculty from the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences have been making. Earlier this month, they made their fifth trip to Fontaine, Haiti, led by David Holmes, clinical associate professor of family medicine and director of global health education. Another team, led by Jennifer Corliss, clinical assistant professor of family medicine, went to Honduras for the first time. Fontaine is about five hours north of Port-au-Prince and while a clinic is less than a half hours drive away, most people in the village have no way to get there. So when students and faculty from the medical school arrived in town earlier this month, they managed to see some patients they had previously treated. I really liked this trip because I got to see a number of patients who I treated on earlier trips there, Vinny Polsinelli, a third-year medical student who started the UB medical trips to Haiti, told the UB Reporter. While an undergraduate at Siena College, he started traveling to Haiti with Friends of Fontaine, the nonprofit organization that built the first school in the village. He now serves on its board.

Medical student Vinny Polsinelli meets with a Haitian patient. Medical student Vinny Polsinelli meets with a Haitian patient.

There was a day on this trip where every patient I saw was a follow-up patient, Polsinelli said. I knew them and their medical histories. UB students and faculty have basically become the primary care physicians for the people of Fontaine and surrounding villages, he said. We go to the same village twice a year and do our best to meet the primary care needs of the people during the limited amount of time that we are there, so we manage to provide some continuity of care. The team headed by Corliss provided care to about 450 patients during its trip to Honduras during the medical schools spring break earlier this month. Seventeen medical students, one UB medical resident, three UB faculty members, a UB office manager and an ultrasound technician from Women & Childrens Hospital of Buffalo who brought a portable ultrasound machine along went on the Haiti trip.

Tammy Bordonaro, an ultrasound technician from Women's and Children's Hospital of Buffalo, performs an ultrasound exam. Tammy Bordonaro, an ultrasound technician from Women's and Children's Hospital of Buffalo, performs an ultrasound exam.

The ultrasound machine was very helpful, allowing us to do prenatal checks and to evaluate abdominal pain, genitourinary problems and other conditions, Holmes said. The UB team also brought eyeglasses for patients. Our students really enjoyed seeing the smiles on patients faces when they realized how much better they could see, he said. And while health care was the primary goal, members of the UB team also helped with a home repair project village leaders had begun.

Medical student Christine Robertson makes a balloon dog for a Haitian girl who visited the clinic. Medical student Christine Robertson makes a balloon dog for a Haitian girl who visited the clinic.

Many people in the village live in homes that are falling into disrepair, Holmes noted. Among other things, their thatched roofs leak  a big problem in the rainy season. Our students did some fundraising before the trip, which helped pay for two homes to get new metal roofs. We also paid for a new roof on the one-room school house in a nearby village, he said. Some of our students took some time off from the medical mission to help the Haitian workers with these repairs. Holmes directs the Department of Family medicines Global Health Education Program, which facilitates experiences for medical students and graduate trainees who want to work with patients in medically underserved areas of the world or with refugees in Buffalo. He also oversees the departments focused global health scholars track for select residents.

READER COMMENT
Moorestown honors Percheron that helped build the town

Percheron Park opened in downtown Moorestown with a tribute to the horse of yesteryear and its owner, who first brought the breed to the U.S.
announced that it will be launching cashback as a way of retaining customers. Couponing websites, which give discount codes for e-commerce websites, typically cannot hold on to customers as deal hunters never stay faithful.

By giving cashback, the company hopes to hold on to the customers and keep them coming back.

"Adding cashback brings a step closer to making the platform the pre-shopping destination of choice. We hope our revamped offering will present our customers with a platform which will enable them to make smarter shopping decisions and save or earn a whole lot of money," said Sameer Parwani, CEO, .

This move, however, means that the Times Internet company will have to dip into the commission it makes for directing traffic to these e-commerce websites, which will further impact its bottomline.

But CouponDunia is hoping to swap the loss for an increased user base and sales. Currently, CouponDunia boasts of a gross merchandise value (GMV) of Rs 1,000 crore, and is looking at scaling this to Rs 4,000 crore.

"With a sleeker, more contemporary visual design and a fresher outlook we plan to better engage and gain customer loyalty," added Sameer Parwani
Dabur Indias March quarter net profit grew 17 per cent year-on-year (y-o-y) to Rs 333 crore, despite loss of sales because of lower supply of Real fruit juices. The company had posted Rs 285 crore net profit during the same period last year. The fast-moving consumer goods major received Rs 2,157 crore in net sales, 11 per cent higher than Rs 1,995 crore in 2015.



Due to better cost management and lower raw material costs, the companys earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) margin improved by 120 basis points to 20.8 per cent on a y-o-y basis. Daburs January-March, 2016 Ebitda was Rs 471.7 crore.

Read more from our special coverage on "DABUR"

We had to deal with a tough economic environment characterised by extreme volatility in currency, as well as geopolitical disturbances in key geographies. We have taken steps to efficiently manage emerging risks and challenges. Our domestic FMCG business grew at 8.5 per cent during fourth quarter, 2015-16, led by seven per cent volume growth, said Sunil Duggal, chief executive, Dabur India.

Daburs manufacturing unit in Nepal produces nearly 60 per cent of its juices sold in India. Political turbulence in Nepal over the promulgation of a new constitution, which led to roadblocks on the Indo-Nepal border, had forced the company to shut down its Birgunj production unit for two days in October.Real fruit juice accounts for a fifth of Daburs total revenue. During the September quarter, its foods business declined 23.7 per cent due to supply disruptions in Nepal.During the quarter, two brands  Dabur Gulabari and Lal Tail  crossed Rs 100 crore sales mark, taking the tally of Daburs Rs 100 crore-plus brands to 16. Out of these, Real, Amla and Vatika generate more than Rs 1,000 crore in revenue.The companys international business grew 15.7 per cent, led by Egypt (27 per cent), Nepal (19.6 per cent), Turkey (8.5 per cent) and the Namaste business in the US.During FY16, Dabur posted net profit of Rs 1,255.5 crore, 18 per cent higher than FY15. Its consolidated net sales grew by 8 per cent to Rs 8,436 crore, compared with Rs 7,806.4 crore in 2014-15. Dabur lost more than Rs 100 crore business because of lower sale of Real juices.
Increasing pressure from a surge in sale of shoes online has impacted Bata India's margins. The footwear maker's net profit margin has declined by about 600 basis points (bps) since 2011, due to subdued consumer sentiments in the recent past and lack of investments in brand building. A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point.

In January 2012, the Union government allowed 100 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) in single brand retail. And, footwear brands have been at the forefront in making most of it. Currently, three of the top global brands - Reebok, Nike and Adidas - have branded stores in India. According to analysts, this impacted Bata's sales further in the country.

"Running a network of retail shoe outlets is tough in here. Usually, the overhead costs exceed total sales. Both Reebok and Adidas have shut down stores in India before, just like any other big retail chain brands," a retail industry executive said. Adidas and Reebok have 760 and 250 outlets respectively. Bata has more than 1,400 branded stores in India.

According to the report, Bata has lost out to foreign footwear brands as they "continue to reap benefits of disintermediation". Disintermediation is a process under which less number of intermediaries, such as distributors and dealers, are involved to reduce costs. Currently, distribution margin stands at 55 per cent of the total selling price of shoes for like Bata, which depends heavily on its established retail outlets for offtake. And its investment on branding remains lower at Rs 110 crore during 2009 and FY15, compared with expenditure in the brick and mortar store - Rs 500 crore during the same period. According to a consumer goods industry consultant, foreign brands have focused intensely on branding. "Branding exercises are crucial in the days of consumerism," he said.

Another factor that impacted its sale in recent times is the growing e-commerce space. The e-commerce sector in India grew 35 per cent in 2015 and is expected to grow by 67 per cent in 2016 to Rs 2,55,000 crore. According to the report, Bata has been affected as "the impact of e-commerce impairs its ability to absorb high fixed costs". The shoemaker's fixed cost currently stands at 35 per cent of sales.

To improve its financial performance, analysts suggest reduction in distribution costs. According to analysts from Spark Capital Advisors, now "Bata is adopting a calibrated approach in widening its retail footprint," deviating from its earlier store expansion strategy. "We realise that not only are rental leases being re-negotiated to take advantage of the subdued real estate environment, but store sizes are also being optimised to drive efficiency," they said.

Bata's rental cost has grown at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24 per cent, compared with 14 per cent revenue growth between 2010 and 2015-16 (estimated). This will keep its rental costs stable. In 2014-15, its rental costs formed 13.9 of sales - up by 390 bps from 2010 at nine per cent.
Idea Cellular, third largest telecom company in subscribers, posted a 39 per cent decline in net profit to Rs 575.6 crore in the quarter ended March, owing to higher finance costs. The net profit was Rs 941.8 crore in the same quarter a year before.

Finance charges jumped twofold to Rs 808 crore in January-March, from Rs 291.6 crore in the same quarter of 2015. Revenue increased 12.6 per cent to Rs 9,484 crore. Realisation from voice and data services came under pressure during the full year, though compared to the December quarter, there was a rise in the March one.

Net debt as on end-March 31 was Rs 38,750 crore, including all the deferred payment liability to the government for spectrum purchased in auctions.

For the year ended March 2016, consolidated net profit declined by 3.5 per cent over the previous year, to Rs 3,080 crore. Consolidated annual revenue rose 13.9 per cent to Rs 35,981 crore.

The realised rate from voice services was 33.3 paise a minute, from 33.9p a year before in the same period. Realisation from data services declined to 22.9p per megabyte from 44.8p an Mb during the same quarter a year before. With the addition of fourth-generation technology (4G) services, mobile data consumption was 82.2 billion Mb and 298 billion MB through the financial year.

With reduced consumer promotions this quarter, the subscriber and volume growth was slower, Idea said. Net quarterly subscriber addition was 1.9 million, taking its customer base to 183.8 mn. The Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) margin was 38.1 per cent, from 34.7 per cent in the December quarter.

For voice services, average revenue per user (Arpu) was Rs 129, against Rs 135 in the same quarter a year before (though, sequentially up from Rs 125 in the earlier quarter). Average realisation per minute from voice, as noted earlier, has dipped from a year before. As for Arpu from data services, it was Rs 147 for the quarter against Rs 150 a year before; data realisation as noted earlier was well down.

Mobile data revenue was 20.1 per cent of all service revenue and non-voice revenue contribution rose to 28.3 per cent against 24.5 per cent in the March quarter of 2015. Data usage went up to 641 Mb, against 586 Mb last year in the quarter.

In December, the company launched its 4G LTE services. In the last 100 days of the financial year, this was introduced in 3,946 towns and villages in 10 service areas (Maharashtra & Goa, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh & Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Haryana, Punjab, Karnataka, Orissa, Northeast and Tamil Nadu, including Chennai). As of end-March, about 680,000 customers were actively using its 4G service, says the company.

The ever improving brand affinity, accelerated pan-India infrastructure expansion and strong cash flows are lead indicators of Ideas ability to meet all volatile and ambiguous developments, stated the company.

Beside 4G, it continued 3G expansion during the year. The 3G data volume rose 2.1 times, from 91.2 billion Mb in FY15 to 188.8 billion Mn in FY16. The company added 8.4 million 3G users in the year, now serving 22.9 mn such data customers. In FY16, Idea has more than doubled its past three years' average capital expenditure, with network investment of Rs 7,770 crore. It integrated 48,878 sites, the highest ever (14,466 2G sites, 19,769 of 3G and 14,643 of 4G), reaching a total of 191,536 sites.

The board of directors announced a six per cent dividend, an overall payment of Rs 260 crore (including dividend distribution tax).

The primary reasons that impacted mobile industry growth in FY16 were reduction of interconnection charges by the sector regulator, reduction in the upper cap for national roaming and SMS charges, and slower uptake for mobile broadband services against supply of 3G and 4G launches across the country, the company stated.
Tata Steel has sought more help from the British government to find a buyer for its steel plants in the UK. Bimlendra Jha, chief executive officer of Tata Steel UK told a committee of British lawmakers there were "structural disadvantages" in the steel industry in the UK which made production unprofitable and added Tata Steel was not prepared to split up its main British assets, such as its Port Talbot steel plant, as part of a plan to divest its UK steelmaking operations.

Jha said, Tata Steel UK had not released dividend in the past nine years despite spending 1.5 billion as capital expenditure, which included putting up a new blast furnace. Tata Steel UK's operations remained unprofitable, which resulted in Tata Steel writing off 2 bn from its books. Structural disadvantages for operations in the UK included high labour and energy costs.

The Tata group had bought Anglo Dutch steelmaker Corus in 2007 for $12.9 bn, which was later renamed Tata Steel Europe. Tata Steel UK is a unit of Tata Steel Europe. Potential buyers are particularly sceptical about the company's pension fund liabilities. "We need to be aware that if this pension fund liability is not taken care of, there is no buyer sitting out there to buy this business," Jha told UK's government business committee. The pension burden is estimated to be about 2.5 bn.

Jha didn't commit to any deadline for the selling of the business that Tata group announced early this month. "There is no dead-drop time, but given the losses, urgency is important as we cannot continue to bleed money," Jha added.

Tata Steel went into trouble as the global steel industry suffered with oversupply, leading to low prices. World steel production doubled between 2000 and 2015, with China accounting for half of it. The sell-off has put up to 15,000 jobs at risk in Tata Steel UK's operations.

The consolidated debt of Tata Steel was Rs 71,798 crore on September 30, 2015. The total long-term debt of its Europe business was about 3 bn.

Greybull Capital agreed to pay a nominal 1 for Tata Steel's entire long-products business in the UK and take over its assets and liabilities, saving around 4,400 jobs. The British government is also willing to purchase a 25 per cent in Tata Steel UK's remaining business. Two potential buyers have been publicly identified so far, which includes a management buyout led by Tata Steel UK veteran Stuart Wilkie and a plan from commodity tycoon Sanjeev Gupta's Liberty House.

Both suitors have indicated that they will need the UK government's support to conclude a deal.

British Business Secretary Sajid Javid on Thursday said the government was not prepared to take more than a 25 per cent stake in Tata Steel's UK assets and he wanted to see them sold as soon as possible. "Twenty five percent was the limit that I thought was necessary to show that on the one hand you're serious about helping but also not to put off potential investors by saying this is something the government seeks to control," he told the lawmakers.
Sajjan Jindals Energy could be renegotiating a proposal to buy a 1,000-Mw power plant in Chhattisgarh from his brother Naveen Jindals Jindal Steel & Power (JSPL).

According to sources, was set to announce the deal on Thursday morning at a press conference which was cancelled a night before.

Read more from our special coverage on "JSW" JSW Steel re-commissions Vijayanagar, Salem blast furnaces

The invite for the cancelled press briefing had mentioned that Sanjay Sagar, joint managing director and chief executive officer of Energy, and Pramod Menon, director (finance) would talk about the business updates.

Company sources said the meet was called to announce the deal to buy the 1,000-MW Chhattisgarh power plant of JSPL.

On April 27, the BSE had also issued notices to JSW Energy and JSPL to reply on media reports of the former buying the power plant.

In its reply, JSW wrote, JSW Energy continues to evaluate various opportunities and as a part of such evaluation, discussion with various parties take place from time to time. Accordingly, no disclosable event under the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Listing Obligation and Disclosure Requirements), Regulations 2015 has taken place. We will duly inform the exchanges as and when the disclosable event occurs.



However, sources said both JSW and JSPL are waiting for response from BSE and National Stock Exchange (NSE) to their respective clarifications.

According to sources, JSPL will sell 1,000-Mw power plant in Chhattisgarh to JSW Energy. This will help JSPL meet interest payment obligations and pare overall debt of Rs 42,500 crore. Jindal Power has a total capacity of 3,400 Mw.

JSPL, in its communication to BSE and NSE said, We wish to clarify that Jindal Steel and Power Limited (JSPL) continues to evaluate various opportunities as a part of its group strategy. Whenever any proposal results into execution of binding documents, the company will comply with the provisions of the Sebi (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2015 and make requisite disclosures accordingly. As stated in our earlier response, JSPL is working on various options to monetise assets, to improve its cash flows, and as a part of such evaluation, discussion with various parties takes place from time to time.



Meanwhile, in a call with analysts to discuss March quarter results, Menon said JSW would continue to look at acquisitions which have synergetic value and insulate business risks. Plants with long-term power purchase agreements will be of interest, he added. While he neither confirmed nor denied the negotiations with JSPL, he said, the company would be comfortable in acquiring assets which would enable it work with a debt-equity ratio of 2.5 to 3 times. Presently, this ratio stands at 1.7 times for JSW Energy and room for additional leverage appears limited. Menon also indicated that the company is open to acquiring solar assets at reasonable valuations.

JSW Energy Q4 revenue increases 22%



JSW Energy management told analysts that it sees a volume growth of 17-20 per cent in FY17. This includes utilisation of recently-acquired hydro power project from Jaiprakash Power Ventures.

In Q4 FY16, the companys revenue grew 22 per cent year-on-year to Rs 2,706 crore. However, factors such as high interest costs and taxes resulted in a flat net profit growth of Rs 305 crore.

Also, with new rules requiring electricity distribution to purchase short-term power through an e-platform, JSWs per unit realisation would be impacted by Rs 0.15 to Rs 0.20 in FY17. In FY16, JSW Energy sold 10,175 million units (MU) of merchant power (47 per cent of total units sold) and earned Rs 4.12 per kilowatt (versus Rs 4.24 per kilowatt in FY15).

The company may reduce its exposure to short-term contracts and move towards medium- and long-term contracts going forward. Cost of fuel, which went up by 13 per cent in Q4, partly because of Rajasthan Electricity Regulatory Commissions verdict on its fuel cost and rupee depreciation, may continue to remain in higher range.
TTK Prestige, the countrys largest kitchenware firm, has expanded into home products space with mops, vacuum cleaners and floor polishers, as growth of its main business slows across the country.

This is the first time the company has moved out of its core kitchen business in its 60-odd year history.

Prestige Clean Home will function in the home appliances space which is growing at about 30 per cent annually as opposed to the Rs 10,000-crore kitchen appliances market where growth has stalled. The market for home cleaning appliances is pegged to be Rs 2,500 crore. The entry into cleaning products is our next push for growth. We intend to build a huge portfolio, for both routine and non-routine purposes, said Chandru Kalro, MD at .

The firm expects its home cleaning business to contribute five per cent of the company's overall revenue in the first year, and is targeting an annual growth of 50 per cent over the next five years. Prestige is expected to launch 20-odd products in four months, including an electric mop that was developed in-house and is manufactured in India.

While the market for home cleaning equipment and appliances is not mapped as a large portion of it is unorganised, will go up against existing firms such as Eureka Forbes that functions in the vacuum cleaners and air purifiers. It will also have to compete with several Chinese brands that are now making their way to India. TTK Prestige's stock fell Rs 41.8 or 0.9 per cent to close at Rs 4,473.3 on the BSE on Thursday.

"This is the first time we're venturing outside of the kitchen. The cleaning appliances market is growing at 25-30 per cent and there are a few entities," said T T Jagannathan, executive chairman at .

In terms of distribution, the company is planning to ride on the channel it has built for kitchenwares but also plans to tap home appliance sellers. Given that direct online sales currently contributes four per cent of TTK's overall revenue, it will also utilise its direct presence on Flipkart, Snapdeal and other marketplaces to sell its cleaning products.

TTK Prestige's stock closed Rs 41.85 or 0.093 per cent at Rs 4,473.35 on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on Thursday.
Vedanta reported a consolidated net loss of Rs 11,181 crore in the quarter ended March against a net loss of Rs 19,228 crore in the corresponding period last year.

This was on lower revenue as realisations from almost all businesses took a hit due to weak commodity prices. Prices of copper, aluminium and zinc were 16-20 per cent down year-on-year on the London Metal Exchange. Aluminium premiums (price over benchmark rates) were down 75 per cent (y-o-y).

The year-ago period had also seen exceptional items of Rs 19,981 crore. However, excluding these one-offs, Vedanta's net profit for the March 2016 quarter stood at Rs 955 crore against Rs 505 crore in the year-ago period and Rs 24 crore in the December quarter of 2015. This was better than analysts estimates of Rs 563 crore, according to Bloomberg poll. Similarly, operating earnings at Rs 3,472 crore was ahead of estimates of Rs 3,249 crore.

Net sales stood at Rs 15,829 crore during the quarter, down 11 per cent from the same period a year ago, but marginally higher than the Bloomberg estimate of Rs 15,481 crore.

Though the bottom line did receive some support from lower expenses and improved other income, a non-cash impairment charge of Rs 12,304 crore, largely relating to Cairn Indias acquisition, pulled it down.

Of the total impairment, Rs 10,074 crore was incurred on account of loss of goodwill over acquisition of Cairn India and Rs 284 crore due to a write-off in exploratory assets in the oil and gas business.

The impairment was triggered by the continued fall in crude oil prices during the year, the company said. Further, in light of declining iron ore prices, both the acquisition goodwill and carrying value of exploratory assets in West Africa had also been impaired by Rs 1,490 crore, Vedanta said.

In addition, certain fixed assets and goodwill at copper mines in Tasmania and iron ore mines in Bellary, Karnataka, incurred an impairment charge of Rs 456 crore, the company said.

Vedantas other income during the quarter was Rs 1,289 crore against Rs 41.14 crore in the same period a year ago.

Other income was significantly higher both sequentially and year on year largely due to timing differences wherein income earned on certain investments are recognised at maturity. During the quarter, a substantial portion of investments were liquidated at Hindustan Zinc on account of an announcement of special dividend and at Cairn India, Vedanta said.

Though the company's iron ore business managed to move into Rs 80 crore profits during the quarter, this was nullified by Rs 64 crore losses incurred by the oil and gas business. Earnings from the aluminium business declined 92.5 per cent to Rs 61 crore against Rs 812 crore in year-ago period. However, on sequential basis, the aluminium business has turned in profits which the company attributed to cost efficiencies. In fact, except for copper, all divisions reported an increase in segment profit compared to the December 2015 quarter.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) declined 13 per cent, year on year, to Rs 3,508 crore during the quarter.

On its progress on the merger with Cairn India, Vedanta said it remained important for simplification of the group and would consolidate assets, improve financial flexibility and deliver superior returns. We are committed to the transaction and continue to work towards completion, it added.

In the year ended March 2016, Vedanta's net debt declined by Rs 6,254 crore with cash and cash equivalents at Rs 52,666 crore. The company's debt stood at Rs 77,952 crore in 2015-16.

Our focus will continue to remain on deleveraging our balance sheet and maximising free cash flow, Tom Albanese, chief executive officer of Vedanta, was quoted as saying.
Hero Splendors long streak of market dominance looks likely to be challenged by Hondas biggest seller Activa, as it steps on the pedal to get the top spot in the two-wheeler space.

Splendor is one of Indias oldest and largest selling motorcycles; Activa is the countrys largest selling scooter. Honda shrunk the gap with the Hero bestseller after Splendor sales declined last year, while that of Activa grew in double digits.

From a gap of nearly 339,000 units in the financial year 2014-15, or FY15, Splendors lead over Activa was down to under 20,000 units in 2015-16 or FY16, according to Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers data.

Last year (FY16), Hero sold 2.48 million Splendors; in FY15, it had sold 2.51 million units. It was a drop of 1.2 per cent.

In seven of the 12 months last year, Activa was racing ahead of Splendor; it held on to its leading position in the January-March quarter.

Since first racing ahead of Splendor in September 2013, the Japanese scooter model has often sold more units than the Indian motorcycle.

Hero has managed to hold on to a slim lead but what could upset the ranking is Hondas new manufacturing capacity. It recently inaugurated the largest scooter-only plant in the world, in Gujarat in February. Now, it can make 1.2 million scooters every year.

Activas growth has eaten into the economy bikes (1,000-cc engine) market. In urban area, scooters are preferred over bikes because it is easier to ride them through congested roads.

According to a Credit Suisse report, Past five years, the share of scooters has increased from around 20 per cent to around 30 per cent and in the same period the share of lower executive bikes (around Rs 50,000 price, same as scooters) has shrunk from around 35 per cent to around 25 per cent. In more developed states, scooter share has already crossed 40 per cent and is still increasing. We expect the share of scooters to reach around 40 per cent by FY20, which should be the most positive for Honda, which completely dominates the space.



Last year, scooter sales grew nearly 12 per cent to 5.03 million units, against 4.5 million units sold in FY15. Motorcycle sales reported a fall of 0.24 per cent last year to close at 10.70 million, against 10.72 million clocked in FY15.

Hondas growing presence in the rural areas will help in rapidly taking scooters to the villages.

At present, only about 15 per cent of Hondas scooter sales come from the rural markets. Its dealership reach is less than half of the market leader.

Hero has over 6,000 dealerships and service points.
In view of rising sexual crimes in the country, consultations are underway to set up a in the country, government told the Rajya Sabha today.

"Draft guidelines on the proposal to set up in India is under preparation in consultation with relevant ministries/organisations, before they are put out for wider consultation with the state governments and the public," Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju said during Question Hour, adding that the proposal was at a "primary stage".

This will be an online database of charge-sheeted sexual offenders in the entire country, which people can access through a Citizen Portal in the upcoming Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) project.

The United States has a similar website called Sex Offender Public Website. Concerned residents can use its search tool to identify location information on sex offenders residing and working not only in their own neighbourhood but in other nearby states and communities. In addition, it provides visitors with information about sexual abuse and how to protect themselves among other things.

Rijiju said the initial consultation draft includes the registration of individuals "convicted for offences like rape, voyeurism, stalking and aggravated sexual assault" and includes possiblity of registration of "offenders below and above 18 years".

Replying to supplementaries, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said, "The central government has issued these draft guidelines to check sexual harassment. They are still at a very primary stage. The draft guidelines, which have been readied have been sent to ministries including Women and Child Development for suggestions. After this, public comments will be solicited."



According to draft guidelines proposed, extensive information on the offender will be collected.

This will inlude, inter-alia name and aliases, registration of primary or given name, nicknames, pseudonyms, telephone numbers, addresses including temporary lodging information, travel and immigration documents.

Besides, the information on offenders to be collected for the Registry include those related to their jobs, professional licenses, information of school, college, institute with which they have been associated, vehicle information, date of birth, criminal history, current photograph, fingerprints and palm prints, DNA sample, driver's license, identification card, PAN card number, Aadhar card number and Voter ID number.

The idea of a nationwide 'Sex Offenders Registry' had also come up during the UPA rule in the aftermath of the horrendous 2013 Nirbhaya gangrape-murder case but had not moved any further.
After cancelling Chinese dissident Dolkun Isa's visa, India has denied visas to another Chinese dissident Lu Jinguh and activist Ra Wong who were coming to attend a conference in Dharamshala on democracy and China.

"As fas as Lu Jinghua's is concerned, her documents were illegible and there was inconsistency with the purpose of her visit. Insofar as Ray Wong is concerned, there was data inconsistency in his documents. As such visas were not issued to both these individuals so question of revocation does not arise," a government source said in New Delhi.

Lu is a well-known Tiananmen activist, while Ra is a Hong Kong-based activist.

According to reports, Lu claimed that she was told that her was cancelled and was stopped from boarding an Air India flight from New York. She also claimed that she had received am email confirmation for an electronic .

Earlier this week, the visa to Isa, a leader of World Uyghur Congress (WUC) who lives in Germany and had been invited for the conference this week being organised by US-based 'Initiatives for China', was cancelled. The Indian action was seen by many as buckling under Chinese pressure.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) on Thursday successfully placed launched a rocket that carried the countrys seventh navigation satellite IRNSS. With this, India has entered an exclusive club of nations who have their own satellite navigation. India will no longer be dependent on foreign power when it comes to military navigation.

With the complete system in place, Indian armed forces will be able to find their position accurately in the battle ground and direct ammunition and missiles deep into enemy territory. This is largely due to the extended range of 1,500 km of the system beyond the borders. The system can also be used for civilian navigation for aircraft, ships, railways and others.

While there are many more features and utilities of this satellite, Business Standard lists out five things to know about the satellite.

- India will no longer be dependent on a foreign power when it comes to military navigation now

- India is now a part of a prestigious club of countries that operate their own satellite navigation systems

- The constellation of seven satellites (three in geostationary and four in geosynchronous orbit) will provide navigational services to Indian subcontinent and South Asia

- IRNSS has both commercial and strategic applications. It caters to the needs of civil aviation and also requirements for positioning, navigation and timing based on an independent satellite navigation system.

- Applications of IRNSS are terrestrial, aerial and marine navigation, vehicle tracking and fleet management, terrestrial navigation for hikers and travellers, disaster management, integration with mobile phones, mapping and geodetic data capture and visual and voice navigation for drivers.
The Ministry of External Affairs has written to the British High Commission seeking the extradition of liquor baron Vijay Mallya, ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said on Thursday.

The move comes days after the ministry revoked the diplomatic passport of Mallya after he failed to turn up for a probe into a Rs.9,000 crore default of loans from Indian banks.

Mallya is currently in Britain. In a related development, the ED on Wednesday urged a Delhi court to recall its earlier order granting permanent exemption from personal appearance to liquor baron Vijay Mallya in a case for allegedly evading summons issued by the agency in connection with purported violation of foreign exchange rules. Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) Sumit Dass, who was hearing final arguments in the case, was told by Enforcement Directorate (ED's) prosecutor N K Matta that he would file an appropriate application in this regard within a week. The court posted the matter for further hearing on May 20. The ED has also decided to make a formal request to the National Central Bureau, a division of Interpol in India, to issue a red corner notice against Mallya.

The move came after CS Vaidyanathan, Mallya's counsel, told the Supreme Court that the liquor baron did not plan to return because he might be taken straight to Tihar jail from the airport.
The Government of India has asked Britain to deport Vijay Mallya, whose Kingfisher Airlines has been accused of defaulting bank loans of about Rs 9,400 crore, citing the revocation of his passport and a non-bailable warrant against him.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has written to the British High Commission seeking Mallya's return, so that "his presence can be secured for investigations against him" under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters.

He further said the Indian High Commission in the UK will also be issuing a similar note verbale to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The foreign ministry last week had revoked Mallya's diplomatic passport. The move was a step towards launching a bid to bring back Mallya, who is the subject of a non-bailable warrant issued by a special judge in Mumbai.

The Enforcement Directorate has approached the MEA seeking initiation of deportation proceedings against Mallya, charged with money laundering in the Rs 900-crore IDBI loan fraud case. It has also accused Mallya-led UB Group of using Rs 430 crore loaned to Kingfisher to buy property abroad.

Creditors, led by State Bank of India, have rejected an offer of partial repayment by Mallya, who had given a personal guarantee for the Kingfisher loan. They have demanded that the former billionaire attend a hearing in the Supreme Court.

Mallya, traced to a country residence in Hertfordshire, has said he would comply with the law.

The British Home Office, which adjudicates in such cases, declined to comment. A spokesman said its policy was neither to confirm nor deny that extradition requests have been made.

Mallya, who had left India on March 2 for the UK, can approach the British authorities to grant him permission to continue his stay in that country or challenge the revocation of his passport. His departure has left the Indian government and bankers red-faced as they try to crack down on high-profile defaulters.
Madame Tussauds wax museum in London unveiled on Thursay the wax statue of Prime Minister alongside other world leaders.

The statue that arrived at Baker Street shows Modi with folded hands in 'namaste' style, dressed in white kurta pyjama and cream jacket.

Indias 15th Prime Minister is featured in World Leaders enclosure alongside US President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and France President Francoise Hollande.

He will also share the space with Indian celebrities including Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar. Other eminent legends of the past include Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

Modi, known for his oratory, seemed at a loss of words looking at his wax self.

He said: "What can I say? As far as art is concerned, the Madame Tussauds team is exceptional at what they do. What Lord Brahma does normally is what the artists there are doing.

"Prime Minister Modi is a hugely important figure in world politics, a position supported by his place in the top 10 of Time Magazine's Person of the Year List 2015," Kieran Lancini, museum spokesperson, said.

According to reports, the wax figure was completed in four months and at a cost of 150,000 (Rs 1.5 crore) each.

A new branch of Madame Tussauds is also set to open in New Delhi as part of the India-UK Year of Culture in 2017, announced during Prime Minister Modi's visit to the UK last November.
The Delhi High Court heard the government's stand today on the banning of 344 fixed dose combinations (FDC's) previously licensed and marketed by manufacturers.

Pursuant to a report submitted by the Kokate Committee established by the Health Ministry, the central government had by notification on March 10 banned the specified FDC's on the grounds of safety and efficacy.

The move with its potentially huge financial implications was immediately challenged by some of the pharmaceutical sectors largest manufacturers leading to a flood of petitions in the High Court.

The court first heard the matter on March 14 and provided interim relief by staying the applicability of the impugned notification. The petitioners on the ground that the drugs in questionhad been in the market for the last 25 years and the notification issued by the government did not disclose any grave urgency.In today's hearing, the government was allowed the opportunity to justify the ban before the court.

Advocate Rajul Jain, appearing for the Union of India made an impassioned plea highlighting the necessity and reasonability of the notification. He said: "This exercise (ofidentification and banning) in itself is required to be taken frequently (bythe government)" in light of general public interest."



He further requested the court for a purposive interpretation of the Act in line with the vision of the legislators and the social objective sought to be achieved.

The court in turn questioned the authority ofthe government to make such notifications and frame rules with retro-activeoperation outside of the provisions of the Act. "Can it be so (the power tomake rules), without statutory provisions" Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw asked.

While defending the power of the government the arguing counsel referred to various provisions of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act,1940 and rules framed there under.

He drew the attention of the court to Section26A which enshrines the powers of the Central Government to prohibit manufacture, etc., of drugs in public interest and Section 33(2)(e) which allows for rules to be made by the Central Government for cancellation orsuspension of licenses if provisions of the Act (or rules) are not complied with.

The government advocate also highlighted the distinction between 'licensing' and 'approval' and submitted that there could be no valid license without approval as required by the rules. He further contended that any license required renewal every five years and that the affected companieshad approached state licensing authorities for renewals without first complying with approval requirements.

After hearing the submissions, the court asked the government to consider if any legal lacuna had remained in their stance and whether the situation could be remedied by any appropriate action. The court continued the interim relief previously awarded to the petitioners and listed the matter for further hearing on May 5.

On a parting note, Justice Endlaw issued aword of concern on the present situation calling it a "Very dangerous thing, aswe don't know how many others (unapproved drugs) there are (in the market)."
A war that threatens to kill the legislative agenda of the budget session of Parliament and possibly the coming monsoon session has broken out between the government and the Opposition, with the Congress alleging that the government is out to "fix" it.

With Congress President Sonia Gandhi the target of corruption charges in the AgustaWestland helicopter deal and fresh revelations in the Aircel Maxis inquiry that mire the family of former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, the Congress is militant, the government unyielding and the biggest casualty, important legislation, including the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Constitution Amendment Bill.

"This (Parliament) session is gone", conceded government leaders. The argument over the imposition of President's rule in Uttarakhand along with updates in the helicopter deal from London, in which "more names are expected to come out", will likely drive this session off the rails and will have its reverberations in the monsoon session as well.

Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy put the cat among the pigeons when he rose to say "Sonia Gandhi" in the Rajya Sabha. The rest of his sentence was expunged. The House erupted in frenzy and had to be adjourned twice and eventually until 2 pm. They did discuss drought in the afternoon, but it was under a non-voting motion.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told a meeting of the consultative committee on NPAs (non-performing assets) that the Joint Committee on Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code has submitted its report and it is likely to be taken up in the ongoing session. Sources said the committee has accommodated all amendments moved by opposition members and submitted its report without any dissenting notes. This, and the raging debate on NPAs and willful default of bank loans by industrialists like Vijay Mallya, might make the government as well as the Congress to allow discussion and passage of the Bill.

The Congress was primed from the morning as Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday convened a truncated Congress Working Committee meeting at her residence where she wiped her eyes as she tried to articulate her feelings at the way she was being targeted by the government.

Her daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who is likely to play a bigger and more visible political role, was present throughout the strategy session also attended by former Defence Minister A K Antony who had instituted the inquiry into the AgustaWestland deal and cancelled the contract.

Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad first raised the AgustaWestland issue in the House, citing a news report in The Hindu, demanding to know if any meeting had occurred between the Indian and the Italian prime ministers and a deal struck whereby Italian marines would be freed in exchange for incriminating information against the Gandhis. Leader of the House and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley rejected outright the charges and said the "investigation is at an advanced stage" and while it was clear that bribes had been given, "the taker of the bribe has to be established".

Later, a combative Sonia Gandhi told the media, "I am not afraid. This is typical of the character assassination kind of politics that they (the BJP) indulge in." Antony described as "criminal negligence" the two-year delay by the National Democratic Alliance government on the investigation against AgustaWestland. Antony demanded to know the "compulsions" under which the Modi government allowed a "blacklisted company" (it was blacklisted in July 2014) to take part in the government's hyped Make In India programme, with permission to bid for defence business in India as partners or sub-contractors, despite objections raised by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate.

Demanding answers from the Modi government, Antony asked, "Why did the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) approve a proposal from Indian Rotorcraft Limited, a joint venture between AgustaWestland and Tata?" He added, "Why did the Modi government permit AgustaWestland to bid for 100 naval utility helicopters in April 2015?"



Without mincing his words, Congress Spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said, "Is it not a fact that Air Chief Marshal SP Tyagi (who is a central figure in the deal) has been part of the Vivekananda International Foundation?" He asked the government to come clean on the connection between Tyagi, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Nripendra Mishra, principal secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Taking the attack to the BJP camp, the Congress raised questions about BJP Chief Ministers Raman Singh and Vasundhara Raje, who have both been indicted by CAG reports for purchase of AgustaWestland helicopters, allegedly causing loss to the exchequer.

Congressmen ensured that they attacked the government, not just within Parliament but outside, for the "political conspiracy" against the party's leader. But the BJP was not backing down either. Several Lok Sabha MPs have given notices for discussion on the helicopter deal that Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar will reply to.

In the Lok Sabha BJP MP Nishikant Dubey raised the Aircel Maxis issue and asked the government to clarify the exact legal nature of the investments made by the family of former Finance Minister P Chidambaram. Later, at a press conference, Skill Development Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy was fielded to say the government must look at the 'benami empire' established all over the world by the family of P Chidambaram.

It is highly unlikely that any bills will be passed by the Rajya Sabha, where the government is in a minority, in the remainder of the session. Only financial business like passing ministry-related grants is on the Lok Sabha's agenda, the House having already passed bills on biotechnology and the composition of the Sikh Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC). In the Rajya Sabha, only issues relating to emergencies like drought and farmer suicides are likely to be permitted. It remains to be seen whether the Congress makes an exception for the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code in the Upper House.

Later in the day, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup also denied that any meeting took place between the Italian and Indian PMs on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2015. He said various law enforcement agencies of India are moving against James Christian Michel in cases relating to the Prevention of Corruption Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

THE CHOPPER STORY SO FAR



On April 7, 2016, an Italian appeals court sentenced former Finmeccanica Chief Executive Giuseppe Orsi to four and a half years in prison for corruption and falsifying invoices. This overturned a lower court ruling holding Orsi guilty only of false invoices. Orsi was on trial for alleged bribes in a Euro 560-million ($638 million) contract awarded to Finmeccanica unit AgustaWestland in 2010 to supply helicopters to India.

Bruno Spagnolini, former head of AgustaWestland, was sentenced to four years in jail. The court also ordered the two executives to pay Euro 7.5 million ($8.5 million), a sum related to the amounts deemed to have been allegedly paid in bribes. Both Orsi and Spagnolini are going to appeal in Italy's Supreme Court. Italian public prosecutor Eugenio Fusco had accused Orsi and Spagnolini of paying tens of millions of euros to Indian officials, including a former air force chief, through intermediaries. Both were acquitted of the corruption accusations. Judge Luisa Bovitutti said the conviction concerned invoices dating to 2009 and 2010 and the acquittal on corruption charges was made because "there was no case to answer".

The India story



AgustaWestland was chosen to supply 12 helicopters to the government to replace the Soviet-built Mi8s, whose working life ran out in 2014. Negotiations began in 2000 and because the specifications were so precise only the Eurocopter qualified.

Brajesh Mishra, the then principal secretary to the prime minister, said this was to be avoided, and the specifications were lowered to make the deal more competitive. This left just two big players in the field, AgustaWestland and Sikorsky.

In 2010, after field trials showed AgustaWestland had the better aircraft, Sikorsky complained it had not been briefed on certain concessions and the trials had been unfair. It followed this up with a legal notice to the ministry of defence.

The Italian public prosecutor produced documents they found at the residence of Guido Ralph Haschke, a middleman who contacted another 'facilitator', Christian Michel, who is said to have had contacts in the Indian government and is a defence middleman. The note has headings "AF", which prosecutors said stood for air force, "BUR" for bureaucrats, "POL" for politicians and "Fam" for family members of the former Indian air force chief of staff, SP Tyagi. Prosecutors allege the family members-three brothers who are the cousins of the former air chief-shared the money among themselves and the chief.

"Staff qualitative requirements for the VVIP choppers were frozen in 2003, much before I assumed office of chief of air staff and the IAF did not change any requirements after that," Tyagi has said. His service records reveal he never had anything to do with procurement.

The last point of procurement-related decision in the IAF is the deputy chief of air staff. Tyagi has never held this office. Below this are six other officers. He has never held any of those appointments either.

But the papers also revealed other facts. Under POL the note lists Euro 3 million for "AP." Prosecutors said in court they believed the initials referred to Ahmed Patel, political adviser to Congress President Sonia Gandhi.

Italian prosecutors alleged that India's anti-corruption watchdogs also were on the list of those who received payoffs. The lists heading "CVC", they said, referred to the Central Vigilance Commission and "Auditor Gen" to the Comptroller and Auditor General.

In its FIR, the CBI - to which the matter was referred when former Defence Minister AK Antony cancelled the order - said the IAF had throughout opposed lowering the altitude requirement but when Tyagi took it agreed to reduce it.

Tyagi's three relatives, Rajiv, Sanjeev and Sandeep Tyagi, were paid via fake companies. "Guido Haschke managed to send Euro 5.6 million through the Mohali-based IDS Infotech and Chandigarh-based Aeromatrix Info Solutions to India and kept the remaining amount of about Euro 24.30 million received from AgustaWestland with themselves in the account of IDS Tunisia," says the CBI FIR.

Orsi has denied hiring Haschke and Michel to influence the helicopter deal, saying it was not necessary. "The AgustaWestland 101 was the helicopter the Indians wanted," he said in court.

The latest update



The Italian court order relies on the old evidence that mentions, but does not name, Sonia Gandhi or Manmohan Singh as recipients of bribes. As the CBI awaits the English translation of the order, the alleged clincher is a letter dated March 15, 2008, from Michel to Peter Hulet, then India region sales and liaison head of AgustaWestland. It reads: "Dear Peter, since Mrs Gandhi is the driving force behind the VIP, she will no longer fly with MI8  Mrs Gandhi and her closest advisers are the aim of the High Commissioner, senior advisor Prime Minister Manmohan Singh obviously the main figure, then there's Ahmed Patel secretary."



BJP Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy has named Sonia Gandhi on the floor of the House as a beneficiary from corruption. Congress Spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said if anybody needed to answer questions on the matter it was the Modi government.

He said the UPA government had included an integrity clause according to which the contract for purchase of helicopters from AgustaWestland was cancelled, the guarantee forfeited and process initiated for recovery of money. Surjewala said the money was recovered and "not a single rupee loss was caused to the government of India." He said the UPA government had also ordered a CBI inquiry as well as initiated the process of blacklisting AgustaWestland.

"As the government changed in May 2014, Modiji proceeded to cancel the process of blacklisting AgustaWestland. Why did Modiji not blacklist AgustaWestland?" Surjewala asked.
Amid the raging row over VVIP chopper scam, the government today said it will seek a report from the CBI on the deal and initiate the move to blacklist AgustaWestland and its parent company Finmeccanica. It also claimed that the previous UPA dispensation had not put any embargo on the scandal-tainted company.

Top Modi government sources claimed the UPA government had not blacklisted AgustaWestland despite allegations of bribery and that it was only when the NDA came to power in 2014 all acquisition proposals with the firm were put on hold.

CBI had in 2013 registered a case in connection with alleged bribes paid by the firm to Indians to clinch the deal for 12 helicopters to ferry VVIPs including the President and Prime Minister.

Congress had yesterday claimed AgustaWestland was blacklisted under UPA rule but "removed" from the blacklist by the Modi government.

Congress leader and former Union Minister Anand Sharma had said, "The chopper deal was scrapped. Action was taken by the UPA government. A K Antony, the then Defence Minister, had made a statement in Parliament and AgustaWestland was blacklisted."



However, the government sources said, "The only punitive action taken by the Congress was in January 2014, just before the Lok Sabha elections, when the UPA govermment encashed the bank guarantee. They never blacklisted the company as claimed by them".

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had earlier in the day challenged the Congress to show the order by the UPA government confirming the blacklisting.

It was on July 3, 2014 when Arun Jaitley was Defence Minister that an order was issued which put on hold all procurement and acquisition cases in the pipeline with six companies involved in the scam including AgustaWestland and Finmeccanica, the sources said.

They said it was also decided that in cases where the tender process had not started, there shall be no dealing with those companies and entities till conclusion of the CBI probe and that Request for Intent/Request for Proposal shall be issued to any of them.

The sources said the question was not about being banned or not but about who the politicians, bureaucrats and IAF officials were who took the bribes as reported by the Italian Court.
Terming the 5/20 rule, which regulates Indian carriers flying abroad as anarchic, Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju on Thursday said he was trying to change it so that new airlines can connect with foreign destinations.

Raju said in Lok Sabha the government wants more Indian airlines to fly to foreign destinations but as long as the 5/20 rule is not changed, they cannot fly abroad. The rule entails that an airline can fly to international destinations only if it has served within the country for five years and has a 20-aircraft fleet.

The more the merrier. It is a fact that 5/20 rule came from a particular Cabinet at a particular point of time. To my mind, it is an anarchic type of thing. It prevents the Indian registered airlines to function. But as long as that rule is there, we have to follow it. I am trying to change the rule and if I have my way, it will happen, he said during Question Hour.

Raju's reply came when Congress member Shashi Tharoor said the Kerala government had tried to set up a state airline called 'Air Kerala' to cater to the vast amount of traffic of Keralites going to Gulf countries since private carriers were exploitative, but could not do so due to the 5/20 rule.

"It is our duty to see that people are not exploited. In fact, airfares before 1994 were controlled by the Government. Airlines before that had to apply and take government approval. In 1994, the Act was repealed by Parliament," the Minister said.

BJP member R K Singh too joined Tharoor saying private airlines often exploit passengers taking emergency situation which government must check.

"Whenever there is an emergency situation, the airlines hike the fare and exploit people. This is nothing but exploitation and if the government keeps watching this happening then what is the use of having a government," Singh said.

The Minister said government has analysed the entire issue and found that the high side of the fares in the total ticketing is about less than two per cent.

"So, we realise that the prices of tickets have come down in most routes, particularly where the competition is more. What is bothering us is where the competition is less, airfares are a bit high. We need strategies to increase capacity there," Raju said.

He said capacities and growth in the country have been going up. If the growth is stifled, the problem will not be resolved.

"With regard to emergencies like Chennai floods, Srinagar floods or the Jat agitation and all that, we do see these things coming up and we give advisories to the airlines and some of the airlines do respond," he said.
There's ample evidence to suggest that power producers for projects awarded through tariff-based bidding have erred in not recognising the unpredictability of fuel costs. In its April 7 order, the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (Aptel), however, shut the doors on compensatory tariff as a way out for developers to address the increase in fuel costs.

For companies like Tata Power, Adani Power and a host of others that were hoping for a compensatory tariff mechanism, the order has added to uncertainty on power rates. The order says the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) has no powers under Section 79(1) (b) of the Electricity Act to vary or modify the tariff or otherwise grant compensatory tariff to generating companies in case the tariff has been determined through a competitive bidding process in accordance with Section 63 of the Act. "This would be contrary to the entire scheme of the competitive bidding process," the Aptel order says.

Sudip Sural, senior director, Crisil Ratings, says the order will have a direct impact on generation companies for which variable costs are not a pass-through, as it restricts CERC from changing tariffs by going beyond the scope of PPAs. What the order has done is to establish the sanctity of PPAs in no uncertain terms. "The flexibility for revision in fuel component of tariff depends on the specific provisions of the relevant PPA with respect to pass-through of fuel costs," says Sural.

TARIFF TUSSLE Tata Power's 4,000-Mw ultra mega power project's first unit commissioned in 2012



The tariff in PPAs with distribution companies in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Punjab and Haryana was set at Rs 2.26 a unit



Adani Power commissioned its 1,980-Mw project in Mundra in 2008



The tariff in PPAs with Gujarat and Haryana was set at Rs 2.35 per unit



Adani Power has been importing coal since 2011 and Tata Power since 2012



Both Tata and Adani Power filed a petition with CERC in 2012, stating increase in coal price should be pass-through under "change of law" and "force majeure"



In February 2014, CERC fixed the compensatory tariff to 54 paise per unit for Tata and 41 paise for Adani



The power procurers moved Aptel contesting the decision



Aptel upheld the decision in July 2014 in an interim order



Supreme Court rejects the interim order in August 2014



Aptel's final order on April 7 rejects compensatory tariff but rules in favour of force majeure

Yet, the Aptel order has not been completely oblivious to the issue of fuel cost increase. By stating that the change in Indonesian coal laws, which affected the cost of fuel for many Indian power companies, be treated as, and by directing CERC to determine the extent of its impact on power companies within the next three months, Aptel has provided some relief to Tata Power and its subsidiary Coastal Gujarat Power.

No immediate boost

While in the near-term, it may not be of much help for the company, over the long-term, as Moody's Investors Service says, the order is going to be credit-positive for Tata Power as any compensation as a result of the Aptel order is expected to help the company trim its losses and in turn improve the ratings of the holding company.

Coastal Gujarat Power has been a drag on Tata power's revenues for a while now. According to a Moody's report, it accounted for 37 per cent of Tata Power's consolidated debt as of December 31, 2015. A large part of this debt is from Coastal Gujarat Power's 4,000-Mw ultra mega power project at Mundra in Gujarat. While the Mundra project made up for 44 per cent of Tata Power's total installed generation capacity of 9,156 Mw as of March this year, it also reported a net loss of Rs 8,900 crore in 2014-15.

"If the tariff revision based on Aptel's order were to fully compensate that (the increase in overseas coal prices), it should lead to 7-9 per cent increase in 2016-17 estimated EBIDTA (earnings before income, depreciation, taxes and amortisation) and its funds from operations/debt metrics improving to 9-10 per cent," says the report.

There is a lot riding for Tata Power on the Aptel order. Coastal Gujarat Power is in breach of its covenants relating to its maximum debt-to-equity ratio and minimum debt- service-coverage ratio, given the impairment booked on its assets and the reduced cash flows. It is in discussion with its lenders for waiver of these covenants, says the Moody's report. "Coastal Gujarat Power's performance, however, has been improving over the last few quarters with the decline in international coal prices and the company reversed 88 per cent of the impairment booked earlier in the quarterly results reported in December 2015."



The positive impact of the Aptel order might also be more visible on Tata Power than Adani Power. Unlike Adani, Tata Power did not take into its balance sheet revenues accruing from the compensatory tariff published by CERC based on the recommendations of a committee in November last year which has now been revoked by Aptel.

For Adani Power, which reported a loss of around Rs 380 crore from Mundra plant during April-December 2015, the benefit of increased tariff will now have to be discounted. The company reportedly took Rs 600-crore benefit on its books on the basis of the now-cancelled CERC order.

The consumer story

Consumers, though, have reasons to rejoice. By rejecting the power of CERC in fixing compensatory tariffs for PPAs under the tariff-based bidding process, Aptel has insulated them from frequent increase in electricity prices.

According to Kameswara Rao, partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers, consumers will face higher tariffs only for electricity from projects which have not been bid under the tariff-based model and where a provision has been made in the agreement for a pass through of fuel cost.

"The order makes a distinction between normal fuel price variation where contract terms permit pass-through, and unanticipated events for which a prior position could not have been taken," he says. "So, bidders who failed to take advantage of available provisions, would find it hard to make a case now," adds Rao.

Aptel's order can be appealed in the Supreme Court. Many believe there is a strong case for tariff revision for power companies. As Rao says, "It is important to recognise that profitable power companies are in consumer interest, as it helps attract capital at competitive rates." Clearly, the last word on the matter hasn't been heard yet.
Swedish furniture maker IKEA has asked the government for a faster Customs clearance mechanism for smooth business operations as it is gets ready to open its first store in India.

The finance ministry has assured the company, which is making the largest foreign direct investment so far in the single-brand retail space, of speedier clearance of cargo at ports to help it save time and cost. The first store will be opened in Hyderabad in 2017.

"IKEA has assured compliance to us and we have assured them time. The company has got into partnerships with the Customs of the 16 countries they operate in for faster clearance of cargo. They want a similar arrangement in India," said a government official.

The company's warehouse is coming up near Jawaharlal Nehru Port, east of Mumbai. It would bring in FDI of Rs 10,500 crore.

The government has assured the multinational retailer of import facilitation through a revamped importers scheme it plans to launch in a few months.

The finance ministry, in consultation with the trade bodies, is looking to unite and expand the scope of two separate programmes for importers - Accredited Clients Programme (ACP) and Authorised Economic Operator (AEO) scheme, allowing deferred payments of customs duty, relief from routine checks, and direct port transfers, besides significantly easing eligibility pre-conditions.

"We have informed IKEA that it can become the member of the revamped scheme to enjoy facilitation benefits. We have studied the performance of these schemes internationally and analysed how the US and China scaled it up. We realised that you cannot have an authorisation programme with a mindset of enforcement," another official added.

The revamped scheme will allow direct port transfers, allowing them to directly move their cargo as it arrives at the land or sea port to the warehouse without any checks.

"Importers can keep the transporter ready at the port ahead of the arrival of the cargo and plan their inventories better without a lag. IKEA works this way globally," said the official.

The government cleared IKEA's FDI proposal in 2013 to set up 15 stores and allied infrastructure in over a decade.

The Swedish company lobbied with then United Progressive Alliance government for relaxation in the 30 per cent mandatory sourcing norm. The government had changed the norms, allowing the company to source from anyone in the domestic market rather than the previously prescribed small and medium enterprises.

Last year, IKEA signed MoUs with Karnataka, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra to set up stores. To be accessible IKEA is looking for store sites with direct access to mass public transport systems, preferably the metro and located near the highway. The Narendra Modi government is promoting ease of doing business by cutting red tape at various levels in order to make India one of the top investment destinations.

An AEO programme offers members reduced examination and inspection, higher facilitation than ACP clients, and acceptance of pre-arrival import declarations. Only about 18 entities so far have AEO status in India. At present, about 13 per cent of imports happen through the Accredited Clients Programme route and has just about 300-odd members, despite being launched in 2005.

The government is aiming that at least 40 per cent of imports occur through the revamped programme, with more than 1,000 members.

The US has 11,000 members on board; China over 1,000.

The government looking to do away with the eligibility criterion of Rs 10 crore worth imports in the previous fiscal to encourage medium and small enterprises be a part of this scheme as against just large members.

The government will also likely do away with the condition of no pending show-cause notice, which has been the biggest deterrent of the scheme so far.

The single unified scheme for importers will focus on taxpayers' services, extending convenience benefits. The central board of excise and customs is holding consultations with other government departments to come on board and mutually recognise imports and opt for only risk-based assessment for member importers.

"Talks are also on with the service tax and excise duty departments to work out a process for mutual recognition," said an official.

THE INVESTOR'S DEMANDS

THE DEMANDS & THEIR STATUS

Made in: 2012

2012 Status: Allowed by UPA govt

Made in: 2015

2015 Status: Government obliged

Made in: 2016

2016 Status: Government assures import facilitation

INDIA PLANS

To open 10-15 stores over the next decade. Each store to be about 350,000 sq ft

First store coming up in Hyderabad in 2 years

With a promised investment of Rs 10,500 crore, Swedish furniture maker IKEA is going to provide the largest FDI to India in single-brand retail:Allow mandatory 30% sourcing from sources other than MSMEsReaching 30% local sourcing within five years from approval date will be tough. Count sourcing from the day of store openingSeeking easier and faster Customs clearance
The government has decided to increase the validity of free sale certificates required by domestic medical device manufacturers for exports. Now, these will expire only alongside the manufacturing licence.

Free sale certificates valid for two years are issued to medical device manufacturers by state licensing authorities. To export medical devices, manufacturers need to register with the foreign country and obtain its regulatory approval. These authorities generally ask for a free sale certificate to allow imports.

Under the provisions of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, only 15 medical devices that are classified as drugs are regulated for import, manufacture and marketing in the country. The notification on free sale certificate validity will apply to these 15 devices only.

"In order to bring uniformity in its implementation, you (all state drug regulators) are requested to grant free sale certificates to manufacturers located under your jurisdiction with the validity of their manufacturing licence to promote exports," said GN Singh, Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI), in his letter to state regulators.

According to Rajiv Nath, secretary, Association of Indian Medical Device Industry (AIMED), medical device exports decreased from $1.2 billion in 2014 to $1.1 billion in 2015.

"Extension of validity of the free sale certificate has been a longstanding request to promote exports. The validity period of two years used to restrict registration in overseas countries. It also added to re-registration costs of overseas importers," he added.

Around 95 per cent of medical devices manufactured and sold in India remain unregulated. For medical devices not covered as drugs under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, the certificates are issued by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT).

"Many countries, especially in south and central America, are not satisfied with this certification. Their authorities desire the certificates be issued by the health ministry or our drug regulatory authority," Nath said.

A proposal was made by the AIMED to the Union health ministry to endorse the DGFT certificate. The health ministry is yet to take a decision on the issue.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
Those filing for bankruptcy could find their assets in other countries assessed under Indian laws, if India implements the suggestions made by a parliamentary joint committee on the bankruptcy code.

The joint committee on the insolvency and bankruptcy code has said since "many corporate transactions and businesses today involve an international and cross-border element, the implications of cross-border insolvency cannot be ignored for too long."



The panel has suggested two new clauses and sub-clauses, which would require India to enter into agreements with foreign governments to enforce provisions of the code to debtors' assets outside India as well.

In its report, the panel said if a resolution professional or bankruptcy trustee decides that a debtor's assets located abroad should be brought under the ambit of the law, then the adjudicating authority in the case should issue a letter of request to a court or an authority of the country in question.



ALSO READ: RBI seeks to regulate P2P lending space

The draft bankruptcy Bill had no provision for cross-border insolvency, as the Bankruptcy Law Reforms Committee (BLRC) and the finance ministry representatives had called the issue quite "complex" in their deliberations with the parliamentary panel.

The draft Bill was made available in the public domain in November 2015, along with the report of the BLRC. It was presented in the Lok Sabha on the penultimate day of the winter session and immediately sent to a joint committee of both Houses.

The committee comprises 20 members of the lower and 10 members of the upper Houses, respectively. It is headed by Rajya Sabha member Bhupender Yadav.

It has also decided to cut the timeline for various processes "during the course of insolvency, liquidation and bankruptcy", suggesting suggested that the time for filing an appeal in the Supreme Court against the order of the National Company Law Tribunal should be brought down to 45 days from the proposed 60 days.

The parliamentary panel also said since a bankrupt entity's workers were some of the worst affected, their outstanding dues for a preceding period of 24 months should be given priority above all other debt.

The draft Bill had this provision at three months, while the final Bill had provided for 12 months.

"Workers are the nerve centre of any company. In the event of any company becoming bankrupt, the workmen get adversely affected and, therefore, priority has to be given to their outstanding dues," the panel said.

The panel also said operational creditors of an entity, such as workers, employees and suppliers, are not given any representation in the proposed committee of creditors which will deal with the bankruptcy proceedings.

"The committee is of the view that, if not voting rights, operational creditors at least should have presence in the committee of creditors to present their views on important issues," the report said.

The panel also said the debtor's outstanding dues to employees' provident funds, pension funds and gratuity funds will not be included in the liquidation estate assets of the bankrupt so that these dues can be fulfilled.

The bankruptcy law, which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley hopes will be passed in the ongoing Budget session, is a key part of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government's plans to improve India's rankings in the "ease of doing business" index.

The Bill provides for a speedy process and a timeline of six to a maximum of nine months to deal with insolvency and enable winding-up of operations of a company or a limited-liability entity. It also proposes early identification of financial distress so that steps can be taken to revive an ailing company.

Among other recommendations, the Bill suggests an insolvency regulator, for oversight over professionals in this regard. It lays down a transition provision during which the central government will exercise all the powers of the regulator till the time one is set up.

"This will enable quick starting of the process on the ground, without waiting for the proposed institutional structure to develop," the report states.

The Bill recommends the existing Debt Recovery Tribunals be the adjudicating authority for individuals and unlimited liability partnership firms.

The National Company Law Tribunal could serve as one for companies and limited-liability entities. It also proposes setting up of information utilities, to collect and collate financial information from listed companies and their creditors.

IN THE FAST LANE

Cross-border insolvency

Workers' outstanding dues

Operational creditors

Continuance of proceedings on death of bankrupt

The parliamentary joint committee on the bankruptcy code has recommended significant changes to the BillNo provision. Bankruptcy Law Reforms Committee had called it the "next frontier", planned to take up this work in the next stage of deliberationsCommittee suggests two clauses and two sub-clauses to deal with cross-border insolvency, including entering agreements with other nations and specifying, on a case-to-case basis, if a debtor's assets outside the country should be brought under ambit of lawWages and unpaid dues payable to workmen of the bankrupt for the whole or any part of the period of three months before the bankruptcy commencement date should be prioritised (later increased to 12 months)Panel recommends increase in this clause to 24 months and says that workers get adversely affected if a company goes bankruptGiven no representation in committee of creditorsSuggests if not voting rights, they should at least have a presence in committee of creditorsIf bankrupt dies, the bankruptcy proceedings shall, unless the Adjudicating Authority directs otherwise, be continued as if he were alivePanel says not inclined to give discretion on the matter to adjudicating authority. Suggests deletion of works
The government is planning to set up an independent tribunal for faster resolution of disputes relating to private sector partnerships and public procurement. The tribunal is likely to be set up through an Act of Parliament.

Senior government officials said inter-ministerial discussion on creating the tribunal was currently on. Besides, a PPP re-negotiation framework would also be evolved to give flexibility to contracts signed with private companies. "A Cabinet approval will be taken for the framework," said an official.

Some 1,300 public-private partnership (PPP) projects costing about Rs 7 lakh crore have been undertaken under the PPP mode. Problems in PPP range from land acquisition and other government clearances to companies finding it tough to operate projects at rates quoted by them.

The erstwhile Planning Commission under the United Progressive Alliance government had also drafted a Bill sent for constituting a Tribunal for Public Contracts for resolution of disputes in PPP projects. The tribunal was envisaged to be based out of New Delhi with benches in Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai. The Bill, however, did not materialise into legislation since a one-size-fits-all solution for disputes across sectors was found to be unfeasible. The ministry of finance had then opposed the Bill.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget speech in February said the government would provide a legal framework for dispute resolution in PPP projects and public utility contracts.

A committee under former finance secretary Vijay Kelkar, set up by the NDA government, had earlier made a case for ex-ante provisioning of renegotiation framework in the bid documents. Besides, it said PPP contracts should have clearly articulated dispute resolution structures that demonstrate commitment of all stakeholders and provide flexibility to restructure within the commercial and financial boundaries of the project, backed by sector-specific monitoring and regulatory committees.

In a report submitted in November 2015, it recommended a two-tier framework of Infrastructure PPP Project Review Committee (IPRC) and Infrastructure PPP Adjudicatory Tribunal (IPAT). Once a stakeholder files a reference before the tribunal, and the IPAT takes cognisance of it, no party or stakeholder would be allowed to approach any court of law, and all courts shall refrain from adjudicating upon any proceedings initiated that are related to the project in question.

The committee has proposed enactment of a law under Article 323B of the Constitution of India under which IPRC and IPAT be empowered to determine whether there is such change in the economic foundation or economic viability of a project which requires any intervention amongst options contemplated in that statute. The article empowers Parliament or state legislatures to set up tribunals for adjudication.

The proposed law will also lay down the guiding principles on the basis of which the IPRC and IPAT will exercise their functions. In case a substantial question of law is involved, the matter should be directly heard by the tribunal.

Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2012-2017) projected an investment of Rs 55.75 lakh crore (at current prices) in infrastructure, which was more than twice that achieved during the Eleventh Plan. Besides, private investment in infrastructure was projected to rise substantially from 37 per cent in the Eleventh Plan to approximately 48 per cent in the Twelfth Plan. The performance in the first two years of the Twelfth Plan, however, suggests that infrastructure investment has slowed and there will be a shortfall of approximately 30 per cent, with the shortfalls in public investment (central and states combined) and private investment at 20 per cent and 43 per cent, respectively.
In a bid to address issue, the ministry has asked to step up recoveries if they wanted a share of the Rs 25,000-crore capital infusion, The Economic Times reported on Thursday.

The ministry is holding meetings with individual on understanding their plans on capital raising, along with sale of non-core assets. Allahabad Bank, Bank of Baroda and Bank of India are said to have made presentations to the ministry.

"We are holding consultations with on their growth projections, credit disbursement targets and other efficiency parameters such as low-cost deposits. Any capital allocation will be based on their overall performance," an official from the ministry told the newspaper.

There will be substantial weightage on how banks recover non-performing assets when the capital allocation is being worked out, the official added.

The Banks Board Bureau (BBB) is said to be looking at options to help lenders raise money internally and improve its functioning, the publication reported.

"Some lenders may be asked to focus on specific sectors where they are already strong such as MSME or agriculture lending and accordingly plan their strategy," the official quoted above said.
On Friday, an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) of public sector lender Bank of India (BoI) will consider approval of a preferential issue of shares to Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC).

will get 1.6 million shares at Rs 96.63 each, a slight discount to the market price of Rs 97.95. Even so, there's a rider. The bank has mentioned in the EGM notice that: The voting of is restricted to 10 per cent of the total voting. Hence, issuance of fresh shares will not increase their voting right.



Regulation 12(2) of the Banking Regulation Act said, (2) No person holding shares in a banking company shall, in respect of any shares held by him, exercise voting right [on Poll] in excess of 10 per cent of the total voting rights of all the shareholders of the banking company.



Further in terms of Section 3 (2E) of the Banking Companies (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings) Act, 1970, the voting right of will be restricted to 10 per cent of the total voting right of all shareholders of a bank.

BoI is not an isolated case. According to shareholding data compiled by the BS Research Bureau, of the 21 public sector banks where LIC has shares, it owns more than 10 per cent in 18. In Corporation Bank, it has its highest stake at 21.22 per cent, followed by India Overseas Bank, Allahabad Bank, Central Bank, IDBI Bank, UCO Bank, Vijaya Bank and Oriental Bank of Commerce, where it has over 14 per cent stake. In the remaining banks, it has between 10 and14 per cent. In some banks, the shares are held by LIC and its various schemes.

After the proposed issue, LIC will hold 14.48 per cent in BoI. Thus, 95.52 per cent shares will be having effective voting rights.

Though restriction of voting rights of LIC is legally correct, it is not in the interest of fairness of unit holders/policy holders of LIC, whose funds are invested by LIC in the bank, said J N Gupta, managing director of Stakeholders Empowerment Services.

The deprival also means an economic loss for LIC. Voting rights are valued at a premium by investors, as can be seen by differential pricing of DVRs (shares with differential voting rights) traded in market. An e-mail seeking comments, sent to the LIC spokesperson on Monday, did not elicit any response. A comparison of prices of shares and DVRs of Tata Motors, Future Retail and Jain Irrigation showed the DVR traded at a substantial discount to the shares. On April 21, the Tata Motor DVRs were trading at Rs 300, a discount of 27.7 per cent to the shares which were at Rs 411.

In addition, the DVRs, which give the holder one vote for every 10 held, are eligible for five per cent additional dividend.

If the voting rights meant nothing, the DVRs should have been trading equal to the share prices. But, this unrealised upside has been there for long and shareholders have not exploited it.

This means the are valuing their voting rights correctly and paying premium for the same, SES analysts concluded.

Based on this, SES calculated that voting rights accounted for 34 per cent of the value in Tata Motors shares, 55 per cent in Future Retail shares and 41 per cent in Jain Irrigation shares.

The Banking Laws (Amendment Act, 2012) provides that voting rights can be increased in a phased manner from 10 per cent to 26 per cent with permission from the Reserve Bank. Gupta of SES said, We are of the view that when voting limits can be increased up to 26 per cent, no logic is found in restricting voting right to 10 per cent and for an institution like LIC which effectively represents millions of policy holders and, being a government-owned corporation, is akin to a state.
National Bank for Agriculture & Rural Development (Nabard) has pledged support to banks for opening branches in the un-banked villages in the Left Wing Extremist (LWE) affected districts in the country.

Nabard would offer support for solar-powered VSAT connectivity.

Nabard, in a letter to chairmen and chief executive officers (CEO) of the scheduled commercial banks, regional rural banks, state cooperative banks, said that the expansion of banking network in LWE affected districts is critical for the empowerment of people in those areas.

"No/ erratic connectivity is a major deterrent for the banks to open new branches in the LWE districts. With a view to expand banking in LWE districts, it has been decided to provide VSAT connectivity support for new branches opening in the 150 districts from Financial Inclusion Fund", Nabard said in its letter.

The scope of the scheme is one time capital expenditure support of Rs 4 lakh and connectivity support of 50 per cent of expenditure incurred subject to the limit of Rs 45,000 per annum for a period of five years per branch in LWE affected 'un-banked villages'.

Only seven branches from each identified district will be supported under the scheme and first come first serve policy will be adopted in the processing of applications.

The banks keen to set up branches in the affected un-banked villages can avail support from either of the two models finalized by Nabard and the scheme will remain in force for banks till March 2017.

The states where 150 LWE districts are identified by Nabard for implementation of the scheme include Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.

Sources said, the Odisha government has already taken a lead in supporting the banks for opening of new branches in the unbanked GPs (gram panchayats) in backward and LWE affected districts -Malkangiri, Nuapada, Nabarangpur and Kandhamal by agreeing to bear the cost of VSAT connectivity to the banks for opening of first 15 banks in each of the four districts.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday said need not report their compliance to the Jilani Committee recommendations, related to frauds and malpractices, to the audit committee of the board (ACB).

On a review of the implementation status of these recommendations in various banks, it has now been decided that henceforth, the compliance to the Jilani committee recommendations need not be reported to the ACB, said in a notification in Mumbai.

The central bank, however, advised to ensure that the compliance to these recommendations were complete and sustained.

It also asked to appropriately factor in these recommendations in the internal inspection/audit processes and duly document these in their manuals/instructions.
The Indonesian Navy and the Indian Navy have been participating in coordinated patrol (CORPAT) twice a year since 2002 to keep this vital part of the Indian Ocean Region safe and secure for commercial shipping and international trade. .

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The 27thseries of India Indonesia Coordinated Patrol (CORPAT) is being conducted from 28 Apr to 19May 16. Opening Ceremony of the CORPAT is being held at Port Blair from 28 30 Apr 16. Closing Ceremony will be held at Belawan, Indonesia from 16 19 May 16. The Indonesian Navy is being represented by the ship KRI Imam Bonjol and Maritime Patrol Aircraft CN 235 whilst INS Karmuk and one Naval Dornier aircraft are representing the Indian Navy. .

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A high level Indonesian delegation for the 27thCORPAT arrived at Port Blair on 28 Apr 2016. Later in the day, senior officers of the delegation led by First Admiral Muhammad Ali, called on Vice Admiral Bimal Verma AVSM at his office, wherein the two discussed issues of mutual interest and cooperation. .

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Apart from securing the trade sea route, the coordinated patrolalso serves to enhance mutual understanding and inter-operability between the two navies.The CORPAT thus reflects the shared concern between the two countries for a peaceful Indian ocean for the benefit of international community. .

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DKS/CKP
Ground water is continuously being exploited due to growth in population, increased industrialization and irrigation and its use being highly inefficient, has resulted in decline of ground water levels in various parts of the Country. Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) under the Ministry of Water Resources, RD & GR carries out ground water monitoring, four times a year, on regional scale through a network of observation wells in the Country including Haryana and Punjab. Water level data for pre-monsoon 2015 compared with decadal mean of pre-monsoon (2005-2014) indicates decline in ground water level in 47% of the wells monitored. .

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A Model Bill on Flood Plain Zoning was circulated to all the States in 1975 for guidance of States for enactment of legislation. The Model Bill provides for flood zoning authorities, surveys and delineation of flood plain area, notification of limits of flood plains, prohibition or restriction of the use of the flood plains, compensation and power to remove obstruction etc. Govt. of Manipur has enacted flood plain zoning legislation in 1978, but the demarcation of flood zones has not been done, as yet. The State of Rajasthan has also enacted legislation. The State Government of Uttarakhand has also passed Flood Plain Zoning Act on 16th December, 2012 but the demarcation of flood zones has not been done, as yet. Some States like Bihar and UP have informed about difficulties in implementation of Bill due to large flood affected plain areas. No fund has been allocated / released for mapping of flood affected areas. .

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Following steps have been taken to check depletion of river and ground water:- .

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CWC has issued an advisory on 12th April, 2016 to the concerned Engineer-in-Chief of State Governments regarding judicious use of available water in view of low storage position of reservoirs in 2016. .

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As per Schedule-I of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the water conservation and water harvesting structures to augment ground water constitute a special focus area for MGNREGA works. .

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During XI Plan, Demonstrative Artificial Recharge Projects were taken up under Central Sector Scheme Ground Water Management & Regulation". The scheme on Artificial Recharge project under Ground Water Management & Regulation Scheme has been discontinued during the XII Plan period. .

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A conceptual document entitled Master Plan for Artificial Recharge to Ground Water in India" has been prepared during the year 2013, which envisages construction of different types of Artificial Recharge and Rainwater Harvesting structures in the Country in an area of 9,41,541 sq.km for harnessing surplus monsoon runoff to augment ground water resources. The Master Plan has been circulated to all State Governments for implementation. .

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Ministry of Urban Development in its Draft Model Building Bye-Laws (2015) has incorporated a Chapter on Provision of Rain Water Harvesting. .

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Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA) constituted under The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 for the purpose of regulation and control of ground water development and management has issued advisory to States/ Union Territories and Ministry of Urban Development to take necessary measures for adopting rain water harvesting/ artificial recharge in all the Government buildings. Besides, 30 States/UTs have made rainwater harvesting mandatory by enacting laws / formulating rules & regulations / by including provisions in building bye-laws / through suitable Government Orders etc. .

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CGWB has been organizing mass awareness programmes in the Country to promote rain water harvesting and artificial recharge to ground water. .

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This information was given by Union Minister for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Sushri Uma Bharti in a written reply in Lok Sabha today. .

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Samir/jk
The Central Government is working on a pilot programme Vidyanjali to involve retired teachers, retired government officials including retired defence personnel, retired professionals, people from Indian diaspora and women who are home makers to volunteer for co-scholastic activities in schools. These volunteers will not be replacement for regular teachers and will not be involved in formal teaching.

In a meeting of State Education Ministers held on February 08th, 2016 by the Ministry of HRD, nineteen States/UTs had expressed willingness to participate in this programme on pilot basis. .

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Teachers of Government and aided schools undergo annual in service training for professional development which is supported under Centrally sponsored schemes of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA). .

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This information was given by the Union Human Resource Development Minister, Smt. Smriti Zubin Irani today in a written reply to a Rajya Sabha question. .

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PM watches launch of IRNSS-1G; congratulates ISRO scientists from South Block through video-conferencing

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The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, today watched the launch of the navigational satellite IRNSS-1G from South Block in New Delhi. The PSLV, carrying the satellite, lifted off from Sriharikota at 12.50 PM. .

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Moments after the successful launch, the Prime Minister congratulated and addressed the scientists at ISRO in Sriharikota, through video-conferencing. .

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He said Indian scientists have achieved a lot in space science, which has the capacity to transform the lives of the people. .

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With this successful launch, we will determine our own paths powered by our technology. This is a great gift to people from scientists," the Prime Minister said, adding that these efforts will not only help India, but can help fellow SAARC nations as well. .

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He declared that this navigation system will be known as NAVIC Navigation with Indian Constellation." He described this as an example of Make in India," and Made for Indians." .

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The Department of Space has policy guidelines approved by the Cabinet in terms of Remote Sensing Data Policy-2011 (RSDP-2011) and Satellite Communication Policy-1997 (SATCOM Policy-1997). RSDP-2011 contains modalities for managing and/or permitting the acquisition/dissemination of remote sensing data in support of developmental activities. SATCOM Policy-1997 was followed by a detailed norms and guidelines to address use of INSAT/GSAT system by private users, for managing INSAT/GSAT system, establishing Indian Satellite System by private entities. .

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Also, the Department of Space is currently engaged in preparation of National Space Act for India for supporting the overall growth of space activities, with enhanced level of private sector participation and offering more commercial opportunities.

After consultations with internal experts and experts on space law, a draft version has been prepared. Currently, approval process for pre-legislative consultations on the draft Space Act is being pursued. .

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ISRO has been engaged in a few multilateral negotiation processes under various international and UN forums, in order to protect the interests of the nation in its pursuance of space activities. These multilateral negotiation processes include International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities (led by European Union), formulation of a set of guidelines for Long Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities discussed under United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS). .

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Outer space research activities are carried out on cooperation basis with the space agencies of other countries. Department of Space is mandated for harnessing the benefits of space technology for national development. .

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This information was provided by the Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Development of North-Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh in written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha today. .

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In its thirty fifth flight (PSLV-C33), ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle successfully launched the 1425 kg IRNSS-1G, the seventh satellite in the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) today afternoon from Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota. This is the thirty fourth consecutively successful mission of PSLV and the thirteenth in its 'XL' configuration. .

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The Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, heartily thanked and congratulated all the ISRO scientists and team ISRO for completing IRNSS constellation and dedicated IRNSS to the nation as NavIC (Navigation Indian Constellation). He appreciated Indias space community for making the country proud through such achievements which have helped in improving the life of common man. .

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After PSLV-C33 lift-off at 1250 hrs (12:50 pm) IST from the First Launch Pad with the ignition of the first stage, the subsequent important flight events, namely, strap-on ignitions and separations, first stage separation, second stage ignition, heat-shield separation, second stage separation, third stage ignition and separation, fourth stage ignition and satellite injection, took place as planned. After a flight of 19 minutes 42 seconds, IRNSS-1G was injected into an elliptical orbit of 283 km X 20,718 km inclined at an angle of 17.867 degree to the equator (very close to the intended orbit) following which the satellite successfully separated from the PSLV fourth stage. .

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After separation, the solar panels of IRNSS-1G were deployed automatically. ISRO's Master Control Facility (MCF) at Hassan, Karnataka took over the control of the satellite. In the coming days, four orbit manoeuvres will be conducted from MCF to position the satellite in the Geostationary Orbit at 129.5 deg East longitude. .

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IRNSS-1G is the seventh of the seven satellites constituting the space segment of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System. IRNSS-1A, 1B, 1C, ID, IE and 1F, the first six satellites of the constellation, were successfully launched by PSLV on July 02, 2013, April 04, 2014, October 16, 2014, March 28, 2015, January 20, 2016 and March 10, 2016 respectively. All the six satellites are functioning satisfactorily from their designated orbital positions. .

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IRNSS is an independent regional navigation satellite system designed to provide position information in the Indian region and 1500 km around the Indian mainland. IRNSS provides two types of services, namely, Standard Positioning Services (SPS) - provided to all users and Restricted Services - (RS), provided to authorised users. .

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A number of ground facilities responsible for satellite ranging and monitoring, generation and transmission of navigation parameters, etc., have been established in eighteen locations across the country. Todays successful launch of IRNSS-1G, the seventh and final member of IRNSS constellation, signifies the completion of the IRNSS constellation. .

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The frequent extreme weather events and erratic monsoon pattern observed in the recent past have affected huge population in concerned areas. .

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The Central Water Commission under this Ministry maintains a network of 878 stations for collection of flood information and issues flood forecasts to 176 stations located on major rivers and their tributaries in the country. In December, 2015, the Ministry has approved the scheme of Flood Forecasting" at a cost of Rs. 281 crore for implementation in XII Plan. The scheme envisages modernisation of its existing network and provision of an additional 100 flood forecasting stations for real-time flood forecasting. .

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Besides, the Ministry has taken up National Hydrology Project (NHP) and setting up of National Water Informatics Centre (NWIC) at New Delhi. The NHP envisages setting up of a system for timely and reliable water resources data acquisition, storage, collation and management. It will help in gathering hydro-metrological data for analysis on a real time basis. .

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The National Water Informatics Centre (NWIC) shall provide a Single Window source of updated data on water resources & allied themes including real time data as per availability; and provide value added products and services to all stake holders for its management and sustainable development for the benefit of all communities across the nation. .

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This information was given by Union Minister of State for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Prof. Sanwar Lal Jat in a written reply in Lok Sabha today. .

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Samir/jk
As per the data of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a total number of 169, 222 and 280 cases have been registered under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (PCMA), 2006 in the year 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively. .

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The Government is concerned about the prevalence of Child Marriages in the country and has put in place necessary legislation viz. Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (PCMA) 2006 to tackle the problem. The States/UTs from time to time are being regularly pursued for effective implementation of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006. Further, State Governments are requested to take special initiative to delay marriage by coordinated efforts on Akha Teejthe traditional day for such marriages; Advertisements in the press and electronic media educating peoples about the issue of Child Marriage etc are also being taken up. Platforms such as the International Womens Day and the National Girl Child Day are used to create awareness on issues related to women and to bring to the centre stage issues such as child marriage. Through the Sabla programme of this Ministry, adolescent girls in the age group of 11 to 18 years are imparted training with regard to legal rights of women which also includes the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006. .

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This information was given by the Union Minister of Women and Child Development, Smt Maneka Sanjay Gandhi in reply to a question in Rajya Sabha today. .

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Po, the wisdom-seeking hero of the Kung Fu Panda films, might recognise this temple in China where the world's first robot monk dwells. For Po's Jade Palace, there is Longquan (Dragon Spring) Temple, a place of Buddhist worship in the mountains northwest of Beijing, where gnarled gingko and cypress trees tower over red-walled buildings underneath rocky Phoenix Ridge.

For his Hall of Warriors, there is the Comic Center deep inside the temple, at the end of winding stone paths and steps, past a flower-shaped audio device that crackles sutras.

As for Po himself, there is Xian'er, the two-foot-tall, advice-dispensing robot whose full title is Worthy Stupid Robot Monk. (In the Beijing dialect, "er," or "stupid," is a term of affection.) Not so much Kung Fu Panda 3, perhaps, as "Robot Monk 1."



A childlike creature in an orange Buddhist robe, Xian'er is an object of fascination in China amid an increasingly urgent pursuit of spirituality and, more recently, artificial intelligence. But Xian Fan, the head of the Comic Center, told National Business Daily that the temple did not plan to commercialise the robot and that its development was for "the public welfare".

And the monks do not seem to be planning a franchise. There is only one robot monk for now, Xian Fan told Beijing News, adding, "We're not doing this for commerce, but just because we want to use more modern ways to spread Buddhist teachings."



The robot was created last year by the temple in collaboration with about a dozen Chinese technology, culture and investment companies, according to Chinese news reports. But the character of Xian'er was first designed by artists at the Comic Center for a 2014 Buddhist comic book series, whose first title was Troubles Are Self-Made. The series has sold well in Chinese bookstores, and an English-language edition is due out soon.

As a robot, Xian'er has expanded his repertoire. He has a touch pad on his chest that allows him to respond to supplicants' questions and statements, such as: "Who are your parents?" "I'm not happy" and "What is the meaning of life?"



On Wednesday morning, employees at the Comic Center declined to let visitors communicate directly with Xian'er, saying he was - literally - recharging in order to meet a delegation of government officials from Beijing later in the day. They would not say who the officials were or give their own names, saying they were not authorised to speak to the news media.

No matter. There was always Weixin, or WeChat, where Xian'er maintains an account.

Clearly no sentimentalist, his answers to the above queries were:



"That's ridiculous, how can robots have parents?"



"If you're not happy, what can anyone else do about it?"



"My master says the meaning of life is to help more people finally leave behind bitterness and gain happiness." Po might have approved.

Many visitors to Longquan Temple on Wednesday, however, expressed doubt as to whether Xian'er could really help people with their problems, though some said they expected technology to advance so quickly that future generations of robot monks might. A second, smarter Xian'er is already in development, a centre employee said. Po would have been envious of Xian'er for being able to pass a difficult question on to his master, having been required in Kung Fu Panda 3 to solve his community's problems himself.

The robotics companies Canbot and Turing Robotic Industries, among the companies cited in Chinese news reports as working with the temple to produce Xian'er, agreed to answer questions about the project but had not responded as of Wednesday evening. At Interjoy, another company listed as one of the designers, and others, the phone rang unanswered.

2016 The New York Times News Service

Here are some answers from Xian'er on WeChat:

"Love is your own obsessions not being satisfied, the clashing of other people's troubles with yours."

"If you don't want to starve and have an O.K. job, work hard."

"A robot doesn't know any people."

"Don't assume you're the most pathetic person in the world."

"Wait, I will ask my master."
Deutsche Bank posted a surprise net profit in the first quarter that was helped by lower litigation costs, but Chief Executive John Cryan warned investors not to expect good results for the full year. Quarterly net income fell 58 per cent to Euro 236 million ($267.5 million) after its investment bank slumped in volatile markets and following its exit from certain businesses, but beat analysts' average expectation for a net loss of Euro 249 million. Shares in Germany's flagship lender, which announced a restructuring plan last October, were 3.6 per cent higher on Thursday in a market that was down by 1.3 per cent.
Automaker Corp (MMC) says it used non-compliant fuel economy testing methods in Japan for as long as a quarter of a century.

Following are some details on the cheating scandal:



What did MMC do, and why?

It rigged test data to overstate fuel economy readings of four mini-vehicle models sold in Japan by up to 10%. It says it did this to get a better fuel economy certification.

Executives say developers may have been pressured into cheating as rivals including Daihatsu Motor set high fuel economy levels.

MMC used a higher speed US coasting test to measure fuel economy, ignoring 1991 changes in Japanese regulations to use tests that better reflect stop-and-go urban driving.

In a January 2001 test, MMC compared readings using the two coasting tests, and found the difference was never more than 2.3%.



Which cars are affected?

Test manipulation involved 625,000 mini-vehicles produced since mid-2013: Mitsubishi's eK Wagon and eK Space, and 468,000 cars it made for Nissan, which markets them as the Dayz and Dayz Roox. All were sold in Japan.

MMC has stopped making and selling these models.

Who discovered the cheating, and what are investigators focusing on?

Nissan, which has a mini-vehicle venture with MMC since 2011, found a discrepancy in test data in November while updating the Dayz.

MMC has set up an external committee to look into the affair. It will report in three months.

Japan's transport ministry will test the fuel economy of Mitsubishi cars next week, and announce results on the first four models in June. It has found irregularities in mileage data on other MMC models, too, and wants an explanation by May 11.

The ministry also has a taskforce to examine all Japanese automakers' fuel economy data.

How much could all this cost MMC?

Estimates vary and there's still uncertainty as to how widescale the cheating was. It's so far limited to Japan, where MMC sells just 10% of its cars.

MMC is likely to have to compensate drivers for the extra fuel used, repay government tax benefits, compensate Nissan and face potential legal suits and fines.

Nomura puts the potential bill at close to $1 billion, or as much as 166,000 yen per car.

Can MMC withstand the fallout?

MMC, which has lost around half its market value, or $3.7 billion, in just over a week, had over $4 billion in cash deposits at end-2015, and relatively little debt. Its cash-flow could suffer if its bruised branding hits sales. MMC has said orders for its cars in Japan have already halved.

MMC produces 1 million vehicles a year, with one third of those sold elsewhere in Asia. It sold just 95,342 vehicles in the United States last year. It says its cars for the model years 2013 to 2017 sold in the US have correct mileage ratings.
Samsung Electronics Co's first-quarter profit benefited from the early release of its newest smartphones, yet left investors wondering whether the industry is running out of steam as it seeks a new hit product. Samsung priced the Galaxy S7 below its predecessor and also fixed criticisms of the earlier model to capture customers between new product releases by Apple Inc. That helped the South Korean company withstand the impact of a global smartphone slowdown that hit prices at its semiconductor and display businesses.Read more from our special coverage on "SAMSUNG"Samsung offers olive ...
Republican presidential front- runner has said he would ask China to rein in North Korea otherwise the US will not be doing so much business with the world's second largest economy which can not even survive without America.

"You tell them (Chinese), we are going to - either you are going to have to straighten out this North Korea problem or we are not going to be doing so much business with you," Trump, 69, told Fox News during a town hall in Indianapolis when asked how he would fix the North Korean problem as the country has recently claimed to have conducted hydrogen bomb test.

"Here is what we do. China has tremendous power over North Korea, tremendous, beyond anybody. Now they do not tell us that. They like to tweak us and say, well, we do not really. They have total control. China can not even survive without us because economically they have been ripping us for many years to come. They have been sucking our blood," he said.

The real estate mogul said there would be a depression in Chinese economy of its business with the US comes down.

"They do not do so much business with us, they would have a depression the likes of which you have ever seen. We have tremendous power, economic power over China. I want to get along with China. We are going to get along with China. But China can strangle because it comes in through China. And China is powerful. China can strangle North Korea. It can make them - bring them to the table," Trump said.

He said that he would act very quick on this if elected to the White House.

Trump said the single biggest threat is weapons.

"If it were not for that capability and the incredible power of weaponry today, I would have been out of there a long time," he added.

In 2009, China, the world's second largest economy, jumped to become the third biggest market for US exports. American companies have cumulatively invested over $62.2 billion in 58,000 projects in China and reaped bumper harvests. Their profits in China amounted to nearly $8 billion in 2008 alone.
India, the world's biggest consumer, is likely to produce 23 million tonnes to 24 million tonnes of the sweetener in the 2016/17 year starting October 1, down from the current year's output of 25.3 million tonnes, the government said on Thursday.

The country will start the new crushing season with carry forward stock of 7.3 million tonnes, it said in a statement.

Total supplies in 2016/17 are pegged at 30 million tonnes to 31 million tonnes, against local demand of about 25.5 million tonnes, it said.

The federal government has asked state governments to impose stock limits on to avoid hoarding by traders, Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said on Thursday.

India is likely to become a net importer of in 2016/17 as back-to-back drought years and dry irrigation channels ravage cane fields, with output in the country's biggest producing state seen dropping by more than 40%.
After nearly 16 months of formal announcement, India has finally signed protocol with the government of Russia for exports of to that country.

With this, Indian producers may start exports of largely hard cheese to Russia to which the first consignment is expected to leave Indian ports by June-end.

Estimated at 230,000 tonnes, Russia's hard cheese supply was met largely through imports from European countries. But, since restrictions were imposed on import from Europe in retaliation with the economic sanctions levied by European countries, the hard cheese import was diverted from South America and neighbouring Russian including Belarus etc.

Amid stiff conditions on quality, therefore, Russia was desparately looking for alternative supply of hard cheese from Asian countries and India being the largest milk producer in the world, could get some pie of the Russian .

"The government today signed the protocol, which would allow Indian dairy exporters to start shipment of hard cheese," said a senior industry official.

Russian announced opening of its dairy product for Indian exporters in December 2014 coinciding the visit of its President Vladimir Putin. But, the actual shipment hit a roadblock due to stiff conditions laid down by the Russian phytosanitary authority Rosselkhoznadzor.

After visiting around two-dozen factory premises and facility of milk procurement in India, Rosselkhoznadzor officials concluded that farms with less than the herd size of 1,000 cattle would not be allowed to export dairy products to Russia. In India, therefore, only two dairy farms including Parag Milk Foods and Schreiber Dynamix were conforming to this norm.

While Parag MD Devendra Shah recommended the government to sign the protocol to begin with the exports and negotiate for the liberalisation in norms later, dairy companies like Amul brand producer Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd (GCMMF) insisted the government to sign the protocol only after liberalisation in this norm.

The objective of GCMMF was to accommodate more companies including small and medium size producers for exports.

"After signing the protocol by the government of India, the Rusian authority would sign it. The entire process would take at least 15 days to one month. After that, negotiations of prices and trade terms would take at least one more month. So, by June- nd we would be able to supply first consignment of hard cheese to Russia," said Shah,

Industry sources, however, said that the Russian authority has liberalised norms to accommodate more Indian players in dairy exports. Instead of herd size of 1,000 cattle, the Russian authority has focused on traceability of milk procurement and quality of cheese India produces.

"More than exports of dairy products, Russia would be able to pay some premiums compared to other export destinations which would help raise prices of skimmed milk powder (SMP) and other products which have been under tremendous pressure for over 18-month. Once dairy farms begin to get higher realisation, they would pass on to farmers for milk procurement. So, farmers would benefit ultimately," said Shirish Upadhyay, Senior Vice President (Strategic Planning), Parag Milk Foods.
Shares of real estate companies have rallied by up to 14% on back of heavy volumes after media report suggests that the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has recommended an increase in permissible floor space index (FSI) in Greater Mumbai.

Among the individual stocks, D B Realty has zoomed 14% to Rs 53.15 on the BSE on back of an over three-fold jump in trading volumes. A combined 1.06 million shares changed hands on the counter so far.

Ansal Buildwell (9% at Rs 90), Indiabulls Real Estate (up 8% at Rs 61.55), Anant Raj Industries (7% at Rs 38), Parsvnath Developers (5% at Rs 20), D S Kulkarni Developers (5% at Rs 80), Housing Development & Infrastructure (5% at Rs 87), Kolte-Patil Developers (4% at Rs 129), DLF (3% at Rs 126) and Oberoi Realty (3% at Rs 293) were up between 3%-9% on the BSE.

At 10:24 am, the S&P BSE Realty index, the largest gainer among sectoral indices, was up 3% as compared to a marginal 0.03% decline in the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex.

According to Business Standard reports, in the run-up to the election in February next year, the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party-controlled BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has recommended an increase in permissible floor space index (FSI) from the present level of 1.33 to 2 and in some cases even up to 5. FSI is the ratio between allowable construction space to the actual space.
India on Thursday defended its decision to revoke visa of Dolkun Isa, head of the 'World Uyghur Congress', saying he had suppressed facts while obtaining it.

Briefing media in the capital, External Affairs Ministry official spokesperson Vikas Swarup said Isa applied for a tourist visa under the electronic travel authorisation system.

"Isa publicly stated that he was coming to attend a conference in India after obtaining the visa," Swarup said.

Swarup said a tourist visa does not permit attending conferences and furthermore, it came to the notice of authorities that Isa was subject of an Interpol Red Corner notice.

When asked if China had raised its objection on granting of visa to Isa by India, the MEA spokesperson said that Beijing had made it clear that Isa has an Interpol Red Corner Notice and all the member countries should honour that.

Isa's visit was being seen as a retaliatory measure taken by the Indian Government after China blocked the listing of Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar as an international terrorist at the United Nation.

Dolkun has been invited to a conference being organised by the US-based Initiatives for China. Uyghurs and other Chinese dissidents in exile are expected to attend and discuss democratic transformation in China.

Meanwhile, activists Ray Wong and Lu Jinghua have been denied visas.

According to sources, the two activists were denied visa as they failed to provide proper documentation.

Lu Jinghua's documents were illegible and there was inconsistency with the purpose of her visit. In case of Ray Wong, there was data inconsistency in his documents.
Set to enter Mumbai's Haji Ali Dargah to break the gender barrier disallowing women's entry, Bhumata Brigade activist Trupti Desai on Thursday asked Bollywood actors Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan to lend support to their cause, which is aimed at eradicating differential treatment meted out to women at religious places.

"I think Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan should state their stand on what we are trying to achieve here, on our cause... That way I believe that their fan following will join us and support us in our fight for equality," she told ANI.

After spearheading a successful campaign for women's right to worship in temples, Desai had on Monday said that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) should allow women to join the organisation. Desai said she would soon write to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat on the issue as part of her campaign for gender equality.

Speaking to ANI today, Desai expressed hope that RSS would respect their stand and consider their demand.

"I think Mohan Bhagwat ji is a progressive thinker and he will respect our stand of entry for women in RSS," she said.

On Saturday, Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat said he would not allow her to touch the mazar-e-sharif at the the Hazi Ali Dargah. Arafat, who joined the Shiv Sena after leaving the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena in 2014, said that the attempt by Desai to enter the Haji Ali Dargah is a conspiracy meant to disturb Mumbai's peaceful environment.

On April 20, 'Haji Ali for All' Forum was launched by Desai along with several activists, NGOs and social groups to fight for entry of women to the shrine.

The Maharashtra Government had in February supported the entry of women to the Haji Ali Dargah.

The government had told the Bombay High Court that the entry of women cannot be prohibited.
Something interesting is cooking at KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken). Starting Thursday (April 28), KFC will be testing edible Rice Bowlz at two of its restaurants in Bengaluru.

According to a company release, the 100 percent edible KFC Rice Bowlz replaces the plastic bowl packaging with a Tortilla bowl.

The crunchy tortilla combines deliciously with the chicken, rice and gravy to take the experience of having the KFC Rice Bowlz one notch higher. What's even better is that this packaging is not just edible but also completely bio-degradable. KFC is making these tortilla bowls fresh in-store by frying the flour tortillas using a specially developed mould.

Rahul Shinde, Managing Director, KFC India, said, "As a socially and environmentally responsible company, we are working to find a cost-effective and sustainable long-term solution that can replace plastics. One of the things that we are experimenting with is the edible Rice Bowlz- an innovative and delicious solution that replaces the plastic bowl packaging with a Tortilla bowl. Rice Bowlz are amongst our best-selling menu items, and we are trying to give it a delicious and eco-friendly twist. We are going to be testing this at select stores in Bengaluru over this week and eagerly await the consumer response."

Available in both vegetarian and non-vegetarian variants, the all-new avatar of the famous KFC Rice Bowlz will be available across select stores in Bengaluru from April 28 to May 4, at prices starting Rs 89.
The meeting between Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar and his Pakistan counterpart Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry on the sidelines of 'Heart of Asia - Istanbul Process' on Tuesday was not a part of the comprehensive dialogue process between the two Asian neighbours, said sources.

Sources also told ANI that the meeting was merely a courtesy call and not a formal meeting, as envisaged by the two nations in December last year.

The two nations had in December last year agreed to resume the comprehensive bilateral dialogue after External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj met Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz in Islamabad.

After the bilateral meeting on April 26, India had said that Islamabad cannot be in a state of denial on the impact of terrorism on the bilateral relationship and asserted at the same time that the terrorist groups operating from Pakistan's soil 'must not be allowed to operate with impunity'.

Describing the meeting between the two foreign secretaries as 'frank and constructive', Ministry of External Affairs ( MEA) official spokesperson Vikas Swarup said that the issue of listing Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Masood Azhar under the UN Security Council committee established under resolution 1267 was also brought up.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has admitted that the recent talks held on the sidelines of the Heart of Asia-Istanbul conference in New Delhi could not achieve any 'major breakthrough' as New Delhi refused to give any time frame for the start of comprehensive bilateral dialogue.

After his return from New Delhi, Foreign Secretary Chaudhry indicated that no headway was made as far as the formal start of the composite dialogue with India was concerned.

During the meeting, Chaudhry emphasized that Kashmir remains the core issue that requires a just solution, in accordance with UNSC resolutions and wishes of the Kashmiri people.

It was the first such meeting between the two top diplomats after the talks were deferred in January following the strike by Pakistani terrorists at the Pathankot Airbase.
Debt-ridden farmers reeling under an agrarian crisis triggered by drought-like situation in Punjab - the land of five rivers and the food bowl of India, seem to have found solace in death.

Unable to bear the burden of repaying their crop-related loans and failing to make ends meet, as many as 20 farmers reportedly committed suicide between April 21 and 28 alone, and 47 farmers for the entire month thus far, leaving one to wonder whether the government is doing enough to contain the situation by providing relief to them.

Baljinder Singh, a farmer of Punjab's Jagraon district, allegedly committed suicide by consuming poison on Thursday. Kawaljit Singh Khanna, a neighbour of the victim, told ANI that Baljinder committed suicide because he was unable to repay his loan.

Khanna added that the government should provide immediate relief to Baljinder's family.

On April 27, unable to repay a loan of Rs. 10 lakh and mounting interest, a farmer and his mother reportedly committed suicide by consuming disinfectants before police officials in Barnala district.

Baljeet Singh, 30, and his 60 year-old mother Balveer Kaur committed suicide after they allegedly failed to repay a loan of Rs. 10 lakh borrowed by Baljeet's father Darshan Singh from a commission agent after mortgaging their a land of two-acre and their house.

When revenue and police officials reached Baljeet's house to carry out the court's order to seize their property, his mother and he ended their lives.

Kissan Sangharsh Committee vice president Sawaran Singh Pandher told ANI, "As many as 45 farmers have committed suicide in March, while 47 ended their lives in April thus far."

"At least 20 farmers have committed suicide just within a week from April 21-28 due to debt burden, reflecting the gravity of situation in the state," he added.

Pandher further said, "In Punjab, a total of 220 farmers have committed suicide since January, while many cases of farmers' suicide due to debt remained unreported because their families feel that it would tarnish their image in society."

Accusing the government of being "inconsiderate", he alleged, "The government has done little to save the farmers' from taking such an extreme step by containing the situation through relief measures to provide them immediate relief."

Pandher alleged that the government announces a compensation and job to a family member of the victim to apply balm on their wounds, but he has never come across a victim's kin getting a government job.

On Wednesday, opposition leaders staged a walkout in Parliament. They alleged that they were not dissatisfied with the government's response in dealing with drought situation in various states.

The Centre claimed that it has provided adequate money to the drought affected states to deal with the situation, whereas the drought-hit states have accused the Centre of providing them with paltry resources to contain the situation and provide relief to the farmers.

Amid trading of charges between the Centre and states, debt-ridden farmers are the real suffers.
Pakistan has admitted that the recent Foreign Secretary-level talks held between the Asian neighbours on the sidelines of the Heart of Asia-Istanbul conference in New Delhi could not achieve any 'major breakthrough' as the latter refused to give any timeframe for the start of comprehensive bilateral dialogue.

Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry and his Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar met in New Delhi as part of latest efforts to break the impasse in bilateral ties.

After his return from New Delhi, Chaudhry indicated that no headway was made as far as the formal start of the composite dialogue with India was concerned.

"India has not given any date for the meeting of foreign secretaries," the Express Tribune quoted Chaudhry as saying.

He said that no major breakthrough was achieved during the talks although India agreed that dialogue was the only way forward to resolve all outstanding issues.

When asked to identify the obstacles in the resumption of peace talks, the Foreign Secretary said the question should be put before the Indian Government.

"Pakistan believes in sustained and structured dialogue. We will welcome whenever India is ready for the dialogue," he said.

The arch-rivals had agreed to resume comprehensive bilateral dialogue in December last year after Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj met Prime Minister's Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz.

Following the meeting, the Foreign Secretaries of both nations were to meet in January and discuss issues of mutual interest. However, the dialogue process derailed after militants stormed India's Pathankot airbase near the border with Pakistan in January this year.

India held Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad responsible for the attack. Pakistan condemning the attack formed a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) to help India probe the incident.

The team recently visited the incident site in India and the final report on it is yet to be made public. However, initial foreign office reaction suggested that limited access to the Pakistani side was provided.

Asserting that Pakistan 'firmly but politely' raised all issues of its concerns with India in an 'open and frank' manner, the Foreign Secretary said Islamabad clearly informed India that Kashmir remains the core dispute between the two countries and called for early commencement of bilateral dialogue, including people-to-people contact and water issues.

The Foreign Secretary said that he also conveyed Pakistan's concerns over the activities of Indian intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), in the internal affairs of Pakistan.

Chaudhry said that Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and the US under the banner of Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) remained engaged in facilitating the talks between the Afghan Government and the Taliban representatives.
Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy today filed a filed a defamation case in a local court against CPI(M) veteran V.S. Achutanandan for levelling baseless allegations against him.

It is reported that Chandy has also filed a complaint against the Achutanandan before the Chief Electoral officer, seeking an enquiry for giving false statements during the campaign for the May 16 assembly election where the latter said that there are 31 corruption cases against the Kerala Chief Minister .

Chandy's complaint is for violation of Model code of conduct for the guidance of political parties and candidates, promulgated by the Election Commission of India.
She came, she saw, she conquered! That's Kangana Ranaut's decade-long Bollywood journey in a nutshell. Ten years ago on this day, the actress made her big screen debut with 'Gangster' that released on 28th April 2006.

Kangana portrayed her character's longing and pain with such intensity that it made people sit up and take notice of this new 'curly-haired girl'. The film went on to become a hit and Kangana to win her first debut award.

However, finding a firm footing was not without struggle for the actress who had nothing but her strong performances to help her cement her position at the box-office.

Talking about her decade-long journey , Kangana said, "I am extremely proud of my rags-to-riches story, it's fun to be a misfit or an underdog if you acknowledge your gifts and befriend your obstacles."

From being treated like an 'outsider' to being hailed as the reigning 'Queen' of Bollywood and a style czarina, the powerhouse performer has come a long way since her debut. What's more, she's the only top actress who has done so without piggy-back riding on a star-name.

With three National Awards on her shelf - which is the second-highest tally ever for a Bollywood actress and the highest for an actress in her generation - along with several other prestigious wins, the highest-paid actress has proven her mettle with every big screen outing and achieved what most can only hope for and that includes winning two National Awards for the Best Actress in a row.

In fact, her blockbuster film 'Tanu Weds Manu Returns' fetched the highest opening ever for an actress and became the most successful Bollywood film featuring a female protagonist. The film became the first Bollywood film with a female protagonist to earn over Rs 1 billion in India.

A bankable name in the industry herself, the actress is also working with the most respectable names here - she has just completed Vishal Bharadwaj's 'Rangoon', post which she has 'Simran' with Hansal Mehta and another film with Rajkumar Hirani is also in the pipeline.

The actress is also the most-sought after name in the ad world, who find her versatile and brave choices on screen and an instant connect with the youth off it a refreshing change. It's hardly a surprise then to see the 'Queen' actress endorse as many as 15 top brands.

Besides ruling the marquee and the ad world, Kangana is also excelling in her role as a global youth icon, earning plaudits for her talks at the several international forums where she's been invited to. With her outspoken ways and brazen attitude, Kangana's views on several issues have made her a role model for the Gen Next, who identify with her as an independent courageous woman. The actress has always been applauded for her brave choices on screen and off it, earning her a respect that few command.

The actress had earlier been invited to London for Women in the World Summit as a New Face of India. Most recently, she was invited to address the Annual Summit 'TakePride2016' organized by CII Young India in New Delhi, where she spoke about various topics including her views on marriage and relationships.

Earlier she was also invited by the Indian Navy to attend the prestigious Opening Ceremony of the International Fleet Review where she shared space with several dignitaries including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Defence Minister.

Not among the ones to compartmentalize or cap her creativity, the actress has also done a filmmaking course from a reputed international institution.
The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the plea of French Marie Verhoeven Emmanuelle, who challenged her arrest and extradition proceedings with regard to her alleged involvement in the assassination of Senator Jaime Guzman Errazuriz in 1991.

Dismissing the plea, the apex court said the extradition treaty between India and Chile is valid.

Emmanuelle, who has been detained by the Indian authorities since February, has challenged her extradition.

A habeas corpus petition has been filed in the Supreme Court for Verhoeven's release from the Tihar Jail.

This comes after Verhoeven was arrested despite a judgment of the Delhi High Court holding her detention illegal.

Verhoeven was initially taken into custody by the Uttar Pradesh Police based on a red corner notice issued by Interpol for her involvement in the murder of Errazuriz.

She was then produced before the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate in Delhi, who had ordered her provisional arrest under Section 34B of the Extradition Act, 1962.
New Delhi, April 28 (ANI): Bollywood hot siren Sunny Leone is again back with an adult film and now her latest film talks about one-night stands and stalking.

When asked which actor she would love to stalk in real, Sunny chose a safe option and named Hollywood hunk Ryan Gosling and Ruby Rose ( the one Deepika Padukone loves to get clicked these days on the set of XXX: Return of the Xander Cage).

She exclusively told ANI, "Well I would love to stalk Ruby Rose today and yesterday it was Ryan Gosling."

When asked whether she has been stalked ever by a male or female fan, the 'Jism 2' star said, "I have never been stalked by any male or female fan but, yes I have had few interesting fans but I won't term it as stalking."

Coming back to her work, Sunny will soon be seen in film titled 'One Night Stand' doing what she does best.

The film hits the screens on May 6.
The Mumbai Police did not allow Bhumata Brigade chief Trupti Desai to come out of her car as she attempted to enter the Haji Ali Dargah this evening.

Several activists had gathered outside the dargah and were chanting slogans against Desai over her decision to enter the inner sanctum.

AIMIM's Haji Rafat Hussain had earlier threatened to smear black ink on activist Trupti Desai if she attempts to enter Mumbai's Haji Ali Dargah.

Hussain told ANI that Desai was attempting to disturb the prevailing ambiance with her ulterior motive, adding that the Mumbai Police should take note of the same and stop her.

"We are of the opinion that whatever work Desai ji has done for the temple that's okay, but I feel that the Muslims would not tolerate if she raises fingers at them," he said.

Bhumata Ranragini Brigade founder Trupti Desai, who had earlier announced that she would enter the dargah on April 28, launched the campaign 'Haji Ali For All' in April to allow women to the tomb of Pir Haji Ali Shah Bukhari and offer 'chadar' there.

Desai today asked Bollywood actors Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan to lend support to their cause, which is aimed at eradicating differential treatment meted out to women at religious places.

"I think Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan should state their stand on what we are trying to achieve here, on our cause... That way I believe that their fan following will join us and support us in our fight for equality," she told ANI.

After spearheading a successful campaign for women's right to worship in temples, Desai had on Monday said that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) should allow women to join the organisation.

Speaking to ANI, Desai expressed hope that the RSS would respect their stand and consider their demand.

"I think Mohan Bhagwat ji is a progressive thinker and he will respect our stand of entry for women in RSS," she said.

Desai had earlier insisted that the threats of Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat will not work.

"This kind of threat is wrong. Everyone has the right to protest in a democracy," Desai said.

On Saturday, Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat said that he would not allow her to touch the mazar-e-sharif at the Hazi Ali Dargah.

Arafat, who joined the Shiv Sena after leaving the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena in 2014, said that the attempt by Desai to enter the Haji Ali Dargah is a conspiracy meant to disturb Mumbai's peaceful environment.

The Haji Ali Dargah does not allow women to enter the inner chamber. Only men are allowed to go inside the Haji Ali Mazar and pray. This ban came into force in 2011.
The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has given its approval to enhance investment by Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL) in Bharat Oman Refineries (BORL). The investment amount could be enhanced upto a maximum of Rs.3000 crore by way of subscription of convertible warrants / other instruments giving right to convert it into equity shares to be issued by BORL, beyond DPE guidelines dated 05.08.2005.

The infusion of funds by the BPCLs will enable BORL to overcome the implications on account of the erosion of the net worth. Besides it will enhance the availability of petroleum products in the Northern and Central parts of the country, industrial development of Madhya Pradesh and substantial increase in employment and tax earnings in the State.

Background:

Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) is a public sector undertaking under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. It has promoted a joint venture company with Oman Oil Company Limited (OOCL) named Bharat Oman Refineries Limited (BORL). The BORL has commissioned the 6 MMTPA (120 Thousand Barrels Per Day) Refinery at Bina in Madhya Pradesh, in June, 2011 at a project cost of about Rs. 12,754 crore.

Currently the refinery is operating at 100% of its installed capacity.

The company now proposes to undertake a debottlenecking project at the refinery to further increase the refining capacity from 6 MMTPA to 7.8 MMTPA. The estimated project cost is Rs.3,072 crore, with an overall implementation schedule of 36 months from date of receipt of environmental clearances (Zero Date). The highlights of the proposal for debottlenecking project include certain modifications to produce products in accordance to the new Auto Fuel Policy.

Hence, there is a need for immediate infusion of funds in BORL by the shareholders. OOCL while expressing their support for the project, had indicated that they are not prepared to commit further funds for the project at this stage. Therefore, BPCL Board has decided to infuse funds to the tune of Rs 3,000 Crore for funding the debottlenecking project and for meeting the extraordinary losses suffered on account of the sharp fall in the prices of crude oil and finished products.

Government has, accordingly, decided to grant approval to the proposal of BPCL to enhance its investment in BORL by an additional amount of up to Rs. 3,000 crore for completion of the de-bottlenecking project.

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The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has given its approval for utilization of 400 hectares of un-cultivable farm land at the Central State Farm (CSF), Jetsar in Sri Ganganagar District, Rajasthan for setting up of a solar Power Plant of capacity exceeding 200 MW. The land is presently in possession of National Seeds Corporation (NSC), a Central Public Sector Enterprise (CPSE) under the administrative control of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. The Solar Power Plant will be set up by a CPSE, which would be selected through negotiation.

NSC will provide 400 hectares of un-cultivable land, out of the 5394 hectares under its possession to the identified CPSE, which will bear the costs relating to the installation of the Solar Power Plant.

The selected CPSE will have to do tariff based competitive bidding for the project. It will be allowed to utilize the land for the installation of a Solar Power Plant over a contract period of 25 years, which may be extended on mutually agreed terms and conditions, after which the entire plant will be surrendered to the NSC on as is where is basis. The Project, by utilizing un-cultivable land for a Solar Power Project, will yield revenue for NSC and will also generate clean energy for the nation.

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BPCL fell 0.55% to Rs 975.45 at 12:39 IST on BSE after the Union Cabinet gave its approval to enhance investment by the company in the joint venture company Bharat Oman Refineries upto a maximum of Rs 3000 crore.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 261.28 points or 1% at 25,802.84.

On BSE, so far 21,000 shares were traded in the counter as against average daily volume of 86,213 shares in the past one quarter. The stock was volatile. The stock lost as much as 0.71% at the day's low of Rs 973.80 so far during the day. The stock rose as much as 0.61% at the day's high of Rs 986.90 so far during the day. The stock had hit a record high of Rs 994.20 yesterday, 27 April 2016. The stock had hit a 52-week low of Rs 704.40 on 13 May 2015. The stock had outperformed the market over the past one month till 27 April 2016, gaining 13.08% compared with Sensex's 2.87% rise. The scrip had also outperformed the market in past one quarter, advancing 12.71% as against Sensex's 6.42% rise.

The large-cap company has equity capital of Rs 723.08 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.

Bharat Oman Refineries (BORL) is a joint venture company between BPCL and Oman Oil Company (OOCL). BORL proposes to undertake a de-bottlenecking project at Bina refinery in Madhya Pradesh to further increase the refining capacity from 6 MMTPA to 7.8 MMTPA. The estimated project cost is Rs 3072 crore, with an overall implementation schedule of 36 months from date of receipt of environmental clearances. The Union Cabinet yesterday, 27 April 2016, gave its approval to enhance investment by BPCL in BORL by an additional amount of up to Rs 3000 crore for completion of the de-bottlenecking project and for meeting the extraordinary losses suffered on account of the sharp fall in the prices of crude oil and finished products. The investment could be through subscription of convertible warrants/other instruments giving BPCL right to convert it into equity shares to be issued by BORL, according to a press release issued by the government after market hours yesterday, 27 April 2016. The infusion of funds by BPCL will enable BORL to overcome the implications on account of the erosion of the net worth, the statement said. Besides it will enhance the availability of petroleum products in the Northern and Central parts of the country, industrial development of Madhya Pradesh and substantial increase in employment and tax earnings in the state, the statement said.

BPCL's net profit jumped 170.1% to Rs 1488.60 crore on 19.5% decline in net sales to Rs 46613.14 crore in Q3 December 2015 over Q3 December 2014.

BPCL is a state-run oil refining-cum-marketing company. The Government of India held 54.93% stake in BPCL (as per the shareholding pattern as on 31 March 2016).

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Canara Bank rose 0.83% to Rs 213.70 at 10:05 IST on BSE after the bank said that it has successfully raised Rs 3000 crore under BASEL-III compliant tier-II bonds with a coupon of 8.4% per annum.

The announcement was made before market hours today, 28 April 2016.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 10.01 points or 0.04% at 26,071.38.

On BSE, so far 26,066 shares were traded in the counter as against average daily volume of 3.96 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 214.50 and a low of Rs 211.75 so far during the day. The stock had hit a 52-week high of Rs 391.20 on 5 May 2015. The stock had hit a 52-week low of Rs 156.20 on 29 February 2016. The stock had outperformed the market over the past one month till 27 April 2016, gaining 10.91% compared with Sensex's 2.87% gains. The scrip had also outperformed the market in past one quarter, rising 11.58% as against Sensex's 6.42% gains.

The large-cap PSU bank has equity capital of Rs 542.99 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.

Canara Bank said that as per the powers delegated by the board of directors of the bank, the Bond Committee had decided to raise Basel III compliant Tier -II bonds amounting to Rs 1000 crore with an option to retain oversubscription, at the sole discretion of the bank for an amount up to Rs 2000 crore on private placement basis. The issue was opened on 18 April 2016 and closed on 27 April 2016.

Canara Bank's net profit fell 87% to Rs 84.97 crore on 1.4% decline in total income to Rs 12050.63 crore in Q3 December 2015 over Q3 December 2014.

The Government of India held 66.3% stake in Canara Bank as per the shareholding pattern as on 31 March 2016.

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During 2015-16, the energy shortage was 2.1% which is the lowest ever in a single year.

As reported by the States / UTs, the details of energy shortage in terms of electricity in the country during the last two decades are given below:-

1991-92 2,88,974 2,66,432 22,542 7.81992-93 3,05,266 2,79,824 25,442 8.31993-94 3,23,252 2,99,494 23,758 7.31994-95 3,52,260 3,27,281 24,979 7.11995-96 3,89,721 3,54,045 35,676 9.21996-97 4,13,490 3,65,900 47,590 11.51997-98 4,24,505 3,90,330 34,175 8.11998-99 4,46,584 4,20,235 26,349 5.91999-00 4,80,430 4,50,594 29,836 6.22000-01 5,07,216 4,67,400 39,816 7.82001-02 5,22,537 4,83,350 39,187 7.52002-03 5,45,983 4,97,890 48,093 8.82003-04 5,59,264 5,19,398 39,866 7.12004-05 5,91,373 5,48,115 43,258 7.32005-06 6,31,554 5,78,819 52,735 8.42006-07 6,90,587 6,24,495 66,092 9.62007-08 7,39,343 6,66,007 73,336 9.92008-09 777,039 691,038 86,001 11.12009-10 830,594 746,644 83,950 10.12010-11 861,591 788,355 73,236 8.52011-12 937,199 857,886 79,313 8.52012-13 995,557 908,652 86,905 8.72013-14 10,02,045 9,59,614 42,431 4.22014-15 10,68,923 1,030,785 38,138 3.6

At present, India is importing power only from Bhutan.

The imported power is mainly Bhutan's surplus power from hydro stations commissioned in Bhutan with the assistance from the Government of India. During 2015-16, energy imported from Bhutan was about 5 Billion units (BU).

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The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has given its ex-post facto approval for the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) and the Insurance Authority of United Arab Emirates.

The MoU was signed in February 2016.

The MoU provides for enhanced cooperation between the two authorities in the field of insurance supervision by providing a framework for co-operation such as channels of communication. It will also result in increasing mutual understanding through the exchange of regulatory and relevant supervisory information including confidential information to enforce or ensure compliance with their respective laws and regulations.

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Mercator rose 3.04% to Rs 28.80 at 11:30 IST on BSE after the company said that all the formalities for sale of entire shares in its Singapore based step down subsidiary have been concluded on 27 April 2016.

The announcement was made during market hours today, 28 April 2016.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 112.67 points or 0.43% at 25,951.45.

On BSE, so far 2.4 lakh shares were traded in the counter as against average daily volume of 2.11 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 29.25 and a low of Rs 27.70 so far during the day. The stock had hit a 52-week high of Rs 31.45 on 24 December 2015. The stock had hit a 52-week low of Rs 14.55 on 3 June 2015. The stock had outperformed the market over the past one month till 27 April 2016, jumping 34.38% compared with Sensex's 2.87% gains. The scrip had also outperformed the market in past one quarter, rising 27.63% as against Sensex's 6.42% gains.

The small-cap company has equity capital of Rs 24.49 crore. Face value per share is Rs 1.

On 30 March 2016, Mercator had said that its wholly owned subsidiary, Mercator International Pte. (MIPL) received approval from the Singapore exchange for divestment of MIPL's entire stake in the company's step-down subsidiary Mercator Lines (Singapore) (MLS). On 10 February 2016, MIPL had entered into a sale and purchase agreement for sale of its entire stake of 90 crore shares MLS to three buyers for 900 million Singapore dollars.

On 18 January 2016, Mercator's board of directors had approved as a part of an ongoing portfolio restructuring exercise to exit dry bulk business carried on by its Singapore Stock Exchange listed arm MLS by way of divestment. MLS had carried a debt of Rs 1000 crore and reported loss after tax of Rs 768 crore in FY 2015. Its operations was consolidated in the financial accounts of Mercator India and adversely affecting its consolidated performance. The bulk carriers business has been the worst affected by the downturn in the shipping cycle and not showing signs of early revival in future, the company had said at that time.

On consolidated basis, Mercator reported net loss of Rs 319.93 crore in Q3 December 2015 compared with net profit of Rs 6.17 crore in Q3 December 2014. Net sales rose 0.9% to Rs 714.64 crore in Q3 December 2015 over Q3 December 2014.

Mercator group has business interests in coal, oil & gas, shipping and dredging.

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Sales reported at Rs 50.52 crore

Net profit of North Karnataka Expressway declined 19.53% to Rs 11.37 crore in the quarter ended March 2016 as against Rs 14.13 crore during the previous quarter ended March 2015. Sales remain constant at Rs 50.52 crore in the quarter ended March 2016 and also during the previous quarter ended March 2015.

For the full year,net profit declined 7.12% to Rs 25.95 crore in the year ended March 2016 as against Rs 27.94 crore during the previous year ended March 2015. Sales remain constant at Rs 101.03 crore in the year ended March 2016 and also during the previous year ended March 2015. ParticularsQuarter EndedYear EndedMar. 2016Mar. 2015% Var.Mar. 2016Mar. 2015% Var.Sales50.5250.52 0 101.03101.03 0 OPM %83.9385.61 -84.8385.81 - PBDT38.0437.26 2 75.8675.38 1 PBT14.8718.09 -18 33.4135.36 -6 NP11.3714.13 -20 25.9527.94 -7

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Held on 28 April 2016

Idea Cellular announced that the Board of Directors of the Company at its meeting held on 28 April 2016 has decided to consolidate its business of providing tower infrastructure services through approximately 7997 telecom towers that it owns and operates across India (Tower Infrastructure Undertaking) with its wholly owned subsidiary, Idea Cellular Infrastructure Services (ICISL) which is engaged in the business of providing tower infrastructure services in Bihar and Orissa.

To implement this transaction, a business transfer agreement will be executed between the Company and ICISL. ICISL will issue approximately 10,000 equity shares to the Company in consideration for the Tower Infrastructure Undertaking.

The transfer of the Tower Infrastructure Undertaking to ICSL is expected to be completed within 3 to 6 months subject to obtaining requisite regulatory approvals.

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Receives bids for 1.68 crore shares

The initial public offer (IPO) of diagnostic chain operator Thyrocare Technologies received bids for a total of 1.68 crore shares on the second day of bidding for the IPO today, 28 April 2016, as per data from the National Stock Exchange (NSE) website at 17:00 IST. The IPO was subscribed 2.24 times.

Thyrocare Technologies has raised Rs 143.76 crore by selling 32.23 lakh shares to anchor investors ahead of the opening of the company's initial public offer (IPO). The shares were allotted to the anchor investors at Rs 446 per share, the top end of the Rs 420 to Rs 446 per share price band for the IPO.

Anchor investors allotted shares of Thyrocare Technologies include Nomura Trust and Banking Company, DSP Blackrock Emerging Stars Fund, HDFC Trustee Company, Birla Sunlife Trustee Company, Reliance Capital Trustee Company, SBI Magnum Multiplier Fund, ICICI Prudential, Tata AIA Life Insurance Company, Copthall Mauritius Investment, Spring Healthcare India Trust, FIL Investments (Mauritius), L&T Mutual Fund, Sundaram Mutual Fund and DB International (Asia).

The IPO of Thyrocare Technologies through the book-building route opened for bidding yesterday, 27 April 2016. The bidding for the IPO concludes tomorrow, 29 April 2016. The issue comprises of offer for sale of up to 1.07 crore equity shares by existing shareholders of the company. The company will not receive any funds from the IPO. Private equity investor Agalia Private Limited is selling 1.02 crore shares via the IPO. From the promoter group, A. Velumani HUF and A. Sundararaju HUF are selling 1.8 lakh shares each and Anand Velumani is selling 1.77 lakh shares.

Promoted by Dr. A. Velumani and A Sundararaju, Thyrocare Technologies is one of the leading pan-India diagnostic chain operators. It conducts an array of medical diagnostic tests and profiles of tests that center on early detection and management of disorders and diseases, including thyroid disorders, growth disorders, metabolism disorders, auto-immunity, diabetes, anemia, cardiovascular disorders, infertility and various infectious diseases. The company primarily operates its testing services through a fully automated Central Processing Laboratory (CPL). It has recently expanded its operations to include a network of Regional Processing Laboratories (RPLs).

The company has built a nation-wide network of authorized service providers that source samples for processing and testing by the RPLs and CPL. As of 29 February 2016, the company had a network of 1,041 authorized service providers, comprised of 687 Thyrocare Aggregators (TAGs) and 354 Thyrocare Service Providers (TSPs) spread across 466 cities, 24 states and one union territory. The company offers wellness and preventive tests under Aarogyam brand. The company also operates a network of molecular imaging centers in New Delhi, Navi Mumbai and Hyderabad focused on early and effective cancer monitoring. This business is carried through its wholly owned subsidiary NHL.

Based on the consolidated financial performance, Thyrocare Technologies reported net profit of Rs 40.02 crore on revenue from operations of Rs 175.91 crore for nine months ended 31 December 2015. Net profit stood at Rs 44.43 crore on revenue from operations of Rs 182.95 crore for the year ended 31 March 2015.

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Health Minister J.P. Nadda on Thursday welcomed the Supreme Court order to conduct entrance examinations for admission to MBBS and post graduate medical courses through the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), terming it a "milestone judgement".

"The health ministry has been making efforts in this direction since a long time. The present order of the Supreme Court will significantly strengthen the efforts of the ministry to achieve this aim. It is a milestone judgement," said Nadda.

He said that despite the challenges to conduct the exam this year, the ministry is geared up to work with the other partners and stakeholders to ensure that the entrance exams are successfully held.

The Supreme Court on Thursday said students aspiring for admission to under-graduate medical courses will have to appear in the National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET).

The apex court bench headed by Justice Anil R. Dave gave its nod to two-phase holding of the NEET by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), as it declined the submission by certain states and associations of private medical colleges not to thrust NEET on them.

The court approved the CBSE schedule for holding NEET exams on May 1, 2016, and July 24, 2016, the declaration of results on August 17 this year, and counselling and admissions later.

--IANS

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Following delegation-level bilateral talks led by Minister of State for External Affairs V.K. Singh and Mongolian Foreign Minister Lundeg Purevsuren here on Thursday, India extended a line of credit (LoC) of $1 billion to Mongolia.

The two countries also agreed to exchange sentenced persons.

"On track for the future. India & Mongolia sign agreements for US$1 bn LoC & exchange of prisoners," external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup tweeted.

This comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Mongolia in May last year during which he announced the LoC for economic expansion and infrastructure development and the two sides signed 14 agreements.

This was the first prime ministerial visit from India to Mongolia.

Modi said that Mongolia was an integral part of India's Act East policy.

Minister of State Singh participated in Thursday's talks on India's behalf as External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is indisposed.

According to a statement issued by the external affairs ministry, the visit of Purevsuren is part of the intensified bilateral exchanges following the upgrade of bilateral relations during Modi's visit.

"During that visit the relationship was upgraded to strategic partnership and a series of important agreements including in the defence and security fields were signed," the statement said.

It also said that as part of ongoing high level exchanges, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan visited Mongolia earlier this month.

"The visit helped to consolidate parliamentary exchanges and underscored the shared bonds of democracy which further strengthen bilateral relations based on age-old spiritual and cultural foundation connecting the peoples of India and Mongolia," it stated.

Earlier on Thursday, Purevsuren conferred Mongolia's highest civilian award, the Order of North Star, on Lokesh Chandra, president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), and Mansura Haider, former academic adviser of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA).

Describing India as the "spiritual neighbour" of Mongolia, Purevsuren, speaking on the occasion, said: "President of Mongolia, Tsakhia Elbegdorj, bestowed the Order of North Star on these two eminent scholars and I am honoured to hand over these awards to them during my official visit to India."

India and Mongolia are marking 60 years of diplomatic relations this year with a series of events.

--IANS

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India, Iran and Afghanistan held the first round of trilateral consultations on Afghanistan here on Wednesday, a senior government official said on Thursday.

"The first round of director general/joint secretary-level India-Iran-Afghanistan trilateral consultations on Afghanistan was held in New Delhi on April 27," external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said in his weekly media briefing here.

"During the consultations, the Afghan delegation gave a briefing on the status of efforts on peace and reconciliation following which the three delegations discussed various dimensions of the current situation," he said.

According to Swarup, both the Indian and Iranian delegations extended support to the efforts of the Afghan government for peace, stability and prosperity in that country and "to preserve the gains of the past 15 years".

"The delegations also had a fruitful exchange of views on mutual cooperation and strengthening economic and commercial cooperation among the three countries, including by promoting regional connectivity such as through Chabahar port (in Iran)," he said.

"In this regard they also agreed to explore avenues for attracting investments from other countries in the region and beyond."

The spokesperson also said that the Iranian delegation has offered to host the next round of consultations in Tehran.

Both India and Afghanistan are participating in the development of the Chabahar port in Iran as a regional connectivity hub.

India and Iran are also working to make Afghanistan a vital link between central and south Asia.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to make a bilateral visit to Iran in the first half of this year.

--IANS

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Al-Asharah (Syria), April 28 (IANS/AKI) IS militants executed an allegedly homosexual man in eastern Syria by pushing him off a hospital roof, a monitoring group reported on Thursday.

The unnamed man was hurled to his death from the roof of a hospital in the town of al-Ashara in Syria's eastern Deir Ezzor province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

The man, who came from the city of al-Mayadin, was accused by IS of being a 'sodomite', reported the Britain-based watchdog, which receives its information from activists and doctors inside Syria.

In Deir Ezzor and other territory under its control, IS metes out savage 'Islamic' punishments including hurling alleged homosexuals off buildings to their deaths, beheading alleged spies and mutilating alleged thieves.

--IANS/AKI

vd
Actress Kalki Koechlin is on cloud nine after getting a letter from Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, praising her for bringing "attention to violence and discrimination against women" through a 'thought provoking' poem.

Kalki, who has also been named for a National Film Award this year, featured in Culture Machine's Unblushed series for the women's lifestyle channel Blush.

In the five-minute-long video "Printing Machine", the actress is seen reciting a monologue she penned down on society and media. She is seen talking about media, society and their approach towards women and crimes against them. The video has been directed by Akanksha Seda.

Kalki says the director should be lauded for spinning magic in the video.

"Culture Machine taking 'The Printing Machine' as far as Melinda Gates' personal computer is social media machinery at its best. I just want to say the magic of my director Akanksha should be held highly responsible," Kalki said in a statement.

The actress got a letter from Melinda and shared a snapshot of the letter on photo-sharing site Instagram.

It read: "Dear Ms Koechlin: I appreciate your taking the time to join me in a discussion on empowering women and girls in India. Your video poem, 'The Printing Machine', was powerful and thought provoking. Thank you for bringing attention to violence and discrimination against women. Your voice helps bring much needed attention and support to these issues - and I am grateful for your efforts. It was a pleasure meeting you during my visit".

Along with her husband Bill, Melinda works towards improving equity around the world including India. She has done work to towards women empowerment.

--IANS

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Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal asked the Central Information Commission (CIC) on Thursday why it was not making public the educational qualification of Prime Minister Narednra Modi.

In a letter to the CIC, Kejriwal said: "I have no problem if information related to me is made public. But I have come to know that you have refused to put the degrees of Modi in the public domain."

On March 18, the CIC had asked the chief minister if information related to him could be made public.

"The people of this country want to know the truth. Why are you not releasing the documents related to Modi's educational qualifications? This is wrong."

The chief minister asked the central panel to show "courage" and make the documents public.

"I am okay with my information being made available to the public. But show some courage by doing the same for the prime minister."

--IANS

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North Korea on Thursday fired a Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile, but it appeared to have failed, South Korea's defence ministry said.

The projectile was launched at 6.40 a.m. (local time) from the Wonsan area in North Korea, Xinhua news agency quoted a defence ministry official as saying.

The launch appeared to have failed as the projectile was believed to have crashed several seconds after liftoff, the official said.

--IANS

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As a world-acclaimed magician, Tony Hassini's not playing tricks to make things disappear. Rather he's using his hands to prevent the enchanting art of magic from vanishing - to the extent of planning an Olympics for the genre in India.

The ace, elderly and globetrotting rockstar magician Hassini is the president of the US-based International Magicians Society, the world's largest professional body of magicians.

"Persistence and determination are the two key words to success," Hassini, 75, who was born with a hearing impairment and dyslexia, told IANS in an interview here.

It's the repertoire of tricks that changed his life.

"Magic gave me the self-confidence and the opportunity to see eye-to-eye," the Muammar Gaddafi lookalike said.

Sharing his inspirational journey from a disabled child born during World War II to an immigrant dish-washer to an acclaimed magician, Cyprus-born Hassini said: "Everybody has the desire to be rich. Talent doesn't make it. There are so many talented people who are starving. Hard work doesn't make it."

The American magician, who has instituted the 'Merlin Award', the Oscar of magic, and is known for making the skull float, believes magic is an art and a business too.

"I studied magic when I was 16 years old. India, where magic is a traditional form of art, has a lot of talent. Sadly, the magicians are starving. It's becoming a vanishing art. It needs to be protected by making it commercial and linking it with tourism like in Thailand and Las Vegas," he said.

Likewise, the art of illusion, skill and more importantly, the ability to entertain, is dying in Bangladesh, China and Indonesia, areas once renowned for magic.

Hassini, accompanying magician Rajkumar, who is known for currency trick, has plans for India, the land of ancient magical art and mystics.

"I am planning a Magic Olympics in India which will see a galaxy of world-renowned magicians and illusionists. Of course, this will help saving the dying Indian magic industry that lacks innovation in magic props and presentation," said the magician, who wants to make it commercial in India.

He said magic has the universal language and no boundaries.

He also has advice for parents.

According to Hassini, magic tricks not only sharpen the brain of the children as they have to think a lot but also make them more confident, smarter and sociable.

"The magic school lessons also encourage skills and critical thinking. It's better than computer games and teaches that every problem has a simple solution."

Magic in no superpower, he said. It's simply an art that needs patience and lots of practice.

Born in 1941, Hassini migrated to London at the age 16. At that time, he couldn't utter a word of English.

He got a dish-washer's job in a restaurant in London and that's where he discovered a nearby magic shop. From there, began his magical rags-to-richness journey.

His hunt for the world's greatest magician/illusionist is on.

"I will be travelling to over 100 countries to search for the world's greatest magician," he said.

So far he has travelled to 26 countries.

"Had I given up on my fifth business which failed, I would have been a loser. But I went on to the sixth one, McDonalds. If that had failed, I would have gone on to my seventh, eighth and ninth, and so forth and so on, until I made it," added Hassini, whose magic organisation records 37,000 members worldwide.

(Vishal Gulati can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in)

--IANS

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Power shortage in India during the last financial year was at 2.1 percent, thus recording the lowest level in a single year, parliament was informed on Thursday.

"During 2015-16, the energy shortage was 2.1 percent, which is the lowest ever in a single year," Power Minister Piyush Goyal said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.

The minister also said that India is currently importing power only from Bhutan, which has a surplus from hydroelectric power stations commissioned in that country with India's assistance

During the last financial year, about 5 billion units (BU) of energy was imported from Bhutan, Goyal said.

In reply to another question, he said that during the 12th Plan period, a target of 88,537 MW was fixed for capacity addition, that excludes 30,000 MW from renewal energy sources. Against this, cumulative capacity addition of 84,990.7 MW has been achieved as on March 31, 2016.

--IANS

bc/vd
South Korea on Thursday denounced North Korea's missile launch as a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

Seoul's foreign ministry said it strongly condemns the yet another ballistic missile launch by Pyongyang in defiance of repeated warnings from the international community, Xinhua news agency reported.

The statement called the launch a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions and a provocative act threatening peace and stability in Northeast Asia and the world.

Seoul will push to encourage actions at UN Security Council in close consultations with major countries, while seeking to make the international community put more pressures and sanctions on Pyongyang, the statement said.

The statement urged North Korea to stop further provocations such as another nuclear test that will speed up self-destruction of the regime in so far as the country pursues the advancement in nuclear and missile programmes.

The statement came after Pyongyang launched a Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile on Thursday. If confirmed, it would be the second test-firing of the missile following the launch on April 15.

The Thursday launch appeared to have failed as the projectile was believed to have crashed several seconds after liftoff, Seoul's defence ministry said.

The first test-launch also failed as the missile exploded in mid-air.

--IANS

py/dg
BJP president Amit Shah on Thursday hit out at Congress president Sonia Gandhi, and asked her to clarify who were the beneficiaries of the VVIP chopper scam.

"It has been established by an Italian court that kickbacks were given. Rather than saying she (Sonia) is not afraid of anyone, she should clarify who received the kickbacks," Shah told reporters.

"I just want to ask who was in the power then? It was UPA and they are responsible. They should bring out the truth before the nation."

"When the National Herald (case) took place, then you say that 'we are not afraid of anybody', when the VVIP chopper scam takes place, then you say that 'we are not afraid of anybody'," he said.

"She might not be afraid of anyone but we the leaders of the BJP are afraid of the Constitution, democracy and public modesty," Shah added.

He said the Congress was a unique party whose corruption deals were coming out even two years after it was ousted from power.

"When the Congress was in power, its corruption deals were coming out every day. This is still going on even after two years of losing power."

Shah's remarks came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a meeting with senior ministers over the scam.

The meeting was attended by Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Parliamentary Affairs Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu and his junior Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi in parliament shortly before both houses met for the day.

Sources told IANS that the prime minister discussed the government's further strategy over the issue in parliament and outside.

He asked the members to corner the Congress aggressively over the scam.

Naidu, who also attended the meeting, said the government was pursuing the case with all seriousness.

"Why is the Congress accusing the ruling dispensation of the deal which was not even signed in its tenure?" he told reporters outside parliament.

A combative Congress on Wednesday dismissed the bribery charges in the chopper scam.

The party, in turn, accused the Modi government of trying to help the Italian firm which had been blacklisted by the UPA government.

A Milan court sent Finmeccanica's former CEO Giuseppe Orsi and AgustaWestland ex-head Bruno Spagnolini to jail for false accounting and corruption in the sale of 12 VVIP choppers to India.

The court ruling refers to Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, her secretary Ahmad Patel and also former Indian Air Force chief S.P. Tyagi.

--IANS

bns/pm/vt
Japan's southwestern region, jolted by two powerful tremors that killed 50 people earlier this month, has witnessed over a thousand aftershocks since the first strong quake hit the country on April 14.

This volume of seismic activity is unusually high even for Japan, a country used to frequent tectonic movements and which recorded 1,842 humanly-perceptible quakes last year, EFE news reported.

The Japan Meteorological Agency on Thursday urged that quake alert in Kumamoto and Oita, the two worst-affected prefecture cities on Kyushu Island, be continued.

On April 14, Kumamoto registered a violent 6.5-magnitude earthquake, which triggered a series of tremors, including one of 7.3 magnitude that struck two days later and caused even greater destruction.

The quakes claimed 49 lives with one person still missing and led to the evacuation of 30,000 people.

Moreover, authorities said 16 people died in the aftermath of the quakes, owing to fatigue and stress from harsh living conditions in the area, where many have had to spend several nights in their cars.

Almost 300 sites on local roads are still blocked by rocks, fallen trees or debris, which have cut off access to several areas.

--IANS

ksk/dg
Film: "The Man Who Knew Infinity"; Director: Matthew Brown; Cast: Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Stephen Fry, Toby Jones, Devika Bhise, Arundhati; Rating: ***

The film, "The Man Who Knew Infinity", based on Robert Kanigel's book of the same name, is an inspiring biographical drama. It pays tribute to the genius mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan from Madras who made extraordinary contributions to the mathematical universe. It is a grim story of the great soul.

The film covers a span of six years of Ramanujan's life, from 1914 when he worked as an accountant in Madras till his death in 1920.

Narrated from his mentor G.H. Hardy's point of view, in a non-linear fashion, the film, encapsulates Ramanujan's struggle from his modest upbringing in India, all the way up to Trinity College at Cambridge, where Hardy arranges for Ramanujan to work with him at Trinity, unaware that he is leaving behind his wife Janaki and an overbearing mother.

Writer-director Matthew Brown's script is fraught with numbers and miracles. Formulaic in nature, the plot, characterisation and emotional manipulation is the highlight of the film. But ultimately it is about the prodigy's love for mathematics and his two relationships, with his wife and his association with his mentor that forms the crux of the tale.

The narrative gets impulsive, with a mumbo-jumbo of numerical analyses which are unabashedly brought to the fore. When Hardy insists on having proofs of the theories, and is unwilling to publish Ramanujan's findings which were derived purely by intuition, you feel that he is trying to tame the genius and subjugate him.

When Hardy, an atheist, asks where Ramanujan gets his formulae, particularly since he is unable to show the process, the prodigy replies, that his God informs him while he is sleeping or praying. And his insistence only infuriates the genius.

The film belongs to Dev Patel. He steals the show as S. Ramanujan. He convincingly makes us believe that he really is the mathematician by being engrossed and immersing himself in numbers. He emotes effortlessly, especially when he pines for his wife, faces racial discrimination or is furious with his mentor when he is forced to present proofs for his theories.

Devika Bhise is a pleasant surprise. She complements Dev as his wife Janaki. She delivers an equally robust performance, especially expressing how she pines for him during their long separation. Though this is not a love-story, their onscreen chemistry is palpable. You feel sorry for both of them.

Arundhati Nag as Ramanujan's mother is equally brilliant.

Jeremy Irons in a straight laced role as G.H. Hardy is effective. To his credit, he brings energy and nuance to a character only thinly sketched in. He strains himself trying to overcome skeptics while helping Ramanujan reach his full potential while he is in Britain.

The same goes for Toby Jones as Littlewood and Jeremy Northam as Bertrand Russell, trying to be subtle in a sensitive but fairly predictable performance that's probably because of the stereotyped nature of the characters they portray.

Visually, the film is simple and realistic. The costumes by Ann Maskrey complement production designer Luciana Arrighi's sets, where they manage to create the era to perfection.

Cinematographer Larry Smith's frames are atmospheric, but nothing exceptional. He captures the locales in India and Cambridge with equal fervour.

The background score by Coby Brown has a faint blend of Indian and Western music. The visuals are brought to life by J.C. Bond's fine edits.

The film is sensitively and skilfully handled and is definitely worth a watch.

--IANS

troy/nn/dg
A top Islamic State (IS) operative was killed in a military raid in a town bordering Syria, authorities said on Thursday.

The IS operative, Nayef Shaalan, was killed in an operation in the border town of Arsal, Xinhua news agency quoted the army as saying.

One of Shaalan's bodyguards was killed and another arrested in the operation.

Lebanon has been battling extremists near the border with Syria since August 2014, when the IS and Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front briefly overran the border town.

--IANS

py/bg
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has denounced US' attempts to "sabotage" the nuclear deal that ended international sanctions against Tehran, and described Washington's commitment to it as only on paper.

According to sources, Khamenei, the highest political and religious figure in the country, said during a meeting that despite the nuclear agreements, "hostility" against Iran by Israel and the US continues, which means his country's distrust of Washington remains absolute, EF news reported.

In particular, Khamenei referred to the obstacles that still prevent Iranian banks from operating with the outside world, and particularly the reluctance of European financial institutions to work with Iran for fear of sanctions from the US.

The leader insisted that the US has resorted to deception to obstruct international trade with Iran despite the nuclear agreements.

On paper, he said, that work with Iran is allowed, but in practice there is "Iranophobia that the Americans have been promoting", according to state-run Fars news agency.

Since the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) came into force in January, there have been complaints from the Iranian side about the limited progress of international banks to operate in the country.

--IANS

ksk/vt
In the article, "For statesmanship and sanity" (April 28), of the three changes the writer Nitin Desai suggests Prime Minister Narendra Modi should adopt, disowning extremists in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is imperative and the easiest to undertake.

The votaries of beef ban and Bharat Mata ki Jai have created little impact on people's mindset but have provided the anti-BJP media and political parties an opportunity to cash in on the controversy. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its followers should have kept quiet during the first two years of BJP-led rule and allowed the government to strengthen its development agenda. The RSS should have publicised its work in the social and educational sectors.

While the animosity between Modi and Congress President Sonia Gandhi may not prompt him to persuade her to support his economic policies, he should garner the backing of other parties so that the Congress is isolated in the Rajya Sabha.

However, the BJP's moves to dislodge the Congress in the states where it is in power have made other parties suspicious of the saffron party's motives.

Modi should consider adopt humility. His predilection for inaugurating almost every new activity, his monthly Mann ki Baat on radio and frequent reference to "I" and "my government" point to growing narcissism and reluctance to self-introspection. The perception that Modi leads an individual-centric government is doing him no good.

It is time Modi included in his Cabinet people with intelligence and who have the courage to dissent. This will not happen if he surrounds himself with advisors, who invent a rationale for every action of his.

Y G Chouksey, Pune



Letters can be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to:The Editor, Business StandardNehru House, 4 Bahadur Shah Zafar MargNew Delhi 110 002Fax: (011) 23720201E-mail: letters@bsmail.in
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement was signed early this year. No one has asked India to join the TPP nor are we in a position to do so. Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is the other mega region in the making between the US and EU. While the former focuses on high standards, the latter aims at regulatory coherence. Between the two, they cover more than 60 per cent of world trade. Major economies such as China, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa are not part of these agreements. In the long run, no major economy can remain uninfluenced by them because the discriminatory rules regime will have consequences on trade with even non-member economies.
Tax havens sprang up in the aftermath of World War I, as the moneyed in Europe felt the need to spread their risks beyond Switzerland. Since they were the ones financing the war, protection of their wealth seemed a fair demand to make on the Eurocentric world economy.
MLA Budda Rajasekhar Reddy becomes the 15th member in the 'defection' order as he crossed over to the Telugu Desam (TDP) from YSR Congress.

At the "auspicious" time of 9.05 a.m, the Srisailam MLA met TDP supremo and Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu at the latter's riverfront residence and got the yellow scarf adorned, marking his admission into the ruling party.

Rajasekhar was also the Kurnool district unit president of YSRC. He is the fourth MLA of YSRC from Kurnool district to defect to the TDP.

In fact, the defection of legislators from the lone opposition party to the ruling party started with two MLAs from Kurnool district on February 22.

Now, four MLAs in all have crossed over to the TDP, reducing the YSRC strength in the district to seven.

Kurnool district had been one of the bastions of the YSRC but now it appears to be crumbling.
The ministry of defence (MoD) has fired the latest shot in an escalating war of words between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over corruption in the purchase of twelve AW-101 helicopters in February 2010 for top Indian political leaders, from Anglo-Italian firm, AgustaWestland International Limited (AWIL) for euro 556 million (currently Rs 4,195 crore).

Although the purchase of these VVIP helicopters was initiated in 1999 by the previous BJP-led government, and concluded in 2010 by the previous Congress-led government, both parties are selectively highlighting the role of the other, while downplaying their own role.

On Thursday, the MoD stated: "The contract for supply of 12 helicopters signed with AWIL on 8th February 2010 was terminated with effect from 1st January 2014 (i.e. by the Congress-led government)... However, the company was not debarred by the said order. Various bonds and bank guarantees were invoked."



The MoD further claims "It is the present government which through its order dated 03 July 2014, put on hold all procurement/acquisition cases in the pipeline of six companies figuring in the FIR registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation, namely: M/s Agusta Westland International Ltd., UK, M/s Finmeccanica, Italy and its group of companies No new capital procurement has been made thereafter from these companies in the tenure of the present Government."



In fact, the current Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has consistently tried to ease the de-facto ban on Finmeccanica companies imposed by United Progressive Alliance (UPA) defence minister, AK Antony, after Italian investigators arrested Finmeccanica chief, Giuseppe Orsi, on February 12, 2013 on charges of bribing Indian officials to seal the VVIP chopper contract.

On December 12, 2014, at a conclave in New Delhi organized by the Aaj Tak TV channel, Parrikar decried the notion of blacklisting foreign violators, instead recommending punitive monetary penalties.

Citing Finmeccanica, Parrikar pointed out that many of its 39 group companies were involved in crucial contracts with India. "Should we rule ourselves out of dealing with all of those 39 subsidiaries? There has to be a clear policy on that," said the defence minister.

Parrikar's predecessor as defence minister, Arun Jaitley, followed an identical approach to blacklisting. As Business Standard reported ("Ministry of Defence reconsidering blacklisting policy", August 23, 2014), Jaitley said on blacklisting: "We have to balance between two competing public interests. One public interest is that contracts are meant to be abided with, and not violated, even by our suppliers. The other competing interest is the larger public interest in terms of our security and defence preparedness. It is an issue that we are fully seized of and we are in the process of finding an answer to this and you will hear about this from us very soon", said Jaitley.

The blacklisting norms that the government eventually promulgated in August 2015 did not blacklist Finmeccanica, instead taking a differentiated approach to its group companies - which include marine specialist, WASS; Selex Electronics Systems; aircraft firm, Alenia Aeromacchi, and naval gun maker, Otomelara.

Also contested is the naming by an Italian court of former Indian Air Force (IAF) boss, Air Chief Marshal SP Tyagi, as the recipient of bribes to change the specifications of the VVIP helicopter. The initial IAF tender, floated in 2002, required the chopper to operate up to altitudes of 6,000 metres, which was higher than the service ceiling of the AgustaWestland helicopter. The Italian court alleges that Tyagi did AgustaWestland a favour by having the service ceiling lowered, making the AW-101 helicopter eligible for the IAF tender.

In fact, according to a detailed MoD release dated February 14, 2013, the decision to lower the service ceiling was taken on the orders of Brajesh Mishra, Principle Secretary to then prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, at a meeting in November 2003. Mishra also directed that the prime minister's office and the Special Protection Group (which is responsible for VVIP security) be brought into the decision making process.

Tyagi became a part of the decision making more than a year later, when he took over as IAF chief in December 2014.
It was a day when Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah launched a direct attack on Congress counterpart Sonia Gandhi on the AgustaWestland issue. The Congress attacked Shah for irresponsible statements but, for a change, chose not to obstruct legislation in .

The Rajya Sabha, where the government is in a minority, deliberated and passed the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order (Amendment) Bill and The Industries (Development and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2015. Fireworks between the ruling BJP and the Congress took a backseat on Thursday. Both benches deliberated the matter of a one per cent excise duty on gold jewellry and then went on to discuss the SC amendment.

The Congress strategy appears to be a shift from the hard stance of Wednesday, when former defence minister A K Antony gave a spirited argument for the decisions taken by the then Congress-led government on the helicopter deal with AgustaWestland. Sonia Gandhi had said she was not afraid of any probe.

BJP president Amit Shah said on Thursday that Sonia Gandhi should name those who received the kickbacks. All I want to ask her is that those who gave a bribe are in jail in Italy; then, where are those who received the kickbacks? Who were in power at that time? They are responsible and they should bring out the truth. It should be disclosed before the people of the country, he said.

On Gandhi saying she does not fear anybody, Shah said she was right and that is why such news items keep coming out. That is why when the Herald corruption case happens, you say you do not fear anybody. When the AgustaWestland case occurs, you say you do not fear anybody... I want to tell her that we in the BJP are afraid of the Constitution, rules and public norms.



Congress Pramod Tewari who had moved a notice for discussion on the Agusta Westland deal yesterday and then today as well, chose to withdraw his notice this morning. Sources within the party said, Parliamentary Affairs minister Venkaiah Naidu had reached out to Congress leaders and urged them to allow legislative business to be transacted in the house. It also suited the Congress to not appear to be too obstructionist; the Congress thinking was that as long as the ruling party did not raise the issue and provoke them, the Congress too would not take it up. Furthermore, the Congress would not oppose any non- controversial legislation, like the Scheduled Caste bill which pertained to a large section of the public. On Friday, the upper house would be devoted to discussing private members bill. A controversial issue like the GST bill however is not on the cards.

The Westland issue is, however, likely to be taken up on Monday in the Lok Sabha by the BJP. Three of its members have moved notices for discussion. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar will reply. A call-attention motion was also moved on the issue by BJPs Bhupendra Yadav in the Rajya Sabha, yet to be decided by the chair.

The major item for this session is to be the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Code. After the Lok Sabha wraps up its discussion on the Finance Bill, the Code will be taken up. On Thursday, a joint committee of presented its report on this. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Wednesday that he expected passage in this session. As the issue of stressed loans and willful default is in the public eye, all political parties could cooperate. More so as the committee report has been adopted without any dissent notes, with all the amendments suggested by opposition members having been taken on board.

Later, he also took a dig at Gandhi's Italian origin, saying she should at least have faith in an Italian court's decision.

Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi questioned why the BJP did not complete the probe into the matter within two years and identify the culprits. Why should Sonia Gandhi explain?



In the Lok Sabha, the BJP's Meenakshi Lekhi alleged middleman Christian Michel had been given Rs 50 crore by the Italian company to manage the media and clinch the deal. Congress members protested and their leader, Mallikarjun Kharge, pointed out that their demands to put the record straight had been denied by the Speaker but Lekhi was allowed to speak. Lekhi, however, continued with her Zero Hour mention; amid the protests, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan adjourned the House for the lunch recess.

Later speaking to journalists, Singhvi said, \"In every case, the BJPs objective is sensationalism and to keep the pot boiling.
Two persons have been arrested in connection with the murder of a Dalit man last week at Godhna village here, police said today.

The accused, identified as Satish and Manju Singh, were arrested last evening, they said.

Samey Singh, 35, was allegedly beaten to death on April 23 and his body found in the fields near the village under Purkazk police station area, police said.

The killing had triggered protests by the villagers.
Two persons were killed and as many injured when two floors of a nearly 80-year-old building in Old Delhi collapsed today.

The deceased were identified as Ramkaran and Manje Lal, both aged between 45-50 years. They, along with their three other family members, were employed as labourers for the renovation of the dilapidated building in Lahori Gate area, a senior police official said.

The incident took place around 11.20 AM today, following which teams of disaster management, fire and police departments were rushed to the spot near the Church Mission Police Post.

The third and the second floor of the residential building collapsed, while the remaining two did not suffer much damage. Also, a family of three who lived on the first floor and one of the labourers escaped unhurt.

The labourers, all natives of a village in Rajasthan, were pulled out from a huge mound of debris. While Ramkaran died on the spot, Lal succumbed to his wounds while being rushed to a hospital. The two others were admitted to Aruna Asaf Ali Hospital, the official said.

A case of negligence causing death was registered in this connection and Ratan Singh, who had employed the labourers for the renovation work, arrested, DCP (North) Madhur Verma said.

A senior officer of North Delhi Municipal Corporation said the collapse was caused by the demolition work undertaken by its owner on the third floor of the building.

The building is located on a plot of 70 sqm in the cloth market area in the Walled City's Lahori Gate.

"Some demolition work was carried out by the owner on the half portion of the third floor which caved in and under the weight of the debris, the second floor of the building also collapsed," he said.

Police said that renovation of any building in the area is forbidden by law. Around 30 buildings have been identified as "dangerous" in the Walled City after a building collapse in Chandni Mahal in 2011, claiming eight lives.

Asha Chaudhary, a resident on the first floor of the building, said, "I am living here for 40 years. My husband was born here, I cannot even think of leaving this place. I protested the renovation but did not file any complaint."



A police official present at the spot said, "Every building is in bad state. Any construction or renovation is dangerous. But, we did not receive any complaint regarding the construction going on here.
At least 20 civilians were killed in regime strikes on a hospital and nearby residential building in the Syrian city of Aleppo, civil defence volunteers known as the White Helmets have said.

A dentist and five members of a family, including two children, were among those killed "by airstrikes targeting al Quds Hospital and a nearby residential building in al Sukkari neighbourhood in eastern Aleppo," the volunteers said late yesterday.

A doctor who was the only paediatrician in the rebel-held eastern neighbourhoods of Aleppo was also among the dead, an AFP correspondent on the ground said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group confirmed the raids were carried out by "regime airplanes" and said two hospital guards and a doctor were among the dead.

Video footage filmed by AFP showed images of the badly damaged hospital, aid workers transporting the victims in ambulances and a weeping man holding a child.

Rescuers were at the scene searching for victims trapped under the rubble, the AFP correspondent said.

Separately, 11 people were killed in western parts of Aleppo earlier yesterday, according to the Syrian Observatory. State agency SANA blamed the rocket and gunfire on Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front and its allies.

Also earlier in the day, five civilians were killed in two neighbourhoods in eastern Aleppo, according to the White Helmets. An AFP correspondent said that regime aircraft targeted one area with barrel bombs and another with missiles.

Following a lull in fighting after the ceasefire took effect on February 27, violence has intensified in recent days, with more than 100 civilians reported dead in air strikes, shelling and rocket fire since Friday.

Once Syria's commercial hub, northwestern Aleppo has been divided between rebel control in the east and government forces in the west since 2012.

The fighting has put the ceasefire in jeopardy and overshadowed a new round of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva that were entering a recess yesterday.

More than 270,000 people have been killed in Syria and millions been forced from their homes since the conflict erupted in 2011.
For the second time in a week, a Chinese city has announced it would halt plans for a garbage incinerator project following angry protests by residents that underscore growing concern over threats to public health.

The government of Nanxian (NAN'-she-ahn) in the southern province of Hunan said today in a public notice that it would cease all work related to the project and would not start up again without public support.

China is faced with the mounting challenge of disposing solid waste generated in ever-larger cities. However, public distrust runs deep as people question their local governments' ability to properly plan, build and manage trash incinerators.

When those projects move ahead, public anger is often stirred over fears they would cause air, water and soil pollution.

Last Friday, the Haiyan county government in the eastern province of Zhejiang halted plans for a trash incinerator after rowdy street protests.

In Nanxian, hundreds took to the street on Monday and Tuesday to protest the project citing pollution concerns, overseas Chinese sites reported.

A man who answered the phone at the propaganda office of the county government said about 200 residents had protested with some actions he described as "extreme."



The man, who gave only his surname Liao, as is common with Chinese bureaucrats, did not elaborate and said, there had been no clash between the protesters and police and no one was injured during the demonstration.

Police had not detained anyone but were investigating the protest, Liao said.

A notice from the local government urged residents not to take extreme measures or spread rumors.
Three Indian medical students have been expelled from a Chinese university and deported from the country after violent clashes between two groups of students from India in which one person was stabbed.

"One of the students was stabbed and three students have been expelled from the Three Gorge University at Yichang," an Indian diplomat told PTI here.

All the three expelled students have been subsequently deported from China, the official said.

Incidents like ragging and violent behaviour are a matter of concern as they are on the increase, the official said.

The students involved were stated to be medical students. Over 8,000 medical students study in China in various cities.

In all over 14,000 Indians study various courses in Chinese universities and colleges making them one of the biggest contingents in the country.

Following the incident, the Indian mission issued an advisory dubbing the conduct of the students as "unacceptable" and warning them of "zero-tolerance" on all such cases.

"The Indian Embassy and Consulates in China are aware of recent incidents involving unacceptable behaviour by some Indian students studying in China," the advisory said.

"In the second week of April, 2016 two groups of students at the Three Gorges University in Yichang resorted to violence. In the ensuing clash, one student was stabbed with a knife. The University has expelled the students directly involved," it said.

"Incidents involving any kind of violence or ill behaviour create a negative image about Indians in China. Although the overwhelming number of students is law-abiding, the actions of a few are detrimental to the interests of all Indians in China," it said.

"It is our common responsibility to ensure that no such act is committed that affects the reputation of the country or the Indian community in China. The Embassy and Consulates will have zero-tolerance on all such cases," it said.

The embassy told the Indian students to respect local customs and laws.
The FBI arrested three people today, including the brother of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook, on charges of marriage fraud and lying to investigators, authorities said.

Syed Raheel Farook, 31, was arrested in the early morning at his home in the California town of Corona, along with his wife Tatiana Farook, also 31.

Mariya Chernykh, Tatiana's 26-year-old sister who lives in the nearby town of Ontario, was also arrested.

The five-count indictment against the three centers on Chernykh's alleged sham marriage to Enrique Marquez, who is awaiting trial on charges of aiding the December 2 attack carried out by Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik.

The duo were later killed in a shootout with police.

"This is the latest step in the comprehensive investigation into the horrific attacks in San Bernardino last year that took the lives of 14 innocent Americans and deeply affected so many more," US attorney Eileen Decker said in a statement.

"As I have said previously, we owe the victims, and the entire community of San Bernardino, a thorough investigation that uncovers all criminal activity surrounding these events."



The trio arrested today were expected to make an initial court appearance later in the day, according to local reports.

They face up to five years in prison on a charge of lying to immigration officials. Chernykh also faces up to 25 years in prison on charges of fraud and misuse of visas as well as lying to federal agents.

Marquez told investigators after his indictment in December on charges of buying weapons used in the San Bernardino assault that he had entered into a fake marriage with Chernykh in November 2014 and had lied about living with her.

Chernykh and her sister are both from Russia and Syed Raheel Farook's marriage to Tatiana has also come under scrutiny.

Investigators have executed several search warrants at his house since the massacre, the deadliest terror attack on US soil since September 11, 2001.

Syed Raheel Farook served in the US navy between 2003 and 2007 and is a decorated veteran.
At least 38 civilians were killed and dozens more wounded in fresh violence in Syria's second city Aleppo today, a monitoring group said.

Rebel rocket and artillery fire on government-held neighbourhoods killed 18 civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Regime air strikes on rebel-held districts, including the heavily populated Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood, killed 20 civilians, the Britain-based group said.
Forty cities will be selected for the second phase of the Smart City Mission, which is likely to be announced by June, Rajya Sabha was told today.

The first batch of 20 cities, including Bhubaneshwar, Pune, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bhopal and NDMC area of Delhi, were selected for Narendra Modi government's flagship smart city project in January.

"It is expected that the results of the next phase will be announced by May/June," Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said in written reply.

Assured water and power supply, sanitation and solid waste management systems, efficient urban mobility and public transportation, IT connectivity, e-governance and citizen participation are some of the highlights of the smart city project.

Under the Smart City Mission, 100 cities across the country will be developed as smart cities by 2019-20 with the Union government providing financial support to the extent of Rs 48,000 crore over five years--on an average Rs 100 crore per city per year for five years.

An equal amount will be contributed by the state/urban local body and the balance funds would be mobilised through various sources such as public private partnership and municipal bonds.

Around 54 cities, including Varanasi, Nagpur, Muzaffarpur, Ghaziabad, Agra, Kanpur, Kota and Gandhinagar will compete to find a place in the second list of 40 cities for the smart city projects.
Two groups of JNU students are sitting on an indefinite hunger strike in protest against the punishments awarded by the university in connection with the controversial February 9 event.

While five protesting students are from ABVP, 20 others including JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar belong to different groups.

The hunger strike began at midnight after the students took out a torchlight march from Ganga Dhaba to administration block, which has been the venue of protest ever since Kanhaiya was arrested in a sedition case over the event against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised.

Kanhaiya, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, who were arrested in the case are now out on bail. The university had earlier this week announced punishments to various students on basis of recommendations of a five-member probe panel.

While Kanhaiya has been slapped with a penalty of Rs 10,000 on grounds of "indiscipline and misconduct", Umar, Anirban and Kashmiri student Mujeeb Gatoo have been rusticated for varied durations.

Fourteen students have been imposed financial penalty, hostel facilities oftwo students have been withdrawn and university has declared the campus out of bounds for two former students.

"The administration thought that if the action is taken during exams there will be no protests from students. Please do not question our intelligentsia, we can write our thesis while sitting on protest and clear our exams," Kanhaiya said.

"This High-level drama of high-level committee was the reason behind suicide of Rohith Vemula. We do not want to learn things by losing our lives but by fighting these agendas," he added.

The protesting students also include the ones who have not been punished but are agitating in solidarity.
National carrier Air India is expected to trim losses by more than half to Rs 2,636 crore in the 2015-16 fiscal as compared to a net loss of Rs 5,859.91 crore in 2014-15, the government said today.

"With regard to Air India Limited, it is likely to suffer a total net loss of Rs 2,636 crore in 2015-16," said Minister of State for Civil Aviation Mahesh Sharma in a written reply in Lok Sabha.

Sharma said the airline has been facing losses in the past years due to multitude of factors.

He said high interest cost and airport charges, increasing competition, particularly from budget carriers, coupled with exchange rate variation due to weakening of Indian rupee are reasons for the carrier's estimated net loss (of Rs 2,636 crore) during 2015-16.

Air India had reported losses of Rs 5,859.91 crore in the fiscal ended March 31, 2015.

The national carrier was given a Rs 30,231-crore lifeline by the Finance Ministry in 2012 under a turnaround plan stretching over a period of nine years to keep it afloat.

This equity infusion also includes the financial support towards repayment of principal as well as interest on government-guaranteed loans taken for aircraft acquisition by the airline.

As per the 2012 Turn Around Plan (TAP), the government will infuse Rs 18,929 crore for repayment of government- guaranteed loans/interest till FY 2010-21, Sharma said.

The minister also informed the House that till March this year, the government has already infused Rs 22,280 crore into the carrier as part of the bailout package.

Air India has also discharged of all its aircraft loans and interest liabilities by the last fiscal, he said, adding that the government has already approved Rs 1,713 crore equity infusion into the carrier for the current fiscal in line with TAP.

Responding to a query, Sharma said the carrier has seen a



decline in its market share in the last three years, with Air India cornering 16 per cent of the total domestic traffic pie till February against a market share of 18 per cent in the 2014-15 financial year and 19 per cent in the previous year.

"The market share of Air India has declined in the last three years. There has been capacity induction (addition of aircraft) by Air India whereas the capacity of the competitor airlines has grown substantially in the domestic market," he said.

The capacity share of Air India has come down to 15 per cent in the previous fiscal as against 17 per cent capacity deployed by the airline in the fiscal 2014-15, he said.

In response to a question, Sharma said Air India had reported as many as 334 delays of more than 15 minutes between April 2015 and March this year due to technical snag in its Dreamliner Boeing 787-800 planes.

These planes have experienced technical issues since induction into Air India fleet. "However, issues do not adversely affect the safety of airplane due to the system design and in-built system redundancy," he said.

"Regular improvements are incorporated as a part of the reliability enhancement process. This is normal process followed as an intrinsic part of maintenance throughout the entire lifespan of aircraft in operations," the minister said.
Noting that the core issue in the VVIP chopper scam was corruption, the Defence Ministry today said the government will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case.

Refuting the Congress claims that the Anglo-Italian helicopter maker AgustaWestland was blacklisted by the UPA government, it said it was the NDA, on July 3, 2014, that had actually put on hold all procurement and acquisition cases in the pipeline of six companies involved in the VVIP chopper scam.

It also said that CBI and Enforcement Directorate are vigorously pursuing all aspects of the investigation, including the arrest and extradition of three alleged middlemen of the deal -- Carlo Gerosa, Guido Haschke Ralph and Christian Michel James.

"Publicly available information on the procurement of AgustaWestland helicopters clearly shows that the core issue in the matter is corruption. The present government has taken effective action to bring out the truth and will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case," a statement released by the ministry said.

It said the time taken is largely because some of the key perpetrators of this "misdeed" are outside the country.

In certain quarters, questions have been raised on certain trivial technicalities, which appear to be intended to distract attention from the core issue of corruption, it said.

The ministry said that the contract for supply of 12 helicopters signed with AgustaWestland International Ltd (AWIL) on February 8, 2010 was terminated with effect from January 1, 2014.

"The main reason was breach of the provisions of the Pre-Contract Integrity Pact and breach of terms of contract by AWIL. However, the company was not debarred by the said order. Various bonds and bank guarantees were invoked.

"It is the present government which through its order dated July 3, 2014, put on hold all procurement/acquisition cases in the pipeline of six companies figuring in the FIR registered by the CBI. No new capital procurement has been made thereafter from these companies in the tenure of the present government," the statement said.

The said companies are AgustaWestland International Ltd, Finmeccanica, Italy and its group of companies, including subsidiaries and affiliates, IDS, Tunisia, Infotech Design System (IDS), Mauritius, IDS Infotech Ltd, Mohali and Aeromatrix Info Solution Pvt. Ltd, Chandigarh.

On the Congress allegation that the NDA gave clearance to



a joint venture involving AgustaWestland through the Foreign Investment Promotion Board, the ministry said this proposal was approved on September 2, 2011 based on an application by Indian Rotorcraft Ltd, a joint venture of Tata Sons with AgustaWestland NV, Netherlands.

"This was later changed to AgustaWestland S.P.A, Italy due to re-organisation within the group. On February 7, 2012, an industrial licence for the manufacture of helicopters was granted by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion to Indian Rotorcraft Ltd. However, the validity of the licence has since expired," it said.

On the "core issue of corruption", it said the two agencies concerned, namely CBI and Enforcement Directorate, are vigorously pursuing all aspects of the investigation, including the arrests and/or extradition of the three foreign nationals.

"Red Corner Notices were issued in December 2015 and January 2016 through Interpol under Prevention of Money Laundering Act and Prevention of Corruption Act. Extradition request has also been made for Christian Michel James. One of the agencies (Enforcement Directorate) has arrested an Indian national and attached approximately Rs 11 crore of property belonging to Indian nationals and to Christian Michel James," it said.

Congress had on Tuesday claimed that AgustaWestland was blacklisted by the UPA dispensation but "removed" from the blacklist by the Modi government.

Congress leader and former Union minister Anand Sharma had said, "The chopper deal was scrapped. Action was taken by the UPA government. A K Antony, the then Defence Minister, had made a statement in Parliament and AgustaWestland was blacklisted.
An ancient stone sculpture of Buddha's footprints that was smuggled into the United States and had been expected to sell for more than USD 1 million was returned to the government of Pakistan yesterday.

The piece, called a Buddhapada, was taken from a Pakistani region rich in Buddhist history decades ago. It was returned by New York prosecutors to Pakistani Deputy Chief of Mission Rizwan Saeed Sheikh, who said it will remain in the city for the time being and may be exhibited at a museum.

Sheikh said the Buddhapada, weighing nearly 500 pounds, was "an important element of the cultural history of Pakistan" and he was relieved to have it returned.

A Japanese antiquities dealer pleaded guilty last month to criminal possession of stolen property in a scheme to smuggle it into the US.

Tatsuzo Kaku made the plea in exchange for a USD 5,000 fine and a sentence of time served and left the country voluntarily. He said he shipped the 2nd-century Buddhapada from Tokyo to New York to sell it at a gallery, where it was expected to fetch USD 1.1 million.

He said he knew it had been excavated and removed from the Swat River valley, a mountainous region of northern Pakistan, in 1982.

He said in court that, while he stood to benefit financially, he also was motivated by a lifelong desire to preserve such works for fear they would fall into disrepair or be destroyed if they remained in Pakistan.

Scholars and art historians say there's little truth to the argument. UNESCO initiated a program more than a decade ago with funds from the US to preserve images of Buddha and other works found in the region.

During the time the Buddhapada was stolen, there were no major threats to any archaeological sites, said Muhammad Zahir, an assistant professor at Hazara University in Pakistan who works in the Swat valley.

Even when the Taliban was present in 2009, the government of Pakistan had plans to protect or remove ancient Buddhist art from the valley and safely moved museum artifacts during military operations to combat the Taliban, he said.

Zahir said in an email from Pakistan that a far more realistic reason for the looting was the demand in the Western and Southeast Asian markets for Buddhist art from the region.

The repatriated piece is a large stone slab with columns and two large footprints. Within the footprints are symbols, including a swastika, a 5,000-year-old Sanskrit symbol that denotes auspiciousness and was co-opted by Nazi Germany.

Prosecutors said the Buddhapada is "so much more than a piece of property.
An angry farmer has sprayed raw sewage Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson and her sister Sophie after they violated a court injunction protecting a proposed fracking site in Lancashire.

The 57-year-old actress and her younger sibling joined in with a Greenpeace protest near Fylde, Lancashire against the controversial energy extraction process known as fracking, and filmed a "Great British Bake Off" parody short while baking renewable energy-themed cakes in a bespoke kitchen powered by solar panels underneath a marquee.

However, the irate landowner, who has leased the field in question to fracking company Cuadrilla, made his way to the site to confront the protesters.

When they refused to budge, the farmer drove his muck spreader in a circle round the activists, spraying them with manure in the process, reported Daily Mirror.

The protesters were on the site in violation of a court injunction, obtained by Cuadrilla in 2014 to keep disruptive elements off the site on which they plan to drill, pending the overturning of a rejection of their application to operating on the site imposed by Lancashire County Council last year.

Communities secretary Greg Clarke has since intervened, and says he will have the final say on the application.

Thompson and her sister, who has won "Celebrity Masterchef" in the past, were believed to have been in the marquee when the farmer took his direct action, and therefore didn't get covered in the manure.

"I was livid when I heard about the government's plans to frack under national parks," Thompson had said explaining her participation in the protests.

"Since then I've discovered that to prop up their half-baked energy policies the government may have to force fracking onto reluctant local communities.

"This must be challenged. We have to show the government that we will not allow fracking to scar our countryside and fuel yet more climate change.
Apparel exporters' body AEPC has strongly opposed Rs 10,000 as minimum payable wages to contract labour, saying if it is implemented, the industry will not be able to afford the existing level of employment and hence capacities and turnover will be affected.

The Central Government has proposed to amend Rule 25(2) (iv) of the Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Central Rules, 1971 to ensure minimum monthly wage of Rs 10,000 to contract workers of the country.

Asserting that the proposed move has come as a "shock" to the apparel industry, AEPC said it could lead to a decline of at least 10 per cent in the export turnover, i.E. Rs 11,000 crore of exports in a year and a proportionate decline in employment.

"For apparel manufacturers, the increase will be around 26 per cent more on account of PF (12 per cent), ESI (4.75 per cent) and Bonus (8.33 per cent). Adding service tax, the total incidence is 41 per cent. Hence, they will effectively have to pay Rs 14,100 to a contract labourer, an increase of over 100 per cent for some states.

"The industry needs to demonstrate wage parity for similar work. Hence this increase in wages of contract labour will either violate wage parity norm or lead to unrest in the industry. Also, wage is fixed as per the work performed and on the basis of skills. The suggestion for fixation of Rs 10,000 for contract workers is arbitrary and will create distortions," Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) said.

It is estimated that if this provision is uniformly implemented across all states, the result will be over 90 per cent increase in wages in states like Odisha and Rajasthan and over 30 per cent for most of the other states.

There is no proposal to bring into the ambit of Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act, 1970 those establishments and contractors that employ less than twenty workmen.

India's apparel sector recorded an export turnover of Rs 1,11,235.5 crore in 2015-16. It provides employment to over 45 million people directly and 60 million people indirectly.
US Consul General in Kolkata Craig L Hall today said the US government is very clear that Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of India.

Craig said this during a meeting with Chief Minister Kalikho Pul while referring to the oft repeated claims of China over Arunachal Pradesh territory, an official release said.

Through Craig, Pul also asked the United States government to help rectify Google Maps wherein China has indicated Arunachal and some parts of Assam as a part of its territory.

Craig said India's Act East Policy could be strengthened if road connectivity in the region is developed well, as Arunachal is located in a strategically important position having international borders with China, Myanmar and Bhutan, it said.

Private companies of the United States are looking for ways, though difficult it seems, for more connectivity in the region so that pace of developmental activities can be accelerated, he said.

"In fact, the US government is working with the Indian counterpart to promote business relations with NE India," he said, adding that the state has potential in hydro-power and tourism sectors.

He put forward his opinion to the chief minister for global tendering of the hydro-power and infrastructure developments projects of the state, so that the advertisement could be sent to the companies in the US, the release said.

Seeking US support in developing road connectivity and harnessing hydropower of the state, the Chief Minister said Western investors should feel free to invest in Arunachal.

The chief minister also sought the help of the US for capacity building, particularly in training, support and equipment for dealing with natural disasters.

Pul further sought the assistance of the United States in getting loans from Asian Development Bank and other institutions for various development projects in the state, the release added.
Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today sought additional funds from the World Bank for timely execution of Water Supply and Sanitation Schemes (WSSS) in the water-logged areas of the state.

The Chief Minister reviewed the progress of World Bank-funded various ongoing water supply and sanitation schemes across the state during a high-level meeting with the members of World Bank Mission and senior officers of the department here.

Badal brought to the notice of the World Bank that nearly 40,000 toilets were needed to be constructed in the water-logged areas and the cost of per toilet was calculated around Rs 28,400 against construction cost of Rs 15,000 in the normal areas.

The additional cost on the count should be immediately provided by the World Bank so that this gigantic task could be completed within the set time-frame, Badal said, according to an official release here.

Badal also asked the World Bank to accept the claim for reimbursement as soon as the funds were released.

The World Bank team leader Srinivasa Rao Podipireddy updated the Chief Minister that water supply schemes have been provided in 317 Not Completed (NC) and Partially Completed (PC) villages.
Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today asked the Centre to rope in agricultural experts and economists to suggest ways and means to arrest the steadily dwindling profits from agriculture.

He demanded the Centre to immediately go for structural changes in the policy related to agriculture.

Badal said any complacency on this count could further add to the woes of the farmers besides putting the national food security at risk.

He was replying to a query on Punjab being the second state after Maharashtra in terms of farmers' suicides as the Lok Sabha was informed.

Badal said the state government has been making all efforts to ensure welfare of farmers by giving them free power and other incentives from its "resources" to make farming at least self-sustainable.

"But the rights of the farmers, who are passing through severe agrarian crisis, must be safeguarded by a prompt intervention of the central government without any further delay," he said.

Unable to repay his loans, a farmer and his elderly mother committed suicide on Tuesday by consuming pesticide at Jodhpur village near Barnala allegedly when a commission agent, alongwith police and revenue officials, was trying to take possession of his land.

Meanwhile, he rubbished allegations of Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh about alleged involvement of SAD to fizzle out his foreign visit to Canada and USA.

"When Amarinder says anything just turn his statement the other way round to know the reality," he said.

Amarinder Singh had recently lodged a protest with the Canadian government over denial of permission to hold interactive meetings with the Punjabis in Toronto and Vancouver.
After a failed attempt to sell Kingfisher House, erstwhile headquarters of Vijay Mallya's defunct carrier, lenders will auction the trademarks of the airline, including for 'Kingfisher' logo and once-famous 'Fly the Good Times' tagline on April 30.

The reserve price for the trademarks, which also include Flying Models, Fly the Good Times, Funliner, Fly Kingfisher, Flying Bird device, has been kept at Rs 366 crore.

The airlines had pledged the trademarks as collateral with banks at the time of taking loans from them.

In its annual report for 2012-13, KFA said at its peak it was the largest airline in India, with a five-star rating from Skytrax.

A valuation report from Grant Thornton put its brand value at USD 550 million on resumption of operations. The airline's brand had been registered separately from the Kingfisher beer trademark.

The online auction is being conducted by SBICAP Trustee Company, subsidiary of SBI Caps, on behalf of lenders.

According to the experts, the auction is unlikely to generate any interest from bidders as the value of brand has deteriorated.

"KFA brand value has deteriorated in last few years. In this case the owner has been the ambassador of the brand and the way Vijaya Mallya has been behaving, there are some negative connotations which are being associated with the brand. I don't think the auction is going to generate too much interest," N Chandramouli, CEO, TRA, a brand intelligence and data insights company said.

"If at all, it could see some interest from players who are from other sectors and want to enter the aviation industry."



Last month, lenders made a unsuccessful attempt to auction Kingfisher House.

The auction failed as none of the bidders came forward due to high reserve prices of Rs 150 crore.

The property has a built-up area of over 17,000 sq ft in Vile Parle area near domestic airport here.

Lenders had taken over Kingfisher House in February last year in a bid to recover part of their dues totalling over Rs 9,000 crore, which includes unpaid loans and accrued interest.
Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC) led by Kuldeep Bishnoi today merged with Congress in presence of party leaders Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, but former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda was conspicuous by his absence.

HJC was floated by Bishnoi's father and former chief Minister Bhajan Lal in 2007 after parting ways with the Congress as he was miffed at being sidelined by the party which preferred Jat leader Hooda as the Chief Minister in 2005.

"I had never separated from Congress. Differences occur in a family. Congress is in our blood. The differences are now over," Bishnoi, who took over the reins of the party after Bhajan Lal's death on June 3, 2011, said following announcement of the merger at 10 Janpath here.

HJC had forged an alliance with the BJP for the 2014 parliamentary elections. In the last assembly polls, the party fought separately and was reduced to just two seats -- Kuldeep Bishnoi won from his his father's traditional Adampur seat of Hisar while his wife Renuka Bishnoi won from Hansi.

"Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are our only leaders. We will work for strengthening the Congress. I will work as an ordinary worker of the party and I have not put any conditions or come back due to greed of any post," Bishnoi said.

AICC general secretary in-charge for the state Shakeel Ahmad played down the absence of Hooda, saying that he was also in favour of the merger.

"All were present here. Bhupinder Singh Hooda had an important appointment so he could not come. He will also join in and will be seen with other leaders. It is his intention also and he is in favour of the merger with all his heart," he said.

Ahmad said that the differences are a thing of the past.

He said Bishnoi will be given responsibility in the party and he will emerge as a "strong leader" of Congress.

"Bhajanlal ji was a veteran Congress leader who had parted way because of some reasons. Now, those things have ended and it is irrelevant what one said in the past. Today the decision has been made to move together and Kuldeep will emerge as a strong leader of the party.

"The party leadership has made a decision and Kuldeep has decided to join. Now, it is time to forget the past and march forward strongly," he said.

Haryana Congress president Ashok Tanwar welcomed Bishnoi and leaders of Haryana Janhit Congress, saying it indicated the "rising graph" of the party.

"It indicates the rising graph of Congress reflecting on its role of a strong opposition in last two years. The country is again looking at Congress, particularly in Haryana. We will strengthen Congress in the state," Tanwar said.

The merger is expected to give a boost to the Congress among non-Jats. Bishnoi, however, asserted that he will work for all eople of Haryana, including the Jats and non-Jats.

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However, in the evening, Hooda was present at the briefing at Congress headquarters when the merger was formally announced by AICC General Secretary Shakeel Ahmed.

In an apparent dig at Bishnoi, the former Haryana Chief Minister said he has done the home coming after "being at many places", a reference to his tie-up with BJP.

Ahmed downplayed the remarks saying that one should look at the future and forget the past.
The prestigious Bhawanipur constituency in the city is set to witness a star-studded fight where Trinamool Congress chairperson and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is challenged by two heavyweights in her own backyard.

Former Union Minister Deepa Dasmunshi is contesting as a Congress candidate while Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's grand nephew Chandra Kumar Bose is fielded by BJP from the seat.

Apart from them, BSP, SUCI(C) and six independents are also in the fray.

Bhawanipore constituency, under which Mamata Banerjee's Kalighat residence falls, has been a stronghold of TMC since its inception in 2011, after delimitation.

The constituency which has 202655 voters is home to a sizeable number of Gujaratis, Sikhs, Biharis, Marwaris and other communities living alongside Bengalis.

TMC General Secretary and Banerjee's trusted lieutenant, Subrata Bakshi had won the seat in 2011 when the party fought the election in alliance with Congress by nearly 50,000 votes defeating his nearest CPI-M rival Narayan Prasad Jain.

Within a few months Bakshi had vacated the seat to pave the way for Mamata Banerjee, who was an MP, to get elected to the state Assembly.

Banerjee had won the bypoll with a margin of 54,000 votes defeating her nearest CPI(M) rival Nandini Mukherjee. Bakshi later won the Kolkata South Lok Sabha seat vacated by Banerjee.

Bhawanipore, which takes the pride of having Banerjee as the MLA, has never disappointed TMC except 2014 Lok Sabha polls when BJP had managed to get a slender lead from this Assembly segment under Kolkata South Lok Sabha constituency.

During the Lok Sabha polls, BJP's Kolkata South candidate and current Tripura Governor Tathagata Roy came second to Bakshi, but took a lead in the Bhawanipore Assembly segment.

Banerjee in spite of her hectic schedule as Chief Minister and TMC supremo has focused on her constituency.

"In other constituencies, the fight may be of winning or losing. But in Bhawanipore the fight is to increase the margin than last time, because we'll know that didi will win in this seat," party leader Firhad Hakim said.

Hakim refuted the claim that the alliance between



CPI-M and Congress had made the fight tougher in Bhawanipore.

"Why only CPI(M) and Congress, BJP can also join them. People will vote for development and TMC will win," he said.

Deepa Dasmunshi, the alliance candidate and wife of ailing Congress leader P R Dasmunsi, felt that people would vote against corruption and lawlessness.

"People are fed up with the corruption and lawlessness of TMC. People want peace and democracy to be established in Bengal and it will start from the Bhawnipore constituency," Dasmunshi, fondly called 'Boudi', said.

"Five years back people had voted in favour of TMC with lot of hopes. It has not only failed, but has also betrayed the masses under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee," she said.

Dasmunshi, a bete noire of Mamata, told
Dean of BHU's Social Science department Manjeet Chaturvedi today said a "Dr Bindeshwar Pathak Chair" would be introduced in the varsity



A Post Graduate course for "Action Sociology" would be soon be introduced under the "Dr Bindeshwar Pathak Chair" to provide education in the field of Sanitation, Social reforms and other aspects of the society, Chaturvedi told reporters here.

Pathak is the founder of Sulabh Social and Sanitation Movement.

Pathak, a globallyrecognised sanitation crusader, social transformer and an inspirational leader has changed the life of millions of people, it would be most appropriate in the centenary year of Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and Sulabh International Social Service Organisation to introduce an action-oriented study and research, Chaturvedi said.

The objectives and functions ofthe Bindeshwar Pathak Chair at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Banaras Hindu University shall beto empirically study and critically analyze the wide range of social, educational and sanitation engagements and achievements regarding the Sulabh movement, he informed.

The Chair will also serve as a course of study in Action Sociology for Post-Graduate teaching.

Pathak who was present on the occasion appreciated the proposal moved by Sulabh, which has been accepted by the university dean.

The Chair aims to extend help to MA students by providing internship in various organs of Sulabh International and also an exchange programme between the BHU and Sulabh International not only for the varsity's students, but also for its teachers.

The BHU's Social Sciences Dean said a MoU in this regard will be signed between BHU and Sulabh International Social Service Organisation, soon after getting an assent from the BHU VC and its board members.
Bihar government today hiked the Dearness Allowance (DA) of its employees and pensioners by 6 per cent to 125 per cent with retrospective effect from January 1, 2016.

Brajesh Mehrotra, Principal Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, informed that a decision in this regard was taken at a Cabinet meeting presided over by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

With the latest hike, the DA of the state government employees and pensioners has jumped to 125 per cent. The DA hike will put an additional burden of Rs 842 crore on the state exchequer, he told reporters here.

Among other decisions, the state government approved a proposal to strengthen Excise Intelligence Bureau (EIB) in order to effectively enforce total prohibition which had come in place with effect from April 5 last, Mehrotra said.

For strengthening the EIB, the Bihar government has approved proposal to create one post each of Deputy Excise Commissioner and Assistant Excise Commissioner, he said.

Besides, two posts of Excise Inspector and five posts of Assistant Excise Inspector will also be created, he added.

Further, the state cabinet has given in-principle approval for Bihar Disaster Reduction Roadmap 2015-30, he said.

It is being drafted on the basis of outcome of the third United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction held in Sendai, Japan from March 14-18 last year, in which India alongwith 131 countries participated.

He also informed that a sum of Rs 112.84 crore has been sanctioned the state government for construction of skill development training centres at 534 blocks.
Concerned over China's provocative actions in the disputed South China Sea, four top US Senators have introduced a legislation to enhance US maritime power in Asia Pacific region and provide more military aid to its American allies.

The Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Initiative Act of 2016 authorises the Secretary of State to provide Foreign Military Financing assistance and International Military and Education Training activities in the Asia-Pacific for maritime security capacity building.

Introduced by Senators Ben Cardin, Cory Gardner, Robert Menendez and Brian Schatz, the bill authorises appropriations for the State Department's Southeast Asia Maritime Law Enforcement Initiative; and upgrades the Philippines' military procurement status to the same level that its closest allies enjoy under US law.

The bill authorises the Secretary of Defense, in concurrence with the Secretary of State, to provide assistance for the purpose of increasing maritime security and domain awareness for countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

Seeking to prioritise Asia-Pacific regional allies and maritime ASEAN member states for transfer of excess defense articles: the act requires the administration to report on plans for freedom of navigation assertions, maritime security partner capacity building and China's activities in the South China Sea.

"China's provocative actions in the South China Sea, including its aggressive island-building campaign, threaten not just regional stability but long-standing US interests in the free-flow of commerce, freedom of navigation, and the peaceful resolution of disputes consistent with international law," Cardin said.

"China's ongoing reclamation activities and militarisation of the South China Sea threatens regional stability and represents a clear and fundamental challenge to the international law," Gardner said.

"The Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Initiative Act codifies US policy that US military will routinely enforce freedom of navigation rights, will stand up for international law, and will provide its partners the resources and training they need to protect their maritime domains," he said.

"For too long as China continues its aggressive and expansive policies, the US has played the role of observer, or perhaps protestor, but not yet actor," Menendez said.

"With this legislation, we offer this new way forward: challenge the Government of China on its destabilising policies in the region, assert legal and rightful international authority over maritime boundaries, and send a signal to our friends and allies in the region that the international community - led by the US - will no longer tolerate China's efforts to militarise its foreign policy," he said.

China's ongoing actions to unilaterally redraw the region's maritime borders exacerbates the risks of misperceptions and conflict," Schatz said.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi today continued to be the target of BJP when its chief Amit Shah asked her to name the beneficiaries of bribes in the AugustaWestand chopper deal but the party hit back saying it was for the investigating agencies to bring out the names.

On its part, the government promised to leave no stone unturned to bring to justice the corrupt and wrong doers.

Gandhi's political secretary Ahmed Patel, one of those whose names is believed to have been mentioned in the Italian High Court judgement in the case, said "there is no question of bribe taking by the political leadership of the Congress Party and allegations against them are baseless".

As political temperatures continued to rise, Shah made a statement to the media taking a dig at Gandhi over her statement yesterday that she was not afraid of being cornered in the controversial deal.

"She is right and that is why such scams keeping come out in the open. That is why when the National Herald corruption case happens, you say you do not fear anybody. When AugustaWestland case occurs, you say you do not fear anybody.

"I want to tell her that we in Bharatiya Janata Party are afraid of the Constitution, rules and public norms.

Shah said Gandhi should come out of "this mindset" and make it clear before the people that when it had been proved by an Italian court that bribe was given, then who received the money, who are responsible."



"All I want to ask her is that those who gave the bribe are in jail in Italy. Then where are those who received the kickbacks? Who were in power at that time. They are responsible and they should bring out the truth. It should be disclosed before the people of the country," he said.

Gandhi had yesterday rejected as "baseless" allegations linking her and the party leaders to bribes in the chopper deal and called them an attempt at character assassination.

Asked about Shah's statement asking Gandhi to name the bribe takers, Patel retorted "They (BJP) are in power for the last two years. They should find out. They are asking us."



To a question as to who took the bribes, he said, "it is for the investigating agencies to find out."



About Shah's dig at Gandhi's comment that she was not afraid of anyone, Patel said they were wrongly interpreting what she said. "Like Mrs Indira Gandhi, she said they (Gandhi family) was facing baseless allegations and that she was not afraid of anybody making baseless allegations.

Asked whether he took any bribes, he said "absolutely no, a big no. Never in my life I have taken money. I can't even pronounce these names (of middlemen). I first read about them in the media.

Meanwhile, the Defence Ministry issued a statement



asserting that the core issue in the scam was corruption government will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case.

Refuting the Congress' claims that the Ango-Italian helicopter make AgustaWestland was blacklisted by the UPA government, the ministry said it was the NDA, on July 3, 2014, that had actually put on hold all procurement and acquisition cases in the pipeline of six companies involved in the VVIP chopper scam.

It also said that CBI and Enforcement Directorate are vigorously pursuing all aspects of the investigation, including the arrests and extradition of three alleged middlemen of the deal - Carlo Gerosa, Guido Haschke Ralph and Christian Michel James.

"Publicly available information on the procurement of Agusta Westland helicopters clearly shows that the core issue in the matter is corruption.

"The present Government has taken effective action to bring out the truth and will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case," the ministry statement said.

It said the time taken is largely because some of the key perpetrators of this "misdeed" are outside the country.

The ministry said in certain quarters, questions have been raised on certain trivial technicalities, which appear to be intended to distract attention from the core issue of corruption.

It said that the contract for supply of 12 helicopters signed with Agusta Westland International Ltd (AWIL) on February 8, 2010 was terminated with effect from January 1,2014.

"The main reason was breach of the provisions of the Pre-Contract Integrity Pact and breach of terms of contract by AWIL. However, the company was not debarred by the said order. Various bonds and bank guarantees were invoked.

"It is the present Government which through its order dated July 3, 2014, put on hold all procurement/acquisition cases in the pipeline of six companies figuring in the FIR registered by the CBI. No new capital procurement has been made thereafter from these companies in the tenure of the present Government," the Defence Ministry statement said.
A Parliamentary panel today suggested incorporation of provision for whistle blowers and their protection while amending the Benami Transaction Act pending in Lok Sabha.

The Standing Committee on Finance headed by senior Congress leader M Veerappa Moily also said that government should specify in the Statement of Objects and Reasons of the bill that the purpose of the amendment is to prevent corruption and track tainted money.

Observing that earlier attempt in 2011 to remove infirmities in the original Act of 1988 has not worked, the Committee said the government might also consider a fresh legislation of instead of overhauling of the existing one.

"The intent of the government should therefore be clearly mentioned in the Statement of Objects and Reasons of the Bill. It is also necessary that prevention of corruption and tracking of tainted money are also added as supplementary objects of the Bill," said the Committee's report tabled in Parliament today.

On whistle blowers, the report made a case for detailed provisions in the bill itself.

"The provisions are also silent on the role of whistle blowers and their protection, which would be important to detect benami holdings. Adequate provisions in this regard should be incorporated in the Bill," it said.

The Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Amendment Bill, 2015 introduced in Lok Sabha on May 13, 2015, was referred to the Committee on May 15, 2015 for examination.

The panel said the provisions of the proposed bill are silent on the extra territoriality, where the transacting persons standing in fiduciary capacity, benamidar, beneficial owner or the property are situated or located abroad.

The panel also said that it should be ensured that all legitimate and genuine power of attorney holders and owners under legally valid agreements even though it is not registered, are allowed enough time period to legitimise their ownership rights through appropriate amnesty scheme.

Also, there should be complete coordination and intelligence sharing between different agencies such as Income Tax, Excise, Customs, police, banks, stock exchanges, regulators (such as SEBI/RBI) and investigative agencies (like CBI, ED and SFIO).

"This aspect should be adequately reflected in the bill," the report said.

It also said pre-emptive structural or systemic measures to curb generation of black money would be more sustainable and effective from public governance perspective.

The panel further said it has been pleaded by some States where land is a State subject, it would be deemed appropriate that the rights of confiscated benami properties vest with State Governments instead of the Central Government as proposed in the Bill.

"In view of this position, the Committee would like the government to re-examine this aspect in the light of the Constitutional provisions," the report said.
A Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) personnel was today killed in an IED blast triggered by Naxals in Chhattisgarh's Bijapur district, police said.

The incident occurred near Phulgatta village forest when a team of security personnel was patrolling the region, a senior police official said.

While the security men were cordoning-off a forest patch near Phulgatta, assistant platoon commander Panchram Bhagat inadvertently stepped over alandmine, triggering the explosion in which he was critically injured, he said.

Theinjured personnel was immediately rushed to a local hospital where he succumbed to his wounds, he said.

Bhagat, an assistant sub-inspector rank official, belonged to CAF's 10thbattalion.

Meanwhile, combing operation has been launched in the region to trace the assailants, the police official added.
Courts cannot turn a blind eye to gruesome crimes against women which require exemplary punishment, a Delhi court has held while sentencing six persons to upto 12 years for gangraping a woman in a Gramin Sewa vehicle nearly four years back.

The court observed that a young unmarried woman will not put her reputation in peril by alleging falsely about forcible sexual assault.

"Theincreasingtrendofcrimesagainstwomencanbe arrested onlyoncesocietyrealisesthatany formof deviance againstwomen would not be toleratedandmoreso in extreme casesof brutalitysuchasthepresentone.

"Hence the criminaljusticesystem mustinstillconfidence inthe minds ofpeople, especiallywomen," Additional Sessions Judge Sanjiv Jain said in a 55-page order.

"These are the times when gruesome crimes against women have becomerampantandcourtscannotturnablindeyetothe need tosendastrongdeterrentmessagetotheperpetratorsof such crimes. Such offences require exemplary punishment," the court said.

It handed down 12 years jail term to 31-year-old Vicky for the offences of gangrape, kidnapping and unnatural offences and sent five other convicts, including a Gramin Sewa driver, to 10 years in jail for gangraping the victim.

According to the prosecution, a complaint was lodged on May 19, 2012 thatthe woman wasrapedbysixpersonsin a vehicle nearKalindiKunj in south-east Delhi.

The court said that the role of a judge is tocull out true facts fromthe evidenceledbeforehimand"ensure that guiltydoesnotgoscotfreeand innocent'slifeandliberty is notjeopardised."



It relied on victim's testimony and rejected contention of defence counsel that there were contradictions in her evidence saying, "Apersonwithso much trauma cannot beexpectedto remembereverysceneanddepose inaparrot-likemanner."



Opposing any leniency towards the convicts, Prosecutor Mohd Iqrar had arguedthat the offences committed by them were serious and they deserved stringent punishment.

The police said accused Vicky, Lucky, Yasin and Satyajeet had abductedthewomanandtookherto an isolated place where these four along with UmaShankerandAmitgangraped her.

Vicky also committed unnatural sex with her and threatened to kill her, it said.

All the accused had denied the allegations and claimed they were falsely implicated.

"Theimportantthingthatthecourthastobearinmindis that whatislostbyarapevictimisface. The victim loses value as a person. Ours is a conservative society, therefore, a woman and more so a young unmarried woman will not put her reputation in peril by alleging falsely about forcible sexual assault," it said.

The court said it must be sensitive and responsive to the



plight of the female victim of sexual assault.

"Society's belief and value systems need to be kept uppermost in mind as rape is the worst form of woman's oppression. A forcible sexual assault brings in humiliation, feeling of disgust, tremendous embarrassment, sense of shame, trauma and lifelong emotional scar to a victim," it said.

The court also condemned how a rape victim is treated in the society which thinks of her as a "sinner".

"We must realize that a woman suffers a tremendous sense of shame and the fear of being shunned by society. Instead of treating her with compassion and understanding, as one who is injured victim of a crime, she is, more often that not,treated as a sinner and shunned," it said.

The court, while sentencing the convicts, refused to take a lenient view towards them saying, itis truethatconvicts areyoungandhave a family to supportbuton theotherhand wemustseetheplightof the woman,whowas forcedtoillicit intercourse,whichisconsideredtobeamong"the most morally andphysically,reprehensiblecrimeinthesociety."



It noted that the woman remained hospitalised for seven months to recover from the pain and trauma yet she had immediately lodged a police complaint.

"Shewasundersomuchtraumaandpainthatafterthe incident, sheremainedhospitalisedforalong time as she had receivedmultipleinjuries," it said.

The court, while sending the convicts to jail,also imposed varied fines.

Vicky, who was awarded 12 years in jail, was also slapped a fine of Rs 70,000. Lucky, Yasin and Satyajeet, who were awarded 10 years in jail for offences of gangrape and kidnapping, were directed to pay Rs 40,000 fine while Amit and Uma Shanker were asked to pay Rs 25,000 fine.

The court, which directed that the total fine be paid to the victim, also ordered the District Legal Service Authority to adequately compensate the woman under victim compensation scheme.

The victim, a rag picker, had told the police that she took a Gramin Sewa on the night of May 18, 2012 to go to Nehru Place and after dropping other passengers, the vehicle was stopped by its driver Lucky at a petrol station where other accused boarded it and took turns to rape her.
With Bhalswa and Gazipur landfill sites running to their full capacity, Delhi government today said that the Centre has assured the municipal corporations to provide land for new landfill site in the nation capital.

Special Secretary (Delhi Environment Department) Kulanand Joshi said that the assurance came at a meeting of Environment ministers of Delhi NCR, chaired by Union Environment Minister Prakash Javedkar yesterday.

"In the meeting, officials from municipal corporations raised the issue of land for new landfill site. The Union Environment Minister has assured that he will take up this matter with Union Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu," Joshi told reporters here.

There are three landfill sites in the national capital, which are running with their full capacity. Due to land crunch, MCD has not developed new landfill site.
Chanting Bharat Mata ki jai when asked to, talking about Sanskrit and not eating beef have become the deciding factors to differentiate individuals in the country, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister said here today.

Sisodia, who is also the state education minister, stressed upon "contradictions" in the country about being in race for "exclusiveness" and then talking of achieving "inclusiveness".

"I as a politician and a leader, dream for inclusiveness but the problem with inclusiveness is it doesn't give you chance to be exclusive which at present is the foundation stone of our society. There are people who forcefully chant Bharat mata ki jai, there are people who say it from heart. We will consider all those who do not say Bharat mata ki jai when asked by us as exclusive rest all will be inclusive," he said at a symposium on 'Making Delhi an inclusive city'.

"Exclusiveness is gained in the country by talking of eating or not eating beef, chanting Vande Matram. Those who do not talk of Sanskrit cannot be inclusive," he added.

Confessing that he is often criticised for being only an Education Minister and focusing less on his other portfolios, Sisodia said, "Education is the biggest crime, roadblock in the way of being inclusive. We teach a two and half year old kid to be exclusive by performing well in school. People want more cars, their children to clear civil services exams only in race of being exclusive.This is the biggest contradiction".

"We want to talk about Human Development Index but because we do not want to be political, we will not talk of how many people want to study sanskrit in IIT or not, issues like beef eating cause clashes. I am sorry to say but until this happens all development reports and Delhi as a city will be on different paradigms," he said.

"Those who want to talk about inclusiveness will have to talk about beef, languages being taught or not taught, political scenario in the country or the political mindset being imposed on the people," he added.

The minister pointed out that one-third of people in Delhi stay in slums while over half of the city's population resides in unauthorised colonies. However, the development plans are always exclusive and not inclusive.

Asserting that there is no clarity in people's thoughts about development, Sisodia said, "No economics theory says development means widened roads, big buildings and flyovers. Unless the youth is assured that there are adequate and affordable arrangements for education there can only be development of the city but not individuals".

"I have not be an educationist but I know that changes in design of education system can only bring inclusiveness. Whenever it comes to government schools, people ask if mid-day meals are being served on time, uniforms being distributed or washrooms are in proper shape or not.

"But no body focuses on why the standard of learning is low in schools which have all the facilities. I went to a government school recently in Dwarka and I was shocked to see that Class X students were not able to read and write even small and common words properly," he said.

He also said that human development and human resource development are different paradigms.
China is working on a new plan for cooperation in the and its neighbouring waters in a bid to shore up ties with a number of southeast Asian countries affected by the maritime dispute.

The plan to cover the next five years will focus on partnerships between China and the ASEAN and in East Asia; Chen Yue, deputy directorr, cooperation, in China'sState Oceanic Administration (SOA) said on Thursday.

Chen did not go into specifics or say when the plan will be unveiled, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

China is currently entangled in a simmering maritime dispute over the with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan who counter its claim over almost the whole of the waterway.

The US waded into the dispute backing the smaller countries to assert their rights against China.

The Philippines petition challenging China's claims is being heard by a tribunal established under the UN Convention on Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) which is boycotted by Beijing.

The two projects under the new plan are expected to be jointly established by the SOA and the government of southeast China's coastal Fujian Province as well as the SOA and the government of east China's Shandong Province, respectively.

Under the previous five-year plan covering 2011 to 2015, China signed 19 intergovernmental and 17 inter-institutional documents on marine cooperation with 15 countries around the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, according to SOA figures.

China also led, initiated and carried out more than 30 cooperation projects, and offered apparatus for four ocean observation stations for southeast Asian countries including Indonesia and Malaysia, the Xinhua report said.

During the period, the Chinese government offered scholarships to 71 students from 27 developing countries and regions to study for masters or doctoral degrees in related majors in China, Chen said.
China said today it will send a warship and special forces for a multinational exercise next month that is also expected to include troops from the Philippines and other rival claimants in the South China Sea.

The May 2-12 maritime security and counterterrorism exercise will feature the militaries of the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, along with those of the US, India and six other dialogue partners.

It will be held in Singapore and Brunei and in nearby waters of the South China Sea.

Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Colonel Wu Qian said that China would send the missile destroyer Lanzhou, staff officers and a dozen special forces troops.

The exercise will help the militaries to "learn from each other and deepen practical cooperation in the defense and security fields," Wu told reporters at a monthly briefing.

China claims virtually the entirety of the strategically vital South China Sea and has attempted to shore up its control by building islands on coral reefs complete with airstrips, harbors and radar stations.

Despite that, China says it wants to resolve differences between the six rival claimants through dialogue and accuses the US of raising tensions by challenging the Chinese actions with what are known as freedom of navigation patrols.

Asked about calls in the US for stepped-up naval activity in the South China Sea, Wu summed up China's hard line on its sovereignty claim in a new formulation claim he called the "Three No's."



"No matter how many and how frequently US ships come to the South China Sea, that would not change the fact that the islands and adjacent islands are China's inherent territory, it would not stop the pace of China's growth and development and even more it would not shake the will of the People's Liberation Army in resolutely safeguarding the sovereignty and security of China," Wu said.
The booming viscose staple fibre (VSF)-based textile industry, which is facing the heat of increased dumping from China and Indonesia, has warned that any tampering with the existing anti-dumping duty structure will affect its growth.

"The viscose-based textile industry has shown a remarkable growth in the last five years, reflecting the spirit of Make in India initiative.

"Before anti-dumping duty was imposed, Chinese and Indonesians had nearly killed our market. Now again both the countries are trying to flood the market with heavy discounts," Ramesh Natarajan, Director of Indian Man-Made Yarn Manufacturers Association, told PTI.

The existing anti-dumping duties, imposed in 2010, are up for review shortly and a section of the textile industry is calling for ending duty protection, citing rising input cost.

Players like the Indian Spinners Association (ISA) has said continuation of the duty on the fibre will have a "deleterious effect" on the textile sector, which is already reeling under high cost of production and sagging export demand.

Before the dumping duty was slapped, Chinese and Indonesians were selling their products at Rs 185-190 a kg while the domestic prices were much higher, Natarajan said, but added that the quality of domestic products is unmatched.

He warned that if the anti-dumping duties are rolled back, it will kill the domestic industry.

Already, the industry has lost over two lakh direct jobs, with one lakh in the Coimbatore-Erode belt of Tamil Nadu alone. If the government falls prey to international and domestic pressure, it will kill more jobs, he said.

Natarajan said the biggest VSF-based textile hub is the Coimbatore-Erode belt which consumes over 20,000 tonnes of the textile a month, while the intake in the rest of the country is only 5,000 tonnes.

"The government must ensure that there are adequate safeguards in place for all products of the VSF value chain so that this industry attracts more investments and drives local manufacturing, which is the key focus of the present regime," P S Sundaram, managing director of Erode-based Victory Spinning, told PTI.

According to industry statistics, the domestic VSF industry grew at a CAGR of 11 per cent in the past five years, while exports clipped at 14 per cent CAGR.

Exports jumped from 249 tonnes per day (tpd) in 2011-12 to 424 tpd in 2015-16, and domestic sales grew from 590 tpd to 853 tpd.

This growth has been driven by the largest domestic VSF producer Grasim Industries, initiatives like creating robust consumer demand and collaboration with SMEs, among others.

Development of the VSF supply chain has also attracted major global brands.

Top international brands like American Eagle, Kohls, Bershka and GAP, among others, have increased their intake from India by around 20 per cent.
Historical adventure film, "Xuan Zhang" tracing the famed Chinese monk's epic 17-year journey to India, is all set for release across the country tomorrow.

The USD 22 million biopic on Tang dynasty scholar and traveller Xuan Zhang will hit 6,500 theatres retelling his odysssey that has become an enduring legacy of the cultural ties between the two countries.

The first Sino-India co-production, besides location in China, in India it was shot in Nalanda in Bihar, Daulatabad and Ajantha and Ellora caves in Maharashtra.

The biopic's Hindi version is due for release in December.

Chinese actor Huang Xiaoming essays the role of the famous monk who brought important Buddhist scriptures from India to China and translated them.

There is a big buzz in the film circles here as the movie is the first India-China joint production featuring top Chinese film actors, said Prasad Shetty, partner of Strategic Alliance, a Chinese firm promoting Indian films.

"It is one those movies which showcase real cultural exchanges between the two countries. It is a first step of India and China relations. It is a perfect start for more production to follow", Shetty told PTI here.

Born in seventh century, Xuan is a celebrated icon in India, his journey still remembered fondly by experts and laymen alike.

The agreement for the co-production was signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to China this year.

Part of the film shot in Maharashtra and Nalanda retraced the actual path traversedby the monk during his arduous journey.

The other two India-China co-productions include "Kung Fu Yoga", by Hong Kong-based director Stanley Tong, and comedy film "Lost in India", featuring the star from China's 2012 blockbuster 'Lost in Thailand'.

These are also expected to be released this year.
Hundreds of employees at China's top statistics bureau are being investigated after selling data, the government has said, despite longstanding doubts over the reliability of official figures.

More than 300 NBS staff have also been asked to return 3.23 million yuan (USD 500,000) they made by selling annual reports and providing data to affiliates, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) -- the Communist party's internal corruption watchdog -- said on its website.

The comes just months after the former head of the NBS was sacked in a corruption probe -- announced shortly after he appeared at a briefing on China's economy when he reiterated that the country's gross domestic product calculations were reliable.

Last year, official figures showed that China's economy grew at its slowest annual pace in a quarter of a century, but questions have repeatedly been raised about the accuracy of the Chinese government's economic data.

Critics say it can be subject to political manipulation in a country where the ruling party depends on growth for legitimacy.

The CCDI statement also said the statistics agency had failed to keep pace with changes in the economy, and noted problems with sales of handheld data-collection devices.
All India Association of Chit Funds has urged media to refrain from labelling ponzi scams by non-banking financial companies as "chit fund scam" as the funds do not accept deposits from public.

"It is a well known fact that the Chit Fund companies are not allowed to accept deposits from the public, trade in stocks, equity or other cash management. Chit fund company means a company managing, conducting or supervising as foreman, agent or in any other capacity, chits as defined in section 2(b) of 'The Chit Funds Act, 1982," the Association said in a statement.

The Association said apart from the regulatory hurdles, "the most dangerous threats" this industry was facing was the "negative perception" that has been created in minds of people by reporting all financial scams as 'chit fund scam'.

"The fact is not a single chit fund has failed since the enactment of the Chit Fund Act, 1982 and ever prior to that, except for a few stray instances, this system has been functioning seamlessly," it said.

The statement said the association has raised objection with all concerned and that includes regulators, administrators, concerned departments and ministries and to the media but somehow the message could not be effectively conveyed and thereby a chaotic condition prevails.

The association has requested the Government, to "carry out public awareness campaign, distinguishing chit funds from the ponzi schemes, for the benefit of the general public lest they again fall in the trap of another 'Saradha'. More so, when this time it may not be possible to blame it on 'Chit Funds'", it said.
Miffed with the attack on Sonia Gandhi, Congress today hit back at BJP saying failure to nab the culprits in the VVIP chopper scam in the past two years showed how "incompetent" the Narendra Modi dispensation is.

Seeking to downplay the names of Congress leaders being allegedly involved in the scam, the party reminded BJP that two decades ago, the Hawala case against BJP veteran L K Advani was quashed in a Supreme Court monitored investigation despite his name appearing in the Jain diaries.

"Are we living in a banana republic? Bribe has flown, so senior most person is guilty?" party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi asked at the AICC briefing close on the heels of BJP chief Amit Shah's attack on Gandhi.

Insisting the BJP was "completely misleading" in the matter, he said the ruling party was "too clever by half" and deserved to apologise to the nation for the "irresponsible" allegations.

"Shah as president of the BJP is expected to be more responsible. It is a vote of no confidence by the president of BJP in his own government" as it has failed to come out with any concrete finding in the probe in the last 24 months, Singhvi said.

Taking any names in the scam is like "tilting at windmills" on the basis of four references on some paper, he said the description referred to the "movers and shakers of Indian politics like A, B, C and there is any remotest suggestion".

When asked about a question about Ahmed Patel, political secretary to the Congress President, Singhvi said "there could be 20 APs in Somalia, Italy and France" saying it was "not even an allegation" as these are "unverified notings".

He claimed the whole thing is that the government and the BJP "wants to keep the pot boiling" and that is why a Rajya Sabha seat has been given to Subramanian Swamy, who is known as a "Gandhi basher".

Singhvi also spoke in similar vein on the BJP attack on former Finance Minister P Chidambaram in the Aircel-Maxis case in the Lok Sabha yesterday. "It is a Goebbelsian technique. First there is a leak from department concerned and then friendly newspaper publishing it."



He claimed the main aim is sensationalism, allow the pot boiling and does not allow completion of a probe so that the real culprit goes away.

Gandhi had yesterday rejected as "baseless" allegations linking her and party leaders to bribes in the chopper deal, calling these an attempt at character assassination.

Asked whether Congress leaders would appear before any inquiry, Singhvi said the exercise should "not be hostile and malicious". He said in a criminal case, the police does not require consent to interrogate.

When asked about statements made by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar about blacklisting of AgustaWestland, he said if the minister said that in Parliament, he could face a breach of privilege.
Costa Concordia skipper Francesco Schettino today begins his battle to avoid prison for causing the 2012 cruise ship disaster off Italy which cost 32 people their lives.

Schettino was sentenced in February 2015 to 16 years and one month in jail after a judge ruled his recklessness caused the accident that ensued after the giant pleasure boat struck underwater rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio.

The 55-year-old career seaman, who has not yet begun his sentence, says he has been made the solitary scapegoat for the disaster and will seek to overturn his manslaughter conviction in an appeal which opens at 0730 GMT today and will run through May at least.

The prosecution is simultaneously appealing last year's sentence, maintaining that Schettino should have been given 26 years.

During his first, 19-month, trial, Schettino was accused of showing off when he steered the ship too close to the island and of being distracted because he was entertaining a nightclub dancer.

He was convicted of multiple manslaughter, causing a maritime accident and of leaving his boat before all passengers and crew had been evacuated, in breach of centuries-old sailors' code.

The latter detail resulted in him being dubbed "Captain Coward' by the international media while prosecutors branded him "an idiot".

Under Italy's long-winded legal system, Schettino was automatically granted an appeal and if it does not go his way he can try again at the Court of Cassation, the country's highest court.

"I will fight for ever to prove that I did not abandon the Costa Concordia," he vowed after his conviction.

The failure to be the last man off the boat only accounted for one year of the sentence handed down in Grosseto, Tuscany last year.

But it was the accusation of cowardice and unprofessionalism that seemed to hit the Naples-born sailor the hardest.

His defence that he had "fallen" into a lifeboat was widely ridiculed and he broke down in tears during his final plea to be acquitted.

Schettino was given 10 years for manslaughter and five for causing a disaster that led to the biggest salvage operation in maritime history.
The revised draft development plan (RDDP) for Mumbai which has proposed floor space index (FSI) alterations for residential and commercial structures has drawn sharp reactions from town planners and political quarters, who have dubbed it as an attempt to destroy open spaces in the megapolis.

BMC chief Ajoy Mehta had yesterday presented RDDP-2034 for Mumbai and proposed a uniform FSI of 2 for residential buildings and FSI of up to 5 for commercial structures, thus paving way for sky-scrapers across the city.

The FSI is the ratio of a building's total floor area to the size of the piece of land upon which it is built.

While Congress and NCP, the main opposition parties in BMC, termed the draft as "an unfortunate attempt to destroy Mumbai's open spaces".

"In the name of development, BMC is setting out to destroy Mumbai's remaining open spaces. It's a very unfortunate move by Sena-BJP that too just a year ahead of the municipal polls," former Union Minister Milind Deora told PTI.

The ex-MP from South Mumbai also lambasted the proposal to increase FSI, saying "the increase in FSI is without an impact assessment study which all cities around the world conduct before arbitrarily raising FSI."



However, BJP hailed the plan, saying it would turn "congested Mumbai into comfortable Mumbai", while its ruling ally in the civic body Shiv Sena said all the aspects of the plan would be considered before final approval.

"This proposal has been brought to solve the woes of lakhs and lakhs of people living in chawls and slums. It's an effort to uplift their conditions and convert congested Mumbai into comfortable Mumbai," Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar said.

"With this balanced draft policy having an environment friendly initiative and meticulous planning, No-Business Mumbai has will be pushed towards becoming a Business-Incentive Mumbai," Shelar said.

Shiv Sena group leader in BMC Trishna Vishwasrao said if there were mistakes in the draft policy, it would be corrected.

"Let all go in the fine print of the draft policy. It would come up in the House next month and then objection and suggestions from the public would also be invited. We will consider all the aspects before finally sending it to the government for the final approval," she said.

In RDDP-2034, the civic body has also proposed to remove restrictions in No Development Zone (NDZ) areas and divide it in three parts-- 33 per cent for open spaces, 33 per cent for affordable housing and 34 per cent for owners to construct saleable buildings.

NCP leader and former Maharashtra housing minister Sachin



Ahir urged the civic body to refrain from making any changes in NDZ, which is already under the scrutiny of Bombay High Court.

"So far as I recollect, NDZ issued is already being heard in High Court, so any move in this regard would cause problems to municipal administration as well as to the government because court may reverse government's decision as it has already done in so many cases," he said.

"Opening the NDZ for the construction would mean to choke the lungs of Mumbai, bringing unwarranted consequences and would further lead towards crumbling infrastructure," Ahir said.

Instead, the government and the civic body should do something concrete on private reports which say that over one lakh homes are lying unsold in the city, he added.

Noted town planner and former Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) president Chandrasekhar Prabhu flagged concern over the "indiscriminate" increase in density of FSI, which he said would be "disastrous".

"The proposed DCRs (development control rules) are incomplete because BMC has merely increased FSI and has not mentioned the conditions for these increases.

"FSI increase for existing residents without increase in density is not objectionable. However, indiscriminate increase in density and FSI would be disastrous. Similarly increase in commercial FSI can have consequences which have to be examined and tested. Without a proper study these can be counter productive," Prabhu told
Taking a dig at Congress after it asked questions to the government over the AgustaWestland scam, BJP said it was ironical that those who should be answering charges are levelling allegations.

The Congress, the party said, should instead respond to the questions its chief Amit Shah asked today.

BJP national secretary Shrikant Sharma said the questions raised by Congress are a "bundle of lies" as he rejected its charge that the NDA government removed the maker of AgustaWestland choppers from the blacklist. "There is a ban on any government transaction with the firm," he said.

He also rejected the Congress's charge that government had done nothing in the last two years in the VVIP chopper scam probe and said it had taken up the matter of middleman Christian Michel's extradition with the government of the UK after the CBI got a red corner notice against him from the Interpol.

Enforcement Directorate is also probing the matter, he said.

"It is bizarre and ironical that those who should be answering questions are instead raising questions. Congress is not only corrupt but also a master in speaking brazen lies," he said.
Alleging that the report for taking disciplinary action on JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar was prepared at the behest of ABVP, the CPI today condemned the imposition of fine on the student leader.

"We condemn the action on Kanhaiya. Action was taken on him without specific allegations. Police had earlier said they found no evidence that he was raising (anti-national) slogans," CPI General Secretary S Sudhakar Reddy said.

Left student unions had nothing to do with the event where objectionable slogans were raised, he said, adding it was not clear why action was taken against Kumar.

"The committee chairman himself was convener of an anti- reservation committee. He was a pro-BJP, anti-Mandal, anti- reservation student leader. It is known to all what sort of a stance a person of such background would take. University teachers' union leaders were not there (in committee). Only those who would give a favourable report were made (appointed to the committee)," he alleged.

Reddy further said that ABVP had given a leak 20 days ago that Rs 10,000 fine would be imposed on him and that others would be rusticated.

"They are doing the same thing now. We feel that this report is not prepared by this committee and that they merely signed on the report prepared in ABVP office," Reddy said.

All India Students Federation (AISF), with which Kanhaiya Kumar is associated, is the student wing of CPI.

Yesterday, JNU students who have been punished by the University in connection with the controversial February 9 event beganan indefinite hunger strike to demand revocation of punitive action.

Kanhaiya, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattachayra were arrested on the charge of sedition in February in connection with an event on campus against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised. They are out on bail now.

While Kanhaiya has been slapped with a penalty of Rs 10,000 on grounds of "indiscipline and misconduct", Umar, Anirban and Kashmiri student Mujeeb Gatoo have been rusticated for varied durations.

(Reopens BOM4)



Observing that 11 states in the country are estimated to have been hit by drought conditions, Reddy said drought relief measures be taken expeditiously.

Stating that about two crore people are affected by drought in Telangana, the CPI leader demanded drought relief measures, including providing drinking water, 'ambali' (a food item like porridge) for poor, continuing mid-day meals for school children during summer vacation, besides providing fodder and grass.

A 'drought pension' of Rs 3,000, as given when N T Rama Rao was Chief Minister in undivided Andhra Pradesh, be provided to poor farmers in all states with Centre's help, in the country, Reddy said.
The 93-year-old CPI(M) warhorse and former Kerala Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan is all set for another round of electoral battle to retain his seat at Malampuzha, where he is pitted against Congress's 29-year old V S Joy for the May 16 Assembly polls.

Known for his inimitable gestures, razor-sharp words and unique style of dialogue delivery, Achuthanandan, an astute campaigner, is leaving no stone unturned to ensure his victory at the segment, which has favoured Communists till inception of the segment in 1965, for the fourth consecutive time.

Braving the scorching summer, Achuthanandan, popularly known as 'VS', has already addressed a series of meetings in the constituency in Palakkad district, considered the state's industrial corridor.

Throughout his campaign, he has attacked the Congress led UDF, taking on Chief Minister Oommen Chandy by raking up the corruption issues related to solar, bar bribery scams and the 'communal and divisive' politics of BJP-NDA.

The fight has turned out to be a fierce one for all, as both Congress led UDF and BJP-NDA are trying hard to inflict maximum damage to Achuthanandan's poll prospects.

The presence of BJP's C Krishnakumar, vice-chairman of Palakkad Municipal Corporation, the only civic body the party controls in the state, has virtually made prediction of poll outcome a difficult task, political observers feel.

Besides, Bharat Dharam Jana Sena,the new partner of BJP, formed by Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam General secretary Vellapally Natesan, is also very active in the segment.

Natesan is itching to get even with Achuthanandan as it was he who had taken up alleged irregularities in the micro finance scheme run by SNDP and had also attacked Natesan for his alliance with the saffron party in the state.

The state government had initiated a Vigilance probe into the charges against Natesan, based on the complaint of VS.

Achuthanandan's victory margin has steadily increased since 2001 when he contested in the constituency for the first time. He won by a margin of 4,703 in 2001, in 2006 by a margin of 20,000 and in 2011 by 23,440 votes.

India's seniormost Communist leader, Achuthanandan is the only surviving comrade among those who walked out of undivided CPI to form CPI(M) after the ideological schism shook the Indian Left movement in the early 1960s.

After being essentially an organisation builder for much of his career holding key posts like the state secretary, what metamorphosed Achuthanandan into a mass leader was his stint as opposition leader during 2001-06.

Achuthanandan, who hails from Punnapara in Alappuzha



district, before switching his constituency to Malampuzha, was earlier elected to the assembly from Ambalappuzha 1967 and 1970 and from Maraikkulam 1991.

An 'old school Marxist' for those outside CPI(M), Achuthanandan's inner-party rivals have often accused him of being the prime source of long-drawn factional trends in the state unit.

This virtually led to his upset defeat, allegedly due to the perfidy of the opposing faction, in the 1996 assembly polls in his home segment Mararikkulam, when he was widely projected as the Chief Ministerial candidate.

On the other hand, Congress candidate Joy during his 'Kudumba Mela' (family gatherings), is focusing on development initiatives of the five-year rule of Chandy government and seek continuation of the UDF government.

Joy said his aim was to rewrite the history of Malampuzha, which has stood with the Left so far.

Joy is also taking up several local issues of the people such as lack of drinking water in many parts of the segment, comprising Akathethara, Elappully, Kodumba, Malampuzha, Marutharoad, Mundur, Pudussery and Puduppariyaram Panchayats in Palakkad taluk.

Local people complain that Achuthanandan, who most of the time resides in Thiruvananthapuram, either as Opposition leader or Chief Minister, has not brought about any major development work in the constituency, while LDF has strongly disputed the charge.

54-year old Krishnakumar attacks both UDF and LDF and focuses on the development and welfare initiatives started by the Modi government.

"The environment problems in the constituency is one of the highlight of the campaign", Krishnakumar said.

The recent incident of alleged insult to a Dalit woman, principal of the Government Victoria College, by activists of CPI-M student wing Students Federation of India (SFI) is also being taken by the BJP to attack LDF.

"It is a clear case of intolerance on the part of CPI-M", Krishnakumar said.

The students had prepared a 'grave' as a retirement gift to the principal. The incident had evoked widespread protest.

The importance the saffron party attaches to the constituency can be gauged from the fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will start his poll campaign in Kerala from Palakkad on May 6.
The deal street involving inbound, outbound and domestic deals grew by 11.3 per cent in 2015-16 at USD 39.56 billion over the previous year and the M&A activity will remain subdued due to the currency and global economic volatility, says a report.

With lots of low-hanging fruits available in the market with rising distress among corporates, the M&A street was dominated by domestic deals at USD 17.87 billion in 2015-16, which was massively down from USD 20.16 billion in 2014-15, a report by domestic investment bank Equirus Capital said.

Inbound deals came in second with USD 17.72 billion, up from USD 12.57 billion during the period, while outbound deals jumped 68 per cent to USD 3.96 billion from USD 2.36 billion.

But the analysts at the city-based i-bank warned that the momentum cannot be sustained as the rupee has depreciated significantly in comparison to the currencies of key regions where domestic players have been historically concentrating their deal activities.

"We feel that the volatile performance of the rupee against the destination-country currencies has led to lower risk appetite among the domestic players looking at global expansion," the report said.

While historically consumer, communication and financials were leading the inbound deal activity, accounting for around 73 per cent of deals, the momentum is fast shifting from these to technology and energy sectors which have almost doubled during the period, especially on the domestic front.

"We expect the momentum to continue, as these inherently play on the rich demographic dividend of the country," the report said, adding in-bound activity to increase in the cyclicals, as the mounting stress in these sectors is expected to ease out in medium-run, while blue-chip assets in these sectors are currently being valued at competitive prices.

Historically, Britain, the US, Japan, Russia and Singapore were the top five acquirers of domestic assets. But, this is changing fast as the US, on the back of a stronger dollar, has been aggressively expanding, while Britain, the largest acquirer for many years has seen a 24 per cent decline, primarily due to currency volatility. England accounted for just 5 per cent of the announced deals in 2015-16.

Significantly, Japan has been a conservative acquirer here, with announced deal value growing at a low 5 per cent since between 2012-13 and 2015-16.

"We see a bleak outlook for cross-border deal activity as sources of in-bound capital have dried-up and the country is expected to become increasingly dependent on even fewer sources of capital. But outbound deals dominated by a few and this coupled with a volatile economic and exchange rate makes for an exceptionally weak story for the country's M&A market in FY17," concludes the report.
Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), alliance partner of BJP in Goa, today said the decision on continuing with the coalition with the saffron outfit would be taken only after announcement of state Legislative Assembly poll dates.

MGP, however, has said that they will retain the existing constituencies represented by them in the Assembly, if an alliance is forged with BJP.

"The central committee of the party has firmly resolved that the decision on alliance with BJP in Goa would be taken only after the Assembly election dates are announced," MGP President Dipak Dhavalikar told PTI today.

Recently, Goa Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar had said his BJP wants to continue its alliance with MGP for the upcoming polls.

Goa polls are due before March 2017.

"The talks on alliance will begin at least 2-3 months before the election. We have to come to consensus on seat sharing and other terms before actual announcement of the alliance," Dhavalikar, a minister in Parsekar-led government, said.

MGP which fought 2012 election in alliance with BJP had won three seats - Madkai, Priol and Ponda.

"The party has began its work in total 25 constituencies. The workers have already hit the ground. Our support base is increasing," he said.

Dhavalikar ruled out forging pre-poll tie with Congress or newly formed regional outfit like Goa Forward for the upcoming polls.

"Congress is not in a position to form government and parties like Goa Forward mushroom in the state during elections. No one takes them seriously," the MGP chief said.

He further said the party will retain the seats which were won during 2012 polls with them in case there's an alliance.

"Sudin Dhavalikar (Goa Transport Minister) will re-contest from Madkai, Lavu Mamlatdar (MLA) from Ponda and I will be in Priol constituency," he said.

"If Priol constituency is reserved for SC/ST then I will shift to Shiroda," Dhavalikar added.
Delhi government today came in for fresh attack in Lok Sabha, this time for the demolition of a 'piao' (water kiosk) at historic Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib.

Raising the issue during Zero Hour, Ravneet Singh Bittoo of Congress said the 'piao' was of historical importance and the Delhi government's action has deeply hurt the Sikh community.

He demanded that the place associated with Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur be declared a national heritage to save it from such demolitions. He was supported by SAD's Prem Singh Chandumajra.

The Arvind Kejriwal government had come under attack in the past few days over the Odd even issue.
After scoring victory for women's right to enter Shani Shingnapur and Trimbakeshwar temples, Bhumata Brigade chief Trupti Desai will today try to enter the core area of Haji Ali Dargah in the city where women are not allowed.

A local AIMIM leader said they would not allow Desai to enter the sanctum sanctorum of the renowned Dargah and threatened to smear her face with black ink if she does so.

"We will hold a peaceful march for women's rights at Haji Ali dargah today, pray there and later decide the future course of action," Desai told reporters here.

"I think (Bollywood actors) Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan too should lend us support for our cause as that will only help us in our fight for equality," she said.

However, AIMIM leader Haji Rafat Husain said entering a graveyard is "haram" (forbidden) in Islam, and added that his party supporters will not under any circumstance let Desai enter the shrine's sanctum sanctorum.

Husain also threatened to smear Desai's face with black ink, even if he gets arrested for it.

"Women are barred from entering graveyards and shrines. She cannot be allowed to play with Islamic traditions for cheap publicity gimmicks. Our women volunteers will be at the shrine to prevent her entry there," Husain told PTI.

"But, if she and her supporters forcefully try to enter the sanctum sanctorum, I will myself paint her face with black ink even if I have to face arrest for the act," he said.

Last week, Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat Shaikh had said Desai would be hit with "slippers" if she tried to enter the Haji Ali Dargah.

However, after his remarks created a furore in various circles, Sena spokesperson Neelam Gorhe rejected Shaikh's statement and even warned of action against him.

Desai had recently led a successful campaign for women's entry into the temples like Shani Shignapur in Ahmednagar district and Trimbakeshwar in Nashik.

The Maharashtra government had in February this year favoured the entry of women into the Haji Ali Dargah.

The state government had then said before the Bombay High Court that unless the Dargah Board is able to prove that ban is part of their religious practice with reference to Quran, women should be allowed to enter the sanctum sanctorum of Haji Ali.

The Dargah Board had said that the sanctum sanctorum of the dargah houses the grave of a male saint and in Islam it is sin for women to touch a male saint, and hence, women are barred from touching the tomb.
The Debt Recovery Tribunal is likely to take up in the coming days three other applications apart from SBI's for securing the first right on the USD 75 million severance package agreed upon between Vijay Mallya and Diageo Plc.

On April 26, the Supreme Court had asked the Debt Recovery Tribunal (DRT) to "expeditiously decide" within two months, the pleas of banks and financial institutions for recovery of their loans.

The other three applications which the bankers had filed before the Tribunal relate to impounding of Mallya's passport, getting him arrested and getting full disclosure of his assets in the country and abroad.

On April 21, DRT Presiding Officer C R Benakanahalli had posted the matter for next hearing on April 29.

Benakanahalli, on a priority basis, had taken up the application for securing the first right on the USD 75 million severance package that Mallya had already received for quitting Diageo-owned United Spirits (USL) as its Chairman under a sweetheart deal.

Benakanahalli, while reserving the order on bankers' plea for lenders right on March 4, had said that the other three applications would be heard later.

As DRT commences the hearing on other three applications, Diageo Plc is expected to challenge DRT's power to direct the company to deposit USD 40 million, a part of USD 75 million a payout package signed with Mallya, who is facing a multi-agency probe, including for alleged money laundering.

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 USD 75 million 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.

Diageo had also prayed that the tribunal should reject the bankers' memo for its inconsistent claims on relief.

The banks are expected to counter Mallya-controlled UBHL's claim of Rs 594 crore from them for compensating the losses incurred by them due to the sale of USL equity shares by lenders at 'cheaper rate'.

UBHL, in its objections filed in DRT on April 5, had contended that the lenders had sold 26 lakh equity shares of United Spirits Limited (USL) pledged to them before maturity.

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.
Scientists have found tooth-marks on a 500,000-year-old hominin bone which indicate that large carnivores, likely hyenas, may have consumed early humans.

During the Middle Pleistocene, early humans likely competed for space and resources with large carnivores, who occupied many of the same areas, researchers said.

However, to date, little evidence for direct interaction between them in this period has been found.

The researchers from the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) in France examined the shaft of a femur from the skeleton of a 500,000-year-old hominin, found in "Grotte a Hominides" cave near Morocco.

The examination of the bone fragment showed various fractures and tooth marks indicative of carnivore chewing, including tooth pits as well as other scores and notches.

These were clustered at the two ends of the femur, the softer parts of the bone being completely crushed.

The marks were covered with sediment, suggesting that they were very old.

While the appearance of the marks indicated that they were most likely made by hyenas shortly after death, it was not possible to conclude whether the bone had been eaten as a result of predation on the hominin or had been scavenged soon after death.

Nonetheless, this is the first evidence that humans were a resource for carnivores during the Middle Pleistocene in this part of Morocco, and contrasts with evidence from nearby sites that humans themselves hunted and ate carnivores.

The researchers suggest that depending on circumstances, hominins at this time could have both acted as hunter or scavenger, and been targeted as carrion or prey.

"Although encounters and confrontations between archaic humans and large predators of this time period in North Africa must have been common, the discovery is one of the few examples where hominin consumption by carnivores is proven," said Camille Daujeard, from MNHN.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Two directors of Avon Lifesciences Ltd were today questioned by Thane police in connection with a probe into the recovery of Rs 2,000-crore drug from the company's Solapur factory.

The US' Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has also approached Thane police after the seizure of party drug ephedrine in Solapur made headlines earlier this month.

The third director of Avon Lifesciences, Manoj Jain, has already been arrested.

Police today questioned Ajit Kamat and Rajesh Kaimal about what they knew about Jain's involvement in the racket.

Considering the alleged involvement of the international drug-baron Vicky Goswami, police were also looking into the role of a former Bollywood actress who was reportedly in a relationship with him.

However, as yet no proof of her involvement had come to light, said a police officer who is a part of the probe team.

So far Thane police have arrested seven persons in the case, including Jain and an operations manager of Avon Lifesciences factory in Solapur district of Maharashtra.

Punit Shringi, the manager, was arrested from suburban Virar on Tuesday night, while Jain (46) and Harjit Singh Gill (42), a transporter, were arrested yesterday from suburban Mahim and Navi Mumbai, respectively.

According to the police, Jain had gone abroad several times to meet Goswami with Jaymukhi and Kishore Rathod, who are wanted in the case.

The Drug Enforcement Agency of the USA approached Thane police to get information about the drug racket after it was busted, Thane police commissioner Parambir Singh had said yesterday.
The proposed 6 per cent levy on online advertisement revenue of foreign companies will "severely raise the cost of doing business" for Indian tech startups, industry body IAMAI said today.

"Tech startups are already paying 14.5 per cent service tax to use these ad platforms, which amounts to an estimated Rs 906 crore of taxes to government. With GST implementation, the tax rate is likely to move to 18 per cent bringing more taxes to the government from this segment," Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) said in a statement.

Considering that the incidence of 6 per cent levy will be passed on to the advertisers by the ad platforms, the total burden to SMEs and tech startups on account of equalisation levy would be an additional burden of Rs 429 crore, a massive hike of nearly 50 per cent, it added.

"This will raise the cost of operations substantially," it said.

In his Budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said payments of over Rs one lakh a year for online advertising to "foreign ecommerce companies" without permanent establishments would attract a levy of 6 per cent.

The levy was brought in to get foreign internet companies to pay taxes.

"Prima Facie it looks impractical and unreasonable that to collect additional revenues of Rs 400 crore, the government is ready to hurt the start-ups," IAMAI President Subho Ray said.

He further said: "What is mistakenly being called Google Tax will turn out to be a levy on Indian start-ups."



IAMAI said this provision of the Finance Bill has its genesis on a consultation paper by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT).

"India will stand out like a sore thumb, if the government doesn't withdraw this proposal or figure out a clear mechanism whereby the asessee will not pass it on to the users of the platforms," Ray said.
A former railways employee has accused Uttarakhand DGP B S Sidhu of allegedly trying to molest her when he was the Chief Security Commissioner of Railway Protection Force in Mumbai in 2004, a charge denied by the police officer.

The woman alleged that she had lodged a complaint with Railway authorities at that time but instead of acting against Sidhu, they transferred and later dismissed her.

Claiming that she had been struggling to get justice ever since, she said if a case is not lodged against Sidhu within four days she will take the matter to the President.

Sidhu has denied the charge and termed it as a "baseless" allegation.

He has said the case had already been probed and the woman had been found guilty of levelling a false charge against him.
Pakistan today said the F-16 jets provide precision strike capability to its on-going campaign against terrorism, a day after top American lawmakers expressed concern over the decision to sell eight fighter jets to Pakistan, saying the aircraft could be used against India.

"F-16s provide precision strike capability to Pakistan's on-going campaign against militancy and have proven to be an effective platform during Operation Zarb-e-Azb," Pakistan's Embassy here said in a statement in response to concerns raised by several US lawmakers yesterday on the potential use of F-16 against India and its utility in the fight against terrorism.

"The US Administration has stated it supports the sale of F-16s to Pakistan. This is in line with bilateral counter-terrorism cooperation that both sides have pursued in mutual benefit," the statement said.

"Pakistan believes that threat from terrorist networks requires continued capacity building and both governments continue to work together towards this objective through a range of measures including sale of these air crafts," it said.

During a Congressional hearing at the Capitol Hill yesterday, top US lawmakers expressed concerns over Barack Obama administration's decision to sell eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, saying the aircraft could be used against India rather than combating terrorism.

They also urged the Obama administration to review its decision in this regard.

The US Senate has currently put a hold on the decision to give eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan at an estimated cost of USD 700 million.

During the Congressional hearing Congressman Matt Salmon said, "Many members of Congress, including me, seriously question the judgement and timing of such a sale. Additionally, Indo-Pak tensions remain elevated and some question whether the F-16s could ultimately be used against India or other regional powers, rather than the terrorists as Pakistan as asserted."



Another Congressman Brad Sherman said, "We have got to be concerned what military assistance and whether the F-16s constitute the least expensive, most efficient way for the Pakistani air force to go after the terrorists and the least disruptive weapon system to the balance of power between India and Pakistan.
Five militants of the banned Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA) surrendered to the Meghalaya police along with huge cache of arms and ammunition today.

The five militants, who were under the command of GNLA 'finance secretary' Rakkam, surrendered before the Director General of Police Rajiv Mehta in the presence of senior police officials.

"The surrender is due to police anti-insurgent operation in Garo Hills and also the important role played by church leaders," Mehta told reporters here and added such cooperation could restore peace in Garo Hills and help return the "misguided" youths to mainstream.

Mehta said the five militants belong to the 4th batch of the outfit and had joined it in 2012. They were trained by ULFA instructors in the general camp at Durama Hills in East Garo Hills.

"They were also trained in preparation of IEDs and were involved in GNLA ambushes and IED attacks on the police besides kidnappings, abduction, extortions in villages," he said.

The five, who hail from South Garo Hills district, have been identified and on surrendering deposited three AK-56 rifles, one carbine, one G-3 rifle, one grenade, one HK magazine, six AK magazines, one Beretta pistol magazine, one G-3 magazine, one carbine magazine and 519 rounds ammunition of AK (421, G-3 (22 nos) and 7.62 mm (76 nos), police said.

One of the surrendered militants named Krewingbirth said the training on preparation of IEDs is conducted in Bangladesh in a camp where there are a number of GNLA ultras as well as from ULFA.

He also claimed that children of the age group of 15 years to 16 years were being forced to join GNLA by its 'commander-in-chief' Sohan D Shira and were being given arms training in the general camp.
Gujarat High Court today issued a notice to the state Government on a petition filed by the online retail major Flipkart against the entry tax in the state on the goods bought through the e-commerce portals.

The division bench of Chief Justice R Subhash Reddy and Justice V M Pancholi scheduled the next hearing for June 9.

Flipkart has claimed the tax is discriminatory, because no such tax is imposed on the goods brought into Gujarat thorough other modes of sale.

It moved the HC after the Gujarat Government amended the law to levy entry tax on goods purchased through e-commerce portals, apparently to provide a level-playing field to the traders and retailers in the state.

The Gujarat Tax on Entry of Specified Goods into Local Areas (Amendment) Bill, 2016, was passed on March 31. Now 15 per cent entry tax is levied on the online purchases.

Flipkart's contention is it does not sell any product itself but only provides an online platform to manufacturers/ traders, so the tax is unjustified.

The new law amends the word "importer" to cover those who "bring or facilitate to bring any specified goods for consumption, use or sale in Gujarat from any part of the country using online platforms.
A former senator of Pakistan's Awami National Party has been named as one of the suspects involved in the assassination of prominent Sikh lawmaker Sardar Soran Singh, who was gunned down by contract killers allegedly hired by his miffed Hindu rival after he failed to secure a ticket for polls.

Former senator Amarjeet Malhotra has been included in the list of suspects involved in the killing of 52-year-old Singh, who was the Special Assistant to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister on Minority Affairs.

Senator Amarjeet Malhotra belongs to Tehsil Barikot of Swat District and has political affiliations with the ANP.

Main accused Baldev Kumar, who is in custody, also belongs to Tehsil Barikot.

Singh was shot dead on April 22 by contract killers allegedly hired by his miffed Hindu rival Baldev after he failed to secure a ticket for elections in 2013.
Haryana Government has decided to make e-stamping mandatory in four districts-- Gurgaon, Faridabad, Sonipat and Panchkula-- from May 1.

In these districts, all other offices or agencies-- treasury office or sub-treasury and authorized State Bank of India branches-- would stop selling stamp paper (non- judicial), a spokesman of the Finance Department said here today.

The stamp vendors would generate stamp papers (non- judicial) up to Rs 10,000 per person only through e-stamping module.

He said that any citizen could generate stamp paper online through E-Stamping system, which is available on website https://egrashry.Nic.In.

This system is implemented in two parts. The first part makes the payment for stamp papers in the relevant receipts head whereas the second part generates e-stamp paper through E-Stamp portal after online confirmation of payment.

The spokesman said that after successful payment through Payment Aggregator Services by using net banking or credit card or debit card and manual payment through draft or cash after generating requisite challan on electronic government receipt accounting system (E-GRAS) portal, the depositors could generate online E-Stamp papers immediately.

They could also seek the date of registration for Revenue Authority by using Haryana Registration Information System (HARIS) portal.

He said the E-GRAS portal has been implemented all over the state and is running successfully.

"The Revenue Authority, after verifying the payment online through E-GRAS portal, would register the document and the system would automatically deface the E-Stamp and corresponding government receipt number (GRN) online to avoid duplicity," he said.

The citizen could apply for refund of unused E-Stamp Paper on E-GRAS portal www.Egrashry.Nic.In, he added.
Amidst concerns over Chinese military activities along the forward areas of Arunachal Pradesh, India has started the process of shifting the North East headquarters of border guarding force ITBP, 500-km from Shillong to state capital Itanagar.

The huge logistical exercise entails shifting of over 2,000 troops and support staff, setting up of communications and border signals, residential logistics and transportation of heavy vehicles, weapons and artillery from Meghalaya to Arunachal Pradesh, both states on the eastern border flank of the country.

Officials said the central government had in 2014 approved a Rs 175 crore infrastructure package for Arunachal which includes deployment of eight fresh ITBP battalions with about 8,000 troops in it, opening of 35 new border roads, 54 border outposts and 72 staging camps along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) force Director General Krishna Chaudhary confirmed the move to PTI stating the exercise of shifting the North East frontier headquarters from Meghalaya's capital Shillong to Arunachal's capital Itanagar is expected to be accomplished by next month.

"The process in on. The ITBP North East frontier will soon be operating from Itanagar," the DG said.

Officials said a huge infrastructure creation exercise is currently on in Itanagar where the force's sector headquarter has been operating since 2004.

A senior official in the security establishment said keeping in mind the military capabilities being created in Arunanchal, it was essential to base the ITBP command in Itanagar rather than in far-off Shillong where there are no such huge developments taking place to bolster the strength and number of Indian troops and other logistical activities.

"The ITBP frontier at Shillong was set up long back but it's geographical location has now lost relevance vis-a-vis the security of the Sino-India border. Arunachal is the right place for basing such strategic activities now," the official said.

While a frontier is headed by an Inspector General (IG) rank officer of the force, a sector is commanded by a Deputy IG (DIG) level officer.

About 7-8 battalions of the ITBP are deployed to secure



the Sino-India LAC in these areas, and at least eight more ITBP battalions are set to be inducted in this region keeping in view the sensitivity, operational requirement and border disputes that occur between ITBP/Army and the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) troops, the official said.

Two other ITBP sectors under the NE frontier are located at Gangtok (Sikkim) and Tezpur (Assam).

Keeping in view the operationalisation of the huge ITBP establishment from Itanagar, the security establishment is also looking at ensuring a dedicated air and road connectivity from the hinterland in order to ensure unobstructed and quick movement of troops, logistics and other essential items.

In view of frequent incursions and transgression bids taking place along the 3,488 km-long border, ITBP had similarly created a frontier headquarter in Leh in Ladakh after shifting it from Chandigarh. The decision is being implemented and Leh at present has an ITBP sector command headed by a DIG rank officer.

China has been objecting to any development of infrastructure along the LAC and setting up of border outposts at locations along Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh leading to instances of stand-offs between the two sides.

India has been wary of road development and other infrastructural facilities coming up across the border on the Chinese side and wants to ramp up developmental work on its side.

The proposed new ITBP BOPs in Arunachal Pradesh are being created to reduce the distance between two border posts on this frontier marred by harsh weather conditions like snow blizzards and treacherous mountainous terrain.

About 80,000 personnel strong mountain-warfare trained force was raised in the wake of the 1962 Chinese aggression and its border posts are located at heights of 9,000 feet to 18,700 feet in heavy snow and oxygen depleted air.
Former Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister and NCP leader Ajit Pawar today accused the state government of "dilly dallying" on arrest of main accused in the Maple housing scam.

"The government is dilly dallying on the issue of arrest of (Maple Group CMD) Sachin Agarwal, accused of cheating common people. Why are police unable to apprehend him?" he told reporters here.

Pawar said he had been the Guardian Minister of Pune and knew how police functions.

"If police want, they can arrest him within 24 hours," he said, adding the accused was responsible for causing hardships to common people who had registered their names for a controversial scheme floated by Maple developers.

Meanwhile, a court here today rejected the anticipatory bail plea of Agarwal, booked under various sections of IPC, including for cheating, in the case being probed by the Economic Offences Wing of Pune police.

Maple Group has been accused of misrepresenting the low cost housing scheme as part of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna with advertisements featuring pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Pune Guardian Minister Girish Bapat.

The firm started returning money to depositors after a case was registered against them following uproar.

Police had said around 32,000 people had booked a flat in the low-cost housing project.

Maple Group had already expressed "regret" over the "confusion" caused by the advertisements.
India's education system has had a distinct bias towards skills and government is making efforts to integrate education with skill development, Rajya Sabha was informed today.

Replying to a question, Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Rajiv Pratap Rudy said for the first time, the HRD Ministry has integrated itself with the Skill Development Ministry and children from schools will now move towards open education on skill development.

"It is a harsh statement to make. Education has had a distinct bias towards skill. Because in the entire education system, skill has been there. But all of us who have become big in the system have been through education. The bias of education against skills has been perpetuating.

"Through National Open School, I am happy to say that for the first time in the history of the country, Ministry of HRD has integrated itself with Ministry of Skill Development and children will now move towards open education," he said.

He also announced that the government has decided that "even students passing out of ITIs will have grand functions and convocations where they will wear robes and come out and say that we are also part of the integrated system".

Lamenting that "we have missed a policy framework", Rudy said government has evolved a policy of opening up training skilled centres in PPP mode across the country to fill up gaps in 2,500 blocks in the country which did not have a single training institute so far.

"There is also a proposal for setting up of 1500 multi- skill training institute in unserved blocks/areas with active participation of industry/private partners for which meeting of Expenditure Finance Committee has been conducted on April 19," he said in a written reply.

He said while Palamu district in Jharkhand had only one ITI, there were as many as 200 ITIs in Jaipur alone. "There are 2,500 blocks across the country which do not have a single training institute. This is a very major concern," he said, adding that the government is opening up new ITIs with funding from National Skill Development Corporation.

"We have made a proposal in this regard and we are taking it to the Cabinet," he said.

Rudy said that in the school system, "a mistake has been committed and we are trying to build up an integrated system where children are skilled in schools. We are trying to build a framework to provide the world skilled workforce".

He also lamented that against one crore apprentices in Japan and China each, India offers only 3 lakh, which needed to be increased.

Rudy said there are 13,000 training institutes in the country, with over 10,000 in the private sector. However, 8.5 lakh seats were lying vacant in engineering colleges in the country and private colleges are being shut down. "We have information that 2000 engineering colleges have shut down and that is a matter of great concern," he added.
To remove "any scope for misunderstanding", National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language has "simplified" the declaration form for authors, the HRD ministry today said, after the body drew flak for seeking an undertaking from writers that the content will not be against the government or the country.

In a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, HRD minister Smriti Irani said that NCPUL gives grants for bulk purchase of books and as part of this process an undertaking had to be provided by the applicant authors.

She said this practice of an undertaking is also in practice in similarly placed other language institutions under the HRD ministry.

"Keeping in view certain complaints, NCPUL had amended the undertaking or declaration on September 1, 2015, which has now been simplified on April 22, 2016 by NCPUL removing any scope for misinterpretation or misunderstandings," Irani said in her reply.

Rajya Sabha member Harivansh had sought to know whether NCPUL had asked Urdu writers to show their allegience towards the country and reasons behind such a move.

The NCPUL, which falls under the HRD ministry, had been criticised over reports that it had introduced the form which requires authors of books to declare that the content will not be against the government or the country.

The Council had in March clarified that that the form is not something new and this has been the practice for the last many years for the books sponsored by NCPUL.

"Last year a complaint was received by NCPUL that some content of a book under the bulk purchase scheme was not factually correct. Therefore, NCPUL, as a precautionary measure, modified the form with the objective that the content in government-sponsored books should only create harmony and goodwill among various sections of the society and not otherwise," it had said in a statement.
Government will bring a bill under which various skills will be granted recognition besides which 500 model centres would be started to train the youth, the Lok Sabha was told today.

The government is also in talks with World Bank for funding the skill development programme, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy said while replying to the concerns expressed by certain members about low allocation in the budget.

Rudy, while replying to a debate on Demand for Grants for the Skill Development Ministry which was later passed by voice vote, said the government is committed to give a big push to the skill development programme in the country.

"National Skill Certification Board will bring a bill in Parliament. By this, recognition can be granted to skills," he said.

"Our programmes are aimed at meeting the aspirations of youth by skilling them. We want to train people so that they can supplement their income," he said.

The Minister said government was planning to start 500 model training centres in a phased manner and would utilise the infrastructure of the state-owned companies to provide training ranging from 15 days to one month.

Admitting that Rs 1,800 crore earmarked for skill development was not sufficient, he said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was very keen about the project and had assured him necessary funds would be made available for the project.

"However, what we need is to develop the capacity to spend the money," he said.

The effort would be to get people trained in specific areas to be recommended by the industry, he said, adding these trained persons will become makers of Make in India.

Rudy said this was the first time that the demands for his Ministry, which was formed one-and-half years ago was being discussed by the Lower House.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has sought help from the European Union to break a deadlock in critical debt talks as his spokeswoman accused the IMF of "undermining" the process.

Tsipras' office yesterday said the leftist premier had asked EU President Donald Tusk to call a summit to help facilitate negotiations with the debt-ridden country's creditors.

The move came after an expected Eurogroup meeting on today was postponed, scuppering Greek hopes of an agreement by Sunday to launch talks on debt relief.

Tusk said he had urged eurozone finance ministers to meet "within days", warning that failure to act could bring a repeat of last summer's drama that nearly saw Greece crash out of the eurozone.

"We have to avoid a situation of renewed uncertainty for Greece," Tusk said.

Tsipras and Tusk would speak again today, a Greek government source said.

Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem for his part yesterday said the next meeting of eurozone finance ministers could take place "next week or ultimately the week after".

"I know that there is a sense of urgency we all share," Dijsselbloem, also the Dutch finance minister, said at a press conference in Paris.

"We need more time to work with the institutions and the Greek government" on legal and political issues as well as the question of debt relief, he added.

Greece is seeking to unlock promised cash from its massive 86-billion-euro (USD 95 billion) rescue package -- its third since 2010 -- that was agreed last year after months of tortuous talks with the European Union, European Central Bank, the European rescue mechanism and the IMF.

Greek government spokeswoman Olga Gerovassili said the International Monetary Fund was "undermining" the latest negotiations with demands that went beyond the bailout deal.

In particular, Greece believes the IMF is behind additional "contingency measures" which the eurozone last week demanded to conclude the current round of talks.

Greece has already pledged to save 5.4 billion euros by 2018 to meet bailout targets, but the new measures -- which the creditors want to be approved by parliament now and applied later if necessary -- could amount to another 3.6 billion euros according to reports.

Gerovassili said the new demands went "beyond the limits of the Greek constitution and the European legal system".

According to the Greek government source, European Commission chairman Jean-Claude Juncker has also called the IMF demands "unreasonable".
Militants today hurled a grenade at a police post in Anantnag district of south Kashmir, police said.

There was no damage caused by the explosion.

The militants hurled the grenade at police post Sherbagh in Anantnag district which exploded in the compound of the police post, a police official said.

Meanwhile, a police party detected a grenade along the banks of Shahkul stream in Ashmuqam area of the district, the official said.

He said a bomb disposal squad was summoned to the spot which destroyed the grenade without any damage.
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar today said that state government is formulating a policy to rejuvenate the agriculture sector and link it to the industry so as to ensure double benefit to farmers.

The Chief Minister stated this while addressing a national seminar on "development of states with special emphasis on northern-western states" organised at Institute for Development and Communication here today.

He said that farmers would be encouraged to adopt organic farming and water conservation.

The state governments, industries, agriculture scientists and farmers would have to make efforts together to achieve the desired results.

He said the state government would provide all help to achieve it.

While emphasising the need for having a detailed policy by northern-western states, especially for Haryana and Punjab, he said that this would help not only in increasing the farmers' income but would also ensure creation of new employment opportunities in agriculture sector.

This has also become essential as in the era of globalisation; competition is increasing among countries rather than states, he said.

For taking advantage of this competitiveness, it is essential that various states of the country work together in the areas of agriculture, its diversification, water conservation, industrial growth, education and health.

In this policy, emphasis should be laid on increasing farmers' income and ensuring food safety of the nation, he added.

Describing industry as next priority after agriculture, the Chief Minister said that Haryana surrounds Delhi on three sides which attracts entrepreneurs for setting up of their venture.

The young farmers, who do not wish to adopt farming on their valuable land should be imparted training to improve their skill so that they could train themselves in service and industry sectors, he said.

This institute would also provide guidance for rejuvenation of agriculture sector, Khattar said.

The Chief Minister said that state government also laying a lot of emphasis on horticulture sector in the state.

First Horticulture University of the state is being set up in Karnal. Its three centres would also be opened, one at Dera village in district Ambala, second at Bakhtavarpur Raiyya village in Jhajjar and third one in Jind.

A budget provision of Rs 50 crore had also been earmarked for this university in year 2016-17.

He said the government is also setting up centres of excellence for horticulture in every district.

Under Indo-Israel project, Centre of Excellence for fruits at Mangiana in Sirsa and center of excellence in vegetables at Gharaunda in Karnal have already been set up. In addition, the centre for sub tropical fruits at Ladwa has also been set up under the same project.

Under state project, potato processing centres have also been set up at Shamgarh in Karnal. Work is under progress for setting up of Integrated Bee Development Centre at Ramnagar in Kurukshetra under Indo-Israel project.

With a view to ensure social and economic safety of farmers, the government is working on self pension scheme so as to give them pension after attaining the age of 60 years, he added.
The Madras High Court has set aside charges framed by a CBI court against five constables in a decade-old question paper leak case.

"In the absence of prosecution of the IPS officer, Radhakrishnan, who is stated to have leaked out the question paper to various persons, there is no scope to frame charge for conspiracy," Justice S Nagamuthu said.

The five constables had challenged a CBI court's order declining to discharge them from the case in connection with two question paper leak scams with regard to recruitment of 1997 Grade II constables in Tamil Nadu in 2005.

Justice Nagamuthu, before whom the criminal revision petition filed by the constables came up last week, observed "though there were very strong allegations made against T Radhakrishnan IPS and others available, they have been left out from the prosecution."



The examination on March 27, 2005 was cancelled by the government after it was found that question papers had been leaked. The re-examination held on June 1, 2005 too was plagued by question paper leak.

The government ordered a probe which was initially handled by CB-CID before being handed over to CBI.

When the case came up, the judge asked CBI if the agency intended to conduct any further investigation in the matter so as to collect further material and prosecute all the people who were responsible for the serious crime.

The CBI prosecutor told the court that it would not be possible to collect any further materials and doing further investigation would be only a wasteful exercise.

Justice Nagamuthu, who recorded the submission of the CBI prosecutor, in his order, said he was not inclined to order further investigation and that the charges framed against the five police personnel would be quashed.
Hero Group's electronics venture Hero Electronix today announced acquisition of a strategic stake in Bengaluru-based Tessolve Semiconductor for an undisclosed sum as part of its plan to become a billion dollar global digital products and solutions enterprise.

The company also announced investment of Rs 1,000-1,200 crore in the next five to seven years on expansion, which will include partnerships, acquisitions and setting up of greenfield projects.

"The acquisition gives us a foot into futuristic products as Tessolve Semiconductor is into providing engineering expertise in semiconductor design, test/product engineering to global clients," Hero Electronix Founder Director Ujjwal Munjal told PTI.

He said the acquisition will be carried out in a phased manner and by the end of 2016, Hero Electronix will have a significant majority holding in Tessolve.

Currently, Tessolve has close to 900 employees with offices in India, Singapore, Malaysia and the US. Since its inception in 2004, its engineers have executed several turnkey development projects for various leading semiconductor companies globally.

Munjal said Tessolve is a strategic fit Hero Electronix' scheme of things to become a global digital enterprise.

"We would continue to add technological capabilities in the company by diversifying further in the semiconductor value chain, IoT, electronics components and services. Hero Electronix and its group companies plan to invest Rs 1,000-1,2000 crore in the next 5 to 7 years for expansion," he said.

"Our vision is to build a billion dollar global digital products and solutions enterprise. Our approach is to invest in businesses that are engineering led and IP driven. We are looking to support both local entrepreneurs and bring global technology leaders into India," he added.

When asked about funding of the investments, he said it will be by the Hero Group and other group firms reinvesting.

Tessolve Semiconductor CEO P Raja Manickam said the company is just "scratching the surface" of opportunities in the field of semiconductor engineering services.

"With Hero's investments we can look at a bigger lab...The combination of industry expertise, brand reach and operational efficiency that will allow us to provide enhanced customer experience and grow our business even further," he added.

Hero Electronix had acquired majority stake in MyBox Technologies in June 2015. MyBox Technologies is a leader in multi-operator manufacturer of digital set-top boxes in the country.
The militaries of China and India are conducting research and trying to reach consensus on how to establish hotlines between their headquarters at an early date, a top Chinese defence official said here today.

Ministry of National Defence spokesperson Colonel Wu Qian said that both sides should actively take efforts to push for the establishment of the hotline between their militaries and to enhance exchanges between the border troops on both sides to maintain peace and tranquility of the border areas.

"So far the competent department of the two sides are conducting research study and discussion on this matter and are trying to reach consensus on the relevant arrangement at an early date so as to enrich exchange and cooperation between the two sides in border areas," he added.

Colonel Wu said that the issue was discussed during Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar's recent visit to China.

Wu said Parrikar's visit has given a "great boost" to the ties between the armed forces of the two countries.

"The two sides have agreed to enhance strategic communication and to further deepen practical cooperation and exchange in various fields, enhance mutual understanding and the integration of interests so as to seek win-win and mutually beneficial cooperation," he said.

"So this visit by the Indian defence Minister to China was a great boost to the bilateral relations especially to the relations between the two armed forces," he told a media briefing here while replying to question on how China viewed Parrikar's visit which took place between April 16 to 20.

During his visit, Parrikar met his Chinese counterpart Chang Wanquan, Vice Chairman of Central Military Commission Gen Fan Changlong and Premier Li Keqiang.

Parrikar told them that India attaches highest priority to relations with China and it was committed to further developing friendly and cooperative relations with China.

"The two sides exchanged views on wide ranging issues including the relations between the two countries and the two armed forces, cooperation in the defence field, the exchanges in border regions, cooperation and management of the border situation as well as regional and international issues of common interest," Wu added.
India today completed its landmark mission for a regional navigational system on par with US-based GPS with the successful launch of IRNSS-1G, the seventh and last in the constellation of satellites that make up the system.

When the IRNSS-1G becomes operational in about a month's time, the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) would offer services like terrestrial and marine navigation, disaster management, vehicle tracking and fleet management, navigation aide for hikers and travellers, visual and voice navigation for drivers.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded the scientists and congratulated the people of the country on the achievement saying, "with this successful launch, we will determine our own paths powered by our technology".

"The world will know it as Navic.... The new technology will benefit our people, our fishermen. This is a great gift to people from scientists," Modi said.

ISRO's workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C33) lifted off from the first launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in this spaceport, about 110 kms from Chennai, at 12.50 PM and soared into clear skies.

The four-stage rocket injected IRNSS-1G into the intended orbit about 20 minutes after the lift-off as the PSLV marked yet another textbook launch and its 34th consecutive successful mission, reaffirming its dependability.

While IRNSS was already operational with four satellites, the remaining three were required to make it "more accurate and efficient", Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said.

The IRNSS comprising the seven satellites will offer services with much 'better accuracy' and targeted position in navigation on par with the Global Positioning System of the United States.

ISRO had launched and operationalised other six



satellites - IRNSS-1F on March 10, 2016, IRNSS-1E (January 20, 2016), IRNSS-1D (March 28, 2015), IRNSS-1C (October 16, 2014), IRNSS-1B (April 4, 2014) and IRNSS-1A on July 1, 2013.

According to ISRO officials, the total cost of all the seven satellites was Rs 1,420 crore.

For today's mission, ISRO used the PSLV-XL variant which has six solid strap-on motors to augment the thrust provided by the first stage, making the rocket powerful.

The XL variant was used during the launch of Mars Orbiter Mission, Chandrayaan-1, ASTROSAT besides the six earlier IRNSS satellites.

IRNSS-1G which has a 12-year mission life would become operational in about a month's time, marking the full-fledged functioning of the IRNSS.

With the operations of six satellites, so far, India demonstrated a targeted position of accuracy much better than 20 metres above earth and round-the-clock.
For the first time, India, Iran and Afghanistan have come together and discussed ways to strengthen economic and commercial cooperation among the three countries, including promoting regional connectivity through Chabahar.

The first round of Director General/Joint Secretary-level India, Iran and Afghanistan trilateral consultation on the landlocked neighbour was held here yesterday.

"The Afghan delegation gave a briefing on the status of efforts for peace and reconciliation following which the three delegates discussed various dimensions of the current situation.

"Both the Indian and Iranian delegations extended support to the efforts of the government of Afghanistan for peace, stability and prosperity of the country and to preserve the gains of the past 15 years," MEA Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

The delegation also had a fruitful exchange of views on mutual cooperation in strengthening economic and commercial cooperation among the three countries including by promotion of regional connectivity, such as through Chabahar, he said.

"In this regard, they also agreed to explore avenues for attracting investment from other countries in the region and beyond," he said, adding, Iran has offered to host the next round of talks.
India is likely to link the Interpol Red Corner Notice database with its e-tourist visa network to avoid embarrassment caused by issuance of the travel document to a leading Chinese dissident recently.

The move comes after India had to revoke the e-tourist visa granted to Germany-based Dolkun Isa, a leader of World Uyghur Congress (WUC), after granting him the document.

New Delhi had to cancel Isa's visa after China informed India that an Interpol Red Corner Notice is pending against Isa.

"We want to link the Interpol Red Corner Notice data base with our e-tourist visa network so that no person having a Red Corner Notice against him is given the travel document and it is detected at the application stage," a Home Ministry official said.

TVoA (tourist visa on arrival), enabled by Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), popularly known as e-tourist visa scheme was launched on November 27, 2014.

Under the e-tourist visa scheme, an applicant receives an email authorising him or her to travel to India after it is approved and he or she can travel with a print-out of this authorisation.

On arrival, the visitor has to present the authorisation to the immigration authorities who would then stamp the entry into the country.

The e-tourist visa is currently given to citizens of 150 countries. Tourists can arrive in 16 designated airports across the country.
India and Mongolia today reviewed entire gamut of bilateral ties and explored ways to further deepen their relationship in diverse areas including trade and investment.

Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh and Mongolian Foreign Minister L Purevsuren, at the 5th meeting of India-Mongolia Joint Committee on Cooperation, deliberated on range of issues and agreed to further step up engagement.

Purevsuren's visit is part of the intensified bilateral exchanges following upgrading of ties to the level of strategic partnership during the historic visit of Prime Minister Modi to Mongolia in May last year.

Progress in utilisation of the Line of Credit of USD 1 billion announced by India to Mongolia during Modi's visit was also discussed.

During that visit the relationship was upgraded to Strategic Partnership and a series of important agreements including in the defence and security fields were signed.

Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan had visited Mongolia this month.

The two sides also reviewed implementation of important understandings reached during Modi's visit and deliberated on on regional and global issues of mutual interest.

Progress towards utilisation of the Line of Credit of USD 1 billion announced during Modi's visit was also discussed.

"We attach importance to further strengthening and deepening bilateral ties with Mongolia. Visit of Foreign Minister Purevsuren will make positive contribution towards this objective," said the Ministry of External Affairs.
Indian authorities have asked an Indian-flagged oil tanker not to discharge about 6.5 lakh barrel oil which it is carrying from eastern Libya, controlled by an unrecognised government.

"The vessel acquired Indian flag recently. It has been asked not to move from Malta and not to offload cargo till further instructions. This will be done in accordance with instructions from the UN. The ship has 6,50,000 barrel of crude," Director General of Shipping Deepak Shetty told PTI.

The direction came after the oil tanker yesterday was added to a UN sanctions blacklist for illegally carrying crude from Libya.

Libyan UN Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi had written to 15-member sanctions committee for blacklisting Distya Ameya tanker.

The ship left Marsa el-Hariga port on Monday from eastern Libya, where the unrecognized government was behind the sale of the crude.
Congress today raised the Pathankot terror attack issue in the Lok Sabha and advised the Narendra Modi government to negotiate with Pakistan from a position of "strength" and not "emotions".

Just before the House was to take up Question Hour, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan allowed Jyotiraditya Scindia (Congress) to raise the issue with a rider that it would not be politicised.

Amid opposition by treasury benches, Scindia recalled that the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) from Pakistan had a member from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Quoting a Pakistani media report, he said the JIT told the government there that "a drama was staged" to malign Pakistan and the Indian authorities did not cooperate with the team.

Referring to the remarks of Pakistan High Commissioner to India Abdul Basit that the investigation into the attack does not include reciprocity, he said the government should negotiate with Pakistan from a position of "strength" and not "emotions".

Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu urged the Speaker to expunge Scindia's remarks against the government.

When Scindia kept on speaking even after the House took up Question Hour, Speaker quipped that "you never listen...That is why I don't allow you."



Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti, who was responding to a question on Ganga rejuvenation, said it is sad that more than Ganga, the Congress thinks of Pakistan.
The Iraqi authorities have shut down the Al-Jazeera channel's Baghdad office, accusing Qatar's state-funded TV network of inciting violence and sectarianism.

Iraq's Communications and Media Commission (CMC) sent the Al-Jazeera Media Network a letter informing it of a March 24 decision to withdraw the bureau's licence and close its office for one year.

The letter cited "your continuing violations and offences and persistent media discourse instigating violence and sectarianism."



In a statement issued yesterday, the Doha-based network, one of the largest in the region, said that it had not violated regulations or deviated from professional and objective coverage.

Al-Jazeera has repeatedly come under fire from the Iraqi authorities for coverage perceived as 'too friendly' to the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group and hostile to the country's Shiite majority.

The network's foreign staff were already unable to enter Iraq because the authorities had made it difficult for them to obtain visas, the network's Iraqi bureau chief Walid Ibrahim told AFP.

The CMC's decision contradicts the Iraqi government's "commitment to guarantee freedom of expression", Al-Jazeera said.

Ziad Ajili, from the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, condemned the move, saying that the CMC does not have direct authority to close media offices in Iraq.

Iraqi leaders have accused Gulf monarchies of not doing enough to fight IS jihadists and in some cases, of directly supporting them.

Qatar is accused by many in Iraq of having intentionally sponsored hardline Sunni groups to counter the expanding influence of Iran and Shiite Islam in the region.
The Telangana government today said Karnataka has promised to complete its share of pending works of inter-state Rajolibanda Diversion Scheme (RDS) irrigation project in 50 days.

Telangana Irrigation Minister T Harish Rao and other ministers including J Krishna Rao and C Laxma Reddy held talks with Karnataka Irrigation Minister M B Patil in Bengaluru.

Harish Rao sought talks with his Karnataka counterpart to complete the pending works of RDS.

The talks were successful and the Karnataka government promised to complete the RDS works on its side in 50 days, an official release said here.

Telangana government told Karnataka it is not able to provide irrigation facility to farmers in the backward Mahabubnagar district due to non-completion of RDS works.

The undivided Andhra Pradesh government had deposited Rs 59 crore with Karnataka for carrying out the unfinished works on their side, the release said.

Though Telangana is entitled to utilise 15.9 TMC of water from RDS, it is not getting even 5 to 6 TMC, the state government had said last week.

RDS is built across Tungabhadra river in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh and Raichur district of Karnataka. The inter-state barrage supplies water to Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
The Abbottabad hideout of Osama bin Laden was under ISI control and a Pakistan Army doctor treated the most dreaded terrorist in the world before he was killed in a daring raid by US commandos in 2011, according to a new book.

In fact, the doctor Amir Aziz, of the rank of major, who lived in a compound near bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, was rewarded by the CIA with a share of the USD 25 million bounty the US had put up because a DNA sample had conclusively proved the al-Qaeda leader's identity.

In his latest book, 'The Killing of Osama bin Laden', investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims that ISI got hold of bin Laden in 2006 after paying bribes to some of the tribal leaders. At the time he was said to be very ill.

"Early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the ISI had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army, to move nearby to provide treatment," Hersh claims, basing his account on a conversation he had with an unidentified retired Pakistan Army official.

And all this while the Pakistani leadership in particular the army chief and ISI boss repeatedly told the US that they did not know the whereabouts of bin Laden.

"It's understood in Washington that elements of the ISI believe that maintaining a relationship with the Taliban leadership inside Afghanistan is essential to national security. The ISI's strategic aim is to balance Indian influence in Kabul.

"The Taliban is also seen in Pakistan as a source of jihadist shock troops who would back Pakistan against India in a confrontation over Kashmir," Hersh said in his book that hit stores early this month.

"The Pakistanis also know that their trump card against aggression from India is a strong relationship with the United States. They will never cut their person-to-person ties with us," a senior retired army official is quoted as saying.

Hersh claims that the CIA came to know about bin Laden's hideout from a senior Pakistani intelligence official who betrayed the secret in return for much of the USD 25 million reward offered by the US.

The said official is now living near Washington along with his family.

Hersh said his information collected from US intelligence and other sources was vetted by former ISI head Asad Durrani.

REOPENS FGN 6



"When your version comes out- if you do it- people in



Pakistan will be tremendously grateful," Durrani told Hersh.

"For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what you've told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode," he said.

As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by "people in the 'strategic community' who would know" that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US' betrayed promises left then army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and ISI chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha exposed, Hersh said.

The US journalist quotes a retired Pakistani general that the ISI kept bin Laden at Abbottabad because of its proximity to military installations so that he could be kept under constant surveillance.

"The bin Laden compound was less than two miles from the Pakistan Military Academy, and a Pakistani army combat battalion headquarters was another mile or so away. Abbottabad is less than 15 minutes by helicopter from Tarbela Ghazi, an important base for ISI covert operations and the facility where those who guard Pakistan's nuclear weapons arsenal are trained," he wrote.

"Ghazi is why the ISI put bin Laden in Abbottabad in the first place," the retired official said, "to keep him under constant supervision".

According to Hersh, the retired Pakistani official told him that Pasha offered the Americans a blunt explanation of the reason Pakistan kept bin Laden's capture a secret, and why it was imperative for the ISI's role to remain secret.

"We needed a hostage to keep tabs on al-Qaeda and the Taliban," Pasha said, according to the retired official.

"The ISI was using bin Laden as leverage against Taliban and al-Qaeda activities inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. They let the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership know that if they ran operations that clashed with the interests of the ISI, they would turn bin Laden over to the US. So if it became known that the Pakistanis had worked with us to get bin Laden at Abbottabad, there would be hell to pay," Hersh wrote.

Hersh claimed that Kayani and Pasha agreed to cooperate secretly with the US only after receiving assurances that they would get a free hand in Afghanistan and there would be more flow of military aid from the US.

"Pasha told us at a meeting in April that he could not risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know he's there. Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about the mission," the retired official is quoted as saying.

"He and Kayani had to tell the whole story to the directors of the air defence command and a few local commanders. Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control," the retired official said.

"Otherwise, they would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder," he said.
The Islamic State (ISIS) has released a document detailing how slain British extremist Mohammed Emwazi fled the UK and passed through six countries to reach Syria and become the dreaded Jihadi John.

Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists have released a document which reveals the details of Mohammed Emwazi's route from Britain to Syria to join the terrorist group in Raqqa.

Emwazi, dubbed Jihadi John after he murdered Western hostages, posed as a migrant to leave the UK.

'The Times' quotes ISIS' monthly magazine'Dar al-Islam' as saying that Emwazi and another unnamed individual opted for a migrant route to leave the UK in the summer of 2012 and were smuggled out in the back of lorry to avoid checks and made their way across the English Channel.

Emwazi was able to make the journey despite being on terrorism watch-lists.

The 27-year-old was killed in a US-led drone strike last year.

His unnamed companion said they travelled through six countries to reach the ISIS stronghold in Raqqa.

He mocked UK intelligence services for not capturing him, and complained about mosquitoes along the way.

The account, which uses Emwazi's assumed name Abu Muharib al-Muhajir, runs to almost 8,000 words, the newspaper reports.

As Emwazi was known to British intelligence, he did not want to risk flying out of France.

The duo got to Brussels in Belgium and bought flights to Albania "without fear that British services are alerted".

The pair travelled on British passports but also carried two fake French passports and 30,000 euros in cash.

They shaved their beards in Brussels, where they had breakfast in a cafe in a Muslim area.

Emwazi went on to appear in a video in August 2014 in which he beheaded US journalist James Foley.

He emerged again in other videos, including those in which the US reporter Steven Sotloff and the British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning were murdered.

He was later identified as a Kuwaiti-born computer programming graduate from London.
Growing safety fears surrounding Israel's largest but ageing atomic research centre have provoked fresh questions over its future and a dilemma over the secrecy of the country's alleged nuclear arsenal.

Israel, believed to be the Middle East's sole nuclear power, has long refused to confirm or deny that it has such weapons.

The Haaretz newspaper reported on Tuesday that a study had uncovered 1,537 defects in the decades-old aluminium core of the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert of southern Israel.

The defects at the centre, where nuclear weapons were allegedly developed, were not seen to be severe and the risk of a nuclear outbreak is very limited, the report said.

However, there are growing calls for new safeguards and even a new research centre -- which could present the country with a decision on whether to acknowledge for the first time that it has nuclear weapons.

The US-based Institute for Science and International Security estimated in 2015 that Israel had 115 nuclear warheads.

At the same time, Israel has strongly opposed other regional powers, most notably its arch-foe Iran, obtaining nuclear weapons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was also one of the most vociferous critics of the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that was implemented in January, leading to the lifting of international sanctions on Tehran.

Officially, the Dimona centre focuses on research and energy provision. But, in the 1980s, nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at the centre, alleged to a British newspaper that it was also used to create nuclear weapons.

He was later jailed for 18 years for the revelations.

The core of the Dimona reactor was provided by France in the late 1950s and went online a few years later.

Common practice is that such reactors are used for only 40 years, though this can be extended with modifications.

Uzi Even, a chemistry professor at Tel Aviv University who was involved in the creation of the reactor, is concerned about the safety of the site and has campaigned for a decade for it to be closed -- "so far, to no avail".

He called for it to be shut off for security reasons. "This reactor is now one of the oldest still operating globally," he said.
Isuzu Motors India expects to achieve production level of 50,000 units per annum in next three years as it opened its manufacturing plant here today.

The Japanese automaker today rolled out its India-made D-Max V-Cross pick-up from the newly-launched facility here. The facility was inaugurated by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu.

Isuzu Motors India Managing Director Naohiro Yamaguchi said that initial production capacity of the plant is 50,000 units per annum and can be scaled up to 1,20,000 units eventually.

"In the current market we cannot aim that 50,000 figure. In the next two to three years we have to open up new markets. We hope that we can reach 50,000 mark in the next three years. We cannot exactly say when we are going to reach 1,20,000 units. We are still in the start up phase," Yamaguchi told reporters here.

A senior official of the company said IMI has sold close to 3,000 vehicle so far during the last two years.

Replying to a query, Yamaguchi said the company has no plans to shift the production of its MU7 vehicle (SUV) to the Sricity plant.

"MU7 will not be produced out of this plant. We will continue to produce that at the current facility which we are sharing on contract basis with Hindustan Motors in Chennai. All D-Max production will be stopped at Chennai plant. The new plant here will start producing them," he added.

Isuzu Motors President Masanori Katayama in his address during inauguration said the new plant will not only cater to requirements of the growing Indian market, but will also serve as a key manufacturing hub for Isuzu's global operations.

Isuzu had earlier committed an investment of Rs 3,000 crore for the Indian project.

Ambassador of Japan to India Kenji Hiramatsu was present during the inauguration.

With its existing operations in the US, Japan and Thailand, this plant in India is expected to provide a manufacturing leg-up to Isuzu globally.

A statement from Isuzu said the new generation of Isuzu D-Max pick-ups will be manufactured at the plant, with 70 per cent localisation at the start of production, which will be stepped up.

Isuzu will also consider export of vehicles manufactured at this facility at a suitable time in future, Yamaguchi said.

Meanwhile, Naidu said his government will consider giving exemption of road tax for Iuszu vehicles that are manufactured and sold in the state.

He also said the government would examine according to 'Mega Project' status to Isuzu plant.
BJP today raised the AgustaWestland issue in Lok Sabha, expressing concern over the reported misuse of media by the Italian company which had earmarked Rs 50 crore for the purpose to clinch the VVIP chopper deal.

Raising the issue during zero hour, Meenakshi Lekhi suggested that the middleman Christian Michel had been given the amount to 'manage' the media.

Amid strong protests from Congress for allowing raising the issue, Lekhi said it was unfortunate that media which is an organ of healthy democracy has been "misused".

"It amounts to misuse of the freedom of expression. It is irresponsible as media is part of democratic structure", she remarked.

Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, supported by party colleagues, protested to Speaker Sumitra Mahajan. "I respect you much. You should not have allowed this. Please don't do this", he was heard remarking.

Amid the protests, the Speaker adjourned the House for the lunch recess.

Reports had it Christian Michel, a British businessman and an alleged middleman in the deal, was paid millions of dollars by AgustaWestland.

A large portion of the money paid by AgustaWestland to Michel is "completely disproportionate" to the work he did for the company, the Milan Court of Appeals has held. Interpol issued a red corner notice against Michel on India's request in December 2015.

The Milan court had noted that Michel was paid over 44 million euros by AgustaWestland for various contracts, which included a deal to supply spare parts for Indian naval helicopters and a post-contract service deal for the VVIP chopper contract.
Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar has met with US Security Adviser Susan Rice and discussed a wide range of bilateral issues including cooperation on climate change, trade and defense.

"Rice and Jaishankar affirmed their commitment to deepening bilateral cooperation on climate change, trade, and defense," spokesman of the Security Council of the White House Ned Price said yesterday.

They also discussed critical follow-on to the Paris Agreement, progress in civil-nuclear cooperation, ongoing support for India's membership in the multilateral export control regimes, next steps in the Global Health Security Agenda, and opportunities for expanded security and counter-terrorism cooperation, Price said in a statement.

The Indian Foreign Secretary is on a visit to Washington and expected to meet the Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken today.

The visit of the foreign secretary comes wherein speculation is rife that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit the United States in early June. However, there has been no official word from either New Delhi or the White House in this regard.

Last week, a bipartisan group of four powerful American lawmakers in a letter urged Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan to invite Modi to address a joint meeting of the US Congress during his visit to Washington which according to them is expected to be on June 7 and 8.

"The visit will represent Prime Minister Modi's fourth trip to the United States in two years, highlighting the robust nature of US-India relations. The number of reciprocal visits by the two leaders is unprecedented and hopefully portends the beginning of a new norm in the bilateral relationship," said Ronak D Desai, a fellow at New America and an affiliate at the Belfer Center's India and South Asia Program at Harvard University.

"Prime Minister Modi's trip to the United States is an opportunity for the two countries to continue focusing on those areas of mutual convergence, include defense, energy cooperation, and disaster management. At the same time, it should allow both leaders to frankly address ongoing irritants in the relationship and ensure these challenges do not fundamentally undermine the strategic logic underlying the US-India partnership," Desai said.
Director Vivek Agnihotri, who has claimed the plot of his film "Buddha In A Traffic Jam" is similar to the ongoing controversy at JNU, has offered to pay the fine imposed by university on ABVP member Saurabh Sharma in connection with the row.

"Dear @SaurabhJNU If the price of loving your country and opposing 'Kanhaiyas' then let me pay your fine of Rs 10000 as my support. #IAmBuddha," the filmmaker tweeted.

The JNUSU Joint Secretary, who is the lone ABVP member in JNU students body replied, "Thanks for your blessing sir. It's not about the punishment. It's about principles. We are fighting for Nation. Why pay single penny? (sic)."



Saurabh had raised objections to the February 9 event on campus against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised.

The university administration had withdrawn the permission for the event on basis of his complaint but the organisers had gone ahead with the programme.

He has been slapped with a fine of Rs 10,000 by the university after the probe panel found him "guilty" of blocking traffic on day of the event.

Saurabh, along with four other members of ABVP, is sitting on an indefinite hunger strike alleging that the university has equated "nationalists" and "anti-nationals" while making the decision and are demanding that the punishment to Saurabh be revoked.

Agnihotri and actor Anupam Kher had stroked a controversy last month when they had alleged that JNU refused to screen their film considering the present atmosphere at the campus, a charge denied by the university.

There are three mechanisms for permission to screen any movie at JNU - at a students union event, administration event or during the academic calendar of varsity's school of cinema studies.

While Agnihotri had contacted the Cinema studies department, where he was told that the academic calendar for the semester was booked, no requests were made to other two bodies.

ABVP had then arranged for a screening of the film on campus that took place amid shouting of slogans by Left-affiliated groups who gave Kher a thumbs down.
Hyderabad-based Karyotica Biologicals today launched a multi-activity enzyme mixture in Gujarat and claimed that it can increase milk yield of cattle by 10 per cent.

"The product, Karyolact, has been developed as a feed supplement which is an amalgamation of nine enzymes that helps improve digestion and thus leads to better health of the animal and increase milk and fat percentage," said Subba Rao, chairman of Karyotica Biologicals Pvt Ltd.

"We tested the product on cattle and were encouraged by the results. A significant overall improvement in milk production and milk fat percentage was observed within a week of treatment of Karyolact. Surprisingly, such a product is not available in the Indian market," Rao said.

For every 10 gm supplement consumed on a daily basis, milk production in an average yielding cow increased by 10.7 per cent, while fat increased by 9.4 per cent, he claimed.

The product trials were conducted at Derol village in Panchmahal. A milk farmer can increase yield by 1 litre per day by feeding cows 10 gm of the product, Rao said.
Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal today raked up farmers' suicide issue in Punjab and claimed people of the state, which goes to polls next year, are "yearning" for a change.

"Farmers are committing suicide and recently a farmer and his mother committed suicide," Kejriwal, who was here to attend a Bar Council programme, said.

He said the next Assembly election will not be just another election but a "revolution" which would uproot the "corrupt" and "non-performing" Akali-BJP regime.

"We want to see a Punjab which is prosperous..Let us make Punjab where no farmer commits suicide," he said.

Notably, unable to pay a loan, a farmer and his elderly mother committed suicide on Tuesday at Jodhpur village allegedly when a commission agent, alongwith police and revenue officials, was trying to take possession of his land.

The Delhi Chief Minister was here to distribute licences to young law graduates of Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh to practice law. It was for the first time that a chief minister from other state attended such a ceremony of the Bar Council of Punjab and Haryana.

Until now, only the CMs, the Governors, other minister of Punjab and Haryana, judges or legal luminaries have been coming to attend such events of the Bar Council.

He claimed that in Punjab assembly polls next year, AAP's performance will be good and "Congress will go to zero while Akalis will be reduced below 10 seats".

Seeking to project a pro-farmer face of his government in Delhi, Kejriwal said when crops were damaged due to rains in the national capital earlier, some farmers had approached him and he immediately accompanied them to their fields.

He claimed more and more people are accepting the AAp's model of governance and trying to replicate it and added if polls were to be held today in Delhi, AAP will win all 70 seats.
All the 17 accused in the Keshpur killings were acquitted and released unconditionally by a local court today, 16 years after the incident.

Five CPI-M and one Trinamool Congress worker were killed on January 25, 2000 at Chakgobindapur and Madhupur villages in an armed clash over area dominance.

Seventh Additional judge of Midnapore court Prasad Kumar Ray acquitted and released the accused for want of evidence.

Ninety nine people had been named accused by CPI-M in a complaint to the police who chargesheeted 18 of them.

During the trial of the case, one of the accused died.

The judgement today acquitted and released the rest 17.
Britain's main opposition Labour Party today suspended former London mayor Ken Livingstone for defending a Pakistani origin colleague involved in an anti-Semitic row and "bringing the party into disrepute".

Livingstone, in an interview to BBC Radio London, tried to defend Labour MP Naz Shah, saying he had never heard anyone in the Labour Party say anything anti-Semitic.

"Livingstone has been suspended by the Labour Party, pending an investigation, for bringing the party into disrepute," a Labour spokesman said.

Shah, 42, stepped down as the parliamentary private secretary to Labour's shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, earlier this week over anti-Semitic remarks on her Facebook posts that called for the relocation of Israeli Jews to US.

She was later suspended by Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn pending an investigation following demands for strict action from within the party.

Shah has since apologised, saying: "I deeply regret the hurt I have caused. This post from two years ago was made before I was an MP, does not reflect my views and I apologise for any offence it has caused."



Livingstone was trying to defend Shah but was instead dubbed anti-Semitic as well.

"Let's remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel.

"He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

"I've heard a lot of people being critical of Israel, but if I was to denounce the South African government, you wouldn't say I was racist. And one of my worries is this confusion with anti-Semitism and criticising the Israeli government policy undermines the importance is tackling real anti-Semitism," Livingstone told the radio.

Fellow Labour party MP John Mann attacked him as being a "Nazi apologist" in front of a media scrum which was caught on camera.

Mann now faces a reprimand for his conduct.

Prime Minister David Cameron also got drawn into the row, when he was asked for a comment.

"The Labour Party has got a problem with anti-Semitism... It's like racism, it's unacceptable in a modern political party. As I said to Jeremy Corbynsome weeks ago...They've got a problem and they'vegot to deal with it," he said.
Even eight years after the shifting out of Tata Motors 'Nano car project' to Gujarat, land and industrialsation continue to be the main issues in this Assembly election at Singur which goes to poll on April 30.

The bare structure of the Nano plant still stands on the side of National Highway-2 as a mute spectator to the political turmoil triggered by the agitation spearheaded by Mamata Banerjee against 'forcible' land acquisition policy of the previous Left Front government which acted as a catalyst in bringing Trinamool Congress to power in West Bengal.

Apparently to remind the people of Singur that they have missed out on the bus to progress and development with the shifting of the Nano project, the candidate of CPI(M)-Congress alliance, Rabin Deb, campaigned riding on a Nano.

TMC has fielded 83-year-old Rabindranath Bhattacharya, fondly called 'Mastarmoshai' (teacher), who had won the seat defeating his CPI-M rival by nearly 35,000 votes in 2011. TMC had an alliance with the Congress during the 2011 polls.

Keeping in mind that land continues to be a sensitive issue here, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during her campaign in Singur spoke of her government's commitment to return land to the 'unwilling' farmers.

Countering her statement, CPI-M state secretary Surya Kanta Mishra said that it was not possible to return the land.

"If our alliance comes to power we will withdraw the case and set up industries here to provide employment to the youth," he stated.

Poll statistics of the 2011 Assembly poll and 2014 Lok Sabha indicated that TMC is better placed in this constituency.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, TMC candidate Ratna De



Nag had secured over 90,000 votes from the Singur Assembly constituency against her nearest CPI(M) rival Pradip Saha who got 60,655 votes.

Riding on the Modi wave, BJP bagged over 24,000 votes in Singur while the Congress nominee managed to bag a little over 3,600 votes.

Even at the panchayat level, the opposition has a meagre presence in Singur.

The BJP has fielded Suren Patra from the constituency this time for the polls.

Although TMC faces corruption charges in the wake of Narada sting operation, Bhattacharya has a clean image. "The people here know me. They know what I have done. I am an MLA from here since 2001. I have nothing new to say," he said.

Bhattacharya said, "We also wanted the Nano project but protest was made against the aggressive policy of the CPI(M) and the way they had acquired farmland. Singur has seen a lot of development during the TMC rule," he said.

Poll observers say that one thing which might pose some problem for Bhattacharya is the infighting within the party in the area.

They say that Bhattacharya does not enjoy good equation with TMC Singur block president and minister Becharam Manna.

The CPI(M) argues that by driving away the Nano project, entire Bengal has lost an opportunity for industrialisation.

"If Nano project was set up here, not only Singur but entire Bengal would have got the benefit of industrialisation," CPI(M)-Congress alliance candidate Rabin Deb has said.

Deb is leaving no stone unturned to wrest the seat from TMC holding meetings and door-to-door campaign. CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury also campaigned in this constituency.

CPI-M's electoral ally Congress also threw its weight behind state party president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury by holding campaign meeting here.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi had also addressed an election meeting in support of the Congress and Left candidates at Srirampur, not very far away from Singur.
The recent incidents of fire at the Bhalaswa and Ghazipur landfill sites, which the AAP had described as a "conspiracy" to derail the odd-even scheme, was caused due to generation of methane and "unknown" human error, a Delhi government committee has observed.

The four-member committee, headed by Special Secretary (Environment) Kulanand Joshi, submitted its report to the government after visiting the two garbage dump sites and the Yamuna flood plains behind Rajghat Power Station, where the fire took place.

"Cause of fire which was observed on April 23, 2016, due to generation of methane from decomposition of garbage and unknown human error which might have taken place at site in the absence of Fire Prevention Plan," it observed.

The committee, among its other observations, said burning was observed at Bhalaswa and Ghazipur in February as well. No fire tenders are stationed at the landfill sites and no safety measures are taken for the people working at the site, it said.

It said the Delhi Development Authority maintains no vigil in the 'O' zone area, which comprises Yamuna and the river front. The government had earlier said the fire incident was a "sabotage" attempt.

"We don't have evidence to prove our claim but question is automatically raised when fire is reported at three points at the same time at the forested area behind Shanti Van. The entire incident indicates indicates something is wrong," Transport Minister Gopal Rai told reporters.

While imposing fines on NDMC and EDMC in February for instances of fire, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee had observed that the plea that methane generated at landfill site is responsible for the burning can occur only if there is an ignition initially provided "deliberately or negligently".

The three sites at Bhalswa and Ghazipur, commissioned in 1984, and Okhla, in 1996, are not designed as per the Municipal Solid Waste Rules of 2000 and lack authorisation from the DPCC but continue to function as civic bodies cites lack of land to set up new garbage dumping grounds.

The committee report also indicted the corporations saying the landfill sites have no standard operating plan including fire prevention or gas extraction facility or leachate treatment plant to prevent fire instances.

"Gas extraction facility exists on pilot plan basis in 10 acres by GAIL which needs to be installed for whole area for mitigation of burning instances," it said on Ghazipur.
President Pranab Mukherjee, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Vice President Hamid Ansari and a host of leaders congratulated ISRO scientists on the successful launch of navigation satellite IRNSS-1G today.

"Congratulations to ISRO team on successful launch of PSLV-C33 carrying IRNSS-1G," the President wrote on micro-blogging site Twitter.

Lauding the scientists, Modi tweeted "with this successful launch, we will determine our own paths powered by our technology".

In his congratulatory message, Ansari said the "flawless launch" by ISRO scientists has "demonstrated India's capabilities in the space sector".

Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said, "More big milestone for our country. ISRO makes us proud again. Congrats to all scientists for this feat. Leadership of @narendramodi inspires".

"Congratulations to @isro & entire team on successfully launching 7th & last satellite of #IRNSS constellation IRNSS-1G #TransformingIndia," Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu hailed the launch of the PSLV-C33 carrying IRNSS-1G as another "proud moment for India".

"Hearty congratulations to @isro for launching IRNSS - 1G. Another proud moment for India," he wrote.

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said, "Heartiest congratulations to @ISRO scientists on successfully launching seventh & the last satellite of IRNSS constellation 'IRNSS-1G'."



Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje said, "Heartiest Congratulations to @isro on launching IRNSS - 1G. #ProudIndian".

India today successfully completed its mission for a regional navigational system on par with US-based GPS with the successful launch of IRNSS-1G, the seventh and last in the constellation of satellites that make up the system, on board its Polar rocket PSLV-C33 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre here.
Steel Minister Narendra Singh Tomar has said that domestic companies have to accept the "external realities" facing the sector and "learn to compete" in the long term.

His comments have come in the backdrop of steel firms such as JSW Steel, Tata Steel, JSPL and state-run SAIL urging the government to adopt measures to check import of cheap metal in the country, which is impacting their sales and profits.

The Minister, who also holds the portfolio of mines, appreciated the concerted efforts by the government and all stakeholders, which has helped the steel sector in gradually coming out of the difficult condition it was in, Tomar was quoted as saying in a ministry's statement.

"But in the long term, industry has to accept external realities and learn to compete and emerge stronger inspite of them. Time is of essence and all plans and actions by the companies must be well-planned and executed," he advised the companies.

A meeting of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee of the Steel and Mines Ministry was held yesterday on the subject of review of SAIL and RINL, the Ministry said.

Presided over by Tomar, the meeting reviewed the progress achieved in the field by the public sector enterprises, it added.

Tomar said that government is aware of the logistics constraints and is continuously working to find out ways to augment the infrastructure, be it railways or waterways.

The Centre has started the Prime Minister Khanij Kshetra Kalyan Yojana (PMKKKY) for benefit of people and areas affected by mining and all stakeholders in the respective districts need to take keen interest in effective implementation of scheme, he added.
A reduction in the amount of oxygen dissolved in the oceans due to climate change is already noticeable in some parts of the world and should be evident across large regions of the oceans between 2030 and 2040, according to a new study.

Scientists know that a warming climate can be expected to gradually sap the ocean of oxygen, leaving fish, crabs, squid, sea stars, and other marine life struggling to breathe.

But it has been difficult to determine whether this anticipated oxygen drain is already having a noticeable impact, researchers said.

"Loss of oxygen in the ocean is one of the serious side effects of a warming atmosphere, and a major threat to marine life," said Matthew Long from National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

"Since oxygen concentrations in the ocean naturally vary depending on variations in winds and temperature at the surface, it has been challenging to attribute any deoxygenation to climate change," said Long.

The entire ocean - from the depths to the shallows - gets its oxygen supply from the surface, either directly from the atmosphere or from phytoplankton, which release oxygen into the water through photosynthesis, researchers said.

Warming surface waters, however, absorb less oxygen. And the oxygen that is absorbed has a more difficult time travelling deeper into the ocean, researchers said.

That is because as water heats up, it expands, becoming lighter than the water below it and less likely to sink, they said.

To study the impact of climate change, researchers used the NCAR-based Community Earth System Model.

They used output from a project that ran the model more than two dozen times for the years 1920 to 2100 on the Yellowstone supercomputer, which is operated by NCAR.

Each individual run was started with miniscule variations in air temperature, researchers said.

As the model runs progressed, those tiny differences grew and expanded, producing a set of climate simulations useful for studying questions about variability and change.

Using the simulations to study dissolved oxygen gave the researchers guidance on how much concentrations may have varied naturally in the past.

With this information, they could determine when ocean deoxygenation due to climate change is likely to become more severe than at any point in the modelled historic range.

Researchers found that deoxygenation caused by climate change could already be detected in the southern Indian Ocean and parts of the eastern tropical Pacific and Atlantic basins.

They also determined that more widespread detection of deoxygenation caused by climate change would be possible between 2030 and 2040.

However, in some parts of the ocean, including areas off the east coasts of Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia, deoxygenation caused by climate change was not evident even by 2100, researchers said.

The findings were published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles.
As male peacocks shake their long feathers in courtship, the iridescent eyespots remain nearly stationary and captivate females, according to a new study.

Courtship displays can signal the relative physical quality of males vying for females. A male peacock, for example, entices peahens by raising and vibrating his long train feathers, said Roslyn Dakin from the University of British Columbia in Canada.

The vibrations both make the feathers rattle and make the brightly coloured eyespots appear to hover motionless against an oscillating iridescent background. Males with eyespots that are the most iridescent win most of the matings.

Researchers used high-speed video to analyse the "train-rattling" movements of vibrating train and tail feathers in 14 adult peacocks, and measured the vibrations of individual feathers in the lab.

They found that displaying peacocks vibrate their feathers at or near resonance, giving the train the greatest vibrational amplitude and suggesting that these courtship displays may be energetically efficient.

Scanning electron microscopy then showed how the eyespots stay so still during displays. Dakin and colleagues found that eyespot barbs are locked together with microhooks much like those on flight feathers.

This gives each eyespot greater density than the surrounding loose barbs, keeping it essentially in place as the loose barbs shimmer in the background.

The findings showed that the longer the train feathers, the faster the males shook their feathers during courtship displays, requiring more muscular effort.

This suggests that the dynamics of feather vibrations could also signal male muscle power to choosy females.

"Charles Darwin observed that peacocks vibrate their feathers during courtship, but it took this multidisciplinary team of scientists to characterise the dynamics of this behaviour," said Suzanne Kane, a co-author of the study.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
At least one militant was today holed up in a mosque in Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir as security forces launched an operation there.

An army official said security forces launched the operation in Kanthpora village of Lolabfollowing information about the presence of militants in the area.

"After a brief exchange of firing, at least one militant took shelter in a local mosque," the official said.

He said the operation was being hampered by local residents who were pelting stones at security forces.

Several policemen, including an officer, were hurt in the stone pelting, a police official said.

The operation was going on till reports last came in, he added.

(REOPENS DEL11)



Meanwhile, a mob in Sopore town set ablaze a police vehicle which was on its way from Bandipora to Kupwara to take a detenue for a court appearance.

As soon as of Wani's death reached Sopore, a group of youth started pelting stones on passing vehicles including the police vehicle which was on way to Kupwara, a police official said.

He said the mob got hold of the vehicle and set it ablaze.

"The eight policemen and the detenue managed to escape from the spot and took refuge in a civilian house," he added.

The trapped policemen and the detenue were later safely rescued from the house, the official said.
Students admitted to post graduate courses in medical colleges of the country on Mizoram state quota would have to sign an agreement for two years of mandatory employment with the state government after completion of their studies, an official statement said today.

State Health Minister Lal Thanzara announced this at a conference of Mizoram Government Doctors' Association here and said the decision was taken to tackle manpower shortage in the medical department.

Lal Thanzara also asked government doctors to give satisfactory mental, physical and spiritual care to their patients.

He also appealed to the doctors not to neglect their patients in the government hospitals while being engaged in private practice.
The ongoing bickering between RSS and ruling BJP in Goa over the issue of medium of instruction (MOI) in schools escalated today on reports of a meeting between Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar and party chief Amit Shah wherein the former sought replacement of Sangh's state unit chief.

RSS, which has been demanding education in schools in regional languages, has opposed the state government's stand on providing grants to English medium schools.

As per reports, Parsekar had demanded replacement of RSS state unit chief Subhash Velingkar during his meeting with Shah in Delhi recently.

The Bharatiya Bhasha Surkasha Manch (BBSM) has been holding agitations demanding grants only for those schools who have regional languages as MoI.

"BJP has no control over Sangh as it is an independent organisation. Right from top to bottom, none of the BJP leaders has capability to touch RSS leaders. RSS is an independent organisation. BJP is not governing appointments or changes in the sangh," Velignkar told reporters while addressing a press conference on MoI issue.

Interestingly, Velingkar had recently criticised the BJP- led government over the issue, appealing people "not to allow these people (BJP) on your doorstep during election".

Responding to a query on the meeting between Parsekar and Shah, the RSS leader said he had no knowledge about it.

Another RSS leader Raju Sukerkar said, "Velingkar is a part of such a huge organisation that no one can touch his position. Anyone speaking against him does not make any difference to his (Velingkar's) stature in Sangh".

Sukerkar said Velingkar has been getting support from common people on the MoI issue.

The government has been under fire from RSS and BBSM for continuing giving grants to English medium schools affiliated to Church's Diocesan Board of Education.

Another RSS leader Subhash Desai said the government has created "confusion" over the issue.

"The CM has been maintaining that government's stand is that MoI should be regional languages. But his deputy Francis D'Souza has made a statement that primary education can be in any language even in English. Why this discrepancy in the statements?" he asked.

Desai said the common people wanted to know the exact position of the government on the issue.

He clarified that RSS and BBSM are two different organisations and that BJP should not confuse people on this.

"The statement was made that RSS was taken into confidence before giving grant to English medium schools. This is an utter lie. Neither RSS nor BBSM was consulted by the government. We would have strongly opposed such a decision," Desai said.
Mongolia today conferred its highest civilian award "North Star" on two noted Indian scholars-Lokesh Chandra and Mansura Haider-for their contribution to Mongolian studies.

Mongolian Foreign Minister Lundeg Purevsuren conferred the award on Lokesh Chandra, president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), and Mansura Haider, former academic adviser at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), at ceremony at the Mongolian embassy here which was also attended by Union Minister Kiren Rijiju.

This year being the 60th Anniversary of Indo-Mongolian diplomatic relations, the award has been presented to two Indian scholars for their outstanding "contributions to the development of friendly relations between India and Mongolia and promotion of Mongolian studies".

"India and Mongolia are two of the earliest nations in Asia, with their friendship as old as Buddhism. The two countries are intertwined with spiritual cultural and spiritual bonds based on which our governments have established diplomatic relations," Purevsuren, who is on an official visit to India, said at the ceremony.

The minister also recalled the contributions of professor Raghu Vira, Lokesh Chandra's late father and a renowned scholar who invited students and scholars from Mongolia and revived the cultural and scientific ties between the two countries even before diplomatic relations were established.

In his acceptance speech, Chandra said, "North Star is called Sudarshan in Sanskrit and goes back to a very ancient period of Mongol History. My father was among the first to travel to Mongolia as they were the first Asians to conquer Europe."



Mansura Haider, who was a professor and former dean of the faculty of arts in Aligarh Muslim University's history department, said was the first to give the Mongols an identity was misrepresented in history.

"Khan was misrepresented in history because the contemporary aggrieved historian whose land was attacked exaggerated the tales of tyranny allegedly inflicted on their country. But Mongolians' regard for the land of Gautam Buddha and Indian culture and religion is exemplary".

To reassess the contribution of Genghis Khan, ICCR is going to organize an International conference in Mongolia on "Genghis Khan, his legacy and Indian culture" concurrently with "International Mongolian Congress" in Ulaanbaatar in August.
Students of Mother's International School in Delhi and Faridabad's Modern Vidya Niketan (MVN) today won city rounds of the all-India inter-school CBSE Cryptic Crossword Contest (CCCC) 2016.

Divya Vaid and Arav Agarwal of Mother's International School and Ashim Kumar Dubey and Abhay Kanwar of MVN were declared winners of the Delhi and Gurgaon city rounds, respectively, of the contest, according to the organisers.

While Devum Pruthi and Kheelit Pruthi of Cambridge Foundation School came second in the Delhi round, Anushka Srivastava and Himal Pandita of Delhi Public School, Sector 45, Gurgaon were the runners-up in the Gurgaon round.

A total of 70 teams participated in the Delhi round held at Salwan Public School in Rajinder Nagar and event at Gurgaon was hosted by Shiv Nadar School with the participation of 25 school teams.

The remaining two city rounds in the NCR are scheduled to be held tomorrow at Amity International School in Vasundhara Sector 6 and Army Public School at Sector 37, Noida.

The CCCC 2016 was launched at DPS of Ranchi on April 18 following an April 5 circular by Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) along with its nationwide schedule.

The contest is being conducted in two stages. In the preliminary round, which is underway, the contest will be held across 37 cities and towns in India. The winners from these rounds will then converge in the national capital for the year-end Grand Finale.

The contest is into its third year. The CCCC 2015 saw participation from about 800 schools across the country.
India has called on the United Nations' information department to increase interaction with media in developing countries in order to reduce disparities that exist in free flow of information.

Minister in India's UN mission, S Srinivas Prasad, said that Department of Public Information (DPI) could also look at giving specific coverage to the UN designated days like the International Days of Yoga and Non-Violence through its media platforms as this would highlight the importance of the designated days as well as project the UN's efforts in "celebrating important values and activities."



"We would also like to urge DPI to increase interaction with media in developing countries to reduce existing disparities in information flow and ensure a free flow of information at all levels," Prasad said at a session of the Committee on Information here on April 26.

Prasad welcomed UN Radio's continued weekly delivery of topical adaptation of main broadcast in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali which he said enables the message of the UN to reach a large population in the South Asian sub-continent.

He added that while Hindi, Urdu and Bengali are the major languages of the South Asian landmass, there are still millions of speakers of other major languages within the sub-continent.

In this context he suggested that DPI could look at setting up a language development centre based in India to reframe content in other major South Asian languages in order to reach a more wider and diverse audience in the sub-continent.

Acknowledging DPI's close co-operation with UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations, he said India is appreciative of the DPI's efforts to highlight the work of UN Blue Berets in some of the most difficult situations in the world.

"We urge the DPI to fast track its plans of highlighting this contribution on media platforms, both in the troop donor countries as well as worldwide," he said.

He also noted that UN TV featured in its long running series-United nations in Action- the inauguration of a solar park in Gujrat State by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon during his visit to India last year in April.

He pointed out that as part of the 70th anniversary celebrations of the UN last year, India had participated in the 'Turn the World UN Blue' global campaign by lighting up the iconic Chhatrapati Shivaji Rail Terminus in Mumbai on United Nation's Day.

He said the iconic landmark had been subjected to terrorist attack in November 2008, leading to the loss of life of many innocent citizens.

"Keeping in view the UN's message of international peace and co-existence, the choice of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Rail Terminus for the campaign was therefore apt," he said.
Nepalese citizens will soon be issued national identity cards, Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli said today and asked lawmakers not to suspect his government's intentions over the matter.

The government has been working to launch the national identity cards," Oli said, adding that it is the need of the hour to issue such cards.

"The government has been working to issue such identity cards that would replace the existing citizenship certificates," he said at the meeting of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) under the Legislature-Parliament.

Oli also asked lawmakers not to suspect the government's intention in issuing such cards and added that there might be weaknesses in the process.

The Prime Minister also called the people to be aware about the issue of national security.

He clarified that no confidential information to take advantage from National Identity Card system.

He said that the government was serious about the security of the nation and its citizens.

The card will include important information about the citizens.The Asian Development Bank is supporting the project.
Niger's government has extended a state of emergency in the south-eastern territory for three months because of the deadly danger from Boko Haram Islamists based in neighbouring Nigeria, state television reported today.

"The security situation in the Diffa region remains alarming because of the high level of threat due to attacks by Boko Haram," said a cabinet statement read on state television.

A state of emergency gives special powers to the security forces. The measure first took effect in February, 2015 and has been renewed several times.

Boko Haram's stronghold is in north-east Nigeria, across the border from Niger, and the risk of attack heightened when troops from Niger and Chad pulled out of the Nigerian towns of Malam Fatori and Damasack after driving out jihadist fighters. The Islamists returned once the soldiers were gone.

Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria have set up a joint task force to fight Boko Haram of 8,500 men, which has forced the hardline Islamist movement to cut back its attacks, without eradicating it.

But yesterday, Nigerian General Lamidi Adeosun, the commander of the regional military coalition, said the international community had been very slow in following up on pledges of support.

"If anything has been given at all, it's a measure of communication equipment and some 11 vehicles -- that is what assistance so far we have received in concrete terms," Adeosun said during a visit to Niger's capital Niamey.
There is no privilege notice against HRD Minister Smriti Irani, Chairman of Rajya Sabha's Privileges Committee P J Kurien said today dismissing reports that the panel decided to seek explanation from her over some remarks made during a House debate on the JNU row.

Addressing the media a day after the Committee members had met in Parliament House, he said it was "not a meeting" of the committee as it did not meet the quorum requirement of at least five committee attending it.

"We met but five members were not present. So it was not a committee meeting. Moreover there is no notice of privilege against Irani before the committee. So it is wrong to say that the panel has decided to seek an explanation from her over her remarks. There is no such decision," he said.

"Yesterday there was no meeting. There was some informal discussion. Whatever we informally said has been reported by the media as a decision of the committee. A member saying something is not a decision of the committee," Kurien said.

He said a notice of CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechury regarding his having received threat calls after participating in a debate on JNU row is under consideration of the committee.

In his letter to the Rajya Sabha Chairman last month, the CPI-M leader had written that the minister had made "baseless allegations" against him "imputing motives that are completely false".

Yechury had also enclosed pages from internet (in Telugu) suggesting threats to him and stated that considering "grievous nature of the allegations". Since they are made on the floor of the House and recorded as part of proceedings, the intervention of the Rajya Sabha Chairman was sought said.

He said that Yechury had given a privilege notice but that was about threat calls and not against Irani.

Regarding the deposition of VHP leader Sadhvi Prachi before the panel yesterday about her controversial statement on "terrorists in Parliament", Kurien said she appeared as a witness and it is not necessary to have a meeting of the committee to call a witness.

He, however, declined to go into what was the response of Prachi when she appeared before the committee.

After meeting the panel yesterday, Prachi had remained defiant and stuck to her remarks,.
The government today said it has no proposal under its consideration to curtail the vacation period and extend the working hours in courts, a statement which comes days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi hinted that long vacations are hurting disposal of cases.

Law Minister D V Sadananda Gowda told the Lok Sabha in a written reply that the "government does not have under its consideration any proposal to curtail the vacation period and extend the working hours in the courts."



He said the duration of vacation is governed by the rules and regulations framed by the concerned high court and the Supreme Court. The vacation or working days or working hours in the district and subordinate courts are regulated by the respective high court.

Addressing a conference of chief ministers and chief justices here on Sunday, Modi had recalled that in one such conferences he had attended as the Gujarat Chief Minister, he had flagged the issue of reducing vacation in courts and holding morning and evening courts.

But during lunch break at that event he was in for trouble as some judges had questioned the idea. "I was afraid from that very day," he had said.

Responding to the issue, Chief Justice of India T S Thakur later that day told reporters that "we don't go to Manali. Judges of constitutional benches write their order... When one side is ready, the other is not. Ask the Bar if they are ready," he had said.

Considering the staggering arrears, vacations in the higher judiciary must be curtailed by at least 10 to 15 days and the court working hours should be extended by at least half-an hour, a Law Commission report titled 'Reforms in the judiciary: Some suggestions' had recommended in 2009.

The Supreme Court Rules, 2013, which came into force on August 19, 2014 states that summer vacations shall not exceed seven weeks from the earlier 10 weeks.
Uttar Pradesh police today launched 'Operation Milan' here to rescue abducted youths and minors, including girls, and reunite them with their families.

"We have launched Operation Milan in Lucknow zone to safely recover those youths- girls and boys - and minors who have been abducted. We aim to recover them and ensure they meet their families again," IG Lucknow Zone, A Satish Ganesh, told reporters.

All the district police chiefs of the zone have been asked to direct concerned police station in-charges, where such incidents have been reported, and give them 15 days to act on such cases of safe recovery, he said.

After 15 days, a review will be held and those policemen performing well will be awarded and action initiated against those showing laxity.

A total of 459 cases of abduction were reported in the zone including a maximum of 140 cases in Lucknow.
Opposition Congress and BJP in Odisha questioned the neutrality of the chitfund probe panel, headed by Justice (retd.) M M Das who attended a function organised by the ruling BJD in Cuttack today.

The retired Orissa High Court judge has been heading the judicial commission probing matters relating to alleged cheating of investors by different chitfund companies. He attended BJD lawyers' forum meeting as the chief guest on occasion of Utkal Gourav Madhusudan Das' birth anniversary. Law minister Arun Sahu also attended the meeting.

"The head of the chitfund scam probe panel attending a political party meeting has cast doubt in the minds of the people over the outcome of the commission's judgement," said OPCC president Prasad Harichandan.

Justice (retd.) Das, however, clarified that he addressed the meeting as it was attended by more than 200 lawyers and he did not consider the event as a function of BJD.

"I believe there is no issue attending a lawyers' gathering. I have attended the programme as a retired judge, not as a Commission head. What I have stated in the meeting is my personal opinion and the ruling party has nothing to do with it. I know my job very well," he said.

Leader of Opposition Narasingha Mishra of Congress, who is also an eminent lawyer, said, "I am not in favour of a judicial commission head attending the function of a political party. He should not have attended the programme."



BJP legislator Pradeep Purohit said it is "unfortunate" that Das attended the meeting.

"Since the event was organised by a political party, he should not continue as the head of the Commission investigating the chitfund scam," he said, adding the poor investors would lose faith in the government which has assured an unbiased investigation into the scam.

BJD, however, defended Justice (retd.) Das.

"Since he is a retired judge, I have nothing to say about his decision to attend a programme. I should not interfere in his meetings and schedules. Besides, the lawyers' body is not a political institution but a social outfit. It provides legal aid to the poor and underprivileged. It is not a wing of BJD," BJD spokesperson Ananta Das said.
A commercial pilot was under the influence of alcohol while flying a JetBlue airliner carrying 151 passengers last year from Orlando to New York City, federal prosecutors have said.

A criminal complaint says Dennis Murphy Jr was selected for a random alcohol test after Flight 584 landed at Kennedy Airport on April 21, 2015. The court papers allege the test found that his blood-alcohol level was 0.11, exceeding the .04 legal limit for pilots.

A co-pilot later told investigators he saw Murphy "drinking an unknown beverage from a cup before and during" Flight 584 and another flight earlier in the day from New York to Orlando, the complaint says. On the way to being tested for alcohol, the pilot was red-faced and "chewing gum rapidly," it adds.

Murphy was released on USD 50,000 bond after appearing yesterday in federal court in Brooklyn. There was no immediate response to a phone message left with his attorney.

In a statement, JetBlue said it has a "zero tolerance" drug and alcohol policy, and that Murphy no longer works there.

The case follows that of an Alaska Airlines captain who is scheduled to go on trial in July on federal felony charges that while drunk he flew a plane full of passengers from Portland, Oregon, to Orange County, California. And In March, an American Airlines co-pilot was arrested when he failed a sobriety test before a flight in Detroit.

Under federal law, airlines can test pilots for alcohol and drug use at random. They also can be tested after an accident or when impairment is suspected.

According to records from the Federal Aviation Administration, 225 pilots for commercial airlines have tested above the legal blood-alcohol limit since 1995.

In 2015, there were 56,327 tests given to workers in the airline industry including pilots, mechanics, flight attendants and air traffic controllers. Of those, 119 people tested above the limit or 0.2 per cent the FAA said. Also, aviation workers failed 1,546 of 218,448 drug tests.
A parliamentary panel has found several loopholes in the implementation of a key housing scheme, 'Indira Awaas Yojana' (IAY), in selection of beneficiaries, quality of work while also expressing its displeasure over "diversion" and "misappropriation" of funds.

In its report submitted to the Lok Sabha today, the Public Accounts Committee, in its report on the Ministry of Rural Development, spelt out the need for focus on efficient and effective utilization of budgetary grants, moving away from the existing tilt towards timely-utilization of grants.

There have been "serious shorcomings" in areas such as identification and selection of beneficiaries of the scheme, construction and quality of work, financial management, and monitoring and evaluation among others.

"The committee note several cases of operation of multiple bank accounts, diversion of IAY funds towards other scheme/programmes, expenditure on inadmissible items, misappropriation and suspected cases of misappropriation, unauthorised deduction of funds on account of administrative charges," the reports states.

IAY, launched in 1985, is a flagship scheme of the Ministry of Rural Development designed to provide assistance to BPL families who are either houseless or have inadequate housing facilities.

The report noted as a "serious lapse" the fact that assessment has not been made about the actual housing shortage in 14 states even after the scheme had been ruuning for almost 30 years. It shows absence of planning and coordination with the states by the Ministry, the report said.

"What is even more disturbing for the Committee to note is that several ineligible beneficiaries were selected to reap the benefit," it said.
Rejecting the Punjab government's plea, a Pakistani court has directed the authorities to summon all concerned and decide on a complaint against Jamat-ud-Dawah (JuD) for running a Taliban-style judicial system here.

While disposing off the petition over the matter, Lahore High Court's Justice Shahid Bilal Hassan orderedthe home secretary of the Punjab government to summon all concerned and decide the matter "strictly in accordance with law".

The law officers of the federal and provincial governments told the court that the petition was not maintainable as the JuD is a "private organisation" and this matter could not be challenged in the court.

A counsel for JuD told the court that "JuD sharia court summons" issued to the petitioner is "fake".

"The JuD is not running a parallel judicial system in the country. The summons is fabricated," he said, requesting the court to dismiss the petition.

Petitioner Khalid Saeed, a resident of Lahore, said he received summons written on letter pad of 'Darul Qaza Al-Sharia' of JuD with a direction to appear before its 'arbitration court of sharia'.

The petitioner said he also received telephone calls from the Qazi (judge) of the JuD court asking him to appear before him.

JuD, led by Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed, set up the Sharia Court, a Taliban-style parallel judicial system in seven cities of Punjab.

The court which is named as "Darul Qaza Sharia",is established primarily to provide 'easy and swift justice to the people.

The complaints are addressed to the chief of the group (Saeed) who later refers them to Qazi (judge) for further proceedings.
Pakistan has been clearly told that it should allow an Indian probe team to visit that country in connection with Pathankot terror attack as reciprocity was the principle on which Pakistan's JIT was allowed to visit here, government told the Rajya Sabha today.

Minister of State for External Affairs Gen V K Singh also insisted that the meeting between the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries here recently was "no formal talks".

Singh's response came after opposition members attacked the government over its handling of Pathankot issue and questioned whether NIA will be allowed to visit Pakistan since its JIT (Joint Investigation Team) already came here in connection with Pathankot terror attack probe.

The members also questioned whether India will be allowed access to interrogate Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar in connection with the terror attack.

"So far as we are concerned, our High Commissioner had conveyed formally to Pakistan Foreign Ministry that the terms of reference of the (JIT) visit are broadly agreed to with the proviso that they would be on the basis of reciprocity and followed in accordance with the extant legal provisions," the Minister said in his reply.

He insisted that this has been "very clearly conveyed" to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Pakistan.

Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, who met his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar here on Tuesday for a "courtesy" meeting, was also conveyed this, Singh said.

"It was conveyed to the Foreign Secretary of Pakistan, when he unofficially on a courtesy visit, met our our Foreign Secretary here that they have to look into our NIA visiting Pakistan. He has to go back and take a formal view and convey to us," he said.

"...What appears in the newspapers, we are not concerned about it. So far as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan is concerned, it has not denied the reciprocity issue," he said.

Jaishankar and Chaudhry met here on Tuesday on the sidelines of a regional conference.

Questions were posed to the MoS for External Affairs by



members in the House in the backdrop of a Pakistani media report which claimed that the JIT had told the government there that Pathankot attack was "staged" by India to malign Pakistan and that Indian authorities did not cooperate with the team.

Members also voiced concern over the reported statement by Pakistan High Commissioner to India Abdul Basit that the investigation into the attack does not include reciprocity.

Acknowledging that the Pathankot attack has served to stress once again the centrality of India's concerns regarding cross-border terrorism in ties with Pakistan, the former Army Chief-turned-minister, however, defended the bilateral engagements saying it was for the first time in the history that country had showed a "cooperative attitude" after a terror attack.

Seeking to allay apprehensions on Pakistani team's probe regarding the Pathankot attack, Singh said the communication between the Pakistan's JIT and the country's NIA has happened in a "very professional manner" and their probe is identical.

He said that the JIT has been given the same evidence which the NIA has on the attack.

Deputy Leader of Congress Anand Sharma dismissed the written reply of the minister saying it "hides more than it reveals" and wanted to know what assurance was given by Pakistan to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that prompted him to suddenly visit that country to greet Nawaz Sharif on his birthday last year.

To questions on whether the issues like frequent ceasefire violations by Pakistan were discussed during the meeting of Foreign Secretaries, Singh said he wants to make it clear that "there has been no formal talks between our Foreign Secretary and his Pakistani counterpart."



Singh said Pakistan's Foreign Secretary had come here for the Heart of Asia Conference and met his Indian counterpart.

"Talks were held as per courtesy. These talks should not be considered formal talks," he said.
Pakistani authorities are looking for a group of suicide bombers who allegedly entered from Afghanistan to target different locations , a media reported said today.

The tip-off came after the deadly bombing in Kabul last week which killed 64 people and for which Afghanistan blamed the Pakistan-based Haqqani network.

The Dawn reported that as many as 11 suicide bombers entered from Afghanistan some 22 days ago, and two of them blew themselves up in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recently.

According to the sources, the bombers were affiliated with Sajna Group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

The information about them and their entry in the country was gathered by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and shared with the authorities concerned, they added.

"They may strike in the Punjab, especially in Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Lahore," the sources revealed.

The agency has advised the authorities concerned to improve security in and around hospitals, shopping centres, markets, parks, food streets and malls to prevent any terrorist activity, the officials added.

Intelligence agencies have kept an eye on slums and rural areas for possible presence of terrorists, he added.

"An information-based operation is being conducted by agencies and Rangers in these areas," he added.

Both Pakistan and Afghanistan in the past blamed each other that militants were using their soil to carry out attacks.
Goa Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar is not in favour of early state Assembly polls and wishes to continue the alliance with Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) during the elections.

"Our tenure ends in March (2017), so we want elections in the beginning of that month (March)," Parsekar told PTI yesterday after arriving from New Delhi where he had a meeting with BJP chief Amit Shah.

"We don't want elections before that. We have informed the party president about our stand," the chief minister said.

The five-year-long tenure of the BJP-led state government ends in March 2017. The party had rode to majority in the 2012 elections which they fought in an alliance with MGP.

"We always wanted to maintain and continue our alliance with MGP. Few MGP members were expressing their reluctance towards this. BJP never said about breaking their ties with MGP," Parsekar said.

MGP had last month expressed discomfort in giving an assurance for a tie-up for the 2017 elections. Its president Dipak Dhavalikar had said his party workers were not happy with BJP's attitude towards them.

MGP was an ally of Congress in the Digambar Kamat government from 2005 to 2012, but later joined hands with BJP.
Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee today alleged that voters in West Bengal were not being able to cast their votes freely because of the 'imposition' of Section 144 CrPC in certain areas during the ongoing Assembly poll.

"An unprecedented terror has been launched during the poll with the use of Section 144 of the CrPC in areas to stop people from voting," Banerjee alleged during a roadshow in the city.

She continued, "But don't be afraid. Please cast your own votes. Don't get intimidated by all those tricks," Banerjee said.

Banerjee said the CPI(M)-Congress alliance was only interested in spreading canards against the state government.

"They can't see the development that has taken place in the last five years, because their mindset is negative."



The roadshow, was also attended by TMC candidates Javed Khan, Aroop Biswas, Shovandeb Chattopadhya, and they covered large parts of the Kasba, Tollygunge and Jadavpur constituencies.
Experts in the College of Veterinary Sciences at Selesih, near Aizawl, who examined the samples of pigs suffering from an unknown disease at a village identified the disease as 'Greasy Pig Disease' or 'Exudative Epidermitis'.

Three pigs in this village, situated in the Champhai district bordering Myanmar, were suffering from the disease which caused discolouration of the skin of the pigs, making it look like the pig was suffering from a severe burn.

Veterinary doctors said that the disease was caused by a virus called 'Staphylococcus hyicus' and the victim pigs were now recuperating after being administered direct treatment.

The doctors said that the disease did not create epidemic situation while it could be communicated only through direct contact.
A letter threatening to blow up the Bihar Legislative Assembly was found to be fake, a senior police officer said here today.

Additional Director General of Police (Headquarters) Sunil Kumar said the letter was posted from Giridih in Jharkhand and received at the Assembly yesterday, following which a case was registered.

He said a police team was constituted under Deputy Superintendent of Police of Secretariat to investigate the matter.

Later, Senior Superintendent of Police of Patna said the police team went to Giridih to investigate and found that the letter was fake, Kumar added.
One person was tonight injured as police fired in the air to disperse a mob that attacked policemen at Baihata Chariali in Kamrup Rural district.

A mob started pelting stones at police personnel posted at Baihata Chariali alleging a bus driver was beaten up by them, police said.

When the mob attacked the security men, police fired in the air to control the situation resulting in serious injuries to one person.

The injured man was admitted to hospital, they said.

Locals put up road blockade in protest against the incident.

Police and civil administration officials have rushed to the spot.
Officials investigating Prince's death have allegedly found prescription painkillers in the singing legend's possession and at his home near Minneapolis.

It is unclear if the found painkillers played a role in the music icon's death.

According to NBC News, the county sheriff has asked for the help of the Drug Enforcement Administration in investigating Prince's death.

The DEA's role will be to determine where the drugs came from, and what prescriptions Prince had obtained.

An autopsy for Prince was conducted last Friday, but it will likely be weeks before results of toxicology tests are delivered.

A cause of death is yet to be determined.

Officials have ruled out suicide and "the rest is under investigation," Sheriff Jim Olson had said at a press conference last Friday.

Prince was found unconscious at his home on Thursday, April 21. Prior to his death, the musician underwent a treatment when his private jet made an emergency landing in Moline, Illinois on Friday, April 15.

Doctors reportedly gave him a "save shot," which is commonly given to counteract the effects of an opiate.
With a focus on developing strong relations with Pacific Island nations, President Pranab Mukherjee today arrived in the capital of Papua New Guinea here, the first ever visit by an Indian head of state since India established diplomatic ties with the country in 1975.

Mukherjee arrived here this morning on the first leg of his two-nation visit and was given a warm welcome. He was received by Deputy Prime Minister of PNG Leo Dion.

The President inspected a guard of honour as a 21-gun salute was accorded to him.

The visit of the President is seen as a diplomatic move to counter China's growing influence in the Pacific Island nations.

Before his departure from India, his Press Secretary Venu Rajamony had said the visit was a natural extension of India's 'Look East' policy.

India is looking to enter the health market of the island nation. Ahead of his visit here, the Indian government had approved the signing of an agreement between the two countries, seeking cooperation in the field of healthcare and medical sciences.

The pact will encourage cooperation between the Health Ministries of both the nations through joint initiatives in the sector.

The visit is likely to give push to Indian pharmaceutical companies to set up businesses in the Pacific nation after the local government withdrew a ban in January.

With a population of 7.38 million, diseases like HIV and AIDS are listed as quite rampant in this Pacific nation.

The life expectancy in the country is also less because of high cost of medical care.

Mukherjee, on April 30, will travel to New Zealand as part of the second leg of his tour.

India and New Zealand will explore prospects for cooperation in agriculture, dairy, food processing, education and skill development as well as high technology during the visit.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key had visited India in 2011 and its Governor General in 2008, 2009 and 2011.

The last high-level visit from India to New Zealand was by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1986.
Italian police have arrested four suspects in a foreign fighter investigation, including a Moroccan-born man living in Italy who had received Islamic State (IS) orders to carry out attacks on Rome during Holy Year, prosecutors said today.

Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli told reporters that investigators intercepted communications from within IS territory ordering attacks in Italy, "with particular attention to the city of Rome" and focusing on the Holy Year pilgrimage now underway.

He said the messages promoting lone-wolf attacks were "very strong, very serious and very efficient," indicating that Islamic State's current policy is to push for attacks in locations where foreign fighters are residing "as the best way of creating terror within Western countries."



While prosecutors gave no indication that attacks were imminent, Romanelli said authorities acted quickly to close the investigation, arresting four people in the northern Lombardy region and issuing arrest warrants for two others believed to be in IS territory.

"This is a new profile, because it was not a generic indication, but an indication given to a specific person who was invited to act within the territory of the Italian state," Romanelli said.

He said the death in battle late last year of a foreign fighter with ties to the group within IS territory had contributed to the radicalisation process. The fighter had been expelled from both Italy in 2015 and later, from Switzerland before traveling to IS territory, where he was killed.

Italian Premier Matteo Renzi praised the anti-extremists operation as "very important."



Authorities arrested the Moroccan-born man, identified as Abderrahim Moutahrrick, and his wife, Salma Bencharki, who allegedly were planning on travelling from their home in Lecco, north of Milan, to IS territory with their children aged 2 and 4.

Romanelli said Moutahrrick had taken Italian citizenship and was an accomplished boxer.

Another Moroccan man who was planning to travel with them, identified as Abderrahmane Khachia, 23, was arrested in the northern city of Varese. It was the death of his elder brother that prosecutors identified as the radicalising event.
A local court today rejected anticipatory bail application filed by Maple Group chairman Sachin Agarwal and other executives who were booked on the charge of cheating by publishing "misleading" advertisements in newspapers promising flats to buyers at cheaper rates.

Additional Sessions Judge S B Kachare rejected the plea filed yesterday by Agarwal, Managing Director Naveen Agrawal and Sales Manager Priyanka Agrawal after the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) opposed it.

"We had opposed the bail application in the court and now the court has rejected the bail," said police inspector Rajendra Mulik of Economic Offence Wing.

He said the police are trying to trace the whereabouts of all suspects.

The CMD and other officials of the builder firm did not turn up before police despite notices served on them after registration of the offence.

Maple Group had recently published advertisements promising a 1-BHK flat for only 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 that the project, titled Maharashtra Housing Day, was a part of Pradhan Mantri Aawas Yojana (PMAY).

The firm started returning money to depositors after a case was registered against them following an uproar.

Police had said that around 32,000 people had booked a flat in the low-cost housing project.

Maple Group had already expressed "regret" over the "confusion" caused by the advertisement.

(Reopens LGB3)



Meanwhile, EOW today slapped additional charges of forgery and criminal breach of trust against the accused.

"We have slapped sections 467 (forgery of valuable security) 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged document) and 409 (criminal breach of trust) of Indian Penal Code," said Deputy Commissioner of Police Deepak Sakore.

He said that one of the reasons behind imposing additional charges is that Maple Group had used the logo of 'Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana' in their advertisement without permission.

Sakore said police had sent some queries to Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) and PMAY and sought their response.

"They have informed us that no formal permission or proposal was sent to them by the developer before releasing the advertisement," he said.
Russia launched the first rocket from its new Vostochny cosmodrome today, with President Vladimir Putin hailing the event after dressing down officials over a delay caused by a technical glitch.

The launch is a major milestone for Russia's beleaguered space sector, with the new spaceport in the country's far east touted to mark a rebirth of an industry plagued by a string of embarrassments in recent years.

Carrying three satellites, the Soyuz 2.1a rocket took off at 11:01 am, the Roscosmos national space agency said in a statement, after the countdown was automatically halted for technical reasons 24 hours previously.

National television showed the rocket taking off into a blue sky in light winds, although foreign media organisations including AFP were not allowed to enter the new space centre.

Putin was present for the take-off.

"You know they say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. You have to make the first launch to confirm the cosmodrome is ready for work. And you did it!" Putin told industry officials.

"I want to congratulate you. We can be proud. It's a serious and important contribution to the development of the Russian space industry," he added.

"Yesterday the technical side was put to the test and the launch had to be stopped, but it happens. It's a normal thing."



The postponement of Vostochny's inaugural launch had seen the Russian strongman scold space chiefs -- despite delays worldwide being relatively frequent.

A European launch from French Guiana had to be put off three times last week before finally taking place on Monday.

The Russian delay was due to a malfunction of a cable, space agency spokesman Mikhail Fadeyev, told AFP.

Putin officially reprimanded Dmitry Rogozin, the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the space and defence industries, and Roscosmos head Igor Komarov over the delay, his spokesman told reporters.

Construction on the new spaceport began in 2012 but has been marred by labour disputes, corruption scandals and delays.

The first satellite launch had been scheduled for late 2015, but setbacks forced authorities to review the timetable.

"Despite all its failings, Russia remains the world leader in the number of space launches," Putin told a meeting of space officials yesterday.

"But the fact that we're encountering a large number of failures is bad. There must be a timely and professional reaction.
Kashmir issue must be resolved in the context of the "domestic and political" environment between India and Pakistan, the head of the UN peacebuilding commission has said as he underlined the need for respecting the primacy of the political situation on the ground.

"The Indian Kashmir issue (with) Pakistan is an old issue. It has been there for a very long time. It will be resolved in the context of the local, domestic, political environment between Pakistan and India," Peacebuilding Commission Chair Macharia Kamau told reporters at a conference here yesterday.

Asked by a Pakistani journalist on how any peacebuilding in the area can go forward without resolving outstanding issues like Kashmir, Kamau said that the peacebuilding commission will be looking to see that "we respect the idea that they must sustain peace, so that the situation cannot be allowed to deteriorate."



Outlining the expectation and ambition that the commission has for the issue in the region, he added that the "primacy" of politics, "the fact that we have to respect the local, political conditions that drive the negotiations has to be respected and we reach out to as many of the institutions within the subcontinent to support this process moving forward.

"That is the ambition that we would have for that process on the subcontinent," he said.

He said while such an approach will "absolutely" compliment the process it will "unlikely" have an "overnight fundamental impact" that will change everything on the ground.

"That is unlikely precisely because the situation on the ground is driven by different forces other than the ones that we are looking to ourselves to address," he said.

On whether the outcome of any resolution on Kashmir will be dependent on India's willingness to talk to Pakistan, Kamau asserted that this is not the case.

"I wouldn't go as far as to say that. What I want to say is that the situation on the ground has to be respected and it isn't about any one country. It is about all the political players on the ground that is the issue," he said.

When asked that the UN resolution on Kashmir has been there for decades, will its objectives ever be met, he said "we never say never in our business. That is not the way in which one approaches the pursuit of peace.

"The whole idea of pursuing peace is to always seek solutions and to look for the historical moments and opportunities that will avail you the opportunity to engage and to bring the instruments that are now available to us in the context of these resolutions to bear on the situation keeping in mind that we have to respect the primacy of the political situation on the ground.
Members in Rajya Sabha today termed RTIs and PILs as a "big problem" for the country, with Samajwadi Party member Naresh Agrawal alleging that the Right to Information (RTI) Act was passed "under US pressure".

As some other members also joined in expressing concern during the Question Hour over the misuse of RTI, Government expressed readiness to look into the issue of "misuse" of RTI.

Calling it a law "passed in a hurry", Praful Patel (NCP) said that there is no locus of people seeking answers under RTI. "Some 'panwadi' (betel leaf seller) or 'chaiwala' (tea vendor) can also ask who made a missile programme or anything on international relations," he said.

Seated in the treasury benches, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has frequently referred to his modest origins as a tea seller, began laughing at Patel's reference to tea vendors. Leader of the House Arun Jaitley, who was seated next to Modi, also smiled.

Patel soon sought to make amends by saying he did not make this remark keeping Modi's origin in mind. "There is no disrespect to the Prime Minister. Rather it is an honour," he said.

Under this law, anybody can pay Rs 10 and seek information about missiles, he said and asked "is the government willing to consider amendments in this Act."



Patel said government officials were afraid of taking decisions because of the fear of the RTI. "They wonder what will come out in the RTI. Objectivity is finished. We all have concerns about this," Patel said.

Alleging that RTI law was enacted "under US pressure", SP's Naresh Agarwal wanted to know whether such laws existed in neighbouring countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh.

When he said something which was not audible in the din, former Union Minister Jairam Ramesh, who is believed to have played an active role in enactment of the RTI during the UPA government, was enraged.

"This is totally wrong," he said evoking a strong response from Agrawal, who reminded that Ramesh is no longer a minister and people "uprooted" Congress due to such "misconceptions".

The SP member went on saying "RTI and PIL are a big problem for the country. So many departments have requested in writing to be kept out of the ambit of RTI.

Rajiv Shukla (Cong) said the RTI was being "misused".

"People have got visiting cards printed with RTI activist embossed on them as if it was some designation. What steps are being taken to check such misuse."



Responding to concerns about the misuse, Minister for State Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions Jitendra Singh said "cognizance of the issue has been taken. Some measures have already been put in place. Perhaps there is scope to bring in some more provisions."



He said that as far as the concern that the law may deter officers from taking initiatives, the "government is equally conerned."



The minister was replying to a question regarding a study by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, which said ministries and departments were reluctant and unwilling to share even basic data under the RTI Act.

Singh also claimed that the response to queries under the Act has gone up substantially under the NDA rule and for the first time, all vacant posts of RTI officers have been filled up.

"As per the annual report of the Chief Information Commissioner (CIC), 75.27 percent of the Public Authorities have filed their annual returns to the CIC for 2014-15, which is higher than the figure of 72.54 percent for 2013-14, indicating an improved compliance over the previous year," the minister said.
Moscow will join the global battle against tax evasion and other illicit activities by signing up to an international scheme to stamp out fiscal cheating, Russia's finance minister said today.

It follows in the wake of the "Panama papers" scandal which shined a light on the vast offshore holdings of individuals close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that Russia will sign the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development agreement on automatic sharing of tax data at a meeting in Beijing in May.

Moscow hopes to be a full member of the OECD's information exchange system by 2018, according to Russian media.

A close Putin confidante was implicated in a series of global reports that revealed how a Panamanian law firm set up offshore entities to help the world's wealthy stash their assets.

Reports based on the leaks linked Putin's close friend, cellist Sergei Roldugin, to shell firms that shuffled at least USD 2 billion and made money out of thin air from questionable deals with Russian state companies.
British film and stage director Sam Mendes will head the jury of the 73rd Venice Film Festival.

The 50-year-old "Skyfall" director will be responsible for selecting several awards, including the Golden Lion for best film and Silver Lion for best director, reported Variety.

Mendes' rapport with the festival dates back to 2002 when he was in the Venice competition with Tom Hanks-starrer "Road to Perdition," which is the only one of his movies to launch from an international film festival.

"I am very honoured to have been asked by Alberto to lead the International Jury for Venezia 73. I've always had a strong personal connection with Venice; as a student I worked for three months at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection way back in 1984, and my happiest film festival memory is launching 'Road To Perdition' at Venice in 2002," Mendes said.

The upcoming edition of Venice will see Alberto Barbera remain in the saddle as artistic director, thanks to an extension of his mandate beyond the fest's customary four year term.

Barbera called Mendes' work "a particularly effective and convincing synthesis of a vocation for distinctive theatre and cinema."



"His productions, whether destined for stage or screen, are able to reconcile the expectations of the most exacting critics with the tastes of a vast audience which seems to transcend all geographical and cultural boundaries," he said.

Last year Alfonso Cuaron served as Venice jury head, two years after his film "Gravity" launched from the fest in 2013.

The 73rd edition of Venice will run August 31-September 10.
Saudi Arabia today executed a Jordanian convicted of drug smuggling, bringing to 88 the number of foreigners and Saudis put to death this year.

Mohammed Abu Zayed had been found guilty of smuggling amphetamines in his car, the interior ministry said.

Authorities carried out the sentence against him in northwestern Tabuk region, which borders Jordan.

Amphetamines are stimulants most often targeted at students and labourers in the kingdom, interior ministry spokesman General Mansour al-Turki told reporters last month.

He added that war-ravaged Syria has become one of the biggest producers of the drug.

Most people put to death in Saudi Arabia are beheaded with a sword.

The executions so far this year include 47 for "terrorism" carried out in a single day on January 2.

Murder and drug trafficking cases account for the majority of Saudi executions.

Amnesty International said Saudi Arabia had the third highest number of people put to death last year -- at least 158.

That was far behind Pakistan, which executed 326, and Saudi Arabia's regional rival Iran, which executed at least 977, said Amnesty, whose figures exclude secretive China.
The Supreme Court today reserved its verdict on a plea of former apex court judge Justice Markandey Katju seeking quashing of resolutions passed by both Houses of Parliament for calling Mahatama Gandhi and Subhash C Bose British and Japanese "agents" respectively in his blog.

Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, whose assistance was sought by the court in deciding the plea of the former judge, vehemently opposed the petition saying that such kind of parliamentary acts are "not open to judicial scrutiny".

"Parliament would not have reacted had it been any Tom, Dick or Harry. They passed the resolution as the statement has come from a former high constitutional functionary.

"You defame the father of the nation who is as important as national flag and then you say that the Parliament cannot react even in mildest terms," the law officer told the bench comprising Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justices R Banumathi and U U Lalit.

Echoing the views, earlier expressed by senior advocate F S Nariman who is assisting the bench as amicus curiae, Rohatgi said, "I am shocked that the former judge of this court has said about the father of the nation all this that he was a British agent and Bose was the agent of Japanese".

Rohatgi further said that the Parliament rightly did not give him the opportunity to put forth his views as it did not issue any "censure" against him.

Parliament is entitled to condemn such kind of statements in strongest possible terms as "he (Justice Katju) is not a small politician or a small businessman who can say anything".

He also said that the "derogatory" remarks on Gandhi and Bose provoked the MPs to condemn his views unanimously.

In a rejoinder, senior advocate Gopal Subramanium, appearing for the former judge, said he would not have any problem if Parliament resolutions were mere opinions and not a censure kind of thing.

Earlier, the court had said MPs who passed the resolution condemning the former judge for his blog enjoyed the same freedom of speech and expression as him.

The court had also said that prima facie the resolutions



were passed to condemn the views and it was not a proceeding to "censure" Justice Katju.

Earlier, the apex court had said "prima facie" it did not find fault with Parliament passing resolutions condemning Justice Katju for his blog against Mahatma Gandhi and Bose.

Katju has moved the court seeking quashing of resolutions passed by both Houses of Parliament for calling Mahatama Gandhi and Subhash C Bose British and Japanese "agents" respectively.

In his Facebook post, the former judge had criticised Parliament for censuring him without even giving him a hearing.

The resolutions were passed against him by Lok Sabha on March 12 and Rajya Sabha on March 11 last year.

Alternatively, Katju has sought a direction to Lok Sabha Speaker and Chairman of the Upper House that he be heard personally or through a lawyer duly appointed by him.

"It is a basic principle of natural justice that no one should be condemned unheard. But paying scant regard to this principle, the Hon'ble members of both Houses of the Indian Parliament all flocked together with one voice to condemn me, like the Queen of Hearts in 'Alice in Wonderland' who would say 'Off with his head! ' even before she would give a hearing to someone..," Justice Katju, who has created controversies with several of his comments in the past, wrote in his post.

The petition claimed Parliament lacked "competence" to condemn him.
Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif today inaugurated a motorway as part of the USD 46 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project that passes through PoK.

The 120-km Havelian-Thakot Motorway section passes through Abbottabad and Mansehra districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

It is part of the CPEC and will be completed in 42 months with a cost of about Rs 134 billion.

"I am putting the country on the path of progress while opposition wants to derail it," he told thousands the gathering.

The motorway announced today is major initiative to complete the CPEC at the earliest and China Exim bank will fund 90 per cent of the project.

Pakistan will finance the remaining 10 per cent.

The CPEC will link western China to southern part of Pakistan through a network of roads, railways and other developmental projects.

On Panama Papers controversy, Sharif said he had already tasked the Supreme Court to set up a probe commission.

Sharif's two sons and a daughter have been named in the leaked papers for alleged links offshore companies.
Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia today apprised a Cambodian delegation on the anti-corruption initiatives taken by the AAP government in the National Capital.

The four-member Cambodian delegation comprising members of Upper House of Parliament, headed by Senator Mam Bunneang, discussed legal frameworks and efforts made by Delhi Government to combat corruption with Sisodia.

According to an official statement, Sisodia told them that the government "is struggling for bringing a strong Jan Lok Pal in order to curb the corruption. The bill has been passed by the Delhi Government and is pending with the Central Government for approval."



Bunneang appreciated the measures taken by the government and said that the Cambodian Government can adopt them as well, the statement said.

The Jan Lokpal Bill was passed by the Delhi Assembly in December last year.
Atleast six persons were arrested after a group of proxy students took private Class X and XII exams for others at a centre in Kalyan here, police said today.

The incident took place yesterday when the accused (students and their proxies) sneaked into the exam centre with fabricated hall tickets and resorted to copying in the exams with the help of text books, PSI M B Kathure of Kolsewadi police station under Kalyan division told PTI.

The accused were held from the centre at the Saket College in Kalyan while they appeared for the private exams conducted by National Institute of Open Schooling of New Delhi, police said.

So far, over a dozen persons have been booked in connection with the fraud but only six of them have been arrested, they said.

However, the identity of the arrested accused, who are in age group of 16-19 years, was not revealed.

Police said they were on the look out for supervisor Anil Dubey who did not not follow proper checking procedures while allowing students into the exam hall.

Offences under sections 420, 419 of the IPC and also under 7 and 10 of the Maharashtra Prevention of Malpractices at University, Board, and other specified examinations act 1982, have been registered against the accused.

Based on a complaint by the Principal of the College, police registered the offence last night.
A 20-year-old girl was allegedly abducted and raped on the pretext of marriage by a Thane police sub-inspector, who was arrested today from Pune, police said.

Sub-Inspector Santosh Sonawane (30) was arrested today after Thane police registered a complaint against him yesterday under relevant sections of IPC and forwarded it to Wanwadi Police station in Pune, senior Police Inspector of Wanwadi Police station, Sachin Sawant said.

The accused will be produced in court and his custody will be sought, he said.

Sonawane has been charged under sections 376 (rape), 420 (cheating), 363 (kidnapping), 341 (wrongful restraint), 342 (wrongful confinement), 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC, police said.

The Thane police yesterday registered an offence against the SI and later the case was transferred to Wanawadi police station in Pune since the complainant hails from there, Thane police PRO Gajanan Kabdule said.

The accused allegedly raped the girl on April 13 and 17 at her house in Pune and later took a room at Kalwa township in Thane where he committed the offence between April 23 and 26, he said, based on the complaint filed by the victim.

Kabdule said Sonawane, who is already married, developed friendship with the girl and promised to help her in pursuing B.Pharma course.

The accused met her several times and then allegedly raped the girl at her house in Pune and also at other places, police said.

He asked her to come to Kalwa township in Thane, and requested one of his friends, an autorickshaw driver, from Pune to bear the expenses of her journey which the latter did, Kabdule said.

The policeman also threatened to commit suicide if she failed to turn up to meet him, the complaint by the girl said.

When the girl came to Kalyan township in Thane, the accused tied a 'mangalsutra' around her neck to pose that he had married here, the complained said.

He also did not want the girl to reveal her whereabouts to her parents, police added.
A student was shot dead during clashes between Sudanese security forces and protesters at a university in the capital's twin city of Omdurman, officials have said.

Violence erupted yesterday when security forces confronted angry students who spilled out of the campus of Ahaliya university in Omdurman, which lies on the western banks of the Nile opposite Khartoum.

The protesters were demanding the release of fellow students arrested in previous demonstrations at Sudanese universities.

"Students clashed with plain-clothed policemen when they stepped out of the university gate," a protester said.

A doctor at Omdurman hospital told AFP the student was already dead when he was brought to the facility.

Late yesterday President Omar al-Bashir's National Congress Party said in a statement that the student was "shot dead with a pistol outside the campus".

Hundreds of students carried his body from the hospital covered in a white shroud to his home in an impoverished neighbourhood of the city, an AFP correspondent reported.

"Killing of student means killing of nation!" angry students chanted as they marched in a procession.

Riot police and plain-clothed officers were deployed around the hospital and also walked along with the procession.

Omdurman's Ahaliya university condemned the killing and ordered the institution to be closed for an indefinite period.

Yesterday's incident came a day after police used tear gas to disperse a protest at Khartoum university over what students said was a government plan -- denied by the authorities -- to sell iconic Khartoum university buildings.

Universities in Sudan have seen regular protests, with the authorities often closing the institutions to prevent unrest.
Attacking lawmakers for terming RTIs and PILs as a "big problem" for the country, Swaraj Abhiyan today said it is nothing but an attempt to escape transparency and accountability.

"It is shocking that our Members of Parliament find RTI obtrusive in functioning of a democracy. Even more shocking is that parliamentarians of the Upper House look at the common man (chaiwala, paanwala) with disdain, almost mocking the interest or inquiry in the functioning of the executive.

"To see the parliamentarians question its rationale and mock the common people (chaiwala, paanwala), who seek information, is an effort to escape transparency and accountability. Swaraj Abhiyan condemns this in strongest possible words," Swaraj Abhiyan, led by Yogendra Yadav and activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan, said in a post on social media.

The post said right from the Indira Gandhi Vs Raj Narain case in 1974, the Supreme Court of India has reiterated in many cases that "RTI is a fundamental right".

"The Act - implemented after a long movement and constant struggle of activists who continue to be targeted by the establishment even today - has been a potent instrument in exposing corruption and a building block of a progressive and transparent India," the post added.

Members in Rajya Sabha today termed RTIs and PILs as a "big problem" for the country, with Samajwadi Party member Naresh Agrawal alleging that Right to Information (RTI) Act was passed "under US pressure".

Calling it a law "passed in a hurry", Praful Patel (NCP) said that there is no locus of people seeking answers under RTI. "Some 'panwadi' (betel leaf seller) or 'chaiwala' (tea vendor) can also ask who made a missile programme or anything on international relations," he said.
The Syrian army was preparing an offensive to retake the northern city of Aleppo, where 53 civilians were killed in fighting today in a new blow to a tattered truce.

It was the highest death toll for a single day in a week of fighting in the divided city of Aleppo between rebels and regime forces that has cost more than 200 lives, a monitoring group said.

UN envoy Staffan de Mistura warned that a hard-won February 27 ceasefire was now "barely alive", appealing for urgent action by its co-sponsors Russia and the United States to rescue it.

At the Security Council, UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien echoed de Mistura, urging world powers to revive the truce and put an end to the "massive human suffering" in war-torn Syria.

But pro-government newspaper Al-Watan said the army was poised for a "decisive battle" for Aleppo and the surrounding province, while a source close to the regime said the campaign was imminent.

"Now is the time to launch the battle for the complete liberation of Aleppo," the paper said, adding that it "will not take long to begin, nor to finish".

The regime source told AFP that "the army is preparing a huge operation in the coming days to push the rebels away from the city by encircling it and creating a security zone".

Rebels have controlled eastern districts of Aleppo city since 2012, while western neighbourhoods are held by the regime.

Control of the surrounding province is divided between a myriad of armed groups -- jihadists of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, Kurdish militia and various rebel factions as well as the army.

Further north in the province, rebels including the powerful Islamist Ahrar al-Sham group and Kurdish forces fought fierce battles yesterday and early today that left 64 fighters dead, a monitor said.

The upsurge in violence in and around Aleppo has strained the February truce between the government and non-jihadist rebels and cast a shadow over UN efforts to convene a new round of peace talks next month and channel aid to Syria's beleaguered population.

Rebel rocket and artillery fire on government-held neighbourhoods today killed 22 civilians, including two children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Regime air strikes on rebel-held districts killed 31 civilians, including three children, according to the British-based monitor.
The Taliban must "face the consequences" for calling off peace talks with the Afghan government, the US said today as it once again asked Pakistan to go after terrorists that threaten its neighbours.

"Unfortunately, the Taliban have refused to come to the table, so it is our view that they should face the consequences of that decision," Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Olson told members of the House Foreign Relations Committee during a hearing.

"We've long expressed our concerns to the Pakistanis about their reluctance to go after terrorists that threaten their neighbours with the same degree of assiduousness that they go after their own terrorists. We think that they are at a moment of needing to make a very strategic and fundamental choice," Olson said when asked what Pakistan is doing to bring the Taliban to the negotiation table.

"Their (Pakistan's) stated policy, which we agree with, is not to discriminate among terrorist groups. We believe there is considerable room for improvement in the application of that policy on the ground and we believe in particular that Pakistan has not taken as vigorous action against groups that threaten its neighbours as it has against those that threaten it domestically," he noted.

"So Pakistan has also been very helpful in the reconciliation process, but I do believe that there is a strategic choice right now. With the Taliban having refused to come to the table, it seems to us that it is time to address more robustly the question of groups that threaten Afghanistan," Olson said.

The US, he said, has pressed the Pakistan government on its commitment not to discriminate among terrorist groups.

"We believe across regions there must be zero tolerance for safe havens," he said.

America's relationship with Pakistan, a growing country with more than 190 million people, a nuclear arsenal, challenges and a key role to play in the region, will remain a critical one, he said.

"In Pakistan, we see the government in a concerted and difficult fight against terror groups that threaten Pakistanis. But unfortunately, Pakistan does not take equivalent steps against groups that threaten its neighbours," Olson said.

"Our core initiatives in Pakistan, include promoting economic growth, countering terrorism, fostering regional stability and promoting the consolidation of democratic institutions. Let me emphasise, we have repeatedly and frankly underscored with most senior leaders of Pakistan that the Haqqani Network must be part of their wider counterterrorism operations in order to keep their commitment not to discriminate between terrorist organisations," Olson said.
Andhra Pradesh Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu has taken exception to the audience granted by leaders of various national parties and "some bigwigs in the Central government" to YSR Congress president Y S Jaganmohan Reddy in Delhi in the last two days.

"It would have been good if the leaders of national parties and some bigwigs in the Central government did not meet Jagan, who is out on bail after spending 16 months in jail. He is the prime accused in 12 charge sheets (filed by the CBI in various corruption cases). The national leaders would have sent good signals to the people had they not granted an audience to Jagan," Yanamala said in a statement here today.

"If people holding high positions encourage those with a criminal record, it would create misgivings among people. There were instances in the past when the national leaders and bigwigs in the Central government declined to meet Jagan. What they did now is inappropriate," the Finance Minister pointed out, without naming anyone.

He was apparently referring to Jagan's meeting with Union ministers Rajnath Singh and Arun Jaitley besides CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury and others in Delhi.

"The bigwigs in the Central government, those occupying constitutional positions and leaders of national parties should act with foresight. They should act in a manner that enhances confidence and faith in Constitution, democracy, judiciary and laws of the land," Yanamala, who is also the TDP politburo member, observed.

Referring to Jagan's "malicious propaganda" that the TDP was purchasing YSRC MLAs by offering Rs 30 crore each, the Finance Minister said it only exposed the bankruptcy of the opposition leader.

"It was your late father Rajasekhara Reddy who launched 'Operation Akarsh' when he was Chief Minister and snatched away legislators from opposition parties. Why did you not question it then? Why did you not open your mouth when opposition MLAs were lured away in Telangana," Yanamala asked.

"The YSRC MLAs were crossing over to the TDP only as Jagan was standing as a wall to block the development of AP. It's ridiculous that you are crying hoarse over it," Yanamala said.
In the latest case of honour killing in Pakistan, a teenage boy today slit his younger sister's throat and let her bleed to death.

Hayat Khan attacked his 17-year-old sister Sumaira with a knife multiple times after he found her talking to a man on her mobile phone at their home in the Orangi Town, senior police officer Azfar Mahesar was quoted as saying by The Express Tribune.

The girl succumbed to her injuries during medical treatment at the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital.

Investigating officer Gulzar Ahmed confirmed the details of the attack adding the girl had suffered multiple stab wounds to the neck, chest and back.

The suspect, who was taken into custody by local police, said he saw his sister talking to a youngster at their doorstep but as soon as he arrived at the spot the boy ran away, the police official said.

"The victim refused to say anything which made her brother suspicious and he attacked her with a kitchen knife," the official said.

Women in Pakistan have fought for their rights for decades, in a country where honour killings and acid attacks remain commonplace.

More than 500 men and women died in honour killings last year, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Many of these crimes, carried out by relatives who say their mostly female victims have brought shame on the family, are never prosecuted, observers say.

Last month, a young couple from North Waziristan Agency had been shot dead for marrying of their free will. They were killed allegedly by the woman's uncle and his son inside their house in Orangi Town.
For the third consecutive day, Malampuzha in Kerala's Palakaad district recorded the highest temperature of 41.7 degrees Celsius in the state even as Kerala decided to approach the Centre to declare it 'drought hit'.

Chief Minister Oommen Chandy wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in this regard and also asked the Centre to relax its conditions and guidelines to declare the state as drought hit.

A high-level meeting convened by the Chief Minister had decided to ask the Centre to declare the state drought hit early in the day.

Government also decided to give Rs four lakh assistance to the next of kin of those who had died in the sizzling heat, Revenue minister Adoor Prakash told reporters after the meeting.

Priority will be given for distribution of drinking water and about Rs 13 crore with district collectors will be used.

The worst affected districts are Palakkad, Kollam, Alapuzha and Pathnamthitta.

There was crop loss in about 1,038 hectares due to droght and the government will provide compensation to the farmers.

While Kozhikode recorded 39.1 degrees celsius, in Kannur it was 37.3 degrees celsius and 37 at Punalur.

The lowest temperature in the state was 34.4 at Trivandrum airport.

While Malampuzha recorded 41.6 degrees celsius yesterday, it recorded 41.9 degrees Celsius, the highest in 29 years, on April 26.

From May 2, Kerala is likely to get scattered summer showers, Met office sources said.
Thailand Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha today warned people against posting politically provocative online messages against the government, saying they should not mix up human rights issue with law enforcement.

Ten people were detained recentlyin Bangkok and Khon Kaen city in the country's northeast for allegedly breaching the computer crime law by their criticism of the regime and prime minister.

Another 16 people were taken away by authorities on yesterday evening here for staging a protest against the detention of the 10 netizens.

Responding to concerns that the country would be pressured by the international community over human rights violations due to the arrests, General Prayut said people should not mix the human rights issue with law enforcement.

"Did they commit a wrongdoing? If they did, they must all be arrested," General Prayut was quoted as saying by Bangkok Post responding to the regime's detention of the netizens.

Police and the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology will look into the matter and the court will decide whether they are guilty.

The protests were organised by the New Democracy Group and the Resistant Citizen Group.

"If you do not break the law, nothing can be done to you," General Prayut said.

Officers had been keeping tabs on the social media activities of the 10 detained and are confident in proceeding with legal action against them,Colonel Winthai Suwaree, spokesman for the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) said.

The Southeast Asia director of Amnesty International, Josef Benedict, asked the government to"immediately release" those detained, unconditionally.

"If ordinary people cannot comment on a Facebook post without facing the threat of 10 years behind bars and a hefty fine, what hope is there for any open and honest debate on the military government's draft constitution?" Bangkok Post quoted the Amnesty representative.
Thailand today sought more investment from Indian companies as it looks to increase the volume of bilateral trade and position itself as a regional logistics hub.

"We are a leading economy in Asean region and invite Indian companies to invest for our growth.

"Nearly USD 200 million has been invested by Indian companies in the last two years and Thailand has positioned itself as a regional logistics hub for Indian companies to help them cater to the needs of Asean countries," Consul of Commercial Affairs at Royal Thai Consulate-General, Mumbai, Suwimol Tilokruangchai, told reporters here.

Thailand's Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha is likely to visit India in June and discuss ways to increase bilateral trade, apart from resolving pending issues like full-fledged Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the two countries.

The two countries have a partial FTA with 83 items being traded at present, Consulate officials said.

Bilateral trade is growing at a "tremendous" rate and stood at USD 8,815 million in 2015, Tilokruangchai said.

The total trade between India and Asean countries in 2015 was worth USD 6.8 billion.

"Besides the trilateral road highway connecting India and Thailand via Myanmar that will connect the Asean region, Thailand has a clearly defined strategy to enhance its connectivity with India though infrastructure links, for example, the development of Pak Bara port on the Andaman Sea, while a private Thai company has obtained a concession to develop Dawei port in Myanmar to act as a gateway to India, the Middle East (West Asia) and Europe," Tilokruangchai said.

Thailand is organising 'Tilog-Logistics 2016', an exhibition on logistics service providers and intra-logistics technologies and solutions for Asean countries between September 21-23 in Bangkok.

Indian companies have been invited to participate in the trade conference, the organisers said.

Unifying the powers of 'Asean+6 Logistics' can boost logistics opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs through business networking and best practices in supply chain management, said Reed Tradex Company's Senior Manager-Portfolio Duangrat Udomsomporn.
The Wedding Brigade, a startup focussed on Indian weddings, has raised Rs 4 crore in funding led by Blume Ventures and four other angel investors.

The Pre-Series A funding will be allocated towards enhancing product and services offerings, growth activities and acquiring talent, a company statement said.

Formerly known as Indear, The Wedding Brigade allows users purchase wedding apparel, jewellery, gifts and other essentials on its platform.

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GirnarSoft acquires SaaS startup Connecto * GirnarSoft, the parent company of auto portals CarDekho.Com, Gaadi.Com and Zigwheels.Com, has acquired SaaS startup Connecto for an undisclosed amount in a cash and stock deal.

With this acquisition, GirnarSoft will leverage Connecto's tools to improve user experience across all the websites and apps of the company, it said in a statement.

Founded in November 2013 by Jagmal Singh and Saurabh Mathur, Connecto has built device-agnostic tools to help product managers and marketers communicate more efficiently with their customers.

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Anil Kapoor-backed Indi.Com launches service in India * Indi.Com, which is backed by Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor, today launched its social video platform in India.

Aimed at millennials, Indi.Com aims to democratise talent discovery and boost social media engagement for brands, it said in a statement.

With users from over 200 countries, the platform works as an extensive resource for brands to drive more meaningful and deep-rooted social media engagement, it added.

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Cognizant launches delivery centre in Kuala Lumpur * IT firm Cognizant today said it has set up a new delivery centre in Cyberjaya, Kuala Lumpur, which will accommodate more than 100 professionals.

Cognizant currently employs about 300 professionals in Malaysia.

Route Mobile acquires Cellent Technologies



* Messaging and voice API company Route Mobile Limited today announced that it has acquired city-headquartered Cellent Technologies.

This is in line with Route Mobile's strategy of pursuing inorganic growth to reach a wider set of enterprise customers as well as broaden its portfolio of products and services, a statement issued here said.

Cellent Technologies, part of the Goel Group, has presence in the A2P messaging markets of the Middle East and Africa. Over 250 customers and a team of over 30 people are now part of Route Mobile's family as part of this acquisition, it added.

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Quicko launches bulk e-filing platform for CAs,tax consultants * Quicko, an e-RI (Return Intermediary) registered with the Income Tax (IT) Department has launched bulk e-filing platform for chartered accountants and independent tax consultants for income tax e-filing within minutes.

Quicko is targeting 5 lakh Indians for income tax e-filing, as deadline for the same is July 31.

Indians from across 30 countries and 500 plus cities choose Quicko for Income tax e-filing. Over 1,00,000 people have been assisted by Quicko already for their tax related matters and targeting half a million (5 lakh) Indians. It is witnessing 5,000 filings every day by tax professionals, a company statement said here.

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Livspace launches home design automation platform * Online home design company Livspace, today announced the launch of a 'Home Design Automation Platform' which combines end-to-end design automation and e-commerce for more lucrative opportunities for interior designers.

This platform helps interior designers earn up to 6 times more and become design entrepreneurs, Livspace said in a statement.

With this announcement, Livspace is also inviting a select set of interior designers and studios to join the 'Livspace Home Design Partner Programme' which will be currently available in metros.

Gamesa secures 60 MW wind power proj from ReNew Power



* Gamesa today said that it has secured 60 MW wind power project from ReNew Power.

"Gamesa...Has received an order of 60 MW from ReNew Power, under a turnkey arrangement," the company said in a statement.

As per the agreement, Gamesa will supply 30 units of G97-2.0MW T104 turbine, which is scheduled to be commissioned by March 2017.

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Societe Generale becomes financial partner of Rugby India * European financial services group Societe Generale has tied up with Rugby India to promote the sport in the country.

"Societe Generale comes on board as the 'Financial Partner of Rugby India' and 'Title Sponsor of the Indian National Rugby Sevens Team' across all categories - senior, junior and women," the company said in a release.

The company has also extended financial support to World Rugby's 'Get Into Rugby' (GIR) programme--started in 2013 in India, an initiative for Rugby India to teach rugby at schools and motivate children to get into the sport.

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Faircent gets international recognition for finance services * Peer to peer lending marketplace Faircent.Com has been acclaimed as the 'Interbrand Breakthrough Brand in Finance' by Interbrand.

Faircent said it is the only P2P lending marketplace and alternative lending platform globally in the Interbrand Breakthrough Brands report.

Around 200 brands were nominated by a global network of key influencers - individuals chosen by Interbrand, Facebook, NYSE and Ready Set Rocket, the company said in a release.
Three persons, including two women, were killed when the car they were travelling in collided with a truck on Sinnar-Shirdi Road today, police said.

The deceased, who hailed from Mumbai and Gujarat, were going to Shirdi when the mishap occurred at around 1 PM, police said.

The driver of their vehicle survived as its air bag inflated soon after the collision.

Police have yet to ascertain the identity of the trio.
Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan today ruled out as impracticable the demand raised by opposition parties and social groups for imposition of a blanket ban on the sale of liquor in the state along the lines of Gujarat and Bihar, drawing the ire of Aam Aadmi Party.

"It is not possible to clamp a ban on liquor all of a sudden. Even if it (the ban) is imposed then those habitual to drinking will not be able to quit it and they will arrange it (liquor) from here and there. It will also lead to problems," Chouhan said, addressing a gathering at Bundelkhand's Ranipura village under the 'Gramodaya Se Bharat Uday' programme.

The demand for banning sale on liquor in the state was raised by Congress and Aam Aadmi Party.

"Those who consume liquor remain in a state of confusion that they are consuming liquor, but in fact it's liquor which is consuming the drunkards... Drunkenness is a cause for disaster," he said.

The Chief Minister said spreading awareness about ill-effects of drinking liquor is a better option than total prohibition.

"The better option is to run an awareness campaign on the issue and let people take a vow that they will not drink. This will gradually reduce the number of liquor shops in the state and time will come when people would say that there is no one in the state who is a habitual drinker," Chouhan said.

However, AAP has criticised the CM's statement.

"The state government's intention on the issue is not honest. If it (prohibition) is possible in Gujarat and Bihar then why not in Madhya Pradesh?" asked state AAP convener, Akshay Hunka.
Germany today criticised Republican White House frontrunner Donald Trump's "America first" prescriptions for US foreign policy as doomed to failure in today's globalised world.

In restrained diplomatic remarks, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier described Trump's radical proposed overhaul of US diplomacy and defence policy presented yesterday as "not without its contradictions".

"'America first' -- the key question is what does that mean for America's foreign policy engagement," Steinmeier told reporters when asked about Trump's closely-watched policy speech.

"The world's security architecture...Cannot be organised in a unilateral way. No American President will be able to ignore this changed reality, so 'America first' actually cannot be the answer."



Steinmeier questioned the logic of "saying on the one hand 'we're going to make America strong again' and on the other, emphasising America's retreat from the world".

"The two don't quite seem to go together," he said. "It doesn't really seem thought through."



In a major foreign policy speech short on specifics, Trump warned that Europe and Asia may have to defend themselves, and vowed to tear up trade deals, retool NATO to oppose migration and "radical Islam" and put US national interests ahead of all other considerations.

Trump's remarks came just days after US President Barack Obama wrapped up a trip to Europe in Germany, which he hailed as a major trade partner, NATO ally and political anchor of stability in a crisis-racked EU.

While Obama praised Chancellor Angela Merkel's welcoming stance toward asylum-seekers as being "on the right side of history", Trump has blasted Germany's decision to let in hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees as "insane".

During a joint press conference with Obama on Sunday, Merkel declined to comment on the prospect of Trump winning the White House in November, saying only that she was following the US campaign "with interest".
A Turkish court today sentenced two prominent Turkish journalists to two years behind bars for illustrating their columns with a controversial cartoon published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, their lawyer said.

The sentence handed to the columnists for the opposition Cumhuriyet daily Hikmet Cetinkaya and Ceyda Karan - which is still subject to appeal - comes amid growing alarm over press freedoms in Turkey.

"The two journalists were sentenced to two years each in jail," said Bulent Utku, the lawyer of the pair. "But we will appeal the ruling at the appeals court," he told AFP.

Karan and Cetinkaya went on trial in January last year on charges of "inciting public hatred" and "insulting religious values" after illustrating their columns with the controversial cartoon.

The opposition Cumhuriyet had published a four-page Charlie Hebdo pullout translated into Turkish that marked the French satirical weekly's first issue since the deadly attack on its Paris offices by Islamist gunmen in 2015.

The edition did not include the controversial front cover featuring Prophet Mohammed, but a smaller version of the cartoon was included twice inside the newspaper to illustrate columns on the subject by Karan and Cetinkaya.

Most media in Turkey had refrained from publishing the cover and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu at the time had condemned the publication of cartoons of the prophet as an "open provocation."



The Cumhuriyet daily, which staunchly opposes the Islamic-rooted government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been regularly targeted by prosecutions as concerns grow over freedom of speech in Turkey.

Its editor-in-chief Can Dundar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul are currently on trial on charges of revealing state secrets and could face multiple life sentences if found guilty.
Twitter, if used properly, may become a teaching tool so effective that students look forward to using it in class and continue to seek out new information with it after the school day ends, researchers say.

The study shows the potential benefits of using as a pedagogical tool based on survey results, interviews, and classroom observations of eighth-grade students in science classes, according to researchers from University of Vermont in the US.

Students reported significant increases in four key areas that contributed to their learning - exposure to reputable science and leaders, in real time; a broadening of the audience for their work outside the classroom; more opportunities for connecting science to their own lives; and new ways to communicate about science.

Researchers used middle school science classes to conduct the study. 95% of students agreed or strongly agreed that enabled them to follow real science in real time as it develops around the world.

Particularly motivating was the ability to interact via with leading organisations such as NASA, and science-related programmes, researchers said.

"NASA, and scientists that I follow, tweet a lot about cool science stuff," said one student.

Researchers suggested to another student who was interested in black holes that she reach out via Twitter to well known and popular astrophysicist Katie Mack.

Mack tweeted back to the student and included her in a conversation about black holes with other experts and students, researchers said.

The study found that 93% of students surveyed think Twitter enabled them to interact and share perspectives with a global audience outside the classroom.

"When I have something important to share about science that I like, as many as 52 people (Twitter followers) can see what I tweet instantly," said one student.

Another student said they use Twitter for academic support by tweeting with other students about concepts, assignments and projects, researchers said.

As many as 91% said Twitter helped them make connections between science and their own lives and interests, they said.

"Twitter has made me think about things that I like and had me think about the science related to them," said one student.

said Twitter helped them learn about science in new ways that related to their everyday lives, researchers said.

Around 81% of students agreed that Twitter helped them think creatively about new ways to communicate science, they said.

The findings were published in the Middle School Journal.
A drug smuggling racket was today busted by the city police with the apprehension of two inter-state drug peddlers and seizure of 2.7 kg opium from their possession.

Kaium Ul Huq and Chandan Naveen were nabbed from Hussaini Allam here by the Commissioner's Task Force (South Zone) team.

The accused duo allegedly indulged in procuring opium from West Bengal for supplying it to customers in Hyderabad, Commissioner's Task Force Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police N Koti Reddy said.

During the interrogation, it came to light that Chandan, a native of Madhya Pradesh and Kaium, who hails from West Bengal, arrested in separate cases, met in Chanchalguda jail here and became friends, police said.

They had met another accused Saleem from West Bengal, who is now absconding in the case.

"After the release from jail, Chandan contacted Kaium and asked him to supply opium to sell it in Hyderabad. Kaium in turn asked Saleem, who procured 2.7 kg opium at West Bengal and handed it over it Kaium," Reddy said.

Today, while Kaium Ul Haq reached Puranapool Darwaza here for the supply to Chandan, the duo were apprehended, he said.

The accused and the seized material were handed over to Central Crime Station, a wing of Hyderabad Police for necessary action against them, Reddy added.
With soaring temperatures causing forest fires in diffferent parts of Uttarakhand, Governor K K Paul today ordered deployment of additional staff and allocation of more funds to control blazes.

He also appealed to people of the state, especially those living in the hills, to lend a helping hand to forest personnel in reining in the fires.

Vast stretches of forest land have been destroyed in hundreds of forest fire incidents in Uttarakhand, which have so far claimed three lives.

Additional funds should be allocated and more staff posted to ensure that forest fires are controlled as soon as possible, Paul said at a meeting at the secretariat here to review steps being taken to control forest fires.

Describing the loss of forest wealth and wildlife in these fires as alarming, he said all possible efforts must be made to control them.

People would have to be made aware of the perils of burning garbage near forests, throwing burning cigarette stubs into them, and burning trees for clearing land which usually lead to the fires, he said.

Meanwhile, former chief minister Harish Rawat asked the Governor to declare the state as fire disaster stricken.

He asked the Governor to take steps like constitution of disaster management and fire extinguishing teams, allocation of different forest beats to them, involving the local population in the exercise by offering them insurance coverage and making them eligible for compensation in case of an accident.

Noting that Uttarakhand's forests will not be able to overcome ill-effects of the fires if they continue unabated like this, Rawat said even water bodies are being polluted due to the fires which will endanger the wildlife dependent on them.

Pradesh Congress President Kishore Upadhyay wrote to party workers, asking them unite to save the state's precious forest wealth.
The United Nation's aid chief today strongly appealed to world powers to revive the ceasefire in Syria and put an end to the "massive human suffering" that has deprived millions of people of food and medicine.

"We must all be ashamed this is happening on our watch," Stephen O'Brien told the Security Council during a meeting on the appalling humanitarian crisis from the five-year war.

The meeting came a day after UN peace envoy Staffan de Mistura told the council that the ceasefire that had allowed aid convoys to reach starving civilians in besieged towns was hanging by a thread.

Echoing De Mistura's call, O'Brien appealed for action to salvage the ceasefire that went into force on February 27 and paved the way for peace talks.

"You must not squander the opportunity presented by talks in Geneva and by the cessation of hostilities to put an end to the massive human suffering in Syria," said the UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs.

"The world and the people of Syria need this. They need your action."



O'Brien reported an increase in violence in recent weeks in Aleppo, Homs, Idlib, Lattakia and rural Damascus.

He said Syrian forces today morning had restarted air bombings in Daraa governorate for the first time since the start of the ceasefire.

As the fighting intensifies, the UN is waiting for approval from the Syrian government to deliver aid to 35 towns, including rebel-held Darayya and Douma.

Syrian authorities removed medicine and surgical supplies from recent UN convoys to the besieged rebel-held towns of Kafr Batna and Rastan, O'Brien said, condemning "this inhumane practice".

Departing from his written text, O'Brien delivered a stern warning that those responsible for depriving civilians of medical aid would face justice.

"There can never be impunity for this behavior," he said.

The UN estimates that 13.5 million Syrians, including six million children, are in need of humanitarian aid.

Of these 4.6 million people are in hard-to-reach areas, including close to 500,000 people in besieged towns.

O'Brien warned that without a restored ceasefire, "the situation will only spiral further and further out of control" in the war that has already killed over 270,000 people and displaced millions.
An Indian-flagged cargo ship has been blacklisted by the UN Security Council for transporting crude oil illicitly exported from Libya.

The UN Security Council's committee concerning Libya yesterday added the vessel 'Distya Ameya' to its sanctions list that includes names of individuals and entities subject to assets freeze, travel ban and other measures relating to attempts to illicitly export crude oil from Libya.

The listing makes the vessel prohibited to load, transport or discharge and enter ports.

The designation is valid till July 26 unless terminated earlier by the Sanctions Committee.

The vessel, whose flag state is India, "may have been sold recently to an unknown buyer and the vessel's name may have changed to Kassos," said the Libya sanctions committee.

"The vessel Distya Ameya was listed pursuant to the resolution as transporting crude oil illicitly exported from Libya, based on information received from the Government of Libya," the committee said in its reason for the listing.

As of April 26, the vessel was north of Al-Bayda, Libya, heading for Malta.

A senior Indian official said that the ship is on a time-charter agreement for a UAE-based company.

Being an Indian-flagged ship, the owner of the ship is registered in India but is doing work for a UAE-based company.

The official said India is already in touch with the ship and has told it to talk to the UAE entity about the UN decision and see how to address the issue.

The official made it clear that the ship is not working for or on behalf of the Indian government nor the oil it is transporting is for India or from an Indian entity.

Libya's National Oil Corporation had said in a press release last week that it had notified the Libyan authorities of an attempt by the parallel administration in Beyda to export oil illicitly from Libya.

Tripoli-based NOC's chairman Mustafa Sanalla said in the release its subsidiary Agoco in the east was instructed by a Beyda official to load the 'Distya Ameya' at the port of Marsael-Hariga but the Libyan authorities tookthe necessary steps to stop the vessel from loading.

Agoco had been instructed to load 650,000 barrels of oil on April 21-23 at Marsael-Harigafor DSA Consultancy FZC, a company registered in Sharjah, UAE.

Through the Libyan mission to the UN, the Libyan government notified the UN Security Council's Libya sanctions committee that the attempted export breached UNSC resolutions.

The vessel arrived at Marsaal-Harigaon the night of April 21 but was not cleared to load and remained at anchor.
The United Nations' Libya envoy has condemned the killing of 12 Egyptians and three Libyan nationals in a string of incidents in the central town of Bani Walid.

"I strongly deplore these terrible killings and call on those with authority on the ground in Bani Walid to ensure that the incidents are investigated and to prevent any further killings," Martin Kobler said in a statement yesterday.

He said the incidents took place on Tuesday and yesterday but gave no details and there was no further information from sources in the region, which is controlled by militias loyal to a new unity government.

Thousands of Egyptians live and work in neighbouring Libya.

The United Nations has brokered the formation of the unity government for Libya, which has been roiled by turmoil since the 2011 ouster and killing of longtime leader Moamer Kadhafi.
The US today welcomed efforts undertaken by India to promote intellectual property (IP) rights within the country and the steps it has taken to strengthen protection and enforcement.

"The United States has welcomed efforts undertaken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration to promote IPR within India and the steps it has taken to strengthen protection and enforcement," the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) said in its latest 301 annual report.

The report said high-level national initiatives, such as 'Make in India' and 'Start-up India' have linked realisation of development goals to IP creation and protection.

The 2015 passage of the Commercial Courts, Commercial Division and Commercial Appellate Division of High Courts Bill may provide an important new tool for right holders in India to efficiently and effectively enforce their rights in the courts, it said.

According to USTR, hiring and training of large numbers of new patent and trademark examiners should help to reduce significant delays new applicants face while also cutting down the backlog of pending applications.

Significant state-level enforcement developments included the establishment of India's first anti-piracy policy unit in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh's anti-piracy campaign, which resulted in the arrest of 11 individuals involved in an international piracy ring, the report said.

"The United States also welcomed the deliberate and transparent process employed in India's evaluation of a compulsory license application in 2015," USTR said, but quickly noted that these are not enough to remove India from the Priority Watch List, indicating that it will wait for some time before India is excluded from this list.

REOPENS FGN 9



In other areas recent actions have raised new concerns. For example, India's proposed Patent Rule Amendments would introduce concerning new incentives to pressure patent applicants to localise manufacturing in India and require the submission of sensitive business information to India's Patent Office, the report said.

India has also not taken the opportunity to address longstanding challenges that represent significant IP regime deficiencies compared to other markets.

The pharmaceutical industry in particular faces a host of challenges related to IP, it said.

Observing that the Indian government is in the final stages of its thorough and holistic review of the IP regime to "nurture the IP culture and address all facets of the IP system including legal, administrative and enforcement infrastructure, human resources, institutional support system and international dimensions," the US report commended India for undertaking this task.

According to the report, the US continues to seek changes to India's copyright protection and enforcement regime that would protect both Indian and US copyright holders in the vibrant and promising Indian market.

In particular, the US urged India to - enact anti- camcording legislation; model its statutory license provisions relating to copyrighted works on the standards of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Berne Convention); ensure that collecting societies are licensed promptly and able to operate effectively; an fully establish and operationalise India's Copyright Boards; address the problem of underreporting of cable subscriptions.

It also urged India to take steps to prevent public broadcasters from facilitating dissemination of pirated content; and provide additional protections against signal theft, circumvention of TPMs, and online copyright piracy.

"The United States urges India to reject policies and practices that amount to barriers that adversely affect not only US companies, but Indian companies as well.

"The United States encourages India instead to adopt policies that both address domestic challenges and support the cutting-edge innovation that can be critical to meeting legitimate domestic policy goals," the report said.
Veteran Journalist and founder member of the Indian Federation of Working Journalists S V Jayasheela Rao died at a private hospital here today.

Rao, who was hospitalised for breathing problem for the last five days, passed away at Maiya Hospital here, his family sources said.

His last rites will be performed in the city tomorrow with police honours, state government in a statement said.

Rao, aged 88, was also a freedom fighter, and was imprisoned in Mysore sub-jail in September 1947 during 'Mysore Chalo Satyagraha', an agitation to force the then Maharaja of Mysore to accede to the Indian Union.

Taking up Journalism in 1947 through "Deshabandhu", a Kannada daily, Rao then joined "Prajavani", where he served as Reporter and Chief Reporter for 26 years.

He has also served "Samyukta Karnataka" as Joint Editor, and as Editor of "Munjaane".

Rao was a founder member of the Indian Federation of Working Journalists, and was the Media Advisor to the Chief Minister H D Deve Gowda in 1994.

He also functioned as Private Secretary to Gowda from September 1997, including during his prime ministership, to April 2003 at New Delhi.

Rao was conferred the title 'Vaarta Visharada' and he received the Karnataka Press Academy Award in 1987 and Rajyotsava Award in 1990.

Recalling his close association with Rao, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaih expressed condolence over his death.
Enforcement Directorate (ED) is expected to issue follow up requests on its earlier Letters Rogatories (LRs) to at least ten countries in connection with its money laundering probe in the Rs 3,600 crore AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal case.

Officials said while seven of the LRs (judicial requests) have been already dispatched, three are being sent.

The agency has obtained, from the courts, a total of ten LRs to countries like Tunisia, Italy, United Kingdom, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Mauritius, Israel, Finland, Singapore and Denmark in order to obtain details about the financial transactions that have taken place in the case by the accused firms and individuals named in its charge sheet filed before a court here last year.

They said the agency is also expected to summon former Indian Air Force (IAF) chief S P Tyagi for questioning in the case in the near future. He has been questioned by CBI last year.

A court in Italy's Milan has recently sentenced Italian defence and aerospace major Finmeccanica's former chief Giuseppe Orsi and the former CEO of the firm Bruno Spagnolini on corruption charges in the sale of a dozen AgustaWestland helicopters to India for VVIP purposes.

Apart from filing a charge sheet, the ED has also attached assets worth Rs 11 crore belonging to the cousins of Tyagi and Italian national and alleged middleman in the case Christian Michel James.

The CBI, meanwhile, is getting the order of the Milan Court of Appeals translated from Italian to English even as it is yet to get a certified copy of the order for which it has made a request to the government.

Agency sources said they have got copy of the order informally which will be studied.
Tata Steel UK "cannot continue to bleed" from its loss making steel units in the country and a buyer needs to be found soon, the company's CEO Bimlendra Jha today told a British parliamentary committee.

Jha told the House of Commons Business Select Committee that structural disadvantages in the UK, such as extremely high energy costs, were largely the reason for the crisis in the steel industry.

"There is no dead drop time that has been given, though you will appreciate with the kind of losses that there are, urgency is important. What if no buyer emerges? We cannot continue to bleed," Jha said.

"We have seen over a period of time that manufacturing in Britain has been on a decline. If we were at the same electricity costs as Germany, then (Tata Steel UK) would be 40 million pounds better off - we would not be having negative numbers. We would not be selling the business if we were not losing money," he added.

He also clarified that the company did not want to split up its UK business by selling it to different buyers.

Jha warned that splitting off Port Talbot in south Wales would cause damage to the pension scheme because more than 4,000 workers would stop making contributions.

"We would not deal with somebody saying leave alone Port Talbot and give us the rest. That is not a solution that's acceptable," Jha explained.

He warned the MPs thatthe company's 15 billion pounds pension liability needed to be addressed to help find a buyer.

The UK government has said it is looking at the pension scheme, which any buyer would have to inherit, to see if it could be separated from the business.

"If we don't solve it [pensions], we are staring at some very bad consequences for the taxpayer...We are staring at a huge economic and social disaster," Jha warned.

The pension fund has more than 130,000 members and a deficit of around 485 million pounds.

UK business secretary Sajid Javid told the committee that pension fund trustees were in talks with the pensions regulator. He reiterated that the UK government would not take a stake of more than 25 per cent in Tata Steel's UK assets.

"Twenty five per cent was the limit that I thought was necessary to show that on the one hand you're serious about helping...But also not to put off potential investors by saying this is something the government seeks to control," he said, adding that the government was keen to secure the sale of Tata Steel's UK units soon.

Javid admitted that "with the benefit of hindsight" he should have gone to Mumbai in late March for a Tata board meeting which concluded it should sell its UK business, rather travel to Australia on a business trip with his daughter.

This one decision has attracted a lot of media flak for the minister over his handling of the steel crisis.
With the advent of social media, more and more writers are taking to this platform more than printed books to get immediate response from readers, according to poet Srijato Bandyopadhyay.

"Consider the series of blogger deaths in Dhaka. I had instantly reacted through my writings on Facebook after one such incident took place in February," said Srijato, who is popular for giving poetic expression to people's reaction on current events.

"Now if I had to wait for the printed book to give vent to my anguish, I would have to wait for my next book to hit the stands," said Srijato whose poems on events like Pathankot terror attack strike a chord with people instantly.

"And if you post one write up, there is 10,000 likes in an one hour. A book instead has to go through certain production procedures - from printing, to binding, to cover illustrations to marketing. It takes a lot of time," he said.

He was speaking while taking part in a debate, "The era of Bengali Books is over", organised by Publishers & Booksellers Guild, at a city book store last evening.

One of the most prominent Bengali poet-lyricist of the present time recalled the Shahbag movement in Bangladesh or the 'Hok Kolorob' movement in Javadpur University to prove his point. Such movements across the country's campuses have been fuelled not by pamphlets but through social media, he said.

However, after the immediate reaching out to the audience is over, a writer craves for compiling his/her works in book form and here fits in the printed world, which will never go away altogether, Srijato said.

Publisher, writer and Publishers & Booksellers Guild secretary Tridib Chatterjee, however, begs to differ, saying there had been 15 per cent rise in sale of books in the last Kolkata Book Fair.

"I want to ask Srijato how this was made possible? When cinema came, people predicted that other forms of art will soon face extinction. But did that happen?" he asked.

"What portends real danger is not the threat from social media, but the addiction of the younger generation to English paperbacks," Chatterjee said.

They take only four hours to complete English paperbacks



and, for Bengali books, they halt several times and take five days to complete, Chatterjee said.

Echoing Chatterjee, Guild director and publisher Sudhangshu Dey said social media could never pose a threat to Bengali books.

"What our real threat instead is the attractive packaging and cover illustration and graphics of English books. We have to match their production quality in every aspect including fonts. And we are," he said.

If that was equally backed up by content, Bengali books can also be the best sellers in various genres of writing, he said.

Dey cited a fiction on third gender people by Swapnomoy Chakroborty and a collection of writings by eminent writer Shankar on 11 Bengali monks including Vivekananda.

While the first one sold more than 5,000 copies, the second one sold over 10,000 copies till date, he said.
President Xi Jinping today said China will "firmly safeguard" its sovereignty in the South China Sea, but at the same time the country is willing to peacefully resolve the maritime disputes with several of neighbours through direct talks.

"China is always committed to peace and stability in the South China Sea," Xi said while addressing the opening ceremony of the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) here.

"While China will firmly safeguard its sovereignty, rights and interests, it is willing to peacefully solve the disputes through friendly consultation and dialogue with the countries directly involved," he said.

China will work with Southeast Asian nations to make the South China Sea a region of peace, friendship and cooperation,Xi said.

CICA, which has 26 members including India, was formed based on a proposal by Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 1992 to further inter government consultations.

China is its current Chairman. India was represented at the meeting by Indian Ambassador to China Vijay Keshav Gokhale.

On Afghanistan crisis, Xi said China will play a constructive role in the Istanbul Process on Afghanistan.

China supports an "Afghan-led, Afghan-owned" inclusive political reconciliation process, hopes the country can realise peace, stability and development at an early date and is ready to provide assistance, he said.

He said China stands for and will continue to help promote a peaceful settlement of the Syrian issue and the Palestine-Israel issue through political negotiation.

On the denuclearisation of Korean Peninsula, Xi said China is fully adhered to the UN Security Council resolution.

He urged all the parties involved to exercise restraint, avoid provocation and pull the nuclear issue back to a track of dialogue and negotiations at an early date.

He reaffirmed China's adherence to a peaceful foreign policy, vowing "China will unswervingly take a peaceful path of development, maintain an international order with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter at the core, promote a new-type international relationship featuring cooperation and reciprocity, and be committed to building a common destiny for mankind.
Nagaland Chief Minister T R Zeliang today shared the 'Lifetime Achievement Award in Transformation' conferred on him during the 6th Global Leadership Award with the people of the state.

"I share the award with the people of Nagaland," Zeliang said while addressing a civic reception accorded to him on arrival at Dimapur Airport from Bali, Indonesia.

He received the award on April 23 at a programme organized by business magazine Leaders International and US-based NGO American Leadership Development Association.

Expressing his gratitude for selecting him for the award, the Chief Minister said he was amazed on his selection as Nagaland is a "very small state in a vast country like India".

Zeliang said the reasons behind his selection as explained to him by the organisers were for being the leader of trouble torn Nagaland state, for garnering 100 per cent vote during the confidence motion in the Assembly in February last year, and for establishing an "opposition less government" in the state, which is the first of its kind in a democratic country.

Leaders of various tribal organisations and civil societies felicitated the Chief Minister for the achievement.

President of Naga Hoho, Chuba Ozukum, said the international recognition received by the CM was a "laurel" for the entire Naga society.

Eastern Nagaland Peoples Organisation (ENPO) president Khoiwang Konyak expressed optimism that Zeliang would work more for the betterment of Naga society.

Ministers, Parliamentary Secretaries, Civil societies, NGO's and others attended the civic reception organized by ENPO.
Betting big on 'blockchain technology', software services major Infosys has launched a new framework that will allow banks to simplify complex transactional services.

Blockchain is like a huge, decentralised ledger for bitcoin (digital currency) that records every transaction and stores this information on a global network so it cannot be tampered with.

It enables secure, peer-to-peer transactions that can be verified without any centralised authority.

Banks and other financial institutions are increasingly investing in blockchain technology as it cuts their costs and make their operations faster and more transparent.

Infosys said it is in discussion with over 10 institutions globally for deploying the solution.

"The EdgeVerve Blockchain Framework is designed specifically for the banking sector and can scale to the levels needed to support international, cross-border transactional business," Infosys Finacle Product Strategy Head Rajashekara V Maiya told PTI.

He added that applications built on this framework can run payments and other high volume transactional banking services with increased efficiencies, transactional security and accuracy at a lower cost.

"We are in active conversations with more than 10 banks," he said adding that these institutions are located across India, Australia, the US, Asia and Africa.

The Bengaluru-based firm is keen on working with companies across areas like payments, trade finance, invoice processing, smart contracts, digital vaults and syndicated loans among others.

Maiya said there is a high level of interest in blockchain technology. He said venture capitalists and private equity players have invested about $20 billion last year in companies working on blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.

"We started from scratch... To start with, we got almost over 40 people to get certified under Blockchain. The blockchain solutions development is built in our R&D centres in India and Ireland. Interest in this field is dynamic and the developer count will keep increasing with the demand," he said.


Government on Thursday refused to budge from its stance on levying one per cent excise duty on non-silver jewellery saying luxury items cannot be kept out of tax ambit for perpetuity, prompting a walk-out by members of the Congress and SP.

Tearing into the opposition charge that imposition of the levy was killing the trade, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley refuted the allegations saying when items of common use were being taxed, how could luxury items be kept out.

Asserting that there was absolutely no harassment of artisans, Jaitley said corporate jewellers with upto Rs 12 crore turnover last year came under its ambit and upto Rs 6 crore turnover in a fiscal later are exempt from it.

"Clearances up to Rs 6 crore in a financial year (if clearances during preceding year were less than Rs 12 crore), are exempt from this duty," Jaitley said, adding "thus small jewellers and artisans are not covered within the ambit of this levy."

Replying to a calling attention on the issue, the Minister said "when there is excise duty on items like soap, toothpaste, razor, pencil, ink, fruit juices and baby food, why should the luxury items be exempted from it."

Opposition members had earlier charged the government of killing the traditional jewellery trade and promoting the big brands by imposing the levy. The jewellers have been on a nationwide strike for over 40 days to protest the levy.

Jaitley said even imitation jewellery attracted 6 per cent excise duty and added that when things used by common people were taxed "how can luxury items be out of its ambit for so long."

He said the opposition should understand that it is a complex subject and when taxes are levied on items like steel, cement and clothes, luxury items cannot be out of its purview.

"We have to decide on which items we will impose excise duty and if there is any structured trade, they do not get the right to resort to agitation against tax," he said and challenged the opposition that if they were so concerned about it, they should get the 5 per cent VAT removed in Kerala.

"Each state imposes VAT on gold and in Kerala it is as high as 5 per cent and if you (opposition) are so much concerned then get it removed from Kerala," he said.

Dismissing charges that excise duty has hit hard small artisans, the Minister said the trade has not developed such that annual turnovers of small jewellers has crossed Rs 6 crore and stressed that "this is implemented on big chains."

Jaitley said the UPA government had imposed taxes on jewellery in 2005 but had recalled it in 2009 in the face of stiff opposition. It again imposed it in 2012 but recalled the same again.


With Oman Oil Company reluctant to put more money, the government on Wednesday allowed Bharat Petroleum Corp (BPCL) to fund the Rs 3,000-crore expansion of Bina refinery in Madhya Pradesh by putting in more equity.

BPCL, India's second-biggest state refiner, plans to raise Bina refinery capacity in two phases - to 7.8 million tonnes a year from current six million tonnes at a cost of Rs 3,072 crore by 2018 and then to 15 million tonnes at an additional investment of Rs 18,000-20,000 crore in five-six years.

The Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave its approval to enhance investment by BPCL in Bharat Oman Refineries Limited (BORL) for the first phase of expansion.

"The investment amount could be enhanced up to a maximum of Rs 3000 crore by way of subscription of convertible warrants / other instruments giving right to convert it into equity shares to be issued by BORL," an official statement said.

The infusion of funds, it said, will enable BORL to overcome the implications on account of the erosion of the net worth.

The expansion will enhance the availability of petroleum products in the northern and central parts of the country.

Oman Oil Company (OCC), which holds 26 per cent stake in the Bharat Oman Refineries (BORL) - the firm that built the refinery - is unwilling to participate in the expansion.

OCC in 2009 paid a 50 per cent premium for a re-entry into the Rs 11,397-crore Bina refinery project. The project was originally conceived through a joint venture company, BORL but the OCC did not contribute equity beyond the initial Rs 75 crore.

The Omanese oil major came back to pick up 26 per cent stake in the project for an additional Rs 1,220 crore.

The BORL was formed as an equal joint venture company way back in 1993. However, following inordinate delays in the implementation of the project, OOC froze its investment in the company at Rs 75 crore for a two per cent equity stake.

BPCL, which holds 49 per cent stake in the project, provided the unbridged portion of the Rs 4,000-crore equity in form of loan. The state-run firm got its loan back once OOC made payments for its 26 per cent share.

The remaining 25 per cent is with financial institutions.

The expansion will help the refinery to produce petrol and diesel confirming to Euro-VI norm.

"OOC while expressing their support for the project, had indicated that they are not prepared to commit further funds for the project at this stage. Therefore, BPCL Board has decided to infuse funds to the tune of Rs 3,000 crore for funding the debottlenecking project and for meeting the extraordinary losses suffered on account of the sharp fall in the prices of crude oil and finished products," the statement said.

BPCL also operates a 12 million tonnes a year refinery at Mumbai and 9.5 million tonnes Kochi unit. It also has majority stakes in the three million tonnes Numaligarh refinery in Assam.
Norway-based Telenor on Wednesday hinted at exiting India as it posted a huge operating loss of 3,100 million Norwegian Krone (around Rs 2,530 crore), a move that will impact about 6,000 employees in the country.

While announcing the result in Norway, Telenor hinted to exit India if it fails to procure spectrum at reasonable rates.

At the same time, the Indian arm of Telenor looks to expand 4G footprint and said it would offer the lowest tariff for the services as part of its affordable pricing strategy.

Telenor global CEO Sigve Brekke said: "Long terms presence in India is dependent on our ability to secure additional spectrum. We are not able to compete with current spectrum portfolio we have in growing data market."

Brekke said the company is looking at solution to procure spectrum and "a price that we can justify".

"We are looking at upcoming auctions and also looking at potential trading options... Need to be pragmatic to consider other alternatives if that turns out not to be a possible to find value focused solutions. We are looking at all sustainable business model option," Brekke said.

Telenor India offer GSM-based services in six out of 22 circles in the country. Trai recommended Rs 11,485 crore per megahertz base price for auction of spectrum in 700 Mhz band, the highest ever for any radiowave.

"We are in India to make money, if we don't see return then we need to look at other alternatives," Telenor CFO Morten Karlsen Sorby said.

The operating loss of Telenor India widened to NOK 3,100 million in January-March 2016 compared to NOK 159 million in the same quarter a year ago.

The revenue during the reported quarter, however, rose by about 11 per cent to NOK 1306 million compared to NOK 1,171 million a year ago.

"Operating profit was negatively impacted by NOK 2.9 billion in impairment and write-down," Telenor said.

The company calculated impairment charges by applying "fair value less cost of disposal when determining recoverable amount of Telenor India."

An impairment loss of NOK 2.3 billion has been recognised in the first quarter of 2016, of which NOK 1.4 billion mainly relates to network equipment and the remaining NOK 0.9 billion mainly relates to spectrum. The recoverable amount of tangible and intangible assets in Telenor India after impairment is NOK 4.5 billion, as per the company's calculation.

The company's average revenue per user in local currency fell by 8 per cent to Rs 90. The decline was primarily driven by lower voice consumption.

Telenor, which has already launched 4G services in Varanasi, intends to roll out high speed services in 6-8 cities across six circles in the next 45-60 days.

The company has operations in Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh East and West, Bihar, Gujarat and Maharashtra and had 51.6 million customers on its network in February.


Greece accused the International Monetary Fund on Wednesday of undermining negotiations over the release of more bailout funds needed in the next few weeks to repay debt.

At issue is what measures Athens would take if it fails to reach fiscal targets by 2018. Creditors, including the IMF and European institutions, want those measures made law immediately.

Athens argues that its constitution precludes legislation on a hypothetical event but it has offered to discuss a mechanism of automatic cutbacks.

Government spokeswoman Olga Gerovasili told reporters that the IMF had not accepted the proposal.

"The IMF is making demands which go beyond what was agreed," Gerovasili said, referring to a 86-billion-euro ($97-billion) deal struck last year and talks to unlock more than five billion euros in bailout funds needed to pay EU and IMF debts by July.

"These demands undermine efforts by both the Greek government and European institutions," she said.

An IMF spokesman in Washington said the institution had no immediate comment on the matter.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras wants the European Union to call a summit of euro zone leaders to break the impasse. On Wednesday he communicated his "displeasure" to European Council President Donald Tusk over the IMF's behavior, his office said.

Euro zone finance ministers had penciled in a tentative meeting on Greece for April 28, but canceled it after progress in talks with Athens proved insufficient, triggering a drop of 2.5 percent in Greek shares fell 2.5 percent and 50-basis-point spike in 10-year bond yields, one of the biggest for weeks.

Tusk said euro zone finance ministers should set a date for a meeting on Greece within days to avoid renewed uncertainty over its ability to finance itself. But one official close to talks said the window for action was getting narrower.

"There is a perception that if no deal is reached in the next week or two, everything will be postponed until after the Brexit vote," the official said, referring to a British referendum on whether to stay in the EU.

"The crisis of the summer of 2015 is on people's minds," Beta Securities chief trader, Takis Zamanis, said, referring to Greece almost being thrown out of the euro zone.

The Greek government is using cash surpluses deposited by public sector entities to pay its bills because of delays on a bailout review, officials told Reuters on Tuesday.

"No deal is causing uncertainty that the country could again be led to a situation where it won't be able to cover its (financial) obligations," Zamanis said.

But a jaded public shrugged off the latest twist in a convoluted and long-running drama.

"Why should I worry? The country is already broke," pensioner Stamatis Mitsikoulis said as he sat in an Athens cafe. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Facebook Inc's quarterly revenue rose more than 50%, handily beating Wall Street expectations as its wildly popular mobile app and a push into live video lured new advertisers and encouraged existing ones to boost spending.

The company's shares rose 9.5% in after-hours trading on Wednesday to $118.39, setting it on track to open at a new high on Thursday, at nearly triple its initial public offering four years ago.

Facebook also announced it will create a new class of non-voting shares in a move aimed at letting Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg give away his wealth without relinquishing control of the social media juggernaut he founded.

The company plans to create a new class of non-voting shares, which would be given as a dividend to existing shareholders. That would allow Zuckerberg, who wants to give away 99% of his wealth, to sell non-voting stock to fund philanthropy and keep the voting stock that assures his control.

Alphabet Inc passed a similar proposal in 2014 that ensured its founders' control by creating new non-voting shares.

Some 1.65 billion people used Facebook monthly as of March 31, up from 1.44 billion a year earlier. Zuckerberg said users were spending more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, a huge amount of time given the millions of apps available to users.

Advertisers are shifting money from television to web and mobile platforms, and Facebook is one of the biggest beneficiaries. It faces fierce competition in the mobile video market, where rivals Snapchat and YouTube also garner billions of video views every day.

Facebook recently expanded its live video product, rolling out several new features and making it more prominent on the app to encourage users to create videos and share them. The quarterly results showed success attracting advertisers with the move, and the company was able to expand its operating profit margin to 55% from 52% a year earlier.

"The company consistently 'warns' about higher spending, but they consistently manage their spending to deliver earnings upside. They're an impressive company, and they leave very little room for criticism," said Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who called the operating margin a good surprise.

Facebook did not offer details on sales of its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, but emphasized that it was early days and said that sales would not significantly impact 2016 revenue.

The results come after disappointments for investors from several major Silicon Valley firms.

"After Intel and IBM last week, and then Twitter and Apple yesterday, this is by far the best number I've seen in technology," said Daniel Morgan, senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust Company which owns about $40 million worth of Facebook shares, commenting specifically about Facebook ad revenue.

Facebook has not begun advertising on some of its most popular apps. "They haven't yet turned on the monetization spigot for Messenger or WhatsApp, so there should be significant headroom still," said Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research.

The company's net income attributable to common shareholders nearly tripled to $1.51 billion, or 52 cents per share, in the first quarter from $509 million, or 18 cents per share, a year earlier.

Excluding items, the company earned 77 cents per share, beating Wall Street's 62-cent consensus.

Total revenue rose to $5.38 billion from $3.54 billion, with ad revenue increasing 56.8 percent to $5.20 billion. Mobile ad revenue accounted for about 82 percent of total ad revenue, compared with about 73 percent a year earlier.

Analysts on average had expected revenue of $5.26 billion.

If the stock proposal is approved - and Zuckerberg has a majority of voting stock - the company will effectively carry out a 3-for-1 stock split, issuing two shares of non-voting Class C capital stock as a one-time stock dividend for each share of Class A and Class B common stock.

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced last year that they would give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares to fund charitable endeavors.

Investors said they were not concerned that Zuckerberg would have increasing control, pointing to the company's consistent ability to grow and exceed expectations.

"I honestly don't think anyone cares if he has more power, since he's done everything right since they went public," said Pachter. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie
LOGAN  Defense attorneys asked a judge to declare a mistrial Wednesday during the second day of testimony, in the trial Anthony Murphy. The 51-year-old Smithfield man is accused of brutally assaulting a woman in 2009.

Attorneys made their motion after the alleged victim testified for over three hours about her relationship with Murphy and the night he reportedly assaulted her. Towards the end of her testimony, while being questioned about a prior spouse of Murphys, the victim told the court that she understood that the ex-wife had shot him five times.

The shooting reportedly occurred in Florida years prior. Judge Thomas Willmore had previously ruled during an evidentiary hearing that the shooting was not relevant to the 2009 alleged assault, and prosecutors could not introduce it to jurors, unless Murphy volunteered to disclose it.

Defense attorney Shannon Demler argued that having the witness refer to the shooting was prejudicial to Murphy and denied him the right to a fair trial.

Judge Willmore later denied the defenses motion but told jurors that the victims concluding testimony about the shooting was being stricken from the courts record and not to be considered.

Earlier in the day the victim described her relationship with Murphy. She said he was a charming person, who went out of his way to take care of her. She explained how he would change though and become abusive, when drinking alcohol.

The victim then described how Murphy physically beat and sexually assaulted her, after she got into an argument with him over a text message he had received from another woman.

During testimony in the afternoon, two of the victims co-workers testified about her appearance the morning after the alleged assault. They explained how her face was red, swollen and bruised and she acted subdued and depressed.

Two of the officers who were assigned to the case the last to testify for the day. They described Murphy as being drunk when they visited him to investigate.

Defense attorneys argued that the officers botched their investigation by tampering with evidence.

The trial will continue Thursday with more of the investigating officers testifying. The trial is expected to last through at least next Friday.

<hr /><p style=text-align: center;>will@cvradio.com
Sofi Oksanen on why only a nation that writes can survive

Published on April 28, 2016

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Estonian history is relatively unknown across the rest of Europe. We interview Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen, on the role of literature in building national identity and the memory of Soviet occupation in the country. Thanks to her novels, other European citizens are also starting to ask questions about Estonia's past.

The Finnish/Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen rose to fame following the publication of her second novel Purge in 2008  translated in more than 50 languages. The title refers to the deportations ordered by Stalin of those Estonians accused of collaboration with the Nazi dictatorship between 1941 and 1944. We caught up with the winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2010.

cafebabel: Do you think literature is able to shed light on things that the mainstream media usually ignores, by taking on the role of historians, journalists and public opinion?

Sofi Oksanen: Art can be eternal; while journalism is always connected to the time of its publication and so is historical research. When you read yesterday's news or historical research, you can see the marks of time. If you think of a magazine a hundred years ago, or a history book, it seems out-of-date, but a novel published a hundred years ago can still be a good read.

The Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich is a good example of work that can be investigative and eternal at the same time. Her work reveals the reality of Soviet life that the media of the time didn't talk about.

cafebabel: There's a quote written on your statue at Tallinn airport: "A nation that writes cannot be erased from the map". What in your opinion is the relationship between Estonians, their identity and their history?

Sofi Oksanen: A Finnish professor Seppo Zetterberg studied Estonian history throughout the Soviet years. He was asked, how did he manage to do that? Material related to the Republic of Estonia was banned and sealed in Soviet-Estonia. He answered that you can put a country on lock-down, but you can't do the same with the material that exists outside the country. Even if you shut down the archives in Soviet-Estonia, not even Soviet officials could get their hands on those photographs, letters or books that Estonians had sent abroad.

During the Soviet-era Estonians also taught history to their children at home, from old Estonian schoolbooks dating back to the time of independence. I recently met a librarian who had been working at Finnish libraries during the process of Finlandisation [when Soviet influence dictated much of the country's policy. ed.]. Lots of books that were considered "Anti-Soviet" were ordered destroyed. She removed these books from the shelves, but hid them at home. Just recently there was an exhibition of these forbidden books.

This is one reason why I like paper compared to e-books. You can control the contents of an e-book  or even remove them from reading gadgets  but trying to destroy every paper book is not that easy.

This is of course the perspective from a young country. When Finns and Estonians started to think about independence in the late 19th century, it was clear that we needed our own literature in our own language. Before this, the language of both education and literature had been Swedish in Finland and German in Estonia.

Both Finnish and Estonia have a very old oral tradition, but as important as that is, it's not as powerful as the written word. When you think of all the ethnic groups that only have an oral tradition, but no literature in their native language  well, these groups don't have the strongest position in the world. You also need written word to convey your stories to others.

cafebabel: You lived part of your childhood during the "Finlandisation" period. Do you have any memories of that time? And what does it mean for you?

Sofi Oksanen: Well it was part of my everyday life. Estonia experienced three occupations after gaining its independence, whereas Finland managed to preserve its independence more or less without interruption.

These differences are clearly seen in how our national memory is reflected in our literature, and the description of national tragedies and turning points in recent history. However, one common feature in both literatures is that they provide a platform for discussion in times when the political situation made it impossible to hold such discussions in public. Such a medium is vital for any nation.

Three of my novels describe Estonia's recent history and periods of occupation. Year after year, one of the most common questions I get is: why do you write about Estonia's recent history? As if it required a specific reason. Every now and then, I come across opinions that say that writing about Estonia's recent history amounts to writing against Russia. After my first novel was published in 2003, I came across journalists, also in Finland, who wondered if this was an anti-Soviet book. This phrase "anti-Soviet" belongs to the vocabulary of Finlandisation and should stay in the dictionary of the past, not the present. In Finland, the process officially ended when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Finlandisation refers to the influence that a stronger power exercises on the policies of weaker states. In Finland, it meant censorship affecting our publishing policy, news media and movies. Also, the Ministry of Education prevented the spread of negative information about the Soviet Union, especially through history books. The Soviet Union always had to be described in a flattering way. Schoolchildren were, for example, taught that agricultural collectivisation in the Soviet Union took place entirely on a voluntary basis, that the Prague Spring was caused by "a counter-revolutionary threat", and that socialism in the Soviet Union worked well. According to schoolbooks: "The Red Army liberated the Baltic States from German occupation and these states joined the Soviet Union as its new republics". None of this was true, but we were taught that it was.

It's no wonder that the first time my peers heard about Estonia as teenagers was in native language classes, while studying languages of the same family. This kind of situation seems strange when it comes to Finland's closest neighbours, but the memory loss brought about by the Soviet Union even affected neighbouring countries.

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This article was published by our local team at cafebabel Milan.

Story by Lorenzo Di Stasi

Translated from Sofi Oksanen: "Una nazione che scrive esiste"
Panama Papers: The tentacles of tax evasion reach Albania

Published on April 28, 2016

Story by Donjet Gjoka

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The archive of 11.5 million documents and 2.6 terabytes of data leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca revealed just how wealthy public figures around the world can be. The offshore service provider is thought to be the 5th largest in the world. The scandal caused global debate and protests in several countries causing huge disappointment among the public towards their chosen elites.

Its a long way from Panama to a small Balkan country such as Albania, but it still turns out to be involved  even in a small way  in the scandal. An interactive map created by Esri UK points to two companies, three beneficiaries and 22 shareholders that are connected to the leak. This enables us to take a closer look at the ornate multinational lattice of connections  and to find out where the big centres of this global offshore industry are.

Tax havens' tentacles extend to the Balkans

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz contributed to revealing a financial scandal related to Albania. It was reported that an Israeli lawyer, named Assaf Halkin, registered four companies through Mossack Fonseca. He founded GFI Technologies, registered in May 2013 in the island of Anguilla. Halkin and another Albanian citizen, named Ismail Mulleti (in the leaks referred to as "Ismail Mulati") were co-owners of this company.

After a deep investigation it was revealed that a Canadian company, the so-called Global Fluids International S.A, owned GFI Technologies  also co-owned by Mulleti. GFI Albania is a small branch of this company that had won some of the most controversial and lucrative fuel-marking concessionaries licensed in 2013. A 10-year contract is worth 150 million euros.

Though the story does not end there. It seems that another company was also involved, the so-called "Petroleum Consulting Partners" that was part of a consortium along with the GFI. The concessionary was established as an offshore company. Later on, GFI disappeared leaving behind a small number of shares and selling the company to "Petroleum Consulting Partners" a typical maneuver of offshore companies that disappeared without a trace.

Podesta Group is a famous lobbying company based in Washington D.C. that was contracted by the pre-2013 Albanian Government on several occasions. The company can be found in the Panama Papers due to their implication in offshore funds owned by Russian companies such as Sberbank. Since Podesta lobbies both the Albanian Government and Sberbank, it tried to also take on the US Government. The involvement of the Podesta Group in Albanian public relations did not pass without political debate in the Balkan country.

The last but not least, the Miami Herald has reported that 22-year-old Efraim Diveroli had won hundreds of millions of USD by being involved in an illegal military ammunitions business operating from China to Albania and then on to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008 a huge explosion occured in the Albanian ammunitions camp, often referred to as the Gerdec tragedy  26 people died and many more were injured.

Diveroli and his company appear in the Panama Papers, and he had been investigated in Albania for international arms trafficking. A new movie, War Dogs, to be released this summer, covers the topic of Diveroli and his partner David Packouz, who won a 300 million dollar contract from the Pentagon to arm America's allies in Afghanistan.

The Three-Day Wonder

So far, these are the only indications that the tentacles of these fiscal havens have reached Albania. Albanian institutions have reacted to this data and investigations have already begun. Both official institutions and public opinion in Albania are awaiting the results of these investigations to see how much the Albanian economy will be affected by the Panama earthquake. However, since no new names have emerged over the last few days, the case is riddled with silent tension.

The corruption issue in Albania is rather disturbing, because it sets a precedent for any violations of the countrys laws relating to fiscal evasion. Lets see how justice will be served to punish those who would like to manipulate and escape it.

---

This article is part of our East Side Stories project. Through fighting the most common cliches levelled at Southern and Eastern Europe, it aims to keep the European idea alive by raising awareness, creating dialogue, exchanging ideas and reporting beyond the mainstream media.

Story by Donjet Gjoka
Contributed photo Tenth Avenue North, pictured, will perform with The Got Faith Music Festival will be on Friday with music from The Newsboys, Hawk Nelson and more at the American Bank Center.

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THURSDAY

JOBS: The Coastal Bend Labor Council will observe Workers Memorial Day to remember those who have suffered and died on the job and to renew the fight for safe jobs. The event will be from noon to 1:30 p.m. Thursday at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 278 chapter, 2301 Saratoga Blvd. Information: www.ibew278.org

EXPO: The Rockport-Fulton Chamber of Commerce will host the "Your Business Rocks" Business Expo from 5-7 p.m. Thursday at the Fulton Convention Center, 402 N. Fulton Beach Road. Cost: Free. Information: 361-729-6445.

PAGEANT: Las Donas de la Corte presents the 63rd annual Buc Days Coronation Pageant, "The Court of Culture & Costume in Dance," at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at American Bank Center, Selena Auditorium. Cost: $60. Information: 361-215-8340.

CONCERT: The Del Mar College Wind Ensemble and the Corpus Christi Wind Symphony will perform its second concert of the spring semester at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Richardson Performance Hall, Del Mar College East. Cost: Free. Information: 361-698-1214.

BREAKFAST: The Texas A&M University-Kingsville will host its sixth annual Community Breakfast at 7:30 a.m. Thursday in the Memorial Student Union Building. Cost: $10. Information: www.tamuk.edu/cba

LECTURE: Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi English and History Departments will host "Windows to Binational Health: Preventive Care and Latin American Migrant Women" at 6 p.m. Thursday at UC Bayview Room 320 on campus. Cost: Free. Information: 361-825-2418.

FRIDAY

FAITH: The Got Faith Music Festival will be on Friday with music from The Newsboys, Tenth Avenue North, Hawk Nelson and more at the American Bank Center, 1901 N. Shoreline Blvd. Information: 956-358-2755.

THEATER: The Aurora Arts Theatre will present "Our Lady of the Tortilla" at 7:30 p.m. Friday. Cost: $15, general admission; military, student, seniors and children discounts available. Information: 361-851-9700, www.auroraartstheatre.com.

FILM: The Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi will screen the film "TV Family" from 6-8:30 p.m. Friday the Art Museum of South Texas, 1902 N. Shoreline Blvd. Cost: Free. Information: 361-825-3500.

AUTO: AutoCheck will be from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday at the Corpus Christi Trade Center, 2833 S. Padre Island Drive. In three to five minutes, AutoCheck measures harmful pollutants emitted from vehicles. If your vehicle is determined to be polluting, you may qualify for a voucher good for up to $600 in repairs. Cost: free. Information: 361-825-3070; email trent.thigpen@tamucc.edu

LECTURE: Del Mar College will host guest lecture, "Exploration and Exploitation of Mycobacteriophages," by University of Pittsburgh Professor Dr. Graham Hatfull on Student Research Day. The event from 10 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. Friday at White Library, Del Mar College East. Cost: Free. Information: 361-698-1460.

RUMMAGE SALE: Dress for Success Corpus Christi will host a Spring Rummage Sale from 6-9 p.m. Friday at Sunrise Mall by Sears and the former Melrose location. The Friday VIP Sip and Shop event will be the first opportunity to shop before the sale with hors d'ourvres, beer and wine, raffle prizes and a new tote. Must be 21 and older. Cost: $15, includes Saturday admission. Information: 361-232-5226.

FAMILY: Sandfest will be from Friday to Sunday at the Port Aransas Beach. Cost: $5, adults; free, kids 12 and younger. Information: www.texassandfest.org.

FESTIVAL: The Emmanuel Christian Fellowship Community Center will be hosting its third Annual Noche De Fiesta event at 6 p.m. at the Retama Room, Del Mar College East. All proceeds benefit the After School Tutoring Program. Cost: $25, general admission. Information: 361-452-8340.
SHARE Contributed photo Heartthrob Harry Connick Jr. will take the Selena Auditorium stage at the American Bank Center on Friday. Contributed photo Heartthrob Harry Connick Jr. will take the Selena Auditorium stage at the American Bank Center on Friday.

By Jimmy Willden, Special to the Caller-Times vivacc@caller.com

Harry Connick Jr. is on a roll with the release of a new album, a daytime talk show premiering this year, and a nationwide tour.

The multi-faceted talent he is, Connick has forged a unique career, featuring several award-winning albums as a musician, and an acting career that has garnered Emmy and Tony nominations.

While releasing two successful albums before age 21, it was his multi-platinum selling soundtrack for the 1989 film "When Harry Met Sally" that brought major prominence, creating one of the most indelible fan bases around.

Corpus Christi is no exception and he's sharing his talents with the Coastal Bend on Friday at the American Bank Center Selena Auditorium.

"He's one of the most underrated actors and musicians of the last 20 years," said Del Mar College graduate David Falcon.

For Kelly Kimball, Theater Arts Director at Mary Carroll High School, it was Connick's voice on the song "It Had To Be You" she fell in love with first.

"I've just always admired his voice and style," Kimball said. "And the gorgeous doesn't hurt either."

Of course, that "gorgeous" has led to Connick becoming one of our most enduring television, movies and stage actors.

His film-acting debut was in 1990's "Memphis Belle." Since then, he has appeared in over 20 credits in film and television, including playing a mass murderer in 1990's "Copycat," and his classic role as Will Smith's pilot buddy in "Independence Day" in 1996.

Ultimately, Connick earned heartthrob status, especially after "Hope Floats" in which he plays a hometown romantic beau opposite Sandra Bullock's.

"I loved his persona in 'Hope Floats'," Kimball agrees.

Most recently, Connick was a judge on the final season of American Idol. In October he released his latest album, "That Would Be Me."

Now, Connick takes on 2016 - with a daytime talk show planned to premiere in the fall, and his tour in support of the new record.

IF YOU GO

What: Harry Connick Jr.

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday

Where: Selena Auditorium at American Bank Center, 1901 N. Shoreline Blvd.

Cost: $47-77

Information: 361-826-4700, www.AmericanBankCenter.com
When is hurricane season? Here's what you need to know in South Texas
KIRK STOWERS/CONTRIBUTED Six Colombian police officials traveled to Corpus Christi on Wednesday to learn about U.S. law enforcement practices.

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By Julie Garcia of the Caller-Times

Colombian police officials witnessed America's diversity by traveling to six cities for a program to learn more about law enforcement.

The program is hosted by the Department of State and World Affairs Council of South Texas and brought the officials to the final stop of their three-week excursion to the U.S. Wednesday. In the past month, the group of law enforcement officers visited Washington D.C., Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville and Sacramento.

The overall objective of the state department program is to bring people to the U.S. to discuss common issues, said Alfonso Villasenor, an interpreter with the state department who has traveled with them.

"They deal with the same things we deal with ... They deal with a lot of different issues, especially the supply side of narcotics," he said. "They're seeing as much of America as they can; they're engaging and networking with people to collaborate in the future because they work in the same field."

Each traveler is the unit chief in a specific police division from Bogota, Colombia's capitol, Cartagena and Medellin. The divisions range from narcotics to children protective services to criminal investigations.

The participants have U.S. management and ethical standards of law enforcement and the judicial system, court administration processes and jury selection, according to a news release from the International Visitor Leadership Program.

Villasenor said the group hopes to get a better understanding of how the system is affected by police and looking at ways to improve their own practices.

Corpus Christi was chosen to be part of the program because of its community-involvement programs, Villasenor said.

Senior Officer Kirk Stowers said there's a feeling of satisfaction and "job well done" knowing that Corpus Christi was chosen from all the options in the country for the visit.

"We've had the good leadership and employees that have made this organization what it is," Stowers said. "It's really nice that people in the industry recognize Corpus Christi as an industry leader."

Major Andrea Rojas, a member of the National Colombian Police in Medellin, said it has been interesting to observe the differences in the U.S. Learning about community practices has been the most enjoyable part of the program, she said.

"I hope we continue to work between our two countries in exchanging information on different programs and initiatives to fight transnational organizations," Rojas said.

The officials will return to Colombia on Saturday.

Twitter: @Caller_Jules
COURTNEY SACCO/CALLER-TIMES Micayla Licea appeared before 319th District Judge David Stith for a bail reduction hearing on Wednesday.

SHARE COURTNEY SACCO/CALLER-TIMES Daniel Martinez appeared before 319th District Judge David Stith on Wednesday. Licea Cerna Ruiz

By Krista M. Torralva of the Caller-Times

A woman drove the getaway car for her boyfriend in a drug-related robbery and was with him when he fatally shot two people earlier that same day, Corpus Christi detectives testified.

Micayla Licea, 19, and her lawyer, Eric Perkins, petitioned for a judge to lower her $300,000 bail to $25,000 on Wednesday. State District Judge David Stith denied the request.

Police arrested Licea last month on suspicion of aggravated robbery related to allegations she helped rob a man at gunpoint about 5 p.m. March 25 in the 5400 block of Hitching Post Court. Police said that earlier that morning, Licea was with her boyfriend, Daniel Martinez, and another man, Gilbert Ruiz, when they fatally shot Elisabeth Martinez, 34, and Eric Rodriguez, 32. The pair were found shot inside a white four-door sedan in the 4700 block of North Shea Parkway near Schanen Estates Elementary, police said.

Ruiz, 20, and Martinez, 21, are charged with capital murder and Daniel Martinez is also charged with aggravated robbery. Another man, Amador Cerna, is also charged with aggravated robbery. Cerna, 17, requested a lower bail but also was denied.

Detectives testified they haven't ruled out Licea and Cerna's involvement in the homicides but neither have been charged in connection with the killings. Detective Jason Smith testified Licea might have been in and out of consciousness from drugs while she was in the getaway vehicle.

A 9 mm shell casing collected from the scene of the robbery matched a shell casing collected at the scene of the killings, detectives testified.

Licea's mother, Jennifer Lopez, testified her daughter lived with her, her husband and Licea's three siblings until she turned 18. She left home to date Daniel Martinez, a man Lopez didn't approve of, according to her testimony.

The court bailiff also testified he heard Licea and Martinez talking to one another from neighboring holding cells before she was brought to court for the hearing. The two made a pact not to give information to authorities, the bailiff said.

Martinez appeared before Stith briefly Wednesday morning while his lawyer requested evidence testing.

Twitter: @CallerKMT
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By Fares Sabawi of the Caller-Times

Border Patrol agents came to the aid of a 13-year-old girl abandoned by smugglers Monday afternoon in Brooks County, according to a news release from the agency.

The smuggler called 911 and told dispatchers the girl hadn't had water in five days. The smuggler informed the dispatcher he left the girl by a fence on a ranch.

Agents pinpointed the girl's location through GPS coordinates and located the girl and her 15-year-old sister. Both are Mexican nationals, according to the release.

The girl was taken to Christus Spohn Hospital Memorial by HALO-Flight, before she was transferred to Driscoll Children's Hospital. She was in critical condition, according to the release.

Twitter: @Caller_Fares
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What do some politicians and special interests do when scientific evidence contradicts their political agendas? They attack the researchers.

First, tobacco companies attacked scientists who revealed the many health harms caused by smoking. Next, fossil fuel companies went after researchers who provided evidence that human use of carbon fuels is changing the climate. And now politicians are denouncing experts whose data expose the health consequences of limiting access to reproductive health care.

In 2013, Texas legislators cut funds for family planning clinics run by Planned Parenthood, but the federal government refused to allow them to limit choices for Medicaid patients. So Texas sidestepped this regulation by setting up its own state-funded family planning program without the Planned Parenthood clinics. Legislators asserted that women on Medicaid would still be able to get care.

However, researchers from the University of Texas and the Texas Health and Human Services Commission decided to look at contraceptive use and births to Medicaid patients in the years before and after the exclusion of Planned Parenthood. They found that in counties that had lost access to Planned Parenthood clinics, fewer women used long-acting birth control and more of these women got pregnant.

Instead of responding to this evidence by considering how to improve the situation, several Texas politicians criticized the study and condemned the researchers for revealing facts that contradicted their claims that the new program would provide care as well as Planned Parenthood had. They were outraged that the two employed by the Health and Human Services Commission had functioned as true public servants  reviewing public data to evaluate the health impact of public policy. Threatened with punishment, one of those researchers has now retired.

In the cases of cigarettes and fossil fuel, the attacks on science are presumably motivated by a desire to keep making profits.

What motivates the politicians who denounce scientific evidence about reproductive health? Clearly, many of them are opposed to abortion.

The eyes of the nation are currently on Texas as the Supreme Court decides whether the state's medically unnecessary requirements for abortion clinics create undue burdens for women seeking legal care.

However, defunding family planning clinics has nothing to do with abortion. In fact, it makes abortion more likely as the lack of contraception leads to unintended pregnancies.

Could politicians be trying to increase births among poor women in Texas?

They certainly have not enacted policies that would support poor mothers as Texas has a very low minimum wage, no paid family leave, no earned income or dependent care tax credits, and has rejected the Medicaid expansion offered by the Affordable Care Act.

It has long been difficult to be a poor mother in Texas. In 2002 I worked with a group of researchers, including from the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, to assess how poor mothers of young children with asthma (or other chronic illnesses) fared under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families' new requirements that they work in order for their children to receive benefits.

We found that these mothers faced rocks and hard places. If they took their children for needed medical care, they missed work and then lost their jobs and benefits. If they did not take their children to the doctor in order to attend work, their children missed medical appointments and got sicker.

In this case, the data showed that it was structurally impossible for mothers of sick children to comply with both the work requirements and the health care needs of their children. This could have led to redesigning the program.

Americans hold a wide range of opinions about regulating industries, poverty and reproductive decisions and services. So let's argue straightforwardly about our political disagreements rather than cover up the science and evidence that could inform these debates.

It is the responsibility of public employees to scrutinize public data to inform public policy. In Texas, the scientists who did so got hurt. And the poor women of Texas got hurt.

Dr. Wendy Chavkin is a physician and public health researcher at Columbia University.
Japans total beer consumption is 5.407 million kilolitres, putting it in seventh place worldwide. However, the beer market has been in decline for the past 11 years, with matters especially challenging for the mainstream beer segment.

A variety of factors are at play, including the trend towards frugality and the increasing popularity of chuhai (shochu highballs) and wine.



Despite the challenging environment, shipments of beer enjoyed a small increase in 2015 of 0.1 percent year-on-yearthe first in 19 years.



In September 2015, Suntory sold 2 million cases (1 case is calculated as 20 large bottles) of its mainstream price segment product, The Malts. By December, it had sold 3.23 million, contributing to an overall market share of 15.7 percent.



The company forecasts sales of 7.3 million cases in 2016. It has launched two campaigns targeting people in their 20s to 40s.



For many consumers, beer symbolises the switch from work to private time. But the phrase have a beer to start with indicates that its typically consumed just for the sake of it, without much thought.

Yusuke Kawai, who is in charge of The Malts brand at Suntory, aims to change that.



The weight has begun to shift from this concept to something where people enjoy the taste and the situation, he said. It is our hope that The Malts becomes an essential part of a good time our customers have with their families and friends.

Reason to drink

Creating a clear trigger in the mainstream segment is not easy.



I feel that the hurdles to getting people to try new products are becoming higher every year, said Kawai. This might be because there are a wider variety of products than ever, and also because customers preferences have diversified.



So the company focused on social media and sampling campaigns. It also used conventional advertising methods such as TV commercials and public transit ads, but Sometimes its difficult for manufacturers messages to reach consumers through these conventional methods. We thought social media was more important this time than for our other brands.

Advertising work emphasises The Malts' 'umami' taste



The most distinctive feature is the promotion in shared houseswhere multiple people share a rented residence and live together. The campaign aimed to achieve the dual goal of creating social media buzz and trigger tasting.



We wanted to do more than just urge people to 'enjoy beer with your friends', he explained. We also wanted to actually jump into that drinking scene. Accordingly, we conducted sampling targeting shared houses around Japan among 5,000 people in 100 different locations at the time of launch.



In January, the company also distributed The Malts as beer for making toasts at mochi (sticky rice cake)-making parties at shared houses in Yokohama.



Since many shared house residents constantly post information on social media, a nice atmosphere where theyre drinking The Malts easily finds its way online," Kawai said. "Being able to introduce the product in the plain words of consumers, which are different from the language of manufacturers, is also appealing.

Sampling was conducted among 300,000 people prior to launch, which also involved social media. From mid-July to August last year, in a campaign to give away six-packs of The Malts to 50,000 people, the company offered a clause where the chance to win would be doubled if applicants posted the campaign information on Twitter.



Suntory Beer plans to conduct a promotion among 3 million people in 2016 as well. It intends to conduct sampling at twice as many share houses.



In 2016, wed like to entrench The Malts as a beer that consumers think of as My Beer, Kawai said. We are planning to roll out various programmes, such as campaigns, sampling, and tasting events. What is ultimately important is to what degree the value we propose resonates with consumers and we can place ourselves in their place for this purpose.

Campaign's view: The shared house strategy is a good one not only because it engages people who are naturally active on social media, but also because it ties what is in essence a generic product to a growingand interestingsocial trend in Japan. As a differentiator from beer campaigns that all seem to blend into one, we like it.
The Coca-Cola Company retained top spot as the highest-ranked marketing company after toppling Unilever last year. Coca-Cola was also the most effective brand for the fourth consecutive year.

McCanns FP7/DXB shop in Dubai was named as the most effective individual agency globally, while ACG Advertising Agency in Budapest was named the most effective independent agency.

The Effie Index Worldwide is compiled from more than 3,000 finalists and winners from its effectiveness competitions around the world over the course of 2015.

Top five most effective marketers:

The Coca-Cola Company Unilever Procter & Gamble Nestle PepsiCo

Top five most effective brands:

Coca-Cola Vodafone McDonalds Samsung Movistar

Top five most effective agency holding groups:

WPP Omnicom Interpublic Publicis Groupe Dentsu Aegis Network

Top five most effective agency networks:

Ogilvy & Mather (WPP) BBDO Worldwide (Omnicom) McCann Worldgroup (Interpublic) MullenLowe Group (Interpublic) DDB Worldwide (Omnicom)

Top five most effective individual agencies:

FP7/DXB (McCann, Dubai) Ogilvy & Mather (WPP, Mumbai) Sancho BBDO (Omnicom, Colombia) ACG Advertising Agency (Independent, Budapest) Ogilvy & Mather (WPP, New York) / MullenLowe Lintas (Interpublic, Mumbai)

Top five most effective independent agencies:
When Ad Nut sees a dog, Ad Nut's heart rate shoots through the roof, because as far as squirrel-kind is concerned, dogs are murderous beasts, and a fight-or-flight response is hard-wired.

But according to this masterful Pedigree film, the heart rates of dogs and their pet humans slow in a synchronised fashion when they're together, which translates to reduced stress for both.

Ad Nut hasn't done a deep dive into the science that's being shown in the demo, but doesn't need fancy instruments to know that canine-human bonds are strong and beneficial to both parties. For example, the man in the film, Glenn, credits his sheepdog, Lyric, with helping him through three years of anxiety and depression following a work injury.

As part of the campaign, the brand is asking Australians to post photos of their dogs using the hashtag #HeartsAligned on Facebook, and has pledged a $1 donation for each photo to a rescue organisation, Pet Rescue, up to $20,000. The campaign runs until the end of May.

CREDITS

Client: Mars Petcare Australia

Marketing Director: Ben Culliganer

Marketing Manager (Pedigree): Kate Waite

Brand Manager (Pedigree): Jess Hoare

Digital Business Partner Manager: Lachland Martin

Digital Operations Manager: Maree Edwards

Agency: Clemenger BBDO

CEO: Nick Garrett

Creative Chairman: James McGrath

Executive Creative Director: Ant Keogh

Creatives: Giles Watson & Joe Sibley

Group Account Director: Bryce Coombe

Account Director: Khia Croy

Account Manager: Charlotte Lang

Planning Director: Michael Derepas

Executive Producer: Sonia von Bibra

Senior Producer: Emma Johnson

Digital Producer: Charlotte Abroms

Print Production: Nick Short

Designer: Jake Turnbull

Digital Designer: Jess Ramsey

Digital Strategist: Sam Hodgson

Social Copywriter: Hugh Gurney

Production: Finch Company

Managing Director / Executive Producer: Corey Esse

Director: Luke Bouchier

Producer: Jackie Adler

DOP: Jordan Maddocks c/o Top Technicians

Editing / Finishing: Jon Holmes

Sound Engineer: Paul LeCouteur, Flagstaff Studios

Can Ad Nut can confide in you, dear reader? Ad Nut is secretly insanely jealous that humans get to enjoy the companionship of dogs. They seem so friendly and kind and loyal and cuddly! Why oh why must they always seek to rend squirrels into bloody shreds whenever they see us?

Stop the presses! A Google search has revealed that there may be hope:
| BY Ricki Green |

How will Australia perform at Cannes this year? In the lead up to the Festival, Campaign Brief will be showcasing the work we hope will impress the judges

The Glue Society, Revolver/Will ORourke, DDB NZ

The Unforgotten Soldiers was a tableau vivant installation that brought an old black and white World War One picture to life on the streets of Auckland. The campaign turned a part of Lorne Street into a real life WWI trench, complete with authentic surround sound to take you back to 1915. The 8-hour performance brought to life a typical day in the trench and was all based on real NZ soldiers and their real stories. Everything looked just as it was 100 years ago, authentic army uniforms, weapons, food rations, were carefully crafted to recreate the effect of looking at an old black and white picture, but in real life. Directed by The Glue Societys Pete Baker.

The Glue Society, Independent UK, Grey London

Running a business is about more than just the numbers , its about people and human ambition. To encapsulate this, Grey, London created a film depicting one mans journey, from the launch of his company in 1974 up until the present day, and tells the story of everything hes experienced in between: the up-and-down, four-decade journey of a business, from start-up to multinational corporation. Directed by The Glue Societys Gary Freedman.

The Glue Society, Revolver/Will ORourke, DDB Sydney

The Volkswagen Amarok was a newcomer to the Australian market, but because of its sleek European styling, hardcore Aussie blokes didnt think it was tough enough to cope with Australian conditions. So, because people were judging the Amarok by its cover, DDB Sydneys solution was to remove the cover. DDB stripped the Amarok of everything that identified it, forcing Australians to judge it on performance alone. It launched with a national unbranded campaign on broadcast channels as well as social media, asking Australia to guess what they thought The Naked Ute was. Later, to everyones surprise, Volkswagen revealed that The Naked Ute was actually the Volkswagen Amarok. Directed by The Glue Societys Matt Devine & Jonathan Kneebone.

The Glue Society, Revolver/Will ORourke, Whybin\TBWA Melbourne

In honour of the 10th anniversary of the banks Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras sponsorship ANZ came out as GAYNZ. In a public display of pride, the banks Oxford Street branch at the heart of the Mardi Gras parade route, rebranded as a flagship GAYNZ branch.

Directed by The Glue Societys James Dive & Pete Baker.

The Glue Society, Revolver/Will ORourke, Clemenger BBDO Melbourne

At the heart of Towards Zero is the belief that human health is paramount to all else. It acknowledges that, as people, we all make mistakes. However, when mistakes happen on our roads they can cost us our lives or cause serious injury. Thats because our bodies arent made to absorb the forces of high impact speeds. We are fragile, and theres only so much physical force we can withstand and this is why we need to build a safer road system. Improving the safety of our roads, our speeds, our vehicles and our people will improve safety for everyone. Directed by The Glue Societys Jonathan Kneebone.

The Glue Society, Revolver/Will ORourke, Clemenger BBDO Sydney

2 out of 3 Australian families dont eat dinner together regularly. MasterFoods inspired families to make dinnertime matter by reminding them who the most important people in the world really are. MasterFoods and Clemenger BBDO Sydney invited real families to casting sessions around the country. They then asked parents and children separately, If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would you choose? The parents told Clemenger BBDO Sydney who their heroes were. And so did the kids. Except the kids heroes werent famous, they were their mums and dads. The online film has had over 90 million views and 1.2 million shares. Directed: The Glue Societys Jonathan Kneebone.

The Glue Society, Revolver/Will ORourke, Whybin\TBWA Sydney
| BY Ricki Green |

CB Exclusive  After 3 years at BWM Dentsu Melbourne as executive creative director, Murray White today joins 10 Feet Tall in the lead creative role. He will partner Joseph Meseha and Stuart Black to lead the promising independent.

Says White: Im a big believer in independence. Theres a wonderful agility and humility that comes with it. You respond to your clients challenges in a way that is truly centered upon the needs of the business and the people running it  rather than in a way that is governed by a network or dictated by their rigid frameworks.

Last week, BWM Dentsu announced Simon Bagnasco as Murrays replacement. White left the agency in February. Prior to joining BWM Dentsu, he was the ECD/chief design officer of Doner, North America, and international creative director of Springer & Jacoby, Europe  both being the largest independent agencies in their respective markets at the time.

Says White: 10 Feet Talls strategic and creative processes are world class, but at the same time they truly understand the importance of preserving their start-up culture. There are no armchair generals at 10 feet tall. They just know how to get on with making great work that gets results.

Says Black: Murray is a top bloke and the perfect fit for our business. Hes been awarded at Cannes, Clio, D&AD etc. He gets our vision and deeply cares for his clients. Its been a long time since we have seen such passion for the work walk through the door here at 10 feet tall.
Will midterm voter turnout be high in Georgia? It was for the primary
Food

By: Cook Britain

With layers of airy sponge and sweet buttercream balanced by decadent coffee and walnut flavours, this cake is simply divine.

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John Taverner's family has been involved with the Manuka Pool for 65 years, his father Owen starting as a lifeguard in 1947 and then managed it from 1956 to 1990. Mr Taverner started work at the pool in 1980 and managed it for 22 years until 2012. Photo: Rohan Thomson
If you see any accidents or have any info on the morning commute, let us know whenever it is safe to do so. Email morningblog@canberratimes.com.au or tweet us @canberratimes.
The fire was contained about 8pm but the spokesman said it was expected to burn for at least a couple of days, due to the types of material that are alight.
Mr Drumgold said there were concerns Boyd would fail to appear at court, given the difficulty police had in apprehending him, and could commit further offences if he was released from custody.
"It's inevitable that the government will need to have another plan for what is going to happen, and the most logical thing to do is to bring those people to Australia," said Ms Parke, who is a former UN lawyer and advocate for asylum seekers and is set to retire from Parliament.
"There is a lot of discussion about the lack of women working in this field at every part of the system, from employers to universities and high schools," she said. "It's great there is this attention but it is a complex problem that has a lot to do with societal attitudes."
The project will cost 20 million, according to the regional governor of Madeira, a group of four islands off the African coast that is part of Portugal. It would require the planned Telebras-IslaLink cable connecting Portugal and Brazil to be rerouted to connect the islands.

According to Portuguese news service Publico, Miguel Albuquerque, president of the regional government of Madeira, said that he is hoping for European Union funds to aid the project, which will end the monopoly of Altices Portugal Telecom of mainland-island communications.

The whole 164 million Telebras-IslaLink scheme was first announced in 2014, backed by Brazils Telebras and Spanish subsea cable company IslaLink. The two companies signed an agreement in mid-2015 to build the cable, due to connect Lisbon with Fortaleza in Brazil.

Albuquerque announced his wish for the cable to connect Madeira in a press conference at Funchal airport in the presence of European Commissioner Carlos Moedas, a Portuguese banker who is in charge of research, science and innovation for the Commission.

The cable, which will be 5,800 kilometres long, is already planned to come within 100 kilometres of Madeira. It is designed to carry data at 30 terabits/s. The cable is expected to be built in late 2017 and early 2018.
President John Magufuli, who was elected in October 2015, says that the regulator is responsible for the loss of $180 million in tax revenue since 2013.

However the figures of potential revenue provided by the TCRA seem to be very different from the loss that Magufuli is claiming.

The presidents office said, according to Reuters: I want the government to collect all outstanding (tax) revenues and I will not hesitate to take action against anyone who becomes an obstacle in this tax collection drive.

According to the office of the president, the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) installed a traffic monitoring system in 2013 but has failed to use it. The contract was signed by Ally Simba, the director general of the TCRA, who has been suspended.

The contract in question appears to be the telecommunications traffic monitoring system that is still being hailed on the TCRA website as not only a revolution but also one of the greatest achievements to the countrys communication sector.

The system was designed to allow 28% of international telecoms revenue to be paid to the government. According to the TCRAs figures on its own website, international calls are charged at $0.25 a minute, out of which the international network operators get $0.13, the government receives 7 cents, and the balance of 5 cents is shared by the consultant and TCRA for maintenance.

This enables the country to earn about 20 billion Tanzanian shillings a year from the revenue share, says the TCRA  meaning that the TCRAs revenue calculations are a long way short of the 400 billion shillings ($180 million) that the president says has been lost.

According to the TCRA, the contract for the monitoring system went  after an open tender  to a consortium of Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS) and Global Voice Group (GVG). The TCRA website says that: The project is being financed under build operate and transfer, whose main advantage is that no funds are paid up front.

Seychelles-based GVG says that it is a pioneer in the development and implementation of telecom governance technologies, with clients in 10 African governments, Rwanda, Tanzania, Liberia, Guinea-Conakry, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, the Central African Republic, Togo, Senegal and Ghana.

SGS is based in Switzerland and describes itself as the worlds leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company, with more than 85,000 employees.

Magufuli has built a reputation as an activist against excessive government spending since he was elected: he has banned overseas travel for government officials, cancelled state banquets and  according to one east African website  fired the board of a hospital after finding patients sleeping on the floor.

Operators in Tanzania include Bharti Airtel, Millicoms Tigo, Smart Mobile, Viettel, Vodacom and Zantel.
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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.

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Applications are invited by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore for admission to Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) Programmes in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & Engineering.

Admissions are offered for the academic session 2016.

Eligibility Criteria:

Candidates should have secured minimum first class master degree in the relevant discipline (Engineering/Technology) OR

Candidate must have secured minimum 60% marks in engineering/ technology from a reputed Institute with a valid GATE score OR

Candidate should have a B.Tech degree from an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) with a minimum CPI of 8.0 OR

Candidate must have completed master degree in the relevant discipline of Science with valid GATE qualification or UGC/CSIR-JRF qualification or equivalent fellowship

How to Apply?

Candidates should visit the official website to apply online

Application fee of Rs 100/- should be paid through a Demand Draft (DD), drawn in favour of "Registrar, IIT Indore" and payable at Indore.

Selection Procedure:

Selection of candidates will be based on the written test and interview, conducted by the institute.

Important Dates:



Last date to apply online:

Ph.D in Electrical Engineering: May 07, 2016

Ph.D in Computer Science and Engineering: May 10, 2016

Ph.D in Electrical Engineering: May 12, 2016

Date of written test and/or interview:
Although production of the NSX has just started, tuners are already toying with the idea of modifying it. And one of the first to do so is long-time modder Hennessey Performance.



Honda, like many other Japanese car manufacturers, accustomed us over the years with easy tunable machines, so we naturally expect the NSX to lend itself to different mods, especially as the 3.5-litre engine within its bowels comes with two turbochargers.

However, since the vehicle is practically a brand-new offering that hasnt been abused in the real world by all sorts of customers, its unknown whether the extra power will upset its carefully studied hybrid balance, but Hennessey is willing to see what the car is made out of by revising and upgrading its twin-turbo system, installing a stainless steel exhaust, a new intercooler, wheels and many more bits and bobs. Basically, Hennessey will be using the NSXs comprehensive developing process as a canvas for a mental supercar.

But well have to wait a little more until the American company will let the hidden beast within the car loose, as these are only its intentions. Until then, one could only wonder what power is deemed adequate for the NSX, knowing that already the car is capable of accelerating from 0 to 100 km/h (0-62 mph) in less than three seconds,

PHOTO GALLERY
MG has dropped the second teaser of the new GS, one week before its public debut, at the London Motor Show, on May 6.



Revealing its headlight cluster with what seems to be incorporated LED DRLs, the image suggests it has the same face as last years concept from the Shanghai Auto Show (pictured below).

While the Chinese study used a 217 HP 2.0-liter turbo engine, the production version is believed to carry a 1.5-liter unit, joined by a 1.9-liter diesel. Customers will also get to choose between FWD and AWD.

Were extremely proud of the GS, so were looking forward to unveiling it and speaking to attendees of the event about how easily it will fit into their lifestyle. I can assure potential customers that it will be consistent with the MG-family pricing strategy, commented the British brands Head of Sales and Marketing, Matthew Cheyne.

MG Concept shown below, after the teaser

PHOTO GALLERY
Skoda will add a subcompact crossover, which is already in development and will be aimed primarily at the Chinese market.



Announced recently by the Czech brand in the form of a CUV, its believed to show up over the next couple of years, as Autocar reports.

In contrast to most vehicles developed for the Peoples Republic, which tend to stay there, the crossover could go on sale in Europe, too, a few months later.

However, before it gets to fight rivals like the Nissan Juke on the Old Continent, the automaker will roll out the production version of the VisionS study, believed to go under the Kodiak/Kodiaq moniker. The SUV is expected to debut in Paris this fall and to be joined by a second version, a five-door coupe with a sloping roofline. This will be offered in China and is still unclear if itll be sold inr Europe.

While the Roomster has been axed, the Yeti will live on. Its replacement is expected late next year or early 2018, with common design elements to the rest of the firms crossovers/SUVs, including squared-off wheel arches, double-bar grille and smaller lights sitting under the headlights.

Note: Skoda VisionS pictured

PHOTO GALLERY
The 2016 Honda Civic Coupe is the equivalent of a shiny object waving in front of you. It exists because looks are important, even on a mainstream car.



Get over the fact it has front-wheel drive and an automatic transmission. The Civic Coupe has the sporting pretensions of a Lululemon yoga bag and it doesnt care what you have to say about it. Throw in exaggerated lights on every corner and its the sensible compact car thats been given some dazzling jewelry to distract your eyes.

Normally, the Civic Coupe has complemented the Civic line as the most stylish and least practical model in the lineup, the attention-grabber while the other variants carry people and cargo easily. But the coupe was always the one you wanted to date and the 2016 version is no different.

We drove the 2016 Civic Sedan extensively when it was released last fall, and the Civic Coupe carries over pretty much all of that cars characteristics. Thats largely a good thing, because the new Civic is not only a quantum leap over the previous model, but aims higher than pretty much anything else in the compact sedan class.

Because the coupe can tell practicality to get lost, it looks much closer to the original Civic Concept shown last year. The boomerang lights, quickly sloping roof and stubby trunk have translated over well  you can even get it in the concepts bright green paint.

While very nearly $27,000 sounds like a lot of money for a Civic, it isnt that much for whats basically a fashion statement. A Volkswagen Beetle 1.8T, Mini Cooper and Kia Forte Koup can all be similar money. And yet the Civic is arguably the most easy to use of the three. The suite of driver assistance tech that comes standard on the Touring (and optional on other Civic Coupes) isnt the most refined of its kind out there, but the stop-and-go adaptive cruise control is extremely useful in nasty traffic situations.

The Civic is unexciting to drive, even with the 1.5-liter turbo four  the CVT, even in Sport mode, smothers the torque curve. And yet its never lacking for thrust and doesnt sound strained in pretty much every passing maneuver. The base 2.0-liter Civic with the manual is still the enthusiasts Civic right now, but the turbo oozes competency.

Much like the Honda Accord Coupe, the Civic Coupe is indulgence without the calories. The rear seats are small, but not nearly as useless as most coupes. You sit low, but visibility is fine. Theres a reasonably large trunk, too. And if all you want from a car are the looks without the hassle, then the Civic Coupe ticks all of the major boxes. What other moving lighting installations can approach 40 mpg on the highway?

The answer to why the Civic Coupe exists is this: Why not? Which made me wonder even more whats going on with the back of this car. I thought the sedan had an unusually short trunk lid, but the coupes verges on the ridiculous. And it makes the car look incomplete. The Civic Coupe is one of the rare cars crying out for a large, stupid wing on the back.

Impractical yes, but this is a coupe and looks are everything.

Photos: Carscoops.com/Keith Moore

Photo Gallery
Editor's note: Castanet News will be sitting down with Kelowna RCMP Supt. Nick Romanchuk each month to discuss issues in our community. This month we focus on increased violent crime, fentanyl on the streets and plans for the tourist season.

A recent string of stabbings, shootings and some violent deaths have both the RCMP and the public on high alert.

Kelowna RCMP Supt. Nick Romanchuk says it is fair to say the Central Okanagan has seen a spike in violent crime this year.

We have seen a number of stabbings over the last few weeks and a number of other serious crimes  it is certainly something that concerns us, says Romanchuk.

We've seen very high unemployment rates here, I think we have one of the highest in the country, and we've seen here and around B.C., that as the price of oil goes down it has affected employment, which increases crime.

He says recent violent crime in Kelowna can be attributed to more issues surrounding unemployment and drug use, rather than that of organized crime.

They are generally known to each other. They are people that get involved in disputes over drugs or whatever the case may be, and it turns into a violent situation, says Romanchuk.

I don't think it is more complicated than that.

For the most part, violent crime, or even homicides, tend to happen between people who know each other, says Romanchuk.

We did have an unfortunate incident here where it was a stranger on stranger attack and unfortunately the one individual was killed, but those are extremely rare and primarily the offender and victim are known to each other.

Following recent stories of a shooting in Glenmore, another in Rutland, a violent break-in in West Kelowna and a murder-suicide near Shannon Lake, many online are speculating about the links between the crimes, but Romanchuk says the evidence just doesn't support it.

It's easy to speculate, it is a lot more difficult to prove things, says Romanchuk. I don't think people should try to make it more complicated than what it truly is. The public does not have the benefit of all the facts and evidence and forensic evidence that we do.

Another concern on the police radar right now is the influx of fentanyl on Central Okanagan streets.

As of March 29, 2016, five overdose deaths have been linked to fentanyl in Kelowna alone, 15 in the Interior Region.

Fentanyl is a relatively new phenomena. It is a very, very powerful drug that is very inexpensive. So, it is lucrative for drug dealers to get involved in fentanyl, says Romanchuk. It is a very dangerous drug.

From a large bust in West Kelowna this year, to new equipment coming to Kelowna to protect emergency personnel in drug labs, Romanchuk says RCMP are actively working to rid the streets of the deadly drug.

It is here for sure and it is a significant concern, notes Romanchuk.

A concern heard from both the public and the RCMP itself is the need for more boots on the ground, as concerns about the extent of RCMP coverage continue to pop up.

Romanchuk says Kelowna RCMP are aware resourcing levels have been an issue for a long time now and they are working on ongoing solutions.

There are challenges for sure. From now until October we will see an influx of tourists, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1.5 million, and that certainly places a strain on our members, says Romanchuk.

This year I think we are in a better place than we were last summer for sure.

He says they are working to increase the amount of 'proactive time' available to officers to do things like road checks and parole checks.

We are trying to build that to a point where at least 25 per cent of their time is proactive, and even at that point it is at the low range compared to some other detachments and police services, says Romanchuk. But let's try to get there first and go from there.

We are in a much better place than we were a few years ago for sure.

While 2016 has seen a spike in violent crimes early in the year, Romanchuk is feeling good about the year so far.

So far, so good,says Romanchuk.

Our goal is just to provide the basic level of police service for the city. That is always our number 1 goal and there will be no issue doing that.

We would like to be as proactive as we can, in terms of enforcement of the downtown. It is as busy down there in terms of street crime as I have ever seen, so we certainly have to be very proactive there.

It is a beautiful, vibrant downtown and we want to make sure everyone can enjoy it.

When asked if Kelowna is safe, Romanchuk answered without qualm.

Absolutely, it really is a safe community, says Romanchuk. Yeah, we have some issues and crime, and we do have a higher crime rate than some areas, but the majority of what we deal with is property-related crime. I would have no hesitation about walking anywhere in this community at any time of day or night."

"It is a safe community, hands down.
Update: 4:38 p.m.

Pizza, the pie dreams are made from.

Papa Johns pizza knows all about how their deep-dish delight put smiles on faces  which is why they wanted to be part of a cause that is all about happiness for children.

For the second year, Papa Johns held Pizza Day for Kids, a fundraising event for the Sunshine Foundation. The charity helps dreams come true for children living with severe physical disabilities or life-threatening illnesses.

Staff from five Papa Johns locations in the Interior have donated 100 per cent of their wages, along with total profits from the day.

David Matis, with the Sunshine Foundation Canada, said Papa Johns is one of their biggest supporters and their effort on the day is beyond expectation.

I really dont know of a supporter, who I have seen, who's as generous with what they do for us. The staff, the revenue, the donations, they put it so much effort.

This year, funds from the day will go to support individual dreams of kids living in the B.C. interior.

Every dream that comes true changes the lives of a family, not just the child, its the entire family, said Matis. Taking a step and daring to dream when you are a child who has some challenges can make a significant impact.

Scott Pattet, Director of Papa Johns Kelowna, has seen that impact first-hand, as he sent 70 kids off on a Dreamlift to Disney in December of 2015.

To be standing there and see the excitement in the kids, actually see the kids getting on the plane, said Pattet. "A lot of times, honestly, these kids have never been away from their parents ever, so its truly amazing.

Looking after the children on their Dream day at Disney are the longtime Sunshine Foundation supporters, the Orange County Sheriffs.

Dozens of officers volunteer their time to take the children around the theme park and care for them in any way they may need.

Orange County Sheriff Bob Peterson volunteered for the first time with Dreamlift 24 years ago and says the young girl he helped for the day became a pen pal, who he corresponded with until she passed away.

We have more volunteers than we have spaces available for the day because every day we deal with criminal element and this is a way to come back and protect the kids. We are super protective, we are big momma and papa bears around them making sure they get around safely, said Peterson.

He was in Kelowna where he has come to donate his time to help raise funds on Pizza Day for the Sunshine Foundation.

Last year Papa Johns raised just over $43,000 for the cause, and this year they hope to break the $50,000 mark to ensure dreams do come true for the children who need them.

Its never too early for pizza.

Head down to Papa Johns today from 10 a.m. until midnight for the second annual Pizza Dreams for Kids Day.

Four locations across B.C. are participating in raising funds for the Sunshine Foundation of Canada. Staff from Kelowna, West Kelowna, Kamloops and Prince George will be donating 100 per cent of their wages to help children living with severe physical disabilities or life-threatening illnesses.

The event will include guests such as the Sunshine Bear and Orange County Sheriffs. The sheriffs take time out of their busy schedules to partner with the Sunshine Foundation to help the children navigate Disneyland during their Dreamlift holiday.

Orders to support Dreams for Kids Day can be placed in person at one of the participating Papa Johns locations or online at PapaJohns.com.
Photo: The Canadian Press

UPDATE: 2 p.m.

Shaw says the massive service outage Tuesday was caused by a "technical issue."

Our teams moved quickly to identify source of the outage, and restored services to most Internet customers within 90 minutes, the company said in a statement.

ORIGINAL

Shaw won't say what caused a major outage this week.

Internet, TV and telephone service was interrupted for about 90 minutes across much of the Okanagan, West Kootenays and Interior on Tuesday afternoon.

The company won't say how many customers were affected, other than to characterize it as "significant."

Also, a spokesman for the company has not answered requests for information about what caused the outage.

The company has not clarified whether the interruption was due to an act of vandalism or an equipment failure.
Photo: ajr_images

If you are looking for a way to make a difference in the lives of others, foster parents are desperately needed in the Central Okanagan.

According to the Central Okanagan Foster Parents Association, children are waiting for a place to temporarily call home and they are hoping information sessions will help local adults consider becoming new foster families.

I am constantly amazed by all that foster parents do for children," said Catrina Roderick, foster parent coordinator in the Central Okanagan area.

Most come to fostering with only their desire to help, but they develop the ability to meet the special needs that many foster children have. Okanagan Foster Parent Association and the Ministry of Children and Family Development work together to provide foster families with training, support, and reimbursement.

Roderick says there is a specific need for foster parents with specialized skills, as some of the children needing homes have exceptional medical or behavioural needs that require experienced caregivers.

Young adults, with training related to children, become excellent foster parents. Those who retire from jobs in education, child care or the medical field, also find fostering is a good way to use their experience in a way that meets their new life style, said Roderick.

She adds that while children come into foster care for many different reasons, they all need a safe and loving home.

Most children stay only for a short time, while others may stay for years, or move on to adoption, said Roderick.

Some children need respite care: a surrogate aunt or uncle who will care for them for a weekend or two every month.

Foster parents can be any age, be single or married, have their own children, have no children or have grown children.

They care for children of all ages, from birth to 18 years old.

There is need for foster parents who will care for one child, as well as for foster parents who have room for family groups of three or more.

Those interested in becoming foster parents are invited to learn more about the responsibilities and rewards of fostering at an Introduction to Fostering class on May 16 from 6 to 8 p.m. at 401-1726 Dolphin Avenue, Kelowna.

For more information, and to register for the class, please contact Roderick via email at [email protected].
Photo: Facebook

A self-proclaimed group of global adventurers will be taking a break from their world travels, meeting in Kelowna tonight to discuss poverty around the world.

Rally4Life, a local charity, is hosting the Wednesday event with the support of Tree Brewing.

The speakers at the event include monster truck driver Cam McQueen, motorcycle rider Steph Jeavons and Mark Jennings-Bates. They will update those in attendance about the work Rally4Life has done over the past few years and identify important projects for the future.

"It is an opportunity for us to get together as adventurers and find out more about issues facing poorer communities and identifying what we may be able to do with our projects to assist," said Mark Jennings-Bates, co-founder of Rally4Life.

The charity will also be releasing a new website that will feature blogs from their members who are travelling around the world.

The charity is currently supporting a water project in Northern Kenya, where 96,000 people currently share one well.

The three adventurers will be presenting at Emmanuel Church in West Kelowna.
Photo: Carmen Weld

In opposition to a move by the Canadian government to legalize assisted dying, the Kelowna Right to Life Society rallied outside MP Stephen Fuhr's office today.

I think this is a landmark in Canada of disgrace, absolutely disgrace, that this is the way we treat those that need our care, they need our patience, they need our love. These are our family members and we are now saying to them that the best we have to offer them is that we are going to kill you, said society member Eileen Collins.

The elderly and the handicapped and the infirm and those that are depressed and cannot speak will become the victims of a society that is degrading with a lack of passion and care.

The impromptu Kelowna rally joined 30 others across the country with groups hoping to encourage local MPs to oppose Bill C-14 and the legalization of assisted dying in Canada.

There is still hope, there is still opportunity to voice our opposition and state unequivocally that we and millions of Canadians across the country are firmly opposed to the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia in Canada, said Marlon Bartram

The group of local pro-life protestors feel the bill is vague and ambiguous and will create a slippery slope of arguments of who can die and when.

I am ashamed of a country that says killing is a solution, said Collins. We are choosing to eliminate those we consider a burden."

What about a woman whose husband is an alcoholic? And she decides he isn't really too helpful around the home and he is inconvenient, is he on the next hit list? A child at home that has problems, do we decide he is next? Where does this legislation end?

Collins and the society say the legislation is a disgrace to the country and the medical profession.

For the first time in our history, a form of intentionally ending the life of another innocent, born human being is about to be legalized, adds Bartram. Should we be surprised after 46 years of legally killing innocent, unborn human beings? I say no.

While Kelowna-Lake Country MP Stephen Fuhr was not in Kelowna today, his office staff did provide the protestors a written response.

We realize that medical assistance in dying is a deeply personal issue for many Canadians; however, it is important we defend people's choices and freedoms in a way that protects the most vulnerable, and also supports the personal convictions of health care providers, reads the letter from Fuhr.

The proposed legislation is the result of extensive consultations with individuals, groups and experts, at home and abroad, and takes into account a range of interests, including personal autonomy and safeguards to protect the vulnerable. This is a compassionate approach that takes into consideration all these interests.

A recent poll on Castanet saw that most readers were for the legalization of physician-assisted dying. Approximately 58 per cent of the more than 7,800 votes cast agreed with allowing physician-assisted dying, while just under 40 per cent were against the move and two per cent were unsure.

Parliament is currently in a race against the clock to pass legislation before June 6, when the legal ban on assisted dying is lifted.
Photo: Carmen Weld

Two local women were meant to be recovering in a Vancouver hospital today from a kidney-transplant surgery, but instead, a last-minute, heartbreaking phone call has left them waiting with bated breath.

Castanet introduced Caroline Lopes and her life-saving angel Jeanne Usen to the public earlier this month.

At the time, the two women had become bonded life-long friends after Usen made a spontaneous decision to provide Lopes her kidney and save her life.

When interviewed at the beginning of this month, the duo were amped up and ready for the kidney-transplant surgery scheduled for April 26 in Vancouver.

Last week Lopes had made her way to Vancouver and was preparing for the big day. Usen's sister had arrived from Calgary and her bags were packed and she was ready to head down to the coast on Saturday to join her, but Friday night, one phone call changed the whole plan.

My doctor called and told me the reason he was calling is because they were going to have to cancel the surgery due to two antibodies that showed up in my blood, explained Lopes.

I was in shock, I was devastated. I was bawling, I had to pass the phone to my boyfriend who got all the details.

It was like I got punched in the head. It was like I couldn't breathe, I had to sit down, said Usen. It was like I had fallen off the end of a cliff. It was just devastating news, devastating.

The women say the odds were in their favour, but it just did not work out.

There was a 95 per cent chance it was a go and, of course, Caroline and I hit that 5 per cent chance where, for some reason, her body would have rejected my kidney, added Usen.

If they did go ahead, there was a 50 per cent chance there would be rejection and we would lose that kidney, or I would die in the surgery because of the complications, said Lopes.

But, all is not lost.

According to her doctor, the problem antibodies in Lopes' blood may be due to a recent infection she is recovering from, which means they may disappear over time.

The two women will be tested several more times over the next few months to see if the transplant is still possible.

If that does not work and it comes to the point where doctors no longer believe the women can successfully be a match, they will both go on the pairing program list.

She told me that no matter what, she is there for me and she still sees it as her kidney keeping me alive and here for my daughter, said Lopes.

The pairing list allows incompatible donor and recipient pairs to find other incompatible donor and recipient pairs across the country where the un-paired donors match the recipients. It allows the donors to still help their loved ones by giving their kidney to another.

Usen could give her kidney to stranger in need and that stranger's donor would, in turn, give Lopes their kidney.

We are on board. Whatever it takes to get this young women a kidney, I will do, said Usen.

Without any hesitation at all. You have to put it behind you and now we've got to go forward.

The news has hit both women emotionally, and now financially, as they both had taken measures to prepare for an extended visit in Vancouver, including accommodations and time off work for both of them and their supporting friends and family.

Lopes had rented a place in Vancouver for her three months of recovery that she had to cancel at the last minute, losing money on that deposit as well.

It has been a financial hardship on both of us, said Lopes. It comes out of all of our own pockets.

My family and friends have just been so supportive and have stepped up to help me when they could, said Usen. Both Caroline and I appreciate that so much.

They will now have figure out a new plan, find ways to raise some more funds to help go through this a second time and wait  in hopes of securing a new surgery date in the future.

If you are interested in becoming a living organ donor, click here for more information.
Photo: Nicholas Johansen

Justin Pearson took to the podium at UBC Okanagan Wednesday to share his research with the packed room  research that means a lot to both Pearson and many in the crowd.

UBC Okanagan hosted its annual undergraduate research conference on campus Wednesday, where students could showcase their honours and directed studies projects to faculty, students and the public.

Justin Pearson has been studying medical marijuana, and the relationship between the colour and clarity of the plants trichomes, small hair-like growths, and the content of medicinal compounds within the plant.

The colour of the trichomes change as the plant matures, and Pearson was investigating the relationship between the maturity of the plant and the chemical compounds within it.

Pearsons passion for the plant stems from his experience with his mother, who was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer and made an incredible turnaround that Pearson attributes to her use of cannabis oil.

Through his research, Pearson found that there wasnt a significant link between the colour and clarity of a plants trichomes and the content of the plants cannabinoids, the psychoactive chemicals in cannabis.

At first I was a little disheartened because it didnt fall in line with my thinking, Pearson said. I have to keep reminding myself that this is science, we set out to learn things, and if we dont find what were looking for thats OK.

Pearson did find significant differences between the different types of cannabinoids across strains of cannabis, a point he says can be used by medical marijuana growers to customize certain strains for certain medical conditions.

An example of this customization can be found in Summerland, where four-year-old Kyla Williams has seen drastic results using a specific type of cannabis strain.

Williams experienced hundreds of seizures a day when she was born, but after using cannabis oil from the Charlottes Web strain, which is high in the cannabinoid CBD, her seizures have dropped to roughly one per week.

Pearson said a greater understanding of what strains have what cannabinoids will only benefit patients.

This is an exciting topic, this is an exciting plant, and I believe this proves that we need to do further studies on this plant because in the end, we owe it to the patients, Pearson said.

He hopes that others will continue researching the plant, and build off his work.

This is the framework, the foundation, that hopefully other people can expand on so we can get to the point, one day, where people have more access to this, or more hope.

As for Pearsons future, he will be traveling to Sri Lanka in September for eight months to do humanitarian work.

He hopes to enter medical school the following year.

Pearson wasnt the only person on campus Wednesday who was personally invested in his research.

Dozens of people, from the young to the old, mobbed Pearson after his presentation, congratulating him on his work and inquiring about the details of his research.

Several people handed Pearson their contact information, looking for more information about cannabis oil.

Many in the crowd were cancer patients themselves, and were intrigued by Pearsons mothers success with cannabis.

Theres a reason why Im doing this, Pearson said. Why I petitioned so hard to get this project was, she (Pearson's mother) is here, and I believe its because of it (cannabis oil), and I want to learn more about it, Pearson said. Shes the inspiration.
Photo: School District 83.

So far, many of the difficult decisions predicted by the superintendent of schools have not had to be made, at least not for the next school year.

The North Okanagan Shuswap school board has found enough funds to cover student programs for the 2016-17 year, said trustee Kelly Rowe, calling Wednesday night's committee of the whole meeting outstanding.

We found some funds that will relieve a lot of pressure, said Rowe. The big plus turns out to be that we don't have to cut programs.

Rowe said there was also enough funding left over to put some aside for capital reserves in case a boiler breaks down at a school, or a vehicle needs work."

She praised the hard work of central staff and the secretary treasurer for finding the money.

Rowe is one of three trustees resigning over what she feels is a lack of public confidence in the board following revelations that $10.5 million in operating surpluses were used to support capital projects in the district over the last five years.

Some trustees are calling this a "breathing room budget," said district spokesperson Alice Hucul, until trustees work out how to reduce space and be more efficient.

A budget report to the board lists two options to help the budget shortfall including, not transferring $1,000,000 to the local capital fund or transferring only half that amount.

No final decisions will be made until a May 10th meeting.

In January, superintendent Glenn Borthistle told parents difficult decisions would have to be made due to dwindling students numbers as well as program and budget reductions.

Since then, proposals to close elementary schools in Armstrong and Salmon Arm have been deferred until next year.

At that time, Borthistle also said the district's budget would run to about $60 million in 2016-17.

Meanwhile, a special advisor appointed by the Minister of Education to review governance issues within the district has arrived in Salmon Arm.

Liz Watson, a lawyer from Vancouver, is holding meetings in the district Wednesday and Thursday, said Alice Hucul, school district spokesperson.

Hucul said Watson would likely meet with the superintendent.

Watson is also expected to meet with trustees next week, according to Rowe.
Photo: Contributed

More blood donations are needed in order to support patients over the summer months.

Canadian Blood Services is calling on all eligible Canadians to roll up their sleeves and donate before July hits.

David Patterson, director of donor relations in the B.C. and Yukon region, estimates 200,000 blood donations will be needed over the next 10 weeks.

We need about 3,000 blood donations in Kelowna to help patients throughout the summer. We have a greater need for donors with Type O blood, but all donors are encouraged to get involved.

There tends to be fewer blood donations during the summer.

Unlike previous years, recent factors, including new donation rules to protect the blood supply from the Zika virus, along with temporary deferrals associated with travel plans, seasonal health conditions like the flu and missed appointments have also put added pressure on Canadas blood supply, said Patterson.

Kelowna area residents can donate blood at:
Photo: Flickr

Lumby is one of 73 rural and remote B.C. communities that will receive a community paramedicine program, offering residents enhanced health services from paramedics.

Lumby is receiving one paramedic on a half-time basis.

The program is part of the B.C. governments plan to enhance primary care service delivery to British Columbians. Under the program, paramedics will provide basic health-care services, within their scope of practice, in partnership with local health-care providers, delivered in non-urgent settings, in patients homes or in the community.

This expanded program is great news for residents of Lumby, who will have greater access to care closer to home, Vernon-Monashee MLA Eric Foster said. Ensuring rural communities have access to health care services is critical. We rely on our paramedics, and this program will enhance the work they already do.

Community paramedics are expected to begin delivering community health services in the B.C Interior, including Lumby, in early 2017.

The services provided may include checking blood pressure, assisting with diabetic care, helping to identify fall hazards, medication assessment, post-injury or illness evaluation and assisting with respiratory conditions.

The paramedics will perform assessments requested by the referring health-care professional, and record their findings for the patients file.

The enhanced role will not replace care provided by health professionals such as nurses, but will complement and support their work.

Initially introduced in the province in 2015 in nine communities, the community paramedicine initiative is now expanding province wide, including 31 communities in the Interior.
Photo: Lore

Constituency week

This week is a constituency week, meaning the House of Commons is adjourned while Members of Parliament are back in our home ridings.

For 2016, there will be roughly 26 break weeks and 26 sitting weeks, depending on when the House adjourns in June. From my perspective, this is an effective balance on time spent equally between Ottawa and our home ridings, and why I remain opposed to efforts in Ottawa to further decrease the House of Commons work week by removing Friday sittings.

Why is time in Ottawa important?

Debates, scrutiny of bills and legislations, and passing or amending (and in some cases repealing) new and existing laws is critically important. Likewise passing of the federal budget, policy discussion, and implementation as well as Parliamentary committee study. They are also much needed aspects for our legislative process.

However, one overlooked item is problem solving. It is common for citizens to provide input and seek assistance from MPs on a variety of different issues. In some cases, a pattern may be shown over time that raises the question, Can a new and more effective ways of doing something be found?

Often these answers must be found and resolved in Ottawa. Researching through the Library of Parliament, and meeting and consulting with civil servants, Officers of Parliament and Ministers along with senior department management often plays a role in the way a particular problem on a local level is solved.

Obtaining Old Age Security benefits

As an example, one concern I have recently been working on involves Old Age Security (OAS).

Although most citizens have little difficulty obtaining OAS benefits, there are some who do, despite having worked and paid taxes in Canada for decades.

This may, from a bureaucratic perspective, be due to having resided in another country, or having immigrated at a young age. There may be a need to provide evidence of residency to show eligibilty.

More often than not these situations can be resolved, as other departments within the Federal Government may have the missing necessary information. However, the onus is on the individual to locate, obtain, and ultimately provide the information from one federal Government agency to another.

This process is not only administratively complex, it is also slow, and can delay a person in need from receiving benefits in a timely manner. In addition some citizens may have physical or mental difficulties, thereby lacking the ability or capacity to obtain this information. They can end up falling through the cracks.

Is there a better way to help people in this situation?

If various departments within the Federal Government already have this information, why not electronically share the information between them to help citizens in an easier and more timely way?

The reason this does not yet occur is related to personal privacy - in many situations, Government departments are prohibited from sharing personal information.

For the record, I am not proposing to eliminate the prohibition on personal information sharing within Government departments. I am researching the possibility of departments having the ability to share specific information if the citizen in question provides written permission in advance to do so.

As we have many seniors in Central Okanagan-Similkameen-Nicola who have encountered this challenge, I believe this would be an effective solution to provide assistance.

Your thoughts

I would like to hear your thoughts on this proposal. Personal privacy is a subject that all citizens and elected officials should take seriously, so I welcome your comments, questions and concerns on this proposal or any other 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: The Canadian Press

Suncor Energy is buying another chunk of Syncrude in a $937-million deal that will give it majority control over the massive oilsands project.

The Calgary-based energy giant said Wednesday it has reached a deal to buy Murphy Oil Corp.'s five per cent stake in the mine north of Fort McMurray, Alta.

The deal will increase its interest in Syncrude from just under 49 per cent to nearly 54 per cent.

Suncor completed its acquisition of another Syncrude partner, Canadian Oil Sands, last month following a bitter hostile takeover battle that came to a peaceful resolution in January.

That all-stock deal was worth $6.9 billion at the time of the acquisition, including $2.6 billion in the target company's debt. It increased Suncor's Syncrude stake from 12 per cent to 49.

Suncor, which has vast holdings elsewhere in the oilsands, has made no secret of its intention to scope out bargain deals during the prolonged downturn in oil prices.

It has argued that with a larger ownership stake, it can marshal more resources to improve operations at Syncrude, which has experienced a litany of outages in recent years.

"This transaction is a strategic fit for our portfolio given the quality of the resource, our existing interest in Syncrude and the potential for value creation," CEO Steve Williams said in a release.

The deal increases Suncor's oilsands production capacity by 17,500 barrels a day.

"This growth gives us even more leverage to oil prices as they recover," said Williams.

The deal is expected to close by the end of June, provided it receives approval from the Competition Bureau, among other conditions.

Also Wednesday, Suncor posted a first-quarter operating loss of $500 million, versus an operating profit of $175 million a year earlier.

Net earnings, which take into account some unusual items, were $257 million, lifted by a foreign exchange gain. A year earlier, Suncor posted a net loss of $341 million, driven by a foreign exchange loss.

Company-wide production rose to 691,400 barrels a day for the quarter, from 602,400 barrels a year earlier, with the increase largely due to the increased stake in Syncrude following the COS acquisition.

Cash operating costs per barrel in the oilsands averaged $24.25 during the first quarter, an improvement from $28.40 a year earlier.
Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer

The final nail was put in the proverbial coffin of Osoyoos Secondary School at the School District 53 board office Wednesday evening.

The third and final reading of the vote to permanently close the school was held in Oliver, and the board trustees voted 4 to 3, again, in favour.

The vote, which was the same as the April 6 meeting, came after many in the large crowd, including parents and politicians, pleaded with the board to keep the school open.

"I say to you, I beg you, I implore you to change your mind," said Councillor CJ Rhodes. "Do not go down in history as making the pinnacle of bad decisions."

The board has been looking at closing the town's only high school, as a way to deal with declining enrolment and a budget deficit.

There have been several meetings on the matter, as well as efforts set in motion to save the school since the board first voted to close it.

Mayor Sue McKortoff, who spoke Wednesday night, has written several letters to board chair Marieze Tarr.

Most recently there was an offer of about $350,000 a year for three years made to the board by council to ease the financial situation.

McKortoff asked for a one year delay on the decision and again spoke of the worst option, legal proceedings, if necessary.

Provincial NDP education critic Rob Fleming, who was in attendance, told the crowd the big picture in BC is that government priorities are all wrong.

He reiterated that this was a bad decision by the board and bad economic news for the town.

Board members spoke of being saddened by having to make such a difficult situation and of being targeted with verbal threats and in the media in recent weeks.

It was mentioned that Tarr has taken a lot of abuse and done nothing wrong, even voting against the closure.

Outside of the meeting, which was rowdy at times, students wept and residents talked about what is next.

"I'm very sad, said Brenda Dorosz, chair of Save Our Schools. Seven people have destroyed our town and our children's future. Our next step is Osoyoos Strong independent school."

Resident Victor Vieira said they were all upset about the vote.

"In my personal opinion this is a vote that was made a long time ago," he said. "And I am supporting an independent school. I think a lot of good people got the ball rolling on that and something will happen."

The plan is for Osoyoos high school students to attend Southern Okanagan Secondary School in Oliver, starting in September.

District superintendent Bev Young has said they are doing all they can to ensure a successful transition.

With files, Deborah Pfeiffer
Photo: Facebook

Two brothers are in custody in the shooting deaths of their parents, who emigrated from Bangladesh 30 years ago and were found slain over the weekend in their California home.

Police arrested 22-year-old Hasib Bin Golamrabbi and his 17-year-old brother on suspicion of homicide Thursday. They're being held without bail. The older son is slated to be in court on Friday. An appearance date for the teen was not immediately available.

The teen's name wasn't released.

The brothers are accused of killing Shamima and Golam Rabbi, who were found dead Sunday.

Police spokesman Sgt. Enrique Garcia says relatives discovered the bodies. It was unknown how long the couple had been dead.

Police haven't released a motive in the killings or any other details.

The husband and wife often hosted relatives as a first step in their own journey from their native Bangladesh to the United States.

The couple's nephew, Golam Mustakim, and his family emigrated from Bangladesh in 2000. Upon arriving in the United States, they stayed with the Rabbis in their four-bedroom home in San Jose.

It was not immediately clear Thursday morning if the two have attorneys.

KNTV reports (http://bit.ly/1qYmqTJ) that board members at the Evergreen Islamic Center in San Jose said the bodies of the parents were released Wednesday afternoon to relatives and the funeral is being planned for Friday at the Five Pillars Farm Cemetery in Livermore.

Mosque spokesman Faisal Yazadi did not know about the arrest of the younger son until notified by a reporter.

"Needless to say," he said. "This is one of those tragedies nobody ever wants to be in. All we can do is pray. This is a family matter and a police investigation."
Photo: CTV

California officials say they will seek more than $90 million in firefighting costs from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. after finding that a deadly 2015 fire was sparked by a tree that came into contact with a power line.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection released a report Thursday detailing the cause of the fire in Calaveras and Amador counties.

The amount is believed to be the largest recovery amount ever sought by Cal Fire, said spokeswoman Janet Upton.

Cal Fire said the state's largest utility or its contractors had removed two grey pine trees from a stand in January 2015, exposing a weaker, skinnier interior tree.

The 44-foot-tall grey pine tree grew taller, seeking the sun, but eventually slumped into a power line, according to the report.

The blaze started Sept. 9 and burned for three weeks. It killed two people and destroyed more than 900 structures, including some 550 homes.

The fire caused an estimated $300 million in insured losses and is the seventh-most destructive wildfire in state history.

PG&E did not have immediate comment.
Photo: The Canadian Press

Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says the key to dealing with climate change in the Arctic is to have "real conversations" with the Inuit peoples who live there.

But Sally Jewell, the U.S. secretary of the interior, has a much blunter assessment, arguing climate impacts are already underway, can't be turned around and that moving some Arctic communities may be the only solution.

"We will have climate refugees," Jewell said Thursday after meeting McKenna at the Museum of History across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill.

National parks, migratory species, climate change and Arctic adaptation  and an urban hike in the spring sunshine  were on their agenda.

They also met Natan Obed, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, who has become a go-to sounding board for the new Liberal government on the matter of climate adaptation and mitigation in the Far North.

McKenna, not quite six months into her job leading the environment ministry in the climate-focused Trudeau government, was her usual cautious self in describing the daunting challenges of climate change in the fast-warming Arctic. She stressed the importance of co-operation and dialogue when asked to name the single most important measure government can take to address climate change in the region.

Jewell, who has only months left in her post before the Obama administration is replaced, was far less circumspect.

"We need to provide support for adaptation and build communities that are resilient in the face of what's happening in the Arctic," the secretary said flatly. "You're not going to be able to turn this around."

"We can stem the increase in temperature, we can stem some of the effects, perhaps, if we act on climate as we are committed to do through the Paris accords. But the changes are underway and they are very rapid. We will have climate refugees."

On average, Canada has warmed more than 1.3 degrees Celsius since 1948, according to Environment Canada. Parts of the Arctic have warmed at more than twice that rate.

The impact has been little short of disastrous. Melting permafrost is affecting the integrity of buildings and roads. Storms are clawing away shorelines in the absence of stabilizing sea ice. Natural habitat is changing animal behaviour and affecting the ability to hunt "country food." Travel on frozen lakes and sea  the highways of the North  has become perilous.

Jewell said she's visited villages in Alaska whose existence is threatened by erosion.

There has been talk for years that Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean in the Northwest Territories may have to relocate eventually.

"We have to figure out how to deal with potentially relocating villages, or supporting communities in their adaptation and in building resilience within those communities to a changed reality," she said.

Even the suggestion of moving indigenous communities has recently sparked acrimonious debate in Canada.

But that wasn't the only controversy Jewell was prepared to tackle Thursday.

Asked about ongoing court challenges in the United States over allegations of climate-science suppression and denial by Exxon Mobil Corp., McKenna said it's time to move forward.

"Look, we all know that climate change is real. ... It's not just industry that have had challenges understanding that."

Jewell, however, waded in with her fists up.

"There is nothing like a company's reputation," she said.

"It takes years to build and can be stripped down in a hurry and if a company is irresponsible in sharing misinformation, they need to be held to account."
Photo: transmountain.com

The premier of Alberta says she has no interest in turning the current pipeline debate into an inter-provincial shouting match that strains national unity.

Rachel Notley said she intends to have a respectful conversation based on the facts, allowing both sides of the issue to feel like they've been heard.

Ongoing pipeline proposals have caused tension with neighbouring B.C., become a hot topic for the Parti Quebecois and prompted Saskatchewan's premier to express annoyance with Quebec.

Notley said she'll avoid finger-pointing.

"Canada is a collection of provinces. Historically some people play that feature off against one another. I don't think that's typically resulted in progress," she said in an interview Thursday.

"It is not in any way, shape or form the appropriate frame for this conversation. And we're not going to do that with it."

The National Energy Board has just announced that a review into the biggest of the ongoing pipeline projects, TransCanada's Energy East, should be completed by March 2018 after consultations with communities along the route; amid vocal opposition in Quebec, the provincial government there has agreed to conduct a separate review.

Notley said the conversation should be based on facts  about safety, the environment, and the economy. And she said people's concerns should be heard.

"Those communities have a right to ask those questions. We're not going to question their right  or fight with them over their right. That doesn't help engage in conversation  suggesting they're not allowed to have it," she said.

Notley made the remarks during a trip to Washington, where pipelines are not high on her agenda this week. She's actually in the U.S. to help spread the word about her government's climate-change plan.

Her goal: change environmental perceptions about Alberta.

Opposition to the province's oilsands grew here during the years-long Keystone XL debate. Now Notley wants Americans to know about her NDP government's $30-a-tonne carbon tax, 100 million-tonne cap on oilsands emissions and plan to phase out coal.

She'll meet with a White House environmental official; the head of the Center for American Progress, a prominent progressive think tank that opposed Keystone XL; and the Republican head of the Senate energy committee. She's also delivering a public speech Thursday evening.

"If I leave here with people going, 'Oh, isn't Alberta doing something that maybe we should take a look at, maybe even learn from, and they're kind of doing the right stuff now,' then that's a win," she said.

"I think we have an important, important story to tell. And it's not just a story. That's the new thing. It's real. We have significant action we're taking on climate change."

Alberta's emissions would not actually decline under her plan  just grow slower than previously projected. Canada's overall emissions are growing, too, and remain far above long-term targets.

The premier said she knows perceptions won't change overnight. But she's keen on speaking to audiences ignored by the former Conservative governments in Ottawa and Edmonton.

Asked about her long-term goal  will Alberta's green initiatives buy support for future pipelines into the U.S.  Notley said that's not her focus now.

She wouldn't get drawn into speculating about some future version of Keystone XL.

The Republican presidential candidates support Keystone, which was cancelled by President Barack Obama. The Democrats running for president both oppose it.

"I'm not a big fan of hypothetical questions," she said.
Photo: Contributed

A Quebec beekeeper is in a sticky situation after thieves buzzed off with about five million of his bees.

Jean-Marc Labonte says he discovered Wednesday that 180 hives were stolen from a field near Victoriaville, Que., about 150 kilometres northeast of Montreal.

He says the bees and the hives are worth about $200,000 and believes they were stolen sometime between Sunday and Tuesday this week.

The beekeeper says Quebec, like many areas in North America, is suffering from a shortage of bees that for years have been decimated by disease and pesticides.

Labonte says he thinks that lack of bees is the reason why his were stolen.

Provincial police say they're investigating but have not made any arrests.

Labonte said Thursday the bees were hibernating for the winter and in about five weeks time were set to pollinate the blueberry bushes around the Lac Saint-Jean region before moving on to cranberry fields in July.
At a time when our Okanagan population is not only aging, but mobility is becoming a challenge, has the city or the regional district proposed the notion of creating accessibility to all on the greenway in mission park and the rails to trails initiative?

At this time, both parks are inadequate to handle wheelchairs, walkers and any mobility device with smaller wheels. As an active wheelchair user myself, it would mean a great deal to be able to access these parks by means of a paved path or hard packed surface where as small casters will not be obstructed by gravel or small rocks.



As an added benefit, by paving these paths this should increase popularity and foot traffic therefor reducing security risks to common users.



Thanks a lot for listening and our community appreciates your support.

James Hektner
If you have just started your journey in an online casino or are looking for a new site to play,...
Community-level interventions that address the social conditions associated with high teen birth rates might further reduce racial/ethnic and geographic teen birth disparities in the United States. State and county-level data can be used to identify populations with the greatest need.

From 2006 to 2014, the birth rate for teens aged 1519 years declined 41% overall (from 41.1 to 24.2 per 1,000 females). The greatest decline was for Hispanics (51%), followed by non-Hispanic blacks (blacks) (44%), and non-Hispanic whites (whites) (35%). From 20062007 to 20132014, the overall birth rate for teens declined significantly in every state, with declines ranging from 13% in North Dakota to 48% in Arizona; the birth rate ratio also declined for black teens compared with white teens in 28 states and for Hispanic teens compared with white teens in 37 states. County-level teen birth rates for 20132014 ranged from 3.1 to 119.0 per 1,000 females aged 1519 years; unemployment was higher, and education attainment and family income were lower in counties with higher teen birth rates.

Teen childbearing can have negative health, economic, and social consequences for mothers and their children (1) and costs the United States approximately $9.4 billion annually (2). During 19912014, the birth rate among teens aged 1519 years in the United States declined 61%, from 61.8 to 24.2 births per 1,000, the lowest rate ever recorded (3). Nonetheless, in 2014, the teen birth rate remained approximately twice as high for Hispanic and non-Hispanic black (black) teens compared with non-Hispanic white (white) teens (3), and geographic and socioeconomic disparities remain (3,4), irrespective of race/ethnicity. Social determinants associated with teen childbearing (e.g., low parental educational attainment and limited opportunities for education and employment) are more common in communities with higher proportions of racial and ethnic minorities (4), contributing to the challenge of further reducing disparities in teen births. To examine trends in births for teens aged 1519 years by race/ethnicity and geography, CDC analyzed National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) data at the national (20062014), state (20062007 and 20132014), and county (20132014) levels. To describe socioeconomic indicators previously associated with teen births, CDC analyzed data from the American Community Survey (ACS) (20102014). Nationally, from 2006 to 2014, the teen birth rate declined 41% overall with the largest decline occurring among Hispanics (51%), followed by blacks (44%), and whites (35%). The birth rate ratio for Hispanic teens and black teens compared with white teens declined from 2.9 to 2.2 and from 2.3 to 2.0, respectively. From 20062007 to 20132014, significant declines in teen birth rates and birth rate ratios were noted nationally and in many states. At the county level, teen birth rates for 20132014 ranged from 3.1 to 119.0 per 1,000 females aged 1519 years; ACS data indicated unemployment was higher, and education attainment and family income were lower in counties with higher teen birth rates. State and county data can be used to understand disparities in teen births and implement community-level interventions that address the social and structural conditions associated with high teen birth rates.

NVSS natality files are compiled annually by CDCs National Center for Health Statistics and include demographic information, such as maternal age, race, and Hispanic ethnicity, for births in all 50 states and the District of Columbia (DC) (3). CDC calculated teen birth rates (number of births per 1,000 females aged 1519 years) at the national, state, and county level, and birth rate ratios (the birth rates for black teens and for Hispanic teens compared with white teens), as measures of disparities at the national and state level. This report includes national data for 20062014. For state-specific comparisons, 2 years of data were combined for 20062007 and 20132014 to provide reliable estimates for each race/ethnicity group (numerators 20). Changes over time were evaluated using a Z-test (for birth rates based on counts 100), or through a comparison of Poisson probability distributions (for birth rates based on counts <100, and for birth rate ratios). County-specific data were reported for 20132014 combined, and excluded counties with <20 teen births in total, resulting in a final data set accounting for 76% of all counties and 99% of all teen births in the United States.

The most recent 5-year estimate (20102014) from the U.S. Census Bureaus ACS was used to describe key socioeconomic indicators. The ACS is a continual nationwide survey that collects detailed information on demographic, social, economic, and housing characteristics (5). Three markers of economic opportunity and perceived potential for future opportunities, previously used as indicators of social determinants for teen childbearing (6), were selected (i.e., percentage of the population aged 16 years unemployed, percentage of the population aged 25 years with an associates degree or higher, and median family income). The value for each indicator was compared between U.S. counties in highest and lowest quintiles of teen birth rates for 20132014. T-tests were used to evaluate differences (p<0.05).

Nationally, from 2006 to 2014, the teen birth rate declined 41% overall (from 41.1 per 1,000 to 24.2 per 1,000). The largest decline occurred among Hispanics (51%, from 77.4 to 38.0), followed by blacks (44%, from 61.9 to 34.9), and then whites (35%, from 26.7 to 17.3) (Figure 1). Correspondingly, the birth rate ratio for Hispanic teens and black teens compared with white teens declined from 2.9 to 2.2 and from 2.3 to 2.0, respectively.

The teen birth rate and racial/ethnic disparities for 20132014 ranged widely across states (Table). In some states, these disparities reflected very low rates of birth among white teens. For example, in New Jersey, the teen birth rate among whites (4.8) was well below the national rate for this group (18.0); whereas teen birth rates in this state among blacks (27.4) and Hispanics (31.3) were also lower than the national rates for these groups (blacks: 37.0; Hispanics: 39.8), they were approximately 67 fold higher than the rate for whites. In other states, disparities reflected birth rates for black and Hispanic teens that exceeded national rates for these groups. For example, in Nebraska, the birth rate for white teens (16.2) approximated the national rate, whereas rates for black and Hispanic teens (42.6 and 53.9, respectively) far exceeded the national rate for these groups. Finally, other states had smaller disparities, because teen birth rates were relatively high among all racial/ethnic groups. In Arkansas, for example, the teen birth rate was above the national rate for whites (37.7), blacks (54.6) and Hispanics (46.5).

From 20062007 to 20132014, the overall birth rate for teens declined significantly in every state, with the percentage decline ranging from 13% (North Dakota) to 48% (Arizona). In nearly every state, there was a significant decline for all three racial/ethnic groups assessed (Table). In many states disparities also declined significantly from 20062007 to 20132014; the birth rate ratio declined significantly for black teens compared with white teens in 28 states and for Hispanic teens compared with white teens in 37 states (p<0.05). However, states with the largest percentage decline in teen births did not necessarily have the largest declines in racial/ethnic disparities (Table).

U.S. county-level teen birth rates for 20132014 ranged from 3.1 to 119.0, with median rates of 14.6 and 57.1 for the counties in the lowest and highest quintiles for teen birth rates, respectively (Figure 2). Many counties with teen birth rates in the highest quintile were clustered in the south and southwest; some states with low overall birth rates also had counties in the highest quintile.

Data from ACS indicated that among counties in the highest quintile for teen birth rates, the mean percentage of the population aged 16 years unemployed, mean percentage of the population aged 25 years with an associates degree or higher, and mean family income were 10.5%, 19.9% and $46,005, respectively. By comparison, values for all three socioeconomic indicators were more favorable among counties in the lowest quintile for teen birth rates, at 7.6%, 40.4% and $73,967, respectively (p<0.001, for all comparisons).
Pregnancy status, sexual activity, and contraceptive use should be ascertained by providers before prescribing opioid pain medications; for women with chronic pain, recommendations from CDCs opioid prescribing guideline should be followed. For women with other pain conditions who are pregnant or who are not using contraceptives, adherence to acute care setting, dental practice, and other clinical practice guidelines facilitated through clinical quality improvement strategies might result in increased prescribing and use of safer pain medications or nonpharmacologic treatments.

During 20082013, approximately 20% of women of reproductive age (1544 years) continuously enrolled in New Yorks Medicaid program filled a prescription for an opioid pain medication from an outpatient setting. The proportion of women who received opioid prescriptions was lowest during the prenatal period for women who had a live birth (9.5%), intermediate for women with no indication of contraceptive use or infertility (17%), and highest for women with an indication of contraceptive use or infertility (27%).

Exposure to opioids during pregnancy can lead to adverse infant outcomes, including neonatal abstinence syndrome (1) and birth defects (2). Ascertaining opioid prescriptions for women who become pregnant or have no indication of contraceptive use is important to determine the number of women who are at potential risk for adverse fetal outcomes. The New York State (NYS) Department of Health (DOH) analyzed data for women aged 1544 years (i.e., reproductive-aged women) enrolled in Medicaid to examine opioid drug prescriptions during 20082013. On the basis of Medicaid drug claims for any drug with an opioid ingredient, prescriptions were identified for the enrolled population of reproductive-aged women and for three subgroups: women whose diagnosis, procedure, and drug codes indicated contraceptive use or infertility; women who were not using contraceptives and not infertile; and women who had had a live birth during the reporting year. During 20082013, among all women of reproductive age, 20.0% received a prescription for a drug with an opioid component; the proportion was highest (27.3%) among women with an indication of contraceptive use or infertility, intermediate (17.3%) among women who had no indication of contraceptive use, and lowest (9.5%) among women who had had a live birth. Although New Yorks proportion of opioid prescriptions among female Medicaid recipients who had a live birth is lower than a recent U.S. estimate (3), these results suggest nearly one in 10 women in this group may have been exposed to opioids in the prenatal period.

To understand patterns of prescribing opioid medications for women of reproductive age, NYS DOH examined Medicaid fee-for-service and managed care data during 20082013 for females aged 1544 years who were continuously enrolled in Medicaid during each reporting year. NYS DOH used a list of medications derived from the NYS Medicaid formulary with First Data Bank hierarchical ingredient codes indicating opioids, and defined opioid prescription as any outpatient claim for a drug that contained an opioid ingredient for any woman during each reporting year (4). Live births were identified based on an International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) primary diagnosis code indicating live birth (641.01676.64, V27) and a principal procedure code indicating live birth (vaginal and cesarean delivery Current Procedural Terminology codes 59400, 59409, 59410, 59510, 59514, 59515, 59610, 59612, 59614, 59620, and 59622; ICD-9 procedure codes 73.51, 73.59, 74.0, 74.1, and 72.072.7) within 2 days of the diagnosis code.

To determine the prenatal period, Medicaid records for a 1-year cohort of women were matched with vital statistics birth records. Among enrolled women who had a live birth, the mean gestational age in days for each pregnancy-related ICD-9 primary diagnosis code was calculated and used to compute the average prenatal period. Using this approach, the prenatal period was defined as the 280 days preceding the date of a live birth for women with an indication of late pregnancy (ICD-9 code 645), 252 days for women with an indication of multiple gestation (ICD-9 code 651), or antepartum hemorrhage (ICD-9 code 641); as 238 days for women with an indication of preterm labor (ICD-9 code 644); and 270 days for all other live births (ICD-9 codes 650, 652, 654657, 659, 660666, or 669). Prescription of an opioid was ascertained during the prenatal period for women with an ICD-9 and Current Procedural Terminology code indicating a live birth, and for the entire reporting period for all other women of reproductive age. Women were identified as infertile using an approach similar to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services developmental measure for pre- and interconception health (5). This approach uses diagnosis codes as well as procedure codes indicating hysterectomy, bilateral oophorectomy, or premature menopause occurring in the reporting year to identify women who cannot become pregnant. Contraceptive use during the reporting year was ascertained using diagnosis, procedure, and drug codes to identify female sterilization, or use of an intrauterine device, hormonal implant, injectable contraception, oral contraception, birth control patch, vaginal ring, or diaphragm. Results are reported for all women enrolled in Medicaid for whom opioid drugs were prescribed and for three subgroups: women with an indication of contraceptive use or infertility; women with no indication of contraceptive use; and, during pregnancy, women who had a live birth during 20082013. The percentage of overall prescribing does not include opioids prescribed to women before pregnancy, on the date of delivery, or after pregnancy for women who had a live birth.

During 20082013, the average number of women aged 1544 years and continuously enrolled in Medicaid was 800,908; the number ranged from 675,717 in 2008 to 903,721 in 2013 (Table). The average proportion of women of reproductive age who received prescriptions for opioids during 20082013 was 20.0%, ranging from a low of 18.7% in 2008 to a high of 20.9% in 2011. The average proportion of opioid prescriptions for women with an indication of contraceptive use or infertility was 27.3%, with a range of 25.8% in 2008 to 28.2% for 2012. The average proportion of opioid prescriptions for women with no indication of contraceptive use was 17.3%, with a range of 18.1% in 2011 to 16.0% in 2013. The average proportion of prenatal opioid prescriptions for women who had a live birth was 9.5%, ranging from 8.8% in 2008 to 10.0% in 2010 and 2011.
Integration of Oral Health Into the Well-Child Visit at Federally Qualified Health Centers: Study of 6 Clinics, August 2014March 2015

Judith Bernstein, MSN, PhD; Christina Gebel, MPH; Clemencia Vargas, DDS, PhD; Paul Geltman, MD, MPH; Ashley Walter, MPH; Raul I. Garcia, DMD, MMSc; Norman Tinanoff, DDS, MS

Suggested citation for this article: Bernstein J, Gebel C, Vargas C, Geltman P, Walter A, Garcia RI, et al. Integration of Oral Health Into the Well-Child Visit at Federally Qualified Health Centers: Study of 6 Clinics, August 2014March 2015. Prev Chronic Dis 2016;13:160066. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5888/pcd13.160066external icon.

Medscape CME Medscape, LLC, is pleased to provide online continuing medical education (CME) for this journal article, allowing clinicians the opportunity to earn CME credit. This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the Essential Areas and Policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of Medscape, LLC, and Preventing Chronic Disease. Medscape, LLC, is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians. Medscape, LLC, designates this journal-based CME activity for a maximum of 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s). Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. All other clinicians completing this activity will be issued a certificate of participation. To participate in this journal CME activity (1) review the learning objectives and author disclosures; (2) study the educational content; (3) take the post-test with a 75% minimum passing score and complete the evaluation at http://www.medscape.org/journal/pcdexternal icon; and (4) view/print certificate. Release date: April 28, 2016. Expiration date: April 28, 2017. Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to: Identify the most common chronic disease among children Evaluate variables associated with higher rates of oral health integration in well-child care Assess perceived barriers to oral health integration Analyze recommendations to improve the integration of oral health in well-child care EDITOR Teresa Ramsey Editor, Preventing Chronic Disease Disclosure: Teresa Ramsey has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. CME AUTHOR Charles P. Vega, MD Clinical Professor of Family Medicine, University of California, Irvine Disclosure: Charles P. Vega, MD, has disclosed the following relevant financial relationships: Served as an advisor or consultant for: Allergan, Inc.; McNeil Consumer Healthcare; Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America, Inc. Served as a speaker or a member of a speakers bureau for: Shire Pharmaceuticals AUTHORS Judith Bernstein, MSN, PhD Boston University Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities at The Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine; Boston University School of Public Health Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston, Massachusetts Disclosure: Judith Bernstein, MSN, PhD, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Christina Gebel, MPH Boston University Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities at The Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine; Boston University School of Public Health Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston, Massachusetts Disclosure: Christina Gebel, MPH, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Clemencia Vargas, DDS, PhD Boston University Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities at The Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts; Department of Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry, University of Maryland School of Dentistry, Baltimore Disclosure: Clemencia Vargas, DDS, PhD, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Paul Geltman, MD, MPH Boston University Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities at The Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts Disclosure: Paul Geltman, MD, MPH, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Ashley Walter, MPH Boston University Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities at The Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine; Boston University School of Public Health Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston, Massachusetts Disclosure: Ashley Walter, MPH, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Raul Garcia, DMD, MMSc Boston University Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities at The Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts Disclosure: Raul Garcia, DMD, MMSc, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Norman Tinanoff, DDS Boston University Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities at The Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts; Department of Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry, University of Maryland School of Dentistry, Baltimore Disclosure: Norman Tinanoff, DDS, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

PEER REVIEWED

Abstract

Introduction

Early childhood caries, the most common chronic childhood disease, affects primary dentition and can impair eating, sleeping, and school performance. The disease is most prevalent among vulnerable populations with limited access to pediatric dental services. These same children generally receive well-child care at federally qualified health centers. The objective of this study was to identify facilitators and barriers to the integration of oral health into pediatric primary care at health centers to improve problem recognition, delivery of preventive measures, and referral to a dentist.

Methods

We collected and analyzed background data and data from structured observations and 39 interviews with administrators and staff at 6 clinics in 2 states, Maryland and Massachusetts.

Results

Participants valued oral health across professional roles but cited limited time, lack of training and expertise, low caregiver literacy, and lack of shared medical and dental electronic records as barriers to cooperation. Facilitators included an upper-level administration with the vision to see the value of integration, designated team leaders, and champions. An administrations vision, not structural determinants, patient characteristics, or geographic location, predicted the level of integration. Interviewees generated multilevel recommendations to promote delivery of oral health preventive measures and services during a well-child visit.

Conclusion

Poor oral health contributes to health care disparities. Barriers to integrating dental care into pediatric medical practice at health centers must be overcome to improve oral health for children living in poverty, with a disability, at a rural address, or any combination of these. Implementation will require adapting delivery systems to support multidisciplinary collaboration. Strategies suggested here may point the way to enhancing childrens oral health.

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Introduction

Early childhood caries (ECC), the most common chronic childhood disease (1), affects the primary dentition of children under age 6; it also affects their sleep, nutrition, and school performance (1). ECC is on the US health care agenda (2) because of its high prevalence (3) and associated health disparities (4,5), which are largely attributable to socioeconomic factors associated with race/ethnicity, poverty, or both (4,6). Approximately 77% of children on Medicaid have contacted a pediatric clinician within the past 6 months (7). Many of these children receive their care in federally qualified health care centers (FQHCs), which are already focused on prevention (8). The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends that all children receive fluoride varnish starting at the age of 6 months or first tooth eruption (9), but pediatric providers in FQHCs are often the only source of oral health education and preventive measures for vulnerable young people (10), according to multiple professional organizations (1115). These organizations advocate an expanded role for pediatric primary care clinicians, including oral health counseling and referral by age 1 year to a dental home, defined by the American Academy of Preventive Dentistry as an ongoing relationship between a dentist and a patient (16). Having a dental home increases the likelihood of a subsequent dental visit (17).

A 2014 systematic review reported, however, that prevention of ECC has limited reach in community health settings (18), despite federal statutes requiring FQHCs to provide primary health services (Section 330), which includes preventative dental services in the definition of primary health services [42 U.S.C. 254(a)(1) and 254b (b)(1)(A)(i)(III)(hh)] (19). Recent studies confirm gaps in care and low screening and referral rates for children on Medicaid (2022).

Unlike previous studies of challenges to oral health integration into pediatric well-child care (13), this study seeks specifically to understand gaps in oral health prevention services in FQHC pediatric care settings, with particular attention to barriers and facilitators, best practices, and recommendations elicited from staff.

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Methods

We selected clinics at 3 diverse FQHCs in Massachusetts and 3 in Maryland to cover a range of geographic locations (rural, small community, and urban), organizational structures, patient populations, workforce composition, and financial resources across a continuum of oral health integration into pediatric services. Variables predictive of the level of integration of dental and pediatric services were determined from the literature on oral health integration into pediatric primary care. Clinics were ranked by their number of integration variables: 4 or 5 advanced integration, 3 intermediate, and 0 to 2 minimal. Contextual, organizational and professional data were collected from August 2014 through March 2015 in 3 formats: background information, key informant interviews, and direct observation. This project was classified exempt by institutional review boards at Boston University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Baltimore, where interview data were collected.

The chief financial officers (CFOs) or their designees provided information on a formatted spreadsheet on aggregate patient demographics, geographic and catchment area information, number and types of clinic personnel, operating budget and sources of income, description of oral health activities (if any), use of electronic medical records (EMR), and level of oral health integration into the pediatric EMR.

The study protocol specified 42 participants, 7 from each FQHC, representing decision makers, clinicians, and support personnel (eg, FQHC clinic directors, medical directors, pediatric physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, medical assistants, and dentists). Interviewers used a 4560 minute semistructured interview via telephone to elicit relevance of oral health for general health, current practices, degree of integration and feasibility of oral health activities as part of pediatric primary care, recommendations for integration of oral health into pediatrics, perceived facilitators and barriers for integration, and potential strategies to remove barriers.

In both states, study investigators observed each site for 34-hours. We used a tested oral health direct observation checklist (13) that included items on physical plant, workflow and patient throughputs, clinic surroundings, patient registration procedures, medical records charting issues, referrals and tracking, oral health discussions during medical appointments, distribution and storage of oral health preventive products, and degree of coordination of medical and dental clinics (if colocated).

For background information, we compared the formatted spreadsheets using Microsoft Excel. For key informant interviews, we transcribed audio recordings. Two qualitative data analysts and a senior member of the research team at Boston University independently coded 3 key informant interviews and assigned initial codes by using inductive coding methods, and then met to discuss the proposed code list to resolve any differences in interpretation. A master code list was entered into NVivo 10 software (QSR International). Interrater reliability was assessed and re-coded independently until interrater reliability was satisfactory ( coefficient greater than 0.70). The remaining interviews were coded, and new codes were discussed, defined, and added to the master list by the research team until the list reached saturation. Thematic analysis identified and enriched constructs specified in the literature and also allowed new ideas to emerge independently (23). For direct observations, these data were used to verify placement of the clinic on the continuum of integration and to verify clinical background.

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Results

Correspondence between the proportion of patients with Medicaid insurance, the amount of uncompensated care, and the existence of collaborations with schools of dentistry were particularly notable (Table 1). Similarities in patient demographics and clinic characteristics (Table 2) existed across all levels of integration in these 6 FQHCs. Differences in size of population served and in clinic operating budgets were apparent, but we found no correlation between the level of integration of oral care into pediatric well-child services (Table 1) and potential determinants such as clinic size (defined as number of patients served), length of time in operation, rate of staff turnover, patient characteristics, geographic location, operating budget, or colocation of dental and pediatric practices (Table 1). For example, the most under-sourced clinic was the most highly integrated (Clinic A); the clinic with the highest rate of private insurance (Clinic C) was least likely to provide pediatric patients with dental referrals; and a clinic with a colocated dental practice had little integration, despite being in the same building (Clinic Z).

We present relevant comments from 39 completed interviews by theme to describe barriers and facilitators to integration of oral health care into well-child visits. Each comment was identified by the key informants role and the level of integration in her or his work setting.

Perceptions of the importance of oral health were positive. Clinicians and administrators in all 6 clinics thought that oral health promotion for young children was crucial for a child to function normally and an important part of overall health care needs: If youre in pain . . . its hard to focus, and sometimes its hard to behave well. . . .[Y]ou cant function the way you want to [pediatrician, advanced integration].

Clinicians and administrators noted the consequences for children of limited access to restorative dental care: A lot of the families . . . have a very simple screening at a school or [commercial dentistry] clinic. I think the parents . . . feel like they can check dental off the list . . .but the kids have not had . . . comprehensive dental care [chief executive officer (CEO), advanced integration].

Pediatric clinicians described significant challenges for parents, such as competing demands on time and energy, difficulties obtaining dental care, and low oral health literacy. I think its not important [to them] until its a problem, and then its very important [pediatrician, advanced integration].

Clinicians described various barriers and gaps to including oral health in care delivery. In the clinical setting, time was a major challenge: Youve got a [patient] family. . . .Theyre divorced, and the kids spend time in different places, and theres smokers in the house, and they dont eat right. They dont have a flush toilet, and theyre playing hooky from school. After a while, how much can you fit into a 20-minute visit? [chief medical officer (CMO), intermediate integration].

Administrators and clinicians spoke of concerns that oral health integration would overstep a pediatric clinicians defined role and expertise: Where were getting the challenge is not only the lack of [oral health] education . . . and sometimes the provider not being comfortable, if you will, just because its not their area of expertise and theyre not trained a lot of times to look for certain things [chief operating officer (COO), intermediate integration].

Both dental and pediatric clinicians felt going beyond a defined role could have potentially negative results for the patient by creating confusion or missing something: Our exam is certainly not as thorough as the dental exam is going to be, and my biggest worry is the gum issues and the gum disease that we may not be picking up. . . . [CMO, intermediate integration]. They [pediatricians] could do a cursory look, but a cursory look does not always tell you whats going on. So I always say, refer to the dental department [dental director, advanced integration].

Many pediatric clinicians reflected on their lack of oral health training in pediatric residency programs or in the FQHC setting: I dont think Ive been to training at all. . . . I think in med school, we did some mild stuff, but no additional training in any technique [physician, minimal integration].

Clinicians and administrators in more integrated clinics reported efforts at collaboration between dental and pediatric units, with regular staff in-services, presentations, or meetings, but multiple clinic priorities limited the amount of time available for cross-specialty communication and education. We do have some staff meetings . . . like monthly. But, it seems like were busy trying to put out a fire as opposed to coming out with newer ideas for moving forward [dentist, advanced integration].

Across all clinics, we found that none of the clinic administrators or pediatric clinicians were aware of federal regulations requiring integration of oral health into pediatric practice in FQHCs (19), and they were also not familiar with the Bright Futures oral health guidelines, issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in conjunction with the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (24), or the Protecting All Childrens Teeth (PACT) training program, which includes the AAPs guidelines for oral health best practices (15).

When facilitators to integration of oral health into pediatric well child care were discussed, several interviewees approved of a collaborative approach to health care delivery, and recognized the impact of oral health on other medical conditions: I mean, you cant separate the mouth from the child and the dentist from the medical provider. It all needs to be integrated [nurse practitioner, intermediate integration].

Staff in clinics with varying degrees of integration valued internal communication and working together on new or existing initiatives, and sharing resources to understand the context of a patients family life: They may have a rapport with the family. They may know the family situation a lot better than me [chief dental officer, intermediate integration].

Interviewees from some clinics also reported using outside resources, partnering with dental schools or outside private practices to increase access for their patients: Ive found that that is very helpful when the dental residents are here and they can be face-to-face with the patients. They come into all of our visits with us, and say, If you dont have a dentist, you can come see me upstairs [pediatrician, advanced integration].

Furthermore, there was general agreement that integration could happen only with leadership and vision at the top. Upper-level administrators involvement was seen as critical in setting the tone for clinic priorities and empowering clinical staff: The administration has to buy in to the importance of pediatric oral health and has to make it a priority among all of the multiple priorities that we have [senior VP of outreach, intermediate integration]

Several clinicians and administrators mentioned the importance of designating a team leader to promote oral health, and many also encouraged designating champions for oral health as team leaders: Any transformation that happens within our practice, there is naturally one person that becomes the leader [chief compliance officer, minimal integration].

In discussing system challenges, respondents noted numerous structural barriers to integrated health care delivery. EMR systems posed a significant barrier to integration in each of the clinics that were studied. At 4 of the 6 sites that were colocated, 2 different EMR programs were used for pediatrics and dental charting, with minimal communication between the 2 systems. Dental and medical providers reported tedious separate login procedures to gain access to patient records. Respondents, particularly at clinics with advanced integration, expressed a strong desire to have this cross-communication, because both systems report on a patients health. However, providers reported not knowing about the activities of their colleagues: Well, I havent seen what happens on the dental side because they are not here at my site [nurse practitioner, intermediate integration]. If the dentist was concerned about nutritional status . . . we dont often get that information. While we are all connected under the health center, we are sort of together but we are separate [pediatric nurse, minimal integration].

Another major challenge noted was the lack of an oral health template, a referral system for dental services, and the capacity to track referral outcomes: I hope they make the appointment, and then they go to the clinic and thats where I lose it, unfortunately, in the loop [nurse practitioner, intermediate integration]. Were trying to figure out a better way to get feedback from the local dentists as well . . . but we havent really formalized the process for that [pediatrician, intermediate integration].

There were also challenges related to state and federal reimbursement policy. Concerns were raised by clinic administrators that some states have bundled (one fee) billing for a well-child visit: There is no additional revenue unless they go into the dental chair . . . . We get the same amount of money from Medicaid on every child visit [president chief executive, intermediate integration].

Interviewees were asked to reflect on what changes would be needed to integrate oral health into routine pediatric care. Their recommendations are listed in the Box.

Box. Recommendations of Key Informants From 6 Federally Qualified Health Care Centers in Massachusetts or Maryland, 2015 Recommendation 1: Identify champions and foster leadership from the top of institutional hierarchies down to grass roots quality improvement committees. Action Item 1.1: Widely disseminate evidence that supports inclusion of oral health promotion strategies in pediatric practice and relevant policy statements from professional organizations to federally qualified health center chief executive officers, chief medical officers, clinicians, and support staff. Action Item 1.2: Review internal decision-making culture and structures to assess potential to be inclusive and conducive to change. Action Item 1.3: Appoint 2 team leaders or oral health champions (1 from pediatrics and 1 from dentistry) who are in regular communication with upper-level management about progress and next steps for integration. Action Item 1.4: Form an oral health committee, comprising many stakeholders involved in planning, implementation, and quality improvement. Recommendation 2: Create an internal mechanism to reward health center staff champions, innovators, and oral health providers to develop and sustain integrated care within Centers; and establish external incentives for Centers that choose to implement integration of oral health into pediatrics within their health care systems. Recommendation 3: Implement standardized, ongoing quality improvement measures. Action Item 3.1: Evaluate documentation and ease of extraction of data about oral health procedures and prevention counseling, and remove barriers to data collection. Action Item 3.2: Provide regular feedback to pediatric staff on oral health activities. Recommendation 4: Provide greater opportunities for training pediatric staff in preventive oral health. Action Item 4.1: Provide onsite workshops and links to useful oral health materials for all pediatric staff. Recommendation 5: Increase funding for oral health in federally qualified health centers and increase awareness of funding opportunities. Action Item 5.1: Increase funding opportunities to offer workshops on securing funding and using it to hire additional staff or expand dental-related activities, with a particular focus on connecting pediatric and dental efforts.

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Discussion

The climate for integration in FQHCs was mixed. The participants valued oral health as a part of a childs overall health and well-being. They reported efforts toward dental and medical collaboration, as well as barriers that complicate or prevent these efforts. Interviewees nearly unanimously noted constrained time for well-child care, especially when caring for families with complex social needs. An FQHC could have colocation of dental and medical services, as did 4 of the 6 sites in this study, but results confirm other findings that colocation of services is only the initial step toward implementing interdisciplinary care (25). Interestingly, levels of oral health integration were not associated with the explanatory variables presented in Table 2.

This study demonstrated that efforts toward interdisciplinary team-based collaboration can be complicated by professional boundaries, sometimes referred to as professional silos (26), as well as challenges from professional values, beliefs, attitudes, customs, and behaviors (27). Respondents felt uncomfortable stepping out of their defined roles and scope of practice, as noted in a recent report by the DentaQuest Foundation (13). This lack of confidence could be closely related to a nearly unanimous lack of training in medical or dental school, continuing education, or professional development. Providers need further education in assessment to improve accuracy in visible examinations in well-child care, and in anticipatory guidance, as demonstrated by a lack of knowledge of oral health guidelines, such as recommendations on age of first dental visit (28,29). Interprofessional education improves core competencies (30) and could be a solution to overcoming this barrier.

As to systemic barriers, administrators and clinicians alike reported difficulty juggling multiple priorities and frustration with the lack of cross-communication in EMR systems. Finally, administrators and clinicians were unfamiliar with federal mandates and professional guidelines. Facilitators of integration were noted as well. Clinics with advanced integration, in particular, noted collaborative efforts between dental and pediatric staff. Clinic staff noted nearly unanimously that a committed vision from top administrators, designated team leaders, and oral health champions were necessary for meaningful change to occur. Key informants asked for ongoing quality improvement measures to highlight progress and identify gaps.

One surprising result from this study was that a clinic with low resources was among the most integrated in the study sample. The catchment area served by this clinic was recently named among the 3 poorest communities in its state, but the clinics lack of resources was balanced by a strong commitment to cross-disciplinary collaboration on the part of its CMO and leadership and supervision of integrative programs at each level of function, from central administration to program implementation to quality assurance. Similarly, integration did not necessarily follow colocation, as shown in Clinic Z, where a large, vibrant dental practice with strong administrative leadership interacted well with Family Practice clinicians, but not nearly as well with pediatricians. Through site observation, we noted that the signs of integration in family practice far exceeded the signs of integration in pediatrics.

Certain recommendations made by interviewees (Box) are conducive to immediate or short-term action, even for clinics with limited resources. Leadership vision statements, naming of champions, formation of an oral health committee, and naming of oral health topics for quality assurance can be taken without extra financial resources. When these actions demand allocated time, support from upper-level administration would help to ease the demand on staff schedules. Dissemination of best practices for oral health integration can be coupled with other clinic- or community-wide efforts for health promotion. Addition of an oral health template to the pediatric EMR can be approached by existing informational technology support staff. Systems changes, such as compatibility between pediatric and dental EMR systems, will be more difficult to overcome and may require dedicated financial resources for technical support.

This study has some limitations. First, although this study included a range of clinics, a larger sample would be necessary to ensure generalizability. Second, key informants were identified by clinic administrators, who may have chosen staff known to be knowledgeable about oral health or especially motivated.

FQHCs provide services for the children with the highest prevalence of early childhood caries, and thus have the greatest opportunity to deliver effective prevention measures. This study shows that pediatric administrators and clinicians in FQHCs collectively have the will but not yet the means to improve oral health and overall health for the children, families, and communities they serve. The strategies they suggested to remove barriers and challenges deserve further investigation and support.

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Acknowledgments

The authors have no relevant financial relationships and no conflicts of interest apply. This study was supported by cooperative agreement U54 DE019275 from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research.

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Author Information

Corresponding Author: Judith Bernstein, MSN, PhD, Professor, Dept of Community Health Sciences, Boston University, 801 Massachusetts Ave 431B, Boston, MA 02118. Telephone: 617-414-1415. Email: jbernste@bu.edu.

Author Affiliations: Christina Gebel, Paul Geltman, Ashley Walter, Raul Garcia, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts; Clemencia Vargas, Norman Tinanoff, Boston University and University of Maryland School of Dentistry, Baltimore, Maryland.

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References

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Tables

Table 1. Levels of Integration of Oral Health Prevention and Services Into Pediatric Well-Child Care at 6 Federally Qualified Health Care Centers in Massachusetts or Maryland, 2015

Characteristic Advanced Integration Intermediate Integration Minimal Integration Clinic A Clinic X Clinic B Clinic Y Clinic C Clinic Z Electronic medical record integration Oral health template or flag in pediatric EMR No No No No No No Access to pediatric and dental problem lists Yes No No No No No Automated referral tracking No No No No No No Clinical practices Formalized referrals for oral health (does not include self-referral) Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Fluoride varnish application in pediatrics No Yes No Yes No No Caries risk assessments (beyond visual inspection) No No No No No No Staff characteristics Includes an oral health champion Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Regular dental/pediatric training or meetings No Yes No No No No Clinic characteristics Certified medical home Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Colocation with dental clinic Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Partnerships Networking with local dental practices if not colocated NA NA NA Yes Yes NA Formal dental school partnerships Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Total number of integration variables 4 5 3 3 2 2

Table 2. Patient Demographics and Structural Characteristics by Level of Integration of 6 Federally Qualified Health Care Centers in Massachusetts or Maryland, 2015

Characteristics Advanced Integration Intermediate Integration Minimal Integration Clinic A Clinic X Clinic B Clinic Y Clinic C Clinic Z Pediatric clinic patients No. of patients 7,462 6,515 10,480 9,824 534 11,460 Age of patients 05 y 3,077 1,460 2,532 3,208 94 3,005 613 y 2,374 2,589 4,783 3,256 175 3,874 1421 y 2,011 2,466 3,165 3,360 265 4,581 Race/ethnicity, % Non-Hispanic white 4.0 10.3 87.0 28.0 100 18.3 Non-Hispanic black 88.0 2.0 4.9 10.0 0 10.7 Hispanic 3.5 79.5 8.1 30.0 0 48.9 Asian 0.8 1.9 0 27.0 0 6.2 Other 3.7 6.3 0 5.0 0 15.9 Limited English proficiency, % 4.0 32.0 70.0 45.0 0 55.8 Payer source, % Private 9.0 3.1 6.0 16.0 30.0 11.0 Medicaid 87.0 96.1 75.0 82.0 50.0 85.0 CSHCN 0 0.6 9.0 0 0 0 Self-pay 4.0 0 10.0 2.0 20.0 4.0 Clinics Geographic location Urban Small City Rural Urban Rural Urban Patient population size (catchment area), n 208,979 40,249 90,000 200,000 100,000 90,000 Years in operation, n 42 40 30 40 8 40 Operating budget, $, in millions 11.4 35.4 14.3 34.5 2.9 66.0 Uncompensated care, % 13.6 0 1015 9 7 12.0 Years CMO in office 8 0.5 2 15 <1 4 Clinical staff turnover Low Low High High High Low

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Post-Test Information

To obtain credit, you should first read the journal article. After reading the article, you should be able to answer the following, related, multiple-choice questions. To complete the questions (with a minimum 75% passing score) and earn continuing medical education (CME) credit, please go to http://www.medscape.org/journal/pcdexternal icon. Credit cannot be obtained for tests completed on paper, although you may use the worksheet below to keep a record of your answers. You must be a registered user on Medscape.org. If you are not registered on Medscape.org, please click on the Register link on the right hand side of the website to register. Only one answer is correct for each question. Once you successfully answer all post-test questions you will be able to view and/or print your certificate. For questions regarding the content of this activity, contact the accredited provider, CME@medscape.net. For technical assistance, contact CME@webmd.net. American Medical Associations Physicians Recognition Award (AMA PRA) credits are accepted in the US as evidence of participation in CME activities. For further information on this award, please refer to http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/about-ama/awards/ama-physicians-recognition-award.pageexternal icon. The AMA has determined that physicians not licensed in the US who participate in this CME activity are eligible for AMA PRA Category 1 Credits. Through agreements that the AMA has made with agencies in some countries, AMA PRA credit may be acceptable as evidence of participation in CME activities. If you are not licensed in the US, please complete the questions online, print the AMA PRA CME credit certificate and present it to your national medical association for review.

Post-Test Questions

Study Title: Integration of Oral Health Into the Well-Child Visit at Federally Qualified Health Centers: Study of 6 Clinics, August 2014March 2015

CME Questions

You are seeing a 2-year-old girl for a well-child examination. Her parents report no health concerns, and you consider her risk for chronic illness. What is the most common chronic disease among children? Obesity Asthma Anemia Early childhood caries Your examination of the patients oral cavity demonstrates multiple caries and broken teeth. You ask the family about dental care, and they have not been to the dentist yet. Which of the following factors was most significant in the integration of oral health into the well-child pattern of federally qualified health centers in the current study? Larger clinic size Lower rate of staff turnover Co-location of medical and dental services None of the above All of the following variables were considered barriers to integration of oral health into well-child care in the current study except: General perception that oral health was a low priority Challenges for parents in prioritizing oral health Finding time during a clinic visit to address oral health Poor training in oral health among medical providers Which of the following statements regarding suggested means to improve the integration of oral health into well-child care in the current study is most accurate? Strong involvement from staff was prioritized vs leadership from upper management Champions of oral health were discouraged; oral health should be everyones job Stand-alone electronic medical records that separate dental and medical visits were preferred External incentives for clinics that practice integration effectively should be established

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CRH 1H16 earnings to reach US$1.1bn driven by US and Asian markets

ICR Newsroom By 27 April 2016

In its earnings statement for 1Q2016, CRH predicts that EBITDA will rise to EUR1bn (US$1.1bn) driven by growth in the United States and the Philippines. This is around five per cent up on last year, with the final figure to be announced when 1H2016 results are published on 25 August.

Sales for 1Q2016 itself are up nine per cent YoY, with US sales up by 22 per cent and Asian sales up 12 per cent. European markets were reported to be flat.

Some EUR85m (US$96m) was spent on acquisitions and investment during the first quarter, while EUR78m (US$88m) was raised from divestments during the period.

Heavy building materials volumes in Great Britain were overall stable, with some decline in aggregates volumes being offset by increased demand for cement. Romania showed a particulary good volume growth and Finnish cement volumes increased.

Dutch and Swiss volumes also improved, though Swiss prices were under pressure, largely reflecting the strength of the Swiss currency. French volumes were slightly ahead while Polish volumes were stable in a very competitive pricing environment. Lightside materials benefited from increased demand in Britain, Germany, the Benelux and France, while in distribution there was a clear improvement in Benelux while elsewhere volumes were broadly stable in spite of competitive markets in Switzerland and Austria.

The first quarter North America turnover from the 44 US states and nine Canadian provinces where CRH is active rose by 22 per cent over the pro-forma previous year number. US aggregates and ready-mixed concrete volumes increased by 25 per cent and asphalt volumes were well ahead, while Canada was mixed but overall stable.

North American heavy materials turnover increased by 27 per cent, helped by a mild winter. In building products, turnover increased by 22 per cent with sales in the architectural products showing a 35 per cent advance and the pre-cast business growing by five per cent. In distribution, the turnover was ahead by 17% as a favourable early season boosted RMI activity in particular.

In Asia, demand in the Philippines rose supported by strong foreign direct investment in the business process outsourcing sector, overseas workers' remittances and increasing government infrastructure spending.

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Caribbean Cement 1Q16 revenue up but exports down 53%

28 April 2016

Caribbean Cement Limited (CCL) reported that, on the back of an increase in domestic sales, 1Q16 total revenue increased by 11 per cent or US$398m to US$3.98bn over the previous year, when they reached US$3.58bn.

However, in the 1Q16 the company also noted declines in exported cement and clinker sales volumes of 53 per cent and 56 per cent respectively, said the Jamaican Observer.



In March CCL introduced a 1.5 per cent discount on all cash purchases, adding to a 0.5 per cent discount that was implemented in October 2015. It also introduced a freight charge for clients who rely on the company for deliveries.



The group reported an improved consolidated profit before tax of US$952m for the first three months, compared to a profit before tax of US$288m in the corresponding period of 2015  an improvement of US$664m. Profit per share improved to US$0.98 when compared with US$0.29 last year.



Directors said that improvements in operational efficiencies, effective control of fixed costs, lower financing costs and lower energy costs contributed to the improved financial performance.



They added that the companys liquidity position has also improved over the quarter. Cash and short-term deposits at the end of the quarter were US$963.21m, compared to US$542.98m last year.

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CRH interested in HeidelbergCement US and Belgian units

ICR Newsroom By 28 April 2016

CRH has expressed an interest in acquiring HeidelbergCements US and Belgian assets. The Germany-based company is expected to divest in such units to comply with the requirements set by competition authorities for its acquisition of Italcementi.

"US cement is of interest to us and we're fully aware of the asset that may spin out of the potential acquisition," Mr Manifold said. "With regards to Belgium, it's a prime asset and certainly it would make a good fit with our businesses, providing the value is right."

CRH is also reportedly in the race to acquire a US$1.5bn Indian cement business currently up for sale by LafargeHolcim.

"I'm always interested to open the paper and see what businesses we're bidding on . . . people are trying to talk up competition on deals. We're probably in 10 per cent of the stuff we're associated with," Mr Manifold said.

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Irish Cement: Limerick plant to cut alternative fuel usage

28 April 2016

Irish Cement is putting forward new proposals to reduce the amount of alternative fuels by half to 90,000t, at its facility in Mungret, Ireland.



It comes after a public outcry against the original proposals to burn tyres and other materials at the Limerick plant.



Irish Cement had announced it is to invest EUR10m at the plant to replace the use of fossil fuels at its plant, in a move which will create 40 construction jobs and secure the future of the 80 staff working on site.



But these proved controversial, with more than 450 people signing a petition in opposition, citing fears over the impact on the environment of burning tyres at such high temperatures.



James Gaffney, Green Party, said although he welcomes the reduction, he warned that using alternative fuels, such as tyres remains inherently risky.



But Irish Cement says due to the extreme temperatures required for cement production, burning tyres will not lead to any increase in emissions.



There is close to 40 years experience in the European cement industry with a wide range of alternative fuels including tyres, which demonstrates the safety of using these fuels in the cement kilns, a spokesperson said.



Irish Cement is now seeking permission to use a lower amount  90,000t of alternative fuels  just under half of the amount previously sought, a spokesperson for Irish Cement said.





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The North Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1 and lasts through Nov. 30. The U.S. Census Bureau produces timely local statistics that are critical to emergency planning, preparedness and recovery efforts. The growth in population of coastal areas illustrates the importance of emergency planning and preparedness for areas that are more susceptible to inclement weather conditions. The Census Bureaus rich, local economic and demographic statistics from the American Community Survey gives communities a detailed look at neighborhood-level statistics for real-time emergency planning for the nations growing coastal population.

Emergency planners and community leaders can better assess the needs of coastal populations using Census Bureau statistics. This Facts for Features edition highlights the number of people living in areas that could be most affected by these acts of nature. The statistics in the Emergency Preparedness section of this Facts for Features are released jointly with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
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Governor Bill Haslam and Economic and Community Development Commissioner Randy Boyd will travel to Asia on an economic development trip focused on increasing foreign direct investment opportunities specifically related to the automotive, high tech and advanced manufacturing sectors.





Monday to Wednesday, May 11, and will include stops in Korea, China and Japan. Haslam and Boyd will meet with executives of existing Tennessee businesses as well as work to expand relationships between Tennessee and Asian business communities. The 10-day business trip is scheduled fromand will include stops in Korea, China and Japan.Haslam and Boyd will meet with executives of existing Tennessee businesses as well as work to expand relationships between Tennessee and Asian business communities.





Last year alone, foreign direct investments totaled $2.25 billion in capital and created more than 7,800 new jobs. This is an excellent opportunity to take the Tennessee Story abroad and promote all of the great things that our state has to offer, Governor Haslam said. Were a low-tax, low-debt, strategically located state that is the first in the nation to offer high school graduates last dollar scholarships to attend community or technical college free of tuition and fees. I look forward to building upon our existing business partnerships and forming new ones that can be mutually beneficial.





Tennessee ranks No. 1 in the Southeast and No. 3 in the nation for Japanese capital investment. Our goal is to not only maintain that position, but to add Korea and China to those rankings as well, Commissioner Boyd said. Our state is fortunate to be home to so many successful global companies, and it is imperative that we continue to expand our relationships with these companies while seeking new opportunities for future investment.





There are 216 Japanese, Korean and Chinese-owned establishments in Tennessee with a combined investment of nearly $20 billion and over 52,000 in total employment to date. Japan is Tennessees largest foreign investor nation, representing over 50 percent of all foreign direct investment in the state. With 183 Japanese-owned businesses in Tennessee, Japan has invested $17.7 billion in the states economy, employing nearly 50,000 Tennesseans. Korea and China are among the top 10 foreign investing countries, ranking fifth and eighth, respectively.





In addition to Governor Haslam and Commissioner Boyd, the delegation will consist of six key economic development project managers and support staff. They will meet throughout the trip with peers from government and businesses.





Updates will be provided throughout the trip and can be found on Facebook at facebook.com/tnecd and Twitter at @tnecd.

Tennessee
Nanotechnology is at the forefront of todays advance in areas such as electronics, optical communica-tion and biomedicine. It is about custom-designed structures that are smaller than a micrometer which is already a hundredth of the diameter of a human hair. These so-called nanostructures exhibit proper-ties unknown from larger specimen of the same material. Fabrication of such systems is still a challenge with many different techniques available.



A direct approach to write the desired structures on a substrate is to remove unwanted material by evap-oration in an intense laser field. However, there are severe limitations. First of all, intense lasers interact mostly with the surface of most materials. Additionally, the minimum spot size and, consequently, the smallest structure written by a laser beam is given by the wavelength of the radiation. For visible light this is 400 to 800 nanometers which today is above the size of some electronic components.



Physicists and electrical engineers of the Center for Interdisciplinary Nanostructure Science and Tech-nology (CINSaT) at the University of Kassel in Germany now demonstrated the creation of sub-focal nano-holes in fused silica with a diameter below 250 nanometers at a wavelength of 800 nanometers. At the same times these holes reach up to seven micrometers deep into the glass providing an aspect ratio that is otherwise difficult to achieve on such small structures.



The team led by Thomas Baumert and Hartmut Hillmer uses laser pulses that are only around one part in a trillion seconds short. But this alone does not do the trick. Using a home-built pulse shaping tech-nique they create optimized sequences of light  so-called temporal Airy pulses (see image)  that are structured such that they efficiently excite the material. This efficient excitation is not instantaneous but a delayed, avalanche-like process. Consequently, the laser pulses are not the shor-test possible ones but stretched to optimal length. The delayed ionization mechanism also circumvents the above-mentioned problem that most of the pulse is absorbed at the surface of the material. Instead excitation is carried into the material, leading to deep and narrow channels. Carefully adjusting the pulse sequence enables to change the depth of the created holes, but also the size of the focal spot and its position with respect to the surface are important control parameters. Interestingly, the approach does not use ex-tremely high laser powers, where non-linear effects such as self-focusing could explain the observed spatial narrowing of the material modification.



The scientists in Kassel are currently testing the technique for the production of miniaturized filters in optical communications. Other possible applications are nano-surgery and cell poration.
This year's batch of Silicon Valley summer interns might earn more money than you.

The median monthly base salary for an engineering-focused summer intern at some of the big technology companies is $6,800. Annualized, that's $81,600 a year, according to data collected by Rodney Folz, a former University of California Berkeley student and soon-to-be Yelp intern. The national wage index is $46,481.52, according to data last compiled by the Social Security Administration in 2014.

Looking to put together a data set of what his peers earn, Folz sent a Google survey to a variety of computer science and technology groups and listservs, including groups for women, the LGBTQ community, and African Americans. He also solicited reports from friends with technology company internships.

His survey was answered anonymously by 503 people who said they landed internships in software or electrical engineering, product design or management, industrial design, and program management. The students were placed at dozens of technology companies, including Apple, Google and Uber Technologies.

As with any online survey, there's room for bad data. Three future interns said they landed internships with Snapchat, the social network based in Venice, Calif., ranging from $9,000 to $11,000 a month, which Folz's network had doubts about. "A couple (of) people had mentioned they didn't believe the Snapchat offer," he said. Four responders said Groupon, the e-commerce company that provides discount deals, offered interns in Seattle and Palo Alto benefit packages worth $13,000, which Folz said was also met with skepticism among his peers. "Groupon, I saw jokes about that on Twitter." (Snapchat declined to comment, and Groupon did not reply to a request for comment.)

The $6,800 median monthly salary mentioned above was pulled from only the 18 companies that received the most replies, a total of 298 responses. Based on that sample, the monthly intern haul ranged from $9,000 at Pinterest Inc., an online bookmarking platform based in San Francisco, to $4,500 at Tesla Motors in Palo Alto, Calif.

Folz's survey also asked about other cash benefits that companies offered interns, such as housing and travel stipends. Those ranged from zip all the way to $10,500 at Twitch, the live-streaming video platform based in San Francisco. Respondents said Twitch's stipend went for corporate housing and travel expenses. Twitch confirmed that number.

"Google offers a competitive compensation package to all interns and employees," said Roya Soleimani, the company's corporate communications manager, in an e-mailed statement. Folz's research found that Google pays interns a median $6,666 per month, along with a median $9,000 stipend.

Salary website Glassdoor reports similar numbers for Google software engineering interns-an average of $6,757 per month. Google was ranked third on Glassdoor's list of highest-rated companies for internships last year.

Folz's data showed that Pinterest interns earn a median $9,000 per month, but Glassdoor's average put the number a bit lower, between $6,574 and $7,675. Pinterest spokesperson Jamie Favazza said the company does not disclose compensation details but added, "We offer competitive salaries to all candidates. Our engineering interns start writing code in their first week and are an important part of our growing engineering team."

Twitch's spokesperson confirmed the survey data, which found that interns make $7,200 a month. Intuit said the median monthly salary of $6,000 determined by the survey was an underestimate but declined to say what it paid interns. The tax preparation software company said corporate housing is also offered to interns. Other companies mentioned in this article declined to comment or did not reply to request for comment.

Folz said he created the survey in an effort to ensure young workers in the technology industry did not "undervalue themselves." Silicon Valley interns can find themselves working on live projects that have the potential to earn substantial money for the company. "The roles they offer to interns, they're basically full-time responsibilities but for three months at a time," Folz said. "A lot of the products that these student interns [work on] end up being part of the core product that these companies own."

Though responders attended a variety of universities and studied at a various levels, they had one thing in common: The vast majority said they did not attempt to negotiate their salary. "I think the idea of being courted like this, being paid so much, being offered so much responsibility at a new job doing real things, is really exciting, especially when it's never happened to you before," Folz explained. "They don't want to ruin it by trying to ask for more."
There's value in preventive medicine, but experts in laboratory testing say that doctors and their patients credit the numbers that come out of screening tests with more accuracy and predictive power than they deserve. (Saurabh Das / AP)

Now that failed inspections, government sanctions and a criminal investigation have shadowed the once stellar expectations surrounding the blood-testing company Theranos, the big question is turning from whether the company will eventually prevail to why so many people were so enamored of it in the first place.

Some cite the charisma of the company's founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and her dream of conducting all blood tests with a finger prick. But other startup founders are charming and have compelling dreams and haven't amassed hundreds of millions in venture capital. At its peak, the company was valued at $9 billion.

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Another explanation is that falling for Theranos was a symptom of an exaggerated faith in the power of medical testing.

There's value in preventive medicine, but experts in laboratory testing say that doctors and their patients credit the numbers that come out of screening tests with more accuracy and predictive power than they deserve.

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"This is not something you typically learn in medical school," said Stephen Master, a professor of clinical pathology at Weill Cornell Medical College. "You turn on a machine and you get a number, but often we have different methodologies for testing the same thing." Cholesterol tests are reasonably reliable, he said, but not because tests produce some perfect number. It took years of work to get cholesterol measurements harmonized to a standard. And even now they aren't perfect.

In general, there's more uncertainty when patients are healthy. The controversial test for prostate specific antigen had proven useful for assessing treatment success and recurrence risk in patients who've already been diagnosed with prostate cancer. But PSA testing has run into trouble as a way to screen healthy men. The test produces false positives that can lead to invasive treatment with nasty side effects for men who could live comfortably with prostate cancer for the rest of their lives.

These broader limitations of lab testing were, to experts, the message of a recent study comparing Theranos unfavorably to two established test companies, LabCorp and Quest. The results, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, cast doubt on Theranos's claim to have revolutionized medical testing even though many of the discrepancies were modest and Theranos challenged the results.

Sixty healthy patients underwent 22 different tests. In some cases, such as the test for LDL cholesterol, a few patients got a normal result from Quest and an abnormal one from Theranos and LabCorp. These tests have big implications since they often determine whether a patient goes on a permanent course of cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Overall, the tests conducted by Theranos came out with abnormal results more often than either of the other two. The most likely interpretation, say the experts, is that Theranos has a higher rate of false positives.

One of the earliest skeptics of Theranos was the University of Toronto pathology professor Eleftherios Diamandis, who voiced his concerns last June in the journal Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine. There, he suggested that the some of the Theranos hype was based on an unquestioning faith in the predictive value of numbers.

He used his sister's breast-cancer markers as an example. As a cancer survivor, he wrote, she gets tested periodically for a marker called CA 15.3, which is associated with recurrence. "If her CA15.3 on one occasion is 25 U/mL, and the next testing shows 24 U/ml she is having a party; if the next testing is 26 U/mL she loses sleep and panics."

In Diamandis's view, her risk may not have changed at all, the variation being the result of natural biological fluctuations and inherent uncertainty in the measurement. He also notes that screening results are far from perfect predictors of recurrence. Sometimes people never get a high reading and their cancer still comes back.

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He said that while Theranos won't release details about how their technology works, investors could have at least demanded data. Some years ago he wrote to Holmes and suggested she offer free testing to 20,000 people as a trial. That way she could see how many diseases were caught early, how many diseases were missed, and how many times false positives occurred. She didn't take his advice.

Professor Norman Paradis of the Dartmouth College medical school has also questioned not just the claim that Theranos can produce cheaper, faster, less scary blood tests, but also the assumption that succeeding in this quest would improve public health.

It's not that he's against blood tests in the right context. "I'm very big on ordering tests," he said. "But I don't immediately say we need to start treatments." What's needed for better preventive medicine isn't just more tests, but more accurate tests, and a better understanding of what to do with the results.

If any good comes out of all this, said pathologist Master, it would be a better understanding of the need for thoughtful interpretation followed by careful decision making. "Medicine," he said, "is more than getting a number out of a box."

Bloomberg
Night market Sauced took over Thalia Hall in Pilsen Wednesday evening, bringing with it an eclectic group of clothing and food vendors. While interesting in its own right, we visited with a singular mission: Included in the food lineup was HaiSous, the latest restaurant concept by Thai Dang.

The project is Dang's first since an unceremonious exit last June from Embeya, which he helped start in 2012. Recently, he announced HaiSous will be at 1800 S. Carpenter St., also in Pilsen. As for what to expect, Dang says the new restaurant will be a "casually chic" take on Vietnamese food.

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Two items were available to taste at the market -- steamed clams and a Vietnamese fruit cocktail, and both fit the stated goal.

The steamed clams were served with lemon grass and a scallion confit, and topped with peanuts, fried garlic, cilantro and culantro leaves. (The latter are long and skinny, with a more pungent herbal smell than cilantro.) Even though cooks were serving a crowd, each clam was nicely cooked, very tender and laced with the fragrance of all the herbs.

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The fresh and inviting fruit cocktail included coconut, jackfruit, longan (a small tropical fruit) and caramelized pineapple.

Dang hopes to open HaiSous in the fall.

HaiSous, 1800 S. Carpenter St., www.haisous.com

nkindelsperger@tribpub.com

Twitter @nickdk
The French novelist and playwright Marie NDiaye has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in France since she was first published at age 18 by Jerome Lindon. During his half century as director of the publishing house Les Editions de Minuit, Lindon championed Samuel Beckett as well as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other writers associated with the post-war French literary movement calling for a Nouveau Roman (or "new novel") in which plot and character took a back seat to a more objective, albeit fragmentary, version of reality. A spiritual heir to that movement, NDiaye writes with an opaque lyricism all her own  one that doesn't always lend itself to easy translation. Her second novel, for instance, was written in the form of a single, long sentence.

If this kind of thing is not an easy sell to American audiences, NDiaye's racial identity hasn't always translated perfectly either. When NDiaye won the 2009 Prix Goncourt for the novel eventually published here as "Three Strong Women," the American media reported it  accurately  as the first time a black woman had won the prize. NDiaye, who is the French-born daughter of a French mother and a Senegalese father she never knew, expressed surprise over this characterization; despite a self-imposed exile to Berlin, she considers herself thoroughly French. While her writing often explores issues of race, gender and nationality, it also lingers in the gaps and cul-de-sacs of interiority in a way that makes identity itself hard to pin down.

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"Ladivine," NDiaye's latest novel to be published here, might be called a "passing novel" if it were American; in NDiaye's hands, it both is and isn't. The book opens on Malinka, a light-skinned girl so embarrassed by her dark-skinned mother Ladivine (she calls her "the servant") that she changes her name to Clarisse, marries a man she barely knows and establishes an entirely new identity in a new town. Telling her husband she's an orphan, Clarisse Riviere visits her mother in secret for decades, keeping her two lives strictly separate: "She had no opinion on the matter, no emotion, only the stubborn, immovable, almost innate conviction that it was her twofold responsibility to act and to keep it a secret." Only the fact that Clarisse names her daughter Ladivine hints at deeper feelings about "the servant."

When Clarisse/Malinka is brutally murdered at the end of the first section, it's as sudden and horrifying a removal from what seems to be her story as Janet Leigh's demise in "Psycho." Nevertheless, when filtered through Clarisse's diffuse point of view, the murder feels less like a twist than a culmination of a lifetime of self-erasure: "Clarisse Riviere felt herself floating back and forth on a warm, syrupy swell, whose thickness stilled any move she might try to make. She didn't want to move anyway ...." A part of Clarisse  Malinka  has always been willfully numb.

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This numbness makes for a difficult introduction to NDiaye's unique style. The Clarisse Riviere section is something of a trial by fog, vague and repetitive, with idiosyncratic metaphors in place of plot points and long sentences full of nesting clauses that, perhaps owing to the translation, have to be read and reread to untangle their meaning. In one sentence that fills almost half a page, Clarisse Riviere's husband kisses her hand while she stares out the window at a chestnut tree, imagining it's the tree kissing her hand instead of her husband. When, in the next sentence, Richard announces he is leaving her, the reader may be tempted to follow suit.

For those who stick it out, however, there are rich rewards, particularly in the book's long middle section, narrated from the grown daughter Ladivine's point of view in firmer, more grounded prose. With the trial of her mother's killer looming, Ladivine Berger embarks with her family on an ill-advised vacation to an unnamed country with a history of colonial violence. Here, the story swerves into the surreal, and somehow, as events grow stranger, the characters grow more human, their motivations more precise and grim. In this country she's never been to, Ladivine is recognized on the street by people she's never met who press her for details about a wedding she did not attend. Eventually, Ladivine begins to deliberately confuse her identity with that of her doppelganger, as if the legacy of erasure in Ladivine's maternal line  her mother's split identity, the grandmother of whom she knows nothing  were haunting her, tempting her to merge with her own double. NDiaye allows room to speculate on Ladivine's newly porous identity as both gateway to freedom and trapdoor.

The brief third section, told from Richard Riviere's point of view, closes the loop on Clarisse Riviere's double life without resolving its ambiguities. It is the peculiar effect of NDiaye's strangely repetitive prose to train readers, over time, to appreciate resonance over resolution. By the final pages of "Ladivine," even those who long for answers will recognize the unmistakable feeling that something has happened. That feeling is the essence of the Nouveau Roman, and it still feels new.

Amy Gentry is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas. Her debut novel, "Good as Gone," is due out in July from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

"Ladivine"

By Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump, Knopf, 288 pages, $26.95
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, announced his VP pick, Carly Fiorina, in Indiana this afternoon, taking his best shot to rouse the GOP and stop Donald Trump. Watching first Cruz and then Fiorina, one could see why this might work:

1. She is lively, at ease, and knows how to deliver a big speech. Cruz? Not so much. His lengthy introduction to her, while capturing valuable air time, also shows why he is so ill-equipped to attract free media and to outshine Trump. In bright red, Fiorina literally added color to the stage. And more important, she may now be a media magnet.

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2. She, in a somewhat convincing fashion, lumped Trump and Hillary Clinton together, saying they are not going to change the system. "They are the system," she said with great deliberateness. That's a plausible argument, actually. They are two very privileged, ideologically slippery candidates who've worked the system to their advantage. Cruz has tried to convey the same, but her delivery was simply better.

3. She said what the entire not-Trump Republican electorate has been thinking about Trump: "He doesn't represent me. He doesn't represent my party." That's as clear and concise a statement of #NeverTrump as we have heard.

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4. She is new. TV audiences are tired of the three remaining Republicans (even Trump becomes repetitive) and the two Democrats as well. Been there, seen that. Most voters haven't seen Fiorina before, or at least not since the debates (back in the Dark Ages of 2015). Trump should know  you have to introduce new players to keep the show fresh.

5. She is making a straight play for female voters. She stressed her own experiences in the workplace. Cruz stressed them. Cruz recounted her standing up to Trump's insult about her face. Many women will perk up and listen to that message.

6. She conveys well the MSM drumbeat that it's all over and they should roll over and give up. When she defiantly insisted that "some things are worth fighting for," she removed a little bit of the fatalism that threatens to overtake the GOP.

7. She tried her best to humanize Cruz, mentioning they watched the Final Four together (this is Indiana, folks) and singing (yeah, singing) one of her made-up songs to the Cruz daughters. Women, especially younger moms, are likely to find that endearing. At least it was unexpected. The campaign can use some spontaneity.

8. While Cruz and Fiorina chose not to go after Trump for his incoherent and daft foreign policy speech earlier in the day, she showed willingness to take on his ignorance, insularity and downright meanness toward the rest of the world. Extolling America as a generous country was a refreshing change of pace.

9. She and Cruz reinforce one another's mental agility. These people are smart, whip smart.

10. As desperate as it might seem to the press corps for the average voter, her appearance does induce them to re-engage, especially if she is (I suspect she will be) all over the media for the next few days. She gives the Cruz campaign a pulse.

Washington Post

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Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Washington Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.
Even by the standards of this presidential race, it seems a dubious strategy. Ted Cruz has named Carly Fiorina as his running mate, three months before the Republican convention and with several states yet to hold their primaries. Yes, Ronald Reagan did something similar in 1976, in naming Sen. Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania as his running mate, before the Republican convention named Gerald Ford as its nominee. But Reagan had a specific aim: to sway Republican delegates, and to reach out to other delegates who feared he was too much of an ideologue.

In Cruz's case with Fiorina, it's less a strategic move than a desperate one. Fiorina has no government experience and lost badly in her previous attempts for elected office. She brings no constituencies or Republican-aligned interest groups with her. After she was trounced in her Senate race in California, she moved away from the Golden State, with no love lost, so it isn't as if she is likely to be helpful in that important primary on June 7. Her national favorability numbers have been consistently below water.

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Cruz's move serves mainly to show the box he is in. He needs to do more than win in Indiana and California to have a shot at the nomination. Even if he can prevent Trump from wrapping up the nomination on June 7, the Texas senator will still need plenty of delegates, and he's now given away his biggest chit to someone who won't bring in any.

Nor does Fiorina make sense as a running mate in the general election, if Cruz somehow prevails over Trump. She would likely draw fire for being unprepared for the presidency, given her complete lack of government experience. Because she was eliminated so early in the race for the Republican nomination, it isn't clear she was vetted the way most presidential candidates have been.

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It's possible that Fiorina was the best person available  that is, the best who would accept a "running mate" position from a candidate who just got clobbered in several states, is unlikely to win the nomination except in a contentious convention fight, and wouldn't be a particularly strong nominee even in the best of circumstances.

If so, Cruz would probably have been better off just not naming anyone, at least not until his prospects improve enough that he could attract someone with greater stature. Adding a Scott Walker or Marco Rubio to his ticket would have been a strong sign that the party was still resisting Trump and that supporting Cruz was the only way to do so. Adding Fiorina? It's showing a weak hand. If Cruz had gained the grudging respect of many in his party, it was for his smart strategic moves that got him this far in the Republican race.

Choosing Fiorina also reminds us that he was the one who rushed into a government shutdown battle without an exit plan. Good presidents as well as good presidential candidates resist the urge to make important commitments in order to win news cycles.

Maybe Cruz figured that he had to do something that went against the odds. Conservative writer Dan McLaughlin that "Trump handles criticism from women very poorly." True, her new status as Cruz's running mate will get Fiorina plenty of time on TV to tweak Trump. But baiting Trump hasn't worked so far.

Bottom line? Cruz needs to win in Indiana this coming Tuesday, but he's still behind in the polls right now. It's hard to see how this gambit changes anything.

Bloomberg View

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist covering U.S. politics.
Wearing an orange jail jumpsuit and shackles, Ralphael Robinson paused expressionless as a man shouted at the North Aurora pastor from the gallery of Kane County Judge Linda Abrahamson's courtroom Thursday.

"Release your people. Tell them what you did," the man yelled at Robinson, who is accused of sexually assaulting and abusing a teenage girl at Kingdom Church in North Aurora.

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The outburst, which followed 39-year-old Robinson's first formal court appearance since his April 22 arrest, came after a bailiff warned those in the courtroom that no disruptive behavior would be tolerated. That announcement was in response to a woman yelling at Robinson supporters outside the courtroom during an earlier recess. The man and woman who yelled at Robinson were escorted to their vehicle by courthouse security and a victim services representative.

Charging documents state Robinson  a convicted sex offender  fondled the girl April 18 at the church located on South Lincolnway Street in North Aurora. The girl confronted him about the alleged incident before going to authorities, according to published reports. Robinson, who is being represented by a public defender, remains held in Kane County Jail on $100,000 bail with a May 26 court appearance scheduled.

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Robinson appears on the state's sex offender list in connection to a 2004 sex abuse conviction in Cook County involving a teenager. He is required to register for life but was charged by Kane County prosecutors in 2013 with failing to do so in Aurora, where he lived in recent years. He pleaded guilty last year to a single count of violating sex offender rules and was placed on 30 months of probation, court records show. He was ordered not to commit any new crimes, to undergo a sex offender evaluation and to have no abusive contact with a woman.

Prosecutors have filed at least two violation of probation notices since Robinson's guilty plea last year. The first violation was filed after officials were unable to activate his electronic home-monitoring system because the electricity at his residence was turned off for nonpayment of the bill. A second violation was alleged after police found Robinson had a website, blog and active Facebook account  things prohibited as part of his probation  after he claimed to have no such accounts, according to court documents.

Although Kingdom Church shut down its website and Facebook page, another entity operating at the church's street address continues to promote Robinson's work. Incorporated in May 2015, Ralphael Robinson Ministries is registered with the Illinois secretary of state's office as a not-for-profit organization. Its website describes Robinson as the "senior leader" at Kingdom Church and someone who "has the amazing ability to diagnose the spiritual condition of a ministry/people."

The site refers to "Dr. Robinson" and his methods which are "known to stimulate growth and success." The ministries' offerings include, among other things, books written by Robinson, a May seminar on "making prophecy work for you," and credit repair services.

Dan Campana is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
By the end of the year, Barrington Hills will have energy-efficient streets lights installed throughout the village.

Fifteen such lights, known as LEDs or light-emitting diodes, will better illuminate well-traveled intersections, such as County Line Road and Haeger's Bend and Old Bartlett Road and Route 59, said Robert Kosin, director of administration in Barrington Hills.

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"We would see about a 60 percent reduction on the average cost per lamp to provide light," he said. "LEDs are more efficient lighting and they don't have to be replaced as often. We pay Commonwealth Edison for the energy it takes to run these lights."

George Malek, ComEd's director of energy efficiency, said traditional streets lamps need 175-400 watts of power, whereas LEDs require 53-145 watts.

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"LEDs give out a lot more light than the electricity you're putting in to run them, compared to the old technology," he said.

He also said traditional streetlights last 12 years, versus 18 years for LEDs.

In the last year, 48 municipalities in Northern Illinois have agreed to rent ComEd's LED lights, Malek said. In Chicago's northwest suburbs, Barrington, Fox River Grove and Fox Lake have all signed on, he said.

ComEd has nearly finished installing 273 lights in Barrington, said Village Manager Jeff Lawler.

"We have them at various busy intersections and residential streets, especially where there are traffic signals and stop signs," he said, adding the LEDs could save the village $1,000 to $1,200 a month.

ComEd also completed installing 180 LED lights three weeks ago in Fox River Grove, said Derek Soderholm, village administrator.

"LEDs make good business and environmental sense," Soderholm said.

Soderholm also said LED lights are not metered for billing, and Fox River Grove pays ComEd a set rate for energy usage and maintenance.

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Anne Marrin, village administrator for Fox Lake, said more than 500 LED lamps will be in place by May.

"We hope to save $12,000 or more per year," she said.

tshields@pioneerlocal.com

Twitter @tshields19
By Dezan Shira & Associates

Editor: Alexander Chipman Koty

With e-commerce exploding across China, businesses from around the world are flocking to enter the fray. According to a study by Accenture and AliResearch, China is expected to become the largest cross border B2C market in the world by 2020, with over 200 million shoppers purchasing US$245 billion worth of imported goods online. Accessing this tremendous market, however, presents a variety of challenges. One such challenge is choosing a third-party (TP), an agency that offers international companies with no physical presence in China access to Chinese e-commerce platforms, also known as a Tmall Partner or Trusted Partner.

To create a presence on Tmall Global, the cross border version of Chinas largest B2C online marketplace, companies must be directly invited by Tmall or apply through the lobbying of a TP. As a result of this policy and the rapid proliferation of Chinas e-commerce market, a myriad of TPs have emerged recently, aiming to capitalize on this lucrative business. These organizations offer an array of different services and expertise yet generally lack extensive track records. As such, selecting a TP is far from a straightforward affair. When expanding into Chinas dynamic e-commerce market, choosing a trustworthy TP suited to a companys industry and needs is essential to connect with discerning Chinese consumers and avoid squandering unnecessary resources.

TP Certification

E-commerce giant Alibabas Tmall Global launched in 2013 to offer Chinese customers access to foreign brands with no physical presence in China. Tmalls Alibaba-owned cousin, the C2C platform Taobao, is notorious for its extensive supply of counterfeit goods. As much of the attractiveness of foreign brands for Chinese consumers lies in product trustworthiness and quality, Tmall Global established its invitation and TP application system to filter out counterfeiters and disreputable companies to ensure quality control and strong consumer confidence.

Tmall and other e-commerce platforms such as Jingdong certify TPs if they meet certain conditions. Notably, certification depends on each platforms private standards and is not an official government designation. In order to qualify, TPs must have previous cross border e-commerce and logistics experience, boast a multilingual staff, and have ERP system and IT interface integration ability. Additional qualifications include having international offices and the capacity for overseas business development, as well as owning cross border warehousing. While the process ensures a certain degree of utility and reduces the amount of fly-by-night agencies, certification alone is no guarantee of quality or trustworthiness.

How to Choose a TP

Before choosing a TP, investors are advised to have a clear market entry strategy. Various considerations, including a companys size, reputation, industry, region of origin, and long term strategy must be examined before jumping into Chinese e-commerce.

RELATED: Business Advisory Services from Dezan Shira & Associates

Industry and Region

One of the primary considerations for choosing a TP is its industry focus. It is important to choose a TP with extensive experience in the investors industry to help with regulations overseeing particular types of products. For example, a TP specializing in cosmetics should have knowledge of the rules concerning government certification of such products, while one in food products would have experience in storing and distributing perishable goods.

Similarly, TPs active in particular regions should have in depth knowledge of the regulations, supply chains, and business cultures of specific countries, and provide unique language skills and support systems. An effective way to identify a trustworthy TP is through recommendations from other companies in a common industry or region. Further, because Tmall Global and other platforms only accept companies meeting certain size and financing requirements, to gain access to the platform and reduce costs it is often a practical strategy for smaller companies from the same industry and region, such as Australian dairy farmers, to band together to share a marketplace space. Many small or specialized companies may struggle to meet the platforms requirements on their own.

Scope of Services

The scope of services offered by a TP is another key factor to consider. Depending on a companys level of infrastructure, it may seek additional services from a TP beyond merely gaining access to Chinese e-commerce platforms. Secondary services many TPs offer include business strategy development, industry and competitor intelligence, digital marketing, sales promotion, brick-and-mortar establishment services, and more. These options can be helpful for businesses in need of additional services, as they offer integrated assistance through a single point of contact with experience in China. However, it is important to keep in mind that, while TPs may offer a wide range of services, many have limited experience in these fields and are often not qualified to answer inquiries in specialized areas such as law and taxation.

Costs and Presence

Any investor expanding into China must budget for the extensive costs of entering a new market. Alibaba promotes Tmall Global as a fast track into China, and many companies see e-commerce as a way to test drive products in a new market before fully establishing a physical presence. However, investors often underestimate the costs of establishing an e-commerce storefront, and the costs associated with engaging a TP are often overlooked entirely. Indeed, in many cases, companies are unaware of the need to enlist a TP in the first place.

TPs generally charge sales commission in addition to quarterly service fees as incentive to provide effective service. Engaging a TP costs upwards of RMB one million (US$154,000) per year, and often several times that amount depending on the kinds of services provided and the amount of commission made. TPs have different rates depending on their size, reputation, services offered, and uniqueness of their expertise. This is in addition to the costs of using each individual e-commerce platform. For instance, Tmall Global requires a US$25,000 security deposit, a US$5,000 annual fee, and a 0.5-5 percent commission depending on the product category. Success on these platforms is not guaranteed either: the Wall Street Journal reports that about 70 percent of stores on Tmall Global have almost no volume.

As cross border e-commerce costs are higher than many expect, investors have the option of choosing TPs that support alternative platforms to ease into the market more gradually. In addition to premium flagship stores, where a brand sells its own products directly, many TPs offer support for authorized and specialty stores as well. The authorized store model involves a brand selling products directly to a TP, which then re-sells the goods on its own storefront or through another authorized re-seller. This model can sometimes be employed directly with a platform. Jingdong, for example, offers a direct sales model where it buys inventory from a brand and re-sells the products itself. A specialty store is a more informal option, which uses C2C platforms such as Taobao and WeChat to re-sell a brands products. Engaging TPs with the infrastructure to provide these alternative models allows businesses to experiment with Chinas e-commerce market before committing to a full-fledged investment.

RELATED: China Plugs Cross Border e-Commerce Import Tax Loophole

Key Takeaways

Selecting a TP is a challenging task for foreign investors jumping into Chinas e-commerce market given its short track-record and lack of reliable information. Before entering the market, investors should have a clear understanding of how a TP can complement their existing infrastructure and capabilities. Ideally, investors should not rely on TPs to form their e-commerce strategy, but enlist a TP that fits into their pre-existing design. Further, as foreign investors often drastically underestimate the costs of establishing an e-commerce presence in China, it makes sense for them to first ascertain its advisability. While Chinas burgeoning e-commerce industry opens the door to an immense and growing consumer market, investors must be aware of the costs and hurdles of entering this rapidly changing, dynamic sector.



About Us Asia Briefing Ltd. is a subsidiary of Dezan Shira & Associates. Dezan Shira is a specialist foreign direct investment practice, providing corporate establishment, business advisory, tax advisory and compliance, accounting, payroll, due diligence and financial review services to multinationals investing in China, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Singapore and the rest of ASEAN. For further information, please email china@dezshira.com or visit www.dezshira.com. Stay up to date with the latest business and investment trends in Asia by subscribing to our complimentary update service featuring news, commentary and regulatory insight. 

China Investment Roadmap: the e-Commerce Industry

In this edition of China Briefing magazine, we present a roadmap for investing in Chinas e-commerce industry. We provide a consumer analysis of the Chinese market, take a look at the main industry players, and examine the various investment models that are available to foreign companies. Finally, we discuss one of the most crucial due diligence issues that underpins e-commerce in China: ensuring brand protection.



Selling, Sourcing and E-Commerce in China 2016 (First Edition)

This guide, produced in collaboration with the experts at Dezan Shira & Associates, provides a comprehensive analysis of all these aspects of commerce in China. It discusses how foreign companies can best go about sourcing products from China; how foreign retailers can set up operations on the ground to sell directly to the countrys massive consumer class; and finally details how foreign enterprises can access Chinas lucrative yet ostensibly complex e-commerce market.

Importing and Exporting in China: a Guide for Trading Companies

In this issue of China Briefing, we discuss the latest import and export trends in China, and analyze the ways in which a foreign company in China can properly prepare for the import/export process. With import taxes and duties adding a significant cost burden, we explain how this system works in China, and highlight some of the tax incentives that the Chinese government has put in place to help stimulate trade.
Chinese female writer Hao Jingfang was nominated for this year's Hugo Awards with her novel "Folding Beijing."

The science fiction is one of the five candidates listed under the "Best Novelette" category. Hao was excited to be shortlisted and said that she didn't expect to have this result.

Chinese female writer Hao Jingfang. [Sina Weibo]

Hao graduated from the department of physics in 2006 at Tsinghua University, where she is pursuing her doctorate.

First published in a new electronic magazine, the story follows the protagonist, Lao Dao, as he tries to navigate the complicated class barriers of a futuristic Beijing in order to send his daughter to school.

"I used to live in suburban Beijing. Near my apartment building there were noisy alleys, small restaurants and an open-air market," she said. The experience inspired her to write the story.

Hao also expressed regret that the second volume of "The Three-Body Problem," by Liu Cixin, who won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, was not shortlisted.

Liu, 53, was the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, which is widely seen as the highest honor for science fictions, along with the Nebula Awards.

Established in 1953, the Hugo Awards are given annually to the best works of science fiction or fantasy and are seen as the "highest honor bestowed in science fiction and fantasy writing."

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Photo taken on April 27, 2016 shows the livestock carrier Ocean Shearer at its unveiling ceremony in Dalian, northeast China's Liaoning Province. [Xinhua]

A Chinese firm delivered a giant carrier ship designed for livestock to a Singaporean buyer on Wednesday.

The ship is the largest of its kind to be produced in China. Built by COSCO Shipyard and delivered by its subsidiary in the northeastern coastal city of Dalian, the vessel is 189.5 meters long with a floor space of 23,500 square meters, enough for 17,000 live cattle at a time.

Worldwide, there is strong demand for livestock shipping vessels. Many vessels used for cattle are converted container ships, but the COSCO ship is equipped with automated water piping, forage feeding systems and other facilities to ensure the livestock arrive in good condition.

China signed a deal with Australia in 2014 to import 1 million head of Australian cattle per year. This alone requires 20 ships with a capacity of 5,000 livestock each.

COSCO Shipyard rolled its first livestock carrier, ordered by a Dutch firm, off production lines in 2013. Its subsidiary has received seven orders for such carriers.
China's biggest internet search engine Baidu signs a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on Copyright Protection Collaboration with the International Publishers Copyright Coalition (IPCC). [China.org.cn]

China's biggest internet search engine Baidu has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on Copyright Protection Collaboration with the International Publishers Copyright Coalition (IPCC).

The creative industries are vitally important for both the UK and China. Creative industries  including publishing, music, film, TV and gaming software  together account for over 5% of GDP in both the UK and China, respectively.

Over a third of British publishing industry total revenues (4.3 billion in 2014) come from digital sales and around 40% from exports. This MOU sets out a programme of collaboration to tackle the shared issue of online IP infringement. Industry initiatives such as this are vital to support the international IP framework.

The signing was witnessed by Dr Ros Lynch, Director of Copyright and Enforcement at the UK Intellectual Property Office, who is visiting for UK-China Copyright week.

The co-operation indicates a positive direction for IP enforcement in China, with digital industry getting behind efforts to reduce online infringements.

Dr Lynch said:"Our work is fundamentally underpinned by industry engagement. In the UK, we recognise that government and legislation can only reach so far. It is important that rights holders and internet platforms work together to help protect IP.

"The benefits of an efficient and fair global IP system are huge, for both the UK and China. This MOU today represents a great step towards this, creating a collaboration which will lead to faster and streamlined approaches to tackling a global problem."

Emma House, Director of Publisher Relations at the UK Publishers Association, said:"As one of the sponsors of the IPCC, we warmly welcome the MOU with Baidu signed during UK-China Copyright Week. This demonstrates Baidu's commitment to working with global rights holders to tackle copyright infringement for mutual benefit.

"We look forward to the implementation of the MOU and continuing dialogue with Baidu in the future to build on collaboration opportunities in the field of IP protection."
George (Zhiqiang) He, senior vice president at Lenovo and president of the Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group (LCIG), introduces LCIG's spinoff business aimed at online authentication at a symposium yesterday on trusted identity in cyberspace. [Photo provided to China.org.cn]

China's tech giant Lenovo has created a firm dedicated to providing online authentication solutions that aim to push China's cyberspace security amid increasing risks of hacking, data breaches and identity theft, the company announced yesterday at a symposium on trusted identity in cyberspace.

Online Biometric Authentication Ltd, a subsidiary of the Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group (LCIG) under the Chinese PC and smartphone manufacturer, will work together with all stakeholders in the field to address the authentication problem and push application of international standards across the ecosystem, revealed Henry (Haixin) Chai, CEO of the new company.

"China is more extensively exposed to the mobile internet than any market in the world, and the traditional authentication methods of username/password combo can no longer meet users' demand for convenience, efficiency and safety especially in the ever expanding mobile internet," said Chai.

"That's why we want to provide more advanced technologies and solutions to end users through stronger online authentication methods based on FIDO standards," added Chai who chairs the China Working Group at Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) alliance that creates open standards for a secure and easy-to-use universal authentication, including biometric measures such as fingerprint and iris recognition, eliminating the world's dependency on password-based security.

The internet, especially with the rapid expansion of mobile and cloud computing, exposes users and enterprises to fraud more than ever before.

In 2015, China witnessed a greater amount of cybersecurity incidents in its territory, such as identity theft, online fraud and blackmail attributed to data breaches, as well as malware on the mobile internet, according to a latest report from China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center.

President Xi Jinping has called for the comprehensive detection of internet risks to ensure online security at a symposium on cybersecurity on April 19, calling for the establishment of a system to protect information infrastructure in industries including finance, energy, telecommunications and transportation.

"Many businesses and government agencies around the world have a shared interest in improving online authentication to address the password problem," said Brett McDowell, executive director of the FIDO Alliance. "But the problem is too big to solve single handedly, and we must collaborate on a global scale."

Tan Tieniu, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and professor of computer vision and pattern recognition, agreed that it takes coordination across the industry and efforts from the policy, technical and standard level to fully address the problem.

Lenovo is one of the six founding members of the FIDO Alliance formed in 2013 aimed at developing technical specifications and promoting the adoption of standards.

It was the angel investor for biometric technology, Face++ and Nok Nok Labs, that addressed problems created by the reliance on weak or overly complex passwords. Lenovo also aligned with the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in pushing for core technology development, according to a briefing by George (Zhiqiang) He, senior vice president at Lenovo and president of the Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group (LCIG).

Online Biometric Authentication Ltd is the second spinoff of LCIG, formerly known as the Ecosystem and Cloud Services Group. The first incubator under LCIG was SHAREit, a popular cross-platform file transfer tool which now boasts 520 million users worldwide and ranks as the most downloaded app in Google Play in 16 countries and regions.

Follow China.org.cn on Twitter and Facebook to join the conversation.
Economic data published by China's provinces and regions showed positive growth in the first quarter (Q1), but also highlighted the challenges faced by some areas.

Tibet Autonomous Region and the economic powerhouse of Chongqing Municipality performed the best in Q1, with growth of 10.7 percent. There were 24 provinces, municipalities and regions that posted growth rates faster than the national Q1 figure of 6.7 percent.

Economic observers said the service industry had played a central role in boosting the economy, while real estate sales, which jumped in many big cities following government incentives rolled out in Q1, also helped.

The Chinese economy has shown positive signs of stabilizing thanks to strong investment in infrastructure and the property sector, and it is expected to hold steady during the remainder of the year.

Anticipating downward economic pressure this year, at least two thirds of provincial-level regions lowered their growth targets for 2016 and left room for capacity reduction and restructuring of industries.

Analysts said the data showed that policies had been successful and local economies were prepared for the next phase of reform.

Investment and infrastructure building are both helping to sustain growth in Tibet. In Q1, the central government allocated 30 billion yuan (around 4.6 billion U.S. dollars) to projects such as hydropower stations and a railway and highway linking Lhasa to Nyingchi Prefecture.

Tourism also contributed to the growth. More than 561,000 people visited the region in Q1, up 20.8 percent year on year. Tourist spending increased almost 30 percent. Moreover, per capita disposable income for urban and rural residents grew more than 11 percent year on year, statistics show.

"Tibet's growth depends largely upon favorable fiscal policies from the central government and aid from other provincial regions," said Lhorang Dradul, a professor with Sichuan University.

The underdeveloped mountainous region of Guizhou Province benefited from anti-poverty funds and incentives. It has also reduced its reliance on mining, instead looking to tourism, computer and environment-related industries to drive development.

Ding Xiongjun, deputy secretariat of Guizhou government, said fixed asset investment was a key driver of economic growth in Q1. This year, Guizhou has plans for 1,948 large-scale engineering projects in the pipeline, 200 more than last year. These projects will greatly improve infrastructure in Guizhou, he said.

Thanks to the robust manufacturing and service industry, Chongqing posted 10.7 percent growth in the first quarter.

"The economy in Chongqing has seen stable Q1 growth, with more structural reforms, and new growth engines identified and nurtured. It is expected to maintain this positive momentum," said Tong Zesheng, Chongqing municipal statistics bureau spokesperson.

Despite encouraging signs elsewhere, the northern industrial and mining provinces of Shanxi and Liaoning posted the country's lowest Q1 growth rates. The former posted growth of 3 percent, and Liaoning put the figure at minus 1.3 percent.

"The problems in Liaoning are not new. They are a hangover of years as an industrial base," said an analyst with Liaoning provincial information center.

"The data doesn't mean the economy is in a mess. Fast growth is seen in service sector and new industries such as robotics, general aviation and pharmaceuticals," he added.

Yi Baozhong, a Northeast Asia expert with Jilin University, said the recession in provinces like Liaoning is mainly caused by an over-reliance on the raw material and energy sectors. "The economy of this model can grow rapidly but is vulnerable to downward pressures," Yi said.

A Deutsche Bank report said there were three factors behind the northeastern recession: an outdated growth model driven by resources, huge losses from torpid state-owned enterprises and stalling population growth.

Policymakers have high hopes for the old industrial base. The government on Tuesday vowed it would do more to rejuvenate the northeast rustbelt through reforms and economic restructuring.

Reviving the northeast is not an expedient but a profound strategy that will help forge fresh economic engines, analysts said.

"China's economic transition needs new vitality, which requires the lagging northeast to keep up with reforms," said Song Donglin, president of Jilin University of Finance and Economics.
For the second time in a week, President Xi Jinping has emphasized the important role of science and technology in powering China's development.

President Xi Jinping visits the Institute of Advanced Technology in University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, east China's Anhui province, on April 26, 2016, where he was introduced to different innovative technologies.[Photo/Xinhua]

Speaking at a symposium on internet and cyberspace security on April 19 in Beijing, he called for China to make a breakthrough in next-generation internet technologies.

On Tuesday, at one of the events highlighted most by Chinese media during his field-study tour of Anhui province, Xi visited the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, the provincial capital.

He visited the province from Sunday to Wednesday.

At the university's Institute of Advanced Technology, Xi was shown achievements in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to public security, and from drones to alternative energy.

He visited the control center of the 2,000-kilometer Beijing-Shanghai quantum communication main network, due to become fully operational in the second half of this year, and the university's Laboratory of Physic Science for Advanced Medical Application.

Talking to faculty members, researchers and students, Xi praised the university's recent progress in innovation and new technologies.

He urged his audience to show a greater "sense of mission" by educating more people and making greater achievements in the new frontiers of science and technology.

An economy of China's size would be unsustainable if it relied entirely on imports for its new science and technologies, Xi said.

Zhang Xiaojun, vice-president of Anhui Huami Information Technology, which has investment from Chinese mobile phone producer Xiaomi, was one of the high-tech company leaders who met with the president.

He said he thinks Xi's comments will greatly encourage technology companies like his, and he is more confident in serving the Chinese economy with smart wearable gadgets.

Yao Hongyu, CEO of Beijing-based cloud computing and big data company Yoyo Systems, said he thought the president was saying in Anhui that the next 10 years is the best time for China to build up its power in new technologies.

He said the country's current scientific research capability still lags behind many developed nations, and most of the core components of China's industrial robots are imported.

Yao added that it will be "a long and tough journey" for the country to improve its capability on core technologies.

He said State-owned companies and government departments should buy domestic brands to support the development of China's science and technology, and the nation needs to develop core technology in fields such as cloud computing and big data.

During his Anhui trip, Xi visited the village of Xiaogang, which was one of China's poorest four decades ago and took a lead in the country's economic reform and opening-up in the late 1970s.

He also visited mountainous Jinzhai county, where many farmers are beginning to use solar power to change their lives under the government program to eliminate poverty.
A changing Chinese military strategy and planned troop reductions in the People's Liberation Army are having an impact on the number and type of students military academies will be recruiting and training.

Chinese President Xi Jinping inspected the Central Military Commission (CMC) joint battle command center in Beijing on April 20, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

Recruitment of students needed to bolster China's combat capability will be increased, even as the overall number of military school students will be reduced, officials said at a military school recruitment conference in Beijing that ended on Tuesday.

Compared with last year, 24 percent fewer students will be admitted to studies related to the army, including the infantry and artillery, while logistic and support departments will see their recruits fall by 45 percent, said a news release from the Central Military Commission's Training Management Department.

In comparison, students studying in aviation, missile and maritime fields will increase by 14 percent. The number of recruits in sectors where there is an urgent need, such as space intelligence, radar and drones, will rise by 16 percent, the release said.

The changes were announced in line with ongoing military reforms and were made after rounds of negotiations with the army, navy, air force, rocket force, regional military commands and military academies, PLA Daily reported, citing an unidentified officer from the department's Training Establishment Bureau.

The department has pledged to intensify supervision of military schools' admissions, the officer said, adding that officers and applicants' parents will be invited to monitor the admission process.

It also plans to revise the regulations on military schools' recruitment and students at such schools, PLA Daily said.

A researcher in the Human Resources Department at the PLA Xi'an Political Academy said the military reform will lead to an adjustment in the proportion of each PLA service and corresponding changes to the military's training systems.

As the PLA moves to implement President Xi Jinping's order for a troop reduction of 300,000, it is natural for the military to reduce the number of new officers, said the researcher, who asked not to be identified.

However, it must address the shortage of officers who have a deep knowledge of joint combat operations and advanced equipment, he said.

"We have developed and deployed many cutting-edge weapons, including some that are the best in the world, but there are not enough soldiers to use many of those advanced weapons," he said.

"In some cases, soldiers lack knowledge and expertise to make the best use of their equipment."
The mainland's Taiwan Affairs Office says both sides of the Taiwan Strait are promising to work together to combat telecom fraud.

The suggestion comes amid the dispute over jurisdiction, after Kenyan authorities deported 77 alleged telecom fraud suspects, including 45 from Taiwan, to the mainland earlier this month.

An Fengshan is spokesperson for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office.

"Both sides say that, based on an agreement toward a joint crackdown on crime, they will further discuss new ways to deepen cooperation and target cross-border telecom fraud. Both sides have agreed they'll provide each other with information about suspects, as well as help arrest criminals at large, confiscate illicit money and maintain communication during any new investigations."

The agreements follow a trip to Beijing last week by a delegation from Taiwan to discuss the status of the suspects from Taiwan, as well as plans for further cooperation against telecom fraud.

In the end, it has been decided all 77 suspects, including the ones from Taiwan, will be tried on the mainland.

An says the investigation and subsequent trials will be fair.

"As part of their trip, the Taiwan delegation visited the detention facility in Beijing's Haidian District to review the investigation and the living conditions of the suspects. Mainland officials have assured the group from Taiwan that all the suspects will be treated fairly, and their rights and interests under the law will be protected. They will also help arrange things like family visits, under the laws on the mainland."

The group arrested in Kenya are thought to be one of a number of telecom fraud operations operating in other countries, but targeting victims on the mainland.

The scam usually involves the suspects posing as police officers, and convincing their victims their bank accounts are in danger.
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In the first three months of the year, China's Internet watchdog shut down 1,046 illegal websites for spreading pornographic content or information that jeopardizes national security.

An illustration shows Chinas cracking down on illegal Internet contents. [Illustration: Xinhua]

Eighty-five websites were given warnings and 8,008 microblog accounts were shut down during the same period, said the Cyberspace Administration of China in a statement released Tuesday.

The top Internet regulator said 89 cases were transferred to judicial organs.

In one case, Ronganwang.com was required by the cyber watchdog in Guangxi to suspend operations for 15 days for spreading information about violent and terrorist activities.

Others were punished for publishing information about illegal acts, including blackmail, telecom fraud, illegal fundraising and exam cheating.

The administration pledged to strengthen the crackdown on illegal websites and welcomed tips from the public in order to ensure a healthy online environment.
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The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) should refrain from irresponsible actions and attempts to achieve nuclear status, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday.

"At the same time we believe that it is dangerous and counterproductive for some countries to use this situation as an excuse to increase their military presence in Northeast Asia," Lavrov said here at the Moscow Conference on International Security.

He added that it was necessary to create reliable mechanisms to "ensure equal and indivisible security" in the Asia-Pacific region.

"Mechanisms should be set up on non-aligned approaches, principles of respect for international law, and refusal to carry out or support any action aimed at overthrowing governments or undermine the stability of other countries," Lavrov said.

In March, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution to impose the toughest sanctions to date on the DPRK to curb its nuclear and missile programs.

But the sanctions failed to stop Pyongyang, which on Sunday announced a successful underwater test-fire of a strategic submarine ballistic missile.

Meanwhile, the United States and South Korea are considering deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) advanced missile system in South Korean territory.
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Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III vowed Wednesday not to pass on to the next administration the problem brought by the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) using the full might of the state.

In a statement he issued following the beheading of John Ridsdel, a Canadian national, by the ASG bandits, Aquino said his government has proven before that it would choose "all-out justice over all-out war."

"But we will always act from a position of strength. So, to the ASG, and whoever may aid or abet them, you have chosen only the language of force, and we will speak to you only in that language. We will not stop until the threat they pose to our communities is ended," he said.

"I am ready to devote all my energies towards ensuring that, at the very least, this will be a very seriously degraded problem that I will pass on to my successor," he added.

He acknowledged that casualties are to be expected.

But Aquino emphasized that what has to be of utmost importance is neutralizing the criminal activities of the ASG.

"The men and women in our Armed Forces are well-trained, well-equipped, and resourceful. I have full trust and confidence in them," he said.

The president said that he sent a letter to Ridsdel's family on Tuesday to express his condolences.

"We are so appalled by this murder. This murder was meant to terrorize our whole population. The Abu Sayyaf thought they could instill fear in us; instead, they have galvanized us even further to ensure justice is meted out. We have always been open to talks with those who desire peace; but those who commit atrocities can expect the full might of the State," he said.

The Philippine authorities were verifying if a male decapitated body found by a civilian in Talipao town in southern province of Sulu was that of Ridsdel.

His severed head placed inside a plastic bag was discovered on the street of Jolo, five hours after the expiry of the ransom deadline set at 3 p.m. on April 25 by the bandits.

Ridsdel was among the four hostages who were abducted by ASG bandits on Sept. 21 last year from a resort on Samal Island, Davao del Norte. Also seized were Canadian Robert Hall, Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstad, and Filipina Marithes Flor. Endit
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday urged the establishment of a broad international front against terrorism under United Nations (UN) auspices.

"To effectively combat this global threat (of terrorism), the entire international community should exert concerted and energetic efforts," Putin said in an address to the fifth Moscow International Security Conference.

Putin stressed that the formation of a broad front against terrorism should be based on international laws and conducted under UN auspices.

During the conference, several senior Russian officials made their own suggestions regarding the fight against terrorism.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested every country involved thoroughly analyze mistakes made during anti-terror missions, and warned against using terrorists as instruments for certain political goals.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for his part urged more efforts on financially devastating the terrorists in Syria, who largely rely on oil smuggling.

Secretary of Russia's Security Council Nikolai Patrushev noted the importance of information exchange with other countries on the movement of terrorists and refugees. He also urged efforts to prevent the spread of terrorism and extremist ideas, especially through the Internet.

The two-day Moscow International Security Conference gathered some 500 participants from 80 countries for discussions on the fight against terrorism as well as the security situation in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia.
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The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Wednesday slammed the United States for using sanctions as a major measure to subdue other countries, calling it a "sanctions doctrine."

A spokesman for the DPRK's Foreign Ministry was quoted by the official news agency KCNA as saying that the United States has always regarded sanctions as a way to implement its aggressive foreign policy and has wielded a sanctions stick against countries that disobey it.

"It (the sanctions doctrine) is a collection of mean methods for bringing into submission those countries and their people courting its displeasure," said the spokesman.

"The U.S. sanctions have become a root cause of unreasonable pressure, inequality, tensions and stand-off in international relations," he added.

The spokesman also called on countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America to unite to cope with the high-handed and arbitrary practices by the United States.

U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner on Tuesday warned that the United States would consider "other options" if Pyongyang continues its nuclear and ballistic missile tests. However, he declined to specify the options the United States is considering,

Also on Tuesday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest issued a similar warning. "We're going to continue to ramp up the pressure on the North Korean regime," Earnest told a press briefing.

Pyongyang must choose to rejoin the international community by committing to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and come into compliance with their international obligations, he said.

On March 2, in an effort to curb the DPRK's nuclear and missile programs, the UN Security Council unanimously approved Resolution 2270, the toughest-ever sanctions so far against the country for its fourth nuclear test on Jan. 6 and the long-range rocket launch that came a month later.
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The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) on Wednesday donated 10 police vehicles to Kenya to help scale up security in the refugee camps in northeastern region.

UNHCR Kenya Representative Raouf Mazou said the vehicles will be used by security officers to patrol in and around the Dadaab refugee camps.

"Our responsibility is to provide the necessary support to the host country to enhance security in and around the refugee camps," Mazou said in Garissa town when he handed over the vehicles to Northeastern regional coordinator Mohamed Saleh.

The vehicles will also be used to escort aid workers to and from the camps, and undertake other law enforcement functions.

Speaking after receiving the vehicles, Saleh said the police will use the vehicles to enhance security but blamed refugees for the insecurity in the region. He noted that for the past 10 months security in the northeastern region has stabilized.

He noted that close cooperation between security apparatus, citizens and the entire leadership had led to the improved security.

Saleh assured UNHCR that the vehicles will be used for the intended purpose "crime control and reduction of fear among the refugee community."

"This cannot be an open ended affair and we would like to see all the refugees go back to their country. Twenty-five years is too long for both the host community and also for the refugees," he added.

Saleh, however, said Kenya will also continue receiving refugees from neighboring Somalia because some parts of the country remain unstable.

He said transport forms a very important component in security and the vehicles will go a long way in enhancing security in the region.

He said the vehicles being handed was a simple of "team concept towards a realization of a collective security and safety as nation, region and the world."

The authorities have also blamed the militants for being behind spates of kidnapping of expatriates working in the sprawling refugee camps in the incursion-prone northern region and tourists in the coastal archipelago towns of Mombasa and Lamu.

Analysts say refugee camps often do pose security challenges for host countries. Armed groups throughout the world have used them for recruits, shelter, and food, and it is likely Al-Shabaab does the same.
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At least 34 rebels have been killed when they launched an attack on government-controlled areas in Syria's northern province of Aleppo, a monitor group said Wednesday.

The attack was unleashed on Sunday by several jihadi groups, including the al-Qaida Syrian wing Nusra Front, with the aim to advance in these areas, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The UK-based group added that the Syrian army responded with heavy shelling, triggering battles that left nine Syrian soldiers dead.

A military source told Xinhua that militants attempted to infiltrate into the al-Assad Suburb in western Aleppo at dawn on Sunday, but the Syrian army repelled the attack, after carrying out airstrikes against them.

The attackers were sneaking into the area through the sewage system, the source said on condition of anonymity.

The Nusra group and allied militants unleashed three wide-scale offensives on Syrian military positions in Aleppo over the past couple of weeks.

The army units reportedly repelled the attacks, and engaged in more battles against the assailants.

The government forces backed by the Lebanese Hezbollah group and the Russian air force are trying to isolate the rebels in Aleppo and cut their supply lines from neighboring Turkey and other rebel-held areas in northern Syria, while the rebels are fighting to keep such lines opened.
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Iran is capable of producing intercontinental missiles thanks to its scientific development, a senior Iranian diplomat said on Wednesday.

"Today, our scientific power has provided us with the opportunity to even produce intercontinental missiles," Hamid Baeidinejad, the Iranian Foreign Ministry's director general for political affairs, was quoted as saying by Press TV.

"Our country's power is increasing, and today we have no restrictions in defense fields, as in our missile program, we have no technical limits anymore," said Baeidinejad, who is also former Iranian nuclear negotiator.

Stressing that Iran's military doctrine is based on deterrent policies, he said that unlike the military policies of other countries in the region and major powers in the world, Iran's military doctrine is not after an escalation of threats in the region or the world.

He hailed the achievements of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) in defense areas, saying that the IRGC is the backbone of the country's military security.

Earlier, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif dismissed U.S. officials' remarks against Iran's missile program, saying Iran would never negotiate over its missile program as it was a matter of national defense.

The White House is critical of Iran's missile program and deems it a threat to regional and world peace.

However, the Islamic republic said that its missile program is totally for peaceful purposes and no measure can strip it of its legitimate and legal rights to boost its defensive capabilities and to safeguard national security.
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The Egyptian Foreign Ministry confirmed Wednesday that at least 12 Egyptian illegal immigrants were killed in clashes with smuggling gangsters in Bani Walid town in neighboring turmoil-stricken Libya.

"The Egyptian embassy contacted the forensic authorities in Bani Walid to examine the bodies in order to identify the victims and return them back home," Foreign Ministry's Spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said in a statement.

The Egyptian embassy in Libya, which works from Cairo due to Libya's security conditions, has been in touch with the local authorities in Bani Walid and the presidential council in Tripoli for information about the Egyptian victims.

Libya has been suffering escalating violence since the 2011 turmoil that toppled and killed former leader Muammar Gaddafi.

In mid-January, 20 Egyptians held captive by Libyan militants were released and received by Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi at Cairo international airport.

"We repeat warning about the danger of illegal infiltration to Libya and engagement in acts that may endanger the lives of Egyptian citizens," said the Egyptian foreign ministry's spokesman.

Despite the Egyptian government's travel warnings, the neighboring Arab country is an ideal destination for thousands of Egyptian workers, mostly work in the construction sector, due to tight economic conditions back home.

In February 2015, the Islamic State (IS) militant group released a video showing beheading of 20 Egyptian Christians near the Libyan city of Sirte.
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The UN Security Council and the General Assembly on Wednesday concurrently adopted resolutions on peace-building architecture, providing renewed momentum for the focus on sustaining peace within the UN system.

The resolutions reaffirmed the role of the Peace-building Commission (PBC), a subsidiary body to the General Assembly and the Security Council, in bringing a strategic approach and coherence to peace-building efforts.

The resolutions also asked the PBC to work more flexibly and serve a bridging role among the General Assembly, Security Council and the Economic and Social Council; meanwhile, they called for closer coordination and cooperation between the PBC and the Security Council on peace-building issues.

Peace-building is an intervention that is designed to prevent the start or resumption of violent conflict by creating a sustainable peace.

The PBC is an intergovernmental advisory body that supports peace efforts in countries emerging from conflict, and is a key addition to the capacity of the International Community in the broad peace agenda.

"The adoption of these comprehensive resolutions simultaneously by the General Assembly and the Security Council sends a powerful signal," said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a statement released by his spokesperson. "The United Nations system will work more strategically with governments and on the ground, in stronger partnership with others, not only to prevent the recurrence of conflict, but to prevent conflict from breaking out in the first place."
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Somali security forces on Wednesday arrested 15 Al-Shabaab suspects in a joint operation in Daynile district, west of the capital Mogadishu.

Spokesperson of the Ministry of Internal Security Abdikamil Moalim Shukri said during the security operation carried out together with the African Union peacekeeping forces, the forces held 15 suspects, including an injured member of Al-Shabaab.

"National security forces and AMISOM conducted successful operation in Daynile district. We have captured 15 suspects, three of them admitted being Al-Shabaab militants including injured member. We had the information before the operation and it happened as planned," Shukri said.

Forces from National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) and AMISOM have increased operation against the militant group of Al-Shabaab recently.

The NISA captured senior Al-Shabaab militant Hassan Fanah from Kahda district in Benadir early this week.

Somali and AU forces flushed out the Islamist militant group from Mogadishu in 2011, but the group still carried out deadly attacks in the Horn of Africa nation.
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Somali National Army (SNA) together with the African Union peacekeeping troops on Wednesday took control of new areas near Hudur town, capital of Bakool region in southwest Somalia, from militant group Al-Shabaab.

Governor of Bakool region Mohamed Moalim told reporters that the SNA and Ethiopian forces under the AU peacekeeping forces captured new locations which were under the militant group control.

Moalim said the areas were captured without any resistance from the Islamist militants who fled the locations before the joint forces moved into.

"The operation still continues, and it is aimed at liberating more areas under the group control at moment," the governor said.
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U.S. presidential front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had huge wins in a spate of primaries Tuesday, which could well seal the deal for their nomination to face off against each other in the 2016 race for the White House, experts said.

Trump, the Republican front-runner, swept all five states -- Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island -- Tuesday, effectively stopping rival Senator Ted Cruz in his tracks and putting himself perhaps within just a couple of states of clinching the Republican Party (GOP) nomination.

Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, also won big Tuesday, winning four states, and experts said the victories mean she will be the Democratic nominee.

"Clinton sealed the deal last night," Brookings Institution's senior fellow Darrell West told Xinhua. "She has 90 percent of the delegates she needs for the nomination and will get them very soon."

"Trump had a great night and moved much closer to the GOP nomination. It is going to be difficult for party elites to withhold the nomination from him even if he is a few delegates short," he said.

Indeed, there had been talk in recent weeks that the GOP establishment would attempt to withhold the nomination if Trump does not grab all 1,237 of the required delegates, but that seems unlikely now, experts said.

Dan Mahaffee, an analyst with the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, echoed those thoughts.

"Trump's big win means that he will, in all likelihood, be the GOP nominee, as momentum and mathematics continue to work in his favor," Mahaffee told Xinhua. "He could be as few as two states away from victory, with New Jersey and West Virginia looking to be in his favor. Cruz will continue to emphasize Indiana, but that won't be enough to stop Trump, and California is increasingly looking to be in Trump's favor."

"Cruz's hope of denying Trump the 1,237 looks increasingly remote," Mahaffee said.

The next round is in New Jersey and California, where Trump is expected to do well.

"He is expected to do well in New Jersey and California and if he can add Indiana to his side next week, he probably will be unstoppable. All of the attacks against him have failed and slowly the party is coming around to his candidacy," West noted.

For her part, Clinton, now practically assured of the nomination, is turning her attention away from rival Senator Bernie Sanders and honing in on Trump.

"She will focus on the billionaire in her future speeches and attempt to make Sanders' voters more comfortable with her. Trump will help her unify the party behind her," West said.

Mahaffee said that for Clinton, it's time to look to the general election. "Her inevitable victory on the Democratic side is now just that more inevitable," he said.

Republican strategist Ford O' Connell told Xinhua that now Trump has a definite shot at beating Clinton in the race for the White House. But to do so, he needs to tone down the bombastic and offensive rhetoric. While his manner of speaking has gained him popularity among his base, it will have to be toned down to make him more appealing to others.

Indeed, Trump has referred to Mexican immigrants as "rapists" and said Muslims should not be allowed into the U.S. He has also made derogatory comments about women.

Some experts said Trump needs to reign in his sharp tongue in order to be competitive in the general election.

"He doesn't need to make a 180 (degrees). If he would just bend around 45 degrees he could actually win this thing," O'Connell said of Trump.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the opening ceremony of the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Beijing on Thursday.

Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses the opening ceremony of the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Beijing, capital of China, April 28, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

Xi's speech covered the Korean Peninsular nuclear issue and the South China Sea.

On the nuclear issue, Xi reiterated China's full adherence to the UN Security Council resolution, and its commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, securing peace and stability on the peninsula and resolving issues through dialogue and negotiation.

He urged all the parties involved to exercise restraint, avoid provocation, and pull the nuclear issue back to a track of dialogue and negotiations at an early date.

The president also said China is always committed to peace and stability in the South China Sea. While China will firmly safeguard its sovereignty, rights and interests, it is willing to peacefully solve the disputes through friendly consultation and dialogue with the countries directly involved, he said.

China will work with Southeast Asian nations to make the South China Sea a region of peace, friendship and cooperation, according to Xi.

The CICA was established in 1992 as a forum for dialogue and consultation on security issues in Asia. It has 26 member countries and 12 countries and international organizations as observers.
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Britain is much stronger as a part of Europe, and Europe is much stronger with Britain as a driving force, and there is no upside for Britain in Brexit, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said Wednesday.

He released the OECD report titled "To Brexit Or Not To Brexit: A Taxing Decision", which finds Britons will be paying a heavy "Brexit tax" for many years if Britain leaves the European Union (EU).

Gurria said: "Only costs that can be avoided and advantages to be seized by remaining in Europe. No one should have to pay the Brexit tax."

He cited that since Britain joined the EU in 1973, its GDP per capita has doubled, saying "This is not only more than in the other major EU member states, but also more than in English-speaking countries that are not EU members."

He emphasized the near-term effects and long-term effects of Brexit, including a sell-off of assets, a sharp rise in risk premia, confidence falling, investment inflows waning, thus holding back growth.

The Secretary-General said: "Less investment, reduced flows of goods and people, costlier credit and lower exposure to ideas and skills across borders would ultimately undermine productivity and the long-run economic capacity of the UK economy."

"Leaving Europe would impose a Brexit tax on generations to come. Instead of funding public services, this tax would be a pure deadweight loss, with no economic benefit," he noted.

A decision by Britain to leave the EU would cause a severe negative shock to the economy and weaken GDP growth for many years.

By 2020, British GDP would be over 3 percent smaller than otherwise (with continued EU membership), equivalent to a cost per household of 2,200 pounds (about 3,190 U.S. dollars) (in today's prices), according to the new OECD study.

By 2030, in a central scenario GDP would be over 5 percent lower than otherwise -- with the cost of Brexit equivalent to 3,200 pounds per household (in today's prices), added the study.

The OECD's analysis echoed the report of the HM Treasury, which has estimated that GDP would be 6 percent lower by 2030 and that this could leave households 4,300 pounds worse off.

Analysts recently suggested the uncertainty of the EU referendum has affected the British economy. The Office for National Statistics announced Wednesday the lowest quarterly GDP growth figures since 2012.

Britain will hold a referendum on June 23 to decide whether it should remain in the EU. (1 pound = 1.45 U.S. dollars)
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Twelve Syrian refugees were returned to Turkey from the Greek island of Lesvos by airplane on Wednesday in the first such readmission this spring, local authorities announced.

According to the spokesperson of the European border control agency Frontex Eva Montuguer as well as the Greek Public Order Ministry, the refugees had requested their return to Turkey.

It was the first return by airplane to Adana, Turkey, Lieutenant General of Greek Police Zaharoula Tsirigoti noted.

In addition, 49 migrants were returned to Turkey by boats from the Greek islands on Tuesday, the third such mission under the March 18 EU-Turkey deal to cope with the refugee crisis, the Greek authorities announced.

Thirteen people were returned to Turkey from Lesvos, five from Chios island and 31 from Kos island.

Greece sent back to Turkey on April 6 the first batch of 136 people under the EU-Turkey deal clinched in March to stem the influx into Europe via the Aegean Sea and on April 8 further 124 deportations followed from three Greek islands, namely Lesvos, Kos, Samos.

Moreover, according to the local authorities, they are not going to be other deportations until May 1.

Meanwhile, some protests were observed by the local police on Tuesday in the Camp of Moria in Lesvos, during the visit of Alternate Interior Minister Yiannis Mouzalas as tension rises in the closed facility.

On Wednesday morning Lesvos counted 62 refugee arrivals, while the Detention Center of Moria and the camp of Kara Tepe have already hosted 4,150 refugees and migrants, according to the latest figures released by the Coast Guard.
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UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said Thursday that while deep-seated differences continue to permeate intra-Syrian peace talks, the latest round of discussions has achieved progress on a number of key points.

Both sides seem to agree that only a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political transition can end a five-year war that has killed some 400,000 people and displaced millions more, the envoy told the press after briefing the UN Security Council in New York.

The Syrian government delegation and its opposition counterpart, the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), also believe that a political transition should be overseen by a new, credible and inclusive transitional government, he added.

Amongst other things, both parties agreed that Syria needs a new constitution, which will be drafted under the supervision of the transitional government.

However, the envoy declined to comment if the two sides are any closer toward a compromise regarding the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The UN envoy also noted that the latest Syria peace talks in Geneva were overshadowed by a substantial deterioration of the current ceasefire.

"In the last 48 hours we have had an average of one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, and one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes," he said, "How can you have substantial talks when you only have news of bombing and shelling?"

He called upon members of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) to reconvene as soon as possible in a bid to put negotiations back on track.

The United States and Russia, the two most significant players within the ISSG framework, should act immediately to restore the ceasefire in Syria and eliminate elements that endanger the peace talks, said the envoy.

The exact date for the next round of talks will be announced in May, de Mistura said.
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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has completed a visit to the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria as part of a technical rapid assessment mission to take preliminary stock of destruction at the World Heritage site.

Headed by the Director of UNESCO's World Heritage Centre, the mission, from 24 to 26 April inspected both Palmyra's museum and archaeological site, taking stock of "considerable damage to the museum, where they found that most of the statues and sarcophagi that were too large to be removed for safekeeping were defaced, smashed, their heads severed and their fragments left lying on the ground," UNESCO said in a press release today.

"Palmyra is a pillar of Syrian identity, and a source of dignity for all Syrians," said UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova.

"UNESCO is determined to ensure the safeguarding of this and other sites with all partners as part of broader humanitarian and peace building operations," she added.

The experts participating in the mission, who were escorted by UN security forces, identified emergency measures to consolidate and secure the building and the work that will be required to document, evacuate, safeguard and restore whatever is possible. Work to match and document the fragments of destroyed statues has already begun.

At the archaeological site, the experts took stock of the state of conservation of the grand colonnade and agora. They observed the destruction of the triumphal arch and Temple of Baal Shamin, which was "smashed to smithereens," UNESCO said.

The members of the mission observed a minute of silence in memory of the victims murdered at the amphitheatre.

The experts had to examine damages to the Temple of Bel from a distance, as the edifice is still inaccessible and demining operations have not been completed. Likewise, the Mamluk Citadel, overlooking the ancient city, which also sustained serious damage, remains inaccessible.

The Director-General of Antiquities and Museums of Syria, Mamoun Abdoulkarim, accompanied UNESCO's experts and heads of several departments in charge of World Heritage museums, architecture and sites.

"The participants paid tribute to the courage of all those who work to document and safeguard the heritage of Syria, especially the Directorate-General of Syria's Antiquities and Museums for its dedication to protect this heritage which belongs to all Syrians and to the whole of humanity," UNESCO stressed.

The mission considered that despite the destruction of several iconic edifices, the archaeological site of Palmyra "retains a large part of its integrity and authenticity."

UNESCO said it will work with its partners to adopt emergency safeguarding measures.

A full report on the site will be presented to the World Heritage Committee at its 40th session, in Istanbul, Turkey, in July, with a view to determining recommendations for emergency safeguarding measures that need to be taken.

UNESCO plans to send an international mission of experts to examine in greater detail the state of conservation of heritage sites of Syria, including Palmyra.

An international meeting of experts on the preservation of Syria's heritage sites will be held on 2 and 4 June in Berlin, Germany.

The mission completed yesterday followed on a decision taken by the World Heritage Committee during its 39th session in Bonn, Germany, this past July, and a decision unanimously adopted during the 199th session of UNESCO's Executive Board concerning the Organization's role in "safeguarding and preserving Palmyra and other Syrian World Heritage sites."

The World Heritage site of Palmyra, an oasis in the Syrian Desert north-east of Damascus, contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world. From the 1st to the 2nd century, the art and architecture of Palmyra, standing at the crossroads of several civilizations, married Greco-Roman techniques with local traditions and Persian influences.
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The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Thursday fired what was believed to be a Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile, but it appeared to have failed, South Korea's defense ministry said.

A Defense Ministry official told Xinhua on the phone that the DPRK launched a projectile, estimated to have been a Musudan missile, at about 6:40 a.m. local time from the Wonsan area in northeastern DPRK.

The official said the launch appeared to have failed as the projectile was believed to have crashed several seconds after liftoff.
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Lebanese authorities said Thursday that a top Islamic State (IS) operative has been killed in a military raid in a town bordering Syria.

The IS operative, identified as Nayef Shaalan, was killed in the operation in the northeastern border town of Arsal, the army said in a statement.

One of Shaalan's bodyguards was killed and another arrested in the operation, the National News Agency reported.

Lebanon has been battling extremists near the border with Syria since August 2014, when the IS and al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front briefly overran the border town.
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The so-called "freedom of navigation" operations in the South China Sea conducted by the U.S. military are "very dangerous," a spokesperson for China's Ministry of National Defense said Thursday.

The U.S. operations are political and military provocations against China and could easily lead to unexpected incidents, spokesman Wu Qian said at a monthly press conference.

The Chinese military will continue to closely monitor the situations in the South China Sea and will take all necessary measures as needed, he said.

The "freedom of navigation" has been used by the United States as an excuse for intervening in disputes in the South China Sea, according to the spokesman.

In fact, freedom of navigation in the South China Sea is not in question, Wu stressed, criticizing the U.S. side for destabilizing regional peace and undermining coastal nations' security interests.

The U.S. military operations in the South China Sea cannot stop China's continued development and growth, the spokesman stressed.

On the same day, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a daily press briefing that China has always respected and supported "real freedom of navigation" in accordance with international law and is firmly opposed to all acts that harm China's sovereignty and security interests under the name of "freedom of navigation."
A man tries Huawei's dual-camera smartphone P9 at a retail outlet in Dubai on Monday. Huawei has collaborated with Leica to offer the dual-lens model, which is equipped with the Hybrid Focus technology that uses up to three measurement methodologies.[Photo/Xinhua]

Apple Inc saw its first quarterly revenue drop in 13 years on weaker China performance while its local rival Huawei Technologies Co is gaining strong momentum in the mid- to high-end sector.

Apple said on Tuesday its sales dropped by more than a quarter in China, its second-largest market after the United States.

The company said in its fiscal quarter that ended on March 26, sales in China fell 26 percent to $12.49 billion, due to weak demand for iPhones in the country. In the same quarter a year earlier, Apple's China sales rose 71 percent.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, attributed the sharp decline to poor sales in Hong Kong, saying that Chinese mainland sales only went down by 7 percent in constant currency. The disappointing performance helped pull down its quarterly revenue to $50.6 billion.

But analysts said gone are the days when Chinese consumers wait in long queues in front of Apple stores for newly released gadgets as the country's homegrown brands such as Huawei and Xiaomi Corp are pushing up-market.

According to the latest report by Counterpoint Technology Market Research, in the first quarter of 2016, demand for iPhones in China dropped almost 32 percent year-on-year, with a shipment of 12.5 million units.

Apple's latest rollout iPhone SE, which was unveiled in March, did not contribute to any uptick in the latest quarter, the report said.

James Yan, a Beijing-based analyst at Counterpoint, said generally, smartphone vendors often see shipment decline in the first quarter, given that the Spring Festival took place on the period when workers had vacations, stopped manufacturing handsets and caused a shortage in global supply.

"But this year Apple performed pretty badly. Its iPhone 6S, with only incremental improvements to iPhone 6, failed to spark enthusiastic and consistent purchasing seen before," Yan said.

In sharp contrast, Huawei regained its leading position, with shipments of 16.5 million units to China in the latest quarter. The Shenzhen-based company is winning customers with smartphones sporting high-end parts and priced hundreds of dollars cheaper than iPhones.

Earlier this month, Huawei unveiled its latest flagship high-end smartphone P9 before The Wall Street Journal reported that the world's third-largest smartphone maker is planning to raise $2 billion by selling bonds to expand its mobile business.

Liu Chang, a 26-year-old computer programmer in Shenzhen, said: "I hope Apple can really come up with a radical innovation on its future iPhones. Otherwise, I will definitely opt for Huawei."

Di Jin, research manager at IDC China, said currently Huawei and Apple are still targeting different groups of users.

"Huawei focuses more on businessmen while iPhone is more like a symbol of popular culture and fashion," he said.
State-owned CSIC says competition in the industry will remain fierce

State-owned China Shipbuilding Industry Corp, one of the country's two major shipbuilding conglomerates and the primary contractor for China's naval force, will focus on 10 areas to integrate its civilian and military businesses over the next five years, the company's president said on Wednesday.

Sun Bo said CSIC will focus on offshore engineering products, power, electronic information and intelligent equipment, mechanical and electrical equipment, underwater defense, new energy, new material and environmental protection products, healthcare and modern services.

In the long term, Sun said, the group will focus on developing commercial products such as equipment needed for offshore oil exploration, storage batteries, law-enforcement vessels, very large crude carriers and supersized container ships to further diversify and adjust its pillar products.

With a workforce of about 150,000 employees, CSIC operates more than 50 industrial subsidiaries and 30 research institutes, including Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co, Qingdao Beihai Shipbuilding Heavy Industry Co Ltd and China Ship Research and Development Academy. It has exported various types of vessels to more than 70 countries.

China State Shipbuilding Corp, the other State-owned conglomerate, also has more than 50 subsidiaries and research institutes.

While the profitability of many Chinese shipyards was squeezed by low technical content, cumbersome financing situation and blind expansion, CSIC devoted more of its resources to high-end vessels and non-marine products over the past half decade. In 2015, the group had sales revenues of 226.08 billion ($34.82 billion), up 12.1 percent on a year-on-year basis.

Last month, the company signed a contract for four 400,000 deadweight-ton VLCCs with ICBC Financial Leasing Co, China's largest financial leasing company, to jointly ensure China's energy security.

Sun said the competition in the shipbuilding business will be fierce, especially at a time when the whole industry is suffering from falling demand.

Overcapacity is another problem. More than 30 major large-scale shipyards went bankrupt over the past two years, according to the Beijing-based China Association of the National Shipbuilding Industry.

"China has excess capacity in building conventional ships, but not in complex and high value-added ships," Sun said. "Under such circumstances, diversifying business focus and adjusting product structure certainly are key elements."

Eager to maintain the country's competitive edge, the government also encourages domestic shipyards to develop vessels in areas such as security, science and research and engineering.

To maintain a healthy cash flow, CSIC established four financial companies including CSIC Capital Co Ltd and injected more cash into CSIC Finance Co Ltd last year. It also set up an industrial fund with an initial capital of 10 billion yuan to further assist its business operation.

The proportion of CSIC's non-marine products now exceeds its total business operation by more than 55 percent.

"If you look at the global market for ships, you can see declining signs in the low-end ship market everywhere," said Bao Zhangjing, director of the Beijing-based China Shipbuilding Industry Research Center.

"Capable shipyards have already shifted their core business to maritime engineering and other fast-growing businesses such as new materials, mechanical and electrical equipment, because, apart from higher profits, there is also less competition as not many shipbuilders are able to produce these sophisticated products," said Bao.
BEIJING - An unnamed official with the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said Wednesday that China and the United States should improve dialogue and communication on global steel overcapacity, following a trade complaint from United States Steel Corp (US Steel).

US Steel lodged a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) on Tuesday, under Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, against around 40 Chinese steel producers and their distributors.

Pittsburgh-based US Steel said in a statement that its complaint regarded "alleged illegal unfair competition methods and seeks the exclusion of all unfairly traded Chinese steel products from the US market."

The ITC has up to 30 days to decide whether it will initiate the case.

The MOC official said he hoped the ITC would overrule the charges as the provision cited by US Steel had mostly been used in intellectual property rights (IPR) dispute cases.

"Steel products are relatively mature and there are no IPR disputes regarding them. Charges of IPR infringement are groundless," the official said.

The steel industries in the United States and China should strengthen dialogue and communication to jointly address the overcapacity, which is a result of anemic global economic recovery and tepid demand, the official added.
DALIAN, Liaoning - A Chinese firm delivered a giant carrier ship designed for livestock to a Singaporean buyer on Wednesday.

The ship is the largest of its kind to be produced in China. Built by COSCO Shipyard and delivered by its subsidiary in the northeastern coastal city of Dalian, the vessel is 189.5 meters long with a floor space of 23,500 square meters, enough for 17,000 live cattle at a time.

Worldwide, there is strong demand for livestock shipping vessels. Many vessels used for cattle are converted container ships, but the COSCO ship is equipped with automated water piping, forage feeding systems and other facilities to ensure the livestock arrive in good condition.

China signed a deal with Australia in 2014 to import 1 million head of Australian cattle per year. This alone requires 20 ships with a capacity of 5,000 livestock each.

COSCO Shipyard rolled its first livestock carrier, ordered by a Dutch firm, off production lines in 2013. Its subsidiary has received seven orders for such carriers.
BEIJING - Hainan Airlines announced on Wednesday it will launch China's first direct flight to Israel on Thursday.

The Beijing-Tel Aviv route will operate three times a week -- on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday -- using Airbus A330 jets.

There has been a long history of friendly exchanges and economic cooperation between the people of Israel and China, and these have grown since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, said Xin Di, chair of Hainan Airlines.

Xin expects the direct flight linking Beijing and Tel Aviv will foster deeper cooperation between the two countries in trade, science and technology and tourism.
China's appetite for foreign assets will continue to grow despite the slowing economy as 72 percent of Chinese companies said they planned to make an acquisition over the next three years, according to a recent survey by global law firm Herbert Smith Freehills LLP.

The survey also found that 60 percent of the Chinese respondents said that they will likely make two or more deals in the next three years while 97 percent said at least one acquisition will be a cross-border deal.

Southeast Asia is the top target destination for 47 percent, followed by 17 percent saying their focus will be on Latin America, according to the survey.

The global report on cross-border mergers and acquisitions was carried out by Herbert Smith Freehills in association with FT Remark, the research division of the Financial Times.

It surveyed 700 senior executives at major businesses around the globe at the end of 2015 about their experiences of cross-border M&A and their views about the outlook for deal-making over the next three years.

It was updated in February to capture any change in sentiment due to changing economic conditions in early 2016.

China's outbound deal landscape is varied and not just restricted to heavy industry, said Matt Emsley, head of corporate for Greater China at Herbert Smith Freehills in Hong Kong.

"We have Chinese firms looking to acquire new technology, but also making investments that reflect the changing demographics in China and its rising wealth  in sectors such as hotels and leisure," he said in a statement.

Meanwhile, China remains an attractive proposition to companies seeking deal opportunities and foreign investors are finding it easier to enter China, according to Emsley.

"The economy may previously have been driven by infrastructure and real estate investmentwhich was what drove demand for commoditiesbut the manufacturing industry is moving up the value chain and other sectors such as food, healthcare, education and financial services are rising," he said.
Xia Yulin, (left) and Pan Dinghao taste beer at a "Panda Brew" bar in Changsha, Hunan province, April 16, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

"Panda Pan" is a nickname of Pan Dinghao, a student who returned from Canada to set up a craft beer factory with his friend Xiao Yulin in Yiyang city, Hunan province.

Pan was a college student studying automotive engineering in Canada, while Xia was a student in the United Kingdom.

Driven by their shared interest of beer making, the two men opened their first shop to sell the craft beer produced by themselves in Beijing in 2013. At the beginning their business expanded fast. But soon they hit the "development bottleneck" as they struggled to cover the costs.

In order to keep their business afloat, Pan and Xia decided to rent a production line to expand production, and packaged their craft beer in Xia's hometown in Yiyang.

At the end of 2013, their first bottled beer was launched. Later, they opened a flagship outlet named "Panda Brew" to sell the craft beer in Beijing in 2014. Last year, they obtained 20 million yuan ($3.08 million) investment. Now, they are selling "Panda Brew" beer in more and more cities.
KANDAL, Cambodia - A China-funded power transmission system in the length of 100 km was inaugurated here on Thursday after four years of construction, officials said.

Cambodian Minister of Mines and Energy Suy Sem and Chinese Ambassador to Cambodia Bu Jianguo jointly unveiled the project.

According to a report by Keo Rattanak, director-general of Cambodia's state-owned Electricite du Cambodge, the project included two substations and a 230-kilovolt transmission line and a 115-kilovolt line, which stretch across southern Kandal Province, southwestern Kampong Speu Province and Phnom Penh capital.

The project was built by the China National Heavy Machinery Corporation at the cost of $83.4 million in which $75.9 million (or 91 percent) was a concessional loan from the Chinese government and the remaining amount was met by the Cambodian government, he said.

The transmission system has played a vital role in importing the electricity from generation sources such as hydropower plants and coal-fueled power plants, he said.

"This is a new achievement for Cambodia, the project will ensure the power supply with reliability, quality, stability and sustainability," he said.

Minister Suy Sem said the development of electricity sources and power grids was a key element for boosting economic growth and reducing poverty.

"I'd like to express my sincere thanks to the Chinese government for supporting Cambodia in the development of energy sector and for encouraging Chinese investors to invest in this sector," he said. "And I'm confident that the Chinese government will continue to support Cambodia in this sector."

Ambassador Bu said the power transmission lines would benefit tens of thousands of families in these provinces.

"As a good and true friend of Cambodia, China is very pleased to support Cambodia in developing economy and in improving people's living conditions," she said. "I believe that this project will contribute further to enhancing friendly relations between China and Cambodia."
BEIJING - The era of easy money seems to be drawing to a close for Chinese banks as annual results showed their bad loans piling up fast while profits slowed sharply last year.

All 16 lenders listed on China's A-share market have now released their annual earnings, all posting higher non-performing loans (NPLs) in 2015. Some saw bad loans jump more than 50 percent year on year.

Chinese lenders, including listed and unlisted ones, had 1.27 trillion yuan ($196 billion) of bad loans by the end of 2015, up 51.2 percent year on year, according to data from China's banking regulator. The ratio of NPLs to total loans had gone up for 10 consecutive quarters by the end of 2015.

Meanwhile, the combined net profits of all Chinese lenders climbed only 2.43 percent, compared with 9.65 percent in 2014, the data showed.

The Agricultural Bank of China, one of the country's "big four" commercial banks, was one of those under intensified pressure. It saw net profits edge up merely 0.7 percent year on year, while its NPL ratio rose to 2.39 percent from 1.54 percent a year earlier.

The increase in bad loans came as China moved to reduce the capacity of oversupplied industries and close "zombie companies," those that survive only on bailouts, to restructure and upgrade a slowing economy.

Facing extreme financial difficulty or already having been shut down, many firms were unable to pay back debts, and that had a knock-on effect on other firms tied to them in business, said Zeng Gang, a banking researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Most non-performing loans went to manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, as well as the mining industry, according to the banks' annual reports.

Meanwhile, dud loans in the country's mid-west rose more significantly than in the east.

"The mid-west has a high concentration of steel and coal firms, which are at the forefront of capacity reduction," said Xiao Yaofei, a researcher at the Guangdong Institute for International Strategies.

The asset quality pressure on Chinese banks will continue in 2016, global rating agency Moody's forecast earlier this month.

The passing of a time when banks made money effortlessly is in line with China's economic transition, said Mo Kaiwei, a researcher with the China Academy of Regional Finance.

"The banking industry goes with the economic cycle. It is quite normal that banks' asset quality and profits decrease when China's economy faces greater downward pressure," he wrote in an analysis article.

China's economic growth slowed further to 6.7 percent in the first quarter of this year as a result of an industrial glut, cooled property investment and sagging foreign trade.

Are the banks capable of digesting the bad loans and reining in the risks?

Mo is among the analysts who think so, citing fast growth in business revenue, steady income from interests and adequate loan loss provisions, expenses that are set aside as allowances for bad loans.

While banks' own profits have so far been used to write off bad loans, there has been consideration of a debt-equity swap program that would allow banks to exchange bad debt for stocks in the companies concerned. China is also ready to let banks issue asset-backed securities collateralized by NPLs.

Even at its current level, the NPL ratio of Chinese banks is still far below that in other major economies, whose NPL ratios range from 3 percent to 5 percent, Mo noted.

Chinese lenders' NPL ratio stood at 1.67 percent at the end of 2015, according to official data.

Mo believes rising bad loans are not necessarily a bad thing, as the phenomenon could force banks to be more prudent when extending credit and develop a more sophisticated business model.
[Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Tongji University's School of Economics and Management (SEM) has been awarded a five-year accreditation from the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) and Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

It is the first time in Tongji SEM history that it has earned a five-year EQUIS and AACSB accreditation. The school obtained a three-year accreditation from EQUIS in 2013.

Jin Fuan, Party secretary of Tongji SEM said, "The two accreditations allow us to develop a better communication, exchange and student training platform with top business schools in the world."

"We also promote Tongji SEM's core value of management education which are sustainability and responsibility."

Huo Jiazhen, dean of Tongji SEM, said "The best business education is destined to be fertilized in a thriving economic center. Taking root in Shanhgai, an international economic hub, Tongji SEM has fortified its success with three totems: internationalization, application-oriented teaching and research, sustainable development. The achievement of the five-year accreditation is an affirmation of the three totems."

The two accreditation agencies applied different criteria in evaluation processes. The EQUIS is awarded to business schools not only on general quality, but also takes account of internationalization, sustainability and relationship with companies. The AACSB accreditation requires schools to pay more attention on education quality, innovation and strategic management.

Huo said Tongji SEM developed its core competency to meet the requirements instead of complying with the accreditation standards mechanically and blindly.

"We developed a long-term internationalization strategy, set application-oriented programs and promoted the concept of sustainability in teaching."

Tongji SEM is one of seven business schools in China that obtained five-year AACSB and EQUIS accreditations.

The AACSB and EQUIS are two top business school performance evaluation systems that are designed to judge the performance of business schools worldwide.

Less than five percent of business schools in the world have been awarded the AACSB accreditation.

Robert Reid, AACSB executive vice president and chief accreditation officer of AACSB International, said, "AACSB congratulates Tongji University and dean Huo Jiazhen for successfully completing a multi-year process to achieve accreditation."

"Tongji SEM confirmed alignment with 15 global accreditation standards, while demonstrating how they achieve success within each of the three pillars on which AACSB accreditation rests - engagement, innovation, and impact."

Eric Cornuel, director general &chief executive officer of European Foundation for Management Development, said, "The award of five-year accreditation is a recognition to Tongji SEM for its achievements. It will enhance Tongji SEM's influence in global market and make it one of the top business schools."
BEIJING - Economic data published by China's provinces and regions showed positive growth in the first quarter (Q1), but also highlighted the challenges faced by some areas.

Tibet autonomous region and the economic powerhouse of Chongqing municipality performed the best in Q1, with growth of 10.7 percent. There were 24 provinces, municipalities and regions that posted growth rates faster than the national Q1 figure of 6.7 percent.

Economic observers said the service industry had played a central role in boosting the economy, while real estate sales, which jumped in many big cities following government incentives rolled out in Q1, also helped.

The Chinese economy has shown positive signs of stabilizing thanks to strong investment in infrastructure and the property sector, and it is expected to hold steady during the remainder of the year.

Anticipating downward economic pressure this year, at least two thirds of provincial-level regions lowered their growth targets for 2016 and left room for capacity reduction and restructuring of industries.

Analysts said the data showed that policies had been successful and local economies were prepared for the next phase of reform.

Robust growth in the west

Investment and infrastructure building are both helping to sustain growth in Tibet. In Q1, the central government allocated 30 billion yuan ($4.6 billion) to projects such as hydropower stations and a railway and highway linking Lhasa to Nyingchi Prefecture.

Tourism also contributed to the growth. More than 561,000 people visited the region in Q1, up 20.8 percent year on year. Tourist spending increased almost 30 percent. Moreover, per capita disposable income for urban and rural residents grew more than 11 percent year on year, statistics show.

"Tibet's growth depends largely upon favorable fiscal policies from the central government and aid from other provincial regions," said Lhorang Dradul, a professor with Sichuan University.

The underdeveloped mountainous region of Guizhou province benefited from anti-poverty funds and incentives. It has also reduced its reliance on mining, instead looking to tourism, computer and environment-related industries to drive development.

Ding Xiongjun, deputy secretariat of Guizhou government, said fixed asset investment was a key driver of economic growth in Q1. This year, Guizhou has plans for 1,948 large-scale engineering projects in the pipeline, 200 more than last year. These projects will greatly improve infrastructure in Guizhou, he said.

Thanks to the robust manufacturing and service industry, Chongqing posted 10.7 percent growth in the first quarter.

"The economy in Chongqing has seen stable Q1 growth, with more structural reforms, and new growth engines identified and nurtured. It is expected to maintain this positive momentum," said Tong Zesheng, Chongqing municipal statistics bureau spokesperson.

Revamping the northeast

Despite encouraging signs elsewhere, the northern industrial and mining provinces of Shanxi and Liaoning posted the country's lowest Q1 growth rates. The former posted growth of 3 percent, and Liaoning put the figure at minus 1.3 percent.

"The problems in Liaoning are not new. They are a hangover of years as an industrial base," said an analyst with Liaoning provincial information center.

"The data doesn't mean the economy is in a mess. Fast growth is seen in service sector and new industries such as robotics, general aviation and pharmaceuticals," he added.

Yi Baozhong, a Northeast Asia expert with Jilin University, said the recession in provinces like Liaoning is mainly caused by an over-reliance on the raw material and energy sectors. "The economy of this model can grow rapidly but is vulnerable to downward pressures," Yi said.

A Deutsche Bank report said there were three factors behind the northeastern recession: an outdated growth model driven by resources, huge losses from torpid state-owned enterprises and stalling population growth.

Policymakers have high hopes for the old industrial base. The government on Tuesday vowed it would do more to rejuvenate the northeast rustbelt through reforms and economic restructuring.

Reviving the northeast is not an expedient but a profound strategy that will help forge fresh economic engines, analysts said.

"China's economic transition needs new vitality, which requires the lagging northeast to keep up with reforms," said Song Donglin, president of Jilin University of Finance and Economics.
Ford Fusion Energi Plug-in hybrid car is displayed, with a charging box on the wall, at an exhibition in Shanghai last year. HAO YAN / CHINA DAILY

Sino-US joint venture Changan Ford is entering the new energy vehicle market as it transforms from a traditional carmaker into an auto mobility solution provider, after gaining a foothold in the Chinese market by offering customers a wide variety of models that meet their new demands.

Ford Motors' new energy vehicle strategy means that 10 to 25 percent of its global sales volume should come from NEVs by 2020, and Changan Ford hopes to match this in China.

The carmaker is developing a new energy platform that can be deployed on hybrid electric, plug-in hybrid and fully battery vehicles. The platform allows the NEV models to be tailored so that they conform to the needs and regulations of different markets.

"We are going to keep investing heavily in NEVs," said Marin Burela, president of Changan Ford Automobile Co.

"With the latest platform, we will tailor the models to touch the hearts and minds of Chinese customers," said Burela.

"We need to be leading in technologies, fuel economy and emission, with the right electric strategy and very broad vision," he said.

The C-MAX Energi plug-in hybrid vehicle is set to follow the Mondeo PHEV, which is already in production at the company's Chongqing plant, into the Chinese market.

Against its domestic rivals, Changan Ford has climbed from sixth to fourth in terms of sales volume so far this year. It has achieved a sales volume of 244,000 units in the first quarter, up 23 percent on the same period in 2015.

"We have been continuously focusing on the voice of Chinese customers, and we will never stop doing that," Burela said.

"Just four months after it was launched, the Taurus is already outselling its major rivals. We also have an unparalleled lineup of SUVs. Changan Ford is extremely aggressive when it comes to introducing new cars," he said.

The Chongqing-based carmaker has found from customer feedback that Chinese buyers require connectivity that enables them to work while they commute, and that they also favor a grand-looking exterior.

The carmaker's answer is the Ford Taurus Limited Edition, which makes its Chinese debut at Auto China 2016. The car is designed to be a sophisticated modern mobile office on four wheels. The Sync 3 connectivity function is provided for the first time, and it enables passengers to meet work demands through wireless connectivity.

Work is not the only consideration, though. Passengers may relax in their seat and enjoy a massage and they can also talk to the vehicle. If the driver or passenger says "I need coffee", the car will help them find the nearest cafe, according to the company. In addition to the in-car technologies and ambient configurations, slight changes have been made to the locally produced models to meet the aesthetic requirements of Chinese customers.
Visitors inspect the BMW X1 at the ongoing Beijing auto show. WANG ZHUANGFEI / CHINA DAILY

Luxury carmakers are upgrading in-car technologies in a bid to appeal to China's internet-savvy youth.

At the ongoing Auto China 2016, BMW Brilliance Automotive launched its new locally manufactured X1. The compact sport activity vehicle is targeted at the younger generation of Chinese customers who, according to the joint venture, "want to live real".

"Our studio in Shanghai redesigned and re-engineered the new BMW X1 locally for young Chinese, especially for customers younger than 30 years old," said Jochen Goller, senior vice-president of sales and marketing at BMW Brilliance Automotive.

In a survey of more than 3,000 BMW car users, industry specialists and experts, the luxury carmaker found that Chinese born in the 1980s and '90s are becoming the nation's mainstream consumers.

The research also found that consumers enjoy the creative process and believe innovation is essential. BMW said young Chinese consumers are looking for innovation, personality and an emotional connection with their purchases.

"There are really big demands on in-car connectivity," Goller said.

"It is a must, so we have the iDrive and BMW Connected installed as standard in the new X1. It also has higher configuration variants, providing remote services."

The company will take orders for the new BMW X1 from May, months after its 2 Series Active Tourer launched in March on the Chinese market at a slightly lower price range.

Around 56 percent of vehicles sold worldwide in 2020 will be equipped with in-car connectivity, according to an Accenture Strategy report, with the percentage jumping to 77 percent by 2025.

The report also said consumers are not willing to pay extra for in-car connectivity, which would allow them to use smartphones, tablets and other mobile connected devices in their vehicles.

The Audi Multi-Media Interface Connect will give free internet access in its recently launched Audi Q2 compact SUV.

General Motors' OnStar system was among the first connectivity systems brought to the Chinese market. It was free for the first year, but incurred a service fee in the second year. The system by the United States carmaker has thus far failed to catch on with drivers.

But carmakers say bandwidth problems in the nation's wireless networks have created issues with incar connectivity.

Accenture said a single carmaker adapting to connectivity technologies must work with tech companies, communications operators and internet service providers to develop the technology.

Currently, State controlled mobile operators are working on more advanced mobile communication networks capable of transferring more data within a shorter period of time.

"The 5G data transmission speed is 100 times faster than 4G mobile networks and there will be one million access points in one square kilometer," said China Mobile Deputy General Manager Li Yue.

"It will connect the car to the internet in milliseconds, potentially make communications among vehicles a reality."
Xiaomi's CEO Lei Jun accepts interview in Beijing, March 5, 2016. [Photo/IC]

Today's cell phone scammers are so wily that even tech tycoons risk being taken in.

Lei Jun, the billionaire chairman and CEO of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, took to Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo on Tuesday to complain that he was "almost tricked" by a phishing text message.
Michael Jiang, president of Motorola Solutions China. [Photo/VCG]

US telecommunication equipment and solution provider Motorola Solutions Inc plans to expand the application of its walkie-talkie two-way radio into transportation, manufacturing, oil and petrochemicals, forest protection, telecom and other key industries in China.

Michael Jiang, president of Motorola Solutions China, said: "China, as a strategically important market for the company, is full of potential."

"The traditional manufacturing industry in China is now facing upgrading and transformation, which is our opportunity and advantage, as our solutions help users to enhance working efficiency and productivity."

"Along with the manufacturing sector, we have a broad application in other fields such as oil and petrochemicals, transportation, forest protection and hotel management," said Jiang, adding that the outlook is very promising.

US tech giant Motorola Inc divided its business into Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions in 2011. Motorola Solutions focuses on providing enterprise-class communication solutions and services, excluding the consumer electronics field.

Motorola Mobility was acquired by Chinese personal computer maker and smartphone vendor Lenovo Group Ltd from Google Inc for $2.9 billion more than a year ago.

The demand for walkie-talkies, which offer reliable and real-time communications, is increasing in China. The forestry department in Central China's Hunan province deploys Motorola's digital radio system for real-time communications and forest protection.

Rangers depend on the radio system and stay constantly connected to their colleagues working in control rooms, who have visibility over the entire operation and can help keep them safe at all times, especially in times of emergency, said Jiang.

Motorola Solutions has now deployed more than 5,000 radios to major forestry projects across the country including the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, as well as Hebei, Liaoning, Sichuan and Guangdong provinces.

With the rapid popularization of mobile telecom technologies, "I believe there is a trend that professional communication network (for radio communication equipment) and public networks, which exists everywhere, will integrate," said Jiang.

For example, a smartphone user could be connected to radio communication network and terminal through downloading software.

Michael O'Connor, vice-president of radio channel sales of Motorola Solutions in Asia Pacific & Middle East, said: "China becomes much more advanced in their use of wireless communications... and their use of communications is not just voice, but also the data applications that help manage businesses."

O'Connor added the application of walkie-talkies is mature in China, and it could be connected to the internet and apps.

Fu Liang, an independent telecom expert, said: "Motorola has a traditional strength in the two-way radio field, and shifting its focus into enterprise-service from consumer is understandable."

Fu added it still faces some competitors such as Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and ZTE Corp, which are making efforts in radio communication network and terminal as the technical obstacles are not difficult to overcome. "The competition in this field might be fierce in the future."
Hu Shengli, president of JD.com Inc's 3C business department, delivers keynote speech during the company's business strategy launch event held in Beijing on April 26, 2016. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com Inc unveiled its updated business strategies for domestic corporate procurement market on Tuesday, aimed at establishing an innovative platform that bridges customers and products suppliers.

During the launch event, named as JD Qiye Gou, literally means JD's corporate procurement service, has been launched.

"JD is providing a new e-commercialization solution for corporate procurement, so as to help enterprises make improvements," said Hu Shengli, president of JD.com Inc's 3C business department.

"Our expectation is to build the largest integrated solution provider for the corporate procurement market in China, and by comparing with the traditional products suppliers, we are not just focusing on sales volume, we are keen on upgrading the procurement model of our business customers," said Song Chun Zheng, general manager of key account department of JD.com Inc.

Li Jing, general manager of JD's commercial marketing department, told chinadaily.com.cn, "We are planning to establish a platform that will act as a bridge between corporates' business demands and supplies."

He said that JD will make the procurement process more simple and convenient, and by utilizing Big Data and cloud computing technologies, each of the enterprises' segment demands will be as customized as drawing a specific "corporate portrait".

Corporate representatives pose for a group picture, during the company's business strategy launch event held in Beijing on April 26, 2016. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Hundreds of corporate clients, manufacturers' representatives, independent software vendors and journalists participated in the event.

By comparison, the traditional channels contain lots of disadvantages such as inefficiency, lack of supervision, high cost and resources wastes, according to ccidconsulting.com, a consulting firm affiliated to the institute of China electronics and information industry of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

According to the recent statistics released by the firm, China's enterprises' e-commerce market scale is 80 percent of the total e-commerce market. In 2015, 103 e-commerce vendors achieved more than 5 billion yuan ($770 million) investments in the market, up 329 percent and 699 present, respectively.

"From the demand perspective of the market, PCs and office equipment have seen strong demand in the direct selling market for the corporate procurement business," said ccidconsulting.com. "Among them, laptop, tablet, printer and all-in-one devices are the hot sale products."

According to JD.com, currently there are some thousands of multinationals, State-run enterprises and small- and medium- sized companies, including Sinopec, China Post, BMW and Siemens, that have signed procurement collaboration agreements with JD on the latter's platform.
"When you travel from the US to Asia, you end up one day ahead, and if you think of mobile internet in particular, Asia is ahead of the rest of the world, and you feel like you have stepped into the future" said Daniel Alegre, president of Google Inc's Global Partnerships, during the "Thought Leader" session of the ongoing Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) held on Thursday in Beijing.

According to Alegre, ranking at $28 billion, Asia is now the second largest market followed by the US for venture capital investment, five times than it was just in 2015.

Taking Alipay, the mobile payment application that launched by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd as an example, he was impressed at the ease of transactions, such as scanning QR codes on mobile phones to pay bills at the counter of restaurant, which was one of China's technological innovations.

Themed "Mobile Infinity", the event covers topics such as robotics, virtual reality, mobile advertising, transforming mobile into an important tool in the medical sector, smart home appliances and the mobile games sector.

Since 2009, organized by the Great Wall Club, the GMIC hosts mobile executives, entrepreneurs, developers, and investors from around the world and across platforms to build partnerships, learn from industry thought leaders, to better understand mobile technology trends, and to shed light on how mobile is positively changing the world.

After the Beijing event, this year's GMIC will be consecutively held in the cities including Tokyo, Jakarta, Sao Paulo, San Francisco, Bangalore, Taipei and Seoul.
NANNING -- Police in a south China city found 37 wild monkeys during a drug bust, according to local sources on Tuesday.

At about 3 am Sunday, Dongxing City Police in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region received a phone call from a woman, who told them her husband was with his mistress and taking drugs. When they arrived at the scene, the suspect, identified as Jiang, was armed with a knife. Police took him into custody and seized several grams of ice.

While they were searching the house, they were drawn to an unusual smell coming from a utility room. In the room there were 20 A-class protected slow lorises and 17 B-class protected macaques.

A police officer told Xinhua that the monkeys were listless as a result of being held in captivity for a long period of time, and many had scars on their bodies.

They also found dead monkeys in the trash.

Jiang said he knew nothing about the monkeys.

But police discovered several notebooks with sales records of wild animals, which allegedly show that the monkeys were mostly sold to Anhui in east China and Liaoning in the northeast, for several thousand yuan each.

The investigation continues.
BEIJING -- Recent cases of illegal fund-raising through Internet peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms and telecommunications fraud have highlighted the need to facilitate cybersecurity legislation, legal experts said.

Yang Dong, deputy dean of the Law School of Renmin University of China, said huge risks lurk in the Internet sector, demanding institutional reform and crafting of a law.

China's court system handled a total of 1.42 million cases involving P2P lending in 2015, according to a report from the Supreme People's Court (SPC).

In one case, online P2P broker Ezubao was found to have cheated about 900,000 investors out of more than 50 billion yuan (around 7.7 billion U.S. dollars) through fake investment projects.

Illegal activities including cyber attacks and invasion also pose a threat to the infrastructure of key fields such as financing and national defense.

There were also reports of illegal disclosure and obtaining of personal information in China, in addition to online spreading of terrorism and pornography.

Cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, and other new technology and applications have complicated the online security situation, according to experts.

According to Ma Ding, dean of the cybersecurity school of the People's Public Security University of China, the personal information of citizens such as home address could be uncovered through big data analysis of their activities.

In the same fashion, confidential information related to the national economy could be revealed through the analysis of 100 million people, Ma said.

Ma's view was shared by Zhi Zhenfeng, a researcher with the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who said threats to the security of data and privacy are problems that must be solved.

According to Zhi, as Internet use continues to grow in China, home to about 700 million Internet users, a cybersecurity law should be in place to establish principles and direction for its development.

Legislative efforts on a cybersecurity law were stepped up starting in 2015, when a draft cybersecurity law was submitted to the top legislature for the first reading in June.

The 68-article draft law aims to "safeguard online sovereignty and national security." It also suggests mechanisms to guarantee the safety of Internet products and services, operations, network data, and information.

Noting the draft will be improved through input from the government, Internet companies and the public, Zhi said he hopes the legislation will be completed as soon as possible to ensure a secure path for the Internet to grow.
MEXICO CITY -- Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region has maintained double-digit economic growth annually for the past 23 years, becoming one of China's fastest growing areas, said China's Tibetan legislator Qizhala here on Monday.

"Tibet's gross domestic product has grown from 130 million yuan ($19.98 million) in 1951 to 102 billion yuan ($15.68 billion) in 2015," said Qizhala, deputy to China's National People's Congress and secretary of the Communist Party of China Lhasa Municipal Committee.

He made the remarks during a conference named "Tibet Today" organized by the Department of Economics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The conference is part of a series of activities for the visiting delegation of China's Tibetan legislators, headed by Qizhala, to enhance mutual understanding between China and Mexico.

Qizhala added that "after many years of efforts, Tibet is currently seeing unprecedented development" and seeing great progress in its economic growth and society.

Stressing that Tibet has always been part of China, and that the autonomous region is currently a picture of economic growth, harmony and happiness, Qizhala said Tibetans are working alongside the rest of the Chinese people to guarantee that the country will meet the objective of becoming a moderately prosperous society by 2020, as part of the 13th Five-Year Plan.

Qizhala also pointed out that the autonomous region, which benefits from ample political, economic and social rights, has seen all levels of society work together to enhance services in education, housing and health, among others.

Tibet has built a modern educational system, and its healthcare system has seen the average life expectancy rise in the region, he added.

Meanwhile, Tibet's rich natural biodiversity in its 47 natural reserves, covering 34.35 percent of its total area, has helped boost its tourism sector, with more multinational hotel chains moving in.

Qizhala also said numbers of the emblematic Tibetan antelopes were up from around 70,000 in 1995 to over 200,000 today, and the black-necked cranes from 3,000 to 7,000 in the same period.

Tibet's location allows it to engage in many exchanges with South Asia, Qizhala said, adding that China's rise to become the second-largest economy has brought the region more opportunities for economic growth.
XINING -- A university in northwest China's Qinghai Province plans to offer international students Master's degrees in traditional Tibetan medicine.

Tibetan Medical College of Qinghai University said Tuesday that it planned to recruit five foreign postgraduates this autumn. The Master's program will last three years, with students taught in both English and Tibetan.

Established in 1987, the college is one of the two higher educational institutes in China which train traditional Tibetan medicine practitioners. The other is in Tibet.

Etsocham, the college's honorary president, said that the school has had exchange programs with universities in the United States, Russia, the Republic of Korea and Japan since 2007. So far, nearly 100 overseas students have come for short-term training in Tibetan medicine.

Traditional Tibetan medicine was also listed as optional course at University of Virginia medical school last July, Etsocham said.

"The core of development of Tibetan medicine lies in training. Helping it go global will be beneficial to more people," he added.

Tibetan medicine, known as "Sowa Rigpa" in Tibetan, is at least 2,300 years old. It has absorbed the influences of traditional Chinese, Indian and Arab medicine and is mainly practiced in Tibet and the Himalayan region.

Tibetan medicine uses herbs, minerals and sometimes insects and animal parts. It was put on the list of China's national intangible cultural heritage in 2006.
Members of an international volunteer team attend a public event in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. More than 100,000 volunteers have signed up to help with the G20 summit. CHINA DAILY

A drive to recruit volunteers ahead of the G20 Summit being held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province in early September is picking up steam.

Since registration opened in December, more than 100,000 volunteers have signed up to help with the high-level international forum for governments and central bank governors.

Around 26,000 of these volunteers are university professors and their students, who will be whittled down to a short list of 3,000 through a strict selection and training process.

These will be the on-site volunteers, who are required to have a relatively high-level of language ability and work at the summit itself, whereas city volunteers will help out with public security patrols, environment management and culture publicity in Hangzhou.

Wang Lingwei, a graduate student from Zhejiang Gongshang University, said it would be an honor to be selected as an on-site volunteer.

"I have participated in a lot of training activities, which is very helpful for me. For example, I was provided with a detailed introduction to the G20 and its background," said Wang.

"There is also training on protocol knowledge, and how to provide first aid in the event of an emergency."

Wang Yuejun, director of Hangzhou Volunteering Work Guide Center, said there was more than two decades' worth of community service experience in the city, which has more than a million registered volunteers and 13,750 volunteer organizations, with volunteering service stations in 97 percent of communities.

"Hangzhou's volunteers have a high willingness to participate in service work, and they have also accumulated years of experience, which provides a good foundation for the service work during the summit," Wang said.

In addition to the local recruitment drive, an international volunteer team has also been set up in the city featuring more than 20 students and teachers from the United States, Russia, Italy, South Korea, Ukraine, Indonesia and Congo, among other countries.

According to the local authorities, all volunteers will be managed in real-time through an online platform, with their contributions to the summit recorded in the form of points and rankings to add incentives for good service.

More than 5,500 volunteer service activities have already been carried out in Hangzhou in preparation for the summit, with a total of 360,000 volunteer man-hours recorded.

Wang Hongyi contributed to this story.
BEIJING -- Tests have begun on a new high-speed railway (HSR) line between Zhengzhou, capital of central Henan Province, and Xuzhou in eastern Jiangsu Province; signalling that it will be operational soon.

Trains on the 362 kilometer, 9 station line -- which broke ground in December 2012 -- will be able to travel at a maximum 350 km per hour, according to the China Academy of Railway Sciences (CARS).

"The tests have been successful so far, but there will be more before the line is given the green light to go into operation," said Hou Fuguo, CARS passenger rail line project chief, on Wednesday.

"The Zhengzhou-Xuzhou line will be a significant milestone in China's 'four-vertical' and 'four-horizontal' HSR network," said Li Ben, assistant chief engineer of Zhengzhou-Xi'an high-speed passenger rail line.
5.6-magnitude quake hits waters off Taiwan: CENC (Xinhua) Updated: 2016-04-28 08:55

BEIJING/TAIPEI - A 5.6-magnitude earthquake occurred in the waters off Hualien county, Taiwan, at 11:17 p.m. Wednesday (Beijing Time), according to China Earthquake Networks Center (CENC).



The epicenter was located at 24.22 degrees north latitude and 121.71 degrees east longitude. It was measured at a depth of 8 km, according to the center.



Xinhua reporters in Taipei said they felt the tremor and saw buildings shaking.



Just 10 minutes later, another earthquake measuring 4.9 was reported by the CENC at roughly the same site.



Local authorities said four aftershocks had been monitored in the past hour. There have been no casualties reported.
Nestlings stall subway construction in SW China (Xinhua) Updated: 2016-04-28 09:02

CHENGDU - Construction on a subway line in Chengdu city in southwest China was put on hold as workers waited for a nest of vinous-throated parrotbills to mature.



The five young birds flew the nest recently, allowing work to resume on the city's new line seven on Wednesday afternoon.



Children from the Golden Apple Emiile Kindergarten spotted a nest containing the bird's blue eggs on April 9 near their school's back door.



On April 18, just four days after the eggs had hatched, the construction team informed the kindergarten that its back door needed to be relocated to make way for the subway.



Fearing that noisy building work would scare away the nestlings' parents, children and staff of the kindergarten sent a letter and drawings to the construction team, requesting that work be postponed until the birds were strong enough to fly away, according to Mao Weilin from the kindergarten.



China Railway Engineering Corp.'s Chengdu branch agreed.



"I hope the little birds will return one day with their children," one student, nicknamed Abu, told his mother.
A member of the English Service Team of the traffic police brigade in Hangzhou's West Lake area provides assistance to foreign visitors. Photo provided to China Daily

A traffic police officer on the English Service Team wears a special armband while working. Photo provided to China Daily

Residents of Hangzhou in East China's Zhejiang province are honing their English language skills ahead of the G20 Summit being held there later this year.

English learning activities have been organized across the city as part of efforts to better serve the summit, which is scheduled to open in early September.

In March, the team behind local mobile app Xiangfu Community, based in the city's Gongshu district, started a campaign to get residents speaking more English by providing free language learning content and encouraging users to learn a new sentence each day.

Once a week, a lesson with a senior English language teacher is organized through the app, and English-themed discussion activities are held once a month.

Elsewhere, residents are being encouraged to share their learning experiences via a discussion group on the social media WeChat, and traffic police in the city's West Lake area have also been learning English to better communicate with international visitors during the summit.

"Fluently mastering English is one of the best ways for each police officer to better serve the summit and the West Lake area," said Zheng Hangfu, head of the area's police team.

West Lake attracts a large number of foreign tourists each year due to its renowned natural beauty, yet visitors often commit traffic violations. Having traffic police who can speak fluent English helps maintain order and ensure the safety of tourists, according to officials.

Improving conversational English has been a key component of the West Lake police team's training over the past year. They have made a specialized implementation plan, which assigns forms of English language training based on the officer's age and learning stage.

All officers are given a book titled Summit English to facilitate police self-learning and practice, while common phrases are sent through a WeChat group called "Everyday English". English teachers also provide on-site oral English training at regular intervals.

An English Service Team has also been established and is providing English service to visitors. Its membership grew from six officers to 28 in a short time.

Wang Hongyi contributed to this story.

shixiaofeng@chinadaily.com.cn
First action plan for 2030 sustainability to be rolled out

As China prepares to host its first G20 Summit, the importance of this grouping of major world economies is becoming more apparent, according to experts.

The event, slated for September 4-5 in East China's Hangzhou city, comes at a time when increasing deflationary risks loom over the global economy's recovery.

Boosting growth among developing countries is highlighted on the summit's agenda, as has making more progress in areas such as addressing global climate change.

Since December, around 30 preparatory meetings have been held at the ministerial or working-group level, including a gathering of personal representatives of heads of state, known as sherpas, as well as finance, trade and foreign ministers.

More than 30 additional meetings are scheduled later this year to ensure the summit's success, according to the latest calendar of events published on the G20's official website.

On April 8, a presidency statement was released following the Second G20 Sherpa Meeting in Guangzhou, stating that the assembled representatives would work toward promoting the implementation of the Paris Agreement, which was adopted at the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December.

Huang Wei, a researcher on global economic governance at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, noted that "the G20 now represents the best efficiency in the aspect of global economic governance", while other mechanisms - such as the UN and G7 - are faced with higher cost or lack of influence.

"The influence of emerging economies upon global economy and relevant policies will further expand," Huang said.

Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs and China's G20 Sherpa Li Baodong has described the Hangzhou summit as "the first time that the G20 will formulate an action plan on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development".

This ambitious agenda, adopted in September, is designed to serve as the launchpad for action to promote shared prosperity and well-being for the next 15 years.

"The concept of development runs through the whole design of the agenda and its outcomes for the Hangzhou Summit, thus serving as an overarching theme in the preparatory work," Li told the United Nations General Assembly in New York on April 21.

Upon China's initiative, the G20 is examining ways to support industrialization in Africa and what are known as least development countries, Li added.

Zhu Jiejin, an associate professor on global governance studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said if the G20 takes the 2030 Agenda as one of its policy goals, the gathering itself will win more recognition for its role as a "leading international economic cooperation platform".

This will "offer political impetus" for implementing the agenda, make the work of international organs such as the UN easier and encourage more countries to join in, Zhu said.

Gao Hucheng, minister of commerce, has said China will work alongside various parties to push for establishing the G20 trade and investment cooperation mechanism to "regularize" the G20 trade ministers' meeting.

"It is hoped that the G20 global trade growth strategy will be formulated and the G20 cooperation framework on trade areas is expected to be built, in order to address the trade and financing issues of developing countries and small and medium enterprises," Gao said at a meeting on the sidelines of Boao Asia Forum on March 24.

Huang Wei noted that although the G20 has built mechanisms for regularized meetings of finance, labor ministers and governors of central banks, many other ministerial-level meetings are not regularized yet.

"This means there is a lack of long-term, lasting discussions on a range of issues, as well as the absence of a fundamental preparation for nurturing consensus and outcomes," Huang said.

zhangyunbi@chinadaily.com.cn
Editor's note: The G20 Leaders' Summit will be held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, in September. China Daily is proud to announce that it has been designated the official newspaper for the event, the first time the summit will be held in China.

In the run-up, China Daily will publish a special section each month highlighting the issues to be tackled at the summit as well as give our readers a glimpse of the host city.

The summit, from Sept 4-5, will be extensively covered by China Daily with special packages looking at all aspects of the event as world leaders address the major challenges facing the global economy.

Click for the PDF version
A train headed for brightness (Xinhua) Updated: 2016-04-28 09:08

BEIJING - Ophthalmic surgeon Zhou Shangkun will never forget the deaf, elderly patient in Northwest China's Gansu province whose life was changed as she boarded the train.



"She became blind after suffering from cataracts," said the doctor, who works at an eye hospital affiliated with the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. "I operated on her on the Lifeline Express so she can see again."



The Lifeline Express is a train that doubles as a mobile ophthalmic hospital and travels to remote areas across China to provide medical care to the needy, mostly those with cataracts.



Cataracts have the highest morbidity of all ophthalmic diseases that cause blindness in China. It is not just elderly people who are prone to the disease. Young people may also suffer due to damage from ultraviolet rays or genetic reasons.



According to Lifeline Express, quoting the health authorities, Chinese mainland has close to 5 million people living with cataracts, most in rural areas.



The condition is curable. However, statistics from 2012 showed that fewer than 100 ophthalmic hospitals, or 30 percent of China's total, were in rural areas.



Symbol of hope



Lifeline Express makes it possible for villagers to receive free operations. The train is painted with rainbows, symbolizing hope.



Its four carriages house a canteen, a dormitory, an operating room and a sickroom with 50 beds, allowing patients to stay on the train before and after their operations.



A Xinhua reporter who visited the train saw it was equipped with an electricity generator, operating table and advanced medical devices.



"(The operating room) is not much different from one in a hospital, except that it is much narrower," said Zhou, who remembered operating on the deaf elderly woman last year.



There were two nurses to bring her in, one in front of her and the other behind, as she couldn't see anything.



"We used local anaesthesia," he said. But he was not sure if the deaf woman understood his instructions as she couldn't talk, so they had a backup plan to use general anesthesia just in case.



The operation was successful. "She was so excited to see the world again. She gave us a thumbs up. I took a photo, which I always keep," said the doctor.



The first Lifeline Express train was donated by people from Hong Kong in 1997 to celebrate the region's return to China.



Now there are four such trains operated by the Lifeline Express charity. As of the end of 2015, mobile hospitals had served more than 170,000 patients with cataracts in 151 locations across China. Each train makes three stops a year. Funded by donations from Hong Kong and Chinese mainland, the mobile hospitals are able to cure more than 12,000 cataract patients a year.



A train typically carries seven crew members, including two doctors. Each trip takes three or four months.



Local media begin promoting the service half a year before the trains arrive, while local hospitals screen the villagers. Those who need operations are later taken to the trains.

Zhou, the surgeon, has travelled with the train twice in 2014 and 2015. At each stop they performed more than 1,500 operations. "The most we have done is 48 a day," he said.



Dong Shuzhen, 64, once managed the train's charity operations as the first "train captain" and has been with the mobile hospital for 15 years. Now retired, she still works on the train as a volunteer.



Dong remembers seeing numerous cataract patients who badly needed treatment. "In Henan, central China, we saw a family with four generations of people all living with the disease. The youngest, a child, was already incurable. In some villages, young women have difficulty finding a husband because of the disease," she said.



Lifeline Express also works to help people in more permanent locations. In addition to the trains, it has set up 15 ophthalmic training centers and 47 clinics to date.

One train is currently in Beijing for mechanical repairs and opened to the public for free eye exams last weekend.



Zhou Shangkun taught two medical students while he was in Gansu. "They are now able to perform operations independently," he said. They are still in touch.



"The train leaves, but hope stays," he said. "Local people continue to benefit even when we are gone, so more and more people can return to brightness."
Contestants parachute jump in a qualifying session on April 27. The 2016 World Low-Altitude Parachute Jump contest is taking place on a cantilever bridge in the Longyang scenic spot of Yunyang county, Chongqing, from April 27 to 29. [Photo/IC]
Chinese companies are deploying more manpower and resources for post-earthquake relief efforts in Ecuador to help the country recover, the Ministry of Commerce said on Wednesday.

China National Petroleum Corp and Huawei Technologies have not only purchased a large amount of lifesaving goods, but also encouraged their employees to donate personal belongings to people who have suffered heavy casualties and financial losses.

Wang Haijing, vice-president of the Red Cross Society of China, said three Chinese rescue teams with 330 kilograms of goods have arrived in Ecuador since Sunday. They recruited 15 translators, medical and construction professionals, for the mission.

A 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit coastal Ecuador on April 16, killing more than 500 people and injuring thousands.

Powerchina International Group, the international arm of Power Construction Corp of China, said power generating equipment in Ecuador's Coca Codo Sinclair project - China's largest hydropower project in South America - were working normally after the earthquake.

"This equipment has been tested many times under many different circumstances including extreme hot and cool weather, as well as under earthquake conditions," the company said.

Power Construction Corp of China has increased its generating capacity every day following the earthquake, and has sent medical equipment and supplies to Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city.

China also sent its first round of humanitarian aid including medicine, water-purification products, tents and lifesaving equipment to Ecuador on Tuesday night, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

(China Daily 04/28/2016 page4)
The Tibet autonomous region has given a huge boost to its transportation links through new railways, airports and highways, Tibetan legislator Qizhala said on Tuesday.

Qizhala, head of a Chinese National People's Congress Tibetan delegation visiting Mexico, told members of the Mexican Senate's Asia-Pacific Foreign Relations Committee that the region overcame technical challenges posed by its altitude in achieving the improvements.

Tibet's development requires the building of infrastructure, but the region seeks to strike a balance between construction and environmental protection, said Qizhala, a delegate to the NPC and chief of the Communist Party of China Lhasa Municipal Committee.

During the meeting, Mexican senator Manuel Cavazos Lerma said: "Despite the distance, we feel a great affinity with China, and the relationship between us has grown stronger over time."

Cavazos Lerma hailed the policies of China's central government, which he said have reduced poverty and improved growth, as well as advanced political, economic, social and cultural development in the region.
The car-hailing mobile app of Uber Technologies Inc. Provided to China Daily

In the acclaimed BBC series Sherlock, a cabbie turns out to be the serial killer in the first episode, the person you least suspect because he's "just the back of a head" to his passenger.

However, when I take a ride on Uber or Didi on my trips around Beijing, I often try to make an effort to have a conversation with the driver - to get some sense of the people that literally drive the two car-hailing juggernauts.

Of course, I try to push the "possible serial killer" thought to the back of my mind, and usually that's pretty easy, since I've rarely had any bad experiences with my drivers.

A screen grab shows the interface of Uber.

The typical Uber or Didi driver in Beijing is a middle-aged Chinese man with short-cropped, un-trendy hair, and usually grew up somewhere other than Beijing. Most of them have been here an average of ten years.

They usually drive a Volkswagen or a Buick or a Toyota, although on one glorious ride I was picked up in a Tesla that moved impossibly silently down Beijing's ring roads, while I questioned its shrunken-faced driver about how he recharged his vehicle (there are stations where you can do so).

What interested me about these men, who seem to be pretty well off - they have at least enough to afford a car - was a strain of nostalgia for their hometowns that ran through their conversations, despite the fact that they were clearly financially better off today.

This was theme that kept cropping up, no matter where they were from - Henan, Shanxi, Shandong. I traced the familiar, expected pattern of rural-urban migration from a farming village to the big smoke, the metropolis, the capital, and the attendant losses that came along with it.

"When I was young, Spring Festival was so exciting. It was the best time of the whole year," said Liang, from Hebei. "It was the only time in the year we got new clothes. Now we can buy new clothes any time, we can eat whatever we like anytime. The new year has become almost meaningless," he said.

Curiously, inherent in his statement was an acknowledgement that life had gotten better - he could buy those new clothes, those special new year foods year round, now, whereas they were rare in his childhood. Yet, it was the very poverty he had escaped that made those things special. They gave him a feeling that mass consumerism cannot now provide.

A screen grab shows driver Zhu, his plate number, his car type, orders he has taken via Didi, and the credit he gets from passengers.

"There is nothing like the moon when it was full in my village," said Zhu, who grew up in a farming family in Henan. "It was so bright in the sky that when you looked down the road you could see all the grass by the wayside. I just don't get that feeling anymore."

We were trying to catch a glimpse of the moon in the sky on that smoggy Beijing night, a difficult thing since it was constantly obscured by the tall buildings surrounding us, and dimmed by the myriad lights of the city. "When we ate soybeans by the light of the moon after cooking them over the fire, they were the sweetest things in the world," Zhu continued. "I don't know how to find such soybeans anymore."

Here he was, in the capital of a rising China, behind the wheel of a Roewe and capable of earning 20,000 yuan a month on a good month driving it. He has his own house and car, a wife and kid, but somehow something has been lost in the move from hometown to capital, from poverty to the middle class.

Being from Singapore, which was growing at the rate China does now in the 80s, I was not too surprised by this strain of nostalgia, because it is one I have seen in my own culture in the face of development.

Whether it was poets bemoaning the clean up of the Singapore River (which had a legendary stink from the pollution) as "losing its soul", or painters resolutely depicting the attap huts of villages which have all but vanished from the island, our art reflected a need to memorialize and honor the things being swallowed up by modernity.

We are simply seeing the same phenomenon in China, which changes at such a break-neck pace that sometimes, it exceeds the human capacity to fully comprehend. Just because we are intellectually able to adapt to modernity and technology does not necessarily mean we are emotionally able to process it.

But perhaps the drivers' sentiments are also part of the age-old human predilection for viewing the past through rose-colored lenses - a normal part of an aging person's nostalgia for their youth, no matter what the circumstances.

"My life now is just about earning more money," says Zhu with a sigh. "We were so carefree then - the moon of our youth is the best moon."
A Guizhou snub-nosed monkey cuddles her newly-born cub at the Beijing Zoo in Beijing, April 27, 2016. The cub is the second child of a pair of Guizhou snub-nosed monkeys at the Zoo. These simians are a very rare and endangered species, with only 750 around the world. In comparison, pandas, another endangered species, number more than 1,000. [Photo/IC]
BEIJING - China is working on a new plan for international cooperation in the South China Sea and its neighboring waters to cover the next five years, sources with the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said on Thursday.



It will focus on partnerships between China and the ASEAN and in East Asia, said Chen Yue, deputy director of the SOA's international cooperation department. Chen did not go into specifics or say when the plan will be unveiled.



The two projects are expected to be jointly established by the SOA and the government of southeast China's coastal Fujian Province as well as the SOA and the government of east China's Shandong Province, respectively.



Under the previous five-year plan covering 2011 to 2015, China signed 19 intergovernmental and 17 inter-institutional documents on marine cooperation with 15 countries around the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, according to SOA figures.



China also led, initiated and carried out more than 30 cooperation projects, and offered apparatus for four ocean observation stations for Southeast Asian countries including Indonesia and Malaysia.



During the period, the Chinese government offered scholarships to 71 students from 27 developing countries and regions to study for master's or doctoral degrees in related majors in China, according to Chen.
Premier Li Keqiang visits a well-known tourist spot, Kuanzhai Alley, in Chengdu, the capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province, on the evening of April 25. [Photo/gov.cn]

Premier Li Keqiang made a surprise visit at night to a tourist attraction and commercial street in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province, bought some souvenirs and even recommended Chinese Tsingtdao Beer to some foreign tourists he met.

Soon after 8:20 pm on April 25, Premier Li arrived at the Kuanzhai Alley in Chengdu. He paid visits to several stores and talked with store owners about the business climate and tax burdens.

Shortly after he entered the alley he was attracted to a book store named "Jianshan", where he bought two sets of postcards and a book.

Li was soon surrounded by crowds of tourists who rushed to shake hands and take photos with him. He later visited several stores and bought a pair of panda dolls.

At a store, he talked in English with a young boss from Bangladesh and bought a vase with a camel pattern.

At a beer shop, Li had a good talk in English with several university professors from Australia. "Have you ever had Chinese beer?" Li asked with a smile, adding that China's domestic brand of Tsingtao is very good.
Representatives from Baidu amd the IPCC sign a memorandum of understanding on Copyright Protection Collaboration. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

China's biggest internet search engine, Baidu Inc, recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on Copyright Protection Collaboration with the International Publishers Copyright Coalition (IPCC).

According to a press release of the British Embassy in China, The signing was witnessed by Dr Ros Lynch, Director of Copyright and Enforcement at the UK Intellectual Property Office, who is visiting for UK-China Copyright week.

He says that the co-operation indicates a positive direction for IP enforcement in China, with digital industry getting behind efforts to reduce online infringements.

"The benefits of an efficient and fair global IP system are huge, for both the UK and China. This MOU today represents a great step towards this, creating a collaboration which will lead to faster and streamlined approaches to tackling a global problem," Lynch said.

The creative industries are vitally important for both the UK and China. Creative industries - including publishing, music, film, TV and gaming software - together account for over 5 percent of GDP in both the UK and China, respectively.

Over a third of British publishing industry total revenues (4.3 billion in 2014) come from digital sales and around 40 percent from exports. This MOU sets out a program of collaboration to tackle the shared issue of online IP infringement.

Emma House, Director of Publisher Relations at the UK Publishers Association, said, "This (MOU) demonstrates Baidu's commitment to working with global rights holders to tackle copyright infringement for mutual benefit."
Beijing-Tokyo Forum to be held in September (Xinhua) Updated: 2016-04-28 21:08

BEIJING -- The 12th Beijing-Tokyo Forum is scheduled for September 25 to 28 in Tokyo and will focus on peace in East Asia and the world economy.



The forum will also highlight discussion of topics including strategic mutual trust, mutual understanding, and economic cooperation between China and Japan, according to a press briefing on Thursday.



The forum has been held annually since 2005 to bring together elites from both countries to exchange views and enhance trust. This year it will be jointly organized by China International Publishing Group and Genron NPO, a Japanese think tank.



Sub-forums on bilateral economic, diplomatic and media exchanges and security will be held.
President Xi Jinping greets delegates at the opening ceremony of the fifth meeting of foreign ministers of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on Thursday. WU ZHIYI / CHINA DAILY

Countries outside region 'welcome to make a positive contribution to peace and stability'

President Xi Jinping, speaking on the South China Sea issue on Thursday, said China upholds the peaceful resolution of disputes through friendly consultation and negotiation with the countries directly involved.

The president said that for some time developments in the South China Sea have attracted extensive attention.

China "unswervingly safeguards its own sovereignty and relevant rights and interests in the South China Sea," the president said.

Xi made the remarks in Beijing as he addressed the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia.

Observers said Xi's remarks come at a time when the US is worsening the situation in the South China Sea by boosting its military presence there, and after the US and the Philippines embarked on joint military drills recently.

Outlining his ideas to increase security in Asia as a whole, Xi said, "We welcome countries outside the region making a positive contribution to peace and stability here and working with Asian countries to promote the security, stability, development and prosperity of Asia."

Su Xiaohui, a researcher of international strategies at the China Institute of International Studies, said Xi's remarks on the South China Sea illustrate two of China's key strategic goals  championing State sovereignty and safeguarding regional stability.

Xi is also sending a message that "China does not accept any attempt to ruin the big picture", and such attempts include the international arbitration sought unilaterally by the Philippines against China, Su said.

The "countries outside the region" mentioned by Xi include the US, which is partly responsible for tension in the South China Sea, Su added.

Zhang Junshe, a senior researcher at the PLA Naval Military Studies Research Institute, said that the US has recently "grouped" with countries such as the Philippines to "muddy the waters" by staging joint military drills in the South China Sea.

"This is a root cause that prompts militarization of the South China Sea region and rising tension there," Zhang said.

In Singapore on Thursday, China and countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations agreed to "properly control and manage differences", according to a Foreign Ministry release.

The consensus was made as Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Liu Zhenmin and Singapore's Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs Chee Wee Kiong co-chaired the 22nd China-ASEAN Senior Officials' Consultation.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of dialogue relations between China and ASEAN.

All parties agreed that China and ASEAN countries should use the anniversary as an opportunity to "strengthen strategic communication, deepen mutually beneficial cooperation, and properly control and manage differences", the release said.

Contact the writer at zhangyunbi@chinadaily.com.cn
A child attends an Earth Hour activity in Shanghai in March calling for environmental protection. The event was started in 2007 by the WorldWide Fund for Nature, an environmental NGO. [Photo/CHINA DAILY]

China adopted its first-ever law on overseas NGOs on Thursday to facilitate their legal operations on the mainland but to combat any activity that might harm national security.

The 54-point law, passed at the bimonthly session of the top legislature, clarifies the registration process, operational rules and liabilities of overseas NGOs, as well as measures for their operations in China.

The law, which takes effect on Jan 1, requires all overseas NGOs operating in China to be registered and regulated by central or provincial-level police authorities, a stipulation that has caused concern among some NGOs over whether their operations and activities will face restrictions.

"Such worries are totally unnecessary if they follow Chinese laws," said Zhang Yong, deputy director of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress. He said overseas NGOs have made a great contribution to China's development.

There is no specific figure on how many overseas NGOs are in China. Chinese media have estimated there are more than 6,000, and most are engaged in environmental protection, education and poverty relief efforts.

The adopted law includes many changes to the previous draft version. For example, the earlier draft required exchanges between Chinese and foreign colleges, hospitals, and science and engineering research institutes, but the adopted version exempts this.

The law also removes the restriction limiting each NGO to a single office on the mainland, but the number and locations must be approved by regulatory authorities.

Guo Linmao, a member of the commission, said the rights of NGOs will be fully protected, but those that break China's laws will be punished accordingly. "A very limited number of overseas NGOs have conducted activities in China that harm our national security or interests," he said.

Behavior that damages China's territorial integrity, regime and people's interests is defined as harming state interests, he said.

The new law gives police the authority to talk with representatives of overseas NGOs and ask them not to conduct such activities, or even blacklist or deport them. If they are found to have broken China's Criminal Law, they are also subject to criminal punishment.
Asylum-seekers camp in Papua New Guinea ruled unconstitutional by court, ordered shut

Australia's hard line immigration policy was thrown into turmoil on Wednesday after Papua New Guinea ordered a processing camp to close, leaving the fate of hundreds of asylum-seekers hanging in the balance.

The move to shutter the Australian-funded Manus island facility follows a Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday that detaining people there was unconstitutional and illegal.
Chinese companies are deploying more manpower and resources for post-earthquake relief efforts in Ecuador to help the country recover, the Ministry of Commerce said on Wednesday.

China National Petroleum Corp and Huawei Technologies have not only purchased a large amount of lifesaving goods, but also encouraged their employees to donate personal belongings to people who have suffered heavy casualties and financial losses.

Wang Haijing, vice-president of the Red Cross Society of China, said three Chinese rescue teams with 330 kilograms of goods have arrived in Ecuador since Sunday. They recruited 15 translators, medical and construction professionals, for the mission.
The 2016 China Online Copyrights Protection Conference in Beijing, April 26, 2016.[Photo/Chinanews.com]

The 2016 China Online Copyrights Protection Conference was held in Beijing on April 26.

"Safeguarding online literature copyrights is still our important mission in 2016," said Ci Ke, director of the Administration Department of China's National Copyright Administration (NCAC).

Despite being a newcomer to intellectual property protection (IPR), China has geared up to strengthen the protection of online music and literature copyrights, step by step.

On June 8, 2015, NCAC issued the Notice for Online Music Providers on the Shutdown of Unauthorized Music Distribution Service to tackle pirated online music.

According to NCAC Deputy Director Yan Xiaohong, China will adopt more effective measures to protect the music industry. And the era of free downloading and sharing music on the Internet will be over.

Copyright infringement of online literature

As to online literature, its copyright protection is structured in the same way.

In light of a report about China's 2015 online literature copyright protection, copyright infringement cost at least 10 billion yuan in losses.

An officer from iResearch, Lu Weina, noted that online forums and post bars are the two places where most copyright piracy appears.

Online writer Angry Banana has been in a fight for the copyright of his novel, Zhui Xu, at Baidu Post Bars since 2011. In a recent case concerning the infringement of a new chapter of the novel in a post bar called "Zhui Xu dt", Baidu's official Weibo issued a notice and noted that Baidu would clear all pirated content from the novel in the post bar within 12 hours on April 25.

The popular comic strip, The Friendship Boat Capsizes Easily, is a recent victim of the copyright pirates. Its creator, Nandongni, uses two little penguins sitting on the two sides of a boat to articulate about the pressures and social faux pas in daily life. With its popularity on the Internet, many versions of these two penguins soon appeared and were forwarded on WeChat Moments and Weibo.

Nandongni posted Breakdown, a Notice on Sina Weibo on April 19, listing many versions of his comic made by others, expressing his thanks to those who loved his comic and emphasizing the strip's copyright.

"I would be happy if someone used my comic and also would like to pay for that," Nandongni said.

How to protect copyrights

"It's unfair to ignore copyrights, because online writers have paid so much energy and time on their creations," said Jiang Bo, general manager of Tencent's Law Department.

He said the awareness of copyright protection should be strengthened on the social level, to let more people know the importance of intellectual property protection.

Meanwhile, the government, writers, enterprises and media should pay more attention to safeguarding copyrights.

Secretary-General of the China Written Works Copyright Society Zhang Hongbo noted many law cases concerning book copyright disputes emerging in recent years.

"The priority is to improve the related laws and rules to meet the need of intellectual property protection. And the copyright owner should also have the awareness to protect their rights," Zhang said.
Superhero movie Captain America: Civil War will be screened in China on May 6.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Marvel's superhero allianceone of the most powerful warrior communities in the comic worldis in tatters.

While this may spread gloom across the fictional land guarded by Iron Man, Captain America and their superhero friends, it is exciting news for fans: It has sparked the biggest fight in Marvel history, which spans nearly eight decades.

The 13th film in Marvel's cinematic universe, Captain America: Civil Warthe third installment of the franchisewill hit Chinese mainland and North American theaters simultaneously on May 6.

On a recent tour to promote the movie in Beijing, Joe Russo, one of the sibling directors, tells China Daily the tale is now a "family conflict".

Picking up from the 2015 Marvel smash hit Avengers: Age of Ultron, or Avengers 2, the new movie expands on the divide in Avengers 2 between supporters of Iron Man and Captain America.

As concerns grow that the superheroes' unlimited powers may threaten humanity, the authorities want to regulate and direct their actions, which puts the superheroes in two camps.

The captain, played by Chris Evans, insists on maintaining free movement without government intervention, and he is backed by Falcon, Scarlet Witch, Winter Soldier, Hawkeye and the latest entrant, Ant Man.

But, surprisingly, Iron Man, reprised by Robert Downey Jr, supports the government's oversight and accountability plan.

Those who pick his side include Black Widow, The Vision, War Machine, the new Spider Man and Black Panther, appearing on the big screen for the first time.

"This movie is different from other Marvel films. It's bigger than all the previous ones, with heavy action sequences and a cast of big names," says Russo, who alongside his brother, Anthony Russo, won an Emmy Award for the comedy TV series, Arrested Development, in 2004.

"We're open to encouraging people to interpret the tale in any way that they want ... whether it's a love story or a brotherhood tale. They (the superheroes) have strong emotional bonds. It's a family drama," says Joe Russo.
A still from the TV drama "The Empress of China". The drama has been heavily edited due to the cleavage-bearing costumes worn by the actresses. [Photo/China.org.cn]

Chinese authorities issued new regulations to ban a number of TV networks' "inappropriate hype," reported Beijing Daily.

According to the rules to further regulate television broadcast issued by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), the media promotion was strictly regulated. The circular asked Chinese TV networks, video websites, and TV production entities not to hype the so-called "full versions", "uncut versions" or "deleted scenes".

Yu Fei, the deputy secretary general of the China Radio and Television Association TV-series Screenwriters Committee, explained that after SAPPRFT's review, the final approved version of a TV series is the final cut. "No matter what platforms the TV series will be broadcast, the version should be the same, there is no such thing as an uncut version. Anything else is just hype."

The circular also asked again that there should be no commercials and shows cut in the broadcast of a TV series. The administration asked TV networks to do so as early as in 2011, but the industry still hoped that extra commercials would be back for TV episodes this year, which SAPPRFT does not support.

There should also be no added commercials at the time when an episode ends and the credits start to roll. Yu said this rule is important, adding, "Many TV networks add extra commercials at free will, and this has become bad for the industry which doesn't respect the cast and crew, now it's time to give them back their dignity."

Chen Liqiang, a professor with the School of Journalism and Communication at Tianjin Normal University, said to Beijing Business Today that the added commercials are normal for satellite television networks. The rules which ban the added commercials have guaranteed the audiences' interest. However, for TV networks which see the commercials as a major part of their profits, this is a challenge for them. Chen believes there will be new loopholes after the rules are issued, such as planted commercials in TV series.

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For the sake of history
A Buddhist figurine (1149). [Photo provided to China Daily]

A Tibetan art exhibition in Beijing's 798 art district is displaying thangka paintings, Buddhist figurines and ritual objects from the Zagya Monastery, in Sichuan's Tibetan region of Ganzi. The exhibition called Holy Objects of the Enlightened Ones displays 33 artifacts from the collection of Sarahaba Rinpoche, the living Buddha at the monastery.

Zagya Monastery, which is located on a plateau at an altitude of 4,500 meters, was built around 500 years ago.

The exhibition, which is on at the Baibamedo Art Center, runs through May 23.

A thangka painting (1776). [Photo provided to China Daily]

A Buddhism ritual object containing a Buddha's Sarire (1102). [Photo provided to China Daily]

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Monk artist brings spirit, flowers to Macao
SAR government should consider taking over ownership of railways Updated: 2016-04-28 07:09 By Raymond So(HK Edition)

The Mass Transit Railway Corporation (MTRC) accepted the government's request for an early review of the Fare Adjustment Mechanism (FAM) last week. This is unsurprising, given that the government is the biggest shareholder of the MTRC. People naturally expected the MTRC to respond positively to the government's request, even though it is one year ahead of schedule. If the MTRC had not agreed to the government's request, there could have been a major crisis of corporate governance for the MTRC. However, the MTRC agreeing to have an early review of the FAM does not mean it is willing to give huge fare concessions. This is a very important point we need to remember.

The FAM is a legally binding agreement between the MTRC and the government. It requires mutual consent for any changes to be made. This is an elementary principle of contract. Many people think that the government, being the largest shareholder of the MTRC, can simply "order" the MTRC to accept changes to the FAM. It is therefore unsurprising to hear criticism that the government does not exercise its authority over the MTRC in regard to fare adjustments. However, in the listing document of the MTRC, it is clearly stated that the government will not interfere with the MTRC's fare policy.

The MTRC is a listed company, which has a responsibility to safeguard the best interests of its shareholders. When the government is reluctant to exercise its rights as a shareholder, the best interests of the MTRC's shareholders refers to the minority shareholders. Whenever there is any action that may affect the interests of the minority shareholders, consent from minority shareholders must be sought. The truth is that many of the minority shares are in the hands of fund managers. They naturally demand the maximum benefits for their shareholders and the MTRC is not able to make too many concessions on its fare policy.

Another important point to note is that even if there is a new round of negotiations over the FAM, the outcome will not necessarily be a significant reduction in fares. Many people feel that the MTRC is greedy since it has raised its fares year after year. However, given the constraints it faces, the annual increase in fares is inevitable. This is also the problem with the MTRC being a listed company.

Therefore, it is not surprising to see that the MTRC puts a lot of effort into managing people's expectations over the review of the FAM. The MTRC has frequently reminded the public that the new FAM is likely to have some minor adjustments and that a major revamp of the FAM is not likely. Such a management strategy aims to ease public expectations, because it understands the fundamental difficulties. The notion of the MTRC being a greedy company has become deeply rooted in people's minds. So even though the MTRC has already taken into consideration society's views on its fare adjustments, it can never win on this issue.

To end this long-standing controversy, I propose an idea. My initial thought is that the MTRC may consider spinning off and privatizing its railway operations system, and then selling it to the government - its largest shareholder. When the government fully owns the railway system, it will have full control over fare adjustments. The government can hire the MTRC as the manager of the railway system and the MTRC will continue to operate it.

Under this arrangement, the MTRC will receive an annual management fee from the government. Such an arrangement is similar to that for the Cross Harbour Tunnel, under which the government, as the owner of the tunnel, hires an outside company to operate and manage it. Of course, arrangements for the Cross Harbour Tunnel are somewhat different from those of the MTRC. This is because the former is based on the "build-operate-transfer" model to allow the government to obtain ownership. But privatization of the railway system will involve more complex technical considerations. It cannot be done in an easy and quick manner. Hopefully my idea will provide food for thought on the MTR fare issue.

Of course, this idea is still very rough and many problems are expected. For example, how to make an appropriate valuation of the entire railway system is already a major challenge. Will the minority shareholders agree to this proposal? Will the MTRC be the only rail operator in Hong Kong in future? Will there be other competition for railways? In short, this idea could be much more complex than it seems. However, this initial thought just provides another suggestion which is outside the box. It is intended to solicit further discussion on the FAM.

(HK Edition 04/28/2016 page10)
Students give their teachers handmade certificates of merits to express their gratitude on Thursday, Teachers' Day, at a primary school in Handan, Hebei province. HAO QUNYING /CHINA DAILY

A group of middle-school students in Bozhou, East China's Anhui province, refused to hand in their examination papers to an invigilator and even attacked him. The school authorities' response has been to ask the two parties to apologize to each other. China Youth Daily commented on Wednesday:

The Bozhou incident was not an isolated case. Recent years have seen quite a few incidents of students creating brawls in exam halls and invigilators trying to defend themselves. That's why it is puzzling that the Bozhou school authorities asked the teacher to apologize to the students.

The authorities have ignored the difference between right and wrong and hurt the teacher's professional dignity.

The "solution" has also exposed the authorities' ignorance of the basic rules of education. The teacher-student relationship has been equated with that between consumers and service providers, which is worse than violating the interests of teachers.

Based on the understanding of the concept of equal rights, it has become a general consensus to build some kind of teacher-student relationship. However, equality of persons in education does not mean teachers and students have equal powers and rights. Teachers and students cannot be equals when it comes to teaching and examinations, especially in schools where minors are students.

Although teachers and students are equal as human beings, students are under the guardianship of the teachers in schools.

As guarding authorities, teachers have the right to discipline students. This power is not only justified, but also necessary. Because minors are intellectually and physically immature, they often fail to properly recognize their own interests. Indulging wayward students will actually have a negative impact on their own growth.
During his visit to the National School of Development at Peking University on April 15, Premier Li Keqiang praised the "creative work" of the New Economy Index, which analyzes the new economy through big data from nine major industries and more than 100 categories.

He pointed out that it would be difficult to maintain China's medium-high economic growth with the traditional drivers, and we should actively cultivate new momentum and promote the development of China's new economy.

Development of the new economy will be conducive to employment and create conditions for the upgrading of traditional momentum, he said.

The New Economy Index was jointly released by local think tank Caixin and BBD, a big data enterprise, in March. The index evaluates the vitality of China's new economy during the process of economic transition based on big data from major industries.

The index gives a higher proportion to the new economy in China's overall economy, showing the more significant role it will play in stabilizing China's economic growth. Information technology and information service industries account for the largest proportion in the new index.

During Premier Li's visit to the Maker Space in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan province, he said that related departments should conduct research on the New Economy Index and the index for mass entrepreneurship and innovation, and make the two indexes a basis for policymaking.
An aerial view shows a landslide triggered by an earthquake in Kumamoto prefecture, southern Japan, on April 16, 2016. [Photo/IC]

On Saturday I came across a Beijinger, Yu Shitong, in Mashiki, one of the districts hit hard by the April 16 earthquake in Kumamoto prefecture in southwest Japan. He was helping local evacuees as a volunteer. Some 90,000 people in Kumamoto prefecture are still living in evacuation centers.

This is the 40-something Yu's first trip to Japan; he speaks not a single word of Japanese. After watching the earthquake jolt Kumamoto on TV, he packed his bags and came to what should be a strange place for him to lend a helping hand. What made him do that? He said his experience as a volunteer in Wenchuan, Southwest China's Sichuan province, which was devastated by a powerful quake in 2008, inspired him to lend a helping hand in Mashiki.

Yu rode a bicycle to Mashiki to help with the rescue and relief work during the day and returned to sleep in one of the evacuation centers in Kumamoto city at night. "This is a rewarding experience. It enables me to know how Japan organizes volunteers. It is amazing that they let foreigners like me in as soon as we came," Yu said.

China-funded companies and organizations based in Japan, too, have opened their wallets and hearts to help the quake survivors by raising 18 million yen ($161,000). The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region sent Kumamoto prefecture, with which it has a "sister" partnership, 34 million yen as a show of solidarity.

Kumamoto Governor Ikuo Kabashima told Chinese Ambassador to Japan Cheng Yonghua who visited the quake-hit region at the weekend that it was heartening to see Chinese donating money to help Japanese quake survivors. In return, Cheng, the first foreign diplomat in Japan to visit Kumamoto, thanked the prefecture authorities and residents for evacuating Chinese citizens from the quake zone to safe places. At the request of China's consulate-general in Fukuoka, Kumamoto government officials and Japan's Self-Defense Force personnel rescued 20 Chinese tourists from an isolated hot spring inn at the foothills of Mount Aso.

The Chinese diplomat said the willingness of Chinese and Japanese citizens to help each other reminded him of the mutual support when deadly quakes hit Wenchuan in China in 2008 and Japan's northeast in 2011. The two countries sent rescue teams and supplies to each other at that time.

But the readiness of the two countries and their peoples to help each other has gone largely unreported on both sides. In contrast, polls on the two peoples' unfavorable views of one another are widely covered.

An increasing number of Chinese have been visiting Japan in recent years, and returning home with a clearer picture of their neighbor. Japanese people who are not willing to visit China seem prejudiced by the preconceived notions about China that the Japanese media promote, even though they have been coming across more people from China.

Speaking to business leaders in Tokyo on Monday, Japan's Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida called the record percent of Japanese who don't feel close to China a serious problem. He said Japan-China relations will be like a castle of sand if such mutual distrust continues.

Bilateral relations can get better only if people-to-people exchanges are normal. Disasters bring out the best and the worst in people. In the quake-hit Kumamoto, I have seen the best in the Chinese, as Wenchuan saw the best in the Japanese.

The author is China Daily Tokyo bureau chief. caihong@chinadaily.com.cn
A new electric car is on show in Beijing. The future looks bright for electric cars in China amid rapidly fluctuating gasoline prices and huge investments by the government to promote use of clean energy.[Provided to China Daily]

A record 175 countries signed the Paris Agreement on climate change at the UN headquarters on Earth Day on April 22. In his opening speech at the signing ceremony, which represents a milestone in humankind's efforts to fight global warming, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: "The era of consumption without consequences is over."

The grand prophecy, however, will not come true unless all countries take immediate action to tread the green path to economic growth.

This is why it was inspiring to see the installation of several recharging stations for electric cars in the parking lot of my residential community at the weekend. This shows local authorities in Beijing are doing their bit to help the city embrace electric cars.

Electric car owners in the community had a tough time recharging their vehicles with makeshift equipment. Stories about some electric car owners having to wait until midnight for their turn at the recharging stations were not uncommon.

The installation of a couple of new recharging stations has made life much easier for people who own the electric cars in the community. The number of electric cars may be small compared with the more than 1,000 gas-engine cars in the community, but it signals a new beginning for these cleaner vehicles in the city.

The sales of new-energy vehicles, including all-electric and hybrid cars, in the country more than tripled last year thanks to substantial government subsidies. Although scandals involving companies trying to cheat the government out of subsidies earlier this year slowed the sales of new-energy cars, the first quarter saw a 100 percent increase in their sales year-on-year. And of the 58,125 such vehicles sold, 42,131 were electric cars, up 140 percent year-on-year.
Charlotte Nicod pratices Chinese calligraphy.[photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

"Knowing it is not as good as loving it. Loving it is not as good as delighting in it." The Master's words came to my mind when Charlotte told me her experience of learning Chinese calligraphy.

My colleague Charlotte Nicod, a twenty-something Swiss woman, is a big fan of Chinese calligraphy. She started learning it when she was only eight years old after seeing an exhibition of Chinese arts in Paris. The characters were so amazing and she loved them so much. She asked her parents to find a tutor to guide her, and soon she started weekly practice with her mentor. For years she traveled every weekend between her home in Lausanne and her teacher's place in Geneva, regardless of the weather.

The whole day's work was undoubtedly hard for a small, 8-year-old girl. It took about three hours to make the round-trip. Besides, she spent seven hours practicing calligraphy, with only a less than one-hour break during lunchtime. But the world of calligraphy is such a fascinating wonderland that she totally indulged herself in it and forgot about being tired.

Then she realized that she also needed to learn the Chinese language. 'How can you write calligraphy well in your own way without knowing it'? she asked herself. And learning and practicing both Chinese and Chinese calligraphy lasted for about 10 years, until she entered university.

She made her first visit to China alone when she went Beijing during a summer vacation. She was 17 years old and still in high school.

She had been seeking such opportunities to experience China. One day she saw information on the internet about a university in Beijing that had a program for foreign students to study Chinese. She got so excited, she flew to Beijing immediately.

When she reached the advertised address, she found that it was a hotel. Obviously it was a fake advertisement and she was cheated, because after several days, she was still the only person who came for the language class. But she didn't want to simply go back, because she had planned to study Chinese in Beijing for two months.

One person told her if she could find a job then she could stay in the hotel, studying Chinese. Then she went outside and wandered on a nearby street. She was quite lucky. She got a job in sales at the Louis Vuitton shop, because they needed a person who was fluent in English and French, and with very good Chinese.

She is indeed a capable girl. The Beijing trip turned out to be a pleasant adventure. She told me that she was so fond of Beijing. The hutongs, the old buildings, the local snacks, the calligraphy and paintings everywhere, and even Beijing accent in spoken Mandarin, all these made Beijing a unique and charming city.

Being impressed and inspired by the experience in Beijing, she searched for other chances to study in China after she went back to Switzerland. Hard work pays off. She got a chance to do a 6-month internship program as an international exchange student at Fudan University, Shanghai, while an undergraduate. Her Chinese improved greatly by living and communicating with other exchanging students, as well as Chinese students. It was really a happy and memorable time.

When our talk neared its end, she asked me one more question, 'Judy, do you know why Laoban means BOSS? I really don't know why an old boardrefers to a boss in charge!' Frankly I had no clue about it, I need to look it up in the dictionary also.

Dear friends, could you please help with answering this question?
Brian's playing with kids around him. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Nowhere is the spirit of Chinese national hero Lei Feng better captured than in the life of Brian Linden. Brian, an American from Chicago, has been in China since 1984 and, unlike many foreigners, his interaction with our country has been solely to promote respect and recognition of our culture and traditions. He is not here to change China, introduce outside beliefs or condescendingly tell us what to do. Instead, he has made it his life's mission to remind China of the importance of its cultural traditions and help package these in an elegant and learning-focused manner to inspire others. The goal is to allow the world to see the traditional beauty of China and the miraculous economic and political changes that have occurred over the past 30 years. Brian believes that these soft power initiatives are integral in softening China's rise on the world's stage.

Brian calls China his Shifu, and The Linden Centre, three cultural retreats in Yunnan, are all based on national relics - they are 'love letters' to China's culture and peaceful rise. Brian, his wife, Jeanne, and two sons sold their American home, left their jobs and traveled around China from 2004-2006 to find an historic complex in which to develop their first model. They carried their boys' books (Shane was 8 and Bryce was 5) in their suitcases, lived in small kezhans and homeschooled the boys throughout their two year journey. They settled on the village of Xizhou, 20 kilometers north of Dali, and partnered with the local government to restore three striking examples of pre-revolutionary Bai architecture.

The Lindens have invested their life savings in the preservation of these three structures. They now serve as platforms for adult and child learning programs and sustainable tourism activities.

Brian works regularly with the local villagers (many call him cunzhang, which means village head) employs and trains nearly 75 locals and lectures to visiting institutions and guests.

Brian, who hails from a very humble Chicago family, feels that the true beauty of his life has been a result of a China dream. He went from attending community college and cleaning carpets to scholarships at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Illinois and Stanford University; from working in a bar to meeting Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders while working for CBS News in Beijing in the mid-1980s and traveling to nearly 100 countries while doing education projects from 1990-2004.

Brian's passion for China often brings his guests to tears. His respect for China, which goes beyond any financial reason, is an example all Chinese should follow. I am proud to have spent time with him in Yunnan and believe that he is Lei Feng incarnate!
As supply-side reform gathers pace, many scholars are trying to analyze it based on Western theories brought by supply-side economists, said Zha Xianyou and Ding Shouhai from Renmin University.

What should be clarified, however, is that the structural reform put forward by President Xi Jinping is comprehensively grounded on Chinese characteristics and reality, which means going beyond the traditional demand management pattern and to seek new growth engine by managing supply side under the shadow of weak economic demand. So its important to remember that the theories suggested by the Western supply-side economists are geared to tackle situations that are different from what China is experiencing right now, they added.

The core logic of Western supply-side school is market liberalism, which maybe is not suitable for our situation.If we look into the history, the academic theories of supply management could be traced back to Say's law of classical economics in the early 19th century, whose key idea is that supply would naturally create demand and government should not intervene in it, because the market itself has the natural ability to solve the problem of demand and supply.

Up to now, only US, UK and Germany have achieved relatively great effect in short-term by applying reform suggested by the supply-side school. Some scholars classify the measures of supply-side reform into nine areas: tax reduction; government expenditure compression; limitation of governments intervention in financial field (especially control the over-issuance of currency); let the exchange rate freely float as the supply-demand situation of foreign exchange market changes; privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs); weakening the power of labor union; deregulation of labor market; reducing government intervention; and loosening the limits of market access and entry.

Obviously, these nine areas cannot be copied in our country without any adjustment.

First, China, as a socialist state, is obliged to let public sector play a predominant role in economy, and also we cannot just sell all the State-owned shares like the UK.Instead, we should find other ways, such as mixed ownership reform, or to build modern enterprise system.

Second, though we havent build a comprehensive modern enterprise system like Western countries, we would still face problems if let the market function solely when distributing resources. Based on our governments previous successful experiences, its considered a more scientific way to make up for the market failure when making good use of governments power and take up with the institutional innovation.

Third, as for labor market, China has long given priority to capital over labor, and protection of labor rights and interests still need a long way to go, the strengthened regulation of labor market began in 2004, which is relatively late. So this situation is totally different from Western countries. We are not in trouble of heavy burden brought by over-protection of workers like the unemployment compensation and high-standard pension, instead further efforts are needed in labor protection.

Fourth, The problems we are facing in boosting economic growth are different from those of Western countries.

Though from the appearance most countries face the same problem of economic slowdown, but the reasons are totally different. On the problems faced by Western countries are due to stagflation, which could feed into factors like over-boosting welfare society and SOEs, so they emphasize the reform of supply side to help alleviate the situation.

While what China is struggling with now is not stagflation, instead the key points are debt and deflation. According to statistics, debt of local government reached 8.6 trillion until the end of 2014, only 54 counties had no government debt in the whole country. On the other hand, the pressure of deflation keeps tightening. Since March 2012 went for a down-trend, PPI saw negative growth for over 40 months, which lead to a structural deflation problem for China.

As we have said above, simply copying Western countries experience would hardly work. For example, if we use tax deduction to stimulate the input of essential productive factors, it would cause more pressure brought by deflation, and also make the over-capacity in some industries even harder to solve. The key of reform should be laid on trying to dominate the international competition rules

As China undergoes industrial structure transformation, were competing more with developed countries, which makes the dominance of international competition rules extremely important. For example, US is trying to take advantage of changing rules of economic agreements to favor itself and also weaken the competitiveness of China, like using the international agreements about carbon emission and intellectual property to weaken Chinas cost advantage on environment industry and labor forces.

All in all, Chinas supply-side reform should never simply apply measures that were used to aiming at solving Western countries previous dilemma.

( Wu Zheyu organized from Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies,Renmin University of China )




China's Global Newspaper





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Photo shows Shenxianju scenic spot shrouded by clouds after a rain in Xianju county, East China's Zhejiang province on April 23, 2016. Shenxianju, literally meaning a dwelling for immortals, is a popular tourist attraction which has been awarded a 5A rating, China's top classification for scenic spots. [Photo/Chinapic]
Photo taken on April 26, 2016 shows the relief materials which will be transferred to the quake-hit Ecuador in north China's Tianjin. [Photo/Xinhua]

QUITO - The Chinese government delivered 60 million yuan (about 9.5 million US dollars) worth of humanitarian aid materials to tens of thousands of victims in the deadly earthquake in Ecuador.

Four planeloads of aid arrived at the Mariscal Sucre International Airport of Quito, the capital of Ecuador, Wednesday. One more cargo plane will get to Ecuador Thursday afternoon.

The aid, which consists of 5,400 tents, 9,999 folding beds and other supplies, has been immediately sent to quake-ravaged Manta and will house the homeless for several months.

Ecuador's first vice president of the National Assembly Rossana Alvarado, Defense Minister Ricardo Patino, and Foreign Minister Guillaume Long welcomed the arrival of the Air China cargo planes at the airport.

Chinese Ambassador Wang Yulin said that his country was shocked by the tragedy in Ecuador. Through the delivery of humanitarian aid, China wishes to express its solidarity with the Ecuadorian government and people.

"China and Ecuador are two friendly countries and our two peoples are brothers. At this difficult time, China is with Ecuador and is more than willing to actively participate in the reconstruction of the affected areas," said the Chinese diplomat, hoping that under the leadership of President Rafael Correa, "the Ecuadorian people will overcome the temporary difficulties."

This aid is in addition to the donation of two million US dollars delivered last week by the Chinese government, along with 100,000 US dollars donated by the Red Cross of China.

Rossana Alvarado thanked the help of the Chinese government, noting that this will help house the victims in shelters while advancing the reconstruction of the affected areas.
President Xi Jinping addresses the opening ceremony of the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Beijing, April 28, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

President Xi Jinping said China, a close neighbor to the Korean Peninsula, will "never allow the Peninsula to have war or chaos" because "it will be no good for anyone in the event of such situations".

Xi made the remarks when addressing the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Beijing on Thursday.

Xi said all parties should hope to continue exercising restraint, and they are urged "not to stimulate each other or flare up contradictions".

Instead, parties should "make joint efforts in dragging the Peninsula nuclear issue back, at an early date, on the track of resolving through dialogue and negotiation" and "push for realizing long-lasting peace and stability in Northeast Asia", Xi added.

The President noted that the Peninsula situation has experienced tension since the beginning of the year.

He said China "has dedicated great efforts in controlling, managing the situation and pushing forward dialogue and negotiation among the parties".

China upholds the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, safeguarding its peace and stability, and resolving the issue through dialogue and consultation, Xi said.

"As a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China implements the relevant UN Security Council resolutions in an all-out and integral manner," Xi said.
Zha Liyou (center), Chinese deputy consul general in San Francisco, and Luis Herrera (third from left), city librarian at the San Francisco Public Library, attend the opening reception for the photographic exhibit Silk Road: A New Look at the Chinese Center in the library, April 27, 2016. The exhibition, which will run through July 21, presents 10 photos taken by Chinese photographers, which shows how the Silk Road, the land and sea trade routes linking the major civilizations of Asia, Africa and Europe for thousands of years, is evolving to adapt to 21st century economic globalization. Zha said that the exhibition opened a window for future cooperation between the San Francisco libraries and the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. "To tell a good story of China requires cooperation between both sides. The Chinese consulate in San Francisco is dedicated to supplying resources from China for a better understanding of Chinese culture," he said. "By working together and thorough more cultural exchanges, we can build a deeper relationship between Chinese people and the local people in San Francisco." ZHIZHI CEN / CHINA DAILY
President Xi Jinping addresses the opening ceremony of the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Beijing, April 28, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

President Xi Jinping, when speaking on the South China Sea issue on Thursday, said that China "upholds peacefully resolving disputes through friendly consultation and negotiation with countries directly concerned".

Xi made the remarks when he was addressing the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Beijing.

The President noted that recently, "various parties have been concerned about the South China Sea issue".

"I would like to stress that China is consistently committed to ensuring peace and stability in the South China Sea region," he said.

China "unswervingly safeguards its own sovereignty and relevant rights and interests in the South China Sea, and upholds peacefully resolving disputes through friendly consultation and negotiation directly with countries directly concerned", Xi added.

"The Chinese side is ready for joint efforts with the ASEAN countries in building a sea of peace, friendship and cooperation out of the South China Sea," Xi said.
Chinese Consul General Li Qiangmin talks with Bernard Harris, president of the US China Innovation Alliance, at a news conference in Houston on Wednesday. MAY ZHOU / CHINA DAILY

US and Chinese business leaders on Wednesday announced the first US China Innovation and Investment Summit will take place May 16-18 in Houston.

The international business conference is designed to connect US technology companies, especially those in and around Texas, with potential investment partners from China.

Li Qiangmin, consul general in Houston, citing President Xi Jinping's speech at a top university three days ago that China will depend on innovation for further development, said that the US innovation will be commercialized and scale up faster with Chinese investment.

Li said that there is unprecedented demand from Chinese companies to seek technology innovation through mergers and acquisitions, as well as establishing new research centers overseas.

"This event will help improve the efficiency of innovation collaboration and cross-border merger and acquisitions between the two countries," Li said.

Dr. Bernard Harris, former astronaut and president of the US China Innovation Alliance, one of the host organizations, said that there is a need for opportunities to connect, especially between China and the southern part of the US, by creating forums for exchange. Harris himself is involved in the process of helping two US companies closing two deals of this nature between China and the US.

According to James Chen, Asia-Pacific director of the Office of the Governor of Texas - Economic Development and Tourism Division, Texas is rich in innovation and exports more high tech than California.

"Chinese has made a lot investment in manufacturing and the oil industry in the past, and now I see more and more Chinese companies coming here to explore opportunity in tech industries," Chen said.

Water Ulrich, president and CEO of the Houston Technology Center, another of the host organizations, said that there are many important technologies in the South. However, they don't get funded as quickly, he said.

"We would like to see more Chinese investment in the Southwest, especially in Texas, to help the startups here flourish, Ulrich said.

The inaugural event is expected to draw 200 US technology companies and 150 Chinese investors, including executives from top venture capital and private equity firms, and industry leaders and administrators from China's top industrial parks and development zones.

After the Houston conference, the Chinese delegations will continue on satellite tours to Austin, Dallas or Atlanta to explore similar opportunities.

mayzhou@chinadailyusa.com
RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said Wednesday that no one can be impeached for unpopularity.

"In Brazil, a country with a presidential system like the US, no one can be impeached merely for unpopularity," she said.

Rousseff said all presidents and prime ministers in Europe who had to face unemployment rates over 20 percent also had sharp popularity falls, in an interview with U.S. news channel CNN.

The president is going through impeachment for alleged fiscal maneuvers to pay welfare benefits and maintain social programs.

The president said the fiscal maneuvers in question were not considered crime under Brazilian law, and thus the impeachment process is illegitimate.

She said several times during interviews with foreign media that the impeachment process is in fact a coup. In her most recent UN speech, she said the Brazilian people fought for democracy and will not accept any regression.

The Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of parliament, voted earlier this month with more than a two-thirds majority in favor of impeaching Rousseff, sending the issue to the Senate.

Should the Senate decide to begin an impeachment trial, Rousseff will have to step aside for 180 days for the trial to proceed, with the vice president taking over as acting president.
State Councilor Yang Jiechi said China is ready to work with the Republic of Korea and Japan to effectively implement the consensus reached through the leaders' meeting and uphold the idea of "facing squarely to the history and looking to the future".

Yang made the remarks on Thursday when meeting with guests scheduled to attend the first China-Japan-ROK Public Diplomacy Forum and the 2016 International Forum for Trilateral Cooperation in Beijing on Friday.

The guests meeting with Yang included Goh Kun, former ROK prime minister and Toshihiro Nikai, chairman of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party's General Council.

The three countries should strengthen political mutual trust, properly tackle sensitive issues, including the history issue, reinforce economic and trade cooperation, boost economic integration, and expand cultural exchanges, Yang said.

All three countries are expected to push for the healthy, stable and sustainable development of trilateral cooperation and "make greater contribution to the rejuvenation of all of Asia", Yang said.

Goh and Nikai said the Friday forum will facilitate exchanges and cooperation among the three countries.

They said the economies of the three countries are closely connected, their cultures are linked, and they are ready to work along with China to achieve further development of the trilateral relationship.

Yang said the trilateral relationship is "of great significance to the peace, stability, development and prosperity in the region and around the globe".

Last year, the trilateral leaders' meeting mechanism was restarted following a stall of more than three years, which Yang said symbolized that the trilateral cooperation has regained its momentum.
All parties involved in the South China Sea issue should find common ground at a bilateral level and follow the principle of non-interference in internal affairs, Kazakhstan's foreign minister said on Thursday.

Erlan Idrissov made the remarks when asked about the South China Sea issue by China Daily on the sidelines of the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia held in Beijing.

He emphasized the need to find common ground at a bilateral level, to resolve all disputes through peaceful dialogue and constructive negotiations on the basis of the principles of equal responsibility for peace and security, mutual respect and non-interference in internal affairs.

Idrissov said his country welcomes China and ASEAN's effort to find an agreement on the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea in accordance with the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, which was signed in 2002.

"We hope that the parties will be able to determine the appropriate mechanisms for the settlement of territorial disputes in the region," he added.
US 'freedom of navigation' operations in South China Sea 'very dangerous': China (Xinhua) Updated: 2016-04-28 20:53

BEIJING -- The so-called "freedom of navigation" operations in the South China Sea conducted by the US military are "very dangerous," a spokesperson for China's Ministry of National Defense said Thursday.



The US operations are political and military provocations against China and could easily lead to unexpected incidents, spokesman Wu Qian said at a monthly press conference.



The Chinese military will continue to closely monitor the situations in the South China Sea and will take all necessary measures as needed, he said.



The "freedom of navigation" has been used by the United States as an excuse for intervening in disputes in the South China Sea, according to the spokesman.



In fact, freedom of navigation in the South China Sea is not in question, Wu stressed, criticizing the US side for destabilizing regional peace and undermining coastal nations' security interests.



The US military operations in the South China Sea cannot stop China's continued development and growth, the spokesman stressed.



On the same day, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a daily press briefing that China has always respected and supported "real freedom of navigation" in accordance with international law and is firmly opposed to all acts that harm China's sovereignty and security interests under the name of "freedom of navigation."
In the age of podcasts and streaming services, you might think pirate radio is low on the list of concerns of US federal lawmakers and broadcasters. You'd be wrong.

They are increasingly worried about its presence in some cities, as unlicensed broadcasters commandeer frequencies to play anything from Trinidadian dance music to Haitian call-in shows.

They also complain that the Federal Communications Commission can't keep up with the pirates, who can block listeners from favorite programs or emergency alerts for missing children and severe weather.

Helped by cheaper technology, the rogue stations can cover several blocks or larger areas. Most broadcast to immigrant communities that pirate radio defenders say are underserved by licensed stations.

"The DJs sound like you and they talk about things that you're interested in," said Jay Blessed, an online DJ who has listened to various unlicensed stations since she moved from Trinidad to Brooklyn more than a decade ago.

"You call them up and say, 'I want to hear this song,' and they play it for you," Blessed said. "It's interactive. It's engaging. It's communal."

Last year, nearly three dozen congressional members from the New York City area urged the commission to do more about what they called the "unprecedented growth of pirate radio operations".

The National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters made a similar appeal, saying that pirates undermine licensed minority stations while ignoring consumer protection laws that guard against indecency and false advertising.

The New York State Broadcasters Association estimates that 100 pirates operate in the New York City area alone, carrying programs in languages from Hebrew to Gaelic to Spanish.

Commission chairman Tom Wheeler cited a stagnant budget and the smallest staff in 30 years. He said fines and seizures are not enough, because pirates often refuse to pay and quickly replace transmitters and inexpensive antennas.
(Photo : Reuters) Startup company Sirin Labs recently announced that it is planning to create a new smartphone that aims to combine premium performance, luxury and strong privacy protection.

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Startup company Sirin Labs said that it is planning to create a new smartphone that aims to combine premium performance, luxury, and strong privacy protection. The company recently closed a seeding round amassing $72 million. The smartphone created by Sirin Labs will be released in May at the company's flagship store in London.



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Sirin Labs received funding from Singulariteam founder Moshe Hogeg, Chinese social networking service Renren and Kazakh businessman Kenges Rakishev.



The company said that concerns regarding smartphone security is what fuel its desire to create a very secure device. Its product will combine the safety features of a ubiquitous smartphone will top military-grade security protocols.



Hogeg told Tech Crunch, "We managed to combine military phone and the phone for everyday use. We said: let's create the best phone we can. Let's see if we can integrate the best from both worlds without limitations."



While the features of the Sirin Labs smartphone are very interesting, the device, once released, will pick up quite a hefty price tag. Hogeg said that it should cost $10,000 to $15,000 per phone.



Hogeg added that they modelling their business strategy with Tesla, which also started by marketing cars that are expensive but slowly slashed their prices as the years pass.



Tech experts believe that Sirin Labs' smartphones will target those Fortune 500 executives rather than the regular tech enthusiast.



Ultra-secure smartphones is currently an empty market since Blackberry left some time in 2013. One of the most prolific devices in the market is the Blackphone from Silent Circle. According to PC World, the Blackphone costs $799 and in February, Silent Circle announced that it is planning to take over the void left by BlackBerry by releasing devices aimed for businessmen.



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TagsSirin, Sirin Labs, Smartphone, secure phone, Smartphones, secure smartphone, smartphone security
(Photo : Reuters) Tim Cook is set to visit China as Apple continues to grapple with several issues in the country.



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Apple Inc. has experienced a 26 percent decline on its iPhone sales in China, highlighting the impact of the saturated Chinese smartphone market on global gadget makers.



Apple CEO Tim Cook said on the companys second-quarter earnings report earlier this week that it is difficult to keep the attention of Chinas inconsistent and increasingly hard-to-impress consumers.



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He mentioned that sales in mainland China had fallen 11 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. In addition, the sales in the first quarter of 2015 were 80 percent higher than in the same period in 2014. However, Cook added that the current decline is a setback for one of the most beloved brands in China.



Apple attributed the drop down on sales to the slowdown on macroeconomic issues and tough year-over-year comparisons. Also, the company mentioned that Hong Kongs currency has strengthened significantly over the past two years, thus making it more expensive for international shopping and tourism in the country.



Analysts said that Chinas young, middle-class consumers are increasingly willing to try phones from the many competitors  including Huawei, Meizu and Xiaomi  that strive to compete with Apple on technical specifications and aesthetics but that offer their models at a few hundred dollars cheaper.



Those companies offering mid-tier phones in China priced below $250 are growing in line with the improving wages of the middle class. However the majority of those wages are still far below the premium market that Apples phones target in China.



We believe Apple still has its brand premium in China. But its sales mix is moving to lower average selling price, said CK Lu, a research analyst at Gartner Inc.



He said the average price for iPhones is expected to fall in China, with Apple having to offer lower cost models in the growing, competitive market.



Some analysts who believe things will begin to recover once the economy starts to improve and wealthier Chinese customers get ready to upgrade their phones, potentially starting with the iPhone 7 in September. They also expect the launch of the iPhone 7 to return Apple to growth.



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Tagsapple, china, iPhone, iPhone 7, Apple China
(Photo : SpaceX) SpaceX is looking to explore Mars by 2018

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The plan by Elon Musk's SpaceX space transport company to land a modified cargo-carrying Red Dragon spacecraft on Mars in 2018 will accomplish many historic firsts in spaceflight.



SpaceX's public announcement of the mission on its social media accounts on April 27 was preceded by Musk's discussing the Red Dragon's capabilities. The long-term goal of SpaceX is to provide spacecraft for the future human colonization of Mars.



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The landing of the uncrewed Red Dragon measuring 20 feet tall and 12 feet wide on the Red Planet is an important step towards attaining this goal. Probable landing sites for Red Dragon will be polar or mid-latitude locations with proven near-surface ice. This because Red Dragon might also drill about 1.0 meters underground to reach reservoirs of water ice that exist in the shallow subsurface.



NASA will assist SpaceX with the Mars landing mission scheduled for an as yet undetermined date in 2018. It will also provide technical assistance, communications and navigation support.



SpaceX said the Mars landing will showcase Red Dragon's ability to reach distant destinations throughout the solar system.



"Dragon 2 is designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system," Musk tweeted. "Red Dragon Mars mission is the first test flight."



Musk will reveal his plans for sending humans to Mars in September at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, said The Verge.



The landing of Red Dragon will accomplish a number of historic spaceflight firsts.



* Red Dragon will become the first commercial spacecraft to land on the Red Planet.



* Weighing 14,000 lb (1 tonne), Red Dragon will also be the heaviest spacecraft to land on Mars. It can also carry a 1 tonne (2,200 lb) payload.



* The Red Dragon mission will be the cheapest landing mission to Mars. Total mission cost will come to less than US$400 million.



* The next-gen Dragon 2 spacecraft, of which Red Dragon is the first, are designed to land on Mars without using a parachute. The 2018 mission might test the feasibility of this concept.



* The Red Dragon mission will be SpaceX's first launch to another planet.



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(Photo : CCTV camera screenshot) The men would approach their victims without trouble given the way they're dressed. They would then make up a story that will eventually end to them borrowing a decent amount of money and promising to return it.

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Six men who were posing as wealthy Hong Kong businessmen to scam mainlanders were arrested by police on Friday.



Authortities received reports about a gang of men terrorizing the streets of Wuhan in Hebei province. CCTV cameras also caught the faces of the extortionists.



The members of the gang wore luxurious clothes and carried expensive items such as Rolex watches, fake iPhones, and fake BMW and Mercedes car keys. They also spoke in fluent Cantonese to make their facade more believable.



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The gang is accused of stealing at least 100,000 yuan from some 30 unsuspecting victims. Local media said that men even taught themselves Cantonese to help their disguises. The scammers all came from Anhui province.



The men would approach their victims without trouble given the way they're dressed. They would then make up a story that will eventually end to them borrowing a decent amount of money and promising to return it.

Chen, a 19-year-old university student, told South China Morning Post that a well-dressed young man asked her for directions to the HSBC Investment Bank. The man said that he is a businessman from Hong Kong who needed to transfer money outside the country.



Chen let the man borrowed her phone where she heard him talking to someone in Cantonese. He invited her for a cup of coffee and asked her for 3,000 yuan to pay his friend's medical bills. He promised to return the money the next day, but the man did not show up.



Wuhan police found the fraudster and detained his five other accomplices.



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Tagsscams in China, Hong Kong businessmen, swindlers in China, swindling
(Photo : Reuters) Alibaba's fourth quarter adjusted earnings fell short of market expectations.

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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibabas affiliate Ant Financial Services Group announced it has completed a huge new fundraising round, which can be used for expanding access to financial services in China's rural areas and improving the company's globalization.



Paypals bigger rival received $4.5 billion from investors, which means raising funds at a $60-billion valuation. Chinese business magnate and philanthropist Jack Ma and Alibaba will prepare to bring Ant public on the Shanghai exchange in 2017. The Initial Public Offering (IPO) is expected to be the biggest in China since Agricultural Bank of China sold $22.1 billion worth of stock in its 2010 offering.



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Alibaba's ability to raise such a whopping funding round for Ant shows credibility to the popular notion that while private tech companies are struggling in the United States, they are hugely developing overseas. Ant Financial said that it aims to expand its footprint overseas to offer the same access to financial services globally.



This round is the largest investment in a tech company to date, surpassing the $3 billion that Didi Kuaidi, Chinas homegrown rival to Uber, brought in from investors last summer by some margin.



Alipay remains Ant's biggest asset, but the company has quickly added more offerings, including a credit rating service, an internet bank that lends money to small businesses, and even a money market fund.



Existing Ant Financial shareholders including insurance firm China Life, China Post Group, and China Development Bank Capital jumped on the latest funding round. Other investors include groups led by China Investment Corp. Capital, and CCB Trust, a subsidiary of one of China's largest banks.



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TagsAnt Financial, Alipay, Alibaba, Jack Ma, PayPal, Ant Financial $60 Billion, china
(Photo : Getty Images) President Xi Jinping said only countries who are directly involved in the South China Sea row should resolve the South China Sea issue without the interference of those countries outside the region like the US

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Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated the country's stance on territorial disputes in the South China Sea, saying that only negotiations between the countries involved must be taken to resolve the festering issue.



Xi said that countries outside the South China Sea region including the US have no role in the disputes and should not meddle in the affairs of other countries.



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"We insist we should peacefully resolve the disputes through friendly consultations and negotiations with other parties directly involved," he said.



Xi, who spoke before foreign ministers from Asia and Middle East in a conference on interaction and confidence building in Asia last Thursday in Beijing, said negotiations and friendly dialogues with the claimant-countries were the only way to go in resolving the South China Sea row.



Verdict



Xi's views and comments came as an arbitration tribunal in Hague is scheduled to hand down its ruling next month on a territorial case filed by the Philippines against China.



Even before the start of arbitration, China said that it will not participate in the case and will not abide by whatever judgment the court will hand down saying it has no jurisdiction on the matter.



China's massive reclamation work on its controlled islands has raised tensions in the region with the US accusing Beijing of militarizing the disputed South China Sea.



Air and naval patrols



The US has been conducting air and naval patrols near the China-controlled islands invoking "freedom of navigation" that have infuriated Beijing, calling them "acts of provocation."



China lays claim to almost the entirety of the islands and reefs in the South China Sea, an international waterway where $5 trillion of ship-borned trade passes through each year.



Other countries claiming part of the disputed waters include Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Taiwan.



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TagsSouth China Sea row, Hague, President Xi Jinping, "acts of provocation"
(Photo : China Photos/Getty Images) Restaurant food overpricing is an issue that commonly happens in restaurants found in scenic tourist areas.

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A Chinese restaurant was punished for charging exorbitantly high prices for a serving of a delicacy, news reports say.



The restaurant, located in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, charged 5,000 yuan (about USD $770) for a dish that consisted of 1.65 kilograms of giant salamander, Xinhua reports. The tourist, named Wang, reported that she was surprised at the exorbitantly high price, and asked the police for help.



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Wang said that she had been taken to the restaurant by a taxi driver. There, a waiter recommended that she try the dish, without informing her of its price. She was only notified of the soaring cost of the dish after the cook had slain the giant salamander  a whopping 3,200 yuan (about $493) per kilo  but with a discount if she will get it without the receipt.



"The highest price I have heard people paying for a giant salamander in Guilin was 1,400 yuan ($216) per kilo, a furious Wang told news media.



Wang then reported the matter to police, who in turn helped her, but only to negotiate with the restaurant to lower the price to 1,500 yuan ($231) per kilo.



Restaurant Defenses



The restaurant, however, denied Wangs narration of the story. According to one of the restaurants waiters, the dishs price is clearly stated in the menu, and the giant salamander will only be killed once she accepts the weight and consequent pricing.



The restaurant manager added that the restaurant acquires giant salamanders from a local market at 700 yuan ($107.9) per kilo, and that the selling prices were all set within the restaurants bounds.



Law Enforced



The police, on the other hand, decided in favor of Wang in accordance with what is called the Pricing Law. According to this law, restaurants are not allowed to over-price their products, and that the prices for their food items must not exceed the average price quoted within the neighboring restaurants in the area.



The police fined the restaurant 500,000 yuan (about $77,000) and had its business and services licenses revoked, the Guilin government said.



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Tagssalamander, overpricing, delicacy, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, china, giant salamander, Pricing Law
(Photo : Kyodo News - Pool/Getty Images) Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the signing ceremony with President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari (not seen) at Great Hall of the People on April 12, 2016 in Beijing, China.

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China must use science and technology to its full advantage in order to sustain the nation's growth and development into the coming years.



This was the message of President Xi Jinping to participants attending a symposium on internet and cyberspace security recently held in Beijing, reported the China Daily.



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And this was essentially the same message the president delivered during a field study tour he participated in China's Anhui province, stressing the Chinese government's increased focus on science and technology.



In Xi's visit to the University of Science and Technology of China, he was presented with the institution's latest achievements in the areas of artificial intelligence, public security and alternative energy.



The president was also given a tour of the control center of the 2,000-kilometer Beijing-Shanghai quantum communication main network, which will be fully operational in the second half of this year



He likewise visited the university's Laboratory of Physic Science for Advanced Medical Application.



In a meeting with faculty members, researchers and students, Xi lauded the inroads made by the university to promote innovation and new technologies.



He also urged them to show a greater "sense of mission" by helping to educate more people in China, and at the same time, work towards unleashing the full potential of science and technology.



Xi noted that it would not do well for an economy of China's size to be too reliant on imports for its science and technology-related initiatives.



Zhang Xiaojun, vice-president of Anhui Huami Information Technology, which has investments in the leading Chinese mobile phone producer Xiaomi, was among the technology industry leaders who had the opportunity to dialogue with the president.



He said Xi's comments will inspire China's science and technology companies to help boost the Chinese economy through the development, for instance, of smart wearable gadgets.







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Tagschina, Science and Technology, Chinese President Xi jinping
(Photo : Getty Images) China has the world's most number of netizens.

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Chinese authorities is pushing for a new regulation that will allow the state to have 1 percent share in major Chinese internet companies. The proposal will also ensure that the government receives a board seat in such companies.



According to the Wall Street Journal, the law is likely to be applicable to the companies which are covered by the Cyberspace Administration of China and State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.



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The proposal indicates that the Chinese government is looking to have more control over internet firms, including the western ones. The government is already held responsible for the withdrawal of critical blogs and articles from the internet.



President Xi Jinping launched a massive internet crackdown after assuming his role in 2013. Recently, the government allegedly asked Apple to pull the plug on its iTunes Movies and iTunes Books services. The order was passed under a new rule that bars foreign companies from online publishing.



A partnership between Alibaba and Disney was put on hold in a similar manner. However, it is not just big western companies, but also new age bloggers and content creators who are facing the brunt. Papi Jiang, one of the most recognizable internet celebrities in China, found her material removed recently due to her use of expletives. She later apologized.



President X recently stated that the internet needs to be "imbued with positive energy and mainstream values."



The new proposal is rather vague in terms. It is also highly probable that it may not materialize into a law. However, it shows the government's growing penchant for controlling content online.



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Tagsapple, Papi Jiang, Alibaba, Disney, Internet Firms
(Photo : NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (artist's concept)

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The James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful telescope ever placed into orbit, will give scientists the ability to peer farther back in time than ever before while helping solve puzzling mysteries such as the existence of alien life.



The successor to the legendary Hubble Space Telescope, "Webb" (as the JWST is affectionately called), will be launched into space in October 2018 on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana. It will operate near the Earth-Sun L2 (Lagrange) point, some 1.5 million kilometers beyond the Earth. It's expected to remain operational for at least five years with 10 years being the maximum.



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In that time, the monster primary mirror of the JWST will allow scientists to look farther back into time, closer to the beginning of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. In this aspect, JWST is a time machine capable of seeing way back to almost the beginning of everything.



Its massive mirror will be capable of detecting the light from the first stars to be born in the Universe and will discover much fainter objects. Scientists will use Webb to study every phase in the history of the Universe.



They expect JWST to become be the world's premier observatory for the next decade as it will be a tool used by thousands of astronomers worldwide. JWST was designed to observe in the infrared sine the most distant galaxies in the Universe can only be detected in this band.



"By studying those faint, distant galaxies, astronomers hope to understand when the first stars began to form and what the first galaxies were like," said ICRAR-Curtin University astrophysicist Dr Rob Soria. "Using the new scope, scientists can gauge how quickly the earliest galaxies formed, pulled together by gravity."



NASA engineers recently revealed the heart of the JWST: the massive primary mirror that's seven times bigger than Hubble's. The primary mirror is a 6.5 meter diameter, gold-coated beryllium reflector with a collecting area of 25 square meters.



Since the size of the mirror is far too large for existing launch vehicles, the mirror was designed as 18 hexagonal segments that will unfold after the telescope reaches orbit. The entire telescope will be four storeys tall.



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(Photo : Twitter/rosetangy) Jinghua and Wong were expected to attend a conference of Chinese dissidents and exiles in Dharamsala this week.

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The Indian government on Thursday denied visas to Chinese dissident Lu Jinghua and Hong Kong activist Ray Wang for a conference in Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama's adopted home, Dharamsala, in north India.



Jinghua, a well known Tiananmen activist and a US citizen, was prevented from boarding an Air India flight to Dharamsala from New York despite having visa confirmation.



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"At the airport, the Air India staff told me simply that I couldn't board as my visa was cancelled. The staff did not tell me why, they kept me waiting at the counter for a long time and were having a heated conversation with each other in Hindi," she said, according to India Today.



Jinghua and Wong were expected to attend a conference of Chinese dissidents and exiles in Dharamsala from April 28 to May 1. The Indian government's move came few days after it suspected Uyghur leader Dolkun Isa's visa to attend the conference on democracy.



China last week blasted Indian government for granting visa to Germany based Isa. China considered him a wanted criminal and put him in country' designated terrorists list.



"On April 23, I got a very short note by the Indian side that my visa is cancelled. There was no explanation... May be because of Chinese pressure put on the Indian government. But, I do not know...I did not get any explanation from the Indian side," Isa said while blaming China for cancellation of his visa. Isa, an exiled Uyghur leader from volatile Xinjiang region, is heading Munich based World Uyghur Congress.



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Tagschina, India, Lu Jinghua, Ray Wang, Dalai Lama, Dolkun Isa
(Photo : Getty Images) China and Indonesia have pledged to strengthen diplomatic ties despite their standing dispute over the South China Sea.

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China and Indonesia have pledged to boost bilateral ties at the fifth China-Indonesia deputy prime ministerial bilateral dialogue mechanism meeting held in Beijing. The pledge for deeper ties comes despite the recent flare up between the two countries over South China Sea issue.



The meeting was co-chaired by Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi and Indonesia's Security Minister Luhut Panjaitan. During the meeting both countries agreed to enhance security cooperation in the fields of defense, anti-terrorism, law enforcement and drug control.



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In addition, both countries also agreed to strengthen marine cooperation on the basis of mutual respect.



After the meeting, Panjaitan said that Indonesia is willing to make mutual efforts with China to enhance cooperation in political, economic and security issues.



However, Panjaitan said that Indonesia is a sovereign country and would not take dictations from other countries over South China Sea issue.



Last month, China and Indonesia were locked in a bitter diplomatic row over South China Sea issue. The dispute arise after Indonesian maritime officials captured a Chinese trawler in the disputed South China Sea region, alleging that trawler had trespassed into its jurisdiction.



The row escalated further after Jakarta summoned the Chinese ambassador and vowed to prosecute all the eight trawler members.



China is staking claim over a large part of the South China Sea. The area is also being claimed by several smaller neighbors of China including Indonesia.



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Tagschina, Indonesia, South China Sea, Yang Jiechi, Luhut Panjaitan
(Photo : Weibo) Student participants have to upload a photo of their bracelet to the universitys public WeChat profile before their first class and after their last class IF they did not use their cellphones.

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Challenge accepted?



A social experiment conducted by the Chongqing Three Gorges University is quickly gaining attention in local Chinese media. Students of the university are uploading bracelets plastered with the words "Cellphone Ninja" on Chinese social media platform Weibo, sparking online curiousity.



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The university challenged their students to refrain from using their mobile phones in class for 21 consecutive days. Every volunteer participant has to wear the orange bracelet. The experiment started on April 12 and will run until May 3.



Student participants have to upload a photo of their bracelet to the universitys public WeChat profile before their first class and after their last class IF they did not use their cellphones. Professors chose 21 days according to a psychological study that found out that 21 days are needed for an individual to form a habit.



More than 800 students applied for the challenge, but the university only chose 400. Seven days into the experiment, the number of participants already dwindled down to only 103 students.



Professors overseeing the experiment clarified that the participants will not receive incentives or punishments if they chose to continue or drop out of the challenge. The participants are all volunteers.



The experiment aims to teach students better study habits.



China has the world's most number of internet and mobile users.



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TagsCellphone Ninja, Chongqing Three Gorges University, mobile phones in China, smart phones in China, challenge accepted, social experiment, social experiment on using smartphones, weibo
(Photo : Don Arnold/Getty Images) While women like shoes for their beauty and function, a Chinese thief loves to steal women-owned shoes because "the smell makes him happy."

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While other thieves or robbers are out to steal money, or maybe even kidnap children for some money, a Chinese man reportedly stole womens shoes, but not for the women in his life. Rather, its for his weird attraction to the smell.



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The man, from Hubei, reportedly stole nearly 160 pairs of womens shoes before getting caught, reports Sohu. The shoes reportedly belonged to female employees working somewhere near his residence.



The female workers reported to their company that some of their footwear, along with some underwear and clothes, went missing. Because of this, the company decided to take action.



"We had five or six employees reporting that their shoes and various other items had gone missing, the company said in a statement, so we installed a surveillance camera."



The shoe thief, however, managed to escape detection and kept stealing the womens footwear. Desperately wanting to end the problem, the company called the police and asked for help.



After a few days, police were able to apprehend a thief named Yang, caught after stealing two pairs of shoes. Further inspection showed that Yang had stolen more than that  he had already stolen 159 pairs of womens shoes and placed them in different places in his home: in the balcony, in the closet, and even under the bed.



Police also found that Yang loved to steal shoes that were left outside to dry under the sun, as these emitted more odors that [made him] happy, according to him.



The smelly nature of Yangs crime apparently elicited various remarks from netizens. Some of them even posted funny but sarcastic comments on the internet.



Police, however, are taking the crime seriously as they should, and are reminding people to immediately report such kinds of behavior if seen or witnessed. Maybe AnBot could help prevent such crimes in the future.



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TagsShoes, ladies shoes, thief, athlete's foot
Boomers and Millennials at church: Who's in charge? 27 April, 2016 by Erich Bridges , |

RICHMOND, Va. (Christian Examiner)  George Turner, 23-year-old seminary freshman, thinks he's ready to step in for the senior pastor at his church.

It's not that Rev. Price is burned out. He's just, well, a little stale. His preaching is too predictable. Worship style? Yawn.

"I just think we need to be more tactile and relational," young Turner observed. "I've experienced deep connections with the mystery of the dance of God burning incense in my dorms."

Rev. Price, out on a hospital visit, was unavailable for comment.

Turner and Price aren't real, by the way. They're fictional characters invented by the Babylon Bee, a satirical website that lampoons church topics. But they hit uncomfortably close to home when it comes to the generational changing of the guard in churches across America. Baby boomer pastors and lay leaders are beginning to hand the reins over to Millennials in thousands of churches. But the hand-off isn't necessarily going smoothly  on either end.

The generational struggle goes deeper than the well-documented "worship wars" over hymnbooks versus praise choruses, traditional versus contemporary worship or shirt-tails and jeans versus coats and ties. The underlying question: Who is going to lead U.S. churches over the next 10 to 20 years?

America's more than 76 million baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are retiring at a rate of 10,000 a day. But plenty of them are in no hurry to step aside, whether in the corporate world or in the church. In fact, millions of boomers enjoy good health and have decades of potential service ahead of them. About 30 million boomers attend U.S. churches.

GENERATIONAL LOGJAM

But a generational logjam looms: Millennials, born between the early 1980s and early 2000s, number more than 80 million. The oldest of them have entered their mid-30s and want their turn at leadership in companies and social institutions. They became the majority of the U.S. workforce in 2015. More than 28 percent of working Millennials now fill management roles in business offices.

Churches, however, tend to change more slowly.

"The baby boomers still want to hold on to much of what is sacred to them, but they are torn by the needs around them," says Virginia Baptist pastor Kevin Moen, 58. "The Millennials are fed up with bureaucracy and structure. They're very project-oriented with a 'see the need and fix it now' mentality. They don't want committees, teams and perpetual offering requests. I think the clash has begun, albeit quietly in most places."

Moen started out as a youth minister pushing boundaries more than 30 years ago. As a veteran pastor, he still likes to challenge the status quo  but with a gentler tone.

"I've learned from experience that in a family there must be give and take, with a tolerance for others' tastes and desires," he says. "My frustration is more with those in leadership who don't want to do what it takes to reach and keep younger folks."

Millennial ministers who share Moen's frustration about churches' reluctance to try something new have another option: start their own churches.

"The most interesting trend I see is the rise and seeming ease of church plants as opposed to 10 years ago," observes Josh Daffern, 38, a Mississippi pastor and Gen Xer who sees himself as a bridge of sorts between Millennials and boomers.

More Millennials, Daffern says, "are avoiding the [generational] clash altogether by starting their own church."

That may work for some young leaders. And creative church starts can reach secularized Americans turned off by traditional churches. But launching a church is a high-risk, high-fail proposition, like starting a company. The most successful church starts have the financial and spiritual support of existing churches and denominations. And that means seeking help and guidance from older, more experienced pastors.

Boomers, in other words.

Clearly, a little cooperation helps on both sides of the generational church divide.

Here are several tips for closing the gap from Dan Darling, a 30-something pastor and Southern Baptist leader:

1. Younger leaders need older leaders as mentors. The relationship can be formal or informal, but it needs to be intentional. "For youngish leaders like me, we should recognize our wisdom deficit. We have much to learn from wise, older leaders who have gone before us," Darling writes.

2. Younger leaders need humility. "We need to dial down the hubris a bit. ... Sometimes I think the church chases relevance and youth so quickly, we make older generations feel useless, as if all their hard work and effort are in vain. Instead, let's respect the previous generation even as we seek to improve or update the ministry model."

3. Older leaders should realize how much they have to give. And they need to give it willingly to younger leaders eager for their help. Training the next generation isn't "giving up." It's faithful discipleship.

4. All generations need to build unity. Unity begins with respect, listening more, and talking less.
Methodist ministers liken Miss. religious freedom bill to segregation 28 April, 2016 by Gregory Tomlin , |

JACKSON, Miss. (Christian Examiner)  A group of nearly 30 Methodist ministers from the American South have penned an open letter in The Clarion Ledger claiming Mississippi's new religious freedom law (HB 1523) harkens back to a darker time in history when blacks were segregated.

This time, however, they claim members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) are in the crosshairs of discrimination.

In the column, published April 26, the ministers pointed to a letter written by 28 of their predecessors in January 1963, protesting the state's effort at blocking student James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi. Meredith, a black student, was eventually allowed to enroll at Ole Miss, but not until the Kennedy administration deployed federal marshals and federalized National Guard troops to ensure Meredith's access to the Oxford school.

As Christian and United Methodist ministers, we proclaim that Christ came to liberate all of creation, not just those we want Christ to liberate and redeem. Christ compels us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and he put no qualifications on that love. Christ served all, even those whom society deemed as sinful and untouchable. Many in our state seek to deny hospitality and welcome to rightful citizens of our state in the name of Christianity, which is antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ that we proclaim.

In the letter 53 years ago, the ministers appealed to the Methodist Book of Discipline's anti-racism statement proclaiming all men as "brothers."

Now, the new group of ministers  some of whom signed the letter in 1963  claimed that "prophetic witness" of old has renewed their desire to intervene.

"With them, we stand against the powers and principalities of evil that seek to exclude those who are different because of their race, color, national origin, ethnicity, age, gender disability, status, economic condition, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religious affiliation," the letter said.

"As Christian and United Methodist ministers, we proclaim that Christ came to liberate all of creation, not just those we want Christ to liberate and redeem. Christ compels us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and he put no qualifications on that love. Christ served all, even those whom society deemed as sinful and untouchable. Many in our state seek to deny hospitality and welcome to rightful citizens of our state in the name of Christianity, which is antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ that we proclaim."

The 2012 Book of Discipline in the UMC rejects "injustice and discrimination of any kind" and claims "any attempt to legislate and sign into law discriminatory practices against any group of people is sinful."

The letter concludes with the ministers claiming that Christ compels the church to welcome all people.

The bill, however, has little if anything to do with welcoming different types of people into the church.

Instead, proponents claim it protects the religious liberty of those who do not wish to support same-sex marriage with their labors or their activities as ministers of the Gospel.

The bill states the government will not intervene to force a person who objects to the solemnization of same-sex marriage to participate in the activity. It will also not force service providers, such as bakers, florists, and wedding coordinators, to participate in gay weddings.

The bill was originally proposed by House Speaker Philip Gunn, a Southern Baptist layman and a member of the trustee board at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

Leaders within the UMC have been attempting to avoid a denominational split over same-sex marriage and LGBT issues since 2014.
Student sues university; claims he was expelled over Christian beliefs 28 April, 2016 by Gregory Tomlin , |

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (Christian Examiner)  A graduate student at Missouri State University claims in a new lawsuit he was dismissed from his program after saying he could not counsel a gay couple because of his religious beliefs on same-sex marriage.

Andrew Cash reportedly told his instructors that he had no problem counseling gay people individually, but would be incapable of rendering service if they were married or living together.

According to the lawsuit, the school was already aware of Cash's Christian beliefs because it approved his mandated clinical hours for counseling at the Springfield Marriage and Family Institute, a Christian counseling service. Another student in the graduate counseling program also interned there.

Later, Cash invited an associate of SMFI to speak to his class for a project because the topic of Christian counseling and its "unique approach and value to the Counseling profession" was "not an area or topic of instruction in the MSU curricula," the lawsuit said. His professor approved the speaker.

During the presentation, the speaker addressed common questions about counseling gay couples and also said prayer was a vital tool in counseling, when those seeking treatment ask for it. SMFI counsels homosexuals indvidually, but refers gay couples to other agencies who do not object to same-sex marriage on religious grounds.

The presentation prompted a "lively discussion" during the next class session, the complaint says. After the class, Cash was instructed to contact the internship coordinator.

Cash was told by the internship coordinator that his Christian views contradicted the anti-discrimination policies of the American Counseling Association's code of ethics and he would need to brush up on the implications of refusing counseling to gay couples. If Cash changed his attitude, the lawsuit said, he could return to the counseling practicum.

His views, however, didn't change and he was eventually informed that he could no longer intern with SMFI for credit.

So Cash found another internship at a different counseling center. He insisted, however, that his previous hours at SMFI be considered for credit. That did not sit well with his instructor who believed he was "still very much defend[ing] his previous internship stating there was nothing wrong with it."

In November 2014, Cash was called to a meeting with the dean and informed he was being expelled from the graduate counseling program, despite his 3.81 GPA. He had completed 39 of his 48 graduate hours.

The lawsuit claims Cash's experience with MSU has been "a living nightmare" and "devastating, crushing, and tormenting, culminating in his termination from the program  all because he interned with a Christian organization and expressed religious beliefs on a hypothetical question about counseling a gay couple on relationship issues."

Cash has not been able to obtain a counseling license from the state since he was booted from the program and is asking for monetary damages, as determined by the court after a jury trial. His attorneys have argued that the university abridged his rights to "freedom of thought, speech, religion, and association, and denigrated his personal and professional abilities, among other things, all through a policy and practice to deprive Plaintiff of his ability to freely express his ideas on issues of religious and political concern at MSU and in the counseling profession."

"Defendants, acting under color of state law, and according to policy and practice, have explicitly and implicitly discriminated on the basis of viewpoint and deprived Plaintiff of his rights to freedom of speech and expression secured by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution," the lawsuit claims.

Missouri State's board of governors, President Clifton M. Smart III, the counseling internship coordinator and counseling department chair are named in the lawsuit.

Christian Examiner contacted MSU and asked for its take on the lawsuit. Suzanna Shaw, vice president for marketing and communications at the school, told CE the university "has not been served with a petition on this matter, and does not comment on pending litigation."

"The University strictly prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion or any other protected class," she added.
A Horry County school in South Carolina has softened its stance on bathroom policy, after it suspended a transgender student for a day for using the boys' bathroom in violation of school mandate.

Oakland Transgender Law Center, which is representing the transgender student, sent a letter to the school warning them of legal action, and telling them that if the school does not give confirmation about changing its policy soon, they would also file a complaint with Department of Education under Title IX which says that schools cannot discriminate against students on the basis of their gender.

On April 26, Horry County Schools released a statement which appeared to be saying that they will let transgender students use bathrooms as per their gender identity.

"The District maintains the privacy of all of its students. The District seeks to accommodate the individual needs of its transgender students in compliance with the law, including Title IX. We will continue our efforts to ensure a welcoming school environment for all students," said district spokesperson Teal Britton.

The teen who identified herself as "R" said she had felt discriminated by the school, when she was followed by a teacher into the boys' bathroom, who did not say anything to her at the time but gave an "exasperated" look. The next day, she was called into the vice principal's office and was told that she was suspended for a day.

"I started having a panic attack," she told CNN. "Teachers should never be following students to the bathroom unless they reek of cigarette smoke or alcohol."

Her mother opted her out of the Socastee High School and enrolled her into an online school.

R was using the girls' bathroom till seventh grade, when some of the girls complained about her using the restroom because of her style of dress. So her family and school administrators agreed to let her use the boys' room.

She had been using boys' bathroom since then. But in October last year, a teacher got to know that she was born a girl, and told the high school administrators about it. In the following discussions, it was decided that R could use nurse's restroom, but it was on a different floor where she did not have many classes, and it took her 10 minutes to walk back and forth from it. So she started using the boys' room again, and was caught doing so recently, which resulted in her being suspended for a day.

"Just let them use the bathroom and don't bother them," her mother who identified herself as Lynne told Fox News. "Don't harass them. Don't single them out. Just let them do what they do every day so they can focus on what they're in school for, which is to learn."

Last week, the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that Gloucester County School Board in Virginia violated Title IX in banning a transgender teen from using a bathroom aligned with her gender identity, which according to the court accounted for discrimination. The decision is valid in nine federal district courts including South Carolina.
Bulldozer death of pastors wife draws attention, but presidents long-awaited speech on religion will impact Chinese Christians much more.

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Image: Mark Schiefelbein / AP

A Protestant church member in Zhejiang arranges crosses used in worship.

China Reveals What It Wants to Do with Christianity

The widely reported death by suffocation of Ding Cuimei, the wife of a pastor in Chinas Henan province, has shocked Christians worldwide. Ding and her husband were buried as they attempted to prevent their church from being bulldozed by developers.

Dings husband managed to crawl to safety, but she did not. Their case highlights again the lack of legal protection for Chinas Christians.

In Beijing, meanwhile, a less noticed but more significant event provides insight into how Chinas atheistic regime plans to deal with the countrys growing Christian population, projected to become the worlds largest within the next couple decades.

At a long-awaited national conference on religion, held April 22-23 in Beijing, Chinas president Xi Jinping called on leaders to take the initiative in reasserting Communist Party of China (CPC) control over religion.

Xis speech, his first specifically on religion since coming to power in 2012, delineates a clear hierarchy in which religion is subordinate to state interests. According to Xi, uniting all believers under CPC leadership is necessary to preserve internal harmony while warding off hostile foreign forces that may use religion to destabilize the regime.

Xis insistence is not new, nor is it simply a function of Chinas Communist rule. Since imperial times, state power has been seen as ultimate. It is, and has always been, the prerogative of the Chinese state to define orthodox belief and to set the boundaries for religious groups whose doctrines fall outside official limits.

In an environment in which the CPC is moving aggressively to rein in all expressions of civil society Xis message on religion comes as no surprise. ...
I had the privilege or reading a pre-release version of "God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church." Here are 20 quotes from the book, which you should pick up.
Nearly two weeks after a Chinese pastor and his wife were buried alive defending their church from destruction, local authorities have ruled in favor of the Protestant house churchs claim to its land.

After a local business wanted to take over the property that Beitou Church in Zhumadian sat on, a government-backed demolition crew was sent to destroy the church. And when the pastor, Li Jiangong, and his wife, Ding Cuimei, stepped in front of a bulldozer, it didnt stop.

Bury them alive for me, a member of the demolition team said, according to China Aid which reported both the tragic incident and the ensuing legal victory. I will be responsible for their lives.

The couple were shoved into a pit and covered with dirt, according to China Aid.

Li manage to free himself. But before he could dig his wife out, Ding suffocated.

The demolition crew is being detained while their actions are being investigated, the local police station told China Aid.

While criminal ...

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When I first became an elder, the board did what most boards do and reviewed my biblical qualifications. Member in good standing? Check. Able to teach? Check. Life beyond reproach? Well . . . let's say "check." It was humbling and joyful.

However, as my term comes to an end and I prepare to hand the reigns off, I am considering sneaking in some addenda. An upgrade. A kind of Qualifications for Elders, 2.0. Because if youre an aspiring elder who doesnt expect to need these characteristics, you might be in for a surprise or two:

1. You must be able to pray, with sincere concern, for things you are not concerned about. Kids playing Dungeons and Dragons. Neighbors who (calamity of calamities!) are Democrats. A family dog with a weird growth on its toe. A PTA mother who throws shade with weird looks during service. Your congregation has concerns, and you are going to feel uncomfortable praying for some of them. Like, really uncomfortable.

2. You must address bad Sunday school teachingwithout undermining the sincere saint leading the class. Okay, so the story of Samson isnt about the importance of keeping secrets, and Jeremiah 29:11 doesnt teach that God is going to give us luxury yachts lined with sacks of money. As an elder, you need to say something. But if you come right out and urge good Brother Francis to use better resources than Wikipedia and Oprahs Book Club to formulate his theologywell, youre going to be short one faithful teacher. Tread softly.

3. You must be sly as a fox and as quick as a hummingbird when passing the bread and the cup. Dont forget the worship team. Dont forget the childrens ...

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Unity Tree Planted on Azusa Street Lou Engle, Dutch Sheets, Bill Hamon, Fred Berry and Many Other Leaders Declare a New Unity from Azusa Street



Contact: Fred Berry,



LOS ANGELES, April 28, 2016 /



The planting of the "Unity Tree" was one of several activities after the AzusaNow coliseum event held on Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles. First Nation people gathered early during the day to shake up Azusa Street with native dancing and worship. Dr. Mel Robeck of Fuller Theological Seminary presented Azusa Street history and announced the Azusa Street memorial wall project expected to be completed in 2019. Over 4,000 homeless and community members were feed and blessed with shoes and clothes as San Pedro Street was closed to accommodate the crowds of people.



The prestigious William J. Seymour award was presented during the final moments of the Azusafest celebration to Bishop T.D Jakes's representative. Azusafest is a three-day Gospel music celebration that commemorate the Azusa Street Revival. This year's Azusafest was held in conjunction with the 'AzusaNow' celebration in the Los Angeles Coliseum on Saturday, April 9th!



Fred and Wilma Berry carry on the history of Azusa Street as international representatives through the Azusa Street Mission. The organization's mission is to carry the flame of Azusa Street to the next generation throughout the nations of the world. The Azusa Street Mission and Historical Society was founded in 2006 during the 2006 centennial celebration. Next year's Azusafest celebration has been confirmed for April 6,7, 8, 9, 2017. Further info can be obtain at

Share Tweet Contact: Fred Berry, Azusa Street Mission , 323-692-7268LOS ANGELES, April 28, 2016 / Christian Newswire / -- Fred Berry of Azusafest and Lou Engle of TheCall joined together after the Los Angeles Coliseum "AzusaNow" event to plant the Unity Tree on Azusa Street. 312 Azusa Street is consider one of the most famous addresses outside of Jerusalem in Christianity. The Azusafest final service was held on Sunday, April 10, with many leaders gathered to celebrate the planting of a new Unity in the Body of Christ. Bishop Bill Hamon, Prophet Dutch Sheets, Apostle Fred Berry and Lou Engle declared with a formal plaque the following statement; "Our Appeal to heaven; May God be with us as he was with William Seymour; Unity Tree planted by Azusafest and theCall April 10, 2016."The planting of the "Unity Tree" was one of several activities after the AzusaNow coliseum event held on Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles. First Nation people gathered early during the day to shake up Azusa Street with native dancing and worship. Dr. Mel Robeck of Fuller Theological Seminary presented Azusa Street history and announced the Azusa Street memorial wall project expected to be completed in 2019. Over 4,000 homeless and community members were feed and blessed with shoes and clothes as San Pedro Street was closed to accommodate the crowds of people.The prestigious William J. Seymour award was presented during the final moments of the Azusafest celebration to Bishop T.D Jakes's representative. Azusafest is a three-day Gospel music celebration that commemorate the Azusa Street Revival. This year's Azusafest was held in conjunction with the 'AzusaNow' celebration in the Los Angeles Coliseum on Saturday, April 9th!Fred and Wilma Berry carry on the history of Azusa Street as international representatives through the Azusa Street Mission. The organization's mission is to carry the flame of Azusa Street to the next generation throughout the nations of the world. The Azusa Street Mission and Historical Society was founded in 2006 during the 2006 centennial celebration. Next year's Azusafest celebration has been confirmed for April 6,7, 8, 9, 2017. Further info can be obtain at www.azusastreetmission.org or contact us in our office at 323.692.7268.
As Wells Dry Up Across India, Gospel for Asia Issues Call to Prayer Widespread Drought Affects 330 Million on Subcontinent



Contact: 434-426-5310,

pressrelations@gfa.org



WILLS POINT, Texas, April 28, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- Gospel for Asia (GFA) is calling on the world to pray for those experiencing a drought, aggravated by rising temperatures. More than 300 million are affected.



Photo: Villagers in India gather to receive water from a tanker truck during crippling drought



The Indian government has noted that nearly a quarter of the country, more than 250 districts, are facing drought conditions. People are dying and schools are being shut down because of the unbearable conditions.



"Our heartfelt prayers go out to those suffering without water. We desperately need to see the Lord's intervention to help these precious people in their time of need," said K.P. Yohannan, founder and international director of GFA. "The government is moving quickly to assist, but this drought requires the prayers and assistance of all who can help."



In addition to a shortage of potable water, many farmers are unable to grow crops because of the drought, prompting terrible food shortages. In several areas, the government has moved to restrict crowds from gathering around water sources in an effort to keep law and order.



The government is providing water through 2,000 tanker trucks, but many of those unable to access water at all are drinking from contaminated sources, leading to the spread of disease.



Workers supported by GFA will supply 72,000 liters of water per day throughout the month to 12 villages in one District of Maharashtra and one-month rations for 1,000 families in the area. In March, workers drilled two Jesus Wells to supply water to drought-stricken villagers.



"We go to far places to collect water. But when we reach there, we have to wait in long queues and often this waiting will end up in quarrels and fights," said one villager. "Today, our problem is solved and I have no words to convey my gratitude."



In 2015, workers supported by Gospel for Asia installed more than 6,000 Jesus Well throughout Asia.



"We are asking prayer for God's grace and mercy upon the drought-affected families," said Yohannan. "Pray also that God would help our brothers and sisters to be a light in the middle of this situation and that He would fill their hearts with faith to believe that He will meet all of their needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus."



GOSPEL FOR ASIA has  for more than 30 years  provided humanitarian assistance and spiritual hope to millions across Asia, especially among those who have yet to hear the Good News. Last year, this included more than 75,000 sponsored children, free medical services for more than 180,000 people, 6,000 wells drilled, 11,000 water filters installed, Christmas presents for more than 400,000 needy families, and spiritual teaching available in 110 languages in 14 nations through radio ministry.



To schedule an interview with a Gospel for Asia representative, contact pressrelations@gfa.org.

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Abortion Cartel is Hating on Troy Newman and Operation Rescue Contact: Troy Newman , President, 316-841-1700; Cheryl Sullenger, Senior Vice President, 316-516-3034, both with Operation Rescue, info.operationrescue@gmail.com



WICHITA, Kan., April 28, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- Within the past 24 hours, the Abortion Cartel has launched a coordinated attack against Troy Newman and Operation Rescue, calling for Sen. Ted Cruz to "fire" Troy Newman as Co-Chair of his Pro-Lifers for Cruz coalition.



The letter, published by the militant left-wingers at People for the American Way, was signed by PFAW President Michael Keegan, NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens.



The group of radical abortion promoters falsely accuses Newman of "violent extremism" and "history of violent rhetoric and harassment toward women's health providers," among other spurious allegations.



However, Newman and Operation Rescue has a long and fully documented history of peaceful activism and denouncing of violence against abortionists.



What Planned Parenthood and their cohorts call "violent rhetoric" is really a discussion of Old Testament Bible verses taken out of context. What they call "harassment" is peaceful activism that is completely protected by the First Amendment.



But Planned Parenthood and their cronies have a vested interest in attacking Newman. He served as a founding board member of the Center for Medical Progress, which released undercover videos that exposed its involvement in the illegal sale of aborted baby body parts.



In fact, Planned Parenthood sued Newman and CMP head David Daleiden in Federal Court under anti-racketeering laws and the abortion giant is now battling a motion to dismiss their ridiculous suit filed by and Daleiden's attorneys as well as a motion to dissolve an injunction that has kept hundreds of hours of incriminating undercover videos from being released to the public.



Attacking the messenger is the only way they have to try to discredit the hefty volume of evidence against them. This most recent attack is all about manipulating the public's perception against those who exposed Planned Parenthood in order to deflect attention from their own crimes.



It is also a feeble attempt to hurt the presidential candidacy of Sen. Ted Cruz, who they know will seek to enforce the laws against them.



The PFAW attack letter was followed almost instantaneously by articles continuing the attack and repeating their falsehoods, which were published by the Huffington Post, Politico, Right Wing Watch, and even Glamour Magazine, among others.



Not one of these publications bothered to reach out to Newman or Operation Rescue's staff for their response.



Newman's position on abortion-related violence is clear. He denounces violence against abortion providers as well as the violence perpetrated by the Abortion Cartel against innocent babies in the womb and their mothers.



In the meantime, Operation Rescue staff is taking extra precautions at their headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, which has been vandalized numerous times by abortion supporters. Newman and members of Operation Rescue's staff have received hundreds of death threats from the pro-abortion crowd over the years - threats ginned up by the false accusations of abortion supporters who irresponsibly fling their lies across the Internet.



A fuller statement on Operation Rescue's position denouncing abortion violence is easily accessible to anyone who can read here: Operation Rescue's Non-Violent History is a Matter of Public Record.



Operation Rescue is one of the leading pro-life Christian activist organizations in the nation and has become a strong voice for the pro-life movement in America. Click here to support Operation Rescue.

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home World China president issues warning against foreign infiltation through religion

Chinese president Xi Jinping has warned the officials of the nation against foreign infiltration in China by means of religion as well as against religious extremism.

"We must resolutely resist overseas infiltration through religious means and guard against ideological infringement by extremists," Xi said, as quoted by the state-run newspaper People's Daily.

According to the report, he gave the warning during the Chinese Communist Party's conference on religious affairs on Saturday, saying that officials should work to unite the religious and the non-religious people, making sure to guide the former to serve in the interest of the country. Regulation of religious affairs should be in line with the law and the rights of religious people should be protected. Religious groups, meanwhile, should abide by the government's laws, adhere to the leadership of the party, and support the socialist system.

He reportedly said that faith-based organizations should "merge religious doctrines with Chinese culture, abide by Chinese laws and regulations, and devote themselves to China's reform and opening-up drive and socialist modernisation to contribute to the realisation of the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation."

The president expressed that religious groups and their followers should be educated in the core values of the socialist movement, and they must be guided with "ideas of unity, progress, peace and tolerance." Furthermore, he said that they should "interpret religious doctrines in a way that is conducive to modern China's progress and in line with our excellent traditional culture." Religion must not interfere with education, the judiciary, and government administration.

He also told the officials that they should work on the guidance, planning and supervision on religious work, and they must be "as "unyielding Marxist atheists, consolidate their faith, and bear in mind the Party's tenets."

He gave the warning amid criticism that his regime had been more stringent toward churches and religious groups.

The government had previously launched a campaign to remove crosses from structures -- having taken down around 1,200 crosses in Zheijang province in past few years -- a move that has sparked complaints and protests. Moreover, Christian lawyer Zhang Kai, who had defended churches in China, was detained for seven months for allegedly "endangering state security," among other charges, although his confessions on national television is believed to have been made under duress. According to the South China Morning Post, a number of foreign non-government officials have also been arrested, while female government workers were warned through a campaign poster that foreign men might have secret agendas.
home Life Christian author writes about his change of heart on same-sex marriage

Christian author and media personality Michael Coren previously made known his stance regarding same-sex marriage, and he has now opened up about his experiences after the public learned that he is in favor of such union.

In his new book titled "Epiphany: A Christian's Change of Heart and Mind Over Same-Sex Marriage," the 57-year-old host of the former "The Michael Coren Show" discusses how he had a personal change of heart when it comes to gay marriages, and he was condemned for his position regarding the issue. He was not only fired from his newspaper columns, he was also banned from Catholic radio and TV stations, and his speeches were cancelled. He was even accused of cheating his wife and was compared to a murderer and child molester. He also received numerous negative articles and social media posts.

An excerpt of his book, published on Torontoist, says that Coren expected contradiction, but he was surprised by the number of people who attacked him and his views, including Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, teachers, academics, lawyers and others "who have sworn to love God, those who actually know me and my family."

"Yet the more I was attacked the more I saw the hypocrisy of those who claimed to be loving, and as a consequence the more firm I became in defending and speaking up for the gay community," he said. "Let me emphasize that I do not accuse all opponents of equal marriage of being cruel and dishonestaI know many of them to be kind, good peopleabut within the organized church-based opposition to the gay community and equal marriage there is in my experience something worryingly dark and dangerous going on."

One of his critics' positions is that Coren is said to always change his mind and religion, having been born to a Jewish family but becoming a Catholic, then leaving the Roman Catholic Church. To this, he said that he couldn't understand why "learning, evolving, growing, and changing is thought to be such a bad thing, especially from a spiritual and religious point of view." He said he now worships as an Anglo-Catholic.

People have given him many arguments to make him change his mind. However, he pointed out that it is ironic how conservative Christians who were intent on making life difficult for him tended to be the first to complain about persecution for going against the rights of gays.

"The whole experience boosted my empathy, deepened my faith, and gave me a vision and a perspective that I had not previously possessed but it also left a mark and one that, if I am candid, has yet to heal. Perhaps, however, that is for the best," he said.
home US Christian school in Denver to scrap Crusaders name because of love and empathy for neighbors

The Denver Christian School will no longer be known as the Crusaders by the latter part of this year, but some people are against changing the name of the school mascot.

"This has nothing to do with political correctness," said school CEO Todd Lanting in an interview with 9News. "It's got everything to do with love and empathy for our neighbors."

The Crusades were military campaigns during the Medieval period starting in the late 11th century, wherein the pope called people to arms to fight against non-Christians, particularly Muslims who inhabited the Holy Land.

The school has decided that in their 100th year -- and after 65 years of using the name -- they would change it. The names reportedly given by parents, students, and alumni in November has been narrowed down to two choices: Thunder and Trailblazers.

"In our mission, in light of the command to love our neighbors as ourselves, the crusader was an inconsistent, inappropriate symbol for that mission," Lanting said.

Then again YOU barely know me so you wouldn't know anything anyways. I barely know David? Been dating for a year and a half. Where've u been https://t.co/KBr1PXbxdZ  Jenelle Evans (@PBandJenelley_1) December 17, 2016

There are those who are opposed to the name change, however, saying that the move is more about political correctness, while others say that it's "giving in to Muslims." There are also those who want to keep the name because it is part of their identity. A Facebook group called "Crusaders Forever -- HELP!" was created to express their sentiments.

Nonetheless, there are also those who support it. An alumnus named David Youngsma said that when he first heard the news, he was angry. However, he came to think about it and said that the first generation of graduates were not Crusaders, and that the school is not defined by a mascot.

"Whether we are the Trail Blazers or The Thunder makes no difference," he said. "We are still and continue to be The GREAT DC!!
home US Christian student organization sues North Carolina university for restricting free speech and freedom of religion

A Christian student organization is taking legal action against a university in North Carolina for violations against freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal protection, and due process.

The lawsuit filed by Grace Christian Life against the NC State University says that in 2015, the school told them that they are not allowed to approach and discuss religion with other students unless they get a written permission. The permission is a requirement under the university's policies on solicitation.

"College campuses, especially public universities, are supposed to be a marketplace of ideas," said Christian Dysart, legal counsel for the student group, as quoted by ABC11. "And that should mean a free flow of ideas, a spontaneous debate."

Non-profit organization Alliance Defending Freedom is handling the case and Dysart is working with them. Their complaint in behalf of the student organization states that the university's solicitation policty, otherwise known as Speech Permit Policy, "regulates expressive activity on campus." Since the Christian organization's goal "is to give an accurate picture of Jesus and His church to all people everywhere," they initiate discussions on religion and other topics with other students. They also distribute printed materials and conduct small group meetings, worship services, among others.

"The aforementioned policy and practices are challenged on their face and as

applied to Grace," the lawsuit says, and mentions the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1871.

The legal document names W. Randolph Woodson, the Chancellor of the North Carolina State University; Warwick A. Arden, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor; TJ Willis, Associate Director of University Student Centers; and Mike Giancola, Associate Provost as defendants. The lawsuit is requesting, among other things, an injuction to prohibit the Speech Permit Policy from being enforced, as well as damages and other costs.

The lawsuit is requesting a jury trial.
home World Christian woman in Pakistan raped by two Muslims while husband serves in the army

A 30-year old Christian woman from Toba Tak Singh district in Pakistan was raped by two Muslim men while her husband was in Peshawar serving in the army.

"The men treated me like an animal, telling me I was a worthless Christian, but I know my God is a great God," Asia Mushtaq said, as reported by the British Pakistani Christian Association. "When I screamed they told me that they knew my husband was away and that I was unprotected. They threatened to kill my child if I did not comply with their perverse demands."

Mushtaq and her 2-year-old daughter were alone in their house when the two men came at night. The attackers knew that her husband, 32-year-old Shakil Khan, was away. They threatened to harm the child if she refused their demands, and bound her wrists and ankles to the bed before sexually abusing her. When she saw that her struggles were futile and she no longer resisted, they untied her and made her do their bidding for five hours.

"They said Christian women are all whores and they would come back and repeat their debauchery if I ever told anyone," she narrated. "I feel so unclean now, but have done nothing wrong. I want these men to be punished and hope the law will protect me."

Mushtaq reported the incident to the police the following day, and two men, Mohammad Zeeshan and Mohammad Razwan, were apprehended on the same day. According to the BCPA, the First Information Report was filed under the Pakistan Penal Code PPC. 376.

The code says, "When rape is committed by two or more persons in furtherance of common intention of all, each of such persons shall be punished with death or imprisonment for life."

The two men have reportedly committed similar acts against Christian girls before but were never convicted. They are from influential families, The Christian Post reports, and the Pakistani Army has refused to help Mushtaq's husband in pursuing justice.

"The army he serves has offered little or no protection despite threats being made against him and his family," said BCPA chairman Wilson Chowdhry. "It pains me to say this but the complex acts of betrayal leave me feeling that Christians have no place in Pakistan's theocratic society."
home Faith #WeAreN2016 international congress on religious freedom opens in New York

The #WeAreN2016 Congress, an international event centering on religious freedom, will take place at the end of April in New York to highlight the persecution that Christians and other religious minorities face around the world.

"Christians account for 80% of persecuted minorities," the event's website says. "They are victims of the deliberate infliction of conditions of life that are calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part."

The event will be a gathering of experts as well as witnesses to what has been happening to Christians and other religious minorities in different parts of the globe, including Nigeria, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria. Victims of the atrocities in the Middle East and other countries will also take part in the event. They want the world leaders to take action to address issues of violence and mass exodus.

According to the website, the actions of the Islamic State aka Daesh have been branded as genocide by governments and religious leaders, including the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, the United States Congress, and Pope Francis. Christians and other minorities have suffered and are suffering from various acts of cruelty, including being beaten, abducted, extorted, crucified, murdered, beheaded, enslaved, and forced to convert to Islam. Girls and women have been subjected to rape, human trafficking, forced marriages, and other forms of sexual abuse, while kids have been recruited by force. Christian villages, homes, and churches have been destroyed and bombed, and historic religious sites have been vandalized.

Speakers include Archbishop Bernardito Auza, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the UN; Ambassador Ufuk Gokcen, Permanent Observer of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation to the UN; Dr. Thomas F. Farr, Director of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University; Mr. Lars Adaktusson, Swedish Member of the European Parliament; Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus; Nina Shea, Director of the Center for Religious Freedom; among many others.

The #WeAreN2016 Congress on "Defending religious freedom and other human rights: Stopping mass atrocities against Christians and other believers," organized by CitizensGo and Mas Libres and co-sponsored by the organization In Defense of Christians, will be held from April 28 to 30 at the United Nations in New York.
A Christian boy in Pakistan has allegedly been hanged by Muslims who believed he was attached to a Muslim girl who lived opposite his brother's house.

A report in the Pakistan Christian Post cites an investigation from The Voice Society which concluded 18-year-old Qaisar Masih was killed by the girl's family in an attack led by her father, Mohammad Billa.

Previous reports said he had been murdered for resisting drug traffickers, while according to The Voice, local police were treating it as a case of suicide.

Qaisar's family attended the local Roman Catholic Church in Pir Mahal, around 300 kilometers from Lahore. A team from The Voice met the priest there, Fr John Joseph, and members of Qaisar's family.

According to The Voice, the family of Mehwish, the Muslim girl whom Qaisar wished to marry, had warned Qaisar not to have anything to do with her and threatened to kill him.

Qaisar's family denied allegations that he had killed himself. His sister Saira told The Voice's team that his neck was broken and there were marks of resistance on his body, and that he was hanged after being killed. She said: "My brother was innocent, he tried not to contact Mehwish but Mehwish said that she cannot live without him... We told her sisters to ask Mehwish to avoid my brother because her father is a criminal and he will kill my brother. But none of our efforts could save my brother."

Qaisar's mother Rani Sardar said: "We all know who killed my son, he was the youngest, he was the apple of my eye and they killed him brutally and hanged him in front of our house. I only demand justice. I want the accused to be hanged and punished."

The Voice spokeswoman Aneeqa Maria told Christian Today a report was being compiled and that the police's assumption of suicide would be challenged when it was completed.

Christians in Pakistan face systematic discrimination and frequently find themselves the target of intercommunal violence. Politicians and judges who have spoken up their favour have been targeted by extremists and risk assassination.
Adopted son charged with murder after Christian pastor and wife shot dead

A much-loved Christian pastor and his wife have been shot dead in Alabama in the US.

Their adopted son has been charged with murder.

Priceville police officers were called to the home of Pastor William Jeremy Hulsey, 43, of Aldridge Grove Church of Christ, and his Sandra, 37.

They found the couple had been shot dead and they also found the murder weapon, a 9mm handgun, according to Al.com.

Hulsey and his wife were shot many times and their adopted son, Andrew, was quickly identified as a "person of interest" and then charged with capital murder. He is being held at Morgan County Jail.

A neighbour, Freddie Lawrence, told WAAY-TV: "I don't know hardly how to explain how I'm feeling. We were quite surprised. I guess we're still trying to deal with the shock of hearing such tragedy happening to people that you know."

He added: "It's times like these that the community needs to come together and let the community know that they're being loved."

According to a friend of the family, the couple fostered Andrew when he was about 5 or 6 years old and then adopted him. They were unable to have children of their own.

The Midway Church of Christ said in a statement: "The tragic loss of Jeremy and Sandra Hulsey is on our hearts and minds this morning. Jeremy was the preacher for the Aldridge Grove Church. He had also preached at Dancy's Chapel and was an amazing man who was not afraid to stand for the cause of Christ. He and his wife have been such humble servants for the Lord. Please remember their family and the church in your prayers."
Church wins land dispute after pastor's wife bulldozed during church demolition protest

Chinese authorities have ruled that a church in Henan province does own the right to its own land, less than two weeks after the pastor's wife was killed after stepping in front of a bulldozer to protest at the church's demolition.

According to human rights organisation China Aid, a task force declared on Monday that the land is the property of pastor Li Jiangong and Beitou Church in Zhumadian, Henan, and no other individual or organisation may lay claim to it.

Li's wife, Ding Cuimei, suffocated to death when she and her husband stood in front of a bulldozer in an attempt to stop a demolition on April 14. A local developer reportedly wanted to take over the church's property.

Witnesses said the bulldozer pushed the two into a pit, where they were covered in soil. Li was able to escape, but Ding was killed. The couple have three children.

Ding's death provoked an international outcry. China Aid's founder Bob Fu denounced Ding's death as a "serious violation of the rights to life, religious freedom and rule of law".

"Bulldozing and burying alive Ding Cuimei, a peaceful and devout Christian woman, was a cruel, murderous act," he said.

"The Chinese authorities should immediately hold those murderers accountable and take concrete measures to protect the religious freedom of this house church's members."

In response to the authorities' latest ruling, Fu said: "While we are glad to see and commend the local authorities under international pressure acted swiftly and fairly to resolve the church's land with this right decision, we are still deeply concerned about the justice for this family of martyr which is still not done.

"We appeal to the Chinese authorities to hold those criminal perpetrators accountable with a fair investigation and standard judicial process for full justice and with unhindered legal representation."

Beijing-based human rights lawyer Li Dunyong has taken on the case.

The Communist Party is believed to be becoming progressively more suspicious of the influence of Christianity, which is experiencing significant growth in China. Up to 1,700 churches have been demolished or had their crosses removed in Zhejiang province to the east of Henan, and a significant number of pastors and human rights lawyers have been arrested and imprisoned.

Activists believe that Zhejiang is being used by the government as a test-ground, and fear that anti-Christian measures may soon be rolled out in other provinces.

In November, five church leaders were arrested in Henan over accusations they were involved in cult practices.
Franklin Graham slams Obama anew for his mosque visit, says U.S. foundations rooted in Christianity, not Islam

Rev. Franklin Graham has long been criticising President Barack Obama for his seeming preference of Islam over Christianity, and now that the U.S. president has just visited a mosque in an alleged attempt to recast the "warped image of Islam," Graham is speaking his mind once again.

"The foundations of this nation have nothing to do with Islam, but everything to do with the Church of Jesus Christ. Islam cannot save anyone from hell or open the gates of heaven. Only One can do that  Jesus Christ, the Son of God who paid the debt of sin for all mankind by giving His life as a sacrifice on Calvary's cross where He suffered and died for our sins, took our sins to the grave, and on the third day God raised Him triumphantly to life," he writes on his Facebook page.

What's even better about Christianity, according to Graham, is that its Saviour is still alive today whereas "Muhammad is dead. I worship a risen Lord! Islam can't compete with that," the evangelist says.

There are several things that Christians and Muslims actually do not agree upon, Graham says. "Islam denies that God has a Son. They deny that Jesus is God. They do not believe in a Triune God  the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," he says.

Because of these differences, Graham worries that jihadists are going to try to infiltrate America and "kill all those who do not follow Islam and expand the territory of the Islamic State to the entire world."

"We have cause to be alarmed at these stories and at the number of potential terrorists," says Graham. "I can tell you  Islam and Christianity clearly do not worship the same God."
Labour's antisemitism nightmare: Why there's something strangely hopeful about it

The depressing thing about the Labour antisemitism row is that, in 2016, it's still possible to have it.

The heartening thing is that it's a row.

Antisemitism is poisonous, a truly evil manifestation of the darkest instincts of fallen human nature. It never quite goes away; as Conor Cruise O'Brien said, it's a very light sleeper. But the crucial difference between antisemitism before the Second World War and antisemitism after it is that people thought it was normal to hate Jews. Antisemitism was in the social and cultural air we breathed. You can see it in TS Eliot, in GK Chesterton, in vile confected panics about the "swarms" of diseased refugees from Russian pogroms that would overwhelm us if we weren't careful; it was just how it was. Now it isn't, and if someone posts a comment or makes a remark that sounds antisemitic the reaction is panicked denial. Today, no one would willingly admit to being an antisemite.

That's why the row currently engulfing Labour is so toxic. Veteran Labour stalwart Ken Livingstone has just been suspended after an attempted defence of Naseem Shah on the grounds that Hitler was briefly in favour of sending Jews to Palestine before he "went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews" backfired spectacularly. It led to a vitriolic attacks from Labour MP John Mann, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on antisemitism, who accused him of being a "Nazi apologist" (and is being investigated by his chief whip for his behaviour) and shadow Commons leader Chris Bryant, who told the House of Commons he was "sick and tired" of people trying to explain away antisemitism, adding: "Yes, I'm talking to you, Ken Livingstone."

It's right Ken livingstone is suspended. As I said this am he's been explaining away anti-Semitism for far too long. I hope he's expelled.  Chris Bryant MP (@RhonddaBryant) April 28, 2016

Blazing row outside BBC newsroom between Ken Livingstone and John Mann over anti semitism  norman smith (@BBCNormanS) April 28, 2016

Shah herself, MP for Bradford West, was forced to make a humiliating apology after being found to have shared a post on social media advocating the removal of all Israeli Jews to the US. The "transportation costs" would be less than three years of US defence spending, she explained brightly: "Problem solved!" She also used the hashtag #IsraelApartheid above a quote saying "Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal". The apology was not enough; she was suspended too.

It's too late to solve Labour's image problem. Lord Levy, Tony Blair's former fundraiser, has warned Labour has a serious problem with antisemitism, which he believes is more common on the left than on the right. Of Shah, he said he was left "scratching his head with despair as to how people like this can enter our parliament with such a lack of knowledge, discretion and sensitivity". Crossbencher Baroness Neuberger has echoed his concerns; she said the problem was "attached to Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader", and added that it was "an issue with the hard left".

As I write, the dust is still flying and there is very little clarity about who is to blame for what. But here are some of the issues in play.

1. The left is more likely than the right to be deeply critical of Israeli policies toward Palestinians. They see the settlements, the wall, the Palestinians' poverty and the systematic discrimination and they are, entirely understandably, outraged. Many of them have chosen their side. Not all of them consider the stories from the other side. Legitimate criticism of Israel overbalances into illegitimate criticism of Jews. While in the case of other ethnicities this might not matter so much  think of France/French or Germany/Germans  in the case of Jews, it really does. They don't think they're being antisemitic, but when they use language stupidly, they are.

2. This applies to Ken Livingstone. It is not really clear what point he was trying to make. But his bizarre reference to Hitler's flirtation with resettling Jews in Palestine is so utterly offensive that it places him unquestionably on the wrong side of this discourse. Public figures cannot say things like that and expect to get away with it. It's right that he has been suspended and if this means the end of his political career he cannot really complain.

3. Similarly, it was inexcusable for Naseem Shah to make the comments she did. She was clearly, as Lord Levy said, deeply ignorant about the Holocaust and for that there is no excuse. Perhaps it was her enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause that led to her to say what she did, but that's no excuse either; we should be able to have confidence that anyone who aspires to elected office is able to treat their political opponents with respect and understanding.

4. Both Shah and Livingstone have attempted to distance themselves from accusations of antisemitism and refocus discussion on the evils of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory. Their astounding ineptitude and the gross inappropriateness of their remarks has made this impossible. Supporters of Zionism are frequently accused of playing the antisemitism card whenever Israel is criticised. They can now say, "We told you so."

5. While Labour is quite capable of shipwrecking itself without help from the Conservatives, the Tories were happy to help. David Cameron called for Shah's suspension after the news of her indiscretion became public, and it would be naive to think he was motivated entirely by virtuous indignation at what she said. Labour is not doing nearly as badly as pundits predicted, and this is a political gift to its opponents.

It's not too soon to learn some lessons.

First: what's at issue is not the classical antisemitism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its lazy assumptions of a "Jewish question". People who say antisemitic things now are in general not using the term in precisely the same way, though the vocabulary of the past throws a long shadow. The Palestine issue has become entangled with how Jews are seen today, because Israel is a de facto Jewish state and the Jewish homeland. No matter what their own opinions on the question, in the eyes of modern antisemites Jews are somehow implicated in what the government of Israel does  and that's wrong.

So our politicians need to be fanatical about distinguishing between Israel and Jews. They need to be wearisomely careful not to say or think one when they mean the other.

Second: it can't be assumed that every politician understands the Holocaust or the long history of antisemitism. The Holocaust is receding into the distant past and in a few years all the survivors will be dead. MPs are not elected as historians but as citizens. Everyone ought to know all about the Holocaust; in fact most people know a few facts and a number, 6 million. That is not the same as feeling the true force of what was done to a whole people, and without an understanding of that it isn't possible to understand the Israel/Palestine question. There's a serious argument for making it compulsory for MPs to be trained in spotting antisemitic attitudes, not only in other people but in themselves. Without that we will have more Naseem Shahs.

Third: it ought to be possible to understand that both sides in this argument  those who fanatically support the Palestinians and those who lift the cry of antisemitism  are motivated by the same desire. It's the desire for justice, and each is appalled by what they perceive as the injustice experienced by the side they support. Ultimately, the sort of trench warfare that we've seen today, with insults lobbed across a no man's land of misunderstanding, doesn't advance justice for either side  and certainly not for both.

Fourth: there are lessons here for evangelical Christians. Especially in the US, there's a tendency for Christians to pick sides too, and Christian Zionism is particularly strong there. But Christians shouldn't be taking sides with anyone. We shouldn't approve of all that Israel does just because it's Israel, any more than we should excuse everything that Palestinians do if we believe they are oppressed. It's about justice for everyone. Everyone should be treated with dignity and respect, because everyone is a child of God.

It has not been British politics' finest hour. But there is still something hopeful about it. Everyone recoils with horror from being thought an antisemite, and that's an advance. People get genuinely angry, and that's a rebuke to the cynics who don't believe in politics or politicians. Real things get talked about. We discover that our political leaders care about something other than their careers. Even those who say unbelievably stupid things are probably not bad people underneath.

Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
Malaysian man finally allowed to embrace Christianity after 33 year court battle

It took 33 years but a Malaysian man was finally granted permission by the country's High Court to renounce Islam and embrace Christianity.

Based on the decision handed down by Justice Datuk Yew Jen Kie, the first and second respondents of the case - Sarawak Islamic Religious Department and the Sarawak Islamic Council, were ordered to issue a letter of release from Islam to the petitioner whose original name Azmi Mohamad Azam Shah, reported The Borneo Post.

The court also ordered the National Registry to change his name to Roneey Anak Rebit and update his religion from Islam to Christian.

The Justice cited the provisions of Article 11 of the Federal Constitution, which grants freedom of religion.

Roneey converted to Islam when he was only 10 years and under the care of his parents, and therefore could not be considered a person professing his religion at the time. Upon reaching adulthood, he chose to convert to Christianity and was baptised in 1999.

Before the court ruled in favour of the petitioner after the decades long deliberation, the first and second respondents of the case already agreed to issue a Letter of No Objection to Come out from Islam to Roneey. However, the third respondent, the director general of the National Registration Department, sought for the same order to come from the Syariah Court.

However, the court ruling, in citing that the petitioner's conversion happened at the time he was a minor, said that he should not fall under the ruling of the Syariah Court because his conversion to Islam was not a choice that he made for himself.

The petitioner was not present at the time of the ruling as he was already working overseas at the time.
Melissa Joan Hart: 'Jesus shouldn't be an uncomfortable name to say'

Christians should be free to talk about Jesus without fear of it making others uncomfortable, Melissa Joan Hart, star of God's Not Dead 2, has said.

In an interview with Metro, the 40-year-old actress said: "In the past few years, I've been taking my religion seriously, taking Bible study and praying. I find that if you say 'Jesus', it makes people feel uncomfortable instead of feeling love and peace. It's very unfortunate.

"The idea with the movie is that Jesus shouldn't be an uncomfortable name to say... Whether or not you believe he is the Messiah, Jesus started a huge movement that changed our world. Why is it not OK to talk about that?"

God's Not Dead 2, out in the UK on Friday, stars Hart as a teacher who is taken to court for answering a question about Jesus in the classroom. It follows God's Not Dead, in which an atheist professor challenges a Christian student to prove the existence of God.

Hart told Metro that the growth of her personal faith has been "sort of a snowball effect". She grew up Catholic, but later converted to Presbyterianism along with her husband.

He is "really proud" of the film, she said and added: "He thinks it's an important story".

The movie franchise has faced some criticism, however. In March David AR White, the film's producer and actor denied accusations the film is "full of fake Christian persecution".

"It's an interesting thing, because, if it wasn't real, why do they get so offended by it? I don't think it would annoy people if it wasn't true," he told The Blaze.
Northern Ireland: Catholic bishops tell voters to avoid pro-abortion candidates

Catholic bishops in Northern Ireland have urged voters away from candidates who may support a change in the region's conservative abortion laws.

In a direct intervention on the regional elections next week, the Irish Catholic bishops' conference published a "pastoral reflection" for the faithful. The 6,000 word document told voters to avoid candidates who sought a change in the law on same-sex marriage or abortion.

Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK where 1967 abortion act and the 2013 same-sex marriage act does not apply.

The statement said: "The moral issue here is not whether what is proposed is abortion 'on demand' or some form of so-called 'limited' abortion.

"From a moral point of view, there is no such things as 'limited' abortion. Abortion is always the deliberate and intentional taking of an innocent, vulnerable human life, and a direct breach of the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill'."

In Northern Ireland abortion is only allowed where the mother's life is in direct danger. The disparity between other parts of the UK has led to a number of prominent cases where women have travelled to England to have an abortion.

A number of women in Northern Ireland face prosecution after buying abortion pills online.

The bishops denied their stance was "mere religious doctrine". They said: "The principle of the inviolability of innocent human life is the most fundamental of all moral principles. It is the basis upon which every human right we enjoy as persons is predicated. This is not only a religious doctrine, but a universal human value upon which our very freedom and dignity as a person rests."

The extensive document also asked candidates to stand against any attempt to legalise same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland. The bishops quoted Pope Francis as it reiterated the Church's stance that there are "no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and family".

The statement urged candidates to "reflect on the importance of the family based on marriage between one man and one woman, as the foundation and cornerstone of society and therefore deserving of special recognition and protection in policy and law".
Persecuted Christians in Eritrea: 'The guards offered to let us go if we renounced Jesus. We said no'

More than 300 Christians are believed to be languishing in Eritrean jails, while tens of thousands have fled the country's brutal regime.

Located in the horn of Africa, Eritrea is run under a one party political system  President Isaias Afwerki of the People's Front for Democracy and Justice party has been in power since independence in 1993, and the formation of other political groups is forbidden. For more than a decade, the government has been persecuting Christians, who make up around half of the population, and other vulnerable groups. According to persecution charity Release International, all evangelical and independent churches have been closed, and many Christians tortured for their faith.

Last year, Eritreans were the second largest group to risk the perilous journey across the Mediterranean in the hope of a better life in Europe. The largest group were from Syria, where a five-year civil war is dragging on.

As of December 2015, however, more than 130,000 Eritreans were living as refugees in neighbouring Ethiopia, according to the UNHCR.

Release International visited a refugee camp in Ethiopia, where Christians who had fled Eritrea revealed the extent of the brutal treatment they experienced.

"There is no law and no justice. When I was living in Eritrea I was arrested because of my Christian faith. That's why I left. In Eritrea almost every Christian faces imprisonment," one refugee, Dawit, told researchers.

He spent more than a month in prison, and also in a hard labour camp. He says he was tortured, and forced to sleep every night with his hands and feet lashed together behind his back.

 Eritrea is like a giant prison... like North Korea, but in Africa.  - Dr Berhane Asmelash

Other refugees shared stories of horrific treatment at the hands of Eritrean authorities. Dr Berhane Asmelash, a former prisoner and victim of torture, described prisoners being tied up and hung from trees. One form of hanging is known as the 'Jesus Christ', he said, because the victim looks as though they are on a crucifix.

"Eritrea is like a giant prison," Asmelash added. "The country is filled with jails, concentration camps and prisons. And it is like North Korea, but in Africa."

Elsa fled Eritrea after her sister was beaten to death by prison guards. "We were kept in underground cells. Sometimes the guards put us both in a metal shipping container to torture us. This became so hot during the day and then in the night it became freezing cold," she recalled.

 The guards offered to let us go, but only if we renounced our faith in Jesus. We said no.  - Elsa, Eritrean refugee

"We didn't get much to eat and there was no medical treatment. The guards offered to let us go, but only if we renounced our faith in Jesus. We said no."

One night the guards took it in turns to beat Elsa and her sister. "I will never forget hearing the screams of my sister," she said. "I never saw her again".

In June 2015, a year-long UN inquiry into human rights in Eritrea found the "systematic violation of an array of human rights on a scope and scale seldom witnessed elsewhere in the world."

A damning report criticised the country's "pervasive control system used in absolute arbitrariness to keep the population in a state of permanent anxiety".

"In its determination to safeguard its own continued existence, the Government has proceeded to establish a system by which individuals in society are silenced and isolated through the organized repression of the freedoms of opinion, expression, assembly, association and religion," the report said.

"Pervasive control systems and heavy consequences for perceived deviant behaviours...have created an environment of self-censorship whereby individuals no longer trust anyone  not even their own family."

Though human rights abuses affect almost everyone except the powerful elite in Eritrea, people of faith are at particular risk. In May 2002, the government announced that it formally recognised just four religious denominations: the Orthodox Church, which is the largest Christian community in the country, the Catholic Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church and Sunni Islam. Every other group was told to apply for registration, and had to adhere to very stringent terms. Over a decade later, and not a single further denomination has been accredited.

According to the UN, even those religious communities that are accredited are "nevertheless to varying degrees targeted by restrictions and attacks by the Government."

"Interference in religious structures and affairs is rampant," the report said. "Religious materials are confiscated. Adherents are arbitrarily arrested, ill-treated or subjected to torture during their detention, and prisoners are coerced to recant their faith. Many religious followers have been killed or have disappeared."

The UN Commission concluded that the Eritrean government "perceives religion as a threat to its existence and has set about controlling it and its expressions."

Release International is supporting Eritrean refugees by helping them to set up small businesses in the camps.

Temesgen has set up a photography shop. He takes and edits pictures in the camp, and has them printed in the local town. "This shop has really helped us to support the family. We can live a normal life, providing for ourselves," he said.

"This refugee camp may seem like a wilderness but we feel God's presence and we are together.

"The greatest thing now is that we can express our faith openly."

Deborah, another Eitrean refugee, urged Christians around the world to pray for those suffering for their faith.

"Please pray for protection for us as we share our faith under enormous pressure. Pray for wisdom and for the Holy Spirit to lead us. Pray for Christian prisoners that God would strengthen their faith while in jail. Pray too for good health in spite of the terrible conditions and that they would be released soon. Pray for the church here to be strong in faith, not to be in fear but to keep on declaring the kingdom of God and sharing the gospel with others," she said.

"Pray for justice to come to Eritrea."
Politician slammed over 'more Muslims than Christians in Europe' comments

A leading anti-Islamophobia charity has criticised a senior politician's comments on the number of Muslims in Europe as "misleading and irresponsible".

Fiyaz Mughal, director of Tell Mama, told The Independent: "The comments by the Belgian Justice Minister, Koen Geens, are not only misleading, they are irresponsible, given his position and given the fact that he is the Justice Minister in charge of a core ministry.

"He needs to understand that statements like this merely add fuel to the far right and to tensions."

Geens told the EU Parliament: "In Europe, we will very soon have more practising Muslims than practising Christians." The reason was not "because there are too many Muslims", he said, but because Christians practise their faith less.

Europe had not yet realised this, he added. "But this is the reality."

He said the EU needed to understand the population shift that is taking place, and warned against making all Muslims the enemy.

"That would really cause problems," he said.

Rather, people should look closely to identify terrorists and their supporters.

There are currently between 600,000 and 700,000 Muslims in Belgium.

"The vast majority of them share our values," said Geens.

A European Commission study in 2012 showed that in 2012, more than seven in ten of the EU population were Christians, and just two per cent Muslims.

Christianity is still the world's largest religion.

However, according to a more recent Pew Research study, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world and if present rates continue, the number of Muslims will equal the number of Christians soon after 2050.

The fast growth rate is due to differences in fertility rates, numbers of young people and numbers converting. By 2050, the number of Muslims around the world, 2.8 billion, or 30 per cent of the population, could equal the number of Christians, 2.9 billion, or 31 per cent.

All of the world's major religions are poised for growth in the coming decades with one exception - Buddhism. Atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion will make up a declining share of the world's total population, the study showed.
Practising Muslims will surpass Christians in Europe very soon, says Belgian minister

Belgian Minister Koen Geens has warned that the number of practising Muslims in Europe will "very soon" surpass those of practising Christians.

Speaking before the European Union Parliament that hears the Brussels terrorist attack, Geens said the stark reality is attributed not just to mass immigration and migration crisis but also to the fact that Christians nowadays are refusing to practise their faith.

"That is not because there are too many Muslims, it is because Christians are generally less practising. Europe does not realise this, but this is the reality," Geens told the European Community, reports The Sun.

According to a 2012 data from the European Commission, 72 percent of people in the European Union identify themselves as Christian but many reportedly do not actively practice their faith.

In contrast, the Muslim population tends to be more observant and devout, said the report, according to Breitbart.

Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Jan Jambon, meanwhile, warned against Europeans "making an enemy of Islam," adding that doing such is "the worst thing we can do,"

"I've said a thousand times, the worst thing we can do is to make an enemy of Islam."

"To make an enemy of all of those people, we really will be creating problems. We need to see who the terrorists are, who supports the terrorists, what networks are there to support them," said Jambon.

The deputy chief stressed: Europe "must get all the rest of the Muslims on our side not working against us."

There are currently 600,000 to 700,000 Muslims in Belgium, and the overwhelming majority of those people reportedly share European values.

Earlier this month, Jambon claimed that some Belgian Muslims were "dancing" in the streets after the Brussels attacks that killed 32 people.

He also accused residents of Molenbeek district of attacking police officers when they were carrying out anti-terror raids last month, the Daily Mail reports.
Richard Dawkins says Christianity is world's best defence against radical Islam

Despite spending years criticising Christianity, well-known atheist Richard Dawkins is now admitting that Christianity is much better than Islam.

Dawkins even conceded that "Christianity may actually be our best defence against aberrant forms of religion that threaten the world," according to The Gospel Herald.

Dawkins noted that Christianity, unlike Islam, does not make use of violent methods to fulfill its teachings. "There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death," he said.

He admitted that he has "mixed feelings" concerning the decline of Christianity, because this faith-based group might just be "a bulwark against something worse."

The atheist reasoned that he constantly attacked Christianity in the past simply because it is the religion he is most familiar with, having attended Christian schools while growing up. Even though he was born in Africa, Dawkins and his family moved to England when he was nine years old.

His disdain towards the religion might have stemmed from the sexual abuse he encountered in school, although he used to say: "Horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place."

Because of his parents' deep love of science, Dawkins followed suit and pursued the field of biology. Even though Dawkins appears to be a logical-thinking scientist, the atheist argues that he is often misunderstood by the media and the public.

"I seem to be perceived as aggressive and strident and I don't actually think I am strident and aggressive. What I think is that we have all become so accustomed to seeing religion ring-fenced by a wall of special protection that when someone delivers even a mild criticism of religion, it's heard as aggressive when it isn't. I like to think I'm more thoughtful and reflective," he said.
Spotify news: Premium accounts leaked online, company denies security breach

Hundreds of Spotify premium accounts have ended up online, complete with details: username, password, account type, email addresses and other information. However, the Swedish streaming company denied that there has been a security breach and user information is secure and intact.

It is not clear yet If this is a new incident with the company or the result of a previous hacking that happened before. In order to check if the accounts are real or simply bogus accounts, TechCrunch decided to get in touch with Spotify members via the email addresses that were found online. Several replied back to their query, confirming that they are members. The list also shows that it is not only specific to U.S.-based accounts, members from other parts of the world were also on the list.

The report also added that they have reached out to Spotify to give light to the matter, with the company denying any security breach.

"Spotify has not been hacked and our user records are secure. We monitor Pastebin and other sites regularly. When we find Spotify credentials, we first verify that they are authentic, and if they are, we immediately notify affected users to change their passwords," the Sweden-based company's official reply to the query says.

However, the email respondents also said more. They have experienced that unusual things had happened to their accounts before the online magazine contacted them. Songs have been added to their saved song list and they are 100 percent sure that they did not add the song. Another member noticed "recently played" audio tracks which are unfamiliar, prompting the member to change the Spotify password immediately and to log out all devices.

The list was posted on April 23, but email respondents mentioned that they have noticed unusual things with their streaming accounts days before the they were contacted by the publication.

It is also worth noting that many users use the same password on several websites, thus, their Facebook, Skype, Uber and even bank accounts have been tampered.

Online security experts have been reminding internet users for quite a time already that each online account must have a different password for such issues similar to this recent Spotify security breach.

Spotify hasn't issued any official statement aside from what TechCrunch has received.
Threatened with throat-slitting and slaughter: Christian persecution in Swedish asylum centres

Christians and other religious minorities are being persecuted in Swedish asylum centres, and provisions must be made for their safety, campaigners say.

According to the Swedish Evangelical Alliance, one Christian refugee in Kalmar, south-eastern Sweden, was threatened with "slaughter", and having his throat cut by a man who claimed to have fought with jihadist groups in Syria. A Pakistani Christian couple moved into a church when the husband's name was sprayed on a wall near their room calling for his death. A separate group of asylum seekers in Kalmar were forced to leave their accommodation when their harassment escalated.

"No one wants a society where people are divided up on the basis of religious beliefs, sexuality, ethnicity, or nationality, but this is an urgent situation that must be resolved," said Jacob Rudolfsson, deputy secretary-general of the Swedish Evangelical Alliance.

"Basic protection should be provided by the state, but when the state fails to protect Christian asylum seekers, Christian organizations must take action."

In a letter dated March 14, Patriarch Ignatuis Aphrem II, Supreme Head of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church, urged Swedish authorities to intervene.

He said he was "dismayed" by reports of Christians being harassed while in asylum accommodation. "This situation does not reflect the culture of the peaceful and loving Swedish people," he wrote.

"Christians do not live in refugee camps in the Middle East, because, there too, they are persecuted by Muslim extremists. Because of that, most of the time, they are not entitled to aid from the UN. We, the Churches and community-based organizations, are doing our best to help them.

"To witness that they are once more being persecuted at Swedish asylum accommodations make[s] us very sad. We expect the Swedish Government and the concerned authorities to immediately make sure that these people are safe.

"A distinct asylum accommodation for Christians and other asylum seekers is essential. We appeal to you to set off such a place and give the word asylum back its true meaning of protection and safety."

In his response, director general of the Swedish Migration Board, Anders Danielsson, highlighted Sweden's long tradition of helping those fleeing war and persecution.

In 2015, the country welcomed more than 160,000 asylum seekers, the majority of whom were from Syria and other war zones. As of March 2016, there were around 180,000 people enrolled in the Swedish reception system, nearly 100,000 of whom were staying in accommodation provided by the Swedish Migration Agency.

Danielsson admitted that the unprecedented number of refugees coming to Sweden means standards of accommodation had been lowered.

"When so many, sometimes traumatized, asylum seekers are housed close together for a long time, there is an increased risk of tensions and conflicts between individuals," he said. "We are very much aware that asylum seekers sometimes bring with them conflicts that exist in their home country, such as conflicts involving Christian minorities or other vulnerable groups, and we look very seriously at the need to ensure that everyone feels safe and secure in their living environment."

However, calls for separate housing for Christians and other vulnerable groups "would go against principles and values that are central to Swedish society and our democracy," he said. "It would be considered a great failure having to resort to segregation as a measure."

Despite this, the Migration Board is in the process of carrying out an action plan to improve conditions for asylum seekers, Danielsson added, and individuals and families experiencing specific harassment may be moved to alternative accommodation.

"We are currently examining the possibilities of offering a limited range of special housing for individuals that feel unsafe where they are staying due to the behaviour of others. These facilities would be open for anyone in need of a safer place regardless of nationality of religious beliefs," he said. "The safeguarding of the right to asylum for those facing persecution for religious or other reasons is at the heart of what we do at the Swedish Migration Agency. We will continue to make every effort to provide safe reception conditions and ensure protection for those in need of sanctuary."

Morgan Johnson, the Swedish Minister of Justice, also wrote to Patriarch Aphrem to assure him that "bullying or harassment based on someone's faith, gender, sexuality or race, is not tolerated in any way" in reception facilities.

"The Migration Agency is working to increase the amount of available housing and I hope this will ease the tensions," he added.

Nuri Kino, founder of A Demand for Action (ADFA), a campaign group working for the rights of religious minorities in the Middle East, said not enough has yet been done.

In a recent article for Sweden's daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, he branded the situation at a number of shelters "alarming", and said many refugees had been forced to flee. "It's mostly Christians, Atheists, Druze and moderate Muslims that are being discriminated [against] by Islamic radicals," he wrote.

"We have to speak openly about what is happening in our country... before it's too late. I am not in favour of further polarization but there are lives at stake if we do not speak up. Innocent people are victims here, Christians, Muslims and others."

Kino is therefore leading charges to open accommodation for Christian asylum seekers who do not feel safe in existing facilities. Speaking to Christian Today, Kino said he felt compelled to campaign on the matter after being contacted by two women who were being threatened. They said they were told to convert to Islam and cover their heads by other asylum seekers, and they and their children were called "kuffar"  infidels. Eventually, a Muslim family moved into their room, forcing them to sleep in a common area without any privacy.

Kino began writing in Svenska Dagbladet in December, and was immediately inundated with hundreds of texts, emails and messages on social media. "I got more than 400 messages, all from people who were working in shelters, asylum seekers themselves, people from the authorities, the police, the migration agency, even from parliamentarians, saying: we're aware of this, and we need to get a grip on the situation."

Since then, the issue has been debated in parliament and government a number of times, though no concrete plans have been put in place. "It's still uncertain," Kino said. "Still people are being harassed and beaten up, it's a mess... It's very sad. Sweden cannot protect them as it looks like today. Many are Christians, and also moderate Muslims are treated the same way."

There is some good news on the ground, though. Kino said while the Migration Agency has not yet taken action from the top, people who work in the shelters are trying to deal swiftly with the problem. Some have employed people from the Middle East who understand the situation better, and some individuals are even paying private rent for families who have been mistreated.

"I believe it's not that the government or Migration Agency don't want to take action, it's just that it would be too much of a failure for the Swedish multicultural identity. It's too much to bear," he said.

"But until we get to grips with the situation, we need to make everyone feel safe. End of discussion. It's been debated too much, too many times, and it's enough now. We need to take action."

"It is obvious that we are not able to protect them at the existing accommodations," Kino said. "We cannot live on with the romantic idea of a harmonious mosaic of religions and ethnicity in our accommodations for asylum seekers, that time is past."
Three children among more than 27 dead as hospital hit by strikes in Aleppo

At least three children are among more than 27 dead after an air strike hit a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

The bombing was part of new wave to hit rebel-held areas of the city. At least 30 more civilians have been killed by the strikes, which local sources said were either carried out by Russian or Assad government's war planes. The Syrian military has said it did not target the hospital.

Violence has escalated in Syria in recent days and on Monday Christian and Kurdish neighbourhoods in Aleppo were attacked. At least eight children died in the fighting in the district of Sulaymaniyah.

Over the past six days as violence has increased, government air strikes have killed 91 civilians in rebel held areas and 49 have been killed by rebel shelling in government held areas, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Aleppo is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said from Geneva.

"Wherever you are, you hear explosions of mortars, shelling and planes flying over," said Valter Gros in a statement.

"There is no neighbourhood of the city that hasn't been hit. People are living on the edge. Everyone here fears for their lives and nobody knows what is coming next."

The increasing violence helped to undermine UN-led peace talks in recent weeks. A cessation of hostilities agreement has unravelled and fighting has resumed on numerous fronts in western Syria.

The hospital was supported by the charity Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). One local activist told the BBC buildings around the hospital were also hit.

"It was an air strike by two rockets, heavy rockets from a Russian air strike," he said.

"Near the hospital one building on five floors just crumbled and just crashed down and we don't know how many dead will be under these ruins."

An MSF spokesman told the BBC that Aleppo's last remaining paediatrician had been killed in the strike.

He said: "He kept it going, was always there and always worried about the needs of the people. He was honest and very committed. He worked in conditions you cannot even begin to imagine."

The Syrian state media has made no mention of the attack but said 14 had been killed on Thursday by rebel shelling in government held areas.

More than 270,000 have been in Syria's ongoing civil war which has torn the country apart since 2011. Millions have been forced to flee.

Additional reporting by Reuters.
Vietnam: Wife of detained pastor 'beaten and tortured' by local authorities

The Vietnamese government must investigate allegations that a Christian human rights campaigner has been tortured by local authorities, campaigners have said.

A joint statement by more than 30 faith-based organisations, human rights NGOs and individuals, including Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), Amnesty International and Vietnam's Association for Promotion of Freedom of Religions and Beliefs, urged immediate action.

Tan Thi Hong, a member of the Vietnamese Women for Human Rights, says officials in Gia Lai province used violence to block her from attending a meeting with the US ambassador at large on international religious freedom, David Saperstein, on March 30.

She alleges she was beaten and forced to return home. The meeting later took place there, under the supervision of local authorities. Saperstein confirmed that Hong had been blocked from entering the hotel where the meeting was scheduled to take place.

Two weeks later, on April 14, Hong says she was abducted from her home and beaten and interrogated for three hours by "plainclothes agents".

She says she was pinned down while being repeatedly kicked, and officers tried to extract information about her meeting with Saperstein. She sustained significant injuries to her head, knees, legs, hands and feet.

Hong is married to pastor Nguyen Cong Chinh, who is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2012 of "undermining national unity". He had advocated for religious freedom and democracy in Vietnam.

The joint statement condemned Hong's treatment.

"We condemn what appears to have been reliably established as the torture of Mrs Hong and call on the Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to initiate a prompt, independent, impartial and effective investigation into the allegations of torture, prosecute any identified perpetrator, and provide Mrs Hong with proper medical care," it said.

The statement also brands Pastor Nguyen's imprisonment "unjust".

"He was arbitrarily detained and hailed for simply and peacefully practising his faith and exercising his right to freedom of religion and belief. His peaceful activities in criticizing government policies cannot justify his continuous imprisonment and the constant harassment of his family.

"We respectfully ask that your government immediately and unconditionally free Pastor Nguyen Cong Chinh and show respect for international human rights law and standards."

Chief executive of CSW, Mervyn Thomas, said: "We fully support this statement calling on Vietnam's government to investigate allegations of torture of Tran Thi Hong. CSW continues to receive reports of harassment, intimidation and violence against religious communities not registered with the authorities; we further note various violations against bloggers, religious leaders, lawyers and activists seeking to promote human rights in Vietnam.

"We call on the government to investigate these deeply concerning reports of violence against Tran Thi Hong, and to release Pastor Nguyen Cong Chinh and other prisoners detained for defending the freedom of religion or belief and other human rights".

Vietnam's constitution guarantees freedom of religion in principle, but, like China, the Communist government tightly controls independent religious practice. According to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, it represses "individuals and religious groups it views as challenging its authority", including independent Buddhists, Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, and Christians.

Of the 93.4 million Vietnamese population more than half identifies with Buddhism. Roman Catholics make up 7 per cent, Cao Dai between 2.5 and 4 per cent; Hoa Hao, 1.5 to 3 per cent; and Protestants, 1 to 2 per cent.
Welsh elections: What do the parties say about faith?

A week today voters in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will go to the polls to decide their regional governments.

Scotland is considered a done deal with the only question being whether the Tories will beat Labour to second place behind the SNP. Wales is more interesting debate with Plaid Cymru and the Conservatives both pushing hard after 17 years of Labour rule.

Health and tax have dominated the debate so far but little has been mentioned of faith engagement or attitude to religion.

Christian Today has taken a look at the manifestos of four biggest parties standing for the Welsh National Assembly. Here is what the parties say about their attitude to faith groups.

Labour

A Labour spokesman told Christian Today their manifesto "confirms we will 'maintain the valuable work of the Communities Faith Forum' which is chaired by the First Minister".

The Faith Communities Forum is an initiative begun under the Labour assembly to give direct access between faith leaders and the first minister. The forum includes two representatives from Baha'I; Buddhist; Hindu; Jewish; Muslim and Sikh faiths. Christian representatives on the forum are from the Evangelical Alliance Wales, Church in Wales, Roman Catholic Church in Wales, the Free Church Council and Churches Together in Wales (CYTUN).

A Welsh Labour spokesman told Christian Today the fact the forum is chaired by the first minister "shows how seriously Welsh Labour takes its responsibility to involving all communities in Wales in decision making".

Conservative

The Conservative manifesto includes a seven-point plan to "engage with faith communities".

Darren Millar, Welsh Conservative Clwyd West candidate, told Christian Today faith communities make an "enormous contribution to Welsh life".

He added: "The next Welsh Government must utilise the levers at its disposal to build upon this and offer support.

"For these reasons, Welsh Conservatives felt it was important to include a dedicated section in our manifesto outlining how we will engage with faith communities."

Dan Boucher, the Conservative candidate for South West Wales, told Christian Today the inclusion of seven explicit commitments "demonstrates the Party takes the place of faith communities in Wales very seriously".

He added the Conservative manifesto "stands in stark contrast to that of the other main parties" which he accused of making a "passing reference to religion".

Plaid Cymru

Plaid Cymru translates as the Party of Wales and was thrust to prominence outside Wales when leader Leanne Wood took part in national television debates for the 2015 general election.

Plaid's manifesto makes few references to religion. It promises to increase support to tackle extremism but makes no mention of churches or working with faith groups.

Their manifesto also declares full citizenship for "everyone who lives in Wales, whatever their language, the colour of their skin, their religion, their roots, their gender or sexual orientation".

Christian Today contacted Plaid Cymru for comment.

UKIP

UKIP have enjoyed a surge in the polls and are predicted to come close behind the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru.

Their manifesto makes a strong reference to religious tolerance and says it is "committed to protecting religious freedoms for all believers in the UK". The manifesto goes on to "challenge the 'culture of offence' as it risks cutting down free speech. We will not condone faith position which is itself intolerant and refuses to recognise the human rights of others."

Liberal Democrats

The setback suffered by the Lib Dems at the 2015 general election has hit the Welsh party too and polls predict they will come fifth behind UKIP.

Their manifesto mentions plans to boost faith tourism and plans to attract more visitors to places of worship.

In relation to inclusion, the Lib Dems to give everyone equal opportunity "regardlss of gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or disability".

Otherwise there is no mention of faith, religion or church engagement in the Lib Dem manifesto.

The Liberal Democrats were contacted for comment.
Texas is going to the lagoons: Another city plans to incorporate Crystal Lagoon's technology to create a residential community/water park.

The Dallas Morning News' Steve Brown reports construction has begun on the City of Rowlett's planned $1 billion Bayside development project along Interstate 30. The project, coming at 262 acres, will feature a resort hotel, marina and thousands of residential units.
Houston's superstar really knows how to keep the Beyhive thirsty. Just a few days after the debut of her "Lemonade" visual album she launched a much-anticipated world tour. And stylistically, she pulled out all the stops.

Her opening night in Miami has received generally positive reviews, not too dissimilar from the appreciation for her music from the Lemonade album. " 'Lemonade' is a visually stunning endeavor as it elevates video into art, lyrics into poetry, and the personal into political and back again," said an editorial on HoustonChronicle.com.
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Residents who live and work along the newly opened segments of the Grand Parkway won't have to wait long for fire protection or ambulance service if there's an emergency.

Since March, the Tomball Fire Department, the Spring Volunteer Fire Department and Cypress Creek EMS have all opened new state-of-the-art stations that will provide a faster emergency response to areas of the Grand Parkway between U.S. 290 and Interstate 69.

"The staff is doing very well, and the station is performing better than I expected," said Tomball Fire Chief Randy Parr. "We are finding that with the Grand Parkway, we can move around and get to various parts of our district much fasterthan we could from station two or station one."

The Tomball Fire Department began officially operating out of Fire Station No. 5 on March 21.

The new station, located on Telge Road three miles south of FM 2920, was built by Harris County Emergency Service District 15 and is being leased to the city of Tomball.

The Tomball City Council voted in December to accept a 15-year service agreement with Harris County Emergency Services District 15 that the city has maintained since 2005.

As part of the contract, the emergency services district will put $260,000 toward three full-time driver operator positions to staff the new station, Parr said.

The station - which will serve the new and growing subdivisions of Willow Creek Ranch Estates, Hayden Lakes, Pine Country and Wildwood at Oakcrest - also will provide a quicker mutual aid response to the Rose Hill Volunteer Fire Department.

The first real test for the new station happened during the April 18 floods.

"They were horrifically busy during the flooding, and that station was actually used for a bunch of mutual aid calls with Cy-Fire Volunteer Fire Department, Cypress Creek Volunteer Fire Department and Klein Volunteer Fire Department," Parr said. "It was very slow going, and the water was highFrom my perspective, (the new station) is working out better than expected for having it open for about six weeks."

Meanwhile, the Spring Volunteer Fire Department and Cypress Creek recently hosted the grand opening of their joint emergency services station in Springwoods Village.

The 24,000 square-foot facility, which is separated by a fire wall, is occupied by Spring Fire Station No. 70; the ninth station in the Spring Volunteer Fire Department, and Cypress Creek EMS Station No. 513.

Since the Spring Volunteer Fire Department and Cypress Creek EMS are both members of two separate emergency service districts, each of the ESD's funded the construction of its respective stations.

Spring Fire Station No. 70 is a 19,569 square-feet and include five apparatus bays, living quarters, a training room, work rooms, a decontamination room, turn-out gear room and a physical wellness area, and was built at a cost of $6 million by Emergency Service District 7.

Shannon Stryk, district chief for Spring VFD, said the department moved quickly to ensure the new station was fully occupied and fully equipped.

"We added some full time (staff) to supplement the volunteers; we purchased a 100-foot tower, a brand new pumper and an all-terrain vehicle that's also housed there," Stryk said.

Brad England, executive director for Cypress Creek EMS, said the original plan called for a grand opening in October 2015, but heavy spring rains in 2015 caused delays and a reduction in the budget by Emergency Service District 11, which funded the $1.9 million EMS portion of the project, pushed the opening back several months.

"The crews have actually been operating out of there for about a month," England said. "We had the staff in place by last November because it takes several months to train them, and get everyone hiredThe manpower was there, the station just wasn't ready."

Cypress Creek EMS No. 513, located at 22310 Springwood Village Parkway, occupies 4,794 square-feet of the station and features two double-deep ambulance bays, living quarters, a work room and storage areas.

Cypress Creek EMS covers 177 square miles in north Houston, and provides EMS support to volunteer fire departments in Spring, Klein, Cypress Creek, Champions and is on call to assist other emergency entities when needed.

New stations

The Tomball Fire Department, the Spring Volunteer Fire Department and Cypress Creek EMS have all opened new stations that will provide a faster response time to areas along the Grand Parkway, and the surrounding area. The stations are located at:

Spring Fire Station No. 70

22306 Springwoods Village Parkway, Spring

Cypress Creek EMS 513

22310 Springwoods Village Parkway, Spring

Tomball FD Station No. 5

Telge Road, Tomball
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As Montgomery County's population continues to grow, the YMCA of Greater Houston has announced plans to build its seventh county location in the southeast near the newly opened segment of the Grand Parkway.

The state-of-the-art facility is estimated to cost $13 million to build and construction could start as early as 2018.

The Holcomb Family YMCA, named after Jim Holcomb, who donated the 10 acres the new center will be built on, as well as $500,000 toward the construction, will be located on a wooded site in the Falls at Imperial Oaks subdivision, overlooking a 100-acre lake.

As the county has boomed, much of the growth has been concentrated in the southeast region, prompting Conroe Independent School District to allocate $234 million to building a new high school, intermediate school and two elementary schools in the new YMCA's service area.

"A YMCA is vital to this growing area. It will provide thousands of young people and families a safe and nurturing place to play, learn and grow," said Jim Holcomb in a statement. "By giving families access to programs that promote youth development, healthy living and social responsibility, the YMCA will make this community even stronger."

The Holcomb Family YMCA will offer after school care, day camps and personal wellness programs, and will be walking distance from one of the planned elementary schools.

"We want to meet the needs of new individuals and families coming into the area," said President and Chief Executive Officer of The YMCA of Greater Houston Paul McEntire in a statement. "We are committed to improving quality of life by offering programs that foster academic achievement and focus on drowning prevention and healthy living."

The YMCA is a nonprofit organization that provides programs and facilities to make healthier communities, regardless of income.

As plans progress for the new facility, the YMCA will launch a capital campaign to raise funding.

Want to give?

For more information regarding the project or to learn about funding possibilities, contact Scott Harper, senior major gifts director, at scott.harper@ymcahouston.org or at 936-494-5107.
The Barbers Hill Independent School District lifted its lockdown status around 2:30 p.m. after a described "armed and suicidal man" surrendered without incident, according to the Mont Belvieu Police Department.

"Mont Belvieu Police received a call of a man, distraught over a family member's passing, threatening to harm himself," the Mont Belvieu Police Department stated in a post on the city's Facebook page. "The subject left a relative's residence walking and ended up in near the road construction site on the south end of Eagle Drive where he was confronted by police. The male was found to be in possession of a handgun and did fire several rounds during the incident."
If its spring in an election year, there are Republican candidates fighting it out in Montana state legislative primaries.

^pThats a trend as reliable as spring dandelions in Eastern Montana. This year is no different.

There the 11 legislative districts in The Gazettes print edition of the primary election guide.

Five of the races feature at least three candidates. One of those three-candidate races is a Democratic race.

To get a better feel for this years primary candidates, The Gazette posed five questions to each one.

We asked the candidates what, if anything, the 2017 Legislature should do to keep the Colstrip power plant operational.

We asked about whether control of federal lands should be turned over to the state government, an especially relevant question following the recent deadly stand-off over public lands in Oregon.

We asked whether the candidates would support pre-kindergarten classes in public schools, an issue that didnt gain much traction in the 2015 Legislature, but will likely resurface.

We also asked how far Montana should go in offering tax breaks to families with children in private schools.

The state Supreme Court has ruled religious schools should qualify for that tax break, but should that be the final word?

Finally, we asked candidates whether they support mandatory collection of union dues from state employees. Union issues have been a perennial issues at recent legislative sessions.
A federal jury on Tuesday convicted a Lame Deer man accused of attempting to strangle and assault a woman in 2014.

The panel found Leon Seminole, 58, guilty of strangulation and assault as charged in an indictment. The jury deliberated about three hours in the two-day trial.

Prosecutors alleged that Seminole assaulted the victim, identified in court records as M.L., at their home on Aug. 17, 2014, by punching her repeatedly in the head, knocking her to the ground. And he attempted to strangle her from behind, prosecutors said.

The victim escaped Seminole.

After the assault, one of the victim's family members attempted to confront Seminole, but he had a gun in his hand and the family member retreated, the prosecution said.

The victim suffered substantial swelling to her face, including having an eye swollen shut.

U.S. District Judge Susan Watters set sentencing for Aug. 31 and ordered Seminole held in custody.

Seminole faces a maximum 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the strangulation count.
MISSOULA  The so-called Islamic State is neither a state nor Islamic.

Its a deviant group of gangsters driven by anger and hatred and a thirst for power, Jameel Chaudhry told a packed Lutheran church basement of mostly non-Muslims on Monday evening.

Leaders of that ragtag band define who the faithful are, said Chaudhry, a Muslim and an ethnic Indian from North Africa.

If you dont pledge allegiance, if you dont follow ISIS, youre not a Muslim. You can't call yourself a Muslim, he said. And if they dont call you Muslim, its OK for them to kill you.

Chaudhry, the longtime campus architect for the University of Montana, was emcee and one of four presenters at Saint Paul Lutheran Church in the first of four events during Celebrate Islam Week in Missoula.

Sponsored by the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center and presented by SALAM, the Arabic word for peace and an acronym for Standing Alongside Americas Muslims, the dinner program drew a capacity crowd to a room with a maximum occupancy of 125.

After a greeting from Mayor John Engen, a proclamation from SALAM declaring Celebrate Islam Week was read that decried the alarming escalation of national and local incidents and rhetoric directed against people of the Muslim faith and celebrated Missoula's long history of embracing diversity and dignity for all by statute and practice.

No dissension was voiced from the crowd. One protester held a sign outside the church on Brooks Street and was joined by a few others as the evening went on.

Wurri Kusumastuti, a graduate teaching assistant at UM from Indonesia, explained why she and other Muslim women wear hijabs, traditional veils that cover their heads and indicate a standard of modesty.

The most important time to wear a hijab is during prayer, the effervescent Kusumastuti explained. And Muslims pray five times a day.

I was born Muslim, and, I dont know, I just got used to it, she said of the veil. By using this kind of attire, when its time to pray, I just pray.

In the 1980s, hijabs were banned in Indonesia, and students who protested the act were arrested. Some disappeared, Kusumastuti said. From 1982 to 1998, any religious movement in her country was considered a betrayal by the government.

Slowly the shackles have come off, to a point where today in Indonesia theres a growing market for hajibs.

They are very big business, said Kusumastuti. Theyre not a symbol of oppression. In Indonesia theyre symbols of freedom.

Technical problems with a short video initially marred the presentation of Hanan Omar, a UM graduate student from Saudi Arabia. Eventually they were straightened out and through music and poetic narration, the video portrayed what she called the real meaning of the Islamic phrase Allahu Akbar  literally God is the greatest.

Its meaning has been demeaned by videos of sick, twisted minds screaming it before explosions, the narrator said.

But in fact its known and celebrated by millions of Muslims who gather and speak it with one voice, one love and no hate.

We say it in every occasion and in every way,  at prayer, when one is startled by beauty or frightened by disasters or scared and weak or joyful and at our peak, the narrator said.

Dont allow terrorists to contaminate a peaceful religion and a phrase that is so great. When you hear it let it show its true colors, let it resonate, that Allahu Akbar is about love and trust from 1.6 billion Muslims to the creator of our faith.

Julian Adler, a UM student in philosophy and political science, studied in Morocco and said he bugged his professor there with questions about religion until he was given a life-altering book on the histories of the world's religions. Adler compared the similar philosophical developments of Christianity and Islam.

Like all other religions they shared basic philosophical ideas with each other that still resonate with us today, he said. Both churches have had histories of both enlightenment and repression.

Celebrate Islam Week continues on Wednesday in the Hellgate High School Auditorium with the showing of most of the movie The Muslims Are Coming based on Muslim comedians routines, as well as a TED talk by Dalia Mogahed called What Do You Think When You Look at Me?

On Thursday UM professor Samir Bitar will be keynote speaker at the Urey Lecture Hall on the UM campus, and Kusumastuti and Chaudhry will take part in a panel discussion afterward.

The weeks events culminate on Saturday when Har Shalom on South Russell Street hosts Dances of Universal Peace. No musical or dance experience is required. All three events begin at 7 p.m.

For more information go to SALAMs Facebook page at facebook.com/SALAMMissoula.
KALISPELL  State officials are proposing a floating boat dock be installed at Wild Horse Island in Flathead Lake in order to reduce injuries.

Montana State Parks is accepting public comments through May 30 on the proposal to place a 60-foot-long dock in Skeeko Bay.

Wild Horse Island draws about 16,000 visitors each year despite not having a public dock anywhere on the 2,163 acre island. According to state officials, more than 60 percent of those visitors access the island through Skeeko Bay.

Currently, state officials say visitors often beach their boats and climb over the bow, leaping to shore. Officials say this kind of access can be hazardous.
POWELL  Wyoming officials have opened Wind River Canyon after a rock fall, but state Department of Transportation personnel will continue to monitor the area.

WyDOT crews cleared some of the rock fall from U.S. 20 inside Wind River Canyon Tuesday evening, but had to leave to ensure worker safety. The highway was closed at either end of the canyon overnight.

WyDOT District Engineer Shelby Carlson of Basin says a few more big rocks fell overnight but the rock fall slowed. Carlson says the canyon will be monitored for increasing rock fall activity throughout Wednesday.

WyDOT geologists will assess the canyon Wednesday.
Police are looking for anyone involved in two unrelated burglaries that happened at a restaurant and a clothing store in west and southeast Houston early Thursday morning.

One of the break-ins happened around 2:45 a.m.at a Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurant in the 2000 block of South Shepherd Drive near Indiana Street, the Houston Police Department said. The burglars shattered a glass door at the back of the restaurant and went inside. They damaged the safe and left after taking items from an office. They drove away in a pickup truck.
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Do you believe that a solution comprised of bleach can cure whatever ails you? Then the Houston-based Genesis II Church of Health and Healing has the perfect event for you.

The self-described "non-religious church of health & healing set up to serve mankind" is holding a seminar from Friday to Sunday at the Ramada Houston Intercontinental Airport East.

RELATED: Ruckus at Lakewood Church signals a new chapter in cult-like activity

For the completely reasonable cost of a $500 donation of cash in an envelope, seminar goers who finish the course get to "know how to restore health from 95% of the diseases of mankind" and get a church membership for one year, complete with a "Revered Certificate."

The mystery potion in question is known as the miracle mineral supplement which Genesis II claims can cure anything, provided you can survive the solution.

To be clear: we're not encouraging anyone to participate and certainly not condoning anyone to drink it, for reasons listed below.

According to a "Basic Sciences of MMS" wiki page listed on the church's Facebook page, "This solution consists mostly of water with chlorine dioxide as a very weak solution - along with regular table salt and several other trace neutral chemicals, such as sodium hydroxide, sodium carbonate, and sodium bicarbonate - none of which are considered poisonous. The trace chemicals are neutralized by the acid that activates the chlorine dioxide."

RELATED: Mexican death cult gaining followers in Texas

For those familiar with chemistry, this health potion includes bleach, which is definitely not good for consumption. In fact, MMS is so dangerous for you that the United States Department of Justice went after Louis Smith, a 45-year-old Spokane, Wash. man, on charges of "smuggling, selling misbranded drugs and defrauding the United States."

The miracle cure solution includes sodium chlorite which the Department of Justice called "an industrial chemical used as a pesticide and for hydraulic fracking and wastewater treatment. Sodium chlorite cannot be sold for human consumption and suppliers of the chemical include a warning sheet stating that it can cause potentially fatal side effects if swallowed."

Chances are you're better off seeing the doctors you've got now and getting your medicine from a pharmacy.
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Two men were sentenced in federal court Thursday for their roles in a multimillion-dollar stolen baby formula ring that ran from Houston to Bayonne, N.J.

Abel Garcia Tepozotlan, 53, an undocumented Mexican national, was sentenced to a year and a half in prison, after which he will likely be deported. He pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison to conspiracy to transport stolen merchandise.

Ellison sentenced Ahmad Manzoor, 73, a naturalized U.S. citizen who immigrated from Pakistan, to five years of federal probation. He must pay a fine of $75,000. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport stolen merchandise through interstate commerce.

BREASTFEEDING IN PUBLIC: Katy mom upset over breastfeeding incident at restaurant

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph C Magliolo, Jr. told the judge both men cooperated with authorities and helped them track down other participants in the ring. More restitution cannot be recovered since authorities can't identify the stores from which the formula was stolen.

According to court documents, Tepolotlan, who also went by Eugenio Ortiz Contreras, organized a crew that stole infant formula from various Wal-Mart, HEB, Winn-Dixie and other stores in the Houston area from 2012 to 2013.

WOULD YOU DO THIS? South Texas couple lets 7-year-old ride motorcycle, photo goes viral

They then sold the cans, valued at more than $2 million, to fences in Houston. These intermediaries repackaged and shipped the powdered formula to a candy store in New Jersey.

The indictment indicates Manzoor owned M&Z Candy, a wholesale grocery supplier in Bayonne, and acted as a second-level fence, purchasing the formula by wire transfer, and selling it again to corner stores and bodegas, for discount purchase.

National Retail Federation reported in 2016 that infant formula was among the top items shoplifted from grocery stores.
Last week, a friend, Lugene Gerber, invited me to look for birds east of Bismarck. We headed to a location just west of Menoken on Apple Creek Road, which is known for great shorebird viewing. There were a few shorebirds present, including yellowlegs, killdeer and snipe. However, fewer species were present than we had observed a few days earlier.

We proceeded to travel around the McKenzie Slough area and saw some great birds, including several northern harriers, a red-shafted northern flicker, which is fairly rare in our area, and a sharp-shinned hawk. We were pretty happy with our day but decided to take a final spin past Menoken to see if any more shorebirds had shown up.

When we arrived back at our original location, more birds had gathered, including hudsonian and marbled godwits. Among them, an unusual black, white and brown bird appeared suddenly. I had never seen anything quite like it.

I excitedly ordered Lugene to, Stop the vehicle! She quickly halted, and I said, Look at that interesting black, tan and white bird about 20 to 30 feet from shore.

She, too, had never seen anything like it in all of her years of birding. It plunged its small head underneath the shallow pool repeatedly, like it was ravenously hungry. When his gorgeous, tufted, gray head emerged from the water, he put on quite a display for us, dancing and puffing up his beautiful, black plumaged collar, which resembled a feather boa. He had orange legs, an orange beak and a gravy boat-shaped body. The godwits squawked loudly and scrapped with him, indicating their displeasure with this strange invader.

We snapped several photos before heading back to Bismarck. I immediately texted Corey Ellingson, a birding expert in the state, and said we had seen a bird with puffy, black feathers around his neck.

Lugene mentioned that she would upload photos to the North Dakota Birding Facebook group page, as soon as she arrived home, since we were both curious to know the birds identity. Within a short time after uploading the photos, Aurelia Kucera, a member of the Facebook group, responded that it was a ruff and Corey agreed. It was a male and in stunning, mating plumage. His gorgeous, feathered cape or collar around his neck is what gives him the name ruff."

This plumage can vary in color  a white or tan color rather than black, like our male.

The ruff species is a rare visitor to the United States. It normally breeds in Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway, but is also known to breed in New Zealand and Great Britain. They winter mainly in Africa. There has been only one report of this bird nesting in the United States  in Alaska.

During mating, it exhibits behavior similar to the grouse family with a fancy dancing display, where males gather and fight, and the female chooses her mate.

Per Corey, the first record of this bird in our state was reported in the 1960s, with only seven recorded sightings since. Areas that have had sightings include: Grand Forks Lagoons, Kelly Slough National Wildlife Refuge, which is 20 miles north of Grand Forks, Ardock, which is north of Grand Forks in Walsh County, and the Fargo area. The last sighting was in 2005. April 14 is the earliest recorded sighting in North Dakota, and this is the first sighting west of the Red River Valley.

His arrival caused considerable excitement. People came from Minot, Valley City, Jamestown and Williston to see the ruff. A few travelers even came from Minnesota and Nebraska, hoping to observe him. He was present from about 11 a.m. until 7:15 p.m. April 14, and then he was seen from 1 to 3 p.m. on April 15. Lugene and I were thankful for the rare opportunity to see the ruff, yet sad for those who traveled so many miles and did not see it.

Why was he here? Its hard to know for sure. Many theories have been discussed, including the El Nino with its unseasonably warm weather, the pervasive North Dakota winds and a storm system containing large amounts of rain moving into the area. Perhaps he was thrown off course. Nevertheless, after seeing him for the first time, I hope he will be back again.
This week the Houston Zoo announced the addition of a few new residents, three female African painted dogs.

The trio of dogs were introduced to the zoos pair of elderly African painted dogs, Mikita and Blaze, who are 10 and 14 years old, respectively.
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This week Houstonians learned that Uber is contemplating the idea of leaving the Bayou City due to a dispute with city regulations.

It's making Houstonians who have grown to enjoy using the service and even depend on it wondering what life would be like without it.

Uber issued an ultimatum to the city of Houston on Wednesday afternoon which was shocking to consumers but probably not to those in the know who have been paying attention to the two sides going back and forth the past two years.

"We have worked hard and taken extraordinary steps to help guide drivers through the current process in Houston," Uber's Houston manager Sarfraz Maredia told City Council in a letter delivered Wednesday afternoon. "However, a year and a half later, it is clear the regulations are simply not working for the people of this city."

RELATED: Uber threatens to leave Houston

The company and city have sparred since Uber came to Houston in February 2014, notably after city regulations went into effect in November of that year that required all drivers to submit to fingerprint background checks. Uber prefers another background check method, and the company and city disagree on which is more successful in securing rider safety.

No departure date has been set, Uber spokeswoman Debbee Hancock said, so Uber users can rest easy for now and enjoy the ride.

Houston officials have insisted fingerprint checks are necessary to ensure public safety. The topic received intense scrutiny after a Houston driver was accused of sexually assaulting a passenger. Though a grand jury failed to indict him, the issue divided Uber and Houston because he was operating on the smartphone-based ride hailing platform without a city license.

Houston officials said he would have failed their background check because of a prior federal drug conviction, which Uber's background check did not catch.

RELATED: 16 things you need to know about Uber and Lyft

What would this mean for Houstonians who use and depend on the service?

Would Uber leaving Houston make much difference to other areas in the region that haven't embraced it like those who live inside the 610 Loop?

The Houston Business Journal does note that Uber service will continue in Houston suburbs like Katy and the Woodlands, but drivers can't make pickups in Houston.

Uber left the city of Galveston in February after city officials passed regulations treating the ride-sharing service virtually the same as cab companies.

If Uber does make a leap out of Houston, would the city's nightlife would suffer? It's not too pie in the sky to imagine that there could be small hit to business.

We all can agree that people won't stop going to bars and enjoying themselves if Uber were to exit the city. Like they said in "Jurassic Park" : life finds away.

But it is an interesting connection to make. Back in late 2015, Uber touted that its arrival in Austin the amount drunk-driving crashes saw a marked decrease. They've even worked with Mothers Against Drunk Driving to get the word out about the service.

Those going to a from the area's two airports will once again need to depend on rental cars, shuttles, and taxicabs, like in year's past or "the dark ages" according to some millennials.

Uber has suggested leaving Houston before, especially as it wages a contentious battle opposing similar regulations in Austin. Voters there will decide on May 7 whether to tighten regulations of Uber and similar ride hailing companies.

With additional reporting from Dug Begley
Police in the Mesquite area are investigating incidents of people in strange black masks casing homes in the city, just east of Dallas.

According to the Dallas Morning News crime blog, police are looking into reports of one or more people knocking on doors and ringing doorbells in Mesquite late in the evening.
A state audit says the North Dakota Health Department stored thousands of COVID-19 vaccine doses at incorrect temperatures or without temperature data over the past two years  and that some of the vaccine was administered to patients. The health department disputed the audit released Tuesday. Tim Wiedrich, who heads the agencys virus response, says no non-viable vaccines were given to patients. The state analysis said nearly 2,000 Moderna doses were stored at incorrect temperatures and were administered to patients. The audit also found nearly 13,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccines were issued from storage with missing temperature data. Neither the Health Department nor the auditor's office is recommending revaccination.
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.
Bob Turner is getting out of prison after 48 years today. He won't be on parole. He'll walk out the gates into retirement.

The longest-serving corrections officer at the North Dakota State Penitentiary, Turner has been around long enough to remember when the place had a working farm and to meet fathers and sons passing through.

Though 48 years is a long time, Turner only beats his father's tenure by three years. His grandfather worked there, too.

Turner started at the prison in 1968 at his dad's suggestion, he said. Training consisted of working alongside an officer for six days before striking out on your own, he said.

"We didn't have a training department at that time. You learned by the seat of your pants," he said.

But his fellow officers say he was a natural, bringing a calm and laid-back demeanor to the cell block.

"I always treated them like I would want them to treat me," said Turner, adding that there were few tense moments. "I didn't really have problems with inmates.

"I just got to know so many of those fellows over a period of time. As time went by, it helped me do my job, because they felt comfortable with me. They knew what to expect of me, and they were all good with that," he said.

As a new officer, he was assigned to work throughout the facility. Turner patroled the prison at night sometimes, and he still remembers making rounds first to the hog barn, then the dairy barn and all the way around the brick wall. He didn't have a radio, just a flashlight, which he would use to signal his position to the watchman.

In order to get a permanent position, someone had to die or retire. Four years after he started, Turner had his chance.

An officer passed away on a Friday night, and Turner showed up the next morning to find he was assigned to work 1 to 9 p.m. in the farm ward  the same shift he mans today.

Through 1993, the state penitentiary had a farming operation on the east end of the facility with milk cows, beef herd, hogs, sheep and chickens, which fed the inmates. The most trusted prisoners worked on the farm, he said.

Turner still works with those kinds of inmates, serving now in a unit for people who have less than three years left on their sentence and are likely to be released to the Missouri River Correctional Center or on parole.

Getting rid of the farm isn't the only thing that has changed about the prison, Turner said. When he started working, most inmates were 40 to 50 years old from North Dakota, who were convicted of alcohol-related crimes or writing bad checks, Turner said. Now, they tend to be in their 20s and are serving longer sentences for drug-related crimes.

"They have a lot more energy," said Turner, who prides himself on the fact that the inmates still feel comfortable talking to him.

"Since so many of them are young nowadays, they need a little more guidance," he said.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation thanked him for his service on Wednesday. Many of his fellow officers  past and present  attended the event.

Capt. Paul Belisle, Turner's supervisor, said he will miss Turner's calm, soothing demeanor, which helps him de-escalate situations between inmates and staff.

Noting significant turnover at the department, Lt. Jean Delozier said Turner's long tenure has been a touchstone, a reminder that "people can last."

"We're going to miss you," director LeAnn Bertsch said.

"That's for sure," Turner said with a laugh.
DEVILS LAKE -- Officers say a Devils Lake woman attempted to stab one deputy with a knife and hit others with a shovel while trying to escape from custody twice in four days -- once while being allowed to use the bathroom.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson, 29, is scheduled to make a first appearance Monday in Ramsey County District Court on charges of possession of a controlled substance, criminal attempt and preventing arrest or discharge of other duties, all Class C felonies.

She remains in the Lake Region Law Enforcement Center jail on $10,000 bond.

According to the criminal complaints, Robinson initially was arrested Friday on a controlled substance possession charge after authorities received a complaint from the landlord of her Devils Lake residence.

During the arrest, a Ramsey County deputy observed her throw a small tan-colored bag behind an end table. When the deputy checked the bag, he found five small baggies of a substance that appeared to be crystal meth, according to the complaint.

Robinson's wrists were handcuffed behind her back, but she managed to get out of the handcuffs, "grabbed a large kitchen knife and stabbed into the torso of a deputy sheriff," according to the complaint.

The complaint said the deputy managed to turn to the side, "barely dodging the knife blade that went under his lift arm and striking him glancingly on the body armor."

The deputy then grabbed the knife by the blade and struggled for control before the two deputies at the scene disarmed her and handcuffed her again, according to the complaint.

On Monday, she was taken from the jail to the emergency room of CHI St. Alexius Devils Lake Hospital (formerly known as Mercy Hospital) for medical treatment.

Once there, she refused treatment and was allowed to go to the restroom, Sheriff Steve Nelson said. She again managed to get free from her handcuffs and ran outside through the emergency room entrance.

When deputies caught Robinson within 30 feet of the door, she grabbed a shovel and used it in an apparent attempt to avoid the officer's taser wires, the complaint said.

She then was returned to the jail.

The deputies escaped injury in both incidents and did not require treatment, the sheriff said.

Her next court date had not been set as of Wednesday.
A North Dakota woman tested positive for the Zika virus, according to a news release from the North Dakota Department of Health, making her the first state resident to become infected with the disease.

The woman traveled to Puerto Rico while pregnant, the release stated, and the health department plans to monitor her infant for a year, since the virus can spread to a fetus and cause severe brain defects. The woman traveled there in January and does not have symptoms, Laura Cronquist, an epidemiologist with the NDDoH said. No birth defects have been identified in the infant so far, according to the release.

Zika spreads through infected mosquitoes and from a man to his sex partners, according to the release. Studies have not yet determined whether a woman can spread the virus through sex, Cronquist said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 426 cases of travel-associated Zika virus disease as of April 27. The North Dakota woman would not count among that number, Cronquist said, because she did not show symptoms.

Mosquitoes in North Dakota do not spread the virus, said Cronquist, adding she does not expect that they will in the future. The same type of mosquitoes also carry familiar diseases such as dengue fever and yellow fever, which have not come to the the state, she said. Because of this, the NDDoH is focusing its efforts on prevention and awareness.

Experts from the CDC estimate that 700,000 people could be infected in Puerto Rico by the end of the year, based upon previous outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya, related viral diseases. A group of U.S. senators, including Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, are pressing Congress to approve $1.9 billion in emergency funding so local communities can implement a strong defense to prevent the spread of the Zika virus ahead of the summer months when mosquitoes are more rampant, without draining existing local emergency health resources.

The NDDoH recommends that people who have traveled to Zika-affected areas take precautions when having sex, avoid mosquito bites and see a doctor if they feel ill. All pregnant women should get tested two to 12 weeks after returning from a Zika-affected area, even if they do not have symptoms. For more information regarding the virus, including Zika-affected areas and health department recommendations, visit www.ndhealth.gov/disease/zika.
Nydia Tisdale, Georgias most notorious citizen journalist, crisscrosses the state with a cardboard box containing little red and blue books in the back of her 2003 Honda CRV.

The red one is Georgias Sunshine Laws; the blue one is Georgia Law Enforcement and the Open Records Act. Tisdale hands them out, with the earnest enthusiasm of a Jehovahs Witness distributing The Watchtower, to elected officials in jurisdictions small and large (but mostly small), often right before public meetings.

Thenat those meetings and anywhere else a politician might hold forth in a public settingshe sets up her Sony HXR-MC5OU video camera and starts recording. Over the past five years Tisdale has made more than 800 Nydeos, as she calls them, chronicling the mundane machinations of local public affairs. They include council meetings and candidate forums, remarks on press freedom and Tea Party gatherings, accounts from people shot by police and ribbon-cutting ceremonies: a sort of hyperlocal C-Span, as Laura Paull, former citizen journalism editor at The Huffington Post, puts it.

I enjoy doing it, and I think its making a difference, says Tisdale. I do feel a connection with other concerned citizens who are paying attention to whats going on in local government. I feel Im not alone.

Tisdale posts her videos, with minimal commentary, on YouTube and Facebook, and on her site, About Forsyth, where the tagline promises an eye-that-never-blinks on the goings-on of local government in Georgia. Most of them will get a couple hundred views, or a couple dozen. They produce no direct revenue.

But Tisdale is most well-known, and has attracted a much larger online audience, for the occasions on which she has been blocked from filming. Her approach tests how faithfully elected officials adhere to open-meetings lawsand how ready the broader civic and political culture is to embrace a youre-on-tape level of transparency.

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Its an approach that has won praise from open-government advocates. In 2014, Common Cause Georgia gave Tisdale its Citizen Advocate of the Year award. A year later, she was named an Open Government Hero by the nonprofit Georgia First Amendment Foundation, which produces the books Tisdale hands out. The foundations award recognized her battle with the Cumming City Council, where officials in 2012 blocked her from recording a public meeting.

After filing a lawsuit against the city, Tisdale secured a $200,000 settlement and a promise by the city to allow filming in the future. The state attorney general, Sam Olens, also took up her cause, and a judge levied a $12,000 fine against the city for a violation of the states open meeting law.

We need more of her, says Hollie Manheimer, the foundations executive director. She shows a lot of bravery  particularly since she is filming in areas of Georgia  that are used to getting their business done without anyone paying attention.

Sometimes, the attention is welcomed. Seanie Zappendorf, a board member of a local Republican womens club whose events Tisdale has filmed, says the group would never tell her no.

These are all open types of meetings  [and] shes doing it to inform people, says Zappendorf. (She adds: I cant tell you the quality of the film or anything like thatIve never seen them.)

Other times, its not. In August 2014, Tisdale took her camera to a political rally at a pumpkin farm in Dawsonville, about 45 minutes north of her home in Roswell. Members of the public had been invited to the private farm to hear several top-of-the-ticket GOP candidates in that Novembers election. Gov. Nathan Deal was there, and so was US Senate candidate David Perdue and Rep. Doug Collins. The state labor and insurance commissioners were on hand, too, as was Olens.

In fact, Tisdale says, Olens told her about the fine against Cumming just before the rally started. She was pleased with the news, another triumph for open government.

But shortly after the event began, Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens made a disparaging remark about Democratic Senate candidate Michelle Nunn. Then Hudgens noticed Tisdale sitting in the front row, with her camera trained on him. I dont know why youre videotaping, he said. Video by Tisdale captures what happened next: A county deputy forcibly removed her from the crowd.

Later in the rally, Olens took the mic and said to the crowd:

Let me be possibly politically incorrect here a second. If we stand for anything as a party, what are we afraid of with the lady having a camera, filming us? What are we saying here that shouldnt be on film? What message are we sending? That because its private property they shouldnt be filming? What is the harm?

Olens, who was also honored last fall by the First Amendment Foundation, declined to comment for this story.

Over a year later, Tisdale was indicted on charges of felony obstruction of an officer, along with misdemeanor counts of obstruction and criminal trespass. She pleaded not guilty at the arraignment last month, and has filed notice of intent to sue for alleged constitutional violations.

Her attorney, Gerry Weber, says the case highlights the David and Goliath aspect of Tisdales work.

She doesnt have the resources, connections, and power that a mainstream journalism outlet has, says Weber, who directed the states ACLU chapter from 1992 to 2009. What Tisdale does have, he adds, is skill at picking apart the minutiae of local ordinances and state laws. Her enthusiasm and attention to detail are striking  and remarkable, from a lawyers perspective.

For her part, Tisdale keeps attending public meetings and events, and posting her Nydeos online. She says she earns no money from her work as a citizen journalist, although she has been hired to film events. She receives less than $5,000 a year from PayPal donations. When professional journalists ask for permission to use her footage, she offers it free of charge.

A few weeks ago, Tisdale spoke at Webers media law class at Georgia State University. She tallied her victories: an apology from an official who slapped her camera at a rally, a municipality that put up a new bulletin board to display public notices.

Why do you do it? one of the students asked.

I do it as a public serviceto inform voters, she said. If you see something thats not right, you gotta stand up for yourself. You gotta stand up for others. How could you not?

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Timothy Pratt is a journalist based in the Atlanta area. He has written for The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and many other publications. He also lived in Las Vegas and worked for the Las Vegas Sun from 2001-2009.
The employee vs. contractor debate has the potential to have a major impact on the insurance industry, according to a pair of experts speaking on the topic on last week at the annual Risk Management Society conference held in San Diego, Calif.

Its estimated there are 10 million independent contractors in the U.S. and that 10 percent of those people are misclassified, according to John Zeigler, an attorney with Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman & Goggin.

Thats a huge number of people out there who are working as independent contractors but likely are misclassified, he said, noting that federal and state governments could swoop in with new rules and regulations. The reality is the pressure on the government is becoming that much greater.

Zeigler and Stephanie Watts, resolution manager at Gallagher Bassett, held an education session titled The War on Employee Misclassification: Risks and Costs to Employers and Insurers, at the annual RIMS conference for risk management and insurance professionals.

Planners of this years conference said more than 10,000 people are in attendance at the conference, with more expected to register in coming days. That would make it the largest conference since 2003, they say.

In the session held by Zeigler and Watts, the employer vs. contractor cloud that has arisen by way of the gig economy explosion has created an uneven playing field where one company does things one way and the other company another way.

Its also made protections for benefits, including workers compensation, uneven for workers, and has created uncertain risks and exposures for insurers, they said.

They also outlined several tests federal and state governments are using to determine whether a worker is an employee or a contractor.

One such test was the U.S. Department of Labors economic realities test, which includes the consideration of the following factors:

The extent to which the work performed is integral to the employers business;

Whether the workers managerial skills affect his or her opportunity for loss;

The relative investments in facilities and equipment by the worker and employer;

The workers skill and initiative;

The permanency of the workers relationship with the employer;

The nature and degree of control by the employer.

The last one has been key in many legal battles that unfolded in many states.

Ultimately when the courts are looking at this they are looking at the right to control and the actual control exercise, Zeigler said. That really, in many respects, is the absolute key factor.

Other federal government entities with independent contractor tests include the Internal Revenue Service, which includes behavior control, financial control and the relationship of the parties, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Many states have their own tests.

A popular test for many states uses three factors:

Is the employee free from directions and controls?

Is the work performed outside the usual course of business?

Is the individual customarily engaged in independently established trade, occupation, profession or business as the involved service performed?

The presenters cited Alexander Vs. FedEx Ground in which the California 9th Circuit Court ruled in 2014 that drivers were not independent contractors despite drivers owning their own vans and being allowed to set their own routes.

The court in its ruling used several factors, most notably control.

The drivers must wear FedEx uniforms, drive FedEx-approved vehicles, and groom themselves according to FedExs appearance standards, the ruling states. FedEx tells its drivers what packages to deliver, on what days, and at what times. Although drivers may operate multiple delivery routes and hire third parties to help perform their work, they may do so only with FedExs consent.

At the end of the day FedEx took a big hit here, Zeigler said.

With decisions like this being made all over the U.S., vigilance is becoming increasingly important, Watts said.

It starts at the bottom, Watts said. It starts with the agents and brokers writing these policies incorrectly.

Zeigler advised paying close attention to a topic that he believes will only become more important to businesses and insurance professionals in the future.

The best you can say is you need to be on top of it, Zeigler said. You can look at the patterns, you can look at the trends, you need to look and see where its going.

At the conference RIMS and American International Group Inc. announced that William H. McGannon and David Mikulina are the 2016 inductees to the Risk Management Hall of Fame.

The hall of fame serves as a means to maintain the history of the field of risk management and recognizes risk practitioners who have made significant contributions to advancing the discipline, according to RIMS.

McGannon was considered a risk management pioneer, according to those who bestowed the award on him.

He is considered one of the first Canadian risk managers to establish a full-service risk management department that included loss prevention and statistical support at NOVA Chemical Corp. in Alberta. McGannon frequently lectured at the University of Calgary, where he was instrumental in setting up the Chair of Risk Management position and served as executive in residence from 1998 to 2000. He died in 2015.

Mikulina is a retired vice president of risk management for Hyatt Hotels Corp., and was a member of the risk management profession for nearly 35 years. He headed the risk management department at Hyatt for 23 years as the organization grew from 130 hotels to 350 hotels worldwide
Its been two months since a blown-out natural gas well was capped and officials spoke of thousands of uprooted families returning to their normal lives.

But nearly half of the 8,000 families who left home at some point have yet to return, many still worried about the possibility of another leak and potential health hazards from chemicals in the gas that spewed uncontrollably for almost four months.

Andrew Krownes family is among those whose lives remain in limbo.

Krowne, his wife, toddler and four other young children, are going into a fourth month at a hotel  paid for by Southern California Gas Co.  where they have celebrated four birthdays, including his wifes 40th and just last week, his daughters fourth.

Valentines Day, St. Patricks Day, birthdays, Easter, everythings been in the hotel, Krowne said. It was basically, stay away from (home) like it was the plague.

The Krownes and others packed up to escape symptoms ranging from nausea to nosebleeds, rashes to respiratory problems  or to avoid breathing air they feared would cause future health problems as the SoCalGas storage facility gushed 100,000 tons of climate-changing methane.

Concerns in Porter Ranch and surrounding communities were reinforced last weekend by a small gas leak and oil spill at another company operating in the Aliso Canyon, one of the nations largest natural gas storage fields and the major supplier for Southern California.

SoCalGas points out that public health agencies have found air in the community safe, but it has been forced by courts to extend paying for temporary housing while the county health department tests homes for chemicals. The department, which initially gave the all-clear signal, has fielded 300 complaints from residents since the leak was capped Feb. 18, and a survey found more than 60 percent still reporting symptoms.

Facing a much longer haul than it expected when it offered to pay for an additional week of lodging after the leak was sealed, the company now plans to move people from hotels to what it says are high-quality, longer-term apartments with kitchens that will prevent them from having to shuffle between hotels.

SoCalGas spokesman Chris Gilbride said the county has created uncertainty for residents by continuing to push for housing extensions while performing tests for some 200 compounds, many of which are found indoors and in common household products.

The Department of Public Healths methodology appears designed to test everything that may be found in indoor air regardless of any relationship with the gas leak and we expect they will fail to produce any results that help residents understand whether the gas leak impacted their indoor air, Gilbride said.

Displaced residents, angry about the leaks effect on their lives and frustrated with lagging reimbursements for meals and mileage, are not happy about being uprooted again.

I dont want to move to downtown LA in some crappy accommodation, said Janet Terterian, who has been staying with her dogs in a Four Seasons hotel. I want to go home, but then when I was going home, I was getting sick.

Terterian is so fed up, shes selling her house and plans to leave the area. Shes having trouble finding a buyer for the spacious four-bedroom home she bought three years ago for $800,000 and listed in March for $1.1 million.

Sales of Porter Ranch homes dropped 44 percent in the three months after the foul smell of gas began wafting over the area, compared with the three months before. The median price, which was just over $700,000 in March, remained stable during the period, according to RealtyTrac.

The gas leak could have an impact on future development. The county has put a moratorium on all new residential development near the gas facility, holding up the luxury 188-home Hidden Creeks Estates, said Tony Bell, a spokesman for county Supervisor Michael Antonovich.

The gas company had estimated costs related to the leak at $250 million to $300 million, but that was before the housing period was extended several times and doesnt include dozens of lawsuits or regulatory action. It said insurance should cover most of it.

As the state investigates the cause of the blowout, the 114 other wells in the field are undergoing rigorous tests before the company can resume injecting gas into wells a mile-and-a-half underground. The company said it expects to resume operations by the end of the summer.

The facility typically supplies gas-fired power plants during summer demand spikes and energy officials have warned that blackouts are possible without the facilitys gas supplies. A consumer group and environmentalists have criticized such claims as a scare tactic to justify keeping the facility in operation.

Krowne and others who live nearby are fighting to get the facility shut down. Hes also fighting to stay in the Courtyard Marriott, where his family is packed into adjoining rooms, rather than move to an apartment.

Theyre ever so gently putting their hand on your back and forcing you to do this, Krowne said. The whole point of this process is to make it so unbelievably hard on the resident so you give up and go home.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thanks to an arcane state law, Florida could enter hurricane season with no one firmly in charge of the state agency responsible for regulating the states at-times fragile insurance industry.

The reason? The two Republican elected officials responsible for picking a new commissioner are locked in a stalemate over who should be hired to replace outgoing Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty.

Gov. Rick Scott and Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater have been backing rival candidates for the job, which has delayed a final decision. The governor and the three members of the Cabinet must vote on the position, but state law allows Scott and Atwater to individually veto the choice.

When you think of the consequences of this choice every Floridian would want us to be thoughtful, said Atwater. It may take a bit longer and thats ok.

The job of insurance commissioner in Florida is crucial because the person regulates an important industry in a hurricane-prone state. The selection of a new commissioner has triggered a furious behind-the-scenes lobbying effort among those aligned with various parts of the industry. The final pick could earn as much as $200,000 a year.

McCarty has been on the job for 13 years, including a time when the homeowners insurance market nearly collapsed following the state getting hit with eight storms over a two-year period. Right after being re-elected in 2014 Scott said he wanted to replace McCarty, but Atwater didnt support the move at the time.

McCarty finally announced his resignation in January of this year and was supposed to leave on May 2. But last week he offered to stay on the job until 45 days after a new commissioner is picked. Hurricane season begins June 1.

At a recent meeting of the Cabinet, Atwater suggested the state hire State Rep. Bill Hager, a GOP legislator from Boca Raton and a former Iowa insurance commissioner. But Scott refused to go along and has instead touted Jeffrey Bragg, who worked for the U.S. Treasury for 11 years as the executive director of the terrorism risk insurance program.

Jackie Schutz, a spokeswoman for Scott, said recently that Braggs public and private sector experience make him an ideal candidate to serve Floridians.

But criticism has been aimed at both candidates.

Hager sponsored legislation that would have reduced the size of Floridas state-created fund that provides financial backing to insurance companies. The bill failed amid concerns it could have resulted in rate hikes for consumers.

Braggs record, meanwhile, has also come under scrutiny after the Palm Beach Post reported that he had been accused of misleading investors in a flood insurance venture. Bragg blamed the lawsuit on investors being upset that a stock had not performed as well as they expected.

Scott and the Cabinet are expected to interview both Bragg and Hager a second time this week. Atwater also asked two other candidates, including McCartys current chief of staff, Belinda Miller, to also be considered at the same meeting.

Atwater conceded hes not sure if a new commissioner will be selected, but he added he doesnt want the process to drag out much longer.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Earlier this month Google announced that it will be testing its autonomous vehicles in Phoenix, Ariz. The California-based tech company has already tested its self-driving vehicles in California, Washington and Texas.

Varying road conditions, traffic patterns and driving environment were some of the reasons cited by the company for choosing the Valley of the Sun.

Metro Phoenix is an ideal place to expand testing, said Jennifer Haroon, head of business operations for the Google Self-Driving Car project. Arizona is known as a place where research and development is welcome, innovation can thrive, and companies can set up roots. The Phoenix area has distinct desert conditions, which will help us better understand how our sensors and cars handle extreme temperatures and dust in the air. Driving in new cities enables our engineers to further refine our software and adapt to these different environments.

Google boasts its self-driving cars have already covered 1.5 million miles. In Phoenix, four driver-equipped Lexus RX450h SUVs have already begun mapping streets. The mapping process includes identifying where traffic signals, lane markers and curb heights are located. Once completed, the autonomous cars will begin navigating the southwest citys roadways.

Sensors on the vehicles can detect a variety of objects, such as a bicyclist or crossing guard, and respond accordingly.

Googles selection of Arizona for this testing program is just another sign that Arizona is on the cutting-edge when it comes to innovation, said Governor Doug Ducey. When you think of companies changing the way we live, Google is at the top of the list, and their self-driving car technology is transformational. We welcome them to our state, and look forward to being part of this innovative project.
Is that Parmesan cheese or sawdust? With food fraud on the rise, a software that employs methods used to predict terrorist behavior can help settle the question, according to its developers.

The program, called EMAlert, models the decision-making behavior of fraudsters when they decide which food commodities to adulterate. Increasing cases of fraud have spurred consumer distrust, Joseph Scimeca, the vice president of regulatory and scientific affairs at Cargill Inc., said in an interview. Scimeca chairs a working group on fraud at the Grocery Manufacturers of America, a trade organization for food, beverage and consumer products companies, which developed the software with Battelle Memorial Institute, a non-profit research and development organization.

Battelle has used the same approach for over a decade in its terrorism-risk assessment works for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said Ashley Kubatko, principal research scientist at the group. Using real-time information, it weighs 12 attributes of a commodity including prices, volumes and geopolitical conditions, then calculates the probability of adulteration.

Consumers have started to demand more transparency about where food comes from and how its produced after notorious examples of fraud in recent years. A Bloomberg investigation into U.S. Parmesan cheese showed high levels of wood-pulp content in common brands, with some industry insiders saying 20 percent of domestic Italian cheeses could be adulterated. Examinations of olive oil have revealed that premium extra-virgin products are often adulterated with cheaper oils, and fish has come under fire, with various species mislabeled and sold as tuna and snapper. Contamination of infant formula with melamine in China eight years ago sickened hundreds of thousands of babies and killed at least six.

Supply Chains

As trade becomes increasingly global, accurately tracing products through supply chains back to the farms where they come from is more difficult, and that opens the door for fraud, Scimeca said. While the Grocery Manufacturers of America estimates that about 10 percent of food in the marketplace is adulterated, Scimeca said the figure is very conservative. The industry still struggles to predict what foods could be the next targets, he said.

You only hear about the high-profile cases, but I can assure you, theres lots of opportunity for fraud, Scimeca said. Consumers mistrusting the food supply is driven by lack of understanding where food is coming from and a sense that the industry is not putting enough diligence in ensuring safety.

Scimeca, who works to ensure Minneapolis-based Cargill meets regulations in the 67 countries the company operates in, said hes seeing governments put more emphasis on economically-motivated adulteration of food. That includes recently finalized regulations from the Food and Drug Administration that require food manufacturers to evaluate potential safety hazards, including those that may come from fraud. Some businesses have to comply starting in September.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
A northeast Ohio court is trying to track down for heirs to hundreds of rubber workers who died or became very ill because of exposure to asbestos as it looks to pay out about $2 million in legal claims.

Heirs have been found for many of the deceased workers with pending claims in the past year. The Summit County Probate Court posted a list on its website of about 850 deceased rubber workers whose heirs havent been located, The Akron Beacon Journal reported.

An $80 million fund was created in 2004 after insurance giant Travelers Cos. settled with lawyers for thousands of workers who had asbestos-related claims. A series of appeals delayed payouts until the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court in New York ordered Travelers to pay in 2014.

After a long fight, we finally created a pot of money, attorney Tom Bevan said. Unfortunately, so much time passed, we have been unable to locate heirs.

Bevan & Associates, a Boston Heights-based law firm that helped fight the asbestos litigation, filed about 1,700 cases in probate court last year involving rubber workers who died and whose heirs couldnt immediately be found. The move gave them time to try to locate surviving descendants.

If the attorneys had an address for the rubber workers or their family, they sent them a letter. They also did online searches and tried to reach them by phone.

Damage claims range from $2,100 to $23,000, based on medical diagnoses for various asbestos-related illnesses.

About 19,000 cases are being paid from the settlement across the country. Summit County has the most, with about 6,000.

Heirs have been located in about half of the countys pending probate cases.

We still have a long ways to go, Bevan said.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
By statute, automobile liability insurance companies are barred from excluding coverage for personal injuries caused to a named insured under Connecticut law. See, Conn. Gen. Stat. (Rev. to 2009)  38a-335(d). However, the Connecticut statute contains an exception which permits insurers to used named insured exclusions if they are set forth in a separate endorsement to the policy.

In Dairyland Ins. Co. v. Mitchell, 320 Conn. 205, 128 A.3d 931 (2016), the issue came up as to whether a clearly written named insured exclusion would be enforceable if it was set forth in the main body of the insurance policy as opposed to being attached in a separate endorsement as indicated by  38a-335(d). The Connecticut Supreme Court said no.

The Mitchell case involved a wrongful death action where the insured was riding as a passenger in his own insured vehicle which was being driven by a permissive user. When the Estate sued the driver, Dairyland denied coverage on the basis of the policys named insured exclusion. The named insured exclusion in the Dairyland policy was set forth within the main body of the policy and was not attached by way of an amendatory endorsement. Dairyland argued that the exclusion was clear and unambiguous and that it would be illogical to conclude that the exclusion, which was specifically authorized by the statute was invalid simply because it was part of the original terms of the policy rather than being set forth in an amendatory endorsement. The Connecticut Supreme Court disagreed.

The Connecticut Supreme Court noted that when insurance companies seek to limit their liability based on a statute, the limitation sought should only be permitted to the extent that the statute expressly authorized the limitation. The policy and that statute must be in substantial congruence. This requirement pertained to matters of both substance and form. The Court found that exceptions to statutes are without effect and could be ignored where there was a violation of the statute in respect to the form required by the statute. Thus, if a policy provision violated a statute requiring a specific format, the exception which was not in compliance with the statute would render the policy meaningless and the policy would be read as if the exception were not there.

The Connecticut Supreme Court concluded that the reason  38a-335(d) required an endorsement to effectuate a named insured exclusion was so that the lay consumer of insurance would be able to see the exclusion in a conspicuous fashion. Because Dairyland had not strictly complied with the formatting required by the statute, the named insured exclusion, irrespective of its clarity, was unenforceable and void.
Federal regulators have relaxed a pollution monitoring requirement for a company responsible for a decade-old oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, a slow-motion spill that could last another century.

In 2008, the Coast Guard ordered Taylor Energy Company to conduct daily flights over the site of its leak to visually monitor chronic oil sheens that often stretch for miles off Louisianas coast.

That requirement remained in effect until December, when the Coast Guard amended the order to reduce the minimum number of required overflights to twice a week.

Regulators didnt announce the change at the time. The Coast Guard confirmed details of its new order on Tuesday in response to an Associated Press inquiry.

Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Bobby Nash said flights are often cancelled due to weather and other safety issues, and they rarely detect the presence of oil that could be recovered from the waters surface.

Based on this historical knowledge and consistent patterns of sheening near the site, the new overflight frequency will target calm days when there is greater likelihood to observe dark, recoverable product on the waters surface, Nash said in a statement he attributed to Unified Command, which includes federal regulators and Taylor Energy itself.

Government experts believe oil is still leaking at the site where waves whipped up by Hurricane Ivan in 2004 triggered an underwater mudslide, which toppled a Taylor Energy-owned platform and buried a cluster of its oil wells under mounds of sediment. Last year, regulators estimated the leak could last a century or more if left unchecked.

Taylor Energy has said nothing can be done to completely eliminate the persistent slicks. The New Orleans-based company claims the sheens are coming from residual oil oozing from sediment on the seafloor.

In 2008, the Coast Guard initially ordered the company to fly over the leak site twice a day but reduced the requirement to once a day in 2009.

The frequency of overflights has historically been reviewed and revised where conditions warrant modification, Nash said.

When slicks are visible during flights, a Taylor Energy contractor submits a pollution report to the Coast Guards National Response Center. Last year, an Associated Press analysis of data identified roughly 2,300 pollution reports on the Taylor Energy site since the leak began.

SkyTruth, a West Virginia-based environmental watchdog group, has used satellite images and Coast Guard reports to track the leak since 2010. The group counts only 40 Coast Guard reports for Taylor Energys leak site since Jan. 1.

The APs investigation last year revealed evidence that the leak is worse than the company, or government, reported. Presented with APs findings, the Coast Guard provided a new leak estimate thats about 20 times larger than one cited by the company in a court filing last year.

SkyTruth estimated last year that between 300,000 and 1.4 million gallons of oil spilled from the site between 2004 and 2015  and it sees no end in sight. Satellite images from April 23 show a slick measuring 27 miles long and 3,500 feet wide and at its widest point, the group noted Monday in a Facebook post.

John Amos, SkyTruths president, questioned why regulators would ease the companys monitoring obligations.

Why would we drop our vigilance about whats happening at the site knowing that the job isnt done? he said. As shoddy and as demonstrably inaccurate as these (Coast Guard pollution) reports are, theyre the only public record of whats been happening out there since the leak began in 2004.

Taylor Energy, which sold all its offshore leases and oil and gas interests in 2008, says it has spent more than $480 million on its efforts to stop the leak. The company sued the federal government in January to recover more than $400 million in additional money that it set aside for leak-related work.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Akron police 3

Akron police are searching for a 24-year-old man accused of being part of a group that robbed a drug house at gunpoint.

(File photo)

AKRON, Ohio -- An Akron man is accused of being part of a group that pistol-whipped two men during a home invasion at a drug house.

Dominique Guess, 24, is charged with aggravated robbery. He is not in police custody and a warrant was issued April 18 for his arrest.

Guess about 2 a.m. April 7 was part of a group of armed three men that broke into a home in the 1100 block of Jason Avenue. The group pistol-whipped two residents, threatened to shoot people in the home and fired several shots into a bedroom door.

The residents ran and hid in the attic. The group stole drugs and ran away before police arrived, according to court records.

Akron police surrounded the home. One of the men inside, Trey Moore, 28, fired a gunshot through the kitchen window, nearly hitting two police officers on the front porch.

Officers searched the home and found methamphetamine, a marijuana-growing operation, synthetic marijuana and several guns.

Matthew Burner, 29, was also arrested. Burner was charged with marijuana trafficking, meth trafficking and possessing weapons as a felon.

Moore's 4-month-old child was in the home at the time, court records say.

If you want to comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments page.
aflcio150.jpg

Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, marks the 25th year the AFL-CIO has published national findings on the safety and health conditions for working people.

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Today is the annual Worker's Memorial Day, an observance of people who have died doing their jobs.

"Every day, millions of Americans leave their homes and report to jobs that provide for their families, strengthen our communities and grow our economy. Too many of them - on average, 13 workers a day - don't make it back at the end of their shift," U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez said in a statement Thursday. "On Workers' Memorial Day, we honor our fallen workers, and we renew our commitment to unwavering vigilance on workplace safety."

While a lot of improvements with workplace standards have prevented deaths in the last half century, Perez said, the numbers are still staggering.

"More than 4,500 workers still die from preventable workplace incidents every year, with 50,000 more succumbing to work-related illnesses," he said. "Ensuring that everyone can make it home safely after a hard day's work - that no one has to give their life to make a living - is our unfinished business."

Workers Memorial Day ceremonies are scheduled to take place throughout Ohio today, including events in Athens, Canton, Cincinnati, Mansfield, Newark, and Toledo.

Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, marks the 25th year the AFL-CIO has published national findings on the safety and health conditions for working people.

More than 4,820 workers were killed on the job in 2014, according to a new report by the AFL-CIO. And an estimated 50,000-60,000 died from occupational diseases, resulting in a daily loss of nearly 150 workers from preventable workplace injuries and illnesses.

According to preliminary data from the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation, 127 Ohioans lost their lives on the job in 2015. That's a decrease from 185 deaths in the state in 2014, which represented a rate of 3.6 deaths per 100,000 workers. Ohio ranked 25th among all states in 2014 according to the new AFL-CIO report.

Among other findings:

The report calls attention to an increase in fatalities among older workers.

The states with the highest fatality rates were Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota and Mississippi.

In 2014, 804 Latino workers lost their lives on the job and the fatality rate for Latino workers remains higher than the national rate.

Workplace violence injuries, particularly among women workers in health care, is a serious problem. The workplace violence injury rate has increased by 60 percent over the past five years, while the overall job injury rate has declined.

Oversight of job safety and health conditions remains weak and is getting worse in certain ways. OSHA can now inspect a workplace on average only once every 145 years, compared with once every 84 years in 1992, when the AFL-CIO issued its first report.

"Because OSHA has so few inspectors compared to the number of companies in business, we are unable to inspect every single company on a regular basis, so we have to leverage our resources and try to target companies that have the highest potential for injury," said Howie Eberts, area director of the Cleveland OSHA office.

The average penalty for serious violations last year was only $2,148 and the median penalty for worker deaths was only $7,000.

"We have made important progress, including winning new OSHA silica standards to protect workers from deadly dust," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. "But as this report shows, too many employers are cutting corners and workers are paying the highest price. We must keep working for stronger laws and enforcement to hold employers accountable, until all working people are safe on the job."
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Cleveland man is ordered not have contact with his girlfriend or their children after pleading not guilty Thursday to kidnapping charges.

Police say he screwed the front door shut on the family home.

Jonathan Torres Rodriguez, 26, remains in the Cuyahoga County on $150,000 bond and is also required to turn over his concealed carry weapons permit while he awaits trial on five felony kidnapping charges.

Torres Rodriguez was arrested on April 6, when, according to police, his girlfriend told a social worker that she had been trapped at home along with four children.

An altercation between the girlfriend and Torres Rodriguez escalated April 1 when he smashed her cellphone, pulled out a gun and fired a shot into the air, police reports say.

Torres Rodriguez dragged her back into the house by her hair as she tried to escape. The woman and four children discovered the next morning that the home's entry door had been screwed shut, court filings say.

Torres Rodriguez also threatened to kill the family and himself, court records say.

He will be back in court May 5 for a pretrial hearing before Cuyahoga Common Pleas Judge Brian J. Corrigan.
Parma police and Ohio Highway Patroll staffing

Here is a comparison of Ohio Highway Patrol and Parma police staffing since 2011. Parma's figures are for the end of each year. The patrol figures are for the middle of each year, unless noted.

(Rich Exner, cleveland.com)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - The number of Ohio Highway Patrol troopers and officers has grown 7.4 percent since Gov. John Kasich's first year in office, outpacing the 1.4 percent growth in police staffing elsewhere across Ohio.

This hiring occurred at a time when the state has urged local officials to manage with less.

Is this evidence of a double standard?

As part of our ongoing series - Impact 2016: Where the cuts hurt most - cleveland.com decided to examine whether state agencies are feeling the pinch like many local governments coping with tighter budgets.

The message from the Kasich administration has been clear - state tax cuts will be paid for in part by handing over less money to cities, and it's up to the cities to become more frugal.

For a closer look at how that is playing out, here's how the highway patrol compares to the police department in Parma, Ohio's seventh largest city. Parma's leaders have publicly criticized the Kasich administration for cutting state aid. They contend the cuts forced them to make a series of painful budget cuts and to begin charging residents $144 a year for garbage pickup. They also scrapped plans to add police officers.

Staffing

The Ohio Highway Patrol employs 1,598 sworn personnel, up 110 from the middle of 2011.

The Ohio Highway Patrol grew by 110 sworn officers since the middle of 2011, the year Kasich took office. That brought the total to 1,598 troopers and officers in early April.

Meanwhile, the Parma's Police Department's total number of officers is down slightly - from 99 in 2011 to 97 at the end of last year.

A plan to eventually boost police staffing to 110 was scrapped, a victim of cuts to balance the city's budget.

Parma Mayor Tim DeGeeter and Police Chief Robert Miller say they could use more police on the streets, but the city's budget doesn't make that possible.

"I don't think we could be more efficient," Miller said.



Though Parma is Ohio's seventh largest city with 81,000 residents, April data from the Ohio Attorney General's office shows Parma ranks 13th in the number of full-time officers with 93.

Similarly sized Canton has 162 full-time officers and Youngstown has 149. (See related story ranking Ohio's 20 most populated cities based on the size of their police departments.)

Equipment

The Ohio Highway Patrol, as a matter of practice, replaces patrol cars once they hit about 110,000 miles, which typically occurs in two to three years. Its SUVs usually are kept longer.

Many repairs on Parma police cars are done by city mechanics in this police garage.

Parma's routine had been to replace its police cars every three years, in an effort to keep more reliable cars on the streets and avoid big repair bills. However, as a short-term budget fix, the city bought no cars in 2015, meaning the fleet is a year older than what is customary.



Plans are to replace the oldest third of the police vehicles this year.

Budget

The Ohio Highway Patrol's budget was about the same in 2015 as it was in 2011 - up just 0.4 percent to $317.6 million.

The patrol is funded primarily through fees for license plates and driver's licenses. It's next largest source of revenue is toll money for policing of the Ohio Turnpike. The patrol receives about 4.4 percent of tolls, or more than $11 million a year.

The agency has become smarter in how it spends money, Lt. Craig Cvetan, the patrol's spokesman, said an email response to questions about why staffing was able to increase.



"Maintaining staffing levels is always a priority and if other purchases need to be placed on hold to ensure funding is available for staffing, that is what is done," Cvetan emailed.

Budgets

Year State

patrol Parma

police 2011 $317,553,993 $12,930,323 2012 $306,657,175 $13,824,380 2013 $304,566,418 $13,483,347 2014 $316,172,560 $14,026,635 2015 $318,929,930 $13,695,410

Despite scrapping the plan to add staff, and delaying the purchase of police cars, Parma's 2015 police budget still was up 5.9 percent from 2011. Some of that increase is attributable to pay raises given in 2013 and 2014.

However, the pay and benefits portion of the police budget - $8 million - was trimmed nearly $500,000 last year to its lowest level since 2011.

The latest police contract froze pay last year, and provided for raises of 1 percent this year and 2 percent in 2017.

An arbitrator called in during the contract talks wrote that the "effect of state cuts to the city cannot be ignored; the state cuts continue to have a devastating impact ... [even after the] city made some painful cost-cutting and revenue-raising decisions in 2015."

DeGeeter, the Parma mayor, said delayed purchases and other cost-cutting efforts have not been enough to offset cuts from the state.

"People say we need to do better," DeGeeter said. "We are. We are trying to get the message out."

Rich Exner, data analysis editor for cleveland.com, writes about numbers on a variety of topics. Follow on Twitter @RichExner


Summer Shalodi of Lorain is flanked by her three attorneys in Lorain County Common Pleas Court. Shalodi is charged with murder in the death of an 18-month-old Cleveland girl she was babysitting.

ELYRIA, Ohio -- A Lorain woman charged with murder in the death of an 18-month-old Cleveland girl made a court apperance Thursday morning.

Summer Susan Shalodi, 30, arrived late, along with a team of three attorneys, for her arraignment in Lorain County Common Pleas Court. One of the lawyer's entered a not guilty plea on her behalf.

Shalodi only said "thank you" to Judge Michele Silva Arredondo before leaving the courtroom.

She remains free on a $50,000 bond and is due back in court May 6.

A grand jury on April 22, indicted Shalodi on charges of murder, three counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of endangering children, two counts of corrupting another with drugs and tampering with evidence in the death of Nadia Nicole Gibbons.

Nadia died Dec. 13 of the combined effects of head trauma and Alprazolam intoxication, police said. Alprazolam is used to treat anxiety and panic disorders.

Shalodi called 911 about 6:30 a.m. and said Nadia wasn't breathing, a police report says. She told a dispatcher that she performed CPR on the girl, but that it didn't seem to work.

Officers found Nadia lying on the floor of a second-story bedroom in Shalodi's Driftwood Drive home. She was cold to the touch and wasn't moving.

Paramedics arrived a short time later and pronounced the child dead. They said the girl had likely been dead for several hours, according to the report.

The girl's mother, who lives in Cleveland, told investigators that she dropped off her daughter in Lorain about 3 p.m. the day before she died.

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Capt. Mark Thompson, 68, of Bismarck, did not experience direct combat during the Cold War and the Vietnam Conflict in the early 1970s. But, as a navigator of a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft for the U.S. Air Force, his crew was key in extending the flight times for other aircraft on attack missions.

Not that refueling aircraft mid-flight  hovering 18 feet above the plan being refueled  was easy, according to Thompson. Among the aircraft assisted were B-52 bombers, a strong part of the countrys nuclear deterrent. Navigating required Thompson to give specific coordinates, work in all weather conditions and get it done safely and efficiently. He said 95 percent of the time the navigator was in charge of the tanker in flight.

Thompsons primary mission was nuclear deterrence via the Strategic Air Command operating out of Travis Air Force Base in California  the base that was on 24-hour alert, seven days a week for decades in the Cold War era. His temporary tours took him to southeast Asia, Europe and Russia for weeks and months at a time.

Thompson estimates he spent at least one week per month with his team on SAC alert. This meant being ready to board and take off in as little as one minute and 49 seconds. The four members of the crew knew at a moment's notice they could be called on a one-way mission to fuel one of the planes that could retaliate against the Communist USSR in the event of a nuclear attack.

"Our mission out of Travis Air Force called us to a predetermined point to offload fuel to the bomber, then clear the track and ditch in the north Pacific. It was most likely a one-way mission," he said. "Because it would be all-out war, there would be most likely no rescue crews attempting to save you."

He found the thought sobering.

The four-member crew was given little in survival gear and service meals to take with them on the plane, said Thompson, recalling that he served as part of one of the first 50-50 fueling teams that partnered African American and Caucasian officers together.

Thompson said he was determined to serve his country, especially after his elementary school friend died serving in Vietnam during Thompson's freshman year of college. He served with the U.S. Air Force from 1971 to 1975, choosing to earn a commission through the ROTC program at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.

Some of the missions stand out in Thompson's memory: Often the crew members were given assignment locations for refueling and no details about the mission in which they assisted until later. One refueling mission out of Okinawa, Japan, was known as "Linebacker II" to assist bombers attacking a target at Hanoi, Vietnam. Twenty-seven tankers were assigned to rendezvous with 27 bombers from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam.

"A chaplain was there to say a prayer. We knew something big was happening," said Thompson, who described it as one of the largest air assault missions since World War II.

While orbiting the Gulf of Tonkin for eight hours, his crew could see bomb bursts from the air strikes over Hanoi.

In a mission out of Thailand, his tanker lost hydraulic pressure and the plane had to lower the flaps and landing gear manually. They were met by fire crews and ambulances that were not needed, Thompson said.

He said the team relied on a GPS system, radar and celestial navigation through a sextant similar to what the Phoenicians used 2,000 years ago  only at speeds of 450 mph.

Temporary assignments took him to Utapau Air Base in Thailand; Andersen Air Force Base in Guam; Torrejon, Madrid, Spain; and Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan.

While other branches of service often refer to the U.S. Air Force as the "Country Club," Thompson said he acknowledges that Marines and U.S. Army ground crews took the brunt of the direct conflict, but he also believes the KC-135s played an important part of a team that kept America safe.

He said he is proud of the work he did during this era, but believes the Vietnam Conflict could have ended much sooner if it were not headed by politicians, but military strategists. He said pilot friends speculate the war could have ended in months instead of years, because they knew where the bridges were, but were not given the orders to win a war, he said.

"Those guys who faced combat face to face, I take my hat off to them. There is no doubt those guys had scarier times .... At the same time, we're all on the same team and doing our job. The combined forces of the military is a pretty impressive fighting force," he said.

When off-duty, his team was advised to not wear their uniforms because the Air Force leaders didn't want them spit on or ridiculed.

"I feel today my opportunity to serve was one of my greatest opportunities. I loved my service. I loved wearing the uniform, and I loved the camaraderie with my fellow officers," said Thompson, who earned a degree in mechanical engineering from UND before being commissioned.

After 3 1/2 years in the Air Force, he and his wife became the third generation to run the family business, H.A. Thompson & Sons. His two daughters have assumed management positions at the firm today.

"People who serve in the military do not love war. We love liberty, and there is no liberty without fighting for it," he said.
GARFIELD HEIGHTS, Ohio - Garfield Heights are searching for a woman who left home three weeks ago and never returned.

Natalie Perez

Natalie Perez, 21, was last seen by her family on April 6, police said in a statement Thursday. She suffers from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and has been without her medication in the time since she went missing.

Perez is 4-feet 11-inches tall and weights about 85 pounds. She has black, curly hair and brown eyes, police said.

She is quiet, which at times has made it difficult for her to make friends, her mother Erica Perez said Thursday in a phone interview.

"She's really into herself, but once you get to know her, she's really nice and trusting. That can be a problem sometimes," she said.

Last year, she met a man through social media who bought her a plane ticket to California, her mother said. Her family did not know where she was, but they got a hold of her at the airport and made her come home before she made the trip.

Besides this instance, her daughter has never left home for extended periods of time, her mother said.

"Right now we're just clueless," her mother said. "And that's the hardest part."

She does not have a cellphone that her family can track, and she goes everywhere by walking, her mother said. She has tried to contact her daughter's Facebook friends, but no one knows where she's at.

"My parents... they're ready to go crazy right now," Erica Perez said. "My 80-year-old father has been around her whole life, and he used to watch her when she was little. He is just so sad."

Erica Perez hopes that someone with information about her daughter will come forward.

"We want her to call home and to know that she's alive and OK," her mother said, crying.

Police have received numerous calls from citizens saying they have seen her around Garfield Heights, but they could not confirm the leads, the statement says.

Anyone with information about Natalie Perez's whereabouts is asked to call Garfield Heights police at 216-475-5840.

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MAYFIELD HEIGHTS, Ohio

Disturbance, SOM Center Road:

Officers responded to the Portrait Innovations parking lot April 17 for a report of a man and woman fighting. The woman said she was driving to Target when one of the seven children in her car told her they saw daddy walking into Portrait Innovations. She said she turned the car around and went to Portrait Innovations where she started talking to the man in the parking lot and he subsequently shoved her against a vehicle and put his hands around her throat. The man said he was inside of Portrait Innovations with another woman and her child when the woman came up behind him and slapped him in the face. He said she then yelled and cursed at him about the other woman before they were asked to leave the store. An employee corroborated the man's story and said the woman also chased him around the parking lot with a can of pepper spray. The Cleveland woman, 30, informed officers that she had a concealed carry permit and officers located two guns inside her vehicle. One of them was loaded with a round in the chamber. Charges for improperly handling firearms in a vehicle are being considered by the prosecutor. The man, 29, reported the next day he found a tracking device under his car which he believed is what led the woman to Portrait Innovations. He did not want to press charges though for the incident.

Property damage, Sunset Road:

A woman, 18, reported April 16 someone damaged a rim and tire on her vehicle while it was parked in her driveway overnight. She suspects an acquaintance may have caused the damage because she had received harassing calls from two of them the previous day. Officers spoke with several people that may have been involved and suggested they all stay away from one another.

Theft from building, Golden Gate Plaza:

A maintenance technician reported April 15 parts had been stolen for scrap from a rooftop air conditioning unit at the vacant Dots store. He discovered the theft when he checked on a water leak in the building. He said the only access to the roof is with a ladder at the back of the building.

Telephone harassment, Landerhaven Drive:

An Executive Caterer's employee said April 12 a former employee continues to call the business and harass employees despite being told he was no longer being booked for work because of poor work habits. He said the Shaker Heights man, 26, said he felt the decision was made because of his race and said that he was going to bring a group of black panthers up to the business. Officers could not reach the man at either of the phone numbers that were provided.

Suspicion, SOM Center Road:

A woman reported at 4:27 a.m. April 16 there were suspicious people trying to enter her home and she believed they were armed with a laser. She said they are church-goers that want her and she knew because of a transmitter that was placed in her neck by the government. The woman was subsequently taken to Hillcrest Hospital for mental health concerns and her family was notified.

Endangering child, Golden Gate Boulevard:

A Cleveland Heights man, 32, was cited for child endangerment April 17 after he left his two-year-old child alone in a vehicle at Costco. A rear window was rolled down about two inches and the vehicle's doors were left unlocked. Officers removed the child from the hot vehicle and placed him in an air-conditioned cruiser until the man returned to the car. He said he left the boy alone because he didn't want to interrupt his nap. It was determined the man was away from his vehicle for approximately 28 minutes.

Violation of a protection order, Inertstate-271:

A woman reported April 15 her husband, whom she has a protection order against, tried to run her vehicle off the freeway with his vehicle. The prosecutor determined menacing by stalking and violation of a protection order charges would be filed. Officers also spoke with the Summit County Sheriff's Department and were told the Macedonia man, 33, violated the protection order April 12 and there was a warrant issued as a result.

Lost property, SOM Center Road:

A woman said April 18 she believed someone stole her wallet from her purse while she was shopping at Target. She said her purse was on her shoulder the entire time, but surveillance video could not confirm the wallet was stolen. It is believed she may have misplaced it.

Fraud, illegal use of credit cards:

A man reported April 18 someone used his credit card fraudulently at a Staples store in Elyria to make a $633 purchase. He said he was still in possession of the credit card. The incident is under investigation.

Theft, Orchard Heights Boulevard:

A man said April 19 some items were stolen from his home and garage. He said they included a woman's fur coat and mink stole, watch, set of wrenches and a U.S. quarter collection. He said he was renting the home and a handyman had been inside of it recently to make repairs for the owner. Officers said they would follow-up with the owner and handyman.

Suspicion, Oakville Road:

A teenage boy and girl were reported to be having sex in a car at Oakville Park around 6:30 p.m. April 13. The car had left before officers arrived and special attention was given to the area.

Impaired driving, Interstate-271:

A Garfield Heights woman, 27, was arrested for operating a vehicle while impaired after she was pulled over for weaving at 11:15 p.m. April 19. She said she had been drinking dark liquor at her family's organization.

See more Mayfield Heights news at Cleveland.com/hillcrest.

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CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 21-year-old father is wanted after police said he opened fire on the car where his 4-year-old son and the boy's mother sat.

Cleveland detectives on Tuesday obtained an arrest warrant charging Diion Brown with attempted felonious assault in the Saturday encounter at East 123rd Street and Superior Avenue.

No one was injured in the shooting, including the young boy who witnessed the attack.

"They started fighting, daddy slapped mommy, then mommy hit daddy, then daddy shot at mommy's window," the child told investigators.

Brown confronted the mother of his child about 8:30 p.m., as she walked out of a convenience store. He demanded to spend time with his son, according to a police report.

The mother, who had the 4-year-old boy and her 14-year-old son from another father with her, refused to let Brown see the child, the report says.

She rushed to her car to put the young child in a car seat. Brown followed.

The two got into an argument, and Brown punched the woman, police said. She tried to fight back, and threw a brick through the windshield of his car, according to the report.

She tried to drive away. Brown grabbed a handgun from his car and fired several shots at the car, the report says.

Officers found six .45-caliber bullet casings near the intersection, and a spent bullet that fell out of the car's wheel well.

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DAYTON, Ohio - A Dayton drug dealer who called himself "El Chapo Jr." has been on federal drug and weapons charges.

A Dayton U.S. District Court grand jury handed up drug trafficking, conspiracy and weapons possession charges on Daniel E. Jones, 28, the Dayton Daily News reports. He is scheduled to appear in court May 3.

Jones is accused of possessing and intending to sell more 14 ounces of fentanyl at one time, according to the Dayton Daily News.

He was arrested in April after an hours-long standoff at a Montgomery County apartment complex. During the standoff, Jones broadcasted himself live on Facebook standing near a fire in a bathroom, saying "No evidence on me, buddy," according to the Dayton Daily News.

During the standoff, Jones reportedly called police and asked to speak with an FBI agent. He told the agent he was "the biggest drug dealer in Dayton" and told him about his Mexican heroin supplier, the Dayton Daily News reports.

Jones was eventually forced out of the apartment after a SWAT team used tear gas and a water cannon, according to the Dayton Daily News. Inside the apartment, law enforcement officials found handguns and ammunition; bulletproof vests; more than $100,000 cash and more than six pounds of burnt fentanyl.

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A unit of China's HNA Group has agreed a deal to buy Carlson Hotels, the owner of the Radisson hotel chain, the firms said in a joint statement late on Wednesday, continuing a spree of overseas deals by Chinese firms.

HNA Tourism Group, a division of aviation and shipping conglomerate HNA Group, will buy 100 percent of Carlson Hotels for an undisclosed sum, including its 51.3 percent majority stake in Rezidor Hotel Group .

Chinese firms have been snapping up hotels and hospitality brands around the world, from Fosun International 's purchase of France's Club Mediterranee to Anbang Insurance buying up the famous Waldorf Astoria in New York.

HNA Tourism's CEO Bai Haibo said the firm would build on the well-known Radisson brand to help "establish our presence in the U.S. market and expand our footprint in hospitality internationally."
It's that time again! Jim Cramer rang the lightning round bell, which means he gave his take on caller favorite stocks at rapid speed:



AIG : "It's OK. I'm a Chubb guy myself, both at home and abroad."

Vector Group : "I'm pro-Vector group down here. I think it's OK."

Medtronic : "It's fantastic. I want to buy that, and let me throw in Bard, Baxter  nice quarter there  and why not do Edwards Lifescience and Boston Scientific."

Read more from Mad Money with Jim Cramer

Cramer Remix: The real issue with Apple

Cramer: How deep the Apple pain goes

Cramer: Bullish pattern formed in material charts

Wyndham Worldwide : "We were taken aback by that quarter. We want Steve Holmes [CEO] to come on and explain a little more, because we did not get exactly the negativity that people felt."

Norwegian Cruise Line : "Our favorite had been Norwegian in the group, but we are always open minded. That has been the one that we are favoring at this price."



Hawaiian Holdings : "Everyone wants Hawaiian Holdings, I have to go back with Gary Kelly [CEO] at Southwest. That was a powerful interview."

WestRock : "I like WRK. I'm actually looking at it as a momentum name lately. I was doing some work on it just this afternoon."
"The bulls turned bears from that nasty downturn at the beginning of the year, and those who keep waiting for the Fed to tighten just keep getting overwhelmed by these mini-bull markets," the " Mad Money " host said.

Given the weight that technology and Apple has on the psyche of many investors, Cramer expected stocks to be down huge on Wednesday. This market is much different from any market he can ever recall.

If a year ago someone told Jim Cramer that the market would be able to thrive, even though the biggest company on earth, Apple, had a downbeat forecast  he would have said they were crazy.

Those who keep waiting for the Fed to tighten just keep getting overwhelmed by these mini-bull markets.

The most salient group is the oil bull market, which had been in retreat since 2014. It has now come back fiercely in a move that Cramer attributed to that of FANG  Cramer's acronym for Facebook , Amazon, Netflix and Google-parent Alphabet  except oil has a much larger impact on the market.

Read more from Mad Money with Jim Cramer

Cramer Remix: The real issue with Apple

Cramer: How deep the Apple pain goes

Cramer: Bullish pattern formed in material charts

"Oil has got ramifications that are much broader than the stocks themselves. It has become the ultimate barometer of the pressure in the system," Cramer said.

When oil goes down, many investors assume that banks are threatened, China is stalling and dividends are in danger. Instead, it went up on Wednesday, which was the bull market move that Cramer wanted to see.

Initially the move only embraced Exxon and Chevron , but then extended to oil service company Schlumberger , now the big international oils are getting in on the action. French giant Total and BP have gained strength to head higher.

Cramer also considers financials to represent the pulse of the market. With the global economy stabilizing and the labor market strong, the Fed's decision to remain unchanged on Wednesday ensured that JPMorgan and Wells Fargo got a lift.

The banking cohort has been able to rally ever since oil crossed above $40, and Cramer didn't see any signs of it quitting.

"Why not, the bank stocks are real cheap, they have been left behind by the rest of the market and the Fed is giving everyone a positive spin," Cramer said.
Head for the Alpine delights of Switzerland to enjoy its trademark chocolate and cuckoo clocks  and Europe's highest standard of living, according to international salary-comparison website Glassdoor.

In its study, released Thursday, the site researched the purchasing power of salaries across Europe, using the U.S. as a benchmark.



Cosmo Condina | The Image Bank | Getty Images

Standard of living index (best to worst):

Switzerland Denmark Germany US Sweden Netherlands Finland Norway Ireland Austria UK France Belgium Spain Italy Portugal Greece Estonia Costs of living are high in Switzerland, but elevated nominal wages averaging 72,000 euros ($81,313) compensate, according to Glassdoor.

By comparison, wages average only 13,000 euros in the Baltic nation of Estonia.

"Adjusting salary data to take into account differences in relative prices within countries tends to narrow the differences in wages across countries, but Switzerland and Estonia remain at opposite ends of the spectrum," the Glassdoor report, which was conducted with Llewellyn Consulting, said.

Switzerland pricier than New York

Despite the example of Switzerland, countries with high costs of living in their major cities do not necessarily offer the highest standard of living, Glassdoor said.

It highlighted Norway and the U.K., which scored indifferently in the standard of living index but whose capitals were respectively the third- and fourth-most expensive major cities in Europe.

fitopardo.com | Getty Images

Living costs in Europe's cities (highest to lowest):
Drivy, a French start-up that lets you put your own car up for rent or hire someone else's, has raised 31 million euros ($35 million), as it looks to take on established rental companies. Cathay Innovation and Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), which is Nokia's venture capital fund, led the round with the participation of early investors Bpifrance's Ecotechnologie Fund and Index Ventures. The nearly six-year-old start-up lets you put your car on its platform to be rented. And a user can hire a car, just like they would rent a place on Airbnb for example.



Drivy was founded in 2010 and currently operates in France, Germany and Spain. The new cash injection will be used to expand into new European markets. "We are going to open in at least three more countries in Europe, then we will scale to be able to open many more next year including outside of Europe," Paulin Dementhon, founder and chief executive of Drivy, told CNBC by phone. The entrepreneur said the U.K. would be one of those markets, but has not yet decided on the other two.

Drivy

Part of the money will also be used on improving the software, with the aim of making the service on-demand. This will require a larger supply of people putting their vehicles up for hire with Dementhon adding that it will require a large marketing push. The company is also looking to expand its product called Drivy Open. This allows people to rent a car, and instead of having it dropped to them, they can go to the car and unlock it themselves with an app. Drivy fits a special piece of hardware into the device that connects with this specific smartphone app to unlock the car, meaning the owner doesn't need to be there for someone to unlock a car. Currently 300 cars out of the roughly 40,000 on the platform are equipped with this technology, something Dementhon is hoping to increase. In 2015, Drivy's revenues grew 100 percent, but Dementhon could not give the actual figures as they are confidential. Since its inception, 1.4 million days of rental were completed with Drivy.



Competition to Uber?
Women influence almost 80 percent of car buying decisions, but only 16 percent make it to managerial positions in the automotive industry, according to a report on gender diversity by Ernst & Young.

In a survey of 350 business leaders from 51 countries around the world, which included 50 from the auto sector, 56 percent of leaders acknowledge women as a critical source of underutilized talent. For example: Among the 50 largest publicly held auto company suppliers in North America, less than 10 percent of business leaders are women.

Meanwhile, 90 percent of auto companies believe they need to change their approach to attracting, retaining and promoting talent dramatically, while only about 22 percent of auto companies surveyed have structured programs to identify and develop women's careers.

The report's sole focus on the automotive industry stems from the findings that the most insufficient diversity of thought and experience exists in this sector at 38 percent, followed by oil and gas at 44 percent and power & utilities at 52 percent.

"The speed of disruption in automotive is accelerating at a historic pace," Randall Miller, EY's Global Automotive and Transportation Sector leader said in a press statement. "Having the right talent in place to support this disruption is mission critical. With a billion women joining the economy for the first time by 2020, advancing gender diversity can be a major competitive advantage to auto industry players."

The advantage is seen in tackling ongoing volatility in the auto industry. Digitization, regulations, evolving customer needs and new competitors are some of the disruptive trends impacting the business landscape in the automotive industry. This industry lacks diversity and hence business leaders surveyed by EY believe that diversity of thought and experience will be key to navigate the challenge of disruption.
Bernie Sanders insists he will go to the bitter end of the Democratic primary process, even after a series of defeats Tuesday pushed the presidential nomination further from his reach. The U.S. senator from Vermont must decide what to do with the ample cash pile in the hands of his campaign committee, which has proven adept at raking in mostly small individual donations. Sanders lost four of Tuesday's five primary contests, beating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in only Rhode Island. He now trails Clinton by 787 total pledged delegates, according to NBC News.



Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders John Sommers II | Getty Images

Considering those results, some have questioned why Sanders remains in the race. On Tuesday night, the candidate said he would stay in to "fight for a progressive party platform," including $15 per hour minimum wage and tuition-free public college, ahead of the party's July convention. "The people in every state in this country should have the right to determine who they want as president and what the agenda of the Democratic Party should be. That's why we are in this race until the last vote is cast," Sanders said. Sanders should have money to work with going forward. His campaign committee had about $17.5 million on hand at the end of March, though it is not yet known what it raised and spent in April. The Sanders campaign did not respond to a request for comment on its finances.



The campaign has shown the ability to raise huge sums, and spend cash quickly. For March, it reported total receipts of $45.9 million and total disbursements of $44.9 million.

But it remains to be seen if Sanders can keep up the fundraising pace as the nomination becomes increasingly less likely. On Wednesday, he told The New York Times the campaign would cut staff and focus more resources on June's California primary.

"He likely can, and will have to, raise additional sums to continue to get his message out to voters, particularly in expensive media markets like California," said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School and vice president of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission. Sanders very well could spend his remaining cash pushing his policies until the end of the primary process. However, any promise to stay in the race until the end should be taken "with a grain of salt," Levinson said.


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When 33-year-old Hong Yuan of Beijing bought his first car earlier this year, the decision was easy. He picked an all-electric crossover utility vehicle, the e6, built by Chinese automaker BYD . "I always thought I would own a car when I was a kid, but I didn't think about having an electric car because I didn't know the technology would move so fast," said Yuan.

His decision to buy an electric car was driven by two major factors: money and the ability to immediately get his car registered.





A customer checks a BYD e6 electric car at a dealership in Beijing, China. Jason Lee | Reuters

"First of all, of course, it's the car plate policy," said Yuan. "Second is the government and the city. They both provide subsidies to these new energy cars." Yuan ended up getting $15,000 in rebates for his $35,000 e6. The Chinese government wants to see more people drive EVs in the hope of cutting down on emission-related pollution  and government policies reflect that. In China's biggest cities, getting a license plate for a new car means waiting weeks or months to win an auction or a lottery. However, those buying electric vehicles get their license plates right away.



These policies have boosted sales of electric cars to Chinese consumers to 188,000 last year, easily ahead of the U.S., where 116,000 were sold. At the BYD plant in Shenzhen, that growth in demand can be seen on the assembly line. BYD sold 62,000 electric vehicles to Chinese consumers last year and plans to at least double that number this year. "We can see that more and more people already accept the new technology," said Michael Shu, general manager of BYD Auto Sales. BYD's growth in electric cars comes after years of expanding from battery production into electric vehicles. Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett liked the business so much that one of his conglomerates has a 10 percent stake in BYD. While the Chinese government is pushing electric cars, analysts are wondering how quickly sales will grow given the challenges facing Chinese consumers who want an EV. "Chinese consumers generally live in large apartment buildings, not in standalone homes where they can more easily have a charging solution," said James Chao, with the consulting firm IHS Automotive. "One of the conundrums for the EV buyer here is 'where do you charge it?'" But Shu isn't worried.
Ecuador has asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for aid after this month's massive earthquake killed hundreds of people and laid extra stress on the struggling economy. On Wednesday, an IMF official said it had received a request for a credit line from Ecuador, according to Reuters. The country might receive up to $368 million during the course of the loan, the newswire calculated.



Pedernales, one of Ecuador's worst-hit towns, two days after an earthquake hit the country. Rodrigo Buendia | AFP | Getty Images

The 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Ecuador on April 16, around 100 miles west of Quito, the capital city  where it was felt. More than 650 people were killed and around 16,600 injured, according to Reuters, citing Ecuador's emergency management authority. Smaller quakes then hit the region, including a powerful 6.0-magnitude one on April 20. Ecuador's President, Rafael Correa, has estimated the cost of damage at $3 billion or 3 percentage points of the country's gross domestic product, according to political risk consultancy, Teneo Intelligence. This poses a huge challenge for the upper-middle income country, which is has been hit by greatly reduced oil revenues. It is a member of oil-producing cartel OPEC and exports around 422,000 barrels a day. Correa was originally reticent about tapping the IMF for aid. Loans from the body tend to be subject to economic conditions that are sometimes unpalatable for leaders.





A man walks along a street of Portoviejo, Ecuador, almost a week after an earthquake hit. Juan Cevallos | AFP | Getty Images

Nicholas Watson, senior vice-president at Teneo Intelligence, was skeptical of Correa's previous assertion that the IMF had offered condition-free support.

"The claim should be treated cautiously; condition-free assistance tends to be provided by the IMF only when the applicant country has very strong economic fundamentals," Watson said in a report on Wednesday. In the meantime, Ecuador's National Assembly is fast-tracking emergency tax-raising measures that are supposed to raise $1 billion over the next year, according to Watson. These measures include a 12-month increase in sales tax to 14 percent from 12 percent, a one-time levy for people with assets over $1 million, a one-off 3 percent tax on company profits and sliding-scale contribution from people earning more than $1,000 per month. The National Assembly also approved a separate program to increase tax revenues this week, in a move that might potentially rile Ecuadoreans and rival politicians.

Damage is seen on the road between Pedernales and Jama after Ecuador's earthquake. Guillermo Granja | Reuters
Bernie Sanders needs to soften his verbal assaults on Hillary Clinton if he wants to stay relevant beyond the 2016 election cycle, onetime Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Richardson said Thursday.

Richardson told CNBC's "Squawk Box" he believes Sanders will stay in the Democratic race for the White House to this summer's convention, even though he doesn't have a chance of winning, so he can give further voice to his hot-button issues of wealth inequality and Wall Street reform.



"I think [Sanders] realizes he can't win. But at the same time, he wants to be a player in the party. He wants to influence the platform," said Richardson, former governor of New Mexico and an official in President Bill Clinton's administration. "If he's going to do that, I think he needs to start moving in the direction of supporting the nominee."

After losing four out of the five state primaries Tuesday, Sanders said he's laying off hundreds of campaign workers. But a spokesperson for the Vermont senator played down the move, saying with just 10 states left they need fewer people.

Richardson, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, said Hillary Clinton is the pro-business candidate who can win the White House in 2016.

While Sanders has pushed the party to the extreme left, Clinton will bring the message back to the center during the general election, said Richardson. He supported Barack Obama for president in 2008 over the former first lady, who later became Obama's secretary of state.

"[Clinton] is going to be somebody, I think, the American people see as moderate," Richardson said. "The country moves to the center in a general election."


Residents in southern Mississippi experienced a flash flood emergency on Thursday morning.

The towns of Biloxi and Gulfport, in particular, are slated to see upwards of 10 inches of floodwater, in addition to severe thunderstorms and possible waterspouts, according the the National Weather Service.

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"Very bad weather currently," Gulfport police said in a statement on Facebook and Twitter. "If you don't have to be out in this mess, stay indoors. Numerous roadways and neighborhoods are flooded. Be careful."

Biloxi's assistant fire chief told the Weather Channel that this is the "worst flooding since Katrina" that the area has seen.
In Alphabet 's annual founder's letter, Pichai documented Google's accomplishments, and homed in on the potential of artificial intelligence. Google's AI system AlphaGo recently beat one of the world's best players of the ancient and complex Chinese game of Weiqi, which is better known as Go  and Pichai was clear that they're not just playing around.

With the spawn of the internet and proliferation of mobile phones, it may seem like technology completely transformed the past two decades. But we're still just at the start, according to Sundar Pichai , CEO of Google.

"The implications for this victory are, literally, game changing  and the ultimate winner is humanity," Pichai wrote. "This is another important step toward creating artificial intelligence that can help us in everything from accomplishing our daily tasks and travels to eventually tackling even bigger challenges like climate change and cancer diagnosis."



Pichai's comments come at a time when artificial intelligence has been the source of intense debate among technologists. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have all hesitated to endorse the technology or have warned of its dangers, while others, like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, have said we should not be afraid of AI.



Right now, Google works across screens, Pichai said, not just computers, but phones, wrists, cars and virtual reality devices. But Pichai predicts that these devices will be replaced by the more powerful forces of artificial intelligence.

"Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the 'device' to fade away," Pichai wrote. "Over time, the computer itself  whatever its form factor  will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. We will move from mobile first to an AI first world."

 CNBC's Saheli Roy Choudhury and Sarah Whitten contributed to this report.


That article, I'll venture, is from Fusion's Kashmir Hill . She detailed how researchers, in essence, reverse engineered Waze's servers to create several "ghost drivers"  fake versions of the little car icons you see on the app  that enable them to track other drivers in real time. She even applied the app's bug hack to herself:

No way, Waze replied today. The Google unit released a statement addressing what it calls "severe misconceptions" about the study, released by researchers at University of California Santa Barbara, and an unnamed "news article."

Yesterday, research surfaced showing how Waze, the Google -owned driving assistance app, has a vulnerability that would let hackers track users' whereabouts unbeknownst to them.

Last week, I tested the Waze vulnerability myself, to see how successfully the UC Santa Barbara team could track me over a three-day period. I told them I'd be in Las Vegas and San Francisco, and where I was staying  the kind of information a snoopy stalker might know about someone he or she wanted to track. Then, their ghost army tried to keep tabs on where I went.



In its response, Waze notes that faux car icons are the norm  a way to make users feel like they're not so alone in places where Waze is new. And it insisted that "a stranger cannot" find or follow you while using the app.

More from Re/code:

Venmo is growing ridiculously fast

KISS guitarist Tommy Thayer is doing an app for kids

Self-driving cars will be huge for disabled people

Plus, there's a hitch here, Waze countered: Hill wanted to be found. "The reporter in the article gave her location and username to the research team," the post reads, "which greatly simplified the process of deducing sections of her route after the fact by using a system of ghost riders."



But that, Hill said via email, is just the point: "I did give my location to the researchers, [and] it was a surprise to me that knowing where I live or where I work would be sufficient information for a hacker to then follow my movements using Waze."



Still, the company said the research prompted a change in its privacy safeguards:



We appreciate the researchers bringing this to our attention and have implemented safeguards in the past 24 hours to address the vulnerability and prevent ghost riders from affecting system behavior and performing similar tracking activities. None of these activities have occurred in real-time and in real-world environments, without knowing participants.



Waze declined to comment on what those safeguards are exactly.
Home sales may be rising, but homeownership in the United States is heading down once again. After gains in the second half of 2015, the homeownership rate fell to just 63.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, in the first quarter of this year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Homeownership hit a high of 69.4 percent in 2004, during one of the biggest housing booms in history. That was also when mortgage lending was arguably at its loosest level in history. The homeownership rate is now just one-tenth of 1 basis point higher than its all-time low in the second quarter of 2015. Watch how homeownership has changed by percentage in the states since 1950.

Source: First Exclusive Economists continue to point to a recovering job market as fuel for growth in the housing market, but for young Americans, just having a job does not translate to homeownership. High levels of student loan debt, tight mortgage underwriting standards and overheating home prices are all contributing to very low homeownership rates among the nation's youngest workers. Homeownership among those aged 25-34 today is nearly 10 percentage points lower than it was a decade ago. First-time homebuyers are still barely 30 percent of today's buyers; traditionally, they comprise 40 percent of homebuyers.



A real estate agent and a potential home buyer in Coral Gables, Fla. Getty Images

"Rental affordability remains a big problem in many places, and that makes it harder to save for a down payment," said Jed Kolko, an independent economist and senior fellow at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at University of California, Berkeley. "We're still seeing relatively few first-time homebuyers because young people are buying homes later than they used to. Some of this is a long-term shift toward marrying and having children later in life. Some of this is that the recovery has been slow among young adults."


It's not all about the money.

According to a new survey of angel investors by Propel(x), some investors aren't just looking at return on investment when reviewing science and technology startups.



Just half of respondents surveyed said the potential for investment returns was their top motivator for investing, while nearly one third ranked solving the world's biggest challenges as top motivation.

Why? It's personal. "Angel investors are investing personal wealth and many want to leave a legacy by helping solve some of the world's biggest challenges through science and technology," Swati Chaturvedi, Propel(x) CEO told CNBC.

"When raising capital, founders should emphasize the impact of their solution besides potential returns to investors," she added. "It's not only about the 'what,' it's also about the 'so what?' "



The study also found that investors want to know the team beyond its founder to get a sense of the brains behind the business.

The study, which was done in collaboration with Breakout Labs, MIT Alumni Angels of Northern California and Innovation Node  Los Angeles, highlighted the importance of keeping technical terms, simple.

Nearly 70% of respondents have invested in science and technology startups, and half of respondents said they would sometimes or often turn down a startup because they didn't understand the technology.

Finally, the majority of investors agreed that having a subject-matter expert will help when evaluating a startup's potential.



"Angel investors are at the vanguard of funding true innovation," Chaturvedi said. "They are swooping in and living up to their names."
North Korea's already-low food supply is set to deteriorate this year as dry weather hits crop yields, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned.

"Given the tight food supplies in 2015/16, the country's food security situation is expected to deteriorate from the previous year when most households were already estimated to have poor or borderline food consumption levels," the agency said in a report on Wednesday.

North Korea's total food production fell 9 percent on-year to 5.4 million tons in 2015, with the harvest of rice  a food staple  dropping 26 percent due to poor rains and a lack of irrigation, the FAO said.
As politicians continue to decry the supposed greed of well-paid investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs  promoting a variety of reforms that seek to mandate minimums or cap executive pay  one company is demonstrating the value of economic freedom and market diversity.

Chobani, a privately owned greek yogurt manufacturer, recently announced it will be giving a 10% ownership stake to its roughly 2,000 full-time workers, a move that could result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars for some employees.

According to the New York Times:

Hamdi Ulukaya, the Turkish immigrant who founded Chobani in 2005, told workers at the companys plant here in upstate New York that he would be giving them shares worth up to 10 percent of the company when it goes public or is sold. The goal, he said, is to pass along the wealth they have helped build in the decade since the company started. Chobani is now widely considered to be worth several billion dollars.

NBC News has the full story:

The reporter describes the move as more Silicon Valley than Upstate New York, and indeed, one doesnt typically associate these sorts of stock options with lower-level manufacturing workers.

For Ulukaya, however, its another way of recognizing the service providing by his employees. This isnt a gift, he wrote in a letter to his employees. Its a mutual promise to work together with a shared purpose and responsibility.

Its better than a bonus or a raise, says Rich Lake, a lead project manager at the company. Its the best thing because youre getting a piece of this thing you helped build.

Whether the move pays off for Chobani is yet to be seen, but the positive response from those on the ground demonstrates how the task of bridging work and wage can be tackled a variety of ways, whether through material benefits (bonuses, increased salaries, ownership), special perks, or other task- and/or relationship-related tweaks.

In more than one case, Chobanis employees express a preference for ownership over straight-up cash, despite increased risk. Yet our conversations at the level of policymaking continue to impose cutter solutions on what businesses should or shouldnt be offering to their workers and at what price. If wages were manipulated to be excessively high, for example, would Chobani even think or have capacity to offer such a program?

The ideal approach and outcome will be different for each employer and employee, which is entirely the point. Ulukaya made a business decision based on conscience, and it is here, not the governments billy club, that work and wage should meet.

As Lester DeKoster writes:

[Executives] have the awesome obligation of setting wage and price scales for employees and products. Theirs is the gift for merging all economic variables into price tags and wage ratesand their choices are as sculpting of their own selves as any others. Conscience sets before these executive stewards an ideal free-economy goal of (1) the best product; (2) produced under the best working conditions for all employees, including themselves; (3) at the best wage for everyone involved; and (4) reflecting the best efforts at every job, to be sold at the lowest price compatible with these requirements. The twin tracks of work and wage do not meet, and cannot be scientifically related. They are bridged by morality, not by mathematics. And it is in the self-sculpting choices of wage and price scales that managers must make the twin tracks merge  under the all-seeing eye of God. It is here that justice, as defined by the will of the Creator and revealed in his Word, comes to bear upon the economy.

As we look to how our laws and policies might hinder or enhance this role, we should note that good economic artistry requires the capacity to cultivate and act on ones conscience, and that means having the imagination to allow for some brush strokes.
"If it means that we're selling less number of phones going out the door. We're fine with that so long as we have a profitable business, and we're really on our way to being profitable in that regard," Kazuo Hira, the chief executive of Sony, told CNBC in February .

Losses in Sony's mobile communications business, which has been a cause for concern, narrowed to 61.4 billion yen from 217.6 billion in fiscal 2015. The Japanese firm has been on a drive to increase profitability with its Xperia smartphone range rather than chase market share, a move that appears to be paying off.

Income before taxes for the year ending March 31 came in at 304.5 billion yen ($2.81 billion), a big rise from the 39.7 billion yen recorded during the same period last year. Operating profit rose 329.2 percent to 294.2 billion yen, its largest figure since fiscal 2007, according to Reuters.

Japanese electronics giant Sony posted a 666.5 percent rise in pretax profit for its full fiscal year on Thursday, helped by cost cutting in its smartphone business and the continued popularity of the PlayStation 4.

Another bright spot for Sony is the gaming division which saw operating income rise 84.3 percent to 88.7 billion yen. In January, the company said that PS4 sales had topped 35 million and in its earnings release, it said an increase in software and hardware sales of the console helped offset the decrease in PlayStation 3 sales.

Its camera business also saw strong profitability which rose 72.7 percent.

Sony's strategy under Hirai has been to focus on its most profitable and high-margin businesses. So some concern will be raised by the 28.6 billion yen loss recorded in its semiconductor and component division, an area that has been key to the company's turnaround plans. The segment recorded an 89 billion yen operating profit in fiscal 2015.

While Sony has managed to post some good numbers, the challenge will be maintaining the momentum, analysts said.

"Sony Mobile has embarked on some aggressive cost reduction over the last 12 months. This has seen it exit markets such as China, India and the U.S. as well as reducing its headcount. Now the business unit has more stable financial position to build on as it looks to driving a return to growth," Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight, told CNBC by email.

"This is a tough challenge in the brutally competitive smartphone market. It seems the starting point will be a focus on the Japanese market given it is now the biggest single contributor to Sony Mobile's revenue. Sony has also accepted that it can't rely on smartphones for future growth and is now pushing into the Internet of Things (IoT) area in the hope that it can drive new revenue streams. It will need to move quickly given progress already made by giant rivals such as Amazon and Google."



The company said it was unable to give guidance for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2017 because of the earthquake that hit Japan earlier this month causing operations at Sony's main manufacturing site for image sensors and digital cameras to be halted. Activity at the factor is still offline.



Sony said the impact of the earthquake on Sony's outlook will "continue to be evaluated" and it plans to issue a forecast in May 2016.
British "challenger" bank Tandem is to kick off a 1 million ($1.46 million) crowdfunding drive in a bid to get more people involved in the start-up's upcoming launch and attract customers. The British start-up lender received its banking license at the end of 2015 and is set to launch later this year. It is part of the wave on online-only banks attempting to challenge the giants of the industry. Tandem has previously raised "tens of millions of pounds", according to founder Ricky Knox, but has never disclosed the actual figure. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of auction site eBay is among the investors. The crowdfunding round is part of the company's "co-founders" program, allowing people to own shares in the bank. Earlier this month, Tandem handed out free shares to people, worth about 5 percent of the business, in return for them offering advice and product feedback.



While the latest round is not a large sum of money, the main aim is to get people involved in the bank's launch and hopefully turn them into customers. "Part of 'co-founders' is building a group of advocates. This is a group of people who have been involved. One of the things about the new generation growing up is that people want to come along and participate," Ricky Knox, founder of Tandem, told CNBC in a phone interview. "We get them involved and we hope they will be customers and they will bring all their mates too." Knox said the company now has 5,000 co-founders that participate in different parts of development from coming to the office and doing events to offering feedback.

Tandem is pitting itself against established banks as well as rival start-ups including Atom, which received a 45 million investment from Spain's BBVA last year. Mondo, another competitor, did its own 1 million crowdfunding round earlier this year in which it reached its target in 96 seconds, highlighting the appetite for these new lenders. Knox said that the crowdfunding page will be on Tandem's website and will begin sometime in mid-May. As of yet, the company has not unveiled its app or given a specific launch date.



Tandem

The aim of Tandem, according to Knox, is not to be a "massive price disruptor" but to "help customers with their finances, help improve relationship with money, make them better off and save them dollars". Knox said that Tandem will be a "full service retail bank" with a range of products from current accounts to mortgages which will roll out at different stages. "We will be looking at how we can find solutions to things in your life you find irritating, such as being ripped off when going abroad and using credit card," Knox told CNBC. "The key is more around the piece that stitches that together, a robo adviser for your finances, the intelligence that sits in the middle and looking at how to do stuff better and do it for you. We are building an app that will intelligently making you better off."


Lahiru Pathmalal is full of interesting contradictions. The 34-year-old angered his father by abandoning his economic major to study politics and psychology in the U.S. Yet Pathmalal ended up being one of Sri Lanka's most successful entrepreneurs, having set up Takas.lk, Sri Lanka's biggest e-tailer.

"I remember my father calling me and saying, 'You're probably never going to get a job'," he laughs. "I started Takas in 2012 because I felt that, with my educational background and work history, none of the corporate entities in Sri Lanka will hire me," he adds.

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Pathmalal may be modest, but he does have many entrepreneurial traits. He dabbled in real estate while he was a student in the U.S. and used the profit to finance his graduate studies in Australia. He is also a risk-taker, choosing to work in a psychiatric ward for children with behavioral disorders in the U.S, and as a field researcher in war-torn Afghanistan, when his peers pursued more mainstream career paths.

But Pathmalal doesn't view his return to Sri Lanka just as the country's civil war ended as a risky bet.

"I think Sri Lanka today is vastly different from the Sri Lanka I grew up in," he tells CNBC. "People here are breaking lots of boundaries, and technology is empowering entrepreneurs.

"I feel now, more than ever, there are more reasons to come home."

Pathmalal was away from Sri Lanka from 2001 to 2010, first as a student and then to work in the U.S, Australia and Afghanistan.

Two years after his return to his home country, he set up Takas.lk with two friends, and is now chief executive of the company, which has 38 employees and sells $200,000 worth of goods on average every month.





Natural beauty spots such as Kalametiya Beach, on the south coast of Sri Lanka, drew entrepreneur Lahiru Pathmalal back to his home country. Tessa Bunney | In Pictures | Getty Images
Of course, the Cruz-Fiorina ticket has to get past Indiana first. Cruz desperately needed to change the narrative. Trump has gained steam, is now consolidating the Republican base, and, if he handily defeats Cruz in Indiana, will likely get to the required 1,237 delegates before arriving in Cleveland. The Fiorina pick alone is unlikely to change that trajectory. But, the Fiorina selection definitely took up some of Trump's oxygen. That was a rare event for Cruz  even if it's just temporary.



Perhaps the best thing about the Fiorina selection is she is just as valuable a primary-nomination asset as she is in the general election. In the primary, Donald Trump's vulnerability is likability and electability. Most voters don't like him and many Republicans worry he can't get elected in November. This is because his numbers with women are terrible. Trump has a 70-percent disapproval rating among women, according to the latest Gallup poll. That's all women but, with a number that high, he's not winning over Republican women. Carly Fiorina is the living embodiment of why Donald Trump is the wrong guy to carry the GOP banner in November.


While Ted Cruz may be overly optimistic in choosing Carly Fiorina as his running mate, Hillary Clinton's victories in the Northeast primaries have allowed her to finally look ahead to the November race. Leaks from her advisors show a predictably large group of potential candidates. Clinton can choose anyone, but as past Democratic nominees show, the party's standard bearers have followed a very strict pattern of running mate selection: Look to the Senate.

Since 1940, every Democratic vice presidential nominee except two very notable exceptions has been a sitting U.S. Senator. From Harry Truman to Joe Biden, 13 of the last 15 choices have been taken directly from the Senate. Those two exceptions both stand out -- U.S. Rep. Geraldine Ferraro in 1984  who was taken from the House -- and Sargent Shriver in 1972. The selection of Shriver deserves a huge asterisk itself. Shriver was George McGovern's second, desperate choice after Senator Thomas Eagleton was picked and then forced to decline the nomination due to revelations about his having received electro-shock therapy treatments. The 1972 and 1984 elections were also noteworthy for a separate reason  those elections represent the two largest Democratic defeats in history.
Photo credit: New York State Attorney Generals office.

BINGHAMTON, N.Y.  The owner and operator of Broome Taxi is facing charges for operating the company without the necessary licensing while generating income from the Medicaid system.

Darin Cox, 43, of Vestal didnt have the licensing to operate a taxicab in Broome County and was involved in allegedly fraudulent actions in obtaining thousands of dollars in payments from the Medicaid system, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a recent news release.

The release described Broome Taxi as a Binghamton-area transport company.

Cox received payments from the Medicaid program for transporting Medicaid beneficiaries to medical appointments, Schneidermans office said.

The office also accused Cox of knowingly operating his business without a Broome Countyissued taxicab license between March 18, 2015 and Jan. 29, 2016.

It also operated without a Broome County-issued taxi-business license and a valid New York state class E drivers license during the same period.

Running the company without those licenses is a violation of Broome County transportation regulations, Schneidermans office said.

The defendants class E drivers license was suspended on March 30, 2015.

In addition, the attorney general accuses Cox of submitting forms in 2014 and 2015 which falsely certified that his business had all the licensing required to operate a taxicab in Broome County.

Cox is accused of obtaining more than $80,000 in Medicaid payments during the time that hes accused on unlawfully operating the company.

He is charged with one count of grand larceny in the second degree; and with offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree.

The defendant was arraigned in Binghamton City Court.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com




Thanks for your reply.



I am planning to connect Via a "RealTech" Dial up Modem Card, or Equivalent. All my XP Computers have one, or something similar, by a different manufacturer. I also harvested about half a dozen. The Installation software is typically part of WinXP.



The XP Default installation is that specific and unspecified features may not be available. However, I seek only Voice Contact, on an Out Dialling only Connection.

I have also a number of Installation disks for older Real Tech Modems which I bought in the past. I suppose that any and all of them can do a basic Function, Dialling out, and thereafter managing a Voice Based conversation. All Computers we currently have, have also a form of sound processing card.(Very Basic in most cases) I assume that this can be used to get the Voice Aspect realised for a phone connection.



Al I am ultimately interested in is, getting an outgoing Voice Connection.

We have NO requirement at all, to deal with in coming calls.



Thanks for your Reply,



Looking forward to your response

Bram van Kampen



modified 1-May-16 20:46pm.



Bram van Kampen wrote:

I am planning to connect Via a "RealTech" Dial up Modem Card, or Equivalent. Okay, you'll need to look into connecting to the cards via the CreateFile("COM3", ...) function. Then you'll send the appropriate AT commands to the open port.



Also check out the TAPI.

"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson



"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons



"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles



modified 3-May-16 9:08am.







But I was really looking for a good Article about the subject, on CP or else were. Even the title of a Good Book will do.



Thanks Again,



Regards,

Bram.

Bram van Kampen





Here we go again...



Hi Dave,



Thanks for your reply, but what I was really looking for was a good article about this on CP or elsewhere, or, even a book will do. Maybe You know where to find same.



Thanks again,



Regards, :}

Bram van Kampen







I Think we are both rumbled by gremlins. My Post was somehow split in two by the CodeProject Server.



Let us Discard One Thread, I Propose This One!





Otherwise: My Reply to This One is:



You must be under pressure, but, I know how that feels. Answered this question before in this thread, However,it is a Desktop Task, in MFC42. I am not looking for a Solution, but for an article(hopefully Old, so that it appreciates the limitations of MFc42) in CodeProject, or elsewhere. Even a Title of a book will do.



Thanks + Regards

Bram van Kampen



Bram van Kampen wrote: I am not looking for a Solution, but for an article(hopefully Old, so that it appreciates the limitations of MFc42) in CodeProject... Did you try here?

"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson



"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons



"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles







It is a Good Start!



(Mental Block I had, not looking for 'Modems' in the first place!), as you know, that's how it goes.



However, it covers, apart from a sprinkling of C or CPP, a Lot of CE, C#, etc, which have their own libraries, etc, and hence are instructive, but not very useful. For Instance, "Phone.Lib" is not a component of MFC42.



All I need to do is the Dialling, and the Channelling of the connection to the Sound System, and hanging up, after ending the call.

I'm going to try for now something called "RasDial.exe" and see how I get on with it. Hopefully I can fool it in not looking for a Phonebook Entry, or stopping it from trying to make an Internet Connection.

I have also bought a 6.00 USB Dialup Modem which comes with a CD. Hopefully the CD contains something useful. I live in hope. Even if it fails, the cost is less than a packet of cigs, and, I still have the Modem.



Hope if all else fails to be able to hang a Head Set and Mike to the 'Phone' Output, and, hope the Modem can do the Dialling via the Line Socket.

May need to set to Pulse, and a switch to isolate the head set, (I know how POTS works) but, for now hope we can make it work without having to resort to this.

Worth Six Pound to try it, though, even if it does not work!



Thanks, and, I'll keep you Posted, but, remember, I'm on my own, and have to resolve many issues, all by myself. If I get an Intractable Problem in One Place, I put it aside, for dealing with, and whilst waiting, tackle something else. That keeps the entire front moving.



Kind Regards,and thanks again

Bram van Kampen



Hi guys,



In my application I had a CTabCtrl object & it has 2 tab window. I want to navigate between these tabs window via Ctrl + TAB.



Currently i can do the same in preTranslateMsg i.e. to look for keydown messages & filter it out ctrl + tab key out of it & calling setcusel().



I need to know if there is any other way that I can implement the same functionality.



Thanks,

Amrit





CPropertySheet with two CPropertyPage objects instead. Navigation would be automatically handled by the framework.

"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson



"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons



"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles



Hi

I have a CDialog which I created on the heap along the way I create a Richedit and a number of other controls



When the users hits X in the right hand corner I Destroy the CDialog do I have to DestroyWindow the rich edit and child controls as well



Didn't see this



Quote: The function first destroys child or owned windows, and then it destroys the parent or owner window







Your only responsibility is to cleanup any memory allocation, handles etc you specifically created. You do that by intercepting the WM_DESTROY message and cleaning up there. WM_DESTROY is sent just before the window is deleted but while the window is actually still valid.



Typically you create things in the WM_CREATE and you dispose of it in the WM_DESTROY.

In vino veritas







Thanks







Override OnDestroy (WM_DESTROY) and destroy your RichEdit followed by 'delete' (to release heap memory) and then call the CDialog::OnDestroy().







Situation 1:

If the memory/object is used by multiple children windows and/or the parent then you create it in OnCreate (WM_CREATE) on the parent and destroy it on OnDestroy (WM_DESTROY) of the parent. The reason is because multiple children and/or parent are using it and you need it created before any children and disposed of after the children are deleted.



Situation 2:

If the memory/Object is used by ONLY the SINGLE child window EXCLUSIVELY (that is the data belongs really to the child) then you create it on OnCreate (WM_CREATE) of the child and you delete it with the OnDestroy (WM_DESTROY) of the child.



Sometimes people get lazy and just use situation 1 to cover situation 2 but there are traps in that. It is very easy to forget you need something done before the child is created which is in an unrelated block of code in the parent window create function. So generally I would advise against being lazy and using situation 1 to try and cover all situations. Using Situation 2 when it is valid to do so makes your code self contained portable without thinking about it.



Situation 2 is that most often not understood by people. I will give you a simple example I might use on your edit entry, and this is a subclass of the edit I use a lot in programs. OnCreate (WM_CREATE) of the edit box I create a string object. Whenever the user hits enter, I validate the entry via a message call and if its valid put the current value into the string object and then update the edit window to the new value. Why do this ... well because in the edit box handler hitting the "esc" key goes and gets the value from the string object and puts it back it the edit box. It is a return to last valid value function or a simple single step back. If you think about it you could extend the concept to a list and be able to scroll back thru the list of entered values something you might recognize for the entry address input of your web browser. Now the point here is the string object is the edit boxes responsibility to delete so it will do that on it's OnDestroy (WM_DESTROY). Now everything is self contained I can create as many of these edit boxes as I want into a parent and they all look after there own object string.



So basically you need to work out what data is being used where and in this regard it is very similar to thread or task code.

In vino veritas



How does one view/obtain the GCC C sources?



I dont know how to use git. I just downloaded a Windows version yesterday (havent installed it yet), and am studying an ebook on it. Or should I use GitHub? I dont know anything about these things. Is there an easier way to do it? Is there an ftp site where you can just download it from without having to learn/use some complicated source code management system?



Ive nearly completed writing my own version of only what I need from the C Standard Library, and all I need from the C++ Standard Library is a String Class, and Ive used my own for many, many years which works fine. The only thing I need yet is a full implementation of pow, and possibly exp if pow needs that, and I dont know how to do it myself. Thats why I need to study and learn from the GCC C sources. Im linking without the Standard Libraries so as to avoid the bloat, and using Windows.



But if Id have asked here first how to implement pow, within 1 minute of posting that question Id have been told to look at the GCC sources, which I dont know how to do. Thats why Im asking for instruction here first on that. Once Ive figured out how to get at the GCC sources, then I can tackle my pow issue.



I'm not the only one baffled by this...







Apparently, I downloaded the wrong program ( git ), and am studying the wrong book. Apparently I've got to learn how to use svn before I can even attempt this? This is ridiculous, in my opinion.



I guess what I'm looking for is a list of all the hoops I've got to jump through to get what I want. Something like this...



1) Download and install Subversion (and hope there is a Windows version of it);



2) Buy a book that teaches how to use Subversion;



3) Figure out how to use Subversion to navigate to GCC sources;



4) Find pow or exp and figure out how it works;



Is the above what I should do, or is there some other route?



modified 24-Apr-16 9:01am.



Frederick J. Harris wrote: This is ridiculous, in my opinion. Many things are. However, if you want source code then you have to go and search for it. Have you tried the GNU website[^]?









https://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/trunk/



https://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/trunk/libgcc/



Perhaps I just need to spend some time searching for pow. Haven't found it yet.



Frederick J. Harris wrote: searching for pow ... probably in a file named math.c, or similar.



The GNU C Library[^]; download without using Git: Index of /gnu/glibc[^].



The pow() and exp() functions are part of the math library which depends on the target platform processor. Once you have unpacked the glibc sources, these functions can be found here for x86 CPUs (file names for double ):



sysdeps/i386/fpu/e_pow.S : Implementation using the x87 math coprocessor.

: Implementation using the x87 math coprocessor. sysdeps/ieee754/dbl-64/e_pow.c: Implementation in plain C.

The FPU implementation is in assembler and should not need any other functions. The IEEE implementation needs other modules (at least e_exp.c) and some header files.



We have a Server and Client application developed in MFC

The Server and the client exchange data using CSocket class



We have a big Structure of size 900000 bytes to exchange data.

Our Structure contains array of integer, char and float as data members. Our structure looks like the below eg.

struct ModData

{

float LH [600];

float XS [30][600];

float NER [600];

float TDER [600];

float DER [30][600];

float SS [1500];

float SS2 [1500];

float COMP [30][1500];

char POIC [900];

int AMID [100];

char AMS [100];

char WTL [2500];

char FRN;

char XGO;

};



I am copying all the structure data to char variable and send and receive data between clients through serialization. We have a global object for the above structure whose values changes continuously based on some calculations every 250 millisec. So some of the data changes continously every 250 millisec.



Example calculations that change data:

Test->ss = Test->ss + Test->Log * Sin(5.62) * Test->LH /4.566



There are several formulas that get executed based on logics which process the data in cycles.



I want to send only the values that are changing whereas now I am transfering the entire data every 2 seconds.



Is there any better way of identifying only the changed data to send it. Please help.


K2 "scent" to Missouri storefronts

Browning, Sheets, and Bruce sold K2 out of multiple Holts Summit storefronts for their two businesses: Esscentials Buy, Sell and Trade, and S & J Tobacco.

Houston, Sandfort, Rader, Shirley, and Miller sold the drug out of Inscentives Resale location in Auvasse and Fulton, as well as Inscentives Auto, and First Stop Last Stop Pawn and Aromatherapy.
Thank you for reading!

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Types of obituaries

The Missourian publishes two types of obituaries  family obituaries and life stories.

A family obituary is the version submitted by a funeral home or family. Please see the submission form for details on cost and deadlines. Family obituaries

A life story is a closer look at a person's life and involves a reporter contacting family and friends. Life stories are based on newsworthiness and consent of the family. Life stories.
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.
Universal Pictures Brothers Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) and Jake (John Belushi) will encounter such R&B legends as Ray Charles when "The Blues Brothers" screens Saturday during an evening of musical mayhem at the Summer Quartet "Time Warp Drive-In." Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

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If you crave famous names delivering blues, pop and rock but don't want to brave the crowds at Tom Lee Park, you're in luck: This month's edition of the "Time Warp Drive-In" program at the Malco Summer Quartet Drive-In presents a cinematic alternative to the Beale Street Music Festival titled "Sing Along Sinema! A Night of Musical Madness," a four-movie set that offers grit (Aretha Franklin), gloss (Olivia Newton-John) and gross ("South Park" creator Trey Parker as Alfred Packer, frontier America's celebrity cannibal of 1874).

The dusk-to-dawn retro cult/classic roll call begins with "The Blues Brothers," the 1980 comedy that provides support to sincere sub-journeyman soul interpreters John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd via such R&B legends as Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway and John Lee Hooker, plus veterans of Stax and the Memphis soul scene, including guitarist Steve Cropper, drummer Willie Hall and bass player Donald "Duck" Dunn.

The "Time Warp" lineup continues with "Xanadu" (1980), starring Olivia Neutron-Bomb (as former Memphis deejay Rick Dees used to call her); John Waters' "Cry-Baby" (1990), an Elvis-movie spoof with Johnny Depp as a crooning juvenile delinquent; and "Cannibal! The Musical" (1993), a pre-"South Park" and  perhaps more to the point  pre-"The Book of Mormon" project by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, inspired by the infamous and ill-fated Alfred Packer prospecting expedition.

Admission to the drive-in at 5310 Summer begins at 7 p.m. The movies start at dusk. "Time Warp" tickets are $10 each. For more information, visit facebook.com/timewarpdrivein.

THE ART OF VIDEO

Coordinated by Indie Memphis and Crosstown Arts, the "Shoot & Splice" series of free public forums on filmmaking continues with a conversation titled "A Method to the Madness: Examining Video Art," to take place at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Crosstown Arts, 430 N. Cleveland. (Doors open at 6:30 p.m., for socializing and imbibing.)

Typically, "Shoot & Splice" investigates techniques related to narrative, documentary and commercial film and video production, but this month's forum will "examine the craft of capturing moving images solely to facilitate creative expression," according to Crosstown Arts publicity. In other words, this is "video art" of the type that is exhibited in museums and galleries more than at theaters and film festivals.

Panel participants will include Memphis artist/novelist/filmmaker/perfume designer (really!) Brian Pera, whose locally shot feature films include "The Way I See Things," "Woman's Picture" (with Ann Magnuson) and "Only Child" (with Grace Zabriskie and Amy LaVere); Dallas-born, Memphis-based Corkey Sinks, an artist who works in a variety of media and is a founding member of the Austin Video Bee, a collective of video artists dedicated to experimental work; and Jill Wissmiller, associate professor of digital media at the Memphis College of Art, where she is chair of the Department of Design. Among Wissmiller's projects is the creation of video portraits that are projected onto canvases of glitter; one of these was chosen for display at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

GIRL POWER

The acclaimed 2015 documentary "He Named Me Malala," a portrait of the Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, who is the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate, returns to theaters for a special screening at 9 a.m. Saturday, May 7, at the Malco Paradiso, 584 S. Mendenhall.

Hosted by Girls Inc. of Memphis in recognition of "Girls Inc. Week," the event is free and open to the public (and complimentary concessions will be provided), but moviegoers should register in advance. To register, visit girlsincmemphis.org.

Now living in England, Malala was targeted for assassination in her home district in northwest Pakistan for being an outspoken teen advocate for girls' right to education. On Oct. 9, 2012, a gunman  believed to be an Islamic fundamentalist opponent of girls' education  stopped the bus on which Malala was a passenger, asked for her by name, and then shot her in the head. She survived, and the incident only galvanized world support for Malala, inspiring a book and this documentary, which was directed by Davis Guggenheim, an Oscar-winner for "An Inconvenient Truth."

The screening is presented in conjunction with Participant Media and the Malala Fund, which is using the film to increase youth interest in global girls' rights.

ACCLAIMED, INDEED

The Memphis-made drama "Free In Deed" continues to collect awards on the film-festival circuit.

Last week, the movie  filmed in Memphis in 2014 with an almost entirely local crew and supporting cast  received second-place "Honorable Mention" recognition in the Best Narrative Feature category at the 10-day Nashville Film Festival, which ended Saturday. (The feature film winner was the dark Peruvian drama "Magallanes.") In addition, British actor David Harewood  a former regular on "Homeland" who now has the high-profile role of J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter, on CBS' "Supergirl"  won a Special Jury Prize for Best Actor for his role as a troubled Memphis Pentecostal minister in the film.

Written and directed by Ohio-born Jake Mahaffy, "Free In Deed" is a fact-based drama about a faith healing gone terribly wrong. The movie is set to make its local debut at the Indie Memphis Film Festival in November, and also has been named the "Centerpiece Film" in the "Narrative Spotlight" category of his week's Independent Film Festival of Boston. It made its debut last year at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Best Film award in the "Horizons" category, dedicated to edgy and truly independent work.
Veteran ensemble Los Lobos return to Memphis for a performance at the Beale Street Music Fest.

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By Bob Mehr of The Commercial Appeal

Far more than "just another band from East L.A.," as one collection modestly dubbed them, Los Lobos has, over the course of 40-plus years, moved from a traditional Mexican outfit to roots-punk purveyors to world music explorers.

"They've progressed from being an East Los Angeles institution to being a national and international institution," says Chris Morris, author of the recent biography of the band "Los Lobos: Dream in Blue." "They've evolved beautifully over the course of their career. They've expanded the scope of their music exponentially over time. At this point they don't have any new worlds to conquer."

Yet, Los Lobos continues to find new territory to explore. The band  vocalist/guitarists David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas, bassist Conrad Lozano, drummer Enrique Gonzalez, and multi-instrumentalists Louie Perez and Steve Berlin  plays the Beale Street Music Festival on Saturday.

The group recently wrapped up a long tour performing with Mexican dance company Ballet Folklorico. "That was a really amazing actually," says Berlin. "We've played folkloric music before, but never with a ballet. It was just a fantastic experience top to bottom."

Los Lobos is nominally touring in support of its most recent album, "Gates of Gold," released last fall. Though hailed critically  as their work consistently has been since the start  the process of making records has become considerably harder for the band.

"For us, making records is not fun. It's a combination of a colonoscopy and root canal to make a record these days," says Berlin, chuckling. "They only happen when medically necessary. None of us are A-type personalities, so the challenge has always been getting enough material written to make it viable to record in the first place. That hasn't improved over time."

Five decades and 24 albums into their career, Berlin admits the other struggle is in finding new ways to express themselves. "Once upon a time we had a rich and varied palate with which to do stuff," says Berlin. "But record after record after record, it gets harder to find something we haven't already done, at least on some level, to where you're just not repeating stuff."

In a sense, "Gates of Gold" avoids that quandary, by serving as a reaffirmation of Los Lobos' entire musical journey to this point. "That record summed up everything they do so well," says band biographer Morris.

A longtime Billboard reporter, Morris' book on Los Lobos also came out last fall, providing a critical study and narrative history of the group. Launched in the early-'70s the barrio band would share stages with Public Image Ltd., sign to Warner Bros., get shafted by fellow music fest performer Paul Simon (who's been accused of robbing them of credit for their work on multimillion selling "Graceland"), generate a massive movie hit with "La Bamba," and build one of the more revered catalogs in rock music.

Morris offers a sense of the terrain, both geographic and cultural, crucial to understanding the Los Lobos' evolution. He establishes a historical context  background on Los Angeles' zoot suit riots, pachuco boogie music, and Latino garage rock  before delivering an album-by-album exploration of Lobos' catalog. The book provides an insider's view of the creative process with an industry expert's understanding of how outside forces shaped each project  and continues to shape Los Lobos' music today, particularly on stage.

"They still try and do unique things in the live context. They never stay in one place," says Morris. "I got a chance to see them several times [last fall] and each show was a little bit different and thrilling. They're so gifted as instrumentalists and so soulful as vocalists, they just always deliver the goods."

Saturday's show marks Los Lobos' first Memphis date since their last Beale Street Music Fest appearance in 2009. That gig saw them sharing the bill with Elvis Costello, and they were joined onstage by Attractions drummer Pete Thomas for a memorable encore.

"If our friends are there, if anybody we know is around, we're going to drag them onstage whether they like it or not," says Berlin. "That's generally how it works."

After music fest, the band will shift gears, and embark on a summer blues package. The "Wheels of Soul" tour will also feature the Tedeschi Trucks Band and the North Mississippi Allstars. "That's going to be a good time," says Berlin of the upcoming jaunt. "At this point, that's what Los Lobos is about: having a good time, and making music that still means something."

Los Lobos 7:25 p.m. Saturday on the Bud Light Stage at the Memphis in May Beale Street Music Festival.
By Katie Fretland of The Commercial Appeal

Ricci Ellsworth, a 45-year-old mother of a daughter and son, was dedicated to her job working 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. at the Memphis Inn.

She was someone to depend on, said Linda Spencer who managed the inn at Interstate 40 and Sycamore View.

"She was honest," Spencer said.

On Thursday, Spencer testified during the retrial of Ellsworth's former boyfriend Michael Rimmer, who is charged with killing the night clerk who disappeared in February 1997 leaving behind blood and the ring she constantly wore.

Ellsworth's body was never found.

Rimmer was sentenced to death nearly 17-and-a-half years ago and again during a resentencing in 2004. But in 2012, a new trial was ordered. A judge found Rimmer's defense counsel, both in 1998 and at his resentencing, failed to effectively investigate the capital case.

Shelby County Criminal Court Judge James Beasley Jr., a former prosecutor, found that the Shelby County lawyer who prosecuted Rimmer, Thomas Henderson, "purposefully misled" Rimmer's defense counsel about evidence.

Rimmer walked into the court Thursday in a beige suit and glasses. He waved to supporters before sitting at the defense table. The trial was attended by Ellsworth's family members seated on the opposite side of the court.

"Revenge and robbery," prosecutor Pam Anderson, of the Davidson County District Attorney's office, told the jury. "That's what this case is about."

In 1989, Rimmer raped Ellsworth and was sent to prison, Anderson said.

Ellsworth forgave him and visited him.

"She was a very forgiving woman," Anderson said.

While incarcerated, Rimmer talked to another inmate about Ellsworth. He felt she owed him money, Anderson said. In 1996, before he was released from prison, he told another inmate he planned to kill her and talked about how to dispose of a body, Anderson said.

"February 8, 1997, was the last time that anyone saw Ricci Lynn Ellsworth alive," Anderson said.

Her son and daughter never heard from her again.

Ellsworth was kindhearted, said her sister, Dianne Faulk.

"We were devastated by my sister's murder," she said.

Faulk said there is "no doubt in any of our minds and hearts, that he did kill her."

On Feb. 8, 1997, between about 8:30 and 9 a.m., Rimmer came to his brother's house. He was muddy and had a shovel, Anderson said. The back seat was wet. The brother dumped the shovel and it was never seen again, Anderson said.

Rimmer was stopped March 5, 1997, in Johnson County, Indiana for speeding. Blood consistent with the female offspring of Ellsworth's mother was found in the car.

Ann Calhoun, a supporter of Rimmer who has visited him along with her husband at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution for about three years, said Rimmer did not receive a fair trial, and she believes he did not kill Ellsworth.

She described him as a good man who is musically talented and has helped other inmates.

"He's not the only man on death row who shouldn't be executed," Calhoun said.

Defense attorney Paul Bruno said two people had something to do with what happened to Ellsworth, but neither were Rimmer.

"There is actually no definitive proof that she's deceased," Bruno said.

Bruno said one of the inmates who came forward with information against Rimmer had been convicted of eight felony drug offenses. Another had a lengthy history of forgery and a conviction for voluntary manslaughter.

Bruno said a credible witness, an Army sergeant named James Darnell, had been at the motel and saw two men who did not fit Rimmer's description with blood on their hands.

Darnell saw a person put something heavy into the trunk of a car. The object was wrapped in something cloth-like.

Bruno said Darnell described two men and a composite sketch was printed in The Commercial Appeal.

A lady in Arkansas identified one as Billy Wayne Voyles. Police put together a photo lineup with 44 white males, including Rimmer, Bruno said. Darnell viewed the lineup.

"Of 44 people, who does he pick out? Billy Wayne Voyles," Bruno said.

He did not pick out Rimmer.
Charles Nicholas/The Commercial Appeal files Leaving by train from Memphis on April 30, 1953, for Johnson City, Tennessee, to attend the 12th annual convention of the National Association of Junior Auxillaries were members representing their chapters. They are (from left) Mrs. Hugh Payne of Leland, Miss.; Mrs. Oscar Fendler of Blytheville, Ark.; Mrs. Joe Reaves III of Warren, Ark.; Mrs. Frank Pajerski of Vicksburg, Miss.; Mrs. Edwin Tune of Blytheville, Ark.; Mrs. Wade Wineman of Greenville, Miss., and Mrs. Gus Pitt of Leland, Miss.

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April 28

25 years ago: 1991

Whoever characterized librarians as quiet and patient hadn't met Judith Drescher. During the year that has passed since a private consulting firm recommended overhauling the Public Library and Information Center, the 44-year-old library director has launched a crusade aimed at rebuilding the library system around a new $70 million Main Library. Addressing civic groups, community gatherings and elected officials, the former children's librarian from Youngwood, Pa., advocates an ambitious list of library improvements she has contemplated since coming to Memphis in 1985.

50 years ago: 1966

The advisory council of Harding Academy last night announced an expansion program which will include an auditorium seating 1,500. The private school is located at 1000 Cherry Road. In addition to the auditorium, the new wing will house an expanded music department, including facilities for band and chorus activities. Another wing, housing classrooms, offices and a faculty lounge, will be added to the elementary building.

75 years ago: 1941

The Metropolitan Opera would like to perform in Memphis during its after-Easter tour next year, Edward Johnson, general manager, indicated here yesterday after an inspection of The Auditorium and a conference with Col. Charles A. McElravy, manager.

100 years ago: 1916

Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Goldsmith entertained last evening with an elaborate dinner in their home on Vance Avenue in honor of the approaching marriage of their daughter, Miss Sadye Goldsmith, to Mr. Albert Herzberg.

125 years ago: 1891

The one coming man in Tennessee just at this time seems to be the Hon. Benton McMillan. His name is in almost every paper and he is seriously regarded as a candidate for the speakership of the next house.
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Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles most likely will be remembered as the man who was on the Lorraine Motel balcony with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when the iconic civil rights leader was fatally wounded by an assassin's bullet.

It was a seminal moment that shook the consciousness of Memphis and the nation regarding the social and economic injustice against African-Americans.

Kyles, 81, who died Tuesday, seldom shied away from discussing the events of that April 4, 1968, evening, understanding the importance of his place in history and sharing details of King's killing for posterity.

But there was more to Kyles, who was born in the Mississippi Delta town of Shelby and who moved to Chicago when he was 6.

He was a loving father, leader of an influential South Memphis church, an advocate for equal and economic justice and neighborhood revitalization.

He was remembered as a gracious man who was generous with sharing his time and information on the local and national stage.

He was instrumental in helping to bring King to Memphis on behalf of Memphis' sanitation workers, who were striking for better pay and working conditions.

King, his Southern Christian Leadership Conference lieutenant Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson were on their way to Kyles' home for dinner. Kyles was on the balcony, a few steps from King, when the fatal shot was fired. He was the subject of a short film, "The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306," which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2008.

"I've asked many many times, 'Why was I there at that crucial moment in time?'" Kyles said often as he traveled around the world every January and April to recount King's final minutes. He didn't accept honoraria for those appearances.

"Over the years, God has revealed to me why I was there. Crucifixions have to have witnesses."

Kyles came to Memphis in 1959 to become pastor of Monumental Baptist Church, and quickly immersed himself in the local fight to desegregate Memphis.

He joined the local branch of the NAACP. In 1961, his daughter, Dwania, was one of 13 African-American first-graders to integrate Memphis City Schools  and the only member of the Memphis 13 to stay in Memphis public schools through graduation.

He supported the sanitation workers, whose dangerous job barely paid a livable wage. He spoke forcefully against police brutality and the police policy at the time that allowed officers to use deadly force against fleeing burglary suspects.

Yet, he was not afraid to criticize those whose criminal acts were wreaking havoc in some neighborhoods.

He advocated for economic development and neighborhood rejuvenation. Instead of Monumental, which he led for 55 years, moving to a new location as its congregation grew, the church decided remain an important neighborhood anchor by way of a major expansion of its South Parkway campus.

And, it should not be forgotten that Kyles was a heck of a preacher, an orator who stirred his congregation to do great things in terms of religious and corporal ministries.

Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles was more than a witness to one of history's more tragic events. He was a civil rights icon who spoke against injustice, a supporter of civic causes and a man of graciousness.

Memphis is better because he chose to make the Bluff City his home.
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Marian Bacon

Memphis

I would like to thank Renee Frazier, retired chief executive officer of Common Table Health Alliance, and Anthony Sheehan, president of Church Health Center, for their April 21 guest column Insure Tennessee unites us all.

I lost my Medicaid coverage under former Gov. Phil Bredesen at a time when I had numerous serious health problems. I was taking some 20 prescriptions and seeing eight specialists.

I was told that I would never be able to work, vote or leave my place alone because of the serious physical and psychological problems taking over my life. Did I listen to any of them? No, because if I had I would not have become an advocate for persons with disabilities, those individuals (like myself) who experienced homelessness with disabilities or the working poor.

In the guest column, Frazier and Sheehan wrote: 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.

I hope and pray seriously that the six individuals chosen to be on the House Healthcare Task Force will be willing to hold town hall meetings within their districts.

Im a strong advocate like many others who want to make sure those individuals without health insurance are given a chance to start working on their health so they can lead a normal life. I feel Insure Tennessee is the best option for citizens, but without our representatives helping, nothing can happen.

Please attend any meetings of this task force, and return phone calls from residents about possible listening sessions or town hall meetings so those without health insurance can finally voice their thoughts about these challenges.
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By Tim Finnell

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) recently celebrated its sixth anniversary (signed into law March 23, 2010).

This year, the effects of health care reform will be felt by virtually every business and individual. Most people have received Form 1095. Businesses and insurance companies were scrambling to meet the deadline in January, before it was pushed back to the end of March. Accountants, tax filers and employers are all being questioned about what to do with these forms by the individuals who received them.

Information on Form 1095 will be used to determine whether an individual owes a penalty, and to reconcile 2015 subsidies (Advanced Premium Tax Credits) that were used to lower health insurance premiums. An individual may get a higher refund or owe money to the Internal Revenue Service if he/she was not entitled to a subsidy or obtained an excess amount.

The individual mandate (shared responsibility provision) rose to its maximum threshold in 2016, requiring individuals to pay a penalty of up to 2.5 percent of their income if they do not have qualified coverage.

Penalties for noncompliance are also in full effect for businesses with more than 50 employees. These rules and regulations have resulted in increased cost to businesses as well as creating a substantial administrative burden.

The last major component of ACA to be enacted is the so-called Cadillac Tax. This controversial provision has been moved down the road from its original scheduled implementation of 2018 to 2020. There is strong support on both sides of the aisle for repeal versus delay. However, the tax revenue generated is estimated to be $9 billion and President Obama would most likely veto any attempt to repeal.

Overall health care costs, as well as premiums, are expected to continue to increase as a result of many factors, including an aging population, increased utilization of services, newly insured individuals having higher claims than anticipated, specialty drugs costs increasing, and end-of-life care in the U.S. being among the most expensive in the world.

Insurance companies have struggled with the effects produced by ACA. Many have either not participated in exchanges or signaled their intention to get out of both Healthcare.gov and state exchanges.

2016 will also produce the largest consolidations in the health insurance industry's history, if approved by regulators. Last year, Aetna announced the purchase of Humana for $37 billion. Anthem (Blue Cross in 14 states) agreed to buy Cigna for $54 billion.

These pending mergers have created significant concerns voiced by many organizations, including the American Medical Association, Families USA as well as many politicians. The issue is whether the diminishing number of health insurance companies will further erode competition and lead to higher premiums.

The AMA released a report in September that determined there would be diminished competition in 154 metropolitan areas within 23 states.

A study by Leemore Dafny, former director of health care antitrust at the Federal Trade Commission, stated an expected result is that "  insurance company mergers typically lead to higher premiums."

All of these changes mean that, now more than ever, it is incumbent upon every business and individual to have a more in-depth understanding of their health care coverage options, costs, compliance requirements and deadlines.

The landscape has changed, and it is up to people to make sure that they fully understand, comply with and leverage health care reform to the fullest potential for the overall health of individuals, companies and our shared communities.

Tim Finnell is a certified health care reform specialist in Memphis.
In 2013, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) emerged as one of the Senate's top H-1B visa supporters, and argued for a 500% H-1B visa cap increase. But during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Cruz had a conversion.

Cruz's presidential platform proposed a $110,000 minimum wage for visa workers, among other restrictions, as a way ending their use as low-cost labor. The move marked a complete turnabout on the H-1B issue.

Cruz's decision Wednesday to add former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (and one-time GOP presidential candidate herself) as his running mate if he wins the nomination, may make his newly found H-1B beliefs a hard sell.

At HP, Fiorina was a prominent supporter of the offshore outsourcing model, said Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University, who wrote about Fiorina's approaches in his book, Outsourcing America.

"To pump up profits, she was an early adopter of the practice, which given HP's status as a leading Silicon Valley firm, pushed other firms to adopt offshoring," said Hira. "It set a precedent that technology firms would now pursue profits through offshoring and that meant that Wall Street would hound executives in other firms to do the same."

As offshoring gained, Fiorina played a leading role in defending globalization.

To make her point, in 2004, Fiorina said: "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

Last September, political talk show host Laura Ingraham asked Fiorina about that controversial quote; Fiorina said she stood by it. "We have to fight for every job," according to a recording posted by Ingraham.

When Ingraham brought up Disney's layoff of 200 to 300 IT employees last year, some of whom had to train their visa-hold replacements, Fiorina said "shame on them (Disney) -- we should never support that kind of policy."

Donald Trump, the billionaire businessman who is leading the Republican presidential delegate count and appears to be on track to defeat Cruz for the nomination, has proposed curbing the use of the H-1B visa.

By teaming up with Fiorina, said John Miano, the founder of the Programmers Guild and co-author of a book about the H-1B visa with columnist Michelle Malkin, Sold Out, Cruz will lose the support of visa critics with Fiorina.

"The advantage Trump has had over Cruz is that Trump is perceived as being the one more likely to cast the money-changers out of the temple," said Miano.
When it comes to the Apple Watch, it's important to know this: Before its arrival last year I was 1) initially skeptical about the whole concept; 2) willing to give it a try as details emerged; and 3) among the first wave of buyers to plunk down $599 and put it on my wrist. I've been loving and hating on it ever since.

I'm not alone, at least when it comes to buying. An estimated 12 million Apple Watches have been sold and it's dominating in the wearables market. But even fans like me can see that there are areas where the Watch still needs improvements.

Let's start with what the Watch does really well.

What works (hardware)

Overall, the design of the Watch works: It's a good-looking piece of tech that doesn't stand out as techy. The Watch succeeds because it looks like a watch. During the past year, I've used the Watch while sleeping, swimming, showering, exercising, and many other times in which it has taken direct hits. I bought the stainless steel model with sapphire display and the materials have held up well. Kudos to Apple for getting the material build right with this first-generation device.

Apple

There were a number of hardware advances that make the Watch special, the Digital Crown chief among them. It is as precise and fluid today as it was on day one. Being able to scroll through lists and scan the day's appointments or weather on the Watch Face is more than handy, and using it as a Home button or to activate Siri is inspired. Apple engineered a crown with functionality that seems downright obvious in retrospect.

The other bit of hardware that truly made the Watch stand apart is the Taptic Engine, the mechanism that provides physical feedback for various functions. The Watch doesn't just vibrate; with some notifications, it literally feels as if it is tapping you on the wrist. It taps when you've been working too long and haven't stood up to walk around; it taps to give turn-by-turn directions (with different tap patterns for turning right or left); and it taps to let you know the timer is done, or for an alarm.

There have been times I've slept through my iPhone blaring music or sirens in attempt to wake me, but I've never been able to ignore the Watch tapping my wrist to pull me from slumber. Even better, the tapping alerts only you -- unlike an audible alarm that can awaken others.

The Digital Crown and Taptic Engine revolve around how the Watch interacts with you. As for how you interact with it, Force Touch has made using the small-screen device a unique experience. By displaying different functions based on how hard a finger is pressed on the screen, Force Touch allows the Watch's interface to remain uncluttered while still allowing access to various hidden functions.

Another clever touch was how Apple built security into the Watch. It knows when it's been removed from your wrist and anyone trying to access any data after that has to enter a passcode. This is smart, as it locks out would-be thieves if the Watch is lost or stolen. (There are options on the iPhone that allow you to disable the Watch entirely.)

Beyond the stock look, the Watch's multiple and customizable Faces and Complications allow for a level of personalization that for most users make it feel like one of a kind. There are countless watch bands from Apple and third-party suppliers to create different looks and styles to match most wardrobes or emotional whimsies.

Best of all, the Watch functions well as a watch and the time is always accurate. (Though it would be nice if Apple offered an always-on display option, even if battery life suffered. The raise-to-activate or tap-to-activate functions are fine, but an always-on screen would be more useful.)

What works (software)

The software feature that works the best -- and this may be the sole function most important to Watch users -- is Notifications. Receiving and being able to act on a notification without having to pull the iPhone out of your pocket is incredibly useful; Messages and Emails arrive and can be answered or dismissed right from your wrist, and Siri dictation is surprisingly solid. And since Notifications can be customized in the Watch app, the only thing that reaches my wrist are the important alerts I've let through. Everything else remains on my perfectly silent iPhone, waiting for me to check them at my leisure. The Watch has helped lower my stress levels and my iPhone no longer irritates me with a constant buzzing.

The second best feature about the Watch is being able to buy things with it. Sure, Apple Pay works well with Watch hardware like the Secure Enclave (for storing encrypted payment info) and wireless NFC for contactless payments on supported point-of-sale systems. But there are other ways to buy products using third-party apps such as the Dunkin' Donuts app; it presents a barcode on the display which can be scanned as easily as a coupon or gift card. Even better, since most apps are aware of their location and the proximity to retail stores, purchasing usually requires just a swipe of the Notifications sheet and a tap to be used. It's not quite as convenient as using Apple Pay, but it's still pretty damned convenient.

That convenience will only grow as more services and locations add support for Apple Pay. Major locations such as Subway and Walgreens already support it, but vending machines are getting in on the action, and soon you'll be able to use the Watch at the gas pump as well.

For travelers, the Apple Watch is downright revolutionary. The American Airlines and Southwest Airlines apps are just two examples. Have you ever gone to an airport with just a carry on, a photo ID, and your Watch? It is incredibly convenient traveling without a paper boarding pass: no more struggling to juggle luggage and paper passes; just show your ID, scan the Watch face, and you're through security and boarding the plane in no time. For frequent travelers, this is almost a godsend. The best part is that since your boarding pass is digital, it updates on the fly. Did your boarding gate change and you missed the announcement? Doesn't matter; the Watch knows, and so do you.

While you're wandering through the airport, you can also quickly respond to incoming Messages on the Watch. I use Siri to dictate messages and rely on the animated emojis more often than I should admit. (Sometimes they're just cuter than the stock emojis.) Speaking of Siri, support for hands-free activation by raising the Watch and saying, "Hey, Siri," is an irreplaceable feature in the kitchen for starting count-down timers. Siri is also useful for dictating messages, checking scores, and quickly setting alarms (more on that below).

The Watch also works really well for controlling other Apple devices: Apple TV content and audio played through an iPhone or iPad can utilize the Watch as a remote control. This works really well because you can't ever misplace the remote when it's attached to your wrist.

Finally, for me the first- and third-party Complications on the customizable Watch Faces have become a major time-saver. Being able to glance at my next appointment, or flight information, or the current weather, or stock prices, or even moon phases -- all of which are continuously updated -- is such a luxury I've come to rely on.

The one app you should have

There is one utility I use all of the time on the Watch: MacID. It establishes a Bluetooth connection to your Mac, and whenever you walk away from the computer, it automatically triggers the screensaver and locks the Mac. When you return, the Watch buzzes and brings up an alert, letting you unlock your Mac with a touch of a button before you even sit down. It's very useful if you are working on confidential documents or even if you have prankster coworkers.

The utility has become more consistent in establishing and maintaining connections from day to day, though I sometimes have to delete the linked device and re-add it. But overall this is a great time saver; especially for those that have to leave their Mac up and running, such as IT workers.

And now for the disappointments

Over the past year, there have been several updates to the Watch software that have improved speed and performance of first- and third-party applications and glances, as well as general reliability. The upgrade process itself is still cumbersome and slow, however. First the software must be downloaded to the iPhone. Then the iPhone transfers the software (slowly) to the Watch. Then the Watch installs said software (slowly) -- assuming it's within range, has over 50% battery life and is connected to power.

See my point?

While the overall process works, it could use some tweaking, including easing up on some of the conditions necessary to start an update.

On the Watch itself, there are a few things that haven't been implemented well, to the point I forget the features even exist.

I rarely access anything using the Favorites button next to the Digital Crown. You remember the Favorites button, right? It's used for quick access to the more social aspects of the Watch. These include quick access to a screen where you can finger-sketch a drawing and send it to a favorite contact, or send a tap to get a friend's attention. You can also send your heartbeat to someone, which you'll almost certainly do when you get the Watch (and find someone to send it to) and then forget to do ever again.

These are all fun things to do, and are actually pretty cool when you see them in action. But the reliance on the Favorites button -- a button you won't use for much else -- means they're effectively out of sight. I have many, many friends that have an Apple Watch and to whom I could be connecting with. But I don't, because I just forget the features are there.

My biggest annoyance

When I said earlier that there are times I'm hating on the Watch, it's not really the timepiece itself; it's the ability (or lack thereof) to use it as a fitness accessory. From day one, I have had problems getting the Workout app to properly monitor my heart rate while lifting weights, and from day one, I've gotten unreliable results. Using the Apple Watch to track my workouts left me with a full year of throwaway fitness results. I've tried everything to get an accurate heart rate; I finally figured out that the best way to get decent -- not accurate, just decent -- results is by turning the Watch so that it faces the underside of my wrist.

Michael deAgonia The best way I've found to get decent heart rate results while weightlifting is by turning the Watch so that it faces the underside of my wrist.

What's the issue? The Workout app loses my heart rate, then displays it as 40-50 beats per minute in the middle of an intense workout. But if I stop the Workout app and launch the heart rate glance, it accurately displays my pulse! So, there's nothing actually wrong with the hardware; it can get an accurate heartbeat (and generally does a good job when I'm running). But accurate data isn't making it to the Workout app. This is clearly a software issue that's never fixed.

Your mileage may vary, but the first-generation Microsoft Band had a better, more accurate heart rate monitor for fitness tracking. I only stopped using the Band because Microsoft never delivered support for Apple's Health app. That's a complete deal-breaker for me.

On a related note, Apple's Workout/Activity/Health apps need serious makeovers; they lack the social aspects of other workout apps that help people stay motivated, and, while filling in the ringed Activity circles is a clever twist for base-level fitness, the Health app needs a rewrite along the lines of TactioHealth to better display information in easy-to-understand ways.

And yet...

Despite these irritations, I wear my Watch daily. I recognize that what it needs most is faster hardware (and more accurate heart rate software) to truly allow developers to build on what can it can do. It's easy to forget that the iPod took several generations to catch on, as did the iPhone. I expect the same thing will happen with the Watch. It remains most useful for the tech-savvy, but it's poised to broaden its appeal as services like Apple Pay expand.

Despite the first-generation tradeoffs -- and there are always trade-offs when you're on the leading edge -- this is a wearable that will continue to gain traction over time as features, battery life and technologies improve. On a larger scale, it's likely the Apple Watch will do to the watch market what the iPhone did to the smartphone industry.

Am I going to give up on the Watch? Hell no, I love this thing. It will not be exiled to the Drawer of Forgotten Tech. Though it remains a work in progress, it is useful day to day. The Apple Watch has made watches interesting again for a generation that had largely given up on them. And it's shown a whole new generation of tech users that a watch can do so much more than just give you the time of day.
With some technical help from NASA, aerospace company SpaceX plans to launch a mission to Mars as soon as 2018.

While NASA has been sending robotic landers and orbiters to Mars and making plans to send humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s, SpaceX is planning on getting there sooner.

The company, which is headed by billionaire high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, tweeted today, "Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018. Red Dragons will inform overall Mars architecture, details to come."

Musk then went on to tweet that the Dragon 2 spacecraft, known as Red Dragon, is designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system. The Red Dragon Mars mission will be its first test flight.

"But wouldn't recommend transporting astronauts beyond Earth-moon region," he went on to tweet. "Wouldn't be fun for longer journeys. Internal volume ~size of SUV."

It's not yet clear where the spacecraft would land on Mars or what kind of payload it would carry.

Musk has said in the past that he not only wants to one day send humans to Mars but he hopes to actually build cities there.

"It would be just the greatest adventure ever," he said of the planned colonization project.

SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California, is under contract with NASA to send unmanned spacecraft carrying supplies to the International Space Station.The cargo includes food, mechanical parts and scientific experiments.

SpaceX also has a contract with the space agency to help build the spacecraft that will launch astronauts from U.S. soil to the space station.

The company's planned Mars mission is intended to help test the technologies needed to land large payloads on Mars. The technologies also are part of what the company expects to be used in its Mars colonization plan, which is set to be announced later this year.

The Dragon 2 spacecraft is expected to be launched using SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket.

According to NASA, the unmanned SpaceX mission will be part of the many steps taken to eventually get humans to Mars.

"We are closer than ever before to sending American astronauts to Mars than anyone, anywhere, at any time has ever been," wrote NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman, in a blog post Wednesday. "In the international space community, gone are the days of the "space race" when the dominant theme was that of various nations racing against each other. Instead, we're increasingly running together."

She added that NASA is "particularly excited" to work with SpaceX on this mission.

In exchange for data on entry into Martian space, descent, and landing from SpaceX, NASA will offer technical support for the company's planned Mars mission.

"As the saying goes, "spaceflight is hard," Newman said. "Sending astronauts to Mars, which will be one of the greatest feats of human innovation in the history of civilization, carries with it many, many puzzles to piece together. That's why we at NASA have made it a priority to reach out to partners in boardrooms, classrooms, laboratories, space agencies and even garages across our country and around the world."

While NASA is aiding with this mission, it is not paying for it. SpaceX is financing the mission, although details on costs weren't available. < /p>
Apple iPhone sales declined 16% in the first quarter, but it's important to remember that the overall smartphone market has also flatlined, largely due to market saturation.

IDC said Wednesday that smartphone shipments in the quarter increased just 0.2% compared to the first quarter of 2015, marking the smallest year-over-year growth on record. IDC recorded 334.9 million smartphones shipped worldwide during the quarter.

Even Samsung, the world's biggest smartphone maker with a 25% market share, saw a slight decline of 0.6% in smartphone shipments, dropping to 81.9 million. No. 2 Apple declined by 16.3% to 51.2 million, giving it a 15% market share, IDC said.

In developed economies like the U.S., nearly everybody already has a smartphone -- and next-generation models don't seem significantly better to bother with a replacement, analysts have noted for the past year or more.

Even in China, where smartphone sales were once supposed to help Apple and others, "the appetite for smartphones has slowed dramatically as the explosion of uptake has passed its peak," IDC said. Year-over-year growth in China was 62% in 2013; that number dropped to 2.5% by 2015.

"We've seen the writing on the wall for some time with smartphone replacement rates down and saturation high in developed markets," said IDC analyst Ramon Llamas. "The smartphone market in emerging markets has also been steadily shrinking. What's the next emerging market going to be? It's not a China or an India. It's going to be scattered across less dense populations and less dense markets. Seeing things flatten is the way the market is going now."

Like other analysts, Llamas said it isn't clear what new smartphone features will throw a life-line to the overall industry. "What will make the market move up again, that's the $64,000 question," he said.

"Things are slowing down quite a bit for smartphones and will adding 5G wireless do it?" he said. "Not really, since that's coming post-2020. The usual things every vendor is putting on are either a big screen or a small screen. They continue to play with materials. So, let's look at where new applications take us. "

As both Samsung and Apple were hit by the same market pressures in the first quarter, Huawei came in third place, with 8% market share and growth of 58% year-over-year. Huawei shipped 27.5 million smartphones in the quarter.

Smartphone makers in the next two spots are almost completely unknown in the U.S. In fourth place, Oppo had 5.5% of the market share with 18.5 million smartphones shipped --an increase of 153%. And in fifth place, Vivo took 4.3% of the market, with 14.3 million smartphones shipped. That represneted an increase of 123%.

Vivo, based in China, sells its smartphones mainly in China and India. Oppo, also based in China, sells phones in 20 countries and just launched the F1 Plus smartphone for customers in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, with online sales for European customers.
Samsung and Microsoft have crossed paths in the smartphone and tablet markets, and will now do battle in the cloud.

Samsung on Wednesday announced the Artik Cloud service for businesses, which the company hopes will give it a strong position in the emerging Internet of Things market. In IoT, it will take on cloud services like Microsoft's Azure and IBM's Bluemix.

Simply put, the Artik Cloud provides the tools needed for companies to securely collect, store and analyze telemetry data collected from a wide range of sensors.

The cloud service also provides software tools and connectors to link IoT data to other cloud services or silos of data that companies may have in server installations or outside sources.

Artik Cloud was announced at the Samsung Developer Conference taking place in San Francisco this week. The service is designed to help businesses deploy Internet of Things products and services quickly, the company said.

The new cloud service is one way Samsung hopes to tap into the fast-growing Internet of Things market, which is also being targeted by top companies like Microsoft, IBM and Intel. Gartner is forecasting that 6.4 billion connected devices will be used worldwide in 2016, climbing to 20.8 billion by 2020.

The service is part of a family of Artik hardware and software products. Samsung is selling Artik developer boards to make gadgets, drones, robots, wearables and home and industrial automation products.

Microsoft's Azure cloud service, meanwhile, has connectors to the Raspberry Pi 3. Samsung offers SAMI, a basic IoT cloud service for developers, and the SmartThings service to control home devices.

But Samsung's strength is in hardware, and it doesn't have the software muscle of Microsoft. So the answer was to provide an open cloud service to which IoT hardware and services can be easily added and linked.

Artik Cloud is free for hobbyists who have limited needs, but has different tiers of pricing for businesses, reaching up to $6 per device per month for a maximum of 100,000 messages. Samsung will also provide custom quotes for large IoT installations.

Artik Cloud will support a wide range of IoT and sensor devices, and provide plug-ins to support different hardware, programs and OSes, said Curtis Sasaki, vice president of ecosystems at Samsung.

For starters, the cloud service will work with Amazon Echo, FitBit, Gear smartwatches, Nest thermostats and various popular wearables. Even Raspberry Pi-developed gadgets and third-party data analysis services will be able to connect to Artik Cloud.

It will also work with Web services like Twitter and Instagram. It'll connect to home automation systems based on the simple IFTTT (If This Then That) Web service, which helps smart home devices operate on auto-pilot based on conditions and action triggers.

The goal behind Artik Cloud is to break the walls between silos that exist today between services, devices and applications, Sasaki said.

"We've made it easy to connect devices and apps," said Sasaki, who called Artik Cloud an "open-data exchange platform."

Legrand, an electrical installation company, will use the Artik Cloud to manage lighting products in building infrastructures. It will plug its own cloud service to Artik Cloud, and that will help manage smart lighting products, Sasaki said.

The service will have data visualization, device management tools, analytics capabilities and software development kits. Samsung has resolved the challenge of handshaking data sources like sensors and and third-party cloud services to Artik Cloud with a wide range of plug-ins and open APIs (application programming interfaces). The company plans to build support for more hardware and cloud connectors for transparent data exchanges.

Samsung is also working with companies to provide analytics, security and other services through Artik Cloud.
Microsoft has partnered with a San Francisco-based company to encode information on synthetic DNA to test its potential as a new medium for data storage.

Twist Bioscience will provide Microsoft with 10 million DNA strands for the purpose of encoding digital data. In other words, Microsoft is trying to figure out how the same molecules that make up humans' genetic code can be used to encode digital information.

While a commercial product is still years away, initial tests have shown that it's possible to encode and recover 100 percent of digital data from synthetic DNA, said Doug Carmean, a Microsoft partner architect, in a statement.

Using DNA could allow massive amounts of data to be stored in a tiny physical footprint. Twist claims a gram of DNA could store almost a trillion gigabytes of data.

Finding new ways to store information is increasingly important as people generate more and more data in their daily lives, and as millions of connected IoT sensors start to come online.

It's also important for Microsoft, which operates one of the biggest public cloud platforms. Finding more efficient ways to store data could reduce its costs, and DNA-based storage has the potential to last longer than existing media.

Today, the vast majority of digital data is stored on media that has a finite shelf life and periodically needs to be re-encoded. DNA is a promising storage media, as it has a known shelf life of several thousand years, offers a permanent storage format and can be read for continuously decreasing costs, said Twist CEO Emily Leproust in a statement.

It remains to be seen what the results of the collaboration will be, but it's a further step towards making DNA-based computers a practical reality.
An Estonian man was sentenced to seven years and three months in a U.S. prison for his role in a cybercriminal operation that infected more than 4 million computers with DNS hijacking malware.

Vladimir Tsastsin, 35, from Tartu, Estonia, was one of the key players in a $14 million click fraud scheme. He is the sixth individual to be sentenced in the case and has received the longest prison sentence. The sentence was handed down Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

According to the Department of Justice, between 2007 and 2011, Tsastsin and his co-conspirators set up companies that masqueraded as publisher networks and entered into agreements with advertising brokers to display ads on their properties.

In order to earn more money, the group artificially increased the number of user clicks and views for the ads they displayed by installing a malware program called DNS Changer on unsuspecting users' computers.

It's estimated that DNSChanger infected more than 4 million computers worldwide, including 500,000 in the U.S., before its operation was shut down by the FBI.

As its name implies, the DNSChanger malware altered the computer's DNS (Domain Name System) settings, forcing them to use DNS resolvers run by the attackers.

The DNS is the Internet's phonebook, translating domain names into numerical Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that computers use to communicate. By controlling the DNS servers used by infected computers, the attackers could point users to other websites when they wanted to reach specific domain names. This capability was used to perform click fraud.

Tsastsin and his co-conspirators used DNSChanger to redirect users who clicked on links in search results to websites that they didn't intend to visit. They also replaced the advertisements that users should have normally seen on various websites with ads for which they were being paid.

While DNS hijacking was used for click fraud in this case, the technique is very powerful and can be used for more serious attacks against users, such as phishing.

For example, when asked for an online banking website's IP address, a rogue DNS server could respond with the address of a Web server hosting a rogue copy of the website. Despite this, the domain name showing up in the user's browser would be the correct one, making it hard to tell that a phishing attack was in progress.

This kind of attack happened in 2014 in Poland, but instead of using malware to change the DNS settings of individual computers, the attackers compromised home and small business routers and changed the DNS settings for entire networks.

Most computers and mobile devices are configured to automatically obtain their Internet connection settings from the router serving the network they're connected to. This makes routers an attractive target for DNS hijacking attacks.

Over the past several years security researchers have observed many large-scale attacks designed to change the DNS settings on routers, either by exploiting vulnerabilities in their firmware or by >hijacking users' browsers when they visited compromised websites.

Router owners should periodically check their device manufacturer's website for firmware updates and install them, especially if they contain security fixes. They should also change the default administrator password on their routers and make sure to always log out from the router's management interfaces after accessing it through a browser.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed Wednesday that it will not tell Apple how the agency hacked an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists.

In a statement, Amy Hess, assistant director for science and technology, said the FBI will not submit technical details to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP), a policy that permits government agencies to disclose acquired software vulnerabilities to vendors.

Hess said that the FBI does not have enough information about the vulnerability to put it through the VEP.

"The FBI purchased the method from an outside party so that we could unlock the San Bernardino device," Hess said. "We did not, however, purchase the rights to technical details about how the method functions, or the nature and extent of any vulnerability upon which the method may rely in order to operate. As a result, currently we do not have enough technical information about any vulnerability that would permit any meaningful review under the VEP process."

Last month, after weeks of wrangling with Apple -- which balked at a court order compelling it to assist the FBI in unlocking the iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook -- the agency announced it had found a way to access the device without Apple's help. Farook, along with his wife, Tafsheen Malik, killed 14 in San Bernardino, Calif., on Dec. 2, 2015. The two died in a shootout with police later that day. Authorities quickly called it a terrorist attack.

The FBI has said very little about the method, which it said came from outside the government. Although many security experts had argued that the agency could unlock the iPhone by using numerous copies of the iPhone's storage contents to input possible passcodes until the correct one was found, some subsequently said an undisclosed iOS vulnerability was what the FBI acquired.

Hess acknowledged that the FBI leans toward secrecy about what security vulnerabilities it acquires and how they work. "We generally do not comment on whether a particular vulnerability was brought before the interagency and the results of any such deliberation," Hess said. "We recognize, however, the extraordinary nature of this particular case, the intense public interest in it, and the fact that the FBI already has disclosed publicly the existence of the method."

Under VEP, federal agencies like the FBI and the National Security Agency (NDA) submit vulnerabilities to a review panel, which then decides whether the flaws should be passed along to the vendor for patching. While VEP's existence had been suspected for some time, it was only last November that the government released a redacted version of the written policy.

There is a thriving market for undocumented vulnerabilities, which are found or purchased by brokers, who then sell them to government agencies around the world, including U.S. authorities, for use against targeted individuals' computers and smartphones.

Hess's explanation of why the FBI would not submit the iPhone vulnerability to VEP signaled that the seller retained rights to the bug, almost certainly so it could sell the flaw again elsewhere. If the FBI had put the vulnerability through VEP, and Apple eventually was told, the company would then have patched the bug, preventing the broker from reselling it to others, or at a minimum greatly reducing its value.

One security expert called the FBI's decision to use the tool "reckless" because the agency had no idea how it worked.

"This should be taken as an act of recklessness by the FBI with regards to the Syed Farook case," said Jonathan Zdziarski, a noted iPhone forensics and security expert, in a Tuesday post to his personal blog. "The FBI apparently allowed an undocumented tool to run on a piece of high profile, terrorism-related evidence without having adequate knowledge of the specific function or the forensic soundness of the tool."

Zdziarski, one of the many security professionals who criticized the FBI's attempt to coerce Apple into unlocking Farook's phone, said the agency's ignorance about the tool threatened any legal case that might stem from the tool's use.

"The FBI has offered this tool to other law enforcement agencies that need it, Zdziarski wrote. "So the FBI is endorsing the use of an untested tool that they have no idea how it works, for every kind of case that could go through our court system. A tool that was also only tested, if at all, for one very specific case now [is] being used on a very broad set of types of data and evidence, which it could easily damage, alter, or -- more likely -- see thrown out of cases as soon as it's challenged."
I have written before about the wisdom of involving security early in the process of acquiring another company. But given what happened at my company last week, its probably a good idea to say it all again.

Trouble Ticket At issue: The company has signed a deal to acquire a small software company, but no security review was conducted ahead of the deals close. Action plan: Quickly assess the companys weaknesses and shore them up just as fast.

The CFO broke the news that we were acquiring a smaller software company in a meeting with most of the executive staff and other department heads. It was greeted as a welcome development, since we had been struggling with the question of whether we should divert resources to develop a needed feature in our product or instead purchase a company that could fill that gap. The problem for me was that I was learning this news along with the other department heads, even though the deal was already signed. I would be given a couple of weeks to conduct due diligence, but it was too late for any discovery that I made to be used as leverage to reduce the acquisition price tag  or even to scuttle the deal entirely.

[ ALSO ON CSO: Cybersecurity no longer merger afterthought ]

The risks that might be uncovered in such a review can have tremendous implications. For example, it isnt unusual for a small software company to use someone elses proprietary software code as a base platform to build upon (why re-create the wheel, right?). The acquisition target might infringe on copyrights in less significant ways, as well, requiring fees to be paid. Those are just two of the many land mines that can be hidden from view in an acquisition, and both of them carry potentially large financial burdens that could fall on the acquiring company.

Although there was no chance of backing out of the deal, it was still important that I conduct a review, so that we would at least know what sorts of problems were in store for us. I dusted off my M&A questionnaire and got to work. After several sessions with the companys small IT team, engineering department and customer service folk, I had a decent handle on the security maturity of the company  or rather, its security immaturity. It fell short on several measures.

This didnt surprise me, since the company doesnt have anyone dedicated to overseeing security matters. In fact, it was obvious from my review that security wasnt a priority. Nearly all of the companys infrastructure was installed on virtual servers located in a small data center closet, with all the servers on the same network and several exposed to the public Internet. One of the servers was hosting Subversion (used for source code management) as well as a wiki to manage product ideas and changes. Another was being used for the open-source PBX phone system Asterisk. The companys public-facing Web server was also acting as the corporate mail server.

The Asterisk server had Secure Shell (SSH) available to the Internet. I asked the IT guy why, and he said a contractor maintained the server and needed remote access. Remediation of those problems wouldnt have been difficult for them; they just had to set up a demilitarized zone for all Internet-facing resources and configure a VPN to provide restricted and secure access to those resources. The problem in my mind was that, when you run into big security risks that can easily be fixed, its a red flag that alerts you to the extremely low priority that security considerations have been given.

Next, a quick Nessus scan turned up many vulnerabilities. The company was running outdated software for Apache, DNS, Asterisk and other things. No server had been patched in over a year. Some of the servers were even running Telnet, which is an unencrypted method for accessing a Unix server. Such servers should never be exposed to the public Internet; due to the lack of proper hygiene and network segmentation, I had to consider the entire network compromised. Although what I had already seen had prepared me for some real problems, I was still surprised that, in an age of breaches, a company could be so irresponsible about securing its infrastructure.

I then turned my attention to the cloud-based enterprise applications that the company was using, including Salesforce, Google Docs and QuickBooks. The big problem here was that the list of active users retained many people who had been terminated  and some of them were still actively logging in. In the case of Google Docs, many sensitive documents had been recently modified by a user who had been terminated more than a year earlier. On top of that, password policies hadnt been implemented, and many users had weak passwords with no expiration.

Obviously, I had my hands full.

My first order of business was to secure the source code, which is our main interest in this company. I had the entire source code tree evaluated for any signs of manipulation; luckily, it was clean. I then had it moved to our own source code repository and decommissioned the old server.

I drafted a remediation plan to close the egregious security holes, the eventual plan being to decommission all of the acquired companys internal infrastructure and migrate data and people to our own corporate servers. I felt it was too risky to even attempt to integrate its network with ours. And of course, with the enterprise cloud-based applications, well be terminating accounts and securing data.

Its a long list of problems, but it gives force to my message to the executive staff: Next time you think about acquiring another company, get security involved early.

This week's journal is written by a real security manager, "Mathias Thurman," whose name and employer have been disguised for obvious reasons. Contact him at mathias_thurman@yahoo.com.

Click here for more security articles.

This story, "Creating a secure network post acquisition" was originally published by Computerworld .
HP's new Chromebook 13 offers some of the latest technologies that the company is also putting in its top-line Windows PCs.

The new laptop is just 12.9-millimeters thick and has a 13.3-inch display that shows images at a 3200 x 1800 pixel resolution. That is the highest-resolution screen ever in Chromebooks, an improvement from the 2560 x 1700 pixel display on Google's Chromebook Pixel.

The Chromebook 13 weighs 1.29 kilograms (2.86 pounds), and is the first with Intel's Skylake-based Core M processor, which focuses more on battery life than performance. HP claims the Chromebook 13 delivers 11.5 hours of battery life.

It has an aluminum finish, giving it a premium look.

The laptop has 802.11ac dual-band wireless, 16GB of memory, 32GB of storage, a webcam, an SD card reader and integrated Intel HD 515 graphics. It also has USB-C ports for charging and connect peripherals like external storage.

The Chromebook 13 has Another unique feature is the Elite USB-C dock, which will provide expanded connectivity to Ethernet, external displays and other peripherals.

It is priced starting at US$499 and will become available this month. It is expensive compared to entry-level Chromebooks from Acer, Lenovo and Asus priced under $250, but you are paying for the luxurious features.

Chromebooks are popular, low-cost computers for those who do most of their computing on the Web. Google is positioning Chromebooks as an alternative to Windows PCs. With Chromebook 13, HP has answered Google's call for PC makers to improve laptop specifications.

Others are catching up. Acer last week introduced the Chromebook 14 for Work, which is the first with Intel's faster Skylake-based Core i series processors.

There are still questions, though, on whether the high-end features are needed in Chromebooks, which are devices in which the wireless network speed matters more than the processor performance. Most buyers opt for low-end Chromebooks that have entry-level Celeron or Pentium processors, up to 4GB of RAM and minimal storage.

With the Chromebook 13, users will be able to view higher-resolution streaming movies, enjoy improved Google Hangout experiences and run multiple browser sessions. Google is also loading richer web applications that require more processor performance.
Anna Soubry is the leader of the Left of the Tory Party. Until Jacob Rees-Mogg made this observation while I was researching this profile, the thought had not quite occurred to me.

But who else is there? Her hero and fellow Nottingham MP, Ken Clarke, is an elder statesman, still capable of intervening with tremendous eclat, but not expected to return to high office.

In the next generation, Dominic Grieve and Damian Green are distinguished figures, who speak with authority on their chosen subjects. But Soubry is the person who possesses, like Clarke, the ability to engage with the wider public, and a pugnacious joy in swinging punches at political opponents, including some who happen to belong to the same party.

It is this reckless delight in fighting her corner which makes her such an arresting figure to watch. At the end of 2013, when she said in a scene-stealing moment on the Andrew Marr Show that Nigel Farage looks like somebody has put their finger up his bottom and he really rather likes it, people began to take notice of her.

She had already confronted the UKIP leader on Question Time, where as the New Statesman reported:

Rather than pandering to Farage, as most Conservatives would do, she said: You talk about facts  in my constituency your party put out a leaflet saying 29 million people from Romania and Bulgaria were going to flood into our country. Well, the population is only 27-and-a-half million of the two of them. You do not talk facts, you talk prejudice. Thats what you talk, and you scaremonger and you put fear in peoples hearts. Look, times are tough. We know that. But when times are tough, theres a danger and history tells us when things are not good, you turn to the stranger and you blame them. And you shouldnt. That is wrong. And Im proud of our countrys history and Im proud that people come here.

Here is a liberal Conservative who is out and proud where others would consider it more prudent to downplay their loathing of people like Farage.

What made her like this? Her willingness to speak her mind must come in part from not being part of the modish, metropolitan world, educated for the most part at Oxbridge and at fee-paying schools, which is uneasily aware that its cultural assumptions  pro-EU, pro-immigrant  are not necessarily shared by Middle England.

Soubry is a robustly provincial figure. Her father ran garages, but went bust when she was 11, while her mother worked for 40 years as a radiographer in the NHS. Anna passed the 11-plus and went to Hartland Grammar School in Worksop, which as she recounted in the Nottingham Post

was a rough and tough school. After I left things were so bad there were areas of the school staff wouldnt go because they would get beaten up, and the police were called because of the number of stabbings. Two people I was at school with ended up becoming murderers. A couple of years after I joined it became Hartland Comprehensive, and by the time I left it was reckoned to be one of the worst schools in Notts. But they were some of the happiest days of my life; I cant stress enough how much of a good time I had there. I look back on it with great fondness'.

Already she enjoyed getting into a row. Our next glimpse of her confirms this. She read law at Birmingham University, and in 1979, when she was 22, attended a conference held by the Federation of Conservative Students in Liverpool, where the 19-year-old Paul Goodman, who was badly hung over, witnessed her performance:

The debate droned on. My eyelids drooped downwards. Then what appeared to be a small nuclear explosion took place in the general vicinity of the microphone. A young woman wearing skintight jeans was addressing what Sir Edward Boyle once called the only intelligent audience in the Conservative Party. My eyelids lifted up. She was shouting vigorously. The conference was shouting back I was transfixed. Less by the quality of the argument (if thats the right way of describing what was taking place) than by the gorgeous pouting allure of the speaker. To my youthful imagination, her primal rage suggested Helen of Troy getting down and dirty. How had she managed to get those jeans on? Would I be able to get them off?

The answer to the second of these questions turned out to be No, as he admitted on recalling the occasion in a piece for ConHome published in 2011. But Soubry, as he realised, was a woman to watch.

She could not, however, be watched in London. For after becoming the only Conservative on the executive of the National Union of Students, her first career was as a presenter of regional television programmes in Scotland and the Midlands, after which she qualified as a barrister and practised at the criminal bar in Nottingham.

She also got married a couple of times, and had two beloved daughters who are now grown up. In an interview with The Times, she touched on her parenting style:

I was the generation that just got on and did it. I had a local girl looking after my daughters at home so I was never the frazzled woman saying, I have to go now to pick up the kids. I never did the cupcake bollocks.

Soubry did not, however, get on and do politics during these years, becoming active in the Party again only after David Cameron became leader. (She dismisses claims of once having joined the SDP as a terrible lie that is put about .) In 2005 she fought and lost Gedling, and in 2010 just won Broxtowe, which stretches from the western suburbs of Nottingham to the Derbyshire border.

As one of her fellow Tory MPs puts it, she is no soft touch, but a compassionate Tory. Soubry herself says:

I went to school with very poor people and their lives had just got worse. They may have had the money for nice trainers but they had no aspirations. There were whole families in my area where for four generations no one had worked and lived shitty lives. It enraged me.

On arriving at Westminster in her early fifties, her experience as a journalist and a lawyer stood her in good stead. She understood television and could master a brief.

She also enjoyed the hooligan possibilities of the Commons Chamber, where she sat with the rough trade  people like Simon Burns  and heckled Ed Miliband, while annoying the Speaker. Quite soon she gained promotion, first to a junior ministerial post at Health, then to the Ministry of Defence, and now to Business, where she is allowed to attend Cabinet.

There is a kind of Conservative right-winger who finds her unbelievably irritating: an attention-seeking sycophant who catches David Camerons eye in the House and responds to him like a nodding dog in the back of a Hillman Imp. They hate and despise her, and she hates and despises them back.

She is as unwilling to woo the Right as Clarke was. Many colleagues were horrified at her disloyal treatment of Andrew Mitchell, on air, when he had to resign after his altercation at the gates of Downing Street.

On another occasion, she refused to take seriously the worry of some Conservatives that military chapels might be obliged to permit gay weddings. As the Archbishop Cranmer blog reported,

This debate is interesting for the way that the Ministry of Defence Minister Anna Soubry treats those of a Christian conscience, in this case Sir Edward Leigh (Roman Catholic) and Sir Gerald Howarth (Church of England), with utter contempt and rudeness. Those who witnessed the exchange were shocked and appalled at the Ministers arrogance.

But her admirers outnumber her detractors. Even if they do not agree with her opinions, they like the way she fights her corner, whether at the Dispatch Box or on television. And although she is capable of getting things completely wrong  in her anxiety to keep us in the EU, she claimed our trade with Europe would drop to almost absolutely zero if we were to leave  she is also capable of apologising for her errors, at least if this does not mean having to mollify some right-wing backwoodsman.

And she still comes to have a drink in the Smoking Room before a vote, whereas with a hell of a lot of ministers, you never see them again. Her partner, Neil Davidson, is a businessman: Hes a nice man, and if he can handle Anna he can handle anything.

Whatever the referendum result, it is more than likely that the next leader will come from the Brexit wing of the party, and that in order to demonstrate balance, he or she will find it expedient to offer Soubry a Cabinet post.
Readers will be familiar with this sites past scrutiny of Momentum, Corbyns Revolutionary Guard. The organisation now has branches right across the country, and they always seem to be willing to defend even the most indefensible behaviour from the hard left.

Against that background, meet Bradford Momentum, the local branch covering the constituency of Naz Shah, the Labour MP who has just been suspended for, among other things, supporting the deportation of Israelis to America and complaining that the Jews are rallying to fix online polls.

Shah herself has conceded that her views were anti-semitic and wrong. But, apparently, Bradford Momentum does not accept that to be the case.

This morning, the groups Facebook page shared a blogpost disputing her apology:

Theyve deleted it since I tweeted about it, but the full piece can be found here. Here are a few extracts:

Nothing she said was anti-semitic  in fact, it was funny

there is nothing anti-Semitic in what Naz Shah has said. She made what was quite a flippant humorous joke

Shahs apology was forced out of her like a defendant at a Stalinist showtrial

Naz Shah has confessed to her comments being anti-Semitic. Isnt that enough proof? No. The defendants in the Stalin purge trials also confessed to being Trotskys agents and more. It is perfectly possible to create a psychological atmosphere such that people will confess to all manner of things, even though they are not guilty. Police interrogators have, throughout the years, been quite skilled in obtaining false confessions without the need to beat people up or torture them.

Israeli policy towards Gaza is like that of the Nazis towards the Warsaw ghetto

The people of Gaza were and are being subject to a merciless blockade by Israel in which the number of calories per person is calculated by Israel before food is allowed in. There is a previous precedent for this. Under the rule of Governor General Hans Frank in the Nazi occupied Polish General-Gouvernment, the number of calories allowed into the Warsaw ghetto was also calculated.

Concern about anti-semitism is bogus because British Jews are extremely prosperous

Not one of the hypocrites on the Labour Right who have condemned the anti-Semitism of Naz Shah condemned Israels bombing of Gaza or have campaigned for the lifting of the siege. That is the issue not the bogus issue of anti-Semitism. Racism isnt prejudice. It is about the exercise of power. Jews didnt suffer because of peoples opinions in Europe but because of what was done to them. Britains Jews are not oppressed, economically or racially. On the contrary British Jews live in a golden age. There is no state racism directed at Jews, as opposed to Muslims and Black people. British Jewry is an extremely prosperous and privileged community.

The Israeli Government is behind a propaganda campaign to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn

What is happening is that the millions of pounds that the Israeli government has devoted to propaganda is being spent now to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn and the new Labour leadership. They are hunting down every tweet, email etc. in order to create an atmosphere of permanent instability.

Jon Lansman, Momentums founder, is holding secret meetings with Jewish groups in the Labour Party

Jon Lansman, Chair of Momentum is holding secret talks with the Jewish Labour Movement, British branch of the Israeli Labour Party, and Labour Friends of Israel in the naive hope that they will be supportive of Corbyn

When will Labour accept that it has a growing problem with anti-semitism, and that the influx of Corbyn fans has made that situation worse? For how long will the Party continue to refuse to act on the issue?
Chris Philp is Conservative MP for Croydon South and sits on the Treasury Select Committee.

When Ken Livingstone was kicked out in 2008, London was in a mess. Home building starts were in free-fall. Unemployment was on the up.

After two terms under a hard-left Mayor whose political heroes are Hugo Chavez and Jeremy Corbyn, a new approach was sorely needed. Eight years later, Boris leaves London a far better place than he found it.

It is a city of growth. Compared to the rest of Europe and the rest of the world, London leads the way. Nearly a quarter of UK GDP can be accounted for by London alone despite being only 15 per cent of the population.

From 2010 to 2014 we saw economic growth of 15.9 per cent in real terms compared to 8.2 per cent nationally.

London has confirm ed its place as a leading international financial hub. The brightest and best French financiers flock in their thousands to London, much to the disgust of the French socialists who have driven them away. Boris Johnson should take huge credit for this renaissance.

Economic strength and resilience starts with a strong and flexible workforce. The employment rate in the capital increased from 67 per cent in 2010 to 73 per cent in 2015, which is pretty much at the highest rate since records began. With Boris as Mayor and George Osborne as Chancellor, London has got back to work.

In my south London constituency, unemployment has halved since 2010 and youth unemployment has fallen by an incredible 62 per cent.

One of the greatest achievements is apprenticeships. Since August 2010, London has created 235,000 of them, staggering when compared to the mere 70,000 created under Ken Livingstone. Apprenticeships are a fantastic way of training people with a new skill and a new work ethic. Over 84 per cent of apprentices remain in employment after their scheme has concluded, and two thirds stay with their employer.

In his action plan for Greater London, Zac Goldsmith has set out his employment targets, with the aim of securing over half a million more jobs for Londoners. He will also work with government to secure 250,000 fresh apprentic eships by the end of his term.

Both Boris and I are strong believers in the Living Wage. The London Living Wage reflects the significantly higher living costs faced by Londoners compared to people throughout the rest of the UK.

Reflecting the challenges business faces, the wage is voluntary. However this has not stopped an incredible number of employers becoming accredited.

Boris made a commitment soon after being elected in 2008 to support the London Living Wage and followed this with a 2012 manifesto target of having 250 employers Living Wage accredited by the end of his second term. He has far exceeded this target.

Under Boris Mayoralty, 839 firms now pay it. This is compared to only 27 in 2008. Since 2011, the benefit of the London Living Wage has been felt by over 30,000 London workers by Accredited Living Wage employers alone. Boris strongly felt that the London Living Wage should become commonplace by 2020, and under Zac Goldsmith, this will happen.

Supporting a growing economy starts at ground level, and the creation of Business Improvement Districts was an important pledge by Boris.

A BID is a geographical region where local traders vote to pay a levy which goes towards their chosen areas for improvement in the local environment. These grassroots, business-led organisations bec ome the lifeblood of their local economies.

Boris set a target of supporting 50 of these districts, which he achieved in March. Together they have contributed more than 25 million to the regeneration of town centres and industrial hubs across the city.

The Purley BID in my constituency started last year and is already on its way to revitalising the district centre, and Zac has pledged to invest 1 million in Purley Town centre if elected. I am now working to set up a BID in Coulsdon  a great way of empowering small traders to compete against the big chains.

High labour productivity is another key element of the economic legacy left by Boris. Productivity not only plays an important role in strong economic growth but is also directly linked to living standards.

It is crucial for long-term sustained economic growth for productivity to grow in parallel. Historically UK productivity has grown around 2 per cent per year. The impact of the 2008/09 recession meant this dropped significantly. However the rebound from this downturn has been a long time coming.

While nationally there was an uphill battle to get productivity back on track, with a national increase of only 0.9 per cent in 2015, London far surpassed this. The capital has made a strong return to productivity growth post-recession, with productivity levels 30 per cent higher than the UK average in 2014.

According to statistics from the ONS the average effort put in per hour by a London worker is an incredible 42 per cent higher than the national average. The boost in employment and the increase in the London Living Wage encouraged by our outgoing mayor has driven this productivity growth, making for a stronger economy in our capital.

The importance of technology in our economy is growing exponentially. Just five years have passed since the cluster of technology firms formerly known as Silicon Roundabout in East London started. The city is now a world leader in FinTech and e-commerce.

No less than 13 of the so-called Unicorns, tech start-ups achieving $1 billion valuations, have come from London  a third of the European total. Household names such as Just Eat, Shazam and TransferWise have become global players in this time.

Venture capital into London is now ten times what is was in 2010, with Tech firms in the capital securing over 900m of this venture capital in 2014. Boris has not only recognised the importance of our flourishing technology scene, but has been an ambassador for the sector.

We must back Zac to secure Boriss golden legacy, and not elect Corbyns candidate Sadiq Khan who will rapidly takes us back to the misery of Livingstone and his inspiration, Hugo Chavez.

I have been hitting the streets of Croydon to do this in the past few months, and I hope to see many fellow Conservatives on the campaign trail in the coming days.
Daniel Hannan is an MEP for South-East England, and a journalist, author and broadcaster. His most recent book is Why Vote Leave.

We are unused to referendums in this country, so we tend to think in terms of general elections. Behind much of the coverage of the EU debate is the assumption that voting to leave somehow means putting the Leave campaigners into office.

Hence the interest in what precise alternative we favour. Do we want Britain to be like Switzerland or like Norway or like Canada or like Jersey? (Its worth noting, en passant, that the phrasing of the question demonstrates its silliness: the fact that no two non-EU states have identical deals with Brussels makes a nonsense of the idea that Britain would precisely mimic any of them. Plainly, wed have our own deal, tailored to suit our own interests.)

I have written before about the sort of arrangement that we could realistically expect. But my opinions, if you think about it, are not relevant, because I wont be overseeing the negotiations. I can point in general terms to the status enjoyed by the other European states that are outside the EU: no tariffs; reciprocal arrangements on healthcare, university access and police co-operation; autonomy in agriculture, fisheries, defence, immigration, criminal justice, culture and regional policy. But my views on, say, how much we should subsidise our farmers matter a lot less than those of the farms minister.

A referendum is best understood as voters instructing their government, rather as a client instructs his barrister. Voting to leave means giving ministers a mandate: wed be telling them to negotiate our departure on the best possible terms.

Remain campaigners dont want us to understand this. They want to make the prospect of withdrawal seem as abrupt and as scary as possible. Hence their suggestion that a Leave vote on 23 June would somehow start a countdown, that wed have two years to negotiate a new deal and that, if no agreement were reached within that time, wed in some unspecified way be outside all trade arrangements.

A moments thought reveals how absurd all this is. A vote to leave wont start any countdowns. Ministers would simply be under instruction to find departure terms that suit Britain  and, indeed, that suit the rest of the EU. They would presumably begin by holding informal talks with the Brussels institutions and the other member states. Then, when the broad parameters were agreed, they would begin formal negotiations. These might be held under Article 50, the clause introduced by the Lisbon Treaty which obliges the EU to reach a trade deal with a departing state within two years; or they might be held under a different intergovernmental structure. It might be possible to reach a mutually beneficial deal very quickly. Or the other EU members might prefer, for reasons of administrative convenience, for the new arrangements to come into effect in 2019 when they choose their new Parliament and Commission, so as not to have to recalculate their voting weights twice.

The point is that nothing would be agreed until both sides were content. The Prime Minister told the House of Commons a couple of weeks ago that he would remain in office to implement a Leave vote. Since he has also promised to stand down before the next general election, that is the effective deadline. It gives us plenty of time to find arrangements that suit us, the rest of the EU and, indeed, our other trading partners around the world.

Whether independence comes into effect in 2017, 2018 or 2019, what will it look like? Well, the first day after Brexit will look pretty much like the previous day. All our existing arrangements will remain in place until one side or the other chooses to abandon them. Wed begin from a position of having all the same technical standards as the other EU states, all the reciprocal deals on social security, all the trade deals. What Brexit means is the freedom to start altering those deals.

Now plainly there will be some alterations: otherwise thered be no point in Brexit. There will be areas where we want to pull out of common EU policies, because the cost of compliance outweighs the benefit of having the same rules as neighbouring states. At the same time, the other member states may well want to push ahead with deeper integration without us. But that process will be gradual and cumulative.

The man who put it best, oddly enough, was the leader of the Remain side, Stuart Rose: Its not going to be a step change, its going to be a gentle process.

Lord Rose went on, before his horrified spin-doctors could shut him up: Nothing is going to happen if we come out of Europe in the first five years, probably. There will be absolutely no change. Then, if you look back ten years later, there will have been some change, and if you look back 15 years later there will have been some.

Quite. The really radical break is not voting to leave; its voting to stay, and thus acquiescing in the EUs continuing economic, political, fiscal and military amalgamation, in more bailouts, in the unfolding migration disaster.

Voting to leave is the way to avoid these risks. It is, for that reason, the safer option. Leaving wont be a sudden rupture, but a gradual reorientation. The United Kingdom will begin to follow a different trajectory, away from the enervated and distempered eurozone and toward more opulent markets across the oceans. Leaving, in short, is the conservative choice.
This week has seen growing pressure on the Government to adopt what has become known as the Dubs Amendment  a proposal by Lord Dubs that Britain should take in 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees who are currently in Europe.

The rhetoric is extremely impassioned, and the comparison is routinely drawn with the Kindertransport, which saved almost 10,000 mostly Jewish children from the Nazis (including a young Alf Dubs). The latest advocate of the policy change is none other than the Daily Mail, which dedicated its leader column today to arguing for the Government to change tack.

That pressure will no doubt continue to grow, and one cannot rule out the possibility that the Government will make some concession as a result. But it would be a mistake to do so.

Britain has differed markedly from many of our European neighbours in its approach to the Syrian refugee crisis. Angela Merkel pursued a come one, come all policy, which encouraged huge numbers of refugees to place their lives in the hands of people smugglers and in the hulls of rickety boats to cross the Aegean. Merkel was motivated by compassion, but in practice her error cost many men, women and children their lives.

By contrast, the British Government has for the last year focused on taking refugees directly from camps in the region. That is clearly a preferable approach  it allows for deliberate choice to help those most in need, rather than outsourcing refugee selection to people smuggling gangs, it ensures those being helped are actually Syrian refugees and not economic migrants from elsewhere, and most importantly it does not require people who have lost everything to risk drowning in order to find safety. Britain is in fact operating a close equivalent of the Kindertransport already, taking refugees directly from the war zone in which they are in danger. Oddly, the Mails leader acknowledges this point itself, although it then advocates the opposite policy straight afterwards.

It is worth cutting through the rhetoric to seek the facts about the Dubs Amendment. If this was a proposal to take more children from the camps around Syria, then I would support it (though the opinion polls suggest I would not necessarily be in a majority). Instead, it is a proposal to take children who are already in EU countries.

It is undoubtedly true that many of them are not safe simply by virtue of having reached Europe  sex traffickers and other criminals are reportedly preying upon them, and many are homeless  but that is a result of abject failure on the part of our EU neighbours to live up to their responsibilities. Imagine there were ramshackle camps in the UK with hundreds or thousands of children left fending for themselves, and they were known to the authorities. Social services and the police would be there in minutes, and rightly so. Instead, France and others are allowing this miserable situation to continue, seemingly in the hope that the children involved will move on to another country, or disappear and cease to pose an issue for the authorities. That is outrageous  we should be calling these governments out on their deliberate or incompetent failings, rather than facilitating them by doing as they seem to wish.

There are other questions about the details of the campaign. As David Burrowes  not an anti-refugee voice by any means  points out, the 3,000 figure seems to be entirely arbitrary, particularly when the Europol estimate of unaccompanied children missing in Europe is 10,000. Britain is taking the right approach to avoid further children ending up in that situation, and should be pressing for a proper plan of action for all European nations to find and help those already in this plight in their current location. Just saying well take 3,000 doesnt fix that, and could at worst be interpreted by some European countries as a message that if they carry on neglecting their responsibilities then Britain will take the problem off their hands.

Then there is the political aspect, which I hinted at with my earlier reference to opinion polling. I, like the Government, Burrowes and many others, want Britain to take in refugees from the Syrian conflict. I believe we have a humanitarian obligation to help them, a self-interest in seeking to end a chaos which offers ISIS a chance to sneak into the EU and also a debt, given that thanks to Ed Miliband we opted to leave Assad and others to carry on the slaughter of Syrian civilians.

But it remains the case that a lot of British voters feel differently  many want either a very small effort or no effort at all on this front. To help more refugees means convincing people  and while a refugee is legally very different to an economic migrant, it is a fact that in the popular imagination the two go together onto a combined total of immigration. As Paul Goodman has previously argued, many voters will demand that taking more refugees should mean taking fewer migrants of other types from elsewhere  having an open border policy to EU economic migrants makes it harder for any Government to choose to increase the number of refugees it welcomes to these shores.
The second he said it, you could feel the air in the room change. Barack Obamas warning that Brexit would mean the UK is going to be at the back of the queue of Americas trade priorities was as brutal as it was effective. And the sharp intake of breath from the gathered press pack, greeted by the knowingly satisfied smiles of Downing Street aides, was proof that the President had delivered and delivered in spades.

So wrote Paul Waugh of the Huffington Post in his newsletter report of the Presidents Downing Street press conference. Are those aides still smiling with satisfaction this morning?

We have now had four polls on the EU referendum since Obamas visit, as follows:

Remain 51 per cent (- 1), Leave 46 per cent (plus 3). (ORB).

Remain 44 per cent (+ 1), Leave 46 per cent (plus 2) (ICM).

Remain 45 per cent (-1), Leave 38 per cent (plus 3) (Survation). And, in this mornings Times () 

Remain 41 per cent (+ 1), Leave 42 per cent (+ 3). (YouGov).

In short, there is no suggestion from any of them that the Presidents intervention has made any substantial difference to referendum voting intentions.

Now, it may be that all these polls are wrong  in other words, that Obamas trip, and his view of any post-Brexit trade talks between America and Britain, are having an effect on voters opinions that they havent picked up.

But the most likely explanation is also the most simple. The overwhelming majority of British voters are not members of the Westminster Village, and consequently got less agitated than it about the Presidents visit.

Indeed, very many will not have noticed it at all. Others may have glanced at a TV screen or glimpsed a headline. But in terms of grabbing their attention, the President was, to coin a phrase, at the back of the queue.

If so, there are two lessons in these findings. The first is about Britain and America (and Obama); the second is about this referendum and the polls.

Many people active on the Left dislike the United States, but like Obama. For many on the Right, it is the other way round. But both share a interest in American politics, amounting in some cases to a West Wing-flavoured passion.

Most voters are certainly less engaged with and arguably more cool about the United States, or at least the views of its politicians insofar as they touch on Britain.

Those breath-drawing lobby journalists and knowingly-smiling Number Ten aides are part of a group that, one way or the other, tends to get overwrought about America and its politics and overwhelmed by the glamour of its presidency.

On the referendum and the polls, we are still too far out from polling day for them to be more than snapshots, not predictions. Local elections take place a week today, and the state opening of Parliament on May 18.

When it is over, the Governments decks will be cleared for the referendum run-in of about a month. Only then will most voters engage their minds more actively with the choice before them.
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Each year, Relay For Life is being celebrated in over 20 countries including the United States and the United Kingdom to raise the much needed funds and awareness to save people from cancer. Anyone can join the event as a team, as a survivor or as an organizer for the relay.

How To Join

To start a team, a team captain (must be at least 18 years old) should get family and friends to sign up to a team with eight to 15 members. Then, the captain must find the nearest Relay For Life event and register their team online. Once registered, the team members should fundraise throughout the year to support the Cancer Research UK. To join as a team member, you must find the name of the team captain or the name of the team.

According to Cancer Research UK, Anyone who has heard the phrase "you have cancer" is invited to become the event's Guest of Honor at their local Relay For life. The Survivors will start the relay by walking at the Survivors' Lap of Honor. After the opening event, the Survivors will be invited to join the Survivors' reception where they can meet other survivors where they can share experiences and recognize the person who became their caregivers and supported them during their illness.

Cool Facts

1. The money raised through Relay For Life is being used for investing in research in all types of cancer and providing free services and information to cancer patients and their caregivers.

2. Canine companions are also welcome to participate to a fun-filled day of demonstrations, games and walking through the Bark For Life event, according to American Cancer Society.

3. Relay Of Life events can be done in 3-D virtual worlds which include InWorldz and Second Life. All events including building campsites and walk a track are being done by more than 15 million people worldwide. Since 2005, the Relay For Life of Second Life was able to raise more than $2 million.

4. Schools can host their own activities. The Relay For Life's student Relay events offer cancer education, specialized fundraising and leadership opportunities for elementary to college students.

5. Dr. Gordy Klatt started the Relay For Life by walking and running for 24 hours around the track in Tacoma, Washington in 1985. He was able to raise $27,000 to help the American Cancer Society fight cancer, which is the nation's biggest health concern.



See Now: What Republicans Don't Want You To Know About Obamacare
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The sensitive issue on Marijuana was discussed here a couple of days ago and now the word out is that Cannabis could be legalized by next year, 2017. Word of such comes from Health Minister Jane Philpott who bared the plan during the United Nations meeting held last week.

Philpotts revelation comes a bit scarce as she did not get into detail. That included stating who would be allowed to grow and/or distribute Cannabis products in the event that it does get legalized. If plans do push through, it could spark a domino effect.

Canada is within 100 miles of the US border and such could spark bordering states to pass a legislation to prevent the exodus of tourism dollars to their end. Proof of this is Colorado and Washington which have seen a spike in tourism when marijuana was legalized back in 2013.

Assuming that Cannabis does get legalized, it is unlikely to be in the center of trade between Canada and the United States. Technically, Cannabis is still illegal under United States laws.

I don't see the government legalizing the export of cannabis, said Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa lawyer who specializes in Canadian social policy. Right now, it's a criminal offense punishable by life imprisonment. They don't need to change that part of the law in order to set up a legal regulatory regime in Canada.

The legalization process will all depend on how prime minister Justin Trudeau deals with it. Though a lot of Canadians support the legalization of marijuana, there are some who consider marijuana worse than cigarettes. One person who thinks so is Trudeaus predecessor, Stephen Harper.

The matter of legalizing marijuana could hinge on whoever becomes the next U.S. president. Among the candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have so far avoided tackling the issue, something that could play an integral part in trade deals between Canada and the United States. Though times have changed when it comes to legalizing Cannabis, it is a sensitive issue that needs to be addressed.

As far as Canada is concerned, there seems to be no strong opposition to the move in case it goes down. Regions such as Alaska, Oregon, Portland and Maine have legalized Cannabis with more expected to follow. Should Canada join the party?

See Now: What Republicans Don't Want You To Know About Obamacare
Sociology Of Kashmiri Nicknames

By Mohammad Ashraf

28 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

(Kashmiris have a nickname for everyone and everything)

For past sometime, film actor Anupam Kher has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. For a change one would not like to counter his campaign against Kashmiri Muslims which, according to some Pandit leaders, has already substantially damaged their cause. Let us concentrate on his name. He is Khar and not Kher. There are many Kashmiri Pandits who have a sub-caste of Khar. This word in Kashmiri means a donkey. Kashmiris have a tradition of not only giving nicknames to people but also shortening and distorting the actual names of the people in general. Ghulam is changed into Gull or Gulla. Mohammad is distorted into Mumma, Mohudd, Ahmad into Ammaand Nabi into Nabba. Khadija into Khajih, Fatima into Fatih, Jameela into Jalleh and so on. Then nicknames are added because of the profession or some peculiarity of the person. Sometimes in these nicknames some object or landmark commonly associated with the person is added. The distorted names are also combined with the profession of the person. Abdul Gaffar, the carpenter becomes, Gaffar Chaan. Ghulam Qadir, the Mason becomes Qadir Dasill. Abdul Rahim, the Coppersmith becomes, Rahim Thanthurr, Abdul Karim, the sweeper becomes, Karim Wattul!And so on.

Then there is a tradition of attaching some animal, peculiarity of character or even an inanimate object, with the name of a person. Ram Krishan Kaul has written a book Sociology of Names and Nicknames of India with special reference to Kashmir. The book has given a detailed background of various names, gotras and so on of Kashmiri Pandits. It is a very informative and interesting read and can even be downloaded through the internet. Because of the mass conversions which took place during the time of Shah-i-Hamadan, there are many common family names among Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir. There are Kauls, Rainas, and Bhats amongthe Hindus as well as among the Muslims in Kashmir.

Kashmir Overseas Organizationhas a very comprehensive article on Kashmiri nicknames accessible at http://koausa.org/names/nicknames.html. It would be interesting to reproduce some extracts from the article. A nickname, says Hazlitt, is the hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man, yet the Kashmiris have shown the unparalleled endurance to bear this hardest stone Pleased with their 'devotion' he (Mr. Devil) seems to have gifted this stone to them (Kashmiri) forever. Love of nicknames is mixed in the blood of Kashmiris, nay; they have nurtured this art with their blood, for generations together. They give it without asking for and make full use of ordinary events, actions, habits and even physical feature of persons to coin new and newer nicknames.

Kashmiris never lose their sense of humour. Even adversity has not killed their instinct of humour. It has on the other hand, sharpened it to boost their morale and love of boisterous life. Hamidullah, a resident of remote meadow village of Nobog Nai, has not only exposed the ruthless Sikh bureaucracy of Kashmir in his Bebujnamah, but has proved himself a caricaturist par excellence as well as a non-conformist as for as Sikh administrative system was concerned. This work contains allegorical names and characters. "It is steeped in symbolism depicting the glaring traits of bureaucracy under Sikh rulers from the Patwari upto the Nazim or Governor. According to the author, the whole lot of them was responsible for all sorts of the sufferings of the peasantry, especially their aim being simply to grease their own palms and to sustain Sikh power by force.

It may not be right to say that Kashmiris have never shown an aversion to the nicknames. Pandit Anand Koul has quoted a classical example of resistance shown against a nickname by a poor Pandit whose name was 'Vasadev'. He had a mulberry tree in his courtyard, and was, therefore, called Vasadev Tul. Tul being the Kashmiri name of mulberry. In order to get rid of this nickname he cut down the mulberry tree. But a Mond (trunk) remained and he was called, ' Vasadev Mond'. Irritated Pandit immediately removed the trunk; and a Khud (depression) was caused and henceforth he was known as 'Vasadev Khud'. Continuing his battle against nickname givers he got the depression filled up and the ground became a Teng (a little elevated). Thus he was re-nicknamed as 'Vasadev Teng'. He had, however, to give in before the limitless arrows in the quiver of nickname givers and accepted gracefully his latest nickname, which has become a family name of his progeny.

In recent times, some of the politicians too have been given interesting nicknames. Shams-ud-Din was called Shamme Kath, G.M.Sadiq, Sadiq Kon; Farooq Abdullah when he started his tenure as the Chief Minister had a number of siren blowing vehicles in his official cavalcade. People gave him the popular nickname of Farooq pee pee! The former Chief Minister, Ghulam Mohammad Shah imposed long curfews due to unrest on his assuming office. He is still remembered with the nickname of Gulle Curfew! So if Anupam Kher is desirous of returning to his motherland notwithstanding the fact that he was born in Shimla, he should revert back to his family name of Khar! He needs to be careful with his bald head! People may start calling him like Vasudev Tul, Anupam Toni Kalle (the bald headed)!



Mohammad Ashraf, I.A.S. (Retired), Former Director General Tourism, Jammu & Kashmir




Arriving In Erbil And Wondering: What Lies Ahead

By Cathy Breen

28 April, 2015

Countercurrents.org

Erbil, Kurdistan--Wherever I look, tall, unfinished concrete buildings, accompanied by construction cranes, loom over the city. It is somewhat eerie because I see no movement inside or around any of the buildings, none whatsoever.



I arrived in Erbil five days ago. Since then, meetings, family visits, efforts to relearn the exchange rate and opportunities to become familiar with new surroundings have peaceably filled my time. Im also beginning to understand the current reality faced by millions of new arrivals to Erbil who fled their homes, seeking refuge. The first time I stepped out of the apartment building where I am staying with an Iraqi friend, I was approached by children, women and youth begging for money.

Representatives from the UNHCR, (U.N. High Commission for Refugees), and IOM, (International Organization for Migration), gave me grim news when they met with me.

Kurdistan has a population of 4  million. Every fourth person is either a refugee or internally displaced. That means the population has grown 25%. There are now 245,000 Syrians in Kurdistan, and more are arriving each day. Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) number over 1 million. The IOM told me that just last week 4,000 families were displaced from Iraqs Anbar region.

In Erbil, due to low oil prices and rampant corruption, teachers, as well as all government workers, are not receiving their salaries. Health care professionals report about insufficient medicines to cure sick people. For example, in Erbil, 1,200 cancer patients remain without treatment.

The UNHCR is in a contingency mode preparing for the worst if armed forces wage a big offensive against Mosel. Tens of thousands would be displaced. Where would they go? How would they be cared for?

The United Nations estimates that three million people now live under ISIL control. One of the biggest problems UN agencies face involves finding ways to reach these people.

Kathy Kelly and I spoke just before I traveled to Erbil. A question she suggested has served me well in interviews: What do you think it is important for U.S. people to understand? I put this question to both the UNHCR and the IOM.

Much attention is on Syria and the European refugee crisis. That there are 3.4 million IDPs (internally displaced) in Iraq is unknown. The Kurdish have been very generous, but now they are barely keeping their heads above water. The surge capacity has been reached. If another 100,000 come, it will be unthinkable. Kurdistan has taken more refugees than the E.U., and yet they have to get on their knees to beg for assistance.

There needs to be a stronger grass roots movement to counter the media. People cant begin to imagine what refugees and IDPs are experiencing, living in tents, in abandoned buildings. People only want security, to regain their dignity. They are being put forth as coming to destroy, to blow up, to take.

There are more than 40 camps in Kurdistan, but only a small percentage of the refugees, (39%), and IDPs, (20%), live in camps. The rest of the new arrivals live outside of the camps.

We have to move away from the charity approach. What they need most is cash. Unconditional cash. Then they can pay rent, buy medicine, etc., and it would support the local economy. We need a more humanitarian approach.

To help cover basic human needs, The U.N. has launched an appeal for more than $860 million dollars.

The compassion of both the UNHCR and IOM representatives was as palpable as their distress. The peoples resilience is unbelievable, said a young woman from IOM.  It has given me faith in the ability to bounce back, to appreciate life.

When I met with a Dominican religious sister who herself is displaced from the town of Qaraqosh, she told me that they had just begun a school for children in the1st through 6th grade. The children belong to IDP families, as do all of the teachers. I asked her what she felt was important for us to know in the U.S.

People forget things that are not in the news, she replied. Then she recalled someone having recently asked her why she had not gone back to her hometown.

There is no hope of return, she said. No one can cross the river.People dont see hope here. People still need help. We have come to recognize the only way to build community is through education, not only to the 6th grade, but through high school. We have decided to fight ISIS with education.

Her challenge involves educating people in places as far away as the U.S., where relatively few people learn lessons about the overwhelming refugee crisis afflicting Erbil.

Cathy Breen is a member of the New York Catholic Worker community and a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org). For more information, contact info@vcnv.org.










JNU Students Go On Hunger Strike

By Countercurrents.org

28 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

Led by JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar, a group of students from Jawaharlal Nehru Univeristy, (JNU) Delhi started an indefinite hunger strike demanding a rollback of the university authorities' punishment for them. Students participating in the indefinite hunger-strike are Kanhaiya Kumar, Rama Naga- General Secretary JNUSU, Shweta Raj, Chintu Kumari, Anant Prakash Narayan, Sraborni Ahmed , Aqsa Asger, Nitisha Kholkar, K. Feyaz Ahmed , Pratim Ghoshal, Anand, Pankhuri Zaheer, Samanth Singh, Sunaina , G. Suresh, Birendra, Awadesh, Sanjeev and Parthipan

The university has accused the students of "arousing communal caste feelings, creating disharmony and colluding in the unauthorized entry of outsiders".

Kanhaiya Kumar said that they would not accept the punishment, pay fine or vacate hostel.

"We have been maintaining right from the beginning that we have no faith in the probe committee. We are all sitting on hunger strike against the arbitrary punishments given to us. The inquiry was a sham and students have rejected it in our general body meeting. We will not abide by the punishment given to us," JNUSU general secretary Rama Naga said.

Five members of ABVP have also been sitting on hunger strike since yesterday, alleging that the university was "criminalising" patriotism. The protest started after ABVP member Saurabh Sharma -- who was the complainant in the police case - was slapped with a penalty of Rs. 10,000 for blocking traffic.

The High Level Committee that enquired into the February 9 event on the death anniversary of Afzal Guru had handed down rustication and fines for several students.

Umar Khalid was rusticated for one semester and a fine of Rs. 20,000 imposed on him Anirban Bhhatacharya was declared out of bounds from the campus for five years after July 23, 2016. He has been rusticated till the period of July 15. Both of them were arrested by Delhi police on sedition charges and spent about 15 days in Tihar jail under judicial custody.

JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar, who was also charged with sedition and arrested in connection with the incident has, however, not been rusticated. The university authorities have imposed a fine of Rs. 10,000 on him.

Other students punished are,

Ashutosh Kumar, former JNUSU President, removed from hostel for one year + fine.

Chintu Kumari, former JNUSU Gen Sec: 20K fine

Rama Naga, current JNUSU Gen Sec: 20K fine

Anant Prakash Narayan, former JNUSU Vice-President: 20K fine

Aishwarya , current GSCASH representative: 20K fine.

Gargi, current JNUSU councillor: 20 K fine

Other organisers fined from 10K to 20K

Two ex students declared out of bounds from campus.

Anirban Bhattacharya said that "Our Decision, simple: UNACCEPTABLE. Down with the fascist witch-hunt of student activists by the administration under the diktats of Nagpur! Reject as per the UGBM mandate the punishments handed down by the administration on the basis of the findings of the farcical HLEC! Right to Dissent Long Live!"










Counter Thinking The Medical Industry

By Prof. BM Hegde

28 April, 2016

Bmhegde.com

To have something different you must do something different. But in order to do something different you must be able to think something different. And before you can think something different you must be willing to believe something different. - Anon

Every thought is a thing, so say many quantum physicists. Therefore, if you want to get anything you must be able to think first. Today in the world of science no body is permitted to think! Even if you write a new sentence in any of your papers, the editor and the so called peer-reviewer want a reference to that statement. Logically, that eliminates fresh thinking. If only I could think, if only I could think! lamented Albert Einstein many times. Curiously, physics died a natural death with his student, Werner Heisenberg, thinking laterally following some of his mediation sessions on the Mountains in 1925. Heisenbergs uncertainty principle put an end to conventional physics. That was finally sealed by another colleague of Einstein and Heisenberg, Hans Peter Durr, Director of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, who showed that matter is not made up of matter. He calls that a-duality, which he himself admits is not as good a concept as Advaitha of ancient Sanathana Dharma in India! Without matter where is physics?

Years ago in 1968, I wrote a paper with the title-Should we be drugging every elevated blood pressure?-which landed me in real trouble in my department. I survived with the skin of my teeth! I have been thinking and researching that ever since. I met a middle aged but young looking man in his early 60s, a retired Dean of an Agricultural University, yesterday after my talk at the International Cocoanut Meet at the CPCRI, Kasargod in Kerala, who wanted my opinion on his cholesterol levels of 600-800 mg per decilitre for decades. He tried drugs for a couple of days and felt miserable and stopped. He was a specimen of perfect health. Health, incidentally, is defined as enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate lately. The concept of organ based disease is long back dead in true science of man. There is NO science of man, wrote Dr. Alexis Carrel, Nobel Laureate, in his celebrated book, Man the Unknown.

A silent killer is a new mantra invented by the powerful pharma lobbys paid scientists to rope in millions to buy drugs for the rest of their lives. Gullible doctors buy that argument whole heartedly which incidentally helps the doctors also if one has read that illuminating editorial in the prestigious JAMA, the official journal of the American Medical Association, entitled Looking the Gift Horse in the Mouth!

Disease inventors is a fascinating book by Professor Jerg Blech that gives a graphic description of this menace called hypertension first started in the Well Man Clinics that German companies started there outside Cinema Halls and Shopping Malls, to label apparently healthy people with a disease! That has been extended to raised cholesterol and raised sugar in healthy people as diseases! The Patron Saint of hypertension research in the UK, Professor Sir George Pickering, wrote the real truth after decades of teaching and researching hypertension thus: More people in this world make a living OFF hypertension than dying OF it. Same could be said about cholesterol and sugar in healthy people. Studies have shown that drug therapy of asymptomatic high blood pressures and sugars have not benefitted the recipients but, have shown to be harmful! A meta-analysis of seventeen large conventional studies of hypertension and two much touted cholesterol lowering treatment studies, conducted by Uffe Ravnskov showed that there is hardly any difference in the absolute risk reduction (ARR) in the treated groups, although the relative risk reduction, (RRR) a statistical trick sold to doctors, did demonstrate some benefit. Similar is the experience of drugs lowering sugar levels in asymptomatic Impaired Glucose Tolerance (IGT) patients by a Scandinavian group of researchers!

To cite a few examples of this syndrome here seems relevant. Mahatma Gandhis blood pressure was always way high which made his physician, Dr. Sushila Nayyar, lose her sleep. Her patient never took drugs and did not die of the consequences of his label. One of the leading neurosurgeons in Bangalore (who has permitted me to disclose this secret) tells me each time we lecture together that his BP has always has been 90/50 or so. Both have had very long lives and the latter is alive at 80 plus! I pray for his century. French nursing home studies have now shown that to be alive at 90 plus one need to have cholesterols in the range of 800 mg plus! One of my dear friends that died last year at 89 had his systolic pressures recorded in 200 ranges ever since he was a student in the 1920s in London. He could not tolerate the treatment and remained hale and healthy all his life without drugs, being a very active management guru of India. A young friend of mine at 89 does not take any pills even now and says he has survived many cardiologists in his long life. He does yoga even now!

Science should learn from nature; neither from the laboratory alone nor try to teach nature a lesson or two. Nature tells us that health is mans birth right and any deviation from the normal (which is the rule rather than exception, called healthy chaos in science) is being managed by the human immune system. The range of change in blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol or any other of the millions of chemical molecules that humans have ( a single human cell cytoplasm has 10,000 protein molecules: there are one hundred thousand billion cells in all) all been managed properly by the immune mechanism. We have recent increase in diseases now, thanks to our messing up with our life styles and environment. A good scientist will dismiss all these as anecdotal, a fashionable word to dismiss unwanted truths. When their rules fail they label it as exceptions only prove the rule-strange logic indeed!

Diseases are only exceptions and accidents. Even diseases, in their incipient stages, are managed by the immune mechanism built in to the human physiology. It is only in the unlikely event that the latter can not afford to correct the deviation does the body show signs of distress-the symptoms of any disease. It is only under those rare occasions that doctors are needed to help patients to cure rarely, comfort mostly but to console always. Every one needs a humane family doctor to assist him/her in times of need. No one should be his/her own doctor and self medicate even for silly symptom like a headache.

To claim that one will be able to catch diseases in their early phase to radically cure them etc, the daily advertisements that we see extolling the virtues of regular health check ups and screening for this or that deadly diseases, is plain rubbish and not based on any science. Routine screening of apparently healthy people is the most dangerous activity avers a leading article in the famous British Medical Journal followed by a devastating editorial by the then editor, Richard Smith, entitled the Screening Industry, which it surely is. Modern Medicine has become a corporate monstrosity, writes Ruth Richardson, a British medical historian. That was precisely the reason why Thomas Wakely started a new journal in 1823, The Lancet, which he claimed could open the large abscess containing foul smelling pus that medicine at that time had become, using his surgical lancet. The Journal has survived to this day with the abscess now becoming a corporate monstrosity according to Ruth Richardson in spite of Wakelys lancet! Thomas Wakely (1795-1862) was a physician, a demagogue and a young radical Member of the House of Commons. Little did he realise, young as he was, that it is folly to be wise in the world of the blind.

You can bend it and twist it... You can misuse and abuse it... But even God cannot change the Truth.--- Michael Levy

Belle Monappa Hegde often abbreviated as B. M. Hegde (born 18 August 1938) is an Indian medical scientist, educationist and author. He is a retired Vice Chancellor of the Manipal University and the head of the Mangalore Chapter of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. He has authored several books on medical practice and ethics. He was Professor of Cardiology [Visiting] London University since 1982. He was Emeritus International Advisor to The Royal College of Physicians of London and Edinburgh. He was First Indian examiner for MRCP [UK] examination in the UK from 1988 to 1998. He was MRCPI examiner in Dublin since 2000 till 2009. He served as President of World Academy of Authentic Healing Sciences, Mangalore. He has been a Non Executive & Independent Director of Zydus Wellness Limited since July 29, 2009. Dr. Hegde has 47 years of teaching experience to undergraduates and postgraduates. He has been a professor of Medicine since 1973. Dr. Hegde, an elected fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences, has won Dr. B. C. Roy National Award in the category of an Eminent Medical Teacher, Dr. J. C. Bose Award for Life Sciences Research, PRIDE OF INDIA Award from the Pacific Association of Indians in California and many more. Dr. Hegde is Padma Bhushan awardee 2010. He is MBBS, Ph. D. [Hon. Causa], MD, FRCP [London], FRCP [Edinburgh], FRCP [Glasgow], FRCPI [Dublin], FACC [USA] and FAMS[10]He is also the Editor in Chief of the medical journal, Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes. He was awarded the Dr. B. C. Roy Award in 1999. In 2010 He was honoured with a Padma Bhushan, one of India's highest civilian awards. Hegde is visiting faculty at many universities. Email: hegdebm@gmail.com






Can Responsibility To Protect (R2P) Preserve Our Cultural Heritage In Syria?

By Franklin Lamb

28 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

Trafalgar Square London, 4/19/2016 (Photo: IDA)

Beirut: This months Trafalgar Square exhibition in London of a digitally modeled replica of Syrias 2000 year old Roman Triumphal Arch at Palmyra (Tadmor), which was destroyed by ISIS in October, 2015, is sparking yet further discussion about the rights and wrongs of restoration at ancient sites. Approximately two thirds the size of the original, the replica arch was created through the efforts of Oxford Universitys Institute of Digital Archeology (IDA). The continuing exhibition of the model has been urged and it is soon on route to Dubai as well as to New York and probably elsewhere, before ending up hopefully in Syria. It features a 3D digital model which employed computer-operated drills to carve Egyptian stone from an Italian quarry. The result is impressive for a number of reasons not least of which is an expression of solidarity with the people of Syria, the enduring custodians of our cultural heritage.

As if the hope created by the Trafalgar exhibition enraged the Islamic State, it answered just as the replica arch was being readied for transport to other public sites noted above. Islamic State militants destroyed the iconic Latin Church in Mosul built in the 1870s and known for its soaring clock tower by blowing it up. According to historians, Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III  the last emperor of France  paid for the Mosul tower as a reward for the Dominican friars who were attempting to end a typhoid outbreak in Mosul at the time.

In tandem with the important discussion of how best to restore damaged antiquities, there is also an important debate also taking place over how best to stop the destruction of our cultural heritage once iconoclastic groups like ISIS unleash their hatred of their and our past. A solution still eludes us despite various international and domestic agreements and legislative initiatives.

For the past 15 years, since the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban, many in the global community have been contemplating what can be done to avoid future catastrophes to our shared cultural heritage like those we continue to witness in Syria and Iraq. Diplomacy has failed for the most part.

From an international legal and political point of view, the 2001 creation of the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is being looked at as a possible tool to salvage our shared global cultural heritage. This observer submits that employing R2P warrants serious discussion as an option that should not be facially rejected.

As is well documented, since its rapid expansion in 2013, ISIS has been responsible for pillaging and destruction of scores of cultural sites in Syria and elsewhere, notwithstanding the protests of the international community. None of the solutions proposed and the few implemented to date have stopped the devastation, raising the question of the legitimacy of organizing a humanitarian intervention-using armed force as necessary- to preserve our cultural heritage from destructive iconoclasm. Admittedly, R2P, particularly after its widely viewed illegal use by NATO in Libya, is controversial among international legal scholars and plenty of others.

This observer concedes that some progress has been made at the international legislative level among UN Member States as well as some positive influence of international law in mitigating-even if to date only to a modest degree, the destructive capacity of iconoclastic groups.

These extremist jihadists, such as ISIS, attempt to attract media coverage, recruit new members and excavate and loot antiquities to be sold on the international black market and they exhibit no signs of abandoning their perversions of a few suras in the Koran. On the contrary, ISIS continues to escalate what they pledge will be decades of ever metastasizing wars of attrition against infidels everywhere. And it is probable that it will continue largely unabated unless the international community, under the aegis of the UN Security Council, takes immediate and resolute action.

One ISIS supporter advised this observer recently, If it takes us 1000 years that is no problem for us. Despite what your Obama tells you Americans, we are here to stay and we are deepening and spreading our base of true believers. Watch for us in Washington.

Frankly put, what is required of all of us is to rethink the doctrine of international humanitarian intervention and to identify the basic conditions for the global community to suppress calculated acts of cultural heritage destruction in Syria and elsewhere.



One possibility gaining adherents from many who favor humanitarian intervention to preserve our culture heritage is the relatively new doctrine of Responsibility to Protect. R2P is generally defined as an uninvited intervention of external actors into the domestic affairs of a State in order to end or prevent violations of human rights. Examples over the past quarter century would include, but not be limited to, Somalia, Iraq, East Timor, Rwanda, Haiti, Kosovo, Libya, and Sierra Leone. Some were modestly successful and others were complete failures given their stated goals which ranged from establishing a secure environment, aiding the peace process, upholding democracy, stopping a massive volition of human rights, ending attacks against civilians and promoting peace and security.

One legal/political source of the responsibility to intervene, perhaps via R2P, to stop the destruction of our heritage is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It identifies a list of inalienable rights that belong to individuals as human beings. Given the UDHRs universal adoption, its influence on binding international legal texts and because of its significant impact on numerous national laws and constitutions, the UDHR has gained such a widespread acceptance within the international community that these rights, in this observers view, constitute binding rules of customary international law. With respect to our cultural heritage under dire threat in Syria, Articles 1, 2, 18, 19, 22 and 27 of the UDHR are particularly relevant. In this observers opinion the reason is because intentional destruction of cultural heritage for discriminatory reasons or aimed to constrain the freedom of thought, conscience, religion, culture, opinion and expression of peoples identity are rightly interpreted as serious violations of human rights.

In addition, the Preambles to both the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) and the UNESCO Declaration concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage (2003) affirm that the entire international community has a duty to assure the preservation of cultural heritage because damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world.

This observer, having spent a fair bit of time in Syria the past few years and having examined many examples of wanton destruction of our shared antiquities believes that the intentional destruction of our cultural heritage in that ancient civilization is a violation of our human rights. And one which justifies humanitarian intervention, perhaps as contemplated by R2P.

What is R2P and is its application warranted to protect our culture heritage?

The incapacity of the international community to organize an effective response to stop the gross violations of human rights that took place during the genocide in Rwanda (1994) and the war in the former Yugoslavia (1991-1995) raised serious doubts about the concepts of international legal and moral justice. It was primarily in response to such traumatic events that the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) introduced, in 2001, the notion of Responsibility to Protect. (R2P) provides that States have the responsibility to protect their citizens from avoidable catastrophes, and when they are unable or unwilling to fulfill this duty, then such responsibility shifts to the international community. In 2005 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan affirmed that It cannot be right, when the international community is faced by genocide or massive human rights abuses, for the United Nations to stand by and let them unfold to the end. If national authorities are unable or unwilling to protect their citizens, then the responsibility shifts to the international community to use diplomatic, humanitarian and other methods to help protect the human rights and well-being of civilian populations. These principles were reaffirmed recently by current UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and from a pro-humanitarian perspective international law via R2P still protect sovereignty, but it is the peoples sovereignty rather than the government sovereignty.

Granted that humanitarian interventions must normally be limited to those circumstances where severe atrocities have been committed. Hence a critical question is whether systemic acts of intentional destruction of cultural heritage justify the risks of an armed humanitarian intervention via R2P.

This observer proposes that R2P should at least be considered as one possibility to protect our cultural heritage. Among its legal underpinnings I would include sundry international legal interpretations and dicta, including but not limited to the judgment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In the 2004 trial verdict of Kordic and Cerkez, the Court explicitly affirmed that the intentional destruction of cultural heritage is criminalized under customary international law and it added that this act, when perpetrated with the requisite discriminatory intent, amounts to an attack on the very religious and culture identity of a people. As such, it manifests a nearly pure expression of the notion of crimes against humanity, for all of humanity is indeed injured by the destruction of a unique religious culture and its concomitant cultural objects.

The ICTY Trial Chamber pointed out that where there is physical or biological destruction there is often simultaneous attacks on the cultural and religious property and symbols of the targeted group as well, attacks which may legitimately be considered as evidence of intent to physically destroy the group. The intentional destruction of cultural heritage by groups like ISIS is frequently accompanied by a more widespread violation of human rights which this observer submits further justify the need for an humanitarian intervention, perhaps via R2P.

Admittedly there are legal and political constraints. Since the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact the use of force in the international relations has been subject to restrictions that since 1945 have been codified in the United Nations Charter. Consistent with its Article 2(4), members of the UN must refrain from the threat and use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State. The sole permitted exceptions are related to the use of force in order to maintain international peace and security (Chapter VII), and the right of individual or collective self-defense in the case of armed attack (Article 51).

As a result, some researchers have criticized the growing support for humanitarian interventions, because in their view this practice is contrary to fundamental principles of international law and, therefore, recognizing its legitimacy would seriously put at risk the preservation of the entire international legal system.

As this important discussion continues, the international community needs to decide whether it has, beyond a general feeling of discontent, the political will to take concrete steps for the preservation of cultural heritage in the world. If it be the case that it does, R2P, far from an ideal measure, in one option that should be considered. This is because doing nothing will surely lead to worse consequences for our shared global cultural heritage in Syria and elsewhere.

Franklin Lamb's recent book, Syria's Endangered Heritage, an International Responsibility to Preserve and Protect is available on Amazon and other ebook outlets as well as at www.syrian-heritage.com . Lamb is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com.




More Steps Toward WW III

By Eric Zuesse

28 April, 2016

Countercurrents.org

On April 27th, NATO member-state Turkey, which on 24 November 2015 had shot down a Russian Su-24 fighter jet near the Syria-Turkey border, refused Russias request to investigate Turkeys having murdered the surviving Russian pilot. (The planes weapons-systems officer was rescued, but the pilot was shot dead while parachuting down from the plane.) Turkey admits having in custody the man, Alparslan Celik, who murdered the parachuting pilot. On April 25th, Turkish authorities had said that they might try Celik for murder; but, now, the Turkish Ambassador in Moscow says Turkey won't.

Also related to the step-up to war, Russia has reported on April 25th, that it's responding to Americas recently announced quadrupling of its troops and armaments in the Baltic republics on and near Russias northwestern Black Sea borders, by Russia's sending more than ten warships of its own to coastal waters there, for training exercises, just as the U.S. troops and weapons are likewise there for training exercises, as both sides prepare for an increasingly likely war between NATO and Russia.

If such war occurs, it will be World War III; so, thats where things are heading, unless and until these escalations reverse on both sides, to avert it.

U.S. President Barack Obama gives, as his cause for his economic sanctions against Russia and for NATOs subsequent increases in men and materiel being stationed on and near Russias borders, what Obama calls Russias seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. The Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev had transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, but polls of Crimeans always showed overwhelming public opposition to that, and this opposition became especially intense right after the Obama Administrations coup in Ukraine in February 2014 overthrew with much bloodshed Ukraines freely elected President Viktor Yanukovych, for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted. Thats when Crimeans asked Russia to protect them. Russia complied, and Obama and NATO call that restoration of Crimea to Russia a seizure of Crimea by Russia. This is supposedly what has sparked the post-February-2014 military escalation between the U.S.-NATO and Russia  and, perhaps (unless the U.S.-NATO side decide to accept Crimeas return to Russia) WW III.

On April 25th, Obama personally asked the leaders of Germany, France, UK, and Italy, to contribute to the increased NATO troops and weapons near Russias Baltic borders. Nothing was announced from that meeting. Clearly, the U.S. is leading the movement toward WW III. Neither the main leaders of Europe, nor  certainly  Russia, seem to be nearly so eager. However, U.S. President Obama says that his concerns are purely of a defensive nature  to defend the NATO alliance, and the entire world (including Ukraine), from Russian aggression. He denies that Russia is taking necessary defensive measures against Americas aggression. However, Russias President Vladimir Putin says that thats the way he is seeing things.



Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of Theyre Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRISTS VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.








PASCAGOULA, Mississippi-- The city of Pascagoula has announced the names of students selected for the 2016-17 Mayor's Youth Council.

Inaugurated in 2014, the Pascagoula Mayor's Youth Council's goal is to provide opportunities for high school students to engage with local government, learning how it operates and how services are provided. Through participation in various events including council meetings, members of the Mayor's Youth Council are encouraged to share ideas with the city council and staff.

Last month at Mayor Jim Blevins' "Ask the Mayor" address, then-Youth Council Mayor Joey Hasbrouck applauded Blevins' commitment to the concept.

"He (Blevins) goes out of his way to get our attention, feedback, and really tries to involve people in the community," Hasbrouck said. "He is the first mayor who has really tried to create a youth council and directly involve people from our high schools in the government interests."

According to organizers, one goal of the council is to provide invaluable leadership experience to its members and ignite an interest in community involvement.

The council is composed of four representatives from Pascagoula High School and two from Resurrection Catholic High School for each grade from nine through 12. New members will be sworn into office in a ceremony at the May 17th City Council meeting.

New members include:
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By Susan Orr of the Courier and Press

Mead Johnson Nutrition saw its sales and profits sag last quarter, and the company said challenges in Venezuela were a big reason why.

The baby formula maker has a large manufacturing plant in Evansville. Its corporate headquarters are in Chicago. The company sells its products in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia, with China representing its largest single market.

Net sales last quarter totaled $962.1 million, down 12 percent from the same period a year earlier. Net quarterly profits attributable to shareholders were $72.7 million (39 cents per share), down from $207.4 million ($1.02 per share) a year ago.

"We do not underestimate the challenges we are facing in an uncertain global economic environment," chief executive officer Kasper Jakobsen said Thursday during a conference call with analysts.

Jakobsen singled out Venezuela and China as especially challenging markets last quarter.

In March, the Venezuelan government devalued its currency and changed its foreign exchange structure. Mead Johnson said this caused the value of its Venezuelan subsidiary's assets to drop. In response, the company booked $78 million in charges related to currency devaluation and asset impairment.

Jakobsen also said Mead Johnson has temporarily suspended shipments to Venezuela because the company has had limited local access to currency.

The company is looking for a solution to this problem, Jakobsen said, but "until one is found we expect very limited sales in Venezuela."

Net sales in Venezuela represented 2.5 percent of Mead Johnson's total net sales during the first quarter of 2015, but they dropped to a negligible amount this year, the company said.

China also provided some challenges last quarter, Mead Johnson said.

The company has been working to transform its China operations in response to changing conditions there.

In recent quarters, Chinese consumers have become more interested in buying baby formula produced overseas because of concerns over domestic product safety.

Mead Johnson has a plant in China, but last quarter 45 percent of its total sales came from formula produced outside the country at other facilities.

Chinese consumers have also shifted in where they prefer to buy formula, with online sales and baby stores becoming more popular. Manufacturers like Mead Johnson have had to adjust in response.

On the topic of China, Mead Johnson also said it launched a "super high premium" product earlier this quarter.

"Chinese consumers are among the world's most discerning," Jakobsen said.

"If you can give them a premium quality offering, they're willing to pay what it takes."

The company reaffirmed its previous full-year guidance. It expects full-year earnings in the range of $2.91 to $3.03 per share.

Thursday afternoon, shares of Mead Johnson (MJN) were trading at $87.88 on the New York Stock Exchange, up $2.95 (3 percent).
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Onsite Occupational Health and Safety, Inc. has been awarded a joint contract by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Memphis Veterans Affairs Medical Center to operate two medical clinics for veterans living in Arkansas.

The Community-Based Outpatient Clinics located in Helena and Jonesboro, Arkansas, will each provide primary care, mental health care, women's health care and preventive health services to veterans.

This is the fourth CBOC contract awarded by the VA to Onsite OHS, which is based in Princeton, Indiana. The company operates CBOCs in Dover, Tennessee, Massena, New York, and Tupelo, Mississippi.
"Long Distrance Man" by artist Robert Mars. Provided photo.

SHARE "Her Spirit Bubbles" from artist Robert Mars. Provided photo. "The Moonlight Butterfly" by artist Robert Mars. Provided photo. "Girl Inform Me" by artist Robert Mars, who will open an exhibit at the Evansville Museum May 5. Provided photo. "New Pride Lit" by artist Robert Mars. Provided photo.

By Kelly Gifford of the Courier and Press

The Evansville Museum has six new exhibits opening at the beginning of May showcasing the work of artists from around the area and across the country.

An opening reception for the exhibitions will be at 5 p.m. May 5 at the museum and is free for Patron members and $5 for general admission. Memberships can be purchased and upgrades made at the event for those interested.

The exhibitions opening are "Lincoln's Boyhood In Indiana" in the ECVB Center for History and Science, a solo exhibit by Robert Mars in the Main Gallery, the 22nd Annual "Working Together" exhibit in the Old Gallery, a solo exhibit by Tom Wintczak in the John Streetman Alcove, "Wildest Weather in the Solar System" in the Koch Immersive Theatre and the First Thursdays series with Patrick Adams in the Eykamp Pavilion.

"Lincoln's Boyhood in Indiana" features works that depict President Abraham Lincoln's life while in Indiana and is part of the state's bicentennial celebration. "Working Together" features a collaboration between the museum and the Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana and will have several local and regional artists on display. Adams will be showcasing his work for the monthly event and will also be selling his art as well. "Wildest Weather in the Solar System" depicts the weather patterns in space. Wintczak will display some of her pottery works.

Below is a Q-AND-A with Mars, the artist in residence at the museum.

Courier & Press: What kind of work will you be showcasing in Evansville? Is it a combination of several years of work or a more recent set of work?

Robert Mars: The show in Evansville will feature 10 new pieces made specifically for the museum and 10 pieces on loan from collectors who have acquired the work over the past few years. I tried to stick to work made from 2012 to the present because I felt that was a window of time that highlights the most recent evolution of my work. The pieces would loosely fit into the category of pop art, but I also incorporated elements of folk art and contemporary quilting culture. I want to voice different aspects of American culture in a singular body of work.

C&P: What inspired you to create the works you will be presenting here?

RM: For the past 16 years my focus has been on icons of Americas' past. My fascination lies particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, and I'd like to show how their influence on global culture has had a lasting, positive impact. In my mind it all begins with vintage neon signs, classic cars, architecture and advertising and then spins into a sort of snapshot of celebrity culture, pre-Internet, when people cultivated an air of mystique. High fashion and branding concepts that are featured in the work relate indirectly to these celebrities.

C&P: What made you want to pursue art as a career? Did you always know you wanted to create work like this?

RM: I prefer to think art chose me, instead of my choosing art. I grew up in a creative household and from an early age was drawn to art. In school I excelled in art classes and eventually attended Parsons School of Design in New York City studying graphic design and illustration. Before transitioning to fine art as a full-time career, I worked as a graphic designer and art director for multiple brands. In the late '90s, when I decided to transition from graphic arts to fine arts, I spent time traveling around the country photographing and documenting the icons who would later be used as reference material for my works. It took a few years to develop my techniques and style, and I feel that I am still refining and developing my pieces.

C&P: A lot of your work is interwoven with pop culture and especially the 1950s and 1960s American celebrity personalities. How do you connect that to modern pop culture and the impact you want your work to have?

RM: My work speaks to popular culture from the past but in a modern way through use of materials and techniques. The result of my work is a highly refined and polished concept of pop art. I want to highlight these icons of the past (Marilyn, Jackie O, Audrey Hepburn, Steve McQueen) and the fact that they were the origination of society's current obsession with celebrities. I recently worked on a collaboration with another artist, William Goodman. Our goal was to highlight modern day icons who have transcended cultural "boxes" to become larger than life personalities. It was interesting to forecast who we felt were the next enduring icons. We felt that Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt and Daniel Craig as Bond were a few of the stand outs.

C&P: How do you start constructing the images you create?

RM: My work starts with museum quality wood panels which I then collage with layers of era correct magazine pages and paint. This sets up the base color of the work. Then I add the quilting layer, which is all hand cut from painted, vintage newspaper in which the type and ads show through to add context to the piece. My main image consists of tiled acrylic transfers. I am constantly adding and taking away layers as I work on the piece and as I see fit to satisfy the composition. To finish the edges I use raw, vintage newsprint and then add a UV protected epoxy resin to seal the piece. The contrast between the weathered layers and the pristine resin finish creates a contemporary feel to the work.

C&P: Why does this specific time period and the celebrity personalities that came from then inspire you so much as an artist?

RM: I feel I am drawn to this era because it was the two decades before I was born. My birthday being December of 1969, I cannot really claim to be a 60s child, yet I think this time period holds a personal allure because I can only experience it through film and magazines. It was also a time when America had a pride that shined outward and influenced the rest of the world.

C&P: Are there any particular pieces that you'll be showcasing that really stand out to you?

RM: My two favorite pieces in the show are "The Moonlight Butterfly," which is a Jackie O-based piece, and "Girl Inform me," which is a Kate Moss-based piece. I feel these images relate to one another yet also provide comment on a sort of timeline of historical context within popular celebrity culture.
SHARE Michael LaBarbera and his sister-in-law Jeannette Moore in Revolutionary Square in Havana, Cuba. Che Guevara's likeness is on Ministry of Interior with the quotation "Until the Everlasting Victory, Always." provided photo This converted semi-trailer was used as a bus for public transportation in Cienfuegos, Cuba. provided photo In the Plaza Mayor in the historical center of Trinidad. provided photo Michael LaBarbera and his sister-in-law Jeannette Moore at the Che Guevara Memorial and Mausoleum in Santa Clara. provided photo

By James Vaughn of the Courier and Press

Michael LaBarbera saw Cuba just in the knick of time.

The Evansville man spent nine days in February on the Caribbean island south of Florida as part of an educational tour through an nonprofit organization known as Road Scholar. It was like stepping back in time, he said.

"It's one of those areas of the world that is sort of just closed to everybody," LaBarbera said. "So the chance to go see it was an opportunity to see how they live and experience a third-world country that you don't know much about."

LaBarbera's visit came a month before President Barack Obama stepped foot on Cuban soil, becoming the first U.S. president to visit the communist nation in nearly 90 years.

While there, Obama met with Cuban President Raul Castro. Despite the country's differences, both presidents have called to lift the decades-old trade embargo, which limits U.S. travel to Cuba and the spending of U.S. dollars on the island.

LaBarbera's decision to go was spur of the moment, he said. His sister-in-law, who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, was planning to go alone, and LaBarbera's wife was worried.

"My wife said, 'Why don't you go?'" said LaBarbera, who is retired from both the Army and a former JROTC instructor. "'That way you can keep an eye on her  a woman traveling alone.' So I said OK."

Road Scholar coordinated everything, including tours of four cities, three lectures, meals and stays at various bed-and-breakfasts throughout the island.

The purpose of the trip was to learn about private-owned restaurants and B&Bs. The government just recently allowed people to own their own businesses, Labarbera said.

He and his sister-in-law were part of a group of 23 on that tour, but he said they came across other American visitors while they were there.

"The Cubans are actually very friendly toward Americans," he said. "They are very open to having trade with the U.S. I do believe they want trade with the United States. But they want to make change slowly. They want the tourist dollars, which help, but they don't want all of these American companies to start inundating Cuba."

The Cubans expect travel to increase this year, LaBarbera said. Last year, about one million U.S. citizens traveled to Cuba. This year, they expect to see about 3.5 million.

"That's a pretty big jump in tourism," he said.

LaBarbera said he's happy he visited earlier this year before the Obama administration loosened trade and travel restrictions.

"I got to see it before it gets so commercialized; it won't be the same," he said.

He does not plan on going back.

"I've seen what I want to see, and I want to keep that memory the way it is in my mind," LaBarbera said. "If it becomes too commercial  I would be really disappointed to start seeing Starbucks and McDonalds."

He spent some time in Old Havana, the capitol of Cuba, which is filled with century-old Cathedrals and Spanish architecture.

"It was beautiful," he said. "Just like stepping back into the 16th century."

One of the lectures, delivered by an architect, was about the makeup of Havana and Old Havana.

There, he bought a street drawing for $12, he said. The average Cuban makes about $20 a month, so they can make a lot more money selling their own items than they can working a government job.

Another lecture, delivered by a University of Havana religion professor, was about the various religions practiced in Cuba.

"I didn't realize there were so many different religions in Cuba, from Catholicism to Greek Orthodox to Jewish," he said. "It was just amazing that they had so many."

The third lecture, delivered by an ambassador, was about Cuban-U.S. relations.

"I didn't feel any dissension toward Americans no matter where we went," LaBarbera said. "I didn't think they were going to be as friendly toward us as they were. I didn't have any fear going there, but I didn't think they were going to be so, 'Yay, USA! Lift the embargo!'"

Besides how clean the streets were, LaBarbera said, the most interesting thing about Cuba is the way the public restrooms operate.

LaBarbera said before they arrived, they were warned to bring their own toilet paper, but they didn't know why.

"I just assumed they didn't have toilet paper there," he said.

But that wasn't the case. Instead, those who don't carry their own with them have to pay for it before they enter the restrooms.

"If you went somewhere public, they had a male and a female restroom, and there was someone sitting at a table full of toilet paper out there," LaBarbera said. "If you needed to use the toilet paper, you gave them a quarter and you took the toilet paper in with you, and when you came out, whatever toilet paper you had left, you put it back on this table."

It's actually a government job, he said.

LaBarbera's advice for locals who decide to travel to Cuba is this: "Don't expect anything luxurious."
SHARE McKenna Thene, 9, and her mom, Melissa Wright, watch the antics of "TreeCircus" creator Tim Womick in the Harper Elementary School auditorium Wednesday afternoon. Thene won first place in a Hoosier ReLeaf essay competition and a tree was later planted in her honor. DENNY SIMMONS / COURIER & PRESS Tim Womick performs his "TreeCircus" presentation for the third- through fifth-graders at Harper Elementary School in Evansville Wednesday afternoon. Womick teaches the children to see trees differently in his 45-minute show.

By Megan Erbacher of the Courier and Press

Harper Elementary School fourth-grader McKenna Thene thinks everyone should learn about nature.

Thene, 9, said nature is a lot like someone's ancestors because "they tell us a lot in history."

On Wednesday afternoon, Thene was recognized in front of her peers as the first-place winner of the Hoosier ReLeaf essay contest. She had to write about how her life would be if she were Johnny Appleseed.

"I never thought I would win first place," she said. "And it just made me feel really good about myself."

Mark Ringenberg, Hoosier ReLeaf co-founder, presented Thene with a plaque and $100 check. Ringenberg and J.T. McCarty, Colonial Classics Landscape and Nursery president in Newburgh, Indiana, helped Thene plant a red bud tree on school grounds in her honor.

"It means a lot to me because I really want to make a difference," she said. "I don't need a different name to make a difference. ... I don't think anybody has ever really planted a tree on school property, and it's really exciting."

Founded in 1991, Hoosier ReLeaf is a tree-oriented nonprofit based near Fort Wayne, Indiana, that works to raise awareness and improve the environment through "more and better" trees. Officials with the group are visiting schools across the state to raise awareness of the importance of trees around Earth Day and Arbor Day.

Nationally-known speaker Tim Womick, founder and president of TreeCircus, presented his program of the same name to Harper students in grades 3-5. The 45-minute presentation is based off the question: What do trees give us?

"By the time they're through with me, they're different people," Womick said. "On the way home they will look at trees differently."

Womick considers himself an "edu-tainer" who teaches people of all ages about urban forests. His interactive presentation incorporates crowd involvement.

"I want students to understand that trees are the oldest, hardest working residents of any community. Period," he said. "If we had to pay for the services trees provide, we couldn't afford it."

Acknowledging he was probably the "biggest tree hugger" in the room Wednesday, he told students it is OK to cut down a tree. However, to do so the tree must either be yours, you must have permission to cut it down, you should use all of it resourcefully and you must plant a new tree.

"A world without trees would be a sad one indeed," he said.
By Richard Gootee of the Courier and Press

That guy with a guitar outside the Donald Trump rally?

He's got a personal reason he has followed the Republican front-runner to more than 20 cities in the last few months.

Owego, New York resident Kraig Moss, 57, found his 24-year-old son's body after a fatal heroin overdose in 2014 and is a strong supporter of Trump's promise to tighten the country's border with Mexico, a source of drug traffic into the United States.

Moss, who raised his son as a single father, spoke with Trump during a town hall meeting in Iowa earlier this year about his son. During that interaction, Trump talked about the importance of stopping the Mexican drug trade as well as the importance of providing more treatment options for addicts, Moss said.

"I told him that I lost my son ... . He said, 'First I want to let you know I'm sorry for your loss. It's got to be hard. (Heroin) is a tough drug,'" Moss said. "He had just come from New Hampshire, and it's very present there in New Hampshire. He said we have to combat it, we have to protect our borders, and we've got to stop this stuff from getting into the country."

Moss was a supporter of Trump's trade policies before his interaction in Iowa, and was already in the state to sing music at an event for a supporter there.

"Our American dollars need to go to support America, whether it's because (something) was made in America or because somebody paid a tariff

Though heroin has been in Indiana and much of the Midwest for the last few years, the Evansville area is just now seeing evidence that the drug is prevalent here. Vanderburgh County had six heroin deaths in 2015 and has already had four this year. There were two heroin-related deaths in Warrick County in 2015.

Moss described his son as a good man who starting hanging out with the wrong people.

"If you have a friend who is using heroin, or you know is testing the waters with this drug, don't keep it a secret," Moss said on Thursday. "Don't think you're doing them a favor. Make an anonymous phone call, send an anonymous letter. Let one of their loved ones know they are in trouble with this stuff because they won't tell because they are ashamed. My son was ashamed to come forward to me."

Moss, a construction worker who admits he's "pretty broke right now," plans to follow the campaign at least into June. He was selling a CD outside the rally. Moss is also selling that CD on eBay for $15. Moss was at the Indianapolis rally on Wednesday and said he has enjoyed the Hoosier State so far.

"Everybody's friendly," he said.
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Editor's Note: The theme of this year's national Law Day celebration is "Miranda: More Than Words." The following is the second of two articles written by the Editorial Board of the Evansville Bar Association.

As with many United States Supreme Court cases, understanding the historical context of Miranda v. Arizona (1966) is important to understanding the decision itself. Arguably, the genesis of Miranda was nearly thirteen years earlier in 1953, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren the fourteenth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Warren led a Supreme Court that greatly expanded the constitutional rights of the criminally accused. For example, in Mapp v. Ohio (1961), the Court barred the introduction of illegally seized evidence in criminal prosecutions; in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Court held that indigent criminal defendants have the right to court-appointed counsel; and in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), the Court held that criminal suspects have a right to have counsel present during police interrogations if the suspect "becomes the focus of the interrogation by police."

In many respects, Miranda followed naturally on the heels of Escobedo. Like Escobedo, Miranda involved a criminal suspect's constitutional rights during a custodial interrogation. The police did not employ physical force, threats, or promises during Miranda's interrogation. Further, Miranda's confession contained a signed declaration stating that it was voluntarily given and the product of Miranda's own free will. However, the officers did not inform him of his right to have counsel present or of his right against self-incrimination. The confession was admitted at trial, and Miranda was convicted and sentenced to prison. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction and, in so doing, held that criminal suspects must be affirmatively advised of their constitutional rights before a custodial interrogation.

Miranda's foundation rests on the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. The Court observed that "without proper safeguards, the process of in-custody interrogation of people suspected or accused of crime contains inherently compelling pressures which work to undermine the individual's will to resist and to compel him to speak where he would not otherwise do so freely." Accordingly, the Court determined that a suspect must be informed of his right to remain silent and that "anything said can and will be used against the individual in court." The Court reasoned: "It is only through an awareness of these consequences that there can be any assurance of real understanding and intelligent exercise of the privilege [against self-incrimination]." Similarly, a suspect must also be informed of his right to an attorney, even if he does not request one.

The Court's "aim (was) to assure that the individual's right to choose between silence and speech remains unfettered throughout the interrogation process."

And because the privilege applies to all individuals, a suspect must be informed that if he or she is indigent, counsel will be appointed.

Only after such warnings are given, the Court reasoned, can a suspect "knowingly and intelligently waive these rights and agree to answer questions or make a statement." The sanction for an officer's failure to give a Miranda warning may be the exclusion at trial of the confession and any evidence gathered as a result of that confession. In essence, the Court found that one's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination outweighs the benefit of using a confession at trial.

Miranda was handed down on June 13, 1966. For the past fifty years, the decision has spurred debate among the members of law enforcement and the legal community. Some say Miranda warnings are necessary to ensure that the constitutional rights of criminal suspects are protected against overzealous police practices. Others say those who confess should not have their confessions excluded from trial based on the "technicality" that Miranda warnings were not given. We can all agree, however, that the Miranda decision has had a lasting and significant impact on police procedures and the rights of the accused.

The editorial board of the Evansville Bar Association is chaired by Max Fiester and comprised of Judge Carl Heldt, Doug Briody, Max Fiester, Clay Havill, Yvette LaPlante, Mark Miller, Dan Robinson, Kathryn Sullivan and Shawn Sullivan.
GULFPORT, Mississippi -- A 37-year-old Gulfport man has been charged with sexually assaulting a teenage girl three times while she was visiting his home.

According to Harrison County Sheriff Troy Peterson, deputies were summoned Tuesday to a local hospital, where personnel had found evidence of a sexual assault.

The victim told investigators that Jenkins had sexually assaulted her three times while she was visiting his home because her foster mother was out of town.

Jenkins was on parole at the time and was taken into custody by the Mississippi Department of Corrections. He was then booked into the Harrison County Adult Detention Center under a $225,000 bond for three counts of sexual battery.

Jenkins has a lengthy arrest record in Harrison County, including multiple burglary charges, credit card fraud, trespassing, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
PASCAGOULA, Miss.-- Huntington Ingalls Industries' Shipbuilding division on Wednesday noted the start of fabrication for the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG 121) for the U.S. Navy.

The start of fabrication signifies that 100 tons of steel have been cut.

According to program manager George Nungesser, "This is a significant day for our shipbuilders and for the U.S. Navy as Ingalls once again begins fabrication of another destroyer."

"We have delivered 28 of these ships to the U.S. Navy, and our experienced and talented shipbuilders are more than ready to produce another high-quality destroyer," Nungesser said.

"This is our fourth destroyer started in three years, and we are seeing the resourcefulness that originates from constructing these ships back-to-back."

DDG 121 is the third of five destroyers the company was awarded in June 2013. The five-ship contract, part of a multi-year procurement in the DDG 51 program, allows Ingalls to build ships more efficiently by buying bulk material and moving the skilled workforce from ship to ship.

The guided missile destroyer honors Frank Emmanuel Petersen Jr., who was the first African-American aviator and general officer in the United States Marine Corps. After entering the Naval Aviation Cadet Program in 1950, Petersen would go on to fly more than 350 combat missions throughout the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The DDG 51-class design is described as a multi-mission ship that can conduct a variety of operations, from peacetime presence and crisis management to sea control and power projection. Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are capable of simultaneously fighting air, surface and subsurface battles.

Earlier this month, the Ralph Johnson (DDG 114) destroyer battleship was christened at Ingalls.

"Ingalls continues to make America stronger," U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker said. "Ingalls also continues to make our economy strong with over 12,000 employees and I am proud to represent Ingalls not only in Mississippi, but also in Washington, D.C."
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Blossman Gas Chief Operations Officer David Reynolds of Ocean Springs has been selected to portray the French explorer d'Iberville for this weekend's 1699 Weekend of Discovery. Reynolds is standing in front of a painting of d'Iberville's ship, the La Marin.

(Courtesy photo/Ocean Springs Gazette)

OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- French explorer d'Iberville will once again land on the shores of Ocean Springs as the 1699 Historical Society presents its annual re-enactment of the 1699 French landing on Front Beach -- the centerpiece of a slate of activities scheduled for the city's "Weekend of Discovery" celebration.

The landing re-enactment is set for 4 p.m. Saturday across from Ft. Maurepas Park, with festivities beginning at 3 p.m.

Blossman Gas executive David Reynolds will portray Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, while Jackson County supervisor Randy Bosarge will play d'Iberville's younger brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville.

"It's such a great honor," Reynolds said of the 1699 society's invitation. "I really appreciate the committee for considering me. I'm pleased to do it, because it commemorates what is not only an historical event for Ocean Springs, but for the entire state.

"I'm so glad we continue to celebrate 1699 weekend and I'm honored and humbled to be a part of it this year."

Bosarge had similar sentiments.

"I'm honored and looking forward to it," he said. "It's a fantastic opportunity to be a part of celebrating the history of our community."

Other key re-enactors include:

Alderman John Gill as Joseph Le Moyne, Sieur de Serigny

Alderman Chic Cody at Gabriel Le Moyne, Sieur d'Assigny

Blossman Gas executive Todd Reinke as Sieur Jean de Sauvole, Commandant of Ft. Maurepas

City building official Hillard Fountain as Antoine Le Moyne, Sieur de Chateauguay

Ocean Springs Gazzette owner James Ricketts as Chevalier Francois de La Rochefoudcauld de Surgeres, Captain of La Marin

Ocean Springs High School assistant principal Jacob Dykes as Jean Francois Le Vasseur, Captain of La Prescieuse

Attorney Todd M. Farrar as Francois Guyon, Captain of La Voyageur

Businessman Bill Burkhard as Sieur Laurens de Graff, Lieutenant Commander of La Marin

Gardens Pharmacy CFO Jeff Rollins as Sieur de Lescalete, Lieutenant Commander of La Badine

Magnolia Park principal Chris LeBatard as Francois Desjordy-Moreau de Cabanac, Ensign on La Badine

Tri-Hard Sports owner Hunter Henley as Sieur de Villautreys, Ensign on La Marin

Blossman Gas collections manager Chad Wade as Laurens de Graff, Master Pilot on La Badine

Blossman Gas executive Alex Gresham as Monsier la Cateau, Master Pilot on La Marin

Emergency room surgeon Matt Emerick as Sieur Pierre Cave', Chief Surgeon

City special events coordinator Lamar Bond as Monsieur Andre Penicaut, Master Carpenter

Holcomb Financial owner Amon Holcomb as Monsieur Le Vasseur de Boussouelle

Jackson County Sheriff's Chaplain Carl King as Father Anatase Douay

Attorney William (Bill) Pettey as the Indian Chief

Contractor Ron Barron as the War Chief

Ingalls Shipbuilding designer Martin Swords as the Medicine Man

The weekend's festivities kick off with a reception for d'Iberville and the landing party at the Ocean Springs Chamber of Commerce starting at 5:30 p.m. Friday.

Saturday morning, the "Race to Discovery" 5K run/walk will start at Ft. Maurepas Park at 8:15 a.m. The race begins at the fort, then makes its way up Jackson Avenue to Cleveland Avenue, takes in part of the Biloxi-Ocean Springs Bridge and returns to Ft. Maurepas Park.

A children's one-mile fun run/walk will start at the fort at 9 a.m. and goes along a portion of Ft. Beach Drive before returning to the park.

For non-running pet owners, the annual 1699 Children's Pet Parade will begin at the Little Children's Park on Washington Avenue at 11 a.m. and makes it's way up Washington to Marshall Park. Awards will be presented in several categories.

Additionally, a two-day sailing regatta will be held over the weekend, sponsored jointly by the Ocean Springs Yacht Club and the Ocean Springs Sailing Squadron.

For more information on the Weekend of Discovery, visit the 1699 Historical Society website.
Queensland distributor inTechnology's off-shoot, Cloud Distribution, has announced the addition of identity management vendor OneLogin to its portfolio.

Cloud Distribution co-founder and chief operating officer Jason Burn described OneLogin as "a foundational vendor" that offered "a well-designed, award-winning cloud IAM solution, reducing costs incurred from traditional IAM vendors".

"OneLogins IAM solution reduces cyber attacks and data breaches by implementing various features, such as federated SSO, user provisioning, compliance, strong authentication and much more, he said.

OneLogin USA and Asia-Pacific vice president of sales Josh Greene said that the vendor is "excited" to commission Cloud Distribution as a distributor in Australia.

OneLogin has already achieved considerable traction in the region with leading companies and organisations in media, telecom, higher education, manufacturing and retail. Were excited to work with Cloud Distribution to build upon that initial success, and accelerate our mutual growth moving forward, he said.

Cloud Distribution was formed in March 2015 by inTechnology managing director Mark Winter and sales director Jason Burn.
VMware's top cloud computing executive, Bill Fathers, is leaving after a three-year run, the virtualisation vendor said Wednesday US time.

Fathers has been leading vCloud Air, VMware's hybrid cloud service, which has struggled to gain market share because of a lack of key features and competition from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. VMware has laid off much of the vCloud Air staff and seen several top executives depart in recent months.

VMware has named two vCloud Air vice presidents, Allwyn Sequeira and Laura Ortman, as co-general managers, a VMware spokesman told CRN USA.

"Bill Fathers has made a personal decision to leave VMware, but we are still committed to vCloud Air," said the spokesman. Fathers couldn't be reached for comment on his future plans. Fortune was first to report on Fathers' departure from VMware.

Fathers joined VMware in March 2013 shortly before it launched vCloud Air, which was initially called vCloud Hybrid Service. The offering was aimed at stemming the tide of VMware customers using AWS, but a lack of pay-as-you-go pricing and the ability to sign up with a credit card led to sluggish sales.

Sources told CRN USA last August that VMware had decided to cut back on developing new features for vCloud Air. In October, when VMware parent EMC hatched a plan to combine its Virtustream business with vCloud Air in a cloud joint venture, Fathers was moved to a "strategic advisory role" and wasn't part of it.

But the Virtustream-vCloud Air joint venture, unveiled shortly after Dell announced its $67 billion bid to acquire EMC, didn't go over well with VMware investors, and VMware pulled out in December. After that, Fathers resumed his old role as head of vCloud Air.

Despite the challenges, VMware is still plugging away with vCloud, pitching its disaster recovery and data center replacement and extension capabilities. And while VMware still isn't sharing revenue figures for vCloud Air, bookings for its vCloud Air network of service provider partners grew 25 percent year over year in its most recent quarter.

VMware insists that vCloud Air offers a better price/performance ratio than rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and has cited data to back up these claims

Fathers is the latest of several top VMware executives to depart over the course of the past year, a list that includes chief technology officer Ben Fathi, chief operating officer Carl Eschenbach and Martin Casado, VMware's top software-defined networking executive.
Cloud News

VMware Hybrid Cloud Chief Fathers Departs, Two VPs Tapped To Co-Manage The Service

Kevin McLaughlin

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VMware's top cloud computing executive, Bill Fathers, is leaving after a three-year run, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based virtualization vendor said Wednesday.

Fathers has been leading vCloud Air, VMware's hybrid cloud service, which has struggled to gain market share because of a lack of key features and competition from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. VMware has laid off much of the vCloud Air staff and seen several top executives depart in recent months.

VMware has named two vCloud Air vice presidents, Allwyn Sequeira and Laura Ortman, as co-general managers, a VMware spokesman told CRN.

"Bill Fathers has made a personal decision to leave VMware, but we are still committed to vCloud Air," said the spokesman. Fathers couldn't be reached for comment on his future plans. Fortune on Fathers' departure from VMware.

Fathers joined VMware in March 2013 shortly before it launched vCloud Air, which was initially called vCloud Hybrid Service. The offering was aimed at stemming the tide of VMware customers using AWS, but a lack of pay-as-you-go pricing and the ability to sign up with a credit card led to sluggish sales.

Sources told CRN last August that on developing new features for vCloud Air. In October, when VMware parent EMC hatched a plan to combine its Virtustream business with vCloud Air in a cloud joint venture, Fathers was moved to a "strategic advisory role" and wasn't part of it.

But the Virtustream-vCloud Air joint venture, unveiled shortly after didn't go over well with VMware investors, and VMware pulled out in December. After that, Fathers resumed his old role as head of vCloud Air.

Despite the challenges, VMware is still plugging away with vCloud, pitching its disaster recovery and data center replacement and extension capabilities. And while VMware still isn't sharing revenue figures for vCloud Air, bookings for its vCloud Air network of service provider partners grew 25 percent year over year in its most recent quarter.

VMware insists that vCloud Air offers a better price/performance ratio than rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and has .

Fathers is the latest of several top VMware executives to depart over the course of the past year, a list that includes Chief Technology Officer Chief Operating Officer and , VMware's top software-defined networking executive.
Storage News

IBM Ups All-Flash Storage Ante With Focus On Cloud, Quality Of Service

Joseph F. Kovar

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IBM on Wednesday expanded its family of all-flash arrays with two new high-performance models aimed specifically at connecting customers' IT environments to the cloud.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based vendor also introduced a new all-flash storage array for its high-performance mainframe servers, and said later this year it expects to introduce a model specific to big data environments.

The new product introductions are part of a move to expand IBM's reach in the all-flash storage market, said Eric Herzog, vice president of marketing for the vendor.

[Related: The 10 Coolest Flash Storage And SSD Products Of 2015]

"We see all-flash arrays as important for the full range of user platforms," Herzog told CRN. "So we're expanding the technology to the mainframe and to the cloud."

That expansion is important as IBM plays in a very competitive environment, Herzog said. IBM has the second-largest share of the all-flash storage array market, after EMC, and has the leading position in the software-defined storage business, he said.

Leading Wednesday's news are two new models featuring IBM's FlashCore technology. Unlike standard SSDs, which are used in a majority of all-flash arrays, IBM's FlashCore was custom-built by IBM in partnership with Boise, Idaho-based Micron specifically for use in high-performance flash arrays, Herzog said.

New to IBM is the FlashSystem A9000, which packs up to 300 TBs of FlashCore capacity after compression and deduplication into an 8U enclosure. Performance is up to 500,000 IOPS.

The company also unveiled the FlashSystem A9000R, which scales to a full rack of all-flash storage capacity of up to 900 TBs raw or 1.8 petabytes of effective capacity. It offers up to 2 million IOPS.

Both feature minimum latency of 250 microseconds. Herzog said that latency number is better than it might seem at first glance. "Many all-flash arrays feature latency of 100 microseconds," he said. "But that is with no data services turned on. The A9000 and A9000R latency of 250 microseconds is measured with data services such as replication and security turned on."

Both were also optimized for use in cloud environments, Herzog said. This includes the addition of multitenancy operation, built-in quality of service, and links to IBM SoftLayer and OpenStack clouds.

Those cloud-optimized capabilities are as important as the raw performance, said Jamie Shepard, senior vice president for health care and strategy at Lumenate, a Dallas-based solution provider and IBM channel partner.

In addition to IBM SoftLayer and OpenStack, the new arrays also feature native APIs for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Shepard told CRN.

"The new all-flash storage can burst out to the cloud," he said. "IBM's flash development people have been working closely with IBM's cloud development team."

Quality of service on mixed workloads and the ability to offer multitenancy is a huge benefit of the new IBM solutions, Shepard said. "Just look at financial organizations," he said. "They probably want to put all their workloads on flash. But for the end-of-the-year workloads, they don't want to add more capacity. So they can burst to the cloud. IBM is bringing cloud efficiency to the data center."

Also new to the IBM all-flash array lineup is the DS8888, which features IBM's Power8-based controllers along with Fibre Channel and FICON connectivity for use with IBM's mainframe and Power-based server families. The DS8888 fits up to 192 TBs of capacity in a 40U controller, and offers latency of under 1 millisecond and performance of up to 2.5 million IOPS.

Herzog said IBM in the third quarter of this year also plans to introduce an all-flash array designed specifically for big data. Designed in conjunction with SanDisk, the new array, dubbed "Big Data Flash," will target such use cases as clustered scale-out NAS, big data in-place analytics, and OpenStack for files, he said.
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This New Deal period mural depicting the legend of the Pascagoula Indians hangs in the Pascagoula Post Office on Jackson Avenue.

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Books have been written inspired by Pascagoula's legendary Singing River and the tribe of Indians that drowned themselves in its waters. The legend has been featured on postcards and chronicled in many promotional brochures throughout our history. Our own Pascagoula post office on Jackson Avenue features in its lobby the original and restored mural from the New Deal era depicting an artist's concept of the tribe and its fateful march into the river.

The Pascagoula High School Theatre in a special event will honor Pascagoula's native historian, Jay Higginbotham, with a performance of his play, "Anola: A Legend of the Singing River." It begins at 6:30 p.m., Friday, April 29, at the Aaron Jones Family Interactive Center. Mayor Jim Blevins will present Higginbotham with a key to the city and a proclamation celebrating the historian's life work.

An early postcard gives a summary of the legend of the Singing River.

Perhaps the river doesn't sing anymore but our parents and grandparents have told what they heard and there have been too many accounts to ignore the phenomenon that has been recorded as early as 1727.

Higginbotham has authored several books on our Colonial period. "Pascagoula: Singing River City," published in 1967, includes his account of the Singing River and the legend of the star-crossed lovers Anola and Altama.

He relates how Altama, son of the Pascagoula chief, met and fell in love with Anola, a beautiful maiden who was betrothed to Otanga, chief of the fierce Biloxis. In retaliation, Otanga led his warriors against the Pascagoulas. Altama offered to surrender himself to the Biloxis but "the brave warriors of his tribe vowed" to save the marriage of Altama to Anola.

"When it was clear that the Biloxis would certainly overpower them, the Pascagoulas chose to drown themselves rather than submit. While chanting their death song, the old folks and the children marched into the river with the warriors following. Finally, Altama and Anola, after a last long embrace, clasped their hands and plunged into the swirling waters that ever since have echoed the mournful sounds of that night of long ago."

For hundreds of years, locals have reported hearing mysterious music coming from the Pascagoula River. It has been described as sounding like a swarm of humming bees in flight. Governor Perier of Louisiana heard it during the summer of 1727.

Higgingbotham cited Mobile Cathedral records of several Indians drowning in the Pascagoula River the summer before the visit by Governor Perier. Who knows how many drowned. The phenomenon will be talked about as long as the Pascagoula River flows.

Admission to the PHS Theatre play is $5 with proceeds going toward the PHS Theatre group directed by Jill Sullivan. For more information, she may be contacted at jsullivan@pgsd.ms.
Let's pause to take a look at 10 extraordinary mothers in the Bible. These women obeyed God's calling, served sacrificially, and built a life of faith for their family. We can learn much from the examples of these Biblical mothers.

1. Sarah: The Mother Who Waited

In Genesis 11:30 we learn, Now Sarai was childless because she was not able to conceive. This would have grieved both Sarah and Abraham, and in Genesis 15 when the word of the LORD came to Abram he answered, what will you give me LORD since you have not given me an heir? God tells him to look at the stars in the Sky, for that would be the number of his offspring. Abraham and Sarah waited 15 years before God renewed His promise, and 10 more years before the promise was fulfilled and Sarah bore a son, Isaac.

Sarah probably wouldnt win an award for waiting and she even laughed at the idea that God could do what He promised, but thankfully Gods promise did not rely on the level of Sarahs faith. God fulfilled His promise according to His plan and Sarah responded in Genesis 21,

God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me. And she added, Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.

Can you imagine waiting that long for a blessing? Sarah tried to believe the promise, but she had doubts until it finally came to fruition. Then she laughed with joy at what the LORD had done. Isaac would go on to continue the legacy of his father Abraham.

2. Hagar: The Mother Who Endured

Hagar was an Egyptian slave and a maidservant to Sarah, the wife of Abraham; she didnt have much say about anything and especially not in becoming Abrahams wife. Though her status changed, she was still secondary to Sarah.

Once Hagar became pregnant with Abrahams child, a rift developed between her and Sarah. After receiving mistreatment from Sarah, Hagar fled toward her homeland. But she met the angel of the LORD who told her to return, He also promised her numerous descendants through her son whom she was to name Ishmael.

Later, Hagar and her son Ishmael were sent away into the desert, where she believed they would both die. But God is faithful and showed her a well. Genesis 21 tells us, God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer.

Hagar thought she would get to escape her misery, but God called her to return to it. She obeyed, and He blessed her and her son just as He promised He would.

3. Rebekah: The Mother Who Believed

Rebekah was a woman of great faith, obeying God when Isaacs servant told her of the man who wanted to marry her. Genesis 25 tells us that when Rebekah became pregnant she could feel the babies jostling within her. When she asked the LORD why this was happening, He answered her: Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger. In that time, the older would have never served the younger, and the firstborn son would have inherited the best of everything.

When Isaac was old in age, he told Esau to hunt and prepare food so that he could receive his blessing. But Rebekah overheard this and told Jacob to bring her food so she could prepare it for Isaac first. Jacob was unsure about deceiving his father, but Rebekah responded in Genesis 27, My son let the curse fall on me. Just do what I say; go and get them for me. I think it is safe to say that she remembered and took very seriously what God had spoken to her during her pregnancy.

Rebekah risked deception to follow Gods promise because she believed what He said was true. It should be noted that God did not call Rebekah to deception, but God is sovereign despite the good or bad choices we may make. And His plan unfolded exactly as He had told her. Later her son Jacob would wrestle with God and be given a new name, Israel.

4. Leah and Rachel: The Mothers Who Had to Share

When Jacob went to stay with his uncle Laban, he met one of his daughters, Rachel, and loved her. He wanted her for his wife and was willing to work seven years to marry her. But Laban tricked Jacob by giving him his older daughter Leah in marriage instead. Jacob worked another seven years for Rachel, and he loved her more. Leah, knowing that she was unloved, bore Jacob many children to please him, while Rachel remained barren.

Both women ended up giving their maidservants to Jacob, who in turn bore him more children. Genesis 30 tells us, Then God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and enabled her to conceive. Rachel bore Jacob two sons, Joseph and Benjamin, before she died in childbirth with Benjamin.

Siblings like to compete, but can you imagine having to share a husband with your sister, feeling like you always had to outdo the other. But God blessed both Leah and Rachel with children, continuing his covenant promise with Abraham. Leah and Rachels sons would go on to form the 12 tribes of Israel.

5. Jochebed: The Mother with a Plan

A new pharaoh in Egypt came to power who was under no obligation to honor Josephs deeds in Egypt and keep the special arrangement with the Israelites. He was worried about the Hebrews outnumbering and overtaking the Egyptians, so he made them slaves. He also commanded the Hebrew midwives to kill Hebrew baby boys when they were born, but they did not listen. Then Pharaoh gave another decree in Exodus 1, Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.

A Levite woman, Jochebed, gave birth to a son and hid him for 3 months. Exodus 2 tells us that when she could hide him no longer, she coated a papyrus basket with tar and pitch, placed the baby in it, then she set it in the reeds along the bank of the Nile. Jochebeds daughter, Miriam, watched to see what would happen as Pharaohs daughter went down to bath. When Pharaohs daughter saw the basket, her servants retrieved it for her and inside she found the baby crying and knowing he was a Hebrew child she felt sorry for him.

Miriam then spoke up and asked her if she would like her to fetch a Hebrew woman to nurse the baby; she agreed and Jochebed returned with her daughter to nurse her own baby. Pharaohs daughter paid Jochebed to nurse and raise the baby until he was old enough to come live with her. She then adopted him as her son and named him Moses.

Jochebed was determined to find a way to save her son, and God blessed her plan. Not only was her son saved from death, she was able to nurse and raise him until he was old enough to go live with Pharaohs daughter. Her son, Moses, went on to free the Hebrew people from Egypt, leading them in the desert toward the Promised Land according to Gods plan.





6. Samsons Mother: The Mother Who Followed the Rules

She is not mentioned by name in the Book of Judges, although some would say she is the Hazelelponi mentioned in 1 Chronicles 4. We cannot know for sure, so we can deduce that what she did is more important than her name. She was married to a man named Manoah but was unable to conceive. Judges 13 tells us,

The angel of the LORD appeared to her and said, You are barren and childless, but you are going to become pregnant and give birth to a son. Now see to it that you drink no wine or other fermented drink and that you do not eat anything unclean. You will become pregnant and have a son whose head is never to be touched by a razor because the boy is to be a Nazirite dedicated to God from the womb. He will take the lead in delivering Israel from the hands of the Philistines.

Samsons mother knew there was something special about the angel of the LORD, and when her husband was afraid they would die for having seen the face of God she became the voice of reason saying He would not have told us these things if He were going to kill us.

She gave birth and named the baby Samson, and the LORD blessed him. Although some of his actions were questionable, the LORD used him mightily in His plan to defeat the Philistines.

7. Naomi: The Mother-in-Law Who Shared Her Faith

Naomi and her family fled to the country of Moab because of a famine in their land. Her husband died, and her two sons married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. After 10 years both of Naomis sons passed away, and Naomi heard that the LORD had blessed the land of her people with food again. She told her daughters-in-law that they could return home to find new husbands. Although they both wept at her leaving, one refused to leave Naomis side. Orpah returned to her people and her gods, but Ruth said,

Dont urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.

Ruth was already learning from Naomis faith even during a time of bitterness. Naomi continued to watch out for Ruth and instruct her wisely in her dealings with Boaz, who became her kinsman redeemer. The LORD blessed Naomi, and she gained a son when Boaz married Ruth. Ruth and Boaz had a child, and the women of the land said to Naomi,

Praise be to the LORD, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.

The child was named Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David who would be king. -Ruth 4:17.

8. Hannah: The Mother Who Kept Her Promise

Hannah was married to a man who loved her very much, but he also had another wife. This wife was able to bear children, but in 1 Samuel 1:5-6 we learn that the LORD had closed Hannahs womb. The rival wife provoked Hannah continually, but Hannah would go to the house of the LORD to pray. Her husband tried to console her saying, Dont I mean more to you than 10 sons? in 1 Sam. 1:8. Hannah prayed to the LORD and wept bitterly; she made a vow saying,

LORD Almighty, if you will only look on your servants misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the LORD for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever be used on his head.

In fact, she was praying so hard that her lips were moving but no sound came out so that the priest, Eli, thought she was drunk. The LORD blessed Hannah, and she gave birth to a son and named him Samuel, saying, Because I asked the LORD for him. -1 Sam. 1:20

She did just as she had promised, and when the boy was old enough she took him to the house of the LORD and presented him to Eli. Hannah then prayed,

My heart rejoices in the LORD; in the LORD my horn is lifted high. My mouth boasts over my enemies, for I delight in your deliverance. And her beautiful prayer continues in 1 Samuel 2:1-10.

Samuel lived a life dedicated to the LORD, and he would go on to lead the people of Israel, anointing Israels first and second kingsSaul and David.

9. Elizabeth: The Mother Who Believed in Miracles

Elizabeth was married to a priest named Zechariah, and Luke 1 tells us that both Elizabeth and Zechariah were righteous before God, observing all of His commands. But Elizabeth was childless, and they were both old in age. Similar to people in Jobs day, people would have thought that sin prevented Elizabeth from bearing a child. This would have been very hard to face, especially being a wife of a priest.

When Zechariah was serving in the temple, an angel of the Lord, Gabriel, approached him and said,

Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. Luke 1:13-14

Zechariah still questioned how this would be possible and because he doubted he was struck mute for the duration of Elizabeths pregnancy. Elizabeth was overjoyed at this blessing of life and said, The Lord has done this for me In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people. Luke 1:25

When Mary, the mother of Jesus, came to visit her cousin Elizabeth, the baby leapt in Elizabeths womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She took great joy in Marys pregnancy and blessing from the Lord. And when it came time for Elizabeth to give birth, she named her son John. When neighbors went to confirm this with Zechariah he wrote the same name and his mouth was opened; everyone wondered at what the child would be since his birth was miraculous.

John would go on to baptize people from their sins with water. He would prepare the way for the Messiah.

10. Mary: The Mother Who Is Blessed among Women

Mary, a virgin pledged to a man named Joseph, was also visited by the angel Gabriel. He said to her in Luke 1:31,

Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacobs descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.

Mary wondered at how this would be possible, and the angel told her, The Holy Sprit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Mary embraced these words in faith. When she visited her cousin Elizabeth, Elizabeth proclaimed, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! Mary believed God would fulfill His promise.

An angel of the Lord also visited Joseph, who put him at ease with Marys pregnancy. As we read in Matthew 1, Joseph took Mary to be his wife, but they did not consummate the marriage until after she had given birth. Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem for a census, where she gave birth in the humblest of environments.

Mary treasured up many things in her heart as she raised Jesus, but she also had to endure the greatest sacrifice of all timeher son was the Son of God and He had come to give Himself up as a sacrifice, the one and only sacrifice that could be made for mankind. She had to watch Him suffer, be tortured and mocked, and die a cruel death on a cross by crucifixion.

John 19 tells us,

Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mothers sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, Woman, here is your son, and to the disciple, Here is your mother. From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.

Even while He was dying, Jesus cared for His mother and gave her a new son to love her. Mary was blessed among women, for she was chosen by God to bear His Son and raise Him. Though there was death there was yet joy for Mary, as her son did not stay dead. He rose again from the grave, securing eternity for her and all who would believe.

Liz Auld is the managing editor for Crosswalk.com.

Photo credit: Getty Images/max-kegfire (main/top image), GettyImages/The Good Brigade (middle image)
Royal Caribbean International and senior Vanuatu government representatives marked the completion of Mystery Islands brand new tender pier yesterday with a maiden visit from the Explorer of the Seas.

The pier was officially opened by Acting Prime Minister, The Honourable Joe Natuman from the Vanuatu government at a ceremony attended by the Captain and senior executive team of Explorer of the Seas.

Undertaken by Royal Caribbean at a cost of $2.5 million, the new pier replaces an older, smaller pier which was frequently damaged during cyclones and now ensures that Mystery Island can continue to receive cruise tourists year-round.

The bigger pier also allows the island to handle increasingly larger cruise ships.

Acting Prime Minister, The Honorable Joe Natuman, said he welcomed the development. Today is a very proud day for tourism in Vanuatu, and we are extremely grateful to Royal Caribbean for their assistance in ensuring the continued success of cruise ship visits to our country," said Natuman.

Adam Armstrong, managing director for Royal Caribbean in Australia & New Zealand, said the investments in Mystery Island and Port Vila are the first of several potential infrastructure projects in the South Pacific islands, where the cruise line is investing significantly to ensure the region continues to benefit from cruise tourism as the size of ships increase, and therefore the number of passengers grows.

Cruises to the South Pacific are the most popular itineraries for Australian travellers  and Vanuatu is one of the highest rated destinations for our guests. Being able to guarantee calls to destinations like Mystery Island and Port Vila with our larger ships is vital to cruise tourism to Vanuatu and is an important economic driver for our island nation neighbour. Our investment here solidifies Royal Caribbeans long-term commitment to cruising in the South Pacific, Armstrong said.
An Estonian man has been sentenced to seven years and three months in prison in the U.S. for his role in a cybercriminal operation that infected over 4 million computers with DNS hijacking malware.

Vladimir Tsastsin, 35, from Tartu, Estonia, was one of the key players in a US$14 million click fraud scheme. He is the sixth individual to be sentenced in the case and has received the longest prison sentence. The sentence was handed down Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

According to the Department of Justice, between 2007 and 2011, Tsastsin and his co-conspirators set up companies that masqueraded as publisher networks and entered into agreements with advertising brokers to display ads on their properties.

In order to earn more money, the group artificially increased the number of user clicks and views for the ads they displayed by installing a malware program called DNS Changer on unsuspecting users' computers.

It's estimated that DNSChanger infected over 4 million computers worldwide, including 500,000 in the U.S., before its operation was shut down by the FBI.

As its name implies, the DNSChanger malware altered the computer's DNS (Domain Name System) settings, forcing them to use DNS resolvers run by the attackers.

The DNS is the Internet's phonebook, translating domain names into numerical Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that computers use to communicate. By controlling the DNS servers used by infected computers, the attackers could point users to other websites when they wanted to reach specific domain names. This capability was used to perform click fraud.

Tsastsin and his co-conspirators used DNSChanger to redirect users who clicked on links in search results to websites that they didn't intend to visit. They also replaced the advertisements that users should have normally seen on various websites with ads for which they were being paid.

While DNS hijacking was used for click fraud in this case, the technique is very powerful and can be used for more serious attacks against users, such as phishing.

For example, when asked for an online banking website's IP address, a rogue DNS server could respond with the address of a Web server hosting a rogue copy of the website. Despite this, the domain name showing up in the user's browser would be the correct one, making it hard to tell that a phishing attack was in progress.

This kind of attack happened in 2014 in Poland, but instead of using malware to change the DNS settings of individual computers, the attackers compromised home and small business routers and changed the DNS settings for entire networks.

Most computers and mobile devices are configured to automatically obtain their Internet connection settings from the router serving the network they're connected to. This makes routers an attractive target for DNS hijacking attacks.

Over the past several years security researchers have observed many large-scale attacks designed to change the DNS settings on routers, either by exploiting vulnerabilities in their firmware or by hijacking users' browsers when they visited compromised websites.

Router owners should periodically check their device manufacturer's website for firmware updates and install them, especially if they contain security fixes. They should also change the default administrator password on their routers and make sure to always log out from the router's management interfaces after accessing it through a browser.
The U.S. Energy Sectors SCADA and ICS networks often are criticized in the press for being outdated, non-standardized, and difficult to manage because of inscrutability to all but a select few. I prefer to think of those as advantages.

Our infrastructure for SCADA and ICS are heterogeneous and distributed. Combine those advantages with the high bar for insider knowledge or engineering expertise necessary to understand and operate these systems and you have created a natural, layered defense! Still, threats and their corresponding risks exist.

My audacious risk predictions for the remainder of 2016 address the nature of the cyber threat and the potential for the energy sector to encounter it during the year. The risks are divided into High, Moderate, and Low. I've based these upon the basic Risk Equation: Risk=Threat x Vulnerability x Cost.

[ PRIMER: Defining the threat in the energy sector ]

Cyber crime  high risk. Administrative systems are most at risk. Commonality of operating systems and the ability of utilities to pay large ransoms make the energy sector a very attractive target for ransomware and data theft.

Hacktivism  moderate risk. Hacktivists often focus on social issues. The energy sector may be targeted after accidents that affect the environment. DDoS intrusions remain a threat to administrative and customer service systems

Cyber espionage  moderate risk. Actors will continue to probe and insert persistent backdoors or other malware. In spite of declarations and treaties, cyber espionage will probably remain at current levels for the next year.

Cyber attack  low risk. The potential for effective, coordinated cyber-physical attacks involving intrusion into U.S. energy networks is low.

How do I justify my analysis?

There's nothing like a slight time delay in getting a publication online - in the interim between my predictive analysis and the posting of this article, DHS in April released a document on the same subject with basically the same predictions. That's a good indication that the private and public sectors are not so far apart in thinking about threats as some would have us believe.

What can I do with this information?

Though these threats appear in a hierarchy, nothing prevents an adversary from changing tactics, techniques, and procedures. Just as it's impossible to legislate against tomorrow's cyber threat, it's impossible to predict their exact nature - that's why an adversary motivation approach is a good fit for enabling a more accurate risk analysis and risk management protocol.

In the end it always boils down to the user. An employee might sell the company's crown jewels or SCADA architecture - the insider threat. A recent survey found that 27 percent of U.S. employees would sell their passwords for less than $1,000. About 47 percent reported that after leaving their company they still had remote access to their accounts.

An employee on a lunch break browses an innocent web site, following each and every guideline the company provides for personal Internet use at work. Through no fault of the employee, the web site has unknowingly been infected to deliver a malware package to visitors - the Watering Hole attack.

An offended hacktivist group might focus world-wide resources on your organization because they didnt like a single tweet out of the thousands youve sent. Now youre the target of a spear phishing or whaling campaign  trying to get access to your systems and bring your business down. Barring that, a DDoS campaign is a handy alternative. Hacktivism may have more supporters than you imagined.

Anybody in cyberspace can suffer an intrusion at any time. It's time to stop blaming the victim for cyber intrusions. At the same time, dont set yourself up as the instrument of your failure. An aware user is always the first line of defense for both administrative and operational sides of your network. Be the aware user.
Ransomware has become a major threat to the U.S. healthcare industry this year. The high-profile attacks that involved Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles, MedStar Health in Washington, D.C., and other healthcare systems are just the tip of the iceberg. Over half of hospitals surveyed recently by HIMSS Analytics and Healthcare IT News said they had been hit by ransomware attacks in the past year. Another 25 percent were unsure whether such attacks had occurred.

Its not clear how many hospitals have paid ransoms to cyber-criminals to unencrypt their data and/or unlock their systems. Hollywood Presbyterian announced it had paid $17,000 to get its data back after being unable to use its EHR for 10 days. Methodist Hospital in Henderson, Ky., also reportedly paid $17,000. MedStars systems were at least partly down for nearly a week, but the organization didnt say whether it had paid a ransom.

Asked whether theyd fork over the ransom payment if hackers had encrypted their hospitals patient data, about half of the healthcare executives in the HIMSS Analytics survey said they wouldnt. Forty-four percent said they were unsure, and just 5 percent said they would pay.

But experts say that the exponential growth of ransomware attacks indicates that some victims are yielding to the hackers demands. The increase is related to the fact that attacks are successful because organizations are willing to pay. They will continue to rise as long as that continues to be the case, says Nathan Gibson, director of IT operations/privacy officer for WVMI Quality Insights, based in Charleston, West Virginia.

Low-hanging fruit makes for easy pickings?

Another reason for the jump in ransomware incidents this year is that publicity about the attacks and hospitals vulnerability to them has emboldened the bad guys, says Mac McMillan, CEO of CynergisTek, an Austin, Texas-based IT security firm. In addition, he says, Theres a very low risk of these people getting caught, and theres a potentially big payoff.

[Related: Youve been hit with ransomware. Now what?]

McMillan agrees that $17,000 isnt a huge sum for a hospital or healthcare system to pay to regain access to its data and to protect its patients and its reputation. But the more you pay, the more it incents the hackers to do it, he notes. And the last thing you want to do is incent their behavior. Also, Gibson observes, theres no guarantee organizations will get their data back if they pay the ransom.

On the other hand, McMillan points out, Its easy to say, We dont pay criminals, if youre not the one whos locked out of your system or doesnt have access to data. At the end of the day, you want to try hard not to pay that ransom. And the best way to do that is to be prepared to deal with the incident and to recover quickly.

There are two basic forms of ransomware. One type prevents users from logging into the system, and the other encrypts the data; some attacks involve both kinds of malware.

McMillan says the crypto-ware version is the more dangerous of the two. If a hospital is attacked by malware that locks the system up, it can survive that if it has good recovery procedures and an alternate site that IT people can use to reconstitute the environment. But once your data is encrypted and you no longer have access to your data, and if you dont have the ability to recover quickly and reconstitute and provide your data from a backup, its very complicated to recover from that.

Data backups are the key to surviving ransomware attacks. But some hospitals and physician practices dont back up their data at all. This lack of security awareness puzzles McMillan. Its possible is that security is still not seen as a critical business function in those organizations, he suggests.

Even if a hospital or a physician group does back up its data, it might do so only on a nightly basis. So, if a ransomware attack occurs and the organization uses its data backup to continue operations, the database will be missing everything that has been entered into the system since the previous evening, notes Gibson. Thats much better than nothing, but it will still send clinicians scrambling.

Many hospitals do near-real-time backups of data on mirrored servers. In case one server goes down, the other can take up the slack. But if you have near real time backups, those backups will be vulnerable to attacks, because theyre online and available [to malware] on the network, Gibson points out.

[ ALSO ON CSO: How to review and test backup procedures to ensure data restoration ]

McMillan agrees that this poses a challenge. You want to make sure you have good access controls and good separation between those two systems so that if malware breaks out in the first system, you can sever the connection between that and the backup very quickly, he says.

Both experts concur that adding a second backup system could help organizations recover in case of a ransomware attack. Gibson suggests using a backup system that is offline most of the time and backs up the main system every so often. Hed also segment the redundant server to allow security controls to ferret out malicious activities that can affect the backup.

McMillan observes, Cloud backup can be advantageous, because often, cloud vendors will back up data in multiple locations. And as soon as you know that something has been infected, you can sever that and make sure not all your backups are infected at the same time. Also, cloud vendors have good malware detectors and filters, so even if it doesnt get caught in your environment, they may catch it before it infects the backup.

[Related: 4 reasons not to pay up in a ransomware attack]

However, Gibson counters, many healthcare organizations are still wary of placing sensitive patient data in the cloud. One alternative, he says, is to segment online backup in a separate non-cloud system that uses a protocol that the malware is not trying to utilize.

A lot of ransomware is looking for network shares and directly accessible systems, he says. If you have a backup thats using a different protocol, the malware might not be able to reach that.

An ounce of prevention 

Healthcare organizations can also protect themselves by using advanced malware detectors that quickly tip off security personnel when an intrusion occurs. Older antivirus software, McMillan notes, searches for malware with known signatures; but the newer forms of malware, including ransomware, lack those signatures. So the advanced detector searches for anomalies rather than just signatures.

It can segregate that attachment or email or other delivery mechanism and put it in a quarantined area where it can be inspected, he notes. Most advanced detectors will block the unknown piece of code at the perimeter and send it to the cloud for analysis. If its harmless, itll send it back and let it through.

Gibson agrees that every organization should have a gateway server that filters email and Internet traffic. The only problem with opening up attachments in a safe area to search for malware is that, in some cases, the ransomware is not executed until it contacts the server that sent it. So it might sit there and do nothing until an organization allows it into its network.

To protect against ransomware and other kinds of malware, says Gibson, every healthcare organization should assess its security vulnerabilities. Its important to have a security risk assessment and instant response plan to combat these types of threats, he says. HIPAA requires a risk analysis, so many of these controls and defenses should already be in place. Then its just a matter of continuing your security risk assessments on a continuous basis to meet new threats and enhance your security controls.

This story, "Should hospitals pay up when it comes to ransomware?" was originally published by CIO .
OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- Southwest Jackson County has been battered by massive thunderstorms producing large hail, heavy rains and severe lightning since the early morning hours Thursday.

Jackson County Emergency Management Director Earl Etheridge said there have been reports of two fires from lightning strikes in Ocean Springs, a tree falling on a house in Gulf Park Estates, street flooding and sporadic power outages.

The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning for southwestern Jackson County, effective until 9:15 a.m. Thursday. In Harrison County, the NWS describes the situation as "a flash flood emergency. Seek higher ground now!"

The good news? Etheridge says it appears the heaviest weather will be confined to the southwest part of Jackson County and should clear out in by late morning. He also said thus far there have been no reports of major flooding, other than street flooding.

"I don't see the heavier stuff continuing anywhere but in the southwest part of the county," he said. "The rest of it appears to have either moved out or offshore.

"Of course, now that I've said that, it'll change and I'll be wrong," he added, laughing.
WESTPORT  The coats of paint have long dried. The furniture is positioned just so. The whimsical touches that make a house a home have been artfully placed throughout this nearly 130-year-old Queen Anne Victorian home. All it needs are some guests.

This weekend marks the official opening of Serena and Lily, an upscale California-based lifestyle and home decor brand, in the 1889 Kemper-Gunn House on Elm Street. The companys products, from furniture to throw pillows, will be featured in vignettes throughout three floors and more than 3,100 square feet of the downtown building, representing a new store concept for the brand.

There is not one Serena and Lily store that is alike, said Aaron Mutscheller, chief brand officer, during a press preview held earlier this week. This will be the companys fourth and largest store, as well as its flagship. The company has design shops in city storefronts in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as another retail store in an old service station in Wainscott, N.Y., along the Montauk Highway.

This past week, several of the companys principals made the journey from corporate headquarters in Sausalito, Calif., to Westport to celebrate the opening, which has its start Friday morning and continues through the weekend with giveaways and refreshments. For customers, it will be a chance to see how a contemporary retail plan is blended with some of the homes original elements, such as the window casings, interior trim, hand-carved staircase and stained glass windows. Prior to this project, it was largely a warren of office spaces.

The company was looking to expand into Connecticut, considering Greenwich first before finding the site in Westport that literally and figuratively felt like home. I think any home retailer has dreams of being able to put their product in a given environment that feels best for the brand, said Mutscheller of the opportunity the homes layout afforded.

Long before we were a direct-to-consumer company, representing our product in the form of a scenario in a room or in a home was almost as much a part of the brand as the product was, said Serena Dugan, the chief design officer and co-founder. It was the projection of that life, the environment we were creating with the use of that product. It has always been our hope to have a home-like setting.

Serena and Lily was founded in 2003 by Dugan and Lily Kanter. It began as a wholesale baby bedding company, but eventually evolved and expanded to meet customer demand. It has a popular catalog, which led to the companys first retail space in 2013. In the Westport store, one can find sheets, duvets and blankets and the beds on which to put them. There are throw pillows, bistro chairs, whimsical table lamps, coffee tables, towels or original art. There is a wide range of prices, too. One can pick up a stool for about $60 or a Moroccan leather pouf for nearly $500. Some of the larger pieces, such as the couches, can be several thousands of dollars.

If anyone needs some help pulling the pieces together, there is a Design Shop, which can be used by customers and interior designers. On the third floor, a loft shows off the companys bedding for children and babies.

The opening comes nearly a year after the company signed a lease for the retail space, which is located across the street from the $100 million Bedford Square development project led by two local real estate development firms  David Adam Realty and Charter Realty & Development. The house was moved in 2014 to its location in the Baldwin commuter parking lot to make way for the tens of thousands of square feet of residential, office, restaurant and retail space planned for the downtown area, which is expected to be completed next year.

David Waldman, project developer and president of David Adam Realty, plans to be at the opening. He initially reached out to Serena and Lily. I knew their brand and their company and I thought it would be a great fit, he said earlier this week. I think the end result is spectacular.

The Serena and Lily store will open Friday at 35 Elm St. at 9:30 a.m. The first 50 visitors receive a gift of $100 to spend on anything in the store. Coffee and treats from SoNo Bakery will be served, as will gelato. Regular hours are Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. www.serenaandlily.com
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Jahana Hayes says she always pushes her students to try new things.

This will be the year for the Waterbury social studies teacher to step out of her comfort zone as the Nations 2016 Teacher of the Year.

Hayes was announced Thursday for the top honor by the Council of Chief State School Officers. She will be recognized by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony on Tuesday.

Hayes, who teaches at John F. Kennedy High School in Waterbury, was named the Connecticut Teacher of the Year earlier this year from among a group of finalists that also included Shaun Mitchell, a teacher at Central High School in Bridgeport, and Dylan Connor, a teacher at Bunnell High School in Stratford.

Hayes will spend a year traveling the nation to represent educators and advocate on behalf of teachers. She said in an interview with Hearst Media News that sees herself as a voice for both teachers and students in her new role.

I dont think there is really a separation, Hayes said. So I am excited about it. I know it is going to be different, but Im still teaching.

She said she wants to teach America that hers is an awesome profession.

I want so badly to change the dialogue that is surrounding teaching as a profession and remind people that wonderful things are happening in American public education, she said. Teachers are not visitors in student lives. We are an enduring presence.

Hayes also wants to shine a light on Connecticut, which she said made her the teacher she is.

All of her education came in Connecticut, including an associate degree from Naugatuck Valley Community College, a bachelors degree from Southern Connecticut State University, a masters degree from St. Josephs College and a sixth-year degree from the University of Bridgeport.

UB School of Education professor Gail Perilli, who taught Hayes in an educational leadership class, said she quickly established herself as a leader in insisting on viewing education from the perspective of students, not administrators.

She was looking for ways to get parents involved who really were not yet involved, said. She wanted equality for all students.

Hayes, 44, grew up in a Waterbury housing project and became a teenage mother while in high school. She said the influence of her own teachers taught her that a school's job sometimes overlaps with the job of parents.

At Kennedy High, an urban school with a widely diverse student body, Hayes said she has found teaching is a lifestyle that extends beyond the contracted hours. She finds herself serving not only as a teacher but also as a counselor, a confidant and a protector of her students.

Hayes has also won praise for her emphasis on community service and development of a service learning curriculum.

Hayes was selected for the national title from among four finalists named in January. The other three teachers hail from Washington state, California and Oklahoma.

Associated Press contributed to this report.
Websters definition of the word sportsmanship: fair play, respect for opponents, and polite behavior by someone who is competing in a sport or other competition.

On Wednesday, a 62-year-old man who was hunting for wild turkeys in Bloomfield was arrested by State Environmental Conservation officers for not playing by the rules.

Mark Zanawich is accused of baiting turkeys with cracked corn and hiding behind a hunting blind on a game club property in Bloomfield.

And EnCon officers say the guy didnt even have a permit to hunt wild turkeys.

Baiting wild turkeys with cracked corn is not only unfair, but its against the law. Because of that Zanawich was arrested Wednesday with negligent hunting in the fourth degree and illegally turkey hunting with the use of artificial bait. Hes scheduled to appear in court in Hartford on May 9.

Wednesday was was opening day for wild turkey hunting in Connecticut and is enjoyed by many legal hunters statewide.

According to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, all 169 towns have wild turkeys in their communities. Wild turkeys were abundant in Connecticut when the first settlers arrived. However, a combination of forest clearing and a series of severe winters eliminated the turkey from Connecticut by the early 1800s. Between 1975 and 1992, 356 wild turkeys were released at 18 sites throughout the state.

As a result of restoration efforts and the increase in forest habitat, sportsmen have been able to hunt wild turkeys since 1981, and landowners and others have enjoyed observing them in their natural state, DEEP posted on its wild turkey page.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to continue underwater dumping of toxic dredge material at a site in the Eastern Long Island Sound that had been scheduled to close at the end of the year.

The New London disposal site will instead be partially closed and expanded beyond its existing underwater footprint to increase capacity. The EPA intends to close the existing Cornfield Shoals disposal site near the mouth of the Connecticut River.

We are proposing to go from two sites to one, said Mel Cote, chief of the surface water branch for EPAs New England region. We are also adding new restrictions and procedures.

Those restrictions are intended to promote the beneficial use of dredged material, such as beach nourishment, or other alternatives to open-water disposal whenever practicable, the EPA said in a statement issued Wednesday.

Environmentalists quickly criticized the decision, saying the Sound should not be used as a dumping ground for contaminated material removed from harbors, ports and marinas in Connecticut and New York State.

The EPA should be closing dump sites not extending existing sites and proposing new ones, said Louis Burch, program director for the Citizens Campaign for the Environment.

More Information EPA will hold four public hearings to receive comments on the proposed underwater disposal rule. Registration will begin 30 minutes before each of the four hearings. The hearing will be held: May 25 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Suffolk County Community College Culinary Arts Center, 20 East Main St., Riverhead, NY and from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Mattituck-Laurel Library, 13900 Main Rd., Mattituck, NY, 11952. May 26 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., and from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., at the University of Connecticut's Avery Point Academic Building, Room 308, 1084 Shennecossett Rd, Groton. See More Collapse

This is still contaminated material, Burch noted. Suitable material is a very gray term.

Dennis Schain, a spokesman for the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said the agency supports the EPA plan, and pointed out that the dredged material to be disposed of at underwater sites is already in the Sound

We are pleased that EPA continues to recognize the need to preserve options for open water disposal of dredged materials, Schain said. Connecticuts ports, harbors and marinas rely on periodic dredging projects to remain open and available to serve the needs of our state.

A recent Hearst Connecticut Media review of a dredging plan developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and now proposed by the EPA found multiple government studies confirming that dredged material stays put after placement, but little science detailing the impact on nearby fish and marine life  or on the 20 million people who live near the Sounds shores.

The review also found stiff opposition to the dredging plan in New York State, in part because Connecticuts maritime economy and dredging needs dwarf New Yorks. Connecticuts sediment is far more polluted, due to generations of industrial factories that dumped pollutants into rivers and the Sound.

Expanding

Cote said EPA proposes to close half of the 1 square mile New London underwater disposal site and continue using the remainder. An additional 1 square mile of seabed not previously used for disposal would be added to the site, making the new site 2 square miles in size, he said.

The disposal area is being called the Eastern Long Island Sound Disposal Site, and will have a capacity of 27 million cubic yards of dredged material. The site now holds 2.8 million cubic yards and had a projected capacity to take an additional 7.8 million cubic yards over the next 30 years.

The draft rule proposed Wednesday will be the subject of public hearings next month and follows a similar rule issued in February that continued use of the Western underwater disposal site, roughly off Stamford, and a Central site off New Haven.

The Army Corps estimates that up to 52 million cubic yards of dredged material  enough to build 12 Hoover Dams  could be disposed of in the Sound over the next 30 years.

Cote said a regional dredging team would be empowered to review each dredge application and evaluate projects and take on a proactive role in developing alternatives to dredging and new technologies to dispose of the material.

The goal is to reduce open water disposal, Cote said.

Disappointing

Asked about complaints that underwater disposal is harmful to marine life and the Sound, Cote dismissed those suggestions.

The Sound is one of the most closely monitored bodies of water in New England, Cote said. There are claims but there is no scientific data to back up the claims.

Material disposed of underwater water is contaminated but does not contain certain heavy metals and substances such as cancer causing PCBS. Sediment thats more highly toxic is buried within harbors and tightly capped to prevent any mobility.

A spokesperson with the New York State Department of State did not immediately comment on the EPA proposals. The DOS has previously opposed the overall dredging plan.

Burch said it is disappointing to say the least that the EPA plans to continue underwater disposal of dredged material.

Its discerning EPA cannot come up with a more sustainable way, Burch said. They want to continue business as usual and dump dredged material in one of our most precious natural resources.

Schain said open water disposal has been proven to be an environmentally sound practice over decades.

EPAs proposal will maintain the availability of an open water site in Eastern Long Island Sound, which is critical for meeting future maintenance dredging needs to support recreational boating, the coastal economy and the continued operations of the U.S. submarine base in Groton, Schain said.
Twenty-one year Gabriel Canestri Jr. has been busted by State Police on 63 motor vehicle charges.

And they caught him through his Instagram account on social media.

Canestri, of Forbes Avenue in New Haven, is accused of driving recklessly on I-95, I-91 and city streets.

In November 2015, troopers initiated an investigation into these dangerous operators in the Bridgeport/ New Haven area.

Troopers were able to locate an Instagram account Reckless_203 which contained a large number of videos showing reckless operation of motorcycles, 4-wheelers and dirt bikes. Using landmarks, troopers were able to identify several locations where violations occurred from Bridgeport to the East Haven on I-95 and I-91.

A search warrant for the Instagram account was applied for and granted by New Haven Superior Court. Upon serving the search warrant, a large amount of digital evidence was seized and analyzed. Through investigative efforts and digital evidence, troopers were able to identify one of the operators/ owner of the Instagram account.

Check out what type of recklless driving Canestri has been arrested for on the Instragram account of Reckless _ 203 HERE.

On Wednesday Canestri was taken into custody and processed at Troop G in Bridgeport. He was held on $50,000 bond.

The charges include 15 counts of reckless endangerment, 23 counts of reckless driving, 24 counts of operating a Motorcycle without face protection and one count of misuse of a registration plate. He was held on $50,000.

Law enforcement personnel throughout the state have been receiving frequent complaints from citizens about reckless motorcycle and ATV riders on our highways and local roads. Unfortunately, many times the offenders are gone before the troopers arrive on scene.

However, troopers are now using social media to identify these operators who endanger the lives of other drivers.
BRIDGEPORT  The Library Board will ask the City Council for an extra $600,000 to maintain staffing and services in the next year.

And in a related move, members have ordered Library Director Scott Hughes to reinstate free programs, from yoga to cooking classes, that he suddenly canceled this week without their knowledge to save money.

The boards decisions at its regular meeting Wednesday capped off several weeks of confusion and miscommunication stemming from the proposed city budget Mayor Joe Ganim released on April 4.

Bridgeports public library system sought an increase from $6.8 million to $7 million. Ganim came back with a $5.8 million offer that would eliminate library positions.

The board said City Hall not only has no authority to tell it how to spend its money, but members complained Wednesday that they were caught off guard because Hughes continues to fail to communicate with them.

Two months ago, Hughes was placed on 60-day probation. The board will discuss his performance and future employment at a special meeting next Wednesday. Hughes was hired in 2007, and while clashing with employees and more recently his board, he has forged relationships with some politicians and community activists, particularly fellow African-Americans.

Hughes pointed a finger at Ganim, whom he supported during last years mayoral campaign, when discussing the proposed staffing cuts.

Who is suggesting cutting librarians? said a puzzled Judge William Holden, a member of the Library Board.

That came from a lot of back-and-forth with the (Ganim) administration, replied Hughes. But, he insisted, At the end of the day, it was their prerogative to propose.

After some discussion, board members decided they could live with a flat-funded library budget of $6.8 million.

Several alarmed library staffers and members of the public turned out at the meeting to call on the board to reverse Ganims personnel cuts.

Were not doing anything right now with payroll, Board Treasurer Tom Errichetti assured them. We had no input as a board into the cuts in Ganims budget.

The board also took action to reverse another budget decision by Hughes that members said they knew nothing about. Earlier this week, he decided to eliminate free programming at the library branches to save money.

One of those impacted was Atara Stroman, a yoga instructor. At the board meeting, Stroman said she learned following her class Tuesday night that, after nearly three years, it would be her last.

I was told there wasnt enough funding, Stroman said. She said her students  some of whom were in the audience  struggle with health problems like asthma, lupus and multiple sclerosis.

It would be a huge disservice to take away yoga and other classes, Stroman said.

Yoga programs being cut  when did that happen? Holden asked the board and Hughes.

I will take the blame for that, Hughes said.

Errichetti said he had asked Hughes to examine current expenses, and did not understand how that translated into cutting programming. Errichetti acknowledged some of the free programs might not be worth the cost, but said they should first be studied by Hughes.

Hughes pledged to immediately reverse his decision and restore the programs.

Theres a lot of confusion, Stroman said in an interview afterward. She credited Hughes, however, for coming up with the idea to host yoga classes in the first place.

But earlier in the meeting Nancy Sweeney, who manages one of the library branches and is a union vice president, urged the board to fire Hughes now that his probation has elapsed.

Lack of leadership, fostering a hostile work environment and no communication with staff has produced an extremely toxic situation resulting in a broken-down institution, Sweeney told the board.

But ex-state Sen. Ernest Newton rose to Hughes defense, saying the black community would not sit back and allow the library directors removal.

Mr. Hughes means a lot to this neighborhood, Newton said, and I would hate to see you all get rid of him.
BRIDGEPORT - A shuttle bus driver for Sacred Heart University was arrested on assault charges Wednesday after police said he attacked a man outside the train station.

Chetayen Brown, 29, was charged with second-degree assault, second-degree reckless endangerment and breach of peace. He was released after posting $25,000 bond.

On Wednesday evening police said they were dispatched to Water Street for an assault outside the train station. When officers got there police said they found a 29-year-old New York man slumped on a bench bleeding heavily from his mouth.

They said he was taken to Bridgeport Hospital to be treated for a broken jaw.

Police said witnesses told them the New York man had been standing in the roadway in front of a Sacred Heart University shuttle bus when the driver, later identified as Brown, got out of the bus and punched the victim in the face knocking him to the ground. The driver then got back in the bus and drove away.

Police said they later went to the university and confronted Brown. They said he told them the victim had been standing in the roadway yelling at him and pointing his middle fingers at him so he got out of the bus and punched the victim.
FAIRFIELD  A month after cases of mumps were identified at Sacred Heart University and a week before students head home for the summer, officials announced the outbreak publicly on Thursday.

Word came from the state Department of Health after a student at another unnamed college campus in the state came down with the communicable viral illness. That student had spent time with an ill student from Sacred Heart.

A few days after spring break we had two cases, then another, then two more came up positive, said Larry Wielk, Sacred Hearts dean of students. In all, there have been 17 suspected and eight confirmed cases at SHU, the latest one last week.

Wielk said at least three of the infected students live in off-campus housing.

Mumps is a highly contagious respiratory disease that is spread through indirect or direct contact with an infected persons nose or throat droplets, such as in a cough or a sneeze. Common symptoms include puffy cheeks, swollen glands or jaw, a fever, headache, muscle aches and fatigue. In some cases, more severe complications can result.

People with mumps can spread the infection for up to two days before and five days after symptoms develop. Symptoms typically appear 16 to 18 days after infection, but this period can range from 12 to 25 days after infection.

More Information Highly contagious Mumps is spread through contact with respiratory droplets from an infected person's nose or mouth. It can cause puffy cheeks, swollen glands or jaw, a fever, headache, muscle aches and fatigue. Health officials advise infected people to stay home and avoid contact with others for at least five days after the swollen glands develop. See More Collapse

Children are routinely vaccinated for mumps at 12 through 15 months of age, and again at 4 through 6 years of age. Vaccination is required for school attendance in Connecticut. But vaccination does not mean people cannot become infected with mumps.

There is no real treatment for the illness. Those infected are kept in isolation for five days. So far, all the students diagnosed with mumps have fully recovered, officials said.

Wielk said that at all times, students and staff on the campus were informed of the mumps outbreak, and that the university Wellness Center has been working with state and Fairfield health officials to minimize transmission.

In recent months, several colleges and universities throughout the country have reported outbreaks of mumps, including schools in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and New York. Harvard University, earlier this week, reported that it had as many as 40 cases.

Wielk said he suspected the illness may have spread among campuses largely during spring break, in early March.

During an impromptu press conference on the Sacred Heart campus Thursday, Anne Mavor, director of health services at the university, called the situation an outbreak and said state guidelines have been followed.

We notified our students and have been doing weekly updates and alerts about mumps, she said.

Commissioner of Health Raul Pino issued a prepared statement on mumps.

With the end of the school semester approaching, and students dispersing to other locations for the summer, it is important for Connecticut residents to take steps to protect themselves against this highly contagious respiratory disease, the statement read. The best protection against mumps is to get vaccinated. In a school setting, it is especially important to wash your hands often and avoid sharing items such as cups and utensils. If you develop symptoms of mumps, stay home and contact your medical provider for advice.

Wielk said that even fully vaccinated people can contract the disease, however. And according to state officials, all of the current cases in Connecticut occurred in people who had been vaccinated against mumps.

Anyone who is experiencing symptoms of mumps should contact a health care provider. If you are ill with mumps, remain home and away from others, especially unvaccinated infants, people with diseases affecting their immune systems, and pregnant women.

Questions about mumps can be directed to the DPH Immunization Program at 860-509-7929. Additional information about mumps is available on the DPH website at www.ct.gov/dph/

immunizations/ .

Sacred Heart is advising undergraduate students who may have mumps to seek care at the Wellness Center, which can be reached at 203-371-7838.
HARTFORD  The memory of Lori Jackson, the Oxford mother of young twins who was murdered by her estranged husband nearly two years ago, was invoked Wednesday as House Democrats pushed through legislation that set off an evening-long debate on gun-owner rights and the safety of women, who are the most frequent victims of domestic violence.

The bill that passed the House late Wednesday  and immediately forwarded to the Senate  would result in the expedited seizure or surrender of firearms and ammunition within 24 hours by people, usually men, against whom restraining orders were filed. They would be allowed expedited court hearings, within seven days, and if found not to be a threat, their weapons and ammunition would be returned within five days.

If evidence of domestic abuse and violence were proven, as under current law, a full restraining order would be issued and the weapon could be held for a year or more.

This is a common sense step forward to strengthen and enhance our gun violence prevention laws, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in a statement after the 104-42 vote was tallied at about 11:23 p.m.. We must protect domestic violence victims - we have a moral obligation to work to prevent needless tragedy. We know that the period of time immediately following a temporary restraining order is critical. Clearly, access to a firearm in that situation can only increase the chances that something tragic might happen. This is about standing up and acting.

Four Republican amendments, including one that would have speeded up for process in which gun owners could retrieve their weapons if a judge were not to issue a permanent restraining order, failed during the more than fine-and-a-half-hour debate. Democrats control the House 87-64.

Twenty Republicans voted in favor of the overall legislation including House Minority Leader Themis Klarides of Derby, Rep. Tom ODea of New Canaan, Rep. David Rutigliano of Trumbull, Rep. Mitch Bolinsky of Newtown, Rep. John Shaban of Redding, Rep. Fred Camillo of Greenwich, Rep. Fred Wilms of Norwalk, Rep. Livvy Floren of Greenwich, Rep. Laura Devlin of Fairfield, Rep. Terrie Wood of Darien, Rep. Gail Lavielle of Wilton, Rep. Brenda Kupchick of Fairfield, Rep. Laura Hoydick of Stratford, and Rep. Stephen G. Harding of Brookfield.

 Today, we have an opportunity as a chamber to create a legal system that protects and values the lives of women, said Rep. William Tong, D-Stamford, who brought the bill to the House floor around 5:40 p.m. Tong traced the history of the states response to domestic violence going back to a Torrington shooting in 1983, which resulted in a civil rights lawsuit against the city by the woman, Tracey Thurman, who survived.

Back then, as late as 1983, it was seen in some communities as permissible or acceptable for a husband to discipline his wife and to physically abuse her, Tong said, adding that a federal court said police had the duty to protect her. Evidence-based research has shown that domestic assaults that involve firearms are 12 times more likely to result in the death of the victim, other than those involving other weapons or bodily force. And women in abusive relationships are five times more likely to be killed if their abuser has access to a firearm.

Tong recalled that Jackson had been unable to have her estranged husband, Scott Gellatly, served with a restraining order because he ventured out of state. He eventually obtained a firearm in Massachusetts and stalked Jackson to her parents Oxford home, where he first shot her mother, Merry Jackson, in the face, before killing the 32-year-old woman. Her 18-month-old twins were sleeping nearby at the time of the May 7, 2014 murder. Gellatly was eventually sentenced to 45 years in prison for murder.

This bill is not about guns, its not about gun control, its not a gun-confiscation bill, said Tong, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee. This bill is really not about due-process rights, its not about the Second Amendment. This bill seeks to improve a legal system, a civil and criminal legal system, a law-enforcement system that not too long ago did not do enough to protect Tracey Thurman. And a system that to this day, to this moment, does not do enough to protect woman like Lori Jackson.

Republicans led by Rep. Rosa Rebimbas, of Naugatuck, and Rep. Rob Sampson, of Wolcott, charged that the proposal threatens the Second Amendment rights of gun owners and other constitutional rights including the lawful seizure of property.

I think its without any doubt, whatsoever, that the intent of this bill truly is to do what we believe is best regarding matters of domestic violence, Rebimbas said. But contrary to the good chairman of the Judiciary Committee, I do believe that the legislation before us, inevitably, is not only about domestic violence. Its about guns, its about due process and the Second Amendment.

Sampson pointed out that existing state law already allows people who fear gun violence to report it to police, who can immediately take weapons.

This bill is so poorly written that, in fact, it is going to end up confusing the court system and leaving people who depend on the system defenseless, Sampson said.
In theory, effective international brand management focuses on rapid expansion and reach. A premium is also placed on ensuring that the growth is consistent with the strategic and tactical goals set back home. But theory doesnt get you to the finish line first. The reality is that successful international expansion requires adaptation.

Despite wanting a brand to be recognizable worldwide, chasing international strategic uniformity rarely works, due to cultural norms, economic climates and political pressures. Effective organizational planning is also a must have. If any of these is managed poorly with a one size fits all strategy, you might find yourself in last place playing catch-up, rather than being a market leader.

This was made quite clear to me during a recent trip to Asia with a group of business students. Ive been taking similar trips for 15 years, but this time I unified the visits through a single theme: international entrepreneurship. We visited senior leaders at over 10 firms, in industries ranging from medical devices to financial derivatives. While each of the companies is identical in trying to maximize revenue and minimize expenses, actual local practices, even within the same industry, proved to be quite dissimilar. Their methods offer good lessons not only for entrepreneurs, but also for any established company looking to expand internationally.

Related: The Sharing Economy Is Absolutely Blowing Up in China

Bigger is not always better.

For U.S. firms, the thought is bigger is always better. This is especially true for those sporting successful track records, particularly when they introduce their latest product. But this approach doesnt automatically translate worldwide. One of Chinas leading for-profit, private healthcare firms is on an expansion tear nationwide and poised to open its 10th office. They promote Western medicine and cater to China-based expats and wealthy Chinese. Given how well theyve done, any future expansion should, in theory, be fast, routine and formulaic. But its not. Unlike in the U.S., where everyone chases as large a customer base as possible, this Chinese venture is taking an almost opposite tack. They consistently begin with a finite number of services. Why? To ensure better control and quality. This gradual approach positively contributes to the firms long-term profitability. And, significantly, it wins points with political officials, since everyone can provide ongoing input on future strategic and tactical adjustments.

Cheap labor is neither a competitive, nor strategic advantage.

Costs vary worldwide, so when an opportunity presents itself, why not immediately chase pockets of cheap labor? Because, business history has proven capitalizing on inexpensive costs never provides a long-term competitive advantage. A U.S. multinational, which has been successfully operating in China for more than 20 years couldnt agree more. For its latest consumer product, its maximizing Chinese labor, but not for the cost savings. Rather, the company is forming a cross-functional worldwide team to increase productivity. Theyve included engineers from the Peoples Republic to signal support for the country through long-term R&D investment and are hoping the perspective of Beijing-based staff will ensure the product is better received by Chinese customers. In fact, executives at headquarters concede Chinese labor costs are practically equal to worldwide standards, so incorporating local input is more of a longer-term cultural investment.

Related: 7 Tips for the International Entrepreneur

Smaller investments are good testing grounds.

So many U.S. startups, and their investors, place a premium on achieving first mover advantage in the biggest market possible from inception and with the largest investment. Its almost business heresy to consider testing a concept on a smaller scale, especially in a strong economic climate. This is the reason that one of my favorite visits in Hong Kong was to a new style investment fund.

The partners impressed me on what types of companies theyre backing and how theyre investing their money. Its nice to see them taking a measured, long-term approach. Real estate and finance moguls and job seekers looking to join behemoth multinational firms, have defined much of Hong Kongs history, so these new entrepreneurial tendencies are welcome. Hong Kongs population of 7 million is also a good test market, and could pave the way for entry into China whose border with Hong Kong is located only a short trip away.

Related: China Remains Rich in Opportunities for Entrepreneurs Who Keep Calm

Ease in international expansion has never been easier. But another key takeaway from this trip is how much Asian business is still focused on interpersonal relationships. Thanks to improvements in technology, nearly any measurement metric worldwide is only a few key clicks away, whether it relates to brand management, expansion and/or implementation. However, to the executives I met, most believed the data management is relegated to second place. They race to win by putting people management first, respecting cultural idiosyncrasies and regularly adjust their strategies based on new information they receive, as opposed to treating it as cast in stone.

Related:

5 Things To Consider For International Expansion

Learning From China's Entrepreneurs

7 Tips for the International Entrepreneur



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Brian A. Pounds / Hearst Connecticut Media

FAIRFIELD  There have been eight confirmed cases of the mumps at Sacred Heart University since an initial outbreak on March 22.

According to a statement from the University, the first ill students have all recovered and the Wellness Center has been working with the Connecticut Department of Public Health and the Fairfield Health Department. The University has implemented public health protocols to minimize transmission.
Oregon Wine Month

Oregon wines are beautiful, delicious and worth seeking out; we all know that, and not just the Pinot noir from Willamette Valley. On that note, congratulations to Ben Thomas of Montinore Estate on his recent accolades from the New York Times wine writer Eric Asimov.

Let us not forget this May to celebrate all the great wines from the other Oregon AVAs. You might want to try a couple of my personal favorites, the rich and complex Walla Walla Bordeaux blends, or perhaps some of the fine Syrah and Tempranillo wines produced in the Southern Oregon AVAs. Albarino, Chardonnay, Gewurztraminer, Muller-Thurgau, Pinot Gris, Riesling, Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc are also fantastic choices when choosing a white wine from Oregon as the temperature increases, and our cuisine becomes a bit lighter.

The party would not be complete without consuming a spring time favorite; Oregon's unique Rose's. They can be the magic that makes a meal work when serving many of the Oregon cuisine staples like Dungeness Crab, local Morel mushrooms, Oregon truffles,halibut, Oregon Lamb, fresh grilled salmon and of course, Mt. Hood Strawberries.

Let's get the Oregon Wine Month party started early, and keep it going strong, all the way to the big celebration that culminates on Memorial Day weekend in Willamette Valley winery tasting rooms and many other Oregon viticultural areas.

The folks over at Oregonwine.org are offering some pretty strong incentives (prizes) that will keep you interested with an inspiring sweepstake that runs through May 31, 2017. I suggest you make sure to enter soon.

I just returned from Languedoc week where I had the pleasure of staying in the Castle at Carcassonne France. When asked by the hosts, winemakers and members of CIVL where we were from, when I replied Oregon almost everyone smiled and queried, "Willamette Valley?"

Proof, the desire for our wines made here in Oregon continues receiving accolades from far beyond the Northwest. Last month there were some competitions where our wines were the stars of the show. Below are a couple of notable events that illuminate Oregon wines allure across the globe.

Over on the East Coast besides the Montinore Estate accolade I previously mentioned, the Hilton Head Food and Wine Festival awarded Best in Show for a red wine from Willamette Valley produced by Old Bridge Cellars Maison l'Envoye released on their Two Messengers label.

Oregon wines extend their allure to reach down under. No, it's not a play on words that references some sexual innuendo. The Aussies really have taken a shine to Pinot noir grown here in Oregon. At the recently held Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, some of our best Willamette Valley wines from Adelsheim, Chehalem, Cristom, Elk Cove, Evesham Wood, Ponzi, Siduri, Stoller Family Estate were poured side by side with excellent selections of Australian Pinot noir from these Victoria wineries Bass Phillip, Bindi, Curly Flat, Eastern Peake, Eldridge Estate, and William Downie. They all make excellent representations of the varietal and I have been fortunate enough to have had the pleasure of tasting all of these producers' wines and wish I could have been there for this event. It is definitely on my schedule for next year, hope to see you there.

In the meantime, enjoy Oregon wines wherever, whenever you can. Today is a gift that is why they call it "the present" so every day is a good day to enjoy the gift of consuming a delicious Oregon wine. Eat well, Drink well, Live well!
Contributed / Contributed photo

FAIRFIELD  Police detectives Wednesday continued their investigation into a report by a Fairfield University student that she was physically and sexually assaulted by an older man on campus Monday night.

A suspect has not been identified and no charges have been filed so far.
On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, announced that one of his former rivals for the GOP presidential nomination, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, will be his running mate as vice president if hes the nominee. So what has she said and done with respect to K-12? Not a whole lot, but during her 2016 campaign, we did get a few details from her about what she envisioned for education policy.

 Fiorina said she would consider putting an end to the U.S. Department of Education last October in an interview with CNBC. That puts her pretty much in line with Cruz, who has vowed to abolish the Education Departmentbut not before directing it to end the Common Core State Standards (something the department does not actually have the power to do.)

 Did someone say common core? Fiorinas position on that has changed over time. She used to be in favor of the standards , and also praised the Obama administrations Race to the Top competitive-grant program when she ran for a U.S. Senate seat in California in 2010. Common core, she said, would help prepare students for the current labor market.

But once the 2016 campaign started heating up, she changed her tune, saying that the common core was being inappropriately influenced by Washington , and that: I dont tend to agree with common core.

 Before the Every Student Succeeds Act was signed into law last December, Fiorina said during an education policy forum last August she preferred the Houses version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization that passed last summer.

Why? Fiorina said she liked that the House version allowed parents to opt their children out of federally mandated tests. Under ESSA, states can have law allowing parents to do just that, but it also requires states to test 95 percent of all students and 95 percent of specific subgroups of students.

 Fiorina has also backed school choice.

Photo: Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina speaks at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in Philadelphia, Friday, June 19, 2015. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
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.
A host of civil rights advocacy groups are urging the U.S. Department of Education to create spending regulations for the Every Student Succeeds Act that create clear and tough requirements for districts to show that federal money is supplementing, and not supplanting, state and local funds.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Education Trust, and the National Urban League are among the signatories of an April 28 letter in which the groups say that despite the bureacratic difficulties that might arise from new, more robust federal spending rules, ensuring that disadvantaged students receive the resources they are due under the law is more important.

The backdrop for this is the tetchy debate over is supplement-not-supplant, part of ESSA that was also included in the No Child Left Behind Act. But a team of negotiators from various groups hashing out rules for ESSA ran into a big pothole when they tried to create supplement-not supplant rules. Why? The language the department proposed to negotiators included a requirement that districts prove their distribution of state and local funds to Title I (relatively low-wealth) schools, on a per-pupil basis, be at least equal to the average per-pupil expenditure in non-Title I schools.

State and local administrators objected vigorously . They said that it would create massive disruptions in district operations by forcing teacher transfers between schools. And they also argued it was a sneaky and improper maneuver by the Education Department to try to equalize per-pupil spending between schools . Ultimately, negotiators failed to reach a consensus on the regulations, so the department is going to go ahead and write its own.

And the 30 civil rights groups on the letter appear to see a lot to like in the administrations proposed regulations, which were not adopted by the committee. Among other things, they argue that districts not abiding by the proposed language would by definition be in violation of the supplement-not-supplant portion of ESSA. They also say that fair funding between schools does not automatically mean equal funding between them, and that districts would still have enough flexibility to use weighted student-funding formulas and budgets that use staffing levels, among other budgetary techniques.

While we appreciate that administrative challenges may arise in the implementation process, we know that the process of moving from inequity to equity or from injustice to justice has never been without disruption, the groups state in the letter.

Read the full letter below:

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
Advocacy groups in favor of computer science education, college preparation, arts education, health and safety programs, counseling programs, and much, more, more have found common cause in trying to persuade Congress to provide as much money as possible for the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants. Thats another name for the brand-new block grant included in the Every Student Succeeds Act. (Read a recent letter on the issue here .)

And it seems that members of Congress who wrote ESSA agree. Last month, the laws lead authors in the HouseReps. John Kline, R-Minn., the chairman of the House education committee, and Bobby Scott, the top Democratsent a letter to lawmakers who oversee K-12 spending asking for full funding ($1.6 billion or more) for the program. You can read the letter here .

Over on the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. and the chairman of the Senate education committee, has also made it clear the block grant is a priority.

Some background: The Obama administration asked for $500 million for the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants in its fiscal 2017 budget request. Thats more than all of the programs included in the fund are getting right now, but still not nearly as much as the $1.6 billion lawmakers recommended in ESSA.

The administration also wants to make the funding competitive within states, while the law envisions it as a formula program.

The problem, of course, is that there isnt a lot spare cash lying around this budget year. Anything considerably less than $1.6 billion isnt going to make much of a difference if its spread to every district. More here .

Kline and Scott had other asks in their letter, all of which reflect ESSAs bipartisan roots. They say theyd like to see the committee provide as much money for Title I as it is getting now, plus as much money as the School Improvement Grant program (which ESSA eliminated) was getting, plus a small increase. (That seems to be more than the Obama administration wanted for Title I.)

The letter also asks for funding to help the Preschool Development Grant program transition from the Education Departmentwhere it has lived up until nowto the Department of Health and Human Services, where it will live once ESSA kicks in fully, in the 2017-18 school year.

Kline hadnt really wanted to include the new preschool program in ESSA at all. But he compromised, as long as the program was moved to HHS, which deals with other early childhood programs, such as Head Start.

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
The Walton Family Foundation has decided to pull its funding in support of charter schools in seven cities as it shifts to a new focus and investments in other communities.

The foundation, which has invested in K-12 initiatives for two decades, has given widespread support to charter schools, boasting that it has granted start-up funds to one in every four charter schools nationwide.

Now, the foundation is leaving seven cities: Albany, N.Y., Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Newark, N.J., and Phoenix. The decision was made last year, according to the foundation.

Our work, and that of our partners, will succeed and sustain when it is in concert with supportive local leadership and in a policy environment that we know is critical to improving education outcomes for the most vulnerable communities, said Marc Sternberg, the foundations director of K-12 education programs, in a statement.

Catalyst Chicago reported April 22 that the foundations decision comes as Chicagos charter schools face a public backlash and some critics have called the withdrawal a victory. Walton has spent more money in Chicago than any other city: $7 million in direct grants between 2009 and 2014, according to Catalyst .

We take no pleasure in this, Sternberg told Catalyst. It is unfortunate that there arent opportunities to help [organizations] like them grow their impact, especially when the need in Chicago is so acute.

In January, the foundation announced a $1 billion investment to include the expansion of school choice in low-income communities, training of teachers and school leaders, and assistance to parents in navigating school choice. The efforts will focus on 13 cities: Atlanta, Boston, Camden, N.J., Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, Tenn., New Orleans, New York, Oakland, Calif., San Antonio, Texas, and Washington, D.C.

(The Walton Foundation provides financial support for Education Weeks coverage of school choice and parent empowerment. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.)

Recent stories about Chicago:

Contact Sarah Tully at stully@epe.org .

Follow @ParentAndPublic for the latest news on schools and parental involvement.

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A pharmaceutical company based in Ireland announced today plans to partner with an American distributor to offer a free carton of the overdose drug Naloxone , also known as Narcan, to every high school in the United States.

Naloxone can help stabilize people suffering from opioid or heroin overdoses until emergency medical help arrives by slowing the drugs effects on their respiratory and nervous systems.

Adapt Pharmas plans to offer a nasal spray version of the drug to high schools builds on its previous work with the National Association of School Nurses to fund efforts to increase awareness of opioid-related risks among students, educators, families and communities, the company said.

Drug overdoses have been an issue of increasing concern in all sectors in recent years as abuse of prescription drugs and heroin climbs across demographic groups. And this concern has spread to public schools , which have responded by adapting their prevention curricula to address the issue and, in some cases, offering additional professional development to school nurses who may have to address drug-related issues. Some states have also passed laws requiring schools to stock overdose drugs.

Responding to increasing interest in Naloxone in school settings, the National Association of School Nurses Board of Directors adopted a position statement on Naloxone Use in the School Setting, The Role of the School Nurse in the summer of 2015.

About 2.2 percent of respondents to a nationally representative 2013 survey of high school students said they had used heroin at least once in their lifetimes, according to the most recent data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On the same survey, 17.8 percent of respondents said they had taken a prescription drug without a doctors permission, and 22.1 percent of respondents said theyd been offered, sold, or given any type of illegal drug on school property.

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Theresa May, not often given to much show, read the Hillsborough determinations in full to a silent Commons

Theresa May, not often given to much show, read the Hillsborough determinations in full to a silent Commons. She moved slowly through the 14 questions which had been put to jurors, plus the single-word answers they gave which cemented this dreadful scandal. As she did so, the Home Secretary's voice failed her slightly. It cracked, lifting from her larynx with the noise of old parchment being folded flat on a spine.

Repeatedly Mrs May lifted her face to speak those verdicts while looking bleakly at the House. This had a dramatic effect: of emphasis, of accruing force. Skilfully she was laying bare the certitude of the jury who sat through 296 days of evidence. How slowly modern 'justice' grinds. Today's jurors need patient employers.

Many MPs noted that the inquests came at the end of a 27-year campaign. If you want an idea of how long ago that is politically, the Home Secretary in April 1989 was Douglas Hurd.

Mrs May's statement followed an untidy PMQs at which David Cameron savaged Labour on its anti-semitism problem. If the Tories are playing this issue hard, it may have as much to do with the coming London mayoral election as it does with noble principle.

Front-bench exchanges at PMQs continued until 12.21pm. That left just nine minutes for backbench interventions. Speaker Bercow duly let the session over-run. Mrs May's Hillsborough statement was therefore late to start  another small wait for Merseyside.

Mrs May was sympathetic yet not sentimental. You could almost call her tone prime ministerial. It was hard to imagine a George Osborne or Boris Johnson delivering this statement with such judicious grace.

'No one should have to suffer the loss of their loved ones through such appalling circumstances and no one should have to fight year after year, decade after decade, in search of the truth,' she said. On the Labour benches, Steve Rotheram (Liverpool Walton) shielded his eyes from general view. He later wiped a tear from his right cheek. The former Anglican bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, watched from the peers' gallery.

Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham said: 'This cover-up went right to the top. It persisted because of collusion between elites in politics  on both sides  police and the media. But this Home Secretary stood outside that. I express my sincere admiration for the stance she has consistently taken in righting this wrong.' Mr Burnham's speech became trenchant and was rewarded with applause  something the Commons generally avoids.

It included a complaint that Hillsborough families had 'not been able to show any emotion' during the inquests. This was taken up later by Mark Durkan (SDLP, Foyle) who said victims and their families often found the legal process wounding. Arguments voiced at legal hearings were 'no less cruel from the lips of paid counsel', said Mr Durkan, who also gulped back tears. He may be correct in this. But must there not be something flinty about a court of law? Hard though it sounds, must justice not be above emotion?

Louise Haigh (Lab, Sheffield Heeley), who has worn police uniform, said coppers must no longer confer with one another when preparing statements.

Many MPs noted that the inquests came at the end of a 27-year campaign. If you want an idea of how long ago that is politically, the Home Secretary in April 1989 was Douglas Hurd

Maria Eagle (Lab, Garston & Halewood) felt there was 'a deep issue here about our legal system'.

Frank Field (Lab, Birkenhead) noted that supposedly trustworthy national institutions had come out of this scandal badly but 'one institution shines through gloriously  that of the family'. Mike Kane (Lab, Wythenshawe) suggested that those who lied about Hillsborough would have to account for themselves at the gates of Hell.

Peter Dowd (Lab, Bootle) noted that people not just from Liverpool but also from other towns and counties suffered that terrible day. 'They are now part of the Merseyside family,' said Mr Dowd, struggling to control his feelings.
Tonight, as for many months past, thousands of unaccompanied child refugees from war zones, some just six years old or even younger, will be sleeping in appalling squalor on the streets or in the makeshift camps of supposedly prosperous and civilised Europe.

Many will be cold, hungry and frightened. As the victims of people traffickers who have them at their mercy, all will be hugely vulnerable to sexual abuse and other forms of vile exploitation.

Indeed, the conditions in which they subsist are a stain on our European partner nations, which have shirked their treaty obligations to process asylum claimants at their point of entry into the EU, accept responsibility for those who qualify and deport those who do not.

The House of Commons rejected a motion on Monday to provide shelter to 3,000 unaccompanied minors

David Cameron wants to offer places to refugees in locations next to war zones such as Turkey, pictured

Mr Cameron fears offering shelter to EU-based migrants would encourage more to cross the Mediterranean

It cannot be stressed too strongly that, under international law, the UK has no duty to these children, however wretched or desperate they may be. For this reason, and for others besides, this paper fully understands ministers reluctance to open the doors of these overcrowded islands to those who have no legal right to our hospitality.

Equally, we recognise why on Monday night, the Commons voted by a majority of 18 to reject a Labour proposal that Britain should offer a welcome to 3,000 of these children travelling alone.

But while we understand the arguments for hardening our hearts, we believe that in the exceptional circumstances of this crisis, it would be wrong to do so. True, we have no legal or treaty obligation to lift a finger to help. But our moral and humanitarian duty cannot so easily be shrugged off.

Let the Mail be absolutely clear. Nobody has been more robust than this paper in giving voice to public concerns over the impact of mass, unrestricted immigration on the social fabric of this country.

For our pains, we have been viciously attacked as racist by a bien pensant liberal elite, cocooned in their prosperous postal districts, who have never had to compete for low-paid jobs, affordable housing, school places or hospital beds with migrants who have arrived in unprecedented numbers since Tony Blair threw open our borders.

Indeed, mass migration has been nothing but a bonus for our sneering critics, parading their right-on consciences while they enjoy all the benefits of cheap nannies, plumbers and office cleaners.

So, no, nobody appreciates better than the Mail why so many decent people in this country believe we simply cannot take more immigrants, no matter how young or vulnerable.

Nor for one moment do we question the motives of David Cameron and those MPs who joined him in rejecting the Oppositions plan. Still less do we endorse yesterdays intemperate attack on the Prime Minister by Labours Yvette Cooper, who accused him of putting this House and this country to shame.

On the contrary, Mr Cameron has nothing whatever to be ashamed of. In his approach to this crisis, he has repeatedly shown himself anxious to offer the most practical help possible, while he and British taxpayers have devoted more resources to saving and improving war refugees lives than almost all our partners put together.

In particular, the Prime Minister has been careful to avoid the catastrophic mistake made by Angela Merkel, when she recklessly promised homes in Germany to 800,000 migrants.

Her motives may have been at least partially selfless (though Germany, unlike Britain, suffers an acute labour shortage). But the effects of her open invitation were as tragic as they were predictable.

In the inevitable stampede to enter Europe from Africa and the Middle East, countless men, women and children drowned in people traffickers unseaworthy boats.

It is a harsh judgment, but nonetheless true, that Mrs Merkels misguided benevolence has left her with blood on her hands.

Clearly, Mr Cameron fears that if Britain were to promise a welcome to thousands of unaccompanied children, this would have similar unintended consequences.

The risk is that many more desperate parents would send their young to make the dangerous journey alone, in the hope of claiming their human right to join them later. Hence, the Prime Ministers insistence that we should limit our offer of asylum to refugees in camps adjoining war zones (indeed, it is much to his credit that he is investing so much in improving conditions in those camps  at last, a respectable use for Britains bloated overseas aid budget).

But while the Mail respects his argument, we believe that the plight of these unaccompanied children now in Europe  hundreds of them on our very doorstep in the Channel ports of France  has become so harrowing that we simply cannot turn our backs.

It is not their fault, after all, that theyve been sent halfway round the world alone to search for a better life, often after seeing family members slaughtered.

As Tory MP Stephen Phillips put it so movingly in the Commons, before joining four of his party colleagues in voting for Labours motion: These children are already in Europe, and they are at risk as I stand here and speak to the House.

They are alone and far from their families. They are frequently without help or access to those who might help or protect them. Their lives are miserable and brutish, and at least half of them have experienced or seen violence that we can only dream of in our nightmares  or rather, hope that we do not.

Every instinct of our hearts must surely be to play our part, looking after at least some of these neglected children until, God willing, conditions become safe enough to return them to their families in their homelands.

David Cameron, pictured has nothing to be ashamed of with this issue, unlike others such as Angela Merkel

As for the danger of encouraging more refugees to send their children on the perilous journey alone, the Mail sees why Mr Cameron is worried. But with the right safeguards in place, and rigorously adhered to, its a danger that can and must be surmounted.

First, it is essential that any offer of asylum to unaccompanied children in the Channel coast camps, many of whom have relatives in Britain, must be a one-off amnesty. A limit must be set on numbers, and stuck to.

To avoid cruelly raising false hopes, it must also be spelt out with absolute clarity that the offer is restricted to children who have already journeyed across Europe, and it will not be repeated or kept open.

Clearly, strict checks must also be made to establish that those granted asylum are genuine refugees from war zones, and really the age they claim to be. Meanwhile, the ultimate aim  again, to be spelt out clearly  must be to return the great majority to their home countries.

This is why the priority must remain for the EU to follow Britains example and redouble its efforts to build civilised refugee camps in the Middle East, as close to displaced families homes as safety allows.

This paper knows that Mr Cameron is a proud and often stubborn politician, who doesnt like to be seen to change his mind.

But on Tuesday night, the House of Lords offered him a painless opportunity to have second thoughts, when it voted by a majority of 107 to amend the Governments proposals.

Under the Lords admirable and moral compromise, the UK would agree to accept unaccompanied child refugees already in Europe, with the numbers and other details of the scheme to be fixed by the Home Secretary. This paper hopes the Prime Minister will accept the amendment without further argument.

True, the pressures of our relentless population growth mean he cannot afford to make more than a gesture  accepting perhaps a few hundred of the most vulnerable lone children from the camps of Calais and Dunkirk. But every sinew of our hearts tells us its a gesture that must be made  while every child we take will mean a life of hope in place of despair.

Mr Cameron should consider that of all the countries in the Europe, Britain has the longest established tradition of offering sanctuary to refugees from war and oppression.

He may also care to reflect on the deep irony that nothing makes it harder for us to honour that noble tradition than our membership of the EU. For the rules of free movement have obliged us to give homes to millions of settlers from the safe countries of Europe, leaving precious little room for those in real need of our compassion.
The new, virulent strain of anti-semitism is driven by an unholy alliance between militant Islam and the Fascist Left. No, I didnt write that yesterday, I wrote it in this newspaper nine years ago to accompany a TV documentary I made called The War On Britains Jews?

The question mark was at Channel 4s insistence, but Im not complaining. Back then it was heresy to suggest that anyone on the Left could be guilty of discriminating against any minority community. If it took a question mark to get the programme broadcast, that was fine by me.

My thesis was that self-styled anti-Zionists were using their visceral hatred of Israel to intimidate Jews in this country. Does anybody today, outside of the lunatic fringe which now runs the modern Labour Party, doubt that I got it right?

Ken Livingstone, pictured, would have been Labour leader if he had been an MP after the last election

Naz 'the Nazi' Shah, pictured, supported the transportation of Jews in Israel to the United States

The difference is that the malignant anti-semitism of the Far Left has gone mainstream. For the past couple of months there has been a disturbing upsurge of anti-Jewish sentiment from so-called liberals at the heart of the Labour establishment.

It has come to a head with revolting remarks about Jews  first from Naz Shah, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, and then, with depressing predictability, from former London Mayor Ken Livingstone.

Naz by name, Nazi by nature, was revealed to have backed the transportation of Jews in Israel to the United States. Red Ken rallied to her defence by claiming, absurdly, that Hitler was a Zionist.

But we shouldnt waste too much time on Nasty Naz  even though it would be wrong to dismiss her as just another dopey bird with a fatal Facebook addiction.

Jew-baiting is what it takes to get elected in the Israel Free Zone of Bradford West these days. How else did she manage to unseat PLO puppet George Galloway? Her views are largely consistent with vast numbers of her Muslim constituents. And dont forget that until this week she was a member of a Commons committee investigating anti-semitism.

You couldnt make it up.

Whats most hypocritical  nay, hilarious  is the reaction of the Labour leadership. Naz and Livingstone have both had their membership of the party suspended, as the Corbynistas have belatedly ruffled their political petticoats like a Victorian maiden aunt confronted with an uncovered chair-leg. Theyve come over all Lady Bracknell.

An anti-semite? In the Labour Party? Quickly, fetch the smelling salts, Chlamydia!

Shah was until recently a bag-carrier for Red Kens old Greater London Council running mate John McDonnell. Back in the Eighties, Livingstone and McDonnell were joined at the hip  united in their pro-IRA, pro-Palestinian terrorists, anti-American, anti-Israel, Wolfie Smith-style socialism.

Just how extreme do you have to be to be too extreme for John McDonnell? Its a bit like Gazza having a quiet word about your drinking.

What you have to remember here is that Livingstone is the life and soul of the new three-quid-a-pop Labour Party. As I wrote a few months ago, the only reason Jeremy Corbyn got elected leader is because Livingstone wasnt on the ticket. Had Red Ken been an MP last summer, he would have waltzed home.

The only surprise is that anyone is surprised at Livingstones rabid anti-semitism. Hes got plenty of history, not least the time he compared a Jewish reporter from Londons Evening Standard to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Hes obsessed with Hitler.

When accused of anti-semitism, he resorts to semantics, just as he did yesterday. And until now, his brothers-in-arms have been happy to indulge him and the rest of the Jew-haters in the party.

Consider Corbyns initial reaction to the Nazi Shah comments, which he dismissed as historic.

This is a man who sits on the front bench alongside his plus-sized deputy, Nonce Finder General Tom Watson  a muck-raking, dirt-throwing, smear-monger who has spent the past few years accusing assorted Tories of historic sex crimes dating back decades and using his position to demand full-scale police investigations.

Yet as far as Corbyn was concerned, anti-Jewish remarks made by a Labour politician two years ago were historic and thus unworthy of further comment.

Again, you couldnt, etc . . .

But what else should we expect? Im prepared to concede that Corbyn doesnt consider himself an anti-semite  despite counting among his friends the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah, whose sole purpose in life is wiping Jews off the face of the earth.

He spent most of yesterday hiding behind the sofa as the crisis unfolded and the Boys In The Bubble went into a feeding frenzy. Assorted Labour MPs came out of the woodwork to demand strong action against Livingstone and insist that he wasnt representative of their party.

Two questions. Where have they been for the past ten years? And what makes them think that Livingstones abhorrent views are in any way unrepresentative?

When I was making my documentary, almost nobody would come forward to speak out publicly. There was one hero prepared to put his head above the parapet  the Bassetlaw MP John Mann. And yesterday he was again front and centre in denouncing Livingstone  a crime for which he was reprimanded by the chief whip.

Also on that programme was the columnist Nick Cohen, who has always considered himself of the Left, but was horrified at the direction his comrades were taking. Cohen, who lives in Islington, North London, identified what he described as dinner party anti-semitism  insidious chatter ostensibly aimed at Israel but actually designed to denigrate all Jews.

My TV show was originally designed to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Cable street in 1936

The North London dinner party brigade are now in charge of Labour, bolstered by embittered, anti-Israel social media class warriors.

Islington is Corbynista Central. The kind of views expressed by Nazi Shah and Red Ken are considered quite respectable in such circles.

Primarily, they are motivated by blind hatred of Israel, and bovine worship of Islamist terrorists in the Palestinian territories. But there are also political considerations.

The Lefts world view is divided into victims and oppressors. They consider the Jewish community not only to be successful, and therefore oppressors, but also pro-Israel, which is the worst crime in the world in their book.

Plus, in electoral terms, Britains Jewish population is outnumbered ten to one by Muslims. Yet historically, British Jews supported Labour and vice versa.

My programme was originally designed to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, when Jews, trades unionists and Labour activists stood together to repel a march by Oswald Mosleys Blackshirts through Londons East End.

Dave the peacock has been terrorising the people of Durham causing to lose out on their sleep

These days the real fascists are on the Far Left. And increasingly at the poisoned heart of the Labour Party. Maybe this is the week that everyone finally woke up to that fact.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of Cable Street. Lets hope it also marks the end of the War On Britains Jews.

A village in County Durham is being terrorised by peacocks, who are accused of holding all-night parties and keeping residents awake.

More than 100 people in Ushaw Moor have complained about loss of sleep caused by constant screeching, damage to cars and bedding plants, as well as widespread defecation, and have signed a petition to get rid of them.

Cock of the walk is a large peacock called Dave, who struts around as if he owns the place.

Females have been spotted grooming themselves in windows and patio doors, as they compete for Daves attention.

We are not told the male-to-female ratio, but it isnt hard to imagine fights breaking out after a hard nights partying.

That might explain some of the screeching as Cawl Me Dave asserts his supremacy.

Oi, are you looking at my bird!

Pixie Balls-Cooper has been on her hind legs again, urging us to take in more migrants.

The Daily Mail agrees with her, at least when it comes to giving sanctuary to children.

So perhaps she can finally tell us when she is going to keep her promise to welcome some Syrian refugees into one of her own two beautiful homes.

Plod goes off the cliff

The Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, David Crompton, has been suspended over the way his force conducted itself during the Hillsborough inquest. He claimed that unless the families of the 96 victims could be shown to be untruthful, the police would be roadkill.

Remember that this is the same constabulary which two years ago launched a highly publicised, mob-handed raid on Cliff Richards home, with a BBC helicopter in tow, as part of the deranged historic sex crimes investigation.

The strain is clearly getting to Cliff, judging by those photos of him in New York this week. And he still hasnt been charged with anything.

Today its Cromptons turn to be hounded and experience some sleepless nights.

Good. Now he knows what roadkill feels like.
Meet the British illustrator giving stars of the screen the ultimate makeover - by dressing them in designer threads.

Benjamin Seidler, from London, has made it his mission to dress our favourite movie characters in high-end couture - with hilarious results.

The artist uses cut-outs of catwalk outfits and superimposes them onto film stills using Photoshop, giving them a whole new lease of life via his Instagram page which has just under 2,000 followers and growing.

Scroll down for video

Benjamin's interpretation of the 'plastics' on Mean Girls went viral; it saw Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith don retro smock dresses from luxury French brand Vetements as they paraded down their high school hallway

Bridget Jones has her infamous 'bunny suit' swapped for a tasselled, pearl-encrusted jacket from Balmain (left) while Legally Blonde's Elle Woods dons a wide-shouldered PVC mac from Comme des Garcons (right)

In Benjamin's world, anyone from Bridget Jones to Carrie Bradshaw can be transformed into a fashion doyenne - donning Balmain, Prada and Comme des Garcons.

The artist perfected his technique after his interpretation of the 'plastics' - a group of popular high school girls from the 2004 film Mean Girls - went viral.

It saw Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith don retro smock dresses from luxury French brand Vetements as they paraded down the school hallway.

Benjamin turned to illustration after studying fashion design at Central Saint Martins and then architecture at Cambridge.

He has illustrated for Harper's Bazaar and The New York Times, and designed for Acne, Asprey, Prada and Smythson.

Working his magic: One famous scene from Titanic sees Jack don a Vetements hoodie and Rose toting a jaunty Balenciaga tote - adding some much-needed comic relief to the tense scene

Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw is given an elaborate ruffled Comme des Garcons coat (left) as well as a knee-length Marc Jacobs jumper dress (right) - while Miranda dons an oversized pusssy bow

One of his recent creations sees Legally Blonde's Elle Woods don a wide-shouldered PVC mac from Comme des Garcons, while Bridget Jones has her infamous 'bunny suit' swapped for a tasselled, pearl-encrusted jacket from Balmain.

A famous scene from Titanic - where Cal accuses Jack of stealing the valuable Heart of the Ocean diamond necklace - sees the doomed protagonist don a Vetements hoodie while his heroine totes a jaunty Balenciaga tote, adding some much-needed comic relief to the tense scene.

Benjamin has also given the cast of 1988 romance Working Girl a full makeover, ditching their 1980s clobber in favour of some vintage Gucci pieces. Harrison Ford dons some oversized spectacles while Sigourney Weaver and Melanie Griffith sport some statement knitwear and headgear.

Benjamin gives the cast of Working Girl a full makeover: Harrison Ford (centre) dons some oversized spectacles while Sigourney Weaver and Melanie Griffith sport some statement knitwear and headgear

Is nothing sacred? The illustrator gives the cast of The Crucible some practical sportsgear to keep warm in (left) and dresses femmes fatales Thelma and Louise in head-to-toe Prada (right)

Even JK Rowling's Harry Potter series is not safe, with Professor McGonagall dressed in blue tartan Loewe

And as if she needed any help in the fashion stakes, Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw is given not one but two dramatic makeovers - one in an elaborate ruffled Comme des Garcons coat, and one with a knee-length Marc Jacobs jumper dress - while her friend Miranda dons an oversized pussy bow.

Benjamin has even worked his magic on the characters from Romy and Michele's High School Reunion - dressing a decidedly unimpressed Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow in Hedi Slimane for Saint Laurent.

He has also given the cast of The Crucible some practical sportsgear, and dressed Thelma and Louise in head-to-toe Prada.

Catherine Zeta-Jones's turn in Chicago is brightened up thanks to a pastel-coloured Chloe dress (left), and Mia Farrow's appearance in the Rosemary's Baby is dressed in a powder pink Simone Rocha creation (right)

The artist has even had a go at the characters from Romy and Michele's High School Reunion - dressing a decidedly unimpressed Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow in Hedi Slimane for Saint Laurent

Meanwhile, Catherine Zeta-Jones's turn in Chicago is brightened up thanks to a pastel-coloured Chloe swing dress, and Mia Farrow's appearance in the 1968 classic Rosemary's Baby is dressed in a powder pink Simone Rocha creation.

Even JK Rowling's Harry Potter series is not safe from Benjamin's magic, with Professor McGonagall dressed in tartan Loewe.

Benjamin told MailOnline: 'The key word about these illustrations is 'parody.' But they are positive parodies, that I hope make people think about fashion and the films they love in a new light - or say something more about either the fashion brand or the film.'

He added: 'I love films and I love fashion, so I wanted to see if I could link them and get involved in them in some way, to make them personal and relevant to now.
'Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot', so said Clarence Thomas, an American lawyer. Very apt!

So just how perfect is your politesse?

Can you hob nob with the creme de la creme, or are you more Crystal Palace than Buckingham Palace? Take my quick quiz to find out.

William Hanson (pictured) has devised the ultimate quiz to test how perfect your politesse is

1) When invited to a dinner at 7.30pm at a private house, what time should you arrive?

a) 7.20pm

b) 7.30pm

c) 7.40pm

2) When served as a first course, which is the correct way to eat asparagus?

a) With a knife and fork

b) With just a fork (in the right hand)

c) With the fingers

When leaving the table during a meal with the intention to return where should you leave your napkin? On the table, chair or on the floor?

3) You have returned home from a weekend stay at your friend's house. Correctly, how long should the thank you letter be?

a) One side

b) Two sides

c) Doesn't matter so long as there is a thank you letter

4) The Duke of Decorum dies. When can his eldest son start using his late father's title?

a) The moment the Duke dies

b) Once the will has been read

c) When the funeral ends

Are opened toed shoes acceptable for indoor evening events?

5) When leaving the table during a meal but with every intention of returning, the napkin should be placed where?

a) On the table

b) On the chair

c) On the floor

6) When dining with The Queen and you notice the Monarch has finished, you should

a) Finish too, regardless of whether you still have more to eat

b) Quickly finish what you can on your plate

c) Carry on eating until The Queen looks bored

7) For smart, indoor evening events, open-toed shoes are acceptable. True or false?

a) True

b) False

8) What does 'place a table' (French) mean in English?

a) Seating plan

b) Table setting

c) Room layout

d) Sideboard

9) The top tier of a wedding cake is traditionally reserved for what?

a) The bride & groom to consume in their new house

b) The mother of the bride

c) The Christening of the first-born

d) To feed the waiting staff

10) Candles should never be lit before what time of day?

a) 4pm

b) 5pm

c) 6pm

d) 7pm

Who is the top tier of a wedding cake reserved for in British tradition? For the bride and groom to eat in their new home, the mother of the bride, the christening of their first born or for the waiting staff?

11) The flap on the envelope for social correspondence (birthday cards, thank you letters, invitations) should be what shape?

a) Inverted triangle

b) Rectangular

12) In Britain, it is correct to present a business card in which hand?

a) Left

b) Right

c) With both

1) Answer: C  it is the custom to arrive ten minutes late to social engagement. This allows the host a little breathing space and shows that you aren't too keen. Showing up early is almost as bad as showing up late!

2) Answer C  so long as the Hollandaise sauce is not served already poured over the asparagus, this is a finger food. In the UK it is picked up and eaten with the left hand.

3) Answer B  Although a short thank you letter is better than none at all, traditionally one would write two pages by way of a thank you letter to your hosts. Not two sides of A4, social correspondence paper is roughly what we now call A5 in size.

4) Answer C  you are not socially dead until after the funeral and it is customary for eldest sons to wait until after this before they style themselves with their new title.

5) Answer B  the napkin on the arm or seat of the chair signals to staff and any guests that see it that you will be returning. In formal dining, however, you do not leave the table at all  unless you are the host/cook and you need to return to the kitchen.

6) Answer A  Correct protocol means that all diners should stop eating within a few moments of The Monarch. Queen Victoria was a very quick eater and also particularly rude and would not even care if the end of the table hadn't even been served by the time she had finished  meaning a lot of people went hungry. Our current Queen is also a quick eater but much more considerate to her guests, thankfully! But still, when she stops eating, you stop too!

Candles should only be lit after a certain time but do you know what hour it is?

7) Answer B  Always closed-toe shoes for formal evening events.

8) Answer A  If you want to impress, ask you hostess what the place a table is before entering the dining room. If you are the male guest of honour, expect to be seated to the right of the hostess; the female guest of honour, to the right of the host. Smart houses will ensure the guests are placed boy-girl-boy-girl.

9) Answer C  Traditionally, wedding cakes are fruitcakes, often with nuts  these ingredients being used to symbolise fertility. In America, the top tier is reserved for the couple's first wedding anniversary, but in the UK it is reserved for the birth of the first-born. Thankfully, fruitcakes keep for a long time if stored correctly!

10) Answer C  candles are evening only accessories. Candles are lit and ladies' hats are removed at six o'clock.

11) Answer A  social letters need triangular flaps, whereas all business correspondence needs straight-edged rectangular flaps.

12) Answer B  in Britain and Europe we present business cards in our right hand, the text of the card facing the recipient. In Asia business cards are presented (and received) with both hands.
A college student has told how she overcame the horrific trauma of being raped by another woman during spring break.

Alaina Leary, 23, a postgraduate student from Boston, says she was sexually assaulted by a female student during a party in a friend's dormitory when she was 18.

Writing about the experience in Cosmopolitan, she explained that for months she 'repressed' her ordeal but later found the courage to speak out and write about it - inspired by her late mother who was also raped.

Survivor: Alaina Leary, 23, pictured, has told how she rebuilt her life after she was raped by a female student when she was 18

Attacked: The postgraduate student, pictured, from Boston was visiting a friend at her college during spring break when she says she was raped by another woman

Brave: Inspired by her late mother, pictured with Alaina, the postgraduate student found the courage to speak out about her experience through writing

The editor and social media director, who is studying publishing and writing at Emerson College, said the life-changing assault took place during her first spring break while visiting a friend she had not seen for years at another college.

She said she was not drinking herself but there were 'bottles of alcohol and mixers everywhere' as the party overflowed into nearby dorm rooms.

Although she did not have 'a ton in common' with the strangers, she said everyone seemed 'kind and friendly'.

But between 10 and 11pm, she said her 'vision began to blur' and she started to feel 'super-drunk and half-asleep' despite having consumed no alcohol.

'My vision began to blur, and my thoughts stopped making sense. I would be thinking something, and then my mind would drop off mid-thought, and I would forget exactly where I was and how I'd gotten there,' she wrote in her article about the experience.

'I remember feeling somewhat like I was super-drunk and half-asleep, even though I'd had no alcohol. I also remember being in a small bathroom down the hall from the dorm room with no idea how I got there, just staring in the mirror.'

She then recounts being taken into another room where she said she was assaulted.

Traumatic: She said she started feeling 'super-drunk and half-asleep' and was led into a room by a fellow female student where she was raped

Determined: Alaina said she 'knew that I had to speak up about what happened to me'

'Later, I was led into an empty dorm room by one of the female party-goers, where she raped me,' wrote Alaina.

Afterwards, Alaina, who now lives with her girlfriend in the Boston area, said she did not share her story and 'tried to pretend it was a dream'.

When she was a teenager, Alaina said she thought rape 'was the worst thing anyone could survive'. She said she would hear her mother, who died before her daughter's assault, crying.

I knew that I had to speak up about what happened to me, even though it hadn't worked for my mom

She wrote: 'Some close relatives and friends hadn't believed her when she revealed what had happened, so she had had to live with the trauma alone, writing letters in her journal to people who would never read them.'

After her mother's death, Alaina found her journals which she said included a number of letters to her sister about how she felt.

Her mother's inability to share her story is what helped inspire her to speak out.

She wrote: 'How desperate she was to connect with someone who believed her. She felt misunderstood and trapped; she never got to heal.

'I knew that I had to speak up about what happened to me, even though it hadn't worked for my mom.'

But when she went to report the assault to the campus police at the college she said she was asked a series of 'unnecessary questions' about her clothes, whether she had been drinking and her sexual orientation and told that they could not help.

She was told that because she was not a student of the college, there were no witness or 'physical evidence' it would be difficult to 'prove' her assault.

Love: Alaina, pictured as a young child with her late mother, tried to report the attack but was not met with a positive response

Voice: She found a support group which helped her talk about her experiences and she has since found the strength to write about them

'I imagined what my mother must have felt - not having someone to really reach out to,' she wrote.

She moved colleges, changed majors, gave up her lifelong passion, writing, and said she had 'just about given up on finding a way to deal with the trauma'.

Then she came across a support group where she told her story and started going to regular sessions out of which she found the courage to write about her assault.

The following semester, she changed her major back to writing and wrote a poem about being a survivor of sexual assault.

My mom died before I was raped, but I think if she were still here, she would listen to my words and not feel so broken

She following year she read a 'fictionalized memoir' about being a survivor aloud to her class and was met by compliments from people who had survived similar experiences.

Although she said it is 'difficult work' to write about her traumatic experience, she said it also makes her 'feel stronger and freer'.

She said when she writes she thinks about watching her mother from the stairs as she wrote in her notebook.

'She died before I was raped, but I sometimes think if she were still here, she would listen to me read my words and not feel so broken,' she wrote. 'That we might share our stories and become survivors together.'
Tennessees department of education terminated its contract with Measurement Inc. Wednesday after a series of technical glitches, according to The Tennesseean. In addition, the state has suspended testing for grades 3-8 after the company was unable to send the paper test to several schools.

Measurement Inc.'s performance is deeply disappointing, Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said in a statement . Weve exhausted every option in problem-solving with this vendor to assist them in getting these tests delivered. Districts have exceeded their responsibility and obligation to wait for grade 3-8 materials, and we will not ask districts to continue waiting on a vendor that has repeatedly failed us.

Tennessee has been a leader in its commitment to incorporate standardized test scores into its school accountability system and teacher evaluations.

Teachers are given bonuses based on test scores, students grades are based on how well they perform on the test, and the state has taken over several schools in Memphis and Nashville mostly based on the schools performance on the exam.

This was Measurement Inc.'s first year administering the states new TNReady exam. On the first day of the exam, computer screens froze and servers shut down, forcing the states superintendent to call off the test. She later placed a moratorium on using the test scores to determine how well teachers perform in the classroom. And the state-run Achievement School District said recently that it will hold off a year before taking over any more schools.

I spoke to Measurement Inc.'s president, Henry Scherich in February, a few weeks after the technical glitches. He said hiccups are bound to happen when placing tests online and characterized the state departments reaction at the time as overreactive. He seemed especially flustered that McQueen would suspend incorporating test scores in teachers evaluations.

Thats a policy decision that has nothing to do with whether or not our online system works well or not, he said. However, Im sure there was a big sigh of relief around the state from educators when they learned it wasnt going to be part of their evaluation system.

The state has paid $1.6 million of the $105 million contract, according to the Tennesseean.

In Memphis, the state has taken over several schools and launched an all-out war with the district over students and the state funding that comes with them. The exam has caused a lot of angst for the districts teachers who are at risk of losing their jobs if their schools test scores dip too low. Dorsey Hopson, the districts superintendent, said this afternoon they wont be continuing their exams.

State suspending 3-8 TNReady test. Giving districts option to continue testing. SCS WILL NOT continue 3-8 testing this year. More to come.  Dorsey Hopson, II (@SCSSupt) April 27, 2016

A friend who teaches at a charter school there told me this afternoon, l feel like Im in someones education reform horror film.

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.
Ms Lo complained to the theme park but they have not responded to her

A Movie World employee told her she had to go to the toilets

A mum has spoken out after being told by a staff member at Australian theme park Movie World that she had to breastfeed in the disabled toilet.

Mimi Lo, from the Gold Coast, was breastfeeding her daughter in a restaurant at Movie World when a staff member asked her to leave the area and feed her child in the disabled toilet instead.

The 37-year-old said she was upset by the treatment she received from the staff member, who refused to even look at her and instead spoke to her mother.

Descrimination: A mum has been ordered out of a restaurant and told to use a disabled toilet to breastfeed at a theme park on the Gold Coast

Shocking: Mimi Lo was breastfeeding her daughter (above) on April 16 when an employee instructed her she had to go to the toilets

'He wasnt speaking to me directly, he had his hand over his eyes blocking his vision from looking at me,' Ms Lo told Daily Mail Australia.

'Instead he was talking to my mum next to me. He said I should not [breastfeed] here, I should go the room behind the one we were in.'

When Ms Lo go to the room she was was directed to, she discovered the employee was referring to a disabled toilet. 'I agreed to go to the room but then I realised it was a toilet. I was shocked, and then I was really upset,' she said.

'I was shocked, and then I was really upset': Ms Lo said she was upset by the employee. Her family left the park shortly after, only an hour after paying more than $220 in entry fees

'I don't feel comfortable outside': The mum-of-three is now too embarrassed to breastfeed outside her home

The mum-of-three then ended up leaving the park only an hour after having spent over $220 in entry fees.

She says she is now too embarrassed to breastfeed her daughter in public after the incident at the theme park.

'Now I just dont feed my baby outside, even when she needs it,' Ms Lo said. 'I go to my car or stay home. I dont feel comfortable outside.'

Ignored: Ms Lo complained to Movie World but had not received a response from them, despite sending several emails

'Breastfeeding of children in our theme parks is welcomed': In a statement, Movie World apologised for the incident and said that staff would be retrained

The mother has complained to Movie World multiple times since visiting the park on April 16, but had not received a response from the theme park.

When asked why the park had not responded to her complaints or contacted Ms Lo, a Movie World spokesperson said that they would 'look into that with our ops team'.

Ms Lo said that she was disappointed to not receive a response from the theme park, despite sending multiple emails. 'Im not hoping for anything for myself, I'm speaking up for other mothers,' she said.
At both events, fans can meet the cast and drink a special 'Mick's Bitter'

The pop-up bars will open in Sydney and Melbourne for four days each

Stan will open two pop-up bars to mark the launch of Wolf Creek in May

Streaming platform Stan will open two pop-up bars to mark the launch of their new Australian horror series, Wolf Creek, in Melbourne and Sydney in May.

The pop ups will run for a total of four days each, and during that period, a specially-brewed 'Mick's Bitter' will be one of several liquids on tap.

The events will take place at the Wolf Creek Roadhouse in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Sydney's Martin Place.

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Horror fun: Streaming platform Stan will open two pop-up bars to mark the launch of their new Australian horror series, Wolf Creek, in Melbourne and Sydney in May - the pop ups will run for four days each

The new mini-series is a TV adaptation of the renowned Australian horror film, Wolf Creek, from 2005.

At the pop-up events, fans will have the opportunity to meet the stars of the show, John Jarratt and Lucy Fry, both in Melbourne at 6pm on May 5, and later in Sydney at 6pm on May 11.

Both bars will be fully immersive, and plan to recreate the rugged, terrifying outback setting from the upcoming TV series in their urban environments.

What to expect: A specially-brewed 'Mick's Bitter' will be one of several liquids on tap, while both bars will be fully immersive, and plan to recreate the rugged, terrifying outback setting from the upcoming TV series

Meet and greet: At the pop-up events, fans will have the opportunity to meet the stars of the show, John Jarratt (pictured) and Lucy Fry, both in Melbourne at 6pm on May 5, and later in Sydney at 6pm on May 11

As well as the drinks and the meet and greets, visitors will also be able to have their photograph taken alongside Mick Taylor's F100 truck at a themed wall.

Giveaways and merchandise will also feature.

If this wasn't enough, the specially-concocted 'Mick's Bitter' will be able to be bought at a so-called 'outback price'.

Special evening: If this wasn't enough, the specially-concocted 'Mick's Bitter' will be able to be bought at a so-called 'outback price', and there will be an outback-inspired menu

There will also be other Two Birds brews and an intriguing outback-inspired menu.

The TV series will take place over six episodes, and it it set to delve back into the crazed outback world of the iconic film and serial killer character Mick Taylor.

Wolf Creek will premiere exclusively on Stan on May 12, when all six episodes will become available at once.

You can find the Sydney Facebook event details here, and the Melbourne event here.
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Fashionistas attending the Punchestown in Kildare, Ireland are raising the bar for race day fashions in a parade of elegant frocks and fascinators.

Ladies Day yesterday saw revellers put on a colourful display and Audrey Kelly from Naas, County Kildare scooped the prize for Best Dressed.

She wore a baby pink jumpsuit and matching fascinator while many opted for on-trend midi length skirts.

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Fashionistas attending the Punchestown in Kildare, Ireland are raising the bar for race day fashions. Pictured: the judges of the Bollinger Best Dressed Lady competition (from left to right) Deanna O'Connor, Rachel Carberry and Lottie Ryan

Catherine Lundon stood out from the crowd in a hot pink dress which she teamed with a matching umbrella

Kirsty Farrell from Newry County down was elegant in a monochrome look

This is day three of the four day festival which yesterday saw Carlingford Lough storm home in the Punchestown Gold Cup.

The judges of the Bollinger Best Dressed Lady competition were among the most elegant with magazine editor Deanna O'Connor opting for a coral textured midi dress by Irish designer Niamh O'Neill.

Rachell Carberry, wife of top jockey Paul Carberry looked elegant in a white skirt and jacket and a fur stole.

She completed her look with a dramatic white head piece and nude court shoes.

Andrea Connolly and Katie Ann Guinge from Crookstwon, Kildare were perfectly co-ordinated in pink and white

Audrey Kelly from Naas Co Kildare was named Bollinger Best Dressed Lady at Day two of the Punchestown Racing Festival

Guest judge Lottie Ryan with the Bollinger Best Dressed Lady Audrey Kelly

DJ Lottie Ryan opted for a red Self Portrait midi dress with an off the shoulder cap sleeve and a cut out that showed a hint of her tummy.

Meanwhile racegoer Catherine Lundon stood out from the crowd in a hot pink dress which she teamed with a matching umbrella

Kirsty Farrell from Newry County down was elegant in a monochrome look, teaming her black lace outfit with a simple white wide brimmed hat.

Sarah Cass from Gowran, Co. Kilkenny kept her look simple and let her accessories do the talking, teaming a black dress with an elaborate veiled hat with yellow corsages

Elaine Kelleher from Killgarvan, Co. Kerry sported a head full of ornamental butterflies

Joanne Murphy (left) and Eileen Kelleher got caught in a downpour but the rain did nothing to dampen their spirits

Hopefuls entering the Kilkenny Carlow Rose round of this year's Rose of Tralee competition also put on a glamorous display as they arrived en masse to the festival

The Rose of Tralee hopefuls looked in great spirits despite the overcast day

Sarah Cass from Gowran, Co. Kilkenny kept her look simple and let her accessories do the talking, teaming a black dress with an elaborate veiled hat with yellow corsages.

Elaine Kelleher from Killgarvan, Co. Kerry wore even more dramatic headgear, which featured a whole flock of ornamental butterflies.

Hopefuls entering the Kilkenny Carlow Rose round of this year's Rose of Tralee competition also put on a glamorous display as they arrived en masse to the festival.

Left to right: Charlene and Ciara Keegan arrive with Dean and Lisa Humphreys to enjoy a day of racing action

Caoimhe O'Callahan, from Cork (left), and Ann Marie Felan, from Kilkenny were the picture of elegance in glamorous outfits

Catherine Lundon and Sarah Kearns from Kilkenny. Many race goers had wisely brought umbrellas which came in handy when hailstones started to fall

Caoimhe O'Callahan, from Cork (left), and Ann Marie Felan, from Kilkenny were the picture of elegance in glamorous outfits.

Caoimhe opted for a white dress with a lilac cape which matched the colours of her fascinator while Ann Marie opted for the monochrome look in a black and white patterned dress.

Many race goers had wisely brought umbrellas which came in handy when hailstones started to fall.

Rebecca Rose Quigley from Clones, Co. Monaghan was a vision in bright green
Actress Anna Brewster swapped her skin-tight leather for Chanel and revealed the hardest moment of her role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The 30-year-old played Bazine Netal in the film but despite her tough appearance as a First Order spy, she was scared of messing up in front of veteran actor Harrison Ford.

The former model, originally from Moseley, Birmingham, had to make up an alien language for her Star Wars character and she told Tatler magazine the pressure got to her.

Anna Brewster swapped her skin-tight leather for Chanel and revealed the hardest moment of her role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens

She told the magazine: 'Theres nothing like having Harrison Ford lurking around [on set] to pile on the pressure.'

Anna was cast as Bazime Netal, who meets Rae in a bar when she's looking for BB8.

In her starring moment, Anna looks sultry and whispers in an alien language to a Jabba The Hutt-style intergalactic creature.

But she obviously kept her cool and delivered her improvised language flawlessly despite feeling nervous Harrison Ford, who plays Han Solo, was behind the scenes.

The former model certainly looked at home in front of the camera for the Tatler shoot and cut a chic figure in Chanel.

Anna looked stylish in a a sumptuous dress with pussy bow detailing and billowing sleeves

The actress played Bazine Netal, a First Order spy pictured left, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, pictured right at Paris Fashion Week in March

Anna looked chic in a double-breasted coat and ankle-crop jeans at the Chanel show as part of Paris Fashion Week last month

Anna has modelled for brands like Hermes and Aquascutum, pictured at the Sonia Rykiel show at Paris Fashion Week last month

Anna looks striking on the cover of June Tatler

She looked ethereal in a tulle cape and draped with curls as she wore soft makeup and her hair swept up in a textured style.

In another shot, Anna looked playful as she posed in a sumptuous dress with pussy bow detailing and billowing sleeves, posing with her thumb to her lips.

While the cover shot saw her wearing a stark white co-ord with flowing trousers with embellished detailing.

It was a dramatic difference to her role in Star Wars which saw her wearing a skintight leather catsuit in a monochrome graphic print.

Anna rose to fame aged 14 when she played Anita, in the film Anita And Me.

Her role as young girl Anita who makes friends with Meena, who comes from a Punjabi family, was a starring role for the teenager.

Last year, Anna starred in BBC blockbuster Versailles as Marquise de Montespan.

The racy series cost a reported 21 million to shoot.

And it seems she can turn her hand to anything, after previously starring in campaigns for Anna had previously modelled for high-end brands Aquascutum and Hermes.
Queen Mathilde of Belgium looked chic in a brocade coat today as she was handed a poesy of flowers by a young girl.

The Queen consort attended a ceremonial ship launching in Oostende, Belgium, and was greeted by a child wearing a floral headband who presented the monarch with a bouquet.

Mathilde, 43, bent down to accept the gift in her stylish outfit of a matching jacket and dress topped with a pill-box hat.

Queen Mathilde of Belgium looked chic in a brocade coat as she was given a poesy of flowers by a young girl

The Queen wore a coordinated outfit with matching coat, dress and pillbox hat complete with spiral detail

The Queen chose a coordinated outfit and her double-layered jacket with a curved neckline looked elegant while her shift dress underneath was the same lilac brocade fabric.

Mathilde wore her hair swept up with a dainty pillbox hat complete with a spiral detail.

Her outfit was broken up with nude accessories, choosing nude patent court shoes and a box bag with bow detailing.

For the finishing touches, the Queen favoured natural makeup showcasing her glowing skin while drop pearl earrings drew attention to her updo.

Mathilde chatted to the adorable girl who wore a pale-pink coat and white flower crown to present the flowers to the Queen and the youngster appeared bashful as she spoke to the royal.

The Queen's outfit was broken up with nude accessories, choosing nude patent court shoes and a box bag with bow detailing

Mathilde bends down to the little girl who presents hew with a bouquet of flowers a the ship launching ceremony

The youngster appears bashful as she speaks to the monarch while wearing a pink jacket and flower headband

Oostende's new Mayor Johan Vande Lanotte, State Secretary for Social Fraud, Privacy and the North Sea Bart Tommelein and Queen Mathilde during the ceremonial ship launching of a new dredging installation ship of Jan De Nul Group in Oostende Launch of new dredging ship

But unfortunately it was a drizzly day and Mathilde had to resort to her umbrella to keep dry as she left.

But it didn't take the shine off her polished look, as she had a see-through umbrella ready to avoid distracting attention from her ensemble.

The event was to launch a new dredging installation ship in the Jan De Nul Group today.

On Thursday, the Queen launched an annual flower show in the city of Ghent and cut a ribbon to mark the official opening of the 35th annual flower show, which runs from 22 April to 1 May in the Ghent arts quarter, and sees famous landmarks adorned with flowers.

Mathilde, who wore a colourful striped dress and orange suede courts, attended with husband King Philippe.

Unfortunately it was a drizzly day and Mathilde had to resort to her umbrella to keep her outfit dry as she left

The Queen favoured natural makeup showcasing her glowing skin while drop pearl earrings drew attention to her updo
The Duchess of Cornwall suffered an awkward moment today when an individual named Kingy crawled under skirt during an official visit.

However, the incident was more funny than outrageous because Kingy has four paws and a tail, and the Duchess was seen howling with laughter as he disappeared under her tartan skirt as she bent down to pet him.

The Duchess encountered the small terrier on a visit to the Queen Mother Hospital in Hatfield which celebrates its 30th anniversary today, as Patron of The Royal Veterinary College Animal Care Trust (ACT).

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The Duchess of Cornwall experienced a hilarious moment today when an dog named Kingy crawled under skirt during an official visit to the Queen Mother Hospital in Hatfield

Camilla and members off staff couldn't contain their laughter over the cheeky incident

She was seen howling with laughter as Kingy cheekily snuffled around under her skirt, while staff surrounding her couldn't contain their giggles either.

Dressed in a purple tartan jacket and pleated skirt Camilla looked delighted to be introduced to recovering animals, particularly the royally named Kingy.

After almost causing a wardrobe malfunction, he started pulling on his lead clearly keen to continue exploring.

The cheeky fellow was also spotted poking his nose into a bouquet Camilla had been presented with for a sniff.

Dressed in a purple tartan jacket and pleated skirt Camilla looked delighted to be introduced to recovering animals, particularly the royally named Kingy

The small terrier was all dressed up for the royal visit in a quilted khaki jacket

After almost causing a wardrobe malfunction, Kingy was keen to be on his way

Cheeky Kingy was also spotted poking his nose into a bouquet Camilla had been presented with for a sniff

The small terrier was all dressed up for the royal visit in a quilted khaki jacket.

He may well have reminded the Duchess of her own Jack Russell rescue dog, Bluebell.

But he was nowehere near as colourful as Max, a husky type dog who was wearing a multicoloured striped onesie.

Max was injured after being hit by a London bus but didn't seem to be showing any ill effects from his recent ordeal as he cocked his head so the Duchess could scratch his chin

Max was wearing a striped onesie for his royal encounter and a canula was visible on his front right leg, just above the paw

Animal lover Camilla looked to be in her element s she got to know the dogs who have been treated at the hospital

Max may have been feeling a little tired out from all the excitement though, as he gave a big yawn while Camilla stroked him

Max was wearing a very colourful outfit for the royal visit

Max was recently injured after being hit by a London bus and a bandage and a canula was visible on his front right leg, just above the paw.

However, he seemed in good spirits despite his ordeal as he cocked his head so the Duchess could scratch his chin.

He may have been feeling a little tired out from all the excitement though, as he gave a big yawn while Camilla stroked him.

The Duchess of Cornwall made some new furry friends today as she toured the Queen Mother Hospital in Hatfield

Lots of the animals were dressed up for the occasion with one wearing a Superman bandana around his neck

The Duchess saw how ACT funds are helping to support state of the art animal care

The Duchess was introduced to members of staff at the animal hospital

The Duchess cut a cake to celebrate the hospital's 30th birthday

Animal lover Camilla looked to be in her element as she toured the facilities, and cut a cake to celebrate their hospital's 30th birthday, decorated with fondant cats and dogs.

Lots of the animals were dressed up for the occasion with one wearing a Superman bandana around his neck.

She's known to have a soft spot for dogs and has another Jack Rusell, Bluebell's sister Beth who she adopted from Battersea Dogs and Cats home in 2011.
A young couple brought their wedding forward by four months and held the ceremony in a hospital - so that the bride's father could give her away just days before he died.

Childhood sweethearts Alex Lake, 21 and Aiesha Williams, 18, from Stroud, Gloustershire, originally planned a summer wedding in August 2016.

But they were forced to make a drastic change in their plans after Aiesha's dad, Eddie, who was suffering from a rare form of testicular cancer, took a sudden turn for the worse.

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Aiesha Williams with her father Eddie on her wedding day on April 11. She originally scheduled her wedding for August but brought it forward by four months after her father got penumonia and took a turn for the worse

Eddie was originally diagnosed last December, when he was told he had less than two years to live.

The news came as a bitter blow to the family - especially as Aiesha's mother Sheran had died last April from a sudden heart attack at the age of 54.

We were just trying to get back to some normality after Mum's death and then we received this awful news about Dad, said Aiesha.

Dad was the most funny, kind, wise and most sensible guy, who was loved by almost everyone who knew him; the last person on earth who deserved any of this.

He went out with "Mamma Mia" playing in the background, surrounded by family and friends, being reassured it was okay for him to go. I will miss him terribly and I love him so much.

I would just like to say a massive thank you to all the staff on ward 8B at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, the palliative doctor Catherine Morrison, and the hospital chaplain John for allowing me to have a beautiful wedding day at the hospital so my dad could be there to give me away.

'I will miss him terribly and I love him so much': Aiesha said that giving her away gave her father 'great peace of mind', calling him 'the most funny, kind, wise and most sensible guy, who was loved by almost everyone'

It gave him great peace of mind and a sense of accomplishment knowing he saw his daughter get married.

Bridegroom Alex proposed to Aiesha during a trip to see the Northern Lights in Iceland. The couple decided to waste no time in organising their wedding because Aiesha wanted to be sure her dad would be there to walk her down the aisle.

But after they arranged the August ceremony, 60-year-old Eddie, who worked for a local funeral director, contracted pneumonia and his condition deteriorated rapidly.

It quickly became apparent to Aiesha that the wedding day would need to be brought forward if she and her dad were going to share her big day.

Alex recalled It was devastating. Aiesha's parents were like family to me. To lose Sheran so suddenly last April hit us all so hard but now we were going to lose Eddie - and a lot sooner than we thought.

With help from the hospital, the couple moved quickly to set a new wedding venue - April 11th in the hospital chapel. Eddie was there to fulfill his fatherly duty of giving Aiesha away and close family and friends were in the congregation. He died a week later.

Alex said he was overwhelmed by the support they had received from everyone to make the early wedding day a success.

Aiesha with her dad Eddie last Christmas. She is planning a marriage blessing service later in the year with the rest of the couple's family and friends and hopefully a honeymoon to Italy in the summer

It has been such a difficult time but the support we have had from family, friends, and Eddie's work colleagues has just made things so much easier for us, he said.

The hospital staff converted a day room into a bridal parlour for Aiesha. Eddie wanted to walk Aiesha down the aisle but he was quite weak and in bed at that stage. The nurses helped him into a wheelchair and he was wheeled down the aisle with Aiesha at his side.

The staff did so much to make our day as special as possible. I cannot ever thank them enough. His colleagues from the Funeral Directors he worked for in Stroud brought in flowers to decorate the Chapel.

Alex said words could not describe how Eddie felt about that day. We heard him tell people afterwards how happy he was he managed to see his daughter walk down the aisle. It is a positive memory for us to take forward, he said.

Aiesha is only 18 and she has already lost both her parents but she is such a positive character - she will always continue with a smile.

Alex works in Marketing whilst completing his degree. Aiesha plans to go to University in September to train to be a Midwife.

Tragic loss: Eddie, known as Little Fred to friends and colleagues, was described by his employers, Philip Ford and Son, as an all round wonderful gentleman who will be sadly missed by all his family and friends'

They are planning a marriage blessing service later in the year with the rest of their family and friends and hopefully a honeymoon to Italy in the summer.

For now, Alex says, they are just trying to come to terms with all that has happened and get through Eddie's funeral next week.

We have been through so much already but I think it has strengthened us as a couple, he said. We are making plans for our future and trying to stay positive.

I know Aiesha's parents would have wanted that. We have lost them both in very different circumstances. Sharon died so suddenly, it was such a shock. With Eddie we knew he didn't have long so we could all say our goodbyes and prepare ourselves but it didn't make it any easier. I am not sure which is the lesser of the two evils.

Eddie, known as Little Fred to friends and colleagues, was described by his employers, Philip Ford and Son, as an all round wonderful gentleman who will be sadly missed by all his family and friends.
A teen girl was reportedly left in tears after she was 'shamed for having breasts' by school faculty members who told her they couldn't allow her in to prom because her dress was 'too revealing'.

Tiffani Taylor, a mother from Tennessee, took to Facebook on Monday to share a photo of her daughter Bronte's friend Amy Steverson in her prom gown, claiming the student at Maryville High School wasn't allowed into the senior dance until she put on the vice principal's tuxedo jacket.

'She spent time looking for the perfect dress, got her hair done and was meticulous in putting her make up on. It's an exciting time. She proudly had her pictures made, and why wouldn't she?' the concerned mom wrote. She looks like a princess.

Shattered dreams: Tennessee student Amy Steverson reportedly cried in the restroom at the Maryville High School senior prom after she was initially denied entry into the dance because her dress was 'too revealing'

'Arriving at the prom, she was stopped at the door. She would not be allowed in because her dress was "too revealing". After spending some time in the restroom crying, she was told she could go in if she wore the vice principal's tux jacket, which mind you, did not cover her chest.'

Tiffani went on to say that a teacher repeatedly told Amy that 'us big girls gotta cover up'.

'This young girl was shamed for having breasts,' she continued. 'Her excitement during this memorable time of her life turned into embarrassment at the hands of adults who are supposed to be leading her.

'Shame on you, Maryville. I think you look amazing, Amy.'

Accusations: Tiffani Taylor, a mother of one of Amy's friends, claimed that the teen (front left) was asked to put on the vice principal's tuxedo jacket and told by a teacher that 'us big girls gotta cover up'

Tiffani's post has been shared more than 19,000 times and liked over 87,000 times, with many people commenting that Amy looks beautiful and shouldn't have been told that her dress was too revealing.

However, Amy's father told WATE 6 that an alteration to the front of her dress broke after the picture was taken, causing the gown to be far more revealing when she had arrived at the dance.

In the photo shared by Tiffani on Facebook, the front of Amy's dress features a piece of black lace on the sweetheart neckline.

According to Amy's parents, the neckline became several inches lower and wider after the lace broke off, and that is when a teacher asked her to wear a jacket.

Personal opinion? In her Facebook post, Tiffani insisted that Amy was 'shamed for having breasts' and called out the administrators for singling her out at the dance

Wardrobe malfunction: Amy's parents explained that an alteration on their daughter's dress broke and the neckline on her gown became several inches lower and wider than it was pictured in Tiffani's photo

A photo collage from that night sees Amy donning a men's jacket over her dress as she happily poses with her friends.

Sharon Anglim, a representative of Maryville City Schools, told WATE 6 that there is no specific prom dress policy in place and noted that there weren't any other girls at the event who were called out over their gowns.

She went on to point out that neither Amy nor her parents complained to the school district about the incident at prom.

However, Tiffani is standing by her original post. The mom took to Facebook on Thursday afternoon to tell people to stop sending her photos of one of Amy's Snapchat photos from prom night.

Singled out: Sharon Anglim, a representative of Maryville City Schools, said there weren't any other girls at the event who were called out over their dresses

Won't give up: Tiffani maintains that Amy shouldn't have been singled out at the dance over her wardrobe malfunction

'I've seen it a million times over. I'm not sure whether it's the hand gestures, F bomb or the fact that her dress alterations were missing that you want me to be offended by, but I'm not [sic],' she wrote.

'I see a young girl with tear smudged prom make up standing up for herself saying, "I feel good. I look good." I'm sorry that you don't see the same.

'Maybe you didn't see the other girl's prom dresses that I saw,' she continued. 'I stand by my original thought process that one person shouldn't be singled out. Maybe Maryville should think about applying a dress code for necklines next year for everyone so this doesn't happen again.'
Those unfamiliar with Greggs products may struggle to spot the difference

High street baker posted the new puzzle on its Twitter account

Popular high street bakers Greggs have had Brits scratching their heads after posting a pasty puzzle online.

The picture shows a lone cheese and onion bake in this pile of steak slices - but only true Greggs fans will know what sets the two apart.

For those not familiar with the baker's offerings, picking out the pasty might prove difficult.

Scroll down for video

This optical illusion has had pasty lovers scratching their heads - and rubbing their stomachs

The puzzle is the latest in the trend of brain-teasers sweeping the web in recent months - with Where's Wally-style puzzles challenging people to spot animals amongst throngs of creates becoming all the craze.

The Greggs challenge could pave the way for a new trend of food challenges, after the picture caused a storm online yesterday.

The eagle-eyed spotted that the difference lies in the patterns of the pasties - with the cheese and onion bake boasting a slightly different scoring.

The cheese and onion bake is tucked away in the bottom right hand corner (circled in red)

Earlier this week, the latest Where's Wally-style puzzle saw an artist hide a panda's face among a herd of elephants - and it's proving surprisingly tricky to spot.

The illustration sees dozens of elephants' heads in shades of brown, yellow, grey and white. However the black ink used to outline their eyes and ears mean that the monochrome panda (second from right, seventh row from the bottom) is all but camouflaged.

It was created by Matthew Merrill from Fresno, California, who is fast becoming known for his head-scratching puzzles.

In the latest Where's Wally-style puzzle, created by California-based artist Matthew Merrill, a panda's face has been buried among a herd of colourful elephants - and it's proving surprisingly tricky to spot

His last creation that swept the internet saw a panda hidden among hundreds of dogs, with a few wearing bows and others with long shaggy hair, making them even more difficult to differentiate between.

Among the 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 illustration sees dozens of elephants' heads in shades of brown, yellow, grey and white. However the black ink used to outline their eyes and ears mean that the monochrome panda (circled) is all but camouflaged

The animal is far less easy to spot than the corgis pictured with giant ears, or the white hound 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.

There's a Hungarian Puli - the dreadlocked pooch owned by Mark Zuckerberg - as well as a Labrador, husky, shar pei, mastiff, doberman, a schnauzer, spaniel, pointer, great Dane, chihuahua and poodle.

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

The black and white creature is sandwiched between various pooches in the middle of the right hand side of the drawing

But the teaser proved a little too easy for the web's taste, with some 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
THE MANDIBLES: A FAMILY, 2029 TO 2047 by Lionel Shriver

THE MANDIBLES: A FAMILY, 2029 TO 2047

by Lionel Shriver

(HarperCollins 16.99)

Shriver is fast becoming the go-to novelist for some of the big issues of the day: recent books have taken on the U.S. healthcare system and our problematic relationship with food.

In this speculative dystopia, its financial systems under scrutiny as the American economy goes into freefall after defaulting on its debt obligations and refusing to trade in a new currency favoured by Mexico and China.

Four generations of the Mandible family, headed by the nonagenarian patriarch Douglas, see their inheritance crash to the ground overnight. Soon, theyre on the streets alongside their fellow New Yorkers as the now lawless city suffers food shortages and a spate of house-nappings.

Shriver eschews the portentous atmosphere beloved of many a dystopian novel in favour of a breezy, mordantly comic tone as the years fast-forward to 2047 and a new, scary, heavily controlled America emerges. One admires Shrivers easy, lucid explanations of complex monetary systems, even while wishing her expositions werent so heavy-handed.

Yet Willing, the Mandibles precocious, prescient teen son, is one of her most memorable creations and, if the test of a futuristic novel is its eerie proximity to the present, this passes with flying colours.

THE LUBETKIN LEGACY by Marina Lewycka

THE LUBETKIN LEGACY

by Marina Lewycka

(Fig Tree 14.99)

What would the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin, designer of visionary Thirties housing estates, make of the state of social housing in the 21st century?

Thats the implicit question in Lewyckas madcap new caper, set on a Lubetkin estate in London and featuring a colourful cast of mostly vulnerable outsiders, each affected in various ways by austerity era politics and the new inequality reshaping city life.

Fiftysomething loner and unemployed actor Berthold is terrified he will lose his mothers two-bedroom council flat now she is dead, so desperately needs a flatmate who can impersonate her.

Diabetic Len cant afford the electricity following cuts to his benefit, thanks to the bedroom tax, while Violet, who is starting to question the moral implications of her job at an investment bank, has realised there may not even be an estate for much longer after discovering the council plans to sell it to a developer.

Lewycka deals more in caricatures than characters (Bertholds Ukrainian flatmate Inna is a stock Eastern European comic figure) and her plotting can go awry.

But she is terrific at channelling a bleak, hapless, quintessentially English form of comedy in what is a very angry novel posing as a warm, cuddly one.

NOW AND AGAIN by Charlotte Rogan

NOW AND AGAIN

by Charlotte Rogan

(Fleet 16.99)

There is a faint whiff of Erin Brockovich in Rogans new novel, set in an Oklahoma town during the Iraq war.

Maggie works at the munitions plant, but when she discovers a report suggesting the factory is involved in a contamination cover-up, she abandons her job on principle for a new position at the local prison.

But she is aghast to discover that many prisoners are there on dubious-looking charges, with evidence to suggest the prison has a dodgy link with the factory. She embarks on a zealous do-gooding mission that places her relationship with her son and husband under strain.

At the same time, a traumatised returning soldier, haunted by a mistake he made on tour, has hooked up with fellow veterans with a view to exposing some of the lies regarding Americas involvement in Iraq.
New Focus on Rape Kits and Sexual Assault Victim Rights

This month the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed a bill to standardize the rights of sexual assault victims and improve prosecution of sex crimes. That federal legislation, introduced by New Hampshire's Senator Jeanne Shaheen, shone a light on rape kit reform throughout the country.

This week, Governor Nathan Deal signed a bill to ensure the timely testing of sexual assault evidence in Georgia, for example. Shaheen's federal bill focused on this type of evidence, and the grueling legal process for sexual assault victims trying to keep track of their rape kits in the criminal justice system. A key feature of The Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act that Shaheen introduced is a provision giving victims comprehensive information about their legal options, particularly with respect to rape kits, or forensic evidence collected after an assault.

Rape Kit Preservation

The focus of Shaheen's legislation is reportedly in large part due to the efforts of a 24-year-old aspiring astronaut who is also a State Department liaison to the White House. Amanda Nguyen learned the hard way, through personal experience, that navigating the legal system after an assault is not easy.

The new bill will give assault victims rights to the information in their rape kits, regardless of whether they choose to assist prosecutors with a case or contact police at all. Victims would have the right to know where their rape kit is located, whether it has been tested, and the test results.

Nguyen pushed for this after struggling to track and preserve her own rape kit as it wended its way around labs in Massachusetts after she was assaulted. She learned that rape kits are preserved for 15 years but only upon a victim's request for extension, and so began her difficult journey into the system. The young woman is reportedly the engine behind the bill introduced this week.

State laws vary widely and Nguyen wants to unify and standardize the righst of sexual assault victims. Some states give victims rights to counseling but won't let them access police reports about their case, while some states offer little or no protection at all. Nguyen came up with a list of about 20 rights that victims had in varying states, created an organization called Rise, and with the help of friends and supporters online began pushing for policy changes.

System Failure

"Too many survivors feel like the entire system has failed them," said Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the bill's primary sponsor. "We need a basic set of rights for people who are sexually assaulted."

Unlike many other laws focused on sexual assault, this new legislation does not concentrate its efforts on more money for law enforcement. It is the focus on victims that makes it seem likely to receive support on both sides of the political aisle.

As for Nguyen, she says, "I could accept injustice or rewrite the law. I chose rewriting the law." Given that kind of will power, she has a good chance of reaching Mars, which is also one of Nguyen's goals.

Related Resources:
India has asked Britain to deport Vijay Mallya

India has asked Britain to deport liquor baron Vijay Mallya, who flew to London last month.

The State Bank of India-led consortium of banks is building pressure on Mallya to repay the Rs 9,500 crore owed by his defunct Kingfisher Airlines (KFA).

The ministry of external affairs has written to the British high commission seeking Mallyas return so that his presence can be secured for investigations against him, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, official spokesman Vikas Swarup told the media here on Thursday.

He said that the Indian high commission in the UK will also be issuing a similar note to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Swarup also emphasised that India will continue pursuing Mallyas deportation with UK authorities.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had approached the ministry seeking initiation of deportation proceedings against Mallya, charged with money laundering in the Rs 900-crore IDBI loan fraud case.

The ED has accused Mallyas UB Group of diverting Rs 430 crore of bank loans taken for KFA to buy property overseas.

A non-bailable warrant against Mallya had been issued by a special judge in Mumbai as he did not appear for the hearings, thus strengthening the governments case to get him deported.

The ED has also decided to make a formal request to Interpol to issue a Red Corner Notice against Mallya.

The premier investigative agencys move comes in the backdrop of Mallya's counsel C.S. Vaidyanathan stating in the Supreme Court that the businessman does not plan to return because he might be taken to Tihar Jail as soon as he lands.

Mallya has not disclosed his whereabouts since flew he from Delhi to London on March 2 after attending a Rajya Sabha session.

Meanwhile, lenders have decided to auction the trademarks of KFA, including the Kingfisher logo and once famous Fly the Good Time tagline on April 30.

The reserve price for the trademarks, which also include Flying Models, Fly the Good Times, Funliner, Fly Kingfisher, Flying Bird device, has been kept at Rs 366 crore.

In its annual report for 2012- 13, KFA had said that at its peak, it was the largest airline in India with a five-star rating from Skytrax.

A valuation report from Grant Thornton put its brand value at $550 million on resumption of operations.

The airlines brand had been registered separately from the Kingfisher beer trademark.

According to the experts, the auction is unlikely to generate any interest from bidders as the value of brand has deteriorated.
The couple say they decided to adopt a child when they couldnt conceive after 10 years of marriage

When Kundan (name changed) turned four, his parents decided it was time for him to go to school.

Weeks later, the boy finds himself stuck in an observation home, his young mind yet to comprehend the fact that the people he calls Mom and Dad merely adopted him and his biological mother wants him back after abandoning him when he was just a few days old.

The childs birth mother says she was approached by a man named Raju who runs a job placement agency.

His brother raped her following which she delivered a baby boy, she told police.

The child was kidnapped and sold off, she added.

The woman says she is now married and ready to take care of her son.

Raju, his wife and brother separated me from my baby without telling me, she said in her complaint.

When I tried asking them regarding his whereabouts, they said that when my son will grow up they will unite us. I was again employed as a domestic help in a house, but as I could not bear the separation, I left the job.

Police registered a case of kidnapping, rape and child trafficking.

An investigation led them to four-year-old Kundan living with adoptive parents.

About 135,000 children are believed to be trafficked in India every year, activists say, pointing towards a need to regulate the growing number of employment placement agencies that are often conduits for selling kids into domestic servitude and other forms of exploitation.

The couple say they decided to adopt a child when they couldnt conceive after 10 years of marriage.

I never thought I would face a situation where I could lose my son to his biological mother. He was going to join school and has now ended up in an observation home, the adoptive mother said.

Kundan was produced before a child welfare committee and was put in a shelter.

His adoptive mother was taken into custody though she later got bail. The couple say they heard in 2011 that a woman wanted to give up her child for adoption as the baby was delivered while she was still unmarried.

They took the boy home but never got the opportunity to meet the biological mother, leaving legal formalities incomplete.

Their counsel, JK Tripathi, while arguing for the wifes bail told the court that as the child has been housed in good conditions and is even being provided education at a reputed school, a case of trafficking cannot stand as exploitation of an individual is an important criterion.
India has denied permission to two more activists hoping to attend the meeting of Chinese dissidents and exiles in Himachal Pradesh on April 28.

The move comes as an attempt to avoid further confusion over the visa issued to World Uyghur Congress leader Dolkun Isa,

Highly placed government sources admitted that there was an oversight while issuing the visa to Isa, which was later revoked on "technical grounds" as it was applied in the wrong category.

Good relations: National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart and State Councillor, Yang Jiechi at the India-China 19th boundary talks in Beijing.

Keeping in mind the agreement between India and China, that two countries will not allow any activity targeted towards each other to be carried on its land, visas to other activists were rejected, a top government official said.

The official added that allowing rebels to be part of anti-China gathering on Indian soil would go against the spirit of the agreement between the two countries.

There was a red corner notice pending against Dolkun Isa, which also led to the cancellation of his visa, a fact which apparently got overlooked when he was granted evisa.

But the activists told Mail Today that they believed Chinese pressure was a factor behind the cancellations, though officially India maintained that there were inconsistencies in their applications.

To save itself of embarrassment in future, the government has decided to link the Red Corner Notice network with the electronic visa process. If somebody is blacklisted or has Interpol notice against him or her it should appear on our e-visa network so that there is no embarrassment like in Isas case, an official said.

Earlier this week, a Uyghur exile, who was scheduled to speak at the same meeting, said his electronic tourist visa was revoked.

On Tuesday, Lu Jinghua, a well-known Tiananmen activist and former 1989 protest leader, and Hong Kong activist Ray Wong, both said their electronic visas had been denied.

After Dolkun Isa (left), Lu Jinghua (right), a well-known Tiananmen activist and 1989 protest leader was denied an e-visa just as she was about to board an India-bound flight

Lu said she was about to board an Air India flight from New York when she was told her visa was cancelled.

At the airport, the Air India staff told me simply that I couldnt board as my visa was cancelled, she told Mail Today from New York.

Official sources based on information available with the Ministry of Home Affairs said the reason for the denial was her documents were illegible and there was inconsistency with the purpose of her visit.

In so far as Ray Wong is concerned, they added, there was data inconsistency in his documents.

As such visas were not issued to both these individuals. On the revoking of Isas visa, the Ministry of External Affairs said he had applied for the wrong category of visa.

A conference visa is required for those attending meetings, while electronic tourist visa is allowed only for tourism and casual business meetings.

The MEA said information about the conference was suppressed in the visa form and that the tourist visa does not permit it.

But despite the Indian governments explanation, the cancellation and visa denials sent a ripple through the community of Chinese dissidents and exiles, said activist and former Tiananmen leader Rose Tang, who has in the past travelled to India.

Countries like Thailand, Vietnam are already unsafe for Chinese dissidents. I am worried that India is becoming one more country not on the list of countries I can travel to, Tang said.




Politicians, officials and agents are not the only ones defending their reputations while battling charges of kickbacks in a VVIP helicopter deal.

Even journalists have come under the scanner following revelations that the firm AgustaWestland paid British businessman and alleged middle-man Christian Michel Rs 50 crore to manage the Indian media.

The money was allegedly paid to handle bad press on the Rs 3,500-crore deal.

Youth Congress members demand the resignations of BJP CMs Raman Singh and Vasundhara Raje, alleging that purchases from Agusta by their governments led to losses of Rs 65 lakh and Rs 1.14cr respectively

BJP MP Meenakshi Lekhi expressed concern in Parliament over the alleged misuse of media.

Little is known about how the money was spent and investigators have a job at hand to unearth the truth.

Arms companies, in the hunt for defence contracts, are known to engage journalists and even organise foreign junkets.

Document

A document has surfaced showing AgustaWestland paying 6 million Euros to Christian Michel from January 2010 onwards for handling the media.

The deal was finalised in 2009. Keeping the heat on the issue, the government dismissed the offensive launched by the Congress to defend its leader Sonia Gandhi as trivial technicalities and claimed it was determined to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case.

Even as the issue was still to come up for discussion in Parliament, BJP president Amit Shah launched a scathing attack on Congress president Sonia Gandhi saying she should clarify who received bribes in the chopper deal.

Constitution

Sonia Gandhi has faced criticism over her role in the VVIP helicopter deal

You say you are not scared of anything. We in the BJP fear the Constitution, rule of law and societal norms, said Amit Shah taking a dig at the Congress chief for saying she was not afraid of anyone as she sought an inquiry into the allegations.

The government said that contrary to claims made by the Congress, all the procurements from AgustaWestland, its parent company Finmeccanica and other affiliates were put on hold when NDA came to power.

On the allegation that AgustaWestland was allowed to do business by entering a joint venture with Tata Sons, the government clarified that the proposal was approved in September 2011 and it has already been expired.

The government also noted that the investigating agencies - the CBI and Enforcement Directorate - are probing the deal and pursing extradition of Carlo Gerosa, Guido Haschke Ralph and Christian Michel James, the three alleged middlemen.

Defence minister Manohar Parrikar is expected to reply in Parliament next week.

The government has countered allegations made by the Congress leaders that no action was taken against AgustaWestland as they sought the hasty resolution of the probe.

The government said that the delay in investigation is largely because some of the key perpetrators of this misdeed are outside the country.

On the core issue of corruption, the two concerned agencies, namely CBI and Enforcement Directorate are vigorously pursuing all aspects of the investigation, including the arrests and/or extradition of three foreign nationals.

Red Corner Notices were issued in December 2015 and January 2016 through Interpol under Prevention of Money Laundering Act and Prevention of Corruption Act," the government clarified.

Swamy warned against provoking Congress

BJP leader Subramanian Swami in the Rajya Sabha

A day after a high-decibel war of words between the treasury and Opposition benches over the AgustaWestland deal in Parliament, both Houses were back to normal as part of a truce between the two sides

However, the 'truce' was broken by the Congress over nominated member Subramanian Swamys provocative remarks.

Just two days old in the Upper House, Swamys comments forced the Chair to expunge his remarks for the second day consecutively.

Chaos resulted after Chaudhary Munavver Saleem of the SP in a Zero Hour mention, referred to Swamy being part of the movement in the 1970s to protect the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University.

Swamy got up to clarify saying he had no objection to minority education institutions but the Constitution prohibits the state from financing them.

While Swamy had incensed Congress members by naming party chief Sonia Gandhi in the AgustaWestland scam on Wednesday.

On Thursday he provoked the opposition party by saying while they may have a good understanding of the Constitution of another country (an indirect reference to Sonias country of birth) he knew the Indian Constitution better.

As angry Congress members protested, the Chair immediately ordered expunging of Swamys remarks and warned him of action for unnecessarily provoking members on the other side.

I will take action against you. Subramanian Swamy you are unnecessarily provoking. I will have to take action against you... you are provoking, Kurien said.

Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad taunted the BJP leader saying Swamy, 76, had not matured with age.

It is only his second day in Parliament. In two days you have expunged his remarks twice and there are 365 days and how many times you are going to expunge his words? This man has aged but does not know the difference between street words and Parliament words," said Azad.

Taking a dig at the ruling party, Azad said Swamy was BJPs gift to the House and would force the Congress to disrupt the House.

The Congress has a strong dislike for Swamy who is a known Congress and Gandhi family baiter.

Though he was shouted down by the Congress members on Wednesday, Swamy did not give up and tried to raise the chopper deal issue several times, to be interrupted by the Congress members each time.

"I am not going to mention that lady's name," Swamy said in an apparent reference to Sonia Gandhi. As he again stood up to speak, Kurien asked Swamy to sit down and directed him to meet him in his chamber.

Swamy also submitted a notice on Thursday for a debate on the AgustaWestland chopper deal in the Upper House and wanted to raise the issue in the Zero Hour but was not allowed by the Chair saying such issues were not allowed in that hour.

Later, minister of state for parliamentary affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi pointed out to the Chair that Swamy was not being allowed to speak even though his name figured in the list of members who had submitted a request.
The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the holding of the National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET).

The NEET is a single common entrance test for admission to MBBS and BDS courses, in two phases for the academic year 2016-17 in which around 6.5 lakh candidates are likely to appear.

While the decision threw open the doors of several prestigious private colleges for all-India students, it has also left the medical students in the lurch.

The NEET decision will have a remarkable impact on the students careers as now no private institute can hold any individual entrance test

With just two days left for the first phase of the exams scheduled for May 1, the lack of time for exam preparation and revision is causing stress. The students feel that injustice has been done.

The second phase of the common entrance test will be conducted on July 24. The result will be declared on August 17, followed by counseling and admissions.

We are not against NEET but we want whole exam in the second phase which is being conducted on July 24. With just two days left for the first phase of exam (which is on May 1), the government cant put this extra burden on us. Every student deserves equal time for the preparation, said Sudhanshu Sharma, one of the aspirants.

The decision will have a remarkable impact on the students careers as now no private institute can hold any individual entrance test.

The new decision will force the private institutes to give admissions to all-India students. The move will help the students to get rid of the donations demanded by the institutions.

Health Ministry sources said the private institutes in last recent years have become money-minting machine as they charge huge sum from the students by offering them a single seat.

But on the other hand, students who had already applied for the entrance exams of the private colleges and did not enroll themselves for AIPMT are stumped.

Our career and life is not a joke. They have come out with the decision in such short notice that we dont even have any time to enroll. These people are making fun of the education system. The NEET is a very good move. But students preparing for state-level exams like CET are at big loss. They should be allowed to appear for phase 2 of AIPMT, said Ritika Singh, another aspirant.

Health Minister JP Nadda has welcomed the order The order of SC will significantly strengthen the efforts of the ministry to achieve this aim (to conduct common entrance test).
The media may seem less concerned about it these days, but women are still being raped in India.

Added to that, they continue to get threatened with sexual violence and similar dreadful things if they enter a particular out-of-bounds temple.

When I last ascertained in my hometown, women were not being allowed to enter even some (or all?) Muslim graveyards - a truly new 'tradition' in India.

Protesters march through Delhi in December last year following an alleged gang rape of a woman in the city

Then, of course, there is the brigade that jumps up and defends women because 'they are our mothers, wives and sisters'. As if that is a defence.

Note, for instance, that women end up being defined only in their relationship to men - mothers, wives and sisters of men.

It makes men central - and that is, of course, the sickness in the core of any rapist, who feels that he is entitled to have his way with a woman, no matter what she feels, thinks, says or does.

It is exactly the kind of male mind that cannot stop feeling that the world revolves around it.

But this defence is even worse than it appears because it is also based on the assumption that it is men who decide what a woman should be - she has to conform to their idea of a mother, wife or sister.

So the moment a woman fails to fit a mans idea of a mother, wife or sister, she becomes vulnerable. She becomes a target.

Hence, the rapes; hence, the threat of rape. It is time to face this fact squarely. Men cannot and should not define what a woman can be.

It is every womans own decision whether she wants to smoke or not, wear a sari or a skirt, go to a bar or stay in the kitchen.
India presents a 'really great opportunity' for Apple, but slow networks and the informal retail structure is preventing the tech giant from realising its full potential in the country.

That was the message from the chief executive officer (CEO) Tim Cook as he announced the company's first decline in profits for 13 years on Tuesday.

Sales dropped by more than a quarter in China - Apples most important market after the US - and it also forecast another disappointing quarter for global revenues.

The CEO of tech giant Apple says that the India market presents a 'really great opportunity' for his company

But iPhone sales in India are up 56 per cent compared to a year ago.

During a conference call, Cook said that, while India is the third-largest smartphone market in the world, it is dominated by low-end devices - primarily because the network speed and retail issues have meant the market potential has not been fully realised.

'But I view India as where China was maybe seven to 10 years ago from that point of view, and I think theres a really great opportunity there,' said Cook, who has seen sales drop 11 per cent in China over the past year.

He said that Apple is placing increasing emphasis in such emerging markets where its clear there will be disproportionate growth compared to the more developed areas.

But at present, the slow networks and informal retail markets are stunting growth in the centre

'And so the infrastructure is one key,' he said.

Cook added: 'The things that have held not only us back but some others as well is the LTE roll out [for 4G data] with India just really began this year, and so we'll begin to see some really good networks coming on in India.'

Cook described building the retail channels was another area that will help Apple get a stronghold in the market.

Meanwhile, many analysts said that Apples immediate future rests with iPhone 7, which is expected to be launched in September.

'If iPhone 7 doesnt surprise with meaningful new useful features, we worry that consumers wont upgrade' Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter said.

The iPhone 7 is expected to sport a new look with features such as waterproofing, wireless headphones and force touch as the home button.
In this era of e-activism which does not require activists, both wannabe and genuine, to march through streets in blistering heat or biting cold, social media has become the barricades of our times.

Consequently, to man the barricades has come to mean to rush to the keyboard and post your protest (or defence) on Twitter or Facebook.

You dont chant rhyming slogans like Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, We shall fight and we shall win; you coin hashtags and make them trend - nationally and globally.

Few among those cheering the Modi government would have had heard of Dolkun Isa before this, or known of him as the Uyghur dissident who lives in exile in Germany and is believed to hold a German passport

Conference

And so it came to pass that when news first broke of India granting a visa to Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa for attending a conference on China at Dharamsala, excited supporters and e-activists of the BJP reached for their keyboards to wave the flag to heap praise on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Soon, the hashtag #ModiSlapsChina was trending, fetching further excited chatter.

It would seem this was the moment India was waiting since the humiliation of 1962; the moment for revenge and redemption.

Few, if any, among those cheering the Modi government would have had heard of Dolkun Isa before this, or known of him as the Uyghur dissident who lives in exile in Germany and is believed to hold a German passport.

Isa heads the World Uyghur Congress which has been campaigning for the rights of Uyghur Muslims in Chinas Xinjiang province.

As in Tibet, Beijing has been trying to suppress and crush Uyghur nationalism and separatism through its triple policy of overwhelming force, sly co-option and massive resettlement, though not necessarily in that order.

Inducements of office and power are offered to Uyghurs willing to collaborate with Beijing.

There are some takers, but the vast majority rejects Chinas repressive rule and abhors the Han Chinese who have been ferried in as settlers with the aim of changing the demography of the province.

Over the decades, Beijing has modulated its position on Tibetan separatists.

They are now called splittists.

This is largely because little remains of the country the Dalai Lama fled in 1959, to seek shelter in India.

Compared to Tibet, Xinjiang is a different story. The indigenous Uyghur population, of Turkic extract, has refused to be bludgeoned into submission.

Beneath the turbulent surface simmers fierce hate. What has fueled Muslim separatism is the global rise of jihadist Islamism.

Beijing claims the East Turkmenistan Islamic Movement, affiliated to Al Qaeda, is behind the ethno-religious uprising by terrorists.

Dolkun Isa is accused by China of being a terrorist, who uses his perch in Europe to mobilise funds and arms for Uyghur separatism.

The accusation may be entirely untrue, but in the past other separatists have used liberal Europes shelter to mobilise resources for armed insurrection.

Given this reality, it becomes difficult to scoff at Chinas claim and accusation.

But, that is precisely what New Delhi was perceived as having done in response to China blocking Indias move at the UN Security Council to secure sanctions on Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar who plotted and executed the Pathankot attack.

In the past, China has restrained Indias hand on Hafiz Saeed and his lieutenants in Lashkar-e-Tayyeba by invoking its right to block.

Worse, China justified the protection it extended to Azhar by lecturing India on the need to be good friends with Pakistan, pretending its deed was that of a well-wisher when in reality it was akin to sprinkling salt on Indias wound.

Its this backdrop that made the visa for Dolkun Isa a big issue: India had done unto China what China had done unto India, or so the hashtag nationalists believed and proclaimed.

For more than a week the narrative gathered steam and the #ModiSlapsChina balloon grew bigger by the day.

Opedists rushed in with their two-penny views.

Foreign affairs analysts agonised over possible fall-outs of a Modi-Xi clash.

The lusty cheers of e-activists grew into a cacophony of nationalist slogans.

The barricades shook and looked as if their collapse under the force of Right triumphalism was imminent.

Protest

Then the least expected happened. The visa (it turned out to be an e-visa meant for tourists) was withdrawn.

This was done after China lodged its protest with India for giving a visa to a wanted terrorist and pointed out that there was a Red Corner notice mandating Dolkun Isas arrest if he were to arrive at an Indian port.

There were various explanations credited to unnamed sources on why the visa was cancelled: that Dolkun Isa could not have attended the Dharamsala conference with a tourist visa; that as a responsible country India could not have allowed unhindered travel to a person against whom there is a Red Corner notice; and, that it was never a considered decision to spite China by thumbing our collective nose at that country.

These are lame excuses. A realistic explanation would be this was yet another halfway house act of standing up to China (or the mighty US and even puny Pakistan, for that matter).

When push came to shove, India, as always, meekly allowed itself to be shoved.

The only other explanation would be this is another instance of two key Ministries, the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Home Affairs, not knowing what the other is up to.

Mystery

Either way it remains a mystery as to why the #ModiSlapsChina narrative was allowed to build up to a virtual point of no return.

It also remains unexplained why India would feel constrained to issue a visa to a German national against whom China bears a grudge.

We can be pretty sure China would not reciprocate in a similar manner. Nor did China pillory the US for ignoring the Red Corner notice while opening its doors to Dolkun Isa.

Foreign policy is largely about pushing, promoting and securing the national interest.

And what is in the national interest is often bereft of moral principles, ethical niceties and obligations to the world at large.

It is silly to even remotely suggest that India should play by the rule-book while dealing with China.

Sadly, the whole messy affair over the visa for Dolkun Isa suggests those who should be playing a crafty power game to push India's national interest are either incapable of craftiness or simply gutless.
One of the oddest aspects of the referendum campaign is how it has turned the Chancellor from cheerleader for Britains economic renaissance into gloomster.

Investment and building are being delayed, and another group of international experts, the OECD, confirms British families would be worse off if we leave the EU, opined George Osborne in an HM Treasury press release.

If we rolled back the video to last years general election campaign, this is just the kind of talking the economy down which might have been heard from Labour leader Ed Miliband and his cohorts.

For some clearer sense on the first-quarter growth figures I rely on Goldman Sachs, one of the firms, incidentally, that has made no secret of its preference for Remain.

Naysayer: Chancellor George Osborne wanred that British families would be worse off if we leave the EU

Goldman notes that the first-quarter estimate of 0.4 per cent is based on just half the data, that services output increased by 0.6 per cent quarter-on-quarter and that construction and production are being hurt by low productivity. There is no mention of Brexit.

Indeed, making the link is wholly misleading. As Osborne noted in both his November Autumn Statement and his Budget speech, a cocktail of bad stuff was affecting the UK long before Brexit uncertainty raised its head.

The dampener on construction has far more to do with the drying up of resources in the Gulf, Russia and elsewhere, than the upcoming vote.

The one place where the impact of the referendum can be seen is on the foreign exchanges. There has been a peculiar reverse ferret.

The pound sold off on fears of Leave, falling to a 30-month low on April 7. Since then it has bounced back 4 per cent against a basket of currencies.

If the traders were watching the GDP rather than politics, the opposite might have happened. It is clearly assumed on the markets that interventions of the IMF, President Obama and now the OECD make a Remain vote a no-brainer.

It may be, as the OECD says, that Britain would have less access to the EUs market of 500m consumers and investors if we left.

But this assumes trade relations are to do with political and tariff arrangements rather than competitive advantage.

In health sciences, aerospace and financial services, Britain and the City of London have goods and services other countries want.

People across Europe havent stopped buying iPhones or Apple devices because the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (between the US and EU) has stalled.

What is encouraging is that the UK services sector is holding up so strongly. This is not just about haircuts, cafes and finance but also high-growth creative industries (up to 10 per cent of GDP), IT and other tech services.

Osborne should be celebrating the brightness on his watch and can only do harm if he fails to focus on the positives.

High hurdles

Even the most short-termist City analyst is not going to judge Jes Staleys stewardship of Barclays on a single quarter.

But the numbers seem to bear out his early judgment that the investment bank still has something to offer and as a consumer and corporate lender it still has a strong franchise.

Indeed, after the rotten first-quarter investment banking results from Goldman et al, Barclays is proving better than average.

There are many bridges to be crossed before the lowly rated Barclays shares (which I hold) can count on a recovery.

Staley could deservedly feel a little early grief today at the companys annual general meeting over a greedy pay package of 8.25million, something totally out of keeping with the times.

The former JP Morgan banker has a long list of issues to clear away before Barclays can perform anything close to potential.

These include a settlement with the US Justice Department over mortgage securities, further provisions against payment protection insurance selling and a long-running Serious Fraud Office inquiry over funding from the Gulf.

He also has to demonstrate that having declared Africa too capital-intensive, he can find a suitable buyer. Barclays has a real duty of care as, in a totally different context, Sir Philip Green has learned to his cost.

Investors also need to bear in mind the warning of deputy governor of the Bank of England Sir Jon Cunliffe: banks will generate lower returns in the post-crisis world.

There wont be much weeping and wailing about that.

Get Google

When Europes competition commissioner decided to take a look at whether Google was uncompetitive in the way it markets and operates its Android operating system, there was disgruntlement across the Atlantic.

It included a thundering attack in the FT from Silicon Valley pioneer investor Michael Moritz, of Sequoia, suggesting it was all terribly unfair.

Now we learn that the USs competition enforcer, the Federal Trade Commission, is seeking to ascertain whether Google is engaged in market abuse by using its Android system to lock out new app developers.
The boss of one of Britains biggest smoke alarm manufacturers has warned up to 10 per cent of jobs could be cut as it reels from the fallout of a product malfunction.

Coventry-based Sprue Aegis has admitted that nearly 100,000 of its FireAngel smoke alarms have a defect that makes them beep for a change of battery long before necessary.

The units are sealed, so the batteries cannot be changed by customers.

Sprue Aegis has admitted that nearly 100,000 of its smoke alarms have a defect that makes them beep for a change of battery long before necessary

The company has set aside an extra 5.5million to cover claims from angry customers and said profits last year and this year will be lower than previously thought.

Chief executive Neil Smith has now told the Mail that between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of jobs could go at the group, which employs 194 staff.

The scale of the expected job losses comes a day after it emerged that Sprue Aegis was paying a dividend for 2015 of 8p a share.

That will result in a payout of 266,400 for executive chairman Graham Whitworth, and 240,000 for managing director and founder Nick Rutter.
Making Sense of Michael Jackson Estate's Tax Troubles

Michael Jackson was a unique man and musician and now his death has spawned a tax battle unlike any other. The Internal Revenue Service claims that, based on the value of his name and likeness, Jackson's estate was worth more than $400 million when he died. The estate claims it was much lower -- more like $2,000.

The tax authority and the estate are expected to have a showdown in court in 2017, but according to The Hollywood Reporter , neither party has much information about how the other arrived at the figures they cite. Let's look at the issues.

Image Problems

The IRS's request for taxes is reportedly based on the value of the Michael Jackson's image and likeness, and this is something that has never been done before. But Jackson's image wasn't great at the time of his death, which is why the estate says it was worth very little.

When Michael Jackson died unexpectedly in 2009 at age 50, his estate was allegedly in rough shape due to legal problems. Jackson had been accused of child molestation and had no licensing deals, and he was only just then planning a comeback tour reportedly. After his death, estate managers supposedly worked wonders and the MJ licensing business has boomed.

The IRS is claiming that Jackson's estate was worth much more at the time of his death than the estate says, and it is suing for more than $400 million. Experts predict that with interest and fees the matter could be worth a billion dollars. The case is set for trial in a Los Angeles tax tribunal in 2017.

But many experts are perplexed, and not just by the fact that a powerhouse like Jackson could claim so little value. They say that the tax authority is basing it claim to so much cash due in estate taxes based on money the Jackson image earned after his death. But "what matters most for tax purposes is the value of Jackson's name and likeness at the time of his death -- not now, after his executors have worked their magic," writes The Hollywood Reporter.

Image Resurrection

Jackson's estate's attorney explained to reporters that much work was done to resurrect the Michael Jackson image after his death. A 2009 documentary, called This Is It, went a long way to contribute to the improved view of the musician.

"Michael Jackson had no merchandising deals then," says Weitzman. "Only after we began the resurrection and This Is It did things begin to change. The IRS says, 'You should have known about the documentary.' That's like [saying] we should have known he was going to die."

Just as it would have been impossible for the estate to predict Jackson's death or even the possibility of his image being so successfully resurrected, no one can say what will happen with this case. Estate planning attorneys are watching carefully and it is anyone's guess what comes next in this one-of-a kind case.

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Property prices: Foxtons has warned it faces a 'challenging' summer

Estate agent Foxtons has warned it faces a challenging summer after booming demand from landlords led to a surge in business at the start of the year.

It said revenues in the first quarter were 16.2 per cent higher than a year earlier at 38.4million as investors snapped up buy-to-let homes before a stamp duty surcharge on such properties came into force.

But it said sales were brought forward to beat the tax hike on April 1, leaving the pipeline of deals for the second quarter lower than they would have been.

Chief executive Nic Budden also said concerns about Britains future in the EU could hit the market.
Penny pincher: Roll's-Royce boss Warren East has told senior managers to make further cuts

The boss of Rolls-Royce has told senior managers to cut costs even more after an internal report found it could make an extra 1billion if it improved margins to match rivals.

Warren East, who joined the jet engine manufacturer in July, has challenged staff to push savings to 400million, which would see it achieve the same margins as US competitor General Electric.

Rolls told investors in February it would seek to slash costs by up to 200million a year, on top of the 145million it expected to save from restructuring its aerospace and marine businesses.

It has issued five profit warnings in recent years.

A Rolls-Royce spokesman said: If we achieved best-in-class margins our profits would be 1billion higher.
Sickening footage of a seven-year-old Palestinian girl 'stabbing' Jews was taken at a 'festival of hate' partly funded by a UK charity supported by Jeremy Corbyn and Labour MPs, MailOnline can reveal.

The film of the gruesome children's play was broadcast on Hamas TV last week, with the British charitys logo clearly visible on a banner behind the stage.

The little girl, dressed in a hijab, is seen pretending to stab two boys dressed as Israeli soldiers, who respond by 'shooting' her. Then, amid cheers from the baying crowd, a boy dressed as a masked terrorist massacres the soldiers with a replica semi-automatic weapon.

This shocking display of brainwashing took place last week as part of Palestine Festival for Children and Education  and the festival was funded by Interpal, which is widely supported by Labour MPs.

The Charity Commission said it is investigating as a matter of priority. MailOnline's revelations will cause intense embarrassment to the Labour leader, who is facing a storm of criticism for not acting strongly enough to quell anti-Semitism in his party. His office declined to comment last night.

Brainwashing: The girl looks to adults for encouragement as she acts out the stabbing

Vicious: A young girl, dressed in a hijab and holding a dagger, hides a knife behind her back

Terror: A boy dressed as a masked terrorist, mounts an 'attack' with a toy gun. The Interpal logo is circled

MailOnline has learnt that Interpal donated 6,800 to Gazas festival of hate, which was organised by the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza City and ended last week.

The charity said it did not support the play but instead 'hosted some activities in Gaza City, as part of the larger event', adding that it does not condone violence. But MPs dismissed this explanation as not very convincing.

The Labour leader has spoken at Interpal fundraisers, and has appeared in a promotional video for the charity.

In 2013, he and his wife accepted a 2,800 tour of Gaza funded by Interpal. He has called the organisations chairman  a notorious Islamic hardliner who has said adulterers should be stoned  a very good friend, and has shared a platform with a range of extremists at Interpal events (see graphic below).

The charity has been designated a specially designated global terrorist organisation by the United States, which says it 'facilitates the transfer of tens of millions of dollars a year to Hamas'. Interpal officials have been repeatedly photographed with the Hamas leadership in Gaza.

Interpal is contesting the designation in the American courts.

Sir Eric Pickes MP said: 'The Leader of the Labour Party has green-lit radicalisation and incitement to violence via his well-documented involvement with notorious hate preachers and Interpal, which is rightly designated in the US as a global terrorist organisation.

'Time is running out for Jeremy Corbyn to give leadership to his Party. His lack of decisive action in stamping out anti-Semitism is sickening. The public demands and deserves an unequivocal condemnation of anti-Semitism and a renouncement of the repugnant Interpal.'

Extreme: Jeremy Corbyn, circled, appears alongside many extremists at an Interpal event in 2013

Tour: Jeremy Corbyn visits Gaza in 2013 on a tour paid for by Interpal, costing 2,800

Solidarity: Jeremy Corbyn poses with Interpal's chairman and senior leadership in Gaza in 2013

A 2009 investigation by Britain's Charity Commission found no evidence to link Interpal to Hamas, but Andrew Hind, the Commission's Chief Executive said, 'our report does not give the charity a clean bill of health'.

Last night, furious MPs demanded that the a fresh inquiry is launched.

The reality is that many who see themselves as defenders of the Palestinian cause are far too close to those holding deeply racist and anti-Semitic views, said Andrew Percy, MP for Brigg and Goole.

It is absolutely disgusting that any charity should be involved in a festival of hate that radicalises children to go and kill innocent Jews.

This is yet another example of Jeremy Corbyns dodgy friends who are associated with very extreme individuals. It shows what a problem Labour has with anti-Semitism. They have got to start getting serious.

A spokesman for the Charity Commission said that it was urgently investigating MailOnlines revelations. The Commission is aware about concerns about the contents of this video, he said. We are assessing the material as a matter of priority before deciding what regulatory action may be required.

Interpal sought to distance itself from the glorification of violence last night, claiming that its money only funded other parts of the festival.

Our logo was used in various materials for the festival, as we held our own activities as part of the larger umbrella of the festival in Gaza City, a spokesperson said. We did not support this particular play and did not have any involvement with it.

MPs did not find Interpals explanations persuasive. I don't think thats a very convincing defence, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP told MailOnline. Interpal is not a reputable charity. This is deeply, deeply concerning.

'Labour MPs nod when the Prime Minister says something must be done to tackle anti-Semitism, but now is the time for action.

Miles of smiles: Jeremy Corbyn poses with Interpal officials and supporters in 2013

Comrades: Jeremy Corbyn and his 'good friend' Ibrahim Hewitt, who has said adulterers should be stoned

Cornyns involvement with Interpal stretches back many years and connects him to a variety of extremists.

He has admitted being a personal friend of Interpal's chairman, Ibrahim Hewitt, 58, a controversial Islamic hardliner who runs a private Muslim school in Leicester that cited sharia law in its child protection policies.

Speaking at a pro-Palestinian event in East London in February 2013, Corbyn said: Ive got to know Ibrahim Hewitt, the Chair, extremely well, and I consider him to be a very good friend, and I think hes done a fantastic job.

Hewitt gained notoriety when he wrote a pamphlet branding homosexuality a great sin, comparable to paedophilia and incest, which should be severely punished under Islamic law. It also said that adulterers should be 'stoned to death.

In 2014, Hewitt was banned from speaking at an Oxfam event as a result of the homophobic views that he has expressed.

The preacher has since said that he was simply setting out the view stated in Islamic texts, and claimed, these do not mean that I would advocate such actions'.

CORBYN AND THE INTERPAL EXTREMISTS Jeremy Corbyn delivered a speech at a London event entitled 'Palestine: Journey Through The Ages' in February 2013. His fellow speakers included: Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of Interpal, who wrote a pamphlet comparing homosexuality to paedophilia and incest and saying that adulterers should be 'stoned to death' Sheikh Zahir Mahmood , who has been filmed saying, Hamas are not terrorists, they are freedom fighters Dr Swee Ang , a pro-Palestinian activist who once sent emails imploring people to watch an anti-Semitic video presented by David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. She claimed she did not know who he was Uthman Lateef , who was banned from speaking at another 2013 event, organised by Education Aid for Palestinians (EAP), because of his anti-democratic and homophobic preaching Hamza Tzortzis , who has been filmed giving a speech in which he said, we as Muslims reject the idea of freedom of speech, and even the idea of freedom Yvonne Ridley , a British Muslim convert who has been filmed chanting, victory to Hezbollah! Victory to Hamas! Victory to the Palestinians! Victory to the Intifada! Allahu Akhbar!, and claiming that drinking Coca-Cola is like drinking the blood of Palestinian children Dr Daud Abdullah , who , who signed a declaration in support of Hamas and military action, led a boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day, and was accused of advocating attacks on the Royal Navy Advertisement

Corbyn's declaration of friendship for Hewitt came as he shared a stage with a number of Britains most notorious Islamist figures at an event organised by Interpal in East London in February 2013.

These included those who defend militant extremists; condemn homosexuality; reject the idea of freedom of speech; and are accused of advocating attacks on the Royal Navy.

Leaked Wikileaks cables showed how the CIA was concerned at UK political support for Interpal in 2010. The American intelligence agency said it was 'politically connected and regularly pressed elected leaders on its behalf'.

Last year, MailOnline revealed Corbyns association with Paul Eisen, a well-known Holocaust denier. Subsequently, the Labour leader was forced to admit that there was a connection but denied that he knew of his controversial views.

At that time I had absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Paul Eisen was a Holocaust denier, he said.

Footage of the horrific play, which was filmed in Gaza and broadcast on Hamas TV, shows the children looking to their teachers and parents for encouragement as they act out the murderous scene, with the Interpal logo proudly displayed in the background.

As the girl attacks, a voice on the loudspeaker says: Do not be angry with her, she is your blood, your flesh and your honour.

When the boy dressed as a terrorist creeps up to the stage as pounding music is played. To the cry of, rejoice, the sniper has arrived! he shoots the soldier dead and releases a boy posing as a prisoner in a makeshift cage.

The Labour Party has been under increasing pressure to root out anti-Semitism from its membership. Yesterday Naz Shah, a Muslim Labour MP, was suspended after it emerged that she suggested that Israel should be relocated to the United States, and tweeted everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. Two Labour peers accused Corbyn of 'dithering' in his response.

Earlier this month, Labour MP Louise Ellman, who is Jewish, said some members are allowed to get away with posting anti-Semitic comments, adding that she had raised this in parliamentary meetings.

Moreover, in March, Vicki Kirby, Labours vice-chair, was suspended for anti-Semitic tweets including suggesting that Jews have big noses.

She had been ejected from the party in 2014 but later reinstated  before the leadership buckled to pressure and expelled her a second time.

Appearing on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday, Corbyn said: Anti-Semitism is absolutely abhorrent and wrong We have suspended and we will suspend any member who behaves in that way.

An Interpal spokesperson said: We did not support this particular play and did not have any involvement with it. Interpal deplores any activity involving children and violence.

'This play is totally contrary to our ethos, and our focus is on getting children away from the politics and trauma of occupation and to focus on being children.

'This year we expended funds on hosting some [Festival] activities in Gaza City, as part of the larger event, for children that we support through our Children Welfare Programmes.

'This included outdoor games, food, T-shirts and also rewards for teachers for their good work over the year and was managed by our Gaza Field Office.
A Philippine presidential frontrunner who joked about raping a 'beautiful' Australian missionary has promised to kill tens of thousands of criminals if he is elected.

Rodrigo Duterte, 71, also joked about his penis and vowed to pardon himself for mass murder as he took his profanity-laced campaign to the nation's business elite.

Duterte hit out again at key Philippine allies, the United States and Australia, after warning last week he would be prepared to sever diplomatic ties because their ambassadors spoke out against a joke he made about raping an Australian missionary who was later gang-raped and murdered.

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Presidential Candidate Rodrigo Duterte has pledged to end crime by killing tens of thousands of criminals

Last week Mr Duterte joked he had wanted to rape the 'beautiful' missionary, who was sexually assaulted and murdered by inmates in a 1989 prison riot in Davao, the biggest city in the southern Philippines.

'I was mad she [the missionary] was raped but she was so beautiful. I thought, the mayor should have been first,' he said at a rally.

After his comments were criticised, Mr Duterte told Australian and US ambassadors to 'shut their mouths'.

The missionary had been identified as Jacqueline Hamill, according to the ABC.

Ms Hamill's friend took to Facebook to 'publicly denounce' the candidate's comments, saying: 'Don't vote for people who speak vile things against women.'

Mr Duterte has shocked the political establishment in recent weeks - surging to a clear lead in opinion surveys before the May 9 presidential election with a campaign speech full of filthy language and promises to end crime by killing tens of thousands of criminals.

In an address to the nation's premier group of business figures on Wednesday, Mr Duterte defended his history of womanising with typical straight-talking and crassness.

'I was separated from my wife. I'm not impotent. What am I supposed to do? Let this hang forever?' the candidate said, referring to his penis, as people in the crowd laughed.

'When I take Viagra, it stands up.'

Mr Duterte gives a campaign T-shirt to young supporters during a campaign sortie in the town of Silang last week

Surveys have shown Duterte is particularly popular among the nation's wealthy and middle class, who fear rising crime

Earlier on the campaign trail, he said he had two mistresses but reassured taxpayers they would not cost much because he kept them at cheap boarding houses and took them to short-time hotels for sex.

Mr Duterte has also boasted about running vigilante death squads during his many years as mayor of Davao.

He once said the death squads had killed 1700 people.

But Mr Duterte has at other times denied any links to the vigilante groups, which have attracted fierce criticism from human rights groups and the United Nations.

A key part of the candidate's campaign has been a pledge to eradicate crime nationwide in the first six months of his presidency by ordering security forces to kill criminals.

In his speech to the Makati Business Club, Mr Duterte again promised his presidency would 'be a bloody one'.

He promised to pardon soldiers or police officers if they were charged with rights abuses.

A friend of the missionary identified as Jacqueline Hamill hit out at the presidential candidate for his comments. Robin Haines Merrill (on the flute inside a Filipino prison) said she 'publicly denounced' his remark

'I will issue 1000 pardons a day,' Mr Duterte said.

Mr Duterte said the constitution also allowed the president to pardon himself for crimes and he would do so at the end of his term.

'Pardon given to Rodrigo Duterte for the crime of multiple murder, signed Rodrigo Duterte,' he said as people in the crowd laughed.

Surveys have shown the candidate is particularly popular among the nation's wealthy and middle class, who fear rising crime.

On Wednesday, he criticised the United States and Australia for failing to do more as China expanded its presence in areas of the South China Sea that are also claimed by the Philippines.

'Why the hell didn't Australia, the Americans or even Japan stop it?' Mr Duterte said.

In the Philippines presidents can serve only a single six-year term.

Mr Duterte has tapped into strong sentiments among many Filipinos who are frustrated with the slow pace of reforms under current President Benigno Aquino, according to analysts.
Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia will allow students with concealed handgun permits from the state to keep their weapons in their dorms beginning next fall.

The News & Advance reports those students would need permission from the school first. The guns would be kept in safes inside the residence halls at the private Christian university.

The policy change was given the go-ahead by the university's board of trustees last week.

Jerry Falwell Jr, the president of Liberty University, announced last year students would be allowed to carry guns anywhere on campus. His initiative got an OK from a board of trustees last week

Liberty University is a private Christian university located in Lynchburg, Virginia. Its president is an outspoken supporter of gun rights and has urged the school's students to arm themselves

University President Jerry Falwell Jr. announced last year that eligible students could carry guns anywhere on campus. Previously, students who qualified could carry guns anywhere except residence halls.

Liberty University has over 14,500 residential students. One requirement for having a concealed-carry permit is being 21 or older.

Falwell says he expects the change to affect few people since not many 21-year-old students live in dorms on campus.

Out of 200 eligible students in on-campus housing who might be eligible, only 20 currently have permits, Falwell said according to News & Advance.

At a weekly convocation speech held days after the December, 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, Falwell urged students to arm themselves.

'I just want to take this opportunity to encourage all of you to get your permit... We offer a free course,' Falwell told an auditorium full of students.

'If more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they go up and kill us.'
A Florida manatee has surprised scientists by giving birth to rare twins and swimming with them in a canal.

The mammal, named Tomo-Bella, was spotted by shocked onlooker Karl Nelson at the waterway on Siesta Key, Sarasota with the twin calves.

Quick-witted Mr Nelson managed to film the manatee with her young and sent the footage to Mote Marine Laboratory, which confirmed the mother's identity.

Rare: A Florida manatee has surprised scientists by giving birth to rare twins and swimming with them in a canal

Cute: The mammal, named Tomo-Bella, was spotted by shocked onlooker Karl Nelson in the water on Siesta Key, Sarasota with the twin calves

Tomo-Bella has been documented with eight calves during the 23 years that scientists have been observing her since 1993.

But manatee twins are extremely rare, with only a 1.4 in 100 chance of being born, lower than the three per cent chance for humans.

Jennifer Johnson, staff biologist with Mote's Manatee Research Program, said: 'We're excited to see that Tomo-Bella is contributing to the manatee population, and it's interesting to see twins from a female whose history we know so well'.

The Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium posted on their Facebook page:

'A manatee gave birth to rare twins this month in southwest Florida, say scientists who confirmed the mother's identity from a video and know her history from 23 years of observations.

'On April 15, female manatee "Tomo-Bella" and her newborn twins were observed in Grand Canal along Siesta Key by members of the public.

Mote asks people who see the manatee with the twin babies to take photos, videos and provide location information - but don't disturb them.

Manatees are large, fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous marine mammals sometimes known as sea cows even though they dwell in rivers.

They can measure up to 13ft, weigh up to 90 stone and typically breed once every two years.

Gestation lasts about 12 months and it takes a further 12 to 18 months to wean the calf.

The Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium posted on their Facebook page: 'A manatee gave birth to rare twins this month in southwest Florida, say scientists who confirmed the mother's identity...'
The other big three banks have signed on with competitor Android Pay

ANZ announced on Thursday it will be the first Australian bank to sign up

The new technology was only available for American Express customers

ANZ has announced it will be the first Australian bank to offer its customers Apple Pay, with the new service available from Thursday.

The technology allows customers to select a bank account to link with their device and then pay for goods simply by waving their phone or a watch over contactless payment terminals.

Apple Pay was launched in Australia last year but it was only accessible for American Express customers, leaving many Australians unable to use the latest technology.

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ANZ announced on Thursday that it will be the first Australian bank to offer Apple Pay to its customers

Apple Pay was launched in Australia last November but only for American Express customers

The idea of not having to carry a wallet appeals to the masses and no doubt to all banks, but the other big three banks have put their money on the competition, signing up with Android Pay.

ANZ is often seen as behind the other big three banks in terms of technology, but their new CEO Shayne Elliott believes the partnership will give them an edge.

'It would be pretty hypocritical of me to ... do all this hoo-h a about digital banking and then not be at the forefront of change,' Elliott said in an interview after the announcement on Thursday.

Collectively, the four big banks account for 80 percent of all credit cards that consumers have linked to mobile payment systems, in a country with a relatively high rate of contactless payment.

As Apple takes on industry after industry, with the latest target finance, Australian banks are now forced to advance their own digital services to compete.

Over a quarter of banking revenue, or about A$27 billion ($20.82 billion), is at risk from "digital disruptors", consultancy KPMG recently estimated.

Apple Pay launched in China earlier this year but Australian banks are reluctant, some signed with Android Pay instead

The partnership also coincides with Apple's first-ever dropin iPhone sales during a quarter in which services such as apps,music and payment emerged as the firm's second-largest business.

The new service would boost revenue for the company as Apple charges the banks a fee for transactions made via their service.

Apple has introduced Apple Pay to countries such as theUnited States and Britain where banks were also reluctant tosign up. It has since launched in China in February and inSingapore last week.
A former Oklahoma volunteer sheriff's deputy who said he mistook his handgun for his stun gun when he fatally shot an unarmed suspect last year was convicted of second-degree manslaughter on Wednesday.

Jurors handed down the verdict in the case of 74-year-old Robert Bates, a wealthy insurance executive accused of fatally shooting Eric Harris while working with Tulsa County sheriff's deputies last year during an illegal gun sales sting.

Harris, who had run from deputies, was restrained and unarmed when he was shot.

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Guilty: Robert Bates, 74, was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter in the 2015 shooting death of unarmed suspect Eric Harris. Bates was working with the Tulsa County sheriff's deputies as a volunteer at the time

Bates (above) was led away in handcuffs after being convicted on Wednesday for the shooting death of Harris

Andres Harris, a brother of Eric Harris, fatally shot while on sheriff's duties, with Sheila Dak-Harris and Dan Smolen, addresses media after Bates was convicted. He said the verdict is a victory for his family

The shooting  which was caught on video  sparked several investigations that, among other things, revealed an internal 2009 memo questioning Bates' qualifications as a volunteer deputy and showed that Bates, a close friend of the sheriff's, had donated thousands of dollars in cash, vehicles and equipment to the agency.

Bates faces up to four years in prison.

The victim's brother, Andre Harris, said after court that the verdict was a victory for his family and for Tulsa.

He said that 'at his age' his sentence of four years in prison 'will teach him a lesson,' according to Tulsa World.

Bates' defense attorneys argued at trial that methamphetamine found in Harris' system, along with his cardiac health, caused his death.

Defense attorneys called the killing an 'excusable homicide.'

The shooting  which was caught on video  sparked several investigations that, among other things, revealed an internal 2009 memo questioning Bates' qualifications as a volunteer deputy. Above he is pictured with his daughter

In addition, Bates, a close friend of the sheriff's, had donated thousands of dollars in cash, vehicles and equipment to the agency. Bates faces up to four years in prison

But prosecutors told jurors that Bates was guilty of culpable negligence when he shot Harris. One deputy testified that Bates apparently dozed off minutes before Harris fled from deputies.

Following the shooting, an outside consultant hired to review the sheriff's office determined that it suffered from a 'system-wide failure of leadership and supervision' and had been in a 'perceptible decline' for more than a decade.

The reserve deputy program was later suspended.

Weeks after Harris was killed, an internal sheriff's office memo from 2009 was released by an attorney for Harris' family that alleged superiors knew Bates didn't have enough training but pressured others to look the other way because of his relationship with the sheriff and the agency.

A grand jury also investigated the agency and indicted the longtime sheriff, Stanley Glanz, in September, accusing him of failing to release the 2009 memo. He resigned on November 1.

The new sheriff, who was sworn into office earlier this month, has detailed plans to reform and revive the reserve deputy program.

This photo shows a deputy bending down to pick up Bates's dropped gun following the accidental shooting in Tulsa last year. Harris is being held down on the ground, out of shot, by other deputies
A Phoenix woman has been dropped as a political fundraiser for U.S. Sen. John McCain's re-election campaign after being arrested on suspicion of drug possession and other charges.

Emily Pitha and her live-in boyfriend, Christopher Hustrulid, were taken into custody Tuesday after deputies served a search warrant at her north-central Phoenix home, Maricopa County Sheriff's officials said.

Hustrulid allegedly signed for a package containing more than 250 grams of Ecstasy.

Undercover detectives and US Postal Inspectors raided the home after the delivery, according to sheriff's officials.

Busted: Emily Pitha and her live-in boyfriend, Christopher Hustrulid, were taken into custody Tuesday after deputies served a search warrant at her north-central Phoenix home, Maricopa County Sheriff's officials said

Hustrulid (right) allegedly signed for a package containing more than 250 grams of Ecstasy and then authorities raided the home after. Pitha (left) has worked for several politicians, including US Sen. John McCain's campaign

Pitha, who has worked for at least three politicians, was recently active in GOP fundraising and had been listed as the RSVP contact for US Sen. John McCain's re-election fundraisers, according to The Arizona Republic.

Authorities were first alerted to the possible drug activity at the home by a parcel in transit from the Netherlands, the Republic reported.

Besides finding an active meth lab, detectives also reported discovering about a quarter-pound of methamphetamine, 10 hits of LSD, about 2 grams of cocaine, several grams of heroin, several hundred Ecstasy pills, marijuana and hash oil plus about $7,000 and counterfeit cash.

Neither Pitha, 34, nor Hustrulid, 36, had a lawyer at their initial court appearance Wednesday.

Each was being held on $20,000 cash-only bonds on suspicion of manufacturing of narcotic drugs, possession of dangerous and narcotic drugs, marijuana possession and other drug charges along with various drug-possession charges and child endangerment.

Hustrulid's two children  ages 5 and 9  live with the couple, but they were at daycare at the time of the bust, authorities said.

Video Courtesy ABC15.com

Authorities found an active meth lab, about a quarter-pound of methamphetamine, 10 hits of LSD, about 2 grams of cocaine, several grams of heroin, several hundred Ecstasy pills, marijuana and hash oil plus about $7,000 and counterfeit cash in the home (above)

McCain's campaign manager Ryan O'Daniel said in a statement Wednesday that the campaign had 'terminated any relationship' with Pitha. Pitha was working as a consultant arranging fundraisers for McCain (above)

The drugs were found in an area that was easily accessible to Hustrulid's children, the Republic reported.

Pitha and Hustrulid are scheduled to appear in Maricopa County Superior Court on May 4.

McCain's campaign manager Ryan O'Daniel said in a statement Wednesday that the campaign had 'terminated any relationship' with Pitha.

Pitha was working as a consultant arranging fundraisers for McCain.
The father of Scientology leader David Miscavige has spoken out about how his son changed from a 'lovable kid' to a 'ruthless' leader after he abandoned his family for the church.

Ron Miscavige, 80, told ABC 20/20 that he and his son had been close when David was a child, living at the family home in Philadelphia.

But aged only 16, David had left his loved ones behind to enter Scientology's spiritual headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, for 'Sea Org' training. Over the next few years the teen swiftly rose through the ranks of the church and into founder L. Ron Hubbard's inner circle.

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The father of Scientology leader David Miscavige, Ron Miscavige (pictured) has spoken out about how his son changed from a 'lovable kid' to a 'ruthless' leader after he abandoned his family for the church

'Ruthless': Ron told how his son David (pictured) left the family home at 16 to join the church's Sea Org training and swiftly rose through the ranks

David, who was Tom Cruise's best man at two of his weddings, would go on to become one of Hubbard's most trusted advisers and would assist in filming the recruitment videos.

By the time Ron joined Scientology in 1985, around a decade after his son, he found a very different man than the 'lovable kid' with a 'great sense of humor' who he raised.

He described one moment, where he called out to David after he saw him walking just 20 yards ahead of him.

'I said: "Hey Dave." And he turned to me and he looked at me like, "Who are you talking to?"

'No words were said but that glance told me those days were over. I would never, I could never do that as a father to a son.'

Ron spent more than 40 years in the church before he finally escaped.

During that time, he says he was given a glimpse of Scientology's most inner workings.

He also got to see his son's short temper up close, along with his erratic and abusive management style. On one occasion, David shouted at him in front of other people for almost an hour, he said.

Marine vet Ron Miscavige (right) will reveal details of Scientology's inner workings and how his son, Scientology Church leader David Miscavige (left) turned into a 'ruthless' tyrant in his upcoming book

During an interview with ABC 20/20, Ron returned to the childhood home of David in Philadelphia (pictured)

The 80-year-old former marine claims his son had continued to seek power until he assumed his position of head of the church or 'Captain' the death of Hubbard

'I'm the one that got him into Scientology. I raised him, good or bad,' Miscavige said. 'And to come to this? What the hell is this? This is nuts.'

Ron's memoir, Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me, is expected to tell of his regret for creating the unyielding man who has ruled Scientology with an iron fist for three decades.

When he got absolute control, he went absolutely bonkers Mark 'Marty' Rathbun, Miscavige's ex-number 2

When asked about the title of his book, he explained: 'He wasn't always that way. When he was a kid, he was a lovable kid...'

The 80-year-old former marine claims his son had hungrily sought power until, following the death of Hubbard in 1986, he assumed his position of head of the church or 'Captain'

'There were no checks and balances on him [David], at a certain point, where he could just go ahead,' Ron said. 'He just assumed that power. And he had an authoritarian figure. He was a great talker.... he used to say, "You have power if people will listen to you." And people did listen to him.'

'When he got absolute control, he went absolutely bonkers,' David Miscavige's former number two, Mark 'Marty' Rathbun said.

Ex-Scientologist Lois Reisdorf told ABC News she first met David when she was at Flag looking for recruits to join Hubbard's Sea Org unit called the Commodore's Messenger Organization.

'Dave was just like a 16-year-old kid,' Reisdorf told '20/20.' 'He was very gung ho. He had a lot of spark.'

She challenged the church's claims that David had been 'groomed' for leadership by Hubbard who viewed him as his natural heir.

Instead, Reisdorf claims that he seized power in a bloodless 'coup' after Hubbard went into seclusion in 1980.

David Miscavige, who was Tom Cruise's best man at two of his weddings, is set to lay bare the inner working of the Church led by his son David Miscavige

'He started to get power and started to pull in people  onto his side, and it ended up being like a coup, where you had half of the management took over and kicked out the other half,' Reisdorf said.

Hubbard, she said, had always wanted Scientology to be run by a committee after his death - not just one person.

Reisdorf says that she was on the half of management staff that was relieved of executive duties.

'It was a betrayal,' she said.

Scientology refute the claims and insist that 'it was clear to everyone that David was the person that Mr Hubbard would want to take the Church forward.'

The church claimed that Reisdorf had been removed by Hubbard himself in 1982 and so could not have any knowledge of his plans for the future of Scientology.

In a statement, the church said Reisdorf had been removed from her management post because 'Hubbard found that she had "systematically crashed" production by issuing destructive orders  He stripped her of all rank, and assigned her to clean rooms.'

Ruthless will be released May 3. The highlight of Ron's pre-launch publicity tour will be an interview on ABC's 20/20 on Friday.

Ron is already facing a battle with his son about the release of the book which will hit stores next week.

Tony Ortega, who runs the anti-Scientology website The Underground Bunker has obtained a copy of a letter from the Church of Scientology demanding that that the book not be published by Silvertail Books in Great Britain.

Scientology claims the book contains 'malicious, false, misleading and highly defamatory allegations relating to David Miscavige'.

Ortega says that US publisher St. Martin's Press has also received a copy of the letter.

The letter also claims David Miscavige has not had any 'meaningful' relationship with his father since he left home at 16. The bid to gag publication was rejected by Silvertail Books.

Publisher Humfrey Hunter told Daily Mail Online: 'Ron's story, Ruthless, shines a vital new light on the inner workings of the Church of Scientology and it is clearly in the public interest for his book to be published in the UK - as well as the rest of the world.

'He is a brave man to have written a book like this and Silvertail is proud to be helping him get it out to as many readers as possible. We are not changing plans: Silvertail Books will publish Ruthless on May 3.'

If Ron hadn't allowed his son to drop out of high school on his 16th birthday to join the church full-time, the ultra-ambitious David may never have caught founder L. Ron Hubbard's eye, and may not have been able to position himself to take command when he was just 26 after Hubbard's 1986 death.

The book was originally to be titled 'If He Dies, He Dies,' after a comment David allegedly made about his father when he thought he might be having a heart attack.

'This could be bloody, [David] Miscavige won't take this without a monumental fight,' one of the church leader's former assistants told Daily Mail Online. 'But don't expect Ron to cave in. This book has been in the pipeline over three years and he can't wait for his moment to come.

'It's going to be gnarly and messy  all out war. The whole might of the Church could come down on Ron, I hope he knows what he's let himself in for.'

The book is co-written by Dan Koon, a former high-ranking member of the church who has become one of David Miscavige's leading critics. Unlike many people who have deserted the church, Koon believes in Hubbard's original teachings but believes Miscavige has led the church down a dangerous path.

Koon, who, now calls himself an 'independent scientologist,' says the church should get back to its roots and blames Miscavige for 'misleading' the church. 'The most important target is to reform the church and put in a new management structure,' Koon says on a YouTube talk.

'The Scientology that a lot of us knew in the 60s and 70s has been lost and replaced by a much less friendlya much more authoritarian and dictatorial 'Scientology,' that is really much more akin to what goes on in North Korea,' he said.

'That is not what Scientology really is.'

Recent high profile defections have included Lisa Marie Presley as well as King of Queens actress Leah Remini and Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis who have both condemned Miscavige's autocratic rule.

Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me by Ron Miscavige and Dan Koon, published by St Martin's Press in the USA and Silvertail Books in the UK will be available on Amazon .com on May 3

Cruise's former wives, Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes, have also cut ties with the church. Miscavige was the best man for Tom at both weddings.

But other celebrities including Lisa Marie's mother, Priscilla Presley, actors John Travolta, Kirstie Alley and Anne Archer, Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss and Fox News's Greta Van Susteren remain committed Scientologists.

After she left, Remini made a report to Los Angeles Police that Miscavige's wife Shelly, who has not been seen in public for nearly nine years, was missing. The LAPD investigated and eventually said they had found her and she did not want to make a statement.

But now it's Miscavige's own father who is expected to turn against him in the most public way. According to one critic, Ruthless  which is subtitled 'Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me'  could be a 'nail in the coffin for Scientology.'

Ron Miscavige left Scientology in 2012 after 41 years. Broke, he and his second wife Becky were reduced to moving in with his other son, Ron Jr., in Virginia. Ron and Becky, who is 21 years younger than him, now live in a tiny 1,100 sq. ft. single-story brick home on a busy street in a Milwaukee suburb.

According to public records they bought the home in 2013 for $84,000.

His first wife, Loretta, David's mother, died in 2005, 15 years after they divorced.

Tony Ortega, who runs the anti-Scientology website The Underground Bunker and knows Ron, believes the book will go into details about Ron and Becky's escape from Scientology  with details that could be straight out of a Tom Cruise movie.

Ortega agrees that this book could be one of Scientology's biggest blows because Ron was so well loved by the whole organization. Even after he left, church staff revered him.

Ron introduced his first wife and four children to Scientology in the 1970s as he was trying to find a cure for David's asthma.

'He liked that instead of discussing heaven, hell and sin, it promised breakthroughs in relationships and marriages, careers, communication, and physical and emotional well-being,' Ron's granddaughter Jenna Miscagive Hill wrote in Beyond Belief, her own 2013 memoir about leaving the church.

'He also liked that there was a Utopian quality to Scientology. It held a point of view that man is essentially good and in charge of his own spiritual salvation.'

The entire family left its home in Willingboro, New Jersey, to join Scientology. They initially went to England for training. They all stayed in the church for more than quarter of a century until Ron Jr. quit in 2000. David's twin Denise and younger sister Lori are still understood to be Scientologists.

The church vehemently deny many of claims made by Ron in his book. In the letter, obtained by The Underground Bunker, it took particular issue with the following claims;

David Miscavige was never officially appointed to be L. Ron Hubbard's successor but rather seized power by out-maneuvering his rivals.

That Gold Base is surrounded by spiked fencing pointing inwards;

That working and living conditions at Gold Base were appalling and staff were not permitted to leave.

That David Miscaige created 'The Hole' as a means of punishing Sea Org members and that people were subjected to deprivation and violence while detained in 'The Hole'

That David Miscavige lives in lavish conditions whille Church staff live in poor conditions.

That David Miscavige's management style is erratic and abusive.

That Miscavige hired private detectives to carry out surveillance on Ron Miscavige.

'Furthermore,' the letter continues, ' the summary of the book on your website is equally outragous and defamatory with your allegations of our client's 'brutal approach to running the organisation today: and the disastrous effects that his leadership has had on countless numbers of Scientologists and their families.'
Utah Claims Porn Is a Public Health Hazard

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert signed a resolution this week declaring pornography a "public health hazard" and calling for more "education, prevention, research, and policy change ... to address the pornography epidemic that is harming the people of our state and nation." The non-binding resolution is a laundry list of harms allegedly created by the production and consumption of pornography, all of which have led to a "public health crisis."

But if the Utah resolution doesn't ban pornography, or even earmark state funds to combat it, what does it actually do? You can check it out below:

I'll Know It When I See It

Anti-porn advocates have fought for decades to ban pornography on moral or obscenity grounds, and thus far gotten nowhere. More recently, some have tried banning porn on civil rights grounds, with the same result. Similar attempts to limit online pornography met similar ends. Each time, courts found that attempted bans on porn unreasonably restricted free speech rights.

Some see Utah's resolution as an end around attempt to restrict pornography based on its effects, rather than its content. By declaring it a public health hazard, the resolution can focus public awareness and future legislation on "efforts to prevent pornography exposure and addiction, to educate individuals and families concerning its harms, and to develop recovery programs."

Harm, Foul

The resolution lists public harm supposedly wrought by the prevalence of pornography in today's society:

"pornography perpetuates a sexually toxic environment";

"exposure to pornography often serves as childrens' [sic] and youths' sex education and shapes their sexual templates";

"because pornography treats women as objects and commodities for the viewer's use, it teaches girls they are to be used and teaches boys to be users";

"pornography normalizes violence and abuse of women and children"; and

"potential detrimental effects on pornography's users can impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviant sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining intimate relationships, as well as problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction".

Therefore, as the resolution resolves, "pornography is a public health hazard leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms," and the state of Utah has recognized a need to address it. You can read the resolution in full, below:

Utah Bill: S.C.R. 9 Concurrent Resolution on Public Health Crisis by FindLaw
A man whose father was killed during the Port Arthur massacre 20 years ago has recalled how the tragedy changed the entire course of his life.

Nesan Kistan, who lives in Sydney with his wife and four children, lost his father Tony when the gunman opened fire inside the Broad Arrow Cafe on April 28, 1996, killing 35 people.

On the 20 year anniversary of Australia's largest massacre by a single person - Mr Kistan, 44, has revealed how he came to forgive gunman Martin Bryant.

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Nesan Kistan, pictured here with his wife Cheryl and their four children Joshua, Samuel, Micah, and Faith, said he forgives Martin Bryant for murdering his father in the Port Arthur massacre

Nesan Kistan's father Tony (left) was killed in the Port Arthur massacre, and his mother Sarah (right) survived. They are pictured here just days before the shooting

The shooting killed 35 people and injured a further 23 and is largest massacre by a single person in Australian history

When his father was killed, his parents had been holidaying in Tasmania and Mr Kistan's mother Sarah survived the attack after her husband pushed her to safety. His father died trying to save others inside the cafe.

In the days following the horrific shooting, which Mr Kistan said were incredibly 'chaotic', the then 22-year-old had been advised by a Salvation Army officer to address the media.

It was on the way to address the media from a Salvation Army headquarters in Sydney he was able to have a moment of reflection.

'I remember jumping in the officer's car and the ten minutes sitting in his car were probably the first ten minutes in that week I had time just to stop and be still.

'I remember this incredible revelation,' he said.

'This guy Martin Bryant, who murdered my father, deserved love, grace and forgiveness.

'I actually feel a whole lot of sorrow for the man, I think he was only a young man and for him to do what he did... he was very sick'.

When his father was killed, Mr Kistan's parents had been holidaying in Tasmania

This family photo was taken of Nesan (left) Sarah (second left), Nesan's brother Adrian (right) and father Tony (back) in the early 1990s

Shooter Martin Bryant opened fired in the Broad Arrow Cafe on April 28, 1996 killing 35 people and injuring a further 23

Pictured here is Tony Kistan, who his son described as 'incredibly brave' for saving his Sarah's life

In 1981 Mr Kistan, his mother and father, and younger brother Adrian had fled apartheid in South Africa, leaving them separated from many relatives.

Gunman Martin Bryant had torn their family apart for a second time, however Mr Kistan recalls vividly the moment he forgave the shooter in a deeply personal 'spiritual moment'.

'It's a time in your life that you never forget,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'I remember having to let people know - my dad's family and my mum's family lived overseas in South Africa... ringing my dad's father was the worst', he revealed.

At the time of the massacre Mr Kistan had been aspiring to great wealth while studying a a double honours degree in psychology and politics.

Although he completed his degree, he said the tragedy led him to instead devote his life to helping others, and he almost immediately began working with the Salvation Army.

Mr Kistan started as a pastor working with at-risk youth, and today is the Director for multicultural ministries across the eastern seaboard.

'I can sit here and wallow in self-pity and woe is me I suffered such a great loss... or I could become not just another whinging whining individual but I could become a solution to the problem.

Mr Kistan said his family do not dwell on the horror of Port Arthur but celebrate his father's life

'I like the saying about the glass being half empty or glass half full - I like to always look at things from an optimistic and positive way.'

While his family do not dwell on the horror of what happened at Port Arthue 20 years ago, they do commemorate Tony Kistan's life in other ways.

'We don't like to highlight the sadness or the grief of the day, but we celebrate my father's life in so many ways such as his birthday.

'We celebrate who he was and the courage he had.

'We could have lost both our parents but we were fortunate enough that through our father's incredible bravery our mother survived.

'He sacrificed himself and endeavoured to save others,' Mr Kistan said.
Sir Philip Green faced damning questions last night after it emerged the playboy who bought BHS was being chased for millions in debts from previous failed businesses.

Billionaire Sir Philip sold the high street chain for 1 to Retail Acquisitions, led by twice bankrupt former racing driver Dominic Chappell.

Last night it emerged that even as Mr Chappell was negotiating the BHS deal with Sir Philip, his finances were still being investigated by the authorities.

Twice bankrupt former racing driver Dominic Chappell's finances were still being investigated by the authorities as he was negotiating the BHS deal with Sir Philip

The 49-year-old had been made bankrupt after a deal to develop a marina on the Isle of Wight left him owing 24million.

A public hearing over these debts was held just days before BHS was sold. The revelation heaps pressure on Sir Philip over why he pushed ahead with the sale and raises questions over how much he knew about Mr Chappells chequered financial past.

The chains collapse leaves 11,000 jobs at risk and a 571million deficit in the company pension fund. As the scandal grew, it also emerged:

 Mr Chappell loaned 1.5million from Retail Acquisitions to a firm linked to his father;

 He has a string of debts settled by the courts;

 He had also been investigated by the Department of Business over a previous failed firm;

 And he is trying to raise finance for US backers to buy back BHS stores;

 Sir Philip was advised by controversial bank Goldman Sachs.

BHS, which has 164 stores, officially went into administration on Monday. Its pension scheme has a black hole estimated at 571million.

Thousands of savers could see their retirement income slashed by 10 per cent. Retail Acquisitions is understood to have taken more than 25million in salaries, fees and interest charges from BHS over the past 13 months.

Mr Chappell has a string of failed business ventures behind him and had racked up debts of 24million.

In 1993 he was a director of a property firm called Eyot, which collapsed into administration in 2008 owing 230,000.Three years later he declared himself insolvent at Slough County Court.

He first became bankrupt in December 2005 following a dispute with a London estate agent over an unpaid fee. He was discharged from this in December 2006.

BHS, which has 164 stores, officially went into administration on Monday. Its pension scheme has a black hole estimated at 571million

But before this happened he became secretary of a firm called Island Harbour Holdings developing a marina on the Isle of Wight. This deal turned sour and in March 2009 loans totalling 24million were called in and administrators were appointed.

Seven months later Mr Chappell became bankrupt for a second time after developers chased him personally for debts. He was discharged from this in 2010. As the fall-out rumbled on, he tried to restore his reputation. In 2014 he became a director of Retail Acquisitions. On March 11 last year the firm bought BHS for 1.

But just three days earlier the accountancy firm untangling the details of Mr Chappells bankruptcy called a public meeting to investigate if there were any new creditors.

And four days after the deal with BHS was signed administrators published a report into Island Harbour that said millions in debts left from the failed deal had to be written off. On April 9, a public meeting was held to clear up his bankruptcy debts.

While he had not done anything illegal, the purchase by an individual who had still not resolved his financial woes will raise eyebrows.

Goldman Sachs is said to have informally conducted a financial health check on Mr Chappell and fellow directors on behalf of Sir Philip and the deal was waved through.

A spokesman for Goldman Sachs said: Goldman Sachs had no formal role on the sale of BHS to Retail Acquisitions and was not engaged or remunerated in relation to it.

Accountant Grant Thornton, who represented Mr Chappell, said: All potential clients go through a rigorous take-on process. Mr Chappell did not return calls.

MPs continued to raise questions over Sir Philips role. Tory Richard Fuller said: He sold the company to people who did not have the credibility to run a lemonade store, let alone a large company responsible for the livelihoods of 11,000 people.

Mr Chappell further raised eyebrows last night by claiming he was trying to mount a rescue of the chain from administrators.

Billionaire lifestyle: A beaming Sir Philip Green with former X Factor judge Rita Ora, 25

He had duty to protect his workers

Commentary by Alex Brummer, City Editor

Among the most baffling aspects of the whole BHS scandal is how Sir Philip Green could have thought it fitting to allow a company of such size and importance to be sold to unscrupulous former bankrupt Dominic Chappell for just one pound.

Discarding and selling companies is the right of any private sector owner in a free market economy. But the owners have a broader moral responsibility to make sure the workforce, suppliers and the pension funds are properly protected before signing on the dotted line.

We have, of course, been here before. In 2000, BMW sold MG Rover, two of Britains most famous car marques, to the Phoenix Four, seeding the new owners with an endowment of 75million.

The new owners went on to loot the company, leaving the taxpayer to cover a large redundancy bill for 6,500 workers and a hole in the pension fund. The four owners were subsequently banned as company directors after an excoriating Department of Business report.

The issue of the credentials of buyers has been brought into sharp relief by the BHS fiasco. But is highly relevant in the far more strategically important steel industry where Mumbai-based owners Tata Steel are seeking to sell Port Talbot and other facilities possibly with the help of government loans and a share stake  potentially placing taxpayer cash at stake.

Very little is known about the bona fides and longer term prospects of several of the buyers queuing up to buy all or parts of Britains remaining steel industry.

When BHS was sold to Retail Acquisitions 13 months ago the least that could been expected from Sir Philip, regarded as one of the shrewdest deal makers in Britain, was to make sure that he was negotiating with a serious buyer rather than a commercial fantasist.

This was especially true for a tycoon who has desperately sought recognition from successive governments and is highly protective of his reputation. His pride in the knighthood, that may now be in jeopardy, knows no bounds. He was also ebullient when the Tory-led Coalition government asked him to conduct a preliminary report into government efficiency in 2010.

Now Sir Philip is being blamed widely for BHSs failure and faced summons before a Commons committee to testify on what he plans to do to plug the 571million hole in the BHS pension fund. The transaction which saw BHS sold to a former racing driver and group of unknowns could not have happened without proper professional advice.

It is my understanding that a team of experts from blue chip auditors Grant Thornton and top City lawyers Olswang were camped out at Sir Philips Marylebone Road headquarters in central London for days trying to put the deal together for Chappell.

Why these financial guns for hire felt it appropriate to work for Chappell, given his history of being a double bankrupt, also needs examining. For his part Sir Philip informally called on the services of top investment banker Goldman Sachs to provide advice.

What is most shocking is that amid all the evidence that Chappell and company were unsuitable owners neither Sir Philip nor any of the advisers involved blew the whistle. Nor apparently did they fully address the half a billion pound hole in the pension fund. It is no wonder the whole sordid affair has attracted such public anger.

New owner in storm over 1.5m loan

By Claire Duffin and Inderdeep Bains

BHS boss Dominic Chappell took 1.5million out of the ailing retailer and loaned it to a company linked to his father Joseph, it has emerged.

And it is alleged that some of the money was used to pay off the mortgage on the familys luxury home in Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey.

The decision to take the cash out of BHS when it was fighting for survival is said to have angered fellow board members at Retail Acquisitions, the holding company which owns BHS.

Luxury: The four-bedroom home in Surrey owned by Mr Chappells father Joseph

Discussions at one informal meeting became so heated that furniture is understood to have been broken.

Eddie Parladorio, a lawyer on the board, objected to the loan but was voted down by other directors, according to The Times.

Mr Chappell said the loan had board approval and part of it had already been repaid. His father lives in an impressive waterside home in Sunbury-on-Thames.

The 78-year-old is director of a number of companies registered to the address, where Mr Chappell also used to live.

Land Registry documents show the property was bought in July last year for 850,000 by JDM Island Properties Ltd  which is owned by Colin Sutton, a business associate of the Chappells.

The money was loaned to JDM by Retail Acquisitions Limited, the documents show.

But the property is worth much more than 850,000, raising questions over why it was bought so cheaply. It was previously listed for sale in June 2013 for 1.9million.

There was no answer at the property yesterday. But neighbours said the Chappell family had lived there for more than 40 years.

The house, set in 3.5 acres, has four reception rooms, four double bedrooms and four bathrooms. There is also a swimming pool, gym and sauna. Mr Chappell did not respond to requests for comment.
Employment Minister Priti Patel (pictured) is set to rubbish claims by the Government that the UK cannot thrive outside the EU

EU diktats are throttling small businesses and costing every household in Britain the equivalent of 4,600 a year, the Employment Minister warns today.

In a hard-hitting intervention, Priti Patel will rubbish claims by the Government that the UK cannot thrive outside of the EU.

She will cite research by the Treasury that the EUs single market could impose costs of 7 per cent of GDP on the UK economy, or 125.2 billion per year.

This is the equivalent of 4,639 per household or 23,236 per company.

Only six per cent of British companies export to the EU - but all must comply with EU single market legislation.

Mrs Patel will say that if small firms  who she describes as the backbone of Britain  are set free from red-tape, the economy will be boosted by billions of pounds.

The speech is a direct response to claims by George Osborne that, if Britain leaves the EU, GDP will be 6.2 per cent lower.

The result of this, according to the Chancellor, is that Britain would be poorer by 4,300 per household.

The Leave campaign is also determined to rebut claims by the Government that it has hoisted the white flag on debating the economic impacts of Brexit.

Today the Prime Minister will go on the campaign stump to once again insist that the safe choice for the economy is to vote Remain on June 23.

Speaking to business bosses in London, ex-Treasury minister Mrs Patel will say: It is a fact that while we remain a member of the European Union, our hands are tied and we are powerless to act on reducing the burdens of red tape.

Britain is a proud nation of entrepreneurs, and small businesses, including in your sector, are the backbone of our economy.

I want us to be able to do everything we can to support them to thrive, but EU membership prevents that. Unaccountable and unelected bureaucrats with no clue how to run a business and no local knowledge of this country dictate the rules that we all must follow.

The speech will highlight research showing that the UK has not managed to block a single proposal from becoming law through the EU Council, costing 2.4 billion each year.

Mrs Patel (pictured) will say that if small firms  who she describes as the backbone of Britain  are set free from red-tape, the economy will be boosted by billions of pounds

The Leave campaign is also determined to rebut claims by the Government that it has hoisted the white flag on debating the economic impacts of Brexit. Pictured, left to right, John Whittingdale, Theresa Villiers, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Iain Duncan Smith and Priti Patel at the Vote Leave campaign launch on February 20

Britain has opposed 72 measures in the EU Council, all of which have gone on to become law.

Meanwhile, during the last full term of the EU Parliament from 2009 to 2014, 1,936 motions were passed, of which 576 were opposed by a majority of British MEPs Some 485 of those  84 per cent - were still passed.

Mrs Patel will say: Just think of the jobs that you could create and the investments you could make in expanding your businesses if you were not bound by these burdens.

Just think of the freedom you would have to innovate if we were no longer forced to compel with every diktat from Brussels.

Just think of the freedom you would have to innovate if we were no longer forced to compel with every diktat from Brussels. Employment Minister Priti Patel

Just think that by getting rid of some of the EU rules that make it so difficult to create employment, we could deliver a 4.3 billion boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs.

Mrs Patel will also point out that CBI members list cutting back EU regulatory burdens as a priority.

Some 49 per cent of members of the pro-EU organisation report that EU employment law has a negative impact on their business.

She will also point out that pro-EU campaigners including Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg have previously called for small companies to be exempted from EU regulation.

However, this was not achieved during the renegotiation. Exempting small firms from regulation remains unlawful under EU law.

In 2005, HM Treasury admitted that: Although Europes founders aimed to remove barriers and reap the benefits of expanded markets internally, they also sought protection and special treatment for particular aspects of their economies such as agriculture.
When angler Ron Hopper died before a fishing holiday, his friends were determined he would still be a part of their trip.

Suffering from terminal cancer, the keen fisherman had agreed that fellow anglers Paul Fairbrass and Cliff Dale would use his remains to make boilies - a form of fishing bait.

So the fishermans friends flew his ashes to Thailand and turned them into a bait that snared a huge 180lb catch.

Dedication: Friends Paul Fairbrass and Cliff Dale with their monster Siamese carp  which they nicknamed Ronnie

The two fishermen named the bait Purple Ronnie and cast off with it on the end of their lines throughout the nine-day trip.

Their dedication to their late friend paid off as the monster Siamese carp - one of the biggest carp fish in the world - took a liking to the bait.

The two friends spent three hours reeling in the monster before posing for photographs with their proud catch.

Mr Fairbrass said: We were gutted that Ron couldnt come on the trip because he was really looking forward to it, but he was definitely with us when we caught that fish.

It seemed like it was destiny we would use Ronnie to catch one of the biggest fish in the lake. Its what he would have wanted.

The three friends, all from Hull, East Yorks, went fishing in Thailand last year as a retirement present to themselves and enjoyed it so much they booked a return this April.

But Mr Hopper, who was a marine engineer, fell ill last December and was diagnosed with aggressive liver cancer by his doctor who gave him just weeks to live.

Suffering from terminal cancer, the keen fisherman had agreed that fellow anglers Paul Fairbrass and Cliff Dale would use his remains to make boilies - a form of fishing bait (shown)

Retired barge master Mr Fairbrass, 65, said: It gave him enough time to think about what he wanted to do.

A few days before he died he asked us to take his ashes to Thailand and scatter them around the lake because he had really happy memories of the place.

I told him we would go one better than that and turn him into boilies and catch a big fish with them. He just cracked up and said it was a brilliant idea.

Mr Hopper died in December aged 64 and was cremated three weeks later. His widow Judith took half his ashes to scatter them on a beach in Grenada in the Caribbean while his fishing friends took the other half.

The pair got permission from the airline to carry the ashes on board in a sealed container and waited until they arrived in Thailand to make the bait mix.

It is believed to be the first time the 180lbs Siamese carp has been caught in the lake and it will now be nicknamed Ronnie in honour of the late angler.

Former radio operator Mr Dale, 65, added: I am not a religious person but it felt spiritual, it felt like Ron was there with us.

Ron Hopper, Paul Fairbrass and Cliff Dale pictured together during a fishing trip in 2015

After we caught this fish I looked to the heavens and said thank you, Ron.

Eddie Mounce, of the Jurassic Mountain Resort which organised the fishing trip, said: The memory of Ron will live with us here.

Ron may not have been with us in person this year but he certainly was in spirit. He made sure the fish gods where smiling down and gave Paul and Cliff the catch of a lifetime.

The three men are now part of Thai fishing legend.

The friends returned from Thailand with one boilie left which they are going to preserve in Ronseal and keep in a presentation box.
Tenants who were busted putting their apartment on Airbnb without the landlord's permission are now facing a landmark legal battle after a court ruled they were allowed to do it.

Barbara Uecker and Michael Greaves have been charging guests $74 a night for a room in the two bedroom apartment at St Kilda in Melbourne after listing the property on the popular accommodation website.

Ms Uecker, who used to work as an ABC executive and is listed as the host on the Airbnb site, describes the property as an 'Art Deco Treetop Escape' in the 'Paris End' of St Kilda's Fitzroy Street.

Barbara Uecker and Michael Greaves have been charging guests $74 a night for a room in the two bedroom apartment at St Kilda in Melbourne after listing the property on the popular accommodation website

'As my guest(s) you will have access to and be able to share with me my bright bathroom and my loungeroom with ajoining (sic) open air terrace,' Ms Uecker wrote on the site.

'Though my kitchen is not available for guests to cook in, I am happy to make room in the fridge for a few essentials, medications, etc. which you need to keep cold.'

Landlord Catherine Swan tried to throw the pair out of the apartment in January by serving them a notice to vacate after finding the apartment on Airbnb, Domain reports.

The tenants have been charging guests to stay in this bedroom within their St Kilda apartment in Melbourne

Ms Uecker, who used to work as an ABC executive and is listed as the host on the Airbnb site, describes the property as an 'Art Deco Treetop Escape' in the 'Paris End' of St Kilda's Fitzroy Street

Landlord Catherine Swan tried to throw the pair out of the apartment in January by serving them a notice to vacate after finding the apartment on Airbnb

But Ms Uecker and Mr Greaves secured a win after the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal ruled in a landmark decision that the landlord could not evict the tenants because they had not technically sublet the apartment.

Instead, it was found they were licensing the bedroom - rather than subletting it - because they had the right to remove guests if they deemed it necessary.

Last week, Ms Swan lodged an application in Victoria's Supreme Court to appeal the decision, the Herald Sun reports.

But Mr Greaves said he had not been made aware of any Supreme Court action.

The Airbnb apartment advertises one room in a two bedroom property, which includes access to a shared bathroom and living room
Billionaire lifestyle: A beaming Sir Philip Green with former X Factor judge Rita Ora, 25

Among the most baffling aspects of the whole BHS scandal is how Sir Philip Green could have thought it fitting to allow a company of such size and importance to be sold to unscrupulous former bankrupt Dominic Chappell for just one pound.

Discarding and selling companies is the right of any private sector owner in a free market economy. But the owners have a broader moral responsibility to make sure the workforce, suppliers and the pension funds are properly protected before signing on the dotted line.

We have, of course, been here before. In 2000, BMW sold MG Rover, two of Britains most famous car marques, to the Phoenix Four, seeding the new owners with an endowment of 75million.

The new owners went on to loot the company, leaving the taxpayer to cover a large redundancy bill for 6,500 workers and a hole in the pension fund. The four owners were subsequently banned as company directors after an excoriating Department of Business report.

The issue of the credentials of buyers has been brought into sharp relief by the BHS fiasco. But is highly relevant in the far more strategically important steel industry where Mumbai-based owners Tata Steel are seeking to sell Port Talbot and other facilities possibly with the help of government loans and a share stake  potentially placing taxpayer cash at stake.

Very little is known about the bona fides and longer term prospects of several of the buyers queuing up to buy all or parts of Britains remaining steel industry.

When BHS was sold to Retail Acquisitions 13 months ago the least that could been expected from Sir Philip, regarded as one of the shrewdest deal makers in Britain, was to make sure that he was negotiating with a serious buyer rather than a commercial fantasist.

This was especially true for a tycoon who has desperately sought recognition from successive governments and is highly protective of his reputation. His pride in the knighthood, that may now be in jeopardy, knows no bounds. He was also ebullient when the Tory-led Coalition government asked him to conduct a preliminary report into government efficiency in 2010.

BHS, which has 164 stores, officially went into administration on Monday. Its pension scheme has a black hole estimated at 571million

Now Sir Philip is being blamed widely for BHSs failure and faced summons before a Commons committee to testify on what he plans to do to plug the 571million hole in the BHS pension fund. The transaction which saw BHS sold to a former racing driver and group of unknowns could not have happened without proper professional advice.

It is my understanding that a team of experts from blue chip auditors Grant Thornton and top City lawyers Olswang were camped out at Sir Philips Marylebone Road headquarters in central London for days trying to put the deal together for Chappell.

Why these financial guns for hire felt it appropriate to work for Chappell, given his history of being a double bankrupt, also needs examining. For his part Sir Philip informally called on the services of top investment banker Goldman Sachs to provide advice.
David Cameron defied mounting pressure yesterday to allow child refugees in Europe to enter Britain.

The Prime Minister dismissed claims that he had put the country to shame, saying the UK had a proud record helping those fleeing war zones such as Syria.

After MPs rejected a proposal earlier this week to accept 3,000 child refugees in the EU, he argued that because they had landed in safe countries they did not need to be transported to Britain.

Prime Minister David Cameron, pictured, was attacked over his decision not to accept 3,000 child refugees who had already arrived in the European Union because they had already arrived in a 'safe country'

Mr Cameron claimed children such as these pictured in Dunkirk were now save because they were in the EU

Labour MP Yvette Cooper, pictured, claimed there were 1,000 child refugees in Greece sleeping rough

But yesterday Labour MP Yvette Cooper attacked the suggestion that they were safe just because they had reached Europe.

There are childrens homes full in Italy and Greece and over 1,000 children will sleep rough in Greece alone tonight, she said. How are they safe? Ten thousand children have disappeared in Europe. How are they safe?

The agencies say children are committing survival sex  they are being subjected to prostitution and rape. It is not insulting other European countries to offer to help; they want us to help.

Ministers have said Britain will take 3,000 child refugees directly from camps in or near Syria and other war zones. But this week Labour peer Lord Dubs tried to make the Government take 3,000 from EU camps, noting that he was given sanctuary after being brought to Britain by the Kindertransport programme as a child fleeing the Nazis.

The proposal was thrown out in a knife-edge vote in the Commons on Monday.

A revised amendment from the 83-year-old peer  which would allow Britain to take in an unspecified number of young refugees after reaching agreement with local authorities  will return to the Commons early next week after being passed by the Lords.

During heated exchanges in the Commons, Miss Cooper, the MP for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford, asked the Prime Minister: Will he reconsider his position on Alf Dubss amendment before it comes back for a vote, and will he stop, through his attitude to lone child refugees, putting this House and this country to shame?

Her question was met with applause  a rare occurrence in the Commons as clapping is banned.

But Mr Cameron rejected the suggestion that the UK was doing little, saying: The crucial point is this: how do we in Britain best help child refugees?

We think we help them by taking them from the refugee camps, taking them from Lebanon, taking them from Jordan and taking them when they come to this country. That is what we are doing. We have a proud record and nothing to be ashamed of.

He was also grilled by the SNPs Westminster leader Angus Robertson, who urged him to stop walking by on the other side.

Mr Robertson said: Europol estimates that 10,000 unaccompanied children in Europe have disappeared. This is an existential question about the safety of vulnerable children. The Prime Minister thinks it is not the responsibility of the UK to help unaccompanied children in Europe, so I ask him: Who has the moral responsibility for feeding them, clothing them, educating them and giving them refuge, if not us, and everyone in Europe?

Mr Cameron pointed out that Britain was taking 20,000 refugees from outside Europe, as well as 3,000 unaccompanied children not in the EU. The country is also one of the larger donors to refugee camps in conflict zones.

He said: To compare, somehow, children or adults who are in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal or Greece with children stuck in Nazi Germany is deeply wrong, and we will continue our approach, which includes being the second-largest donor country anywhere in the world in those refugee camps. I want Britain to play our part, but we have to ask ourselves whether we do better by taking a child from a refugee camp, or taking a child from Lebanon, or taking a child from Jordan, than by taking a child from France, Italy or Germany.

Sarah Brown, the wife of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, said yesterday she was ashamed MPs had voted against helping child refugees in Europe.
Every day, Sharon Brennan must take several drugs to keep her alive. While the antibiotics are doing their job for now, that might soon change for the worst.

As the countrys Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, has warned, some bacteria are building up a tolerance to antibiotics, possibly posing a graver threat to humanity than terrorism.

She blames the over-prescription of drugs and has also castigated the farming industry  calling on it to give fewer antibiotics to animals (they are primarily used to prevent disease linked to squalid, overcrowded and stressful rearing conditions or farming methods) because they then enter the human food chain when we eat the meat.

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As the countrys Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, has warned, some bacteria are building up a tolerance to antibiotics, possibly posing a graver threat to humanity than terrorism

Otherwise, Dame Sally warned, the battle to prevent antibiotic resistance will be a daily grind for ever.

Her comments follow a similarly apocalyptic warning by Chancellor George Osborne in which he said resistance to antibiotics will become an even greater threat to mankind than cancer if the world fails to take serious action.

The truth is that in GPs surgeries and hospitals up and down the country, the drugs that have revolutionised medicine  ever since Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, in 1928  have been handed out so freely that bacteria are finding ways to beat them.

But while doctors and patients are increasingly aware of the dangers, the farming industry blithely seems to ignore the threat.

As the medical world fights to prevent bacteria becoming resistant to life-saving medicines, in the dark confines of chicken, pig and turkey farms, countless drugs are still being pumped into these benighted creatures in order to turn them into food products.

May I ask whether we have all gone mad to want to give penicillin to pigs to fatten them? Backbench MP

Through the reckless abuse of antibiotics to maximise production and keep costs down, some farmers are putting at risk nothing less than the future health of humanity.

For the reality is that the more often bacteria are exposed to the drugs that can kill them, the faster resistant strains can develop  and so overuse of antibiotics can give rise to deadly illnesses that can withstand all available treatment.

The great fear is that between now and 2050, as many as ten million people worldwide could die as a result of antibiotic resistance created through the excessive use of these drugs.

The crisis around the use of antibiotics on farms dates back to 1953, when the government passed a law that allowed penicillin to be mixed with pig food. Experiments had shown that the drug increased the rate at which animals put on weight.

Hardly any MPs bothered turning up for the debate over what ministers described as a little Bill allowing farmers to give animals drugs and, at the time, the health minister saw little to worry about. He dismissed it as an agricultural matter, declaring that hed had assurances from the medical profession there would be no adverse affect whatsoever on human beings. The legislation duly went through on the nod.

Dame Davies (pictured) blames the over-prescription of drugs and has also castigated the farming industry  calling on it to give fewer antibiotics to animals because they then enter the human food chain

There had been some dissenting voices  and during the Commons debate, one backbench MP warned that farmers might be tempted to be careless in their use of drugs that had acquired a reputation as an efficient and magic cure all.

Another said: May I ask whether we have all gone mad to want to give penicillin to pigs to fatten them? Why not give them good food, as God meant them to have?

All too soon such fears would be proved justified, as farmers quickly exploited the new law by feeding their animals antibiotics to boost production.

As well as pig farmers realising that small amounts of antibiotic had a remarkable effect on their animals growth, studies showed that sows produced more surviving piglets and that hens fed low doses of penicillin laid more eggs.

We are really treading into strange country. If pigs are fed in this way, new types of bacteria may evolve and thrive which are resistant to the penicillin. MP Dr Barnett Stross in 1953

In the following decades, antibiotic use  with scant regard to any possible side-effects  became the norm in farming.

Mounting concerns finally led to a change of the law in 2006, when drugs for growth promotion were banned across the EU as the final step in the phasing out of antibiotics used for non-medicinal purposes  part of a Europe-wide strategy to tackle the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Yet despite this ban, farmers continue to give the drugs in huge quantities to animals that have no intrinsic need of them.

The problem is that, even as the industry was forced to stop feeding livestock drugs to boost growth, farmers were increasingly relying on drugs to maximise production another way.

As the world of farming grew ever more industrialised, antibiotics were routinely used to stop animals from getting sick, which was often a knock-on effect of them no longer being kept in fields but held in cramped barns.

I spent three years investigating factory farms and saw for myself all over the world the appalling conditions that started this health time-bomb. The result was Farmageddon, a book I co-wrote, exposing the true cost of cheap meat.

While the food and farming industry disingenuously peddles false images of pigs lolling in the sun, chickens scratching about in yards, and contented cows grazing on clover-rich grass, the truth is that most modern farms are brutal places and often, through their focus on intensive farming methods, a breeding ground for sickness.

Animals are treated like machines in factory farms, selectively bred to get fatter faster for the quickest possible conversion from living being to meat. Pictured, chickens in a battery farm shed

In factory farms  whose dreadful conditions are shamefully justified on the basis of economic efficiency  animals are treated like machines, selectively bred to get fatter faster for the quickest possible conversion from living being to meat.

This pile them high, sell them cheap model means they are kept in ever-closer confinement, and pushed further and further beyond their natural capabilities  making them weak, stressed and highly vulnerable to disease.

Most chickens  whether they are being reared for meat or eggs  never breathe fresh air or see a blade of grass. Pigs are routinely barracked in small, filthy and grotesquely overcrowded pens. A typical dairy cow is forced to produce so much milk that she becomes exhausted and unproductive by the age of five  a decade less than the natural life-span.

No wonder disease rips through flocks and herds so easily.

We are the people that are dying because there are no longer antibiotics that can treat our infections. Sharon Brennan, 35-year-old cystic fibrosis sufferer

When these animals are trucked off for slaughter, their treatment gets worse. The stress of being transported lowers their immune system, allowing bacteria to flourish, meaning they excrete more bacteria in their waste.

Campylobacter, salmonella and, to a lesser extent, E.coli are among the various strains that can infect humans who eat animal products contaminated with these bacteria.

Yet instead of acting to clean up these filthy production systems that allow sickness to flourish among their animals, many farmers simply try to contain any disease by administering preventative drugs to entire flocks and herds of animals before they are actually ill.

A prime example of this ugly practice is in the industrial rearing of pigs.

In natural conditions, piglets begin weaning themselves off their mothers milk at the age of around three months. On organic farms, they are left with their mothers for a minimum of eight weeks. On factory farms, however, they are separated grossly prematurely, at between three and four weeks  so that the sow can be impregnated again as quickly as possible.

Traumatised and struggling to adapt to solid food in unfamiliar and overcrowded surroundings, the piglets are very vulnerable to disease  which is why more antibiotics are used to keep them alive.

In Denmark, Europes centre for cheap bacon, piglets weaned on factory farms are given 20 times more antibiotics than those reared on organic farms (where drugs are rarely needed). Chickens and dairy cows are similarly treated  dosed up with antibiotics in their water and feed.

Conveniently for the farmers, there is evidence that antibiotics administered preventatively can also help boost animals growth, enabling them to get around the ban on using the drugs as growth accelerators.

This pile them high, sell them cheap model means animals are kept in ever-closer confinement, and pushed further and further beyond their natural capabilities  making them weak, stressed and highly vulnerable to disease (file image of battery hens)

On factory farms, piglets are separated grossly prematurely, at between three and four weeks  so that the sow can be impregnated again as quickly as possible (file image)

Its no coincidence that sheep, in general the last remaining farm animals reared as nature intended, almost exclusively outdoors, barely ever need such drugs.

The scale of drug use by the livestock industry is staggering: around half of all antibiotics manufactured in the world are squandered in this way  used not to treat illness, but as a prevention policy, to offset the terrible conditions in which livestock are kept.

One chilling consequence is that humans are getting ill, instead.

During the original Commons debate in 1953, Dr Barnett Stross, an MP with a medical background, most presciently foresaw how it would play out.

He cautioned: We are really treading into strange country. If pigs are fed in this way, new types of bacteria may evolve and thrive which are resistant to the penicillin . . . if there be migration of the bacteria to humans, we may find ourselves in trouble. I do not want to frighten anybody, but these are matters we may look at.

The official parliamentary record, Hansard, records that fellow MPs greeted his warnings with scornful guffaws.

I see myself and my friends on the very frontline of the battle. If the drugs don't work that's pretty much end-game. Sharon Brennan, 35-year-old cystic fibrosis sufferer

Just as he predicted, however, the wonder drugs of the medicine cabinet are now so widely used that they are losing their potency in human medicine. Every dose of antibiotics given to either a human or an animal is a chance for resistant bacteria to develop.

The practice in farming of giving low-dose antibiotics as a preventative measure is particularly dangerous, because it creates ideal conditions for bacteria to fine-tune their resistance, as more survive after a low dosage compared to higher doses that are given in extremis.

The resistant bacteria can then transfer from animals to people, via meat.

The economist Lord Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, has described this as a classic example of short-term private interest in conflict with medium-term public good. In this case, the private gains are modest and the public damage is huge.

Combine the irresponsible use of antibiotics in farming with the widespread misuse of antibiotics in human medicine and the truth is that were are approaching a terrifying new age in which life-saving drugs we have taken for granted for decades wont work.

The World Health Organisation has warned that in this so-called post-antibiotic era, there will be no way to cure many common infections.

There may, therefore, be no effective treatment for a range of diseases such a typhoid, tuberculosis, pneumonia, meningitis, tetanus, diphtheria and syphilis.

This is not some dim and distant prospect. It is already happening.

Just a few days ago, doctors warned of a devastating new strain of gonorrhoea that is proving resistant to traditional antibiotic treatment.

The practice in farming of giving low-dose antibiotics as a preventative measure is particularly dangerous, because it creates ideal conditions for bacteria to fine-tune their resistance (file image)

In the coming months, we will know if the Government is serious about tackling the crisis.

Recognising the urgency of the situation, the European Parliament has proposed a ban on routine use of antibiotics on farms. Under the new rules, farmers would no longer be allowed to dispense drugs to entire flocks and herds in a pre-emptive strike to ward off disease.

Such changes sound encouraging, but it remains to be seen whether Britain will back the plan.

Those who care about the issue are not convinced.

There are disturbing signs that the agricultural industry will simply carry on as before  under the guise of an approach known as metaphylatic use. This would allow the treatment of all their animals with antibiotics if just one individual is ill. It would be a deeply worrying step.

For Sharon Brennan and thousands of people like her who are dependent on drugs to maintain their health, the issue of antibiotic resistance is already a matter of life or death  every day.

Following a double lung transplant, the 35-year-old cystic fibrosis sufferer is in better health than she has been for years, but an infection could kill her. She has seen several friends succumb to bugs that can no longer be treated, as antibiotics lose their force. Sooner or later, she fears, the medicine on which she herself depends will no longer work.

I see myself and my friends on the very frontline of the battle, she said. We are the people that are dying because there are no longer antibiotics that can treat our infections.

She despairs that people such as her will survive complicated surgery, but then get pneumonia or a chest infection.

If the drugs dont work, thats pretty much end-game, she says.

No wonder there is mounting alarm in the health profession. As a result, politicians are putting pressure on pharmaceutical companies to find new drugs.

Mr Osborne has promised incentives to such firms to encourage them to accelerate the necessary research. Remarkably, though, the Chancellor made no mention of the farming industry. In a parallel gross abrogation of responsibility, ministers seem to be prioritising the profits of food giants and farmers over public health.

In the absence of politicians taking a lead, the rest of us must act.

First, we must change what we eat  refusing to buy meat from animals pumped with drugs.

If its chicken, turkey or pork, and its not free-range or organic, the chances are that the animal was reared on a factory farm where it was kept alive using medicines.

Of course, meat produced on farms with more careful welfare regimes is more expensive  but that seems a small sacrifice if it means keeping antibiotics potent and protecting future generations
A video of the moment an Irish girl was left dumbstruck by the word 'receptionist' on a census form is going viral.

Laura Pender from Kildare makes a comical blunder after she becomes confused with the word spread over two lines.

Bafflingly she mistakes the latter part of the word for 'penis' and sends her family into fits of hysterics.

What does this say? Laura Pender from Kildare makes a comical blunder when she cannot understand the word on this census form

In all fairness it looks strange split into two, but perhaps not quite to the extent that it could be seen as the 'hotel recky pianist', as Laura at first guesses.

Her attempt to Google the letters then yields no conclusive results.

She posits therefore that the strange letters making up 'ptianist' may have something to do with the word 'penis', which would explain the loud laughter coming from her family.

Laura tries again: 'The hotel recky ptianist?' inducing even more giggles from her relatives.

'The hotel recky ptianist?' Laura is confused by the word spread over two lines and her attempts to google the letters yields no conclusive results

She finally gets it! At long last Laura, almost in tears, realises her big mistake before the footage cuts out

Then at long last she realises her big mistake before the footage cuts out.

A video of her attempts to say the word were uploaded to Facebook by her sister Georgina.

She titled the video: 'This is definitely the funniest thing you will see on Facebook today.'
NY Trump University Fraud Case Will Go to Trial in Fall

Donald Trump is a busy billionaire and this fall it seems his steak-filled plate will be very full. The businessman-turned-politician is running a presidential campaign while facing a trial for fraud associated with Trump University.

Across the country, there are a few cases against Trump University, a real estate seminar that costs tens of thousands of dollars to attend. Yesterday a New York court found sufficient questions of fact that a fraud case brought by New York Attorney General (AG) Eric Schneiderman should go to trial. The AG sought summary judgment, or a ruling based on the evidence submitted thus far, but this was denied and the judge has reportedly expressed a desire to "move expeditiously as possible."

Bait and Switch

The fraud alleged in this case is based on Trump's promises to prospective students of his "university" that he would teach them the secrets of success. But it seems he had no involvement in the school's hiring or curriculum creation. According to the New York AG, Trump pulled a classic "bait-and-switch" on students.

Schneiderman spoke to CNN about his suit in March, saying, "[Trump] did ads saying my hand-picked instructors will teach you my personal secrets. You just copy what I did and get rich." The thing is, according to Schneiderman, Trump didn't give away his secrets (secrets which we know already in part -- he was born rich).

In fact, he seemed to have little to do with the development of the school that bears his name. "If you tell people we're going to teach you Donald Trump's secrets, and he never had any part in writing the curriculum, that's fraud," Schneiderman said. In 2013, he filed a case against Trump based on deceptive business practices.

The Republican presidential candidate also promised that students would have access to private sources of financing, reports CNN. Schneiderman says that did not happen.

Counsel Responds

There are three lawsuits pending against Trump for his now-defunct real estate investment seminar dubbed Trump University. This case in New York may well go trial during the fall, which might prove tricky for Trump's campaign to be president. Will his supporters worry that they will be Trump's next suckers?

For now, his counsel is keeping it simple. Responding to the New York court's ruling, Trump's attorney Alan Garten said, "We are extremely pleased that the Supreme Court has yet again rejected the Attorney General's attempt to avoid a trial."

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Yale University has decided to keep the name of a residential college named for 19th-century alumnus John C. Calhoun, who was an ardent supporter of slavery.

The Ivy League university in New Haven, Connecticut, announced the decision Wednesday via Twitter. The tweet said it would keep Calhoun's name to 'teach and confront the history of slavery in the U.S.'

'Ours is a nation that often refuses to face its own history of slavery and racism. Yale is part of that history,' Yale President Peter Salovey said. 'We cannot erase American history, but we can confront it, teach it and learn from it.'

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Yale University announce Wednesday that they would not be renaming Calhoun College (pictured). The college is named after alumnus and former Vice President John C. Calhoun, who supported slavery

The Yale Corporation is the university's governing body. It had been gathering input from students on names it might consider for Calhoun College and two new residential colleges it's planning.

Calhoun was a U.S. vice president and senator from South Carolina. Three portraits of Calhoun were recently taken down from the walls of the residential college.

A recent poll by the student newspaper the Yale Daily News showed that 55 per cent of 1,700 respondents supported changing the school's name.

Reactions to the school's decision to leave the name were mixed.

Sophomore Alexander Nemzow told the New Haven Register that he did not have a problem with the college staying with the same name.

'It doesn't really bother me,' he said.

The university said in a statement that keeping the name will help 'teach and confront the history of slavery in the U.S.' Pictured right is a portrait of Calhoun

Meanwhile, graduate student Maria Mahon said she would have liked to see it changed.

'Its part of our heritage, but its not a part that we should celebrate, and I think by keeping the name, that is what they are doing,' she said. 'Im sure there are others who are worthy of having a building named for them with a more acceptable history. I think they should have changed it.'

THE CAST-IRON MAN: WHO WAS JOHN C CALHOUN? John C Calhoun was a prominent US statesman who served as US Secretary of War, Vice President and Secretary of State, as well as Senator for South Carolina. He was renowned as a leading voice of the South and specifically the pro-slavery movement. Born in 1782, the son of a successful farmer and slaveholder was educated at Yale before moving into politics. In 1812, both he and Henry Clay, convinced the House of Representatives to declare war on Britain. He served as Secretary of War under President James Monroe from 1817 to 1825 and ran for President in 1824 but withdrew, instead running for Vice President. He served as Vice President in 1824 under John Quincy Adams and then Andrew Jackson. He became the first Vice President to resign in 1832 after clashing with Jackson on the Tariff of 1828. He was nicknamed the 'cast-iron man' for his ideological rigidity. He was appointed Secretary of State in 1844 under President John Tyler, where he pressed for the annexation of Texas. As a spokesman representing the South, he increasingly defended slavery on moral and ethical grounds, endorsing it as 'a good - a great good', and defended it on the grounds of white supremacy and paternalism.

While the school is keeping Calhoun's name on the college, they have made some concessions in changing the title for faculty members who serve as residential hall leaders from 'master' to 'head of college'.

The title of 'master' is brought over from British institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, but some thought that the term could be an offensive reminder to slavery.

Yale also announced this week the namesakes of two new residential colleges currently under construction. One will be named after founding father Benjamin Franklin, who was given a Yale honorary degree in 1753, and civil rights activist Anna Pauline Murray, who attended Yale Law School.

Debate over the name began last summer after nine black worshippers were slain in a Charleston, South Carolina, church.

A similar debate has also been going on at Princeton University, where students have been protesting since last fall to remove Woodrow Wilson's name from the School of Public and International Affairs.

The former president was a supporter of segregationist policies. While the Ivy League Institution has not changed the name of the school, it did decide this week to remove an 'unduly celebratory' mural of Wilson from a campus dining hall.
Woolworths has caught out a woman trying to get her money back by using an old photo in a complaint about the quality of avocados on the supermarket's social media page.

In her Facebook post, the woman claims she purchased avocados from Woolworths Double Bay, in Sydney's east, and went to make a sandwich.

'I came to find these avocados are rotten! THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE, I demand my money back!!!! and at your double bay store aswell! [sic]' she wrote on Woolworths' Facebook page.

Woolworths has caught out a woman trying to get her money back by using an old photo in a complaint about the quality of avocados on the supermarket's social media page

'I expected more from you woolies. On top of that one of your employees gave me the biggest dirty look as i was self servicing, making a comment about my crocs, since when is it a crime to wear crocs???

'This is Australia god dammit. From now on im shopping at aldi!!!!!'

Unfortunately for the woman, a Woolworths representative called her out underneath the post.

'Hey... we think you may have taken your photo from another customer's Facebook post from 2014,' the representative said, with a link to a post made in 2014.

Unfortunately for the woman, a Woolworths representative called her out underneath her post

The post made by another customer, who was also disgruntled with the quality of avocados, had the exact same photo the woman claimed to be hers. Above is stock image of Woolworths

The post made by another customer, who was also disgruntled with the quality of avocados at Woolworths, had the exact same photo the woman claimed to be hers.

Social media users expressed their disbelief at the woman's extensive efforts to get free avocados.

'Can you believe this chick?! What a absolute waste of time to post this,' one woman said.
The House Armed Services Committee approved a measure Wednesday requiring women to register for the military draft.

The unexpected move comes a few months after the Defense Department lifted all gender-based restrictions on front-line combat units.

In a twist that presages how contentious further debate may be, the author of the amendment, Republican Representative Duncan Hunter voted against his own measure.

Hunter had hoped his effort would have the opposite effect and lawmakers would reject the push to coerce women ages 18-26 into joining the military. Instead it passed the committee by a narrow vote of 32-30.

'Right now the draft is sexist,' said Hunter, a former marine who opposes the Obama administration's decision to change combat restrictions, according to the Washington Post.

President Barack Obama has not taken a position on the proposed change. His spokesman said today that he had no new information to share.

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The House Armed Services Committee approved a measure Wednesday requiring women to register for the military draft. The unexpected move comes a few months after the Defense Department lifted all gender-based restrictions on front-line combat units.

America stopped drafting young men into service in 1972. Though the Selective Service System is inactive, it remains in place in case of emergency.

Hunter, the congressman who proposed the amendment, served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and doesn't support drafting women into combat. He's also opposed to opening infantry and special operations positions to women.

He said he offered the measure to trigger a discussion about how the Pentagon's decision in December to rescind the gender restrictions on military service failed to consider whether the exclusion on drafting women also should be lifted.

That's a call for Congress to make, Hunter said, not the executive branch.

'I think we should make this decision,' he said. 'It's the families that we represent who are affected by this.'

At times, Hunter evoked graphic images of combat in an apparent attempt to convince committee members that drafting women would lead to them being sent directly into harm's way.

'A draft is there to put bodies on the front lines to take the hill,' Hunter said. 'The draft is there to get more people to rip the enemies' throats out and kill them.'

But if Hunter was trying to sway people against his amendment, his plan didn't work.

All but one Democrat voted for the measure.

Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Speier said she supported Hunter's measure.

'I actually think if we want equality in this country, if we want women to be treated precisely like men are treated and that they should not be discriminated against, we should be willing to support a universal conscription,' she said.

Martha McSally a retired Air Force fighter pilot, said draftees aren't exclusively sent to the front lines.

There are plenty of other useful, noncombat positions for them to fill, the Republican representative said.

BOTH SIDES: Republican Representative Duncan Hunter voted against his own measure. Hunter had hoped his effort would have the opposite effect. Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Speier said she supported Hunter's measure. 'I actually think if we want equality in this country...we should be willing to support a universal conscription,' she said

Republican Congressman Mike Coffman sided with Hunter, however, and said, 'The bar would have to be dramatically lowered if we were to return to conscription again.'

Coffman predicted that most young people wouldn't be eligible anyway because of disqualifying drug addictions and obesity issues.

Hunter's amendment will be included in the defense policy bill that authorizes the defense budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

The full House will take up the bill soon.

Even if the House fails to adopt the measure, it could still become policy down the line if the Supreme Court takes up any one of the ongoing court cases that deal with the discriminatory nature of the ban.
A skateboarder has spoken out about the terrifying moment he was arrested at an overseas airport for carrying a torch taser he thought was just a 'harmless' toy he purchased from a market.

Alex Lawton, from Brisbane, recently spent two weeks in Shanghai for a skating tour when he decided to shop around at some 'hidden markets' after hearing about the cheap items being sold.

'Like a lot of tourists, we went to one of these markets and I ended up buying a torch taser to play pranks on my friends,' he told News Corp.

But the 26-year-old skateboarder got more than he bargained for after he was arrested by authorities at Hong Kong Airport when he was on his way back home to Australia.

Alex Lawton (pictured) has spoken out about the terrifying moment he was arrested at an overseas airport for carrying a torch taser he thought was just a 'harmless' toy he purchased from a market

Lawson was arrested at Hong Kong Airport when he was on his way back home to Australia (stock image)

'We flew via Hong Kong, and while we were in transit at Hong Kong Airport, I was called off the plane and was asked if I was carrying a gun in my bag,' Lawton said.

'Initially I thought it was all a big joke as they rummaged through my bag on the tarmac, I just laughed, thinking that there was nothing inside that would cause a problem.

'Then one of the officials pulled out the torch taser. Again - I laughed and said that it was just a toy!'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Alex Lawton for comment.

The 26-year-old recently spent two weeks in Shanghai for a skating tour - and decided to shop at a market

Under the Hong Kong legislation law, travellers found with torch tasers could face a hefty fine of up to AU $16,000 and imprisonment for up to 14 years (stock image)

Under the Hong Kong legislation law, travellers found with torch tasers could face a hefty fine of up to AU $16,000 and imprisonment for up to 14 years.

After being held in a room for nearly 24 hours, Lawson apologised to a judge, claiming he didn't know the item was deemed an illegal weapon when he fronted a court.

The ordeal was over when Lawson - who was found guilty - was handed a measly fine of just $417.
Guns must be imported and reflect overall sales as they

There are more firearms in Australia today than there were two decades ago on the harrowing day Martin Bryant took a number of powerful guns and went on a murderous rampage, shooting and killing thirty five innocent people in the Port Arthur massacre.

New research shows that in recent years arms dealers have been able to bring more guns into the country than ever before, with well over three million firearms currently owned legally in Australia.

Former Prime Minster John Howard was responsible for destroying about one million firearms after he tightened gun control and launched a controversial buy-back scheme following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, dramatically reducing the 3,200,000 guns in the country.

However, according to gun expert Philip Alpers, those weapons have now been replaced by around 1,026,000 new guns, with statistics gathered from 2014-15 driving numbers higher than before the massacre and breaking all previous records for firearm importation into Australia.

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There are more firearms in Australia today than there were two decades ago on the harrowing day a 'simple' man took a number of powerful guns and went on a murderous rampage in Port Arthur

Australia's strict gun control came after Martin Bryant mercilessly shot 35 people in the Port Arthur massacre

Number of guns imported to Australia 2015 - 104,323 2014 - 98,351 2013 - 88,185 2012 - 90,006 2011 - 72, 586 2010 - 73,701 2009 - 57,522 2008 - 58,111 2007 - 47,820 2006 - 39,389 2005 - 38,786 2004 - 36,980 2003 - 40,939 2002 - 28,016 2001 - 30,666 2000 - 33,152 1999 - 18,405 1998 - 34,867 1997 - 89,760 1996 - 44,802 Estimated total guns owned in Australia 2015 - 3,779,994 2005 - 3,050,000 1997 - 2,500,000 1996 - 3,200,000 1988 - 3,500,000 Source: gunpolicy.org Advertisement

Number of gun-related deaths 2014 - 230 (suicide 178, accidental 3) 2013 - 208 (suicide 166, accidental 3) 2012 - 226 (suicide 177, accidental 3) 2011 -188 (suicide 144, accidental 7) 2010 -232 (suicide 171, accidental 11) 2009 - 226 (suicide 174, accidental 7) 2008 - 231 (suicide 183, accidental 5) 2007- 231 (suicide 190, accidental 4) 2006 -242 (suicide 181, accidental 8) 2005 - 220 (suicide 147, accidental 50) 2004 - 241 (suicide 167, accidental 54) 2003 - 289 (suicide 193, accidental 40) 2002 - 292 (suicide 217, accidental 30) 2001 - 326 (suicide 261, accidental 18) 2000 - 324 (suicide 222, accidental 45) 1999 - 347 (suicide 269, accidental 28) 1998 - 312 (suicide 235, accidental 22) 1997 - 428 (suicide 329, accidental 19) 1996 - 516 (suicide 382, accidental 30) Advertisement

'Last financial year Australia imported 104,000 firearms,' Associate Professor Alpers said.

The number of firearms imported into the country directly reflect legitimate gun sales as they are no longer manufactured in Australia.

According to The Conversation, fewer Australians own guns today than they did back in 1996 but those who already possessed several guns have increased their collections, with a portion of those deadly weapons managing to find their way into the illegal market.

'Until recently, the average Australian shooter owned three to five firearms. The same people now keep a larger collection,' he said.

The number of gun-owners with significant collections in metropolitan areas appear to be on the rise, with at least three individuals in New South Wales boasting a collection of more than 300 guns.

Associate Professor Alpers said that while there are far more hoops to jump through in order to become a registered firearm owner, they are still the most likely to harm another person, often with only one shot.

Former Prime Minster John Howard was responsible for destroying about one million firearms after he tightened gun control and launched a controversial buy-back scheme following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre

A young girl holds a banner featuring the pictures of Port Arthur victims during an anti-gun demonstration

Fewer Australians own guns today than they did back in 1996 but those who already possessed several guns have increased their collections

'Gun owners who know each other well  be they family members or gang members  have always been the ones to kill each other most frequently,' he wrote in The Conversation.

Gun expert Philip Alpers said the guns that were destroyed in 1996 have now been replaced by around 1,026,000 new firearms

'Although Australia destroyed rapid-fire weapons, most gun deaths take only one shot,' he added.

Associate Professor Alpers said the increase in firearms has been driven by a 'gun swap', where high powered semi-automatic weapons were traded for brand new 'single-shot' firearms, which you can legally own in Australia if you have a 'genuine reason'.

This can be anything from having a membership to a shooting club, needing to control feral animals or an interest in gun related sports.

He argued that driving gun owners towards shooting clubs has only politicised firearm ownership further, while creating another generation of people who are passionate about their right to bear arms, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Interestingly, while we may have more firearms and arguably more gun fanatics in the country than we did twenty years ago, the number of gun related deaths have more than halved.

In the decade before the Port Arthur massacre, the number of firearm related deaths - including accidental and suicide - generally exceeded 600, according to gunpolicy.org.

In 1996, at the height of controversy surrounding gun control, 516 people died from firearm related injuries.

Following Mr Howard's tough stance on gun control, that number steadily declined from 428 in 1997 to 324 by 2000.

In 2014, 230 people were fatally shot, 178 of those due to suicide.

Mick Roelandts, firearms reform project manager for NSW Police, looks at a pile of about 4,500 prohibited firearms that were handed in under the Australian government's buy-back scheme in 1997

Then Prime Minister John Howard lays a wreath in memory of the shooting victims at Port Arthur

A policewoman stands on the steps of the Broad Arrow Cafe in Port Arthur where it took approximately 1530 seconds for Bryant to fatally shoot twelve people wound ten more

The gun expert argued that driving gun owners towards shooting clubs has only politicised firearm ownership further, while creating another generation of people who are passionate about their right to bear arms

While these numbers are encouraging, Associate Professor Alpers has warned against a 'backslide', stating that resistance and a lack of enforcement can cause complacency.

'The proud claim that Australia may have "solved the gun problem" might only be a temporary illusion.'

WHO OWNS THE MOST GUNS? A registered firearm owner who lives in the 2285 postcode (which covers Cameron Park, Cardiff, Cardiff Heights, Cardiff South, Edgeworth, Glendale and Macquarie Hills in Newcastle, NSW) has 332 licensed guns. Advertisement

'At this 20th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, we've seen in media coverage a resurgence of public scepticism about the motives of self-interested groups seeking to wind back gun laws.'

He has sought to remind the public of the heartbreaking reasons these gun control laws were implemented in the first place: 'the rampage of a solitary male, enabled with a couple of guns.'

Former Prime Minister Howard and Child and Adolescent Mental Health expert Michael Dudley echoed his sentiment, warning that complacency could lead to another 'mass homicide by firearm', the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Mr Howard said he would not be 'foolish' enough to think guns could not get into the country, but was confident the horrific mass killing in Port Arthur had left a mark on the Australian psyche

Policeman Mick Reolands holds a military style shotgun that was on display among 4,500 other firearms before they were melted down in Sydney

THE PORT ARTHUR MASSACRE The Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people died, is the deadliest mass killing in Australia's history, and the fourth biggest shooting spree anywhere. Port Arthur is a former prison colony, now a popular tourist site, near Tasmania's capital Hobart. On April 28 1996 Martin Bryant, then aged 28, opened fire in the cafe, gift shop and car park. It took Bryant just 15 seconds to kill 12 people and wound 10 more in the cafe. He then left Port Arthur, killing indiscriminately as he went. He went to a nearby B&B which his father had once tried to buy, and killed several more people there. He was captured by police when he set the house on fire and ran out. Bryant is now serving 35 life sentences, plus an additional 1,035 years in jail. His motive for the killing has never been established, but he is believed to have been mentally sub-normal, with an IQ of just 66. Bryant's father had committed suicide in 1993, which contributed to his son's mental unrest. Advertisement

'The evidence is all in favour of gun availability and gun ownership being the critical factor' in gun violence, Dr Dudley said.

'The main game is around ensuring that the guns aren't available.'

Mr Howard said he would not be 'foolish' enough to think guns could not get into the country, but was confident the horrific mass killing in Port Arthur had left a mark on the Australian psyche.

'The evidence is that, to date, close to 20 years after the tragedy [Port Arthur], that we have learnt something from it,' he told Andrew Denton.

'That doesn't mean to say that you shouldn't be revising and keeping it up to speed, and you shouldn't be complacent.'

This comes as survivors and family members of the Port Arthur victims plan to gather at the former convict settlement to reflect on the horrors that took place twenty years ago.

This comes as survivors and family members of the Port Arthur victims plan to gather at the former convict settlement to reflect on the horrors that took place twenty years ago

The memorial will include songs from a Hobart girls' school choir, poetry readings and a keynote address, before 35 floral tributes are laid in a reflection pool near a site previously occupied by the Broad Arrow Cafe

The memorial will include songs from a Hobart girls' school choir, poetry readings and a keynote address, before 35 floral tributes are laid in a reflection pool near a site previously occupied by the Broad Arrow Cafe.

The popular eatery was where most of the harm was done on April 28, 1996 and just a shell of the building remains by way of tribute to those who lost their lives.

Bryant, a man with a history of violent and erratic behaviour, killed 35 people and injured 23 others at Port Arthur when he opened fire with an automatic rifle similar to that used at Sandy Hook elementary school in Colorado in 2012, when 20 children and six teachers were fatally shot.

Now 48, Bryant remains in Hobart's Risdon Prison where he was sentenced to serve a record 35 consecutive life sentences.

Bryant killed 35 people and injured 23 others at Port Arthur when he opened fire with an automatic rifle similar to that used at Sandy Hook elementary school when 20 children and six teachers were fatally shot
There had been an ongoing conflict between the two neighbours

A neighbour has caused a stink after picking up dog poo left on their lawn and dumping it on the offending pet owner's door step.

The Cambridge Police posted the incident on their Facebook, showing a photo of a New Zealand woman's front door with dog poo left on the step.

'After Neighbour #1's dog did its business on Neighbour #2's lawn,' Cambridge Police posted on Facebook. 'Neighbour #2 decided it would be a good idea to place the doggy-doo on the doorstep of Neighbour #1. Not very nice!'

Cambridge Police Constable Tristan Gerritsen told Domain that they were called to the address because there was a young woman at home by herself, and she felt threatened by the act.

Cambridge police have posted a photo on their Facebook page showing where a fed up neighbour dumped dog poo left on their lawn on the pet owners door step

Cambridge Police Constable Tristan Gerritsen was called to the address because there was a young woman at home by herself, and she felt threatened by the act

The act itself didn't fall under police jurisdiction, but the neighbour was warned by Constable Gerritsen about his actions and trespassing the other neighbours' property:

'Both neighbours have been advised of the right way to deal with the problem  the dog owner is to keep the dog secured and clean up, and the neighbour is to advise council if the dog continues to poo on his lawn or if it is unsecured.'



The environmental services team leader at Waipa District Council told that dog owners have a legal obligation to pick up after their dog and agreed with the way police handled the situation:

'While returning the faeces is definitely not something we would encourage, it is also something we could not deal with under dog control,' Karl Tutty said.

'A polite request to the dog owner to remove the faeces would have been more appropriate.'

Mr Tutty added that dog owners had a legal obligation to ensure that their dog is under control at all times.

The dog owner must now to keep the dog secured and clean up after it, and the neighbour is to advise the council if the dog continues to poo on his lawn or if it is unsecured

As the incident happened on private property, there isn't a lot the council can do. Legally, it's a case of trespassing according to retired lawyer Neil Wells

Retired lawyer and author of Animal Law in New Zealand, Neil Wells, believed there was not a lot Waipa District Council could do, as the incident occurred on a private property:

'If the defecation was on public land then it might come within the council, but there's no suggestion of that here. It's all on private land,' Mr Wells said, adding that legally, it was a case of trespassing.
The couple tried calling 911 twice, but gave up after long wait times and took the baby to the hospital

A family dog that killed a 3-day-old San Diego boy has been put down at the owners' request.

San Diego County animal control officials say the dog, Polo, was euthanized Wednesday morning.

The 2-year-old male was an American Staffordshire terrier-mix.

Authorities say the dog was in bed with Sebastian Caban and the baby's parents, who were watching TV, on April 21 when the mother suddenly coughed.

Authorities say that startled the dog and it bit the baby in the head. Authorities say they have no record of the dog attacking anyone before.

Euthanized: This undated file photo shows a male American Staffordshire terrier-mix named Polo, in their custody after it mauled to death a 3-day-old boy

Sudden: Authorities say the dog was in bed with Sebastian Caban and the baby's parents, who were watching TV, on April 21 when the mother suddenly coughed and startled the dog who attacked

Home: The attack happened at this apartment complex in San Diego. The couple pulled the dog off the baby and made two unsuccessful 911 calls before getting frustrated and taking him to the hospital themselves

The couple pulled the dog off the baby and made two unsuccessful 911 calls before getting frustrated and taking him to the hospital themselves, police said.

The baby was pronounced dead at the hospital after efforts to revive him were unsuccessful, according to the autopsy.

The parents waited 28 seconds before hanging up their first call to 911, then tried again and waited 34 seconds before giving up, police Lt. Scott Wahl told KNSD-TV on Saturday.

Police said the family has their condolences and that they're also frustrated by slow 911 response times.

'Our heartfelt condolences go out to the family in this very tragic case. We know every second counts in an emergency,' Lt. Scott Wahl of SDPD said in a statement Saturday.

They said their operators are understaffed and that 73 calls came in during the half-hour span when the parents called.
Rudd hasn't nominated and said role would go to Eastern European leader

Helen Clark, the former PM of New Zealand wants to lead the UN

Australians would prefer Helen Clark over Kevin Rudd for UN top job

Twice as many Australians would support former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark to lead the United Nations than Kevin Rudd.

The Essential poll found 45 per cent of 1020 people surveyed thought Ms Clark would be a better leader for the UN, with just 21 per cent opting for the past Australian prime minister.

Australian Labor voters have also shown preference for Ms Clark with 36 per cent favouring her over 34 per cent for Mr Rudd.

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Twice as many Australians would support former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark to lead the United Nations than Kevin Rudd (pictured)

Helen Clark (pictured) has officially put herself forward for the role of UN secretary-general but Mr Rudd has not yet done so, despite months of speculation he would

Ms Clark has officially put herself forward for the role of UN secretary-general but Mr Rudd has not yet done so, despite months of speculation he would.

Mr Rudd said recently he believed an Eastern European candidate was the most likely to be chosen to replace Ban Ki-moon as UN head.

'Last I looked my name is not Ruddovich,' he said.

Mr Moon's term is due to end on December 31 this year after serving two terms since he was appointed in 2007.

Among Coalition voters, Mr Rudd was also unpopular with just 17 per cent registering their support for the former Australian prime minister.
The father of a young man who died during a bikie shooting which also injured two of his friends has issued a chilling warning to his son's killer.

Mitch Finnerty, 23, was gunned down outside a house in Banksia Grove in Perth about 10.30pm on Tuesday, The West Australian reported.

On Thursday his father Lance Finnerty took to social media to write: 'you low life piece off s*** you kill my son i am coming looking see you soon (sic)'.

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Mitch Finnerty, 23, was gunned down outside a house in Banksia Grove in Perth on Tuesday night

The 23-year-old had just welcomed his first child into the world, a son called Cruz

The two other men injured during the shooting - Pelligrino Paul Mule, 53, who is the State president of the Coffin Cheater bikie gang and his son Mark Mule, 24 - were close friends of the dead man.

The Coffin Cheaters are one of Perth's oldest and most notorious bikie gangs, formed in the Western Australia capital in 1971.

They were taken to hospital Royal Perth Hospital where they remain under police guard with non life-threatening injuries.

Mr Finnety's father described his son as a 'normal person with a normal life' who had just welcomed his first child into the world.

Mr Finnerty (second from left) is pictured here with a group of friends

His father posted a warning on Facebook for his son's killer

Two other men were also injured and they were taken to Royal Perth Hospital where they remain under police guard

'He had just had a baby... a little boy named Cruz. He was very excited by that. It is not just my family thats been busted up, it is now his own too,' Lance Finnerty told The West Australian.

Major Crime Squad detectives are investigating the shooting and are yet to lay any charges.
Officials said they have seized over half a million one-dollar bills at the home of a suspected drug kingpin who was arrested along with 15 others in coordinated sweeps Wednesday.

Derrick Turner, 48, was busted by a SWAT team with the Los Angeles Police Department and agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency at his Teresa Court home in the Los Angeles suburb Cerritos around 3:30am, ABC7 reported.

The news station was present at the raid against Turner's home. In its report, Turner's distraught children and wife can be heard crying as he's led away to be charged with running a drug ring that supplied cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin to the city's Skid Row area.

Derrick Turner, pictured left as he emerges from his Cerritas home, and right after being handcuffed by LAPD cops. He is suspected of running a drug ring that focused on LA's Skid Row area

Turner's wife and two children could be heard crying as they emerged from the suburban Los Angeles home

An LAPD SWAT officer prepares for an early-morning raid on Wednesday. Out of 20 raids, 16 suspects were arrested

Skid Row is a small area in Downtown Los Angeles known for its permanent homeless population. Within the 0.4 square mile radius of Skid Row, there are more than 2,500 homeless individuals, according to estimates by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

When serving previous warrants in connection to the case, police said they found over $600.000 in one-dollar bills, along with some $1.2 million in other denominations.

Police also seized 13 kilos of cocaine, 22 pounds of methamphetamine and 20 pounds of heroin on the older warrants, ABC7 reported.

This is just some of the cash seized by LAPD during their months-long investigation into Skid Row drug ring. pic.twitter.com/wIyeIHIWXP  Marc Cota-Robles (@abc7marccr) April 27, 2016

In the 0.4 square mile area that is Skid Row, 2,500 homeless individuals live, according to the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce

Police were worried Turner would be armed with an AK-47 and a scoped rifle, but video shows him surrendering peacefully, clad in pajamas and walking barefoot towards the SWAT team.

It was unclear whether any drugs, cash or weapons in Wednesday's raid in Cerritos, ABC7 reported.

Turner was jailed on three felony charges: possession of narcotics for sale, receiving the proceeds of drug sales and conspiracy, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The kangaroo was sedated before being tended to

The marsupial was found by a couple who were metal detecting in the area

The animal survived the fall without injuries but was highly stressed

A volunteer abseiled down the shaft to rescue the marsupial

A volunteer abseiled 10 metres down a mine shaft to save a kangaroo that fell into an abandoned mineshaft.

The unlucky marsupial was discovered after apparently hopping down the hole near Malmsbury, north-west of Melbourne, Victoria.

Local couple John and Christa Kook had been metal detecting in the area, once home to a mini gold rush which left hundreds of abandoned mine shafts, when they came across the animal.

A kangaroo fell down 10 metres into an abandoned mineshaft. The kangaroo was sedated before being taken for treatment

A couple who were metal detecting in the area stumbled across kangaroo in central Victoria

John phoned animal charity Wildlife Victoria Rescue and volunteer Manfred Zabinskas arrived to assess what looked like a difficult rescue.

Despite the dangerous fall, once rescuers had recovered the kangaroo it miraculously appeared uninjured.

'The shaft was located deep into the forest and a considerable distance away from the track that they had driven in on,' Mr Zabinskas told website, thedodo.com.

'Thankfully, they met me on the main road and guided me to the location of the shaft which I doubt I could have found without their help.

'Two other Wildlife Victoria rescue volunteers, Harold and Rhoda, also attended and everyone assisted in the rescue of the kangaroo. Their help was critical as light was failing and time was of the essence.'

Malmsbury, north-west of Melbourne was once home to a mini gold rush which left hundreds of abandoned mine shafts

Wildlife Victoria Rescue and volunteer Manfred Zabinskas arrived at the scene to assess the situation

The marsupial was found uninjured despite the long fall down the shaft

Mr Zabinskas, who has a background in rock climbing, said he had attended a number of rescues from mine shafts over the years for kangaroos, wallabies and even snakes.

'Only a few months ago, four kangaroos were discovered down one shaft in similar circumstances that required an epic rescue operation,' Mr Zabinskas said.

'Only two of the four kangaroos were able to be saved, one of which was a joey that went into care at a local Wildlife Shelter.

'In this case, the kangaroo appeared to be uninjured, although highly stressed and upset. I would normally expect significant injuries to result from a fall of such a distance.'

'Abseiling down into the shaft was the most dangerous part of the rescue and consideration had to be given to my own safety while, all the time, a kangaroo was in desperate need of help.

'In addition to potential collapse of the walls, a major concern relates to the floor of the shaft.

'Shafts can be hundreds of metres deep. The floor might consist of debris and a build up of dirt over the years and therefore not be solid and can collapse at any stage to expose a deeper shaft.

'If this were to happen, the kangaroo would likely be killed. It was therefore important to remain suspended from my ropes and to minimise my contact with the floor.'

In addition to potential collapse of the walls, a major concern related to the floor of the shaft. The abseiler needed to remain suspended from the ropes and not step on the floor in case it collapsed.

Volunteers were under pressure to complete the rescue quickly because light was beginning to fade

The rescued kangaroo was taken back to a rescue shelter and given IV fluids before being examined by a vet.

'Aside from being so lucky to have been found at all, it was nothing short of a miracle that he was found so early following his fall,' Mr Zabinskas said.

'As he woke, he readily drank and ate and appeared calm. By morning he was hopping around the room and obviously wanted to go home.

'I sedated him for the return trip and immediately returned him to his home where he recovered in familiar surroundings and to rejoin with his family.'

Wildlife Victoria Rescue sedated the wildlife kangaroo before pulling it out the shaft
The BBC is to ask new staff to disclose how middle class they are as it aims to become more diverse, it was reported.

Workers for the corporation could have to declare their family income and details of their upbringing.

It follows concerns about lack of diversity within the organisation. This included a 2014 report by a government social mobility commission, which found more than a quarter of staff were privately-educated.

The BBC is to ask new staff to disclose how middle class they are as it aims to become more diverse. Pictured is the BBC Media City in Salford, it's main UK base

It follows concerns about lack of diversity within the organisation. This included a 2014 report by a government social mobility commission, which found more than a quarter of staff were privately-educated

A BBC source told the Daily Telegraph: We are already making a real difference to diversity on and off air but weve been clear there is more to do.

Nothing should be a barrier to thriving at the BBC whether it is where you were born, what school you went to, the colour of your skin, your gender or a disability.

If were going to serve audiences even better and be the creative powerhouse for the UK at home and abroad, we need the best people working for us and a workforce that reflects the many communities that exist in the UK  thats what these plans will ensure.

Under the BBC plans, new recruits will be asked for information including the type of school attended, had free school meals and whether they were the first in their families to attend university.

Pre-application training would be offered to recruits from under-represented backgrounds.
'You're doing it now! It's wonderful to watch it up close,' he said

The TV funnyman accused him of undermining Ms Clark during their chat

The former PM sat down with Gleeson on the ABC's The Weekly program

Mr Rudd burst out laughing as Tom Gleeson pressed him over Helen Clark

Kevin Rudd burst out laughing when a TV funnyman asked him whether he was undermining a rival for a top United Nations post.

Comedian Tom Gleeson sat down with the former prime minister for the ABC show The Weekly on Wednesday evening.

Asked whether he was plotting against Helen Clark, the New Zealand candidate for Secretary-General, Mr Rudd said: 'I think Helen's a great candidate...'

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Former PM Kevin Rudd lost his composure, laughing as he was repeatedly accused of undermining rival United Nations Secretary-General candidate Helen Clark

Mr Rudd grinned and laughed as Mr Gleeson said he was undermining Ms Clark even in their very interview: 'You're doing it now!'

As Mr Rudd continued with his faint praise, Gleeson shook his head and said: 'It's wonderful to watch it up close. 'It's what 's between the sentences, that's what I like.'

But he struggled to maintain his composure when Gleeson cut him off. 'You're doing it now! This is it! This is how it starts'.

The former diplomat grinned, laughed and started to repeat his line. But Gleeson wouldn't let him get away with it.

Competitor? Former NZ leader Helen Clark has declared her candidacy for the post of UN Secretary General

'You see, that's it! That's you!' Gleeson said. 'This is what you're good at! It's your natural game! We love watching you do it.'

The laughing former PM replied: 'I think she's a great candidate'.

'Oh, look at him go!' Gleeson exclaimed.

Mr Rudd giggled and put on a serious face.

'A lot of us were out there out supporting Helen to be supported ahead of UNDP in the first place,' he said.

'Gordon Brown, myself - she's a great international public servant.'

Clearly enjoying himself, Gleeson shook his head and said: 'It's wonderful to watch it up close.

'It's what 's between the sentences, that's what I like.'

Mr Rudd's successor Julia Gillard accused him of sabotaging her leadership after she knocked him out of the top job in 2010.

The amusing interview came after a new poll found Australians may not welcome the idea of Mr Rudd as the head of the UN.

An Essential poll found 45 per cent of 1020 surveyed thought Ms Clark would be a better leader for the august international body.

That included a narrow majority of Labor voters, who chose the former Kiwi prime minister over Mr Rudd 36 to 34 per cent.

Ms Clark has officially put herself forward for the role. Despite speculation, Mr Rudd has not.
The longtime girlfriend of Boston gangster James 'Whitey' Bulger was sentenced on Thursday to an additional 21 months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating whether other people helped Bulger while he was a fugitive.

Catherine Greig already is serving an eight-year sentence for helping Bulger while he was a fugitive. Greig spent 16 years on the run with him before they were captured in Santa Monica, California, in 2011.

Federal prosecutors had asked the judge to add a little more than three years to her prison time for her conviction on a criminal contempt charge. Greig's lawyer asked for leniency and said she should not get any more than six months.

Did others help him? Catherine Greig (left) was captured with James 'Whitey' Bulger (right), June 22, 2011, in Santa Monica while he was a fugitive

'It is obvious that she is a kind, gentle woman who has literally done nothing bad in her life except fall in love with James Bulger and live with him for 16 years until their arrest,' he wrote in a sentencing memo.

Prosecutors said Greig refused to answer questions before the grand jury even after she was given immunity and after a judge issued an order compelling her to testify.

They argued in a sentencing memo that she should be sentenced to a little more than three years 'for her conscious, considered, and unapologetic violation of the law.'

Greig already had nine months added to her prison time after she was found in civil contempt for refusing to testify before the grand jury.

Bulger, now 86, is serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2013 for playing a role in 11 murders. He has denied involvement in the crimes.

U.S. District Judge Dennis Saylor voiced no sympathy for Greig's apparent desire to show loyalty to Bulger.

Criminal duo: Bulger fled Boston in 1994 and remained a fugitive until he was captured in Santa Monica, California, in 2011. He is pictured walking with Greig, who he was living with at the time, in 1998

'It is had to imagine being less worthy an object of love and affection than Bulger,' Saylor told the court.

'He is a lifelong criminal, not just a criminal but a murderer, not just a murderer but a serial murderer.'

Bulger was on the FBI's 'Ten Most Wanted' list for most of his time on the run and his story inspired multiple films, including 2015's 'Black Mass' starring Johnny Depp.

His trial highlighted his dealings with the FBI's Boston office, where fellow Irish-American agents turned a blind eye to Bulger's crimes in exchange for information they could use against the Italian-American mafia, then a top FBI target.

Prosecutors said Greig had numerous opportunities to leave Bulger during their time on the run. Instead, they said, she helped him remain a fugitive by using false identities and pretending to be his wife so she could pick up his prescriptions.

The couple posed as married retirees from Chicago. After they were captured, authorities found a stash of more than $800,000 in cash and 30 weapons in their Santa Monica rental.

Steven Davis, whose sister Debra Davis was among the people Bugler was accused but not convicted of murdering, said he did not understand Greig's apparent loyalty to Bulger.

'She still makes me sick to my stomach,' he said.
Apple has paid tribute to a Hispanic employee who killed himself at the company's Cupertino headquarters on Wednesday.

A spokesman for the tech giant said: 'We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of a young and talented coworker.

'Our thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends, including the many people he worked with here at Apple.'

The company added that it is providing assistance to the man's co-workers after his body was discovered inside a conference room next to a gun.

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Apple said it is providing support to the co-workers of a Hispanic employee after he was found dead in an apparent suicide at the company's California headquarters on Wednesday (scene pictured)

Police were called to the scene shortly after 8.35am after reports of a male suffering a wound to the head, a Santa Clara County Fire Department spokesman told Daily Mail Online.

Apple declined to identify the employee, who has also not been named by the coroner in charge of the case.

The Santa Clara County Sheriff's office confirmed no one else was involved despite initial reports a female may have been part of some sort of dispute.

They added that it was an isolated incident and there was no risk to the rest of the staff.

The company added that it is providing assistance to the man's co-workers after his body was discovered inside a conference room next to a gun. Above, the headquarters

Sgt Andrea Urena, with the Sheriff's Department, said: 'Through further investigation, they determined there was no other individuals involved and they believe it was an isolated incident.'

An employee told the San Jose Mercury News that most of their colleagues did not know who the victim was and had been given the option of the rest of the day off. Most people carried on with their day.

Fire officials did not enter the building as they were called off by law enforcement. They could not confirm the death and referred calls to the police.

The death comes a day after the tech giant's stocks tumbled after their revenue declined for the first time in 13 years.
A new series of the documentary Struggle Street will return to the screens despite sparking outrage over its controversial representation of a region.

SBS has confirmed the new six-part observational television series will shine a light on the social and economic disadvantage in Victoria and Queensland.

Last year, the first season, set in Mount Druitt in Sydney's west, angered the community before it screened, with Blacktown Mayor Stephen Bali labelling it as a 'publicly-funded poverty porn'.

However, series two will continue the widespread debate by focusing on the personal stories that touch the lives of Australians from diverse backgrounds struggling against the odds.

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A new series of the documentary Struggle Street will return to the screens despite sparking outrage last year

'At the heart of SBS is a commitment to contributing to a cohesive society,' SBS television and online content director Marshall Heald said in a statement on Thursday.

'Struggle Street will seek to raise awareness and deepen our understanding of those of us in the community facing social and economic hardship through an honest reflection of what its like to be doing it tough in Australia today.'

Last year, series one gave a voice to those who were affected a range of circumstances and factors, including poverty, unemployment, drug abuse, violence and physical and mental illness.

A convoy of garbage trucks blocked the SBS offices in Artarmon in protest but the series managed to rate highly, buoyed by national debate about its merits.

Young mother Billie Jo Wilkie (pictured) was shown in the first Struggle Street series smoking drugs

The Mount Druitt woman was spotted sitting on a toilet while she was pregnant and smoking with her mother

Series one gave a voice to those who were affected a range of circumstances and factors, including poverty, unemployment, drug abuse, violence and physical and mental illness

The precise location of Struggle Street's latest offering is yet to be released by SBS.

SBS Chief Content Officer, Helen Kellie, said: 'There are 2.5 million people in Australia living below the poverty line.

'Some research points to the situation getting worse not better and this is a barrier to social cohesion. But the statistics don't allow us to connect with the real stories, in a way that Struggle Street does, to raise awareness about hardship,' she said.

SBS denied reports last year it was filming Struggle Street in the Queensland city of Logan while their crews were shooting The Logan Project which looked at musicians in the city.

SBS confirmed the new six-part series will shine a light on the disadvantage issues in Victoria and Queensland

Last year, the first season, set in Mount Druitt in Sydney's west, angered the community before it screened

The documentary angered local community leaders who fear it's representation of parts of Western Sydney were unfairly negative

Sunshine in Melbourne's west has also been rumoured as a potential location for the show.

Struggle Street series two will be produced by Keo Films, the same team behind season one, with support from Screen Australia and Film Victoria.

'The first series of Struggle Street provoked a unique and important discussion about the extent and effects of poverty in Australia,' Screen Australia senior manager of documentary Liz Stevens said.

'Screen Australia hopes the second series of Struggle Street will raise further awareness of these complex problems and the networks and services that provide essential and sometimes lifesaving support to their communities.'
A 15-year-old boy pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges expected to keep him locked up at least until he is 21 for opening fire on fellow students in a school cafeteria for reasons that remain unclear.

James Austin Hancock pleaded guilty to four counts of attempted murder and one count of inducing panic. Prosecutors dropped four felonious assault counts.

Butler County Juvenile Court Judge Ronald Craft ordered a pre-sentencing investigation and agreed to a defense request for a psychological evaluation of Hancock before he sentences him on June 6.

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James Austin Hancock sits next to his attorney Charlie Rittgers Sr. while in court in Hamilton, Ohio on Thursday. He pleaded guilty to four counts of attempted murder and one count of inducing panic

Hancock, a teen accused of shooting students in a school cafeteria, hugs emotional relatives during the hearing

Before he was led away, ankles shackled, the teen hugged his parents and other relatives, some sobbing and assuring him: 'We love you, Austin.'

Hancock was charged in the February 29 shooting at Madison Local Schools near Middletown, north of Cincinnati.

Authorities said Hancock, who was 14 at the time, took a relative's loaded gun to school and opened fire in the cafeteria, hitting two students.

Two other students were injured by shrapnel or while running away.

'There really isn't a good motive for what he did,' defense attorney Charles Rittgers said.

'You're dealing with the mind of a 14-year-old.

'And as most people know, especially at that age, they're immature and they act sometimes impulsively.'

He said Hancock's actions 'came totally out of the blue' and that he did not have a history of causing trouble.

He said the teen is sorry for what he did and is relieved no one was hurt more seriously than they were. Authorities have said all four students recovered.

The Associated Press generally does not identify juveniles charged with crimes, but Hancock's name was widely reported.

Brant Murray, a 13-year-old student hit in the legs by shrapnel in the shootings, was at the court with his mother, Ginger Weaver.

In this February 29 photo, deputies are shown standing at the scene of the school shooting

Above parents run towards Madison Jr/Sr High School following the February 29 shooting. Authorities said Hancock took a relative's loaded gun to school and opened fire in the cafeteria, hitting two students

She said 'physically, he's fine,' but he does not talk much about that day, adding he did not even know Hancock.

She thought Hancock should have been charged as an adult.

'At 15 years old, he knows better. Period,' she said. 'I wanted more... This is my child.'

Hancock was indicted in March as a juvenile under a serious youthful offender classification.

Butler County Prosecutor Mike Gmoser said the grand jury had the option of indicting Hancock as an adult but chose to charge him under the juvenile classification.

The serious juvenile offender status results in a rare blended sentence with both juvenile and adult penalties.

Rittgers said Hancock will be in a juvenile detention center until he turns 21, and if he stays out of trouble in the meantime, the threat of the adult sentence would go away at 21.

If not, a prosecutor can request he be moved into the adult system.

There, he could face dozens of years in prison, depending upon Craft's sentencing decision in June.
This is the emotional moment friends and family gathered to bid a last farewell to Gary Rhoden, one of eight members of the Rhoden family shot to death 'execution-style' in their Ohio homes last week.

Loved ones were pictured tearfully hugging one-another as they walked into the Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home in Kentucky, around half an hour's drive from where Gary was found dead on Friday.

The 38-year-old was shot multiple times, including in the head, during a series of well-coordinated murders at four locations in the tiny town of Piketon, Ohio.

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Emotional members of the Rhoden family were pictured outside the Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home in Kentucky on Wednesday to pay their last respects to Gary Rhoden, 38, who was shot last week

Gary was among seven members of the Rhoden family who were shot execution-style at four homes in the tiny town of Piketon, Ohio, in what police believe may have been drug-related violence

Lisa Wallace, Gary's former sister-in-law, told local media: 'Everybody is in shock, and they really want their privacy. A lot of them are scared - I would be, considering'

Gary's visitation, which took place under heavy police surveillance according to WSAZ, marks the first of many funeral arrangements the Rhoden family will have to endure in the coming days.

While police have yet to give a motive for the slayings or make any arrests, they have revealed a extensive quantities of marijuana were found close to where the Rhodens were killed.

Gary was shot several times, including once in the head, during a series of planned attacks carried out against his family on Friday last week

Cops have uncovered more than 2000 cannabis plants at one of the four murder scenes and growth operations in two of the others.

That evidence, coupled with the area's historic links to Mexican cartels, has led many to speculate that the killings could be drug related.

The victims are 40-year-old Christopher Rhoden Sr.; his ex-wife, Dana Rhoden; and their three children, 16-year-old Christopher Rhoden Jr., 19-year-old Hanna Rhoden and 20-year-old Clarence 'Frankie' Rhoden.

Christopher Rhoden Sr.'s brother, 44-year-old Kenneth Rhoden; their cousin, 38-year-old Gary Rhoden; and 20-year-old Hannah Gilley, were also shot.

Gilley's 6-month old son with Frankie was unharmed. Two other children, a 6-month-old and a 3-year-old, also escaped unscathed.

An autopsy report into the killings has laid bare the extraordinary level of violence wrought on the family in their final moments.

All of the victims were shot in the head, while seven of the eight had multiple gunshot wounds, with one person riddled with nine bullets.

The report says that one person had a single bullet wound, another had two wounds, while the rest of the victims all sustained three or more.

Some of the victims had also sustained bruising, indicating that they were beaten before being shot to death inside their own home.

Car repairman Donald Stone, 44, described how he found cousin Kenneth Rhoden lying face down on his bed with a single bullet wound to his head.

Stone revealed that Rhoden's corpse, from its knees down, was strewn with dollar bills which may have been a sinister message from the killer.

Stone said he was due to have spent the previous evening with his cousin and slept overnight there adding: 'If I had, I would have been victim number nine. I feel lucky about that and to be alive today.'

While funeral services for the seven other victims have yet to take place, makeshift memorials have been set up close to where the killings took place

All of the victims were shot at least once in the head, an autopsy has revealed, while

Fighting back tears, he said: 'There was blood everywhere man. It was something no human should see.

'A man who was good a man lying there like that, shot dead by cowards. It makes me feel ill when I think about what I saw.'

Stone revealed that his cousin owned a 'ferocious' pitball dog called Brownie and believed the killer must have been known to him.

Specialists are examining 79 pieces of evidence including bullet casings and blood stained items found at the scenes of the crimes.

Around 215 officers are working around the clock to trace the gunman or gang that carried out the massacre.

Murdered teenager Christopher Rhoden was involved in a court case claiming he was assaulted 48 hours before he was blasted to death with seven other people, Daily Mail Online can reveal.

Heartbreaking: Husband-to-be Frankie Rhoden and his fiancee Hannah Hazel Gilley, 20, were among those killed Friday in Piketon, Ohio

Tragic: Grandmother-to-be Dana Lynn Rhoden (left), 37, and her son, 16-year-old Chris Rhoden (right) were also murdered, according to the Morning Ledger. Victims Chris and Frankie are brothers

Devastating: Hanna May Rhoden (pictured left and right) was killed Friday in the Piketon shooting that has rocked the small community, according to the Morning Ledger. Her Facebook page says she was already a mother to one child

Kenneth Rhoden (left), 44, and Chris Rhoden Sr (right), 40, were named as victims in Friday's murders. Chris Rhoden Sr is the father of Chris Rhoden Jr, who was also killed in the massacre

His grandfather has visited officers investigating the shooting of eight people urging them to assess the case.

The teenager and his slain mother complained to police after a road rage incident involving the 16-year-old and a 33-year-old woman.

Court documents obtained by Daily Mail Online show that Rebecca Allen, of Piketon, was given two years probation and 40 hours community service less than two days before Friday's massacre.

She pleaded no contest to the charge of assault on February 24 and appeared before the court last week.

On Wednesday detectives were remaining tight-lipped about the progress of their investigation.

Attorney General Mike DeWine (left) remained tight-lipped about his investigation on Wednesday, saying that he didn't want to give the killer or killers any indication on how they were being tracked down

Attorney General Mike DeWine said: 'I assume the person or the people who committed these murders are watching the news reports about Pike County.

'I do not intend or want to broadcast any information that would let them know details about this investigation.

However, DeWine did urge people to come forward with any information related to the killings.
While 'designer vagina' surgery in women of ages increased by 16 per cent

Number of under 18s having labiaplasty surgery almost doubled from 222 in 2014 to 400 in 2015

A sharp rise in 'designer vagina' surgeries is being fuelled by a desire to achieve a sleeker look in yoga pants, a leading plastic surgeon has revealed

More teenage girls than ever are going under the knife in pursuit of a 'designer vagina' as experts warn porn is to blame.

Last year saw a 16 per cent increase in women of all ages going in for labiaplasty surgery - operations to reduce the size of the labia.

But procedures for under 18s almost doubled in the same period.

Experts believe porn and poor sex education may be to blame for the sharp rise in teens seeking 'designer vaginas'.

Julie Strickland, the chair of ACOG's Adolescent Health Care Committee and lead author of the paper, said that many young girls are not taught about vast ranges of shapes and sizes of labia which fall into the range of 'normal'.

While teens are becoming increasing exposed to images of 'idealized' vaginas through porn and advertising by plastic surgeons.

'Variety in the shape, size, appearance and symmetry of labia can have particularly distressing psychological effects on young women,' Strickland said in a press release.

'It's one more body part that women are insecure about and it's our job, as ob-gyns, to reassure our young patients.'

In 2014, doctors performed 222 labiaplasty operations on girls under the age of 18.

By the following year, that number had soared to 400 - an 80 per cent increase.

There is such a growing demand for the procedure in that age range that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has issued guidelines on how doctors should talk with teens about labiaplasty.

Labiaplasty is the most common type of female genital cosmetic surgery, in which the size of the labia is reduced.

Surgery can be performed on the labia majora - the outer, larger vaginal lips - or the labia minora - the smaller, internal vaginal lips.

It is usually offered as a treatment for women who have concerns with hygiene, difficulties during sexual intercourse or discomfort when exercising. However, many women want surgery because of concerns about the way their genitalia look.

But it can come with the risk of serious complications, including pain, scarring and infection.

Meanwhile, vaginoplasty is a procedure that aims to 'tighten up' a vagina that has become slack, often the result of childbirth or ageing.

The number of under 18s having labiaplasty operations almost doubled form 222 to 400 between 2014 and 2015

Meanwhile the number of women of all ages having the surgery soared 16 per cent from 7,535 to 8,745

Dr Jennifer Walden, an aesthetic plastic surgeon and spokeswoman for the ASAPS, based in Austin, Texas, said labiaplasty is 'one of the most popular cosmetic procedures in women'.

Over the last few years, she has noted a huge rise in the number of patients requesting the procedure.

'It is one of the fastest rising procedures, in terms of popularity,' she told Daily Mail Online.

'It can prove life-changing for so many patients.'

The increasing popularity of the 'designer vagina' operation has also gained a celebrity following from the likes of Sharon Osborne.

Between 2014 and 2015, operations among women of all aged jumped 16 per cent up to 8,745 - the majority of those who went under the knife were aged between 19 and 34.

The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) also recorded a significant increase in the number of tissue removal and re-structuring operations - a staggering 49 per cent rise in one year, from 2013 to 2014.

Dr Walden thinks that the fad for women to have all their pubic hair removed, in Brazilian and Hollywood waxes and laser hair removal, is also driving this trend.

'There has been a rise in women going bare, down there, having Brazilian waxes and laser hair removal,' she told Daily Mail Online.

'It has become fashionable and as a result women have, all of a sudden, started to see things they may not have taken notice of before.'

But, the rise in requests for labiaplasty is not merely a vain one, Dr Walden said.

'The majority of consultations I perform are on women who do have enlarged labia,' she said.

'This is not a made up problem. It can have serious consequences.'

Enlarged labia can impact on a woman's hygiene, and can cause severe discomfort during sex as well as when wearing tight clothing.

'Some women have a real issue with contouring when wearing tight jeans and yoga pants,' Dr Walden said.

'They want to look and appear sleeker in that area. And enlarged labia can have a real impact on a woman's sex life.

'In mechanical terms the labia can be tugged on constantly, which can cause repeated pressure during sex, which leads to severe discomfort.'

But, rather than suffer in silence, due to a rise in awareness of 'designer vagina' surgery, Dr Walden said women are now aware they have options.

'For better or worse, a rise in online images, both pornographic and those of women wearing very little, has made women aware of areas they may not have noticed before,' she added.

In turn, greater discussion of the issues has helped to break down the taboo and make surgery a viable option for women of all ages.

'I have seen girls as young as 16 anxious and concerned about having enlarged labia,' Dr Walden told Daily Mail Online.

'And just recently I saw a 75-year-old woman, who came in with her husband, to discuss their options after issues with vaginal lubrication.

'But, typically I would say most women seek the procedure after childbirth, so it is normally women in their 20s and 30s that come to see me about the surgeries.'
If the White House doesn't work out for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders his constituents will be perfectly happy having him stay put in the U.S. Senate.

Sanders is the most popular U.S. senator in the country, according to new numbers out today from Morning Consult.

Among his constituents, he has an approval rating of 80 percent.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders' constituents feel the Bern so much that he's the most popular man in the U.S. Senate - perhaps a consolation prize if rival Hillary Clinton's clinches the Democratic nomination

Texans don't mind that Sen. Ted Cruz (left) has been on the campaign trail with his numbers seeing a boost. Sen. Marco Rubio's (right) constituents didn't like him running for president instead of doing his day job

Just 17 percent of the Vermonters polled disapprove of Sanders.

Sanders also polls leaps and bounds better than the other two senate White House hopefuls  Ted Cruz, who's still in the running and Marco Rubio, who dropped out in mid-March.

Cruz's approval is better than Rubio's and has actually increased throughout the campaign.

His favorability now stands at 55 percent, up three points, while his unfavorability went down two points to 30 percent.

Cruz was first elected to the Senate in 2012, so won't be up for re-election until 2018.

Rubio, who pulled out of the presidential race after the embarrassment of being clobbered in his home state of Florida by GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, has an approval rating of 45 percent, which is near the bottom of his senate peers.

The Florida senator often eschewed his senate duties to head out on the campaign trail instead earning him a reputation of a Congressional 'no-show.'

That standing hurt him with Republican primary voters and it hurt him with the poll respondents as well.

Rubio's favorability went down five points while he was running for president and his unfavorability increased by eight points to 41 percent.

Rubio is on the top ten list of least popular senators, according to the Morning Consult results.

The nonpartisan media and survey technology company polled 62,288 voters in total, interviewing a significant sample in each state based on population.

Registered voters were asked whether they approved or disapproved of the job performance of their home state senators, with the pollsters using zip codes to produce the results.

Beyond those just running for president, Sen. Susan Collins, the moderate Republican senator from Maine came in second place behind Sanders with a 79 percent approval rating.

She was followed by Republican Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota and another Mainer  independent Sen. Angus King. They each received an approval rating of 74 percent.

Vermont's other senator, Democrat Patrick Leahy, came in after the top trio with 73 percent.

Rounding out the top 10 were Sens. Thomas Carper, D-Del., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., John Barasso, R-Wyo., Al Franken, D-Minn., and Chris Coons, D-Del.

The star of the bottom of the barrel is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is disliked by 49 percent of his constituents.

He's followed by three other well-known Republicans  Kansan Pat Roberts, former GOP presidential nominee John McCain and Utah's Orrin Hatch.

Next up on the dislike list is McConnell's Democratic counterpart, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid.

After that is Marco Rubio, followed by Louisiana Republican David Vitter, known best nationally for a sex scandal that was brought back by political opponents in 2015.
Based on William Edmund Barrett's 1962 novel, producer/director Ralph Nelson's 'Lilies of the Field' tells the story of African American handyman Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) and his encounter with a group of Eastern European nuns. He comes upon their farm in the Arizona desert through an act of fate, or the will of God according to the order's leader Mother Maria (Lilia Skala), in search of water for his car.

Understandably, Mother Maria thinks Homer, or Schmidt as the nuns call him, is an answer to their prayers. She asks him to fix the roof, which he is willing to do for pay. At suppertime, Homer (and the audience) sees how meager the nuns' lives are when they serve him a meal that is not very filling. He helps them learn English and then stays the night, under the presumption he is going to get paid in the morning.

However, Mother Maria has a plan. At first, she talks him into performing other jobs around the farm, and then she reveals her ultimate goal: getting Homer to build a chapel so the local people, mainly comprised of poor Mexicans, won't have to travel so far to worship. Although he had dreamed of being an architect, he couldn't afford to go to school so he declines the offer. That is until a construction contractor, Ashton (Ralph Nelson in an uncredited role), calls him "Boy" and scoffs at the idea. Homer decides to show Ashton and himself that he can do it.

That scene was the first and only bit of overt racism in the story, which is interesting considering what was occurring elsewhere in America in 1963 when the film was released. In Birmingham, Alabama, photographs and newsreels showed police officers using fire hoses and dogs against African Americans and members of the Ku Klux Klan killed four girls when they bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In Mississippi, Medgar Evers was assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. led the March on Washington and gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.

I am very curious if the country's racial turmoil contributed in any way to Academy voters honoring Poitier with the very first Best Actor Oscar given to an African American. Rather than the traditional winners where an actor is clearly acting in a showy, over-the-top performance or by portraying an afflicted character, Poitier's Homer is a subtle creation that reveals a man is a man no matter his skin color.

The plot of 'Lilies of the Field' moves along at a brisk pace and the main characters deal with little conflict in achieving, which is my only complaint. It's a feel-good movie with an ending that comes as no surprise. While there is certainly an audience for that, I would have preferred greater challenges in order to make their resolutions more satisfying.

The Blu-ray: Vital Disc Stats

Twilight Time presents 'Lilies of the Field' comes on a 50GB Region Free Blu-ray disc housed in a clear keepcase. The booklet features liner notes by Julie Kirgo. The disc boots up directly to the menu screen without any promotional advertisements.
A clever father, who is a Washington D.C.-based pilot, pulled off the surprise of a lifetime on board one of his flights this month.

When Capt Mario Lopes, a United Airlines pilot, learned his son was set to return from Kuwait on April 14, he jumped at the opportunity to pilot a military flight to Norfolk, Virginia that same day.

Unsure if it was coincidence or fate, Lopes followed his intuition and was able to surprise his son, First Lt Mario Lopes who ended up being a passenger on the flight as he returned from deployment.

A clever father, who is a Washington D.C.-based pilot, pulled off the surprise of a lifetime on board one of his flights this month for his son returning from deployment in Kuwait (the pair pictured during their reunion)

After Capt Mario Lopes, a United Airlines pilot, learned his son First Lt Mario Lopes was set to return from Kuwait on April 14, he jumped at the opportunity to pilot a military flight to Norfolk, Virginia that same day

'I told my wife that this couldn't be a coincidence,' Capt Lopes told ABC News.

'No one could confirm or deny if he would actually be a passenger on my aircraft, but I knew I had to take the chance and find out.'

On April 14, Lopes notified his crew about his plan to surprise his son and asked for their help in distracting him while he attempted to sneak on board, according to ABC News.

He said he gave his lead flight attendant a bag of his son's favorite cookies as he made his way onto the aircraft.

Capt Lopes recalled how as the moment approached, he felt anxious and excited, adding it seemed like 'time was standing still,' according to ABC News.

Capt Lopes shakes his son's hand after they embraced during the heartwarming moment a few weeks ago

Capt Lopes was unsure if his son would be on board the flight but followed his intuition and was able to surprise Mario, who ended up being a passenger on the flight as he returned from deployment

'[I] just could not believe that this opportunity was ahead of me,' Capt Lopes said.

Then the moment came when Lopes made his entrance onto the plane and stood behind his son, asking him 'First Lieutenant Lopes, what are you doing on my aircraft?'

'When he turned around we embraced for as long as I could hold him,' Capt Lopes told ABC News.

'I cannot express the emotions I felt holding my son after not seeing him for so long.'

Lopes, who has been flying since he was 17, said the reunion on the flight was 'by far' the most important to him in his 27-year career at United Airlines

In the heartwarming moment captured on video, Capt Lopes is seen tightly embracing his son as others look on.

They pull away from each other and shake hands only before hugging again during the sweet reunion.

Lopes, who has been flying since he was 17, said the reunion on the flight was 'by far' the most important to him in his 27-year career at United Airlines.
He failed to turn up to court and was later added to NSW's most wanted list

The 71-year-old was charged in 2006 with 45 counts of child sexual assault

NSW chiropractor Warwick John McEwen was on the run for a decade

A convicted child sex offender on the run for 10 years has been found dead in hospital by police.

The notorious chiropractor from New South Wales, Warwick John McEwen, was located in a South Australian hospital where he was being treated for terminal cancer.

In 2006, McEwin was released from prison on unrelated child sex matters when police charged him with 45 counts of child sexual assault, committed more than 25 years earlier in his Campbelltown practice in Greater Western Sydney.

The 71-year-old was later added to NSW's most wanted list after he failed to appear at Cambelltown Local Court, reported The Daily Telegraph.

Warwick John McEwen, a convicted child sex offender who has been on the run for 10 years has been found dead in a South Australian hospital where he was being treated for terminal cancer

Sex Crimes Squad detectives were liaising with South Australia Police as to whether they could extradite McEwin back to NSW to face court.

But authorities were instead informed the 71-year-old who checked himself into hospital earlier this month had died on Monday.

It is understood McEwan was preparing to be transferred to a hospice when he passed away in his hospital bed.

Police have removed him from the state's most wanted list.

Police initially conducted a statewide hunt for the elderly man but McEwan escaped to live almost day to day by working for cash in hand jobs and changing his name.

'But that doesn't mean we ever gave up, you can go to ground but we're still going to be looking for you,' the Child Sex Crime Squad's commander Detective Superintendent Linda Howlett said.

'Basically, we never give up.

'We'll continue to be checking social security numbers, speaking with acquaintances, speaking with family.'
A two-year-old boy is fighting for his life after he suffered burns to 90 per cent of his body when a fire ripped through his home in rural Queensland.

Austin Cotterill had surgery at the Lady Cilento Children's Hospital in Brisbane to remove dead tissue after a blaze broke out about 8.30pm on Tuesday at the family home in Eidsvold, more than 400km northwest of Brisbane,The Courier Mail reported.

The boy was initially taken to Gayndah Hospital before being airlifted to Brisbane in critical condition.

Austin Cotterill, 2, is fighting for his life after he suffered burns to 90 per cent of his burns when a house fire ripped through his home in rural Queensland

A woman who suffered minor burns was also treated at Gayndah.

Austin's father, Steven, is maintaining a constant presence by his son's bedside after his son underwent four hours of surgery.

'He's holding in there at the moment,' he said.

Firefighters are investigating if candles burning in one of the children's bedrooms had caused the blaze, 9News reported.

The toddler had surgery at the Lady Cilento Children's Hospital to remove dead tissue, father Steven said

Firefighters are investigating if candles burning in one of the children's bedrooms had caused the blaze

The boy's mother, Mandy, only had enough time to drag his two siblings away from the fire but was too late to save Austin from his extensive burns.

Witness Doug Hooker told 9News the family had sought assistance from neighbours.

'I heard the wife call out to me and said there were people screaming for help,' he said.

'I'm a bit immobile so by the time I got out here, all I saw was the flames leaping out of the front corner of the house.'

A friend has started up a gofundme page for Austin's family.

Organiser Louie Christine Naumovski said Steven, Mandy and their two other children would be staying at Ronald McDonald House accommodation while Austin remained in hospital.

'They may be there for a very long time. We want to show our support to their family, to make their stay easier and without worry except for their little boy,' Ms Naumovski said.

The boy's mother, Mandy, only had enough time to drag his two siblings away from the fire but was too late to save Austin from his extensive burns
A student at one of Melbourne's most elite schools is being investigated after he was accused of hacking into a teacher's email to cheat on an upcoming assessment.

The Year 12 student at Caulfield Grammar School allegedly gained access to his teacher's email last year so he could get an early glimpse of upcoming finals school assessments.

Principal Reverend Andrew Syme said the student gained 'improper and early access' to assessment tasks for business management during his final year of study for the Victorian Certificate of Education.

The Year 12 student at Caulfield Grammar School in Melbourne allegedly gained access to his teacher's email last year so he could get an early glimpse of upcoming finals school assessments

The school, which charges up to $28,000 per year in fees, denied the student hacked into the system, the Herald Sun reports.

The student reportedly gained access to the assessment task by using the teacher's email password, which had been left on the staff member's desk.

Reverend Syme said the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority had been notified of the school's investigation following the allegations.

Caulfield Grammar School Principal Reverend Andrew Syme said the student gained 'improper and early access' to assessment tasks for business management during his final year of study

'The school is aware of claims that a Year 12 student gained improper and early access to assessment tasks while studying VCE Unit 3-4 Business Management in 2015,' he said.

'The claims relate to 'School Assessed Coursework', or SAC, which are the primary avenue of internal assessment for the VCE.
A body believed to be that of missing person Taddeo Haigh was found near a creek 500 metres from the house where the bushwalker was last seen on Sunday evening.

The body has not been formally identified but police believe it is the 31-year-old marine engineer that went missing near Merrijig in Victoria earlier this week.

The Herald Sun reported that line searchers uncovered the missing man's body near Sawmill Settlement.

'Taddeo was last seen leaving a residential address in Gibb Court on Sunday night about 9.30pm after telling family and friends he was going for a walk,' said Victoria Police in a statement on Thursday afternoon.

Police are not treating the death as suspicious and will prepare a report for the Coroner.

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Taddeo Haigh's wife Elizabeth made an emotional plea for the public to come forward with information earlier this week

Mr Haigh, known to friends as Ted, had rented a holiday house in Sawmill Settlement with his wife and friends to go mountain biking over the ANZAC day long weekend.

His wife Elizabeth Campbell was joined by family, friends and dozens of volunteers in the search for Mr Haigh who left for a walk from Victoria's Sawmill Settlement near Merrijig on Sunday night and failed to return.

He is believed to have had taken his phone and wallet but his bank account has not been accessed.

Temperatures in the area had dropped as low as 5.2 degrees on Monday night but were a mild 11 degrees on Tuesday night.

He was on holiday with his wife and friends who said Mr Haigh was a fit man but ill-equipped for two nights in the bush

The family were 'shocked and upset at the discovery, Acting Superintendent Libby Murphy said, according to The Age.

'We're working with Ted's family to provide some support,' she said.

She said a family liaison officer had been accompanying the family on Thursday.

It was a 'devastating and disappointing' result, she said, for search crews and volunteers who had worked tirelessly in the search.

Mr Haigh was a fit man but ill-equipped for two nights in the bush, friends told 7News.

However, his parents Jenny and Jeff Haigh said he was capable of surviving rough outback, according to The Age.

The parents flew from Germany on Tuesday night to join the search effort before the discovery on Thursday.

Acting Sergeant Mark Helyer said he rough terrain surrounding where Mr Haigh went missing has hampered search efforts

Ms Campbell made a tearful plea on Tuesday and said she believed her husband was either lost or injured and urged anyone who may be able to track him down to come forward, 9 News reported.

'I feel like he is lost at this stage, or perhaps injured and can't make his way back,' Ms Campbell said at the time.

'If anyone has seen him walking or seen someone who looks like they're trying to get a ride somewhere, or any information at all, we'd be grateful for it,' she said.

Victoria SES co-ordinated a full-scale search with the help of local officers, the dog squad, mounted police and a police aircraft.

Parks Victoria crew and bushwalking volunteers from Bush Search and Rescue Victoria were also involved.

The search radius was increased to five kilometres on Wednesday from Sawmill Settlement and all nearby walking tracks and bicycle tracks had been searched.

The unshaven Mr Haigh was last seen wearing a grey hoodie, dark jeans and brown shoes leaving a home in Gibb Court in Sawmill Settlement on Sunday about 9.30pm.
The wife of a former Australian soldier turned professional 'child recovery' agent has slammed Channel Nine for cutting a deal with Lebanese authorities while her husband remains behind bars.

Karin Whittington, from Sweden, said Nine had the power to help her Australian husband Adam Whittington following a botched child recovery operation in Lebanon earlier this month.

Mrs Whittington said Nine turned its back on Whittington, who she claims was hired to snatch Sally Faulkner's two children from a street in Beirut, and were happy to leave him rotting in jail along with the rest of his team because it was the 'easiest' option, the Guardian reported.

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Karin Whittington, from Sweden, said Channel Nine had the power to help her Australian husband Adam Whittington following a botched child recovery operation in Lebanon earlier this month

Father of the children, 32-year-old Ali Elamine, is still pressing charges against Whittington (left and right), who was allegedly in charge of the operation

'The deal they made was disgusting  they got everyone out and left Adam behind. They paid for him to be there; they were part of his operation,' she told the Guardian.

'It's easy to buy a story and then buy yourself out when there is trouble.'

Father of the children, 32-year-old Ali Elamine, is still pressing charges against Whittington, who was allegedly in charge of the operation, as well as Craig Michael and two Lebanese people involved.

She claims the television station struck a financial deal with Mr Elamine 'behind Adam's back' to have the private charges dropped against the 60 Minutes team - reporter Tara Brown, producer Stephen Rice, cameraman Ben Williamson, sound recordist David Ballment.

32-year-old Ali Elamine with five-year-old Lahela (right) and three-year-old Noah (left)

Brown and 60 Minutes producer Stephen Rice arrive at Sydney International Airport on Thursday night

'I am angry with Channel Nine, I have every right to feel that way. To save their reputation just a little bit, now would be a good time to reach out a hand to Adam, to admit they made a mistake and to correct that mistake.'

Mrs Whittington told the Guardian it hurt to see the Australian television crew, who she claims was planning the operation for months, holding their family members without consequence while she was left to contemplate her husband's fate.

'How can they say they are not responsible for anything? It's not like they jumped the gun and said: 'Let's go to Lebanon tomorrow, there's a good story'. Everyone knows they were planning the operation, and that they paid for it.'

Mrs Whittington told the Guardian it hurt to see the Australian television crew, who she claims was planning the operation for months, holding their family members without consequence while she was left to contemplate her husband's fate

Ms Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew returned to Australia on Thursday night without her children  five-year-old Lahela and three-year-old Noah  after spending two weeks in a Beirut prison.

Presenter Michael Usher on Sunday night admitted the team had made mistakes and confirmed an internal investigation is underway.

'There's one thing we want to state very clearly from the outset: we made mistakes,' Usher said.

He said the 'mistakes and failures' had been 'the subject of a lot of soul searching here at Channel Nine'.

Usher said the chain of events were 'complex and distressing' which had gone 'badly wrong'.

A review commissioned by the network began on Friday and will investigate the editorial approval and actions of the crew involved in the story.

60 Minutes presenter Michael Usher admitted the Nine Network crew had made 'mistakes and failures' which saw their team, including Tara Brown as well as Ms Faulkner, imprisoned for two weeks (Usher and Brown pictured)

A teary-eyed Brown said she did not believe it would get so bad when they originally faced questioning

'Over the past two weeks we've been limited in what we could say,' Usher said. 'In the next few weeks we'll share in detail what we know about this whole sad scenario and our role in it.'

The 60 Minutes presenter said there was 'relief' when their team was returned to their families, who landed with Ms Faulkner.

A teary-eyed Brown said she did not believe it would get so bad when they originally faced questioning.

She remembered thinking: 'We are here just to do a story on a very, very desperate mother.

'We're journalists, they'll understand that. They'll see reason, you know?

'I just thought reason would prevail. And it didn't.'

Brown told Usher it had gone 'terribly', but said Ms Faulkner 'knows in her heart she's tried everything to get them [the children] back'.

'In her opinion, she had no choice but to do this.'

Usher said the mother is 'probably in a worse situation' now than she was prior to the botched abduction.

Ms Faulkner is reunited with her partner Brendan Pierce (left) and mother, brother and baby to Mr Pierce (right)

'I'm so amazed at how she's held up and how strong she's been because ultimately she's lost everything, you know? She's lost her babies,' Brown said.

Ms Faulkner told 60 Minutes she felt 'numb' following the 'surreal' incident.

She was reunited with her baby, her mother, her partner Brendan Pierce, and brother Simon.

'I'm really proud of you, you're so brave,' Ms Faulkner's mother told her.

'I had to try,' Ms Faulkner responded.

Her ex-husband agreed to drop the abduction charges if she relinquished custodial rights to their children.

A Lebanese policeman prevents Brown from looking towards journalists while escorting her form a Lebanese courthouse to Baabda Prison for women in Lebanon on April 18

The moment Brown and Ms Faulkner were freed from prison after two weeks behind bars

Ms Faulkner was released on bail on Wednesday along with Ms Brown and her crew.

They could still face further charges though they have returned to Australia.

The children will now live in Lebanon with their father, but Mr Elamine insisted that Ms Faulkner would be able to visit.

She shared an ice-cream with Lahela and Noah before leaving the country.

Mr Elamine said 'the visit was good' and that all 'enjoyed it'.

The charges against the Child Abduction Recovery International team members have not been dropped.

32-year-old Ali Elamine with five-year-old Lahela (right) and three-year-old Noah (left)

Ms Faulkner with their two children in happier times. The Brisbane mother returned to Australia without the children after her botched attempted at getting them back

Sally Faulkner (pictured) was released on bail after relinquishing custodial rights to the children

60 Minutes producer Stephen Rice is reunited with family on Thursday night after landing back in Sydney

60 Minutes cameraman Ben Williamson is reunited with family on Thursday night after spending two weeks in a Lebanese prison cell
A synagogue in Marseille is to be converted into a mosque, reflecting demographic shifts in the southern French city.

A Muslim cultural association, Al Badr, is to purchase the Or Thora synagogue, which is used less and less by the Jewish community, the city's top Jewish leader Zvi Ammar said.

'For the past 20 years or so we have seen the shift of the Jewish community to other neighbourhoods,' Ammar said, adding that he viewed the sale 'positively'.

'We all have the same God, the main thing is for this to proceed in harmony,' he said.

Faith swap: The Or Thora synagogue (pictured) in Marseille is to be converted into a mosque due to 'a shift of the Jewish community' to other neighbourhoods in the city

The site near the city's main rail station was built as Jews flocked to Marseille from Algeria after the north African country gained independence from France in 1962 following an eight-year war.

Al Badr currently runs a mosque nearby that is too small for its congregation.

But Ammar said Marseille's Jewish community is thriving, with the number of synagogues nearly doubling to 58 from 32 over the last three decades.

The city's 70,000 Jews make up one of France's  and Europe's  largest Jewish communities.

Marseille's population of nearly two million also counts around 220,000 Muslims, of whom 70,000 are practising.

A Muslim cultural association, Al Badr, is to purchase the Or Thora synagogue, which is used less and less by the Jewish community, the city's top Jewish leader Zvi Ammar said

Marseille's Muslims are still awaiting the construction of a Grand Mosque, but the project promised by the city's mayor in 2001 is mired in financial woes as well as legal challenges by the far-right National Front.

At an estimated cost of some 23million ($26m), the mosque would be France's largest if the project is finally achieved.

Earlier this week, the mayor of Nice, just along the French Riviera from Marseille, secured a green light to sue the French state in a bid to block the opening of a Saudi-funded mosque in the city.
Britain's borders were left dangerously exposed after systems in place to detect dangerous terrorists and criminals coming into the UK went down while the nation was on 'severe' terror alert.

The eBorders system went down twice in 48 hours in June - as thousands of people travelled through British airports - just months after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.

Britain was on a 'severe' alert at the time, which means an attack is 'highly likely', and the problem was considered so serious that Home Secretary Theresa May was called in the middle of the night.

Britain's borders were left dangerously exposed after systems that detect dangerous terrorists and criminals on their way to Britain went down while the nation was on a 'severe' terror alert. File image

Yet the thousands of people going through airports and train stations in one of the busiest months of the year were kept in the dark about the failure, revealed by The Telegraph.

Usually hundreds of names are 'flagged' by the system, but on the Sunday in June it went down, only one person produced an alert, leading to concerns some may have slipped under the radar.

The IBM Semaphore system, which went down due to a fault with British Airways software, was fixed overnight but stopped working again the next day.

The Home Office says that passengers will all have been checked by a separate system - passport control - although that alone was deemed inadequate in a report following the 9/11 attacks.

Theresa May, Home Secretary, was alerted in the middle of the night but thousands of people going through airports were kept in the dark

The eBorders system was introduced under Labour to add an extra layer of security in the wake of the New York tragedy, although it is supposed to have been replaced five years ago.

TheHome Office also says that further checks are done on the Schengen Information System, which gives European enforcement agencies up to date alerts on terrorists and wanted criminals.

The difference between passport control and the eBorders system, is that Sephamore checks the names of potential flyers before they get to the airport, rather than when they are already there.

It could help prevent attacks such as the airport bomb in Belgium in March, in which ISIS militants detonated the explosives in a public area, meaning their passports were not even checked.

Sephamore uses databases from various international government agencies to detect suspect passengers and alerts border agencies.

It also passes the the information to the National Border Targeting Centre, which will make a decision on whether to stop them entering the country.

Theresa May was contacted shortly before midnight when the fault emerged. She was due in Luxembourg the next day to discuss counter-terror with other EU leaders.

It had gone down after 7pm that day, and was fixed during the night, but it broke again at around 7.35pm the following day.

The Home Office has refused to answer if the system has gone down since, reports The Telegraph.

Thousands of people going through airports and train stations and airports in one of the busiest months of the year were kept in the dark about the failure. File image

The news comes as Theresa May is considering extra security at airports following the explosion in Brussels which killed 14 people.

She is considering moving security checks to outside airports so that terrorists would not have the chance to detonate explosives in populated areas inside without gong through passports control.

Although the system looks unlikely, as the Home Secretary told MPs that the new system would just create unmonitored crowds in a different place, and people would be just as vulnerable outside.

Extra measures in Britain would also not address the problems caused by transit into the country from other nations with lesser security systems.
But now they may face perjury charges, with allegations referred to DPP

Also formally ruled they did not abandon Gammy in Thailand

The parents of baby Gammy could face a maximum 14 years in jail after a court found they lied under oath about the genetic make-up of the boy with Down Syndrome and his sister.

Perjury allegations were referred to the Western Australian Director of Public Prosecutions on Thursday after the family court awarded David and Wendy Farnell custody of Pipah.

In his judgment earlier this month, Chief Justice Stephen Thackray said the Farnells had lied about the identity of the egg donor for the twins.

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David and Wendy Farnell (pictured) could face perjury charges after lying about the genetic make-up of the children

The couple had claimed David was the sperm donor and Wendy the egg donor in an affidavit. But an anonymous person was the egg donor

In a sworn affidavit, the couple had claimed David was the sperm donor and Wendy the egg donor, and that the embryos had been created in Perth and sent to Thailand.

But the egg donor was a third party, the court heard.

Justice Thackray said: 'I note that the Farnells only told the truth about the identity of the egg donor after the story broke in the media.'

They had even lied to their families about the identity of the egg donor, thinking it was in Pipah's best interests, he said.

He said there was 'no excuse' for the lie, but added he was concerned about the criminal proceedings would have on Pipah given the 'stress, expense and public humiliation' for her carers.

In handing David Farnell (pictured) and wife Wendy custody, Justice Thackray ruled they did not abandon the baby boy

The Farnells were at the centre of controversy last year after baby Gammy's mother accused them of abandoning the boy in Thailand while taking his healthy sister home.

It also emerged Mr Farnell is a convicted child sex offender.

Handing down the decision a fortnight ago, Justice Thackray formally ruled the Farnells had not abandoned Gammy and did not try to access his trust fund.

A spokeswoman for Attorney-General Michael Miskin confirmed perjury allegations had been referred to the DPP.
On Wednesday they were led from

One of four men accused of conspiring over the murder of Sydney police accountant Curtis Cheng has raised his index finger in court, in a gesture similar to a salute used by Islamic State militants.

Talal Alameddine, 23, Mustafa Dirani, 22, Milad Atai, 20, and Raban Alou, 18, were already in custody over other alleged offences when charged on Wednesday with doing an act in preparation of a terrorist act.

Appearing via videolink, Atai, who is also accused of helping 15-year-old gunman Farhad Jabar's sister travel to Syria in the day before the killing, lifted a finger as his matter came to a close in Goulburn Local Court on Thursday.

On Wednesday the four men were transferred from Goulburn Supermax, when Atai stuck his tongue out and smiled for the camera.

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Milad Atai is pictured sticking his tongue out as he is transferred from Goulburn Supermax to be charged over the murder of Curtis Cheng

Dressed in orange jumpsuits, the men, who face life in jail, were led by guards as they were transferred from Goulburn Supermax prison on Wednesday

On Wednesday the four men were transferred from Goulburn Supermax prison in orange jumpsuites

NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Catherine Burn said all four men were facing the serious charge of conspiracy to prepare for and commit a terrorist act, which carries a sentence of life in prison

A similar gesture features in pictures of Islamic State militants, including some holding severed heads.

In court documents, police allege Atai has been a member of Islamic State and provided resources to the organisation.

He and the other men are accused of acting in concert with Jabar before the October shooting of Mr Cheng outside police headquarters in Parramatta.

Schoolboy Farhad Jabar, 15, shot Mr Cheng in the back of the head outside the police station in October 2 last year before he was gunned down by a guard.

Police say they may have come together on the day of or before the attack, which led to Jabar being killed in an exchange of gunfire with police.

Alou is accused of directing a terrorist organisation and allegedly gave the murder weapon - a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson - to the teen.

Milad Atai has performed an Islamic State style salute while appearing in Goulburn Local Court via videolink

Schoolboy Farhad Jabar, 15, shot Mr Cheng (pictured left with his family) in the back of the head outside the police station in October 2 last year before he was gunned down by a guard

Alameddine and Dirani were also involved in supplying the pistol, police allege.

Atai had not been charged with offences relating to Mr Cheng before Wednesday, while the other three have been in custody on a string of charges relating to the father-of-two's death.

The trio had been slated to stand trial mid this year but prosecutors previously asked to have the date vacated, saying they required more time to work on the complex case.

Around 2000 intercepts, including many in foreign languages, need to be transcribed before trial, a court has previously heard.

All the men, except for Alameddine, appeared via videolink but spoke only to answer administrative questions asked by registrar Bernadette Hilton.

Alameddine was the only one to have a representative in court.

Mr Cheng was murdered in a terror attack outside Parramatta Police station on October 2, 2015

The men's charges include membership of a terrorist organisation and supporting a terror organisation

Gunman Farhad Jabar, 15, was fatally shot at the scene outside Parramatta Police station after killing Mr Cheng

The men did not apply for bail and had their matters adjourned to Central Local Court in June.

NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Catherine Burn said all four men accused of plotting the attack are facing the serious charge of conspiracy to prepare for and commit a terrorist act.

Alou, 18, from Guildford, stands accused of directing the terrorist organisation - and of supplying the pistol used to kill Mr Cheng.

The three other men are charged with being members of that terrorist organisation.

Following the announcement, Mr Cheng's son Alpha told 9 News he was relieved.

'It's good to see the legal system addressing that. But it's heartbreakung to hear and to be continuously reminded that hate and intolerance has led to dad's death.'

Police allege 20-year-old Milad Atai (pictured) - also from Guildford - helped Jabar's sister travel to Syria the day before the Parramatta attack

Mr Cheng's children and wife are pictured here at his funeral last year
It's important for a film to have a theme, an underlying idea or message that works within a film. This is what the story is actually about, not what the characters are going through or doing on screen, that's just plot that should work in service to the story. That said, the theme should be the subtext, only in rare cases should it ever be explicitly stated. Some filmmakers can subtly state what their film is actually about, while others insist on hitting the audience over the head with the material. Director Mike Hodges' 1987 film is essentially about a murderer with a crisis of faith. The material is already pretty thick, but some heavy-handed visuals and genre conventions bog down what could have been a taught yet dramatic thriller.

Martin Fallon (Mickey Rourke) was a man with a cause, his heart was with the IRA and he was willing to do anything and everything for a free Ireland - even kill. When a bomb he helped build and plant on a rural road detonates too early and blows up a bus full of school kids, Martin loses his path. When the military starts hunting him and his partner Docherty (Liam Neeson), Martin flees to London so he can book passage to America and put the war behind him. There's just one problem, the English customs officials now know the name Martin Fallon, they know he's wanted for a horrible crime. That means Martin needs forged documents to get out of the country which puts him in the crosshairs of the slimy crime boss Jack Meehan (Alan Bates).

Meehan doesn't want money for these documents, he has plenty of that, what he wants in exchange is a service. He wants Martin to do what he does best and kill a man. Martin reluctantly agrees, telling himself and his soul it'll be the last one. When Martin kills the man kneeling beside a gravestone, Father Michael De Costa (Bob Hoskins) witnesses the crime and see's Martin's face clear as day - but Martin can't execute this man. Meehan expects all loose ends to be taken care of, but Martin doesn't want to fire a single bullet. Instead, he visits the priest during confession forcing Father De Costa's holy vows run into conflict with the needs of the police. Now that Martin has taken this route, Father De Costa makes it his mission in life to save Martin's soul and show him that if he really turns to God, God is capable of forgiving even the worst of crimes.

I usually enjoy films that deal with some sort of duality with human nature. I like films with morally gray characters who are relatable in some way. 'A Prayer for the Dying' finds its strength in these areas with the interplay between Fallon and Father De Costa. Mickey Rourke's Martin Fallon is a killer, a beast but he is also an artist of sorts. A tender soul corrupted during a dangerous time. By contrast, we have Bob Hoskins Father De Costa who was a former British SAS commando, a killer in his own way who got so fed up with death that he turned to God to save his soul. It's on this level that the film works best. Their interplay is some solid dramatic material full of subtext and themes and ideas that aren't overtly stated but simmer just below the surface to keep your attention focused on the two great actors.

Where 'A Prayer for the Dying' starts to run aground is with the B and C side stories. Story B we have a British Gangster in the form of Alan Bates' Jack Meehan. Meehan is a man who has had a stranglehold on the community for decades and the cops want to nail him and this murder committed by Martin and Father De Costa is the key. This element should have worked, but it is unfortunately undercooked. We're supposed to fear Meehan because his "legit" business is a crematorium which actually provides them a convenient means to dispose of bodies, but we never really feel them as a threat or with enough menace to sense that either Martin or Father De Costa's lives are actually in danger. Had it been one of the real life Kray twins, for example, Martin or De Costa would have been dead or physically threatened long before the second act was over. Bates certainly looks and sounds threatening, but the character's bite doesn't quite measure up to the bark.

Story C is an odd one that could have been cut entirely and the movie wouldn't even have noticed it. This revolves around Liam Neeson's Docherty searching for Martin throughout London. Because Martin fled without giving any word to the IRA commanders, Docherty has been charged with finding his friend and bringing him in for debriefing. If Martin doesn't come in willingly, Docherty has orders to kill his best friend on the spot. On top of that there is a D story where a second assassin has been assigned to do the job should Docherty fail. It's just too much story that distracts from everything else. If we're supposed to fear the fate of Marin in the hands of either the police or Jack Meehan, all of this extra IRA baggage just slows the film down and thins out the proceedings. Things get so thin that once the film crescendos, it falls back on typical 80s action movie tropes to move things forward with enough heavy-handed religious iconography that the subtext hits the audience over the head with a sledge hammer.

This isn't to say that 'A Prayer for the Dying' is a bad movie, it does have several very strong points, it's just that when you take into account all of the baggage holding it back, it could have been better. The film spends just too much time keeping Mickey Rourke and Bob Hoskins apart and then throws in a love plot involving Hoskins' blind sister Anna played by Sammi Davis and Martin for extra depth - as if to say this blind woman is the only one who can truly "see" him for who he is. It's a lot of parts that don't always work together. The end result is a film that is well meaning, and well acted, but very clunky.

The Blu-ray: Vital Disc Stats

'A Prayer for the Dying' is brought to Blu-ray thanks to Twilight Time and is limited to a release run of 3000 units. Pressed onto a Region Free BD50 disc, the disc opens directly to the film's static image main menu featuring traditional navigation options. The disc is housed in a standard clear Blu-ray case and comes with a booklet containing stills from the film with an essay by Julie Kirgo.
Incredible footage shows US fighter jets soaring majestically over the Welsh valleys as their pilots train with the RAF on anti-terror exercises.

The F-22 Raptors are seen zooming around the Mach Loop, a set of picturesque Valleys in Wales used by the RAF for low level training exercises.

Aircrew from the USAF 95th Fighter Squadron set off from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk before putting on the display as they begin a short tactical training secondment in Britain.

Majestic: An F-22 Raptor fighter jet flown by pilots from the USAF soars over the Mach Loop in the Wales

The F-22 is a single-seat stealth aircraft renowned for its superior air-combat capabilities and during the clip viewers are allowed a brief insight into its agility and grace.

The Mach Loop is a vital training ground for the RAF as it allows aircrews to practice the art of low flying, a tactic helping pilots to avoid enemy detection during a combat situation.

Low flying takes place at 250ft and can only be carried out at certain parts of the country, away from built-up populated areas to ensure the safety of the public.

US Colonel David Eaglin, vice commander of the 48th Fighter Wing at RAF Lakenheath, told the Eastern Daily Press that having US pilots train alongside their RAF counterparts was crucial to winning the war on terror.

He said: 'We are grateful that the UK allow us the opportunity to train here and from a US perspective it's a chance to get combat ready while showing a commitment to the defence of our nations.'

Pilots from the 95th, affectionately nicknamed 'the Boneheads', were brought to Britain to train against and alongside different pilots and aircraft - rather than their usual US colleagues.

Exercise: The airmen from the USAF 95th Squadron are in Britain on an anti-terror training secondment

Tactical: The RAF use the Mach Loop as it offers the ideal setting to practice the art of low level flying

In particular they will face RAF pilots flying Typhoon jets, a multi-role combat aircraft.

Air Commodore Ian Duguid, commander of the RAF's Typhoon Force, said: 'We have a very close relationship with the US Air Force here in the UK, and particularly at RAF Marham.

'This visit will help that as we train with them.'

Defence: F-22's are stealth aircraft and have been deployed in combat sorties against ISIS in the Middle East

The USAF pilots flew to Britain from an airbase in Florida and pictured, crews land at an airfield in Lithuania

Pilot Captain Andrew van Timmeren added that flying the F-22's had been both enjoyable and challenging for the British pilots.
The woman whose naked body was found floating face down inside a blowhole may have been planning to go on a date with someone she met on social media, according to reports.

Police are investigating several tip-offs that the Asian woman discovered at Snapper Point in the NSW Central Coast on Sunday with multiple stab wounds may have been an overseas student.

The Sydney-based student was thought to have been planning to meet up with someone she met online, according to social media chatter within the Chinese community seen by news.com.au.

On Wednesday, police released an image of the woman found in the Munmorah State Conservation Area who they said suffered a 'violent assault' before her death.

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Police have released an image of a woman whose naked body was found floating in a blowhole on the NSW Central Coast at the weekend in the hopes of identifying her

Police are investigating several tip-offs that the Asian woman discovered at Snapper Point in the NSW Central Coast on Sunday with multiple stab wounds may have been an overseas student

Since then, at least one user on the social media message app WeChat claimed a couple who believed the woman may be their daughter had contacted police.

The student was reported missing over the weekend and she is understood to have last been seen at a Myer department store on Friday.

A spokesman for NSW Police told Daily Mail Australia that they are 'aware' of the chatter and officers have been following up on numerous reports to Crimestoppers.

'Police are not in a position to comment until the woman is identified'.

Police are awaiting the results of DNA tests on the woman's body.

Detective Chief Inspector Gary Jubelin said her body was found in an area frequented by tourists and rock fisherman, but said it was somewhat isolated.

The victim is described as Asian, aged between 20 and 35, and about 170cm tall. Above are homicide detectives at the scene

'It is a very beautiful location but for a crime and someone to be disposed of in that manner in the location its a very lonely and isolated area.

'The post-mortem revealed the woman had suffered a number of wounds, significantly some stab wounds,' he said.

'Our interpretation of the situation is that she suffered a violent assault prior to her death.'

The woman was discovered face down on Sunday morning and authorities believe she could not have been there for any longer than 48 hours, and it was likely much less than that.

'She was found at 10.30am so this is suggestive of the fact that perhaps her body hadn't been there very long in the water,' Mr Jubelin said.

He said although the blow hole was about five kilometres from the entrance to the national park, there was a carpark right near the tourist attraction and so it is possible she was transported there by a vehicle.

Police are still waiting for the autopsy to be completed to determine the cause of death

The woman's body was seen floating face down at Snapper Point (pictured) in the Lake Munmorah State Conservation Area on Sunday about 10.30am

Homicide detectives are also exploring the possibility the person who dumped the woman's body could have slept overnight inside the gates of the park

However the gates to the national park are only open between 5.30am and 6pm so investigators are exploring the possibility that the person who dumped the body could have stayed there overnight.

A crew member of the Westpac Rescue Helicopter had to be winched down to the blowhole to help officers with the removal of her body.

The woman has been described as Asian and aged between 20 and 35.

This is not the first death at the notorious fishing spot.
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President Vladimir Putin watched as Russia's first rocket from a new cosmodrome finally took off on Thursday, a day after a technical glitch thwarted the much-publicised launch.

But there was no trace of a smile on Putin's face and he appeared to be still seething after travelling thousands of miles to the Amur region in Russia's Far East earlier in the week only for the launch to be called off.

The rocket, carrying three satellites, finally roared off into a clear blue sky from the launch pad at Vostochny cosmodrome at 5am local time (2am GMT).

The Soyuz rocket finally takes off from the launch pad at Vostochny cosmodrome. It was carrying three satellites. Vostochny is about 100 miles from the Chinese border in Russia's Far East

The satellites successfully separated from the rocket's third stage about nine minutes into the flight, heading to their designated orbits, according to the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

Putin had warned workers they would be jailed if it was found that crimes had been committed in the building of the spaceport.

But after the successful launch he said: 'I want to congratulate you. There is something to be proud of.'

President Putin is pictured gazing up at the Soyuz rocket as it climbs into the clear blue sky. He said it was a 'very serious step forward in the development of Russia's space exploration'

He added: 'The equipment overreached itself a little bit yesterday.

'In principle, we could have held the launch yesterday, but the equipment overdid its job and stopped the launch. This is a normal thing.'

It came after Putin travelled to the spaceport for the first ever launch from the new site, which has been beset by problems.

A prestige project for the Russian leader, Vostochny is intended to phase out Russia's reliance on the Baikonur cosmodrome, which was built during the time of the Soviet Union but is now in a foreign country, Kazakhstan.

Several people involved in building the spaceport are under criminal investigation for embezzlement, workers went on strike over pay arrears, there were cost overruns, and the project missed its scheduled completion date last year.

The Soviet Union pioneered manned space flight when it fired Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961.

But, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's space programme has had to retrench for a lack of cash.

This dramatic picture shows the moment the Soyuz rocket lifts off from the launchpad. The Soyuz name - which means Union in English - was first coined in 1966 and Russia has continued to use it for their rockets since the fall of the Soviet Union

It filled gaps in its budget for years by taking paying 'space tourists' as guests.

Putin has warned those responsible for committing crimes during the construction of the cosmodrome they will not escape justice and will be jailed.

He was cited by the Interfax agency on Wednesday as saying: 'Six criminal cases had to be launched, in which four people weere arrested. Two of them, however, are under house arrest, while the other two are in pre-trial detention.

'But if their guilt of the suspected crimes is proven, they'll have to swap their warm beds at home for prison bunks.

The Soyuz rocket disappears from view after launching just after dawn on Thursday. It was carrying three satellites - Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218. Lomonosov will carry out space research formulated by students in South Korea, Canada, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States

But on Thursday he was more upbeat.

He told spaceport workers: 'The main thing is that this launch pad is now working, it has been prepared well by you and it is functioning.

'We are now facing a second stage here, to accommodate a heavy rocket.

'We have a lot of work in front of us, and it's daunting. But, beyond all doubt, this is ... a very serious step forward in the development of Russia's space exploration.'

The Russian leader was left humiliated on Wednesday (left) when the inaugural launch from the spaceport was postponed on Wednesday. But 24 hours later the rocket did finally lift off (right)

The Soyuz rocket heads skywards from the cosmodrome, which is barely 100 miles from the Chinese border. Vostochny is replacing Baikonur cosmodrome, which was built in the 1950s and is nowadays on the territory of a foreign country, the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan

The rocket heads for the border between sky and space (pictured). Nine minutes after take off the three satellites successfully separated from the rocket and went into their respective orbits. One of the satellites, Aist-2D, will test advanced solar cells made out of gallium arsenide

The rocket disappears from view, leaving only a trail of smoke (pictured). Two of the satellites are the work of Samsara State University

A stern-looking Vladimir Putin has warned he will jail any workers on the Vostochny Cosmodrome project who engaged in any illegal activity

The new spaceport has been hailed by Putin as the country's biggest current building project with a budget estimated at between 300 billion and 400 billion rubles ($4.5 billion and $6 billion)

A prestige project for the Russian leader, the facility is intended to phase out Russia's reliance on the Baikonur cosmodrome, in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan, for launching its rockets into space

Several people involved in building the spaceport are under criminal investigation for embezzlement
This is the terrifying moment a plane flying in to land at London's Heathrow airport was struck by a bolt of lightning during a thunderstorm last night.

The Icelandair flight from Reykjavik to London was approaching Heathrow airport last night at around 8.30pm when it was hit by the lightning but it somehow managed to escape unscathed.

At least two other flights, a plane flying to City Airport from Edinburgh and a flight from Prague into Heathrow, are also believed to have been hit by lightning.

The Icelandair flight from Reykjavik to London was approaching Heathrow airport last night at around 8.30pm when it was hit by the lightning (pictured) but it somehow managed to escape unscathed

Catherine Mayer, who was on board the plane from Iceland, told the London Evening Standard: 'It was very obvious we were flying into a storm which is why I was able to take a photograph of the moment we entered the storm.

'But I didn't catch the moment of the lightning strike which was sudden and loud and very bright and unmistakeable for what it was.

'I think all the passengers were too shocked to react but when we landed everybody was talking about it.'

She said shortly after the strike the captain addressed the passengers and made a lighthearted joke about them noticing the lightning.

The plane, the light coloured speck in the centre of this picture, was approaching Heathrow when it was struck

This picture shows the moment of impact as the lightning hit the passenger plane flying over London

On Twitter passengers who had been on board the planes which were hit spoke about their experiences.

Alexander wrote: 'Hello London! Welcomed back by a lightning strike to the plane just as we were coming into land at Heathrow. #NoFear'

Alaxen said: 'Plane got struck by lightning on the way into Heathrow. Good to be back in London.'

Liz Dobson wrote: 'Plane just got hit by lightning on the descent into Heathrow. Didn't die #winning.'

Chris Jones, who saw the drama unfold, added: 'Just witnessed lightning strike a plane over #Putney. Would not want to be flying into Heathrow right now.'

At least two other flights, a plane flying to City Airport from Edinburgh and a flight from Prague into Heathrow are also believed to have been hit by lightning last night during a thunderstorm

Lightning strikes a plane coming into land at Heathrow over Stamford Bridge during Youth Cup Final

The moment a bolt of lightning strikes a commercial aircraft as it comes in to land at London's Heathrow

At least three flights are believed to have been hit by lightning during the electric storm last night

Lightening also hit the Shard, London's tallest building, during the fierce storm last night

A spokesman for British Airways said of the Prague flight: 'Flight BA857 landed safely, and will undergo inspection before it returns to service. The safety of our customers and crew is always our top priority.

'Lightning strikes are fairly common, and aircraft are designed to cope with them.'

A Civil Aviation Authority spokesman said: 'Airliners are designed to withstand the effects of a lightning strike, and so significant physical damage to the airframe is very rare.

'The safety of the aircraft in flight is not usually affected.

'Any aircraft that is believed to have been struck by lightning will nevertheless be inspected by engineers once on the ground and before being released back into service.

'Where possible flight crews will use on board weather radar to monitor and avoid areas where lightning activity is likely.'

On Twitter passengers who had been on board the planes which were hit spoke about their experiences
Advertising vacuum cleaners in a Mother's Day sale is 'wrong' and sexist, a woman has said of department store BIG W.

Lyndsey Regan-Evans had seen shelves full of Dyson vacuum cleaners under a 'Happy Mother's Day' sign in one of the Australian stores, and posted it to their Facebook page with her critique.

She said she 'loved' her own Dyson, but didn't want a 'b****y cleaning appliance for Mother's Day'.

Lyndsey Regan-Evans posted this image of vacuum cleaners underneath Mother's Day branding at a BIG W to the department store's Facebook page, telling them it was 'wrong'

Despite saying it was wrong, Ms Regan-Evans also said she didn't find it offensive and thought it was 'funny'

She said she 'loved' her own Dyson - but didn't want a cleaning appliance for Mother's Day

'I didn't find it offensive... I just thought it was funny.. Hey thanks for all your hard work as a mum here's a vacuum to clean up after me !!,' she added.

She told Daily Mail Australia she found it funny because it was sexist and BIG W was oblivious as to why.

'I'm sitting at home breast feeding after being up all night and here's an idea for my first Mother's Day - a bloody vacuum' Gee what a reward.'

She said the way to decide if it was sexist or not was to see if it had featured in BIG W's Father's Day display.

BIG W apologised for any offence caused and said the vacuums weren't intended to be 'purposely directed as gifts for Mother's Day'

BIG W responded saying the vacuums were 'not intended to be purposely directed as gifts for Mother's Day'.

It also said they were featured items on offer in its catalogue, and apologised for any offence caused.

It had passed the feedback on to its marketing team, the post said.

Other social media users echoed her sentiment that advertising the appliances for Mother's Day was wrong.

Although some weren't impressed, others liked the idea.

One woman wrote: 'I'd love a new Dyson, I don't find it offensive at all. Nothing better than new appliances in my opinion. Better than a robe and slippers. Even though it's the thought that counts.'

On the Big W website, a range of beauty items and appliances are advertised under the heading 'Mother's Day gift ideas'.

Daily Mail Australia has attempted to contact BIG W for comment, but reached the company outside of operating hours.

BIG W said it had passed the feedback on to its marketing team and apologised for any offence caused
The Department of Justice has coined a new term for convicted criminals and has started calling them 'justice-involved' individuals to improve their chances of finding work and a home.

The new term was first used by Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a statement released on how best to re-integrate prisoners back into society once they are released from jail.

In it, Lynch talks about how the department has launched the first-ever National Reentry Week to help offenders get jobs and gain a driving licence.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who has started referring to convicted criminals as 'justice-involved individuals'

But rather than refer to the ex-prisoners as convicted criminals, she used the newly coined term.

Lynch said: 'The Department of Justice - and the entire Obama administration - is committed to expanding opportunities for justice-involved individuals throughout the U.S.

'In order to highlight our ongoing efforts to improve federal re-entry outcomes and to raise awareness of the many issues facing re-entering citizens, the Justice Department designated the week of April 24-30 as the first-ever National Reentry Week.'

She also outlined how she believed 'justice-involved' youth were the future of the country and should be given a chance to turn their lives around.

Lynch added: 'The future of our nation depends upon the future of our young people  including young people who have become involved with our justice system.

'By helping justice-involved youth find decent jobs and stable housing after they return home, these critical grants provide a foundation for a fresh start and offer a path towards productivity and purpose.'

The Department of Justice have launched a new campaign to help re-integrate prisoners back into society when they are released from jail

National Re-entry Week is part of a wider plan by the Attorney General to urge the nation's governors to make it easier for convicted felons to obtain state-issued identification.

She is calling on governors to allow federal inmates who are returning to their communities to exchange their prisoner identification card for state-issued identification, or to simply accept their BOP card as an identity document.

Without identity documents, Americans leaving prison face challenges in getting jobs, housing or opening bank accounts, Lynch wrote in a sample letter to Alabama Governor Robert Bentley.

The topic of prisoner re-entry has attracted growing attention on the state and federal level.
Jeremy Corbyn was slammed for 'dithering' over anti-Semitism today after he took hours to accept he had to suspend an MP who shared anti-Semitic Facebook posts.

The Labour leader faced a growing backlash over his handling of the revelations about Naz Shah as a senior shadow minister warned the party had to 'do more'.

Comedian David Baddiel warned the left had a real problem with anti-Semitism and he condemned Corbyn-ally Ken Livingstone for playing down the row over Ms Shah.

Labour donor David Abrahams has warned Mr Corbyn must 'stop the rot' of anti-Semitism within Labour after the row reignited fears racism against Jews was taking hold in parts of the party.

Jeremy Corbyn today faced a backlash after his 'dithering' over whether to suspend Naz Shah, pictured campaigning last year, over her anti-Semitic posts

Mr Corbyn eventually agreed to suspend Ms Shah and withdraw the whip in Parliament yesterday after he was hammered by David Cameron at Prime Minister's Questions over his failure to act.

The scandal broke on Tuesday after the Guido Fawkes website revealed that in 2014, before she was an MP, Ms Shah shared a graphic on Facebook which was headlined 'Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict - Relocate Israel into United States' and she added: 'problem solved.'

In a series of apologies, Ms Shah has admitted the posts were not 'excusable' and vowed to help build relations between faith communities in penance for her statements.

Shadow education secretary Lucy Powell revealed the anger at the heart of Mr Corbyn's team today.

She told the Today programme the posts had been 'appalling and abhorrent' and admitted the party 'had to do more' to tackle anti-Semitism.

Ms Powell said: 'Sometimes I know people want us to act immediately but sometimes it does take some time to establish the facts.'

Asked if she would be happy to sit with Ms Shah if the whip was returned to her, Ms Powell said she did not want to 'predetermine the outcome' of the investigation into the MP.

Naz Shah issued her fourth apology for her Facebook posts in the House of Commons, pictured, after she was condemned by Prime Minister David Cameron

Ms Shah shared the graphic, pictured left, in August 2014 on Facebook. She added comments underneath, pictured right, suggesting she would lobby Barack Obama and David Cameron over the idea

Labour MP John Mann said Ms Shah should either be thrown out of Labour and forgotten or forced to learn about anti-Semitism.

He said: 'They are the two options  thats John McDonnells line on this, theyre the two options.

TIMELINE: HOW NAZ SHAH WAS SUSPENDED BY LABOUR TUESDAY APRIL 26 7:53am: The Guido Fawkes website publishes a story revealing that in August 2014, Naz Shah shared a graphic on Facebook which offered a 'solution for Israel-Palestine conflict' that would be 'relocate Israel into United States'. The website said Ms Shah confirmed she was responsible for the post. 11.00am: Ms Shah issues an apology via the website, in which she said 'This post from two years ago was made before I was an MP, does not reflect my views and I apologise for any offence it has caused'. 1.20pm: Ms Shah quits as PPS to shadow chancellor John McDonnell and apologises again, confessing she 'made these posts at the heigh of the Gaza conflict when emotions were running high' but admitting 'that is no excuse'. WEDNESDAY APRIL 27 11.35am: Shadow energy secretary Lisa Nandy said Ms Shah should be suspended and investigated in line with normal Labour Party rules on anti-Semitism allegations. 11.37am: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn makes his first intervention, describing the remarks as 'offensive and unacceptable' but accepting a 'fulsome apology'. 12.00pm: Ms Shah's third apology emerges on the Jewish News website, admitting the language used was 'wrong' and 'hurtful' and offering an 'unequivocal apology'. 12.27pm: David Cameron uses Prime Minister's Questions to slam Mr Corbyn for failing to suspend Ms Shah's Labour Party whip. 12.45pm: Labour spokesman says Mr Corbyn believes the remarks were themselves anti-Semitic but that Ms Shah is not anti-Semitic. 2.35pm: Ms Shah appears in the House of Commons to raise a point of order and make a fourth apology for her remarks. She tells MPs 'anti-Semitism is racism' and promises to help build relations between different faiths. 4.07pm: Labour release a statement claiming Mr Corbyn and Ms Shah have agreed 'mutually' the MP will be 'administratively suspended'.

'What Ive recommended, and I did so before she was suspended to Jeremy Corbyn and to her directly, personally, is that she should be educated in anti-Semitism in order that she be one of the people that fights it.

'That should include  and Ive asked Jeremy Corbyn to do this  that she should go to Israel, to the Holocaust centre at Yad Vashem and also to Sidrot where the missiles from Hamas hit families, to get a better understanding of Israel and why her remarks are so offensive.'

He added 'Prejudice comes from ignorance and the best counter to prejudice is education and thats what she seems willing and happy to engage, thats a good sign.'

Former London mayor Mr Livingstone provoked further outrage last night by insisting Ms Shah's posts were not anti-Semitic and adding she should not have been suspended.

Mr Baddiel said he receives 'much worse' anti-Semitic abuse on social media every day but criticised the Left for its failures in dealing with anti-Jewish rhetoric.

'The bigger issue here is the Left does have an issue with Jews,' he told the BBC.

'If Ken (Livingstone) hasn't heard anything anti-Semitic in 47 years he hasn't heard himself speak.'

Baddiel said the Left championed itself as the protector of the oppressed but had a hangover that Jews 'are rich and powerful and controlling'.

'This is about the Left and their image of Jews and there is no question, obviously, that the way that the Left talk about Israel is part of that issue,' he added.

Labour peer Lord Levy, a former fundraiser for the party under Tony Blair, told BBC's Newsnight: 'Unfortunately I have to say that I do think that it's a serious problem.

'The lack of sensitivity when an MP talks about transportation of the largest Jewish community in the world, I think it just shows such ignorance.

'The tweets and comments that she made on Hitler, I just begin to scratch my head in despair as to how people like this can enter our Parliament with such a lack of knowledge, such a lack of discretion and such a lack of sensitivity.'

He added that it had 'taken too long' for the leadership to act in Ms Shah's case and Mr Corbyn's team had 'dithered'.

He said 'every party needs to look very carefully in their cupboards as to what is going on on anti-Semitism at the moment'.

Labour MP Ian Austin, a former minister, said Labour was in a 'mess' and said he never thought the party would have ended up in such knots over anti-Semitism

Labour donor David Abrahams told Jewish News: 'I have been appalled by the growth of anti-Semitism in the party.

'This is a plague that has to be stamped out.

'Jews and others with values and principles need to work together within the movement to stop the rot.'

Rabbi Baroness Neuberger, a crossbench peer, told Newsnight: 'I think Labour does have a problem with anti-Semitism. That's not to say that other parties haven't got problems with anti-Semitism, or that it isn't elsewhere.

'But Labour has a very particular problem, and a particular problem at the moment.

'I think the Naz Shah case illustrates that, but more than anything else, Oxford University Labour Club.'

Labour MP Ian Austin, whose Czech Jewish father fled Nazi persecution, said: 'What a mess. Aged 16, I joined the Labour Party to fight racism. I would never have thought we'd have ended up here.'

Ms Shah's suspension was confirmed by Labour shortly after she apologised to MPs for her posts.

LABOUR LEADER FACES RISING DEMANDS TO ACT OVER ANTI-SEMITISM Jeremy Corbyn has faced rising demands to do more on anti-Semitism after Labour expelled and suspended a series of members over the issue. Labour peer Baroness Royall is already leading an inquiry after Oxford University Labour Club's co-chairman resigned, claiming a 'large proportion' of its members had 'some kind of problem with Jews'. It was reported today the group includes Mohammad Shabbir, a staff member of Ms Shah who repeatedly used the racial epithet 'zio' in social media posts about Israelis. Earlier this month, a Labour councillor in Luton Aysegul Gurbuz was suspended after she was alleged to have called Adolf Hitler the 'greatest man in history'. She said she hoped Iran would use a nuclear weapon to 'wipe Israel off the map'. In the past weeks, Labour has also twice suspended the deputy chairman of its Woking branch, Vicki Byrne, for posting anti-Semitic tweets. And the party suspended councillor Khadim Hussain, former Lord Mayor of Bradford, for sharing a Facebook post that said: 'Your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler.'

Labour MP Rupa Huq attempted to defend Ms Shah today, telling the BBC: 'I do think that this does demonstrate the perils of social media because as far as I understand this was before she was an MP, before she was a candidate even.

'She shared a post on Facebook, its easy to click those buttons like share and we have to be very, very careful what it is we are clicking on. All of us.

'It was at a time when she wasnt a public figure and its just really unfortunate it seems we are entering a phase where it is trial by Twitter.'

Confirming the Labour leader's U-turn, a spokesman said: 'Jeremy Corbyn and Naz Shah have mutually agreed that she is administratively suspended from the Labour Party by the general secretary.

'Pending investigation, she is unable to take part in any party activity and the whip is removed.'

In her apology to MPs, Ms Shah told the Commons: 'Anti-Semitism is racism, full stop.

'As an MP I will do everything in my power to build relations between Muslims, Jews and people of different faiths and none.'

Ms Shah wrote in Jewish News that she wished to make an 'unequivocal apology for statements and ideas that I have foolishly endorsed in the past'.

'The manner and tone of what I wrote in haste is not excusable.

'With the understanding of the issues I have now I would never have posted them.

'I have to own up to the fact that ignorance is not a defence.'

NAZ SHAH'S FOURTH APOLOGY OVER ANTI-SEMITISM ROW IN FULL In a point of order in the House of Commons, Naz Shah said: 'Mr Speaker, can I seek your advice on how I can express my deep sorrow for something the Prime Minister referred to earlier? 'As you know, if a Government minister makes a mistake, they can correct the record. I hope you will allow me to say I fully acknowledge that I have made mistakes and I wholeheartedly apologise to this House for the words I used before I became a member. 'I accept and understand the words I used caused upset and hurt to the Jewish community and I deeply regret that. 'Anti-Semitism is racism. Full stop. As an MP, I will do everything in my power to build relations between Muslims, Jews and people of different faiths and none. 'I am grateful and very thankful for the support and advice I have received from many Jewish friends and colleagues - advice I intend to act upon. 'I truly regret what I did and I sincerely hope this House will accept my profound apology.' Speaker John Bercow thanked Ms Shah for the apology and said it will have been 'noted' by the House.

Ken Livingstone claims Hitler 'supported Zionism' and backed moving the Jews to Israel before he 'went mad and ended up killing six million Jews'

Ken Livingstone today suggested Adolf Hitler was a 'zionist' who supported an Israeli state before he 'went mad and ended up killing six million Jews'.

Labour MPs immediately made calls to suspend the former London mayor from the party amid a growing anti-Semitism storm triggered by Facebook posts by Naz Shah, the MP for Bradford West.

Mr Livingstone, a close ally of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, repeated his claim to have 'never heard' anti-Semitism within the Labour Party - including Ms Shah's post which talked about 'relocating' Israel to the United States.

He said Mr Corbyn was being 'smeared' with claims of anti-Semitism.

Ken Livingstone, a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, today claimed Hitler supporting 'Zionism' before going 'mad' and killing six million Jews

Mr Livingstone told the BBC: 'It's completely over the top but it's not anti-Semitic.

'Let's remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism  this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

'The simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians.

'And there's one stark fact that virtually no one in the British media ever reports, in almost all these conflicts the death toll is usually between 60 and 100 Palestinians killed for every Israeli.

'Now, any other country doing that would be accused of war crimes but it's like we have a double standard about the policies of the Israeli government.'

Labour MP Jess Phillips led calls for Mr Livingstone to be suspended over his remarks.
Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane will have above average temperatures

Australia has experienced an unusual warm spell for the start of autumn and there are no signs of it letting up with balmy weather forecast across the country for the next three months.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, parts of mainland Australia are likely to welcome showers after parts of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania received some of the lowest rainfall on record for the start of 2016.

But, the rain front will not affect the unseasonably warm weather and nights are likely to be warmer than average across the whole country for the end of autumn and well into winter.

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The weather has been particularly warm in northern NSW and southeast Queensland. Pictured is Coolangatta

Beachgoers sunbathe at Coogee, Australia, this week as the bureau of meteorology forecast temperatures over 40 degrees for parts of Sydney

The rain front will not affect the unseasonably warm weather and nights are likely to be warmer than average across the whole country for the end of autumn and well into winter.

'We've got a rain band coming through ahead of a front but the front itself is not very strong so there won't be much of an air mass change,' Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Neale Fraser told The Daily Telegraph.

On Thursday, the Bureau released the forecast for the next three months and noted the average daytime temperature is expected to remain warmer than average for tropical north and parts of southern Australia.

Most areas across the country have been extremely dry and in some parts, rainfall between April 1 and April 26 has been at a record low.

According to Bureau of Meteorology Senior Climatologist Dr Andrew Watkins, the dry conditions were partly due to the lack of monsoon bursts for Australia's northern wet season.

'[There have been] just three in our region this season compared with the average of 11,' he said.

Most areas across the country have been extremely dry and in some parts, rainfall between April 1 and April 26 has been at a record low

Over the next three months, Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and all of Tasmania have an 80 per cent chance of exceeding their maximum forecast temperatures

FORECAST: WHAT THE WEATHER LOOKS LIKE AROUND AUSTRALIA SYDNEY Friday : Min 16, Max 26. Partly Cloudy Saturday : Min 18, Max 26. Rain at times Sunday : Min 19, Max 25. Shower or two BRISBANE: Friday : Min 19, Max 27. Possible shower Saturday : Min 19, Max 28. Possible shower Sunday : Min 19, Max 29. Possible shower ADELAIDE Friday : Min 16, Max 22. Morning shower Saturday : Min 12, Max 25. Sunny Sunday : Min 12, Max 20. Morning shower DARWIN Thursday: Min 25, Max 35. Mostly sunny Friday : Min 25, Max 35. Mostly sunny Saturday : Min 25, Max 25. Possible shower MELBOURNE Friday : Min 18, Max 21. Showers Saturday : Min 16, Max 25. Possible shower Sunday : Min 14, Max 19. Showers easing CANBERRA Friday : Min 9, Max 25. Late rain Saturday : Min 13, Max 23. Some rain Sunday : Min 13, Max 20. Rain clearing PERTH Friday : Min 13, Max 21. Shower or two Saturday : Min 13, Max 20. Possible shower Sunday : Min 9, Max 20. Cloudy HOBART Friday : Min 11, Max 22. Showers Saturday : Min 11, Max 23. Late shower Sunday : Min 12, Max 18. Showers

The warm weather has been due to El Nino bringing hot and dry conditions. Although El Nino is now weakening, there is only a 50 per cent chance its opposite La Nina will arrive.

'La Nina is often, but not always, associated with above-average winter-spring rainfall over northern, central and eastern Australia,' the Bureau of Meteorology said.

Sydney will see a shower or two over the coming weekend with tops of 26 and Melbourne will have easing rain and a maximum of 25.

Over the next three months, Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and all of Tasmania have an 80 per cent chance of exceeding their maximum forecast temperatures.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, parts of mainland Australia are likely to welcome showers in the coming months, but the temperature will be largely unaffected

Although El Nino is now weakening, there is only a 50 per cent chance its opposite La Nina will arrive

Sydney will see a shower or two over the coming weekend with tops of 26 and Melbourne will have easing rain and a maximum of 25
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A grieving Chinese mother has been reunited with her long-lost son 22 years after he was snatched by human traffickers.

Zou Qixiu, 50, admitted she thought she would never see her kidnapped son ever again, until one fateful day when she received a phone call that changed her life forever.

She had looked up and down the country for several years after her boy, Yuan Dan, was abducted in the winter of 1994 from a public square in their home town of Shaoyang in central China's Hunan province.

Zou Qixiu is finally reunited with her son Yuan Dan 22 years after he was kidnapped. The little four-year-old boy she knew is now a big grown man and himself a father

Mrs Qixiu, her sister and other relatives burst into tears as they see Yuan for the first time. They were reunited thanks to the Baobei Huijia (Baby Come Home) website, which helps to find missing people in China

Yuan was four years old at the time of his kidnapping, leaving Mrs Qixiu and her husband wondering whether they would ever see their firstborn again.

The couple, who were both illiterate, had two more daughters and a second son, and their search efforts were greatly hampered by the need to raise the family.

But that did not stop the dad scouring China in search of Yuan.

It was an emotional reunion as Mrs Qixiu was reunited with her firstborn child. He was also introduced to the brother and two sisters he never knew he had

His desperate attempts to find the boy cost the grieving family more than just time, as Yuan's father succumbed to liver cancer in 2001 which the family thought was a result of stress.

He died without ever having found out the truth about his son.

Mrs Qixiu said: 'My husband and I were not educated; we never went to school, so we could only go from street to street searching for our son.

At one point the emotion was too much for Mrs Qixiu, who collapsed and had to be comforted by relatives (pictured). Her husband died of cancer in 2001, unaware that his son was growing up hundreds of miles away

'But after my husband died, our family's pillar collapsed, and I was left to look after our three children.'

It was not until earlier this year that volunteers from a missing persons organisation, Baobei Huijia (Baby Come Home), called Mrs Qixiu and told her they may have found her son.

The organisation, which operates through a website, was contacted by Yuan himself, who finally mustered up the courage to face the reality of his past.

Mrs Qixiu still lives in the same house in Hunan province where she lived when Yuan was a little boy. Here she shows him the bedroom which had been his when he was a child

Yuan, now 26, had been sold to a couple in China's eastern coastal province of Fujian.

He said: 'I remember clearly the moment I was taken by kidnappers.

'I thought about looking for my birth parents in the past, but I never wanted to hurt the feelings of my foster parents.

'They treated me so well over the years.'

Yuan Dan (pictured, second from the right) with his younger sisters and younger brother. He grew up in Fujian province hundreds of miles from the rest of his family

But Yuan changed his mind in 2014 when he had his own son and realised the anguish his mother must have been going through since his disappearance.

He contacted Baobei Huijia volunteers through the website and provided DNA samples, which were later matched with missing person's reports filed by Mrs Qixiu.

The authorities conducted DNA tests to confirm the match, and the pair were reunited recently in Shaoyang, where dozens of relatives attended a tearful reunion.

Yuan Dan is pictured meeting his many relatives in his home town of Shaoyang. His family made sure that a huge feast of Chinese food was laid on in his honour

The successful reuniting of Yuan and his mother represents another success story for Baobei Huijia and China's increasing anti-human trafficking efforts, which have seen thousands of relatives find each other over the years.

It is not clear if the kidnappers have been identified or if the foster parents will face charges.

Mrs Qixiu shows her son Yuan (right) some of the clothes he had worn as a boy. He said he realised he had to find his real mother when he himself had a child

Traditional Chinese firecrackers were let off to welcome Yuan back home (pictured). He was abducted by kidnappers who sold him to a childless couple in Fujian province.

Mrs Qixiu is pictured holding hands with her son Yuan, who is now 26. She also learned that she had become a grandmother

Who's a big boy now? The joy is clear on Mrs Qixiu's face as she meets her son Yuan for the first time. He has made a life for himself in Fujian province, where he grew up with a mother and father he knew were not his biological parents

Zou Qixiu is pictured here in a state of excitement as she waits for her son to arrive. Human trafficking is a big problem in China and the country's one-child policy has been accused of encouraging kidnapping and child trafficking

Yuan Dan (pictured, centre) got a VIP welcome when he returned to Shaoyang in Hunan province for the first time in 22 years. His father had scoured the country in vain looking for him before he died
Former Chief of Defence Materiel Sir Bernard Gray

The former procurement chief at the Ministry of Defence has been recruited to carry out a 60,000 review of his own work.

Sir Bernard Gray left his 380,000 role as Chief of Defence Materiel at the end of last year, soon after being knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

He had been drafted in by David Cameron in 2011 to help tackle a multi-billion pound black hole in funding for equipment programmes.

But the department has confirmed that he will now be conducting a review of progress in reforming procurement processes, despite complaints that he is 'marking his own homework'.

Sir Bernard was credited with cutting cost overruns at the MoD, but his time was marred by a series of controversies about his salary and expenses as the government pushed through drastic austerity measures.

It was revealed in 2012 that he spent 23,000 on 106 overnight stays at hotels in London and Bristol during his first ten months even though his home was a 60-mile drive from his offices in Whitehall and the equipment arm of the MoD in Bristol.

He also had access to a taxpayer-funded official car and driver worth 49,000.

Sir Bernard's total pay was 380,000 in 2014-15, according to the MoD accounts.

That included his basic salary of 220,000-225,000, a bonus of 45,000-50,000, 23,000 in benefits in kind, and 83,000 in pension benefits.

MoD sources confirmed to MailOnline that it has awarded a 'non-competitive' 60,000 deal to Pole Star Strategy to review whether reforms had been effective. The review is expected to be completed within months.

Details on the Companies House website show that Sir Bernard founded the firm in December after leaving the department.

An MoD spokesman pointed out that Sir Bernard had carried out a similar review for the Labour government in 2009, and said he was 'well placed' to undertake the latest study.

'Sir Bernard Gray has been asked to undertake a technical review into the state of the procurement landscape,' the spokesman said.

'The review will look at the recommendations made in Sir Bernards 2009 Review of Defence Acquisition and Lord Levenes 2011 report on Defence Reform.

'The report will examine the degree and success of the implementation of the recommendations of these reports in order to inform future strategy and direction.

HOTEL BILLS AND CAR SPENDING THAT MARRED SIR BERNARD'S TENURE Sir Bernard Gray came under fire over his expenses Bernard Gray was appointed by David Cameron to help tackle the huge black hole in financing for the Ministry of Defence's equipment programme. But he was soon embroiled in controversy after it emerged he had charged the taxpayer 23,000 for luxury hotel stays in his first ten months in the job  at a time when his department faced huge budget cuts. The Chief of Defence Materiel made 106 overnight stays in London and Bristol even though his home was a 60-mile drive from his offices in Whitehall and the equipment arm of the MoD in Bristol. He also had access to a taxpayer-funded official car and driver worth 49,000. Sir Bernard then faced calls to resign after failing in his efforts to part-privatise the way the MoD buys defence equipment, costing taxpayers millions of pounds. The move fell through after all the bidders pulled out. But he was credited with reducing cost overruns at the MoD from 4billion to just 50million. Mr Gray, a former Labour adviser and businessman who had been appointed to help bring down the military budget, saw his total pay reach 380,000 in 2014-15. The figure  which included his total pay and perks  was up 30 per cent on the previous year.

'Sir Bernard is well placed to undertake this work having written the 2009 report assessing the problems that existed within Defence Acquisition, and, as the former CDM, he has considerable experience of leading efforts to reform DE&S and the challenges in doing so.'

But Labour MP and former defence minister Kevan Jones branded the situation 'completely wrong' and called for the Commons spending watchdog to investigate.

'This is completely wrong,' he told MailOnline. 'Someone who was not only highly paid when he worked for the MoD but controversial in his decisions being drafted back to mark his own homework.

'I think the Public Accounts Committee ought to urgently look at this.'

Successor at MoD who was handed an even bigger pay package

Tony Douglas took over from Sir Bernard at the MoD

Tony Douglas, who succeeded Sir Bernard in charge of the MoD's equipment programme, was handed a 285,000 salary and performance-related annual bonus of up to 250,000.

His basic salary  nearly double what the Prime Minister earns  is 25 per cent more than Sir Bernard was receiving.

It is nearly three times a brigadiers 104,000 salary and 15 times a regular soldiers pay.

The Ministry of Defence announced the appointment of Mr Douglas, previously chief executive of Abu Dhabi Airports, last March and he started in September.

He was the latest in a line of senior business figures lured into the public sector with the promise of private sector levels of pay.

In a statement released by the MoD at the time, Mr Douglas said he would provide utmost service quality and value to the taxpayer.




A British graphic designer beaten unconscious in a savage attack by vicious thugs in Thailand along with his elderly parents has vowed never to return to the country.

Lewis Owen, his businessman father, also called Lewis, and mother Rosemary, both 68, were beaten up during the attack by at least six people.

The family were on holiday on the beach resort of Hua Hin when they were attacked. Mr Owen, who lives in Singapore said neither he nor his elderly parents would go back.

Hopsitalised: Rose Owen and her businessman husband Lewis were were set upon after their son, also called Lewis, spilled one of the gang's drinks. This photo, released by the Thai tourist board, shows Mrs Owen in hospital following the April 13 assault

Holiday: The grandparents were on a month-long holiday in Thailand when their dream trip turned into a nightmare, after the couple were viciously attacked by a gang of drunken thugs

Injured: Mrs Owen - pictured on holiday in the country last year - is understood to still be recovering in hospital, having suffered head injuries. The couple have been visiting the country since the 80s

Horror: The early morning attack happened in the popular tourist resort of Hua Hin, where the family from Wales were celebrating Thai New Year. Pictured: Mr Lewis, who runs an engineering company in Cardiff

Mr Owen, 43, said: 'Im not going back to Thailand again. Mum and dad wont be either. Never, ever again.

'My mum and dad are on the mend so it is all okay. Dad had six stitches in his forehead and there is some heavy bruising and he had two black eyes. They were a bit worried about my mum but she is okay. The swelling was not going down on her brain but they have done some operations.

'Mum and dad have been going to Thailand for a long time. I dont get to see them very often, I see them at Christmas and at my dads birthday,' he told The Mirror.

Mr Owen and his parents were walking along the street when they were attacked. He said the CCTV footage of the assault was so violent that police would not let them look at it.

He said he suffered 16 stitches, but luckily all of the damage was above his hairline.

He said he believed the attacks were entirely random. Mrs Owen has since been released from hospital.

One of the men launched a flying punch at Mr Lewis when he brushed past him and seemed to spill his drink while he was involved in an altercation with another man.

His mother, who lives in a village near Cardiff, Wales, tries to reason with them, before slapping one man - seconds before her husband is punched by a man who runs up to him, seemingly in order to land a hit with the most force possible.

Mrs Owen then tries to escape the violence.

In the next moment, one of them walks up to her and punched her so hard in the face the grandmother is sent flying to the floor, knocked unconscious.

As she lies unmoving on the ground, her husband and son are subjected to a barrage of punches and kicks.

Mrs Owen then comes around and props herself up, at which point her callous assailant walks over and kicks her so hard in the face her head snaps back, out cold once more.

By the time the men had finished their vicious attack, which happened at around 2am on Wednesday in the popular tourist resort of Hua Hin, all three Owens were lying on the floor.

The crowd which had stood by and watched the brutal beatings only daring to step forward once they were sure the gang had left.

The couple's daughter Ceri was visibly upset at her home in Barry, three miles from her parents country cottage, just outside of Cardiff.

Mother-of-two Ceri visited her parent's bungalow briefly yesterday and is helping to arrange early flights to get them home.

She said: 'My mum and dad are in hospital abroad, I'm too upset to say anything.'

A picture showing Mrs Owen with members of the Thai tourist board while recovering has been released to the local media, showing her badly damaged face.

It is believed Mrs Owen is still in hospital, recovering from the savage assault which left her with serious eye and head injuries, according to the police.

Beaten: The couple and their son Lewis, 43, were left knocked out cold and lying in the street during Thai New Year festivities in the popular resort of Hua Hin, after being attacked by a gang of local youths

Catalyst: The row appeared to start when Lewis, known as Blue to his friends, put his hand out and brushed a local man who had collided with him as they walked down the road

Hurt: The couple's grown up son can be seen clutching his head in agony in the left of this image, after he was pushed to the ground seconds after touching the man

In the leafy village of Wenvoe, five miles outside of Cardiff, neighbours are still in shock after seeing the footage of their friends being so horrifically attacked.

Dave Cannon, chairman of the village hall committee, a long-time friend who has been to Thailand with the couple, told MailOnline: 'I've been in touch with Lew by text after seeing the pictures of the attack.

'It was a hell of a shock to hear what happened to them.'

Friends revealed the couple had visited Thailand almost every year since falling in love with the country in the 80s.

And they are always in Thailand for the Songkran festival - which falls the same day as Mr Owen's birthday.

'They always go to the festival, it is a part of their holiday,' Mr Cannon, 71, told MailOnline.

We are still upset - they are just fabulous people, the best neighbours you could wish for. Neighbour John Miles

'It is a family joke - Lew reckons the whole of Thailand is celebrating his birthday that day.

Mr Cannon has visited Thailand with the couple and was last in the country with them in 2007, from which he has a souvenir plate in his hallway with a picture of himself and Mr Owen taken as they were sitting in a boat on the way to the Floating Market near Bangkok.

He said: 'They love it out there. They used to travel around Vietnam Laos and Cambodia but they always return to Thailand, it's their favourite place.

'They go sightseeing and have made lots of friends over there.

'Their Thai friends bake a cake every year for Lew's birthday.'

Retired long distance lorry driver Mr Cannon lives half a mile from the Owens, added: 'They are lovely people, we've been friends for years.

'Their two children grew up here - everyone in the village knows them.'

Neighbours said they were due to return home next Tuesday but are now trying to get an earlier flight.

Birthday: The family always enjoyed spending Mr Owen's birthday in Thailand, as it coincided with the New Year celebrations. The family joked it was like the entire country came out to celebrate

Brutal: Mrs Owen was initially punched in the face, after trying to escape. When she came back around, one of the attackers walked over and kicked her hard in the face, knocking her out again

Attacked: Lewis, pictured, lives in Thailand, and his parents visit once a year - sometimes with friends

Break: Mr Owen runs a successful electrical engineering company in Cardiff

John Miles, who lives opposite, said: 'We heard about the attack and then bumped into their daughter in the village and she said it was Lewis and Rose.

'We are still upset - they are just fabulous people, the best neighbours you could wish for.

'Apparently the attack is on Youtube but I couldn't watch it.

'Their daughter said she had not slept after being told what happened to her family.'

Another neighbour said: 'They are lovely, law-abiding people, it's dreadful they got caught up in this.'

Local police chief in Hua Hin and the head of the local tourist authority held a press conference on April 17 where they confirmed they had arrested two men - Suppata Baitong and Yingyai Sangkham, both aged 32 - in connection with the incident.

Chief Police Colonel Chaiyakorn Sriladecho explained that the younger Mr Owen accidentally bumped into Suppata, who had been drinking and responded by pushing him into a table.

Mr Owen then asked Suppata not to hurt his son, at which point it is alleged four other men turned up at the scene and assaulted the father, son and the mother.

Police added that the family had identified the arrested men, who had apologised to the victims for being drunk and that officers are still looking for the accomplices.

Arrested: Thai police parade the suspects Suppata Baitong and Yingyai Sangkham, both aged 32, who have been arrested in connection with the horrific assault

The small street lined with cafes and shops was full of people, out to celebrate the New Year Songkran festivities. In the left of this image, the father is seen helping son back to his feet

Colonel Sriladecho also added that the son suffered head injuries that required minor stitches with the father suffering a gash to his forehead and had eight stitches.

The mother is said to have suffered bruises to her chin and face and is still experiencing headaches which have kept her in hospital.

Police said the son has already left Thailand, while Mr and Mrs Owen are still in the country helping with the police investigation but will leave on Wednesday next week.

The news comes after a witness to the attack described how he tried to break up the fight but was also beaten so violently he now needs surgery.

A witness, calling himself 'Usual Suspect' on the Hua Hin internet forum, said a group of Thai youths had been looking for trouble in the area during the Songkran New Year water splashing holiday.

He claims he was walking with his wife and tried to intervene, pushing a youth away who was beating the woman, but was himself attacked and he now needs dental surgery due to his injuries.

Support: Villagers have spoken of their shock, and said their friends are 'lovely, law-abiding people'

The couple's daughter posted this picture to a friend during a recent trip to the country, apparently a message to a friend

He said: 'The girls in the bar I was in all night waved goodbye to two elderly customers and their son and my wife and I followed only seconds after them.

'Within 20-30 metres of leaving the bar the Thais were punching the 65-year-old lady in the face!!

'The elderly gentleman was down on the floor and their son was beaten very badly!

'At this point I caught up to the scene and pushed one of the youths away from the woman. I got severely punched and kicked for my troubles, but felt the need to protect this frail lady.'

He continued: 'Not one person (other than myself) came to aid these old folk and they ended up laid in the road bleeding..so if you're still out in the wee hours tonight please be alert.

'These pockets of youths were intent on causing harm, and did blend in with all others beforehand.

'The three of them are still hospitalised, and I will need cosmetic dental work done.'

The attack is believed to have happened outside Tina Bar and Mama Mia Bar along a bustling street called Soi Bintabaht, close to the Tourist Police Station.

This horrific image shows the moment the elderly woman was punched in the face (circled) during the fight, after she approached one of the gang members and appeared to try to reason with him

As the stunned woman tried to sit back up after being punched in the face, one of the attackers kicks her hard on the jaw knocking her unconscious (circled)

Police are using the CCTV footage from a camera at the entrance to a small street of bars called Soi Bintabaht in front of Wat Hua Hin to trace the attackers.
A disqualified driver was 'likely' to have been high on drugs and very tired when she allegedly hit a cyclist and left him seriously injured in the middle of the road, a court has heard.

Rebekah Stewart, 23, may have been up for almost 24 hours and on drugs when she hit Christian Ashby at Lake Wendouree in Ballarat, north-west of Melbourne, at 6.20am, police claimed.

She stands accused of veering onto the opposite side of the road before smashing into the father-of-two who was on a morning bike ride on March 25.

Major Collision Investigation Unit Detective Sergeant Mark Amos told Ballarat Magistrates' Court that her driving was indicative of a fatigued motorist or somebody high on drugs.

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Rebekah Stewart, 23, (pictured) allegedly veered onto the opposite side of the road and smashed into a father of two who was on a morning bike ride at 6.20am on Good Friday at Lake Wendouree in Ballarat, Victoria

'There is every possibility she was more likely than not on drugs at the time of the incident,' he said, according to the Herald Sun.

Stewart applied for bail on Thursday on six charges, including dangerous driving causing serious injury, failing to stop at the scene of an accident and driving while disqualified.

The court heard that an examination of Stewart's mobile phone records show 22 hours of constant use before the incident - including 15 minutes before the crash.

'Any person with that sort of usage would be fatigued and would not have been able to control a vehicle,' Det Sgt Amos said.

Christian Ashby, a 36-year-old podiatrist and keen triathlete, was reportedly hit by the car at a considerable speed.

He is still in hospital with severe injuries, including a broken right leg, broken ribs, and damage to internal organs.

The driver may have been up for almost 24 hours and on drugs when she hit Christian Ashby (pictured)

Police allege Stewart fled the scene of the crash and hid her car in an empty lot in Delacombe.

CCTV footage captured her driving with the cars headlights off before she parked the car in long grass at the vacant lot.

Magistrate John Doherty heard Stewart then walked 2km to her boyfriends mothers house.

She allegedly told the woman and her boyfriends brother that she had hit a kangaroo, before later saying she hit a man.

Stewart and two male friends then drove back to where the Lancer was parked, police have claimed.

Police found the car in the backyard of one of the mens homes on March 28 with its bonnet removed, the windscreen partially pulled off, and the electronics disconnected.

Stewart was arrested at a friends house in Altona North on March 31 after she caught a train from Ballarat towards Melbourne.

The hit-and-run scene: Ambulance services rush Mr Ashby to hospital where he remains a week later

The Mount Pleasant woman has been remanded in custody and fronted Melbourne Magistrates' Court today to face six charges over the March 25 incident

Police claimed that Stewart has taken steps to avoid them since then.

When she was arrested, police found a notebook in her possessions which indicated she had ties to Queensland.

Detective Sergeant Amos said he feared she would flee the state if she was released on bail, The Age reported.

Stewarts lawyer, Kate Ballard, said her client was booked in for a four-week stint at a Toorak private rehabilitation clinic.

She has previously undertaken an education program on the effects of ice.

Mr Doherty adjourned the bail application so that a representative of the clinic may appear before court.

Stewart remains in custody.
British ex-pats have lost their High Court battle over the right to vote in June's EU referendum.

The legal challenge threatened to delay the date of the referendum but this morning judges dismissed their case, meaning the June 23 referendum will go ahead as planned.

British citizens who have lived abroad for more than 15 years are automatically disenfranchised, which currently affects an estimated 700,000 UK nationals.

David Cameron promised to abolish the 15-year rule in the Conservative party election manifesto last year but has yet to act on the pledge.

WWII veteran Harry Shindler, a 94-year-old who retired to Italy, submitted the judicial review, arguing that the automatic exclusion rule broke EU law and meant expats were being illegally denied the chance to vote.

British citizens who have lived abroad for more than 15 years are automatically disenfranchised, which currently affects an estimated 700,000 UK nationals

He brought case to the High Court along with lawyer and Belgian resident Jacquelyn MacLennan.

Backed by law firm Leigh Day, they said the people who will be most affected by Brexit are those who have been excluded from having a voice in the historic referendum.

They said expats feared becoming 'resident aliens' in Europe if Britain votes to leave the EU and asked judges to declare that 'the 15-year rule' for overseas electors unlawfully restricts their right to freedom of movement under EU law.

But Lord Justice Lloyd Jones ruled today that excluding them from voting in the EU referendum did not restrict their rights and rejected their application for a judicial review.

The judges also ruled that even if there was a restriction of EU free movement rights, it would be 'objectively justified'.

David Cameron promised to abolish the 15-year rule in the Conservative party election manifesto last year but has yet to act on the pledge

But lawyers acting for the expats confirmed they will seek leave to appeal direct to the Supreme Court.

Aidan O'Neill QC, who represented Mr Shindler and Ms MacLennan, argued at a one-day hearing earlier this month that the 15-year rule was arbitrary and said the Government had 'absolutely no reason for it'.

He said: 'Without British membership of the EU these two British citizens will no longer be EU citizens.'

In total more than two million British citizens live on the continent and the court was told today that their right to live, work, own property, retire, receive health care free at the point of use - paid for by the NHS - could be placed in jeopardy.

EVERY DAY 100 UK EXPATS QUIT SPAIN DUE TO FEARS OF BREXIT Nearly 100 British nationals are leaving Spain every day, figures show as experts warn that uncertainty over June's EU vote is driving thousands of Britons to return home as they fear losing benefits such as free healthcare and the minimum 2.5 per cent rise in the UK state pension Nearly 100 British nationals are leaving Spain every day, figures show as expatriates quit Europe in fear of what will happen to them if UK votes to leave the EU in June's referendum. Experts have warned that uncertainty over healthcare and the value of the state pension will trigger a mass exodus from the continent if Britain votes to leave. It would widen the gap between the number of Britons who live in Europe and the number of EU nationals living in Britain. Currently 1.2million Britons live in other EU member states while 2.9million Europeans live in the UK. But Out campaigners said the figures showed how the 'balance of power favours the UK' and would put the UK in a strong position to negotiate a good settlement for expats if voters opted to quit the Brussels club. Expats fear they will lose access to free healthcare  available through the European Insurance Card or by signing up to free health insurance on offer in countries like Spain. There are also doubts over whether British pensioners living on the continent will continue to benefit from the minimum 2.5 per cent rise in the state pension paid to all Britons living in EU member states. The UK Government raises the state pension for pensioners living in the EU and a handful of other countries where it has a social security agreement, but expats living in countries such as Australia do not benefit from the same terms. A net total of 72,000 British expats have left Spain over the last two years, while around 7,000 have quit Italy. Christopher Chantrey, chairman of the British Community Committee of France, told the newspaper: 'The issue is sowing panic among Britons who have taken early retirement to France.' The figures show that all EU countries apart from Spain, France and Luxembourg have more of their population living in the UK than vice-versa. Pro-EU campaigners warned that expats would have no automatic guarantee that their current rights would continue if Britain left the EU.

But government lawyers argued that their case was 'unarguable' and insisted the 2015 referendum legislation did not interfere with free movement rights and was not open to challenge on EU law grounds.

Mr Eadie said the impact of a Leave vote on those caught by the rule 'would be subject to negotiation with other member states and cannot be predicted at this stage'.

Mr Eadie also warned that a win for Mr Shindler and Ms MacLennan could lead to it being impossible to hold the referendum as planned on June 23.

Ms MacLennan said: 'The Government made a manifesto commitment to enfranchise all British citizens, no matter how long they have been abroad, saying that they thought that 'choosing 15 years, as opposed to 14 or 16 years, is inherently like sticking a dart in a dartboard' and that 'if British citizens maintain British citizenship, that brings with it rights, obligations and a connection with this country, and that that should endure'.

'We just want the Government to keep its promises.'

Announcing that the expats will now seek to appeal the decision at the Supreme Court, Richard Stein, from Leigh Day, said: 'We now intend to take the legal battle to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, so that all British citizens living elsewhere in the EU can be part of the democratic process to vote in this referendum, which will have a very real impact on their lives.

'We believe that there is precedent for fast-track legislation being put through Parliament in a matter of days in response to court judgment, so there would be no need for the referendum to be delayed if the Supreme Court rules in our favour.

'Since this is a vote in a referendum rather than in an election there is no need to link the votes of Britons in Europe to any particular constituency in the UK. Possession of a British passport should be enough.'

Mr Shindler, who retired to Italy in 1982, said the legal challenge was the 'last stand' for expats who fear for their way of life if the UK severs ties with Brussels.

He said he would vote Remain if he had the chance as many expats were concerned about the future if the UK voted to leave.

'It would have very serious repercussions for all expats and their families here,' he said before the High Court decision today.

'I came here in 1982 when you had to have a permit from the police to stay here. All that would come back. We would be immigrants here.'

Mr Shindler, who fought in Italy during the Second World War and was part of the Anzio landings in 1944, said younger expats could be forced to apply for work permits to remain in their adopted countries.

He was sceptical about assurances from the Leave camp that there would be little change in the status of Britons living in the EU following Brexit.

'That really is wishful thinking. That's no comfort to us at all, it's absurd to say that,' he said.

'There could be permits for work - I don't work of course - but those who work here will have to have a permit like they used to.'

The expats in EU nations were 'free ambassadors', helping to promote the UK across the continent, he said.

Mr Shindler, who lives in Porto d'Ascoli on Italy's east coast, said: 'It leaves us speechless to think anyone can stand up in Parliament and deny another Brit the right to vote.'

It is not the first time Mr Shindler has sought to challenge the 15-year rule in the courts.

In 2013 he lost a European Court of Human Rights case in Strasbourg over his inability to vote in general elections.

Leigh Day claims that UK expats are excluded under the EU Referendum Act 2015 in a way that is incompatible with EU laws.

The firm said a win for the expats would have required fast-track legislation in a matter of days, which would have thrown the date of the June 23 referendum into jeopardy because the Electoral Commission would have had to enroll hundreds of thousands of new voters onto the electoral roll.

Richard Stein, the lawyer representing the claimants, said before today's decision: 'Our clients are being penalised for exercising their EU free movement rights.

'The EU Referendum Act 2015 is said to be based on legislation for UK parliamentary general elections.

'But it gives a vote in the EU referendum to members of the House of Lords, as well as to Irish and Commonwealth citizens who are resident in Gibraltar. None of these are allowed to vote in UK general elections.

'The people it arbitrarily excludes are those UK citizens who are among those most likely to be affected by the decision taken by voters in this referendum.

'Not to allow them to vote on the decision whether the UK remains part of the EU is unlawful and we have asked the court to deal with the issues urgently so that the Act can be amended before the June date, to include all UK citizens residing in the EU for however long.'

Responding to today's High Court ruling, a Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: 'The Government welcomes the ruling of the High Court in this case.

'The franchise for the EU referendum was debated, considered and agreed by both Houses of Parliament and is enshrined in law.'
Boots the ginger cat has been rescued from - thanks to a crowdfunding campaign.

Melbourne woman Susie Butler launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds to pay for rescuing her neighbour's cat Boots.

The Go Fund Me page raised the $205 needed to call animal rescuer to retrieve the stricken feline, who got stuck in a tree on Wednesday and was stranded there for 36 hours.

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Boots the cat got stuck in a tree on Wednesday and was stranded there for 36 hours

Animal rescuer Nigel Williamson came to the rescue on Thursday afterSusie Butler launched a crowdfunding campaign to rescue the cat

Ms Butler, from Ferntree Gully, said she turned to the internet after the RSPCA, local council and fire brigade all turned down her plea for help.

'I would so love to pay to get him down myself but we are a little down on our luck at the moment, as is my neighbour,' she wrote on the crowdfunding page.

'The tree can't be climbed.'

Animal rescuer Nigel Williamson came to the rescue on Thursday, and said the animal was a little shaken but unharmed, reports 9News.

'He's perfectly ok health-wise but, being an indoor cat, he was a little bit scared,' he said.

Mr Williamson wore a harness when he climbed up and put the cat into a bag and pulled him from harm's way

He said Boots was a little shaken but unharmed from the ordeal

The Go Fund Me page raised $205 after the RSPCA, local council and fire brigade reportedly down a plea for help

Mr Williamson wore a harness when he climbed up and put the cat into a bag and pulled him from harm's way.

'The longest I've had a cat up a tree is 21 days - cats are very hardy animals,' he said.
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Young graduates moving to London might think they've finally put the days of university halls of residence behind them.

But a solution to the capital's housing crisis could see them move into buildings which are remarkably similar to university digs, albeit rather more upmarket.

So-called 'twodios', like those just finished in Willesden, offer young professionals a private room and bathroom with a kitchen shared between two people.

Residents get a small, 10 metres square room as well as access to a shared kitchen and a number of other communal facilities

This 550-bedroom, 11-storey tower (pictured in an artist's impression) offers young professions university halls-style living in west London

The building charges rents starting from 1,000-a-month for a small room, but that includes bills, cleaning and use the facilities

The 1,100-a-month rent might seem a bit steep for a bedroom which is just 10 square metres in size, but the company behind 'The Collective' scheme says that includes cleaning, linen and bills.

The tower - which overlooks Willesden Junction station - is being billed as 'the world's largest co-living scheme'. The 550 residents of the 11-storey tower also get the use of a roof-top terrace, library and games room.

Bosses hope the building will not degenerate into the squalor of some halls of residence however, and could evict anyone who doesn't clean their kitchen.

It comes after a report last year found that new graduates are being prevented from taking jobs in the capital because they cannot afford the rapidly-rising rents.

The scheme is designed as an alternative to flat-sharing, which is all most young people can afford

The company behind the scheme are already working on similar buildings in other parts of the capital

The trendy interiors are designed to attract recent graduates and young professionals moving to London

The cost of flat-sharing has risen by more than a quarter in the last decade, meaning many can't even afford a room in a flat with strangers.

Those behind the Collective building are hoping the twodios could offer the answer and are now working on a second development in Stratford, east London.

The company also has what it calls 'co-living spaces' in Acton, Camden, Hyde Park, King's Cross and Notting Hill.

CEO Reza Merchant, told MailOnline said: 'The people who are moving in for the first time on Monday are typically young professionals earning between 20,000 to 50,000 a year.

'They've seen that the options for living in London at the moment are pretty poor. They face either moving into an illegally converted houseshare or paying a fortune to rent.

'This is a much-needed option for capital's housing crisis. I think the people who are moving here are keen for a good experience rather than trying to save and buy their own home.'

The building includes a gym, launderette, spa, cinema, rooftop terrace, games room, library (pictured)

The building contains three dining rooms which organisers say will allow residents to entertain friends. This one is in the style of a gastro pub

While residents have a rather cramped private space, there is a number of communal areas, including this 'secret garden' room

Tenants agree a fixed term to live in one of the rooms. To start with, many are agreeing short term deals for the summer, but from September, many will start nine or 12-month contracts.

Searches show one-bedroom and studio flats in the area are currently on the market for between 1,300-a-month and 2,200-a-month.

A series of horror stories have emerged in recent years of conditions being offered by unscrupulous flatshare landlords in London, with tenants crammed into rooms and extortionate rents being charged.

Other newcomers to the capital have found themselves taken to see 'flats' which turn out to be tiny rooms which kitchens and toilets fitted next to beds, and fold-out tables on which to eat.

Last summer, MailOnline told how a flat the size of a snooker table had gone up for rent for 400-a-week in central London.
An Argentinian model who was travelling to Thailand for a holiday of a lifetime died after suffering an brain embolism as her flight was about to land for a stopover in Qatar.

Elina Bernasconi, 30, was on the flight with friends when she fell ill with the embolism, which is usually caused by a blood clot.

It came when her plane was coming into land and she spent two weeks in a hospital in Qatar in a coma.

Elina Bernasconi, an Argentinian model who suffered a pulmonary embolism on a flight to Qatar while on her way to Thailand. She has now died at an Arabian hospital

Miss Bernasconi comes from the city of Belen in Argentina's north-western province of Catamarca.

And the local MP for the area has now confirmed that she died in the early hours of Tuesday.

Miss Bernasconi's 30th birthday was on April 15, and she had originally planned to spend it celebrating in Thailand.

But after falling ill on a flight to Qatar, where she planned a stopover, she instead spent the day in a coma in an Arabian hospital.

During the two weeks she was in a coma, she was accompanied by her cousin Fernando Ricas, who lives in Oman.

Miss Bernasconi had been travelling to Thailand for a holiday where she planned to spend her 30th birthday

The local government in her home city had agreed to cover the costs to transfer Miss Bernasconi back to Argentina so she could be with the rest of her family.

However, doctors said she was too ill to be moved as she was in a critical condition before she later died.

Plans are now in place to send Miss Bernasconi's body back to Belen in Argentina for a funeral.

Miss Bernasconi fell into a coma as her plane landed at Doha airport, pictured, in Qatar after suffering the blood clot

Meanwhile thousands of people have took to Facebook to pay their respects to the 30-year-old through a page called 'All for Elina'.

One user wrote: 'May God give strength and acceptance to Elinas family and to all those who fought and hoped for her recovery.
Jeremy Corbyn tonight denied Labour was facing an anti-Semitism crisis despite being forced to suspend his old friend Ken Livingstone for claiming Hitler was a 'Zionist'.

Mr Livingstone made the incendiary comments as he waded into the row over anti-Semitic Facebook posts by Labour MP Naz Shah, who was suspended by Mr Corbyn yesterday after hours of pressure.

As the row escalated, the former mayor of London was branded a 'Nazi apologist' by Labour MP John Mann in an ugly public spat outside the Millbank TV studios in Westminster.

Senior Labour MPs tonight expressed horror at the attempt to play down the explosive row, which has rocked the party just a week before crucial elections.

Former minister Ian Austin told MailOnline: 'Just seven days from polling day and instead of knocking on doors like the rest of us, Ken Livingstone is treating us to his weird views on Adolf Hitler and his offensive views on Jewish people.

'The media are talking about nothing else, the party is having to suspend people on almost a daily basis and Jeremy thinks there's no problem?'

Jeremy Corbyn, pictured campaigning in Grimsby today as the anti-Semitism storm raged back in London, tonight insisted there was no 'crisis' facing Labour

Mr Austin continued: 'It looks like a pretty big problem to everyone else. Labour's reputation is being destroyed and instead of pretending there's no problem Jeremy needs to act and he needs to act now.'

John Woodcock, a senior backbencher, told MailOnline: 'Many thousands of Labour members will be bewildered by the hideous remarks of Ken Livingstone and are looking to Jeremy Corbyn to swipe the moment and tackle Labour's anti-Semitism problem.

'He must not bury his head in the sand in the face of this madness.'

Asked if Mr Livingstone's suspension demonstrated a crisis in Labour, Mr Corbyn tonight told the BBC: 'It's not a crisis. There's no crisis. Where there is any racism in the party it will be dealt with and rooted out. I have been an anti-racist campaigner all my life.'

Asked, during an election visit to Hull, whether the party had a 'problem with anti-Semitism', Mr Corbyn replied: 'No, there is not a problem. We are totally opposed to anti-Semitism in any form within the party.

'The very small number of cases that have been brought to our attention have been dealt with swiftly and immediately, and they will be.'

Mr Corbyn's statement came at the culmination of a day of drama for the Labour Party:

'YOU'RE A NAZI APOLOGIST': THE EXPLOSIVE ROW BETWEEN MANN AND LIVINGSTONE The explosive row between Ken Livingstone and John Mann shocked Westminster today when it was captured in full - because it was carried out in front of ITV journalists. Mr Mann confronted the former London mayor and said: 'You're a disgusting racist, Livingstone. A disgusting racist rewriting history. You're a disgusting racist.' Livingstone: 'Are you saying it's not true?' Mann: 'Yes, you're a lying racist.' Livingstone: 'Really? Why don't you go and check the history.' Mann: 'A Nazi apologist.' Livingstone: 'Check the history.' Mann: 'A Nazi apologist.' Livingstone: 'Check your history.' Mann: 'A Nazi apologist. You're a disgusting Nazi apologist, Livingstone.'

The day began with Jeremy Corbyn facing a backlash from inside and out of Labour over his 'dithering' about Naz Shah's Facebook posts yesterday.

Senior Labour donor David Abraham demanded Labour 'stop the rot' of anti-Semitism in the party.

Shadow education secretary Lucy Powell warned Labour had to 'do more' while comedian David Baddiel said there was a real problem on the left.

Ken Livingstone gave an interview to BBC Radio London in defence of Ms Shah. He made the explosive claim that Hitler was a 'Zionist' when he ran for election in 1932.

Labour MPs immediately began to call for Mr Livingstone's suspension from the Labour Party.

John Mann got into an angry clash with Mr Livingstone outside the Millbank TV studios while the former London mayor is live on LBC defending his earlier statement. Mr Mann branded him a 'Nazi apologist.

The pair clashed again on live television in a series of interviews for different channels.

Mr Livingstone was then suspended for bringing the Labour Party into 'disrepute' while Mr Mann was summoned to the chief whip to explain his own actions on the day of drama.

Mr Livingstone this afternoon said he would not be doing any more media interviews until his regular LBC show on Saturday morning. Meanwhile, Mr Mann was given a slap on the wrist by Labour chief whip Rosie Winterton over the row.

Mr Livingstone relaxed in the aftermath of the row by taking his dog for a walk. Jeremy Corbyn, seen today campaigning in Hull, said suspensions would send a message to anti-Semites

The anti-Semitism scandal first broke on Tuesday after the Guido Fawkes website revealed that in 2014, before she was an MP, Bradford West MP Ms Shah shared a graphic on Facebook which was headlined 'Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict - Relocate Israel into United States' and she added: 'problem solved.'

In a series of apologies, Ms Shah has admitted the posts were not 'excusable' and vowed to help build relations between faith communities in penance for her statements.

Mr Corbyn suspended her from the party and removed the whip yesterday afternoon after hours of escalating tensions within Labour and after he was hammered at PMQs.

The new row risks shattering a tentative display of Labour Party unity despite Mr Corbyn's unpopularity with MPs as the party fights on several fronts in next week's elections.

Ken Livingstone, pictured leaving the Millbank TV studios today following an extraordinary series of interviews, was suspended today for bringing the Labour Party into disrepute

Labour MP John Mann, pictured today in Westminster, was summoned by the chief whip Rosie Winterton to discuss his conduct after he got into an explosive public row with Mr Livingstone, also seen today, over this remarks

Mr Livingstone, who chairs a foreign policy commission for the Labour Party, triggered the latest round of Labour infighting when asked about Ms Shah's suspension early today.

He told the BBC: 'It's completely over the top but it's not anti-Semitic.

'Let's remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel.

'He was supporting Zionism  this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

'The simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians.'

Mr Livingstone and Mr Mann, ringed above, left the TV studios in a mass scrum today after their earlier altercation

Mr Livingstone's comments this morning provoked immediate calls for his suspension from the Labour Party.

That decision eventually came at 1.24pm but not before the row exploded into public view.

An angry clash at Millbank - yards from Parliament - saw Mr Mann brand Mr Livingstone a 'f****** disgrace'.

The ferocious row between Mr Livingstone and Mr Mann was carried out in front of journalists, including Michael Crick of Channel 4 News

Mr Mann bumped into Mr Livingstone as they both arrived at the Millbank studios - and immediately launched into furious tirade at the former mayor.

The row began as Mr Livingstone walked into the studios while on the phone doing a live radio interview with LBC.

Mr Livingstone was heard on the radio saying 'I've got a Labour MP threatening me, sorry about this'.

Mr Mann said: 'You're a disgusting racist, Livingstone. A disgusting racist rewriting history. You're a disgusting racist.'

Mr Livingstone replied: 'Are you saying it's not true?'

Mr Mann said: 'Yes, you're a lying racist.'

The row continued as the pair walked into the building and up the stairs to the TV studios - where both did back to back interviews.

Former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg condemned Mr Livingstone live on air as they debated the issue on the BBC Daily Politics.

He said: 'What possesses you to talk about Hitler and your views about Zionism given the genocide, given the sensitivities of the issue?'

Mr Livingstone insisted he had only quoted history and was answering questions put to him by reporters.

Following the public row, Mr Livingstone also said Mr Mann had gone 'completely over the top' and started 'bellowing' at him while he was conducting a radio interview over the phone.

As the row continued on the BBC, Mr Mann said: 'I think you've lost it, Mr Livingstone ... What are you on at the moment?

'You certainly shouldn't be on Labour's national executive.'

John Mann confronted Ken Livingstone at the Millbank TV studios in Westminster today, shouting at him while he completed one of many broadcast interviews today

Mr Livingstone also said he believed the row over his future would 'calm down' over the next couple of days.

CORBYN DITHERING FUELS FEARS OVER RISE IN LABOUR ANTI-SEMITISM By James Tapsfield, Political Editor for MailOnline Jeremy Corybn has been in charge of the Labour Party for less than eight months. But in that short time it has gone from a fairly united, centrist party to a seething mass of factional fighting. The influx of tens of thousands of new activists, attracted to Mr Corbyn's brand of anti-austerity politics, has changed everything. Moderates believe the return of the hard-left - which tried to seize control of Labour in the 1980s - has brought with it a wave of anti-Semitism. Jewish shadow cabinet minister Luciana Berger highlighted the vile abuse she had suffered on Twitter last month, including an image of her with a Holocaust-era yellow star superimposed on her forehead. While no-one accuses Mr Corbyn of personally harbouring such views, many are furious that he seems unwilling to tackle the problem head-on. The Labour leader has long been a critic of the Israeli state, and a champion of the Palestinian cause. He has called for talks with Hamas and Hezbollah. There are complaints that despite repeatedly condemning anti-Semitism, Mr Corbyn does not come down hard enough on views that step over the line. His dithering over the case of Naz Shah, who posted on Facebook about 'relocating' Israel to the US, has fuelled those concerns. Mr Corbyn initially tried to let the Bradford West MP off with a grovelling apology, but finally withdrew the party whip in the face of a tidal wave of protests from his own ranks. The fact that the leader's close ally Ken Livingstone then went out and robustly defended Ms Shah, denying that her remarks had been anti-Semitic, will not have improved the situation. After the former London Mayor was engulfed in the extraordinary row over his own comments this morning, it again took hours for Mr Corbyn to act against him.

Asked if he was under pressure, he told BBC Two's Daily Politics: 'Not really.

'I simply said what I believed to be true, which is that Naz is not anti-Semitic.'

Pressed about his future on Labour's ruling NEC, he said: 'Things erupt.

'They dominate the news for 24/48 hours.

'People calm down again when they go back and check what you have really said.'

Mr Corbyn finally made a statement on the row shortly before 3pm when, speaking on a visit to Hull, he said: 'He has been suspended from the party. We are not tolerating anti-Semitism in any form whatsoever in our party.'

The Labour leader said the suspension would send a 'message' to anti-Semites.

Mr Corbyn added: 'We are totally opposed to anti-Semitism in any form within the party.

'The very small number of cases that have been brought to our attention have been dealt with swiftly and immediately, and they will be.'

A Labour spokesman today said: 'Ken Livingstone has been suspended by the Labour Party, pending an investigation, for bringing the Party into disrepute.

'The Chief Whip has summoned John Mann MP to discuss his conduct.'

In a statement later, the party said chief whip Rosie Winterton had made clear to Mr Mann it was 'completely inappropriate' to get involved in public rows on television.

David Cameron then intervened on the anti-Semitism row for the second time this week, telling an audience in Cambridgeshire: 'It is quite clear the Labour party has got a problem with anti-Semitism. I think they have got to recognise that anti-Semitism is like racism.

'It is unacceptable in a modern political party and every political party facing this problem has got to deal with it.

'And as I said to Jeremy Corbyn some weeks ago, when I was shouted down in the House of Commons with cries of disgraceful from the Labour benches, they've got a problem.

'It is now totally apparent that they have got a problem. And they have got to deal with it.'

As the row grew, shadow Cabinet Minister Chris Bryant condemned anti-Semitism in Parliament and his colleague Luciana Berger tweeted: 'There is no hierarchy of racism.

'Ken's comments are a disgrace and have no place in our party.'

The start of the row was captured by ITV deputy political editor Chris Ship on Twitter. Mr Livingstone was on the phone to LBC radio at the time doing a live interview

As the row escalated as the pair entered the Millbank Studios, Mr Livingstone said 'you saying it's not true?'

Mr Bryant said: 'I'm sick and tired of people trying to explain it away and, yes, I'm talking to you, Ken Livingstone.'

LABOUR LEADER FACES RISING DEMANDS TO ACT OVER ANTI-SEMITISM Jeremy Corbyn has faced rising demands to do more on anti-Semitism after Labour expelled and suspended a series of members over the issue. Former shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said the party had been too slow to respond to complaints of anti-Semitism within its ranks. "The Labour Party needs to do more than simply to have suspensions of people who have been saying anti-Semitic things," she told Channel 4 News. "We've actually got to have an action plan to deal with this in order to have strong processes so that there is swift action because you can never tolerate that kind of discrimination in the party." Labour peer Baroness Royall is already leading an inquiry after Oxford University Labour Club's co-chairman resigned, claiming a 'large proportion' of its members had 'some kind of problem with Jews'. It was reported today the group includes Mohammad Shabbir, a staff member of Ms Shah who repeatedly used the racial epithet 'zio' in social media posts about Israelis. Earlier this month, a Labour councillor in Luton Aysegul Gurbuz was suspended after she was alleged to have called Adolf Hitler the 'greatest man in history'. In the past weeks, Labour has also twice suspended the deputy chairman of its Woking branch, Vicki Byrne, for anti-Semitic tweets. And the party suspended councillor Khadim Hussain, former Lord Mayor of Bradford, for sharing a Facebook post that said: 'Your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler.' Last month, Labour kicked out Gerry Downing for a second time over allegations he had written blogs including about the 'Jewish question' and made statements seen by some as apologising for the 9/11 terrorists.

Jon Lansman, a close ally of Mr Corbyn, signalled the end of support for Mr Livingstone from the left of the party.

He said: 'Period of silence from Ken overdue, especially on anti-Semitism racism and Zionism.

'Time he left politics altogether.'

Mark Regev, Israel's ambassador to Britain, said: 'Not sure which is worse, deliberately distorting Hitler's goals or accusing his Jewish victims of being his partners.'

Rabbi Danny Rich, senior rabbi of Liberal Judaism, said: 'If anyone has gone mad, it is Ken Livingstone.

'His comments get more offensive and unworthy every time he is interviewed.

Claiming Hitler was a Zionist is not only a huge historical perversion, but it directly equates Nazism and Zionism.

'It suggests they share objectives and values; it is guilt by association.

'It is hard to think of a more offensive linkage.

'Suspending him from the Labour Party is not the end of the matter. Livingstone is a symptom, not the cause.'

He added: 'I am nervous that by focussing on one large personality, we are not dealing with the issues which lead him to make such a statement.

'The first step is to admit you have an institutional problem and then to set out strategies to deal with that.

'Anti-Semitism in British politics is quite simply unacceptable, from whatever quarter it may come.'

James Sorene, of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, said: 'Recent comments about Israel and Zionists by members of the Labour party, and the way some have defended them, show a fundamental misunderstanding of what Zionism is.

Mr Sorene continued: 'Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.

'It is a movement driven by a desire for the Jewish people to live in an independent state, to shape their own destiny free from centuries of horrific persecution.

Ms Shah shared the graphic, pictured left, which triggered the row in August 2014 on Facebook. She added comments underneath, pictured right, suggesting she would lobby David Cameron over the idea

RED KEN V HISTORY: ANALYSIS OF WHAT LIVINGSTONE CLAIMED AND WHAT THE FACTS TELL US By Matt Dathan, MailOnline Political Correspondent Ken Livingstone was accused of 'rewriting history' with a series of claims about anti-Semitism today. Here we compare Red Ken's claims with the facts. Red Ken's claim: 'Let's remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. 'He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.' Actual history: It is very clear from Mein Kampf  written in 1925  that Hitler did not support moving Jews to Israel. Hitler wrote: 'While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. 'It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. 'It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.' Red Ken's claim: 'Let's look at what someone who is Jewish actually said, something almost very similar to something Naz has just said: Albert Einstein. When the first leader of Likud, the governing party now in Israel, came to America he [Einstein] warned American politicians: 'Don't talk to this man, because he's too similar to the fascists who fought in the Second World War'. 'Now if Naz or myself had said that today we would be denounced as anti-Semitic, but that was Albert Einstein.' Actual history: Albert Einstein did indeed warn about the 'fascist' intentions of Menachem Begin in a letter to the New York Times. But this was 25 years before Likud was even launched as a political party and Begin became first leader in 1973  18 years after Einstein died. Red Ken's claim: He said Naz Shah's remarks were 'over the top' but not anti-Semitic. Explaining his own definition of anti-Semitism, Mr Livingstone told the Daily Politics show today: 'Blurring these two things [criticising Israel and being anti-Semitic] undermines the real importance of anti-Semitism, because a real anti-Semite doesn't just hate the Jews in Israel, they hate their Jewish neighbour in Golders Green or in Stoke Newington. It's a physical loathing.' Actual definition: The definition of anti-Semitism is 'a hatred of Jewish people'  so this would logically include 'Jews in Israel'. Mr Livingstone's comments suggest hating Israeli Jews is understandable and even excusable. The Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre said: 'Criticism of the Israeli government is of course entirely legitimate, as it is against any government. 'But when that criticism is expressed in violent language, directed at its people in racist terms or uses references to Hitler and Nazism, it is antisemitic and deeply offensive. 'If the only country in the world that you want to disappear is the Jewish one then you are in very bad company, on the wrong side of history.' Red Ken's claim: He said it was wrong to say anti-Semitism is racism. Actual definition: But as Jeremy Corbyn and even Ms Shah said yesterday: 'Anti-Semitism is racism, full stop.'

'Anti-Zionists deny the Jewish people their right to national self-determination, seek to portray the very existence of Israel as a crime and indulge dangerous fantasies about the country no longer existing.

'Criticism of the Israeli government is of course entirely legitimate, as it is against any government.

'But when that criticism is expressed in violent language, directed at its people in racist terms or uses references to Hitler and Nazism, it is anti-Semitic and deeply offensive.

'If the only country in the world that you want to disappear is the Jewish one then you are in very bad company, on the wrong side of history.'

Bernard Hughes, director of external affairs for the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), said: 'We do not believe the Labour Party is institutionally racist or anti-Semitic but sadly there are individuals within the party whose views and statements are anti-Semitic and have really shocked us.'

He said the Labour leadership 'must now act decisively' to 'combat this terrible issue'.

He added: 'We have supported the request by the Jewish Labour Movement to have Ken Livingstone suspended from Labour for the offensive remarks he made this morning.'

A string of Labour MPs joined the criticism today amid calls for Mr Corbyn to 'do more' to 'stop the rot' of anti-Semitism.

The demand for immediate suspension was led by Sadiq Khan, who is bidding to win Mr Livingstone's former office at next week's elections.

He said: 'Ken Livingstone's comments are appalling and inexcusable.

'There must be no place for this in our party.'

Labour MP David Lammy said: 'This is a very sad day for the Labour Party.

'I simply cannot reconcile being in the same Party as someone with these views

'I am appalled by Ken Livingstone's despicable comments.

'There is no place in our party for racism, bigotry or intolerance of any sort.'

Michael Dugher, the former shadow culture secretary, said: 'I don't say this often but I agree with John McDonnell.

''If people express these (anti-Semitic) views, full stop they're out''. Livingstone?'

Labour MP Jess Phillips led calls for Mr Livingstone to be suspended over his remarks.

Wes Streeting, another MP, said: 'Please tell me this is satire and didn't actually happen?'

Mr Streeting added: 'Ken Livingstone has form on anti-Semitism and has been tolerated for far too long.

'He should be suspended immediately.'

Tristram Hunt, the former shadow education secretary, said: 'Ken Livingstone's comments this morning were despicable - he should be suspended from the Party immediately.'

In his initial interview today, Mr Livingstone said: 'There's one stark fact that virtually no one in the British media ever reports, in almost all these conflicts the death toll is usually between 60 and 100 Palestinians killed for every Israeli.

'Now, any other country doing that would be accused of war crimes but it's like we have a double standard about the policies of the Israeli government.'

Mr Livingstone also claimed Albert Einstein had made similar criticisms of Israeli policy.

He said: 'As I've said, I've never heard anybody say anything anti-Semitic, but there's been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-Semitic. I had to put up with 35 years of this...

'Let's look at someone who's Jewish who actually said something very similar to what Naz has just said.

'Albert Einstein, when the first leader of Likud, the governing party now in Israel, came to America, he warned American politicians: don't talk to this man because he's too similar to the fascists we fought in the Second World War.

'Now, if Naz or myself said that today we would be denounced as anti-Semitic, but that was Albert Einstein.'

Sadiq Khan, Labour's candidate for City Hall, led calls for Mr Livingstone to be removed from the Labour Party over his 'appalling' comments

Labour MP Jess Phillips said Ken Livingstone should be suspended from Labour over his latest remarks

Michael Dugher, the former shadow culture secretary, said the Labour leadership should follow the advice of the shadow chancellor and kick out Mr Livingstone

Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy said Mr Livingstone should be suspended immediately because there was no place for his views in the 'Labour family'

TIMELINE: HOW THE NAZ SHAH ANTI-SEMITISM ROW EXPLODED INTO A LABOUR PARTY BRAWL ON THE STREETS OF WESTMINSTER TUESDAY APRIL 26 7:53am: The Guido Fawkes website publishes a story revealing that in August 2014, Naz Shah shared a graphic on Facebook which offered a 'solution for Israel-Palestine conflict' that would be 'relocate Israel into United States'. The website said Ms Shah confirmed she was responsible for the post. 11.00am: Ms Shah issues an apology via the website, in which she said 'This post from two years ago was made before I was an MP, does not reflect my views and I apologise for any offence it has caused'. 1.20pm: Ms Shah quits as PPS to shadow chancellor John McDonnell and apologises again, confessing she 'made these posts at the heigh of the Gaza conflict when emotions were running high' but admitting 'that is no excuse'. WEDNESDAY APRIL 27 11.35am: Shadow energy secretary Lisa Nandy said Ms Shah should be suspended and investigated in line with normal Labour Party rules on anti-Semitism allegations. 11.37am: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn makes his first intervention, describing the remarks as 'offensive and unacceptable' but accepting a 'fulsome apology'. 12.00pm: Ms Shah's third apology emerges on the Jewish News website, admitting the language used was 'wrong' and 'hurtful' and offering an 'unequivocal apology'. 12.27pm: David Cameron uses Prime Minister's Questions to slam Mr Corbyn for failing to suspend Ms Shah. 12.45pm: Labour spokesman says Mr Corbyn believes the remarks were themselves anti-Semitic but that Ms Shah is not anti-Semitic. 2.35pm: Ms Shah appears in the House of Commons to raise a point of order and make a fourth apology for her remarks. She tells MPs 'anti-Semitism is racism' and promises to help build relations between different faiths. 4.07pm: Labour release a statement claiming Mr Corbyn and Ms Shah have agreed 'mutually' the MP will be 'administratively suspended'. THURSDAY APRIL 28 09.35am: Ken Livingstone appears on BBC Radio London and claims Hitler backed the removal of Jews before going 'mad' and launching the Holocaust. 10.22am: Jess Phillips becomes the first Labour MP to call for Mr Livingstone to be suspended. 11.42am: Ken Livingstone gives an interview to LBC Radio but is interrupted by John Mann who accuses him of being a 'Nazi apologist'. 12.25pm: Ken Livingstone and John Mann clash again, this time live on the BBC Two Daily Politics show. 1.24pm: The Labour Party issues a statement confirming Mr Livingstone's suspension.

How left-winger Ken Livingstone once called a Jewish journalist a 'Nazi war criminal', told property developers 'to try your luck in Iran' and hugged a sheikh who backed suicide bombings on Israeli children

In trouble: Ken Livingstone has been accused of anti-Semitism on a number of occasions, including when he compared a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard

By Martin Robinson, Chief Reporter for MailOnline

Ken Livingstone's suspension from Labour today for saying Hitler was a Zionist follows years of being dogged by claims he is anti-Semitic.

Red Ken once compared a Jewish journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard and asked him if he was a Nazi war criminal.

And also while Mayor of London he told Jewish property developers to 'go back to Iran and try their luck' - a nation notorious for its hatred of Israel.

Today he faces investigation for 'bringing Labour into disrepute' for comments which led to him being accused of being a 'Nazi sympathiser'.

He had defended suspended MP Naz Shah over offensive social media posts demanding Israelis move to America, with Mr Livingstone insisting that while her remarks were not anti-Semitic, just 'over the top'.

Mr Livingstone is no stranger to finding himself in hot water - in 2006 a High Court judge said he made 'unnecessarily offensive' and 'indefensible' remarks likening a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

He made his remarks after a party at City Hall marking 20 years since former Culture Secretary Chris Smith's became Britain's first openly gay MP.

When Mr Livingstone was asked by Mr Finegold, whether he had enjoyed the party, the mayor likened him to a 'German war criminal'.

When Mr Finegold told him he was Jewish and found his remarks offensive, Mr Livingstone said: 'Well you might be, but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard - you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren't you?'

He also told the reporter to 'work for a paper that doesn't have a record of supporting fascism'.

The resulting row ended up in the High Court in 2006 where Mr Justice Collins said: 'When he knew that Mr Finegold was particularly offended because he was Jewish, to go on to compare him to a concentration camp guard was indefensible.

'He should have realised it would not only give great offence to him but was likely to be regarded as an entirely inappropriate observation by Jews in general, and those who had survived the Holocaust in particular.'

Row: Ken Livingstone was recorded comparing Jewish journalist Oliver Finegold (right) to a 'German war criminal' , which ended up in the High Court

John Mann confronted Ken Livingstone at the Millbank TV studios in Westminster today, shouting at him while he completed one of many broadcast interviews today calling him a Nazi apologist

Mr Livingstone rose to power and prominence in the 1970s and 1980s when he ran the Greater London Council.

He became the face of the hard left, supporting everyone from striking miners to Sinn Fein's leaders at the height of the IRA's bombing campaign.

He famously goaded Mrs Thatcher across the Thames in Parliament during the turbulent 1980s by displaying the unemployment figures on City Hall.

His finance chief at the time was the now Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who he later sacked for being too left wing.

Mr Livingstone also co-edited the Labour Herald in the 80s that offered a unique and at times comically misguided take on the affairs of the day.

In 1983, for example, when co-edited by Ken Livingstone  then leader of the GLC  it ran a 'special photo report' praising the achievements of the murderous North Korean dictator, Kim Il-sung.

It also had an ugly habit of publishing articles that were regarded as virulently anti-Semitic.

A cartoon it printed in July 1982, under Livingstone's co-editorship, was headlined: The Final Solution.
the woman from behind while she was taking photographs

Jake Hart, 15, who was convicted of raping an Austrian woman on a canal towpath in Melling

A schoolboy attacked and raped an Austrian au pair as she walked along a canal towpath.

Jake Hart, 15, targeted his 20-year-old victim, who had come to the UK to work, on Thursday, December 10, last year.

Hart, from the village of Melling, Merseyside, admitted rape and assault causing actual bodily harm and was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison.

Liverpool Crown Court heard his victim feared for her life as he raped her.

Judge Robert Warnock said: 'You carried out a horrifying attack on a totally innocent visitor to this country.

'You repeatedly struck her, you caused her serious physical injury, you raped her. She was undoubtedly psychologically damaged in the extreme.'

He said that experts had 'concluded sadly and very rarely' that despite his age he poses a danger to others.

The victim was in Brewery Lane, Melling, standing on the canal path taking photographs of a flooded field, when she was grabbed from behind by Hart.

Martine Snowdon, prosecuting, said the woman tried to run away but was punched several times and when she screamed, he punched her in the eye.

Hart demanded she carry out a sex act and when the victim refused, he raped her.

When he had finished, Hart insisted on walking her to the road, where she managed to flee and flag down a man in a car saying: 'Help me, help me' after other motorists failed to stop for her.

The man followed Hart in his car but he escaped over a field while carrying his bicycle. DNA evidence was recovered and enquiries led police to the defendant's address the next day.

The victim was in Brewery Lane (pictured), Melling, standing on the canal path taking photographs of a flooded field, when she was grabbed from behind by Hart

He attacked the victim after earlier following another woman along the same path. She had been so worried she had alerted another dog walker about him.

Police said he showed 'no emotion' when he was arrested and was adamant that no DNA would link him to the crime.

Although he has no previous convictions he had made some admissions to police in 2012 after 11 women reported a male indecently exposing himself. He was not picked out on identity parades and police released him.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said she had given up her job and returned home. She suffers flashbacks, anxiety and cannot go out alone for fear of attack.

Sharon Watson, defending, accepted that Hart had been assessed by two experts as a dangerous offender.

She said: 'He is unable, it seems, to articulate the reasons he committed the offence, although to his credit he has been able to accept responsibility.'

Judge Warnock at Liverpool Crown Court, pictured, handed him an extended four years on licence

'He explained he was angry when he saw the complainant and saw red and against that background acted in the way he did.'

She said his parents are 'utterly horrified' by his behaviour but are supporting him.

Judge Warnock handed him an extended four years on licence when he is released.

He said: 'It is my earnest wish you will receive professional treatment and advice which will go to the prevention of such horrifying offences.

'It is imperative for society and for you that you receive the best professional treatment and advice that can be afforded to you.'
North Korea fired an intermediate range ballistic missile on Thursday but it crashed seconds after the test launch, according to South Korea's defence ministry.

It is the second such failure in the run-up to next week's congress of North Korea's ruling party, which is due to start on May 6, and could lead to a purge of those deemed responsible.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has conducted a flurry of missile launches in violation of UN resolutions and a defence expert in Seoul told Reuters the latest test appeared to have been hurried.

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A man in Seoul watches TV news showing file footage of a previous North Korean missile launch. North Korea has not shown footage of the launch, presumably because it was unsuccessful

Yang Uk, a policy adviser to the South Korean navy, said: 'They are in a rush to show anything that is successful, to meet the schedule of a political event, the party congress.

'They need to succeed but they keep failing. They didn't have enough time to fix or technically modify the system, but just shot them because they were in hurry.'

A South Korean defence ministry official said the missile was launched at 6.40am local time (9.40pm GMT on Wednesday) near the city of Wonsan on the east coast.

Kim Jong-un, seen here at a military parade last year, is desperate to test the Musudan missile successfully before the party congress on May 6. One South Korean analyst says the latest test appeared hurried

It appeared to have been a Musudan missile with a range of more than 1,800 miles, capable of reaching Japan or Guam.

He said it crashed within seconds of take-off.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency said the missile was not detected by radar because it failed to get above a few hundred metres, but it was spotted by a US satellite.

A man walks past a TV screen showing file footage of North Korean missiles at a railway station in Seoul. The constant signs of warmongering from Pyongyang are very disconcerting for most South Koreans

Thursday's apparent failure marks another setback for Kim Jong-un.

A similar missile launched on April 15 - the birthday of his grandfather, North Korea's founder, Kim Il-Sung - but exploded in a what the Pentagon called a 'fiery, catastrophic' failure.

Yonhap reported on Tuesday that the North appeared to be preparing the second launch of a Musudan.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye also said the North is ready to conduct its fifth nuclear test at any time, despite the imposition of tougher UN sanctions earlier this year which were as a direct result of previous tests.

Soldiers of the United Nations Command salute on Thursday in front of coffins containing the remains of UN and South Korean soldiers who were killed inside North Korea in the 1950-53 Korean War. The US retains a large military presence on the peninsula 60 years after the ceasefire

President Park said: 'Signs for an imminent fifth nuclear test are being detected ahead of North Korea's seventh party congress.'

North Korea is a one-party state and the ruling Workers' Party of Korea has not held a congress since 1980.

The gathering beginning on May 6 is seen as very significant in Pyongyang politics and it appears Kim Jong-un wants a successful missile launch to show off to his apparatchiks.
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A studio apartment, which is so tiny you have to leave it to go to the toilet, has gone up for sale for 295,000.

The flat is situated in Jefferson House in Knightsbridge, London - an area where the average apartment costs 4million - and is just a stone's throw away from Harrods.

The pint-sized apartment has just 156 sq/ft of living space - making it around one-third of the size of a London Underground train carriage.

The flat is situated in Jefferson House in Knightsbridge, London - an area where the average apartment costs 4million - and is just a stone's throw away from Harrods

The pint-sized apartment has just 156 sq/ft of living space - making it around one-third of the size of a London Underground train carriage

Against the wall is a tiny kitchen area, with a couple of cupboards, hooks to hang utensils and space for a microwave

To use the bathroom, you have to leave the studio and go out onto the apartment block's corridor and open the next door

The home has an open-plan living and sleeping space, separate bathroom and a kitchen area which is hidden behind a cupboard.

To use the bathroom, you have to leave the studio and go out onto the apartment block's corridor and open the next door.

The studio flat has now been put onto the market with Winkworth and is just 40,000 more than a car parking space currently for sale in the area.

It is likely to attract an investor who will re-configure the apartment so they don't have to leave it to use the bathroom.

Nick Tobin, sales negotiator at Winkworth, believes the studio would make a great investment for a savvy developer.

He said: 'It is a very dated property which has had very little done to it in 20 years but it has a lot of potential.

'It is in Prime London and is going to be more appealing to people who visit the capital for holidays or three-to-four times per month with work.

'Unfortunately it can't currently be used for AirBNB but if that changed I could see it making around 30,000 per year.

'The studio represents a cracking investment and most enquiries so far have come from developers.

'In a modernised condition and with a lease extension, I would say it would be worth around 485,000.'

The home has an open-plan living and sleeping space, separate bathroom and a kitchen area which is hidden behind a cupboard

The studio flat has now been put onto the market with Winkworth and is just 40,000 more than a car parking space currently for sale in the area

It is likely to attract an investor who will re-configure the apartment so they don't have to leave it to use the bathroom

There are now just 34 residential properties currently on the market in Knightsbridge for less than 1million.Lonres, the data company which tracks the property market in the capital, said the average apartment price in the area now sells for 3.98 million.

Just nine per cent of properties in the area sold for less than seven-figures last year with 31 per cent of properties selling for more than 5 million, Lonres added.

It is also subject to a 3,000 service charge and annual ground rent of 600.

The apartment, which has Harrods at the end of the street, is less than 200 yards away from One Hyde Park, where a penthouse once sold for a rumoured 140 million.
At the time the photograph was released Ms Montoya said it was 'immoral'

Mother also said she would pose for Playboy as she made announcement

A police officer who became an internet sensation after posing for a topless selfie in her patrol car has agreed to take part in a series of 'sensual shows'.

Nilda Garcia Montoya quit her job after being suspended while an internal investigation was launched when the sexy snap ended up on Facebook earlier this month.

Now the Mexican, who worked in the northern city of Escobedo in Nuevo Leon, has revealed she has accepted a proposal to tour the country's 'gentlemen's clubs' showing off her assets.

Nilda Garcia Montoya quit her job as a police officer after an internal investigation was launched when a sexy snap (left) ended up on Facebook earlier this month - but she has now revealed she has accepted a proposal to tour the country showing off her assets. She is pictured making the announcement at a lap dancing club (right)

She made the announcement in a revealing blue dress at a lap dancing club where she admitted she would be delighted to pose for Playboy if she got the chance.

She will appear under the stage name Polisex, an obvious play on her past as an officer.

Mrs Montoya, a 24-year-old mother of two daughters aged three months and five, insisted her family supported her radical career move.

She wrote on a new Facebook page today: 'People of Cancun get ready. I'll be with you soon.'

She added: 'I've just given birth to a child so I'm a bit chubby and having difficulties getting rid of my belly but I'm not famous enough to have a perfect body.

'I'm ugly and I admit it but it's better to accept it than hide behind something you're not.' The post also included another selfie of Mrs Montoya in a revealing vest top.

The 24-year-old, pictured in uniform before she quit her job, revealed a colleague had taken the snap during a dare and it was on a phone that was stolen last July

Local media reported several men's magazines and local businessmen had shown an interest in giving her a modelling contract after her topless stunt.

She admitted at the time it was an 'immoral act' and claimed on Facebook before quitting her job: 'I feel outrage at the damage that photo has caused because it mainly hurt my family including my two daughters, my husband, my parents and my siblings.

'I recognise I was at fault and beg forgiveness for this terrible situation. We're all human and we all make mistakes.'

She admitted this week the first thing she did when she saw the photograph had been released was cry.

She revealed a colleague had taken the snap during a dare and it was on a phone that was stolen last July.

The former police officer has not made clear how daring her show will be although it is understood she has stipulated in her contract she won't be baring all. Above, Escobedo in Nuevo Leon, where Mrs Montoya used to work

She claimed a mystery man began to call her a week and a half before it was published saying he had 'compromising' photos of her. He allegedly tried to blackmail her into a date, which she refused.

Nilda's new representative, Mario Rodriguez, also pulls the career strings of Mexican actress Lyn May, who worked as a go-go dancer before making her name working at a cabaret show in a Mexico City theatre.

Fans vowed to support Nilda in her new venture.

Oscar Castellanos said: 'I love you. I will be in the front row when you come to my city.'

The former police officer has not made clear how daring her show will be although it is understood she has stipulated in her contract she won't be baring all.
Germany's foreign minister has slammed Donald Trump's 'America first' policy after he said he would leave Europe to defend itself if it did not pay for protection from the U.S.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier said international conflicts - such as those seen in Ukraine and the Middle East in recent months and years - could only be solved when world powers such as the U.S. and Russia get involved.

'No American president can get round this change in the international security architecture,' Steinmeier said, adding: 'America first is actually no answer to that.'

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German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier slammed Donald Trump's 'America first' policy after the presidential contender said he would leave Europe to defend itself if it did not pay for protection from the U.S..

Steinmeier continued: 'I can only hope that the election campaign in the USA doesnot lack the perception of reality.

'The world's security architecture has changed and it is no longer based on two pillars alone. It cannot be conducted unilaterally.'

Trump outlined his foreign policy on Wednesday, saying that if he is elected president he will prioritize defending America and not other countries.

'We have spent trillions of dollars over time on planes, missiles, ships, equipment -- building up our military to provide a strong defense for Europe and Asia,' Trump said.

'The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense. And if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves,' he added.

Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister and foreignminister who served as UN envoy to the Balkans in the aftermathof the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, said he heard Trump's speechas 'abandoning both democratic allies and democratic values'.

'Trump had not a word against Russian aggression in Ukraine,but plenty against past U.S. support for democracy in Egypt,'Bildt said on Twitter, referring to lines from Trump's speechthat criticised the Obama administration for withdrawingsupport for Hosni Mubarak during the 2011 uprising.

Former South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Sung-han said Trump wouldbe 'the first isolationist to be U.S. presidential candidate,while in the post-war era all the U.S. presidents have been tovarying degrees internationalists'.

'Saying the U.S. will no longer engage in anything that is aburden in terms of its relationships with allies, it would bealmost like abandoning those alliances,' he said.

'It willinevitably give rise to anti-American sentiment worldwide.'

Xenia Wickett, head of the U.S. and Americas Programme atBritain's Chatham House think tank, said the speech 'suggestsTrump would make America's allies less secure rather than more'.

'He talked about allies being confident but all of hisrhetoric suggested that America should be unpredictable and thatAmerica's allies needed to stand up for themselves,' she added.

In his speech Trump pledged that Americans would 'know that we are putting the American people first again'.

'On trade, on immigration, on foreign policy  the jobs, incomes and security of the American worker will always be my first priority,' he said.

'No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Both our friends and enemies put their countries above ours and we, while being fair to them, must do the same. We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism.'

The real estate billionaire promised an easing of tensions with Russia 'from a position of strength only' along with the swift destruction of the ISIS terror army and a reset-button approach to NATO and other multinational alliances.

He called for a 'rebalancing of financial commitments' among NATO members to ensure fairer treatment for America, which foots the lion's share of the bills.

'Our allies are not paying their fair share ... the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves,' he said. 'We have no choice.'
Sajid Javid has admitted that he should have gone to Mumbai for a crunch meeting where Tata decided to ditch its UK steel assets.

The Business Secretary said 'with hindsight' he should have travelled to India for the meeting of the company's board.

But instead Mr Javid went on a trade trip to Australia accompanied by his daughter because he was not aware how important the event would be.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid was giving evidence to MPs on the Business Select Committee today

The admission came during bad-tempered clashes with MPs as he gave evidence to the Commons Business Committee on the crisis that engulfed the British steel.

The government has been battling to find a way of saving thousands of jobs at the massive Port Talbot plant and other sites.

David Cameron visited the South Wales steelworks earlier this week in a bid to assure workers of his commitment to support its future.

The government has said it is prepared to consider taking a stake in Tata Steel UK.

Stuart Wilkie, Tata Steel UK's director at Port Talbot and Llanwern, is working on plans for a management buyout.

Mr Javid told MPs that Tata in India had told the Government in mid February it was 'seriously considering' closing its steel operations in the UK, including Port Talbot.

The minister said his focus following the warning was to persuade Tata not to close plants immediately, but to give time to find another buyer.

Pressed by committee chairman Iain Wright on why he had not travelled to Mumbai for the crucial board meeting on March 29 rather than go on a trade mission to Australia, Mr Javid said he did not believe a decision to immediately close the plants would be taken.

'You were blind sided by this. You had no-one in your department able to pick this up. You looked like you were on the back foot after the Mumbai announcement and you were in crisis mode,' said Mr Wright.

Mr Javid said it might have been a good photo opportunity to turn up in Mumbai on March 29, but it would have been too late by then.

'A photo opportunity would not have helped the workers. What has helped is the work we have done since.'

But Mr Javid said that with the benefit of hindsight he would have been in Mumbai at the time of the board meeting last month.

Mr Javid said the situation was different with the closure of the SSI plant in Redcar because no potential buyers had come forward with a viable plan.

The massive Port Talbot Steel works has been under threat following the decision by Tata

However, Mr Wright branded his handling of the crisis an 'absolute disgrace'.

'The fact that mothballing for a future potential owner was not considered is an absolute tragedy,' he said.

'We have lost these skills forever. It is an absolute disgrace that was allowed to happen on your watch.

'We have lost a valuable asset.'

Giving evidence to the committee earlier, Tata executives blamed 'structural weaknesses' in the UK for its decision to sell its assets.

Chief executive Bimlendra Jha said he could not confirm a claim by Mr Javid that the company had planned to close the giant Port Talbot plant immediately.

He told MPs there was no set deadline for selling the loss-making assets, but made it clear that Tata could not continue to 'bleed' indefinitely.

'We would not be selling the business if we were not losing money,' he said.

If energy costs in Britain were the same as in Germany Tata would be 40 million better off, Mr Jha said.
A father was devastated to hear the man who was piloting the plane his daughter died in has walked free with a suspended sentence.

David Whitten lost his 11-year-old daughter Kayla in 2014 when a plane they were flying about 15-30m above Clarence River in northern NSW's Ewingar ran into power lines and crashed.

Kayla died at the scene from a fractured upper spine while her father and the pilot - John Patrick Crumpton - sustained major injuries including fractures and burns, the court heard.

Mr Crumpton, 55, was given a fully suspended sentence of 15 months for two reckless flying charges at the Sydney District Court on Thursday.

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John Patrick Crumpton leaves court after he was given a fully suspended sentence for two reckless flying charges

Kayla Whitten died after a plane Mr Crumpton was flying ran into power lines and crashed

Mr Whitten told reporters justice had not been served and he would appeal the sentence.

'It's unfair he gets to go home and go back to his family like nothing's happened,' he said.

During sentencing submissions, Mr Crumpton's lawyer Tony Bellanto told the court his client's decision to fly so low over the river 'was made with the best of intentions for the enjoyment of his passengers'.

'Got s***loads of that,' Mr Whitten interjected.

Mr Bellanto said Mr Crumpton 'gave into a momentary lapse (of judgment) thus hitting the wires'.

He said Mr Crumpton's actions were unusual for his noble character, supported by glowing testimonials from people in his community.

'I don't know how you can say a person's a good bloke when he's killed your daughter and dragged our broken family through a trial,' Mr Whitten said.

Mr Crumpton was acquitted of a manslaughter charge in February this year.

The plane (pictured) was flying only 15-30m above Clarence River in northern NSW's Ewingar

David Whitten (picture) was devastated to hear Mr Crumpton walked free with a suspended sentence

'I am 36 years old and the best days of my life are over,' Mr Whitten said in a victim impact statement in court.

'I wish and I had died that day with my daughter.'

Mr Whitten described how he had been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder following the overwhelming experience of waiting in the river with his dead daughter until emergency services arrived.

'My skin was burning as I screamed trying to resuscitate my beautiful angel.'

Mr Whitten said his wife Kirsty's health had deteriorated.

'I watch her every night cry herself to sleep, wishing she would die so that she can be with Kayla.'

Kayla died at the scene from a fractured upper spine while her father and the pilot sustained major injuries when the plane crashed into the Clarence River

The court heard Mr Crumpton's actions were unusual for his noble character, supported by glowing testimonials from people in his community.

Mr Whitten yelled out, 'coward', as he passed Mr Crumpton on the way back to his seat.

Judge North told the court that in time, one can only hope 'the pain will be a little easier to endure'.

He noted both Mr Whitten and Mr Crumpton made 'brave and desperate' attempts to reach Kayla after the crash.

The court heard it was Mr Crumpton who retrieved the girl's body and then walked 4km to find help.

Crumpton apologised to the family later that day at Lismore Hospital and paid them reparations of $300,000.
A police officer fatally shot a man who was stabbing a woman in Miami.

The cop was on patrol at 2am on Thursday in the Little Havana neighborhood when he saw the attack.

He opened fire, killing the man, then rushed to treat the woman.

The woman was taken to hospital in a critical condition.

Miami Fraternal Order of Police President Javier Ortiz called the officer - who has not been identified - a hero, saying he saved the life of an innocent bystander.

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The scene in Miami's Little Havana after an officer shot dead a man who was stabbing a woman on Thursday

'It was justified,' Ortiz said at a press conference screened by NBC Miami.

'The officer of course is now in a state of shock. No one comes to work and says: Hey, I want to get in a shooting.

'However, he did his best and his best was neutralizing the threat and saving the life of not only this woman but countless other people that were in the area.'

The woman and her attacker, who appeared to know each other, have not been identified.

The incident will be investigated by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
'Embarrassed' tourists missed ship and are now trying to get back to U.S.

Pair are reported to be alive and well after speaking with relatives

Couple had been travelling on the Royal

A couple who were reported missing on a Jamaican island after their cruise ship departed without them are alive and safe, according to relatives.

There were fears for the safety of Hayden Gerson, 33, and Alisha Frank, 32, from California, after they were last seen disembarking at Falmouth Pier in Trelawny two days ago.

But Gerson's mother, Margot, has now told ABC News that the couple have been in touch with her and are fine, though a little embarrassed after missing their ship.

Found: Hayden Gerson, 33, and Alisha Frank, 32, have been found alive and well two days after they went missing from a luxury Jamaican cruise while on the island of Trelawny

Margot Gerson, Hayden's mother, says she has spoke to the pair who are fine, though a little embarrassed after missing their ship, and says they are now making their way back to the U.S.

Gerson, who is the father of a young daughter, and Frank are now trying to find their way back to the U.S., Margot added.

Police said the couple were planning to make a trip to Montego Bay - a popular tourist city on the island - before they disappeared.

The had been travelling on the Royal Caribbean ship Oasis of the Seas.

'While on board, they asked to debark the ship in Jamaica. The ship team assisted them with this request and were escorted to immigration,' said Cynthia Martinez, a spokesperson for Royal Caribbean.

Authorities had hoped to track the pair via social media, but Frank had vowed to stay off such sites earlier this week.

She posted on her Facebook and Instagram accounts: 'I have decided to take a much needed break from social media for the next seven days.

'I challenge each of you to do the same by consciously leaving your phone at home while you go out into the world to explore.

The two were last seen at the Falmouth Pier leaving the Oasis of the Seas (above) as they went into town

Police believe the couple was planning to make a trip to Montego Bay - a popular tourist city on the island that features duty-free shopping and golden sand beaches when they failed to return to the boat

'It is up to each of us to take a break and come back to our inner goodness by being as present as possible.Wish me luck!I miss you guys already.xoxo.'

Ms. Frank, who details her past struggles with drugs on her blog, now works as a a life coach, Reiki Master, yoga instructor, intuitive healer and writer.

Such disappearances from cruise ships are surprisingly common - on average one person a month goes missing from luxury liners.

While many resurface only hours or days later - and are more often than not hit with Immigration Act charges - some have disappeared entirely.

Cruise Law News reports that in the past four years there have been six passengers who have gone missing in Jamaica, but that all were eventually found safe.
Fears are growing that a British grandmother on Death Row in Bali could be killed within months after Indonesia hinted at more executions.

Lindsay Sandiford, 59, from Redcar on Teesside, has been on death row since December 2012 after attempting to smuggle cocaine into Bali after arriving on a flight from Bangkok.

Almost a year ago today - on 29 April 2015 - the so-called Bali Nine, who included two Australians, were executed by firing squad almost a decade after being arrested.

Lindsay Sandiford is pictured in her cell in Kerobokan jail. Last year it was reported that she had set up a knitting group in jail to raise funds for legal fees

The executions provoked a stream of outrage from Australia - one of Indonesia's biggest trading partners - and the withdrawal of Canberra's ambassador.

Before the executions went ahead Australia's then prime minister Tony Abbott implied that Indonesia owed them a favour after A$1bn was donated in aid for the 2004 tsunami, but his comments led to angry Indonesians delivering plastic bags full of coins to the Australian embassy.

The British granny admitted smuggling in 4.8kg (10.6lb) of cocaine but said she was pressured by a drugs gang

Sandiford and other Death Row convicts were given hope last year when a reprieve on executions was announced.

Sandiford is pictured in December 2012 after she was arrested in Bali with a consignment of cocaine. She admitted smuggling it in from Bangkok but claimed she had been pressured by a criminal gang

Indonesia said President Joko Widodo would not authorise any more executions pending efforts to revive the economy, which was growing at its slowest pace in six years

But Indonesia's Attorney General HM Prasetyo recently suggested a resumption of executions was possible.

Last week President Widodo visited Britain and Prime Minister David Cameron was urged beforehand by Amnesty International to raise the Sandiford case and human rights in general with him.

The focus of the meeting was clearly on trade.

Afterwards a Downing Street spokesman said: 'They discussed how to strengthen the bilateral trade relationship, including through todays agreement for Indonesias national airline to upgrade its aircraft to a new Airbus model with Rolls-Royce engines, in a deal worth nearly 1billion to the UK economy.

'And they considered new commercial opportunities, such as in infrastructure, particularly around the 2018 Asian Games, and the creative industries.'

But a Foreign Office spokesman told Mail Online on Thursday: 'We oppose the death penalty in all circumstances and have made repeated representations on the issue to the Indonesian government at the highest levels.

'The prime minister expressed UK opposition to the death penalty personally to Indonesias President Widodo during his visit to the UK earlier this month.'

A year ago Andrew Chan (centre, left) and Myuran Sukumaran (centre, right) were executed by firing squad in Indonesia. The pair, both Australian citizens, were members of the so-called Bali Nine

Britain is the fifth largest foreign investor in Indonesia.

Amnesty International researcher Padang Hedayat said trade deals must not be made by the UK government at the expense of condemning the deeply troubling human rights abuses which have taken place under President Widodos leadership.

Mr Padang added: This is a president whose ruthless war on drugs led to 14 executions last year to the horror of the watching world, with more promised for this year.'

Indonesia executed 14 people, including 12 foreigners, in total last year and Mr Prasetyo suggested a further 10 people will be executed this year.

Sandiford sounded philosophical when she was interviewed by the Mail on Sunday last year.

She said: Im nearly 60 and a lot of people dont live to be this age. Being lined up and shot isnt the ending Id pick, but everyone has to go somehow.

Firing squads are made up of 12 paramilitary police, three of whose rifles are loaded with live ammunition, while the other nine rifles contain blanks.
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The deserted pubs of outback Australia have been captured in an eerie photo series showing rusted tin rooves and boarded up doors and windows.

Photographer Ryan Cremer, 42, based in Albury at the NSW and Victorian border, has travelled across neighouring towns in the Riverina area to capture the abandoned pubs for his photo series Last Drinks.

Over the past few years, Mr Cremer snapped spooky pictures of deserted pubs with rusting roofs and temporary wire fences around them in towns Balldale, Moulamein, Albury, Howlong and Alfredtown.

The Conargo Hotel (pictured) was built in the 1850's but following a fire in 2014 it today remains abandoned behind a wire fence

The Balldale Hotel was reportedly robbed six times before the owner finally closed-up, according to photographer Ryan Cremer

Mr Cremer has been photographing deserted pubs in the Riverina region in NSW for his photo series 'Last Drinks'. Pictured: The Balldale Hotel

Some of the pubs were still open, but empty or run-down.

Whilst many pubs in the Riverina area of Australia are thriving, more and more it seems are sliding into extinction, the photographer said.

Many of the pubs are still trading, many have also closed.

The Balldale Hotel, for example, was reportedly robbed six times before the owner finally closed-up. Meanwhile, The Shanty Hotel, located in Alfredtown, could not be sustained with a small local population of only 88. The Conargo Hotel, built in the 1850's suffered a fire in 2014 and remains abandoned behind a wire fence, Mr Cremer explained.

The Pretty Pine Hotel on the Cobb Highway is still trading after first opening its doors in 1916 when it replaced the original which was destroyed by a fire

Pictured: The Balldale Hotel in the NSW Riverina which closed its doors after it was reportedly robbed six times

Many of the pubs are boarded up, some of them re-purposed as residential quarters or reopened for other commercial pursuits. Some of the liquor licences from the pubs were transferred to new venues established for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.'

The Pretty Pine Hotel on the Cobb Highway is still trading after first opening its doors in 1916 when it replaced the original which was destroyed by a fire.

The Blighty Pub is still trading after opening in 1941 to meet the demand of a growing population after a large settlement of soldiers.

Each establishment has its own history, soul, and lore and demonstrate significant resilience,' Mr Cremer said.

The Riverina area is known as the food bowl of Australia for its agricultural production.

The Shanty Hotel, located in Alfredtown, could not be sustained with a small local population of only 88, said Mr Cremer, and it was closed in 2009

The Blighty Hotel is still trading after opening in 1941 to meet the demand of a growing population after a large settlement of soldiers

The Kyalite Pub remains open after it was bought in 1988 by new owners who restored it to its original appearance

The Burrajaa Hotel opened in Lowesdale in 1912 and was de-licensed in August 1999

The Howling Hotel in the NSW Riverina region, known for its agricultural production, remains open after it was established in 1858

Mr Cremer has been photographing pubs in outback Australia over the past few years. The Yanco Hotel remains open after it was established or rebuilt in 1930

Wentworth's Royal Hotel Motel is the oldest pub in the Sunraysia area according to the Visit NSW website

Each establishment has its own history, soul, and lore and demonstrate significant resilience,' Mr Cremer said
Two women were arrested after police found them living in an filthy minivan with an astonishing thirty-eight cats and new-born kittens.

When police were called to check on a homeless family living in their van, they found the cats including days-old kittens squashed inside a cup holder.

The officers from Sandy Springs in Atlanta, Georgia said they were overwhelmed by the stench of urine and feces.

Filth: Two women were arrested after police found them living in a dirty minivan with an astonishing thirty-eight cats and new-born kittens

Stench: The officers from Sandy Springs in Atlanta, Georgia said they were overwhelmed by the stench of urine and feces

Horrific conditions: Tim Poorman of Fulton County Animal Control, said they had to dig through trash on their hands and knees

Extreme cat ladies: Alexandra Wingate (left), was in the car and told police she was a local vet waiting for her mother Sharyn Wingate (right); Officers later discovered they had warrants out for their arrests

Alexandra Wingate, 41, was in the car and told police she was a local vet waiting for her 70-year-old mother Sharyn Wingate.

The pair said they had stopped off at a local store to pick up some water but the officers later discovered they had warrants out for their arrests on animal cruelty charges.

They were arrested after allegedly violating their probation by owning animals, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The cats will be treated by vets before being put up for adoption at Fulton County Animal Shelter.

Karen Hirsch, of the LifeLine Animal Project, told the outlet that 34 of the 38 cats are healthy and ready to be adopted.

'Out of the four who aren't ready for adoption, one is pregnant, one is nursing kittens, one is FIV positive [feline immunodeficiency virus] and one has an upper respiratory infection,' she said.

Tim Poorman, of Fulton County Animal Control, said that they were digging through trash on their hands and knees to find the animals.

'In their mind they think they're doing a good thing but in reality they're not, he told Fox5 Atlanta.

Squalid: When police were called to check on a homeless family living in their van, they found a pounce of cats including days-old kitties squashed inside a cup holder

Cruel: Karen Hirsch, of the LifeLine Animal Project, told the outlet that 34 of the 38 cats are healthy and ready to be adopted

Karen Hirsch, of the LifeLine Animal Project, said that 34 of the 38 cats are healthy and ready to be adopted
A cat who faced total heart failure has been given his own life-saving pacemaker in an incredibly rare operation.

Shady, an eight-year-old tabby, was taken to Walker Green Vets in Timperley, Greater Manchester, for a routine examination when vets discovered he had a slow heart rate.

The pet then underwent further cardiology tests which revealed he had what vets described as a complete heart block.

Shady the cat who faced total heart failure has been given his own life-saving pacemaker in an incredibly rare operation. He is pictured with his owner Laura Hutchinson

The condition put him at high risk of heart failure, but vets said a pacemaker could save his life.

A team of specialist then carried out the intricate operation.

Although pacemakers are common in humans, they are rare in others animals such as dogs and are even more rare in cats.

The clinic's head nurse Emma Greene, who assisted with the procedure, said the team felt a mixture of excitement and nerves.

He said: 'The procedure had not been performed at Walker Green before, so we wanted to ensure that the day ran as smoothly as possible.'

The operation - which was covered by Ms Hutchinson's insurance - involved accessing Shady's heart through his belly and attaching a special lead to the outside of the muscle while it is still beating.

This lead, which connects to a pacemaker, can detect when Shady's heart fails to beat and sends an electrical impulse.

The pet underwent cardiology tests which revealed he had what vets described as a complete heart block

The team of specialists involved were veterinary cardiologist Emily Dutton, from Cheshire Cardiology, surgeon Catherine Sturgeon, from Visiting Vet Specialists, and Carl Bradbrook, a veterinary anaesthetist.

Ms Greene added: 'As the operation progressed and it was time to suture the lead to Shady's heart, Catherine asked me to use my fingers to lift Shady's sternum up so that she could get a good view, I could feel his heart beating against my finger.'

The procedure is rare in cats because of their size. Whereas dogs have larger veins and they can put a pacemaker in through the shoulder, a cat's has to be inserted through the abdomen.

A team of specialist vets then carried out the intricate operation at Walker Green Vets in Timperley, Greater Manchester. Pictured with Shady (left to right) are head nurse Emma Greene, Ms Hutchinson, Veterinary surgeon Luke Ainsworth and veterinary cardiologist Emily Dutton

A similar operation carried out in Singapore cost $5,000, which is about 3,500.

Shady was sent home to recover. He returned to see the team of specialists last week for his post-op check-up and is fighting fit.

His owner Laura Hutchinson, who said she was 'shocked and worried' when she found out Shady needed a pacemaker fitted, said: 'He has recovered really well. He's quite a placid cat so he has just been taking it easy but he's becoming more playful.

'The team have been excellent. Emily has been in contact to check up on Shady and Ben and his staff looked after us well.'

'We are all over the moon that Shady has made such a good recovery,' added Emma. 'It makes us feel proud that we have been able to do this for Shady and his owner.'

RSPCA London veterinary director Caroline Allen said: 'Fitting a pacemaker is a very specialist procedure which would be done by a cardiologist.

'It is quite common for pacemakers to be fitted in dogs but I've not heard of them being used to treat cats before because they don't tend to get the type of heart condition that would require one.
Britain's most married man has been arrested for allegedly harassing his eighth wife.

When Ron Sheppard, 67, from Martock in Somerset, celebrated his 11th wedding anniversary with Weng Platino, 36, he insisted she would be his last.

But she ended the marriage earlier this year and at the end of January the father-of-eight proposed to Filipino call centre worker Cristel Marquez, who is 40 years younger than him.

Ms Platino now claims she was harassed by him - an allegation Sheppard denies.

Weng Platino, pictured with Sheppard (left, on their wedding day) and (right, celebrating their 10th anniversary in 2014) gave him the boot after 11 years of marriage

Ron Sheppard, 67, got down on one knee and proposed to Filipino call centre worker Cristel Marquez in a bar in the Philippines

Speaking from his home, he revealed he was arrested just days after splitting up with his ninth wife-to-be, Ms Marquez (left)

He was arrested while in hospital being treated for suspected heart failure and a clot on his lung, and later questioned under caution. He has been bailed until Sunday.

Speaking from his home, he revealed he was arrested just days after splitting up with his ninth wife-to-be, Ms Marquez.

He said: 'Three days before I went into hospital she took me out and we did some shopping and went for a meal.

'I bought her a card and flowers for her birthday, and it was a nice day.

'Then 11.30pm at night, when I have just been moved onto a ward, I was arrested for harassment.

'I didn't feel very well at all.

'I have been given unconditional bail until Sunday and I think it will all be dropped.'

Sheppard has spent 44 of the last 47 years married and his longest union lasted 13 years and the shortest was just 10 months.

He first got married in 1996 to Margaret, when he was just 19. They had three children together but divorced after two years.

In 1973, he married Jeanette for one year, before he tied the knot with Lesley three years later - having two boys in five years.

He had one daughter with Kathy during their four-year marriage from 1982 to 1986 and had two sons with Sue, who threw him out in 1997 after 11 years.

In 1999 he married Singaporean Usha, but that also ended after four years, before his shortest marriage with Wan, from Bangkok, in 2003.

He married Ms Platino on the Isle of Wight in November 2004 and he said she was 'the one' when they celebrated their 11th wedding anniversary last year.

Sheppard first walked down the aisle in 1966, when he married his first wife Margaret, at the age of just 19

Sheppard married third wife Lesley in 1976 and they had two children together but left her five years later

In November last year, he went to the Philippines alone for a four-week charity trip, and ordered a leg massage in his hotel room, which was carried out by Iza Samontes, 27,

Sheppard said there was a security lock-down due to President Obama attending a nearby economic meeting, she forced to stay in his hotel room.

He denies they had sex, and simply slept in the same room, but Ms Platino demanded a divorce.

Cristel Marquez shows off her engagement ring after Sheppard popped the question in January

He proposed to mother-of-one Ms Marquez, 27, who he met when she was 16, while he was married to Wan (wife No7) and living in Thailand.

Unemployed Ms Marquez lives in Pampanga with her mother and was married previously, but split up with her husband six years ago.

Sheppard had intended to marry her in England in September this year and adopt her son Miggs, seven.

But he claims while he is still going ahead with his divorce to Ms Platino, him and Ms Marquez have called off their marriage.

'It was just too confusing,' he said.

'She has a child, and there was the annulment and the divorce.

'I'm not really up to travelling any more and she wanted to stay in the Philippines.

'We are still good friends and that, but I'm on my own at the moment, until the next one.

'I've never been on my own.

'I'm not looking for anyone at the moment, but if anything happened I'd be looking for somebody in England.

'I have had people contact me online [since I split up with Weng]. You would be surprised. I suppose it must be my personality.

'But I'm being very cautious at the moment.'

He met Weng after splitting from his seventh wife, Wan (right), when she returned to her home in Bangkok after eight months. Pictured (left) is Sheppard now

Sheppard said he is exploring taking legal action over his arrest in hospital.

A spokesman for Yeovil Hospital said: 'We have made it clear that we feel coverage of this issue is entirely inappropriate and we will not be commenting on the details of this individual case.

'However, we will say that a strong partnership with local police is fundamental to the running of a safe and responsible hospital and we have a public duty to enable them to undertake investigations.

'If this involves approaching a patient we will always ensure it is clinically appropriate to do so.'

A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Constabulary said: 'We can confirm that a 67-year-old Somerset man was arrested at the hospital on April 1 on suspicion of harassment.
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Miles of rugged terrain stretch into the distance with mountains rising up as far as the eye can see.

Few bushes dot the sparse landscape while the roads and paths which cross the area are covered in dust and sand.

This impenetrable scene was shot as part of a series of aerial photographs taken on the US-Mexico border, where Donald Trump has promised to build a 40ft dividing wall if he becomes president.

This impenetrable image is one of a series of aerial shots taken on the US-Mexico border near Tijuana, where Donald Trump has promised to build a 40ft dividing wall if he becomes president

They shed light on the challenge facing the Republican, whose campaign suggested in a memo the 1,000-mile wall would be paid for by targeting billions of dollars in remittances sent by immigrants living in the U.S., if he were to try and carry out his plan.

Photographer Pablo Lopez Luz set out with the goal of capturing the entire man-made section of the border, which is far smaller than Trump's proposed barrier and is only made out of corrugated iron in places.

The 37-year-old revealed he was inspired to carry out the project when looking at a mountainous view of Tijuana, which he had photographed in 2007.

The 'Frontera' project was shot over three different sessions, with each shoot varying in length and success. A book of the images is set to be released later this year.

The photographs shed light on the challenge facing the Republican, whose campaign suggested in a memo the 1,000-mile wall would be paid for by targeting billions of dollars in remittances sent by immigrants living in the U.S

Photographer Pablo Lopez Luz set out with the goal of capturing the entire man-made section (seen above) of the border, which is far smaller than Trump's proposed barrier and is only made out of corrugated iron in places

Other images show the harshness of the environment, with sand and dust covering the few roads and paths that wind through the area

Before each session Mr Luz researched the topography, geography and vegetation of each location, giving him a rough idea of what to capture.

Conditions - such as the weather, lighting, height and the helicopter's speed of movement - also needed to be considered for each shot.

The United States border with Mexico is almost 2,000 miles long with around 350 million legal crossings being made annually.

The proposed wall would cost an estimated $8billion, Trump said. Other commentators have suggested the construction could cost much more, with some extending it to $25billion.

But the cost does not seem to have put off some supporters - the mere mention of the word 'wall' elicits booming cheers and applause at Trump's rallies, where people sometimes dress in wall shirts and costumes.

Mr Luz said he deliberately took the pictures to show that both sides are the same. Above, El Paso (left) and San Diego (right)

The current fence, which features in many of Mr Luz's photographs, is far smaller than 40ft and has gaps in some places, such as the one above

Mr Luz said he deliberately took the pictures to show that both sides are the same.

He added: 'I believe this is a subject which has been enclosed with absurdity since the beginning. Trump's remarks have been catered towards a very specific audience which seems to be content with his oversimplified, fictitious ideas.

'What worries me more is not the recurring hate-speech of this man but the fervent following it has been received with.

'When seen from a bird's eye point of view, it is easier to actually understand the physicality and complexity of the border.
A flight was forced to make an emergency landing at Seattle-Tacoma Airport on Wednesday, after the plane struck a flock of birds on take-off, causing a huge dent in the nose.

American Airlines flight 2310, took off from Sea-Tac around 3:36pm on Wednesday, headed for Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.

Shortly after take-off, one of the pilots radioed Air Traffic Control, saying that they had struck one or two birds on take-off and that they would need to make an emergency landing to determine the damage.

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An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing shortly after taking off from Seattle-Tacoma Airport on Wednesday, because of a bird strike that resulted in a huge dent to the nose cone

The pilot told air traffic controllers, according to LiveATC.net: 'Looks like we hit some birds after takeoff, were gonna need to go back and have the airplane looked at.'

The plane landed back at the airport a little less than an hour later, at 4:25pm. News crews who were on the scene took video of the Airbus A321 returning to the airport, with a large dent on the nose of the airplane.

Sea-Tac officials tweeted that there 150 passengers on the plane, as well as six crew members, and that no one was injured.

The flight from Seattle to Dallas/Fort Worth took off at 3:36pm and then returned to the airport to assess the damage at 4:25pm. A new plane was brought out and the flight continued on to Texas at 6:50pm

There were 150 passengers and six crew members on the flight, none of which were injured. Bird strikes are uncommon, but typically happen on take-off or landing

The nose cone contains important weather radar technology. Airport spokesman Perry Cooper told the Seattle Times that there was not enough damage to put anyone in danger.

The passengers were deplaned and then a new plane was brought out to take them to Dallas/Fort Worth, taking off at 6:50pm.

'Our maintenance team is currently evaluating the aircraft,' the airline said in a statement. 'We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience, and are working to get them to Texas as soon as possible.'

The body of the bird or birds that struck the airplane will be sent to the Smithsonian to determine what kind of birds they are.
A 20-year-old who went on the run after he allegedly killed another man outside a casino has been arrested in Wyoming after spending six days at large.

Jared Jerome Stone was wanted for first degree murder after Baptiste Paul WhiteEyes, 27, was shot in the head outside Lucky Lady Casino in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on Friday night.

He has now been arrested in southeastern Wyoming after leading officers in a pursuit through parts of the state and Nebraska, Keloland TV reported.

Jared Jerome Stone, 20, (pictured in surveillance video at Lucky Lady Casino) is on the run after allegedly shooting Baptiste Paul WhiteEyes in the head in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on Friday night

WhiteEyes (left) had children with Stone's girlfriend, family told police. Stone then fled the casino with 26-year-old Lachara Bordeaux (right), who later notified the police and said she was being held at gunpoint

Stone fled the scene with 26-year-old woman before updating his Facebook profile claiming he acted in self defense.

Lachara Bordeaux, 26, who has claimed he held her at gunpoint, managed to escape outside a truck stop in Le Mars, Iowa, police say.

Stone had updated his Facebook page on Tuesday night, writing: 'Sorry to all of you...If anything it's self defense f**k all of you who doubt me', the Argus Leader reported.

The two men got into a fight in the parking lot outside the casino after surveillance video showed them approaching a clerk together, the Argus Leader reported.

According to the local news site, family members told police Stone, a felony drug offender, was dating the mother of WhiteEyes' children.

Stone shot WhiteEyes in the head with a handgun and fired a second time after the victim fell to the ground, according to an arrest warrant cited by KSFY.

Police arrived just before 7pm on Friday and the 27-year-old was pronounced dead at the scene.

Stone then texted another girlfriend and the mother of his child, 'I jus killed someone I'm sorry,' which she showed the police when they questioned her.

He left the scene with Bordeaux, who police believe was driving the stolen getaway car.

The car was recovered less than two miles away from the casino after midnight on Saturday, KDLT reported.

The getaway car, which police believe was driven by Bordeaux, was found hours later less than two miles away from the casino (left). Four days later, Bordeaux and Stone were in Le Mars, Iowa 80 miles from Sioux Falls (right)

In two Facebook posts made on Tuesday night, the 20-year-old made posts under 'Jay Stone' on Facebook apologizing, claiming it was self defense, and saying he was going to vanish

On Tuesday morning, the 26-year-old woman notified the police at a truck stop 80 miles away in Le Mars, Iowa.

'She had an opportunity to flee from the vehicle and approached a citizen who was able to make a phone call to law enforcement,' said Lieutenant Robert Bendlin.

When authorities showed up, Stone was gone, and Bordeaux was arrested in connection to the shooting.

Bordeaux is held at the Plymouth County Jail in Iowa, and faces extradition to South Dakota where she faces two felony counts of acting as an accessory.

Bordeaux filed a report that she was held against her will at gunpoint and Le Mars Police Lt. Robert Bendlin told KDLT she is considered a victim in Iowa.

Around 9pm Tuesday, Stone made two posts to his Facebook under 'Jay Stone' alluding to the shooting, the Argus Leader reported.

In the first, he wrote: 'I can't change what happened but I'm sorry for the hurt I caused. Everyone know I will defend myself, not run.

'I didn't want to fight over childish reasons. This isn't my fault, I defended myself [and] just because I got a felony on my record don't mean I'm going to give my guns up.

The two men got into a fight in the parking lot outside the casino (pictured) after surveillance video showed them approaching a clerk together. WhiteEyes died at the scene

'About to vanish I love my fam and the real friends...No matter what happens let my baby girl remember the father I was.'

In a second post, he wrote: 'Sorry to all you I know who he was and nobody knows what happened, only me and him...

'He wouldn't stop with the bull**** and if anything it's self defense, f*** all of you who doubt me.'

Police do not think Stone stayed in Le Mars, but have asked residents in the area to take precautions and stay vigilant.

Stone was convicted twice for the possession of methamphetamine. He told a judge in March 2015 he had taken parenting classes and gotten his GED in an effort to have the felony removed from his record, according to the Argus Leader.

Stone is 5'7", 160 pounds and considered armed and dangerous.
ISIS fighters have launched a bid to stop multi-million pound military drones spying on them - by covering whole streets with sheets in their Syrian stronghold.

The terror group has ordered its beleaguered residents in Raqqa to help create the make-shift shield after becoming increasingly fearful of the threat posed by the unmanned aircraft.

Pictures show sheets stretched out between buildings in the city's narrow streets in an attempt to create cover for the extremists.

Scroll down for video

ISIS fighters have launched a bid to stop multi-million pound military drones spying on them - by covering whole streets with sheets in their Syrian stronghold

The terror group has ordered its beleaguered residents to help create the make-shift shield after becoming increasingly fearful of the threat posed by the unmanned aircraft such as this MQ-9 Reaper

The images were released by the activist group Raqqa is being Slaughtered Silently, which reported that the sheets were put up to 'prevent drones from targeting (ISIS) fighters.'

Military drones, such as the US MQ-9 Reaper, cost up to $17million and are capable of carrying out high-altitude surveillance and airstrikes.

According to the Daily Telegraph, ISIS security chiefs issued a letter to residents earlier this week saying: 'We are all partners, which means every house must pay 2,000 Syrian pounds (6) for installation of the sheets, which we began putting days ago in some of the main streets in order to prevent aerial spying on its fighters.'

US Colonel Steve Warren told Newsweek that the tactic was not unheard of - but did not say whether it was effective.

He said: 'They've been using this tactic for a year. Extensive use in Ramadi but also everywhere else. 'They also use tunnels.'

Drone attacks are a common tactic used in the battle against ISIS - especially in and around Raqqa.

The images were released by the activist group Raqqa is being Slaughtered Silently, which reported that the sheets were put up to 'prevent drones from targeting (ISIS) fighters'

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the terror group's chief executioner Jihadi John was killed in a drone strike so powerful that it left his remains like a 'greasy spot on the ground'.

Colonel Warren said the terrorist  real name Mohammed Emwazi  was killed close to midnight on a night in November.

He had been walking along the main square in Raqqa while talking on a mobile phone, but as he moved towards a parked car, he was hit by a drone missile.

Col Warren said: 'I watched the video when we killed Jihadi John.
A teenage thug winked to his family and friends as he was jailed for tying up and threatening an 83-year-old woman in a terrifying raid.

Jordan Holt, 17, and an older accomplice, who is yet to be caught, smashed their way into a couple's home in Wilmington, Kent.

The hooded teenager held the couple, who have not been named, at knifepoint - leaving her and her 86-year-old husband traumatised.

The woman had survived a V2 bomb which targeted a church during World War Two.

Jordan Holt, 17, and older accomplice, who is yet to be caught, smashed their way into a couple's home in Wilmington, Kent

The hooded teenager held the couple, who have not been named, at knifepoint - leaving her and her 86-year-old husband traumatised.

A jury at Maidstone Crown Court heard that they both 'thrown to the floor' face down on September 25 last year, with the woman's hands tied behind her back and her husband having his hands and ankles tied together.

Holt and his accomplice dragged the couple to the kitchen before stealing a 12,000 diamond Rolex Oyster from his wrist.

The raiders had a six-inch knife and threatened the couple, demanding to know where their safe was before ransacking the house - smashing china ornaments and vases.

They also ripped out the phone line and stole jewellery worth thousands of pounds, before speeding off in the couple's white 65,000 Jaguar XF.

The couple did eventually manage to free themselves after the hooded raiders left and called the police.

Officers arrived at the scene and found Holt's DNA on the tights he used to tie up the couple.

The court heard how Holt was on bail for another burglary and had previous convictions from theft, handling stolen good and racially aggravated public disorder.

Jordan Holt, from Dartford in Kent, was jailed today

Recorder Mark van der Zwart told Holt, who admitted aggravated burglary, he had 'terrorised' the couple.

He told him: 'She (the female victim) had survived quite literally the worst that the Nazis could throw at her in the Second World War and she and her husband had led a law-abiding life.

'You shattered the peace that they then had and were looking forward to having in their home that they had worked for for many years.'

He told the court that the victims had been 'frightened for their lives' and 'would never be the same again'.

He added: 'One can only imagine the true shock and terror that elderly couple felt when you and your colleague subjected them to that terrorising ordeal.

'They speak of the fear and confusion that they continue to have as they go about their home and which they no longer wish to live in because of you.'

Bridget Todd, prosecuting, told the court that the victims had been left severely affected by the raid.

She told the court: 'She (the female victim) finds herself hiding everything around the house and gets confused and flustered.

'She was scared and described the effect on her husband.

'There has been a big change and he appears to have lost interest in everything and walks around as if he doesn't care and is vacant a lot of the time and shuts himself off.'

None of the property stolen, including the Jaguar car, has been recovered, nor Holt's accomplice - said to be in his mid-20s - arrested.

Holt, of Dartford, Kent, was jailed for five years and four months.




Taxi companies are hoping to flood Sydney streets with cabs to ensure passenger who book are picked up more promptly.

In December, the Baird government placed a four-year freeze on the release of taxi licences in a hope the move would help 'the industry adjust' to Uber and other ride-sharing services.

But Cabcharge have made a controversial proposal to combat the 'capacity restraint' on the market by scratching the cap on plates and introducing more taxis across Sydney.

'To arbitrarily go, 'right, no more licences for four more years, you can't grow'  I think that's nuts,' NSW Taxi Council, Cabcharge chief executive Andrew Skelton told The Sydney Morning Herald.

Taxi companies are hoping to flood Sydney streets with cabs to ensure passenger who book are picked up more promptly

Cabcharge have made a controversial proposal to combat the 'capacity restraint' on the market by scratching the cap on plates and introducing more taxis across Sydney

In 2012, the value of taxi licence plates were at an all time high of $430,000, but last year recorded a plunge of 41 per cent to $210,000.

NSW has almost 7500 taxi licence plates and around 5700 of those are in Sydney alone.

'We are all looking for a strong and viable industry  but we just have to make sure we chart a very careful pathway,' NSW Taxi Council chief executive Roy Wakelin-King said.

He said the freeze on taxi licences was justified as they were already flooding the streets.

In 2012, the value of taxi licence plates were at an all time high of $430,000, but last year recorded a plunge of 41 per cent to $210,000

In December, the Baird government placed a four-year freeze on the release of taxi licences in a hope the move would help 'the industry adjust' to Uber and other ride-sharing services

In late 2015, the NSW government announced licence plate owners would receive a capped $20,000 per taxi plate.

This leaves passengers paying a $1 levy for each trip to help pay for a $250 million compensation package, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Mr Skelton said taxi companies risked losing customers if the cap on plates was not scratched as the licences 'lose value' the 'less relevant' cabs become.
A business student blew more than 700 on a spontaneous trip to Spain following a night in the pub - before flying back home just six hours later.

On the spur of the moment, Northumbria University student Dexter Panashe travelled 1,376 miles from Newcastle to Magaluf, blowing hundreds of pounds from his student grant and savings.

He packed just two pairs of short, two t-shirts, headphones and an apple and a banana before getting on a flight to Palma at 9am on Monday morning.

Business student Dexter Panashe (pictured) blew more than 700 on a spontaneous trip to Spain following a night in the pub - before flying back home just six hours later

But just a few hours after arriving in Spain, the 20-year-old remembered he had an important lecture to attend, so headed back to Palma Airport to catch a return flight.

When no direct flights to Newcastle were available, Dexter flew to Manchester before paying a taxi driver 260 to drive him back up to Newcastle so he could get to university on time.

He arrived home at 3.20am and had just five hours sleep before getting up on Tuesday morning to do his presentation.

Speaking about his spontaneous trip, he said: 'It was the feeling, the adrenaline, you just take a leap and think "I need to do this", that is what is was.

'When you are feeling that good in your life, when you get a thought in your head, a positive thought, you should do it.

'Don't think about it, don't look back. I was there for six hours. We got in the hotel and got showered and went straight to the pool.

'I remember coming back up from the pool and packing my bag. I didn't even sleep there.'

Dexter, who studies International Business Management, was with a friend when he decided to take the last minute trip.

Just a few hours after arriving in Spain, the 20-year-old (left) remembered he had an important lecture to attend, so headed back to Palma Airport to catch a return flight. He is pictured on the flight (right)

When his friend did not want to go on holiday, Dexter bumped into two other pals friends Sean Stanley, a DJ, and Max Cooper, a club photographer, in Newcastle who agreed to go along.

When they arrived at Newcastle International Airport they choose to fly to Palma, which he originally thought was in Italy, but was advised by fellow holidaymakers to go to Magaluf.

Dexter said: 'I Googled flights leaving Newcastle and there was Amsterdam and Palma. I thought Palma was in Italy.

'I thought you can go to Amsterdam any time, but Palma is a place somewhere different. We did Google it and found out it was in Spain. People thought we were crazy.

'One girl said "you need to go to Magaluf, it is only 20 minutes in a taxi", so in the end we decided to go there.'

He said they got a taxi to Magaluf, went for a stroll, got into a hotel, relaxed in the pool and had a couple of drinks.

The student arrived in Magaluf (file picture, above), went for a stroll, chilled in his hotel pool and then flew home

He said: 'I had a presentation on the Tuesday. I think it was about 7pm at night on the Monday I was texting my university group on Facebook. They were worried I was going to let them down. I would never let them down.

'I remember apologising, telling them I had gone on a spontaneous trip but would be back. They didn't believe me.

'I realised how quickly the time had gone and told the boys I needed to get back. They knew how important university is to me. I said, you boys have a good time and I'm glad we did this.'

Dexter returned to Palma airport in a taxi alone while his friends stayed in Magaluf for the night.

There were no direct flights to Newcastle so he ended up paying 185 to fly to Manchester instead.

He arrived at midnight and paid for a taxi so that he would have enough time to sleep and prepare for the presentation the following day.

Dexter used his savings from working and 120 of his student grant to pay for the trip.

He said: 'When I look back I am glad I did it, I'm gutted about how much I actually spent if it wasn't for the taxi ride it wouldn't have been as bad.
His huge collection is now up for grabs at auction and could fetch 5,700

He stored it all in cases inside his garage - but died three weeks ago

The Aer Lingus pilot, from Bristol, started collecting the wine in the 1970s

A spectacular collection of more than 2,000 bottles of wine belonging to a pilot who visited Duty Free shops almost every time he flew has been found in his garage.

The wine-loving airman made a point of picking up cases of discounted plonk at destinations he had flown into before returning to his home in Frenchay, Bristol.

But he passed away three weeks ago and his daughter flew from Australia to sort out his funeral arrangements and she told an auction house there was some wine in her father's garage.

Auction experts were then called to deal with the late Aer Lingus pilot's estate and were stunned to discover that his garage was crammed floor to ceiling with 190 crates of wine.

A spectacular collection of more than 2,000 bottles of wine amassed by an airline pilot who cashed in at Duty Free shops almost every time he flew has been found stored in his garage in Bristol

The wine-loving airman made a point of picking up cases of discounted plonk at destinations he had flown into before returning to his home in Frenchay, Bristol

The wine - which was valued at costing an average of 5 a bottle - was from all over the world and from countries including Argentina, Chile, Italy, France and Spain.

His impressive collection consisted of 2,280 bottles - with 1,600 being red, 340 white and 340 rose.

Experts from Charterhouse Auctioneers in Sherborne, Dorset, have now looked through the expansive collection, which will go under the hammer on May 18 next month.

They are offering 24 bottles of the pilot's wine - some of it bought during the 1970s - for 60. This means his huge haul of plonk is up for grabs for 5,700.

And it wasn't just cases of wine which was discovered in his garage as those working for the auctioneers also came across 90 cases of spirits.

Some of the bottles of wine found in the pilot's collection included a 1978 Vina Real from Spain (left)) and a 1999 bottle of Australian red (right)

The pilot's huge collection of wine (pictured) was discovered in his garage in Frenchay, Bristol, after he died. It was pictured with other bottles collected by the auction house

David Baines, a wine specialist at Charterhouse, pictured with one of the pilot's bottles of 1974 Rioja

His spirit collection including Irish whisky, scotch, vodka, liquor, drambuie and amaretto and it will also go under the hammer next month.

And the experts probably thought they had consumed a few of the bottles themselves when they cleared the boxes and found a time-capsule car behind them.

The 1992 Talbot Horizon GL motor was found with just 318 miles on the clock and it was won by the pilot as a raffle prize held by his employer, Aer Lingus.

Those working for the auctioneers also came across 90 cases of spirits in the pilot's garage, including bottles of Smirnoff vodka (pictured)

Wine specialist Mr Baines was photographed holding a bottle of the pilot's scotch whisky

It hadn't been taken out of the garage in 24 years having been blocked in by the boxes.

Both the wine collection and the car are now being sold by Charterhouse Auctioneers in Sherborne, Dorset, with the car estimated to fetch 4,000.

David Baines, a wine specialist at Charterhouse, said: 'Sadly, the owner had recently died and his daughter asked us to clear his semi-detached house in Frenchay in Bristol.

'While we were there his daughter said there was a lot of wine in the garage as well as a car.

'We opened it up but couldn't move for wine.

'We couldn't see what type of car it was as it was hidden by the wine which was in boxes floor to ceiling.

'The owner was an airline pilot for Aer Lingus who obviously enjoyed his wine and spirits because he had a vast stock of it.

Mr Baines added: 'Every time he went on a trip he always came back with a case of wine from the Duty Free.

'He collected it because he enjoyed drinking it. He just like to have a good selection of wine in.

'It is not outstanding wine but quite good, drinkable stuff.

The 1992 Talbot Horizon GL motor (pictured) that has just 318 miles on the clock was won by the pilot as a raffle prize held by his employer, Aer Lingus

Both the wine collection and the car are now being sold by Charterhouse Auctioneers in Sherborne, Dorset, with the car estimated to fetch 4,000

The car (pictured) had not been taken out of the garage in 24 years because it was blocked in by the boxes. It was found with just 318 miles on the clock

'His particular lot consists of 190 cases of wine and 60 cases of spirits.

'The bottles contain everyday wine bought during the 1970s, 80s and 90s and even more recently through to 2007.

'It seems like collecting wine and spirits was his hobby and it looks like he spent around 5 on each bottle of wine.

'He passed away around three weeks ago and his daughter flew back from Australia to sort out his funeral.'
Dentist Peter Aimiuwu (pictured) is facing a 200,000 legal bill after he and his wife were sued by their neighbours for blocking their 'right to light' with an extension

A dentist and GP who had planning permission to build an extension on their 1.65m home are now facing a 200,000 bill after losing a legal battle over the development blocking their neighbours' light.

Peter Aimiuwu and his doctor wife Catherine were given permission to build an extension at the back of their home in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire.

But they ended up in a court after their neighbours Peter and Frances Scott sued, despite failing to lodge an official complaint over the application.

The Scotts, who live in the 1.1m home next door, had wanted to object over the plans but feared damaging their 'cordial' relationship with the Aimiuwus.

But a judge found in the Scotts' favour, agreeing that the extension blocked their windows and left part of their house in the shade.

Now the Aimiuwus have been ordered to pay costs of more than 200,000 to cover both theirs and the Scotts' legal bill.

Sitting at the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Briggs to ordered the Aimiuwus to pay 90 per cent of the Scotts' costs, with 100,000 up front, before the full amount is eventually assessed.

Their lawyers had argued that the Aimiuwus should only pay their court fees, rather than their overall legal costs.

But, the judge said that would allow the already-expensive case to result in 'further substantial bills'. The couple had already been awarded more than 31,000 in damages.

Meanwhile, the Scotts claim they have been forced to move because of the dispute and have put their home on the market.

She told MailOnline: 'We are moving. The court case is still going on they are supposed to have paid us 140,000 in costs and so far all we have received is 30,000.'

The court was told how the row began in June 2012 when the couple began work on the extension.

Ahead of the development, the couples were on good terms.

But building surveyor Mr Scott, 51, said he and his 49-year-old management skills trainer wife became worried about the impact it would have on light at the back of their property when they were shown the plans.

Mr Scott then wrote to Hertsmere Borough Council - not objecting - but hinting at potential issues which might 'scupper' the development.

He said he did not want to damage the relationship with his neighbours and was 'shocked' when permission was granted.

He then did all he could to persuade them not to go ahead with the work, the court was told.

In a hearing over the issues at Central London Court Court last February, Judge Edward Cole also said he understood why the Scotts had not complained.

Peter and Frances Scott (pictured), who live in the 1.1m home next door, had wanted to object over the plans but feared causing tension between the two couples. They took their neighbours to court and won damages

The judge said: 'Given the neighbourly relationship it would have been awkward at the least to be making a hostile response to an application that he hoped would be rejected.

'He knew that his letter would be available to be read on the council's records and he was hoping that a letter in this form would not appear too unfriendly.

'Unfortunately, from his point of view, what he hoped would happen did not materialise.'

He added that the Aimiuwus had been careless in carrying on with the work without their neighbours' support and considered the 'right to light' an issue that did not affect residents in the suburbs.

'The attitude taken by the defendants appears to have been that it was not an issue because they had planning permission,' he said.

He also rebutted Mr Aimiuwu's claim that there had been an agreement between the couples that they would not object to planned work at each other's houses.

He said: 'There is a good deal to be said for the view that the Aimiuwus' behaviour does not entitle them to sympathy.

The court was told how the row began in June 2012 when the couple began work on the extension at their home (left). Ahead of the development, the couples were on good terms

A judge found in the Scotts' favour, agreeing that the extension blocked their windows and left part of their house in the shade. Their house in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, is pictured above

'They were aware of the Scotts' objections - if not before the works commenced, very soon afterwards - and those objections were sustained.

'They appear to have underplayed the significance of the impact that their work would have on Mr and Mrs Scott and their rights of light.'

WHAT IS RIGHT TO LIGHT? James Souter, a solicitor who advises on right to light issues, explained: 'Rights to light are entirely separate from the planning process. 'They are private rights to receive light over a neighbouring property. 'Even if your neighbour has planning permission to build an extension, this doesn't authorise an interference with your light. 'Therefore, the impact on a neighbour's right to light should be considered prior to applying for planning permission to ensure there aren't problems further down the line.' Advertisement

Judge Cole also said that experts agreed the extension had resulted in loss of light in a bathroom and a garage which the Scotts - who had lived there since 1997 - used as an occasional workshop and office.

The couple's rights had been infringed, leading to an adverse impact on their 'use and enjoyment' of their home, he found.

Mr Aimiuwu said the couples had agreed not to complain about one another's extension work.

He claimed they had kept their end of the bargain in not objecting to an extension at the front of the Scotts' house and expected their neighbours to do the same.

But the Scotts denied ever making such a binding agreement and Judge Cole agreed it was 'inherently improbable' there had been one.

After the ruling, Mrs Scott, told the Evening Standard: 'We asked the Aimiuwus to change the design of their extension  long before they started building it.

'We feel the Aimiuwus brought the difficulty and costs of this matter on themselves.'
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.

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Prior to Priceline, he introduced WiFi and loyalty card at Starbucks

Under Hutson, Priceline's market value has increased by 173%

The firm will fly him and his family to the US from their home in Holland

Darren Hutson, the married chief executive of travel giant Priceline Group Inc, has resigned following an investigation that found he had an affair with an employee that violated the firm's code of conduct.

The company said that Huston, who has been the CEOsince January 2014, has acknowledged his misconduct andexpressed regret.

According to a statement, the employee was not under Hutson's direct supervision but the relationship involved activities banned by the firm.

His resignation is effective immediately. He has also resigned as CEO of Booking.com, Priceline's biggest unit alongside Kayak and OpenTable.

Priceline confirmed the company will pay for Hutson and his family, based near Booking.com's headquarters in the Netherlands, to fly back to the United States.

Darren Hutson (pictured), chief executive of travel giant Priceline Group Inc, has resigned following an investigation that found he had an affair with an employee that violated the firm's code of conduct

DARREN HUTSON CAREER Trent University, Ontario (1989) Canada Dept of Finance, policy adviser (1990-2) Harvard Business School (1994) McKinsey, engagement manager (1994-8) Starbucks, senior VP (1998-2003) Microsoft US, corporate VP (2003-5) Microsoft Japan, CEO & president (2005-8) Microsoft, corporate VP (2008-11) Booking.com, CEO (2011-16) Priceline Group, CEO & president (2014-16)

Hutson, who has led Priceline since January 2014, was seen as a strong CEO, who oversaw the firm's acquisition of OpenTable, a restaurant booking site worth $2.6billion.

He also brokered a deal to land a stake in China's travel agency CTrip - a pivotal move to tap into the country's growing market.

Under his leadership, the firm's market value has soared 178 per cent in just over a year.

Since he joined Booking.com - part of Priceline Group - the firm's operating profits have gone up from $1.40 billion to $3.26 billion.

And the firm has grown from 5,000 employees to 15,000 in the last four years.

When the news broke on Thursday, Priceline's shares suffered an immediate dip, slumping 1 per cent.

The online travel agency operator has appointed former CEO andcurrent chairman, Jeffery Boyd, as interim CEO while the boardconducts a search to name a successor.

At Booking.com, he will be replaced by Chief OperatingOfficer Gillian Tans.

'I am satisfied with the Board's thorough review of thisissue,' James Guyette, lead independent director, said in astatement.

'The performance of the business under Darren has been strong, and the Company is very well-positioned to continue executing on its strategy for growth.

'Jeff is deeply familiar with the Company's strategy and leadership team, which consists of highly accomplished entrepreneurs and seasoned professional executives with long-tenure in the business.

'We are confident the Company is in strong hands while we conduct a search for a new CEO.'

Prior to Priceline, Hutson was Senior VP of Starbucks from 1998 to 2003.

He pioneered the Starbucks Card and led the roll-out of Wi-Fi to Starbucks cafes globally.

Canada-born Hutson attended university in Ontario before taking a job as an environment policy advisor in Canada's Department of Finance.

He then took a place at Harvard Business School, graduating in 1994.

When the news broke on Thursday, Priceline's shares suffered an immediate dip, slumping 1 per cent

His first job after graduating was at consulting firm McKinsey, working as an engagement manager from 1994 to 1998.

In 1998, he took the coveted role of senior vice president at Starbucks.

He left Starbucks to be corporate vice president at Microsoft US (2003-2005), before being promoted to president and CEO of Microsoft Japan (2005-2008), then corporate VP of Microsoft (2008-2011).
Two men who were kept afloat by clinging on to oil rigs have been rescued after nearly 48 hours out at sea.

Michael Watkins, 51, and Raymond Jacik, described as boaters, were reported missing Monday and were last seen aboard a white and red 20-foot Larson boat, according to KPRC-2.

The pair left Bayshore Park, Texas, at 7 am Monday and were expected back on dry land six hours later.

Rescued: Two men who were kept afloat for 48 hours by clinging on to oil rigs have been rescued after nearly 48 hours out at sea. The pair left Bayshore Park, Texas, at 7 am Monday and were expected back on dry land six hours later

Lucky to be alive: They were air-lifted to safety in a dramatic helicopter rescue and were taken to hospital after suffering dehydration and exhaustion

But when they didn't return, family members alerted the coast Galveston County Sheriff's office.

When they were eventually found by the Coast Guard on Wednesday afternoon, the men were found floating just half a mile away from each other - with neither knowing if the other was alive.

Coast Guard officials said they had been in the water since Monday, when their boat capsized.

Jacik had grabbed on to a ice cooler to stay afloat and used it to make his way to an oil rig where he remained until his rescue.

Meanwhile, Watkins was half a mile away also clinging on to an oil rig.

They were air-lifted to safety in a dramatic helicopter rescue and were taken to area hospitals.

Speaking from hospital, Jacik, who was dehydrated and sunburned, told KPRC-2 he was able to survive the storms Tuesday night 'by the grace of God'.

Coast Guard officials said they had been in the water since Monday, when their boat capsized. Raymond Jacik (pictured being helped by air crew) said he survived 'by the grace of God'.

Jacik (pictured in stretcher after the rescue) described how the cold, dark nights were the worst. A friend of the pair said they thought the rescue team were going to find bodies, not survivors

Michael Watkins (pictured right after the rescue) used an oil rig to stay afloat and said he was 'thankful to be back on dry land' and thanks the rescue team for their role in his recovery

He said: 'You get out there, the middle of the night, holding onto a pipe that feels like it's full of nails, or razor blades, and don't know how long you're going to be bear-hugging that thing.'

Meanwhile, Watkins released a statement that read: 'I am thankful to be back on solid ground and with my family. I am forever thankful for the Coast Guard, EMS and Bay Area Regional for their role in my rescue and recovery. I request privacy for my family and I during this time.'

Friends and family were filmed celebrating at the local pub after the pairs' rescue and many of their fisherman friends had gone out themselves to look for them.

David Dunford said: 'We thought we were going to find bodies, we're not going to find people.'

Emergency response boats and several Air Station rescue helicopters had been searching the area since 10 am Tuesday.
The skipper of the doomed cruiseliner Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, has begun his appeal against a 16 year jail sentence handed out last year.

The ship sank off the coast of the island of Giglio in Tuscany, Italy, on January 13, 2012 with the loss of 32 lives.

Schettino, 55, was dubbed 'Captain Coward' after it was revealed he had fled the ship before the 4,200 passengers were safely ashore.

The trial heard that Francesco Schettino (pictured) had taken his lover, dancer Domnica Cemortan, onto the bridge on the night of the accident. After the ship ran aground on rocks Schettino told her to 'save herself'

In February last year he was given ten years for manslaughter, five for causing a shipwreck, one for abandoning ship, and a further month for giving false information to port authorities.

But as is the case with most Italian criminal cases he was not sent straight to jail but released pending his appeal.

His legal team is now seeking to overturn his manslaughter conviction in an appeal which began on Thursday and will run through until the end of May.

The Costa Concordia ran aground on rocks off the coast of the island of Giglio but 32 people died after becoming trapped underwater. The ship was finally righted in September 2013 and was towed into Genoa harbour in July 2014, where it was slowly dismantled

During his trial Schettino was accused of showing off to his lover, Moldovan nightclub dancer Domnica Cemortan, when he steered the ship too close to the island.

The prosecution is also simultaneously appealing against the sentence, which they claim is too lenient and Schettino should have been given 26 years.

Lawyers for survivors have also pointed the finger at the ship's owner, Costa Crociere, a subsidiary of the giant Carnival Corporation.

The company sidestepped potential criminal charges in 2013 by accepting partial responsibility and agreeing to pay a one million euro (780,000) fine.

Under Italy's legal system if Schettino loses his appeal he can still ask for the case to be looked at again by the Court of Cassation, the country's highest court.

The Naples-born captain resented the accusation of cowardice and unprofessionalism and claimed he had 'fallen' into a lifeboat as the Concordia rolled.

'I will fight for ever to prove that I did not abandon the Costa Concordia,' he said after his conviction.

It was dark when the ship hit rocks and began to tilt ominously to starboard. British dancer Joe Stribley said at the time: 'I saw that the ship was starting to sink and extreme panic set in and I thought that I was going to die'

The ship's Indonesian helmsman accepted a non-custodial sentence.

The trial heard he could have averted the disaster but did not understand an order given by Schettino to change course just before the collision.

Survivors of the disaster who had rejected Costa's initial compensation offer and become civil parties in the Schettino case were awarded an average of 30,000 euros (23,000).

Their lawyer Massimiliano Gabrielli said: 'Justice has begun to be served, but there is something important missing from the dock; the society behind Schettino's acts.

'We want the question of responsibility to be widened, notably concerning Costa Crociere.'

Schettino was also banned from public office for life and from working as a ship captain for five years.
As Captain she could lead around 150

Captain Kristen Griest will become America's first ever female Army infantry officer as she graduates from training today.

She has completed the Maneuver Captains Career Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, passing a two-month leadership course necessary for holding a command position.

Captain Griest has already completed Ranger and Airborne School and could take charge of her infantry unit of about 150 soldiers in Spring next year.

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Ground-breaking: Captain Kristen Griest will become America's first ever female Army infantry officer as she graduates from her training course today

Women were banned from combat positions until 2013 when the long-standing limitation was overturned by the Pentagon.

But it was only in December 2015 that Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered all combat positions to be made open to women.

Captain Greist became the first woman to complete Ranger School last year, after which she returned to serve at her home base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Her course at the Ranger School was part a research program undertaken by the US Army to determine whether women should be admitted into combat units.

A spokesman at Fort Benning, Georgia said: 'Like any other officer, male or female, that wants to transfer their branch, she took the opportunity and applied for an exception to the Army policy to transfer her branch from Military Police to Infantry.'

Happy: Captain Kristen Griest (right) became the first woman to complete Ranger School last year, after which she returned to serve at her home base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky

Sue Fulton, a member of the 1980 West Point class that was the first to include women, told the Fresno Bee that she has full confidence in Captain Griest: 'Having gotten to know her, I can tell you that the last thing Kris... is the kind of officer we need in the infantry: extremely tough, smart, a quiet professional and a team player.

'She is the first of a select group of women who will step up to the challenges of Army Infantry, and make it stronger through their talent and selfless service.'

As of 2015, women make up about 15 per cent of the U.S. military. More than 165,000 women are enlisted and active in the armed services with over 35,000 additional women serving as officers.

This summer Fort Benning will see 22 women will enroll in its Armor and Infantry Basic Officer Leadership Courses.
Carly Fiorina plans to keep singing on the campaign trail  but now shell keep her melodies restricted to the Cruz campaign bus, Ted Cruzs new running mate said Thursday.

The former Hewlett-Packard exec got asked about her adorable singing by CNN host Alisyn Camerota a day after she decided to roll out a tuneful ditty when Cruz revealed that she will run alongside him if he gets the GOP nomination  a prospect made less likely by Donald Trumps stunning wins this week.

Well on the bus for sure, Fiorina responded when asked whether shell keep singing as Cruz campaigns across Indiana.

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Carly Fiorina plans to keep signing on the campaign trail  but now shell keep her melodies to the Cruz campaign bus, Ted Cruzs new running mate said Thursday on CNN

Look Alisyn, campainning is tough. But campaigning can be joyful as well. And I think every day should be a joyful experience and for me, singing to little girls or singing to my granddaughters or singing to my dogs is a source of joy.

The joyful campaigning line is also one used by failed GOP candidate, though he eventually got into nasty fights with Trump, who mercilessly ridiculed the former Florida Governor as low-energy.

Fiorina was forced to account for some of her less-joyful campaign statements from her own failed campaign  she dropped out of the race after coming in seventh in New Hampshire.

She ripped Cruzs signature Senate filibuster in 2013 and even hit him on his past Canadian citizenship.

Now she and Cruz have become pals, and she has taken a particular liking to his two daughters, having herself lost a step-daughter to addiction

I dont agree with my husband about everything, and Ted Cruz and I have differed on tactics, Fiorina said Thursday.

Now she and Cruz have become pals, and she has taken a particular liking to his two daughters, having herself lost a step-daughter to addiction.

Anyone who knows Ted Cruz knows that he is a thoughtful, deliberative man. He doesnt do anything in a rush and he doesnt do anything in a panic, she said.

Weve gotten to know each other very well over the last seven weeks, she added.

She said neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton will fight the system because they are the system.

She defended her past decisions as an executive to outsource jobs, saying that many occurred within the US. The issue could be dicey here in Indiana, where voters are fuming over job losses.

Ill stand on my record, Fiorina said.

Its true that many jobs that I outsourced from California went where? Texas, she said.




An award-winning Hollywood filmmaker who was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer four years ago has chosen to dedicate her life to rescuing dogs in Los Angeles.

J.D. Disalvatore, who enjoyed a 30-year film career working behind-the-scenes on movies like Armageddon, Dante's Peak and The X-Files, hopes to make LA a 'no kill' city before she dies.

A full-time volunteer at the East Valley Animal Shelter, Disalvatore is working on a documentary about the movement called How To Save A Dog.

'This is a subject that just really deeply matters to me. There's no reason we, as a civilized society - we're so proud of ourselves as Americans - kill dogs and cats,' she told KTLA 5.

'I'm determined': J.D. Disalvatore, who enjoyed a 30-year Hollywood film career working behind-the-scenes on movies, hopes to make - or at least contribute to - LA a 'no kill' city before she dies

Advocate: Disalvatore was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer four years ago and found a new cause

Her film credits include Eating Out 2, A Marine Story, Gay Propaganda, Elena Undone and Shelter, for which she won the GLAAD Media Award for best feature film in limited release in 2009

Disalvatore continued: '(Dogs and cats) are only here because we make dogs and cats, because we want them to be our pets.

'It needs to be 'no kill' before I die. They will be putting me in the grave and I'll be like ''no, no, we're not no kill yet!''. I'm determined. I think we can do it.'

Disalvatore, who is also a prominent gay rights activist, said she drew on her history with the LGBT movement for this new endeavor.

'The 2000s really were the tipping point for the gay rights movement. I feel like now we can easily apply what we did there. Basically everyone just got involved and stepped up.

'These guys don't have a voice.'

A full-time volunteer at the East Valley Animal Shelter, Disalvatore is working on a documentary about the movement called How To Save A Dog

Disalvatore has not spoken much about her cancer, other than the fact it is terminal.

She said she built up the idea for her film after starting to volunteer at her local animal shelter.

How to Save A Dog is a feature documentary project taking a look at what it takes to rescue animals in America and the millions of unwanted dogs and cats are euthanized each year.

'When I started volunteering at my local animal shelter, I didn't know the first thing about animal rescue,' Disalvatore told Edge Media Network.

'As in any revolution or triage situation, you have hundreds of people in so many different capacities working together (and sometimes at odds) to rescue, foster, transport, groom, train, rehabilitate and find homes for the millions of unwanted dogs and cats in America.

J.D. Disalvatore, who enjoyed a 30-year film career working behind-the-scenes on movies like Armageddon, Dante's Peak and The X-Files, hopes to make - or at least contribute to - LA a 'no kill' city before she dies

Disalvatore continued: 'I was not only captivated by the ingenuity, bravery and gumption of the rescuers, but also completely sucked into the world of the animals themselves. I feel compelled to share that with everyone. Especially people that are interested in helping.'

Her film credits include Eating Out 2, A Marine Story, Gay Propaganda, Elena Undone and Shelter, for which she won the GLAAD Media Award for best feature film in limited release in 2009.
Police will take no action against online trolls for abusing a family who complained that their horse photobombed a prize-winning picture 'without their permission'.

Father David Bellis, 31, from Prestatyn, North Wales, was branded 'shameful' for not getting the horse owner's consent when the animal photobombed his toddler's picture, which he then entered into a competition and won a holiday.

However, Mr Bellis was then told by the horse's owner Nicola Mitchell in February that he did not have her consent to photograph the horse and she claimed she was contacting Thomson Holidays to complain.

Father David Bellis, 31, (left) from Prestatyn, North Wales, was branded 'shameful' for not getting the horse owner's consent when the animal photobombed his photo with son Jacob (right) , which he then entered into a competition and won a holiday. Police will be take no action over online abuse hurled at the owners of the horse

The row resulted in Ms Mitchell and her family receiving a torrent of abuse and her father Phillip Dunn, 67, contacted North Wales Police claiming that online trolls had threatened to break his granddaughter's legs.

Police have now confirmed they have probed the matter and found no crime has been committed.

PC Katherine Jones said: 'We have investigated the matter and no offences have been disclosed.'

Mr Bellis says his three-year-old son Jacob had taken the photo of the duo enjoying a walk together when a horse in the background looked up and 'smiled', even sticking out his tongue.

The dad-of-one and partner Rhian Jones, 31, entered the picture into Thomson Holiday's 'Made Me Smile' competition and scooped a 2,000 trip, which would be their first family getaway.

Mr Bellis said: 'I'm relieved that the whole episode is now over. I hope the family affected by this are OK as I am a family man myself and never meant any harm when we took the photo.

Mr Bellis was told by the horse's owner Nicola Mitchell (right with daughter Katelyne) in February that he did not have her consent to photograph the horse and she claimed she was contacting Thomson Holidays to complain

'We never thought it would cause any issues for anyone and to hear they suffered abuse online was horrible.

'I was really worried for a while when the row erupted and I thought Thomson might take the holiday back off us.

'Jacob was in tears as he thought he was no longer going to get to go on holiday - and it was going to be our family's first time away together.

'I was so relieved to hear a few days after the row erupted that we can still go. I'm really pleased and we're really looking forward to it.

'I've had hundreds of messages, probably about a 1,000 to be honest, and all of them have been so supportive.

'One man even told me if we have the holiday taken off us he would have paid for another as he is a travel agent. Thankfully we won't have to take him up on the offer now.'

Mr Bellis (right) says his three-year-old son Jacob (left) had taken the photo of the duo enjoying a walk together when a horse in the background looked up and 'smiled', even sticking out his tongue

The dad-of-one (right) and partner Rhian Jones, 31, (left with son Jacob) entered the picture into Thomson Holiday's 'Made Me Smile' competition and scooped a 2,000 trip, which would be their first family getaway

Mother-of-three Ms Mitchell, also from Prestatyn, bought the horse Betty for her daughter Katelyne three years ago and Betty has since been taught to stick out her tongue.

Speaking in February, the secretary said: 'I was really annoyed to hear he had won a 2,000 holiday and had used a picture of our horse without our permission. He should have asked for our consent.

'It's not like it's just 100. 2,000 is a lot of money and would go quite a long way for a family.

'I didn't give him permission to use our horse in a competition. I will be phoning Thomson Holidays to tell them what has gone on but I don't know what they will do. But I will tell them I'm not happy.

'There should be some token of gesture as it is our horse that has really won them the holiday.

'I didn't even know that this competition was on. If I had known about it we would have entered it ourselves and could have won as Betty is always sticking out her tongue.'

Mr Bellis received messages from Nicola's friends calling his actions 'shameful' and demanding he hand over half the winnings (pictured)

Mr Bellis, who works on off-shore wind turbines, had been walking with Jacob down a path that goes past the field where Betty the horse was staying at the time.

Jacob asked to take a photo of the duo to show mum Rhian the fun they were having, when father and son were surprised to find a nearby horse had decided to get involved.

The bizarre sequence shows the horse look up and smile, before baring a toothy grin and finally seemingly laughing.

He said at the time: 'The field is right behind our house, in fact you can see our home in the pictures.

'Jacob loves the horses and wanted to show mummy a picture of us enjoying the day so we posed up with a horse quietly eating grass in the background.

Mr Bellis, who works on off-shore wind turbines, had been walking with Jacob (pictured) down a path that goes past the field where Betty the horse was staying at the time

'I couldn't believe it when I realised the horse had decided to pose up for the photos too. He started out as a smirk and then started grinning wildly, he looked absolutely crazy. He clearly loved being in front of the camera and enjoyed the attention.

'When I saw Thomson Holidays were running a competition with smiling as the theme I thought of this picture that I had taken back in November and thought it was worth entering. I never thought I would win so we were all over the moon when I did.

'Jacob was particularly happy as he sees the picture as his. I never thought of asking anyone for consent for the horse - it was clearly viewable from the road, so why would I? I just don't understand it at all.'

Thomson Holidays confirmed that David will get to keep the holiday regardless of the row.

A Thomson Holidays spokesperson said at the time: 'We can confirm that despite questions over foal play, Mr Bellis and his family will still be receiving their holiday.

'And we're sure they will hoof a good time.'
A armed and dangerous Texas inmate, who escaped jail with the help of his mother and girlfriend, has been caught, authorities said.

Jay Scott McEvers, 47, escaped from the Van Zandt County Detention Center in Canton at 8pm on Wednesday.

Authorities confirmed he had been captured on Thursday morning, according to ABC News, but no other details were released.

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Recaptured: Jay Scott McEvers (pictured), an armed and dangerous Texas inmate escaped jail earlier with the help of his mother and girlfriend, authorities said

Following the escape, McEvers 71-year-mother was arrested for helping him.

Carolyn Rush McEvers was taken into custody for facilitating escape with a deadly weapon on Thursday.

McEvers girlfriend Cynthia Heese is also under investigation for assisting in the escape.

Authorities had said McEvers  whose aliases include Tracy Ranes - should be considered armed and dangerous.

Carolyn Rush McEvers (pictured) was taken into custody for facilitating escape with a deadly weapon

He was said to be driving a red Chevrolet Cobalt, NBCDFW reports.

McEvers was booked into custody on April 14 on drug charges and for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

His criminal history includes armed robbery and numerous drug charges. He pleaded guilty to holding up a bank at gunpoint in 2009.

Anyone with information about McEvers and the escape should call the Van Zandt County Sheriffs office on 903-567-4133.

McEvers escaped from the Van Zandt County Detention Center (above) in Canton at 8pm on Wednesday




A Pakistani man used a kitchen knife to murder his sister after flying into a rage when he caught her using a mobile phone.

Hayat Khan, 20, attacked his 16-year-old sister Sumaira at their home in the Orangi Town neighbourhood of Karachi on Wednesday.

Senior police officer Azfar Mahesar said the brother later threw her out of the house where she lay on the steps as neighbours gathered to help.

Human rights activists hold placards during a protest against honour killing in Islamabad in 2014. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said in February he wanted to rid the country of 'honour killings' but he has yet to bring forward any legislation

A woman using a mobile phone, in particular to speak to a male non-relative, is seen as highly taboo among conservative elements in Pakistani society.

Speaking to AFP from his jail cell, Khan said: 'She was talking to someone at the entrance of the house, I asked her who was there and she replied why are you bothered it's none of your business, I am free to talk to anyone.

'I just wanted to scare her off with the knife but it hurt her fatally.'

He added: 'Of course it is very sad, I wish I could also die.'

Mobile phone footage shot by an unknown onlooker showed several men and boys standing around Sumaira, who was seen dressed in a red tunic and orange headscarf and draped in a blanket as she writhed in pain.

Mobile phone usage in Pakistan and neighbouring India has shot up in recent years. But in conservative parts of Pakistani society it is haram, or forbidden, to talk to a stranger whether it is face to face or on a phone. A woman holds a smartphone (posed by model)

A young boy is shown fighting back tears as one man says in Pashto: 'Let's take her to a hospital in a car.'

Another man replies: 'It's almost here, it's coming brother.'

Abdul Hakeem, a local resident, said: 'She was taken by car to a private hospital but she died before she arrived.'

Mr Mahesar told AFP the police had taken the unusual step of making themselves the complainants in the case, in order to avoid a loophole in the law that allows the relatives of the victim to forgive the killer.

He said: 'We have registered the case on behalf of the state as we don't want to give the family the option of settling the case outside court.'

Pakistan has an estimated 140 million mobile phones and is the eight biggest phone market in the world. But phones are even more omnipotent in neighbouring India (pictured), which notched up its billionth mobile phone subscriber in October.

The move came after Sumaira's father Inayat Khan told reporters: 'What is done is done' and said he forgave his son.

Hundreds of women are murdered by their relatives in Pakistan each year on the pretext of defending family 'honour'.

A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, which tells the story of a survivor of an attempted 'honour killing', won the Oscar for best documentary short earlier this year.

Pakistan amended its criminal code in 2005 to prevent men who kill female relatives escaping punishment by pardoning themselves as an 'heir' of the victim.

But it is left to a judge's discretion to decide whether to impose a prison sentence when other relatives of the victim forgive the killer, a loophole which critics say is often exploited.
Italy is to introduce the fingerprinting of migrants crossing the Mediterranean as soon as they are picked up by rescue boats.

In December the European Commission ordered Italy to use force if necessary to compel migrants and refugees to have their fingerprints taken.

Italy's agreement to do so could help reduce mounting tensions between Italy and its EU partners over the large numbers of migrants who arrive in Italy but then drift across Europe without any registration documents or means of identification.

On one day this month 900 migrants arrived in the Italian port of Palermo on board the Norwegian vessel Siem Pilot. The ship, working for the EU's Frontex border force, picked up seven boats, mainly from west Africa

But it was unclear how the policy would be implemented in practice.

Migrants are often picked up at sea in the dark and in a traumatised state, having almost drowned.

Asylum seekers from some countries, such as Eritrea, often refuse to have their prints taken.

Under the Dublin Convention refugees have to register and apply for asylum in the first EU country they arrive in.

If migrants are not registered in Italy they cannot be sent back there by neighbouring countries such as France and Austria or popular destination countries like Germany, Sweden or Britain.

Today's move follows talks between Italian Interior Minister Angelo Alfano and EU migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos.

In this picture taken earlier this month migrants on an overloaded dinghy beg for help as they are approached by the SOS Mediterranee's ship Aquarius off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa

They met in Sicily, the island where most migrants arrive and are processed at 'hotspot' reception centres.

'With this we will now have hotspots at sea,' Mr Alfano quipped.

The move could theoretically mean Italy will have to shoulder a heavier burden of migrants.

If they are fingerprinted and registered in Italy it will be almost impossible for them to seek asylum in another EU country.

Austria has been threatening tough new anti-migrant measures, including threatening to build a fence at the Brenner Pass on the Italian border in the Alps.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said: 'We cannot shoulder the whole world's burden.'

Italy has now promised to fingerprint migrants as soon as they are rescued or as soon as they land on Italian territory. Other EU countries have complained that unregistered migrants are drifting north and will not say they arrived in Italy because they do not want to live there

Austria's parliament has just passed a bill which would allow the government to call a 'state of emergency' if migrant numbers suddenly rise and reject most asylum seekers at the border, including those from war-torn countries like Syria.

Support for the far right has been surging in Austria as a result of the migrant crisis and Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party won the first round of the presidential election at the weekend, running on an anti-immigrant ticket.

In a veiled reference to the bill, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon said on Thursday: 'I am concerned that European countries are now adopting increasingly restrictive immigration and refugee policies.

At the weekend Norbert Hofer, who ran on an anti-immigrant and anti-Europe platform, won 36.4 per cent of the vote to become head of state in Austria

'Such policies negatively affect the obligation of member states under international humanitarian law and European law.'

Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi has warned that closing the Brenner Pass would be a 'flagrant breach of European rules'.

Italy says it cannot cope alone with the migrant influx.

More than 350,000 people have reached Italy on boats from Libya since the start of 2014, as Europe battles its biggest migration crisis since World War Two.

These migrants are waiting to be processed before leaving a ship in the Italian port of Palermo earlier this month. The Sicilian mafia recently 'declared war' on migrants and a Gambian man was shot dead by a mafiosi earlier this month

Italy is pushing a plan to introduce Nato naval patrols off Libya in time for the peak summer season for people smuggling.

Modelled on an existing Nato operation in waters between Turkey and Greece, the plan has been backed by US President Barack Obama and is expected to be approved at a Nato summit in Warsaw in July.
Sean John Michael Mullender, 23, was said to be 'over the moon' when his partner Fiona Templeton told him she was pregnant

A two-month-old baby suffered fatal brain injuries after he was vigorously shaken by his dad who has been described as 'a perfect father.'

Sean John Michael Mullender, 23, was said to be 'over the moon' when his partner Fiona Templeton told him she was pregnant.

Even after the tragedy the couple went on to have a second child following their marriage.

On October 2, 2014, Mullender was left in sole care of first child, baby Daniel Mullender, after working a long night shift while his partner went to pick a wedding dress for their forthcoming marriage.

He insisted that he had done nothing to his son and ran out holding him in his arms to seek help from a neighbour after he said he found him limp and lifeless in his chair.

But Mold Crown Court heard how doctors found that Daniel, who died two days later, had been subject to severe rotational movement of the head which caused brain damage and subdural bleeding.

Nine rib fractures were found - some of them older and healing which he denied any responsibility for - but the fresh ones indicated that he had been gripped hard and shaken vigorously when his head was not supported, explained prosecuting barrister Paul Lewis QC.

Mullender, of Bryn Lane, Connah's Quay, Wales, denied murder but his earlier guilty plea to manslaughter was accepted by the prosecution.

He will be sentenced tomorrow by Mrs Justice Nicola Davies.

Mullender said he caused the injuries 'on the spur of the moment' and while he could not recall losing his temper or acting in a manner that caused him deliberate harm he accepted that he must have done. He added that his memory was 'very jumbled'.

The court heard how baby Daniel John Mullender, died after being shaken on the morning of October 2, 2014.

Mr Lewis said that the baby had been seen by health professionals during his short life and no injuries were noted and there was no concern for his development or safety.

The defendant was described by Daniel's granddad, Alexander Templeton, as a doting dad, while his grandmother Julie Templeton said he was 'a perfect father.'

Overnight on Wednesday, October 1, Daniel had been in the care of his grandparents at their home in Sutton Close, Connah's Quay.

His parents picked him up at 9.50am and at 10.40am Fiona left to go and pick a wedding dress with her mother and sister.

Fiona rang the defendant at 11.30am when Daniel could be heard crying and screaming and Mullender said 'I just need to feed him.'

But within minutes the defendant went to neighbour Rhona Smith carrying Daniel who was lifeless in his arms and appeared not to be breathing.

She administered first aid while Mullender dialed 999 and paramedics found him limp but breathing.

At the hospital in Chester, he said that he had settled Daniel and went to the toilet leaving him in the car seat in the lounge. Then when he came down he said Daniel had stopped breathing.

Daniel was transferred to Alder Hay Children's Hospital in Liverpool where Mullender told police his baby son was grumpy and agreed he was screaming and crying when his partner rang.

Mullender, of Bryn Lane, Connah's Quay, denied murder but his earlier guilty plea to manslaughter was accepted by the prosecution

When he returned from the toilet he initially thought Daniel was asleep but then he could not hear him breathing and picked him up and found him floppy and blue in the face.

He then ran to get help. The prosecutor said that he gave no explanation for the injuries the doctors found.

The brain was swollen and bleeding, the brain was damaged caused by a lack of oxygen and blood and there were hemorrhages to his eyes. Despite efforts to save him he died at 4pm on October 2.

Mr Lewis said that Daniel had suffered traumatic head injuries caused by vigorous shaking. He suffered whiplash type injuries because his head had not been supported.

The recent rib injuries were highly suggestive of his chest being compressed forcibly, probably while he was being shaken, the court heard.

Mr Lewis said: 'The defendant must inevitably have shaken him with considerable force to cause the brain injury and bleeding to the eyes, certainly excessive, unlawful and well beyond any degree of rough handling.'

He said the degree of force necessary would have been extreme - causing a repeated, rotational motion.

He loved his child. Something went wrong which he acknowledges by his guilty plea Patrick Harrington QC

Mullender was arrested on October 5. He sobbed after being detained but during a series of interviews, denied being responsible for the injuries.

He suggested at one stage that Daniel could have been shaken when he ran out to get the help of the neighbour.

The defendant protested that he loved Daniel and that he would not have hurt him.

He described Fiona as a loving and caring mother.

Defending barrister Patrick Harrington QC said his client had no intention to kill.

'The voice on the 999 call was the voice of a doting and caring father and that was how he was described by everyone who had been asked to comment on him,' he said.

'We all know children, especially babies, need to be cared for, loved and cherished. That is how this

defendant behaved towards Daniel.'

He had been 'over the moon' when he learned Fiona was pregnant and put back their wedding because they wanted 'their little man' to be present.

Mullender shook Daniel after he returned home from a ten hour physical and arduous shift.

Mr Harrington added: 'He loved his child. Something went wrong which he acknowledges by his

guilty plea. The evidence is overwhelming that he shook the child, and he accepts that he did.

'There had been no confession but he had been strongly advised about the strength of the evidence, accepted that advice and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

'Until the morning of October 2, 2014, he was a loving and doting parent who had taken the responsibility of fatherhood very seriously.

'He was happy to look after the child at all times.'

Mr Harrington said that parents sometimes became frustrated with crying babies and did things in 'hideous moments of madness' that they would not ever do when rational.

His remorse was all consuming and his self-loathing that he could have any part in his baby, was genuine, his barrister said.
Vice President Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Iraq today to promote 'national unity' as the country's leadership faces a protracted political crisis even as its forces battle jihadists.

'The vice president has arrived in Iraq for meetings with (the) Iraqi leadership focused on encouraging Iraqi national unity and continued momentum in the fight against ISIL,' his office said, using an acronym for the Islamic State jihadist group that also goes by ISIS.

Biden's visit is the highest-ranking by a US official to Iraq since he traveled there in 2011.

The vice president was accompanied on the trip by his son Hunter and met with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi shortly after stepping off the C-17 military transport plane that flew him to Baghdad.

The vice president cited James Joyce's Ulysses and said the history of the Mideast region is a nightmare from which everyone is trying to awake.

The White House avoided a direct endorsement of the embattled prime minister today as it vocally backed the reforms Abadi is pursuing.

Vice President Joe Biden shakes hands with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi following a meeting in Baghdad. iden made an unannounced visit to Iraq today to promote 'national unity' as the country's leadership faces a protracted political crisis even as its forces battle jihadists

Biden was accompanied on the trip by his son Hunter and met with Abadi shortly after stepping off the C-17 military transport plane that flew him to Baghdad. 'The vice president has arrived in Iraq for meetings with (the) Iraqi leadership focused on encouraging Iraqi national unity and continued momentum in the fight against ISIL,' his office said

Biden said the U.S. has sent its troops abroad to keep the peace in places where history has led people to create artificial states based on artificial lines made up of distinct ethnic and religious groups. He says the world has told them, 'Have at it.' He commented on the situation as he thanked U.S. military and diplomatic personnel working in the country for their service

'I think this is a good indication of the United States' continued support for Prime Minister Abadi's efforts to unify the nation of Iraq' to confront ISIS, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said of the trip.

Biden said the U.S. has sent its troops abroad to keep the peace in places where history has led people to create artificial states based on artificial lines made up of distinct ethnic and religious groups. He says the world has told them, 'Have at it.'

He was alluding to deep sectarian tensions in Iraq. Biden commented on the situation as he thanked U.S. military and diplomatic personnel working in the country for their service. He said their courage sends a message to everyone else.

Biden's visit comes at a time of political crisis that has seen Iraq's fractious political class squabble over Abadi's efforts to replace the current government of party-affiliated ministers with a cabinet of technocrats.

Political turmoil surrounding Abadi's US-backed reform drive has sparked chaos in parliament, with lawmakers brawling in the chamber, staging a sit-in and throwing water bottles towards the premier.

Thousands of supporters of prominent Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have also protested in recent days outside the fortified 'Green Zone' -- where Biden and Abadi met Thursday -- ostensibly to lend mass support to the reform process.

The political shambles has further discredited politicians who are widely seen as corrupt and pursuing only the interests of their parties, clans or sects.

The vice president met with Iraqi Parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri during the unannounced visit, in addition to Abadi.

Al-Jabouri, a Sunni leader, is under pressure from lawmakers to resign amid a political crisis fueled by protesters angry over corruption and mismanagement.

Abadi and Biden discussed political, security and economic developments, the premier's office said.

He and Biden met at the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, inside the heavily fortified Green Zone. The grandiose palace served as U.S. headquarters in Baghdad after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 until the U.S. opened a new embassy.

U.S. military members serving in Iraq listen as Vice President Joe Biden greets them. He said their courage sends a message to everyone else

A U.S. administration official travelling with Biden praised Abadi, whom many, including within his own party, have criticized as a weak leader.

He said that Abadi 'has been a very effective prime minister. He's really pulled the country together.'

'The vice president will also be discussing steps the international community can take to promote Iraq's economic stability and further regional cooperation,' the statement from Biden's office said.

The White House also praised Abadi's commitment to the fight against ISIS on the ground and his pursuit of political reforms to fight corruption and build a government that is 'capable, is honest and that most importantly' represents Iraq's diverse population.'

'The vice president's visit is an effort to underscore our support for Prime Minister Abadi's commitment to those priorities,' Obama's spokesman said today.

Baghdad is grappling with a damaging budget crunch, caused largely by the drop in the price of oil, which accounts for more than 90 percent of Iraq's revenue.

The United States heads an international coalition of countries providing Iraq with arms, military training and a limited number of combat forces to help it battle IS, which overran large areas in 2014.

US forces have in recent weeks further deepened their involvement by setting up a base south of Mosul, which is Iraq's second city and the jihadists' main hub in the country.

The US official said Biden would not venture a timetable for a much-anticipated offensive on Mosul, which is likely to involve a myriad different -- and sometimes competing -- forces.

'We have to be realistic. We are at the end of April. Once we get into July and August, it starts to get pretty hot in Iraq and things start to slow down,' the US official said, suggesting a big push on Mosul was still months away.

Abadi vowed in February that IS in Iraq would be fully defeated by the end of the year.

'It's very important that the Iraqis decide on a clear plan for what forces are going to take Mosul, under what arrangements so that everyone is clear about the circumstances that will lead up to liberation and set the conditions for the day after,' the US official said.

The vice president met with Iraqi Parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri during the unannounced visit, in addition to Abadi. Al-Jabouri, a Sunni leader, is under pressure from lawmakers to resign amid a political crisis fueled by protesters angry over corruption and mismanagement

'What you don't want is a race to Mosul from a bunch of different forces that end up getting in each other's way or clashing with each other,' the official said.

With the US election campaign in full swing and President Barack Obama due to leave office having served two terms, Biden's visit is also likely to be his last to Iraq as vice president.

'The vice president has been the point person on Iraq for the administration since the beginning,' the US official told reporters on Biden's plane.

'He's been itching to get back for a while -- looking for an opportunity. This seemed like a good moment to do it,' the official said.
Labour MPs have reacted with fury after John Mann was summoned by the leadership to be told he had made a 'serious' mistake by confronting Ken Livingstone.

The Bassetlaw MP accosted the former London Mayor outside TV studios in Westminster, accusing him of being a 'Nazi apologist' for citing Hitler in defence of Labour MP Naz Shah.

Mr Livingstone waded into the anti-Semitism row over Ms Shah's Facebook posts by claiming that the fascist dictator supported 'Zionism' before he 'went mad and ended up killing six million Jews'.

Labour MP John Mann confronts Ken Livingstone outside TV studios in Westminster today

Labour MPs responded on Twitter to the news that the Labour leadership had summoned John Mann to discuss his conduct

Shortly afterwards party leader Jeremy Corbyn bowed to a tidal wave of protests from his own ranks by suspending his long-standing ally.

But a Labour spokesman added: 'The Chief Whip has summoned John Mann MP to discuss his conduct.'

The party said later that Rosie Winterton had 'made it absolutely clear' to Mr Mann that his conduct had been 'completely inappropriate'.

The Chief Whip was 'very clear about how seriously this was viewed' and 'John Mann fully accepted and understands this', Labour said.

Former frontbencher Michael Dugher branded the move 'outrageous', suggesting that Mr Corbyn was trying to even the score.

'Outrageous that Lab spokes announces Livingstone suspended and @JohnMannMP summoned to see chief whip. Like it's 1-1! John Mann was 100% right.'

Islwyn MP Chris Evans added that Rosie WInterton should just give Mr Mann a 'pat on the back'.

'I hope the Chief Whip has summoned @JohnMannMP to give him a pat on the back,' he posted.

The angry clash at Millbank - yards from Parliament - saw Mr Mann brand Mr Livingstone a 'f****** disgrace'.

It came as many Labour MPs demanded swift action from Jeremy Corbyn to suspend Mr Livingstone.

Mr Mann said Mr Livingstone was 're-writing history' about the actions of Hitler.

The row began as Mr Livingstone walked into the studios while on the phone doing a live radio interview with LBC.

Mr Livingstone was heard on the radio saying 'I've got a Labour MP threatening me, sorry about this'.

The Bassetlaw MP jabs his finger at the former London Mayor, who was in the middle of a radio interview

David Cameron intervened on the anti-Semitism row again today, telling an audience in Cambridgeshire: 'It is quite clear the Labour party has got a problem with anti-Semitism.'

The scandal first broke on Tuesday after the Guido Fawkes website revealed that in 2014, before she was an MP, Ms Shah shared a graphic on Facebook which was headlined 'Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict - Relocate Israel into United States' and she added: 'problem solved.'

In a series of apologies, Ms Shah has admitted the posts were not 'excusable' and vowed to help build relations between faith communities in penance for her statements.

Mr Corbyn suspended her from the party and removed the whip yesterday afternoon after hours of escalating tensions within Labour.
A jailed wife has sentenced to 100 lashes in Iran for having an extra-marital affair.

The woman, known only as ST, was subjected to a public flogging in the city of Golpayegan, south of the capital Tehran in Isfahan Province.

There are reports that she was already in jail after receiving a 15-year sentence over the murder of her husband.

The woman, known only as ST, was subjected to a public flogging in the city of Golpayegan, south of the capital Tehran in Isfahan Province (file picture)

IB Times, citing Serat News, said the she carried out the crime with the man who she was having an affair with in 2012.

He was sentenced to death while she was jailed and has now received 100 lashes, the website reports.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran called the flogging a 'misogynist measure' and labelled the country's government's actions 'extremely disturbing and abhorrent'.

Activist, Farideh Karimi, said: 'In view of the new wave of suppression of women in Iran, we urge women's rights activists and organisations to stand up and speak out against the mullahs' misogynist policies.'

Public floggings are not uncommon in Iran.

Last year, two Iranian poets were jailed for their work and sentenced to 99 lashes each for shaking hands with members of the opposite sex in a harsh new crackdown on writers and artists.

Fatemeh Ekhtesari, a practicing obstetrician, and Mehdi Mousavi, a trained doctor who taught literature and poetry, were arrested in 2013, months after President Hassan Rouhani took office.

Ekhtesari received an 11-and-a-half-year prison sentence, while Mousavi got nine years on charges ranging from propaganda against the state to 'insulting sanctities'.
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A polar bear and her two cubs have been snapped moments after gorging on a seal with blood all over their faces.

The trio had been feeding on the animal off the coast of Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic, when they were spotted by an expedition.

Lawyer John Rollins, who took the pictures of the bears, was about to head home with his group due to an incoming storm when he spotted the mother and her cubs.

A polar bear and her two cubs were snapped moments after gorging on a seal with blood all over their faces and paws

The trio had been feeding on the animal off the coast of Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic, when they were spotted by an expedition

The 51-year-old, of Kansas City, Missouri, said the mother and her cubs had come down from a den in the surrounding mountains.

He said: 'The three of them had been feeding on a seal. We actually missed the hunt but the most likely scenario is that the mother did the hunting.

'These cubs are young enough that they were still nursing. The cubs probably ate a little bit, but mum ate most of the seal.

'The cubs are probably bloody from imitating their mother by sticking their heads into the seal carcass. I think this was more play for the cubs and survival for the mother.'

The lawyer who photographed the bears said the mother and her cubs had come down from a den in the surrounding mountains

One of the cubs, who had streaks of blood over his snout and neck as well as on his paws, ran alongside his mother as they made their way through the snow

The two little cubs looked curious as they stared directly at the camera while one balanced on his mother's back as she turned away

The trio of bears were out of their den despite an incoming storm heading into the area, clouding visibility and bringing heavy snow

The seal is likely to have been found in a snow den, which it would have hollowed out in order to give birth.

Mr Rollins explained: 'In the spring, the bears venture out onto the ice in search of these dens in hopes of catching a seal pup or a mother that is either out of the water nursing a pup or is coming up for air.'

The stunning set of photographs were the last thing Mr Rollins took before the group struggled to head back to their cabin.

He said: 'When we saw these bears, we were actually getting ready to call it a day and head back to the cabin because a storm was blowing in.

The seal is likely to have been found in a snow den, which it would have hollowed out in order to give birth. The bears later walked back in the direction of their den

Photographer John Rollins described the experience as 'amazing and unique' and said the photographs he took were his 'dream shot'

'You can tell from the photos that it was grey, overcast and the visibility was low. As we headed back to the cabin after this, we actually encountered a "white out" blizzard that created some difficulty in getting back to the cabin.

'This encounter was incredibly special. It was the first time that we had been this close to a mother and cubs.

'The setting, standing on the sea ice watching polar bears play on snow-covered icebergs, was amazing and unique and then to see these cubs with blood all over their faces I think is incredibly rare.
Tony Abbott has said his era is over, as he envisions his future as a standard bearer for Liberal conservative values - and reveals what he believes was his biggest mistake.

The former Australian Prime Minister said after being replaced by Malcolm Turnbull last year, he held no ambition to regain leadership of the country, but was proud of his achievements.

'The Abbott era has been and I think my role is to be occasionally perhaps an elder statesman,certainly a very vigorous and forthright member for Warringah... to be a standard bearer for liberal conservative values,' he told Sky News.

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Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott says the 'Abbott era' is over, and that he has no ambitions to regain leadership of the Liberal Party or the country (stock image)

Instead, Abbott sees his role as that of an elder statesman and standard bearer of Liberal conservative values (stock image)

He said he didn't expect the party to go back on its decision, which he accepted, and explained that he didn't intend to let 'one bad day prejudice six good years'.

He also described what he felt was his biggest mistake - abolishing the debt ceiling in late 2013.

'If the debt ceiling had remained in place the Labor Party and the Greens would have been forced to look at this problem of excessive government spending and this remains one of the fundamental challenges for government.'

Despite the nature of his removal from leadership in September 2015, he said 'the bruises had subsided, the wounds have healed and the bones have re-knitted,' he told Sky News.

Tony Abbott was replaced by Malcolm Turnbull (pictured) as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Australia in a leadership spill last September (stock image)

Abbott said 'the bruises had subsided, the wounds have healed and the bones have re-knitted' after losing the leadership last year (stock image)

He also described how the mass of emails, more than 4000, which he received after being ousted, had been gratifying.

The decision to remain in politics had been a 'line ball call'.

'Nevertheless... I think I still have a contribution to make to Australian public life.'

He conceded that a vote in his household would have been 'one against four' in opposition to a decision to remain in politics - but said his family was very supportive.

Abbott also discussed his once chief of staff, Peta Credlin, saying if he'd done as his opponents suggested and sack her, it would only have provided them with more ammunition, Sky News reported.

'The person who throws people overboard soons finds himself swimming with the sharks.'
Vision has surfaced showing members of a notorious gang ambushing a teenager in plain view of crowds at a suburban shopping centre.

The footage shows the boy, 14, getting ambushed by members of the Apex gang, who strangle and repeatedly kick him in the car park of Melbourne's highpoint shopping centre, reports ACA.

It comes as calls are made for authorities to deport members of the gang following a spate of beatings, home invasions and car thefts.

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The brutal attack was reportedly sparked because the teenager refused to hand over his mobile phone

The brutal attack was reportedly sparked because the teenager refused to hand over his mobile phone.

The disturbing vision was brazenly uploaded to social media by one of the attackers.

Victoria police launched Task Force Tense in November specifically to crack down on the 100 strong gang, which have been steadily recruiting members over the past year.

The head of the Australian Border Force has this week threatened to enforce the same laws used to deport outlaw bikies to expel members of the violent gang, reports Herald Sun.

'If we were to have a conversation with Victoria Police where they say to us they are having trouble with street gangs, a number of them are non-nationals on some sort of temporary visa arrangement or whatever the case may be, we want to start a program at looking at whether we can use the Migration Act to disrupt some of those, we would be up for it.'

Apex were blamed for an infamous riot in Melbourne's CBD during the Moomba festivities in March.
The entire population of Belgium is to be provided with iodine pills in case there is a nuclear accident at one of its ageing power plants.

The moves comes as Belgium faces growing pressure from neighbouring Germany to shut down two old reactors near their border due to safety concerns.

Iodine pills, which will help reduce radiation build up in the thyroid gland, have previously been given to people living within 14 miles of the Tihange plant near Brussels and the Doel plant in Antwerp.

The Belgian government is to provide the entire population of Belgium with iodine pills, pictured, in case of a nuclear accident at one of its ageing power plants

Now Belgian health minister Maggie De Block has been quoted by Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique as telling parliament that the range had been expanded, meaning it effectively covered the whole country.

The head of Belgium's French-speaking Green party, Jean-Marc Nollet, backed the measures but added that 'just because everyone will get these pills doesn't mean there is no longer any risk.'

Belgium's creaking nuclear plants have been causing safety concerns for some time after a series of problems ranging from leaks to cracks.

Last week Germany asked that the 40-year-old Tihange 2 and Doel 3 reactors be turned off until 'the resolution of outstanding security issues'.

The reactor pressure vessels at both sites have shown signs of metal degradation, raising fears about their safety. They were temporarily closed but resumed service last December.

Belgium's official nuclear safety agency (AFCN) rejected the German request, saying the two plants 'respond to the strictest possible safety requirements.'

The Tihange nuclear power plant, pictured, south of Brussels, where the reactors are now 40 years old

Germany has also requested that the Doel nuclear plant in Antwerp be closed due to safety concerns

Meanwhile the two plants have also seen security heightened in the wake of the Brussels terror attakcs.

Just hours after the attacks on Brussels airport and the city's metro, the Belgian government ordered the electricity operator to evacuate the two nuclear power stations.

It came after fears ISIS were attempting to follow the attacks with a dirty bomb, but it was unclear if the government had specific intelligence of an attack targeted against the facilities.

Earlier this year police discovered ISIS were working to breach Belgium's nuclear security.

Belgian security services learnt in February that two men had been secretly videotaping one of the country's senior nuclear scientists.
Women have staged a semi-naked protest on social media in a call for an end to sexist attitudes in Kazakhstan.

They complain that attitudes to sex are outdated in the mostly rural country, immortalised by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in his 2006 movie Borat.

Asel Bayandarova started the protest by posting a topless selfie along with a provocative post branding men 'hypocrites' for treating sex as a taboo subject for women.

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Asel Bayandarova started the campaign by posting this selfie along with a post branding men 'hypocrites'

Despite some hostile comments, her post received a large response and prompted many other woman to post selfies in support

Pictured is Yekaterina Ozol, one of the women who posted their own pictures to support equality in Kazakhstan

Ms Bayandarova's original post complained that the country suffers from double standards regarding attitudes towards men, women and sex. Pictured are two photographs uploaded by her supporters

The country of Kazakhstan was portrayed rather unflatteringly by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in his 2006 film Borat (pictured), in which he played a racist and misogynistic Kazakh citizen travelling through the U.S.

She wrote: 'Kazakh woman are not allowed to like or enjoy sex. Most girls in villages in Kazakhstan are not even allowed to talk about sex.

'Girls who don't manage to get married can only dream of becoming prostitutes. No wonder our country is ranked number one for women and children suicides.

'The world has changed, ethnic identity no longer plays the same role as it did before. Choosing "your crowd" based on national identity is an outdated tradition.'

Despite a few hostile comments, her post has caused a massive reaction in Kazakhstan with both men and women posting - and posing in states of undress - in support.

Scores of men and women posted half-dressed photographs of themselves along with messages of support for Asel's demand for a sexual revolution.

Many of them opted for creative poses, such as Aset Narmanbetov who is shown wearing a cardboard crown and a veil in his selfie.

And some were just courageous, such as a young woman who joined the naked protest and suffers from cerebral palsy.

Last year, the leader of a Islamic group in Kazakhstan proposed a tax on sex, with people paying different amounts depending on what they were doing, who they were doing it with and whether or not they were married.

Murat Telibekov, of the Muslim Union of Kazakhstan, came up with a comprehensive list of financial penalties for sex and posted them on social media.

Even men joined in the campaign, posting selfies of themselves mimicing the women's poses
In trouble: Ken Livingstone has been accused of anti-Semitism on a number of occasions, including when he compared a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard

Ken Livingstone's suspension from Labour today for saying Hitler was a Zionist follows years of being dogged by claims he is anti-Semitic.

Red Ken once compared a Jewish journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard and asked him if he was a Nazi war criminal.

And also while Mayor of London he told Jewish property developers to 'go back to Iran and try their luck' - a nation notorious for its hatred of Israel.

Today he faces investigation for 'bringing Labour into disrepute' for comments which led to him being accused of being a 'Nazi sympathiser'.

He had defended suspended MP Naz Shah over offensive social media posts demanding Israelis move to America, with Mr Livingstone insisting that while her remarks were not anti-Semitic, just 'over the top'.

Mr Livingstone is no stranger to finding himself in hot water - in 2006 a High Court judge said he made 'unnecessarily offensive' and 'indefensible' remarks likening a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

He made his remarks after a party at City Hall marking 20 years since former Culture Secretary Chris Smith's became Britain's first openly gay MP.

When Mr Livingstone was asked by Mr Finegold, whether he had enjoyed the party, the mayor likened him to a 'German war criminal'.

When Mr Finegold told him he was Jewish and found his remarks offensive, Mr Livingstone said: 'Well you might be, but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard - you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren't you?'

He also told the reporter to 'work for a paper that doesn't have a record of supporting fascism'.

The resulting row ended up in the High Court in 2006 where Mr Justice Collins said: 'When he knew that Mr Finegold was particularly offended because he was Jewish, to go on to compare him to a concentration camp guard was indefensible.

'He should have realised it would not only give great offence to him but was likely to be regarded as an entirely inappropriate observation by Jews in general, and those who had survived the Holocaust in particular.'

Row: Ken Livingstone was recorded comparing Jewish journalist Oliver Finegold (right) to a 'German war criminal' , which ended up in the High Court

John Mann confronted Ken Livingstone at the Millbank TV studios in Westminster today, shouting at him while he completed one of many broadcast interviews today calling him a Nazi apologist

Mr Livingstone rose to power and prominence in the 1970s and 1980s when he ran the Greater London Council.

He became the face of the hard left, supporting everyone from striking miners to Sinn Fein's leaders at the height of the IRA's bombing campaign.

He famously goaded Mrs Thatcher across the Thames in Parliament during the turbulent 1980s by displaying the unemployment figures on City Hall.

His finance chief at the time was the now Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who he later sacked for being too left wing.

Mr Livingstone also co-edited the Labour Herald in the 80s that offered a unique and at times comically misguided take on the affairs of the day.

In 1983, for example, when co-edited by Ken Livingstone  then leader of the GLC  it ran a 'special photo report' praising the achievements of the murderous North Korean dictator, Kim Il-sung.

It also had an ugly habit of publishing articles that were regarded as virulently anti-Semitic.

A cartoon it printed in July 1982, under Livingstone's co-editorship, was headlined: The Final Solution.

It depicted Menachem Begin, then the Israeli Prime Minister, as a bloodthirsty Nazi officer, trampling in jackboots over a pile of Arab corpses.

Ken Livingstone with the Labour Herald, which he had co-edited and had an ugly habit of publishing articles that were accused of being virulently anti-Semitic

Jeremy Corbyn has publicly criticised all forms of anti-Semitism, in particular, speaking out against far-Left abuse directed at Luciana Berger, a Jewish Labour MP. Above: now suspended Ken Livingstone (left) with Gerry Adams (centre), and Mr Corbyn (second right) walking on Westminster Bridge in the 80s

So outraged was the Jewish community at the racist nature of the image  which recalled viciously racist Hitler-era German cartoons  its leaders reported the paper to the Attorney General.

A feature the Labour Herald published the same year also advanced the false anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that 'Zionist' Jews (those who believe in the right of Jews to inhabit an Israeli homeland) collaborated with Nazis during World War II. 'Basically, your Zionist argues with the Nazis that Jews cannot be assimilated into Gentile society,' it read.

'From this, he says that Jews need a land of their own, not just any land, either, but only the land of Palestine.'

Jewish leaders, it continued, had shamelessly: 'Used the sympathy stirred up . . . after the Holocaust for their own devious ends.'

In 2006, again when Mayor of London, he was cleared of anti-Semitism by an official investigation launched after he told two Jewish businessmen to 'go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs'.

Mr Livingstone's jibe was directed at billionaire brothers David and Simon Reuben at a City Hall press conference on March 21 during a row over the redevelopment of the Olympics 2012 site in east London.

A member of the public complained to the local government watchdog, the Standards Board for England, which referred the matter to the Greater London Authority's monitoring officer for an investigation which could have led to a three-month suspension for the Mayor.

But a report found no evidence of anti-Semitism, racism or malice and ruled that Livingstone did not breach the GLA's Code of Conduct or bring his office into disrepute.

Strange friends: Ken once hugged Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi at City Hall (pictured together) - Sheikh Yusuf has said that attacking Israeli citizens is legitimate

Mr Livingstone insisted that he did not know the Reubens were Jewish at the time he launched his attack, accusing them of jeopardising the 4 billion Olympic City development, in which they held a 50% stake.

But many believed his comments had smacked of anti-Semitism.

Ken once hugged Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi at City Hall.

The Egyptian scholar was a vocal supporter of female genital mutilation, the killing of gay people and also said that suicide bombings were fine as long as the victims were Israeli civilians.
A teenager who threatened one of the Ohio massacre victims has been forced to deny he was behind the shootings.

Rusty Mongold was handcuffed and questioned by police earlier this week in Pike County following the brutal shootings that left eight members of the Rhoden family dead.

The 19-year-old was interviewed after he posted on Facebook that he wanted to 'beat the skull' of the youngest victim, 16-year-old Chris Rhoden Jr.

He was angry at the teenager, who was shot execution-style on Friday, after the two were involved in a road rage incident.

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Rusty Mongold, 19 (left), has been forced to deny he was behind the Ohio massacre after he threatened the youngest victim, Chris Rhoden Jr, 16 (right), on Facebook

Mongold was questioned by police earlier this week in Pike County following the brutal shootings that left eight members of the Rhoden family dead. It is believed this post was the reason he was interviewed by cops

He has since insisted he just wanted to fight the family, not kill them.

Mongold wrote: 'God I cant stop thinking about the kid that hit me with his car... Every time I see a silver Tiburon I get pumped and ready to beat his skull.'

His denial came as mourners prepared for the first of the funerals and police in Pike County continued their desperate search for the suspect.

They are now scouring through 79 pieces of evidence to try and find a link to who was responsible.

Cops are also trying to determine whether their marijuana growing operation, which consisted of at least 2,000 cannabis plants, or the area's historic links to Mexican cartels were a factor.

Mongold wrote: 'God I cant stop thinking about the kid that hit me with his car.

He added: 'Every time I see a silver Tiburon I get pumped and ready to beat his skull.'

Mongold then goes on to say he's not worried that he will 'get all of them'.

In the wake of the execution-style killings, he was forced to deny that he was involved.

'Okay to everyone falsely accusing me of having anything to do with the shooting I did not i just a few weeks ago met the rohdan [sic] family and yes there was a conflict were [sic] we tried to fight each other but that lasted a couple days.'

He insisted that after that they dropped the feud. In a bid to distance himself from the crime, he said he was at work when the shootings took place.

'I also went to the sheriffs office to clear my name,' he went on.

'I gave them DNA and everything... I would never wish death on anyone nor shoot anyone and im very sorry for everyones lost [sic].'

Visitors gather for the wake of Gary Rhoden at the Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home on Wednesday. A heavy police presence is expected at the services

Gary Rhoden (pictured above in an undated photograph), 38, was named as one of eight family members killed in Pike County on Friday. He was shot multiple times, including in the head, during the series of well-coordinated murders

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said he was aware of the social media threat

He then said they wished that they had left things on better terms and urged people in the small rural community to leave his family alone.

In a separate interview with WSYX, he said he just wanted to fight the family, not kill them.

One of his friends, Larry Jones, also surfaced on Facebook to say he wasn't involved. He felt he had to respond after writing similar posts about the Rhoden family.

In a lengthy post, he wrote: 'Okay everyone. I've tried to abstain from Facebook. But I no longer can. What has happened to the Rhoden family was an absolute tragedy.

'Even though I had posted some stuff on here in the past doesn't mean I would ever even think about acting on it. Looking back I feel awful about what I posted in the first place.

'But. I'm human. Just like every single one of you. People say things when they are mad that they don't mean. I have seen a plethora of my Facebook friends do it.

'It does not. In any way shape or form mean that you acted upon it. Or that you even intended to act upon it. What happened was a horrendous thing.

'When I heard about it. I was one of the first people at the police station that was willing to help in any way shape or form. I talked with the police. And I'm not even a suspect.'

A spokesman for the Ohio Attorney General's Office said they would not comment on whether Mongold was interviewed or whether his post was investigated.

Authorities have revealed the area where the Rhodens were murdered has historic ties to Mexican cartels. Above, an aerial view of one of the scenes on Friday

Husband-to-be Frankie Rhoden and his fiancee Hazel Gilley, 20, were among those killed Friday in Piketon, Ohio, according to the Morning Ledger

Devastating: Hanna May Rhoden (pictured left and right) was killed Friday in the Piketon shooting that has rocked the small community. Her Facebook page says she was already a mother to one child

On Wednesday, friends and family gathered for the visitation of Gary Rhoden under a heavy police presence.

Loved ones were pictured tearfully hugging one-another as they walked into the Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home in Kentucky, around half an hour's drive from where Gary was found dead on Friday.

Tragic: Grandmother-to-be Dana Lynn Rhoden (left), 37, and her son, 16-year-old Chris were also murdered, according to the Morning Ledger

The 38-year-old was shot multiple times, including in the head, during a series of well-coordinated murders at four locations in the tiny town of Piketon.

Gary's visitation, which took place under heavy police surveillance according to, marks the first of many funeral arrangements the Rhoden family will have to endure in the coming days.

The victims are 40-year-old Christopher Rhoden Sr.; his ex-wife, Dana Rhoden; and their three children, 16-year-old Christopher Rhoden Jr., 19-year-old Hanna Rhoden and 20-year-old Clarence 'Frankie' Rhoden.

Christopher Rhoden Sr.'s brother, 44-year-old Kenneth Rhoden; their cousin, 38-year-old Gary Rhoden; and 20-year-old Hannah Gilley, were also shot.

Gilley's 6-month old son with Frankie was unharmed. Two other children, a 6-month-old and a 3-year-old, also escaped unscathed.

An autopsy report into the killings has laid bare the extraordinary level of violence wrought on the family in their final moments.

All of the victims were shot in the head, while seven of the eight had multiple gunshot wounds, with one person riddled with nine bullets.

The report says that one person had a single bullet wound, another had two wounds, while the rest of the victims all sustained three or more.

Some of the victims had also sustained bruising, indicating that they were beaten before being shot to death inside their own home.

Kenneth Rhoden (left), 44, and Chris Rhoden Sr (right), 40, were named as victims in Friday's murders. Chris Rhoden Sr is the father of Chris Rhoden Jr, who was also killed in the massacre
An Asian UKIP candidate is accused of calling a Tesco trolley collector a 'f***ing foreigner' and told him to 'go back to where you came from' in a car park row.

Sam Naz, 33, who finished fifth in her bid to beat Tory Zac Goldsmith to become MP for Richmond Park and North Kensington in London, allegedly racially abused Mohammed Wafta, 48, after he intervened in an altercation between her and another customer.

Mr Wafta, who is of Muslim background, told Snaresbrook Crown Court that he spotted her arguing with the man at the supermarket in Leystone and went over to see if she needed help.

When he intervened, the man got into his car and drove off - only for Naz, who is the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, to turn her anger on the Tesco worker.

Sam Naz (left and leaving court today, right) is accused of calling a Tesco trolley collector a 'f***ing foreigner' and told him to 'go back to where you came from' in a car park row

Sam Naz (pictured with UKIP leader Nigel Farage), who finished fifth in her bid to beat Tory Zac Goldsmith to become MP for Richmond Park and North Kensington in London, allegedly racially abused Mohammed Wafta

Mr Wafta told Snaresbrook Crown Court that he spotted Naz arguing with the man, at the supermarket in Leystone, and went over to see if she needed help

Mr Wafta told the hearing: 'I went outside in the car park to collect trolleys between 4pm and 5pm.

'I heard an argument between a male and women by the last exit.

'The only person I heard was the lady calling for security and the police to come and arrest this man.

'I left the trolleys and went between the two people. The man was definitely about to punch her in the face.

'He was saying no woman can say the 'f***' word to me and I let her go. She was holding the man who was about to run away.

'I was trying to calm her down saying I will call the police. The man got in his car with a baby in the front.

'The woman held onto the handle, he got off and they were arguing. He then got back in the car and drove off.'

Mr Wafta told the court Naz then turned her ire towards him, mistaking him for security.

'She started shouting and swearing. She said: 'What kind of f***ing security are you?'

'What kind of f***ing man are you? You aren't even f***ing born here, you don't belong here.'

Mr Wafta told the court he had tried to calm her down, saying he was not security and was only trying to help her.

He said: I told her you are too pretty to say those words, she had used them over 50 times.

'I said stop using those words, if you look at me, and look at you, we are both foreigners.'

'She then told me: 'No, I was born here.'

He told the court Naz had then stormed into the Tesco promising to 'make sure they f***ing sack you'.

When Mr Wafta intervened, the man got into his car and drove off - only for Naz, who is the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, to turn her anger on the Tesco worker

Mr Wafta told the court Naz (pictured) then turned her ire towards him, mistaking him for a security worker

Mr Wafta told the court he had tried to calm Naz down, saying he was not security and was only trying to help her

Mr Wafta said he had followed Naz into the store, where the swearing continued.

He said: 'I came in and she pointed at me and began shouting and swearing at me.

'My manager Chris grabbed me from my back to get me away from the quarrel or fight.

'When Chris had grabbed me and dragged me away I was about to try and approach her.

'I lost my temper, maybe I'd have done something bad.

'I felt very upset, in all my life I've not been cussed at like that.'

Prosecutor Swarma Kodikara said: 'You will probably hear from Ms Naz as to how this came about.

'She repeated this abuse a number of times to this man who had tried to rescue her from a rather dangerous situation.

'That did not seem to occur to Ms Naz as she kept calling him a "f***ing foreigner" and a "f***ing b***ard" a number of times.'

Prosecutor Swarma Kodikara said: 'Ms Naz as she kept calling him a "f***ing foreigner" and a "f***ing b***ard" a number of times.'

Naz (pictured with UKIP leader Nigel Farage) later took up her fight with 31-year old store manager Christopher Sanders and demanded 'this man ought to be sacked'

Naz, from Twickenham, Middlesex, denies causing racially aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress on March 22 last year

Naz later took up her fight with 31-year old store manager Christopher Sanders and demanded 'this man ought to be sacked'.

She told Mr Sanders that he was a racist before she left the store.

Naz was arrested on March 29 last year and told police that Mr Wafta had stood by and said: 'You deserve it' while she was being assaulted by the unknown male.

The jury also heard about Naz's run as a UKIP candidate - 'a party which some of you may think has controversial views about immigration'.

'Ms Naz explained in her interview that she believed she was a target by some of the witnesses there who knew her as a member of the UK Independence Party,' said Ms Kodikara.

She added that they may have been 'hostile to her choice of political party'.

'What we have to prove this case is the evidence of Mr Wafta and the evidence of independent eyewitnesses who will come to this court and say Ms Naz had made such racial remarks to Mr Wafta,' added Ms Kodikara.

Naz, from Twickenham, Middlesex, denies causing racially aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress on March 22 last year.
A Georgia sheriff's deputy was fired on Monday and charged with a felony after an investigation found she used pepper spray to punish a jail inmate who spit in her face while his hands and feet were in restraints, the sheriff said.

Sgt. Charlesetta Hawkins was arrested on a charge of cruelty to an inmate less than a month after Chatham County Sheriff John Wilcher won election to the office.

Wilcher promised during his campaign to rid the county jail of excessive force by deputies following the high-profile death of a detainee last year.

Sgt. Charlesetta Hawkins was arrested on a charge of cruelty to an inmate on Monday after video surfaced of her pepper spraying inmate Jonathan Mahone who jailed on aggravated assault charges

'I'm not going to tolerate an inmate being abused and I'm not going to tolerate my officers being abused by an inmate,' Wilcher said Monday.

Jonathan Mahone, jailed on aggravated assault charges, was strapped into a restraint chair in an open area of a cell block April 18 after he broke a fire sprinkler, flooding his and other inmates' cells, the sheriff said.

Video from a cell block security camera shows Hawkins, a deputy for about 17 years, bringing a nurse to check the inmate's restraints when Mahone spits in the deputy's face.

'Go get me a can of spray,' Hawkins says immediately.

The video shows the inmate and deputy arguing for several minutes.

'You can't spray me,' says Mahone, who laughs during the exchanges.

'I'm getting ready to show you I can,' Hawkins replies.'You will never make that mistake again.'

About four minutes after she was spit upon, Hawkins is seen on the video walking toward Mahone with a spray can in her hand. She sprays him twice in the face at close range.

Alleged abuse: About four minutes after she was spit upon, Hawkins is seen on the video walking toward Mahone with a spray can in her hand. She sprays him twice in the face at close range

The video shows Mahone duck his head (left) after being sprayed, but he never cries out in pain. Video on the right then shows Hawkins, a deputy for about 17 years, bringing a nurse to check the inmate's restraints when Mahone spits in the deputy's face

The video shows Mahone duck his head after being sprayed, but he never cries out in pain.

'You think I'm going to scream?' the inmate says. 'Am I screaming?'

About 15 minutes after Mahone gets sprayed, the video shows Hawkins return and wipe his face with a towel.

The sheriff said authorities plan to charge Mahone with assault for spitting on the deputy. But he said Hawkins' use of pepper spray was unjustified because the inmate was immobilized.

'She lost her cool,' Wilcher said. 'My understanding is she thought she'd done nothing wrong.'

Hawkins was released from jail Monday without being required to post bond. Court records did not list an attorney for her. A message left at a phone number listed for Hawkins was not immediately returned.

The Chatham County Sheriff's Office has been under close scrutiny since the January 2015 death of a jail detainee. Mathew Ajibade, 21, was found dead in a restraint chair hours after a violent brawl with deputies. One deputy shocked Ajibade four times with a Taser while he was restrained.

Eight deputies were fired following Ajibade's death and two of them stood trial on criminal charges. A medical examiner couldn't say exactly what killed Ajibade, and a jury acquitted both deputies of involuntary manslaughter.

Former jailer Jason Kenny was ultimately sentenced to a month in jail for cruelty to an inmate. His colleague, Maxine Evans, was sentenced to probation for faking jail records and perjury.
Care home manager Melanie Oliver (pictured) who stole a veteran's life savings before he died in distress and had to be given a pauper's grave has been jailed for three years

A care home manager who stole a veteran's life savings before he died in distress and had to be given a pauper's grave has been jailed for three years.

Melanie Oliver swiped more than 47,000 from vulnerable residents over a four-year period so she could fund an 'extravagant lifestyle' of foreign holidays, jewellery and alcohol.

The 49-year-old - who worked in a home that specialised in dementia care - would take residents' bank cards before walking across the road and withdrawing huge amounts of cash.

One of her victims, a 90-year-old retired serviceman, was left penniless after she stole his 7,000 life savings in 13 different instalments shortly before he died.

The court was told how he died 'in distress' after finding out about the theft and had to be given a pauper's funeral because he did not have enough in his account to pay for a proper burial.

Weeks before he died, Oliver and her husband had gone on an all-inclusive holiday to Israel.

Oliver then tried to blame a retired colleague but was rumbled when police discovered that the point from a Pandora bracelet belonging to one of the residents had been credited to her store privilege card.

When they searched her home, they also found brand new bikes, a new cooker and other electrical appliances which had just been bought.

She has now been jailed for three years at Warwick Crown Court after she admitted six counts of theft.

Handing down the sentence, Judge Griffith-Jones told her the offences had been 'carefully crafted'.

'You had the responsibility for a number of people who could not really look after themselves, and the public and their families trusted them to your care,' he said.

'But you preyed upon them financially. You stole to live an extravagant lifestyle which included holidays abroad, electrical items, jewellery and presents for your family, which were not really presents from you but gave the impression of generosity.'

He added that that Oliver had used her 'intelligence' to identify the most vulnerable residents and research how she could get away with her theft.

'Clever, greedy and dishonest, you stole from the most vulnerable of people, bringing terrible unhappiness to one man in the last days of his life,' he said.

'This was not only a gross breach of trust, but when you were eventually confronted, you placed suspicion on a wholly innocent person to deflect culpability from yourself.'

The court was told how Oliver carried out her crime spree while working at the River Meadows care home in Kineton, Warwickshire, which specialised in providing dementia care.

She had been in charge of the finances of the 41-patient home from 2004 but started stealing from residents in 2011.

The court was told how she stole 47,000 from five residents - including 38,000 from one elderly man - and a further 500 from her employers, Prime Lift Ltd.

The court was told how Oliver carried out her crime spree while working at the River Meadows care home in Kineton, Warwickshire (pictured), which specialised in providing dementia care

Prosecutor Walter Bealby told the court her crimes were discovered when Prime Lift Ltd sent an internal finance officer to investigate the care home's accounts.

It emerged that 38,000 had been stolen from one of the resident's accounts over an 11-month period with his bank card.

When staff were asked about what might have happened, Oliver tried to put the blame on another member of staff who had since retired.

But further investigations by officers from Warwickshire Police revealed that the card had been used at various shops including Argos, Boozebusters and Sainsburys, as well as at cash machines.

They also discovered that no money had gone missing while Oliver was on holiday.

Mr Bealby said: 'When the police later examined Oliver's computer, they found she had made a number of searches along the lines of whether all ATM machines have CCTV cameras and whether the police can find who has used a cashpoint.

Oliver would take the residents' cards before walking across the HSBC cashpoint and withdrawing huge amounts of cash. The former bank and cashpoint is pictured above

'At her home, when she was arrested, officers found brand new bikes, a new cooker and other electrical appliances, new toys for her grandchild, and other examples of extravagant spending.'

The court was told how, during her theft spree, Oliver stole 800 from another resident in nine transactions in 2014.

An investigation under the Proceeds of Crime Act showed she had no assets, so Judge Richard Griffith-Jones made a confiscation order for a nominal 1.

Justin Jarmola, defending, said: 'She is obviously going to lose her liberty, which will have significant impact on her family, and particularly on her grandchild who she cares for.

'She is totally ashamed and disgusted with herself that she let people down she was meant to care for. She has said herself: "I know it's only right for me to pay for what I've done".'
When it comes to police chases, this was a particularly slippery case.

A stark-naked man was reported frolicking through the streets of downtown San Antonio on Wednesday night during peak-hour traffic, but when the cops arrived at the scene, they could not keep up with the au naturel runner.

In video taken by a witness, the nude sprinter managed to not only escape the officers, but at one point jumped on top of their police cruiser.

Catch me if you can! A bizarre police chase unfolded in the middle of downtown San Antonio during peak-hour traffic on Wednesday night as a naked man ran through the streets and away from police

Too slow! The man easily escaped the police trying to grab him, even as they used pepper spray

Bolter! Video taken at the scene shows the man sprinting down the road completely naked

In video taken by a witness, the nude sprinter managed to not only escape the officers, but at one point jumped on top of their police cruiser

The incident occurred near the intersection of Euclid and San Pedro.

According to KSAT 12, officers used pepper spray to try to subdue the man, but he got away, and ran off down the street.

In the video, which was uploaded to Live Leak, at least three cops can be seen struggling to chase after the man, who easily outruns them.

Finally police were able to stop him, thanks to a joint effort by the officers on the ground and some in cruisers.

The man was taken to hospital for a psychological evaluation.

Police said he could be charged with criminal mischief and evading arrest.
Grief-stricken friends and family are mourning the death of a teenage swimming champion after she was struck by a car while walking to practice.

Jade Frith, 15, was heading to the local pool in Warners Bay, Lake Macquarie on Tuesday just before 5pm when she was run down by a Ford Laser on Hillsborough Road.

She was rushed to John Hunter Hospital in a critical condition, but tragically died on Thursday afternoon from significant head injuries and broken bones, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The local community shared their grief on social media with many using the hashtag #capsoutforjade with photos of swimming goggles and caps.

Grief-stricken friends and family are mourning the death of teenage swimming champion Jade Frith (pictured) after she was struck by a car while walking to practice

The local community shared their grief on social media with many using the hashtag #capsoutforjade with photos of swimming goggles and caps

Olympian swimmer Thomas Fraser-Holmes posted a social media tribute to Jade saying his 'heart is deeply saddened to hear the news' and 'thoughts and prayers go out to [her] family'.

Her Facebook page was inundated with messages of love on Thursday evening with many reading 'fly high' and 'never stop swimming'.

Young sporting stars from surrounding clubs announced they would hold a minutes silence for the young swimmer and respectfully don black arm bands.

'This Saturday at Wangi Netball courts there will be a minutes silence before each game and players will be wearing black arm bands as a mark of respect to Jade Frith,' Erin D'Agostino wrote.

Jade's Facebook page was inundated with messages of love on Thursday evening with many reading 'fly high' and 'never stop swimming'

One club put their #capsoutforjade in the shape of her name and laid a bouquet of flowers by their pool

'This Saturday at Wangi Netball courts there will be a minutes silence before each game and players will be wearing black arm bands as a mark of respect to Jade Frith,' Erin D'Agostino wrote

Young sporting stars from surrounding clubs announced they would hold a minutes silence for the young swimmer and respectfully don black arm bands

'You train together, you laugh together, you spend most of your days being one big family. The Novocastrian team past and present has always been one big family,' another young woman said.

The 22-year-old driver of the vehicle that struck Jade was unscathed.

Police are investigating the incident and a report is being prepared for the coroner.

Various swimming clubs came together to remember the young star by placing their caps out by the pool
Melania Trump is lashing out at the journalist responsible for writing a GQ profile about her that reveals she has a secret half-brother.

'The article published in GQ today is yet another example of the dishonest media and their disingenuous reporting,' Trump wrote on her Facebook page. 'Julia Ioffe, a journalist who is looking to make a name for herself, clearly had an agenda when going after my family.'

Trump went on to note that her parents were 'private citizens' and shouldn't have been subjected to 'unfair scrutiny' in the piece.

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Potential first lady Melania Trump is none-too-pleased about a piece in GQ that reports for the first time that she has a secret half-brother and that her father shares many similarities to Donald Trump

Melania Trump pushed back on an article about her that appeared in GQ suggesting that journalist Julia Ioffe was only trying to make a name for herself

Then and now: Melania Trump pictured with Donald Trump in 1999 and then in 2016, as the two attended the Time 100 gala before Trump held a victory press conference on Tuesday night after winning five states

The story, which was published online yesterday, goes into detail about Melania Trump's dad Viktor Knavs, which Ioffe writes shares a lot of similarities with Melania's husband, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.

'Like Donald Trump, Viktor Knavs is not just a hard-charging businessman with a penchant for real estate; he is also viciously litigious when it comes to the women in his life,' Ioffe wrote.

The journalist discovered legal papers that documents a legal battle between Knavs and a former girlfriend, Marija Cigelnjak, who had gotten pregnant with a son.

Knavs had denied paternity, taking Cigelnjak to court.

Eventually a blood test determined he was the dad.

Fifty-year-old Denis Cigelnjak has never met his dad, nor his two half-sisters.

In the profile, Melania Trump first denied Denis Cigelnjak's existence over the phone and then changed her story, telling Ioffe that she didn't understand what the reporter is asking.

'I've known about this for years,' she said to GQ. 'My father is a private individual. Please respect his privacy,' she added.

Ioffe also uncovered that Melania Trump's dad was charged with a tax offense, something that his daughter denied.

'He was never under any investigation, he was never in trouble,' Melania 'snapped' Ioffe wrote. 'We have a clean past. we have nothing to hide.'

Parents: Melania's mother and father Viktor and Amalija Knavs (above in 2011). Viktor has a son who is Melania's half-brother

No fixes: Melania Trump (left in 1999, right on Tuesday) denies every having Botox or plastic surgery in a new interview

Melania Trump tried to seed doubt in her Facebook post as well.

'There are numerous inaccuracies in this article including certain statements about my family and claims on personal matters,' she said.

Ioffe also asked a number of beauty-related questions that Melania Trump seemed to hate.

'A lot of people say I am using all the procedures for my face. I didn't do anything. I live a healthy life. I take care of my skin and my body. I'm against Botox. I'm against injections. I think it's damaging your face, damaging your nerves. It's all me. I will age gracefully, as my mom does,' she told the journalist.

Ioffe discussed Melania Trump's business ventures and pointed out that her 'caviar-infused anti-aging creams havent sold as well, though a federal judge ruled in her favor in a lawsuit she filed against its promoters.'

On her Facebook page, Melania Trump pushed back against this as well, though noted much of the same thing.

'Furthermore, the statement surrounding the performance of my skincare collection is completely false,' she wrote. 'The company in which I was involved with did not honor the contract and did not meet their obligations and as such the courts ruled in my favor.'

This is the second time in the campaign cycle that something GQ-related upset The Donald's wife.

The first was when an anti-Trump super PAC called Make America Awesome used a nude photo spread that Melania Trump had shot for GQ in an attack ad before the Utah primary.

'Meet Melania Trump your next first lady,' the Facebook ad said, showing the former model laying over a white bearskin rug. 'Or you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.'

While not coming directly from the Cruz campaign, Trump still blamed his rival setting off a week-long war over the candidates' wives.

Now Melania Trump is deploying one of her husband's other tactics  blame the media.
Lawyer Gerard Hale, 62, says he suffered a rare reaction from the needle prick when he gave blood

A lawyer who claims his life and career fell apart after he suffered a reaction while giving blood is now claiming 1.5 million in compensation.

Gerard Hale, who ran a criminal law practice in Doncaster before his health began to fail, is suing NHS Blood and Transplant over the incident in March 2009.

Mr Hale, 62, says he suffered a rare reaction to the needle prick in his left arm and is now plagued by 'neuropathic pain and complex regional pain syndrome'.

His lawyers have told how the condition has taken a devastating toll on his business and personal life, resulting in the eventual 'loss of his solicitor's practice'.

NHS Blood and Transplant accepts that it should compensate Mr Hale, Mr Justice Globe told London's High Court.

But it is hotly disputing the value of his claim, which it says should be 'measured in the thousands'.

The case involves a complex debate about the nature of Mr Hale's symptoms, which NHS experts have suggested are mainly psychological.

The case involves a complex debate about the nature of Mr Hale's symptoms, which NHS experts have suggested are mainly psychological.

A report by a psychiatric expert said his condition may result from a bipolar disorder, somatoform pain disorder, or even malingering, the court heard.

The medic stated that he could not understand how the needle jab 'can have produced such dramatic and persistent general and cognitive changes to Mr Hale'.

He says he suffered a serious reaction to giving blood, leaving him in pain, and is suing the NHS. File photo

In a costly legal row, NHS lawyers argued this week that the psychiatric report and other evidence should be admitted for a trial.

But Mr Hale's lawyers insisted the 'bombshell' report was raised too late to be admitted as evidence.

Simon Wheatley, for Mr Hale, told the court: 'If you're suggesting that a claimant has either a bipolar condition, or is malingering, you must provide him with an opportunity to respond to that and have it investigated.'

Mr Justice Globe allowed the NHS to rely on the disputed psychiatric evidence, directing the trial should start in early May.

NHS barrister, David Thomson, said Mr Hale's experts are asserting a 'panoply of illnesses' to explain his symptoms.

Those included chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pain disorder, neurasthenia, hypomania and cognitive impairment, the court heard.
Three British teenagers have been arrested during a school holiday to Spain after being accused of pick-pocketing fellow UK tourists so they could get into pubs barred to minors.

The 17-year-olds, from Bolton, Greater Manchester, were detained at Alicante airport in south eastern Spain as they were about to catch their flight home.

They were traced to the airport by detectives from the National Police after a hotel worker in Benidorm, where they were staying, found documents lying on the floor of their room after they had left.

were traced to the airport by detectives from the National Police after a hotel worker in Benidorm (file picture), where they were staying, found documents lying on the floor of their room after they had left

The papers were handed-in to the police who found that they bore the name of a holidaymaker from the UK who had reported that he had been the victim of a pick-pocket.

Police today said that when the trio were detained they had other papers identifying more people who had recently reported having documents stolen in a British pub.

They had reported the documents missing in an area known as the 'English zone' in the popular resort.

The 17-year-olds, from Bolton, Greater Manchester, were detained at Alicante airport in south eastern Spain as they were about to catch their flight home. Benidorm is pictured above

The three teenagers reportedly confessed that they had stolen the documents to enter British run clubs which do not allow entry to people under 18.
Last week air steward Rodrigo Alves, 32, who is originally from Sao Paulo, Brazil, but now lives in London, was hospitalised with necrosis after undergoing his seventh nose job

A surgery addict who has undergone 42 operations to look like 'Barbie's Ken' is to get a new 50,000 nose on the NHS after his body rejected his latest implant.

Last week air steward Rodrigo Alves, 32, who has spent 305,000 on plastic surgery, was hospitalised with necrosis - when the flesh begins to die - after undergoing his seventh nose job.

Mr Alves, who is originally from Sao Paulo, Brazil, but now lives in London, last week described how following his seventh nose job a hole began to appear and his new septum appeared to come loose.

The hole grew and he began having trouble breathing and so he was sent to hospital in Malaga, Spain, where he was given antibiotics through an IV drip every eight hours.

Doctors warned the infection may eat through his nose into his face - which could become gangrenous - and told him he may have to be removed.

Now, in Britain he is expected to undergo a 10 hour operation which will involve removing cartilage from his rib area and rebuilding his nose from scratch after previous operations have left him with hardly any bone and tissue.

He said today: 'I can't breathe through my nose and feel terrible. It has collapsed. I have been given an appointment with a consultant in London in six weeks time and then I'm hoping surgery can be as soon as possible after that.

'I know I wasn't born in this country but I work and pay my taxes here and have a British passport so I am entitled to get help from the NHS.

'I've always paid for my other operations myself but this is an emergency because of my breathing problems.'

His British GP has signed the surgery addict off from work for two months as he seeks yet another operation.

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The surgery addict who has undergone 42 operations to look like 'Barbie's Ken' is to get a new 50,000 nose on the NHS after his body rejected his new nose

Mr Alves, pictured before falling ill, is suffering from necrosis - where the body's tissue dies - in his nose, and is receiving antibiotics by an IV drip every eight hours

Speaking from the hospital in Malaga last week he said: 'I had nose reconstruction three months ago and it appears the new cartilage has been rejected by my body.

'It is very frightening and I'm trying to get back to London as soon as possible for help.

'My breathing has been getting worse for the last three days and now my nose is completely blocked.

'A horrible hole has appeared in my nostril and the infection is eating my nose and I've been warned if it is not stopped it could eat into my face.

'It's very hot and dusty here and I wonder whether this might have set the infection off.'

The 32 year-old has undergone a transformation in recent years and is now unrecognisable from his youth

Mr Alves pictured with post-surgical swelling and a blood-stained dressings while recovering in hospital

WHAT IS NECROSIS? Necrosis is the body's cells dying prematurely due to a lack of blood supply. This tissue death can occur anywhere on the body and is usually caused by an external factor such as injury, infection, or chemicals. If a substantial area of tissue dies completely the condition is know as gangrene. This can quickly trigger blood poisoning and so is thought to be a medical emergency. Treatment involves the removal of the dead tissue, keeping the area clean and antibiotics.

Necrosis is a complication of plastic surgery in which a loss of blood supply causes the new flesh to die.

This condition can quickly trigger more severe complications including blood poisoning and gangrene.

Three years ago, Mr Alves suffered dangerous complications after undergoing a procedure to enhance his biceps, triceps and shoulders with silicone.

The chemical leaked into his system and within days his arms has swelled so much that he couldn't feed or bathe himself.

Soon he was back in hospital having litres of fluid drained from his body. He was perilously close to death.

He has undergone 42 operations to look like Barbie's Ken, including 30,000 on operations on his nose

Mr Alves decided to go under the knife for the first time in 2004 after struggling with the way he looked since childhood. Pictured (left) before surgery and during nose reconstruction surgery (right)

Before turning himself into a 'real life Ken doll' Mr Alves said he was deeply unhappy with his looks. He has been diagnosed with Body Dysmorphic Disorder and is receiving treatment for it

At one point doctors told him that one arm might have to be amputated. If the infection caused by the leaking fluid had reached his heart he would have died.

Mr Alves decided to go under the knife for the first time in 2004 after struggling with the way he looked since childhood.

A horrible hole has appeared in my nostril and the infection is eating my nose and I've been warned if it is not stopped it could eat into my face Rodrigo Alves, 32

In the past 12 months he has spent an astonishing 95,000 on 20 surgeries all over the world.

In January he splashed out 15,000 on his sixth nose job, liposuction and a chin implant in Iran.

He also had a 25,000 hair transplant at the Beverly Hills Hair Restoration Clinic and cheek fat removed last August.

His long list of surgery includes 8,000 on Botox and fillers, 30,000 on three nose jobs, 3,000 on liposuction to his jaw and 10,000 on chest implants.

He has also spent 22,000 on a fake six pack, 7,000 on fillers to his arms, 7,000 on hospital bills, 7,000 on laser liposuction, 6,000 on leg liposuction and 3,000 on calf shaping.

He pays for his operations through an inheritance from his Brazilian grandparents, his airline job and rental income from his property in Puerto Banus,Spain

The surgery enthusiast maintains his latest look with laser combs, ultra-violet teeth whiteners and resurfacers

Last August, Mr Alves had a 25,000 hair transplant at the Beverly Hills Hair Restoration Clinic so he could 'attend pool parties. He calls himself 'Peter Pan' and says he will have more cosmetic surgery as he ages

He also indulges in twice-yearly Botox and filler top-ups and takes a cocktail of daily pills consisting of collagen tablets, anti-water retention and hair growth tablets.

Last year, he began treatment for Body Dysmorphia, an anxiety disorder that effects about one per cent of the population.

It causes a person to have a distorted view of how they look and to spend a lot of time worrying about their appearance.

When beginning his treatment, he said: 'I am really hoping that that is going to help me. Help me not to keep changing myself.'

Mr Alves said he pays for his operations through an inheritance from his Brazilian grandparents, his airline job and rental income from his property in Puerto Banus, Spain.
Donald Trump could end the presidential primary season with more individual votes than any other Republican candidate in modern history, according to an analysis of the results so far.

Nearly 10.1 million Americans have voted for the real estate tycoon in GOP primaries so far, including the results from Tuesday's five Northeastern contests.

That's already about 200,000 more than 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney had at the end of the entire primary season four years ago.

YUUUGE: Donald Trump is collecting primary votes on a record-breaking pace this year

MISUNDERESTIMATED: President George W. Bush has the modern record for primary votes but Trump could eclipse him this year

The modern record is 10.8 million votes, set by President George W. Bush in 2000, according to University of Minnesota political science professor Eric Ostermeier, who writes the Smart Politics blog.

TEN TO GO: THE REMAINING REPUBLICAN PRIMARIES May 3: Indiana May 10: Nebraska, West Virginia May 17: Oregon May 24: Washington June 7: California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota

There are still 10 Republican primaries to come, including the mega-population center of California.

And as the nail-biter contest between Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich comes down to the wire, voter participation rates are climbing with each new statewide election.

Ostermeier told the New York Post that with so many contests left to be fought, Trump should easily break Bush's record.

'In an election cycle with a high Republican turnout, his numbers are rising, even more so now that there's only three candidates' left, he said.

EATING TRUMP'S DUST: Mitt Romney got fewer primary votes in the entire 2012 campaign than Trump has with 10 primary elections left to go

There's some disagreement about exactly how many votes Bush got in 2000, with some estimates ranging as high as 12 million.

But Ostermeier says Trump will likely exceed even that number because of his celebrity and the white-hot light of publicity that has turned the GOP presidential race into a political cage match.

Indiana's primary is next, coming in just five days. Nebraska and West Virginia come a week later, followed by Oregon the week after that.
EU diplomats have been accused of wasting millions of pounds on over-sized embassies around the world.

An official report yesterday found some of the outposts were so big that staff members had individual offices bigger than the average British family home.

One property in Tanzania was still owned by the EU despite lying empty since 2009.

Big spenders: EU diplomats have been accused of wasting millions of pounds on over-sized embassies around the world

Some of the outposts were so big that staff members had individual offices bigger than the average British family home. Pictured: the Barbados branch of the EU's foreign office

The European External Action Service, the EUs foreign office, has set up 140 embassies across the globe  in many cases replicating those already run by member states.

In a scathing report, the European Court of Auditors yesterday warned the diplomats were splashing 165 million euros a year (128m) on grand buildings that were much bigger than needed.

The official residences of the EU ambassadors, known as heads of delegation, according to guidelines should not be excessively ostentatious.

The European External Action Service, the EUs foreign office, has set up 140 embassies across the globe  in many cases replicating those already run by member states. Pictured: the EU embassy in Washington DC

But the EUs financial watchdog said 33 of the properties were bigger than the maximum 600 square metres allowed under the rules.

When diplomats looked for a new residence in Sri Lanka in 2014, the auditors found that the staff had opted for a house that was 930 square metres.

Several of the office buildings used by the EEAS were also found to be excessively big. In Geneva, Switzerland, the EUs embassy to the UN is 2,500 square metres despite having just 25 staff.

Each individual therefore has 100 square metres in which to work. In comparison, the average family home in Britain is around 97 square metres.

Auditors criticised the diplomats for not making proper checks to make sure the property costs were in line with market rates for the offices in Togo, the residences in Mauritania and Sri Lanka and accommodation in Kenya.

The report warned that while delegation buildings generally met needs, they did not provide best value for money in some cases because their space exceeded the limits specified in the building policy.

European Commission spokesman Maja Kocijancic (pictured) last night said the delegations play a key role in presenting, explaining and implementing the EUs foreign policies

The European Court of Auditors yesterday warned the diplomats were splashing 165 million euros a year (128m) on grand buildings that were much bigger than needed. Pictured: the Australian office in Canberra

The EEAS, which was created by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, has been accused by Eurosceptics of taking over the role of national diplomatic services as part of the formation of an EU superstate.

European Commission spokesman Maja Kocijancic last night said the delegations play a key role in presenting, explaining and implementing the EUs foreign policies.

The EEAS manages 180 office buildings and 140 official residences in 138 countries throughout the world, each with its own specific legal system and property market, from Europe to Africa, Asia to Australia and the Americas. This makes for a challenging and complex environment in which to operate, she said.
A decapitated stowaway was found in an air conditioning unit of an office block after he fell from a jet coming into land at Heathrow, an inquest heard.

Carlito Vale, believed to be 29, was still alive when he plummeted 1,400 ft to his death when the undercarriage of a British Airways flight opened.

The orphan from Mozambique had hidden on the aircraft for the 8,000-mile journey from Johannesburg to Heathrow on June 18 last year.

The jet was passing over west London when the wheel wells of the landing gear opened, dropping Mr Vale on top of a building used by the online shopping company, Notonthehighstreet.com, in Kew Road, Richmond.

Flight data showed the plane was at an altitude of around 1,400ft when it passed over the area where Mr Vale's body was found.

Carlito Vale, pictured with wife - the orphan from Mozambique had hidden on the aircraft for an 8,000-mile journey from Johannesburg to Heathrow

Forensic police officers on the roof of Notonthehighstreet.com's building in Richmond after the body was found

Another stowaway who was on the same flight survived but has since disappeared.

An inquest into Mr Vale's death at West London Coroner's Court heard his body was discovered in the shattered housing of an air conditioning unit after staff complained about the heat.

Facilities manager at Notinthehighstree.com, Michael Bentley, went to investigate the fault to see if the system was blocked and made the gruesome discovery at around 9.25am.

A statement from Mr Bentley was read by coroner Kally Cheema at West London Coroner's Court today.

It said: 'At around 8.44am I received an email from colleagues claiming the air was stuffy and that they were falling asleep at their desks.

'I went up to the roof to check the air conditioning unit. I saw what I can only describe as a bone sticking out of the smashed aluminium.

'At that point I thought I really hope that's not a body up there as it could only have come from a plane.

'I Iooked in and saw a foot, then a leg, then saw it was a human face down inside the unit.

'I emailed my manager and said "I think I've found a body on the roof", he said "what do you mean?"'

'I said "no jokes, there's a body up there".'

A statement by his boss Jason Weston read: 'I would describe the body as wearing some sort of Converse trainers, I only saw one foot and a leg that was wearing some sort of blue or grey trousers.

Carlito Vale, believed to be 29, was still alive when he plummet 1,400 ft to his death when the undercarriage of a British Airways flight opened

Mr Vale's body was discovered on top of the offices of NotOnTheHighStreet.com (pictured) on Kew Road in Richmond, south-west London

A stowaway was found dead on an office block roof after plunging from a British Airways plane (file picture)

'All I could see was lumps of matter and bones that had smashed the metal housing of the air conditioning unit.'

The first officer at the scene PCSO Gunnie Mooneesawmy she said in a statement: 'I got onto the roof via the skylight.

'I was directed to the aluminium box at the end where I could see lots of blood and body parts and two human legs stuck up in the air.'

Investigating officer Inspector Steve Lemon, said: 'When I got to the roof I saw a gentleman's lifeless body in the air conditioning unit.

'It appeared the body had fallen from the sky at great height.

'Due to the height it had fallen and the force on the landing the body was completely decapitated and had smashed through the metal panels.

'There were no other buildings at that height and no other way for him to get up there as the security door was intact.

'There was no identification on the body.

'Colleagues at Heathrow Airport informed me there was a stowaway found in the landing gear of BA flight 056 that landed at 5.20am from Johannesburg and he was in a critical condition.'

When I got to the roof I saw a gentleman's lifeless body in the air conditioning unit Investigating officer Steve Lemon

A bag with a Mozambique passport and an out-of-date US visa found in a bag left at Johannesburg airport helped to identify Mr Vale.

From that information Mr Vale's daughter was tracked down in Mozambique and DNA taken from the remains and a shirt in the bag confirmed his ID.

Authorities also made contact with an orphanage in his home town of Beira, Mozambique's second city, to confirm his identity.

Mr Vale is believed to have been born in 1986, and was among thousands of children taken in by the orphanage after civil war ravaged the southern African country.

It is believed he had travelled from Uganda to South Africa and was trying to contact a friend in the Netherlands before attempting to get to Britain.

Another man, aged 24, who stowed away with Mr Vale managed to survive the journey after being found in a 'critical condition' in the plane's undercarriage, but it is not known where he is now.

A postmortem carried out by pathologist Dr Michael Heath found that Mr Vale was 'well nourished' and that the cause of death was 'multiple injuries'.
Katy Pancott, 19, from Kidlington in Oxfordshire, (pictured) became embroiled in a drunken argument with her partner Andi Rama in his car before leaping out and being hit by another vehicle, an inquest heard today

A teenage girl who darted across an unlit road at night after rowing with her boyfriend and leaping out of his Mercedes died when she was hit by another car, an inquest heard today.

Katy Pancott, from Kidlington in Oxfordshire, became embroiled in a drunken argument with her partner Andi Rama after he came to pick her up from seeing friends, the night before she was due to go away on a family holiday.

The 19-year-old opened the door of Mr Rama's Mercedes as it travelled along the A40 near Cassington, before getting out of the vehicle when he pulled over into a layby.

As she ran across the road shortly after midnight, she was hit by a silver Ford focus car.

Mr Rama was initially arrested on suspicion of her manslaughter but detectives today revealed there was no proof that Mr Rama had assaulted his girlfriend immediately prior to the accident, as had been suggested.

The inquest heard that earlier that day Miss Pancott had been drinking for several hours at The Crown in Oxford where she worked as part of the front of house team.

She began drinking with friends at around 5pm on October 8, before contacting Mr Rama on Instagram to say she wanted to be taken home.

Mr Rama told officers: 'I picked her up after work. She was very drunk. We had a verbal argument.

'She was trying to, and did, open the car door. I stopped the car in a safe place. She got out. There was no physical altercation and I did not threaten her in any way.'

He said the couple had been in an on-off relationship for two years and at the time of the accident they had been 'going through a stage of arguing' and it was 'difficult to say' if they were still together.

On the night of October 8, Miss Pancott messaged him on Instagram to say she wanted some of her possessions brought back to her house, before requesting a lift home.

Mr Rama said he dropped off her things before collecting her from outside her workplace.

He had planned to take her home but during the journey she said she wanted to go to Witney instead.

When asked who she was planning to stay with there, Miss Pancott said 'It's none of your business'.

Mr Rama told the inquest in Oxford: 'She was saying, "Go ahead, leave me like always", just swearing and stuff. I didn't really reply.

The 19-year-old (pictured) opened the door of Mr Rama's Mercedes car as it travelled along the A40 near Cassington, before getting out of the vehicle when he pulled over into a layby and stopped

'She was drunk and just shouting. She was bringing up stuff from the past.'

He told the coroner that Miss Pancott had accused him of seeing another girl behind her back.

He denied this but admitted to messaging the girl. He added: 'Technically we had split up.'

Miss Pancott opened the passenger side door as if to get out, which Mr Rama told the inquest was something she had done in the past.

He pulled into a layby outside an industrial park at the first opportunity he could, he said, and his girlfriend leapt out of the vehicle.

Mr Rama thought she ran into the road as immediately before the collision he could hear a 'shuffling' noise caused by the contents of her handbag moving about but he could not see her as it was 'pitch black'.

As she crossed the road she was hit by a silver Ford Focus being driven by Philip Cartwright, who was driving back to Witney with his wife Beryl after a day out in London.

Speaking after the inquest, Miss Pancott's father David Griffin vowed to keep his daughter alive 'in everybody's minds and hearts'.

He recalled being 'amused' when police officers arrived at the family home late at night, at the time that she was due back - expecting them to tell him about her latest escapade.

Instead they were on his doorstep to tell him that his daughter had been killed.

Mr Griffin said: 'The police knocked on the door - I expected it to be my daughter. My reaction was, "Oh God, what has she done now?" We'd had police round once or twice, for doing weird and wonderful things you are not supposed to be doing - nothing major, of course.

'I was given the news, which was distressing.'

Mr Rama (above) was initially arrested on suspicion of her manslaughter but detectives today revealed there was no proof he had assaulted his girlfriend

Paying tribute to Miss Pancott, Mr Griffin said: 'She was a lovely daughter. She doted on her brothers and sister.

'She was just wonderful - she'll be missed, not just by us as a family, but friends and many, many other people she knew that I never met.

'It's been very difficult. I don't think it's going to get any easier for myself.

'My two sons are a lot younger aged. They seem to accept what's happened, but don't necessarily feel the pain. They talk as if she's still around.

'All I can ask is people just don't forget my daughter. My children gave her a Christmas card.

'I will keep her alive in everybody's minds and hearts. She will never be forgotten.'

Referring to the inquest hearing, held at Oxford Coroner's Court, Mr Griffin said: 'To me it was an expected outcome - no big surprises. It was an awful thing for us as a family to go through today.'

Retired Mr Cartwright said in a statement read to the inquest that the teenager 'appeared, almost immediately, in front of my car'.

He said: 'I had a split second to react. I didn't have a chance to swerve before the impact, which was immediate. I was shocked, and had a short hysterical reaction.'

Mr Cartwright saw Miss Pancott's body lying on the verge at the side of the road, with Mr Rama over it after getting out of his car.

In his statement he recalled Mr Rama saying to him: 'She can't take her drink. She opened the car door and ran across the road.'

Police ruled there were no mechanical defects on Mr Cartwright's car that could have been a contributory factor and no criminal proceedings were taken against the driver, who passed a roadside breath test.

Speaking after the inquest, Miss Pancott's father David Griffin vowed to keep his daughter, pictured above left and right, alive 'in everybody's minds and hearts'

Collision investigator Daniel Henderson said it was likely that Mr Cartwright would have been travelling at between 38 and 48mph, far below the 60mph speed limit.

He explained that the headlights of Mr Cartwright's car would have only made Miss Pancott - who was wearing mainly dark clothing along a road with no street lighting - visible from 30 metres away.

Mr Henderson added: 'In effect, the collision was inevitable under the circumstances.'

Miss Pancott suffered a cardiac arrest and was treated at the roadside by paramedics before being taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

Medics were twice able to restart her heart before resuscitation was halted and she was formally declared dead at 2.22am.

A post mortem examination revealed that Miss Pancott was just over twice the legal drink-drive limit and she had died from multiple injuries.

Dr Nicholas Hunt, who conducted the post mortem, said Miss Pancott would have been upright, as if walking or running, at the time of the collision.

He added that he studied the body for signs of an assault and could not find any although he could not completely rule out the possibility that there were some, which had been covered by the more serious injuries she sustained in the collision

Recording a verdict of death by road traffic accident, Oxfordshire coroner Darren Salter said: 'I think this was an accident.

'There's no evidence at all that Katy intended to run in front of the vehicle; there's no evidence to that extent whatsoever.

'There's no evidence before the court that it was anything other than accidental, in the sense of any criminal or third party act.

'From Mr Cartwright's point of view, he clearly, it seems, couldn't avoid the collision.

'She exited the vehicle and moved into the path of a car on the A40, resulting in a collision and her death.'

Mr Salter added: 'I would like to offer my condolences to Katy's family. It must obviously have been a massive shock when this occurred, entirely unexpectedly as it was.'
A high school assistant principal accused of abusing a 15-year-old student allegedly threatened to ruin her school records if she did not give in to his sexual demands.

Kenneth Williams, 30, had an 'extensive sexual relationship' with the girl, who is a student at Northwestern High School in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Detective Ryan Thomas told a court.

Det Thomas told a judge Williams had 'manipulative control' over the girl - who is now 16 - by threatening her and her family.

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Assistant principal Kenneth Williams, 30, is accused of having a relationship with a 15-year-old student and allegedly threatened to ruin her school records if she did not give in to his sexual demands

Arrest warrants said the teacher threatened 'to harm her school records' and promised he would protect the teenager from bullies if she 'complied with his sexual demands'.

He also said he would 'allow her injury from bullies at school if she denied his demands', according to warrants seen by the Charlotte Observer.

The officer also told the court that Williams 'threatened to take her and her younger sibling away from their mother' so 'she would never see them again'.

The vulnerable girl believed the assistant principal's threats, Det Thomas said, and she feared for her safety.

The detective added that his team found a 'trail of evidence that concretely and definitely supported' the student's version of events.

The alleged victim reported Williams to another member of high school staff on April 20.

Courtesy FOX 46

Williams had an 'extensive sexual relationship' with the girl, who is a student at Northwestern High School (pictured) in Rock Hill, South Carolina

She was being restrained by the school official when she shouted out the allegations, the Observer reported.

Det Thomas said the girl now struggles to sleep and 'sits up and stares out the window at night waiting for Mr Williams to show up at her residence and harm her family'.

A victim impact statement from the teenager's mother said her daughter had been left 'with a feeling of fear, shame, guilt, hopelessness'.

The mother told WNCN that she had so much trust for Williams that he even had a key to their house.

Police believe the alleged abuse started in May 2014, with Det Thomas adding that the assistant principal has a reputation among students for 'being a pedophile'.

Police spokesman Captain Mark Bollinger said more alleged victims could yet come forward.

Williams' defense attorney said he had no criminal record and was an active member of the community.

The assistant principal is charged with four counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor, one count of second-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor and another of unlawful conduct toward a child.

Williams, who is on paid leave from the school, is being held on a $110,000 bond.
Clayton Foskey, 2, was found dead in a pond less than a mile away from his Hudson, Florida home after wandering off on Wednesday

A two-year-old Florida boy was found dead in a pond less than a mile away from his home after wandering off on Wednesday night.

Clayton Foskey's body was found in four feet of water just three hours after his mother, Roxanne Bracken Potts, reported him missing from their Hudson home at 7.20pm.

A K-9 team discovered Clayton, who was 15 feet out, after finding a small footprint by the water at 10.47pm, according to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office.

Surveillance footage from a neighbor's camera captured Clayton walking down the street at 7.04pm, according to Bay 9 News.

Around 60 deputies were involved in the ground search, as were 21 firefighters, multiple K'9s, helicopters and marine and agriculture units, in addition to dozens of neighbors.

'We are all heartbroken,' Pasco Sheriff Chris Nocco said during a press conference. 'As a parent, I can tell you if your child is ever missing, first call 911 then immediately run to any nearby bodies of water.'

'In Florida, we have a lot of pools and ponds and in our investigations we find children are drawn to water.'

Nocco said Clayton's disappearance is being treated as a death investigation to determine how he managed to leave the home. His mother is being questioned.

The Child Protection Unit was investigating at the home on Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, according to WTSP.

A K-9 team discovered Clayton, who was 15 feet out, after finding a small footprint by the water at 10.47pm, according to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office

'We want to find out why this child was out there, how long this child was out there and how he was able to get out of the house' Nocco said.

'We will get justice for this boy, if we find out someone is responsible.'

Nocco said there is record of law enforcement having contact with Clayton's family at their home in the past but would not elaborate, according to Fox 13.

Two children, aged seven and nine, were also the home but Nocco did not say if they were staying with the family or present at the home amid the investigation.
The father-in-law of a murdered fitness instructor took a bloody t-shirt to the dry cleaners just days after she was killed.

Randy Bevers took the stained clothing into the Dry Clean Super Center in Midlothian, Texas, on Friday, insisting the blood belonged to his injured Chihuahua.

He arrived on Friday, four days after daughter-in-law Terri 'Missy' Bevers was killed in a church.

Just an before her, a male or female suspect was spotted on surveillance footage walking through the halls dressed in SWAT gear.

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Randy Bevers (left) took a t-shirt covered in blood stains which he says came from his Chihuahua (right) just four days after his daughter-in-law Teri 'Missy' Bevers was found murdered in Midlothian, Texas

He arrived on Friday, four days after fitness instructor Bevers (pictured) was killed in a church

According to an affadavit seen by CBS Dallas/Fort Worth, Midlothian police seized a woman's white shirt, size XXL.

They also obtained a copy of a receipt for the shirt which claims to have 'animal blood all over' it.

Workers from the store contacted police that day, telling authorities that Bevers told them the stains were animal blood.

They also claimed someone tried to clean it up before bringing it in.

He told the news station he'd taken his Chihuahua to the hospital after it had gotten into a fight with another dog.

There is nothing to suggest the blood came from a human being, but authorities are still waiting for the results from a DNA test.

The veterinarian where Randy Bevers took his dog for treatment confirmed the story about the dog fight to WFAA.

Just an before her, a male or female suspect was spotted on surveillance footage walking through the halls dressed in SWAT gear

Mr Bevers (left) said he'd taken the his Chihuahua to the hospital after it had gotten into a fight with another dog. There is nothing to suggest the blood came from a human being

Terri Missy Bevers, 45, was found dead by one of her bootcamp participants at the Creekside Church in Midlothian around 5am on Monday, April 18.

Questions have swirled around the suspect's identity, but Kristi Stout does not believe her sister-in-law died because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Authorities have said they found evidence of forced entry at the church and believe Missy may have walked in on a robbery while preparing for her Camp Gladiator fitness class.

Her body showed signs of a struggle. A motive for the killing has not been confirmed.

'Even amongst our investigators, there are a lot of theories,' Johnson said Tuesday. 'Were discussing all possibilities. And we'll go where the evidence leads us.'

Police have asked the public to watch the video closely to see if they can recognize the walk of the individual and are offering $10,000 for any information about the alleged crime.




An Australian woman reportedly working for a non-profit aid organisation has been kidnapped by armed men in an early morning abduction.

The woman, who had been working in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, was snatched early on Thursday from the offices of the the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees (DACAAR) by men wearing military uniforms.

Although DACAAR denied the woman was an employee of the organisation, a spokesperson for the government of the state where she was taken, Nangarhar province, said she had worked in DACAAR's handicrafts department, The Daily Telegraph reported.

The Australian woman working for a non-profit aid organisation in Afghanistan was abducted by armed men wearing military uniforms, according to reports (stock image)

Reports said responsibility for the abduction hadn't been claimed yet.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said on Thursday evening the Australian government was working to confirm the reported kidnapping, it was reported.

A source who wished to remain anonymous said police had detained eight suspects and the woman hadn't asked for protection, the Telegraph reported.

Abductions - particularly for ransom - are common in Afghanistan, with human aid organisation workers often targeted.

Earlier in 2016, five Afghan workers for the International Committee of the Red Cross were kidnapped but freed days later.

Reports said responsibility for the abduction, which occurred early on Thursday, hadn't been claimed yet (stock image)
Les Waas, the advertising legend behind the Mister Softee jingle heard in hundreds of ice cream trucks for more than half a century, has died at the age of 94.

Waas died April 19 at Abington Hospice in Warminster, according to Goldsteins' Rosenberg's Raphael-Sacks funeral home.

The Mister Softee song, originally written in 1960 for the company started in his Philadelphia hometown just a few years earlier, played in the company's ice cream trucks as a way to signal their approach.

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Les Waas, (pictured) the advertising legend behind the Mister Softee jingle heard in hundreds of ice cream trucks for more than half a century, has died. He was 94

Waas died April 19 at Abington Hospice in Warminster, according to Goldsteins' Rosenberg's Raphael-Sacks funeral home.

Soon, the song became ubiquitous with ice cream, summer and fun as the opening notes became instantly recognizable to anyone within earshot  sparking a craving they didn't realize existed.

Both loved and loathed, the jingle remains a lasting part of the collective American childhood.

The tune has also been used by competitors to lure children out of their homes and into the streets for frozen treats.

During his advertising career, which spanned more than five decades, Waas wrote and produced more than 970 jingles for advertisers, according to the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia  where he served as president and chairman of the board.

The Mister Softee song, officially titled 'Jingle and Chimes,' is his greatest legacy.

Although most people know the notes of the twinkling, looping cadence, the song also has lyrics, including: 'The creamiest dreamiest soft ice cream you get from Mister Softee' and 'Listen for my store on wheels ding-a-ling down the street.'

Mister Softee has over 600 trucks and over 350 franchise dealers operating in 15 states plus China.

The jingle has been a prominent feature in popular culture over the years.

Popular culture: In one Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, character Larry David (pictured left) had a traumatic flashback to his childhood triggered by the jingle. And Mayor Bloomberg (right) tried to ban the song in an attempt to rid the city of noise

Mister Softee has over 600 trucks (pictured) and over 350 franchise dealers operating in 15 states plus China

So much so, that it even featured in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which the very sound of the tune triggers a traumatic flashback for character Larry David.

It was even recorded by thrash-metal band Nuclear Assault and inspired composer Jed Distler's String Quartet No. 1: The Mister Softee Variations.

But it's not to everyone's taste. In 2004, Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to ban the song in an attempt to rid the city of noise. He was unsuccessful.

Waas was also known for his sense of humor. University of Calgary psychology professor Piers Steel wrote in a 2011 'Psychology Today' article that in 1956, Waas and some of his fellow admen posted a sign in a Philadelphia hotel reading, 'The procrastination's club meeting has been postponed.'

The sign drew attention from local press, prompting Waas to eventually hold the meeting  the start of a long-running prank. Waas served as president of the Procrastinators Club of America, which even today claims thousands of members.

Waas' wife, Sylvia, died in 2006. He is survived by his children, Sherri Waas Shunfenthal and Murry Waas.

The Mister Softee song, officially titled 'Jingle and Chimes,' is his greatest legacy (still from the 1960s ad)
The girl told police she could not remember anything that happened that night

The defendant later admitted that the girl performed oral sex on him saying it was her idea

Eyewitnesses said the girl was drunk and stumbling and that two individuals had to carry her to the defendant's car

The girl's blood alcohol level at the time was .34, over four times the legal limit for driving a vehicle

The decision came after a girl, 16, filed charges against a 17-year-old when a sexual assault examination found his DNA around her mouth

The highest criminal court in the state of Oklahoma has ruled that oral sex cannot be classified as rape if an individual is drunk and unconscious.

The decision came after a girl, 16, filed charges against a 17-year-old when a sexual assault examination performed on her at a hospital following a night of heavy drinking found the boy's DNA around her mouth and on the back of her leg.

The girl's blood alcohol level at the time was .34, more than four times the legal limit for driving a vehicle.

Testimony from other teenagers that night said the girl was drunk and stumbling and that two individuals had to carry her to the defendant's car.

The defendant later admitted that the girl performed oral sex on him saying it was her idea. The girl told police she could not remember anything that happened that night.

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals said in a unanimous decision that 'forcible sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act of oral copulation.'

Ruling: The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals said in a unanimous decision that 'forcible sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act' (Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals above)

Tulsa County district attorney Benjamin Fu said he was 'gobsmacked' by the decision according to Oklahoma Watch.

'The plain meaning of forcible oral sodomy, of using force, includes taking advantage of a victim who was too intoxicated to consent,' said Fu.

He later added; 'All this does is add to the fire. Their biggest fear is that people they tell the story to wont understand or will judge them for their behavior. If they had that concern, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed that, 5-0.'

Shannon McMurray, the lawyer for the defendant, said prosecutors should have just tried for a charge of sexual battery, adding that the problem with their case is that the young woman did not remember anything that happened that night.

'The court agreed what the state was attempting to do was rewrite statute and add an element. You cant substitute force with intoxication under the law,' said McMurray.
Senior HSBC banker Mark Attfield, 47 (pictured outside the Old Bailey) has been cleared of conning police out of 3,500 in travel expenses

A senior HSBC banker has been cleared of conning police out of 3,500 in travel expenses while motorbiking to his shift as special constable after insisting it was down to a computer glitch.

Conduct Standards manager Mark Attfield, 47, was alleged to have more than doubled his fuel allowance on several occasions for riding his Yamaha motorbike from Essex to London.

The court was told how Attfield, who had risen through the police ranks to 'Special Inspector', failed to inform Met police that he had moved from his parents' home in Benfleet, to his second wife's house in Rainham, Essex.

Prosecutors said that, over a three-year period, he continued to claim 28p a mile for travelling the 39 miles from Benfleet to a police station in London instead of the 18 miles from Rainham.

But Attfield was cleared by an Old Bailey jury after just 45 minutes of deliberation after explaining the Mets computer system would not let him change his starting location.

He told the jury: You cant have two different locations where you are doing your journey from.

I had always been told that you shouldnt change your home address - its not part of the policy.

Prosecutor Max Hardy had told jurors how Attfield moved to the Rainham address some time after March 2011 when he was added to the electoral roll.

But Attfield insisted he was still living with his parents, until he got engaged to his partner in 2014, so he did not mess up her tax credits arrangement.

He told the court: I split up with my ex-wife in 2010, the divorce came through in July 2011. I did a very bad thing, I committed adultery - she found out and she kicked me out.

Only five weeks after the split, Attfield met his second wife Nicola Purdy on dating website Plenty of Fish.

He told jurors: I wasnt staying at her house because of the tax credit rules - I could stay a maximum of three days in a row or four days over the course of a week.

I wasnt every week, I spent about 30 per cent of my time at my girlfriends.

Attfield said he would leave his Yamaha motorbike in Ms Purdys garage for safekeeping. He claimed he would drive his BMW from his parents house, park up, then travel the rest of the journey to London on his bike.

Attfield said he wanted to remain in Benfleet to be close to his then nine-year-old daughter.

When asked why he had always expensed from Benfleet to London - even when staying with his girlfriend - he said it was not possible to change the starting point on the expenses system.

He added: I classed my home - until I got engaged - as my parents address. Its where I felt comfortable and after my divorce I was very vulnerable.

But Attfield was cleared by an Old Bailey jury after just 45 minutes of deliberation after explaining the expenses system at New Scotland Yard (pictured) would not let him change his starting location

I was throwing my time and effort into the police to try and make sense of my self at the time. I was also trying to ensure my relationship with my daughter was moving forward.

I had a young daughter who was looking up to me, I didnt want to let her down again.

Attfield started working for HSBC in 1996 and began volunteering as a special constable in 2010, giving his address as Highcliff Road, Benfleet.

Jurors heard Attfield, who was mainly stationed at Eltham, south east London, claimed a total of 9,884 in travel expenses as a special constabulary.

On one expense claim he attached an invoice for buying motorcycle boots.

The total amount of the alleged fraud was said to be around 3,500.
A police investigation is underway after a bar posted a job advert asking for waitresses with little experience but 'nice breasts'.

One woman who answered the classified for the bar in Sanxenxo, in Galicia, Spain, claimed she was asked to do a Skype interview wearing just her underwear.

Another said she was offered more than 2,500 for having sexual relations with the manager.

A police investigation is underway after a bar posted a job advert asking for waitresses with little experience but 'nice breasts' (file picture)

Their email correspondence has now been turned over to the police after official complaints were lodged against the 'chauvinistic and intolerable' job offer.

The advert said: 'We are looking for waitresses who are attractive, nice, hard-working, have good people skills, nice breasts and minimal experience.'

Following the outcry, it was quickly removed from a jobs' website but not before people took screenshots as evidence.

It's estimated that in the 12 hours the ad was online, there were more than 13,300 hits.

Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia said some of the women callers were offered high pay and a bonus if they had a casual encounter with a director.

Sandra Fernandez from Sanxenco's Departy of Equality said she had called in the Civil Guard to investigate if the ad was real or a joke and to trace the person who had placed it.

President of the local hotelier's association, Francisco Gonzalez said they were sure an individual was behind the ad rather than a business.

People who have complained say the publicity is damaging the image of the town in Galicia.
Madeleine McCann was kidnapped by a group of thieves because she woke up while they robbed her family's holiday apartment, it has been claimed.

This is believed to be the final line of inquiry mentioned recently by Scotland Yard's boss Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, who said two days ago the probe could formally finish within months.

It is believed to centre on a group of thieves which included a 16-year-old teenager and a man who worked at the Mark Warner resort in Portugal when she disappeared in 2007.

It has been claimed Madeleine (pictured) was taken by a group of thieves during a botched robbery of the apartment in which she was sleeping in May 2007

Kate and Gerry McCann (pictured) have campaigned tirelessly in a bid to solve the mystery disappearance of their daughter

The Ocean Club in Praia Da Luz, Portugal, where the McCann's were staying when Madeleine went missing

According to The Sun, phone calls raise questions about the group's actions on the night of the three-year-old's disappearance.

It's claimed they have been identified as suspects by British police, but officers are being blocked from accessing them by Portuguese cops who say no new evidence has been brought forward.

An officer told the paper: 'It has dogged the investigation all the way through and it's happening again.

'If we can't question the three suspects again the trail goes cold and the case will be shelved.'

When they were previously interviewed, the men admitted theft from apartments at the complex but denied any involvement in the youngster's disappearance.

Madeleine vanished at the age of three while on holiday with her parents in Portugal in 2007. Despite a high-profile hunt, no trace of her has ever been found.

Speaking on LBC this week, Sir Bernard said: 'There's been a lot of investigation time spent on this terrible case.

'It's a child who went missing, everybody wants to know if she is alive and if she is where is she, and sadly if she's dead then we need to give some comfort to the family.

'It's needed us to carry out an investigation together with the Portuguese and other countries have been involved.

'There is a line of inquiry that remains to be concluded and it's expected that in the coming months that will happen.'

Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe says the probe into Madeleine's disappearance will wind down in the next few months once one 'final' line of enquiry has been completed

Sir Bernard's comments come just weeks after the Home Office granted 95,000 funding to keep the investigation - which now only has a handful of officers working on it - going for another few months.

Sir Bernard said: 'The size of the team has come down radically, we are now down to two or three people in that team, at one stage there were about 30 officers in it.'

But he added: 'There is a line of inquiry that everybody agrees is worthwhile pursuing.'

When asked when the probe called Operation Grange will end, the Met chief said: 'At the moment it would be at the conclusion of this line of inquiry unless something else comes up.

'If somebody comes forward and gives us good evidence we will follow it. We always say that a missing child inquiry is never closed.'

Operation Grange, which is estimated to have cost 12million so far, was launched in 2011 after the Portuguese police ended their investigation into Madeleine's whereabouts.
Jason Richardson, 30, exposed himself to three women in January, February and August last year

An Army corporal who told police his penis 'must have fallen out of his shorts' when he indecently exposed himself to three women has escaped prison.

Jason Richardson, 30, exposed himself to three women in January, February and August last year.

On each occasion, the women were walking along a road in Crumlin, Belfast, when Richardson pulled up in his car and asked for directions to the airport.

When they leaned in to his vehicle to give directions, he indecently exposed himself.

The incidents happened on the busy Mill Road in the middle of the afternoon.

The first victim ran away while the second told Richardson to 'put it away'.

Both were able to give police a description of the Army corporal and the second even managed to get his car's registration number.

Despite that, it was until the third incident that police finally caught Richardson.

She had a clear view of Richardson 'who had his penis in his right hand...moving his hand in a masturbation motion.'

During police interviews Richardson, from Crumlin, admitted being in the areas at the time but denied exposing himself.

In relation to the third incident he said his shorts were open so his penis 'must have fallen out'.

He eventually abandoned the claims and pleaded guilty to three counts of exposure.

He was handed a two-year probation order along with 120 hours of community service.

District Judge Alan White also ordered Richardson to pay each victim 250 in compensation.

He added: 'I'm always reluctant to send someone to prison with no previous convictions, particularly where probation believe they can address the issues.'

He was also ordered to sign the police sex offenders' register for five years.

Neil Moore, for the defence, revealed Richardson is still a serving member of the armed forces but his 13-year career with the Army is now in jeopardy.

He said the Army had 'stepped in' since the offences came to light and were helping Richardson through therapy and counselling to ensure 'these offences never happen again.'

Mr Moore added: 'He is a man of 30 who had risked everything...his career, his marriage and the likelihood that won't see his son again, all over an urge, an uncharacteristic sexual urge for which he is deeply remorseful.

'I can submit in his behalf that he proffers his sincerest apologies to the victims.'
A Russian warplane flew within 50 feet of a US surveillance aircraft in Asia last week.

The US P-8 Maritime Patrol reconnaissance was conducting a routine mission in international airspace near the Kamchatka Peninsula on April 21.

But during the exercise, it was intercepted by an MiG-31 Russian jet - a supersonic jet, which is one of the fastest combat planes in the world.

It came just days after a Russian Su-27 barrel-rolled over an American RC-135 reconnaissance plane near the Baltic Sea on April 14 - a move deemed 'unsafe' by the Pentagon.

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The US P-8 Maritime Patrol reconnaissance, was conducting a routine mission in international airspace near the Kamchatka Peninsula on April 21 when it was intercepted by an MiG-31 Russian jet (file image pictured)

The Russian jet began its course on the left side of the American reconnaissance plane, then went over it while spiraling on itself and finished on the right side.

And on April 11, the Pentagon slammed Russia after two Su-24 aircraft came within feet of the USS Donald Cook, a missile destroyer.

Secretary of State John Kerry said the Navy ship could have opened fire on the Russian military jets that buzzed around it.

The altercations come as Russia increases its patrol of borders using attack submarines.

Russia has hit back at the US, accusing American military of intimidation by sailing the naval destroyer close to Russia's border in the Baltics.

Kremlin officials warned that the Russian military would respond with 'all necessary measures' to any future incidents.

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.'

On Thursday, a Pentagon spokesman downplayed the latest set-to.

Cmdr. Dave Benham, of the Pacific Command, told the Washington Free Beacon the move by the Russian jets was 'safe and professional' compared to the other incidents.

He added: 'Intercepts between the United States and other militaries occur often and the vast majority are professional.
An ISIS fanatic who wished his followers a 'Happy 9/11' and posted 8,000 tweets glorifying the terror group and encouraging jihad has been jailed for five years.

Mohammed Ameen, 23, used 42 Twitter handles and 16 different accounts to express his support for ISIS between May and October last year.

Photos of Ameen holding a large knife with Arabic writing on the blade were found on his phone, and videos of him preaching on the streets of London had been uploaded online, the Old Bailey heard.

Jailed: Mohammed Ameen, 23, wished his followers a 'Happy 9/11' and posted 8,000 tweets glorifying ISIS. Photos of Ameen holding a large knife with Arabic writing on the blade were found on his phone, the Old Bailey heard

The security guard pleaded guilty last month to five counts of encouraging terrorism and one count of support for a proscribed organisation.

Ameen, of Dagenham, east London, also pleaded guilty to one count of dissemination of a terrorist publication, relating to a video called For The Sake Of Allah, posted on Twitter last September.

The court heard he sent tweets celebrating the 9/11 attacks in New York.

One read: 'TheMagnificent19 May you all get accepted in the highest ranks and multiply your kind! Happy 911'.

An image was posted of a statement which read: 'When we descend on the streets of London, Paris and Washington the taste will be far bitterer, because not only will we spill your blood, but we will also demolish your statues, erase your history and, most painfully, convert your children who will go on to champion our name and curse their forefathers.'

Ameen tweeted a picture of Mohammed Emwazi - known as Jihadi John - in a black face mask holding out a knife. Another tweet read: 'Your 7/7 is our 24/7'.

Prosecutor Christopher Amis QC told the court it 'perhaps gives an insight into the defendant's mindset'.

Mohammed Ameen has been jailed for five years for sending a stream of tweets glorifying the Islamic State.

He said: 'The tweets, looked at individually or when taken as a whole, amount to a sustained effort indirectly to encourage others to engage in terrorism.

'There is, with one exception, no explicit encouragement. Mr Ameen does not direct or invite the reader to engage in acts which would constitute terrorism.

'However the messages clearly constitute indirect encouragement in that they glorify acts of terrorism and those involved in them and they encourage the emulation of this conduct.'

He added: 'There are tweets which celebrate acts of terrorism by ISIL (ISIS). The tweets encourage the emulation of terrorist actions.

'The tweets also portray those who engage in such terrorist action as role models.'

Ameen's home was first raided by police in December 2013, when they found a one way ticket from Luton to Istanbul, Mr Amis said.

Mr Amis said: 'He didn't travel to Istanbul on that occasion. It is thought the intervention of police caused him to alter his plans.'

In June 2014 counter terrorism officers interviewed him about his possible wish to leave the UK to 'travel to regions controlled by the ISIL', Mr Amis said.

In November 2014 he told police he was planning to go to the Turkish border with Syria that night as part of an aid convoy - but was persuaded not to go.

Mr Amis said: 'The defendant's father was shocked. He had no idea.'

He added: 'He was planning to travel to Syria that very evening as part of an aid convoy.'

But he refused to provide any further details regarding the people he would be travelling with, the court heard.

Mohammed Ameen, 23, used 42 Twitter handles and 16 different accounts to express his support for ISIS

Ameen had a large following on Twitter, it was said.

Mr Amis said: 'It's quite clear from the material ISIL supporters are his audience.

The ISIS propaganda video he had posted online, called For The Sake Of Allah, was shown to the court, which featured combat soldiers and a speaker talking about sacrifices 'in the name of jihad'.

The background music to the video included lyrics such as 'we are men that love death' and 'we are the soldiers that fight in the day and the night'.

It also included the line: 'Oh my brothers jihad is the way, to bring back the honour, the gloriest day.'

Bearded Ameen, wearing a navy blue Adidas jumper, smirked in the dock as the video was played.

Mr Amis said it was 'unusual' the video was in English, and was aimed at young English-speaking western men with the intention of persuading them to support ISIS.

He said: 'It's quite a sophisticated piece of propaganda.'

Photos were also found on Ameen's phone of him holding a large knife, the court heard. Images of ISIS flags and people in uniform were also found, as well as a photo of the Statue of Liberty holding the terror group's flag.

Mr Amis said: 'His declared intention to travel to the Syrian border show he was intent on taking action of some sort but was frustrated by the intervention of police.

'The Crown submit this defendant is a surveillance aware propagandist.'

Mr Amis said the defendant took 'active steps to frustrate the police investigation of him and, indeed, others'.

Photos of Ameen holding a large knife with Arabic writing on the blade were found on his phone, the Old Bailey (pictured) heard

The prosecutor added: 'He said in one tweet, 'I got radicalised in the UK and by Allah, I will stay a radical until the day I hit the grave'.'

His defence barrister, Tim Maloney QC, in mitigation, said Ameen was vulnerable to radicalisation and regretted his behaviour.

Mr Maloney said: 'He is genuinely sorry for what he has done.

'Not only for the upset he has caused to his family, but he says he now sees the damage he could have done to other families of those he was encouraging.'

Sentencing Ameen to five years in prison, the Common Serjeant of London, Richard Marks QC, said: 'Those tweets involved a sustained effort on your part to give encouragement, albeit indirectly.

'And in some instances, you were involved in glorifying this, as well as celebrating acts of terrorism by ISIL, celebrating the view of a future that could, by its nature, only be achieved by terrorism.

'It was over a protracted period of about eight months and did therefore clearly show, as the prosecution put it, dogged persistence, as exemplified by the fact you kept opening new Twitter accounts.'

He said: 'Of that, you will serve one half. You will then be on licence.'

Ameen was also made to pay a victim surcharge of 120.
Ken Livingstone was involved in an extraordinary public spat with a Labour MP who branded him a 'Nazi apologist' and 'f****** disgrace'.

The former London mayor was confronted by backbencher John Mann outside the Millbank TV studios in Westminster in an angry row which spilled over into a round of live interviews.

The foul-mouthed showdown came hours after Mr Livingstone poured petrol on the row over MP Naz Shah's Facebook post in which she suggested re-locating Israel to the United States.

Mr Livingstone insisted this was not anti-Semitic - claiming even Hitler supported 'Zionism' and the movement of Jews to Israel, adding 'before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews'.

Bassetlaw MP John Mann confronted Ken Livingstone outside TV studios in Westminster this morning

Jeremy Corbyn delayed hours before finally taking action against his close ally.

Speaking on a visit to Hull, the Labour leader said: 'He has been suspended from the party. We are not tolerating anti-Semitism in any form whatsoever in our party.'

He insisted the suspension would send a 'message' to anti-Semites.

But Mr Corbyn also triggered fury among his own ranks after Chief Whip Rosie Winterton summoned Mr Mann to reprimand him for his 'serious' mistake in confronting Mr Livingstone.

Mr Livingstone, who chairs a foreign policy commission for the Labour Party, sparked the latest round of Labour infighting when asked about Ms Shah's suspension early today.

He told the BBC: 'It's completely over the top but it's not anti-Semitic.

'Let's remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel.

'He was supporting Zionism  this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

'The simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians.'

Mr Mann bumped into Mr Livingstone as they both arrived at the Millbank studios - and immediately launched into furious tirade at the former mayor.

The angry clash at Millbank - yards from Parliament - saw Mr Mann brand Mr Livingstone a 'f****** disgrace'.

Mr Mann pursued the former London Mayor, who was in the middle of a radio interview

Mr Mann told Mr Livingstone he was a 'disgusting racist' as the exchanges grew even more heated

Mr Livingstone was heard on the radio saying 'I've got a Labour MP threatening me, sorry about this'.

Mr Mann said: 'You're a disgusting racist, Livingstone. A disgusting racist rewriting history. You're a disgusting racist.'

Mr Livingstone replied: 'Are you saying it's not true?'

Mr Mann said: 'Yes, you're a lying racist.'

The row continued as the pair walked into the building and up the stairs to the TV studios - where both did back to back interviews.

Former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg condemned Mr Livingstone live on air as they debated the issue on the BBC Daily Politics.

He said: 'What possesses you to talk about Hitler and your views about Zionism given the genocide, given the sensitivities of the issue?'

Mr Livingstone insisted he had only quoted history and was answering questions put to him by reporters.

Following the public row, Mr Livingstone also said Mr Mann had gone 'completely over the top' and started 'bellowing' at him while he was conducting a radio interview over the phone.

As the row continued on the BBC, Mr Mann said: 'I think you've lost it, Mr Livingstone ... What are you on at the moment?

'You certainly shouldn't be on Labour's national executive.'

Mr Livingstone earlier repeated claims the Facebook posts by Ms Shah were not 'anti-Semitic' and claimed Mr Corbyn was being 'smeared' over the affair.

The extraordinary spat was witnessed by a pack of reporters who recorded it for posterity

Mr Livingstone also said he believed the row over his future would 'calm down' over the next couple of days.

Asked if he was under pressure, he told BBC Two's Daily Politics: 'Not really.

'I simply said what I believed to be true, which is that Naz is not anti-Semitic.'

Pressed about his future on Labour's ruling NEC, he said: 'Things erupt.

'They dominate the news for 24/48 hours.

'People calm down again when they go back and check what you have really said.'

The scandal first broke on Tuesday after the Guido Fawkes website revealed that in 2014, before she was an MP, Bradford West MP Ms Shah shared a graphic on Facebook which was headlined 'Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict - Relocate Israel into United States' and she added: 'problem solved.'

In a series of apologies, Ms Shah admitted the posts were not 'excusable' and vowed to help build relations between faith communities in penance for her statements.

Mr Corbyn finally bowed to pressure to suspend her from the party and remove the whip yesterday afternoon.
Arrested: Hasib Bin Golamrabbi, 22, (pictured) and his 17-year-old brother were detained on Thursday

Two brothers have been arrested on suspicion of murdering their parents, who emigrated from Bangladesh 30 years ago and were found shot dead over the weekend in their California home.

Hasib Bin Golamrabbi, 22, and his 17-year-old brother were detained on Thursday. They're being held without bail.

The older son is slated to be in court on Friday. An appearance date for the teen, who has not been name, was not immediately available.

The brothers are accused of killing their parents Shamima and Golam Rabbi, aged 57 and 59, who were found dead on Sunday.

Their bodies, each shot once, were left on the floor of their home in San Jose, next to a chilling note that read: 'Sorry, my first kill was clumsy.'

They were discovered by concerned friends, who opened an unlocked sliding glass door at around 2pm on Sunday and found them lifeless.

Aside from the ominous message on the floor, another rambling message was written across the wall.

It said in part: 'I can't be like you, telling a lie. I can't love someone without telling them', and claimed that Mrs Rabbi begged for her life before she was killed.

It was unknown how long the couple, who were Muslim, had been dead. Police haven't released a motive in the killings or any other details.

The husband and wife often hosted relatives at their home since moving from Bangladesh to the United States.

Mr Rabbi, who was an engineer, liked to hunt and had several guns in the house, friends claim.

Evergreen Islamic Center in San Jose said the bodies of the parents were released Wednesday afternoon to relatives and the funeral is being planned for Friday at the Five Pillars Farm Cemetery in Livermore, KNTV reports.

Mosque spokesman Faisal Yazadi did not know about the arrest of the younger son until notified by a reporter.

'Needless to say,' he said. 'This is one of those tragedies nobody ever wants to be in. All we can do is pray. This is a family matter and a police investigation.'

Tragic: Bangladeshi husband and wife Golam and Shamima Rabbi, 59 and 57, were found dead on Sunday

It was not immediately clear Thursday morning if the two sons have attorneys.

Hasan Rahim, from the Evergreen Islamic Center, said the Rabbis often attended services at the mosque.

But he said he had warned the couple of the dangers of keeping guns at home.

'I just said be careful. If you have weapons in the house be careful,' Mr Rahim said.

'I've known him for 30 plus years, so it's a loss,' he added.

Video courtesy: KRON

'People were in disbelief, in shock, they were stunned and the loss is so enormous that we are still finding it difficult to come to grips with the truth.

'I still cannot reconcile the tragedy of this whole situation. It is just unbelievable. It is just too much too accept.'

Friends described the the husband and his accountant wife as gentle and kind.

'We are surprised that they are no longer with us and especially going away in such a manner is something we just can't come to grips with,' Evergreen Islamic Center member Faisal Yazadi said.

'He always asked me about my family, now I can't answer him back. I can't ask him about his family,' he added.

Anyone with information is urged to contact Detective Sergeant Pat Guire or Detective Ken Tran of the San Jose Police Department on 408-277-5283.

Crime scene: Their bodies, each shot once, were left on the floor of their home in San Jose, next to a chilling note that read: 'Sorry, my first kill was clumsy'. Pictured: Police outside the property on Sunday afternoon

It was unknown how long the couple, who were Muslim, had been dead. Pictured: An ambulance at the scene
Dan Stuparu, 46, was jailed for 18 months in October 2014 after the brutal attack in East Yorkshire and has now been deported

A Romanian care home worker who 'lost his temper' and viciously assaulted a defenceless 86-year-old man - leaving the room splattered with blood - has been deported.

Dan Stuparu, 46, was jailed for 18 months in October 2014 after the brutal attack at a care home in East Yorkshire, which the victim never recovered from and left him terrified of staff in nursing uniforms.

Pensioner Derrick Blacker, who suffered from dementia, died just months after he was punched twice in the face and did not live to see his attacker sentenced and deported.

Mr Blacker was assaulted in bed on the night he was due to return home, but a hoist to move the frail man was not available.

He had only been staying at Summer Court Hall nursing home in Hornsea for two weeks of respite care.

Stuparu pleaded not guilty at Hull Crown Court last year, but he was convicted of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and jailed for 18 months last year.

He was more than twice the legal alcohol limit for driving when he was arrested, the court heard.

Chris Palmer and Sue Griffiths, who were friends of Mr Blacker and cared for him during the last 14 years of his life, welcomed the news of Stuparu's deportation.

Derrick Blacker (pictured), who suffered from dementia, died just months after he was punched twice in the face and did not live to see his attacker sentenced and deported

Mr Palmer said: 'If he'd got let out we would have been frustrated and angry at the sentence.

'But because he's been deported we are happy that he's gone. He can't hurt anyone else now, at least not in this country. We don't want people like that here.'

Stuparu 'lost his temper' and assaulted Mr Blacker when a colleague momentarily left the room, jurors were told during his trial in 2014.

The assault was so brutal, the wall was 'splattered' with blood after the attack, the court heard.

Mr Blacker also became 'petrified' of anyone in a nursing uniform and, when taken to Hull Royal Infirmary, asked staff: 'You're not going to punch me, are you?'

Recalling when she saw Mr Blacker in hospital after the assault, Ms Griffiths said her friend told her: 'I've been in a fight, Sue'.

'They'd cleaned him up, so I dread to think what he did look like. He looked such a mess, such a mess.

'It was horrendous,' she added.

Mr Blacker was assaulted on the night he was due to return home, but a hoist to move the frail man was not available

Mr Blacker, from Rise, East Yorkshire, suffered from dementia and did not even have the strength to turn himself over in bed.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: 'Foreign nationals who abuse our hospitality by committing crimes in the UK should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them.

'We will use every available power to take action against those foreign criminals who cause significant problems in the UK, including those from countries within the European Union.
David Mills, 38, pictured, pleaded guilty to theft after appearing at Liverpool Crown Court

A man who defrauded his best friend's business out of 187,000 has been jailed for almost three years after pleading guilty to theft.

David Mills from Blackpool began working part time at his best friend's contractor's firm in 2010 and was soon promoted to the company's Office and Finance Manager by April 2011.

Liverpool Crown Court heard that Mills, 38, worked for the Wigan based company for several years before his employers became concerned about his conduct.

Following his promotion in April 2011, Mills was responsible for for processing invoices and making payments to suppliers.

However, during the summer of 2015, Mills had been regularly turning up to work late, had been drinking excessively and had been understood to spend some nights sleeping in the office.

In September 2015, Mills went to a concert with one of the company's owners and following a few drinks where he spoke about the difficulty of hiding things on mobile phones as opposed to computers. He said it was easy to 'mask' files on a computer.

Mills admitted he had a large amount of cash in his bank account which further raised suspicions.

The firm began an investigation and discovered that a number of payments to different companies went into the same bank account which was controlled by Mills.

Detective Constable Sarah Langley of GMPs Fraud Investigation Team said: 'This theft was a huge betrayal not only by an employee against his bosses but by a man against his best friend.

'David Mills had a very close relationship with one of his bosses who was also the best man at his wedding and is the god father to his daughter.

'The company directors obviously thought very highly of him and trusted him enough to give him access to their bank accounts but he destroyed that trust as if it meant nothing to him.

'I hope the sentence passed here today will bring them some comfort and help them move on from this terrible saga.
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A Saudi Arabian billionaire made it extremely clear what he thought about parking fines around west London after he was caught dining casually with friends while his gold supercars were slapped with tickets.

Money is clearly no object for billionaire Turki Bin Abdullah, who looked to discard the 80 parking fine as if the total was nothing more than pocket change to him.

A member of the house of Saud, the billionaire was shown sitting in a restaurant with friends with his 370,000 Mercedes G63 and 350,000 Lamborghini Aventador SV parked immediately outside in Brompton Road.

It isn't the first time he has been pictured flaunting parking regulations, after his infamous gold-plated supercars, which include a 350,000 Rolls-Royce and a 220,000 Bentley, were spotted with parking tickets slapped on the windshield in Knightsbridge.

It comes after MailOnline revealed how the billionaire could actually be saving money by getting parking tickets.

The bay in Knightsbridge where three of the vehicles were left in March costs 4.60 an hour and can be used for a maximum of two hours. However, all three cars had been parked there for more than six hours.

Turki Bin Abdullah's 370,000 Mercedes six-wheel off-roader, which looks more suited to the sand dunes than the congested streets of London

The billionaire's 350,000 Lamborghini Aventador SV is shown parked immediately outside the restuarant he is dining at in Brompton Road

Money is clearly no object for billionaire Turki Bin Abdullah, who looked to discard the 80 parking fine as if the total was nothing more than pocket change to him

As a result, the owner was fined 80 per car  which can be reduced to 40 if paid within 14 days. It means getting booked is cheaper than parking in one of the nearby car parks.

Just 50m away there is an NCP car park where the charge for a 24-hour stay is 50. The Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel also charges 50 a day for leaving a vehicle in its underground car park.

A spokesman for Kensington and Chelsea Council said that tickets issued to foreign cars and drivers are followed up to ensure they are not ignored.

It is thought owners pay in excess of 20,000 to fly their vehicles around 3,000 miles to London. Qatar Airways is one of the operators that facilitates the transportation, with airport staff securing vehicles to the floor of the relevant aircraft before flight.

Last year, following numerous complaints, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea introduced a Public Spaces Protection Order in Knightsbridge.

Motorists are now banned from revving their engine, rapidly accelerating, racing, performing stunts, sounding horns or causing obstructions. They are also prohibited from leaving the engine of a stationary car running.

The PSPO came into place to deal with the 'excessive level of noise nuisance, annoyance, danger or risk or harm or injury' caused by the drivers.

Motorists who breach the order face a maximum 1,000 fine or fixed penalty notice of 100. Over the past three weeks seven drivers have been handed fixed penalty notices.

Council leader Cllr Nick Paget-Brown said: 'It's too early yet to judge the success of the PSPO but the police and the council will continue to ticket drivers who breach it until the message gets through that our residents are not to be disturbed by supercars.'

A member of the house of Saud, the billionaire was shown sitting in a restaurant with friends with his 370,000 Mercedes G63 and 350,000 Lamborghini Aventador SV parked immediately outside in Brompton Road

A City of Westminster penalty notice on the windshield of the billionaire's Mercedes G63, one of four gold supercars he had flown over to the capital earlier this year
Aimee Copeland, who lost her limbs when she contracted a flesh-eating bacteria four years ago when she was 24, will be this year's Gwinnett College commencement speaker.

On May 12, Copeland, who grew up in Gwinnett, Georgia, will tell the graduating class of over 400 students about her life changing battle with necrotizing fasciitis . She will speak about how despite having all four limbs amputated, she refuses to stop living her life, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

'I am blessed to have the capacity to share my experience with others and have a chance to improve the quality of someone elses life,' Copeland said in a Gwinnett College news release.

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Tale of bravery: Aimee Copeland, who lost her limbs when she contracted a flesh-eating bacteria four years ago, will be this year's Gwinnet College commencement speaker

School: On May 12, Copeland, who grew up in Gwinnett, Georgia, will tell the graduating class of over 400 students about her life changing battle with necrotizing fasciitis

Aimee Copeland will speak about how despite having all four limbs amputated, she refuses to stop living her life. She is pictured here enjoying a day out with her dog

NECROTIZING FASCIITIS: THE VICIOUS FLESH-EATING DISEASE Necrotizing fasciitis, more commonly known as 'flesh-eating disease', is a rare but extremely vicious bacterial infection. 'Necrotizing' refers to something that causes body tissue to die, and the infection can destroy skin, muscles and fat. The disease develops when the bacteria enters the body, often through a minor cut or scrape. As the bacteria multiply, they release toxins that kill tissue and cut off blood flow to the area. Because it is so virulent, the bacteria spreads rapidly throughout the body. Symptoms include small, red lumps or bumps on the skin, rapidly-spreading bruising, sweating, chills, fever and nausea. Organ failure and shock are also common complications. Sufferers must be treated immediately to prevent death, and are usually given powerful antibiotics and surgery to remove dead tissue. Amputation can become necessary if the disease spreads through an arm or leg. Patients may undergo skin grafts after the infection has cleared up, to help the healing process or for aesthetic reasons. There are 500 to 1,500 cases reported a year, but 20 to 25 percent of victims die. Advertisement

Copeland has been a success and completed her Master's degree in humanistic psychology and is pursuing another in social work. She is currently writing a memoir, the profits from which 'will go toward my dream of creating a nonprofit community growth center for people of all ages and abilities,' she said on Facebook.

Earlier this year, Aimee said she is happier than ever after meeting the love of her life, an English teacher named Stephen. Though, her journey was not an easy one.

Prior to her accident, Aimee Copeland seemed to have it all - a loving boyfriend, a successful academic career with her Master's degree in psychology around the corner, and confidence in her beauty.

But then Copeland suffered what seemed at first a minor injury when she went zip-lining, only for the steel rope to snap, causing her to fall and cut her left calf badly enough to need 22 stitches.

That, however, was only the beginning of her ordeal.

In fact, over the next two days Aimee returned to the doctors twice more as the pain worsened, but after receiving a clean MRI report, she was given antibiotics, painkillers and sent home.

Three days after she fell, Copeland was so weak a friend carried her back into hospital and it was then a physician delivered the devastating news that necrotizing fasciitis [NF] was rampaging through her body eating her flesh.

Banding together: And she serves on the advisory council for Tools for Life and the board of Friends of Disabled Adults and Children, pushing for accessibility and inclusion

Prior to her accident: Aimee Copeland (pictured before) seemed to have it all - a loving boyfriend, a successful academic career with her Master's degree in psychology around the corner, and confidence in her beauty

Aimee was in a relationship with her boyfriend Ben (she is pictured with him left) for five years. After she had her legs amputated, her relationship crumbled and in 2015 she met her new love Stephen

Aimee was flown to the JMS Burn Center in Augustus, Georgia, the most advanced infection care unit in the area.

It was there doctors performed a high-hip amputation of her left leg.

They were also forced to remove tissue from her abdomen and days later they also had no option but to remove both her hands and right foot.

With just a one percent chance of survival, Aimee remained in intensive care for the next two weeks.

Her devastated parents Donna, Andy, her sister Paige and then boyfriend of five years Ben - whose surname she declines to disclose - kept a constant vigil at her bedside.

Six weeks after her accident, Aimee left hospital and was moved to a rehabilitation center where she spent almost two month learning to adapt to life without her limbs.

Little by little she began to learn how to use her first prosthetic hands to do the simple tasks most of us take for granted such as using her phone, doing her hair or brushing her teeth.

Helping her sister down the aisle: At her sister Paige's wedding, Aimee was a bridesmaid

Sharing her talents: Aimee is also a passionate advocate for people with disabilities and loves to speak out on behalf of others like herself, sharing her journey of recovery

Forced to move back in with her parents, Aimee felt like she had lost her independence, and plunged into a depression.

She struggled to deal with the physical changes in her body and recalls how looking in the mirror for the first time was incredibly difficult.

Not long after, Aimee's five year relationship with boyfriend Ben began to crumble, as he struggled to come to terms with the new Aimee.

It was extremely challenging for Aimee to lose her boyfriend. However, in January 2015, she met an English teacher named Stephen.

Copeland drives her own specially adapted car and her hobbies include kayaking and wake boarding.

Aimee is also a passionate advocate for people with disabilities and loves to speak out on behalf of others like herself, sharing her journey of recovery.

She travels around the US speaking at conferences to help other amputees.
A woman whose family mistakenly believed she had died in a car crash has spoken at the ten -year anniversary of the tragedy, which claimed the lives of four fellow students and a staff member.

Following the horrific 2006 crash on State Road 18 in Indiana, Whitney Cerak had been wrongly identified as Laura Van Ryn, who paramedics said was critically injured.

Both were blonde with similar features and were students at Taylor University in Indiana.

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Whitney Cerak, whose family mistakenly believed she had died in a car crash, has spoken at the ten -year anniversary of the tragedy on Wednesday

Following the horrific 2006 crash, Whitney Cerak (left) had been wrongly identified as Laura Van Ryn (right), who paramedics said was critically injured

Catastrophe: In 2006, four students and a college employee were killed when their van was struck by a tractor in Indiana

But as family and friends gathered at the bedside of who they believed to be Van Ryn, Cerak was in fact lying there, comatose and covered in bandages.

Meanwhile, Cerak's family held a funeral service for her, attended by hundreds of friends and family.

It wasn't until five weeks after the crash, that the sister of 22-year-old Van Ryn noticed that her sibling's teeth looked different - and the horrifying mistake was discovered.

Speaking ten years on, Whitney Cerak - now Wheeler - told those gathered at Taylor University, what it was like to have a funeral held for you when you're still alive, reported Detroit Free Press.

Wheeler said: 'A lot of people wonder what will people say about you at your funeral. I know.'

She joked that she was surprised to find out she wasn't very good at sports, according to one speaker at her funeral and that her sister thought she didn't shower often enough.

She also spoke frankly about the difficult reality of facing a family who mistakenly believed their daughter was alive.

But, she said: 'The Van Ryns, they loved me like I was their daughter because they believed that I was their daughter'.

Four months after the crash, Wheeler returned to Taylor University, where she graduated three years later.

Eerie: The gravestone of Whitney Cerak was laid following her funeral despite the fact she was alive and injured in an Indiana hospital

Mistaken identity: Whitney Cerak was so badly injured after the crash that the VanRyn family believed it was their daughter Laura for five weeks

She spoke of the struggle she faced upon her return: 'Coming back to school was really hard. Nothing was making sense to me. My identity before the accident was no longer.

'I thought I was really social and funny, I had a lot of friends. But after April 26, those things changed.

'The left side of my body was completely crushed, I wasn't able to speak above a whisper.'

She added: 'Not only did I have the feeling of guilt, but I also had the feeling of anger, always being in the public eye, never wanting to be.

'Everything I had known about myself, my identity, was swallowed up by this accident. This is how I was known, just as that girl that survived.'

She thanked the Taylor community for supporting her through this tough time and also said her relationship with God 'got her through' emotionally.

Wheeler also said it was her faith God that aided her speedy recovery.

She told the room: 'Doctors said that I would never be the same because of the brain injury that I had,.

'But it's a good thing that we don't put our hope in doctors, but we put our hope in God, because four months after this accident I was back on campus and starting my sophomore year again.'

The Wheeler couple now have three children (pictured) and she works with middle school girls in North Carolina

At the speech, Wheeler thanked the Taylor community for supporting her through this tough time and also said her relationship with God 'got her through' emotionally. Pictured, left with child and right with husband and two of her three children

The memorial, held Wednesday, was followed a chapel service Monday that was attended by family members of the four victims.

The brother of victim Brad Larson, Jeft, and Laura Van Ryn's sister, Lisa, both spoke at the service.

Also killed in the crash were Laurel Erb, Betsy Smith and university staff member Monica Felver.

Truck driver Robert Spencer, who caused the crash, was later arrested on five counts of reckless homicide. Spencer pleaded guilty and served two years of a four-year sentence.

Meanwhile, Wheeler has got her life back together.

In 2012, she went on to marry her then boyfriend Matt Wheeler, who had helped her recover from the accident. The couple wed in the same church in Gaylord, Indiana where the Cerak family once held her funeral.

They had a son, Zachery in that same year. The couple now have three children and Wheeler works with middle school girls in North Carolina.

Happiness: Whitney Cerak married at the church where her family once held her funeral after a case of mistaken identity meant they believed she had died
Police fear that other women may also have been attacked by the rapist

Abdi was told he will serve at least twelve years behind bars for his crimes

One of his victims - targeted while she was out for a walk- was in her 70s

Liban Abdi has been jailed for life after assaulting at least five women

An obsessive serial sexual predator who targeted lone women after being repeatedly released on bail by police has been jailed for life.

Liban Abdi, 28, was on bail for burglary when he sexually assaulted three women  including one in her 70s  on the same day.

He then raped a fourth woman after dragging her into a pub car park before being arrested by police again.

But when they let him out on bail he went on to pounce on another woman as she opened the front door of her home.

Police fear unemployed Abdi could be responsible for many more attacks on women who have been too scared to come forward.

Today, the career criminal was jailed for life and to serve a minimum of 12 years.

A judge said he clearly planned all the attacks.

Judge Grace Amakye said: I am satisfied that your offences are so serious that a sentence of life imprisonment is required and that is the sentence which I impose.

Abdi, who has a goatee beard, pulled his red tracksuit top over his mouth and hung his shaved head in his hands as he heard the verdict.

Snaresbrook Crown Court was told Abdi, born in Britain to Somali parents, was a prolific criminal with 13 convictions whose criminal career began when he was just 14.

In 2007 he was jailed for three years for wounding his own brother.

He was jailed again in June 2011 and sentenced to 42 months for robbery.

His last conviction was in April last year for indecent exposure and shouting vile lewd and racist comments to a group of white women.

Abdi carried out all the sex attacks while on bail for breaking into a womans bedroom as she slept and stealing an iPad.

The predator was captured on CCTV on December 4 2014 just before attacking a woman he followed on a bus

Prosecutors said he targeted petite Asian women telling one victim as he raped her twice: I love Chinese and Japanese.

The three women he attacked on November 29 2014, were all of Oriental appearance, the court was told.

Abdi throttled the woman in her 70s before putting his hand down her trousers as she took her daily walk in Poplar, East London.

A short while later he groped a second woman nearby at an underpass beside Blackwall Docklands Light Railway station.

On that day he also attacked a woman in her own hallway, pushing her onto the floor before groping her.

He then struck again five days later, dragging a woman he followed on a bus into a pub car park where he twice raped her.

Police arrested him at his home on December 7, 2014, and seized a distinctive red and green striped New York Yankees cap and a mobile phone but released him.

Five months later he attempted to overpower a woman as she entered her home in Bethnal Green at around 6am.

But she fought him off after pleading with him that I am human too and screamed causing him to run away before he was arrested.

Prosecutor Sandip Patel QC said: He was clearly targeting Oriental females.

We know he was arrested shortly after the burglary and was bailed and, therefore, we know that he was on bail when he committed the offences.

In a statement read to the court, one victim said she has been left a shell of my former self by the attack.

Another said: Now my landlord wants to evict me because I cant work to make the extra money.

The attack lasted merely seconds, but the effects have lasted ever since. I have no idea what sort of man could such a thing. He has ruined my life.

Abdi was convicted by a jury of sexual assault, rape, attempted rape, assault by beating, assault and assault by penetration.

Speaking after the case, DC Tim Duffin, of the Metropolitan Police, said: Abdi targeted lone women and put them through a terrible ordeal.
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Hackney is not renowned for its green open spaces.

But after years of work and campaigning by activists the London borough will welcome the capital's newest nature reserve, which opens to the public this Sunday.

Surrounded by tower blocks and social housing, the reservoir and its banks will be an oasis of nature in the middle of the inner city urban sprawl.

Woodberry Wetlands, created by Thames Water and London Wildlife Trust, is on the site of a working reservoir, which was originally constructed in 1833 to provide water to north London.

It is home to a variety of wildlife including Kingfishers, reed warblers, bees and dragonflies.

Alongside the reservoir is the UK's largest regeneration project, which aims to provide 5,500 homes by 2040 - with 41 per cent affordable housing.

In 2007 Hackney council appointed Berkeley Homes and Genesis Housing Association to redevelop the 64-acre site.

Hackney is not renowned for its green open spaces. But after years of work and campaigning by activists the London borough will welcome the capital's nature reserve (pictured), which opens to the public this Sunday

Surrounded by tower blocks and social housing, the reservoir and its banks will be an oasis of nature in the middle of the inner city urban sprawl

Woodberry Wetlands, created by Thames Water and London Wildlife Trust, is on the site of a working reservoir, originally constructed in 1833 to provide water to north London

Alongside the reservoir is the UK's largest regeneration project (pictured), which aims to provide 5,500 homes by 2040 - with 41 per cent affordable housing

Soon to open as a wildlife reserve, it is home to a variety of wildlife including Kingfishers, reed warblers, bees and dragonflies

Post-war social housing built to rehouse people from inner city slums in the capital ring the reservoir that was built in the 19th century

Two geese fight on the bank of the reservoir at Woodberry Wetlands, which is home to a large variety of wildlife

The reserve is expected to be popular with locals. Pictured: a Coot nests amongst its chicks and unhatched eggs among the reeds

The regeneration of the site will bring a huge number of new residents to the borough and give a boost to the local economy

Among the growth in the wildlife reserve a goose walks on the bank of the reservoir. The reserve is home to many types of fowl

In 2007 Hackney council appointed Berkeley Homes and Genesis Housing Association to redevelop the 64-acre site

Among the reeds that line the water's edge a Wren takes a rest. It is hoped more wildlife will be attracted to the protected site

Victorian terraced housing was built alongside the reservoir and some lucky residents have a view over the water
Another said it would be great if some world leaders were scared of Trump shaking up the world order from the Oval Office

One senator who called the Trump campaign an 'albatross' around the GOP's neck now says he could shake up the election in a good way

Trump claimed Tuesday night that former naysayers have come out of the woodwork to ask about helping him

Republican Party elites are beginning to warm to the idea of Donald Trump as their presidential nominee, including some establishment figures who just months ago were painting it as a harbinger of doom for the GOP.

'I think he could change the electoral map in ways we haven't seen before,' Texas Sen. John Cornyn said hopefully on Thursday.

Cornyn had previously predicted that a Trump nomination would be an 'albatross' around the party's neck, generating Democratic turnout numbers large enough to crush Republican congressional candidates.

But now he's telling CNN it could work out.

TOLD YOU SO: Trump has claimed on the campaign trail that establishment Republicans will come out of the woodwork to support him, and the first trickle of a flood appears to be forming

DON'T FREAK OUT: Texas Sen. John Cornyn said GOP elites 'don't need to despair' about a Trump nomination dragging the Republican Party down in November

'This disrupts the usual Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal paradigm, and I think we don't know how this will all play out. I think it will be OK,' he said, laughing: 'You don't need to despair.'

Trump said Tuesday night after his five-state primary sweep that Republicans who have publicly disparaged him are now calling and asking 'if they can join our team.'

'I'm a unifier. I unify people,' he claimed.

'We will have people that are backing this party and backing my candidacy that you folks will not even believe,' he told reporters gathered at Trump Tower in New York City.

'We will have such unity. Now, I'm not saying everybody. Because some people have gone over the edge. But we will have people backing the party and backing [me for] the presidency. And we're going to win, and we're going to beat Hillary Clinton. And it's not even going to be hard.'

Many of the Johnny-come-latelies are Ted Cruz supporters, but with his campaign struggling and Trump's skating to the finish line, they've come around.

'Many of us who have expressed concerns are reconciling ourselves to the fact that in all likelihood he will be the eventual nominee,' South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, a Cruz partisan, told CNN.

And Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker of Tennessee gave Trump's foreign policy address on Wednesday high marks, calling it 'very thoughtful.'

He said it could be a good thing for the U.S. if some world leaders were scared of Trump moving into the Oval Office.

'I did say to my staff that is somewhat of a welcome change,' Corker said. 'There is some good that comes with that.'

SHAKE IT UP: Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said world leaders fearing Trump wouldn't be such a bad thing

Even those lawmakers on Trump's right flank who aren't embracing him say they're keeping their powder dry because they don't want to alienate voters who have.

While many conservatives aren't ready to publicly endorse Trump, some privately admit that they don't want to criticize him and antagonize his supporters, whom they will need to turn out in November to retain control of Congress.

Backing Trump 'is a way to give Congress and the Republican Party the middle finger,' Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador told reporters on Wednesday.

Labrador is a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. He endorsed Cruz after initially acting as a campaign surrogate for Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

For every Trump convert on Capitol Hill, though, there seems to be an equal and opposite member of Congress who is stubbornly calling the Trump train a train wreck.

NOT SO SURE: Rep. Raul Labrador of Idaho (left) sees Trump's broad support as a 'middle finger' to the Washington establishment, while South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham insists the party will get shallacked in November with Trump as its standard bearer

'If he's the nominee, we get creamed,' said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former presidential candidate who now backs Cruz.

'We're going to get killed with women and Hispanics. It's going to be a wipeout.'

But Graham acknowledges that if Trump wins Indiana, the next winner-take-all primary state, 'it's over' and Cruz will be sent home packing.

Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, another Cruz supporter, said he can't support Trump in the general election.

'Some of his ideas are fine,' Amash said. 'Others are terrible.'

But Minnesota Rep. John Kline seemed resigned to the idea of a brash billionaire leading the charge in November.
Just in case there are 'riots,' as Donald Trump predicted, at this summer's Republican National Convention in Cleveland the Ohio city is procuring 'protest insurance' to cover the costs of lawsuits.

Cleveland.com is reporting that the city is paying AON Risk Services Northeast a $1.5 million brokerage fee to obtain a $10 million insurance policy, which has become standard practice for cities hosting such a large event.

The insurance will be used in case there are protests  which is extremely likely  and protect the city from lawsuits due to any police action.

Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena is where the main stage events will happen at this summer's Republican National Convention, but protests are expected outside the stadium walls

In 2012, Tampa - the site of the Republican National Convention - paid for protest insurance. A security perimeter was set up around the main convention sites keeping the protesters at bay

Still there was plenty of protesting happening in Tampa's streets, with activists railing against nominee Mitt Romney and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan

Technically the policy is called law enforcement professional liability insurance.

It will be paid for through a federal grant.

There's certainly precedent for needing it to cover a political convention.

The Huffington Post reminded readers that in 2004, at the Republican National Convention being held in the politically-hostile environment of New York City, approximately 1,800 protesters were arrested and the city paid out $18 million in a settlement agreement that took a decade to work out.

By 2008 the lesson was learned with St. Paul, Minnesota, host of the Republican National Convention, spending $1.2 million on insurance premiums, but only having to pay out $175,000 to activists who had protested that year, according to Cleveland.com.

In 2012, both Tampa, Florida, which hosted the Republican National Convention and Charlotte, North Carolina, which hosted the Democratic National Convention, used federal dollars allocated for security to pay for protest insurance.

Looking ahead to Cleveland, there's good reason for the city to have such a policy.

The political conventions bring a massive amount of people into town with 50,000 to 75,000 additional people expected this July in Cleveland, Ohio for the Republican National Convention

The political climate could bring additional protests with the Republicans likely going into Cleveland without a nominee, though Donald Trump is far-and-away the frontrunner

First, the RNC is expected to bring in 50,000 to 75,000 people into the mid-sized Ohio city.

'Theres such a huge range of things that can happen when you have that many people with so many different viewpoints together in a city,' Christine Link, the executive director of the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union told the Huffington Post.

Second, there's the political climate.

The Republicans are likely looking at the first contested convention since 1976.

Donald Trump will likely be the nominee, but he still has a very narrow path to being able to clinch the nomination outright.

He's more likely to grab the nomination on the first ballot with the help of the 200 or so unbound delegates that will come into Cleveland without a specified guy.

There will likely be supporters from both Trump's camp and his rival Sen. Ted Cruz's camp outside.

Additionally, Trump's rallies have attracted left-wing protesters too, including those involved in the Black Lives Matter movement.

'Nerves are on edge because of the possibility of a contested convention, Robert Hartwig, the president of the Insurance Information Institute, told the Huffington Post. 'It could cause tempers to flare on the parts of various parties.'
Timothy Ray Jones Jr, 33, is accused of strangling and beating his five children to death and dumping their bodies in a ditch

The mother of five young children who were strangled and beaten to death is suing the state of South Carolina for granting custody to her ex-husband, who is accused of murdering them.

Timothy Ray Jones Jr, 33, allegedly killed his five children at their home in Lexington County in August 2014 before driving for nine days with their bodies in trash bags in the back of his SUV.

Amber Jones, the children's mother, said the authorities failed to take action despite three years of complaints about the children's care, with allegations of abuse escalating in the months before their deaths.

After travelling for 700 miles, Timothy Jones allegedly dumped his five children's bodies in a ditch in a field in Alabama.

He was arrested in Mississippi after a deputy smelled the stench of death coming from Jones' vehicle.

Police then found 'a large amount of blood and handwritten notes with directions to kill and mutilate bodies' in the vehicle, as well as 'a significant amount of bleach products along with the blood'.

Jones was reported to have admitted killing one-year-old Abigail Elizabeth, two-year-old Gabriel , six-year-old Nahtahn, seven-year-old Elias and eight-year-old Merah Gracie.

According to their autopsies, Nahtahn was beaten to death while the others were strangled.

While the motive for the murders is not known, Jones reportedly made statements before the killings, saying that he feared the children were going to 'kill him, chop him up, and feed him to the dogs'.

Ms Jones, 31, is now suing the South Carolina Department of Social Services (DSS), branding it 'grossly negligent' for granting custody of the children to her ex-husband, the Daily Beast reported.

In her lawsuit, she says the DSS 'failed to provide the statutorily mandated protection that would have saved [her children] from abuse and neglect and prevented their deaths'.

Jones allegedly killed one-year-old Abigail Elizabeth Jones (left) and two-year-old Gabriel Jones (right)

Nahtahn Jones (left) and Elias Jones (right), six and seven years old, were also found dead in Alabama

Eight-year-old Merah Gracie Jones, the eldest of five siblings, was also killed in the horrific murders in 2014

Ms Jones claims the agency did not properly investigate allegations of abuse made by herself, teachers, neighbors and babysitters.

She adds in the legal documents that even when the abuse was noticed by officials, they did not consider removing the children from their father's care.

The DSS first visited the Joneses in 2011 and continued to do so through 2012 after the accused became violent and threatened to shoot a neighbor's dog, according to the suit.

Complaints were also made because the children were unclean, while trash and power tools were dumped all over the property, Ms Jones claims.

Ms Jones said her then-husband threatened to break her neck in front of their children and mentioned shooting their neighbors, according to the lawsuit.

Jones was granted custody of the five children two years before he allegedly murdered them

She also claims that he 'played chicken' with another car while she and their children were in the vehicle and alleged that he spat in her face and head-butted her afterwards.

Ms Jones claims she informed the police and the DSS about the incident at the time.

The Joneses marriage fell apart in June 2012 after he found out she was having an affair with their neighbors' 19-year-old son.

The DSS landed on the father's side of the custody battle after he argued he was in a better position to care for the children than Ms Jones because of her 'lifestyle', according to divorce records seen by the Daily Beast.

But, according to the lawsuit, the abuse continued and Jones was reported to the DSS again in April 2014 after a large bruise was found on one his daughters.

The girl told her teacher she had been 'pulled around the house as punishment', but no action was taken by the authorities.

Just a month later, one of the children was found to have bruises on their neck and jaw after they were thrown against a wall, while another said their groin hurt, according to the Daily Beast.

It was also reported that the children were forced to do push-ups and other exercises as punishment for misbehavior, while they also received spankings and were beaten with a belt.

Jones was said to have told the DSS that his child 'was very clumsy and bruised easily'.

More complaints came throughout the summer from a teacher and a babysitter, leading the agency to investigate Jones once again.

He was reportedly found to have not been feeding his children properly and their dinner one night was 20 chicken nuggets to share between them.

Two months later, the five children were dead.

The DSS did not comment.
Penny Mordaunt (pictured) said the EU can only be saved from the disaster of conflict between its member states by Britain voting to leave

The EU can only be saved from sleepwalking into the disaster of conflict between its member states by Britain voting to leave, the Armed Forces Minister warned last night.

In a dramatic intervention, Penny Mordaunt said the austerity programme required to keep the euro alive had created tremendous potential for civil unrest across the continent.

She said that, unless the EUs leaders woke up to the danger by Britain walking away from the Brussels club, there could be unrest between cultures, between nations.

Interviewed by House magazine, the Brexit campaigner also insisted that the momentum was on the side of Out  with the public not being taken in by the hysteria generated by the Government machine.

Miss Mordaunt said: One reason why I decided to Leave is because I think its the only route open to us to get both the better deal that we need to thrive  but also to try and wake up the EU from what its currently sleepwalking into, which is a disaster.

The suffering that it is putting on certain member states because it cant get its act together over the euro, that forced harmonisation, is horrific, and is just the sort of thing that is going to lead to those countries not thriving, but failing.

Take a look at whats happening on the continent now. The tremendous potential for civil unrest. The tremendous ill feeling built up in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, because of the forced harmonisation in the eurozone, the tremendous austerity.

Now with the migrant crisis added to that and the behaviour of particular nation states you have a real unrest, a political reaction to that with the rise of far-right parties, again causing further unrest  between cultures, between nations.

The Armed Forces minister insisted that the momentum was on the side of Out  with the public not being taken in by the hysteria generated by the Government machine

The continent is fragmenting. People are taking back control against the EUs rules to try and get some control over the situation, to try and protect their states interests.

So it is fragmenting now. The dominoes are already tumbling. And we need to help Europe realise this and get a grip.

I think us leaving will not just make us safer more secure and give us what we need to thrive, it will enable Europe to really start to reform. And without that it is going to end very badly indeed.

Miss Mordaunt said the campaign fight was unfair - with the entire weight of the government machine and taxpayers money on the Remain side.

She said: The Remain campaign is being deeply patronising to the public. I think that they underestimate the grit and determination of the British people, and I think that that is what we are tapping in to.

There is a sort of hysteria, and language that has undermined our country, our businesses, our services, our capacity in all areas - which fundamentally has undermined the people that work in those areas.

I think is quite wrong. But it has been a huge own goal by the Remain campaign. I think that its not appealing to the public.

The minister insisted, however, that the momentum was with Brexit.

She said: I think that the public are really realising what a seismic moment this is.

Miss Mordaunt cited the migrant crisis as a possible source of civil arrest. Pictured: armed forces personnel speaking to migrants that landed at the RAF air base at Akrotiri in Cyprus last year

People respond to optimism and aspiration, and when theyre told that their country cant do something, or is too weak or too poor or too inept, they get quite cross about that. I think thats why the momentum is with us at the moment.

The nation is conservative with a small c. Im under no illusions. The last two referendums weve had the public voted for the status quo.

But I think the nation is ambitious, it has optimism about what were capable of. We risk very little to gain a huge amount, and I think the public, once presented with the facts, will see that.
Two Florida teenagers who were lost at sea during a fishing trip last summer sent an ominous final Snapchat message saying 'we're f***ed' shortly before they disappeared.

Austin Stephanos and Perry Cohen, both aged 14, had set off from Florida's Jupiter Inlet at around 11am on July 24 for the fishing trip.

But within a few hours their boat was hit by a storm as winds of up to 40mph whipped through the inlet area, PEOPLE report.

Friends of the teens say the boys may have been aware of the danger they faced as they weather turned, as they had sent a Snapchat message saying 'we're f***ed.'

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Austin Stephanos and Perry Cohen, both aged 14, had set off from Florida's Jupiter Inlet at around 11am on July 24 for the fishing trip

Investigators say they have found evidence of potential foul play as the battery and ignition were off

Friends Austin Stephanos (left) and Perry Cohen (right) went missing on July 24 last year after setting out on a fishing trip from Jupiter, Florida, but never returned

It was the last time they would hear from Stephanos and Cohen who were never seen again after the doomed trip. Their capsized, 19-foot Seacraft boat was spotted about 100miles off the coast of Bermuda in March.

Now new evidence has been released from the vessel which investigators say may indicate the boat was tampered with.

Photos released on Wednesday by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission show that both the battery and the ignition had been switched off.

Cohen family's attorney, Guy Rubin, say that shows that the battery switch, which is difficult to reach and almost impossible to switch off by accident.

He said it could have been done either by one of the boys or possibly another party that may have accessed the boat.

'We do know for sure that boat was disabled intentionally because the battery switch, which is very difficult to get to, was in the off position,' Rubin told WPBF.

'That can't be maneuvered by the passage of time, the current, and other events. The key in the ignition was in the off position. If the storm came and capsized the boat, the battery switch and the key would not be in those positions.'

Their fishing boat was discovered capsized 100 miles from Bermuda nine months later

A boat on the way to Norway spotted the 19-foot Seacraft about 100miles off the coast of Bermuda, and Stephanos' iPhone was among the personal items recovered from the boat

But marine expert Captain Jimmy Hill said the boys may simply have switched off the ignition and battery to try and conserve what little energy they had.

Both the bilge pump, to pump out water, and the radio work off the battery so they may have been trying to save the battery to radio in.

As for the ignition, 'If the boat had any type of mechanical failure, it would have been shut off, otherwise the alarm on the engine would have been driving them crazy if they left it on,' he told PEOPLE.

'Those particular items, by themselves without any other information, are not particularly shocking.'

Investigators have now released 128 pages of social media posts, investigative reports, cell phone tower records, interview notes and FBI emails.

They reveal that the boys had also messaged their families before they disappeared.

Cohen had sent a text to his mom Pamela on the morning of that fated trip,People report.

'Mom, it's Perry. My iPad is dead... I'll text you in a little. Love you,' the 14-year-old wrote at just before 10am on July 24 last year.

His mom replied within a minute, telling her son she miss him.

'OK. I wanted you to sleep home tonight,' she said. 'I miss you. We leave Sunday morning for New York. What about your work?'

Cohen assured her that he's been doing his homework, 'but I was going to sleep at...'

That final message - cut off mid-sentence - was the last time Pamela would ever hear from her son.

A few hours later, Cohen and Stephanos set out on a fishing trip Jupiter Inlet, never to be seen again, despite a massive US Coast Guard search.

Cohen family's attorney, Guy Rubin, say that shows that the battery switch, which is difficult to reach and almost impossible to switch off by accident

Investigators also found other items in the boat belonging to the 14-year-olds, including fishing tackle

Cohen had sent the texts from Stephanos' phone as his own was not working that day.

Investigators also found Austin had posted 'Peace out Jupiter' on his Instagram and had revealed they were planning to fish 'far off shore' for dolphin.

However, records from AT&T show that his iPhone 'pinged' off their offshore cell tower at 11:25am but back inshore at 12:02pm.

That same iPhone has now been recovered after their capsized, 19-foot Seacraft boat was spotted about 100miles off the coast of Bermuda in March.

It had been severely damaged after months submerged in sea water but Stephanos' family are working with Apple to try and recover any lost messages and data it may hold.

The iPhone has been a source of tension between the families of the two boys who are both desperate to find any clues it may hold.

Until recently, Blu Stephanos had refused to let state investigators inspect the phone in case it jeopardized his chance to recover the data. He cited the recent controversy over Apple's refusal to help the FBI unlock the functioning iPhone of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook.

The decision had infuriated Perry's family who insisted that the phone could hold vital clues as to what happened in the boys' final hours on board the boat and even filed a lawsuit in an attempt to stop officials in Florida from handing the iPhone to Austin's parents.

But yesterday, Mr Stephanos relented and agreed to share whatever information found on his son's recovered cellphone with Perry's family and law enforcement.

Mr Stephanos told the Palm Beach Post that while he is doubtful the phone has survived months of salt water damage, 'but I am not giving up hope.'

Austin and Perry's capsized boat was found 100 miles off the coast of Bermuda with an intact iPhone on board last month - nine months after the boys were last seen.

The phone was taken by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC) and was due to be handed back to Mr Stephanos after he refused to sign consent forms allowing investigators to try to access its data.

The phone spent eight months submerged in seawater and does not currently work, but the father claims he has been in touch with Apple, who he says is willing to help in attempts to recover any information left on the phone, such as final messages or calls the boys tried to make.

Stepahnos That same iPhone has now been recovered after their capsized, 19-foot Seacraft boat was spotted about 100miles off the coast of Bermuda in March.

Clues? Perry's family had appealed to Austin's family to hand over their son's iPhone to investigators - who have now relented

The family of Austin Stephanos (left) were initially confident he and Cohen are still alive. The families used a GoFundMe page to raise almost $500,000 for a private search, but that was called off after it failed to yield any new evidence

Missing teen Perry Cohen, 14, embraced his mother, Pamela before going missing on a fishing trip with his pal, Austin Stephanos

Experts say the phone could contain key clues as to what happened, including the boat's location, speed and direction. It may also contain the last messages the boys may have tried to send and any pictures they may have taken.

Mr Stephanos said he had been working with Apple 'who seems willing to help us try to get the phone operational again.'

'That would be the first order of business, since Austin's phone has been submerged in salt water for over eight months,' he said.

'We've also had an IT expert access the phone's Cloud backup and, unfortunately, found that it had never been enabled.'

Mr Stephanos added that he had not wanted to scare off Apple by handing the phone over following the phone company's refusal to cooperate with the FBI over one of the San Bernadino terrorist's locked phones.

'In light of the recent San Bernardino incident involving attempts by the FBI to retrieve data from a locked iPhone, we felt that it would be best to avoid the pressures of having these efforts played out in the media,' Mr Stephanos said.

'We didn't want to do anything publicly that might jeopardize the cooperation of the manufacturer. Unfortunately, I feel that the recent publicity and wild speculation may have done just that.

'Of course, any relevant information that might be retrieved from Austin's phone will be shared with the Cohen family and the proper authorities.

'To me, this phone represents a connection with my son, so I thank you all for your continued support and understanding in this very sensitive, and very personal, matter,' he said yesterday.

Cohen (left) grew up on the water fishing and is a strong swimmer, his family said. They hope to learn more about what happened to their son through the recovered iPhon

Mr Stephanos' decision came just one day after the Cohen family filed a lawsuit against the FWC and the Stephanos family, calling for an injunction stopping the FWC from handing the phone Austin's parents.

According to the lawsuit, they feared that other family may try to access the iPhone, which they say could accidentally lead to all of it data being wiped.

'I don't know his last moments and it's haunting and it's terrifying,' Perry's mother, Pam Cohen, told WPBF. 'I miss him dearly and would do anything to get him back.'

'It's the largest search and rescue that the U.S. Coast Guard conducted in modern day time. So the fact that eight months later, two vital pieces of information and evidence has been recovered ... why the investigation wouldn't be reopened to look into that and find the answers, it doesn't make any sense,' she added.

Ms Cohen believes that Austin's phone may reveal any last calls or text messages the boys tried to make, as well as any photos or videos they took while on the fishing trips.

But she said that the FWC have asked for the consent of Mr Stephanos, Austin's father, numerous times but he will not give permission for the phone to be accessed.

'Blu Stephanos has said no he will not sign the consent form and that he is demanding the phone to be returned to his possession,' Ms Cohen said.

Austin and Perry were last seen at about 1.30pm on July 24 when they went on a fishing excursion without adult supervision.

The pair had stocked up on $110 worth of fuel for their 19-foot white single-engine boat and did not return to shore that night.

The U.S. Coast Guard first recovered the teenagers' 19-foot boat just two days after they went missing in July (pictured), but the towing company was unable to find it when they tried to bring it to shore

Perry Cohen, who vanished while fishing off Florida's coast nine months ago along with his friend Austin Stephanos, sent a text to his mom Pamela (pictured with her son) on the morning of that fated trip

After just two days, the U.S. Coast Guard found the teens' 19-foot boat capsized some 67 miles off the shore of Daytona Beach.

However, the boat then drifted away and was not found until it was discovered by a boat headed to Norway. The ship's crew found the 19-foot Seacraft vessel about 100miles off the coast of Bermuda on March 18.

Personal items, including Austin's iPhone, were found and handed over to the FWC.

Family members expressed the hope that they would learn more about what happened to the two boys, who were both experienced fishermen.

Ms Cohen wrote on her Facebook: 'This is an open Missing Persons case, and we hope that FWC reopens their investigation and utilizes the expert resources of other government agencies as well as the private sector if necessary to extrapolate the data from the recovered iPhone'.

Items missing from the boat - including a white Yeti cooler and life jackets - gave the impression that the boys made improvised flotation devices, while a missing engine cover suggested they may have tried to work on the engine.

Also missing were a translucent Plano tackle box and a pair of white Royal brand fishing boots.

Two life jackets and a boat cushion were later found off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, but they could not be linked to the missing teens.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission confirmed the boat belonged to Stephanos, and his iPhone was recovered on board

The Coast Guard and volunteers called off the search after they combed through more than 25,000 square miles of ocean in one week.

The families used a GoFundMe page to raise almost $500,000 for a private search, but that was also cancelled after it failed to yield any new evidence.

The boys' families were initially very confident they would find the boys alive, with Ms Cohen saying: 'I have 100 per cent faith they'll find our boys.'

Cohen's stepfather Nick Korniloff agreed, saying the family were 'people of the water'.

He told CNN's New Day: 'I know that we've trained them correctly - we've taught them the respect of mother nature and the power of the sea.

'We've raised these kids right. Our optimism comes from the faith we have. They are strong kids. They are survivors.'
A 14-year-girl is one of four teenagers who have been charged over the bashing and robbery of a 63-year-old man in central Brisbane.

The group got into a verbal argument with the man about 11.45pm on Thursday in Gallipoli Park on Roma Street.

Police say the group then allegedly pushed the man to the ground before kicking and punching him, and robbing him.

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A 14-year-girl is one of four teenagers who have been charged over the bashing and robbery of a 63-year-old man in central Brisbane. Above is one of the teenagers

They attempted to flee on foot but were caught by police a short time later after they were spotted on CCTV.

The man was taken to Royal Brisbane and Womens Hospital for treatment of minor lacerations and bruising to his face and head.

Two women aged 18, a 14-year-old girl and a 17-year-old man have all been charged with one count each of robbery in company.

One of the women, from Annerley, will appear with the 17-year-old boy, from Goodna, at Brisbane Magistrates Court on Friday.

Senior Sergeant Sean McKay said police were able to arrest the alleged offenders quickly

The group attempted to flee on foot but were caught by police a short time later after they were spotted on CCTV. A police van pulls away with one of the alleged offenders inside

The 63-year-old man was taken to Royal Brisbane and Womens Hospital for treatment of minor lacerations and bruising to his face and head

The second woman, from Redbank Plains, will front the same court on May 17, while the 14-year-old girl, from Logan Central, will be dealt with under the Youth Justice Act.

In Queensland, a person who is 17 years old or over is tried as an adult.

Senior Sergeant Sean McKay said police were able to arrest the alleged offenders quickly.

'[The incident] was quickly picked up by the Roma Street Parklands security on their cameras,' he said.
The Turkish Parliament was thrown into chaos today when a huge brawl broke out during a debate on migrants

Members of the country's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) clashed with representatives from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) as MPs tried to pass legislation on a migration deal with the EU.

After a series of verbal disagreements, members of both groups began pushing and grabbing at each other.

As others attempted to restrain those involved, the situation only escalated, leading to a full-on all-parliament rumpus.

The fighting erupted when a member of the HDP referred to the 'massacre' of Kurdish civilians by the Turkish army four years ago.

Ferhat Encu told Parliament: 'I remember the civilians recently massacred by shelling in Silopi. I remember the 34 people, including children, who were brutally bombed by Turkish war planes in Roboski four years ago.'

Members of the country's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) clashed with representatives from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) as MPs tried to pass legislation on a migration deal with the EU. After a series of verbal disagreements, members of both groups began pushing and grabbing at each other

As others attempted to restrain those involved, the situation only escalated, leading to a full-on all-parliament rumpus

The fighting erupted when a member of the HDP referred to the 'massacre' of Kurdish civilians by the Turkish army four years ago

Mr Encu was referring to the killing of 34 people - 17 children - crossing from Iraqi Kurdistan to Turkey in 2011.

The group were first believed to be outlaws from the banned Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), but were later found to have been villagers smuggling oil, cigarettes, sugar and coffee from Iraq.

AKP MPs took exemption to Encu's comments, responding by calling him a PKK supporter and a 'murderer'.

They shouted that he was 'despicable', with one adding: 'You are a terrorist and a defender of murderers. You should be in jail.'

When Encu responded by calling AKP MPs terrorists for allegedly supporting ISIS, the all out brawl broke out.
Businessman Jeff Ruby tonight withdrew his $25,000 reward to help solve the brutal murders of eight family members shot to death in Ohio.

Ruby took to Twitter to explain that he had reversed his decision because of the drugs connections to the Rhoden family.

He wrote: 'With recent complex criminal developments in Pike Co case, we are withdrawing our reward and involvement. Grieving and praying for family.'

Ruby's decision came after family and friends of victim Gary Rhoden, 38, gathered for his funeral in South Shore, Kentucky.

Businessman Jeff Ruby has withdrawn the $25,000 he was offering to help catch the killer or killers of eight members of the Rhoden family because of their potential drug connections

The first funeral service was held today for Gary Rhoden, 38, one of eight members of the Rhoden family shot to death in a series of well-coordinated murders in Ohio last week

Emotional family members and loved ones gathered at Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home in South Shore, Kentucky, on Thursday amid a heavy police presence

Emotional relatives and friends were pictured hugging as Gary was laid to rest, one of two more funeral services that the Rhoden family will have to endure in the next week

Amid emotional scenes Rhoden's coffin was pictured being carried to his grave where he was buried dressed in full camouflage because he loved hunting.

Before walking into the service, father Chris Rhoden Sr. vowed 'no sleep, no rest, no peace' until his youngest son's killer or killers are found, the Chillicothe Gazette reported.

Rhoden Sr said his main goal for the service was to hold himself together after days of crying, adding: 'Let the Lord take care of it now.'

Gary (pictured) was buried in full camouflage because of his love of hunting

There was a heavy police presence at the funeral as family members are concerned they may still be targeted in a follow-up attack.

Gary Rhoden was among eight members of the Rhoden clan shot to death in four homes on Friday last week in an as-yet unexplained massacre.

Police have yet to reveal a motive for the killings, but have said that multiple marijuana grow operations were found near to the murder sites in Piketon, Ohio.

That, plus the area's historic ties to Mexican cartels, has led many to speculate that the murders may have been drug-related.

An autopsy has laid bare the astonishing level of violence wrought upon the victims, with all of them shot at least once in the head, while one person was riddled with nine bullets.

One victim was shot once, another was shot twice, and the other six were shot three or more times.

At least two are believed to have shown bruising, meaning they were likely beaten before being killed, it has been reported.

The victims are 40-year-old Christopher Rhoden Sr.; his ex-wife, Dana Rhoden; and their three children, 16-year-old Christopher Rhoden Jr., 19-year-old Hanna Rhoden and 20-year-old Clarence 'Frankie' Rhoden.

Christopher Rhoden Sr.'s brother, 44-year-old Kenneth Rhoden; their cousin, 38-year-old Gary Rhoden; and 20-year-old Hannah Gilley, were also shot.

Gilley's 6-month old son with Frankie was unharmed. Two other children, a 6-month-old and a 3-year-old, also escaped unscathed.

On Saturday visitation and funeral services are planned for Gilley, before the remaining six victims have visitations on Monday and joint funeral services on Tuesday.

Car repairman Donald Stone, 44, described how he found cousin Kenneth Rhoden lying face down on his bed with a single bullet wound to his head.

As family members gathered to pay their respects, Chris Rhoden Sr, Gary's father, vowed there would be 'no sleep, no rest, no peace' until his son's killer or killers are found

Eight members of the Rhoden family were shot to death in four different homes in the early hours of Friday last week in what police believe was a well-coordinated series of executions

The funeral service for another of the victims, 20-year-old Hannah Hazel Gilley, will be held on Saturday while a joint funeral for the remaining six victims will take place on Tuesday

Stone revealed that Rhoden's corpse, from its knees down, was strewn with dollar bills which may have been a sinister message from the killer.

Stone said he was due to have spent the previous evening with his cousin and slept overnight there adding: 'If I had, I would have been victim number nine. I feel lucky about that and to be alive today.'

Fighting back tears, he said: 'There was blood everywhere man. It was something no human should see.

'A man who was good a man lying there like that, shot dead by cowards. It makes me feel ill when I think about what I saw.'

Stone revealed that his cousin owned a 'ferocious' pitball dog called Brownie and believed the killer must have been known to him.

Specialists are examining 79 pieces of evidence including bullet casings and blood stained items found at the scenes of the crimes.

Around 215 officers are working around the clock to trace the gunman or gang that carried out the massacre.

Police are still hunting for the killer or killers that murdered Gary along with seven of his relatives, and have not yet released a list of suspects or a possible motive

There was a heavy police presence at the Crockett L Reed Funeral Home in South Shore, Kentucky, as Rhoden was buried today as other family members fear more attacks

Murdered teenager Christopher Rhoden was involved in a court case claiming he was assaulted 48 hours before he was blasted to death with seven other people, the Daily Mail Online revealed.

His grandfather has visited officers investigating the shooting of eight people urging them to assess the case.

The teenager and his slain mother complained to police after a road rage incident involving the 16-year-old and a 33-year-old woman.

Court documents obtained by Daily Mail Online show that Rebecca Allen, of Piketon, was given two years probation and 40 hours community service less than two days before Friday's massacre.

She pleaded no contest to the charge of assault on February 24 and appeared before the court last week.

Heartbreaking: Husband-to-be Frankie Rhoden and his fiancee Hannah Hazel Gilley, 20, were among those killed Friday in Piketon, Ohio, according to the Morning Ledger

Tragic: Grandmother-to-be Dana Lynn Rhoden (left), 37, and her son, 16-year-old Chris Rhoden (right) were also murdered, according to the Morning Ledger. Victims Chris and Frankie are brothers

Devastating: Hanna May Rhoden (pictured left and right) was killed Friday in the Piketon shooting that has rocked the small community, according to the Morning Ledger. Her Facebook page says she was already a mother to one child
Puppies were set to be sold by breeders for thousands of pounds

A litter of Pomeranian puppies has been rescued after being smuggled into the UK from Eastern Europe in the back of a van.

The so-called handbag dogs were destined to be sold online to unsuspecting buyers for thousands of pounds.

Thanks to the many celebrities who own them - from actress Jennifer Lawrence to model Miranda Kerr  miniature dogs have become a highly fashionable accessory.

A litter of five adorable Pomeranian puppies have been rescued after being smuggled into the UK from Easter Europe

The charity has cared for more than 150 illegally imported pups since December 2015.

Dogs Trust said it has also seen an 84 per cent increase in the number of handbag dogs that are abandoned after their owners realise the responsibility of caring for them.

Bichon Frises have increased by 73 per cent while the number of Yorkshire Terriers has gone up by 70 per cent.

Yesterday, the Daily Mail revealed the plight of hundreds of 'handbag dogs' who have been abandoned in rescue shelters.

The litter, including Floss the puppy, were brought into the country under fake pet passports

Petunia, a pug, was found cowering in fear after being dumped by the side of the road in Cricklewood, north London, in March this year.

The little pup, who was found lying curled up in a blanket with her head down, was in such bad condition that she had to be put down a few days later.

She was rushed to the RSPCAs Putney Animal Hospital and was found to have a severe infection in her eyes, one of which had ulcerated.

She also had severe infections in her ear canals. Vets who examined the animal say she had been suffering with the infections for a considerable period of time.

The pug was treated and monitored at the animal hospital, but vets later decided to put her to sleep.

Yesterday we revealed how many 'handbag dogs' are falling victim to cruelty and neglect - including this pug, Petunia, who had to be put to sleep

A Dogs Trust spokesperson said: Dogs Trust continues to be concerned about certain breeds of small dogs being regarded as fashion accessories due to the rise in celebrity culture, and bought on impulse without the necessary thought and consideration required.

This trend gives way to high levels of demand for smaller designer dogs, which can lead to a rise in unscrupulous breeding with dogs being bred irresponsibly with potential health and behavioural problems. This can sadly lead to people having to pay large vet bills when their dog becomes unwell.
Labour was last night being torn apart by a vicious civil war over anti-semitism.

On the darkest day of Jeremy Corbyns leadership, he was forced to suspend close friend Ken Livingstone for an extraordinary outburst in he claimed Hitler was a Zionist.

Mr Livingstone was condemned by Labour MPs and activists after making a series of explosive claims, including saying that the Nazi leader backed moving German Jews to Israel before he went mad.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, pictured, was yesterday forced to suspend his close friend Ken Livingstone

Corbyn, pictured yesterday in Grimsby was forced to act due to the ongoing anti-semitism crisis in Labour

Veteran Labour politician Ken Livingstone, pictured, was described as a 'lying racist' by a Labour MP

As he toured studios repeating the remarks, he was confronted by Labour backbencher John Mann, who called him a lying racist and disgusting Nazi apologist.

Mr Corbyn came under immense pressure from senior shadow cabinet figures, backbench MPs and Jewish groups to expel Mr Livingstone from the party immediately.

However, it was claimed that the Labour leader was extremely reluctant even to suspend Mr Livingstone, and agreed to do so only if Mr Mann suffered the same fate.

Labour whips are said to have refused point blank to exclude the MP, laying bare the tensions at the heart of the party as moderates and the hard-Left wrestle for control.

Last night, Mr Corbyn dismissed claims of a crisis in Labour and denied there was a problem of anti-semitism within his party.

He suggested the row had been whipped up by moderate Labour MPs plotting to destabilise his leadership because they feared being removed from their seats by his army of militant supporters.

The Labour leader said he had concerns about the language used and wouldnt tolerate anti-semitism, but added that he was very sad to kick out Mr Livingstone.

Theres no crisis, he told the BBC. I suspect that much of this criticism that youre saying about a crisis in the party comes from people who are nervous about the strength of the Labour Party at a local level.

The comments were seen as a direct challenge to moderate Labour MPs, who are themselves under siege from pro-Corbyn activists trying to de-select them.

Jewish Labour donor David Abrahams, who has given 650,000 to the party, called for Mr Corbyn to resign, saying a new leader was needed to cut out the cancer of anti-Semitism. The crises have arisen as a consequence of the weak and ineffectual leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, he said.

The row exploded after Mr Livingstone, who was appointed by Mr Corbyn to join a foreign policy review, took to the airwaves yesterday to defend Bradford MP Naz Shah over claims of anti-semitism. Mr Livingstone blamed criticism of her on a smear campaign by the Israel lobby, adding that it was over the top to suggest anti-semitism and racism were exactly the same thing.

He then made the explosive claim  dismissed by historians - that Hitler was a Zionist who supported Jews being moved to Israel in 1932. Zionism is the political belief in the need for the creation of a Jewish state.

He suggested that to be a real anti-semite someone has to hate not just Jewish people in Israel but their Jewish neighbour in Golders Green or in Stoke Newington.

Mr Livingstone said: Lets remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism  this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians. As Ive said, Ive never heard anybody say anything anti-semitic, but theres been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-semitic.

It was as he entered the Millbank studios in Westminster for another interview that Mr Livingstone was confronted by Mr Mann. The second suspension of a senior Labour figure in as many days for anti-semitic remarks sparked uproar in Westminster.

Around 30 Labour MPs, including several shadow cabinet members, demanded Mr Livingstone be expelled from the party.

Shadow mental health minister Luciana Berger said: Kens comments are a disgrace and have no place in our party.

Jon Lansman, a close ally of Mr Corbyn, wrote on Twitter: A period of silence from Ken Livingstone is overdue. Its time he left politics altogether.

There was also outrage over the decision by Mr Corbyn to issue a public telling off to Mr Mann. Party chief whip, Rosie Winterton is said to have refused to suspend Mr Mann.

One report  furiously denied  also claimed Mr Corbyns director of communications, Seumas Milne, had argued against Mr Livingstones suspension, saying he had a point.

Israels ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev, said: Not sure which is worse, deliberately distorting Hitlers goals or accusing his Jewish victims of being his partners.

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said Mr Livingstones comments were anti-semitism  pure and simple.

How Red Ken 'Hitler' row exploded

By JACK DOYLE

Unbridled and in the full glare of the media, it was one of the most extraordinary public clashes between two senior politicians in modern times.

Backbench Labour MP John Mann cornered Ken Livingstone and, amid a tirade of invective, denounced him as a disgusting racist.

The explosive confrontation came just yards from Parliament and continued for several minutes as the outspoken MP for Bassetlaw repeatedly accused Mr Livingstone of being a Nazi apologist.

Backbench Labour MP John Mann, left, cornered Ken Livingstone as he approached a TV studio

Mr Mann, chair of the all-party group on anti-semitism described Livingstone as a 'disgusting racist'

The row began outside the Millbank broadcasting studios and continued inside the Westminster building

Mr Mann, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on anti-semitism, challenged Mr Livingstones claim that Hitler supported Zionism in 1932, when he took over as German chancellor, saying: What are you on?

The row started outside Millbank broadcasting studios in Westminster, then continued inside the building as the former London mayor attempted to conduct a radio interview on his mobile phone.

It came after Mr Livingstone said during a previous radio interview: Lets remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

As Mr Livingstone was entering the building at 4 Millbank, which houses BBC studios, Mr Mann shouted: Youre a disgusting racist. A lying racist. A Nazi apologist.

He then shouted: Youve lost it. You need help... Factually wrong racist remarks.

Mr Livingstone replied: Go and check your history. That was the policy they ran on in 1932. It was to deport all the Jews in Germany to Israel.

The MP replied: You read the Nazi policy, you read Mein Kampf. What did Mein Kampf say about Zionism?

Later on, he said: Youre a disgusting Nazi apologist, Livingstone.

And he added: I think youve lost it, Mr Livingstone. What are you on at the moment? You certainly shouldnt be on Labours national executive.

Mr Livingstone then went on the BBCs Daily Politics show where he was appearing as a guest  only to be confronted by Mr Mann on a giant screen from a separate studio.

A string of Labour MPs also attacked Mr Livingstones anti-semitic words.

After hours of procrastination, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn suspended Mr Livingstone.

But in the same statement, he said Mr Mann would be hauled before chief whip Rosie Winterton to discuss his conduct.

It was claimed he also wanted to suspend Mr Mann  a known critic of his leadership  for bringing Labour into disrepute but his whips refused.

Critics said it showed the far-left leadership of the party viewed Mr Mann losing his temper over what he thought was outrageous racism as morally equivalent to Mr Livingstone making a stream of offensive comments about Jews and Hitler.

The Labour leadership was forced to deny a claim that Mr Corbyn, on a trip to Grimsby, told a colleague: We are not suspending Ken, unless we suspend John [Mann] too.

Mr Mann is one of the most combative backbenchers.

He is seen as close to Labours working-class supporters as opposed to the more middle-class metropolitan supporters of Mr Corbyn.

A Labour spokesman said: The chief whip has made it absolutely clear to John Mann that it is completely inappropriate for Labour MPs to be involved in very public rows on television.

'She was very clear about how seriously this was viewed. John Mann fully accepted and understands this.
A woman whose naked body was found with stab wounds in a blowhole on the New South Wales' Central Coast has been identified as a University of Technology Sydney graduate.

NSW Police have released CCTV footage of Mengmei Leng, 25, shopping at Pitt Street in central Sydney about 3pm last Thursday.

Ms Leng, also known as Michelle, caught a train from St James Railway Station, arriving at Campsie Railway Station about 4.30pm three days before her body was found.

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NSW Police have release CCTV footage of Mengmei Leng, 25, shopping at Pitt Street in central Sydney about 3pm last Thursday

Her body was found at the bottom of a blowhole near Snapper Point on Sunday. Above is an image from CCTV

Detectives are hoping to piece together Ms Leng's movements from Thursday evening to Sunday morning after she was reported missing to Campsie Police on Monday by a relative.

The 25-year-old, who is originally from China, is a University of Technology Sydney graduate who studied economics and hospitality business management.

Ms Leng was living with her aunt and uncle at Campsie, in Sydney's south-west, and had been living in Australia for five years.

Her mother and brother live in China and she was also studying translation at UTS before her death.

Friends of Ms Leng said they last saw her at a bus stop outside UTS on Friday before the long weekend and she may have been planning to meet someone for a date, news.com.au reported.

Detective Chief Inspector Gary Jubelin said on Friday she had been communicating with friends on her mobile phone up until Thursday night and she did not post on social media following that time.

He also said it was 'out-of-character' and 'unusual' for Ms Leng to disappear.

'From all the information we've gathered in relation to the young lady, she was very responsible, would always stay in contact with her family, let them know where she was going, so there was concerns when she disappeared,' Det Chief Insp Jubelin said.

'So it is definitely out-of-character for her.'

A picture of Ms Leng on her graduation day last year after getting her economics and hospitality business management degree

The blowhole at Snapper Point is a notorious spot popular with fisherman. In eight years, there have been 16 deaths at and around the spot

Friends of Ms Leng said they last saw her at a bus stop outside UTS on Friday before the long weekend

Ms Leng's family have been informed of her death and Det Chief Insp Jubelin said he did not think 'devastated properly describes' the way her relatives were feeling.

'It is difficult and traumatic for her family so far away at this time,' he said.

'Speaking to the brother, he was shocked by it and there is a lot of pain.

'They're dealing with it as best they can but it's a very sad situation.'

Homicide detectives are scouring CCTV and traffic cameras to map out Ms Leng's final movements.

They are also speaking to her family members, friends and associates.

Det Chief Insp Jubelin said there was no 'clear or concise motive' at this stage of the investigation.

'It just seems like a senseless crime for a lady like that to be killed and murdered in the situation that occurred,' he said.

Friends and acquaintances paid tribute to Ms Leng on Chinese and Australian social media sites.

'Devastated. Hope there is no pain in Heaven,' one friend said.

The 25-year-old, who is originally from China, is a University of Technology Sydney graduate

Ms Leng, also known as Michelle, caught a train from St James Railway Station, arriving at Campsie Railway Station about 4.30pm

'Cherish life, as you never know which day is your last day,' another said.

'Who would've thought she was gone.'

Ms Leng was an adventurer who recently travelled to Hobart for a getaway and regularly embarked on day trips around New South Wales.

In recent weeks, she posted a video from West Head lookout near Sydney Harbour, pictures from Resolute Beach, north of the city, in the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, and Werri Beach on the south coast.

Like so many girls her age, she would often post pictures of herself having cocktails and glasses of wine with friends and hip Harbourside on weekends.

Ms Leng is originally from Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province, according to an old missing persons report circulated online.

Ms Leng's body was found floating in a blowhole at Snapper Point at the Munmorah State Conservation Area on Sunday morning.

Earlier this week, Det Chief Insp Jubelin said Ms Leng suffered a 'violent assault' before her death.

'The post-mortem revealed the woman had suffered a number of wounds, significantly some stab wounds,' he said.

'Our interpretation of the situation is that she suffered a violent assault prior to her death.'

Detectives are hopping to pieces together Ms Leng's movements over the long weekend after she was reported missing to Campsie Police on Monday by a relative

Ms Leng's body was found floating in a blowhole at Snapper Point at the Munmorah State Conservation Area on Sunday morning

Police released a photo composite of Ms Leng's face when they were unable to identify her after her body was found on Sunday

Det Chief Insp Jubelin said her body was found in an area frequented by tourists and rock fisherman, but it was somewhat isolated.

'It is a very beautiful location but for a crime and someone to be disposed of in that manner in the location its a very lonely and isolated area,' he said.

Ms Leng was discovered face down on Sunday morning and authorities believe she could not have been there for any longer than 48 hours, and it was likely much less than that.

'She was found at 10.30am so this is suggestive of the fact that perhaps her body hadn't been there very long in the water,' Mr Jubelin said.

The detective chief inspector said although the blow hole was about five kilometres from the entrance to the national park, there was a carpark right near the tourist attraction and so it is possible she was transported there by a vehicle.
Mr Hammond had earlier visited Colombia (pictured) where he lent UK support to the South American nation's peace process

Philip Hammond has become the first British Foreign Secretary to visit Cuba since before the communist revolution of 1959.

Arriving in the capital Havana, Mr Hammond said that Britain was keen to forge "new links" with the Caribbean nation.

His visit follows US President Barak Obama's historic visit last month intended to normalise relations between the two countries after decades of hostility.

Mr Hammond will hold a series of high-level meetings to discuss recent social and economic changes, human rights and the fight against global health threats such as the Zika virus.

He will also sign a bilateral agreement restructuring Cuba's debt to the UK, as well as agreeing future co-operation on financial services, energy, culture and education.

"Britain and Cuba have outlooks on the world and systems of government that are very different," Mr Hammond said.

"But as Cuba enters a period of significant social and economic change, I am looking forward to demonstrating to the Cuban government and people that the UK is keen to forge new links across the Atlantic.

"That is why Cuba and the UK are set to reach new cooperation agreements on energy, financial services, education and culture, to the benefit of both our nations.

"As the first British Foreign Secretary to visit Cuba since before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, this is an opportunity to hear for myself what Cuba thinks about its present challenges and where it sees its future."

He arrived in Havana from Colombia where he had started his tour of southern and central America.

Mr Hammond highlighted the UK's support for the country's peace process and fight against narcotics during high-level talks.

It was also announced that Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos will make an official state visit to the UK this autumn after accepting an invitation from the Queen.

The Latin American leader will be joined by his wife Maria Clemencia Rodriguez de Santos for the three-day visit beginning on November 1.
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He had been absent for much of her childhood because of his promiscuous and unconventional lifestyle.

But the tenderness eventually forged between the late artist Lucian Freud and his daughter Isobel Boyt, one of the twelve illegitimate children he fathered by four mistresses along with two by his first marriage, is reflected in this tender painting.

It is expected to fetch 18 million when it goes under the hammer as part of Christies forthcoming 250th anniversary sale, which also includes a portrait of a society beauty by Sir Joshua Reynolds which has never been offered for sale before.

Around 25 paintings will feature in the auction at Christie's, which is set to be one of the most prestigious of the year

The 1992 Freud oil painting, titled Ib and her husband (pictured), shows the artists daughter when she was pregnant huddled together with her partner Pat Costelloe on a bed in Freuds studio, the paint-strewn wall of which is visible in the background above a utilitarian radiator

The 1992 Freud oil painting, titled Ib and her husband, shows the artists daughter when she was pregnant huddled together with her partner Pat Costelloe on a bed in Freuds studio, the paint-strewn wall of which is visible in the background above a utilitarian radiator.

It last sold for 9.3 million in 2007 - then an auction record for the artist. It is being sold by an anonymous private collector.

But pricey though the latest estimate for it is, it is still a snip compared to the Freud work of his friend job centre worker Sue Tilley, and entitled Benefits Supervisor Resting  which was sold at Christies last year to a London art dealer on behalf of an anonymous buyer for an astonishing 35.8m, creating a new record for the price paid for a Freud painting.

Freud, who died in 2011 aged 88, rarely named his sitters and art experts said when he did so for family pictures it doubled as a means of formally and publicly acknowledging his children through his art.

Discussing sitting for her father, Isobel, who featured in several of his paintings, once said: Each time I did a picture with him I swore Id never do it again, but I then do because it is a way of having a relationship with my dad as well as there is a part of me that if he wants to paint me I am quite flattered.

Also up for sale is a Reynolds portrait of Lucy Long, which the auctioneers describe as one of the finest works by the artist to come to the market in a generation and is expected to fetch 3 million.

The 1778 painting is being sold from the collections of the stately home Harewood House in Yorkshire.

Also up for sale is a Reynolds portrait of Lucy Long, which the auctioneers describe as one of the finest works by the artist to come to the market in a generation and is expected to fetch 3 million

Golden Hours (pictured), a painting by the Victorian artist Frederic, Lord Leighton, is expected to sell for 5 million - and set a new record for the artist

It has not been seen outside of Harewood for more than 80 years but will, along with the Freud painting, go on public view in a preview called Defining British Art before the sale.

Also due to go under the hammer and to feature in the preview is Golden Hours, a painting by the Victorian artist Frederic, Lord Leighton, which is expected to sell for 5 million - and set a new record for the artist.

It has not been seen in public for 20 years and not been auctioned in 100 years.

Around 25 paintings will feature in the auction, which is set to be one of the most prestigious of the year. But so far only these three have been announced.

Yesterday Orlando Rock, chairman of Christies UK, said: All of the pictures are exemplary of their type. I think from a quality point of view, they all epitomise the periods they were created in.

James Christie first opened his doors for business in 1766 in St Jamess, London, where the headquarters remain today.
The last place you'd expect there to be a fight is a temple.

But footage has emerged of three monks in an altercation at a temple in China's Jiangsu province on April 24.

The head monk at the temple has dismissed all of those involved in the punch up, according to People's Daily Online.

Not very zen! Hilarious footage has emerged of monks engaging in a punch up at a temple in China

Punch up at the temple! Eventually onlookers manage to drag them apart but they continue with a war of words

The incident occurred at Ningguo temple in Yangzhou, east China's Jiangsu province.

In the footage, the men can be seen violently hitting each other while onlookers watch the drama unfold.

One of the monks wearing yellow is even hitting another on the head with a mobile phone.

They continue to fight, moving around the temple as another monk tries to make them stop.

Eventually onlookers manage to drag them apart but they continue with a war of words instead.

According to CCTV News, the monks are all middle-level managers at the location.

Not a happy boss: The head monk at the temple has dismissed all of those involved in the punch up

The head monk has dismissed the three involved and said in a statement on Chinese social media Wechat: 'We insist on following the principal of quality over quantity.'

He also went on to say that the three broke the principal of Buddhism and set a bad example for society.

The video has proved popular on China's social media sites with many people unimpressed by the monks actions.

On CCTV's facebook page, people have said they have kung-fu fighting skills.

Roman Chong wrote: ' This is the authentic Shaolin Kung-fu!'

While others were surprised at their behaviour.

Rachel Ruble said: 'Whoa not something I'd ever thought I'd see'.
A bizarre video has recently emerged from China of a male driver threatening the traffic police officer who just gave him a parking ticket by claiming he has '500,000 fans'.

The man had illegally parked in Shanghai on Monday and was being fined for the offence according to People's Daily Online.

Instead of admitting the mistake, the man decided to swear at the officer. He has since been arrested for 'obstruction of official business'.

Illegal: A driver who has been identified as Xue was fined for parking his white Porsche (pictured) illegally

Argumentative: Instead of admitting his mistake, Xue, from Shanghai, decides to film the argument that ensued

Confrontational: Xue swore at the officer repeatedly after proclaiming that he had 500,000 fans on social media

The man, identified by his surname Xue, was seen filming the incident in the footage captured by the traffic officer according to The Paper.

At the beginning of the video, he was heard saying 'I'm famous, I have 500,000 fans on Weibo (China's equivalent of Twitter)'.

He then started swearing before asking the officer how many points would be docked from his licence.

When he was told it would be three, he then said that the officer should dock 12.

The man was also heard saying 'if you make me look bad today, I will make you look bad in the future' while refusing to move his white Porsche away.

Escalation: Another officer (right) came to the scene to intervene but Xue would not give up his stance

Crowd: The argument between Xue and the officer drew a crowd of people who watched as the event unfolded

Unstoppable: The officer ended up finding Xue 200 Yuan (20) and had three points deducted from his licence

A crowd started to gather as the man argued with the officer.

At several points in the video, the police officer involved in the argument could be heard accusing Xue of threatening him, which the driver denies.

However, eventually the officer decides to arrest the man after the repeated 'threats'.

He was fined 200 Yuan (20) and had three points deducted from his licence.

After police investigation, the Xue was revealed to have only 'a few hundred fans' according to The Paper report.

Since the footage emerged on Weibo, there has been more than 14.6 million people reading and discussing the incident on the social media website.

Many people have ridiculed the man for making the extravagant claims.

But a footage of another man, who has not been identified, trying to get out of paying a ticket with a ridiculous reason has also surfaced on Wednesday.

The video, which had more than 12.1 million views on Weibo, showed a man from Huzhou, east China, who claimed to be a member of the royal family from the Milky Way.

In the bizarre footage captured by the officers, who stopped the driver for 27 different traffic violations registered to the vehicle, the man also claimed to drive an UFO according to QQ.

He was also filmed saying that he would destroy the earth when the officer said that he needed to impound the car.
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Armored tanks are built to protect, but they weren't designed to manoeuvre through rough terrain or avoid incoming threats.

New concept vehicles have dropped the extra thick steel padding, allowing future machines to travel over 95 percent of available terrain and with more speed.

Created by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the Ground X-Vehicle Technology program is working to produce 'nimble, fast and smart' combat trucks that are able to shield themselves from enemies and deflect targeted missiles.

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A new concept design drops the extra thick steel padding from the machines, allowing the future fighting vehicles to travel over 95 percent of available terrain and with more speed. Created by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the Ground X-Vehicle Technology program is working to produce 'nimble, fast, smart' combat trucks that can shield itself and deflect missiles

WHAT TECHNICAL AREAS WILL GXV-T PURSUE RESEARCH IN? Radically Enhanced MobilityAbility to traverse diverse off-road terrain, including slopes and various elevations. Survivability through AgilityAutonomously avoid incoming threats without harming occupants through technologies that enable, for example, agile motion and active repositioning of armor. Crew AugmentationImproved physical and electronically assisted situational awareness for crew and passengers; semi-autonomous driver assistance and automation of key crew functions similar to capabilities found in modern commercial airplane cockpits. Signature ManagementReduction of detectable signatures, including visible, infrared, acoustic and electromagnetic. Source: DARPA

'DARPA's performers for GXV-T are helping defy the 'more armor equals better protection' axiom that has constrained armored ground vehicle design for the past 100 years,' said Major Christopher Orlowski, DARPA program manager.

DARPA awarded a total of eight contracts to a group of defense contractors and research institutes.

Corporate units include Raytheon, Honeywell International, Ledios, QuinetiQ and Pratt & Miller.

Also in the mix are Carnegie Mellon University, the Southwest Researcher Institute and SRI International.

The Ground X-Vehicle Technology program (GXV-T) will develop an array of technology in four areas for the combat machines: radically enhanced mobility, survivability through agility, crew augmentation and signature management.

The program is looking at new capabilities that will allow the machines to travel up steep slopes and travel around uneven elevations.

For instance, the group has interest in revolutionary wheel/track and suspension technology that would give vehicles access to all type of terrain and move faster on- and off-road.

The contract also includes ways to improve situational and threat detection, as well as technology that provides a 360-view from a control base-- technology used in commercial airline cockpits.

These cutting-edge machines are set to be autonomous, so they will need technology that can recognize incoming threats on their own.

And the program is interested in technology that includes vertical and horizontal movement of armor that can react in real-time to incoming threats, such as missiles.

'DARPA's performers for GXV-T are helping defy the 'more armor equals better protection' axiom that has constrained armored ground vehicle design for the past 100 years, and are paving the way toward innovative, disruptive vehicles for the 21st Century and beyond,' said Major Christopher Orlowski, DARPA program manager

DARPA awarded a total of eight contracts to a group of defense contractors and research institutes. Corporate units include Raytheon, Honeywell International, Ledios, QuinetiQ and Pratt & Miller. Also in the mix are Carnegie Mellon University, the Southwest Researcher Institute and SRI International. Without the heavy steel shells, these vehicles will be much lighter and easier to transport

GXV-T plans to explore ways to provide semi-autonomous driver assistance and the augmentation of key functions.

And although the vehicle will be able to see for miles, it will be designed with infrared, acoustic and electromagnetic stealth capabilities to reduce detectable signatures.

'We're exploring a variety of potentially groundbreaking technologies, all of which are designed to improve vehicle mobility, vehicle survivability and crew safety and performance without piling on armor,' said Major Orlowski.

DARPA says the US Army and Marine Corps have expressed interest in future GXV-T capabilities.

Autonomous machines are the future of the military, as there have been many discussions and plans surrounding autonomous weapons.

And although these futuristic devices would ease the burden for human soldiers, it also poses a threat to our safety and security, experts have warned.

At a recent meeting, researchers said they were concerned these war machines could engage in unethical behavior and become a playground for hackers.

Unlike today's drones, which are entirely controlled by humans, autonomous weapons in the future could potentially select and engage targets on their own.

These concerns, among others, were highlighted at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switerland in January.

'It was one of the concerns that we itemized last year,' Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence (AI) at the school of computer science and engineering at the University of New South Wales, told FoxNews.com.

'Most of us believe that we don't have the ability to build ethical robots.'

The contract will also include ways to improve situational and threat detection, as well as technology that provides a 360-view from a control base-- technology used in commercial airline cockpits. These cutting-edge machines are set to be autonomous, so they will need technology that can recognize incoming threats on their own

The program is looking at new capabilities that will allow the machines to travel up steep slopes and travel around uneven elevations. For instance, the group has interest in revolutionary wheel/track and suspension technology that would give vehicles access to all type of terrain and move faster on- and off-road

'What is especially worrying is that the various militaries around the world will be fielding robots in just a few years, and we don't think anyone will be building ethical robots.'

Others say we are just 'jumping the gun' altogether when talking about an AI revolt.

'For the most part weapons like this don't exist today,' Paul Scharre, senior fellow and director of the Ethical Autonomy Project at the Center for a New American Security, told FoxNews.com.

'Most systems are still fire and forget and even the advanced systems are designed not to choose a target, but to correct to hit the target.'

Scharre, who gave a press note at the World Economic Forum, also mentioned that even though autonomous weapons are not forbidden in war, it will be a challenge to create ones that comply with accepted rules of engagement.

'Even if they could operate lawfully, however, autonomous weapons raise serious moral and ethical challenges. Is it right to give a machine the power over life and death?', he said.

'And finally, even if autonomous weapons would be legal and moral, they may be extremely dangerous.'

The Ground X-Vehicle Technology program (GXV-T) will develop an array of technology in four areas for the combat machines: radically enhanced mobility, survivability through agility, crew augmentation and signature management. The program is looking at new capabilities that will allow the machines to travel up steep slopes and travel around uneven elevations

GXV-T also plans to explore ways to provide semi-autonomous driver assistance and the augmentation of key functions. And although the vehicle will be able to see for miles, it will be designed with infrared, acoustic and electromagnetic stealth capabilities to reduce detectable signatures

'The consequences of a malfunction or enemy hacking of an autonomous weapon could be severe.'

Autonomous weapons are not being used by any nation at the moment, but some have deployed unmanned vehicles in combat zones.

If the security systems safeguarding the autonomous technology can be overridden by hackers, it could cause havoc on the battlefield.

'There have been efforts to harden the data link's encryption to make the connection with the operator more secure,' said Huw Williams, editor of IHS Jane's International Defence Review.

'It remains a concern, no encryption is perfect and there is still the danger that a data link can be broken.'

Hijacking risks will increase as the system becomes more automated, regardless if the platform is still controlled by a human operator.
There may be hope for thousands of couples struggling to conceive worldwide after scientists successfully created human sperm from skin cells.

It builds on previous research that used skin cells to create mice sperm in a lab, and the medical feat could eventually lead to a treatment for infertility.

The researchers said they were working to find a solution for the roughly 15 per cent of couples worldwide who are unable to have children and whose only option is to use donated sperm or eggs.

Scientists in Spain on Wednesday they had created human sperm from skin cells, a medical feat which could eventually lead to a treatment for infertility. The researchers said they were working to find a solution for the roughly 15 per cent of couples worldwide who are unable to have children. Stock image

'What to do when someone who wants to have a child lacks gametes (eggs or sperm)?' asked Carlos Simon, the scientific director of the Valencian Infertility Institute, Spain's first medical institution fully dedicated to assisted reproduction.

'This is the problem we want to address: to be able to create gametes in people who do not have them.'

The result of their research, which was carried out with Stanford University in the United States, was published Tuesday in Scientific Reports, the online journal of Nature.

They were inspired by the work of Japan's Shinya Yamanaka and Britain's John Gordon who in 2012 shared a Nobel prize for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells.

Simon and his team managed to reprogramme mature skin cells by introducing a cocktail of genes needed to create gametes.

Simon and his team managed to reprogramme mature skin cells by introducing a cocktail of genes needed to create gametes. Within a month the skin cell was transformed to become a germ cell, which can develop into sperm or an egg, but it did not have the ability to fertilise, they found. Stock image

It is a step further than that reached by Chinese researchers who earlier this year announced they had created mice from artificial sperm. Stock image. The creation of sperm in the body is so complex and lengthy that it had been thought impossible to recreate in a dish

MAKING SPERM FROM SCRATCH Around one in seven couples has trouble conceiving, and although infertility is traditionally considered a female issue, the problem is as likely to lie with the man as the woman. And while IVF can help some men, many are told that nothing that can be done. The creation of sperm in the body is so complex and lengthy that it had been thought impossible to recreate in a dish. Earlier this year, a team at Nanjing Medical University team not only succeeded in making mouse sperm in the lab  they used it to fertilise eggs, which led to the birth of baby mice. Importantly, these pups were healthy and went on to have young of their own, the journal Cell Stem Cell reports.

Within a month the skin cell was transformed to become a germ cell, which can develop into sperm or an egg, but it did not have the ability to fertilise, they found.

'This is a sperm but it needs a further maturation phase to become a gamete. This is just the beginning,' Simon said.

Around one in seven couples has trouble conceiving, and although infertility is traditionally considered a female issue, the problem is as likely to lie with the man as the woman.

And while IVF can help some men, many are told that nothing that can be done.

The creation of sperm in the body is so complex and lengthy that it had been thought impossible to recreate in a dish.

Earlier this year, a team at Nanjing Medical University team not only succeeded in making mouse sperm in the lab  they used it to fertilise eggs, which led to the birth of baby mice.

Importantly, these pups were healthy and went on to have young of their own, the journal Cell Stem Cell reports.

'With the human species we must do much more testing because we are talking about the birth of child,' Simon said.

The researchers also must take into account legal constraints since the technique involves the creation of artificial embryos which right now is only allowed in some countries.
The body of a highly-respected Buddhist monk in China has been transformed into a beautiful golden statue four years after his death.

Fu Hou died in 2012 after spending most of his life at the Chongfu Temple on a hill in the city of Quanzhou, in southeastern China, according to the temple's abbot, Li Ren.

The temple decided to mummify Fu Hou to commemorate his devotion to Buddhism and to serve as an inspiration for followers of the religion.

The body of a highly-respected Buddhist monk in China has been transformed into a beautiful golden statue (pictured) four years after his death. Fu Hou died in 2012. He started practicing Buddhism at 13 and devoted his life to the religion before his death at the age of 94

The practice reserved for holy men in some areas with strong Buddhist traditions.

The monk started practicing Buddhism at 13 and devoted his life to the religion before his death at the age of 94.

He was born in Jinjiang - also in Fujian Province - in 1919.

According to People's Daily, he was considered to be a wonderful monk by his disciples while preaching and was a quiet man who would always painstakingly practiced his belief.

The monk (pictured before his death) started practicing Buddhism at 13 and devoted his life to the religion before his death at the age of 94. He was born in Jinjiang - also in Fujian Province - in 1919. He was said to be a wonderful monk by his disciples while preaching

Before he died, Fu Hou made the decision to have his body preserved. Immediately following his death, the monk's body was washed, treated by two mummification experts, and sealed inside a large pottery jar (pictured) in a sitting Lotus position

When the jar was opened in January this year, the monk's body was found intact and sitting upright with little sign of deterioration apart from the skin having dried out, Li Ren said. The body was then washed with alcohol and covered in layers of gauze, lacquer and finally gold leaf (process pictured)

Fu Hou is said to have little contact with the outside world, a heart of compassion and was widely respected by the younger monks and his peers.

Before he died, Fu Hou made the decision to have his body preserved.

Immediately following his death, the monk's body was washed, treated by two mummification experts, and sealed inside a large pottery jar in a sitting position, the abbot said.

When the jar was opened in January this year, the monk's body was found intact and sitting upright with little sign of deterioration apart from the skin having dried out, Li Ren said.

Fu Hou's golden statue (pictured) will be placed in the ancestral hall of shrines at the Dongdan inner chamber. Fu Hou is said to have little contact with the outside world, a heart of compassion and was widely respected by the younger monks and his peers

The statue (pictured) was also robed, and a local media report said a glass case had been ordered for the statue, which will be protected with an anti-theft device. The local Buddhist belief is that only a truly virtuous monk's body would remain intact after being mummified

The body was then washed with alcohol and covered in layers of gauze, lacquer and finally gold leaf.

It was also robed, and a local media report said a glass case had been ordered for the statue, which will be protected with an anti-theft device.

The local Buddhist belief is that only a truly virtuous monk's body would remain intact after being mummified, local media reports said.

'Monk Fu Hou is now being placed on the mountain for people to worship,' Li Ren said.

Fu Hou's golden statue will be placed in the ancestral hall of shrines at the Dongdan inner chamber.

The monk served at the Chongfu Temple on a hill in the city of Quanzhou, in southeastern China, according to the temple's abbot, Li Ren (marked on the map)
Ideas such as the role of siblings and presence of genes is discussed

has been clouded by how sexuality is measured

Between two and 11 per cent of adults have reported having experienced homosexual feelings.

Yet, what determines a person's sexual orientation is largely a mystery.

For years scientists have searched for the answer, exploring the influence of siblings and specific genes, and a new study points out their quest has been clouded by how sexuality is measured, as well as political agendas.

For years scientists have searched for the answer of what makes a person gay, exploring the influence of siblings and specific genes, and a new study points out their quest has been clouded by how sexuality is measured, as well as political agendas. A stock image of a homosexual couple is shown

Over the past 50 years, political rights for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals have significantly broadened in some countries, while they have narrowed in others.

In many places, political and popular support for LGB rights hinges on the causes and consequences of homosexuality, making research into why it occurs important.

Researchers wrote in the study, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest:' Individuals' political attitudes about sexual orientation tend to correlate with their views of the causes of sexual orientation.

'Those who hold positive attitudes (i.e., that there is nothing inherently wrong with non-heterosexuality or its open expression) have tended to believe that sexual orientation is due to non-social causes such as genetics.

'Those who hold negative attitudes (i.e., that non-heterosexuality is undesirable or immoral and that society should restrict its free expression) have tended to believe that homosexuality has social causes, such as early sexual experiences and cultural acceptance of non-heterosexuality.'

The experts, from seven universities continued: 'The question of whether or not people choose their sexual orientations has clouded rather than clarified thinking.'

Between two and 11 per cent of adults have reported having experienced homosexual feelings, but the review says studies into sexual orientation should take more measures into account than self-reporting. An example of the average prevalence for sexual orientation based on a 2013 survey is shown above

THE CLAIMS OF A 'GAY GENE' According to previous research, sexual orientation is influenced to a degree by genetic factors and is therefore heritable. This poses a problem from an evolutionary perspective, because homosexual men tend to have fewer offspring to whom they can pass on their genetic material. Other reports also suggest many heterosexual men are carriers of the genes that could predispose someone to homosexuality. Based on the researcher's calculations, male homosexuality is maintained in a population at low and stable frequencies if half of the men and roughly more than half of the women carry genes that predispose men to homosexuality.

They believe various biological factors, including prenatal hormones and specific genetic profiles are likely to contribute to sexual orientation, but are probably not the sole cause.

Scientific evidence suggests biological and non-social environmental factors jointly influence sexual orientation, in other words, a combination of nature and nurture.

One interesting idea is that homosexuality may be due to an immune attack on an unborn son - an idea first proposed by Ray Blanchard, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto in 2001.

He claimed the 'fraternal birth order effect' means the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay.

However, the effect doesn't hold 'true' for women or younger brothers.

Male foetuses carry male-specific proteins on their Y chromosome, called H-Y antigens and he theorised that some of the antigens may influence homosexual orientation in men.

As H-Y antigens are not present in a mother's body, they may trigger the production of antibodies that bind to the H-Y antigens to stop them from working properly, perhaps not 'switching on' the 'straight' signal in the foetus' brain, The Atlantic explained.

According to previous research, sexual orientation is influenced to a degree by genetic factors and is therefore heritable but this poses a problem from an evolutionary perspective, because gay men tend to have fewer offspring to whom they can pass on their genetic material

WHY UPBRINGING MATTERS TOO The debate of whether nature or nurture plays more of a role in someone's make-up is an age old debate. In the review, psychological scientist Ritch Savin-Williams of Cornell University along with the other authors concluded that gender nonconformity in childhood behaving in ways that do not align with gender stereotypes predicts homosexuality in adulthood. But he said the degree to which this is true could be a consequence of how study participants are typically recruited and may not be accurate among more representative samples of non-heterosexual individuals.

He proposed the effect grows stronger with every son a woman bears, so that an only child has a 2 per cent chance of being gay, but the odds rise to six per cent for a man with four older brothers.

Last week, a study claimed that around half of straight men and women potentially carry so-called homosexuality genes that are passed on from one generation to the next.

This has helped homosexuality exist among humans throughout history, even though gay men tend to have fewer descendants who directly inherit their genes.

Researchers from Ilia State University in Georgia came to this conclusion using a computational model that, among others, included aspects of heredity and the tendency of homosexual men to come from larger families.

The study, published in Springer's journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour, did not, however, identify any specific genes.

The review paper says the number of people who say they are gay could also be growing because of more tolerance in some societies.

'Homosexual orientation does not increase in frequency with social tolerance, although its expression (in behaviour and in open identification) may do so,' they write.

While this reasoning has been negatively used by countries such as Russia to support anti-gay laws, the review says nothing can change the fact homosexuality is natural and ubiquitous whether it's caused by antibodies, genes or any other biological mechanisms.

Lead author, J Michael Bailey of Northwestern University said: 'Sexual orientation is an important human trait, and we should study it without fear, and without political constraint.'

Various biological factors - including prenatal hormones and specific genetic profiles - are likely to contribute to sexual orientation, though they are not the sole cause. Scientific evidence suggests that biological and non-social environmental factors jointly influence sexual orientation.
Whether we like it or not, almost every aspect of our modern lives is governed and overseen by centralised authorities, but more than 5,000 years ago these ruling structures did not exist.

Archaeologists now believe they may have found the site where human authoritarianism was born in a remote part of ancient Peru.

They claim to have found evidence a pre-Incan culture known as the Chavin, which lived in the Peruvian Andes 3,000 years ago, may have been among the first people to live under an authority.

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Chavin de Huantar is a 3,000-year-old pre-Incan religious complex (pictured) that sat at the heart of one of Peru's earliest cultures. Archaeologists believe the priests who ran the culture may have been one of the first groups to establish an authoritarian rule that enabled them to manipulate people living in the area

Priests at the head of the social hierarchy used architecture, psychoactive drugs and iconography to exert their control over the population.

Dr John Rick, an archaeologist at Stanford University and one of the world's leading experts on the Chavin, claims the priesthood were able to manipulate the people by creating an illusion of power.

He said: 'We live in authoritarian systems today, no matter how democratic they are, they are authorities.

WHO WERE THE CHAVIN? The Chavin culture is thought to have begun emerging around 1,200BC, becoming firmly established culture by 900BC before collapsing in 200BC. Chavin de Huantar appears to have been an intensely religious centre that sat at the mouth of two large rivers and attracted people from the surrounding areas. Temples were one of the chief pieces of architecture built by the ancient culture. Archaeologists have suggested the site attracted people because it was a cult of devotion. But it also shows complex innovations that allowed the people living there to adapt to the highland environments of Peru. To avoid flooding during the rainy season, the Chavin people created a successful drainage system. The Chavin culture also demonstrated advanced metal working skills, particularly with gold. They are also though to have domesticated llamas, and grew crops such as potatoes, maize and quinoa.

'Yet, 5,000 and certainly 10,000 years ago, nowhere in the world was anyone was living under a concerted authority. But today we expect that. It is the essence of our organisation.

'The site of Chavin can tell us about the outstanding single organisational characteristic human beings have, which is authority structure.

'This is looking at one of the primary components of what it means to be human in the world today.'

Dr Rick and his colleagues have spent more than 20 years studying the Chavin by excavating the ruins of Chavin de Huantar, just north of Lima in Peru.

The Chavin are thought to have begun emerging around 1,200BC, becoming an established culture by 900BC before they vanished in 200BC.

Chavin de Huantar appears to have been an intensely religious centre that sat at the mouth of two large rivers and attracted people from the surrounding areas.

Archaeologists have suggested the site attracted people because it was a cult of devotion.

But Dr Rick and his team claim the archaeological evidence there is telling a different story.

Large underground spaces have been discovered beneath the architectural stonework while a system of water canals and carvings of animals are scattered around the site.

Dr Rick claims the priests who ran Chavin may have used these to give themselves an aura of power and control over the elements.

Archaeologists claim the architecture and stone carvings at Chavin de Huantar in the Peruvian Andes (shown on map) point to attempts by priests to exert authority over the surrounding populations

The priests may also have used psychoactive drugs to help control the population. Paraphernalia associated with this practice (snuff plate pictured) have been found at the site

Dr John Rick (pictured examining human remains found at Chavin de Huantar) believes the priests at the 3,000-year-old site may have imposed one of the first authoritarian social structures in human history

THE WORLD'S FIRST AUTHORITY Large underground spaces have been discovered beneath the architectural stonework at the site, while a system of water canals and carvings of animals are scattered around the site. The archaeologist claims the priests who ran Chavin may have used these to give themselves an aura of power and control over the elements. They estimate there is almost a mile of underground labyrinth and gallery like spaces that were designed to confine and manipulate those who entered them. The architecture was also designed to alter the way sound was projected in the city. Stone engravings found at the site give clues that the priesthood manipulated visitors to the site with psychoactive drugs. Illustrations carved into the stone show the paraphernalia associated with the drugs and their effects on humans

They estimate there is almost a mile of underground labyrinth and gallery like spaces that were designed to confine and manipulate those who entered them.

The architecture was also designed to alter the way sound was projected in the city.

Dr Rick said: 'I was fascinated with the evidence we have of the manipulation of people who went through ritual experiences in these contexts.

'After a while I realised it was being done for a purpose. The planners, organisers and orchestrators were trying to get something  what they wanted was an increase in their level of authority.

'They went to incredible creative ends to get there.'

Stone engravings found at the site give clues that the priesthood manipulated visitors to the site with psychoactive drugs.

Illustrations carved into the stone show the paraphernalia associated with the drugs and their effects on humans.

The priests also used a sophisticated hydraulic system to control the flow of water in the area.

'They were playing with this stuff,' said Dr Rick. 'They were using water pressure 3,000 years ago to elevate water, to bring it up where it shouldn't be.

The priests at Chavin de Huantar manipulated sound to help them exert their authority over people visiting their religious complex. The architecture was designed to alter sound while shells (pictured) which are thought to have been used as trumpets, have also been found on the site

Many engravings and art (gold crown pictured) found at Chavin used iconography to help underline the authority of the priesthood, according to archaeologists

'They're using it as an agent to wash away offerings.'

This, he claimed, gave the priests the ability to demonstrate their power over the natural world.

Be believes visitors to Chavin would have been given a sense that the priests wielded supernatural powers. The dark underground spaces and drugs could have helped enforce this experience.

Dr Rick outlines his ideas in a new book, Innovation, Religion and the Development of the Andean Formative Period.

He said: 'These were the elite from Chavin and the aspiring elite form the regional areas surrounding Chavin.

'They are really in the process of developing a hierarchy - a real social structure with a strong political power at the top.'

The rise of authority in Chavin could be one of the starkest examples of authoritarian rule in early civilisations around the world.

The ruins at Chavin de Huantar (pictured) hide a network of underground spaces and canals that archaeologists believe were exploited by the priests who ruled there to give the impression they had supernatural powers

Ancient Egyptian civilisation also centralised around an all-powerful Pharaoh who projected to the people as a living god.

But Dr Rick believes the priests at Chavin went to extraordinary lengths to help enforce their authority.

He said: 'Chavin is one of the earliest sites with monumental architecture. It is a site that has many mysterious features  underground space and enigmatic art, a very rapid building program and manipulation of light and sound and other things.
Lying on the cusp of the vast steppe of Central Asia and the soaring Caucasus Mountains, the aquamarine salt water of the Caspian Sea has a unique beauty.

But images captured by Nasa's Landsat 8 satellite has revealed something strange is scarring the world's largest inland sea.

Mysterious lines have been spotted crisscrossing in the shallow waters of the North Caspian close to the Tyuleniy Archipelago, in Kazakhstan.

Strange marks have been appearing in the aquamarine waters of the north Caspian Sea (pictured), but now scientists believe they have solved the mystery. They say the marks appear to have been caused by ice

Thousands of the unusual marks can be seen clustered close to the coastline in the images.

In an attempt to solve the mystery, Nasa put out an appeal for suggestions by posting the images on its Twitter feed.

HOW ICE HUMMOCKS FORM When weak, thin ice forms over the sea, it can become broken up by currents, waves and the wind. These can drive the pieces to pile up on top of each other. When these then become locked back into an ice floe, they form hummocks which can extend down several metres. In the Caspian Sea, this is sufficient for the ice to scrape the seabed in the shallow waters around the Tyuleniy Archipelago. Advertisement

While some have suggested the marks may be the trails left by propellers in sea grass or algae growing in the water, others warned they could be more damaging scars left by trawlers.

But now scientists believe they have solved the mystery - they were made by ice.

They found winter ice that forms on the Caspian Sea can deform due to the winds and currents to create 'hummocks' that scrape the sea bed as the ice moves.

Images taken in January this year have shown that the blocks of ice sit at the leading endge of many of the lines.

When the ice melts, the scrapes they have gouged into the sea bed are left behind.

Dr Stanislav Ogorodov, a scientist at Lomonosov Moscow State University who has studied the phenomenon, said: 'Undoubtedly, most of these tracks are the result of ice gouging.'

The Caspian Sea usually only partially freezes in winter with ice forming quickly in its northern reaches as temperatures drop around 28F (-2C).

The marks on the floor of the Caspian Sea were seen on the Tyuleniy Archipelago, Kazakhstan (shown on map)

Scientists say the hummocks are caused by ice (pictured) which forms when the thin sea ice is broken up by the wind and currents, causing it to become jumbled

The water around the Tyuleniy Archipelago is very shallow - less than 10ft-deep (3 metres).

According to Dr Ogorodov, the ice that forms over the area during the winter is rarely more than one and a half a foot thick (0.5 metres), so it rarely touches the sea floor.

But the ice also tends to be quite weak due to relatively warm conditions in the area, so it becomes deformed by the wind and currents in the sea.

Scientists say that the scouring may be caused by hummock ice, which forms when sea ice is jumbled by the wind and sea currents (illustrated above)

Analysis of images taken during the winter (pictured) helped to reveal how the ice lined up with the marks, suggesting the ice had been creating them by scraping the sea floor

This causes the ice to be pushed together into a jumble, forcing the plates upwards and downwards into hummocks.

With periods of -4F (-20C) frosts, these hummocks can become refrozen back into the ice fields.

Dr Ogorodov said the keels of these hummocks can reach the seafloor and leave deep, long scour marks as the ice moves.

He has found that some gouges are up to 16ft-wide (5m) and can be up to 656ft-long (200m).

The scour marks were spotted in an image sent back by Nasa's Landsat 8 satellite, which showed the area around the Tyuleniy Archipelago covered in strange marks, while the surrounding sea is a clear aquamarine

The scouring can pose a risk to underwater oil pipelines that cross the Caspian Sea.

Dr Norman Kuring, an ocean scientist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre, who spotted the gouges in the satellite images, said when he examined images from January it became clear the ice was responsible.

He said: 'You can tell this by the fact that marks laid down in January have not moved by April.

'If those were water features, they would not persist through one tidal cycle.'
Computer giant Microsoft has furthered its plans to store data in DNA, striking a deal with a US biosciences company to produce millions of synthetic strands.

The Washington-based firm confirmed its plans to tap into the biological code as a means of 'secure data storage', demonstrating serious interest for the method from industry.

Microsoft will work with San Francisco-based Twist Bioscience, buying 10 million short strands of DNA, called oligonucleotides, for the project.

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Microsoft has invested in synthetic DNA as a means of data storage (stock image). In a deal announced this weak, the firm will work with San Francisco-based Twist Bioscience, buying millions of short strands of DNA, called oligonucleotides, for the project

With huge amounts of data being produced and captured every day, the volume and rate of production is fast outstripping methods of storage.

The bulk of data is stored on media with finite shelf life, with servers and hard drives needing to be replaced periodically.

This means data has to be transferred, which increases the risk of corruption and data loss.

In the hunt for solutions, Microsoft has partnered with researchers at the University of Washington to focus on using DNA as a storage medium.

Long-buried human ancestors demonstrate DNA is stable and can survive intact for thousands of years, offering tantalising insight into its potential for long-term data storage.

Microsoft's plans to tap into the biological code as a means of 'secure data storage' demonstrates serious industry interest for the medium as a means of long-term, secure storage

MICROSOFT INVESTS IN DNA Microsoft and University of Washington researchers will work to translate a volume of binary code to DNA, with San Francisco-based Twist Bioscience then making strands of synthetic DNA. Researchers will transfer the 1s and 0s of binary code into the four bases of DNA  A, C, T and G  transferring the data from the digital to the biological. Early tests have proved successful, with the DNA storing data and being read without error. It remains unclear exactly what data Microsoft plans to convert to DNA, and Twist will not be supplied with the decoder key. Advertisement

'As our digital data continues to expand exponentially, we need new methods for long-term, secure data storage,' explained Doug Carmean, a partner architect within Microsoft's Technology and Research organisation.

Researchers will transfer the 1s and 0s of binary code into the four bases of DNA - A, C, T and G - transferring the data from the digital to the biological.

Microsoft and University of Washington researchers will work to translate a volume of binary code to a corresponding DNA, with Twist Bioscience then making strands of synthetic DNA according to the sequences.

'They give us the DNA sequence, we make the DNA from scratch,' Dr Emily Leproust, CEO of Twist Bioscience, told IEEE Spectrum.

According to Microsoft, early tests have proved successful, with the DNA storing data and being read without error.

While it is unclear exactly what data Microsoft plans to convert to DNA, Twist will not be in the loop.

With huge amounts of data being produced and captured every day, the volume and rate of production is fast outstripping methods of storage (stock image of a server). But researchers hope DNA could offer a solution

WHY USE DNA FOR DATA? With huge amounts of data being produced and captured every day, the volume and rate of production is outstripping storage. The bulk of data is stored on media with finite shelf life, with servers and hard drives needing to be replaced periodically, meaning data has to be transferred which increases the risk of degradation, corruption and data loss. What makes DNA so attractive is its durability, being able to survive intact for hundreds, even thousands of years under the right conditions. In addition, DNA is immensely compact inside cells. This could mean immense volumes of data could be stored in a fraction of the space they currently take up. Advertisement

According to IEEE, the firm will not divulge its decoder key, so Twist will not know what it is encoding.

'The initial test phase with Twist demonstrated that we could encode and recover 100 percent of the digital data from synthetic DNA,' said Carmean.

'We're still years away from a commercially viable product, but our early tests with Twist demonstrate that in the future we'll be able to substantially increase the density and durability of data storage.'

Dr Leproust added: 'DNA is a promising storage media, as it has a known shelf life of several thousand years, offers a permanent storage format and can be read for continuously decreasing costs.'

She added: 'We are thrilled to work with Microsoft, and University of Washington researchers, to address the growing challenge of digital data storage.'

The potential for DNA to store data is huge, offering benefits not only in stability but in space.

As DNA is so densely packed inside cells it would mean that just a single cubic millimetre could store in the region of one Exabyte  or one billion Gigabytes - worth of data.

DNA is an attractive option for data storage due to its durability, being able to survive intact for hundreds, even thousands of years (stock image). But it is also highly compacted inside cells. This could mean immense volumes of data could be stored in a fraction of the space they currently take up

Earlier this month, Microsoft and UW revealed the results of their initial attempts, successfully encoding and retrieving digital data from images and videos.

Data was chopped into pieces and stored by synthesising a massive number of tiny DNA molecules, which can be dehydrated and preserved for a long time.

In order to retrieve the stored data, the team encoded the equivalent of zip codes and street addresses into the DNA sequences, which allows them to easily find what they need.

And using DNA sequencing techniques, researchers can 'read' the data and transform it back into its original form using the street addresses to reorder the data.
It is not something you will be able to pop into your mouth to take your temperature when you're feeling ill, but chemists have created the world's smallest thermometer from DNA.

The tiny instrument is 20,000 times smaller than a human hair and could lead to new ways of monitoring temperatures in electronic equipment and the body.

It takes advantage of one of the inherent properties of DNA, which cause it to unfold, or denature, when it gets too hot.

Biochemists have developed a thermometer from DNA that is 20,000 times smaller than a human hair. They designed the DNA strands to fold and unfold at different temperatures, allowing them to measure temperature changes between 86F (30C) and 185F (85C). Stock image of women with thermometer pictured

By engineering specific DNA sequences, researchers at the University of Montreal found they could design strands of genetic material that unfold and fold at defined temperatures.

This allowed them to produce molecules that could be programmed to change shape at different temperatures between 86F (30C) and 185F (85C).

WHY DNA CHANGES WITH HEAT When heated DNA undergoes a process known as denaturation, where it loses structure and unfolds. Strands of DNA are held together by hydrogen bonds of different strength according to the molecules involved in the bond. Not as strong as atomic bonds, these hydrogen bonds can be broken with relatively low levels of energy, such as moderate increases in heat. Often this can damage DNA, as if the temperature decreases to quickly, the strands can realign imperfectly. Advertisement

They said such molecules could be used as nanoscale thermal switches or could also be used in combination to generate ultrasensitive thermometers.

Professor Alexis Vallee-Belisle, a biochemist at the University of Montreal who led the research, said they had been inspired by nature's use of molecules as temperature gauges.

'In recent years, biochemists also discovered that biomolecules such as proteins or RNA (molecules similar to DNA) are employed as nanothermometers in living organisms and report temperature variation by folding or unfolding,' he explained.

'Inspired by those natural nanothermometers, which are typically 20,000 times smaller than a human hair, we have created various DNA structures that can fold and unfold at specifically defined temperatures.'

The researchers found they could control the temperatures at which the DNA folded and unfolded at by altering the sequence of 'base pairs' - known as A, T, C and G - in the molecules.

These are four basic molecules that provide the genetic code in all living organisms but are also partly responsible for determining how tightly bound a piece of DNA is.

David Gareau, a student at the University of Montreal and first author on the study, said: 'DNA is made from four different monomer molecules called nucleotides.

DNA molecules fold and unfold as temperature changes. By designing genetic strands with specific sequences, the scientists were able to control at what temperature this happened (illustrated)

'Nucleotide A binds weakly to nucleotide T, whereas nucleotide C binds strongly to nucleotide G.

'Using these simple design rules we are able to create DNA structures that fold and unfold at a specifically desired temperature.'

Writing about their findings in the journal Nano Letters, the researchers said one of the main advantages of using DNA to engineer thermometers like this is the ability to edit and program DNA is already well established.

By adding molecules that emit light when the DNA changes shape, the researchers found they could use it to then monitor changes in temperature.

Arnaud Desrosiers, another of those involved in the work, said: 'By adding optical reporters to these DNA structures, we can therefore create 5nm-wide thermometers that produce an easily detectable signal as a function of temperature.'

The research team hope that their DNA thermometers could provide new ways of studying changes in body temperature on a cellular scale.

Professor Vallee-Belisle said: 'There are still many unanswered questions in biology.

'For example, we know that the temperature inside the human body is maintained at 37C, but we have no idea whether there is a large temperature variation at the nanoscale inside each individual cell.
At the centre of our galaxy lies group of ancient stars which are at odds with their stellar neighbours.

While the majority of stars near the centre of the Milky Way rotate in line with their surroundings, researchers have found a population of elderly stars at the centre refuse to follow suit.

Rather than rotating around the centre of the galaxy, these stars - which are estimated to be 10 billion years old - meander around the core in larger random motions.

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An international team of astronomers has found a population of stars more than 10 billion years old at the heart of the Milky Way (pictured). The team believes that based on how they move and their composition, the stars may have been among the earliest elements of the galaxy to form

According to an international team of researchers peering inwards to the Milky Way's core, the stars' origins are a mystery as their movement indicates they would have formed much further out.

'This even more ancient population of stars appears to have a completely different origin,' explained Juntai Shen, an astronomer at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and co-author of the study.

The team used an instrument aboard the Anglo-Australian Telescope near Siding Spring, Australia, to measure the speed of almost 950 stars in the centre of the Milky Way.

They focused on a particular class of star, called RR Lyrae variables, which are only found in star clusters more than 10 billion years old.

The ancient stars were at odds with their neighbours in the centre of the Milky Way. At the heart of the galaxy is is a dense cluster of stars which form a bulging bar-like shape (illustrated), most of which orbit in the same direction around the galactic core, but the older stars move differently

ANCIENT STARS GIVE INSIGHT TO MILKY WAY'S BEGINNINGS An international team of astronomers found a population of stars more than 10 billion years old. They move differently to the surrounding stars in the bulging heart of the galaxy. The team found that rather than following the same rotation, these elderly stars moved more randomly, indicating a different origin. What's more, early analysis indicates they are made up of less heavy metals than younger stars. Based on the findings, researchers believe the stars may have been among the earliest parts of the Milky Way to form.

At the centre of the Milky Way is a dense cluster of stars which form a bulging bar-like shape, most of which orbit in the same direction around the galactic core.

But the RR Lyrae variables were quite different, hinting at a different origin from the surrounding stars.

According to the team, the movement of the aged stars indicates that they may have been among the earliest elements of the galaxy to form.

Dr Andrea Kunder, an astrophysicist at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in Germany, who led the study, said: 'We expected to find that these stars rotate just like the rest of the bar. Our team was quite surprised by the results.'

Shen added: 'They account for only one per cent of the total mass of the bar, but this even more ancient population of stars appears to have a completely different origin than other stars there, consistent with having been one of the first parts of the Milky Way to form.'

More than their movement, the make-up of the stars themselves could be offer another clue, say researchers.

As stars burn, scientists believe they act as fusion factories, churning out elements.

New generations of stars are expected to be made up of increasing amounts of heavier elements, while the older star are expected to be lacking in them. Early analysis indicates that the almost 950 RR Lyrae stars observed by the team have lighter elements than their neighbours, hinting at their ancient origins

They carry out a process called nucleosynthesis, in which lighter elements  starting with hydrogen and helium  are fused to create heavier and heavier elements.

New generations of stars are expected to be made up of increasing amounts of these heavier elements, while the older star are expected to be lacking in them.

Early tests indicate that this may be the case with the RR Lyrae stars spotted.

Dr Andreas Koch of Lancaster University added: 'Our first tests indicated that the RR Lyrae population also behaves very differently from the rest of their neighbourhood in terms of their metal content.

'Consolidating their chemical composition is one of the next big tasks that we wish to tackle, as that will give us further clues as to their origin.'

Dr Kock told MailOnline: 'The most likely explanation is that the non-rotating population is of a different origin of the surrounding. This is like digging in a city that is built on, such as Roman remains, finding signs of an even older culture underneath.

He added: 'Our finding then sheds light on the earliest formation phases of the Milky Way and it could point to an early merger-origin - some bigger object fell into the central regions long ago - i.e. these stars were born far away from their present, central location.'

In future, the group hopes to take more measurements of these strange stars, of which there may be two or three times as many.
It is more commonly associated with a self-destructive enthusiasm for fast cars, motorbikes or running triathlons, but is seems there may be an upside to a mid-life crisis.

Nearly one in four people aged 40 and 59 suffer a mid-life crisis, but going through the emotional upheaval makes us more curious about the world around us, a study has found.

It seems that in an effort to dig ourselves out of the situation, our minds go into overdrive in search of a creative solution.

Nearly one in four people between the ages of 40 and 59-years-old suffer some sort of mid-life crisis. While this can typically involve buying fast cars, motorbikes (stock picture) or having an affair, researchers have found there is a silver lining, as these outlets may merely be manifestations of a growing sense of curiosity

This means popular perceptions of the mid-life crisis - such as the middle aged man buying a powerful motorbike, or a middle-aged woman getting a toy-boy - may derive from an increase in hankering for new experiences, the research suggests.

Dr Oliver Robinson, who presents his research to the British Psychological Society's conference in Nottingham, said increased curiosity is 'the silver lining' of the mid-life crisis.

SECRET TO A HAPPY LIFE It has long been known that being socially connected can boost your mental health. But researchers have revealed the secret of happiness could be to party hard in your twenties, but concentrate of quality relationships in your thirties. They say this approach can have a major effect on wellbeing in later life. A study from the University of Rochester showed the quantity of social interactions a person has at 20 - and the quality of social relationships that person has at age 30 - can benefit a person's overall and psychological health later in life. People with poor social connections have been shown to be at an increased risk for early mortality. The 30-year longitudinal study, which appeared in Psychology and Aging, suggests our social interactions earlier in life benefit us later by helping us build a tool set to be drawn on later; they help us to figure out who we are, the researchers said.

Dr Robinson of the University of Greenwich and colleagues interviewed more than 900 people aged 20 and over.

They found that people aged 40 to 59 who were 'definitely' having some kind of crisis was 24 per cent while 36 per cent were 'maybe' having a crisis.

A crisis was defined as feeling emotionally unstable, making major changes and overwhelmed for at least a year.

Dr Robinson said that increased curiosity was reflected in a greater interest in people, in one's own self, ideas in general, and the world around.

He said it includes 'exploring my environment, rather than charging through it'.

But the middle aged are not alone in undergoing crisis: among the 20-39 aged group 22 per cent said they were in crisis, and 36 per cent maybe.

Older people - aged 60 plus - were much less likely to report being in a crisis at just 14 per cent.

Dr Robinson said there were two schools of thought in 'crisis theory' - that crisis is a situation that is negative and needs to be treated with drugs.

But by contrast, he argues that curiosity is part of our problem solving toolkit.

For some people, a fast car (stock picture) may seem like the solution to the emotional problems they feel when they turn middle aged, but in fact our brains are actually going into overdrive as they try to find a solution

Researchers said at its best curiosity can create a sense of child-like wonder and excitement but it can also create a feeling of thirst that cannot be quenched (stock picture of a middle-aged woman with a younger man)

'At times when the world doesn't make good sense, when we've got lots of questions, but not got lots of answers, that kicks off curiosity.'

He added that some theorists argue that it is curiosity is the oldest human drive, which sets us apart from other species.

'Curiosity is a doubled headed beast. It's exciting and fun, but it can be the feeling of a thirst that can't be quenched.
We may not be not the universe's first advanced civilization.

That's the conclusion of a recent revision of the famous 1961 Drake Equation, which estimates the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe.

Their new equation includes recent data from Nasa's Kepler satellite on the number of exoplanets that could harbour life.

Researchers also adapted the equation from being about the number of civilizations that exist now, to being about the probability of civilization being the only one that has ever existed.

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The Drake equation (top row) has proven to be a durable framework for research. But it is impossible to do anything more than guess at variables such as L, the probably longevity of other advanced civilizations. In new research, Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan offer a new equation (bottom row)

THE REVISED DRAKE EQUATION The Drake Equation is a seven-variable way of finding the chance of active civilisations existing beyond Earth. It takes into account factors like the rate of star formation, the amount of stars that could form planetary systems, the number potentially habitable planets in those systems. But it's now 55 years old, and doesn't include new information from astronomers on the likelihood of life existing on newly-discovered planets. Their new equation includes recent data from Nasa's Kepler satellite on the number of exoplanets that could harbour life. Researchers also adapted the equation from being about the number of civilisations that exist now, to being about the probability of civilisation being the only one that has ever existed. The study shows the odds of an advanced civilisation developing need to be less than one in 10 billion trillion for humans to be the only intelligent life in the universe. Advertisement

The study shows that unless the odds of advanced life evolving on a habitable planet are astonishingly low, then humankind is not the only advanced civilization to have lived.

In fact, the odds of an advanced civilization developing need to be less than one in 10 billion trillion for humans to be the only intelligent life in the universe.

But Kepler data places those odds much higher, which means technologically advanced aliens are likely to have existed at some point.

'The question of whether advanced civilizations exist elsewhere in the universe has always been vexed with three large uncertainties in the Drake equation,' said Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester and co-author of the paper.

'We've known for a long time approximately how many stars exist.

'We didn't know how many of those stars had planets that could potentially harbor life, how often life might evolve and lead to intelligent beings, and how long any civilizations might last before becoming extinct.'

'Thanks to Nasa's Kepler satellite and other searches, we now know that roughly one-fifth of stars have planets in 'habitable zones,' where temperatures could support life as we know it.

'So one of the three big uncertainties has now been constrained.'

Frank said that the third big question - how long civilizations might survive - is still completely unknown.

'The fact that humans have had rudimentary technology for roughly ten thousand years doesn't really tell us if other societies would last that long or perhaps much longer,' he explained.

But Frank and his co-author, Woodruff Sullivan of the astronomy department at the University of Washington, found they could eliminate that term altogether by simply expanding the question.

'Rather than asking how many civilizations may exist now, we ask 'are we the only technological species that has ever arisen?' said Sullivan.

Pictured is a plot of human population, total energy consumption and atmospheric CO2 concentration from 10,000 BCE to today. Scientists used data such as this to estimate how quickly a civilization might die out

'This shifted focus eliminates the uncertainty of the civilization lifetime question and allows us to address what we call the 'cosmic archaeological question' - how often in the history of the universe has life evolved to an advanced state?'

COULD 50 GALAXIES BE HIDING ADANCED ALIEN LIFE? Last year, scientists said they had found 50 galaxies that may contain intelligent alien races. These galaxies were found to be emitting 'unusually high' levels of radiation - possibly indicating 'the presence of a highly advanced civilisation.' Within these galaxies, the researchers said it was possible that an alien race could be harnessing the power of the stars - emitting huge amounts of noticeable heat in the process. The study was led by Dr Jason Wright from the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University in Pennsylvania. The Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies Survey (G-Hat), published in the Astrophysical Journal, details how the team thought they might see the infrared signature of a race far more advanced than ours. 'The idea behind our research is that, if an entire galaxy had been colonised by an advanced spacefaring civilisation, the energy produced by that civilisation's technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths,' said Dr Wright. Advertisement

Rather than guessing at the odds of advanced life developing, they calculate the odds against it occurring in order for humanity to be the only advanced civilization.

With that, Frank and Sullivan then calculated the line between a universe where humanity has been the sole experiment in civilization and one where others have come before us.

'Of course, we have no idea how likely it is that an intelligent technological species will evolve on a given habitable planet,' says Frank.

'But using our method we can tell exactly how low that probability would have to be for us to be the only civilization the universe has produced.

'We call that the pessimism line. If the actual probability is greater than the pessimism line, then a technological species and civilization has likely happened before.'

Using this approach, Frank and Sullivan calculate how unlikely advanced life must be if there has never been another example among the universe's ten billion trillion stars, or even among our own Milky Way galaxy's hundred billion.

'One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,' says Frank. 'To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us.

'Think of it this way. Before our result you'd be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion.

'But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history.'

The study shows the odds of an a civilisation developing need to be less than one in 10 billion trillion for humans to be the only intelligent life in the universe. Pictured is an artist's impression of an Earth-like planet

For smaller volumes the numbers are less extreme.

For example, another technological species likely has evolved on a habitable planet in our own Milky Way galaxy if the odds against it are better than one chance in 60 billion.

But if those numbers seem to give ammunition to the 'optimists' about the existence of alien civilizations,

Sullivan points out that the full Drake equation - which calculates the odds that other civilizations are around today - may give solace to the pessimists.

'The universe is more than 13 billion years old,' said Sullivan.

'That means that even if there have been a thousand civilizations in our own galaxy, if they live only as long as we have been around - roughly ten thousand years - then all of them are likely already extinct.

Their new equation includes recent data from Nasa's Kepler satellite on the number of exoplanets that could harbour life. Pictured is an artist's impression of the probe

'And others won't evolve until we are long gone. For us to have much chance of success in finding another 'contemporary' active technological civilization, on average they must last much longer than our present lifetime.'

'Given the vast distances between stars and the fixed speed of light we might never really be able to have a conversation with another civilization anyway,' said Frank.

'If they were 20,000 light years away then every exchange would take 40,000 years to go back and forth.'

But, as Frank and Sullivan point out, even if there aren't other civilizations in our galaxy to communicate with now, the new result still has a profound scientific and philosophical importance.

'From a fundamental perspective the question is 'has it ever happened anywhere before?'' said Frank.

Our result is the first time anyone has been able to set any empirical answer for that question and it is astonishingly likely that we are not the only time and place that an advance civilization has evolved.'
Earlier this month, a study set dog-lovers in a frenzy after it revealed that hugging your canine companions may actually be causing them stress.

Dogs despise being held close by their owners because their first line of defense is to run away, the research explained, and suggested humans choose other ways to show their affection.

But, not all experts agree that you should stop hugging your dog.

Earlier this month, a study set dog-lovers in a frenzy after it revealed that hugging your canine companions may actually be causing them stress. The research suggested humans choose other ways to show their affection. But, not all experts agree that you should stop hugging your dog. Image posed by a model

SIGNS YOUR DOG IS STRESSED Signs of canine stress include when the dog has its ears down. So-called half moon eyes, in which the dog looks down with its eyes up, are another sign, as is a head turned away to avoid eye contact. If the dog has its eyes closed or is licking its lips it may be stressed out too. Yawning or raising a paw is another warning sign that your pet is uncomfortable. 'Shaking off' the hug after the dog has been released, similar to what they do after a bath to get rid of water.

In the study, Dr Stanley Coren, a canine expert and professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia examined 250 dogs being hugged by adults and children and analysed them for signs of stress.

Coren found that 81 per cent of all dogs being hugged were uncomfortable, suggesting they wanted their owners to put them down.

On the other hand, these stress signals may be prompted by something else, according to Corey Cohen, a companion animal behaviour therapist at A New Leash on Life in Pennsylvania.

The dogs in the photos may have been anxious because they didnt like having their picture taken, Cohen told The New York Times, or the person involved may have been trying to pose them.

If a dog trusts the human who is giving the hug, Cohen explains that a dog could be comfortable with this gesture.

Cohens own dogs love to be hugged, he tells NYT, a reaction which he determines based on the slowing of their breathing and softening of the gaze.

Some dogs may even tilt the edges of their mouths up in an expression similar to a smile.

The truth is, if you have a decent relationship with your dog, it releases oxytocin, he told The New York Times, referring to the love hormone.

I dont think there is any other creature on the earth that will do this.

But while it may be alright to hug a dog in some cases, Erica Lieberman, a dog trainer and behaviour consultant with Pawsibilities Pets in New York City agreed with the message of Corens research, telling NYT that people should be cautious.

Dog owners going in for a hug should always look for cutoff signals, Lieberman explained, including the distress signs noted in the study and a shaking off gesture similar to what a dog does after a bath.

If none of these are present, then the dog may not mind the hug.

The study was carried out by Dr Stanley Coren, a canine expert and professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. Signs of canine stress include when the dog has its ears down. So-called half moon eyes, in which the dog looks down with its eyes up, are another sign, as is a head turned away. Stock image

SHOULD YOU HUG YOUR DOG? In the initial study, Dr Stanley Coren examined 250 dogs being hugged by adults and children and analysed them for signs of stress. He found that in 81.6 per cent of cases, the dogs had at least one sign of discomfort, stress, or anxiety. Only 7.6 per cent showed comfortable dogs whilst the remaining 10.8 per cent were either neutral or ambiguous. This is because 'dogs are not human children,' Coren explained. Dogs are technically cursorial animals, indicating that they despise being held close because their first line of defense is to run away. Cutting off their ability to run away may increase the dog's stress level. Instead of a hug, the expert suggests showing your dog affection with a pat, kind words, or a treat.

But, the expert also says dogs have learned that certain actions, like hugging, make people happy, so in some cases they may be putting up with contact that they dont like, according to The New York Times.

As much as they may jump up at you, lick your face and seemingly crave attention, hugging your dog can actually make it stressed, Coren's study explained.

At an extreme end, when dog is especially anxious it bares its teeth or may bite, but Dr Coren said there are 'subtler indicators' that it may be uncomfortable.

Signs of canine stress are when the dog has its ears down, half moon eyes or his head turned away to avoid eye contact.

If the dog has its eyes closed or is licking its lips it may be stressed out too.

Yawning or raising one paw is another warning sign.

In the article published in Psychology Today,, Dr Coren only used images where the dog's face was clearly visible and did not use pictures where the dogs were in situations which might be independently stressful.

He found that in 81.6 per cent of cases, the dogs had at least one sign of discomfort, stress, or anxiety.

Only 7.6 per cent showed comfortable dogs whilst the remaining 10.8 per cent were either neutral or ambiguous.

Canines despise being held close by their owners because their first line of defence is to run away, a study has found. By depriving them of that, you are making them miserable and anxious. Stock image pictured

Dr Coren wrote that 'the results indicated the internet contains many pictures of happy people hugging what appear to be unhappy dogs'. The key to understanding why is that, quite simply, 'dogs are not human children'

Dr Coren wrote that 'the results indicated that the internet contains many pictures of happy people hugging what appear to be unhappy dogs'.

The key to understanding why is that, quite simply, 'dogs are not human children'.

Dr Coren said: 'Dogs are technically cursorial animals, which is a term that indicates that they are designed for swift running.

'That implies that in times of stress or threat the first line of defense that a dog uses is not his teeth, but rather his ability to run away.

'Behaviourists believe that depriving a dog of that course of action by immobilizing him with a hug can increase his stress level and, if the dog's anxiety becomes significantly intense, he may bite'.

Dr Coren added: 'The clear recommendation to come out of this research is to save your hugs for your two-footed family members and lovers.
Major volcanic eruptions may have paved the way for the Roman Empire's success in Egypt and the Middle East.

These eruptions helped destroy the Ptolemaic Kingdom on the Nile, which ruled in the Hellenistic period, scientists say.

The domestic unrest and ensuing uprising led to the Kingdom's destruction in Egypt and North Africa 30 BC.

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Major volcanic eruptions may have paved the way for the Roman Empire's success in Egypt and the Middle East. These eruptions helped destroy the Ptolemaic Kingdom on the Nile, which ruled in the Hellenistic period

Researchers at Yale University were able to discover a link between volcanic eruptions and region by combining historical accounts with climate data.

'So far, Hellenistic history has never had any climate component,' Joseph Manning, a historian at Yale University told the meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria, last week.

'There were revolts and social unrest from 245 BC onwards, down to the mid-first century BC.'

'One involved the entire river valley along the Nile for 20 years.'

The kingdom was created following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, were land was divided amongst his generals.

Ptolemy, son of Lagos took control of Egypt and governed the country until 305 BC. The Dynasty then ruled in Egypt for nearly 300 years, until the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC. Pictured is an artist's impression of Antony and Cleopatra

Ptolemy, son of Lagos took control of Egypt and governed the country until 305 BC.

The Dynasty then ruled in Egypt for nearly 300 years, until the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC.

During its downfall, the Kingdom suffered political unrest, driven by starvation and famine.

Although the Ptolemies introduced free-threshing wheat, a labor saving grain that should have significantly improved the quality of life, history has not been kind to them.

'History had judged the Ptolemies to be bad rulers,' says Manning.

VOLCANIC ERUPTION MAY HAVE LED TO THE DOWNFALL OF THE ROMANS Major volcanic eruptions may have paved the way for the rapid spread of Islam across the Middle East, Africa and into Europe. Scientists have found large volcanic eruptions between 536AD and 626 AD resulted in widespread changes in the climate and famine. This may have pushed the Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, to the brink of collapse and opened the way for a new religion  Islam  to dominate. The researchers have found evidence, locked inside ice cores and tree rings around the world, for a massive volcanic eruption in North America in 536AD. The summer that year appeared to be exceptionally cold  between 1.6C (34.8F) and 2.5C (36.5F) below the 30 year average. Historians such as Procopius record thick dust clouds darkening the skies across Europe for nearly 18 month and the sun shining as dimly as the Moon. It is thought ash thrown out by the volcano caused the disaster, meaning crops received too little light to ripen. Then again in around 539AD or 540AD a second enormous eruption spread more volcanic ash around the globe, blocking out the sun for several more months. Researchers found evidence for this second eruption encased in ice in both Greenland and Antarctica. And they said aerosols thrown high into the atmosphere by the eruptions led to longer term cooling of the Northern Hemisphere for the next decade. The researchers say the environmental disaster was responsible for widespread famine and the great Justinian Plague of 541543 CE that decimated populations in the Mediterranean and Asia, which is thought to have caused 50 million deaths.

Up until now, that downfall has been explained in terms of poor politics, nationalism, and resentment of Greek rule.

But scientists believe major eruptions that affected global climate would have reduce the annual rains in the highlands of Ethiopia that drained into the Nile, according to a report in New Scientist.

'Aerosols from volcanoes reduce evaporation and cool the temperature, leading to fewer clouds,' says Francis Ludlow of Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, and the team's lead volcanologist.

The scientists say they have found almost exact matches between the timing of uprisings in the kingdom and a series of eruptions.

The kingdom was created following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, were land was divided amongst his generals. Up until now, that downfall of the kingdom has been explained in terms of poor politics, nationalism, and resentment of Greek rule. Pictured is a wall relief in Philae Temple, Aswan, Egypt.

Evidence of the eruptions came from sulphate contamination in Greenland and Antarctica in the form of ice cores.

These are layered time capsules reaching back thousands of years that preserve particles from the atmosphere.

Eight out of nine revolts against the Ptolemaic rulers began within two years of eruption dates.

These revolts mean the Ptolemaic armies were worse equipped to seize new territory in Mesopotamia between 274 and 96 BC.

'Now, we can see it's all lining up,' says Manning.

'The last four centuries BC were very active volcanically and as a result saw this incredible instability, which ultimately paved the way for the kingdom to fall and for the rise of the Roman Empire.'




In the past, Uber has also tested out helicopter services for special events

If summoning a car to pick you up at the tap of a button doesnt feel luxurious enough, Uber has revealed its plan to land you a spot on a deluxe party yacht in Dubai.

UberYacht costs just AED300 per person, or roughly $82, for a ride which is set to take off this Saturday  and the firm will provide complimentary Ubers to and from the pier.

Lucky Uber users who were able to book a spot can enjoy the ride with up to three friends and will have access to free food and drinks while they sail along the shoreline.

If summoning a car to pick you up at the tap of a button doesnt feel luxurious enough, Uber has revealed its plan to land you a spot on a deluxe party yacht in Dubai. UberYacht costs just AED300 per person, or roughly $82, for a ride which is set to take off this Saturday

UBER LAUNCHES 'PASSPORT' Now, you can call an Uber for your next trip to Mexico. The taxi-service has launched its first cross-border service, offering one-way transportation from San Diego across the San Ysidro border. The program, called UberPASSPORT, began driving passengers to Tijuana in March. To use the service: - Open your Uber app and select the PASSPORT option within the vehicle menu - Request a ride and remember to bring all of the required documentation - Hop in your UberPASSPORT and cross into Mexico in one trip - A trip from San Diego to Tijuana Airport will cost $100. - Uber will charge a $20 cross-border fee for each journey, and the entire far can be split between four passengers. - Rather than just getting one Uber on the way back, customers have to book two. One for the trip to the border in Mexico, and another from the US border to San Diego.

Uber has partnered up with Nikki Beach and Alpha Tours to offer the UberYacht party ride that will take place on Saturday April 30.

The trip is booked through the Uber app by moving the slider to UberYacht to request a spot.

Then the request and payment are confirmed, and riders will receive an email with the confirmation code, and codes for the included rides.

For Uber riders who were able to book the trip before 4 p.m. Thursday, a spot will be guaranteed, though you must arrive to the dock no later than 1:15 to get aboard.

The four-hour trip will leave from Pier 7 in the Dubai Marina, and riders must be 21 years old to participate.

Along with a spot on the party yacht, participants will receive round-trip Uber rides valued at up to about $16 each way, and complimentary food and drinks.

The party-yacht isnt the first time Uber has strayed from its car service to try out other forms of transportation.

Earlier this year, Airbus and Uber teamed up to offer stylish helicopter rides in Utah during the Sundance Film Festival.

Airbus planned to supply two different aircraft models, and customers used Uber's app to request a ride.

Lucky Uber users who were able to book a spot can enjoy the ride with up to three friends and will have access to free food and drinks while they sail along the shoreline. The trip is booked through the Uber app by moving the slider to UberYacht to request a spot

Uber offered to take visitors by helicopter roughly 40 miles from the Salt Lake City airport to the Robert Redford-founded festival in Park City, charging $200 one-way during the day and $300 at night.

Customers who booked ahead of time were granted cheaper fares.

The move was met with backlash from the Utah community, which urged Uber to discontinue the rides due to a number of complaints.

Uber has partnered up with Nikki Beach and Alpha Tours to offer the UberYacht party ride that will take place on Saturday April 30. But. the party-yacht isnt the first time Uber has strayed from its car service to try out other forms of transportation

The firm, however, revealed its plans to resume just hours after reaching an agreement to halt its choppers.

In 2013, the car service also tested its UberChopper between Manhattan and the Hamptons, and for the Cannes Film Festival and Bonnarroo Music and Arts Festival.

And this past December, Uber offered rides for one day from 10 am to 12 noon for residents living in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, India.

Once connected, an Uber car picked up riders from their specified location, drove them to the nearest air-field, where they hopped in a chopper for a 15 minute ride.

H125 pictured above. Airbus and Uber offered stylish helicopter rides in Utah during the Sundance Film Festival. Uber offered to take visitors by helicopter roughly 40 miles from the Salt Lake City airport to the Robert Redford-founded festival in Park City, charging $200 one-way during the day and $300 at night

The on-demand car service used the Airbus H125 and H130 helicopters for the Sundance project. The H130 is pictured above

The rides to the Hamptons and back were about $3,000, while the ones in India were just $75 for two people.

The on-demand car service used the Airbus H125 and H130 helicopters for the Sundance project.

This collaboration between the two companies comes as Airbus seeks to push innovation at the Toulouse.

The aerospace company has dipped their fingers in everything from passenger airplanes to military transporters, but has found themselves barely staying afloat in the helicopter industry.
The hilarious moment a horrified tourist has her mobile phone snatched by a monkey has been recorded and released online.

The short video clip begins with the holidaymaker leaning forward with an arm outstretched to feed the creature, during a tour in Leshan, Sichuan Province, China

As well as snatching her edible offerings, the cheeky monkey also swipes her smartphone.

The tourist bends down to feed a monkey during a tour in Leshan, Sichuan Province, China

The video, which was filmed by a spectator on April 14, shows the young woman dressed in yellow, bending down to capture close-up footage of a wild monkey on her phone.

Offering the brown primate a snack, the woman is left shocked when the animal unexpectedly snatches her phone as well as the food.

Running off into the woods with the smartphone, the monkey disappears from the footage.

The video concludes with the woman shouting and laughing in a state of bemused shock.

Offering the brown primate a snack, the woman is left shocked when the animal snatches her phone as well as the food

The video concludes with the woman shouting and laughing in a state of bemused shock

MailOnline Travel reported earlier this week on a more terrifying tourist interaction with a wild animal which saw an elephant charge towards a safari truck and begin rummaging through the vehicle for food.

Met by screaming holidaymakers, the enormous bull elephant's tusk even speared through a seat as he frantically raided the van.

During the three-minute-long clip, shot in Sri Lanka the hungry creature searched the open truck with his trunk before fleeing.

Running off into the woods with the smartphone, the monkey disappears from the footage
This is the heart-in-mouth moment a man jumped 40ft down into a waterfall.

Taking place at Alberta's Lundbreck Falls in Canada, the footage shows Chris Mezai, 33, taking the daredevil plunge, captured on camera by his friend Colin Ross.

A shirtless Mezai climbs over a small wire fence and makes his way to the waterfall's edge.

Chris Mezai makes his running start ahead of his daredevil plunge down a 40ft waterfall

The heart-in-mouth footage was caught on camera by Mezai's friend Colin Ross, from a safer point

This image shows Mezai's entry point as he hits the water at Alberta's Lundbreck Falls in Canada

As Mezai heads towards the gushing water, Ross says to the camera: 'It's going to be one of the craziest dives you've ever seen in your life.

'This guy is going to jump right off into the falls.'

The video then shows Mezai survey the waterfall as he prepares to take on the terrifying stunt.

He then appears to take off his footwear as Ross adds: 'If I've got to bail in and drag him out, my day is going to get real s****.

'This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to watch this.'

Ahead of the daredevil plunge, Mezai was captured surveying the extent of the challenge ahead of him

The police have said that the jump was not illegal as there are no signs forbidding the action

Other people watching on are heard saying 'no way,' as Mezai inches closer to the drop.

After a shout of 'whenever you're ready, man,' from Ross, Mezai sprintsto the cliff edge and jumps.

Exclamations of disbelief are heard from those watching on, and thankfully Mezai emerges from the water and swims to some rocks.

'Good job, that was nuts, I can't believe he just did that,' shouts Ross.

As Mezai plunges into the waters, onlookers can be heard exclaiming their disbelief at the actions

If you look closely, you can just see Mezai poking his head out of the water at the Canadian waterfall

'That is crazy, you're crazy.'

The video was shared on YouTube by Ross, with the description reading: 'Living the life no limits.

'Once in a life time opportunity to see someone do this. Living life Canadian style glacier cold water.'

The jump is not illegal as there is no warning sign, according to CBC News.

'Locals say it's dangerous because the rocks are hidden,' constable Sean McKenna told the Canadian news site.

'If you take a shorter jump you could hit rocks, plus the undertow is strong.'
He was awoken by 'a flight attendant's scream' to find

A firefighter allegedly saved a co-passenger's life after a man went into cardiac arrest at 30,000ft.

Austin Bleiweiss was in a deep sleep on his flight home to Florida following a holiday in Puerto Rico when he was awoken by 'a flight attendant's scream', local media reported.

Climbing out of his seat along with two others with a medical background, Bleiweiss allegedly saw an unconscious man slumped over his seat.

Austin Bleiweiss was in a deep sleep on his flight home to Florida following a holiday in Puerto Rico when he was awoken by 'a flight attendant's scream', local media reported

According to Naples News, the 31-year-old - who is a firefighter and paramedic in the Naples Fire-Rescue Department - said that the passenger had turned a shade of grey and 'had no pulse'.

The emergency worker said that his training then kicked in and he claims that he positioned himself by the ill man's head and applied an oxygen mask while calling for the aircraft's automatic defibrillator and telling one other passenger to start chest compressions.

Bleiweiss stated that the incident was like a flashback as he had, three years earlier, been faced with a similar situation on a flight home from Las Vegas after his dad's 60th birthday.

Taking to Facebook, the nine-year veteran of the Naples fire department said: 'Man it happened again!!! We were flying home today and I am woken up from the flight attendants yelling for people in the medical field.

'I thought this was a dream again because this has happened to me before on a flight out to Las Vegas for my dad's 60th birthday. The person that was in need of help was pale white or grey looking in colour and had his eyes open but was lifeless and not breathing.

'After making sure everyone was clear we shocked him. After the shock we had a pulse back. We then continued to assist with respirations and oxygen while we did an emergency landing in Ft. Lauderdale airport. The man was up and talking as we handed him over to the Fort Lauderdale Firefighter Paramedics.'

Bleiweiss stated that the incident was like a flashback as he had, three years earlier, been faced with a similar situation on a flight home from Las Vegas after his dad's 60th birthday

According to Naples News, Bleiweiss squeezed the bag attached to the oxygen mask two times to give the man air during the CPR. After two rounds of chest compressions, the defibrillator was attached to his chest.

The man later reportedly regained conciousness and started to breath on his own but the firefighter continued to squeeze the oxygen bag every seven seconds.

Despite saving his life, Bleiweiss claims he did not know the man's name due to a language barrier.

The man was allegedly later transferred to hospital following an emergency landing in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
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This is the moment two paddle boarders came face to face with a family of whales.

The incredible footage was shot off the coast of California, and shows a mother and her calves coming within a few feet of the two men.

Rich German filmed the chance meeting from his yellow paddle board, while his colleague, Mark Girardeau also captured the footage from a drone above as he was in a nearby boat.

Two paddle boarders came face to face with a whale off the coast of California, as the animals make the journey to Alaska

Rich German filmed the chance meeting from his yellow paddleboard, while his colleague, Mark Girardeau also captured the footage from a drone above

Speaking to The Dodo, German said: 'I paddle with whales almost every day,'

'They were moving super slow, I love that they feel safe. They would bring the baby right over to us.

'Obviously, they realise that we're no threat to them, and that's just a pretty amazing, magical experience.'

The whales don't appear to be flustered despite their close meeting with the men.

The whales don't appear to be flustered despite their close meeting with the men who were taking some time on the waters

The incredible footage was shot off the coast of California, and shows a mother and her calves coming within a few feet of the two men

German passes the creatures along with his other friend Ethan Taub who is standing on a white paddle board.

The magnificent animals are believed to be making the journey to Alaska for the summer, with the mother's known for keeping a protective eye on their offspring.

During this time its not uncommon for the whales to appear near paddle boards, kayaks, divers, and whale watching boats.
He was living it up in Iceland with his tight-knit circle of friends.

And continuing on with the luxurious activities, Jonathan Cheban treated himself to a nourishing facial at the world-famous Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, the day after pal Kourtney Kardashian's 37th birthday.

The 42-year-old was joined at the spa by sisters Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, who splashed around nearby as he pampered himself to a rejuvenating mask.

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Rejuvenating: Jonathan Cheban enjoyed a nourishing facial at the Blue Lagoon in Iceland with pals Kim and Kourtney Kardashian nearby in April

It was clearly a relaxing moment for the reality star, who had been busy traveling through Iceland at the time with his famous friends.

By the time the assistant was finished, Jonathan's face, neck, and shoulders were given a healthy coat of the mask.

Letting it soak in: The reality star closed his eyes as he waited for the facial to work its magic

Hold still! Cheban smiled as the helper coated his face with the rejuvenating cream

As Jonathan's skin reaped the rewards of the facial, he was helped onto a blue flotation device for a relaxing glide on the waters.

He seemed to have been taken by surprise, however, as he looked to momentarily lose his balance atop the flotation device.

Jonathan was at the geothermal spa with a host of friends that included Kim, Kourtney, and Kim's husband Kanye West, who did not appear to join his friends and family in the water.

All done! Cheban grinned as he waded in the ice blue water following his facial

Kick back and relax: Jonathan settled himself onto a blue flotation device

Meanwhile, Kim stole the spotlight as she displayed her curvaceous physique.

Last month, the mother-of-two said she had lost 42 of the 60 lbs she gained while pregnant with son Saint.

The star was pleased to announce that she has now dropped to a slim and trim 139 lbs via Snapchat on Wednesday.

Splish, splash: But the reality star seemed to momentarily lose his balance in the process

Good times! The 42-year-old smiled for a snap with Kim and friends

It was an impressive feat for one who gave birth to her second child just over four months ago.

'YOU GUYS!!!! PRE BABY WEIGHT WAS 135!!!!!' Kim excitedly wrote in a caption.

With only four more pounds to go before she reaches her desired target weight of 135 lbs, no wonder Kim was in a giddy mood.

It has been a whirlwind few weeks for the stars, for aside their trip to Iceland they also jetted over to Miami for David Grutman's wedding last week.

Cheers! The mother-of-two also held a juicy strawberry pink beverage up
Kyle Sandilands choked up on air this week as he reunited a man and his estranged daughter during a live show just a month after his own father's death.

The 44-year-old could be seen tearing up as he watched Michelle, a 25-year-old Sydney woman, meet her father, Daryl, for the first time.

Their emotional reunion was brought about when Michelle, a mother herself, contacted Kyle's KIIS FM show with Jackie 'O' Henderson to be asked to be put in touch with the man.

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Emotional: Kyle Sandilands became emotional while watching a father and daughter reunite on his KIIS FM radio show after being estranged for 25 years

Appearing alone before their introduction, she nervously told the presenters: 'I just want to know what he looks like.'

Jackie called for Daryl to be brought in to the recording booth where the pair hugged and cried.

A visibly moved Kyle, who participated in the segment via Skype, was momentarily quiet as he watched the pair hug.

Big moment: Michelle and Daryl were reunited on the show after spending her entire life apart

Tender: The pair hugged as Kyle, who was taking part in the segment via Skype, watched on

Later he excitedly revealed Daryl, who has three other children, was also a grandfather. Summer, Michelle's six-year-old daughter, appeared to greet him, jumping in to the man's arms for a warm cuddle.

Gushing over the 'overwhelming moment', Kyle remarked happily: 'She's just gone in for another hug, I love this kid.'

The emotional segment comes just a month after the death of Kyle's father, Peter.

Overwhelmed: Jackie 'O' Henderson appeared to become emotional too as the pair met for the first time

Happy: The man was delighted to be introduced to his granddaughter, Summer, too

He somberly announced the sad news on his radio show, revealing that his father's battle with cancer.

Kyle returned to Australia after a trip to Europe with girlfriend Imogen Anthony to learn of his death.

'I love you, Dad, wherever you are. Well get [psychic medium] John Edwards on, and well get dad back,' he joked.
It's a meal commonly associated with university students on a budget.

But My Kitchen Rules winners Tasia and Gracia Seger have confessed they're also huge fans of Indomie Mi Goreng two-minute noodles.

Speaking with Good Food in an article published on Wednesday, the young reality stars demonstrated how they liven the humble dish.

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It's an instant winner! MKR champions the Spice Sisters Tasia and Gracia Seger revealed in an article published on Wednesday their favourite cheat meal is two-minute noodles

They begin with adding fresh chili into the boiling water with the noodles, and once the noodles are cooked and drained, Tasia adds a fried egg, any left-over meat and fried shallots.

'I basically do this to make it look fresh!' she said.

'Then I add rice. It's pretty much carbs on carbs,' she added.

Cheap as chips! Single packets of the instant noodle brand can be purchased for around 70 cents

Turning it up a notch! Tasia adds fresh ingredients to make it look 'fresher'

Winners: Tasia and Gracia, known as the Spice Sisters, were announced as the winners of Seven's hit cooking series

Tasia and Gracia, known as the Spice Sisters, were announced as the winners of Seven's hit cooking series on Tuesday.

During the high-pressure finale, the siblings took home the $250,000 cash prize after receiving a score of 57 out of 60 from the judges after facing off against Italian couple Lauren and Carmine.

With their efforts praised by the judges, Colin Fassnidge labelled Tasia and Gracia's third course dish of spicy king prawns 'perfectly cooked'.

That's a spicy meatball! The siblings took home the $250,000 cash prize

'The sauce out shone the prawns. Guys, you don't need $250,000 - you open a sauce factory, and you'll be loaded', the tough-to-impress Irish judge told them.

For the chance to be crowned victors the two teams had to create a five-course menu for 100 guests at a packed restaurant.

While Lauren and Carmine chose an Italian theme, the sister duo opted for their signature spice Asian palate.
The outfits may well have been different, but the curious new accessories looked remarkably similar as Kris Smith and girlfriend Maddy King arrived at Sydney Airport.

Arriving ahead of a flight to the Gold Coast on Monday, the couple sported matching silver bands on their wedding fingers as they made their way towards the departure lounge.

Both appeared to be smitten on the day and indulged in an affectionate kiss as they idled with their luggage shortly before catching their flight.

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Something to tell us? The outfits may well have been different, but the curious new accessories looked remarkably similar as Kris Smith and girlfriend Maddy King arrived at Sydney Airport

Kris, 37, cut a suitably stylish figure in a navy blue shirt left fashionably unbuttoned and with the sleeves rolled up.

Going for his trademark designer stubble look, he opted for a simple pair of denim jeans for the 90 minute journey from the New South Wales capital to Queensland's tourist hotspot.

The ex-Daily Edition co-host accessorised with a brown outback hat and a flashy silver watch and clutched a bottle of Mount Franklin spring water for hydration.

It's a match: Arriving ahead of a flight to the Gold Coast on Monday, the couple sported matching silver bands on their wedding fingers as they made their way towards the departure lounge

Moving in: Both appeared to be smitten on the day and indulged in an affectionate kiss as they idled with their luggage shortly before catching their flight

Maddy could hardly stop smiling as she walked alongside her handsome boyfriend - and the pair were even spotting sharing a kiss and a cuddle before boarding their flight.

Kris and Maddy have been dating for over three years and he previously told Daily Mail Australia an engagement isn't off the table for the couple.

Speaking at the Magic Millions races in the Gold Coast in January, Kris said: 'She's a good chick, a great girl. I'm never going to say no.'

The loved-up pair were faced with breakup rumours in July after Kris was spotted with former FHM model Siobhan Parekh in Sydney's Double Bay.

But they quickly put an end to the speculation, however, emerging publicly for a morning walk together.
She's maintained a relatively low profile since exiting Coronation Street back in 2013.

But Natalie Gumede made a welcome return to the spotlight as she lead the glamour at the Raindance Independent Filmmakers Ball at London's Cafe de Paris on Wednesday evening.

Posing up a storm on the red carpet, the 32-year-old actress pulled out all of the stops in a plunging black jumpsuit, which teased a peek of her enviable bust.

Turning heads: Former Coronation Street star Natalie Gumede made a welcome return to the spotlight as she lead the glamour at the Raindance Independent Filmmakers Ball at London's Cafe de Paris on Wednesday evening

The tailored design featured a belted waist that did a fantastic job at highlighting the former Strictly Come Dancing star's lean frame.

Injecting the look with a welcome splash of colour, Natalie put her best foot forward in a pair of neon pink stilettos.

She gave the look some added glamour with gold statement jewellery, which included a cuff bracelet, an over-sized ring and lengthy drop earrings.

Gorgeous: Posing up a storm on the red carpet, the 32-year-old actress pulled out all of the stops in a plunging black jumpsuit, which teased a peek of her enviable bust

Svelte: The tailored design featured a belted waist that did a fantastic job at highlighting the former Strictly Come Dancing star's lean frame

Her brunette locks were worn in natural corkscrew curls around her stunning face, which modelled an alluring make-up look with a pink smokey eyeshadow and berry lipstick.

Natalie certainly wasn't camera shy as she placed her hand on her hip and worked her angles for photographers at the bash.

The exclusive fundraiser attracted filmmakers and indie film lovers alike, and boasted live music from the likes of Natty Cangeroo & the Flames of Rhythm, as well as a raffle with prizes from some of the top companies in the film business.

Stunning: Natalie's brunette locks were worn in natural corkscrew curls around her stunning face, which modelled an alluring make-up look with a pink smokey eyeshadow and berry lipstick

Wild thing! Legend actress Tara Fitzgerald rocked up to the event in a bold leopard print jacket and black dress combination

Also in attendance was Legend actress Tara Fitzgerald, who rocked up to the event in a bold leopard print jacket and black dress combination.

Burlesque dancer and star of BBC Three's Killer Magic Jasz Vegas also dazzled on the red carpet, showing off her curves in a thigh-grazing pencil dress.

Other stars at the film event included Interstellar actor David Gyasi and social media prankster Jack Jones.

Dressed to impress: Burlesque dancer and star of BBC Three's Killer Magic Jasz Vegas also dazzled on the red carpet, showing off her curves in a thigh-grazing pencil dress
A former Playboy pinup says she had a secret romance with Prince in the mid-1980s that ended because she didn't want to be 'one of many girls.'

Devin Devasquez, 52, told People she was 'absolutely in love' with Prince whom she romanced on and off for six months in 1985.

She said she first met him after a member of his entourage showed the musician a photo of her and he invited her to come to his Chicago concert in December 1984.

'I loved him': Devin Devasquez claims she had a secret romance with Prince back in 1985. She posted this photo on her instagram of herself in a Purple Rain outfit she says was given to her by the late musician

Devasquez, who was featured on the cover of Playboy in 1985 and 1986, described the late star as 'small but such a sexy, charming guy.'

'During the Purple Rain tour he would fly me to all of the concerts, all over the country,' she told the magazine.

'We used to go dancing with Sheila E. and his band, but he always told no one to talk to me. He liked me to be mysterious, and so I was.'

Telling tales: Devasquez, 52, pictured in April 2015 in Los Angeles, said she first met Prince at a December 1984 concert and described him as 'small but such a sexy, charming guy'

Party time: The pinup was a Playboy centerfold in 1985 and was on the cover in 1986, pictured. She said Prince flew her all over the country so she could join him on his Purple Rain tour

When he was on stage, she recalled, he was a high energy, sensual and outgoing entertainer.

In private, he was shy, she said.

At the hotel after that first concert, she said the two of them talked for hours and he invited her to Sheila E.'s birthday the next day.

But Devasquez said she had to be in LA for a meeting with Hugh Hefner and so had to leave.

'When I got to the [Playboy] Mansion, I had a note waiting for me saying Prince would like to call' she said.

Two sides: The brunette said Prince, pictured in 1986, was a sensual and high energy performer on stage but in private he was shy

They exchanged several lengthy calls and Prince flew her to Texas for his 1985 New Year's Day concert in Dallas.

Backstage, she watched him put on his make-up and then he gave her one of the Purple Rain tour outfits to wear.

The romance ended in the summer of 1985.

'He was respectful of me and our relationship. He also knew I was old-fashioned  and I wouldn't be one of many girls,' she told People.

Hollywood lifestyle: Devasquez, pictured in Beverly hills in 2002, has continued to be a part of the showbiz scene since her days as Prince's girlfriend

She had the look: The centerfold mingled with other famous rock stars including Gene Simmons from KISS. They're photographed together at a party in LA in 2002

Celebrity dates: The Louisiana-born beauty also briefly romanced Sylvester Stallone post Prince

Prince, 57, died last week at Paisley Park, his famous home and recording studio complex in suburban Minneapolis.

His cause of death hasn't been released. An autopsy was conducted Friday, but results aren't expected to be released for weeks.

On Wednesday a judge in Minnesota appointed a special administrator to take over the handling of his estate as it's believed he died without making a will.
She was forced to withdraw from the 2014 season of MasterChef Australia due to prolonged effects from a head injury she sustained while snowboarding.

But Cecilia Vuong is set to make a triumphant return to the hit cooking series, being announced as one of the 24 hopeful contestants for the upcoming season.

Speaking to Who magazine, the 31-year-old single mother recounts her terrifying stroke and the subsequent brain surgery she endured in 2013, a year before she first applied for MasterChef.

Comeback: Cecilia Vuong is set to make a triumphant return to MasterChef after withdrawing following a head injury

'It felt like somebody was whacking my head with a metal bat,' she said, recounting the accident when she and son Nathan snowboarded during a trip to Mount Hotham in Victoria.

Sent to hospital immediately after having a stroke, she underwent brain surgery.

After recovering, Cecilia decided to audition for MasterChef in 2014, but had to withdraw soon after due to chances her memory could fail her during high-pressure challenges.

Shock exit: She sustained a head injury while snowboarding in August 2013, and had to exit MasterChef in 2014 early due to prolonged effects of her injury

Tough times: 'It felt like somebody was whacking my head with a metal bat,' she has said, recounting the accident when she and son Nathan snowboarded during a trip to Mount Hotham in Victoria

Her exit from the stress-inducing show came as a shock to viewers and her fellow contestants, with judge Gary Mehigan saying 'It's not in her best interest' to continue.

He said: As you know, Cecilia is recovering from a brain injury. We received expert medical advice instructing us that it is not in her best interest to continue in the competition.

Cecilia is a brilliant cook and we all hope we see her next year in this competition.

Cecilia is a brilliant cook': The judges George Calombaris, Gary Mehigan and Matt Preston were full of praised for the maths teacher when she appeared on the show in 2014

Cecilia was replaced by 18-year-old Georgia Hughes from South Australia who had just missed out on making the final 24.

The maths teacher had lost the ability to perform simple equations, however, as a result her creative instincts blossomed and she developed the desire to cook.

She floored the judges with her Jaffa and sesame macaroons, putting her through to the top 22.

In a promotional preview for the new season of MasterChef released earlier this month, Cecilia says in a piece-to-camera: 'I told my 12-year-old son Nathan that if you fall, you can get back up'.

Stunning: She floored the judges with her Jaffa and sesame macaroons
On paper, it doesnt sound like much. There are no devilishly handsome detectives, no car chases, no whizz-bang capers, no picturesque locations, no humour and no sex. Definitely no sex.

Yet this singular lack of glamour and sexual tension has not stopped BBC2 police corruption drama Line Of Duty from gripping the nation.

Each Thursday evening, five million viewers  with many more watching later on catch-up  have tuned in to view the anti-corruption officers of a police department called AC12 do battle against bent coppers and the forces of evil in a bleak town that is never identified.

Audiences have been baffled and thrilled in equal measure by the plot twists and turns, courtesy of series creator Jed Mercurio.

Unnerving stare: Vicky McClure as DC Kate Fleming in hit television show, Line of Duty

What the heck is going on, Jed? Many fans watch each episode twice just to keep on top of developments.

A sometimes confusing storyline spools back to the original series in 2012, which featured gangland boss Tommy Hunter.

Who? viewers of the current series kept asking. He was killed following a botched attack on a police convoy in the second series  and now his name has cropped up on a list of possible paedophiles.

All these strands have been transmuted into a tale about historic child abuse; a scandal that has deliberate echoes of real-life Operation Yewtree, and involves a local politician, a former police chief, a childrens home and  clearly shown last week in a mocked-up photograph alongside Line Of Duty characters  Jimmy Savile.

This blurring of the lines between fiction and reality caused no little controversy, but Mercurio is unrepentant.

It raises a very particular question about the relationship between the police and Jimmy Savile, he says. The fact is that Savile bragged of his close relationships with officers.

He suggests it was clear Savile enjoyed the protection, at the very least, of police officers  but what did they get out of the deal?

BBC2 police corruption drama Line Of Duty has had the nation gripped every week, with millions of viewers tuning in

In a week where the Hillsborough inquest raised once more the question of who polices the police, Line Of Dutys themes of corruption, Masonic links and widespread cover-ups have struck a chord with viewers.

The mood in Line Of Duty is relentlessly downbeat, the dialogue often sparse and blunt, while endemic drabness and bad haircuts seep into every scene. However, despite the endless grimness, this complex, claustrophobic series has become a classic.

Why? Perhaps because it is the kind of old-fashioned thriller that is blacker than a policemans boot on a moonless nightshift  and performed by an impeccable cast.

For many viewers, the most compelling character has been Detective Inspector Lindsay Denton, played by the marvellous Keeley Hawes.

This is the Spooks and Tipping The Velvet star as we have never seen her before: devoid of make-up, emotionally derelict and down on her luck.

She first cropped up in series two: an ambiguous character who was either terribly wronged or terribly wicked.

WHICH COPS ARE CROOKS? A GUIDE TO THE SHOW'S MORALLY AMBIGUOUS CAST OF CHARACTERS Keeley Hawes as Lindsay Denton SUPERINTENDENT TED HASTINGS Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) is the boss, the moral core and beating heart of Line Of Duty. Or is he? A Masonic handshake with a retired senior office accused of being involved in a child sex ring threw suspicion on him last week. He is good but flawed. His wife left him in series two, over his gambling debts. DI COTTAN Now unmasked as The Caddy  the corrupt police officer DI Matthew Cottan (Craig Parkinson) is mad and bad  but can he carry on fooling his colleagues? DC KATE FLEMING Possessed of an unnerving, pale blue 30-yard stare. Has now launched her own inquiry into Hastings because she fears he is trying to help a fellow Freemason. She sort of fancies Cottan  or does she? LINDSAY DENTON Rogue detective played by Keeley Hawes. Morally ambiguous, she has battered her neighbour, been jailed for a murder conspiracy and beaten up her creepy parole officer. She was shot in the head by evil Cottan last week after refusing to take a bribe. Why not take the money? Because I am a police officer, she screamed. DS STEVE ARNOTT Ladies man Arnotts troubled relationship with DI Denton  did they have a fling?  meant his judgment is open to question. Now Denton has been killed in Arnotts car, could he be framed by Cottan for her murder? His only hope is Kate, but could she be turning on him? GILL BIGELOW Saucy Gill (Polly Walker) is the legal adviser to AC-12. Seems to want to scupper the child sex abuse inquiry, but why? Last week she suddenly came out as a Cottan supporter. Its all very suspicious. Advertisement

An astonishing range of catastrophes have befallen the character played by Keeley, who lied to reporters to keep her return in series three a surprise for viewers.

Denton has been jailed, tortured with scalding water and  last week  murdered in one of the most shocking moments on the show. Did she deserve it? Who knows.

But the rest of the cast is just as compelling. The characterisation, the faultless connection between the actors and the taut script and the sheer dark-heartedness all make it a must-see.

There are moments, for example, when I find it incredibly hard to believe that Superintendent Hastings, so brilliantly played by Adrian Dunbar, is not actually Superintendent Hastings in real life.

His authority is absolute. He is the moral centre of the drama, the boss who leads a dedicated team of officers loathed by the rank and file they have to investigate.

They include DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston), DC Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) and DI Matthew Cottan (Craig Parkinson).

Viewers already know the vulpine Cottan is The Caddy: the traitor in their midst. Nicknamed Dot (after EastEnders character Dot Cotton), his guilt has seeped out like something nasty dripping from a sewage pipe.

Dot has grown adept at lurking in the corner of the office, slurping mugs of tea and adopting extravagantly innocent expressions, even though he is as about as blameless as a smoking gun. He even thrashed himself with a pair of handcuffs to make it look as though another officer had attacked him.

But for how much longer can he continue to fool his colleagues? His superiors are so blind to his bad side that, last week, they gave him a medal for his troubles.

Tonights climax of the third series, a special 90-minute episode, will attempt to tie up the spaghetti of loose ends, suspicions, allegations, murders, bluffs, double bluffs and shocks that have characterised the action so far.

One of the most unusual aspects of this nail-biting drama is that a great deal of the action takes place in the arid confines of the AC12 interview room, where Hastings and his team take their suspects through the evidence.

A typical piece of dialogue goes something like this: Now we turn to document three in your folder, which is a photocopy of a suicide report dated 21st November 1998. For the benefit of the tape, this is being projected on to the screen now.

These interrogation scenes sometimes go on for a very long time. In the first episode, the grilling of the leader of an armed response unit went on for 17 minutes. In tonights episode, another extremely tense interview lasts for nearly 25 minutes of screen time.

In the chop-chop, bang-bang world of most police procedural shows  and in most TV dramas  scenes of such length are absolutely unheard of.

Much of Line Of Duty is just people sitting in a room talking  yet they are some of the most electrifying moments on television.

Part of this is because its far from the usual kind of detective series. In contrast to most cop shows, the police refused to co-operate with producers because it is their policy not to do so on any dramas that portray police in a bad light.

Instead, the production team is advised unofficially both by retired police officers and anonymously by serving members of the force. This gives it a real edge.

Perhaps one of the reasons Line Of Duty is so popular is that it deals with real issues, with crimes and misdemeanours that viewers have been reading about in the newspapers. And it treats its audience with intelligence and respect and is not afraid to throw in the occasional shock along the way.
All eyes were certainly on celebrity makeup artist Napoleon Perdis' eldest daughter Lianna during an appearance on Thursday.

Stepping out at the launch of her own 'Total Bae' range - in collaboration with her father's self-titled cosmetics company - the 16-year-old was dressed in a bright blue frock at Sydney's Town Hall.

The teenager's sleeveless outfit featured a slit down the front, and was teamed with a pair of statement black boots.

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Father and daughter: All eyes were certainly on celebrity makeup artist Napoleon Perdis' eldest daughter Lianna during an appearance in Sydney on Thursday for the launch of her new makeup range

Lianna wore her caramel tresses out in loose waves, while of course sporting a hint of the makeup she was promoting, including a rich crimson lipstick.

Posing up a storm in front of the media wall, Lianna flashed her signature smile for the camera while also taking selfies with her famous father.

Napoleon, 46, made quite a statement in the style stakes himself.

He sported a black T-shirt layered with a brown jacket, which featured pockets splashed with animated prints.

Beautiful in blue: Stepping out at the launch of her own 'Total Bae' range - in collaboration with her father's self-titled cosmetics company - the 16-year-old was dressed in a bright blue frock at Sydney's Town Hall

Selfie time: She was seen taking photos with her famous father and magazine publisher Jackie Frank

The makeup mastermind also slipped on a pair of army-style trousers, white running shoes and a pair of spectacles.

Earlier this week Lianna spoke to Daily Mail Australia about following in her father's footsteps and said despite her rising profile, she doesn't think of herself as an 'IT girl'.

'I don't necessarily think of myself like, "hey, I'm an IT girl",' Lianna said, who also models for the brand.

'I think it's a pretty exciting thing though that people are recognising me and stuff.

Ready for their closeups: Lianna happily posed with her father whose products are used by celebrities across the globe

Working it: Lianna wore her caramel tresses out in loose waves, while of course sporting a hint of the makeup she was promoting, including a rich crimson lipstick

'For example, the other day, on the street, someone recognised me and came up to me and was like, "hey, can I get a picture with you?".'

'I don't necessarily think I'm going to get so many followers and likes and stuff like that,' she said.

Lianna - who is based in the US with her family - has more than 7,000 Instagram followers and is a red carpet regular.

Total Bae is a range of products that she and her father are launching featuring lip and cheek tint, concealer and mascara that she said everyone can use but is largely aimed at her generation.

Mother and daughter: Lianna posed for some photos with her proud mum Soula-Marie Perdis

Star power: Australian radio and television personality Sophie Monk attended the event

Girl of the moment: It's no surprise that everyone wanted to get a photo with Lianna

The brunette said that she has always wanted to be apart of the family business saying: 'I always wanted to be apart of the business, ever since I was a little girl.

'I would go on shoots, I used to go behind the scenes on fashion week.

'I would watch all this beautiful make-up happen and this whole process happen and I just really wanted to be apart of it,' she said.

She described working with her father as 'very special and exciting'.

'I always come to my dad for advice, whether it's like boys, school friends, girlfriends and stuff like that and I think I have quite a close bond with my dad.'

She's popular: Former Big Brother star Aisha McKinnon also attended the event and posed with Lianna

About her product range, she said it came about because she wanted her father's makeup to be more accessible to her generation.

'I told my dad one day, I love that our brand is in so many luxury retailers, but I feel like it should be available to everyone including my generation.'

About being a budding entrepreneur while being a teenager, she said make-up has always been a part of her life.

'I guess I'm young, but it's a part of my life, like everyday, we gather every night for dinner and we always talk about the business and things...it's just a part of me.

'So I don't really think of it like "oh, I'm doing work." It's something fun and something I really enjoy and love.'

Making her mark: Sophie opted for an animal print blouse for the occasion

Strutting it: A pair of nude coloured heels accentuated her height, matching a long sleeveless coat she wore
If it's good enough for Justin Bieber, it's good enough for Hailey Baldwin.

The 19-year-old appears to have followed in her ex's footsteps - who in turn was following in several other celeb footsteps - by trying cupping.

The model appeared to bear the telltale circular bruises on her chest when she stepped out for a coffee in LA on Wednesday.

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Increasing her cup size? Hailey Baldwin became latest celeb to bare a telltale cupping fad bruise on Wednesday - right between her boobs

The celebrity fad has seen a range of famous faces engage in the ancient Chinese art, which involves placing suction cups on the skin, supposedly to help blood flow.

To show they are keeping up to date with the latest must-do therapy, celebs need only wear a revealing top to display the curious little bruises.

But while practitioners usually have several markings all over their backs or torsos, Hailey bizarrely only appeared to have one - right in the middle of her boobs.

The young socialite wore tight black yoga pants and a matching top for her outing, over a midriff-baring peach crop top.

Fit: The young socialite wore tight black yoga pants and a matching top for her outing, over a midriff-baring peach crop top

Just the one: While practitioners usually have several markings all over their backs or torsos, Hailey bizarrely only appeared to have one - right in the middle of her boobs

Run like the wind! Hailey also showcased her athletic ability as she sprinted through the streets, pounding the pavement in her chunky white trainers that proved to be both practical and stylish on the outing

Supermodel strut: Even dashing through the streets Hailey still managed to retain her poise and elegance

My ride: She jumped into her friend's convertible Rolls Royce before driving off

Stopping at celeb haunt Alfred's, it was her second coffee of the morning, having just grabbed a cup at Verve a little earlier.

She then jumped into her friend's convertible Rolls Royce before driving off.

Hailey joins a long line of clean living celebrities who practice cupping, including Victoria Beckham, Jennifer Aniston and Gwyneth Paltrow.

I'll try that: Last summer her ex Justin Bieber flashed his similar bruises

Dating back 5,000 years, the therapy is a form of acupuncture, and is based on the idea that suction from the cups draws the skin up and mobilises blood and energy around the body.

Cupping enables the blood and energy to move again and travel to the treated area, aiding with lymphatic flow, a reduction in fluid build-up and an increase of blood flow.

Typically, a flame is first placed inside a glass or rubber cup, so the heat can create a partial vacuum, before the flame is removed and the cup held to the skin for about three minutes.
Shia LaBeouf isn't one to normally smile for the camera.

However, the 29-year-old actor has clearly changed his tune as he was seen beaming for photographers after a lunch date with his girlfriend, Mia Goth in Studio City on Wednesday.

The estranged actor surprisingly smiled for the camera as he walked hand-in-hand with his British girlfriend as they both donned casual clothes.

Something to smile about? Shia LaBeouf has clearly changed his tune as he was seen beaming for photographers after a lunch date with his girlfriend, Mia Goth in Studio City on Wednesday

The pair looked like they had worked up quite the sweat as they were seen dressed head-to-toe in gym gear.

Shia has kept a relatively low profile recently however the Transformers actor does have a film coming out later this year - American Honey.

The story follows a teenage girl with nothing to lose who joins a traveling magazine sales crew. She gets caught up in a whirlwind of hard partying, law breaking and young love as she travels the Midwest with a band of misfits.

The couple that works out together stays together: The pair looked like they had worked up quite the sweat as they were seen dressed head to toe in gym gear

However, the elusive actor has been in the news a lot recently, for different reasons.

Sadly, last week in New York an innocent man got punched in the face because he looks like Shia.

Mario Licato, 26, told People he was walking down the subway on a Saturday evening on his way to a friend's show when a man suddenly punched him.

Happy couple: The estranged actor surprisingly smiled for the camera as he walked hand-in-hand with his British girlfriend

The lookalike said: 'I just saw a fist coming at my face. And the next thing I know I was, like, falling down the stairs and all I heard was, "That's because you look exactly like Shia LaBeouf." '

But it seems Shia is feeling very generous at the moment as the actor actually called up Mario to apologise.

Mario told Cosmopolitan: 'It was a pretty long voicemail. He was like, "Hey, this is Shia LaBeouf  I just read an article that you were punched in the face because you look like me?" And he was like, "Aw, man. That sucks. I'm so sorry'.

Ouch: Despite being punched Mario got a call from Shia. 'It was a pretty long voicemail. He was like, "Hey, this is Shia LaBeouf  I just read an article that you were punched in the face because you look like me?" And he was like, "Aw, man. That sucks. I'm so sorry'.

Mario has been keeping everyone up to date on Instagram as he shared a bruised photo with the caption: 'I wanna thank the guy who randomly decided he needed to hit me last night. "this happened bc you look exactly like Shia labeouf". Well sir you boosted my self esteem bc he's p hot'.

He then shared another photo looking less beaten up as he was talking on the phone. He captioned it: 'Brb talking to the real Shia'.

Looking better: Even though he'd been attacked on the subway for no reason Mario looked happy as he spoke to the famous actor on the phone. He captioned the Instagram: 'Brb talking to the real Shia'.
Cindy Crawford is the epitome of a supermodel and is queen of the runway.

The timeless beauty still managed to look catwalk ready as she was seen at the restaurant Pierluigi in Rome, Italy on Wednesday taking pictures with fans.

Despite being dressed more casually, the 50-year-old actress still looked effortlessly chic.

Timeless beauty: Cindy Crawford still managed to look catwalk ready as she was seen at the restaurant Pierluigi in Rome, Italy on Wednesday

She wore a pair of black trousers, a white top and a black leather jacket over the top as she carried a small black tote bag with her.

Her hair looked perfectly blow-dried and her make-up was simple but flawless.

The actress is currently in Rome shooting a new secret project but she was more than happy to pose for photographs with fans as she was seen leaving the restaurant.

Effortlessly chic: She wore a pair of black trousers, a white top and a black leather jacket over the top as she carried a small black tote bag with her as her hair looked perfectly blow-dried and make-up flawless

The runway goddess, 50, oozed glamour as she filmed scenes for what is believed to be a television commercial in a charming plaza.

Cindy posted a behind-the-scenes photo on Instagram on Tuesday, as she teased: '#BTS On set in Rome - stay tuned.'

She's clearly been enjoying her time in the European country as she posted another shot to Instagram with the caption: 'Having a Roman Holiday moment with @SanBenedetto_Official'.

What a profile: The runway goddess, is currently in Rome filming scenes for what is believed to be a television commercial in a charming plaza

Rome getaway: The actress is currently in Rome shooting a new secret project which she has been posting about on Instagram recently

Despite being a million miles away she still made sure to publicly wish her husband, Rande Gerber, a happy birthday.

The supermodel's husband turned 54 on Wednesday, and she marked the special occasion by sharing a sweet flashback family photo on Instagram.

'Happy birthday @RandeGerber!' the 50-year-old wrote. 'You are a wonderful husband, father and friend  and you've managed to not age one day since I met you! Not fair! I [heart] you!'

Still queen of the catwalk: Cindy Crawford oozed glamour even in her casual and laid back attire as she dined at a restaurant in Italy

Cindy and Rande will be celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary next month. The happy couple married on May 29, 1998.

Cindy has had a busy schedule travelling the world over the past few weeks, and last week jetted to to Bogota, Colombia as brand ambassador for Omega watches.

The hardworking mother then flew back to her home in Los Angeles for a weekend with her family before travelling to Italy.

Snap happy: She's clearly been enjoying her time in the European country as she posted another shot to Instagram with the caption: 'Having a Roman Holiday moment with @SanBenedetto_Official'
KIIS FM host, Kyle Sandilands is not one to shy away from over-sharing on radio.

And it seems he made former Full House star John Stamos a little uncomfortable on the airwaves on Thursday morning, when the shock jock recounted details of a threesome he'd had with sisters.

Recalling the encounter, he said he had encouraged the pair to kiss during their tryst.

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Opening up about his past: It's not the first time the radio personality has gone into extreme detail when recounting a previous sexual encounter - talking about a threesome with two Brazilian models last month

'I've had twins and a couple of sisters as well but I tried to get them to kiss and I didn't realise they were sisters and I was like "you guys kiss" and they're like "we can't...we're sisters...same last name, we can't"

'And I thought "oh right but you both can have sex with me but you can't kiss each other, what's the difference?",' the shock jock said to the shock of his Hollywood guest.

Gathering himself after the host's candid admission, John replied: 'That's too much man. I'm a cuddler, like Jackie and that's it...not weird like you'

Candid: The 44-year-old shared more details of his intimate relationship with girlfriend Imogen Anthony

Their racy chat came about as producers advised John that his name had been given to the act by Urban Dictionary.

Producer Bruno quoted Urban Dictionary and said a John Stamos is to: 'Have intercourse with twins, and at the end you yell "Have mercy",' referencing the actor's Full House catchphrase.

Kyle wasn't afraid to admit he has done that on multiple occasions, before elaborating on the experience of his threesome with sisters.

Shocked: The confessions came during a candid conversation with actor John Stamos (above)

Introducing his own story, Kyle said cheekily: 'I've done The Stamos then...twice!'.

He later shocked again by joking that he is 'never on top' of his 25-year-old girlfriend Imogen Anthony, revealing: 'Oh definitely - I'd kill her, she'd be dead.

'I'm on bottom all the time, I'm like base camp at Everest' he confessed.

It's not the first time Kyle has revealed intimate details of his sex-life.

Awkward: The 44-year-old went on to explain he didn't know there were rules when it came to threesomes which resulted in a fight between the women

Last month, the shock jock recounted: 'I once had one with two South American models and a big fight broke out.'

Kyle went on to explain: 'Apparently I finished on the wrong one, I didn't know there was rules and it was just arguing in Colombian.

'I think I've gone into too much detail,' Kyle exclaimed after he realised just how many of the specifics he had given to the audience.
She was one of Vogue magazine's most famous cover girls, having appeared on the publication 41 times.

And model and actress Lauren Hutton can still turn heads in her eighth decade as she made an appearance at the New York screening of The Man Who Knew Infinity on Wednesday.

The 72-year-old beauty sported a classic, casual look for the evening and at the after party held at Absolut Elyx House New York.

Stepping out: Model and actress Lauren Hutton, 72, made an appearance at the New York screening of The Man Who Knew Infinity on Wednesday

Lauren layered a navy blue sweater over a pair of cream slacks.

The model added a pair of white sneakers, giving a laid-back vibe to her look.

The beauty wore minimal make-up, highlighting her natural beauty.

Classic colours: Lauren layered a navy blue sweater over a pair of cream slacks

Ladies' night! The actress posed was joined by DIY expert Martha Stewart, 74

Standouts: Dev Patel and Devika Bhise were happy to be a part of the evening

Another special guest at the screening was DIY expert Martha Stewart.

The 74-year-old wore a classic look comprised of a white, long sleeve top layered over a pair of skinny khakis. She added snakeskin-style wedges and kept warm with a coat.

Aside from the special guest attendees were the film's talented stars.

Celebrating their work: Devika Bhise was joined by co-star Jeremy Irons, 67

Celebrating: The co-stars shared a warm embrace as they walked step-by-step

His big night: Dev, who plays Srinivasa Ramanujan in the film, was sharply dressed in a navy blue suit

Spending time with the boss: Devika and Jeremy were joined by the film's director, Matt Brown

Dev Patel, who plays Srinivasa Ramanujan in the film, was sharply dressed in a navy blue suit.

In The Man Who Knew Infinity, the 26-year-old actor plays the famed mathematician who's contributions to the subject were outstanding, especially since he did not bear any formal training.

New York-raised actress Devika Bhise plays his wife Janaki Ammal.

Jeremy Irons, 67, plays G.H. Hardy, the famed English mathematician who develops a close working relationship and kinship with Dev's character.

Longtime friends Lauren and Jeremy looked thrilled to see each other

Feeling accomplished: The cast proudly gathered together for the premiere of their work

Towering: Devika looked statuesque as she stood beside her co-star Jeremy
She was crowned Miss Universe Australia just last year.

And on Thursday Monika Radulovic proved just why she's worthy of the prestigious pageant title.

Stepping out at the launch of the LXE and Oracle Fox collaboration 'La Muse Parisienne' in Sydney, the 25-year-old model revealed her toned figure in a stylish midriff-baring top and shorts.

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Dressed to impress: Stepping out at the launch of the LXE and Oracle Fox collaboration 'La Muse Parisienne' in Sydney on Thursday, Monika Radulovic revealed her toned figure in a stylish cropped top and shorts

Monika stunned in her sleek black blouse, the top featuring flared sleeves and revealing a glimpse of her toned stomach.

She teamed the attire with a pair of animal print shorts, the monochrome hot pants finishing well above the knee and showcasing her trim pins.

A pair of light brown strappy heels accentuated her model height, while a few other accessories completed her picture perfect look.

Very stylish: Monika stunned in a sleek black blouse, the top featuring flared sleeves and revealing a glimpse of her toned stomach

Working it: She teamed the midriff-baring top with a pair of animal print shorts, the monochrome hot pants finishing well above the knee and showcasing her trim pins

A gold chain handbag was slung over Monika's left shoulder, while a light watch was also wrapped around her wrist.

She wore her caramel tresses out in loose waves, while some lashings of black mascara and a slick of pink lipstick accentuated her stunning facial features.

Posing for photographers at the fashion event, Monika was also joined by fellow model Tegan Martin.

Like Monika, blonde beauty Tegan is a pageant princess, the 23-year-old having been crowned Miss Universe Australia in 2014.

Accessoriser: A gold chain Yves Saint Laurent handbag was slung over Monika's left shoulder

Brunette beauty: She wore her caramel tresses out in loose waves, while some lashings of black mascara and a slick of pink lipstick accentuated her stunning facial features

Also ensuring she was dressed to impress, the Celebrity Apprentice star sported a printed jumpsuit.

The white number was splashed with a pink floral pattern, and she chose to accessorise with some striking black items.

Tegan arrived in a pair of strappy black heels, teamed with a matching handbag.

Meanwhile her golden locks were pulled back in a chic updo on the day.
The Bachelor's Snezana Markoski has weighed in on the proposals to ease on Australia's strict gun laws on the 20th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre.

On Thursday, the 35-year-old shared a snap of herself with her fiance Sam Wood with a strong message to keep the laws as they were immediately following the mass shooting.

The photo was taken of the reality couple at a Alannah & Madeline Foundation gala, a charity which was set up in the name of two little girls who were killed during the rampage on April 28 1996.

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'I want to stop this': The Bachelor's Snezana Markoski weighed in on proposed gun law changes via Instagram on Thursday

'20 years ago today 35 innocent people including Alannah 6, and Madeline 3, were tragically killed and 23 others were injured during the horrific events which unfolded in Port Arthur,' she wrote.

'It's now been bought to my attention that there are signs that our gun laws are starting to weaken and in support of the Alannah & Madeline Foundation - Keeping Children Safe from Violence.'

She continued: 'I want to help stop this from happening and protect our children from gun-related violence and I hope you do too' and signed off with a link to a Change.org petition.

'Protect our children': She attended a gala for the Alannah & Madeline Foundation, who were two girls killed in the massacre

Bryant, who was described as a loner by those who knew him, had driven to the Seascape Guesthouse where he murdered owners David and Sally Martin, at what would be the beginning of a bloody rampage.

He then headed to the Port Arthur historic site where he had lunch before opening fire on tourists and locals, including children.

Bryant hunted down victims as he moved through the cafe, gift shop and car park, while countless survivors have told how they played dead on the floor as the gunman stalked his victims.

Paying tribute: Thursday marked the 20th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre (pictured former Prime Minister John Howard and current Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party Julie Bishop)

Guilty: Martin Byrant was sentenced to 35 life sentences of life imprisonment

Bryant was sentenced to 35 life sentences of life imprisonment plus 1,035 years in Hobart's Risdon Prison where he remains in solitary confinement.

Following the massacre, then-Prime Minister John Howard initiated a buy-back scheme after placing heavy restrictions on firearms including semi-automatic rifles.

The government bought back and destroyed nearly one million firearms.
She's the former Olympian and reality TV star who made headlines across the globe by coming out as transgender last year.

But as Caitlyn Jenner embarks on a new life as a woman, an investigative journalist has claimed she previously considered moving Down Under as her marriage to ex-wife Kris Jenner collapsed.

Ian Halperin revealed on KIIS 106.5's The Kyle and Jackie O Show this week that the former track athlete apparently briefly contemplated living in Melbourne when her relationship was breaking down.

Heading Down Under? As transgender TV star Caitlyn Jenner (pictured) embarks on a new life as a woman, a journalist claims she once considered moving to Melbourne as her marriage to ex-wife Kris Jenner fell apart

The Canadian journalist, 51, explained that Caitlyn, then known as Bruce Jenner, fleetingly planned to move overseas - and the Victorian capital was an option.

'He (Caitlyn) was considering different places in the world and Melbourne came up,' said Halperin, the author of biography Kardashian Dynasty: The Controversial Rise of America's Royal Family.

Eventually, Caitlyn didn't commit to the move, and still resides in Los Angeles, California, near her ex-wife and six children - Kylie, Kendall, Brody, Casey, Brandon, and Burt.

In happier times: Caitlyn, then known as Bruce Jenner (centre), married Kris (top) in April 1991 and posed for this family photograph with their children from previous relationships

Former life: Before embarking on a career as a reality TV star on Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Caitlyn was best known for her achievements as an Olympic gold medalist while living as a male

As Daily Mail previously reported, Halperin also alleges in his book that the gold medal-winner, 66, announced her male-to-female transition tactically to avoid manslaughter charges related to a fatal car crash last year.

In February 2015, she was involved in a multiple-vehicle collision on California's Pacific Coast Highway and animal rights activist Kim Howe's was killed when Caitlyn's SUV ran into her car.

The author quotes a friend saying: 'After the accident, he went full steam ahead (with the transition).

Planning a move? According to claims by a Kardashian family biographer, Caitlyn considered moving abroad while her marriage to Kris fell apart and 'Melbourne came up' as a potential destination

Celebrity biographer: Canadian investigative journalist Ian Halperin (pictured) spoke to The Kyle and Jackie O Show this week and made some surprising revelations about the Kardashian-Jenner dynasty

Shock claims: Halperin also alleges in Kardashian Dynasty: The Controversial Rise of America's Royal Family that Caitlyn announced her male-to-female transition tactically to avoid manslaughter charges related to a fatal car crash in Malibu, California back in February 2015

'I truly believe he was trying to misdirect the negative publicity he received after the car crash

'It was clear he was worried about being charged.'

Meanwhile, Halperin has a reputation for shock tell-all biographies of A-list stars, having written books about late musicians Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain and Whitney Houston.

Kardashian Dynasty is available now, published by Simon & Schuster.

The Ex-Factor: Caitlyn was married to Kris Jenner (pictured), the ex-wife of Robert Kardashian, for 13 years
Emmy Rossum kept it simple and stylish at the premiere of comedy flick Keanu on Wednesday.

The actress posed on the red carpet at the Arclight in Hollywood sporting a flattering white a-line dress which showed off her slender legs.

The 29-year-old beauty appeared to be wearing barely a scrap of makeup as she joined other stars at the venue for the screening of the kitten adventure movie.

Effortless chic: Emmy Rossum looked fantastic in white for the premiere of Keanu at Arclight Hollywood on Wednesday

Simply stylish: The 29-year-old beauty wore a white fit and flare dress with matching heels

Her brunette locks were styled voluminously around her shoulders and she opted for no accessories or fancy jewelry apart from her engagement ring from director beau Sam Esmail.

Keanu is the big screen debut of comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, directed by Peter Atencio and co-written by Peele.

The film follows two best friends, one a lazy stoner and the other a boring suburbanite who go on a mission to find a kidnapped kitten and find themselves in a dangerous criminal underworld.

Natural beauty: The Shameless star wore a butterfly broach and wore her thick brunette locks loose

Im-paws-ibly cute: The stars of the movie Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, brought along their furry co-star Keanu

Feline adventures: In Keanu, Key and Peele play two friends who infiltrate the local criminal underworld to find their kidnapped kitten

Mixing with the wrong crowd: Actor Keanu Reeves, 51, has a cameo role voicing the cute kitten

Naturally there were some four-legged stars in attendance on Wednesday, including the movie's star tabby who plays the gangster kitten named Keanu.

Actor Keanu Reeves, 51, voices the adorable feline in one scene where a character hallucinates and hears Keanu the cat talking.

The Matrix star was reportedly hesitant at involving himself in the movie, fearing that it was poking fun at him.

Loved it! The actress gave the comedy two thumbs up

Red carpet cuteness: Another star of the movie, Luis Guzman, cuddled with Keanu's co-star Albert

Goofball: Will Forte, who stars as a gang member called Hulka in the movie, arrived in a smart grey suit and a curious-looking shaved hairline

Speaking with the LA Times this week, Atencio explained that the actor's reps politely declined at first but after Keanu was shown the trailer by his sister, he contacted the director directly, eager to get involved.

'He flipped out and got in touch with us directly to say "If theres anything I can do, lets make this work." Atencio said.

After being assured that the movie wasn't making fun of him, Keanu signed on to the project.

Also posing on the red carpet was actor Luis Guzman who cuddled up to Keanu's co-star Albert, a very pretty munchkin cat with over 300,000 followers on Instagram.

Ready for some laughs: Actresses Amber Stevens West and Jane Lynch also came to support the flick

Standing out: Nia Long looked gorgeous in a graphic print dress and grey platforms

Coordinated couple: Actor Terry Crews arrived with his wife Rebecca King

Taking to Twitter that evening Emmy gave the comedy two thumbs up writing: 'Got to see KEANU premier tonight!!! A LOT of fun. Key & Peele are brilliant as usual. Will Forte, you are ridiculous. Back on set tomorrow.'

She followed up with 'I don't understand how you could NOT love kittens after seeing KEANU.'

The New York born beauty is currently filming season 7 of the hit Showtime series.

Say cheese! Actors David Alan Grier, Loretta Devine, Tiffany Haddish and Amber Stevens West cosied up for a photo

Date night! Newsroom star Alison Pill arrived with husband Joshua Leonard
As seasoned Made In Chelsea stars they're never short of invitations to London's glitziest soirees.

So it came as no surprise to see Tiffany Watson leading the glamorous brigade of stars at Boux Avenue's fifth birthday bash on Wednesday, hosted by Dragon's Den's Theo Paphitis.

Joined by her equally as chic co-stars, Jess Woodley and Georgia Toffolo, the 22-year-old reality star dazzled in a monochrome ensemble that ensured all eyes would be on her.

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Terrific trio: The Made In Chelsea stars are never short of invitations to London's glitziest soirees, so it was fitting Tiffany Watson lead the glamorous brigade of stars at Boux Avenue's fifth birthday bash on Wednesday

Flashing her enviably toned abs in a skintight black crop top, the younger sister of Lucy Watson highlighted her gym-honed physique by teaming the garment with a pair of tapered white trousers.

Elongating her lean legs, she donned a pair of black court heels, whilst she injected a splash of colour to her ensemble with a monochrome clutch that included vibrant splashes of blue.

Wearing minimal make-up to show off her natural beauty, she framed her pretty face with her golden tresses, that were left loose and tousled.

Magical in monochrome: Flashing her enviably toned abs in a skintight black crop top, Tiffany Watson, 22, highlighted her gym-honed physique by teaming the garment with a pair of tapered white trousers

Blonde beauty: Wearing minimal make-up to show off her natural beauty, she framed her pretty face with her golden tresses, that were left loose and tousled. Whilst a blue clutch injected some colour into her ensemble

Looking equally as stunning on the evening was Jess, 21, who opted for a denim shift dress with cropped blouson sleeves.

Cutting just above the knee, the blonde beauty flashed a hint of her tanned and toned pins, which were slipped into a pair of patent black boots.

Painting her plump pout with a slick of rosy gloss, she framed her sparkling blue eyes with a slick of mascara, whilst a subtle smattering of rouge traced her defined cheekbones.

Denim dreams: Looking equally as stunning on the evening was Jess Woodley, 21, who opted for a denim shift dress with cropped blouson sleeves that she teamed with patent knee high black boots

Leggy lady! Nipping in at her tiny waist, a dusty pink gown complemented Georgia Toffolo's tanned complexion, whilst a pair of brown lace up heels added some extra height to her modelesque frame

Also putting on a leggy display at the party was Georgia, who dared to bare her lithe limbs in a satin wrap dress.

Nipping in at her tiny waist, the dusty pink gown complemented her tanned complexion, whilst a pair of brown lace up heels added some extra height to her modelesque frame.

Wearing her caramel locks coiffed and curled over one shoulder, the 21-year-old starlet was a vision of beauty on the evening.

Natural beauty: Wearing her caramel locks coiffed and curled over one shoulder, the 21-year-old starlet was a vision of beauty on the evening, highlighting her pretty features with careful application of bronzer and powder

Into the dragon's den: Jess, Tiffany and Georgia dazzled in their chic ensembles as they cosied for a photograph with the owner of Boux Avenue, multi-millionaire and entrepreneur Theo Paphitis

Mixing up their styles: Jess and Toff were joined by former Made In Chelsea co-star Millie Wilkinson (left)

Also representing the Made In Chelsea gang was Rosie Fortescue who took the plunge in a low-cut crimson gown with shoulder pads.

The brunette beauty, 26, took to Twitter following Monday night's episode to sum up the night's events, with simply the word 'INTENSE.'

Following the fall-out between Lucy Watson and Stephanie Pratt during the episode, next week will see the team jet off to the Maldives for what will no doubt be the holiday from the hell.

Rosie in red! Also representing the Made In Chelsea gang was Rosie Fortescue who took the plunge in a low-cut crimson gown with shoulder pads that she teamed with equally vibrant fuchsia lace up heels

Goodie bags: The blonde Chelsea girls looked pleased with their goodies as they headed home following the party
He recently spent some time bonding with his mates on a surfing trip in Fiji with Kelly Slater.

And on Thursday the down time continued as Thor star Chris Hemsworth enjoyed an afternoon in Byron Bay with friends.

The 32-year-old showcased his kinship with one male friend in particular by sporting the exact same singlet as him.

Twins: Chris Hemsworth and an unidentified male friend wore matching singlets during a surfing trip in Byron Bay on Thursday

The blue-grey garment is from surf brand Emery, and retails for $39.95.

In addition to the identical tank tops, the twosome wore very similar shorts and matching sunglasses.

The only difference between their ensembles was their footwear - Chris went barefoot, while his friend opted for flip-flops.

Spot the difference: The twosome looked virtually identical with the exception of their footwear, with Chris deciding to go barefoot

Despite keeping his shirt on before hitting the surf, the actor's bulging biceps were impossible to miss in the sleeveless garment.

The handsome hunk's impressive muscles have won him the adoration of fans the world over.

And as admirers continue to swoon over Chris's muscular physique, the 32-year-old seems eager to add to their excitement.

Muscular: The 32-year-old flaunted his bulging biceps in the sleeveless garment

Keen to show off his upper body strength, the star appeared in a video to perform one-armed pull ups last Friday.

In the clip his bulging arms can be seen in all their glory as he lifts himself effortlessly on two gymnastics rings.

The Australian actor has recently been busy promoting his new film, The Huntsman: Winter's War.
It seems Chris Hemsworth can't get enough of the sun, sand and surf.

Having returned from a boys surfing trip in Fiji with Kelly Slater, the Thor star was back hanging ten with mates in Byron Bay on Thursday.

The 32-year-old showed off his buff body and bulging biceps as he carried his surfboard out of the water, with his rash top draped on the board.

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Sun, Sea and Surf! Chris Hemsworth flashed muscular physique as he left the surf in Byron Bay on Thursday, carrying his board back to his car

His chiselled torso glistened as the water droplets caught the sun while he trudged through the shallows to the shoreline after his bumper surf session.

Looking like a pro as he caught waves, Chris put on an impressive display of prowess out on the water.

Perhaps practising some tips for his champion friend Kelly, the Summer Bay boy looked extremely comfortable on his board.

Wearing low slung boardshorts, the Thor star flashed his v-shaped transversus abdominis muscles and accentuated his well-defined eight-pack across his muscular torso.

Scruff and buff! The Thor star whipped off his rashie as he waded out of the water flashing his chiselled torso

Impressive display! The keen surfer was seen catching waves and put on an impressive display on his board

Tips from the pros! Chris recently returned from a surfing holiday with friends in Fiji, including champion surfer Kelly Slater

Chris also sported a scruffy beard along with a watch on one wrist and multiple rope-style bracelets on the other.

The Hollywood heartthrob added sunglasses and little else to his beach-side attire once out of the water but the Australian actor blended in among the locals.

As he made his way up beyond the sand to the grassy area, the barefoot spunk joined his friends as he appeared to pack away his gear in the back of a ute.

His impressive muscles have won him the adoration of fans the world over.

Barefoot babe! The hunk carried his board with ease under one arm as he made his way across the sand

One of the locals! The Hollywood A-Lister blended in among the locals and his friends

Clean up: The Huntsman star was seen cleaning up his gear on the back of a ute in the carpark

And as admirers continue to swoon over Chris Hemsworth's muscular physique, the 32-year-old seems eager to add to their excitement.

Keen to show off his upper body strength, the star appeared in a video to perform one-armed pull ups last Friday.

In the clip his bulging arms can be seen in all their glory as he lifts himself with ease on two gymnastics rings.

Beach babe: The actor was seen changing into his wetsuit with his surfboard nearby

Hunky: Chris recently relocated his young family to Byron Bay where he is regularly seen enjoying the sun and surf

Muscular: Keen to show off his upper body strength, the star appeared in a video to perform one-armed pull ups
He split from wife Millie Mackintosh in February after three years of marriage.

And Professor Green appears to be moving on from their romance since he was spotted leaving the OURS restaurant launch party in London on Wednesday night alongside two mystery brunettes.

The 32-year-old rapper was in good spirits as he exited the bash, flanked by his two striking companions.

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New acquaintances? Professor Green was spotted leaving the OURS restaurant launch in London on Wednesday alongside two mystery brunettes

Pro Green clambered into the driving seat of his car, with the two women piling into the vehicle behind him.

The trio appeared pretty cosy outside the venue, chatting away as they prepared to head off for the night.

The rapper's outing comes after his estranged wife Millie recently revealed she was planning a move Stateside.

Leggy lady: Pro Green was joined by a brunette in a woolen mini dress and peep-toe ankle boots

Beaming: The 32-year-old rapper was in good spirits as he exited the bash, flanked by his two striking companions

Casual: The Just Be Good To Green hitmaker was sporting a khaki jumper with a tartan hood

In an interview with Look magazine, she said: 'London can be a bit stifling, but when you go away you can get some headspace.

'I also just love LA - the healthy vibes and all the vegan restaurants.

'I'm actually plotting a move for hopefully next year. I'd probably split my time between London and LA.'

Calling it a night: The trio appeared pretty cosy outside the venue, chatting away as they prepared to head off

Buckle up! Pro Green clambered into the driver's sear as his female friends joined him in the car

Moving on? The star revealed in February he had parted ways with his wife of three years, Millie Macktintosh

Making a change: Millie recently revealed she was planning to move to Los Angeles

Pro Green was also joined by Paris Hilton at the bash, who is believed to have parted ways with her millionaire boyfriend of one year, Thomas Gross.

The star didn't show any signs of heartbreak about the split while she was pictured enjoying a meal in London's Mayfair before party-hopping across town to the star-studded launch of Restaurant Ours in Kensington.

The 35-year-old heiress even sought solace in a few fellow lonely hearts, including Ellie Goulding's ex Dougie Poynter.

Lonely hearts: A newly-single Paris Hilton was pictured with Ellie Goulding's ex-boyfriend Dougie Poynter at the launch of Restaurant Ours in Kensington

Moving on so soon: Soon-to-be divorced Professor Green introduced himself to Paris, who was sitting with Kate Rothschild and Example

The blonde bombshell was pictured getting cosy with McFly star Dougie, who's rarely pictured at parties, especially since parting ways with musician girlfriend Ellie for good in March.

Paris was also captured sharing a sofa with opportunist Pro Green. The rapper had bumped into DJ Example and his wife Erin McNaught on the night, even sharing a cuddle with former Rothschild, Kate Goldsmith.

Kate is technically part of Paris' family, after her brother James Rothschild married Paris' sister Nicky Hilton last summer.

An in road: Opportunist Pro Green quickly introduced himself to the blonde, who's thought to have split from millionaire boyfriend of one year, Thomas Gross

Sharing a sofa: It was an unlikely bunch, but they were no doubt helping Paris get over her reported split

Nice meeting you: Example, who was joined by wife Erin McNaught at the bash, looked delighted with the meeting

Drowning their sorrows? She sought solace in fellow singleton Dougie, who split from popstar Ellie in March

Paris was certainly a sight for sore eyes, highlighting her slender frame in a gorgeous nude and black mini dress by popular LA brand, For Love And Lemons.

The blonde beauty perfectly showcased her lithe physique in the semi-sheer dress which she teamed with black heeled boots.

She accessorised with a small black handbag and a trendy black cuff while she styled her blonde locks in glamorous waves.

Paris' current trip to London comes after reports that she has parted ways with her millionaire boyfriend Thomas Gross after just one year of dating, according to TMZ.

Moving: Paris didn't show any signs of heartbreak about the split while she enjoyed a meal in London's Mayfair earlier that night

Braving the cold: The 35-year-old highlighted her slender frame in a gorgeous nude and black mini dress by popular LA brand, For Love And Lemons

Dare to bare: The blonde beauty perfectly showcased her lithe physique in the semi-sheer dress which she teamed with black heeled boots

Strike a pose: She accessorised with a small black handbag and a trendy black cuff while she styled her blonde locks in glamorous waves

Looking good: Paris' current trip to London comes after reports that she has parted ways with her millionaire boyfriend Thomas Gross after just one year of dating

Famous face: Sources close to the reality star allegedly told the outlet that the duo broke things off over a month go because they could failed to find a balance between running their own empires from one place

Party hopping: She arrived at the second venue of the night, the Restaurant Ours, in her black coat

London town: The US star looked like she was making the most of her night out in London

Sources close to the reality star allegedly told the outlet that the duo broke things off over a month go because they could failed to find a balance between running their own empires from one place.

Thomas is based in Switzerland, while Paris' fashion and DJ work insists the beauty regularly jets between Los Angeles and Ibiza, something she struggled to do from their home in the Swiss Alps.

The publication also claimed that Paris found it difficult to be away from her sister and mother, despite her ability to make the 12-hour flight between L.A. and Switzerland on Gross' private jet.

Partying her troubles away: The Simple Life star proved that single is simple enough

Hanging out: She seemed intent on making friends throughout the night

Hanging out: Paris partied with Jamie Reuben (centre) and Kate Rothschild (right)

New friends? She was also seen chatting to Portia Freeman and Jade Williams

Lots in common: Paris and Kate no doubt bonded over their famous families

It was also suggested that the TV personality missed her dogs, who were forced to remain in LA during her relationship with Thomas.

The blonde beauty started dating the Swiss businessman after meeting at the Cannes Film Festival last May, and was rumoured to have relocated to Europe to be close to him.

News of the split is likely to come as a shock since Paris previously confessed she had finally found The One.

Fancy seeing you here: Pro Green bumped into his old friend Example at the bash

Three's a crowd: Pro Green was a third wheel to Erin McNaught and husband Example

Looking on the bright side: The singleton seemed to be enjoying life without a wife

Heading home? Paris seemed to leave the venue alone later that evening

Still smiling: The blonde bombshell was seen leaving with her gal pal

'Thomas is my soulmate. I've never been happier. He doesn't like fame, he just wants me', she told Closer magazine.

'With my previous boyfriends, I felt there was always an intention, but with him I know it's all about love.' And she also spoke of her desire to marry and have children with Thomas, revealing that she would love to have a big family.

The relationship seemed more serious than others - the beauty has also dated River Viiperi and Cy Waits.

Jet-set life: Thomas is based in Switzerland, while Paris' fashion and DJ work insists the beauty regularly jets between Los Angeles and Ibiza, something she struggled to do from their home in the Swiss Alps

Tough time: The publication also claimed that Paris found it difficult to be away from her sister and mother, despite her ability to make the 12-hour flight between L.A. and Switzerland on Gross' private jet
She ruled the runways during the nineties.

And Eva Herzigova proved why she was such a muse as she stepped out her with boyfriend Gregorio Marsiaj at the Tiffany Celebration in partnership with Cabana Magazine on Wednesday in London.

The 43-year-old made a statement in a unique midi length skirt with embroidered childlike designs, which she teamed with all black essentials.

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Ageless: Eva Herzigova, 43, proved why she was such a muse in the 90s as she stepped out her with beau Gregorio Marsiaj at the Tiffany Celebration in partnership with Cabana Magazine on Wednesday in London

Wearing a fitted black top, the Czech stunner looked graceful in an A-line black coat which added sophistication to the look.

Keeping her accessories to a minimum, she balanced a sleek black handbag with gold chains on her left arm.

Completing the look was a unique pair of midi-length heels, highlighting her lithe pins.

Keeping her make-up look fresh, she threw her hair up in a messy tousled bun which only seemed to highlight her dazzling smile further.

Her long-term partner Gregorio looked dapper in a smart navy checked suit, which he teamed with a matching polo neck.

Trend-setter: The Czech model made a statement in a unique midi length skirt with childlike designs, which she teamed with all black essentials

Attractive duo: Her other half looked dapper in a form-fitting navy suit, which he teamed with a matching polo neck

Coordinating with red socks and black shoes, the businessman looked at home on the arm of his supermodel girlfriend.

The genetically gifted pair have been dating since 2006 and have three children together- George, eight; Philipe, four; and two-year-old Edward.

The 90s icon recently said she was never focused on having a family until Gregorio swept her off her feet.

'When I had the first [baby], I wondered why I waited so long, but it was timing  I never had the right man before', she told Net-a-Porter's The Edit.

Eva has also been forging ahead with her modelling duties and has been the face of Dior's luxury anti-ageing collection since late 2012, when she took over the ambassador role from Sharon Stone.

Her ageless beauty was evident in the campaign video for Dior's Capture Totale skincare line at the end of last year.
He is rarely seen far from a bevvy of beauties.

And Scott Disick made no exception on Wednesday as he stepped out once more with stunning Australian model Megan Blake-Irwin at Koi Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles.

The 32-year-old former Keeping Up With The Kardashians star put on a cosy display with the blonde beauty as they left a party following their dinner date.

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Tender: Scott Disick made no exception on Wednesday as he stepped out once more with stunning Australian model Megan Blake-Irwin at Koi Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles

Scott, who split with Kourtney Kardashian last year, has been frequently seen out and about with the pretty model yet this was a particularly tender moment.

Clearly dressed to impress for her night out with the reality heartthrob, Megan slipped into a stunning dress which made the most of her slender physique.

Tumbling to knee-length in hemline, Megan ensured she still flashed her endless legs due to the slashed split which nearly reached the top of her thigh.

Stunner: The 32-year-old former Keeping Up With The Kardashians star put on a cosy display with the blonde beauty as they left a party following their dinner date

Blonde beauty: Her blonde tresses tumbled in a straight style while her make-up was kept relatively natural to afford a glance at her supermodel good looks

The neck flashed one shoulder although the top of the gown slipped off her arm to afford a sexy look at even more skin.

Her blonde tresses tumbled in a straight style while her make-up was kept relatively natural to afford a glance at her supermodel good looks.

Toting a huge handbag, Megan looked as though she was ready for a sleepover, as she was reportedly spied heading back to Scott's hotel after dinner.

With her statuesque frame, willowy limbs and bright blonde hair, Megan is the antithesis of diminutive yet buxom Kourtney, who has always had long raven tresses.

The opposite: With her statuesque frame, willowy limbs and bright blonde hair, Megan is the antithesis of diminutive yet buxom Kourtney, who has always had long raven tresses

Scott was typically low-key as he rocked a crew neck blue jumper with lightly coloured jeans while rocking a huge busy beard.

Scott has been enjoying the single life since his split with famous girlfriend and mother to his three children, Kourtney, last year after nearly a decade together.

Since their split in the summer, the couple who have three children -Mason, six, Penelope, three, and Reign, 15 months - have remained on good terms.

He has been spotted out with several different women in recent months including with model Christine Burke, who he was seen out with in Calabasas last month.
We usually see her looking poised on breakfast television.

But Samantha Armytage has shared a slightly less flattering photo comparing herself to the great Dame Edna Everage.

Taking to Instagram, the 39-year-old stands behind what looks like prison bars while pulling an unflattering wry smile as she glances sideways mimicking the famous comedienne.

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Carbon copy? Sunrise host Samantha Armytage has shared a photo comparing herself to the legendary Dame Edna Everage on social media saying 'I think I may have just discovered what I'll look like when I'm old(er)'

The bubbly blonde compared the shot to that of Barry Humphries' famous character Dame Edna neck deep in water and pulling a very similar facial expression in her signature purple wig and comical glasses.

'I think I may have just discovered what I'll look like when I'm old(er),' Samantha captioned the snap before referring to Edna's cameo in the upcoming Absolutely Fabulous film writing, 'Who else is excited about the @abfabmovie??!!'

Despite entertaining the masses for six decades as Dame Edna'S Barry Humphries is far from done with the iconic character set for a guest cameo in the upcoming film version of Absolutely Fabulous.

The big screen adaption of the classic British comedy series has lined up a slew of star-studded cameos for the film, including Kim Kardashian, Kate Moss, John Hamm, and Australia's own Rebel Wilson.

Stylish: The 39-year-old's unflattering facial expression is a far cry from the poised host we see every morning on Sunrise

Dame Edna's highly-anticipated cameo is seen an official promotional still released from the film, which shows the 82-year-old Barry in Edna's signature purple wig and comical sunglasses whilst sitting in a pool.

The first full-length trailer for Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie was unveiled this week.

Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley are back in full force in the film, which begins with the pair trying to sign supermodel Kate Moss to their PR agency.

She's still got it! Barry Humphries will bring back Dame Edna Everage yet again for a cameo in the upcoming Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie

The trailer opens in typical Ab Fab style with Edina Moon falling out of her car in her glad-rags after another wild night, promptly plummeting all the way down to to outside the basement kitchen where her daughter Saffy, Julia Sawalha, is enjoying a peaceful breakfast with Jane, her teenage daughter.

Little seems to have changed for PR guru Eddy as she moans to Patsy (Lumley) 'I think I am now officially fatter sideways than I am front on.'

Sweetie, darling! Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley return as Edina Moon and Patsy Stone as the star-studded first full-length trailer for Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is unveiled

Icon: PR gurus Eddy and Patsy are on a mission to nab Kate Moss as their new client in the film

The real drama comes though when Patsy phones Eddy, excitedly telling her that their idol Kate Moss is changing her PR.

'We've got to get her, Kate Moss darling!' screams Patsy.

Cue the friends crashing a fashion bash in London, where a whole host of famous names make cameos, including Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie, Lily Cole and designer Stella McCartney, who challenges Eddy over her wardrobe.

'You're not wearing my clothes are you?' the top designer asks her,'No darling, no this is all TK Maxx,' a sheepish Eddy insists.

This is the dream: Eddy is seen working and lunching when she gets the call about Kate

This is it: 'We've got to get her, Kate Moss darling!' screams Patsy

Soon the party-crashers spot Kate, chatting away on a balcony with Mad Men star Jon Hamm.

'I'm going to roll away the Hamm,' Patsy tells Eddy as she saunters over, only for the handsome actor to exclaim: 'Oh god, I can't believe you're so... alive.'

In all the excitement disaster strikes as Eddy sends Kate flying into the river Thames below.

Party time: Cue the friends crashing a fashion bash in London, where a whole host of famous names make cameos

They're in fashion darling: A whole host of famous names make cameos, includingLily Cole and designer Stella McCartney, who challenges Eddy over her wardrobe

Dressed to the nines: Jennifer is back in Eddy's fabulously eccentric wardrobe, modeling a gold jacket and a colorful Charlotte Simone fur scarf

'How bad can this be, you know?' Eddy asks Patsy and Saffy as the case of the missing supermodel hits headlines around the world.

'You have killed Kate Moss!' Saffy points out. A brick through the window from Stella, 'the first thing I've ever had from Stella', soon convinces Eddy and Patsy to make their escape to the South of France, where 'everyone's a criminal'.

The glam location isn't exactly what they imagined though as they find themselves at what Patsy promptly dubs 'some kind of late life lesbo party'

There she is: The best pals spot their target- Kate- across the crowded room

All-star cameos: Mad Men's Jon Hamm makes an appearance as Kate's friend and Patsy's old conquest

Model overboard! In all the excitement disaster strikes as Eddy sends Kate flying into the river Thames below

After seeing Rebel Wilson taser Patsy on board a flight, the trailer ends with a typical exchange between Eddy and the voice of reason as she forlornly tells Saffy: 'I'm being trollied on Twitter, a woman told me I was a pariah.'

'Do you know what a pariah is?' Saffy asks. 'Yeah, it's a fish,' a distraught Eddy replies.

As well as Kate, Stella, Jon and Rebel, there are said to be an incredible 60 a-list cameos in the hugely anticipated movie include Barry Humphries aka Dame Edna Everage, Graham Norton, Jeremy Paxman, Jerry Hall, Dame Joan Collins, Pam Hogg, Perez Hilton and Wanda Ventham.

On the run: Patsy and Eddy escape to the French Riveria with Saffy and her teenage daughter Jane

In disguise: The duo resort to outlandish plans in an attempt to outrun the authorities and the bad press

Also starring: Rebel Wilson, a self-confessed huge Ab Fab fan, makes a cameo as an air hostess

Meanwhile Jane Horrocks as Bubble, Celia Imrie as Claudia Bing and June Whitfield as Mother are back reprising their roles.

As well as starring in the film, Saunders wrote the script, which was directed by Mandie Fletcher, produced by Jon Plowman and Damian Jones.

The film hits cinemas in the UK on July 1, 2016 with US and Australia release dates of July 22 and August 11, respectively.

Like the look? The duo are back in Eddy and Patsy's colourful, designer ensembles

Voice of reason: Julia Sawalha is also back as Eddy's daughter Saffy, now in her 40s and with a teenager of her own
It's one of her favourite places in the world, even more so after her fiance proposed on the island last November.

So no wonder TV presenter Zoe Salmon looked thrilled to be back in Barbados on a romantic holiday with her husband-to-be William Corrie.

The former Blue Peter host, 36, looked relaxed in a white cut-out dress as she and William, 30, chatted to two hotel staff.

Bridal style: Engaged TV presenter Zoe Salmon shows off a hint of tum in a white cut-out dress on holiday in Barbados

The Northern Irish star was going for an all-white ensemble ahead of their nuptials later this year.

The former beauty queen accepted Northern Irish butcher William's proposal over dinner at the Sandy Lane Hotel last year.

The couple have been together for five years this month after meeting at a friend's wedding in Castle Leslie, County Monaghan - where Sir Paul McCartney famously married Heather Mills in 2002.

Wedding bells: Zoe and her butcher fiance William (far left) are planning their wedding this year after getting engaged on the island last November

In an interview with the Belfast Telegraph soon after the engagement, Zoe said she was determined to marry this year at home in Ulster.

She said: 'There are so many beautiful places I have been fortunate to travel to, but I am such a home bird, it has to be at home.

'I love it. One of the things I love most about William is that he is Northern Irish. He is a local boy, so it is important for us to get married at home.'

Zoe's romance with William comes after she dated another fellow Northern Irish man - former Hollyoaks actor Gerard McCarthy.

Favourite place: The couple have returned to the Caribbean island where they got engaged six months ago

The pair split in 2009 after 18 months together, with Gerard declaring 'there's plenty more Salmon in the sea' following the end of their romance.

The blonde started her career when she won Miss Northern Ireland in 1999, before turning her attention to presenting.

She co-hosted Blue Peter to 2004 until 2008 and also appeared as a contestant on Dancing On Ice in 2009.

Earlier this year, she played the title role in the panto production of Cinderella at the Theatre Royal Windsor.
Last month he departed Saturday Kitchen after a decade on the show.

Although James Martin left fans devastated when he left, the beloved chef revealed that before he left the show he thought nobody would care.

The 43-year-old host spoke to Herald Scotland about leaving the show, after scooping his first job since stepping down - a partnership with Asda.

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New pastures: Leaving the kitchen: James Martin left fans devastated when he left, the beloved chef revealed that before he left the show he thought nobody would care

James decided to walk away from the popular weekend show in order to work on new projects, leaving his legion of fans heartbroken.

The star was inundated with messages from fans on social media, who were shocked and disappointed that the popular host was hanging up his apron in order to pursue other projects.

James was no at all prepared for the impassioned reaction from viewers: 'I said to the guys at the Beeb,: "Oh just put it out there, nobody will notice me leaving." Pfft! It was on the front page of every newspaper going.

'Its surreal, its quite weird, but very touching for me, because for something that youve done for so long, for people to have that reaction with it, its pretty moving. Im a grown farmers kid from Yorkshire, but I was touched with that one, thats pretty special.'

United together: James will now be partnering with Asda, providing recipes and cooking advice to families on a budget - a project he looks forward to as the supermarket shares 'the same ethos' he has with his food

Causing a storm: The 43-year-old host spoke to Herald Scotland about leaving the show, after scooping his first job since stepping down - a partnership with Asda.

James will now be partnering with Asda, providing recipes and cooking advice to families on a budget - a project he looks forward to as the supermarket shares 'the same ethos' he has with his food.

On Thursday Andy Clarke, President and CEO Asda, and James Martin announced the partnership with Asda, at the InterContinental London Park Lane

Before James' emotional last show aired on March 27, one Twitter user wrote, 'A shame James Martin has quit Saturday Kitchen after 10 years.He did a great job and it will be hard to replace him after he leaves in March', while another shared, 'Gutted. Saturday mornings won't be the same'.

A third summed up the shock announcement by joking: 'if james martin is quitting saturday kitchen then i am quitting life (sic)'.

Radio 1 presenter Chris Stark wrote: 'WHAT ARE YOU PLAYING AT? @jamesmartinchef you can't leave!!! #saturdaykitchen #saturdaykitchenlad.'

United: On Thursday Andy Clarke, President and CEO Asda, and James Martin announced the partnership with Asda, at the InterContinental London Park Lane

'I would like to personally thank all the viewers for turning Saturday Kitchen into a three million-plus smash hit': The chef paid tribute to his fans but explained he was 'looking forward to getting stuck into new projects'

Disappointed: Many social media users revealed how sad they were to see James leave after 10 years

Won't be the same: Fans said they wouldn't know how to spend their Saturdays in future

In a statement released by the BBC at the time, he said: 'I would like to personally thank all the viewers for turning Saturday Kitchen into a three million-plus smash hit. I could not have done it without them.

'I would also like to thank the BBC and Saturday Kitchen for the great opportunity they have given me. It has been an amazing journey and I have been privileged to work with some of the world's greatest chefs and some of the greatest names in showbiz. I wish the new chefs every success.'

The popular presenter, who made his TV debut with James Martin: Yorkshire's Finest, revealed that he was looking forward to exploring new projects, as well as enjoying a well-deserved lie in.

He added: 'I am looking forward to getting stuck into my new projects and to lots of lie-ins on a Saturday morning.'

Popular presenter: The departure of James hit some fans harder than others

Embracing new projects: Explaining his decision to walk away from the show, the Yorkshire-born star said he was eager to get 'stuck into' new projects following his lengthy and successful stint on the cookery show

In response to the news Dan McGolpin, Controller BBC Daytime and Early-Peak, said: 'I'd like to thank James for the last 10 years in which he has given up his Saturday mornings and more to help make Saturday Kitchen into the much loved institution that it is today.'

Fans of the popular chef won't see James disappear straight away, as he has agreed to stay on for an undisclosed amount of time till a certain point in March.

Something which he clarified himself on Twitter, while confirming the news of his departure to his 209,000 followers.

He wrote: 'It's been a true pleasure but sometime in March will be my last #saturdaykitchen.'

It's official: He wrote on Twitter: 'It's been a true pleasure but sometime in March will be my last #saturdaykitchen'
She is one of the world's most beautiful women.

And Rosie Huntington-Whiteley proved she can pull off every style as she stepped out in an exquisitely cut suit in New York on Thursday.

The 29-year-old model and actress oozed androgynous chic in her navy two-piece layered over a black polo neck while glamming up the look with sky-high black heels.

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Suited and booted: Rosie Huntington-Whiteley proved she can pull off every style as she stepped out in an exquisitely cut suit in New York on Thursday

Rosie, who has just touched down in the Big Apple from Los Angeles, looked extremely elegant as she nailed the perfect blend of androgyny.

The longline tailored blazer perfectly hung off her model frame and as the lingerie-model strutted her stuff she treated the pavement like a catwalk.

She showed off her endless legs in a pair of tapered trousers which hovered just above her ankles in length, below which she wore thin strap sky high heels.

Suits you! The 29-year-old model and actress oozed androgynous chic in her navy two-piece layered over a black polo neck while glamming up the look with sky-high black heels

Her blonde tresses were left to cascade in natural waves around her face, a stark contrast to the severe bun she modelled earlier in the day

Beneath the jacket she peeled on a black polo neck jumper, which tied in nicely with her other black accessories, while also showing off her stunning figure even further.

Maintaining her model poise, Rosie pulled on a pair of huge square black sunglasses which partially shielded her stunning face yet she pulled her famed pose.

Her blonde tresses were left to cascade in natural waves around her face, a stark contrast to the severe bun she modelled earlier in the day.

Time to relax: Putting her best stiletto forward, Rosie exited her car with poise as she arrived back at her hotel in the city

Made for her: The longline tailored blazer perfectly hung off her model frame and as the lingerie-model strutted her stuff she treated the pavement like a catwalk

Legs eleven! She showed off her endless legs in a pair of tapered trousers which hovered just above her ankles in length, below which she wore thin strap sky high heels

Rosie has just returned from Los Angeles, where she hosted a dinner at The Apartment in honour of designer Brandon Maxwell on Tuesday but she also had time to party too, since she had been celebrating her 29th birthday with fiance Jason, just last week.

Rosie marked the occasion in spectacular style, partying until the early hours at The Nice Guy in Hollywood with friends.

The blonde was just named global ambassador for UGG, adding the footwear retailer to her growing list of brand associations including Bulgari and Paige Denim.

Fashion's favourite colour: Beneath the jacket she peeled on a black polo neck jumper, which tied in nicely with her other black accessories, while also showing off her stunning figure even further

Superstar staple: Maintaining her model poise, Rosie pulled on a pair of huge square black sunglasses which partially shielded her stunning face yet she pulled her famed pose
Oscar and Golden Globe winner Geena Davis can't fathom why she doesn't get juicy roles like Walter White/Heisenberg in AMC's Breaking Bad.

'I thought it was so good that I started to cry,' the 60-year-old Mensa member - who binge-watched the series - told Emma Watson for Interview.

'It's the only time in my life I've been completely jealous, the only time. I was like, [imitates crying] "I want to do what Bryan Cranston gets to do! I want a part like that!" Isn't that pathetic?'

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'I probably could be better than ever!' Oscar and Golden Globe winner Geena Davis can't fathom why she doesn't get juicy roles like Walter White/Heisenberg in AMC's Breaking Bad

The 60-year-old Mensa member told Interview: 'It's the only time in my life I've been completely jealous, the only time. I was like, [imitates crying] "I want to do what Bryan Cranston gets to do! I want a part like that!"'

The Me Him Her actress stressed: 'Now I have so much experience, I probably could be better than ever...I don't want to wait ten years for something great to come along. It's maddening. It's so frustrating. It's completely embarrassing.'

In 2007, Geena launched The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which provided evidence that gender equality is just as bad onscreen as offscreen.

'Now I know exactly what the numbers are, and it's horrifying,' the Grey's Anatomy actress said of statistics - that 21 percent of filmmakers are women and 31 percent of speaking roles in films are women.

'We sponsored the largest amount of research ever done on gender depictions in TV and movies. Then we go meet with every studio, every guild, every network, every production company and share it with them, privately...It's had a great impact.'

'Now I know exactly what the numbers are, and it's horrifying': In 2007, Geena launched The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which provided evidence of the gender disparity

The Grey's Anatomy actress said: We sponsored the largest amount of research ever done on gender depictions in TV and movies. Then we go meet with every studio, every guild, every network, every production company and share it with them, privately...It's had a great impact' (pictured April 20)

Geena - born Virginia - is currently celebrating the 25th anniversary of one of the most feminist flicks of all time, Thelma and Louise.

And it turns out, Susan Sarandon wasn't just Davis' co-star in the Ridley Scott road drama, she was also her 'hero.'

'I drive her nuts. I'm always talking about her being my hero. I'm sure she's probably sick of it,' laughed the skilled 6ft archer.

'We sit down to go through the script [with the director]. I swear, I think it was page one, she says, "So my first line, I don't think we need that line. Or we could put it on page two. Cut this..."

'Well darlin', look out 'cause my hair is comin' down!' Geena - born Virginia - is currently celebrating the 25th anniversary of one of the most feminist flicks of all time, Thelma and Louise

'She's amazing': And it turns out, Susan Sarandon (2-L) wasn't just Davis' co-star in the Ridley Scott (R) road drama, she was also her 'hero'

The skilled 6ft archer recalled: 'It was an extraordinary experience to do that movie with her because every day was a lesson in how to just be yourself'

'And I was just like...my jaw was to the ground, because she was just saying what she thought! She was saying her opinion. Even though I was 34 or 35 or something. I was like, "People can do that? Women can actually just say what they think?" It was an extraordinary experience to do that movie with her because every day was a lesson in how to just be yourself.'

26-year-old Emma Watson, who interviewed Geena, revealed she decided not to study politics or history because she didn't see women in the fields.

'I didn't think when I was 13, 14 that that had anything to do with me. I just didn't see women in my textbooks. I didn't see many female politicians on TV. I didn't see women in history textbooks,' the Brown University grad and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador said.

'So I did geography, and art and English literature. But I know I must have been affected by not seeing women represented.'

'I just didn't see women in my textbooks': 26-year-old Emma Watson, who interviewed Geena, revealed she decided not to study politics or history because she didn't see women in the fields (pictured February 5)

The UN Women Goodwill Ambassador said: 'So I did geography, and art and English literature. But I know I must have been affected by not seeing women represented' (pictured March 8)

The A League of Their Own star then told the Harry Potter alum about when she met Iceland's former president Vigdis Finnbogadottir.

'I think she was president for, like, 16 years or something,' Davis said.

'She said she used to get letters from little boys saying, "Madam President, do you think it will ever be possible for a boy to be president?" Just like we assume that girls can't be politicians, they were assuming boys can't. That's what they thought. It's so crazy.'

Geena's female-friendly Bentonville Film Festival is about to host its second year in Arkansas between May 3-8.

'So, you know, people think of me in the same breath as Robert Redford and Robert De Niro,' the thrice-divorced mother-of-three said sarcastically.

'So, you know, people think of me in the same breath as Robert Redford and Robert De Niro': Geena's female-friendly Bentonville Film Festival is about to host its second year in Arkansas between May 3-8

The thrice-divorced mother-of-three said: 'It's the only film festival in the world where the prizes are guaranteed distribution. It's unheard of, you know?' (pictured February 25)

'It's the only film festival in the world where the prizes are guaranteed distribution. It's unheard of, you know. So if you win one of the categories, your film is going to be in theaters, on TV, digital, and on DVD.'

Davis will next play Angela Rance in Fox's The Exorcist series based on William Blatty's 1971 novel.

'It exists in the same world, but it's a different family and a different time,' the Beetlejuice alum explained.

'I'm the mother of two daughters, one of whom is going to get possessed. It's really spooky and great. I'm shooting it right now. That's why I'm in Chicago.'

Meanwhile, the Regression starlet will next play Mae Holland in this year's sci-fi thriller The Circle alongside Patton Oswalt and Tom Hanks

'I'm the mother of two daughters, one of whom is going to get possessed': Davis will next play Angela Rance in Fox's The Exorcist series based on William Blatty's 1971 novel
She's alleged to have lined up a new 100,000 radio deal.

And Caroline Flack was putting her best foot forward as she paid a visit to the Capital Radio studios in central London on Thursday.

The 36-year-old presenter was rocking a casual yet fashionable ensemble for her relaxed outing, which appeared to support the rumours concerning her next job.

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Relaxed style: Caroline Flack was rocking a casual ensemble as she paid a visit to the Capital Radio studios in central London on Thursday

Caroline showed off her perfectly flat stomach in a casual navy crop top, paired with low-slung jeans.

The boyfriend cut denim trousers boasted large rips running down the legs and were rolled up at the ankle.

She carried a brown leather handbag over one arm and topped off her look with white Birkenstock sansals.

Simple attire: The former X Factor presenter showed off her perfectly flat stomach in a casual navy crop top, paired with low-slung jeans

Elegant updo: Caroline wore her brunette locks puled back into a tight bun, with pretty braids keeping flyaways in check

Caroline wore her brunette locks puled back into a tight bun, with pretty braids keeping flyaways in check.

The former X Factor presenter added a pair of round shades and a slick of bright red lipstick to complete her attire.

It was recently reported that Caroline is moving on from the ITV talent contest with a fresh start on the radio.

Grunge look: The boyfriend cut denim trousers boasted large rips running down the legs and were rolled up at the ankle

Fresh move: The beauty has reportedly landed a huge 100,000 to present a show on Heart Radio

The beauty has reportedly landed a huge 100,000 to present a show on Heart Radio.

Caroline is said to be joining forces with Welsh presenter Gethin Jones after the pair impressed producers with their chemistry during trial shows in the studio.

A source told The Mirror: 'Heart FM have been after Caroline for a while, theyve offered her loads of money and reckon theyve struck gold pairing her with Gethin. Producers are hoping they will be the stations next hit duo.

'Its likely to be a temporary position to begin with, but station bosses are hoping she stays for the long haul.'
She's one of America's top models and has showcased some of the world's top fashion brands.

But for Lindsey Wixson's latest shoot, it looks like she doesn't have to wear many clothes at all.

The 22-year-old, famed for her bee-stung lips and gap in her front teeth tooth, ended up going topless during a swimsuit shoot on one of the many rooftops on Miami's South Beach.

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Svelte: American model Lindsey Wixson shows off her slim figure in a pink swimsuit during a photoshoot on a rooftop in Miami on Wednesday

The Kansas-native started her career when she was just 15 after signing to Vision Models in Los Angeles.

After appearing in Vogue Italia, she made her runway debut at the Spring/Summer 2010 New York Fashion Week shows.

Over the past five years, Lindsey has modelled for the likes of Chanel, John Galliano, Versace, Miu Miu, and Alexander McQueen.

In an interview with Vogue a few years ago, she credited modelling with improving her confidence after being bullied for her looks at high school.

I'm the king of the world... It looked like the 22-year-old was having a Titanic moment as she larked about on the roof

She said: 'I was actually always really self-conscious about my gap. In middle school, this group of girls were always trying to beat me up - they called my gap a parking lot. It was a really awkward time.

'I felt skinny and tall - it was the worst time of my life. But I don't feel like that anymore. Modelling has really helped build my confidence.'

Last year, Lindsey sprained her ankle after falling over at the Jean Paul Gaultier show at Paris Fashion Week.

No tanlines please! The Kansas-native seemed in high spirits as she basked in the sunshine on the roof

She shared a photo of her ailing ankle on her Instagram, captioning it: 'The result after walking off the end of #jeanpaulgaultier runway from my bee-keepers mask yesterday. 5 days wrapped.'

Lindsey has had a few falls during fashion shows in recent years, most famously being during Naomi Campbell's Fashion for Relief fundraiser in Cannes in 2011.

She also slipped at Versace's 2014 Fall/Winter show, and before that, at the same designers' 2012 Spring/Summer show.

The brunette ended up at No.7 on the top 10 list of world's highest paid supermodels in 2013/2014, taking home $3million.
Her older sister Gigi may have graced the covers of 12 editions of Vogue.

But Bella Hadid is playing catchup, as she excitedly shared a look at her first shoot for the world renowned fashion magazine on Thursday.

The 19-year-old wows on the cover of the Turkey edition of the mag, styled in a glam eighties look.

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Cover girl: Bella Hadid excitedly shared a look at her first cover for Vogue magazine on Thursday, as she poses up a storm in a retro shoot for the Turkey edition of the world renowned fashion mag

The brunette beauty is seen posing in all white, flaunting her svelte figure in a white Givenchy off the shoulder top.

The designer piece flashes Bella's toned waist, with the skimpy number paired with a lace detail skirt.

Glittering cocktail rings, bracelets, necklaces and statement drop earrings from Istanbul-based label Gilan add to the glam vibe.

The crowning glory though is Bella's locks, which have been styled into a curly pompadour do, completing the retro feel.

Blossoming career: Bella has strutted the catwalk for the biggest designers around, walking for the likes of Givenchy during Paris Fashion Week this year

Bella couldn't wait to share her milestone moment on Insatgram, posting the cover alongside a gushing thank you note to the likes of photographer Sebastian Faena, and stylist Konca Aykan.

'I can't believe it!!! My first VOGUE cover !!!Thank you @vogueturkiye and my wonderful @sebastianfaena & so talented @koncaaykan for creating such an amazing story with me,' she wrote.

'Thank you @annemarieleonie @jonathan_bender @ivanbart & @imgmodels I LOVE you guys so much & am so thankful for you! I feel so grateful, proud and excited!!! Wearing my darling @riccardotisci17 @givenchyofficial Of course'

The beauty revealed last year that she is battling Lyme disease but she hasn't let the debilitating illness get in the way of her dreams.

Following in the footsteps of her supermodel sister, Gigi Hadid, who has strutted the catwalk for the biggest designers around, Bella's modelling career took off last year.

She made her Chanel Couture debut in January 2016, while also walking for huge names like Givenchy and Miu Miu at their shows in Paris Fashion Week shows two months later,
She has remained steadfastly loyal after fiance Luke Hunt was jailed over a fatal crash that killed a 78-year-old man on Sydney's northern beaches.

And now model Samantha Harris is counting down the days until his imminent release after he served two of his four-year sentence following the death of grandfather Kenneth Lay in 2012.

The 25-year-old indigenous Australian told the Daily Telegraph on Thursday: 'Yes, hes soon to be released... 'Im so excited, itll be so nice.'

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'Excited': Samantha Harris is counting down the days until his imminent release of fiance Luke Hunt after he served two of his four-year sentence over a fatal crash in 2012

Loyal: The model has stood by her beau side and was in the car he was driving when it crashed with another killing a 78-year-old grandfather

Luke, 28, was sentenced to four years in prison after his speeding car ran a red light and collided with another, killing the driver.

Mr Lay died in hospital after the car that he and Samantha were travelling in collided with the older man's car, which then careered and slammed into a tree.

Luke had pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death, and the court heard he had been speeding in the 60km/h zone, driving at 95km/h.

Counting down: The indigenous model previously said she had to get used to Luke not being in her life after he was jailed

Close: The tradesman is due for parole imminently

Judge Colin Charteris said at the time the sentence sent a strong message about reckless driving and its consequences.

'There has been no real account from Hunt to explain why he was driving in such a hurry at the time of the accident,' he told the Downing Centre District Court.

'It's completely inexcusable.'

Remorseful: Luke has been disqualified from driving for six-and-a-half years and says he has suffered depression since the accident

Luke had been trying to change lanes at high speed when his Commodore collided into Mr Lay's Hyundai Lantra at the intersection of Warringah Rd and Alfred St, Narraweena.

Judge Charteris said the grandfather of 16 and father of seven had been obeying the road rules.

In 2014 Samantha revealed her heartbreak at losing her partner as he was sent behind bars.

'It has been an incredibly traumatic couple of years,' she told the Daily Telegraph.

'I am beyond devastated with what has happened and for the Lay family. It is still so raw, having lost my partner. I need time to process and get used to not having him in my life for now.'
She's retired from the runway after an impressive career as one of the world's top models.

And supermodel Gisele Bundchen opted for a casual look in baggy jeans as she spent time in New York City on Thursday.

The 35-year-old gave a hint of her toned stomach in the loose Rag & Bone engineer jeans, which she wore without a belt and slung low over her slim hips.

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Casual chic: Supermodel Gisele Bundchen wore baggy jeans that gave a hint of her midriff while out in New York City on Thursday

The Brazilian beauty looked relaxed and flashed a smile as she left her Manhattan apartment building.

Gisele rested her hands in the pockets of her slick black bomber jacket as she strolled around SoHo.

She slung a small black leather handbag with a chain strap over her shoulder.

Sleek: The 35-year-old flashed a small smile as she walked through SoHo

Baggy look: The Brazilian beauty wore slouchy engineer jeans that hung low over her slim hips

Gisele pulled her blonde hair back in a high ponytail, and wore a number of gold earrings.

The model's outing came after she appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday, where she taught the host how to sashay down a runway in heels.

And she revealed she's taking a 'gap year' to focus on being a mom after her retirement.

Stylish: Gisele pulled her hair back in a high ponytail as she left her New York apartment

Best foot forward: The model wore tan heeled sandals with cute tied straps

Stepping out: She added a small black leather back and a number of earrings

Gisele told host Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday that she is 'really focusing on being the best mom I can be' and was 'taking this year as a sabbatical to see where my life will take me, kind of just see what the next 20 years will look like.'

'I'm just waiting to be inspired,' she said.

Gisele and her Patriots quaterback husband Tom Brady, 38, have two children together: three-year-old daughter Vivian and six-year-old son Benjamin.

Tom also has an eight-year-old son John Edward, from his relationship with actress Bridget Moynahan.

Casual supermodel: Gisele looked relaxed as she rested her hands in the pockets of her bomber jacket

Gisele wore a grey sweater and tight leather pants as she revealed on The Tonight Show that her mother only encouraged her to take modelling classes to help her posture.

After being approached by a modelling scout at a mall at the age of 14, she almost blew off the chance to be a model because she wanted to go hang out with friends at an amusement park instead, she said.

And the top model also gave Jimmy some tips on how to walk in high heels, telling him: 'Put the chest forward, squeeze the belly in - and shake the hips.'

The model also has a new, self-titled coffee table book out on May 10, which contains 300 photographs of her long career. She's donating all the proceeds of the book to charity.

A limited-edition, $700 version of the Gisele book sold out last year.

Work it! The model gave host Jimmy Fallon some tips on how to strut down a runway in heels when she appeared on The Tonight Show on Wednesday
Jessica Alba celebrated her 35th birthday on Thursday, and she shared the highlights on her Snapchat account.

'It's my barfday and I'll cry if I want to!' the mompreneur captioned a snap of herself wearing an Honest Company cap.

The Golden Globe nominee posted pics of her birthday bouquet as well as her gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate cake from the Sweet Laurel Bakery.

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'It's my barfday and I'll cry if I want to!' Jessica Alba celebrated her 35th birthday on Thursday, and she shared the highlights on her Snapchat account

'Wowzers!' The mompreneur posted pics of her birthday bouquet as well as her gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate cake from the Sweet Laurel Bakery

Jessica's daughters Honor, 7, and Haven, 4, painted paintings for their famous mother, which she captioned: 'Feeling super blessed on my bday!'

Jessica's daughters Honor, 7, and Haven, 4, painted paintings for their famous mother, which she captioned: 'Feeling super blessed on my bday!'

The Veil actress 'loves a good game night' and played the Hasbro board game Sorry with her children and husband Cash Warren.

Of course Alba - who boasts 16.7M followers - also got presents, like a bauble from London jeweller, Ruifier.

'I have to say I like me better at 35 than at 25,' the Bad Blood video vixen told E! News last month.

'Family game time!' The Veil actress 'loves a good game night' and played the Hasbro board game Sorry with her children and husband Cash Warren

'I have to say I like me better at 35 than at 25!' Of course Alba - who boasts 16.7M followers - also got presents, like a bauble from London jeweller, Ruifier

The Bad Blood video vixen told E! News: 'I definitely went through a crisis at 25, 26, 27. I don't know, it was like a three-year crisis. Then I had honor at 28, and I felt like everything just kind of fell into place and made sense. I feel really good now, and I'm excited about turning 35'

'I definitely went through a crisis at 25, 26, 27. I don't know, it was like a three-year crisis. Then I had honor at 28, and I felt like everything just kind of fell into place and made sense. I feel really good now, and I'm excited about turning 35.'

On Tuesday, Jessica celebrated early with her mother Catherine and a few gal pals at Hawaii's Four Seasons Resorts Lanai.

The festive times will continue May 19 when Alba and her 37-year-old beau celebrate their eighth wedding anniversary.

The busy mother-of-two's birthday was likely a welcome distraction from the lawsuit filed against her $1.7 billion company earlier this month.

'So much fun on my early bday celebration!' On Tuesday, Jessica celebrated early with her mother Catherine (2-L) and a few gal pals at Hawaii's Four Seasons Resorts Lanai

Biracial Cali couple: The festive times will continue May 19 when Alba and her 37-year-old beau celebrate their eighth wedding anniversary (pictured December 6)

'Contains 11 hazardous and synthetic ingredients': Her birthday was likely a welcome distraction from the lawsuit filed against her $1.7 billion Honest Company earlier this month for her infant formula

Organic Consumers Association not impressed: It's the third time Jessica has been sued for hidden ingredients after similar allegations against her sunscreen and cleaning products

Organic Consumers Association alleged that Honest's 'organic' infant formula contains '11 hazardous and synthetic ingredients.'

It's the third time Jessica has been sued for hidden ingredients after similar allegations against her sunscreen and cleaning products.

Alba will next play hula-hooping dancer Daisy in Kevin Connolly's 1962 coming-of-age film Dear Eleanor - streaming on VOD July 5 - alongside Luke Wilson, Josh Lucas, and Ione Skye.

The Pomona-born beauty will also play Gina in the action sequel Mechanic: Resurrection - hitting US/UK theaters August 26 - with Jason Statham, Tommy Lee Jones, and Sam Hazeldine.

Streaming on VOD July 5! Alba will next play hula-hooping dancer Daisy in Kevin Connolly's 1962 coming-of-age film Dear Eleanor alongside Luke Wilson, Josh Lucas, and Ione Skye

Had so much fun on my friend @mrkevinconnolly directorial debut Dear Eleanor -such a sweet film w a lot of  Chk it- https://t.co/p3chSD1Xhm  Jessica Alba (@jessicaalba) April 26, 2016

Hitting US/UK theaters August 26! The Pomona-born beauty will next play Gina in the action sequel Mechanic: Resurrection with Jason Statham (L), Tommy Lee Jones, and Sam Hazeldine (R)

Working it out! Alba shared a Snapchat image, which looked to be taken following her spin class

Hello petal: The actress also shared with her fans an image of her birthday bouquet
He got his big break appearing in the Australian sketch comedy show Full Frontal in the 1990s.

And now Eric Bana is returning to his comedic roots starring alongside British comedian Ricky Gervais in the upcoming Netflix film Special Correspondents.

However the 47-year-old struck a slightly more serious demeanor when he landed back in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

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Back in LA: Eric Bana struck a slightly more serious attitude as he landed back in the US on Wednesday

Casual look: Looking relaxed, the Hulk actor sported a knitted navy sweater over a white T-shirt and grey trousers, finishing his casual look with brown shoes and a pair of dark trendy shades

No time to chat: Carrying a canvas bag and a backpack, Eric made his way through the airport looking serious

Looking relaxed, the Hulk actor sported a knitted navy sweater over a white T-shirt and grey trousers, finishing his casual look with brown shoes and a pair of dark trendy shades.

Carrying a canvas bag and a backpack, Eric made his way through the airport without so much as a smile.

Despite his serious expression, the handsome Australian recently revealed he made a deliberate effort to avoid being cast in comedic roles in order to be taken more seriously.

New role: The 47-year-old is returning to his comedic roots starring alongside British comedian Ricky Gervais (L) in the upcoming Netflix film Special Correspondents

Speaking to Mr Porter, Eric said the move away from comedy meant he was able to do concentrate on more serious roles.

'I was always very conscious of not overdoing things,' he explained to the publication.

'That's why I stopped [doing] sketch comedy. Same with stand-up. After a while I just started getting sick of myself.'

Although he once had his own television programme, The Eric Bana Show Live, the deliberate move to more serious roles meant he was to embrace more opportunities when they arose, like the 2005 film Munich.

Big break: The Troy star first got his big break appearing in the Australian sketch comedy show Full Frontal in the 1990s and had his own comedy program The Eric Bana Show Live soon afterwards

In Special Correspondents, Eric plays a radio journalist who fakes frontline war dispatches from Iraq while hiding out in New York, while Ricky plays his technician.

The film was directed and co-written by UK The Office star.

'I'm sure there are comedies that aren't fun to work on, but with Ricky, you spend all day p*****g yourself laughing,' Eric went on to say.

Getting along: In an interview with Mr Porter Eric said 'I'm sure there are comedies that aren't fun to work on, but with Ricky, you spend all day p*****g yourself laughing'

'I remember telling my wife over the phone one night how I actually felt physically different at the end of the day.

'You're being pumped with endorphins in a way you don't get when you're working on something dead serious.'

Special Correspondents premieres on Netflix on 29 April.
Caitlyn Jenner possibly out-trumped even The Donald with her speech about restrooms at Tuesday's TIME 100 Gala in New York.

The most famous transgender of the moment was back on the blazing trail as she arrived at Los Angeles International Airport for another flight out of town on Thursday.

Caitlyn looked casually chic in faded jeans and white top with a quilted black jacket and boots to match.

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Jet-setting style: Caitlyn Jenner cut a casually chic figure in jeans and quilted jacket as she arrived at LAX ahead of a flight on Thursday

The 66-year-old former Olympic medalist, who was joined by her eldest son Burt, clutched a large coffee that no doubt gave her the needed boost at such an early hour.

Caitlyn was impeccably made up too with a dusting of eye shadow, mascara, foundation and rouge along with rose-tinted lip gloss.

She clutched a stylish black leather tote with one red-manicured hand as she made her way down the terminal.

Caffeine boost: The 66-year-old former Olympian clutched a large coffee as she emerged from the chauffeured vehicle

Up in the air: Caitlyn was in LA briefly following a trip to NYC but appeared to be on another mission

Head-to-toe style: Caitlyn's ensemble was complimented by a black handbag and polished boots

While Caitlyn preferred the head-to-toe perfect look, Burt was dressed down in T-shirt and cargo shorts.

The 37-year-old race car driver, from Caitlyn's first marriage, has kept out of the public eye for the most part compared to his more famous half-siblings.

However, Burt has been Caitlyn's devoted supporter and someone who has known about his parent's transition for a long time.

Travel buddy: The I Am Cait star was accompanied down the terminal by her eldest son Burt

Loyal: Burt has been Caitlyn's devoted supporter and someone who has known about his parent's transition for a long time

'A lot of people don't know that this is something that I've known now for, I think, 25 years,' Burt told Esquire last fall.

'Before I was allowed to tell anybody, or before my dad even knew that I knew, I went and marched on behalf of Prop 8 through the streets of Los Angeles. I've always tried to be an outspoken supporter of the LGBT community.'

Caitlyn, meanwhile, generated more attention after she praised Donald Trump for keeping his word in regards to his gender-neutral bathroom policy at his tower.

A little bathroom humour: Caitlyn toasted Donald Trump at the TIME 100 Gala in NY on Tuesday for keeping his word in regards to gender-neutral restrooms at his tower

Praise: Caitlyn said at the gala: 'Last week Donald Trump said I could use any bathroom I wanted in the Trump Tower. So of course I veered right in there  took care of myself'

'This toast actually started in a bathroom,' Caitlyn told the crowd at the TIME 100 Gala in New York. 'Actually, bathroom issues right now in my life seem to be in the forefront.'

She went on: 'Actually, on that issue I just want to say also  One little trans woman walking down the street had to go, I looked up and who did I see but the Trump Tower.

'Last week Donald Trump said I could use any bathroom I wanted in the Trump Tower. So of course I veered right in there  took care of myself.'

Trump, who was in the audience with his wife Melania, told Today last week that trans people such as Caitlyn shouldn't be banned from using the restroom of their choice.

Caitlyn, who was named one of the year's most influential people, dedicated her honour to others, such as Trump, 'really trying to make a difference in the world.'
Courteney Cox is looking at wedding dresses again.

On Thursday Life & Style Weekly reported the Friends vet is once again engaged to ex Johnny McDaid after a brief split in 2015.

This comes after the 51-year-old former wife of David Arquette, who she has 11-year-old daughter Coco with, was seen passionately kissing the 39-year-old Snow Patrol musician in London at Heathrow Airport.

They can't let go: Courteney Cox is looking at wedding dresses again. On Thursday Life & Style Weekly reported the Friends vet is once again engaged to ex Johnny McDaid after a brief split in 2015; here they are seen in August

This picture speaks a million words: This comes after the 51-year-old former wife of David Arquette, who she has daughter Coco with, was seen passionately kissing the 39-year-old Snow Patrol musician in London at Heathrow Airport in mid April

They have been on again since March.

'Courteney and Johnny are planning a fall wedding,' a friend told Life & Style. 'They just took a trip to London to meet with their wedding planner.'

The site added the ceremony wont be in London. Instead, it will be in Johnnys native Ireland.

'They are considering Castle Leslie where Paul McCartney married Heather Mills, as well as Ballintubber Abbey where Pierce Brosnan got married,' a source added.

Will she wear white? They have been on again since March. 'Courteney and Johnny are planning a fall wedding,' a friend told Life & Style. 'They just took a trip to London to meet with their wedding planner'

Don't expect a big, splashy wedding like the one she had with Arquette over a decade ago.

'She really wants a low-key wedding with about 100 guests,' said a pal.

'Their good friend Ed Sheeran will be playing and Johnny will be singing a song he wrote especially for Courteney.'

Other guests will include Friends cast mates Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow and Matthew Perry.

Sources claim the two split last year because Courteney was unwilling to leave Los Angeles and he was homesick.

Small and sweet: Don't expect a big, splashy wedding like the one she had with Arquette over a decade ago. 'She really wants a low-key wedding with about 100 guests,' said a pal; here she is seen in LA last week
A Los Angeles judge has thrown out a temporary restraining order filed by Brett Rossi - real name Scottine Ross - against her ex-fiancee Charlie Sheen.

TMZ reported on Thursday that a judge deemed Sheen posed no imminent threat to Rossi, who was granted a temporary restraining order against the actor last month after a tape emerged in which he appears to threaten her life.

'We're pleased that the court vacated the restraining order,' Sheen's lawyer Andrew Brettler toldThe Hollywood Reporter on Thursday.

The way they were: A Los Angeles judge has thrown out a temporary restraining order filed by Brett Rossi - whose real name is Scottine Ross - against her ex-fiance Charlie Sheen, according to reports (the former couple pictured in Toronto in 2014)

'It was obvious that there wasnt enough there for the restraining order to stay in place,' he added.

A future hearing for May 18 was scheduled.

On Monday, Sheen's attorney urged a judge to reject a request by the actor's ex-fiancee to extend a temporary restraining order, calling the filing a publicity stunt intended to keep an unrelated civil case in the news, according to the AP.

Rossi did not appear in court on Thursday, and Sheen's lawyer was 'incredulous' to discover it was due to an upcoming appearance at the Pink Pony strip club in Atlanta, according to TMZ.

Meanwhile: On Monday, Sheen's lawyer urged a judge to reject a request by the actor's ex-fiancee to extend a temporary restraining order, calling the filing a publicity stunt intended to keep an unrelated civil case in the news, according to the AP

Charlie's ex, who dated the actor in 2013 and 2014, was granted a temporary restraining order earlier this month after a secret recording obtained by the The National Enquirer purported to show the 50-year-old actor threatening to pay to 'have her head kicked in'.

After reading the story the porn star - who was briefly engaged to the actor - filed the order with police in Van Nuys, revealing she was 'obviously' in fear for her life.

Her lawyer told Fox News: 'Ms. Rossi is terrified after listening to the recording of Mr. Sheen apparently threatening her life. She takes the threat as being serious, given what she knows about Mr. Sheen.

Legal woes: Rossi, pictured in January in Las Vegas, previously filed a $5million lawsuit against Sheen in December for assault and battery after first claiming Sheen did not disclose his HIV status

'She will take all necessary steps with law enforcement and the courts to protect herself.'

Earlier in April it emerged that the Los Angeles police had opened a criminal investigation of Sheen.

The LAPD served a search warrant on the New York City office of Radar Online and The National Enquirer in order to obtain a recording of Sheen where he allegedly says he would pay $20,000 to have Rossi killed.

Previously: Charlie's ex, pictured in August in Los Angeles, was granted a temporary restraining order earlier this month after a secret recording obtained by the The National Enquirer purported to show the 50-year-old actor threatening to pay to 'have her head kicked in'

The recording also allegedly includes a segment in which the actor admits that he did not disclose to her that he was HIV positive after his diagnosis.

Radar Online has said it believes the warrant is illegal.

Rossi previously filed a $5million lawsuit against Sheen in December for assault and battery after first claiming Sheen did not disclose his HIV status

Sheen fired back by filing court documents claiming Rossi not only knew that he was HIV-positive, but also was the one who 'insisted' that the couple have unprotected sex.
While many people may claim to look like a famous movie star, rarely are the similarities as striking as Adam Sandler's doppelganger Max Kessler.

The actor was so taken aback by the 23-year-old's resemblance to himself that he reached out to him through social media and invited him to his movie premiere next month.

And in a crazy twist, Max Kessler just happens to be the name of Sandler's character in his new movie The Do-Over.

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Striking resemblance: Adam Sandler has discovered he has a lookalike in the form of accountant Max Kessler after the 23-year-old's pal posted a side-by side shot that went viral on Reddit

Kessler, an accountant from New York, has been told for as long as he can remember that he looks like the 49-year-old Happy Gilmore star and even has similar mannerisms to the funny guy.

'As I am getting older [close to Sandlers age when he played Happy Gilmore in 1996] people are noticing it more and more,' Kessler told ABC News.

'People say I look like him, act like him and sound like him. The amount of people that are freaked out when they first meet me is crazy.'

Kessler's friends were the first to tell him that Sandler's new character was also named Max Kessler and that's when he decided he had to take action to get the actor's attention.

Freaky coincidence: Kessler started communicating with the actor through captions when he realised that Sandler's character in The Do-Over is also called Max Kessler

Up to the challenge: Sandler put the 23-year-old through his paces to make sure he was really a doppelganger

'I thought it was fake at first,' Kessler said. 'I called my mom and said this has to be a prank, but soon realized it wasn't. I started laughing.'

Kessler then posted side-by-side photos of the duo on Reddit which soon went viral and has more than 5 million views.

Soon enough the Grown Ups star himself saw the post and was super excited to find out about his young lookalike.

The actor reached out to Kessler via a series of photos of him holding up caption cards and the duo communicated back and forth that way.

Let's meet! Finally the 49-year-old happy Gilmore star invited Kessler to the premiere of his new movie The Do-Over next month

Uncanny: In a clip produced by student Samara Abramson and posted to Youtube, Kessler talks about growing up looking like the movie star

In one image, Sandler pulled a funny face and challenged Kessler to do the same.

Finally, Sandler invited Kessler to the premiere of The Do-Over next month where the duo will finally get to meet face-to-face.

'Ok! You can come party with the better Max Kessler at The Do-Over premiere on May 16th! Rock 'n Roll!' Sandler wrote on a piece of paper in the invite snap.

Kessler revealed to ABC he is excited to meet the star and is very keen to offer himself to star in Sandler's next movie as the actor's son.
Elizabeth Olsen certainly caught the eye of her Captain America: Civil War co-star Chris Evans when she wore a plunging gown at the film's London premiere on Tuesday.

And she flashed more flesh for the cover shoot of Elle Canada's June issue.

In one black and white image, the 27-year-old stared at the camera provocatively as she showed off a shapely leg and her black undies plus a view of her cleavage in a long wrap dress that gaped open to her waist.

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Getting herself out there: Elizabeth Olsen showed off her cleavage and her undies in a wrap dress, open to the waist, for the cover shoot of Elle Canada's June edition

In a colour shot, a ripped blouse has huge cutouts over both breasts and shoulders.

Surprisingly, given the attention grabbing outfits, the younger sister of Olsen twins Mary-Kate and Ashley described herself as 'low-key.'

'Ive been very conservative, but Im trying to allow myself to feel confident with being sexy,' the beautiful blonde explained to Elle.

Chic-y little number: The 27-year-old wore a blouse with huge cutouts over both breasts and shoulders

Little girl look: 'Ive been very conservative, but Im trying to allow myself to feel confident with being sexy,' the beautiful blonde explained to the magazine

'A lot of the time in my life, I try not to take up space  I just want to disappear into a wall,' she dished.

'And then eventually, when Im around people I feel confident with, Ill take up more space.'

She is presently filming Wind River, co-starring Jeremy Renner, in Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival.

Pretty in pink: The little sister of Olsen twins Mary-Kate and Ashley on the front cover of Elle Canada

Putting her pins up: The actress, who plays superhero sorceress Scarlet Witch in the Marvel film world, showed off her shapely legs in this shot

The story centers on Jeremy as Cory, who works for the Fish And Game Department hunting coyotes and other predators.

He stumbles on the raped body of a teenage girl frozen in the wilderness and is enlisted by Elizabeth's rookie FBI agent, who is unfamiliar with the terrain and weather, to help find those responsible.

Taking herself way out of her comfort zone, Elizabeth has been practicing stunts for the indie thriller.

Bringing the bling: The beautiful blonde modelled this sequin-strewn top for the magazine

Frill-ing look: This pink frock appeared to bring out the little girl in Elizabeth

'Going 60 miles an hour sliding on ice isnt my idea of fun,' she told Elle. 'But I got used to it and loved it. Its absolutely breathtaking 10,000 feet up here in the mountains.'

Shooting began in March and the thriller is due out next year.

Meanwhile, she has an ongoing role as superhero sorceress, Scarlet Witch, a role she originated in Marvel's Avengers: Age Of Ultron last year and reprises in Captain America: Civil War, out May 6.
Jessica Wright opted to cover up on the night as she attended the launch of Georgia Kousoulous swimwear line.

The former TOWIE star was on hand to support her friend for the press launch of Summer Dreams By Georgia K at the event held in London on Thursday evening.

Jessica, 30, sported a white blouse which she teamed with distressed denim skinny jeans and high heels.

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Wright on trend: Jessica Wright opted to cover up on the night as she attended the launch of Georgia Kousoulous swimwear line

Her simple look was completed with flawlessly applied make-up and glossy locks as she had a look at Georgias collection.

Jessica then went on to attend the Zeynep Kartak catwalk show which was in support of the Syrian children refugee crisis charity Turk Kizilayi.

Jess recently revealed that she still messages ex-boyfriend Pete Wicks.

Showing her support: The former TOWIE star was on hand to support her friend for the press launch of Summer Dreams By Georgia K at the event held in London on Thursday evening

Simply stylish: Jessica, 30, sported a white blouse which she teamed with distressed denim skinny jeans and high heels

The 'Only Way is Essex' star may be head over heels in love with his co-star Megan McKenna, who he has been dating for just over a month, but that doesn't mean he's decided to cut all contact with his former flame.

Speaking to BANG Showbiz, Jessica said: I do still text Pete. We're friends, so yeah we talk a lot.

However, the brunette beauty - who split from the heavily-inked hunk late last year following a few months of dating - is adamant their texting will never turn into anything sexual.

Cheers: Her simple look was completed with flawlessly applied make-up and glossy locks as she had a look at Georgias collection

Busy night: Jessica then went on to attend the Zeynep Kartak catwalk show which was in support of the Syrian children refugee crisis charity Turk Kizilayi

Well-heeled: The reality star had her waterfall coat slung over her shoulders while she carried a nude handbag

She added: I definitely wouldn't sext [sexy text] Pete. I wouldn't do that to Megan. I knew Megan from years ago - she was in my band Lola and Pete, obviously, I love to bits. He's a lovely guy, it just wasn't to be with me and him - they obviously must suit better. I'm really happy with it.

Meanwhile, although Pete has wasted no time moving on, the reality TV star is still trying to find her Mr. Right.

She said: I am very single. Don't get me wrong I am talking to some guys but, to be honest, if anything did come up I probably wouldn't tell because I am trying to keep things private for a while in that sort of area.

On the hunt: The reality TV star is still trying to find her Mr. Right as she said, I am very single. Don't get me wrong I am talking to some guys'
With only weeks to go until Ronnie Wood becomes a dad again, the rocker couldn't hide his delight.

The 68-year-old made a show of his pregnant wife Sally, 38, on Thursday night as they stepped out in aid of a Tusk Trust event at Ham Yard Hotel, London.

Naturally, soon-to-be mum Sally - who's due in June - was glowing with her bump on display in a patterned maternity dress with a cute bow on one side.

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Bumping along nicely: Ronnie Wood (left) displayed his pride for pregnant Sally Humphreys (right) as they stepped out in aid of Tusk Trust at Ham Yard Hotel, London on Thursday

Due to give a talk at the event that night, Ronnie pointed to their twin girls in the pictures as expectant mum Sally made him proud by being at his side.

She maintained her high-glamour look in nude pointed heels and offset her black and cream party frock with a striking red lipstick.

Rolling Stones rocker Ronnie was suitably smart in a navy blue suit, but added a characteristically cool edge with his bright white shirt left open at the collar.

Soon-to-be parents: The duo are expecting twin girls in June this year

Double date: The married duo coupled up with Katherine Jenkins and Andrew Levitas for photos

Ronnie was due to give a talk at the event as the longest standing supporter and first ever Patron of the Tusk Trust, having joined in 1991.

Aside from his campaigning work, Ronnie has only recently returned from Cuba where he was touring with The Rolling Stones again.

It wrapped up with good time to spare until he becomes a father for the fifth and sixth time in two months.

Strong supporter: Ronnie has been campaigning with Tusk Trust since 1991

He recently revealed the band's excitement in an interview with HELLO! magazine, explaining: 'The Rolling Stones are all thrilled. Keith [Richards] loves kids, so he's excited, and Mick [Jagger] keeps telling me to give him a year and then he'll be our nanny so now we're calling him 'Nanny Mick'."

'The Stones are one big family. It's all about the kids. In this tour, everyone's been there: (Sir Mick's children) Jade, Karis, James, Lizzy, Gabriel, Lucas and Georgia May; Patti and Keith's girls (Theodora and Alexandra) and Charlie's granddaughter Charlotte.

'My girls will be two more added into the mix. I hope my girls will be coming on tour with me for years to come.'
Jessica Chastain showed off her elegant style in a new photo shoot.

The actress looked chic in a sheer black-and-blue dress as she posed on the cover of Manhattan magazine and opened up about her career and her low-key life with boyfriend Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo in New York.

The 39-year-old held up a vintage camera as she modeled a delicate Bibhu Mohapatra crepe dress with see-through black sleeves and high neckline.

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Blow up: Actress Jessica Chastain wore a blue Bibhu Mohapatra dress with sheer black sleeves for an elegant photo shoot with Modern Luxury magazine

In another shot, she modeled a white dress with a lace cross-body design and sleeve.

And she donned a long dark coat over a fitted blue-and-black floral dress in another look, pulling her hair back in a chic updo.

Despite her glam image, Jessica said she 'begged' her The Huntsman: Winter's War director to let her add a scar her character's face, to show that there is beauty in imperfections.

'I didn't think the studio was going to go for it, but they did,' she told the magazine.

Classy: The 39-year-old wore a Dior silk crepe dress and styled her red hair in a touseled bob

Stylish: Jessica modeled a white tank-style top with a long lace sleeve as she opened up about life with her boyfriend Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo

'I was so happy with it too. When you think of heroines or love interests, you think of these perfect little packages, but I think scars are really beautiful. Flaws are beautiful.'

The actress - who has started her production company Freckle Films to help create movies with female and diverse points of view- said she told Chris Hemsworth she'd only take the part if she could 'kiss ass.'

'I said, 'Listen, I really want to work with you. But please don't send me a script if my character doesn't kick ass. I don't want to be the girlfriend,' she said. 'He was like, 'You have no idea.'

Flawless: The Huntsman: Winter's War star says she added a scar to her character's face because she wanted to show 'flaws are beautiful'

The private star also briefly opened up about life with her Italian boyfriend in New York City, where she moved in 2012.

'I had been in a one-year relationship with someone who lives in Italy, and I knew that if I remained in California it would be harder to see each other,' she explained of her decision to move to Manhattan.

The low-key couple enjoy attending Broadway plays and visiting their favorite Korean and vegan restaurants, she said.
They are high profile businesswomen with a taste for haute couture fashion, sparkly jewellery, big hair and gossip.

But the Real Housewives Of Melbourne (RHOM) might be no more, it has been claimed.

According to the Daily Telegraph, there has been much speculation that 'Foxtel will announce The Real Housewives Of Sydney before another series goes ahead in Melbourne'.

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More drama! Real Housewives of Melbourne is speculated to cancel after the third season despite a Sydney spin off of the popular show

The Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Foxtel for comment.

To add to the reports, it seems producers have headed straight to Sydney for the newest installment of the international franchise and are understood to have been casting among local identities.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Skye Leckie leads a number of formidable women at the top of the list for producers, who have been meeting with a number of ladies over lunch in the posh suburb of Woollahra.

'I've been on the list since day one': Skye Leckie confirmed recently she was among the names being considered for The Real Housewives Of Sydney

The wife of former Seven Network boss David Leckie, appeared to confirm the news when contacted by the publication, saying: 'I've heard I've been on the list since day one but I dont know, you've caught me unawares'

The couple celebrated their 20 year wedding anniversary in January this year, together with their family, on holiday in Hawaii.

'This new years I resolve to be less awesome since that is really the only thing I do in excess,' the confident blonde beauty posted on social media of her 2016 aspirations.

Arty: Christa Billich, who is married to artist Charles Billich is also named as a potential star of the new show

Another among the highly likely cast mates is Christa Billich who is married to artist Charles Billich and is also besties with Real Housewives of Melbourne star, Gamble Breaux.

As a result, the blonde and her pet pooch have already appeared a number of times on the Melbourne series as guests.

Daily Mail Australia understands Matty Samaei, cosmetic beauty therapist and TV personality, who is the beauty adviser and a judge for the Miss Universe Australia pageant, is also among contenders.

While Daily Mail Australia can confirm PR maven Roxy Jacenko will not be on the show, it's not yet certain whether former WAG Nation starlet Terry Biviano will be among the mix.

Beauty queen: Daily Mail Australia understands cosmetic beauty therapist, TV commentator and Miss Universe Australia beauty adviser Matty Samaei is still be in talks for a spot on the show

Brains and beauty: Model-turned-businesswoman Michelle Walsh, who's husband Martin runs the modelling agency Chadwicks, is also believed to be one of the top candidates for the spin-off series

No go? While Daily Mail Australia can confirm Roxy Jacenko (left) will not be part of the series, it's not known if former WAG Nation star Terry Biviano (right) will be part of the show

The Sydney Morning Herald first reported on Matty's screen tests last October, which Daily Mail Australia understands are still on-going with no contracts given out as yet by Foxtel.

It's understood Foxtel are yet to officially commission the spin-off but have been running a range of castings over lunch to find the right mix of feisty beauties.

Other names believed to be contenders for a spot on the upcoming series including model-turned-business woman Michelle Walsh, who ran online kid's clothing company Mrs Walsh, which was relaunched as a lifestyle blog in 2010.

Bringing the edge: Make-up and tattoo artist Gordana Willesee-Poljak (left), is the ex-wife of TV journalist Mike Willesee and could bring an edge to the series

Hats a good look! Former One Nation politician David Oldfield's wife Lisa Oldfied is in talks with producers

Designer dresses galore: Designer Charlie Brown name has been thrown into the mix

Hairdresser to the stars Jo Bailey's long-time business partner Marylin Koch has been reported on more than one occasion to be among the top contenders.

While fashion designer Charlie Brown is believed to have been in talks at some stage, as was former One Nation politician David Oldfield's wife Lisa Oldfied.

Ex-wife of TV journalist Mike Willesee, Gordana Willesee-Poljak, a make-up and tattoo artist has also confirmed she was speaking to producers.

Meanwhile, Lanolips founder Kirsten Carriol and comedian Vince Sorrenti's wife, Kate, were also believed to be in talks.
Alicia Vikander battled it out with a Star Wars heroine and came out on top.

The 27-year-old actress will star as Lara Croft in the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot according to a Thursday report from The Hollywood Reporter.

She seems to have beat out some stiff competition for the coveted role as Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens actress Daisy Ridley was also reportedly in consideration.

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Contentious: Alicia Vikander is set to star as Lara Croft in the upcoming Tomb Raider film as Daisy Ridley had been previously considered for the role, according to The Hollywood Reporter

Last month she told THR that there 'have been conversations' about taking the role but she hadn't been officially offered it.

The 24-year-old British star said that the script had not been completed and added: 'Im waiting for someone to say, "I want you, lets do it."'

Vikander was not only able to snag the role from a prominent name but also has quite big holsters and boots to fill as she will be portraying the character popularised by Angelina Jolie.

Belle of the ball: The 27-year-old Vikander has enjoyed a milestone year as she took home the Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role for her work in The Danish Girl

Rising star: The 24-year-old Ridley made her name starring as Rey in the blockbuster Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens

In the upcoming project, Alicia will be portraying the female-empowerment character in her younger years as the untested and unproven protagonist fights to survive her first adventure.

Roar Uthaug, known for his work on last year's The Wave, is set to direct as Graham King will produce the flick.

The 40-year-old Jolie previously starred as Croft in 2001's Lara Croft: Tomb Raiser and 2003's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life.

The character originated with 1996's Tomb Raider video game on the original Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn.

It is still one of the most popular adventure titles out there as there have been 16 total games including last year's Rise Of The Tomb Raider.

Big shoes to fill: Angelina Jolie previously portrayed Lara Croft in 2001's Lara Croft: Tomb Raiser and 2003's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life

Highly-successful: The character of Lara Croft originated in the highly popular Tomb Raider franchise of video games as there have been 16 tittles total including last year's Rise Of The Tomb Raider

Alicia has had a milestone year in her acting career as she took home the Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role for her work in The Danish Girl.

The Swedish-born beauty also received rave reviews for her work in critically-acclaimed fantasy/mystery flick Ex-Machina.

Her star is shining as bright as ever as she is set to star in drama The Light Between Two Oceans alongside real-life boyfriend Michael Fassbender. It is set for release in September in the US with a UK release on 7 January 2017.

Alicia will also be seen soon starring in a Summer blockbuster with Matt Damon in Jason Bourne. The action flick is set for worldwide release on 28 July.
From the slicked back hair, to the dark-rimmed glasses and dapper suit, many would be forgiven for thinking retired TV presenter Denis Norden had perched himself on Graham Nortons sofa.

In fact it was actor Martin Freeman who was being interviewed and he confessed he had dressed up for the occasion.

Speaking on the BBC One show, he said: I like clothes a lot but I cant just throw something on. I cant leave the house  whether its walking the dog or going to Sainsburys  without it being right. That can take a while but it drives my wife up the wall.

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Double take: Actor Martin Freeman cut a striking resemblance to retired TV presenter Denis Norden for his appearance on the Graham Norton show

The Office star, who will appear on the chat show Friday evening was promoting his latest film, Captain America: Civil War, in which he plays the character Everett Ross.

The 44-year-old father of two, said he is keen to appear in more superhero films in the future.

Bafta-winning Freeman said: Thats the plan. I think my character will develop a bit more as I enter the Marvel world a bit more which seems to be happening.

Promo tour: The Office star, who will appear on the chat show Friday evening was promoting his latest film, Captain America: Civil War, in which he plays the character Everett Ross

In a previous interview, the Sherlock star revealed that he 'immediately trusts men' who care about fashion.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies star is a self-confessed lover of clothes and shoes and admits it has only got worse as he's got older.

He said: 'I like people who like clothes. I immediately trust men who are into clothes, even though they could turn out to be horrible people. There is an intelligence about caring about what you wear ...

Nice outfit: Speaking about his ensemble, Martin explained, I like clothes a lot but I cant just throw something on. I cant leave the house  whether its walking the dog or going to Sainsburys  without it being right

Dapper: Denis presented television programmes on ITV for many years, including blooper shows It'll Be Alright on the Night and Laughter File and nostalgia quiz Looks Familiar. He went on to retire in 2006.

'I was always into fashion and, as I've got older, it's got worse. I know there are more important things in the world. Outside my normal life, aside from music, it's where most of my energy goes. I'm not very proud of that. Some people's energy goes on saving Syrian refugees. Mine goes on shoes.'

The 44-year-old actor went as far to describe his fashion addiction as a "sickness", admitting it infuriates his partner of 16 years, Amanda Abbington.

He added to The Times newspaper's Luxx menswear supplement: 'I can't leave the house unless I'm happy with my appearance. It's a sickness. It's a nightmare for Amanda.'
Ruth Wilson has been chosen by radical director Ivo van Hove to lead the first British production of his eye-opening re-examination of Henrik Ibsens 19th-century classic

Award-winning actress Ruth Wilson is going to tackle Hedda Gabler, one of the stages dynamite roles, at the National Theatre.

Wilson  who starred in Luther opposite Idris Elba and the hot U.S. drama The Affair with Dominic West  has been chosen by radical director Ivo van Hove to lead the first British production of his eye-opening re-examination of Henrik Ibsens 19th-century classic, which he directed in Amsterdam and New York several years ago.

Van Hove has made a name for himself by breathing new life into landmark dramas, such as Arthur Millers The Crucible (now on Broadway with Saoirse Ronan, Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo) and A View From The Bridge.

When he directed Hedda Gabler at the New York Theatre Workshop back in 2004, using a translation by Christopher Hampton, the actress playing Hedda had been shorn of the straight-backed period costume the character is traditionally trapped in. Instead, she was wearing a figure-hugging slip.

Van Hove and Jan Versweyveld, his long-time designer, intend to use similar apparel and a contemporary set when they bring their version of Hedda to the Nationals Lyttelton in December.

Van Hove removes as much excess baggage from a piece as possible so the text can be explored without being weighed down by the same old costumes and sets.

I was struck when I saw the show in New York by how dangerous and vital this new Hedda felt.

I can just imagine what an actress of Wilsons powers will inject into the title characters pinched nervous system.

Anyone who saw her starring in Anna Christie or playing Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire, both at the Donmar Warehouse (earning her Olivier honours) will know shes one of the best at portraying complex characters.

In demand, Ruth recently filmed How To Talk To Girls At Parties with Nicole Kidman, and in August will film a third season of The Affair.

The National, under artistic chief Rufus Norris, is on a roll, too, thanks to Danny Sapanis powerful performance in Lorraine Hansberrys revolutionary Les Blancs; Gillian Slovo and Nicolas Kents Another World: Losing Our Children To Islamic State; and the brilliant revival of Ma Raineys Black Bottom.

Theres also excitement about its forthcoming productions The Threepenny Opera, directed by Norris, and The Deep Blue Sea with Helen McCrory, which opens in June.

Watch out for...

Carlyss Peer is starring as Rita in the new production of Groundhog Day

Carlyss Peer, a classically trained actress from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, who started rehearsals on Monday for the musical version of the film Groundhog Day, in which she will play the part of TV producer Rita (Andie MacDowell in the 1993 movie).

Andy Karl plays mean-spirited weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murrays role in the film), who lives the same day over and over again. Eugene McCoy has the part of Larry the cameraman. Matthew Warchus is directing the musical, which has been written by Danny Rubin (who also wrote the picture) and Tim Minchin, who worked with Warchus on Matilda.

Choreographer Peter Darling and the shows designers are using five revolves to give a sense of days repeating themselves over and over again. Performances at the Old Vic will start on July 11.

Anne-Marie Duff and Yolanda Kettle, who will play mother and daughter in Ella Hicksons play Oil, which Carrie Cracknell will direct at the Almeida Theatre from October 7. The drama spans from 1889 to the present day, and follows a familys relationship with oil after it is discovered in the West Country.

Barbara Flynn, Zoe Wanamaker and Nina Sosanya, who star in Elegy  Nick Paynes heartbreaking poem about love and death. As directed by Josie Rourke at the Donmar Warehouse, the hour-long piece makes you think about what truly, deeply matters in life.

Lin-Manuel's hit New York show Hamilton will arrive on the West End next year

Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the Broadway musical megahit Hamilton (its going to be loaded with Tony award nominations when theyre announced on Tuesday), based on the life of early U.S. revolutionary government minister Alexander Hamilton, which will begin performances at the Victoria Palace in the autumn of 2017. (Dates are expected to be officially announced in the next few weeks.) Hamilton has become a phenomenon in the U.S. It started at the Public Theater, where I was lucky enough to catch it with Miranda as Hamilton and Brian dArcy James as King George III, and Ive seen it several more times, with different actors playing the monarch  but always Miranda in the lead.
Earlier this month it was revealed English rock band 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.

Now the music group has announced shows in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth as part of an arena tour Down Under.

This will be the band's first Australian tour since August 2007, with members Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Roger O'Donnell, Jason Cooper and Reeves Gabrels no doubt looking forward to arriving in Australia for the concert extravaganza.

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Heading Down Under: English rock band The Cure has announced shows in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth as part of an arena tour Down Under in July

Taking to the stage at Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney on July 25 and Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on July 28, The Cure will be performing an array of fan favourites for their enthusiastic audiences.

A statement released by Live Nation this week said the band will 'explore 37 years of Cure songs, mixing hits, rarities, favourites and as yet unreleased tracks in a brand new stage production'.

Tickets are set to go on sale on May 6, while concert dates for Adelaide and Perth are yet to be announced.

They will also be making an appearance at the popular Splendour In The Grass 2016 music festival in Byron Bay.

Get ready: The band will perform in Sydney on July 25 and in Melbourne on July 28

To be confirmed: The dates for the Adelaide and Perth concerts are yet to be announced

THE CURE TOUR DATES: Sydney Monday July 25 - Qudos Bank Arena Melbourne Thursday July 28 - Rod Laver Arena Adelaide To be announced Perth To be announced

Furthermore, British alt-rockers The 1975 will also be making an appearance at the festival.

And 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.

Electronic producer Flume will lead the local lineup which includes Courtney Barnett, former Australian Idol contestant turned indie darling Matt Corby and King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard.

The festival will also host Icelandic post-rock outfit Sigur Ros exclusively.

Pre-sale tickets for The Cure's Australian tour are available through Telstra Thanks on May 3 here.
David Gest's funeral is set to take place on Friday at Golders Green crematorium in London, according to reports.

Following the service, the star's ashes are expected to be taken to York, where David had been living since 2013.

The 62-year-old producer was found dead in his hotel room at the Four Seasons in Canary Wharf, east London, on April 12 and his friends and loved ones will gather for a 'celebration of his life' on Friday.

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Gone but not forgotten: David Gest's funeral is set to take place on Friday at Golders Green crematorium in London

A source said: 'David would have wanted something uplifting, so all his friends will be there to celebrate the joy and fun he brought to their lives.'

The decision to take his ashes to York shouldn't come as a surprise to fans, with the reality television star previously saying of the Yorkshire city: 'I've lived in New York, Beverly Hills, I still have property in Hawaii, I lived in Claridge's for two years. But here it's so special.

'When you have the Minster, all other churches fade by comparison.

'It has an elite beauty and the people are so special. I think I'd like to die here.'

The show must go on: The tour is fittingly due to begin at York's Barbican in July

One of the people who will among the congregatuon is Wayne Chadwick, who owns one of David's favourite eateries, York Roast Co.

Mr. Chadwick told York Press: 'It feels pretty special. We never got chance to properly thank the man for what he did for us. He did it all with his heart, he wasn't looking for any deals or discounts, nothing like that, he actually just loved what we did. That was it.

'It's a great shame. I think York took David in, really. If you went back quite a few years, people were very sceptical about him and people got to like him through the jungle ['I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!'], and 'Celebrity Big Brother', but I think in York, the fact he was utterly accessible, he never shirked people, and would speak to anyone was appreciated.'

David's upcoming I'm Not Dead But Alive With Soul tour was thrown into doubt following his untimely death, but the variety show's stars have vowed to go ahead as planned.

The tour is fittingly due to begin at York's Barbican in July and will feature performances by the likes of Dina Carroll, The Stylistics' Russell Thompkins Jr and Deniece Williams.

Its unusual name was a play on a misunderstanding during the last series of Celebrity Big Brother, when housemate Tiffany Pollard wrongly thought David had died during filming.

Imad Handi, who co-produced the tour, said: 'Just like myself, all the artists were devastated when they learned David had died.

'Over the years they had become like a family together due to their close working relationship and the musicians were determined to go ahead with the tour to remember David with their music.

'Although he was known for his reality TV appearances in the UK, he lived for hosting gigs and his soul reviews were always the highlight of his year. I did think about changing the name of the tour but then I decided to keep it as it is in keeping with Davids mischievous sense of humour.

'And also its true, he may sadly be gone but his spirit is alive in the music he loved.'
No kidding: Rhys Ifans is returning to the stage to play the fool.

More accurately, the actor will be playing King Lears Fool in a production of Shakespeares tragedy that marks Glenda Jacksons theatrical comeback after 23 years as a Labour MP.

Jackson, who won two Oscars before she entered politics, will (as this page revealed) take the title role of Lear in what is likely to be one of the most exciting examples of gender-blind casting ever seen on the London stage.

Rhys Ifans (left) is returning to stage to play the Fool in King Lear, opposite Glenda Jackson as the eponymous king in what will be an exciting piece of gender-blind casting

Ifans formally accepted the part of Lears scheming clown this week after being approached by Deborah Warner, who is directing the play at the Old Vic from October 25. Ifans joins Harry Melling, who will play heroic Edgar, who tries to watch over Lear and Gloucester, his father.

Ifans is no stranger to Old Vic artistic chief Matthew Warchus: they worked together at the National Theatre in a version of Volpone, which Warchus directed. And although Ifans is nobodys fool, he delivered a delicious portrait of one when he played Hugh Grants Welsh lodger in the film Notting Hill, memorably posing for the paparazzi in his underpants when it was discovered that Julia Robertss fictional movie star was dating his flatmate.

Ifans was well-regarded as an actor before Notting Hill, but once audiences saw his comic timing, his career took off.

Tickets for King Lear are going to be thin on the ground. Priority booking for Old Vic members opens at noon on Wednesday and seats go on general release from May 31, also from 12pm.

Director Warner told me that Jacksons quarter of a century in Parliament was an example of someone going off to research an interior life.

But from an actors point of view, that can only be thrillingly meaningful, with respect to what they bring back, she said.

Annette Bening will portray Hollywood femme fatale Gloria Grahame in a film about how a family in Liverpool helped nurse her through serious ill-health.

In the Forties and Fifties, Grahame got to work with the likes of James Stewart and Humphrey Bogart. In 1953, she won an Oscar for The Bad And The Beautiful.

Behind the scenes, though, she had an eventful private life and later had trouble finding work.

Annette Bening will portray Hollywood femme fatale Gloria Grahame in a film about how a family in Liverpool helped nurse her through serious ill-health

In the late Seventies she met the young actor Peter Turner. When Grahame became ill, Turner moved her into his familys home in Liverpool, where his mother cared for her until Grahame returned to the States.

Turner later wrote Film Stars Dont Die In Liverpool, a sad tome about Grahames decline.

Bond producer Barbara Broccoli has cast Bening as Grahame, Jamie Bell as Turner and Julie Walters as his mother.

In the Forties and Fifties, Grahame got to work with the likes of James Stewart and Humphrey Bogart. In 1953, she won an Oscar for The Bad And The Beautiful

When you think of big effects in musicals, perhaps you recall the chandelier dropping in Phantom Of The Opera or the helicopter landing in Miss Saigon.

But Daniel Evans and designer Lez Brotherston are going for the Dior dazzle.

In Act II, you see nine Dior creations! Evans told me during a break from rehearsing a musical version of Paul Gallicos novella Flowers For Mrs Harris.

The house of Dior has given Brotherston permission to replicate elements of gowns it created in post-war Paris.

And these dresses are central to the show by Richard Taylor and Rachel Wagstaff. Clare Burt (pictured left) plays Ada Harris. Shes a charlady. Shes happy, shes funny and she inspires people, Burt told me.

One day she discovers a Dior gown called Ravishing, and it ignites something within her. To her, the dress is a piece of art; and it enables her to take a risk and fully embrace life, Burt said.

The show, which runs at Sheffield Theatres, from May 19, has a cast that includes Anna Jane Casey as the best friend, Rebecca Caine as the owner of Ravishing, plus Laura Pitt-Pulford, Nicola Sloane and Moyo Akande.
Syria ceasefire should be 'revitalised' before peace talks resume

The UN's Syria envoy said on Thursday he planned to hold another round of peace talks next month, but called for a stuttering ceasefire to be "revitalised" before setting a date, as at least 20 civilians were killed in second city Aleppo.

Staffan de Mistura made the comments after briefing the United Nations Security Council on the talks, which he said had made gains despite escalating violence on the ground that continues to threaten the fragile truce.

He said the United States, which supports some rebel groups, and regime ally Russia needed to act, calling on them to organise a high-level Syria meeting before negotiations resume.

Civil defence volunteers evacuate wounded people following a reported airstrike in the rebel-held neighbourhood of Hayy Aqyul, in Syria's second city Aleppo, on April 22, 2016 Ameer Alhalbi (AFP/File)

As the latest round of negotiations went on recess, de Mistura said he wanted to open a fresh set "during the course of May", to build on momentum gained so far.

But he added that he was waiting to fix a date in the hope that world powers would use their leverage to strengthen the ceasefire, which needed to be "urgently revitalised".

"How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?" de Mistura asked.

The announcement came after regime strikes on an Aleppo hospital and nearby residential building late Wednesday left at least 20 civilians dead, including two children, according to civil defence volunteers in the country.

A doctor who was the only paediatrician in the rebel-held eastern neighbourhoods of Aleppo was also among the dead, an AFP correspondent on the ground said.

Video footage filmed by AFP showed the badly damaged hospital, aid workers transporting the victims in ambulances and a weeping man holding a child.

In separate attacks on the east and west of the city earlier in the day, 16 people died, including at least five civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and defence volunteers.

State news agency SANA blamed rocket attacks and gunfire in the west on Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front and its allies.

- Political transition -

De Mistura highlighted that all parties at the Geneva-based talks now recognised the need for a new transitional government in Syria that should be tasked with drafting a new constitution, even if huge divides remain on the nature of that government.

The talks are focused on creating a transitional government capable of leading Syria out of a brutal civil war that has killed more than 270,000 people and displaced millions.

"No one is doubting any more that there is an urgent need for a true and credible political transition," he told reporters.

"There is a clear understanding that a political transition should be overseen by a new, I repeat new, credible and inclusive transitional government, which will be replacing the present governance arrangement," he said.

But the UN mediator declined to discuss the most daunting obstacle at the talks -- the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The main opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) has insisted that Assad cannot be part of a transitional government and must agree to leave power as part of any peace deal.

Government negotiators have said Assad's fate is not on the agenda at the talks.

The HNC, which is backed by Saudi Arabia and the West, officially withdrew from this round last week to protest escalating violence, but left technical experts in Geneva who continued to meet with UN mediators.

On Wednesday Russia asked the UN to blacklist Jaish al-Islam, a major Syrian rebel group that counts HNC chief negotiator Mohammed Alloush among its members.

The group is "closely linked to terrorist organisations, primarily the Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda", Moscow's ambassador to the UN said.

But Alloush rejected the accusation and said Russia was committing "massacres" with its air and artillery strikes in support of Assad.

US State Department spokesman John Kirby backed de Mistura's concern over escalating violence, adding, "We urge Russia to press the Assad regime to fulfil its commitments under (previous resolutions)".

Syria's hard-to-reach areas -, -, - (AFP Graphic)

UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura arrives for a meeting with the government delegation during peace talks at the United Nations in Geneva, on April 26, 2016 Denis Balibouse (POOL/AFP/File)
UN blacklists tanker carrying Libyan oil

An Indian-flagged oil tanker on Wednesday was added to a UN sanctions blacklist for illegally carrying crude from Libya.

The Distya Ameya vessel was headed for Malta after leaving on Monday from eastern Libya, where rival authorities were behind the sale of the crude.

The decision would mean that port authorities in Malta or in any other destination country would have to impound the tanker on arrival, diplomats said.

General view of an oil and gas terminal in western Libya Mahmud Turika (AFP/File)

The UN sanctions committee said the vessel may have been sold recently and its name changed to Kassos. On Tuesday, the tanker was north of Al-Bayda, Libya and headed in the direction of Malta.

A Security Council diplomat said the tanker's final destination could be the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and that the cargo was in violation of a ban on oil revenues to entities other than Libya's new unity government.

The tanker was listed for "transporting crude oil illicitly exported from Libya, based on information received from the government of Libya", the sanctions committee said in a news release.

Libya was left with two rival administrations after a militia alliance took over Tripoli in mid-2014, but a new UN-backed government of national unity is seeking to assert its authority in the country.

The new government is working to tighten control over the country's oil revenues with the National Oil Corporation and the central bank both throwing their support behind the new authorities earlier this month.
Real estate tycoon Durst to be transferred to California prison

Real estate tycoon Robert Durst, charged with shooting a friend in the back of the head 16 years ago, will be transferred to a prison near Los Angeles to serve time for unrelated gun charges, a judge in New Orleans ruled.

Durst, 73, is to be transferred to the minimum-security prison at Terminal Island, where the likes of crime boss Al Capone and mass murderer Charles Manson were once held.

He pleaded guilty to weapons charges in New Orleans in February and the judge on Wednesday approved a plea bargain agreement in that case, sentencing him to seven years in prison.

Federal Correctional Institution, Terminal Island, a low security facility housing male inmates, seen at the entrance of the Port of Los Angeles Kevork Djansezian (Getty/AFP/File)

Durst has sought his transfer to Los Angeles where he has said he plans to enter a not-guilty plea for the 2000 murder of his close friend Susan Berman, who was a mobster's daughter.

Berman was shot in the back of the head at her home in Beverly Hills, a day before she was due to be questioned by police who had reopened an investigation into the 1982 disappearance of the tycoon's wife, Kathie Durst, in New York.

Durst appeared to make an unwitting confession to a number of killings during filming of the acclaimed six-part HBO documentary "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst."

In the final episode Durst was heard muttering to himself, "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course," apparently unaware that a wireless microphone remained switched on while he used the bathroom.

It was not clear if Durst was sincerely confessing, but authorities in Los Angeles said the documentary had played a role in their decision to seek the multimillionaire's arrest for Berman's murder.

He was arrested in March of last year when police found a .38 caliber revolver and marijuana in his New Orleans hotel room.
California cops in spotlight over racist messages

Police in Los Angeles and San Francisco have come under fire after authorities uncovered racist and homophobic text messages and emails in which minorities were referred to as "barbarians" and "wild animals."

Three officers in San Francisco have already left the police department after the messages were discovered and a fourth is facing disciplinary measures, officials said.

On Tuesday, authorities released details of text messages exchanged between the three former officers in which they used the N-word to refer to black people, and described Arabs as "rag heads."

San Francisco police cars sit parked in front of the Hall of Justice Justin Sullivan (Getty/AFP/File)

The messages could affect at least 207 criminal cases, including three for murder, San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi told reporters.

He said the slurs were discovered as part of a separate probe over rape accusations against Jason Lai, one of the former officers.

In one of the text messages Lai compares black people to "barbarians" and a "pack of wild animals on the loose."

"It is chilling how casually former officer Lai dehumanizes the citizens he was sworn to serve," Adachi said. "He wished violence upon the very people he was being paid to protect and none of his colleagues turned him in."

In Los Angeles, the county sheriff's chief of staff, Tom Angel, has also come under the spotlight for emails he forwarded in 2012 and 2013 mocking Muslims, blacks, Latinos and women.

Angel at the time was a top police official in the city of Burbank, near Los Angeles.

According to the Los Angeles Times, which obtained a copy of the emails, one message forwarded by Angel on January 7, 2012, lists a series of terrorist attacks attributed to "devout Muslim male extremists" and says "Muslims, gotta love em can't punish em .......?"

Officials at the sheriff's office in Burbank could not be reached for comment but Angel told the Times he did not mean to embarrass or demean anyone and that it was unfortunate his work emails had not been kept private.

"Anybody in the workplace unfortunately forwards emails from time to time that they probably shouldn't have forwarded," Angel told the Times. "I apologize if I offended anybody, but the intent was not for the public to have seen these jokes."
Australia warned of 'eroding' gun laws, 20 years after massacre

Australia marked 20 years since its last mass shooting Thursday as campaigners warned its gun laws, which were severely tightened after the massacre, are being eroded.

Thirty-five people died at the historic Tasmanian colonial convict site of Port Arthur in 1996 as lone gunman Martin Bryant, armed with semi-automatic weapons, went on the rampage.

Now aged 48, he remains in jail after being sentenced to 35 life sentences without parole.

Gun Control Australia says the estimated total number of firearms in the hands of civilians was now 3.2 million -- the same number as in 1996 David McNew (Getty/AFP/File)

Then-prime minister John Howard reacted swiftly by pushing for tough gun laws, including bans on certain weapons, a minimum age, licences and secure storage.

Since then there have been no massacres on such a scale, in contrast to countries such as the United States where mass shootings are common, with guns being blamed for around 10,000 homicides each year.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was to attend a memorial service to mark the anniversary at the popular tourist site, insisted the laws would not be watered down.

"John Howard ensured that we have had, and have, the toughest gun control laws in the world and we are committed to ensuring they remain just that," he told reporters in Tasmania.

"We are committed to ensuring that our national firearms agreement becomes stronger and that Australians remain safe from gun crimes, like the shocking events at Port Arthur."

But Rebecca Peters, a campaigner to reform Australia's laws after Port Arthur and the 10 other mass shootings in the decade before it, said that while the changes introduced by Howard were "a very powerful step forward", they were slipping.

"Australia was recognised as having the best gun laws in the world," she told AFP. "Twenty years later, those gun laws are being eroded, we are slipping backwards."

Gun Control Australia agreed, saying the estimated total number of firearms in the hands of civilians was now 3.2 million -- the same number as in 1996.

The organisation's chair, Sam Lee, said while people must have a gun license to possess a firearm, some owners were accumulating many weapons, while unlicensed people were also able to shoot at gun clubs.

"We have seen a watering down of gun laws... as the gun lobby groups continue to prosper and pro-gun representatives to state and federal parliaments gain power," Lee said.

Research by Philip Alpers, a University of Sydney gun control expert and founding director of GunPolicy.org, backed the concern.

"The million guns destroyed after Port Arthur have been replaced with 1,026,000 new ones. And the surge only shows upward momentum," he said in a commentary for academic journal The Conversation.
Australia talks tough on asylum-seekers

Australia cannot be "misty-eyed" about boatpeople, the country's prime minister said Thursday, the day after his immigration policy was thrown into disarray when Papua New Guinea ordered an offshore processing camp to close.

Malcolm Turnbull, who likely faces an election in coming weeks, said allowing even genuine refugees who arrived by boat to settle in Australia would encourage more people to make the risky journey.

"By stopping the people-smuggling we have stopped people drowning at sea," he told reporters.

Australia has a long-standing policy of sending boatpeople to processing centres in Manus island and Nauru Peter Parks (AFP/File)

"We cannot be misty-eyed about this. We have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose."

Canberra has a long-standing policy of sending boatpeople to processing centres in Papua New Guinea's Manus island and the Pacific nation of Nauru.

Applicants who are deemed legitimate refugees are offered resettlement in PNG or Cambodia, but not admitted to Australia.

The policy was dealt a blow Wednesday when the PNG government ordered the Manus island facility to close after the supreme court ruled it was unconstitutional and illegal.

Canberra officials are set to hold talks with their Port Moresby counterparts next week on what to do with the 850 or so men held there.

But Turnbull was unequivocal.

"They will not come to Australia. That is absolutely clear and the PNG government knows that, understands that very well," he told reporters.

"To do that would send a signal to the people-smugglers to get back into business, and that is utterly unacceptable."

Boat arrivals have been halted since the government put in place its tough policies, compared to at least 1,200 people dying trying to reach Australia by sea between 2008 and 2013.

Australian media have reported the government is trying to negotiate deals with Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

It also has a detention camp on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru, where an asylum-seeker on Wednesday set himself on fire during a visit by UN officials.

No timeframe for closing the Manus island facility has been provided.
India court rejects French woman's extradition challenge

India's top court on Thursday rejected a French woman's challenge against extradition to Chile, where she is wanted over the assassination of a key supporter of General Augusto Pinochet's military regime.

Chile is seeking the extradition of Marie-Emmanuelle Verhoeven, aged in her mid 50s, for her alleged role in a conspiracy to kill Senator Jaime Guzman Errazuriz on April 1, 1991.

Indian police arrested her on February 16 last year as she entered the country overland from Nepal, and she has been held in New Delhi's high security Tihar Jail ever since.

A policeman stands guard at a watchtower at New Delhi's high security Tihar Jail Raveendran (AFP/File)

Verhoeven, who has told authorities she was visiting India on a Buddhist pilgrimage, had challenged a treaty between India and Chile allowing for extradition.

Lawyers argued that the treaty dating back to the 1800s was not constitutional because it was not ratified after partition of India in 1947.

But the Supreme Court in a written judgement on Thursday ruled in favour of the Indian government which argued it was still valid, her lawyer Ramni Taneja said.

"This is a big blow and means the extradition proceedings can continue to go ahead. This has been very devastating for her," Taneja told AFP.

Extradition proceedings which had been on hold in another Delhi court are now expected to resume in the coming days, Taneja said.

The Supreme Court in November rejected Verhoeven's request for release on the grounds that her arrest and detention were illegal.

She was arrested in India on the basis of an Interpol notice for her detention issued at Chile's request, but Interpol later cancelled the notice.

The Delhi High Court in September ruled in favour of Verhoeven's immediate release, saying the extradition request was illegal, but shortly afterwards she was re-arrested in prison after a fresh request from Chile.

Verhoeven, a native of Nantes in western Frances, was arrested in the German city of Hamburg in January 2014 and detained for four months.

But Germany rejected Chile's request to extradite her -- something her Indian lawyers had pointed to as they tried to thwart her extradition.

Verhoeven lived in Chile from 1985 to 1995 and worked to promote human rights there, before returning to France.
Two North Korea missile tests fail: South

North Korea on Thursday made two failed bids to test fire a powerful, new medium-range ballistic missile, in a thwarted display of military strength ahead of a landmark ruling party congress.

South Korea's defence ministry said an initial morning launch of what was understood to be a Musudan missile saw the rocket plunge back to earth seconds after take-off.

A second attempt in the evening -- again of a Musudan -- also appeared to have failed, a ministry official said.

North Korea initially tried to test a Musudan on April 15, but the exercise ended in failure

North Korea has now made three unsuccessful bids in two weeks to test-fly a Musudan, which is capable of striking US bases on the Pacific island of Guam.

The first effort on April 15 -- the birthday of founding leader Kim Il-Sung -- ended in what the Pentagon described as "fiery, catastrophic" failure, with the missile apparently exploding just after take-off.

South Korean military officials say the North is desperate to register a successful launch ahead of next week's party congress, at which leader Kim Jong-Un is expected to take credit for pushing the country's nuclear weapons programme to new heights.

- Nuclear test fears -

There is growing concern that Pyongyang is also preparing to conduct a fifth nuclear test before the party gathering begins on May 6.

In recent months the North has claimed a series of major technical breakthroughs in developing what it sees as the ultimate goal of its nuclear drive -- an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to targets across the continental United States.

The achievements trumpeted by Pyongyang have included miniaturising a nuclear warhead to fit on a missile, developing a warhead that can withstand atmospheric re-entry and building a solid-fuel missile engine.

Last Saturday, it successfully tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) and was promptly criticised by the UN Security Council.

Existing UN resolutions forbid North Korea from the use of any ballistic missile-related technology, and South Korea said it would push for fresh penalties to be imposed on Pyongyang.

"The government strongly condemns this additional ballistic missile launch... which is a clear violation of UN resolutions and an act of provocation," the foreign ministry in Seoul said after the failed Musudan test on Thursday morning.

It said it would work with other UN members to "try to put the North's regime under more sanctions."

- Longer range -

The Musudan is believed to have an estimated range of anywhere between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres (1,550 to 2,500 miles). The lower range covers the whole of South Korea and Japan, while the upper range would include US military bases on Guam.

The missile has never been successfully flight-tested.

Three failures in swift succession will be seen as an embarrassment for the leadership, especially as it has built up the party congress -- the first to be held for nearly four decades -- as an opportunity to celebrate the country's achievements.

Speaking last weekend during a visit to Germany, US President Barack Obama warned that North Korea was making dangerous progress even when its efforts fell short of outright success.

"Although, more often than not, they fail in many of these tests, they gain knowledge each time," Obama said.

"We take it very seriously, so do our allies and so does the entire world," he added.

Anxiety has been high on the divided Korean peninsula since Pyongyang conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and a rocket launch a month later that was widely seen as a disguised ballistic missile test.

The UN Security Council responded with its toughest sanctions to date, angering the North, which has since made repeated threats of attacks targeting the South and the United States.

North Korean missiles

North Korea released this picture purporting to show the underwater test-fire of a strategic submarine ballistic missile at an undisclosed location in North Korea on April 23, 2016 KCNA (KCNA VIA KNS/AFP/File)

Kim Jong-Un's nuclear ambitions Adrian LEUNG, John SAEKI (AFP)
Yemen suicide bomber targets Aden police chief

A suicide bomber targeted the police chief of Yemen's second city Aden on Thursday in the latest attack against senior officials in the base of the Saudi-backed government, a security official said.

The bombing came after loyalist forces backed by a Saudi-led military coalition seized the key southeastern port city of Mukalla and the nearby airport and oil facilities from Al-Qaeda, ending a year-long occupation by the jihadists.

General Shallal Shayae escaped unharmed from the attack but one guard was wounded when the bomber blew up a vehicle packed with explosives, the official said.

Yemeni loyalist forces and onlookers gather at the scene of a suicide attack targeting the police chief in Aden on April 28, 2016 Saleh Al-Obeidi (AFP)

A witness said the bomber, dressed as a woman, was stopped at a checkpoint on the perimeter of the compound around the general's house, where he blew himself up.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, but Shayae has survived attacks by jihadists more than once.

In February, suspected Al-Qaeda militants opened fire on a convoy carrying Shayae and Aden governor Aidarus al-Zubaidi, but they escaped unharmed.

Shayae and Zubaidi also survived a car bombing that targeted their convoy in Aden on January 5 killing two of their guards.

The port city has seen a growing jihadist presence since loyalist forces backed by the Saudi-led coalition drove Huthi Shiite rebels out of the city in July.

For the first 12 months of the intervention that the coalition launched in March last year, it focused its firepower on the rebels, creating a power vacuum that was exploited not only by Al-Qaeda, but also by rival jihadists of the Islamic State group.

As a ceasefire with rebels went into effect on April 11, the loyalists and their allies turned their guns on the jihadists, driving them out of a string of southern provincial capitals and imposing heavy losses.

Washington regards Al-Qaeda's Yemen-based branch as its most dangerous and has waged a drone war against its commanders since 2002.
Japan wants foreign tourists to avoid 'public flatulence'

A Japanese tourism board has called on foreign tourists to refrain from public "belching or flatulence" in an etiquette guide which was hastily rewritten, reportedly after complaints from a Chinese resident.

The Hokkaido Tourism Organization, which represents Japan's northern-most island, published a downloadable brochure on its website, with polite instructions on everything from public bathing to using a Japanese toilet.

Helpfully, it even dedicated an entire section to protocol for avoiding bodily functions.

People cover their noses to avoid a foul smell

"Japanese etiquette is based on avoiding causing discomfort or nuisance to others," the guide points out.

"Accordingly, Japanese will avoid bodily functions such as belching or flatulence in public entirely, or perform bodily functions as discreetly as possible."

However, the Chinese-language guide -- originally entitled "Common Sense When Travelling in Hokkaido" -- upset a Chinese resident who angrily claimed the diagrams featuring examples of bad tourist behaviour were offensive, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported.

The complaint prompted a new, foreigner-friendly version with softer explanations of Japanese customs.

In the updated guide available in Chinese and English, gone are the large 'X'-marks next to cartoon illustrations of tourists committing, from a Japanese perspective, embarrassing gaffes, such as putting used toilet paper into the waste bin -- the general custom in China -- instead of flushing it away.

According to The Japan Times newspaper, the original booklet was first published last August and was targeted at Chinese tourists, including a reminder not to open products before buying them when shopping, a habit also seen in China.

China has said it will monitor the behaviour of unruly tourists abroad and punish them on their return home after being shamed by a string of well-publicised incidents in recent years.

Research by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch found that more than 100 million Chinese tourists went abroad in 2014, spending some $164 billion.

But reports of disruptive behaviour have tarnished their reputation, such as passengers scalding a flight attendant with hot water and noodles or a holidaymaker fined in Thailand for washing her feet in the wash basin of a public toilet.

Media in Japan have carried a spate of reports of alleged uncouth behaviour by Chinese visitors, though some local commentators have urged understanding, recalling that the emergence five decades ago of Japanese tourists as a force in global travel was often met with complaints about their behaviour.

Around 85,000 copies of the Hokkaido tourist brochure have reportedly been printed in Chinese and English, to be distributed to hotels and tourist attractions across the island.

Chinese tourists spent more than $164 billion in 2014, according to a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch Toru Yamanaka (AFP/File)
Death toll in Syria's Aleppo rises despite UN truce plea

The death toll from an upsurge of fighting in Syria's second city Aleppo rose on Thursday despite a plea by the UN envoy for the warring sides to respect a February ceasefire.

Rescue volunteers in a rebel-held neighbourhood recovered another 10 bodies from the rubble, taking the death toll from overnight air strikes by the regime to 30, the civil defence said.

In government-held areas, rebel fire killed four people early on Thursday, state news agency SANA reported.

A Syrian couple walk with their baby amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following a reported airstrike on April 28, 2016 in Aleppo Baraa Al-Halabi (AFP)

One of the regime strikes on the rebel-held Sukkari neighbourhood hit a hospital, killing the only paediatrician still working in opposition areas of the city, civil defence said.

Another strike hit a block of flats close to the Al-Quds hospital.

At least 20 of the dead were civilians.

"We cannot identify the 10 bodies. Some of them are too badly burned, others are missing their heads and others are badly disfigured," a rescue worker told AFP.

The air raids paused for several hours in the early morning but resumed at around 10 am (0700 GMT), an AFP correspondent reported.

The deaths are the latest from an upsurge of fighting between government and rebel forces in the divided city that has killed nearly 150 people since last Friday.

They come despite an appeal by UN envoy Staffan de Mistura late on Wednesday for urgent steps to rescue the February 27 truce from its cosponsors Russia and the United States.

Washington has accused Moscow of encouraging its Damascus ally to embark on an offensive to retake the whole of Aleppo, Syria's pre-war commercial hub.

Moscow has countered that the rebels in the city are fighting alongside Al-Qaeda, which is not covered by the ceasefire, and has asked the UN to add two key Islamist rebel groups to the exclusion blacklist.
US, UN condemn Syria hospital bombing in war-ravaged Aleppo

The United States and the United Nations Thursday condemned an air strike on a hospital in Syria's Aleppo, with Washington demanding that Russia restrain its Syrian ally.

UN officials also voiced alarm at the "catastrophic deterioration" of the situation in Syria and appealed on world powers to salvage a February 27 truce.

But in Aleppo on Thursday, fighting between rebels and regime forces killed 53 civilians -- the highest toll for a single day in a week of violence that has cost more than 200 lives, according to a monitor.

Syrians evacuate a toddler from a destroyed building following an air strike on the rebel-held neighbourhood of al-Kalasa in Aleppo, on April 28, 2016 Ameer Alhalbi (AFP)

The Syrian army was meanwhile poised to launch an offensive against rebels who control part of the northern city.

Secretary of State John Kerry expressed "outrage" over Wednesday's air strike that hit Al-Quds hospital in Aleppo's rebel-held Sukkari neighbourhood.

He said it appeared to be "a deliberate strike on a known medical facility" and said Russia, which backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, must restrain the Damascus regime.

"Russia has an urgent responsibility to press the regime to fulfil its commitments under UNSCR 2254, including in particular to stop attacking civilians, medical facilities, and first responders, and to abide fully by the cessation of hostilities."

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said attacks that target civilians are "inexcusable" violations of humanitarian law.

"There must be accountability for these crimes," he said.

The city's last remaining paediatrician and three children were among the 20 people killed in the air strike overnight on the Al-Quds hospital, which was supported by Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

A civil defence group known as the White Helmets told AFP 30 people were killed in the strike on the hospital and a nearby block of flats.

- Truce 'barely alive' -

The Aleppo violence has raised fears for the ceasefire in other areas of Syria and called into question the future of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva that have now gone into recess.

UN envoy Staffan de Mistura warned that the hard-won February 27 ceasefire was now "barely alive" and could collapse "any time".

Speaking late Wednesday after a third round of Syria peace talks fizzled out, De Mistura also urged its co-sponsors Russia and the United States to take action to rescue it.

He said the United States, which supports some rebel groups, and regime ally Russia needed to act, calling on them to organise a high-level Syria meeting before negotiations resume.

UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien further raised the alarm on Thursday in remarks made at the UN Security Council.

"We must all be ashamed this is happening on our watch," said O'Brien, urging world powers to salvage the truce.

"You must not squander the opportunity presented by talks in Geneva and by the cessation of hostilities to put an end to the massive human suffering in Syria," he said.

And the UN's Jan Egeland, who heads an international humanitarian taskforce for war-ravaged Syria, spoke of a "catastrophic deterioration" of the situation in the country.

"The stakes are so incredibly high," Egeland told reporters in Geneva, and warned that "the lifeline to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people... may be broken."

- 'Humanitarian disaster' -

Rebel rocket and artillery fire on government-held neighbourhoods on Thursday killed 22 civilians, including two children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Regime air strikes on rebel-held districts, including Bustan al-Qasr, killed 31 civilians, including three children, said the British-based monitor.

An AFP correspondent said every building in sight in the Bustan al-Qasr district had had its windows blown out.

"It is the worst day in Aleppo in five years. The regime did not spare a single neighbourhood," said one resident.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned that Aleppo city was "on the brink of humanitarian disaster".

The pro-government Al-Watan newspaper and a Syrian regime source meanwhile said the army was preparing to take the whole of Aleppo.

"Now is the time to launch the battle for the complete liberation of Aleppo," the paper said, adding that it "will not take long to begin, nor to finish".

A regime source told AFP that "the army is preparing a huge operation in the coming days to push the rebels away from the city by encircling it and creating a security zone".

Rebels have controlled eastern districts of Aleppo city since 2012, while western neighbourhoods are held by the regime.

Control of the surrounding province is divided between a myriad of armed groups -- jihadists of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, Kurdish militia and various rebel factions as well as the army.

Further north in the province, rebels including the powerful Islamist Ahrar al-Sham group and Kurdish forces fought fierce battles Wednesday and early Thursday that left 64 fighters dead, a monitor said.

More than 270,000 people have been killed in Syria and millions forced from their homes since the conflict erupted in 2011.

Dozens killed in fighting at Aleppo Sabrina Blanchard (AFP)

Syrians inspect destroyed buildings following a reported air strike on a rebel-held neighbourhood of Aleppo, on April 28, 2016 Ameer Alhalbi (AFP)

A Syrian couple walk with their baby amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following a reported airstrike on April 28, 2016 in Aleppo Baraa Al-Halabi (AFP)

UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura arrives for a meeting with the government delegation during peace talks at the United Nations in Geneva, on April 26, 2016 Denis Balibouse (POOL/AFP/File)
'Dozens dead' in Aleppo clashes

At least 38 civilians were killed and dozens more wounded in fresh violence in Syria's second city Aleppo on Thursday, a monitoring group said.

Rebel rocket and artillery fire on government-held neighbourhoods killed 18 civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Two children were among the dead, and about 40 people were wounded.

Syrians inspect destroyed buildings following a reported air strike on a rebel-held neighbourhood of Aleppo, on April 28, 2016 Ameer Alhalbi (AFP)

Regime air strikes on rebel-held districts, including the heavily populated Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood, killed 20 civilians, the Observatory said.

An upsurge in fighting in Aleppo, Syria's pre-war commercial hub, has killed at least 186 people since Friday, the Britain-based group said.

An AFP correspondent in the city said the barrage of air strikes began at around 10 am (0700 GMT) and was carrying on into the afternoon.

Rescue workers in the city -- known as White Helmets -- said they were exhausted by the escalation in violence.

"We were still working on the air strikes from last night in the Sukkari neighbourhood," one volunteer told AFP.

Overnight raids on the rebel-held neighbourhood hit a hospital and a nearby block of flats killing at least 30 people, the White Helmets said.
Murders force Bangladeshi gay rights activists underground

Xulhaz Mannan was a rallying figure for Bangladesh's marginalised but increasingly outspoken lesbian, gay and transgender community, but his brutal murder has dealt a huge blow to the movement and forced some of its leaders underground.

Mannan, who founded Bangladesh's first magazine for gays and lesbians which he used to launch a vibrant rights movement in the deeply conservative, Muslim-majority country, was hacked to death on Monday along with a fellow activist.

Friends and fellow campaigners this week rushed to remove all trace of their activism from social media sites, fearing they could themselves become targets.

Relatives and friends attend funeral prayers of Xulhaz Mannan, a Bangladeshi gay rights activists who was hacked to death, on April 26, 2016 in Dhaka Rehman Asad (AFP/File)

"Everyone felt safe because of him. But he is gone, so everyone is scared," one fellow activist who helped set up the magazine told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"I'm sure everyone (is now) facing the same devastating situation."

A group of unidentified attackers carrying machetes and guns murdered Mannan and Mahbub Tonoy after gaining access to his Dhaka apartment on Monday night.

It was the latest in a series of killings of secular bloggers and liberal activists in Bangladesh that have caused global outrage, and sparked fears that the attackers are expanding their range of targets to include openly gay people.

Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) has said it killed the men, accusing them of working to "promote homosexuality" in Bangladesh.

The government, however, says homegrown Islamists were responsible. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Monday blamed the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamist ally, Jamaat-e-Islami.

Kyle Knight, who works on LGBT issues for Human Rights Watch, condemned the government for failing to protect activists and said the murders had stoked fears in the small community.

"In recent months LGBT activists had been receiving threats from extremists, and had taken steps to secure themselves -- including by going into hiding," he said in an email response to AFP.

"But discretion on the part of LGBT activists and individuals in the face of persistent abuse and heightened security concerns should not be confused with abolition -- indeed some courageous individuals have already indicated their intent to re-double their efforts."

- 'A huge setback' -

Mannan co-founded Bangladesh's first lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) magazine Roopbaan in 2014.

Gays and lesbians suffer discrimination and often violence in Bangladesh, where homosexual acts are punishable by a maximum life term, although prosecutions are rare.

Many are forced to hide their sexual identity and live double lives for fear of reprisals.

"When the country's first magazine on LGBT issues, Roopbaan, was published, the reaction from the majority was harsh. But things are changing; very slowly, but steadily," Mannan later wrote in a piece for the Guardian's website.

He cited a rise in online activism and the government's decision to recognise a transgender community known as hijras as a separate gender category in official documents.

In the same year he and his fellow activists organised a "rainbow rally" on April 14 as part of Bengali New Year celebrations.

This year, however, police banned the rally citing security concerns after Mannan and his friends received death threats via a Facebook page believed to have been set up by Islamists.

Four LGBT activists were briefly detained as they tried to defy the ban and Mannan spent the day trying to get them freed.

"XM (Xulhaz Mannan) never liked to take any credit. But almost everything we did was his dream," said Roopbaan's co-founder.

Since the murders, many fellow activists have switched off their mobile phones and deactivated their Facebook pages.

It is unclear whether the magazine, which had struggled to stay afloat financially in recent months, will survive -- although most believe the gay rights movement will eventually get back on its feet.

"He was a brave man who touched many hearts," one of Bangladesh's leading transgender activists told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"His death is a huge setback -- at least for the time being."

Bangladesh activist Xulhaz Mannan celebrates Bengali New Year at a rally organised by an LGBT society in Dhaka in 2014 STR (AFP/File)
Malaysia's troubled 1MDB fund ordered to repatriate money

Malaysia's central bank on Thursday ordered troubled state-owned investment firm 1MDB to repatriate money that was sent overseas without approval, putting further strain on the scandal-plagued company just days after it defaulted on a bond issue.

The fund, founded in 2009 by Prime Minister Najib Razak, is teetering on the brink of collapse amid multiple investigations around the world into allegations that billions were looted from it.

Najib also has been under pressure over $681 million that he received from overseas in 2013.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has been in office since 2009 Mohd Rasfan (AFP/File)

A statement issued by the central bank, Bank Negara Malaysia, did not specify how much money 1MDB had been ordered to repatriate.

But the bank has been pressuring 1MDB, or 1Malaysia Development Berhad, over $1.83 billion that the company has said was previously remitted abroad.

As questions swirl around billions of dollars moved around the world by 1MDB, Bank Negara has said the company failed to prove the ultimate use of the money or comply with previous instructions to repatriate the $1.83 billion.

The bank's order requires "1MDB to repatriate monies remitted abroad", it said, adding that the company has "failed to submit evidence and documentation specified by the bank to justify its inability to fully comply with the repatriation order".

1MDB said, in a statement, it would pay an undisclosed fine for not complying with Bank Negaras orders but it did not say if it would also repatriate the money in question.

1MDB, whose advisory board is chaired by Najib, earlier this week defaulted on a $1.75 billion bond issue after missing a $50 million interest payment, triggering fears that the government will have to step in and bailout 1MDB, which could rattle markets and hurt Malaysia's credit rating.

1MDB, which ran up more than $11 billion in debt in a series of much-questioned investments, has steadfastly denied money was stolen or that it was in financial trouble.

But earlier this month a Malaysian parliamentary committee said at least $4.2 billion in questionable overseas money transfers were made by 1MDB.

Najib was plunged into the crisis last year when the Wall Street Journal revealed $681 million in transfers to his personal bank accounts.

He claims the money was a gift from the Saudi royal family, most of which he returned. A Saudi official recently said that was true, but only after weeks of silence that cast doubt on the claim.

In a series of more recent investigative reports, however, the newspaper said Malaysian investigation documents indicate more than $1 billion in 1MDB-linked money had been funnelled to Najib.

Najib and 1MDB vehemently deny that claim.

Najib has faced calls to resign but he has tightened his grip on the ruling party and thwarted domestic investigations. His position is not seen as under imminent threat.
Philippine troops attack Islamic militants holding foreign hostages

Philippine warplanes on Thursday attacked Islamic militants holding 20 foreign hostages on a remote southern island, but there was no sign of the captives, the military said.

Government forces said they rained artillery fire on Abu Sayyaf gunmen on a mountainous area of Jolo island, as planes and helicopters flew low over the jungle terrain dropping bombs.

President Benigno Aquino on Wednesday vowed to "neutralise" the militants, who have declared allegiance to the Islamic State group, a day after the severed head of Canadian hostage John Ridsdel was dumped near Jolo's city hall.

Philippines forces said they sent military planes and helicopters to attack Abu Sayyaf gunmen on Jolo island

"As a result of the bombardments... they were able to occupy the former places occupied by the Abu Sayyaf that resulted in the recovery of (Ridsdel's) torso," military spokesman Colonel Noel Detoyato told reporters in Manila.

He said local civilians told authorities that 14 gunmen were killed, but no bodies were reported to have been discovered and his tally could not be independently verified.

Detoyato said the offensive, targeted at veteran one-armed Abu Sayyaf commander Radullan Sahiron, was proving a success.

"What is important here is that operations are continuing and we are gaining headway and our troops are determined," Detoyato said.

However he said there had been no sightings of the remaining hostages, and that the militants had apparently escaped the area that had been the target of the attacks.

Aquino said Wednesday the hostages, including a Canadian, a Norwegian and a Filipina abducted with Ridsdel from yachts at a southern Philippine marina seven months ago, were being held by Sahiron on Jolo.

The militants are also holding 18 Indonesian and Malaysian sailors kidnapped from waters south of the Philippines over the past month, as well as a Dutch bird watcher abducted in 2012.

The Abu Sayyaf is a radical offshoot of a Muslim separatist insurgency in the south of the mainly Catholic Philippines that has claimed more than 100,000 lives since the 1970s.

It is believed to have just a few hundred militants but has withstood repeated US-backed military offensives against it, surviving by using the mountainous, jungle terrain of Jolo and nearby islands to its advantage.

Abu Sayyaf gangs have earned many millions of dollars from kidnapping foreigners and locals since the early 1990s.

Although the Abu Sayyaf's leaders have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, analysts say they are mainly focused on their lucrative kidnappings-for-ransom rather than setting up an Islamic caliphate.

The Abu Sayyaf is also blamed for deadly bombings, including an attack on a ferry on Manila Bay in 2014 that claimed 116 lives in the country's deadliest terror attack.

The Abu Sayyaf group Adrian Leung, Gal Roma (AFP)
India gets homegrown satellite navigation system

India on Thursday took the final step towards completing its own satellite navigation system, a development heralded by the prime minister as making the nation self-reliant in the field of space-based positioning.

The seventh satellite to make up the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) was launched into space via a rocket from Sriharikota spaceport in southwestern India at 12:50 pm IST (0720 GMT).

However, unlike the widely used United States' Global Positioning System (GPS) or Russia's GLONASS, the Indian system will provide positioning information only in India and 1,500 square kilometres (580 square miles) around its periphery.

The seventh satellite to make up the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) was launched into space via a rocket from Sriharikota spaceport in southwestern India Arun Sankar (AFP)

"Until now we were dependent on their systems, now we are self-reliant," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a televised congratulatory message to scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

"With this successful launch, we will determine our own paths powered by our technology. This is a great gift to our people from the scientists," he said.

"Our efforts will help not only India but we can help fellow SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) nations as well."

The system, which will be fully operational in a month's time, offers applications for marine and air navigation and can be integrated into mobile phones for use by hikers or fishermen, for example.

Over the next six months, all the IRNSS satellites will be stabilised in their final orbital positions, ISRO spokesman Deviprasad Karnik said.

A ground control centre in the southern city of Bangalore and tracking stations across the country will monitor the system round the clock.

ISRO scientists have been riding high since an Indian spacecraft successfully reached Mars in 2014 on a shoe-string budget, winning Asia's race to the Red Planet and sparking an outpouring of national pride.

The eight countries that make up SAARC are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Boeing wins $4bn aircraft order from China Eastern

Boeing has won a contract from China Eastern Airlines for 15 787-9 Dreamliner planes worth nearly $4 billion, Boeing said Thursday.

China Eastern plans to use the long-haul planes for travelling between China, North America and Europe, Boeing said.

We are very happy to introduce the new 787 Dreamliners into our long-haul fleet," said China Eastern Airlines Chairman Liu Shaoyong in a statement.

A Boeing 787 Dreamliner lands after its first flight at Boeing Field in Seattle, Washington on September 17, 2013 Stephen Brashear (Getty/AFP/File)

"The addition of these next-generation, fuel-efficient airplanes will play a key role in supporting China Eastern's strategy for international expansion, and enable us to realize profits in point-to-point routes across the Pacific Ocean, and between China and Europe."

The aircraft will be mainly used on flights from Shanghai to Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Chicago.

China Eastern is one of China's top three airlines, operating 560 aircraft and carrying around 100 million passengers annually.
Fighting between rebels, Kurds 'kills 64' in north Syria

Fighting between Syrian rebels and Kurdish forces has killed at least 64 people in the north of Aleppo province near the border with Turkey, a monitor said Thursday.

The clashes, which broke out on Wednesday night as rebels tried to capture the Kurdish-held town of Tal Rifaat, killed 53 rebel fighters and 11 members of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-Arab alliance, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

According to Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman, it is the largest rebel toll from clashes with Kurdish forces since the beginning of the war.

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 the Kurdish forces were displaying several bodies of rebel fighters in the town of Afrin, which they control.

Abdel Rahman told AFP that the clashes, which involved rebels including the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham, subsided on Thursday.

Ahrar al-Sham is among the most powerful Islamist rebel groups in Syria.

Financed by Turkey and Gulf states, it is allied to Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate, and fights alongside it around Aleppo and in neighbouring Idlib province.
Lego admits 'mistake' in Ai Weiwei bricks row

Lego billionaire Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen has admitted that the Danish toymaker's refusal to sell bricks to dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was a "mistake".

The company found itself at the centre of a social media storm last year after Ai said Lego had refused his order of the famous children's building blocks as they would be "used for political works".

Lego's deputy chairman, the grandson of the company's founder, said the decision to deny the artist a bulk order had been due to "an internal mistake."

Lego does not want its building blocks to be "used for political works" Claus Fisker (Nordfoto/AFP/File)

The order, which Ai planned to use for a show in Australia, had been rejected "very low in the organisation by our consumer service department," Kirk Kristiansen told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published Thursday.

In January, Lego said it would no longer ask what its bricks would be used for when making bulk sales, and that customers displaying their Lego creations in public would instead be asked to make it clear "that the Lego Group does not support or endorse the specific projects".

Ai has been targeted by Chinese authorities for his advocacy of democracy and human rights as well as other criticisms of the government.

Meanwhile, the family-owned Lego group moved to hand over more power to fourth-generation heir Thomas Kirk Kristiansen, who will take over from his father Kjeld as deputy chairman.

"I am very pleased to say that we are now ready to take certain important steps toward the smooth generational handover that will continue to maintain active family ownership of the Lego Group," Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen said in a statement Wednesday.

His 37-year-old son will also replace him as chairman of the Lego Foundation, which owns 25 percent of the Lego Group, but he will remain chairman of family holding company and majority owner Kirkbi.

Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen is ranked the world's 65th richest man according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated fortune of about 11.4 billion euros ($13.1 billion).

Lego is dumped inside a car in the courtyard of London's Royal Academy in 2015, after Chinese artist Ai Weiwei asked the general public to donate their bricks as part of his next project Leon Neal (AFP)
Israel nuclear reactor defects spark secrecy dilemma

Growing safety fears surrounding Israel's largest but ageing atomic research centre have provoked fresh questions over its future and a dilemma over the secrecy of the country's alleged nuclear arsenal.

Israel, believed to be the Middle East's sole nuclear power, has long refused to confirm or deny that it has such weapons.

The Haaretz newspaper reported on Tuesday that a study had uncovered 1,537 defects in the decades-old aluminium core of the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert of southern Israel.

Israel's Dimona nuclear power plant was built in the 1950s Thomas Coex (AFP/File)

The defects at the centre, where nuclear weapons were allegedly developed, were not seen to be severe and the risk of a nuclear outbreak is very limited, the report said.

However, there are growing calls for new safeguards and even a new research centre -- which could present the country with a decision on whether to acknowledge for the first time that it has nuclear weapons.

The US-based Institute for Science and International Security estimated in 2015 that Israel had 115 nuclear warheads.

At the same time Israel has strongly opposed other regional powers, most notably its arch-foe Iran, obtaining nuclear weapons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was also one of the most vociferous critics of the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that was implemented in January, leading to the lifting of international sanctions on Tehran.

Officially the Dimona centre focuses on research and energy provision.

But in the 1980s nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at the centre, alleged to a British newspaper that it was also used to create nuclear weapons.

He was later jailed for 18 years for the revelations.

- 'Waiting for disaster' -

The core of the Dimona reactor was provided by France in the late 1950s and went online a few years later.

Common practice is that such reactors are used for only 40 years, though this can be extended with modifications.

Uzi Even, a chemistry professor at Tel Aviv University who was involved in the creation of the reactor, is concerned about the safety of the site and has campaigned for a decade for it to be closed -- "so far, to no avail".

He called for it to be shut off for security reasons. "This reactor is now one of the oldest still operating globally," he said.

Michal Rozin, a lawmaker with the leftwing Meretz party, has called for a radical shakeup in policy in the light of the safety worries.

"The nuclear reactor has no supervision besides the body that runs it, the Israel Atomic Energy Commission," she wrote in a letter, seen by AFP, to the parliamentary foreign and defence committee.

"We don't need to wait for a disaster to make a change."

- 'Political matter' -

Israel's atomic energy agency said in a statement that the country had the "highest international standards" of security and safety, adding that many reactors can last for far longer than 40 years.

While a challenge, safely closing a nuclear reactor and opening a new one is far from impossible, Arthur Motta, chair of Nuclear Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, told AFP.

"Technically it is not a difficult problem," he said. "Nuclear energy is so dense, the volume of a reactor that provides a whole city with energy is just (the size of) a building."

"It is more a political matter."

And there are a number of political reasons why the site has remained open, not least the thousands of jobs at risk, Even said.

Building a new site could also see Israel pushed to officially declare its nuclear capabilities.

While Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, officials do not formally confirm or deny the claims -- a policy often dubbed deliberate ambiguity.

As such, the country has yet to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty -- which would require its sites to undergo regular inspection of its facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Motta explained. The IAEA declined to comment.

"I don't think we have the capability to build a new reactor (alone)," Even said. "And no one will sell us a reactor before we sign the non-proliferation agreement."

Writing in the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, investigative journalist and security specialist Yossi Melman called it a "strategic dilemma of the first order".

"If it were to sign the treaty (Israel) would be able to obtain nuclear reactors."

"But it would also have to declare and reveal what it has, nuclear-wise, and the monopoly it allegedly has on this in the Middle East."

Mordechai Vanunu has alleged that Israel used the Dimona nuclear facility to develop atomic weapons Gali Tibbon (AFP)
UN Security Council readies North Korea missile test reply

UN Security Council diplomats warned North Korea to expect a response after Pyongyang's repeated failed attempts to test-fire a powerful ballistic missile, the latest defiance of UN resolutions.

At the request of the United States, the council held urgent closed-door consultations after North Korea's unsuccessful launch earlier in the day of two medium-range missiles, as fears grew that the secretive country was preparing to conduct a fifth nuclear test.

North Korea has now made three bids in two weeks to test-fly a Musudan missile, which is capable of striking US bases on the Pacific island of Guam.

North Korea has now made three bids in two weeks to test-fly a Musudan missile, which is capable of striking US bases on the Pacific island of Guam

"We are looking at a response," China's Ambassador Liu Jieyi, who holds the Security Council presidency this month, told reporters.

Japanese Ambassador Motohide Yoshikawa said Tokyo condemned the "grave and very clear violations" of UN resolutions that comprised a direct threat to Japan's national security.

The 15-member council was unanimous in condemning the latest launches, Yoshikawa said.

Current UN resolutions bar North Korea from developing any ballistic missile-related technology, and South Korea said it would push for fresh penalties to be slapped on Pyongyang.

Diplomats said they expected the council to issue a statement on Friday after the Chinese delegation requested time to consult with officials in Beijing.

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday underscored Beijing's commitment to enforcing existing UN sanctions on North Korea and to preventing any instability on its doorstep.

"As a close neighbor, we will never allow war or chaos on the (Korean) peninsula," he told a meeting of regional foreign ministers in Beijing.

- Failed launches -

South Korea said a first launch Thursday of what was understood to be a Musudan missile saw the rocket plunge back to earth seconds after take-off.

A second attempt in the evening -- again of a Musudan -- also appeared to have failed, a defense ministry official said.

An initial effort on April 15 -- the birthday of late founding leader Kim Il-Sung -- ended in what the Pentagon described as "fiery, catastrophic" failure, with the missile apparently exploding just after take-off.

South Korean military officials say the North is desperate to register a successful launch ahead of next week's ruling party congress, at which leader Kim Jong-Un is expected to take credit for pushing the country's nuclear program to new heights.

In recent months, the North has claimed a series of major technical breakthroughs in developing what it sees as the ultimate goal of its nuclear drive -- an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to targets across the continental United States.

The achievements trumpeted by Pyongyang have included miniaturizing a nuclear warhead to fit on a missile, developing a warhead that can withstand atmospheric re-entry and building a solid-fuel missile engine.

Last Saturday, it successfully tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile -- a move that was promptly condemned by the Security Council.

- Growing anxiety -

The Musudan is believed to have an estimated range of anywhere between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometers (1,550 to 2,500 miles).

The missile has never been successfully flight-tested.

US President Barack Obama recently warned that North Korea is making dangerous progress, even when its efforts fall short of outright success.

"Although more often than not they fail in many of these tests, they gain knowledge each time," Obama said.

Anxiety has been high since Pyongyang conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and a rocket launch a month later that was widely seen as a disguised ballistic missile test.

The council responded with its toughest sanctions to date, angering the North, which has since made repeated threats of attacks targeting Seoul and Washington.

South Korea and the United States began wrapping up Friday their annual "Foal Eagle" military exercise, which was beefed up this year in response to the January nuclear test.

North Korea regularly condemns the large-scale joint drills, which it insists are provocative rehearsals for invasion.

North Korean missiles
Pentagon working to 'take out' Islamic State's Internet

The US military's secretive Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) is working to destroy the Islamic State group's Internet connections and leave the jihadists in a state of "virtual isolation," Pentagon chiefs said Thursday.

In what he described as the command's "first major combat operation," Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said CYBERCOM is playing an important role in the US-led military operation against the IS group in Iraq and Syria.

"The objectives there are to interrupt ISIL command and control, interrupt its ability to move money around, interrupt its ability to tyrannize and control population, interrupt its ability to recruit externally," Carter told lawmakers at a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting, using an acronym for the IS group.

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on operations against the Islamic State group and Middle East strategy on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on April 28, 2016 Nicholas Kamm (AFP)

"We're bombing them, and we're going to take out their Internet and so forth as well.

Carter's top military advisor General Joe Dunford, who is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the goal was to cut off the jihadists' lines of communication.

"The overall effect we're trying to achieve is virtual isolation. And this complements very much our physical actions on the ground, and the particular focus is external operations that might be conducted by ISIL," Dunford said.

The two top Pentagon officials were grilled for nearly three hours in a hearing on America's progress in the campaign.

The United States launched an anti-IS international coalition in August 2014, after the jihadists caught the West off guard and stormed vast bands of Iraq and Syria -- slaughtering residents and local troops as they went, and then imposing harsh Islamic laws.

Lawmakers have repeatedly voiced frustration. About two years after their lightning assault, IS jihadists still control the key cities of Raqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

The committee chair, Republican Senator John McCain, said Carter's ideas to quicken the war's pace were "intellectually dishonest" because they did not include the option of creating a 100,000-strong ground force -- comprising Sunni nations and Western troops -- to recapture Mosul and Raqa.

"That would be a highly desirable circumstance to be in," Carter responded, adding that he had seen "no indication from those countries, despite a lot of effort, of a willingness to do that."

Carter and President Barack Obama have long insisted the only way to defeat the IS group is by training and arming local fighters to do the job, saying the presence of US combat troops would fuel new calls for jihad.

To the consternation of ally Turkey, the United States is training Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, though officials say US-friendly Syrian Arabs will ultimately need to recapture Raqa because locals would not welcome a Kurdish liberating force.

CYBERCOM is charged with protecting America's military and some civilian networks from attacks. By 2018, it will have more than 6,000 military and civilian technical experts working across 133 teams.

One such team, comprising about 65 people, today works in the Middle East and carries out cyber operations against IS networks.
Three linked to California terror attack arrested

The FBI arrested three people, including the older brother of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook, on charges of marriage fraud and lying to investigators, authorities said.

Syed Raheel Farook, 31, was arrested in the early morning at his home in the California town of Corona, along with his wife Tatiana Farook, also 31.

Mariya Chernykh, Tatiana's 26-year-old sister who lives in the nearby town of Ontario, was also arrested.

A pastor leads a prayer for victims of a mass shooting, by Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik at a makeshift memorial in San Bernardino, California Robyn Beck (AFP/File)

The five-count indictment against the trio centers on Chernykh's alleged sham marriage to Enrique Marquez, who is awaiting trial on charges of aiding the December 2 attack carried out by Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik.

The pair were later killed in a dramatic shootout with police.

"This is the latest step in the comprehensive investigation into the horrific attacks in San Bernardino last year that took the lives of 14 innocent Americans and deeply affected so many more," US attorney Eileen Decker said in a statement.

"As I have said previously, we owe the victims, and the entire community of San Bernardino, a thorough investigation that uncovers all criminal activity surrounding these events."

The trio appeared in federal court after their arrest on Thursday and entered not guilty pleas, a Justice Department official said.

They were all given bail but were ordered to turn in their passports and banned from traveling outside Southern California pending their trial which was set for June 21, the official told AFP.

If convicted, they face up to five years in prison on a charge of lying to immigration officials. Chernykh also faces up to 25 years in prison on charges of fraud and misuse of visas as well as lying to federal agents.

Marquez told investigators after his indictment in December on charges of buying weapons used in the San Bernardino assault that he had entered into a fake marriage with Chernykh in November 2014 and had lied about living with her.

Chernykh and her sister are both from Russia and Syed Raheel Farook's marriage to Tatiana has also come under scrutiny.

Investigators have executed several search warrants at his house since the massacre, the deadliest terror attack on US soil since September 11, 2001.

Syed Raheel Farook served in the US navy between 2003 and 2007 and is a decorated veteran.

His attorney Ron Cordova underlined before the judge at Thursday's hearing that the case against Syed Raheel Farook and his wife was about a "misrepresentation in an act of marriage, it's not about an act of terror."

Several neighbors expressed surprise at the couple's arrest on Thursday telling local media that they were pleasant and minded their own business.

"This is a family that has suffered much, particularly by reason of the horrible, horrible acts of a family member who is no longer living," Cordova told reporters after the hearing. "But those acts should not be attributed to the family."

The probe into the massacre is ongoing and the FBI last month dropped a pitched legal battle with Apple after managing to hack into the iPhone used by Syed Farook without the tech giant's help.

Combo photo shows Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik the two suspects in the December 2, 2015, mass shooting in San Bernardino, California
Israel renews opposition to French peace initiative

Israel on Thursday reiterated its opposition to a planned French peace conference, calling instead for direct and unconditional negotiations with the Palestinians.

"The best way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct, bilateral negotiations," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement.

"Israel is ready to begin them immediately without preconditions. Any other diplomatic initiative distances the Palestinians from direct negotiations."

A Palestinian protestor runs with his national flag during clashes with Israeli forces near the Nahal Oz border crossing with Israel, east of Gaza City, on November 1, 2013 Mohammed Abed (AFP/File)

The statement comes after French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced Paris would organise a ministerial meeting on May 30, ahead of a potential peace conference.

The proposal has been welcomed by the Palestinians, who suspended a planned UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements to focus on the bid.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas encouraged support for the French proposal on a recent tour of Europe.

Senior Palestinian leader Saeb Erekat condemned the Israeli statement on Thursday.

"The Israeli government's call for 'bilateral negotiations' is not a call for the achievement of the two-state solution, but an attempt at legitimising its settlement enterprise," he said.

"We call upon the French government and the rest of the international community to take immediate steps in order to give peace a chance."

But Israel has consistently argued that peace can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the two sides, rather than international forums.

The last serious attempt at peace negotiations broke down two years ago.

The May 30 meeting will include representatives from 20 countries, plus the European Union and the United Nations, but not the Israelis or Palestinians.

Paris is currently preparing invitations for the event, diplomatic sources said.

If successful, the meeting would lead to an international conference later this year in the presence of both Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

Israel has not explicitly ruled out involvement in the conference.

The French attempt comes at a time of polarisation and high tensions in Israel and the Palestinian territories, with 203 Palestinians and 28 Israelis killed since October 1.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, Israeli authorities say.

Peace talks have been frozen since a US-brokered initiative collapsed in April 2014, after a year of intense shuttle diplomacy by US Secretary of State John Kerry.
US urges Russia to restrain Assad after Syria hospital strike

The United States expressed outrage Thursday over an air strike on a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo and demanded that Russia restrain Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Secretary of State John Kerry said the strike matched a pattern of Syrian government attacks targeting health workers that he said have left hundreds dead.

And he called on Moscow to press its ally in Damascus to respect a cessation of hostilities between regime and rebel forces that has been enshrined in a UN Security Council resolution.

A man gestures amid the rubble of destroyed buildings following a reported air strike on the rebel-held neighbourhood of al-Kalasa in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, on April 28, 2016 Ameer Alhalbi (AFP)

"We are outraged by yesterday's air strikes in Aleppo on the al-Quds hospital supported by both Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which killed dozens of people, including children, patients, and medical personnel," Kerry said.

"While we are still trying to gather the facts surrounding the circumstances of this attack, it appears to have been a deliberate strike on a known medical facility and follows the Assad regime's appalling record of striking such facilities and first responders.

"These strikes have killed hundreds of innocent Syrians," he added.

"The United Nations today assessed the situation in Aleppo to be catastrophic, and the regime's most recent offensive actions there - despite the cessation of hostilities - compound the violence and undermine the cessation of hostilities.

"Russia has an urgent responsibility to press the regime to fulfill its commitments under UNSCR 2254, including in particular to stop attacking civilians, medical facilities, and first responders, and to abide fully by the cessation of hostilities."

The United States and Russia are co-chairs of the International Syria Support Group, a 17-nation body formed to promote an end to Syria's five-year-old civil war through a ceasefire and peace negotiations.
UN envoy 'positive' as Yemen peace talks enter second week

The UN's Yemen envoy on Thursday hailed the "positive atmosphere" at crucial peace talks between the country's warring sides, as negotiations in Kuwait entered their second week without a major breakthrough.

UN special envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed has held several rounds of talks with Shiite Huthi rebels and a government delegation over the past two days focussing on key issues.

Besides discussing ways to firm up an ongoing ceasefire, delegates also tackled "the issues related to the withdrawal of armed groups, handover of heavy weapons, resumption of the political transition and the release of prisoners and detainees," Ould Cheikh Ahmed said in a statement.

UN Special Envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed (R) in Kuwait City on April 22, 2016 Yasser al-Zayyat (AFP/File)

He said a "positive atmosphere" prevailed during talks but warned that differences remained.

"The divergence of views is to be expected in a country witnessing war. It is crucial that all parties make concessions... in order to reach a comprehensive political agreement," he said.

More than 6,800 people have been killed and around 2.8 million displaced in Yemen since a Saudi-led Arab coalition began operations in March 2015 against the Iran-backed Huthis, who have seized swathes of territory including the capital Sanaa.

After the start of the latest round of negotiations was delayed as the rebel delegation sought guarantees, Ould Cheikh Ahmed has managed to get the two sides to approve the agenda and has begun debating key issues.

Sources close to the negotiations however said the two delegations have not yet met face-to-face.

The government delegation proposed a mechanism on how to implement the withdrawal of the rebels and handover of heavy arms, a Yemeni official said.

"We are optimistic over the prospects of an agreement being worked out by the UN envoy," Mani al-Matari, the press advisor to Yemen's foreign minister, told AFP.

The main sticking point remains that the rebels want to discuss a political settlement before surrendering arms while the government delegation insists on the implementation of UN Security Council resolution 2216.

The resolution states that the rebels must withdraw from seized territories and disarm before talks can progress.

The government delegation also submitted a letter of "strong protest" to the UN envoy over alleged rebel ceasefire violations, especially in third city Taez, Matari said.

Ould Cheikh Ahmed said the negotiations have no timeframe.
UN lifts Ivory Coast sanctions, plans to shut down mission

The UN Security Council on Thursday lifted the last remaining sanctions on Ivory Coast and said it would shut down its mission there next year.

It was the latest sign that the West African country has bounced back from turmoil.

French Ambassador Francois Delattre has described the move to end the 12-year sanction regime and wind down the mission as a "success story" for the United Nations in Africa.

The UN mission in Ivory Coast will be gradually drawn down from its current strength of 4,000 to some 2,000 in August before shutting down altogether in June 2017 Sia Kambou (AFP/File)

The world's top cocoa producer, Ivory Coast was torn by crises during president Laurent Gbagbo's rule from 2000 to 2011.

After Gbagbo refused to recognize the victory of Alassane Ouattara in elections in 2010, fighting broke out, leaving 3,000 dead in five months.

The 15-member council unanimously adopted two French-drafted resolutions that lift the remaining restrictions of an arms embargo imposed in 2004 and scraps assets freezes and travel bans on six people.

These include Gbagbo, his wife Simone Gbagbo -- both of whom are on trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague - and youth leader Charles Ble Goude.

In 2014, the council had lifted a ban on the diamonds trade in Ivory Coast.

The UN mission in Ivory Coast will be gradually drawn down from its current strength of 4,000 to some 2,000 in August before shutting down altogether in June 2017.

Ivory Coast's UN Ambassador Claude Bouah-Kamon thanked the countries that contributed troops to the mission, which he said was "perfectly successful" in achieving its goals.
Repsol to resume Libya activity once security allows: Spanish FM

Spanish oil giant Repsol is ready to resume activity in Libya once the security situation allows it, Spain's foreign minister said Thursday during a visit to Tripoli.

Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo was in Tripoli to demonstrate Spain's support for a new UN-backed Libyan government.

"Repsol is ready to resume production as soon as an accord is finalised," Garcia-Margallo said during a press conference after meeting the head of the unity government, Fayez al-Sarraj.

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo gives a press conference on April 28, 2016 in Tripoli

Libya's warring rivals have come under intense international pressure to rally behind the unity government at a time when the country is grappling with a growing jihadist threat.

Prime minister-designate Sarraj's cabinet has taken control of eight government ministries including foreign affairs as it seeks to assert its authority over the violence-plagued country.

But his government has still not been endorsed by a vote of confidence from the internationally recognised parliament in Tobruk.

Repsol has operated in oil-rich Libya since 1975, and was pumping 340,000 barrels per day before it ceased activity in the country in 2014 due to security concerns.

Garcia-Margallo said the company would be able to produce 100,000 bpd at the Al-Sharara plant in south Libya once the situation stabilised.

Spain's foreign minister said he and Sarraj discussed"the intensification of cooperation in the fight against illegal migration and against terrorism".
2 Palestinians who tried to stab Israeli soldiers arrested: army

Israeli authorities arrested on Thursday two Palestinians who tried to stab Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank, the army said, adding that one of them was shot and wounded.

The suspects carrying knives approached Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near the West Bank city of Ramallah in an apparent bid to attack them.

The soldiers opened fire in self defence and one of the Palestinians was wounded, an army spokeswoman added.

Israeli security forces stand guard at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah in the Israeli occupied West Bank on April 27, 2016 Ahmad Gharabli (AFP/File)

A wave of violence has killed 203 Palestinians and 28 Israelis since October.
Gambia's parties pledge free elections amid rare protests

Gambia's ruling party and the opposition have signed a joint pledge to promote free elections and peaceful politics amid rare protests and rising political tensions.

The pledge seen by AFP on Thursday, was signed a week ago, on April 22, in the capital Banjul in the presence of EU, UN and US diplomats, by the ruling Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) and opposition parties including the United Democratic Party (UDP).

The signature followed the arrests of 37 people after a rare opposition protest on April 14. The group, a few of whom are reported to be missing, have been denied bail on charges of rioting, illegal protest and other offences.

People wearing t-shirts reading "We are all Gambian" demonstrate in Dakar on April 22, 2016 Seyllou (AFP/File)

The pledge says that the ruling party and opposition agreed "to promote peaceful political party activities and the holding of free, fair and genuine elections."

A group is to be formed "to address the current political tensions and prevent future ones".

The protesters early this month had called for radical political reforms in the small west African nation ruled with an iron fist by President Yahya Jammeh since a coup in 1994.

In February, the 50-year-old Jammeh was named his party's candidate to seek a fifth mandate in a presidential poll in December. He was first elected head of state in 1996, two years after the bloodless coup.
Nigeria, France step up joint fight against Boko Haram

Nigeria and France on Thursday signed an agreement on closer military cooperation, including intelligence sharing, to strengthen the fight against Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region.

Nigerian Defence Minister Mansur Dan Ali said the agreement was evidence of a "growing partnership" between Abuja and Paris, as he met his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian in the capital.

France has provided satellite images and surveillance footage from Rafale fighter jets based in Chad's capital, N'Djamena, which have flown over the main conflict area in northeast Nigeria.

A soldier walks past a burnt house on April 6, 2015 in N'Gouboua, near Lake Chad, after an attack by Boko Haram Philippe Desmazes (AFP/File)

Some 2,000 surveillance images have been shared and Nigerians have also been trained by French military intelligence in how to interpret them, French officials indicated.

Nigeria's neighbours, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, are all former French colonies where Paris continues to have influence and its support is vital, Dan Ali acknowledged.

Relations between anglophone Nigeria and its francophone neighbours have often been tense but Dan Ali said the French army can act as an intermediary for dialogue.

Boko Haram, whose insurgency has killed some 20,000 in Nigeria since 2009, has been pushed out of captured territory over the past year, leading to more cross-border attacks.

- Greater co-operation -

Le Drian for his part said France was primarily concerned with "the common fight against terrorism and particularly against Boko Haram".

Maritime security is also a key factor in cooperation, he added, with incidences of piracy in the Gulf of Guinea off Nigeria's oil-rich south increasing sharply since the turn of the year.

Both armies signed an operational cooperation document detailing 28 areas to be tackled before the end of the year, including training against improvised explosives and combat rescue.

Cross-border military exercises and joint maritime operations with other countries are also included.

A regional security summit is scheduled to take place in Abuja on May 14 with French President Francois Hollande in attendance, as well as representatives from Britain and the United States.

Britain and the United States have provided military personnel to the counter-insurgency in the form of special forces advisors in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, and training.

Some 300 US troops have been sent to Cameroon's remote north, where Washington is operating a drone base for surveillance flights above Nigerian territory.

- Regional force -

Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin have agreed to set up a new regional force against Boko Haram with African Union backing but the deployment of its 8,700 troops has been severely delayed.

The troops were supposed to have been operational in July last year, commanded by a senior Nigerian officer from N'Djamena, where France has a base for anti-Islamist operations in the Sahel region.

"It (the regional force) is far from being perfect but it's starting to function," said one French military source.

"By speaking to one another they'll end up cooperating and understand their common interests are more important than their differences," he added.

Nigeria has struggled to acquire military hardware for troops fighting Boko Haram, with Western governments reluctant to provide arms and ammunition because of its army's poor human rights record.

A former national security advisor is currently on trial over a multi-billion arms deal scandal, in which cash earmarked for weapons procurement was allegedly diverted for political ends.
UN rights expert warns Darfur security 'unpredictable'

A senior UN rights official warned Thursday that the security situation in Darfur remained "fluid and unpredictable", two days after Sudan said the region's conflict that killed hundreds of thousands of people had ended.

Sudan held a referendum in Darfur earlier this month on whether to unite it into a single autonomous region, and on Saturday said that almost 98 percent of voters had opted to keep the region as five states.

Khartoum said the result of the referendum clearly showed that the conflict in Darfur -- a region roughly the size of France -- had finally ended.

United Nations independent expert on the situation of human rights in Sudan gives a press conference in the capital Khartoum on April 28, 2016 Ashraf Shazly (AFP)

But on Thursday, Aristide Nononsi, the UN's independent expert on human rights in Sudan, warned that the situation in Darfur was still "volatile".

"In Darfur, the security situation remains fluid and unpredictable," he told reporters after touring the region.

"This has had a direct impact on the human rights and humanitarian situation" in Darfur, he said, adding that the conflict in the Jebel Marra mountain range was of particular concern as it had caused new displacement of people.

Clashes between troops and the Sudan Liberation Army led by Abdulwahid Nur in Jebel Marra have forced at least 100,000 people from their homes since mid-January, the United Nations says.

Overall more than 2.5 million people have been displaced by the conflict that erupted in 2003 in Darfur, and according to UN figures 300,000 have been killed in the conflict.

The conflict erupted when ethnic minority rebels in Darfur mounted an insurgency against the Arab-dominated government of President Omar al-Bashir -- who is wanted for alleged war crimes in the conflict -- complaining of economic and political marginalisation.

Darfur was a single region until 1994 when the government split it into three states, and later added another two in 2012, claiming it would make local government more efficient.

- Inter-tribal clashes -

Nononsi said his concerns were highlighted during a visit to the Zam Zam camp of displaced people in North Darfur.

"The IDPs live in a state of insecurity due to the presence of various armed elements and criminality that occur within the region," he said.

"In recent weeks, nine incidents of rape of women from the camp were reported," he said, adding the incidents occurred outside the camp.

Nononsi said inter-tribal clashes in East Darfur were also killing and displacing civilians, with combattants using sophisticated firearms.

On April 18, gunmen attacked the residence of the governor of East Darfur state after violent tribal clashes in the area.

Up to 20 fighters were killed the day before in clashes between the Arab Rizeigat and Maaliya tribes in East Darfur.

While insisting that the "page on Darfur crisis has now been turned" following the referendum, a top Sudanese official said this week that Khartoum now planned to collect weapons that are widespread in the region.

"We will first collect heavy weapons which are in the hands of outlaws," said Amin Hassan Omar, the official in charge of Darfur file in Bashir's government.

Nononsi meanwhile said allegations were still rife that the country's security forces, including the National Intelligence Security Service (NISS), continued to carry out "arbitrary arrests and detentions" and also "ill-treat" human rights defenders and political activists.

"I strongly urge the government to build on its positive efforts, and for these efforts to be directed towards concrete change on the ground," he said.
Sanders scales back W.House campaign as Clinton cruises

Democrat Bernie Sanders is laying off hundreds of campaign workers after a string of losses to frontrunner Hillary Clinton, focusing his forces on the last big presidential primary in California -- and on the battle for the party's platform.

The move, the clearest signal yet that his White House bid is essentially over, comes as Clinton has taken a virtually insurmountable lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"We do not need workers now in states around the country" that have already held primaries, Sanders, a US senator from Vermont, told The New York Times in an interview.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks to a crowd gathered on April 18, 2016 in New York Don Emmert (AFP/File)

He said his campaign would "allocate our resources to the 14 contests that remain, and that means that we are going to be cutting back on staff."

Sanders's nationwide paid staff amounted to more than 1,000 people in late January, shortly before the first presidential nominations contest in Iowa, campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told The Washington Post.

Citing the campaign, CNN reported that the number recently shrank to about 550.

In a statement, Briggs said the campaign would likely drop further, to a bit more than 300 people.

"That's unheard of" for a campaign still in the thick of a primary battle, Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, told AFP.

"They can explain it in any which way they want, but obviously the top brass and probably Sanders himself has accepted reality; he's not going to be the Democratic nominee."

In public, the 74-year-old Sanders continues to assure his supporters that he still has a shot at the nomination, even though the path is a narrow one. And he still could win upcoming primaries. Indiana votes on Tuesday.

But his delegate shortfall is so immense that he not only would have to take the remaining primaries by large margins, including California on June 7, but also win over the hundreds of super-delegates already in Clinton's camp.

The roughly 700 super-delegates are members of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic members of Congress and state governors. Of those, 500 have already declared their support for Clinton.

The former secretary of state is only about 215 delegates short of the 2,383 delegate majority need to win the nomination. And more than 1,000 delegates are up for grabs in the state nominating contests between now and mid-June.

- Uniting the Democrats -

Clinton is already working to reunite the Democrats after months of increasingly acrimonious political warfare with Sanders, a self-styled democratic socialist whose call for a "political revolution" has energized young, independent and white blue-collar voters.

Apart from their policy differences, Sanders has suggested that Clinton has been corrupted by donations from lobbyists and executives for banking and financial interests, who have contributed heavily to her campaign.

But the enmity between the two rivals does not appear to have reached the levels of 2008, when Clinton dueled with Barack Obama for the White House nomination.

Former president Bill Clinton in particular was so irritated by what he considered the young black senator's hypocrisy that he was unable to control himself, and his attacks escalated at rally after rally.

On the evening of the last primary, despite having been defeated, Hillary Clinton stunned observers by refusing to concede. It wasn't until several days later that she formally threw in the towel.

"In 2008, there was quite a serious concern as to whether disgruntled Clinton supporters actually would get on board with Barack Obama," said Jennifer Lawless, a professor of government at American University.

"She made a very impassioned case that they should once she was out of the race, and they did. Which is part of the reason why I feel like, given the intensity of that race compared to this one, there's no question that the Sanders people will ultimately support Clinton."

- Sanders future role -

Defeated candidates often lose clout. But some, like Pat Buchanan for the Republicans in 1992 and 1996, or Howard Dean on the Democratic side in 2004, manage to retain their influence after their defeats.

Sanders, who spent his political career as an independent and not a Democrat, appears determined to anchor the Democratic Party on the left.

He has said repeatedly that he will go to the convention in Philadelphia in July, where the party's platform will be hammered out.

He intends to fight for adoption of a $15 an hour minimum wage (Clinton prefers $12), a ban on hydraulic fracking, and the creation of a carbon tax.

Clinton, for her part, desperately needs the support of young Democrats. About 80 percent of those aged 18 to 29 have voted for Sanders.

"Clinton clearly needs the Sanders votes, and she needs the Sanders enthusiasm," said Sabato. But he added: "November is a long time away. And conventions often act as a reunifying factor."

Another reason why Sanders will be a player: his war chest.

"At this point, the big question with the Sanders campaign is that he still has a lot of money, he has the ability to raise a substantial amount of money. So what he does with his money is a bigger question," said Robert Boatright, a political science professor at Clark University.

A man watches television newscasters predict a Hillary Clinton win during an election night results watch party for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in Baltimore, Maryland, April 26, 2016 David Tulis (AFP/File)

US vote primaries Simon Malfatto, Jonathan Jacobsen, Paz Pizzaro (AFP)
Canadian woman murdered in LA identified 46 years later

A Canadian woman stabbed to death in Los Angeles around the time and place of the infamous Manson murders has been identified 46 years later, authorities and her family said.

Known for nearly half a century only as "Jane Doe 59," the murder victim was publicly identified Wednesday by Los Angeles police and her sister as Reet Jurvetson.

Her body was discovered in the brush off Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles mid-November 1969, shortly after she arrived in the city.

California Highway Patrol officers are seen on the 405 freeway, near the Mulholland overpass on July 16, 2011 in Los Angeles, California David McNew (Getty/AFP/File)

The 19-year-old had been stabbed over 150 times in the upper torso and neck, according to police.

Her identity remained a mystery until a family friend in June 2015 recognized her photograph while browsing the US national database for unidentified missing and deceased persons.

A test comparing the victim's DNA to Jurvetson's sister living in Canada confirmed her identity.

Her sister Anne described Reet as a young woman who had "developed a taste for adventure and freedom, all the while being naive and trusting of others."

"Reet was a lovely, free-spirited and happy girl. She was very artistic, drew well, and liked to sew her own clothes," said Anne, who is also the last living member of Reet's immediate family.

Her wanderlust brought her to California as the 1960s were coming to a close.

"Initially, we believed that Reet was probably in search of more autonomy, and therefore we waited for her to get in touch with us," Anne said.

"As months and then years passed, we imagined that she was making a new life for herself.

"However, not once did we suspect that she had been killed."

Reet Jurvetson was born in Sweden, the youngest child of refugees who fled Estonia during the Second World War and later moved to Montreal.

Because her body was found only a few miles from and a few months after the infamous Manson murder spree, police interviewed Charles Manson in prison to try to "rule out any possible connection" to Reet's killing.

"Their encounter with Manson did not produce anything fruitful and the investigation remains open and ongoing," the Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement.
'Panda suit' man shot by police had 'bomb' made from candy bars

A man who threatened to blow up a local Baltimore TV station dressed head-to-toe in a bear costume was carrying chocolate bars made to resemble an explosive device, police said.

The 25-year-old was in "serious but stable condition" at a local hospital after police shot him several times when he emerged from the building and walked toward them, Baltimore police spokesman T.J. Smith told reporters during a news conference.

Police used a robot to disarm the man as he lay injured on the ground after being shot, which is when they discovered that his bombs were fake.

An officer rolls out police tape on May 4, 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland Allison Shelley (Getty/AFP/File)

"Those devices were actually candy bars wrapped in aluminum foil with wiring connecting each of them," Smith said.

The authorities were alerted at 1:20 pm (1720 GMT) after the man set what was believed to be his own car on fire just outside the FOX45 station before entering the building.

The station's website showed images of the suspect seated inside the premises, which were evacuated during the standoff.

The Baltimore, Maryland station, also known locally as WBFF, said the man demanded news coverage of what he described as a case of government conspiracy.

"He talked to me and was wearing what appears to be a full-body white panda suit, surgical mask and sunglasses," FOX45 News Director Mike Tomko said.

"He had a flash drive, said he had information he wanted to get on the air," he added. "He compared it to the information found in the Panama Papers."

Police dispatched a bomb squad, SWAT team and negotiators to the scene, but the man remained "uncooperative," Smith said.

At least three police officers fired as he left the building and approached them, he added.

The man, who police did not identify, is being treated in hospital, and is "conscious and alert," Smith said, adding that police have not yet charged him.

The police spokesman declined to provide a possible motive.

"There are a lot of questions that we have," Smith said.
Nigerian Shiite group demands exhumation after deadly clashes

The mass grave lies just outside the city of Kaduna in northern Nigeria, but apart from the recently turned ochre soil there's nothing to indicate what might lie beneath.

This is where public officials and human rights groups say the bodies of some 350 people, including women and children, were dumped by the military under the cover of darkness.

Even now, as one of several public inquiries hears evidence about what led to their deaths, there are claims the number buried may be a gross underestimation.

Members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria pray at a mass grave on the outskirts of the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna on April 26, 2016 Aminu Abubakar (AFP/File)

"The (Kaduna state) government claimed they buried 347 people here but we know the actual number is far more than that," Mohammed Mustapha told AFP.

Mustapha and Nura Adam joined fellow members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) at the burial ground in Mando on Tuesday to pray for the dead after a visit by inquiry officials.

Amnesty International last week accused the Nigerian Army of deliberately shooting dead members of the Shiite Muslim group during clashes 80 kilometres (50 miles) away in Zaria in December.

Most of the evidence of the military action -- the destruction of the IMN cultural and religious centre, and the house of the group's leader Ibrahim Zakzaky -- was "meticulously destroyed", it added.

- Exhumation calls -

Mustapha recalled how earth-moving equipment was brought in to the cemetery near the Nigerian Defence Academy on December 14 to dig a pit for the burial.

At about 11:00 pm (2200 GMT) armed soldiers cordoned off the narrow path leading to the burial ground, an hour before trucks filled with bodies arrived, he added.

"I counted six huge trucks and several military vans laden with dead bodies driving into the cemetery for the mass burial which residents were not allowed to witness", said Adam.

"It took them five hours to finish the burial, which was an indication that the bodies were more than 347 because it doesn't take that long to thrown in such a number of bodies into a pit."

Pointing to the mound of earth the size of a badminton court, Adam called for the bodies to be exhumed to confirm the exact number of dead.

The world would be "shocked by the true number of those buried", he added.

But Abdulhakeem Mustapha, counsel to the Kaduna state commission of inquiry probing the incident, said: "This is an investigative committee. It doesn't have powers to issue orders.

"It is going to make its recommendations to the government on what it believes are the best ways to resolve the problem based on its findings," he told AFP.

Amnesty International's report, "Unearthing the truth: unlawful killings and mass cover-up in Zaria", also called for exhumation and included an account corroborating Mustapha and Adam's claims.

"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," one witness was quoted as saying.

A medic at Zaria's Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital told AFP in January he counted at least 400 bodies in the morgue while other witnesses said as many again littered the streets.

- Military denial -

The clashes in Zaria on December 12 and 13 were sparked after IMN supporters blocked the route of Nigeria's chief of army staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Yusuf Buratai.

The military maintains its soldiers acted according to the rules of engagement and did not use excessive force but were responding to "a criminal and enemy of the state".

The IMN denies army claims its followers attempted to assassinate Buratai.

What is clear is the massive destruction caused by the operation -- one of several claims of excessive force and human rights abuses by the military against civilians around the country.

In Zaria, Zakzaky's compound and the religious and cultural centre lie in ruins. Blocks of shattered concrete lie where the buildings once stood. Once-occupied IMN houses are ransacked and empty.

Amnesty accused the military not just of taking away the bodies but razing the buildings, removing the rubble, washing off the bloodstains, and recovering bullets and spent cartridges.

Zakzaky -- who has previously fallen foul of Nigeria's secular authorities by calling for an Iranian-style Islamic revolution -- remains in custody and partly paralysed and half-blind.

Hundreds of his supporters are still missing, presumed dead or in custody, with dozens facing a possible death sentence for killing a soldier in the initial stages of the clashes.

A vehicle drives past a sign post outside the northern Nigerian city of Zaria, where around 350 members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) were killed before being secretly buried in a mass grave outside the city of Kaduna Aminu Abubakar (AFP)
Amnesty urges probe into Chad troops missing after vote

Amnesty International expressed alarm Thursday over the disappearance of more than 20 soldiers and police officers in Chad since this month's presidential election, calling on authorities to open an independent investigation.

"According to some media, more than 40 members of the defence and security forces may have gone missing since April 9," the rights group said.

Amnesty and the Chadian League of Human Rights (LTDH) "are in the position to confirm more than 20 cases of suspected disappearances," the two groups said in a statement.

A soldier stands guard during a campaign rally on April 8, 2016 at the Place de la Nation in N'djamena Issouf Sanogo (AFP/File)

Soldiers had voted on April 9, a day before the April 10 election that saw President Idriss Deby extend his 26 years in power, despite opposition claims that the vote was marred by widespread fraud.

In at least two polling stations, military officials forced troops to publicly vote for the ruling party.

"Those who did not obey orders were either publicly beaten or locked in a cell for several hours," the statement said.

Authorities said the soldiers had been sent on a mission. On April 21, four of the missing men were shown on national television.

"But no information on their whereabouts has been communicated to their families, who have lost contact with them and do not know when they may be coming back," the rights groups said.

"Chadian authorities must shed light on this," the statement added, urging "an independent inquiry into mistreatment suffered by those who would not have voted for the ruling party".
California lawmakers reject honor for 'racist' John Wayne

California lawmakers voted down a resolution Thursday aimed at honoring legendary actor John Wayne, after opponents accused him of being a racist.

The resolution would have declared May 26 -- the screen icon's birthday -- "John Wayne Day," but several Latino and black lawmakers objected to the proposal, citing comments by Wayne that they said were racist toward blacks and Native Americans.

Assemblyman Matthew Harper had submitted the motion, which described Wayne -- nicknamed the "Duke" -- as the "prototypical American hero, symbolizing such traits as self-reliance, grace under pressure, resolve, and patriotism."

In a 1971 interview with Playboy, Wayne made several offensive comments about blacks and Native Americans. Wayne said: 'I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility'

Supporters of the resolution also noted that the actor, who died in 1979 and was known for his conservative views, was an avid supporter of the US military and had contributed to cancer research.

However assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez complained that Wayne's movies included "a lot of slaughtering of Native Americans" and that the actor had sanctioned the white occupation of Indian lands, the daily Sacramento Bee reported.

In a widely-reported 1971 interview with Playboy, Wayne also shared his thoughts on race relations and discrimination.

"With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so," he was quoted as saying.

"But we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks.

"I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people."

As the resolution to honor Wayne was voted down Thursday, one lawmaker appeared to downplay the actor's past comments saying "everyone of us is imperfect," the Bee reported.
All shaken up: Owner reunited with sentimental snow globe

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP)  When a man was forced to throw away a liquid-filled snow globe before going through security at a Florida airport, he was heartbroken: It had been a gift from his mother to celebrate his and his wife's adoption of a 5-year-old girl.

A couple who picked up on Michael Moore's distress retrieved the sparkling, silver orb that played the song "Greensleeves" and yelled after him as he ran for his plane to Ohio that they would get it back to him somehow.

That was in February. On Wednesday, Ivelise Amarri Hernandez personally handed the keepsake over to Moore's emotional mother, Linda Modry.

Modry, who lives in St. Petersburg, had bought the globe in January and engraved it with the message "We love you Katie. Nana and Papa." She also decorated it with photos of the couple, their new daughter, and the couple's dog, and gave it to Moore when he was visiting her.

But when her son tried to carry it with him onto the plane, security at the St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport told him he would have to throw it out because it was filled with liquid.

Hernandez and her boyfriend, waiting for a flight to Pittsburgh, retrieved the globe from the trash where a saddened Moore had tossed it. When they arrived back home to Florida a few days later, they posted a photo of the treasured gift on Facebook.

"We felt bad about the situation and want to find out who these people are so we can return their gift out of the kindness of our hearts," Hernandez wrote in the post.

Shared 40,000 times, the message eventually caught the attention of executives at Things Remembered, the company that made the globe. Employees at the company's Ohio headquarters and the St. Petersburg, Florida, store were able to identify Modry as the buyer and connect her with Hernandez.

On Wednesday, Modry and Hernandez met in Tampa, and the snow globe was returned.

Said Modry: "It was raining when I picked it up. A good thing, because we were all crying."

___
UN envoy appeals to US, Russia to help Syria peace talks

GENEVA (AP)  The U.N. envoy for Syria appealed to the U.S. and Russia to intervene to help revive Syrian peace talks that sputtered to a pause Wednesday, saying a recent spike in fighting has overshadowed the talks and put an increasingly feeble truce in "great danger."

Staffan de Mistura spoke to reporters early Thursday after briefing the U.N. Security Council via videoconference about the largely stalled indirect talks between the Western- and Saudi-backed opposition and envoys from President Bashar Assad's government, which has the backing of Moscow.

After 60 days, he said, the cessation of hostilities agreed to by both sides "hangs by a thread."

FILE-- In this Fiday April 22, 2016, file photo, UN special envoy for Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, right, and his deputy Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy attend a meeting with the Syrian government delegation during Syria peace talks at the United Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland. A military buildup in northern Syria coupled with heavy fighting and mounting civilian casualties spells the end of a cease-fire that for two months brought much needed relief to war-stricken Syrians, ushering in what could be an even more ruinous chapter in the country's five-year-old conflict. (Fabrice Coffrini/Pool Photo via AP, File)

"I really fear that the erosion of the cessation is unraveling the fragile consensus around a political solution, carefully built over the last year," de Mistura said in his council briefing obtained by The Associated Press. "Now I see parties reverting to the language of a military solution or military option. We must ensure that they do not see that as a solution or an option."

The current effort to end the five-year Syria conflict was largely spearheaded by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, backed by major global and regional powers who formed the International Syria Support Group. It includes 17 countries as well as the United Nations, Arab League, European Union and Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

De Mistura appealed not only for U.S.-Russia intervention but for international support, calling in the Security Council briefing for another ministerial meeting of the International Syria Support Group "lest we lose the window of opportunity to reverse the negative downward spiral."

He stressed that the talks may not survive unless the fighting subsides, and that won't happen "without some sort of political solution on the horizon."

De Mistura said he hoped that the talks would resume in May, and he predicted the overall process would continue as previously planned through July. But he stopped short of setting a specific date, pointing to the recent upsurge in fighting, notably in and around Aleppo, Syria's largest city before the war.

Lamenting the worsening violence, he said that "in the last 48 hours, we have had an average of one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes ... How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?"

Speaking at the end of a third session of Syria peace talks this year, de Mistura said the truce brokered by the U.S. and Russia had pulled off a "miracle" by sharply reducing violence in March, but acknowledged that the renewed fighting has put the cessation of hostilities "in great danger."

He called for a "U.S.-Russian initiative at the highest level" to help reinforce it.

"There is no reason that both of them  who have been putting so much political capital in that success story and have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war  should not be able to revitalize what they created, and which is still alive, but barely," he said of the two countries.

U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said he shared de Mistura's concerns about the increased violence jeopardizing the process and urged Russia to press the Assad regime "to fulfill its commitments."

The talks foundered last week after the Western- and Saudi-backed opposition called the High Negotiating Committee suspended formal participation in the indirect talks with Assad's envoys to protest alleged government cease-fire violations, a drop in humanitarian aid deliveries and no progress in winning the release of detainees in Syria.

De Mistura suggested back-channel work between Moscow and Washington was already under way to help the truce, and that a revival of it would help bring the two sides back to the table.

"I know that both the Russian Federation and the U.S. are talking among themselves on how to salvage on what has been actually a remarkable success  but needs to be sustained," he said, referring to the cease-fire. If it is revived, he predicted: "It will not be difficult for everyone to come back around the table."

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Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer contributed to this report from the United Nations.
Bundy attorney: Feds turned down proposed plea deal

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)  Lawyers for Ammon Bundy say the leader of the Oregon wildlife refuge occupation offered after his arrest to plead guilty if charges against other defendants were dismissed, but the deal was rejected.

The assertion is made in a pre-trial motion filed in federal court on Wednesday.

Bundy was arrested by FBI agents and Oregon state troopers on Jan. 26. More than two dozen people have been arrested for the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge that began Jan. 2 and ended with surrender of the last four on Feb. 11.
Man pleads no contest to giving minority women KKK fliers

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP)  A white man accused of distributing Ku Klux Klan recruitment fliers to two minority women in Vermont has pleaded no contest to charges of disorderly conduct.

Burlington resident William Schenk last year pleaded not guilty to passing out the fliers to a black woman and a Hispanic woman. He sought to have the charges dismissed, saying he wasn't targeting the women and his conduct was protected by the First Amendment.

But he agreed to the no contest plea Wednesday and was sentenced to 120 days in jail, which he had already served.

The Burlington Free Press reports (http://bfpne.ws/1Wqh0gr) Schenk will appeal his conviction.

New York police took him into custody after the hearing to face a felony charge in Plattsburgh of violating an abuse prevention order.

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Manager says Chyna's death may be accidental overdose

REDONDO BEACH, Calif. (AP)  Former wrestling star Chyna died of an accidental overdose of a prescription sleeping pill and a tranquilizer, her manager said Wednesday.

"It's a 98 percent certainty and 2 percent speculation," Anthony Anzaldo said.

Anzaldo, who lived nearby, discovered the 46-year-old ex-WWE star dead on April 20 in her bed at her Redondo Beach home. He believes she may have died two or three days earlier.

FILE - In this Nov. 16, 2003, file photo, Joanie Laurer, former pro wrestler known as Chyna, flexes her bicep as she arrives at the 31st annual American Music Awards, in Los Angeles. Chyna's manager, Anthony Anzaldo, says he believes the former wrestling star died of an accidental overdose of a prescription sleeping pill and a tranquilizer. Anzaldo found the body of the 46-year-old in bed at her Redondo Beach home on April 20, 2016. (AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian, File)

Chyna, whose birth name was Joan Marie Laurer, was a lifelong insomniac who had prescriptions for Ambien and a generic version of the anti-anxiety drug Valium, Anzaldo said.

Days before she was found dead, Chyna appeared rambling and disjointed as she wandered around her apartment wearing headphones and a feather in her hair in a 13-minute video she posted online.

Chyna has acknowledged struggling with addiction in the past. Anzaldo said she had been known to binge drink but had not had a drink for several weeks, and there was no alcohol in her home at the time of her death.

Anzaldo said he suspects that Chyna had been "self-medicating a little bit more than she should have" because she had begun seeing a psychiatrist for the first time, was attending a women's domestic violence group and had visited the grave of her estranged father.

She was trying to deal with issues of abandonment and violence from previous relationships, Anzaldo said.

"A lot was going on in her life emotionally. But she wasn't depressed; it was just a lot to deal with," he said.

The drugs may have clouded her memory so that she took more than she realized, Anzaldo said.

"She accidentally, over the course of two or three weeks, misused her legally prescribed medication," Anzaldo said. "They're not going to find, like, 60 pills in her stomach."

Anzaldo, who was making a documentary with and about Chyna, said he was concerned and was in the process of trying to get Chyna free rehabilitation by making her a subject on A&E's celebrity addiction reality series, "Intervention."

"This would have been the quickest possible way" to arrange for rehab, he said.

No cause of death has been released by the Los Angeles County coroner's office because results of toxicology tests are pending.

The death initially was reported as a possible overdose with prescription drugs, "but we don't know," coroner's Assistant Chief Ed Winter said.

Anzaldo said that with the consent of Chyna's mother, he donated her brain to Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist who has investigated possible links between the brain injury, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and concussions in athletes. He was portrayed by Will Smith in the recent film "Concussion."
Disputed Mississippi witness now faces own murder charges

JACKSON, Miss. (AP)  A man has been charged with murder in the shooting deaths of three people in a Mississippi county Wednesday, and authorities said the suspect is a onetime jailhouse informant whose testimony helped convict another man of four 1996 killings.

Odell Hallmon could eventually face trial in the same courthouse where he testified in five separate trials involving another man eventually convicted of the shooting deaths at a north Mississippi furniture store.

The 40-year-old is charged with three counts of first-degree murder, one count of aggravated assault and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm after three separate shootings before dawn Wednesday in Montgomery County, about 90 miles north of the state capital of Jackson.

This April 27, 2016 booking photo released by the Carroll-Montgomery County Correctional Facility in Vaiden, Miss., shows Odell Hallmon, who is charged with three counts of first-degree murder, one count of aggravated assault and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm. A judge ordered him held without bond in the Wednesday pre-dawn shooting deaths in Montgomery County of his former girlfriend, the girlfriend's mother, and a third man. A fourth man was shot and wounded. (Carroll-Montgomery County Correctional Facility via AP)

A judge on Wednesday afternoon ordered Hallmon jailed without bond.

Hallmon is charged with the shooting deaths of his former girlfriend, 32-year-old Marquita Hill, and the girlfriend's mother, 59-year-old Carolyn Ann Sanders, in the town of Kilmichael in the county. He's also charged with shooting and killing 32-year-old Kenneth C. Loggins in Winona, 11 miles away.

The assault charge stems from the shooting of a fourth man, Marcus Brown, who was wounded in Kilmichael, authorities said.

Hallmon does not yet have a lawyer.

Montgomery County Sheriff Bubba Nix told The Associated Press that authorities don't yet know why the people were shot or even in what order. The first call came in after 2 a.m., and by 4 a.m. Hallmon had turned himself in.

Nix said that Hallmon fathered a 12-year-old son with Hill.

"He was living with her until she put him out," the sheriff said, adding Hill broke up with Hallmon in recent weeks. The sheriff said the son was at home with his mother and grandmother Wednesday, but escaped harm. Nix said the son is staying with relatives in Kilmichael, a town of 700.

Nix said all of the dead were shot multiple times and the bodies were taken for autopsies.

"It's a tragic thing," said Kilmichael Mayor Bobby Howell, who said Sanders was well-liked and had helped decorate the town square for Christmas last year.

Ty Young told The Associated Press that Brown, his cousin, was shot multiple times at another house in Kilmichael and was alert but in critical condition at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

Young said that Brown and Hallmon are friends, which is why Brown's girlfriend let him in the house in the middle of the night. Young said he doesn't know why his cousin was shot.

Hallmon has been convicted of at least three previous felonies, most recently completing a 10-year-prison stint for cocaine possession, according to Mississippi Department of Corrections spokeswoman Grace Fisher. He had been released on five years' probation in August.

Hallmon and his sister were both witnesses against Curtis Giovanni Flowers, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 2010 for the killings of four people at the Tardy Furniture Store in 1996. Flowers remains imprisoned at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

Three of Flowers' trials ended in convictions that were overturned on appeal. Two other trials end in hung juries before he was convicted in the sixth trial. The case drew wide attention for the number of times a person had been tried in a single case. The credibility of the witnesses, including Hallmon, also was questioned.

Hallmon testified in Flowers' defense in an early trial. He later claimed he lied that time, testifying in the last four trials that Flowers, while a cellmate at Parchman in 1997, had confessed to him the killings.

There was no apparent connection between Wednesday's shootings and Hallmon's testimony in the furniture store deaths.

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Follow Jeff Amy at: http://twitter.com/jeffamy. Read his work at http://bigstory.ap.org/author/jeff-amy.

This is a May 2012 driver's license photograph provided by the Mississippi Department of Public Safety of Marquita Hill, 32, who,with her mother, Carolyn Ann Sanders, 59, was shot and killed at a home in Kilmichael, Miss., Wednesday, April 27, 2016. A third person was killed and a fourth was injured following a series of shootings before dawn in Montgomery County. (Mississippi Department of Public Safety via AP)

This is a April 2013 driver's license photo provided by the Mississippi Department of Public Safety of Carolyn Ann Sanders, 59, who, with her daughter Marquita Hill, 32, was shot and killed at a home in Kilmichael, Miss., Wednesday, April 27, 2016. A third person was killed and the fourth is injured following a series of shootings before dawn in Montgomery County. (Mississippi Department of Public Safety via AP)
Australian leader defends gun controls on tragic anniversary

CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  Australia's prime minister said Thursday that a review of national gun laws would not weaken strict regulations that had kept Australians safer since 35 people were shot dead by a mass murderer 20 years ago.

Malcolm Turnbull was in the island state of Tasmania to attend a 20th anniversary commemoration of one of the world's worst mass murders by a lone gunman at the historic tourist site of Port Arthur on April 28, 1996.

Federal and state governments responded by severely restricting ownership of rapid-fire weapons and by buying back about one-in-five guns from Australia's public arsenal.

FILE - In this Monday, April 18, 2016 file photo, tourists read names on a memorial in Port Arthur, Tasmania state, Australia, where 35 people were killed by a lone gunman in 1996. Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said a review of nation gun laws will not weaken strict regulations that have kept Australians safer since 35 people were shot dead by a mass murderer 20 years ago. Prime Minister Turnbull was in the island state of Tasmania on Thursday, April 28, to attend a 20th anniversary commemoration of one of the world's worst mass murders by a lone gunman at the historic tourist site of Port Arthur on April 28, 1996. (AP Photo/Rod McGuirk, File)

Turnbull told Hobart Radio 7HO that the National Firearms Agreement was one of the then Prime Minister John Howard's "greatest achievements and it has kept Australians safer ever since."

A government inquiry into a 2014 siege in a Sydney cafe in which a gunman and two of his hostages died recommended a review of that agreement with a view to modernizing it.

Gun enthusiasts fear that any changes to the agreement could mean greater restrictions on gun ownership, while gun control advocates argue that the country was already backsliding on its post-Port Arthur regulations.

Turnbull, who is a licensed shooter, said maintaining the strength of the agreement was "one absolutely non-negotiable factor."

"We must continue to maintain our strong and responsible stance with respect to guns that is enshrined in the National Firearms Agreement and which has kept Australians safe," he said.

Most analysts agree that the reforms have resulted in declines in gun deaths and gun crime. Some opponents argue the reforms have achieved nothing and blame illegal guns for Australia's gun problems.

Turnbull pointed to the United States, where a person is 10 times more likely to be shot dead than in Australia, as an example of why Australians needed to severely restrict the type of semi-automatic weapons used at Port Arthur.

"You only have to look at the tragic examples  I was going to say 'daily' but certainly 'weekly'  in the United State of what happens when you have very little if any restrictions on the purchase of weapons like that," Turnbull said.
UN blacklists India-flagged ship carrying oil from Libya

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The U.N. Security Council has blacklisted an Indian-flagged cargo ship for illegally transporting crude oil from a Libyan port not under government control.

The council committee monitoring sanctions against Libya put the vessel Distya Ameya on the list Wednesday based on information it received from the Libyan government that it was carrying oil in violation of a 2014 U.N. resolution prohibiting shipments from rebel-held ports.

The sanctions committee said that on Tuesday the vessel was north of Al-Bayda, Libya, heading for Malta.

It said the Distya Ameya may have been sold recently to an unknown buyer and the vessel's name may have changed to Kassos.
The Latest: Ohio attorney general warns of donation scam

PIKETON, Ohio (AP)  The Latest on the killings of eight family members in southern Ohio (all times local):

9:20 p.m.

Ohio's attorney general is warning of a scam in which someone is claiming to be from the local sheriff's office and is asking for donations for the victims of last week's killings.

Leonard Manley, left, father and grandfather of several murder victims, drives up Union Hill Road away from a roadblock at the outer perimeter of a crime scene, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, near Piketon, Ohio. Several people were found dead Friday at multiple properties near Piketon. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Mike DeWine said Wednesday evening a resident told the Pike County Sheriff's Office that he received a call from a man indicating that he was with the sheriff's office and was soliciting donations to benefit the victims.

DeWine says it's a scam, and people should not give money.

Eight family members were found shot to death in their homes Friday near Piketon, about 80 miles east of Cincinnati.

Earlier Wednesday, DeWine and other officials visited the four crime scenes.

Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people, but no arrests have been made.

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5:00 p.m.

Ohio's attorney general is calling the slayings of eight people from one family in a rural part of the state a "cold-blooded, calculated massacre."

Mike DeWine and other officials visited the four crime scenes again Wednesday. Seven adults and a 16-year-old boy were found dead Friday at four properties in the hills near Piketon. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people but haven't made arrests or confirmed a motive for the slayings.

DeWine says authorities don't want to reveal information or theories that could inform the killer or killers.

A coroner says seven victims were shot multiple times, and one had nine gunshot wounds. Some victims also had bruising.

DeWine calls the multiple shootings another indication they were the work of a "ruthless" individual or group who planned them.

Deputy Sheriff Michael Creamer of the Pickaway County Sheriff's Office stands guard beside a police roadblock on Union Hill Road at the outer perimeter of a crime scene, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Piketon, Ohio. Seven adults and 16-year-old boy were found dead Friday, April 22 at four properties near Piketon. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

A small memorial stands beside the entrance on Union Hill Road at the outer perimeter of a crime scene, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Piketon, Ohio. Seven adults and 16-year-old boy were found dead Friday, April 22 at four properties near Piketon. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Deputy Sheriff Michael Creamer of the Pickaway County Sheriff's Office watches as official vehicles carrying Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine pass a police roadblock on Union Hill Road at the outer perimeter of a crime scene, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Piketon, Ohio. Seven adults and 16-year-old boy were found dead Friday, April 22 at four properties near Piketon. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

A motorist obscures their face from media cameras as he speaks to Deputy Sheriff Michael Creamer of the Pickaway County Sheriff's Office beside a police roadblock on Union Hill Road at the outer perimeter of a crime scene, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Piketon, Ohio. Seven adults and 16-year-old boy were found dead Friday, April 22 at four properties near Piketon. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Leonard Manley, father and grandfather of several murder victims, gets into his truck after speaking with police on Union Hill Road beside a roadblock at the outer perimeter of a crime scene, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Piketon, Ohio. Seven adults and 16-year-old boy were found dead Friday, April 22 at four properties near Piketon. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Leonard Manley, father and grandfather of several murder victims, drives down Union Hill Road towards a roadblock at the outer perimeter of a crime scene, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Piketon, Ohio. Seven adults and 16-year-old boy were found dead Friday, April 22 at four properties near Piketon. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Ohio State Attorney General Mike DeWine, right, speaks to the media alongside Pike County Sheriff Charles Reader during a news conference, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Waverly, Ohio. A coroner's report released Tuesday showed new details of vicious violence in the shooting deaths of eight members of a rural southern Ohio family, finding most victims were shot three to nine times each and some of them were bruised. Meanwhile, the hunt for whoever is responsible continued to expand, with more than 200 law enforcement officials involved. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Pike County Sheriff Charles Reader speaks to the media alongside Ohio State Attorney General Mike DeWine during a news conference, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Waverly, Ohio. A coroner's report released Tuesday showed new details of vicious violence in the shooting deaths of eight members of a rural southern Ohio family, finding most victims were shot three to nine times each and some of them were bruised. Meanwhile, the hunt for whoever is responsible continued to expand, with more than 200 law enforcement officials involved. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Mexican judges orders 5 cops, soldiers to trial for torture

MEXICO CITY (AP)  Judges in Mexico have ordered two soldiers and three federal police officers to stand trial in connection with the torture of a young woman that was caught on video.

Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that all five face charges of torture. They are accused of torturing the woman after she was detained Feb. 4, 2015, in Ajuchitlan del Progreso, in the troubled southern state of Guerrero.

The video circulated on social and traditional media in recent days shows a female soldier interrogating the woman, pulling her hair and putting the muzzle of a rifle against her head.
UC Davis chancellor placed on leave over "missteps"

SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  The chancellor of the University of California's Davis campus was put on paid leave Wednesday amid an uproar over her service on corporate boards and the school's hiring of consultants to improve its image online, following the widely criticized pepper-spraying of protesters by campus police, the university's president announced.

UC President Janet Napolitano plans to appoint an independent investigator to examine the "serious and troubling" questions raised by the actions of Chancellor Linda Katehi and to determine if they violated any university policies, Napolitano's office announced in a statement.

In the meantime, Napolitano has removed Katehi from the post she has held for nearly seven years until the inquiry is completed. The campus provost, Ralph Hexter, will fill the chancellor's shoes on an acting basis.

FILE - In this Dec. 14, 2011 file photo, University of California, Davis, Chancellor Linda Katehi, told lawmakers that she never ordered campus police to use force or pepper spray on students last month, while testifying at a legislative hearing at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif. Katehi has been placed on leave amid an uproar stemming in part from the school's hiring of consultants to improve its image, following a widely criticized protest pepper spraying incident by police. UC President Janet Napolitano's office announced Wednesday, April 27, 2016, that she is appointing an outside investigator to determine whether the actions of Chancellor Katehi have violated university policies. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

"I am deeply disappointed to take this action," Napolitano said in the statement. "But Davis is a strong campus, nationally and internationally renowned in many academic disciplines. I'm confident of the campus's continued ability to thrive and serve California students and the Davis community."

Katehi did not immediately reply to emails seeking comment.

Along with probing whether Katehi has been truthful about her role in the hiring of the online image consultants, the investigation will evaluate if there were irregularities surrounding the hiring and compensation of three of her close relatives, Napolitano said in a letter to Katehi released by the president's office.

Katehi's husband is a chemical engineering professor at Davis, while her daughter-in-law works as chief of staff to the vice-chancellor for student affairs. Her son is a graduate student in epidemiology.

Chief among the potential conflicts of interest about which Napolitano said she is concerned was a raise of over $50,000 and series of promotions the daughter-in-law received over 2  years while reporting to an administrator who in turn reported to the chancellor. Katehi recommended that the vice-chancellor's pay go up by 20 percent during the same period, according to the letter.

Napolitano also expressed concern that the academic program where Katehi's son has a paid research position was put under his wife's supervision and that student fees may have been used inappropriately to finance the move.

"You have verbally assured me that all matters relating to the employment of your husband, son and daughter-in-law have been consistent with policies and procedures, but documents and other information appear contrary to that assurance," Napolitano wrote to Katehi.

Napolitano's announcement ended two days of tense speculation at the Davis campus over Katehi's status.

A petition to Napolitano circulated among faculty members and signed by more than 300 professors earlier Wednesday stated they believed Napolitano had asked Katehi to resign and voiced objection to "this peremptory action carried out without any consultation."

Katehi added to the intrigue with a midday email to her deans and vice-chancellors in which she said she was "100 percent committed" to staying on as chancellor.

"I very much look forward to continuing to lead the campus to greater levels of success and excellence in the future," she wrote.

Katehi, 62, an electrical engineer who has advocated for women in the sciences, came under fire early in her tenure at Davis when campus police officers used pepper spray on seated demonstrators during a November 2011 Occupy movement protest.

The action received global attention because of widely circulated videos and photos of the cringing demonstrators getting sprayed.

The Davis Faculty Association called for Katehi's resignation for ordering police to dismantle the protesters' tent city. An independent investigation later criticized her for demonstrating ineffective leadership leading up to and during the incident, which sparked a series of campus reforms.

Although Katehi weathered the crisis, calls for her resignation resurfaced after The Sacramento Bee reported in March that she had accepted a seat on the board of a for-profit college company the federal government is suing and previously earned hundreds of thousands of dollars as a director for a textbook publisher.

Student protesters upset by what they perceived as a conflict of interest spent five weeks camped outside her office, staying there even after Katehi said she would donate some of the proceeds from her service on the board of textbook company John Wiley & Sons to a scholarship fund.

Pressure for her to quit continued to mount when The Bee reported the campus had spent at least $175,000 on Internet search optimization consultants who promised to diminish online references to the pepper-spray incident so the public would get a more favorable image of Davis.

In a statement last week, Katehi apologized for "a series of highly publicized missteps" that she acknowledged had overshadowed the university's accomplishments and "been a setback to our reputation and hard-earned prestige."

She disputed, however, the idea that her administration had tried to bury the pepper-spray incident by working with the search optimization firms and investing more than $2.6 million on advertising and campus outreach.

"Because of the importance of philanthropy to UC Davis and the need to make sure those searching for information about the university get a complete picture, we needed to do a better job telling the world about the university's extraordinary achievements," she said. "So we did what any organization in a similar situation would do ? we sought to strengthen our communications capabilities."

In her letter to Katehi, Napolitano said the chancellor's leave would last at least 90 days and could be extended by the university's governing board.

UC Davis enrolls about 27,000 undergraduates and 4,600 graduate students at a campus 18 miles from Sacramento.
2nd Chinese city in a week halts trash incinerator plans

BEIJING (AP)  For the second time in a week, a Chinese city has announced it would halt plans for a garbage incinerator project following angry protests by residents that underscore growing concern over threats to public health.

The government of Nanxian (NAN'-she-ahn) in the southern province of Hunan said Thursday in a public notice that it would cease all work related to the project and would not start up again without public support.

China is faced with the mounting challenge of disposing solid waste generated in ever-larger cities. However, public distrust runs deep as people question their local governments' ability to properly plan, build and manage trash incinerators.

When those projects move ahead, public anger is often stirred over fears they would cause air, water and soil pollution.

Without a voice inside the city hall, residents usually resort to street protests. Local governments tend to cave in to calm public sentiments and keep order, while seeking to punish those who have initiated the protests, leaving garbage disposal an unsolved problem.

Last Friday, the Haiyan county government in the eastern province of Zhejiang halted plans for a trash incinerator after rowdy streets protests.

In Nanxian, hundreds took to the street on Monday and Tuesday to protest the project citing pollution concerns, overseas Chinese news sites reported.

A man who answered the phone at the propaganda office of the county government said about 200 residents had protested with some actions he described as "extreme."

The man, who gave only his surname Liao as is common with Chinese bureaucrats, did not elaborate and said there had been no clash between the protesters and police and no one was injured during the demonstration.

Police had not detained anyone but were investigating the protest, Liao said.
Funerals to be held in days ahead for 8 killed in rural Ohio

PIKETON, Ohio (AP)  Grieving family members will gather for funeral services in the days ahead to remember eight of their own who were killed in what authorities are calling a "cold-blooded, calculated massacre" in rural Ohio.

A visitation was held for one of the eight Wednesday night at a funeral home in Kentucky, about 30 miles south of where the victims were fatally shot.

Gary Rhoden, 38, was among those killed. Family friend Lisa Wallace attended his viewing at Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home in South Shore, Kentucky.

Visitors gather for the wake of Gary Rhoden at the Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in South Shore, Ky. Multiple people, including Rhoden, were found dead Friday at several properties near Piketon, Ohio. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

"Everybody is in shock, and they really want their privacy," Wallace told WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, Ohio. "And a lot of them are scared. I would be. Considering," she said.

Mourners spent hours at the funeral home while local police and sheriff's deputies stood watch, a reminder that the killer or killers are still on the loose.

Authorities say they've interviewed more than 50 people, but haven't made any arrests or confirmed a motive for the slayings. They remain tight-lipped about the investigation.

"I assume the person or the people who committed these murders are watching the news reports about Pike County," state Attorney General Mike DeWine said. "I do not intend or want to broadcast any information that would let them know details about this investigation."

The bodies of seven adults and a teenage boy were found in their homes in the hills near Piketon, about 80 miles east of Cincinnati, on Friday.

The victims were 40-year-old Christopher Rhoden Sr.; his ex-wife, 37-year-old Dana Rhoden; their three children, 16-year-old Christopher Rhoden Jr., 19-year-old Hanna Rhoden and 20-year-old Clarence "Frankie" Rhoden; Christopher Rhoden Sr.'s brother, 44-year-old Kenneth Rhoden; their cousin, 38-year-old Gary Rhoden, and 20-year-old Hannah Gilley, whose 6-month old son with Frankie Rhoden was unharmed.

Two other children, Hanna Rhoden's 4-day-old daughter and Frankie Rhoden's 3-year-old son, also were unharmed.

A coroner said seven members of the Rhoden family were shot multiple times, and one had nine gunshot wounds. Some victims also had bruising.

Earlier Wednesday, DeWine and other officials visited the four homes where the family members were killed.

"It's absolutely shocking, some of these scenes," Pike County Sheriff Charles Reader said at a news conference with DeWine.

DeWine stressed that authorities would do whatever is necessary to solve the crimes.

"We are going to find whoever did this," he said.

Funeral services for Gary Rhoden will take place at 12 p.m. Thursday, followed by burial at the Miller Cemetery in South Shore.

Ohio State Attorney General Mike DeWine, right, speaks to the media alongside Pike County Sheriff Charles Reader during a news conference, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Waverly, Ohio. A coroner's report released Tuesday showed new details of vicious violence in the shooting deaths of eight members of a rural southern Ohio family, finding most victims were shot three to nine times each and some of them were bruised. Meanwhile, the hunt for whoever is responsible continued to expand, with more than 200 law enforcement officials involved. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

A motorist obscures his face from media cameras as he speaks to Deputy Sheriff Michael Creamer of the Pickaway County Sheriff's Office beside a police roadblock on Union Hill Road at the outer perimeter of a crime scene, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Piketon, Ohio. Seven adults and 16-year-old boy were found dead Friday, April 22 at four properties near Piketon. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
After fanfare, forecasters review talk of storm 'outbreak'

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP)  After warning for days about violent storms that could rake the central U.S. with huge hail, high winds and strong tornadoes, forecasters will review whether the messages they sent were appropriate for severe weather that some considered a "bust" because the tornadoes that did develop were small.

Storms on Tuesday brought grapefruit-sized hail in Kansas and winds near 75 mph throughout the Great Plains and Missouri River Valley. But the tornadoes that formed lacked enough of the "right" ingredients to become monster storms.

"We had signals that it could be on the higher end," said Bill Bunting, the operations chief at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. "But each system is different, and (this one) didn't live up to our expectations."

A low cloud moves over a farm near Gypsum, Kan., Tuesday, April 26, 2016. Thunderstorms bearing hail as big as grapefruit and winds approaching hurricane strength lashed portions of the Great Plains on Tuesday. The area is expecting severe weather. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

The center for the first time had said six days out that a severe weather "outbreak" was possible  raising questions on whether it was appropriate to sound a general alarm that far in advance.

"The one thing missing was what the hazards were," said Kim Klockow, a visiting scientist at the National Weather Service who studies meteorology and human behavior. "It was always entirely possible there would be tornadoes and it was possible there won't be."

The Storm Prediction Center doesn't quantify the chance of specific hazards in its forecasts until the day the storms are expected. On Tuesday, the center predicted that the central U.S. had a "moderate risk" of severe weather based on a 45 percent chance of 1-inch hail, with at least a 10 percent chance of 2-inch hail. The center said there was a lesser risk of tornadoes.

Klockow, who was brought aboard to help forecasters communicate their messages more effectively, said the solution lies not only with the Storm Prediction Center but with all charged with spreading the news about bad weather. She noted that some broadcasters talked up tornadoes as though they were certain.

"No single one of us communicates alone. We need to be on the same sheet of music," she said.

The dire predictions led several Oklahoma school districts to shutter their doors. Businesses cleared inventory from exposed areas, fearing the worst.

"So many people were sheltering for the tornado, I would be surprised if there wasn't some talk of a bust," Klockow said.

Marshall Shepherd, a former president of the American Meteorological Society, a professor and director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia and the host of a Sunday talk show on the Weather Channel, noted in an email to The Associated Press that forecasters and the public often focus on tornadoes when discussing severe weather.

"I think the communication of (a) severe weather threat is still tornado dominant," Shepherd said. "The overall event was generally ok, the 'bust' is in the hyper-discussion and anticipation of an outbreak."

In a piece that he wrote for Forbes on Wednesday, Shepherd said some discussion of a "bust" is likely fair after the hype of Tuesday's storms. "However," he went on to say, "I frequently encourage society to move beyond the notion of being upset when preparing for the worst and it does not happen. Just say thank you."

Klockow said she would like to know how people handled information they received before and during the storms' development  using actual data, not just anecdotes from people tweeting about what was perceived as a flawed forecast.

She said she also would like to see the National Weather Service collect data on social behaviors, like the agency already does on how storms come together.

"It's a physical science agency," Klockow said. "The pressure will need to come externally to bring that to the attention of the agency."

Bunting, whose team made the forecast, said the pre-storm outlooks succeeded in drawing attention to the weather, even if storms weren't entirely as bad as expected.

"We always have to work to improve how we present information," he said.

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Hawaii church deploying igloos to house homeless families

HONOLULU (AP)  A church in Hawaii looking to address the state's ongoing homelessness crisis has settled on a solution that on first look appears better suited for the frigid winters of Alaska than the islands' tropical climate: igloos.

There's no risk of the dome-shaped structures melting. They are made of fiberglass and their construction keeps the interior about 10-15 degrees cooler when the hot sun is blazing down, officials at First Assembly of God in Honolulu said.

Church officials plan to order a dozen homes, each of which can house four people, and erect them on the windward side of Oahu on land that the church had planned to use as a cabin retreat for its members.

In this Friday, April 22, 2016 photo, a dome-shaped shelter is shown at the First Assembly of God church in Honolulu. The church is looking into an unexpected solution to state's homeless crisis: they're planning to erect Alaska-made igloos to house homeless families. The snow-inspired dome-shape structures would appear at first glance to be a misfit among the island state's palm trees and sandy beaches, but their bright fiberglass exterior reflects the sun, shading those inside. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

"It is a crisis situation," said Klayton Ko, the church's senior pastor, noting that the igloos can be part of an interim solution until several years from now when new affordable housing becomes available.

The igloos are the latest idea in the islands as the state struggles to deal with the nation's highest per capita homelessness rate. Honolulu is using shipping containers to house some people, and others are pushing traditional thatched "hale" homes.

It's not the first time igloos or domes have been deployed before for the homeless. In Los Angeles, about 35 people lived in a cluster of them called "Dome Village" beginning in 1993, but the shelter closed in 2006 when the property owner raised the rent.

Ko said he was inspired when he read about the village online.

The igloos have 21 panels that overlap like fish scales, said Don Kubley, president and CEO of Juneau-based InterShelter, which manufactures the igloos. "The panels stack like Pringle potato chips and can fit in the back of a pickup truck," Kubley said.

The 20-foot-wide, 314-square-foot domes will cost the church about $9,500 each, not including a floor or base, plus $800 each for shipping, Kubley said. The church has raised about $100,000 for the project so far through donations from its members and other churches, and it's seeking corporate sponsors, said Daniel Kaneshiro, pastor at First Assembly of God.

Oregon-based Pacific Domes has supplied domes to homeless shelters, and their structures were used to house people who lost their homes in Hurricanes Andrew, Katrina and other major disasters, said Asha Deliverance, the company's founder.

The company has worked on proposals to erect domes on a large scale for homeless people in major cities, including San Francisco, but none of the projects have panned out, she said.

"It's been a really touchy subject, because every city wants to get rid of their homeless," Deliverance said. "They don't want to support homelessness and what that attracts."

On industrial Sand Island, Honolulu recently opened Hale Mauliola, a shelter made from shipping containers.

Single units in the pastel-colored containers are big enough to hold a cot and some personal belongings, and residents use communal showers and facilities at a trailer on-site. Three meals per day are served at a cluster of picnic tables shaded by an awning.

"It's like an upgraded camping experience," said Kimo Carvalho, spokesman for the Institute for Human Services, the nonprofit that runs the shelter.

The containers cost $9,117 per unit for a 72-square-foot room for a couple, or $7,717 for a 49-square-foot room for singles.

The Hale Mauliola shelter helped Clayton "Uncle Clay" Gohier, a former Waikiki surf instructor and canoe captain, get off the streets and recover from a knee infection.

"I didn't have a home I could call my own," Gohier said. "I lived in a van, because the rent was so high in Waikiki."

Now, living in the shelter with his wife, he's getting the help he needs to find a permanent home. "A lot of good things are coming out of here, for me and my wife," he said.

In this Friday, April 22, 2016 photo, the window of a dome-shaped shelter is shown at the First Assembly of God church in Honolulu. The church is looking into an unexpected solution to state's homeless crisis: they're planning to erect Alaska-made igloos to house homeless families. The snow-inspired dome-shape structures would appear at first glance to be a misfit among the island state's palm trees and sandy beaches, but their bright fiberglass exterior reflects the sun, shading those inside. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

In this Friday, April 22, 2016 photo, Don Kubley, president and CEO of Juneau-based InterShelter, Inc., talks to The Associated Press inside one of his company's dome-shaped shelters at the First Assembly of God church in Honolulu. The church is looking into an unexpected solution to state's homeless crisis: they're planning to erect Alaska-made igloos to house homeless families. The snow-inspired dome-shape structures would appear at first glance to be a misfit among the island state's palm trees and sandy beaches, but their bright fiberglass exterior reflects the sun, shading those inside. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

In this Friday, April 22, 2016 photo, Daniel Kaneshiro, a pastor at First Assembly of God church, talks to The Associated Press inside a dome-shaped shelter at the church in Honolulu. The church is looking into an unexpected solution to state's homeless crisis: they're planning to erect Alaska-made igloos to house homeless families. The snow-inspired dome-shape structures would appear at first glance to be a misfit among the island state's palm trees and sandy beaches, but their bright fiberglass exterior reflects the sun, shading those inside. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

In this Friday, April 22, 2016 photo, a dome-shaped shelter is shown at the First Assembly of God church in Honolulu. The church is looking into an unexpected solution to state's homeless crisis: they're planning to erect Alaska-made igloos to house homeless families. The snow-inspired dome-shape structures would appear at first glance to be a misfit among the island state's palm trees and sandy beaches, but their bright fiberglass exterior reflects the sun, shading those inside. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

In this Friday, April 22, 2016 photo, the window of a dome-shaped shelter is shown at the First Assembly of God church in Honolulu. The church is looking into an unexpected solution to state's homeless crisis: they're planning to erect Alaska-made igloos to house homeless families. The snow-inspired dome-shape structures would appear at first glance to be a misfit among the island state's palm trees and sandy beaches, but their bright fiberglass exterior reflects the sun, shading those inside. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

In this Monday, April 25, 2016 photo, Ray Inouye sits outside his temporary home at Hale Mauliola, a transitional housing complex that uses modified shipping containers as shelter for the homeless, on Sand Island near Honolulu. The homeless crisis in Hawaii has spawned many ideas for housing those in need, including using shipping containers, grass homes and plastic igloos. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

In this Monday, April 25, 2016 photo, shipping container homes are shown at Hale Mauliola, a transitional housing complex that uses the modified containers as shelter for the homeless, on Sand Island near Honolulu. The homeless crisis in Hawaii has spawned many ideas for housing those in need, including using shipping containers, grass homes and plastic igloos. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

In this Monday, April 25, 2016 photo, Clayton "Uncle Clay" Gohier, a former Waikiki surf instructor, sits in a common area near his temporary home at Hale Mauliola, a transitional housing complex that uses modified shipping containers as shelter for the homeless, on Sand Island near Honolulu. The homeless problem in Hawaii has spawned many ideas for housing those in need, including using shipping containers, grass homes and plastic igloos. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

In this Monday, April 25, 2016 photo, Kimo Carvalho, Director of Community Relations at the Institute for Human Services, shows a double occupancy unit at Hale Mauliola, a transitional housing complex that uses modified shipping containers as shelter for the homeless, on Sand Island near Honolulu. The homeless problem in Hawaii has spawned many ideas for housing those in need, including using shipping containers, grass homes and plastic igloos. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones)

FILE - In this Nov. 5, 1993 file photo, Irene Rainey, 34, moves into the new Genesis Transitional Dome Village, a pilot project to help the homeless, in Los Angeles. A church in Hawaii is looking to address the state's ongoing homelessness crisis. They've settled on a solution that at first appears better suited for the frigid winters of Alaska than the islands' tropical climate: igloos. (AP Photo/Tara Farrell, File)
Egypt explorers hunt gold in the desert, following ancients

EASTERN DESERT, Egypt (AP)  Off the off-road tracks deep in Egypt's eastern desert, prospectors are ramping up the hunt for the treasure once revered by the Pharaohs as the "skin of the gods"  gold.

Essential for ancient artifacts like the famed burial mask of Tutankhamun and still highly desired in Middle Eastern culture today, gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia. But experts say the country is heavily underexplored and that modern technology now allows much deeper excavation of the ancient sites shown on Pharaonic treasure maps.

If developed, gold and mineral mining could prove a boon to the country at a time it is desperate for foreign currency, and provide jobs for its burgeoning population of 90 million. But miners and experts say current legislation is out of step with global practices and doesn't give enough incentives to bring in foreign investment.

In this Friday, April 15, 2016 photo, Geologist Leonard Karr, shows mineral formations inside an abandoned gold mine once exploded by the British, in Egypt's eastern desert, between Luxor and Hurghada. Essential for ancient artifacts like the famed burial mask of Tutankhamun and still highly desired in Middle Eastern culture today, gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia. But experts say the country is heavily underexplored and that modern technology now allows much deeper excavation of the ancient sites shown on Pharaonic treasure maps. If developed, gold and mineral mining could prove a boon to the country at a time it is desperate for foreign currency, and provide jobs for its burgeoning population of 90 million. (AP Photo/Brian Rohan)

"Mining has been going on here for over 5,000 years, but in the 21st century it's essentially virgin ground," said Mark Campbell, president of the Canadian exploration company Alexander Nubia, which is increasing its drilling this year in a 1,070-square mile area in the desert. "Exploring for gold and minerals in Egypt today with modern technology is like having a map where X marks the spot."

The group has identified six potential mines in the area, filled with barren valleys and pink rock outcroppings known as the Arabian-Nubian Shield, which stretches south to Eritrea and east to Saudi Arabia. While veins close to the surface have been largely excavated by successive Pharaonic, Roman and even British colonial operations, the sites still hold gold concentrations deeper down that nowadays can be extracted with heavy machinery.

The area contains the remnants of volcanic belts and sea floor sediments rich in metals, with a wide range of valuable mineral deposits including those containing gold, copper, uranium and others, geologists say.

At the moment, Campbell's team is drilling core samples that are sent off for analysis in Romania. The gold can't always be seen by the naked eye, with concentrations of only a few grams per ton of dense, mineral-filled ore. But it's promising enough for the team of two dozen explorers and specialists to have undertaken plans to open Egypt's first new mine by 2019.

One former British colonial-era mine in the area, known as Abu Zawal, was abandoned in the mid-20th century after nationalist strongman President Gamal Abdel Nasser chased away foreigners and ended decades of laissez-faire capitalism in the Arab world's most populous country. The British also had been following in the tracks of the ancients  the site is still littered with Roman pottery fragments, an ancient fort and water well, as well as Pharaonic grinding stones that lie scattered alongside turn-of-the-century spent rifle cartridges.

But the mining sector today remains largely dormant, a victim of outdated policies, experts said. Despite some reforms that went into effect last year amid government promises to create more favorable investment laws, Egypt's mining legislation still falls short of international standards, and attempts by the government to attract foreign investment have largely failed.

"No one wants to deal with the profit-sharing structure," said Yousef Husseini, an analyst at Egyptian bank EFG Hermes who follows the mining sector.

"The ideal setup would be royalty and taxes as opposed to royalty and profit share, as is currently the case," he said, referring to the current system where mining companies in Egypt must pay at least half of their profits to the state in addition to royalties paid annually based on sales figures. In most other countries, taxes levied on companies in the mining sector range from 25 to 50 percent.

Mark Tyler, an investment banker with Nedbank in London, agrees that the current split of profits demanded by Egypt is out of step with global practices. Mines are both expensive to build and to operate throughout their lifespans, unlike oil and gas discoveries that run relatively cheaply after the initial investments.

"There's a long history of small-scale mining in Egypt. Generally that's a good indication there are minerals in the area," Tyler said. "But those rules are pretty harsh. Typically you have royalties and taxes and some type of state shareholding in the company, like is often the case in West Africa and the rest of the world."

The exception is the Sukari mine, Egypt's only modern mining operation, which has consistently increased its profits in recent years. Built over another ancient gold mining site further to the south, the company that runs it, Centamin, has seen its share price grow by over 60 percent since the beginning of the year, buoyed by rising gold prices and a 15.7 percent increase in production in the first quarter compared to last year.

The company has a special deal that was approved by parliament during the rule of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's long-time strongman who was ousted in a popular uprising in 2011. Its success was briefly halted the following year, when the country was under the rule of the elected but divisive Islamist, Mohammed Morsi, and a court decreed that Centamin's right to operate Sukari was invalid.

But since general-turned-president Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi led Morsi's overthrow in 2013, promising a business-friendly government that would protect and streamline investments, Centamin has regained confidence. Its license was upheld briefly before Morsi's ouster, although the case is still facing appeal with a decision due in late May. The company believes it is in a good position, given more recent legislation that bolsters property rights.

Under el-Sissi, the government has talked of creating a "Golden Triangle" of development in the area, one of its favored "mega projects" to spark the fast economic growth needed to provide jobs. But like investment law reforms announced in 2015, that plan has so far fallen short, with investors still regularly complaining of endless red tape when doing business in Egypt.

Still, the players involved in mining today are decidedly upbeat. Both Campbell and Centamin's chairman, Josef El-Raghy, envision a future where new mines could sprout up all over Egypt.

"If there were more favorable legislation, there'd be dozens of companies all around the area," said geologist Leonard Karr, an American with Campbell's company who has worked for 36 years in the industry, as he enthusiastically pointed out rock formations during a jeep tour of the area.

As Campbell, who has overseen mining and oil drilling in a dozen or more countries over the years, put it: "Egypt is a geological Disneyland."

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Follow Brian Rohan on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/brian_rohan

The Friday, April 15, 2016 photo, shows a sign marking the turn-off leading to the Hamama gold exploration site, deep in the desert east of Luxor, Egypt. Essential for ancient artifacts like the famed burial mask of Tutankhamun and still highly desired in Middle Eastern culture today, gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia. But experts say the country is heavily underexplored and that modern technology now allows much deeper excavation of the ancient sites shown on Pharaonic treasure maps. If developed, gold and mineral mining could prove a boon to the country at a time it is desperate for foreign currency, and provide jobs for its burgeoning population of 90 million. (AP Photo/Brian Rohan)

In this Friday, April 15, 2016 photo, shows rocks analyzed for their concentration of gold, at the Hamama camp in Egypt's eastern desert, between Luxor and Hurghada. Essential for ancient artifacts like the famed burial mask of Tutankhamun and still highly desired in Middle Eastern culture today, gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia. But experts say the country is heavily underexplored and that modern technology now allows much deeper excavation of the ancient sites shown on Pharaonic treasure maps. If developed, gold and mineral mining could prove a boon to the country at a time it is desperate for foreign currency, and provide jobs for its burgeoning population of 90 million. (AP Photo/Brian Rohan)

In this Friday, April 15, 2016 photo, Geologist Leonard Karr, right, shows maps of the company concession in Egypt's eastern desert, between Luxor and Hurghada. Essential for ancient artifacts like the famed burial mask of Tutankhamun and still highly desired in Middle Eastern culture today, gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia. But experts say the country is heavily underexplored and that modern technology now allows much deeper excavation of the ancient sites shown on Pharaonic treasure maps. If developed, gold and mineral mining could prove a boon to the country at a time it is desperate for foreign currency, and provide jobs for its burgeoning population of 90 million. (AP Photo/Brian Rohan)

In this Friday, April 15, 2016 photo, Mark Campbell, president of Canadian exploration company Alexander Nubia, poses for a photograph inside a tent in the company's camp in eastern desert, between Luxor and Hurghada, Egypt. Mining has been going on here for over 5,000 years, but in the 21st century it's essentially virgin ground," said Campbell. Alexander Nubia is increasing its drilling this year in a 1,070-square mile area in the desert. "Exploring for gold and minerals in Egypt today with modern technology is like having a map where X marks the spot." (AP Photo/Brian Rohan)

In this Friday, April 15, 2016 photo, Geologist Leonard Karr, left, shows core samples drilled out from rock formations in Egypt's eastern desert, between Luxor and Hurghada. Essential for ancient artifacts like the famed burial mask of Tutankhamun and still highly desired in Middle Eastern culture today, gold has been mined in Egypt for millennia. But experts say the country is heavily underexplored and that modern technology now allows much deeper excavation of the ancient sites shown on Pharaonic treasure maps. If developed, gold and mineral mining could prove a boon to the country at a time it is desperate for foreign currency, and provide jobs for its burgeoning population of 90 million. (AP Photo/Brian Rohan)
Some principals charged with kickbacks faced financial woes

DETROIT (AP)  A dozen Detroit principals and an administrator are accused of finding a way to bleed their struggling public schools of $900,000  ordering chairs, writing paper and other supplies that in most cases were never delivered, even as investigators doggedly battled fraud in a district that lacks textbooks and even toilet paper.

Federal authorities say the bribery and kickback scheme started as early as 2002 and ended earlier this year. It is the latest in a string of embarrassing public corruption cases where elected officials and workers succumbed to the temptation of an easy dime left in a too-often unguarded public till.

"They stole from the children," said an angry Ida Byrd-Hill, who had two children attending a Detroit high school in 2009 during the height of the alleged kickbacks.

FILE- In an Oct. 2, 2012 file photo, Osborn Collegiate Academy of Mathematics, Science and Technology Principal Tanya Bowman is seen in Detroit. Bankruptcies, tax liens and civil judgments are among the financial troubles that were faced by some Detroit principals accused of receiving kickbacks on inflated invoices for classroom supplies, in a school system crippled by debt and serving among the most under-privileged children in the country. (David Coates/Detroit News via AP, File) DETROIT FREE PRESS OUT; HUFFINGTON POST OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

"We keep forgetting that these schools belong to the citizens of Detroit," she said. "They don't belong to Detroit Public Schools. They don't belong to the principals. Everybody has forgotten who they work for. They work for the parents."

Mostly middle aged, the 13 schools officials charged last month with conspiracy to commit bribery had salaries far above what the average Detroiter takes home. But a public records search by The Associated Press showed some faced bankruptcies, tax liens and other personal financial troubles just prior to or during the time they are accused of receiving kickbacks from longtime district supply vendor Norman Shy, 74.

Wayne State University Law School professor Peter Henning described it as a scenario that is all too familiar in a city where public employees think they are owed more than they get for difficult, thankless jobs.

"I doubt any of them really thought they were doing anything wrong  they (believed they) were just getting something they deserved," Henning said. "They worked hard, were underpaid and had to deal with all the stuff that goes on in DPS."

Henning said it "comes down to (the) basic morality" of city officials  or a lack thereof.

"If somebody wants to steal, they can steal. If somebody wants to take an improper benefit or payment, they can do it. Is anyone going to notice $100 here, a $1,000 there?" he said.

Federal investigators have been busy in Detroit for at least seven years. Much of their work involved uncovering rampant pay-to-play schemes at the highest levels of City Hall.

Disgraced ex-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is serving a 28-year prison sentence for corruption. Former City Council President Monica Conyers also spent time behind bars after pleading guilty in 2009 to conspiracy to commit bribery.

But the school bribery charges are particularly galling given the district's poor finances. The state Legislature is being asked to enact a $720 million restructuring plan that would pay off the district's enormous debt. Dozens of schools were forced to cancel classes this year as teachers called in sick to protest low pay, lacking supplies and over-crowded classrooms. Enrollment has dropped to about 46,000 students from 95,000 in 2009.

The state recently provided $48.7 million in emergency funding to keep the schools open through June.

Principals in Detroit were responsible for ordering supplies and selecting vendors. Authorities said that because of the scheme, the district paid thousands of dollars for auditorium chairs, supplemental teaching material, raised line paper and other classroom supplies that either never arrived or came in smaller quantities than ordered.

"At the core of this apparent scheme is something that's very real  horribly resourced public schools," Detroit teachers' union president Ivy Bailey said last month, when charges were announced.

The probe evolved from a state audit of finances in a spin-off district of 15 low-performing Detroit schools. That led to the arrest of Kenyetta Wilbourn-Snapp, a principal at two high schools who was charged late last year with taking bribes to hire a company to perform tutoring services.

From there, federal investigators eventually found enough evidence to charge more administrators. Their average salary, without benefits, is about $98,600, compared with the median Detroit household income of about $26,000. Nonetheless, several of the accused educators found themselves in financial straits and appear to have accepted money, gift cards and checks from Shy to pull themselves out.

The U.S. Attorney's office says Spain Elementary-Middle School principal Ronald Alexander received about $23,000 in kickbacks from May 2009 through June 2014. Alexander filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2011.

Suspended Thirkell Elementary-Middle School principal Clara Smith on Thursday became the first in the case to plead guilty. Shy's company gave her a total of $194,000, including $18,000 in personal credit card and bill payments and checks to relatives and friends in 2011. She received Sam's Club gift cards, cash and checks made payable to family members and friends. On or about March 10, 2010, one kickback was in the form of a $5,000 personal credit card payment. On Dec. 12, 2012 she received $4,000 in Walmart gift cards, prosecutors say.

Smith even kept track of how much was coming to her in a ledger, according to court documents. A tax lien was filed last year on her Southfield home.

"At first I said, 'No, no, no,'" Smith said Thursday at her plea hearing. "But then I fell out of the grace of God."

She said she relented after she was told by Shy that other principals were taking kickbacks. She said she used some of the money as gift cards for students and to decorate the school.

She faces up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and restitution when she is sentenced Sept. 7. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Buckley said he will recommend she serve no more than 57 months in prison and pay $194,000 restitution.

The U.S. Attorney's office says a big chunk of the $900,000 in kickbacks went to Clara Flowers. Flowers, 61, had been an assistant superintendent in Specialized Student Services and a former principal. Now, she's accused of receiving nearly $325,000 in the scheme.

Shy's Allstate Sales received about $2.7 million from the district, according to court documents.

The Associated Press left messages seeking comment from attorneys representing the principals, who face up to five years in prison and a fine. Only Flowers' attorney, Frank Eaman, responded.

Flowers plans to pay the district back, he said.

"She profoundly regrets that she became involved with a vendor who was paying kickbacks to administrators," Eaman said. "She has completely cooperated with the authorities and will continue to do so. She will accept responsibility for her actions and accept the consequences of her actions."

The U.S. Attorney's Office says 10 other guilty pleas so far are scheduled into May, including plea deals with eight other principals. Shy is scheduled to plead guilty May 11.

Many of the kickbacks allegedly occurred after then-emergency manager Robert Bobb began attacking corruption and fraud in 2009, while trying to fix a $300 million budget deficit.

But somehow, the administrators evaded detection.

"I think it's shocking anytime you hear that 13 very high-level school officials are engaged in bribery," U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said. "If I were a parent or a teacher, I would not be satisfied that this could occur under anyone's watch."

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Associated Press researchers Rhonda Shafner, Jennifer Farrar and Monika Mathur and AP writer Roger Schneider contributed to this report.

FILE- In a May 13, 2015 file photo Hutchinson Elementary School Principal Stanley Johnson is seen in Detroit. Bankruptcies, tax liens and civil judgments are among the financial troubles that were faced by some Detroit principals accused of receiving kickbacks on inflated invoices for classroom supplies, in a school system crippled by debt and serving among the most under-privileged children in the country. (Max Ortiz/Detroit News via AP, File) DETROIT FREE PRESS OUT; HUFFINGTON POST OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT

FILE- In this Oct. 2, 2010 file photo, Marcus Garvey Academy Principal James Hearn is seen in Detroit. Bankruptcies, tax liens and civil judgments are among the financial troubles that were faced by some Detroit principals accused of receiving kickbacks on inflated invoices for classroom supplies, in a school system crippled by debt and serving among the most under-privileged children in the country. (John T. Grelick/Detroit News via AP, File) DETROIT FREE PRESS OUT; HUFFINGTON POST OUT; MANDATORY CREDIT
Casualties mount from bombardment in Syria's largest city

BEIRUT (AP)  Airstrikes and artillery killed more than 60 people in the past 24 hours in Aleppo, including dozens at a hospital in a rebel-held neighborhood, as Syria's largest city was turned once again into a major battleground in the civil war, officials said Thursday.

Aid agencies warn that Aleppo is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster with the collapse of a two-month cease-fire and stalled peace talks.

The intensified violence  by far the worst since the partial cease-fire began  coincides with reports of a military buildup outside Aleppo that many fear is a prelude for a government attempt to force a complete siege of the city's neighborhoods.

In this image made from video and posted online from Validated UGC, a Civil Defense worker carries a child after airstrikes hit Aleppo, Syria, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A Syrian monitoring group and a first-responders team say new airstrikes on the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo have killed over a dozen people and brought down at least one residential building. The new violence on Thursday brings the death toll in the past 24-hours in the deeply divided city to at least 61 killed. (Validated UGC via AP video)

Battle-hardened residents were shocked by the bloodshed. Opposition activists accused the government of carpet-bombing rebel-controlled areas, while Syrian state media said more than 1,000 mortar rounds and rockets were fired at government-held districts, killing 22 people.

Video posted online by opposition activists showed rescuers pulling bodies from shattered buildings in the rebel neighborhoods of Sukkari, Kallasa and Bustan al-Qasr.

In one scene, a building's staircase hung sideways and old men were sobbing.

"The walls, cupboards, everything fell on top of them," cried one man. In another, a clearly terrified small girl with pigtails wept silently while held by a man.

A blond girl walked from the rubble behind her mother, questioning why they were bombed. "What have we done?" she cried.

In the rebel-held Sukkari neighborhood, 27 people died as a well-known field hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee for the Red Cross was hit overnight, along with nearby buildings, according to opposition activists and rescue workers.

U.N. envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura appealed to the U.S. and Russia to help revive the peace talks and cease-fire, which he said "hangs by a thread."

However, the violence only escalated.

Chief opposition negotiator Mohammed Alloush blamed the government of President Bashar Assad for the violence, saying it shows "the environment is not conducive to any political action."

"What is happening is a crime of ethnic and sectarian cleansing by all means," Alloush told The Associated Press, adding it was an attempt by Assad's government to drive residents from Aleppo.

But a citizen journalist said there was little sign of people fleeing the city.

"Where can they go?" said Bahaa al-Halaby.

A Damascus-based Syrian military official denied the government had hit the hospital. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov also denied bombing any hospitals in Aleppo, saying its aircraft have not flown any missions in the region for several days.

Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State group, said fighter jets from the international coalition have not carried out any airstrikes in Aleppo in the past 24 hours.

About 200 civilians have been killed in the past week in Syria, nearly half of them around Aleppo.

With the U.N.-sponsored peace talks in Geneva completely deadlocked, Syrians are watching the escalating violence with dread, fearing that Aleppo is likely to be the focus of the next, more vicious phase of the 5-year-old war.

The hospital that was hit in Sukkari has been one of the main medical centers for Aleppo since the city became divided in 2012.

Among the 27 dead were 14 patients and staff, including three children and six employees, officials said. A dentist and one of the last pediatricians in opposition-held areas of Aleppo were among the victims. The toll was expected to rise.

The 34-bed, multistory hospital, the area's main pediatric care center, was "hit by direct airstrike," according to a statement by Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym MSF.

The hospital had an emergency room, an intensive care unit and an operating room, and its eight doctors and 28 nurses offered services such as obstetric care, outpatient and inpatient treatment, the MSF said. The group has supported the hospital since 2012.

The 250,000 people still in Aleppo will now have to find an alternative facility for care, said Sam Taylor, who is Syria communications coordinator for MSF and is based in Amman, Jordan.

"We're absolutely appalled," he told AP.

Dating to the 1990s, the hospital was renamed for one of the uprising's early victims, Basel Aslan, after the area came under rebel control. Aslan had been detained by security forces and tortured to death, said civil defense volunteer Ibrahim Alhaj.

The civil defense, also known as the White Helmets, said the hospital and adjacent buildings were struck in four consecutive airstrikes.

Video posted by the White Helmets showed lifeless bodies, including children, being pulled from a building and loaded into ambulances amid screams and wailing. Distraught rescue workers tried to keep away onlookers, apparently fearing more bombs.

Shortly after midday Thursday, new airstrikes in rebel-held areas killed at least 20 people in two neighborhoods, the Syrian Civil Defense and the Observatory said.

Videos by activists showed dust and smoke rising from burning buildings as men and women ran from collapsing houses and children cried, looking for their parents.

Syrian lawmaker Omar Ossi, part of the government delegation at the Geneva talks, blamed the escalation on Turkey and Saudi Arabia as patrons of the rebels.

"The Syrian army will be able to regain the initiative and rein in this Turkish interference," he said.

Humanitarian officials said the fighting is putting millions at grave risk.

The U.N. won't be able to reach embattled Syrians if the intensified violence continues on and near aid convoys, said Jan Egeland, an adviser to the U.N. envoy, adding that in the last three days, one convoy into Homs was hit by a mortar round and another had to stop several times due to air raids.

Egeland decried a "catastrophic deterioration" of the security situation in Aleppo, saying a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of Syrians "may be broken."

The ICRC said stocks of contingency food and medical aid are expected to run out soon and warned that an escalation in fighting means that they cannot be replenished.

The partial cease-fire that began Feb. 27 held for weeks. Formally called a "cessation of hostilities," it was never meant to be a total truce because it excluded extremists such as the Islamic State group and its rival al-Qaida branch, the Nusra Front.

It frayed further recently as casualties mounted, particularly in Aleppo and other parts of northern Syria. Airstrikes this week hit a training center in rural Aleppo for the Syrian Civil Defense, killing five volunteers.

Since April 19, nearly 200 people have died, including 44 in an airstrike on a market in a rebel-held area in northern Syria's Idlib province. Dozens of civilians also were killed by rebel shelling in government-held areas. There also has been shelling in Damascus, along with a car bombing  both rare for the capital.

De Mistura, the U.N. envoy, told the Security Council via videoconference that after 60 days, the truce "hangs by a thread."

"I really fear that the erosion of the cessation is unraveling the fragile consensus around a political solution, carefully built over the last year," he said. "Now I see parties reverting to the language of a military solution or military option. We must ensure that they do not see that as a solution or an option."

The talks foundered last week after the main opposition group, called the High Negotiating Committee, suspended its formal participation to protest alleged cease-fire violations by the government, a drop in humanitarian aid deliveries and no progress in winning the release of detainees.

___

Associated Press writer Zeina Karam in Beirut and Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.

In this image made from video and posted online from Validated UGC, a man carries a child after airstrikes hit Aleppo, Syria, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A Syrian monitoring group and a first-responders team say new airstrikes on the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo have killed over a dozen people and brought down at least one residential building. The new violence on Thursday brings the death toll in the past 24-hours in the deeply divided city to at least 61 killed. (Validated UGC via AP video)

In this image made from video and posted online from Validated UGC, a firefighter tries to extinguish a building caught on fire after airstrikes hit Aleppo, Syria, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A Syrian monitoring group and a first-responders team say new airstrikes on the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo have killed over a dozen people and brought down at least one residential building. The new violence on Thursday brings the death toll in the past 24-hours in the deeply divided city to at least 61 killed. (Validated UGC via AP video)

In this image made from video and posted online from Validated UGC, men look at damaged buildings after airstrikes hit Aleppo, Syria, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A Syrian monitoring group and a first-responders team say new airstrikes on the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo have killed over a dozen people and brought down at least one residential building. The new violence on Thursday brings the death toll in the past 24-hours in the deeply divided city to at least 61 killed. (Validated UGC via AP video)

In this image made from video and posted online from Validated UGC, a boy weeps at the scene after airstrikes hit Aleppo, Syria, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A Syrian monitoring group and a first-responders team say new airstrikes on the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo have killed over a dozen people and brought down at least one residential building. The new violence on Thursday brings the death toll in the past 24-hours in the deeply divided city to at least 61 killed. (Validated UGC via AP video)

In this image made from video and posted online from Validated UGC, a man carries a child after airstrikes hit Aleppo, Syria, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A Syrian monitoring group and a first-responders team say new airstrikes on the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo have killed over a dozen people and brought down at least one residential building. The new violence on Thursday brings the death toll in the past 24-hours in the deeply divided city to at least 61 killed. (Validated UGC via AP video)

This image made from video and posted online from Validated UGC, shows smoke rising from buildings after airstrikes hit Aleppo, Syria, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A Syrian monitoring group and a first-responders team say new airstrikes on the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo have killed over a dozen people and brought down at least one residential building. The new violence on Thursday brings the death toll in the past 24-hours in the deeply divided city to at least 61 killed. (Validated UGC via AP video)

This image made from video and posted online from Validated UGC, shows a building on fire after airstrikes hit Aleppo, Syria, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A Syrian monitoring group and a first-responders team say new airstrikes on the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo have killed over a dozen people and brought down at least one residential building. The new violence on Thursday brings the death toll in the past 24-hours in the deeply divided city to at least 61 killed. (Validated UGC via AP video)

In this image made from video and posted online from Validated UGC, a man leads a woman in tears and child out of the scene after airstrikes hit Aleppo, Syria, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A Syrian monitoring group and a first-responders team say new airstrikes on the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo have killed over a dozen people and brought down at least one residential building. The new violence on Thursday brings the death toll in the past 24-hours in the deeply divided city to at least 61 killed. (Validated UGC via AP video)

In this image made from video and posted online from Validated UGC, a man makes his way in rubble after airstrikes hit Aleppo, Syria, Thursday, April 28, 2016. A Syrian monitoring group and a first-responders team say new airstrikes on the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo have killed over a dozen people and brought down at least one residential building. The new violence on Thursday brings the death toll in the past 24-hours in the deeply divided city to at least 61 killed. (Validated UGC via AP video)

In this image made from video on Wednesday, April 27, 2016 and posted online by the Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets, Civil Defense workers stand in rubble after airstrikes hit a hospital in Aleppo, Syria. A series of airstrikes hit a hospital and adjacent buildings in the rebel-held part of the contested city of Aleppo in Syria on Wednesday night, reportedly killing more than a dozen people. (Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets via AP video)

Ukraine's U.N. Ambassador Volodymyr Yelchenko views a video monitor as he listens to U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen O'Brien report to the Security Council in a live broadcast on the bombing of a hospital in Syria, Thursday April 28, 2016 at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

China's U.N. Ambassador and current Security Council president Liu Jieyi, right, listens as U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen O'Brien reports to the council in a live broadcast on the bombing of a hospital in Syria, Thursday April 28, 2016 at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
Turkey: 15 detained in connection to suicide bombing

ANKARA, Turkey (AP)  Turkish authorities on Thursday detained 15 people in connection with a suicide bomb attack in the northwestern city of Bursa which wounded 13 people, Interior Minister Efkan Ala said.

The female attacker blew herself up near an Ottoman-era mosque in Bursa's historic district on Wednesday. None of the wounded was in serious condition.

Ala did not provide details on the suspects. Earlier, the state-run Anadolu Agency said 12 suspects were detained in Bursa, Istanbul and two other cities.

An injured person sits in an ambulance after a suicide bomb attack outside the historical tourist destination at Ulu Cami in Bursa, Turkey, Wednesday, April 27, 2016. The office of the governor of Bursa said in a statement carried by the state-owned Anadolu Agency that a woman believed to be a suicide bomber blew herself up. (IHA agency via AP ) TURKEY OUT

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack and authorities have refused to disclose details on the identity and possible affiliation of the attacker until the end of the investigation. The assailant was "aged about 25" and only fragments were left of her body, according to the country's health minister.

The attack occurred a day after the United States issued a new warning to its citizens about "credible indications" of terrorist threats against tourist areas in Turkey.

The country, which is facing growing blowback from the conflict in Syria and renewed conflict with Kurdish militants, has recently witnessed an increase of such attacks. In the past year, more than 200 people across Turkey have been killed in seven suicide bombings, including Wednesday's.

Kurdish militants, who have been fighting state security forces in a renewed conflict in the southeast, have claimed two such attacks recently.

Turkish authorities have blamed four of the attacks on the Islamic State group, which controls territory in neighboring Syria and Iraq. The extremist group is known to have cells in Turkey but never claimed responsibility for any of the suicide attacks on Turkish soil.
Russia launches 1st rocket from new space facility

MOSCOW (AP)  Russia on Thursday successfully launched the first rocket from its new space facility after a last-minute delay the day before.

The Soyuz 2.1a booster blasted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East in the early hours. The Roscosmos space agency said in a statement that the three satellites the rocket was carrying orbited several hours later.

The launch was originally scheduled for Wednesday but was called off 1 minutes before the planned liftoff. President Vladimir Putin flew to Vostochny for the launch and had to extend his stay in order to see the rocket go.

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny Cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. The launch of the first rocket from Russia's new space facility has been delayed after a last-minute problem. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)

Putin, who watched from about a mile (1.6 kms) away, congratulated the facility's staff.

"This is just the first stage of enormous work, and everything you were supposed to do you did brilliantly," he said in televised comments.

The launch pad so far is equipped only for launching rockets carrying small cargo like satellites. More facilities have to be built to accommodate heavy-lift launch vehicles and service manned launches.

Roscosmos officials have said the space agency was working to pinpoint what went wrong on Wednesday.

The construction of the vast space complex some 5,500 kilometers (3,400 miles) east of Moscow has been troubled by delays  the first launch had been expected about four months ago  and dogged by corruption scandals. Workers who had complained of going unpaid for months went on strike last spring. The directors of three project subcontractors were arrested on corruption charges.

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny Cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. The launch of the first rocket from Russia's new space facility has been delayed after a last-minute problem. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin watches a launch of a Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites at the new Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. Russia has successfully launched the first rocket from its new space facility after a last-minute delay the day before. (Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin watches a launch of a Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites at the new Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. (Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny Cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. The launch of the first rocket from Russia's new space facility has been delayed after a last-minute problem. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny Cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. The launch of the first rocket from Russia's new space facility has been delayed after a last-minute problem. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny Cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. The launch of the first rocket from Russia's new space facility has been delayed after a last-minute problem. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny Cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. The launch of the first rocket from Russia's new space facility has been delayed after a last-minute problem. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites leaves a trail of smoke as it lifts off from the new Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites leaves a trail of smoke as it lifts off from the new Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)

A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying Lomonosov, Aist-2D and SamSat-218 satellites lifts off from the launch pad at the new Vostochny cosmodrome outside the city of Uglegorsk, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the city of Blagoveshchensk in the far eastern Amur region Thursday, April 28, 2016. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool Photo via AP)
Cruz makes VP pick as GOP race takes another unusual turn

WASHINGTON (AP)  An astonishing Republican presidential primary season has taken another unusual turn, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz announcing Carly Fiorina as his running mate  even though he's mathematically unable to become the GOP nominee through the regular voting process.

It was the move of a candidate desperate to block Donald Trump, a front-runner who is only growing stronger as the primary contest presses deeper into the spring.

Trump now has 80 percent of the delegates he needs for the Republican nomination, though he could still fall short and have to battle Cruz for the nomination at a contested convention. Trump must win 48 percent of the remaining delegates to avoid that scenario.

In this April 26, 2016, photo, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during a rally at the Hoosier Gym in Knightstown, Ind. Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are having a tough time attracting establishment Republican donors even as they intensify their efforts to derail the nomination of billionaire Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Cruz's White House hopes now rest largely on Tuesday's primary in Indiana. That's where he announced that he was tapping Fiorina as his vice presidential pick, bringing aboard a prominent Republican woman who has been eager to take on both Trump and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

In fiery remarks, Fiorina panned Trump and Clinton as a pair of liberals who would do little to shake up Washington.

"They're not going to challenge the system  they are the system," Fiorina said.

Trump, in turn, mocked Cruz at a rally in Indianapolis. "Cruz can't win. What's he doing picking vice presidents?" Trump asked. "He is the first presidential candidate in the history of this country who's mathematically eliminated from becoming president who chose a vice presidential candidate."

While Cruz grasped for a way to slow Trump, the businessman turned his attention to the general election. In a wide-ranging, though often vague, foreign policy speech, Trump sought to answer questions about his temperament and preparedness to be commander in chief.

He outlined a doctrine that he said would put American interests first and leave allies to fend for themselves if they don't contribute financially to back up security agreements. He vowed to send U.S. troops into combat only as a last resort, a break from years of hawkish Republican foreign policy.

"Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war and destruction," he declared in a 38-minute address that was heavy on broad statements and light on specific policy details. Unlike his rambunctious, free-wheeling rallies, the event featured Trump reading prepared remarks in a measured tone off a teleprompter.

He also used the address to target Clinton, his expected opponent in a general election. He assailed her handling of the deadly 2012 attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, and said that during her tenure as secretary of state, the U.S. had a "reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy."

Clinton's campaign sees foreign policy as an area ripe for a sharp general election contrast with Trump, given her years at the State Department and his lack of experience. In a campaign conference call Wednesday, Clinton supporter and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright called Trump's views "incoherent."

"I've never seen such a combo of simplistic slogans and contradictions and misstatements in one speech," Albright said.

Like Trump, Clinton emerged from this week's Northeastern primaries with a stronger claim on her party's nomination. With four victories Tuesday, she now has 91 percent of the delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders conceded Wednesday that the delegate math was not in his favor and his campaign announced it was laying off hundreds of field staffers and other aides. Sanders said he still aims to win the Democratic nomination but will also seek to assemble as many delegates as possible to influence the party's platform and message.

"Our job, whether we win or whether we do not win, is to transform not only our country but the Democratic Party, to open the doors of the Democratic Party to working people and young people and senior citizens in a way that does not exist today," Sanders said.

Cruz hoped that adding Fiorina to his potential ticket would be a draw for Republicans desperate to keep Clinton out of the White House. Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, was frequently praised for her tough criticism of Clinton during her own presidential campaign and also irritated Trump with her sharp retorts during GOP debates.

Since dropping out, she has become Cruz's most active surrogate, making frequent campaign appearances alongside him and on her own.

Candidates typically wait until they've secured their party's nomination before picking a running mate, in part to avoid appearing to be getting ahead of the will of the voters.

But in Cruz's case, the announcement seemed aimed at keeping up the idea that he has a claim to the nomination and potentially attracting more voters in Indiana and other remaining states  including Fiorina's home state of California.

Trump won more than 50 percent of the Republican votes in Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Maryland in Tuesday's elections, and scored over 60 percent in Delaware and Rhode Island.

Similarly, Clinton won convincingly in four of the five contests, scoring 56 percent in Pennsylvania and 63 percent in Maryland  the two biggest contests of the night. Sanders won the Rhode Island primary with 55 percent of the vote.

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Associated Press writers Lisa Lerer, Stephen Ohlemacher and Hope Yen in Washington contributed to this report.

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Follow Julie Pace on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in Indianapolis, Wednesday, April 27, 2016. Cruz chose Fiorina as his running mate. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
Rubio, Bush big donors shun Cruz and Kasich

WASHINGTON (AP)  It seems like a logical pairing: Republican donors who despise Donald Trump, and two GOP presidential rivals sticking it out to keep him from the nomination.

Yet those donors have largely shunned Ted Cruz and John Kasich, depriving each of them as much as $39 million in what has become a desperate final push to topple Trump.

Yet, donors who once gave as much as allowed by law to establishment favorites Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have mostly disappeared from the political landscape, an Associated Press analysis of campaign finance records shows.

In this April 25, 2016, photo, Republican presidential candidate Ohio Gov. John Kasich, speaks during a town hall at Thomas Farms Community Center in Rockville, Md. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Kasich are having a tough time attracting establishment Republican donors even as they intensify their efforts to derail the nomination of billionaire Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Less than 3 percent of the nearly 14,600 donors who gave the $2,700 limit to Bush or Rubio have also ponied up the maximum amount to Kasich or Cruz, the analysis found.

Trump, who has formidably deep pockets, trounced his competitors in Tuesday's Northeast primaries, putting him in a stronger position to win the Republican nomination outright in the next six weeks of voting.

The prospect of stopping him has grown so dire that Cruz on Wednesday took the unusual step of announcing a running mate, Carly Fiorina. Earlier, he and Kasich agreed to divide their efforts in some remaining primary states to improve their chances of beating Trump.

But the big donors' continued spurning of Cruz and Kasich is one reason they haven't had more success.

"There are a significant number of major fundraisers in the Republican Party whose networks are exhausted and donors who are worn thin emotionally from the effort they made for a candidate who is no longer in the race," said Wayne Berman, a longtime Republican fundraiser. "That combination has led to many, many people sitting on the sidelines."

He's speaking from experience. Berman was the national finance chairman for Rubio and chose not to raise money for any other candidate after the Florida senator dropped out March 15.

Both Kasich and Cruz have feverishly pitched themselves to donors as the candidate best able to unify the party. It has been a particularly tough fit for Cruz, a first-term Texas senator who has made his name as an unrelenting conservative fighter  even against those in his own party.

He's had a healthy core of his own donors, including roughly 3,900 who have given the maximum amount. In fact, Cruz is the best Republican campaign fundraiser of the 2016 cycle, and started April with $8.8 million cash on hand.

Cruz has stepped up his requests of donors who might not have otherwise considered him. He and his wife, a Goldman Sachs manager on leave, talked to New York financiers last week at the Harvard Club of New York City.

The backers of former candidates are seldom responding, AP's analysis shows. Through the end of March, just 186 Bush-Rubio maxed-out donors had given the maximum to Cruz.

Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based fundraiser for Bush's failed bid, is one of them. He said he felt he "owed" the donation to Cruz because of his strong support of Israel, Zeidman's top issue.

Still, Zeidman said he can understand why lots of former Bush and Rubio donors are reluctant.

"They're keeping their powder dry until the general election, in effect just letting the primary system sort itself out," he said.

Kasich, the governor of Ohio, has attracted 174 maxed-out donors who also gave the maximum to Bush and Rubio. He's won over some of the party's top female donors, including Lynne Walton, a Wal-Mart heiress.

But Kasich has been in desperate need of more donors willing to give as much as they can. He started April with just $1.2 million on hand.

The AP analysis is based on reports of campaign contributions filed with the Federal Election Commission from the beginning of the 2016 presidential election cycle through the end of March.

The AP looked at donors who gave the maximum primary-election amount to Bush or Rubio with those who had given the maximum amount to the Democratic and Republican candidates still in the race, comparing each donor's name, city, state and ZIP code. Because the analysis excluded donors if any of the information didn't match, there could be a slight undercount.

On the Democratic side, the analysis revealed that front runner Hillary Clinton attracted about the same number of Bush-Rubio donors as did the Cruz and Kasich campaigns.

About a dozen Bush-Rubio donors have also given to Trump. A tiny core of 15 Bush-Rubio donors continued to hedge their bets by maxing out to both Cruz and Kasich. Stanley Hubbard, a billionaire Minnesota broadcast executive, has doled out checks of $2,500 or more to half a dozen presidential candidates.

Hubbard told the AP a few months ago that he wanted anyone other than Trump or Cruz at the top of the GOP ticket because he saw either of them as devastating for the party's down-ballot prospects.

Trump's continued dominance led him to revise that view: He gave Cruz a check of $2,700 on March 31.

"He's not my first choice, no," Hubbard said last week. He said he has no regrets about his heretofore fruitless campaign gifts. "Not a bit. When you give to politicians, sometimes you lose. That's the way it works."

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Follow Julie Bykowicz and Chad Day on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/bykowicz and http://twitter.com/ChadSDay
Lawyer: extradition of Ukrainian pilot expected soon

MOSCOW (AP)  Jailed Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko has been given forms to complete for extradition from Russia, one of her lawyers said Thursday.

Savchenko was captured by Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and was sentenced to 22 years in prison last month for her alleged role in the deaths of two Russian journalists. Her capture and trial became a rallying point for Ukrainians at home and abroad.

The extradition procedure implies that a convict should continue serving the sentence at home, but that is unlikely in Savchenko's case because as an elected member of Ukraine's parliament she is immune from prosecution.

Savchenko's lawyer, Mark Feygin, told reporters in Kiev that Savchenko has been given extradition documents to complete, but he believes her transfer is still weeks away. Feygin said he got the information from Savchenko's sister who visited her, and will know more when another Savchenko attorney visits her on Friday.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko earlier this month announced that he had reached a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to exchange Savchenko for two Russian servicemen captured in Ukraine and convicted of waging a war of aggression. Russian officials have not confirmed any impending swap.

Legal procedures for the swap are unlikely to begin before May 25, Feygin said on Thursday, when the verdict for the two Russians comes into effect. They were each sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Migrants: UN secretary general critical of European curbs

VIENNA (AP)  Warning of "growing xenophobia," U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon on Thursday criticized increasing restrictions on safe haven for refugees in Europe, saying they tarnish commitments to international law.

Ban did not name any country in his speech to Austria's lower house of parliament. But considering the venue, his comments appeared to allude at least in part to ongoing Austrian moves to tighten and reduce the entry of migrants.

The upper house is scheduled later in the day to vote into effect a law that would allow authorities to stop accepting asylum requests at borders if they decide such a move is necessary to "maintain public order and ... protect internal security." Asylum-seekers would instead be turned back.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon speaks during the 20th anniversary celebration of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, CTBTO, at the UN headquarters in Vienna, Austria, Wednesday, April 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak)

The draft law also mandates "temporary asylum" for all migrants who have applied for such status since Nov.15. They would have to leave Austria after three years if authorities determine that their home country is once again safe. If not, their status would be indefinitely extended.

The proposed legislation also makes it more difficult for family members to join those granted asylum.

Expressing concern "that European countries are now adopting increasingly restrictive immigration and refugee policies," Ban said these "negatively affect" their human rights commitments under international and European laws.

"We have a moral and legal ... obligation to help those fleeing war, human rights abuses and persecution," Ban told the legislators. "I'm alarmed ... about growing xenophobia here and beyond."

Human Rights Watch criticized the pending law in a statement, saying it constitutes "a legal wall to asylum just as despicable as a razor-wire fence."

Austria welcomed migrants with few restrictions last year but has moved to tight limits after accepting about 90,000 asylum requests last year.

Early this year, it orchestrated the closure of the West Balkan route used by those moving northward from Greece in hopes of settling in Austria and other prosperous EU nations. It also has re-imposed border controls and capped the number of asylum seekers it will accept at 37,500 annually.
Lego's founding family in leadership handover

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP)  The family that founded and owns Lego, the maker of the popular multi-colored toy building bricks, is reshuffling its top leadership to create a "smooth handover of active ownership to the next generation."

Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the company founder's grandson, said Thursday he will leave his position as deputy chairman to his 37-year-old son, Thomas Kirk Kristiansen. The 68-year-old father will take a seat on the board.

Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen said the aim was "to maintain active family ownership of the LEGO Group."

After 25 years as CEO, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen was replaced in 2004 by Joergen Vig Knudstorp, an outsider to the founding family who helped bring Lego A/S from a loss to a profit.

Known for its assortment of building blocks, Lego is not publicly listed and doesn't release quarterly figures. However, the group, based in Billund, western Denmark, has published earnings reports since 1997.

Last year, net profit was up more than 30 percent from 2014, at 9.2 billion kroner ($1.4 billion), while revenue grew 25 percent to 35.8 billion kroner ($5.4 billion). The number of employees also grew by more than 15 percent in 2015 to 17,300.

The company was launched in 1932 and the first snap-together Lego bricks were created in 1949.
Fighting erupts in Turkish parliament over contentious bill

ANKARA, Turkey (AP)  Turkish lawmakers on Thursday fought and threw punches at each other as they debated a contentious ruling-party proposal to strip themselves of immunity from prosecution  a move that could pave the way for the trial of pro-Kurdish legislators on terrorism-related charges. Five people were hurt in the fighting, a news agency reported.

A parliamentary committee began initial discussions on the proposed constitutional amendment, which was drafted by the ruling party after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party, HDP, of being an arm of the outlawed Kurdish rebels, and repeatedly called for the prosecution of some party leaders.

The move comes amid a surge of violence in Turkey's southeast after a fragile, more than 2-year-old peace process with the rebels collapsed. Hundreds of people, including close to 400 security force members, have died in the renewed fighting, which also displaced tens of thousands of people and left some towns and districts in ruins.

Turkish lawmakers argue and push each other on the assembly floor in Ankara, Turkey, late Wednesday, April 27, 2016. Turkish lawmakers on Thursday argued and pushed each other as they debated a contentious ruling-party proposals.(AP Photo)

The HDP, which backs Kurdish and other minority rights, denies accusations that it is the political arm of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. It has called on the government to end security forces' operations in the southeast to resume peace efforts. The PKK is considered a terror organization by Turkey and its Western allies.

Although the measure would lift the legal immunities of all lawmakers who have legal cases pending against them, critics say the proposed amendment particularly aims to oust HDP lawmakers from parliament. The party's two co-leaders, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, face possible prosecution for making statements last year in support of calls for Kurdish self-rule in southeastern Turkey.

The committee meeting began with people arguing and pushing each other in a meeting room that turned out to be too small to hold scores of journalists, lawmakers and employees who wanted to observe the proceedings.

The meeting grew tenser in the afternoon, and Dogan news agency video showed lawmakers throwing punches at opponents and others trying to stop the brawl. The chaos forced committee leaders to postpone the discussions until Monday.

Dogan news agency said three ruling-party and two HDP lawmakers sought medical help after the brawl.

On Wednesday, a brawl also erupted on the assembly floor after an HDP lawmaker accused the security forces of "massacres" against Kurds in the southeast, sparking anger in the ruling party, where people were heard shouting "Terrorist, terrorist!"

Turkish lawmakers argue and push each other on the assembly floor in Ankara, Turkey, late Wednesday, April 27, 2016. Turkish lawmakers on Thursday argued and pushed each other as they debated a contentious ruling-party proposals.(AP Photo)

Turkish lawmakers argue and push each other on the assembly floor in Ankara, Turkey, late Wednesday, April 27, 2016. Turkish lawmakers on Thursday argued and pushed each other as they debated contentious ruling-party proposals.(AP Photo)
Revered Chinese monk is mummified and covered in gold leaf

BEIJING (AP)  A revered Buddhist monk in China has been mummified and covered in gold leaf, a practice reserved for holy men in some areas with strong Buddhist traditions.

The monk, Fu Hou, died in 2012 at age 94 after spending most of his life at the Chongfu Temple on a hill in the city of Quanzhou, in southeastern China, according to the temple's abbot, Li Ren.

The temple decided to mummify Fu Hou to commemorate his devotion to Buddhism  he started practicing at age 17  and to serve as an inspiration for followers of the religion that was brought from the Indian subcontinent roughly 2,000 years ago.

In this photo taken March 16, 2016, a man takes a photo of the mummified body of revered Buddhist monk Fu Hou in Quanzhou city in southeastern China's Fujian province. The monk, who died in 2012 at the age of 94, was prepared for mummification by his temple to commemorate his devotion to Buddhism. The mummifed remains were then treated and covered in gold leaf, a practice reserved for holy men in some areas with strong Buddhist traditions. (Chinatopix via AP) CHINA OUT

Immediately following his death, the monk's body was washed, treated by two mummification experts, and sealed inside a large pottery jar in a sitting position, the abbot said.

When the jar was opened three years later, the monk's body was found intact and sitting upright with little sign of deterioration apart from the skin having dried out, Li Ren said.

The body was then washed with alcohol and covered with layers of gauze, lacquer and finally gold leaf. It was also robed, and a local media report said a glass case had been ordered for the statue, which will be protected with an anti-theft device.

The local Buddhist belief is that only a truly virtuous monk's body would remain intact after being mummified, local media reports said.

"Monk Fu Hou is now being placed on the mountain for people to worship," Li Ren said.

In this photo taken Sunday Jan. 10, 2016, men remove the top of a jar containing the mummified body of revered Buddhist monk Fu Hou in Quanzhou city in southeastern China's Fujian province. The monk, who died in 2012 at the age of 94, was prepared for mummification by his temple to commemorate his devotion to Buddhism. The mummifed remains were then treated and covered in gold leaf, a practice reserved for holy men in some areas with strong Buddhist traditions. (Chinatopix via AP) CHINA OUT

In this photo taken Thursday Jan. 14, 2016, men apply lacquer on the mummified body of revered Buddhist monk Fu Hou in Quanzhou city in southeastern China's Fujian province. The monk, who died in 2012 at the age of 94, was prepared for mummification by his temple to commemorate his devotion to Buddhism. The mummifed remains were then treated and covered in gold leaf, a practice reserved for holy men in some areas with strong Buddhist traditions. (Chinatopix via AP) CHINA OUT

In this photo taken Wednesday March 16, 2016, men apply gold leaf on the mummified body of revered Buddhist monk Fu Hou in Quanzhou city in southeastern China's Fujian province. The monk, who died in 2012 at the age of 94, was prepared for mummification by his temple to commemorate his devotion to Buddhism. The mummifed remains were then treated and covered in gold leaf, a practice reserved for holy men in some areas with strong Buddhist traditions. (Chinatopix via AP) CHINA OUT
Moldova PM: reforms must start with the government

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP)  Moldova's prime minister says badly needed reforms in the impoverished country must start with the government.

Premier Pavel Filip, who became the sixth prime minister of this impoverished former Soviet republic in January, told The Associated Press that he believes "reforms should start with us who are proposing reforms."

In a telephone interview Wednesday, he said he plans to slash the number of ministries by almost half to make government more efficient, and he believes private investment will come "when they have the certainty that corruption doesn't exist, there are no bureaucratic barriers, and there are no longer abusive controls by the state."

File - In this Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016, file picture, Moldovan Premier, Pavel Filip, walks after delivering a speech in parliament before his pro-European government was approved in Chisinau, Moldova. Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2016. Premier Pavel Filip, who became the sixth prime minister of this impoverished former Soviet republic in January 2016, told The Associated Press on Wednesday April 27, 2016, that badly needed reforms in Moldova must start with the government.(AP Photo/Roveliu Buga, FILE)

His aim is "a prosperous and stable Moldova in the European Union," he said  a vision that currently seems remote, with Moldova forced to borrow from commercial banks to cover state pensions and salaries.

The country is so poor that it needed emergency food aid from neighbor Romania this winter.

A key aspect of his reforms is restoring Moldova's credibility. Filip vowed to find and prosecute those who stole more than $1 billion from three Moldovan banks in November 2014, sparking months of protests and political instability.

U.S. investigative company Kroll, hired to probe the loss which represented one-eighth of Moldova's gross domestic product, will present a plan for recouping the losses at the end of May.

Located between Ukraine and Romania, Moldova has traditionally been in Russia's orbit. Moscow opposed Moldova signing an association agreement with the EU in 2014, and placed an embargo on Moldovan fruit and wines.

Pavel says Russia has nothing to lose from Moldova moving closer to the European mainstream.

"What we want in our relationship with Russia is reciprocal respect and predictability," he said.
After hostage beheading, is Philippines facing IS threat?

MANILA, Philippines (AP)  Months before Abu Sayyaf militants beheaded retired Canadian mining executive John Ridsdel in the tropical jungles of the southern Philippines, they showed him pleading for life in a video with three other hostages that demanded a record-high ransom.

The scene was all too familiar in a Southeast Asian nation that has struggled with ransom kidnappings by the Islamic militants for years, except for two things.

In the video that appeared in November, two black flags with Islamic State group symbols were displayed by the heavily armed Abu Sayyaf fighters in the backdrop of lush foliage. Then after a deadline for ransom lapsed on Monday, they killed the 68-year-old Ridsdel  instead of waiting patiently for the money as the mostly impoverished rural fighters have done in the past.

This image made from undated militant video, shows Canadians John Ridsdel, right, and Robert Hall. Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed that the decapitated head of a Caucasian male recovered Monday, April 25, 2016, in the southern Philippines belongs to Ridsdel, who was taken hostage by Abu Sayyaf militants in September 2015. (Militant Video via AP Video) NO SALES, MANDATORY CREDIT

Shocked by the outcome, many in the largest Roman Catholic nation in Asia are asking if this is the same band of militants the government has long dismissed as ransom-seeking bandits. Or, has the Philippines fallen into a growing list of countries that are now grappling with the spread of influence from the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq?

The Philippine government has insisted the IS still has no presence in the country's south, homeland of minority Muslims who rose up to seek a separate state in the early 1970s.

In his first remarks following Ridsdel's killing, President Benigno Aquino III, whose term ends in two months, gave a history of the Abu Sayyaf's brutal attacks, describing it as a group of outlaws and vowing "to devote all my energies toward ensuring that, at the very least, this will be a very seriously degraded problem."

A major offensive is believed to have killed about 14 Abu Sayyaf militants in southern Sulu province this week, the military said.

"Even as it poses as a group of Islamic freedom fighters, the Abu Sayyaf has behaved as criminals focused on enriching themselves by taking hostages for ransom," Aquino said, describing them as opportunists who want to "align themselves with ISIS to gain access to the funds and resources of ISIS," using a different abbreviation for the Islamic State group.

Terrorism experts, however, believe that a key Abu Sayyaf faction and at least two other small armed groups have gone beyond pledging allegiance to the Middle East-based jihadis on video and have struck a new alliance under the IS flag.

Some foreign militants from Malaysia, Indonesia and the Middle East helped forge the union under an overall leader, Isnilon Hapilon, a senior Abu Sayyaf commander on southern Basilan Island, said Rodolfo Mendoza, a retired police general who helped lead counterterrorism efforts.

It's not yet clear if the foreign militants, three of whom were killed in military offensives last year and this year, were IS fighters or sympathizers who wanted to recruit Filipinos into the IS fold, according to the Philippine military.

In November, Abu Sayyaf gunmen beheaded a Malaysian hostage despite ongoing ransom negotiations. It happened while Manila was hosting an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit attended by world leaders, including President Barack Obama and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Another armed group, which has brandished the IS group's black flag in southern Butig town but is not yet known to have joined Hapilon's alliance, recently posted a picture online of two kidnapped villagers in orange garb before they were beheaded as suspected military spies. It's the first known instance in which local militants dressed their captives in orange, as IS extremists do.

An unusual surge in kidnappings, including daring attacks on three tugboats in and around the Sulu Sea that captured 18 Indonesian and Malaysian crewmen beginning last month, along with recent beheadings, may be an effort by the emerging bloc of militants to dramatize their capability and brutality and convince the IS group to fully recognize them as an affiliate entitled to funds and training support, Mendoza told The Associated Press.

Earlier this month, an Abu Sayyaf ambush in Basilan killed 18 soldiers in the military's largest single-day combat loss so far this year.

"They're now able to project internationally that they deserve the serious recognition of mother ISIS," Mendoza said. "The kidnappings that they do shouldn't only be seen as plain banditry."

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the militants tried to forge a formal alliance with al-Qaida but those efforts failed. The Abu Sayyaf group tried for years to foster an impression that it was formally allied to al-Qaida for survival, said Abu Muslim, a former Abu Sayyaf ranking member who has been captured and now cooperates with the government.

"There was really no direct connection between the ASG and the al-Qaida then," he said. "But the impression that there was gave the group stature and a veil of notoriety that was important in raising funds."

Ahmed Hashim, a counterterrorism and defense policy expert with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said European and Middle Eastern countries have been more exposed to the dangers from IS militants, but a vulnerable period awaits Southeast Asia.

A few hundred Malaysian and Indonesian militants are believed to have traveled to Syria and Iraq in recent years. There are unconfirmed reports that a few Filipinos have also joined the fighting.

"Not too many have come back yet," Hashim said. "The biggest danger is for Malaysia and Indonesia."

Under any label, Abu Sayyaf is clearly a "terrorist group" that will face offensives for its "gruesome attacks on innocent people," the military said.

A day before he was abducted from a marina on Samal Island, where he and his friends berthed their yacht, Ridsdel wrote in his blog about the thrill of his sea adventures and a hint of the unexpected that might suddenly come with it.

"With a little bit of wind, it feels like the craft is flying, as it skims over the water rather than undulating with it," he wrote. "All very wonderful, until you have to go upwind in rough weather."

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Otto leads by 2 at 9 under after 1st round of China Open

BEIJING (AP)  Hennie Otto had seven birdies and an eagle in an opening round of 63 on Thursday to lead the China Open at 9 under.

It was Otto's lowest round in a European Tour event since he won the 2014 Italian Open.

The 39-year-old South African started on the 10th and had three birdies before turning in 33, then added birdies at the 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 7th before chipping in for eagle on the par-5 8th.

"The first hole I saved a good par and I think that gave me momentum," said Otto, who has been working hard on his putting game. "You have to hit it in the right places and that's the thing I did today. I hit them close, that makes a big difference."

Bernd Wiesberger of Austria had eight birdies and a bogey for a 65 and was two shots behind.

Gregory Bourdy of France, Sweden's Peter Hanson, Roope Kakko of Finland and Paraguay's Fabrizio Zanotti had a share of third spot at 6 under.

Joost Luiten, who has finished second in his last two events, including the Shenzhen Open last weekend, was in a three way share of seventh at 5 under.

Rikard Karlberg won a Volvo car when he holed out with a seven iron on the 212-yard, par-3 16th for a hole-in-one during his 69.
Connecticut history teacher named US Teacher of the Year

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  A Connecticut high school history teacher chosen as the National Teacher of the Year on Thursday says she was surrounded by poverty, drugs and violence as a child but imagined other possibilities for her life with help from educators.

Jahana Hayes, who teaches at John F. Kennedy High School in Waterbury, was selected for the honor by the Council of Chief State School Officers. She will be recognized by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony on Tuesday.

Hayes, 44, grew up in a Waterbury housing project and became a teenage mother while still in high school. She said the influence of her own teachers taught her that a school's job sometimes overlaps with the job of parents, and she wants her students to know there are no dead ends.

This April 2016 photo released by the Waterbury Public Schools shows Jahana Hayes in Waterbury, Conn., a history teacher at John F. Kennedy High School who was selected as the National Teacher of the Year announced Thursday, April 28, by the Council of Chief State School Officers. She will be recognized by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony on Tuesday, May 3. (David Therault/Waterbury Public Schools via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT.

"No matter where you are or how bad you think it is, there's always opportunities for growth and opportunities for improvement," she said. "I think too often, especially at the high school level, people deal in absolutes and students get the message that, 'If I mess up or I don't do everything exactly right right now, that that's the end of my story.'"

At an urban school with a widely diverse student body, she said she has found teaching is a lifestyle that extends beyond the contracted hours. She finds herself serving not only as a teacher but also as a counselor, a confidant and a protector of her students.

Hayes has won praise for her emphasis on community service and development of a service learning curriculum.

"A lot of my students, they feel like they have nothing to give, which is a very defeating attitude," she said. "I've had students who live in shelters, and they're out with me working with Habitat for Humanity. It is empowering for them because they know no matter where they are right now, there's opportunity for improvement. So many people have helped them along the way, it just feels good for them to help somebody else."

Hayes was selected from among four finalists named in January. The other three teachers hail from Washington state, California and Oklahoma. Hayes will spend a year traveling the nation to represent educators and advocate on behalf of teachers.
UK's Labour suspends ex-London mayor in anti-Semitism row

LONDON (AP)  Britain's main opposition Labour Party, facing growing criticism over perceived anti-Semitism in its ranks, suspended former London Mayor Ken Livingstone on Thursday over his comments in defense of a lawmaker who made anti-Israel posts on social media.

Livingstone, who sits on Labour's National Executive Council, said in a radio interview that he had never heard any anti-Semitic views expressed by Labour members during several decades in the party. He also said criticism of Israel wasn't anti-Semitism, claiming Adolf Hitler had supported Zionism "before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews."

Livingstone was defending lawmaker Naz Shah, who was suspended Wednesday over anti-Israel sentiments she expressed before she was elected to Parliament last year. She has apologized over the comments, which include a 2014 Facebook post in which she shared a graphic that showed the outline of Israel superimposed on a map of the U.S. under the headline "Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict - Relocate Israel into United States."

Former mayor of London Ken Livingstone is surrounded media outside Millbank in Westminster, London, Thursday April 28, 2016. Britain's main opposition Labour Party has suspended former London Mayor Ken Livingstone over comments about anti-Semitism. Livingstone, who sits on Labour's National Executive Council, said in a radio interview that he had never heard any anti-Semitic views expressed by Labour members, and claimed Adolf Hitler had supported Zionism before the Holocaust. (Anthony Devlin/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

Labour said in a statement that Livingstone had been suspended "pending an investigation, for bringing the party into disrepute."

Jewish groups and some Labour members accuse party leader Jeremy Corbyn of not clamping down on anti-Semitism in the party. He comes from Labour's left wing, which has strongly supported the campaign for a Palestinian state.

Livingstone, who served as London mayor from 2000 to 2008, is a close ally of Corbyn.
Biden presses Iraq to not let political chaos upend gains

BAGHDAD (AP)  Vice President Joe Biden pressed Iraq on Thursday not to let its crippling political crisis upend hard-fought gains against the Islamic State group as he returned to the country that's come to symbolize America's relentless struggles in the Middle East.

Biden slipped into Baghdad on an unannounced trip, his first to Iraq in nearly five years. Officials said the stop was planned before Iraq's political system descended into turmoil, hindering U.S.-led efforts to defeat extremists who control parts of both Iraq and Syria. Sitting down with Iraq's beleaguered leaders, he praised them for working "very, very hard" to construct a new Cabinet and touted progress wresting back territory from IS.

"It's real, it's serious, and it's committed," Biden said as he met with Parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri, a Sunni politician facing calls from his colleagues to resign.

Vice President Joe Biden meets with U.S. diplomatic and military personnel serving in Iraq, Thursday, April 28, 2016, at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. (AP Photo/Josh Lederman)

Still, the anxious undertones of Biden's brief visit were clear from the moment he stepped off a military transport plane into blistering heat after an overnight flight from Washington. White House staffers donned body armor and helmets as Biden was whisked by helicopter to the relative safety of the heavily fortified Green Zone, reminders of the dire security situation even in Iraq's capital.

Biden's roughly eight-hour visit came amid a wave of tense protests and demands for sweeping political reforms that have paralyzed a government already struggling to tackle a dire economic crisis and battle IS. The United States has deployed more troops and equipment in hopes of putting Iraq on a better path as President Barack Obama prepares to leave office in January.

Though there's been progress in wresting back territory from IS and weakening its leadership, senior U.S. officials traveling with Biden said any lost momentum would likely be due to political unrest rather than military shortcomings. Chaotic politics are nothing new in Iraq, but the present infighting risks becoming a distraction, with politicians more focused on keeping their jobs than fighting IS, said the officials, who weren't authorized to speak on the record.

While Obama and Biden came into office pledging to end the war - and did so in 2011 - U.S. troops returned here in 2014 amid the rise of IS violence.

Obama now acknowledges that his goal of defeating the militants won't be realized during his presidency.

Still, this month Obama agreed to deploy more than 200 additional troops to Iraq, bringing the authorized total to just over 4,000, and to send Apache helicopters into the fight. Biden thanked some of those troops and American diplomats during a visit to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where he alluded to the deep sectarian divides still plaguing Iraq long after U.S.-led forces toppled the late dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.

"Think of all the places we are today trying to keep the peace, all the places we've sent you guys and women," Biden said. "They're places where because of history, we've drawn artificial lines, creating artificial states, made up of totally distinct ethnic, religious cultural groups and said, 'Have at it. Live together.'"

Biden, as a U.S. senator in 2006, proposed dividing Iraq into semi-autonomous regions for Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. Though that plan wasn't adopted, the persistent strains among the groups that have flared recently in Iraq's government illustrate the difficulty in holding the country together.

The current round of turmoil grew out of weeks of rallies by followers of influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr demanding an end to pervasive corruption and mismanagement. Thousands have protested just outside Baghdad's Green Zone, calling for politicians to be replaced by independent technocrats and for Iraq's powerful Shiite militias to be brought into key ministries.

At the center of the crisis is Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a Shiite who met with Biden on Thursday at one of Saddam's grandiose former palaces. Long overdue to deliver on his promises for reform, Al-Abadi is caught between ordinary Iraqis pleading for government accountability and entrenched political blocks that are reluctant to give up a powerful patronage system.

Last month, al-Abadi pulled troops fighting IS on the front lines to protect Baghdad amid the protests, and other Arab nations have declined to provide Iraq more financial support until it gets its political act together. An economic crisis spurred by collapsing oil prices has further compounded Iraq's troubles.

Biden said he and al-Abadi discussed plans for retaking the key northern city of Mosul, an immense challenge for Iraqi forces and their U.S. backers. Biden said he was "very optimistic," though U.S. officials predict a long road ahead.

"If you think about it, the history of the region is a nightmare from which everyone is trying to awake," Biden said of Iraq and the Middle East, riffing on a passage from James Joyce's "Ulysses."

While in Iraq, Biden also stopped briefly in Irbil, the capital of Iraq's mostly autonomous northern Kurdish region, where he met with Kurdish President Massoud Barzani. Kurdish Peshmerga forces have been among the most effective forces battling Islamic State extremists, but the U.S. partnership with Kurdish forces in neighboring Syria has been a sore point with U.S. NATO ally Turkey.

Biden headed for Rome after leaving Iraq.

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Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP

Vice President Joe Biden steps off a C-17 military transport plane upon his arrival in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, April 28, 2016. Biden arrived in Baghdad on a visit intended to help Iraqi leaders resolve a political crisis that has hindered efforts to defeat the Islamic State group. (AP Photo/Josh Lederman)

Iraqi security forces guard the heavily fortified Green Zone as followers of Iraq's influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr gather in front of the Green Zone, ahead of a scheduled parliament session to press for a vote on a new government, in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, April 26, 2016. Thousands of Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters arrived there early on Tuesday to join others who have been holding a sit-in since two weeks ago, snarling traffic in huge parts of the Iraqi capital. Many protesters are waiving Iraqi flags and playing songs praising al-Sadr. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

Vice President Joe Biden meets with U.S. diplomatic and military personnel serving in Iraq, Thursday, April 28, 2016, at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. (AP Photo/Josh Lederman)
American state senator meets with Syrian President Assad

BEIRUT (AP)  Syrian President Bashar Assad scored a minor, if bizarre, publicity victory Thursday, receiving a part-time state senator from America at a time when U.S. officials have repeatedly asserted Assad has lost his legitimacy to rule the war-torn country.

Outspoken Virginia state Sen. Dick Black  who resigned as co-chairman of Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign in Virginia just before his trip  told reporters outside Damascus it would be "beneficial" for the U.S. to speak directly to Assad.

Black has no role in official U.S. foreign policy, and it's highly unusual for a state lawmaker to contradict the State Department line. He is one of the most vocal social conservatives in Virginia's General Assembly, and has drawn national attention for his opposition to abortion and gay rights. In 2014, he raised eyebrows when he sent a letter to Assad praising him. It was posted on the Syrian president's Facebook page.

FILE - In a Nov. 10, 2007 file photo, Republican House of Representatives hopeful Dick Black speaks at a convention held by the Republican 1st District Congressional Committee in Milford, Va. The official Syrian news agency says Wednesday, April 27, 2016, that Virginia state Sen. Republican Dick Black is touring the war-torn country and meeting with officials from Syrian President Bashar Assads government. Black arrived in Syria on Tuesday for a three-day visit, according to The Syrian Arab News Agency. (Peter Cihelka/The Free Lance-Star via AP)

The U.S. has called publicly for Assad to step aside in the wake of a brutal crackdown against demonstrations demanding his ouster in 2011. The country has since descended into all-out war.

Black, however, said there is no moderate opposition in Syria.

"I wish that the U.S. could take a stronger stand and recognize that most of these groups are simply terrorists," he said.

The senator called on the U.S. to lift its economic sanctions against the government, saying they have crippled the country's ability to provide its wounded with medical care.

But various human rights groups say the government and its allies have targeted hospitals as a strategy of war.

A report by Physicians for Human Rights last year said the Syrian government "systematically violated" the principle of medical neutrality by targeting medical facilities and doctors; detaining patients; and arresting, torturing, and executing doctors.
The Latest: Governor orders flags at half-staff after crash

WATKINSVILLE, Ga. (AP)  The Latest on a car crash that killed four University of Georgia students (all times local):

1:15 p.m.

Georgia's governor has ordered flags at state properties lowered to half-staff in honor of four University of Georgia students killed and one critically injured in a car crash.

Gov. Nathan Deal says in a statement that he and first lady Sandra Deal join those mourning for the women who died and praying for the woman injured.

Deal said "Today, we are all Bulldogs," referring to Georgia's mascot.

The order issued Thursday runs until sunset on Friday.

Authorities say the crash happened Wednesday night, when a car carrying all five students collided with another car just after 9 p.m. on a highway south of the Athens campus.

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11:30 a.m.

The University of Georgia's president says students and staff at the school will gather Thursday evening to reflect on the lives of the four students killed and one critically injured in a car crash.

During a morning briefing, UGA President Jere Morehead said members of the university community are devastated at the loss the students. He said they were very active in campus activities such as the Greek system and religious organizations.

Authorities say the crash happened Wednesday night, when a car carrying all five students collided with another car just after 9 p.m. on Georgia State Route 15 just outside Watkinsville.

Morehead said the aim of the 5 p.m. gathering on the Athens campus is to come together and care for one another during "this time of tremendous sadness."

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10:20 a.m.

The Georgia State Patrol is identifying the four University of Georgia students killed in a car crash, all of whom were from the Atlanta suburbs.

State Patrol Capt. Mark Perry said in a statement they are: 19-year-old Kayla Canedo and 20-year-old Brittany Feldman, both of Alpharetta; 19-year-old Christina Semeria of Milton; and 19-year-old Halle Scott of Dunwoody.

Oconee County Sheriff Scott Berry said the crash happened Wednesday night when two mid-sized sedans, one northbound and the other southbound, collided just after 9 p.m. on Georgia State Route 15 just outside Watkinsville.

The State Patrol said the driver of the car carrying the students, 21-year-old Agnes Kim of Snellville, Georgia, who is also a student, remained in critical condition at a hospital late Thursday morning.

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9:45 a.m.

The University of Georgia says the school's president, Jere Morehead, plans to speak about the car crash that claimed the lives of four female students and left another student in critical condition.

School officials say Morehead intends to talk about the university's response to the crash during an 11 a.m. Thursday briefing on the Athens campus.

Oconee County Sheriff Scott Berry said the crash happened Wednesday night when two mid-sized sedans, one northbound and the other southbound, collided just after 9 p.m. on Georgia State Route 15 just outside Watkinsville.

Berry says the five university students were in one of the cars. The driver of the other car was taken to a hospital, but their condition wasn't available.

The student in critical condition was taken to Athens Regional Medical Center.

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4:15 a.m.

Four female University of Georgia students have been killed and another student critically injured in a car crash.

Oconee County Sheriff Scott Berry tells local news outlets the crash occurred just outside Watkinsville when two mid-sized sedans, one northbound and the other southbound, collided just after 9 p.m. Wednesday on Georgia State Route 15.

Berry says the five students were in one of the cars. The driver of the other car was taken to a hospital, but their condition wasn't available.

The student in critical condition was taken to Athens Regional Medical Center.
Holocaust Remembrance Day to connect 9 states with plays

NEW YORK (AP)  Events in nine states will honor Holocaust Remembrance Day with readings of plays that deal with that darkest time in world history.

The second annual Remembrance Readings program will include the reading of "2.5 Minute Ride" by Lisa Kron, "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" by Bertolt Brecht and "The Timekeepers" by Dan Clancy, among others.

The states participating either Sunday or Monday include New York, Florida, Illinois, California, Wisconsin, Alabama, Oregon, North Carolina and Massachusetts.

FILE - In this Feb. 8, 2016 file photo, actor Ed Asner arrives at the 15th Annual Movies for Grownups Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif. Asner will team up with actress Jayne Atkinson to read The Soap Myth at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. (Photo by Rich Fury/Invision/AP, File)

In New York, Emmy Award-winner Ed Asner will team up with actress Jayne Atkinson to read "The Soap Myth" at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

"We live in a word where ant-Semitism is growing by leaps and bounds," said Asner, who lost relatives fighting the Nazis. "That's why I'm doing 'The Soap Myth.'"

The annual event, launched by the National Jewish Theater Foundation, draws upon the over 600 plays in their Holocaust Theater Catalog at the University of Miami, the first comprehensive archive of theater materials related to the Holocaust.

This year's remembrance day comes at a time when immigration is a hot-button issue and Europe faces a refugee crisis unseen since World War II.

Asner noted that Germany is "trying to repay for crimes of the past" by taking in Syrian refugees but America is only offering "a cold shoulder."

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Investigators look at overdose in Prince death

MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  Investigators are looking into whether Prince died from an overdose and whether a doctor was prescribing him drugs in the weeks before he was found dead at his home in suburban Minneapolis, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The official said that among the things investigators are looking at is whether a doctor was with Prince on a plane that made an emergency landing in Illinois less than a week before the star died.

The law enforcement official has been briefed on the investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

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. ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN, citing unidentified law enforcement sources, reported that prescription painkillers were found on the musician and in his home. The Star Tribune, also citing unnamed sources, reported that prescription pills were found but that it wasn't clear whether they had been prescribed to Prince. Prince was found dead in his Paisley Park home in suburban Minneapolis on April 21, 2016. He was 57. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP, File)

The official said investigators are also looking into what kind of drugs were on the plane and at Prince's house in suburban Minneapolis.

The official also confirmed some details that have previously been reported by other media outlets, including TMZ.

Prince's plane made an emergency stop in Moline, in western Illinois, on April 15 and he was found unconscious on the plane, the official said. The person said first responders gave Prince a shot of Narcan, which is used in suspected opioid overdoses. The official said the so-called save shot was given when the plane was on the tarmac in Moline as Prince returned to Minneapolis following a performance in Atlanta.

The official said investigators are looking at whether Prince overdosed on the plane and whether an overdose killed him, and at what kind of drugs were involved. One possibility is the powerful painkiller Percocet or something similar, the official said.

Narcan can be used on people even if an overdose isn't confirmed because it wouldn't necessarily be harmful.

While it's premature to say where the investigation is heading, the mention of a doctor calls to mind other celebrity deaths, including Michael Jackson's. Jackson's doctor, Conrad Murray, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for his role in prescribing a powerful anesthetic that contributed to the pop star's death in 2009.

A second law enforcement official told AP that prescription drugs were discovered at Prince's home when the musician was found dead on April 21.

That official spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak about the ongoing investigation into Prince's death. The official did not elaborate. An autopsy has been performed, but results aren't expected for three to four weeks. The search warrant for Prince's Paisley Park home and studio  carried out the day of his death  was filed Thursday under seal at the request of investigators who said it would hamper their investigation if contents were public.

An affidavit in support of sealing the warrant, signed by Carver County Chief Deputy Jason Kamerud, also warned that disclosing details in the warrant could cause "the search or related searches to be unsuccessful" and risk injury to innocent people.

Kamerud declined to comment Thursday on the reports of drugs found at Paisley Park, and told AP that he strongly disputed reports by several media outlets that investigators had asked the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for help in the case.

"We have not asked them for help, or asked them to be a part of the investigation," Kamerud said. "We might contact them to help us, but that hasn't happened. We don't have the medical examiner's report yet. We don't know to what extent pharmaceuticals could be a part of this."

Leo Hawkins, a DEA spokesman in Chicago, said he had no comment.

Prince's death came two weeks after he canceled concerts in Atlanta, saying he wasn't feeling well. He played a pair of makeup shows April 14 in that city. Prince was scheduled to perform two shows in St. Louis but canceled them shortly before his death due to health concerns.

Longtime friend and collaborator Sheila E. has told the AP that Prince had physical issues from performing, citing hip and knee problems that she said came from years of jumping off risers and stage speakers in heels.

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In 'BFG,' Rylance takes on a new role: Spielberg regular

NEW YORK (AP)  The first time Steven Spielberg offered a role to Mark Rylance, the actor said no. That was 30 years ago for "Empire of the Sun." Now, Rylance can't stop saying yes.

Fresh off their Oscar-winning collaboration on "Bridge of Spies," Spielberg and Rylance have booked not just another film together, but a trio of them. Along with joining the cast of Spielberg's "Ready Player One," a science-fiction thriller due out next year, Rylance has signed up to star as Pope Pius IX in the Tony Kushner-scripted "The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara."

But first, Rylance stars in "The BFG" (out July 1), Spielberg's adaption of the Roald Dahl classic. Rylance plays the titular Big Friendly Giant in a motion capture performance that the actor promises will impress in its technological wizardry.

In this image released by Disney, Ruby Barnhill portraying Sophie, right, appears in a scene with the Big Friendly Giant, voiced by Mark Rylance in "The BFG," opening nationwide on July 1. (Disney via AP)

"That's the big leap forward in this film," says Rylance, whose character befriends an orphan girl, played in live action by Ruby Barnhill. "The trickery of it will be hidden. But make no mistake, the trickery was incredible."

Before "Bridge of Spies" and PBS's "Wolf Hall," Rylance was known primarily as arguably the greatest stage actor and Shakespeare interpreter of his generation. His commitment to theater remains (he recently finished a run of "Nice Fish," a play based on Louis Jenkins poetry, in Brooklyn) but his newest role is as Spielberg regular.

"It comes from him because obviously I'm not in a place to offer him work," Rylance says, chuckling. "It makes me a little nervous that I'll fail him at some point! But at the moment it's quite enjoyable."

Rylance says he relishes becoming a member of Spielberg's community, which includes other mainstays like composer John Williams, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and the late Melissa Mathison, who penned the screenplay to "The BFG." Rylance believes Spielberg may be eager for a company of actors, too.

"Because I was doing 'Nice Fish' and busy in New York, at first I contemplated not going to the Academy Awards because I'd have to miss some performances," he says. "But I thought, well, I'll ask Steven what he feels about it. He said it would mean a lot to him if I went. He's only ever had one other actor win an award in one of his films: Daniel Day-Lewis in the Lincoln film. I think he feels there is a slight opinion that he's not an actor's director. I don't have that opinion, quite the contrary. But I think he feels he's known more for other aspects of filmmaking."

Essential to the making of "The BFG" was having the two stars together in the same room, despite their characters being separated by scale in the motion capture process.

"There was no camera. There was no lighting apart from the general state. There were no marks to hit," Rylance says. "It was like doing a play in a small theater studio where the audience is all around you. Steven, who wasn't (electronically) suited up, could stand right next to us on the set, which he often did, laughing and looking at us."

The 56-year-old Rylance is used to being part of some of the most celebrated plays in London's West End and on Broadway, but his newfound prominence in Hollywood is novel. He's soon to begin shooting Christopher Nolan's WWII film "Dunkirk."

At his first Oscars, he went home a winner, all the while with a bemused but gracious attitude about the affair.

"It was fascinating to go through for the first time," says Rylance. "I don't think it's any kind of true reckoning of the quality of anything, so it was a little sad to me that the African American community put such stock into it as a way of determining their worth. I don't think any artist should be determining their worth on those things."

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Carter defends US strategy for defeating Islamic State group

WASHINGTON (AP)  Defense Secretary Ash Carter defended the U.S. strategy for defeating Islamic State militants, telling Congress on Thursday that U.S.-backed local forces in Iraq and Syria are making substantive gains toward retaking the extremist group's strongholds.

Carter counseled against sending a large, American-led "foreign ground force" to battle the Islamic State. Such a move would play into the hands of the extremists, he said, "fighting on the enemy's terms of ground combat amid a local population that has previously responded violently to such an approach."

But the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, criticized the Obama administration's approach in Iraq and Syria as reactive, slow, and insufficient. McCain also said military operations in both countries are being micromanaged by officials in Washington, which is causing them to lose sight of the larger strategic picture.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter listens at left as Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 28, 2016, before the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the Islamic State group. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the chairman of the GOP-led Armed Services Committee is calling the U.S. response to the extremists reactive, slow, and insufficient. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

"Put simply, too many of our leaders appear involved in the tactical fight ... and not enough in the strategic fight," McCain said. "And despite the real tactical gains we have made, we must ask ourselves: Is this working? Are we winning? Are we getting ahead of the threats and problems we face? Or are they getting ahead of us?"

Carter and Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. cyberattacks against the Islamic State are continuing and aim to disrupt the group's financial support and recruiting abilities.

"The objectives there are to interrupt (the Islamic State's) command and control, interrupt its ability to move money around, interrupt its ability to tyrannize and control population, interrupt its ability to recruit externally," Carter said.

The overall goal, Dunford added, is to put the extremists in "virtual isolation."

Defense Secretary Ash Carter, accompanied by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 28, 2016, before the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the Islamic State group. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the chairman of the GOP-led Armed Services Committee is calling the U.S. response to the extremists reactive, slow, and insufficient. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Duke Ellington personal items heading to NYC auction

NEW YORK (AP)  More than 250 items belonging to pianist, songwriter and bandleader Duke Ellington are headed for auction.

Guernsey's says Ellington's suits, piano and other items will be offered May 18 at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

They're consigned by one of his nephews.

FILE - In this April 24, 1969 file photo, Duke Ellington, plays the piano at a news conference in New York. More than 250 items belonging to the pianist, songwriter and bandleader are headed for auction. Guernseys says Ellingtons suits, piano and other items will be offered May 18, 2016, at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. (AP Photo/John Duricka, File)

Ellington's iconic white baby grand piano could bring as much as $1 million.

There are tuxedos and dinner jackets with Ellington's name written inside the jacket pockets, ranging from $3,000 to $6,500.

The Grammy-award winning artist composed thousands of songs during his 50-year career. The auction has two dozen music manuscripts penned in Ellington's hand. An orchestra arrangement of "Mood Indigo" could fetch up to $20,000.
South Africa: Shoppers go to new mall, despite economy woes

JOHANNESBURG (AP)  South African shoppers flocked to the opening Thursday of one of Africa's largest malls outside Johannesburg, despite rising unemployment and slowing economic growth.

The Mall of Africa, spanning 130,000 square meters (140,000 square feet) registered 68,000 visitors by 1 p.m. local time, a spokesman for the mall's owners told The Associated Press.

"We did expect a high number but this has exceeded our expectations," said Michael Clampett of the Attacq group the majority owner of the mall. "It's the kind of number you get on December 23. ... I am fairly confident we will cross 100,000."

A man jumps from a stepping stone at the entrance to the newly-opened Mall of Africa in Midrand, South Africa, Thursday April 28, 2016. Thousands of South African shoppers flocked to the opening Thursday of one of Africa's largest malls outside Johannesburg, despite rising unemployment and slowing economic growth, seemingly attracted to the international brand names and opening discounts available. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)

Before the opening of stores at 9 a.m. lines of people, some stretching for more than a hundred meters (yards), waited outside of international stores that recently launched in South Africa, such as fashion retailer H&M, Starbucks and doughnut shop Krispy Kreme.

The mall, which caters for a luxury as a well as a low-end market, had to block overcrowded escalators as massive crowds built up outside retailers offering opening specials on everything from televisions to bulk packs of toilet paper.

The mall, which developers say will be the largest in Africa once it is completed, opens as the country's economic prospects look bleak. Unemployment has increased from 22 percent in 1994 to 25 percent at the end of 2014 with approximately 5 million estimated to be jobless, according to the state Statistics South Africa.

The country's gold and platinum mines have been retrenching tens of thousands of workers in the past year after a fall in demand for commodities from China, while an El Nino drought has decimated agricultural production, forcing food prices to go up. South Africa's economic growth is expected to slow to a 0.5 percent this year, according to ratings agency Moody's.

Shoppers make their way along the wide shopping avenues inside the newly-opened Mall of Africa in Midrand, South Africa, Thursday April 28, 2016. Thousands of South African shoppers flocked to the opening Thursday of one of Africa's largest malls outside Johannesburg, despite rising unemployment and slowing economic growth, seemingly attracted to the international brand names and opening discounts available. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)

Boys hang out in the newly-opened Mall of Africa in Midrand, South Africa, Thursday April 28, 2016. Thousands of South African shoppers flocked to the opening Thursday of one of Africa's largest malls outside Johannesburg, despite rising unemployment and slowing economic growth, seemingly attracted to the international brand names and opening discounts available.(AP Photo/Denis Farrell)

Shoppers make their way along the broad shopping walk-ways in the newly-opened Mall of Africa, in Midrand, South Africa, Thursday April 28, 2016. Thousands of South African shoppers flocked to the opening Thursday of one of Africa's largest malls outside Johannesburg, despite rising unemployment and slowing economic growth, seemingly attracted to the international brand names and opening discounts available. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)
EU in trouble as Eurosceptic parties gain in strength

VIENNA (AP)  Even before a vehemently anti-EU party won strong support in Austria, the European Union's top official acknowledged that the 28-nation bloc was in trouble.

"We are facing very tough times," European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told parliamentarians this month. "We are not very popular when we advocate for Europe."

Those comments were reinforced just days later with the victory Sunday of an anti-EU right-wing party in the first round of Austria's presidential election.

FILE - In this Monday, March 14, 2016 file photo, Norbert Hofer, candidate for Sunday's presidential elections of Austria's Freedom Party, FPOE, speaks during a news conference in Vienna, Austria. Even before a vehemently anti-EU party won strong support in Austria, the European Unions top official acknowledged that the 28-nation bloc was in trouble. We are facing very tough times, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told parliamentarians this month. We are not very popular when we advocate for Europe.Those comments were reinforced just days later with the victory Sunday of an anti-EU right-wing party in the first round of Austrias presidential election. (AP Photo/Ronald Zak, File)

Such parties are growing in strength and putting European unity under siege. Instead of moving closer toward the founding nations' ultimate goal of "an ever-closer union," the EU faces disconnect and drift as populists blame it for much of the continent's ills.

At its worst, the EU faces a possible downsizing after Britain's June 23 referendum on whether the country should stay in the bloc of 500 million people. But less immediate threats also loom, from Eurosceptic populist parties that are exploiting both domestic voter discontent and general disillusionment with the EU to gain in strength.

With both national governments and the EU stumbling in response to the migrant crisis, terrorism, economic stagnation and joblessness, political consultant Thomas Hofer says Europeans are turning to "populist parties that offer easy solutions."

Political scientist Thomas Filzmaier traces the populist surge to the 2008 world financial crisis.

"(Since then), trust in EU institutions has crumbled but trust in national governments is hardly better," he says.

Beyond blaming the EU for dropping the ball on the continent's major concerns, Euroskeptics are campaigning on promises of more direct democracy. They make much of the fact that those on the European Commission  which proposes laws for the whole EU  are not elected but appointed by EU member governments, including Juncker, the commission president.

Such attacks have left their mark.

"Back 10 years ago, trust in national governments and the EU institutions was 60 percent, 65 percent, 70 percent," says professor Jeffry Frieden of Harvard University's Department of Government. "Now its 10-15 percent of the population who have any faith.

"The disaster, and the danger, is not a loss of support for Europe," he says. "The disaster is in the loss of faith and confidence in governments and in the institutions of European integration."

Austria is the latest to embrace the Eurosceptic message. There, the candidate from the Freedom Party, which preaches less instead of more EU, is the favorite going into May 22 presidential runoff election. Norbert Hofer received over 35 percent support in Sunday's first round, eliminating two contenders from pro-EU parties in the government coalition who received a total of just 22 percent of the vote.

The shift is significant, for Austria has been traditionally in the pro-EU camp. For pro-European politicians, the trend  and the strength of similar parties elsewhere  is just a worrying sign of what could happen in the country's next general election, which must be held within two years.

In EU founding member France, Marine Le Pen's far-right Front National party won European Parliament elections two years ago and a recent poll had 80 percent of respondents saying they think she'll make it to the second round of France's 2017 presidential election. In the Netherlands, a poll this year had anti-EU populist Geert Wilders' party leading in popularity.

Hungary and Poland are already governed by Eurosceptic parties while the Czech president regularly criticizes the EU. In Scandinavia and Finland, populist parties advocating national interests over EU authority are either in power or strongly represented in parliament.

Germany's AfD party, whose views clash with key EU principles, is in eight state parliaments, scoring in the double digits last month in three state parliament elections.

And the list goes on, with nationalist-populist parties  most of them right-wing  advocating less EU in the majority of the bloc's countries.

It's too early to tell whether their efforts will translate into more votes in the next European Parliament elections in 2019 and allow Euroskeptics to expand on the third of seats they now hold.

But symbolic gestures of EU disenchantment abound even in traditionally pro-EU countries like the Netherlands, where voters recently voted against an EU association agreement with Ukraine.

And even if they remain in the minority for now, Euroskeptics already are sapping efforts to find unified solutions to major challenges.

An EU-wide plan to distribute refugees foundered because of opposition from Hungary and like-minded nations. That, in turn, led to the unilateral imposition of national border controls even by some countries that subscribe to free movement within the EU  a fundamental right that political scientist Anton Pelinka describes as "the core value of European integration."

Top EU officials are heeding such signals. Juncker is warning that change is needed to keep alive the vision of a strong EU.

Otherwise, he said, "we will eventually end up with the ruins of this ideal."

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Washington state biologists are trying to determine what killed a sea lion that was captured and released after it was strangely found in the driveway of a cattle ranch about 50 miles from the ocean.

The male California sea lion was released into Puget Sound on April 15 after it apparently swam and waddled its way to the ranch, The News Tribune reported.

On Friday, the sea lion was found dead under a bridge in Olympia, ending its unusual journey from the ocean to a small creek and then to Puget Sound.

A wayward California sea lion sits in the driveway of the Soggy Bottom Farm near Oakville, Washington, about 50 miles from the ocean. Biologists are now trying to determine what killed it

Dyanna Lambourn, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist, examined the sea lion on Sunday and found no immediate cause of death.

Samples from the necropsy were sent out on Tuesday to test for possible causes.

The animal's wayward journey to Soggy Bottom Farm began sometime before April 15.

Rancher Ken Shively found his gate open and the 350-pound animal in his driveway. He initially thought it was a deer or elk.

The sea lion was about 200 yards from a tributary of the Chehalis River, and roughly 50 miles of river, creek and drainage ditch travel from Washington's coast. He called state wildlife officials.

'They didn't believe us,' Shively told The News Tribune. 'They were like, 'A what? Can you describe that to us?''

Sgt. Bob Weaver with the agency's enforcement division said it was the most unusual call he's gotten in years.

'I've dealt with sea lions before, but never in a cattle farm,' he said.

He estimates the animal traveled about five miles up a creek, which is only a foot deep in some places.

It's not unusual for a sea lion to travel far up rivers in the pursuit of salmon and other fish.

'The unusual part is that it went up that little creek,' said Steve Jeffries, a research scientist with the state wildlife department.

Agency personnel corralled the sea lion into a cage on a flatbed trailer, and released it that evening into Puget Sound near DuPont.

On Friday, the male California sea lion was found dead under a bridge in Olympia, ending its unusual journey from the ocean to a small creek and then to Puget Sound

'All our cows came running over to see what all the excitement was about,' Shively said.

Lambourn, who examined the sea lion at the ranch, found no obvious injuries or illnesses.

The animal weighed between 350 and 400 pounds, half the normal weight of an adult male sea lion.

Biologists are investigating what role domoic acid, a neurotoxin produced by algae blooms, played in the sea lion's death.

Domoic acid can affect a sea lion's neurological functioning and cause seizures.

In California, where all sea lions originate, the population has been hit by low birth rates and high mortality.
Deputies find body of 2-year-old boy in pond near his home

HUDSON, Fla. (AP)  A massive search for a 2-year-old Florida boy ended tragically when deputies found his body in a pond about 150 yards from his home in the Tampa Bay area.

Pasco County Sheriff's spokeswoman Melanie Snow said in a news release that Clayton Foskey wandered away from his home in Hudson on Wednesday evening. Some 60 law enforcement officers started searching for the child about 7:20 p.m.

The Tampa Tribune (http://bit.ly/1WsrGuQ ) reports deputies went door-to-door and found that a neighbor's surveillance camera captured video of the boy walking about 7:04 p.m.

A short time later they found a footprint near the pond and deputies saw the boy's body about 15 feet from the shore.

An investigation is continuing.

Hudson is located north of Tampa on Florida's Gulf Coast.

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Police: 80 people arrested in Ontario in child porn probe

TORONTO (AP)  Ontario police say they have arrested 80 people as part of a sweeping investigation into internet child pornography in the province.

Ontario Provincial Police said Thursday the investigation involved 274 charges against 80 people, including one youth.

Charges include sexual assault, possession of child pornography, making child pornography, distributing child pornography and accessing child pornography. Police say 20 victims have been identified.

Police said Thursday they also secured the safety of nine people working in the sex trade as minors or against their will. They worked with several security agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to make the arrests.
Israel rejects French peace effort proposal

JERUSALEM (AP)  Israel has rejected a French initiative aimed at restarting peace efforts with the Palestinians, saying direct negotiations are the best way to reach a final agreement between the sides.

Paris is to host an international meeting in May of 20 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to discuss the peace process. Israel and the Palestinians have not been invited.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement Thursday that "Israel adheres to its position that the best way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct, bilateral negotiations. Israel is ready to begin them immediately without preconditions."

The Palestinians have welcomed the French proposal.
UN votes to wrap up Ivory Coast peacekeeping mission in 2017

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Thursday to wrap up its 12-year peacekeeping mission in Ivory Coast next year, a sign of confidence in the West African nation's progress to peace after years of political turmoil and thousands of deaths.

A resolution adopted by the U.N.'s most powerful body calls for all U.N. peacekeepers and international police to leave Ivory Coast by April 30, 2017 and for the mission to officially end on June 30, 2017. It had about 4,650 troops and military observers and nearly 1,400 police at the end of February.

A second resolution, also adopted unanimously, immediately lifted an arms embargo on Ivory Coast as well as a travel ban and asset freeze on individuals.

After an attempted coup sparked a civil war in 2002, Ivory Coast was split into a rebel-controlled north and government-controlled south. A peace deal in March 2007 brought key rebel leaders into the administration, but deep divisions remained.

The country headed to the brink of civil war in early 2011 when then-president Laurent Gbagbo refused to concede defeat after losing a presidential runoff vote in 2010 to Alassane Ouattara, who finally became president in May 2011. Gbagbo was arrested and is currently before the International Criminal Court, accused of involvement in violence that left some 3,000 people dead in the aftermath of the 2010 elections.

The Security Council resolution welcomed "the remarkable progress by Ivory Coast to achieve lasting peace and stability, as well as economic prosperity." It commended the successful presidential election last October, which Ouattara easily won after overseeing economic growth during his first term, as "a critical milestone" in consolidating the country's long-term peace and stability.

Ambassador Francois Delattre of France, Ivory Coast's former colonial power, called the U.N. mission, which began in April 2004, "a success story."

Ivory Coast's U.N. Ambassador Claude Bouah-Kamon told the council after the vote that the government believes and hopes the council's actions testify to its "myriad efforts" undertaken since the end of the crisis in 2011.

With the lifting of sanctions, he said, the government will now tackle the modernization of the country's military and security and overhaul related laws.
Kenya: Large pyres set up for massive burn of ivory

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)  Kenyan authorities have built towering pyres of more than 100 tons of elephant tusks that will be burned on Saturday, in what wildlife officials believe will be the largest single destruction of ivory in history.

In front of the tusks are illegal ornaments made from ivory, such as a Chinese warrior on horseback with his fist in the air.

As local conservation groups and media visited the ivory-burning site in Nairobi National Park on Thursday, workers were putting the finishing touches to the stacks of ivory as rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service stood guard nearby.

A Maasai man in ceremonial dress poses for visitors to take photographs of him in front of one of around a dozen pyres of ivory, in Nairobi National Park, Kenya Thursday, April 28, 2016. The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has stacked 105 tons of ivory consisting of 16,000 tusks, and 1 ton of rhino horn, from stockpiles around the country, in preparation for it to be torched on Saturday to encourage global efforts to help stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

The ivory is now piled into some dozen giant pyres, ready to be lit when the Giants Club wildlife summit being held in Laikipia ends on Saturday.

Dignitaries led by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta  who last year set fire to 15 tons of ivory  are expected to light a fuel gel which will flow into the center of each pyre and ignite pieces of confiscated endangered African sandalwood. A mixture of diesel and kerosene will be pumped through pipes into each pyre, creating a sufficiently high temperature to incinerate the ivory, a process expected to last many days before everything is reduced to ashes.

The 105 tons of ivory and over 1 ton of rhino horn were transported in shipping containers from across Kenya, representing the vast majority of the country's stockpile.

Conservationists worry that there is a a real threat of elephants becoming extinct in the next 50 years because of poaching bankrolled by the illegal trade in ivory, fueled especially by demand in China.

A ranger from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) stands guard near some of around a dozen pyres of ivory, in Nairobi National Park, Kenya Thursday, April 28, 2016. The wildlife service has stacked 105 tons of ivory consisting of 16,000 tusks, and 1 ton of rhino horn, from stockpiles around the country, in preparation for it to be torched on Saturday to encourage global efforts to help stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

A ranger from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) stands guard near an ivory statue in front of one of around a dozen pyres of ivory, in Nairobi National Park, Kenya Thursday, April 28, 2016. The wildlife service has stacked 105 tons of ivory consisting of 16,000 tusks, and 1 ton of rhino horn, from stockpiles around the country, in preparation for it to be torched on Saturday to encourage global efforts to help stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

A ranger from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) adjusts the positioning of tusks on one of around a dozen pyres of ivory, in Nairobi National Park, Kenya Thursday, April 28, 2016. The wildlife service has stacked 105 tons of ivory consisting of 16,000 tusks, and 1 ton of rhino horn, from stockpiles around the country, in preparation for it to be torched on Saturday to encourage global efforts to help stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

Workers walk past as ivory statues stand in front of one of around a dozen pyres of ivory, in Nairobi National Park, Kenya Thursday, April 28, 2016. The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has stacked 105 tons of ivory consisting of 16,000 tusks, and 1 ton of rhino horn, from stockpiles around the country, in preparation for it to be torched on Saturday to encourage global efforts to help stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

Maasai in ceremonial dress stand around after having their photograph taken with visitors, next to one of around a dozen pyres of ivory, in Nairobi National Park, Kenya Thursday, April 28, 2016. The wildlife service has stacked 105 tons of ivory consisting of 16,000 tusks, and 1 ton of rhino horn, from stockpiles around the country, in preparation for it to be torched on Saturday to encourage global efforts to help stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

Ivory statues stand in front of one of around a dozen pyres of ivory, in Nairobi National Park, Kenya Thursday, April 28, 2016. The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has stacked 105 tons of ivory consisting of 16,000 tusks, and 1 ton of rhino horn, from stockpiles around the country, in preparation for it to be torched on Saturday to encourage global efforts to help stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

A ranger from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) adjusts the positioning of tusks on one of around a dozen pyres of ivory, in Nairobi National Park, Kenya Thursday, April 28, 2016. The wildlife service has stacked 105 tons of ivory consisting of 16,000 tusks, and 1 ton of rhino horn, from stockpiles around the country, in preparation for it to be torched on Saturday to encourage global efforts to help stop the poaching of elephants and rhinos. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Steve McMillan named AP's Mid-Atlantic news editor

ATLANTA (AP)  Steve McMillan, news editor for The Associated Press in Virginia and West Virginia, has been named Mid-Atlantic news editor, overseeing a newly expanded region as part of a realignment of several AP regions.

The appointment was announced Thursday by interim South Editor Ravi Nessman, who oversees 13 southeastern states plus the District of Columbia.

The expanded Mid-Atlantic region will include Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia. The realignment will allow AP to take a more thematic approach to coverage in the region that borders the nation's capital, as well as to bring all the reporters in Virginia under one operation.

In this Monday, March 24, 2014 photo,news editor for The Associated Press in Virginia and West Virginia, Steve McMillan poses for a photo in Richmond, Va. McMillan, 59, has been named Mid-Atlantic news editor, overseeing a newly expanded region as part of a realignment of several AP regions. The appointment was announced Thursday, April 28, 2016, by interim South Editor Ravi Nessman, who oversees 13 southeastern states plus the District of Columbia. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

McMillan will oversee the region from his base in Richmond, Virginia.

McMillan, 59, joined AP in 2014, guiding coverage of the University of Virginia rape case, the surprise election defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and the trial of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.

Before that, he was an editor at The Denver Post.

Current Mid-Atlantic news editor Amanda Kell will remain a news editor under McMillan and will help oversee Maryland, the District of Columbia and Delaware from her base in Baltimore.

"Steve and Amanda will make an excellent team. They are veteran journalists committed to telling the stories of the region in innovative and compelling ways," Nessman said.
Refugee baby Serbia Merkel in transit across Europe

KRNJACA, Serbia (AP)  She has wide brown eyes, rosy cheeks and thick black hair. Her name is Serbia Merkel al-Mustafa.

Serbia for the country where she was born just a few days ago, Merkel for the leader of Germany, where her Syrian refugee parents want to go in their desperate attempt to escape the war at home.

The al-Mustafa family is among hundreds of refugees stuck in Serbia after Austria and several Balkan nations shut their borders to migrants this winter. But the route that saw one million people reach Western Europe last year seems to be picking up in pace once again  and the family of four has high hopes of reaching their dream location soon.

A baby named Serbia Merkel Al Mustafa sleeps in the "Krnjaca" collective centre, in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, April 28, 2016. Serbia for the country where she was born just a few days ago, Merkel for the German leader where her Syrian refugee parents want to go in their desperate attempt to escape the war and poverty. The Al-Mustafa family is among hundreds of migrants stuck in Serbia after the official closure of the Balkan route for passage. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

"Inshallah, we will be in Germany one day," Jaafar, the proud father, said Thursday as he caressed his tiny daughter's cheeks inside a cramped room with bunk beds at a drab refugee camp near Belgrade, the Serbian capital.

"We walked across mountains, nearly drowned in the rough seas," Jaafar said, holding the baby as mother Rasmyah tenderly watched after leaving a Belgrade maternity hospital just a day before. "Nothing will stop us now."

Serbia Merkel is just one of many who have been born during the largest exodus into Europe since World War II. And she is not the only one named after Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, for her welcoming policies toward migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

But since the closure of the Balkan migration route and a European Union deal with Turkey to deport some migrants back there, things have gone sour for the migrants. Thousands have been stuck in Greece, many camping in appalling conditions on the border with Macedonia, and thousands more have been forced to turn to human traffickers.

Jaafar al-Mustafa, a 27-year-old who walks with a metal cane, thinks Macedonian police let them into the country from Greece because they felt pity for the family that also included 20 month-old Sarah and his heavily pregnant wife, 23-year-old Rasmyah.

"We have walked most of the way to Serbia," he said. "My wife started getting pains while walking. Lucky we made it to here before she started giving birth."

The migrants stuck in Serbia, including many children, are trying to figure out how to proceed deeper into Europe. Most hope to cross into Hungary and then Austria, despite those governments' tough stances toward refugees.

Among those is Diaa Alaf, 23, a Syrian who left Aleppo four months ago and is traveling with her 15-month-old daughter. She hopes to reach Austria, where her parents are already established. Smugglers took her from the squalid camp at Idomeni, on Greece's northern border, through Macedonia to the Serbian camp along with two other families, 22 people in all, each paying 310 euros ($350).

"We came into Serbia in a group with smugglers," Alaf said. "Now we heard we can go with smugglers to Hungary, but also we are hearing the Hungarians are letting in families with children, around 30 people per day."

Their journey could face further obstacles, with Hungarian police saying they are arresting about 130 migrants a day for crossing the border illegally.

"I just want this horror to end," said Alaf.

Rasmyah Al Mustafa holds her baby named Serbia Merkel Al Mustafa in the "Krnjaca" collective centre, in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, April 28, 2016. Serbia for the country where she was born just a few days ago, Merkel for the German leader where her Syrian refugee parents want to go in their desperate attempt to escape the war and poverty. The Al-Mustafa family is among hundreds of migrants stuck in Serbia after the official closure of the Balkan route for passage. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Jaafar Al Mustafa, right, and his wife Rasmyah, left, sit in their room with his daughter Sarah and baby named Serbia Merkel in the "Krnjaca" collective centre, in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, April 28, 2016. The Al-Mustafa family is among hundreds of migrants stuck in Serbia after the official closure of the Balkan route for passage. But, the most popular track that saw one million people reach Western Europe last year, seems to be picking up in pace once again _ and the family of four has high hopes of reaching their dream location soon. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Rasmyah Al Mustafa tends to her baby named Serbia Merkel Al Mustafa in the "Krnjaca" collective centre, in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, April 28, 2016. Serbia for the country where she was born just a few days ago, Merkel for the German leader where her Syrian refugee parents want to go in their desperate attempt to escape the war and poverty. The Al-Mustafa family is among hundreds of migrants stuck in Serbia after the official closure of the Balkan route for passage. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Jaafar Al Mustafa and his daughter Sarah play with baby Serbia Merkel in the "Krnjaca" collective centre, in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, April 28, 2016. Serbia for the country where she was born just a few days ago, Merkel for the German leader where her Syrian refugee parents want to go in their desperate attempt to escape the war and poverty. The Al-Mustafa family is among hundreds of migrants stuck in Serbia after the official closure of the Balkan route for passage. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Sarah, sister of baby named Serbia Merkel Al Mustafa stands in their room in the "Krnjaca" collective centre, in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, April 28, 2016. The Al-Mustafa family is among hundreds of migrants stuck in Serbia after the official closure of the Balkan route for passage. But, the most popular track that saw one million people reach Western Europe last year, seems to be picking up in pace once again _ and the family of four has high hopes of reaching their dream location soon. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Diaa Alaf, a refugee from Syria, sits with her children in the "Krnjaca" collective centre, in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, April 28, 2016. The family is among hundreds of migrants stuck in Serbia after the official closure of the Balkan route for passage. But, the most popular track that saw one million people reach Western Europe last year, seems to be picking up in pace once again _ and the family of four has high hopes of reaching their dream location soon. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

A man plays with a child in the "Krnjaca" collective centre, in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, April 28, 2016. The migrants, including many children, have now converged in Serbia, plotting their strategy on how to proceed deeper into Europe. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

A woman holds a baby in the "Krnjaca" collective centre, in Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, April 28, 2016. The migrants, including many children, have now converged in Serbia, plotting their strategy on how to proceed deeper into Europe. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
Tracking the flow of guns used in crime is inexact science

SMYRNA, Ga. (AP)  Adventure Outdoors is an 80,000-square-foot store with walls lined with long guns, cases packed with handguns and aisles jammed with all the accessories an avid outdoorsman would need: coolers, clothing, ammo. At the customer service counter is a government-issued poster that warns: "Don't lie for the other guy."

Store founder Jay Wallace said his staff is diligent about making sure buyers are legitimate and not fronting for someone who is legally prohibited from buying a gun. But once a sale goes through, he said, it's out of his hands.

"A firearm takes on a life of its own after it leaves. It can be bought and sold many times over," Wallace said.

In this April 18, 2016 photo, Jay Wallace, founder of Adventure Outdoors, poses for a portrait in Smyrna, Ga. Wallace was among a group of gun dealers once sued by then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg over allegations of allowing illegal sales of firearms. (AP Photo/Lisa Marie Pane)

The flow of guns from one person to another, and from states with loose gun laws to those with strict ones, has long flummoxed law enforcement and gun-control advocates and is emerging again as a hot topic.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton singled out rival Bernie Sanders' home state of Vermont, which has few gun restrictions, for supplying a disproportionate share of firearms used in crimes in New York. (She exaggerated: in reality, many more guns flow in from states to the South.) California Gov. Jerry Brown, after the San Bernardino attack, charged that lax gun laws in Arizona and Nevada have created a weapons pipeline into California. And Chicago has long been plagued by guns traced to points as far away as Mississippi.

While the vast majority of guns used in crimes were originally sold legally, what happens to such weapons after their initial sale is difficult to track and even harder to prevent, because most criminals get their guns from friends, family or on the street.

"We have very little information about the precise course that all the guns take that are used by criminals," said Daniel W. Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

The government has essentially two snapshots of a gun: where it was purchased and where it was recovered, an incomplete picture because not every gun recovered by police is traced.

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show that guns used in crimes usually are bought in the state where the offense is committed.

Of the 7,686 firearms recovered in New York that were traced by the ATF in 2014, 1,397 were originally sold in New York. The top out-of-state source of firearms was Virginia, where 395 firearms originated, followed closely by Georgia and Pennsylvania.

After the attacks in San Bernardino, California's governor noted that his state has some of the country's toughest gun laws and complained that neighboring Arizona and Nevada are "a gigantic back door through which any terrorist can walk." The governors of Nevada and Arizona rebuked Brown and, in any event, the guns used in the attacks were bought legally in California.

Around the U.S., the data suggest three significant routes for out-of-state guns: the "iron pipeline" that runs along Interstate 95 from the South to the Northeast; a path from Mississippi and Indiana into Chicago, which has some of the toughest run restrictions in the nation and does not have a single gun shop within the city limits; and a channel that runs from Arizona and Nevada into California.

I-95's accessibility  it connects more than a dozen major cities  makes it nearly impossible for law enforcement to prevent firearms from making their way northward, said John DeCarlo, a former police chief in Branford, Connecticut, who is now a professor at the University of New Haven.

"It's the equivalent of the Old Silk Road," he said.

Johns Hopkins' Webster said I-95's accessibility coupled with less strict laws in the South are the reasons the South is a key exporter of guns to the Northeast.

The gun lobby and firearms dealers say the tracing data are misleading. They say the problem is not law-abiding gun dealers or a particular state's laws.

"The bottom-line answer is passing a law doesn't stop bad guys from breaking the law," said Erich Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America. "Bad guys are still going to get the guns  and what happens is it prevents good people from getting guns."

A decade ago, Wallace's store was among about two dozen that found themselves in the crosshairs of a sting operation when then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York sought gun dealers he accused of turning a blind eye to "straw purchases" that allow weapons to fall into the hands of criminals in the big city. A straw buyer is someone who poses as a customer but is actually purchasing the weapon for a person who is ineligible because of a criminal conviction, mental illness or some other reason.

About a dozen guns recovered from crimes in New York over a six-year period were originally purchased at Wallace's store in metro Atlanta. Not one, he said, was ever fired during a crime, and only one was actually employed as a weapon, when it was used to hit somebody.

During that six-year period, his store sold 60,000 firearms, said Wallace, a member of the board of directors of the American Firearms Retailers Association. A court-ordered special master later monitored sales at Wallace's store for several years and issued recommendations. But no fines were ever levied or further action taken.

Wallace said customers encounter at least four employees during the purchase, each of whom asks a series of questions meant to pinpoint potential red flags while also helping customers pick out the best weapon for their needs.

"We're at the front lines," he said. "You never read about it when we turn down a transaction."

FILE- In this Oct. 12, 2012, file photo, nearly 100 confiscated illegal firearms rests on a table before a news conference with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, and New York City District Attorney Cyrus Vance in New York. While the vast majority of guns used in crimes were originally sold legally, what happens with such weapons after their initial sale is difficult to track and even harder to prevent: criminals getting guns from friends and family, or on the street. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
Friends turn foes for justice's re-election in West Virginia

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)  In 2004, former coal baron Don Blankenship spent $3.5 million to help get a West Virginia Supreme Court candidate elected in a wild race that inspired a John Grisham novel.

At the time, Blankenship's company, Massey Energy, had a $50 million case pending before the court. Blankenship's Republican candidate, Brent Benjamin, won the election, and Benjamin and two other justices later ruled 3-2 in Blankenship's favor in the Massey case, saving the company a massive payout.

Now, 12 years later, Blankenship is headed to prison for a mine safety conspiracy and Benjamin is facing his first re-election fight  and opposition from many of the same people who once supported him.

Benjamin says he was never Blankenship's buddy and the money the coal CEO funneled into a political group known as "And for the Sake of the Kids" didn't influence him.

"Everyone who was involved in that group, the And for the Sake of the Kids, is with another candidate" now, Benjamin said. "I think that sent a pretty strong message that I was independent, and even though, at the time, it may have been hard to see. Certainly, actions speak louder than words."

The political group with the rosy name pounded Benjamin's old foe, former Democratic Justice Warren McGraw, as soft on crime and bad for business. The entire ordeal inspired the book "The Appeal"  which tells the story of a chemical company that loses a $41 million lawsuit in Mississippi for causing cancer deaths. Its top executive hand-picks a conservative, naive small-town lawyer, Ron Fisk, to run for the Supreme Court and be the swing vote his company needs to ultimately win the lawsuit.

Benjamin believes "The Appeal" was written about the Mississippi Supreme Court. Grisham has said the story "already happened" in West Virginia. Either way, the election gives Benjamin the opportunity to write a post-script for the character, and himself.

This year, Benjamin is running the antithesis of what helped him get elected. In the middle of a five-way race, he is using a public campaign finance option that is at the center of his message to voters: he has remained un-swayed as a jurist, even by the flushest of special interests.

The public option and third-party money have become sticking points in the race.

Benjamin has called for the Republican State Leadership Committee to take down ads blasting his opponents and said the courts should "remain independent of any special interests or political groups."

Outside spending has already topped $1.1 million. The leadership committee has spent $722,700 on negative ads while a trial lawyers group poured in another $229,000 in ads attacking conservative candidate Beth Walker.

The state's public campaign financing option, which lets Supreme Court candidates access up to $525,000 after certain requirements are met, was started in 2012 in response to the Blankenship-Benjamin election.

And because of the Massey case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that elected judges must step aside from cases when large campaign contributions from interested parties create the appearance of bias.

This year, for the first time, court candidates won't run with a party label, and the race will be decided on primary day May 10  no runoffs or general election.

The advocacy group Justice at Stake says it doesn't know of any other state that elects justices this way, said spokeswoman Laurie Kinney.

About half use competitive elections  the majority of them nonpartisan  while the others mostly use bipartisan commissions to pick justices, according to the group.

For Blankenship, the election comes two days before he's scheduled to head to prison.

On April 6, the once widely influential coal boss was sentenced to a year in prison for a misdemeanor conspiracy to willfully violate mine safety standards at Upper Big Branch Mine, which exploded in 2010, killing 29 men.

Blankenship is hoping to convince an appeals court to keep him free until a higher court decides his case. He hasn't brazenly puppeteered West Virginia politics in years, but his former operatives still play vital roles in Republican circles.

Roman Stauffer, who heads West Virginia Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse and joined And for the Sake of the Kids after the 2004 election, said those groups weren't as close with Benjamin as perceived. Stauffer's group is now opposing Benjamin and supporting Walker. They cite Benjamin's decisions against health care organizations and a personal injury case that the group thought should not have been brought in West Virginia.

"I think that Justice Benjamin happened to be the candidate who made it through the primary election in 2004, and the groups involved, it was their goal to defeat Warren McGraw and to see someone else," Stauffer said.

McGraw lost, and his brother, former Supreme Court justice and longtime former Democratic Attorney General Darrell McGraw, is now one of the front-runners in this year's race.

The other candidates include Bill Wooton, a former Democratic lawmaker, who is also using public campaign money, and Wayne King, a Democratic attorney in Clay County who calls Benjamin "Justice Blankenship Benjamin."
Police chief: No apparent warning before Wisconsin man shot

NEENAH, Wis. (AP)  A Wisconsin police chief says a dashcam video appears to show that officers who fatally shot an armed hostage in December gave no warning before they fired outside a motorcycle shop.

Neenah Police Chief Kevin Wilkinson commented Thursday on the video, which was obtained and published online by the USA Today Network . It appears to show Michael Funk wasn't warned he'd be shot Dec. 5 as he ran from Eagle Nation Cycles shop, where hostages were being held.

Neenah police had said shortly after the shooting that Funk, 50, ignored orders to drop his gun. Wilkinson told The Associated Press that the initial information about Funk ignoring orders was from early interviews with witnesses, who may have been mistaken about when the commands were given, if in fact they were.

"From the video, it appears no warning was given," Wilkinson said of the nearly 5-minute dashcam footage. Wilkinson said it was possible a warning was given but not heard by Funk.

Funk and two other men were held hostage at the bike shop in a dispute over a motorcycle. The video shows Funk escaping out the back door of the shop into an alley, falling or diving to the ground and taking cover behind a pickup truck, gun drawn, before moving away from it and coming under police gunfire.

Neenah police have said one or more officers opened fire on Funk and that the gunman inside also may have shot at him. Funk's wife, attorney and longtime business partner have all said he was a hostage who shouldn't have been killed. His widow, Theresa Mason-Funk, filed a $3.5 million claim in March against the City of Neenah and three police officers.

The fatal shooting remains under investigation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, as required by a state law.

The man who authorities say took hostages, 46-year-old Brian Flatoff of Stevens Point, is charged with 11 felonies, including attempted first-degree intentional homicide. A police officer was injured after a bullet bounced off his helmet.
1st funeral held for victims of Ohio slayings that killed 8

SOUTH SHORE, Ky. (AP)  A funeral amid extra security was held Thursday in Kentucky for one of eight people shot dead in Ohio in what authorities describe as a cold-blooded massacre targeting a single family.

With law enforcement monitoring the area, loved ones gathered in South Shore, Kentucky, to honor 38-year-old Gary Rhoden at the first of three planned funerals for the victims.

He was buried dressed in full camouflage because he loved hunting. The Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home said the Greenup, Kentucky, man would be buried in South Shore, across the Ohio River from Portsmouth.

Visitors gather for the wake of Gary Rhoden at the Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in South Shore, Ky. Multiple people, including Rhoden, were found dead Friday at several properties near Piketon, Ohio. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Rhoden and seven others from his extended family were found dead April 22 at four properties near Piketon, about 80 miles east of Cincinnati, launching a scramble to determine who killed them and why.

Authorities said none of the deaths appeared self-inflicted and whoever was responsible might be at large. They've received hundreds of tips and are processing dozens of pieces of evidence but haven't discussed possible motives and have announced no arrests, a void of information adding to the family's grief.

"Let the Lord take care of it now," Kenneth Rhoden Sr. said before heading into his son's funeral Thursday, The Chillicothe Gazette reported.

Funeral services for six of the victims are planned for Tuesday at a church in West Portsmouth, Ohio, following visitation on Monday. Those victims are Rhoden's cousins, 40-year-old Christopher Rhoden Sr. and 44-year-old Kenneth Rhoden; Christopher's ex-wife, 37-year-old Dana Rhoden; and their three children, 16-year-old Christopher Rhoden Jr., 19-year-old Hanna Rhoden and 20-year-old Clarence "Frankie" Rhoden.

A separate service is planned Saturday afternoon in Otway, Ohio, for 20-year-old Hannah Gilley, whose 6-month old son with Frankie Rhoden was unharmed.

Two other children, Hanna Rhoden's 4-day-old daughter and Frankie Rhoden's 3-year-old son, also were unharmed.

Visitors gather for the wake of Gary Rhoden at the Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in South Shore, Ky. Multiple people, including Rhoden, were found dead Friday at several properties near Piketon, Ohio. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Lisa Wallace, former sister-in-law of Gary Rhoden, speaks to the media outside of his wake at the Crockett L. Reed Funeral Home, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in South Shore, Ky. Multiple people, including Rhoden, were found dead Friday at several properties near Piketon, Ohio. Investigators have interviewed more than 50 people in the case but have made no arrests. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
GOP senator blocks vote on Army secretary over Guantanamo

WASHINGTON (AP)  The nomination of President Barack Obama's choice to serve as Army secretary remains blocked by a Kansas senator over administration efforts to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and transfer detainees to the U.S.

Eric Fanning, who has held several jobs in the Pentagon, would be the first openly gay leader of a U.S. military service if confirmed. But Republican Sen. Pat Roberts placed a hold on the nomination last year and refused to relent Thursday despite pleas from the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

"My hold on the nominee is to protect the security of the United States and more especially the people of Kansas," Roberts said on the Senate floor.

Closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay was a theme of Obama's 2008 campaign, and he has pushed to shutter the facility, which he argues is costly and gives extremists a recruiting tool. Congress repeatedly has prohibited the transfer of any detainees to U.S. soil, and the possibility of Kansas' Fort Leavenworth as an alternative prompted Roberts' actions.

Roberts said his hold has nothing to do with Fanning's qualifications or character. "I would be more than happy to vote on Fanning's nomination" once there are assurances from the White House, he said.

The senator said he had a conversation Thursday morning with the White House in hopes the issue could be worked out, but the administration would not rule out Leavenworth as a potential location for detainees.

McCain argued that it was unfair to block Fanning's nomination over an unrelated issue. He said Roberts "is shooting a hostage" and abusing his power.

"That's not the role of advise and consent," McCain said. "That is a distortion of advise and consent."
Military disciplines about 16 in Afghanistan hospital attack

WASHINGTON (AP)  About 16 U.S. military personnel, including a two-star general, have been disciplined for mistakes that led to the bombing of a civilian hospital in Afghanistan last year that killed 42 people, a senior U.S. official said Thursday.

According to officials, no criminal charges were filed and the service members received administrative punishments in connection with the U.S. airstrike in the northern city of Kunduz. A number of those punished are U.S. special operations forces.

And while none was sent to court-martial, in many cases a nonjudicial punishment, such as a letter of reprimand or suspension, can effectively end a military career. The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, so spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Pentagon is expected to release the full report on the investigation on Friday, including details about what exactly happened and how the mistakes were made.

Last month, The Associated Press reported that more than a dozen U.S. military personnel had been disciplined in connection with the bombing, and that they were all largely administrative.

The hospital, run by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, was attacked by a U.S. Air Force special operations AC-130 gunship, one of the most lethal in the U.S. arsenal. Doctors Without Borders has called the attack "relentless and brutal."

Last November, the U.S. military said the crew of the AC-130, which is armed with side-firing cannons and guns, had been dispatched to hit a Taliban command center in a different building, 450 yards away from the hospital. However, hampered by problems with their targeting sensors, the crew relied on a physical description that led them to begin firing at the hospital even though they saw no hostile activity there.

Officials have said the accident was caused by human error, and that many chances to avert the incident were missed.

A separate U.S. report on the incident, obtained last fall by the AP, said the AC-130 aircraft fired 211 shells at the hospital compound over 29 minutes before commanders realized the mistake and ordered a halt. Doctors Without Borders officials contacted coalition military personnel during the attack to say the hospital was "being 'bombed' from the air," and the word finally was relayed to the AC-130 crew, the report said.

The attack came as U.S. military advisers were helping Afghan forces retake Kunduz, which had fallen to the Taliban on Sept. 28. It was the first major city to fall since the Taliban were expelled from Kabul in 2001.
The Latest: Competency hearing ends for day without ruling

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP)  The latest on a mental competency hearing for a man who acknowledges killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic: (All times local)

5:15 p.m.

A hearing on the mental state of a man who acknowledges killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic has ended for the day without a ruling on whether he is competent to stand trial.

In this Nov. 28, 2015 file photo, police investigators work near a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo., after a deadly shooting Friday. The man who acknowledges killing three people at the Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic will return to court for a discussion of his mental health. The hearing on Thursday, April 28, 2016, will focus on whether 57-year-old Robert Dear is competent to continue with his criminal case. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Defendant Robert Dear will return to court on May 10.

Forensic psychologist Jackie Grimmett testified that the 57-year-old Dear suffers from a delusional disorder and believes the FBI is persecuting him and that President Barack Obama is the Antichrist.

Grimmett said the disorder rendered Dear incompetent to stand trial. She said he lacks a rational understanding of the case against him and distrusts his attorneys too much to help with his defense.

If a judge rules that Dear is incompetent, his case would be put on hold while he gets treatment intended to restore him to competency.

___

4:45 p.m.

A forensic psychologist says a man who acknowledges killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic suffers from a delusional disorder that causes him to believe the FBI is persecuting him and that President Barack Obama is the Antichrist.

Jackie Grimmett testified Thursday that 57-year-old Robert Dear is incompetent to stand trial because of the disorder. She said Dear lacks a rational understanding of the case against him and distrusts his attorneys too much to help with his defense.

If a judge rules that Dear is incompetent, his case would be put on hold while he gets treatment intended to restore him to competency.

Dear is charged with 179 counts including murder, attempted murder and assault for the Nov. 27 shootings in Colorado Springs. Nine other people were injured.

___

12:20 p.m.

A forensic psychologist says she and a colleague who evaluated the man who acknowledges killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic determined that he is not competent to stand trial.

Jackie Grimmett says she met with 57-year-old Robert Dear twice for a mental evaluation and by the end of the second interview, both agreed he has a mental illness impairing his functional ability. She did not provide details as testimony continued Thursday to determine if Dear should be committed to a psychiatric hospital. If a judge agrees, Dear's case would stall indefinitely while he gets treatment.

A Colorado Springs detective testified earlier that Dear told people that he believes a move by defense attorneys to have him declared mentally incompetent is part of a plot to diminish his message opposing abortion.

A judge ordered Dear's mental evaluation after he announced he wanted to fire his public defenders and represent himself.

___

11 a.m.

A Colorado Springs police detective says the man who acknowledges killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic told people after his arrest that he believes a move by defense attorneys to have him declared mentally incompetent is part of a plot to diminish his message opposing abortion.

Detective Jerry Schiffelbein testified Thursday that 57-year-old Robert Dear made a number of phone calls after he was charged with 179 counts including murder, attempted murder and assault for the Nov. 27 shooting that also injured nine. He says Dear told people he believed federal agents were out to get him before he decided to make his last stand by attacking what he called the "evilest place on Earth."

A judge ordered Dear's mental evaluation after he announced he wanted to fire his public defenders and represent himself.

His defense wants him committed to a psychiatric hospital. If a judge agrees, Dear's case would stall indefinitely while he gets treatment.

___

1:10 a.m.

The man who acknowledges killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic will return to court for a discussion of his mental health.

Thursday's hearing will focus on whether 57-year-old Robert Dear is competent to continue with his criminal case. A doctor who conducted Dear's competency exam and a police detective could testify.

A judge ordered Dear's mental evaluation after he announced he wanted to fire his public defenders and represent himself.

Prosecutors charged Dear with 179 counts including murder, attempted murder and assault for the Nov. 27 shooting that also injured nine.

During courtroom outbursts, he declared himself a "warrior for the babies" and said he was guilty.

His defense wants him committed to a psychiatric hospital. If a judge agrees, Dear's case would stall indefinitely while he gets treatment.
Ohio massacre: 1 family, 8 dead, hundreds of tips, 0 answers

PIKETON, Ohio (AP)  From her house on Union Hill Road, Brittany Barker heard the first sirens first thing in the morning. She looked out and saw four police vehicles rush past. That was only the beginning.

"They just kept coming, kept coming, and kept coming," she recalled.

Authorities in this struggling corner of Appalachia were dealing with what turned out to be one of the worst mass killings in Ohio history: Eight family members were shot to death at four homes scattered across a few miles of countryside in what investigators have portrayed as a meticulously planned "execution." Nearly all were shot repeatedly  one, nine times  and some were also beaten.

Leonard Manley, left, father and grandfather of several murder victims, drives up Union Hill Road away from a roadblock at the outer perimeter of a crime scene, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, near Piketon, Ohio. Several people were found dead Friday at multiple properties near Piketon. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

What looked to some people like a feud within a family, possibly a murder-suicide, soon took on a more sinister cast when authorities disclosed a large-scale illegal marijuana growing operation at one of the crime scenes and said pot was being cultivated at some of the other homes, too. Ohio's attorney general also said there were signs of cockfighting at one of the properties.

Nearly a week after the killings, though, authorities have announced no arrests and no motive, an unsettling silence considering the huge investigative force brought to bear in this thinly populated county where many people either knew the victims or knew of them.

Since the discovery of the bodies April 22, over 215 law enforcement officers have been involved in the investigation, with several hundred tips received and more than 50 people interviewed.

Attorney General Mike DeWine has said he doesn't want to telegraph the killer or killers what investigators know.

Relatives of the victims said they were surprised by the marijuana. Some neighbors said they had heard rumors. And some said the marijuana-growing was a case of courting trouble.

"If you don't go around bad places, the odds of something bad happening to you are pretty slim," said Ron Lucas, a paper-mill worker who lives a few miles from where the killings took place.

But Angie Tolliver, a home health aide, said that whatever connection drugs may have had to the slayings, "Nobody deserves that. That's just evil."

Large marijuana operations are common in Pike County, scene of the killings. Authorities in 2012 said the seizure of about 1,200 plants in Pike County could be related to a Mexican drug cartel, while in 2010 more than 22,000 plants were confiscated. Marijuana is grown widely in parts of southern Ohio, where the dense forests and rural roads make it easy to hide the crop, and where many people need the money.

While the cleanup of a shuttered Cold War-era uranium plant employs hundreds of people in some of the best-paying jobs around town, about one-fifth of Pike County's 28,000 residents live in poverty, and the area roughly 80 miles east of Cincinnati consistently has some of Ohio's highest unemployment and drug-overdose death rates.

Investigators won't say if the killings are related to the marijuana, and law enforcement officials not associated with the investigation cast doubt on any cartel connection, saying there are no signs of it in Ohio.

Meanwhile, Cincinnati-area restaurateur Jeff Ruby tweeted Thursday that he is withdrawing the $25,000 reward he had offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction. He cited "recent complex criminal developments." A message left with his spokeswoman was not immediately returned.

The victims were 40-year-old Christopher Rhoden; his ex-wife, 37-year-old Dana Rhoden; their three children, 16-year-old Christopher Jr., 19-year-old Hanna and 20-year-old Clarence, or "Frankie"; Christopher Rhoden Sr.'s brother, 44-year-old Kenneth Rhoden; their cousin, 38-year-old Gary Rhoden; and 20-year-old Hannah Gilley, whose 6-month old son with Frankie Rhoden was unharmed.

Two other children, Hanna Rhoden's 4-day-old daughter and Frankie Rhoden's 3-year-old son, also were unharmed.

Neighbors accustomed to leaving doors open are settling into a nervous new reality. Gone is the sound of the loud truck that Frankie Rhoden used to drive up and down Union Hill Road. Sheriff's deputies sit round-the-clock in cruisers on either end of the hilly road, keeping out everyone but residents, approved visitors and investigators.

Roads in the area cut through slowly greening forests sprinkled with the white petals of early-blooming dogwood trees. Trailers surrounded by jumbles of cars, propane tanks and tractors sit side-by-side with neat, well-kept homes. Steer grazing on pastures share the landscape with old family cemeteries.

Guns are a staple in these wooded hills, where neighbors say they wouldn't think twice about opening fire if an unfamiliar figure showed up with a weapon. A $10 fund-raising raffle for a local Masonic lodge offers a Bushmaster XM-15 semi-automatic rifle as first prize.

Some people in the area said they are scared, but most seem to believe the victims were targeted and the killers long gone.

"Somebody that slaughters a whole family wouldn't stay here," said Ray Goldsberry.

Law enforcement authorities have pretty much suggested the same thing, though Sheriff Charles Reader said: "If you are fearful, arm yourself."

Dozens of officers from outside the county have come to town, helping the beleaguered sheriff's office with patrol duties. At calling hours Wednesday at the Kentucky funeral home where Gary Rhoden lay, several state troopers and sheriff's deputies stood guard at the front door.

Family members "really want their privacy. And a lot of them are scared," said Lisa Wallace, Gary Rhoden's former sister-in-law. She said he was a harmless person whose killer or killers were cowards.

"Hurting Gary was like kicking a dog," she said.

Barker, the neighbor who saw the first emergency vehicles scream past, said that if she were in any danger, she probably would have been killed the night of the slayings. But she also said her peaceful surroundings don't feel like home now.

"It just feels kind of strange knowing that they're not there anymore," she said.

___

Associated Press writer Kantele Franko in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this story.

___

Find the reporters on Twitter at https://twitter.com/awhcolumbus and http://www.twitter.com/kantele10 . Their work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/andrew-welsh-huggins and http://bigstory.ap.org/author/kantele-franko .

Pike County Sheriff Charles Reader speaks to the media alongside Ohio State Attorney General Mike DeWine during a news conference, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Waverly, Ohio. A coroner's report released Tuesday showed new details of vicious violence in the shooting deaths of eight members of a rural southern Ohio family, finding most victims were shot three to nine times each and some of them were bruised. Meanwhile, the hunt for whoever is responsible continued to expand, with more than 200 law enforcement officials involved. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Activists seek independent probe of Florida teens' drownings

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP)  A coalition of activist groups is calling for an outside investigation of the drownings of three teenage girls who were fleeing from Florida sheriff's deputies.

The Tampa Bay Times (http://bit.ly/1ND8jhh) reports that activists spoke at a news conference Thursday about the Pinellas County deputies who followed the girls in the stolen car last month.

The groups include Black Lives Matter, Bay Area Dream Defenders, Nation of Islam and the NAACP, among other organizations.

Officials say deputies never pursued the car.
Israel treads carefully with claim to Golan

JERUSALEM (AP)  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sparked a new diplomatic brushfire by declaring that the Golan Heights, seized from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war, is and should remain "under Israel's sovereignty permanently."

But following tough international criticism, Israeli officials said Netanyahu's statements had been misconstrued and that a 1981 decision to apply Israeli law to the strategic plateau fell short of annexation.

The debate offers a window into a more nuanced Israeli perspective that, despite statements from the country's hard-line political leadership, continues to leave the door open, just barely, to a peace deal when Syria's civil war finally winds down.

File - In this Sunday, April 17, 2016 file photo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, poses with ministers prior to the weekly cabinet meeting in the Israeli controlled Golan Heights. Netanyahu has sparked a new diplomatic brushfire by declaring that the Golan Heights, seized from Syria in the 1967 war, is and should remain sovereign Israeli territory. But following some tough international criticism, Israeli officials have begun to backtrack, saying that a 1981 decision to apply Israeli law to the strategic plateau fell short of annexation and implying that Netanyahu misspoke. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)

For now, the debate is largely academic. Syria has been engulfed in civil war for nearly five years, and there is no end in sight. With Syria, and the Syrian side of the Golan, divided between Syrian troops and various rebel forces, there is nobody to talk to, even if Israel decided to open negotiations.

But the Golan remains central to any future peace deal with Syria, and its fate is a key part of a 2002 Saudi initiative that offered Israel peace with the Arab world in exchange for a full withdrawal from all territories captured in the 1967 Mideast war. While that offer is usually connected to areas sought by the Palestinians, the Golan is also considered occupied land by the international community. Past Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu himself, have held talks with Syria about control of the Golan.

So when Netanyahu convened his Cabinet for a first-ever meeting in the Golan on April 17, he triggered an international uproar by calling it "sovereign" Israeli territory.

"The Golan Heights will forever remain in Israel's hands," he declared. "After 50 years, the time has come for the international community to finally recognize that the Golan Heights will remain under Israel's sovereignty permanently."

The U.S., Israel's closest ally, quickly criticized Netanyahu, saying the Golan is "not part of Israel." Germany and the European Union also rejected his statement, as did the Arab League, 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Syrian government. And early this week, the U.N. Security Council took issue with him.

"Council members expressed their deep concern over recent Israeli statements about the Golan and stressed that the status of the Golan remains unchanged," said Council President Liu Jieyi, China's ambassador to the U.N. He noted a previous 1981 resolution that said Israel's decision to impose Israeli law on the Golan is "null and void."

Alan Baker, a former legal adviser to Israel's Foreign Ministry, said the parliamentary decision to impose Israeli law back in 1981 was "merely a means of governing" the territory. He said that previously, Syria had deferred to the local Druse population, whose secretive religion and customs were difficult to apply after Israel took over.

He said Israel was careful not to annex the territory  a decision that would require additional parliamentary action  in order not to "prejudice" future border negotiations with Syria.

"Israel has never claimed the Golan to be part of its sovereign jurisdiction," said Baker. "That's why in my opinion, the statement that was made was somewhat ill-advised."

In reality, Israel has in effect already annexed the territory and any thought of returning it to Syria is deeply unpopular with Israelis. More than 20,000 Israeli settlers now live in settlements on the Golan, according to official Israeli statistics.

The territory, with its rugged terrain, open spaces and sweeping vistas of Syria and northern Israel, is a popular tourism spot that is home to high-end wineries, rustic restaurants and cattle farms. The native Druse population, who also number about 20,000 people, mingle freely with Israeli Jews and are eligible for Israeli citizenship.

The system in the Golan is part of a legal kaleidoscope that Israel has created since the 1967 war. Shortly after the war, it annexed east Jerusalem, home to the city's most important holy sites, in a move that also has not been internationally recognized. Under interim peace accords, military rulings and special stipulations, West Bank settlements are subject to Israeli jurisdiction, while Palestinians are subject to a combination of their own municipal and family laws, as well as Israeli military law for security offenses.

In a statement this week, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon accused the Security Council of "ignoring reality" with its criticism.

"With whom is Israel supposed to negotiate the future of the Golan  Islamic State? Al-Qaida? Hezbollah? The Iranian and Syrian forces that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people?" he said. "The suggestion that Israel will withdraw from the Golan is not reasonable."

Still, he acknowledged that the Golan Heights is not part of "Israel proper," even if Israeli law is enforced there.

Netanyahu's spokesman, David Keyes, said the prime minister's comments "were a description of the reality on the ground," and the Golan's legal status has not changed.

"The territory must remain under Israeli control for a simple reason. When Syria ruled the Golan, it was used as a staging ground for attacking Israeli civilians. It was mined and crisscrossed with barbed wire. It was a place of war. In the nearly five decades since Israel liberated the Golan, it has been used for agriculture, tourism and great wine. It is now a place of peace," Keyes said.

It remains unclear why Netanyahu decided to drag his Cabinet to the Golan, a three-hour trip from Jerusalem. It may have been a message to international negotiators not to forget Israeli interests as they try to end the Syrian war. It also may have been meant as a show of strength to domestic critics.

Moshe Maoz, an expert on Syria at Israel's Hebrew University, said the prime minister's tough stand was "an affront and chutzpa" to the international community.
Clinton backers 'feel the Bern' of angry Sanders supporters

WASHINGTON (AP)  Nancy Schumacher says she just wanted to do her civic duty, and so she heeded the call to become a superdelegate for Hillary Clinton. But in the year of the angry voter, not even an administrative assistant from Elk River, Minnesota, can escape the outrage.

"Some of the (phone and email) messages called me names. Some of them called Hillary names. And others said I was a stupid bitch and something bad will happen to me," said Schumacher, a Democratic committee member. "It's kind of hard to take sometimes."

Bernie Sanders defied expectations to turn his long-shot presidential bid into a real threat for the Democratic nomination. Now, as his path to the White House becomes all-but-impossible, some of his supporters are lashing out at a system they believe was engineered against them from the start.

FILE - In this April 27, 2016 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. speaks in West Lafayette, Ind. Sanders defied expectations to turn his long-shot presidential bid into a real threat for the Democratic nomination. But as his path to the White House becomes all-but-impossible, some of his supporters are lashing out at a system they believe was engineered against them from the start. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

While Sanders decries a "rigged" economy, some of his backers see signs of corruption everywhere  even in the party their candidate hopes to lead. Some have turned their frustration on superdelegates, the party insiders whose ability to back either candidate give them an outsized role in picking the nominee.

The superdelegates include public officials: governors, former presidents and even Sanders himself. But they also include people like Schumacher, volunteers who've generally stayed behind the scenes.

The Sanders campaign assures everyone that it doesn't condone harassment.

Yet Schumacher says she's received vitriolic phone and email messages from self-identified Sanders backers and doesn't quite understand how things got quite so nasty. Eight years ago, she backed Clinton but said she "cheerfully" switched to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. She'd do the same, she said, if Sanders won the popular vote or pledged delegates from state primary elections.

"I got five emails on Easter Sunday. I mean, give me a break," she said.

Barry Goodman, a personal injury lawyer in Detroit, suddenly found his firm's Yelp business review page besieged by bad ratings.

"You deserve this rating. Why does some random lawyer get more sway than the citizens," read one comment.

Gus Bickford, the former executive director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, was taken aback by the threats that flowed into his inbox and onto his Facebook page.

"Someone put up a list of the superdelegates and a person from Rhode Island posted a response that basically said, 'They should all be assassinated' and then said 'I'm only joking,'" recalled Bickford. "With the way people are talking, you never know who's going to take something like that seriously."

Bickford said many of the callers were Sanders supporters who asked him to side with the will of the people, even though Clinton narrowly won Massachusetts in March.

Democrats aren't the only ones facing this kind of barrage: Some Republican delegates say they have also found themselves at the receiving end of death threats and other personal attacks from supporters of GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

But Clinton won the support of many superdelegates even before votes were cast in the primaries, and that has drawn the wrath of many Sanders partisans.

Clinton is 91 percent of the way to capturing the nomination, meaning that she can lose every remaining primary by a wide margin and still become the party's standard-bearer, according to an Associated Press analysis. It also means Sanders would need to flip hundreds of superdelegates to his side to have a shot at the nomination  including many from states that Clinton won.

Though they've been part of Democratic presidential elections since 1984, the superdelegates have never been a determining factor. Even in 2008, when several dozen switched to Barack Obama from Clinton, Obama won enough pledged delegates to make superdelegate support largely irrelevant.

Several liberal organizations have circulated petitions asking superdelegates to align their choice with the vote in their state. Even if that happened, Clinton would still likely be the nominee, given her lead in the popular vote.

That leaves Sanders' most ardent fans  many of whom are relatively new to the political process  looking for someone to blame.

A Sanders backer named Spencer Thayer created the "Superdelegate Hit list," a website to share the contact information of superdelegates so they can be pressed to switch their votes. Thayer later dropped the word "hit" after it attracted criticism.

The name change didn't reassure Clinton-backing superdelegates..

"It's not comforting to be on anything that's called a hit list," said Wendy Davis, a city commissioner from Rome, Georgia.

In 2007, Davis was tasked with wooing superdelegates for the presidential candidate of former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. Now, a superdelegate herself, she was shocked when Sanders supporters accused her of being bribed by Clinton for her support.

"I have been a loyal volunteer for this party. You impugn my integrity and suddenly think there's something you can say that will draw me to you," she said. "It's that a whole bunch of people who haven't been involved in the details of presidential campaigns started paying attention and suddenly don't like the rules."
Abroad, some see Trump as danger, others as mystery

BRUSSELS (AP)  The world is fascinated by Donald Trump, just as blindsided as many Americans are about his rise and nearly at a loss to understand what he would do as president.

Foreign-policy elites around the globe speak of Trump as a loose cannon, a "roller-coaster," ''unpredictable," ''dangerous" and, perhaps above all, a "mystery."

But they can't avert their gaze from a Republican presidential race that turns on the billionaire's every word.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

"Donald Trump makes me laugh a lot," said Felipe Algorta Brit, a member of the lower house of Uruguay's parliament. "If he wins the presidency, everybody will cry."

The handwringing is not universal. Some analysts saw hints in Trump's foreign policy speech this week that he would take a reasoned approach in office, his out-there instincts curbed by the realities of government. Others think that under Trump, relations with China and Arabs might improve.

And Trump is no outlier in contending the United States is too entangled abroad.

If there is a dominant thread in Trump's speeches, said Peter Trubowitz at the London School of Economics and Political Science, it's that "the U.S. needs to scale back in its international commitments, and that those commitments have been too much of a one-way street, favoring America's allies."

SHOOTING FROM THE HIP

"Trump is a mystery," said Yoaz Hendel, a former spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "Trump fires in all directions and makes lots of contradictory statements. This terminological roller coaster does not bode well for Israel."

Russians are similarly wary, despite Trump's conviction that he and President Vladimir Putin could do some "great deals" together.

Trump "is unpredictable and may change his position 180 degrees," cautioned Sergei Rogov, a specialist on the U.S. at the Russian Academy of Science.

"With Trump," said Danish Foreign Minister Kristian Jensen, "it is really like drawing a ticket in the lottery."

___

MIDEAST, PRO AND CON

"I honestly believe he will take the world to a deplorable state of affairs," said Iraqi lawmaker Muwaffak al-Rubaie.

Emad el-Din Hussein, editor in chief of Shrouk, a leading Cairo newspaper, said Trump would be the "best gift" to the Islamic State because his presidency would strengthen violent anti-Western sentiment in the Middle East.

Yet some in the Arab world, noting Trump's suggestion that he would be more neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than his predecessors, said he might be better placed to broker a peace deal.

Mustafa Alani of the Gulf Research Center in Geneva said many politicians and elites in the Middle East are unhappy with President Barack Obama and "are ready to take a risk on Trump."

___

EUROPE: ALREADY 'MISTRUST'

Trump's opposition to sweeping free trade deals could doom a proposed trade agreement between the U.S. and the European Union.

And Trump has said the "obsolete" NATO alliance must pay greater attention to terrorism and questioned whether it makes sense for Washington to keep guaranteeing the security of allies he called "freeloaders."

Bruno Lete of the German Marshall Fund, a Brussels-based think-tank, agrees Europeans should do more to defend themselves. But he said Trump's talk about NATO, backbone of U.S. foreign and defense policy for almost 70 years, is damaging.

"Mr. Trump's rhetoric has already created among the European partners a sense of mistrust and skepticism," Lete said. "I am afraid Mr. Trump's first job would have to be to build trust on this side on the pond, and that's bad news for the trans-Atlantic partnership."

Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said it's unclear how Trump's "make America great again" slogan fits with his wish to pull back on foreign commitments.

Trump's positions "aren't entirely free of contradictions," Steinmeier said diplomatically. His agenda "doesn't seem to be entirely spelled out yet."

Nicolas Bouchet, who researches Europe at the German Marshall Fund, was blunt: "A President Trump would ignite anti-Americanism across Europe."

___

MEXICO AND LATIN AMERICA

Former Mexican leaders have voiced rage at his proposals to build a border wall at Mexico's expense, rectify what he's called a rip off of U.S. jobs and crack down on immigrants he's branded criminals and rapists.

Peter Schechter, who researches Latin America at the Atlantic Council, said a Trump presidency could dampen trade with all of Latin America.

He said Trump's statement that he might tax or restrict remittances Mexican immigrants send home has raised alarm in other countries that rely on payments by U.S.-based workers, such as Honduras and El Salvador.

___

IN THE END, REALPOLITIK?

Trump promises to defend U.S. economic interests much more aggressively  in particular by getting tough on China, which he accuses of unfair competition.

But Chinese leaders expect him to moderate his positions if he assumes office, in part because of pressure from U.S. companies doing business in China, said Zhao Kejin, a specialist in international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Zhao said ties might improve, as they historically have done during Republican administrations back to Richard Nixon.

"Chairman Mao (Zedong) once said he preferred to deal with the Republicans rather than the Democrats," Zhao said.

Josef Braml of the German Council on Foreign Relations said Trump's foreign policy speech suggested he was seeking stability, interested in "making 'deals' with autocrats and engaging in realpolitik."

jNew Zealand Prime Minister John Key said "I take all of the slogans that are made on the campaign trail with a grain of salt."

But Mats Karlsson, director of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, contends harm has already been done.

Trump's vow to walk away from the table if he's not getting his way would make agreements on conflicts, trade or the climate more difficult, he said, and "will make anyone on the other side of the table look for long-term solutions that are less dependent on the U.S."

"Trump is weakening the U.S. position even as he campaigns," he said. "Even as we wait for the outcome of the election, the prospects for a rules-based world order are eroding."

___
The Latest: Dead whale being cut up on California beach

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. (AP)  The Latest on the removal of a gray whale carcass from a California beach (all times local):

12:15 p.m.

Crews using earth-moving equipment have begun removing a massive gray whale carcass from a California beach.

FILE - In this Tuesday, April 26, 2016 file photo, a woman carrying an infant on her back looks at a massive carcass of a whale at a popular California surfing spot in San Clemente, Calif. Authorities say the rotting carcass of a 30-ton gray whale that washed up on a California beach will be cut up and trucked to a landfill. California parks officials made the decision Wednesday, April 27, 2016, after deciding it would be impractical to tow the 40-foot whale out to sea or bury it at San Onofre State Beach in San Diego County. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi, File)

A bulldozer rolled the 30-ton whale away from the water's edge on Thursday and higher up on San Onofre State Beach.

A heavy equipment operator then began using a mechanical claw to chop off pieces, which will be hauled by dump trucks to a landfill.

The whale washed ashore Sunday at a popular surf break called Lower Trestles north of San Diego. The cause of death has not been determined.

Gray whales are currently migrating north toward arctic waters after wintering in Baja California lagoons.

___

8:30 a.m.

Authorities say the rotting carcass of a 30-ton gray whale that washed up on a California beach will be cut up and trucked to a landfill.

California parks officials made the decision Wednesday after determining it would be impractical to tow the 40-foot whale out to sea or bury it at San Onofre State Beach about 55 miles north of downtown San Diego.

Beach Superintendent Rich Haydon says the work by an emergency contractor will begin Thursday morning and take a couple of days at a cost of about $30,000.

Curiosity seekers have been visiting the beach, despite the stench, since the huge animal washed ashore Sunday at Lower Trestles, a popular surfing spot.

The whale likely died of natural causes.

Gray whales are migrating north along the West Coast after wintering in Baja California lagoons.

___

This story has been corrected to show the beach superintendent's last name is Haydon.

Heraclio Belmontes looks down at the mouth of a massive carcass of a whale at a popular California surfing spot Tuesday, April 26, 2016, in San Clemente, Calif. Authorities are trying to decide what to do with the massive, rotting carcass. (AP photos/Lenny Ignelzi)

A woman covers her face while walking past a massive carcass of a whale decomposing at a popular California surfing spot Tuesday, April 26, 2016, in San Clemente, Calif. Authorities are trying to decide what to do with the massive, rotting carcass. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi)

A woman carrying an infant on her back looks at a massive carcass of a whale at a popular California surfing spot Tuesday, April 26, 2016, in San Clemente, Calif. Authorities are trying to decide what to do with the massive, rotting carcass. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi)

A woman and a young boy cover part of their noses as the walk past a massive carcass of a whale at a popular California surfing spot Tuesday, April 26, 2016, in San Clemente, Calif. Authorities are trying to decide what to do with the massive, rotting carcass. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi)
California lawmakers have rejected a resolution to honor the late actor and director John Wayne because of decades-old racist comments that he made.

The state Assembly defeated the official ode to world-renowned movie icon John Wayne after several legislators described statements he made about racial minorities and his support for the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee and John Birch Society.

Known as 'Duke,' a nickname he picked up as a boy in Glendale, California, Wayne grew into the star of movies including The Alamo, The Green Beret, and True Grit, for which he won an Academy Award, while portraying the gruff, rugged cowboys and brave soldiers who were his stock in trade.

Republican State Assemblyman Matthew Harper of Huntington Beach sought to declare May 26, 2016, as John Wayne Day to mark the day the actor was born.

Rejected: California lawmakers have defeated a resolution intended to honor actor John Wayne after opponents challenged what they say are racist statements by the late actor. Above Wayne is pictured in 1978

Republican State Assemblyman Matthew Harper (above), of Huntington Beach, sought to declare May 26, 2016, as John Wayne Day to mark the day the actor was born

'He had disturbing views towards race,' objected Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Watsonville, leading off a 20-minute debate.

Alejo cited a 1971 interview with Playboy in which Wayne talked disparagingly about blacks.

'I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people,' Wayne told the magazine.

Assemblyman Mike Gipson, D-Carson, who is black, said he found Wayne's comments personally offensive.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, cited his comments defending white Europeans' encroachment on American Indians who Wayne once said 'were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.'

In a 1971 interview with Playboy, Wayne made several offensive comments about blacks and Native Americans. Wayne said: 'I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility'

Wayne is the latest deceased white icon to recently come under attack.

Former President Andrew Jackson, a slave owner and Indian fighter, is being removed from the face of the $20 bill.

Princeton University recently announced that former US President Woodrow Wilson's name will remain on its public policy school despite calls to remove it because he was a segregationist.

Harper's resolution fell on a 35-20 vote to what Harper called 'the orthodoxy of political correctness.'

'Opposing the John Wayne Day resolution is like opposing apple pie, fireworks, baseball, the Free Enterprise system and the Fourth of July!' he said later in a written statement.

Harper said he sought the resolution, ACR137, to keep up with a Texas resolution commemorating Wayne's birthday a year ago.

JOHN WAYNE'S CONTROVERSIAL COMMENTS FROM PLAYBOY INTERVIEW In a 1971 interview with Playboy magazine, Wayne made several comments that could be deemed offensive about blacks and Native Americans. Below are a few quotes from the interview: 'We can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.' 'I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that's what you're asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.' 'When you allow unlawful acts to go unpunished, you're moving toward a government of men rather than a government of law; you're moving toward anarchy. And that's exactly what we're doing. We allow dirty loudmouths to publicly call policemen pigs; we let a fella like William Kunstler make a speech to the Black Panthers saying that the ghetto is theirs, and that if police come into it, they have a right to shoot them. Why is that dirty, no-good son of a bitch allowed to practice law?' 'I don't feel guilty about the fact that five or 10 generations ago these people were slaves. Now, I'm not condoning slavery. It's just a fact of life, like the kid who gets infantile paralysis and has to wear braces so he can't play football with the rest of us.' 'The academic community has developed certain tests that determine whether the blacks are sufficiently equipped scholastically. But some blacks have tried to force the issue and enter college when they haven't passed the tests and don't have the requisite background.'

He represents the legislative district that includes John Wayne Airport in Orange County.

The airport, among the largest in California, was renamed after Wayne's death in 1979 and hosts a nine-foot-tall statue of the actor.

'I think the assemblyman would know if there was a cross word about having the airport named after him,' said Harper's spokeswoman, Madeleine Cooper.

Several lawmakers supported the resolution, recalling Wayne as an American hero whose family created a namesake cancer foundation after his death.

'He stood for those big American values that we know and we love,' said Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach.

Lawmakers have honored others despite controversies that eventually clouded their legacies, said Assemblyman Donald Wagner, R-Irvine. Wagner cited President Franklin Roosevelt, who has been honored despite his internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

'Every one of us is imperfect,' Wagner said.
The Latest: Ohio teen pleads guilty in cafeteria shooting

HAMILTON, Ohio (AP)  The Latest on the 15-year-old student charged in Ohio school cafeteria shootings. (all times local):

3:25 p.m.

A 15-year-old boy accused of shooting students in an Ohio cafeteria has pleaded guilty in juvenile court to four attempted murder charges and one charge of inducing panic.

FILE - In this Feb. 29, 2016 file photo, Butler County Sheriff Deputies stand on the scene at Madison Local Schools, in Madison Township in Butler County, Ohio, after a school shooting. A 15-year-old boy charged with shooting students in an Ohio school cafeteria is due back in juvenile court to face charges including attempted murder. Butler County Juvenile Court Judge Ronald Craft scheduled a pretrial hearing for Thursday, April 28, 2016, for James Austin Hancock. Hancock has been held in juvenile detention since his Feb. 29 arrest after the shootings that wounded two students and injured two others at Madison Local Schools near Middletown. (Cara Owsley/The Cincinnati Enquirer via AP, File) MANDATORY CREDIT; NO SALES /The Cincinnati Enquirer via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT; NO SALES

Butler County's prosecutor dropped four felonious assault charges against James Austin Hancock.

Hancock was charged in the Feb. 29 shooting at Madison Local Schools near Middletown, north of Cincinnati. Authorities say Hancock took a relative's loaded gun to school and opened fire in a cafeteria, wounding two students. Two other students were injured either by shrapnel or while running away.

Hancock was 14 at the time.

The teenager replied guilty to each charge Thursday. He is to be sentenced June 6.

The Associated Press generally doesn't identify juveniles charged with crimes, but Hancock's name was widely reported.

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1 a.m.

A 15-year-old boy accused of shooting and wounding two students in an Ohio school cafeteria is scheduled to appear in juvenile court to face charges including attempted murder.

A pretrial hearing will be held Thursday for James Austin Hancock in Butler County Juvenile Court.

Defense attorney Charles Rittgers said after a hearing in early April that he didn't expect the case to go to trial, but Butler County Prosecutor Mike Gmoser said at the time that no plea deal was in place.

Hancock was charged in the Feb. 29 shooting at Madison Local Schools near Middletown, north of Cincinnati. Authorities said Hancock, who was 14 at the time, took a relative's loaded gun to school and opened fire in a cafeteria, wounding two students. Two other students were injured either by shrapnel or while running away.

The Associated Press generally does not identify juveniles charged with crimes, but Hancock's name was widely reported.
Southwest, Delta tangle over whether to cut or raise fares

DALLAS (AP)  No one should blame consumers for being perplexed by airfares  even the airlines themselves can seem confused at times.

Southwest Airlines caught rivals and Wall Street by surprise when it cut many U.S. fares by $5 each way. The reduction this week applied to tickets bought within seven days of departure, which are usually favored more by last-minute business travelers than vacationers.

Meanwhile, Delta Air Lines was busy raising fares on domestic routes by $5 each way. And it did not match Southwest's lower fares where the two carriers compete, a Delta spokesman said Thursday.

FILE - In this June 5, 2014, file photo, travelers check in at a Southwest Airlines ticket counter at Love Field in Dallas. Southwest Airlines caught rivals and Wall Street by surprise when it cut many U.S. fares by $5 each way, applicable to tickets bought within seven days of departure. Meanwhile, Delta Air Lines was busy raising fares on domestic routes by $5 each way. And it did not match Southwest's lower fares where the two carriers compete, a Delta spokesman said Thursday, April 28, 2016. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

Spokesmen for American and United said that their airlines matched the Southwest reduction on routes where they overlap with Southwest but did not match Delta's fare hike.

U.S. airlines often match one another on fare hikes, but increases can be rolled back if a key competitor doesn't go along. Even when they raise base fares, airlines often water down the effect by running frequent sales.

And airlines adjust fares constantly based on demand. That is why consumers often see one price one day and a different price the next day for the same flight.

Southwest's decision to cut base fares was particularly eye-catching. JPMorgan analyst Jamie Baker, who tracks fares, said he could not recall such a "plain vanilla fare decrease by a large airline." Baker said he was "troubled" because the decrease unwound a fare hike from February.

Airline stocks have fallen in recent days over renewed concern that average fares, which began dipping early last year, will continue to drop throughout 2016. Some analysts blame the major airlines for matching prices set by so-called ultra-low-cost carriers or ULCCs such as Spirit and Frontier, which charge more fees on top of their no-frills service.

David Cush, the CEO of Virgin America, said that airlines might eventually stop pricing in lockstep. He said that airlines can charge higher fares if they offer a better flying experience than rivals or operate a nonstop against a competitor's connecting itinerary  but are sometimes afraid to do so.

"The airlines believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have to compete on price even though they tend to have a product advantage to a lot of the ULCCs," Cush said in an interview.

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Follow David Koenig at http://twitter.com/airlinewriter
House GOP seeks to block stricter rule on retirement savings

WASHINGTON (AP)  The GOP-controlled House has voted along party lines to overturn new Obama administration rules requiring stricter standards for brokers regarding retirement investments.

Thursday's 234-183 vote to reject the rules was driven by Republicans who warn they will limit the options available to investors and could cause brokers to abandon retirement savers with smaller accounts.

The new rules require brokers to act as so-called fiduciaries that put their clients' best interests first, rather than steering them toward investments with higher fees for the broker. At stake are about $4.5 trillion in 401(k) accounts and more than $7 trillion in IRAs. Problems often occur when people who are retiring "roll over" their 401(k)s into individual retirement accounts and are sold questionable products.

"Some financial advisers are recommending financial instruments that offer financial rewards to the adviser for steering clients to those instruments, instead of recommending retirement options that are in the best interest of the customer," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.

The White House has promised to defend the rules with a threat to veto Thursday's measure.

Opponents of the rules counter that the new fee structure might not be worth the broker's trouble. Instead, opponents say, retirees may have to seek higher-priced advice.

"The last thing Washington should be doing is making it harder for working families to save and invest, but because they took their 'my-way-or-the-highway' approach, we now have a rule that will do exactly that," said Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn. "This 'fiduciary' rule will make it harder for working families to save for retirement. It will restrict access to some of the most basic financial advice."

Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., said the rule will "make it so costly to use a retirement adviser, most low- and medium-income families will be locked out."

Democrats countered that the previous rules allowed brokers to rip off investors by pushing them toward higher-cost investments like variable annuities or riskier options such as real estate investment trusts.

And they said that Labor Secretary Tom Perez has been accommodating to concerns raised by interest groups and has made numerous modifications in response. As a result, Democrats who opposed prior versions support the final rule, and they said the financial services industry can more easily adapt to it.

"I don't know why you would ever bet against innovation in the United States of America, but that seems to be what our Republican colleagues are doing when they're saying, 'the industry won't respond to this rule,'" said Rep. John Delaney, D-Md.

In a statement, the White House says the new rules "will ensure that American workers and retirees receive retirement advice in their best interest, better enabling them to protect and grow their savings.

"The final rule reflects extensive feedback from industry, advocates, and Members of Congress, and has been streamlined to reduce the compliance burden and ensure continued access to advice," the statement said.

The measure now heads to the Senate under a special procedure that would not allow Democrats to filibuster it. President Barack Obama's veto makes it virtually certain that the rules will go forward.
Texas' fetal tissue research questioned before court hearing

AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  Texas legislators who passed one of the nation's toughest abortion laws turned their attention to fetal tissue research Thursday, ahead of a Houston court appearance by two anti-abortion activists on charges related to their filming of undercover videos at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

The Legislature doesn't return until 2017  meaning that by then the state will lag behind other Republican-controlled statehouses already putting restrictions or outright bans on fetal tissue sales. The measures follow last year's release of edited videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood selling fetal tissue for profit.

During the hearing of the House State Affairs Committee, Texas health officials denied claims that fetal tissue remains were being stored in clinic refrigerators next to Chinese take-out leftovers.

"In some cases the use of fetal tissue is the only viable approach," said Raymond Greenberg, executive vice chancellor for health affairs over the University of Texas System, defending the work of university researchers.

The makers of the videos, two anti-abortion activists from California, were indicted in January on charges that they used fake IDs to gain access to a Planned Parenthood clinic. They are expected in court Friday.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has already said he will support banning the sale or transfer of fetal tissue. Republican state Rep. Byron Cook scheduled Thursday's hearing a week after one of the video makers, David Robert Daleiden, rejected a plea deal from Houston prosecutors in February that would have taken the possibility of prison off the table.

A judge Friday will take up claims by Daleiden's attorney that the Republican district attorney in Houston colluded with Planned Parenthood to obtain an indictment. An attorney for Planned Parenthood has said a Houston prosecutor told him the same grand jury never even voted on possible criminal charges against the nation's largest abortion provider.

Daleiden is charged with second-degree record tampering and misdemeanor attempting to buy human organs.

Texas is waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on tough abortion restrictions passed in 2013 that led to the closure of more than half the state's abortion clinics. State health officials said the remaining facilities have been in compliance while facing questions from lawmakers who raised the possibility of fetal tissue becoming contaminated.

Two opponents of fetal tissue sales were the only other witnesses called to testify. Planned Parenthood was not invited by lawmakers.

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Missing students' parents demand Mexican prosecutor be fired

MEXICO CITY (AP)  Parents of 43 college students who disappeared in 2014 called Thursday for the firing of the head of Mexico's criminal investigation agency, the AIC, for what they called missteps in the investigation.

Human rights groups that represent the parents issued a statement in which the parents asked that Tomas Zeron "be fired from his post at the AIC so that he can be investigated for crimes related to obstruction of justice."

The attorney general's office, which oversees the AIC, said in a statement that it had opened an investigation through its internal affairs unit.

Family members of 43 missing teachers college students carry pictures of the students as they march with supporters to demand the case not be closed and that experts' recommendations about new leads be followed, in Mexico City, Tuesday, April 26, 2016. The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said Tuesday that it is troubled by a group of international experts' complaints of obstacles to their investigation into Sept. 26, 2014 disappearance of the students in southern Guerrero State.(AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Earlier, a group of experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said Zeron did not adequately document the discovery of charred bone fragments in a river where the students' remains were supposedly dumped.

The experts don't agree with that hypothesis. The bone fragments are the only physical evidence tying the students to the garbage dump where they were supposedly burned by members of a drug gang.

Questions about how the bones were found, whether on the 28th or 29th of October 2014, and by whom have thrown the government's case into doubt.

Even Zeron acknowledges some bone fragments were registered as being found a day before they actually were. One of the bone fragments was later matched by DNA tests to one of the students.

The experts on Thursday criticized Zeron's trip to the river on Oct. 28 with a detained suspect who was allegedly tortured.

Zeron has defended his actions and said the suspect was not tortured. He stood by the governments account that the bags of bone fragments were found in the river by divers on Oct. 29

The experts said Zeron's trip to the town of Cocula in Guerrero state should be investigated because it was unclear if he should have had custody of the suspect or if he was the correct person to go there to check out reports of bones being in the river. It was also unclear why outside experts were not immediately advised of the find.
Cuban exiles drop lawsuit over Carnival cruise to island

MIAMI (AP)  Two Cuban exiles have dropped their federal discrimination lawsuit against Carnival Corp. after the cruise line reached an agreement with the communist-run island to permit Cuban-born passengers to make the voyage.

Attorney Tucker Ronzetti said Thursday that the lawsuit's goal was to ensure anyone could make the trip. Before the agreement last week, Carnival would not sell tickets for the cruise to Cuban-born people because Cuba would not allow them to arrive by sea.

Cuba's reversal cleared the way for anyone to book the cruise on Carnival's Fathom brand. The 704-passenger Adonia departs Miami on Sunday for the first such cruise in 50 years to Havana and two other cities. Carnival says the ship will cruise to Cuba every other week.
Arizona Republicans want funding for Koch-backed schools

PHOENIX (AP)  Arizona's Republican leaders have proposed earmarking millions of dollars for programs at the state's public universities that are backed by billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch.

The proposal would funnel $5 million to support programs at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona that have received millions in funding from the Charles Koch Foundation  a nonprofit backed by the petrochemicals CEO known for supporting limited government and lower taxes.

That money makes up a significant chunk of the $13 million set aside for new ongoing spending at Arizona's three state universities, as part of the $9.58 billion budget plan negotiated between the Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Doug Ducey.

People stand on the campus overpass, Thursday, April 28, 2016, at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz. Arizona's republican leaders have earmarked millions of dollars in next year's proposed budget for schools at the state's public universities that are backed by billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch. (AP Photo/Matt York)

It is not unusual for billionaires  including those on the other end of the political spectrum  to donate large sums to schools, which can raise unease among students and faculty about maintaining academic independence.

Democratic Rep. Ken Clark of Phoenix called the use of the funds "indoctrination through state government dollars."

Clark said that although universities are often seen as bastions of liberalism, it doesn't mean the state should fund programs that could be seen as supporting conservative causes.

"So what we are just going to do, favor one over the other? That's absurd," he said.

The governor's office dismissed the concerns, saying the proposal would simply increase students' exposure to a variety of opinions.

"It's our position that students in our university system should be exposed to a broad range on all issues including economics," said spokesman Daniel Scarpinato.

The centers, which offer classes at the universities, maintain their curriculums are unbiased.

University of Arizona would receive between $2 million and $2.5 million for the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, which says its mission is to promote the ideals of freedom and responsibility.

Arizona State University would receive $3 million to establish a new school comprised of the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty and the Center for Political Thought and Leadership, to study ideas surrounding free markets, private property rights and entrepreneurship.

Senate President Andy Biggs, R-Gilbert, said the earmarked funds are an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars.

"The argument that there's some kind of inconsistency with wanting to teach our young people about the virtues of free enterprise and our American political traditions is just nonsensical to me," he said.

The Charles Koch Foundation offers grants for 300 colleges and universities around the country, said John Hardin, director of university relations for the foundation  including $48 million to George Mason University, in one form or another, from 2011 to 2014, tax records show.

Hardin said the generosity comes without conditions as long as they are pursuing questions about freedom and prosperity.

"Our role is to provide the funding. They do the research," he said.

The foundation has given at least $4.5 million to the two centers at ASU and at least $1.3 million to the U of A philosophy program.

David N. Gibbs, a professor of history at U of A, said the Charles Koch Foundation is using academia to influence public opinion to win support for policies that will benefit Koch and his business interests.

"The question would be, 'Why would they be funding it unless they want some sort of ideological payoff?'" Gibbs said.
House committee votes to require women to register for draft

WASHINGTON (AP)  Women would be required to register for the military draft under a House committee's bill that comes just months after the Defense Department lifted all gender-based restrictions on front-line combat units.

A divided Armed Services Committee backed the provision in a sweeping defense policy bill that the full House will consider next month, touching off a provocative debate about the role of women in the military. The panel also turned aside a measure backed by Democrats to punish the Citadel military college in South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag.

The United States has not had a military draft since 1973 in the Vietnam War era, but all men must register with the Selective Service Systems within 30 days of turning 18. Military leaders maintain that the all-volunteer force is working and the nation is not returning to the draft.

FILE - In this Aug. 30, 2011 file photo, Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., talks to reporters in Washington. A divided Armed Services Committee, in which Speier is a member, backed the provision in a sweeping defense policy bill that the full House will consider next month, touching off a provocative debate about the role of women in the military.(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

The 32-30 vote Wednesday night came with a twist: The proposal's author didn't back it.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, a former Marine who served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, does not support drafting women into combat and opposes opening infantry and special operations positions to women. Hunter, R-Calif., said he offered the measure during the committee's consideration of the policy bill to prompt a discussion about how the Pentagon's decision in December to rescind gender restrictions on military service failed to consider whether the exclusion on drafting women also should be lifted.

That's a call for Congress, not the executive branch, Hunter said. "I think we should make this decision," he said. "It's the families that we represent who are affected by this."

At times, Hunter evoked graphic images of combat in an apparent attempt to convince colleagues that drafting women would lead to them being sent directly into harm's way.

"A draft is there to put bodies on the front lines to take the hill," Hunter said. "The draft is there to get more people to rip the enemies' throats out and kill them."

But if Hunter was trying to sway people against his amendment, his plan did not work.

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., said she supported Hunter's measure. "I actually think if we want equality in this country, if we want women to be treated precisely like men are treated and that they should not be discriminated against, we should be willing to support a universal conscription," she said.

Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz. and a retired Air Force fighter pilot, said draftees aren't exclusively sent to the front lines. There are plenty of other useful, noncombat positions for them to fill, she said.

Reporters pressed White House spokesman Josh Earnest on whether President Barack Obama would hesitate to sign legislation expanding the draft because it would mean his daughters would be required to register. Earnest declined to comment, citing lawsuits that have been filed against the Selective Service System over the exclusion.

If an 18-year-old man does not register with the Selective Service he could lose his eligibility for student financial aid, job training and government jobs. Immigrant men could lose their eligibility for U.S. citizenship. According to the latest annual report, 73 percent of 18-year-olds registered on time during the 2015 fiscal year ending last Sept. 30. And the registration rate for all men aged 20-25 was 94 percent.

Hunter's amendment was part of a defense policy bill that authorizes defense spending for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. The committee passed the legislation by a 60-2 vote early Thursday.

The overall bill cuts $18 billion from the wartime operations account to pay for weapons and troops the Pentagon didn't request, a money-shifting strategy Defense Secretary Ash Carter condemned on Wednesday as a "road to nowhere" that undermines U.S. troops and emboldens America's enemies.

Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, the committee's chairman, defended the plan and said the billions of dollars shifted out of the wartime fund would be restored in a supplemental budget submitted to Congress early next year by Obama's successor. He's argued the committee's approach is essential to halting an erosion of combat readiness that has grown worse on Obama's watch.

On another thorny policy issue, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the committee's senior Democrat, offered an amendment that would have barred the Defense Department from financially supporting the ROTC program at any institution that flies the Confederate battle flag.

The Citadel is the only school that fits the profile. The college is in South Carolina Rep. John Clyburn's district. He's not on the committee, but he backed Smith's measure in a statement, calling the Confederate flag a symbol of hate, racial oppression, and resistance to the rule of law.

Republicans said the college's Board of Visitors has voted to remove the flag, but South Carolina state law prohibits the Citadel from doing so.

"This failure to take down the Confederate battle flag is an extremely disappointing statement of principles," Smith said. "They should have voted to take it down instead of dodging the issue."

The overall bill authorizes $602 billion in defense spending for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

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Associated Press writer Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

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Follow Richard Lardner on Twitter at http://twitter.com/rplardner .
The Latest: Judge: Bulger's girlfriend had 'twisted' loyalty

BOSTON (AP)  The Latest on the sentence of the Catherine Greig, the longtime girlfriend of gangster James "Whitey" Bulger (all times local):

5:20 p.m.

The judge who sentenced the girlfriend of James "Whitey" Bulger (BUHL'-jur) to another 21 months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury says Catherine Greig (grehg) had a "twisted" kind of loyalty to the Boston gangster.

FILE - This undated file photo provided by the U.S. Marshals Service shows Catherine Greig, the longtime girlfriend of Whitey Bulger, who was captured with Bulger, June 22, 2011, in Santa Monica, Calif. Prosecutors will ask a federal judge to sentence the longtime girlfriend of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger to three more years in prison for refusing to testify about whether anyone else helped Bulger after he fled the city. Greig is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday, April 28, 2016, after pleading guilty to a criminal contempt charge for refusing to testify before a grand jury. (AP Photo/U.S. Marshals Service, File)

Judge Dennis Saylor IV called Greig "defiant" and "unapologetic." He rejected her lawyer's argument that her only crime was falling in love with Bulger.

The judge called Bulger a "serial murderer" and said it's "hard to imagine a less worthy object of affection than Bulger."

Bulger is serving two life sentences on racketeering charges, including his role in 11 murders. He has denied the crimes.

Greig's lawyer says Greig does not believe Bulger committed all the crimes he was convicted of in 2013.

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4:10 p.m.

The longtime girlfriend of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger (BUHL'-jur) has been sentenced to an additional 21 months in prison for refusing to testify whether other people helped him while he was a fugitive.

Catherine Greig (grehg) already is serving an eight-year prison term for helping Bulger evade capture during the couple's 16 years on the run. They were captured in Santa Monica, California, in 2011.

Federal prosecutors had asked the judge to add just over three years to Greig's prison time for her conviction on a criminal contempt charge. Her lawyer asked for leniency, saying she shouldn't get any more than six months.

The 86-year-old Bulger is serving a life sentence after being convicted in 2013 for his role in 11 murders. He has denied involvement in the crimes.

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12:30 a.m.

Prosecutors will ask a federal judge to sentence the longtime girlfriend of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger (BUHL'-jur) to three more years in prison for refusing to testify about whether anyone else helped Bulger after he fled the city.

Catherine Greig (grehg) already is serving an eight-year sentence for helping Bulger during his 16 years on the run. They were captured in Santa Monica, California, in 2011.

Greig is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday after pleading guilty to a criminal contempt charge for refusing to testify before a grand jury.

Her lawyer argues that no more than six months should be added to her sentence.

The 86-year-old Bulger was convicted in 2013 for playing a role in 11 murders. He's serving a life sentence.
Feds, NYC-area Port Authority talking potential resolution

NEW YORK (AP)  The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are discussing a "potential resolution" of the regulator's investigation into the agency, bond documents published Thursday show.

The disclosure did not elaborate on the how the probe might possibly be resolved and spokesmen for both sides declined to comment further on the talks. SEC investigations can result in a range of outcomes, including the payment of fines or the issuing of statements about past or future actions.

Central to the probe into the Port Authority  which controls the New York City area's airports, seaports and bridge and tunnel crossings  is a 2011 expenditure of $1.8 billion in agency funds to repair New Jersey state roads such as the Pulaski Skyway, an elevated road that connects Newark and Jersey City.

FILE- In this Feb. 11, 2014, file photo. the Pulaski Skyway, which connects Newark and Jersey City, N.J. is shown. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are discussing a "potential resolution" of the regulator's investigation into the agency, bond documents published Thursday, April 28, 2016, show. (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)

That was an issue because by law the Port Authority is supposed to spend its funds on projects it controls. To justify spending its money to repair the Skyway, port attorneys dubbed it an access road to the authority-owned Lincoln Tunnel, some eight miles away.

That decision was outlined by an authority lawyer in a 2011 memo, after Republican Gov. Chris Christie's appointees at the Port Authority pushed for repairing the Skyway and other state-owned roads.

Since then, the expenditure has been challenged by United Airlines and the motorist group AAA and has resulted in probes by the Federal Aviation Administration, the Manhattan district attorney and the SEC, which wants to know whether bondholders were deceived when the funds went to state-owned repairs.

At a January court hearing over AAA's challenge to the Skyway funding, a Port Authority lawyer argued the authority has broad discretion on how it spends money on various projects and that the Skyway had a "functional relationship" to the Lincoln Tunnel.

The Port Authority faces other investigations, the bond filing shows.

Among them is an ongoing inquiry by the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, who has charged Christie's former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Kelly, and a former Port Authority executive, Bill Baroni, with creating traffic jams for political retribution near the George Washington Bridge in 2013.

They've both pleaded not guilty and their attorneys were in federal court in Newark Thursday arguing to have the charges thrown out. Baroni's attorney, Michael Baldassare, said new evidence he has received and additional evidence he is seeking will show that the pair shouldn't have been charged in the case. He told reporters that he will pursue emails, documents and even Christie's cellphone.

Christie said Thursday that he has fully cooperated with the government and the judge will resolve it "as she sees fit."

U.S. District Judge Susan Wigenton gave attorneys time to submit additional filings before deciding whether to let the trial scheduled to begin in September proceed.

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Fans' Holy Grail: unreleased songs in Prince's vault

LOS ANGELES (AP)  Before his death, fans searching online for Prince were likely to find just a handful of his performance videos and almost none of his recorded music. In the days since he died, YouTube and other uploading sites have been flooded with hundreds of hours of the superstar musician's songs, concert footage, TV appearances and music videos.

It's a boon for Prince lovers, and a sign that the notoriously tight copyright controls the artist maintained over his material are rapidly loosening. It's also building hope for hardcore fans that they might someday hear the Holy Grail of Prince's music: unreleased recordings from the vault at Paisley Park, his famous recording studio complex in suburban Minneapolis.

"There could be hundreds of songs we haven't heard, and I'm told they're from all sorts of eras," said author and journalist Toure', who cited estimates from bandmates that Prince recorded a song a day on average during an "extraordinarily prolific" stretch in the 1980s. The finished "Purple Rain" had nine tracks, but there were reports that Prince and the Revolution recorded as many as 200 songs during that album's sessions, he said.

FILE - In this April 21, 2016 file photo, people stand outside entertainer Prince's Paisley Park compound in Chanhassen, Minn. Since Prince died, YouTube and other uploading sites have been flooded with hundreds of hours of the superstar musician's songs, concert footage, TV appearances and music videos. It's a sign that the notoriously tight copyright controls the artist maintained over his material is rapidly loosening, and raising hope that hardcore fans might someday hear the Holy Grail of Prince's music: unreleased recordings from the vault at Paisley Park. (Jim Gehrz/Star Tribune via AP, File) MANDATORY CREDIT

Devoted fans will be eager for the emergence of unreleased album sessions like "Camille," ''Dream Factory" and "Roadhouse Garden"  fabled projects that saw some tracks reworked for release and others locked away. Those who were awed by Prince's fierce live shows  and legendary after-show shows  will want concert recordings. Then there are the collaborative sessions he did with artists like Miles Davis, not to mention the songs he channeled to other musicians like the Bangles, The Time and Mavis Staples.

"If anyone could have a great album in the vault, or several great songs, it could be him," said Toure', who interviewed Prince and wrote the 2013 book "I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon." But he added the cautious reminder that even music icons like John Lennon, Michael Jackson, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain produced few posthumous gems even though all died while still actively recording.

Music writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine suggested Prince's after-death output may be comparable to the surge of material Bob Dylan has been releasing regularly since 1991 on his "Bootleg Series"  12 volumes (so far) of demos, rare tracks, alternate takes and concerts.

"I think there will be re-workings of familiar songs that will put Prince's released albums in context, and there will be songs that will be a complete surprise," said the senior pop editor at Rovi, who said he's hoping for a live album. "We really don't have any live recordings of Prince at his peak."

On the forums at the fan website prince.org , devotees mourned Prince and debated which recordings they were eager to someday hear.

"They need to take their time with this," wrote a member with the nickname PURPLEIZED3121, who hoped that former members of the Revolution and Prince's other bands would be involved. "It could actually be a very joyful and healing experience."

Someone posting as TheEnglishGent had an idea: an online streaming service like Spotify or Pandora. "Digitise everything and let us at it for $10 a month," he wrote.

The Prince vault may have taken on a mythical status but it's an actual secured location on the grounds of Paisley Park. The compound's lead architect, Bret Thoeny of California's BOTO Design, said the musician asked for a walk-in repository similar to a bank vault.

"He wanted a place to keep his master recordings, but at the time it was very important to keep this a secret," Thoeny told CNN.

The vault is likely to remain locked for months while Prince's estate is hashed out in probate court. A Minnesota judge granted an emergency temporary appointment Wednesday to a corporate trust company on a request from Prince's sister, Tyka Nelson, who said her brother did not leave a will. Bremer Trust will tackle immediate business concerns and identify Prince's heirs, who will presumably decide what happens with the unreleased trove of music.

"Who knows what will happen when people who haven't historically been in the business of Prince are suddenly put in charge?" Toure' asked.

Prince, 57, died April 21 at Paisley Park. His cause of death hasn't been released. An autopsy was conducted April 22, but results aren't expected to be released for weeks.
Slain teen's dad, stepmom arrested on domestic abuse charges

WYTHEVILLE, Va. (AP)  Authorities say the father and stepmother of a slain Virginia teenager have been arrested after a domestic violence incident.

Wytheville Police Chief Ricky Arnold said Thursday that David Madison Lovell and Terri Surratt Lovell have been arrested and charged with unlawful wounding against each other.

Arnold declined to provide further details about the incident.

David Lovell's daughter, Nicole Lovell, was found dead in January. Two former Virginia Tech students have been charged in connection with the girl's slaying.

Karen Akers, clerk of the Wythe Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court, said they're being held at the New River Valley Regional Jail. Akers said a $10,000 bond has been set for David Lovell. A bond hearing hasn't yet been held for Terri Lovell.
Wife admits killing New York farmer who was buried in manure

WARSAW, N.Y. (AP)  The wife of a New York farmer who was hit with a pitchfork, shot in the head and then buried in manure has pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

Charlene Mess of Attica faces up to 25 years in prison in the April 2015 death of Douglas Mess, her husband of 30 years. She entered the plea Thursday in Wyoming County Court.

District Attorney Donald O'Geen says the Mess family supports the lengthy prison sentence.

Authorities say Charlene Mess hit her 52-year-old husband with a pitchfork and shot him in the head with a .22-caliber rifle before burying his body in a manure pile on the family dairy farm.

One of his sons reported him missing, setting off a seven-hour search.
Panama: 2 Colombian drug suspects killed in border firefight

PANAMA CITY (AP)  Panamanian authorities say two suspected Colombian drug traffickers were killed and two more wounded in a shootout with border agents.

The National Frontier Service says the gunfight took place Wednesday in the eastern province of Darien, which borders Colombia.

It says a group ignored a police order to stop and shooting broke out.

Agents seized sacks containing an unspecified amount of cocaine and marijuana.

The service said Thursday in a statement that a fifth suspect was detained nearby carrying $15,000 in cash.
Mexican general gets 52 years for torturing, killing man

MEXICO CITY (AP)  A judge has sentenced a general in the Mexican army to 52 years in prison for ordering the torture of a suspect, then having his body burned, Mexico's federal judiciary council said Thursday.

The sentence was among the longest ever against a senior army officer.

The council said the conviction came in a 2008 case in the northern state of Chihuahua. The judge also ordered the army to publicly apologize, clear the victim's name and pay his family damages.

The judge in the case did not release the general's name in the public case record. But the case number on the docket was the same as one linked in local media reports to Gen. Manuel Moreno Avina, who formerly commanded an army unit in the town of Ojinaga, across the border from Presidio, Texas.

Troops under the general's command detained a suspect in a soldier's death and tortured him for hours with electric shocks until he died. They then took the man's body to a ranch and burned it.

The man was detained by soldiers just after midnight July 25, 2008. According to the council, the court found that soldiers "tied him up and watered him down in order to apply electric shocks on his body, in order to obtain information about the death of a soldier."

"They prolonged the torture until 9 a.m. that day, which caused the man to die despite attempts to revive him, quite possibly as a result of ventricular fibrillation and a heart attack brought on as an effect of the electric shocks," the council said.

"Under direct orders from the guilty party, the victim's body was loaded aboard a vehicle and taken to a ranch where it was secretly burned," it added.

Moreno Avina and more than 20 soldiers who were under his command had been charged with torture, homicide, drug trafficking and other crimes. It is unclear how many have been sentenced.

Mexican army officers have been sentenced before for corruption or aiding drug traffickers, but seldom for torture and seldom for such long sentences.

In 1997, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo was arrested after being appointed the country's top anti-drug official. He was later convicted of drug trafficking, racketeering and corruption and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

The army has been stung in recent years by allegations of torture, abuse and executions.

This week, judges ordered two soldiers and three federal police officers to stand trial in connection with the torture of a young woman that was caught on video. The video circulated on social and traditional media in recent days shows a female soldier interrogating the woman, pulling her hair and putting the muzzle of a rifle against her head. Later, a female police officer suffocates the woman by putting a plastic bag over her head until she nearly passes out.

In Mexico's highest profile criminal investigation  the disappearance of 43 college students in 2014  some of the suspects claim that marines tortured them into confessing to killing the students.
The Latest: Businessman withdraws reward in Ohio shootings

PIKETON, Ohio (AP)  The Latest on the developments in the killings of eight family members in southern Ohio (all times local):

5:25 p.m.

A Cincinnati-area businessman says he is withdrawing a $25,000 reward that he had offered in the slayings of eight family members in rural southern Ohio.

Leonard Manley, left, father and grandfather of several murder victims, drives up Union Hill Road away from a roadblock at the outer perimeter of a crime scene, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, near Piketon, Ohio. Several people were found dead Friday at multiple properties near Piketon. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Restaurateur Jeff Ruby said on his Twitter page Thursday that he is withdrawing the reward because of "recent complex criminal developments" in the case of the Rhoden family. Seven adults and a teenage boy were found fatally shot last Friday at four homes near Piketon, roughly 80 miles east of Cincinnati.

A message left with Ruby's spokeswoman on Thursday wasn't immediately returned. Ruby told The Cincinnati Enquirer his advisers have asked him not to talk publicly about his decision.

No arrests have been made, and officials have not said if they have any suspects in mind.

Marijuana growing operations were found at three of the homes, but authorities haven't released any details about a motive.

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2 p.m.

Nearly a week after eight family members were found shot to death at four homes in rural Ohio, investigators have announced no arrests, no motive and few details beyond saying it was a meticulously planned "execution."

But the discovery of marijuana-growing operations at some of the crime scenes has given the case a new, more sinister cast.

Relatives of the victims say they were surprised by the marijuana. Some neighbors say they had heard rumors. And some say the pot-growing was a case of courting trouble.

Large marijuana operations are common in Ohio's Pike County, the scene of the killings, and there have been some big seizures of pot plants there.

About one-fifth of Pike County's 28,000 people live in poverty, and the area has some of Ohio's high rates of unemployment and drug-overdose deaths.

Pike County Sheriff Charles Reader speaks to the media alongside Ohio State Attorney General Mike DeWine during a news conference, Wednesday, April 27, 2016, in Waverly, Ohio. A coroner's report released Tuesday showed new details of vicious violence in the shooting deaths of eight members of a rural southern Ohio family, finding most victims were shot three to nine times each and some of them were bruised. Meanwhile, the hunt for whoever is responsible continued to expand, with more than 200 law enforcement officials involved. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Massachusetts Senate approves under-21 ban on tobacco sales

BOSTON (AP)  The Massachusetts Senate voted overwhelmingly Thursday to raise the minimum age for purchasing cigarettes and other tobacco products across the state, which could make it the second to raise its threshold to 21 years old.

The higher age is already in effect in Boston and more than 100 other cities and towns, covering about half the state's population.

The bill, which moves to the House after being approved on a 32-2 vote, also sets new regulations for electronic cigarettes including a ban on vaping in places where smoking is otherwise prohibited. It would also ban the sale of tobacco in pharmacies and other health care facilities.

Stores caught selling tobacco to people under 21 would face fines ranging from $100 to $300.

An amendment added by senators without debate would also make it illegal for anyone under age 18 to smoke or possess tobacco products, and require police to notify the parents of children caught with tobacco. But there would be no other penalties and the infraction would not appear on any criminal record.

Hawaii became the first U.S. state last year to raise the tobacco purchase age to 21, and other states are considering the change.

"Young people whose brains are still developing and haven't reached full maturity are particularly vulnerable to nicotine addiction," said Sen. Jason Lewis, a Winchester Democrat and principal author of the Massachusetts bill.

Supporters faulted tobacco companies for marketing strategies aimed at youth and pointed to studies that show most smokers tried their first cigarettes as teens. Raising the minimum purchase age from the current 18 to 21 would help to remove tobacco from high school and middle social networks, Lewis contended, because teens are less likely to socialize with people over 21.

Anyone who has reached age 18 by Jan. 1, the effective date of the proposed law, could continue to buy tobacco.

Sen. Donald Humason, a Westfield Republican and one of two senators who voted against the bill, said he has never smoked or even tried a cigarette.

"I hope that no one will take up the habit, but as a senator or an individual I will not try to tell a law-abiding adult what to do," said Humason. "Tobacco is still legal in this state as disgusting as some of us think it is."

Jon Hurst, president of The Retailers Association of Massachusetts, said the bill would hurt many retailers, especially smaller stores near borders with neighboring states where the purchase age remains 18.

"We're not Hawaii, we're not an island," said Hurst. "We have members on the border who clearly are going to be hurt," he said.

Hurst suggested his organization might accept the age 21 requirement if lawmakers included assurances that cities and towns could not take further steps on their own in regulating tobacco.

The bill also appears to have support in the House. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has said he'll review the language if it reaches his desk but supports the concept of raising the tobacco age.

In California, Gov. Jerry Brown is weighing a bill passed by the Legislature in March that lifts the age for purchasing tobacco from 18 to 21. Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont are among other states where bills have been filed. New Jersey lawmakers approved a tobacco-21 bill in January, but Gov. Chris Christie declined to sign it.

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This story has been corrected to fix spelling of California governor's first name to Jerry, not Gerry, and the name of its legislative body.

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How Amazon convinced you to pay up for shopping

NEW YORK (AP)  Amazon is clearly entering its Prime. Meaning, of course, its $100 annual membership program, now a decade old, which has accomplished the remarkable feat of convincing millions of people to pay an annual fee for the privilege of, well, shopping.

Prime is now central to Amazon's strategy of dominating the world of commerce. What started as a yearly fee for free two-day shipping now offers a sometimes bewildering array of perks, including household product subscriptions, one and two hour Prime Now delivery, streaming music and video, e-books, groceries (for an additional $200 a year), photo storage and more.

"Prime has become an all-you-can-eat, physical-digital hybrid," Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in his annual shareholder letter in April. He wants the service to be such a good deal that you'd be "irresponsible" not to sign up, he wrote.

FILE - This June 4, 2014, file photo, shows Amazon boxes in Phoenix. Amazon reports financial results Thursday, April 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

Why the emphasis on Prime? Simply put, members of the loyalty program shop more frequently and spend more money, analysts say.

Prime shoppers helped drive Amazon's surprise profit surge in the first quarter. Shares of the e-commerce giant jumped in after-hours trading Thursday after it reported a 28 percent jump in revenue, to $29.13 billion. Net income was $513 million, compared to a loss in the year-earlier quarter.

Amazon doesn't release detailed numbers on Prime, although Bezos wrote that Prime has "tens of millions" of subscribers. Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter estimates there are about 50 million Prime members.

Even a 25 percent price increase in 2014, the only one for Prime in 10 years, hasn't appreciably dampened enthusiasm for the program. Membership grew 51 percent last year, including 47 percent growth in the U.S., according to Bezos.

Pachter estimates that Prime members spend about four times what others do, and account for about a third of all Amazon purchases. "That's why Prime matters," he said.

Tawnie Knight in Tuscon, Arizona joined Prime about two years ago for the convenience of free shipping. Since then Amazon has become her default shopping site.

"I call it the $100 cart, because every time I go on there I spend about $100," she said. "Before Prime I probably spend around the same amount, just with other retailers like Walmart."

Brandon Kraft joined Prime when it began 10 years ago to get cheap textbooks while in school. Now he finds it essential  with five kids ranging in age 17 months to 6 years at home  for ordering diapers and wipes and other household goods.

"I think it's fair to say we spend $125 or $150 a month at Amazon that we wouldn't have been spending if we didn't have Prime," Kraft said. "We go to the Amazon site first when we need something, and if they don't carry it we start the actual shopping process of looking elsewhere."

Of course, Amazon Prime isn't for everyone. Those that shop infrequently online won't find the $100-a-year fee worth it. With an estimated 244 million registered Amazon accounts, a large majority of Amazon shoppers  roughly 80 percent, in fact  haven't signed up yet.

Amazon continues to add Prime offerings to entice more users. Last week Amazon started offering a monthly Prime subscription for $11 a month, aimed at hooking shoppers during the holidays when the majority of Prime members sign up. In 2015, 3 million shoppers joined Prime in the third week of December alone.

Amazon also introduced a standalone video service for $9 a month, setting itself up to directly compete with other streaming services like Netflix.

Investors have long griped about Amazon's strategy of investing the revenue it makes into new offerings, leading to little or no earnings growth. But the first quarter results were the fourth in a row in which Amazon reported a profit, which some analysts interpret as a willingness to rein in costs when needed.
Whitey Bulger's girlfriend gets 21 more months in prison

BOSTON (AP)  The longtime girlfriend of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger was sentenced Thursday to an additional 21 months in prison by a judge who said she had shown a "twisted" sense of loyalty to Bulger by refusing to testify about whether other people helped him while he was a fugitive.

Catherine Greig, 65, already is serving an eight-year sentence for helping Bulger while he was a fugitive. She spent 16 years on the run with him before they were captured in Santa Monica, California, in 2011.

Bulger, now 86, was convicted of a litany of crimes in 2013  including participating in 11 murders  and is serving life in prison.

FILE - This undated file photo provided by the U.S. Marshals Service shows Catherine Greig, the longtime girlfriend of Whitey Bulger, who was captured with Bulger, June 22, 2011, in Santa Monica, Calif. Prosecutors will ask a federal judge to sentence the longtime girlfriend of Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger to three more years in prison for refusing to testify about whether anyone else helped Bulger after he fled the city. Greig is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday, April 28, 2016, after pleading guilty to a criminal contempt charge for refusing to testify before a grand jury. (AP Photo/U.S. Marshals Service, File)

Federal prosecutors had asked the judge to add a little more than three years to Greig's prison time for her conviction on a criminal contempt charge for disobeying a judge's order to testify before a grand jury investigating whether other people helped Bulger while he was on the run.

Greig's lawyer had asked for leniency and said she should not get any more than six months.

U.S. District Judge Dennis Saylor IV imposed a sentence in the middle of the two recommendations, but not before rejecting an argument from Greig's lawyer that her only crime was loving Bulger and remaining loyal to him. Saylor called Bulger a lifelong criminal and "serial murderer."

"It is hard to imagine a less worthy object of affection than Bulger," Saylor said.

"History, I think, will remember Bulger as a monster," he added.

Greig's lawyer, Kevin Reddington, called the sentence "very severe" and said Greig does not believe that Bulger committed all the crimes he was convicted of in 2013.

"She still thinks he's the guy she fell in love with," Reddington said.

Patricia Donahue, whose husband, Michael, was fatally shot by Bulger and another man in 1982, said 21 months is not enough time for Greig's refusal to testify.

"How do you go before the grand jury and refuse to testify? ... That's OK to do that? That's what they're saying by giving her less than two years," she said.

Greig already had nine months added to her prison time after she was found in civil contempt for refusing to testify.

During his trial, prosecutors said Bulger worked for the FBI as a criminal informant on the New England Mob, a rival criminal group to his gang. Bulger denied being an informant.

Bulger also called his trial a "sham" because the judge denied his request to present a defense based on his claim that he received immunity for his crimes from a now-deceased federal prosecutor. The judge found that Bulger had offered no hard evidence to support his claim and that a prosecutor would not have had the authority to grant immunity for crimes that included murder.
Venezuela congress votes to censure food czar amid shortages

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP)  Venezuela's opposition-controlled congress voted Thursday to censure the country's food minister amid widespread shortages.

Lawmakers held the vote against Food Minister Rodolfo Marco Torres after he failed to show up for a congressional hearing.

Critics of President Nicolas Maduro's socialist administration said they took the vote for the good of the Venezuelan people in light of what has become a nutritional emergency. They said the censure should be enough to remove the minister from his post, but the ruling socialist party called it a purely symbolic gesture.

The opposition took control of congress in January, but has been almost entirely sidelined by Supreme Court decisions rendering legislative actions null. The administration said the no-confidence vote against Torres is also invalid because of a recent court ruling on parliamentary procedures.

Also on Thursday, the opposition said it had gathered the signatures needed to begin the process of recalling President Nicolas Maduro.
Trump, Cruz face early test at California GOP conclave

LOS ANGELES (AP)  California's Republican Party convention will be an early test for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich in a state whose June election could hold the decisive delegates in the fight for the party's presidential nomination.

Trump, who has seized front-runner status as a political outsider, will be speaking Friday outside San Francisco to hundreds of longtime GOP insiders  the activists, grassroots organizers and elected officials who make up the core of the state party. Kasich also speaks Friday, while Cruz and his choice for running mate, Carly Fiorina, speak Saturday.

The reception Trump in particular receives will be noteworthy: The billionaire businessman known for his boisterous public rallies rarely speaks to Republican establishment groups, and has railed against what he calls a rigged party system that governs the nomination.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally, Thursday, April 28, 2016 in Costa Mesa, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

He began his trip to California Thursday with a rally at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa, where he filled the Pacific Amphitheatre to its capacity of about 18,000. Many hundreds more were turned away.

Still, he has faced questions about his electability in November and his conservative bona fides.

The behind-the-scenes cajoling could be as important as the speeches. The candidates and their allies are seeking to galvanize supporters, sway undecided party members or poach from rival campaigns.

"It's going to be a free-for-all," predicted state party vice chairman Harmeet Dhillon.

The tableau will be remarkable for a state whose end-of-the-line primary on June 7 has often been ignored, coming far after the nominations were locked up.

But this year it's possible that California, home to the largest trove of delegates, could provide the margin to anoint nominees in both major parties.

The convention crowd defies expectation in a state known as a Democratic fortress. There have been pushes toward moderation, but the group tends toward conservative leanings and favors calls for a strong national defense, free markets, tax cuts and shrinking the size of government. It's also socially conservative: the state party's platform defines marriage as between one man and one woman, and wants Roe v. Wade reversed.

Trump opposes abortion but has spoken favorably about Planned Parenthood. He has warned against cutting into Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, often targets for conservatives who want to slow government spending. When Trump earlier this month said transgender people should be able to use whichever bathroom they choose, Cruz's campaign released a statement saying Trump was "no different from politically correct leftist elites." The California platform endorses free markets; Trump has long criticized U.S. trade policy and advocated steep tariffs on Chinese goods.

How Trump fares this weekend could be an indicator of his fortunes on June 7. The event marks an unofficial kick-off for the California race, which will award 172 delegates  a rich trove in the race for the 1,237 required to clinch the GOP presidential nomination. Currently, Trump has 994 delegates, Cruz has 566 and Kasich has 153, according to the AP's delegate count.

The contest in the nation's most populous state  Los Angeles County alone has more people than Michigan  is vastly complicated, playing out in what amounts to 54 separate races on a single day  one in every congressional district and one statewide.

The winner in each district collects three delegates; then, the candidate who gets the largest number of votes statewide claims a bonus of 10 more, plus the state party chairman and Republican National Committee members for a total bonus of 13.

An independent Field Poll released earlier this month found Trump with a 7-point edge over Cruz, 39 percent to 32 percent, with Kasich trailing at 18 percent and the rest undecided.

"Donald Trump is not going to agree with every member of this audience on every issue but he remains the rock star of this presidential race," said Thad Kousser, who teaches political science at the University of California, San Diego.

But inside the California GOP, Cruz has something of a home field advantage. He's been organizing in the state since last summer, and is supported for four former state party chairmen, along with a host of elected officials and activists.

With Cruz's organizational roots in the state, a challenge for Trump will be breaking into the party establishment to line up as many supporters as possible in congressional districts he needs to win in June.

Kasich, the holder of one primary victory, his home state of Ohio, is looking to make inroads in California districts that could be favorable to his more moderate credentials and bolster his bid to stay in the race.

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Follow Michael R. Blood on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MichaelRBloodAP.

A spectator arrives for a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Thursday, April 28, 2016 in Costa Mesa, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives for a rally, Thursday, April 28, 2016 in Costa Mesa, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)
Burkina Faso court throws out ex-president arrest warrant

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP)  An appeals court in Burkina Faso has thrown out an international arrest warrant for former President Blaise Compaore.

Last year, a military tribunal issued the warrant against Compaore, who was forced to resign in late 2014 amid a popular insurrection after nearly three decades in power.

Compaore faced assassination charges in connection with the killing of revolutionary president Thomas Sankara during a coup in 1987.

However, Compaore had become a citizen of Ivory Coast, a move critics said blocked him from facing extradition.

The Burkina Faso court of appeal announced Thursday the warrant was being annulled because of procedural errors.
Rutgers reporter asks Obama for interview _ and gets it

WASHINGTON (AP)  A college reporter spending time at the White House has landed what many beat reporters long for: an interview with President Barack Obama.

Obama interrupted a question-and-answer session that his press secretary, Josh Earnest, held Thursday for visiting college students. After some opening remarks about a new federal resource to help with student loan payments and criticism of Senate Republicans for blocking his nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, Obama began taking questions himself.

The first student he called on at random was Dan Corey editor-in-chief of The Daily Targum at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Obama is scheduled to deliver one of his final college commencement addresses as president there on May 15.

President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference with college students in the Brady Press Briefing Room in Washington in Washington, Thursday, April 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Corey told Obama a little about the paper's history before getting to the heart of question. "In light of the news of you speaking at our commencement, I was wondering, would you be interested in being interviewed by our newspaper?" Corey asked.

Obama complimented Corey for using his time wisely, then said he'd give the 19-year-old sophomore some "play."

"I have to say that, normally, I coordinate carefully with my press team before we grant interviews, but I am favorably disposed towards giving a little bit of time," Obama said. "It may not be a really long interview. But I figured, give the college newspaper a little bit of play."

Obama also offered some advice when Corey said he was really nervous.

"Just never admit that you're nervous," the president said. "Just pretend like this is routine."

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Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap

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This story has been corrected to show the reporter's name is Dan Corey, not Cory.

President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference with college students in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, April 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

President Barack Obama decides which college students to call on as he surprises them by attending a mock daily press briefing for college reporter day, Thursday, April 28, 2016, at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

President Barack Obama calls on college students as he surprises them by attending a mock daily press briefing for college reporter day with White House press secretary Josh Earnest at the White House, Thursday, April 28, 2016, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

A college student, right, takes a selfie as President Barack Obama surprises everyone by attending a mock daily press briefing for reporter day with White House press secretary Josh Earnest at the White House, Thursday, April 28, 2016, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Sajid Javid to face MPs over steel crisis

The Business Secretary is to be questioned by MPs about the crisis in the steel industry and efforts to save thousands of jobs.

Sajid Javid will appear before the Business Select Committee today as efforts continue to find a buyer for Tata Steel's UK assets.

Bimlendra Jha, chief executive of Tata, Gareth Stace of trade group UK Steel, and Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community union, will also appear before the committee.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid will face questions from MPs on the crisis in the steel industry

Other witnesses will include Marc Meyohas of Greybull Capital, which is buying Tata's plant at Scunthorpe.

Prime Minister David Cameron visited the Tata Steel works in Port Talbot, South Wales, on Tuesday to assure workers, unions and bosses of the Government's commitment to support the future of steel-making at the under-threat plant.

Unions welcomed the recent offer of state support for potential buyers, but stressed that any action must cover plants across the whole country and not just in Wales.
Jeremy Corbyn denies Labour crisis after Ken Livingstone suspended

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has denied his party is in crisis, after Ken Livingstone was suspended by Labour for "bringing the party into disrepute" over comments about Hitler.

The party is launching an investigation into the former London mayor's conduct after outraged senior Labour figures lined up to call for him to be kicked out.

Backbencher John Mann was also hauled in for a dressing down by party chief whip Rosie Winterton after he launched a furious face-to-face attack on Mr Livingstone, accusing him of being a "Nazi apologist".

Ken Livingstone has been suspended by Labour for bringing the party into disrepute

Mr Corbyn said that Mr Livingstone's remarks would be investigated and dealt with by Labour's General Secretary and National Executive Committee.

And the Labour leader told the BBC: "It's not a crisis. There's no crisis. Where there is any racism in the party it will be dealt with and rooted out. I have been an anti-racist campaigner all my life."

Asked, during an election visit to Hull, whether the party had a "problem with anti-Semitism", Mr Corbyn replied: "No, there is not a problem. We are totally opposed to anti-Semitism in any form within the party.

"The very small number of cases that have been brought to our attention have been dealt with swiftly and immediately, and they will be."

Mr Livingstone's suspension came after he took to the airwaves for a series of interviews in an attempt to defend Bradford West MP Naz Shah from allegations of anti-Semitism.

Ms Shah was suspended on Wednesday pending an investigation into controversial social media posts about Israel which she made before becoming an MP.

But Mr Livingstone insisted that while her remarks were "over the top", she was not anti-Semitic, and that he had never encountered anti-Semitism in 40 years in the Labour Party.

He sparked fury among colleagues by going on to claim that Hitler had supported Zionism "before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews".

Within minutes of his BBC London interview, Labour MPs - including several members of the shadow cabinet - were queuing up to demand his suspension or removal from the party.

Labour's London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan described his comments as "appalling and inexcusable" and shadow cabinet member Chris Bryant told the House of Commons he was "sick and tired" of people trying to explain away anti-Semitism, adding: "Yes, I'm talking to you, Ken Livingstone."

Even the chairman of the left-wing Momentum group of Corbyn supporters, Jon Lansman, said it was time Mr Livingstone "left politics altogether", adding: "All political lives end in failure and he should now depart voluntarily."

Mr Livingstone was harangued by Mr Mann as the pair arrived for separate interviews at broadcast studios in Westminster's Millbank.

As the former London mayor, phone clamped to his ear, attempted to conduct a radio interview, the Bassetlaw MP jabbed his finger at him, accusing him of being a "Nazi apologist" and attempting to "rewrite history".

The party later said in a statement that Ms Winterton had "made it absolutely clear to John Mann that it is completely inappropriate for Labour Members of Parliament to be involved in very public rows on the television".

The statement added: "She was very clear about how seriously this was viewed. John Mann fully accepted and understands this."

Labour MP Louise Ellmann, who was chairwoman of the Jewish Labour Movement until earlier this year, welcomed Mr Livingstone's suspension, but said it was "difficult to understand" why Mr Mann should face disciplinary action for confronting him.

Ms Ellmann told the Press Association: " Jeremy Corbyn, as leader of the Labour Party, should recognise the seriousness of the incidents of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and be seen to take more decisive action more quickly."

But Mr Corbyn told Sky News: "Anybody who thinks this party is not cracking down on anti-Semitism is simply wrong. We have suspended where appropriate, we have investigated all cases. We will not tolerate anti-Semitism in any form whatsoever in the party."

A number of Jewish groups called for Mr Livingstone's immediate expulsion from Labour.

Gideon Falter, chairman of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, said: "He is a hardened politician who has spent his political career accommodating anti-Semitic extremists and making anti-Semitic gaffes.

"Jeremy Corbyn should understand that zero tolerance for racism is all or nothing, and it is time for Ken Livingstone to be banished or for Corbyn to stop pretending to oppose racism."

Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: "Ken Livingstone's comments were abhorrent and beyond disgraceful.

"He denies anti-Semitism in Labour when the evidence is there for all to see. He lacks any sense of reality and decency. He must now be expelled from the Labour Party."

London mayor Boris Johnson told LBC radio: "There is plainly some sort of virus of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party that needs to be addressed."

Mr Corbyn told the BBC: "My job is to lead the party, my job is to ensure all members of the party behave in an appropriate way. There were concerns about the language used by Ken Livingstone, as there were one or two other people.

"A number of people, a very small number of people I have to say, in the entire party membership, have been suspended pending investigation.

"We are not tolerating anti-Semitism in any way or indeed any other kind of racism."

Asked how he felt to suspend a close friend, Mr Corbyn said: "Obviously very sad, but there is a responsibility to lead the party."

He suggested that some of the attacks on Labour were motivated by the party's "strength" under his leadership.

"The party membership is the biggest it has been in my lifetime. There are 400,000 individual members, there's 100,000 affiliated supporters, there are three million affiliated trade union members," he said.
Carl Frampton to fight Leo Santa Cruz in New York on July 30

Carl Frampton's challenge of Leo Santa Cruz for the WBA featherweight title will take place on Saturday, July 30 at the Barclays Center in New York.

Frampton announced on social media last week that he would step up in weight to challenge the highly-rated Mexican warrior in the Big Apple, with the date announced on Thursday.

It is a bout that will set the pulses racing on both sides of the Atlantic with both fighters unbeaten. Frampton extended his record to 22-0 with a split-decision victory over Scott Quigg in February while three-weight world champion Santa Cruz has 32 wins from 33 bouts with one draw.

Carl Frampton, pictured, defeated Scott Quigg in an all-British showdown in February

Northern Ireland's Frampton, who won the IBF and WBA super-bantamweight titles by defeating Quigg, will be bidding to win the same crown mentor and manager Barry McGuigan captured when he beat Eusebio Pedroza in 1985.

Frampton said: "It's fitting that I will have the chance to recapture this title.

"This is the fight I wanted and I'm one hundred per cent confident that the belt will be coming home to Belfast. Santa Cruz is a strong and aggressive undefeated champion but his style is made for me.

"Myself and my team have been chasing this fight for a long, long time and that's because we know we have the tools to beat Leo. He throws a lot shots and is a proven operator, it's going to be a great fight."

McGuigan is convinced his charge can extend his unbeaten record as a professional and become a two-weight world champion in the process.

"This is going to be a cracking fight," he said. "Their styles complement each other so well so the real winner will be the fans.

"It is going to be a tough fight for both men but I'm very confident that Carl will be able to impose his style on Santa Cruz and win this fight convincingly."

Frampton, who was stripped of his WBA super-bantamweight belt for failing to agree a bout against mandatory challenger Guillermo Rigondeau, announced he would relinquish his IBF title.
Camilla meets onesie-wearing Siberian husky

The Duchess of Cornwall has met a onesie-wearing Siberian husky and a rabbit called Prince Harry during a visit to mark the 30th anniversary of a Royal Veterinary College (RVC) hospital.

Camilla seemed amused by both encounters as she celebrated the milestone of the RVC's Queen Mother Hospital for Animals near Hatfield in Hertfordshire.

During another meeting with a dog - aptly named Kinggy - it disappeared under her skirt for a split second, when she knelt down to greet it, before reappearing.

The Duchess of Cornwall with Max the husky, who wore a striped onesie for the occasion

The Duchess is patron of the RVC Animal Care Trust, the charitable body that raises funds to support the RVC's clinical, research and educational activities, and she was given a guided tour of the hospital and its facilities.

It is a major teaching centre, pioneering new treatments and procedures, and is the largest specialist referral centre in Europe.

A team of its specialists were the first to successfully treat a dog for the recently-discovered New Forest Syndrome - and Camilla met the now-healthy Alba and its owners.

During the tour Camilla met Karen Leung, 35, from London, and her 13-year-old Jack Russell terrier Kinggy, who needed a blood transfusion after he lost a lot blood during an operation to remove a tumour.

The Duchess was told the hospital has around 100 donor dogs registered, and as she bent down to greet the dog, it scurried under her skirt. She joked with the photographers, saying: "That's a good photo."

Camilla has two Jack Russell terriers, Beth and Bluebell, both from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, but she fondly remembered a past pet, saying: "I had a Jack Russell and it got to (the age of) 21."

As she was taken along corridors, the hospital's clinical director Professor Holger Volk made an unscheduled stop to show his guest Prince Harry the rabbit.

She crouched down to say hello to the furry animal, being treated for abscesses on its skin, and it poked its nose through the bars as if to say hello.

Camilla joked about the rabbit having the same name as her stepson, and said with a smile: "He looks like the Easter bunny."

Before the Duchess unveiled a plaque to mark her visit, she met supporters and other staff in a marquee in the hospital's grounds, and sitting quietly in one section was Max the husky, wearing his multi-coloured onesie.

Lynda Rutherford, a lecturer in small animal surgery, said: "Max was hit by a London bus in November last year, and the skin along his left side was scraped off.

"He's being helped by the husky charity Heart Welfare and they made him this onesie to protect his skin as he's had a number of skin grafts."

She added: "Camilla loved his onesie, she was very interested in the outfit, and said 'it's very becoming, it suits him really well and he looks extremely smart'."

Max was recently hit by a London Bus and is recovering at the Queen Mother Hospital for Small Animals near Hatfield in Hertfordshire

Camilla visited the Royal Veterinary College hospital to mark its 30th anniversary

Another dog the duchess met, Kinggy, disappeared under her skirt for a split second when she knelt down to greet him

Kinggy, who recently received a blood donation at the centre, then reappeared ready for a cuddle with the royal visitor

Kinggy, a 13-year-old Jack Russell, grabbed the limelight

Camilla has two Jack Russells herself, Beth and Bluebell, and told how a previous pet of the same breed lived to the grand age of 21

The Duchess cut an animal-themed cake during her visit

She also met a rabbit called Prince Harry and joked about the pet having the same name as her stepson, adding: 'He looks like the Easter bunny.'
Security guard gets five-year jail term over tweets glorifying Islamic State

A security guard has been jailed for five years for sending a stream of tweets glorifying Islamic State after his attempts to go to Syria were thwarted.

Mohammed Moshin Ameen, 23, admitted posting material on the micro-blogging site over eight months including a link to an English language IS propaganda video specifically targeting young British men.

The court heard that between March and October last year, he used 42 different Twitter profiles to send 8,000 messages, of which 250 were found to be extreme.

Mohammed Ameen has been jailed for five years for sending a stream of tweets glorifying the Islamic State

He became radicalised after falling in with well-known radical figures within the community, including some who went on to be convicted of terror offences, the court heard.

And he exchanged views on Islamic ideology with Sydney teenage terrorist Farhad Jabar, discussing their shared desire to travel to IS territory.

Ameen first came to the attention of authorities in December 2013 when it was believed he might try to go to IS-held territory.

When police raided an address in London, they found Ameen with a one-way ticket from Luton to Istanbul for the same day as well as a letter to provide "cover".

Thanks to the intervention of counter-terrorism officers, he was stopped from going, prosecutor Christopher Amis said.

In June 2014, officers from the Prevent unit went to his home in Dagenham, east London, to talk to him about his apparent desire to travel to IS-held territory.

In the autumn of that year, they went back and discovered Ameen had half packed a bag for "immediate departure" - to the shock of the defendant's father.

Ameen told police he was planning to travel to the Syrian border with an aid convoy of ambulances that evening and was going to fly back - even though he did not have a ticket booked.

When officers returned on March 18 last year, Ameen's father said his son had abandoned his ambitions to travel to Syria, Mr Amis said.

Mr Amis said Ameen's activities on Twitter "amount to a sustained effort indirectly to encourage others to engage in terrorism".

He carried on his "prolific support for IS" with "dogged persistence" in the full knowledge of what he was doing, the prosecutor said.

In one tweet he wrote: "The ISIS fighter who chose to drive a truck filled with tons of explosives instead of his Rolls-Royce".

He also posted a picture of masked Jihadi John - aka Mohammed Emwazi - holding out a knife.

He portrayed terrorists as "role models" referring to the "magnificent 19" from the September 11 suicide bombings.

He posted a link to an unusual English language IS propaganda video set to seductive musical chanting.

The "sophisticated" production played in court was one of the first such examples specifically aimed at recruiting young British men.

The video glorified fighters showing them in action interspersed with bloody images of dead jihadis.

Ameen also tweeted cropped selfies posing with a large knife, the court heard. He had searched the internet for updates on Islamic State and news about terror-related cases.

In June, police seized Ameen's phone but the defendant refused to hand over the Pin number.

Then on October 21, more searches were made at another address in Dagenham where Ameen was found to be sleeping on the floor beside two more mobile phones.

On arrest, he again refused to hand over Pin details, saying "I'm not signing anything, mate" and made no comment in police interviews.

The court heard that Ameen had lived at the family home in Steven Road and at the time of his arrest was working as a night shift security guard. He had no previous convictions.

At a hearing at the Old Bailey in March, Ameen pleaded guilty to five counts of encouraging the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism on Twitter.

He admitted a further charge of inviting support for Islamic State, as a proscribed organisation, between October 4 and 6 2015.

He also pleaded guilty to disseminating a terrorist publication relating to a link to a video entitled For The Sake Of Allah posted on Twitter in September last year.

In mitigation, Tim Moloney QC said his client was of "below average intelligence" and vulnerable to radicalisation by the more sophisticated individuals within the community with whom he had been in contact.

The barrister said: "He does want to put that behaviour behind him. He is genuinely sorry for what he has done."

Jailing him, Common Serjeant of London Richard Marks QC said: "You had a not insignificant following on your accounts, and at the time this case is concerned, you were thoroughly radicalised."

Commander Dean Haydon, of SO15, said: "The harm of spreading of hate and encouraging others to commit offences cannot be underestimated.

"My officers sifted through over four million terabytes of data and collected extensive evidence to build their case and prove that Ameen was behind the thousands of pro-Daesh tweets.
Philip Hammond becomes first British Foreign Secretary to visit Cuba since 1959

Philip Hammond has become the first British Foreign Secretary to visit Cuba since before the communist revolution of 1959.

Arriving in the capital Havana, Mr Hammond said that Britain was keen to forge "new links" with the Caribbean nation.

His visit follows US President Barak Obama's historic visit last month intended to normalise relations between the two countries after decades of hostility.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond has visited Cuba.

Mr Hammond will hold a series of high-level meetings to discuss recent social and economic changes, human rights and the fight against global health threats such as the Zika virus.

He will also sign a bilateral agreement restructuring Cuba's debt to the UK, as well as agreeing future co-operation on financial services, energy, culture and education.

"Britain and Cuba have outlooks on the world and systems of government that are very different," Mr Hammond said.

"But as Cuba enters a period of significant social and economic change, I am looking forward to demonstrating to the Cuban government and people that the UK is keen to forge new links across the Atlantic.

"That is why Cuba and the UK are set to reach new cooperation agreements on energy, financial services, education and culture, to the benefit of both our nations.
Jeremy Corbyn launches independent review into racism after Livingstone row

Jeremy Corbyn has proposed a tightening of Labour rules and launched an independent review into racism as he seeks to calm tensions in the party over alleged anti-Semitism in the ranks.

A code of conduct would "make explicitly clear for the first time that Labour will not tolerate any form of racism, including anti-Semitism, in the party" and provide guidance on acceptable language.

Former Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti has been appointed to head a panel tasked with drawing up "a statement of principles and guidance about anti-Semitism and other forms of racism".

Ken Livingstone leaves his home in London on Friday morning

The panel - whose vice-chairman is Professor David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism - is expected to consult with the Jewish community and other minorities and report within two months on issues such as "transparent compliance procedures" and training.

Mr Corbyn insists there is no "crisis" within the party but his handling of anti-Semitism allegations, which have led to the suspension of long-time ally Ken Livingstone and Bradford West MP Naz Shah, has been criticised.

Announcing the attempted fightback, he said he had taken "decisive" action.

"We have taken decisive action over allegations of anti-Semitism since I became leader, suspending all those involved from membership, and have set up an inquiry under Baroness Royall into reports of anti-semitism in the Oxford University Labour club and elsewhere.

"There is no place for anti-Semitism or any form of racism in the Labour Party, or anywhere in society. We will make sure that our party is a welcoming home to members of all minority communities."

It came as an unrepentant Mr Livingstone suggested Labour will have to lift his suspension over controversial remarks linking Adolf Hitler to Zionism as the row over the party's handling of anti-Semitism allegations continued.

The former London mayor's comments were branded "vile, offensive and crass" by the party's deputy leader, Tom Watson, who said Mr Livingstone had "let down the Labour Party".

But the former London mayor, who faces calls to be expelled over his remarks, claimed that the party's internal inquiry would have to let him back in because "it's hard for somebody to decide to suspend me from the party" when he had been making the same point for 30 years.

The recommendations of the inquiry led by Baroness Royall are expected to feed into the wider inquiry.
U.S. proposes restoring UN W.Sahara's mission's functionality

By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS, April 27 (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday proposed that the U.N. Security Council demand a restoration of the full capability of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in disputed Western Sahara that has been crippled by Morocco's expulsion of civilian staff.

The 15-nation council is scheduled to vote on Friday on extending the mission's mandate, which expires on Saturday. The United States has drafted a resolution calling for the urgent restoration of "full functionality" of the U.N. Western Sahara mission, according to a copy of the text seen by Reuters.

Originally the council planned to vote on Thursday but delayed it by one day to allow more negotiations, diplomats said.

Morocco expelled dozens of international U.N. civilian staff from 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."

The U.S. draft's proposed terminology, council diplomats said, suggests the mission, known as MINURSO, should be restored to staffing levels comparable to what they were before the Moroccans ordered civilian personnel out of the country.

"Full functionality ... means being able to fulfill the whole mandate including the civilian part of the mandate, which has at its center the preparation of an eventual referendum on the political future of the territory," a council diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

This view was echoed by Mhamed Khadad of the Sahrawi people's Polisario Front separatist movement, which wants a referendum on independence for Western Sahara. Morocco says it will only grant autonomy.

Khadad told reporters that Polisario wants the council to ensure MINURSO fulfills it mandate to organize a referendum.

Rabat said its decisions were irreversible, though one diplomat said the United States and Morocco were discussing MINURSO's future at the foreign minister level.

The latest U.S. draft also calls for Ban to report within 120 days on whether MINURSO has "full functionality".

Several council diplomats said Morocco's traditional ally France, a permanent veto power on the council, along with Senegal opposed calling for "full functionality". Such a move, they said, risks making MINURSO's reductions permanent.

French Ambassador Francois Delattre told reporters discussions on the text were continuing and that France was pushing for a compromise on a "good text with as large as possible support."

Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters MINURSO "should be returned to its full capacity."
Nigeria says preventing attacks by armed herdsmen a security priority

ABUJA, April 27 (Reuters) - Nigeria's government has made preventing attacks by armed herdsmen a security priority in Africa's most populous country, a spokesman for the president said on Wednesday in the wake of an attack that may have left up to 50 people dead.

The government led by President Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler, is already contending with the militant Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast and a resurgence of pipeline attacks in the oil-rich southern Niger Delta region.

Clashes over land use between the semi-nomadic, cattle-herding Fulani people and more settled communities that practice a mix of farming and cattle rearing, claim hundreds of lives each year, but have increased in frequency in recent months.

Police and local politicians said seven people were killed on Monday when armed herdsmen, suspected to be Fulani, clashed with locals in the southeastern town of Ukpabi Nimbo, in Enugu state. But local media reports suggest up to 50 were killed.

Two witnesses told Reuters more than 20 people were killed and many were injured in the attack which they said involved herdsmen shooting and burning houses.

Buhari's spokesman Garba Shehu said the police and Nigeria's security agencies, acting on a "directive" from the president, were taking "urgent steps to fully investigate the attacks, apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice".

"Ending the recent upsurge of attacks on communities by herdsmen reportedly armed with sophisticated weapons is now a priority on the Buhari administration's agenda for enhanced national security," said Shehu.

"The armed forces and police have clear instructions to take all necessary action to stop the carnage," he said, adding that the government was ready to "deploy all required personnel and resources" to remove the threat to national security.

The latest attack took place in the country's southeast, though in the last few years the unrest has been concentrated in Nigeria's middle belt where the country's mostly Christian south and Muslim north meet.

Fulanis are Muslim and the communities with which they are in conflict in central Nigeria tend to be Christian.
Chile court tosses key part of president's labor reform law

SANTIAGO, April 27 (Reuters) - A top court ruled on Wednesday that a provision of Chilean President Michelle Bachelet's landmark labor reform legislation was unconstitutional in stating that only unions could carry out collective wage negotiations with companies.

The legislation, aimed at strengthening organized labor in the South American country, was passed by the Senate in March after a bruising battle that opened divisions within the governing Nueva Mayoria coalition.

"The (stipulation) was voted unconstitutional by six votes in favor and four against," said Rodrigo Pica, secretary for the court.

In a last-ditch attempt to derail it, conservative lawmakers had filed a motion against some aspects of the bill in Chile's Constitutional Tribunal.

"For more than a year and a half we told the government, in all manner of ways, that their intention of giving unions a monopoly and obligating workers to join a union in order to get the benefits (that are negotiated) was unjust and unconstitutional," said opposition Senator Andres Allamand.

The tribunal rejected as a violation of constitutional law the provision of the reform that said companies could only negotiate with legally designated unions for collective wage talks.
Russia proposes U.N. blacklist two Syrian opposition groups

By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS, April 27 (Reuters) - Russia has proposed that the United Nations Security Council blacklist Syrian rebel groups Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham for links to Islamic State and al Qaeda militants, though Washington warned such a move undermine the push for a truce.

If none of the council's 15-member Islamic State and al Qaeda sanctions committee blocks or puts a hold on the listing by 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) on May 11 then the groups will be added to the U.N. sanctions list, said diplomats.

"The reason for such a move was the information that these groups, which are waging a war in Syria, are closely connected to terrorist organizations, first of all with ISIS (Islamic State) and al Qaeda," Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said in a statement on Tuesday.

Washington's mission to the United Nations cautioned against blacklisting the two groups, saying it would undermine attempts to get a sustained halt in the fighting in Syria.

"Designating Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham - two groups that are parties to the cessation of hostilities - would have damaging consequences to the cessation (of hostilities) just as we are trying to de-escalate the situation on the ground," Edgar Vasquez, a spokesman for the U.S. mission, said.

A senior Security Council diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the Russian move as "unhelpful."

"It's a way of trying to divide the opposition," the diplomat said on Wednesday.

Jaish al-Islam (Islam Army) is a major armed rebel group in Syria and part of the High Negotiation Committee, which was set up in Riyadh last December to negotiate on behalf of opposition groups at U.N.-brokered peace talks with the government.

The High Negotiation Committee is backed by Western nations and key Arab states.

Ahrar al-Sham withdrew from the Riyadh meeting, saying "revolutionary groups" were sidelined. But the group did attend the latest round of peace talks in Geneva.

Russia's Foreign Ministry has long said that Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham should not be involved in Syria peace talks.

Ahrar al-Sham is an ultra-orthodox Salafist group and has fought as part of a military alliance including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, which was not part of a cessation of hostilities agreement brokered in February.
Charity urges price cut for pneumonia vaccine for poor children

By Sebastien Malo

NEW YORK, April 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Global charity Medecins Sans Frontieres delivered a petition with hundreds of thousands of signatures to pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc on Wednesday, asking the drugmaker to slash the price of its pneumonia vaccine for poor children.

Supporters of a proposal to cut the vaccine price to $5 U.S. per needy child took their petition, and a baby's crib covered with signatures, to the company's New York City headquarters on the eve of its annual shareholder meeting.

They made the same request of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which also makes a vaccine to prevent pneumonia.

Pneumonia killed some 920,000 children globally last year, according to United Nations data, and many regions of the world cannot afford to vaccinate children against the acute respiratory infection, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said.

Fifty-five nations, including Pakistan, Kenya and Myanmar, currently can obtain pneumonia vaccines at cut-rate prices through a public-private partnership called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI).

Those prices are about $10 U.S. for the Pfizer vaccine, which comes in three doses, and about $9 for a vaccine made by GSK.

But MSF and supporters want those prices cut roughly by half in all developing nations and for humanitarian groups.

"Millions of babies and young kids around the world are left unprotected against pneumonia because Pfizer and GSK charge such high prices for the pneumonia vaccine," said Greg Elder, a MSF spokesman, in a statement.

In response, Pfizer said producing its pneumonia vaccine, Prevenar 13, is costly and time-consuming.

Every dose takes two and a half years to be produced, the company told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"We continue to help address humanitarian crises through donations of Prevenar 13 to humanitarian organizations," the company said.

A dose of Prevenar 13 costs $159 on the U.S. private market, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

GlaxoSmithKline also said developing its pneumonia shot, Synflorix, involved extensive labor and money.

"Synflorix is one of the most complex we've ever manufactured, essentially combining ten vaccines in one and requiring significant upfront capital investment," it said in a statement.

Both companies said they make large quantities of the vaccines available at discounted prices through GAVI.

According to the World Health Organization, pneumonia accounts for 15 percent of all deaths of children under 5 years old.

Delivering the petition to Pfizer's midtown Manhattan building, protesters of its prices laid out 2,500 flowers they said symbolized the children dying of pneumonia each day.

Overall, the cost of vaccinating a child in the poorest countries has been rising and is 68 times higher than it was in 2001, according to the MSF.

Last month, MSF formally opposed Pfizer's application for a patent of its pneumonia vaccine in India.
Saudi Arabia will struggle to kick its addiction to oil: Kemp

By John Kemp

LONDON, April 27 (Reuters) - "King Abdulaziz and the men who worked with him for the establishment of the state did not depend on oil and they established the kingdom without oil, and they ran this state without oil, and they lived in this state without oil," Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in an televised interview on Monday.

The deputy crown prince criticised the kingdom's subsequent "addiction" to oil which has "disrupted the development of many sectors in the past years" implying this was a relatively recent problem.

The prince claimed his national transformation programme would enable the kingdom to "live without oil" as early as 2020 ("Transcript of Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Interview", Al Arabiya, April 25).

But if modern Saudi Arabia was founded by conquest and the skilful statesmanship of Abdulaziz, it has been held together by the revenue from oil, even more than conservative religion.

Distribution of oil revenue to client groups has formed the foundation of the state from its earliest years and shaped the contours of the economy and society.

Sharing oil wealth in exchange for popular submission to absolute monarchical rule has always been central to the social contract between the ruling Al Saud and the kingdom's population.

Transforming that contract so that it does not centre on oil is an enormously ambitious undertaking fraught with considerable risks and with an uncertain chance of success.

OIL AND ARABIA

Before the discovery of oil, Saudi Arabia was a desperately poor country, with a largely subsistence economy and depending on the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.

The modern state was assembled through a series of conquests between 1902 and 1926 and proclaimed as the unified Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

At the time, the only government revenue came from customs duties, pilgrimage taxes and tithes. From the start, the state was short of money and desperately looking for additional sources of income.

One reason the kingdom granted a concession in 1933 to prospect for oil to the U.S. company Socal rather than Britain's Iraq Petroleum Company was that Socal was prepared to offer more cash up front and loans to be repaid from future production ("A king and a concession", Aramco, 1984).

In 1938, the government's revenue amounted to just $7 million, according to Arthur Young, the U.S. financial expert sent out after World War Two to help set up the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency.

The first commercial oil discovery was made the same year and the kingdom received $340,000 in oil royalties ("Saudi Arabia: the making of a financial giant", Young, 1983).

Hopes of an immediate bonanza were delayed by the world war, which led to the postponement of exploration and development work. But once the war ended, production and oil revenue began to ramp up.

The kingdom's annual oil revenue surged from $340,000 in 1938 to $10 million in 1946, $57 million in 1950, $334 in 1960, $1.2 billion in 1970 and $84 billion in 1980.

MONEY AND POWER

Even before oil, gift-giving was an important element of the compact between the ruler and his subjects, and the need to demonstrate generosity frequently strained royal finances ("Two kings in Arabia", Bullard, 1993).

Once the gusher of oil revenue arrived, it provided the scope to co-opt almost all social groups and make them clients of the state.

Tribal groups were granted generous state subsidies and recruited into the national guard. Hundreds of thousands of other citizens have been put on the payrolls of the armed forces and various ministries.

Money could also be used to settle tensions within the royal family by allowing each senior prince to be given their own vast and essentially autonomous bureaucratic fiefdom.

Oil wealth enabled the state to avoid levying income and other taxes and to subsidise the provision of basic services including water, electricity and gasoline.

Oil wealth enables Saudi Arabia to maintain more than 250,000 men under arms and run the world's third-largest defence budget ("Princes, brokers and bureaucrats: oil and the state in Saudi Arabia", Hertog, 2010).

More or less everything in modern Saudi Arabia depends directly or indirectly on oil.

BUDGET PROBLEMS

From the very beginning, however, expenditure tended to run ahead of receipts. "When oil production and spending grew after the war, spending grew even faster", according to Young.

"Governments, like individuals, have the urge to spend more whenever income suddenly increases."

In 1949, despite oil revenue amounting to $39 million, the government was struggling to pay its bills, the first of several budget crises in the subsequent decades.

The kingdom's history from the 1950s to the 2010s has been a series of oil-fuelled booms followed by painful adjustments when oil prices fell and revenue shrank.

ADDICTED TO OIL

Periodic crashes in the oil price and state revenue have brought periodic calls to adjust the social compact between the state and its citizens.

Prince Mohammed, effectively the kingdom's top economic policymaker, is not the first ruler to complain about the country's addiction to oil ("Saudi reform efforts wax and wane with oil prices," Reuters, February 2016).

"The GCC governments and peoples should realise that the boom period is over. We must all get used to a certain type of lifestyle that does not rely entirely on the state," then-Crown Prince Abdullah warned back in 1998.

"The upcoming period needs the private sector to assume part of the responsibility which has up until now been carried by the state."

Abdullah was speaking at the GCC summit in Abu Dhabi in December 1998, just as oil prices were hitting rock bottom at the end of a long period of stagnation through the late 1980s and 1990s.

But the impetus to reform was lost as oil prices and revenue soared again in the 2000s.

The problem is that when oil prices are low the revenue needed to accomplish the transition are scarce and the difficulties can appear daunting. When oil prices rise, it has been easier to postpone difficult decisions.

TRANSFORMATION

Prince Mohammed's "SaudiVision2030", adopted by the cabinet and published on Monday, is essentially a diversification strategy which aims to move the kingdom away from dependence on oil revenue (April 2016).

It is closely modelled on an earlier and even more comprehensive study by the McKinsey Global Institute entitled "Saudi Arabia beyond oil: the investment and productivity transformation" (December 2015).

The aim is to shift the economy away from an almost exclusive reliance on oil (and the spending of oil revenue) to develop other sectors such as mining, manufacturing, retail, tourism, pilgrimage, and healthcare.

The strategy also envisages developing the country as a logistics hub for East-West trade, becoming a financial services centre, localising defence manufacturing, and development more small and medium-sized enterprises.

The prince has stressed that much of the transformation can be achieved through improvements in government efficiency and restructuring (termed "qawam" in the vision document).

There is no doubt Saudi Arabia needs to undertake these changes, and a younger generation of policymakers has brought an increased sense of urgency to tackling the problems.

But describing the kingdom's problem as an "addiction" to oil, as if it was incidental, rather than a fundamental part of the political, social and economic structure, risks understating the challenge involved.

External commentators have focused on the valuation likely to be realised from a part-privatisation of state-oil company Saudi Aramco but that is the least of the problems.

True diversification requires developing industries which have nothing to do with the extraction of oil and spending of oil-related revenue.

Pilgrimage is a natural choice but the business environment for other sectors such as finance, logistics and manufacturing remains forbiddingly tough.
UN envoy urges Obama, Putin to save Syria truce, peace process

By Stephanie Nebehay and Shadia Nasralla

GENEVA, April 28 (Reuters) - The United Nations mediator on Thursday called on the leaders of the United States and the Russian Federation to salvage the "barely alive" two-month-old ceasefire in Syria and revitalise the damaged peace process.

U.N. Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura voiced deep concern at the truce unravelling in Aleppo and at least three other hotspots, although he saw some narrowing of positions between the government and opposition visions of political transition.

"Hence my appeal for a U.S.-Russian urgent initiative at the highest level, because the legacy of both President Obama and President Putin is linked to the success of what has been a unique initiative which started very well. It needs to end very well," de Mistura told a news conference.

The United States and Russia must convene a ministerial meeting of major and regional powers who compose the International Syria Support Group (ISSG), he said.

"There is no reason that both of them which have been putting so much political capital in that success story and have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war should not be able to revitalise what they have created and which is still alive but barely."

The main opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) pulled out of the formal talks a week ago, in protest of intensified fighting and slow aid deliveries.

"How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling? It's something that even I find it difficult, can you imagine the Syrians?" de Mistura said, adding he aimed to resume talks in May, though he gave no date.

Bashar Ja'afari, who led the government delegation, said on Tuesday the round had been "useful and constructive." But he gave no sign of ceding to the HNC's central demand for a political transition without President Bashar al-Assad.

De Mistura, asked whether Assad's future was discussed, replied: "We didn't get into names of people... but actually how to change the current governance. And I must say that the concept of a new government and a political transition with a new constitution is quite a lot already in terms of preparing of what could be the next steps."

He issued a document saying the two sides remain far apart in their vision of a political transition, but shared some "commonalities," including the view "that the transitional governance could include members of the present government and the opposition, independents and others."

De Mistura said this round of talks had been "overshadowed by a substantial and indeed worrisome of cessation of hostilities."

"The perception is that it could collapse any time," he said.

In the past 48 hours there had been an average of 1 Syrian civilian killed every 25 minutes and one wounded every 13 minutes, he said.
Sec. of State Kerry expresses reservations about all-volunteer US military

By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas, April 27 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday he feels all Americans should find a way to serve their country, suggesting the need for a renewal in public service that could also affect the military.

"I have deep reservations about just an all-volunteer military," Kerry said at a forum on the Vietnam War at the University of Texas in Austin.

"There should be shared responsibility among all Americans," he said. "I think that is one of the best ways you don't have wars."

Kerry also said numerous deployments overseas under the current system placed enormous burdens on military families.

"Every American ought to find a way to serve, somehow. It doesn't have to be in the military. I like the idea that everybody ought to give back something," he said.

Kerry, a former Navy officer, earned silver and bronze combat stars and three Purple Heart medals for his service in the Vietnam War. He become a prominent figure in the anti-war movement when he returned to the United States.

He said that, among the lessons from Vietnam, was that Americans must always treat returning veterans with dignity and respect regardless of whether a war was popular or unpopular.
Russia launches first rocket from new spaceport at 2nd attempt

By Dmitry Solovyov

MOSCOW, April 28 (Reuters) - Russia launched its first rocket from a new cosmodrome on Thursday, a day after a technical glitch forced a postponement of the event in a sign of continuing crisis in the nation's space industry.

An unmanned Soyuz-2.1A rocket, carrying three satellites, roared into a clear blue sky from the launchpad at Vostochny cosmodrome in the remote Amur Region near China's border at 0501 Moscow time (0201 GMT), state television showed.

The satellites separated from the rocket's third stage about nine minutes into the flight and headed for their designated orbits, Russian news agencies quoted officials from the space agency Roscosmos as saying.

The launch was called off less than two minutes before lift-off on Wednesday, upsetting President Vladimir Putin. He had flown thousands of kilometres to watch what Russian media and officials called a historic event.

"I want to congratulate you. There is something to be proud of," Putin told cosmodrome workers and Roscosmos officials after watching Thursday's launch at Vostochny, Russian media reported.

"The equipment overreached itself a little bit yesterday," he said. "In principle, we could have held the launch yesterday, but the equipment overdid its job and stopped the launch. This is a normal thing."

His remarks contrasted with his tough words after Wednesday's aborted launch, when he criticised Roscosmos and government officials for the large number of technical problems in the space industry, saying that "there should be an appropriate reaction".

Putin reprimanded Roscosmos head Igor Komarov and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who is in charge of space and military industries, Russian news agencies quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.

CORRUPTION AND GLITCHES

Delays and corruption have blighted work on the new cosmodrome. A European Space Agency launch in French Guiana, using a similar Russian Soyuz rocket, was also delayed by technical problems this month.

Problems with Russian space rockets are worrisome not just for the Kremlin but also for the U.S. space programme. NASA has depended on Russia to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station since it retired its space shuttle.

The Soviet Union pioneered manned space flight when it fired Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961.

But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's space programme has had to retrench for lack of cash. For years it filled gaps in its budget by taking paying tourists into space.

The Vostochny spaceport, the first civilian rocket launch site on Russian territory, is intended to phase out Russia's reliance on the Baikonur cosmodrome, which it leases from ex-Soviet Kazakhstan.

"The main thing is that this launch pad is now working, it has been prepared well by you and it is functioning," Putin told cosmodrome workers on Thursday. "We are now facing a second stage here, to accommodate a heavy rocket."
Genel courts Turkey with Kurdish gas to reduce reliance on Russia

By Ron Bousso

LONDON, April 27 (Reuters) - Genel Energy, chaired by former BP head Tony Hayward, is betting on a major deal with Turkey to jointly develop gas fields in Iraqi Kurdistan which will help Ankara reduce its reliance on Russian supplies after relations soured with Moscow.

The deal, if it goes through, could help London-listed Genel regain investor confidence after it steeply downgraded its oil reserves two months ago - leading to it losing a third of its market value, contributing to its biggest-ever annual loss and piling pressure on Hayward.

The company, which owns most of the Bina Bawi and Miran fields, is in talks to sell a stake to TEC, a joint venture that includes the international arm of state-owned Turkish Petroleum, according to several sources involved in the negotiations.

"(TEC) want to invest in the entire value chain of the project," one source said. The sources did not disclose the size and price of the stake being discussed.

The deal would provide a new source of gas for Turkey, which has scrambled to find alternatives after relations with major supplier Russia deteriorated sharply after the Turkish airforce downed a Russian warplane late last year.

Entering the partnership, which would also include the construction of a pipeline and storage facilities to connect the field to Turkey, would also reinforce ties between Ankara and Iraqi Kurdistan, two neighbours battling Islamic State.

Genel hopes to complete the negotiations with the partner by the end of the year, Chief Executive Murat Ozgul said at the company's annual general meeting in London on Wednesday. He did not name the partner.

Genel, one of the main oil producers in Iraqi Kurdistan, has made no secret of plans to bring in a partner for the fields, which it operates and holds an 80 percent stake in.

Its growing focus on Turkey was underlined when Turkish renewable energy company Bilgin Enerji bought a 10.5 percent stake in the company this month to become its second largest shareholder after Turkish billionaire Mehmet Karamehmet.

Genel plans to export up to 20 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year from the fields, located some 300 km (186 miles) from Turkey and with gas reserves of around 11 trillion cubic feet. It has said it expects the fields to take around three years to develop and to start production in early 2020.
Car bomb outside security chief's home in Yemen's Aden - sources

ADEN, April 28 (Reuters) - A suicide car bomb exploded outside the home of the security chief of Yemen's Aden, Shelal Ali Shayyeh, on Thursday, residents said, wounding at least two people.

Guards fired at the attacker and the car he was driving exploded, residents said.
Poland - Factors to Watch April 28

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):

MBANK

Poland's fourth-largest lender by assets and Commerzbank unit reported on Thursday a 32-percent fall in its first-quarter net profit to 308 million zlotys ($79.5 million), as one-off transactions supported its results last year.

LOTOS

Poland's second biggest oil refiner said on Thursday it swung into higher-than-expected net profit of 106 million zlotys ($27.4 million) in the first quarter, helped by rising output and lower costs.

ROADS

The Polish government will not raise car fuel levy to bridge the 90 billion zloty ($23.2 billion) gap in financing new roads, and would rather go for higher debt, deputy infrastructure minister Jerzy Szmit told daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

CONSTITUTIONAL COURT

Poland's top administrative court urged the government on Wednesday to recognise constitutional court rulings and appealed for the judiciary's independence to be respected in Poland's worst constitutional crisis in decades.

****Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.****
Romania - Factors to watch on April 28

BUCHAREST, April 28 (Reuters) - Here are news stories, press reports and events to watch which may affect Romanian financial markets on Thursday.

BANCA TRANSILVANIA

Romanian lender Banca Transilvania said on Thursday its net profit stood at 228.5 million lei ($58.08 million) in the first quarter, 50.8 percent higher from the same period of 2015.

CEE MARKETS

The biggest daily yield rise for months knocked down Hungarian government bonds on Wednesday as investors digested central bank signals that there was only limited room to lower rates further.

GAS PRICES

Natural gas tariffs for household consumers will fall by 1.5 percent on average from May due to lower distribution fees, energy regulator ANRE was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

CABINET MINISTERS

Cristian Ghinea was sworn in as minister in charge with European Union fund absorption on Wednesday, after previous minister Aura Raducu resigned.

Culture Minister Vlad Alexandrescu resigned his post on Wednesday over a row at the National Opera House that began when the ballet company's Danish artistic director resigne due to clashes with management.

For the long-term Romanian diary, click on

For emerging markets economic events, click on

For an index of all diaries, click on
Fifteen people held over suicide bomb in Turkey - interior minister

ISTANBUL, April 28 (Reuters) - Turkish police have detained 15 people over a suicide bombing in the northwestern city of Bursa where a woman injured eight bystanders as she blew herself up near the city's main mosque, Turkish media said on Thursday.

The TRT and CNN Turk television stations quoted Interior Minister Efkan Ala as giving the total and saying evidence pointed to a link with a militant group, but gave no details.

The attack on Wednesday was the fifth suicide bombing in a major urban centre in Turkey this year.

"Fifteen people have been detained in connection with the Bursa attack. There are strong indications that it is related to a group," the broadcasters quoted Ala as saying.

Some of those detained were brought in from outside of Bursa and were being questioned at the provincial police headquarters, CNN Turk said.

No group has claimed responsibility. Two attacks this year in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city, have been blamed on the radical Islamic State movement. Two in the capital Ankara were claimed by a Kurdish militant group.

Turkey has also faced attacks from far-left groups, mostly targeting police and security forces. The Bursa attack came a day after the United States warned American citizens in Turkey about credible terrorist threats to tourist areas.
Vietnam, grappling with mass fish deaths, clamps down on seafood sales

By Ho Binh Minh

HANOI, April 28 (Reuters) - Vietnam on Thursday banned the sale and distribution of non-living aquatic products in its central region, following inconclusive efforts to explain why huge numbers of dead fish washed ashore.

The ban tackles fears of a health threat along 200 km (124 miles) of the coast, after the government said the fish could have been killed by toxic discharge caused by humans or "red tide", when algae blooming at an abnormal rate produce toxins.

On Wednesday, the government said there was no evidence that discharge from a new Taiwanese-built steel plant, a unit of Formosa Plastics, was to blame for the fish deaths.

Vietnam exports $7 billion of seafood a year, mostly from waters off its southern coast, but industry has yet to feel the impact. Fish and shrimp from the affected region are chiefly consumed at home, an industry official told Reuters.

Deputy Prime Minister Trinh Dinh Dung ordered officials in four Vietnamese provinces to seize and destroy dead aquatic products washed ashore or raised along the coastline.

"The use, collection, transport, trading of dead aquatic products as food for people and feed for livestock is strictly prohibited," the order said.

Seafood exports from January to April are estimated to have risen 3.8 percent from a year ago to $1.93 billion, compared to a fall of 15.6 percent in 2015. Vietnam's biggest markets are the United States, Europe and Japan.

On Thursday, Facebook users called for peaceful protests to highlight food security and environmental concerns sparked by the deaths, while a petition on the White House website urging help from the United States drew close to 100,000 signatures.

Signers want President Barack Obama to raise the issue with the government when he visits Vietnam next month, and sought help in doing an independent environmental impact assessment of the steel plant.

Tests of seawater in Thua Thien-Hue, one of the affected provinces, showed higher than normal levels of some pollutants, the province's environment department has said.

Vietnam has a four-day holiday ending Tuesday, and many people had booked tours to beaches in Quang Binh, neighbouring the province of Ha Tinh. The latter, 400 km (250 miles) south of Hanoi, is where dead fish began washing up on April 6.
Lebanese army kills Islamic State leader at Syrian border

BEIRUT, April 28 (Reuters) - Lebanese soldiers killed an Islamic State leader on Thursday in the mountainous border region with Syria, Lebanon's army said.

The army command said Fayez al-Shaalaan, known as Abu Fawz, was killed when the army attacked an Islamic State position on the edge of the town of Arsal in north Lebanon.

It described Shaalaan as the militant group's leader in the Arsal area, confirming an earlier report from a security source.

Fighting between Islamic State and al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front militants often spills over Lebanon's mountainous northern border with Syria, where conflict has been raging for five years.

Fighters briefly overran Arsal in 2014 before withdrawing to the hills after clashes with the army, which stages regular operations against Islamic State and Nusra Front in the area.
Sanofi launches $9.3 bln fight for U.S. cancer firm Medivation

By Ben Hirschler and Leigh Thomas

LONDON/PARIS, April 28 (Reuters) - French drugmaker Sanofi went public with a $9.3 billion offer to buy Medivation on Thursday, setting up what could be a lengthy takeover battle after the U.S. cancer firm rebuffed its approaches.

The decision to target Medivation marks a return to the biotech takeover trail for Sanofi, which is looking to new cancer treatments to bolster its portfolio and help offset declining sales of mainstay diabetes drug Lantus.

Sanofi's non-binding proposal is to buy Medivation for $52.50 per share in cash, representing a roughly 36 percent premium over Medivation's stock price one month prior to Thursday's offer.

It is, however, only modestly above Medivation's Wednesday closing price of $52.05 and investors signalled they expected Sanofi to dig deeper, with the shares trading above $56 on Thursday.

In 2015, the average offer price among life sciences deals was 40 percent above the target's stock price four weeks earlier, according to data from Thomson Reuters. Biotech deals saw even frothier premiums, typically around 50 percent.

Reuters reported last month that Medivation had been working with investment bank J.P. Morgan to handle interest from companies regarding a potential acquisition, but it had no plans to sell itself.

Bryan Garnier analyst Eric Le Berrigaud said Sanofi could now face a prolonged takeover fight with other players potentially getting involved, including Japan's Astellas Pharma , Medivation's partner on its prostate cancer drug Xtandi.

Britain's AstraZeneca has also been reported to have looked at Medivation.

Officials at Astellas and AstraZeneca declined to comment, although one person close to the British company said it was unlikely to enter a bidding war.

Medivation, which has limited takeover defences, said it would respond to Sanofi's offer following a board meeting on Thursday, with input from financial advisers Evercore and J.P. Morgan.

Sanofi, which is being advised by Morgan Stanley, has a track record of pushing through unsolicited deals, after buying Genzyme for $20 billion in 2011.

Sanofi's move comes on the same day that Abbott Laboratories agreed to buy medical device maker St. Jude Medical for $25 billion and AbbVie announced a $5.8 billion deal for cancer firm Stemcentrx, highlighting a pattern of healthcare companies snapping up smaller rivals.

LOOKING FOR DEALS

The French company, whose shares slipped 1 percent, said there was no certainty the deal would get done, but that if it did, it would boost earnings immediately.

Deutsche Bank analysts said Sanofi likely had "significant flexibility" to raise its offer, given the current low cost of debt, while Bernstein calculated the deal would still lift earnings from 2017 even at $62.40 a share, or 20 percent above Wednesday's close.

The premium to the unaffected price offered by Sanofi is below some other recent large biotech deals, with Roche paying a 63 percent premium for Intermune in 2014 and Alexion 140 percent for Synageva last year.

Stepping up acquisitions fits with the strategy of Sanofi Chief Executive Olivier Brandicourt, who took over a year ago. He told Reuters in January that he was looking for deals to broaden its reach in areas such as oncology and could consider deals of up to $20 billion.

France's biggest drugmaker is going through a tough patch, due to falling sales of Lantus, prompting it to warn of no meaningful profit growth over the next two years.

Oncology is currently the hottest area of pharmaceutical research, thanks to advances in understanding the biological drivers of the disease. Sanofi has a long history in selling chemotherapy drugs but has been less successful at developing modern cancer medicines.

'COMPELLING' PROPOSAL

Brandicourt first contacted Medivation about a deal on March 25 but he said Chief Executive Officer David Hung had declined to meet him and had told him the U.S. company's board was not interested in discussing a transaction.

Sanofi then set out its $52.50-a-share offer in an April 15 letter to Hung, to which Medivation only acknowledged receipt without commenting on its contents.

"We do not understand the delay in responding to our letter. The price we put forth represents a very substantial premium, and it would be all cash without any financing condition. In these circumstances we believe it is appropriate to make this letter public, which we are doing today," Brandicourt wrote in a follow-up letter to Hung on April 28.

"We also strongly believe that Medivation shareholders would find our proposal to be compelling."

Xtandi, which had worldwide sales of nearly $2 billion in 2015, is Medivation's only marketed drug. The high price of Xtandi has been criticised by some U.S. lawmakers, including Democratic Party presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.

Medivation is also conducting clinical trials on two experimental drugs, talazoparib for breast cancer and pidilizumab for blood cancers.
PRESS DIGEST - RUSSIA - April 28

MOSCOW, April 28 (Reuters) - The following are some stories in Russia's newspapers on Thursday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

VEDOMOSTI

www.vedomosti.ru

- The Finance Ministry has offered the government its guidelines of a new pension reform which foresees growth of the retirement age and refusal from mandatory accumulative contributions of employees.

- The number of Russians believing in the necessity of selling off state assets has shrunk to 19 percent from 51 percent of those polled in 1991 during the first wave of privatisation, according to VtsIOM pollsters.

KOMMERSANT

www.kommersant.ru

- Russia could join the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement on Automatic Exchange of Financial Information, CRS MCAA, the daily says referring to the agenda of the cabinet meeting on April 28.

- While Russia is cutting its spending on healthcare, the HIV infection is spreading across the country, the daily says, referring to the growth of the number of HIV positive people by 100,000 last year, which is 10,000 more compared to 2014.

IZVESTIA

www.izvestia.ru

- Russia's banking sector has earned 107 billion roubles ($1.64 billion) in the first three months of the year which is 18 times more compared to the same period of last year, according to central bank statistics.

ROSSIISKAYA GAZETA

www.rg.ru

- Russia could introduce mandatory registration of diary and meat products with Genetically Modified Organisms.

RBC

www.rbc.ru

- More than 8,000 hectares of Crimea's land considered best for growing grapes will be developed by two companies based in Tatarstan. This is the way Tatarstan is helping its local Muslim "brothers" in Crimea, the daily says, quoting Tatarstan's Rustam Minnikhanov.

- A democratic coalition has fallen apart in Russia after failing to agree on ways to hold primaries, the daily says referring to a split between allies of anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny and the PARNAS party led by ex-prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
North Korea test-fires two missiles, both fail - U.S.

By Ju-min Park and David Brunnstrom

SEOUL/WASHINGTON April 28 (Reuters) - North Korea test-fired what appeared to be two intermediate range ballistic missiles on Thursday, but both failed, the U.S. military said, in a setback for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ahead of next week's ruling party congress.

The isolated nation has conducted a series of missile launches in violation of U.N. resolutions ahead of the Workers' Party congress which begins on May 6. South Korea also says North is ready to conduct a new nuclear test at any time.

China said the U.N. Security Council was working on a response to North Korea's latest missile tests, while U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Pyongyang to cease "further provocative actions."

Thursday's tests looked to have been hurried, according to a defence expert in Seoul, and follow a failed launch of a similar missile earlier this month.

The first launch, at about 6:40 a.m. local time (2140 GMT Wednesday) from near the east coast city of Wonsan, appeared to have been of a Musudan missile with a range of more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles) which crashed within seconds, a South Korean defence ministry official said.

Later, at around 7:26 p.m., the North shot a similar intermediate range missile from the same area, but the launch was also understood to have failed, the official added.

The U.S. military's Strategic Command said it tracked two attempted launches, neither of which posed a threat to North America.

"NOT SUCCESSFUL"

"Initial indications reveal the tests were not successful," said Lieutenant Colonel Martin O'Donnell, a STRATCOM spokesman. .

The Musudan missile theoretically has the range to reach any part of Japan and the U.S. territory of Guam. It has never been successfully flight-tested.

A similar missile launched on the April 15 birthday anniversary of Kim's late grandfather, North Korea's founder Kim Il Sung, exploded in what the U.S. Defense Department called a "fiery, catastrophic" failure.

Some experts had predicted that North Korea would wait until it figured out what went wrong in the previous launch before attempting another, a process that could take months.

Yang Uk, a senior research fellow at the Korea Defence and Security Forum and a policy adviser to the South Korean navy, said the North Koreans appeared to be in a rush to demonstrate a success head of the party congress.

"They need to succeed but they keep failing," he said "They didn't have enough time to fix or technically modify the system, but just shot them because they were in a hurry."

U.S. and South Korean officials have expressed concerns that North Korea could attempt a fifth nuclear test in a show of strength ahead of the congress.

"Signs for an imminent fifth nuclear test are being detected ahead of North Korea's seventh Party Congress," South Korean President Park Geun-hye said at a national security meeting on Thursday.

The 15-member U.N. Security Council met to discuss the latest missile tests at the request of the United States. China's U.N. Ambassador Liu Jieyi, president of the council for April, said: "We're looking at a response from the Security Council."

Diplomats said the council was likely to issue a statement condemning the latest missile tests.

Japan's U.N. Ambassador Motohide Yoshikawa, also a council member, said that during the closed-door meeting "everybody condemned the latest failed launches."

Ban's spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, called the actions "extremely troubling."

Yonhap said the first missile was not detected by South Korean military radar because it did not fly above a few hundred metres, and was spotted by a U.S. satellite.

On Saturday, North Korea tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile, which travelled about 30 km (18 miles) off its east coast.
IFC arranges $375 mln in financing to boost Iraq's power sector

DUBAI, April 28 (Reuters) - International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank's private sector investment arm, said on Thursday it had arranged $375 million in financing for an Iraqi power company to provide electricity to millions of people in Kurdistan and Baghdad.

The company, Mass Global Energy Sulimaniya, will use the funds to add 500 megawatts of capacity to a 1,000-megawatt power plant in Kurdistan, providing power to 3 million people. It will also help complete a new power plant near Baghdad that will supply about half of the Iraqi capital's electricity requirements.

The debt and equity package, which includes $250 million from IFC and $125 million from Bank Audi, Lebanon's biggest lender by assets, includes IFC's first Islamic syndicated loan.

The investment in Kurdistan will help boost infrastructure in a part of Iraq that is struggling following an inflow of more than 1 million internally displaced Iraqis and 250,000 Syrian refugees, IFC said in a statement.

"One of IFC's objectives is to promote investment in conflict-affected countries and Iraq is one of those countries as it faces security, migrant and power challenges," Dimitris Tsitsiragos, IFC's vice president of global client services, told Reuters in an interview.

Years of war and lack of investment have crippled Iraq's power infrastructure, causing frequent blackouts and stifling economic growth.

The financing is part of IFC efforts to support infrastructure development in Iraq, which needs to raise power generating capacity by an estimated 70 percent to meet current demand, the IFC said.
Tanzania's forest conservation at risk as funds run out

By Kizito Makoye

DAR ES SALAAM, April 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When the international forest conservation scheme known as REDD+ first came to Tanzania in 2008, it brought hopes of slowing deforestation and curbing climate change.

But according to a recent report, funding for the programme is drying up, threatening the future of the East African country's efforts to safeguard its forests.

REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is a U.N.-backed push to reduce climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions through having developed countries pay poorer nations to protect their forests, which store carbon.

Richer countries buy credits for CO2 emissions reductions, and the money is used to keep tropical forests standing and to support forest communities.

But a report last month from a forest finance tracking initiative called "REDDX", run by non-profit group Forest Trends, said financing to prepare for REDD+ in Tanzania had stagnated, with no new funding announced since 2010.

As a result, pilot REDD+ projects in Tanzania, including forest conservation activities and land-use planning, have been shuttered, it said.

"The lack of new donor funding is a matter of serious concern for the sustainability of the REDD+ initiative in Tanzania," the report added.

When REDD+ was launched in Tanzania, Norway was its biggest donor, committing $80.2 million in 2009, or around 85 percent of all REDD+ funding for the country, to be paid over five years.

Other backers included Finland, Germany, Britain, Belgium, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, the multilateral UN-REDD programme and the government of Tanzania itself.

The money was used to develop an action plan with 10 priority areas, including identifying and tackling the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, and accurately measuring and recording emission levels.

But according to the REDDX report, the flow of funds from Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative has declined significantly since the programme began.

"Following a jolt of funding from Norway that jump-started Tanzania's REDD+ process in 2009, progress has now come to a standstill," Brian Schaap, REDDX senior program associate, said in a statement.

REVERSING DAMAGE

Norway's involvement with the REDD+ initiative in Tanzania has had its detractors. In 2012, it drew criticism when green group WWF was embroiled in allegations of misappropriating NOK25 million ($3.07 million) of Norwegian REDD+ money.

The WWF Tanzania country director, Stephen Mariki, denied the accusations, but later resigned.

And with only 18 percent of the REDD+ funding going to the government, according to the report, there is concern that too much money is going to NGOs and academic institutions, and not enough into building state capacity.

But Norwegian officials stand by the country's role in REDD+, saying some of the projects have already started to reverse the damage done to Tanzania's forests.

According to officials from the Norwegian embassy in Dar es Salaam, the drop in funding for the REDD+ projects is, in fact, a sign of success.

"The annual amount of funds has decreased along with the progress of projects under the REDD+ portfolio as most of them have been completed, and consequently the annual spending is less than at the start of the partnership," said Berit Tvete, councillor on environment and climate change.

Some pilot and research projects were completed in the last two years, and have delivered "new knowledge and valuable lessons", she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by email.

According to Tvete, the embassy is still implementing its original plan, which was extended to 2016 since not all the funds had been committed. Two projects are ongoing, and a third is still being drafted, she added.

Across many parts of Tanzania, poor households look to forests as a source of income, harvesting trees to supply a growing market in charcoal and timber.

That activity has contributed to the loss of 420,000 hectares (around 1 million acres) of rainforest every year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization's 2012 State of the World's Forests report.

So far, one Norway-funded project has trained 50,000 local people in sustainable forest management, while another has established land-use plans for 82,754 hectares of land, said the REDDX report.

The REDD+ initiative has also helped establish carbon monitoring for seven types of trees and reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, it added.

BIG INVESTMENT

Norway intends to fulfil the promise it made in 2008 and support the rest of the projects through completion, Tvete said.

"The intention of the current support is to make it possible for Tanzania to participate in results-based REDD+ funding schemes," she said.

But there are no "concise plans" for additional REDD+ funding from Norway, Tvete added.

Faustine Ninga of the independent Tanzania Natural Resources Forum is confident Norway won't abandon its investment in Tanzania's forest-saving efforts.

He pointed to another REDD+ project, the National Carbon Monitoring Centre, one of the projects funded by Norway, which is being set up to measure, report and verify carbon levels in the country's forest ecosystems.

"Since this is a big investment, it would be futile to let it go," he said.

But without an official commitment from Norway of further funding, the future of REDD+ in Tanzania remains uncertain.

For now, according to the REDDX report, the government is working with the World Bank to secure around $3.5 million to consolidate its REDD+ preparation efforts and make sure the good work done so far doesn't go to waste.
Deutsche Bank posts surprise profit, aims to speed up cuts

By Arno Schuetze and Jonathan Gould

FRANKFURT, April 28 (Reuters) - Deutsche Bank posted a surprise net profit in the first quarter that was helped by lower litigation costs, lifting its shares, and said it saw 2016 as the peak of a restructuring drive.

Germany's flagship lender said on Thursday its quarterly net income fell 58 percent to 236 million euros ($268 million) after a slump by its investment bank in volatile markets and its departure from certain businesses.

But that beat analysts' average expectation for a net loss of 249 million euros, and the bank's shares rose 2.6 percent in a market that was down by 1.2 percent.

"On an operating basis, the year is looking in line. The first couple of months were very slow, especially compared with how they normally are," Chief Executive John Cryan said during an analyst call.

But he said an acceleration of legal settlements and restructuring could lead to higher costs in the remainder of the year at the bank, which announced an overhaul last October to restore profitability after its valuation sank following a series of scandals and fallout from a market rout in Asia.

"The issue is that we want to get an awful lot done this year," Cryan said.

Despite the rise in the bank's share price, it is still down 24 percent since the start of the year and has recovered little since a selloff of European bank shares in February on concerns about their ability to cope with a low-growth, low interest-rate environment.

Chief Financial Officer Marcus Schenck said he expected the bank's costs to remain flat this year.

"We are looking into potentially accelerating some of the cost measures that we have planned until 2018 as a reaction to what we are seeing in the market," he said.

Deutsche Bank is considering further reductions of its trader headcount, cancelling contracts with external advisors for regulatory issues speeding up the revamp of its information technology and Asian service centres.

While Deutsche Bank booked 1.4 billion euros less in legal costs in the quarter than in the year-earlier period, it expects to settle other big legal cases this year, such as ones involving allegations of fraud related to U.S.-mortgages and alleged money laundering in Russia.

That will result in a sharp increase in the litigation bill in the coming quarters, although the total is expected to remain below last year's 5.2 billion euros.

Cryan, who this year urged investors to be patient with his revamp of the bank, said the restructuring efforts would peak in 2016 and mostly be completed in 2017.

"POSITIVE SURPRISE" ON COST SIDE

Union Investment, one of Deutsche Bank's top investors, said Deutsche Bank had surprised positively on investment banking income as well as costs for litigation, restructuring and the divestment of non-core assets.

"The development of the capital side is negative. That remains a challenge, but there is no acute need for a capital increase," fund manager Helmut Hipper said.

Deutsche Bank reiterated that it was confident of complying with bank regulators' demands regarding its capital cushion.

It is targeting a stable core tier 1 ratio of 11.1 percent at year-end, despite a 0.4 percentage point drop in the first quarter.

While the sale of its Chinese Hua Xia unit will boost the ratio by 0.5 percent, greater clarity on bank rules also means that Deutsche Bank has another year - until the end of 2019 - to show a required reading of 12.25 percent.

"We see downside risk on litigation - we model 3.6 billion euros in 2016 - which is likely to eventually necessitate a capital raise, in our view," analysts at Citi said in a note.

Deutsche Bank's revenues from trading debt and equities dropped 29 percent in the first quarter as sliding commodity prices, worries about the Chinese economy and the low interest rate environment kept clients from trading, investing or issuing new securities.

European peers like Barclays and U.S. rivals such as Goldman Sachs have suffered similar trends in their investment banking activities.

Deutsche Bank also saw effects of its retreat from individual business lines such as secondary trading of mortgage-backed securities. It has also largely pulled out of Latin America and countries such as Russia and South Korea, except for some client-related forex trading activities.

Despite having fired so-called front office staff as traders, the headcount at the investment bank -- now called Global Markets -- increased by 4 percent, while lower bonuses brought total compensation down by 22 percent in the quarter.
Mozambique boosts security in Maputo due to demonstration fears

MAPUTO, April 28 (Reuters) - Mozambican security forces were deployed on the streets of the capital Maputo on Thursday after rumours of planned anti-government demonstrations circulated on social media, witnesses said.

Several posts on social media in recent days said new groups were planning to demonstrate on Saturday to vent popular anger at secret government borrowing which could cripple the economy in one of the world's poorest countries.

Armoured vehicles packed with police were deployed on major street corners in Maputo although there was no sign of civil unrest, two witnesses told Reuters.

Police on Wednesday warned the public not to do anything to unsettle the "harmonious coexistence" in Maputo.

"We will not tolerate any conduct that undermines the order security and public tranquillity," a police statement said, referring to rumours of demonstrations.

The International Monetary Fund said on Saturday that Mozambique had admitted to having over one billion dollars of undisclosed debt.
UK suspends Mozambique aid after borrowing scandal

JOHANNESBURG, April 28 (Reuters) - Britain is withholding all financial aid payments to Mozambique following Maputo's admission of as much as $1.35 billion of previously undisclosed borrowing, much of it for maritime security.
Italy minister says will tell Austria Brenner fence "unacceptable"

ROME, April 28 (Reuters) - Plans by Austria to curb migrant flows by building a fence at the Alpine Brenner Pass between the two countries are "unacceptable", Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said on Thursday.

Alfano said the plans were even more unjustified because the numbers of migrants passing from Italy to Austria were at their lowest levels for many years, adding that he would say so "very clearly" to his Austrian counterpart at a meeting in Rome later on Thursday.

"The logic of raising barriers is unacceptable," Alfano told Canale 5 in a television interview.

"I will tell him very clearly that unilateral decisions go against European rules," Alfano said when asked what message he would have for Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka.

Migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa are crossing the Mediterranean to Italy in growing numbers and Austria has said Rome must stop them travelling on towards northern Europe.

Austria outlined plans on Wednesday to erect a 370 metre-long fence at the Brenner Pass, which is the busiest route through the Alps for heavy goods vehicles.

The Austrian parliament on the same day passed tough new asylum measures - including one under which migrants could be turned away at the border within an hour - that could be activated if lawmakers decided there was a threat to public order.
Eight charged with sedition in Thailand over Facebook criticism of draft charter

BANGKOK, April 28 (Reuters) - Thai police charged eight people with sedition and computer crimes on Thursday, part of fresh wave of arrests as Thailand cracks down on online dissent before a referendum on a military-backed draft constitution.

The eight were detained by troops on Wednesday over Facebook comments criticizing the draft, which has been denounced by groups on both sides of Thailand's political divide ahead of the Aug. 7 referendum.

Police said the eight had been charged over comments critical of the junta and the constitution.

The charges follow arrests over the past week of anti-junta activists who have held gatherings around the Thai capital amid growing criticism of the draft charter.

Critics say the charter entrenches the military's political influence. Among other things, it proposes an unelected upper house Senate to include a handful of top military and police commanders.
Myanmar bans lucrative logging in bid to preserve forests

By Timothy Mclaughlin and Aung Hla Tun

YANGON, April 28 (Reuters) - Myanmar has banned lucrative logging operations as the newly-elected government of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi steps up a battle on deforestation, an environment official said on Thursday.

Myanmar's rich forests are among its most valuable natural resources, but they have been plundered by logging that helped fund the former military regime that ran the country for 49 years, before reforms began in 2011.

In April 2014, Myanmar banned export of raw timber logs to slow deforestation and boost its own production. By 2010, forest cover had shrunk to 47 percent of land area from 58 percent in 1990, Forestry Ministry data show.

Despite the ban, illegal logging has thrived in northeast Myanmar, where valuable teak and rosewood are smuggled over the border to neighbouring China, forest watchdog the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has said.

"We have been reducing timber extraction, and now we have decided to stop logging completely," said John Swe Ba, a managing director at Myanmar's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation.

"This measure will cover teak and other hardwoods all across the country," he added.

Legal logging has also played a major role in ravaging the environment. State-owned Myanma Timber Enterprise (MTE), overseen by Swe Ba's ministry, has a monopoly on the formal timber sector, but subcontracts work to numerous companies.

That body was targeted by United States sanctions until 2014, when the Treasury Department gave it an initial one-year waiver to work with the U.S.-based International Wood Products Association, extended in July 2015 for two more years.

"Methods of over-harvesting include felling a greater number of logs of a particular tree species and extracting logs smaller in diameter than recommended," said the EIA, which is based in Britain.

"As such, the legal forest sector practices in Myanmar are a significant contributor to deforestation and forest degradation," the watchdog added in its 2015 report.

Measures are needed to save the jobs of more than 17,000 employees in government departments working on timber production, Swe Ba added, without saying what they might be.
GRAINS-Soybeans prices weaken as Argentina rains abate

By Nigel Hunt

LONDON, April 28 (Reuters) - U.S. soybeans were lower on Thursday as drier weather in Argentina after the recent deluge inspired a bout of profit taking, while corn and wheat edged higher on a softer dollar.

The Chicago Board of Trade's most-active soybean contract was off 0.4 percent at $10.24-1/4 a bushel by 1105 GMT.

"The soybean market has been rallying on South American weather concerns. Brazil has now seen some showers and rain in Argentina has abated," Commonwealth Bank of Australia analyst Tobin Gorey said.

A third of Argentina's soy farms remain swamped after early April storms. Analysts estimated crop losses at 5 million tonnes as harvesting starts in areas dry enough to support the 30-tonne carbines used to bring in the beans.

Flooding on the Pampas grain belt could end up benefiting U.S. farmers. The weather is improving, but big importers like China are already looking to the Midwest to make up for a likely drop in supply from the South American soybean powerhouse.

"Soybeans are down on profit taking, but there has been damage to Argentina's crop from excessive rains which will decrease production," said Kaname Gokon at brokerage Okato Shoji in Tokyo.

"This is increasing demand for U.S. products."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Wednesday that U.S. exporters sold 393,000 tonnes of soybeans to unknown destinations.

The market noted that forecast rains in Brazil this week would provide welcome relief to a parched corn crop there, but losses from recent dry weather are still widely anticipated.

Chicago corn prices edged up, with the most active contract up 0.3 percent at $3.85-3/4 a bushel.

Dealers said rains this week had slowed the pace of corn plantings in the U.S. Midwest but there appeared unlikely to be any prolonged delays.

"The forecast for next week is looking plenty favourable and the U.S. corn planting is already well ahead of schedule," Gorey of Commonwealth Bank of Australia said, noting the rains were not providing any significant support for prices.
Serbs to vote again in some areas after abuses, could affect result

By Aleksandar Vasovic

BELGRADE, April 28 (Reuters) - Serbia will re-run voting at 15 polling stations after days of bickering among the ruling and opposition parties over alleged irregularities in Sunday's election, a move that could significantly affect the outcome.

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, who wants to take Serbia into the European Union, won the election with 48 percent of the vote, unchanged from 2014. But his Progressive Party's majority in parliament was reduced as more parties attained the five percent vote threshold needed for seats.

A day after the vote, left-wing and ultra-nationalist opposition parties teamed up to demand a recount, claiming election fraud. Vucic responded by accusing the opposition of attempting to rig the vote and influence the Election Commission, and also demanded a recount.

Scattered abuses were reported including missing or vandalised ballots, more votes cast than voters, people voting without identification and one case where a drunkard smashed ballot boxes.

International observers, including rights bodies Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said fundamental freedoms were respected although there was biased media coverage, undue advantage for incumbents and a blurring of state and party activities.

After considering the complaints, the Election Commission said late on Wednesday the vote would be repeated within a week at 15 polling stations around the country, totalling 16,678 voters, although there would be no nationwide recount.

Counting of valid votes, still going on after the election, is expected to be completed on Thursday, the commission said.

While the affected polling places comprise a tiny proportion of the 8,549 voting stations nationwide, the impact could be significant because two political groups are a whisker above the five percent threshold needed to enter parliament.

Those two are the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS)/Dveri, an ultra-nationalist grouping that media reports say is just 48 ballots above the threshold. A leftist alliance grouped around former president Boris Tadic is also just above it.

The partial re-run could reinforce their position or push them below the threshold, in which case their seats - around 13 in each case - would be shared out proportionally among the other parties in parliament.

That would give Vucic's conservative Progressives - currently in line to get 131 seats in the 250-seat assembly - a more comfortable majority.

If DSS-Dveri gets in to parliament, it would bring another pro-Russian, anti-EU voice into the assembly, in addition to the Radicals of Vojislav Seselj, who was recently acquitted of war crimes by the U.N. tribunal in The Hague.

"This is a dangerous gamble by the opposition parties because they can lose what they already have and it could also erode trust in the system," said Milos Damljanovic, head of research at the Belgrade-based BIRN Consultancy.
Belgium, Slovenia rebuked for not applying EU bank bail-in rules

BRUSSELS, April 28 (Reuters) - The European Commission rebuked Belgium and Slovenia on Thursday for not having fully applied EU rules to reduce taxpayers' costs in rescuing failing banks, leading to a delay in the euro zone completing its banking union project.

EU states were required to apply the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive by the end of 2014. Compliance by the 19 states of the euro zone, of which Belgium and Slovenia are members, is a precondition to starting talks on a backstop for the newly established euro zone bank fund, the Single Resolution Fund.

It is the second time that the EU Commission, which is in charge of monitoring the application of EU rules, has warned Belgium and Slovenia.

"If these countries fail to comply within two months, the Commission may decide to refer them to the Court of Justice of the EU," the EU executive said in a press release.

Without bail-in rules in place, Belgian and Slovenian taxpayers are likely to be more exposed to possible new banking crises. The delay in the application of the rules is also slowing down the completion of a banking union, an EU flagship project to increase lenders' financial stability.

One of the missing parts is a backstop to the Single Resolution Fund (SRF). EU finance ministers agreed to start a debate on this issue only after all euro zone states have applied bail-in rules.

The EU institutions and some member states are worried that in case of a broad banking crisis, the SRF may not be sufficient to rescue failing lenders unless it is quickly propped up.

The SRF will reach its target capacity of 55 billion euros ($62.45 billion) through a gradual transition until 2024. This year the fund is expected to reach a capacity of 10 billion euros.

In a document addressed to EU finance ministers in April, France and Italy have urged a debate on the SRF backstop, calling for the euro zone bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, to provide financial support to the SRF. The ESM has a lending capacity of 500 billion euros.
Rare gasoline cargo heads from China to United States

By Ron Bousso and Libby George

LONDON, April 28 (Reuters) - Trading house Trafigura is shipping a rare cargo of gasoline from China to the United States, as the recent weakening of the Asian market after months of stock builds opens up new routes.

Asian gasoline stocks have risen sharply in recent months as traders and refiners betting on strong summer demand for the road fuel in China and other countries ramped up imports and production.

China's teapot refineries, which only recently gained government approval to import crude oil and export products, added to the excess.

Between imports and sky-high production, gasoline prices and refining margins fell sharply in recent weeks as once-importing countries starting to export volumes.

The tanker Dalmacija is currently sailing across the Pacific Ocean after loading a part cargo at the port of Changzhou near Shanghai in early April before stopping at the port of Laizhu in northern China in mid-month to load a further cargo, according to Reuters ship tracking data.

After waiting off the coast of South Korea for a day, the vessel changed direction with orders to go to Houston, Texas, according to the data.

Traders said the tanker, which is on a time charter to Trafigura, was loaded with gasoline or blending components for the fuel, but could end up in Latin America.

East-bound gasoline exports from Asia to the Americas are extremely rare, according to traders, as North and Latin American countries are mostly supplied from the U.S. Gulf Coast and Europe.

"A lot of distillate goes from Asia to Latin America," one trader said. "But on gasoline, it's very unusual."

A gasoline cargo sailing from Asia into the U.S. Gulf - the country's main refining hub - would be even more unusual.

But the drop in Asian prices allowed the arbitrage to open briefly, according to traders, a move that could happen more frequently as refiners and traders in Asia look for the best margins.
Croatia govt moves to boost economic growth, reduce debt

ZAGREB, April 28 (Reuters) - Croatia plans to implement a wide range of reforms in the next 18 months to boost growth and employment, Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic said on Thursday.

Croatia is aiming for growth of 2 percent this year after coming out of a six-year recession in 2015 when the economy grew 1.6 percent. The government aims to reduce the public debt to 80 percent of gross domestic product by the end of its term in 2019, while the budget gap should fall towards 1 percent of GDP.

"We plan to implement key reforms in the next 12 to 18 months. Those reforms are necessary, they are for the benefit of our citizens and their goal is to boost growth and employment," he told a cabinet session.

Zagreb, the newest European Union member, will now present its reforms plan to Brussels to avoid corrective measures due to high debt and deficit.

Unemployment is currently at around 17 percent, while growth prospects would without reforms remain meagre due to a poor business climate and an unreformed economy still dominated by the state.

Oreskovic said the reforms would include fiscal consolidation with an aim to reduce public debt, measures to cut red tape for and reduce various non-taxation fees on businesses, and more transparent and efficient public administration.

Reforms in the loss-making pension and health sectors are also on the agenda as well as improving the efficiency of public companies.

Finance Minister Zdravko Maric told the cabinet session that this year the budget deficit was seen at 2.6 percent of GDP, down from 3.2 percent last year, which should help stabilise the high public debt, currently equivalent to 87 percent of GDP.

"We may even reduce the debt a bit to 86 percent this year," he said.
Biden visits Iraq in show of support amid multiple crises

By Roberta Rampton and Stephen Kalin

ERBIL, Iraq/BAGHDAD, April 28 (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden met Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and other top officials in unannounced visits to Baghdad and Erbil on Thursday to show support for a government battling Islamic State amid political and economic crises.

It was the first visit for Biden, the White House's point person on Iraq, since U.S. forces withdrew in 2011 after nearly nine years of occupation. He was the third and highest-level U.S. official to visit the country this month.

Islamic State, also known as ISIL, seized large portions of Iraq and neighboring Syria in 2014. Iraqi forces have won back some territory, such as the western city of Ramadi, but often after long battles that have left the areas destroyed.

Biden's trip, several months in the planning, is a sign of the progress Washington believes Iraqi forces have made in beating back the militants over the past year and its hope that the northern city of Mosul can be recaptured before U.S. President Barack Obama leaves office in January.

"This is a good indication of the United States' continued support for Prime Minister Abadi's efforts to unify the nation of Iraq to confront ISIL," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

The vice president has close relationships with Iraqi leaders and speaks with them about every 10 days. Still, "there's no substitute for being able to sit down face-to-face," a U.S. official said.

Biden, a longtime U.S. senator before becoming vice president in 2009, said he had been to Iraq almost 30 times during his career.

His first stop on Thursday was Baghdad where he met Abadi and Parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri to discuss "progress" in the fight against Islamic State, including plans to retake Mosul.

"It's real. It's serious. It's committed," Biden told reporters.

Iraqi officials say they will retake Mosul this year but, in private, many question whether that is possible. Biden hopes some progress can be made before the extreme summer heat, a senior administration official said.

He later flew to Erbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, for a 90-minute working dinner with the Kurdistan region's president, Massoud Barzani, to discuss the Mosul offensive in which Kurdish peshmerga forces are expected to have a critical role.

The peshmerga have emerged as a key component of a U.S.-led coalition's strategy to "degrade and destroy" Islamic State, driving the insurgents back in northern Iraq with the help of air strikes despite a financial crisis that has made it difficult to pay salaries.

POLITICAL CRISIS

Biden's trip also served to counter a "misperception in the region" that Iran, which backs powerful Shi'ite Muslim militias fighting Islamic State in Iraq, has undue influence in the nation, the U.S. official added.

But it comes at a turbulent time in Iraqi politics. Abadi has faced resistance to a government overhaul aimed at tackling corruption. He won lawmakers' approval to replace a handful of ministers on Tuesday after delays and disruptions.

The political battle has also sparked populist protests that forced the government to bring back troops from the front lines to secure the capital.

U.S. officials have expressed concern that unrest could distract from the war effort. Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited Baghdad earlier this month to show their support.

"It's been a pretty all-consuming political affair," a senior U.S. official told reporters, noting recent signs of a "calmer trajectory" in the drama.

Obama has said he has seen "momentum" in the efforts of the coalition fighting Islamic State, and recently authorized more U.S. forces to go to Iraq and Syria to help train and assist local fighters.

Their goal is to help Iraqi and Kurdish forces retake Mosul by the end of the year. The United States has already redeployed several thousand troops to Iraq to help defeat Islamic State.

The White House is concerned that not enough is being spent to rebuild parts of Iraq devastated by the fight, a deficit made worse by the low price of oil, Iraq's main revenue source.

The United Nations is urgently seeking $400 million from Washington and its allies for reconstruction, while Obama asked Gulf Arab leaders to assist during a visit to Riyadh last week.

He also discussed the issue with European leaders in London and Hanover, Germany, and told reporters Iraqi reconstruction would be a topic for the G7 meeting in Japan next month and for NATO.

Biden, whose late son Beau spent a year in Iraq with the Army, later spoke with U.S. troops and embassy workers. He showed them a daily tally of the number of U.S. troops serving, killed and injured in the line of duty that he carries in his front suit pocket.

"The history of this region is a nightmare from which everyone is constantly trying to awake," he said, adapting a line from Irish novelist James Joyce.
Italy says uncovers possible plot to attack Rome, arrests suspects

MILAN, April 28 (Reuters) - Italian police issued arrest warrants on Thursday for six people suspected of conspiring to join Islamic State, and court documents said three of them had been discussing possible attacks on the Vatican and the Israeli embassy in Rome.

Four of the suspects - a couple living near Lake Como, a 23-year-old-man and a woman, all of them Moroccans - were detained in Italy on Thursday, Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli told a news conference.

The other two - a Moroccan man and his Italian wife - left Italy last year, travelled to Iraq and Syria and are still on the loose, Romanelli added.

Italy has not suffered the kind of deadly Islamist attacks that hit France and Belgium, but authorities have arrested a number of people suspected of planning assaults.

Transcripts of wire-tapped phone conversations between three of the suspects, contained in the arrest warrant and seen by Reuters, mentioned the possibility of an attack against the Vatican and the Israeli embassy in the Italian capital.

"I swear I will be the first to attack them in this Italy of crusaders, I swear I'll attack it, in the Vatican God willing," one of the arrested men is quoted as telling the man on the run in the transcript.

In a separate conversation with another of the suspects arrested on Thursday, the same man said he wanted to hit the Israeli embassy in Rome and had contacted an Albanian man to get a gun.

"The new aspect here is that we are not talking about a generic indication (of an attack) but a specific person being appointed to act on Italian soil," Romanelli said.

"Rome attracts attention because it is a destination for Christian pilgrims," the prosecutor added.

A lawyer appointed to represent two of the suspects declined to comment, saying he was waiting for court papers.
Lufthansa CEO eyes airline mergers in Europe

By Peter Maushagen

HAMBURG, Germany, April 28 (Reuters) - German airline Lufthansa wants to take part in much-needed industry consolidation in Europe so carriers can compete better with U.S. and Asian rivals, Chief Executive Carsten Spohr said on Thursday.

Spohr told an annual shareholders meeting in Hamburg on Thursday that the five largest airlines in the United States have an 80 percent share of the market, while in Europe the top five have just 40 percent.

"Consolidation is a part of what needs to happen in Europe in order to make the sector more competitive when compared to the United States and Asia," Spohr said.

"As Europe's largest airline, we want to take part in consolidation, not just be a bystander," he told investors.

Lufthansa said late on Wednesday it was looking at ways to bring part-owned Brussels Airlines under its low-cost Eurowings brand, though the Islamic State attacks in Brussels have pushed back the deadline for a decision to August.

Sources have also told Reuters that Lufthansa is considering partnerships, or even takeovers, of Scandanavian carrier SAS and Condor, the airline that belonged to Lufthansa for decades before being bought by Thomas Cook.

Lufthansa is already one of the few European airlines to have driven merger activity in the region, snapping up Swiss, Austrian and bmi several years ago.

But the restructuring of Austrian proved time consuming, while Lufthansa eventually sold British Midland to British Airways parent IAG in 2012, meaning not all shareholders are in favour of further merger forays.

"The desire for size has not always suited Lufthansa," Ingo Speich, portfolio manager at shareholder Union Investment, told the meeting.

"Instead of casting an eye over Brussels, Condor or SAS, Lufthansa should invest the capital into its balance sheet, restructuring and renewing its fleet," Speich said.

IAG too has been on a buying charge, adding Vueling and Aer Lingus to a stable that started with British Airways and Iberia.

British holiday carrier Monarch said on Thursday it was considering acquisitions too, while Qatar Airways said on Wednesday it had increased its stake in IAG to 12 percent.

But several analysts and sector bankers have told Reuters they feel there are few major deals to be done, with small deals or cooperation agreements instead more likely.
Croatia unveils reforms to boost growth and cut debt

By Igor Ilic

ZAGREB, April 28 (Reuters) - Croatia plans to implement a wide range of reforms in the next 18 months to boost growth and employment, Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic said on Thursday.

The government is aiming for growth of 2 percent this year after coming out of a six-year recession in 2015, when the economy grew 1.6 percent.

It aims to reduce public debt to 80 percent of gross domestic product by the end of its term in 2019, and the budget gap to 1 percent of GDP.

"We plan to implement key reforms in the next 12 to 18 months. Those reforms are necessary, they are for the benefit of our citizens and their goal is to boost growth and employment," Oreskovic told a cabinet session.

Zagreb, the newest European Union member, will present its reform plans to Brussels to avoid corrective measures due to high debt and deficit. Unemployment is currently around 17 percent.

Oreskovic said the reforms would include measures to cut red tape and reduce non-tax fees on businesses, and more transparent and efficient public administration.

Reforms of the loss-making pension and health sectors, including an increase in retirement age from 65 to 67 years, are also on the agenda as well as improving the efficiency of state-run companies.

Finance Minister Zdravko Maric told the cabinet session that this year's budget deficit was expected to be 2.6 percent of GDP, down from 3.2 last year, which should help stabilise public debt currently equivalent to 87 percent of GDP.

"We may even reduce the debt a bit, to 86 percent this year," he said.

The government plans to privatise a portion of its non-strategic assets, including real estate and minority stakes in some firms.

"As a first step we want to reduce our public debt by up to 200 million euros ($227 million) before July, when rating agencies should reassess our policy," Oreskovic told a news conference.

"We hope to change our outlook from negative to stable, which should help reduce our borrowing costs."

Three main rating agencies currently hold Croatia two notches below investment level, with a negative outlook.

Croatia currently spends 3.6 percent of GDP on interest payments.

Oreskovic said the government was planning to start taxing property from 2018 to replace the current system of fees on communal services.
Sudanese police fire tear gas at protests over student's killing

By Khalid Abdelaziz

CAIRO, April 28 (Reuters) - Sudanese police fired tear gas on hundreds who gathered in central Khartoum on Thursday in a second day of protests over the killing of a student at a campus demonstration a day earlier.

"Killing of a student, killing of a nation, down with military rule," protesters chanted.

Protests in Sudan are usually limited to campuses and Thursday's demonstration was unusual in that it took place in the centre of the capital.

Clashes also erupted later at another protest by hundreds in front of Khartoum University. Police used batons and students hurled rocks.

Students had initially demonstrated on Wednesday against government plans to sell off Khartoum University buildings, before gunmen in plain clothes opened fire on them, killing 20-year-old Mohammed al Sadek.

His funeral later in the day turned into an anti-government protest by students, witnesses said.

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who took power in a 1989 coup, brooks little dissent in Sudan, which has been suffering from an economic crisis since South Sudan seceded in 2011, costing Khartoum more then 70 percent of its oil revenues.

Bashir is wanted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court on charges of masterminding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes during Sudan's Darfur conflict. He denies wrongdoing.

Last week Amnesty International called for a thorough and impartial investigation into violent attacks against students after an 18-year-old student was shot dead.
Russia's capital amnesty to end July 1 - Finance Ministry

MOSCOW, April 28 (Reuters) - The Russian government plans to end in July its amnesty on people returning capital to Russia without facing tax or other penalties, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Thursday.

"The amnesty's terms are limited," Siluanov said, adding that declarations can be submitted until July 1.

"We are not planning to extend it."

After huge capital outflows in 2014 as relations with the West deteriorated over Ukraine and oil prices plunged, President Vladimir Putin offered an amnesty on people returning capital to the country.

The deadline for returning capital to Russia was originally Dec. 31, 2015, but has been extended until July 1.

Siluanov also said on Thursday that Russia would accede to an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development agreement on automatic exchange of information in tax matters.
Libya outlines ambitious plans to restore oil output

By Ahmad Ghaddar and Aidan Lewis

LONDON/TRIPOLI, April 28 (Reuters) - Libya's National Oil Corporation has ambitious plans to restore output to pre-2011 levels after years of violence and disruption, officials said.

Oil output is now less than a quarter of the 1.6 million barrels per day Libya pumped before Muammar Gaddafi fell in 2011, and the National Oil Corporation (NOC) in Tripoli hopes to ramp it up swiftly with the backing of a new unity government.

Full recovery could take years because of shutdowns by disgruntled workers, political rivalry and attacks by Islamic State militants.

Militants hit the al-Ghani, Mabrouk, and Dahra fields in the Sirte basin over a year ago, forcing the NOC to declare force-majeure on 11 fields, and there have been further attacks since then.

An NOC official in Tripoli told Reuters that at least 200,000 bpd of capacity had been damaged in attacks on oil fields in the western Sirte basin, Libya's most prolific.

It may take the NOC until late 2017 or 2018 to bring those fields back to full capacity, the official said, if it can afford the repairs.

The first phase of a three-stage recovery plan can be implemented within three months, a second NOC official in Tripoli said, allowing fields like El Sharara and Elephant, with a combined capacity of around 430,000 bpd, to come back on stream.

But other fields, including those that have been directly attacked and others that feed via pipeline to Libya's largest export terminals at Ras Lanuf and Es Sider, may take longer to bring back online, he added.

Phase two covers six to eight months down the line while the final phase covers fields that will take between eight months and several years to reopen.

Infrastructure damage at the ports could take years to repair and will delay the restart of the fields feeding to them. Another big factor is the cost of the repairs.

"All those plans depend on security. If proper and robust security at the oil facilities is not in place, then our plans will be in jeopardy," the second official said.

Earlier this year militants attacked Ras Lanuf and Es Sider, which can handle 600,000 bpd of crude exports. The two terminals had been closed since December 2014, after an attack on Es Sider.

The latest assault left just 12 out of 32 storage tanks at the terminals operational, NOC chairman Mustafa Sanalla told Reuters in February. It may take NOC "many years" to rebuild damaged "long lead items" at the ports, he added.

MODEST, CONDITIONAL RAMP-UP

A U.N.-backed unity government's move to Tripoli last month raised hopes that Libya could restart idled fields and reopen export terminals, and the NOC in Tripoli says it could quickly double production to over 700,000 bpd, if political and security conditions stabilise.

The government is still struggling to gain clear support, especially in the east. A parallel NOC in the east exported a shipment of oil independently for the first time this week, further complicating the prospects for recovery.

"We are focused now on how to resume oil production. In some places, we'll just have to open the valves," Sanalla told Reuters last week. "But first of all, we need to have stability."

Industry sources do not expect production to increase beyond 600,000 bpd within the next few months.

"If the new unity government is successful in asserting some control, then output should recover, but only slowly and with setbacks," Energy Aspects analyst Richard Mallinson told the Reuters Global Oil Forum earlier this month.

SECURITY CHALLENGE

The NOC hopes the unity government can create a unified security force to protect oil infrastructure.

For now, security will depend on an array of armed factions including the Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG), a semi-official corps that has blockaded ports and whose attempt in 2014 to export crude independently was thwarted by U.S. special forces.

PFG leader Ibrahim Jathran says he supports the unity government and is ready to reopen the ports of Zueitina, Es Sider, and Ras Lanuf, and Sanalla has said the NOC would accept the PFG as part of a future, national security force.

But the blockade and the PFG's refusal to allow storage tanks to be emptied at threatened terminals have infuriated the NOC. Meanwhile a rival PFG faction, Battalion 152, has said it is loyal to eastern military commander Khalifa Haftar, whose political allies have blocked the eastern parliament from approving the unity government.

The unity government said on Sunday it feared further attacks on coastal infrastructure and oil fields, and that it had received reports that these were threatened not only by Islamic State but also by Gaddafi loyalists and Sudanese rebels.

Financing could be a challenge in the short term as Libya has been hard hit by falling oil prices and has had to bear the double burden of a price crash and constrained output simultaneously. .

Sanalla has estimated the cost of lost production at more than $68 billion for the past three years, and says Libya loses $30 million every day because of shutdowns. Security worries in some areas mean the NOC has yet to assess the full cost to repair damaged facilities.
Portugal's BPI shareholders reject CEO's re-election

By Sergio Goncalves

PORTO, April 28 (Reuters) - Shareholders in Portugal's Banco BPI on Thursday rejected a proposed re-election of chief executive Fernando Ulrich, in a sign of growing tensions between two main shareholders.

Spain's Caixabank, which owns a 44 percent stake in BPI, last week launched a takeover bid for the Portuguese lender despite opposition from Angolan investor Isabel dos Santos, who has a 18.6 percent stake.

BPI said in a statement that only 63.6 percent of shareholders voted for two proposals at a shareholder meeting on Thursday, falling short of the two-thirds majority necessary.

As well as the re-election of the CEO, the vote would also have given authorisation for any potential capital increase of up to 500 million euros.

The current CEO, who is 63, and the board stay on for another year, but under the current rule CEOs can only be re-elected if they are younger than 62. BPI has not announced plans for any capital increases, and if a capital hike is needed shareholders can still take it to a vote.

BPI chairman Artur Santos Silva said the bank would put the two proposals to a new vote after July 1, when a change in the law on shareholder voting limitations takes effect.

"I am extremely calm," said Santos Silva. "The problem of the shareholder limitation has a short shelf life, we have a takeover bid by the largest shareholder underway."

A 20 percent voting rights cap has so far allowed dos Santos to fend off Caixabank's attempts to control the bank, but the cap will be lifted after a government decree announced last week. Dos Santos, the daughter of Angola's president, has accused the government of making an "unprecedented and clearly partial" decision in changing the law.

Caixabank launched a bid for the 56 percent of BPI it does not already own on April 18, offering 1.113 euros per share.

Santos Silva also said BPI was in close contact with the European Central Bank on the bank's exposure to Angola, where it has a 50.1 percent holding in bank BFA. The exposure, if it is not reduced, could lead to daily fines of up to 162,000 euros.
South Asia clothing industry can employ millions more women, boost growth - World Bank

By Rina Chandran

MUMBAI, April 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - South Asia's clothing and textiles industry can create millions of jobs for the region's working-age women, boosting economic growth and helping improve children's health and education, a World Bank report said.

The industry is already the most female-intensive in much of the region, women making up 71 percent of its workforce in Sri Lanka, 35 percent in India and 34 percent in Bangladesh. In Pakistan, its share of women workers is second to agriculture.

"South Asia needs to create jobs in labour-intensive industries where it enjoys a comparative advantage - such as apparel - to employ its burgeoning youth and attract more women into the workforce," the report released on Thursday said.

"South Asian households with women working, especially in the textile and apparel sector in India and Pakistan, tend to have fewer young children on average," it said.

Higher wages in China, the world's largest clothing exporter, are driving global brands to seek cheaper alternatives in countries including Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

South Asia is best placed to lure these businesses with its lower wages and expanding young population, even though recent industrial disasters have raised questions about safety and the conditions of workers in these countries.

The industry employs about 4.7 million workers in the formal sector, and several million more informally, making up about 40 percent of the region's manufacturing employment.

Its ability to lure unskilled and semi-skilled women is particularly important, as South Asia has one of the lowest female labour force participation rates in the world of about 32 percent, compared with East Asia's 62 percent, the report said.

MORE WOMEN WORKERS, FEWER CHILDREN

Countries with greater female labour force participation generally see later marriages, fewer children, better nutrition and school enrolment, and higher gross domestic product, according to the World Bank.

"The apparel sector offers a promising and realistic entry point for women into the formal labour force, thanks to a high wage premium compared to agriculture," the report said.

"As apparel exports increase, the rising demand for female labour pulls women from agriculture and other informal sectors."

Average wages in the industry range from about $0.51 per hour in Bangladesh to about $1.06 in India, compared with $2.60 in China, according to 2012 data compiled by the World Bank.

As output increases to meet higher demand, a 1 percent increase in the expected wage raises the likelihood of women joining the labour force by between 16 percent in Pakistan and 89 percent in Sri Lanka, the World Bank estimates.

Despite the large number of women the industry employs, however, female workers lack a voice and representation in Bangladesh, the region's largest exporter by value.

Regulatory capacity is also weak in Bangladesh, even though scrutiny has increased in the wake of the Rana Plaza disaster.

Three years after the disaster that killed more than 1,100 factory workers, the rights and safety of workers in the region are in greater focus, but progress in fixing problems in the supply chain is slow, experts and activists say.

In India, compliance is limited in the informal sector, where most workers are employed. Overtime is a serious problem, and child labour is common, with reports also of exploitation and sexual harassment of women.

In addition, the region faces growing competition from Southeast Asian countries including Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam.

But with stricter controls, better wages and higher-value products, South Asia's apparel and textile industry can retain its competitive edge, the report said.

"Given that much of apparel production continues to be labour intensive, the potential to create more and better jobs is immense," it added.
Turkish military kills 11 Islamic State militants in northern Syria -sources

ANKARA, April 28 (Reuters) - Turkey's military returned fire on Islamic State positions in northern Syria on Thursday, killing 11 members of the militant group, military sources said.

The military returned fire after its artillery near the border town of Karkamis was hit by mortars, the sources said. Seven militants firing mortars were killed and four more were killed in a vehicle, the sources said.

Karkamis is just across the border from the Islamic State-controlled Syrian town of Jarablus. It is also about 100 km (62 miles) east of the Turkish border town of Kilis, which has been frequently hit by rocket fire from Islamic State-controlled Syrian territory in recent months, killing civilians.

Turkey has repeatedly fired back at Islamic State positions from its border with Syria, but has said it needs greater support from Western allies, citing the difficulty of hitting moving targets with howitzers.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying this week that the United States would deploy a rocket launcher system near the stretch of border that has come under attack.

A senior U.S. military official has confirmed the matter was under discussion but declined to comment further.
U.N. council removes 12-year-old arms embargo on Ivory Coast

UNITED NATIONS, April 28 (Reuters) - The United Nations Security Council lifted a 12-year-old arms embargo on Ivory Coast on Thursday and renewed the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the West African state for a final year.

The world's top cocoa grower has emerged from a decade-long crisis that culminated in a brief 2011 war to become a rising African economic star. The U.N. arms embargo was imposed in 2004 after an initial 2002-2003 civil war.

"(Ivory Coast's) example proves that security endeavors can attain their ends when assisting a country in extracting itself from a crisis," French U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre told the council after the unanimously voted .

U.N. peacekeepers, who were deployed in 2004, will leave Ivory Coast by April 30, 2017, according to the resolution. The United Nations will then have two months to complete the mission's closure. There are currently some 6,900 U.N. troops and police in Ivory Coast, according to the U.N. website.

The Security Council removed the arms embargo and an asset freeze and travel ban on six people, including former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo who is on trial before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

In 2014, the Security Council partially eased the arms embargo on Ivory Coast and removed a ban on its diamond exports, a measure that U.N. experts said had failed to stop illicit trafficking.
"Highly likely" Ukraine will receive next IMF loans in June - finance minister

By Natalia Zinets and Matthias Williams

KIEV, April 28 (Reuters) - Ukraine thinks it is highly likely to receive its next aid tranche of $1.7 billion from the International Monetary Fund in June but is in a comfortable position to service its existing debt, new Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk said on Thursday.

A day after Kiev passed energy tariff reforms demanded by the IMF, Danylyuk said in an interview that parliament would reconvene in May to pass laws that are a further precondition to securing the IMF funds.

In its negotiations with the IMF, he said Ukraine would seek to "fix" aspects of its planned pension reforms but declined to go into specifics regarding what Kiev might want to change.

With renewed cooperation there was a "very very high likelihood" of Ukraine receiving a long-delayed third tranche of IMF loans in June, he said.

"We are in a good shape now," he said, when asked if Ukraine would be able to service its debt this year.

He stressed that he wanted Ukraine and the IMF to work as equals rather than seeing the IMF as a source for handouts.

"We are not looking at the IMF as a chocolate bar that you eat and how much energy and how many kilometers, miles you can run before you get another chocolate bar," he said.

"They need to understand that we are equal partners."

Danylyuk joined Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman's newly formed cabinet in April, which took power after months of political turmoil that stalled reforms and Ukraine's efforts to stamp out endemic corruption.

Ukraine's chief international backers - the IMF, the U.S. government and the European Union, have pressed Kiev to accelerate the pace of reforms, and the EU has publicly warned it not to renege on existing commitments.

The economy has been battered by a Russian-backed separatist conflict in its industrial east, although Danylyuk said the economy has bottomed out. He declined to give precise predictions for growth this year.

Danylyuk said he wanted to turn the finance ministry into an "engine that drives reform" to show potential foreign investors that Ukraine aims to make their life easier.

A priority is transforming an inefficient tax office by merging it over the next two years with the customs service to create an efficient, combined system that will crack down on corrupt practices.

These include customs offices allowing companies to forge documents to misrepresent goods in order to reduce their tariff burden.

"If it's not one system, then some goods that enter Ukraine are just lost or turn out to be something else. What we have is cars coming, but they're sold as teapots. It's a real mess," he said.

He also wants to slash the role of regional tax inspectors by minimising the number of times they audit companies and reduce red tape by cutting the amount of documents companies have to file.

More broadly, the new government will not look to ditch a $17.5 billion aid package agreed with the Fund by the previous government, he said, but didn't rule out making changes later.

"Finding exactly what are the solutions, that's where we will have discussions with the IMF. On pension reform, because that needs to be fixed, eventually, the vision of it. And many other areas," he said.

Groysman's predecessor Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk struggled to pass unpopular reforms in parliament.

Danylyuk said the government would smooth the passage of such bills by engaging with lawmakers as opposed to trying to strong-arm them into accepting reforms as a fait accompli.
Azerbaijan says one civilian killed, six wounded by separatist gunfire

BAKU, April 28 (Reuters) - Azerbaijan said one civilian was killed and six were wounded by gunfire from the breakaway Armenian-backed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh early on Thursday, as tensions simmered weeks after an eruption of clashes.

Both sides said they exchanged fire overnight and blamed each other for starting the fighting.

A Moscow-brokered ceasefire halted four days of violence in the South Caucasus region on April 5, but sporadic shooting is still frequent at night.

"One resident of Chemenli village in Agdam region was killed, six others were injured and taken to the hospital in a serious condition," the Azeri prosecutor general's office said in a statement.

Azerbaijan's defence ministry said in a statement that it had carried out "retaliatory strikes" only on military targets after Nagorno-Karabakh's army hit its positions and villages from multiple rocket launchers.

The defence ministry accused the Armenian-backed rebel region's armed forces of violating the ceasefire more than 117 times with the use of mortars and howitzers. It added that it had had to return fire.

The defence ministry in the rebel region accused the Azeri armed forces of violating the ceasefire and shelling their positions from tanks, mortars, multiple rocket launchers.

It also accused Azeri armed forces of violating the Geneva convention by taking up positions close to populated areas.

Nagorno-Karabakh is a mountainous region within Azerbaijan's borders, populated mainly by ethnic Armenians who reject Azerbaijan's rule. With support from Armenia, they fought a war in the early 1990s to establish de facto control over the territory.
U.N. urges North Korea to stop "further provocative actions"

UNITED NATIONS, April 28 (Reuters) - The United Nations urged North Korea on Thursday to stop "any further provocative actions" after the Asian state test-fired what appeared to be two intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

"These types of actions by the DPRK (North Korea) are extremely troubling," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

Both missile tests on Thursday failed, a South Korean official said, in a setback for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the run-up to next week's ruling party congress.
French wheat exports await Indonesia approval

By Valerie Parent

PARIS, April 28 (Reuters) - French wheat exports to Indonesia are on hold as traders await the approval of a food safety agreement between the two countries, something exporters say is being delayed by Indonesia in retaliation against a French palm oil tax plan.

A farm ministry official from Indonesia, the world's largest producer of palm oil, said the delay was a procedural one, and denied any link to the proposed tax.

France's additional tax on palm oil, due to come into force next year, is billed as an environmental levy on a product associated with deforestation and other environmental damage.

The delay to exports from the European Union's largest grain exporter was on the agenda of France's Secretary of State for Trade Matthias Fekl when he travelled to Indonesia earlier this month.

A spokesman for Fekl said trade barriers were discussed, and that he was unable to give further details. Exporters said they had learned that the palm oil tax was at the root of the delay.

"The door is closed in retaliation against the project to tax palm oil," one exporter said. "Indonesia is losing a supplier at a time when French wheat is competitive."

The problem comes just a few months after France's first wheat exports to Indonesia since the 2008/09 season as a number of factors make French wheat affordable for the country.

Indonesian wheat importers bought 300,000 tonnes of French wheat earlier this year.

That was just before a new Indonesian food safety law came into force under which all grain, fruit and vegetable must be tested by special laboratories before being exported.

France has asked that its own testing systems be recognised under this legislation. It has yet to sign a deal to that effect, and French exporters in the meantime cannot clear their exports.

Indonesia's agricultural authorities denied any link with the palm oil tax.

"We're now in verification process (on the food safety deal) ... As long as it's not done yet, they can't export yet, and this process is long," Banun Harpini, head of Indonesia's Agriculture Quarantine Body at the agriculture ministry, told Reuters.

She added that it had offered France to apply for an alternative laboratory registration but Paris had not done so yet.

France's palm oil tax proposal has yet to come into force but Indonesia, along with second-largest producer Malaysia, has protested against it, calling it discriminatory.

Indonesia raised the issue at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) earlier in March.

A senior Indonesian government official said he was not aware of any restrictions on French agricultural products.
Seeing shared threats, Turkey sets up military base in Qatar

DOHA, April 28 (Reuters) - Turkey deployed soldiers to a new military base in Qatar on Thursday as part of a security agreement which visiting Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said would help counter threats to both countries.

The move marks a strengthening of cooperation between two countries that have both provided support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and backed rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Davutoglu told students at Qatar University that the base, Turkey's first overseas military installation in the Middle East, was not intended for any specific operation but was a "presence for stability".

"I came here and I met with our officers. I told them Qatar is your second home, you are not in a foreign country," he said.

"I can tell you now that the security and stability of Qatar is like the security and stability of Turkey. We want a stable and secure Gulf. Turkey and Qatar, we have the same destiny," he added. "We face the same threats."

He said the number of soldiers would be specified later and did not give details on the size or location of the base.

Ahmet Demirok, Turkey's ambassador to Qatar, told Reuters in December that some 3,000 ground troops would be stationed at the base as well as air and naval units, military trainers and special operations forces.

Establishment of the base, part of an agreement signed in 2014 and ratified by Turkey's parliament in June, intensifies its partnership with Qatar at a time of rising instability and a perceived waning of U.S. interest in the Middle East.
Hackers leak stolen Kenyan foreign ministry documents

By George Obulutsa

NAIROBI, April 28 (Reuters) - Online activists who claim ties to Anonymous said on Thursday they had begun to leak documents from Kenya's foreign ministry as part of a campaign to expose government and corporate corruption across Africa.

HackRead, a cyber security news site, reported that a hacker affiliated with "Operation Africa" had told it: "In (a) few days you will receive full disclosure of the data - We the Anonymous will stand against corruption, child abuse, and child labour!"

A link to a sample of 95 documents was published to a widely known Anonymous Twitter account, part of what it claimed was a one-terabyte stash of date from Kenya's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The sample documents cannot be read using standard Web browsers but can be viewed using TOR.

The documents, viewed by Reuters, appear to consist of mostly routine correspondence between Kenyan foreign ministry officials and other diplomatic missions, trade partners and international companies around the world.

A news release in January by activists described Operation Africa as an effort to mount computer attacks on governments in Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Sudan and South Sudan and Ethiopia. The Kenyan government was not on the initial list.

The Kenyan ministry documents leaked on Thursday included email discussions of security preparations for diplomatic trips, trade deals and a status report on the conflict between Sudan and South Sudan, dated from the middle of this month.

One document, from last August, contains a warning to ministry staff of hacking attempts using phishing techniques containing links to malware.

A spokesman for the ministry declined to comment on the alleged breach and referred Reuters to Kenya's Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

"NOTHING TOP SECRET"

The ICT Cabinet Secretary Joseph Mucheru told Reuters the attack was a phishing attack, as opposed to a hacking attack on the foreign affairs ministry's computer systems, and that no classified material had been accessed.

"What they did is they managed to send emails to people, and people clicked the links to change their credentials, and as a result they were able to access emails," he told Reuters by phone. "Our systems have remained safe and stable."

"What we have been able to identify is mostly on security clearance 'Open' as opposed to 'Restricted' or 'Top Secret'."

Mucheru said they were working to alert government employees on how to avoid being tricked by phishers and hackers.

In January, Operation Africa hackers said they were seeking the dismantling of corporations and governments in Africa they blamed for corruption, child abuse, environmental problems and Internet censorship.

In February, hackers using the Operation Africa banner said they had breached a South African government database and leaked names, email addresses and passwords of some 1,500 government employees, security site Softpedia reported.

Hackers also claimed credit that month for attacking the Ugandan Finance Ministry and a firm supplying video services to the Rwandan government, Softpedia reported. In February and March they claimed to have stolen data from employees of Tanzania Telecommunications and defaced the website of a Kenyan oil refinery, according to HackRead.
Kyrgyz authorities search Centerra unit Kumtor's office

TORONTO, April 28 (Reuters) - Canadian miner Centerra Gold Inc said prosecutors and state law enforcement agencies had conducted a search at the Bishkek offices of its subsidiary Kumtor Gold Co on Thursday and its shares fell nearly 9 percent.

Centerra, which operates Kyrgyzstan's biggest gold mine, Kumtor, said the search was to collect documents related to a criminal case alleging financial violations by its subsidiary.

The government has said it is concerned about a dividend paid by Kumtor to Centerra in 2013, Centerra said, adding that the dividend complied with Kyrgyz laws and 2009 agreements governing the Kumtor project.

Toronto-based Centerra and the government have been in drawn-out, on-and-off talks on restructuring the ownership of the mine. The ex-Soviet republic currently holds a 32.7 percent stake in Centerra.

In late December, the government said it had stopped talks with Centerra because the current agreement "ran counter to the country's national interests."

The Kumtor mine is the biggest foreign investment in Kyrgyzstan and accounted for 7.4 percent of the Central Asian nation's GDP in 2014.
US condemns Syria hospital attack, urges Russia to use influence with Damascus

WASHINGTON, April 28 (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department said on Thursday that Syria's air strike on a hospital in Aleppo was "reprehensible," and it called on Russia to use its influence to pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government to stop the attacks.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said Washington was still learning more about the attack on a hospital supported by the Doctors Without Borders medical charity but that there appeared to be several dozen casualties.

"Once again we call on the regime to cease these absolutely senseless attacks, which are of course violations of the cessation of hostilities," Kirby said, calling the bombing "reprehensible."

He said the attack bore the hallmarks of attacks that the Syrian government has carried out on medical facilities and first responders in the past. Kirby said the Syrian cessation of hostilities was "very much in peril" because of the ongoing violations.
Hundreds protest against student's killing in Khartoum

By Khalid Abdelaziz

KHARTOUM, April 28 (Reuters) - Police fired tear gas at hundreds who gathered in central Khartoum and outside the city's main university on Thursday, protesting against the killing of a student at a campus demonstration a day earlier, witnesses said.

Crowds chanted: "Killing of a student, killing of a nation, down with military rule," at the rare rally in the centre of the heavily-guarded Sudanese capital.

Protesters later blocked a road and set fire to tyres outside Khartoum university. Police fired tear gas canisters and used batons to beat protesters who hurled rocks back at them.

Students had initially demonstrated on Wednesday against government plans to sell off Khartoum University buildings, before witnesses said gunmen in plain clothes opened fire on them, killing 20-year-old Mohammed al Sadek.

Anti-government-protests erupted at his funeral later on Wednesday.

The government said on Thursday that unnamed armed groups were trying to undermine security at Sudan's universities - long centres for political activism and debate.

"The government will not allow any disruption to the stability of universities," President Omar Hassan al-Bashir's aide, Ibrahim Mahmoud, told the Sudanese Media Centre, an agency which is close to Sudanese security services.

Bashir, who took power in a 1989 coup backed by the army and Islamists, brooks little dissent in Sudan, which has been suffering from an economic crisis since South Sudan seceded in 2011, costing Khartoum more then 70 percent of its oil revenues.

The former army officer is wanted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court on charges of masterminding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes during Sudan's Darfur conflict. He denies wrongdoing.

"I remain concerned about a number of human rights issues in the country," Aristide Nononsi, the United Nations Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in the Sudan, said in a statement on Thursday.
Business / Economy

by Thobekile Zhou

Government is targeting at attracting foreign direct investment from BRICS nations, Macro-economic Planning and Investment Promotion minister Obert Mpofu has said.To that end, investment roadshows are planned to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS)."Plans are advanced for us to visit BRICS countries to scout for investment and our Diaspora Community."My ministry is working on a comprehensive Diaspora policy to attract Diaspora skills and investments," said Mpofu while addressing a business meeting at the ongoing ZITF on Wednesday.Mpofu said the country's investment climate was affected by "negative stories"."Too many negative stories about the investment climate destroy the country's drive towards attracting investment."Let us make the environment attractive to bring investors to Zimbabwe."
U.N. Security Council considers North Korea response: China

UNITED NATIONS, April 28 (Reuters) - The United Nations Security Council is working on a response to North Korea's latest missile tests, China said on Thursday, while U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Pyongyang to cease "further provocative actions."

North Korea test-fired what appeared to be two intermediate-range ballistic missiles on Thursday, but both failed, a South Korean official said, in a setback for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ahead of next week's ruling party congress.

The 15-member Security Council met to discuss the issue at the request of the United States. China's U.N. Ambassador Liu Jieyi, president of the council for April, said: "We're looking at a response from the Security Council."

Diplomats said the council was likely to issue a statement condemning the latest missile tests.

Japan's U.N. Ambassador Motohide Yoshikawa, also a council member, said that during the closed-door meeting "everybody condemned the latest failed launches of missiles."

"These types of actions by the DPRK (North Korea) are extremely troubling," said Ban's spokesman, Stephane Dujarric.

The tests are the latest in a string of demonstrations of military might that began in January with North Korea's fourth nuclear test and included the launch of a long-range rocket in February. On Saturday, Pyongyang conducted a submarine-launched ballistic missile test.

The tests have increased tension on the Korean peninsula and angered North Korea's ally China. In March, the Security Council imposed harsh new sanctions on North Korea to starve it of money for its nuclear weapons program.
Minnesota police obtain sealed search warrant for Prince's residence

April 28 (Reuters) - Authorities in Minnesota obtained a search warrant in connection with the death of pop star Prince and also won a court order to keep the findings secret, documents showed Thursday.

Chief Deputy Jason Kamerud of the Carver County, Minnesota, sheriff's office cited intense media scrutiny surrounding the death of the 57-year-old performer, in his request for a state district court judge to seal the warrant.

Prince, whose full name was Prince Rogers Nelson, died at his home, a compound known as Paisley Park, in suburban Minneapolis on April 21. Authorities investigating the death found prescription opioid medication on him, according to news outlets on Wednesday from CNN, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and others, that cited anonymous law enforcement sources.

According to documents released by Kamerud on Thursday, the search warrant is for the Paisley Park compound, where Prince also had a recording studio.

In a court order dated Thursday, state District Court Judge Eric Braaten approved sealing the results of the search for 180 days or until the beginning of court proceedings, whichever comes first.
Equatorial Guinea's President Obiang wins re-election

DAKAR, April 28 (Reuters) - Equatorial Guinea's President Teodoro Obiang Nguema has won re-election, securing 93.7 percent of votes cast in an April 24 poll to extend his 37-year rule over the Central African oil producer, a government statement said on Thursday.

Obiang, Africa's longest-serving leader, has ruled the former Spanish colony since 1979 when he staged a bloody military coup and ousted his uncle, who was later executed.

Obiang's closest challenger in the polls was Avelino Mocache Benga, who won just 1.5 percent of the vote, according to complete provisional results. Turnout was 92.9 percent, the statement from Equatorial Guinea's Office of Information and Press said.

With territory divided between the African mainland and islands in the Gulf of Guinea, Equatorial Guinea boasts the highest GDP per capita in Africa thanks to its extensive oil and gas reserves.

However, it ranks 144 out of 187 states listed on the United Nations' 2014 Human Development Index.
Libyan govt urges factions to hold off attacking Islamic State in Sirte

By Ahmed Elumami

TRIPOLI, April 28 (Reuters) - Libya's U.N.-backed unity government called on Thursday on military factions to hold off from any campaign against the Islamic State-controlled city of Sirte until a unified military command structure is created.

The statement came amid signs that factions from both eastern and western Libya could be gearing up for an advance on Sirte though such operations have repeatedly been announced in recent months without taking place.

Islamic State has held Sirte since 2015, taking advantage of a conflict between loose alliances of armed brigades allied to Libya's rival governments to seize a 250 km (155 miles) strip of coastline around the central Mediterranean city, which lies between the eastern and western power bases.

The West is hoping the unity government, which arrived in Tripoli last month, will be able to make Libya's armed factions work together against the ultra-hardline militant group.

The unity government's leadership, or Presidential Council, said on Thursday that it welcomed the "push by various factions and armed forces to fight Islamic State forces in Sirte", but warned that an uncoordinated offensive could lead to civil war.

"In the absence of coordination and unified leadership ... the Council expresses its concern that the battle in Sirte against Daesh (Islamic State) will be a confrontation between those armed forces," it said in a statement, adding that such a conflict would likely benefit Islamic State.

"Accordingly, the Presidential Council, as the supreme commander of army, demands all Libyan military forces wait for it to appoint a joint leadership for the Sirte operation," the statement said.

Since 2014 Libya has had two competing sets of governments and parliaments in Tripoli and the east. Both were backed by shifting coalitions of military factions and former rebels.

The unity government has been gradually establishing itself in Tripoli, displacing the self-declared administration that had been set up in the capital.

But it has failed to secure a vote of approval from the eastern parliament, or House of Representatives, amid opposition from hardline allies of Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the eastern military.

The hardliners say they are worried that the military will not be protected under the new government, and have opposed a clause that would give it power over military appointments.

The military in the east has been making significant gains on the ground against Islamist and other opponents in Benghazi, Libya's second city.

It said on Thursday it was "fully ready for the battle of Sirte and was waiting for orders" from Haftar.

Witnesses told Reuters dozens of armoured vehicles and ambulances had been mobilising for the operation.

Reports and pictures have been circulating on social media in recent days that brigades from the western city of Misrata were also mobilising for a campaign against Sirte.

No one from the military operations room in Misrata was immediately available to confirm the reports, but commanders from the city have previously said they intend to launch an offensive.

Brigades from Misrata have been militarily strong ever since playing a major role in the NATO-backed campaign to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Forces from Misrata abandoned ground operations against Islamic State in Sirte last year, but have continued to conduct air strikes over the city.
U.S. military punishes 16 over 2015 Afghan hospital bombing

WASHINGTON, April 28 (Reuters) - The U.S. military will announce on Friday that has it taken disciplinary action against 16 service members over a deadly Oct. 3 air strike in Afghanistan that destroyed a hospital run by the international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, U.S. officials tell Reuters.
South Sudan names unity cabinet in step towards peace

By Denis Dumo

JUBA, April 28 (Reuters) - South Sudan's President Salva Kiir named a new cabinet including former rebels and members of the opposition on Thursday, a step forward in a drawn-out peace process aimed at ending more than two years of conflict.

The decree read out on state television and radio said a third of the ministers in the new 30-member "national unity" cabinet were members of the SPLM-IO party led by Kiir's long-term rival Riek Machar.

Fighting broke out between both men's supporters in the capital in December 2013 after Kiir sacked Machar as first vice president. That triggering ethnically charged clashes across the oil-producer that the U.N. says have killed thousands and forced more than 2.3 million to flee.

Under pressure from the United States, the United Nations and other powers, both sides signed a peace deal in August, but it broke down repeatedly.

Machar only returned to Juba on Tuesday, and was swiftly given back his old job.

"I, President Salva Kiir do hereby issue this ... decree for the appointment of ministers of the transitional government of national unity ... effect from April 28," the statement said.
Ecuador says in talks with IMF over quake reconstruction funds

QUITO, April 28 (Reuters) - Ecuador is negotiating credit lines to finance reconstruction after this month's devastating earthquake with multilateral agencies that include the International Monetary Fund, a government official said on Thursday.

The Andean nation has already opened an emergency credit with multilateral agencies including the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank for about $600 million, and plans to continue seeking additional financing.

An IMF official on Wednesday said Ecuador had requested a credit line, without offering details.

"The work has been positive, and right now (officials are) in negotiations both the (IMF) and with other multilateral agencies," said Planning and Development Secretary Sandra Naranjo in an interview. "We have to keep all our options open."

She did not say which other agencies were involved in financing talks.

Ecuador could receive up to $368 million through an IMF credit line, according to a Reuters calculation based on the rules governing such loans. Disbursements would depend on the country's balance of payments needs.

President Rafael Correa, a harsh critic of IMF policies, has estimated the quake caused around $3 billion in damages and that the country will need "tens of millions of dollars" for reconstruction in the short term.

That includes rebuilding some 6,600 homes, along with roads, schools and health centers affected by the 7.8 magnitude temblor that killed at least 659 people, according to the latest official estimates.
Dijsselbloem tells Greece Eurogroup will meet on May 9 - Greek official

ATHENS, April 28 (Reuters) - Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem has told the Greek finance minister that euro zone finance ministers will meet on May 9 to discuss Greece, a Greek government official said on Thursday.

European Council President Donald Tusk said on Wednesday ministers should set a date for a Eurogroup meeting on Greece within days to avoid renewed uncertainty over the country's ability to finance itself.

A meeting had been pencilled in for April 28 but was cancelled after progress was deemed insufficient in talks between Athens and its lenders on the reforms needed before new loans are disbursed under its third EU/IMF bailout.

International lenders asked Greece last Friday to prepare a package of additional savings measures which would be passed into law now but implemented only when needed, to make sure the country reaches agreed fiscal targets.

Athens says Greek law prevents it from legislating on a hypothetical event, but it has offered to discuss a mechanism of automatic cutbacks in the event of a fiscal fallout.

Without the contingency package, lenders refuse to disburse new loans or discuss debt relief for Greece. Without new loans, Athens will be forced to go into arrears on domestic payments.

It also faces a total of about 5 billion euros in debt repayments until the middle of July.
Venezuela's Congress orders food minister sacked over shortages

CARACAS, April 28 (Reuters) - Venezuela's opposition-dominated Congress on Thursday ordered the dismissal of Food Minister Rodolfo Marco over chronic shortages of staple goods that have become the primary complaint about President Nicolas Maduro's government.

The opposition majority used a constitutional censure vote to order that Maduro dismiss Marco. Legislators had previously summoned him for questioning over the shortages, but he declined to appear.

"It cannot be that today in Venezuela, 3 million citizens eat less than twice a day, and the majority of them do not eat dairy, meat or eggs," said opposition deputy Carlos Paparoni.

The ruling Socialist Party may simply ignore the censure vote or seek to have it shot down by the Supreme Court, which has routinely sided with Maduro in disputes with Congress since the opposition's legislative elections victory in December.

Responding earlier this month to congressional criticism of Marco, Maduro said "nobody touches the food minister" and that "the revolution will not be censured by anyone, much less an immoral National Assembly," according to local media reports.

The growing difficulties in obtaining staple goods has helped spur the opposition's efforts to seek a recall of Maduro.

A combination of food shortages and electricity rationing contributed to dozens of incidents of looting around the country on Tuesday and Wednesday. Maduro attributed that violence to right-wing conspirators seeking to destabilize his government.

He has criticized the assembly for continuing to hold sessions despite an executive order that the public sector should work only on Mondays and Tuesdays, to save power.
Business / Local

by Thobekile Zhou

Bulawayo Show Society Vice Chairman Richards Wakefield has said foot and mouth outbreak has again forced cancellation of cattle exhibition at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair.Wakefield told farmers and government officials during a meeting on Thursday morning.Last year, exhibition was also affects by the outbreak which claimed thousands of cattle countrywide.Agriculture deputy minister Paddy Zhanda said Government has spent nearly $6 million in dealing with foot and mouth.The country run out of money to vaccinate millions of domestic animals to curb the spread of Foot and Mouth.At the time Government veterinarians had vaccinated 410,000 cattle against FMD at a cost of about $2 per head.Foot and mouth is a highly contagious and often fatal disease that affects domestic livestock such as cattle, pigs, goats and sheep and can be transmitted from wild buffalo.
The brutal and selective killings in Bangladesh of intellectuals who don't toe a hard Islamist line recall Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto saying in 1971 that if "Muslim Bangla" (as he called Bangladesh) was primarily a Bengali nation, it should merge with West Bengal. If it was Islamic, it should remain East Pakistan.

Neither course was acceptable to a people who were proudly optimistic in that dawn of freedom of forging a personality that was both Bengali and Muslim.

Question

The unresolved question of Bangladesh's identity remains as poignant as ever 45 years later, inviting the mischief of west Asian terrorists who boast of being behind the murders that keep society on the boil. The latest victim epitomises all that is anathema to fundamentalists - 35-year-old Xulhaz Mannan was a gay rights activist, editor of Roopbaan magazine and employed by the American embassy in Dhaka.

Bangladeshis might be better able to come to grips with the dilemma if only they bring themselves to discuss it. But that isn't the Bengali - Hindu or Muslim - way. It's impolite to mention religious differences. Politeness demands glossing over cultural chasms. "The only difference," a Bengali Muslim scholar told me once, "is that Hindus hold the water glass with the right hand and Muslims with the left!"

Only Bengalis indulge in such dangerous hallucinations. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman held forth on Tagore when we met in London before Bangladesh was born as if Rabindra Sangeet solves all political problems. One reason for this blind spot is that Bangladesh's leaders are not communal. But the politics of opportunism won't allow them to ignore grassroots communalism.

When my wife and I were visiting Dhaka in 1985, general HM Ershad, then president of Bangladesh, invited us to tea in his cantonment bungalow. Conversation veered to politics and he stressed - wrongly as it happened - that Bangladeshis would never vote for the Awami League's Sheikh Hasina Wazed, now prime minister, because Muslims expect their head of government to lead the nation in prayers, which a woman cannot do.

Apart from the political misjudgment, he was historically unaware of Razia, Sultan of Delhi from 1236 to 1240. What embarrassed me was the president's own obvious embarrassment at bringing up a purely Muslim situation with non-Muslims.

They do a disservice to their country by not discussing the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism.

He kept apologising to my wife and me both for denigrating a female contender for power and for giving a sectarian reason. Yet, only three years later Gen Ershad's eighth constitutional amendment made Islam Bangladesh's state religion.

Two recent autobiographical books by senior Bangladeshi bureaucrats I have known maintain this self-defeating silence over the communal divide. Rehman Sobhan's Untranquil Recollections: The Years of Fulfilment tells of an upper class Muslim whose world straddled all three countries of the subcontinent at the highest level. Rehman was an internationally known economist and helped to compile the six-point programme that became the basis for Bangladesh's liberation struggle.

The much younger Kamal Siddiqui, who was the first district magistrate of Khulna after liberation (when I met him), grew up at the other end of the spectrum. But, as described in In One Life: The Memoirs of a Third World Civil Servant, he retired as cabinet secretary under Khaleda Zia.

Challenge

They do a disservice to their country by not discussing the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism or the implications of the Hindu population dwindling from 22.05 per cent in 1951 to 8.5 per cent in 2002.

While the East Bengal Evacuee Act, Defence of Pakistan Ordinance, Enemy (Custody and Registration) Order, and Vested Property Act dispossessed wealthier Hindus, the poor suffered all manner of bullying, intimidation and other pressure tactics.

Both arose from the bedrock of communalism in Bangladeshi society - even in the Awami League - that prevents Wazed from undoing Ziaur Rahman's constitutional changes. These include starting parliamentary sessions with "Bismillahir-Rahmaanir-Rahim" (In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful); Articles 8(1) and 8(1A) proclaiming "absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah"; and Article 25(2) promising that "the state shall endeavour to consolidate, preserve and strengthen fraternal relations among Muslim countries based on Islamic solidarity".

Secularism

Although in 2010, the Bangladesh Supreme Court restored secularism as one of the constitution's basic tenets, it didn't touch Islam's official status.

Only a month ago - on March 28 this year - the high court rejected the last of many petitions against Gen Ershad's amendment and confirmed Islam as state religion.

Wazed dare not change the constitution on this point. That awareness of the popular mood probably also explains her statement allowing religion-based parties.

There are many reasons for faulting this ambivalence. It encourages bigots in groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami, which was the Bangladesh Nationalist Party's coalition partner during Khaleda Zia's prime ministership, the Jama'at ul Mujahideen Bangladesh, and the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh whose leader, Siddique ul-Islam, was hanged in 2007.

It invites meddling by al Qaeda and the Islamic State which claim responsibility for some of the killings of secular thinkers and bloggers. It permits persecution of the minority while authority seems to look away.

And it makes anti-India policies politically rewarding. The combined effect is to prevent a resolution of Bangladesh's identity dilemma and keep the country in a permanent state of uncertainty and instability.
Are freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad terrorists? BJP MP Anurag Thakur raised the issue in the Lok Sabha on April 27. He complained that Singh, Azad, Surya Sen and others, who laid down lives for the country's freedom, were termed as "revolutionary terrorists" in the book India's Struggle for Independence, written by eminent writer of modern history, late Bipan Chandra. The book, published in 1987, is a reference point in the curriculum of Delhi University.

That the formal Indian history is biased was a matter of academic discussion so far. But now, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, vociferous demands are being made to rewrite history, which is perceivably tilted heavily in favour of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muslim kings and, in many cases, the British rulers. The storm over Bipan Chandra's book threatens to wipe out the words in history text books written by the Leftist historians and replace them with a more balanced account of history.

Developments so far

Smriti Irani

The controversy promises to embarrass the Congress and force it to indulge in another round of confrontation with the ruling BJP. Union HRD minister Smriti Irani has objected to the use of the word "terrorists" for freedom fighters and suggested that those who have lost their lives in the freedom struggle will not be allowed to be demeaned under intellectual cover. She called the text of the book an "academic murder" of sacrifices of individuals. "It is extremely unfortunate that martyrs and freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh continue to be denigrated as 'terrorists'," she said.

Bhagat Singh's family

Calling such references as "derogatory", Bhagat Singh's family has appealed to the NDA government at the Centre to drop them. Singh's kin met DU vice-chancellor Yogesh Tyagi in this regard. The family has also written to Smriti Irani. " We have come to associate the word with something which the revolutionaries were the opposite of. This is not the way to treat the nation's martyrs. We demand an immediate removal of the book from the syllabus of the history department," said Singh's grandson Yadvinder Singh Sandhu.

"We demand an ordinance stating that all such derogatory references to the revolutionary freedom fighters be dropped immediately," Singh told Mail Today. "This is a very sad precedent that even after 68 years of Independence such words are used for the revolutionaries, who gave their lives for the freedom of the nation," Bhagat Singh's nephew Abhey Singh Sandhu said.

"The Britishers, who hanged Bhagat Singh, described him as 'true revolutionary' in their judgement, even they didn't use words like terror or terrorism. Using such words for revolutionaries in an attempt to stir controversy is very unfortunate," he added.

Will freedom fighter Bhagat Singh get justice?

JD(U)

The Janata Dal (United) too took exception to the use of the word "terrorists" for the freedom fighters. Party general secretary KC Tyagi said that the issue will be raised in the Rajya Sabha.

Bipan Chandra's co-authors

In a rejoinder, co-authors Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee and Sucheta Mahajan claimed that there were attempts of a "deliberate misrepresentation". "In fact the first time the term 'revolutionary terrorism' is used in the book on p 142, Chandra, who wrote two chapters on the Revolutionary Movement, clearly said it is "a term we use without any pejorative meaning and for want of a different term".

DU V-C

DU V-C Yogesh Tyagi maintained that the book is taught in the history department as a "reference book" and not a "text book". He said they have taken note of the request. "The book is taught as a reference book in our history department but is not a text book or published or authored by DU professor... We have taken note of the request and the matter is being looked into," Tyagi added.

What next?

The controversy gives force and credence to the right wing activists and supporters that the history which is being taught is biased in favour of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru to perpetuate the Nehru-Gandhi rule in the country. It also reinforces the belief that the leaders such as Subhas Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Bhimrao Ambedkar and Sardar Patel have been shown in a poor light in comparison to Gandhi and Nehru.

The history being taught were written either by the Leftists, Congress-minded writers or the Britishers view and they did not do justice to these leaders who stood as stumbling blocks in their way.

This controversy will strengthen the view that history books need to be re-written. In fact, the whole education system needs to be overhauled because it has been dominated by the Leftists so far and has taught skewed lessons in history of India.

So far, the BJP was being seen as appropriating the legacies of Sardar Patel, Ambedkar and Bose. Now, it seems, Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad's names will be added to this list.
Business / Local

by Thobekile Zhou

Lands Minister Douglas Mombeshora has again warned farmers that Government would not hesitate to reposes idle land from absent owners.He also said those who refuse to pay rentals would also be evicted. Mombeshora told a farmers meeting at ZITF today."We are concerned with productivity on the land. How can we assist farmers to be productive?"Farmers refused to contribute $5 and offered $2. I said its fine, I will go the legislative way"."Absentee landlords will lose their pieces of land," said Mombeshora.
Entertainment / Music

by Bruce Ndlovu

DESPITE being a darling of music lovers in Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa, three countries where she was resident at various points in her life, Dorothy Masuka does not have a favourite between the three nations as she believes she owes her talent and achievements to the whole of Africa.The veteran jazz musician jetted into Bulawayo yesterday alongside fellow jazz legend and actress Abigail Kubeka for a performance at the first annual Bulawayo International Jazz Invitational tonight.Other performers on the night are Mara Louw, Jeys Marabini, Oliver Mtukudzi and Albert Nyathi.Born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in September 1935, Masuka left Zimbabwe for Johannesburg at the age of 12. A rebel in her earlier years, Masuka rose to fame in the early 1950s after abandoning her education at a Catholic boarding school in Johannesburg to join Philemon Magotsi's Ink Spots in Durban at the age of 15.She was later "caught" and sent back to Johannesburg where she ran away again, this time to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where she joined the Golden Rhythm Crooners jazz band.Masuka went back to South Africa but later fled back to Zimbabwe after trouble with the then apartheid government. She then went to Zambia, the country of her father's birth, where she spent 16 years after being placed on a subversives list by the Ian Smith regime.Fans in all three Sadc states have been happy to claim Masuka as their own."No one should ask me questions about how I find my visits to Zimbabwe because I was born in Zimbabwe. I've never felt the need to choose between the countries because I belong to Africa. I'm the Dorothy of Africa and that's all that people need to know about my identity," she said.Masuka, who became famous for her support of liberation movements and songs grounded on the harsh realities of life in Africa, added that she felt at home wherever she went on the continent."Africa is not defined by a single place but the people who live in it. Throughout my travels I've always been warmly welcomed around the continent and that's why I can't choose one place as my favourite," she said.During her visit to the country last year, Masuka said she wanted to let people know that her real surname was Masuku.The jazz artiste explained the origins of the name, which she said came from revellers in Bulawayo when she used to perform in the city."The name means one who has left a certain place and gone to another and I got it because I had moved to Bulawayo from South Africa.For years, that has been my identity but even if I try to correct it through official channels they still revert back to calling me Masuka so I gave up," she said.Masuka dispelled the notion that jazz was a dying genre, saying promoters were at fault for the decline of genre's popularity over the decades."It hasn't been properly promoted because as the years have gone by, attention has been paid to other genres like rock, pop and now hip-hop. If it was given the same amount of space it would also be thriving."
News / Local

by Stephen Jakes

Eighteen villagers from Mazwi Village on the outskirts of Bulawayo are facing eviction from their homes after they were told to leave the area when they went to the council to pay for the stands.According to Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), In 2013 they were issued with eviction notices by the City Council."From then on no action was taken and the area Ward 17 councillor, Ephraim Ncube even assured them they were now allowed to stay. However, when they went to the housing office to pay rates they were told they were not on council records. On 24 March 2016, they were ordered to leave or face demolitions. They believe they are being victimised on political grounds," reported ZPP.
News / Local

by Stephen Jakes

The MDC-T Councillor for Ward 24 in Bulawayo Gideon Mangena has been accused of employing some part-time workers on partisan bases.The Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP) reported that on 13 March 2016, Nketa residents held a meeting at Nketa Hall where they accused Ward 24 MDC-T councillor, Mangena, of employing council part time workers on partisan lines among other accusations of abuse of office."The residents, led by Zanu-PF members said even the recruitment for workers for the upcoming Egodini Mall was in favour of MDC-T members," reported the ZPP.
News / Local

by Stephen Jakes

Harare City council has indicated that it will stick to the appointment of James Mushore despite the suspension of Mayor Bernard Manyenyeni by Local Government Minister Saviour Kasukuwere.The Harare Residents' Trust (HRT) said it stands in the conflicting situation at Town House where there is an Acting Town Clerk Josephine Ncube, and a candidate who was chosen by the Councillors."The HRT still consider the position of Town Clerk of Harare unoccupied. There is an Acting Town Clerk, who still has the mandate to lead the council, until such a time that the Court challenge around the appointment of Mr James Mushore is resolved," said the trust."The Acting Town Clerk Josephine Ncube will remain in an Acting capacity until 2018. In that case, the position becomes controversial to the extent that the local authority is afraid to fill in the position, and the Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing is hesitant to open the position to 'undesirable people' who might be revolutionary in their approaches at Town House."The trust said the City of Harare councillors will stick it out and stand by their appointee Mr Mushore. In that case, the City of Harare will have two people holding the position of Town Clerk and the scenario is:"One is substantive, but not officially confirmed through the recruitment process involving all local government institutions. The other one is an Acting Town Clerk but without being confirmed. In that case, the City of Harare will have to pay two people in one position," said the trust."Previously, the City of Harare has experienced this controversy in other positions. In City Health, the council has Dr Stanley Mungofa, coming in through the political patronage system, and Dr Prosper Chonzi, coming through the interview process. In City Treasury, there was Cosmas Zvikaramba, patronage system, and Misheck Mubvumbi, on merit."The trust said the third scenario is the City of Harare follows the due process of the law as provided for in the Urban Councils Act and the Constitution. This is the safest route for all stakeholders involved."The Executive has pronounced its position on the issue of the Town Clerk. The Judiciary has been approach to make a determination. The Parliament is yet to be presented with Bills that addresses contradictions in the laws governing the administration of local authorities," said the trust.
News / Local

by Stephen Jakes

MDC-T Secretary General Douglas Mwonzora has lambasted Local Government Minister Saviour Kasukuwere for plotting to replace an elected Harare Council with imposed Zanu PF aligned members soon after he suspended the mayor Bernard Manyenyeni."Zimbabwe woke to the news that Local Government Minister Saviour Kasukuwere had threatened to dissolve the Harare City Council run by the MDC-T and replace it with a Commission run by Zanu PF," Mwonzora said. "In short he wanted to replace an elected entity and replace it by an unelected entiy. He apparently changed his mind and targeted only the Mayor Benard Manyenyeni."He said in his simple mind Kasukuwere thought targeting Mayor Manyenyeni will be a magic divide and rule wand."The reason for this action was that the Harare City Council had refused to wait for Kasukuwere's choice for Town Clerk but had appointed a new Town Clerk on merit after open and transparent interviews that had been overseen by some key stakeholders in Harare including the Combined Harare Residents Association," he said."Minister Kasukuwere has no power in terms of the constitution of Zimbabwe to determine who the Town Clerk should be. He also has no power to fire Mayors and Councillors any more. When he tried to do that in Gweru the High Court delivered a judgement that set the legal position clear."He said it ruled that the Minister had no power to fire Councillors and replace them with his handpicked people. Despite the clear ruling of the High Court Big Baby Kasukuwere still stands uneducated on that point.Mwonzora said the MDC-T has decided that enough is enough and is not going to take Kasukuwere's illegal actions lying down."To that end a legal challenge has been mounted to reverse the illegal actions of this Minister. The matter will be filed in Harare High Court this morning. Secondly the MDC-T knows that when Kasukuwere did his illegal act he was behaving not as a minister of government but as the political commissar of Zanu PF. To that end the decision was political," he said."Therefore, besides the legal challenge , the MDC-T is preparing a comprehensive political answer to Kasukuwere's actions.To that end all MDC-T structures in Harare and the other affected cities are being prepared for the political answer. We stand by our persecuted Mayor and Councillors.The decision lies with Kasukuwere on whether to make Harare ungovernable or not. This is a fight that the MDC-T will not lose. Victory is certain."
News / Local

by Staff Reporter

THE Ministry of Mines and Mining Development has given a two-month notice for anyone who claims to be the legal owner of the more than six kilogrammes of processed gold worth over US$300 000 seized from South African citizen, Gert Johanness Drederek Erasmus, more than three years ago, the last chance to claim the loot before it is sold.Erasmus was arrested at a tollgate at Esigodini in February of 2013 with 38 gold buttons weighing a total of 6,1213 kg which he was in the process of smuggling out of the country.According to a notice in the Government Gazette of April 8, the ministry's permanent secretary, Francis Gudyanga, invited anyone who could have a legal claim to the gold loot to get in touch with his office within two months, failure of which the contraband would be disposed of."The gold may, by prior arrangement, be inspected by a person claiming a legal right to the gold at the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development during the two months following the publication of this notice. If no such person establishes a legal right to any of the gold within the afore-mentioned period, the gold may be disposed of," reads the notice.Zimbabwe, which is hoping for a comeback to the London Bullion Market Associations (LBMA), says it is working on increasing its annual gold output to 30 tonnes by 2018.
Three Charlottesville Area Transit routes will detour from Lane Road near the University of Virginia Medical Center all day Saturday because of a temporary road closure.

Routes 4 and 6 will travel north on Roosevelt Brown Boulevard, turn left onto Lee Street and turn right onto Jefferson Park Avenue. Route 4 will be following this traffic pattern in both directions.

Route 9 will go south on Roosevelt Brown Boulevard, turn right onto Lee Street and then take another right onto Jefferson Park Avenue.

Riders who normally wait at the Jordan Hall and UVa hospital stops on Jefferson Park Avenue will be asked to wait at a temporary CAT stop on Lee Street. Passengers for Route 4 at the outbound West Main-11th Street stop are asked to cross the road and wait on the opposite side for the bus.
News / Local

by Thobekile Zhou

Agriculture deputy minister Paddy Zhanda has chided careless Matabeleland cattle owners for allowing their cattle to randomly stray to Botswana.He said the farmers have a tight grip on their wallets but reckless on their cattle.Botswana government recently said it would employ a shoot to kill policy on stray cattle from Zimbabwe.Botswana blames cattle from Zimbabwe for spreading the deadly foot and mouth.Said Zhanda today ay ZITF "You look after your wallets way better than you do your cattle" he began."That's unacceptable. Know where your cattle are."People let their cattle stray into Botswana."We need to respect the laws of Botswana. Stop your cattle straying into Botswana, it will be shot" he said.He said government has no business looking after Matabeleland cattle."Look after your cattle. Why should the govt be the one that looks after your cattle?" he asked.
BEIRUT  Syrian President Bashar Assad scored a minor, if bizarre, publicity victory Thursday, receiving a part-time state senator from America at a time when U.S. officials have repeatedly asserted Assad has lost his legitimacy to rule the war-torn country.

Outspoken Virginia state Sen. Dick Black  who resigned as co-chairman of Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign in Virginia just before his trip  told reporters outside Damascus it would be "beneficial" for the U.S. to speak directly to Assad.

Black has no role in official U.S. foreign policy, and it's highly unusual for a state lawmaker to contradict the State Department line. He is one of the most vocal social conservatives in Virginia's General Assembly, and has drawn national attention for his opposition to abortion and gay rights. In 2014, he raised eyebrows when he sent a letter to Assad praising him. It was posted on the Syrian president's Facebook page.

The U.S. has called publicly for Assad to step aside in the wake of a brutal crackdown against demonstrations demanding his ouster in 2011. The country has since descended into all-out war.

Black, however, said there is no moderate opposition in Syria.

"I wish that the U.S. could take a stronger stand and recognize that most of these groups are simply terrorists," he said.

The senator called on the U.S. to lift its economic sanctions against the government, saying they have crippled the country's ability to provide its wounded with medical care.

But various human rights groups say the government and its allies have targeted hospitals as a strategy of war.

A report by Physicians for Human Rights last year said the Syrian government "systematically violated" the principle of medical neutrality by targeting medical facilities and doctors; detaining patients; and arresting, torturing, and executing doctors.

The Syria conflict has claimed over a quarter-million lives, according to the U.N., which stopped counting casualties last year. Around half of the country's population has been displaced.
Trump swept five states in Tuesday's Northeast primaries, bringing him tantalizingly close to securing the Republican nomination against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Clinton, meanwhile, is now 90 percent of the way to her party's nomination after four solid victories of her own.

Trump, the Republican businessman, pushed forward with his charge that Clinton is "playing the woman card," telling CNN's "New Day" in a telephone interview Wednesday that "she does have the woman card" but said that "a lot of women don't like Hillary, despite the card."

Clinton said during her Tuesday night rally in Philadelphia that Trump had accused her of playing the "woman card," telling supporters, "if fighting for women's health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the 'woman card,' then deal me in."

The Republican race now turns to Indiana, where next week's primary marks one of Cruz's last chances to slow Trump and push the race toward a contested convention. While Trump does need to keep winning in order to stay on his narrow path to the GOP nomination, he declared himself the party's "presumptive nominee" after Tuesday's results rolled in.

"It's over. As far as I'm concerned it's over," he declared. The real estate mogul now has 77 percent of the delegates he needs.

Trump emerged with more than 50 percent of the Republican votes in Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Maryland, and scored over 60 percent in Delaware and Rhode Island. Similarly, Clinton won convincingly in four of the five contests, scoring 56 percent in Pennsylvania and 63 percent in Maryland  the two biggest contests of the night. Her rival, Bernie Sanders, won the Rhode Island primary with 55 percent of the vote.

Trump planned to deliver a foreign policy speech in Washington and then campaign in Indiana. The address at a downtown hotel is the first in a series of speeches the Republican front-runner is expected to give in the coming weeks, all with the goal of easing Americans' concerns about his readiness for the presidency.

Likewise, Clinton was eager to turn her attention to Trump. While Clinton advisers say they won't underestimate Trump, as many of his vanquished Republican rivals did, her campaign sees opportunities to not only energize Democrats in an effort to keep him out of the White House but also appeal to Republicans turned off by the brash billionaire.

"If you are a Democrat, an independent or a thoughtful Republican, you know that their approach is not going to build an America where we increase opportunity or decrease inequality," Clinton said of the GOP candidates.

Trump's victories came in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Clinton ceded only Rhode Island to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Sanders, in an interview with The Associated Press, conceded he has a "very narrow path and we're going to have to win some big victories."

In the Republican race, Cruz and Kasich are desperately trying to force a convention fight. The challengers have even taken the rare step of announcing plans to coordinate in upcoming contests to try to minimize Trump's delegate totals.

But that effort did little to stop Trump from a big showing in the Northeast, where he picked up at least 105 of the 118 delegates up for grabs. He now has 950 of the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination.

Cruz spent Tuesday in Indiana, where Kasich's campaign has withdrawn in an attempt to give the Texas senator a clear path.

"Tonight this campaign moves back to more favorable terrain," Cruz said during an evening rally in Knightstown, Indiana.

Yet there's no doubt the GOP is deeply divided by Trump's candidacy. In Pennsylvania, exit polls showed nearly 4 in 10 GOP voters said they would be excited by Trump becoming president, but the prospect of the real estate mogul in the White House scared a quarter of those who cast ballots in the state's Republican primary.

The exit polls were conducted by Edison Research for The Associated Press and television networks.

Democrats award delegates proportionally, which allowed Clinton to maintain her lead over Sanders even as he rattled off a string of wins in recent contests. According to the AP count, Clinton now has 2,141 delegates while Sanders has 1,321.

That count includes delegates won in primaries and caucuses, as well as superdelegates  party insiders who can back the candidate of their choice, regardless of how their state votes.

Sanders has vowed to stay in the race until voting wraps up in June. He continues to raise millions of dollars and attract big crowds, including Tuesday night in West Virginia, where he urged his supporters to recognize that they are "powerful people if you choose to exercise that power."

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Like the Marines, the Virginia Defense Force needs a few good men and women.

But unlike the Marines, no pay or benefits come with the VDF uniform. It is a strictly volunteer organization that is not armed.

We are about 450 soldiers statewide who are dedicated to the mission, said Lt. Col. Thomas Cooke, commander of the 2nd Regiment.

That unit includes about 50 volunteers from Caroline, Spotsylvania, Stafford, Culpeper, Fauquier and Prince William counties and the city of Fredericksburg. The regional headquarters is in Manassas.

For those who are not familiar with the Virginia Defense Force, it is one of three state military organizations (the Virginia Army National Guard and the Virginia Air National Guard are the other two) that may be called to action during emergencies.

The VDF, for example, was activatedalong with the National Guardwhen Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency during the January blizzard.

We augment National Guard efforts, Cooke said.

Like many VDF members, Cooke is a military veteran, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who wanted to get involved.

He admits that he knew nothing about this organization until one of the men working under him in Charlottesville asked for time off to train. Once he found out what the VDF was all about, Cooke told the employee that he was interested in joining, too.

Five years later, he is head of the 50th Regiment, having taken command in January.

The Virginia Defense Force, which accepts men and women between the ages of 16 and 65, was organized in 1985. Its state militia predecessors, however, go all the way back to Jamestown in 1607 and were the primary Virginia fighting forces in the Revolutionary War.

State militia units, like the Culpeper Minutemen, were active as late as 1916, when they fought Poncho Villa along the Mexican border.

Although the VDF is 31 years old, it was reorganized in 2014 into what Cooke calls reaction teams. Instead of the original three brigades, the VDF is now made up of four regiments.

This gives us tighter command and control, Cooke said.

While many VDF members are veterans (They miss the military structure and camaraderie, said Cooke), others are civilians who just want to help out.

We know theres a need, said Command Sgt. Major John Clatterbuck, who lives in Culpeper and has been in the VDF for 26 years.

Clatterbuck said that new recruits must undergo some basic military training, but after that we try to leverage the skills that the recruits already bring to the table.

Although Clatterbuck calls the VDF a search-and-rescue organization, he adds that under the reorganization, the group now deals primarily with communications.

Recruits with such skills are in high demand.

Some of our members are taking Community Emergency Response Team courses, said Cooke, adding that the VDF would like to increase its scope of service in the next few years.

Units meet at different locations on the first Saturday of each month, with the entire regiment coming together every three months.

A lot of our training occurs at Fort Picket [the Virginia National Guard training center near Blackstone], Cooke said.

Besides emergency activations, the Virginia Defense Force also provides a number of community services, such as helping with traffic and crowd control at the Virginia Apple Blossom Festival in Winchester this weekend.

But mostly the VDF steps up when an emergency arises. Right now, however, it is short of members.

We do recruiting events at high schools and colleges, said Cooke, adding that more information on the group is available on the VDF website (vdf.virginia.gov).

We are Virginians helping Virginians, said Clatterbuck.

ABOUT THE VDF

The Virginia Defense Forces headquarters are at Waller Depot in Richmond, which also serves as headquarters for the 1st Regiment. That regiment covers the southeastern quarter of the state and includes companies in Petersburg and Norfolk.

Other regiments are:

 2nd: Headquarters in Manassas; companies in Manassas/Fairfax and Fredericksburg/Bowling Green/Warrenton.

 3rd: Headquarters in Winchester; other companies in Leesburg and Charlottesville.

 4th: Headquarters in Lynchburg, other companies in Bedford and Gate City/Pulaski.

For information about joining, visit vdf.virginia.gov or call Command Sgt. Major John Clatterbuck at 540/825-0935.
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

Zanu-PF Masvingo Province has endorsed President Robert Mugabe as the party's candidate for the 2018 elections, expressing confidence in his leadership of both the party and Government.Zanu-PF provincial co-ordinating committee meeting at Masvingo Polytechnic yesterday, the party's Masvingo acting provincial chairman Amasa Nhenjana said the province was solidly behind President Mugabe.Nhenjana said the PCC meeting was held to quell unconfirmed reports that Masvingo was no longer behind President Mugabe.He said contrary to the reports, the province was united behind President Mugabe and the First Family."We support President Mugabe and the First Family and we also support his candidature for the 2018 elections. We were disturbed by messages claiming that Masvingo no longer supported the President and the First Family," he said."We had to call a meeting to set the record straight over the false reports."
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

A political analyst Save Mawarire has predicted that MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai will emerge as a winner in the 2018 presidential poll followed by President Robert Mugabe and former Vice President Joice Mujuru landing on the third position."I see 3 possible scenarios in 2018 Presidential vote. Morgan Tsvangirai gets majority vote but shy of the 50% +1 vote threshold, Mugabe comes second and Joice Mujuru third," said Mawarire."Under this scenario Joice Mujuru can back Morgan Tsvangirai in a run off and they form a coalition government."He said if Mugabe wins the vote and fall shy of the 50%+1 vote, Tsvangirai comes second and Mujuru third, Mujuru will back Mugabe in a coalition government.
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

A political analyst Godknows Kudzanayi Mashaire has said for people to insult President Robert Mugabe daily will not save the economy of the country but what was needed were solutions to the crisis."Insulting Robert Mugabe is not a solution to Zimbabwe's problems," he said."What is needed in Zimbabwe is an environment of engagement, dialogue, discussion, negotiation and positive interaction. That can only be achieved by focusing on common ground for unity."Mashaire said politics of confrontation rarely work in Africa, even the 16 year war of liberation was ended by negotiations and discussions."Since independence in 1980 the best times in Zimbabwe economically and socially were after negotiated settlements, firstly the 1987 unity accord between Zapu and Zanu PF then the 2008 Government of national unity between the MDC and Zanu-PF," he said."There is plenty that unite us that the little which divide us. The old generation cannot change, it therefore calls upon us the young people of Zimbabwe to shake off the divisions of tribe, race or political opinion and unconditionally unite to bring forth a functional system that renders the status quo redundant. Millions of children in school are looking up to us to act right today to secure the future for Zimbabwe and Africa."Mashaire said the nation has a bigger task waiting on it, to lead a Federal United Africa and awaken the greatness in Africa, the mother of all mankind and the future of humanity."We are some of the finest intellectuals on the continent. Time to Unite and prosper, we cannot continue to look down upon ourselves," he said.
News / National

by Staff reporter

Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa yesterday said Government had launched a forensic audit of seven firms that operated in the Chiadzwa diamond fields amid suspicion that the country could have lost $15 billion through leakages.President Mugabe in February said Government had not received meaningful returns from Chiadzwa diamond fields and that private companies mining could have robbed the State.The President said less than $2 billion was remitted from diamond proceeds and those seconded by Government to work with private miners had failed to account for the gems."We've not received much from the diamond industry at all. I don't think we've exceeded $2 billion, yet we think more than $15 billion has been earned," President Mugabe said in an interview on the occasion of his birthday.Speaking during a Zimbabwe International Trade Fair Business Conference plenary in response to a question, VP Mnangagwa said: "You said there was $15 billion stolen. What it then says is that there's an investigation, where there's investigation there's an allegation, and where there's an allegation there's a prima facie case, there's a possibility that the thing happened."You properly said there is $15 billion which is being investigated, which means the issue of $15 billion is under investigation, using your own terms, to establish whether it actually happened and if it did, that is corruption."He added: "And up to now, that hasn't been concluded. There were something like seven companies and each company will be subjected to a forensic audit to establish during the past five or six years, what it did. A forensic audit on each company will be done."A forensic audit has been instituted against all the seven companies. They will be audited to discover whether this happened or not, and those who will be found through the forensic audit will account for the resource they have stolen from this country, that becomes a fact. That is the essence about the $15 billion question." VP Mnangagwa told the same forum that all Zimbabweans should join in the fight against corruption and not just talk about it.He was responding to Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) board member, Mr Nelson Matongorere, who said the VP had not spoken about corruption in his keynote address."I understand the question on corruption has come from Zimra and I think my brother, if the people seated here are honest with you, during tea time, they will discuss with you the corruption perception about Zimra," chuckled VP Mnangagwa.He said Matongorere's comment created a perception that Government could be involved in corruption."I don't dispute it, but you're excluding the private sector. My view is that corruption wherever it raises its ugly head must be fought and not talked about. We must cease talking about corruption but fight corruption."We want to hear ministers here with me, including myself, permanent secretaries, directors in the Government, whenever they have an opportunity, they should talk about the fight against corruption."I would like also to say captains of industry, whenever they have an opportunity, to talk to their companies and the people, they should fight corruption, not only speak against it but fight it."VP Mnangagwa said if all Zimbabweans took a stand against corruption, the scourge would be wiped out."Yes, we had an anti-corruption commission which we have dissolved because we now needed another team or commission to investigate the commissioners that are leaving. We instituted another one two months ago and I believe their focus is fighting it (corruption) and we shall continue to monitor whether they continue fighting it," he said."Let it not be a duty of Government alone, but let it be a duty for all of us who love our country to expose corruption wherever we see it, wherever we hear about it, let's fight it.""So my brother from Zimra, perhaps you're not very sociable otherwise you'll be hearing what the people have to say about Zimra. I have no evidence, but I hear about those things so it's good that you raised this issue."
News / National

by Tendai Mugabe

Zanu-PF has dismissed as "utter rubbis" reports in some sections of the private media that party members were making manoeuvres to stampede President Mugabe from power before the end of his term of office.The party's provincial structures on Tuesday reacted angrily to the reports and reaffirmed unconditional support for the President, saying the media were fomenting non-existent divisions in the party.This followed a litany of concocted stories by the private media projecting alleged deep-rooted divisions in the party based on factional and succession lines.The stories alleged that some senior Zanu-PF officials did not want President Mugabe to finish his current term of office though voted for in the 2013 harmonised elections.In separate interviews, Zanu-PF provincial chairpersons said the stories, which were always confirmed by faceless sources, were a creation of the media in a foiled bid to destabilise the party.One such story was published by the Daily News on Tuesday claiming that Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa wanted to force President Mugabe to retire before the end of his current term, which expires in 2018.Zanu-PF Mashonaland Central provincial chairman Dickson Mafios (pictured) said: "We do not know where that speculation is coming from and we do not run the party through the media."We have taken a resolution that our candidate for 2018 is President Mugabe and why should people talk about succession when his term of office is still running?"We cannot talk about the wishful thinking of the media because our President was endorsed by thousands of Zimbabweans who voted for him in 2013. That position was further endorsed by our Congress and by our annual National People's Conferences. There is no way the party can be directed by the media to deviate from its resolutions."Mafios said instead of being obsessed with succession issues, the media should direct its efforts towards development.He said the picture portrayed by the media was not good for prospective investors."Unless the media wants to cause political upheavals in the country, this kind of reportage is not good," he said."We have other things to concentrate on rather than succession."In Harare, provincial chairman Charles Tawengwa said: "It's hallucination of the media. The President was endorsed long back and I do not know where that is coming from."Mashonaland West provincial chairman Ephraim Chengeta said they stood by their endorsement of President Mugabe as the party's sole candidate for 2018 national elections and 2019 party Congress."In any case, the President's support is actually growing in our province. Reports of divisions and other unsubstantiated things in the party are mere talk by the media that should not be taken seriously."You will see at the upcoming one million men march that President Mugabe is a darling of the people and as a province we are mobilising massively for that event," he saidBernard Makokove, who is the ruling party's Mashonaland East acting provincial chair, said: "There is no change to our Congress resolution. As a province we do not have any talk about succession and we are solidly behind our President and First Secretary."Masvingo acting provincial chair Amasa Nhenjana said: "Some of these newspapers want to create fictitious divisions in the party and we are not going to be moved by that. President Mugabe commands great support and thinking of dislodging him will be a matter of wasting time."
News / National

by Staff reporter

Zimbabwe is to receive a US$900 million bailout from Algeria for arrears clearance, ahead of a crucial International Monetary Fund (IMF) board meeting on the country scheduled for Monday.The IMF board meeting is expected to pave way for a debt clearance strategy, which government said this week would be completed between September and October.Zimbabwe is working on a plan to clear at least US$1,8 billion in arrears to the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB).An Algerian embassy official confirmed the deal with Zimbabwe, but said this was being handled in Algiers, the Algerian capital.Government sources said Zimbabwe had turned to Algeria because it could give cash. They indicated that the so-called all-weather friend, China, did not lend cash to extricate its allies from debts.
Sixteen years ago, Dal professor Jeff Dahn was on a bus zigzagging its way to the outskirts of Phoenix when he had one of the most important conversations of his career.



Dr. Dahn and the group members hed brought along to a conference used public transit to get back to their inexpensive motel just outside the city. As the bus weaved along the city streets, Dr. Dahn and postdoctoral fellow, Zhongua Lu, began picking apart a lecture on battery materials they'd just heard.



"We were saying 'This doesn't make any sense. These guys are not interpreting their data correctly,'" recalls Dr. Dahn, Canada Research Chair in Battery and Fuel Cell Materials and professor in the Department of Physics and Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Chemistry.



Drs. Dahn and Lu made an alternative interpretation and then extended the work with experiments in their own lab when they returned home from the conference. This ultimately led to the invention of a new set of materials now used in about one-third of all lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery cells produced worldwide.



Today, Dr. Dahn and his team represent one of the worlds most renowned hubs of expertise in battery technology  a major reason why he is being recognized with one of the first ever Governor Generals Innovation Awards.





Announced Thursday, the new awards recognize individuals, teams and organizations whose innovations have had a transformative and positive impact on quality of life in Canada. By celebrating achievements such as Dr. Dahns, the awards are intended to inspire other Canadians to embrace innovation and to take risks to create impactful new products and services.

Dr. Dahn and the five other inaugural winners were chosen from a broad pool of nominees through a two-stage, merit-based selection process managed by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. The awards will be presented at a ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on May 19.



Whats really nice for me is that people around the world are starting to adopt our tools and see the value in them, says Dr. Dahn, who has been the NSERC/3M Canada Industrial Research Chair (IRC) in Materials for Advanced Batteries at Dal since joining the university in 1996.

Stronger, longer-lasting batteries



Li-ion batteries were first developed in the 1990s as a longer-lasting, rechargeable alternative to their single-use counterparts, but Dr. Dahns innovation at the turn of the millennium offered a significant step forward for the technology, in part by making cells more cost-effective to produce. The material combinations they created  later patented at light speed by 3M Canada, he says  are now used in batteries that power everything from electric cars and power tools to smart-grid power-storage devices that could one day support the widespread use of renewable energy.



In collaboration with Dr. Lu, the creation of NMC, which stands for the nickel, manganese and cobalt used in the material, has been Dr. Dahns biggest success to date from a commercial standpoint, but several of the 65 or so other inventions hes patented also hold potential for widespread use.



One of the most significant innovations to come out of Dr. Dahns lab in recent years was the creation of a high-precision testing method that can rank the lifespan of Li-ion cells intended for decades-long use in a matter of weeks. Former graduate researchers Chris Burns, Aaron Smith and David Stevens all assisted Dr. Dahn in the breakthrough project, which involved building the testing devices from scratch in their lab at Dal. Dr. Burns and Dr. Stevens now run a spinout firm called Novonix that was created to meet demand for the technology from companies of all stripes.



The demand for this type of equipment is going to increase a lot as more and more engineers and researchers realize it is one of the best ways to learn about the lifetime of cells, says Dr. Dahn, noting that the young firm may soon expand into a larger space to accommodate demand.





Dr. Dahn says this and other examples in recent years  including the creation of a new class of battery electrolyte additives that improve lifetime  show just how crucial students are to driving innovation within his lab. The Dahn lab currently employs 13 graduate students, three postdoctoral fellows, eight undergraduates and a handful of others. The lab has expanded from a few rooms room to an entire wing of the Sir James Dunn Building over the years.



Dr. Dahn reckons that more than 50 of the graduate students and postdocs who have come through his lab over the years are now key players in the Li-ion battery business globally, working in everything from materials development and R&D to sales or manufacturing at world-leading companies. At a recent conference in Shenzhen, China, a hub for Li-ion activity, he says he ran into seven of his former lab colleagues all working in the industry there.

A celebrated career  with more to come



The Governor Generals award is not the first time Dr. Dahns work has been recognized at such a high level. He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2001 and has won more than 20 major awards  both for his teaching and graduate supervision as well as his research  since he began working in the lithium battery business back in 1978. This latest award is unique, though, in that it recognizes the impact Dr. Dahn has had on inspiring innovation with a broader societal impact.



Scientific journals and mainstream news publications alike have praised Dr. Dahns discoveries, with business news site Quartz going so far as to say he is one of a handful of scientists worldwide most likely to develop a super-battery capable of taking electric cars to the masses. This year, Dr. Dahns research contract with NSERC/3M will come to and end and he will begin a new, five-year partnership with Tesla Motors, a world leader in electric vehicles and grid storage. The new partnership, which kicks off this summer, promises to give Dr. Dahn new stimulus to take research on Li-ion cells to the next level.



Such industry partnerships have proved integral to Dr. Dahns work over the years, given the competitive nature of the Li-ion battery industry. What happens there is you end up forming a really strong relationship with that company and youre working in detail on their projects and the projects that matter, he says.



While the market for electric cars seems to be finally growing beyond its niche base (Dr. Dahn and his wife, Kathy, joined the nearly 400,000 to pre-order a new Tesla Model 3), the widespread adoption of renewable energy remains a long-term project given the currently unfavourable economics of producing the batteries to store the power.



In 2015, the entire world production of lithium-ion cells was 60 gigawatt hours  just enough to power Nova Scotia for one day. If youre talking about bringing in electrical energy storage grid-scale, worldwide, theres a long way to go, he says.



Not that Dr. Dahn is any stranger to taking the long view. That bus ride through Phoenix 16 years ago may be a distant memory now, but it was the spark that formed the building blocks of some of his many innovations since.



Really, it was the bus ride that got us together thinking about it, he says. And it was talking about it right after listening to this lecture that made it all happen.
Like so many kids who came of age during the 1960s space race, Kathryn Sullivan was drawn to the stars.



Id grown up glued to the television set when any of the earlier space program things were on, or any of the Jacques Cousteau shows for that matter, she said. What had always excited me was this notion that there were some group of people whose lives consisted of going on these great adventures Who they were, what they did, how to become one, I didnt really know. I was just drawn to the adventure of it all.



In time, Dr. Sullivans adventures would have her soaring into orbit, walking in space, launching the Hubble Telescope and eventually ending up in charge of one of the largest and most important scientific agencies in the U.S. government. But first, her adventures took her to Dalhousie, where in 1978 she graduated with her PhD in Geology from the Department of Geology, now known as the Department of Earth Sciences. (She also received her first honorary degree from Dalhousie, in 1985.)



This week, Dr. Sullivan returned to Dalhousie  by her recollection, her first time visiting Halifax in about a decade. Over the course of her two days on campus, she delivered the annual student-organized Gordon A. Riley Memorial Lecture in the Department of Oceanography, took part in a coffee chat and panel discussion with Dal students and faculty about women in the sciences, and delivered a public lecture titled Looking at Earth to a packed house in the McCain Buildings Ondaatje Hall Tuesday night. She also sat down with Dal News for an interview about her career.



Dr. Sullivan said she had a great time connecting with the students she met and witnessing their passion for oceanography (which she considers her primary discipline), earth sciences and science in general.



All of them, in the work theyre in, have some fascination with the ocean, or some fascination with the planet more broadly, so theres a lot of great passion, intensity and curiosity to what theyre doing, she says. And its wonderful to see how gratified they are by these challenges theyre involved in.



From textbooks to space telescopes



Dr. Sullivan first learned about Dalhousie when she was an undergrad student on exchange in Norway.



I was following the articles just beginning to come out about sea floor spreading. That whole revolutionary idea of how the ocean works and how the planet works was unfolding before my eyes as a young third-year student. The epicentre of the story was the North Atlantic, and it was clear there were still a lot of fascinating things to figure out.



One of the groups heavily involved in that emerging research was a team of scientists at Dalhousie University and the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, including geology professor Fabrizio Aumento. Their reputation is part of what brought Dr. Sullivan to Dal for her graduate studies, where her eventual PhD project studied the geology of Newfoundland sea mounts. I liked the feel of Halifax, the culture of it. The department was very collegial it was an easy place to fit into.



It was around that time in the late-1970s that NASA began to once again ramp up astronaut recruitment, with an eye to the forthcoming space shuttle program. For Dr. Sullivan, it was an opportunity she had to pursue.



I knew theyd be swamped with applications, and they didnt need many people, so theyd tell most people no. But if they said yes, Id get to actually see the earth with my own eyes from orbit. And that wasnt an opportunity I was going to pass up  you could have told me the odds were one in 200 million and I would have applied, because that means theyre not zero.





Kathryn Sullivan in spacewalk in 1984. (Photo courtesy NASA)

She was accepted right out of her PhD studies  one of the first six women ever to be admitted to NASAs astronaut corps. Over the next 15 years she would take part in three space flights. On the first in 1984 aboard the Challenger, she earned the distinction of becoming the first American woman to walk in space. On her second mission in 1990 aboard the Discovery, she helped deploy the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the largest and most versatile telescopes ever put into orbit and still a vital research tool for astronomy more than 25 years later.



And what about that view of the Earth from orbit she was looking for?



It will literally take your breath away. Its stunning.



Civilian leadership



After her third space flight in 1992, Dr. Sullivan began to consider life after NASA. She said she could have probably spent the rest of her career in former astronaut mode, getting paid to tell stories and share photos of her experiences. But she knew that wouldnt be enough for her.



The vantage point from space  the sense of intersection and connection you clearly have, just with your own eyes, even without advanced instrumentation  was so powerful, she said. I wanted to shift gears and somehow get into the field or get into roles where I was helping make that perspective matter.



I knew Id probably never be doing anything ever again that had such cachet, got such sizzle and big headlines. But Id had enough experiences before I went to space that that I knew that while being an astronaut might have been the biggest headline I will ever have, it is far from the only intriguing or challenging or worthwhile thing to do on Earth.



After leaving NASA, she made her way to the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA) to serve as its chief scientist. From there, she spent a decade as president and CEO of one of Americas leading science museums  the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio  before becoming inaugural director of the Battelle Center for Mathematics and Science Policy, based at Ohio State Universitys School of Public Affairs (which, appropriately, is named for a fellow astronaut: John Glenn).



In 2011, Dr. Sullivan was nominated by the White House as assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction and deputy administrator of NOAA. The multifaceted science-based services agency employs nearly 20,000 people, has a budget just shy of $6 billion and includes such important departments as the U.S. National Weather Service, the National Fisheries Service, the National Ocean Service and more.



Our mission truly runs from the surface of the sun to the bottom of the sea, said Dr. Sullivan.



In 2013 she took over as administrator, NOAAs highest position, on an acting basis, and was subsequently confirmed to the role proper by the U.S. Senate in March 2014. That same year, she was named one of Time magazines 100 most influential people. Among her many other honours: induction into the Astronaut Hall of Fame, membership in the National Academy of Engineering, induction as a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and the Rachel Carson Award for her environmental leadership.



Looking at our planet in new ways



Dr. Sullivans visit to Dal was hosted by the Dalhousie Oceanography Student Association (DOSA), which invited her to campus for its Riley Memorial Lecture.



As an accomplished scientist and astronaut dedicated to bridging the gap between science and society, Dr. Sullivan is truly an inspiration to us all, says Jenna Hare, president of DOSA and PhD candidate. With the Riley Lecture, were reminded of the great places our degrees can take us. Dr. Sullivan showed us that the possibilities are endless.





Many students also attended Tuesdays panel discussion and coffee conversation on the topic of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers. Other panelists in addition to Dr. Sullivan included Dal faculty members Katja Fennel (Oceanography), Stephanie Kienast (Oceanography), Sophia Stone (Biology) and Becky Jamieson (Earth Sciences), whos been friends with Dr. Sullivan since they were college roommates.



A key theme that came out of the discussion was the importance of women having the confidence to show leadership and take charge of their careers and ambitions  a message Dr. Sullivan embodies, and was on full display in her public lecture.



In part of her talk, she walked the audience through various data-driven ways of looking at the Earth and its various systems: sea floor charts, satellite images of phytoplankton blooms, sea-surface temperature maps. She said that from outer space to the bottom of the sea, we have vantage points of our planet far beyond anything previously available in all of human history.



NOAA is a place that works to connect this kind of capacity to the challenges and issues that face the planet every single day, whether thats protecting public safety, providing information to guide resource use decisions, shape economic opportunities, she said. We like to call it environmental intelligence  its measurements, plus scientific knowledge, plus computational capability to produce information that is pertinent to a decision facing someone today.





And, of course, she shared several views of earth from orbit, taken from her weeks spent soaring above our atmosphere. She acknowledged, though, that no on-screen image can truly compare to the experience of being there in-person.



Looking at a movie can never give you the understanding of what its like to be looking at it yourself  not because it looks that different, but because its about what it took to get there, she explained. We can watch the Olympics and feel empathy and excitement for the person standing on the gold-medal platform but for them its not about being on the platform itself thats special. Its that moment, and everything you invested to get to that moment, that makes it meaningful.


News / National

by Staff reporter

Angry about their continued political and economic marginalisation in independent Zimbabwe, ex war detainees and collaborators are taking a leaf out of ongoing agitation by the restless war veterans for democratic dividends demanding their meeting with president Mugabe.Respected Zanu-PF elder and patron of war time detainees, Cephas Msipa said that was unacceptable that tens of thousands of ex detainees and war collaborators continues to live in squalor, while many had died paupers, in a country that was rich in natural resources.He also bemoaned the fact that Zanu-PF and government efforts aimed at assisting people who had played a part in the liberation struggle were mostly focused on vocal ex combatants, to the exclusion of war time participants.
News / National

by Staff reporter

Police roadblocks in Zimbabwe are scaring away tourists as they feel their presence is an indication that there is something wrong in the country, a top tourism official has revealed.Zimbabwe Council for Tourism (ZCT) executive director Paul Matamisa told the Daily News, tourists and even ordinary motorists are now in the habit of counting police roadblocks between towns ."There are too many police roadblocks on our roads and tourists feel it is not safe to be here as the police presence scares them because in their countries police details are usually visible when there is an emergency."We have constantly raised the issue of roadblocks because it is not doing us any favour - it is not working at all and is sending the wrong vibes. Most times the fines are overcharged and illegal."We are not saying roadblocks should be abandoned altogether, no, they should not disappear but we are saying they should not be so overwhelming."
Taylor Corporation has announced that it will retain the former Standard Register operations at the current location in Dayton. Business will be conducted under the "Taylor Communications" name. The announcement signals the continuation of a business legacy that has endured for over a century in Dayton.

The City of Dayton and economic development partners CityWide Development Corporation, Montgomery County, Dayton Development Coalition, JobsOhio and the Ohio Development Services Agency have been working together to assist Taylor Communication in continuing operations in Dayton.

"We are pleased to have reached an agreement with the city of Dayton where Taylor Communications has over 103 years of history," said Deb Taylor, CEO of Taylor Corporation. "Our continued partnership supports our mission of Opportunity and Security, for hundreds of employees."

"Taylor Communications continued commitment to Dayton is tremendous news for our city and the broader region," said Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley. "Due to the collaborative work of our local economic development partners, we were able to craft a deal that will allow Taylor Communications to have a meaningful presence in Dayton. I look forward to continuing our close relationship with Taylor Corporation for decades to come."

Taylor will enter into a ten year property lease with CityWide Development Corporation, which will substantially renovate the former Standard Register building. The City of Dayton has committed to $2.1 million in streetscape improvements over several years, as well as the demolition of 30 to 40 dilapidated structures through the Neighborhood Improvement Program.

"Our community came together to keep this long-standing, well-respected Dayton company where it belongs," said Julie Sullivan, Vice President of Development for the Dayton Development Coalition. "We are so grateful Taylor gave us the opportunity to show them why Dayton is the best place for Taylor Communications to build its future. When companies bring us to the table and work with us in partnership, it allows us to tap into valuable resources that meet their specific needs and move their project forward." "This is a great team win through the collaboration of JobsOhio, the Dayton Development Coalition, City of Dayton and Montgomery County, and we are all excited about Taylor Communications commitment to Ohio and Standard Register's continued operations in the region," said John Minor, President and Chief Investment Officer of JobsOhio. "Taylor Communications recognized JobsOhio's proactive and innovative approach that sets Ohio apart from others and concluded that this state is the best place for its business."

A major selling point in Taylor's decision to continue operation in Dayton was CityWide's ability to assume ownership of the facility, upgrade it, and lease it back to Taylor Communications.

"There is a long tradition of operating in Dayton as well as a talented and experienced local workforce, but the decision had to make financial sense for Taylor Communications, said Mark Shaker, President and CEO of Miami Valley Hospital and Chair of CityWide. "We're pleased we could help Taylor Communications find a way to make Dayton work."

Taylor Communications is optimistic about future employment levels at the facility and has recently increased employment to over 600 employees. Under the agreement, Taylor Communications has committed to keep a minimum of 500 jobs in Dayton.

Montgomery County has approved $500,000 in Economic Development/Government Equity (ED/GE) funding.

"This ED/GE funding is an investment in Taylor Communications operating infrastructure and workforce that will give it a competitive advantage in a global market," said Montgomery County Commission President Judy Dodge. "Our combined economic development efforts highlight a unique collaborative intensity that results in retaining and creating jobs for our citizens."

*Financial Assistance includes:

A $750,000 grant from the City of Dayton (awaiting approval from the Dayton City Commission) A $500,000 Montgomery County ED/GE grant

JobsOhio and the State are still evaluating the project parameters and further assistance is under consideration

* The project remains contingent on the approval of the incentives.
News / National

by Staff reporter

The Morgan Tsvangirai-led MDC's planned nationwide demonstrations will provide a sucker punch that will end President Robert Mugabe's misrule, the opposition party spokesperson Obert Gutu said.After shaking Zanu-PF from its slumber with a peaceful demonstration last week, Gutu said the planned series of rallies in each province will culminate in a "grandmaster of all demonstrations" that will force the governing party to call for early elections."The 'mother of all demonstrations' that was held on April 14 was just an appetiser, a teaser so to speak. That demo clearly showed that the MDC is the real deal, the only game in town."Zimbabweans are sick and tired of the Zanu-PF regime's unmitigated and rampant corruption and misrule. We are going to spread the demos to all provinces soon."Everything is being planned methodically and strategically. Before the Zanu-PF regime gets to know what, exactly, is happening, Zimbabwe will witness the 'grand master of all demonstrations' to be staged by the MDC. Just watch this space."With Zanu-PF apparently failing to solve the country's myriad of challenges Gutu claimed that solutions can only come from the opposition."We are not going to fail the toiling masses of Zimbabwe. We are ready, willing and capable of governing Zimbabwe to make the country get out of the prevailing socio-economic mess."Unlike the crumbling Zanu-PF regime, the MDC is going to lead and not to rule the country. We are social democrats who are adequately equipped with the requisite technical and intellectual gravitas to take Zimbabwe to the next level."It is against this background that we are planning the ultimate sucker punch; the knock-out punch that we have aptly dubbed the grand master of all demonstrations."In dramatic fashion, Gutu said due to the current economic woes, Mugabe's exit is now imminent and the MDC is ready to take over."Fasten your seat belts, relax and just wait for the moment when the MDC is going to re-define Zimbabwe's political landscape. There's no going back. There's neither fear nor surrender. Defeat is not on the agenda," added Gutu.The MDC is protesting against a number of issues, including Zanu-PF's failure to fulfil its promise to create 2, 2 million jobs as espoused in the ruling party's 2013 election manifesto, as well as demand answers following Mugabe's recent claim that $15 billion had been stolen from the Chiadzwa diamond mining fields.
New Delhi: Power shortage was at 2.1 per centthe lowest level in a single yearin last financial year, Parliament was informed on Thursday.

"During 2015-16, the energy shortage was 2.1 per cent, which is the lowest ever in a single year," Power Minister Piyush Goyal said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.

The minister further stated that India is importing power only from Bhutan at present. The imported power is mainly Bhutan's surplus power from hydro stations commissioned in Bhutan with the assistance from the Government of India.

During 2015-16, energy imported from Bhutan was about 5 billion units (BU), the minister added. During 2014-15, electricity shortage, when total demand outstripped supply during peak hours, was 3.6 per cent whereas it was slightly higher at 4.2 per cent in 2013-14 and 8.7 per cent in 2012-13.

In another reply, the minister said that during the 12th Plan period, a target of 88,537 MW excluding 30,000 MW of Renewal Energy source, was fixed for capacity addition.

Against this, cumulative capacity addition of 84,990.7 MW has been achieved as on March 31, 2016. In a separate reply to the house, the minister said that at present, there is no shortage of coal in the country. None of the coal-based power generation plants across the country has reported any loss of generation due to shortage of coal during 2015-16.

The minister further stated that at present, as on April 21, 2016, coal stock at power plants has been reported to be more than 37 million Tonne (MT) by power utilities, sufficient for operation of power plants for about 25 days.

However, he said that at present, there is some deficit in availability of domestic gas.

"Due to government initiative, the scheme of utilization of RLNG (Regassified Liquefied Natural Gas) helped in improving the generation from gas based power stations. During 2015-16, the growth of generation from gas based power station was 14.6 per cent over the same period last year," he said.

Enhanced availability of domestic coal has offset shortage of gas and has resulted in growth in overall thermal generation from coal & gas based power plants to 7.4 per cent during the year 2015-16 as well as reduction of 10.6 MT import of coal by power sector, he added.
Theres a short gasp of surprise. Gregory Jacob had expected to hear a mans voice as this reporter called. Thats the name of his brother too. The name that is now familiar to a lot of people in Kerala - not just his, all the names in Gregorys family. Vineeth Sreenivasan has put at the end of his movie Jacobinte Swargarajyam the photos and names of all the real life people that inspired this story, Gregory at the centre of it all.

It is a work day and Gregory has to switch between many calls while he tells his tale. But he is ever so patient. And yet, its like you know him already, if you have seen Vineeths film. Vineeth has made him George, a typical young man, below 25, taking life easily, without any kind of seriousness, till a crisis comes to the family. Nivin who had played George in the film transforms through the two hours into the man that Gregory, in real life, had to become.

My friendship with Vineeth, and Shaan Rahman (musician), goes back eight years, Gregory says, in a long distance call. He is in Dubai, the same place that Vineeth and Shaan had met him all those years ago, when they went to shoot their music album Malayali.

It is a year or two later that Gregorys problems began - a financial crisis that would shatter his family that lived in all comfort for years. At first I wouldnt discuss my problems much. But gradually, when we started talking about our families, I told them (Vineeth and Shaan) about it, and how I havent seen my dad for a long time. Jacob had to go to Liberia on business, but he got stuck there. He couldnt come back because of the case back in Dubai.

Neither could Gregorys mother step out of their home. It was bad times like nothing else they have ever known. Our problems were so big that I became a kind of encouragement tool for my friends who were dealing with everyday common problems like a bad boss or little pocket money. Thats the kind of problems one has in that kind of age.

But when they spoke to Gregory, they felt better. I would tell them, their brother may have a problem, but their family is still together. I havent seen my dad in five years. And even now, as he says that, there is a little crack in Gregorys voice. Vineeth had remarkably passed on this emotion to the big screen as Nivin becomes voiceless with emotion on a meeting with his dad played by Ranji Panicker.

Vineeth had asked for suggestions for the film name. I was suggesting names like Georgeinte Swargarajyam and all, but then he said Jacobinte Swargarajyam. When he said that I had tears in my eyes; I broke down. I knew it was our story but I didnt realise it was that personal. I hold my dad very close to my heart, look up to him a lot. I feel so much pride when I hear people talk about the good things he did.

It was in Christmas 2013 that Gregory and family finally met Jacob, and the meeting happened in their hometown Tiruvalla. He clicked several photos with his dad and send happy pictures to his friends including Vineeth. Just as he used to call Vineeth or Shaan when he was stressed out in the past, and theyd then crack a joke or two. Four months later, Vineeth asked him if he could make a film out of Gregorys life. I told him to go ahead, for I see him on a different level. He would go on and off for the shooting in Dubai but not much. He wanted to keep off and enjoy his surprise as he saw the film.

But Gregory has not yet seen the film! I couldnt come to Kerala yet. We are waiting for the Dubai release on May 4, and already bought some 40 tickets, he laughs as easily as he cries. The real life George is just as sweet, if not sweeter than his reel version.
New Delhi: No bilateral meeting was held between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Italian counterpart Matteo Renzi on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York last year, External Affairs Ministry said on Wednesday.

The ministry was reacting to allegations by James Christian Michel, the middleman in the AgustaWestland chopper deal, on purported meeting between Modi and Renzi where the Indian leader offered to free two Italian marines, facing murder charges in India, in exchange of evidence linking Sonia Gandhi and her family to the corruption in the Rs 3600 crore deal.

Read: BJP links Sonia with VVIP copter scam, Cong forces adjournments in House

There was no meeting between Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister Renzi of Italy as part of PMs bilateral meetings at the UNGA in September 2015. Insofar as James Christian Michel is concerned, various law enforcement authorities of India are proceeding against him in cases relating to the Prevention of Corruption Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), the ministry said.

It also noted that an open ended non-bailable arrest warrant has been issued by the special judge of CBI against Michel on September 24, 2015.

Read: Manohar Parrikar questions Cong's claim on blacklisting AgustaWestland

Upon a CBI request a Red notice against him has been issued by the Interpol Headquarters on November 25, 2015. A request for provisional arrest for the purpose of extradition was made to UK authorities on January 4, this year by the CBI. The Enforcement Directorate, another autonomous agency to handle private money laundering and foreign exchange irregularities, has also separately sent a Red Corner notice seeking arrest and a request for his extradition from the UK on February 29, this year, it added.

Read: 'No case' in AgustaWestland, Congress will respond: Manmohan Singh
Kochi: Chief Minister Oommen Chandy on Wednesday has asked the Union government to declare Kerala as a drought affected state. A high-level meeting of ministers and government officials will be held in Thiruvananthapuram on Thursday to review the drought situation in many parts of the state.

Our demand is that Kerala should be declared as a drought affected state, he told reporters. Describing the situation as unprecedented the CM said that the government has permission from Election Commission to undertake drought relief measures. The CM was speaking to reporters after actor Mammooty called him and offered to cooperate with drought relief operations in the state. The failure of the civil society to take timely measures will result a Latur like situation in Kerala too, the actor said. Mammooty said a meeting of civil society activists and other organisations would be held in Kochi on Thursday to discuss the ways hold drought relief operations in affected areas. The actor said all those interested in such works can attend the meet.
Chennai: DMK Treasurer M.K. Stalin, DMDK-PWA chief ministerial candidate Vijayakanth and VCK supremo Thol. Thirumavalan are some of the star candidates who filed their nominations on Wednesday to contest the high-stakes May 16 Assembly elections.

Several candidates of the DMK, DMDK, VCK, TMC and BJP also filed their nomination papers before the respective Returning Officers across the state.

Prominent among them were VCKs Vasanthi Devi, who takes on Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in R.K. Nagar and former Chennai Mayor M Subramaniam of the DMK from Saidapet.

Mr Stalin, accompanied by party men, arrived at the Ayanavaram Zonal Office of the Greater Chennai Corporation at around 2 pm and submitted his nomination before the Returning Officer Ms Karthika. The DMK treasurer is seeking reelection from Kolathur constituency in Chennai. Immediately after filing nomination, Mr Stalin began his campaign in Kolathur constituency.

In Ulundurpet, the DMDK chief, accompanied by his wife Premalatha and brother-in-law L K Sudeesh, filed his nomination at 1.40 pm before the constituencys Returning Officer Mukundan. Mr Vijayakanth, who won the 2011 elections from near-by Rishivandiyam in Villupuram district, shifted to Ulundurpet due to perceived anti-incumbency in his original constituency.

VCK chief Thol. Thirumavalavan filed his nomination around 11.30 pm at the Tahsildar office in Kaatumannarkoil. After his nomination before Returning Officer Muthukumaraswamy, the VCK supremo exuded confidence that the DMDK-PWA would form the next government, ushering in an era of coalition government in Tamil Nadu.

Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, DMK chief M. Karunanidhi and PMKs Chief Ministerial candidate Anbumani Ramadoss had filed their nominations on Monday, choosing an auspicious day and timing. Candidates belonging to AIADMK and its alliance partners will be filing their nominations on Thursday during an auspicious hour chosen by the party high command.
The likely withdrawal, around the end of 2016, of the El Nino (Christ Child) weather system is likely to mitigate the adverse effects on the monsoon winds associated with it. It is a matter of cautious hope for India, which has been suffering for the last three years from prolonged drought in the southern, western and central regions. El Ninos strongest effects on precipitation are in Southeast Asia and Western Pacific region.

Of further cheer is the recent prediction of the Indian Meterological Department that the southwest monsoons due in June would be normal and up to the mark, with rainfall in some cases perhaps even exceeding the normal.

The ongoing drought in India has been attributed to the creeping effect of climate change  a topic that covers a host of technical, socio-political and economic factors that are much discussed in various fora. All these discussions have led to the unyielding bottomline that chronic shortage of water will now be an almost normal feature of human existence over large parts of the world, both first and third.

Countries in the former obviously possess greater capabilities to ride out the impact, while those in the latter, in many cases, remain mortally stricken and floundering.

The deepening sense of all-round crisis has been compounded by the sense of fear and insecurity created in many parts of the world by unrelated geopolitical factors, i.e. religious radicalisation, fundamentalism and terrorism by organisations like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Al Qaeda and their outriders in South Asia like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Hizbul Mujahideen, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

India is a good example. Not yet in First World, but nevertheless slowly pulling itself by its bootstraps out of the third. The visual media daily brings home the grim reality of the climatological catastrophe creeping up over the country.

The images of women trekking long distances under a blazing midday sun with headloads of metal or plastic pots to collect a few litres of water  often dirty and polluted, from dried-up wells, muddy ponds or water tankers, which often operate at irregular intervals and to no fixed schedule  are harrowing.

The stoicism and enduring courage of Indias womenfolk in Maharashtra and other states in this daily battle for preservation of hearth and home makes each one them true incarnations of every warrior-goddess in the pantheon. In this context, China had promised to release water from March 15 to April 10 to drought-hit neighbouring countries located downstream along the Mekong river, from the network of hydropower dams and reservoirs constructed along its upper reaches as a good neighbourly gesture. The amount of water released by China is too low to help alleviate drought-stricken Southeast Asia.

This is of tangential significance to India because India and China are at best uneasy neighbours. They share common riverine water resources of the Yarlung Tsangpo river, which originates on the high plateau of Tibet and flows into China, with a major channel branching off into India where it flows through both India and Bangladesh as the mighty Brahmaputra-Jamuna-Meghna river system, and flows through the Sunderbans Delta into the Bay of Bengal. In this instance, both India and Bangladesh are the lower riparian countries and ultimately dependent on the Chinese goodwill for access to the Brahmaputra waters.

As in India, where several states like Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been affected by drought, the northern regions of China, mainly Inner Mongolia, Qing Hai and Sichuan provinces have reportedly been similarly hit. This has caused losses of $1.2 billion due to crop failures. Droughts are said to be occurring in China with increasing frequency which, coupled with the inexorable rise of population pressure, have caused massive increase in the demand for water, both potable and non-potable.

China is casting about for additional resources of fresh water, and international rivers like the Mekong and the Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, which flow through more than one country to outfall through China have the potential of becoming future flashpoints of water wars unless these issues are addressed in a timely and serious manner.

China has indicated future plans to construct no fewer than four run-of-the-river (a type of hydroelectric generation plant whereby little or no water storage is provided) hydroelectric power plants on the Yarlung Tsangpo at Zhangmu (510 megawatts), Dagu (320 megawatts), Jiacha and Jiexu (capacities not yet known). Indias abiding concern has been the potential utilisation of these power plants as choke-off points, should China choose to regulate or even stop the flow of water downstream to India. Though an unlikely contingency at present, if it happens, it will, of course, affect Bangladesh as well.

India needs to watch and address the future course of geopolitical events on the subcontinent with balance and circumspection. But it should also remain confident, keeping in mind the interplay of forces many of which retain their traditional institutional biases against India.

In the specific context of management of Indias national interests in any future water-sharing arrangements relevant to the Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra waters, the terms set out in the 1997 UN Convention on Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (which has not yet been ratified by China), should be informally adopted by India to base its overall guidelines to ensure equitable sharing.

India, China and Bangladesh  the concerned riparian states  have earlier held technical discussions in respect of sharing of hydrological and other relevant data. A workable answer will ultimately lie in the creation of a suitably structured tripartite Tsangpo-Brahmaputra commission, comprising representatives of the three upper and lower riparian countries.

But beyond the facade of the United Nations and international conventions, treaties and cooperative commissions of management remains the ultimate factor which in the end always takes centrestage, especially in an issue as critical as water, the giver of life  Indias national interests. Is India ready?
Seoul: North Korea on Thursday made two failed bids to test fire a powerful, new medium-range ballistic missile, in a thwarted display of military strength ahead of a landmark ruling party congress.

South Korea's defence ministry said an initial morning launch of what was understood to be a Musudan missile saw the rocket plunge back to earth seconds after take-off.

A second attempt in the evening, again of a Musudan, also appeared to have failed, a ministry official said.

North Korea has now made three unsuccessful bids in two weeks to test-fly a Musudan, which is capable of striking US bases on the Pacific island of Guam.

The first effort on April 15, the birthday of founding leader Kim Il-Sung, ended in what the Pentagon described as "fiery, catastrophic" failure, with the missile apparently exploding just after take-off.

South Korean military officials say the North is desperate to register a successful launch ahead of next week's party congress, at which leader Kim Jong-Un is expected to take credit for pushing the country's nuclear weapons programme to new heights.

Nuclear test fears

There is growing concern that Pyongyang is also preparing to conduct a fifth nuclear test before the party gathering begins on May 6.

In recent months the North has claimed a series of major technical breakthroughs in developing what it sees as the ultimate goal of its nuclear drive, an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to targets across the continental United States.

The achievements trumpeted by Pyongyang have included miniaturising a nuclear warhead to fit on a missile, developing a warhead that can withstand atmospheric re-entry and building a solid-fuel missile engine.

Last Saturday, it successfully tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) and was promptly criticised by the UN Security Council.

Existing UN resolutions forbid North Korea from the use of any ballistic missile-related technology, and South Korea said it would push for fresh penalties to be imposed on Pyongyang.

"The government strongly condemns this additional ballistic missile launch... which is a clear violation of UN resolutions and an act of provocation," the foreign ministry in Seoul said after the failed Musudan test on Thursday morning.

It said it would work with other UN members to "try to put the North's regime under more sanctions."

Longer range

The Musudan is believed to have an estimated range of anywhere between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres (1,550 to 2,500 miles). The lower range covers the whole of South Korea and Japan, while the upper range would include US military bases on Guam. The missile has never been successfully flight-tested.

Three failures in swift succession will be seen as an embarrassment for the leadership, especially as it has built up the party congress, the first to be held for nearly four decades, as an opportunity to celebrate the country's achievements.

Speaking last weekend during a visit to Germany, US President Barack Obama warned that North Korea was making dangerous progress even when its efforts fell short of outright success.

"Although, more often than not, they fail in many of these tests, they gain knowledge each time," Obama said.

"We take it very seriously, so do our allies and so does the entire world," he added.

Anxiety has been high on the divided Korean peninsula since Pyongyang conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and a rocket launch a month later that was widely seen as a disguised ballistic missile test.

The UN Security Council responded with its toughest sanctions to date, angering the North, which has since made repeated threats of attacks targeting the South and the United States.
News / National

by Thobekile Zhou

Opposition MDC has attacked Zanu PF led government for allegedly dumping 32 stranded female Zimbabweans in Kuwait.Flamboyant businessman Wicknell Chivayo had to come to rescue by buying air tickets worth US$58,900 for the stranded women to get back home.Below is MDC statement :The Government's shameful failure to assist in the return of 32 Zimbabwean women stranded in Kuwait, effectively condemning them to an unbearable existence in a foreign land is an embarrassment to the nation.Just recently President Mugabe just got back from one of his costly global jaunts in New York for a debate on SGDs where he took with him an entourage of no less than 20 people, gobbling up thousands of dollars. Surely if government can afford to blow $20 million in less than 6 months on President Mugabe's wasteful and useless trips abroad, it can afford to set aside $12 000 for a worthwhile cause to bring back the women stranded in Kuwait. It is a shock that up to now no plan whatsoever had been put in place to try and rescue these women, who are in the predicament they are in as a result of the very government's failure to manage the economy, turning them into paupers in their own country. A government that fails to assist its citizens and ensure their safety when they are facing such grave danger is a useless one.Meanwhile President Mugabe and his ZANU PF bigwigs are living lavishly while the majority wallow in poverty. Vice President Phelekezela Mphoko is still living it up in a luxury hotel more than one year since his appointment, gobbling up thousands of dollars a month. Honestly we wonder how these so called leaders sleep at night. The failure to rescue the women in Kuwait is a shame that rubber stamps Robert Mugabe's legacy of failure, gluttony and cold heartedness.
Describing her one year of torment in al-Bab, Passoni said that she was confined to the house and was not allowed to go out anywhere, except for the time when her husband accompanied her and she wore a burqa. (Photo: AP, Representational Image)

Charleroi, Belgium: A Belgian woman who fled to Syria to join ISIS after falling in love with a Muslim man has revealed how difficult life is under the terror group. After having faced several hardships, she escaped and returned to Europe, according to a report in the Daily Mail.

Identified as Laura Passoni, 30, the woman said that she had met Osama Rayan while she was working in a supermarket in Belgium. Passoni fell in love with Rayan who convinced her to move to Tunisia after marriage.

Read: Girl burns herself to be less attractive for IS: Ghastly tale of Yazidi woman

On pretext of moving to Tunisia, he took Passoni to the Syrian city of al-Bab, a place ruled by the dreaded Islamic State group. While moving in with her new husband, she brought her two kids along.

Expressing her sorrow, Passoni said that she also converted to Islam to marry Rayan and had no idea about the 'hell' she would have to live in after entering ISIS territory.

Members of the Islamic State group distribute niqabs, enveloping black robes and veils that leave only the eyes visible, to women in Mosul. (Photo: AP)

Only after she reached Syria, she came to know how life is under ISIS. She was not forced to become a Muslim, but she was in fact persuaded to become one. "I was not forced, I was persuaded. You just get washed away, like trying to stand against a waterfall," Passoni was quoted as saying.

Read: ISIS militants rape 9-year-old three times a day for over three days

Describing her one-year torment in al-Bab, Passoni said that she was confined to the house and was not allowed to go out anywhere, except for the time when her husband accompanied her and she wore a burqa. All that she could do the entire day was cooking and cleaning the house.

"I started to become very afraid that they might take my children away. It was just the opposite of what they promised in the propaganda of the Caliphate. I decided I wanted to escape when I realised there was a very real risk my son might end up a terrorist," said Passoni.

Read: Islamic States unborn army: Women used to breed future terrorists

She somehow managed to get hold of a mobile phone and contacted her family through a text message. With her family's support, she managed to flee Syria through Turkey and was united with her children and parents only after rigorous questioning by Belgian authorities.

While being held captive, many women are raped, beaten and forced to convert to Islam. (Photo: AP)

Although Passoni was among the very few lucky women to escape ISIS, many other still await freedom.

Reports by the United Nations in the past have also revealed the inhuman treatment to girls in the ISIS held territories, where girls are stripped and paraded in slave markets, and sold for sex by ISIS terrorists.

In one horrific instance, one girl had been temporarily married over 20 times, and after each occasion was forced to undergo surgery to repair her virginity.
While China will firmly safeguard its sovereignty, rights and interests, it is willing to peacefully solve the disputes through friendly consultation and dialogue with the countries directly involved, says Xi Jinping. (Photo: AP)

Beijing: President Xi Jinping on Thursday said China will "firmly safeguard" its sovereignty in the South China Sea, but at the same time the country is willing to peacefully resolve the maritime disputes with several of neighbours through direct talks.

"China is always committed to peace and stability in the South China Sea," Xi said while addressing the opening ceremony of the fifth foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) here.

"While China will firmly safeguard its sovereignty, rights and interests, it is willing to peacefully solve the disputes through friendly consultation and dialogue with the countries directly involved," he said.

China will work with Southeast Asian nations to make the South China Sea a region of peace, friendship and cooperation, Xi said.

CICA, which has 26 members including India, was formed based on a proposal by Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 1992 to further inter government consultations. China is its current Chairman. India was represented at the meeting by Indian Ambassador to China Vijay Keshav Gokhale.

On Afghanistan crisis, Xi said China will play a constructive role in the Istanbul Process on Afghanistan.

China supports an "Afghan-led, Afghan-owned" inclusive political reconciliation process, hopes the country can realise peace, stability and development at an early date and is ready to provide assistance, he said.

He said China stands for and will continue to help promote a peaceful settlement of the Syrian issue and the Palestine-Israel issue through political negotiation.

On the denuclearisation of Korean Peninsula, Xi said China is fully adhered to the UN Security Council resolution.

He urged all the parties involved to exercise restraint, avoid provocation and pull the nuclear issue back to a track of dialogue and negotiations at an early date.

He reaffirmed China's adherence to a peaceful foreign policy, vowing "China will unswervingly take a peaceful path of development, maintain an international order with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter at the core, promote a new-type international relationship featuring cooperation and reciprocity, and be committed to building a common destiny for mankind."
On April 22, 2016 (Earth Day), world leaders gathered for a high-level signing ceremony at the United Nations for the planets ultimate New Years resolution  the 2015 Paris Agreement. The future success of the agreement, however, hinges on the level of ambition contained in the voluntary national pledges  Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)  to curb climate change which will be submitted by all parties.





Like all New Years resolutions, it is not the well-intended verbiage about climate mitigation, but the measurable national/global shift towards sustainable energy (low and zero carbon) that matters. The negotiators are set to gather in Bonn from May 16-26, 2016, for the first session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement. Yet another new meeting group will convene, but the real litmus test for the UN-led sustainable development process will be verified by the move towards clean, cost-effective energy for those who happen to both energy-poor and climate-vulnerable.



It is this more neglected aspect of the energy-climate change nexus that is directly connected to poverty eradication and that has not received as much global traction.



The World Energy Outlook 2015 demonstrates that 1.2 billion people are without access to electricity and more than 2.7 billion people rely on the traditional use of biomass for cooking, which causes harmful indoor/household pollution. This heavy reliance on solid fuels also results in emissions of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs). Integrated action on energy access and SLCPs offers multiple sustainable development benefits.



But currently, there are 2 separate global processes  silos  on energy and climate. The lack of a globally integrated process on sustainable energy and climate change poses thorny implementation and tracking challenges for the UNs ambitious Transforming our World: The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. This agendas pledge that no one will be left behind includes 2 separate sustainable development goals (SDGs)  SDG 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all; and SDG 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.



Sustainable energy objectives are considered within the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) launched by the UN in 2010. SE4All currently has 3 linked objectives:

Providing universal access to modern energy services; Doubling the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency; Doubling the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix. But, if sustainable energy is a common factor in achieving both SDGs, then why is there no globally integrated process that can ensure efficient financing, implementation and tracking of relevant sustainable energy actions across both SDGs?



As it turns out, the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement avoids any references to energy; and the solo, cursory reference to energy is found in Article 16 which mentions the International Atomic Energy Agency. The solitary reference to sustainable energy and renewable energy is contained in the preambular section of the Paris Climate Conference outcome document but not in the actual agreement:

Acknowledging the need to promote universal access to sustainable energy in developing countries, in particular in Africa, through the enhanced deployment of renewable energy.



Sobering findings

There is no escaping the fact that progress on sustainable energy objectives is vital for both SDGs. The Global Tracking Framework (GTF 2015) conducted by the World Bank and the International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued sobering findings on this front:



 Across all dimensions of sustainable energy for all  whether access, efficiency, or renewables  the rate of progress during the 2010-12 tracking period falls substantially short of the rate that would be needed to ensure that the 3 objectives are met by 2030.



 There have been notable advances in electrification  driven primarily by India  but progress in Africa remains far too slow.



 By contrast, access to clean cooking continues to fall behind population growth leading to negligible progress.



 Traditional methods to measure energy access significantly underestimate the scale of the challenge.



 The growth of renewable energy final consumption continued to accelerate in recent years, but to achieve the SE4All objective, the rate of progress will need to increase over 50%.



 Todays investment flows of $400 billion a year would need to triple to achieve the necessary pace of progress.



Having two separate SDGs makes little implementation sense for the majority of developing countries where integrated approaches on sustainable energy, climate change and poverty eradication is needed. For instance, in India, according to the IEA, a population similar to that of the European Union and the United States combined lives without clean cooking facilities  840 million people in India, by far the largest national population of any country in the world.



The IEA reports that the heavy reliance on solid biomass (mainly fuelwood) used in traditional stoves in India is the major cause of indoor air pollution and premature deaths. Indias submission of its INDCs to the UN does not include an aggregate emissions reduction target. Instead, it has pledged to reduce its emissions intensity or its emissions per unit of economic output. The countrys push towards increasing access to sustainable, renewable energy is the nationally identified strategy to reduce emissions intensity (address climate change) and simultaneously provide clean energy to millions.



Expecting a clean energy breakthrough without actually breaking through existing UN silos on sustainable energy and climate change is a wasteful and ineffective fallacy, especially when viewed from the perspective of millions who die prematurely at the toxic and tragic intersection of energy poverty and climate vulnerability.



(Cherian is the author of Energy and Global Climate Change: Bridging the Sustainable Development Divide)
Firecrackers were lit and sweets distributed in village Dyalpura Bhaika in Punjabs Bathinda district as a mark of celebration soon after former Khalistani terrorist, Davinder Pal Singh Bhullar, walked out of a Punjab jail on a 21-day parole a couple of days ago.





A convict in the 1993 blast case, Bhullars native village is Dyalpura, where he grew up as a child and completed his schooling. Bhullars ancestral house in the village was opened and spruced up in anticipation of his visit. A Sukhmani Sahib Path (religious prayer as per Sikh rituals) was also held inside the house.



Another former militant, Gurdeep Singh Khera, who was recently relocated from a Karnataka jail to another jail in Punjab, too was granted a three-week parole a couple of days ago after decades behind bars.



The move to grant parole to former militants is being alleged as an attempt by the ruling Badal government in Punjab to reclaim some of the lost Panthic ground ahead of elections.



Punjab witnessed a series of incidents of sacrilege of the Holy Guru Grant Sahib in recent months that put this border state on the boil.



Sikh organisations and hardliners were unhappy over the alleged failure of the government to prevent such incidents.



As the issue of parole to former militants assumes political colour, Union Minister and MP from Punjab Harsimrat Kaur, who is the daughter-in-law of CM Parkash Singh Badal, has stirred a new controversy of sorts seeking to declassify all files relating to Operation Blue Star in 1984.



The military operation was undertaken to flush out militants from the sacred Golden Temple in Amritsar.



The grant of parole to two former Khalistani militants has triggered a reaction from the Congress which has slammed the ruling government for being allegedly soft on militants.



Elsewhere in Bhullars alma mater- Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College (GNDEC) in Ludhiana from where he graduated as a mechanical engineer and even worked as a professor before turning into a militant - his colleagues and friends still remember him as an intelligent soft spoken person.



For some time now, the political landscape in Punjab is witnessing a movement of sorts for release of certain former militants who have been languishing in various jails across the nation for several decades. Ever since January 1 last year, Sikh activist Surat Singh Khalsa is on a hunger strike seeking the release of over a dozen such militants in jails.


Observing that there is a valid and binding extradition treaty between India and Chile, the Supreme Court today dismissed a plea of a jailed French woman facing extradition to Chile for her alleged role in the murder of a senator there in 1991.





A bench comprising justices M B Lokur and N V Ramana directed the trial court to proceed with extradition proceedings.



"On the basis of material available on record, we find that there is a valid and binding extradition treaty between India and Chile. We direct the magistrate at Patiala House Court to continue with the extradition proceedings. The petition stands dismissed," the bench said.



Earlier on October 9 last year, the Supreme Court had sought response from the Centre on the plea of a jailed French woman challenging her arrest and the ongoing extradition proceedings at the request of Chile for her alleged involvement in 1991 assassination of a senator there.



Besides seeking "immediate release" of Marie Emmanuelle Verhoeven, the plea filed through lawyer Ramni Taneja, had also sought a direction to the External Affairs Ministry, which is pursuing the extradition proceedings on behalf of Chile, to quash the ongoing inquiry before the magisterial court.



The plea had also sought quashing of the extradition request, made on March 24, 2015 by the Government of Chile through the Ministry before the court here.



Verhoeven, arrested on February 16 last year from Uttar Pradesh on the basis of a red corner notice issued against her, is alleged to have participated in a conspiracy leading to the assassination of Chilean Senator Jaime Guzman Errazuriz on April 1, 1991.


A Parliamentary panel has pulled up the Competition Commission for watching silently airlines charging exorbitant fares during the recent Jat agitation in Haryana and at the time of making last minute bookings.





Besides, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance has sought to know the preparedness of the government to "proactively intervene" in instances of cartelisation, price parallelism and abuse of dominance, especially in the wake of new business models such as electronic and mobile commerce.



In a report tabled in Parliament today, the panel said it took up the case of airlines charging exorbitant fares during the recent agitation in Haryana and also from passengers reserving their seats at the eleventh hour.



"CCI, which is empowered to examine anti-competitive conduct not only in India but also on acts taking place outside India, watched silently and only now on being pointed CCI has woken up and have informed that the issue of abnormal rise in airfare is currently under consideration of the Commission," it noted.Further, the panel said it would like to be apprised of the outcome in the case at the earliest.



In February, during the Jat agitation, the price of air tickets for flights in certain routes from Chandigarh was exorbitantly high for sometime.



Earlier, there have been concerns expressed from various quarters, including from Parliamentarians, that air tickets were priced very high during certain periods.



The committee, headed by Congress leader Veerappa Moily, has made the observations in its report on the Demand for Grants (2016-17) of the Corporate Affairs Ministry (MCA).

CCI comes under the administrative control of MCA.



The panel said it would like to be apprised of the Ministry's efforts in a "system which can proactively intervene in cases of cartelisation, price parallelism and abuse of dominance especially when new business models like e-rail, e-commerce and m-commerce will come".



Further, the committee has sought to know the "preparation of CCI as a watchdog to intervene where Government of India have/will allow 100 per cent FDI in e-commerce in the interest of consumers".



According to the report, CCI has received 680 cases and out of them, 582 have been decided, 49 are pending and 69 are stated to be under consideration of the Commission.

Of the 377 merger filings received, decisions have been taken only with respect to 353 cases, it noted.



"The committee would like to be apprised of the steps the Commission has taken so far to bring the pending cases to their logical conclusion. The committee also desires a similar appraisal in case of 24 merger filing cases," the report said.
The Health Ministry today said that it is geared up to ensure that the the single entrance exams for admission to MBBS and BDS courses as directed by the Supreme Court are held successfully despite the "challenges".





Clearing the decks for holding National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) for the academic year 2016-17, the apex court said it will be undertaken in two phases in which around 6.5 lakh candidates are likely to appear.



The apex court approved the schedule put before it by the Centre, CBSE and MCI for treating All India Pre-Medical Test (AIPMT) fixed for May 1 as NEET-1 and those who have not applied for AIPMT will be given opportunity to appear in NEET-II on July 24. The combined result would be declared on August 17.



Noting that the aim of the Health Ministry is to facilitate and enable the Medical Council of India (MCI) and CBSE to conduct the entrance exams in a manner and time which would not cause "distress" to students, Health Minister J P Nadda said that it has been making efforts in this direction for a long time.



"Health Minister J P Nadda has welcomed the order of the Supreme Court in the matter of conducting the entrance examination for admission to MBBS and Post Graduate Medical Courses via NEET this year," an official statement said.



"It is a milestone judgement," he stated, and added that "despite the challenges to conduct the exam this year the Ministry is geared up to work with the other partners and stakeholders to ensure that the entrance exams are successfully held".





The order, ending all uncertainity, was pronounced after rejecting the opposition for holding NEET by states including Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and Association of Karnataka Medical Colleges besides minority institutions like CMC Vellore which had contended that NEET cannot be imposed on them.





"The aim of the Health Ministry is to facilitate and enable MCI and CBSE to conduct the entrance exams in a manner and time that would not cause distress to the lakhs of students appearing for the NEET.





"The Ministry has been making efforts in this direction since a long time. The present order of the Supreme Court, will significantly strengthen the efforts of the Ministry to achieve this aim," Nadda said.





The apex court order also revives the Government's Decemeber 21, 2010 notification for holding single common entrance test through NEET with a clarification that any challenge on the issue would directly come before it and no High Court can interfere in it.




Miffed with the attack on Sonia Gandhi, Congress today hit back at BJP saying failure to nab the culprits in the VVIP chopper scam in the past two years showed how "incompetent" the Narendra Modi dispensation is.





Seeking to downplay the names of Congress leaders being allegedly involved in the scam, the party reminded BJP that two decades ago, the Hawala case against BJP veteran L K Advani was quashed in a Supreme Court monitored investigation despite his name appearing in the Jain diaries.



"Are we living in a banana republic? Bribe has flown, so senior most person is guilty?" party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi asked at the AICC briefing close on the heels of BJP chief Amit Shah's attack on Gandhi.



Insisting the BJP was "completely misleading" in the matter, he said the ruling party was "too clever by half" and deserved to apologise to the nation for the "irresponsible" allegations.



"Shah as president of the BJP is expected to be more responsible. It is a vote of no confidence by the president of BJP in his own government" as it has failed to come out with any concrete finding in the probe in the last 24 months, Singhvi said.



Taking any names in the scam is like "tilting at windmills" on the basis of four references on some paper, he said the description referred to the "movers and shakers of Indian politics like A, B, C and there is any remotest suggestion".



When asked about a question about Ahmed Patel, political secretary to the Congress President, Singhvi said "there could be 20 APs in Somalia, Italy and France" saying it was "not even an allegation" as these are "unverified notings".



He claimed the whole thing is that the government and the BJP "wants to keep the pot boiling" and that is why a Rajya Sabha seat has been given to Subramanian Swamy, who is known as a "Gandhi basher".



Singhvi also spoke in similar vein on the BJP attack on former Finance Minister P Chidambaram in the Aircel-Maxis case in the Lok Sabha yesterday. "It is a Goebbelsian technique. First there is a leak from department concerned and then friendly newspaper publishing it."



He claimed the main aim is sensationalism, allow the pot boiling and does not allow completion of a probe so that the real culprit goes away.



Gandhi had yesterday rejected as "baseless" allegations linking her and party leaders to bribes in the chopper deal, calling these an attempt at character assassination.



Asked whether Congress leaders would appear before any inquiry, Singhvi said the exercise should "not be hostile and malicious". He said in a criminal case, the police does not require consent to interrogate.



When asked about statements made by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar about blacklisting of AgustaWestland, he said if the minister said that in Parliament, he could face a breach of privilege.
Delhi based Non-Government Organisation, Routes2Roots (R2R) has been recently honoured with the award of The Inter-Cultural Innovation Award-2016 from United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) in Baku, for its World Largest Oral History Programme, Exchange For Change.





R2R has been trying to promote people to people contact between India and Pakistan since 2004 through cultural activities such as art, theatre, music and festivals. Their Student Exchange Programme is an off-beat one, where they have connected over 12,000 students aged between 9-14 years from 37 schools across seven cities of India and Pakistan.



Their idea is that, India and Pakistan share boundaries, similar histories and cultures and also misconceptions about each other which have contributed to growing tensions. R2R is trying to erase these misconceptions.



Rakesh Gupta, founder of R2R spoke to Metrolife, regarding this achievement and what it means for R2R, which can be inspirational for some social entrepreneurs.

Excerpts:



How did R2R widen its reach?

R2R was formed in 2004 for enhancing people to people contact through art, culture and student exchange programme. It was primarily set up to enhance the cultural cooperation amongst the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries, but gradually expanded its operations beyond SAARC nations. There were seven founder members of R2R initially.



How did you gather attention of the youth to join your NGO?

The programmes and the uniqueness of the mission was the inspiring factor in many people joining this organisation. We believe success instills inspiration.



Are you surprised with your success?

The success of our initiatives and the support that we got from the people was overwhelming which enhanced the pace of our growth. Numerous inter-country programmes were organised which were attended by national leaders, diplomats and importantly by large number of common people.



Were there any hurdles that have moved you?

There were times when we could not raise sponsors and funds for our programmes, and we were feeling helpless. At that stage we were thinking of abandoning some projects. But we did not cancel any of our projects and also did not compromise with the content and quality of the programme, which resulted in creating a robust image of ours in the donors mind. Even now we struggle for raising funds and obtaining permissions. However, it has become a routine and does not hamper our growth.



Why did you think of an NGO like R2R?

We do not know of any such NGOs who are working in the same space as that of ours, that is building peace through enhancing cultural tolerances.



What helped you make R2R what it is today?

I belong to a business family and my experience in managing businesses helped me to conceive, fund and execute newer projects for this NGO. R2R is a place where I work for my passion and thus have no job profile cut out for myself. All of us in our NGO do all the work that is required to be done.



How do you feel as a social entrepreneur on receiving this award?

R2R is proud to have received the Special Mention award on April 26 at the Seventh Global Forum of the UNAOC, held in Baku Azerbaijan. It was inaugurated by the president of Azerbaijan, president of Turkey, H E Nasser Abdulaziz al Nasser, a high

representative for the UNAOC, the Spanish foreign minister and Indian diplomats. This is one of the most prestigious recognition received by R2R. This will benefit R2R in enhancing its capacity and replicating this project in other countries.
News / National

by Stephen Jakes

Mthwakazi Liberation Front has challenged the Zimbabwean government to stop what it called the demonisation of people's children with its national pledge.Ndabezinhle Fuyane, MLF information and Publicity Bulawayo province said MLF is not finding the reason of the present government demonizing children with the so called National School Pledge as the history of great grand fathers, fathers, brothers and sisters is not known but rather the history of foreigners."This so called National School Pledge should be for those who think they did better for Zimbabwe," he said. "Zimbabwe remains our neighbour but their affairs of such demonic proposals which are even the abuse of school children's rights according to the Zimbabwean constitution. We thereby oppose the idea as this totally distort the history of our state which in this case is blinkering our children and the generations to come into believing that the sentiments in the pledge are true,thus fold blinding."He said now they therefore stand against such in Mthwakazi."We say NO ! NO! to such. Our kids should be taught proper history at schools . The Zimbabwean government has no right whatsoever to determine what parents should do for their children," he said. "As parents we know the time for the presents of our children and what the presents are. This is just the infringement of our rights as parents, hence we need not reminded on buying our children presents."
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been invited to address a joint meeting of the US Congress on June 8 during his visit here, Speaker of the US House of Representative Paul Ryan said today.



"The friendship between the United States and India is a pillar of stability in an important region of the world," Ryan told reporters during his weekly press conference.



"This address presents a special opportunity to hear from the elected leader of the world's most populous democracy on how our two nations can work together to promote our shared values and to increase prosperity. We look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi to the US Capitol on June 8," he said.



Modi, who was invited by President Barack Obama for a bilateral visit when he was here for the nuclear summit, will be the fifth prime minister of India to address a joint meeting of Congress, and the first since 2005.



Earlier, Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh (July 19, 2005), Atal Bihari Vajpayee (September 14, 2000), P V Narasimha Rao (May 18, 1994) and Rajiv Gandhi (July 13, 1985) addressed the joint meeting of the US Congress.



The tradition of foreign leaders and dignitaries addressing Congress began with the Marquis de Lafayette of France, who spoke in the House chamber on December 10, 1824.



Ronak D Desai, a Fellow at New America and an Affiliate at the Belfer Center's India and South Asia Program at Harvard University, said, "an invitation to Prime Minister Modi to address a Joint Meeting of Congress is significant, given past US policy towards Modi during his time as Chief Minister of Gujarat."



Modi's visit is likely to be the last official meeting between the two leaders during President Obama's final year in office.



Top American lawmakers welcomed the decision of Ryan to invite Modi to address joint meeting if the US Congress.



"I applaud Speaker Ryan for inviting Prime Minister Modi to address a Joint Meeting of Congress, and I look forward to welcoming the Prime Minister to the Capitol. This address will serve as a sign of the deep and important relationship between the US and India," said Ed Royce, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.



"Our partnership in areas such as defence, nuclear power, renewable energy and space exploration is very strong, thanks to our many shared values. I look forward to hearing from Prime Minister Modi about how we can continue working together to promote peace and prosperity," Royce said.



"I look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi to Washington in June, where his address to a Joint Session of Congress will explore how our two nations can work together to further our shared values and interests," said Tulsi Gabbard, the first ever Hindu lawmaker elected to the US Congress.



"As the worlds oldest and largest democracies, the US and India have many shared values and objectives. Since Prime Minister Modi was first elected in 2014, he has made active engagement with the US a priority on many levels including exploring mutually beneficial economic opportunities, stronger government-to-government relations, and enhanced security engagements," she said.



Earlier this month, Gabbard, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, wrote to Ryan encouraging him to invite Modi to address the Congress.

"I'm pleased that Speaker Ryan has granted my request," said Congressman Ami Bera, the only Indian-American in the current Congress.



"India is a key partner of the US, and this will be an opportunity for members of Congress to learn more about the challenges and opportunities facing our two nations," he said.

Last week, Bera and Royce along with two other lawmakers had urged Ryan to invite Modi to address a joint session of Congress.



Earlier today, Ryan told reporters that Modi would be the leader to address a joint meeting of the Congress after he became the Speaker of the US House of Representatives.



"This will be the first joint meeting of this speakership. We certainly look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi in the United States Capitol this summer, I believe it's June 8th," Ryan said.



"India is the most populace democracy and soon it's going to be the most populace country. The friendship between our nations is a pillar of stability in a very, very important region. This address presents a special opportunity for us to deepen our ties with our ally, India," he said.



"It is a chance to hear from the prime minister on how we can work together to promote our shared values and to increase prosperity," Ryan said.


Exploring business opportunities in India, a delegation of 55 companies and 85 participants from the private sector of the Flanders region of Belgium, visited Bengaluru on Thursday along with the Minister-President of the Government of Flanders Geert Bourgeois.





By visiting India, we further tighten the bonds with a trade partner who is gaining importance and offers many opportunities in a variety of sectors. Flemish exports to India amount to no less than 7.6 billion. With this mission, we seek to consolidate our diamond exports to India and promote other export sectors such as clean tech, food, infrastructure and high tech. In India, our Flemish innovative and knowledge-driven economy is held in high regard. Also, we hope to encourage Indian companies to increase investments in Flanders, Bourgeois said.



In a three-city roadshow across Pune, Mumbai and Bengaluru, six deals have been signed between Indian and Flemish companies. Pune witnessed the signing of a deal between Flanders Newtech and Indias Tech Mahindra, while in Mumbai, the European Business and Technology Centre signed a deal with Agoris Smart Cities and De Watergroep signed a deal with IL&FS.



Bengaluru saw the signing of deals between Waterleau and KEC International, Haven van Zeebrugge and Chennai Port Trust, and Nicolai/Belinfreah and IG International.

India is the seventh biggest destination for Flemish exports, and 97% of Belgian exports to India originates from Flanders. About 80% of the exports comprises of diamonds, followed by chemicals & pharma and machines & electrical equipment, which command about 4% each.



India and Flanders share a hollistic view on innovation, wherein investing in technology is not enough, but people of the country should want to, and be able to, use it. This is an endeavour to leverage the existing ties between India and Flanders to further boost production technologies and client-bases for companies from either countries, said Pascal Cools, General Manger, Flanders District of Creativity.
With the ruling AIADMK having advantage in southern districts of Tamil Nadu due to their welfare schemes, the scene is different in the east coastal segment.



Here, the fishermen's issues poses a greater challenge to the electoral prospects of AIADMK candidates as several thousands of people living in these areas have decided to boycott the May 16 polls.



All the fishermens organisations, which comprises several lakhs of people as members, expressed serious concerns about fishermen of the five coastal districts of Tamil Nadu being regularly arrested and their boats and gears being confiscated by the Sri Lankan Navy.



Cuddalore, Nagapattinam, Ramanathapuram, Tuticorin and Kanyakumari, comprising more than 30 Assembly segments, export different types of rare fishes to other countries. More than 90% of the people living in these districts are into fishing profession.



As the fishing community in this region feels that the ruling AIADMK and DMK, when it was in power, failed to solve their issues permanently, they have threatened to boycott the May 16 Assembly polls if the Centre does not initiate steps for the release of fishermen arrested by Sri Lanka and also their boats, before the polls.



"We have decided to boycott the polls. Even if we exercise our franchise, nothing is going to happen," TN Fishermen Association secretary Karthikeyan from Nagapattinam district told DH.



Claiming that in 2015 alone, more than 70 fishermen belonging to various parts of Tamil Nadu have been arrested by Sri Lanka on the charge of fishing in the island nations waters, he said. We elected AIADMK candidate Jayapal in the last elections. However, as fisheries minister, he did not solve our issue," says Kamachiammal from Nambiar Taluk of Nagapattinam district, one of the areas that was severely affected by Tsunami.



Election Commission officials camping in the coastal districts said, "We spoke to the people to change their decision and they said that they would consider it."



Though Cuddalore district was also affected by the action of Lankan Navy, fishermen in this area complain that the state government and the Centre were not taking steps to prevent huge floods in the rainy season. "We were severely affected by the flood last December. Though the state government provided financial assistance to the affected people, it has not taken steps to find permanent solution to the flood," Prabakaran, a fisherman from Cuddalore district, said.



Fishermen, who have also decided to boycott the elections in Rameswaram of Ramanathapuram district, which is just 18 km away from Sri Lanka coast, too complain that the maritime boundary line is just 9 km and since there is no indication of it, they were frequently arrested by the Lankan authorities. "Every day we face the risk of being shot at and arrested," Annadurai, a fisherman in Rameswaram, said.



Though both the ruling AIADMK and DMK cadre, who were involved in intense poll campaign by once again promising the fishermen that their issues will be solved, most of the people were not convinced. We are really confused whom to vote. Both AIADMK and DMK are not taking care of us. Even if we vote for BJP, its candidate will not win," Arogiyasamy from Tuticorin said.




Rajya Sabha members across the parties on Wednesday supported the demand that reference of Bhagat Singh as terrorist in a textbook should be removed immediately.





They also demanded that the Home Ministry should also delete reference of the great martyr as terrorist.



The issue was raised by Janata Dal United leader KC Tyagi. He said freedom fighters family is campaigning in Delhi demanding that the martyr should not be called a terrorist.



He said the book Freedom Struggle of India has been published with the financial help of the Government of India and it refers to Bhagat Singh as a terrorist. The Home Ministry also mentions the martyr as terrorist in its blacklist.



He also demanded that the place from where Bhagat Singh had thrown bomb and the place to which it was thrown should be declared as historical monuments.



Some members demanded action against the authors.



Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi assured the House that he would convey the demands to the concerned ministries.
Amid tension and sloganeering, the right-to-pray movement reached the doorsteps of the famous Haji Ali dargah at Worli here in Mumbai.



A group of people and organisations staged a peaceful demonstration demanding entry of women even as womens right activist Trupti Desai staged a protest.



The Haji Ali Sabke Liye, which is a conglomerate of 50-odd organisations and activists, staged a demonstration from 3 pm to 5 pm.



Desai, the founder-president of Bhumata Ranragini Brigade, who had spearheaded the campaign successfully against the entry ban on women into Shani Shingnapur and Trimbakeshwar temples, however, reached the place of protest around 5.25 pm and was prevented from entering. She later made another attempt, but was stopped once again.



AIMIMs Haji Rafat Hussain threatened to smear her face with black ink, while Samajwadi Party's MLA Abu Asim Azmi said that she was engaging in cheap publicity and was hurting religious sentiments. The Shamsher Khan Pathan-led Awami Vikas Party too protested against the demand seeking entry of women. Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat Shaikh also accused Desai of playing politics.



It was a peaceful protest and lot of people joined us and supported the demand for gender equality in places of worship, said Jatin Desai, veteran activist.



Even while protests by the Haji Ali Sabke Liye forum and pressure group were underway, there were counter-protests by several Muslim organisations.
Former Bollywood actor Mamta Kulkarni and her husband Vicky Goswami have come under the scanner of the police and drug enforcement agencies.





The duo is being probed for the sensational Rs 2,000-crore drug bust in Thane city, which had international repercussions and links to big foreign cartels. A few days ago, the Thane police conducted raids and seized 18.5 tonne of Ephedrine and 2.5 tonne of acetic anhydride totally valued at over Rs 2,000 crore in the international market.



So far, the police have arrested eight people including a Nigerian national. Avon Lifesciences Ltd, that manufactured these drugs, is also under scanner.



The US Drug Enforcement Administration has joined the investigations and the probe has been widened. Vijaygiri Anadgiri Goswami aka Vicky Goswami alias Vijay Goswami Vicky faces an Interpol notice and reportedly does not move out of Kenya. Latest reports said that both Vicky and Mamta are in Kenya and are underground.



This is an international racket and Vicky Goswami is the main link to it. As for Mamta Kulkarni, we are probing her role. In the past she had come under the scanner of DEA and she was detained for a while as well, Thane Police Commissioner Parambir Singh said.



Among those arrested so far include Manoj Jain, a director of Avon Lifesciences Ltd. Others arrested include Punit Shring, who was part of the same company and Hardipsingh Gill, who used to help the duo transfer the product from one place to another. The company has a licence to manufacture ephedrine, but it used to hide the actual quantity of manufactured ephedrine and also sent it to other places that would make drugs out of it.



Thane Police officials said that Jain was in touch with Goswami and they collaborating with each other and planning to send across huge consignements of the contraband to the United States.



On Thursday, Singh briefed Director General of Police Pravin Dixit about the ongoing investigations and the future course of action. Officials of the US DEA too were present.

Singh said: During the investigations, it has emerged that some of the accused had been regularly visiting African countries. They had visited Kenya and met Goswami. He was under the scanner of DEA. Our investigations match with that of the DEA.



Asked specifically about Mamta Kulkarni, he said that she was also under the scanner of the DEA. We are carrying out investigations, he said.
The Excise department and the police have drawn flak from the Congress party for raiding its MLA Vinay Vermas house and finding nothing unlawful.





Verma, in a sting operation, was shown to be boasting of arranging liquor, despite ban imposed in the state from April 5. The MLA from Narkatiaganj reiterated that he was a teetotaller and denied having said what was being shown in the sting operation. Following telecast of the clippings, an FIR was lodged against the legislator of the Congress, which is a ruling alliance partner in Bihar.



After the raids failed to yield anything, the raiding team is now treading cautiously and consulting senior lawyers and officers before initiating any further action. A section of Congress has questioned the undue haste shown in the matter and the manner in which the police team raided the residence of a ruling party MLAs house without any search warrant.



The conduct of police in this case defies all logic. I have sought a detailed report in the case as I have to brief the AICC about it, said Congress Legislature Party leader in the Assembly Sadanand Singh. Lawyers of Verma too are contemplating initiating action against the journalists and the TV channels which showed a minuscule part of the 20-minute interview of the MLA.



Vinay is a teetotaller. There is no proof that he provided any liquor to anybody, said his lawyer Satyavrat Verma. The lawyer wondered why no FIR had been registered against those journalists who were shown in the video asking for liquor. Seeking or demanding liquor in a dry State is also an offence, he added. Terming the episode as a cheap gimmick, the lawyer contended that Section 47 (a) and 53 (b) of the Bihar Excise Amendment Act, under which the Congress MLA had been booked, do not apply on the legislator as no liquor was either recovered from him or from his residence, nor was it consumed at any place.
The government on Thursday defended cancellation of Uyghur leader Dolkun Isas visa, even as another exiled Chinese dissident was barred from attending a conclave in India.





Chinese pro-democracy activist Lu Jinghua, who is now based in New York, could not attend the conference being held at Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh as she was denied visa to travel to India. Ray Wong, a pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong, was also denied the visa to attend the conference, which commenced on Thursday and would continue till May 1.



New Delhi earlier cancelled a visa issued to Dolkun Isa, a front-line leader of the Uyghurs stir to liberate their homeland East Turkestan, which is now known as Xinxiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. Isas visa was cancelled after Beijing cried foul and reminded New Delhi that China viewed the World Uyghur Congress chairman as a terrorist.



Isa fled China after being jailed repeatedly for his activism seeking political and religious freedom for Uyghurs. He is now a citizen of Germany.



He (Isa) applied for a tourist visa under the electronic travel authorisation system. He was accordingly granted the visa. After obtaining the visa, Isa stated publicly that he was coming to attend a conference in India. (It was) a fact which was suppressed in the visa form and something that a tourist visa does not permit, Vikas Swarup, official spokesperson of the MEA, stated on Thursday. He added that the visa issuing authorities had learnt that Isa had an Interpol Red Corner notice against him.



Isa was expected to take part in the conference, which will also be attended by other representatives of marginalised ethnic and minority communities of China as well as the exiled Chinese dissidents demanding democracy in the communist country. Seeking to counter the speculation about New Delhi buckling under pressure from Beijing, the MEA spokesperson also cautioned against meanings being read, either on visa being given to Isa or its subsequent cancellation.



We are a democratic society, conscious of our responsibilities. Those would remain the guiding factors in such matter, said Swarup.



Sources said that Lu Jinghua, a prominent exiled Tiananmen Square activist, had been denied visa as the documents she submitted with her application for the travel document had been found illegible.



There was also inconsistency with regard to the purpose of her visit. Ray Wong had not been issued visa due to data inconsistency with the purpose of her visit.
A usually low profile Ahmed Patel, the political secretary to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, launched an all out campaign to clear the name of his leader from the AgustaWestland controversy.





Patels name also figures in documents presented to an Italian Court of Appeals that convicted senior officials of AgustaWestland and its parent company Finmeccanica on charges of false accounting and corruption. What is the proof that AP mentioned in the court documents refers to Ahmed Patel? Mere mention of AP cannot be an indictment. AP can mean anything, Patel, a close confidant of the Congress president, told mediapersons.



The 66-year-old leader from Gujarat has been a member of the core group of the Congress and is known to have played a key role in all the important decisions taken by the party since 2004. On Wednesday, he was in a combative mood as the court documents refer to Signora Gandhi as the driving force behind the purchase of the VVIP choppers and the need to lobby her to swing the deal. My party and my leader has nothing to do with it, Patel said dismissing the charges as baseless. There is not an iota of evidence against me or my leader, he said.



Since the controversy re-surfaced, Patel has also been demanding for speedier investigation into the case by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate, ordered by the then UPA government in 2013.



The NDA government has been in office for 24 months. They should speed up the investigation to find the truth, he said. Referring to media reports, Patel said even James Christian Michel, the middle-man in the AgustaWestland deal, has said that the writing on the documents presented before court was not his.



These are forged documents, he said. The Congress maintains that unverified noting and a hand-written diary cannot be admissible as evidence in Indian courts.
Deputy Chairman of Rajya Sabha PJ Kurien on Wednesday warned Subramanian Swamy of action when the BJP leader referred to the Constitution of a foreign country.



His remarks triggered angry protests by the Congress members. Kurien immediately expunged the remarks and instructed media not to report it.



Swamys attempts on Tuesday to drag the name of Sonia Gandhi into the AgustaWestland scam had also triggered huge protests.



I will take action against you. Subramanian Swamy you are unnecessarily provoking. I will have to take action against you, said the Deputy Chairman. He also told Swamy to meet him in his chamber.



The trouble started after Chaudhary Munavver Saleem of Samajwadi Party referred to his name in Zero Hour mentioning that Swamy was part of the movement in 1970s to protect the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University.



The BJP MP stood up to clarify and said he had no objection to minority education institutions but the Constitution prohibits the state from financing them.



When he was countered by the Opposition on the issue, he responded that he was referring to the Indian constitution, not the Constitution of another country. The mention of the name of a country triggered protests. Swamys remarks also evoked angry responses from Opposition MPs.



Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said: Swamy is just two days old in the House and his remarks have already been expunged twice. There are 365 days in a year, how many times are you going to expunge his words. Swamy took oath on Monday.



Senior Congress leader and Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh also reacted angrily over the remarks of the BJP leader. Earlier too, Swamy tried to raise the issue of AgustaWestland but was denied permission. It triggered protests but the House came to order.


News / Press Release

by Staff Reporter

If you listen to any Zimbabwean radio station anytime, you'll hear the same playlist that you heard last month, same music, same artists one wonders if it's the lack of content or what the other musicians from different genres are submitting is not good enough. Zimbabwean musicians and concerned citizens across the globe has come together to change all that and are demanding all radio stations in Zim what the masses love, something that will conserve their tradition and identity.Zim-dancehall is currently dominant in all commercial radio stations in Zimbabwe with the Harare side enjoying massive airplay as the genre's Capital. There are a number of genres across Zimbabwe some of which nature and promotes the growth and preservation of black culture. The musicians use their music as a tool to tackle different social troubles, they use music to highlight and suggest possible solutions on how to solve the matter at hand. Now that the meaningful music is facing extension from the national radios, it calls for serious concern as to where the country is going in terms of arts and culture. The traditional music genre is sidelined mainly Khalanga music, Ndebele music, Tonga and Shona to name a few.Music is a tool that is used to soothe a wounded soul, cheer, warn or provoke a certain action and mainly to preserve a nation's culture and tradition. What will happen to our culture 15years from now if the radio only promotes the music that speaks of sex, drugs, money and guns?, is that what you have in mind for the future generation?, whose going to tell them about Mzilikazi, Lozikeyi, Mhunu Mhutapa, Langa and Njelele?We calling upon every musician and concerned Zim citizens to come forward and sign an online petition which will be submitted to the top government officials in one voice as a nation, we demand that all Zimbabwean musicians get fair and equal airplay without discriminating or grading them using their tribal background or genre to decide what's good for radio, radio is for the people listen to what people want.There are many Zimbabwean musicans who are big in other countries but they are unkowns in their homeland just because they don't get airplay in their own country. The time is now, enough is enough let us all unite and fight this demon now and save our beloved language. We've been silent for way too long, now give our musicians their voices back and watch music unite different tribes.There are more than 80 Maskandi musicians from Zimbabwe, how many have you heard on your stereo playing or being interviewed?, is it because their language of choice ain't radio's market? Or it's because their genre is dustbin material?. We have a large number of Rhumba artists from Zim, how many Rhumba artists are playlisted on your popular radio stations?."Phakama Zulu ngaphambi kokuba kumoshakale, phakama nzalo kaNdaba silondoloze ulimi lwethu namasiko ngomculo".Let us all rise and defend our culture by fighting for those who preserve it through arts.Here is the link, sign and share. Your voice counts, make it heard: www.ipetitions.com/petition/give-our-muaicians-their-voices-back-lets-all
Indian agencies investigating the VVIP chopper scam have collected a trache of documents on the bribe received by country's officials.





However, they are waiting for more details from abroad to pinpoint the money trail. The Indian leg of investigations by the CBI and Enforcement Directorate in the case are almost over and they believe that middleman Christian Michel, who is still out of their reach, could throw more light into the way the bribe money travelled.



Both CBI and ED want Michel, a British national whose whereabouts is not known, to be brought to India and face investigations.



Investigators said AgustaWestland had assigned Michel with the tasks, including that of managing media. The Court of Appeals in Milan had in its judgement sentencing two former AgustaWestland officials said that Michel had received 330 million Euro from the company for various tasks.



The Italian authorities had earlier shared around 1.5 lakh documents related to the VVIP chopper deal.



According to the CBI, Indian officials were paid around Rs 360 crore as bribe for swinging the deal for AgustaWestland.



Sources said Michel could throw more light on the people, including politicians, who received the money. Michel had used some of his Indian contacts like Gautam Khaitan, who was earlier arrested in the case by Enforcement Directorate, for getting his work done. Investigators believe Michel, who was earlier staying in the Gulf, is now in the United Kingdom.



The Enforcement Directorate had last year attached five properties worth Rs 6.2 crore owned by cousins of former Air Force chief S P Tyagi in connection with its probe. Tyagi is also named in the FIR by CBI and ED.



Sources said the bribe money was routed through a circuitous path. According to investigating agencies, they had detected that funds for the deal were routed through Aeromatrix, run by Khaitan, and few others.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) clarified on Thursday that controversial helicopter design and manufacturing company Agusta-Westland has no commercial links in India at the moment.



While all dealings with MoD has been suspended, an industrial licence given to the company to enter into a joint venture with Tata Sons has expired, it added.



In September 2011, the Foreign Investment Promotion Board approved a proposal from Indian Rotorcraft Ltd, a joint venture of Tata Sons with AgustaWestland NV, Netherlands. This was later changed to AgustaWestland S.p.A, Italy, due to re-organisation within the group.



An industrial licence for the manufacture of helicopters was granted by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion to Indian Rotorcraft Ltd on February 7, 2012. However, the validity of the licence has since expired, MoD stated. Asserting that the core issue is corruption, MoD stated that the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate were vigorously pursuing all aspects of the investigation, including the arrests and extradition of three foreign nationals, Carlo Gerosa, Guido Haschke Ralph and Christian Michel James.



Red Notices were issued against them in December 2015 and January 2016 through Interpol under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and Prevention of Corruption Act. Extradition request has also been made for Christian Michel James.



The ED has arrested an Indian national and attached approximately Rs 11 crore of property belonging to Indian nationals and to Christian Michel James.



Though MoD did not name the Indian, Delhi-based lawyer Gautam Khaitan was the first person who was arrested by the ED in the VVIP chopper scam. In July 2014, MoD put on hold all acquisition cases in the pipeline involving six companies named in the FIR registered by the CBI.



The companies are: AgustaWestland International Ltd, UK; Finmeccanica, Italy and its group of companies, including subsidiaries and affiliates; IDS, Tunisia; Infotech Design System (IDS), Mauritius; IDS Infotech Ltd., Mohali and Aeromatrix Info Solution Pvt. Ltd, Chandigarh. Khaitan was on the board of Aeromatrix.
India has asked UK to deport business tycoon and parliamentarian Vijay Mallya, who is being probed by the Enforcement Directorate in a money laundering case.



The Ministry of External Affairs has written to the British High Commission in New Delhi, conveying Indias request to the UK Government for deportation of Mallya. The MEA pointed out in its communique that the liquor barons passport had been revoked and a non-bailable warrant had been issued against him by a special court in Mumbai.



The ministry has written to the High Commission of the UK in Delhi requesting the deportation of Vijay Mallya so that his presence can be secured for investigations against him under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002, Vikas Swarup, official spokesperson of the MEA, told mediapersons on Thursday.



The MEA also asked the High Commission of India in London to issue a note verbale to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the British Government asking for deportation of Mallya.



Mallyas Kingfisher Airlines defaulted on loans of over Rs 9,400 crores. He left the country for UK on March 2, the day a consortium of 13 banks, which had lent him money, moved the Debt Recovery Tribunal to step up pressure on him to return the money.



New Delhi is of the view that getting Mallya deported from UK might not be difficult because a court had issued a warrant against the liquor baron and his passport had also been revoked.



The ED informed the ministry that a special court in Mumbai had issued a non-bailable warrant against Mallya under provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. The ED requested for initiation of the procedure for seeking his deportation from UK.



The ED had earlier requested the MEA to suspend the passport of Mallya, as he had refused to appear before the agency despite being summoned by it thrice between March 10 and April 2. The agency had declined pleas by Mallyas lawyers seeking more time for the flamboyant billionaire to return from UK and appear before it. The MEA first suspended the diplomatic passport issued to Mallya, who is a member of the Rajya Sabha. The passport was later revoked.



Meanwhile, the efforts to bring back Mallya gained momentum, even as the MEA on Thursday told Parliament that it was yet to receive a request by agencies concerned for extradition of former Indian Premier League chairman Lalit Modi from the UK. Modi too was under a probe by the ED for alleged money laundering.



The extradition request in respect of Lalit Modi is yet to be received by the MEA, Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh told Rajya Sabha in response to a question.



The ED has been asking Modi to join investigations after an FIR was registered against him and others under the provisions of PML Act 2002.
Congress MPs from Karnataka forming a forum recently to take up the problems faced by them vis-a-vis their constituencies with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has created a flutter in the state political circles.





It was speculated in the Congress circles that the MPs had raised the banner of revolt against Siddaramaiah, who has of late come under criticism from a section his partymen for his style of functioning. However, Congress MP from Bengaluru Rural, D K Suresh, who is also the convenor of the forum, denied reports the MPs had revolted.



The MPs have formed the forum with the intention of taking up with the chief minister issues related to the development of our constituencies. We all have decided to meet Siddaramaiah when he visits Delhi and discuss the development projects pending in our constituencies. It has got nothing to do with politics, he said.



The chief minister is likely to visit Delhi after completing his tour of the drought-affected regions in Karnataka. The members of the forum will meet him during his visit. One of the major issues is the pending railway projects. The forum wants to urge the chief minister to extend his cooperation in completing all the development projects, he added.



Horticulture Minister Shamanur Shivashankarappa said Siddaramaiah would complete his term as the chief minister.



Speaking to reporters, he said Siddaramaiah would become the chief minister again if the party won the 2018 Assembly elections. MLAs of the ruling party aspiring to become ministers is common. I will continue as the minister for the remaining two years, irrespective of whether the chief minister reshuffles the Cabinet or not. But I am ready to face anything, he said. Asked whether senior leader S M Krishna could again become the chief minister, Shamanur said: He is already 85. CM denies rift in Cong



Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday denied reports of misunderstanding between him and Congress leaders, reports DHNS from Mysuru.



When asked about 13 Congress MPs who have expressed their displeasure over his style of functioning, Siddaramaiah said the MPs gathered at Congress leader M Veerappa Moilys house for lunch.



Siddaramaiah said: The media and Opposition party leaders are spreading false rumours about me and are speculating change of guard in the state. Opposition party leaders cannot tolerate the fact that I am the chief minister and the media is writing things based on their imagination. There is no misunderstanding in the party.


Forest department officials trapped a male leopard at midnight on Wednesday at Mahadeshwara village, Ujjai forest block in Doddaballapur taluk of Bengaluru Rural district. The big cat was relocated to the Kollegal forest patch on Thursday evening.





The village is a part of Saslu section of the Doddaballapur forest range. The animal is said to be aged between 6 and 8 years and has minor scratches on its body. According to forest officials, the animal may have sustained the bruises while trying to escape from the cage.



Villagers were complaining to the forest department officials for the past one week of leopard sightings. Cases of cattle being attacked by the leopard were also reported. Three days ago, the forest officials placed a cage with a street dog as bait to capture the animal. D Mahesh Kumar, DCF (territorial), Bengaluru Rural, said Nelamangala and Doddaballapur house leopards because of the hilly terrain and forest patches. Leopards are highly adaptable and despite their regular sightings, no human injury has been reported for many years now. Cattle and street dogs have been attacked and local residents panic because of this.



Kumar said they would place camera traps around Doddaballapur range to keep track of leopard movements. One camera had already been installed near Nelamangala.



Forest officials said it was not easy to ascertain from where the leopard entered the village. One theory doing the rounds is that quarrying is going on in some hillocks near Doddaballapur, disturbing their habitat. So, they are wandering into the villages, looking for prey.


Bengaluru City MLAs on Thursday took Bengaluru Development Minister K J George to task over the citys garbage problem.



The minister had convened a meeting of senior BBMP officials, city MLAs and the mayor. According to sources, MLAs cutting across party lines, including Aravind Limbavali and Byrathi Basavaraj, attacked the minister for not resolving the issue. Highlighting the crisis in their respective constituencies, they demanded that the minister resolve the problem at the earliest.



Later speaking to the reporters, George defended the transfer of senior IAS officer T M Vijay Bhaskar, who was relieved of his charge as BWSSB chairman. An order to this effect was issued on Thursday.



Terming his transfer as an administrative matter, George said he had nothing to do with the development and that it was Chief Minister Siddaramaiahs decision. He also said the government had initiated disciplinary action against KAS officer K Mathai and shunted him out from his post as Assistant Commissioner, BBMP.



Vijaya Bhaskar was appointed as BWSSB chairman last September. Recently, the government relieved him of his services as Additional Chief Secretary, Urban Development department, and BDA chairman. Though he was transferred as Additional Chief Secretary, Environment and Ecology, he had retained additional charge at BWSSB till Thursday.

There is speculation that George was responsible for the officers transfer.


A heavy wooden roof came crashing down inside one of the lockups at the Bengaluru city railway police station on Thursday morning.



Nobody was injured as the police had taken out the two suspects in the lockup for breakfast just before the roof collapsed. The incident occurred a month after the South Western Railway (SWR) building section certified the structure that houses the police station on platform number 6 as strong enough for a few more decades.



A railway police officer told Deccan Herald: Our men had detained two youths, aged around 25 and hailing from Dharwad and Magadi, in a mobile theft case on Wednesday night. The two were kept in lockup number one for questioning. The duo were taken out for breakfast around 8.25 am and within minutes the wooden roof, which weighed around 250 kg, collapsed.



I rushed inside the lockup after I heard a thud and the cell was filled with debris, he said. The railway police would have been in trouble had the roof fallen on the two suspects. They would have surely been killed in the incident and it would have amounted to lockup death, said the police.



The SWR subordinate staff reportedly hushed up the matter and they directed the railway police to remain tight-lipped about the incident. They rushed to the spot and cleared the debris.



Sanjiv Agarwal, Divisional Railway Manager, Bengaluru, South Western Railway, was not even informed about the incident until evening.



A small false ceiling collapsed inside the lockup, where there is no light. Its actually the false ceiling and no part of the wall collapsed, Agarwal told Deccan Herald. Our staff regularly conduct check-ups and there is nothing wrong in the building, he said.



A police officer said, A team from the SWR visited our police station in March after the tragedy at the Hubballi railway station. They certified that the structure was constructed by the British about 120 years ago and it could be used for many more decades.



The police claimed that their repeated pleas for a new building with the SWR higher-ups have fallen on deaf ears.



Six people were killed and at least 15 injured when the building, more than a century-old, which housed the SWR parcel office and the railway police station, in Hubballi collapsed on February 8.



The incident at the Bengaluru City railway police station has raised serious concerns about the safety of many railway police stations as they are housed in old structures.




Opinion / Columnist

ON Independence day, the Zimbabwe Defence Forces Commander General Constantine Guveya Chiwenga was tough talking, and in his interview with The Herald, he collapsed the country's historical, military and intelligence narrative, to describe the long road travelled so far.He also spoke on issues that have taken so long to be part of the national discourse when he said the ZDF was alive to the machinations by the country's detractors, through their local stooges, and that there was nothing new in whatever anyone was day-dreaming to do to usurp power and/or cause disunity in the country.Said Gen Chiwenga: "We are aware of the ascetic warfare they are waging on the country, the country's political system, the country's economy . . . But if we defeated them in 1979 and got our Independence in 1980, what makes them feel that they can launch another war against us and defeat us? We are aware of them. We are aware of all the tricks."Even during the liberation struggle, we also had the same problems. We had numerous rebellions that you are aware of. The parties were being split left, right and centre. They tried all the tricks. In the case of us, we had the parties being destroyed - Zapu and Zanu - when Frolizi was formed. It did not work. We had the rebellions of the Nhari/Badza. We had the rebellions of Vashandi 1 and Vashandi 2. Every trick which has been used, we have been prepared for it and here we are, prepared even more than what they expected," he said.So much history compressed in so short a statement!What has always surprised the writer is how some people would be quick to label such information as propaganda, when these events are still being used by the enemy as templates to interfere in Zimbabwe's internal affairs.Take the Nhari/Badza rebellion for example. Some people have gone to great length to come up with spurious conspiracy theories, despite the fact that primary data provided by the Rhodesian security system is there to help solve the puzzle.It is well known that the Rhodesian forces' counter-insurgency activities were meant to derail the liberation struggle, and create divisions and disunity among the liberation movements zanla (zanu) and zipra (Zapu). They also created inter-and intra-party rivalry using sellouts they planted in the liberation movements.We have also read the spirited denials by some regarding Peter Stiff's claims in his biography on the assassination of zanu founding chairman Herbert Chitepo. Stiff, an ex-SAS soldier who acted as "agent provocateur in Rhodesia in the 1970s" makes it very clear how their undercover operations led to Chitepo's assassination in the Zambian capital Lusaka.Those who have read the hard cover edition of his biography, "See you in November: The story of Alan 'Tafy' Brice: An SAS assassin", published in the mid-eighties would have seen the plates that even had a hand-drawn map leading to the Chitepo homestead and other security diagrams.There is no need to reinvent the wheel, when the agenda setters tell it as is.Why would today's researcher fail to see through the issues in the Badza/Nhari rebellion, when the director of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation, Ken Flower describes how the two were knowingly embedded with their system?Flower might use language that is peculiarly Rhodesian, but he gives important information that should be used to revisit some of the events of the liberation struggle, in order to put closure.In his biography, "Serving secretly: An intelligence chief on record, Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, 1964 to 1981", published in 1987, (more or less the same period when "See you in November"), Flower captures what led to the Nhari/Badza rebellion in the chapter he titled "External escalation 1972-76."Says Flower: "A year after the coup I was in Lisbon again, to experience something of the changes . . . My friends in Lisbon were sure the pendulum would swing once again, though they conceded that the Portuguese empire had gone forever. For, after Portugal had handed over the reins of power in Mozambique to Frelimo in September 1974, full independence followed in June 1975."Flower continues, "The issue of joint clandestine action between Rhodesia and South Africa had continued to occupy much of CIO's time during the period of our liaison with Portugal over the fate of Mozambique."In August 1974 I submitted a brief to Ian Smith which I suggested he use in his forthcoming off-the-record discussion with Vorster."Let us now turn to the specifics about the Rhodesian involvement in the rebellion led by Thomas Nhari and Dakarai Badza.Flower on page 146 says: "By this time, CIO was in possession of Intelligence of vital significance concerning the numbers and deployment of zanla guerillas operating within Rhodesia, their tactics and the availability of supplies. Acting upon this Intelligence, we had met some of zanla's junior commanders in the field (north-eastern region)."From these meetings, it was clear that there was dissension within their ranks which we could turn to our advantage."Among those contacted were Thomas Nhari, zanla commander of the Nehanda Sector, and Dakari Badza, commander of the Chaminuka Sector."At a meeting with them at Mukumbura on the Mozambique border, our Special Branch representatives learnt that guerillas were the effects of indifferent command and serious shortages of supplies caused by the lengthening of their lines of communication."In the light of such disaffection, it was easy for us to convince them of the injustice of their fight for survival in the bush while their leaders 'relaxed in comparative luxury' in Zambia and Tanzania."We were offering substantial rewards at the time for surrender of 'Terrorist Leaders', or for their collaboration, and had something to bargain with. We could even talk of negotiating an end to the war," says Flower.How did they eventually use the Intelligence gathered at the meetings they held with Badza and Nhari?Ken Flower says: "The opportunity to exploit this situation came in November 1974 when, with the release of nationalist leaders from Rhodesian gaols, CIO became aware for the first time of even greater dissension within the political ranks of zanu . . . Now that we knew the depth of the rift within zanu, and were convinced that neither zanu nor Zapu would accept each other's leadership, it seemed that the only course open to the (Frontline) presidents in their pursuit of guerrilla unity was to turn to the 'moderates' of the ANC."To sow further dissension we had ready tools in Nhari and his companions, who became willing conspirators. Nhari seized command of zanla's Chifombo base on the Mozambique/Zambia border indulging in random killings as he did so. His followers then planned to kidnap Josiah Tongogara, the Lusaka-based commander of zanla since 1972, but he was out of the country at the time . . ."In the same chapter, Flower also talks about Chitepo's assassination.From what Gen Chiwenga said, these were some of the lessons learnt. They are alive to the enemy's tricks, and strongly feel that like in the past, they will prevail.
Water levels in all reservoirs of the state are fast depleting, and the government has announced that water will last only till the end of May.





Water Resources Minister M B Patil told the media in Bengaluru on Thursday that the situation might worsen if the monsoon fail this year too.



If such a situation were to arise, then the government will meet the drinking water needs by pumping water from the dead storage.



He said that water boards had been directed to supply water on a staggered basis, to ensure judicious utilisation.



Come June, if the rains fail, the situation will worsen. It will be ideal if BWSSB and other water supply boards stagger the supply of water, said Patil.



He said Maharashtra had fulfilled Karnatakas demand and had supplied 1 tmc ft of water from Ujjani dam. The government has sought an additional 1 tmc ft of water from Maharashtra, but the neighbouring state had said that it might be difficult to provide the same. Patil said that Karnataka would appeal once again. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah would submit a petition shortly to Maharashtra.



Mekedatu project



Patil also said that the department was on the verge of finalising the detailed project report for the Mekedatu balancing reservoir project. The project proposal would be submitted to the Centre next month.



The department will also submit a proposal for the expansion of the Tungabhadra reservoir.



Telanganas appeal



The Telangana government has requested Karnataka to release 3 tmc ft of water from the Narayanpura dam.



Telangana state too is facing severe drought conditions. A three-member ministerial delegation led by the Telangana minister for Irrigation, Marketing and Legislative Affairs, T Harish Rao, met Patil and submitted a memorandum to him to this effect.

Patil has promised to consider the demand on humanitarian grounds.



I will discuss the matter with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and the officials concerned. A decision will be taken soon after assessing the availability of water and the requirement of the state, he said.



He said people of Karnataka too were facing severe shortage of drinking water and the government was making concerted efforts to mitigate the problem.
The Doddaballapur police arrested three executives of the Terra Firma landfill in Gundlahalli of Doddaballapur taluk in connection with the major fire incident at one of the garbage mounds.



Based on a complaint by the Panchayat Development Officer (PDO) of Bhaktarahalli village Kemparaju, the police arrested Deepak, Kanthappa and Santosh. Even after 24 hours of the fire incident, the fire could not be brought under control completely. Firefighters struggled to douse the fire with the help of earthmovers and fire tenders. Several truckloads of soil was dumped on the burning mound of garbage but to no avail. Firefighters were seen having a tough time to control the fire amid thick smoke emitting from the site.



The Deputy Commissioner of Bengaluru Rural district S Palaiah had camped at Gundlahalli on Wednesday night and was monitoring the operation to extinguish fire. He had several rounds of meeting with the officials in his office on Thursday.



Medical teams have been running camps in and around the villages to provide medical aid to those affected by the smoke. The medical officer of the Gundlahalli village Dr Parameshwar conceded that many people have developed respiratory problem and skin allergy.


The Supreme Court may have paved the way for the conduct of a single entrance exam (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) for admission to undergraduate medical courses across India, but private colleges appear cautious about the move.





Shafi Ahmed, secretary of Karnataka Religious and Linguistic Minority Professional Colleges Association (KRLMPCA), said the announcement had come late. It should have been announced earlier. The dates and schedule of the CET have been declared, consensual agreement has been agreed upon. It will cause great inconvenience to the students.



The KRLMPCA has 12 medical and dental institutions under it and conducts its own exam. We have announced our schedule and issued hall tickets. Moreover, an online exam for lakhs of students cannot be arranged at short notice. There is bound to be some glitch, he said. Further, he said that with the NEET being merit-based, minority students especially from rural areas would be at a disadvantage.



S Kumar, general secretary, Consortium of Medical, Dental and Engineering Colleges of Karnataka, welcomed the intention to do away with multiple exams but called for caution. One needs to curtail multiple exams but there is a methodology that needs to be followed.



If somebody wants to correct the present system, a radical wipeout is not recomm ended.

Dr S S Harsoor, Director, Medical Education, said: At this point of time, I would not like to comment as I have not seen the order. A decision on the matter will be taken on Friday.
A Bengaluru court has handed out 10 years of rigorous imprisonment to a man who forcibly took his neighbour into his house, threatened her at knifepoint, drugged her and then raped her repeatedly.



The court also fined him Rs 5 lakh, out of which Rs 3 lakh would be paid to the girl as compensation. The incident occurred at Attur Layout, Yelahanka, north Bengaluru, in April 2012. The accused is Manjunath whose parents have rented residential property and run a small business.



While he had threatened to kill the victim if she talked to her parents, he bragged about the incident to his friends, who lived in the same locality. He told them how he mixed a sedative into a bottle of Pepsi and made the girl drink it. When she lost consciousness, he sexually assaulted her.



Before that, Manjunath had befriended the girl and talked to her casually. He even tried to get intimate with her but she spurned his advances. But he appeared determined and went on to commit the crime, the prosecution said. The girl became distraught after the incident but gathered the courage to tell her parents about what had happened.



The parents, who run a small shop of tender coconuts and do odd jobs, went to the Yelahanka New Town police station and lodged a complaint. Accordingly, the police registered a case under sections 342 (punishment for wrongful confinement) and 376 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code.



The investigation officer, Umesh, and his team arrested Manjunath a few days after the incident. They also recovered the knife he had used in the crime.



Additional City Civil and Sessions Judge, Vijayalakshmi Sangappa Upanal, found Manjunath guilty and sentenced him on Wednesday. S N Hiremani was the public prosecutor.


Opinion / Columnist

The United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Peter Harry Thomas (Jr)'s recent public denial that the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by his country were not affecting ordinary citizens but were only targeted to some ZANU PF leaders and some entities owned by those leaders showed that he is not in touch with reality. Ambassador P.H Thomas (Jr) has shown his lack of knowledge on what the Zimbabweans have been undergoing economically since the turn of the 21st millennium when Zimbabwe got economically embargoed.His lack of knowledge on the impact of the economic sanctions imposed on the country by both the USA government and the European Union (EU) for more than a decade now should not make him trivialise the suffering of some Zimbabweans here. As a new top American diplomat to Zimbabwe he needs to take his time and get to understand what Zimbabweans have been experiencing for close to two decades before he comes out with such uninformed comments.Ambassador Thomas Junior who would be in the country for some number of years to come should use that time as a means to get more information about Zimbabwe. Taking history lessons on Zimbabwean issues would also help him to appreciate more about what the Zimbabweans have been experiencing even before the sanctions were imposed so that he would not have problems coming up with a well-researched conclusions about the status of this Southern African country.The fact that he is new in the country and has not travelled around the country on his fact finding missions to see the effects of the western imposed economic sanctions on the Zimbabwean economy makes him to deny the real facts on ground. Ambassador Thomas (Jr) needs to consult widely with his counterparts in the US embassy and those in the diplomatic community who have been in the country before him so that he is well informed of the real issues on the ground. Relying on the western written books on Zimbabwe without first-hand information would not help the ambassador to the whole information in which he would be covering for the duration of his tour of duty.Responding to journalists' questions during a roundtable discussion at the American Corner at the Bulawayo Public Library on Thursday 21 April 2016, Ambassador Thomas Jnr said that his country was the biggest supporter of ordinary people in Zimbabwe. He added: "It is not true that US sanctions affect ordinary people the most. We are the biggest donor in this country; we give more scholarships to support people". End of quote. Ambassador Thomas further said that his country had been the largest donor to Zimbabwe giving the Southern African country $2, 6 billion since independence.For Ambassador Thomas Jr to come out telling those who bothered to listen to him that the $2, 6 billion which his country is said to have donated to Zimbabwe since independence was necessary when the country has lost more than $100 billion in potential revenue since the country was embargoed more than a decade ago reveals that he lacks respect for the Zimbabwean people. Ambassador Thomas needs to appreciate that Zimbabwe is endowed with mineral resources that can be exploited to finance her operations without any outside donations. And such potential coming from the use of mineral and other natural resources was destroyed by sanctions as all line of credits were cut off by the international community because of some sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe.It should be clear to Ambassador Thomas Junior that the West's illegal economic sanctions regime has cost Zimbabwe's economic wellbeing since 2001, with negative effects on vulnerable groups that saw their livelihoods decline to pitiable levels. So the US top diplomat to Zimbabwe needs to grasp such information so that next time if he gets to give a comment on sanctions in the country he would not get himself into angering the affected people.Since 2001, the illegal sanctions have put the Zimbabwe economy under siege with negative downstream effects on vulnerable groups, communities and civil society thereby creating confusion in the economic turnaround of the country. Zimbabwean companies that have been performing well before the sanctions regime like the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ), Zimbabwe National Foods, Industrial Development Corporation and its subsidiaries as well as some of the companies not mentioned here got their operations affected by the sanctions. So Ambassador Thomas Jr should be aware of such information. He should not boost about giving Zimbabwe $2, 6 billion as such amount looks like a drop in the ocean if compared to what Zimbabwe lost because of the sanctions imposed by the same.It is quite noble for Ambassador Thomas Junior to know that these sanctions manifested themselves as financial, trade, cultural, academic, sport embargoes, diplomatic isolation travel bans, freezing of financial accounts of the national leadership, influential individuals in the business community and strategic entities and generally worsening Zimbabwe's sovereign risk. So for him to downplay the effects of some sanctions on the ordinary citizens is unfortunate if not frivolous.Some facts on the ground that the ambassador is quite aware of are that the US promulgated the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act in 2001, that has since been renamed Zimbabwe Transition to Democracy and Economic Recovery Act resulting in the cutting of all lines of credit from multilateral lending institutions prompting an assault on, and decimation of the Zimbabwe dollar. What defends could the ambassador bring to make his country clean on sanctions.Recent reports from the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development indicates that Zimbabwe lost donor support amounting to approximately US$36 million annually since 2001, US$79 million in loans from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and African Development Bank, commercial loans of US$431 million and GDP reduction of US$3,4 billion. Up to this day Zimbabweans continue to suffer because of the economic hardships caused by sanctions imposed on the country by Ambassador Thomas Junior's country and the European Union bloc.It further said that the negative publicity by the international community on Zimbabwe scared away potential creditors and reduced commercial loans by US$431 million per annum during the 200s. So Ambassador Thomas Junior should not rush into coming up with unsubstantiated claims when information on the ground point elsewhere.In addition the report says that the interruption of trade and constraints on manufacturing and general economic activities saw the Growth Domestic Product (GDP) almost halving from US$7, 49 billion in 2000 to US$4 billion in 2010. For that reason Ambassador Thomas Junior should now go around the country to see for himself the effects of sanctions imposed by his country on Zimbabwe. Actually he should not keep on reading issues to do with sanctions on the hardcover but should read more about that inside the book itself.
Opinion / Columnist

"True, MDC-T is the biggest opposition movement today, nobody can contest that. It is also true that the MDC has a huge following," you said.I contest that on two grounds:- MDC-T had the biggest following BEFORE the July 2013 elections but the party failed to turn the huge electoral support into electoral victory because the elections were rigged. MDC was warned that it must implement the democratic reforms to stop the vote rigging but the party leaders would not listen.Since the rigged elections many Zimbabweans have deserted MDC; some to follow the break-away factions whilst others simply gave up on politics and life. MDC-T has been very careful to avoid by-elections or holding big rallies for fear a low public turnout would confirm the party's worst fears that the party's "huge public support" is a myth.- MDC-T supporters are renowned for following like sheep to the slaughter and they showed this again and again throughout the GNU by their failure to get the party to implement even one reform, for example. Who can ever forget the sea-of-red of MDC-T supporter in the party colours all screaming "Chinja!" "Change!" at party rallies; they clearly had no clue what change they wanted because, if they did, they would have forced their leaders to implement at least one reform in the five years of the GNU.The hard core of the MDC-T supporters, the mindless wildebeest herd, have remained with Tsvangirai even in the face of the mountain of evidence he is incompetent, corrupt and a sell-out. An electorate that is incapable of one coherent original thought and will not listen to reason are not an asset but a curse to democracy."I can confirm that the party has decided to shelve any coalition plans. We have carefully analysed the situation and realised that other opposition parties do not have much to give to the coalition in terms of following," said MDC-T Secretary, Douglas Mwonzora. This is more like the old granny in the folklore story who insist the lice on her back must be included in the count of family's animal wealth together with the cattle, sheep, chicken, etc.!Tsvangirai and his MDC friends had their golden opportunity to change Zimbabwe for the better during the GNU; they wasted it because they are corrupt and incompetent, breathtakingly so too. The people of Zimbabwe must accept the political reality that incompetent leaders like Morgan Tsvangirai will never get the nation out of this hell-hole Zanu PF landed the nation into. Never ever!I do not believe forming a coalition is the panacea to all our political problems. What would Tsvangirai, in a coalition, accomplish now which he failed to accomplish during the GNU, given he had the support of SADC and the world's support then?"Grand coalitions no silver bullet for electoral victory over Zanu-PF," wrote Geoffrey Nyarota in an article last month. He was right then and he is right now, especially when the coalition is to be composed of recycled corrupt and incompetent leaders!Zimbabweans must realize that it is not that the country is incapable of producing competent quality leaders who can lead us out of this hell; there are hundreds of thousands of such quality men and women out there. The problem is with the political system, the Zanu PF dictatorship, which has stifled all meaningful public debate and democratic competition. The system is so repressive only corrupt, incompetent and murderous thugs would thrive and it is hardly surprising then that they are the only ones occupying the political stage!If Zimbabweans want competent and visionary leaders who can lead them out of this hell-on-earth then we must dismantle the Zanu PF dictatorship by implementing the democratic reforms and free the nation to think again. We have a corrupt and tyrannical regime which we have failed to remove from office because it rigs elections.In short, to stop Zanu PF rigging the elections by making sure the elections are free, fair and credible; simple. All these talks of forming coalitions when all we need to do is implement the reforms are doing my head in. Just implement the reforms and stop coming up with all these rocket science solutions and reinventing the wheel!
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LOS ANGELESPunk rock porn princess Joanna Angel is headed back up the trail to Oregon for a weekend of hot dance performances in Portland on April 29 and 30. This weekend, Angel will dazzle the crowds with her natural charms at Portlands Sunset Strip Gentlemens Club at 10 PM.

Oregon is just this whole other world, and I mean that in the best possible way, said Angel. The people, the vibe, the doughnuts and of course the great staff at Silver Dollar and Sunset Strip make this a trip I now look forward to every year.

Angel will be available after the shows to say hi and take photos with fans. Her BurningAngel DVDs, clothing and novelties will be available for purchase during the stars dance performances.

For more information about Angels Oregon Trail, visit Sunset Strip Gentlemens Club, which is located at 10205 SW Park Way in Portland, and for more info on Joanna herself, visit BurningAngel.com.
Barclays reiterated an overweight rating and target price of 280p for Tullow Oil on Thursday after the oil producer reported its first quarter trading update.

The Africa-focused oil miner said first quarter production was slightly below expectations due to technical issues at the Jubilee field off Ghana, adding that 2016 capital expenditure would be cut by $100m to $1bn with further savings expected.

Group working interest production for the first quarter averaged 59,200 barrels per day for West Africa and 6,500 for Europe.

The company said it had to implement new Jubilee off-take procedures at the end of March following damage to a turret bearing.

Therefore, the group said full year 2016 average working interest production is likely to be below current guidance of 73,000-80,000 bopd and updated guidance will be provided when the new operating procedures have been fully implemented and stabilised.

However, Tullow does not currently expect this issue to have a material impact on future cash flow, due to the imminent resumption of production and appropriate insurance policies in place, the firm said.

The company also agreed a $3.5bn deal with its lenders to extend its borrowing facilities.

Barclays said the extension of the loan facility would "comprehensively address remaining concerns about the balance sheet.

The $1bn corporate facility has been extended by one year to April 2018 (commitments reduced to $800m from April 2017), sufficient to provide Tullow with at least $500m of financial headroom through 2017E, it said.

The bank welcomed the cuts to capex and was also encouraged by news that Tullows Tweneboa-Enyenra-Ntomme (TEN) field off the coast of Ghana, which is due to deliver first oil this summer, is now 90% complete.

Shares jumped 7.66% to 270.55p at 1119 BST.
Serco has won a 160m contract to design, build and operate the new icebreaker research and supply vessel for the Australian Antarctic mission.

The FTSE 250 outsourcing group said the contract was to manage the four-year design and build phase, followed by a 10-year operation and maintenance phase that could potentially be extended by four five-year blocks.

Replacing the Aurora Australis, the new state-of-the-art vessel, which is unlikely to be named Boaty McBoatface like its British counterpart, will supply Antarctic research stations with cargo, equipment and personnel, and carry out research from extensive laboratory facilities on board.

Serco said the icebreaker will carry 34 crew from its DMS Maritime subsidiary and up to 116 scientific personnel from the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) of the Department of the Environment.

Australia has three permanent research stations within its Antarctic territory, that will be served by the vessel, as well as its research station on Macquarie Island.

The ship will be designed and built by DMS Maritime's subcontractor Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding.

Serco's Asia Pacific chief executive officer, Mark Irwin, said the contract will see Serco "play a vital role in supporting Australian and global Antarctic scientific programmes through the provision of experienced ice-qualified crews, maintenance engineers and our extensive services in vessel management.

"These operations will significantly expand Serco's existing presence in Tasmania, and will further strengthen our substantial expertise in project management and end-to-end vessel support to the marine industry."
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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.
Cast-in-place structures: High-rise

Photo courtesy of WACA Premiere on Pine was built with high-strength concrete, allowing its columns to be smaller.





Premiere on Pine

Location: Seattle

Owner/developer: Holland Partner Group

Team: Holland Construction, general contractor; Conco, concrete contractor; Weber Thompson, architect; Cary Kopczynski & Co., structural engineer; Stoneway Concrete, ready-mix supplier

Premiere on Pine recently joined Seattles skyline as one of the tallest residential towers in the city. The 42-story, 490,000-square-foot structure has 386 apartments, a rooftop lounge with an outdoor terrace, a restaurant, and five levels of parking above grade and five more below.

Premiere on Pines slender curtainwall facade is decorated with burnt orange vertical metal panels and two massive LED backlit glass art walls.

Construction started in August 2012 and finished in early 2015.

A small site and floor plan posed significant design and construction challenges. The team responded with an efficient system that maximized floor space on a small site.

Premiere on Pines structure consists of cast-in-place concrete with post-tensioned floor slabs and a shear wall core for seismic and wind resistance. The gravity system utilizes long-span, 7.5-inch-thick post-tensioned flat plate slabs with 12-foot perimeter cantilevers at two sides of the building, which resulted in fewer columns, optimized slab bending moments, and reduced floor-to-floor height with thinner slabs.

Post-tensioned 7.5-inch-thick flat plate slabs were used at all levels, including the subterranean parking levels, which created flexible interior space with open layouts. At subterranean levels, shotcrete perimeter basement walls followed construction of the slabs. This allowed slab shortening to occur prior to shotcrete wall construction.

Premiere on Pine is the first building in the Northwest to have a specified concrete strength of 15,000 pounds per square inch in its columns, reflective of steady advances in concrete materials technology. The effective use of ultra-high-strength concrete and rebar resulted in smaller structural elements than would have otherwise been required, which increased the buildings net rentable square footage.













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Top United States lawmakers have urged the Barack Obama administration to reconsider its decision to sell the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon to Pakistan, as these could be turned against India. Republican representative for Arizona's 5th congressional district Matt Salmon, along with other lawmakers, raised the issue at the Congressional hearing on Afghanistan and Pakistan, for which the Obama administration was represented by Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Olson. The US has virtually confirmed the sale of eight F-16 fighter jets worth $700 million to Pakistan, a move strongly opposed by India (See: Senate okays F-16 fighter sale to Pak despite opposition). "Many members of Congress, including me, seriously question the judgement and timing of such a sale. Additionally, Indo-Pak tensions remain elevated and some question whether the F-16s could ultimately be used against India or other regional powers, rather than the terrorists as Pakistan as asserted," Salmon said. "We've got to be concerned what military assistance and whether the F-16s constitute the least expensive, most efficient way for the Pakistani air force to go after the terrorists and the least disruptive weapon system to the balance of power between India and Pakistan. We need to offer to Pakistan those weapon systems well-crafted to go after terrorists and not crafted for a war with India," Congressman Brad Sherman said. A report in Pakistan's newspaper Dawn in early March said the US has notified the sale, a step towards finalising the deal. While the report suggested that the deal will be finalised after 11 March, the US Senate has kept the decision on hold. Salmon questioned the Obama administration's decision to sell more weapons to Pakistan, which has failed to combat terrorism originating in the country despite getting "enormous amounts" of assistance. "Despite giving Pakistan enormous amounts of counter-terror assistance since 9/11, terrorist organisations continue to operate with impunity in Pakistan. Pakistan has used terror as a tool of statecraft and terrorist proxy groups, for the Pakistani military have carried out fatal attacks inside India," he said. Meanwhile, Olson responded to the concerns raised by the Congressmen and said the sale will benefit the US as Pakistan will use the jets against terror organisations like Pakistani Taliban. He said the US has applauded Pakistan's efforts against the domestic terrorism threat. "The administration is supportive of the F-16 sale to Pakistan ... the Pakistanis have developed a precision strike capability that they use in the F-16s they have right now to take out targets. These are principally the Pakistani Taliban, but we think that that is a good thing. The Pakistani Taliban has been involved in attacks against Americans at Chapman in Afghanistan in 2009, and indeed, in supporting the Times Square bomber," he said. Objections have always been raised against Obama administration's decision, not just by India and US lawmakers (US lawmakers oppose F-16 fighter sale to Pakistan ) but also by a former Pakistani diplomat. Former Pakistani ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani had, last year warned against the move, raising concerns similar to those of the US lawmakers. "Unless Pakistan changes its worldview and its compulsive competition with its much larger neighbour, American weapons will end up being used to fight or menace India and perceived domestic enemies instead of being deployed against jihadists," Haqqani had said.








Local Vietnam veterans were honored by state Rep. Barry Moore during the Enterprise Chamber of Commerces quarterly Military Affairs Breakfast at Cutts Restaurant Wednesday morning. Travis Parker, vice president of Vietnam Veterans of Americas Chapter 373, spoke at the breakfast and offered some statistics about the vets in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War. Parker said more than 2.7 million Americans served in Vietnam, and about 71 percent are estimated to be alive today. The youngest veterans are about 61 years old, but military personnel serving in the war were born between 1914 and 1955.
A Dothan man helped local law enforcement on Wednesday in the capture of the woman convicted in his brothers stabbing death.

Shane Clayton said a friend of his and his now deceased brother, 41-year-old Chad Thomas Clayton, recognized Tareka Green Stoddart as she walked on Cherry Street Wednesday. Clayton said the friend had called him, and after driving to Cherry Street he immediately called the Houston County Sheriffs Office after seeing Stoddart sitting on the porch of a home on Cherry Street.

I drove down there on Cherry Street, and where they arrested her it was literally 10 feet from where she killed my brother, Clayton said. I wouldnt have recognized her because she looks nothing like she did in court.

Houston County Sheriffs Capt. Bill Rafferty confirmed deputies responded and took Stoddart into custody Wednesday afternoon.

Clayton said he believed Stoddart had attempted to disguise herself because she appeared to be wearing a wig and glasses.

Stoddart had been wanted for a couple months after a Houston County judge revoked her bail.

It brings us some closure, Clayton said of Stoddart. Shes still got an appeal going, but to know shes back in jail, it brings some relief.

Dothan police originally arrested Stoddart on Aug. 2, 2013, and charged her with murder in the stabbing death of Chad Thomas Clayton.

A jury found Stoddart guilty of a lesser felony manslaughter charge in May of 2015.

Stoddart said at trial she stabbed Clayton in the chest with a screwdriver in self-defense in the 800 block of North Cherry Street on July 19, 2013. He died from his injuries about two weeks later.

District Attorney Doug Valeska argued at trial that Stoddart murdered her former boyfriend, and her past history of violence with him showed she had the intent. Valeska reminded jurors of evidence, which showed Stoddart had stabbed and cut Clayton on three prior occasions before the fatal screwdriver stabbing. No charges were ever filed in the other stabbings.

Circuit Court Judge Larry Anderson sentenced Stoddart to serve 16 years in prison, but agreed to an appeal bond in the case while the Alabama Criminal Court of Appeals considered her appeal.

Stoddart was released from custody after she posted a $20,000 appeal bond in June 2015.

Court records show Anderson issued an order to revoke the appeal bond on Feb. 9, 2016, granting a request from the Houston County District Attorneys Office. The request cited Stoddarts failure to report to the probation office for weekly drug screenings in accordance with her appeal bond requirements.

Valeska commended the local resident who recognized Stoddart and notified authorities.

This is the kind of cooperation and support we need from the community where people get involved, Valeska said. It helps us get justice for the victim.
OZARK  Relevance is job one at Carroll High School Career Center, as the career technical program recently launched simulated workplaces to provide students with a real-world work experience in their classes.

The new simulated workplaces replace traditional classes with a mock company, allowing students to learn as if they were on the job. Students fill various roles in the simulated classroom as they would at a real workplace. For example, in a health sciences course, students might have different nursing jobs than they would have if they worked in a hospital.

This is the only program like this in the state, said Rick McInturf, Ozark City Schools superintendent. Were giving students real world workplace experiences.

Carroll High School Career Center held a ribbon cutting for the new program on Wednesday. The program has already been implemented in nine classes. Carroll High School Career Center Director Dana Griggs said the program will soon be implemented in all career technical programs at the high school and the career center.

Griggs said the program benefits students by providing them with experience in applying what theyre learning in school to a simulated workplace environment. In addition to mastering skills associated with the career fields theyre studying, students will also learn other relevant skills such as showing up to work on time and resolving workplace conflicts in a professional manner.

Katie Thomas, a representative of Alabama Power, said the program will benefit the Ozark area in recruiting business.

Your school is setting the bar for how simulated classrooms and partnerships with business are supposed to work, she said.

Raine Griffin is a student in the centers medical sciences program. She said the program has been helpful in teaching her the importance of being on time and other workplace skills. She said the workplace environment of the classroom makes it seem real and important.

I arrange all my doctors and orthodontists appointments around it because I dont want to be late or miss it, she said.
OZARK  Debbie Bond brought the blues to a new generation on Wednesday at Mixon Elementary School.

Bond, cofounder of the Alabama Blues Project, her band and local students performed at the school for about an hour Thursday, interjecting lessons about the blues and its roots in the Wiregrass between songs. Bond and members of the Blues in Schools Project demonstrated classic blues instruments and told students about the history of the blues  including information about local blues legends.

This gives students a chance to see a style of music that they dont often get to see, Ozark City Schools Superintendent Rick McInturf said.

Bond said she enjoys the opportunity to provide some musical enrichment at Mixon, which does not have a formal music education program.

They are completely wide open, Bond said about Mixon students. They are very receptive. With older students you have more peer pressure.

Bond said she hopes her program exposed students to music they may not have experienced before and encouraged some of them to learn more about the blues.

Desire Henry, 10, was a Mixon student who performed with Bond on Wednesday. She said she had no worries about performing with Bond in front of her classmates.

Ive done a lot of singing, so Im used to having the whole town watch me, she said.

Henry said performing with Bond was a learning experience.

I think its pretty cool, she said. I learned a lot about the blues, including some artists I had never heard of before.

Thursdays performance was part of the Wiregrass Blues Fest, which finishes Saturday. Troy University and theWiregrass Blues Society will host a free educational presentation and concert Thursday at 7 p.m. at The Studio in Troy. The performance will feature Bond and an honoree, Little Jimmy Reed.

According to the university, Reed, an Enterprise resident, has played the blues professionally for 50 years. Reed can often be seen playing at festivals and events in the area, and his music career has taken him overseas to Europe, Israel and Lebanon.

The Wiregrass Museum of Art will host events Friday and Saturday. The Museum will hold a meet and greet Friday from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. On Saturday, the museum will host an outdoor concert beginning at 4 p.m.
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.
Only about 8% of wine farms in South Africa make money, according to a leading winemaker from the Rainbow Nation

Alastair Rimmer, cellar master at the Stellenbosch farm, Kleine Zalze, was in London this week (April 27) to mark the 20th anniversary of Kobus Basson taking over the farm.

At a dinner to showcase the farms wines, Rimmer said: With Brand South Africa we want to lift the bar. Only about 8% of farms are making money. About 12% break even. The rest are making a loss. Farms are struggling.

He said to stop old vines being grubbed up in bad years, the company is paying farmers a flat fee to keep vines, particularly old vine Chenin Blanc in the ground. Otherwise, land is either left fallow or given over to wheat.

He suggested that South African wines probably needed to be retailed at 10+ for them to be economically viable.

It is like building a house, said Rimmer. We need foundations otherwise it is going to collapse. We have to evolve and add value in the supply chain, as a buffer to the farmer.

The Kleine Zalze range of wines is the number one South African wine brand in the UK on-trade, according to Wine Business Solutions 2014 UK On-Premise report. Its Zalza Shiraz/Mourvedre/Viognier blend is the only expression available in the UK off trade.

Rimmer announced that to mark the 20th anniversary, Basson was further investing in the winery with a vineyard analysis programme and there are some forthcoming new launches, including a Kleine Zalze Cellar Selection Cinsault.
A Citroen CX Safari wagon, a '75 or '76, which I bought because it was such a beautiful looking object. Unfortunately it had a tendency to settle down on its hydraulics with monotonous regularity. But it was the love of my life. The most I ever got in it was 17 people going to the beach. Interesting note: the only other people who I knew had one were South American dictators. Both [Manuel] Noriega, who I actually made a movie about, and [Augusto] Pinochet owned these same cars, I think because the French president drove one of the sedan versions for a while. So they're very popular with dictators and art directors.
You could argue the last thing Australia needs is more car brands. But that's not stopping anybody, particularly the Chinese manufacturers that are eager to use Australia as a test bed for exports before taking them global.

Already we've seen some failed first efforts from Great Wall, Chery, Geely and MG (the latter, a British brand, now part of the giant SAIC Motor corporation). The most successful was Great Wall, but there's currently a legal stoush between the Chinese operators and the local importer, Ateco, which now imports LDV, another Chinese brand.

As that's brewing in the background, Great Wall has deployed its dedicated SUV brand, Haval, on Australia. It's being done directly by the brand, not through a distributor.

Haval is claimed to be the biggest SUV brand in China and has hopes of carving itself a niche in the growing SUV market here, which now accounts for about 40 per cent of the 1.1 million-plus new vehicles retailed each year.

Haval arrived in 2015 with three models, the entry-level H2, the five-seat H8 and the H9 tested here, the biggest and most expensive in the fleet. An H6 is due later in 2016 and the company has just unveiled an H7.

What do you get?

The general path trodden by new brands is by starting at the bottom and working up. It's how Japanese brands such as Toyota gained a foothold half a century ago, and in recent decades the South Korean brands have employed similar tactics.

But Haval is hoping its products - not just the prices - can speak loudly enough to get people to take notice. Haval describes its pitch as "premium value". As such, the H9 range starts at $46,490 for the Premium, which comes generously appointed with alloy wheels, parking sensors front and rear, a reversing camera, smart key entry with push button start, satellite-navigation (with free map updates), tri-zone air-conditioning and six airbags (dual front, front-side and side curtain).

The Luxury tested here adds to that with leather trim, headlights that turn around corners, electric front seats, electric-folding third-row seats, a better Infinity sound system and 18-inch alloys (up from 17s).

Safety has been a question mark hovering over Chinese brands, and Haval is no different. While it misses out on the latest active safety features becoming more common in many passenger cars (things like blind spot warning or emergency braking), it does get good airbag coverage, with curtains covering all three rows.

The five-year warranty is also worth a mention.

What's inside?

It doesn't matter whether you're inside or outside, one thing you can't ignore in the H9 are Haval badges. The name is plastered across the tail, then all manner of bold red badges on everything from the grille to the steering wheel. Open the door and there's an illuminated Haval scuff plate; Haval is even projected on to the ground before you open the door. Perhaps it's an indication how seriously Haval takes the task of establishing an identity for what is a fledgling brand.

Once inside there's a pleasant interior, albeit one that appears to try too hard in some areas. The adjustable mood lighting, for example, is over the top, as are the mass of lights and buttons than don't dim quite enough at night.

But there's a consistency to the layout, which is also logical with large buttons for often-used functions, such as the radio volume. Storage, too, is good thanks to cupholder binnacles and a deep centre console.

But there are chinks. The radio reception on the outskirts of town has noticeable static, and while the fit and finish is generally pretty good, the fake woodgrain doesn't extend the upmarket them. We never got the hang of the smart key door opening, either; sometimes you would grab the door handle to open the door and lights would flash but the doors would not unlock.

Yet at the same time there is unexpected thoughtfulness, such as the duplicated seat adjustment buttons for the front passenger seat that make it easy for the driver to move the seat. Or the 240V power outlet in the boot.

Those in the rear are also well catered for with air vents. There are roof vents feeding the second and third rows, along with separate controls and central vents for those in the middle.

The middle row slides and folds to create a flat floor. The third row folds at the push of a button, but it's a slow process taking 15 seconds to fold into the floor and 19 seconds to raise.

The boot is broad and useful when only five seats are in play. But there's a bulky swing-out door that means you have to leave plenty of room behind to open it fully. Thankfully there's a damped strut (it looks very similar to the one used on the Toyota Prado) to prop it open on hills.

With all seven seats in place luggage space is minimal; perhaps a couple of soft bags at best.

Under the bonnet

Four-cylinder diesels are typical for this class and most are at least 2.5 litres in capacity. The H9's engine is only 2.0 litres and is fuelled by petrol.

Yet it still manages a respectable 160kW of power, more than some key competitors. But that power is only accessible if you rev the engine hard  all the way to 5500rpm. In most cases the Haval's six-speed auto has already shifted into a taller gear prior to tapping into its power peak.

So really, it's about the torque, and that's where the H9's 2.0-litre petrol is undernourished. The 324Nm available from 2000rpm is much less than competitors, most of which comfortably surpass 400Nm. And with 2250kg to shift, it translates to only average acceleration.

The end result is an engine that needs to be pushed and revved hard to get the desired result, especially if you've got it laden or are trudging up steep hills. That the auto transmission isn't as intelligent as some when it comes to holding lower gears makes the whole drivetrain work a tad harder again. It can be cumbersome having to regularly convince it to kick down into a lower gear then revving the engine harder than it feels like it wants to.

There's also lag in its responses, particularly from a standstill. Throttle response is lethargic and it takes some forward planning to duck out of an intersection or go for a gap in traffic.

Fuel use is the final piece of a sub-standard drivetrain equation. Claimed consumption is a V8-like 12.1 litres per 100km  much more than the competition  and it requires more expensive premium unleaded. We found it used about 16.0L/100km in a mix of spirited country driving and suburban roads. Still thirsty, then.

It also needs to serviced every 10,000km.

On the road

The H9 is designed to tackle some serious off-road tracks, so comes with appropriate hardware. Underneath is a truck-like ladder frame chassis, similar to those used on other tough off-roaders such as the Toyota Prado and Ford Everest. There's also a dual-range transfer case and a terrain select dial that tailors traction control to various conditions, such as mud, sand or rocks.

As it does in those cars, the trade-off for that off-road ability is on-road composure. The Haval is floppy around corners, with woolly steering that calls for a decent reef to get the desired result; it's also prone to kickback on mid-corner bumps.

The tyres have one eye on off-road; they're decent Cooper-branded hoops that will start to squeal on a slick surface but cope well with the weight of the car and less than perfect surfaces.

As for the ride, it's helped by the soft suspension, easily disposing of big bumps. But things get busy over smaller, successive lumps, something not helped by the average body control that can have things rocking once you up the pace.

Yet for all its faults, the H9 is not bad considering its off-road ability. Yes, there are flaws, but they're not blockers when compared with others in the class.

However there are also curiosities, such as the hazard light flashers that kick in under heavy braking. It's a common safety addition to modern cars, but the Haval is the only car we've driven where moderate cornering combined with any level of braking has the hazard lights flashing. It can make twisty roads or even sweeping corners in suburbia an interesting mix of lights-on, lights-off.

The woman's voice telling you to "please select the parking mode"  with an odd inflection on the "mode"  is also an annoyance, particularly because she talks straight over phone calls in the process. But Haval Australia has sent that feedback and more to its Chinese head office and is confident of changes.

Verdict

The biggest challenge the H9 will have is getting on people's radars, and with good reason. It's a brand most have never heard of and reputation means plenty in the world of new cars. The track record of Chinese car brands in Australia is poor so far, with many owners burnt by poor resale and/or poor after sales service  or the brand disappearing altogether.

If you're prepared to take a leap  and it's $50k leap with a car like the H9  then you'll get a surprisingly well put together car that is basic but honest. Whereas the H8 is more of an on-road prospect, the H9's rugged hardware means it should be reserved for those planning to go off-road. At which point the underdone petrol engine detracts from the experience.

Haval H9 price and specifications

Price: $50,990, plus on-road and dealer costs

Country of origin: China

Engine: 2.0-litre 4-cylinder turbo petrol

Power: 160kW at 5500rpm

Torque: 324Nm at 2000-4000rpm

Fuel use: 12.1L/100km

CO2 emissions: 278g/km

Transmission: 6-speed auto, four-wheel-drive

Weight: 2250kg

Safety: 6 airbags, stability control

The Competitors

Ford Everest Trend

Price: $59,990

Engine: 3.2-litre 5-cylinder turbo diesel; 143kW/470Nm; 6-speed auto; 4WD

Fuel use/CO2 emissions: 8.5L/100km, 224g/km

Safety: 7 airbags, stability control

Pros: Quiet cabin; ability to put child seats in second and third rows; clever 4WD system

Cons: Heavy; still compromised dynamically on-road due to ute underpinnings

Our score: 6.5/10

Toyota Fortuner GXL

Price: $54,990

Engine: 2.8-litre 4-cyl turbo diesel; 130kW/450Nm; 6-speed auto; 4WD

Fuel use/CO2 emissions: 8.6L/100km, 228g/km

Safety: 7 airbags, stability control

Pros: Off-road ability; honest diesel engine; reasonable value; borrows Hilux's reputation for reliability

Cons: Vague steering and mushy dynamics; third row seats don't fold into floor; fussy infotainment system

Our score: 5.5/10

Isuzu MU-X LS-T 4WD

Price: $54,000

Engine: 3.0-litre four-cyl turbo diesel; 130kW/380Nm; 5-speed auto; 4WD

Fuel use/CO2 emissions: 8.4L/100km, 223g/km

Safety: 6 airbags, stability control

Pros: Strong 4WD credentials; 3000kg tow capacity; 5-year warranty

Cons: Bouncy ride; engine and transmission average; cabin feels underdone in parts

Our score: 5/10
Home Four wheelers POS Malaysia Issues 500 Tata Xenon Pick-Up Models Order oi-Ajinkya

The Postal Service Provider in Malaysia, POS Malaysia has issued a humongous order to Tata Motors. Over 500, Tata Xenon pick-up models have been ordered. All the models will be built specifically for the Malaysian Postal Service Provider by Tata Motors.

Xenon single cab 4x2 pick-up model with custom box body has been ordered by the POS Malaysia. These new pick-up models are expected to speed up the delivery process and further improve customer satisfaction.

Powering the Tata Xenon single cab 4x2 pick-up model is a 2.2-litre common rail turbo diesel engine. The engine produces 138.08bhp, along with 320Nm of peak torque output. Tata Motors will be pairing the engine to a 5-speed synchromesh gearbox.

For POS Malaysia, Tata Motors will be equipping its Xenon with several added features. Reverse camera, strong body structure, and chassis frame to support additional load capacity. Easy loading option from rear and sides will be provided for better convenience.
Sinn Fein Deputy Gerry Adams has welcomed the allocation of over 100,000 by the International Fund for Ireland to the Muirhevnamor Youth Project and the Camlough Community Association.

Gerry Adams said last week: In a very unique cross-border collaboration the Muirhevnamor Youth Project in Dundalk successfully applied for funding along with Camlough Community Association in South Armagh. Together they have received over 110,000 for a one year project for youth programmes for the area. The Management Committee between Muirhevnamor and Camlough had its first meeting at the end of March to discuss how best to facilitate the Youth Programme.

The funding has come from the IFI under the Peace Impact Programme. It is an important investment in youth projects straddling the border. It will help resource cross border/cross community programmes and events that aim to build good working relationships and upskill our young people. The programme will run from March 2016 to February of next year and one of its key projects will be the holding of a cross border community safety/community policing conference.

Providing young people with the opportunity to up-skill and to build relationships with others on either side of the border is very important.
Vinny McCoy is in the national finals of the toastmasters International public speaking finals. They were held in the Regent Hotel Dublin last Saturday. There were eight finalists from all over the country and Vinny represented Area 19 which stretches from Drogheda to Belfast and includes Dundalk.

The Ardee man won the Drogheda Toastmasters club competition in March and then went on to defeat finalists from Dundalk Lurgan and Belfast to win the area finals.

Vinney won the national finals in 2013 and went on to compete in the Ireland and UK finals in at Torquay in England.

I joined the Toastmasters club in Drogheda 10 years ago, said Vinny. I was leaving the Army at the time and had decided to start up my own security business.

That year i won The Security Institute Trainer of the Year and to develop my presentation and speaking skills I decided to join Toastmasters.

Toastmasters was above and beyond what I expected. It taught me that it is the person you become that matters. I went to Toastmasters to better myself, but I found its not about that, its about the people you meet.

When you overcome your demons it's liberating.

Vinny was in the Irish Army for 23 years. An NCO he served in the Middle East 46th Battalion and the 77th Battalion.

I loved the army, he said. But in the end I had done all I wanted to do and had a vision or a dream, if you like, to run my own security company.

Through hard work and determination the dream came through.

His company is called Meridian Security and is based at the Ardee Business Park. Hale Street Ardee.He runs the company along with sons Shane and Barry.

But the Toastmasters bug never left Vinny. He is still competitive, still winning awards, but he is also putting a lot back into it.

Toastmasters started as a series of speaking clubs organized by Ralph C. Smedley during his time working for the YMCA in the United States.

Smedley saw a need for the men in the community to learn how to speak, conduct meetings, plan programs and work on committees, and he wanted to help them.

He named the group the Toastmasters Club; "toastmaster" was a popular term that referred to a person who gave toasts at banquets and other occasions.

The first unofficial Toastmasters meeting was held in 1905. Just like Toastmasters meetings today, the participants took turns leading and speaking at each meeting. Smedley and the older, more experienced men evaluated short speeches, while the younger men were invited to join in the evaluations.

Smedley died in 1965. In 1970, Toastmasters International admitted its first female member, Helen Blanchard, under the name Homer Blanchard. In 1973, Toastmasters began officially admitting women.

This might make the early years sound misogynistic, but up until 1970, when the new feminist movement emerged, and Germaine Greer published the Female Eunuch, women werent supposed to have a voice at all.

Dundalk Toastmasters Club meetings, because of extenuating circumstances, has temporarily moved to the Nuremore Hotel in Carrick.

Dundalk Toastmasters Club is now 10 years in operation.

It began in 2005 and was chartered in 2006.

The Toastmasters programme helps men and women to practice their public speaking skills and develop their leadership qualities.

Their claim is that no matter who you are, if you wish to tackle your fear of speaking, you've definitely come to the right place at Toastmasters. You'll make friends, and in time your self esteem and self-confidence will soar.

The club meets on the first and third Monday of each month between September and May. No meetings are held on Bank Holiday Mondays.

Those meetings take place on the Tuesday of the same week instead.

People arrive at 7.45pm and meetings start at 8pm.

Members also have a programme on Dundalk 97.7 FM radio.

Conversations With Dundalk Toastmasters.


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The Department of Justice today issued a statement today requiring 18 local First Niagara branches to be sold as terms of KeyCorp's acquisition of the company -- including the East Avenue branch.The department said that the divestitures will ensure that the transaction does not harm competition for retail banking services in the Greater Buffalo area. As a result of the acquisition, KeyCorp will become the 13th largest bank in the nation, with about $135 billion in assets, $99.8 billion in deposits and more than 1000 branches across 15 states.Under their agreement with the department, the companies have agreed to divest 13 branches in Erie County and 5 branches in Niagara County. The divested assets will include the commercial loans associated with the divested branches. The companies have also agreed to suspend existing, and not to enter into new, non-compete agreements with their small business and middle market relationship managers and their retail regional and branch managers, in the state of New York, for a period of 180 days following the consummation of their merger. Further, the companies have agreed to sell or lease branches closed within two years of the consummation of the merger in the state of New York to other depository institutions.Americans value the convenience of retail bank branches, said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Renata Hesse of the Justice Departments Antitrust Division. Todays agreement will ensure that customers in Buffalo and other New York markets will continue to enjoy the benefits of competition among banks with retail branch networks.The proposed merger is subject to the final approval of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The department said that it will advise the Federal Reserve Board that it will not challenge the merger provided that: the parties divest the branch offices, associated loans and deposits and the entire customer relationships associated with the divestiture branches; the parties commit to the Federal Reserve Board that they will comply with the agreement with the department; and the parties commitments to the department are included as a condition to any order the Federal Reserve Board enters allowing the transaction.Other Niagara County branches required to be sold include one in Lewiston, one in North Tonawanda and a pair in Niagara Falls.
Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, center, and Lockport Mayor Anne McCaffrey, right, took a short trip Tuesday by bike on the newly opened Erie Canalway Trail path through Lockport. (ENP PHOTOS BY HEATHER N. GRIMMER)

Officials cut the ribbon, officially opening the new four-mile stretch.

Canal Corp. Director Brian U. Stratton discusses the upcoming boating -- and biking -- seasons along the Erie Canal.

Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul said Tuesday's cold weather wouldn't deter her from biking along the new path.

Lockport Mayor Anne McCaffrey said the bike path makes Lockport more accessible.





A grand opening for the Lockport Locks, including a first-ever Lock Tenders Tribute event will be held on May 20.



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The Erie Canal opened for travel on Wednesday. A new stretch of bike path along the canal in Lockport and Pendleton officially opened a day earlier.The 192nd season of navigation along New York's Canals April 27 opening is the earliest the waterway has opened in more than 30 years thanks to a mild winter which allowed staff to complete maintenance projects, and opening preparations, ahead of schedule. The Canal system includes the Erie, Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga-Seneca Canals in upstate New York."New York's Canal system is an engineering marvel of epic proportions and its construction demonstrated the sort of vision, determination and boldness that define us as New Yorkers," Governor Cuomo said. "Nearly two centuries after its completion, the Canal system continues to be an important tourist destination, while also playing a vital role supporting industries throughout Upstate New York."The Erie Canal represents one of the most significant engineering achievements in New Yorks history and along with its adjoining canals, it continues to play a pivotal role in supporting the states economy. According to a 2014 report, the system generates nearly $380 million in tourism spending annually across upstate New York, and more than $6.2 billion from non-tourism uses such as agricultural irrigation, commercial shipping, and renewable power generated at 27 hydroelectric facilities located along the Canal. The report also determined that the Canals support 26,472 jobs, $1.6 billion in personal income, and $702 million in tax revenue, both directly and indirectly.New York State Canal Corporation Director Brian U. Stratton said, "Each year, our iconic Canal system draws scores of visitors from all over the world to travel along America's most storied manmade waterway and to enjoy walking, biking, and fishing along its banks. It is a historical marvel that has consistently fueled New York's economy through recreation and tourism, and I look forward to seeing what this year's Canal navigation season adds to that already-rich history."The Canal navigation season is scheduled to end on Nov. 20, weather permitting.For those who want to travel along the canal but not necessarily on it, there's a newly constructed section of the Erie Canalway Trail between the city of Lockport and the town of Pendleton. The opening marks the completion of a $5.4 million project to construct four new miles of 10-foot wide asphalt trail between Stevens Street in Lockport and Fisk Road in Pendleton, as well as additional work in the town of Amherst. The 365-mile trail that stretches from Lake Erie to the Hudson River is now more than 75 percent complete.In addition to the four miles of new trail, a pedestrian bridge was built over Donner Creek in Lockport near Fisk Feigle Road and an on-street path was added from Stevens Street to Erie Canal Locks 34 and 35. Informational kiosks have been installed on the trail to guide visitors, and parking and trail access is now available on State Street.At Tuesday's grand opening and ribbon cutting, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul said, "The completion of this part of the Canalway Trail will help these communities thrive. It is imperative that we continue to preserve the land and trails surrounding the Canal so it can be enjoyed by future generations."The Canalway Trail's popularity among New Yorkers and visitors alike has made it an economic engine for communities throughout upstate New York. Each year, approximately 1.5 million people use the Erie Canalway Trail, resulting in an estimated $253 million in economic activity from visitor spending statewide. The Buffalo-Pendleton segment is the most heavily used part of the Canalway Trail with approximately 350,000 annual users.State Sen. Rob Ortt said, "Shortly after its completion in the City of Lockport a couple of months ago, Ive seen dozens of people taking advantage of the Canalway Trail, whether theyre walking or biking. The trail offers scenic views along the Erie Canal, and has the potential to attract more tourists to the area with the help of the Flight of Five locks and the Lockport Cave and Underground Boat Ride virtually down the street. I have no doubt this project will have a positive economic impact thatll also bring a sense of resurgence to the city."Town of Lockport Supervisor Mark Crocker called the project "a great example of State and local government working together to finish a project that will enhance the lives of people for many generations to come." He said he expects people to use the path hundreds of years from now.Lockport Mayor Anne McCaffrey said, "The expansion of the Canalway Trail from Lockport to Pendleton is exciting for our residents as well as visitors who come to enjoy the Erie Canal, Bicyclists and runners will have the opportunity to take in the Erie Canal while doing so on a safe and well-maintained trail. We're looking forward to showing off our city and locks to more neighbors and visitors on the trail."Following the ribbon cutting, Hochul, McCaffrey and others went for a short ride down the path.
An army of 39,000 workers this week went on strike against Verizon in one of the biggest labor actions in the U.S. in several years. Fast food workers have joined in a show of support, and both Democratic candidates for president have entered the fray.

Thousands of wireline workers from Massachusetts to Virginia walked off the job at 6 a.m. Wednesday morning after the company was unable to reach an agreement with labor leaders on health benefits, flexibility to utilize technicians away from home, and a host of other issues.

Verizon has trained thousands of non-union employees under a contingency plan to make sure customers are not disrupted by the massive strike, the company said. The two sides appear to be hardened in their positions, and an immediate resolution does not appear to be on the table.

Were more than prepared, and thats our primary focus right now  meeting the needs of our customers with minimal disruption, Verizon spokesperson Ray McConville told the E-Commerce Times.

Verizons Story

Company negotiators have worked hard over the past 10 months to find a resolution with unionized workers, represented by the Communication Workers of America and the IBEW, Verizon maintained.

Unionized workers have an agenda that is rooted in the past and ignores todays digital realities, said Marc Reed, chief administrative officer at Verizon.

The average wage and benefit package of 36,000 employees involved in the strike is US$130,000 per year, according to Verizon. About 99 percent of those workers support the wireline business, which provided 29 percent of the companys revenue in 2015 but only 7 percent of its operating income.

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service on Monday offered to provide mediation if the unions would extend the strike deadline, Reed noted, but they declined.

The Unions Side

Among the workers beefs is that Verizon has sent more than 5,000 jobs overseas and wants to outsource even more jobs, including call center jobs, according to CWA spokesperson Candice Johnson.

Verizon wants to make technicians work up to four months away from home in the mid-Atlantic region in order to help make repairs to the network or do emergency work, she told the E-Commerce Times.

Thats one reason Bernie Sanders and other politicians have joined the picket line, Johnson said, which resonated well with working class people who feel that the economy is rigged against them.

These companies are not sharing, if you will, the increased productivity gains with the workers at all, Johnson maintained.

Verizon has told them it is heavily focused on the needs of its wireless business at the expense of its landline business, she noted.

The company is under investigation for allegedly failing keep promises to build out broadband infrastructure in several jurisdictions, including Pennsylvania, some parts of New York City, and other communities, Johnson pointed out.

Promises to Keep

Verizon is in the wrong in this dispute, said analyst Craig Settles, who follows the broadband industry closely.

The workers have legitimate concerns, and these are also the concerns of customers and businesses that use Verizon services, he told the E-Commerce Times.

The buildout issue is of particular resonance, he said, noting that these communities in many cases exemplify the struggle to get adequate service for low-income and rural communities that Verizon and other telecoms do not view as potentially profitable.

Intense speculation that Verizon would put its wireline business up for sale began circulating late last year.

I think if Verizon could snap their heels together and make a wish, they would want to get out of local phone service, wireless industry analyst Jeff Kagan told the E-Commerce Times. Verizon has gone from nearly 100 percent market share 10 and 20 years ago to roughly 30 percent today, and its still dropping.

Meanwhile, the company is one of the leading candidates to acquire the Web assets of Yahoo in an effort to build up its content business, which includes America Online.
Key components of the Obama administrations multipronged cybersecurity initiative keep falling into place.

One of the most recent developments was the formation of a federal Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. Another was the formal introduction in Congress of the administrations information technology investment plan, which is heavily tilted toward cybersecurity protection. Both are elements of the Cybersecurity National Action Plan, or CNAP, which was launched earlier this year.

Earlier this month, President Obama appointed 12 people to the commission, including representatives from private sector IT companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Facebook,CrowdStrike andFrontier Communications.

The goal of the panel is to make recommend actions that can be taken over the next decade to enhance cybersecurity awareness and protections throughout government and the private sector, according to a White House statement.

Politically Inclusive

I have charged the commission with the critically important task of identifying the steps that our nation must take to ensure our cybersecurity in an increasingly digital world, Obama said.

The commission will issue a set of recommendations by December.

The selection of commission members involved the participation of congressional leaders for both major parties, the administration emphasized. Another goal was to ensure the positive participation of the private sector.

The chairman of the commission will be Tom Donilon, former assistant to the president and national security adviser, while Sam Palmisano, former CEO at IBM, will serve as vice chair.

Panel Has Short Deadline

So with a chairman who understands government and national security issues, a vice chairman from the private sector who understands the intimacies of computing, of the digital world, the economic aspects of this, I think weve got two of the best possible people to head up this effort, Obama said.

Panel members are going to be thinking about everything from how do we keep the huge databases that exist in the federal government more secure to how do we more effectively work with critical sectors of our economy, whether its the financial sector or our critical infrastructure, like utilities, to make sure their systems are more secure, he said.

There is a lot of optimism regarding the CNAP, and we are pleased to see a strong representation of the industry on the commission. We are hopeful that the commissioners will be able to complete their tasks in the limited time that they have been given, said Elizabeth Hyman, vice president for public advocacy atCompTIA.

There is only a six-month window, and commissioners are voluntary and part-time, so it is a heavy lift. That said, we hope the commissioners will vigorously consult their colleagues in the industry that are not on the commission to help reach their goals and to come up with technology-neutral solutions that can keep up with the rapidly changing threat landscape, she told the E-Commerce Times.

It is imperative that we lay the groundwork for the safer and more resilient use of emerging technologies and digital information for generations to come. Doing so involves solving hard problems with no easy answers, but that doesnt mean there arent answers. Im optimistic that we can find those answers if we pull together with a unity of purpose, said commission member Steven Chabinsky, CrowdStrikes chief risk officer.

The panel will be soliciting comments from the public, as we seek to recommend actionable steps that balance the often competing demands of security, privacy, functionality, convenience and cost  all within a dynamic, interoperable, expansive and international context, he noted.

Modernization Plan Mirrors Private Sector

Another component of the initiative is a proposal to upgrade federal IT, concentrating on cybersecurity. Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the Democratic Party minority whip, this month introduced the Information Technology Modernization Act on behalf of the Obama administration.

The bill, HR 4897, proposes spending US$3.1 billion for IT cybersecurity and modernization projects in fiscal year 2017 through a revolving fund. Federal agencies would return to the fund future savings from upgrades to develop a continuing, sustainable financial vehicle. Projects would be vetted through a board of federal experts in cybersecurity and all aspects of project management.

The fine print of the legislation addresses an issue of longstanding concern in federal IT management: the elimination of redundant IT systems that are inefficient and potentially insecure in favor of improved resources that can be shared by federal agencies on a common basis.

This bill will rapidly upgrade our federal IT systems that are most in need of upgrading, either from being cybersecurity risks, inefficient or costly to maintain. It will implement the upgrades using the latest best practices from our innovation economy in Silicon Valley and all across our country, Hoyer said.

The funding and management model of the ITMF is a novel proposal for the government, though it is one that has an already established track record of success in the private sector when it comes to modernizing services, increasing cybersecurity and bringing costs down over the long term, he said.

Additional Cybersecurity Protections

A key goal of the bill is to upgrade legacy IT systems, which we applaud, said Tina Stewart, vice president of marketing atVormetric.

Our overall take is that the effectiveness of the modernization fund will rest on how the money is spent. To be most effective, funds should be used to replace legacy systems and invest in solutions that protect the data running our country, she told the E-Commerce Times.

Additional solutions could improve cybersecurity, Vormetric suggested in a recently released analysis of the federal environment conducted with 451 Research. Bolstering network and endpoint protection should be reinforced with other safeguards for existing data at rest. Tools such as encryption and privileged access controls would be appropriate.

We primarily focus our public sector efforts at the state and local level, but we strongly encourage any scenario where the federal government elevates a priority of our membership, like IT modernization, as it sets a good example for the states, said CompTIAs Hyman.

Our members believe that whenever government IT systems are consolidated and modernized, there needs to be a centralized strategy that has enterprise-wide authority and insight. We are encouraged to hear that the federal government plans to use a centralized board and the 18F unit within the General Services Administration to accomplish the strategic planning, she said.

The 18F unit was established to expedite federal IT contracting by providing agencies with technical assistance and innovative acquisition approaches.
Nokia on Tuesday announced plans to purchaseWithings for US$192 million in cash as part of its move into the healthcare devices arena.

The deal is expected to close in early Q3, and Withings will become part of the Nokia Technologies business.

We have said consistently that digital health was an area of strategic interest to Nokia, and we are now taking concrete action to tap the opportunity in this large and important market, Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri said.

The deal will strengthen the companys position in the Internet of Things market, he said.

Healthcare is expected to be one of the largest vertical IoT markets, and mobile health, with a compound annual growth rate of 37 percent, will be the fastest growing healthcare segment through 2020, Nokia disclosed.

Withings products include activity trackers, scales, thermometers, and blood pressure, home and baby monitors that run on its digital health platform and have an ecosystem of more than 100 compatible apps.

The company has a well-established presence in the mobile health space born of relatively early entry into the activity tracking and smart scales market, noted Jonathan Collins, a principal analyst atABI Research.

Ongoing development of a range of innovative offerings  has extended the reach of the company within m-health as well as the range of m-health devices themselves, he told the E-Commerce Times.

Nokia has chosen a company that has certainly showed potential and that could benefit from greater financial support, Collins said.

Health Is Wealth

The IoT healthcare market is the biggest growth market over the next seven years in terms of revenue, pointed out Laura DiDio, a research director at Strategy Analytics.

Healthcare is bigger than the other two major markets for IoT  the financial and industrial sectors, she told the E-Commerce Times. It affects everybody and has a big impact in both the consumer and enterprise space in IoT.

Further, healthcare in IoT has a wide swath of applications ranging from wearables to predictive analysis and enables research in various fields, DiDio said. It impacts and intersects other verticals, including insurance and biopharma.

Sitting Back and Raking It In

Nokia has 19 percent of the 3,000 patents considered essential to 4G LTE tech and is the leader there, DiDio said. The company has 16,000 patents issued and pending in the United States and another 20,000 outside of the U.S., the majority in Europe.

Its holds patents related to WiFi and older 2G and 3G technologies such as GSM, GPRS, Edge and W-CDMA, on which it has a stranglehold, she pointed out.

Now that it has sold off its handset business to Microsoft, Nokia can monetize the communications patents they have and can charge other people royalties if they dont use them internally, DiDio noted.

The company is sitting on King Solomons mine, and a lot of people are going to overlook that, she added. The gadgets will be great, but theyve also got this treasure trove of patents.

Going Up Against Giants

Nokia will have to take on Google, Microsoft and Apple, all of which have a presence in the healthcare field, as well as Fitbit and other makers of wearable devices for the fitness and healthcare fields.

Microsoft Research has its Medical Devices Group, which is developing sensors and sensor technologies and combining them with machine learning and signal processing technologies. It also offers Windows 10 IoT Core for medical devices.

Google X earlier this year unveiled a health tracking band. Its also working onsmart contact lenses. Several other healthcare technologies were under development at Google that may have been handed over to parent company Alphabet.

Apple has been hiring medical tech talent since 2014 and in March unveiled itsCareKit health tracking platform. The company might make a regulated medical device, CEO Tim Cook has indicated.

Nokias ability to push into the space alongside larger rivals will require significant investment and commitment, ABIs Collins said.
While hobbyists, inventors and innovators alike have been experimenting and producing a variety of do-it-yourself projects, their world is expected to undergo a hard shift as DIY moves to the next level.

3D printing is the cornerstone of the coming shift, and its effect on our daily lives will be multiplied by several converging forces: the collaborative economy, the jobless economy and the age of personalization.

As these three very different economic forces bear down on DIYers and their tools  especially 3D printing and related tools  the market will shudder hard and eventually reboot. Heres how that will work.

Its the Economy, Stupid

Its the economy, stupid, Bill Clinton famously said in his first presidential campaign. Its true: Economic forces are fueling and forging the next level of DIY.

A hard and long worldwide recession helped create the collaborative economy. Some know it as the sharing economy, but sharing is just part of the overall collaborative economy.

Whats the difference? The sharing economy subset is about sharing or renting goods rather than buying them. Examples of that are ride-sharing company Uber and home-sharing company Airbnb. The overall collaborative economy encompasses the sharing economy plus other collaborative, peer-to-peer activities such as crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, and task-sharing, such as TaskRabbit and Instacart.

So, yes, technology made these companies possible, but it was the recession and its aftermath of uncertainty that made the new business models attractive. Its common for such services tosave users 25 percent or more over the total cost of ownership of traditional services.

Another recession likely would spur developments in the collaborative economy.

A similar dismal economic force afoot could add to both overall economic uncertainty and the rising rolls of the poverty-stricken: the new jobless economy. While its true that the U.S. has beenadding jobs steadily since the recession, it is also true that job growth is slowing as increased use of automation replaces human workers.

Eventually, job growth could stall and fall in the wake of mass automation. Machine learning and eventually artificial intelligence would see a dramatic erosion of even more jobs.

Already,an algorithm is serving as a board director. No job is safe from automation  hence the term jobless economy.

The Economic DIY Big Bang

As more people have trouble finding work that pays enough to survive on now, many of their needs remain unmet. Further, government has yet to address what comes next: what to do in the face of mass unemployment brought about by a jobless, fully automated economy.

There would be a lag before government could reform the economic structure to meet basic human needs, most likely through the establishment of auniversal paycheck. Meanwhile, more people would struggle and more needs, even the basics, could go unmet.

The next level of DIY likely will take the form of meeting the new market demand for essentials.

The biggest impact will come when digital DIY is allowed or pushed to move down the pyramid of needs, from gadgets for first-world problems to agriculture and mass customization of low-tech objects that everybody already needs and use, said Marco Fioretti, leader of Work Package 8: dissemination, future road map and sustainability atDigital Do It Yourself. He spoke on his own and not in his capacity at DiDIY.

The DiDIY Project is a European initiative partially funded by the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program and consisting ofseven partners, all European universities and research institutions.

Fioretti has spent his career in Silicon Valley and Italy and is both an engineer and a tech writer.

Hence, well see the expansion of DIY to include the production of goods and parts for everyday needs.

From Virtual Store to Personal Factory

DIY 3D printing is part of a growing trend towards the personal factory, saidLykle Schepers, co-owner of Zesty Technology.

This is shown not only in 3D printing, but also in the proliferation of small CNC machines, or computer-controlled machining tools, desktop laser cutters, and there are now even small injection-molding machines. The 3D printer fits perfectly into this trend, he told TechNewsWorld.

Schepers has his own personal factory at home. Previous to the startup, he was an engineer designer and worked in the CAD sales department at IBM. Hes been designing and modeling all his life, he said. 3D printing is just a natural extension of his skills.

I use my printer to print shapes that I use as molds for aluminum casting I do in the backyard. I use the aluminum parts for a custom bike I am building, he said.

Thats the gist of a personal factory  home manufacturing tools that enable you to create and produce whatever you desire or need. Necessity is the mother of invention, so invention will spring forth from areas that are suffering the most.

The most relevant applications of 3D printing and other digital DIY in general may very well come not from Silicon Valley, but from places in dire straits, like Greece, Fioretti told TechNewsWorld.

Where Personal Factories Fit

Personal factories will exist for reasons of survival and artistic expressions, and they might become income generators and micro or small businesses.

Digital DIY does not necessarily create more economic activity  not of the kind that increases GDP at least  but for people who live paycheck to paycheck or off their pensions, it can be a big help, Fioretti said.

In other words, digital DIY can increase resiliency, both at the personal and community level, from DIY Internet access network in rural areas to increasing local food production through hydroponics, crop and cattle monitoring, and other things such as telemedicine, etc., he added.

Social makerspaces  that is, places that 3D print, CNC mill, etc., on-demand  would also create service jobs that cannot be outsourced and are cool, Fioretti said. They would give youngsters both help to stay in the local area and not migrate to find a job, and skills they may reuse later on in other jobs.

From Personal Factory to Community Factory

Given the economic forces at work here, personal factories also may be out of reach for the people who need them most.

To make sure that it is accessible to everyone, even and especially senior citizens, disabled people, working single mothers with children  who for a lot of valid reasons could never afford to spend time in a fab lab or could never realistically do it because they dont have the right skills, nor can they realistically acquire them  makerspaces and fab labs instead should help these people too and make things as needed for the community, Fioretti said.

The shift from DIY as we know it to creating things to help neighbors, family and friends is what he called digitally do it for others.

A 3D printer in every home would be a terrible waste of resources! But an on-demand making space on every block that everybody could use to make copies of objects, much like we already do today at any copy shop,  would be a game-changer, Fioretti said.

The Age of Personalization

However, DIYs next level will be not just about survival in a jobless economy or another recession, because something else is afoot. The third economic force affecting DIY is the age of personalization, wherein consumers prefer unique items over mass-produced, identical products. The trend is much of the reason for success in the DIY space for artisans.

Even wealthy patrons areshunning logos and brand names on merchandise, in part because they dont wish to appear gauche when so many are struggling financially, but also because they too want to express individuality rather than conformity.

Commercial companies are trying to capitalize on the trend by allowing customers to add their personal touches to otherwise mass-produced goods, such asNike has done with its NIKEiD line of products.

However, commercial interests will find it much tougher to compete with personal factories.

Outsourcing too is slated for a tough challenge ahead.

There are new specialty 3D printing filaments that enable printing metal at home and also magnetic, UV-sensitive, temperature-sensitive, color-changing, flexible and even electrically conductive filaments, said Nathan Ostrout, quality control engineer atM3D.

Imagine the potential for those DIY robotics individuals who can now print simple circuitry with conductive filaments. With this wide range of filaments available at affordable prices, were going to see a lot of new innovation in personal workshops without having to waste precious time outsourcing parts to manufacturing companies, he told TechNewsWorld.

As a result, DIYers soon may profit as much in the brick-and-mortar space as in virtual marketplaces.

3D printing is going to get faster, cheaper, will increase the size of the output and be able to print in full color with various materials, said Tim Lynch, CEO atPsychsoftpc.

This will lead to a much more diverse use for 3D printing. Products will be customizable and made on demand. There will be shops or mall carts springing up offering individualized, on-demand, highly customized 3D printed items, he told TechNewsWorld.

The next level for DIY is distributed manufacturing at scale and the birth of an entirely new market force. Indeed, it already looks to be a hard reboot of the economy.
Facebook last week announced that it had rolled out group calling worldwide in its Messenger app. Members engaged in a group conversation can tap the phone icon on their screen to initiate a group call. They can manage individual participants on the next screen.

Members of a group who miss the initial call can tap the phone icon in the group chat to join the call while its in progress.

The feature allows up to 50 participants and is available only in the latest version of Messenger.

Move Over, Phone Carriers

The announcement likely will cause concern among telecommunications companies because if you consider that social medias a form of asynchronous communication, then Facebook is the largest telecom on the planet, with about 1.3 billion subscribers, observed Michael Jude, program manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.

Now add synchronous communications  that is, communications in real time  and Facebooks beginning to come into focus as the next paradigm of communications: async and sync combined, he told TechNewsWorld. This could be a game changer.

Messaging appsViber andLine already offer group calling for up to 200 people.

However, Facebook is different  its a social media site with a huge following that now offers direct communication to groups of people, Jude said. Viber and Line are much smaller pools of people and dont have the rich social media capabilities that Facebook does.

The calling feature is in software, so if Facebook sees a need to expand the scope of the service, they could probably do it by flipping a switch, he noted.

Facebook stands to gain a substantial portion of the millennial telecom business, Jude suggested.

Further, the company launched a beta of its Messenger Platform with bots and its Send/Receive API, as well as bots for the Messenger Platform. How those features will play into group calling remains to be seen.

Killing Off Telcos

Facebooks move highlights the threat that new technologies pose to telecom companies.

As we move farther and farther from traditional PBXs and wired phone lines to VoIP services, many of which are either very cheap or free, telecom companies are going to lose this revenue, noted Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

Theyve had plenty of warning, he told TechNewsWorld. This is just another one of those services that will make it easier for small companies and individuals to cut their phone cord.

Facebookbegan offering VoIP in 2013. A year later, it fully rolled out audio calls and had 10 percent of the global VoIP phone call market.

Facebook is a much bigger threat than chat apps because far more people are likely to try and like it, due to its visibility, Enderle said.

Facebook Messenger has more than 900 million monthly active users.

The overall trend is making traditional telephones obsolete, Enderle said. This is just another indicator that trend is reaching critical mass, putting traditional telecom services increasingly on death watch.

Wireless carriers wont be hit as hard, because data charges apply to calls made through Facebook and other apps, unless WiFi is used.

What About Video?

Skype in February began supporting group video calls on iOS and Android for up to 25 people,ooVoo lets users make free high-quality video calls to groups of up to 12 people on any device, andTango supports video calls to groups of up to 50 people.

Facebook reportedly is working on a group video calling feature, but video introduces some issues associated with bandwidth, both in the network and on the end device, Frosts Jude pointed out.

Still, he said, I expect Facebook will do something like that eventually.
Yahoo on Wednesday announced that it has reached a deal with Starboard Value to add four independent directors, thus avoiding a proxy fight with a key investor that has been seeking radical changes at the company.

Under the agreement, Starboard CEO Jeff Smith will join Yahoo as an independent director and will be a member of the companys Strategic Review Committee, which has been in negotiations with several suitors for Yahoos core Web business.

Eddy Hartenstein, former DirecTV and Tribune CEO; Richard Hill, chairman of Tessera Technologies; and Tor Braham, former global head of technology mergers at Deutsche Bank, also will join as independent directors, Yahoo said.

As part of the agreement, Starboard has withdrawn its slate of nominees to the Yahoo board.

Get Down to Business

The constructive resolution will allow management and the board to keep our focus on our extremely important objectives, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said, adding that management is looking forward to working with the entire board, including the new directors, to increase shareholder value.

The board and management remain focused and dedicated to the exploration of strategic alternatives and the execution of strategy for the operating business, Yahoo spokesperson Rebecca Neufeld told the E-Commerce Times.

The new board members were looking forward to working closely with existing board members and management right away to maximize shareholder value, Smith said.

Starboard, which owns about 1.7 percent of Yahoo, has been one of its chief critics, calling out the company for its failure to produce acceptable results, its poor acquisitions and its compensation practices.

Pressure Point

The announcement of a new board structure is the first step toward necessary changes among the top management, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

One of Yahoos problems is a board that really didnt understand Yahoos business or could execute well on any of the options they had. This change should address that problem, he told the E-Commerce Times.

The announcement comes at a critical time for the company, as it received bids from numerous suitors for its core Web assets. Among the companies making a bid for Yahoo is Verizon, which reportedly wants to integrate Yahoo with AOL and turn itself into a major provider of online content.

Other companies that have expressed an interest in Yahoo include Microsoft, IAC and Time Warner; however, it was not immediately known which companies had submitted official bids.

Two incumbent directors, Lee Scott and Sue James, will not stand for re-election at the companys annual meeting, bringing the total number of board members to 11, Yahoo said. Scott and James have agreed to relinquish their respective committee responsibilities immediately to board members who will be up for re-election.

The board committee responsibilities have been restructured with Maynard Webb continuing as chairman.

Eric Brandt will chair the Audit and Finance Committee, joined by Braham and Tom McInerney. Cathy Friedman will chair the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, joined by Jane Shaw and Richard Hill. McInerney will head the Strategic Review Committee, joined by Smith and Brandt. Shaw will lead the Compensation and Leadership Development committee and will be joined by Webb, Friedman, Smith and Hartenstein.

The full agreement will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an exhibit to the companys 8-K report.
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(Photo: REUTERS / Kacper Pempel)A visitor walks between electric barbed-wired fences at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and former concentration camp November 18, 2013.

BUSAN, South Korea  When United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the Auschwitz concentration camp this week the world focussed for a brief moment on the horrific impact of antisemitism.

Ban became the second U.N. head to visit the camp complex, which was essentially a death factory, after Boutros Boutros-Ghali's tour in 1995. His visit came at a time when there are reports of growing antisemitism in the world.

More than one million people, most of them Jews, died in gas chambers or from starvation and disease and forced labor in Auschwitz and the nearby Birkenau camp between 1940-1945.

Journalist Nan Spowart wrote in the Scottish Daily Record newspaper on November 12, "A visit to Auschwitz death camp changed my daughter's view of the world."

Spowart wrote, "I'm worried that it has traumatized her. When I picked her up from the airport she started to cry.

"As a rule she doesn't cry much but I think her heart is broken."

A SIN AGAINST GOD

(Photo: Ecumenical News / Peter Kenny) Manuel Quintero, international program coordinator of the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) talks to Ecumenical News on October 30, 2013 during the 10th WCC Assembly in Busan, South Korea.

Two weeks earlier, a key religious figure from Israel had called on leaders at the 10th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Busan to renew a commitment at the Christian organization's foundation at Amsterdam in 1948 to treat anti-Semitism as "a sin against God."

Debbie Weissman, president of the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), said the disease of antisemitism must be halted.

"I look to the WCC to continue to condemn and combat antisemitism, especially where it is on the rise today, in places like Hungary, Greece and the Ukraine."

Speaking to Ecumenical News from her home in Jerusalem before flying to Busan, Weissman said her relationship with the WCC goes back to a 1988 women's conference in Toronto which she described as "a life transforming experience."

"I remember as well the 1990 convocation in Seoul, devoted to justice, peace and the integrity of Creation," said Weissman, a feminist and educator.

Busan was her second WCC assembly.

"My first was seven years ago in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and I have attended many other smaller conferences and meetings."

At Busan she discussed a number of issues with Christian leaders, including the need for on developing relationships with all the world's great religions.

SPECIAL JEWISH CHRISIAN RELATINSHIOP

"We would hope that Christians would feel a special relationship with Jews and Judaism, because of our shared Scripture and because of the Jewishness of Jesus," she said.

She said she wanted to see Christians oppose legislation against circumcision and ritual slaughter for meat which she described as "issues that Jews share in common with their Muslim brothers and sisters."

Weissman noted, "We hope that any discussion of the precarious situation of Christians in the Middle East would note that Christians have more freedom of religion within the State of Israel than in any other country in the region.

"The Occupation of the Palestinian Territories is a serious problem, but it's a political one, not specifically a religious one."

Weissman recalled that the ICCJ recently published a statement on the situation in Israel/Palestine a document called "As long as you believe in a living God, you must have hope."

She said that this was a direct quotation from Palestinian Bishop Munib A. Younan, who is president of the 70-million strong Lutheran World Federation, and who also attended the world church gathering in Korea.

DIALOGUE WITH ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS

"We hope that the WCC will help us promote this nuanced, balanced approach, characteristic also of our 2009 Berlin Document," Weissman told EN. "Both of our organizations are very interested in promoting dialogue with Orthodox Christians.

"This has particular implications for the Middle East, where so many of the Christians are Orthodox. Within the Global South, where Christianity is growing the fastest, there are many areas where there is no Jewish community.

"We would like to share the fruits of the so far largely Western Christian-Jewish dialogue with Christians around the world."

The ICCJ president said that religious people around the world today face serious problems including the rise of secularism and the rise of extremist kinds of religious expression.

"The liberal religious movements seem to be on the decline. What can Jews and Christians do together to express their faith through what we call Tikun Olam (mending a broken world)

"The Assembly theme, God of life, lead us to justice and peace provides a welcome opportunity to do this," said Weissman.

EAPPI

Welcoming the arrival of Weissman in Busan is a man at the heart of Christian influence and change in the Middle East, Manuel Quintero, international program co-ordinator of the WCC's Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI).

He said Weissman had done "a great deal" to improve relations between Palestinians and Israelis.

"She has always said that by wanting to see change in Israel, the WCC is certainly not an anti-Semitic organization.

"She is one of the Jews in Jerusalem who understands the humanity of other people and the EAPPI want to improve its relationship with everyone in Israel."

Quintero, an elder in the Presbyterian Church of Cuba, involved in the ecumenical movement since 1969, said that EAPPI had a prominent role at the 10th Assembly.

It played this by bringing the Palestine/Israel situation to the attention of Christian leaders.

He strongly denied accusations from some Jewish and Christian organizations that the WCC is an anti-Semitic organization, often levelled when there is criticism of Israeli actions or expansion of settlers into "occupied territories."

The organization he represents is simply pro-human rights for everyone in Israel where there are now many people, Christians, Jews and Muslims, calling for change and end to "The Occupation" of what are known as the "occupied territories."

OCCUPIED TERRITORY

These are areas designated as occupied territory by the United Nations and other international organizations, governments and others to refer to the territory seized by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967 from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. They consist of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; much of the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip.

"If we want to employ Christian terminology, then these are what we'd call prophetic voices. I don't think that ending The Occupation will mean the end of Israel.

"On the contrary, it will open the way for the co-existence of two States, side by side with people that have a lot in common."

Quintero there is much to admire in Israel.

"If you go to Israel, you'll see how they've modified the landscape.

"It's a very scientifically progressive society. They are so culturally advanced and have so much to contribute.

"It's a pity with all that richness they stop Palestinians enjoying the basic rights and privileges that they enjoy. I'm not anti-Semitic at all. But what we have is a David and Goliath situation. Israel has all the military power and economic advantages.

"Palestinians are helpless. When one Israeli is killed, 100 Palestinians die."

Quintero said that one day the wall that divides Jews from Palestinians in Israel will fall; "Walls always come down."

He explained that EAPPI, which has teams of people monitoring human rights violations in Israel, was formed in 2001 after calls to the WCC were made by the churches in Jerusalem for protection and help.

He said its basic aim was to end The Occupation.

On its website EAA says it campaigns "for a just and peaceful resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict through an end to the occupation, respect for international law and implementation of U.N. resolutions."

Asked if that would also mean an end to Israel he said, "No. We believe that The Occupation is bad for both Palestinians and Israelis."
(Photo:  Peter Kenny / Ecumenical News)The Israeli flag flies at the Western Wall, a Jewish Holy site, next to the Al-Aqsa Mosque one of Islam's Holy sites in Jerusalem on Feb. 11, 2016.

The leader of the opposition in Britain's Parliament Jeremy Corbyn has caved in to pressure from government lawmakers and those from his own Labour Party, suspending Naz Shah, the Bradford West Member of Parliament over remarks she made about Israel on Facebook.

The Labour Party responded to charges of anti-Semitism on April 27 by suspending Shah, who had suggested a policy of "transportation" for Israeli citizens to the United States as a "solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict."

Corbyn has faced repeat accusations in recent months for failing to take a sufficiently tough line against antisemitism and acted against Shah only after coming under intense political pressure, The Financial Times reported.

Later his party also suspended former London mayor Ken Livingstone for saying Shah's remarks were not antisemitic.

The allegations center around a 2014 Facebook post, in which Shah shared a graphic of Israel's outline superimposed on a map of the United States under the headline "Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict  Relocate Israel into United States", with the comment: "Problem solved."

A Labour Party spokesman said: "Jeremy Corbyn and Naz Shah have mutually agreed that she is administratively suspended from the Labour party by the general secretary. Pending investigation, she is unable to take part in any party activity and the whip is removed [so she cannot represent the party]."

UK Prime Minister David Cameron said it was "quite extraordinary" that she had not been suspended and found support from Corbyn's side, with Labour MP Lisa Nandy suggesting that Shah should be suspended "pending an investigation".

"I made clear my view to the leader's office that we should suspend anybody who makes antisemitic remarks, in line with our policy, and investigate," Nandy told the BBC's Daily Politics.

SHAH STEPS DOWN AS KEY PARTY AIDE

The pressure finally told 24-hours after Shah stepped down from her role as aide to shadow chancellor [finance chief] John McDonnell, after it was revealed she had shared the Facebook graphic showing an image of Israel's outline superimposed on to a map of the United States, The Jewish News reported.

Shah told lawmakers, "I wholeheartedly apologise to this house for the words I used before I became a member. I accept and understand that the words I used caused upset and hurt to the Jewish community and I deeply regret that."

She stepped down as parliamentary assistant to McDonnell on April 26 and was summoned the following day to a meeting with Corbyn, who told her the comments were "offensive and unacceptable".

Corbyn accepted she no longer held those views.

(Screengrab from video of speech.) UK Member of Parliament Naz Shah apologizes to parliament for remarks she posted on Facebook in 2014 saying Israel should relocate to the United States after she was accused of antisemitism.

MP John Woodcock,a former chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, said: "The handling of this has been a mess. But the most important thing is that the Labour leadership properly acknowledges now the scale of the antisemitism problem that is growing in the party," The Guardian reported.

"This is abhorrent to our values as a party. It ought to transcend views on the leadership and wider party direction but unless and until it is gripped by everyone from Jeremy downwards it is going to fester and undermine everything we do."
(Photo: REUTERS / Kacper Pempel)U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon talks with holocaust survivor and Council for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews chairman Marian Turski (R), and Tel Aviv chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau (L) during his visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and former concentration camp November 18, 2013. Ban urged the European Union on Monday to stay at the vanguard of efforts to combat climate change, sweeping aside arguments led by Poland and business leaders that the bloc has to prioritize economic growth.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has visited the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz to pay tribute to Holocaust victims at a time of growing concern of growing antisemitism in some parts of Europe.

Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II.

The notorious word "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Makes You Free) towered above the gate that Ban worked through on Monday.

"Auschwitz-Birkenau is not simply a register of atrocities. It is also a repository of courage and hope," Ban said. "Today I say loud and clear: Never again."

The U.N. chief also visited Krakow about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Auschwitz memorial and one Tuesday he joined the U.N. COP 19 climate conference in Warsaw.

More than one million people, most of them Jews, died in gas chambers or from starvation and disease and forced labor in Auschwitz and the nearby Birkenau camp between 1940-1945.

The first U.N. secretary-general to visit Auschwitz was Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1995.

The Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch urged the world body to do more against mass atrocities as well as to address rising anti-Semitism in Europe as Ban was visiting Auschwitz.

"The secretary-general's visit is a historic and welcome development for the leader of an organization founded in 1945 on the ashes of the Holocaust, with the aim to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights and in the dignity and worth of the human person," said executive director Hillel Neuer.

"The deafening silence and indifference that allowed Auschwitz to happen must serve as remembrance and reminder of the moral imperative for the United Nations - founded as the anti-Hitler alliance - to speak out and take action in the face of genocide, atrocity, hatred, intolerance, demonization, and gross abuses of human rights," said Neuer.

He said the United Nations needs to improve its record and focus on the world's "gravest human rights emergencies", and turn international attention to putting an end to mass crimes.

"The recent election of gross human rights abusers to the UN Human Rights Council - including a powerful dictatorship that is actively aiding Syria to murder its own people - underscores the reality whereby politics, regional alliances, and vote-trading are too often allowed to trump human rights. Responsible voices must not be silent."

"But to draw only abstract and universal lessons from the Holocaust, as the U.N. often does, is to overlook what the Nazi crime was about.

"The UN chief's visit to the death camp that symbolizes the Nazis' deliberate murder of six million Jews - as part of Hitler's publicly stated goal of 'annihilation of the Jewish race' - provides a historic opportunity for the world body to recommit itself to the fight against increasing manifestations of anti-Semitism in the Middle East, Europe, and around the world," said Neuer.

He noted that it was regrettable that the "annual Holocaust Remembrance Day statements of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay regularly omit any mention of the word anti-Semitism."

UN Watch said Ban's visit came 10 days after the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights released a major poll showing an alarming rise in antisemitism.

A survey of nearly 6,000 self-identified Jews in eight European Union countries showed that two-thirds of respondents found anti-Semitism to be a major problem in their countries, while more than 75 percent said the situation had become more acute over the last five years.

"Sadly, however, Kofi Annan's historic 2004 UN gathering on anti-Semitism, and his call on the Geneva-based human rights machinery of the United Nations to become 'mobilized in the battle against anti-Semitism,' have been largely ignored," said Neuer.

"Few if any of the UN human rights mechanisms - including those experts concerned with racism - have addressed antisemitism in any meaningful way."

A recent survey conducted online by the European Union's Fundamental Rights Agency among 5,874 respondents who self-identified as Jews, showed that Hungarian Jews were particularly worried about discrimination and that nearly half have considered emigrating.
With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, our country is entering a new chapter in education reform. After 15 years of work by states and school districts to raise standards, disaggregate data, and close gaps, the federal government is taking the foot off the gas and leaving even more decisions to the states and to local school officials, including those about measures, metrics, incentives, and interventions.

For those of us who have been working with states for many years toward the goal of college and career readiness for all students, this is a period of great excitement and, admittedly, some trepidation. Excitement because theres a real opportunity for states to build on the good work thats been done, make midcourse corrections, and spark much-needed innovation. Trepidation because if state leaders and advocates arent careful, more than a decade of important work to establish more meaningful, rigorous expectations for our schoolchildren could be undone.

Although the No Child Left Behind Act outlived its relevance, lets not overlook the significant progress that states made during its time frame. As recently as the early 1990s, very few states even had standards. Expectations for students varied district by district and school by school, which led to great inequities and achievement gaps. One prominent 1994 study showed that students earning As in their courses in high-poverty schools were actually achieving at the same level as those earning Ds in low-poverty schools . Translation: Disadvantaged students were held to much lower standards in their classrooms, and the impact of this was borne out by lower college-going and college-success rates.

By the late 1990s, most states had established statewide standards and assessments to raise the floor for all students, but the quality and rigor of those expectations was, at best, mixed.

In 2004, Achieve, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and the Education Trust released a seminal report that called on states to align K-12 standards with college and workplace expectations so that high school prepared students for the real world. This sparked a round of work by states to recalibrate their standards in accordance with higher education and employer expectations.

College and career readiness became the goal for all students, and states sought to align their standards with that target. In 2008, this served as the impetus for the Common Core State Standards initiative, when governors and state schools chiefs decided to lock arms and develop consistent college- and career-ready standards based on the best models in the states and in other high-achieving countries.

Fast forward to today. Despite the politicization of the issue, most states still have rigorous standards in place, standards that have been validated by higher education and employers as meeting their readiness expectations. This is a major step forward from the previous era of weak to middling standards or even no standards at all.

Higher education institutions and employers need to be working closely with K-12 schools to align expectations."

Heres the rub: A growing number of states are reopening their standards and rethinking the decisions they previously made about aligned assessments. And all states will be revamping their accountability systems over the next 18 months, in response to ESSA. If these decisions are made on the basis of the wrong criteria, or simply to appease noisy critics on the left or the right, it could set back progress considerably.

Oklahoma is a case in point. In its haste to express its disdain for the common core, the legislature required the state department of education to revise the standards, but forbade them from using any content from the common core. As a result, they hamstrung the educators who were chosen to write the new standards by ruling out a lot of rigorous content.

States that are serious about college and career readiness need to build on the best of whats been done before, rather than retreat from it. Heres what it will take to maintain progress:

 Resist pressures to lower the standards. It wont help students. Maintaining high expectations is critical if students are to be well prepared for the competitive world theyll enter after high school. States revising standards and assessments should engage higher education and business leaders in the process to ensure alignment with their expectations. This will require genuine, not cursory, engagement. If higher education institutions and employers wont validate the standards and assessments, theyre not worth adopting, particularly at the high school level.

To their credit, national higher education organizations are speaking out about this. The National Association of System Heads, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, and a new coalition of college and university leaders called Higher Ed for Higher Standards recently released recommendations making a compelling case for higher educations seat at the table as states rework K-12 standards and assessments.

 Deliver supports and close gaps. Higher standards will have an impact only if we support the students who arent meeting them. That requires early-warning systems and targeted interventions. At the high school level, assessments should have college-ready cut scores, and students who havent reached the college-ready standard by the end of 11th grade should be provided specialized courses and supports designed to catch them up by graduation. California pioneered this strategy with its Early Assessment Program, and it got results. Today, most states have the tools to do this, but very few have instituted the courses and supports.

 Address the career side of college- and career-ready. Theres promising new work underway in states to improve the quality and rigor of career-focused programs and scale career pathways that lead to meaningful postsecondary credentials and well-paying jobs. This spring, 24 states and the District of Columbia will receive grants from the Council of Chief State School Officers to advance this work, thanks to an investment by the JPMorgan Chase Foundation. States will need to build new measures and metrics into their accountability systems to place greater value on these pathways and credentials as part of a system that encourages and supports college and career readiness for all students.

 Break down the silos. For all of this work to take root, higher education institutions and employers need to be working closely with K-12 schools to align expectations and create smoother transitions for students from high school to college to employment. This is the most important, and most difficult, work of all. States should use policy, resources, and the bully pulpit to incentivize this cross-sector work while removing barriers that stand in its way.

States that successfully address these issues will become the pioneers in the post-No Child Left Behind era. They will successfully bring together the excellence and equity goals that have been at the heart of the reforms for the past two decades. And they will show how their newfound flexibility can be used to accelerate progress rather than upend it.
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To build the largest and most complete Amateur Radio community site on the Internet - a "portal" that hams think of as the first place to go for information, to exchange ideas, and be part of whats happening with ham radio on the Internet. eHam.net provides recognition and enjoyment to the people who use, contribute, and build the site. This project involves a management team of volunteers who each take a topic of interest and manage it with passion. The site will stand above all other ham radio sites by employing the latest technology and professional design/programming standards, developed by a team of community programmers who contribute their skills to the effort. The site will be something of which everyone involved can be proud to say they were a part. We welcome your comments. The eHam.net Team, Revision 07/2020.
UCL (University College London) has agreed a 280 million loan with the European Investment Bank to develop its Bloomsbury and UCL East campuses, the largest sum ever lent by the bank to a university.

The 30-year loan will provide funding for UCLs Bloomsbury campus in central London which is undergoing an ambitious programme to upgrade and expand its historic buildings as well as finance for the building of UCL East, the universitys new site at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London.

UCL is investing 1.25 billion over 10 years to implement its Transforming UCL programme, which includes developing the two campuses as well as other projects across London, to support growth in its world-leading teaching and research and create a more vibrant, student-focused environment.

It is the largest capital investment programme UCL has undertaken since the building of its original campus, and is one of the biggest being carried out in the higher education sector in the UK.

Projects in Bloomsbury include the refurbishment and expansion of the prestigious Bartlett School of Architecture which will house nearly 1,000 staff and students and the building of a new student centre, on which construction started this year. Investment in the Bloomsbury campus is expected to be around 740 million.

When the Transforming UCL programme was published five years ago, it was clear that further growth in Bloomsbury would be constrained. In 2014, the university announced that it would build UCL East, a new campus at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to form part of the wider Olympicopolis education and cultural quarter.

UCL East is envisaged as a radical new model of how a university campus can be embedded in the local community and with businesses.

The new campus will bring together cross-disciplinary UCL expertise in such areas as creativity and material culture, future global cities, experimental engineering, and education and research through public service, including the UCL Centre for Access to Justice. The first phase of UCL East is due to open during the 2019/2020 academic year.

The loan agreement was formally signed during a visit to UCL by Jonathan Taylor, Vice President of the European Investment Bank. The loan follows the investment of 25 million in January in the new UCL Technology Fund by the European Investment Fund, which is part of the EIB group and provides risk finance to small and medium sized enterprises across Europe.

Jonathan Taylor, Vice President of the European Investment Bank, said: The European Investment Bank recognises the impressive and ambitious development planned at UCL that will strengthen world class research, transform teaching facilities and improve student life, as well as creating a new centre of learning in Stratford. This new 280m 30-year loan represents the largest ever EIB backing for investment at a European University, and reflects the EIBs commitment to strengthen the local and global role of leading universities. The EIB has supported more university investment in the UK than any other country and provided more than GBP 2.1 billion for investment at 30 universities across the UK over the last six years.

Professor Michael Arthur, UCL President & Provost, said: UCL is proud of its world-class teaching and research and this support from the European Investment Bank will help us deliver our ambitious growth plans, enhancing facilities for students and allowing our academics to continue to tackle key global research challenges. Our investment in our Bloomsbury and UCL East campuses is substantial and will support our activities for decades to come, allowing us to deliver on the UCL 2034 programme which sets out our 20 year strategy.

Jim ONeill, Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, said: Supporting Britains world-class universities is crucial to the success of our economy, and this significant investment by the EUs bank, the largest sum ever given to a university, is set to transform UCLs two campuses. This 280 million loan will help grow its world-leading research and teaching facilities, building on the millions of pounds worth of investment already secured from the European Investment Fund. It is a strong example of the benefits that money from the European Investment Bank can bring to support our leading universities across the country.

Since 2010 the European Investment Bank has provided GBP more than 2.1 billion for transformational investment at thirty universities across the UK. This has included new campuses in Swansea and Belfast, cutting edge research facilities in Oxford and Edinburgh, the world-class Technology and Innovation Hub at Strathclyde and new research and teaching facilities in Newcastle, Birmingham, Hull and Lincoln.

Lending by the EIB in the UK last year totalled 5.6bn and represented the largest annual engagement since the start of EIB lending in the UK in 1973. This supported nearly 16bn of overall investment in 40 projects across the UK, which schools, university campuses, hospitals, upgraded energy links, renewable energy projects and water infrastructure.

Over the last decade, in response to requests from public sector and private business clients, the European Investment Bank has provided more than GBP 7.3 billion for transport, education, social housing, water, energy, healthcare and urban regeneration investment across London, with additional investment from UK wide programmes.
My great uncle was born in the village of Washington, Tn., on the banks of the Tennessee River in Rhea County. He grew up in a typically large family of the day, and one of his sisters was my grandmother, Mattie Smith Young.

The Civil War treated his family very un-civilly, witnessing the burning of his home by neighbors after the Battle of Chickamauga. He endured a number of unpleasant encounters with enemy soldiers which he never forgot.

Ever driven by the desire to succeed, he got a degree from Emory University and became a Methodist minister. His first church was called St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and was at Pulaski, Va. He named his only son "Paul", after the church. The church is still there in 2015.

Uncle J. Wesley was interested in Science as well as Religion, and wrote scientific articles which were published in such newspapers as the Atlanta Constitution. He also published several books, one of which was titled, "Mountaineers - or Bottled Sunshine for Blue Mondays". It was highly popular in its day, and I still have my mother's copy.

Methodist ministers are frequently moved about, and he had at least one pastorate here in Chattanooga which occurred while he was still young and unmarried. A yellow fever epidemic hit our entire area while he was here, and he was one of only four men of the cloth who stayed in town to minister to those afflicted. He was heavily involved with the burials and would spend all night attending to those unpleasantries, only to rush home for an hour's sleep before starting a new day's voluntary duties. (A second of those four ministers who remained in town was the Presbyterian minister Dr. Thomas McCallie.

Eventually the fever epidemic simply went away - with thanks to no medical intervention - and life normalized. Only then could he find time to marry a Virginia bride - Lucy Jordan. Two children were born to them - a boy and a girl. The boy (above) was named Paul in honor of Uncle John's first church, and his full name was Paul Jordan Smith. More on him in another of my articles.

Uncle J. Wesley was struck by some of the Utopian ideas of the later 19th Century and envisioned a self-supporting university on some property he acquired at Hooker, Ga., just west of Chattanooga. It was to be called, "Tenooga". Revenue would be raised through several industries which would be set up there, such as a pottery operation, which actually got under way, and produced some concrete planters - samples of which I still have. A large plot of his land at Hooker was reserved for a cemetery, for which he sold lots. My grandparents Young purchased a number of these, and they are buried there at Hooker Cemetery.

John Wesley Smith was a man of influence and clout, and was able to attract a seminal faculty, largely from outside the area, and so the university started out. But sadly it fell almost immediately on hard times resulting in disgruntled - and stranded - faculty who were unable to easily return home. Uncle John's house mysteriously burned to the ground one night, making things doubly bad.

I know of another such Utopian dream which was realized - successfully - not far away, and at about the same time as the Hooker, Ga., venture. It was by former Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith. His enterprise flowered into Sewanee University (The University of the South) at Sewanee, Tn. His great-great granddaughter, Maria Kirby-Smith, is a close friend of mine, with equally close ties to Chattanooga. I hope to soon write about her and her outstanding work as a sculptor.

Uncle John Wesley Smith was able to carry on with his ministry for a number of years, although his wife, Lucy Jordan, died unexpectedly - a blow from which he never fully recovered. I have been fortunate in very recent years to re-establish contact with one of the branches of his family now based in White Plains, NY.

(Chester Martin is a native Chattanoogan who is a talented painter as well as local historian. He and his wife, Pat, live in Brainerd. Mr. Martin can be reached at cymppm@comcast.net )
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Mayor Andy Berke launched his Family Friendly Workplace Challenge Wednesday, along with the first businesses and organizations signed on to take the Challenge. Mayor Berke announced the Challenge on Monday night during his third State of the City Address. During a press conference Wednesday at the Edney Center for Innovation, Tennessee American Water and CO.STARTERS joined the list of businesses taking the Challenge.



There are many types of benefits that help a business attract and retain employees with families, said Mayor Berke.

There are lots of options depending on what works for business owners and their employees. Each company has unique challenges, and their employees have different preferences. But as a city, we prosper when employers get this right, when we find ways for everyone to participate in the workforce, use their talents, and help Chattanooga employers succeed and create even more jobs.Creating more family friendly workplaces was a recommendation made by the Economic Committee of the Mayors Council for Women. The Committee spent several months studying barriers that women face in the workplace and looking at programs local companies and womens groups have implemented to empower and encourage women to support one another.The Family Friendly Workplace Challenge is a great way to begin to have this important conversation, said City Councilwoman and Mayors Council for Women Chairman Dr. Carol Berz. We know that too many companies are not providing the kinds of benefits that allow their employees to thrive. By taking part in the Challenge, businesses and organizations can talk to their employees and create policies that fit with their specific needs. And most importantly, well have multiple examples of how to make family friendly practices feasible in the workplace.Under the Challenge employers commit to engaging their employees and developing a plan to make their businesses attractive for working mothers and fathers. At the end of a year, the City will highlight success stories and use them as a model for other businesses throughout Chattanooga.In addition to the City of Chattanooga, a number of large businesses and organizations have signed on to Mayor Berkes Family Friendly Workplace Challenge, including Blue Cross Blue Shield of TN (second largest employer in Chattanooga with 4,437 full-time employees), University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (1,218 full-time employees), Chattanooga State Community College (679 full-time employees), and EPB (545 full-time employees)."Chattanooga State Community College eagerly accepts the Family Friendly Workplace Challenge, said Dr. Flora Tydings, president of Chattanooga State Community College. We have already begun recruiting employees who will be gathering input from our campus community in order to help design what we want Family Friendly to look like in our quest to provide a great place to work and learn."At Wednesday's press conference, Mayor Berke announced the inclusion of Tennessee American Water to the list of those taking the Challenge.As changes occur in our workforce and society, we recognize the importance of work-life balance for our employees. Thats why Tennessee American Water is pleased to join Mayor Berkes Family Friendly Workplace Challenge, said Tennessee American Water President Valoria Armstrong. We look forward to building upon existing programs we have that focus on health and wellness while identifying new opportunities with our employees.Small businesses and organizations with 50 or fewer employees taking the Family Friendly Workplace Challenge include The Bread Basket, Co. LAB, Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce, Epiphany Day Spa and Brow Couture, and Ovalles Catering Company.The key to finding a job that launches a career is to find a company that matches your needs. Ovalles is not the biggest company out there, nor are we the flashiest, but we are a company that puts our employees and their families first, said Erwin Ovalle, owner of Ovalles Catering Company. We want our employees to know that when you join Ovalles, you join a company that will commit to supporting you and your unique needs, whether it is our support for professional development and education, or our commitment to helping find a work-home balance that fits your familys needs.

In addition to Ovalles, local small business the Bread Basket is also taking the Challenge saying, We are a family-owned business, so we understand the importance of creating an environment that provides our employees with the flexibility needed to balance demands of work and family life.



The Bread Basket is proud to be part of the City of Chattanoogas Family Friendly Workplace Challenge, and we look forward to working with our employees to come up with new ideas for managing stress and improving our overall wellness, said Anson Hyde, owner of the Bread Basket. Thats tough when we work with cookies and cakes all day, but Im confident we can be successful!



Wednesday's announcement added CO.STARTERS to the list, furthering the number of small businesses and organizations looking for innovative ways to ensure a family friendly workplace for their employees.



Our purpose with CO.STARTERS is to grow thriving communities by supporting local business, which starts with providing the most supportive environment possible for our own team to thrive, said Enoch Elwell of CO.STARTERS. We are excited to join the other members of this challenge as we together highlight the family friendly culture that gives our employees the freedom to do their best work."



To learn more about Mayor Berkes Family Friendly Workplace Challenge visit: http://connect.chattanooga.gov/family/.


Chattanooga 2.0 will host a community forum to discuss education in Hamilton County on May 16 from 4-8 p.m. at Bessie Smith Cultural Center, 200 E. MLK Blvd. (parking is available).



This forum will explore the data presented in the 2.0 report and seek community feedback on early childhood education, K-12 schooling, and college and career readiness solutions.

Attendees can visit stations on varying aspects of education and will be asked share their thoughts on the following questions:



- What positive, successful things are happening in education locally? ;

- What needs to improve in public education?; and



- What are bold solutions to address these challenges?



Chattanooga has a history of taking action when the need arises  in re-imagining our riverfront, creating the Gig City and building the Innovation District, said the 2.0 Coordinator Jared Bigham. Now is our moment. If the whole community comes together, we can make education our next frontier. We want the community to help us set audacious education goals for every single child in Hamilton County.



The event is designed for community members to drop in at any time between 4-8 p.m. and participate in multiple information and feedback stations.



"Some of the primary areas of focus within 2.0 where measurable outcomes can be defined are: school readiness, third grade literacy, career exploration in middle school, post-secondary readiness, post-secondary completion, and workforce readiness," officials said.
Public feedback of adoption process encouraged

Adoption processes on the Island are being reviewed in a bid to see if change is needed.

The Department of Health and Social care is asking for the community's feedback - the area hasn't been reviewed for some time.

The Isle of Man has a different process to that in the UK but it is still lengthy - which can cause problems for the families involved.

A public meeting on the issue will take place at the Manx Museum on May 4th where people are encouraged to dicuss their experiences.

Local consultant Jane O'Rourke will carry out the review - she wants to hear from anyone who's had experience of adoption:

Media

Jane O'Rourke
MHK fires social worker concerns at Health Minister

Appropriate action would be taken against social workers on the Isle of Man - if it was ever deemed necessary.

That's the Health and Social Care Minister who says he has no doubts over the capability of the staff working for his department.

In the House of Keys this week Onchan MHK Peter Karran directed a barrage of questions at him regarding how they are trained, whether they are regulated and the

complaints process.

Howard Quayle says all social workers on the Island are qualified and registered and it would be an offence if they weren't:

Media

Howard Quayle MHK
Semillas, a group claiming to represent the Hispanic community in Chattanooga, is demanding HCDE School Board member Rhonda Thurman resign. Their excuse is Rhonda Thurman dared to acknowledge the increase in the number of non-English speaking students attending HCDE from five percent of total school enrollment in 2015 to over 9.2 percent in 2022. Because these students were ... (click for more)

Rheubin Taylors termination by Mayor Wamp is deserved. In fact, his termination should have come immediately following the revelation that his office destroyed records requested in an open records request. I dont care how long he has served in this position, open defiance of the open records laws in the state of Tennessee should not merit an extension of a contract, ... (click for more)
Apollo Nida has been in prison for a little more than a year now and considering he is in the same facility as Teresa Giudice of Bravo The Real Housewives of New Jersey husband, Joe Giudice, its only right that Nidas wife, Phaedra Parks of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, and Teresa start bonding one another (just like their husbands have been rumored to be doing in jail).

Now, the two ladies have come up with a plan to visit their men in jail.

We discussed that! Parks said in the latest issue of In Touch Weekly. It would be wonderful to do it because then my boys could interact with her girls and everyone would be occupied.

Nida is months into his sentence while Joe just began his on March 23. He was given 41 months while Nida was handed eight years.

Parks added, I just told [Teresa] she has to take care of herself, her daughters, and most importantly, her health. Her girls need her more than ever now.

Nida pleaded guilty in a scam that brought in more than $2 million. Teresa and Joe both pleaded guilty to similar fraud charges from bank and loan to mortgage and tax evasion. Teresa was released less than a year after serving a 15 month sentence. She was placed on house arrest and officially became free back in February.

As for Parks, she has maintained that she was not involved in Nidas criminal activity and that she wasnt even aware it was going on.
Anne Maddux Frazier has joined Wiseman Ashworth Law Group as an associate. Fraziers practice focuses on mental health law, health care defense, conservatorships, and long term care litigation.Ms. Frazier is a 2015 graduate of Emory University School of Law with a concentration in civil litigation. During law school, Ms. Frazier clerked for the Honorable Judge W. Jeffrey Hollingsworth, Circuit Court Judge of the 11th Judicial District in Chattanooga and also served as a clerk to the Office of the Tennessee Attorney General, where she gained experience in Tennessee appellate law.Ms. Frazier holds a masters degree in teaching from Lee University and taught ninth grade world history prior to attending law school.Born and raised in Chattanooga, Ms.Frazier and her family live in Green Hills.
There is widespread variation in the use of hip fracture surgery across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, concludes a study published by The BMJ today.

The findings show that, despite clear national guidelines, patients with higher levels of socioeconomic deprivation and those who require surgery at the weekend are less likely to receive it.

There are over 70,000 hip fractures in the United Kingdom every year, with a combined health and social cost of 2bn.

A number of studies have shown that patients who undergo total hip arthroplasty (THA) have better function and less need for repeat surgery. So in 2011, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended THA for patients with good cognitive and physical function who are fit enough for anesthesia and surgery.

But the extent to which surgeons comply with this guidance is unknown.

So a team of UK and US researchers set out to determine whether the use of THA among hip fracture patients is based on this guidance or if there are systematic inequalities.

Using the UK's National Hip Fracture Database, they analysed data for 114,119 adults aged 60 or over who received surgery for hip fracture at hospitals in England, Wales and Northern Ireland from July 2011 to April 2015.

The degree of non-adherence to this guidance was remarkable: only 32% of eligible adults received THA, and, of those who underwent the procedure, 42% did not meet the NICE eligibility criteria. There was also substantial variation in compliance between hospitals.

The researchers identified several variables that were associated with increased odds of receiving THA after fracture, including younger age, fewer co-morbid conditions, and better mobility before fracture.

Of particular concern, however, were the findings that being admitted on a weekday or being of a higher socioeconomic status were associated with increased odds that a patient would receive a THA.

The researchers suggest that availability of experienced hip surgeons "might account for the reduced use of this procedure observed at weekends."

This is an observational study, so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect. Nevertheless, the researchers say their results show "unexplained variation" - the so called "postcode lottery" - in the use of THA after a hip fracture.

"Further efforts are necessary to improve the use of THA for eligible patients and reduce unexplained variation in care for older adults with hip fractures," they conclude.

In a linked editorial, Harman Chaudhry at McMaster University in Canada says a lack of conclusive evidence on the benefits of THA and consensus among orthopedic surgeons about best practice may explain why there is such widespread non-compliance with the NICE guidelines.

He believes we need strong evidence to guide treatment decisions.

A concerted strategy to translate knowledge will be required, he says, combining dissemination of evidence based indications for THA with widespread mobilization and availability of specialized resources and personnel.

He acknowledges that there might never be a "silver bullet" intervention to improve the lives of patients with hip fracture. But calls for "evidence and models of care that facilitate standardization of hip fracture care nationally (and globally), ultimately rooting out biases in the system and improving the lives of patients after hip fracture."

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ITHACA, N.Y. - Healthy eating habits are more important than ever, with advocates calling for fast-food restaurants, schools and food providers to promote the sale of salads and vegetables as alternatives to burgers and fries. According to new Cornell University research, the most effective strategy for influencing such healthy food choices is not calorie counts and reduced prices, but rather more subtle incentives that reward healthy eating behavior.

The study, "McHealthy: How Marketing Incentives Influence Healthy Food Choices," by Robert Kwortnik, associate professor at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration; Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing in Cornell's Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management; and Elisa K. Chan of the Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne, was recently accepted for upcoming publication in the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.

Kwortnik and Wansink are also on the faculty of the newly established Cornell College of Business, which is made up of the School of Hotel Administration, the Dyson School and the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management.

The research shows that consumers who have poor eating habits and who are overweight benefit the most from long-term reward incentives than if they are offered price reductions of an equal value. However, among healthy eaters, price breaks lead to more purchases of less healthy items.

In one study, a reward-points group of customers was told they would receive 50 points equivalent to 50 cents on a points-collection card redeemable for future purchases if they chose the targeted food item; the price-discount group of customers was told they would receive 50 cents off the price of a specified meal. According to Kwortnik, "The findings are significant because they reveal a positive path -- behavioral rewards for making good food choices -- to healthy eating, as opposed to the punitive path (e.g., calorie counting or food restrictions). We find that offering rewards, such as points that can be redeemed later, encourage healthy food choices, especially for consumers with bad eating habits. So restaurants can encourage repeat patronage with reward programs and encourage healthy eating by rewarding consumers for making better choices. It's a win-win."

For consumers, behavioral reward programs introduce more variety, especially among healthy food choices, and consumers are rewarded for making smarter choices. The study indicates "incentivizing with behavioral rewards is more effective for consumers who are either overweight or junk-food junkies. The points received for each healthy choice not only led to a reward (e.g., accumulated cash value or free food), but also signify the otherwise intangible benefits of an isolated act of eating healthy."

For food service providers, healthy eating incentives help build a better brand at a lower cost. The study said, "While fast-food restaurants spend millions on marketing healthy menu options, these efforts have little effect on consumers' choices."

Kwortnik says, "Rather than overtly telling consumers to eat better, we propose and show through the empirical results that behavioral reward programs trigger a longer-term view that coincides with longer-term goals to eat healthy versus more immediate goals to indulge in typically less healthy foods such as fries, salty snacks or sweets."

The findings also provide a better solution for governments and policymakers that rely on taxation and regulation to promote healthy eating. While those solutions place undesirable burdens on businesses, "policies or regulations to encourage behavioral rewards programs are unlikely to stimulate negative reactions from food companies because such programs help promote the healthy food items already on their menus and encourage repeat customers."

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Cornell University has television, ISDN and dedicated Skype/Google+ Hangout studios available for media interviews.
Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development Commissioner Burns Phillips announced on Thursday, the department has awarded $50,000 in Incumbent Worker Training Grants to two companies in Hamilton County. Incumbent Worker Training Grants assist employers with upgrading skills to avoid layoffs of their employees.By helping employers throughout the state provide the necessary training and education for their employees, Tennessee companies can remain competitive in an ever-changing marketplace, Governor Bill Haslam said.So far this year, we have awarded more than $509,000 in Incumbent Worker Grants to 27 Tennessee businesses benefiting 1055 workers, Comm.Phillips said. Since the programs inception, Incumbent Worker Grants have assisted 700 businesses by providing nearly $17 million to train approximately 55,000 employees.The following criteria must be met to qualify for the Incumbent Worker Training Program. Employers must be in operation in Tennessee for at least one year prior to application date. Employers must have at least five full-time employees, demonstrate financial viability and be current on all state tax obligations. Funding priority is given to businesses whose grant proposals represent a significant layoff avoidance strategy and represent a significant upgrade of skills. Miller Industries Towing Equipment, Inc. awarded $25,000 to train 12 workers in Miller U-Level 2-Supervisory Training. This will provide front line managers the ability to deal with the day-to-day employee issues effectively and make the operation more efficient while increasing the global market competitiveness. Astec, Inc. stated awarded $25,000 to train 49 workers in Lean Training. This will help to reduce waste while implementing new processes for job instruction, job relations, job methods and job safety.The Southeast Tennessee Development District played a key role in awarding these grants to Miller Industries Towing Equipment, Inc. and Astec, Inc., officials said.The Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development administers the Incumbent Worker Training program. The program has been structured to be flexible to meet the business's training objectives. The business may use public, private, or its own in-house training provider based on the nature of the training.
April 27, 2016 -- Men who view more sexually explicit pornography where condoms were used were less likely to have anal sex without a condom themselves. A study by Eric Schrimshaw, PhD, at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, and Martin J. Downing, Jr., PhD, of the Public Health Solutions shows evidence that suggests pornography can have an important protective function by encouraging men to use condoms. Findings are published online in the journal PLOS One.

The research is among the first to examine the relationship between sexually explicit media and the frequency of condomless anal encounters.

According to Schrimshaw, who is an associate professor of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health and the papers first author, the findings showed no evidence of a public health problem stemming from watching most internet-based sexually explicit media. "Actually one type of pornography was associated with higher rates of condom use -- men who viewed more pornography containing condom use engaged in fewer condomless anal sex encounters. Even those who took part in compulsive pornography viewing were not more likely to engage in condomless anal sex," noted Schrimshaw.

However, watching pornography containing condomless anal sex was associated with more condomless anal sex behaviors. "These findings have important policy and HIV prevention implications," said Downing.

Results were based on an online survey of 265 men who have sex with men and who had viewed sexually explicit media in the past three months. Participants were recruited via ads on Craigslist and Facebook and asked about the amount, compulsivity, and proportion of condomless anal sex and anal sex with condoms. Eligible men for the survey were at least 18 years of age and resided within 50 miles of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, D.C.

Nearly all (92 percent) of the men having sex with men reported viewing sexually explicit media containing condomless anal sex, and 48 percent agreed that seeing this had contributed to them engaging in riskier sex. Viewing the explicit material led to acting out the things they saw for 70 percent; 55 percent reported that viewing sexually explicit media led them to seek out sex afterwards.

The men surveyed were also asked to comment on how they perceived the effects of viewing sexually explicit media. Respondents agreed that pornography containing condomless anal sex contributed to their engaging in riskier sex, which the study authors say suggests that pornography can encourage men to engage in more sexual risk behaviors. This perception lends support to the argument for greater availability of sexually explicit media that contains anal sex in which condoms are clearly used by actors, noted Schrimshaw. "The potentially negative consequences on behavior, therefore, has policy implications for pornography directors, producers, distributors, performers, and viewers."

Historically, condom use within the sexually explicit media industry has been self-imposed for the purpose of HIV/STD transmission prevention among the performers. However, with the increase in the prevalence of condomless anal sex in Internet-based porn, the Los Angeles City Council passed regulations mandating condom use among adult film performers for occupational safety purposes. A similar ballot initiative will be voted on statewide in California in November 2016.

Even more extreme, a bill has been passed by the State Assembly of Utah that labeled all sexually explicit media, regardless of condomless content, a "public health crisis." Downing responds, saying, "Our findings run counter to Utah's recent legislation since we now know that most pornography is not associated with more sexual risk behaviors."

"Indeed, our finding that viewing pornography that contains condom use is associated with fewer condomless anal sex encounters suggests that pornography may have a potentially important protective function by encouraging men to use condoms," noted the authors. However, future research will be needed to test whether safer sex interventions using sexually explicit media in which condoms are used by performers will result in changes in condom use behavior.

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About Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health

Founded in 1922, Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Mailman School is the third largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its over 450 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change & health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with over 1,300 graduate students from more than 40 nations pursuing a variety of master's and doctoral degree programs. The Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers including ICAP (formerly the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs) and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit http://www.mailman.columbia.edu
Washington, D.C., April 28, 2016 -- A study to be published in the May 2016 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) reports that use of certain antidepressants during pregnancy can result in offspring depression by early adolescence.

Using national register data from Finland, researchers found that children exposed to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) during gestation had more chance of being diagnosed with depression after age 12, reaching a cumulative incidence of 8.2% by age 15. For children exposed to maternal psychiatric illness but no antidepressants, the incidence was 1.9%. Rates of anxiety, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses did not differ significantly between the two groups. Comparing SSRI-exposed children to children of mothers with neither antidepressant use nor psychiatric diagnosis, researchers found the rates were significantly elevated for each outcome.

Animal studies already demonstrated that exposure to SSRIs during early brain development can result in depression-like behavior in adolescence; this is the first study that follows children beyond childhood to monitor the development of depressive disorders, which typically emerge after puberty has started. The increasing rate of SSRI prescriptions to pregnant women since their introduction 30 years ago makes the study of affected children particularly urgent. Today 6% of pregnant women in the US and 4% in Finland are on SSRIs at some stage of pregnancy.

To investigate whether using SSRIs during pregnancy is associated with offspring psychiatric disorders, researchers from Columbia University, New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology joined forces with researchers from the University of Turku and Helsinki in Finland. They examined psychiatric diagnoses, including depression, anxiety, ASD, and ADHD, in the offspring of nearly 16,000 mothers who had used SSRIs during pregnancy between 1996 and 2010. Children in this cohort ranged in age from 0 to 15 years old. Because maternal psychiatric illness can affect offspring neurodevelopment in the absence of SSRIs, primary comparisons were made between offspring of the SSRI group and offspring of mothers with a psychiatric disorder diagnosis but no antidepressant use.

"The results are in line with studies in rodents, suggesting that SSRI use during pregnancy increases the risk of offspring depression,'' Dr. Heli Malm, the first author of the study, said. "However, the oldest subjects had only just entered the age of risk for depression, and we know that mood disorders typically emerge after the onset of puberty. Further research is therefore urgently needed to follow these children as they get older to substantiate our findings. Until confirmed, these findings must be balanced against the adverse consequences of untreated maternal depression. While some women with mild to moderate depression may do well coming off antidepressants during pregnancy, severe depression when left untreated can lead to serious consequences in the mother and can have direct and indirect adverse effects on the pregnancy, the fetus, and the child."

While it might seem reassuring that the results showed no elevated risk of ASD and ADHD for SSRI-exposed offspring, there may still be significant effects on offspring risk for depression. Dr. Andre Sourander, co-author of the study, added: "Further studies should determine whether the developing fetus is particularly sensitive to the effects of SSRIs in different trimesters, whether some medications may be safer than others for the fetus, and whether evidence-based psychotherapies could be better utilized to maximize maternal benefits while minimizing risk to the long-term health of the developing fetus."

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Notes for editors

The article is "Gestational Exposure to Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and Offspring Psychiatric Disorders: A National Register-Based Study" by Heli Malm, Alan S. Brown, Mika Gissler, David Gyllenberg, Susanna Hinkka-Yli-Salomaki, Ian W. McKeague, Myrna Weissman, Priya Wickramaratne, Miia Artama, Jay A. Gingrich, and Andre Sourander (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2016.02.013). It appears in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 55, Issue 5 (2016), published by Elsevier.

Full text of the article is available to credentialed journalists upon request; contact Mary Billingsley at +1 202 587 9672 or mbillingsley@jaacap.org. Journalists wishing to interview the authors may contact Dr. Heli Malm at heli.malm@hus.fi.

All articles published in JAACAP are embargoed until the day they are published as in-press corrected proofs online at http://jaacap.org/inpress. Articles cannot be publicized as in-press accepted manuscripts. Contents of the publication should not be released to or by the media or government agencies prior to the embargo date.

About JAACAP

Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) is the official publication of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. JAACAP is the leading journal focusing exclusively on today's psychiatric research and treatment of the child and adolescent. Published twelve times per year, each issue is committed to its mission of advancing the science of pediatric mental health and promoting the care of youth and their families. http://www.jaacap.com

The Journal's purpose is to advance research, clinical practice, and theory in child and adolescent psychiatry. It is interested in manuscripts from diverse viewpoints, including genetic, epidemiological, neurobiological, cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic, social, cultural, and economic. Studies of diagnostic reliability and validity, psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacological treatment efficacy, and mental health services effectiveness are encouraged. The Journal also seeks to promote the well-being of children and families by publishing scholarly papers on such subjects as health policy, legislation, advocacy, culture and society, and service provision as they pertain to the mental health of children and families.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions--among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Elsevier Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey--and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 33,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a world-leading provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries. http://www.elsevier.com

Media contact

Mary Billingsley

JAACAP Editorial Office

+1 202 587 9672

mbillingsley@jaacap.org
Research to be published in Science on April 29, 2016 shows how cash-hungry patent trolls are squelching innovation when the American economy depends on it more than ever. What should be done?

The new study, co-authored by Professor Lauren Cohen of Harvard Business School, Professor Umit Gurun of the University of Texas at Dallas, and Dr. Scott Duke Kominers, a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows, examines the sharp rise in patent litigation in the United States during the past decade, with 2015 marking one of the highest patent lawsuit counts on record.

In theory, the rise in patent litigation could reflect growth in the commercialization of technology and innovation, as lawsuits increase proportionately as more and more companies turn to intellectual property (IP) protection to safeguard their competitive advantages. In reality, however, it's a very different story. The authors point out that the majority of recent patent litigation has been driven by "nonpracticing entities" (NPEs) -- firms that generate no products but instead amass patent portfolios just for the sake of enforcing IP rights.

Cohen, Gurun, and Kominers discuss new, large-sample evidence adding to a growing literature that suggests that NPEs--in particular, large patent aggregators--on average act as "patent trolls," suing cash-rich firms, seemingly irrespective of actual patent infringement.

Patent trolling has a negative impact on innovation activity at targeted firms. Cohen, Gurun, and Kominers estimate that after settling with NPEs (or losing to them in court), companies on average reduce their research and development (R&D) investment by more than 25 percent. These results, Cohen, Gurun, and Kominers say, indicate a need to change U.S. intellectual property policy, particularly to screen out trolling early in the litigation process.

Although since 2010 the U.S. Congress has considered more than a dozen bills aiming to reduce patent trolling, most of the proposed policy changes focus on after-the-fact punishments for bringing lawsuits that are declared to be frivolous (or "extraordinary") after court proceedings.

For example, H.R. 9, the "Innovation Act," which is currently on the docket, provides for mandatory fee-shifting for patent lawsuits that the courts determine are not "reasonably justified." In reality, however, the average costs of patent litigation are large ($1 million to $4 million) and the process is drawn out. Even with the prospect of post-trial fee shifting, patent litigation targets may thus find it cost-effective and less disruptive to simply settle with NPEs, even in unfounded lawsuits. According to the authors, this is not a sufficient solution.

So what should be done? Cohen, Gurun, and Kominers say that policies should screen out trolling at or before the time of patent assertion. The authors recommend advance review procedures that would provide preliminary evaluation as to whether the plaintiff's infringement claims are reasonable and whether the asserted patents are of high quality. Such advance review could cripple trolling, they conclude; pre-litigation review can separate good NPEs (and, more generally, good patent lawsuits) from bad. Legitimate infringement claims will be encouraged, whereas trolling will be screened out. This would greatly benefit innovative companies and help them propel the U.S. economy to greater heights.

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Media Contact

Jim Aisner

Director of Media & Public Relations

Harvard Business School

Boston

jaisner@hbs.edu

617-495-6157

Special note to reporters: More information, including a copy of this 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.
Today, April the 28th, 5 hours 1 minute Moscow time, the first launch from the Vostochny Cosmodrome took place. The carrier rocket "Soyuz-2.1a" put scientific satellite of the Moscow State University "Lomonosov", spacecraft "Aist-2D" and nano-satellite SamSat-218.

The "Lomonosov" satellite was introduced on February the 24th. It is an international project which engaged scientists, graduate and undergraduate students from South Korea, Canada, USA, Poland, Germany, Italy and Spain

"Lomonosov" is intended for researching such extreme cosmic phenomena as gamma-ray bursts and cosmic rays of extremely high energy in the Earth's atmosphere, near space and the Universe. Moreover, the satellite will monitor the radiation environment and the dangerous objects in near-Earth space in collaboration with a network of "Master" ground-based telescopes.

The device is planned to be launched to an altitude of 490 kilometers. Its weight is 645 kilograms, and it contains 160 kilograms of scientific equipment. The "Lomonosov" satellite is expected to work for three years in orbit.

'Today is an important day not only for the Lomonosov Moscow State University, but also for the entire country and science in general. The real space program at the Moscow University started with the launch of our own satellites. In 2005 we launched the satellite "Tatiana", in 2009 - "Tatiana-2". They completed their programs successfully. Now we start the real space research station. No university in the world has such cosmic science lab,' says the rector of the Lomonosov Moscow State University Viktor Sadovnichy.

'"Lomonosov" is a modern research space station at the forefront of the fundamental science. This is an international project, which joined the forces of experts from the US, Germany, Canada and other countries, but certainly the decisive contribution, both financial, scientific and intellectual was provided by students, graduate students and young scientists of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. The satellite is designed to study space and astrophysical measurements: it will monitor the asteroid danger, study the interaction of high-energy radiation from outside galaxy.

It is a true victory of our country. You know, 'Before us gapes a well of stars'? These are the words of Mikhail Lomonosov, which precisely suite to this launch.'

All the scientific data collected by the spacecraft "Lomonosov" will be available to the international scientific community concerned with fundamental space physics, astrophysics, Earth's atmosphere and other phenomena.

'From the Earth orbit, using a space experiment, we will first study the particles of the highest energies that exist in the Universe,' tells the director of the Skobeltsyn Research Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University Mikhail Panasyuk. 'We observe an acceleration of cosmic particles called cosmic rays in the Universe. The particles with the greatest energies are difficult to measure from the ground, because they are very few. Now we will do this with the space experiment onboard.

Secondly, the unit will study gamma-ray bursts, which are the result of explosive processes in the Universe. These processes took place a long time ago, right after the Big Bang, that is, in the era of the birth of the Universe. They were accompanied by a large release of energy: generation of gamma radiation, ultraviolet radiation, visible light. Onboard the "Lomonosov" satellite a set of instruments will study gamma-ray bursts in the gamma range with gamma detectors developed at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, as well as in the visible, ultraviolet and X-ray bands with telescopes created at the Sternberg State Astronomical Institute.

The third scientific challenge set within the experiment is the study of the radiation environment of Earth. The phenomena related to radiation can also be attributed to extreme events, as during the disturbances that occur on the Sun, the so-called geomagnetic storms, radiation situation changes dramatically, radiation fluxes increase, which creates a danger to spacecraft and humans in space. "Lomonosov" will help to understand the physics behind those changes.

The fourth task is to test the system, which refers to the space biology. This is an electronic system that can adjust the shortcomings of the human vestibular apparatus, which appear during periods of weightlessness. All four of these areas we will try to implement onboard "Lomonosov" satellite.

Also the onboard telescopes will observe the technogenic objects around the Earth. This is the system for monitoring the asteroid hazard. This system will work together with the ground equipment, the system of "Master", which has already been monitoring the cosmic danger both of the man-made and natural character.'

According to Mikhail Panasyuk, the program under implementation is unique. Many universities around the world participate in the implementation of space programs, from nano-satellites to major experiments. However, "Lomonosov" is an integral scientific project.

The "Aist-2D" satellite, which will also be onboard the carrier rocket, designed for remote sounding of the Earth. Nano SamSat-218 satellite is a part of the "Contact" scientific equipment, whose tasks include testing of the control technologies in small spacecraft.

The construction of the Vostochny cosmodrome in the Amur region began in 2010. Originally it was planned to conduct the first launch in December 2015. However, mid-October last year, President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that the works stay behind schedule and proposed to move the start to the next year.

The total area of the Vostochny is about 700 square kilometers. The cosmodrome is supposed to provide full access for Russia to the space, and reduce dependence of Russian cosmonautics on Baikonur, located in Kazakhstan.

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New Rochelle, NY, April 28, 2016--A new study shows that black raspberry extract can significantly lower a key measure of arterial stiffness-an indicator of cardiovascular disease. Black raspberry intake was also associated with increased levels of circulating endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), which help repair and regenerate damaged arteries, according to the study published in Journal of Medicinal Food, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Medicinal Food website until May 28, 2016.

Han Saem Jeong, Sohyeon Kim, and coauthors from Korea University Anam Hospital (Seoul) and Gochang Black Raspberry Research Institute (Korea), describe the results of a randomized controlled trial in which they compared two groups of patients with metabolic syndrome. One group received 750 mg/day of black raspberry extract, and the other received a placebo for 12 weeks.

In the article "Black Raspberry Extract Increased Circulating Endothelial Progenitor Cells and Improved Arterial Stiffness in Patients with Metabolic Syndrome: A Randomized Controlled Trial," the researchers present the changes recorded in the radial augmentation index (a measure of arterial stiffness), blood pressure, circulating EPCs, and various markers of inflammation for the two groups of patients.

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About the Journal

Journal of Medicinal Food is an authoritative, peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal published monthly online with open access options and in print. Led by Editors-in-Chief Sampath Parthasarathy, MBA, PhD, Florida Hospital Chair in Cardiovascular Sciences and Interim Associate Dean, College of Medicine, University of Central Florida, and Yangha Kim, PhD, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea, the Journal publishes original scientific research on the bioactive substances of functional and medicinal foods, nutraceuticals, herbal substances, and other natural products. The Journal explores the chemistry and biochemistry of these substances, as well as the methods for their extraction and analysis, the use of biomarkers and other methods to assay their biological roles, and the development of bioactive substances for commercial use. Tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Journal of Medicinal Food website.

About the Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine and Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research. Its biotechnology trade magazine, GEN (Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 80 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website.
WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- Can a cell sense its own shape? Working in the Marine Biological Laboratory's Whitman Center, scientists from Dartmouth College developed an ingenious experiment to ask this question. Their conclusion - Yes - is detailed in a recent paper in the Journal of Cell Biology.

"Cells adopt diverse shapes that are related to how they function. We wondered if cells have the ability to perceive their own shapes, specifically, the curvature of the [cell] membrane," says Drew Bridges, a Ph.D. candidate in the laboratory of Amy Gladfelter, associate professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth College and a scientist in the MBL's Whitman Center.

The team focused on the septins, proteins that are usually found near micron-scaled curves in the cell membrane, such as the furrow that marks where the cell will pinch together and divide. Using live-cell imaging at the MBL, they noticed that septins in a novel model system, the fungus Ashbya gossypii, tended to congregate on fungus branches where curvature was highest.

They then decided to recreate this natural phenomenon in the lab, using artificial materials they could measure more easily than living cells. Using precisely scaled glass beads coated with lipid membranes, they discovered that septin proteins preferred curves in the 1-3 micron range. They got the same result using human or fungal septins, suggesting that this phenomenon is evolutionarily conserved.

"This ability of septins to sense micron-scaled cell curvature provides cells with a previously unknown mechanism for organizing themselves," Bridges says.

The idea for the glass bead experiment came from "many rich intellectual discussions with other members of the MBL community," says Bridges, who has accompanied Gladfelter to the MBL each summer since 2012. "Both our collaborations and the imaging resources at MBL were central to this work."

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Citation:

Bridges, A. A., Jentzsch, M.S., Oakes, P.W., Occhipinti, P., and Gladfelter, A.S. (2016) Micron-scale plasma membrane curvature is recognized by the septin cytoskeleton. J Cell Biol 213:23-32, doi:10.1083/jcb.201512029.

The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is dedicated to scientific discovery - exploring fundamental biology, understanding marine biodiversity and the environment, and informing the human condition through research and education. Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1888, the MBL is a private, nonprofit institution and an affiliate of the University of Chicago.
The first IHM in a patient with Fontan anatomy and physiology enables real-time monitoring of central venous and pulmonary artery pressures

While the Fontan procedure has improved the short- and mid-term outcomes for patients born with single ventricle anatomy, long-term complications of Fontan circulation include heart failure. These complications are thought to be secondary to elevated central venous pressure, chronic venous congestion and low cardiac output.

In the recent case series published in the journal Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions, clinicians from The Heart Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center describe the first implantable hemodynamic monitor (IHM) placement in single ventricle Fontan anatomy. To date, Nationwide Children's is the first pediatric hospital to perform the procedure, while Ohio State's Wexner Medical Center is the first hospital to perform the procedure in a Fontan patient.

"This pressure gradient between central venous pressure and a combination of ventricular end diastolic pressure and resistance of flow across the pulmonary vascular bed is critical to cardiac output," explains Darren Berman, MD, co-director of Cardiac Catheterization and Interventional Therapy in The Heart Center at Nationwide Children's. "Recently, implantable hemodynamic monitors have been used to monitor pressures in patients with left heart disease."

Noninvasive studies are unable to determine these pressures in the Fontan anatomy, thus limiting physicians' understanding of the changes in pressure for a Fontan patient in heart failure, according to Curt Daniels, MD, director of Adolescent and Adult Congenital Heart Disease in The Heart Center at Nationwide Children's and professor of Clinical Cardiology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.

"Our ultimate goal is to improve care for patients with congenital heart disease," says Dr. Daniels. "We are excited to be leading the charge to incorporate the use of this tool to learn more about the hemodynamic changes in real life ambulatory situations in Fontan patients."

Two patients with single ventricle anatomy and Fontan physiology, both with New York Heart Association (NYHA) functional class III heart failure, were implanted with the CardioMEMS HF System by Drs. Berman and Daniels. Real-time pulmonary artery catheter tracings were shown to correlate with IHM tracings in Fontan anatomy. Additionally, home transmission of IHM readings was successful.

"We have shown early safety and feasibility of placement of the IHM in these two cases, and we will follow these patients to monitor the safety in the medium- and long-term, including assessment for pulmonary arterial thrombus," says Dr. Berman, who is also an assistant professor at OSUCM.

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Dr. Berman, Dr. Daniels and coauthor Elisa Bradley, MD, cardiologist at Nationwide Children's and assistant professor at OSUCM, hope that, as it does in patients with non-congenital heart disease, monitoring hemodynamic information from the transmissions will translate to improved fluid balance and heart failure symptoms, including reduced hospital admissions.

Reference: Bradley EA, Berman D, Daniels CJ. First implantable hemodynamic monitoring device placement in single ventricle fontan anatomy. Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions. 2016 Mar 25. [Epub ahead of print]
LA JOLLA--Salk Institute scientists showed how an FDA-approved drug boosts the health of brain cells by limiting their energy use. Like removing unnecessary lighting from a financially strapped household to save on electricity bills, the drug--called rapamycin--prolongs the survival of diseased neurons by forcing them to reduce protein production to conserve cellular energy.

Rapamycin has been shown to extend lifespan and reduce symptoms in a broad range of diseases and, at the cellular level, is known to slow down the rate at which proteins are made. But the new Salk research, published in the journal eLife, suggests that rapamycin could also target the neural damage associated with Leigh syndrome, a rare genetic disease, and potentially other forms of neurodegeneration as well.

"Our study shows that protein production in neurons is one of the major utilizers of energy and that neurons of Leigh syndrome degenerate because they can't sustain a high enough level of energy," says Tony Hunter, the Renato Dulbecco Chair and American Cancer Society Professor in Salk's Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory, who led the research.

Previous studies on rapamycin, which blocks a key energy sensor in cells, found that it can alter the immune system, extend lifespan and treat disorders, including lupus and Alzheimer's disease. Researchers assumed that the drug prevented the neurodegeneration seen in Alzheimer's by encouraging cells to degrade damaged components and aggregated proteins. But recent data hinted that the drug might also have an effect on the mitochondria, organelles that act as cells' powerhouses, producing energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

Xinde Zheng, a research associate in the Hunter lab, was already studying the properties of cells affected by Leigh syndrome, whose inherited neurodegeneration is caused by a mutation in mitochondrial DNA that reduces ATP production. Zheng wondered how rapamycin would affect the neurons plagued by the diseased mitochondria. He and Hunter teamed up with the lab of Rusty Gage, a professor in Salk's Laboratory of Genetics and holder of the Vi and John Adler Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Disease. Zheng, together with Leah Boyer, then a researcher in Gage's lab and now director of Salk's Stem Cell Core, generated diseased neurons by taking skin cells from patients with Leigh syndrome, reprogramming them into stem cells in culture and then coaxing them to develop into brain cells in a dish.

Though cells must make proteins to survive, protein production is a highly energy-consuming process and, for diseased cells, the process leaves too few energy reserves to deal with cellular stress or other demands.

"Reducing protein production in aging neurons allows more energy for the cell to put toward folding proteins correctly and handling stress," says Zheng, the first author of the new paper. "The impact of our finding is that modulation of protein synthesis could be a general approach to treating neurodegeneration."

In their study, the team found that Leigh Syndrome neurons decayed in the dish and showed clear signs of energy depletion. Meanwhile, Leigh syndrome neurons exposed to rapamycin had more ATP and showed less degeneration. By turning down the dial on protein production, the diseased and damaged neurons were able to survive longer.

"We are surprised and delighted that rapamycin's effect to reduce protein synthesis as an energy-austerity approach may lead to a potential treatment for mitochondria-related neurodegenerative diseases," says Gage.

This is a good example of the value of studying a disease in a dish, according to Hunter. "It's led to a lot of new insights into the underlying biology of this rare and understudied condition," he adds.

More work is needed to determine whether the findings on rapamycin hold true in animal models of Leigh syndrome and other neurodegenerative diseases, and to ascertain how exactly rapamycin is altering the metabolism of the cells.

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Other researchers on the study were Mingji Jin, Youngsung Kim, Weiwei Fan, Cedric Bardy, Travis Berggren and Ronald M. Evans, all of the Salk Institute.

The work and the researchers involved were supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Fellowship, a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine Postdoctoral Training Award, and the Helmsley Center for Genomic Medicine.

About the Salk Institute for Biological Studies:

Every cure has a starting point. The Salk Institute embodies Jonas Salk's mission to dare to make dreams into reality. Its internationally renowned and award-winning scientists explore the very foundations of life, seeking new understandings in neuroscience, genetics, immunology and more. The Institute is an independent nonprofit organization and architectural landmark: small by choice, intimate by nature and fearless in the face of any challenge. Be it cancer or Alzheimer's, aging or diabetes, Salk is where cures begin. Learn more at: salk.edu.
LA JOLLA--(April 28, 2016) A microscope about the size of a penny is giving scientists a new window into the everyday activity of cells within the spinal cord. The innovative technology revealed that astrocytes--cells in the nervous system that do not conduct electrical signals and were traditionally viewed as merely supportive--unexpectedly react to intense sensation.

The new miniaturized microscope and related imaging methods, described by Salk Institute scientists on April 28, 2016 in Nature Communications, offer unprecedented insight into nervous system function and could lead to novel pain treatments for spinal cord injuries, chronic itch and neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The spinal cord is crucial for sensing and responding to the world. Sometimes it even works independently from the brain, such as when your hand recoils from a hot stove before the sensation has fully registered. But it is unknown exactly how the cells within the spinal cord encode these and other feelings from the skin or internal organs.

In the new study, senior author Axel Nimmerjahn, an assistant professor in Salk's Waitt Advanced Biophotonics Center, and his team improved upon the miniaturized microscopes they first described back in 2008. The researchers' new version--which features numerous hardware and software improvements--enabled them to visualize changes in cellular activity in awake, roaming mice.

"For a long time, researchers have dreamed of being able to record cellular activity patterns in the spinal cord of an awake animal. On top of that, we can now do this in a freely behaving animal, which is very exciting," says first author Kohei Sekiguchi, a Salk researcher and PhD student at the University of California, San Diego.

Most of the Salk team's previous work focused on deploying microscopes to observe the brains of living animals. The spinal cord, by contrast, presented a bigger challenge for several reasons. For example, unlike the brain, multiple, independently moving vertebrae surround the spinal cord. The spinal cord is also closer to pulsating organs (heart and lungs), which can hinder stable views of the cells within. However, by developing new microscopy and procedural and computational approaches, the team was able to overcome these challenges and capture the action of living cells in real time and during vigorous movements.

In the new work, the group found that distinct stimuli--such as light touch or pressure--activate different subsets of spinal sensory neurons. They also found that certain features, like the intensity or duration of a given stimulus, are reflected in the activity of the neurons.

To the team's surprise, astrocytes, traditionally thought to be passive support cells, also respond to stimuli (albeit differently than the neurons). Though the astrocytes cannot send electrical signals like neurons can, they generated their own chemical signals in a coordinated way during intense stimuli.

Nimmerjahn is excited about this result because his group has a longstanding interest in understanding astrocytes and their roles in nervous system function and disease. These cells are increasingly appreciated as important players in how the nervous system develops and operates and could serve as promising new drug targets, he says.

"Not only can we now study normal sensory processing, but we can also look at disease contexts like spinal cord injury and how treatments actually affect the cells," says Nimmerjahn.

The team is now working to simultaneously record touch or pain-related activity in the brain and spinal cord using additional iterations of the miniaturized microscopes, which allow them to monitor and manipulate multiple cell types at even higher resolutions.

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Other researchers on the paper include the Salk Institute's Pavel Shekhtmeyster, Katharina Merten, Alexander Arena, Daniela Cook, Elizabeth Hoffman and Alexander Ngo.

The work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Rita Allen Foundation, Whitehall Foundation and Brain Research Foundation; funds from the Waitt Foundation, Hearst Foundations and the Richard Allan Barry Family Charitable Foundation; and research fellowships from the Nakajima Foundation, Mary K. Chapman Foundation, Jesse and Caryl Philips Foundation, the Rose Hills Foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Catharina Foundation.

About the Salk Institute for Biological Studies:

Every cure has a starting point. The Salk Institute embodies Jonas Salk's mission to dare to make dreams into reality. Its internationally renowned and award-winning scientists explore the very foundations of life, seeking new understandings in neuroscience, genetics, immunology and more. The Institute is an independent nonprofit organization and architectural landmark: small by choice, intimate by nature and fearless in the face of any challenge. Be it cancer or Alzheimer's, aging or diabetes, Salk is where cures begin. Learn more at: salk.edu.
DALLAS (SMU) - Researchers from SMU's Lyle School of Engineering will lead a multi-university team funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build a theoretical framework for creating a computer-generated image of an object hidden from sight around a corner or behind a wall.

The core of the proposal is to develop a computer algorithm to unscramble the light that bounces off irregular surfaces to create a holographic image of hidden objects.

"This will allow us to build a 3-D representation - a hologram - of something that is out of view," said Marc Christensen, dean of the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering at SMU and principal investigator for the project.

"Your eyes can't do that," Christensen said. "It doesn't mean we can't do that."

The DARPA award is for a four-year project with anticipated total funding of $4.87 million. SMU Lyle has been awarded $2.2 million for the first two years of what DARPA calls the "REVEAL" project, with the expectation that phase II funding of another $2.67 million will awarded by 2018. SMU is the lead university for the research and is collaborating with engineers from Rice, Northwestern, and Harvard.

Co-investigators for the SMU team are Duncan MacFarlane, Bobby B. Lyle Centennial Chair in Engineering Entrepreneurship and professor of electrical engineering; and Prasanna Rangarajan, a research assistant professor who directs the Lyle School's Photonics Architecture Lab.

DARPA's mission, which dates back to reaction against the Soviet Union's launch of SPUTNIK in 1957, is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.

In seeking proposals for its "REVEAL" program, DARPA officials noted that conventional optical imaging systems today largely limit themselves to the measurement of light intensity, providing two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional scenes and ignoring significant amounts of additional information that may be carried by captured light. SMU's Christensen, an expert in photonics, explains the challenge like this:

"Light bounces off the smooth surface of a mirror at the same angle at which it hits the mirror, which is what allows the human eye to "see" a recognizable image of the event - a reflection," Christensen said. "But light bouncing off the irregular surface of a wall or other non-reflective surface is scattered, which the human eye cannot image into anything intelligible.

"So the question becomes whether a computer can manipulate and process the light reflecting off a wall - unscrambling it to form a recognizable image - like light reflecting off a mirror," Christensen explained. "Can a computer interpret the light bouncing around in ways that our eyes cannot?"

In an effort to tackle the problem, the proposed research effort will extend the light transport models currently employed in the computer graphics and vision communities based on radiance propagation to simultaneously accommodate the finite speed of light and the wave nature of light. For example, light travels at different speeds through different media (air, water, glass, etc.) and light waves within the visible spectrum scatter at different rates depending on color.

The Goal for the DARPA program is to develop a fundamental science for indirect imaging in scattering environments. This will lead to systems which can "see" around corners and behind obstructions at distances ranging from meters to kilometers.

People have been using imaging systems to gain knowledge of distant or microscopic objects for centuries, Christensen notes. But the last decade has witnessed a number of advancements that prepare engineers for the revolution that DARPA is seeking.

"For example, the speed and sophistication of signal processing (the process of converting analog transmissions into digital signals) has reached the point where we can accomplish really intensive computational tasks on handheld devices," Christensen said. "What that means is that whatever solutions we design should be easily transportable into the battlefield."

The SMU-led project is working under the acronym OMNISCIENT - "Obtaining Multipath & Non-line-of-sight Information by Sensing Coherence & Intensity with Emerging Novel Techniques." The team unites leading researchers in the fields of computational imaging, computer vision, signal processing, information theory and computer graphics. Guiding the Rice University component of the research are Ashok Veeraraghavan, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Richard Baraniuk, Victor E, Cameron Professor; leading the Northwestern component is Oliver Cossairt, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and head of the university's Computational Photography Lab; and the Harvard research is led by Todd Zickler, professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Wolfgang Heindcrich, director of the Visual Computing Center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, will be a consultant to the SMU Team.

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SMU's Bobby Lyle School of Engineering, founded in 1925, is one of the oldest engineering schools in the Southwest. The school offers eight undergraduate and 28 graduate programs, including masters and doctoral degrees.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls approximately 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools
Senator David Perdue, a member of the Senate Budget and Foreign Relations Committees, on Thursday highlighted the impact the federal debt crisis is having on the countrys ability to support the military and protect the nation.

Here are highlights:

Responsibly Funding The Federal Government: The primary role of Congress is to responsibly fund the federal government. To do that, we must set clear national priorities that we can financially support. All too often, the process of setting  and then sticking to these national priorities  has become a purely political exercise, not a function of governingComing from the business world, I clearly see two interlocking crises we face as a country. First we have a global security crisisInterlocked with what is our national debt crisis, which threatens our ability to defending our country today.

Fiscal Crisis Jeopardizing Our Military: Under President Carter, Clinton, and Obama weve seen three different periods of disinvestment in our military. Our 30-year average of defense spending has been 4.2 percent of GDPWere about to have the smallest Army since WWII, the smallest Navy since WWI, and the smallest and oldest Air Force ever. How can this be? The world is more dangerous right now than at any point in my lifetimeOur women and men in uniform need to have the tools and resources to complete their missions around the world. This fiscal crisis is jeopardizing our ability to actually fund the missions being asked of our military today.

JSTARS Capability Gap: JSTARS is a fleet of planes, 16 in numberToday, they fly missions providing critical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), ground targeting, and battlefield command and control capabilities to all branches of our military in multiple regions of the world. The problem is they have outlived their useful lifeBut because of our intransigence in Washington, the funding is not there to replace them so were now facing potentially eight years where we will not be able to fulfill their mission.

National Debt Driving Disinvestment: So, whats causing this great disinvestment in our military? Well, theres only one answer. The national debtWe no longer have the luxury of debating both issues separately. In the past seven years, Washington has spent $25 trillion running the federal government. Thats bad enough but the problem is we borrowed $9 trillion of that $25 trillion.

Defense And Fiscal Hawks Coming Together: You know, it used to be that fiscal hawks and defense hawks were at odds with each other in Washingtonand Ive said thisbut today I see more people, who are one or the other, beginning to come together and recognize the other problem. Theyre interrelated in a way theyve never been.

Solving The Underlying Problem: In the private sector, you fix a business by first drilling down and finding the underlying problem. The way that Washington funds the federal government the time it takes to complete the federal budget, the fact that the current process allows Members of Congress to put off making tough decisionsis the real problem. In business, this would never be allowed. In your personal homes, this cannot be tolerated, but somehow, were able to do it here year after year. This process has only worked four times in the past 42 years.

We Need To Act Now: Every member of this body knows that we need to act now. My question is, well, why arent we acting? The challenge is to stop talking about it theoretically and start putting the solutions into practiceLets not lose sight of Congress number one responsibility. We are charged in the Constitution  under Article I  to responsibly fund the federal government, and to ensure that the six reasons why 13 colonies came together in the first place can actually be realized.

View the full transcript here.
The tiny crystals probably formed in huge impact craters not long after Earth formed, some 4 billion years ago

DUBLIN, IRELAND, Thursday April 28th, 2016 - New research suggests that the very oldest pieces of rock on Earth -- zircon crystals -- are likely to have formed in the craters left by violent asteroid impacts that peppered our nascent planet, rather than via plate tectonics as was previously believed.

Rocks that formed over the course of Earth's history allow geologists to infer things such as when water first appeared on the planet, how our climate has varied, and even where life came from. However, we can only go back in time so far, as the only material we have from the very early Earth comes in the form of tiny, naturally occurring zircon crystals.

Naturally then, the origin of these crystals, which are approximately the width of a human hair and more than four billion years old (the Earth being just over four and a half billion years old), has become a matter of major debate. Fifteen years ago these crystals first made headlines when they revealed the presence of water on the surface of the Earth (thought to be a key ingredient for the origin of life) when they were forming.

Ten years ago, a team of researchers in the US1 argued that the ancient zircon crystals probably formed when tectonic plates moving around on the Earth's surface collided with each other in a similar fashion to the disruption taking place in the Andes Mountains today, where the ocean floor under the Pacific Ocean is plunging under South America.

However, current evidence suggests that plate tectonics -- as we know it today -- was not occurring on the early Earth. So, the question remained: Where did the crystals come from?

Recently, geologists suggested these grains may have formed in huge impact craters produced as chunks of rock from space, up to several kilometres in diameter, slammed into a young Earth. To test this idea, researchers from Trinity College Dublin decided to study a much younger impact crater to see if zircon crystals similar to the very old ones could possibly have formed in these violent settings.

In the summer of 2014, with the support of the Irish Reseach Council (IRC) and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the team collected thousands of zircons from the Sudbury impact crater, Ontario, Canada - the best preserved large impact crater on Earth and the planet's second oldest confirmed crater at almost two billion years old.

After analysing these crystals at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, they discovered that the crystal compositions were indistinguishable from the ancient set.

PhD Researcher in Trinity's School of Natural Sciences, Gavin Kenny, is first author of the article which explains these findings, and which has just been published in leading international journal, Geology.

He said: "What we found was quite surprising. Many people thought the very ancient zircon crystals couldn't have formed in impact craters, but we now know they could have. There's a lot we still don't fully understand about these little guys but it looks like we may now be able to form a more coherent story of Earth's early years -- one which fits with the idea that our planet suffered far more frequent bombardment from asteroids early on than it has in relatively recent times."

Gavin Kenny recently travelled to the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Houston, Texas, to present these findings to the space science community.

He added: "There was a lot of enthusiasm for our findings. Just two years ago a group2 had studied the likely timing of impacts on the early Earth and they suggested that these impacts might explain the ages of the ancient zircons. They were understandably very happy to see that the chemistry of the zircons from the Canadian impact crater matched the oldest crystals known to man."

A copy of the journal article is available on request.

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Additional Notes

A copy of the published paper is available on request.

The citation is: Kenny GG, Whitehouse MJ, Kamber BS. Differentiated impact melt sheets may be a potential source of Hadean detrital zircon. Geology. 2016; DOI: 10.1130/G37898.1

Papers referenced to in text (for context purposes):

1: Watson EB, Harrison TM. Zircon thermometer reveals minimum melting conditions on earliest Earth. Science. 2005; 308:841-844. DOI: 10.1126/science.1110873

2: Marchi S, Bottke WF, Elkins-Tanton LT, Bierhaus M, Wuennemann K, Mordibelli A, Kring DA. Widespread mixing and burial of Earth's Hadean crust by asteroid impacts. Nature. 2014; 511:578-582. DOI: 10.1038/nature13539

ABOUT TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

Trinity College Dublin, founded in 1592, is Ireland's oldest university and today has a vibrant community of 17,000 students. It is recognised internationally as Ireland's premier university. Cutting-edge research, technology and innovation place the university at the forefront of higher education in Ireland, and across the globe. It encompasses all major academic disciplines, and is committed to world-class teaching and research across a range of disciplines in the arts, humanities, engineering, science, social and health sciences.

Trinity College Dublin is Ireland's leading university across all international rankings, and is ranked 78th place worldwide in the recent QS World University Rankings 2015.
All light sources work by absorbing energy - for example, from an electric current - and emit energy as light. But the energy can also be lost as heat and it is therefore important that the light sources emit the light as quickly as possible, before the energy is lost as heat. Superfast light sources can be used, for example, in laser lights, LED lights and in single-photon light sources for quantum technology. New research results from the Niels Bohr Institute show that light sources can be made much faster by using a principle that was predicted theoretically in 1954. The results are published in the scientific journal, Physical Review Letters.

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute are working with quantum dots, which are a kind of artificial atom that can be incorporated into optical chips. In a quantum dot, an electron can be excited (i.e. jump up), for example, by shining a light on it with a laser and the electron leaves a 'hole'. The stronger the interaction between light and matter, the faster the electron decays back into the hole and the faster the light is emitted.

But the interaction between light and matter is naturally very weak and it makes the light sources very slow to emit light and this can reduce energy efficiency. Already in 1954, the physicist Robert Dicke predicted that the interaction between light and matter could be increased by having a number of atoms that 'share' the excited state in a quantum superposition

Quantum speed up

Demonstrating this effect has been challenging so far because the atoms either come so close together that they bump into each other or they are so far apart that the quantum speed up does not work. Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have now finally demonstrated the effect experimentally, but in an entirely different physical system than Dicke had in mind. They have shown this so-called superradiance for photons emitted from a single quantum dot.

"We have developed a quantum dot so that it behaves as if it was comprised of five quantum dots, which means that the light is five times stronger. This is due to the attraction between the electron and the hole. But what is special is that the quantum dot still only emits a single photon at a time. It is an outstanding single-photon source," says Sren Stobbe, who is an associate professor in the Quantum Photonic research group at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen and led the project. The experiment was carried out in collaboration with Professor David Ritchie's research group at the University of Cambridge, who have made the quantum dots.

Petru Tighineanu, a postdoc in the Quantum Photonics research group at the Niels Bohr Institute, has carried out the experiments and he explains the effect as such, that the atoms are very small and light is very 'big' because of its long wavelength, so the light almost cannot 'see' the atoms - like a lorry that is driving on a road and does not notice a small pebble. But if many pebbles become a larger stone, the lorry will be able to register it and then the interaction becomes much more dramatic. In the same way, light interacts much more strongly with the quantum dot if the quantum dot contains the special superradiant quantum state, which makes it look much bigger.

Increasing the light-matter interaction

"The increased light-matter interaction makes the quantum dots more robust in regards to the disturbances that are found in all materials, for example, acoustic oscillations. It helps to make the photons more uniform and is important for how large you can build future quantum computers," says Sren Stobbe.

He adds that it is actually the temperature, which is only a few degrees above absolute zero, that limits how fast the light emissions can remain in their current experiments. In the long term, they will study the quantum dots at even lower temperatures, where the effects could be very dramatic.

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Article in Physical Review Letters: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.163604

Contact:

Sren Stobbe, Associate Professor in the Quantum Photonic Group, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, +45 6065-6769, stobbe@nbi.ku.dk,

Petru Tighineanu, Postdoc in the Quantum Photonic Group, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, petrut@nbi.ku.dk.
The ability of children to speak any two dialects - two closely related varieties of the same language -- may confer the same cognitive advantages as those reported for multilingual children who speak two or more substantially different languages (such as English and French).

The new findings on bi-dialectalism are published in the journal Cognition, following a study undertaken by researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Cyprus, and the Cyprus University of Technology.

Although a topic of continuing academic and public scrutiny, a lot of research to date reports a positive cognitive net effect for multilingual children compared to children who speak only one language.

The effect is usually manifest in attention, cognitive flexibility and the ability to inhibit irrelevant information, with some researchers arguing that the advantages of bilingualism are evident throughout the human lifespan. Until now, however, there has been very little research on children speaking two dialects which may only be separated by subtle linguistic differences.

Bi-dialectalism, the systematic use of two different dialects of the same language, is widespread in many parts of the world. In the USA millions of children grow up speaking African American English at home as well as Mainstream American English at school.

Similar situations arise in many parts of Europe, such as the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, where school-children may only feel comfortable to talk about school subjects in High German, but switch to Swiss-German for everyday conversation.

British English, Gaelic and Welsh have well-established dialects as well as newly emerging ones such as Multicultural London English, which has a rising number of speakers, especially among young, urban people.

To date, bi-dialectalism can be found in Lowland Scotland (in speakers of Scots and Standard Scottish English), in parts of Northern Ireland and elsewhere. However, the criteria for classifying two varieties as dialects rather than independent languages are not strictly objective and it could be debated whether these are cases of bilingualism instead.

Dr Kyriakos Antoniou and Dr Napoleon Katsos from the University of Cambridge studied the cognitive performance of children who grew up speaking both Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek -- two varieties of Greek which are closely related but differ from each other on all levels of language analysis (vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar).

The study showed that multilingual and bi-dialectal children exhibited an advantage over monolingual children that was evident in composite cognitive processes including memory, attention and cognitive flexibility; suggesting that advantages previously reported for multilingual children could be shared by children speaking any two or more dialects.

Dr Kyriakos Antoniou, from Cambridge's Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: "What is exciting and encouraging about our findings is that we were able to replicate the advantages of bilingualism in children who speak two varieties of the same language. They need not be as diverse as English and Mandarin Chinese.

"The distance between languages and dialects does not make much of a difference according to our tests and findings. Systematically switching between any two forms of language, even quite similar ones, seems to provide the mind with the extra stimulation that leads to higher cognitive performance.

"Our findings could be significant for parents and children in the UK and countries across Europe and beyond where children speak a variety of different dialects. Germany, Italy and Spain all have significant numbers of dialectal speakers, as do parts of the US and China. With the rise and increased recognition of dialects in the UK, bi-dialectalism might become even more relevant in the UK in the near future.

"What our research suggests, contrary to some widely held beliefs, is that we don't have to treat multilingual or bi-dialectal children as problematic. When it comes to language, plurality is an advantage."

The study consisted of 64 bi-dialectal children, 47 multilingual children and 25 monolingual children. Comparisons between the three groups were performed in two stages and the socio-economic status, language proficiency, and general intelligence of all children taking part was factored into the research methodology.

Dr Napoleon Katsos, one of the study authors, said: "Previous research has documented positive associations between childhood bilingualism and cognitive abilities.

"The novel and most important contribution of this study is that it showed similar positive effects extend to children speaking two closely related dialects of the same language. In qualitative terms, the effects of bi-dialectalism and multilingualism were, in general, quite similar. However, more research is needed on this topic.

"Dialects are very much under-recognised and undervalued. This kind of research can make people appreciate there is an advantage to bi-dialectalism and this may be important when we think about our identity, about how we educate children and the importance of language learning."

Dr Antoniou and Dr Katsos are now retesting and extending their hypotheses on a larger scale in Belgium, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Brussels. Belgium offers an ideal testing ground, with dialects of Dutch such as West-Flemish, being spoken alongside more standard versions of Dutch and French.

The new study includes larger samples and new measures, to better understand the effects of bi-dialectalism on cognitive and linguistic development and their relation to bilingualism.

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Reference:

K.Antoniou et. al. 'The effect of childhood bilectalism and multilingualism on executive control' Cognition 149 (2016)

DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.12.002
The belief that online user ratings are good indicators of product quality is largely an illusion, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study.

Yet almost all retailers provide user ratings on their websites and many consumers rely on the information when making purchase decisions, according to the paper, published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research.

For the study, researchers examined user ratings for 1,272 products across 120 product categories, such as car seats, bike helmets, sunblock, air filters, smoke alarms and blood pressure monitors. Their analyses show a very low correspondence between average user ratings of products on Amazon.com and product ratings, based on objective tests, found in consumer reports.

"The likelihood that an item with a higher user rating performs objectively better than an item with a lower user rating is only 57 percent," said Bart de Langhe, author of the study and professor of marketing at CU-Boulder's Leeds School of Business. "A correspondence of 50 percent would be random, so user ratings provide very little insight about objective product performance."

In addition, user ratings do not predict the resale value of used products, found the study.

"Products with better reliability and performance retain more of their value over time," said de Langhe. "If average user ratings reflect objective quality, they should correlate positively with resale values. The fact that they don't casts more doubt on the validity of user ratings."

Philip Fernbach and Donald Lichtestein, professors of marketing at the Leeds School, co-authored the study, which also examined what information consumers rely on when judging the quality of products on Amazon.com. Consumers rely very heavily on the average user rating, which is presented front and center, according to the paper. They do this regardless of whether the average rating is based on a small or a large sample of consumers.

"This is a mistake," said de Langhe. "Oftentimes, there are just not enough ratings for a product or there is too much disagreement among reviewers. In this case, consumers should not trust the average very much, but they do nonetheless."

In light of their findings, the authors recommend consumers be more cautious when they make inferences about product quality based on user ratings.

"Accurately evaluating product performance is not an easy task," said de Langhe. "Different alternatives need to be evaluated side by side under the same conditions using objective measurement instruments. You can't assume that people follow such a scientific approach before they rate products online."

What are the implications for marketing and branding in the age of user-generated content? Because consumers comparing two products with the same objective qualities tend to give higher ratings to the one that is more expensive or from a brand with a premium reputation, marketing still counts.

"Brand managers should not fear for their jobs just yet," said de Langhe. "User ratings do not shield consumers from the influence of good old-fashioned advertising and price-signaling."

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The Taiwanese government should provide subsidies for the solar panel industry to help it survive in that country, University of Exeter researchers have recommended.

Solar photovoltaic production in Taiwan is not competitive, a new study has found, and more support should be given to producers through publically-funded research and development.

Politicians should give support so companies can develop advanced technology and use new advances and production methods from abroad, experts recommend, and the Taiwanese government should help to encourage academics to share their expertise with people working in the solar panel industry.

Solar panel producers in Taiwan should do more to differentiate themselves from their competitors in other nations

The global solar photovoltaic industry is heavily affected by government policy. Green technology is becoming increasing popular as many governments invest in policies to encourage a new energy industry because of the shortage of natural resources.

The cost of electricity generated by solar panels is still higher than nuclear power, coal and gas and governments provide financial incentives to encourage take-up. Solar panels are now becoming increasingly popular in Asian countries, particularly China and Japan. They are also becoming installed in more households in the USA.

The study by Dr Jeff Jia from the University of Exeter Business School, and Hui Sun and Lenny Koh, from the University of Sheffield School of Management, is thought to be the first detailed comparison of policy, industry and the supply chain in Taiwan, China, Japan, Germany and the USA.

Academics found the only strength of producers in Taiwan is in solar cell production, and they could gradually lose its competitive advantage even in this.

In 2000, the global PV market value was worth USD 2.5 billion but has boomed over the past 15 years as a result of strong global demand. In 2011, the market value had risen to USD 91.6 billion. By 2012 the economic recession caused a 13 per cent drop in market value to USD 79.7 billion in 2012, but it had recovered by 15 per cent up to USD 91.3 billion in 2013.

By 2015 56 per cent of the global market share of the solar market share industry was in Asia. The five countries with the highest demand were China, Japan, USA, Germany and United Kingdom, which accounted for 75 per cent of market shares.

Dr Jia said: "The solar industry has become a battlefield for the global trade war as every government creates tariffs or some kind of trade barriers to protect its own interests. On one hand, China indeed destroyed the market mechanism by selling PV products at a price below the normal level, thus forcing many producers in USA, EU and Japan to leave the market.

"On the other hand, low-cost equipment has enhanced the amount of world's installation and increased the electricity generated by solar power. China and the USA should enhance the growth together rather than obstruct development."

Global Solar Photovoltaic Industry: An overview and national competitiveness of Taiwan is published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

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An international conference in the highly contested region of Northeast India has heard from a University of Kent expert on sovereignty in stateless nations what can be learned from Gaza.

In his capacity as scientific advisor for the 'Sovereignty in stateless nations' project, Glenn Bowman, Professor of Socio-historical Anthropology and Director of the University's new BA in Liberal Arts, presented papers entitled 'Conceptions of Democracy in a One-State Solution' and 'Israel and Palestine: The One State Solution'.

His papers form part of his work for the project, which is funded by the Research Council of Norway and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), with both drawing on his chapter in the new book Gaza as Metaphor. In the book, Professor Bowman explains that the radical closure of Gaza serves as an extreme example of a process of isolation and immiseration of national enemies that is deeply rooted in Israeli ideology and practices of state formation.

Professor Bowman, has engaged in extensive fieldwork in Jerusalem and the West Bank, has carried out research in Yugoslavia at the outbreak of the war and has subsequently and, more recently, worked in divided Cyprus. In February he joined a group of scientists and scholars for conferences in Guwahati and Manipur, areas that have become synonymous with ethnic politics and its manifestations.

Professor Bowman made specific reference to the British emergency laws imposed on both India and Palestine during the colonial periods and which were adopted after the British withdrawal by both new states. Palestinians within the 1948 borders were under a state of emergency between 1949 and 1965; this was subsequently imposed on those within the territories conquered in 1967 where it remains in effect now. The emergency rules imposed on Northeast India in 1948 remain in effect until today.

Although anthropological comparison does not seek out exact correlations, it seeks to understand from developments in one context the possible range of developments in others. Even though the situation in Assam and particularly Manipur is nowhere near as draconian as that imposed by the Israelis on Gaza, Professor Bowman said that the continued occupation by the Indian army (very evident during the February conference), the enduring regional rebellions in both Manipur and Assam against the Indian state, and India's perpetuation of the State of Emergency over both regions raises the alarm about the future of these 'stateless nations' in a period of escalating nationalist and sectarian sentiment.

The conference was organised by the Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development (OKDISCD) in collaboration with PRIO. The group engaged with local scholars and activists on sovereignty and governance issues and Professor Bowman also carried out field research on 'shared' shrines (Hindu-Islamic-Buddhist as well as animist) in both Manipur and Assam.

Professor Bowman is a member and former Head of Kent's School of Anthropology and Conservation.

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For further information or interview requests contact Sandy Fleming at the University of Kent Press Office.

Tel: 01227 823581/01634 888879

Email: S.Fleming@kent.ac.uk

News releases can also be found at http://www.kent.ac.uk/news

University of Kent on Twitter: http://twitter.com/UniKent

Notes to editors

1. The paper: Bowman, Glenn 2015 "Encystation: Containment and Control in Israeli Ideology and Practice". Journal of Palestine Studies XLIV: 3, 6-16.

Bowman, Glenn 2016. "Gaza: Encystation" in Gaza as Metaphor. eds. Helga Tawil-Souri & Dina Matar, 113-26. London: Hurst.

2. Established in 1965, the University of Kent - the UK's European university - now has almost 20,000 students across campuses or study centres at Canterbury, Medway, Tonbridge, Brussels, Paris, Athens and Rome.

It has been ranked: third for overall student satisfaction in the 2014 National Student Survey; 16th in the Guardian University Guide 2016; 23rd in the Times and Sunday Times University Guide 2016; and 22nd in the Complete University Guide 2015.

In the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2015-16, Kent is in the top 10% of the world's leading universities for international outlook and 66th in its table of the most international universities in the world. The THE also ranked the University as 20th in its 'Table of Tables' 2016.

Kent is ranked 17th in the UK for research intensity (REF 2014). It has world-leading research in all subjects and 97% of its research is deemed by the REF to be of international quality.

Along with the universities of East Anglia and Essex, Kent is a member of the Eastern Arc Research Consortium (http://www.kent.ac.uk/about/partnerships/eastern-arc.html).

In 2014, Kent received its second Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education.
A study conducted by the universities of Liverpool and Oxford has found that "Inconsistent and inequitable" hip fracture treatment in the UK means deprived patients and those admitted at weekends are least likely to receive the recommended operation.

Poorer patients and those who require surgery at the weekend are less likely to receive a total hip replacement (THR), despite clear national guidelines setting out who should get one.

The study, published by The British Medical Journal (BMJ) today, found that just 32% of those who should have received a THR actually got the treatment. 42% of those who underwent the procedure did not meet eligibility criteria.

Substantial variation

There are over 70,000 hip fractures in the United Kingdom every year, costing around 2bn in health and social care. In 2011, after a number of studies showed that patients who undergo THR have better function and less need for repeat surgery, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended THR for patients with good cognitive and physical function who are fit enough for anaesthesia and surgery.

The researchers set out to discover whether the use of THR among patients with broken hips always follows NICE guidance. Using the UK's National Hip Fracture Database, they analysed data for 114,119 adults aged 60 or over who received surgery for hip fracture in England, Wales and Northern Ireland from July 2011 to April 2015, finding substantial variation in compliance between hospitals.

Substantial treatment variations

Lead author, Daniel Perry, a National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Clinician Scientist and Senior Lecturer in Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Liverpool, said: "NICE was established in 1999 to reduce variation in the way that patients are treated across the NHS. Unfortunately, we found that this aim might sometimes be frustrated by poor compliance with their treatment recommendations. There also continues to be substantial inter-hospital variation in practice, which is not readily explained by patient-level differences."

The team found that patients were more likely to get THR if they were younger, had fewer other medical conditions, and were more mobile before breaking their hip. However, being admitted at the weekend or living in a poorer area reduced the odds that a patient would receive the operation.

They also found that because the operation is complex and cannot be performed by all orthopaedic surgeons, the limited availability of suitably experienced hip surgeons might account for the reduced use of the procedure at weekends. However, this does not account for more deprived patients being less likely to be treated with THR.

Systematic inequalities

Matthew Costa, Professor of Orthopaedic Trauma at the University of Oxford, said: "We would like to think that these inequalities do not exist in the NHS. However, it is clear from our study that we need to be vigilant to prevent systematic inequalities creeping into NHS care. The limited use of total hip replacement amongst patients from deprived areas and inequalities in the provision of treatment at the weekend, despite clear national guidelines, are particular concerns."

Daniel Perry added: "It is clearly unacceptable that the treatment of broken hips in the NHS depends on where and when patients present to hospital."

###

Further information

Eligible patients who did not receive THR received other operations, such as a hemiarthroplasty ('half hip replacement'), a simpler procedure that is more likely to require further operations.

The study, titled 'Inequalities in the Use of Total Hip Arthroplasty for Hip Fracture: Population Based Study', will be published in the British Medical Journal on 30th April. It can be found here once the embargo has lifted (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/doi/10.1136/bmj.i2021).

For additional information please contact University of Liverpool Press Officer Simon Wood on 0151 794 8356 / simon.wood@liverpool.ac.uk

Researchers:

Daniel Perry is a NIHR Clinician Scientist and Senior Clinical Lecturer in Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Liverpool

David Metcalfe is a Clinical Research Fellow in Musculoskeletal Trauma at the University of Oxford

Xavier Griffin is an Associate Professor in Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Oxford

Matthew Costa is Professor of Orthopaedic Trauma at the University of Oxford
Pioneering gene therapy has restored some vision to patients with a rare form of genetic blindness for as long as four years, raising hopes it could be used to cure common causes of vision loss, new University of Oxford research published today shows.

A technique which involves injecting a virus into the eye to deliver billions of healthy genes to replace a key missing gene for choroideremia sufferers has provided sustained improvement in vision for up four years for some patients.

This provides the strongest evidence so far in humans that the effects of gene therapy are potentially permanent and could therefore provide a single treatment cure for many types of inherited blindness. These include retinitis pigmentosa, which affects young people, and age-related macular degeneration, which affects the older age group.

Reporting the results this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors from the University of Oxford examined the vision of six patients up to four years after receiving gene therapy at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital. These six were the first in the world to have the procedure for choroideremia in a trial funded by the Department of Health and the Wellcome Trust.

The gene therapy treatment was designed to slow or stop sight loss, however, two of the patients experienced a significant improvement in vision that was sustained for at least four years, despite a decline in their untreated eyes over this period. A further three maintained their vision in their treated eyes throughout this period. The sixth patient who had a lower dose had a slow decline in vision in both eyes.

It is hoped that gene therapy would ideally be applied to patients early in the disease process to prevent sight loss because the treatment is expected to be long lasting. Patients with choroideremia are missing a key gene in their retina and the technique involves injecting a virus to deliver billions of healthy genes to replace the missing gene.

Professor Robert MacLaren, the lead investigator of the study, said: "There have recently been questions about the long term efficacy of gene therapy, but now we have unequivocal proof that the effects following a single injection of viral vector are sustained. Even sharpening up the little bit of central vision that these patients have can give them considerable independence.

"Gene therapy is a new technique in medicine that has great potential. As we learn more about genetics we realise that correcting faulty genes even before a disease starts may be the most effective treatment. Gene therapy uses the infectious properties of a virus to insert DNA into a cell, but the virial DNA is removed and replaced with DNA that is reprogrammed in the lab to correct whichever gene is faulty in the patient.

"In this case, success in getting a treatment effect that lasts at least several years was achieved because the viral DNA had an optimal design and the viral vector was delivered into the correct place, using advanced surgical techniques. In brief, this is the breakthrough we have all been waiting for."

Dr Stephen Caddick, Director of Innovation at the Wellcome Trust, added: "To permanently restore sight to people with inherited blindness would be a remarkable medical achievement.

"This is the first time we've seen what appears to be a permanent change in vision after just one round of treatment. It's a real step forwards towards an era where gene therapy is part of routine care for these patients."

Jonathan Wyatt, the first patient in the world to be treated with this gene therapy is still sight impaired, but he was able to double the level of vision in his treated left eye, which has been maintained for four years so far.

The retired barrister, 68, of Bristol, suffered vision problems since the age of 20. The right eye has continued to degenerate and the left eye is now dominant.

Mr Wyatt, married to Diana, for nearly 30 years, could read 23 letters in eye chart tests prior to the operation but by three-and-a-half years could read 44.

Mr Wyatt said: "I feel very lucky, privileged and honoured to be part of the fantastic John Radcliffe research group. I feel that even though I am the meat in a sandwich, my life will be making a contribution to help others."

"The left eye is much improved to such an extent that I use it mostly to get about these days. It has substantially improved, it is fantastic.

"It has made me more independent, I think I would be more dependent. I think I would feel more cautious about train journeys on my own. Without it I think I would be tapping with a white stick, I think I would have remained cheerful but I would be at home more."

Joe Pepper, a 24-year-old teacher from Croydon, who was the last patient to receive the gene therapy treatment (not in the original cohort of six), said: "I sat down and began the reading chart test on my treated right eye and I read the first two lines and for the first time in my memory I read on and on.

"I will remember that day for the rest of my life. I could see more than before the operation. I could read four lines beyond where I was earlier. I laughed and shed a tear. It was special.

"Six months on from the surgery the results have been more than I ever imagined. My vision now has a new found clarity and I am no longer putting stress on my vision when reading or looking into the distance. Instead of looking into the distance and seeing outlines of people or trees I am seeing their defined features. At night I now have a new found confidence in dimly lit areas that means I can feel independent and safe after dark.

"Without Professor MacLaren and his team, and their pioneering work I could have lost my sight and for the last 14 years I have feared I could. The work they do is special and I have nothing but thanks to them."

###

The project is a collaboration between the University of Oxford and Oxford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust with funding from the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and the Department of Health and Wellcome Trust's Health Innovation Challenge Fund. A follow on trial of 30 further patients has been funded by the Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME) Programme, a Medical Research Council (MRC) and NIHR partnership.
Nearly 10 billion years ago in a galaxy known as PKS B1424-418, a dramatic explosion occurred. Light from this blast began arriving at Earth in 2012. Now, an international team of astronomers, led by Prof. Matthias Kadler, professor for astrophysics at the university of Wurzburg, and including other scientists from the new research cluster for astronomy and astroparticle physics at the universities of Wurzburg and Erlangen-Nurnberg, have shown that a record-breaking neutrino seen around the same time likely was born in the same event. The results are published in Nature Physics.

Neutrinos are the fastest, lightest, most unsociable and least understood fundamental particles, and scientists are just now capable of detecting high-energy ones arriving from deep space. The present work provides the first plausible association between a single extragalactic object and one of these cosmic neutrinos.

Although neutrinos far outnumber all the atoms in the universe, they rarely interact with matter, which makes detecting them quite a challenge. But this same property lets neutrinos make a fast exit from places where light cannot easily escape -- such as the core of a collapsing star -- and zip across the universe almost completely unimpeded. Neutrinos can provide information about processes and environments that simply aren't available through a study of light alone.

Recently, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole found first evidence for a flux of extraterrestrial neutrinos, which was named the Physics World breakthrough of the year 2013. To date, the science team of IceCube Neutrino has announced about a hundred very high-energy neutrinos and nicknamed the most extreme events after characters on the children's TV series "Sesame Street." On Dec. 4, 2012, IceCube detected an event known as Big Bird, a neutrino with an energy exceeding 2 quadrillion electron volts (PeV). To put that in perspective, it's more than a million million times greater than the energy of a dental X-ray packed into a single particle thought to possess less than a millionth the mass of an electron. Big Bird was the highest-energy neutrino ever detected at the time and still ranks second.

Where did it come from? The best IceCube position only narrowed the source to a patch of the southern sky about 32 degrees across, equivalent to the apparent size of 64 full moons. "It's like a crime scene investigation", says lead author Matthias Kadler, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, "The case involves an explosion, a suspect, and various pieces of circumstantial evidence."

Starting in the summer of 2012, NASA's Fermi satellite witnessed a dramatic brightening of PKS B1424-418, an active galaxy classified as a gamma-ray blazar. An active galaxy is an otherwise typical galaxy with a compact and unusually bright core. The excess luminosity of the central region is produced by matter falling toward a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the mass of our sun. As it approaches the black hole, some of the material becomes channeled into particle jets moving outward in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. In blazars one of these jets happens to point almost directly toward Earth.

During the year-long outburst, PKS B1424-418 shone between 15 and 30 times brighter in gamma rays than its average before the eruption. The blazar is located within the Big Bird source region, but then so are many other active galaxies detected by Fermi.

The scientists searching for the neutrino source then turned to data from a long-term observing program named TANAMI. Since 2007, TANAMI has routinely monitored nearly 100 active galaxies in the southern sky, including many flaring sources detected by Fermi. Three radio observations between 2011 and 2013 cover the period of the Fermi outburst. They reveal that the core of the galaxy's jet had been brightening by about four times. No other galaxy observed by TANAMI over the life of the program has exhibited such a dramatic change.

"Within their jets, blazars are capable of accelerating protons to relativistic energies. Interactions of these protons with light in the central regions of the blazar can create pions. When these pions decay, both gamma rays and neutrinos are produced," explains Karl Mannheim, a coauthor of the study and astronomy professor in Wurzburg, Germany. "We combed through the field where Big Bird must have originated looking for astrophysical objects capable of producing high-energy particles and light," adds coauthor Felicia Krau, a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg in Germany. "There was a moment of wonder and awe when we realized that the most dramatic outburst we had ever seen in a blazar happened in just the right place at just the right time."

In a paper published Monday, April 18, in Nature Physics, the team suggests the PKS B1424-418 outburst and Big Bird are linked, calculating only a 5-percent probability the two events occurred by chance alone. Using data from Fermi, NASA's Swift and WISE satellites, the LBA and other facilities, the researchers determined how the energy of the eruption was distributed across the electromagnetic spectrum and showed that it was sufficiently powerful to produce a neutrino at PeV energies.

"Taking into account all of the observations, the blazar seems to have had means, motive and opportunity to fire off the Big Bird neutrino, which makes it our prime suspect," explains Matthias Kadler.

Francis Halzen, the principal investigator of IceCube at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and not involved in this study, thinks the result is an exciting hint of things to come. "IceCube is about to send out real-time alerts when it records a neutrino that can be localized to an area a little more than half a degree across, or slightly larger than the apparent size of a full moon," he concludes. "We're slowly opening a neutrino window onto the cosmos."

But this study also demonstrates the vital importance of classical astronomical observations in an era when new detection methods like neutrino observatories and gravitational-wave detectors open new but unknown skies.

###

TANAMI (Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with Austral Milliarcsecond Interferometry) is a multiwavelength monitoring program of active galaxies in the Southern sky. It includes regular radio observations using the Australian Long Baseline Array (LBA) and associated telescopes in Chile, South Africa, New Zealand and Antarctica. When networked together, they operate as a single radio telescope more than 6,000 miles across and provide a unique high-resolution look into the jets of active galaxies.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, built into a cubic kilometer of clear glacial ice at the South Pole, detects neutrinos when they interact with atoms in the ice. This triggers a cascade of fast-moving charged particles that emit a faint glow, called Cerenkov light, as they travel, which is picked up by thousands of optical sensors strung throughout IceCube. Scientists determine the energy of an incoming neutrino by the amount of light its particle cascade emits.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

Original Paper:

Coincidence of a high-fluence blazar outburst with a PeV-energy neutrino event. Kadler, M.; Krau, F.; Mannheim, K.; Ojha, R.; Muller, C.; Schulz, R.; Anton, G.; Baumgartner, W.; Beuchert, T.; Buson, S.; Carpenter, B.; Eberl, T.; Edwards, P. G.; Eisenacher Glawion, D.; Elsasser, D.; Gehrels, N.; Grafe, C.; Hase, H.; Horiuchi, S.; James, C. W.; Kappes, A.; Kappes, A.; Katz, U.; Kreikenbohm, A.; Kreter, M.; Kreykenbohm, I.; Langejahn, M.; Leiter, K.; Litzinger, E.; Longo, F.; Lovell, J. E. J.; McEnery, J.; Phillips, C.; Plotz, C.; Quick, J.; Ros, E.; Stecker, F. W.; Steinbring, T.; Stevens, J.; Thompson, D. J.; Trustedt, J.; Tzioumis, A. K.; Wilms, J.; Zensus, J. A. 2016, Nature Physics, DOI 10.1038/nphys3715.

Local Contact:

Prof. Dr. Matthias Kadler,

Lehrstuhl fur Astronomie, Institut fur Theoretische Physik und Astrophysik, Universitat Wurzburg.

phone: +49 931 31-85138

E-mail: matthias.kadler@astro.uni-wuerzburg.de

Prof. Dr. Karl Mannheim,

Lehrstuhl fur Astronomie, Institut fur Theoretische Physik und Astrophysik, Universitat Wurzburg.

phone: +49 931 31-85030

E-mail: mannheim@astro.uni-wuerzburg.de
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Gathered in Montreal, leading conservation organizations have announced a new global initiative to prevent the extinction of endangered species, in partnership with the governments of Brazil, Chile, and Madagascar.Supported by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the initiative will mobilize $6.7 million to deliver a project entitled the Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE): Conserving Earths Most Irreplaceable Sites for Endangered Biodiversity. AZE is a global initiative working to prevent species extinctions by identifying and safeguarding the places where Endangered or Critically Endangered species are restricted to single remaining sites.Birds such as the Stresemanns Bristlefront, clinging to existence with fewer than 15 known individuals in significantly fragmented habitat in Brazil, will be targeted.The projects focus will be the creation and improved management effectiveness of protected areas and the improved conservation status of AZE species at five demonstration sites in Brazil, Chile, and Madagascar and at an additional 10 sites globally.By focusing on those sites that represent the tip of the iceberg of the extinction crisis, the Alliance for Zero Extinction is a key approach to save species from extinction, said Gustavo Fonseca, GEF director of programs. These are sites that are the last remnants for entire species. Saving the habitat is saving these fragile species."Carlos Alberto de Mattos Scaramuzza, Ministry of the Environment, Government of Brazil, said: By expanding the Mata do Passarinho Reserve and working with local landowners, this initiative will provide a vital lifeline for the critically endangered Stresemanns Bristlefront. The initiative will provide essential information to inform national species conservation efforts, by focusing effort on the last remaining habitats of endangered species.Neville Ash, UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre director, said: Working with the GEF and other partners, this UNEP project is the first global effort to integrate AZE as a distinct priority into conservation planning at the national level. It will scale up best practices on effective and equitable management of the worlds ecological safety nets, and has potential to have a major long-term reduction of global extinction rates, directly contributing towards CBDs Aichi Targets 11 and 12.Braulio Dias, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, stated: Protecting the last remaining habitats for critically endangered species is a vital strategy for preventing extinctions. The CBD Secretariat welcomes this initiative as a contribution towards global species conservation efforts.Diego Flores Arrate, Ministry of the Environment, Government of Chile, said: In Chile, the initiative seeks to create conditions for the survival of three amphibian species, by protecting their habitat and reducing impacts from farming, ranching, and logging activities, considering a participatory approach with different stakeholders.Paola Mosig Reidl, CONABIO, Government of Mexico, stated: Mexico is a strong supporter of the Alliance for Zero Extinction. As host of the CBD COP this year, Mexico welcomes the role of the AZE initiative in informing global species conservation efforts.Michael Parr, hairman of AZE and chief conservation officer for American Bird Conservancy, said: AZE presents an ambitious but realistic plan to address Earths pending extinction crisis. This is a team effort that ultimately needs to involve all of us. The time for action is now.Pepe Clarke, head of policy, BirdLife International, stated: This initiative is particularly important as it links local conservation action to national and international policy. We are truly honoured to be working with the Governments of Brazil, Chile and Madagascar.
Once set in motion, it never stops expanding.

Euthanasia boosters, as we know, are so full of baloney. To get the death agenda adopted, they promise the moon, that medicalized killing will be strictly limited, and always restricted to competent adults. Then, once society widely accepts killing as an answer to suffering, the age limits drops  because how in the name of compassion can a (now) right to die be limited to competent adults?

Belgium has already legalized assisted suicide for children deemed, by their death doctor, mature enough to decide. Now the Dutch Pediatric Association wants to go there too, where the current age limit  once 16  is now 12. But thats not low enough! From the deVolkskrant story (Google translation):

The Dutch Association of Pediatrics (NVK) comes to the position after intense debate. If a child is incompetent, parents should be able to consult with the doctor to decide on euthanasia The 12-year-age limit for euthanasia is a problem for pediatricians: they see in practice that even younger children are often well able to see the consequences of their decisions. Still, doctors are not allowed to do anything when a child between 1 and 12 years asks for euthanasia. The NVK therefore proposes to include real mental competence as a benchmark, rather than chronological age. For children who can not make the decision, the physician in consultation with the parents can decide. This happens already in children between 0 and 1, but doctors believe it should also be possible for incapacitated children under 12 years.

Two points. Infanticide is legally (still) murder in Netherlands and yet, as the story admits, killing sick and disabled babies is an accepted part of Netherlander euthanasia practice.

You see, when it comes to euthanasia, protective guidelines and legal boundaries soon dont matter. Netherlander pediatricians and neonatologists kill babies in their cribs without consequence, proving that protective guidelines arent worth the time it takes to read them. (See the Groningen Protocol, a published bureaucratic check list for deciding which babies can be killed.)

Second, note that the suffering would not have to be a terminal illness, which is not a required criterion for euthanasia in Netherlands. This means a depressed child with disabilities, who feels isolated and marginalized, could ask for euthanasia and be killed! Perhaps even a mentally ill child deemed, by a death doctor, sufficiently competent to decide that life is not worth living.

Image credit: Gouwenaar (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted at The Corner

.
See Rock City (SRC), Inc. presented Emilys Power for a Cure (EPFAC) with a $2,000 donation from their Fairytale Nights event, at Tuckers Trek on Sunday.

"Our community partnerships are an important part of continuing the legacy of generosity that has lived through three generations of Rock City's ownership, said SRC President Susan Harris. We are proud to partner with Emily's Power for a Cure for our spring break evening event Fairytale Nights, because fighting childhood cancer takes superhuman courage and strength. This local foundation funds critical research and provides direct support for families battling neuroblastoma, one of the deadliest of all childhood cancers. It is an honor to help them raise both funds and awareness, as well as having their families attend Fairytale Nights each year."
Hi all



I complete on house on 9th May.. been building up to this moment for six plus months, and a bee in bonnet for several years prior.. so excitement abounds... but I do have quite a few things to sort...

I have acquired a french registered car with all documents from another ex-pat, I am buying in the poitou charante area... I will be flying in and out of limoge.

I know I have the options of the larger scale providers for car storage and indeed the parking at limoge airport... but in order to keep costs in order wondered if there would be anyway to find some generous person with plenty of outdoor/outbuildings around the area to use? It could be a little extra money and could be combined with the picking up of car from limoge and returning it as and when needed...??

Any ideas help would be appreciated as always.

Cheers



John

ps: need to source insurance for both also.. presumably better through an agent for both combined? ta
Presented by the American Institute of Architects, AIA, Tennessee and River City Company, Passageways is a community outreach project of the 2016 AIA Tennessee State Convention to be held in Chattanooga in August. Currently, submissions are being accepted on transformative alleyway proposals that activate the urban alley through architecture.

These forgotten and often times overlooked spaces between buildings exist throughout our city. The intent of Passageways is to exemplify the potential of these spaces and the benefits they have in creating a healthy urban environment, said Jared Hueter, AIA TN Convention co-chairman.

Within the context of the American urban environment, alleyways are often disregarded solely as

service corridors, lined with dumpsters and mechanical units; historically, they were built for the

pedestrian experience, said Amy Donahue, Marketing and Communication manager at River

City company.

Were excited to see what ideas are presented to reclaim alleyways as inviting

public spaces.

With similar projects in cities like Austin, Texas and Seattle, Washington, Passageways currently

extends an open invitation to architects, designers, engineers and artists from around the world to

design a spatial installation that is habitable and can be adapted for use as a small public event

space. The design must be safe for public use and have the ability to be constructed within a

weeks schedule with certain elements of the exhibit able to stand for a minimum of a year while

other elements may be deemed more temporary.

Each submission selected as a funded installation will receive between $5,000 to $10,000 for the

construction of the design. In addition to River City Company and AIA Tennessee, Passageways

partners include The Benwood Foundation, The Lyndhurst Foundation, Cogent Studio, Causeway

and ArtsBuild.

In order to realize the full potential of these auxiliary spaces, we must change the way we

fundamentally think about them, said Jason Ennis, Passageways co-chairman.

For more information and the schedule of submissions, visit passagewayschattanooga.com. Initial submissions are due on May 23.
First-quarter profits for pipeline operator NuStar Energy LP slid to $44.8 million during a brutal period in the oil and gas industry, but still beat Wall Streets estimates that projected a tougher quarter.

The San Antonio-based master limited partnership earned 57 cents per share. That was down 61 percent from $1.47 per share for the same quarter the prior year when it made $114 million  though almost half of the companys earnings in 2015 came from a one-time, non-cash gain from an acquisition.

NuStar, which owns pipelines, terminals and storage facilities, was expected to earn 51 cents per unit for the first quarter of this year, according to an average estimate of 12 analysts polled by Thomson Financial Network.

Investors in limited partnerships get units in the venture, similar to shares in a publicly traded companies get shares. They differ in that limited partnerships typically distribute all excess cash to unit holders, giving it a more favorable tax structure for investors.

Its earnings report sent the stock soaring Wednesday, up 5.2 percent, to $48.96.

Last year, a record amount of crude oil from the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas moved through NuStars system, helping boost the companys performance for 2015 to record levels. This year, falling crude oil prices have meant NuStar is moving less Eagle Ford oil.

However, it instead is benefiting from a volume of crude oil in storage  the U.S. is storing more commercial crude oil than at anytime in history. NuStars storage facilities are effectively full. And its moving more product for refining customers  a segment of the industry that has weathered the downturn in crude oil prices well. Refiners benefit from cheap crude, turning it into higher priced products such as gasoline, while low prices at the pump drive up consumer demand.

NuStar executives also said the companys oil producing customers are blue-chip companies in a strong financial position, and it expects the drillers will uphold their pipeline contracts.

To protect itself during turbulent times in the oil business, NuStar has liens against the products it holds in storage, and said it continues to monitor the financial condition of its counterparties.

President and CEO Brad Barron said the company has been faring well despite the low price environment. Oil prices have crashed from $107 per barrel in June 2014 to around $45 Wednesday. Its clear we are addressing market conditions effectively, said Barron in a call with analysts Wednesday morning.

The stock price of master limited partnerships such as NuStar have been moving in lockstep with crude prices  mostly down in the last year. NuStars stock price was $66.72 per share a year ago. In recent months, the unit price of pipeline companies hasnt been as closely tied to crude oil prices, and Barron doesnt think NuStars value should be tied to oil any more than it should be tied to any other commodity such as cotton, copper or corn.

In any other year the market would have responded in an incredibly positive way with such great results, Barron said at the companys annual meeting, held at its corporate headquarters. We would have seen a big jump in our unit prices. As you all know, 2015 and the first quarter of 2016 were not ordinary times.

The company also beat its distribution target for the quarter. NuStars board of directors approved a first quarter distribution of $1.10 per unit. It will be paid May 13 to investors as of May 9.

NuStar has around 8,700 miles of pipeline and 79 terminal and storage facilities that store and distribute crude oil, refined products and specialty liquids.

Also on Wednesday, NuStar GP Holdings LLC, which holds a general partner interest in NuStar Energy, announced first quarter net income of $16.7 million, or 39 cents per unit. That was down from $26 million in the first quarter of 2015, or 62 cents per unit.

Voter Guide: What to know for the midterm election Your guide to the Texas and San Antonio races and candidates on the Nov. 8 ballot.

NuStar GP Holdings will pay 54 cents per unit to investors for the first quarter, the same as the amount paid the year before.

jhiller@express-news.net

Twitter: @Jennifer_Hiller




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Amazon.com Inc. posted first-quarter sales and earnings that topped analysts estimates, adding to evidence that the company can make money even while investing heavily in endeavors such as one-hour delivery and marketing new gadgets like the Echo voice-activated home assistant.

Net income was $1.07 a share, and revenue climbed 28 percent to $29.1 billion, the Seattle-based company said Thursday in a statement. That compared with analysts average projection for earnings of 57 cents a share and sales of $28 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Amazon also gave a revenue forecast that topped some estimates for the current period. Shares jumped more than 12 percent.
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WOLFSBURG, Germany  The chief executive of Volkswagen said Thursday that he personally apologized to President Barack Obama this week for cheating on vehicle emissions tests, while making what amounted to a plea for mercy as the German carmaker negotiates penalties with U.S. officials.

Volkswagen is in talks with U.S. authorities about the fines it must pay for programming engines to cheat on emissions tests. The company said Thursday it had set aside 7 billion euros ($7.9 billion) for legal costs worldwide, indicating that it expected fines in the United States to be much lower than some analysts have estimated.

Matthias Mueller, the chief executive of Volkswagen, had what he described as a two-minute conversation with Obama during the presidents visit this week to Hanover, not far from Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg. The encounter took place on Sunday at a dinner hosted by Chancellor Angela Merkel for Obama and representatives of German industry.

I used the opportunity to personally apologize to him for our behavior, Mueller said during a news conference in Wolfsburg on Thursday. I thanked him for the constructive cooperation with his officials. Of course I also expressed the hope that I will be able to continue to fulfill my responsibility to 600,000 employees and their families as well as suppliers and dealers.

Muellers mention of Volkswagen workers and their families can be seen as a plea for U.S. officials to not punish those who had nothing to do with any wrongdoing. Lawyers in the case expect the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department to demand penalties that are painful for Volkswagen, but not so severe that they destroy the company.

Thousands of jobs in the United States depend on Volkswagen. The company has a factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that is preparing to produce a new version of the Tiguan compact SUV, as well as an extensive dealer network in the country.

Mueller said Thursday that Obama appeared receptive to his remarks. The Volkswagen chief said he felt encouraged about a solution that would ensure the company a future in the United States.

The German carmaker said last week it had set aside 16.2 billion euros to cover costs related to its admission that it had programmed diesel vehicles to evade clean air regulations. On Thursday, it said that within that figure was 7 billion euros for legal costs, which includes proceedings in other countries, like France or South Korea.

Most of the rest of the 16.2 billion euros will be used to repair diesel vehicles that are polluting more than allowed or to buy back ones that cannot be fixed.

In theory, Volkswagen faces fines of $18 billion in the United States alone, plus compensation to owners. But the 7 billion euro figure disclosed Thursday indicates that the company is confident the final amount will be much lower.

Volkswagen has admitted to manipulating software in 11 million cars worldwide, including about 600,000 in the United States, so that emissions equipment operated at full capacity only when the vehicles were being tested. At other times, the cars polluted much more than allowed.

The 7 billion euros also would cover compensation to the owners of Volkswagen vehicles who have filed class-action lawsuits.

Voter Guide: What to know for the midterm election Your guide to the Texas and San Antonio races and candidates on the Nov. 8 ballot.

On Thursday, Volkswagen also provided details on the loss it reported last week. The company said it had lost 1.5 billion euros worldwide during the year, compared with a profit of 11 billion euros in 2014. Volkswagen A.G., a subset of Volkswagen Group that includes core operations such as the Volkswagen brand but that excludes the Audi unit as well as some foreign holdings, reported a loss of 5.5 billion euros.

Though Audi has belonged to Volkswagen since the 1960s, it continues to have a small number of outside shareholders and holds its own annual meeting.

Volkswagen, which owns brands including Porsche and Skoda as well as manufacturers of trucks and commercial vehicles, sold 10 million vehicles in 2015, down from 10.2 million in 2014. Sales rose 5.4 percent to 213 billion euros.

Company executives said they still saw the United States as a growth market for Volkswagen, despite the enormous damage to the carmakers image.

We do see a lot of potential, though of course not in the short term, Herbert Diess, the executive in charge of Volkswagen brand cars, said during the news conference. We are starting from zero.
For several summers while in college, I drove a soft serve ice cream truck. There were two flavors: vanilla and chocolate. Even with such a limited selection, I well remember any number of little  and not-so-little  kids standing there going Ummmmmm, seemingly paralyzed because they couldnt choose between the two.

Ive sometimes wondered how those kids, now all grown up, are dealing with the myriad food choices were all faced with these days. How, for example, do they choose from the 107 items available on a typical McDonalds menu, the more than 500 flavors of Keurig coffee, or the 87,000 possible drink combinations at Starbucks?

Can I get an Ummmmmm?

As anyone who has ever pondered the small-town-telephone-directory-sized Cheesecake Factory menu knows, were living in what author Sophie Egan calls the Era of Infinite Choice.

Egan, director of programs and culinary nutrition at The Culinary Institute of Americas Napa Valley campus, is also author of Devoured (William Morrow, $28.99). In her book, she argues that the American desire to have it our way  to paraphrase the classic Burger King jungle (Hold the pickles/hold the lettuce)  says a lot about who we are as a people.

Its a uniquely American characteristic to value independence over interdependence, she said when we spoke by phone recently. No one wants to be average.

In her book, Egan quotes a classic 1977 survey from the University of Nebraska in which 94 percent of professors said they were of above average intelligence compared to their colleagues. Such a finding is, of course, mathematically impossible.

Because we as Americans tend to think of ourselves as being so special, we demand that the food we eat be special, too, even if that only means we get to choose provolone, American or Swiss cheese on our Subway sub.

Food marketers, well aware of this aspect of our collective id, are helping us remain true to ourselves by all means possible.

For example, more food customization is being enabled by technology, according to Egan.

Websites and mobile apps make it easier than ever to order what you want and how you want it, she said. You can build your own meal from the ground up.

This happens at my house when we order on the Pei Wei website. I get brown rice, my daughter gets white. I order dishes with spice, she gets hers without (or, as I like to put it, bland). And my wife, who has celiac disease, can order from the fairly extensive gluten-free menu.

No muss, no fuss and no eye-rolling from a put-upon waiter.

Still, according to Swarthmore College psychology professor Barry Schwartz, having too many selections to choose from can actually leave you less satisfied, a situation he calls the Paradox of Choice.

I think theres going to be a response to these menus that take 15 minutes to read, Egan quotes Schwartz in her book.

Early signs of such a response this infinite customization may be at hand. While Egan counted those 107 menu items at McDonalds, she also noted that so-called fast-casual restaurants  your Five Guys, Red Lobster, Marie Callenders and the like  offer an average of about 40 fewer items.

Some restaurants in other parts of the country have even pared down their menus to the bare minimum. In Berkeley, California, the Cheese Board Collective and Sliver offer just one entree per day, for example. If you dont like whats on the menu today, come back tomorrow when itll be changed. The trend has yet to make it to San Antonio.

But just wait.

rmarini@express-news.net

Twitter: @RichardMarini
Photos: Prince Is Already Resting In Power On 2 New Chicago Murals

By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 27, 2016 8:46PM

Prince passed away on Thursday, at the age of 57, and already two commemorative Prince murals have cropped up in Chicago. (That's not to mention the Garfield Park Conservatory's pond tribute, or the Prince dance parties and purple cupcakes sweeping the city.)

One mural can be found on an auto body shop in Avalon Park on Stony Island Avenue; another is in Logan Square, at roughly Fullerton and Sacramento, facing the Blue Line tracks. We spoke to the artists working on both pieces about their processes, their connections with Prince, and why neither mural is quite done yet.

The Avalon Park Mural

This mural, which we first learned of from DNAinfo, is the work of Rahmaan Statik Barnes, an artist born and raised in Chicago whos been making murals in the city since 1997. He started on this particular mural at McArthur Auto Clinic (8051 S. Stony Island Ave.) this past Sunday, three days after Princes death, and he plans to have it finished by this coming Saturday weather and work schedule permitting, he told Chicagoist.

As of right now, it looks like a direct replica of Princes Purple Rain album cover, but Barnes told us its not done yet. He plans to add finishing touches that make Prince look like "a more divine, spiritual character, he said"maybe looking slightly angelic." He'll draw inspiration for this phase of the project from Baroque portraits of saints.

Barnes' connection with Prince started young. He was born in 1980two years before 1999, and four before Purple Rainto parents who were huge Prince fans. "I remember my parents going out to the record store and buying a Purple Rain album on 12-inch vinyl, and seeing that cover as a kid and always having the album playing in the background.

This Prince piece is just one of the murals Barnes has made in Chicago over the years. He said that all told, he's done hundreds of projects in Chicago, though only 20 to 30 are left standingthe rest have been scrubbed, or their buildings have been demolished. Still, you've probably seen Barnes' work around town. He made the mural that decorates the underpass at 47th Street and Lake Park, and the Wicker Park mural on the back of what was once jewelry store The Silver Room. (It's now boutique Personal Privilege.)

The Logan Square Mural

This Prince mural, which was first reported in the Reader, replaced another Blue Line-facing mural of Chicago house DJ Frankie Knuckles. (Knuckles died in 2014.) It's on the second story of the building that houses X-It European Clothing Boutique at street level and, on the second floor, Look Better Hair Salon (2950 W. Fullerton Ave.).

"This murals gonna be the best mural in the whole city as far as anybody doing anything for Prince," Kel 4, a leader of J4F Krew, told Chicagoist. Around since the "late 80s," J4F (which stands for Just 4 Fun) has about 35 members, Kel said. Only half or so are working on this mural, though; the others are pitching in paint, money, and moral support.

Like Barnes' Prince mural, this one is also a work in progress. J4F is still filling in details. We spoke to Kel, 36, while he was working on the mural Wednesday afternoon (here's a photo gallery of him working on the mural). He said that today, he plans to fill in detail on Prince's face and finish up some black outlining, among other things. When the mural is finished, which it should be by Sunday, Kel told us it will also feature the message "All I want is to see you laugh"a lyric from "Purple Rain"across the top. Along the bottom of the mural, against a blue background, the mural will have the guitar sheet music for "Purple Rain."

"Everybody does little simple notes," Kel said, "and it's really easy to do." He and J4F wanted to go above and beyond, though.

Kel himself has been listening to Prince since he was a kid, when Prince was huge on the radio. "My family's all Mexican, so they weren't listening to that kind of stuff," he said, but Kel personally was listening to more hip-hop, and knew Prince well. Especially "Purple Rain."

"This is the main song, 'Purple Rain,'" he said, in explanation of the mural design. "If you see this"say, on one of the trains barreling past the mural every few minutes"you already know who we're talking about."
SAN FRANCISCO  Jurors who threaten to derail trials by researching them on Google or posting comments about them on Twitter are often dismissed with nothing more than a tongue-lashing from a judge.

But that may soon change in California. Legislation supported by state court officials would authorize judges in some counties to fine jurors up to $1,500 for social media and Internet use violations, which have led to mistrials and overturned convictions around the country.

As jurors and judges have become more technology savvy in recent years, the perils of jurors playing around with their smartphones have become a mounting concern, particularly in technology-rich California. A 2011 state law made improper electronic or wireless communication or research by a juror punishable by contempt.

Supporters of the latest California measure say a potential fine would give teeth to existing prohibitions against social media and Internet use and simplify the process for holding wayward jurors accountable.

Its disruptive of the judicial process, and there ought to be a fairly simple and convenient way for a judge to sanction a juror based on the order that the judge has given, said Assemblyman Rich Gordon, D-Menlo Park, who authored the legislation.

But critics question whether it will have any practical effect on jurors who are constantly on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and suggest judges vet the social media activity of potential jurors before seating them.

If you have an Internet addict who just cant psychologically stop, you may want to excuse that person, said Paula Hannaford-Agor, who studies juries at the National Center for State Courts.

Brian Walsh, a judge in the Silicon Valley county of Santa Clara, said a fine could also change the dynamic between judges and juries.

You want to present the jurors obligations to serve as an inviting opportunity to participate in the democratic process, he said. One could consider it counterproductive to be laying out all the penalties a juror can incur if they blow it.

It is not clear exactly how many times juror social media or Internet use has affected trials. But anecdotal evidence suggests it is more than sporadic.

Eric Robinson, co-director of the Press Law and Democracy Project at Louisiana State University, said he used to track cases of juror social media or Internet misconduct using news accounts and other sources, but there were so many it got to be more trouble than it was worth.

Those are the ones we hear about, he said. Im sure it happens a lot more.

An Arkansas court in 2011 threw out a death row inmates murder conviction in part because of tweets. One said, Choices to be made. Hearts to be broken. Another said, Its over less than hour before the jury announced its verdict.

A New Jersey appeals court in 2014 tossed the heroin possession conviction of two men after a juror was accused of searching the defendants names online and finding information about their criminal records.

A California appeals court in January cited juror Internet research in throwing out a fraud conviction against an investment firm CEO. The juror looked up a case involving an accountant the defendant blamed for the fraud.

Judges warn jurors against using social media and the Internet, and have the power to hold them in contempt if they violate those rules.

Greg Hurley, a lawyer who studies juries at the National Center for State Courts, said he is unaware of any state that fines jurors outside the contempt process.

California judges say the contempt process can be time-consuming and is rarely invoked. A juror facing contempt has a right to an attorney, and the court could get bogged down in a lengthy formal hearing. So judges often opt to replace a wayward juror with an alternate to keep the proceedings moving.

Historically, contempt has been something judges are told, Dont do, said J. Richard Couzens, a retired judge from Californias Placer County who now rotates through courts around the state. You have to follow so many rules to institute a contempt process.

Couzens, a member of the judicial committee that recommended the fines legislation, said he dismissed a juror years ago in a theft case for using a cellphone to figure out the value of a stolen item.

The fine would be similar to a traffic citation, making it relatively easy to dispense, Couzens said.

Judges could mention it when warning jurors against Internet and social media use, said Steve Austin, presiding judge in Californias Contra Costa County.

At the very least with the sanction, it would be a good thing youd be able to tell the jurors, he added.

The legislation initially called for giving all state judges the power to fine wayward jurors. But it was scaled back after legislators expressed concern that it could dissuade potential jurors from serving.

The bill now authorizes the judiciary to select some county courts for a five-year pilot program, which a legislative analysis said could save participating courts money. It is before the full assembly.
A Texas appeals court hearing the citys lawsuits against the local police and fire unions has ordered mediation between the San Antonio Police Officers Association and the city.

The 4th Court of Appeals on Wednesday granted a city motion asking for mediation to attempt resolving a fight over a provision in the collective bargaining agreement known as the evergreen clause, which keeps the labor contract in force for up to a decade after it expired, or until its replaced with a new agreement.

The City of San Antonio continues to be ready and willing to return to the bargaining table and resolve the 2-year-long dispute with the police labor union, a city news release said. The union has refused to negotiate since September 2015.

Mike Helle, president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association, said Thursday the union is examining the order to determine its next course of action.

We realize the public has an expectation that both sides at least listen to each other. We believe Mayor Taylor is trying to find a middle ground. Unfortunately, the Citys position is to ask for Mediation, while continuing to sue police officers. Our stand remains very clear  there will be no negotiations unless the City drops their lawsuit. Helle said. This Mediation is non-binding and we have our direction from the Membership of SAPOA to stand firm.

The CBAs expired on Sept. 30, 2014, and attempts at negotiating a new one have failed. Meanwhile, the San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association has yet to even begin negotiations.

Last fall, the city and SAPOA appeared poised to reach an agreement.

They had hashed out details on the two main contentious points: a shift of some financial burden for health care to uniform personnel and a salary package. But the city and the union butted heads over the evergreen clause, which city officials say is a violation of the Texas Constitution.

At loggerheads with the union, the city sued in district court. San Antonio lost its individual suits over the evergreen clause with the police union and fire union and subsequently appealed to the 4th Court of Appeals.

Those cases are pending. Meanwhile, the city is hoping to reach an agreement through mediation that could eventually result in hammering out new contracts.

jbaugh@express-news.net
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Its been two years since President Obama designated a long-blighted, 22-square-mile swath of the East Side as a Promise Zone, an intensely focused urban renewal initiative. Before that, millions in federal grants and other funding have poured in  $84 million to date, not counting another $100 million expected in private investment.

Most of the revitalization efforts have been focused on EastPoint, a four-square-mile area within the Promise Zone where 18,000 people live and three federal grants overlap.

On Wednesday, officials spearheading the revitalization program told the City Council that progress has been dramatic, but the work is far from over.

In our collaborative vision, EastPoint by 2025 will be a vibrant, mixed-income community, rich in diversity and opportunity, said Mike Etienne, a city employee who is director of EastPoint. But for this effort to be sustainable, we have to engage the community.

Located on a side of San Antonio with high crime, poverty and unemployment rates, the EastPoint area has seen virtually all statistical markers move in a positive direction, thanks to the work of more than 20 partners, Etienne said.

He presented a litany of data showing the renewal effort is producing good results:

The four-year graduation rate at Sam Houston High School has increased from 45 percent in 2009 to 81 percent last year. The drop-out rate has decreased from 35 percent to 14 percent.

The poverty rate in EastPoint has decreased from 35 percent in 2010 to 31 percent in 2015.

The percent of children who are kindergarten ready when they enter Promise Neighborhood targeted schools has increased to 41 percent, versus 31 percent three years ago.

More than 160 residents received various in-demand certificates through Promise Zone to Work programs, and more than 1,300 jobs have been created in the area.

Were really moving the needle, Etienne said.

The first federal grant, $23.3 million in 2011 and overseen by the United Way, has focused on cradle-to-career initiatives aimed at improving education, teacher training and access to pre-K and after-school programs in the neighborhood.

A $29.7 million grant in 2012, overseen by the San Antonio Housing Authority, involves a mammoth and ongoing mixed-income housing initiative on the site of a former housing project called Wheatley Courts.

The first phase of what will be 412 new residential units is 215 apartments of which 70 percent will be affordable to low-income tenants. Those are expected to be fully occupied by next year, said SAHA interim CEO David Nisivoccia.

A third grant, for $920,000, has worked to improve public safety through hot spot policing, foot patrols, safe school zones and offender recidivism programs. Etienne reported that violent crime was down 6 percent in EastPoint last year, compared to 3.7 percent citywide, but simultaneously acknowledged the recent spike in violent crime in the area tied to drug and gang activity.

San Antonio Police Chief William McManus told council members the uptick in violence is being effectively dealt with by his department.

Things have been very quiet and Im going to go out on limb and say its going to stay that way, he said. Weve made four significant arrests and more are coming.  A very small number of people are involved in the (violent) activity, and once theyre arrested or theyve gone away in some shape or form, the violence is stopping.

Mary Ellen Burns, senior vice president of United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County, said improvements in child well-being  better access to healthy food, health care, physical activity and so on  were among the most significant benefits achieved by the EastPoint collaborative.

Mayor Ivy Taylor lauded Etienne and the partners for the good work thus far, but sounded a cautionary note.

Theres definitely a lot more to do, she said. You cant undo decades of disinvestment (in an area) in a couple of five-year grants. She also noted a key issue will be sustaining the success, once the grant money is gone, as well as replicating the improvements in other parts of the East Side and other areas of the city.

mstoeltje@express-news.net
Fair Oaks Ranch is suing the owner of a site where a controversial subdivision was proposed, claiming violations of a development agreement they signed more than two years ago on the stalled project.

The lawsuit filed last month in state district court in Bexar County is the latest volley between the city, the landowner and the would-be developer of The Reserve at Fair Oaks Ranch, a proposed 635-home subdivision thats been in limbo since last summer.

It accuses defendant R.W. Pfeiffer Properties LLC of breach of contract for seeking to exclude its 345-acre Ammann Road parcel from the service area for municipal water and sewer services.

Pfeiffer couldnt be reached for comment. His real estate agent said last week that Pfeiffer hadnt been served with notice of the suit.

Including The Reserve tract in the city utility service area was called for in a 16-page development agreement that Russell W. Pfeiffer struck with the city Nov. 25, 2013, in conjunction with Trio Residential Developers of Austin, the projects would-be builder.

Trio spokesman Marc Frease did not respond to a call seeking comment.

The binding agreement included provisions for Trio to build a public water supply system, then turn those assets over to the city, as well as a wastewater treatment plant.

The suit states Pfeiffer objected last summer to being added to the municipal utility service area, so the city deleted the parcel from a requested service area expansion that was then before state regulators.

But, reviving efforts to get Pfeiffers tract in its service area, the citys breach of contract suit asks the court to order Pfeiffer to comply with the development agreement.

If the defendant is not immediately and permanently restrained from opting out, plaintiffs will be permanently harmed, it states.

Before things began to unravel, Trio sought city approval for the development plat and also applied to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for a discharge permit for the planned wastewater treatment plant.

Claiming the huge development would overburden local resources, especially groundwater, project critics convinced city leaders in April 2014 to deny Pfeiffers annexation request for the site.

If annexed, The Reserve was projected to boost annual city property tax revenues by $676,000, based on an anticipated market value of $254 million at full build out.

The annexation refusal precluded the collection of municipal taxes there, but did not kill the project.

However, its future has been in doubt since the city last summer rejected the plat application based on the apparent absence of a formal assignment by Pfeiffer to Trio of development or ownership rights for the parcel.

Without proof of such an assignment, City Attorney Charles Zech told Trio and Pfeiffer in a July 7 letter that the city would only deal with Pfeiffer moving forward.

The city and Pfeiffer Properties have a valid and binding agreement, the terms of which the city stands willing and able to observe, wrote Zech.

Zech said Friday that no assignment has been provided, nor have any negotiations with Pfeiffer or Trio occurred since before the plat was rejected.
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Prompted by its Austin-area counterpart, the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization is debating a decision that could determine the future of a proposed passenger train in the Interstate 35 corridor.

At a meeting Monday, the organization discussed whether it ought to fund some of the costs of planning a rail service known as LSTAR amid considerable doubt about whether it can proceed as planned. The project, which would connect San Antonio and Georgetown, hit a roadblock in February when Union Pacific pulled its tracks from a possible route that many believed would be most beneficial to the region.

The Lone Star Rail District, a government-funded agency that represents six counties and many cities and agencies in the I-35 corridor, has been working for more than a decade on the train, a project many people agree is needed now more than ever to help address congestion, air quality problems and population growth.

But the $25 million spent on planning so far have yet to produce a definite route, and the most recent setback left many stakeholders questioning whether another agency ought to lead the project.

Now, the AAMPO board must decide whether it believes in the current iteration of the project enough to dedicate millions of dollars to planning it. MPOs, which are agencies established under federal law, help determine how to allocate federal and state funding for transportation infrastructure in urban areas.

The discussion followed a somewhat tense meeting last week with the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, which already has spent millions of dollars on planning the rail service. The Austin-area group made clear it might stop funding the project if San Antonio-area officials decline to shoulder some near-term costs.

We need to see, are you all in or not? said Cynthia Long, a Williamson County commissioner. Are you pushing your chips in or not?

CAMPO has already spent about $12 million of the $20 million it set aside for the project in 2011. The board debated freezing the remainder late last month but voted 10-9 to revisit the issue in June after discussing it with other agencies.

The remainder of the allocation makes up about three-quarters of the LSTAR districts $12.4 million annual operating budget. Much of it is dedicated to continuing an $8 million environmental study, which will cost nearly $6 million to finish at this point.

Doubt about the future of the passenger train emerged in February when UP nixed the LSTAR districts proposal to use the companys freight line tracks that parallel Interstate 35 for passenger rail service. The projects environmental study, which began in 2013, has focused mainly on that route.

The study includes alternate routes that could involve building new tracks parallel to I-35 or the Texas 130 toll road. LSTARs leadership has spent the past several weeks explaining to its stakeholders, the two MPO boards and, most recently, the Express-News Editorial Board that it plans to move ahead by focusing its efforts on evaluating alternatives to the UP route.

In the end, the hope is that youll come out with an alternative that is preferred, said Sid Covington, chairman of the districts board. We started out with hundreds of ideas, and weve gotten it down to six or seven alternatives. Itll probably end up being some combination of them.

Its also holding out hope that UP might return to the bargaining table, as it has during the course of planning several other commuter rail projects across the country. Rail director Joe Black said the district plans to keep about $185,000 in the annual budget for freight negotiation services in case that happens.

We are convinced UP is still a player in this, he said. Because of the fact that we may, at the very least, be adjacent to them, we believe we need to leave some money in the budget so that we can engage with them in some way.

Union Pacific spokesman Jeff DeGraff said no two projects are alike. He advised against using the companys past decisions as an indication that it might change its stance on the LSTAR route.

In this individual case, weve determined that this option is not feasible and were no longer participating, he said.

At Mondays AAMPO meeting, several board members made it clear they werent willing to gamble with taxpayer dollars on routes that have not yet been proven viable. The organization set aside $20 million for the passenger rail service in 2007, but those funds, reserved for final design, right-of-way acquisition and construction, have not yet been spent.

An AAMPO policy doesnt allow it to fund planning costs, so in order to release the money now, the board would have to vote both to suspend that policy and to change the funding designation. Several board members said they wouldnt support such a change, even if CAMPO opted to freeze its allocation as a result.

Its my opinion that if we dont participate, (the project) will stop, Guadalupe County Judge Kyle Kutscher said. But if we close our eyes and hand money over, I dont think well ever see it again.

Others, citing concerns about air quality, congestion and population growth, cautioned the board against rushing into a decision that could jeopardize the projects future.

I still believe the project has a lot of potential in some shape, form or fashion, said AAMPO Chairman Ray Lopez, a San Antonio city councilman. It was a great idea 15 years ago, and its only validated itself with the growth and congestion in the corridor.

He stressed the need for his organization to gather more information from the district and discuss it at length. He said he doubted it would reach a decision before CAMPOs June meeting.

We will make a decision in an expedited of a fashion as possible, but were going to make a decision predicated on due diligence, Lopez said. Their urgency is not my concern.

kblunt@express-news.net
A Bexar County grand jury on Wednesday indicted a San Antonio attorney previously accused of coercing clients into having sex with him in exchange for money or legal services.

The indictment added to the charges against Mark H. Benavides, 46, bringing the total to 35 counts of sexual assault and compelling prostitution, both second degree felonies, involving nine alleged victims.

Benavides has been free on bail after his arrest in November following an investigation by the Bexar County District Attorney's Office and the San Antonio Police Department.

The indictment covers offense dates ranging from 2009-2015, according to the DAs office. The newest allegations were raised by a client who had asked for a new trial in 2015.

Before his arrest, several women had claimed that Benavides had coerced them into performing sex acts and that he videotaped the encounters, and more women came forward after the arrest, the DAs office said.

According to an arrest warrant affidavit last November, the first of Benavides three accusers told investigators that she met him when she was 21 and a prostitute on the West Side. She said she had sex with him at the River Inn Motel at Frio and Guadalupe streets and that Benavides offered more money if he could film their encounter.

The affidavit stated that he gave her his card and offered his services as a lawyer if she ever needed help, which led to numerous sexual encounters at Benavides' law office, his vehicle, his father's office and a conference room used by lawyers at the Bexar County Courthouse.

Another former client of Benavides told police she was a defendant in a criminal case in 2012 in the 399th District Court and believed that Benavides' friendly relationship with Judge Ray Olivarri could hurt her case if she did not have sex with Benavides, according to the affidavit. Investigators have not accused Olivarri of wrongdoing in the matter.

A third accuser, also represented by Benavides in two separate criminal cases, told investigators that when she did not have money to pay for his legal services in one case, she had to meet him every Tuesday to make payments at a motel, according to the affidavit.

All of the victims recounted that they felt they had no choice in the matter and that if they did not perform the sexual acts in the manner that Benavides required, they would go back to jail or he would not give them proper legal representation, the DAs office said in a statement released Wednesday.

Sexual assault and compelling prostitution are both second-degree felonies. If convicted, Benavides faces up to 20 years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine for each count.

This report contains material from Express-News archives.

ezavala@express-news.net

Twitter: @elizabeth2863
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INDIANAPOLIS  Ted Cruz electrified supporters in make-or-break Indiana on Wednesday by naming former GOP rival Carly Fiorina as his presidential running mate in a bid to grab the initiative after a string of primary losses.

The early announcement  long before he would have any hope of claiming the nomination at the Republican national convention  represents a final gambit to unify conservatives to slow front-runner Donald Trump.

After a great deal of time and thought, after a great deal of consideration and prayer, I have come to the conclusion that if I am nominated to be president of the United States, that I will run on a ticket with my vice presidential nominee, Carly Fiorina, Cruz said.

The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard endorsed Cruz in March, after ending her own campaign, and has stumped actively for him around the country.

This is a fight for the soul of our party and the future of our nation, Fiorina told a cheering audience on stage in Indianapolis. This is a fight worth having.

It was the second dramatic upheaval from the Cruz campaign this week, following a stumbling public rollout Monday of an alliance with rival John Kasich.

This is just an attempt to resurrect a downward spiral, Los Angeles-based GOP strategist John Thomas said.

Experts said the move, which came far earlier than is typical in the race for partys presidential nomination, reflects a sense of urgency in the Cruz campaign ahead of the next state primary in Indiana. If Cruz fails to claim the state, front-runner Donald Trump will have an all-but certain path to the Republican nomination.

I dont really think it moves the needle in Indiana, said Pete Seat, a GOP strategist who ran Kasichs ground operation in Indiana until Monday, when the campaign struck a deal with Cruz and left the state. At this moment, its more about shifting the narrative from Trumps routs last night and moving it back to Cruz.

Media reports Wednesday morning had been focused on Trumps tremendous leap toward the nomination during a five-state sweep in the Northeast, until Cruz teased a major announcement later in the day, which swiftly was assumed to be his vice presidential pick.

Trump, anticipating Cruzs move, tweeted a video clip of Fiorina in a CNN interview before she dropped out of the race:

Ted Cruz is like any other politician, Fiorina says in the clip. He says whatever he needs to say to get elected.

He later put out a statement calling Cruzs announcement a waste of time.

It reminds me very much of the already failed Kasich collusion a desperate attempt to save a failing campaign by an all talk, no action politician, Trump said. The people of Indiana are very smart and they will see through this just like they saw through the already failed Kasich alliance. Cruz has no path to victory  he is only trying to stay relevant.

Candidates usually do not announce a running mate until they have cinched the nomination, said Aaron Carter, a fellow at Southern Methodist Universitys Center for Presidential History.

Typically, there are so many liabilities that its just not done, he said. Picking a running mate is the first major act of governance that a candidate demonstrates.

The last time a full ticket was announced before the presidential nominee actually was chosen was in 1976, which also was the last time there was a contested GOP convention. A contested convention, with multiple votes to determine the partys nominee, remains a real possibility this year.

With that in mind, the Cruz campaign has been working for weeks to court delegates to vote for him should the nominee not be chosen on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.

Cruz acknowledged that it is a break from tradition to name a running mate before securing the nomination, but he said he wanted voters to have a clear choice.

Fiorina brings complementary expertise to the Cruz ticket, pairing her background as a business executive with his background in constitutional law. In his introduction speech Wednesday, Cruz praised Fiorinas ascent from a secretary up the corporate ladder to become the first female CEO of a Fortune 20 company.

He also made reference to her roots in the Lone Star State. Born in Texas,  Cruz said, the very first thing I liked about her.

JoAnn Fleming, Cruzs tea party chair, said Fiorinas business acumen brings a boost to the Texas senators economic ambitions of creating jobs, building the military and repatriating offshore capital.

Fiorina also has no history in government, a crucial credential in a race where the leading candidates are striving to prove who is more anti-establishment.

Cruzs choice of Fiorina goes in line with his entire history of being an outsider, said Luke Macias, a Texas-based GOP strategist.

Fiorina also comes to the Cruz campaign with national name recognition and already having been vetted by the national press corps. So the conversation can move quickly beyond her background and on to the campaign issues, University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus said.

Fiorina will help the Cruz campaign play up Trumps resounding disapproval among women voters. Gallup reported this month that 70 percent of U.S. women view Trump unfavorably.

The billionaire repeatedly has derided women for their looks, and many of his comments have been condemned as misogynistic. He lobbed one such comment at Fiorina in a September article in Rolling Stone saying, Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?

Days later, Fiorina widely was declared winner of a CNN undercard presidential debate, in part because she stood up to Trumps comments at a time when few other Republican candidates were willing to do so.

I think the Cruz campaign probably thinks they can use Fiorina to goad Donald Trump into saying things that are sexist or biased because he already has a history of saying those things to her, said Jennifer Lawless, a professor of government and women in politics at American University.

She said any women who support Trump in spite of his long history of questionable comments are unlikely to switch their votes because of Fiorina.

Putting a woman on the ticket also seems like strategic posturing to face likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the general election.

Cruz supporter Karen Semple, whole drove to the announcement rally from Champaign, Illinois, embraced the choice.

She certainly can go toe to toe with Hillary, she said. Then Hillary cant play the poor me card  youre attacking a female.

Cruz faces a possible last stand in Indiana next week, where a full sweep of the winner-take-all primary could get Trump within striking distance of the threshold to win the GOP nomination. Cruz currently lags between 5 and 8 percentage points behind Trump in Hoosier State polls.

I think this pick in particular is as much about Indiana as it is about California, Seat said.

California, with the nations largest delegate cache, could decide the GOP nomination in the last state primary on June 7.

Fiorina led Hewlett-Packard in California from 1999 to 2005 and ran an unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign there in 2010. She could boast solid name recognition there and could drive more women voters out to the polls for Cruz.

Thomas doubted that Fiorina would make the difference Cruz needs in California.

Does Carly have more reach than Ted Cruz in California? Yes, absolutely. But I think its too little too late, he said. I think people are voting for president; theyre not voting for vice president at this stage.

dylan.baddour@chron.com

twitter.com/DylanBaddour

kevin.diaz@chron.com

twitter.com/DiazChron
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SAN ANTONIO  Two former San Antonio Police Department officers suspected of tricking women into sex by recruiting them to a bogus undercover program were indicted by a grand jury on Tuesday, according to the Bexar County District Attorney's Office.

Emmanuel Galindo and Alejandro Chapa both resigned from their positions as patrol officers with SAPD last September following their arrests on a litany of charges including sexual assault, compelling prostitution and official oppression.

A third officer suspected of involvement in the scam, Aaron Alford, was arrested at the same time as Chapa and Galindo and officials then had said he was charged with official oppression. But on Wednesday the DA's office said Alford had not been charged, though the investigation is still active. Sgt. Jesse Salame, a police spokesman, said Alford was indefinitely suspended in January.

MORE: 3 SAPD officers allegedly duped women into sex with contract for fake investigation

According to the District Attorney, police in Live Oak began investigating the officers after a woman reported that she had been sexually assaulted by a law enforcement officer in June 2015.

"The victim told police she met the officer after she was referred to him by an SAPD officer who was a friend of hers," the DA said in a release Wednesday. "The officer she was referred to told her that she could earn up to $5,000 a day if she qualified for this undercover operation."

Women told investigators the officers had them sign a contract agreeing to do anything necessary for the investigation, even if it meant having sex with them, officials said.

SEE ALSO: San Antonio man gets prison for not stopping at fatal crash

Investigators determined that there was no undercover operation, and that the officers had made similar false claims to more than 20 women, according to the DAs office.

The victims told authorities they were in desperate need of the money and believed the operation was in fact real, the release said.

Galindo faces five counts of sexual assault, six counts of compelling prostitution and 12 counts of official oppression, while Chapa faces four counts of sexual assault, four counts of compelling prostitution and eight counts of official oppression.

Staff Writer Elizabeth Zavala contributed to this report.

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mdwilson@express-news.net

Twitter: @MDWilsonSA
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Not too long ago, in a political galaxy not very far away, Julian Castro couldnt seem to give an interview without fielding an inevitable question: Would Hillary Clinton select him as her vice presidential running mate?

His answer was unwavering: The former mayor of San Antonio was focused on his current job as the nations housing secretary, and good things come to those who concentrate on the task at hand.

He might need to keep concentrating.

The political fates have conspired to dim Castros prospects as Clintons pick.

Donald Trumps dominance in the GOP primaries, particularly the near-death blows he delivered on Tuesday to Sen. Ted Cruz, coupled with Sen. Bernie Sanders refusal to concede in the face of Clintons slow ascendance, have rubbed some of the luster off the HUD secretarys shiny hair.

As an inspiring Latino figure, Castros best chances for luring Clinton existed when Cruz or Sen. Marco Rubio, both of Cuban descent, seemed poised to win the GOP nomination.

Rubio gave up last month. And despite Cruzs ploy this week to reboot by tapping Carly Fiorina as a running mate, the Texas senator is circling the drain.

With its primary next week, Indiana is the drain. Republicans: Unless the anti-Trump movement performs a neat trick, the white male business mogul is your man.

Clinton now must grapple with her white male problem.

In this years primaries and caucuses, Sanders has repeatedly beaten her among white voters, especially white men. She needs to find a running mate who would help her get those votes.

She also needs to worry about Sanders left.

After winning only Rhode Island on Tuesday, the dogged senator told a crowd of more than 6,000 people that he was still in the race and would make a stronger candidate in the general election than Clinton.

If and when Sanders eventually concedes, Clinton must rally his fervent, left-leaning supporters. And for all of Castros status as a rising star, he remains a more traditional Democrat than others in his party.

Thats partly a consequence of Castros cultivation in San Antonio, a conservative city with a powerful business community, as well as the restrictions placed on him politically as a member of President Barack Obamas Cabinet.

For Clinton, a more left-leaning, white male could prove a more effective running mate  perhaps why Castro seemed like an afterthought in a weekend New York Times article on the subject.

The newspaper reported that Clinton and her campaign advisers were mulling five in particular: the liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio; Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, former governors from Virginia; former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, a black Democrat; and Thomas Perez, a Latino civil rights attorney and the nations labor secretary.

The war, of course, is only heating up.

The GOP national convention opens July 18  a week before the Democrats meet  and Clinton will make her selection after the Republican ticket solidifies.

Who would Trump choose as his running mate?

Come summer, the stars of spring could look like another passing galaxy, and a certain young and inspiring Latino could drift again to the apex.

bchasnoff@express-news.net
You Can't Use Amazon Prime's Same-Day Service On Most Of The South Side

By Sophie Lucido Johnson in News on Apr 28, 2016 3:23PM

For as long as toilet paper has existed, people have wished that they could push a button to replenish it. In 2015, Amazon brought that dream closer to reality with Amazon Prime's same-day delivery.

Amazon Prime same-day delivery was made available to 14 U.S. metropolitan areasincluding Chicagoand all of a sudden, no one had to trek out into the snow to get dish soap or cat food anymore. Except, of course, for the people on much of the South Sidea vast area that Amazon's same-day delivery service does not cover. Even as Amazon has extended same-day service to include 13 additional cities nationwide since its implementation, many predominantly African-American neighborhoods on the South Side are still excluded. Chicago is not alone: According to a report from Bloomberg, Dallas, Boston, New York, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. also provide same-day delivery to significantly more zip codes in white neighborhoods than they do in black ones.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon has fiercely denied that race plays in any factor in which zip codes it decides to provide service to. To be fair, there is no evidence that suggests that race is taken into account. The system for establishing same-day delivery in certain zip codes rather than others is purely data-driven, and considers several factors, including the number of Prime memberships inside a zip code and the proximity of an area to an Amazon warehouse.

In Chicago, 472,000 people living on the South Side are excluded from same-day service, according to Bloomberg. Their report found that while 98 percent of white residents in Chicago have access to the service, only 54 percent of black residents do. Craig Berman, Amazons vice president for global communications, told Bloomberg that the South Side is too far from the company's Kenosha, Wisconsin-based distribution center. However, same-day service is available to Prime members in Oak Lawna predominantly white neighborhood that is full eight miles farther south than Chicago's South Side neighborhoods.

Amazon does provide same-day service to most of Chicago's Near West Side, which is predominantly black; it also provides service to other largely non-white neighborhoods such as Woodlawn, Pilsen, Austin, Lawndale, and Garfield Park. Of the Hispanic population in Chicago, 94 percent live inside the same-day service area.

Bloomberg's report speculated that income inequality plays a pivotal role in determining same-day delivery areas. Given the $99 annual membership fee, households with Prime memberships tend to be wealthier.

A recent study of Prime memberships and income groups conducted by investment bank Piper Jaffray found that about 70 percent of U.S. households with incomes of $112,000 or higher have Prime memberships, while 43 percent of households with incomes of $21,400 to $41,000 do. However, in Chicago (as well as in New York, Boston, and Atlanta), there are excluded areas with higher average incomes than covered neighborhoods.
A one-time test combining hepatitis B virus (HBV) surface antigen and HBV DNA measurement accurately distinguished inactive carriers from active cases of chronic HBV, based on data from 1,529 patients published online in the journal Hepatology.

Correct identification of active chronic HBV patients vs. inactive cases is a crucial step in identifying patients in need of less stringent follow-up, as well as patients who may benefit from additional follow-up and earlier initiation of antiviral therapy, wrote Dr. Jessica Liu of the Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan, and her colleagues (Hepatology. 2016. doi: 10.1002/hep.28552).

CDC/Dr. Erskine Palmer

The investigators reviewed data from patients in the REVEAL-HBV cohort, which included individuals aged 30-65 years with chronic HBV who were recruited between 1991 and 1992. All patients were free of liver cirrhosis and were seronegative for antihepatitis C virus and hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) at baseline, and were characterized as inactive carriers or active cases based on their serologic profiles at 18 months follow-up. Blood was collected at study entry and every 6-12 months.

At 18 months follow-up, the combined test distinguished inactive carriers from active cases with a sensitivity of 71% and a specificity of 85%. The positive and negative predictive values were 83% and 74%, respectively, and the diagnostic accuracy was 78%. In addition, the one-time combination measurement predicted cirrhosis, hepatocelluar carcinoma, and HBsAg seroclearance with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves of 0.72, 0.79, and 0.78, respectively. The combination test also yielded information about the predictability of inactive carrier status, showing that inactive carriers had a significantly lower risk of cirrhosis and hepatocelluar carcinoma; adjusted hazard ratios were 0.43 and 0.13, respectively.

To our knowledge, this is the first study to externally validate the usage of a one-time measurement of serum HBsAg less than 1,000 IU/mL and HBV DNA less than 2,000 IU/mL, the researchers wrote.

The study was limited by a relatively short follow-up period, but the results suggest that this single-point strategy may provide new and complementary information useful for simplifying or tailoring management of patients with chronic hepatitis B infection, they said.

The study was supported by the Taiwan Department of Health, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Roche Diagnostics, and Academia Sinica. One of the coauthors is employed by Roche Diagnostics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Preventions new data on suicide have resulted in much interest and concern. Both are warranted, but panic is not.

The CDCs National Center for Health Statistics reported a 63% increase in U.S. deaths by suicide for females and 43% for males, equating to a national rate of 13.5/100,000 (the highest rate since 1986, representing a 2% increase per year, compared with 1% per year before that). In actual numbers, rather than percentages, there were 29,199 suicidal deaths in 1994, compared with 42,773 such deaths in 2014.

The numbers reported for some subgroups were of particular concern. For example, girls aged 10-14 had a triple increase (50 deaths in 1999, compared with 150 in 2014). Native Americans had the sharpest increase (89% for females and 38% for males), and the only demographic group that had a decreased rate was black males older than age 65.

Dr. Howard S. Sudak

Another suicide concern relates to methodology. Twenty-five percent of completed suicides were by hanging or strangulation in 2014, compared with 20% in 1999. This trend is worrisome, because hanging/strangulation is such a readily available method. Interestingly, female suicide by guns fell from 37% to 31%, and male suicidal deaths from guns, from 62% to 55%.

Finally, a New York Times article about the CDC data addressed some theories of what could be responsible for these increases. The authors noted that marriage rates had decreased and divorce rates had increased over the period in question. Unmarried adult men are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than married ones, and unmarried adult women are 2.8 times more likely to do so than their married counterparts. Divorce rates have doubled for middle-aged and older adults since the 1990s as well.

History informs us that major cataclysms such as World War I and World War II resulted in markedly decreased U.S. suicide rates, and that major financial depressions such as the crash of 1929-1934 were associated with enormously increased rates. Such data indicate that our current increases in suicide may be at least partly explained by vulnerable individuals concerns about the state of the world, coupled with the enormous difficulties associated with rectifying these concerns. There seems to be a sense of constant threat from within and without, from perceived hostile countries to global warming, and our relative helplessness adds to the burdens perceived by all  but especially by the more vulnerable among us.

The new reported suicide data certainly are worrisome but, hopefully, will lead us to consider what can be done to ameliorate the situation. One certain way to diminish the problem is through means restriction. It is my belief that all gun possession (rifles, handguns, etc.) should be forbidden except among the military and the police. A civilized society should be civil. It doesnt take a Nostradamus, however, to predict that such restrictions are unlikely to take place in the United States now or, perhaps, ever. Certainly, a less controversial, but more costly, approach would be through markedly improved identification and treatment programs for those at risk.

We need many more properly trained social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists staffing our emergency departments. In typical busy hospitals, the ED staff is overloaded and overwhelmed, and apt to dismiss the concerns of suicidal patients because they dont consider their psychic pain as legitimate, and as a result, keep staff from their real and needy patients. Thus, imminently suicidal patients may be seen in a cursory manner, receiving what amounts to a revolving door approach.

Compounding this is the substantial shortage of mental health personnel capable of treating suicidal patients if and when they finally do get referred for outpatient mental health care. Waits at such centers are considerable, and there is a shortage of properly trained individuals to prescribe and closely monitor the required pharmacologic and psychological treatments.

In addition, there is an egregious lack of properly trained individuals to provide and closely monitor the psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy required; thus, the patient receives substandard and ineffective treatment, if any. How can we possibly fund adequate systems?

Many other developed countries have built and can afford health care systems that appear more advanced and humane than ours. We need to speak out and demand more for our patients and ourselves.

Dr. Sudak was chairman of the department of psychiatry at Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 until 2002, when he retired. He continued to have a small private practice and was active in the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention until 2012. Currently, he continues to serve as an expert witness in suicide malpractice litigation. He is married to Dr. Donna Sudak and is grateful for her advice on this manuscript.
Two Ebola vaccines were found safe and effective in separate international phase I trials involving healthy European and African adults, according to two reports published online April 27 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

After further testing and confirmation of these preliminary results, both vaccines should prove useful in both preventing and controlling future outbreaks, both research groups said.

NIAID A 39-year-old woman receives a dose of the investigational NIAID/ GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Ebola vaccine.

Several vaccines showed promise in previous primate and preliminary human studies, including one expressing the surface glycoprotein of Zaire ebolavirus (ZEBOV). Different versions of this vaccine were assessed in the present phase I studies.

In the first trial, investigators sought to extend the durability of this vaccine by administering a single priming dose of the chimpanzee adenovirus 3 (ChAd3) vaccine encoding the ZEBOV surface glycoprotein, then giving a booster with a modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) strain either 1 or 2 weeks later. The participants, 60 healthy adults aged 18-50 years, were randomly assigned to receive a low dose (20 subjects), an intermediate dose (20 subjects), or a high dose (20 subjects) of viral particles. Ten participants from each of these dose groups were then offered the booster. Then two additional groups of eight participants each were assessed to see whether giving the booster at 1 week vs. at 2 weeks made a difference in immunogenicity or safety.

All the study groups showed both antibody and T-cell immunogenicity after vaccination, but the groups that received the boosters showed antibody responses four times higher than those who did not. The MVA booster increased virus-specific antibodies by a factor of 12, and significantly increased neutralizing antibodies as well, said Dr. Katie Ewer of the Jenner Institute and Centre for Clinical Vaccinology and Tropical Medicine, University of Oxford (England) and the National Institute for Health Research Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and her associates.

The boosters also improved the vaccines cell-mediated immunity, increasing glycoprotein-specific CD8+ T cells by a factor of five.

In addition, the MVA booster markedly improved the vaccines durability, with 100% of recipients continuing to show seropositivity at 6 months, compared with only 50%-74% of participants who did not receive the booster.

The safety profile of the vaccine and the booster were termed acceptable at all dose levels and at all dosing intervals studied. There were no serious adverse events, and most adverse events were self-limited and mild. Moderate systemic adverse events included transient fever, myalgia, arthralgia, headache, fatigue, nausea, and malaise. Regarding laboratory abnormalities, four patients showed prolonged activated partial-thromboplastin time without coagulopathy, all of which resolved within 10 weeks; several patients showed mild or moderate lymphocytopenia and mild or moderate elevations in bilirubin, all of which were transient.

Overall, We found that boosting can be immunogenic for antibodies and T cells at prime-boost intervals as short as 1 week. Such short-interval regimens may facilitate vaccine deployment in outbreak settings where both rapid onset and durable vaccine efficacy are required, Dr. Ewer and her associates noted (N Engl J Med. 2016 Apr 27. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1411627).

They added that the ChAd3-plus-MVA viral vectors have other practical advantages. Large-scale manufacturing processes concordant with Good Manufacturing Practice standards have been established, and both vectors have been assessed in large numbers of vaccines for a range of indications, without reports of any substantial safety concerns to date, Dr. Ewer and her coauthors said.

The second report concerned four parallel studies: three open-label dose-escalation studies in Gabon, Kenya, and Germany and one randomized, double-blind trial in Geneva assessing the safety and immunogenicity of several doses of recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (rVSV)-vectored ZEBOV. The 158 participants were followed for at least 6 months, said Dr. Selidji T. Agnandji of the Centre de Recherches Medicales de Lambarene (Gabon), the Institut fur Tropenmedizin, Universitatsklinikum Tubingen (Germany), and the German Center for Infection Research, Tubingen, and his associates.

The vaccine was immunogenic in all participants across every dose and every study site, with higher glycoprotein-binding antibody titers at higher doses. These antibodies persisted through 6 months, a promising result suggesting that a single dose of this vaccine may be sufficient for early and possibly for long-term protection, the investigators said (N Engl J Med. 2016 Apr 27. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1502924).

Although there were no serious adverse events associated with this vaccine, acute vaccine reactions were common: 92% of patients reported an acute reaction, and 10%-22% (depending on the study site) reported grade 3 symptoms. The most bothersome  and unexpected  reactions involved viral seeding of joints and skin.
Columbus Day Is Now Indigenous Peoples' Day In Evanston

By Mae Rice in News on Apr 28, 2016 6:45PM



Evanston's waterfront (photo via Facebook)

Evanston will replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day on the the city celebration calendar, Evanston's Mitchell Museum of the American Indian announced on Wednesday.

"I believe it's the right thing to do," Evanston's mayor, Elizabeth Tisdahl, said in the statement.

The holiday, first adopted in Berkeley, California in 1992, has been spreading as of late. At least nine citiesincluding Albuquerque; Portland, Oregon; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Olympia, Washingtonadopted the holiday in 2015, according to the Associated Press.

Native American activists have been central to the surging popularity of the holiday, which celebrate the contributions of indigenous populations worldwide. Columbus Day and its celebratory tone, activists argue, ignores the violence, oppression and land theft Native people endured from European settlers following Columbus's arrival in America in 1492. Indigenous Peoples' Day aims to set the historic record straight.

In Evanston, the Mitchell Museum spearheaded the effort to get the holiday adopted, motivated by the city's Native American roots. Evanston was once home to the Ho-Chunk, Ottawa, Miami, and Potawatomi, according to the museum, and has a Native American population today as well.

This year Indigenous Peoples' Day, like Columbus Day, will be celebrated on Oct. 10.
Ohio hunters continue to enjoy the springtime pursuit of wild turkeys.

Turkey challenges

And why not, Ohio has the birds, hunters have the itch and there are few hunting challenges to match the excitement and skill sets that go along with tagging these wary game birds. Make no mistake, killing a mature gobbler is all about knowing how or being lottery-level lucky.

Ohio hunters get a month to accomplish the feat.

Youth hunt

Young hunters under 18 get a special treat, a weekend of gobbler chasing before the regular spring season opens. Youth season follows the same rules as those for the regular season; it gobblers only and its not easy. But its a great learning experience because young hunters must be accompanied by an adult and that usually means a family member of close friend who knows what they are doing.

Indeed, this type of special season brings out soon-to- be-adult hunters who will represent the future of our hunting traditions.

Turkey hunt decrease

This year, young hunters killed 1,564 tom turkeys during the two-day weekend special youth season, a very slight decrease from last years 1,589 birds checked.

Adult season open

The regular spring gobbler season is open now, running April 18 through May 15.

Opening day results showed a significant increase over last springs first day harvest.

Hunters checked 2,511 gobblers this year compared to 2,335 last year.

Gobblers may be the wrong word because the actual rule is spring hunters can only kill bearded birds and yes, there is an occasional hen with a visible beard.

Beards

Ohio hunters can and often do kill two birds during the month long season.

Wild turkeys are nothing less than a perfect example of how given the right conditions, wildlife can be successfully introduced or reintroduced to an area.Ohio was once void of turkeys. In fact, by 1904 there was not a wild turkey to be found in Ohio.

History

The Ohio Division of Wildlife reintroduced turkeys by releasing the first birds in the 1950s.

Fast forward to 1966 when Ohios first wild turkey season allowed hunting in just nine counties where 12 birds were harvested. The rest is history, as they say, with the harvest topping 1000 for the first time in 1984 and 20,000 in the year 2000.

First-time wild turkey hunters are usually hooked for life. It is that challenging and that rewarding.
SALEM, Ohio  Listen up, landowners. If you are being approached by a Rover landman, there are some things you may want to know before you start negotiating.

The Rover Pipeline LLC is an interstate natural gas project designed to carry 3.25 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas across 830 miles. It will reach across Ohio, West Virginia, Michigan and into the Dawn Hub in Ontario, Canada. In parts of the project, there will be two 42-inch lines, and in other parts of the project, there will be one line.

Rover pipeline

In Ohio, the counties with land impacted include Belmont, Harrison, Carroll, Tuscarawas, Stark, Wayne, Ashland, Richland, Crawford, Seneca, Wood, Hancock, Henry, Fulton and Defiance.

The pipeline is expected to be in service in late 2016 or the first half of 2017.

FERC regulated

The Rover pipeline is an interstate pipeline, and is governed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which must issue a permit before the pipeline construction can begin.

According to FERC spokeswoman Tamara Young-Allen, the permit application process is about midway completed.

A draft environmental impact statement was issued in February, and the follow-up comment period ended April 11.

FERC staff is now going through the comments, and they are expected to issue a final rule and final environmental impact statement this summer.

Landowners in Ohio

There are more than 1,200 landowners in Ohio impacted by the pipelines construction, and not all of them are happy about it. At least 750 have hired attorneys to represent them in negotiations, according to filings made with FERC.

The filings have more than one thing in common  most state its not just about the money being offered for the easements, its also about the terms of the easement agreements.

Lawyer involvement

Some law firms have filed briefs with FERC asking the commission to force Rover Pipelines to negotiate fairly with landowners.

Columbus-based Emens and Wolper Law Firm is working with the firm of White Law Office, Millersburg, Ohio, and the law firm of Goldman and Braunstein LLP, Columbus. The attorneys claim the landowners feel the deals offered are one-sided and benefit only the pipelines.

Its a stacked deck against the landowner, said Dick Emens, of Emens and Wolper.

Liability, damage issues

The attorneys say landowners need stronger protection from liability and property damage resulting from construction or operation of the pipeline.

Landowners need language in the easements to protect them in the event something happens with the pipeline, such as explosion. They want to know that someone is going to pay for the injuries or property damage.

Other information in the filings show landowners are concerned about compaction, since the pipeline is passing through a large portion of farmland.

The filings show that the pipeline company could be using equipment that weighs three times the weight of a combine loaded with grain, which they are concerned will lead to compaction and lower yields.

Drainage tile

Other concerns have been with drain tile in farm fields.

The hope is that Rover will include a plan about replacing drain tile before construction begins.

Farmers are losing very real production value, said Attorney Tom White, of the White Law Office, talking about the impacts of the drainage tile being disassembled and reassembled, as well as the compaction issues.

He added if a landowner discusses using a local land improvement contractor for field drainage/tiling, then that should be specified in the agreement.

Contractors

Dale Arnold, Ohio Farm Bureau Federation energy director, agreed, and said landowners need to know what they can do in their easements when it comes to drainage tile and compaction.

He said if a landowner has used a local land improvement contractor in the past to install drainage lines or clay tiles, the landowners attorney who writes or reviews the easement can write that into the easement so that the landowner can use that contractor again to ensure their property is put back the way he wants it.

Moving the pipeline

The comments reflect other landowner concerns, such as the lack of willingness by the pipeline company to relocate the proposed pipeline route on the property to accommodate for projects the landowner has planned or because of other existing pipelines or railways on properties.

Emens said the landowners he is representing say they have been told that unless landowners take the offers given, there will be no choice in the matter  and the pipeline will force eminent domain.

Money

And one of the biggest hurdles is the negotiation of payment for the permanent pipeline easements. The pipeline easement agreement includes only one payment, and the easement is permanent, unlike an gas and oil lease where the landowner could be paid royalties or another leasing bonus in the future.

According to Emens and White, the going offer for landowners is $42.73 a linear foot for the construction of a single line on the property and just over $60 per linear foot for the construction of a double line on the property.

However, in negotiating for landowners on the Nexus pipeline, which has a smaller pipeline diameter and is shorter in length, Emens and Wolper found that Nexus was offering landowners between $140-$160 per square foot.

Rover response

For its part, Rover Pipelines said it is negotiating fairly with landowners.

According to an email statement to Farm and Dairy from Rover Pipelines spokeswoman Vicki Granado, Rover has allocated $124 million for direct payments to landowners along the route.

It is Rovers first choice to negotiate voluntary easement agreements with landowners. If an impasse occurs between the company and the landowner, then and only then, do we use legal options available to us, the email statement read.

We are very proud of the success rate we have had in negotiating voluntary easement agreements overall. We are able to reach agreements with more than 90 percent of the landowners we have worked with across all the projects associated with Energy Transfer Partners, the parent company of Rover, said Granado.

Property values are assessed by local real estate appraisers. Rover bases its offers of compensation upon these professional appraisals.

Easement payments are typically based upon two categories: A permanent easement (which includes like land use) or a temporary easement for construction, and crop loss if appropriate (nontaxable).

Crop loss funding

Granado stated farmers would be paid 100 percent of the crop loss in the first and second years, 60 percent in the third year, 30 percent in year four and 10 percent in year five.

Eminent domain

OFBFs Arnold said the eminent domain process is not available to Rover Pipeline until is granted the permit from FERC, which will be Oct. 27 at the earliest, according to FERC.

In the meantime, Arnold said, every landowner approached by a Rover Pipelines landman can stave off eminent domain by negotiating with the company.

There is still time to work out an easement, he said.

He added that odds are with the landowner that an agreement can be decided, and said a national average for pipelines to use the eminent domain proceedings is between 1 and 1 1/2 percent.

Many landowners come to an agreement before they get to that point, said Arnold.

Negotiate, negotiate

Arnold said that as landowners negotiate with any pipeline company, they need to keep good notes. Document every name, date and was discussed at every meeting.

I encourage all farmers and landowners to negotiate in good faith and these notes will be very valuable in showing that, said Arnold. Its a matter of negotiation. Continue to communicate, keep good notes.

And last, but not least, if a landowner feels pressured by a pipeline company in any way, there is something he can do.

If you feel pressured, call the Ohio Attorney General and file a complaint, said Arnold.

If a landowner is looking for an attorney to represent them in a pipeline easement, Arnold encouraged the landowners to contact the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, which maintains a list of 18 law firms in Ohio that are known for their work in the field.

Tips for pipeline negotiation

Take notes.

The No. 1 thing to do when negotiating with a landman regarding a pipeline easement is to take notes of each session.

Get a notebook and designate it the pipeline easement notebook.

Record the date of the meeting, who you are meeting with and what is discussed. If you look at the property with the Rover representative, jot it down.

Keep a running tab of the meetings.

The notebook will become valuable if forced to hire an attorney or if you are forced into eminent domain proceedings. The notebook can serve as proof that you have been negotiating faithfully.

Also know this:

Rover case:

Rover is an interstate pipeline, which means it is a pipeline governed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Any court proceedings will be in a federal court, not a county court. In Ohio, this will mean that court hearings could be held in Youngstown, Akron, Cleveland or Toledo depending on the land location.

Quick Take means that a federally licensed pipeline can ask for a preliminary injunction in the negotiation proceedings, and means the pipeline can build the pipeline now and pay later. The landowner will be forced to accept the construction on the property while waiting for the court system to determine the land easement value. It is important to note that Rover has not yet asked for the quick take.

All court proceedings in the Rover pipeline will be in federal court, and there are no juries in the federal court. The land value will be determined by a team of three commissioners from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Story update

* Since the original publication of this story, Rover responded with comments.*

Our (Rover) easement payments are calculated in linear feet. Those are very different things. Again, we do not discuss details of our easement payments as we consider those private contracts with the individual landowners, said Rover Pipelines spokeswoman Vicki Granado.
Shropshire

A Full-Time position is available for an assistant herdsperson on a family dairy farm in mid Shropshire. We have a 250 dairy herd rearing own replacements together with a b...
In addition to reducing poverty and hunger, agriculture can play a crucial role in making the response to climate change responsible and more effective, Maria-Helena Semedo, Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Deputy Director-General for Natural Resources said today.

Agriculture can help reduce the impact of climate change; thus fostering resilience among communities, she said during a High-Level Thematic Debate on Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UN Headquarters.

Semedo was in New York to attend the signing ceremony of the Paris Climate Change Agreement as well as other high level events.

Some 175 countries today signed the historic accord - agreed last December in the French capital - at a ceremony at UN headquarters hosted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The Agreement recognizes "the fundamental priority of safeguarding food security and the particular vulnerabilities of food production systems to the impacts of climate change".

It also highlights the need to "increase the ability to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience in a manner that does not threaten food production."

Impact on agriculture

Agriculture is one of the main sectors of the economy that is severely affected by climate change. The recent El Nino phenomenon is a testimony to that, Semedo noted.

The support for the agreement comes at a time when some 60 million people around the world are being affected by the El Nino climate event.

It is important to note that the rural poor and small holder farmers are severely affected by climate change threats, Semedo stressed.

Role of farmers

During speaking engagements at various high level events, the FAO Deputy-Director General reiterated the crucial role of family farmers in poverty and hunger eradication.

Poverty and hunger have similar causes and are often bound together - and must therefore be tackled together.

"Support to end extreme poverty, hunger and all other forms of malnutrition by 2030 - the key of SDGs 1 and 2. Nearly 80 percent of the extreme poor and hungry people live in rural areas, so let's empower rural actors, small holders, rural women, youth, and indigenous peoples in our collective action," said Semedo.
New data revealed today shows bees can be exposed to more pesticides from contaminated wildflowers than from crops on farms.

The research, discussed at a scientific briefing in London today (28 April 2016) organised by the Soil Association, showed a staggering 97% of the neonicotinoids brought back to honeybee hives in pollen could come from wildflowers - not oilseed rape.

The briefing looked at the latest scientific research and its implications for the environment and the future use of neonicotinoid pesticides in the UK.

The panel included three leading experts on the impacts of neonicotinoid pesticides on pollinators - Professor Dave Goulson, Dr Lynn Dicks and Dr Penelope Whitehorn. Peter Campbell from Syngenta responded to the presentations from the three scientists.

The panel discussed the recently published, first ever assessment of pollinators by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), recent research on population impacts of neonicotinoids, and new research on the risk posed by neonicotinoids and other pesticides in wildflowers and hedgerows.

Professor Dave Goulson revealed new scientific research that found when neonicotinoids are applied to seeds, low concentrations are found in the nectar and pollen of the crop, which are then collected and consumed by bees.

But throughout spring and summer, mixtures of neonicotinoids and other pesticides are also found in the pollen and the nectar of wildflowers growing in arable field margins and hedgerow flowers like hawthorn, wild rose, blackberries and honeysuckle at concentrations that are sometimes much higher than those found in the crop.

'Contamination of wild plants near treated crops'

Dave Goulson said: "Indeed, the large majority (97%) of neonicotinoids brought back in pollen to honey bee hives in arable landscapes was from wildflowers, not crops.

"Both previous and ongoing field studies have been based on the premise that exposure to neonicotinoids would occur only during the blooming period of flowering crops and that it may be diluted by bees also foraging on untreated wildflowers.

"Here, we show that exposure is likely to be higher and more prolonged than currently recognised because of widespread contamination of wild plants growing near treated crops."

The Soil Association says one in 10 species of Europe's wild bees is facing extinction, and neonicotinoid insecticides are "increasingly seen as contributing to these declines.

"In addition to neonicotinoids, farmers may spray non-organic crops a dozen or more times while they are growing, with anything up to over 20 different chemicals."

'Pesticides key reason as to decline in bumbelees'

Peter Melchett, policy director at the Soil Association said: "This shocking new research shows that the very wildflowers that were designed to protect bees are actually killing them.

"The scientific panel agreed pesticides in general, and neonicotinoids in particular, are one of the key reasons why bumblebees and other pollinators are in decline.

"But the dramatic new issue raised at this briefing is that we cannot save bees while we continue any use of neonicotinoids - the current ban should be extended to all crops.

"The routine, regular use of any toxic chemical or drug is now seen as bad practice  and seed coatings like neonicotinoids are just that - used routinely, and long before any problem emerges - this prophylactic use of pesticides should be stopped."

To combat bee decline, the Governments Pollinator Strategy has focused on creating safe havens for bees by increasing flower habitats next to fields  yet research shows these flowers may be laden with dangerous chemicals.

'Manage the environment in a smart way'

The panel was chaired by Dr Alastair Leake who said: "We need to be as smart in the way we manage the environment as we are in the way we manage our crops."

Meanwhile, Dr Penelope Whitehorn concluded that neonicotinoids do have far reaching impacts on many different species.

Dr Lynn Dicks called for improving regulatory systems globally  some are not as robust as others and pollinators in countries like Africa are facing a rapid decline.

The panel concluded that the current ban on neonicotinoids should be maintained, and that more work needs to be done looking at chronic exposure to neonics.

They concluded the current regulatory system as being "flawed" and only looks at a limited period of exposure and does not include exposure to chemical cocktails.

The panel also called for more large-scale landscape studies.
Photos: The Making Of Logan Square's New Prince Mural

By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 28, 2016 1:49PM

On Wednesday, we spoke with two Chicago artists currently working on commemorative Prince muralsand we sent our photographer Braden Nesin to shoot the J4F Krew's mural unfolding. Located at roughly Fullerton and Sacramento, this mural faces the Blue Line tracks between the California and Logan Square stops. It's on the second story of the building that houses X-It European Clothing Boutique at street level and, on the second floor, Look Better Hair Salon (2950 W. Fullerton Ave.).

In the photos above, Kel 4 of J4F Krew, 36, works in an army jacket and bright red sneakers, often with a camo bandanna wrapped around his nose and mouth. (He's on the rooftop with his pitbull, Chula.) Kel's working with Alexander, another J4F member, to add detail to Prince's face with a paper stencil, and give the mural crisper black outlines. Alexander, who wears a gray crewneck sweatshirt or a navy blue T-shirt in the photos above, told Chicagoist he moved to Chicago from Texas less than a month ago.

Kel says the mural should be finished by Sunday, when the crew plans to have a barbecue on the building's rooftop, spitting distance from passing trains. By then, the mural will feature the message "All I want is to see you laugh," a lyric from "Purple Rain," across the top, Kel said. Along the bottom of the mural, against a blue background, will be the guitar sheet music for "Purple Rain."
Always a must see at Cereals, this years crop plots reveal an intense focus not only on high yielding varieties but on crops that will allow farmers, in tough economic times, to maximize output whilst reducing their cost of production.

The event  which takes place on June 15  16 at Chrishall Grange in Cambridgeshire  will see a predominance of new varieties that combine generous yields with agronomic characteristics that provide growers with much needed resilience and flexibility.

AHDB  3 Rs

As such, the three Rs of arable business risk, resilience and reward will be at the heart of the AHDB Cereals & Oilseeds exhibit and their ever popular Recommended List plot tours will now cover over 150 variety plots including wheat, barley, oilseed rape and a new daily oats tour. Dr Grantley-Smith said: With incentives for growers to diversify rotations, the oats tour and exhibit will help clarify the opportunity to grow for the oats market as part of a resilient arable business.

AHDB experts will also encourage visitors to discuss relative risk in relation to variety selection and applying the Recommended List to individual growing and marketing situations.

Limagrain

A range of new winter wheat, oilseed rape and spring barleys that are not costly to grow, but also offer the opportunity to earn a premium, are the highlight of the Limagrain stand.

Very high yielding soft feed winter wheats LG Sundance and LG Motown are aimed at the distilling and soft UK's export markets. LG Motown, has consistently yielded 104.3% over control, whilst LG Sundance has a very good 7 rating for the yield robbing disease Septoria tritici.

The companys oilseed rape breeding programme is responsible for Archimedes which offers early plant vigour and good autumn development as well as a very good disease resistance profile including clubroot resistance, a 6 for Light Leaf Spot and an impressive 8 for Stem Canker (Rlm7 resistance).

For spring barley, LG Opera is a Limagrain first: a triple use variety it is under test by the IBD for brewing and also, spreading risk, both the malt and grain distilling categories.

Elsoms

Strength in depth is evident at Elsoms with four AHDB candidate wheats -Bennington, Moulton, Freiston and Dunston  lining up alongside Belgrade the AHBD recommended early maturing, high yielding (106%) group 4 hard feed wheat.

Newly recommended OSR Elgar tops AHDB E/W Recommended list with the highest gross output (111%) and an impressive disease resistance and agronomic package including the earliest maturity of the conventional varieties.

For spring barley the company offers Acorn, combining impressive malting potential with excellent disease resistance whilst oat varieties Harmony and Yukon combine high yields with good quality.

RAGT

RAGT is showing three breakthrough varieties, focusing on new and robust genetics to meet the needs of both farmers and end-users.

New milling wheat RGT Illustrious, has a treated yield of 100% and consistent baking performance, combined with excellent disease resistance and strong standing ability.

RGT Knightsbridge, is a high yielding, high alcohol soft Group 4-type wheat. Topping distillers tests over the past two years it also achieved, in 2014 and 2015, a score of 107% of controls for the UK, and 106% for the north.

RGT Planet, is the highest-yielding (108%) spring barley, ahead of any other malting or feed variety on the RL, and is in the process of IBD evaluation, having already been approved in France and Ireland.

NIAB TAG

NIAB TAG will be featuring variety demonstration plots alongside the latest independent arable advice focusing on future developments and the role of technology, including remote sensing techniques. Simon Kightley will advise on 15 winter oilseed rape varieties, linseed, peas and beans and Clare Leaman will be offering insight into winter wheat variety choices for 2016 with 30 established and new varieties on display.

NIAB TAG will also be helping growers to understand and tackle their blackgrass problems and offering advice on cover cropping strategies using phacelia, oats and vetch, crimson clover, medick and radish plots.

Senova

The variety Senova expects to receive most interest at Cereals 2016 is Costello, its new Group 4 hard feed wheat. A very high yielding winter wheat which combines excellent grain quality (highest specific weight of 80.4kg/hl, a Hagberg of 313 and a grain protein of 11.5%) with strong agronomic package, Costello offers growers the opportunity to maximize their output, keeping their growing costs in check and exploit its market flexibility.

One of the highest yielding candidate winter wheats, the hard feed variety Marlowe, with a yield of 107, has orange wheat blossom midge resistance to add to its good disease resistance ratings.

Bayer

Bayer will be displaying two new varieties in the oilseed rape plots, and promoting the difference that an oil bonus can make to crop profitability  as much as 142/ha.

InVigor 1030 (InV1030) is a candidate for the 2017/18 AHDB Recommended List, and has excellent yield, extremely high oil content and the best combination of disease resistance to both Phoma and light leaf spot.

Also available for planting in autumn 2016 is InVigor 1020 (InV1020), which has a similar agronomic profile to Harper, plus improved standing power and the highest oil content available.

Finally, spare some time for the packed programme of debates, panel sessions and technical seminars taking place in the Arable Marquee. These including Franek Smith of the British Edible Pulses Association (BEPA) and farmer Mark Wells talking about how pulses can more than tick the green box  they can be profitable too!
A new pilot scheme opens today, providing a more efficient and effective way of farmers informing beekeepers of their intention to apply insecticide nearby.

BeeConnected's pilot will pave the way for a nationwide launch later in year.

Current best agricultural practice, as advocated by farm assurance schemes and the UK code of practice for pesticide use, requires that notification takes place to minimise the risk to bees of spraying.

The traditional system of notifying Spray Liaison Officers (SLOs), who acted as go between the farmers and beekeepers, has not always been straightforward.

'Automatically notified of beehives in the area'

Chris Hartfield, bee health specialist at the NFU said: "This is a great opportunity for all farmers across the Hertfordshire region.

"Once they register for BeeConnected they will be automatically notified of beehives in their area and will be able to update their communications with beekeepers accordingly."

BeeConnected plans to operate on a very simple, yet efficient, two-way communication process: farmers in Hertfordshire are invited to register, identify their fields and, in just a few simple clicks, inform local beekeepers when they intend to spray an insecticide in particular fields.

Similarly, beekeepers across the region are encouraged to register and plot the location of their hives, whether permanently or temporarily placed.

Beekeepers will receive a notification when a farmer within their locality (up to a maximum of 5km) is undertaking a spray event within that vicinity.

The beekeeper will then be in an informed position to decide what action, if any, to take.

The notification system is being promoted by the Voluntary Initiative (VI) who have worked closely with the Crop Protection Association, British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) and the National Farmers Union (NFU). The development of the site has been funded by the CPA.

'Farmers are committed to responsible use of pesticides'

Richard Butler, Chairman of the VI said: "Were delighted to support this initiative.

"Farmers are committed to responsible use of pesticides and protecting pollinator health, this is a simple tool that supports them in that aim.

The website offers various levels of communication between farmers and beekeepers, including the ability to remain anonymous if they wish.

Tim Lovett of the BBKA added: "BeeConnected is an important step forward in communication between farmers and beekeepers.

"The scheme is based on a proposal put forward by the BBKA to bring spray-alerting into the 21st century.

"The launch of BeeConnected is most timely and we hope that all beekeepers in Hertfordshire will register and take part."

It is anticipated that the Hertfordshire pilot will last for 5 weeks with a national launch in September 2016, to coincide with autumn spraying.
A Chinese lantern started a huge fire on a nature reserve in Dorset. Fire fighters were called to Hartland Moor near Wareham a few days ago to a member of the public saying there was a bonfire that had spread to the heath.

However, when crews arrived shortly after 8.10pm they found that it was a blaze sparked by a Chinese lantern landing on the shrubland.

Crews from Wareham and Poole attended the fire, although no indication was given of its severity.

The fire was put out by 8.34pm. There was a second false alarm caused when someone spotted another Chinese lantern on Hartland Moor.

Craig Baker from Dorset & Wiltshire Fire Service said: "With Chinese lanterns, you're basically throwing a naked flame into the sky with no control over the direction it will take or where it will land.

"There is no guarantee that the fuel source will be fully extinguished and cooled when the lantern eventually descends, and that presents a real fire hazard.

"Chinese lanterns are very attractive when they're in the sky, and we fully understand why they are so popular.

"We would just urge people to think very carefully about where they will be released."

Farmers and the rural community are urging people to ban the usage of sky lanterns due to the risk they pose to livestock and property.

Evidence has shown that the frames of lanterns can harm or even kill farm animals if they are ingested, fields of standing crops and buildings are at significant risk of being set alight, while littering is also a major problem.

In 2014, the Trading Standards Institute published a new code of practice following discussions between the government and industry. The code offers guidance for those designing, manufacturing, distributing, retailing or using the lanterns.

'Not just livestock affected - many other valuables are'

NFU Deputy President Minette Batters said: "I know from personal experience just how dangerous sky lanterns can be after losing a cow from my own herd which died after eating some fine wire from a lantern that landed on the farm - the post mortem revealed that this was the cause of death.

"But its important to point out that its not just farm animals which can be affected. Sky lanterns cause fires to crops, grassland on moors and bales of hay and straw that have been stacked, which can lead to a loss of buildings.

"It is really encouraging that local authorities are now starting to see sense and have banned the release of lanterns on their land.

"However, we would like to see many more follow suit. Members of the public can play a big part by writing to their local councils spelling out how dangerous sky lanterns can be.

"Please back British farming and think twice before setting sky lanterns alight and releasing them into the environment.

"The NFU continues to call for an outright ban and we will continue to lobby government until action is taken."
President Obama has headed home after talking up the value of the trade deal known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). If the deal progresses, what will it mean for food, farmers and consumers?

In a new report by Friends of the Earth, an international network of environmental organizations in 74 countries, they have identified 3 key areas of concern around TTIP and the impact it will have on farming.

'TTIP will be bad for farming'

The report shows TTIP will generally "be bad for farming", while in theory it will open up US markets to British producers, the lower cost of most meat and dairy products in the US means that the "value of the livestock and dairy sectors will decline.

"This will lead to less money for our farmers and a lower contribution from agriculture to our GDP.

"One study (CEPII) found that the contribution of agriculture to the UK's GDP  will go down $1.1 billion (about 765 million)."

'Threaten food safety regulations'

"In the US, meat products are subject to less stringent hygiene controls and are often washed in chlorine before going on sale.

"GM products are allowed and pesticides banned in the EU are routinely used. During negotiations the US will continue to push for these products to be sold to UK and European consumers."

'Will not improve animal welfare'

The report goes on to state American animal welfare regulations are less strict than in the UK and EU.

"TTIP will fill supermarket shelves with more meat reared to poor welfare standards and routinely injected with unnecessary antibiotics, pushing our farmers and lawmakers to lower standards to compete.

"It has been calculated that stricter welfare, environmental and hygiene standards in the EU add 5% to the cost of poultry production"

'Faceless agri-business'

Commenting on the report, Friends of the Earth campaigner, Kierra Box, said: "The majority of British farmers and consumers will lose out if TTIP goes ahead.

"TTIP risks further intensification of farming leading to farms across Europe being driven out of business. This means we could also see hard-fought for food quality standards destroyed.

"The clear danger here is that farming is being sacrificed to get a TTIP deal at any costs.

"Farmers are at the heart of our communities across Europe, not faceless agri-business.

"If we want to address climate change as well as protect our countryside we will need to move towards producing more low intensity, local food.

"We need to support farmers to grow more fruit and vegetables, not challenging them to export more meat at ever-lower prices."

What is TTIP?

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a proposed trade agreement between the European Union and the United States, with the aim of promoting trade and multilateral economic growth.

The agreement is under ongoing negotiations and its main three broad areas are: market access; specific regulation; and broader rules and principles and modes of co-operation.

The European Commission says that the TTIP would boost the EU's economy by 120 billion, the US economy by 90 billion and the rest of the world by 100 billion.

The controversial agreement has been criticized and opposed by unions, charities, NGOs and environmentalists, particularly in Europe.
The Princess Royal, the Chancellor of Harper Adams University, opened the Dairy Crest Innovation Centre at the Harper Adams University campus, Newport, Shropshire yesterday.

She spent two hours touring the facility before unveiling a plaque to commemorate the occasion.

Princess Anne was accompanied throughout her visit by Stephen Alexander (Chairman, Dairy Crest), Mark Allen (Chief Executive, Dairy Crest) and Dr David Llewellyn (Vice-Chancellor, Harper Adams University).

Princess Anne was particularly interested to hear about the knowledge sharing partnership between Dairy Crest and Harper Adams University  a unique development between a major food business and a University.

The partnership means a number of students will spend time working within Dairy Crest on 12 month placements and one-off projects. It also gives Dairy Crest access to research, staff and students at the University.

The Princess met several students from Harper Adams who are spending their placement year in industry working for Dairy Crest.

She also viewed the state of the art facilities at the Innovation Centre, including development kitchens, a pilot plant and the laboratories.

'Very exciting for everybody'

Before unveiling the plaque, she commented: "May I just thank Dairy Crest for joining the University of Harper Adams on this Innovation building.

"It is very exciting for everybody and very nice for the University to have its reputation and future underlined in quite such an interesting way.

"So we all look forward to what is going to happen in this building."

Mark Allen, Chief Executive of Dairy Crest, said: "I am delighted we were able to welcome the Princess Royal to open our new Innovation Centre.

"Building brands and adding value is fundamental to everything we do at Dairy Crest. Innovation is at the heart of our strategy.

"I am particularly excited that the Dairy Crest Innovation Centre, which is home to our research and development and technical teams, is built on the campus of Harper Adams University.

"The university is well known and respected for its leading role in food, farming and science education.

"Harper Adams and Dairy Crest are both very proud of the ground-breaking partnership.

"It is built on regular interaction between our respective staff and Harper Adams students, giving Dairy Crest a link into leading research within the agriculture and food sectors."

Dr David Llewellyn, Vice Chancellor, Harper Adams University, said: "The Princess Royal takes a keen interest in developments at the University and we were pleased to be able to show her the unique and very positive collaboration we have developed with Dairy Crest.

"A number of our students were able to discuss their research projects with the Chancellor, all of which were related to the companys research and product development activities.

"It is always a pleasure to welcome Her Royal Highness to Harper Adams, and to be able to celebrate the opening of the Dairy Crest Innovation Centre in this way made it a great occasion for the company and the university."
The Scottish Government has "virtually fulfilled" its pledge to ensure any Scottish farmers and crofters who had not received any support payment by the end of March would receive a nationally-funded payment from the Scottish Government in April.

With a few days left in the month, NFU Scotland understands that virtually all eligible businesses have received, or are about to receive, an element of their support equivalent to approximately 80 percent.

The Union believes that of those businesses as yet unpaid, the majority will receive a notification letter before the end of the month.

There are a small number of complex applications which Scottish Government is struggling to process and they are unlikely to receive any funding by 30 April.

The Union is extending an offer to help any member who finds themselves in this position.

The support payment pledge, made by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to NFU Scotland in March, was in response to the catastrophic delivery of new CAP support to the Scottish industry.

Investment of 178 million in a flawed IT delivery system meant that the vast majority of Scottish farmers and crofters saw payments significantly delayed and a huge hole develop in Scotlands rural economy.

As part of that pledge, there was a commitment for beef calf scheme payments to be made before the end of April and NFU Scotland also understands that those scheme payments are now underway.

March also saw Scottish Government deliver part payments to those farming in Less Favoured Areas with payments based on 2015 claims.

While the gap in Scotlands rural economy is slowly being filled, NFU Scotland says it will be looking to the new Scottish Government after the elections on 5 May to finish the job.

The NFU Scotland wants the following completed:

 Complete the processing of all 2015 applications

 Finalise all mapping associated with claims

 Complete the regionalisation process so that every land parcel is allocated to one of the three Scottish regions

 Fix the entitlement rate associated with each region and issue confirmation of entitlement letters to claimants

 Deliver balance payments due under the Basic Payment Scheme, Greening, Young Farmers and Less Favoured Areas Scheme

 Make awards under the National Reserve

 Deliver payments due under the new Scottish Upland Sheep Support Scheme.

With applications for the 2016 scheme already being submitted, the Union is looking for a categorical assurance from the Government that the many problems encountered with last years scheme will not be repeated.

The Union proposes a clear timetable of when Scottish farmers and crofters can expect payments in the future must be established and adhered to.

'Blew a hole in Scotland's rural economy'

NFU Scotland President Allan Bowie commented: "The 2015 payment debacle was wholly unacceptable and Scottish Governments failure to quickly address its deeply flawed IT delivery system blew a hole in Scotlands fragile rural economy.

"It took relentless pressure from NFU Scotland and the commitment of members to rally outside the Scottish Parliament on the issue to finally generate a solution to the issue and establish welcome plans to ease the financial pressure on farm businesses and the supply trade.

"We understand that virtually all farmers and crofters have now received a part payment  either through their application being processed through the flawed IT system or secured through a payment from the national pot pledged by the First Minister in March.

"We expect that figure to rise further in the final few days of April.

"And with beef calf scheme payments now starting, that puts a further 37 million into the rural economy.

"Slowly the 400 million hole in Scotlands rural economy, which opened up between December 2015 and now, is being filled but the damage to businesses and the stress placed on individuals by Scottish Government was intolerable.

"We now need Scottish Government to quickly finish the job and deliver the balance of the payments.

"With Single Application Forms for 2016 already being submitted and the deadline of May 16 only three weeks away we urge all claimants to press ahead with their applications and not to leave it until the last minute.

"Last years IT failures prompted a deadline extension but signs so far are that the system has markedly improved.

"While some of our members have still encountered problems, Scottish Government has been working to rectify them and there appears to be no major issues at this time.

"One of the first jobs for Scotlands next Cabinet Secretary, once appointed after the 5 May elections, will be to complete the 2015 payment run, ensure SAF 2016 applications go smoothly and to lay down a clear, realistic timetable for payments in the future."
There maybe sunshine on the horizon for the pig industry after enduring a difficult year.

According to a market specialist there are signs that things are likely to improve. The industry has seen tough times recently with prices falling for the past two years.

In a period that has seen production rise and consumer demand fall, pork prices have come down by a third. Add to this the poor exchange rate and the Russian ban and it has been a perfect storm.

Now though, there may be light at the end of the tunnel. Stephen Howarth, a market specialist manager at AHDB, said there are signs that things are likely to get better.

He said the industry would be helped by the fact that the Pound had weakened against the Euro compared to last year.

On top of this he also said that that the European market had stabilised and that consumer demand was starting to rise again.

Looking to the future Stephen said that the industry needed to look at developing new products to draw in the modern consumer.

He also said that the industry needed to work alongside government to open up new export markets similar to the Chinese market in order to add more value to the carcass.

UK pig meat production remained strong in last month, with 79,800 tonnes output during the month, according to latest figures from Defra.

This equated to an increase of around 5% compared with March 2015, once changes to reporting periods are taken into account.
From traditional cheddar to Somerset brie, Europes food connoisseurs cant get enough of British cheese, with 330 million of UK cheese exports going to the EU market in 2015.

Also, export volumes increased by 8 per cent since 2010, Environment Secretary Elizabeth Truss said today.

Visiting Somersets Wyke Farms, the Environment Secretary hailed the success of British cheese exports, three-quarters of which went to Europe last year.

France alone bought 59 million of British cheese, which is gaining a growing reputation across the continent for its quality and taste.

Demand for Wykes award-winning cheddar is growing rapidly in France, with sales up by 30 per cent last year.

Last year 60 per cent of all its exports went to the EU, with top customers being France, Spain and Czech Republic.

Outside the EU, cheese producers like Wyke Farms could face crippling tariffs of up to 30 per cent to sell their produce to Europe, costing an additional 169 million per year and meaning EU consumers would pay much higher prices for our cheese.

'Stronger, better and safer in the EU'

Speaking as she visited Wyke Farms dairy, Environment Secretary Elizabeth Truss said:

"With a huge 330 million of cheese exports going to Europe its clear Somerset dairy farmers and producers are stronger, safer and better off as part of a reformed EU.

"Wyke Farms is a prime example of a farm business taking advantage of our tariff-free access to the worlds largest single market of 500 million customers to export their high-quality produce."

Having launched a new British-themed brand to specifically target their export customers, Wyke Farms values the fact that wherever they sell their produce in the EU, the label requirements are exactly the same.

If the UK were to leave the EU, businesses could face re-labelling costs around 3,000 for each product line they export to the EU.

Based in the centre of the cheddar-making region in Somerset, Wyke Farms sources its milk from its own herd which grazes the Mendip Hills, as well as directly from 150 other farms, and employs 250 people, making this 150-year-old family business a crucial part of the rural economy.

'Working hard to build European exports'

Richard Clothier, MD of Wyke Farms, said: "My family have been farming here in Somerset for over 150 years and Im immensely proud of how we have thrived in recent years as weve been able to sell Somerset produce all over the continent.

"Weve worked hard to build our European export business and now have relationships with many European businesses such as Carrefour.

"Leaving the EU puts our free market trade at risk; the current arrangement gives us access to a market more than twice the size of the US and the ability to trade within it under just one set of regulations.

"Changing this would be disabling for business, not empowering. We have an ambitious five-year growth plan for our business and leaving Europe in the coming years will jeopardise that."

Cheese manufacturers in the South West also benefit from EU Protected Food Name status for West Country Farmhouse Cheddar.

By meeting specific criteria, cheddar from the region can carry the resulting logo, helping to distinguish our high-quality produce in a competitive market.

New figures from HMRC recently revealed the UK exports far more cheese to France than to the US, despite the US population being nearly five times largerin 2015, cheese exports to France were worth 59.5m compared to 45.6m to the US.

Last year, UK exports to Ireland alone - the UK's top EU market - were worth 74.7m, more than exports to the USA, Canada, UAE, South Africa, Australia and China combined.
Welsh authorities confirm new case of bird flu on Anglesey
You Can Now Get Your Water Tested For Lead For Free

By Mae Rice in News on Apr 28, 2016 5:55PM



Glass of water (photo via [cipher] on Flickr

Chicagoans can now call 311 to schedule free water testing in their homes, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced Wednesday. The announcement comes a week after Flint Michigan's ongoing lead contamination crisis resulted in criminal charges for three public officials. The revelation that Flint has relied on lead-tainted water from the Flint River since 2014 has brought national attention to the problem of lead contamination in drinking water. (Emanuel's announcement also comes months after a report found the city of Chicago could be doing more to warn residents about potential lead contamination in their water.)

Here's how the new, free water testing will work: Residents who call 311 to request testing will get a call back within two business days to schedule a home visit, where officials will collect a water sample. (It's unclear what the lag time between scheduling calls and actual home visits will be like, though.) Residents will get results of their water sample within three weeks; results will also be posted publicly online.

If a home's water has lead levels above 15 parts per billion, the city will make a second home visit to evaluate the source of the lead and create a plan of action. While none of the city's pipes are lead, some private residences still have lead pipes.

The city has also started a pilot program to test water in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) "out of an abundance of caution," according to the mayor's office. Results from these tests will be posted publicly online, too.

Emanuel said in a statement that the city's water "already meets or exceeds" state and national standards. Chicago gets its water from Lake Michigan; from there, it's treated and purified by the Department of Water Management, which also keeps constant, 24/7 tabs on Chicago's water quality. Lead poisoning is also less of an issue in Chicago now than it was in the '90s, according to the mayor's office. Today, less than one in 100 children have elevated levels of lead in their blood; in the late 1990s, that figure was one in four.

This new water testing program has arrived less than a month after the Department of Public Health announced plans to test tap water in homes where children are suffering from lead poisoning.




Brett McDowell speaks about FIDO's online authentication at a symposium on identity trust in cyberspace on April 27. [Photo provided to China.org.cn]

FIDO (Fast Identity Online) alliance, the security-minded industry consortium that aims to transform the current username/password combo into a more secure and user-friendly universal authentication, is looking to China for more adoptions and deployments of its standards.

"We founded the FIDO China Working Group this January in order to collect business requirements from the Chinese market, facilitate the evolution of FIDO technology and lead collaboration within and outside China," Brett McDowell, executive director of the alliance, told China.org.cn.

He added that the working group is the first one FIDO has founded specifically focusing on one regional area.

With almost all the global tech giants on board, like Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Intel, Samsung and Lenovo, FIDO is looking to introduce stronger online authentication, including biometric measures like fingerprints and iris recognition, amid increasing risks of hacking, data breaches and identity theft.

President Xi Jinping has called for the comprehensive detection of internet risks to ensure online security at a symposium on cybersecurity and informatization on April 19, asking for the establishment of a system to protect information infrastructure in industries like finance, energy, telecommunications and transportation.

"Many businesses and government agencies around the world have a shared interest in improving online authentication to address the password problem," said McDowell, who is in China for a symposium on identity trust in cyberspace on April 27.

"But the problem is too big to solve single-handedly, and we must collaborate on a global scale."

He expressed that an evolving FIDO is happy to consider specific regional requirements as well as government regulations.

FIDO now boasts over 30 China-based members including Lenovo, Alibaba Group, Huawei and the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Henry (Haixin) Chai, CEO of Online Biometric Authentication Ltd., a subsidiary of the Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group (LCIG) under the Chinese PC and smartphone manufacturer, answers questions from China.org.cn on April 27. [Photo provided to China.org.cn]

Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group (LCIG) under the Chinese PC and smartphone manufacturer has also spinoffed a new firm, by the name of Online Biometric Authentication Ltd., that is dedicated to introduce FIDO-enabled solutions across China's industry.

"We will work together with all stakeholders in the field to address the authentication problem and push application of the international standard across the ecosystem," said Henry (Haixin) Chai, CEO of the new firm and also chairman of FIDO China working group.
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.
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Today's cell phone scammers are so wily that even tech tycoons risk being taken in.

Lei Jun speaks at the 2016 China Green Companies Summit in Jinan, Shandong on April 23,2016. (Photo by Ren Qi/China Daily)

Lei Jun, the billionaire chairman and CEO of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, took to Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo on Tuesday to complain that he was "almost tricked" by a phishing text message.

His post showed screenshots of phishing messages he received over the past month. Phishing scams are designed to deceive a recipient into handing over sensitive information, usually by impersonating a legitimate business.

"Text message scams are so rampant. I just received another one. Everybody be careful!" Lei wrote.

"Dear customer, your mobile banking service will expire tomorrow. Please log on to [the site] for verification," said a message sent on Tuesday.

Lei has more than 13 million Weibo followers, and his previous posts focused on Xiaomi and other tech news. The rare complaint from a tech celebrity about the widespread scams has drawn thousands of replies and "likes" from social media users.

"I have a friend who was cheated out of 200,000 yuan (30,800 U.S. dollars)," one Weibo user wrote.

Others asked whether the IT mogul could do anything to stop the fraudulent messages.

"Mr. Lei, can you make a smartphone that can detect all these scams?" microblogger "C Luoxuan" asked.

Lei's tech peers used the opportunity to make fun of his bad luck and promote their own brands.

"When it comes to detecting phishing messages, 360 is the expert. Mr. Lei should communicate with us more often," wrote Zhou Hongyi, chairman of Qihoo 360, an Internet security company known for its antivirus software.

"I suggest you switch to Huawei smartphones, and these scams won't bother you any more," said product manager Li Xiaolong from Huawei Technologies, one of Xiaomi's rival phone makers.

Phishing text messages and phone scams have long plagued Chinese smartphone users. They continue to swindle billions of yuan from victims every year.

In a recent case, 62 people were arrested for cheating mobile phone users out of 117 million yuan in southwest China's Guizhou Province. It is believed to be the biggest telecom fraud case China has ever seen.
A video screen shows three monks fighting at Ningguo Temple in Baoying County, Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province on April 24, 2016. [China.org.cn]

You may have seen many kung fu fights by monks in Chinese movies, but theres recently been a real one and the fight was not that impressive. Three monks were expelled from their temple in Jiangsu Province due to the fight on April 24.

A one-minute video of the monks fighting was recently uploaded online and went viral. In the video, three monks scuffled while other monks and tourists tried to calm them.

Master Qingchun, the abbot of Ningguo Temple in Baoying County, Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province confirmed to media yesterday that the incident happened on the morning of April 24.

The abbot said that they swiftly dealt with the incident and that the three quarreling monks had "fought over a tiny issue. The three monks now were expelled from the temple.

The abbot said the three monks were from mid-level leadership and had different ideas over how to manage the temple. "Their fight violated Buddhists' Six Harmonies rules and set a bad example to society," Qingchun said to ThePaper.cn.

The expelled monks can still follow the Buddhist path if any other temples accept them.
When it comes to Marvel movies, no one has made more appearances than the fantastic Stan Lee; appearing in movies both inside and outside the MCU over the last decade or so.

Stan Lee

I don't know about you, but I love sitting down to watch a Marvel film and keeping a beady eye on where Lee is going to turn up... and he has had some wonderful cameo roles over the years.

This week Captain America: Civil War is set to hit the big screen and we take a look back at some of the appearances that he has made in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Do you have a favourite?

- Ant-Man - Bartender (2015)

Ant-Man was the last Marvel film to be released and it was a blink and you miss him cameo from Lee, which is a shame.

Lee was a bartender in a flashback scene of one of Lang's friends; who is talking about a girl that he met in a bar.

- Avengers: Age of Ultron - Drinking Buddy (2015)

Avengers: Age of Ultron is one of my favourite of Lee's appearances as he plays a World War II veteran who is invited to one of Tony's parties at the beginning of the movie.

Thor is reluctant to give the veterans a homebrew from Asgard but they insist that they share it together... needless to say, Lee's character ends up a little worse for wear and has to be carried out.

- Guardians of the Galaxy - Xandarian Ladies' Man (2014)

It was originally reported that Lee would not be making an appearance in Guardians of the Galaxy because he did not write the original comic books - of course, outrage ensued from the fans.

Plans were changed and Lee made his cameo after all as a bit of a ladies man. Director James Gunn revealed that the original plan was to kill off Stan Lee in the film.

- Captain America: The Winter Soldier - Museum Security Guard (2014)

Lee's job as a security guard is put under threat by Captain America in The Winter Solider when he steals his original uniform for the mission against Hydra.

Lee is doing his rounds and comes to the Captain America exhibit to find the outfit gone and nothing left but a tin shield and a naked mannequin... leading him to say, 'damn, I am so fired.'

- Thor: The Dark World - Hospital Patient (2013)

'Can I have my shoe back' is another great Stan Lee cameo quote as he appeared as a patient on a mental ward in Thor: The Dark World.

Lee and the other patients are having the convergence explained to them by Doctor Selvig, who finds himself on the ward after running around Stonehenge naked and being arrested. Sadly, the good doctor is still feeling the effects of having his mind controlled by Loki in Avengers Assemble.

- Iron Man 3 - Beauty Pageant Judge (2013)

It has been three appearances out for three for Lee in the Iron Man franchise - mistaken for Hugh Hefner in the first, was Larry King in Iron Man 2 and a pageant judge in the third film.

Iron Man 3 hit the big screen in 2013, and it was another great cameo from Lee as he was enthusiastically giving one of the pageant contenders a well-deserved 10.

- Avengers Assemble - Chess Player (2012)

'Superheroes in New York? Give me a break' the chess playing Stan Lee did not think much of the Avengers' heroics at the end of Avengers Assemble back in 2012 and was more interested in getting back to his game of chess.

The cameo came at the end of the movie when everyone was reflecting on the actions of the Avengers and the alien invasion that they had sent packing.

- Thor - Truck Driver (2011)

Another of my favourite Stan Lee cameos came in Thor back in 2011. When Thor's hammer lands on earth a string of humans try to pick it up - obviously without success.

Trying to lift the hammer becomes quite an event and Lee is a truck driver who tries to use his vehicle to move it... that doesn't work either!!!

- Captain America: The First Avenger - Retired General (2011)

Lee also popped up as a retired general in Captain America: The First Avenger back in 2011. Steve Rogers is supposed to be collecting an award when he is a now show - leading to the line 'I thought he would be taller' from Lee.

In this great video, you can see all of Stan Lee's appearances since his debut in X-Men back in 2000.

We have also seen Lee turn up in the Spider-Man Fantastic Four, and X-Men movies over the years. More recently, he has also been spotted in the likes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Jessica Jones.

Captain America: Civil War is released 29th April.

by Helen Earnshaw for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Anthony Mackie has described Captain America: Civil War as a 'family fight.'

Anthony Mackie

Mackie is set to reprise the role of Falcon for his second consecutive Captain America film as he reunites with Chris Evans and directors Anthony and Joe Russo.

The actor was in London earlier this week for the European premiere of the movie and he talks about what audiences can expect this time around. He said: "It is basically a family fight; you have two people who care about each other and they see different perspectives of the same argument. They have to battle it out, the same way that you do with your siblings.

"I feel that this is a re-discovery of the Marvel characters. I feel that if you felt like you knew these characters, you fall in love with these characters again after this movie.

"Everybody has their moment, everybody has their charm, everybody as their suits and their talents to the highest of highs. It is a great event to have all of these characters in the same movie."

Falcon was a character that was introduced in Captain America: The Winter Solider - he went on to make a small appearance in Avengers: Age of Ultron last year.

The movie will see Falcon on Team Captain America as Steve Rogers goes head to head with friend Tony Stark.

The movie is based on the iconic comic book story and is set to be the biggest Marvel film to date.

We have already seen Mackie star in Triple 9 this year and he is currently filming his latest movie Wetlands, which sees him team up with director Emanuele Della Valle.

Captain America: Civil War is released 29th April.

by Helen Earnshaw for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Prince William will visit Oxford on May 11.

Prince William

The Duke of Cambridge has been invited to see the results of three major investment projects at the University of Oxford next month.

Kensington Palace tweeted: "The Duke of Cambridge has been invited to see the results of three major investment projects @UniofOxford.

"The Duke will visit #MagdalenCollege, the #WestonLibrary and Blavatnik School of Government @UniofOxford on Wednesday 11th May (sic)."

Meanwhile, William recently revealed he wants to "develop" into his royal duties.

The 33-year-old royal - who has two-year-old son Prince George and 11-month-old Princess Charlotte with his wife, the Duchess of Cambridge - has hit back at claims he is work shy, insisting he takes his duty "very seriously".

He said: "I take duty very seriously. I take my responsibilities very seriously. But it's about finding your own way at the right time and if you're not careful duty can sort of weigh you down an awful lot at a very early age and I think you've got to develop into the duty role."
By Danny Whitehouse, Editor - Into Forward

Where will you be travelling to this year?

In today's world global travel is more turbulent than ever. Over recent years there has been a rise in awareness around global terrorism and an increasing popularity by the media to showcase air-traffic disasters. With many negative stories being told and fair for travellers becoming more prominent than ever there is an opportunity to further understand what is influencing people's decisions to travel. It remains apparent that in today's day and age a huge amount of potential travellers use search engines to find information and make decisions about where to travel to next. With more and more people researching more more topics around travel, understanding trends and what's going to happen next is a job for data analysts. The problem that then happens is that the world is data sources are not getting any smaller. In fact, there are new technology is appearing every day created to be able to do the job of the analysts.

This technology is able to crunch data at a phenomenal speed and evolving to have the capability of processing data in real time. Taking this process one step further, a new breed of machine learning appears which has the ability to do the above mentioned and also refine its own set of processes alleviating the need for human intervention other than to import the data. This process is not restricted to large multinational business it is simply due to the fact that this technology is in its infancy. That's not to say that it is underdeveloped and unpredictable but quite the opposite. Utilising this technique above we have crunched thousands of lines of data to be able to come up with a summary of travel trends and predictions for the next year.

The most notable points from this data analysis have been that there are a huge amount of emerging searches being made by travel consumers around 'reports'. This certainly seems to be a trend that has started around 2014 but has escalated significantly in the last 12 months. Certain companies such as the ABTA and ITS produced travel trends reports but only base their conclusions on previous travel trends but don't look to the future. It seems as though many people are looking to these reports to understand more about potential travel opportunities before booking the flights. This is certainly an area for concern considering the rise of global terrorism over the last couple of years in the Middle East and the West. This could suggest a certain tentative stance by potential travellers searching for this information. Country such as South Africa, China, Germany, Australia and Canada are being searched for more online.

Could this signify to travel agents that these destinations are the new hotspots for travel in the coming year?

Certain words are being used when searching for certain regions, which would imply a general outlook as to how the consumer feels about travelling to a certain destination. Alternatively it could predict or give more information as to what travel patterns are happening within those regions. For example China is searched for and referenced as 'essential'. Does this mean that potential travellers are making a decision as to whether they should travel to China if it is deemed to be essential. It almost feels the same as when there are weather warnings in the region you are in and everyone is asked to remain inside. Can we conclude from this information that potential travellers are more wary of flying and seek information before travelling from reputable sources?

Based on the hotspots above where will you be basing your holiday this year?
New research from Mind has revealed that more than half (52%) of people who have seen a storyline involving a character with mental health problems has helped to improve their understanding of mental health problems, with almost a third being encouraged to seek help or support after reading a news story.

Credit: BBC

2,063 adults from the UK took place in the polling, which also found 25% of those questioned were prompted to find help personally after seeing a storyline on television involving a character with their own mental health problems and struggles.

Men were much more likely to be moved in this way, with more than a third (37%) being encouraged to seek help or support after seeing the storylines, compared to 15% of women.

Chief Executive of Mind, Paul Farmer comments: "These statistics show just how powerful all forms of media can be in encouraging people to go and see their GP, call a helpline or just get in touch with a friend or family member with a mental health problem. Media portrayals and reporting, when done well, can be a lifeline. Drama storylines in particular can help people who might be struggling to feel less alone and they play a vital role in signposting to the help and support that is available.

"It's fantastic that we are seeing more media coverage which offers a sensitive, compelling and realistic representation of mental health. We urge journalists and programme-makers to continue this welcome trend of showing people with mental health problems as a whole and giving a platform to more people to speak out about their experiences.

"We're looking forward to receiving strong entries to this year's Mind Media Awards to showcase the great work we have seen in the media over the last year which not only challenges and changes attitudes towards mental health, but also saves lives."

Maisie Williams, who appeared in award-winning drama Cyberbully last year (2015) added:

"Shows like Cyberbully can really help young people to build up the courage to ask for help or to accept that what is going on in the classroom or online isn't acceptable. I feel like it inspires young people to pick up the phone or talk to a parent or just get help.

"After Cyberbully was aired in the UK, we had the anti-bullying line on afterwards and they had a massive influx in calls from kids and teenagers who had been too frightened to speak out and try and stop whatever is happening and I feel like it gave them the confidence to do that.

"In Casey's situation (Maisie's character in Cyberbully) after her friends and family found out about her mental health issues and struggles online they didn't judge her. They accepted it and they were very forgiving and very helpful. And I think seeing that, for someone who may be going through something similar, would hopefully be uplifting. No one is going to judge you, there are people out there who want to help you. I hope that is the message people get from a series like Cyberbully."

The Mind Media Awards 2016 winners will be announced at a celebratory event on Monday, November 14 at the Troxy, bringing celebrities, media professionals and those who have shared their personal experiences through the media together.

Below, see Game of Thrones actor Maisie Williams talk more about why the Mind Media Awards are so important:

by Daniel Falconer for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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President Xi Jinping has called for more to be done to advance rural reform to ensure that measures result in a solid agricultural sector and improve the well-being of farmers.

Xi made the remarks when he presided over a symposium on rural reform in a village in Fengyang County in east China's Anhui Province.

Addressing the symposium with local officials on Monday in Xiaogang Village, often referred to as the birthplace of China's rural reform, Xi, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said that work related to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers is the CPC's top priority.

In 1978, some farmers in Xiaogang secretly signed an agreement to divide their People's Commune farmland into family plots -- an ingenious idea, albeit illegal at that time. Each plot was to be worked by a family. Their crops were then divided between the government, the collective and the families themselves.

This process resulted in bumper grain production and the initiative was soon rolled out across the country, creating a system that combined unified and decentralized management. Xi called the system "an important corner stone" for the CPC's rural policy.

There have been great changes in the countryside since the fledgling days of reform and opening up in China. Farmers now have brighter prospects thanks to socialism with Chinese characteristics, Xi said.

Xi underscored the important role that agriculture, farmers and the countryside play -- as they are integral to the country's modernization and to the goal of building a moderately prosperous society.

The core of deepening rural reform is upholding and improving the basic rural operation system, sticking to collective ownership of rural land, adhering to the fundamental status of household management in agriculture, and insisting on keeping land-contracted relationship stable, said Xi.

He called for more pilot programs that explore contracted rural land-use rights, noting that the separation of contract rights and operation rights had been a milestone in rural reform.

The key to the program is to respect the wishes of farmers, protect their rights and interests, and ensure grain production, Xi said.

Xi explained that developing modern agriculture, increasing farmers' income and building a new socialist countryside are the three major tasks in rural development.

More should be done to improve the modern agricultural industrial system, along with the production and management systems, Xi added.

He urged CPC officials at all levels to help farmers find ways to solve their problems and increase their income while maintaining rural stability.

Farmers are scattered across China's vast countryside and conditions vary from place to place, Xi said. To improve farmers' livelihoods, education, health care, elderly care and housing should all improve, the president said.
Olympia Valance has "begged" bosses not to kill off her character Paige Smith in 'Neighbours'.

Olympia Valance

The 23-year-old actress may be busy trotting around the globe picking up international deals in both acting and modelling, but she's adamant her heart will always belong to Ramsay Street.

Speaking to the Herald Sun newspaper, she said: "I begged the producers not to kill me and they've promised not to. I've always said I might want a little break... or go away for a few months, but God, please don't take away my character because I might want to come back."

The brunette beauty, who first joined the soap in 2014, is keen to take a short break from the long-running show once her three-year contract comes to an end early next year as she's desperate to crack Hollywood.

She said: "I've got to give it a go. I would hate to have that regret. It'll be when my contract is over. I have a three-year contract, so probably in just over a year and a half."

Meanwhile, Olympia is keen to persuade her half-sister Holly Candy to reprise her role as Felicity 'Flick' Scully, who she portrayed between 1999 and 2002, in the well-loved soap.

She said recently: "Holly isn't completely against doing it. Our characters aren't related in any way, but Steph Scully is on the show. Who knows, it could happen."

But Olympia - who shares the same father Rajko Vukadinovic as her sibling - doesn't think Holly will make a return any time soon as she now lives in London with her husband Nick and their two-year-old son Luka.
Ali Ryland is the Web and Digital Communications Officer at The Vegan Society. We caught up with her to discuss her vegan journey and how she extends her passion for veganism into her personal life.

Ali Ryland

Please tell us about your personal journey into veganism.

Having been pescatarian since birth and then vegetarian later, I always thought I was doing my part for non-human animals. I'd met one or two vegans in college but it wasn't until I started university that I heard all the ethical arguments behind veganism thanks to the people behind Glasgow University Vegan Society, including my colleague Alex Douglas. Spurred on by them, I've now been vegan for over five years.

You are the Web and Digital Communications Officer at The Vegan Society so what does that entail?

A lot! I run the website, social media, the e-newsletter and I help out on campaigns. At The Vegan Society you can end up floating between lots of different jobs, so helping to run and public face at events is part of it too. My favourite part is the blog section- which I started. I contribute to it and accept articles from others too, as long as they are from a vegan perspective on an issue relating to veganism. Email [email protected] if you have a pitch in mind.

How long did it take you to fully transition, including products and clothes?

I don't think we ever stop transitioning. There'll always be something you own that is not vegan (cars, bikes, medicine, etc.) but it's about what is possible and practical for your situation at the time. Regarding food- it did take me nearly a year to settle down properly (I was a bit of a freegan for a time) and toiletries not too long after that. The main problem I encountered was the fact that my family would buy me non-vegan toiletries and clothes. While they have stopped doing this these last few years, I still have a stockpile of non-vegan products at home!

What vegan product can't you live without- edible and beauty?

Hmm that's a hard one. I've always been a big cheese lover but when I went vegan I found it hard to find vegan cheese that I liked for the first year. But once I did, I immediately reverted back to being a cheese addict. Right now I'm buying tons of Violife Original (in block form) because it's readily available in supermarkets, and very versatile.

As for beauty, I don't have a favourite product. Probably because I only ever hurriedly apply make-up before going out on the town as everyday use is a bore for a feminist and a night owl like me. I give myself 15 minutes to wake up and get out the door in a morning. If I had to choose- it would probably be one of the vegan items from Marks and Spencer's Autograph range. I really don't mind what shampoo or other toiletries I use as long as it's vegan, though Original Source is probably the best smelling shower gel out there.

How do you extend your veganism to others in your personal life?

I've actually turned quite a few of my friends vegan since starting out, it's a wonderful feeling. I can be persuasive when I want to be! Just laying out all the arguments (see www.vegansociety.com/whyvegan for more information) in a concise manner seems to do it, if they're actually likely to change. These days all my close friends are vegan (or at least vegetarian) and all my colleagues are vegan, so it's not something I think about as much anymore. I'm glad that my mum is getting more into veganism as a side-effect of her supporting my work. I hope that she'll go from veggie to vegan soon.

What is your favourite vegan dish to cook at home?

Fajitas with chili and refried beans. And lots of vegan cheese, lettuce and salsa. Ideally vegan sour cream and guacamole too, but that's usually too much effort for me.

As well as people looking to stay vegan- or convert to veganism do you also receive negative comments at The Vegan Society from those who perhaps don't understand what you do it all for?

We receive many pictures of meat, sometimes of dead animals too. The other day some joker tweeted a beef burger at us (do these knuckleheads realise that this is nothing new and doesn't faze us?) so I tweeted back at them a picture of V Revolution's bacon double cheeseburger sandwiched between two vegan doughnuts.

Do you have any advice for people who struggle to stay on track and have perhaps gone through phases of eating meat and phases of veganism?

Just remember what you're doing it for. Don't disassociate what you're eating from the animals you're hurting - this can be harder with items like eggs and cheese but you have to think about the suffering involved. Watch these videos www.vegansociety.com/10videos to remind yourself of how amazing animals are, and why they deserve our respect and compassion.

What do you see as the hardest and easiest aspects of living this lifestyle?

The first few months were somewhat hard when I was trying to give up cheese, but since then I've not found anything hard about being vegan, not in the UK at least. Going to France one Christmas was a bit of a challenge - I had cheese-less pizza for Christmas dinner - but that was the first time I have ever lost weight and gained muscle over the festivities, rather than the other way round. Nowadays I always pack tons of vegan goodies when I go abroad, and I generally choose vegan-friendly places to visit anyway. Being vegan five years, everything comes easy to me now.

by Lucy Moore for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Pulling out all the stops, Disney India managed to rope in designer Gavin Miguel to work on the costumes. The designer is known for his work with Aishwarya Rai on the film

, has styled stars like Priyanka Chopra and Kangana Ranaut and his outfits have been spotted on names like Madhuri Dixit and Lisa Haydon. Here, the Mumbai-boy gives us the scoop on switching from film to theatre.

Weve all seen the Disney film; some of us, multiple times. And now for Disney musical fans, things have gotten even more exciting with the recent launch of Beauty and the Beast the musical.Dhoom 2

What is it like to create costumes for a complete fantasy world?

To be able to visualise each character and all its details has been one great creative ride. There are so many references but since Beauty and The Beast is such a classic story, I had to be true to the principle characters and be able to retain the recall in the audiences mind.



Did the story of Beauty & Beast have a personal connect to you?

Beauty and the Beast was truly for my daughter Zaria. She lives and breathes the story. I have watched it many times for her sake as well as read her the book, so you could say that I am more familiar with it than ever.



Which character did you enjoy creating the most?

It is very difficult to pick a favourite but I would still say Monsieur DArque [the antagonist who puts Belles father in an insane asylum]was special. For his costume we had to create these snake skin textures and add those small details that would make him look fierce, yet fashionable.



How is working in theatre different to working in film?

For the musical we had to be very careful while choosing the fabrics as all the costumes were used multiple times. We also have to keep in mind the quick change time. Luckily, since I have done multiple fashion shows, we knew how to tackle it.



What is your biggest advice for budding costume designers?

Hard work and sheer determination will take you miles ahead.



Beauty & The Beast is on from 6th May to 15th May, Mumbai and June onwards, New Delhi.

Log on to bookmyshow.com for details.
Less than 24-hours after Kangana Ranaut's lawyer Rizwan Siddiquee told the press that common friends of the actor and Hrithik Roshan are trying to resolve their dispute amicably, her ex boyfriend and Raaz 2 co-star Adhyayen Suman revealed intimate details of their torrid relationship (in 2008) too. Amidst all this blame game, Kangana (like several times in the past) has remained stoic, exercised complete control on herself, and spoken measured words.



This time around she decided to ignore the negativity and instead focus on her new milestone as she caps 10 years in the film industry today. Interestingly, Kangana's debut film Gangster, which released this day 10 years ago, had her play the role of a troubled young girl in love with a gangster.

Describing her journey, the National Award winning actor (she has three under her belt) told Femina: "I'm extremely proud of my rags to riches story, it's fun to be a misfit or an underdog if you acknowledge your gifts and befriend your obstacles."
Germany's Economic Cooperation and Development Minister Gerd Muller, who launched a Partnership for Sustainable Textiles in 2014 in order to help improve environmental and social standards along the entire textile value chain in Bangladesh, has said that ensuring living wages for workers remains a big challenge."A lot has happened over the past three years. We have already achieved major improvements since Rana Plaza, especially on structural and fire safety. Compliance with core labour standards and the payment of living wages continue to be big challenges in the textile sector. In our Textiles Partnership, we are working with the private sector and with civil society to address this," Muller said according to a press release of the Ministry.

Germany's Economic Cooperation and Development Minister Gerd Muller, who launched a Partnership for Sustainable Textiles in 2014 in order to help improve environmental and social standards along the entire textile value chain in Bangladesh, has said that ensuring living wages for workers remains a big challenge. "A lot has happened over the past#

With German support, more than 750 factory managers in Bangladesh have received advice on how to improve social and environmental standards and been given training on related issues. Some 100,000 women workers have been educated about their rights. Together with the International Labour Organization (ILO), Germany has provided training to 300 labour inspectors.With assistance from Germany, Bangladesh is currently introducing an occupational accident insurance system. Government representatives and employer and employee representatives from the textile industry in Bangladesh are being given the opportunity to visit Germany to exchange ideas and get first-hand information on the ground about health and safety standards and accident prevention and about the organisation of committees of workers' representatives.Putting in place the fundamental elements of social protection systems for workers is becoming a focus of the German Development Ministry's work with its partner countries, the release said.The Partnership for Sustainable Textiles now has more than 180 members. As it covers more than 55 per cent of the German textile market, the Partnership already has gained enough influence to reach the mass market. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has signed a loan agreement with Bangladesh's BRAC Bank under the $30 million loan facility approved by ADB's Board, which will be used to finance the construction and upgrade of ready-made garment factories in the country that have taken steps to meet globally agreed standards for structural improvements and worker rights and safety.In a press release, the ADB also said the loan will also be used to build badly needed effluent treatment facilities in the textile and garment industry. Many factories in Bangladesh still operate without effluent treatment plants, resulting in widespread water pollution which is particularly damaging in rural areas where communities rely on surface water for washing, bathing, irrigation and fishing.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has signed a loan agreement with Bangladesh's BRAC Bank under the $30 million loan facility approved by ADB's Board, which will be used to finance the construction and upgrade of ready-made garment factories in the country that have taken steps to meet globally agreed standards for structural improvements and worker#

This loan, with a 5-year tenure, will help meet the need for longer term finance currently unavailable from local banks and international capital markets, and will be used exclusively by BRAC Bank to finance socially and environmentally sustainable projects, said Biao Huang, Investment Specialist in ADB's Private Sector Operations Department.Transforming the factories in line with agreements after the Rana Plaza tragedy of 2013, however, requires substantial outlays, with the cost estimated at around $250,000 to $400,000 per factory. Given the lack of long term funding available in Bangladesh, ADB's loan will enable BRAC Bank to offer longer tenure financing to companies wanting to upgrade and improve structural, safety and social standards at their factories.ADB will also be working with the bank on a rollout of a gender action plan, which will ensure factory upgrades reflect the needs of women. This includes the provision of day care facilities, safety measures for females, and health clinics. Women make up nearly 80 per cent of all workers in the textile and garments industry in Bangladesh. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
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China's top legislature on Thursday ratified an international treaty on reducing mercury emissions, which are harmful to humans and the environment.

The National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee approved the Minamata Convention on Mercury at a bi-monthly session, which concluded the same day.

The legally binding global treaty was signed by the then chief engineer of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, Wan Bentai, on behalf of China, on Oct. 10, 2013, in Kumamoto, Japan.

The treaty takes its name from the Japanese city of Minamata, where methylmercury from the city's industrial wastewater killed hundreds and left many more disabled in the 1950s.

As of Nov. 2, 2015, 128 countries and regional organizations had signed the convention and 18 of them, including the United States, had ratified it.
HanesBrands, a leading worldwide marketer of underwear, intimate apparel and activewear, has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Pacific Brands Limited, the leading underwear and intimate apparel company in Australia.The acquisition would be Hanes' sixth in the past three years and would add Australia and New Zealand to the list of countries where the company holds the No. 1 or No. 2 market share position for underwear, intimate apparel or hosiery. The countries include the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and South Africa, the company said in a press release.

HanesBrands, a leading worldwide marketer of underwear, intimate apparel and activewear, has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Pacific Brands Limited, the leading underwear and intimate apparel company in Australia. The acquisition would be Hanes' sixth in the past three years and would add Australia and New Zealand#

HanesBrands projects that under its ownership publicly traded Pacific Brands would have calendar 2016 net sales in its core Underwear and Sheridan businesses of approximately 800 million Australian dollars ($600 million) and adjusted operating profit of AUD75 million ($56 million). The Melbourne-based company, which has a June fiscal year end, sells primarily in Australia with some distribution in New Zealand, UK, and Asia.The transaction is valued at approximately $800 million on an enterprise-value basis, or slightly more than 10 times projected calendar 2016 EBITDA (for all businesses), and would pay Pacific Brands shareholders AUD1.15 per share.The all-cash transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to adjusted earnings per share and deliver an after-tax internal rate of return in the mid-teens. It is projected to deliver full benefits within three years, attaining adjusted operating profit of approximately $100 million, contributing approximately S$0.25 to Hanes' adjusted EPS.Pacific Brands is a natural addition to the HanesBrands portfolio with its strong market-leading brands that will be complemented by our global supply chain, Hanes Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Richard A. Noll said. In the span of 10 years, we have transformed the company through acquisitions and our Innovate-to-Elevate initiatives. We have tripled operating profits and expanded from a $4 billion company concentrated in the US to a $7 billion global underwear and activewear powerhouse.Pacific Brands has three business units  Underwear, Sheridan, and Tontine & Dunlop. The company has undergone significant restructuring over the past two years to streamline its portfolio to focus on the core Underwear and Sheridan businesses.Hanes intends to divest the Tontine pillow business and Dunlop Flooring business, which it does not consider part of Pacific Brands' core. Combined, they account for 12 per cent of sales and operating profit (excluding corporate overhead allocation). Hanes is not including sales and profits for those businesses in its long-term projections.Pacific Brands' restructuring and focus on Underwear and Sheridan has resulted in significant sales and profit growth. Based on fiscal 2016 expectations, the core businesses have a combined two-year compound annual sales growth rate of approximately 8 per cent.Of the core business, Underwear accounts for three-fourths of sales and includes underwear, bras, socks, hosiery, babywear and outerwear. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Deputy General Secretary National Trade Union Federation (NTUF) Pakistan, Nasir Mansoor has accused the government of not taking any step to end modern day slavery-like conditions for millions of textile and garment workers in Pakistan.His comment came at a press conference in Karachi on Sunday on the third anniversary of the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh where over 1100 garment factory workers lost their lives.

Deputy General Secretary National Trade Union Federation (NTUF) Pakistan, Nasir Mansoor has accused the government of not taking any step to end modern day slavery-like conditions for millions of textile and garment workers in Pakistan. His comment came at a press conference in Karachi on Sunday on the third anniversary of the Rana Plaza#

He expressed these views at a press conference at Karachi Press Club to mark third anniversary of Rana Plaza Bangladesh tragedy. Mansoor said that a similar tragedy also happened in Ali Enterprises Karachi on September 11, 2011 when 260 textile workers were burnt alive.He said that such tragic incidents showed that the local and international labor laws were being deliberately and criminally violated in factories and mills, especially textile and garments factories. He alleged that the government departments were also involved in that conspiracy."In Bangladesh, Pakistan and other countries, millions of workers are engaged in textile and garment industry, but in these countries, especially Pakistan and Bangladesh, the workers are deprived of their basic rights guaranteed to them under the law and constitution," Mansoor said.NTUF President Rafiq Baloch said that many big factories had been working illegally for a long time and they have not bothered to get register themselves.He claimed that said the process of labour inspection was suspended by the government due to the pressure from factory owners."Due to this, industrial incidents are rising sharply. Mostly these incidents occurred in the garment factories that make goods for big international brands," he said.The international brands were ignoring all local and international safety standards and violating local and international laws to maximise their profit, he added.Baloch welcomed the development in Bangladesh under which factory owners and the international companies had agreed to give due rights to workers.The NTUF officials demanded that the international brands should also ink an agreement with Pakistan to ensure rights of workers on the pattern of Bangladesh. They urged the international brands should compulsorily accept the international labour standards and the system of labour inspection should be revived. They demanded human and labour rights under the GSP+ should be fulfilled.The NTUF also demanded that heirs of those who died in the Ali Enterprises tragedy should be given lifetime pension cards, group insurance and gratuity. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
With just over a year left for Gujarat's 2012 Textile Policy, it has so far attracted investment commitment worth Rs 9,208 crore through varied units such as weaving, made-ups, processing, spinning, ginning and technical textiles, the Business Standard has reported.The investments so far are less than half of the Rs 20,000-crore target envisaged in the policy that will run till 2017. The policy had also targeted the creation of 2.5 million jobs by 2017.

With just over a year left for Gujarat's 2012 Textile Policy, it has so far attracted investment commitment worth Rs 9,208 crore through varied units such as weaving, made-ups, processing, spinning, ginning and technical textiles, the Business Standard has reported. The investments so far are less than half of the Rs 20,000-crore target#

Under the policy, 549 textile units have got approval. The latest nod is for a textile and apparel park coming up in Surat. This park will come up on 62 acres, house 42 manufacturing units and generate 1,900 jobs. So far, 12 such parks have received in-principle nod.The Gujarat government has set up a ministerial committee led by the state's Industries Minister Saurabh Patel, to look into the approvals and promotion of the textile sector in the state by incentivising the same.The committee met for its 10th meeting recently and approved 43 units  42 units of weaving, made-ups, knitted fabric, processing, embroidery, cotton ginning and twisting, and one unit of technical textiles. These units, to come up in Surendranagar, Surat, Botad, Morbi, Rajkot, Valsad, and Junagadh districts, bagged approval for interest subsidy and value-added tax (VAT) concession for all units, apart from power rate subsidy for weaving units.These units have invested Rs 603 crore for plant and machinery. Among the incentives, while made-up units will enjoy interest subsidy of seven per cent, technical textiles and rest of the units will enjoy six per cent and five per cent, respectively, Patel said.In the past nine meetings of the committee, 506 units investing around Rs 8,605 crore bagged approval. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
The Pakistani government has said that it would fund the research and innovation projects for the textile sector initiated by the National Textile University (NTU).Commerce Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan said in Islamabad on Wednesday that his Ministry would take up the funding initiative, Pakistani newspapers have reported.

The Pakistani government has said that it would fund the research and innovation projects for the textile sector initiated by the National Textile University (NTU). Commerce Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan said in Islamabad on Wednesday that his Ministry would take up the funding initiative, Pakistani newspapers have reported. #

The minister said the project would establish a Textile Innovation Centre at the NTU to focus on the global demand for next generation fabrics, which includes technical and functional fabrics to provide new initiatives in the field of design and value-addition.Khurram Dastgir Khan's remarks came while chairing the third meeting of the Federal Textile Board (FTB), which was attended by the representatives of all the associations of the textile value-chain and ministries concerned.Khan told the FTB that in order to arrest the recent decline of exports in the sector, the Commerce Ministry was scheduling a branding and marketing campaign to re-launch Pakistan in the export world with the country 's new and improved credentials.(SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
The Fourth High Level Forum on United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management (UN GGIM) was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from 20  22 April, 2016.



The forum was hosted by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in collaboration with the government of Ethiopia with the theme of Good Land Governance for the 2030 Agenda.



This forum brought Member States and geospatial stakeholders with unique opportunity to share and learn from each other new ideas, methods and strategies to support local, regional and global land administration and management initiatives.



The forum was attended by the Ministry of Lands and Mineral Resources permanent secretary Malakai Finau and the Geospatial Information Management (Ministry of Lands and Mineral Resources) director Akata Takala.



They were joined by H.E Ambassador Mosese Tikoitoga and Counsellor Ropate Cabealawa from the new Fijian Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.



The forum was opened by H.E. Dr Mulatu Teshome, President of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Part of H.E. Dr Teshomes speech stated that good land governance is critical for sustainable and equitable development that has led to double digit economic growth of Ethiopia for the past many years.



Fiji contributed in the opening segment with an address from Mr Finau acknowledging the importance and need for geospatial information for good land governance. Mr Finau mentioned the need for geospatial information management for disaster management in the areas of climate change, adverse weather conditions, for example tropical cyclones, and geological hazards such as earthquake and tsunami.



Other aspects included the need for geospatial information management to provide for security of land tenure, for example regularization of informal settlements, for conflict resolution leading to peaceful existence and for economic recovery and growth.


HIS Excellency the President, Major General (retd) Jioji Konousi Konrote today received the credentials of the non-resident Ambassador of the Republic of Guinea to Fiji.



The Fijian Head of State formalised the appointment of His Excellency Sylla Senkoun by receiving his letters of credence at State House.



This ceremony was preceded by a 25 member guard of honour by members of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces that was accorded to the new envoy.



Mr Senkoun, who will be based in Tokyo, Japan, began his undergraduate studies in Conakry and continued his education at the Faculty of Administrative and Legal Services in the Guinean capital.



The diplomat, who is multilingual, went on to study at the English Language Institute at Churchill House and then to Higher School of Commerce and Administration Industry at (ESACI) Chareton, France.



He has also completed a Master of Economics and Social Administration (AES) from the University of Paris, France.



Mr Senkoun began his Foreign Service career after a diplomatic training at the Ministry of International Cooperation and Foreign Affairs and worked his way up the ranks.



He has served extensively at Guineas permanent mission based in the Peoples Republic of China in various capacities.



He is married and has four children.


The Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan has donated US$50,000 for the relief of the devastation caused to Fiji by Tropical Cyclone Winston this year.



The funds were presented this week to Fijis Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Peter Thomson, by his Kazakhstan counterpart, Ambassador Kairat Abdrakhmanov.



In accepting the funds, Ambassador Thomson said they would be conveyed without delay to the Prime Ministers National Disaster Relief and Rehabilitation Fund in Suva. He thanked Kazakhstans Ambassador for his Governments generous concern for the victims of Tropical Cyclone Winston. Ambassador Abdrakhmanov said the donation represented further evidence of the growing ties of friendship and cooperation between Kazakhstan and Fiji.


A few days ago, the gorgeous diva Aishwarya Rai Bachchan was spotted at the L'Oreal event to unveil the Cannes 2016 collection and she was looking absolutely amazing!

Now we got our hands on the latest ad photoshoot of Aishwarya, for L'Oreal and let us tell you that she is looking at least 10 years younger than her original age. It seems like the actress is ageing in reverse. Aishwarya, who is sporting turquoise kajal is looking just bewitching and can easily make many heads turn!

Check Out All The Pictures Here:

We do understand that it is no big deal for Aishwarya Rai Bachchan to make people go crazy over her looks. It's her left hand work, after all!

OMG! Kangana Ranaut PHYSICALLY ABUSED Ex-boyfriend Adhyayan Suman!

Aishwarya To Celebrate 15 Years Of Representing India At Cannes:

This May 2016, Aishwarya will celebrate her 15 years of representing India at the Festival De Cannes. The 42-year-old actress, who made her debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002, said her journey has been humbling and beautiful.

"It is an absolute privilege to represent L'Oreal Paris and India in particular at a platform that honors world cinema and beauty in equal measure. 15 years with Cannes have gone by in a flash, and the journey has been immensely humbling and beautiful. I've treasured every moment at Cannes, and I'm ever so thankful to L'Oreal Paris, members of the Indian and World media, my well-wishers and my family for always making this such a memorable experience," Bachchan said in a statement.

"I'm looking forward to now creating some Infallible moments at the French Riviera with my L'Oreal family of amazing makeup technicians and my co-ambassadors," she added.
After Bhabhi Ji Ghar Par Hain's Shilpa Shinde ban controversy, CINTAA was in news for taking action against Rakhi Sawant and Dolly Bindra for their insensitive reaction (statements) over the actress Pratyusha Banerjee's death.

It has to be recalled that Dolly Bindra had shared pictures of Pratyusha's body and Rakhi Sawant had conducted a press conference where she requested the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ban ceiling fans and distribute table fans. Amit Bhel, the Joint Secretary of CINTAA, had said that they would send a notice to them. But now, CINTAA general secretary, actor Sushant Singh, has clarified that Amit's comments were his own, and not CINTAA's stand!

Click On 'View Photos' To Read Rakhi Sawant's Statements...

Previously, Amit was quoted by a leading daily as saying, "I will raise the issue at our Annual General Meeting on May 1 and propose a ban on them."

But now, Amit has apologised to both the actresses. He was quoted by IANS as saying, "I would like to offer my unconditional apology to Dolly Bindra and Rakhi Sawant for using the word 'ban' and other related statements."

He further added, "I admit it is entirely my fault, and also for going on record on electronic media, Whatsapp and SMS, about their actions or views on Pratyusha Banerjee's untimely demise, which had affected me very gravely mentally."

Well, now you must be wondering why Amit apologised to Rakhi and Dolly. Read the statement of Rakhi in the slides... (With IANS Inputs)
Bank of America Corporation (the "Corporation") filed a Current Report on Form 8-K with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") on April 27, 2016, announcing that it held its 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders on April 27, 2016 (the "Annual Meeting"). At the Annual Meeting, the Corporation's stockholders elected all of the nominees for director; approved the advisory vote on executive compensation; and ratified the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the Corporation's independent registered public accounting firm for 2016. With respect to all matters subject to a vote, holders of the Corporation's common stock, Series B Preferred Stock and Series 1 to 5 Preferred Stock voted together as a class.

Bank of America Corporation makes available all of its SEC filings on its website: http://investor.bankofamerica.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=71595&p=irol-irhome.

The SEC maintains a website that contains reports, proxy statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC. These materials may be obtained electronically by accessing the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov. A copy of the document will also be available on the National Storage Mechanism's website at: http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/NSM.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160427006860/en/

Contacts:

Bank of America

Michael Pressman, 980-386-5083

Assistant General Counsel
Children look at the Myitsone dam from the bank of Ayeyarwady River in 2012.

In 2009, after years of talks, most of the $3.6 billion Myitsone Dam project was to be paid for by the China Power Investment Corp. in a joint venture with Myanmar's Ministry of Electric Power. Myanmar was expected to get 10 percent of the electricity garnered, own the project after a 50-year period and earn $54 billion via tax payment, power and shares.

But criticism quickly ensued. Economically and socially, initial estimates were criticized for their underestimation of adverse impacts. Historically, the Irrawaddy is seen as the birthplace of Myanmar's civilization. Geopolitically, the dam is located in the unstable northern Kachin region, where clashes between the government and local separatists remain common. Internationally, foreign governments, including the U.S. embassy, have funded some anti-dam activists, as disclosed by Wikileaks.

In fall 2011, then-president Thein Sein suspended the project. Recently, Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), won a huge parliamentary majority. What will the new government do?

Myanmar's long emergence

In China, observers believe the dam project was stopped and the Chinese companies targeted unfairly. But although China has been portrayed as the exclusive partner of the old military government, Japan provided the country with $2.2 billion in foreign aid and reparations until the 1990s.

The close relations were due to General Ne Win, who had been trained by the Japanese in 1940. While half of Myanmar's foreign aid came from Tokyo, Ne Win's widespread persecution of ethnic Chinese moved from discrimination to mass violence. After the 1988 military coup, General Saw Maung took over but Ne Win remained influential in the military into the 1990s. This long "inconvenient history" is often downplayed in the West.

As the new military rulers consolidated power, Japan became preoccupied by its own economic troubles. It was then that Chinese firms filled the vacuum investing in hydropower dams, mining projects, oil and gas.

By the early 2010s, Myanmar's reforms had led Washington to relax curbs on foreign aid to Myanmar, relations were normalized and Brussels followed suit. As Western investment drives took off, some late entrants began to compete for projects that China had already been scheduled to manage.

Need for cooperation

After the recent visit by Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Suu Kyi said she had not read the contract for the Myitsone project but characterized bilateral relations with China as "very important politically, as well as socially and economically."

In the past five years, Myanmar has tripled its expenditure on electricity. Yet, only one third of the country's 53 million people live with electricity. Today, two-thirds of total electricity comes from hydropower, 29 percent from gas, and less than 1 percent from wind, solar and biomass. Full access will take until 2030.

While most people in Myanmar would prefer uncontroversial electricity resources, all expect accelerated development. Unlike the U.S., China is a large investor in Myanmar. In turn, Chinese firms have learned lessons of their own about local responsiveness and community relations.

Indeed, there is reason for cautious optimism. While Aung San Suu Kyi cannot ignore the legal weight of contracts, she has the mandate to come up with out-of-the box solutions, which could prove to be pragmatic and balanced. In another contested case - the Chinese-Myanmar Letpadaung copper mine - she did not recommend project cancellation but revised terms instead. This allowed construction while reducing adverse impact locally.

Myanmar has a great interest in China's development experience and pioneering efforts, including the "Belt and Road" initiative , the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New BRICS Development Bank.

Historically, China and Myanmar have gained a lot from sustained economic cooperation. Today, the need for mutual collaboration is greater than ever before.

Dr Dan Steinbock is Guest Fellow of Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS). This commentary is based on his project on "China and the multipolar world economy" at SIIS, a leading global think-tank in China. For more about SIIS, see http://en.siis.org.cn/ ; about Dr Steinbock, see http://www.differencegroup.net/

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors only, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 04/27/16 -- Theratechnologies Inc. (Theratechnologies) (TSX: TH) is pleased to announce that it has been notified by its partner, TaiMed Biologics, Inc., that the enrollment for the Phase III study of ibalizumab, in combination with optimized background regimen (patients' current therapy), for patients infected with multi-drug resistant HIV-1 has been completed as of April 27, 2016. The enrollment in the US has reached 36 patients, exceeding the minimum of 30 patients proposed by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The last patient enrolled in the study has entered the initial 7-day control period. On Day 7, ibalizumab will be administered and the primary end point will be assessed 7 days after initiation of ibalizumab on Day 14. The study will continue for a total of 24 weeks of treatment with ibalizumab.

This open label, single arm Phase III study is the last clinical trial required by the FDA to complete the BLA submission. The primary end point is the proportion of patients achieving a viral load reduction of at least 0.5 log10 at Day 14. Top-line results of the primary end point should be available by the end of May 2016.

About Ibalizumab

Ibalizumab is a humanized monoclonal antibody for the treatment of HIV-1 infection. The antibody is a novel CD4-directed HIV entry-inhibitor currently in a late stage Phase III clinical trial.

About Theratechnologies

Theratechnologies (TSX: TH) is a specialty pharmaceutical company addressing unmet medical needs to promote healthy ageing and an improved quality of life among HIV patients. Further information about Theratechnologies is available on the Company's website at www.theratech.com and on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information, or, collectively, forward-looking statements, within the meaning of applicable securities laws, that are based on our management's belief and assumptions and on information currently available to our management. You can identify forward-looking statements by terms such as "may", "will", "should", "could", "would", "outlook", "believe", "plan", "envisage", "anticipate", "expect" and "estimate", or the negatives of these terms, or variations of them. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release include, but are not limited to, the timing to obtain the top-line results of the primary end point.

Forward-looking statements are based upon a number of assumptions and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Theratechnologies' control that could cause actual results to differ materially from those that are disclosed in or implied by such forward-looking information. These assumptions include but are not limited to, the following: no delay will occur in the study, no serious adverse effect will occur using ibalizumab and the FDA will not request additional studies.These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the risk that top-line results do not meet the primary end point, the FDA requires additional studies and delays occur in the conduct of the study.

We refer potential investors to the "Risk Factors" section of our Annual Information Form dated February 24, 2016 available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. The reader is cautioned to consider these and other risks and uncertainties carefully and not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements reflect current expectations regarding future events and speak only as of the date of this press release and represent our expectations as of that date.

We undertake no obligation to update or revise the information contained in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or circumstances or otherwise, except as may be required by applicable law.

Contacts:

Denis Boucher

EXOCET Public Relations inc.

514-913-1957




Mr. Stephen Ho, CEO of CITIC Telecom CPC (Left) and Mr. Heiko H. Koop, CEO of Linx Group (Right) Mr. Stephen Ho, CEO of CITIC Telecom CPC (Left) and Mr. Xin Yue Jiang, Chairman of CITIC Telecom International Holdings Limited (Right) CITIC Telecom CPC and Linx's management team at Amsterdam office CITIC Telecom CPC and Linx's staffs at Amsterdam office

HONG KONG, Apr 28, 2016 - (ACN Newswire) - CITIC Telecom International CPC Limited ("CITIC Telecom CPC"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of CITIC Telecom International Holdings Limited ("CITIC Telecom") (SEHK: 1883) today announced its acquisition of the telecommunication business of Linx Telecommunications B.V. (Linx Telecommunications), including Linx's 470 kilometer optic fiber network in the Baltic Sea, and its network operations centers (NOCs) in Moscow and Tallinn, Estonia. The acquisition also includes Linx's data center in Tallinn, which serves as Estonia's largest Internet Exchange (TLL-IX). Currently undergoing customary regulatory approval, the acquisition is expected to complete in the second half of 2016.The acquisition extends CITIC Telecom CPC's global footprint to Central Asia and Eastern Europe markets, further strengthening the company's global reach-which already includes Asia-Pacific, North America and Western Europe-and greatly enhancing CITIC Telecom's ability to capture opportunities arising from China's "One Belt, One Road" economic cooperation initiative.Capturing opportunities from "One Belt, One Road" via synergy of network and technology expertiseMr. Xin Yue Jiang, Chairman of CITIC Telecom International Holdings Limited said: "Our mission is 'Connecting The World with Quality Service' and the acquisition of these important telecommunications assets is significant to our development strategy of expanding business internationally and increasing global network coverage, keeping Mainland China as the foundation of our business, with Hong Kong and Macau serving as both base and springboard to more opportunities."Chairman Xin added: "We are leveraging Linx's extensive network resources and experience in Central Asia, Central and Eastern Europe to significantly boost our access to, and capability to handle, opportunities from the "One Belt, One Road" initiative, in addition to addressing and better serving our customers' business needs in these regions."CITIC Telecom CPC is acquiring extensive telecommunications infrastructure and business operations that Linx has built to service customers in 14 countries with 24 points of presence (POPs) across Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Central Asia. With a wealth of local experience and advanced technologies, Linx Telecommunications has been investing heavily in constructing extensive networks and providing a variety of bandwidth services, including a 470 kilometer submarine fiber network covering the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea which connects Sweden, Finland and Estonia. The majority of its customers are major companies which require data services, such as Ethernet circuits, bandwidth services, MPLS virtual private networks, data centers and cloud computing.The acquisition of Linx Telecommunications is a testament to CITIC Telecom CPC's commitment in capturing opportunities brought about by the "One Belt, One Road" Initiative as announced by China in 2015. The network services provided by Linx cover a high-growth potential market which includes Russia, Kazakhstan and the "Stan" region, the Baltic Sea and Eastern Europe. Because both companies have a similar customer base, comprising multinationals, the acquired assets will enable CITIC Telecom CPC to readily strengthen its development and strategy for markets in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. This latest acquisition will also further reinforce CITIC Telecom CPC's capabilities in managed networking services, cloud computing and other managed value-added data services. Moreover, Russian language proficiency among Linx Telecommunications team members joining CITIC Telecom CPC, as part of the acquisition, will bring added competence in expanding business in the region."The acquisition of Linx Telecommunications will enable CITIC Telecom CPC to expand our reach to markets covered by the 'One Belt, One Road' Initiative. By extending our footprint to Russian-speaking markets and Central Asia, we will enhance network access for our existing customers and facilitate greater business growth across Asia and Europe," said Mr. Stephen Ho, CEO of CITIC Telecom CPC. "With this new competitive advantage, we will continue to support the 'One Belt, One Road' Initiative through ongoing investment and development of telecommunications infrastructure and premium ICT services. I am confident this acquisition will bring new business opportunities, enhance overall efficiencies and elevate our growth to greater heights."The "One Belt, One Road" Initiative aims to foster growth and closer cooperation in trade links, capital flows, infrastructural investment and policy coordination in Asia, Europe, and Africa. It is expected that investment by China under the Initiative will double within the next three years, reaching a total of US$200 billion. Currently, The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Silk Road Fund are the two major financial institutions involved in the Initiative, with additional investment from the Russia Direct Investment Fund in the pipeline.About CITIC Telecom CPCCITIC Telecom International CPC Limited ("CITIC Telecom CPC"), a wholly owned subsidiary of CITIC Telecom International Holdings Limited (SEHK: 1883), is a trusted Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions provider with multiple branches across Asia Pacific, and a preferred partner by multinational corporations and business enterprises.CITIC Telecom CPC delivers a range of innovative services, including: TrueCONNECT - an advanced MPLS VPN service which employs state-of-the-art fully meshed network, TrustCSI - an integrated suite of information security solutions, DataHOUSE - converged cloud solution and global unified management datacenter solutions, and SmartCLOUD - smarter, better and high performance cloud computing solutions which complement the company's managed network, managed security, and managed cloud data center solutions.As further testament to its commitment in providing premium quality services in the Asia Pacific region, the company became the first VPN service provider in Hong Kong to achieve all four ICT related certifications in ISO 9001 - Quality Management System, ISO 27001 - Information Security Management System, ISO 20000 - Information Technology Service Management System, and ISO 14001 - Environmental Management System. Learn more at www.citictel-cpc.com.About Linx Telecommunications B.V.The Linx Group (Linxtelecom & Linxdatacenter) is an international telecommunication and carrier neutral data center solutions provider. Headquartered in Amsterdam and with offices across Central and Eastern Europe region, and Russia, it bridges East with West, providing highly secure and advanced IT solutions to its customers. The Linx Group's unique proposition, which differentiates it in the market and simplifies data management process for the customers, is based on integrated offering of Data Center, Connectivity and Cloud solutions. The synergy of Linxtelecom and Linxdatacenter, as well as around the clock technical support, creates a 'one-stop-shop' platform for clients' data and IT needs and, therefore, maximizes the value received. Bank Street Group LLC served as exclusive advisor to Linx Telecom in the transaction.For more information, please visit: www.linxdatacenter.com and www.linxtelecom.comMedia Contact:Micty WongCITIC Telecom International CPC Limited(852) 2170 7511Email: micty.wong@citictel-cpc.comRowena LeungCITIC Telecom International CPC Limited(852) 2170 7536Email: rowena.leung@citictel-cpc.comSource: CITIC Telecom International CPC LimitedCopyright 2016 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
Fujitsu Limited Public and Investor Relations Tel: +81-3-3215-5259 URL: www.fujitsu.com/global/news/contacts/ Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. ICT Systems Laboratories Server Technologies Lab E-mail: Retimer_ISSCC2015@ml.labs.fujitsu.com

KAWASAKI, Japan, Apr 28, 2016 - (JCN Newswire) - Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced that Fujitsu Laboratories employee Akira Nakagawa has been selected by the Cabinet Office of the Government of Japan to receive the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon for "the development of encoding technology and transmission equipment for digital video" at the 2016 Spring Conferment. The award ceremony will be held on May 17th.The Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon award is bestowed upon individuals who have contributed inventions or discoveries in scientific fields, as well as outstanding accomplishments in academics, arts and culture, or sports.This award is for the commercial development of digital video encoding technology and H.264 video transmission equipment, which have contributed to the spread of HD video on a global scale.Award Summary1. RecipientAkira Nakagawa, Innovation Director, Life Innovation Laboratories, Applied Innovation Research Center, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.2. Summary of AccomplishmentThe years from 2000 to 2005 were witness to a growing volume of HD video broadcasts, which are of higher quality and overwhelmingly more realistic than conventional analog quality SD video. Demand was also growing for the ability to record and display HD content on TVs, cameras, PCs, and other devices. However, the cost burden associated with the devices and video transmission needed to shift to HD was prohibitively expensive.In order to resolve these issues, the award recipient, Akira Nakagawa, led the R&D efforts on a number of technologies, beginning with a video encoding algorithm that greatly reduces the information volume of HD video at low power while preserving high quality, as well as an H.264(1) encoding chip that supports HD video based on the algorithm. Another technology enabled HD video transmission through the public IP network, which was previously thought to be unsuitable for real-time data use for professional-level video with broadcast quality, and a technology that completely prevents deterioration from color bleeding that would happen in multi-stage video relays. The commercialization of these technologies resolved the issues of HD video device and transmission cost.These technologies made commercially viable digital video encoding and H.264 video transmission devices, enabling huge reductions in the device and transmission costs of high resolution, realistic HD video. Through these technologies, H.264 video transmission equipment was adopted at broadcast stations around the world, contributing both to the development of an industry using HD video across a broad range of fields, from consumer equipment to professional-use broadcasting equipment, and to the growth of HD video on a global scale.3. Other Awards Received by Akira Nakagawa2008 - The Promotion Foundation for Electrical Science and Engineering Chairman's Award and the Electrical Science and Engineering Promotion Award2010 - SMPTE Journal Certificate of Merit Award2011 - Local Commendation for Invention of Kanto - The Encouragement Prize for Invention2013 - Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology - Prize for Science and Technology (Development Category)2013 - The Ichimura Prize in Industry for Distinguished Achievement(1) H.264A video compression format. An international video compression standard jointly established by the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and the International Organization for Standardization and International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC).About Fujitsu LtdFujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company, offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. Approximately 159,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702; ADR:FJTSY) reported consolidated revenues of 4.8 trillion yen (US$40 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2015. For more information, please see http://www.fujitsu.com.* Please see this press release, with images, at:http://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-releases/Source: Fujitsu LtdContact:Copyright 2016 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
SHANGHAI, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 28, UnionPay International announced its joint issuance of the first UnionPay credit card (card number starting with 62) in the US with Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (US) (hereinafter referred to as the "ICBC US"). It is also the first credit card issued by a Chinese commercial bank there. Cai Jianbo, CEO of UnionPay International, Wang Xiquan, Vice President of ICBC, and Luan Jiansheng, President of ICBC Peony Card Center attended the issuing ceremony. Zhang Qiyue, Chinese consul-general in New York was present for congratulations.

UnionPay and ICBC, with similar internationalization strategies, are strategic partners to each other. They work closely worldwide in UnionPay cards acceptance, issuance and innovative payment. UnionPay's continuously expanding acceptance footprint overseas meets the payment demand of global cardholders, who are also customers of international issuers like ICBC. UnionPay International also helps Chinese banks' overseas expansion. So far, it has cooperated with ICBC in issuing cards in over 20 countries and regions, including Canada, New Zealand and Singapore.

This UnionPay credit card, accepted in the UnionPay acceptance network in 157 countries and regions, is to deliver secure, convenient and preferential payment service to American residents who travel to China and other Asia-Pacific countries, as well as Chinese citizens in the US and exchange students. Two types are offered: "Preferred cards" and "Premier cards"; the former is without annual fee and offers cash refund while the latter offers more cash refund sand VIP services.

Cai Jianbo said, China-US Travel Year will promote personnel exchanges between the two countries and UnionPay cards will offer more convenient and considerate payment services. The UnionPay network in the US can now satisfy cardholders' needs while providing rich privileges and optimized experiences. UnionPay online payment is also available at major e-merchants and renowned universities. With improved acceptance environment, we partner with ICBC in issuing UnionPay cards to offer new payment options for local residents, attract more US customers to China, and support bilateral exchanges.

To date, over 54 million UnionPay cards have been issued overseas. UnionPay's service system in the US keeps improving. UnionPay cards are now accepted at almost all local ATMs. 80% of local merchants support signature payment with UnionPay cards, and merchants with PIN pads support PIN payment with UnionPay cards.

For more information: http://www.unionpayintl.com/




TAIPEI (dpa-AFX) - Taiwan's Siliconware Precision Industries Co., Ltd. (SPIL) late Wednesday announced that it has resolved to terminate its strategic alliance agreement and share subscription agreement with Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd. Siliconware had previously resolved to conduct a private placement of common shares pursuant to a board resolution on December 11, 2015 and had on even date executed a Share Subscription Agreement and Strategic Alliance Agreement with Tsinghua. The termination decision was taken after consideration of subjective and objective factors of the Company and Unigroup. Siliconware said its Board resolved to terminate the Private Placement on April 28 and execute a termination agreement with Unigroup, mutually agreeing to terminate both agreements. The Company's board of directors will authorize the chairman and/or another designated person to represent the Company in executing a termination agreement with Unigroup. The assigned person will also fully handle all matters relating to terminating the Private Placement in accordance with law. 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.
In December 2014, Stockmann announced it would focus on developing its Stockmann and Lindex brands and its real estate business. The divestment of Hobby Hall completes Stockmann's strategic aim to withdraw from non-core business operations.

Regulatory News:

Stockmann has signed an agreement to sell the business operations of Hobby Hall to the Finnish SGN Group. The transaction will be completed on 31 December 2016, and the business will be transferred on 1 January 2017. The transaction price is not expected to have a significant effect on Stockmann's result. The transaction includes Hobby Hall's assets and liabilities and all of its business operations, excluding logistics, as of the date of transfer. When the transaction takes place, Hobby Hall's sales and support personnel in all locations will be transferred to SGN as existing employees.

"We are pleased to have found a strong, committed Finnish owner for Hobby Hall. SGN Group wants to develop Hobby Hall as a profitable, modern e-commerce operator. The divestment enables Stockmann to focus on its Stockmann and Lindex brands and real estate business in line with its strategy," says Lauri Veijalainen, Stockmann's interim CEO.

"Hobby Hall is a well-known brand and has a wide customer base and popular online store. We believe that these qualities will benefit both parties when combined with SGN Group's strong financial standing, long-term operational focus and expertise. To support our wholesale expertise and strong cooperation with retailers, we want to build a multichannel operation that will consolidate its position in people's daily lives and in Finnish homes," says Sam Nieminen, CEO of SGN Group.

Stockmann has also signed an agreement to transfer Hobby Hall's logistics operations to Posti as of 1 May 2016. The agreement covers warehousing services for Hobby Hall's products, logistics services for its online store, including deliveries and the product returns centre, and the transport of products to the Hobby Hall store in Tammisto, Vantaa. All of Hobby Hall's warehouse personnel will transfer to Posti as existing employees.

Hobby Hall's 2015 revenue was EUR 86 million and its operating result EUR -5.7 million. At the end of the year, Hobby Hall had about 340 employees, of whom around 130 worked in warehouse operations. Stockmann will continue to report Hobby Hall's result in the Stockmann Retail segment in 2016. Hobby Hall's assets will be reported as assets available for sale on the balance sheet.

Established in 1933, SGN Group is a strong, continuously developing Finnish family business in the commerce sector. Its areas of business include sports, recreational and household goods, agriculture, environmental management and industrial equipment, and snowmaking and snow-management equipment. The Group also has significant business operations in Russia and Sweden. The SGN Group comprises Agritek Oy, Kessu Oy, S.G. Nieminen Oy, SGN Sportia Oy, SGN Sportecom Oy, SGN Tekniikka Oy, SSF Spraying Systems Finland Oy, Sumeko Oy, Team Sportia AB and Truebell Finland Oy. Its net sales are approximately EUR 154 million and it has around 200 employees. The Group's head office is in Vantaa. http://www.sgn.fi/

STOCKMANN plc

Lauri Veijalainen

Interim CEO

Distribution:

Nasdaq Helsinki

Principal media

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Contacts:

Stockmann

Lauri Veijalainen, +358 9 121 5062

interim CEO

or

Nora Malin, +358 9 121 3558

Communications Director

www.stockmanngroup.com

or

SGN Group

Sam Nieminen, +358 40 552 7040

CEO

or

Helena Peltola, +358 50 561 5895

Communications Manager
Regulatory News:

Indutrade's (STO:INDT) Annual General Meeting was held on 27 April 2016, at IVA's Conference Center, Grev Turegatan 16, Stockholm.

The AGM resolved on dividends of SEK 9.00 per share. The record date for the dividends was set to 29 April 2016. Dividends are expected to be distributed via Euroclear Sweden on 4 May 2016.

Fredrik Lundberg, Bengt Kjell, Johnny Alvarsson, Ulf Lundahl, Katarina Martinson, Krister Mellve and Lars Pettersson were re-elected as directors. Annica Bresky was elected as new board member. Fredrik Lundberg was re-elected as chairman of the board.

PricewaterhouseCoopers AB was reelected as the company's auditor for the period until the end of the AGM 2017.

The AGM resolved to adopt guidelines for remuneration and other terms of employment of the senior executives in accordance with the board of directors' proposal.

In accordance with the board's proposals, the AGM resolved to amend the articles of association with regard to the limits of the company's share capital and the number of shares, and on a bonus issue, whereby the company's share capital is increased by SEK 200 million to SEK 240 million and each existing share entitles to two (2) new shares free of charge. The total number of shares in Indutrade is thereby increased to 120,000,000. The record date for the bonus issue is 27 May 2016.

More information about the AGM is available at the company and on the company's website: www.indutrade.se, under Investor relations/AGM/AGM 2016.

Stockholm, 28 April 2016

INDUTRADE AB (publ)

Indutrade markets and sells components, systems and services with a high-tech content to industrial customers in selected niches. Indutrade's business is distinguished by the following factors, among others:

High-tech products for recurring needs

Growth through a structured and tried-and-tested acquisition strategy

A decentralised organisation characterised by an entrepreneurial spirit

The Group is structured into six business areas: Engineering Equipment, Flow Technology, Fluids Mechanical Solutions, Industrial Components, Measurement Sensor Technology and Special Products.

The Group's financial targets (per year across a business cycle) are to grow by a minimum of 10%, to attain a minimum EBITA margin of 10% and a minimum return on operating capital of 20%.

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Contacts:

Indutrade

Johnny Alvarsson, President and CEO

+46 70 589 17 95
Regulatory News:

The Annual General Meeting of Axactor AB (publ) (OSE:AXAO), 556227-8043, (the "Company"), will be held on Thursday, May 26, 2016 at 2.00 pm CET at Wistrand Advokatbyra, Regeringsgatan 65 in Stockholm.

Right to attend and notice to the Company

Those wishing to attend the meeting must:

be entered as a shareholder in the share register kept by Euroclear Sweden AB on Friday, May 20, 2016, and

give notice of attendance to the Company no later than 4.00 pm CET Monday, May 23, 2016.

Notice of attendance shall be done by regular mail to Axactor AB (publ), Annual General Meeting 2016, Hovslagargatan 5B, bottom floor, SE-111 48 Stockholm, Sweden, by telephone +46 8 402 28 00, by fax +46 8 402 28 01 or by e-mail to torbjorn.ranta@axactor.com. When giving notice of attendance, please state the shareholder's name, social security number or corporate registration number, address, and telephone number (office hours). A shareholder may be accompanied by one or two assistants if the shareholders give notice to the Company of the accompanying persons in accordance with what has previously been stated.

Shareholding in the name of a nominee

To be entitled to participate in the meeting, those whose shares are registered in the name of a nominee must register the shares in their own name with the help of the nominee, so that he or she is entered in the share register kept by Euroclear Sweden AB on Friday, May 20, 2016. This registration may be made temporarily.

Shareholders registered in the Norwegian Verdipapirsentralen (VPS) must request a temporary entry as shareholders in the share register kept by Euroclear Sweden AB in order to be entitled to participate in the meeting. Shareholders wishing to attend the meeting must notify DNB Bank ASA about this by regular mail to the address Verdipapirservice, Postboks 1600 Sentrum, 0021 Oslo or by e-mail to vote@dnb.no no later than 12.00 noon CET on Wednesday, May 18, 2016, in order for DNB Bank to be able to ensure that an entry is made in the share register kept by Euroclear Sweden AB by Friday, May 20, 2016, which is the day when such entry must have been executed. Following the meeting, DNB Bank will arrange for the shares to be re-registered in the Norwegian Verdipapirsentralen.

Proxies etc.

Those who do not attend the meeting in person may exercise his or her rights at the meeting through a proxy in possession of a written proxy form, signed and dated. A template proxy form will be available on the Company's website www.axactor.com no later than three weeks before the meeting and on the day of the meeting. The template proxy form can also be obtained from the Company. A proxy form issued by a legal entity must be accompanied by a copy of the certificate of registration or a corresponding document of authority for the legal entity. To facilitate registration at the meeting, proxy forms, certificates of registration and other documents of authority should be submitted to the Company at the address above no later than by Monday, May 23, 2016.

Proposed agenda

1. Opening of the meeting

2. Election of chair of the meeting

3. Preparation and approval of voting list

4. Adoption of agenda

5. Election of one or two persons to check the minutes of the meeting

6. Determination of whether the meeting has been duly convened

7. Presentation of the annual report and the auditors' report as well as the consolidated accounts and auditors' report on the consolidated accounts

8. Resolution on adoption of the income statement and balance sheet as well as the consolidated income statement and consolidated balance sheet

9. Resolution on appropriation of the Company's result as shown on the adopted balance sheet

10. The Board of Directors' statement regarding corporate governance

11. Resolution on discharge of the directors and Managing Director from personal liability

12. Resolution on the number of directors and deputy directors

13. Election of directors and chair of the Board of Directors

14. Election of auditor

15. Resolution on remuneration and other compensation to the directors

16. Resolution on remuneration payable to the auditor

17. Resolution on the establishment of a Nomination Committee and the election of members thereto

18. Resolution on authorization to issue shares and certain other financial instruments

19. Resolution on change of Articles of Association; (a) removal of series A-shares and (b) change of accounting currency

20. Closing of the meeting

The proposals by the Board of Directors

The previous Nomination Committee of the Company resigned at the Annual General Meeting on June 3, 2015. A new Nomination Committee is proposed to be established at this Annual General Meeting, and which, if elected, will take office from the date of the Annual General Meeting. Accordingly, the proposals in relation to composition and remuneration of the Board of Directors below have not been prepared by a Nomination Committee.

Election of chair of the meeting (item 2)

The Board of Directors proposes that Mr. Hendrik Kangasmuukko (lawyer at Wistrand Advokatbyra) shall be elected chair of the Annual General Meeting.

Resolution on appropriation of the Company's result as shown on the adopted balance sheet (item 9)

At the disposal of the meeting is the share premium reserve of SEK 1,468,787,486, the retained earnings of SEK -1,071,213,151 as well as the result for the period of SEK -204,756,757. Total unrestricted equity at the disposal of the meeting thus amounts to SEK 192,817,578.

The Board of Directors proposes that the funds available, SEK 192,817,578, are brought forward.

Resolution on number of directors and deputy directors and election of directors and chair of the Board of Directors (items 12 13)

The Board of Directors recommends to appoint a board consisting of three directors and no deputy directors. Further, it is proposed to re-appoint Einar J. Greve, Gunnar Hvammen and Per Dalemo as directors, and that Einar J. Greve shall continue as the chair of the Board of Directors.

Resolution on election of auditor (item 14)

The Board of Directors recommends to re-appoint PricewaterhouseCoopers as auditors with Mr. Johan Palmgren as responsible auditor.

Resolution on remuneration and other compensation to the directors (item 15)

The Board of Directors proposes that board remuneration amounting to SEK 900,000 shall be paid to the chair of the Board of Directors while as each of the two ordinary directors shall be paid SEK 450,000. No remuneration shall be paid to the Board of Directors for any type of committee work.

Resolution on remuneration payable to the auditor (item 16)

The Board of Directors proposes that the auditor shall be compensated for accrued and approved invoices.

Resolution on the establishment of a Nomination Committee and the election of members thereto (item 17)

The Board of Directors proposes to the general meeting to, in accordance with the Company's Corporate Governance Policy, resolve on members and instructions for a nomination committee, mainly in accordance with the following:

A nomination committee (the "Nomination Committee") consisting of one (1) to three (3) members at the discretion of the general meeting shall be elected. All members of the Nomination Committee shall be elected by the general meeting. The names of the candidates of the Nomination Committee shall be disclosed in advance of the Annual General Meeting.

The term of office of the Nomination Committee appointed in this way shall end when a new Nomination Committee has been appointed.

Resolution on authorization to issue shares and certain other financial instruments (item 18)

The Board of Directors proposes that the general meeting resolves to authorize the Board of Directors to, on one or more occasions before the Annual General Meeting of 2017, resolve on issues of shares, warrants and/or convertible instruments, mainly in accordance with the following.

a) Issues may be carried out with or without considering the shareholders' preferential rights.

b) The total number of shares which can be issued through resolutions under the authorization shall not exceed 400,000,000 shares through share issues, the exercise of warrants and/or conversion of convertible instruments (this does, however, not prevent warrants and convertible instruments from being combined with terms and conditions for recalculation which, if applied, may result in another number of shares), corresponding to approximately 34 percent of the number of shares and votes in the Company after dilution, based on the number of shares and votes in the Company as at the date of this notice including outstanding warrants and an ongoing issue in kind directed to the sellers of IKAS company.

c) Issues carried out without the shareholders' preferential rights with cash payment or payment by set-off of claims, may only take place at a price in line with the market price of the Company's share with a deduction for such market-related discount deemed required by the Board of Directors for successfully carrying out the issue. In case of a rights issue, the Board of Directors decides on the pricing.

d) The authorization shall include a right to resolve on issues with cash payment, payment by set-off of claims or payment with non-cash consideration, and in combination with such conditions referred to in Chapter 2, section 5 second paragraph, points 2-3 and 5 of the Swedish Companies Act.

The reason for the Board of Directors' proposal as well as the possibility to disregard the shareholders' preferential rights is that the Company must be prepared to without delay improve its financial position and strengthen the shareholder value by way of opportunities that may arise. The authorization approved at the Extraordinary General Meeting on December 23, 2015 expires as of the Annual General Meeting of 2016.

Resolution to change the Articles of Association; removal of series A-shares and change of accounting currency (item 19 (a) and (b))

19 (a) Removal of Series A-shares

According to the current Articles of Association there are two share series, ordinary shares with one vote per share and A-shares with 0.999 votes per share. The latter is a technical solution from autumn 2015 when the private placement of 400 million new shares took place. Currently there are no A-shares outstanding and the Board of Directors does not foresee a need for different series of shares. The Board of Directors proposes to the general meeting to amend the current Articles of Association of the Company whereby the serie A-shares, and the related conversion right in 14, is removed.

The existing and new proposed wordings of 5 of the Articles of Association are as follows:

Existing wording:

5. Amount of Shares and Series of Shares

The number of shares in the company shall be not less than 400,000,000 shares and not more than 1,600,000,000 shares.

The shares may be issued in two different classes, ordinary shares and shares in class A. Ordinary shares and shares in class A may be issued to a number corresponding to all issued shares in the company.

Ordinary shares shall carry one (1) vote each in the company. Shares of class A shall carry 0.999 vote each in the company. Shares of series A shall be subject to conversion in accordance with item 14 in the Articles of Association.

If the Company decides to issue new shares payable by cash or by debt set-off, then existing shares shall give preferential rights to subscribe to new shares of the same series in a quantity proportional to the existing number of shares of the same series (primary preferential rights). Newly issued shares not subscribed in accordance with the primary preferential rights shall be offered to all existing shareholders (secondary preferential rights). If the remaining quantity of shares offered in accordance with the secondary preferential rights do not suffice, then such remaining quantity of shares shall be allocated to the subscribers in proportions corresponding to the subscribers' relative existing total shareholding in the Company. If full allocation cannot be accomplished in this way concerning any share(s), any remaining allocation shall take place by drawing of lots.

If the Company decides to issue new shares of one only series payable by cash or by debt set-off, then all existing shareholders shall have preemptive rights to subscribe to these shares proportionate to their existing shareholdings.

What is stated above does not constitute a limitation to announce a directed issue payable by cash or by debt set-off with a deviation from the existing shareholders' preferential rights.

What is stated above relating to the shareholders' preferential rights shall also be applicable on any issues of warrants and convertible debentures.

If the Company increases the share capital by conducting a bonus issue, then new bonus shares shall be issued in both share series in the same proportions as given prior to the bonus issue. At such occasions existing shares of each share series shall give preferential rights to new bonus shares of the corresponding share series. What is stated in the preceding paragraph shall not imply limitations, following corresponding amendments to the Articles of Association, to issue bonus shares of a new series.

Proposed new wording:

5. Amount of Shares

The number of shares shall be not less than 400,000,000 and not more than 1,600,000,000.

The conversion right in 14 of the Articles of Association is removed.

19 (b) Change of accounting currency

The Board of Directors proposes to change the accounting currency of the Company from SEK to EUR. The reason for the change is to align the accounting currency within the group.

The new accounting currency will, provided the Annual General Meeting so resolves, be introduced as of the following financial year.

The existing and new proposed wordings of 14 of the Articles of Association are as follows:

Existing wording:

No wording (following resolution to remove 14 as per item 19 (a)).

Proposed new wording:

14. Accounting currency (to be included as 15 if 14 is not removed.)

The accounting currency shall be euro (EUR).

The full and complete new proposed Articles of Association of the Company can be studied in a separate attachment available on the website www.axactor.com.

Resolutions according to items 18 and 19 (a)-(b) above demand support by at least 2/3 of both the votes present and casted at the Annual General Meeting in order to be valid.

____________________________

Shareholders' right to request information

Upon request by any shareholder and where the Board of Directors believes that such may take place without significant harm to the Company, the Board of Directors and the Managing Director should provide information at the Annual General Meeting in respect of any circumstances which may affect the assessment of a matter on the agenda, and any circumstances which may affect the assessment of the Company's or a subsidiary's financial position and as regards the Company's relationship to other group companies. The obligation to provide information relates also to the consolidated accounts.

Documents

Accounting documents and the auditor's report as well as the complete proposals will be available at office of the Company and on the Company's website www.axactor.com no later than three weeks before the meeting including the day of the meeting. Copies of accounting documents and the auditor's report as well as the proposals will be sent free of charge to those shareholders who so request and state their postal address.

Corporate governance

As the Company is a Swedish private limited liability listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange, the Norwegian Recommendation for Corporate Governance (the "Recommendation") does not apply directly to the Company. However, with due regard to the fact that the Company is listed in Norway and to a substantial degree approaches the Norwegian investor market, and considering that it wishes to place emphasis on sound corporate governance, the Company has prepared a policy document on the basis of the Recommendation, but made certain necessary adjustments given the Company's Swedish domicile. The report on corporate governance is included in the annual report for 2015, which is available on the Company's website www.axactor.com.

Shares and votes

As per the day of this notice, the total number of shares and votes in the Company is 656,214,360. However the registration of 49,033,589 new shares following the issue in kind directed at the sellers of IKAS company is ongoing and is expected to be registered before the Annual General Meeting.

____________________________

Stockholm, April 2016

Axactor AB (publ)

The Board of Directors

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Contacts:

Axactor

Geir Johansen

CFO Investor Relations

+47 47710451
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Victrex plc (VCT.L) said it has entered into a consent decree with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission or FTC, concerning an FTC inquiry into the sale and marketing of implantable grade PEEK polymer in the U.S.by Victrex's subsidiaries, Invibio Inc and Invibio Limited. The company noted that the consent decree is clear that it has not admitted any violations of any law. There are no penalties or fines and the consent decree will resolve all outstanding matters pending before the FTC. The consent decree will apply to all existing and future Invibio customer contracts. Victrex said it took the decision to enter into the consent decree and end the investigation quickly, so as to ensure that management time, resources and focus remains on product and market innovation, maximizing customer relationships and minimizing business disruption. Victrex does not expect the FTC consent decree to have a material impact on its business. 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:

Pricer AB (STO:PRICB)

Highest quarterly order intake and strengthened operating result

First quarter 2016

Net sales of SEK 155.4 M (142.9), an increase of 9 percent compared to last year

Operating profit of SEK 2.2 M (0.9) and profit for the period of SEK 1.1 M (1.3)

Cash flow from operating activities decreased to SEK 20.8 M (42.0)

Order intake of SEK 304 M (269), an increase of 13 percent compared to last year

The backlog[1] is approximately SEK 206 M (226), whereof the majority is expected to be invoiced in the second and third quarter of 2016

Amounts in SEK M unless otherwise stated Q1 2016 Q1 2015 FY 2015 Order intake 304 269 792 Net sales* 155.4 142.9 864.8 Gross margin* 25.4% 22.5% 21.8% Operating profit 2.2 0.9 47.8 Operating margin 1.4% 0.6% 5.5% Cash flow from operating activities 20.8 42.0 101.4 Profit for the period 1.1 1.3 37.0 Earnings per share (SEK) 0.01 0.01 0.34

See Note 1 in the complete version of the interim report.

See Note 1 in the complete version of the interim report.

Comments from the CEO, Jonas Vestin Pricer started 2016 with an order intake of over SEK 300 M, which is the highest ever for a single quarter. Net sales were up by 9% compared to the same quarter of last year and gross margin strengthened gradually for the third consecutive quarter. Operating profit also improved year-on-year and it is highly satisfying that despite dramatic fluctuations in sales between quarters, Pricer is able to report its fifth consecutive quarter with a positive operating result.

The high order intake is mainly attributable to major orders from French chains Carrefour in the grocery retail trade and Castorama in the DIY sector. Norwegian grocery retailers also contributed sizeable orders based on previously communicated contracts. Delivery of these orders will take place mainly in the second and third quarters. The French franchise sector showed a continued strong order intake in the first quarter and the new framework agreement that was signed with the leading French food grocer Systeme U underlines that this trend will carry into the coming quarter. In a longer perspective, this could reduce Pricer's dependency on individual large projects.

In view of the high order intake and resulting strong order backlog at the end of the first quarter, we anticipate substantial delivery activity in the second quarter. The rollout of major projects has historically had a significant impact on the gross margin for individual quarters, but given the existing product and contract mix and the changes that have been made in logistics and supply chain, we expect more stable gross margin going forward.

The combined effects of price-based competition and new competitors entering the market are still being felt, but at the same time signals are that market growth is gaining momentum. With our advanced and difficult-to-copy technical platform, Pricer has a unique capacity to meet the needs of retailers that demand true automation and active pricing. Pricer is continuing to win business in the market where there are clear requirements on the solution's speed, robustness and scalability, and in those contracts where the customer has an explicit digital strategy.

In its capacity as issuer, Pricer AB publishes the information in this interim report in accordance with the Securities Markets Act (2007:528). The information was issued to the media for publication on Thursday, 28 April 2016 at 8:30 am CEST.

[1] The order backlog consists of binding orders and call-offs under frame agreements. Expected future value of frame agreements is not included.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428005645/en/

Contacts:

Pricer AB

Jonas Vestin, CEO

or

Helena Holmgren, CFO

+46 8 505 582 00.
 Flash

The signing ceremony of an MoU of collaboration between Pak-China Investment Company, Frontier Works Organizatio (FWO) and China International Contractors Association

Pakistan's Federal Minister for Planning Development and Reform Prof. Ahsan Iqbal has said that China is now the number one Foreign Direct Investor (FDI) in Pakistan, just within two years of start of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

He was addressing the "Belt & Road" China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Investment & Construction Cooperation Forum in Beijing, China, 28th April 2016. The Minister also reaffirmed Pakistan government's firm resolve and commitment to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor during his address and said that Prime Minister is personally supervising implementation of CPEC projects.

Ahsan Iqbal said that Pakistan was emerging as the favorite investment destination with economic reforms undertaken by government. A 10,000 MW power plant will be added by 2018 and additional 15,000 MW by 2025, he said adding that the government was building new dams, including Diamer Bhasha Dam to overcome food security. He said that Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) were rich in minerals and economic zones were being developed to take advantage of minerals and industries in Pakistan.

Pakistan's Federal Minister for Planning Development and Reform Prof. Ahsan Iqbal

The planning minister said that modern transport infrastructure under CPEC would make Pakistan's economy competitive. Western and eastern routes will link all regions with China. China's technology and experience combined with location and low cost advantage of Pakistan will create world class production platform, the minister highlighted. He said that government of Pakistan was committed to putting Pakistan among top 15 economies by 2025. CPEC has taken Pakistan-China friendship higher than Himalayas to beyond stars, said the minister.

The chief minister of the resource rich Baluchistan province Sanaullah Khan Zehri also attended the Seminar.

The event has been organized by Pak-China Investment Company, Frontier Works Organization (FWO) and China International Contractors Association and the Embassy of Pakistan in Beijing.

Madam Zhao Baige, Vice Chair Person of Foreign Affairs Committee of National People's Congress and Mr. Fang Qiuchen, President of China International Contractors Association, also spoke on the occasion.

Ahsan Iqbal and Sanaullah Khan Zehri also witnessed signing of a MoU of collaboration between Pak-China Investment Company, Frontier Works Organization (FWO) and China International Contractors Association during the seminar.

The Seminar was attended by around 200 participants of top Chinese and Pakistani companies.
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Wood Group (John) PLC (WDGJF.PK, WG.L) announced Thursday that it has won a new five year contract with BP-operated projects, valued at $500 million, to deliver services to eight facilities, offshore Azerbaijan. The contract, which has the option of two, two year extensions, effective immediately. Wood Group PSN or WGPSN will provide engineering, procurement and construction management services or EPCM under the contract, which has the option of two, two year extensions. Creating approximately 200 new positions, WGPSN will support various platforms. David Buchan, WGPSN's eastern region managing director, said, 'We are committed to hiring and developing local personnel, building partnerships and supporting supply chain companies in the communities where we operate. This is reflected on this contract where more than 50 per cent of the workforce will be from the region with a focus on increasing local employment opportunities further, as the contract progresses.' 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.
- Only 13% of leaders expect a substantial increase in gender diversity in five years' time

- Less than 20% of companies have structured programs to develop women

- Survey results show disconnect between male and female perception of problem

LONDON, April 28,2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The majority (69%) of industry leaders believe they will achieve gender parity on their board within the next 25 years despite little progress being made within their organizations, according to EY's reportNavigating disruption without gender diversity? Think again. These results are in stark contrast to the World Economic Forum's broader prediction of 117 years to gender parity across the workforce.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160427/360780

A survey of 350 C-suite executives from the top 200 companies in seven industries across 51 countries revealed only 13% expect a significant increase to the number of women in leadership roles in the next five years. Banking and Capital Markets was the only industry to surpass the cross-sector average with 27% expecting a substantial increase in the number of women in leadership. At the opposite end of the spectrum, only 6% of Insurance respondents anticipate this change.

Alison Kay, EY's Global Vice Chair - Industry, says:

"Disruption is here and it's presenting incredible opportunities and serious challenges across every industry. There are proven, direct links between a company's gender diversity and its business performance. Achieving gender diversity is a business imperative. Yet our research shows the biggest companies across seven major industries are far from realizing the benefits of gender diversity. Businesses need to put gender parity on the agenda - and start today."

Only 44% of organizations surveyed have metrics in place to track women as they move along their career path. While more than half of respondents (55%) recognize the need to do more to attract, retain and promote women to build the pipeline of future leaders, only 18% have structured programs to identify and develop women in their organizations.

Banking and Capital Markets, once again, is the clear leader in addressing gender parity with 33% citing structured programs to advance women in the workplace, followed by Automotive with 22%. Meanwhile, Insurance performs the lowest with only 8% citing formal programs.

Of companies with structured programs in place to advance women's careers, 44% are in EMEA, compared to 28% in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.

Randy Miller, EY's Industry Diversity and Inclusiveness and Global Automotive Leader, says:

"The talent is there and more needs to be done to ensure female professionals make it to the top: more structured programs, more measurement and more reporting. Companies should ask their female employees what support, programs and policies they would like to see in the workplace. This approach is especially important given our research shows us that men and women see the gender diversity problem in entirely different ways."

Forty-three percent of men cited a shortage of female candidates as the top obstacle to gender parity, compared to just 7% of women. Meanwhile, female respondents identified an unsupportive culture (28%), organizational bias (28%) and the conflicts of raising a family (24%) as their key obstacles.

Miller says: "To support and advance women into top leadership, this issue must be understood at all levels of the organization. If women don't get the right opportunities and support at the beginning and middle of their careers, their chances of making it into top roles are even slimmer. It's about identifying high-potential female talent, creating formal and informal programs to sponsor and provide the right opportunities, and to put measurement systems in place to record progress."

Men and women do agree, however, on the importance of creating a supportive corporate culture, with 59% of men and 40% of women listing it as a primary enabler of women's careers. Mentoring from senior leaders and strong female role models were also cited as top enablers.

Kay says: "There is a widespread reality disconnect across industries. Companies believe they are making progress toward their gender diversity goals, but not actively planning to increase their female leaders in the near future. It's time for each of us to think critically about how we're contributing to the solution and not perpetuating the problem. Gender parity won't be achieved without deliberate action."

For more information visit ey.com/womeninindustry and access individual industry results for Automotive; Consumer Products and Retail; Financial Services (Banking and Capital Markets and Insurance); Life Sciences; Oil and Gas and Power and Utilities.

Notes to Editors

About EY

EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services we deliver help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. We develop outstanding leaders who team to deliver on our promises to all of our stakeholders. In so doing, we play a critical role in building a better working world for our people, for our clients and for our communities.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

This news release has been issued by EYGM Limited, a member of the global EY organization that also does not provide any services to clients.

About the report

EY's Navigating disruption without gender diversity? Think again. is based on the results of interviews with 350 C-suite leaders (50% men and 50% women) from 51 countries. This cross-sector report is part of a wider sector program on women in industry. This program also includes reports on gender diversity within seven industries: automotive; consumer products and retail; financial services (banking and capital markets, and insurance); life sciences; oil and gas; and power and utilities.

For more details on the wider program, please visit ey.com/womeninindustry.
BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - At 3:55 am ET Thursday, the Federal Labor Agency is scheduled to release German unemployment data for April. The jobless rate is seen unchanged at a seasonally adjusted 6.2 percent in April. Ahead of the data, the euro showed mixed trading against its major rivals. While the euro rose against the U.S. dollar, it fell against the yen and the Swiss franc. Against the pound, the euro held steady. As of 3:50 am ET, the euro was trading at 0.7781 against the pound, 1.0978 against the Swiss franc, 1.1355 against the U.S. dollar and 122.94 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.


SCHIPHOL-RIJK (dpa-AFX) - Shares of Airbus Group N.V (EADSF.PK, EADSY.PK) were losing around 6 percent in the early morning trading after the French aerospace giant reported sharp decline in its first-quarter profit on weak deliveries. Order backlog also plunged from last year. The company maintained its fiscal 2016 outlook of stable earnings, while commercial order book is expected to grow.



Chief Executive Officer Tom Enders said, '2016 turns out to be the challenging year we anticipated. Overall, we expect a stable financial performance but deliveries, cash and earnings will be heavily loaded towards the end of the year.'



In the quarter, Airbus received 10 net commercial aircraft orders, compared to 101 net orders last year. Airbus Helicopters received 51 net orders, down from 86 units last year.



For the first quarter, net income declined 50 percent to 399 million euros from the previous year's 792 million euros, with earnings per share decreasing to 0.51 euros from 1.01 euros last year.



Earnings before interest and tax or EBIT fell to 365 million euros from 1.241 billion euros in the prior year. The latest-quarter result Included net one-offs totaling negative 136 million euros, while last year included a net gain of 697 million euros from the sale of shares in Dassault Aviation.



Group EBIT before one-off was 501 million euros, compared to 651 million euros in the prior year.



Group revenues were 12.2 billion euros, versus 12.1 billion euros in the prior year.



Revenues were stable at Commercial Aircraft supported by the strengthening average U.S. dollar rate, while deliveries declined to 125 aircraft from 134 aircraft in the last year. Helicopters' revenues declined 10 percent, reflecting lower deliveries and an unfavourable mix.



Group order intake in the quarter was 7.2 billion euros, sharply lower than 21 billion euros in the previous year. The order book value totaled 957 billion euros as of March 31, lower than 1.006 trillion at the year-end 2015.



Further, the company confirmed its forecast for fiscal 2016, expecting stable adjusted earnings per share and EBIT compared to 2015.



The company also expects to deliver more than 650 aircraft and the commercial order book is expected to grow.



As the basis for its 2016 guidance, Airbus expects the world economy and air traffic to grow in line with prevailing independent forecasts and assumes no major disruptions.



In Paris, Airbus shares were trading at 54.86 euros, down 6.16 percent.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
BIELEFELD, Germany, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Global initiative successful, itelligence AG achieves Partner Center of Expertise recertification from SAP for its high level of customer support

itelligence AG, a global SAP partner and multiple award winner, has achieved Partner Center of Expertise (Partner COE) recertification from SAP. The aim of SAP's demanding certification process is a uniformly high level of service and support for users of SAP solutions across the world as part of software maintenance. Every two years, value-added resellers that are SAP partners must undergo a complex audit as part of the recertification process.

itelligence AG's high quality of service receives support authorization for SAP Hybris Commerce for the first time

The certification process consists of a strict evaluation of the overall support system, including employees, support processes and infrastructure. Through this certification SAP confirms that itelligence AG fulfills all the necessary requirements to offer customers service of the highest quality - in both technical and organizational terms. The Partner COE certification is a prerequisite for value-added resellers to offer maintenance and support services (SAP Standard Support or SAP Enterprise Support) for the different areas of the SAP software landscape. In addition to the SAP Business All-in-One solution, analytics solutions from SAP, the SAP HANA platform and SAP mobile solutions, this year the scope of the certification was extended to include support authorization for the SAP Hybris Commerce solution. This certification recognizes itelligence AG for high-quality service and support in the area of the leading omnichannel solutions for e-commerce.

Partner COE certification follows a global approach - certification in 19 countries

itelligence AG has developed a global service and support strategy in cooperation with SAP. The aim of this strategy and delivery model is to support managed-services customers across the world in an optimum manner. This year, the itelligence offices in Turkey and Ukraine have joined this global approach, for a total of itelligence agencies in 19 countries certified for the next two years.

Lars Janitz, Executive Vice President, Head of Global Managed Services, itelligence AG, stressed the importance of certification for itelligence's global strategy: "The recertification is an important component of our efforts to expand and for the consistent development of our local and global managed-services business. itelligence is one of the most important of SAP's partners in managed services, having won the SAP Pinnacle Award in 2015 as Cloud Value-Added Reseller of the Year. The recertification proves that we have laid the foundation to provide optimal support to our customers in the area of service and support."

During the process, itelligence has also strengthened international cooperation between the various locations. For example, while Germany is currently the central delivery unit for the e-commerce solution SAP Hybris Commerce, the unit in Turkey is taking over support for mobile solutions in many countries. Numerous other collaborations between other sites have emerged.

Strict guidelines

As part of the Partner COE certification, SAP has significantly intensified testing of the tools and processes and reduced tolerances. In addition, for the first time SAP undertook an audit of itelligence's global ticket tool directly in the system, and employees were certified according to a revised policy.

More awards

Since January 2016, itelligence has also been a member of the Run SAP partner program. As a participant in this program, itelligence has, among other points, intensified its use of SAP Solution Manager to optimize its support still further. In addition, itelligence AG has been successfully recertified in the areas of application management, hosting, cloud and operations services for SAP HANA on each respective global level. These certificates prove the highest competence in dealing with customers on a global scale.

itelligence AG

itelligence is one of the leading international full-service providers of solutions in support of SAP solutions, employing more than 5,000 highly qualified employees in 23 countries. As a frequently awarded SAP partner, among others global value-added reseller, itelligence is SAP-certified in cloud services, an SAP-certified provider of hosting services for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and an SAP platinum partner. itelligence realizes large projects in the SAP solution-based environment for customers worldwide. The company's services in support of SAP solutions range from consulting and licensing to application management services and hosting services to proprietary industry-specific SAP solutions. In 2015, itelligence generated total sales of EUR 696.2 million.

SAP, SAP HANA, Hybris 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.



Public Relations:

Silvia Dicke

Tel:+49(0)521-91448-107

Fax:+49(0)521-91445-201

silvia.dicke@itelligence.de



itelligence AG

Konigsbreede 1

33605 Bielefeld

http://blog.itelligence.de/

http://www.itelligence.de


Vilnius, Lithuania, 2016-04-28 10:47 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --1. WAS CONSIDERED:Auditor's opinion on the company's financial statements and on the company's yearly report.RESOLUTION (unanimously accepted):.Approve Auditor's opinion.2. WAS CONSIDERED:Proposals and comments of the Supervisory Board.Meeting has listened proposals and comments of the Supervisory Board.3. WAS CONSIDERED:Approval of the company's yearly report for the year 2015.RESOLUTION (unanimously accepted):.Approve Vilniaus degtine AB yearly report for the year 2015.4. WAS CONSIDERED:Approval of the company's financial statements for the year 2015.RESOLUTION (unanimously accepted):.Approve the company's financial statements for the year 2015, according to which the Company's assets as of the 31st December 2015 were EUR 27 079 685 owner's equity - EUR 12 956 920, and profit of 2015 - EUR 1 336 313.5. WAS CONSIDERED:Company's profit appropriation for 2015 in the year 2016. General Manager of the company has informed shareholder about AB "Vilniaus degtine" obligation do not take decisions for payment of dividends for the period during which there are binding agreements with AB DNB bank, by which are corresponding obligations are binding.RESOLUTION (unanimously accepted):Results of the year 2015:1. Retained profit of previous financial year - at the end of the year under report EUR 3 857 883;2. Profit of the year under report EUR 1 336 313;3. Profit (loss) of the financial year under report not recognized on the Gross income report - EUR (9 275);4. Transfers from reserves - absent;5. Shareholder contributions to cover the Company's losses - absent;6. Allocated profit, total EUR 5 184 921;7. Share of profit allocated to the statutory reserve - absent;8. Share of profit allocated to the reserve for purchase of own shares - absent;9. Share of profit allocated to other reserves - absent;10. Share of profit allocated to payment of dividends - absent;11. Share of profit allocated to annual allowances (bonuses) to members of the Board and the Supervisory Board, to employee bonuses and other purposes - absent;12. Retained profit at the end of the year under report, moved forward to the following year EUR 5 184 921.6. WAS CONSIDERED:Election of the Audit Company and determination of the terms of payment for audit services.RESOLUTION (unanimously accepted):1. Elect audit company "KPMG Baltics" UAB to the position of the auditors of Vilniaus degtine AB for 2016.2. Authorise the Company's Managing Director (CEO) to sign service provision agreement with the Company's auditor "KPMG Baltics" UAB with regard to execution of the audit of Annual Financial Statements 2016, paying for the services the price agreed by the parties.7. WAS CONSIDEREDRegarding mortgage and pledge of companies fixed assetsRESOLUTION (unanimously accepted):To conclude amendments of pledge and/or mortgage (including maximum pledge and maximum mortgage) of AB "Vilniaus degtine" fixed assets, in such way, that amended conditions would meet all conditions stated in overdraft agreement, concluded on 29th of September, 2008, with all of its amendments and aditions.8. WAS CONSIDEREDElections of members of Supervisory board.RESOLUTION (unanimously accepted):After the end of the Supervisory Board term, to elect new Supervisory Board: Jean Noel Reynaud, Aymeric Donon, Stephane Laugery.9. WAS CONSIDEREDOther questionsAdditional question was not submitted for the shareholders meetingGeneral ManagerJuozas Daunys8 5 233 0819
GUANGZHOU, China, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- China's best automaker, GAC Motor, unveiled its first seven-seat SUV, the GS8, at this year's Beijing Auto Show on April 25. As a premium C-class vehicle, the GS8 appears at the exhibition together with the GA8, the recently launched C-class high-end business sedan, and the GM8, the i-lounge concept car released at the 2015 Guangzhou Auto Show.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160428/361058

The GS8 is powered by GAC Motor's second-generation Ti-POWER320T engine which features a low-inertia E-Turbo turbocharger, GCCS combustion control that increases power by 22 percent while lowering gas consumption by 15 percent, and a DCV VT double-span variable valve timing.

The new SUV is also equipped with i-4WD, the on-demand four-wheel drive system manufactured by global auto parts supplier Borg-Warner Automotive. Drivers can easily switch between different gear ranges - 2WD/AUTO/4WD LOCK - via a center console to help with performance over rough terrains and improve safety at high speed and on rainy or snowy days, while remaining more fuel-efficient compared with 4WD.

Both the exterior and interior design of the GS8 demonstrate GAC's long-held conviction for auto making - "Brave in Exploitation." The design is led by world-famous, award-winning designer Zhang Fan who previously worked with Mercedes-Benz. Inspired by Chinese and western culture, he and his team make the new SUV a perfect representative of both reserve and strength.

With its square front face and straight bodyline, the impressive GS8 inherits GAC Motor's iconic grille design - the "Flying Dynamics" inspired by grand, sculptural light and shadow. Perfectly blended with the grille area are the matrix-structured headlights, each comprised of four LED light modules, while the U-shaped taillights share the same geometric silhouette for a deep, multi-layered lighting effect.

As for the interior, the simple and elegant arrangement and quality materials jointly shape the center console and door panel in a fine and luxury style. The two areas are linked through camphorwood-grained boards and gold metallic decorative lines that provide an overall reddish-brown and beige color scheme and a warm and natural atmosphere that is both comfortable and safe.

"The GS8, released right after our other two high-end models, the GA8 and GM8, illustrates the strong R&D capability and quality assurance system of GAC Motor in the new era of the Ti-POWER engine," said Wu Song, General Manager of GAC Motor.

The unveiling of the GS8 in Beijing also welcomed the visit of Rod Alberts, director of the North American International Auto Show and executive director of Detroit Auto Dealers Association. "The GS8 is superior in quality - I cannot see any differences between it and cars made in the U.S. I hope GAC Motor can soon sell their products in the U.S. I can't wait for a drive," said Alberts.

Targeting the mid and high-end markets, GAC Motor has overturned the stereotypical images of Chinese car brands with strong advantages in quality, performance, design and the ability to deliver continuous technological innovations.

Over the past eight years, GAC Motor has created the GAC production system (GPS) to meet fast changing market demands and established international supply chain systems in Europe, America, Japan and South Korea. The assembly line allows vehicle production to be completed in 57 seconds.

The company's Cross Platform Modular Architecture (CPMA) strategy has streamlined the period of complete vehicle development from 36-48 months to 25-28 months and the overall sharing rate of CPMA has reached nearly 80 percent.

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.

E-mail address: sukie_gacmotor@126.com; liqi@gacmotor.com

Facebook, Twitter: GAC Motor

Instagram: gac_motor

Download photos via: http://pan.baidu.com/s/1hsvvpiO






Judge Rejects Lawsuit by Commscope Subsidiary Andrew

Court-Appointed Expert Concludes Comba Telecom's Antenna Technology Differs from Andrew Patent

HONG KONG, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Comba Telecom Systems Holdings Limited ("Comba Telecom" or "the Group", Hong Kong stock code: 2342), a global leading wireless solutions provider, has announced the results of litigation brought against it by Commscope Holding Company Inc. ("Commscope") and its subsidiary Andrew LLC ("Andrew") in Brazil. The courts have ruled in favor of Comba Telecom and rejected the RET ("Remote Electrical Tilt") antenna technology patent infringement lawsuit.

In this civil case, the court-appointed technical expert examined both Andrew's Brazilian patents and Comba Telecom's antennas and concluded that the technologies used in the antennas are markedly different from those claimed in those patents. The 8th Trial Court of the State Court of Sao Paulo also stressed the findings of an invalidity lawsuit filed by Comba Telecom before the Federal Courts in Rio de Janeiro, in which Andrew's patents were declared to be null and void for multiple and independent reasons. Based on this evidence, the court subsequently ruled for the rejection of the lawsuit because it had no legal basis.

Mr. Simon Yeung, President of Comba Telecom Systems International Limited said, "We are pleased with the ruling of the Brazilian courts. This is a vindication of the company's stance on intellectual property rights, and we will vigorously defend ourselves from any spurious legal proceedings brought against the Group now and in the future.

We are a firm supporter of fair competition and the company has taken numerous steps to address this issue; these steps includes the successful application for the cancellation of certain Commscope/Andrew patents in Brazil and China, and other similar ongoing cases in the US and China. In fact, Andrew's RET patents have already been revoked by the European Patent Office upon application by other antenna vendors."

Mr. Yeung concluded, "We have invested considerable resources in R&D to develop and deliver the best and most efficient technologies for our customers and hold hundreds of patents around the world. Operating on these principles has enabled Comba Telecom to become one of the world's top-tier vendor of base station antennas and wireless solutions, and this latest win will encourage us to continue innovating and leading the field on a global basis."

About Comba Telecom Systems Holdings Limited

As one of the leading wireless solution providers in the world, Comba Telecom is primarily engaged in the R&D and manufacturing of wireless products including RRU, antennas and base station subsystems and wireless transmission and access systems. The Group also provides complete turnkey solutions and services to its global customers. Headquartered in Hong Kong, Comba Telecom's global operations include manufacturing bases in mainland China, R&D centers in China and the USA and more than 40 offices worldwide. Comba Telecom has been included into several indexes including MSCI China Small Cap Index, Hang Seng Composite Index (Information Technology Industry Index, MidCap & SmallCap Index and SmallCap Index), Hang Seng Global Composite Index, Hang Seng Internet & Information Technology Index, as well as Hang Seng Corporate Sustainability Benchmark Index. For further information, please visit: www.comba-telecom.com.


LONDON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Heptares Therapeutics ("Heptares"), the wholly-owned subsidiary of Sosei Group Corporation (TSE Mothers Index: 4565), announces that Dr Fiona Marshall, Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder, has been elected a Fellow of The Academy of Medical Sciences.

Fellows are drawn from laboratory science, clinical academic medicine, veterinary science, dentistry, medical and nursing care. Nominees are selected for their outstanding contribution to the advancement of medical science, or for the application of existing scientific knowledge or understanding in an innovative way.

Dr Marshall said: "I am honoured to join the Academy, which plays such an important role in promoting the excellence of UK medical science and in particular encourages partnerships between academia and industry - something I am very committed to."

Malcolm Weir, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Heptares, added: "We are delighted for Fiona; this is very well deserved and justified recognition of her important contribution to basic academic research coupled to the discovery of new medicines, and towards the success of the U.K. biotechnology sector."

Founded in 1998, the Academy of Medical Sciences is the independent body in the UK that represents the diverse spectrum of medical science - from basic research through clinical application to healthcare delivery. Its mission is to promote medical science and its translation into benefits for society.

Biography

Dr Marshall has more than 25 years' experience, in the field of structure-based drug design and development with particular expertise in G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), the most important family of receptors in the human body for drug targeting. She is inventor of seven patents and author of over 80 peer-reviewed scientific papers in the area. Her work has contributed to the discovery of drugs in development for cancer, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and migraine.

Dr Marshall set up Heptares Therapeutics with Dr Malcolm Weir in 2006, building the company into one of the UK's leading biotechnology companies prior to its acquisition in 2015 by Sosei Group, a Japan-based biopharmaceutical company. Following the acquisition, Dr Marshall became Executive VP and CSO of Sosei in addition to her current role as CSO of Heptares. She leads a team of 70 scientists at Heptares, which is pioneering a structure-based approach to GPCRs to create a broad pipeline of novel medicines with potential to transform the treatment of serious diseases. Heptares has established collaborations with Allergan, AstraZeneca, Kymab, MedImmune, MorphoSys, Pfizer and Teva.

Before Heptares, Dr Marshall worked in senior drug discovery roles at GlaxoWellcome / GlaxoSmithKline and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and then spent several years as an independent consultant to a variety of venture capital and biotech companies.

Dr Marshall is on the Translation Advisory Group of the Francis Crick Institute and on the Scientific Advisory board of the Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation (CTTV). She is also on the Board of Trustees of Alzheimer's Research UK (ARUK) and on the ARUK Drug Discovery Alliance Advisory Group.

Dr Marshall won the 2012 WISE Women of Outstanding Achievement for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and received the Malcolm Campbell Memorial Prize 2015, awarded by the UK Royal Society of Chemistry's Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Sector, in recognition of her contribution to GPCR drug discovery. She received a BSc in biochemistry from Bath University and a PhD in neuroscience from Cambridge University.

A photograph of Dr Marshall is available by contacting mark.swallow@citigatedr.co.uk.



About the Academy of Medical Sciences

The Academy of Medical Sciences is the independent body in the UK representing the diversity of medical science. Our mission is to promote medical science and its translation into benefits for society. The Academy's elected Fellows are the United Kingdom's leading medical scientists from hospitals, academia, industry and the public service. We work with them to promote excellence, influence policy to improve health and wealth, nurture the next generation of medical researchers, link academia, industry and the NHS, seize international opportunities and encourage dialogue about the medical sciences. http://www.acmedsci.ac.uk

This year, Fellows were chosen from 356 candidates. The seven Sectional Committees met in March to consider potential Fellows for 2016 entry to the Academy. Three nominators from within the Fellowship must back each candidate. The Academy Registrar, Professor Moira Whyte, Professor of Respiratory Medicine, University of Sheffield, oversees the election. 106 candidates were shortlisted for peer review. The election brings the number of Fellows to 1207.

About Heptares Therapeutics

Heptares is a clinical-stage company creating transformative medicines targeting G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), a superfamily of 375 receptors linked to a wide range of human diseases. Heptares' proprietary StaR technology and structure-based drug design (SBDD) capabilities enable us to engineer and develop drugs for highly validated, yet historically undruggable or challenging GPCRs. Using this approach, we are building an exciting pipeline of new medicines (small molecules and biologics) with the potential to transform the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, cancer immune-oncology, migraine, addiction, metabolic disease and other indications. We have partnerships for our novel candidates and technologies with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including Allergan, AstraZeneca, Kymab, MedImmune, MorphoSys, Pfizer and Teva.

Heptares is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sosei Group Corporation. For more information, please visit http://www.heptares.com and http://www.sosei.com.

HEPTARES is a registered trademark in the EU, Switzerland, US and Japan;

StaR is a registered trademark in the EU and Japan.

About Sosei

Sosei is a biopharmaceutical company originating from Japan but with global presence. Sosei's primary business model is based on identifying novel and/or differentiated product assets or technology platforms and, through supporting these in preclinical and clinical development and establishing commercial partnerships, advancing new medicines to patients worldwide. For more information about Sosei, please visit http://www.sosei.com
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO ) This comprehensive report forecasts the global dairy whitener market to grow at a CAGR of 5.65% during the period 2016-2020. Commenting on the report, an analyst from the research team said: Vendors continually innovate with respect to packaging to make it more appealing and to enhance product shelf life. Dairy whiteners are now available in packaging formats such as sachets and pouches, which add to the convenience. Ornua, the Irish dairy cooperative, introduced its Kerrygold brand of milk powder in Nigeria in sachets and pouches. In March 2015, Fonterra, New Zealand's leading dairy cooperative, collaborated with Orora, the Australian packaging company, to procure multi-wall bags for its milk powder. According to the report, numerous product launches have contributed significantly to the growth of the global dairy whiteners market. Most of these launches have been part of vendors' portfolio expansion and in response to consumer demand for wider choice of products. Questions Answered:

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.
Wellington, New Zealand--(Newsfile Corp. - April 27, 2016) - New Zealand Energy Corp. (TSXV: NZ) ("NZEC" or the "Company") announced today it has filed with Canadian regulatory authorities its 2015 year-end consolidated financial results, management discussion and analysis and Form 51-101F1 reserves report, which documents are available on the Company's website at www.newzealandenergy.com and on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

The net loss for the year was $10,058,739 (including non-cash charges of $8,221,825) compared with a loss for the 2014 year of $84,107,442 (which included non-cash charges of $82,358,978). The Company realized a loss per share for the year of $0.05 (2014: $0.49).

The Company achieved average net daily production of 143 BOE/D (80% oil) through the 2015 year. At year end, 31 December 2015, the net daily production rate averaged over the last 10 days of December was 248 BOE/D (83% oil). Production of oil and gas from the Copper-Moki pools accounted for 163 BOE/d (i.e. 66%) of this production rate. The increased production has continued through the first quarter of 2016 at an average of 332 BOE/d (75% oil) from 1 January to 31 March 2016.

NZEC CEO Mike Adams commented , "The Company's improving production performance in 2016 is the result of focussed technical work and our team's innovative and efficient implementation of production enhancement activities while maintaining high operational and HSE standards. The results from the Copper-Moki pools have been particularly satisfying and the success of the low cost waterflood project is a highlight."

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"James Willis"

Chairman

New Zealand Energy Corp.

New Zealand Energy Contacts

Email: info@newzealandenergy.com

Website: www.newzealandenergy.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as such term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION AND CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING RESERVE ESTIMATES

This document, the condensed consolidated interim financial statements for the period ended 30 September 2015 and Management's Discussion and Analysis contain certain forward- looking information, forward-looking statements ("forward-looking statements"). The reader's attention is specifically drawn to the qualifications, disclosure and cautionary statements in these documents regarding forward-looking statements and reserve and resource estimates.

The Company notes that such forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond NZEC's control, the impact of general economic conditions, industry conditions, volatility of commodity prices, currency fluctuations, imprecision of reserve estimates, environmental risks, operational risks in exploration and development, competition from other industry participants, the lack of availability of qualified personnel or management, stock market volatility and the ability to access sufficient capital from internal and external sources. Although the Company believes that the expectations in its forward-looking statements are reasonable, they are based on factors and assumptions concerning future events which may prove to be inaccurate. Those factors and assumptions are based upon currently available information. Such statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could influence actual results or events and cause actual results or events to differ materially from those stated, anticipated or implied in the forward looking information.

As such, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the forward looking information, as no assurance can be provided as to future results, levels of activity or achievements. All forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this document or the date of the documents referenced above, except as required by applicable law, the Company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or to revise any of the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
CAMBRIDGE, England, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

CEG Digital, the flexible learning division of global education provider Cambridge Education Group (CEG), is proud to announce a new partnership with the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton, a world top-100 university,[1] to deliver a suite of short online courses, initially in the area of Data Science.

The courses are designed to address the demands of our increasingly data-driven world, helping ambitious individuals around the world to master the powerful tools of Data Science: business and data analysts, marketers, engineers, developers, economists, scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs, designers, and nascent data scientists.

The initial Foundations of Data Science course will welcome its first intake in the autumn, followed by specialised options in the areas of Data Science for Marketing, Finance and Healthcare launching in 2017. The application process will be highly selective to ensure each participant is fully prepared for the demands of the course.

Delivered part-time and wholly online over four weeks via Instructure's state-of-the-art Canvas learning management system, the courses will enable participants to study with world-class professionals and leading academics to secure the real world skills they need to succeed in these highly competitive fields. Supplementary workshops will provide opportunities to meet with fellow participants, tutors and teachers, and to present their work to potential employers. Fees will be competitive with current face-to-face and online options; corporate rates will also be available.

The University of Southampton is ranked in the top 1% of universities in the world and its Web Science Institute is the home to a uniquely rich network of experts in Computer Science, Web Science, Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, Health Science, Social Science, Economics and Business. As a result of the WSI's pioneering work in Data Science, our expertise is transforming the way that data are collected, integrated and converted into knowledge and evidence, informing decision making in business, industry and government sectors. We are founding partners of the UK's Open Data Institute in Tech City, set up to lead UK businesses in exploiting data. The WSI's current training programme has reached many tens of thousands of people through its MOOCs in Web Science, Linked Data, and the Power of Social Media, and its highly regarded University-level Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral programmes provide an excellent career grounding in the digital and information economy.

Dr Elena Simperl, CPD Course Director, WSI Associate Professor and Scientific Director of the European Data Science Academy, explains:

"Data Science is a critical competence for our economy. Our new series of short professional courses is an integral and essential part of our training portfolio, alongside our postgraduate degrees. With these new online courses, we reach out to decision makers, business analysts, IT developers, and other groups of practitioners interested in learning about some of the most promising technologies and application domains in data science, including digital marketing, finances, and healthcare."

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Director of the Web Science Institute says:

"I am very excited about working with CEG Digital on these new on-line courses in Data Science. The future of education is on-line and this partnership will enable the WSI to develop and deliver state of the art Data Science courses that are available to busy professionals wherever they are based."

CEG Digital and the Web Science Institute are working in partnership to develop, market and deliver the world leading courses to students in the UK and worldwide. Geoff Webster, Managing Director of CEG Digital, said:

"We are very proud to be partnering with the University of Southampton to deliver short professional courses in the area of Data Science. We believe there is enormous demand for high quality professionally focused courses in this area and we are excited to be working with the world-leading academics at Southampton. We believe this will be a very attractive proposition for professionals, companies and entrepreneurs, in the UK and around the world."

--------------------------------------------------

1. QS World University Rankings 2015/16
Gledhow Investments plc

First Half Results to 31 March 2016

Date: 28 April 2016

Results

Gledhow Investments plc ("Gledhow" or the "Company") is pleased to announce its half year results ("interim results") for the current financial year. The period covered is from 1 October 2015 to 31 March 2016. These are unaudited interim results.

The Company continues to pursue its investment strategy which has the objective of achieving long-term capital growth.

The Company had cash of GBP 190,432 at the period end. The continued downturn in the resources sector was primarily responsible for the unrealised losses. During the period the company invested 40,000 by way of a convertible into Bolt Mobility BV, a Dutch company developing the AppScooter, an electric scooter it hopes will be "the Dutch Tesla on two wheels".

Despite the uncertain economic environment the Company is in a strong position, thanks to its strong cash position, and we look forward to being able to make opportunistic investments in small to medium sized undervalued companies as they arise.

Profit and Loss Account

for the six months ended 31 March 2016

Continuing operations Six months to Six months to 31-Mar-16 31-Mar-15   Turnover Proceeds from sale of investments 1,226 - Cost of sales (including unrealised losses and gains on investments held for resale) '(64,245) '(62,730) ________ ________ Gross loss (63,019) (62,730) Administrative expenses (19,129) (16,782) ________ ________ Loss on ordinary activities before tax (82,148) (79,512) Taxation - - ________ ________ Loss for the year (82,148) (79,512) ======= ======= Loss earnings per share - Basic (pence) (0.17)p (0.16)p ===== ======

Balance Sheet as at 31 March 2016

2016 2015   Current assets Investments held for resale 229,946 329,104 Debtors - 200 Cash at bank and in hand 190,432 218,936 _________ _________ 420,378 548,240 Creditors: amounts falling due within one year (5,931) (1,761) _________ _________ Net current assets and total assets less current liabilities 414,447 546,479 ======== ======== Capital and reserves Called up share capital 490,000 490,000 Share premium account 71,122 71,122 Profit and loss account (190,777) (58,745) Other reserve 44,102 44,102 _________ _________ Shareholders' funds - equity interests 414,447 546,479 ======== ========

Notes

1. The interim results together with the related notes set out below have been approved by the board of directors of Gledhow Investments plc.

2. The Company's strategy is to make short to medium term investments in small to medium sized quoted or

unquoted companies. These investments are carried in the accounts as current asset investments and are valued at lower of cost and net realisable value.

3. The financial results detailed above are unaudited, and have not been reviewed by the auditors of the Company.

4. Earnings per share - Basic

The loss per share for the six months ended 31 March 2016 is calculated on the loss on ordinary activities after tax of 82,148 (2015: loss of 79,512) divided by the weighted average number of 49,000,000 (2015: 49,000,000) ordinary shares of 1p each in issue during the period.

5. The financial information in this report does not constitute Statutory Accounts within the meaning of Section 434 of the Companies Act 2006. The financial statements for the year ended 30 September 2015 have been delivered to the Registrar of Companies and the auditors' report on those financial statements was unqualified and did not contain a statement made under Section 498(2) or Section 498(3) of the Companies Act 2006.

For further information please contact:

Brett Miller: 07770447338 (Gledhow Investments plc)

The Directors of the issuer accept responsibility for the contents of this announcement.
EAGLE POINT, OR -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Grow Condos, Inc., a fully reporting publicly traded company under the trading symbol (OTC PINK: GRWC), a real estate purchaser, developer & manager of specific use industrial properties providing "condo" style turn-key grow facilities to support the cannabis industry, is pleased that it has closed on the purchase of the land to support an additional 35 units under management in Eugene, Oregon.

Plans call for the Eugene project to be developed and sold into industrial condominiums for approximately $150,000 per each unit for the basic shell. The company discovered in our first development in Medford (now 100% fully occupied; a rental unit development) that there is also a tremendous opportunity to offer customized units with the variety of types of growers. In addition the company expects to earn additional ancillary income for its advisory and consulting services.

"We are very excited to have closed on our 2nd facility and we have already begun targeting suitable locations for our 3rd facility. We believe that once we have laid down a proper foundation there is a tremendous opportunity to build a national footprint of professional industrial condominium facility parks specifically targeted to the marijuana industry," said Wayne Zallen, CEO.

About Grow Condos, Inc.

Grow Condos is a fully reporting publicly traded company listed under the symbol GRWC: Pink Sheets. It is a real estate purchaser, developer & manager of specific use industrial properties providing "condo" style turn-key grow facilities to support the cannabis industry. We own, lease, sell and manage multi-tenant properties.

Like during the Gold Rush days in California, Grow Condos is focused on a pick-and-shovel approach to participating in the exploding marijuana industry. We finance the purchase and/or development of properties by offering investors private placement sponsorships, debt instruments, or limited partnerships. We believe there is a significant investor demand for such opportunities. Currently we own and manage a 15,000 square foot warehouse in Eagle Point, Oregon, own and are developing a property in Eugene, Oregon and are currently looking into other acquisitions in Oregon, Colorado, Washington, California and Nevada with like-minded investors who want to share in the growth of this dynamic new industry.

Additionally the company currently has an additional line of products and services to offer our partners, customers and tenants.

Safe Harbor: This release contains statements that constitute 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. These statements appear in a number of places in this release and include all statements that are not statements of historical fact regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of Grow Condos Inc, its directors or its officers with respect to, among other things: (i) financing plans; (ii) trends affecting its financial condition or results of operations; (iii) growth strategy and operating strategy. The words "may," "would," "will," "expect," "estimate," "can," "believe," "potential" and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Grow Condos Inc. ability to control, and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. More information about the potential factors that could affect the business and financial results is and will be included in Grow Condos, Inc. filings with the OTC Markets, Securities and Exchange Commission and/or the company's website.

CONTACT:

Grow Condos, Inc.

Corporate: www.growcondos.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GrowCondosInc

Twitter: https://twitter.com/GrowCondosInc

Investor Relations: ir@growcondos.com




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Thursday, April 28 is the labour movement's most solemn day. Thousands of workers, friends and families of fallen workers will gather at ceremonies across Ontario to recognize the National Day of Mourning for Workers Killed or Injured on the Job. As we mourn for the dead, the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) will continue to fight for the living.

The OFL's six-year-long campaign, "Kill a Worker, Go to Jail," made history earlier this year, when Metron Construction Project Manager, Vadim Kazenelson, received Ontario's first prison sentence for workplace negligence causing the deaths of four workers and the serious injury of a fifth. The sentence was the first of its kind in Ontario, since the Criminal Code of Canada was amended in response to the 1992 Westray Mine Disaster, to allow for the criminal conviction of negligent employers.

"Workers have been fighting for health and safety rights for centuries but we know that we won't stop the carnage in the workplace unless employers come to realize that there will be serious personal consequences if they put workers' lives in the line of danger," said OFL President Chris Buckley. "No prison term or financial penalty can bring back the workers who died or undo the pain felt by their families, but we hope the threat of jail time will send a shiver down the spine of every employer and make them see accident prevention as an occupational priority."

According to the latest statistics from Ontario's Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), 226 workers reportedly lost their lives in 2015 due to workplace tragedies or occupational disease. Roughly 230,000 Ontario workers are injured or made sick at work every year, thousands of others pass away years later due to resulting health complications, and still other cases, undoubtedly, go unreported or unacknowledged. It amounts to a workplace epidemic that has needlessly cost tens of thousands of lives and impacted literally millions of working families over the years.

This year, the OFL has joined the Canadian Labour Congress in calling for a total ban on asbestos. Every year, 145,000 Canadian workers are exposed to asbestos in their workplace and, tragically, over 2,000 are still being diagnosed with often fatal diseases, like mesothelioma and lung cancer. These startling figures have earned asbestos a reputation as the number one workplace killer, yet after banning the mining and export of asbestos in 2011, Canada continues to allow the importation of products containing asbestos.

"There is absolutely no justifiable reason to delay a full ban on asbestos. Indeed, Canadian lives are depending on it," said Buckley. "It is time to start listening to the resounding scientific evidence, it is time to start listening to the tragic stories of the families of fallen workers, and it is time to make workplace health and safety a national priority."

OFL Officers and staff will attend Day of Mourning Ceremonies in cities and towns across Ontario. The province's labour unions, regional labour councils, injured workers' groups, family members and allies will come together demand action - from our courts and from our governments - to ensure that every employee who heads off to work will return home safely to their family at the end of a workday.

"Canada has the opportunity to show the world we care about stopping the tragedy of asbestos and protecting the lives of every worker. We believe the National Day of Mourning on April 28 offers a tremendous opportunity for meaningful action to make workplace health and safety the bottom line for every employer," said Buckley.

For a list of Day of Mourning events across Ontario, visit: https://www.whsc.on.ca/Events/Day-of-Mourning

The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) represents 54 unions and one million workers in Ontario. For information, visit www.OFL.ca and follow the OFL on Facebook and Twitter: @OFLabour.

Contacts:

Joel Duff

OFL Communications Director: 416-707-0349 (cell)

jduff@ofl.ca




Regulatory News:

The Management Board of Arctic Paper S.A. ("Company") herewith informs that on the 27thof April 2016 the Company's Supervisory Board adopted a resolution appointing Ernst Young Audyt Polska sp. z o.o. sp.k., as Company's auditors authorized to audit the Company's financial statements. The Supervisory Board is the eligible body to adopt such resolution pursuant to article 15, clause 15.2, item e of the Company's Articles of Association.

The appointment has been made according to generally applicable provisions and professional standards.

Ernst Young Audyt Polska sp. z o.o. sp.k., seated in Warsaw (00-124), Rondo ONZ 1, has been entered on the list of chartered auditors of financial statements maintained by the National Chamber of Chartered Auditors with the number 130.

Ernst Young Audyt Polska sp. z o.o. sp.k. shall:

1) review mid-year standalone financial statements of the Company and mid-year consolidated statements of the Arctic Paper S.A. Capital Group, as of June 30, 2016;

2) audit of annual standalone financial statements of the Company and annual consolidated statements of the Arctic Paper S.A. Capital Group for the trading year from 01 January 2016 through 31 December 2016 prepared according to MSR/MSSF principles.

The contract with the auditor will be concluded for the period necessary for the performance of the services.

The Company has already used services of the auditors to obtain audits of financial statements of Arctic Paper S.A. for years 2008-2015.

This information is disclosed pursuant to the 5 clause 1, item 19 of the Minister of Finance Regulation of 19 February 2009 on current and periodic information provided by issuers of securities, and on conditions of equivalence of information required to be provided under non-Member State law and was submitted for publication on 28 April 2016 at 12:00 am CET, in reference to Arctic Paper's current report no. 7/2016 filed with the Warsaw Stock Exchange

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428005774/en/

Contacts:

Roger Mattsson

Member of the Supervisory Board of Arctic Paper

tel. +46 (0)761 757 741
28 April 2016

Pendragon PLC ("the Company")

Results of Annual General Meeting

Following the Company's Annual General Meeting held at 10.30am today, the Company announces the results of the business proposed at the meeting. Each of resolutions 1 to 18 were passed. Details of the proxy votes cast on all resolutions are set out below.

These are also available at the Company's website at:-

www.pendragonplc.com/investors/annual_general_meeting

In accordance with UK Listing Rule 9.6.2 copies of all resolutions passed, other than ordinary business, have been submitted to the National Storage Mechanism.

Resolution Votes for % For (to 2 d.p) Votes Against % Against (to 2 d.p) Votes Withheld 1. To receive the annual accounts and Directors' and Auditors Reports for year ended 31 December 2015 843,319,248 99.83 1,459,361 0.17 3,656,262 2. To approve the annual report on Directors' Remuneration 775,960,233 92.57 62,309,324 7.43 10,165,314 3. To declare a final dividend of 0.7 pence per share 845,698,769 99.99 22,356 0.01 2,713,746 4. To re-elect Mr M S Casha as a director 841,754,597 99.55 3,804,021 0.45 2,876,253 5. To re-elect Mr

C M Chambers as a director 843,616,686 99.77 1,942,583 0.23 2,875,602 6. To re-elect Mr

M J Egglenton as a

director 837,923,681 99.1 7,634,937 0.9 2,876,253 7. To re-elect Mr

T G Finn as a director 842,254,039 99.61 3,304,579 0.39 2,876,253 8. To re-elect Mr

P N Hampden Smith as director 838,412,883 99.16 7,139,326 0.84 2,882,662 9.. To re-elect Mr

T P Holden as a director 841,787,466 99.55 3,764,092 0.45 2,883,313 10. To re-elect Ms

G D C Kent as a director 844,908,387 99.92 647,610 0.08 2,878,874 11. To re-elect Mr

J S King as a director 838,044,926 99.11 7,510,414 0.89 2,879,531 12. To re-elect Miss H C Sykes as a director 835,926,954 99.55 3,763,842 0.45 8,744,075 13. To appoint KPMG LLP as auditors of the Company 827,351,419 97.83 18,350,421 2.17 2,733,031 14. To authorise directors to determine remuneration of the auditors 844,473,784 99.87 1,122,901 0.13 2,838,186 15. To authorise the Directors to allot shares in the Company 841,795,146 99.55 3,827,083 0.45 2,812,642 16. To authorise the directors to call a general meeting on not less than 14 clear days' notice 771,735,933 91.25 73,981,723 8.75 2,717,215 17. To authorise the Directors to dis-apply pre-emption rights when allotting shares 843,159,486 99.70 2,508,183 0.30 2,767,202 18. To authorise the Company to make market purchases of its shares 844,223,434 99.82 1,500,375 0.18 2,711,062

HILARY C SYKES

COMPANY SECRETARY

28 APRIL 2016

Enquiries: Pendragon PLC Trevor Finn Tel: 01623 725114 Tim Holden RLM Finsbury Gordon Simpson Tel: 0207 1513801

-ENDS-
The following resolutions have been adopted at the Annual General Shareholders' Meeting of Panevezio statybos trestas AB taken place on 28 April 2016:1. The conclusions of the audit regarding the Financial Statement and Annual Report of the Company for the year 2015.Information heard.1. The Annual Report of the Company for the year 2015.Information heard.1. Approval of the set of Financial Statements of the Company for the year 2015.The sets of Consolidated and Individual Financial Statements of Panevezio statybos trestas AB for the year 2015 have been approved.1. Appropriation of profit (loss) of the Company for the year 2015.The following appropriation of profit (loss) of Panevezio statybos trestas AB for the year 2015 has been approved:4.1. Unappropriated profit (loss) of the previous financial year at the end of the accounting financial year - 32,206,158 EUR;Dividends paid - - 1,079,100 EUR;Net profit (loss) of the accounting financial year - 328,238 EUR;Profit (loss) of the accounting financial year unrecognized in profit (loss) statement 154,352 EUR;Transfers from reserves - 0 EUR;Contributions of shareholders to cover the loss of the Company (in case of the shareholders' decision to cover all or a part of loss) - 0 EUR;Total profit (loss) available for appropriation - 31,609,648 EUR;a part of profit to the legal reserve - 613 EUR;a part of profit to the reserve for the acquisition of own shares - 0 EUR;a part of profit to other reserves - 0 EUR;a part of profit for dividend paying - 261,977 EUR;a part of profit for bonuses (tantiemes) for the members of the Board and Supervisory Board, premium pays for employees and other purposes - 65,647 EUR;Unappropriated profit (loss) at the end of the accounting financial year transferred to the next financial year - 31,281,411 EUR.4.2. To allocate 32,823.5 EUR from the part of profit for annuity (bonuses) for the members of the Board and Supervisory Board, premium pays for employees and other purposes - 65,647 EUR, to Remigijus Juodvirsis, the Chairman of the Board of Panevezio statybos trestas AB. To obligate Remigijus Juodvirsis, the Chairman of the Board, to appropriate the remaining amount of 32,823.5 EUR for annuity (bonuses) for the members of the Board and Supervisory Board, premium pays for employees and other purposes to the members of the Board of Panevezio statybos trestas AB.To allocate dividends in the amount of 0.016023 EUR for each ordinary share of Panevezio statybos trestas AB of the nominal value of 0.29 EUR.1. Election of the members for the audit committee.The following members have been elected to the audit committee:-- Drasutis Liatukas (as an independent member) -- Lina Rageliene -- Regina Sukareviciene6. Conversion of the authorized capital and nominal value of the shares of Panevezio statybos trestas AB from expression in Litas to expression in Euros.Following the provisions of the Law on Introduction of the Euro in the Republic of Lithuania and the Law on Redenomination to the Euro of the Capital and Nominal Value of Securities of Public Limited Liability Companies and Private Limited Liability Companies and Amendment of the Articles of Association of These Companies of the Republic of Lithuania, to convert the nominal value of one share of Panevezio statybos trestas AB from 1 (one) Litas to 0.29 Euro (twenty nine hundredth Euro) and determine accordingly the expression of the authorised capital of the Company in Euros to be 4,741,500 (four million seven hundred forty one thousand five hundred) Euros divided into 16,350,000 (sixteen million three hundred fifty thousand) ordinary registered shares.7. Approval of the new revision of the Articles of Association of Panevezio statybos trestas AB.7.1. Considering the decision taken on conversion of the authorized capital and nominal value of the shares of Panevezio statybos trestas AB from expression in Litas to expression in Euros and amendments to be made covering only conversion of the authorized capital and nominal value of the shares of the Company from expression in Litas to expression in Euros, to approve the new revision of the Articles of Association of the Company.7.2. To authorise Dalius Gesevicius, the Managing Director of Panevezio statybos trestas AB, to sign the new revision of the Articles of Association of Panevezio statybos trestas AB (Appendix) and perform all necessary actions related to implementation of the decision taken.Dalius GeseviciusManaging DirectorPanevezio statybos trestas ABInformationPhone: (+370 45) 505 503


WOLFSBURG (dpa-AFX) - Volkswagen CEO Matthias Muller Thursday said the realignment of the group is making good progress and 2016 will be a year of transition. Chairman reaffirmed its goal of playing a key role in e-mobility as it is planning to launch over 20 additional models by 2020.



According to CEO, fiscal year 2016 will again be a very challenging year for the Volkswagen Group, which it began 'with grounds for some optimism but also accordingly realistic.' 'We are not letting the crisis slow us down, but are stepping on the gas - in all of our brands, and in all relevant markets. All in all, from today's perspective we have good chances of again recording solid growth in our operating business in 2016.' He hoped that Volkswagen will emerge stronger from the present tense situation as its financial substance is strong.



The automaker said the automotive industry is on the cusp of the next big innovative leap and a radical transformation. 'We are in a good starting position for this epochal transformation. And we have many strengths to throw into the mix.' By midyear, the group will present its strategy focusing on the major fields of future importance in the industry - such as digitalization, networking, e-mobility and new mobility services. Muller said, 'We plan to make electric cars one of Volkswagen's new hallmarks,' Besides the extensive realignment of the Group, it will work on the diesel issue. The diesel issue led to total exceptional charges of EUR 16.2 billion in 2015, which were recognized in the operating result. He noted that with the software manipulation of diesel engines at Volkswagen, rules were broken and ethical boundaries overstepped. 'We sincerely regret this. Also because we know that we have disappointed many people - people who have placed their trust in Volkswagen. We stand by our responsibility. And we are doing everything in our power to regain trust,' Muller stressed. In the first three months of 2016, 2.5 million vehicles were delivered to customers, an increase of 0.8 percent over the prior-year period. With the exception of Volkswagen Passenger Cars, all brands increased their deliveries in the first quarter, in some cases substantially. Russia and Brazil remain problematic for all car manufacturers. In spite of the diesel issue, the decline in unit sales in the United States has been kept in check on the whole, largely thanks to the sustained success of Audi and Porsche. Vehicle sales in Europe and Asia-Pacific were very solid in the first quarter of 2016. In China, the Volkswagen Group started the year on its strongest footing since entering the market over 30 years ago.



In terms of the Group's operating profit, the Board of Management anticipates an operating return on sales of between 5.0 and 6.0 percent in 2016.



In the Passenger Cars Business Area the Volkswagen Group expects a sharp decrease in sales revenue, with an operating return on sales in the range of 5.5 to 6.5 percent. With sales revenue in the Commercial Vehicles Business Area likely to remain essentially unchanged, the operating return on sales should be between 2.0 and 4.0 percent. For the Financial Services Division, sales revenue and an operating profit at the prior-year level are expected.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - The U.S. dollar weakened against the other major currencies in the European session on Thursday. The U.S. dollar fell to a 10-day low of 107.92 against the yen, from an early near 4-week high of 111.88. Against the euro and the Swiss franc, the greenback dropped to 1-week lows of 1.1368 and 0.9661 from early highs of 1.1296 and 0.9733, respectively. The U.S. dollar slipped to 1.4618 against the pound and 0.7657 against the Australian dollar, from early highs of 1.4523 and 0.7571, respectively. Against the New Zealand and the Canadian dollars, the greenback slid to an 8-day low of 0.6989 and nearly a 10-month low of 1.2528 from early highs of 0.6823 and 1.2603, respectively. If the greenback extends its downtrend, it is likely to find support around 107.00 against the yen, 1.14 against the euro, 0.95 against the franc, 1.47 against the pound, 0.78 against the aussie, 0.70 against the kiwi and 1.24 against the loonie. 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.
ofDALHOFF LARSEN & HORNEMAN A/SNAME AND DOMICILE1.1 The name of the company is Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S.1.2 The company is also trading as:a) Nordisk Tr-Holding A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)b) Nordisk Trimport A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)c) DLH Tr-Holding A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)d) Nordisk Sav- & Finervrk A/S, Northern Sawmill & Veneerworks Ltd.(Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)e) OK Tr A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)f) DLH A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)g) DLH Nordisk A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)h) DLH Nordisk Ltd. A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)i) IH Softwood A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)j) Internationalt Hardttr A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)k) Nordisk Hardttr Co. A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)l) Nordisk Rederi A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)m) Nordisk Timber A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)n) Nordisk Timber Ltd. A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)o) Nordisk Trlast & Hardttr Co. A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)p) Nordisk Trlastagentur A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)q) DLH Timber Ltd. A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)r) DLH Tr A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)s) DLH Finer A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)t) DLH Danmark A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)u) DLH Global Trading & Sourcing A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)v) DLH Global Sales & Sourcing A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)w) DLH Global Sales A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)x) DLH Global Sourcing A/S (Dalhoff Larsen & Horneman A/S)OBJECTS2.1 The objects of the company are to be engaged in trade, industry, shipping, consultancy services, investment and financing activities.SHARE CAPITAL3.1 The company share capital has been paid up in full and amounts to DKK 26.783.248,50, in words, twenty-six million seven hundred and eighty-three thousand two hundred and forty-eight 50/100.3.2 The share capital is divided into shares in denominations of DKK 0.50 and multiples hereof.4.1 The shares are registered shares and shall be entered by name in the Company's register of shareholders. The shares are issued through and registered with VP Securities A/S. The shares are negotiable instruments.4.2 Following registration, see Article 10.2, each share of DKK 0.50 carries one vote.4.3 No shareholder is required to have his shares redeemed in whole or in part.4.4 No share carries special rights.4.5 If the share capital is increased by subscription for new shares, the shareholders are entitled to subscribe for the new shares in proportion to their shareholdings, unless otherwise determined by the general meeting by special resolution.4.6 The shares confer on the holders a right to receive dividend and any other rights in the Company from the time specified in the resolution on the capital increase.4.7 Any dividend on the shares will be distributed under the Danish Securities Trading Act.4.8 Any remaining dividend unclaimed five years after the due date of payment will accrue to the Company.4.9 The Company's register of shareholders will be kept by Computershare A/S, Kongevejen 418, 2840 Holte, which has been appointed by the supervisory board as keeper of the register of shareholders on behalf of the Company5.1 The share capital of the company may be increased by issue of new shares without pre-emption right for the existing shareholders of the company, and the Supervisory Board is free to determine the time and terms of such increase. The share capital may be increased in one or more issues by up to nominally DKK 30,000,000 (6,000,000 shares of nominally DKK 5.00 each). The share capital may be increased by cash payment or by contribution in kind, including by contribution of an existing business or specific assets, all at market price. The authorisation given to the Supervisory Board is valid for a period of 5 years, until 1 April 2018, and may be extended by the general meeting for one or more periods of up to 5 years at a time. The new shares shall be registered in the names of the holders in the company's register of shareholders. The new shares shall be negotiable instruments with no restrictions on their negotiability. No shares will carry any special rights, and no shareholders will be required to have his or her shares redeemed in whole or in part.GENERAL MEETING6.1 Within the framework of the company's articles of association the general meeting is the ultimate authority in all matters affecting the company.7.1 General meetings of the company must be convened by the Supervisory Board by notice in the IT system of the Danish Business Authority and by notice on the company's website no later than 3 weeks and no earlier than 5 weeks prior to the general meeting. The same length of notice must be given in writing to all such shareholders registered in the company's register of shareholders who have requested written notice of general meetings. The shareholders registered with an e-mail address in the company's register of shareholders will receive their notice by e-mail.7.2 The annual general meeting will be held every year before the end of April.7.3 Extraordinary general meetings will be held when requested by the supervisory board or the auditor elected by the general meeting, when resolved by the general meeting or at the written request of shareholders holding no less than 5% of the company's share capital. Extraordinary general meetings to consider a specific issues must be convened within two weeks of receipt of a request to such effect.7.4 General meetings are held in Region Hovedstaden.7.5 In order to qualify for consideration at the general meeting of the company, proposals from shareholders must be submitted in writing to the supervisory board at least six weeks prior to the general meeting. The supervisory board will decide whether written proposals received by the supervisory board later than six weeks prior to the general meeting qualify for consideration at the general meeting of the company.7.6 The notice convening the meeting, the agenda, the complete proposals for consideration and any documents to be submitted at the general meeting, and, with respect to the annual general meeting, also the audited annual report, must be posted at the company's website not later than three weeks prior to the date of the general meeting and remain posted up to and including the date of the general meeting for inspection by the shareholders.8.1 The agenda of the annual general meeting must include the following items:1. Presentation of the audited annual report for approval.2. Resolution on the appropriation of profit or provision for losses pursuant to the approvedannual report.3. Election of chairman, deputy chairman and other members to the supervisory board.4. Appointment of auditors.5. Proposed resolutions.6. Any other business.9.1 The supervisory board appoints a chairman to conduct the business of the general meeting and to decide on any matters concerning procedure, the casting of votes and the result of the voting. Voting takes place in writing if so decided by the chairman of the meeting or if at least 1/10 of the votes represented request voting to take place in writing.9.2 Minutes of the general meeting are entered in the minute book authorised for this purpose by the supervisory board and signed by the chairman of the meeting.10.1 Any shareholder who has received an admission card not later than three days prior to the general meeting from the company's offices is entitled to attend the general meeting. Admission cards and ballot cards may be requested from the company's offices by stating the name registered in the register of shareholders or by producing a statement of account from VP Securities A/S or a statement of safe custody deposit and the name and address of the holder of the share.10.2 Shareholders are only entitled to attend and vote at the general meeting in relation to the shares they hold at the date of registration. The registration date is one week ahead of the date of the general meeting. The shares held by the individual shareholder are computed at the registration date, based on the shareholder's ownership data according to the register of shareholders. Ownership data that the company or the registrar has received with a view to entering in the register of shareholders on the registration date, but which are not yet recorded in the register of shareholders, will also be included.10.3 Voting rights may be exercised by proxy.11.1 At the general meeting all resolutions are passed by simple majority unless the Danish Companies Act stipulates specific rules as to majority.SUPERVISORY AND EXECUTIVE BOARDS12.1 The company is managed by a supervisory board consisting of 3-5 members elected by the general meeting and of any employee representatives elected in pursuance of the provisions of law to this effect. The chairman and the deputy chairman of the supervisory board are elected by the general meeting.12.2 DLH-Fonden has, as long as DLH-Fonden holds at least 10% of the Company's share capital, a right to appoint one further member of the Supervisory Board.12.3 Any member elected under Article 12.1 and appointed under Article 12.2 will serve for a one-year term. Re-election and re-appointment is possible. Any person who has reached the age of 70 at the date of the general meeting cannot be (re-)elected or (re-)appointed as member of the Supervisory Board.13.1 The supervisory board is responsible for the general management of the company.13.2 The supervisory board adopts its own rules of procedure governing the performance of its duties.13.3 Minutes of the business conducted at board meetings are kept and signed by all members of the supervisory board present.14.1 The supervisory board appoints an executive board consisting of one or more executive vice presidents, one of whom may be the President and Chief Executive Officer, to be in charge of the day-to-day management of the company. The supervisory board also allocates the duties to be discharged by the executive vice presidents as well as the terms of their employment.14.2 The supervisory board may grant individual or collective powers of procuration.14.3 The company has drafted general guidelines for the incentive remuneration of members of the management. These guidelines have been submitted to and approved by the company in general meeting and may be viewed at the company's website.POWERS TO BIND THE COMPANY15.1 The company is bound by the joint signatures of two executive vice presidents, by the joint signatures of one executive vice president and either the chairman, the deputy chairman or two members of the supervisory board or by the joint signatures of the chairman or the deputy chairman of the supervisory board and one of the members of the supervisory board.AUDIT AND FINANCIAL STATEMENTS16.1 The company's annual reports are audited in accordance with the Danish Financial Statements Act. The financial statements of the company must be audited by an auditor elected by the general meeting, who must be a state-authorised public accountant.16.2 The auditor is appointed for one year at a time.17.1 The company's financial year coincides with the calendar year.18.1 The annual report must give a true and fair view of the company's and the group's assets and liabilities, financial position and results for the year.19.1 The Company's annual report and interim reports are prepared in English.As adopted at the extraordinary annual general meeting of the company held on 12 March 1986 with amendments of 29 August 1986, 19 November 1986, 29 April 1987, 25 May 1989, 16 May 1991, 7 May 1992, 11 May 1994, 4 May 1995, 8 June 1998, 18 January 2000, 4 April 2002, 7 April 2005, 7 February 2006, 19 April 2006, 18 April 2007, 16 April 2008, 16 April 2009, 26 August 2009, 9 April 2010, 8 March 2011, 12 April 2012, 8 April 2013, 9 January 2014, 27 April 2015 and 25 April 2016.Attachment:https://cns.omxgroup.com/cds/DisclosureAttachmentServlet?messageAttachmentId=559002
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Health insurer Aetna Inc. (AET), which is in deal to acquire Humana Inc. (HUM), reported Thursday that its first-quarter net income attributable to the company declined 7 percent to $726.6 million from $777.5 million last year. Net income per share was $2.06, down 6 percent from $2.20 a year ago. Operating earnings were $810.8 million or $2.30 per share, compared to $844.3 million or $2.39 per share last year. On average, 21 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of $2.23 per share. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Total revenue increased to $15.69 billion from $15.09 billion a year ago. Analysts expected revenues of $15.45 billion. Aetna now projects full-year 2016 operating earnings per share of $7.90 to $8.10, compared to previous expectation of at least $7.75 per share. Analysts expect annual earnings of $7.95 per share. 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.
NEW YORK, NY -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- From April 19th until April 22nd, PVBLIC together with the Office of the President of the General Assembly hosted a Digital Media Zone (DMZ) in parallel to the high-level meetings at the United Nations, where media influencers, bloggers, and journalists from around the world engaged in active discussions related to the Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Change. The Digital Media Zone Team hosted a live broadcast on April 21st together with UN TV. Partners present at the event conducted interviews and produced relevant content to engage with the online audience.

On April 21st the Digital Media Zone reported about the High Level Thematic Debate on the Achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals hosted by the President of the General Assembly, Mogens Lykketoft. This event served to significantly increase international awareness and political momentum around the implementation of the SDGs. It brought together global political, business and civil society leaders in New York to focus on kick-starting the SDG implementation. It also addressed the synergy between the COP21 outcome and the 2030 Agenda. Leaders were offered a platform to catalyse action, discuss concrete steps forward and mobilize potential implementation partners. Forest Whitaker -- Special Envoy for Peace and Reconciliation for UNESCO and SDG Advocate and Leonardo DiCaprio -- UN Messenger of Peace, addressed the General Assembly on Thursday and Friday.

The following day, on April 22nd, Leaders from 175 countries have signed the Paris Agreement on climate change as the landmark deal took a key step forward. To keep the global spotlight focused on climate change and build on the strong political momentum from Paris, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon invited representatives of all countries to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change at a special Ceremony at the United Nations Headquarters on 22 April. The Signing Ceremony took place on the first day that the Agreement opened for signatures, and marked the first step toward ensuring that the Agreement enters into legal force as quickly as possible.

Media and partners at the Digital Media Zone included: Connect 4 Climate, UN Foundation, UN Development Programme, Mashable, +Social Good, Now This Media, UN Radio, SDG Action Campaign, AIESEC International and Origin Magazine.

Most interviews and summaries from the Climate Agreement Signing Ceremony and the High Level Thematic Debate on the Achievement of the SDGs are available on the Digital Media Zone official YouTube Channel.

The Digital Media Zone was made possible with the generous support of The Toolbox, Qualcomm, Noa, and El Voyage.

About PVBLIC Foundation:

PVBLIC Foundation is an innovative non-profit media organization that harnesses the power of media to drive social change. An aggregator of media across all platforms, PVBLIC works strategically to pair media space with key non-profits at the local, national and global levels. We utilize existing and emerging technologies to increase issue awareness around important causes and help non-profits amplify their message. At PVBLIC, we believe that media is the new currency. @PVBLICF or visit www.pvblic.org

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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) - Invesco Ltd. (IVZ) released a profit for first quarter that declined compared to the same period last year. The company said its profit dropped to $204.8 million, or $0.49 per share. This was down from $272.1 million, or $0.63 per share, in last year's first quarter. Analysts had expected the company to earn $0.54 per share, according figures compiled by Thomson Reuters. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. The company said revenue for the quarter fell 10.8% to $818.1 million. This was down from $917.5 million last year. Invesco Ltd. earnings at a glance: -Earnings (Q1): $204.8 Mln. vs. $272.1 Mln. last year. -Earnings Decline (Y-o-Y): -24.7% -EPS (Q1): $0.49 vs. $0.63 last year. -EPS Decline (Y-o-Y): -22.2% -Analysts Estimate: $0.54 -Revenue (Q1): $818.1 Mln vs. $917.5 Mln last year. -Revenue Change (Y-o-Y): -10.8% 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.
AURORA, ON -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Helix BioPharma Corp. (TSX: HBP) (FRANKFURT: HBP) ("Helix" or the "Company"), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing innovative drug candidates for the prevention and treatment of cancer, today announced that the first patient has been enrolled in the Phase II component of study LDOS002.

"We continue to build on the clinical experience that was gained from the Phase I component of the study," said Mr. Steve Demas, Helix's newly appointed Chief Medical Officer. Up to forty-five (45) patients will be enrolled in the Phase II open-label, non-randomized study designed to make a preliminary assessment of efficacy of L-DOS47 in patients with non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer ("NSCLC").

"We would like to thank the investigative sites for their continued commitment to the study," said Dr. Sven Rohmann, Chief Executive Officer of Helix.

About L-DOS47

L-DOS47 is Helix's first immunoconjugate based drug candidate in development based on the Company's novel DOS47 platform technology, which is designed to use an innovative approach to modify the microenvironmental conditions of cancer cells in a manner that leads to their destruction.

About L-DOS47 clinical development

L-DOS47 is currently being clinically evaluated in two clinical studies, in Poland and in the United States, as a treatment for certain patients with NSCLC.

LDOS002 is an open-label Phase I/II clinical study to evaluate the safety, tolerability and preliminary efficacy of ascending doses of L-DOS47, initially as a monotherapy, in patients with inoperable, locally advanced, recurrent or metastatic, non-squamous, stage IIIb/IV NSCLC. The study is being conducted at five Polish centers: the Maria Sklodowska-Curie Memorial Cancer Centre & Institute of Oncology, the Military Medical Institute, the National Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases Research Institute, the Mazovian Center of Pulmonary Diseases and Tuberculosis in Otwock and the Department of Oncology, Poznan University of Medical Science.

On September 8th, 2015, the company presented results from the ongoing LDOS002 study at the 16th World Conference on Lung Cancer held in Denver, Colorado. Results from patients enrolled in the first twelve dosing cohorts included:

L-DOS47 was well tolerated at dose levels studied to-date;

Twenty-one (21) of the 40 patients enrolled (52%) had an overall response of 'stable disease' after completion of two cycles of L-DOS47;

Eleven (11) of the 21 patients had a response of 'stable disease' after completing four cycles of L-DOS47;

One (1) patient in the 9th dosing cohort (1.84g/kg) was dosed for 10 cycles (approximately 7 months) without disease progression.

LDOS001 is a Phase I, open-label, dose escalation study being conducted in the United States at three centers: The University of Texas, M.D. Anderson Cancer Centre, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center; and University Hospitals Case Medical Center. The primary objective of the study is to determine the safety and tolerability of L-DOS47 in combination treatment with pemetrexed/ carboplatin.

On March 3rd, 2016, the company reported on the progress of study LDOS001. A patient in the first dosing cohort received four cycles of L-DOS47 in combination with pemetrexed/carboplatin and an additional four cycles of L-DOS47 alone before progression of their disease. The best response reported for this patient was a 37% decrease in the sum of the diameters of target lesions identified at baseline.

About Helix BioPharma Corp.

Helix BioPharma Corp. is a biopharmaceutical company specializing in the field of cancer therapy. The company is actively developing innovative products for the prevention and treatment of cancer based on its proprietary technologies. Helix's product development initiatives include its novel L-DOS47 new drug candidate. Helix is currently listed on the TSX and FSE under the symbol "HBP".

Forward-Looking Statements and Risks and Uncertainties

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements and information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws, including, without limitation, those relating to the total number of patients that will be enrolled in the Polish Phase I/II clinical study and the potential generation of valuable information by such further enrollment of patients, which may be identified by words including, without limitation, "will", "may", "anticipated", and other similar expressions, are intended to provide information about management's current plans and expectations regarding the conduct of the clinical study.

Although Helix believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, such statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated and no assurance can be given that these expectations will be realized, and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. Risk factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements include, without limitation, (i) the inherent uncertainty involved in scientific research and drug development; (ii) the risks associated with delay or inability to complete clinical trials successfully, including that patient recruitment for the Polish Phase I/II clinical trial for L-DOS47 does not continue as scheduled or at all, that Helix's planned U.S. Phase I clinical trial for L-DOS47 proceeds in a manner and on the timelines anticipated by Helix, or at all and the long lead-times and high costs associated with obtaining regulatory approval to market any product which may result from successful completion of such trials; (iii) need to secure additional financing on terms satisfactory to Helix or at all; (iv) clinical trials that yield negative results, or results that do not justify future clinical development, including that the Polish Phase I/II clinical trial for L-DOS47 will yield negative results and that the information, if any, gained from higher dose levels in such study will not be of use in future studies; and (v) those risks and uncertainties affecting the company as more fully described in Helix's most recent Annual Report, including under the headings "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors", filed under Helix's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com (together, the "Helix Risk Factors"). Certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, that the Helix Risk Factors will not cause Helix's actual results or events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. These cautionary statements qualify all such forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements and information are based on the beliefs, assumptions and expectations of Helix's management on the date of this news release, and Helix does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statement or information should those beliefs, assumptions or expectations, or other circumstances change, except as required by law.

Investor Relations:

Helix BioPharma Corp.

3-305 Industrial Parkway South

Aurora, Ontario, L4G 6X7

Tel: 905 841-2300

Fax: (905) 841-2244

Email: ir@helixbiopharma.com

Web: www.helixbiopharma.com




TORONTO, ON and TAMPA, FL -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Cott Corporation (NYSE: COT) (TSX: BCB) ("Cott" or the "Company") today announced that, effective June 27, 2016, Steven Kitching, the current President of the Company's Cott North America business unit, will return to the United Kingdom to be the President of the Company's Cott United Kingdom/Europe business unit, a position similar to the one he previously held from 2008 to 2013.

The Company has appointed Bradley J. Goist to assume the role of President of the Company's Cott North America business unit. Mr. Goist joins Cott from the Kellogg Company where he held various positions from 2009 to 2016, including Senior Vice President and General Manager, US Snacks and Senior Vice President of Marketing and Innovation, US Snacks. Prior to that, Mr. Goist held several positions with The Coca-Cola Company from 1996 to 2009, including Senior Vice President and General Manager, Hydration and Senior Vice President, Juices, Teas and Emerging Brands. Mr. Goist holds a Masters in Business Administration from Ohio State University and is a graduate of University of Michigan, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics.

"Steve was instrumental in setting a clear strategy for stability and growth in North America, with a significant focus on growing our Contract Manufacturing business," said Mr. Fowden. "We are very thankful for the many contributions Steve made to the North America business unit and are very pleased that he is staying with Cott on his return to his native United Kingdom to lead our United Kingdom/Europe Business Unit," continued Mr. Fowden.

"We are excited about Brad's appointment as President of the North America Business Unit. With 30 years of diverse sales, marketing and general management experience, Brad has the knowledge and expertise to lead our North America Business Unit. Brad and Steve will collaborate with the rest of the management team in the North America business unit in a phased handover of responsibilities," continued Mr. Fowden.

ABOUT COTT CORPORATION

With the acquisition of DS Services of America, Inc. in December 2014, Cott combined a leading provider in the direct-to-consumer beverage services industry with its traditional business, one of the world's largest producers of beverages on behalf of retailers, brand owners and distributors. Cott now has the largest volume-based national presence in the U.S. home and office delivery industry for bottled water and one of the five largest national market share positions in the U.S. office coffee services and filtration services industries. Cott reaches over 1.5 million customers (approximately 60% commercial and 40% residential) through over 2,000 routes located across its national network supported by national sales and distribution facilities, as well as a fleet of over 2,000 vehicles. Cott's broad portfolio allows it to offer, on a direct-to-consumer basis, a variety of bottled water, coffee, brewed tea, water dispensers, coffee and tea brewers and filtration equipment. With the ability to cover approximately 90% of U.S. households, in terms of geography, Cott believes it has the broadest distribution network in the direct-to-consumer beverage services industry in the United States, which enables it to efficiently service residences and small and medium size businesses, as well as national corporations, universities and government agencies.

Website: www.cott.com

CONTACT:

Jarrod Langhans

Investor Relations

Tel: (813) 313-1732

Email Contact




DENVER, CO--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - HempTech Corp. (OTC PINK: HTCO), a provider of advanced Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) with sophisticated automation and analytical tools for the cultivators of legal industrial hemp and cannabis, announces today that it is now trading under the ticker symbol HTCO. Although HempTech is currently trading on OTC PINK, the Company will be up-listing onto OTC QB and possibly OTC QX in the next few months.

The Company is in preparation stage on filing with Securities and Exchange Commission to become a fully reporting company in the next few weeks.

HempTech is also planning on releasing announcements on major contracts received by both the Company and FutureLand Corp (OTC PINK: FUTL). Contracts represent a major milestone reached by both companies. The contracts are results of an extensive joint efforts between HempTech and FutureLand for the past few months.

Since 2014, HempTech Corp, a subsidiary of FutureWorld Corp (OTC PINK: FWDG), in cooperation with FutureLand Corp (OTC PINK: FUTL), has spent substantial amount of resources to develop state-of-the-art automation technologies for the growers and cultivators in the burgeoning cannabis industry.

About HempTech Corp

HempTech Corp (OTC PINK: HTCO), a Nevada corporation, is a provider of advanced Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) with sophisticated automation and analytical tools for the cultivators of legal industrial hemp and cannabis. We design and engineer specialized products using advanced sensors, process control techniques, big data aggregation, analytics and security solutions so cannabis growers can easily and effectively control every aspect of their operation. Through HempTech technologies, virtually every component of the plants' vegetative growth matrix and flower harvest is automated, documented and available in visible format both in real time and historically. This simplifies operations and ensures that the baselines set by the master grower are adhered to by the cultivation staff.

HempTech's mission is to establish a reputation in the cannabis industry as a one-stop-shop that provides all the infrastructure elements required by growers in a manner that is fully integrated, state-of-the-art, and secure. Products include the SPIDer' (Secure Perimeter Intrusion Detection), SmartSense', SmartEnergy, and analytics dashboard Cognetix' through which HempTech Corp. provides growers unparalleled data analysis capabilities to Know Your Grow! HempTech -- America's Future Taking Root Today.

To request further information about HempTech, please email us at info@hemptechcorp.com, log onto our website at http://www.hemptechcorp.com or visit us at our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/hemptechcorp or on Twitter @hemptechcorp.

About FutureLand Corp

FutureLand Corp., a Colorado company, is a cannabis and hemp specialty zoned land leasing company formed to capitalize upon the emerging global cannabis market. FutureLand, focuses on target acquisition, zoning, license fulfillment, site plan preparation and financing of cannabis or hemp grow facilities throughout the United States. We give growers the opportunity to grow. We monetize through leasing the land, leasing the structures on the land, financing interest revenue and management fees associated with cultivation centers. FutureLand retains ownership of all the land and the structures. FutureLand leases to both medical marijuana, retail marijuana as well as industrial hemp growers. FutureLand does not currently grow, distribute or sell marijuana. To request further information about FutureLand, please email us at info@futurelandcorp.com, log onto our website at http://www.futurelandcorp.com, or visit us on FB @ futurelandcorp and Twitter @futurelandcorp.

About FutureWorld Corp.

FutureWorld (OTC PINK: FWDG), a Delaware corporation, is a leading provider of advanced technologies and solutions to the global cannabis industry. FutureWorld, together with its subsidiaries, focuses on the identification, acquisition, development, and commercialization of cannabis related products and services, such as industrial Hemp. FutureWorld, through its subsidiaries, provides personal and professional THC and HTD test kits, pharmaceutical grade HTD oil solutions, SafeVape vaporizers, smart sensor technology, communication network, surveillance security, data analysis for smart cultivation and consultation for the industrial hemp and legal medicinal cannabis. Our wireless agricultural smart sensor networks offer precision to the agriculture, irrigation systems, and greenhouses for the global cannabis and hemp industry. FutureWorld and its subsidiaries do not grow, distribute or sell marijuana. As the only Cannabis Technology Accelerator, FutureWorld will incubate and fund leading technologies, products, and services for Cannabis industry (Industrial Hemp) for foreseeable future; bringing value to its core and its shareholders.

To request further information about FutureWorld, please email us at info@futureworldcorp.com, log onto our website at http://www.futureworldcorp.com or visit us at our Facebook page facebook.com/futureworldcorp or on Twitter @futureworldinc.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain forward-looking statements covered within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements relate to, among other things, plans and timing for the introduction or enhancement of our services and products, statements about future market conditions, supply and demand conditions, and other expectations, intentions and plans contained in this press release that are not historical fact and involve risks and uncertainties. Our expectations regarding future revenues depend upon our ability to develop and supply products and services that we may not produce today and that meet defined specifications. When used in this press release, the words "plan," "expect," "believe," and similar expressions generally identify forward-looking statements. These statements reflect our current expectations. They are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, changes in technology and changes in pervasive markets. This release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 27E of the Securities Act of 1934. 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. Actual performance and results may differ materially from that projected or suggested herein due to certain risks and uncertainties including, without limitation, ability to obtain financing and regulatory and shareholder approval for anticipated actions.

Contact:

Media Contact

HempTech Corp.

http://www.hemptechcorp.com

info@hemptechcorp.com

(727) 474-1810

Twitter - @hemptechcorp

Facebook - hemptechcorp
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Editors Note: There are 3 photos associated with this Press Release.

Who would have thought that elephants could be Canadian ambassadors for their endangered friends in Sumatra? While zoos across Canada are shipping their old elephant friends out of the country, the U.S. based Tarzan Zerbini Circus will be returning to Canada once again with a lifelong pair of elephant companions, Shelly and Marie. The Shrine Circus will be performing its Spectac! 2016 show in various locations throughout the province of Ontario between June 24 and August 21, 2016. The Shrine Circus remains committed to conservation and helping animal loving Canadians witness and learn about the wonders of these amazing elephants in an up-close experience.

"These girls have been a part of the Zerbini family for decades. We are absolutely committed to their health, wellbeing and quality of life. And this shows in their affection for us", states ringmaster and family member Joseph Bauer. Bauer adds, "Acting as they do as ambassadors for their species, Shelly and Marie bring awareness to the challenges that elephants face world-wide and of the elephant conservation programs that are always short of funds".

The Zerbini Circus family has been producing circuses and working with both domestic and exotic animals for over 250 years world-wide. They are recognized for pioneering significant improvements in the care and training of elephants especially, and have built a non-profit animal care and retirement facility in sunny central Florida called "Two Tails Ranch".

There is no question that while Canada is sending elephants south of the border, thousands of Canadians would not learn as much about elephants, and the need to support world-wide conservation programs such as AES (Asian Elephant Support Group). There is a host of compelling information online on the urgent need for help with the elephant crisis in Sumatra.

Most significantly, with Shelly and Marie's help, the circus urges its patrons and all friends of conservation to understand and contribute to efforts aimed at ensuring that elephants are protected and can thrive in the wild. Tarzan Zerbini himself has created a crowdfunding initiative for Sumatran elephant conservation where contributors are directly linked to the "Asian Elephant Support Group" through www.HelpTheElephants.com.

For more information on the dates and times for the Shrine Circus and this year's "Spectac! 2016" cities and shows, please visit their website at http://www.shrine-circus.com.

To view the photos associated with this release, please visit the following links:

http://www.marketwire.com/library/20160427-1052420a_800.jpg

http://www.marketwire.com/library/20160427-1052420b_800.jpg

http://www.marketwire.com/library/20160427-1052420c_800.jpg

Contacts:

Cathy Sproule

Director Public Relations

Phone: (403) 815-7499

Email: cathy@festivalxpress.com




MOUNTAIN VIEW (dpa-AFX) - Symantec Corp. (SYMC) announced the company now expects its fourth-quarter revenue to be $873 million compared to previous guidance of $885 to $915 million. The company said a shift in enterprise security customer buying preferences is resulting in less license revenue during the quarter and more revenue being deferred to future periods. Symantec expects fourth-quarter non-GAAP EPS of $0.22, below previous guidance of $0.24-$0.27. The company said the shortfall is primarily a result of lower than expected revenue. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect the company to report profit per share of $0.25 on revenue of $901.16 million. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Shares of Symantec Corp. were down more than 16% in pre-market trade Thursday. Symantec also announced that Michael Brown will be stepping down as President and CEO. Brown will continue to serve as CEO and as a director of the company until a successor has been appointed. The Symantec Board has begun the search for the next CEO. 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.
DUBLIN, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Research Report on Rare Earth Industry in China, 2011-2020" report to their offering.

China launched the rare earth export quota license system in 1998. In recent years, Chinese government has attempted to decrease the amount of export enterprises and quotas as well as the annual exploitation of rare earth mines. For example, the rare earth export quota set by Ministry of Commerce of China for domestic enterprises declined from 50,000 tons in 2005 to 21,590 tons in 2014. Decrease in export quotas results in the increasing amount of smuggling.

At present, production capacity of China's rare earth separation enterprises exceeds 300,000 tons. However, the global annual demand is no more than 150,000 tons, of which that of the international market is about 50,000 tons and that of domestic market is less than 100,000 tons. The dominant position of China's rare earth on the global market is still stable. In 2015, the actual production of China's rare earth was more than 150,000 tons which was higher than the quota. The reasons lied in the illegal exploitation.

Key Topics Covered:

Supply and Demand Status of Rare Earth

Global Rare Earth Trade Status

Government Policies on Rare Earth Industry in China

Export Status of Rare Earth in China

Smuggling Status of Rare Earth in China

Price Trend of Rare Earth in China

Key Enterprises in China's Rare Earth Industry

Rare Earth Industry Prospect of China's Rare Earth Industry

Companies Mentioned:

Aluminum Corporation of China

Baogang Group

China Minmetals Corporation

Ganzhou Rare Earth Group Co., Ltd.

Guangdong Rare Earth Industry Group

Xiamen Tungsten Co., Ltd.

Report Structure:

1 Relevant Concepts of Rare Earth Industry

2 Supply and Demand of Rare Earth in China, 2009-2015

3 Analysis of China's Rare Earth Downstream Application Fields, 2011-2015

4 Top 6 Enterprises in China's Rare Earth Industry, 2013-2016

5 Prospect of China's Rare Earth Industry, 2016-2020

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/zjcmwb/research_report

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
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- UEX Corporation (TSX: UEX) ("UEX" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement with Primary Capital Inc. (the "Agent") under which the Agent has agreed to act as agent for the offering of 16,000,000 common shares of the Company which will qualify as "flow-through" shares pursuant to the Income Tax Act (Canada) (the "Offering") at a price of $0.25 per "flow-through" share to raise $4,000,000, on a "guaranteed" agency basis.

The Agent will have an option to increase the size of the Offering by up to an additional 4,000,000 "flow-through" shares at $0.25 per "flow-through" share to raise additional gross proceeds of up to $1,000,000.

The Agent will receive a cash commission on the sale of the "flow-through" shares equal to 5% of the gross proceeds raised.

The Company intends to use the gross proceeds of the "flow-through" Offering to fund exploration of the Company's uranium properties.

Closing of the Offering is anticipated to occur on or before May 12, 2016 and is subject to receipt of applicable regulatory approvals. The securities issued by UEX in connection with the Offering are subject to a four month plus one day "hold period" as prescribed by the Toronto Stock Exchange and applicable securities laws.

The Offering is being made in the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Ontario, and other jurisdictions as may be determined between the Company and the Agents, and is subject to the approval of regulatory authorities. The securities offered have not been registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of UEX

Roger Lemaitre, President & CEO

Forward-Looking Information

This news release may contain statements that constitute "forward-looking information" for the purposes of Canadian securities laws. Such statements are based on UEX's current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections. Such forward-looking information includes statements regarding the Offering, the use of the proceeds from the Offering, UEX's mineral resource and mineral reserve estimates, outlook for our future operations, plans and timing for exploration activities, and other expectations, intentions and plans that are not historical fact. The words "estimates", "projects", "expects", "intends", "believes", "plans", "will", "may", or their negatives or other comparable words and phrases are intended to identify forward-looking information. Such forward-looking information is based on certain factors and assumptions and is subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from UEX's expectations include UEX's ability to complete the Offering, uncertainties relating to interpretation of drill results and geology, additional drilling results, continuity and grade of deposits, participation in joint ventures, reliance on other companies as operators, public acceptance of uranium as an energy source, fluctuations in uranium prices and currency exchange rates, changes in environmental and other laws affecting uranium exploration and mining, and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in UEX's Annual Information Form and other filings with the applicable Canadian securities commissions on SEDAR. Many of these factors are beyond the control of UEX. Consequently, all forward-looking information contained in this news release is qualified by this cautionary statement and there can be no assurance that actual results or developments anticipated by UEX will be realized. For the reasons set forth above, investors should not place undue reliance on such forward-looking information. Except as required by applicable law, UEX disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contacts:

UEX Corporation

Roger Lemaitre

President & CEO

306-713-1401

ww.uex-corporation.com




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- The Mint Corporation (TSX VENTURE: MIT) ("Mint" or the "Company") announces the following:

Business Update

Mint Middle East LLC ("MME"), a company 51% owned by Mint, has signed a partnership agreement with UnionPay International to issue UnionPay cards in association with Mint's partner banks. UnionPay International, a provider of payment services claiming the world's largest cardholder base, has also certified Mint as a Third Party Service Provider (TPSP). Mint becomes the first Union Pay certified payment processor and issuer for UnionPay Chip Cards in the GCC countries (a political and economic alliance called the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) made up of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain). Banks and financial institutions in the region, and globally, can now issue UnionPay scheme cards leveraging the end-to-end processing platform from MME on an outsourced basis without the need to make upfront capital investments. UnionPay cards enjoy a wide acceptance in the UAE and the GCC in both merchant point of sale terminals and ATMs. It is the intent of Mint to convert a portion of its existing card portfolio to UnionPay cards and also to issue UnionPay cards to new cardholders.

PCI Certification

MME successfully completed the audit for, and received, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard certification (PCI DSS). This was an important milestone for the company in its evolution to be a significant regional card issuer and electronic payments company. PCI DSS is an information security standard for organizations that handle branded payment cards from the major card schemes.

Middle East Cards & Payment Conference 2016

MME is a gold sponsor for the upcoming Cards and Payment Conference, to be held in Dubai on May 31st 2016. MME will have a strong presence in the conference and the MME team is planning to actively participate in the conference. This is the leading payments conference in the region and the active participation of MME will continue to enhance its visibility in the market place.

Readers are also directed to the Management Discussion and Analysis for the audited, consolidated financial statements of Mint for the years ended December 31, 2015 and 2014 filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Restatement of financial statements

During the year-end process, Mint identified that the accretion and interest expense on its Series A and Series B debentures, and the gain on the redemption of Series B debentures, were incorrectly calculated for the year-ended December 31, 2014 and for the periods ended March 31, 2015, June 30, 2015 and September 30, 2015. Restated audited consolidated financial statements for the years ended December 31, 2015 and 2014 have been filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

The effect of the restatements for the year-ended December 31, 2014 results in a decrease of the net loss from $14,160,588 to $11,810,707, a decrease in the comprehensive loss from $16,046,659 to $13,696,778 and a decrease in the loss per common share from continuing operations from $0.188 per share to $0.113 per share.

In addition, the net loss for the three months period ended March 31, 2015 decreased from $3,142,505 to $1,918,531, the net loss for the six month period ended June 30, 2015 decreased from $5,500,417 to $4,087,884 and the net loss for the nine month period ended September 30, 2015 decreased from $7,143,441 to $6,442,825.

General Disclosure Statement

Investors are encouraged to read the Management Discussion and Analysis Documents filed on SEDAR for a description of additional risks associated with investing in the Company. The following statement is only intended to inform investors on certain of the many risks associated with investing in the Company. The Company operates predominantly in the Middle East. It is exposed to significant political, legal and regulatory risks associated with operating in this emerging and volatile market. The key management personnel and operations of the Company are based in countries which do not have strong and reliable judicial enforcement. This results in additional risk with respect to the enforcement of legal and contractual rights, including, for example but without limitation, the enforcement of the rights of creditors, the protection of intellectual property rights, the enforcement of joint venture arrangements, and binding key employees with non-compete agreements. Since inception, the Company has not reached profitability. The Company relies heavily on debt financing to fund its business plan. This has exposed the Company to unique financial risks associated with significantly higher than normal debt levels. Investors in the company are strongly encouraged to be aware of the significant risks of the Company, to conduct additional due diligence and to seek the help of a licensed investment advisor before investing in securities of the Company. Moreover, investors must be aware that the purchase of the Company's securities involves a number of additional significant risks and uncertainties, as disclosed in the Management Discussion and Analysis reports filed on SEDAR by the Company. Investors considering purchasing securities of the Company should be able to bear the economic risk of total loss of such investment.

About The Mint Corporation

Established in 2004, Mint is a vertically integrated prepaid card and payroll services provider with its own processing platform, ATM network and proprietary branded card products delivered to workers in the United Arab Emirates. Mint operates as a payroll card and processing services provider in the UAE through its ownership in Mint Middle East LLC and Mint Gateway for Electronic Payment Services LLC.

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:

The Mint Corporation

Rishi Tibriwal

(647) 252-1675

rtibriwal@mintinc.com

www.themintcorp.com




SINGAPUR (dpa-AFX) - Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (CY) and Broadcom Limited (AVGO) announced the signing of a definitive agreement under which Cypress will acquire Broadcom's Wireless Internet of Things (IoT) business and related assets in an all-cash transaction valued at $550 million. Cypress will acquire Broadcom's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee IoT product lines and intellectual property, along with its WICED brand and developer ecosystem. Broadcom's IoT business unit, which employs approximately 430 people worldwide, generated $189 million in revenue during the last twelve months. Cypress expects the transaction to be accretive within a year of closing and to improve its gross margin, earnings and long-term revenue potential. Broadcom will continue to focus on its wireless connectivity solutions for the access and mobility segments that are not IoT related, including serving set-top box, wireless access, smartphone, laptop and notebook customers. 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.
FREMONT, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Dataguise, a technology leader in secure business execution, today announced a partnership with master IT distributor Green Light Technology (GLT), extending availability of Dataguise DgSecure to enterprises throughout Latin America. The Dataguise partnership with GLT brings a unique depth of technical expertise to organizations with challenges in information security and compliance. Availability of Dataguise DgSecure complements GLT's solution portfolio to safely unlock the value of big data, databases, and unstructured information for business success.

According to a report by the Bureau of National Affairs on privacy laws in Latin America, "Thirteen jurisdictions in Latin America now have comprehensive privacy laws including: Argentina, Aruba, Bahamas, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Curacao, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Trinidad, Tobago, and Uruguay. The two laws that are most closely aligned with the European laws (and thus deemed to the European Commission to provide adequate protection) are Argentina and Uruguay. Other countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, and territories such as the Cayman Islands have draft bills that have either been or are expected to be introduced to their legislatures. In addition, Chile, which has had a high-level data protection law since 1999, may amend its existing law in 2015 to include registration, impose cross-border restrictions and establish a data protection regulator."(1)

Headquartered in Maitland, Florida, GLT provides custom development, professional services, and the recommendation, implementation and customization of best-of-breed software products to organizations throughout Latin America. The solution provider builds solutions that create a bridge between legacy and advanced technologies to meet the needs of companies in a range of industries. GLT works with a number of organizations to leverage business analytics powered by Hadoop and other big data platforms. Dataguise now supports these efforts by GLT with cradle to grave protection of the data to ensure that sensitive information is detected upon creation, protected from unauthorized access, and monitored in real-time to prevent threats from impacting business operations.

The flagship offering by Dataguise is DgSecure, a highly automated data-centric security platform that precisely monitors access and activities associated with sensitive data such as email addresses, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, or other confidential or personally identifiable information (PII). The solution works seamlessly with all leading big data and database platform vendors. DgSecure is also ideal for protecting vast pools of difficult to aggregate unstructured data for end-to-end protection of sensitive data.

According to a data breach industry forecast by Experian, "The risk of experiencing a data breach is higher than ever with almost half of organizations suffering at least one security incident in the last 12 months. To address this, 48 percent of organizations increased investments in security technologies in the same timeframe, and 73 percent acknowledged the likelihood of a breach by developing a data breach response plan. Showcased by shifts in leadership at companies that suffered a public data breach in the last year, it is clear that security can no longer be viewed as just an IT issue. Scrutiny of corporate leadership's management of security may continue to increase in the form of legal and regulatory action after a major incident."(2)

"Data security is receiving high profile attention from Global 2000 enterprises, including many across Latin America," said Jaime Penagos, VP of Business Development at Green Light Technology (GLT). "Many of our customers are concerned about the exposure of sensitive information and looking for solutions to address this threat. While perimeter security solutions are critical, DgSecure by Dataguise delivers a unique data-centric advantage that allows enterprises to safely unlock the full potential of their information assets."

"Data driven organizations around the world remain at high risk from internal and external threats to their most precious informational assets," said JT Sison, VP, Marketing and Business Development, Dataguise. "Our emphasis on sensitive data, from detection to protection and monitoring, makes DgSecure an important security layer that allows our customers to operate safely under compliance mandates. This alliance with GLT extends access to DgSecure, thereby ensuring secure business execution for organizations throughout Latin America."

Resources:

Follow Dataguise on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/dataguise

Follow Dataguise on LinkedIn at: http://www.linkedin.com/company/dataguise

Contact Dataguise directly at: http://dataguise.com/?q=inquiries

About Dataguise

Dataguise is the leader in secure business execution, delivering data-centric security solutions that detect and protect an enterprise's sensitive data, no matter where it lives or who needs to leverage it. Dataguise solutions free the enterprise from traditional security constraints to support the data-driven organization and maximize the business value of information. DgSecure by Dataguise makes data security painless, delivering a powerful solution that provides the highest level of protection without the need for programming. The company is proud to secure the data of many Fortune 500 companies committed to responsible data stewardship. To learn more about how Dataguise is spearheading the secure data revolution, visit: www.dataguise.com

About Green Light Technology

Headquartered in Central Florida with representatives across Latin America, Green Light Technology (GLT) brings a unique depth of technical expertise to organizations of every size -- from multinational corporations to SMB companies. Technically oriented, the organization prides itself on consulting closely with clients to solve information technology challenges. Through custom development, professional services, and the recommendation, implementation and customization of best-of-breed software products, Green Light Technology buids solutions that create the bridge between existing technologies and the needs of clients. Learn more at http://www.greenlt.com.

(1) Privacy & Security Law Report, 14 PVLR 730, 04/27/2015. Copyright 2015 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) http://www.bna.com

(2) Experian, Data Breach Industry Forecast, https://www.experian.com/assets/data-breach/white-papers/2015-industry-forecast-experian.pdf

Agency Contact:

Joe Austin

The Ventana Group

(818) 332-6166

Email Contact




PORTLAND, OR -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Eastside Distilling, Inc. (OTCQB: ESDI), a producer of award-winning master-crafted spirits, is pleased to announce that Horizon Beverage Group has placed its fifth consecutive purchase order for the Company's award winning Burnside Bourbon and Barrel Hitch American Whiskey, since its initial purchase order placed in late February this year.

A distributor of beer, wine and spirits in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, Horizon Beverage is a New England beverage alcohol distributor serving its market from its 500,000-square-foot distribution center in Norton, Mass. With the addition of these markets, Eastside brands are now available in 20 states.

Horizon placed its initial order for four of Eastside's award winning spirits, Burnside Bourbon, Burnside "Oregon Oaked" Bourbon, Barrel Hitch American Whiskey and Barrel Hitch "Oregon Oak" Whiskey, in late February 2016 and has since placed a series of purchase requisitions now totaling 480 cases with additional orders forthcoming.

"Burnside and Barrel Hitch have been great additions to our portfolio. Our reps have had great success out of the gate just by telling the story and sampling our key retailers. We sold out of our initial order and needed to reload already," said Jim Merrill, President Coastal CBU, Horizon Beverage Company.

Burnside Bourbon is a straight bourbon whiskey bottled at 96 proof giving it a bit more kick than many of the other bourbons on the market. It won a Gold Medal in 2012 at the MicroLiquor Spirit Awards for small-batch brands in the Tasting competition. In a separate competition, the Beverage Tasting Institute awarded Burnside Bourbon a gold medal and a 90 Point rating. Great for sipping straight, Burnside Bourbon has solid cinnamon and oak flavors making it ideal for mixing cocktails where bourbon is the central focus.

Also bottled at 96 proof Burnside Bourbon "Oregon Oaked" is taken through an additional 60 day aging process in new 59-gallon heavy-charred Oregon oak barrels, adding new and subtle flavors to an already great-tasting Bourbon.

Bottled at 80 proof, Barrel Hitch American Whiskey hits the mark with a smooth body, toasted oak and hints of green apple and vanilla. Its unique flavor profile is the result of a meticulous blending process of carefully selected finished whiskey sources. In 2015 Barrel Hitch was awarded a Triple Gold Medal for "Best in Show" and a Bronze Medal for packaging design by the MicroLiquor Spirit Awards.

Bottled at 88 proof, Barrel Hitch 'Oregon Oak' American Whiskey takes its Barrel Hitch American Whiskey through a second "Oregon Oaked" aging process for an additional four months. Barrels constructed of Oregon Oak impart a distinctive savory spice flavor to aged spirits that cannot be produced from barrels made from other oak varietals.

"We couldn't have selected a better distribution partner for our New England roll out than Horizon Beverage, who has been family owned and operated for over 80 years. Their well-established presence in the region is paying great dividends for Eastside providing us with brand building expertise, superior marketing and efficient distribution in this highly lucrative market," said Eastside Distilling CEO, Steven Earles. "The accelerating demand from the region's leading distributor is a solid testament to the customer acceptance our superior tasting spirits are generating. We look forward to greater success as more whiskey enthusiasts have an opportunity to sample our full flavored, great tasting brands."

About Horizon Beverage

Horizon Beverage Group was founded in 1933, originally named Brockton Wholesale Beverage. The operation was a simple one, with six salespeople working out of a garage in downtown Brockton, MA. Today, Horizon Beverage Group employs more than 700 people throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont. We distribute the world's top wines, spirits, malts and waters. With four generations of family ownership and 80+ years of experience in sales, marketing and service, Horizon Beverage Group is now New England's leading beverage alcohol distributor. http://www.horizonbeverage.com

About Eastside Distilling

Eastside Distilling, Inc. (OTCQB: ESDI) has been producing high-quality, master crafted spirits since 2008 and is located in Southeast Portland's Distillery Row. Makers of award winning spirits, the company is unique in the marketplace and is distinguished by its highly decorated product line-up that includes Burnside Bourbon, Barrle Hitch American Whiskey, Below Deck Rums, Portland Potato Vodka and a distinctive line of infused whiskeys. All Eastside spirits are master crafted from natural ingredients for unparalleled quality and taste. The company is publicly traded under the symbol OTCQB: ESDI. For more information visit: www.eastsidedistilling.com or follow the company on: Twitter & Facebook.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain matters discussed in this press release may be forward-looking statements. Such matters involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially, including the following: changes in economic conditions; general competitive factors; acceptance of the Company's products in the market; the Company's success in obtaining new customers; the Company's success in product development; the Company's ability to execute its business model and strategic plans; the Company's success in integrating acquired entities and assets, and all the risks and related information described from time to time in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including the financial statements and related information contained in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and interim Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Examples of forward-looking statements in this release may include statements related to our strategic focus, product verticals, anticipated revenue, and profitability. The Company assumes no obligation to update the cautionary information in this release.

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Company Contact:

Eastside Distilling, Inc.

Investor Relations

Tel 971-888-4264

inquiries@eastsidedistilling.com




IRVINE, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Every second, 963 robocalls -- automated phone calls that deliver a pre-recorded message or connect with a telemarketer -- are made somewhere in America. In total, an estimated 2.5 billion robocalls were made last month to U.S. phones, according to the latest National Robocall Index report released today by YouMail, the leading provider of intelligent telecommunications services for consumers and small businesses. This number is up by 13.3 percent over the number of robocalls reported in February.

The Politics of Robocallling

Several of the states that held presidential primaries in March or April (including Florida, New York, Georgia, Illinois and Texas) saw greatly increased robocall activity in March -- to the tune of 100 million calls. In fact, all of the 'Super Tuesday' states realized an increase in robocalls during the month of March, ranging from just under one percent to more than 16 percent. Though political robocalls may be legal and permitted by the FCC, these unsolicited messages have a negative impact on recipients -- and open the door for scammers and fraudsters.

Follow the Money: Top Robocalls by Type

When it comes to the types of robocalls placed, 17 of the top 20 robocallers on this month's report are in the business of payment reminders or debt collection. Bank, retail and student loan debt collectors topped the list in March -- as they did in February -- and have gotten even more prolific, with the Top 20 robocallers making 181.2 million calls -- up from the 165 million calls they made last month.

Federal health insurance providers were the only other group to crack the March Top Ten list, with over 12.5 million calls made.

Who are Autodialers Calling Most Often?

For the fourth straight month, Atlanta has the dubious distinction of being the most robocalled city. Over 110.4 million robocalls were placed to Atlanta residents in March -- that averages out to 40.3 robocalls per person based on the city's population -- a nine percent increase over the previous month. The other cities that made the top ten list are, in order: New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Newark, Philadelphia and Detroit.

YouMail - Bringing Power to the People

"Placing your number on the National Do Not Call List does not guarantee that robocalls will stop," notes Alex Quilici, CEO of YouMail. "To fight robocallers effectively, call blocking technology needs to prevent the robocalling machines that spew out tens of millions of scam calls a day -- and at YouMail, we are doing just that. With our intelligent answering service, you're not powerless against time-wasting robocallers."

YouMail works on Apple iOS and Android-based smartphones, as well as landlines. The service includes a proprietary technology called Smart Blocking that detects Robocall call patterns, including those generated by spoofing systems, and tricks those callers into thinking that the subscriber's number has been disconnected. It's more effective than using the "block" function on an iPhone or "reject" list on an Android phone, which only enables you to block one number at a time. However, callers, such as a debt collector or scammer, may have hundreds of different numbers they use to call people. Blocking those one at a time is a game of cat and mouse. YouMail, however, convinces those callers that the number they called is disconnected, which gets YouMail subscribers taken off lists completely, so they don't get called again by any of the phone numbers a particular company or group of companies might use.

About YouMail's National Robocall Index

Despite the pervasiveness of robocalls, there was no definitive data made available that gives consumers or lawmakers a sense for how big the problem really is -- until YouMail created the Robocall Index. YouMail's Robocall Index is a free monthly report that tracks robocall volumes across the U.S. The report highlights the top phone numbers robocalls are placed from, the most robocalled cities, and the most common types of robocalls. The data is based on callers blocked and/or reported as spam by millions of YouMail subscribers nationwide, and on YouMail's algorithms for detecting automatically dialed calls. Having answered billions and billions of calls for its users, YouMail is uniquely positioned to aggregate this national call data for the Robocall Index.

About YouMail, Inc.

YouMail, Inc. is the leading provider of intelligent, cloud-based telecommunication services. The company's flagship service provides an intelligent answering service that replaces the subscriber's voicemail on iPhone, Android, and Windows phones. Headquartered in Irvine, California, YouMail, Inc. was founded in 2007 and is privately funded. To learn more, please visit www.youmail.com, check out the YouMail blog, follow on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and like on Facebook.

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Media Contact:

Stephanie Olsen

Lages & Associates

(949) 453-8080

Email Contact




SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- CloudFlare, the leading Internet performance and security company, today introduced the industry's first-ever HTTP/2 Server Push support for all customers. HTTP/2 Server Push is the next generation Internet standard aimed at speeding up websites and mobile applications. CloudFlare is turning it on for free for all of its 4 million customers, making it possible for everyone to experience the fastest web performance available.

"Usually, Internet performance improvements shave just milliseconds. In this case, the impact of HTTP/2 Server Push will be measured in seconds per page load, a quantum leap in performance that no service provider has been able to offer yet," said Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO of CloudFlare. "If with HTTP/2 Server Push we're able to save one second off every page load served across CloudFlare's network at our current scale, we would save about 10,000 years of time every day that people would have otherwise spent waiting for the Internet to load."

HTTP/2 Server Push enables web servers to provide content to site visitors without waiting for a request. This builds on CloudFlare's support of HTTP/2, announced last year, that automatically speeds up web properties for all customers with the latest version of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The initial benefit of HTTP/2 was the ability to have multiple HTTP requests share a single connection between the browser and a web server--but it still required a dedicated request for each CSS, JavaScript, or image file on a page. With HTTP/2 Server Push the resources an application needs can be proactively pushed to a device without waiting to be requested. HTTP/2 was built to improve the performance of everything from traditional websites to modern mobile apps.

Server Push is a fundamental update to HTTP/2 which was not previously available or supported by SPDY, the protocol that HTTP/2 is based on. This new HTTP/2 functionality allows a web server to send resources like images, CSS, JavaScript, and fonts back to the user before their browser even knows it needs them. This eliminates an additional round-trip for every resource in a web page, resulting in an estimated 15 percent performance increase for a typical website.

Server Push is another way CloudFlare is bringing the new standard of Internet performance to the masses. CloudFlare is the first organization to offer HTTP/2 Server Push at scale. The HTTP/2 Server Push standard is supported across modern browsers including the latest versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer (Windows 10) and Edge. Apple Safari has HTTP/2 Server Push in beta and is expected to release support broadly soon.

"Latency is the performance bottleneck for most web applications: a single roundtrip to the server can take anywhere from tens to thousands of milliseconds, forcing the browser to wait for critical resources before it can render the page," said Ilya Grigorik, web performance engineer at Google, co-chair of the W3C Web Performance Working group, and author of High Performance Browser Networking. "Adding support for HTTP/2 Server Push for all CloudFlare-powered sites is a big and exciting step towards enabling a faster and more optimized web."

Supporting HTTP/2 Server Push furthers CloudFlare's ongoing mission to help build a faster, safer and better Internet for all. "Nearly two years ago, CloudFlare democratized access to the encrypted web by turning on free Universal SSL for all of its customers. In addition to doubling the size of the encrypted web overnight, Universal SSL paved the way for our support of of next generation Internet protocols SPDY and HTTP/2," said John Graham-Cumming, CTO, CloudFlare. "HTTP/2 Server Push will enable a whole new class of web applications. It represents the biggest change in delivery of web content since AJAX--for the first time it gives web servers the power to send assets to a web browser. This upends the way in which the web works eliminating the need for countless browser performance hacks."

Developers-- you can start experimenting with HTTP/2 Server Push today with our Implementation Guide.

To learn more about HTTP/2 and to experiment with HTTP/2 Server Push today, please check out the additional resources below.

Announcing support for HTTP/2 Server Push

HTTP/2 Server Push demo

See the difference in performance over HTTP/1.1 through CloudFlare's HTTP/2 Guide

Introducing HTTP/2 (Blog)

About CloudFlare

CloudFlare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world's largest networks that powers more than 10 trillion requests per month, which is nearly 10 percent of all Internet requests for more than 2.5 billion people worldwide. CloudFlare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Websites powered by CloudFlare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with each new site added. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. CloudFlare was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer, named the Most Innovative Network & Internet Technology Company for two years running by the Wall Street Journal, and ranked among the world's 50 most innovative companies by Fast Company. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, CloudFlare has offices in Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, Washington, DC, London, and Singapore.

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Press Contact

Daniella Vallurupalli

Communications

CloudFlare

650-483-4463

press@cloudflare.com

daniella@cloudflare.com




VANCOUVER, BC--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - Aequus Pharmaceuticals Inc. (TSX VENTURE: AQS) (OTCQB: AQSZF) ("Aequus" or the "Company") announced today that it has initiated commercial activities for PR Vistitan' (bimatoprost 0.03%, ophthalmic solution) in the Canadian market, which is a prostaglandin approved as a treatment for the reduction of elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) in patients with open angle glaucoma or ocular hypertension.

The prostaglandins remain a primary treatment option for lowering IOP in glaucoma. Bimatoprost is currently only available in a 0.01% formulation in Canada and represents approximately 30% market share by dollar volume of IOP-lowering medications in Canada as of 2014, accounting for $42.1M in sales revenues. In a dose-response study, bimatoprost 0.03% demonstrated significantly better efficacy versus bimatoprost 0.01% " with a similar safety profile " .

"We are extremely pleased to be working with our partner to bring bimatoprost 0.03% back to the Canadian market," said Ian Ball, CCO of Aequus. "Canadian patients will be able to benefit from this product's demonstrated efficacy and lower price compared to the 0.01% formulation."

"The launch of our second commercial product is a proud achievement for Aequus. It has been exciting to see our sales team steadily growing revenues of tacrolimus since the start of the year and we look forward to building the Vistitan brand and revenues over the coming months and years," said Doug Janzen, CEO of Aequus.

As previously announced, Aequus and its partner will split revenues of this product based on an undisclosed tiered royalty structure.

About PR VISTITAN'

Bimatoprost is a synthetic prostamide analogue and is structurally related to prostaglandin F2A. Its mechanism of action resembles that of prostaglandin F2A, a naturally occurring substance. Vistitan, which was approved by Health Canada in 2014, is currently the only marketed version of 0.03% bimatoprost ophthalmic solution indicated for the reduction of elevated intraocular pressure in patients with open angle glaucoma or ocular hypertension. Bimatoprost 0.03% has been studied in two randomized, multicenter, double-blinded, parallel-group clinical studies, of 12 months duration, conducted on 1198 patients with glaucoma or ocular hypertension, versus timolol twice-daily as an active control. Over the 12 month study duration bimatoprost predictability lowered IOP in over 90% of patients to 22mgHg or less, with approximately 50% of patients having IOPs of 17mmHg or less. Additionally, in a meta-analysis published by CADTH in 2015, bimatoprost 0.03% was demonstrated to be superior or equivalent to other prostaglandins in reducing IOP.

" In a Phase 2 dose-response study conducted by Allergan, which included 60 patients with twice-daily dosing for 52 days showed significant reductions from baseline IOP with bimatoprost 0.01% and 0.03% formulations as well as with timolol 0.5%, compared to vehicle. Among the bimatoprost concentrations evaluated, 0.03% had the best ratio of safety to efficacy.

" The effects of 0.003%, 0.01% and 0.03% bimatoprost (non-preservative formulations) and of twice-daily versus once-daily (evening) dosing were compared to timolol 0.5% and vehicle in 100 patients treated for one month. Although 0.01% and 0.03% had similar safety profiles, 0.03% had significantly better efficacy. There was no significant difference in efficacy between twice-daily and once-daily dosing.

Please refer to the product monograph for more details.

About Aequus Pharmaceuticals

Aequus Pharmaceuticals Inc. (TSX VENTURE: AQS) (OTCQB: AQSZF) is a Vancouver-based, specialty pharmaceutical company primarily focused on developing and commercializing high quality, differentiated products. Aequus' development stage pipeline includes several products in neurology and psychiatry with a goal of addressing the need for improved medication adherence through enhanced delivery systems. Aequus intends to commercialize its internal programs in Canada and to establish strategic partnerships to accelerate product development and maximize the reach of its product candidates worldwide. Aequus also has a Canadian commercial platform to build on for the launch of products that are either created internally or brought in through an acquisition or license; remaining focused on highly specialized therapeutic areas. For further information, please visit www.aequuspharma.ca.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This release contains forward-looking statements or forward-looking information under applicable Canadian securities legislation that may not be based on historical fact, including, without limitation, statements containing the words "believe," "may," "plan," "will," "estimate," "continue," "anticipate," "intend," "expect," "potential" and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based on estimates and assumptions made by us in light of our experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as the factors we believe are appropriate. Forward-looking statements in this release include but are not limited to statements relating to: the timing and amount of revenues that the Company may receive from its currently announced commercial products; the ability of the Company to reach its revenue goals; the implementation of our business model and strategic plans; Aequus' anticipated regulatory submissions and commercial activities in Canada in respect of Vistitan, the expected benefits of once-daily extended release forms of anti-epileptic drugs; the expected impact of Vistitan commercialization on Aequus; and the estimated peak sales for Vistitan. Such statements reflect our current views with respect to future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties and are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by Aequus, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors could cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In making the forward looking statements included in this release, the Company has made various material assumptions, including, but not limited to general business and economic conditions, the suitability of Vistitan to commence commercial activities in Canada, the ability of Aequus to integrate Vistitan into its existing pipeline and sales infrastructure, Aequus' assumptions regarding the sales of Vistitan being accurate, and the demand for Aequus and the expenses associated with Aequus' business continuing as expected by Aequus. In evaluating forward-looking statements, current and prospective shareholders should specifically consider various factors set out herein and under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's Short-Form Prospectus dated June 30, 2015, a copy of which is available on Aequus' profile on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com, and as otherwise disclosed from time to time on Aequus' SEDAR profile. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties, or a risk that is not currently known to us materialize, or should assumptions underlying those forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this release and we do not intend, and do not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable securities laws. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are inherently uncertain. Accordingly, investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

TM: Trademark owned or used under license by Sandoz Canada Inc.

Aequus Investor Relations

Email: investors@aequuspharma.ca

Phone: 604-336-7906
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- All figures presented in Canadian Dollars, unless specified otherwise

Atlantic Gold Corporation (TSX VENTURE: AGB) ("Atlantic" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that its wholly owned subsidiary, DDV Gold Limited ("DDV"), has secured an option to purchase the interest of its partner Moose River Resources Inc. ("MRRI") in the Touquoy deposit.

DDV has been granted an option to purchase MRRI's interest at fair market value after the later of (a) 18 months of commercial production at Touquoy and (b) the point where 3,000,000 tonnes of Touquoy ore has been processed, provided that at the date of notice to commence the option process, the 30 day average spot price of gold is at least CAD$1,400/oz. Fair market value will be determined by a valuation completed by a mutually appointed independent valuator. If the valuation is acceptable to DDV, then MRRI is obliged to complete the purchase. If DDV elects not to proceed with the acquisition, costs of the valuation will be paid by DDV and the option will remain open to exercise by DDV at its future election under the same process. A $500,000 option fee is payable at the first drawdown of senior project debt facilities and a $500,000 exercise fee is payable only if DDV elects to proceed after the valuation.

The option terms have been provided for in an amendment and restatement of its prior agreement with MRRI, along with other amendments requested by the providers of debt finance for the MRC project, including provisions for transition to processing of other deposits wholly owned by Atlantic.

These amendments are conditional upon Atlantic finalizing project financing prior to September 30, 2016.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Steven Dean, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

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.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This release contains certain "forward looking statements" and certain "forward-looking information" as defined under applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. Forward-looking statements and information can generally be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may", "will", "expect", "intend", "estimate", "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "plans" or similar terminology. Forward-looking statements and information are not historical facts, are made as of the date of this press release, and include, but are not limited to, statements regarding discussions of future plans, guidance, projections, objectives, estimates and forecasts and statements as to management's expectations with respect to, among other things, the activities contemplated in this news release and the timing and receipt of requisite regulatory, and shareholder approvals in respect thereof. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, without limitation, statements related to proposed exploration and development programs, grade and tonnage of material and resource estimates. These forward looking statements involve numerous risks and uncertainties and actual results may vary. Important factors that may cause actual results to vary include without limitation, the timing and receipt of certain approvals, changes in commodity and power prices, changes in interest and currency exchange rates, risks inherent in exploration estimates and results, timing and success, inaccurate geological and metallurgical assumptions (including with respect to the size, grade and recoverability of mineral reserves and resources), changes in development or mining plans due to changes in logistical, technical or other factors, unanticipated operational difficulties (including failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate in accordance with specifications, cost escalation, unavailability of materials, equipment and third party contractors, delays in the receipt of government approvals, industrial disturbances or other job action, and unanticipated events related to health, safety and environmental matters), political risk, social unrest, and changes in general economic conditions or conditions in the financial markets.

In making the forward-looking statements in this press release, the Company has applied several material assumptions, including without limitation, the assumptions that: (1) market fundamentals will result in sustained gold demand and prices; (2) the receipt of any necessary approvals and consents in connection with the development of any properties; (3) the availability of financing on suitable terms for the development, construction and continued operation of any mineral properties; and (4) sustained commodity prices such that any properties put into operation remain economically viable. Information concerning mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates also may be considered forward-looking statements, as such information constitutes a prediction of what mineralization might be found to be present if and when a project is actually developed. Certain of the risks and assumptions are described in more detail in the Company's audited financial statements and MD&A for the year ended December 31, 2015 on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. The actual results or performance by the Company could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, any forward-looking statements relating to those matters. Accordingly, no assurances can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do so, what impact they will have on the results of operations or financial condition of the Company. Except as required by law, the Company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaim any obligation, to update, alter or otherwise revise any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

Contacts:

Atlantic Gold Corporation

Chris Batalha

CFO and Corporate Secretary

+1 604 689-5564




ALBANY, New York, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Biomass refers to biodegradable organic materials which are non-fossilized and originate from biological sources derived from plants, animals, and micro-organisms. Biomass includes wastes, residues, products, and byproducts from forest, agriculture, and related industries as well as biodegradable organic fractions of municipal and industrial wastes. Biomass in general refers to agriculture and wood wastes, waste from food processing industries, urban and industrial residues, short rotation woody crops, wood, sawdust, municipal solid waste (MSW), and a host of other materials. It can be used as a source of energy input for the provision of heat, electricity generation, and as a fuel in the transportation sector. Biomass is a carbon-neutral, environment-friendly and sustainable source of power generation with a significant potential to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Rapidly growing industrialization, and developing and emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil are fueling the demand for energy. Biomass power generation is increasingly adopted across the globe to meet policy targets for reliable, affordable, and secure supply of energy in order to promote economic development and improve electricity access. Biomass power generation, unlike other alternative sources, can also provide base load power which is expected to foster additional growth in the biomass power generation market. Clean sources of renewable energy form a significant part of the solution to economic, climate, environmental, and security challenges posed by the utilization of fossil fuels.

Research Report with ToC & Free Analysis: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/biomass-power-generation-market.html

The research report states that the biomass power generation market will expand at a 6.4% CAGR in terms of value between 2014 and 2022, rising from a valuation of US$28.68 bn to US$50.52 bn by 2022. In terms of power generation, the market is expected to rise to 738,350.3 million KWh in 2022 from 72,571.9 MW in 2013, exhibiting a 6.8% CAGR over the period. In terms of installed capacity, the market is expected to exhibit a 6.2% CAGR and rise to 122,331.6 MW by 2022 from 72,571.9 MW in 2013.

Biomass used for power generation can provide a low-carbon and sustainable alternative to fossil fuels, while allowing local communities to use domestic biomass resources. The utilization of biomass resources for power generation forms an important part of the strategic initiatives by various governments and institutions. These initiatives aim to reorganize the national energy economies and augment the share of renewable energy in the overall power generation mix.

Get free research PDF for more Professional and Technical insights:http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=4495

For this study, the biomass power generation market has been segmented on the basis of feedstock type and biomass power conversion technology. On the basis of feedstock type, the biomass power generation market has been segmented into woody biomass, agriculture & forest residues, biogas & energy crops, urban residues, and landfill gas feedstock. According to current estimates, woody biomass is the single largest feedstock for power generation through biomass and occupies the major market share globally in terms of utilization of feedstock by biomass power plants. Agriculture and forest residues are the second most preferred biomass feedstock across the globe. The use of agriculture and forest residues to produce biomass power offers significant opportunity for local and regional economies along with the potential to tap resources around the country.

Browse Research Press Release: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/global-biomass-power-generation-market.htm

Regulatory framework and government support in terms of government grants and funding programs that provide investment subsidies and tax benefits play a key role in encouraging power generating companies and utilities to switch to environment-friendly biomass for power generation. Many countries such as the U.S., U.K., and Germany provide a range of incentives and grants to encourage the development and use of biomass as a source of energy. Some countries including India, Indonesia, Australia, and Poland are proposing legislation to boost investments in biomass power generation.

Research Article: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/article/biomass-power-generation-market.htm

Cost of electricity from biomass-fired power plants majorly depends on feedstock and capital costs. Biomass can compete with conventional power sources with the availability of low cost agricultural or forestry wastes and residues. Even in the regions where feedstock is expensive, the cost of electricity from biomass is still more competitive than that from coal-fired generation, making biomass ideal for off-grid power supply. Governments support the biomass power sector in the form of incentives that include feed-in tariffs, tax incentives, loan guarantees and public competitive bidding. The above factors are likely to fuel growth in the biomass power generation market.

Key participants in the global biomass power generation market include Alstom SA, Ameresco, Inc., DONG Energy A/S, Drax Group plc, Forth Energy Ltd., Helius Energy Plc, Enviva LP, MGT Power Ltd., The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and Vattenfall AB. The report provides an overview of these companies, followed by their financial overview, business strategies, and recent developments.

Research Blog: http://www.tmrblog.com/2016/01/as-countries-make-dash-for-biomass.html

Global Biomass Power Generation Market: Feedstock Segment Analysis

Woody Biomass

Agriculture & Forest Residues

Biogas & Energy Crops

Urban Residues

Landfill Gas Feedstock

Global Biomass Power Generation Market: Technology Segment Analysis

Anaerobic Digestion

Combustion

Gasification

Co-firing & CHP

Landfill Gas (LFG)

Global Biomass Power Generation Market: Regional Segment Analysis

North America

U.S.

Rest of North America

Europe

Sweden

Finland

U.K.

Germany

Italy

Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific

China

India

Japan

Rest of Asia Pacific

Middle East and Africa (MEA)

South Africa

Rest of MEA

Latin America

Brazil

Rest of Latin America

Browse Other Research Reports:

Power Generation Market: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/power-generation-market.html

Biomass Boiler Market:http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/biomass-boiler-market.html

About TMR

Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The company's exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.

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Next generation cranial radiosurgery software is patient-tailored and treatment optimized

Brainlab, a global leader in medical technology, will showcase new Elements Cranial SRS* software at this year's ESTRO 35, April 29-May 3 in Turin, Italy. Elements Cranial SRS offers both research and daily practice opportunities, dovetailing perfectly with ESTRO 35's focus on multi- and interdisciplinary components in all aspects of radiosurgery treatment.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428006094/en/

Optimization of planning processes for cranial indications (Graphic: Business Wire)

Strengthened by a new intellectual property, exclusively licensed to Brainlab, Elements Cranial SRS features a new algorithm that creates patient specific arc trajectories by penalizing geometric collisions with critical structures and rewarding steep dose gradients toward such structures.

"Working closely with our Dalhousie University partners in Halifax, Canada, we have incorporated IP technology into the next generation of Brainlab cranial software that is both innovative and powerful," said Stefan Vilsmeier, CEO and Founder, Brainlab. "The technology bolsters our already-strong IP in beam pathway optimization. Elements Cranial SRS offers indication-specific, intelligent workflows that automate the procedure so caregivers can spend more time with patients and less time on technology."

The new intellectual property license will help deliver patient-tailored, optimized arc trajectories aimed at minimizing radiation dose to organs at risk without compromising target coverage. The new algorithm optimizes dose delivery for selected gantry and couch positions. This optimization can be applied to fixed couch arcs as well as simultaneous gantry-couch movements. The software's planning processes are streamlined and based on clinical need and user necessity.

"Brainlab Elements Cranial SRS is part of a suite of indication-specific and intelligent workflows for stereotactic radiosurgery," said Claus Promberger, Director Product Portfolio, Brainlab. "Their automation and flexible business model solutions offer value to clinicians and facilities in terms of patient time and investment management."

About Brainlab

Brainlab, headquartered in Munich, develops, manufactures and markets software-driven medical technology, enabling access to advanced, less invasive patient treatments.

Core products center on information-guided surgery, radiosurgery, precision radiation therapy, digital operating room integration, and information and knowledge exchange. Brainlab technology powers treatments in radiosurgery and radiotherapy as well as numerous surgical fields including neurosurgery, orthopedic, ENT, CMF, spine and trauma.

Privately held since its formation in Munich, Germany in 1989, Brainlab has more than 9,000 systems installed in about 100 countries. Brainlab employs 1,300 people in 19 offices worldwide, including 320 Research Development engineers, who form a crucial part of the product development team. Core products center on information-guided surgery, radiosurgery, precision radiation therapy, digital operating room integration, and information and knowledge exchange. Brainlab technology powers treatments in radiosurgery and radiotherapy as well as numerous surgical fields including neurosurgery, orthopedic, ENT, CMF, spine and trauma.

To learn more, visit www.brainlab.com.

*This product is not available for sale and will not be available until all applicable approvals have been obtained.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428006094/en/

Contacts:

Brainlab

Ann Marie LaCasha

Director, Corporate Marketing

Tel: +1 708 486 1924

Email: annmarie.lacasha@brainlab.com
DGAP-HV: CPI Property Group / Bekanntmachung der Einberufung zur Hauptversammlung CPI Property Group: Bekanntmachung der Einberufung zur Hauptversammlung am 26.05.2016 in Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, mit dem Ziel der europaweiten Verbreitung gema 121 AktG 2016-04-28 / 15:24 Fur den Inhalt der Mitteilung ist der Emittent verantwortlich. CPI PROPERTY GROUP Societe Anonyme 40, rue de la Vallee L-2661 Luxembourg R.C.S. LUXEMBOURG B 102254 (the 'Company') CONVENING NOTICE OF THE COMPANY'S ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING TO BE HELD ON 26 MAY 2016 Dear Shareholders, You are invited to attend the annual general meeting of the shareholders of the Company (the 'Meeting') to be held at the registered office of the Company at 40, rue de la Vallee, L-2661 Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, on 26 May 2016 at 10:00 CET. The Meeting is convened in accordance with article 70 of the Luxembourg law on commercial companies dated 10 August 1915, as amended from time to time (the 'LCA') and article 3 of the law dated 24 May 2011 on the exercise of certain rights of shareholders in general meetings of listed companies, with the following points on the agenda: AGENDA 1. Presentation of the reports of the Board of Directors and of the approved auditors (reviseurs d'entreprises agree) of the Company for the financial year ended 31 December 2015. 2. Presentation and approval of the statutory annual accounts for the financial year ended 31 December 2015. 3. Presentation and approval of the consolidated annual accounts for the financial year ended 31 December 2015. 4. Allocation of the financial results in relation to the financial year ended 31 December 2015. 5. Discharge to be granted to the members of the Board of Directors in respect of the performance of their duties during the financial year ended 31 December 2015. 6. Discharge to be granted to the auditors in respect of the performance of their duties during the financial year ended 31 December 2015. 7. Decision to appoint Mr. Martin Nemecek to the Board of Directors of the Company until the Annual General Meeting of 2017 concerning the approval of the annual accounts of the Company for the financial year ending 31 December 2016. 8. Decision to appoint Mr. Edward Hughes to the Board of Directors of the Company until the Annual General Meeting of 2017 concerning the approval of the annual accounts of the Company for the financial year ending 31 December 2016. 9. Decision to appoint Mr. Radovan Vitek to the Board of Directors of the Company until the Annual General Meeting of 2017 concerning the approval of the annual accounts of the Company for the financial year ending 31 December 2016. 10. Decision to appoint Mr. Tomas Salajka to the Board of Directors of the Company until the Annual General Meeting of 2017 concerning the approval of the annual accounts of the Company for the financial year ending 31 December 2016. 11. Decision to appoint Mr. Philippe Magistretti to the Board of Directors of the Company until the Annual General Meeting of 2017 concerning the approval of the annual accounts of the Company for the financial year ending 31 December 2016. 12. Decision to appoint Mr. Oliver Schlink to the Board of Directors of the Company until the Annual General Meeting of 2017 concerning the approval of the annual accounts of the Company for the financial year ending 31 December 2016. 13. Subject to approval of item 7 of the agenda, decision to appoint Mr. Martin Nemecek as the Managing Director (administrateur delegue) of the Company until the Annual General Meeting of 2017 concerning the approval of the annual accounts of the Company for the financial year ending 31 December 2016. ATTENDING THE MEETING In order to attend the Meeting, shareholders must provide the Company with the following three items as explained in greater detail below: (i) Record Date Confirmation, (ii) Attendance and Proxy Form, and (iii) Proof of Shareholding. Record Date Confirmation: This document shall be provided to the Company by a shareholder at the latest by 23:59 CET on the Record Date. The Record Date is 12 May 2016 (the 'Record Date', i.e. the day falling fourteen (14) days before the date of the Meeting). The Record Date Confirmation must be in writing and indicate that a shareholder holds the Company shares and wishes to participate in the Meeting. A template form of the Record Date Confirmation is available on the Company's website at www.cpipg.com. The Record Date Confirmation must be sent to the Company by post or electronic means so that it is received by the Company at the latest by 23:59 CET on the Record Date, i.e. 12 May 2016, to: CPI PROPERTY GROUP 40, rue de la Vallee L-2661 Luxembourg Fax: + 352 26 47 67 67; email: generalmeetings@cpipg.com Attendance and Proxy form: A template form is available on the Company's website at www.cpipg.com and is to be duly completed and signed by shareholders wishing to attend or be represented at the Meeting. Proof of Shareholding: This document must indicate the shareholder's name and the number of Company shares held at 23:59 CET on the Record Date. The Proof of Shareholding shall be issued by the bank, the professional securities' depositary or the financial institution where the shares are on deposit. Please note that Proof of Shareholding is not necessary for those shareholders whose shares are still recorded as registered shares in the Company's shareholders register. Shareholders wishing to attend the Meeting must send the Attendance and Proxy form together with the relevant Proof of Shareholding by post or electronic means so that they are received by the Company at the latest by noon (12:00 noon CET) on 23 May 2016, to: CPI PROPERTY GROUP 40, rue de la Vallee L-2661 Luxembourg Fax: + 352 26 47 67 67; email: generalmeetings@cpipg.com Please note that only persons who are shareholders at the Record Date and have timely submitted their Record Date Confirmation, Attendance and Proxy form, and Proof of Shareholding shall have the right to participate and vote in the Meeting. Documentation and information: The following documents and information are available for the shareholders on our website: www.cpipg.com: - the present convening notice; - the total number of shares and the voting rights in the Company as at the date of this convening notice; - the documents to be submitted to the Meeting (in particular the reports of the board of directors and of the approved auditors (reviseurs d'entreprises agree), the statutory annual accounts for the financial year ended 31 December 2015 and the consolidated annual accounts for the financial year ended 31 December 2015); - the draft resolutions of the Meeting. Any draft resolution(s) submitted by shareholder(s) shall be added to the website as soon as possible after the Company has received them; - the Record Date Confirmation form; and - the Attendance and Proxy form. The above documents may also be obtained by shareholders upon written request sent to the following postal address: CPI PROPERTY GROUP S.A., 40, rue de la Vallee, L-2661 Luxembourg. For further information, visit our website: www.cpipg.com. Quorum Requirement: The Meeting shall validly deliberate regardless of the corporate capital represented. Resolutions, in order to be adopted, must be carried by a majority of the votes cast. Votes cast shall not include votes attaching to shares in which the shareholder has not taken part in the vote or has abstained or has returned a blank or invalid vote. Right to add new items on the agenda: One or more shareholders together representing at least five per cent of the share capital has the right to (i) put one or more items on the agenda of the Meeting and (ii) table draft resolutions for items included or to be included on the agenda of the Meeting. Such requests must: - be in writing and sent to the Company by post (at the following address: CPI PROPERTY GROUP, 40, rue de la Vallee, L-2661 Luxembourg) or electronic means (at the following email address: generalmeetings@cpipg.com) and be accompanied by a justification or draft resolution to be adopted in the Meeting; - include the postal or electronic address at which the Company may acknowledge receipt of the requests; - be received by the Company at least twenty two (22) days before the date of the Meeting, i.e. 4 May 2016. The Company shall acknowledge receipt of requests referred to above within (forty-eight) 48 hours from receipt. The Company shall prepare a revised agenda including such additional items on or before the fifteenth (15th) day before the date of the Meeting. For further information, visit our website: www.cpipg.com. If you need further assistance or information, please contact: CPI PROPERTY GROUP, 40, rue de la Vallee, L-2661 Luxembourg, Tel: + 352 26 47 67 1; Fax: + 352 26 47 67 67; email: generalmeetings@cpipg.com. Luxembourg, 25 April 2016 Yours faithfully, The Board of Directors of the Company 2016-04-28 Die DGAP Distributionsservices umfassen gesetzliche Meldepflichten, Corporate News/Finanznachrichten und Pressemitteilungen. Medienarchiv unter http://www.dgap-medientreff.de und http://www.dgap.de Sprache: Deutsch Unternehmen: CPI Property Group 40, rue de la Vallee 2661 Luxembourg Groherzogtum Luxemburg E-Mail: generalmeetings@cpipg.com Internet: http://www.cpipg.com Ende der Mitteilung DGAP News-Service 458781 2016-04-28

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 28, 2016 09:25 ET (13:25 GMT)
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Note to editors: An image is included with this press release on Marketwired's website.

Cogeco Peer 1, a global provider of essential business-to-business products and services, such as colocation, network connectivity, managed hosting, cloud services and managed IT services, today announced the appointment of Bertrand Labelle to the role of Vice President, Marketing. Based in Toronto, Bertrand will be responsible for the creation and delivery of the company's integrated global marketing programs.

Previously at Microsoft, Bertrand held senior positions in national and international sales, marketing and business development - this experience, paired with his knowledge of global marketing and his extensive background in technology, bring a unique perspective to his role. "We have appointed Bertrand to this role to drive demand for our continued growth in North America and around the globe. Bertrand's commitment to champion marketing as an accountable business function and his success in spearheading global marketing programs, make him an exceptional fit for this position and will enable him to deliver superior programs and services that enhance the brand and promote meaningful customer experiences," said Philippe Jette, President of Cogeco Peer 1.

"The team at Cogeco Peer 1 is exceptional and backed by solid leadership - I was immediately drawn to the company's unique place in the market. I am looking forward to collaborating across the organization to develop integrated programs - from product strategy to digital interaction - that will deliver exceptional experiences to our customers and, ultimately, their end users," said Bertrand Labelle, Vice President, Marketing, Cogeco Peer 1.

Bertrand has a Master's Degree in Business Administration, from the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management and a Bachelor of Applied Science, Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

ABOUT COGECO PEER 1

Cogeco Peer 1 is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cogeco Communications Inc. (TSX: CCA) and is a global provider of essential business-to-business products and services, such as colocation, network connectivity, managed hosting, cloud services and managed IT services, that allow customers across Canada, Mexico, the United States and Western Europe to focus on their core business. With 17 data centers, extensive FastFiber Network and more than 50 points-of-presence in North America and Europe combined, Cogeco Peer 1 is a trusted partner to businesses small, medium and large, providing the ability to access, move, manage and store mission-critical data worldwide, backed by superior customer support.

To view the image accompanying this press release, please visit the following link: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/BertrandLabelle.jpg

Contacts:

Information and Interview Requests:

Shawna Gee

Director, Communications and PR

(416) 903-2025

shawna.gee@cogecopeer1.com




MIDDLETON, WI -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- PharmaSeek LLC, an Investigative Site Network (ISN), is expanding the reach of its network by partnering with the Puerto Rico Consortium for Clinical Investigation (PRCCI). PRCCI is a newly established non-profit government trust comprised of multiple clinical research sites throughout Puerto Rico. Through a collaborative network of investigators and the support of PharmaSeek, PRCCI hopes to promote and enhance clinical research and drug development in Puerto Rico.

PharmaSeek will use their many years of experience as an ISN to help PRCCI build and grow a network of their own. The setup of PRCCI's network will largely mirror that of PharmaSeek, which has grown to over 250 research sites throughout the US and Canada and represents research in nearly all therapeutic areas. In addition to study identification, PharmaSeek will provide assistance with site feasibility, contract and budget negotiation, and accounts receivable. At the forefront of these efforts will be PharmaSeek's Director of Network Operations, Jill Shilbauer, who will be stationed in Puerto Rico to provide on-site support.

While Puerto Rico has never been known as a hub for clinical trials, studies show that the quality of their research is equivalent to that of the United States. Furthermore, participation of Puerto Rican volunteers could meet the long-standing need for greater diversity in clinical trials put forth by the FDA. Despite these factors, clinical trials in Puerto Rico have decreased by nearly 50% since 2008, a statistic PharmaSeek and PRCCI hope to quickly reverse.

A five-year strategy will establish the foundation for the network's growth, laying the groundwork for three five-year increments in which PRCCI develops a clinical research hub, followed by a regional center of excellence for clinical research, and finally a Bio-island in 2030.

Many aspects of Puerto Rico make the island a favorable location for research. Its strategic geographic location allows access to the United States for expertise, in addition to Central and South America for multi-site trials. Furthermore, Puerto Rico boasts a favorable regulatory environment with US FDA regulation, as well as a world class business environment of international airports, foreign trade zones, mass transit, and an island-wide broadband and fiber optic network.

The development of PRCCI will not only boost the clinical research industry, but the livelihood of Puerto Ricans as well. PRCCI's growth is expected to improve the local economy, promote Puerto Rico as a place of research and development, and create jobs. The network also gives Puerto Ricans a chance to participate in clinical research and gain access to treatments that are not yet commercially available.

To learn more about this partnership, contact PharmaSeek at info@pharmaseek.com, or PRCCI at contact@prcci.org.

Liz Goar

813-333-2844

liz@npccs.com




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- The British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) today announced that it strongly supports taking action to strengthen the client-registrant relationship through a sweeping set of targeted reforms to the obligations that registrants owe to their clients (NI 31-103). Proposed targeted reforms to 31-103 were published for comment today in the CSA's Consultation Paper 33-404: Proposals to Enhance the Obligations of Advisers, Dealers, and Representatives Toward Their Client (the Consultation Paper).

"All CSA jurisdictions agree that we can do better for investors in their existing client-registrant relationship, and improving investor outcomes is a goal we all share," said Nigel Cave, Vice-Chair of the BCSC. "Raising the standards of conduct for registrants is clearly in the interests of investors, and we are convinced that the best way to achieve this is to implement the proposed targeted reforms on their own."

The BCSC believes that the overlay of the proposed best interest standard is not workable in the current regulatory and business environment, and may cause investors to think registrants have an unqualified duty to act in their best interests, not understanding that some conflicts would still be permitted. This may exacerbate one of the investor protection issues identified by the CSA - overreliance by clients on registrants. Implementing only the specific targeted reforms will meaningfully and practically address problems in the client-registrant relationship identified by the CSA, and will provide regulators with the tools necessary to ensure compliance and pursue enforcement action, where necessary.

"We believe the targeted reforms establish clear, practical, and enforceable requirements for registrants to follow and for regulators and courts to enforce, all in a way that will not raise expectations about investor protection that may not be realized," said Cave. "We have concluded that the proposed targeted reforms, combined with the full realization of the CRM2 and Point of Sale initiatives, will achieve the best outcomes for investors and significantly improve investor protection."

The Consultation Paper can be found on CSA members' websites. Comments must be submitted in writing by August 26, 2016.

Background and Timeline

Investor Protection Concerns Identified in Client-Registrant Relationship

Work undertaken by the BCSC and the Alberta Securities Commission (ASC), along with additional research undertaken by other CSA jurisdictions and third parties, identified a number of investor protection concerns within the client-registrant relationship:

-- Overreliance by clients, creating an expectations gap that may result in sub-optimal investments; -- Clients not getting the returns they could reasonably expect from investing. Problems include product costs, investment strategies, and investor bias, which can all erode overall savings; -- Clients not getting outcomes that the regulatory system is designed to give them. Problems include opaqueness in the suitability assessment, existing requirements that require more clarity so that they can be more effectively enforced, barriers to obtaining redress for a registrant breach, and lack of effective compliance and enforcement in certain cases; -- Conflicts of interest, where in some circumstances the current required disclosure of conflicts may have the counter-intuitive effect of increased reliance on the conflicted advice; and -- Information asymmetry, as most investors have limited financial literacy and are challenged to avoid biases and apply what financial knowledge they have to their decision making.

Targeted Reforms Proposed in the Consultation Paper

The targeted reforms published for comment in the Consultation Paper will protect investors by increasing standards in the following areas:

-- Conflicts of interest, including -- firms and advisers must have a reasonable basis for concluding the client fully understands the implications and consequences of the conflict -- responding to material conflicts in a way that prioritizes the interests of clients ahead of the interests of the firm and advisor, including guidance on impact of incentives -- Know Your Client, including that the KYC process results in a thorough understanding of the client, including the client's risk profile -- Know Your Product, including understanding the impact of all fees, costs and charges connected to the products they recommend -- Suitability, including -- taking into account product costs and investment strategies -- considering the client's target rate of return and whether the proposed investment meets the client's needs -- considering not only the suitability of a trade but also of the portfolio on an ongoing basis. -- Relationship Disclosure, including -- disclosure of the actual nature of the client-advisor relationship -- disclosure by firms in restricted registration categories or that only offer proprietary products that there may be securities products they don't sell that may be more suitable -- Proficiency, including requiring -- increased proficiency on product costs and investment strategies that can impact investment outcomes -- continuing education -- Titles, including limiting the number of titles that can be used. There are three alternative approaches in the paper.

Timeline

Below is a short timeline outlining how the investor protection issues within the client-registrant relationship model were identified:

-- October 2012: the CSA published Consultation Paper 33-403 - The Standard of Conduct for Advisers and Dealers: Exploring the Appropriateness of Introducing a Statutory Best Interest Duty When Advice is Provided to Retail Clients on the potential introduction of a statutory best interest duty and received 93 comment letters. -- December 2013: the CSA published a CSA Staff Notice identifying key themes that emerged from the October 2012 consultation paper. -- 2015: the BCSC and the ASC reviewed media reports, investment publications, academic journals, and investor advocate publications about the client-registrant relationship, and interviewed experts in this area to assess whether there were issues related to the client- registrant relationship. -- June 2015: the CSA published research by The Brondesbury Group on mutual fund fees. -- September 2015: the OSC, IIROC & MFDA published the results of "mystery shop" of registrants across Ontario. -- October 2015: the CSA published a research paper on mutual fund fees, flows and performance. -- November 2015: the BCSC published the National Smarter Investor Study, which examined client-registrant relationships in Canada. -- November 2015: the OSC Investor Advisory Panel published a report on current practices for risk profiling in Canada and Global Best Practices.

About the British Columbia Securities Commission (www.bcsc.bc.ca)

The British Columbia Securities Commission is the independent provincial government agency responsible for regulating capital markets in British Columbia through the administration of the Securities Act. Our mission is to protect and promote the public interest by fostering:

-- A securities market that is fair and warrants public confidence -- A dynamic and competitive securities industry that provides investment opportunities and access to capital

Learn how to protect yourself and become a more informed investor at www.investright.org.

Contacts:

Media Contact:

Richard Gilhooley

Media Relations

604-899-6713



Public inquiries:

604-899-6854 or 1-800-373-6393 (toll free)




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Note to editors: There is a photo associated with this press release.

Jamie Milner, Vice President at Enbridge Gas Distribution Inc. (Enbridge) presented a cheque for just over $635,000 to Toronto Community Housing's President and CEO Greg Spearn yesterday. The contribution - one of the biggest energy efficiency incentives ever issued by Enbridge - is to offset the costs for energy efficiency improvements made by Toronto Community Housing in 2015 as part of the company's 10-year capital repair program. The rebate will be reinvested to fund additional energy efficiency upgrades to aging Toronto Community Housing buildings across the city.

At the Toronto Community Housing Board Meeting, Milner congratulated Spearn on their conservation efforts. As part of the most recent project, 90 boilers that provide space and water heating to 43 apartment buildings were upgraded. These boiler replacement projects will achieve close to 1.6 million m3 and $300,000 of annual natural gas savings. This is substantial considering that 27 per cent of Toronto Community Housing's operating expenses are slotted for utility costs. This incentive payment will significantly offset increases in electricity and water costs.

QUICK FACTS

-- Through Enbridge's affordable housing program, Toronto Community Housing is receiving $635,000 towards 90 new boilers that are providing space and water heating to 43 buildings with over 5,000 households. -- This will result in approximately $300,000 of annual natural gas savings and a greenhouse gas reduction of 3,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per year - equivalent to taking 632 passenger vehicles off the road for one year. -- A modest component of the financial incentive represents enhancements to the district heating system at Regent Park. -- In 2015, Enbridge and Toronto Community Housing signed a MOU to improve the insulation of their single family homes at no cost through Enbridge's Home Winterproofing Program. -- Enbridge is working very closely with Toronto Community Housing to improve the mechanical systems and energy performance of their buildings. In addition to the financial incentives to help reduce the cost of energy efficient equipment, Enbridge has also provided (and continues to provide) financial subsidies towards energy audits and building assessments, energy monitoring services to identify energy saving opportunities that will result in a reduction in utility bills.

QUOTES

"We remain committed to helping the Toronto Community Housing manage their energy bills and improve the condition of their buildings. Not only will they be able to redirect funds to other important upgrades as a result of these savings, Toronto Community Housing residents will benefit from system improvements and more reliable energy." - Jamie Milner, Vice President of Market Development, Enbridge Gas Distribution.

"This partnership with Enbridge is another example of Toronto Community Housing working together with the private sector to improve our buildings. Thanks to Enbridge's contribution towards these 90 new boilers we will reduce our energy consumption and utility costs by over $300,000 per year, while also improving heating and hot water reliability for residents in 43 of our buildings."- Greg Spearn, President and CEO, Toronto Community Housing

About Enbridge Gas Distribution

Enbridge Gas Distribution Inc. has a more than 165-year history and is Canada's largest natural gas distribution company. It is owned by Enbridge Inc., a Canadian-based leader in energy transportation and distribution. Enbridge has ranked as one of the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations for the past seven years and was also named as one of Canada's Top 100 Employers in 2015. Enbridge Gas Distribution and its affiliates distribute natural gas to over two million customers in Ontario, Quebec, New York State and New Brunswick. For more information, visit enbridgegas.com or follow us on Twitter @EnbridgeGasNews.

About Toronto Community Housing

Toronto Community Housing (www.torontohousing.ca) is Canada's largest social housing landlord, providing homes for nearly 60,000 low- and moderate-income households in neighbourhoods across the city. We are wholly owned by the City of Toronto and our 2,100 buildings represent a $9-billion public asset.

To view the photo associated with this press release, please visit the following link: http://www.marketwire.com/library/20160428-TCH-800.jpg

Contacts:

Tanya Bruckmueller

Manager, External Communications

1-855-884-5112

enbridgegasmedia@enbridge.com



Lisa Murray

Manager, Media and Public Relations

416-981-4252

media@torontohousing.ca




STOCKHOLM (dpa-AFX) - The Swedish Krona retreated from its early high against the U.S. dollar in early New York trading on Thursday, as Sweden Central Bank Deputy Governor Per Jansson talked down the currency, saying he hoped for a weaker currency after the announcement of bond purchase programme in April. 'The development is in the wrong direction and it's been going on for some time, and I think that's worrying,' Jansson said in Stockholm. The bank is ready to curb excessive appreciation of the currency before it's 'too late,' he cautioned. The Swedish Krona eased to 8.0898 against the greenback, off its early new 2-week high of 8.0311. The Krona is likely to find support around the 8.10 zone. 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.
NINGHAI, China, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Risen Energy Co., Ltd, a Tier 1 manufacturer of high-performance solar photovoltaic products, today confirmed the initial dispatch of 11MW to Chemtech Solar as a part of their recent 22MW order for The Republic of Senegal, West Africa.

Risen has had the fortune of a strategic partnership with Chemtech Solar in Italy for more than 8 years, with multiple projects being realised during this time frame. The most recent order, for 22MW of Risen's high performance solar PV modules, has deliveries split into two equal parts, the first as noted here, and the second delivery due in early Q3, sees both Companies further strengthening their geographical reach.

Many words are written about partnerships, but actions speak much louder, as Mr. Piergiorgio Balicco, Managing Partner of Chemtech posited, "Risen keeps helping us to add to our bottom line. Why change a good thing? Over the years we keep returning to Risen as they support our vision with core parameters required for sustainable growth, with their competitive honest deliverables in our portfolio, we can achieve on any continent."

Chemtech, as a successful IPP and EPC Company, is well positioned to evaluate the solar PV supply chain, and not least resultant from Ms. Junshu Zeng's participation, also a Managing Partner of Chemtech; "Our history with Risen is well documented, and it is fair to say we owe much of our success to our alliance with Risen. This more recent supply is part of a bigger program that we, together with Risen, have underway within Africa, and indeed other parts of the world. These successes result from our transparent sharing of common goals, and an understanding of the real business levers to pull to make tangible benefits to our companies, and our customers and end users."

As Mr. Bypina Veerraju Chaudary, CSMO of Risen Energy was keen to point out, "Credibility, it's about earning and keeping credibility. Chemtech's pursuit of excellence has been unswerving in all of the time we have known them, with no compromises, and a consistent strategic approach to delivering their vision. We are delighted to participate in Chemtech Solar's continued expansion and trust we can continue together to be a credible force within the industry."

The Risen-Chemtech alliance continues to satisfy both partners and their customers. For an investment of time and understanding, each has reaped the benefits of truly comprehending and surpassing their customer's expectations. This truly is a "watch this space" event in progress.

About Risen

Risen Energy is a leading, global, Tier 1, "AAA" credit rated manufacturer of high-performance solar photovoltaic products and provider of total business solutions for power generation. The Company, founded in 2002 and publicly listed in 2010, compels value generation for its chosen global customers. Techno-commercial innovation, underpinned by consummate quality and support, encircle Risen total Solar PV business solutions which are among the most powerful and cost effective in the industry. With local market presence, and strong financial bankability status, we are committed, and able, to building strategic, mutually beneficial collaborations with our partners, as together we capitalise on the rising value of green energy.

About Chemtech Solar

Chemtech Solar is the special branch of Chemtech Group, based in Bergamo Italy. Established in 1994, Chemtech operates as an IPP, EPC and investment group internationally, with major penetration into the emergent African solar market, as well as a solid foothold within Europe.




LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Custom House Global Fund Services, a leading independent hedge fund administration specialist, is pleased to announce it has been honored as "Best Administrator - Small and Start-Up Firms" at the recent HFM European Hedge Fund Services Awards.

The annual awards, presented in London on April 21, are recognition and reward for hedge fund service providers that have demonstrated exceptional customer service and innovative product development over the prior 12 months. Richard Hale, UK Business Development Head, accepted the award on behalf of Custom House.

"We are delighted to receive this important industry recognition," said Mark Hedderman, CEO, Custom House Global Fund Services. He added, "As an independent fund administrator, we aim to be the service provider of choice for small and medium sized alternative fund managers. This means consistently providing a high quality professional service at a fair and competitive price."

"This award is an endorsement of outstanding work by the entire Custom House team globally, and is only the most recent among numerous honors over the course of many years," said Richard Hale. "We endeavor to bring real value to our clients and provide security and comfort to their investors, and are proud that we are acknowledged as valuable partners by investment managers."

About Custom House Global Fund Services

Custom House Global Fund Services is a leading independent hedge fund administration specialist ideally located to deliver services in Europe, Asia and the Americas. We partner with established hedge fund managers, start up managers, family offices and institutional managers, with a combination of experience, global presence and technology. Founded in 1989, Custom House grew with the alternative investment industry providing superior fund administration and investor services and today provides one of the most advanced service offerings available to fund managers. With over $20bn in AUA, Custom House provides fund administration services to more than 200 managers and 500 investment funds. The firm has offices in Chicago, Dublin, Geneva, Guernsey, Hong Kong, London, Malta, New York, Rotterdam, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sofia and Sydney. For more information, visit www.customhousegroup.com.

For further information, please contact:

Rosalia Scampoli

LJOPR

Tel: (212) 404 2395

rscampoli@ljopr.com




GATINEAU, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Members of the media are invited to join a technical briefing teleconference on the implementation of the Phoenix pay system.

Date: April 28, 2016 Time: 2 p.m. (EDT)

Senior officials will deliver remarks and will be available for a question period.

Notes to editor / news director:

Interested media must register with Public Services and Procurement Canada's Media Relations Office at 819-420-5501. The phone numbers for joining the teleconference will be provided upon registration.

Follow us on Twitter.

Contacts:

Media Relations

Public Services and Procurement Canada

819-420-5501




NEX Withholds ESG Resolution From Shareholder Vote

WASHINGTON, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/-- Today, National Express Group PLC (LSE: NEX.L) investors, including British public service union UNISON and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, are criticising the company's decision to withhold a shareholder resolution from its 2016 Annual General Meeting (AGM) agenda. At last year's AGM, the resolution received the highest shareholder vote of support ever achieved for a labour rights issue at a United Kingdom-based PLC.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20100127/IBTLOGO

National Express published the notice of its AGM on 8 April, but failed to include a shareholder resolution and members' statement calling for an independent investigation into employment rights violations at the company's largest revenue-producing business - North American school bus.

The resolution and statement, sponsored by UNISON's staff pension fund, Teamsters General Fund, SEIU Master Trust and individual shareholders, was lodged with the company on 30 December 2015. No objection to its validity was raised by the company during the following three months. Only in April 2016 did the company state grounds for declining to include the resolution and statement, which the co-sponsors of the resolution consider to be open to challenge.

In a break with previous practice, the company also issued its AGM notice two weeks later than its annual report. This has reduced the time available for shareholders to appeal the non-inclusion of the resolution.

"This is a highly antagonistic move by a major British PLC to exclude a shareholder proposal on a critical ESG issue," said Dave Prentis, General Secretary of UNISON, the union whose staff pension fund is one of the co-filers of the resolution. "Through its American subsidiary, Durham School Services, National Express is not only violating its employees' workplace rights, it has now taken to silencing debate and suppressing shareholders' voices."

"Whether it's in the bus yard or the boardroom, the behaviour of National Express is unacceptable," said Ken Hall, General Secretary Treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. "It is a disgrace that in the face of growing investor support for a proposal to address workers' rights violations in its US subsidiaries, National Express sought to exclude the resolution rather than adopt it. Investors should be wary of any board that seeks to silence shareholders rather than heed their concerns.

"Over the past week, shareholders have expressed dismay both at the company's handling of the resolution and the lack of progress on the issues that lie behind it." said Hall.

Over the past two weeks the resolution proponents were in dialogue with shareholders representing more than 25 percent of the company's issued shares, investor representation bodies, Members of Parliament and U.K. trade unions representing National Express workers. These meetings have helped raise awareness of the company's anti-union and anti-shareholder behaviour.

Contacts:

Galen Munroe, International Brotherhood of Teamsters

+1 (202) 624-6904 (U.S.)

gmunroe@teamster.org

Tom Powdrill (U.K.)

+44 (0) 7764 200896, powdrill_tom@itf.org.uk
PowerHouse Energy Group plc

("PowerHouse" or the "Company")

Corporate and Operational Update

The Company is pleased to announce that further to its announcement of 6 April 2016 it has now entered into an agreement with Renewme Limited ('Renewme') in full and final settlement of amounts asserted by Renewme. The Company will, subject to the Company's shares being readmitted to trading, issue Renewme 90,932,961 ordinary shares in the Company amounting to approximately 16 per cent of the to be enlarged share capital of the Company. This full and final settlement will not result in a change to the Company's cash position, which remains positive, and will release the Company from any and all previously disputed issues with RenewMe.

The Company is further pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement with Hillgrove Investments Pty Limited whereby the repayment dates for all loans and debt due to Hillgrove amounting to approximately 2,999,704 as of 31 December, 2015 are to be extended to, at the earliest, 12 months after the publication of its Financial Statements for the year ended 31 December 2015.

Further to the Company announcement of 30 March 2016 relating to the finalization of the testing program for the PHE G3 UHt system , the Company announces that this process continues. However, the engineering team has identified a significant opportunity to increase the efficiency of the gasification reactor and is making modifications to the design before final testing can be completed. The Company will update the market upon completion of final testing.

"I recognize that we have not achieved the milestones we had anticipated by this date. However, one must keep in mind that we have designed, engineered, and built the entire G3-UHt system from first principles in less than one year. The fact that our team has been able to make such an improvement to the process, incorporate the latest breakthroughs in materials science, improve the overall system efficiency, and be on the cusp of delivering a commercial technology, gives us great satisfaction," said Keith Allaun, Executive Chairman of the Company.

As previously announced in 2015, the Company has sought the closing, and the winding up, of its subsidiary companies in Switzerland, Germany and the United States. PowerHouse, Inc. in the US was closed in 2013 with no outstanding debts. Upon determination that the technology platform associated with the Pyromex acquisition was not commercially viable, the three associated companies Pyromex Holding AG, Pyromex AG, and Pyromex GmbH were allowed to go into administration. The Pyromex companies are currently in administration and the processes are yet to complete. Keith Allaun, by virtue of his role as Executive Chairman of the Company is also a director of these companies. The estimated deficit to creditors is, in aggregate, approximately1,553,252.00. In compliance with AIM rule 17, Schedule Two, paragragh (g) as a supplementary disclosure in relation to Mr. Allaun, he had previously filed for a personal bankruptcy in the United States of America in 1991 that was completely discharged in 1993.

For additional information please contact:

PowerHouse Energy Group plc

Keith Allaun

+1 352 359 0911

Vicarage Capital Limited (Joint Broker)

Jeremy Woodgate

+44 (0) 20 3651 2910
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION IN OR INTO OR TO ANY PERSON LOCATED OR RESIDENT IN THE UNITED STATES, ITS TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS (INCLUDING PUERTO RICO, THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS, GUAM, AMERICAN SAMOA, WAKE ISLAND AND THE NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS), ANY STATE OF THE UNITED STATES OR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.

Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) (the "Company") announces that it is inviting eligible holders (the "Noteholders") of its 1,000,000,000 2.125% Fixed Rate Notes due 2026 (ISIN: XS1107727007) (the "Euro Notes"), 400,000,000 6.5% Fixed Rate Notes due 2030 (ISIN: XS0116066449) (the "Sterling 2030 Notes"), 800,000,000 6.8% Fixed Rate Notes due 2038 (ISIN: XS0372391945) (the "Sterling 2038 Notes"), 500,000,000 4.5% Fixed Rate Subordinated Notes due 2031 (ISIN: XS0245936496) (the "Sterling 2031 Notes" and, together with the Sterling 2030 Notes and the Sterling 2038 Notes, the "Sterling Notes" and, together with the Euro Notes, the "Notes" and each a "Series") to tender their Notes for purchase by the Company for cash (each such invitation, an "Offer", and together, the "Offers

The Offers are made on the terms and subject to the conditions contained in the tender offer memorandum dated 28 April 2016 (the "Tender Offer Memorandum", as may be amended from time to time) prepared by the Company in connection with the Offers, and are subject to the offer and distribution restrictions set out below and as more fully described in the Tender Offer Memorandum. Capitalised terms used but not otherwise defined in this announcement shall have the meanings given to them in the Tender Offer Memorandum.

As Citi continues to enhance the efficiency of its funding and capital structure, maintaining an active liability management strategy allows Citi to replace its higher coupon and other less efficient securities at attractive levels. Since 2014, Citigroup redeemed or retired U.S. $28.9 billion of securities, reducing Citigroup's overall funding costs. Citigroup will continue to consider opportunities to redeem or repurchase securities, based on several factors, including without limitation, the economic value, potential impact on Citigroup's net interest margin and borrowing costs, the overall remaining tenor of Citigroup's debt portfolio, capital impact, as well as overall market conditions.

Title of Notes ISIN Exchange Listing Outstanding Nominal Amount Benchmark Fixed Spread (basis points) Amount subject to the Offers 1,000,000,000 2.125% Fixed Rate Notes due 2026 XS1107727007 Luxembourg Stock Exchange 1,000,000,000 Interpolated Mid-Swap Rate 100 bps Up to 100,000,000 in nominal amount, subject to the right of the Company to amend such amount as set out herein 400,000,000 6.5% Fixed Rate Notes due 2030 XS0116066449 Luxembourg Stock Exchange 114,952,000 4.75% U.K. Treasury Gilt due December 2030 115 bps Up to 30,000,000 in nominal amount, subject to the right of the Company to amend such amount as set out herein 800,000,000 6.8% Fixed Rate Notes due 2038 XS0372391945 Luxembourg Stock Exchange 450,560,000 4.75% U.K. Treasury Gilt due December 2038 140 bps Up to 50,000,000 in nominal amount, subject to the right of the Company to amend such amount as set out herein 500,000,000 4.5% Fixed Rate Subordinated Notes due 2031 XS0245936496 Luxembourg Stock Exchange 232,575,000 4.75% U.K. Treasury Gilt due December 2030 185 bps Up to 25,000,000 in nominal amount, subject to the right of the Company to amend such amount as set out herein

To the extent the Company accepts any Notes for purchase, it will purchase up to 100,000,000 in nominal amount of such Euro Notes, up to 30,000,000 in nominal amount of such Sterling 2030 Notes, up to 50,000,000 in nominal amount of such Sterling 2038 Notes and up to 25,000,000 in nominal amount of such Sterling 2031 Notes validly tendered at or prior to the Expiration Deadline.

The Company will pay for Notes validly tendered and accepted by it for purchase a cash purchase price expressed as a percentage of the principal amount thereof and determined by reference to the sum of the relevant Fixed Spread set forth in the table above and the relevant Sterling Benchmark Security Rate or the Interpolated Mid-Swap Rate, as applicable.

The final determination of the Purchase Price in respect of the Notes will be made in accordance with standard market convention, at or around 1:00 p.m. (London time) on the Business Day following the Expiration Deadline (the "Pricing Time

The Company will also pay an Accrued Interest Payment in respect of Notes accepted for purchase pursuant to the Offers, all as further described in the Tender Offer Memorandum.

The anticipated transaction timetable is summarised below:

Events Times and Dates Commencement of the Offers Offers announced. Tender Offer Memorandum available from the Tender Agent. 28 April 2016 Expiration Deadline Final deadline for receipt of valid Tender Instructions by the Tender Agent in order for Noteholders to be able to participate in the Offers. 4:00 p.m. (London time) on 6 May 2016 Announcement of Indicative Tender Results Announcement by the Company of the aggregate nominal amount of Notes (if any) of each Series that it will accept for purchase pursuant to the Offers. At or around 11:00 a.m. (London time) on 9 May 2016 Pricing Time Determination of the Sterling Benchmark Security Rates and the Interpolated Mid-Swap Rate and calculation of the Purchase Price for the Sterling Notes and the Euro Notes if the Company intends to accept such Notes for purchase. At or around 1:00 p.m. (London time) on 9 May 2016 Announcement of Purchase Prices and Final Tender Results Announcement of whether the Company will accept valid tenders of Notes pursuant to each Offer and, if so accepted, (i) the relevant Sterling Benchmark Security Rate or the Interpolated Mid-Swap Rate, as applicable, and (ii) the Purchase Yield and Purchase Price for the Sterling Notes and the Euro Notes accepted for purchase. As soon as reasonably practicable after the Pricing Time Expected Settlement Date Expected settlement date for the Offers. 13 May 2016

This is an indicative timetable and may be subject to change. Noteholders are advised to check with any bank, securities broker or other intermediary through which they hold Notes when such intermediary needs to receive instructions from a Noteholder in order for that Noteholder to be able to participate in, or (in the limited circumstances in which revocation is permitted) revoke their instruction to participate in, the Offers by the deadlines set out above. Noteholders are advised to read carefully the Tender Offer Memorandum for full details of, and information on, the procedures for participating in, the Offers.

The obligation of Citigroup Inc. to accept for purchase, and to pay the Purchase Price for Notes validly tendered pursuant to the Offers is subject to, and conditional upon, the satisfaction or, where applicable, waiver of a number of conditions described in the Tender Offer Memorandum. Citigroup Inc. reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to waive any one or more of the conditions at any time. The Offers are not contingent upon the tender of any minimum nominal amount of Notes.

Citigroup Inc. has retained its affiliate Citigroup Global Markets Limited to serve as the Dealer Manager, and its affiliate Citibank, N.A., London Branch has been retained to serve as Tender Agent for the Offers.

For additional information regarding the terms of the Offers, please contact: Citigroup Global Markets Limited at Citigroup Centre, Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5LB, Attention: Liability Management Group, or by telephone at +44 20 7986 8969 or email liabilitymanagement.europe@citi.com.

Requests for documents and questions regarding the tender of Notes may be directed to Citibank, N.A., London Branch at Citigroup Centre, Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5LB, Attention: Exchange Team, or by telephone at +44 20 7508 3867 or email exchange.gats@citi.com.

DISCLAIMER

This announcement must be read in conjunction with the Tender Offer Memorandum. This announcement and the Tender Offer Memorandum contain important information which should be read carefully before any decision is made with respect to the Offers. If any Noteholder is in any doubt as to the action it should take, it is recommended to seek its own financial advice, including as to any tax consequences, from its stockbroker, bank manager, solicitor, accountant or other independent financial adviser. Any individual or company whose Notes are held on its behalf by a broker, dealer, bank, custodian, trust company or other nominee must contact such entity if it wishes to tender Notes in the Offers. None of Citigroup Inc., the Dealer Manager or the Tender Agent nor any of their respective directors, employees or affiliates makes any recommendation whether Noteholders should tender Notes in the Offers.

OFFER AND DISTRIBUTION RESTRICTIONS

Neither this announcement nor the Tender Offer Memorandum constitutes an invitation to participate in the Offers in any jurisdiction in which, or to any person to or from whom, it is unlawful to make such invitation or for there to be such participation under applicable securities laws. The distribution of this announcement and the Tender Offer Memorandum in certain jurisdictions may be restricted by law. Persons into whose possession this announcement and/or the Tender Offer Memorandum comes are required by each of the Company, the Dealer Managers and the Tender Agent to inform themselves about, and to observe, any such restrictions.

United States

The Offers are not being made, and will not be made, directly or indirectly in or into, or by use of the mails of, or by any means or instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce of, or of any facilities of a national securities exchange of, the United States. This includes, but is not limited to, facsimile transmission, electronic mail, telex, telephone, the internet and other forms of electronic communication. Accordingly, copies of this announcement, the Tender Offer Memorandum and any other documents or materials relating to the Offers are not being, and must not be, directly or indirectly mailed or otherwise transmitted, distributed or forwarded (including, without limitation, by custodians, nominees or trustees) in or into the United States or to any persons located or resident in the United States and the Notes cannot be tendered in the Offers by any such use, means, instrumentality or facility or from within the United States or by any persons located or resident in the United States. Eligibility to participate in the Offer is not dependent on whether the Noteholder is a "U.S. person" as defined for purposes of Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Any purported tender of Notes resulting directly or indirectly from a violation of these restrictions will be invalid and any purported tender of Notes made by any person located in the United States or any agent, fiduciary or other intermediary acting on a non-discretionary basis for a principal giving instructions from within the United States will be invalid and will not be accepted.

Each Noteholder participating in an Offer will represent that it is not located in the United States and is not participating in such Offer from the United States or it is acting on a non-discretionary basis for a principal located outside the United States that is not giving an order to participate in such Offer from the United States. For the purposes of this and the above paragraph, "United States" means United States of America, its territories and possessions (including Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, Wake Island and the Northern Mariana Islands), any state of the United States of America and the District of Columbia.

European Economic Area ("EEA")

In any EEA Member State that has implemented Directive 2003/71/EC, as amended (which includes the amendments made by Directive 2010/73/EU) (together with any applicable implementing measures in such EEA Member State, the "Prospectus Directive"), this communication is only addressed to and is only directed at qualified investors in that EEA Member State within the meaning of the Prospectus Directive.

United Kingdom

The communication of this announcement, the Tender Offer Memorandum and any other documents or materials relating to the Offers is not being made and such documents and/or materials have not been approved by an authorised person for the purposes of section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. Accordingly, such documents and/or materials are not being distributed to, and must not be passed on to, the general public in the United Kingdom. The communication of such documents and/or materials as a financial promotion is only being made to persons in the United Kingdom who are (i) Investment Professionals (as defined in Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (the "Financial Promotion Order")), or (ii) persons within the scope of Article 43 of the Financial Promotion Order, or (iii) persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) ("high net worth companies, unincorporated associations etc.") of the Financial Promotion Order, or (iv) any other persons to whom it may otherwise lawfully be made under the Financial Promotion Order (such persons together being the "Relevant Persons

Insofar as the communication of this announcement, the Tender Offer Memorandum and any other documents or materials relating to the Offers is made to or directed at Relevant Persons, it is made to or directed at persons having professional experience in matters relating to investments, and any investment or investment activity to which it relates is available only to such persons or will be engaged in only with such persons, and persons who do not have professional experience in matters relating to investments should not rely upon it.

Belgium

Neither the Tender Offer Memorandum nor any other documents or materials relating to the Offers have been submitted to or will be submitted for approval or recognition to, or have been approved or recognized by, the Belgian Financial Services and Markets Authority (Autorite des Services et des Marches Financiers Autoriteit voor Financiele Diensten en Markten) and, accordingly, the Offers may not be made in Belgium by way of a public offering, as defined in Articles 3, 1, 1, and 6, 1, of the Belgian Law of 1 April 2007 on public takeover bids ("loi relative aux offres publiques d'acquisition/wet op de openbare overnamebiedingen") (as amended from time to time). Accordingly, the Offers are, insofar as Belgium is concerned, exclusively conducted under private placement exceptions and the Offers may not be advertised and the Offers will not be extended, and neither the Tender Offer Memorandum nor any other documents or materials relating to the Offers (including any memorandum, information circular, brochure or any similar documents) may, has been or shall be distributed or made available, directly or indirectly, to any person in Belgium other than "qualified investors" ("investisseur qualifie/gekwalificeerde belegger") in the meaning of Article 10, 1, of the Belgian Law of 16 June 2006 on public offering of securities and admission to trading of securities on regulated markets ("loi relative aux offres publiques d'instruments de placement et aux admissions d'instruments de placement la negociation sur des marches reglementes/wet op de openbare aanbieding van beleggingsinstrumenten en de toelating van beleggingsinstrumenten tot de verhandeling op een gereglementeerde markt") (as amended from time to time), as referred to in Article 6, 3, of said Belgian Law of 1April 2007 on public takeover bids, acting on their own account. Insofar as Belgium is concerned, the Tender Offer Memorandum has been issued only for the personal use of the above qualified investors and exclusively for the purpose of the Offers. Accordingly, the information contained in the Tender Offer Memorandum may not be used for any other purpose or disclosed to any other person in Belgium.

France

The Offers are not being made, directly or indirectly, to the public in France. Neither the Tender Offer Memorandum nor any other documents or offering materials relating to the Offers have been distributed or caused to be distributed and will not be distributed or caused to be distributed to the public in France, and only (i) qualified investors (investisseurs qualifies), other than individuals, acting for their own account and/or (ii) legal entities whose total assets exceed 5 million, or whose annual turnover exceeds 5 million, or whose managed assets exceed 5million, or whose annual headcount exceeds 50, all as defined in, and in accordance with, Articles L.341-2 1, L.411-2, D.341-1 and D.411-1 of the French Code monetaire et financier, are eligible to participate in the Offers. The Tender Offer Memorandum has not been and will not be submitted to the clearance procedures (visa) of nor approved by the Autorite des marches financiers (the "AMF") or by the competent authority of another State that is a contracting party to the Agreement on the European Economic Area and notified to the AMF.

Italy

None of the Offers, this Tender Offer Memorandum or any other documents or materials relating to the Offers have been or will be submitted to the clearance procedures of the Commissione Nazionale per le Societa e la Borsa ("CONSOB") pursuant to applicable Italian laws and regulations.

The Offers are being carried out in the Republic of Italy ("Italy") as exempted offers pursuant to article 101-bis, paragraph 3-bis of Legislative Decree No. 58 of 24 February 1998, as amended (the "Consolidated Financial Services Act") and article 35-bis, paragraph 4 of CONSOB Regulation No. 11971 of 14 May 1999, as amended.

Holders or beneficial owners of the Notes that are resident and/or located in Italy can tender the Notes for purchase through authorised persons (such as investment firms, banks or financial intermediaries permitted to conduct such activities in Italy in accordance with the Consolidated Financial Services Act, CONSOB Regulation No. 16190 of 29 October 2007, as amended, and Legislative Decree No. 385 of 1 September 1993, as amended) and in compliance with any other applicable laws and regulations and with any requirements imposed by CONSOB or any other Italian authority.

Each intermediary must comply with the applicable laws and regulations concerning information duties vis-a-vis its clients in connection with the Notes and the Offers.

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, and wealth management. Additional information may be found at www.citigroup.com.

Certain statements in this release, including without limitation the anticipated consummation and successful completion of the Offers (including the satisfaction of the conditions described in the Tender Offer Memorandum), the possible amendment, extension or abandonment of one or more of the Offers, and Citigroup Inc.'s successful execution of its liability management strategy, are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the rules and regulations of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. Actual results may differ materially from those included in these statements due to a variety of factors, including without limitation (i) the level of participation in the Offers, and (ii) the precautionary statements included in this release and in the Tender Offer Memorandum, and those contained in Citigroup Inc.'s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including without limitation the "Risk Factors" section of Citigroup Inc.'s 2015 Annual Report on Form 10-K.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428006288/en/

Contacts:

Citi

Simon Boughey

0207 508 3864

simon.boughey@citi.com
Technavio's latest geographic information systems (GIS) market in APAC report highlights three key emerging trends predicted to impact market growth through 2020. Technavio defines an emerging trend as something that has potential for significant impact on the market and contributes to its growth or decline.

"Vendors in the GIS market in APAC provide customized GIS applications as per any given industry's specific requirements. For instance, retail industry vendors opt for customized GIS solutions to suit their requirements that help them remain ahead of the competition," said Amrita Choudhury, one of Technavio's lead industry analysts for enterprise application.

"Vendors are developing application-specific GIS solutions that are in high demand among retailers as they are more cost-effective than general purpose GIS solutions. For instance, Corson GIS Solutions, a web mapping solutions provider, develops custom GIS solutions mainly for the government sector and the utilities sector," added Amrita.

Technavio's market research study identifies the following three emerging trends expected to propel the growth of the GIS market in APAC:

Increasing demand for industry-specific GIS

Integration of GIS with social networks

Increasing demand for 3D GIS software and development of 4D GIS software

Increasing demand for industry-specific GIS

Vendors in the GIS market in APAC provide customized GIS applications as per industry requirements. For instance, retail industry vendors opt for customized GIS solutions to suit their requirements. This helps them remain competitive in the market.

Also, vendors develop application-specific GIS solutions that are in high demand among retailers, as they are more cost-effective than general purpose GIS solutions. For instance, Corson GIS Solutions, a web mapping solutions provider, develops custom GIS solutions mainly for the government sector and the utilities sector.

Integration of GIS with social networks

Many retailers have started to use GIS technology as a means to enhance their marketing campaigns over social networks. Vendors use GIS applications to get demographic details of target customers, and it helps retailers promote their campaigns over various social networks. Retailers post updates and offers through social networks based on information collected from GIS software.

With an increase in the number of smartphone users, this trend is expected be a major growth-promoting factor. China and India are among the top consumers of smartphones in the world. While smartphone users are the biggest GIS data generators, companies such as Amazon and Google will look to retain this data through the use of advanced cloud infrastructure. The retained data will be processed further, and with the help of data science it is predicted to yield positive results for end-users.

Increasing demand for 3D GIS software and development of 4D GIS software

Growing use of GIS for security applications is resulting in increased development of 3D GIS software. The 3D GIS software provides better visibility and enhanced performance than 2D GIS software. Many end-users, especially the government and defense organizations, have started to adopt 3D GIS software to improve the operational efficiency of security applications. Therefore, many vendors are developing and offering 3D GIS software in the market.

In addition, vendors are focusing on the development of 4D GIS software. 4D GIS data includes 2D data, 3D data, and data regarding time change. An integrated database with real-time monitoring is required to generate 4D data.

Companies have started providing support for 4D data. For instance, 4D mapper is an Australia-based company that puts multi-source and multi-format geospatial data including 3D and 4D GIS on the cloud and streams it to browsers after rasterization and vectoring.

Browse related reports:

Global Mobile GIS Market 2016-2020

Global Cloud GIS Market 2016-2020

GIS Market in China 2015-2019

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WATERLOO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, joined the leaders of the Perimeter Institute and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and members of the wider science community today to congratulate physicist Asimina Arvanitaki on being named the first Stavros Niarchos Foundation Aristarchus Chair in Theoretical Physics, a remarkable achievement.

An $8-million investment, shared equally between the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and the Perimeter Institute, will support Dr. Arvanitaki's leading-edge research into the universe at its most fundamental level.

Using technologies and techniques from other fields of physics, Dr. Arvanitaki designs novel experiments that can provide insight into the nature of dark matter, particle interactions and other deep questions about the origins of the universe and the behaviour of the elements. This investment will enable new avenues of research and further collaboration between Dr. Arvanitaki and her colleagues at Perimeter and around the world.

Quotes

"The Government of Canada is committed to promoting equity and equality for women in all fields of work and study, including science. With role models such as Dr. Arvanitaki, Perimeter's first female research chair, young women will be inspired to consider a career in research and make discoveries that further our collective understanding of our world and universe."

- Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science

"Perimeter is world renowned for its scientific excellence. I congratulate Dr. Arvanitaki on her new role and the Institute partners on breaking new ground with the appointment of this chair. Her new role demonstrates that there are great opportunities for young, emerging talent to think big and be at the leading edge of science."

- Bardish Chagger, Minister of Small Business and Tourism

"Asimina is an exceptional physicist. Her ideas bridge theory and experiment in new and creative ways. Hers is a rare talent, needed now more than ever when the field is on the threshold of revolutionary advances. Thanks to this new investment from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Asimina will have opportunities to pursue breakthrough discoveries."

- Neil Turok, Director, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

"Asimina's work is on the cutting edge of scientific research and carries profound implications for us all. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation recognizes the importance of pure research and the need to support it. But Asimina's work is also significant in ways that transcend science and research. As a young scientist, she will be a great inspiration to the youth in her native Greece, who are pursuing their dreams amid the current crisis. Furthermore, Asimina's appointment is a manifestation of one of Perimeter's most defining characteristics, namely its commitment to attracting young scientists just entering their peak years of research productivity and providing them with the proper environment and resources to flourish and make new and innovative scientific contributions."

- Eva Polyzogopoulou, Program Coordinator, Education, Stavros Niarchos Foundation

"The Stavros Niarchos Foundation has given us the opportunity to pursue some of the big questions in physics, and we will do our best to help find the answers. This will also help us strengthen research and training ties to Greece, where there is a lot of untapped potential. I am proud to be recognized by an organization that has contributed so much to Greece and the world."

- Asimina Arvanitaki, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Aristarchus Chair, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Quick facts

- On April 15, 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the Government of Canada will invest $50 million over five years in the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics so that it can continue its world-leading research, training and educational outreach.

- Dr. Asimina Arvanitaki joined the Perimeter Institute in 2014, after earning an undergraduate degree from the University of Athens and a graduate degree from Stanford University. Before starting at Perimeter, she was a research associate at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics.

- Stavros Niarchos was considered one of the most innovative and successful businessmen of the 20th century. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation continues his legacy to support causes in Greece and internationally in the fields of education, social welfare, health, and arts and culture.

- The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Aristarchus Chair is named after Aristarchus, an ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer who proposed the first-known model placing the sun at the centre of the solar system.

Associated links

- Stavros Niarchos Foundation

- Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Follow Minister Duncan on social media.

Twitter: @ScienceMin

Instagram: sciencemin

Contacts:

Veronique Perron

Press Secretary

Office of the Minister of Science

343-291-2600



Media Relations

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

343-291-1777

ic.mediarelations-mediasrelations.ic@canada.ca




Semcon's Annual General Meeting (AGM) was held on Thursday 28 April 2016 at the company's head office in Goteborg, Sweden. The AGM took inter alia the following resolutions.

Regulatory News:

Adoption

The AGM adopted the parent company and consolidated income statements and balance sheets.

Dividend

The AGM resolved in accordance with the Board's proposal to give a dividend of SEK 1.25 per share. In total the dividend amounts to SEK 22.3 million. The remaining disposable profit, around SEK 272 million, will be brought forward. The record date for the dividend is 2 May 2016 and payment is expected to be made on 6 May 2016.

Discharge from liability

The AGM granted the Board of Directors and the CEO discharge from liability for the 2015 financial year.

Board members

The AGM resolved that the Board of Directors will continue to comprise of five Directors elected by the general meeting without deputy directors. The AGM re-elected Marianne Brismar as Board member and current Board member Tore Bertilsson was elected Chairman. Furthermore Karl Thedeen, Jan Erik Karlsson and Jeanette Saveros were elected as board members.

Remuneration to the Board of Directors and auditors

The AGM resolved on unchanged fees to the Board of Directors. A total fee of SEK 1,610,000 shall be paid to the Board of Directors elected by the general meeting, of which SEK 550,000 to the Chairman and SEK 265,000 to each of the other Directors elected by the general meeting. No additional fees will be paid for work on Board committees. The AGM also resolved that auditors' fees will be paid according to invoice.

Auditors

The AGM re-elected Deloitte AB as its registered auditing company until the end of the next AGM.

Authorisation to issue new shares

The AGM authorised the Board, until the next AGM, to resolve on new share issues, deviating from shareholders' preferential rights, of no more than 1,811,253 ordinary shares to allow the use of own shares as payment for acquisition activities. The subscription price shall correspond to the share's estimated market value.

Authorisation on the acquisition and transfer of own shares

The AGM authorised the Board, until the next AGM, to resolute on the acquisition of ordinary shares on the stock market within the applicable price interval or through directed offers to owners of ordinary shares, at a price equivalent to the market price with an addendum of no more than 20 per cent to improve the company's capital structure and to allow the use of own shares as payment for acquisition activities, or to ensure fulfilment of the company's commitments in the Performance-related Share Savings Scheme 2015. Acquisitions may, on each occasion, include up to a number of ordinary shares implying that the company after an acquisition, owns maximum ten per cent of the outstanding shares in the company.

The AGM also authorised the Board, until the next AGM, to resolve on the transfer of own shares, deviating from shareholders' preferential rights and outside the stock market, as payment for acquisition activities. Transfers may, on each occasion, be the entire number of own ordinary shares. The value of the payment should be equivalent to the estimated market value.

Semcon is an international technology company in engineering services and product information. We have around 3,000 employees with extensive experience from many different industries. We develop technology, products, plant and information solutions along the entire development chain and also provide many services and products in areas such as quality control, training and methodology development. Semcon contribute to our customers' competitive strength by providing innovative solutions, design and solid engineering expertise. Work processes and solutions are adapted to customer requirements, from taking part in the customer's teams to in-house development projects. The Group had annual sales of SEK 2.6 billion in 2015 with activities at more than 40 sites in Sweden, Germany, the UK, Brazil, China, Hungary, India, Spain and Norway. Some of Semcon's biggest customers include: ABB, AB Volvo, Audi, BMW, CEVT, Jaguar Land Rover, Scania, Volvo Cars and VW. Read more at semcon.com.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160428006306/en/

Contacts:

Semcon AB

Tore Bertilsson, Chairman of the Board

+46 (0)31-721 03 06

or

Bjorn Stromberg, CFO

+46 (0)31-721 03 06

www.semcon.com
OGDEN, UT -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- TAB Bank is pleased to announce it has provided working capital funding to two companies located in the Western United States. Each funding represents TAB Bank's belief that small businesses are the heartbeat of the American economy. TAB is committed to providing ongoing financing, service, and support so these companies can flourish and realize their potential.

The first transaction is with a cyber security company located in Arizona. The company provides cyber security products and services to school districts, government offices, power companies, and a variety of other corporate clients. TAB has provided them with a $1.75 million revolving credit facility that will support the company's ongoing working capital needs.

The second transaction is with a company based in California that installs and dismantles tradeshow exhibits and provides services in the commercial construction and remodeling industries. TAB has provided them with a $3 million revolving credit facility. The facility is extended through a multi-year agreement.

TAB Bank provides custom working capital solutions to commercial businesses across a wide range of industries. These solutions can be customized to meet the needs of companies in all stages of the business life cycle and during any economic conditions. TAB Bank does this through a variety of asset-based structures including Asset-Based Revolving Loans, Accounts Receivable Financing, Lines of Credit, and Equipment Finance. TAB's lending options can also be combined with a full suite of business banking solutions and Treasury Management Services.

Brett Horwitz is TAB Bank's Vice President and Business Development Officer based in Southern California. Brett has years of experience developing client relationships and structuring credit facilities in the asset-based lending arena. Brett can be reached at 949.466.5255 or at brett.horwitz@tabbank.com.

Contact Information:



Trevor Morris

Director of Marketing

801-624-5172

trevor.morris@tabbank.com

Twitter - @TABBank

Facebook - facebook.com/TABbank




ST. JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Fortis Inc. ("Fortis" or the "Corporation") (TSX: FTS) will release its first quarter 2016 financial results on Tuesday, May 3, 2016. A teleconference and webcast will be held the same day at 9:00 a.m. (Eastern). Barry Perry, President and Chief Executive Officer, Fortis, and Karl Smith, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Fortis, will discuss the Corporation's first quarter 2016 financial results.

Analysts, members of the media and other interested parties in North America are invited to participate by calling 1.877.223.4471. International participants may participate by calling 647.788.4922. Please dial in 10 minutes prior to the start of the call. No pass code is required. A live and archived audio webcast of the teleconference will be available on the Corporation's website, www.fortisinc.com. A replay of the conference will be available two hours after the conclusion of the call until June 3, 2016. Please call 1.800.585.8367 or 416.621.4642 and enter pass code 88662322.

Fortis will hold its Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders on Thursday, May 5, 2016 at 9:00 a.m. (Eastern), 10:30 a.m. (Newfoundland), at the Holiday Inn St. John's, 180 Portugal Cove Road, St. John's, NL. A live and archived audio webcast of the meeting will be available on the Corporation's website, www.fortisinc.com.

About Fortis

Fortis is a leader in the North American electric and gas utility business, with total assets of approximately $29 billion and fiscal 2015 revenue of $6.7 billion. The Corporation's asset mix is approximately 96% regulated (70% electric, 26% gas), with the remaining 4% comprised of non-regulated energy infrastructure. The Corporation's regulated utilities serve more than 3 million customers across Canada and in the United States and the Caribbean. For more information about Fortis, visit www.fortisinc.com or www.sedar.com.

Contacts:

Angela Doyle

Investor Analyst

Fortis Inc.

709.737.2800




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- "This is great news for our IAM membership at Bombardier and indeed for the Canadian aerospace industry as a whole," said a pleased IAM Canadian General Vice President Dave Ritchie.

Ritchie was reacting to the announcement this morning that Bombardier confirmed its biggest order so far for its C Series airliner: an order from U.S. giant Delta Airlines for up to 125 jets.

"I am so pleased to see that the airline industry is finally realizing that the C Series is a superior aircraft and one that will take the industry toward the next century," said Ritchie. The order from a major global airline is a significant boost to the C Series program. Delta has placed a firm order for 75 of the 120-seat C Series 100 model with options on an additional 50 aircraft. The value of the deal is about $5.6 billion U.S. The first Delta C Series 100 aircraft will be delivered in 2018.

On February 17, 2016, Air Canada announced it would purchase 45 C Series 300 aircraft with options on 30 additional aircraft. Bombardier's C Series order book now stands at 370 firm orders.

"It's taken us a while to get there but finally we have recognition for what we knew from the beginning, what is to become a world product leader in commercial aviation," said Ritchie.

The IAM which is the largest union in the Canadian Aerospace industry, represents over 4,600 workers at Bombardier.

Contacts:

Dave Ritchie

IAM Canadian General Vice President

416-386-1789 Ext #6323



Bill Trbovich

IAM Director of Communications

416-386-1789 Ext #6331/416-735-9765




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Silver Bear Resources Inc. ("Silver Bear" or the "Company") (TSX: SBR) is pleased to announce that it has entered into a non-binding term sheet (the "Term Sheet") with the Company's major shareholders, Inflection Management Corporation Limited ("Inflection") and A.B. Aterra Resources Ltd. ("Aterra" and together with Inflection, the "Lenders"), for a comprehensive secured debt funding package (the "Debt Funding Package") for the final development, construction and commissioning of the Company's Mangazeisky Silver Project.

It is anticipated that the Company's wholly-owned Russian subsidiary, ZAO Prognoz, will be the ultimate borrower under the Debt Funding Package which will consist of a US$42.85 million secured loan (the "Secured Loan Facility"), a working capital facility of US$3.5 million and a contingency facility of US$2 million, for total funding of US$48.35 million. Pursuant to the Term Sheet, a portion of the Secured Loan Facility will be used to repay the principal and accrued interest on certain outstanding promissory notes previously issued by the Company to the Lenders. The Company anticipates that the Debt Funding Package will result in net new funding to the Company of approximately US$17 million following the repayment of such outstanding promissory notes.

The proposed Debt Funding Package is currently non-binding and subject to, among other things, the negotiation and execution of definitive loan and security agreements, the approval of the Company's minority shareholders, the approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange and any other required regulatory approvals, as well as other customary terms and conditions. There can be no assurances that the Debt Funding Package will be completed on the terms set out in the Term Sheet, or at all, or if completed, that the conditions to drawdown would be satisfied.

About Silver Bear

Silver Bear (TSX: SBR) is focused on the development of its wholly-owned Mangazeisky Silver Project, covering a licence area of approx. 570 km2 that includes the high grade Vertikalny deposit (amongst the highest grade silver deposits in the world) located 400 km north of Yakutsk in the Republic of Sakha within the Russian Federation. The Company was granted a 20-year mining licence for the Vertikalny deposit in September 2013 and completed a Preliminary Economic Assessment in February 2014. The Feasibility Study, scheduled for completion in Q2 2016, is contracted to Tetra Tech in the UK with SRK and ERM as subcontractors for the mining and environmental studies respectively. Other information relating to Silver Bear is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com as well as on the Company's website at www.silverbearresources.com.

Cautionary Notes

This release and subsequent oral statements made by and on behalf of the Company may contain forward-looking statements, which reflect management's expectations. Wherever possible, words such as "intends", "expects", "scheduled", "estimates", "anticipates", "believes" and similar expressions or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved, have been used to identify these forward-looking statements. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this release reflect management's current beliefs based upon information currently available to management and based upon what management believes to be reasonable assumptions, Silver Bear cannot be certain that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. A number of factors could cause events and achievements to differ materially from the results expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Such risk factors include, but are not limited to: specific risks relating to the negotiation and execution of definitive agreements for the Debt Funding Package; the satisfaction of each party's obligations in accordance with the terms of the definitive agreements for the Debt Funding Package; failure to receive any required regulatory approvals (including stock exchange), shareholder approval or other approvals; the possibility that the amount of net new funding to the Company following the repayment of certain outstanding promissory notes held by the Lenders may be less than anticipated; and risk factors identified by Silver Bear in its continuous disclosure filings filed from time to time on SEDAR. These factors should be considered carefully and prospective investors should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements necessarily involve significant known and unknown risks, assumptions and uncertainties that may cause Silver Bear's actual results, events, prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Although Silver Bear has attempted to identify important risks and factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors and risks that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. 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, prospective investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this release, and Silver Bear assumes no obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances, unless otherwise required by law.

Contacts:

Graham Hill

President and Chief Executive Officer

Russia: +7 (916) 731 5673

info@silverbearresources.com



Judith Webster

Investor Relations Manager

+416 453 8818

jwebster@silverbearresources.com






BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - The Swiss stock market was under pressure in early trade Thursday, but staged a comeback in the afternoon and ended the session with a very slight gain. Early losses were sparked by the Bank of Japan's decision not to implement further stimulus measures. The news shocked investors, leading to a sharp sell off in early trade. The SMI slipped below the 8,000 point level at its session low.



The market began to recover from its losses around the time the U.S. equity markets bounced back from their early weakness. Economic data from the U.S. this afternoon was mixed, with disappointing GDP data and some better than expected employment data. The U.S. Federal Reserve made no change to monetary policy after the European close Wednesday and gave no clear signal on timing of next rate increase.



The Swiss Market Index increased 0.03 percent Thursday and finished at 8,099.42. The Swiss Leader Index rose 0.21 percent and the Swiss Performance Index added 0.13 percent.



Clariant surged 8.1 percent after its first quarter earnings exceeded expectations. The specialty chemical maker also confirmed its 2016 outlook.



Geberit jumped 5.1 percent. The plumbing company's first quarter results topped expectations.



The financial stocks were also among the gainers Thursday, after the better than expected earnings report from Deutsche Bank in Germany. UBS increased 1.2 percent and Credit Suisse advanced 1.6 percent. Julius Baer also finished higher by 0.1 percent.



A number of cyclical stocks also finished in the green. Adecco and LafargeHolcim both gained 1.0 percent. Sika closed higher by 1 percent. France's Saint-Gobain reiterated its interest in acquiring a controlling interest in Sika.



Elevator and escalator manufacturer Schindler dropped 1.3 percent, after it delivered quarterly results that were more or less in line with expectations.



Novartis was the lone gainer among the index heavyweight, with an increase of 0.2 percent. Roche decreased 0.5 percent and Nestle lost 0.1 percent.



Swiss Life weakened by 2.8 percent and Syngenta surrendered 2.4 percent. Health care group Galenica dropped 2.7 percent and biotech company Actelion fell 0.8 percent. Both stocks were among the gainers yesterday.



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BOSTON, MA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- David Druley, 49, will become Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of global investment advisor Cambridge Associates effective July 1, 2016, said current Chairman and Chief Executive Office Sandra A. Urie. She announced that she will step down from that role as part of a long-term succession plan she has led with the Board.

She also announced that Philip Walton, 45, will succeed Mr. Druley as the firm's President.

Ms. Urie, 63, joined Cambridge Associates in 1985 and has led the firm for the past 16 years. She will remain actively involved in an 'of counsel' role, advising the new leadership and the Board. Mr. Druley joined Cambridge Associates in 2003. Before becoming President and Head of Global Investments, he headed the firm's global pension practice. Mr. Walton, currently Head of the private client practice, joined Cambridge in 1999.

"I am delighted that David Druley has agreed to lead Cambridge Associates," Ms. Urie said. "He has worked with all types of clients and has always demonstrated a laser-like focus on delivering value to them. Based on his visionary leadership of our pension practice, and more recently our Global Investing Group, I am certain he will lead the firm with a continued, unwavering commitment to our clients and the firm."

"I am also pleased that Philip Walton will become President, and continue as Head of our private client practice. He has established himself as a strong leader and collaborator, not only in his work in our private client practice, but also in our private investment group. He will be an instrumental partner to David Druley in guiding the firm forward," Ms. Urie said.

She added, "After 25 years in various firm leadership roles, I am excited to redirect my efforts and spend even more time meeting with clients to focus on their specific needs. I will also devote energy to an area of great personal interest -- the growing opportunity set in impact investing."

Said Cambridge Associates co-founder and Board member James N. Bailey, "Under Sandy Urie's leadership, Cambridge Associates has successfully advised some of the world's most sophisticated investors, across all asset classes, creating innovative portfolio management solutions. The firm's high client retention rate and growth in discretionary and non-discretionary outsourcing relationships are attributable to her team's commitment to delivering results for clients and sitting on the same side of the table with them as diligent and responsible stewards of their capital."

"Equally notable has been Sandy's focus on talent and succession. The organization grows and cultivates the right people and capabilities, while preserving a culture that anticipates clients' expanding needs. In that vein, we have great confidence in David Druley's vision and leadership strength and in the teams that support him. We are excited about the future," Mr. Bailey added.

Mr. Druley holds a BBA and an MBA, both from The University of Texas, Austin. Before joining Cambridge Associates 13 years ago, he operated his own investment management firm for nine years. Mr. Walton holds a BA from Williams College and an MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Before joining Cambridge Associates 17 years ago, he worked in investment banking.

For more information, please contact Eric Mosher, Sommerfield Communications, Inc., at +1 (212) 255-8386 / Eric@sommerfield.com.

About Cambridge Associates

Founded in 1973, Cambridge Associates is a provider of independent investment advice and research to institutional investors and private clients worldwide. Working alongside its early clients, among them several leading universities, it pioneered the strategy of high equity orientation and broad diversification, which since the 1980s has been a primary driver of performance for these leading fiduciary investors. Cambridge Associates serves over 1,000 global investors and delivers a range of services, including investment advisory, outsourced investment solutions, research and tools, and performance monitoring, across global asset classes. Cambridge Associates has more than 1,200 employees serving its client base globally and maintains offices in Arlington, VA; Boston; Dallas; Menlo Park and San Francisco, CA; London; Singapore; Sydney; and Beijing. Cambridge Associates consists of five global investment consulting affiliates that are all under common ownership and control. For more information about Cambridge Associates, please visit www.cambridgeassociates.com.

Media Contact:

Eric Mosher

Sommerfield Communications, Inc.

212-255-8386

eric@sommerfield.com






The 2016 Annual General Meeting of Admiral Group Plc was held at Cardiff City hall, Cardiff, CF10 3ND on Thursday, 28(th) April 2016 at 2:00pm.



All resolutions were decided on a poll and all resolutions proposed at the Meeting were passed. Resolutions Votes Percentage Votes Votes Votes For For Against Total Withheld



To receive the Financial Statements 1 and the 181,299,956 99.71% 530,866 181,830,822 128,474 reports of the Directors and the Auditors



To approve the 2 Directors' 177,611,364 98.38% 2,919,568 180,530,932 1,428,364 Remuneration Report



To declare the Final 3 Dividend on 181,934,714 100% 0 181,934,714 24,582 the ordinary shares of the Company



To appoint Manning Rountree 4 (Non- 179,756,580 98.80% 2,178,134 181,934,714 24,582 Executive Director) as a Director of the Company



To appoint Owen Clarke (Non- 5 Executive 179,802,390 98.83% 2,132,324 181,934,714 24,582 Director) as a Director of the Company



To re-elect Alastair Lyons (Non- Executive 6 Director) as 176,086,469 98.24% 3,151,191 179,237,660 2,721,636 a Director and Chairman of the Company



To re-elect Henry Engelhardt 7 (Executive 180,682,632 99.31% 1,252,082 181,934,714 24,582 Director) as a Director of the Company



To re-elect David Stevens 8 (Executive 180,092,540 98.99% 1,842,174 181,934,714 24,582 Director) as a Director of the Company



To re-elect Geraint Jones 9 (Executive 180,091,908 98.99% 1,842,806 181,934,714 24,582 Director) as a Director of the Company



To re-elect Colin Holmes (Non- 10 Executive 180,748,064 99.35% 1,186,650 181,934,714 24,582 Director) as a Director of the Company



To re-elect Annette Court (Non- 11 Executive 180,594,952 99.26% 1,339,762 181,934,714 24,582 Director) as a Director of the Company



To re-elect Jean Park (Non- 12 Executive 180,799,096 99.38% 1,135,618 181,934,714 24,582 Director) as a Director of the Company



To re-elect Penny James (Non- 13 Executive 180,692,092 99.32% 1,242,622 181,934,714 24,582 Director) as a Director of the Company



To appoint Deloitte LLP 14 as Auditors 181,578,274 99.80% 355,533 181,933,807 24,489 of the Company



To authorise the Directors to determine 15 the 177,515,644 97.79% 4,020,751 181,536,395 422,901 remuneration of Deloitte LLP



The amended rules of the 2015 16 Discretionary 176,792,481 97.19% 5,104,733 181,897,214 62,082 Free Share Scheme be approved and adopted



To authorise the Directors 17 to allot 171,521,899 94.29% 10,393,029 181,914,928 44,368 relevant securities



To dis-apply 18 statutory 172,386,382 94.96% 9,148,558 181,534,940 424,356 pre-emption rights



To authorise the Company 19 to make 181,699,034 99.87% 235,680 181,934,714 24,582 market purchases



To authorise the Directors to convene a 20 General 151,216,914 83.54% 29,794,230 181,011,144 948,152 Meeting with not less than 14 days clear notice



The number of votes for and against each resolution put before the Meeting and the number of votes withheld are as follows:



At the close of business on 28(th) April 2016, the issued share capital of the Company was 281,967,266 ordinary shares.



The full text of each resolution is contained in the Notice of Annual General Meeting, which is available on the Company's website: www.admiralgroup.co.uk.



A copy of the Non Routine Resolutions passed at the Annual General Meeting will shortly be submitted to the National Storage Mechanism and available for inspection at www.Hemscott.com/nsm.do.



Mark Waters Group Company Secretary



This announcement is distributed by GlobeNewswire on behalf of GlobeNewswire clients. The owner of this announcement warrants that: (i) the releases contained herein are protected by copyright and other applicable laws; and (ii) they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.



Source: Admiral Group PLC via GlobeNewswire [HUG#2008108]



A0DJ58B02J639R47



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HARPERS FERRY, WV--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - AbleGamers -- the leading charity and organization wielding the power of gaming to break down the barriers of economic and social isolation for people with disabilities -- is thrilled to announce its attendance at the New York Metro Abilities Expo from April 29 - May 1, 2016, to showcase the latest innovations in adaptive gaming technologies for disabled gamers.

AbleGamers will be located in the Adaptive Gaming Pavilion in Booth #1117 at Abilities Expo, sharing with attendees the positive impact gaming has on one's social and emotional health. Attendees will be able to try out for themselves the new adaptive gaming equipment AbleGamers provides to the disabled community via its Expansion Pack program -- free care packages containing modified controllers and peripherals designed to allow disabled gamers to enjoy today's hottest video games, allowing those with impaired mobility to experience what it is like to walk, run, climb, drive and even fly in a virtual world -- and learn more about the charity's support programs at the AbleGamers booth.

For nearly four decades, Abilities Expo has supported the disability community, hosting events in major cities around North America -- including Boston, San Francisco (Bay Area), New York City, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto. Each Abilities Expo provides people with disabilities and their loved ones, as well as the medical community, insight on new assistive technologies and programs to help improve the lives of those with limitations. Numerous activities for the young and old are available, including educational workshops and hands-on experiences.

The New York Metro Abilities Expo will be held at the New Jersey Convention and Expo Center. Registration to the event is free and available at http://www.abilities.com/newyork/vregister.html.

If you would like to arrange an in-person meeting with AbleGamers Program Director Craig Kaufman at the New York Metro Abilities Expo, or have an exclusive interview with Chief Operations Officer Steven Spohn (also available via email, telephone and Skype if you are not attending Abilities Expo) please contact us at pr@uberstrategist.com.

About The AbleGamers Foundation

The AbleGamers Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charity that wields the power of video games to break down the barriers of economic and social isolation for people with disabilities. Through received support and donations, AbleGamers provides disabled gamers with assistive technologies (including their Expansion Pack program) that allow those with limited real-world mobility to experience what it is like to walk, run, climb, drive and even fly -- in a virtual world. Via their Includification initiative, AbleGamers additionally advises developers and publishers on how to best incorporate accessibility options so that their video game titles may reach and appeal to the widest and most diverse audience possible. To read AbleGamers articles that rate popular video games on their level of accessibility, or to find out how your support or donations can help them positively impact an even greater number of individuals with disabilities, please visit www.ablegamers.com.

Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/28/11G095603/Images/adaptive-gaming-8002-39eab2602c2d95738d3befe8b3ad5aa6.jpg

Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/28/11G095603/Images/adaptive-gaming-800-bf4c39d2fb15be5eae8ce1b5c5f86561.jpg

PRESS CONTACT



UberStrategist

pr@uberstrategist.com

+1 (646) 844-8388



Mario R. Kroll, MBA

mario@uberstrategist.com



CJ Melendez

cjm@uberstrategist.com



Find us on Twitter @uberstrategist and Facebook at fb.com/uberstrategist.


Admiral Group plc ('the Company')



28 April 2016



Notification is given that non-executive directors, Lucy Kellaway and Margaret Johnson, did not offer themselves for re-election at Admiral's Annual General Meeting held on 28 April 2016 and have retired from the Board, with effect from that date. Lucy Kellaway will also step down as a member of the Nomination and Group Risk Committees and Margaret Johnson will step down as a member of the Audit and Remuneration Committees.



Alastair Lyons, Admiral Group Chairman said: 'Being both from outside the financial services sector, Margaret and Lucy have brought particular insights and a fresh perspective to our deliberations that together have contributed to better decision-making. On behalf of the Board, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Margaret and Lucy for their valuable contribution to the success of the business during the 9 years that they have been directors and I wish them the very best for the future.'



With effect from 28 April 2016, the members of the Company's Audit Committee are: Colin Holmes (Chair); Annette Court; Penny James and Owen Clarke. Non- executive director, Penny James, has joined the Company's Nomination Committee as a member. The members of the Nomination Committee are: Alastair Lyons (Chair), Penny James and Colin Holmes. Non-executive director, Owen Clarke has joined the Remuneration Committee as a member. The members of the Remuneration Committee are: Annette Court (Chair), Jean Park and Owen Clarke. The members of the Group Risk Committee are: Jean Park (Chair), Annette Court, Manning Rountree and David Stevens.



For any further information, please contact:



Karen Maguire, Investor Relations 029 20602075



James Carnduff, Communications 029 20434232



This announcement is distributed by GlobeNewswire on behalf of GlobeNewswire clients. The owner of this announcement warrants that: (i) the releases contained herein are protected by copyright and other applicable laws; and (ii) they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.



Source: Admiral Group PLC via GlobeNewswire [HUG#2008113]



A0DJ58B02J639R63



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - Ambassador John Bolton is proud to endorse U.S. House of Representatives candidate Adam Kinzinger (IL-16) ahead of the 2016 election. The John Bolton PAC will also make a total campaign contribution of $5,000. This announcement comes as part of a larger effort by Ambassador Bolton to ensure America elects officials who will vote for a strong national defense and keep America safe.

"It is our mission to build on the historic majority that the John Bolton PAC helped elect in both the House and the Senate in 2014, and it is of the utmost importance that we keep these majorities intact for our next Republican president," said Ambassador John Bolton. "As a veteran of Afghan and Iraqi combat operations, Adam believes that the security of the United States requires that we fully commit to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. We need people like Adam, who have lived and seen the terror of ISIL in their service to this country to bring a common sense, national-security-minded approach to government."

The John Bolton PAC is committed to supporting candidates for the House and Senate who believe in restoring America's national security and protecting the United States' vital freedoms at home through securing U.S. interests in an increasingly dangerous world.

"Ambassador John Bolton knows our national security and global leadership are more critical now than ever," said Congressman Kinzinger. "I'm grateful to have the support of someone I admire, and proud to know the John Bolton PAC will continue to highlight the importance of our national security."

In 2014 the PAC was a major contributor in the midterm elections with 87 endorsements and PAC contributions.

About John Bolton PAC(www.boltonpac.com): The John Bolton PAC was founded by former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John R. Bolton to raise the importance of American national security in federal elections. The PAC will support and contribute to candidates who are committed to restoring strong American economic and national security policies that secure America's interests in a challenging world.

CONTACT

Garrett Marquis

gm@prismstrategygroup.com
WEST JORDAN, UT--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - Mountain America Credit Union earned honors as a top ten "Best Places to Work in Idaho." After receiving top-ten honors in the Small Employer category (fewer than 100 employees), the credit union moved into the Large Employer category (100+ employees) for the first time this year. The ranking is determined by the results of an employee satisfaction survey conducted by POPULUS  , a marketing and research firm.

"Mountain America understands that a quality culture starts with engaged and committed employees," said Sterling Nielsen, President/CEO of Mountain America. "We achieve this through investing in employees, helping them learn and grow with the best-possible educational opportunities and tools. Combined with an exceptional work environment, where staff is empowered to use their talents, the result is consistently superior member service."

Mountain America has 15 Idaho branches, with more than 100 employees across Southern Idaho.

The Best Places to Work in Idaho is a community of organizations working together to identify, recognize and inform Idaho employers about Idaho's best employment practices, using a data-driven process. This community is composed of Idaho universities, chambers of commerce, Idaho chapters of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), and is organized by POPULUS.

Mountain America Credit Union has more than $5.1 billion in assets and serves more than 575,000 members, wherever they are, through online and mobile banking, 86 branches in five states and access to more than 30,000 ATMs and 5,000 shared-branching locations nationwide. With roots dating back to the 1930s, Mountain America offers a variety of financial products and services for consumers and businesses, including savings accounts, auto loans, checking accounts, mortgage loans, business checking, student loans, SBA loans and retirement options. Visit www.macu.com for more information.

Media Contact:

Angie Nelson

Mountain America Credit Union

208-493-0131

Email contact


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Latino voters could play a crucial role in this year's presidential election, and the results of a new analysis point to a spike in Latino turnout in 2016. According to the NALEO Educational Fund analysis, more than 13.1 million Latinos are expected to cast ballots this year. The prediction would reflect a 17 percent jump in turnout and an 8.7 percent increase in the Latino share of the vote compared to 2012. Approximately 11.2 million Latinos voted in 2012, reflecting an increase of 1.4 million voters or 15 percent from 2008. A jump in Latino turnout could be bad news for Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump if he manages to win the GOP nomination. Many Latinos are expected to vote against Trump due to his inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants and his calls for the construction of a wall on the Southern border. 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.
DUBLIN, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Global Three-Phase Separator Market in Oil and Gas Industry 2016-2020" report to their offering.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO )



The global three-phase separator market in the oil and gas industry to grow at a CAGR of 1.25% during the period 2016-2020.

The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global three-phase separator market in the oil and gas industry for 2016-2020. The report also presents the vendor landscape and a corresponding detailed analysis of the top five vendors operating in the market. The vendors included in the report are component manufacturers and suppliers. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.

Crude oil is of two types: sweet crude oil and sour crude oil. Sweet crude is also referred to as light crude while sour crude is referred to as heavy crude.



Based on composition, sweet or sour crude oil needs to be refined using different methods and technologies. At the time of production, crude oil stream consists of three-phase s, solid, liquid, and gas. For transportation of crude oil, it is necessary to separate these phases.

Three-phase separator vendors are conducting R&D to reduce the equipment's cost and improve its efficiency. The overall efficiency of three-phase separators is highly dependent upon the nature of the inlet devices. A variety of inlet devices with different working mechanisms are available. Their performances differ from each other in efficiency and complexity. A good inlet device separates the bulk liquid with minimum creation or shattering of droplets, reduces the inlet momentum, and creates good vapor distribution.



According to the report, the refineries can now procure cheaper oil and sell the refined petroleum products at higher margins. To reduce operational costs, integrated oil and gas companies are adopting cost-effective technologies to become lean and survive the oil price turmoil. One of the areas to reduce cost is to shift the oil and gas separation to the beginning of the value chain, just after its extraction.



Further, the report states that fluctuation in crude oil prices is one of the major challenges faced by the market.



Key vendors



- Alfa Laval Corporate AB

- FMC Technologies

- Frames Group

- Halliburton

- MI Swaco



Other prominent vendors



- ACS Manufacturing

- ASCOM

- Burgess Manning

- Cameron

- Exterran



Key Topics Covered:



Part 01: Executive summary



Part 02: Scope of the report



Part 03: Market research methodology



Part 04: Introduction



Part 05: Market landscape



Part 06: Market segmentation by end-user



Part 07: Market segmentation by type



Part 08: Geographical segmentation



Part 09: Market drivers



Part 10: Impact of drivers



Part 11: Market challenges



Part 12: Impact of drivers and challenges



Part 13: Market trends



Part 14: Vendor landscape



Part 15: Key vendor analysis



For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/7skd3d/global



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


VANCOUVER, BC--(Marketwired - April 28, 2016) -THEMAC Resources Group Limited (TSX VENTURE: MAC) ("THEMAC" or the "Company") announces that it has entered into a letter of intent effective as at 26 April, 2016 (the "LOI") with Yunnan Haliliya Nonferrous Metal Import and Export Co. Ltd. ("Yunnan Haliliya"). The LOI is the first step towards establishing a framework for investment by Yunnan Haliliya in the Company's wholly owned subsidiary, New Mexico Copper Corporation ("NMCC"), through which the Company holds a 100% interest in the Copper Flat project in New Mexico (the "Project"). The LOI sets out Yunnan Haliliya's expression of interest in making an initial investment of USD$6 million to acquire a 6.85% interest in NMCC or the Project. The Company will use the funds from the initial investment to advance the permitting at Copper Flat and initial work on the development of the Project. Yunnan Haliliya has also expressed an interest in providing a further investment to assist in funding the construction and development of the mine and processing plant at the Project. The terms of that additional investment have not yet been determined.

The letter of intent provides that Yunnan Haliliya will have 120 days to (i) conduct due diligence in respect of the project, (ii) to conduct and prepare, in consultation with NMCC, an economic study on the Project at various production rates (the "Study"), and (iii) negotiate a definitive agreement for the initial investment in the project (the "Definitive Agreement"). The costs of the due diligence and the Study will be to the account of Yunnan Haliliya. Execution of the Definitive Agreement is subject to each party being satisfied with the results of the economic study, and to the negotiation of terms satisfactory to each party.

The LOI contemplates that the Definitive Agreement will provide for investment through the Company's wholly owned subsidiary, New Mexico Copper Corporation ("NMCC"). It will be a term of the Definitive Agreement (if concluded) that Yunnan Halilaya will have the ability to invest USD$6 million to acquire a 6.85% interest in NMCC. The parties have also agreed that they will discuss the terms on which Yunnan Haliliya may be able to increase their interest in NMCC to 51%. The terms of this additional investment have not yet been agreed upon and the decision to sell an additional stake to take Yunnan Haliliya to a 51% interest in NMCC is subject to the ultimate consent of THEMAC.

There is no guarantee that a Definitive Agreement will be concluded, or that Yunnan Haliliya will make any investment in NMCC or the Project.

Moelis & Company is advising THEMAC and NMCC in relation to this investment.

About THEMAC Resources Group Limited

THEMAC is a copper development company with a strong management team and as of May 18, 2011, a 100% ownership interest in the Copper Flat copper-molybdenum-gold-silver project in New Mexico, USA. We are continuing to advance the closed copper mine, Copper Flat, in Sierra County, New Mexico toward production with innovation and a sustainable approach to mining development and production, local economic opportunities, and the best reclamation practices for our unique environment. The Company is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (ticker: MAC) and has issued share capital of 79,400,122 common shares (fully diluted share capital 89,252,316).

For more information please visit www.themacresourcesgroup.com or review the Company's filings on SEDAR (www.sedar.com).

For further information contact:



THEMAC Resources Group Limited

Andrew Maloney

Chief Executive Officer

Phone: +1 505.382.5770

www.themacresourcesgroup.com
DUBLIN, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "2016 Africa Healthcare Industry Outlook" report to their offering.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160330/349511LOGO )



Africa is experiencing a plethora of changes in the healthcare segment. From being the market of imports and low-value manufacturing, the continent is transforming into a region of tailor-made medical equipment that is compatible with telemedicine solutions.



There is an increase in the in-country production of pharmaceuticals, smart phone applications for monitoring vitals, point-of-care healthcare equipment, and medical equipment that runs on solar power. These innovative solutions are discussed in the study to indicate the expected trends in Africa in 2016. These trends may further pave the way for an improvement in Africa's healthcare scenario in the coming years.



Key Predictions:

- In 2016, many pharmaceutical drugs will be specially designed for Africa, thereby opening many business possibilities.

- Public-Private partnerships will offer free information, diagnosis, and treatment to many in 2016.



Key Topics Covered:



1. Executive Summary

- Research Scope

- Key 2016 Healthcare Market Predictions for Africa

- Africa's Healthcare Revenues by Sector in 2015 and 2016



2. Total Africa Healthcare Industry Outlook for 2016

- Key 2016 Healthcare Market Predictions for Africa

- Top Healthcare Market Predictions for 2016-Africa

- 2016 Predictions-Africa



3. Industry Sector Outlook

- Africa's Healthcare Revenues by Sector in 2015 and 2016

- 2016 Market Snapshot-Pharmaceuticals

- 2016 Market Snapshot-Medical Devices

- 2016 Market Snapshot-Patient Monitoring

- 2016 Market Snapshot-Medical Imaging Equipment

- 2016 Market Snapshot-In Vitro Diagnostics (IVD)

- 2016 Market Snapshot-Healthcare IT



4. 2016 Key Trends Watch

- Key 2016 Pharmaceutical Trends

- Top Pharmaceutical Trends for 2016

- Key 2016 Medical Technology Trends

- Top Medical Technology Trends for 2016

- Key 2016 Healthcare IT Trends

- Top Healthcare IT Trends for 2016

- Key 2016 Business Trends

- Top Business Trends for 2016

- Key 2016 Care Delivery Trends

- Top Care Delivery Trends for 2016



5. Key Conclusions

- Concluding Thoughts

- Legal Disclaimer



6. Appendix

- Market Engineering Methodology

- Learn More-Next Steps



Companies Mentioned



- Cipla

- Johnson & Johnson

- Merck



For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/6nc6np/2016_africa



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


TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Prism Medical Ltd., ("Prism Medical" or "the Company") (TSX VENTURE: PM), a leading provider of durable medical equipment and related services to the mobility challenged, today reported financial results for the first quarter (Q1) ended February 29, 2016.

Highlights for the three months ending February 29, 2016 compared to three months ended February 28, 2015:

-- Revenues of $14.7 Million, up $2.5 Million or 20% -- Gross Margin of $6.0 Million, up $1.35 Million or 29% -- Adjusted EBITDA(1) of $1.5 Million, up $0.25 Million or 20%

Chief Executive's message:

Ross Scavuzzo, Chief Executive Officer stated "We are pleased with the sales growth in all facets of our Canadian operations. Further positive results should result from the previously announced acquisition of our distributors business in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta which is expected to close May 31, 2016. Our USA Homecare and company owned dealer segments achieved above average sales growth.

The Company intends to grow sales and profitability and provide a reasonable return on shareholders' equity with a focus on the North American market. The Company believes that performance will be positively affected by a continued North American institutional and homecare demand for our products, improved manufacturing efficiencies, greater geographic coverage, and revenues and profits from new product introductions.

During the past year the Company's North American operations have materially improved, driven by the additions of quality people and new customers and products. Management believes that there are significant growth opportunities within the expanding North American health care industry both through organic growth and acquisitions that offer the potential to significantly increase shareholder value, while remaining consistent with Prism Medical's key growth strategies of vertical integration, product diversification and the application of relevant knowledge by its services oriented personnel. The 2015 focus on building a strong foundation for growth will continue in 2016 and be sustained by greater positive growth in profits.

The demand for our core products and services, in management's estimation, continues to experience growth at different rates in the geographic markets in which we participate. Government funding for our products in Canada is a key driver of sales. Although government policies related to healthcare in the markets we operate continue to change, we believe that the long term trend for our product solutions will be favourable.

Management believes that the US market holds the greatest long-term potential to provide above-average revenue growth both in the institutional and home care markets. Budget constraints and the cyclical nature of the institutional order causes variability in USA revenue pipeline, which mask our efforts to gain market share.

While the Company has no formal policy on dividend payments and the Board of Directors determines the suitability of such payments on a quarterly basis, the Company views dividend payments as an important part of its investor strategy and expects to continue its historical pattern of four dividend payments per fiscal year.

Financial Results for First Quarter (Q1) ended February 29, 2016:

Three months ended February 29/28 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Expressed in thousands of Canadian dollars except for earnings per share and where 2016 2015 otherwise noted) $ $ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revenues 14,678 12,181 Gross margin 6,023 4,677 (as % of revenues) 41.0% 38.4% Net income (loss) 57 402 (as % of revenues) 0.4% 3.3% Non-IFRS Adjusted EBITDA 1,515 1,262 (as % of revenues) 10.3% 10.4% Basic earnings per share From continuing operations 0.01 0.08 Diluted earnings per share From continuing operations 0.01 0.08 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- As at February As at November 29, 2016 30, 2015 $ $ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total Assets 51,974 51,001 Total Liabilities 23,177 26,969 Cash and Cash Equivalents 941 600 Bank indebtedness 4,158 3,236 Long Term Debt 11,861 12,325 Shareholders' Equity 24,503 24,032 Common Shares (In thousands) 4,939 4,939 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dividend Declaration

On April 27, 2016, the Board of Directors approved the payment of $0.125 per common share to shareholders of record on May 13, 2016 to be paid on June 3, 2016. This is an eligible dividend within the Income Tax Act.

About Prism Medical Ltd.

Prism Medical is a vertically integrated manufacturer and leading provider of equipment and services used to move and handle mobility challenged individuals in a safe and dignified manner. Prism Medical's products are marketed under the brand names of Prism Medical, ErgoSafe, Waverly Glen and Nightingale in the homecare, acute care and long-term care markets throughout North America. The Company offers solutions that encourage improved care, quality of life and mobility, while seeking to lower the overall cost of the caregiving function in a number of ways, including reducing the incidence of handling-related injuries among caregivers. In addition, the Company through its network of Nightingale dealers provides an integrated suite of products and services that make home care a viable option for many people. For further information visit Prism Medical's website at www.prismmedicalltd.com or www.sedar.com.

Non-IFRS Financial Measures

Management uses Non-IFRS measures described herein to assess operating performance, to provide more meaningful period-to-period comparisons of operating results and provide investors understanding of core business operations.

We believe the non-IFRS measures presented herein are useful to investors as they enable investors to evaluate and compare our results by excluding specific items that we do not consider to reflective of our ongoing operating results largely from management's determination that the facts and circumstances surrounding the excluded charges or recoveries are not indicative of the ordinary course of the ongoing operations of our business.

We believe investors use both IFRS and non-IFRS measures to assess operations and financial results. Starting in Q1 2016, management determined that the definition of Non-IFRS Adjusted EBITDA would be revised and Pro-forma Adjusted EBITDA would no longer be disclosed. The newly revised definition of Non-IFRS Adjusted EBITDA now excludes the following items from IFRS Net Income (loss), where applicable: Amortization and depreciation, interest expense, income tax expense (recovery), stock-based compensation expense, gains or losses from discontinued operations (including gains or losses on the sale of business), foreign exchange gains or losses, restructuring costs, qualifying strategic initiatives, and acquisition and integration costs. We believe these costs are not directly related to ongoing operating results and do not reflect expected future operating expenses after completion of these activities.

Acquisition and integration costs may include the cost of legal, due diligence, external consultant and other costs relating to acquisitions and their integration into the Company within one year of the date of acquisition. Strategic initiatives may include various non-recurring activities of the company that contribute to long-term growth and profitability including valuations, system implementations, and market studies. Restructuring is a program planned and controlled by management that materially changes the scope of the business or the manner in which it is conducted. Restructuring costs include charges relating to workforce reductions, site consolidations and costs associated with exiting businesses. Restructuring costs include employee severance and benefit costs, gains, losses or impairments related to owned sites and equipment we no longer use and which are available for sale, impairment of related intangible assets, and costs related to leased sites and equipment we no longer use.

Forward-Looking Information

This document contains forward-looking statements relating to our operations and to the environment in which we operate and our strategy, action plans and investments, which may involve estimates, forecasts and projections. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict and/or are beyond our control. A number of important factors could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements. These factors include those set forth in this report and our other public filings. Consequently, readers should not place any undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this report. Prism Medical is under no obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained herein should material facts change due to new information, future events or other factors. All forward-looking statements attributable to Prism Medical are expressly qualified by these cautionary statements.

The TSX Venture Exchange does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Complete financial statements and management's discussion and analysis for 2015 will be available shortly at www.PrismMedicalLtd.com and Sedar web-site.

(1) See Non-IFRS Financial Measures section

Contacts:

Prism Medical Ltd.

Ross Scavuzzo

Chief Executive Officer

416-260-2145 x.238

rscavuzzo@prismmedicalinc.com

www.PrismMedicalLtd.com




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Teranga Gold Corporation ("Teranga" or the "Company") (TSX: TGZ)(ASX: TGZ) is pleased to announce that it is strengthening its management team and increasing its focus on exploration with the appointments of Paul Chawrun to Chief Operating Officer and David Mallo to Vice President, Exploration.

"These management changes underscore our commitment to achieving operational excellence and exploration success on our large and highly prospective land position on one of the best emerging gold belts in the world," stated Richard Young, President & Chief Executive Officer of Teranga. "Paul and David are senior mining professionals and each has a long track record of success. Together, they will both play a critical role in the growth of our Company in the coming years."

Paul Chawrun - Chief Operating Officer

Paul Chawrun has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer and will be focused on achieving operational excellence at the Company's Sabodala gold mine in Senegal, West Africa. Mr. Chawrun has served as Teranga's Vice President, Technical Services, playing a fundamental role in steering the Company's successful acquisition and integration of the Oromin Joint Venture Group ("OJVG") property, the development of the high-grade Gora satellite deposit, and driving several high-return organic growth initiatives including a plant expansion and heap leaching. Prior to Teranga, Mr. Chawrun held a number of senior management, project development and operations positions at Detour Gold, Dynatec Mining, Suncor Energy and Fording Coal (now part of Teck Resources). Mr. Chawrun holds a B.Sc. Mining Engineering from Queen's University, a B.Sc. Geology from McMaster University, and an MBA from Athabasca University.

David Mallo - Vice President, Exploration

Since its initial public offering in 2010, Teranga has increased its reserve base, through exploration and acquisition, net of production by more than 1 million ounces, or 80 percent. Currently the Company has 2.6 million ounces in reserves with a 13.5-year mine life.

Moving forward the Company is channeling more resources into exploring its large and prospective land package. Leading Teranga's exploration team will be David Mallo, who has been appointed to the newly created position of Vice President, Exploration.

"It is a wonderful opportunity to be back exploring this high potential property on a world-class gold belt," stated David Mallo. "I was thrilled when Teranga asked me to do some consulting work starting earlier this year and I am even more excited to join the team on a full-time basis. While I have only been back a short time, I am very encouraged by what I am seeing both on the expanded mine license and on the large regional land package."

Added Mr. Young, "With his intimate knowledge of our property, David Mallo is the natural choice to lead our exploration team."

Mr. Mallo holds a Bachelor of Science (Specialist) degree from Brandon University and has over 35 years of mineral exploration experience predominantly in project evaluation and management of exploration programs. As Manager-Advanced Projects with Prime Explorations Ltd., Mr. Mallo was an integral part of the acquisition, discovery, and exploration management team at the world-class Eskay Creek gold deposit in northern British Columbia. As Executive Vice President of Exploration for Adrian Resources Ltd., Mr. Mallo managed all aspects of the extensive exploration programs through feasibility at the world-class Petaquilla copper-gold property in Panama.

More recently, Mr. Mallo was the Vice President of Exploration for Oromin Explorations Ltd. at the OJVG Gold Project in Senegal, West Africa. In this capacity, he was responsible for designing, implementing and managing all aspects of the advanced exploration campaigns from the 2004 inception of the OJVG Gold Project through feasibility and merger with Teranga in 2013. While managing the exploration programs for Oromin, the OJVG Gold Project progressed from a grassroots property to a viable multi-million-ounce gold property hosting numerous gold deposit discoveries, including Teranga's currently operating Masato and Golouma deposits.

About Teranga Gold

Teranga is a Canadian-based gold company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: TGZ) and Australian Securities Exchange (ASX: TGZ). Teranga is principally engaged in the production and sale of gold, as well as related activities such as exploration and mine development in Senegal, West Africa.

Teranga's mission is to create value for all of its stakeholders through responsible mining. Its vision is to explore, discover and develop gold mines in Senegal and West Africa, in accordance with the highest international standards, and to be a catalyst for sustainable economic, environmental and community development. All of its actions from exploration, through development, operations and closure will be based on the best available techniques. For more information, please refer to www.terangagold.com.

Contacts:

Teranga Gold Corporation

Richard Young

President & CEO

+1 416-594-0000

ryoung@terangagold.com



Teranga Gold Corporation

Trish Moran

Head of Investor Relations

+1 416-607-4507

tmoran@terangagold.com

www.terangagold.com




LOS ANGELES, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- Spark Networks, Inc. (NYSE MKT: LOV) announced today that it has changed the release of its first quarter 2016 financial results to Monday, May 16, 2016, following the close of the financial markets. The Company will host a conference call at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time to discuss the quarterly financial results with the investment community.

Call Title: Spark Networks First Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call

Toll-Free (United States): 1-877-705-6003

International: 1-201-493-6725

In addition, the Company will host a webcast of the call which will be accessible in the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at www.spark.net or by clicking http://investor.spark.net.

A replay will begin approximately three hours after completion of the call and run until May 30, 2016.

Replay

Toll-Free (United States): 1-877-870-5176

International: 1-858-384-5517

Passcode: 13635185

About Spark Networks, Inc.:

Spark Networks is a leader in creating iconic, niche-focused brands and communities that help individuals form life-long relationships with others that share their interests and values. Our core properties, JDate.com (www.jdate.com) and ChristianMingle.com (www.christianmingle.com), are communities geared towards singles of the Christian and Jewish faiths.
WEST CHESTER, OH -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- AK Steel Holding Corporation (NYSE: AKS) ("AK Holding" or the "company"), the parent company of AK Steel Corporation ("AK Steel"), announced that it has commenced a registered offering of 52,000,000 shares of its common stock. In connection with this offering, AK Holding has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 7,800,000 shares of common stock. AK Holding intends to use the net proceeds from the sale of the common stock to repay outstanding borrowings under AK Steel's $1.5 billion asset-based revolving credit facility. The offering is being made pursuant to an effective shelf registration statement on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC").

Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Goldman, Sachs & Co., BofA Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank Securities, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo Securities are acting as joint book-running managers. The co-managers for the offering are BTIG, Fifth Third Securities, ING, PNC Capital Markets LLC and Regions Securities LLC.

AK Holding, along with certain of its subsidiaries, has filed a registration statement (including a prospectus) with the SEC relating to the offering. The offering may be made only by means of a prospectus supplement and the accompanying prospectus. Before you invest, you should read the prospectus supplement and accompanying prospectus and other documents AK Holding has filed with the SEC for more complete information about AK Holding and the offering. You may review electronic copies of these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC Web site at www.sec.gov.

Alternatively, any underwriter or any dealer participating in the offering will arrange to send you the prospectus supplement and accompanying prospectus if you request them by contacting: Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, One Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010, telephone: 1-800-221-1037, or email: newyork.prospectus@credit-suisse.com; Citigroup, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717 or telephone: 1-800-831-9146; Goldman, Sachs & Co., Attn: Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, telephone: 1-866-471-2526, facsimile: 212-902-9316, or email prospectus-ny@ny.email.gs.com; BofA Merrill Lynch, 222 Broadway, New York, NY 10038, Attn: Prospectus Department, email: dg.prospectus_requests@baml.com; Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Attention: Prospectus Group, 60 Wall Street, New York, NY 10005-2836, telephone: 1-800-503-4611, or email prospectus.cpdg@db.com; J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Attention: Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, telephone: 1-866-803-9204; or Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Attention: Equity Syndicate Department, 375 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10152, telephone: 1-800-326-5897, or email: cmclientsupport@wellsfargo.com.

This announcement does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy the common stock in the offering, nor shall there be any sale of such common stock in any state in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements the company made or incorporated by reference in this release, or made in other documents furnished to or filed with the Securities Exchange Commission, as well as in press releases or in oral presentations made by company employees, reflect management's estimates and beliefs and are intended to be "forward-looking statements" identified in the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "expects," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "plans," "estimates" and other similar references to future periods typically identify forward-looking statements. The company cautions readers that forward-looking statements reflect the company's current beliefs and judgments, but are not guarantees of future performance or outcomes. They are based on a number of assumptions and estimates that are inherently affected by economic, competitive, regulatory, and operational risks, uncertainties and contingencies that are beyond the company's control, and upon assumptions about future business decisions and conditions that may change.

Forward-looking statements are only predictions and involve risks and uncertainties, resulting in the possibility that actual events or performance will differ materially from such predictions as a result of certain risk factors, including reduced selling prices, shipments and profits associated with a highly competitive and cyclical industry; increased global steel production and imports; changes in the cost of raw materials and energy; the company's significant amount of debt and other obligations; severe financial hardship or bankruptcy of one or more of the company's major customers or key suppliers; reduced demand in key product markets due to competition from aluminum or other alternatives to steel; excess inventory of raw materials; supply chain disruptions or poor quality of raw materials; production disruption or reduced production levels; the company's healthcare and pension obligations; not reaching new labor agreements on a timely basis; major litigation, arbitrations, environmental issues and other contingencies; regulatory compliance and changes; climate change and greenhouse gas emission limitations; financial, credit, capital and banking markets; derivative contracts to hedge commodity pricing volatility; potential permanent idling of facilities; inability to fully realize benefits of margin enhancement initiatives; information technology security threats and cybercrime; as well as those risks and uncertainties discussed in more detail in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015 and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2016, as updated in subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As such, the company cautions readers not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only to the company's plans, assumptions and expectations as of the date hereof. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, except as required by law.

AK Steel

AK Steel is a world leader in the production of flat-rolled carbon, stainless and electrical steel products, primarily for automotive, infrastructure and manufacturing, construction and electrical power generation and distribution markets. Headquartered in West Chester, Ohio (Greater Cincinnati), the company employs approximately 8,500 men and women at eight steel plants, two coke plants and two tube manufacturing plants across six states: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Contacts:

Media

Lisa H. Jester

Corporate Manager, Communications and Public Relations

(513) 425-2510



Investors

Douglas O. Mitterholzer

General Manager, Investor Relations

(513) 425-5215




CALGARY, ALBERTA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- The Board of Directors of TransAlta Renewables Inc. ("TransAlta Renewables" or the "Company") (TSX: RNW) today declared monthly dividends of $0.07333 per share for holders of record on June 1, 2016, July 4, 2016 and August 2, 2016 payable on each of June 30, 2016, July 29, 2016 and August 31, 2016, respectively.

In addition, the Annual Meeting of Shareholders (the "Meeting") of TransAlta Renewables was held on April 28, 2016 in Calgary, Alberta. A total of 185,059,164 common and class B shares, representing 73.96% of the Company's outstanding voting shares, were represented in person and by proxy at the Meeting.

The following resolutions were approved by shareholders:

1. Election of Directors

The six director nominees were elected by a show of hands. Proxies were received as follows:

Nominee Votes For Percent Withheld Percent David W. Drinkwater 184,058,221 99.46% 996,943 0.54% Brett M. Gellner 172,451,600 93.19% 12,603,564 6.81% Allen R. Hagerman 184,069,160 99.47% 986,004 0.53% Cynthia Johnston 173,097,064 93.54% 11,958,100 6.46% Kathryn B. McQuade 184,786,742 99.85% 268,422 0.15% Paul H.E. Taylor 172,369,563 93.14% 12,685,601 6.86%

2. Appointment of Auditors

The Appointment of Ernst & Young LLP to serve as the independent auditors for 2016 was approved by a show of hands. Proxies were received as follows:

Votes For Percent Withheld Percent 184,374,612 99.63% 680,552 0.37%

All currency is expressed in Canadian dollars.

About TransAlta Renewables Inc.

TransAlta Renewables is among the largest of any publicly traded renewable independent power producers ("IPP") in Canada. Our asset platform and economic interests are diversified in terms of geography, generation and counterparties and consists of interests in 18 wind facilities, 13 hydroelectric facilities, eight natural gas generation facilities (including one currently under construction) and one natural gas pipeline, representing an ownership interest of 2,441 MW of net generating capacity, located in the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, the State of Wyoming and the State of Western Australia. Our objectives are to (i) create stable, consistent returns for investors through the ownership of, and investment in, highly contracted renewable and natural gas power generation and other infrastructure assets that provide stable cash flow primarily through long-term contracts with strong counterparties; (ii) pursue and capitalize on strategic growth opportunities in the renewable and natural gas power generation and other infrastructure sectors; (iii) maintain diversity in terms of geography, generation and counterparties; and (iv) pay out 80 to 85 per cent of cash available for distribution to the shareholders of the Company on an annual basis.

Contacts:

Investor Inquiries:

Jaeson Jaman

Manager, Investor Relations

Phone: 1-800-387-3598 in Canada and U.S.

Email: investor_relations@transalta.com



Media Inquiries:

Stacey Hatcher

Manager, Communications

Phone: Toll-free media number: 1-855-255-9184

Email: ta_media_relations@transalta.com




Changes to net metering and other aspects of distributed solar policy in the United States are often hard-fought battles. However, few policies have seen as tortured a route to passage as a bill which may be re-considered by the Maine legislature after a veto by Governor Paul LePage (R). LD 1649 would re-write Maine's distributed solar policies. Under the bill PV projects under 250 kW would move a self-consumption model, allowing unlimited customer use of electricity with a rate for excess electricity to the grid to be set by state regulators. For PV projects above 250 kW, it would set a series of auctions under which 129 MW would be procured by 2021. The bill was the result of extensive compromises both inside and outside the state government, and is backed by Natural Resources ...

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) - Synaptics Inc (SYNA) announced a profit for third quarter that retreated from last year. The company said its earnings totaled $46.0 million, or $1.21 per share. This was down from $63.5 million, or $1.65 per share, in last year's third quarter. Analysts had expected the company to earn $1.51 per share, according figures compiled by Thomson Reuters. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. The company said revenue for the quarter fell 15.7% to $402.5 million. This was down from $477.6 million last year. Synaptics Inc earnings at a glance: -Earnings (Q3): $46.0 Mln. vs. $63.5 Mln. last year. -Earnings Decline (Y-o-Y): -27.6% -EPS (Q3): $1.21 vs. $1.65 last year. -EPS Decline (Y-o-Y): -26.7% -Analysts Estimate: $1.51 -Revenue (Q3): $402.5 Mln vs. $477.6 Mln last year. -Revenue Change (Y-o-Y): -15.7% 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.
This press release contains forward-looking statements that reflect management's current expectations, assumptions and estimates of future performance and economic conditions. Such statements are made in reliance upon the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results and future trends to differ materially from those matters expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. Statements about the value or expected value of orders, contracts or programs are forward-looking and involve risk and uncertainties. Harris disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

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.
NEW YORK, NY -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- As the popularity of the French macaron grows, so does Woops! -- the nation's premier macaron franchise. Woops! is pleased to announce that four savvy entrepreneurs from across the country have signed on to become Woops! franchise owners.

The four new Woops! owners will open locations in the Texas cities of Austin and Houston, as well as in northern New Jersey and New York City, where the Woops! proven business model is flourishing. The brand has 22 locations operating in New York City and the Tri-State area.

For Carlos Salinas, who will bring the joy of macarons to a mall in Houston, franchising with Woops! has been a smooth, straightforward experience -- thanks to extensive and ongoing support from the Woops! executive team.

"They've been with me every step of the way as I try to find the best mall for my Woops! kiosk," Salinas said. "Not only are they helping me negotiate the process of signing a lease, but they also answer any questions that come up. I can count on them to support me."

Salinas is already planning on opening a bakeshop location in Dallas, Texas.

"My new dream is to bring the bakeshop experience to Dallas," Salinas said. "When you see the kind of atmosphere the Woops! bakeshop creates for a community and the kind of reception they generate, you know that you've found something truly special. The aesthetics and the overall positivity of the Woops! brand have the potential to be a hit anywhere in the country. I want to only think about macarons from now on."

Woops! is ramping up for a nationwide expansion

"People really do crave our authentic international pastries," said Raj Bhatt, Co-CEO of Woops! "Becoming a Woops! macaron franchise owner means that your community will have a place to pick up those pastries and European-styled coffee.

"Before franchising, we were confident in the success of our business model," Bhatt said. "I know how important it is to have a business model that is easy to manage, is potentially profitable and is scalable. This is what we have developed with Woops!, and we are very excited to roll out our brand across America."

The majority of the Woops! executive team has not only significant experience in growing franchise systems, but they also have been franchise owners. The Woops! business model requires no baking experience -- only the drive to follow its proven systems, manage the business and take care of customers.

"We're actively seeking entrepreneurs who are passionate about bringing the joy of macarons, international pastries and perfectly brewed coffee to their communities," Bhatt said. "With Woops!, entrepreneurs have the luxury of choosing between two proven business models. Our macaron kiosk has the biggest mall chains in America chomping at the bit for us to enter their malls, and our in-line bakeshop is a great fit for entrepreneurs who want a classic European cafe experience designed for the American sensibility."

Woops! has prime locations available in Ohio, Texas, Florida and Arizona and is actively targeting the cities of Denver, Colorado; Boston, Massachusetts; and Atlanta, Georgia.

Low investment for high potential rewards

Woops! is uniquely poised to capture a sizable share of the $310 billion American baking industry and rapidly expand across the country.

With starting costs at $52,000 for a macaron kiosk and $168,500 for an in-line bakeshop, Woops! offers investors a low initial investment with a high potential return: the brand's in-line bakeshops generated average sales of $62,000 a month in 2014, and its average kiosk generated $252,000 in sales in the same year.

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Contact

Ellie Lippel

Vice President of Marketing and Business Development

ellie@bywoops.com

866-339-7194




VANCOUVER, April 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Capstone Mining Corp. ("Capstone") (TSX: CS) today announced the voting results from its 2016 Annual General Meeting held Wednesday, April 27, 2016 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

A total of 246,256,131 common shares were voted at the meeting, representing 63.65% of the votes attached to all outstanding common shares. Shareholders voted in favour of all items of business before the meeting, including the election of all director nominees listed in the information circular for the meeting as follows:

Director % of Votes in Favour % of Votes Withheld Lawrence I. Bell 65.17 34.83 George L. Brack 65.06 34.94 Chantal Gosselin 99.68 0.32 Soon Jin Kwon 99.75 0.25 Kalidas V. Madhavpeddi 99.33 0.67 Dale C. Peniuk 65.55 34.45 Darren M. Pylot 99.73 0.27 Richard N. Zimmer 99.68 0.32

The resolution to set the number of directors at eight was approved by 79.69% of the votes cast for the resolution. Deloitte LLP, Chartered Professional Accountants were reappointed Capstone's auditors for the ensuing year.

Detailed voting results for the 2016 Annual General Meeting are available on SEDAR atwww.sedar.com.

About Capstone Mining Corp.

Capstone Mining Corp. is a Canadian base metals mining company, focused on copper. We are committed to the responsible development of our assets and the environments in which we operate. Our three producing mines are the Pinto Valley copper mine located in Arizona, US, the Cozamin copper-silver mine in Zacatecas State, Mexico and the Minto copper mine in Yukon, Canada. In addition, Capstone has two development projects; the large scale 70% owned copper-iron Santo Domingo project in Region III, Chile, in partnership with Korea Resources Corporation, and the 100% owned Kutcho copper-zinc project in British Columbia, Canada, as well as exploration properties in Chile and US. Capstone's strategy is to continue to extend the lives of our current mines with mineral resource and reserve expansions, maintain the optionality on the Santo Domingo development project, prudently progress the exploration portfolio and grow through acquisitions in politically stable, mining-friendly regions. We will pace our growth with our financial capacity, to retain, as a priority, sufficient financial flexibility to meet the requirements of our existing operations and our committed development projects, while maintaining an adequate cushion to deal with market volatility and operating risks inherent in the mining industry. Our headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and we are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Further information is available at www.capstonemining.com.

Cindy Burnett, VP, Investor Relations and Communications, +1-604-637-8157, cburnett@capstonemining.com
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 04/28/16 -- First Bauxite Corporation ("First Bauxite" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: FBX)(FRANKFURT: FBI)(BERLIN: FBI) is pleased to announce that it has filed its audited year-end financial statements and management's discussion and analysis for the 15 months ended December 31, 2015. Both are available under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on the Company's website at www.firstbauxite.com.

HIGHLIGHTS

During the 15 months ending December 31, 2015, the Company made significant progress:

-- November 2014. The Government of Guyana ("GoG") granted the Company an extension of the construction commencement date under its Bonasika Mining License from January 31, 2015 to January 31, 2016. -- December 2014. The Company completed a strategic review which significantly changed the 2011 Bankable Feasibility Study Update ("BFSU") project concept with reduced energy, market, technology and resource risks. The revised strategy contemplates: -- Bauxite mining and beneficiation taking place in Guyana. -- Bauxite calcining and sintering taking place in the USA. -- Plant technology revised from the pressurized vertical shaft kiln proposed in the BFSU to a rotary kiln operation. -- Switching market focus from the mature refractory bauxite market to ceramic proppant applications in the oil and gas industry. -- December 2014. The Company announced a $4M convertible note financing with Resource Capital Fund V LP to be used for: -- Completing a feasibility study ("FS") on the changed project concept. -- General working capital. -- June 2015. The company announced positive FS results for the changed project concept, including: -- Verified the financial feasibility of the project. -- Established a reserves life of 29.5 years. -- Generated positive ceramic proppant testwork results with ultra high strength proppants demonstrating superior strength and conductivity compared to competitor products. -- August 2015. The Company filed a NI 43-101 Compliant Technical Report with respect to the FS on the changed project concept. -- October 2015. The Company announced a $15M convertible note financing with Resource Capital Fund VI LP to be used for: -- Initial detailed engineering on the mining and beneficiation plant in Guyana. -- Continuing analysis of the ceramics proppant market. -- Mining of a bulk sample to manufacture large scale ceramic proppant samples for market tests in select oil and gas wells. -- General working capital. -- October 2015. The Company commenced bulk sample mining in Guyana for shipment to an offshore ceramic proppant plant to produce industrial scale volumes of ceramic proppants. -- December 2015. The GoG granted the Company an extension of the construction commencement date under its Bonasika Mining License from January 31, 2016 to January 31, 2018. -- Subsequent to year end, the company restructured all outstanding notes with PRRF and RCF V ($19,873.685) to have a common maturity date August 2017 and common commercial terms.

About First Bauxite

First Bauxite Corporation (TSX VENTURE: FBX) is a Canadian natural resource company engaged in the exploration and development of bauxite deposits in Guyana, South America. The Company has its head office in Toronto and is managed by experienced professionals with worldwide experience in the global industrial minerals industry across a number of industrial minerals. For further information on First Bauxite Corporation, please visit the Company's corporate website at www.firstbauxite.com.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of First Bauxite Corporation

Alan Roughead, President and CEO

Certain statements contained herein constitute "forward-looking statements". Forward-looking statements look into the future and provide an opinion as to the effect of certain events and trends on the business. Forward-looking statements may include words such as "will", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "expects" and similar expressions. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the continued advancement of the Bonasika Project, modifications to the Mineral Agreement, Mining License and Environmental Permit and the Company's development plans. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and entail various risks and uncertainties. Actual results may materially differ from expectations, if known and unknown risks or uncertainties affect the Company's business, or if the Company's estimates or assumptions prove inaccurate. Factors that could cause results or events to differ materially from current expectations expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, include, but are not limited to, effect of capital market conditions and other factors on capital availability, availability of sufficient financing to fund planned or further required work in a timely manner and on acceptable terms, continuing support of the Government of Guyana for the Bonasika Project; execution of the Company's existing plans as budgeted, including development programs for the Bonasika Project, which may change due to changes in the views of the Company or if new information arises which makes it prudent to change such budget, plans or programs, including the results of future trials and testwork or any inability to reproduce test results on a commercial scale or in the field, and other risks affecting the Company or the mining industry more fully described in the Company's continuous disclosure documents, which are available under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements contained in this press release. Except as required by law, the Company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or any other reason.

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:

First Bauxite Corporation

Alan Roughead

President and CEO

416-613-0910

www.firstbauxite.com




Evident.io, a Dublin, CA-based provider of cloud infrastructure security and compliance automation solution, completed $15.7M in Series B funding.

The round was led by Venrock. In conjunction with the funding, Doug Dooley of Venrock will join the Evident.io Board of Directors, which already includes Bain Capitals managing director and former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem, and True Ventures partner Puneet Agarwal.

The company intends to use the funds to expand its offering beyond Amazon Web Services (AWS) to include other cloud provider platforms, as well as develop new capabilities.

Led by Tim Prendergast, cofounder and CEO, and Justin Lundy, cofounder and CTO, Evident.io provides a security and compliance automation platform for public cloud. The Evident Security Platform (ESP) continuously monitors an organizations entire AWS footprint, identifying and assessing security risks, providing security staff with expert remediation guidance, and enabling security auditing and compliance reporting. Built on Amazon Web Services APIs, ESP is agent-less and can be deployed any environment in minutes.

In addition to the funding, veteran security executive Jeff Williams, Operating Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, joined the companys executive team as interim Senior Vice President of Sales to lead sales strategy and execution globally.

FinSMEs

28/04/2016
Remitly, a Seattle, Washington-based independent digital money transmitter in the United States, closed a $38.5m Series C funding round.

The round was led by Stripes Group with participation from Vulcan Capital, both new investors,with participation from existing investors DFJ, DN Capital, Bezos Expeditions and Trilogy Equity Partners, among others. In conjunction with the funding, Stripes Group partner Ron Shah will join Remitlys board of directors.

The company will use the new capital to grow the team and continue the global expansion.

Led by CEO Matt Oppenheimer, Remitly is a mobile payments service that enables consumers to make person-to-person international money transfers from the United States and Canada. The Techstars company is a licensed money transmitter currently operating in 49 states and Washington, D.C.

Remitly, which has additional offices in the Philippines, has built a proprietary network of banks and cash pickup locations to deliver funds securely overseas as well as a core remittance platform that offers the ability to deliver on promises to customers residing in the largest remittance markets.

FinSMEs

28/04/2016
Trifacta, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of data wrangling software that enables non-technical users to transform data for analysis, received an investment from Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a provider of consulting, technology, outsourcing and next-generation services.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

As part of this investment, Trifacta will provide a data wrangling solution for the Infosys Information Platform (IIP) and Infosys other platforms and offerings.

Led by Adam Wilson, CEO, Trifacta provides a data wrangling solution for exploratory analytics, which aims to enhance the value of an enterprises big data by enabling users to transform and enrich raw, complex data into clean and structured formats for analysis.

The company is also backed by Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and Ignition Partners.

FinSMEs

28/04/2016
On Thursday, staff and parents of students at Chippewa Falls Area Unified School District received a letter from Jeffrey Holmes, Superintendent about active shooter swatting calls taking place at multiple school districts across the state. Swatting calls are hoax reports of threats made to police which insight panic.

Police say similar types of false threats have occurred at multiple schools across the state Thursday. These threats included 911 calls to police across the state claiming that schools had an active shooter.
New Delhi: The hearing on pleas seeking cancellation of interim bail granted to JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar on 28 April witnessed a confrontation between the AAP government and Delhi Police in the Delhi High Court over the issue of representing the state. There are two petitions seeking cancellation of Kanhaiya Kumar's bail.

One petition sought direction for initiation of perjury proceedings against the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) president for allegedly filing a false affidavit to obtain bail. Another petitioner sought cancellation of the bail on the ground that his speeches subsequent to his release were "anti-national" which violated the bail conditions.

During the hearing before a bench of Justice PS Teji, Delhi government's senior standing counsel Rahul Mehra objected to the presence of advocates Shailendra Babbar and Anil Soni, who were appointed as special public prosecutors (SPPs) for representing the Delhi Police in the matter.

"I am objecting to their presence," Mehra told the bench after which Babbar said they have been appointed as SPPs by the Lieutenant Governor to represent police in the matter.

The court, however, directed both of them to file their replies within four weeks on the pleas seeking cancellation of interim bail granted to Kanhaiya for allegedly violating bail conditions.

"Say whatever you both want to say in your replies. I want everything in black and white," the court said.

"It would be in the interest of justice that replies be filed by both Rahul Mehra and Shailendra Babbar within four weeks," the court said and fixed the matter for hearing on 19 July.

During the hearing, Mehra told the bench that the petitioners have to first satisfy the court about their locus in filing such petition.

After Mehra raised the issue of locus of the petitioners, the bench said, "Let us have the replies first. Whatever you

want to say, say in your replies."

"These objections (raised by Mehra on the locus of petitioners and presence of SPPs appearing for the police) cannot be entertained orally," the bench said.

AAP government had earlier told the court that there was no violation of any bail condition by the student leader. The police had earlier said that it cannot comment on the pleas seeking cancellation of interim bail granted to Kanhaiya without verifying facts and they were investigating whether any bail condition was violated.

Separate pleas have been filed in the high court seeking cancellation of interim bail to Kanhaiya on the ground that his speech after his release from Tihar Jail here in March was "anti-national" and he had violated the bail conditions.

Besides seeking cancellation of interim bail, one of the petitioners has moved another plea for initiation of perjury proceedings against Kanhaiya alleging that he had "deliberately and willfully filed a false affidavit" before the court while securing the relief.

Kanhaiya, who was granted six months interim bail on 2 March by the high court, is facing a sedition charge in connection with an event at JNU on February 9 where anti-national slogans were allegedly raised and Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru was hailed as a 'martyr'.

with inputs from Agencies
Gandhinagar: The Gujarat High Court on Thursday granted permanent bail to three close aides of Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) convenor Hardik Patel in a sedition case.

The court granted bail to Dinesh Bambhania, Chirag Patel and Ketan Patel on the condition of not leaving Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar for the next six months.

A lower court in Ahmedabad had rejected the bail pleas of Dinesh, Chirag and Ketan despite their written assurance to the court that they would not be involved in any sort of activities related to the ongoing pro-quota agitation of Patidars.

Challenging the lower court's order, the pro-quota leaders had filed their bail application before the Gujarat High Court.

On October 21, 2015, the police had arrested Dinesh and Chirag from the Gujarat High Court complex. Later on the same day, the police also nabbed Ketan on similar sedition charges.

The Ahmedabad Crime Branch (ACB) had registered a case against Hardik and his associates under IPC sections 124(A) (sedition), 121 (A) (conspiracy to wage war against the government) and 120 (b) (criminal conspiracy) for their role in the violent stir in which 11 people lost their lives including a police constable.

In another sedition case registered in Surat, a local court there granted bail to Chirag Patel and Vipul Desai on Rs.25,000 bonds.

Advocate of Patel and Desai argued in the court that there were inadequate evidence against Chirag but admitted to the court, as both belong to Surat they would be present before the investigation agencies whenever required in the case.

Meanwhile, jailed PAAS convener Hardik Patel was also presented before a local court in Surat in connection with one of the two sedition cases against him on Thursday.

According to sources, the 22-year-old pro-quota leader was taken to the court complex amid tight security.
Jammu: Describing Revenue Department as "the fulcrum of good governance", Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Wednesday asked the officials to maintain the highest standards of probity and help make the administration public-oriented, accountable and transparent.

She said Public Service Guarantee Act (PSGA) can become a potent tool against the scourge of corruption, provided timelines are adhered to by the Revenue Department under whose ambit most of the services fall.

The Chief Minister made these remarks while chairing a meeting to review the functioning of the Revenue, Relief and Rehabilitation Department.

Mehbooba highlighted the difficulties faced by countless people in obtaining services like income certificate.

On the observation made by the Chief Minister regarding inordinate delay in delivery of most services under PSGA, the Revenue Minister said the department will soon set up a mechanism to fix accountability and pledged to provide most of the services online, once the existing records are scanned and digitised under Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme (DILRMP).

The Chief Minister was also apprised of the status of Jhelum-Tawi Flood Recovery Project (JTFRP), which will be taken up at a cost of Rs 1,500 crore.

JTFRP, supported by the World Bank, proposes reconstruction of critical infrastructure, roads and bridges, urban flood management infrastructure, strengthening of livelihoods, disaster risk management capacity and contingency emergency response.

The Revenue Minister also apprised the Chief Minister about the ex-gratia paid to victims of 2014 floods whose houses were damaged.

While Rs 199.44 crore has been disbursed under SDRF, an amount of Rs 565.69 crore has been given as compensation under PMNRF norms. Under the Prime Minister's Development Plan, an amount of Rs 1,194 crore has been released as assistance for damaged houses.

On the status of rehabilitation package for settlement of 36,384 families of PoK and Chamb displaced persons, the Chief Minister was informed that the central government has sought certain clarifications after which Rs 2,000 crore earmarked under PM's Development Package would be released to the state.

Regarding creation of 3,000 supernumerary posts for Kashmiri migrant youths, the Chief Minister was informed that comments of various administrative departments have been sought so that a comprehensive proposal could be placed before the Cabinet.
New Delhi: Chanting "Bharat Mata ki jai" when asked to, talking about Sanskrit and not eating beef have become the deciding factors to differentiate individuals in the country, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said in New Delhi on Thursday.

Sisodia, who is also the education minister, stressed upon "contradictions" in the country about being in race for

"exclusiveness" and then talking of achieving "inclusiveness".

"I as a politician and a leader, dream for inclusiveness but the problem with inclusiveness is it doesn't give you chance to be exclusive which at present is the foundation stone of our society.

"There are people who forcefully chant Bharat Mata ki jai, there are people who say it from heart. We will consider all those who do not say Bharat Mata ki jai when asked by us as exclusive rest all will be inclusive," he said at a symposium on "Making Delhi an inclusive city".

"Exclusiveness is gained in the country by talking of eating or not eating beef, chanting Vande Mataram. Those who do

not talk of Sanskrit cannot be inclusive," he added.

Confessing that he is often criticised for being only an Education Minister and focusing less on his other portfolios, Sisodia said, "Education is the biggest crime, roadblock in the way of being inclusive. We teach a two and half year old kid to be exclusive by performing well in school. People want more cars, their children to clear civil services exams only in race of being exclusive. This is the biggest contradiction".

"We want to talk about Human Development Index but because we do not want to be political, we will not talk of how many people want to study Sanskrit in IIT or not, issues like beef eating cause clashes. I am sorry to say but until this happens all development reports and Delhi as a city will be on different paradigms," he said.

"Those who want to talk about inclusiveness will have to talk about beef, languages being taught or not taught, political scenario in the country or the political mindset being imposed on the people," he added.

The minister pointed out that one-third of people in Delhi stay in slums while over half of the city's population

resides in unauthorised colonies but the development plans are always exclusive and not inclusive.

Asserting that there is no clarity in people's thoughts about development, Sisodia said, "No economics theory says

development means widened roads, big buildings and flyovers. Unless the youth is assured that there are adequate and

affordable arrangements for education there can only be development of the city but not individuals".

"I have not been an educationist but I know that changes in design of education system can only bring inclusiveness. Whenever it comes to government schools, people ask if mid-day meals are being served on time, uniforms being distributed or washrooms are in proper shape or not.

"But no body focuses on why the standard of learning is low in schools which have all the facilities. I went to a government school recently in Dwarka and I was shocked to see that Class X students were not able to read and write even small and common words properly," he said.

He also said that human development and human resource development are different paradigms.
12:43 (ist)

Manohar Parrikar explains AgustaWestland deal:

"AgustaWestland chopper was 100 cCore. We had to test the helicopters in Indian conditions. The other two vendors didn't agree to do so and conducted the test outside the country. this was against the clause in the country. Out of the 6 vendors who were given tenders, AgustaWestland Italy was also one of the vendors. But AgustaWestland UK took over the tender.

Only AgustaWestland got the concessions. They created a single vendor situation. In 2008, the price oh AW101 was 15 million Euros and oin 2010, it was listed as 27 million. Benchmark cost given by CNC(Contract negotiations committee) was 6 times higher than that of AoN (Acceptance of Necessity) There was no explanation for this.In 2012 February, then the government had written to the embassy through the MEA. The government even went to the investigating agency but nobody wrote to the company. This deal should have stopped in 2012. But yet, 3 helicopters were delivered in December 2012 and we accepted it.

In January 2013, Chief exec of Finmenccancia was arrested, Within hours our defence minister wrote to CBI immediately. If he wasn't arrested, they would not have taken this up.

After the CBI took it up, in Feb 2013, there was a notice issued to stop the deal.

Legal action forced the termination of the deal, it was not a proactive step, it was forced. Bank guarantee needed to be revoked and that was done.

When the Milan Court argued, they said that 166 Euros could be returned and the money for the 3 helicopters will not be returned.

I am not making allegations, but it is our Endeavour that we will take action. Defence Ministry initiating procedure to blacklist AgustaWestland. If that is our job, why is the Congress worried? "
The long legal battle over a contentious political investigation into Gov. Scott Walkers recall campaign is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Three Wisconsin prosecutors on Thursday filed an appeal of the state Supreme Courts decision to halt the so-called John Doe II probe, a matter that has sharply divided conservatives who believe in unfettered political speech and liberals who lament an erosion of the publics ability to know who is influencing elections.

Critics of the state Supreme Court decision say Justices Michael Gableman and David Prosser should have recused themselves from the decision because the same groups under investigation helped elect them. They also say the decision went beyond prior U.S. Supreme Court rulings on coordination and campaign finance laws.

The filing marks the beginning of the next  and possibly final  chapter in a high-stakes political and legal battle that has played out over the past six years mostly in secretive court proceedings.

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, one of the three prosecutors involved, confirmed the case had been filed, but said he was awaiting word that the filing had been received before he could disclose the arguments being made.

Were still trying to operate under the orders of the court, Ozanne said, referring to a controversial secrecy order imposed by a John Doe judge in 2013. Some may not, but we are.

The appeal document is expected to be filed both in its entirety and in a redacted format in keeping with the secrecy orders intent to shield the names of those being investigated from public view.

Coordination

central to case

The case involves coordination between Walkers campaign and supposedly independent groups, based initially on evidence gathered at the tail end of a previous John Doe investigation into Walkers Milwaukee County office that resulted in six convictions of aides and associates, including Rindfleisch.

In the so-called John Doe II, a special prosecutor alleged in court documents that Walker helped raise millions of dollars for the Wisconsin Club for Growth, which in turn distributed it to so-called issue advocacy groups that ran thinly veiled political ads to protect Walker and Republican senators during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections.

The Government Accountability Board previously held that groups coordinating with a campaign committee must register as part of that committee and disclose their contributions, which would be subject to state campaign finance limits. The Wisconsin Club for Growth is a tax-exempt social welfare group that doesnt disclose its donors and is limited in how much it can be involved in political activity.

Evidence collected during the probe found large contributions to the club, including a $700,000 contribution from Gogebic Taconite, which was lobbying for changes in state law to build a large iron mine in northern Wisconsin.

A special prosecutor, appointed by a John Doe judge at the urging of the Government Accountability Board and five district attorneys from both parties, executed dozens of search warrants and subpoenas in September 2013.

That prompted the subjects of the investigation to fight back in court saying their activities were protected First Amendment free speech.

In January 2014, a judge overseeing the probe reversed a previous judges decision to grant the warrants, quashing the evidence collected and halting the probe.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed that decision last July, saying the underlying legal theory was invalid. It later removed the special prosecutor from the case and ordered all evidence be turned over to it for safe keeping. The two Republican district attorneys who were part of the original probe also stepped back from the case.

The petition for Supreme Court review was filed by three Democratic district attorneys  Ozanne, Iowa Countys Larry Nelson and Milwaukee Countys John Chisholm, whose office led the first John Doe and who brought the second John Doe to the Department of Justice. Former Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen referred the case to the GAB.

The investigation was conducted under the states former John Doe law, which allowed the court to order documents be kept under seal and parties involved in the case be barred from speaking about it publicly.

Those under investigation have argued that the gag order deprived them of their First Amendment right to free speech.

Walker and the Legislature changed the John Doe law last fall so that it can no longer be used to investigate alleged political crimes.

1 percent accepted

The U.S. Supreme Court, which currently has a vacancy, had not received and docketed the filing as of Thursday afternoon, a court spokeswoman said.

The court receives between 7,000 and 8,000 applications a year and agrees to hear oral arguments in about 1 percent of them. The court typically acts within six weeks of an application being filed on whether to grant a review. Four of the justices must agree to hear a case.

After that the process can take up to three months as the parties file briefs.

If the court locks 4-4 on a decision then a lower court ruling stands without setting a federal precedent.

President Barack Obama has submitted a nominee to replace former Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February, but the Republican-controlled Senate has refused to consider the nomination before the November election.
Proceedings in Parliament on Thursday were marked by protests over 'unparliamentary' remarks, lessons in pronunciation, poetry sessions, andbelieve it or not some legislative business. The Rajya Sabha passed two significant bills, even as there was another uproar over BJP member Subramanian Swamy's allegations the Congress' first family.

Subramanian Swamy sparks political row...again

Rajya Sabha witnessed angry scenes with the opposition and treasury benches involved in a war of words after Subramanian Swamy mentioned the name of a European nation, a reference later expunged by the chair.

Swamy came in the direct line of fire of Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad who said that the BJP member did not know the difference between "parliamentary and street language". Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien too remarked that Swamy, a known Congress baiter, is "unnecessarily provoking" the opposition.

The commotion started as soon as the upper house met, when Bharatiya Janata Party's Swamy, who raised the opposition's temper on Wednesday with certain references that were later expunged, was on his feet.

Swamy kept standing, which got the Congress members agitated. He made an oblique comment on the party leadership, to which the Congress protested. Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi then said it was wrong to stop any member from speaking.

Panama Papers

For the second day in a row, the controversial Panama papers found an echo in Parliament. While the issue was raised in the Rajya Sabha by the Samajwadi Party on Wednesday, the allegations were debated in Lok Sabha on Thursday by the JD(U).

Kaushalendra Kumar of the party asked the government to make public the names of Indians mentioned in it as it was a case of "tax evasion". Kumar also accused the RBI Governor of making "contradictory" comments on the matter, alleging that he had said some of the money had gone there as per RBI rules.

"I want to tell the government that it should take legal action against these people. Their names should be made public. It is not clear so far how much serious the government is," he said in the Zero Hour, drawing support from some opposition members.

Rohith Vemula

The issue of Dalit student Rohith Vemula's suicide was raised in Parliament in the context of a bill seeking to amend the list of Scheduled Castes in some parts of the country. The opposition, citing the case of Hyderabad student Rohith Vemula, accused the government of not being sincere in working for the interest of the Scheduled Castes. However, the opposition supported "with a sad heart", the government's bill.

"I stand in support of the Bill with a sad heart," JD(U) leader KC Tyagi said as the The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order (Amendment) Bill, 2016, passed by the Lok Sabha, was taken up for discussion.

The proposed legislation seeks to amend the Constitution to include certain castes in the list of Scheduled Sastes (SC) in five states. It was earlier passed in the Lok Sabha. The bill includes certain castes like Sais, Aheria and Peruvannan, in the SC list of states like Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Kerala, Odisha and West Bengal.A

And meanwhile...

AAP leader Bhagwant Mann decided to take the lyrical route to criticising the BJP-led Central government. "Mr Prime Minister, at least speak about it during a foreign tour...Is this what you call achche din?" As Mann launched into an unexpected session of poetry, the Parliament proceedings came to life at the fag end of the day.

Earlier in the day, KC Tyagi poked fun at Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien over his pronunciation of names, saying, "aapne arth ka anarth bana diya." Tyagi pointed that Kurien pronounced Raj Babbar's name as 'Babur, ' and remarked that it could lead the BJP to cook up a storm. Will the BJP really latch on to the 'Babur' gaffe? We will know in the days to come.

With inputs from agencies
India seems to be making a habit of it. First it was Uyghur dissident Dolkun Isa and now it is Lu Jinghua, a well-known Tiananmen activist, who has the indignity of getting her visa cancelled at the last moment. Ray Wong, the co-founder of Hong Kong Indigenous, got similar treatment. All three were headed for the same conference in Dharamshala from 28 April to 1 May.

A meeting with the Dalai Lama was also on the cards for all the activists as this is home to Tibets spiritual leader.

Lu was actually about to board an Air India flight from New York to India, when she was informed that her visa has been cancelled. She was carrying a print of the electronic visa. A shocked Lu tweeted her experience soon after.

Lu Jinghua does not have a red-corner notice against her. Nor, as far as is known, does Ray Wong. So what is it with the Narendra Modi government? Dont those in authority think through the consequences of their actions? Or are they testing the waters to see how far they can go with China?

At his weekly news conference, MEA spokesman Vikas Swarup said he had no details about the denial of visa to Lu Jinghua.

Officials who have bungled have come up with another howler. Sources say that ``visas were not issued to either Lu Jinghua or Ray Wong. So why did the two plan their trip? At least in Lu jinghuas case, she has spoken out. Why should she lie?

Lu Jinghua, according to sources, had submitted documents which were 'illegible' and there were 'inconsistencies' about the purpose of the visit. So it would appear that the print of the visa that she carried before leaving for the airport was a false document. Are the officials now saying that Lu is lying? Lu herself has tweeted that she had received the visa. Ray Wong was not issued a visa because there were 'data inconsistencies in his documents,' the sources said.

Is this a reflection merely of officials bungling, or of an inconsistency in Indias policy? Delhi should have known China would react considering the event was taking place in Dharamsala. China regards the Dalai Lama as enemy number one and calls him a splitist. So facilitating a conference organized by a US-based Citizen Power, and allowing pro-democracy activists to attend from across the world, would be certainly be regarded as a provocation by China.

If India wanted to send a strong message to China, it has certainly not succeeded. Issuing a visa for Isa, who has a red-corner notice against him was foolish in the first place considering that New Delhi has been lecturing the world about consistency on issues of terrorism.

Prime Minister Modis supporters had welcomed the move as an instance of a new confident Indias assertiveness in the face of Chinas constant championing of Pakistan. Many say that even if the visa was later cancelled, India has conveyed its unhappiness. This logic is a bit difficult to comprehend.

According to China watcher Srinath Raghavan at Delhi-based think tank, the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), all this has much to do with the Modi governments desire for a muscular foreign policy. After all the BJP had spent its time in the opposition criticisng the UPA for not being assertive in its policy towards Pakistan and China. So the BJP began with a bang, inviting the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile Lobsang Sangay to Narenda Modis swearing-in ceremony in 2014. ``This was very much in keeping with the tough line in foreign policy that the BJP has always favoured. Issuing visas to Chinese dissidents was an extension of the same policy,  said Raghavan.

While India has offered refuge to the Dalai Lama, it has always maintained that he will not take part in any political or anti-China activities. For China a conference for democracy blessed by the Dalai Lama is certainly not something it will take without a murmur. Delhi possibly realized this too late.

Whether it was the oversight of home ministry officials , or higher-ups in the government were also involved, the move back-fired. It has left the government red faced and reinforced the view that India, despite its ambitions of being a big power player has a long way to go and plenty to learn before flexing its muscles.
Quito: The Chinese has government delivered 60 million yuan (about $9.5 million) worth of humanitarian aid materials to the victims of the deadly April 16 earthquake in Ecuador.

Four planeloads of aid arrived at the Mariscal Sucre International Airport of Quito, the capital of Ecuador on Wednesday, Xinhua news agency reported.

One more cargo plane reach Ecuador on Thursday.

The aid, which consists of 5,400 tents, 9,999 folding beds and other supplies, has been immediately sent to quake-ravaged Manta and will house the homeless for several months.

Ecuador's first vice president of the National Assembly Rossana Alvarado, Defense Minister Ricardo Patino, and Foreign Minister Guillaume Long welcomed the arrival of the Air China cargo planes at the airport.

Chinese Ambassador Wang Yulin said that his country was shocked by the tragedy in Ecuador. Through the delivery of humanitarian aid, China wishes to express its solidarity with the Ecuadorian government and people.

"China and Ecuador are two friendly countries and our two peoples are brothers. At this difficult time, China is with Ecuador and is more than willing to actively participate in the reconstruction of the affected areas," said the Chinese diplomat, hoping that under the leadership of President Rafael Correa, "the Ecuadorian people will overcome the temporary difficulties."

This aid is in addition to the donation of $2 million delivered last week by the Chinese government, along with $100,000 donated by the Red Cross of China.
TRIPOLI At least nine Egyptian migrants and three people smugglers were killed in a money dispute in the town of Bani Walid, a local official said on Wednesday.

The official said a group of Egyptians had killed the Libyan smugglers and tried to drive the bodies away, but they were stopped at a checkpoint when blood was noticed on their car.

A fourth smuggler then went to the police station where the Egyptians were being held, and opened fire on them, he said.

The United Nations mission to Libya said as many as 13 Egyptians had been killed in the incident and called for an investigation.

Hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants are currently in Libya. Some have settled in the North African country to work, while others are seeking to cross the Mediterranean Sea for Europe.

Powerful smuggling networks linked to Libya's numerous armed groups generally control migration flows, and migrants are frequently subjected to abuses.

(Reporting by Ahmed Elumami, writing by Aidan Lewis, editing by G Crosse)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Washington: Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar has met with US National Security Adviser Susan Rice and discussed a wide range of bilateral issues including cooperation on climate change, trade and defense.

"Rice and Jaishankar affirmed their commitment to deepening bilateral cooperation on climate change, trade, and defense," spokesman of the National Security Council of the White House Ned Price said on Wednesday.

They also discussed critical follow-on to the Paris Agreement, progress in civil-nuclear cooperation, ongoing support for India's membership in the multilateral export control regimes, next steps in the Global Health Security Agenda, and opportunities for expanded security and counter-terrorism cooperation, Price said in a statement.

The Indian Foreign Secretary is on a visit to Washington and expected to meet the Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken today.

The visit of the foreign secretary comes wherein speculation is rife that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit the United States in early June. However, there has been no official word from either New Delhi or the White House in this regard.

Last week, a bipartisan group of four powerful American lawmakers in a letter urged Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan to invite Modi to address a joint meeting of the US Congress during his visit to Washington which according to them is expected to be on 7 and 8 June.

"The visit will represent Prime Minister Modi's fourth trip to the United States in two years, highlighting the robust nature of US-India relations. The number of reciprocal visits by the two leaders is unprecedented and hopefully portends the beginning of a new norm in the bilateral relationship," said Ronak D Desai, a fellow at New America and an affiliate at the Belfer Center's India and South Asia Program at Harvard University.

"Prime Minister Modi's trip to the United States is an opportunity for the two countries to continue focusing on those areas of mutual convergence, include defense, energy cooperation, and disaster management. At the same time, it should allow both leaders to frankly address ongoing irritants in the relationship and ensure these challenges do not fundamentally undermine the strategic logic underlying the US-India partnership," Desai said.
Peshawar: An armed policeman stood guard outside the 300-year-old Sikh temple, known as a gurdwara, in northwest Pakistan. He kept a watchful eye on everyone who passed him on the narrow street, looking for a suspicious gesture, or a bulge beneath the clothes that hints at a hidden gun or a bomb.

Earlier this month, the gurdwara in Peshawar's crowded Old City opened its doors to worshippers for the first time in 73 years. The reopening was celebrated by Pakistan's tiny Sikh minority, but security is a constant concern.

On Friday, a Sikh leader and provincial lawmaker was shot and killed outside his home in a remote area in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province, some 140 kilometers (86 miles) from Peshawar. The murder of Sardar Suran Singh devastated the Sikh community and heightened their fears of militant attacks.

It also added to human rights activists' despair over rising violence against religious minorities in Pakistan.

"It is tragic, but this is the trend in Pakistan right now. It is increasingly intolerant," said Zohra Yusuf, chairwoman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting of Sardar Suran Singh, but police disputed their claim, blaming the shooting on political rivalry and saying they had arrested the culprit. There was no response from the Taliban, who often make unsubstantiated claims.

Peshawar is a deeply conservative city at the foot of the mountainous Khyber Pass  once a popular route for traders and tourists travelling to nearby Afghanistan, now the focus of an extremist insurgency. Militants have attacked Peshawar schools, killing children as they studied, bombed buses of government workers and attacked Christians in their churches.

The newly-opened gurdwara has a 24-hour Sikh Security detail as well as police guards, but their Muslim neighbors believe an attack is inevitable.

"Security is very necessary ... for the people who want to come here for prayers without any fear," said Gurpal Singh, security chief for Peshawar's Sikh community.

Gohar Iqbal, a bookseller who works at a busy stall opposite the temple was certain the building would be targeted by militants. "We are worrying because of the children if something happens," he said, gesturing to the white cement building that houses a girls' high school, which abuts the gurdwara.

Few in this overwhelmingly Muslim neighborhood welcomed the gurdwara's opening. Apart from the security risks, many simply don't want Sikhs in their midst. The Sikhs that lived in the area and attended the gurdwara left when it closed in the 1940s.

It is not known how many Sikhs live in Pakistan today. The vast majority migrated to India in 1947, the year Pakistan was created as a homeland for Muslims of the subcontinent. The CIA Factbook estimates that 3.6 percent of Pakistan's 180 million people are non-Muslims, including Sikhs, Christians and Hindus.

Sikhs are among the smallest minorities. They are easily identifiable because of their tightly wound and often colorful turbans, and because they share the surname Singh.

Many of the Sikhs living in Pakistan are internally displaced, having fled their traditional homes in Pakistan's tribal regions as the threat posed by militants increased.

As the Taliban grew in strength in tribal regions such as Orazkai and Bajour, Sikhs were forced to pay protection money to local militant leaders or were killed, Yusuf at HRCP said.

Two years ago, extremists in the area swore allegiance to the Islamic State group. IS militants routinely video the brutal killings of non-Muslims in their territory.

Charanjeet Singh, a volunteer at the gurdwara and a community spokesman, fled his home in Orazkai several years ago.

He spoke to The Associated Press from inside the cavernous prayer hall of the gurdwara. Inside the sprawling compound, most of the buildings are crumbling  only the ornately carved prayer hall has been renovated.

Still, remnants of its former glory are visible  a small arch made up of odd-shaped blocks of stone, known as Waziri bricks, remains from the original structure laid around 300 years ago.

Charanjeet Singh said the community had been battling government intransigence and local resistance since 2012 to reopen the gurdwara.

In the 73 years it stood empty, the gurdwara was administered by the government's Evacuee Trust, an organization that looks after properties vacated by those who left for India during partition in 1947. Sometimes the buildings are returned to their original owners  as happened with the gurdwara  and at other times they are given to those who migrated from India to Pakistan, provided they can prove they owned property of a similar value in India.

Under the Pakistani government's guardianship, the gurdwara went through many incarnations. At one point, it housed a vocational school and it has been used for private homes. Several members of the Evacuee Trust still work and live there.

Despite receiving a chilly reception from their Muslim neighbors, the Sikhs of the gurdwara are giving shelter to an elderly Muslim woman.

In one of the ramshackle buildings lives Begum Shafqat Ara, a diminutive old woman who believes her age to be around 90. She has lived in the gurdwara for some 60 years. She never married and taught at the vocational school, where she continued to live after she retired.

"I didn't have anywhere to go, no family. This is my home," she told AP, sitting on the purple carpeted floor of the gurdwara's prayer hall.

Charanjeet Singh says Ara will stay. The Sikh community takes care of her and has promised to continue to do so for as long as she lives. Ara smiled a mostly toothless grin as she heard this and affectionately rested her hand on the knee of a nearby Sikh volunteer who had helped her to the prayer hall.

Despite the dangers they face, Charanjeet Singh said they will not capitulate to the militants. "If we do, they win," he said. "We are fully determined we will keep our holy places open."
United Nations: The UN Security Council will hold an informal meeting on 6 May on the protection of Palestinian civilians, an issue the Palestinians have pressed for decades and say is more needed now than ever.

Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour said four council members  Egypt, Senegal, Venezuela and Malaysia  are organizing the meeting which will hear briefings from a legal scholar, an Amnesty International representative and others.

Last October, the UN sent the council a study on precedents in addressing the protection of civilians in conflicts around the world.

Mansour told reporters Wednesday that the meeting is a first step toward action that the Security Council must take.

"Our desire is to find any form of protection to protect our people from the brutality of this occupation," he said.

Israel's UN Ambassador Danny Danon responded to the announcement of the council meeting saying: "The Palestinians are continuing to lie to the world and turn to the international community with ridiculous claims instead of focusing their efforts on fighting terror and incitement."
Jammu: Jammu and Kashmir government on Wednesday welcomed the resumption of Foreign Secretary-level talks between India and Pakistan saying the peace process is quite significant for the state.

The State cabinet met under the chairperson-ship of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti here. "The State cabinet welcomes the resumption of foreign secretary-level talks between India and Pakistan and the lead role played by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in carrying forward the peace process, which has significance for the whole region specifically for Jammu and Kashmir, which has been the main victim of hostilities", Education Minister and state government spokesperson Naeem Akhtar told reporters here.

"We look forward to sustained effort to bring peace in the region and J&K in particular," he said. Replying to a question whether Pakistan should investigate the Pathankot terror attack and cooperate with India, Akhtar said, "Who denies that?... we do not deny that.. Both countries have to do it."

The Cabinet also hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts to revive the peace process in the region. "The Cabinet observed that while peace process between India and Pakistan is of great significance for the whole South Asian region, it has the greatest impact on Jammu and Kashmir which faces the maximum brunt because of Indo-Pak hostilities," Akhtar said.

He said the Cabinet authorised the Department of Industries and Commerce to work out the modalities for establishing banking facilities for cross-LoC trade. "This follows the go-ahead from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to institutionalise the cross-LoC trade through a proper banking mechanism and doing away with the present barter system," he said.

Akhtar, who is also the state government spokesman, said the Cabinet gave its nod to develop tourism infrastructure at selected border points in Jammu and Kashmir for promotion of border tourism.

"To begin with the government has decided to develop tourism infrastructure at Suchetgarh and Chamlyal in Jammu region," he said. Akhtar said the Cabinet approved setting up of an Aadhaar-based mechanism for ascertaining the actual number of persons who have been temporarily engaged in various departments between 2009 and 2014 and their skill levels.

In another important decision, he said, the Cabinet also approved a road map for implementation of the interest subvention scheme for flood-hit traders under PM's Special Package. The identified flood-affected traders would get five per cent interest subsidy on the loans availed from banks during the next four years with a slab of Rs 5 lakh loan amount.

The Minister said the cabinet also approved enhancement of the honorarium of village numberdars and chowkidars. Honorarium of numberdars has been enhanced to Rs 1,501 from Rs 751 and that of Chowkidar to Rs 1,500 from Rs 750.

The Cabinet, he said, also approved reorganisation of the state's Planning and Development Department to properly channelise the development funds and ensure its gainful utilisation. He said the P&D Department will have five divisions  Development Strategy Division, Project Formulation Division, Area Planning Division, Project Monitoring and Evaluation Division and Coordination Division.

The minister said the Cabinet approved bringing KPS service under the ambit of the Cabinet Sub-Committee, formed for cadre review and other related issues of KAS. The Cabinet also approved induction of officers from various feeding services into KAS.
Islamabad: Police in the Pakistani capital today said several Western embassies had received parcels containing a mysterious poisonous powder and a warning against the reopening of Nato supply routes to Afghanistan that were closed nearly six months ago.

"Parcels containing about 0.5 grams of poisonous materials were received by the missions of Britain, Australia and France," Islamabad Police chief Bin Yamin Khan told reporters.

The parcels were sent to the Western embassies from Hyderabad in southern Sindh province on 14 May, he said. "Police are investigating the matter," he said.

A police officer said the parcels contained a warning against the reopening of supply lines for Nato forces in Afghanistan, which were closed in November after a cross-border air strike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

"There was a three-line note that Nato supplies must not be restored," the police officer said. The parcels contained a "minute quantity" of a black

powder. "The powder is not explosive," the officer said. Police sent to the powder to a state-run laboratory for tests.

The officer said police learnt of the parcels after the embassies contacted the Secretariat Police Station, which is responsible for security within the diplomatic enclave. The British High Commissions spokesman confirmed that

the mission had received a parcel containing a mysterious powder. He too said the powder was not explosive.

The Pakistan government has indicated it is close to reopening the NATO supply routes and a formal announcement is expected in the next few days.

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America Helped Australia in Battle of the Coral Sea - Australia Calls World to Pray for America Contact: Warwick Marsh, 61-418-225-212



UNANDERRA, Australia, April 28, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- The team behind Australia's National Day of Prayer & Fasting is calling the nations of the world to pray and fast for six days for USA from this Saturday 30 April - 5 May 2016. Watch this promo video.



Australia has done this for the last 3 years so this will be our fourth year praying for America. The 30 April 2016 is the USA Day of Repentance and 5 May 2016 is the USA National Day of Prayer.



Warwick Marsh from Australia said, "On the morning of 7 May 1942, Admiral Fletcher, commander of the US fleet gave orders to his scouting pilots to find the enemy fleet. Suddenly at 8:15 a.m. his fighter pilots spotted the enemy. In warfare surprise is everything. It is our belief that this sighting was an answer to prayer.



"Within a few hours the US aircraft carrier, the Lexington, and the Yorktown launched 80 Dauntless Dive Bombers, Torpedo Bombers and Fighters. The Naval squadron attacked the Japanese aircraft carrier Shoho at 11 a.m. The carrier was hit by 13 bombs and up to 7 torpedoes, she sank at 11:35 a.m. with a loss of 638 lives.



"The Battle of the Coral Sea was a strategic victory for the United States and Australia because the Japanese invasion landing force was turned back permanently. Yet the cost of victory was high. 656 Americans paid the ultimate price in the fight against tyranny. Here is an Australian-produced documentary about the Battle for the Coral Sea.



"This story is very relevant to us. In several days' time, we in both Australia and America will celebrate the 64th anniversary of that historic battle on the 4-8 May 1942. Many military historians would assert that the Battle of the Coral Sea was the turning point in the Second World War.



"Right now the USA is in a spiritual battle for its very survival as a nation under God. Secular forces have taken prayer out of school and progressively waged war against family, faith and religious freedom. It is time for Australia and the people of the world to join with our brothers and sisters in Christ in the USA in this battle for their nation."



Marsh continued, "We are praying for revival and transformation for America according to 2 Chronicles 7:14. We in Australia are grateful for the protection that America gave Australia during World War II. American blood was poured out in the Coral Sea for Australians. It is time for us to return the favour and get on our knees and pray for America. It is time for us to call the nations of the world to stand in the gap in prayer for America.



"Often the prayer part of God's army is likened to the air arm aspect of modern warfare. The Battle of the Coral Sea was fought and won in the air. We believe the battle for both Australia and America will be fought and won on our knees. So we encourage whoever can to pray and fast in whatever way you can between Saturday 30 April and 5 May 2016. Together we can make a difference!"



For more information phone: Warwick Marsh 61 418 225 212



www.nationaldayofprayer.com.au/prayusa2016



See this Australian prayer video of how God answered prayer & Fasting for America in 1746.



Check it out here.



See the Australian prayer video of Abraham Lincoln's "Presidential Proclamation of a Day of Prayer, Fasting and Humiliation" 30 April 1863.



Check it out here.

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home US Christian baker's appeal denied by Colorado Supreme Court

The Colorado Supreme Court has denied the appeal of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, who was previously found guilty of breaking the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

The court's decision, given on Monday, April 25, stated that "after review of the record, briefs, and the judgment of said Court of Appeals, IT IS ORDERED that said Petition for Writ of Certiorari shall be, and the same hereby is, denied."

The court supports an earlier ruling that Phillips cannot use his religious beliefs or right to free speech in order to refuse baking wedding cakes for gay couples.

In 2012, gay couple David Mullins and Charlie Craig went to Phillips' bakeshop and ordered a cake for their wedding. Phillips turned them down, saying it was against his religious beliefs to do so. He added that he had previously refused other clients for the same reason.

The gay couple filed a case against him, and in 2013, he was found guilty of breaking discrimination laws. In 2014, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission declared that the bakery violated the CADA. The commission also ordered Phillips to undergo sensitivity training, which his lawyer said was "vague."

"This is the problem where a bunch of lay people are making decisions about someone's livelihood and other people's jobs where the state has decided, has told Mr. Phillips, you don't have any First Amendment rights," Phillips' lawyer, Nicolle Martin, told the Christian Post.

In 2015, Phillips filed an appeal to the Colorado Court of Appeals. His appeal, which was discussed after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its ruling regarding same-sex marriage, was rejected.

The commission said that although Phillips accepted orders for birthday cakes and other products from gay clients, it did not nullify the fact that he broke the CADA when he refused to bake a gay wedding cake, particularly when he made wedding cakes for other clients.

"Masterpiece's potential compliance with CADA in this respect does not permit it to refuse services to Craig and Mullins that it otherwise offers to the general public," the commission said, according to Fox 31 Denver.
home World Muslims destroy Christian church, livestock in Uganda

Muslims destroyed a church building and killed the livestock of Christians in Nalugondo village in Uganda earlier this month.

A group of Muslims reportedly attacked and killed the pigs of Samuel Kijali, one of the lay leaders of the Nalugondo Church of Uganda, while singing praises to Allah and Muhammad. The pigs were an important source of income for Kijali and his family.

Sources claimed that Kijali had received text messages a few weeks before his livestock was attacked, warning him he should stop raising pigs because these are unholy.

"Let this be known to your church members that pigs are extremely unholy and an abomination before Allah, very outrageous and shameful. They are haram [forbidden] and unlawful as our holy Quran does prohibit them," a text message read.

Two days after the slaughter of Kijali's pigs, some Muslims again attacked at midnight and demolished the church building. Witnesses who saw the destruction of the church building said the Muslims were shouting that they were fighting "for the cause of Allah" and they could not tolerate living together "with neighbors who are infidels," according to Morning Star News.

Although there are a lot more Christians than Muslims in Uganda in general, the opposite is true in Nalugondo village, where Muslims have outnumbered the Christians.

"It is quite difficult to resist these militant Muslims, because they have outnumbered us the Christians and are accusing us that we are defiling their faith," Kijali lamented.

The Nalugondo church has 450 members. With their church building gone, many of them are left without shelter.

According to the East African Center for Law and Justice, Muslims in Uganda comprise approximately 12 percent of the population. However, persecution of Christians still occur in the country.
Worldwide smartphone shipment growth fell flat for first time and this is the smallest year-over-year growth on record. According to a report from IDC, vendors shipped a total of 334.9 million smartphones worldwide in the first quarter of 2016 (1Q16), up slightly from the 334.3 million units in 1Q15.



The research firm stated that, one of the key changes in this quarter is the inclusion of Chinese smartphone makers like Oppo and Vivo in the top 5 list. Samsung continued to top the charts with 24.5% market share and shipped 81.9 million units while Apple came in second with 15.3% market share and shipped 51.2 million iPhones. IDC also said that the $399 price of the iPhone SE wont help it win especially in India and China. The company saw its first-ever year-over-year decline in the first quarter, down 16.3% from last year. Three Chinese smartphone manufacturers Huawei, Oppo and Vivo are third, fourth and fifth in the list respectively. These companies have pushed Lenovo and Xiaomi out of the top 5 list.

Shipment volume for Huawei climbed from 17.4 million units in 1Q15 to 27.5 million this quarter for year-over-year growth of 58.4%. OPPOs 18.5 million shipments represented a growth of 153.2 percent, the strongest among the top 5 smartphone makers in the world. In case of Vivo, less than 10% of its shipments were outside of China in 2015.

Melissa Chau, senior research manager with IDCs Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker said,

Along Chinas maturing smartphone adoption curve, the companies most aligned with growth are those with products serving increasingly sophisticated consumers. Lenovo benefited with ASPs below US$150 in 2013, and Xiaomi picked up the mantle with ASPs below US$200 in 2014 and 2015. Now Huawei, OPPO, and vivo, which play mainly in the sub-US$250 range, are positioned for a strong 2016. These new vendors would be well-advised not to rest on their laurels though, as this dynamic smartphone landscape has shown to even cult brands like Xiaomi that customer loyalty is difficult to consistently maintain.

Anthony Scarsella, research manager with IDCs mobile team said,

Outside of China, many of these brands are virtually unknown and the ability of these rapidly growing Chinese vendors to gain entry into mature markets such as the United States and Western Europe will be essential if they have aspirations of catching Apple or Samsung at the to. Huawei has proven that it can sell increasingly premium devices. In China, Huawei is already recognized as a premium brand, but it is now going toe-to-toe on build quality with premium devices like the Nexus 6P that are available worldwide. While Huawei is furthest along in terms of international recognition, selling equally impressive volumes outside of China remains a challenge for many of these brands, whether it is Xiaomi, Lenovo, OPPO, or vivo. Their ability to drive local growth no longer applies when it comes to international expansion, where premium branding quickly turns to price competition.
BuySell Tickets, a new Android app from NFN Labs, based in Chennai lets you sell extra movie tickets easily without revealing your personal information such as contact number or email. If you are looking for tickets for a movie, you can easily search for a movie by name, language, number of tickets and theaters they are available in.

You can pay for the tickets by recharging the persons mobile number or in cash. The company is in talks with Wallet companies to integrate wallet into the app. The beta version is now live in Chennai and will be expanded to other cities soon.

Features of BuySell Tickets for Android Filter Movies Easily: You no longer have to scroll through an endless list of movies. With BuySell Tickets, you will be able to filter movies by movie name, payment mode, showtime, dates, language and even number of tickets.

Protect Your Privacy: Youll be able to chat with a seller or a buyer with in our in-built chat feature. This would allow to conduct the exchange without disclosing your personal details.

Enriched Selling Experience: You can easily upload details of the movies that you have extra movie tickets for. It is simple, quick and easy to use.

Download BuySell Tickets (Free)  Android

Regarding the new app, NFN Labs, in a medium post, said:

While we want to create a great experience for both the seller and the buyer, few areas are closely monitored by the BuySell Tickets Team. A seller cannot charge more than the purchase price. This is easy to manage when we are starting off with Chennai as base with specific theaters. Also if a particular user is reported by other users for overcharging or inappropriate behavior, their account will be immediately disabled till the issue has been resolved.
After years of research, Starbucks announced its plan to donate all unsold food from its U.S. outlets. This comes after the Seattle-based coffee giant has finally worked out a way to ensure that its unsold food remains safe to eat.

The company announced last March 22, 2016 of its new donation program named FoodShare, where the company plans to donate unsold ready-to-eat meals from its more than 7,600 outlets across the U.S. according to its website. Under FoodShare, Starbucks partnered with Food Donation Connection and Feeding America to distribute the meals.

While the United States is one of the richest countries in the world, an alarming 14% of American households or 17.4 million households face food insecurity due to poverty, reports Feeding America. These 17.4 million households are comprised of 32.8 million adults and 15.3 million children or a total of 48.1 million Americans who live in homes where regular meals are uncertain.

Starbucks' Foodshare will definitely help in addressing a significant portion of these families. On its first year, the company estimates that the program will be able to provide almost 5 million meals to nourish these families and individuals. The company has even plans to further upgrade its donation program where by 2021, it projects that a total of 50 million meals will be donated.

The company had long-ago wanted to donate its unsold food to charity. However, the concern was that the food items, most of which are perishables, might be spoiled by the time they reach the intended recipients and may cause more harm than good when eaten. Fortunately, the company found a solution to this problem. Starbucks brand manager Jane Maly said in a statement that they team focused on temperature control to make sure that the surplus food is still safe to eat, reports Fortune.

Through its FoodShare program, Starbucks was likewise able to address food waste. If left to a landfill to rot, the decaying wasted food could release methane into the atmosphere, a gas that is even more destructive the CO2 in terms of greenhouse effect. Currently, around 70 billion pounds of food are wasted annually in the U.S. alone.
After reporting its worst quarter ever as a public company in February, many investors hoped that beaten-down burrito-maker Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG 0.89%) would have started turning things around by now. Unfortunately, the company announced much worse financial results for its first quarter on April 26, including its first net loss as a public company.

But how bad were the results? What is management doing to turn things around? Let's take a closer look at the financial results, as well as what management had to say about the situation, and what they're doing to right the ship.

The numbers

Metric Q1 2016 Q1 2015 Change Revenue $834.5 $1,089 -23.4% Net income $(26.4) $122.6 -121.6% Earnings per share $(0.88) $3.88 -122.7% Comparable restaurant sales -29.7% 10.4%

The comps decline of almost 30% is a bit misleading, as Chipotle said that transactions at restaurants open more than 13 months decreased by 21%, indicating that traffic wasn't quite as far down as the 29% comps drop makes it seem. The big divergence between transactions and revenue comps was due to heavy promotional discounting in the quarter, a big part of the company's strategy to bring customers back.

Chipotle also opened 58 new locations in the quarter, helping offset the huge comps decline.

Everything cost more last quarter, but operating results weren't as bad as they seem

While revenue fell significantly, Chipotle spent more money on essentially every expense line than it did the year before, with the exception of food, beverage, and packaging expenses, which declined because the company sold fewer burritos in the quarter:

As you can see, every operating expense increased as a percentage of revenue. Let's put a little context on the numbers in terms of cash expenses.

Of the company's $881.1 million in operating expenses, $34.8 million were non-cash depreciation/amortization, and the $2.2 million loss on disposal of assets was likely a non-cash loss, as well. That leaves $844.1 million of expenses as cash, with $834.5 million in revenue. That gives us -- roughly -- a cash loss of about $10 million in the quarter before taxes. Not good, but also not a $26 million loss.

Chipotle also saw a tax benefit of $18 million in the quarter because of the GAAP loss it reported, leaving its balance sheet in relatively the same shape as it was at the beginning of the quarter. The only significant change was tied to the company's $538 million purchase of shares held as treasury stock by the company.

In other words, digging past the GAAP results, which include non-cash charges and the non-cash benefit of depreciation and amortization expense, the strategy that management is taking -- which means high expenses and low margins until sales levels start to recover -- is probably more sustainable than it seems on the surface.

What management said

CFO John Hartung, on the company's marketing campaign gradually leading to more paying customers:

...as the number of redemptions leveled off, we saw our paying customers steadily increase. And by the first week of March when redemptions were down to under $100,000 per day, our comp transactions were down only 14% and comp sales were down 22%. We felt the recovery was off to a respectable start just three weeks or four weeks into our marketing campaign.

Hartung again, on the uneven geographic recovery:

For the first three weeks of April, our traffic comps excluding the Easter benefit were -15% in the middle of the country, the Southeast and the Mid-Atlantic, whereas they were down 20% companywide, again excluding the benefit of Easter. That's about a 16-point recovery as compared to January, which means we recovered about half the lost visits in these areas. But on the West Coast and the Northeast, the two areas closest to the outbreaks of late 2015, our traffic comps have recently been trending at -24%, again excluding the Easter benefit, compared to -37% in January. So we've only recovered about a third of customer visits in these areas.

What to expect in Q2

John Hartung said that promotional/marketing expense was $55 million, or 6.6% of sales in the quarter, and that was expected to fall to 3%-4% of sales during the next few quarters -- a lower amount than at the start of the campaign, but still higher than historical levels. He also said that there are some indications that sales are slowly starting to recover in April, though they are still well off 2015 levels.

The marketing campaign is also shifting away from free food items to buy-one, get-one-free promos. Management is counting on this transition to start driving more revenue. While management wouldn't offer up guidance on earnings for the second quarter, Hartung did say that he doesn't expect the company to report a loss.

Looking ahead

A few takeaways:

Management is committed to investing in making sure customers get a great experience, and not cutting costs because sales are down.

The balance sheet remains in good shape, even after higher cash expenses in Q1.

Marketing expenses are likely to fall in coming quarters, while sales are -- tenuously at this point -- starting to recover, which should further bolster the company's ability to continue investing in marketing and restaurant growth.

Other expenses -- particularly labor and store expenses -- aren't likely to decline, as management is emphasizing the restaurant experience as "the best marketing we can do."

Management also said that they still plan to open 220 to 235 new restaurants this year. Co-CEO Marty Moran did say that restaurants opened in new markets in Q1 performed less well than those opened in more-established markets, so the company would be more market-selective with openings.

All things considered, things probably aren't as dire as they may seem on the surface. Does that mean sales are set to recover quickly? Probably not. But at the same time, Chipotle's management is sticking to its plans based on a long-term recovery of the business, not managing quarter-to-quarter expenses, potentially at the risk of further damaging the brand's image at a critical time.
After major defeat in four states during Tuesday nights East Coast primaries, Bernie Sanders is setting his sights on Junes Golden State competition. His wife, Jane Sanders, joined the FOX Business Networks Neil Cavuto to discuss the 2016 race.

She first responded to Donald Trumps comments about the Democratic Party mistreating her husband as she clarified his party affiliation.

Bernie is not running as an independent. He decided early on to run as a Democrat and hes running as a Democratic nomination. Now, Donald Trump has a point. The electoral process, the way its conducted now, in both parties is not good. Its not Democratic. Its not smart. So we want to change the electoral process by having there be open primaries, same day registration  if Independents can vote theres no doubt that the results in the Democratic process at least would be very different, she said.

Sanders then voiced her opposition to the super-delegate system.

It doesnt seem fair that super-delegates could play such an outsized role. We learned in a Democracy its one person one vote -- evidently not in the primary system. So we dont like the concept of the super-delegates its  pretty much an insurance policy for the establishment that they can make sure that the primary doesnt go array. I think that the Republicans over the last few months have been wishing they had it as Donald Trump has moved forward but now it looks like both parties will have to deal with the will of the people.

She also dismissed complaints that Bernie is helping Republicans win the presidential election by not dropping out of the race.

We may be spoiling their day but were not spoiling the race. The fact is there are very different visions for America between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. What we need to do is we need to let votes in every state, 10 states still havent voted, have the opportunity to support the candidate of their choice and support the agenda they want the nation to follow, she said.

While Democratic voter participation is down in 2016 versus 2008, and a third of recently polled Sanders supporters said they would have a hard time supporting Clinton, she said the race is all about systemic change.

That includes the electoral system in terms of how it is set up and how it is carried out. It is also about voter participation. We are bringing millions. Bernie is bringing millions of people into the process. She said.
Marketing chief Phil Schiller introducing the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. Image source: Apple.

I've long been a big fan of Apple's share repurchase program, largely due to the fact that it's simply enormous. By virtue of its magnitude, combined with Apple's cheap valuation, the buyback program is mostly able to avoid the common criticisms that typically surround repurchase programs (most are not accretive and/or poorly timed).

The buyback program was a no-brainer during the 2012-2013 pullback, and Apple was able to retire a boatload of shares as it repurchased during that time frame. That's precisely why Apple added a whopping $50 billion to its repurchase authorization in early 2013. But once shares inevitably recovered to highs around $130, and even with today's prices of around $100, it's not as clear-cut. Even as the valuation remains cheap, it's not entirely obvious whether or not the broader market will ever assign Apple higher multiples.

As such, it seems appropriate that Apple's buyback program, while still going strong, is starting to cool off a little bit.

Time to play it slowAlongside fiscal second-quarter earnings, Apple said that it was again expanding its capital return program (as expected, since it's about that time of year). The company is adding $50 billion to the program, bringing the total to $250 billion. Of that increase, $35 billion is being allocated to share repurchases, with the remaining $15 billion to cover dividend payouts over the next couple of years. Apple is still focusing its capital return strategy on repurchases, which is the right call since that's how it can ensure that the program is accretive.

The reason I say that the buyback program is cooling off is that while $35 billion is still a meaningful increase, it's a relatively more conservative increase than last year's boost, which was $50 billion. Here's each year's respective increase in repurchase authorization.

Year Increase Total Authorization 2012 $10 billion (initial) $10 billion 2013 $50 billion $60 billion 2014 $30 billion $90 billion 2015 $50 billion $140 billion 2016 $35 billion $175 billion

Data source: SEC filings.

Here's how cumulative share repurchases have compared:

Data source: SEC filings. Calendar quarters shown.

You can also see this cooling off in quarterly trends:

Data source: SEC filings. Calendar quarters shown.

To date, Apple has repurchased $116.6 billion worth of stock, which is a pretty astounding figure when you think about it. That's greater than the entire market caps of tech companies like Qualcomm ($78 billion), Baidu ($65 billion), and Texas Instruments ($60 billion). The level of Apple's increases also signal the company's intentions over the next year.

Apple will have a little over $58 billion left on the authorization until its next capital return update, which comes every April. That should be plenty considering the fact that Apple has repurchased about $37 billion over the past four quarters.

The article Apple, Inc.'s Buyback Program Is Cooling Off originally appeared on Fool.com.

Evan Niu, CFA owns shares of Apple and Baidu, and The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends those two stocks, as well as Qualcomm. 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 detail from Euronet Worldwide's most recent annual report. Source: Euronet Worldwide.

Euronet Worldwide reported its fastest top-line increase in four quarters on Wednesday, as the company's first-quarter 2016 revenue climbed 11% against the prior year, to $437.9 million. Net income expanded to $29.1 million, from $7.2 million last year. The leap in net income was due to higher operating income, as well as a foreign currency exchange gain of $2.2 million, versus a $13 million foreign exchange loss in Q1 2015. Euronet's results are usually best viewed through its three major operating segments, so let's do just that, to see where the company has momentum and where it may need to improve.

EFT processingOnce again this quarter, EFT processing held the distinction of being Euronet's smallest but most profitable segment. The EFT business recorded a top-line increase of 16% to $86.6 million. Operating income rose 17% to $13.3 million. Growth derived primarily from a surge in ATM installations. The company added 2,607 lower margin ATMs in India, and in Europe, it installed 531 "high-value" ATMs, as well as reactivating 263 "winterized" high-value ATMs for the tourist season.

Euronet did not name the banking collaborator in its Indian ATM deal but noted that while the first wave of ATMs will bring only marginal income to the company, it anticipates "a future beneficial relationship with the bank." In other words, once it proves itself as a solid transaction partner, Euronet intends to scale its ATM network in India at transaction margins more similar to its installations in other countries.

EpayOver the last few quarters, the epay segment has underperformed relative to Euronet's overall business. But in an encouraging sign, the segment's $170.1 million in revenue represented only a 3% decline against Q1 2015. Compare this to the last sequential quarter (Q4 2015), in which epay's revenue skidded 14%. Operating income of $15.8 million in the current quarter was essentially flat, which. again, is preferable to significant deterioration.

Epay's business focuses on "top-up" services for mobile airtime contracts and includes a number of other revenue streams, including prepaid debit and credit card products. In the current quarter, non-mobile revenues offset a decline in top-up transactions. Euronet appears to be keen on diversifying this segment to supplement those mobile airtime transactions. New epay opportunities in Q1 2016 included a "gift mall launch" in 500 Shell locations in the U.K., and a digital content distribution deal signed with digital gifting site Cashstar.

Money transferOf Euronet's three segments, money transfer enjoyed the most significant growth this quarter. Revenue rose 25% to $181.6 million, and operating income jumped 56% to $13.8 million. The laudable performance was catalyzed by the segment's RIA money transfer business, which continues to benefit from a 2014 deal signed with Wal-Mart to provide competitive money transfer services to the retail giant's customers. In Q1 2016, RIA signed a similar deal with Wal-Mart Chile.

RIA appears to be expanding in every conceivable direction as the market for international remittances itself only gets larger. Management praised RIA's organic growth, as the subsidiary hit double-digit transaction increases in the U.S., Asia-Pacific, and Europe during the first three months of the year.

But money transfer's success is also benefiting from an expansion of its network through acquisitions undertaken over the past two years. These purchases include foreign exchange specialists HiFx and XE, as well as Malaysian money transfer firm IME. Money transfer's network has grown to 310,000 locations as of the end of Q1 2016, a 26% increase from last year's first quarter.

Looking aheadEuronet Worldwide doesn't issue much in the way of formal quarterly guidance. The company did convey on Wednesday that it expects to earn $0.90 per share on an adjusted basis in the second quarter of 2016, which would represent a healthy 15% increase from the $0.78 adjusted EPS achieved in Q2 2015.

On a more global basis, Euronet's business is the story of two operating segments that are selling into great market demand, and a third which is at best stagnant for the time being. As we move into the next three quarters of the fiscal year, shareholders may want to keep tabs on the epay segment, to see if management can sign additional deals that will bring its performance more in line with its peer segments.

The article ATMs and Acquisitions Fuel Euronet Worldwide's Earnings originally appeared on Fool.com.

Asit Sharma has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Euronet Worldwide. 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: Tesla.

Tesla Motors gets a lot of attention these days for Autopilot, its semi-autonomous driving system -- as it should. The electric carmaker's system is one of the best in the automotive industry right now, and Tesla's CEO Elon Musk is 100% committed to expanding the future of driverless automobiles (while at the same time creating vehicles that are insanely funto drive).

Tesla should be applauded for its driverless pursuits, but China-based search giant Baidu is doing more to make driverless cars ubiquitous.

Eliminating all of the driverless blindspotsTesla says its Autopilot is a combination of "cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors and data to automatically steer down the highway, change lanes, and adjust speed in response to traffic." The car can also be summoned by its driver and parallel park by itself.

That's some impressive technology, and recently, Autopilot showed off its strengths when it successfullymaneuvered around a truck that had cut off a Model S driver.

Baidu's technology is just as impressive, though. One of the tech giant's driverless autos has already successfully driven in Beijing.The car merged with other vehicles and successfully overtook ones it wanted to pass.

And it's not stopping there. Baidu aims to bring fully autonomous shuttles to Chinese roads by the end of 2018. The vehicles would drive a pre-set route that would be expanded over time.

The tech giant is also lobbying both the Chinese and U.S. governments for improved driverless auto regulation.Baidu was part of a U.S. Senate Commerce Committee a few months ago -- along with Google and General Motors-- advocating for looser autonomous vehicle regulations. The company is trying to pave the way for its own driverless car testing in the U.S.

By contrast, the Chinese government appears much more open to autonomous cars than even the U.S. is right now. That's helped Baidu come close to realizing its fully autonomous car dreams, and it's at least partially why the company is ahead of Tesla and other carmakers in the driverless space.

Baidu is also building a trove of autonomous car patents as it researches the technology, and it has focused much of its attention on the need for driverless cars to use artificial intelligence (AI).

Baidu's CEORobin Li recently said, "Artificial intelligence will continue to be an unceasing core for Baidu innovations." And to get there, the company hiredAndrew Ng, formerly at Google, to be its chief scientist. Ng and his team work in the U.S., helping to create artificially intelligent systems for Baidu's cars.

Foolish thoughtsDon't get me wrong -- I'm a huge fan of Tesla's cars, its all-electric goals, and its semi-autonomous driving pursuits. There's no denying the carmaker is pushing U.S. automakers to expand not just their electric car capabilities, but also their driverless ones.

But if investors are looking for a company that's not just using driverless tech, but also creating its own technology, earning patents, investing in AI, and influencing governments to adopt fully autonomous cars, China-based Baidu is winning that race hands down.

The article Forget Tesla: Here's 1 Company That's Really Pushing Driverless Tech Forward originally appeared on Fool.com.

Chris Neiger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Baidu and 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: Hyster-Yale.

Forklift specialist Hyster-Yale Materials Handling has its fortunes tied to the global industrial economy. When the need for inventory management and movement is the greatest, customers turn to Hyster-Yale to get the equipment they need. Yet coming into Wednesday's first-quarter financial report, Hyster-Yale shareholders were bracing for declines in the company's top and bottom lines, and the results that Hyster-Yale released only confirmed some of those fears. Nevertheless, the company remains excited about its future. Let's take a closer look at what Hyster-Yale told investors this quarter and what's ahead for the forklift-maker in the future.

Hyster-Yale deals with economic headwindsHyster-Yale's first-quarter results didn't live up to what investors had hoped to see from the company. Revenue fell 3% to $604.2 million, which was far worse than the $619 million in sales that most investors had expected to see. Bottom-line performance also suffered, with Hyster-Yale reporting net income of $10 million, down 28% from year-ago levels, and earnings of $0.61 per share. That figure missed the consensus forecast by $0.02 per share.

Hyster-Yale's operational numbers weren't as bad as you might expect from the revenue and earnings performance. New unit shipments of forklifts rose by 600 units to 20,500. However, bookings fell by 200 units to 23,500, and worldwide backlog was down 2,000 to 29,900 units. In dollar terms, the backlog figure dropped $60 million to $670 million. Lift-truck-related operating profits fell by more than 40%, and net income was off more than 20% compared to the previous year's first quarter.

Looking at Hyster-Yale's geographical segments, total shipments in the Americas segment were up 800 units, with the company citing its strategic initiatives in prompting the gains. The weak Brazilian economy held back growth there, but strength in North America and the rest of Latin America were able to offset Brazil's headwinds. Segment revenue rose slightly, despite unfavorable foreign currency movements against Brazil's real. Operating profits fell in the Americas, however, because of higher overhead from acquisition related costs. The Europe/Middle East/Africa segment picked up 200 more units shipped, but operating profits plunged by three-quarters largely because of the strong dollar. The Asis-Pacific segment suffered a 400-unit drop in shipments, and a shift in sales mix toward lower-priced lift trucks helped produce an operating loss for the segment during the quarter.

Fuel-cell subsidiary Nuvera also kept producting losses, including a net loss of $3.7 million. That was comparable to last year's figures, but it still ate into profits from the rest of Hyster-Yale's business.

Can Hyster-Yale recover?Outlooks for Hyster-Yale's near future were mixed. Overall, for the forklift market, Hyster-Yale thinks that strength in Europe won't be able to overcome weakness in the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region. Unit shipments should increase during the rest of 2016, but any resulting gains in revenue won't be enough to offset the shortfall from the first quarter. Conditions could improve somewhat during the second half of the year, but higher operating expenses and weaker pricing power could offset any increases in sales volumes.

Hyster-Yale's recent completion of the acquisition of Italian company Penta Holding could bolster long-term growth. The deal closed on April 1, and Hyster-Yale has worked to buy out other shareholders in forklift-attachment manufacturer Bolzoni with the goal of purchasing all outstanding shares. So far, Hyster-Yale controls about 62% of Bolzoni, and further purchases of shares will come from cash on hand and credit-facility borrowing.

Looking forward, Hyster-Yale seems to believe that poor industry conditions could hold its growth back for a while. Despite intentions to improve distribution, cut costs, and expand into relatively untapped markets in Asia, expecting a fast growth ramp-up for Hyster-Yale could set up bullish shareholders for disappointment in the near-term.

The article Hyster-Yale Can't Get a Lift As Revenue, Profits Decline originally appeared on Fool.com.

Dan Caplinger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Hyster-Yale Materials Handling. 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: ConocoPhillips.

Given how weak oil prices were during the first quarter,we knew ConocoPhillips' financial results would be pretty awful. However, in a bit of a surprise, the company's results weren't quite as awful as analysts were expecting. And that wasn't the only surprise the company had in store for investors this quarter.

Surprise! We beat expectationsAs a result of very weak oil prices during the quarter, ConocoPhillips reported a loss of $1.5 billion, or $1.18 per share. However, some of that loss was due to impairment charges the company took on assets in the Gulf of Mexico and the U.K. as well as some other special items. After making adjustments for these items, that loss was trimmed to $1.2 billion, or $0.95 per share. While that's still a steep loss, it was $0.10 per share less than analysts were expecting.

Driving that slightly better showing was production. At 1.578 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, or BOE/d, ConocoPhillips came in right near the high end of its guidance range of 1.54 million BOE/d to 1.58 million BOE/d. Also contributing to the company's expectation-beating results were lower costs, with operating costs now down 20% year over year.

Image source: Anadarko Petroleum.

Surprise! We're cutting capex againThe next surprise the company revealed was that it's cutting its 2016 capex budget once again. This time, it's bringing its budget down from $6.4 million to $5.7 million. Driving this reduction was a decision to further reduce deepwater exploration activity; however, the company is also benefiting from lower costs across its portfolio. Further, because the capex being cut is longer-term capital, the company doesn't expect this reduction to impact its production guidance for 2016.

Given how steep oil prices have dropped, it probably shouldn't be a surprise to see the company cut capex again. However, ConocoPhillips and partner Anadarko Petroleum recently sanctioned a drilling project in Alaska, which is expected to see work start this year. Meanwhile, there's some growing optimism in the oil market that oil prices could recover later this year, which is encouraging companies like Whiting Petroleum to get creative to find the funds to increase production. In Whiting's case, it's bringing on a financial partner to enable it to resume fracking wells. Because of this, there was an outside chance ConocoPhillips could have decided to boost spending, especially given its access to capital.

Surprise! We raised billions in debtSpeaking of access to capital, ConocoPhillips took advantage of this during the quarter, raising $4.6 billion of low-cost debt to boost its cash pile to $5.2 billion. That cash infusion gives it the flexibility to weather a longer-duration downturn of the oil price, and gives it the cash that could immediately be put to work when oil prices start to improve.

ConocoPhillips is one of just a handful of oil companies that still have the ability to borrow at reasonable rates these days because it still has an investment-grade credit rating. That's not something either Anadarko Petroelum or Whiting Petroleum have, with Anadarko losing its investment-grade rating earlier this year after one of its credit rating agencies cut its rating from Baa2 to Ba1, while Whiting Petroleum saw its credit rating cut all the way down to Caa2. Both ratings imply that their debt is speculative, which makes it much harder, if not impossible, in Whiting's case, to borrow at a reasonable rate in the current environment.

Investor takeawayThanks to high-end production and lower costs, ConocoPhillips delivered an expectation-beating first-quarter report. On top of that, the company continues to surprise investors by how deeply it can cut its capex budget while still maintaining its production. It also surprised investors by loading up on cheap debt, which gives it a leg up on its weaker peers because it has tremendous financial flexibility right now to not only weather the current storm, but thrive when conditions improve.

The article 3 Big Surprises From ConocoPhillips This Quarter originally appeared on Fool.com.

Matt DiLallo owns shares of ConocoPhillips. 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.
Source: Pixabay.

Most investors think ofChevron(NYSE: CVX) as an integrated energy company with refineries, pipelines, and billion-dollar megaprojects that take years to come online. They don't think of Chevron as a major shale player.

Yet Chevron is one of the largest shale producers in the world. The company owns or leases millions of acres in aggregate in shale plays everywhere from Argentina's Vaca Muertato Canada's Duvernay Shale. While Chevron holds vast acreage in many shale plays, nowhere more is Chevron excited about the company's shale prospects than in the Permian Basin. Here's why.

1. The Permian is cost-competitive The Permian Basin is one of the most cost-competitive basins in the United States. Because of favorable geology, some parts of the basin, such as certain counties over theWolfcamp or Spraberry, have breakevens of well below $35 per barrel. Other parts of the basin are cost-competitive in a way that net production in the Permian has actually increased from the beginning of the year rather than declined like in other basins because of the low crude prices.Overall, 18 out of the 22 counties that cover the Permian have breakevens below $45 per barrel.

Chevron's acreageover the Permian. Source: Chevron investor relations.

Because of its strong legacy position, 85% of Chevron's leases in the Permian have either no or low royalty payments. That gives Chevron a competitive advantage versus others and lowers its breakeven cost. Given its lower royalty costs, Chevron estimates that 1,300 of its Permian well locations can offer a 10% rate of return when WTI trades for $40 per barrel, 4,000 well locations can offer a 10% return at $50 per barrel, and 5,500 well locations can deliver a 10% return at $60 per barrel. The number of locations that can deliver acceptable rates of return will increase going forward as the previous economic figures reflect well counts for just 30% of Chevron's operated acreage in the basin.

Chevron's costs in the Permian have also declined as the company's expertise in shale and unconventional drilling have improved. Because of increased efficiency, the company's average horizontal well development cost in 2015 dropped 40% year over year. Assuming that oil service costs remain low, the lower cost trend should continue as the gap between Chevron's development cost per well and that of its more experienced competitors narrows.

2. The Permian has vast growth potential For a big major like Chevron, it takes a lot to move the needle. The good news is that the Permian's resources are big enough even for Chevron. The company estimates that the company's leases of around 2 million net acres in the Permian Basin holds total potentially recoverable oil equivalent resources of 9 billion barrels, which, if all the resources were discovered and unlocked commercially, could power its current rate of production of 2.62 million BOE per day for over nine years.

Chevron Permian production, past and future. Source: Chevron investor relations.

Overall, Chevron's production in the Permian grew 33% year over year to around 120,000 BOE per day, and management hopes to potentially triple that number by 2020.

3. Shale is flexibleShale is short cycle. The time from initial drilling to production is substantially shorter than that of conventional projects. The shorter time to market has its advantages. In the past, Chevron has spent tens of billions of dollars on conventional megaprojects such as the Gorgon and the Wheatstone LNG facilities. When those projects' final investment decisions were made in 2009 and 2011, the outlook for their product, LNG, was bright, and the price for LNG was high. Many people thought that China, Japan, and South Korea, with little to no natural gas production of their own, would need LNG to power their economies. Because of the lower-than-expected growth in those markets and the low crude prices today, however, the supply and demand outlook for LNG is no longer as bright, and the return on investment for the Gorgon and Wheatstone will not be as great as previously expected because of the lower LNG prices that will cut Chevron's earnings on the spot market. There could also be financial risk to Chevron if some of the buyers of Gorgon and the WheatstoneLNG try to get out of their long-term contracts.

Because of shale's short ramp-up time and its fast decline rate, the time to market is short, and Chevron can avoid much of that economic change risk. When energy prices change, Chevron can ramp production up and down faster than it can with conventional projects and better preserve its balance sheet.

Investor takeawayChevron is committed to the Permian because of its growth potential. The company owns attractive acreage that could potentially hold billions of barrels of resources that might be unlocked commercially one day. Many of Chevron's well locations can yield an acceptable rate of return at current WTI prices, and the company's operations are improving every day as its employees learn new ways to become more efficient. The Permian's potential and Chevron's increased efficiency will translate to more profit and greater production down the road.

The article 3 Reasons Chevron Is Committed to the Permian Basin originally appeared on Fool.com.

TMFJay22 has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Chevron. 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.
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Snake-bitten semiconductor giant Qualcomm simply cannot catch a break.

QCOM data by YCharts

Down over 20% in the past year, the firm has been buffeted by a bruising combination of financial and strategic headwinds.

In a sign that the worst might have passed, Qualcomm bested analysts' estimates in its recent earnings release. Unfortunately, an important development with its relationship with Apple distracted from what otherwise was a solid report from Qualcomm.

The good news Qualcomm exceeded expectations on both the top and bottom lines. All told, the firm produced non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.04 on sales of $5.5 billion in the second quarter. Though both were down sharply versus a year prior, those results still outpaced Wall Street expectations for EPS of $0.96 on revenue of $5.34 billion.

According to Qualcomm, it has been able to regain some of its lost market share in high-end mobile smartphones thanks in part to design wins in Samsung's popular Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. The placement of its Snapdragon 820 in some S7 and S7 Edge models is likely due, at least in part, to Qualcomm's decision last year to shift its chip fabrication from Taiwan Semiconductor to the Korean electronics giant's own foundry business. Either way, it's still a positive development for the semiconductor giant.

The company also announced patent licensing deals with Korea's LG Electronics and Chinese handset maker Hisense. For context, issues collecting royalties on its massive trove of international patents have been without question the most substantive issue weighing on Qualcomm's performance in recent years.

Overall, the earnings report offered Wall Street plenty to like. However, one important piece of negative news also caught investors' attention during the firm's conference call.

Source: Qualcomm

So long Apple? On the call, CEO Steve Mollenkopf hinted that his firm expects to lose some business from one of its largest handset customers, a reference many believe referred to iPhone maker Apple.

Apple is widely believed to require strict confidentiality from its suppliers, which occasionally puts a company like Qualcomm in an awkward position. As such, members of the analyst community often ask questions using tongue-in-cheek code phrases such as "large customers" when they're digging for information about how Apple's moves will affect a supplier's business. When asked about the demand he expects to see from "large customers," Mollenkopf responded with the following guarded reply: "Difficult for me to talk about timing related to that, but I think the point we wanted to communicate was that we are assuming for planning purposes that that [second-sourcing] is the case."

Obviously, that is far from a definitive response, but there's fair reason to interpret Mollenkopf's answer as referring to Apple -- the second largest smartphone maker in the world. While Samsung ranks as the world's top smartphone maker, that firm has long used a mix of suppliers, including Qualcomm, for various parts in its handsets. As such, the analyst community grew worried thatMollenkopf was implying that Apple plans to diversify away from Qualcomm's components in coming years. This also lead at least one sell-side analyst to speculate that Apple might enlist Intel to supply some of those components for future iPhones.

According to device teardown data, Qualcomm currently supplies four components for the iPhone. Intel has long been eyeing Qualcomm's mobile baseband business. However, though the firm has made strides in recent years, a fair amount of skepticism still exists as to how truly viable a competitor Intel might prove in areas Qualcomm has long dominated, like mobile connectivity.

Either way, the specter of Apple deemphasizing the firm as a supplier proved frightening enough to send Qualcomm shares down in the hours after its earnings report. Of course, we won't know at least until autumn whether these speculations have any truth to them. True or not though, it appears that despite its ongoing turnaround efforts, Qualcomm isn't entirely out of the woods yet.

The article Apple Implications Overshadow Qualcomms Earnings Beat originally appeared on Fool.com.

Andrew Tonner owns shares of Apple. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Apple and Qualcomm. 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.
Image source: BP investor presentation.

The last thing BP and its peers needed this quarter was for oil and gas prices to decline even more than they did last quarter. But they did, and to make matters worse, the operating environment for refiners wasn't as strong, either. Considering this and the big loss that BP saw last quarter, it woudn't have been surprising to see an even weaker earnings report this past quarter.

Surprisingly, though, the company showed better-than-expected results from its operations. Let's take a quick look at BP's results from last quarter to see what went right from operations, and why it was all for naught as charges related to the Gulf of Mexico ate up any operational gains.

By the numbersAmid a low oil and gas price environment, BP was able to eke out a better-than-expected profit.BP's normalized first-quarter earnings on its American depository shares was $0.17 per share, a welcome surprise to Wall Street, which was expecting a loss. These normalized earnings don't include large charges that the company took related to its Gulf of Mexico settlement, though. When we add those back into the equation, the company's earnings fell to a loss of $0.19 per share

A big reason BP was able to generate a modest profit on a normalized basis is that it didn't take large impairments or writedowns as it has in prior quarters, and refining and chemical earnings were surprisingly strong, considering refining margins for the quarter were noticeably weaker. Here's a quick breakdown of BP's earnings by business segment.

Image source: BP earnings report. Author's chart.

The highlightsThere weren't exactly a lot of things to jump and down about in BPs earnings this time around, but there were two things of note that could be promising over the next several quarters. One of them is the company's stronger refining results. The refining margins in the quarter were simply not as strong as this time last year, but BP was able to make up for this drop with stronger operational performance and growth in petrochemicals and lubricants. These are typically very small parts of the company's overall business, but this quarter the two combined to generate $490 million in operational profits. Getting some additional help from these normally unloved segments could be immensely helpful in keeping the company somewhat profitable over the coming quarters.

The other item of note is the company's cost-cutting efforts. When we strip out the non-cash charges and writedowns from upstream earnings, both this quarter and the prior quarter come in pretty much the same. This may not sound like much, but over that same time period BP's price realizations for oil and gas dropped from $44 a barrel to $34, and natural gas prices have notably declined as well. The company was able to keep profits flat in part because it has significantly reduced its cost structure. BP's management estimates that its operational costs are now $4.6 billion less than 2014 levels, and it expects to get those costs down such that they will be $7 billion lower than 2014 levels by 2017. If it can really get costs down that much, it will have a much easier time finding profits.

The outlookAs costs continue to come down, so, too, does the per-barrel breakeven price. With the cost savings target and reduced capital spending, BP estimates that it can lower its breakeven price from $60 per barrel to a range of $50 to $55. That would certainly help today, but that could be even more critical in the coming years as the industry starts to recover. Even with this low oil price breakeven cost, the company estimates that it will be able to deliver 800,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in new production by 2020.

What a Fool believesBP still has some issues to work out before the company really starts to be a solidly profitable business again, but this quarter did show hints that it could get there in the coming years. There's a plan in place that looks like it will work, and now BP needs to execute on that plan. The payments associated with the Gulf of Mexico spill may be more clear, but they will be a constant drag on earnings for a very long time and should give investors some pause.

BP does look slightly more promising than it did a year ago, but it's still got some work to do before it's generating strong returns for shareholders.

The article BP's Operations Did Surprisingly Well Last Quarter, but Gulf of Mexico Costs Kept It From Profits originally appeared on Fool.com.

Tyler Crowe has no position in any stocks mentioned.You can follow him at Fool.comor on Twitter@TylerCroweFool.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.
What: Shares of CARBO Ceramics slumped 14% by 2:45 p.m. ET on Thursday after the company reported poorly received first-quarter results.

So what: The downturn in the oil market had a significant impact on CARBO, which reported revenue of just $33.1 million, down from $73.7 million in the year-ago quarter. Meanwhile, the company turned in a loss of $25.7 million, or $1.07 per share. However, that loss included $5.7 million, or $0.25 per share, in after-tax charges and $6.5 million, or $0.28 per share, of after-tax costs associated with slowing and idling production.

Given the severity of the downturn on the company's business, its focus right now is on cash preservation and cost reduction. This has included reducing its head count and idling production, including the recent decision to cease most production activities at plants in Louisiana and Georgia.

Unfortunately, the company doesn't see any signs of improvement in market conditions, with CEO Gary Kolstad noting that the "near-term outlook for ceramic proppant remains extremely challenging." Making matters worse, according to the company, is the inventory liquidation of low-quality Chinese ceramic proppants in North America, which should lead to additional downward pressure on the company's business during the second quarter.

Now what: Times are rough for CARBO Ceramics right now. Its primary goal is to stop the bleeding by reducing costs and preserving cash so it can make it through these tough times and position itself for the next upcycle. That said, things could get even harder, and that next upcycle could be far away, which makes this stock a real lottery ticket right now.

The article Cratering Earnings Cause CARBO Ceramics Inc.'s Stock to Slip originally appeared on Fool.com.

Matt DiLallo 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.
IMAGERY COLLECTED BY DIGITALGLOBE'S VARIOUS SATELLITES. IMAGE SOURCE: DIGITALGLOBE.

DigitalGlobe reported first-quarter 2016 results Wednesday after the bell. With shares already up 20% year to date on the heels of last quarter's encouraging performance, the satellite image purveyor offered investors a surprise return to revenue growth and profitability.Let's take a closer look at what DigitalGlobe achieved in its latest quarter:

DigitalGlobe results: The raw numbers

Metric Q1 2016 Actuals Q1 2015 Actuals Growth (YOY) Revenue $175.4 million $169.4 million 3.5% Net income (available to common shareholders) $7.3 million -$5.9 million N/A Earnings per share $0.11 -$0.08 N/A

DATA SOURCE: DIGITALGLOBE.

What happened with DigitalGlobe this quarter?

U.S. government revenue fell 3.9% year over year, to $110.3 million, an expected result as DigitalGlobe realized the deferred revenue earn-out on prior Global-EGD awards in the first quarter of last year. The decline was also partially offset by a 10% increase in the U.S.G. analytics business.

Diversified commercial revenue rose 19.2% year over year, to $65.1 million, including a 35% increase in revenue fromDirect Access Program (DAP) customers, to $33.2 million.

Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) grew 30.5% year over year, to $95.4 million.

Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 1,124 basis points, to 54.4%

Cash flow from operations increased 1.2% year over year, to $57.6 million.

Free cash flow was $17.8 million, down from $25.6 million in the same year-ago period, once again primarily due to timing of milestone payments related to DigitalGlobe's WorldView-4 satellite, which is scheduled to launch in Sept. 2016.

Subsequent to the end of the quarter, announced it has entered into a letter of intent for three-year direct access capacity on WorldView-4 with an unnamed "new international defense and intelligence customer."

This brought the value of contracts and letters of intent for both WorldView-3 and Worldview-4 to a total of $355 milllion, of which 65% is under firm contract. This also increased the amount of annualized contracted revenue from international defense and intelligence customers to $43 million, up from $38 million last quarter. Nearly all of this contracted revenue will start flowing in 2017.

Repurchased 4,116,271 shares of common stock for $60.9 million, at an average price of $14.80 per share, leaving around $55 million remaining under DigitalGlobe's original $335 million repurchase authorization.

What management had to sayCEO Jeffrey Tarr stated:

Looking forwardTo be sure, DigitalGlobe reiterated its full-year 2016 outlook, which calls for revenue of $670 million to $700 million (down 4.6% to 0.3% from 2015), and adjusted EBITDA of $330 million to $355 million (down 7.2% to 0.2% from 2015). And while that might seem strange considering DigitalGlobe's relative outperformance in Q1 -- after all, analysts' consensus estimates predicted the company would turn in a loss of $0.03 per share on lower revenue of $166.5 million. However, CFO Gary Ferrera explained during the subsequent conference call that DigitalGlobe expects some of the increase in DAP revenue during the quarter was due to revenue potentially being pulled forward from the second quarter.

And that's fair enough. With that in mind, DigitalGlobe's latest quarter once again contained no significant surprises -- something about which you'll be hard-pressed to find shareholders willing to complain in light of the stock's harrowing 30%-plus post-earnings plungeon light guidance six months ago. In the end, as long as DigitalGlobe continues to focus on operational efficiency while readying new satellite launches in the coming months, the company should remain nicely positioned to return to sustained, profitable growth.

The article DigitalGlobe Inc. Returns to Growth -- for Now originally appeared on Fool.com.

Steve Symington has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends DigitalGlobe. 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.
Ford (NYSE:F) CEO Mark Fields, emphasizing Fords investments in U.S. manufacturing, shrugged off criticism that has been lobbed at the automaker during the presidential primary races.

I cant speak to whats being said on the campaign trail. Obviously, we have these trade agreements, and I think as we look at our business, we made a big commitment here to our facilities in the U.S. Youve seen some of the numbers in terms of backing that up, Fields said during a conference call with analysts.

Earlier this month, Ford again became a lightning rod on the campaign trail when it officially revealed plans to build a new $1.6 billion factory in Mexico, where the company is expected to build the Focus compact car and C-Max hybrid. Small cars are less profitable than trucks and SUVs, and several automakers have concentrated production in Mexico to reduce costs.

Donald Trump often targets U.S. companies that have outsourced jobs to other countries, and the Republican primary frontrunner has specifically cited Ford in his criticisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump has argued in favor of taxing imports to stem job losses.

This transaction is an absolute disgrace, Trump said in a statement following Fords April 5 announcement. NAFTA has incentivized plants to move to Mexico, closing factories across the United States.

At the time of its announcement, Ford noted that its investments in America over the past five years totaled $10.2 billion. Executives also stressed that Ford builds more cars in the country than any other manufacturers.

During Thursdays earnings call, Fields said Ford has another $9 billion allocated for U.S. investments going forward.

At the same time, Fields said, Ford continues to evaluate its footprint and determine what doesnt make sense for our business.

I think we have a good plan going forward to support our growth, despite some of the political campaign chatter right now, Fields added.
Image source: Eagle Materials.

An improving construction market, due in part to better weather conditions, provided a big boost to U.S. Lime & Minerals first-quarter results. It also helped to more than offset the continued weakness in the oil and gas market, which has not only been impacting the company's lime and limestone sales to that market, but also the revenue the company gets from its own natural gas production.

U.S. Lime results: The raw numbers

Q1 2016 Actuals Q1 2015 Actuals Growth (YOY) Revenue $33.6 million $30.0 million 11.7% Net income $4.1 million $2.4 million 71.9% EPS $0.73 $0.42 73.8%

Data source: U.S. Lime & Minerals.

What happened with U.S. Lime this quarter?U.S. Lime reported a much improved quarter.

The company's core lime and limestone operations enjoyed a strong quarter, with revenue up 12.9% to $33.2 million. That was due to increased sales volumes thanks to higher demand from construction and industrial customers as well as a slight year-over-year increase in prices. The higher demand from construction customers was partially due to the fact that demand last year was very weak because of poor weather conditions.

Revenue from the company's natural gas interests continued to fall due to the weak natural gas market, slumping 38.5% to just $432,000. Not only was production weak, with volumes dropping from 187,000 MFC to 160,000 MCF, but prices fell from $3.75 per MCF to $2.69 per MCF.

The higher revenue in the company's lime and limestone operations fell directly to the company's bottom line, pushing net income up by more than 70%. Meanwhile, net income on a per share basis was even stronger due to a lower share count after the company's stock buyback program reduced its outstanding share count by roughly half a percent.

What management had to sayIn commenting on the quarter, CEO Timothy Byrne said:

So far 2016 is shaping up to be a better year for the construction industry, which is good news for materials suppliers U.S. Lime, Eagle Materials , and Martin Marietta Materials . That's what the sector had been banking on after last year's tough showing with Eagle Materials seeing heavy rain impacting its cement business in Texas and Oklahoma while U.S. Lime's customers were affected by similar weather problems. That wash-out last year, however, has actually unleashed stronger demand this year, which is in-line with what Martin Marietta Materials CEO Ward Nye said his company expected to see this year. He noted last quarter that the company's "[...] outlook for 2016 reflects growing underlying demand and strong pricing across our entire geographic footprint ... in addition to substantial contractor backlogs resulting from historic rainfall in 2015, should fuel growth and further recovery of the U.S. construction industry."

That outlook is clearly being played out in U.S. Lime's results, with it seeing a rebound in demand from the construction segment so far this year.

Looking forwardAs long as the weather cooperates, sales to construction customers should continue to improve this year and boost U.S. Lime's results. That said, what remains to be seen if the energy market, which has been weighing on the results of both U.S. Lime and Eagle Materials, will also recover. If that market starts to recover in the second half of the year as some market participants expect, it could fuel further improvements in U.S. Lime's results this year.

The article Improving Construction Sales Boost United States Lime & Minerals Inc.'s Earnings originally appeared on Fool.com.

Matt DiLallo has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends U.S. Lime and Minerals. 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.
Energy storage has finally captured the imagination of the energy industry. It could be the industry's next growth segment and make a grid with more variable renewable energy operate efficiently.

GTM Research recently concluded that U.S. energy storage grew 243% in 2015 to 112 MW, more than doubling the amount of storage installed. By 2020, they predict the market will be 1.7 GW annually. And now there may be a new entrant into the market.

Image source: GTM Research.

Today's battery systems aren't fully developedLockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) has revealed that it is pursuing energy storage in a bold move into the electricity business. The opportunity is too big to ignore and with smaller companies, with weaker balance sheets, dominating the business today it could have a place in the future. The company's first idea is to build a lithium ion battery system that aims to lower balance of system costs.

A lot of companies have entered the market buying commodity batteries from suppliers in Asia and building the brains behind charging and utilizing the system. Lockheed Martin says it wants to work on the entire balance of system design (everything beyond the battery itself), making installation, integration, and operations more efficient. That's where, the company argues, the opportunity lies.

Most energy storage systems today are big, bulky boxes, which Lockheed Martin is trying to change. Image source: SunEdison.

Right now, the company says it is launching a 250 KWh and 500 KWh system, which is larger than Tesla Motors' 100 kWH Powerpack. Now, Lockheed Martin just has to show that it can live up to its talk about lowering costs on the balance of systems.

The next level of energy storage The bigger move may be in long duration energy storage, which could be the big market long-term. Long duration wouldn't be used for storage hour to hour, as a lithium battery is, but rather allow for operation all night or even storage of energy from sunny summer to winter months. And it's those applications that could prove to ultimately disrupt energy even more than the fast-charging lithium ion battery.

Lockheed Martin thinks it has technology that will make flow batteries economical enough to work in grid applications. Product manager Brad Fiebig called the product a "fundamentally new flow-battery chemistry" that uses more common materials and will have lower costs than competitors. With a flow battery energy "flows" through a cell stack from one storage tank to another, leading to almost limitless amounts of storage capacity (limited by the tanks). And if someone can make the concept economical it could be nothing short of transformative for the energy industry.

Again, time will tell if these claims become industry leading products. There's a place in the industry for both fast charging and long-duration energy storage, so if Lockheed can make a compelling product it could be a large untapped market.

Why this exciting for energy storage I have no idea if Lockheed Martin is really serious about energy storage long-term or if this is a side project for the company. However, the fact that a company with billions in revenue in adjacent markets to energy is taking notice of energy storage is a big deal. It validates that this is an infant industry worth keeping an eye -- that's notable in and of itself. As more and more players begin taking an interest in energy storage, it becomes increasingly likely that a breakthrough is on the horizon.

The article Lockheed Martin Throws Its Hat in the Energy Storage Ring originally appeared on Fool.com.

Travis Hoium has no position in any stocks mentioned. 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.
LaPlaya Beach Resort Club. Image source: Pebblebrook Hotel Trust.

Despite a sluggish hotel market, Pebblebrook Hotel Trust reported strong first-quarter results after the market closed on Wednesday. The company's results were not only well above its own guidance but also outperformed the industry because of strong demand for its hotels on the West Coast.

Still, the company sees this quarter as an outlier, with some of its strength being due to one-time events. That's why it's holding to its prior guidance, as that the hotel market remains under some pressure because of weakening travel trends.

Pebblebrook results: The raw numbers

Metric Q1 2016 Actuals Q1 2015 Actuals Growth (YOY) Same-property revPAR $195.01 $180.50 8% Adjusted FFO $40.6 million $24.4 million 66.4% AFFO per share $0.56 $0.34 64.7%

Data source: Pebblebrook Hotel Trust; RevPAR: revenue per available room; AFFO: adjusted funds from operations.

What happened with Pebblebrook this quarter?All of Pebblebrook's key financial metrics were well above its guidance range.

Same-property revPAR jumped 8% year over year in the first quarter, well above the company's guidance range of $186 to $191. Driving this figure was higher occupancy, with same-property occupancy rising 4.8% to 82.6% during the quarter.

This outcome drove higher-than-expected earnings metrics, with adjusted FFO and AFFO per share rising above the company's guidance ranges of $31.2 million to $34.2 million for adjusted FFO and $0.43 to $0.46 for AFFO per share.

The company also did a solid job keeping its expenses in check, with same-property expenses rising just 3.6% for the quarter against a 6.8% increase in same-property revenues.

What management had to sayCEO Jon Bortz, discussing the company's first-quarter results, said:

As Bortz notes, the company's stronger performance during the quarter was due to a few one-time items. That situation enabled the company to deliver growth that was both "above the industry's 2.7% growth and in excess of our 3% to 6% outlook," according to Bortz.

Pebblebrook wasn't alone in experiencing a strong quarter, with LaSalle Hotel Properties also performing well during the quarter. In fact, LaSalle Hotel Properties achieved its highest-ever first-quarter hotel EBITDA and hotel EBITDA margin, with its outperformance mainly driven by acquisitions and the completion of renovations. That situation helped LaSalle Hotel Propertiesovercome weakening market conditions, with its CEO, Michael Barnello, noting on the company's conference call: "[T]hese trends are swiftly moving, and unfortunately, most of it to the downside. ... So we acknowledge the following: We are in or approaching a downturn."

Looking forwardIt's this backdrop of a weakening hotel industry that has given Pebblebrook Hotel Trust pause, with Bortz noting that while the company "continue[s] to believe that 2016 will be a solid year for Pebblebrook and the overall U.S. hotel industry ... we remain cautious given the uncertain economic environment and softening business travel trends."

It's that caution that's leading it to simply reaffirm its full-year guidance even after delivering strong first-quarter results. That guidance calls for adjusted FFO to be in a range of $194.3 million to $206.3 million and AFFO per share to be between $2.67 to $2.84, which is 6.8% to 13.6% higher year over year. However, even providing guidance at all is noteworthy because LaSalle Hotel Properties made the decision not to provide guidance for 2016 because of a lack of transparency into what the year will bring. That situation suggests the potential that Pebblebrook might not hit its guidance if industry conditions do take a turn for the worse.

The article Pebblebrook Hotel Trust Reports Upscale Q1 Results originally appeared on Fool.com.

Matt DiLallo has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Pebblebrook Hotel Trust. 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: Penn National Gaming.

Penn National Gaming, Inc's plan to spinoff real estate to Gaming and Leisure Properties and put more operational leverage on the company's finances is paying off in 2016, as strong growth has resulted in a sharp rise in earnings. Thursday morning the company released first quarter results, and there was a lot for investors to like.

The gaming industry is back in Middle America First quarter net revenue jumped 13.9% to $756.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA, which is a proxy for cash flow from a resort, increased 15.5% to $212.9 million. But given the leverage Penn National has to the bottom line, net income jumped from just $1.9 million a year ago to $23.7 million.

To be fair, results were helped tremendously by the acquisition of Plainridge Park Casino in Maryland, Tropicana Las Vegas, and Prairie State Gaming in Illinois. But improvement in the gaming market was so widespread that it can't be attributed to acquisitions alone.

Regional gaming is back What's particularly encouraging about Penn National's results was the breadth of growth. West region revenue jumped 39.9% to $87.6 million, driven by the acquisition of Tropicana Las Vegas. The resort isn't running at full steam yet, so EBITDA in the region increased just 11.9% to $20.1 million -- but that's by far the company's smallest region.

East/Midwest net revenues jumped 13.2% to $437.5 million, and EBITDA was up 15.7% to $134.8 million, primarily from organic growth at existing casinos.

Southern Plains results showed a similar trend, with revenue up 7.1% to $225.2 million and EBITDA up 6.7% to $77.7 million.

Once Tropicana Las Vegas starts to generate more cash after remodeling the hotel, updating slots, and opening a day club, the West region should start to grow as well. And there's another addition coming.

Another expansion on the horizon The next project that will open this summer is Jamul Indian Village east of San Diego. It's not a property the company owns, but Penn National will get 30% of the resort's pre-tax revenue, a licensing fee of 1.5% of gross gaming revenue, and interest on the funds advanced to the $390 million project.

This will further push the company's reach west, and should be a low-risk addition to the income statement.

Is the expansion of regional gaming finally over? There are two major drivers of improving results for Penn National Gaming. The first is the general improvement in the economy, which gives players a little extra money to spend on gambling, hotels, and other expenses at the company.

The other driver is a slowdown of expansion in regional gaming in general. The trend over the last decade has been for states to open up gaming to new competitors, which Penn National has taken advantage of -- but this dilutes the market that already exists, and hurts a lot of companies along the way. Slowly, we're seeing the pace of new projects slow, and that's leading to more consistent results for Penn National Gaming.

With the spinoff of Gaming and Leisure Properties, investors can also see some of the resulting leverage the company has on the bottom line. The company is now growing net income rapidly, and second quarter guidance is for net income to grow from $3.0 million a year ago to $25.1 million. That's welcome news for investors, and the trend should continue as long as the economy keeps rolling along.

The article Penn National Gaming, Inc's Profit Jumps on U.S. Gaming Growth 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.
Priceline Group Inc said its Chief Executive Darren Huston has resigned, effective immediately, following an investigation into a personal relationship with an employee that violated the company's code of conduct.

The investigation, which involved an employee who was not under his direct supervision, determined that Huston had engaged in activities inconsistent with the board's expectations for executive conduct, Priceline said.

The travel website operator said Huston, who has been the company's CEO since January 2014, had acknowledged his misconduct and expressed regret.

"This did not involve issues about the company's financial statements, accounting or internal controls over financial reporting," Leslie Cafferty, a company spokeswoman, told Reuters in an email.

Huston will not receive any severance payments, the company said in a regulatory filing.

"I am satisfied with the Board's thorough review of this issue," James Guyette, lead independent director who is also overseeing the CEO search, said in a statement.

Chairman and former CEO Jeffery Boyd replaces Huston on an interim basis.

Huston will also step down as CEO of Booking.com, a unit of Priceline. He will be replaced by Booking.com Chief Operating Officer Gillian Tans.

Huston's resignation comes just days before the company is scheduled to report its second-quarter results on May 4.

Shares of the company were trading down 1.2 percent at $1,338 in premarket trading. They have gained 6.2 percent in value this year.

(Reporting by Sweta Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza and Anil D'Silva)
Image Source: Flickr user eutrophication&hypoxia.

What: Shares of FirstEnergy slumped 11% by 10:45 a.m. EST on Thursday. That's after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, decided to review income guarantee agreements from the company and fellow utility American Electric Power .

So what: For the past two years FirstEnergy and American Electric Power have been fighting hard to get a controversial proposal approved that would guarantee income for some of their aging power plants. That approval was finally given last month by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. However, FERC has now decided to step in and review the income-guarantee plans.

It's a blow to both companies because the approval would have enabled them to increase electricity rates in the short-term in order to subsidize older coal-fired and nuclear power plants. In commenting on the decision, American Electric Power said that it "is a disappointing and unfortunate intrusion by FERC into Ohio's ability to protect its retail customers from market volatility and plan for the state's generation needs." That being said, this does not mean that the companies won't be able to obtain the income guarantees that they are seeking, but now must apply for and receive it from FERC.

Now what: The FERC decision certainly adds to the uncertainty of both companies, which were banking on the income guarantees in order to keep some older plants running profitably. There's no telling how long it will take for these new reviews to be completed, nor the outcome of the reviews, given that there is intense opposition to them because they would raise electricity rates for consumers in Ohio.

The article Regulatory Ruling Sends FirstEnergy Corp.'s Stock Sinking Today originally appeared on Fool.com.

Matt DiLallo 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.
Image source: Pixabay.

What: Shares of Coeur Mining , a silver and gold miner in North, Central, and South America, witnessed its shares surge as much as 11% during Thursday's trading session following the release of its first-quarter earnings results, as well as another strong rally in underlying precious metal prices.

So what: For the quarter, Coeur Mining reported revenue of $148.4 million, which was a slight drop from the $153 million it delivered in the year-ago quarter. Revenue was generated by producing 8.1 million silver equivalent ounces (SEO), and selling 8.3 million SEO. More importantly, costs applicable to sales dipped from $115.1 million in Q1 2015 to $101.6 million in Q1 2016, as all-in sustaining costs on an SEO basis dropped 14% to $13.73. Focusing on costs helped reduce Coeur Mining's Q1 loss to an adjusted $0.04 per share. By comparison, Wall Street had been expecting Coeur Mining to report a much wider loss of $0.16 per share.

Looking ahead, Coeur Mining anticipates costs will remain more or less in line with what it produced in 2015, and it expects to produce between 33.8 million SEO and 36.8 million SEO for the full year.

Also helping the company's cause was silver prices approaching a one-year high. As of 4 p.m. ET, silver prices were nearing $17.60 an ounce, a better than 2% gain for the day. As underlying metal prices rise, Coeur could see its margins improve.

Now what: Coeur Mining, like the rest of the mining sector, has benefited of late by reducing its costs and expanding production in areas where ore grades have been better than expected. This is why we've seen revenue falling for some gold and silver miners since they're focusing on quality of production rather than quantity.

However, expect production rates to improve substantially in the coming years. The addition of the Wharf mine in 2015 for $105 million from Goldcorpcould quickly pay dividends through mine expansion, and improved recovery rates at Palmarejo in Mexico should lead to rapid production improvement. Coeur still has some work to do to get back to profitability, but if precious metal prices continue to rally, Coeur Mining could be a name you'll want on your watchlist.

The article Shares of Coeur Mining Inc. Briefly Jumped 11% -- Here's Why originally appeared on Fool.com.

Sean Williamshas no material interest in any companies mentioned in this article. You can follow him on CAPS under the screen nameTMFUltraLong, track every pick he makes under the screen name TrackUltraLong, and check him out on Twitter, where he goes by the handle@TMFUltraLong.The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter servicesfree for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe thatconsidering a diverse range of insightsmakes us better investors. The Motley Fool has adisclosure policy.

Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Volkswagen has a chance of posting solid growth in its operating business this year even as it grapples with its diesel emissions scandal and a strategic repositioning, Chief Executive Matthias Mueller said.

Cost reductions at Europe's largest automaker are "in full swing" at individual brands and across the group, Mueller said at Volkswagen's (VW) earnings press conference on Thursday, reiterating a target for an operating margin of 5-6 percent, versus 6 percent last year, adjusted for special items.

VW incurred an operating loss of 4.1 billion euros ($4.65 billion) last year, the biggest in its history, after setting aside 16.2 billion euros in provisions and slashing its dividend to help pay for the emissions-test cheating scandal.

Costs of the manipulations and slumping demand in overseas markets led operating profit at VW's core namesake brand to plunge 15 percent last year to 2.10 billion euros, causing the return on sales to fall to 2 percent from 2.5 percent, way below a 6 percent target.

VW is ceasing unprofitable models, shrinking complexity in parts, streamlining model development and shedding hundreds of temporary jobs to accelerate cost savings at the VW brand. The steps have triggered a dispute with the powerful labor leaders who occupy about half the seats on VW's supervisory board.

"We know that 2016 will be another highly demanding year for the VW Group," Mueller said, adding the company was making gradual progress in clearing up the emissions scandal.

VW aims to increase its electric-car offering and is taking steps to boost online connectivity in its models as it struggles to reposition itself in the wake of the scandal.

VW said it now expected long-term cost savings from its efforts to align truck brands MAN and Scania of as much as 1 billion euros per year, up from a previous target of 850 million euros.

Efforts to improve structures and increase efficiencies across the 12-brand group will be fully in place by the start of 2017, and a business strategy spelling out targets and priorities through 2025, to be published in June, is making "good progress", Mueller said.

(Reporting by Andreas Cremer; Editing by Maria Sheahan)
IMAGE SOURCE: MATT KOPPENHEFFER.

For more than 50 years, legendary investor Warren Buffett has guided Berkshire Hathaway on an incredible journey of business success and shareholder wealth creation. The iconic company is scheduled to report its latest financial results on April 29. The following day, thousands will travel to Nebraska to hear the Oracle of Omaha speak, as well as glean bits of wisdom from Buffett's partner, Berkshire's highly respected vice chairman and fellow master investor, Charlie Munger.

This year, there will be an exciting new twist on the much-anticipated event. Read on to see what it is and what investor questions Berkshire's results might answer.

Has Buffett still got it? While Buffett has takenseveral steps to ensure that Berkshire Hathaway will continue to prosper after he and Munger step down (such as bringing on Todd Combs and Ted Weschler to help manage its massive investment portfolio), Berkshire's success is still very much tied to Buffett's ability to allocate capital effectively on behalf of shareholders. Yet with Buffett now 85 years old, the morbid among us may question whether he is still sharp enough mentally to oversee such a sprawling empire. To help quell these concerns, Berkshire is placing a new spin on its annual shareholder meeting: Yahoo! Finance will stream the event live to audiences around the world.

Buffett said the live stream will give investors a chance to make sure he and the 92-year-old Munger hadn't "drifted off intola-la land."

Are operating profits on track?While the performance of its publicly traded stock portfolio has been responsible for a huge portion of the company's success, Berkshire has increasingly looked to acquire businesses outright as a means to benefit even more from the profits they produce and as an attractive reinvestment destination for Berkshire's ever-growing cash flows.

Of particular importance are Berkshire's railroad operations. In 2009, Berkshire invested more than $26 billion to purchase Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Since then, Berkshire has invested billions to expand and improve BNSF's rail network. Yet with many U.S. railroad operators struggling with declining demand for their freight-hauling services over the past year, some investors question whether this is a wise use of Berkshire's capital.

Buffett, of course, has a much longer time horizon and is likely thinking in decades rather than years. And Berkshire's investment in BNSF is already paying sizable dividends, with the railroad titan's pre-tax income rising nearly 10% to $6.8 billion in 2015. Still, investors will be perusing Berkshire's upcoming financial results for signs that BNSF -- and, more importantly, the business' overall operating earnings -- remain on track to deliver steady gains in the years ahead.How to access Berkshire Hathaway's resultsBerkshire Hathaway will announce its first-quarter financial results on Friday after the market closes at 4:00 p.m. ET. The report will be available on the company's investor relations website. Investors can also tune in to the live stream of the annual shareholder meeting beginning at 10:00 a.m. ET on April 30, when Buffett and Munger will once again hold court at the "Woodstock for Capitalists."

The article What to Watch When Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Reports Earnings originally appeared on Fool.com.

Joe Tenebruso has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool recommends Yahoo. 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.
Funnyman Will Ferrell will channel President Ronald Reagan in a comedy that focuses on the President at the beginning of his second term as he falls into dementia. However, Dan Gainor, VP of Business and Culture for the Media Business Center believes the script is in bad taste.

Written by Mike Rosolio, the script Reagan made the list for best unproduced screenplays in 2015 and centers on an intern tasked with attempting to convince the leader of the country that he is playing the president in a movie.

For desperate lefties to push forward yet another try at this totally discredited idea that Reagan was somehow senile is disgusting, Gainor said.

Gainor said Hollywood is determined to dethrone a conservative icon.

Now, Hollywood's bitter left-wingers are trying to rewrite history by discrediting a man greater than any of them can ever hope to be, he said. Liberals have never been able to come to grips that Reagan won election and was both incredibly popular and successful. They blame him for all of what they consider the ills of the current world, including making America strong and ending the communist Soviet Union.

Some social media users expressed outrage at the plot of the upcoming film.

Alzheimers is not a comedy!Will Ferrell to play dementia-stricken Ronald Reagan https://t.co/5wdo2PVvHt via the @FoxNews Android app  Michael Reagan (@ReaganWorld) April 27, 2016

I don't appreciate this. We don't make satire movies about JFK or other liberal sweethearts. https://t.co/J9SHJywZ9u  Alyssa Canobbio (@AlyssaEinDC) April 27, 2016

Having family members who passed from Alzheimer's this is offensive. Boo #WillFerrell https://t.co/TVtRPpyamf  Joe Randeen (@joetheflow) April 28, 2016

What an Outrag....Alzheimers is not joke...It kills..You should be ashamed all of you. https://t.co/GNzqR5vjrX  Michael Reagan (@ReaganWorld) April 27, 2016

I am no fan of Reagan at all but a comedy about his dementia seems like it could be really inappropriate...  Mike Silangil (@msilangil91) April 27, 2016 Then it's going to making fun of him in the most stupid manner! I WON'T see it!  #WillFerrell https://t.co/iWtox5q4A8  Fates Fool (@JenniferSelvidg) April 28, 2016

Others, however, said critics of the upcoming film need to ease up.



Back in December, one Reagan historian, Craig Shirley, expressed his outrage to Inside The Beltway regarding Rosolios script.

I personally love Ronald Reagan. This new Will Ferrel movie is just a movie. It doesn't have to follow any rules regarding content.  Ben (@Cipione) April 28, 2016 Will Ferrell is a master of his art, God Level. He is the Bruce Lee of acting. He will do great as Ronald Reagan. Stay calm  VaughanSollo (@VaughanSollo) April 27, 2016

The Hollywood of Reagans era, in which the good guys won and the bad guys lost, and American values and truth were upheld, is a thing of the past. Now Hollywood for the most part is a cesspool of human garbage where the left is venerated and the right is eviscerated.

In March, a live read of Reagan took place in Hollywood starring James Brolin, John Cho, and Lena Dunham.

Ferrell along with Gary Sanchez Productions will produce the movie. No director has been named.

Gary Sanchez Productions, Rosolio, and Ferrell did not return FOX411s request for comment.
"Most people cite 'lack of time' as the main reason for not being active," professor of kinesiology Martin Gibala says in a press release. But that's no longer a valid excuse for not getting in better shape.

According to a study published Tuesday in PLOS One, Gibala and fellow researchers have shown that just one minute of go-for-broke exercising is as beneficial as a 45-minute moderate workout.

"If you are someone, like me, who just wants to boost health and fitness and you dont have 45 minutes or an hour to work out, our data show that you can get big benefits from even a single minute of intense exercise, Gibala tells the New York Times. Researchers split 27 "sedentary men" into three groups. The first group continued not working out as usual, the second group did 45 minutes of moderate pedaling on a stationary bike plus five minutes of warm-up/cool-down, and the final group did 10 minutes of sprint interval training. That training included just the aforementioned one minute of intense exercise: three 20-second intervals of pedaling as hard as possible, which alternated with two two-minute recovery periods of very slow pedaling and five total minutes of warm-up/cool-down. Both exercising groups worked out three times a week for 12 weeks and showed nearly identical improvements in their health and fitness. (This man lost 70 pounds eating nothing but potatoes.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: Study: Minute of Hard Exercise Just as Good as 45-Minute Workout

More From Newser
A pair of siblings with a rare hereditary condition that is destroying their bones reportedly will have to continue suffering and possibly face an early death after the Australian government ruled that it will not cover life-changing treatment.

Max and Mila Horder, 13 and 12 respectively, were diagnosed with lysosomal storage disease and told that a drug named Vimizim would have life-saving benefits, news.com.au reported. However, treatment costs up to $800,000 per person, and the Australian governments Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) will not cover the costs.

Without the drug, their bones will continue to disintegrate, their quality of life will diminish and they will continue to suffer in pain, their mother, Luba Horder, told news.com.au. The Horders have two other boys who are not affected by the condition.

I cant breathe most of the time, I dont know what Im doing, she told the news station. I just want the drug for my children, thats all I seek, she said.

For now, friends have set up a fundraising page to help cover some costs of the medication, while others launched a petition asking the countrys federal health minister to intervene. The maker of the drug reportedly also applied for listing on a separate Life Saving Drugs Program, which is still under consideration by the government, News.com.au reported.

I just want a chance to grow tall enough to go on the big girls rides at Luna Park, Mila told news.com.au. One day, I want to get married and have children of my own.


Thanks to widespread vaccination campaigns across most of the developed world, very few people or their dogs in those areas contract rabies, which is almost always fatal in humans.

But in parts of the world where vaccination rates remain far lower, rabies claims tens of thousands of human lives a year. Fortunately, one such case in China has a silver lining.

As scientists report in the Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins Including Tropical Diseases, a 25-year-old pregnant woman in Henan province who was infected by a dog she didn't know had rabies gave birth to a healthy, uninfected boyjust before the virus claimed her own life.

Researchers posit that the placenta played a protective role, but they note there were still ample opportunities for the virus to pass to the child, particularly during delivery.

"The prompt administration of vaccines and anti-rabies immunoglobulin to the infant may have also contributed to his survival," they write. The rabies virus has a "well-earned reputation for its brutal ingenuity," Medical Daily notes.

After taking over most any warm-blooded mammal's central nervous system, causing excessive salivation and aggression, it then hides out in the salivary glands, where it provokes its host to bite or scratch another creature and keep the vicious cycle alive.

And while the researchers report that there are only six other documented cases of a pregnant woman with full-blown rabies delivering a baby, five of those six newborns did survive.

Their mothers weren't so fortunate. (This girl became only the third person to survive rabies without the vaccine.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: Rabies Kills a Pregnant Woman; Son Finds Better Fate

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A toddler who contracted a deadly strain of meningitis in April 2015 and almost lost his life is thriving after having one of his legs amputated and being fit with a prosthetic.

News.com.au reported that Taylor Marshall, of Nottingham, Britain, also had to have all 10 fingers and toes removed when they turned black after being diagnosed with meningococcal septicaemia type W. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), meningitis involves swelling of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord an effect usually caused by infection of the fluid surrounding those body parts.

In Taylors case, the infection caused total body shutdown, leaving the tot unable to eat or drink.

It was the worst day of my life when doctors prepared us to say our goodbyes, Terri, his mother, told news.com.au. His legs were black and he was hooked up to every machine possible. I just prayed he would pull through, and after surgeons amputated his left leg, toes, and fingers on both hands, he started to improve and smile again.

Five months ago, he was discharged from the hospital, and four weeks later he received his prosthetics: an artificial left leg and a splint for his right leg, which was left in place but remains injured from the brain disease. Nearly a year after his diagnosis, Taylor is happy and walking again.

I was so happy I could have cried when he stood up for the first time, Terri told the news website. Taylor is the biggest fighter I have ever known, hes amazing.
Lets look at where the math sits right now on the GOP side of the presidential race. After Donald Trump's five big wins Tuesday night, he now has 987 delegate, Ted Cruz at 562, and John Kasich at 153.

The GOP presidential candidate needs 1237 delegates to win the nomination, and there are still 583 delegates up for grabs.

Here are some of the remaining states and their delegate count.

Indiana awards 57 delegates.

Nebraska -- 36.

West Virginia -- 34.

Oregon -- 28.

California with 172.

The prevailing thought process is that Trump will do better in states like New Jersey and California, and Cruz in other western states. I, however, think there could be a different factor now. The voters now know that its almost statically impossible for Cruz to get to 1237. So, will that reality give the momentum to Trump? I believe it could, meaning we may not see a contested convention.
The worlds greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II is unfolding in the Middle East.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Syria and Iraq have lost their lives, and entire communities have been displaced or wiped out, while neighboring communities and cultures strain to accept millions of people fleeing years of war and terrorism.

We face the very real prospect of the extinction of many communities indigenous to the region.

This crisis implores all people of good will to unite to build a worldwide effort to save these historic, indigenous minority communities regardless of race, ethnicity or religion.

The Knights of Columbus is committed to this great cause. We submitted to the State Department on March 9 and subsequently to members of Congress, a nearly 300-page report that documented the atrocities and laid out the legal analysis supporting the conclusion that genocide is occurring.

Our recent fact-finding mission to Iraq found evidence of widespread rape, kidnapping, forced conversions, slavery, murder, property confiscation and forced expulsion. Many of the incidents had not been previously reported.

The State Departments declaration of genocide on March 17 marked only the second time that such a determination has been made by the U.S. government while the crime is ongoing.

It is our impression that what we know today is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg. A concerted, sustained effort now needs to be undertaken to document the extent of this tragedy.

ISIS and the victims we interviewed agree on one thing. Many of those targeted were targeted because of their Christian faith. The predecessors of ISIS--the Islamic State in Iraq and Al Qaeda in Iraqalso targeted Christians.

We know that ISIS has killed thousands of Christians in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Mass graves have been reported in Syria, and the desert between Mosul and Erbil was littered with bodies as Christians there fled too quickly to bury neighbors and family members.

Churchmen from the region, including Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan, and archbishops from Aleppo, Erbil, and Mosul, have all called what is happening to their people genocide.

Genocide has special meaning for Christians in the Middle East. Almost a century ago, Raphael Lemkin formulated the concept he would later call genocide to address the killing of Christians in the region during and after World War I.

Today the stakes are even higher. The number of Christians in Iraq has plummeted from more than 1.5 million to as few as 200,000. In Syria, the Christian community has been reduced by two thirds, from 1.5 million to 500,000.

These people are among the longest-standing ethnic and religious communities, not only in the region, but in the world.

The United Nations must act to ensure that these ancient and vulnerable indigenous groups do not face extinction.

We cannot accept one standard for human rights in this region and another standard for the rest of the world.

If Christianity disappears in this region, so does the opportunity for pluralism; and the likelihood of majoritarian theocracy, or something worse, is increased.

We have a unique opportunity to change things for the better. Never before has the worlds attention been so focused on the suffering of these minorities. Never has their plight been so high on the agenda of the worlds governments, the vast majority of the worlds Muslims, and all people of good will.

The United Nations can play a vital role by protecting the victims and refugees, by ensuring the survival of these ancient indigenous and religious communities, by punishing the perpetrators and by supporting the establishment of internationally agreed-upon standards of justice, equality, rule of law and religious freedom.

Carl Anderson is CEO of the Knights of Columbus. This essay is based on remarks he made to a conference on Christian genocide at the United Nations on April 28.


Would all of our lives be safer if the government could break down all the doors it wishes, listen to all the conversations it could find and read whatever emails and text messages it could acquire? Perhaps. But who would want to live in such a society?

To prevent that from happening here, the Framers ratified the Fourth Amendment, which is the linchpin of privacy and was famously called by Justice Louis Brandeis the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. He wrote those words in his dissent in the first wiretapping case to reach the Supreme Court, Olmstead v. United States, in 1928.

Roy Olmstead had been convicted for bootlegging on the basis of words he used in overheard telephone conversations. Because he had used a phone at his place of work that the government had tapped without breaking and entering his workplace, the high court ruled -- despite the fact that the government had not obtained a warrant -- that he had no right to privacy. Brandeis dissented.

Over time, the Brandeis dissent became the law. The Fourth Amendment, which protects the privacy of all in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, was interpreted to cover telephone conversations and eventually emails and text messages. So today, if the government wants information contained in those communications, it needs to obtain a search warrant, which the Fourth Amendment states can only be given by a judge -- and only upon a showing of probable cause of evidence of a crime contained in the communications it seeks.

If the government does not obtain a search warrant and listens to phone conversations or reads emails or text messages nevertheless and attempts to use what it heard or read to acquire other evidence or directly in the prosecution of a defendant, that is unlawful. That type of information is known as the fruit of the poisonous tree.

Evidence procured that is the fruit of the poisonous tree has been inadmissible in federal criminal prosecutions in the United States for the past 100 years and in state criminal prosecutions for the past 50 years.

Until now.

Now comes the super-secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, reaffirmed by Congress last year under the so-called USA Freedom Act. Beware the names of federal statutes, as they often produce results that are the opposite of what their names imply; and this is one of them.

Congress has unconstitutionally authorized the FISA court to issue search warrants on the basis of governmental need -- a standard that is no standard at all because the government can always claim that it needs what it wants. The FISA court does not require a showing of probable cause for its warrants, because it accepts the myth that the government is listening to or reading words by foreign people for foreign intelligence purposes only, not for prosecutorial purposes.

Never mind that Congress cannot change the plain meaning of the Constitution. Never mind that the Fourth Amendment protects all people in the United States, American or foreign, from all parts of the government for all purposes, not just criminal prosecutions.

Yet the FISA court still grants general warrants -- look where you wish and seize what you find -- exposing our innermost thoughts to the prying eyes of the intelligence community in direct contravention of the Fourth Amendment.

Enter the USA Freedom Act. One of its selling points to Congress was that it would permit the FISA court to appoint a lawyer to challenge hypothetically some of its behavior. The court recently made such an appointment, and the lawyer appointed challenged the policy of the National Security Agency, the federal governments domestic spying agency, of sharing data it acquires via the unconstitutional FISA warrants with the FBI. She argued that the data sharing goes far beyond the stated purpose of the FISA warrants, which is to gather foreign intelligence data from foreign people, not evidence of domestic crimes of anyone whose emails might be swept up by those warrants.

The challenge revealed publicly what many of us have condemned for years: The NSA actually makes its repository of raw data from emails and text messages available for the FBI to scour at will, without the FBI's obtaining a warrant issued by a judge pursuant to the Fourth Amendment.

In an opinion issued in November but kept secret until last week, the FISA court rejected the hypothetical challenge of its own appointee and ruled that the NSA could continue to share what it wants with the FBI.

There are several problems with this ruling. The first is the hypothetical nature of the challenge. Federal courts do not exist in a vacuum. They do not render advisory opinions. They can only hear real cases and real controversies involving real plaintiffs and real defendants, not hypothetical ones as was the case here.

The whole apparatus of hypothetical challenge and hypothetical ruling is constitutionally meaningless. It was the moral and legal equivalent of a law school moot court oral argument. Yet federal and soon state law enforcement will interpret it as giving cover to the NSA/FBI practice of data sharing, which is clearly unconstitutional because it is the use of fruit from a poisonous tree.

FISA and the USA Freedom Act were enacted under the premise -- the pretense -- that the data collected under them would be used for foreign intelligence purposes only so that attacks could be thwarted and methods could be discovered. Yet the use by the FBI of extraconstitutionally obtained intelligence data for ordinary criminal prosecutions defies the stated purposes of the statutes and contradicts the Fourth Amendment.

If this is keeping us safe, who or what will safeguard our freedoms? Who will keep us safe from those who have sworn to uphold the Constitution yet defy it?
The military says Defense Secretary Ash Carter "misspoke" when he told a Senate committee Wednesday the northern Iraqi city of Mosul would be "enveloped" by Iraq and Kurdish forces within five weeks.

Initially, U.S. military officials were scratching their heads about Carter's testimony before the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, in which he appeared to be offering an overly optimistic timetable for the liberation of the de facto Islamic State capital in Iraq.

The secretary did seem a bit tongue-tied during the exchange in which he confused the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with the Iraqi city of Ramadi. "Some of those are [Iraqi security] forces coming from the south, some of them are two brigades of Peshmerga coming from the north. We would like to complete that envelopment before Ramadi," apparently referring to Ramadan.

What the secretary meant to say, according to a military spokesman, is that Iraqis will begin "positioning" forces for the future envelopment of Mosul before Ramadan, which begins June 6, not that the envelopment would be complete by then.

Read more on WashingtonExaminer.com
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, at a Fox News-hosted town hall in Indianapolis, on Wednesday blasted rival Ted Cruzs decision to announce a running mate even though hes losing the nomination race  calling it a waste of time.

Shortly afterward, though, Cruz VP pick Carly Fiorina fired back, saying the race isn't over yet and "close doesn't count."

The back-and-forth capped an unusual day on the campaign trail, even as the nomination seems within Trump's grasp. The billionaire businessman responded to Cruzs campaign curveball, while also elaborating on a foreign policy speech he delivered earlier in the day, at the forum hosted by Greta Van Susteren.

I think its really a waste of time, honestly, Trump said of Cruzs decision to name former presidential candidate and ex-HP CEO Fiorina as his VP pick. Of the race, Trump said, It should be over.

Cruz earlier acknowledged it was unusual to name a VP choice so early, but defended the decision. He claimed nobody is getting to 1,237 delegates, the number needed to clinch the nomination, and voters should know what [they] will get.

After Trump swept five states across the Northeast on Tuesday, the three remaining GOP candidates are looking next to Indianas primary on May 3 as a pivotal point in the race  one that can show whether Trump turns his winning streak into irreversible momentum, or whether Cruz and John Kasich still have a shot at preventing him from clinching the nomination before July.

But Trump cast Cruzs ticket roll-out Wednesday as a bid to distract from bad headlines, calling it awfully early for such an announcement.

You have to first get the nomination.  He has zero chance, he said.

Trump declined to go into detail about his own potential running mate choices. I have a lot of great people. I just dont like to talk about it right now, he said.

In an interview Wednesday night on "The Kelly File" with Fox News' Megyn Kelly, Fiorina responded to Trump's comments over Cruz making her his VP pick.

"Donald Trump hasn't won this nomination yet, despite so many people in the media just wishing it would all be over," she said.

"This isn't over until someone reaches 1,237 (delegates) ... and no, close doesn't count," she added.

Fiorina told Kelly that parts of the Republican Party are uniting behind Cruz, with him receiving endorsements from former presidential candidates Gov. Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, in addition to Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

A majority of Republican voters dont want Donald Trump to be their nominee," Fiorina said Wednesday.

She also responded to a question by Kelly over her criticism of Cruz earlier in the presidential campaign.

"In the heat of a presidential campaign, like in a basketball game, you make some fouls," she said.

Trump spoke just hours after delivering what was billed as a major foreign policy address in Washington. In the speech, Trump called for a drastic shake-up in Americas foreign policy  including getting out of the nation-building business and demanding NATO allies pay their fair share or be left to defend themselves.

At the Fox News town hall, Trump questioned at what point are we the guardian of the world, saying countries have to protect themselves or you have to pay us properly.

We have to be good to our allies, but they have to remember that were good, and they have to take care of us, Trump said.

He also discussed his goals for bringing jobs back to America, and  when asked about Bernie Sanders plans for free college tuition  said he would like to look seriously at bringing down college costs. He said he would, if elected, work out a deal to address that, potentially to include giving students more time to pay back their debt.

Trump was joined onstage Wednesday by legendary Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight, now a Trump supporter, who called the candidate far and away the best person to lead America back to where we all want to be.

Trump sought to demonstrate his foreign policy chops Wednesday as he tries to present a more presidential image  while increasingly turning his attention on the campaign trail to a general election battle he presumes will involve him and Hillary Clinton.

The billionaire businessman declared himself the presumptive nominee Tuesday night, after winning primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Maryland. He hasnt shelved the trash talk and provocative language on the campaign trail, not yet anyway  repeatedly accusing Clinton of playing the woman card and mocking remaining GOP rivals Cruz and Kasich.
EXCLUSIVE: In a stunning reversal, the U.S. Army decided late Thursday to retain a decorated Green Beret it had planned to kick out after he physically confronted a local Afghan commander accused of raping a boy over the course of many days.

Sgt 1st Class Charles Martland, confirmed the Army's decision to retain him when reached by Fox News, who has been covering the story in depth for the past eight months and first broke the story of the Army's decision in August to kick out Martland over the incident, which occurred in northern Afghanistan in 2011.

"I am real thankful for being able to continue to serve," said Martland when reached on the telephone by Fox News. "I appreciate everything Congressman Duncan Hunter and his Chief of Staff, Joe Kasper did for me."

As first reported by Fox News, while deployed to Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, Martland and his team leader confronted a local police commander in 2011 accused of raping an Afghan boy and beating his mother. When the man laughed off the incident, they shoved him to the ground.

Martland and his team leader were later removed from the base, and eventually sent home from Afghanistan. The U.S. Army has not confirmed the specifics of Martland's separation from service citing privacy reasons, but a memorandum of reprimand from October 2011 obtained by Fox News makes clear that Martland was criticized by the brass for his intervention after the alleged rape. Asked for comment in September 2015, an Army spokesman reiterated, "the U.S. Army is unable to confirm the specifics of his separation due to the Privacy Act."

An Army spokesman said Thursday that Martland's status has been changed, allowing him to stay in the Army in a statement to Fox News.

"In SFC Martlands case, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records determination modified a portion of one of SFC Martlands evaluation reports and removed him from the QMP list, which will allow him to remain in the Army," said Lt. Col. Jerry Pionk.

Martland's former Special Forces team leader, now out of the Army and living in New York said the Army is a better place with Martland in its ranks.

"This is not just a great victory for SFC Martland and his family- Im just as happy that he can continue to serve our country and inspire his peers, subordinates and officers to be better soldiers. Charles makes every soldier he comes in contact with better and the Army is undoubtedly a better organization with SFC Martland still in its ranks," said Martland's former team leader Danny Quinn when reached by Fox News Thursday.

Quinn is a 2003 graduate of West Point.

"I am thrilled beyond words that my brother is able to continue his career of service to country. The relentless defense of Charles as a soldier and a man of integrity by his friends, family and colleagues sent a clear message that abhorrent decision making made in the interest of self promotion and lacking common sense will not be tolerated. Charles is where he belongs. He is an elite warrior. He belongs on the front lines. Our enemies last vision in this life should be of Martland's face. They have earned that right," said Casey a former Special Forces teammate of Martland's who asked that only his first name be used due to the sensitive of his current work.

The American Center for Law and Justice, who was involved with a writing campaign to save keep Martland in the Army, called the decision a significant victory."

The decision by the Army to retain this hero is long overdue and represents a significant victory for SFC Martland, said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the ACLJ. Justice has been served. The U.S. military has a moral obligation to stop child sexual abuse and exonerate SFC Martland for defending a child from rape. The Army finally took the corrective action needed and this is not only a victory for SFC Martland, but for the American people as well.

"The Army did the right thing and we won -- the American people, won," said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a phone interview with Fox News. "Martland is who we want out there."

Lawmakers were not the only ones who supported Martland's case.

One famous Hollywood actor also weighed in.

Harvey Keitel of "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs" fame also asked the Army to reconsider their decision.

Martland grew up south of Boston, in Milton, Mass. An all-state football player in high school, he set his sights on playing college football after graduating in 2001. Martland went for the Florida State University team, which just finished a season ranked fourth in the nation.

He made the team, impressing legendary head coach Bobby Bowden and famed defensive coordinator Mickey Andrews. Still, he often remained on the sidelines.

When Pat Tillman, a former NFL football player who volunteered for the Army Rangers, was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, he saw Tillman's sacrifice as motivation to apply for another elite program.

Martland dropped out of college and graduated in 2006 from Special Forces Qualification Course, one of the U.S. military's toughest training programs. Over the years he became a jumpmaster, combat diver and sniper.

After a deployment to Iraq in 2008, he deployed to Afghanistan in January 2010 as part of a 12-man unit. He and his team found themselves fighting large numbers of Taliban militants in volatile Kunduz Province.

In 2014, three years after being sent home from Afghanistan, Martland was runner-up Special Warfare Training Group Instructor of the Year from a pool of 400 senior leaders in Special Forces.

FoxNews.com's Judson Berger contributed to this report.
A government encirclement of the Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo could be imminent, according to military and humanitarian observers, some of whom point to United Nations-sponsored peace talks as having given the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad maneuvering room.

If Syrias largest city is surrounded by government troops, the strategic situation in Syria could change very rapidly for the worse, not only for Syrians, but also for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoganand for the Obama Administration, which has banked heavily on the crumbling peace talks to end five years of civil war and an expanding presence for ISIS amid the chaos.

The encirclement would also be a major strategic advance for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has drawn down his forces in Syria, but has also been helping the Assad regime conduct more focused military operations under a two-month cessation of hostilities..

A number of signs, including a higher concentration of air strikes, the movement of Russian artillery support for regime forces, and a variety of skirmishes near a 3-to-4 kilometer gap that still keeps Aleppo from being besieged, all show that they are getting ready to move, says Chris Kozak, a Syria analyst with the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

Recent air attacks on civilian institutions in Aleppo, including the Wednesday bombing of an underground hospital, and attacks on civilians in other centers are also symptoms of the impending military move, says Valerie Szybala, executive director of the Syria Institute, a Washington-based non-profit research organization.

The assault on Aleppo that everyone has been expecting is beginning, she told Fox News. It doesnt look good.

We think they will move to besiege Aleppo City as soon as they can, Dr. Khaled Almilaji, a doctor providing emergency medical training for relief workers in the Turkish city of Gazientep, not far from the Syrian border. We are stockpiling medical supplies in Aleppo City as much as we can.

The pessimistic analysis of the situation on the ground contrasts sharply with the message of strained optimism that emerged yesterday from U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura, who briefed the U.N. Security Council on his efforts to keep the faltering peace talks on life support.

Those talks, he related to journalists after his briefing have instead been overshadowed, lets be frank, by a substantial and indeed worrisome deterioration of the cessation of hostilities, in the past several weeks, following a decision by Syrian opposition forces to withdraw from the talks on April 19.

That withdraw in turn was sparked by opposition charges that the Assad regime and its supporters were already using the cessation of hostilities to carry on their military actions.

The cessation is still alive, but barely, de Mistura insisted, while adding that the perception is that it could collapse at any timea distinction not felt by those affected by recent bombings.

The U.N. envoy declared that even while the Geneva-based peace talks were frozen, progress had been made in a series of substantial technical meetings and consultations among the warring sides, interested nations and other Syrian civil groups that had taken place elsewhere.

The commonalities from those meetings, according to a mediators summary made public by da Mistura, included the need for a new Syrian constitution, and a Syrian-owned and Syrian-led political transition in the future, overseen by a new, credible and inclusive transitional governance that could include members of the present government and the opposition, independents and others.

CLICK HERE FOR THE MEDIATORS REPORT

Da Mistura hailed the commonalities as an opportunity of going deeper in future rounds of peace talks, and declared that we have at least one or two more rounds before July, when a timetable passed by the Security Council called for the peace process to turn the commonalities into actual facts.

Meantime, however, regime aircraft are bombing on a daily basis, according to a media spokesman for the volunteer Civil Defense units known as White Helmets, who lost five of their own members during attacks this week,. The attacks are occurring not only in Aleppo but in other major Syrian opposition centers such as Idlib, where rebels have charged that barrel bombs were used.

Many aid workers, as well as opposition forces, have charged that Russian aircraft were used in the Aleppo hospital strikecharges that have not been confirmedbecause regime aircraft are not deemed capable of accurate night-time attacks.

A least 14 people, including two doctors, died in the hospital bombing. Nearby buildings were also struck, bringing the death toll, including children, to 25 and rising. The outrageous targeting of yet another medical facility in Syria was roundly condemned by, among others, Muskilda Zancada, the head of Syrian operations of Medicins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders, which supported the hospital.

Overall, according to da Misturas Wednesday briefing, In the last 48 hours, we have had an average of one Syrian killed every 25 minutes.

A tightening of border controls with neighboring Turkey means that refugees from the violence are less and less able to flee the country even as humanitarian supplies that cross the Turkish border face greater difficulties in reaching the besieged populations.

At the same time, the crisis in long-besieged opposition centers such as the town of Daraya is continuing to be absolutely dire, according to Ashley Proud, humanitarian director for Syria for Mercy Corps, the biggest non-government relief organization involved in cross-border relief operations.

It is very important for us to support the U.N. but we also need genuine, sustained humanitarian aid for Syrian populations. Humanitarian discussions so far only include discreet convoys for U.N. relief.

And despite the lengthy cessation of hostilities, she added, most of the places where we work are still really tightly under siege.

All of those situations would grow dramatically worse in the event of Aleppos encirclement, according to the Institute for the Study of Wars Kozak.

It would be a tremendous morale blow to the opposition, he told Fox News, and a tremendous opposition blow to opposition power.

One result could be to cause links between opposition factions to break down, and drive some in the direction of extremist groups like ISIS, and cause a deeper radicalization of the opposition in northern Syria.

The longer term danger is that the military shift would be a direct blow to the strategic perspective of Turkeys Erdogan, who has heavily backed the insurgents, and if Erdogan decides to take a position of support, it would invite retaliation by Russia.

Indeed, Kozak added, I think Russia would be ecstatic if Erdogan takes military action. Moscow is already embedding military support with Kurdish groups on the Turkish border who would put additional pressure on that country, a NATO member, and thus provide a new front to pressure NATO.

Kozak also declared himself pessimistic that Western backers of the anti-ISIS campaign and a brokered peace arrangement in Syria would react effectively to any strategic shift caused by Aleppos encirclement.

They are going to be strategically surprised by the most obvious strategic surprise, he declared. It may already be too late.

If so, added the Syria Institutes Szybala, she believes a major factor in the darkening perspective has been the much touted cessation of hostilities, which has worked to the Syrian governments benefit.

The regimes big conundrum was that it was unable to carry out offensives on multiple fronts, she said. The ceasefire allowed them to focus militarily on a few key areas. Their continued military actions have been tolerated by the international community because no-one wants to see the ceasefire dead.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday weighed the case of a former Marine court-martialed in part for expressing her Christian faith while on the job  though the Marines lawyer faced tough questions from judges who suggested she was thumbing her nose at a superior with her actions.

Monifa Sterling, while with the Marines, had posted biblical verses at her desk, despite orders from a superior to remove them. At issue in Wednesdays case is the extent to which a federal law on religious freedom protects members of the Armed Forces like her.

The central issue of free speech on government property, especially within a military context, has made this case closely watched. But several judges hearing the case at a 45-minute oral argument seemed skeptical Sterling had done enough to assert her right to post the messages.

"The military is a structured society," said Chief Judge Charles Erdmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. "How can we hold the military at fault when no request for an accommodation was made?"

"They are supposed to be neutral" on matters of religion, said Judge Scott Stucky. "Does throwing a cloak of religion over this case excuse it from a court-martial?"

Sterling, who was a lance corporal stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C., was court-martialed for various offenses relating to separate incidents -- including disrespecting a superior officer, disobeying lawful orders and failing to report to an assigned duty. She was reduced in rank, was given a bad-conduct discharge, and has since left the service.

Part of the broader case against her stemmed from a personalized version of the biblical phrase from Isiah 54:17: "No weapon formed against thee shall prosper." Sterling taped the verses in three spots on her workspace, including her computer.

Court testimony said Sterling's superior ordered her on several occasions to remove the signs, saying at one point, "I don't like the tone." She refused to remove them, so her superior on two occasions took them down and put them in the trash, after Sterling had simply reprinted and reposted the messages.

Her lawyer admitted Sterling did not ask for permission to post or repost the verses, or assert her rights before the court-martial.

She did not comment on the case for Fox News, since this is an ongoing legal matter. Her lawyers say military members deserve the same First Amendment protections enjoyed by civilians.

"This is a historic moment for military religious freedom," said Mike Berry, an attorney with First Liberty Institute, a religious liberty advocacy group told Fox News. "This case will determine whether our service members constitutional right to practice their faith will be protected by the law as they serve in the Armed Forces."

A key issue for the judges will be interpreting a 1993 federal law known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, requiring the government to seek the "least burdensome" and narrowly tailored means for any law that interferes with religious convictions.

The Supreme Court has already ruled individuals, as well as some companies, churches, and universities, are protected under RFRA, with limitations.

The appeals court considering the Sterling case is expected to issue a decision in coming months, and it then can be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

The lawyer for the military also was peppered with questions from the five-judge appeals panel.

Several judges wondered whether the military gave enough respect to Sterling's religious rights, when they were asserted at her court-martial.

Judge Kevin Ohlson on several occasions suggested Sterling -- who represented herself at the court-martial -- had properly demonstrated a "substantial burden" on her constitutional rights, an important legal hurdle to make a claim under the RFRA law.

The case is U.S. v. Sterling (15-0510/MC).
The former co-chairman for Texas Sen. Ted Cruzs campaign in Virginia traveled to Syria Wednesday and promised to show support for President Bashar Assad, who U.S. officials have repeatedly said has lost legitimacy to rule the war-torn county.

Virginia state Sen. Dick Black is a part-time senator who has no official role in U.S. foreign policy. Still, he has met with Assad government officials and said he would advocate for a better relationship between the U.S. and Assad, according to Syrias state news agency.

"I will be Syria's voice," Black said, according to the news agency.

An aide for Black told the Associated Press that he resigned as co-chair for the Cruz campaign in Virginia shortly before his trip. In a resignation letter dated April 21, Black said he was resigning to avoid any possible distraction related to his endeavor.

Black said in the letter that he was traveling to Syria in an attempt to restore peace and prevent the slaughter of Christians and other minorities at the hands of the armies of terrorists rampaging across the country.

Black has also called anti-Assad fighters a group of terrorists that are fighting against a legitimate Syrian government.

Many people misunderstand the situation in Syria, and refuse to believe that all the groups fighting against the Syrian regime are terror groups, Black told the Jerusalem Post. I know that Syrian President Bashar Assad wants to have a modern state, where people would enjoy freedom of religion.

Black has been strong advocate for Cruz and was recently elected to serve as a Cruz-supporting Virginia delegate at the Republican National Committee's convention this summer.

Cruz hasnt advocated using force to remove Assad as the leader of Syria.

"If we are to defeat our enemies we need to be clear-eyed that toppling a government and allowing radical Islamic terrorists to take over a nation is not benefiting our national security interests," Cruz said at the Republican Jewish Coalition forum in December, referring to President Barack Obama's Syria policy goals. "Putting ISIS or Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood in charge of yet another state in the Middle East is not benefiting our national security."

Last year, Black said the Virginia Capitol Police alerted him to a threat against him by the Islamic State for his support of Assad. The state senator was featured in a magazine published by the Islamic state.

Black posted a link on Twitter on Wednesday to article written by an Iranian state-run TV news agency, which quoted Black as saying the Syrian civil war would "come to an end if the U.S. stops training terrorist in Jordan, Saudi Arabia" and other countries.

U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Black "is entitled to his views, but they do not reflect this administration's policy on Syria."

The outspoken Republican lawmaker is one of the most vocal social conservatives in Virginias General Assembly, and has drawn nationwide attention for his opposition to abortion and gay rights.

The former Vietnam War veteran and military lawyer dismayed Republican leaders in 2003 by sending fellow lawmakers small, plastic likenesses of a fetus to underscore his opposition toward abortion.

The state senator raised eyebrows in 2014 when he sent a letter to Assad praising him. It was posted on the Syrian president's Facebook page.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A controversial Seattle ordinance that allowed city workers to inspect people's trash -- as part of an effort to stop residents from throwing food scraps in the wrong pile -- was ruled unconstitutional on Wednesday.

King County Superior Court Judge Beth Andrus said sanitation works and other city collectors poking through everyday garbage violates privacy rights and voided the ordinance.

Im thrilled as can be, Ethan Blevins, attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of eight Seattle residents, told The Seattle Times. He added, We have been vindicated.

The rule first went into effect last year, and was meant to compel residents to put food scraps in the same bins as yard waste, so all could be composted. Under the program, nine full-time solid waste inspectors as well as contracted waste haulers tagged trash cans with more than 10 percent compostable material, providing those residents with educational material on how to improve. Residents also were told that breaking the rules would come with a $1 fine for single-family homes and $50 fine for businesses or multi-family units.

Seattle Public Utilities spokesman Andy Ryan said the agency had not read the judges decision and did not provide an immediate response, according to The Seattle Times.

Lawyers for a group of homeowners who sued the city said it made garbage collectors snoop through trash like police detectives.

I understand people have noble goals, Keli Carender, who got tagged two weeks in a row, told Fox News last year. But at some point we have to say, you cant violate my rights to achieve this noble goal.

Carender was among 14,000 residential and commercial customers who got tagged in 2015.
The Obama administration is locked and loaded for a fresh push on gun control initiatives  reportedly moving to advocate for so-called "smart gun" technology as early as Friday, despite concerns from the gun lobby.

Politico reports President Obama is set to release findings on the technology from a multi-agency review, and White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett was previewing the material to a select set of groups on Thursday.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest confirmed to reporters that the administration would be making an announcement on Friday, without going into detail.

We'll have more that we can talk about tomorrow," he said. " Under discussion was exploring what kind of technology could be effectively used to make guns safer. So this is something that that a variety of federal agencies have reviewed and they'll have some findings to share.

Smart-gun technology overhauls guns so they can only be fired by authorized users. The multi-agency review was ordered as part of Obamas Jan. 4 executive action on guns.

The National Rifle Association and other gun groups do not necessarily oppose the technology itself, but are concerned about any new mandates from the government requiring it. And law enforcement groups have voiced concerns about the reliability of the tech, and whether it can be trusted when needed most.

Politico quoted a source saying a mandate is not being considered at the moment  but the roll-out of the review could fuel those concerns. Earnest would not say Thursday whether the announcement would entail simply findings or some kind of requirement.

The presidents January order had directed the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security to prepare a report outlining a research-and-development strategy designed to expedite the real-world deployment of such technology for use in practice.

The Department of Justices National Institute of Justice now plans to announce in the Federal Register on Friday that it is seeking an objective demonstration of the reliability of firearms available today with advanced gun safety technology integrated into the firearm.

Most of the concerns revolve around the safety of the technology and how it will be tested.

Police officers in general, federal officers in particular, shouldnt be asked to be the guinea pigs in evaluating a firearm that nobodys even seen yet, James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, told Politico.

During a town hall days after his executive actions, Obama erroneously claimed smart gun technology has not been developed primarily because it has been blocked by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and firearms manufacturers.

The NRA does not oppose the technology. But in responding to the presidents controversial January executive action, the groups Institute for Legislative Action said the private market, not the government, should drive its development.

Although NRA is not opposed to the development of new firearms technology, we do not believe the government should be picking winners and losers in the marketplace, the statement said.

While the administration may not be pushing an executive order mandating the purchase of smart guns, Second Amendment advocates fear a slippery slope.

In 2002, New Jersey passed a law requiring all guns sold in the state be smart guns once the technology is widely available, but the technology is not an option in most places, according to NJ.com.
Chris Christie's popularity in his home state has hit a new low, according to a poll released Thursday -- with the New Jersey governor even viewed more unfavorably than the state's indicted U.S. senator.

According to the Rutgers-Eagleton survey of 738 registered voters, Christies favorability has fallen from 29 percent to 26 percent.

By comparison, 29 percent voters hold a favorable view of Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, who was indicted in 2015 on federal corruption charges.

The one-time Republican presidential candidate, who since leaving the GOP race has backed Donald Trump, is now seen unfavorably by 64 percent of voters, according to the new Rutgers University poll.

While some analysts thought he would be damaged by endorsing Trump shortly after he dropped out of the race, there are apparently other factors.

Negativity toward Christie continues to grow, but not entirely because of his support for GOP frontrunner Donald Trump or his own involvement with the 2016 election cycle, Ashley Koning, assistant director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling (ECPIP) at Rutgers University, said in a statement. Instead, Christies unpopularity stems from the same longstanding reasons that voters have cited in both their praise and condemnation of him throughout his tenure."

Among the voters who dislike Christie, some cited his character, personality, or attitude as their reason; others pointed to job performance and other factors.

The poll was conducted April 1-8.
Slowly but surely, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders seems to be acknowledging Hillary Clinton enjoys a relatively clear path to the Democratic nomination  which begs the question, why is he still in the race?

While the underdog presidential candidate insists hes still in it to win it, he is also dropping hints that he has other long-term goals in mind. Namely, to use his delegate leverage to ultimately change the party platform, and even the nominating process itself, at the convention.

The senator referenced that strategy at a rally in Indiana Wednesday, saying that if he cant win, We're going to have the votes to put together the strongest progressive agenda that any political party has ever seen.

The rhetorical shift comes as the Sanders campaign begins to scale back in the final stretch, after the senator lost four of the five states that voted this past Tuesday. The campaign confirmed Wednesday that "hundreds" of field staff from those states were told they are being let go.

Communications director Michael Briggs said the changes are part of "right-sizing" the campaign after the elections.

We will continue to have a strong and dedicated staff of more than 300 workers who are going to help us win in California and other contests still to come, Briggs said in a statement. This campaign believes that we have a path toward victory and were going to marshal our resources to do everything we can to win the Democratic nomination.

Sanders also said Wednesday that he realizes hes behind in delegates, But you know what: unusual things happen in politics.

Still, Politico reports that Sanders aides have been in contact with Democratic National Convention organizers to talk about logistics in July, and are considering pursuing party platform changes and reforms to the nominating process.

The report said this could include changes in the use of closed primaries  primaries where independents cannot vote, a system Sanders has complained about  and the role of superdelegates. Superdelegates are party insiders and officials free to vote for whomever they want; they have mostly backed Clinton in the 2016 race.

As for changes to the party platform, the candidate's Tuesday-night statement could offer a guide. In it, he said the campaign would go to Philadelphia with as many delegates as possible to fight for a progressive party platform that calls for a $15 an hour minimum wage, an end to our disastrous trade policies, a Medicare-for-all health care system, breaking up Wall Street financial institutions, ending fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities tuition free and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the planetary crisis of climate change."

Counting superdelegates, Clinton now has 2,165 delegates on her side. Sanders has 1,357. It takes 2,383 to clinch the nomination.

While Sanders weighs his options, Clinton is increasingly turning her attention and criticism toward Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

After he accused her of playing the woman card, she countered: If fighting for women's health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in.

The Clinton campaign, though, denies it is fully pivoting to the general election and says it respects Sanders' decision to continue.

Fox News Ed Henry and Rich Edson contributed to this report.
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New supersharp photos of Mars show Europe's long-lost Beagle 2 lander, ancient Red Planet lake beds and snaking rover tracks in unprecedented detail.

Scientists "stacked and matched" photos captured over the years by NASA's eagle-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) using new machine-vision methods, creating images in which features just 2 inches wide can be seen.

This resolution is five times greater than MRO or any other instrument orbiting Earth or Mars had been able to achieve, researchers said. Further use of this technique could help space agencies select safe landing sites for future Mars missions, search for pieces of other lost Red Planet hardware and perform a variety of other science work, they added. [Mars: The Spacecraft Graveyard]

"We now have the equivalent of drone-eye vision anywhere on the surface of Mars where there are enough clear repeat pictures," study co-author Jan-Peter Muller, of University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said in a statement. "It allows us to see objects in much sharper focus from orbit than ever before, and the picture quality is comparable to that obtained from landers."

"As more pictures are collected, we will see increasing evidence of the kind we have only seen from the three successful rover missions to date," Muller added, referring to NASA's Pathfinder, Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity missions. "This will be a game changer and the start of a new era in planetary exploration."

The team applied the new technique to a variety of regions imaged by MRO, including the ancient, potentially habitable lake beds explored by Curiosity; the "Home Plate" region traversed by Spirit; and the site where Europe's first Mars lander, Beagle 2, touched down in December 2003. [The Search for Beagle 2 on Mars in Photos]

The United Kingdom-led Beagle 2 was part of the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission, which launched in June 2003 and arrived at the Red Planet six months later. The lander detached from its mother ship, the Mars Express orbiter, on Dec. 19, 2003, and was supposed to touch down on Christmas Day.

Beagle 2 never called its handlers from the Martian surface, and many experts assumed the craft had crashed. But last year, officials with the UK Space Agency announced that they had spotted the lander in MRO photos. These images appeared to show partially deployed solar arrays, suggesting that Beagle 2 had succeeded in touching down softly.

The newly released photos give the best looks yet at Beagle 2, which measures just 7 feet wide, scientists said.

The research team, led by Yu Tao of University College London, described the new "Super-Resolution Restoration" technique in a study that was published in the journal Planetary and Space Science in February. But team members have only recently begun using the method to zero in on specific locations on Mars.

The Mars Express orbiter continues to operate to this day.
Starting next year, all mobile phones sold across India must include a panic button, local news outlets are reporting. In addition, by 2018, all cell phones need to come with a built-in GPS chip, so a person in trouble can be more easily found.

"Technology is solely meant to make human life better and what better than using it for the security of women," communications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a statement, according to The Economic Times. "I have taken a decision that from January 1, 2017, no cell phone can be sold without a provision for panic button and from January 1, 2018, mobile sets should have in-built GPS."

According to the Times, those with feature phones can press keys 5 and 9 to alert local law enforcement to an emergency under the new policy. On smartphones, vendors will be required to display an "emergency" button. Smartphone makers can also build in a feature that alerts law enforcement once the on/off button is pressed three times in succession.

India is one of the most important emerging markets in the world, and has quickly become a battleground for nearly every major smartphone maker, including Apple. According to the Times, phone makers have signed on to make this change, but "it remains unclear if manufacturers like Apple would play ball."

Last year, Uber added a panic button inside its app in India after the alleged rape of a female passenger by her male Uber driver.

As The Washington Post reports, women's safety has been a major issue in India since the 2012 gang rape and death of a woman on a bus. The country has tried a few things, but according to the Post, "Many of the safety features, such as panic buttons and GPS devices installed in public buses, are not working or have been stolen, activists say."

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.
Verizon says equipment sabotage spiked in the wake of a strike by Verizon workers, now entering its third week.

Thousands of Verizon customers have been cut off from critical services" because of "criminals who have damaged or destroyed critical network facilities, according to an announcement last week. That announcement came after a Verizon union went on strike on April 13.

Specific incidents mentioned by Verizon include Sliced fiber optic cabling at a network facility in New Jersey that cut off services to customers including police and fire departments and an incident in Massachusetts where phone services were cut off for 16 hours. The cutting of fiber optic and copper cables also occurred in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, which brought down both voice and internet connectivity.

We have dispatched additional Verizon security teams in all states where this illegal activity is taking place, said Michael Mason, Verizons chief security officer in a statement. Were also working with law enforcement to ensure our networks and facilities are secure, he added.



This is happening in the wake of a strike by Communications Workers of America (CWA) and IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) members at Verizon, which is entering its third week.

Related: Thousands of Verizon workers go on strike amid contract dispute

The workers are fighting against off-shoring and outsourcing of jobs, among other things.



Verizon cited that strike in its release to the media.



These malicious actions take place as Verizon is experiencing a strike involving about 36,000 employees, primarily in its wireline business, in nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States plus Washington, D.C. Verizon Wireless operations have had very minimal impact from the strike, Verizon said in a statement.

Coincidence? Or not?

"As of now, were not able to connect the two," a Verizon spokesperson said in an email to FoxNews.com about any alleged link. The spokesperson added, however: "I can tell you that in a normal year, we may have 5 or 6 deliberate cable cuts. Since this strike started, there have been 49 suspected incidents of sabotage. We saw a similar spike during the last strike in 2011."

Indeed, a similar pattern of events happened back in August of 2011 when 45,000 Verizon workers went on strike and the company linked that to sabotage on equipment and facilities. At that time, Mason told The New York Times that it just isnt feasible that there is not a connection because theres been such an uptick since the calling of the strike.

Related: Verizon to pay $1.35M to settle FCC 'super cookie' probe

Union officials at the time said they were opposed to sabotage and had repeatedly told members not to engage in those kinds of acts, according to the Times report. The union also said at the time that Verizon was exaggerating the number of cases and that the company was focusing on the sabotage to turn the public against the union.

Regarding the most recent incidents, CWA District 2-13 vice president Edward Mooney said in a statement that "regulators in three states are already investigating Verizon for its refusal to keep up with network maintenance and wear and tear  the root of many ongoing service problems."

The statement continued. "Even with many technicians regularly working overtime hours, the demand is still too high for the current workers to cover. Additional delays that customers are experiencing because of the strike are a result of Verizon executives' insistence on offshoring and outsourcing jobs and their refusal to invest in adequately maintaining lines."

Verizon said that the public can report sabotage of Verizon property or suspicious activity by calling 911 and contacting the Verizon Security Control Center.
A girl who just wanted to take her first ride on an airplane has Russian authorities scratching their heads and working to review standard security procedures at Moscows Vnukovo airport.

On Tuesday, a 10-year-old, whose name has not been released flew from Moscow to St. Petersburg on Rossiya Airlines without identification or a ticket, according to a report filed by Russian police.

The girl reportedly left home for school on Tuesday and did not return later that evening, which alarmed her parents.

Alexander Rzhanenkov of St. Petersburg's city hall told Russian news agencies that the girl went to Moscow's Vnukovo airport where she mingled with a small crowd, which enabled her to somehow slip through security undetected. CCTV footage also reveals the gaffe.

Rzhanenkov said that after the young girl made it through security, she boarded a Rossiya Airlines plane with a large family with children.

Upon landing at Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg, policewho had been tipped off by the girls parents-- picked her up at the airport where she was wandering around unaccompanied. According to RT, the girl, who later told authorities she just wanted to fly on a plane, was immediately returned to Moscow and never got to explore St. Petersburg.

Children's rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said on Wednesday the girl's trip sends "a serious alert sign" about airport security.

The mother of the child told local media that she plans to sue both the Moscow airport, and the carrier, for failing to carry out proper security protocols.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Even if you're not a native Angeleno, you've no doubt heard of Hollywood.

But what's West Hollywood, you ask?

West Hollywood-- called WeHo by folks in the know-- is crammed between Beverly Hills to the west, and Hollywood to the northeast.

Its home to the Sunset Strip, which runs right through its center. Its home to its own Design District, where new styles and trends start and flourish. Its a population of 39,000 that swells on the weekends. It pulsates with the energy of celebrities, rock n roll establishments, trendy restaurants and shopping. It has its own beat  lively, independent and welcoming to all.



It isnt Hollywood, and it isnt the city of Los Angeles. Its 1.9 square miles of excitement and it has an essence thats all its own.

If you're planning a trip to the Los Angeles area, here are five ways to explore WeHo:

DINE

From locally sourced farm-to-table restaurants to long-established spots, West Hollywood brims with eatery options, including E.P. & L.P., Maia and Pump. And dont forget Boxwood at The London. Sampling small plates is the way to go at Maia, a Latin/Asian fusion spot where lobster quesadillas are a favorite. At E.P. & L.P., youll be more than pleased with the pan fried snapper with white soy, ginger, green onion and cilantro.

SHOP

From jewelry and swimsuits to designer dresses and furniture, Sunset Plaza has it all. Check out Nicole Miller for chic dresses, Molly Browns for trendy bathing/swimsuits and Samira for unusual jewelry. Head to the Design District, where trends are born and thrive. Visit Phyllis Morris/Circa, Maxfield and Hamilton-Selway Fine Art. At Maxfield, look for Alaia designs, especially dresses. At Phyllis Morris, sleek, contemporary sofas are striking. Hamilton-Selway is the place for works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

ROCK N ROLL

Since the opening of the Troubadour in 1957, West Hollywood has been the place where rock n roll greats launched their careers-- and where they still headline today. Whether you book a show or not, stop by the Troubadour as well as the Whisky a Go Go, the Viper Room and The Roxy. If you press your ear against the door of the Troubadour in the mid-afternoon, youll hear (and feel) the pulsating sounds of bands rehearsing.

RELAX AND IMBIBE

From juices and smoothies to the hard stuff, West Hollywood is the place to get acquainted with great beverages. This town has everything, from the tropical green smoothie at Gracias Madre to a Rob Roy at the Sunset Tower Hotel. Dont miss L.P., the rooftop drinking house, with its international crowd and spectacular view.

STAR GAZE

Celebrities are everywhere in West Hollywood, but to see the most, head to Sunset Tower Hotel on a Saturday night. You can't always tell the real thing from the wannabes, but it doesn't matter. This is a place to see and be seen, so find your way to 8358 Sunset Blvd. on a Saturday night  or any night, for that matter, and keep your eyes peeled.
Expectant mothers are usually warned of the risks they take on while traveling.

But sometimes when a babys ready to come, all you can do is push.

Last Friday, a pregnant woman began going into labor at 30,000 feet on a JetStar Asia flight from Singapore to Yangon, Myanmar.

According to a Facebook post from the airline, the Jetstar crew on board the flight, led by Customer Service Manager Saw Ler Htu, rushed into action, calling for immediate medical assistance. There were three doctors aboard the aircraft who assisted crew with the speedy delivery.

A baby boy clocking in at six pounds, seven ounces, was born just before the plane touched down in Myanmar. The mother and child were rushed to a local hospital upon arrival but have since been discharged.

The happy arrival of baby Jet Star was met with a round of applause from other passengers on the plane, so were sure its not a moment theyll ever forget either, a Jetstar spokesperson told news.com.au.

But it wasnt just the passengers who were thrilled by experience.

The new mother was reportedly so overwhelmed by the support and care she received during the ordeal that she named her newborn after the airlineSaw Jet Star.

The airline, a budget carrier based in Singapore, says its the first baby ever born on one of its aircrafts and is providing the family with SGD $1,000 (about USD $741) to put toward supplies needed for the newborn. The doctors who assisted with the delivery were also rewarded with Jetstar flight vouchers.

U.S. airlines have varying rules regarding pregnant fliers. Jetstar has not released details about how far along the mother claimed to be but for a flight less than four hours, the airline permits pregnant women to travel up to the end of their 40th week, provided they bring a doctors note.
Forecasters warned people across the Deep South to prepare for another onslaught of severe weather Thursday, one day after a line of storms that triggered tornadoes left at least ten people hurt.

More than 8 million people will be at an "enhanced" risk of severe weather, according to the National Weather Service. The greatest threat of tornadoes and large hail will be in northern Mississippi and Alabama, along with parts of Tennessee, northwestern Georgia and southern Kentucky, forecasters say.

Severe thunderstorms are already moving across the lower Mississippi River Valley, bringing hail and damaging winds. Forecasters already have issued a flash flood watch covering much of Georgia through Friday evening.

Heavy rain in the Mississippi Delta on Thursday caused widespread flooding and prompted some evacuations.

Forecaster Latrice Maxie said 3 to 5 inches of rain fell late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning causing some evacuations and closing several highways. Maxie said the heaviest rain was along the U.S. Highway 82 corridor between Washington and Montgomery counties.

Sunflower County Emergency Manager Ben Grant told the Associated Press about two dozen homes in Moorhead were evacuated.

Mayor George Holland said he went into one flooded house and was standing in 10 inches of water.

Holland said most of those evacuated have returned to their homes to begin repairs or moved in with relatives.

The National Weather Service confirmed Thursday afternoon that two tornadoes touched down in southeast Louisiana, bringing down trees and power lines but causing no injuries.

Meteorologist Frank Rivette told the Associated Press an eastward-moving storm spawned two weak tornadoes, both rated EF-1, early Thursday. One hit east of Greensburg in St. Helena Parish; the other struck near the village of Tangipahoa in Tangipahoa Parish.

Rivette says showers remain in the forecast through Friday, keeping the area under a flash flood watch.

Wednesday's storms hit northeastern Oklahoma especially hard, knocking down trees and slamming into homes in the Tulsa and Owasso areas. At least one of the seven people hurt there was in critical condition, Emergency Medical Services Authority spokeswoman Kelli Bruer said.

Also, a suspected tornado hit the southeastern Arkansas town of Dermott wounding at least one person, according to officials there. The National Weather Service says heavy damage, including downed trees and power lines, was reported after severe weather swept through the town about 115 miles southeast of Little Rock late Wednesday.

Earlier in the day, an American Airlines flight traveling from Dallas to Memphis was forced to make an emergency landing in Little Rock because of the stormy weather. American Airlines says the plane landed safely, but two flight attendants suffered minor injuries and were taken to a Little Rock hospital.

Tulsa fire officials told Fox 23 News described at least one square mile of damage. They also said a gun club was leveled by the storms.

Click for more from Fox 23.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Crews searching for a treasure hunter who disappeared more than three months ago urged people at New Mexico's Bandelier National Monument on Thursday to stay out of the way.

Randy Bilyeu of Broomfield, Colo., vanished in early January while hunting for a $2 million cache of gold, jewels and artifacts after he set out to raft part of the Rio Grande northwest of Santa Fe. Officials say the search area includes dangerous rocky terrain.

"It's rugged country and it takes a pretty high level of expertise to work in that area," Bandelier Superintendent Jason Lott said. "We're actively pursuing the search and rescue and just ask that others don't try to engage in this."

The search-and-rescue mission restarted on Wednesday, days after a backpack turned up near a waterfall at Bandelier. Investigators wouldn't say whether it belonged to Bilyeu.

His dog and raft turned up along the river soon after his disappearance, but authorities called off the search in mid-January when the trail went cold.

Bilyeu's ex-wife, Linda, has been helping organize volunteers who spent countless hours hiking along the river, using drones, telephoto lenses and dogs to scan the area for clues. She said her ex-husband had a blue backpack.

Linda Bilyeu and her family have been steadfast, saying they're not giving up until they find out what happened to the father and grandfather who would have turned 55 on Feb. 21.

Randy Bilyeu had moved out West to live his dream -- finding the treasure of Santa Fe antiquities dealer and author Forrest Fenn. Thousands have been inspired over the last several years to search for the cache using cryptic clues provided by Fenn in his self-published memoir.

Like Bilyeu, treasure hunters have scoured remote corners of New Mexico, Yellowstone National Park and other parts of the Rockies in vain for the small bronze chest.

Fenn believes some 65,000 people have gone looking for the treasure. He said his intent was to get people outside and onto an adventure.

Family and friends say Bilyeu bought a raft and set out on Jan. 5 after scouting for two weeks along the river west of Santa Fe. He had a GPS device, a wetsuit and waders, and brought along his little dog, Leo.

More than a week passed before a worried friend reached out to Linda Bilyeu, who filed a missing person's report on Jan. 14.

Bilyeu left maps with markings in his car that fellow treasure hunters used in an attempt to narrow their search for him. He also left food, suggesting that he hadn't planned to be gone long.

The community that has formed around the search for Bilyeu shared their support and prayers Wednesday as the search-and-rescue team worked at Bandelier. They were all hopeful for some kind of news.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
University of Georgia students and employees are devastated at the loss of four female students killed in a horrific, high-speed car crash that left another student critically injured, the school's president said at a somber Thursday briefing.

The wreck happened when two cars, one northbound and the other southbound, collided around 9 p.m. Wednesday on Georgia State Route 15 south of the Athens campus, Oconee County Sheriff Scott Berry said.

All five students were in a Toyota Camry heading north when it veered into the southbound lane, the Georgia State Patrol said in a preliminary report. A Chevrolet Cobalt heading the opposite direction struck the Camry in the passenger side. It wasn't known why the Camry drifted into the other lane, the patrol said.

The students killed, all from the Atlanta suburbs, were Kayla Canedo, 19, of Alpharetta; Brittany Feldman, 20, of Alpharetta; Christina Semeria, 19, of Milton; and Halle Scott, 19, of Dunwoody, the State Patrol said.

The driver of the Camry -- fellow student Agnes Kim, 21, of Snellville, Georgia, another Atlanta suburb -- remained hospitalized late Thursday morning.

The Cobalt driver, Abby Short, 27, of Demorest, Georgia, was taken to a hospital but her condition wasn't available, authorities said.

The State Patrol said troopers don't suspect that alcohol played a role in the crash.

"The loss of any student is very difficult and a tragedy of this magnitude is truly devastating," University of Georgia President Jere Morehead said. "During this time of tremendous sadness, let us draw together as a UGA family and care for each other."

A gathering was planned Thursday evening on the Athens campus to reflect on the lives of the students, he said.

Morehead said he doesn't recall such a tragic event in his three decades at the university, where he was a professor and administrator before being named president in 2013.

"This is something that the university hasn't faced before," he said, adding that "we will face it, we will provide support for each other."

The students who were killed were active in campus activities such as the Greek system and religious organizations, Morehead said.

Friends, sorority sisters and family members of the victims were gathered at the Athens hospital overnight, Oconee County Sheriff Scott Berry said in a statement. The university president was also there, talking to family members who arrived during the night.

"I told them that I cannot imagine how any of them are facing this kind of tragedy and loss, and that our university stands ready to assist them in any way, to support them in any way and we want them to know that they are not alone," Morehead said.

Click for more from Fox 5.
The military has reportedly filed two new criminal charges Thursday against a former U.S. Naval Academy instructor who insisted he had been unfairly convicted of sexual misconduct with two female midshipmen.

Marine Maj. Mark Thompson has now been charged with one count of making a false official statement and another of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

If convicted of lying under oath, Thompson could face up to five years in prison, a dismissal from the service and a total loss of his retirement benefits, The Post reports.

The Marine Corps will hold an Article 32 preliminary hearing next month to determine whether the case should proceed to a court-martial, according to the Post.

Earlier this week, another U.S. Naval Academy instructor implicated in sexual misconduct was removed from his position, and the academy saids if it had known about a former student's sexual misconduct accusation against him, he would not have been allowed to teach.

The school confirmed Tuesday to the Associated Press that Marine Maj. Michael Pretus, a history teacher since 2014, is no longer teaching.

One student alleged Thompson assaulted her; another reported an ongoing sexual relationship. The second student also reported having sex with Thompson and Pretus, who wasn't then a teacher at the school.

The Naval Academy says Pretus was an instructor from the summer of 2014 to April 2016 and that he is "no longer in a teaching status." The academy says he has orders for reassignment with an early May departure date.

"The Naval Academy had no knowledge of any involvement in this case prior to his receipt of orders here. Under no circumstances would the Naval Academy have allowed for assignment on staff and faculty had there been disclosure of the circumstances and details of his involvement in that event," Naval Academy spokesman Cdr. John Schofield said in a statement.

The Washington Post reports Pretus declined to comment on whether he had ever had sex with one of the two students involved in Thompson's case. The paper says under military law, an officer having sex with a midshipman is a crime, as is having sex with two people at the same time, something the former student alleged she, Thompson and Pretus did.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from The Washington Post.
A suspect in Maryland faces a second-degree murder charge in the stabbing death of a pregnant school bus driver and her unborn child on Wednesday, Takoma Park Police said.

Thierry Kinshala Nkusu, 33, of Silver Spring, was held on $5 million bond in the stabbing of Maria Veronica Mbunga, 36, of Takoma Park. Officials did not reveal a possible motive, but said additional charges were pending.

Mbunga worked as a bus driver for the Montgomery County Public School Transportation System.

Police said they found Nkusu injured near the lobby of an apartment building Wednesday afternoon. Paramedics rushed Nkusu to a hospital with superficial knife wounds that did not correlate with what he said occurred, investigators said.

Police found Mbunga with multiple stab wounds in an apartment at the same building. She died on the way to the hospital, WTOP reported, and the baby did not survive.

Nkusu did not require surgery for his wounds and police took him into custody. The investigation is ongoing, authorities said.
Capt. Kristen M. Griest, one of two women who graduated from the Armys Ranger School last summer, became the first woman named as an infantry officer Monday.

Like any other officer wishing to branch-transfer, Capt. Griest applied for an exception to Army policy to transfer from military police to infantry, Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning spokesman Bob Purtiman said. Her transfer was approved by the Department of the Army, and shes now an infantry officer.

The Army Times was first to report the move. The paper reported that Griest, a West Point graduate, is expected to graduate on Thursday with the distinctive blue infantry cord.

She has kept a low profile and has declined interviews.

In August, Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver graduated as Army Rangers, ending its six decade history as an all-male institution.

At the time, the female graduates could wear the prestigious tab and were considered Rangers, but were still barred from serving in the infantry and Special Operations units, including the 75th Ranger Regiment.

However, that changed on Dec. 3, when Defense Secretary Ash Carter lifted gender-based restrictions on military service.

Griest, after her August graduation, said, I do hope that my performance in Ranger School has been able to inform that decision, as to what they can expect from women in the military -- that we can handle things physically and mentally on the same level as men.
A 25-year-old man who threatened to blow up a Baltimore Fox TV station Thursday and then was shot by police did not have a bomb, but a device that was chocolate bars held together by wires, according to the Baltimore Police Department.

The suspect had refused to cooperate with officers, police spokesman T.J. Smith said. When he walked out of the building, he was wearing a white panda suit, a surgical mask and sunglasses before being shot by three officers.

A bomb robot then scanned him for nearly an hour before police removed his clothing, picked him up and carried him into an armored van. Crews transferred him to an ambulance minutes later.

Smith said he was in serious, but stable condition at a local hospital.

Smith added the suspect was not armed with a bomb, but with candy bars wrapped in plastic. He said the chocolate candy bars were wrapped together with a "motherboard," as well as wires in the suspect's shirt.

Robot trying to get suspect to show his hands. pic.twitter.com/ekDM4i3qGm  Shelley Orman (@ShelleyOFox45) April 28, 2016

He apparently lit a car on fire in the parking lot before entering the building, Fox 45 reports.

"He had a flash drive, said he had information he wanted to get on the air. He compared it to the information found in the Panama Papers. I told him, 'I can't let you in, you're going to have to leave the flash drive here and slide it through the opening.' He wouldn't do that. Apparently he had made some threats before," News Director Mike Tomko said. The Panama Papers, released earlier this month, revealed the tax avoidance habits of several world leaders and their associates.

Station security guard spent 45 min speaking with man making threats @FOXBaltimore pic.twitter.com/9fshzMv3WN  Shelley Orman (@ShelleyOFox45) April 28, 2016

Investigators did not reveal the name of the suspect. The three officers shot him after he refused to take his hands out of his pockets, Smith said.

An official at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told Fox News special agents and bomb technicians from the Baltimore field office responded and set up an incident command post. The FBI's Baltimore field office was closely monitoring the situation and offered to help police, a law enforcement official told Fox News.

Tomko said another employee had received a bomb threat earlier in the day, but he wasn't sure if the threats were related.

Firefighters rushed to the scene and extinguished the car fire. The flames had emerged from the dark sedan's gas tank.

Fox 45 announced it would air an evening newscast.

The station is located at the base of Baltimore's TV Hill. The area is home to two other TV stations and a radio station.

Fox News' Matt Dean and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from Fox 45.
Authorities say a man who escaped from an East Texas jail has been captured.

Van Zandt County Sheriff's Office said Thursday that 46-year-old Jay Scott McEvers had been captured. McEvers, who was being held on drug and firearm charges, escaped from the Van Zandt County Detention Center on Wednesday.

Authorities did not immediately release details on how he escaped, but said his mother had been arrested for facilitating escape.

The jail is in Canton, which is about 60 miles east of Dallas.
The father-in-law of a fitness instructor murdered inside a Texas church last week took a shirt to the dry cleaners that appeared to have blood stains, Fox 4 reported Thursday, citing a search warrant.

Randy Bevers reportedly told the store clerk that it was animal blood, and the employee told authorities that it appeared as though someone tried to clean the shirt before dropping off the item.

Randy Bevers' son Brandon, who was married to the murder victim Missy Bevers, told the station that the blood came from his fathers Chihuahua who was killed by another dog.

The shirt was described as a XXL womens white shirt. The owner of Dry Clean Super Center in Midlothian told FoxNews.com that the shirt was never dry cleaned and was turned over to police.

Its just a sign that people are being diligent about the situation, Brandon Bevers said. We want that to continue.

The body of Missy Bevers was discovered in the early hours of April 18 inside the Creekside Church of Christ. Midlothian Police Chief Carl Smith told reporters that the church's motion-activated surveillance cameras captured a suspect walking around inside the church before Bevers' body was found. Smith said the man was wearing full tactical gear with a heavy vest, helmet, shin guards and gloves. The vest had the word POLICE on the front.

Missy Bevers was scheduled to teach an early-morning fitness class at the church. One of her students found her body.

The suspect was first seen on the cameras at around 3:50 a.m. Bevers is first seen on the cameras about 30 minutes later, as she arrives to prepare to teach the 5 a.m. fitness class.

Investigators also have not ruled out that Bevers was the victim of a targeted attack. The Dallas County medical examiner will determine exactly how Bevers died.
The University of California announced Wednesday that it has placed the chancellor of its Davis campus on leave amid an uproar over her service on corporate boards and the schools hiring of consultants to improve the schools image online, following the 2011 incident when campus police pepper-sprayed protesters.

UC President Janet Napolitano plans to appoint an independent investigator to determine whether Chancellor Linda Katehi violated any university policies with her actions, Napolitanos office said in a statement.

Napolitano removed Katehi from her post, which she has held for nearly seven years. The campus provost, Ralph Hexter, will fill the chancellor's shoes on an acting basis, the statement said.

"I am deeply disappointed to take this action," Napolitano said in the statement. "But Davis is a strong campus, nationally and internationally renowned in many academic disciplines. I'm confident of the campus's continued ability to thrive and serve California students and the Davis community."

Katehi, 62, came under fire early in her tenure at Davis when campus police used pepper spray on seated protesters during a November 2011 Occupy movement protest. The action received global attention because of widely circulated videos and photos of the cringing demonstrators getting sprayed.

The Davis Faculty Association called for Katehi's resignation for ordering police to dismantle the protesters' tent city. An independent investigation later criticized her for demonstrating ineffective leadership leading up to and during the incident, which sparked a series of campus reforms.

Even though she waded through the rough waters of that crisis, Katehi came under fire last month when the Sacramento Bee reported that she had accepted a seat on the board of a for-profit college company the federal government is suing and previously earned hundreds of thousands of dollars as a textbook publisher.

The Bee then reported the campus had spent at least $175,000 for image consultants to scrub internet search results of the pepper spray incident to boost the universitys image.

Other companies were also paid to help improve UC Davis online image, using a strategic communications budget that almost doubled in the six years after Katehi became chancellor in 2009.

The UC Student Association called for her resignation two weeks ago. The group that represents 240,000 University of California students echoed the calls already made by seven state lawmakers and student protesters.

The UC must do better by its students. Katehi collected a $425K salary while students on her campus skipped meals, lived in their cars, and sat on the floor in their classrooms, president of the UC Student Association Kevin Sabo said in a statement. The UC has plenty of challenges - nefarious Chancellors should not be one of them. We applaud President Napolitanos decisive action and commend her for standing with students

In a statement last week, Katehi apologized for "a series of highly publicized missteps" that she acknowledged had overshadowed the university's accomplishments and "been a setback to our reputation and hard-earned prestige."

She disputed, however, the idea that her administration had tried to bury the pepper-spray incident by working with the search optimization firms and investing more than $2.6 million on advertising and campus outreach.

"Because of the importance of philanthropy to UC Davis and the need to make sure those searching for information about the university get a complete picture, we needed to do a better job telling the world about the university's extraordinary achievements," she said. "So we did what any organization in a similar situation would do? We sought to strengthen our communications capabilities."

UC Davis enrolls about 27,000 undergraduates and 4,600 graduate students at a campus 18 miles from Sacramento.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
San Diego State students blocked the university presidents car Wednesday during a long protest over the response to fliers linking some students to anti-Israel terrorists, FOX5 reported.

The fliers were apparently printed by the David Horowitz Freedom Project and featured the names of seven student activists allegedly allied with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] and Jew Hated on this campus. Horowitz, a controversial right-wing writer, is slated to speak at the university next week.

We wanted the president to come to our defense as students, said political science student Osama Alkhawaja, 22, who was listed on the flier, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

Alkhawaja and other students contend that President Elliot Hirshmans response to the flier, which involved supporting free speech while saying the flier could chill discussion, was insufficient.

After the protesters blocked Hirshman from leaving for about an hour, he eventually got out of the car he was in and met with students, apologizing to some.

Its always difficult balancing free speech with things that make people uncomfortable, and we deal with that every day on campus, university spokesperson Greg Block told the Union-Tribune. But in the end, free speech wins out, and we support that.

The students named on the flier were accused of being activists for the BDS movement or members of Students for Justice in Palestine or the Muslim Students Association. BDS seeks to elicit changes in Israels policies by boycotting firms that do business with the Israeli government. SJP supports BDS and has accused Israel of war crimes. MSA has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood and has advocated against Israel.

Any time something happens on campus, people want the president to make a statement, Block said. He cant make a statement for everything that happens.

Click for more from FOX5.
Yale University announced Wednesday it will keep the name of a residential college named after 19th century alumnus and slavery supporter John C. Calhoun, but will eliminate the title of master for faculty members.

The Ivy League university said it was preserving the name of Calhoun College, despite fierce protests that called for the removal of Calhouns name to confront the history of slavery in the U.S.

"Ours is a nation that often refuses to face its own history of slavery and racism. Yale is part of that history," Yale President Peter Salovey said. "We cannot erase American history, but we can confront it, teach it and learn from it."

Two of the schools new residential colleges under construction will be named for Anna Pauline Murray, a civil rights activist who received a doctorate in law from Yale in 1965. The other will be named after founding father Benjamin Franklin, a 1753 recipient of an honorary degree from Yale.

The two new colleges are part of an expansion plan for Yale's undergraduate student body.

The title master for faculty members who serve as residential college leaders will be renamed to head of college. Some people at the university argued the title master, despite its ancient roots with the college system at Oxford and Cambridge, had a painful and unwelcome connotation of slavery.

Controversy has surrounded the name of Calhoun College for decades, but it received new attention in the fall as protesters on campuses around the country called for universities to address the legacies of historical figures, such as Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey.

Three portraits of Calhoun, a U.S. vice president and senator from South Carolina, were taken down from the walls of the residential college. The Yale Corporation, the university's governing body, had been gathering input from students on names it might consider for Calhoun College and the two new residential colleges.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
At least 27 people, including children, were killed at a hospital in Aleppo, Syria overnight, activists said Thursday, in what Secretary of State John Kerry called a "deliberate [air]strike" by government forces on a "known medical facility."

The incident was part of a wave of nighttime airstrikes by Syrian warplanes in embattled Aleppo that killed at least 61 people overall. An official from the Syrian opposition claimed Russia may have also participated in the strikes.

Some of the overnight strikes hit the well-known al-Quds field hospital in the Sukkari district in Aleppo, according to Doctors Without Borders, opposition activists and rescue workers. They said 14 doctors and patients were among the dead.

"Whoever carries out these massacres needs a war tribunal and a court of justice to be tried for his crimes."  Mohammed Alloush, chief Syrian opposition negotiator

Kerry said in a statement later Thursday that the attack on the hospital appeared to be "a deliberate strike on a known medical facility."

"[This] follows the Assad regimes appalling record of striking such facilities and first responders. These strikes have killed hundreds of innocent Syrians," Kerry said.

A separate blitz in Aleppo reportedly killed 20, raising the 24-hour death toll in the key city to at least 61. Senior opposition official Anas al-Abdeh, the head of the Syrian National Council, claimed Syria's ally Russia may have taken part in the strikes as well.

Russian defense spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov denied his country flew any jets near Aleppo over the past several days.



The chief Syrian opposition negotiator Mohammed Alloush told The Associated Press the latest violence showed how negotiations, such as the February talks that led to a short-lived cease fire, were not realistic.

"Whoever carries out these massacres needs a war tribunal and a court of justice to be tried for his crimes. He does not need a negotiating table," Alloush told the AP in a telephone interview. "Now, the environment is not conducive for any political action."

"Russia has an urgent responsibility to press the regime... to stop attacking civilians, medical facilities, and first responders, and to abide fully by the cessation of hostilities," Secretary of State John Kerry responded.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned that Aleppo was on the brink of a humanitarian disaster as a result of the renewed fighting.

"Wherever you are, you hear explosions of mortars, shelling and planes flying over," Valter Gros, who heads the ICRC office there, was quoted as saying Thursday in a statement, Reuters reported.

"There is no neighborhood of the city that hasnt been hit. People are living on the edge. Everyone here fears for their lives and nobody knows what is coming next," he added.

Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym MSF, said in a series of tweets that the death toll was expected to rise.

"Destroyed MSF-supported hospital in Aleppo was well known locally and hit by direct airstrike on Wednesday," it said.

The Civil Defense, a volunteer first-responders agency whose members went to the scene of the attack, put the death toll at 40 and said the dead included six hospital staff, including a dentist and one of the last pediatricians remaining in the city.

The agency, also known as the White Helmets, said the al-Quds hospital and adjacent buildings were struck in four consecutive airstrikes. It said there were still victims buried under the rubble and that the rescue work continued.

A video posted online by the White Helmets showed a number of lifeless bodies, including those of children, being pulled out from a building and loaded into ambulances amid screaming and wailing. It also showed distraught rescue workers trying to keep onlookers away from the scene, apparently fearing more airstrikes.

Marianne Gasser, head of the ICRC mission in Syria, said the attack on the ICRC-supported hospital is "unacceptable and sadly this is not the first time the lifesaving medical services have been hit."

The ICRC also said stocks of contingency food and medical aid are expected to run out soon and warned that an escalation in fighting means that they cannot be replenished.

Alloush, who was one of the leading negotiators of the opposition in the Geneva talks, described the airstrikes as one of the latest "war crimes" of Assad's government.

But a Syrian military source told Reuters Thursday that government warplanes had not been used in areas where the airstrikes were reported.



The Feb. 27 cease-fire has been falling apart in the past weeks as casualty figures from violence mount, particularly in Aleppo and across northern Syria. Airstrikes earlier this week also targeted a training center for the Syrian Civil Defense, leaving five of its team dead in rural Aleppo.

Since April 19, nearly 200 people have died, including at least 44 in an airstrike on a market place in rebel-held area in northern Idlib province, as well as dozens of civilians in government-held areas from rebel shelling.

The U.N. envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, briefed the U.N. Security Council via videoconference late Wednesday about the largely stalled indirect talks between the Western- and Saudi-backed opposition and envoys from Assad's government, which has the backing of Moscow.

He said that after 60 days, the cessation of hostilities agreed to by both sides "hangs by a thread."

"I really fear that the erosion of the cessation is unraveling the fragile consensus around a political solution, carefully built over the last year," de Mistura said in his council briefing obtained by The Associated Press. "Now I see parties reverting to the language of a military solution or military option. We must ensure that they do not see that as a solution or an option."

The talks foundered last week after the main opposition group, called the High Negotiating Committee, suspended its formal participation in the indirect talks with Assad's envoys to protest alleged government cease-fire violations, a drop in humanitarian aid deliveries and no progress in winning the release of detainees in Syria.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The British government says a British Airways jet reported to have hit an object as it came in to land at Heathrow Airport this month did not strike a drone as first thought.

The pilot of the flight from Geneva reported a collision as the plane was approaching the airport on April 17, and police said it was believed to have hit a drone.

The incident sparked calls for tighter controls on unmanned aerial vehicles.

But Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin told lawmakers Thursday that it is now thought the incident did not involve a drone.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch said it had ended its investigation. It said "we made initial inquiries but there was insufficient information on what object was involved for us to take it further."
A Dutch carpenter inspired by a dream to build a massive replica of Noahs Ark has a new and equally daunting vision  to bring the 410-foot vessel to the Americas in time for this summers Olympic Games in Brazil.

Johan Huibers impressive boat, built at a cost of nearly $4 million, is currently moored in Dordrecht, some 60 miles south of Amsterdam. A popular tourist attraction drawing as many as 3,000 visitors a day, the ark is an interactive museum and event center. Hauling it across the ocean in time to reach an international audience would cost an estimated $1.5 million, according to a California nonprofit recently established to help Huibers realize his latest dream.

If we are able to purchase a barge, that will make taking it to every port in South and North America a very real possibility, David Rivera, of The Ark of Noah Foundation, told FoxNews.com.

The group needs a miracle to achieve Huibers latest goal, as just under $1,800 has trickled in to date. But Huiberss history of overcoming long odds is testament to his tenacity. His lifes work began with a dream, which he was later able to achieve after his contracting business made him a multimillionaire.

[I hope] to see happy faces, explain the story of the Ark as a tool of God to give hope to mankind.  Johan Huibers

In 1992 I had a dream about the Netherlands being underwater [due to] a flood, Huibers, 57, told FoxNews.com. A short time after, I saw a book and I read it to my children. It showed pictures of the Great Flood. I said then that I want to build the ark. Thirteen years later, I had the means and time to do it.

At 410 feet long, 95 feet wide and 75 feet high, the ark is half the size of the specifications described in the Bible. It is made of cedar and pine and was built atop a steel barge in the river port of Schagen, some 30 miles north of Amsterdam. Since its completion, it has been towed by canal tugboats to Rotterdam and Arnhem, as well as to its current base.

Completing the 2,500-ton ark took more than four years, during which time Huibers and a crew that included random volunteers, his son and even the local butcher, often slept aboard the 95-foot-wide, 75-foot- high vessel. Given the time and money that went into building the ark, as well as its popularity, Rivera believes bringing it more than 5,200 miles to Brazil is a prophecy that can be fulfilled.

The price point is actually low, Rivera said optimistically. Its been reduced a bit because of falling oil prices.

Rivera, an Air Force veteran and retired 3M executive, became involved with the effort to bring the ark to the Americas after visiting it in the Netherlands.

I was just in awe of the size, said Rivera, who worked with Huibers to establish the tax-deductible charity to raise funds. The dimensions. The scale of it. I found it overwhelming, in a good sense.

The to-date vastly underfunded plan would have the ark docked in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza for as long as four years, with trips penciled in to cities along the South American coast, through the Panama Canal and to U.S. cities along the West Coast.

I hope that visitors will learn of true hope, Huibers said. [I hope] to see happy faces, explain the story of the Ark as a tool of God to give hope to mankind.

Although the ark can hold up to 5,000 people, there are no live critters aboard, much less two of everything. But models of the animals the Bible says Noah saved from a devastating flood are part of the museum experience. If they can get it to Brazil, they hope to use proceeds from admissions to create more interactive exhibits, including ones that would feature hologram animals.

Once in Fortaleza, we will make upgrades to allow visitors of seeing a Bible story come to life, Rivera said.

Time is running out for Huibers and Rivera to raise the money needed to get the ark to Brazil by early August, when the Olympics begin. But as the foundations motto states, above a logo showing a sea of umbrellas opened against an epic downpour, There is always hope.


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The parents of two Palestinian siblings gunned down at a West Bank checkpoint say Israeli troops killed them without cause.

The deaths of 24-year-old Maram and her 16-year-old brother, Ibrahim Taha, raise new questions about Israel's use of lethal force against Palestinians with knives.

Sarit Michaeli of the Israeli rights group B'Tselem said Thursday that it often finds the "degree of threat posed by the individual was much lower than was claimed by security forces."

Israeli police says troops shot the Taha siblings on Wednesday after they ignored calls to stop and Maram threw a knife at a policeman.

Since September, 28 Israelis and two Americans have been killed by Palestinians, while some 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis, mostly in what Israel says were attacks or attempted attacks.
ISIS executioner Jihadi John easily dodged British authorities, riding in the back of a truck to exit the UK before boarding a flight in Belgium -- despite being on a terror watch list -- according to a chilling account by a jihadist who traveled with him through six countries before reaching Syria.

ISIS' English-language magazine Dabiq details how the London-raised Jihadi John -- whose real name was Mohammed Emwazi -- and his unnamed terror associate eluded security forces on their way to Syria, where they would train to kill in the summer of 2012.

The two-page article, released Jan. 19 in Issue 13 of the magazine, eulogizes the 27-year-old Emwazi, who was killed in a drone strike last year. The Kuwaiti-born terrorist was responsible for the beheadings of American and British hostages -- including U.S. journalist James Foley -- that were videotaped and posted online by the terror network.

"The controls are much stricter entering the U.K. than outgoing."  ISIS fighter

The article refers to Emwazi as "Abu Muharib Al-Muhajir" and details how he and the unnamed fighter fled the UK "right under the nose of the much-overrated MI5 British intelligence agency," according to MEMRI, which translated a copy of it.

Because their names were on terror watch lists, the fighter says he and Emwazi decided to leave the country "hidden in a lorry" and noted how "the controls are much stricter entering the UK than outgoing."

"Despite the efforts of MI5, Abu Muharib [Emwazi] never ceased in his struggle to make hijrah for the sake of Allah. On his last attempt to leave the UK for his homeland of Kuwait, Abu Muharib was stopped at the airport and kept for questioning by MI5, the result of which was their refusal to allow him to travel," the article claims.

"During the interrogation, Abu Muharib would present himself as unintelligent, as was his method when dealing with intelligence agencies," the article said. "One particular agent said to him, 'You're not going anywhere. We are going to be on you like a shadow.' The joke would eventually be on him, for it was just a matter of days before Allah opened for Abu Muharib the opportunity to make hijrah to Sham [Syria]."

The identity of the ISIS jihadist is unknown, though he is reportedly believed to be Somali-born terror suspect Ibrahim Magag from London. The fighter says the two, carrying approximately $44,000, made it to France and then on to Belgium, where they shaved their heads and beards to disguise their identities.

The two were carrying British passports, but Belgium police did not stop them as they boarded flights and eventually made their way to Greece, according to the fighter. There, an ISIS fixer guided them onto a boat across to Turkey and eventually into Syria to join the Islamic State.

On Thursday, MEMRI released a statement, calling the Emwazi eulogy "only one of many ISIS articles and statements boasting to followers and supporters about ISIS members' evasion and circumvention of European security apparatuses as they move back and forth between the Middle East and Europe, and about their ability to conduct surveillance of potential targets in Europe and to plan attacks undisturbed."

According to the article, Emwazi came from the northeast of the Arabian Peninsula, and his mother was of Yemeni origin. It says that at a young age he and his family moved to London, adding, "This would become a place he grew to hate along with its kafir [infidel] people, whose customs were far-removed from the praiseworthy values he was much accustomed to."

FoxNews.com's Cristina Corbin contributed to this report.
Police asked for help Thursday in their search for two American cruise ship passengers who asked to disembark in Jamaica and disappeared.

Two cruise ship passengers missing https://t.co/ddwuUZV5o9  Jamaica Gleaner (@JamaicaGleaner) April 27, 2016

Hayden Gerson, 33, and Alisha Frank, 32, got off Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas in Trelawny Tuesday morning to take a day trip to Montego Bay, St. James, according to local media reports, but nobody has reported seeing them since.

Gerson and Frank were last seen at the Falmouth Pier.

Police said Frank wore a red short skirt and red open-back blouse while Gerson had light-colored shorts and a grey shirt on. They did not give any other details.

The couple's disappearance came one week after a cruise ship left a couple stranded in the Bahamas while it sailed off with their children on board, New York Post reports.

The Norwegian Cruise Line vessel left the unidentified woman and her husband behind on Thursday after the woman did not return for the widely communicated scheduled all aboard time of 5:30 p.m, the cruise line said. The husband, who was on board with their children waiting for her, then left them with other family members to search for her.

Cruise company executives said they offered the couple travel and lodging assistance, and arrangements have been made for them to reunite with their children.
A Philippines presidential candidate who previously boasted about running vigilante death squads that killed more than 1,700 people now says he will pardon himself for mass murder if he is elected.

Rodrigo Duterte made the comment Wednesday  while also making jokes about his genitals -- during a speech to the Makati Business Club in Manila.

The mayor of Davao City has flip-flopped about his ties to the vigilante squads, but they have drawn criticism from human rights groups and the United Nations, the AFP reports.

The squads reportedly killed more than 1,700 people and Duterte said he would pardon soldiers and police accused of human rights abuses.

I will issue 1,000 pardons a day, he said, while referencing a law that lets the president to pardon himself. Pardon given to Rodrigo Duterte for the crime of multiple murder, signed Rodrigo Duterte, he reportedly said, drawing laughter from the crowd.

A cornerstone of Dutertes campaign has been a pledge to crack down on crime across the Philippines by using security forces to kill criminals.

Duterte told the group of business figures that the first six months of his presidency, if elected, "will be a bloody one, the AFP reports.
The U.N. envoy for Syria called upon President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin Thursday to help revive stalled peace talks, saying a recent spike in fighting has overshadowed the talks and put an increasingly feeble truce in great danger.

Staffan de Mistura told reporters that the cessation of hostilities agreed upon by the Western- and Saudi-backed opposition and envoys from President Bashar Assads government  backed by Moscow hangs by a thread.

"I really fear that the erosion of the cessation is unraveling the fragile consensus around a political solution, carefully built over the last year," de Mistura said in his U.N. Security Council briefing. Now I see parties reverting to the langue of a military solution or military option. We must ensure they do not see that as a solution or an option.

De Mistura said hes urging the leaders of the U.S. and Russia to intervene because both presidents legacies are linked to the success of what has been a unique initiative which started very well.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov largely spearheaded the current effort to end the five-year Syrian conflict.

De Mistura appealed not only for U.S.-Russia intervention but for international support, calling in the Security Council briefing for another ministerial meeting of the International Syria Support Group "lest we lose the window of opportunity to reverse the negative downward spiral."

The International Syria Support Group includes 17 countries as well as the United Nations, Arab League, European Union and Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

De Mistura said he hoped that the talks would resume in May, and he predicted the overall process would continue as previously planned through July. But he stopped short of setting a specific date, point to the recent surge in fighting, notably in and around Aleppo.

According to Reuters, the opposition group  High Negotiations Committee  pulled out of formal talks a week ago in protest of the intensified fighting and the slow response for aid deliveries.

Bashar Jaafari, who led the government delegation, said Tuesday the latest round of talks were useful and constructive, but gave no sign of giving into the oppositions demands of forming a new government without President Assad.

Lamenting the worsening violence, he said that "in the last 48 hours, we have had an average of one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes ... How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?"

Speaking at the end of a third session of Syria peace talks this year, de Mistura said the truce brokered by the U.S. and Russia had pulled off a "miracle" by sharply reducing violence in March, but acknowledged that the renewed fighting has put the cessation of hostilities "in great danger."

He called for a "U.S.-Russian initiative at the highest level" to help reinforce it.

"There is no reason that both of them  who have been putting so much political capital in that success story and have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war  should not be able to revitalize what they created, and which is still alive, but barely," he said of the two countries.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said he shared de Misturas concerns and urged Russia to press the Assad regime to fulfill its commitments.

The talks floundered last week after the Western- and Saudi-backed opposition called the High Negotiating Committee suspended formal participation in the indirect talks with Assad's envoys to protest alleged government cease-fire violations, a drop in humanitarian aid deliveries and no progress in winning the release of detainees in Syria.

De Mistura suggested back-channel work between Moscow and Washington was already under way to help the truce, and that a revival of it would help bring the two sides back to the table.

"I know that both the Russian Federation and the U.S. are talking among themselves on how to salvage on what has been actually a remarkable success  but needs to be sustained," he said, referring to the cease-fire. If it is revived, he predicted: "It will not be difficult for everyone to come back around the table."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from Reuters.
Just two months after the United States and Russia joined together to forge a partial cease-fire in Syria, the alliance between the two countries barely hangs by a thread, according to the U.N. envoy to Syria.

Russia is accusing the Obama administration of bending to its regional allies by ignoring the presence of terrorists among opposition forces in the fight against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman sarcastically commented on President Obamas recent decision to send in another 250 Special Operations troops to fight Islamic State terrorists in Syria, The Washington Post reported. Obama had previously pitched a scenario where there would be no American boots on the ground.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman asked if the U.S. was instead planning to deploy troops barefoot.

The recent comments reflect the rising tension between the U.S. and Russia.

The Washington Post reported Thursday there is growing dissension over whether to call Russia out for acting in bad faith.

Earlier Thursday, the United Nations envoy for Syria appealed to both countries to intervene and help revive stalled peace talks, saying a recent spike in fighting had overshadowed talks and put an increasingly feeble truce in great danger.

Staffan de Mistura told reporters that the cessation of hostilities agreed upon by the Western- and Saudi-backed opposition and envoys from Assads government  backed by Moscow hangs by a thread.

"I really fear that the erosion of the cessation is unraveling the fragile consensus around a political solution, carefully built over the last year," de Mistura said in his U.N. Security Council briefing. Now I see parties reverting to the langue of a military solution or military option. We must ensure they do not see that as a solution or an option.

De Mistura said hes urging the leaders of the U.S. and Russia to intervene because both presidents legacies are linked to the success of what has been a unique initiative which started very well.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov largely spearheaded the current effort to end the five-year Syrian conflict.

De Mistura appealed not only for U.S.-Russia intervention but for international support, calling in the Security Council briefing for another ministerial meeting of the International Syria Support Group "lest we lose the window of opportunity to reverse the negative downward spiral."

The International Syria Support Group includes 17 countries as well as the United Nations, Arab League, European Union and Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

De Mistura said he hoped that the talks would resume in May, and he predicted the overall process would continue as previously planned through July. But he stopped short of setting a specific date, pointing to the recent surge in fighting, notably in and around Aleppo.

According to Reuters, the opposition group  High Negotiations Committee  pulled out of formal talks a week ago to protest the intensified fighting and the slow response for aid deliveries.

Bashar Jaafari, who led the government delegation, said Tuesday the latest round of talks was useful and constructive, but gave no sign of giving in to the oppositions demands of forming a new government without President Assad.

Lamenting the worsening violence, he said that "in the last 48 hours, we have had an average of one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes ... How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?"

Speaking at the end of a third session of Syria peace talks this year, de Mistura said the truce brokered by the U.S. and Russia had pulled off a "miracle" by sharply reducing violence in March, but acknowledged that the renewed fighting has put the cessation of hostilities "in great danger."

He called for a "U.S.-Russian initiative at the highest level" to help reinforce it.

"There is no reason that both of them  who have been putting so much political capital in that success story and have a common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war  should not be able to revitalize what they created, and which is still alive, but barely," he said of the two countries.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said he shared de Misturas concerns and urged Russia to press the Assad regime to fulfill its commitments.

De Mistura suggested back-channel work between Moscow and Washington was already under way to help the truce, and that a revival of it would help bring the two sides back to the table.

"I know that both the Russian Federation and the U.S. are talking among themselves on how to salvage on what has been actually a remarkable success  but needs to be sustained," he said, referring to the cease-fire. If it is revived, he predicted: "It will not be difficult for everyone to come back around the table."

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Bill Clinton

Alice Gatebuke and Claude Gatebuke

On the day the Rwandan genocide is generally commemorated, former President Clintons words rang hollow both in material and delivery. Instead, they conjured up images of white foreigners being evacuated from Rwanda to safety at the outset of the genocide.

The shameless hypocrisy of former US President Bill Clinton will not change the historical record about his administrations cold indifference to the Rwandan genocide.

Clinton pushed for the drastic reduction of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, leaving the field open for the horrific murders.

During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, US President Bill Clinton and members of his administration pushed for the reduction of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Rwanda from over 2 500 troops to 270, with the remaining troops mandate being reduced to a mere observers role.

The US government evacuated foreign (read: white) personnel from Rwanda, and pretty much ensured the total success of the 100-day slaughter that occurred.

President Clinton later told Rwandans that he did not act quickly enough after the killing began in his 1998 address in Rwanda.

President Clinton did not fail to act as he told the world then. Actually, he actively pushed for a particular course of action. The genocide began after the April 6 assassinations of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents. By April 11, US government and foreign personnel were successfully evacuated from Rwanda.

Once the evacuations were completed, President Clinton, along with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, visited the State Department task force in charge of evacuating American citizens to congratulate them on finishing their job.

President Clintons administration then strongly and successfully pushed for the reduction and evacuation of the peacekeeping force, by April 21, 1994. On April 30, nine days after the reduction and complete evacuation of foreign personnel and dismissed peacekeeping troops, President Clinton acted bewildered and shocked in front of the world. In his radio address, he said, The horrors of civil war and mass killings of civilians in Rwanda, since the tragic deaths of the Rwandan and Burundian Presidents three weeks ago, have shocked and appalled the world community.

But in his 1998 address to the Rwandan people, he claimed he did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which (Rwandans) were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.

On April 7, 2016, the 22nd anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, former President Bill Clinton asserted that Black lives matter, in Africa, in one of his many responses to Black Lives Matter activists protest over his controversial crime and welfare bills, and comments by former First Lady Hillary Clinton.

The words were in reference to a Tanzanian shopkeeper who named his shop after presidential candidate, and his wife, Hillary Clinton.

According to former President Clinton, the sign was in appreciation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clintons work in the fight against AIDS.

On the day the Rwandan genocide is generally commemorated, former President Clintons words rang hollow both in material and delivery. Instead, they conjured up images of white foreigners being evacuated from Rwanda to safety at the outset of the genocide. The rest of us, the innocent civilians, were provided with neither the option of evacuation, nor the decency of protection, but were left, amidst a bloody war and genocide, come what may.

What is it about our black lives that made them immaterial to President Clinton and his administration?

The cynicism of his utterance Black Lives Matter in Africa juxtaposed to his administrations comments and actions goes even deeper.

In discussions about whether to call the events occurring at the time in Rwanda genocide, Clinton National Security Council staff member Susan Rice, who went on to serve as US Ambassador to the UN, and as current National Security Advisor, said, If we use the word genocide and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November (congressional) election?

It is almost impossible to articulate the depth of betrayal felt at this profound sense of political expediency. While our lives were being slaughtered, at least somewhere in the United States, elections were being won. And in exchange, 800 000-1 000,000 casualties of black lives that apparently did not matter more than mid-term elections were lost.  Pambazuka news

Alice Gatebuke is a Rwandan genocide and war survivor, Cornell University graduate, and a human rights advocate. She serves as the communications director for AGLAN. She can be reached atalice@aglan.org.

Claude Gatebuke is a Rwandan war and genocide survivor. He is the executive director and co-founder of the African Great Lakes Action Network. He can be reached via email at claude@aglan.org
Always Best Care of San Diego Announces Major Senior Health Event

Always Best Care Senior Services of San Diego is honored to help host the 17th Annual Senior Health Fair on Friday, April 29, 2016 from 10:00am to 1:00pm at Sonrise Community Church in Santee, CA. The health fair is free to attend and will have blood pressure, blood glucose, stroke, hearing, vision and balance screenings available. In addition, there will be several senior-focused exhibitors and presenters at this event.

San Diego, CA, April 28, 2016 - (PR.com) - Jeremy Willis, Marketing Director for Always Best Care Senior Services of San Diego and Chairperson of the East County Senior Service Providers, is pleased to announce the upcoming 17th Annual Senior Health Fair, an annual event of the East County Senior Service Providers which will take place on Friday, April 29, 2016 from 10:00 am until 1:00 pm at Sonrise Community Church in Santee, CA. The event, which is the largest senior health fair in Eastern San Diego County, will feature health screenings, demonstrations and numerous presentations aimed at the needs of area senior citizens. Always Best Care of San Diego has been involved heavily in the planning and coordination efforts of the Health Fair, which is free for the public to attend. Thanks to the voluntary efforts of 72 local senior service agencies, the event will feature free admission and access to presentations, exhibits and demonstrations catering to the health needs of senior citizens in the area.

Always Best Care has been a long standing member business of the East County Senior Service Providers, a multi-disciplinary networking group. The Mission of the East County Senior Service Providers group is to identify, educate and advocate for issues relating to the quality of life of older adults residing in the East San Diego County region. The group also develops and maintains a continuous link between senior service providers; educates seniors and offers relevant resources on critical issues; advocates for quality of life for the older adults of San Diegos East County. The East County Senior Service Providers is honored to provides financial support scholarships for senior-focused non-profit organizations at the end of each year and regularly sponsor community-based educational events.

We are honored to join partners in Eastern San Diego County to put on this event is for San Diego seniors. - Bill Mathis, Owner, Always Best Care Senior Services of San Diego

Key Facts:

The 17th Annual Senior Health Fair will take place on Friday April 29, 2016 from 10:00 am until 1:00 pm at Sonrise Community Church in Santee, CA

The Health Fair is free to attend

Blood pressure, blood glucose, stroke, hearing, vision and balance screenings will be available

A prescription drop box will be available for disposal of unwanted, unusable or expired medications

A number of senior-focused exhibitors and presenters will be present

For additional information about the Health Fair, interested parties can call (619) 667-1322.

For more information about Always Best Care Senior Services of San Diego, call 888-681-1559, or visit online at www.alwaysbestcaresandiego.com. Inquiries can also be sent via email to jdwillis@abc-seniors.com

About Always Best Care

Founded in 1996, Always Best Care Senior Services is based on the belief that having the right people for the right level of care means peace of mind for the client and family. Always Best Care assists seniors with a wide range of illnesses and personal needs, and currently provides more than 4 million hours of care every year. Franchise opportunities are available to individuals interested in leveraging the companys clear strategy and proven track record for delivering affordable, dependable service to seniors in their local areas.

By working with case managers, social workers, discharge planners, doctors, and families, Always Best Care franchise owners provide affordable, comprehensive solutions that can be specifically matched to meet a clients particular physical or social needs. The hallmark services of the Always Best Care business portfolio include non-medical in-home care and assisted living finder and referral services, with skilled home health care now being phased in throughout the country.

SOURCE Always Best Care

Contact:

Jeremy Willis

Always Best Care San Diego, CA

Director of Marketing

(619) 457-3063

jdwillis@abc-seniors.com

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Dickeys Barbecue Pit Announces Three-Store Development Agreement in Ohio

Owner/Operator Kelley Millikin will open three new locations in Central Ohio

April 28, 2016 // Franchising.com // Columbus, OH - Dickeys Barbecue Pit has signed a three-store development agreement in Central Ohio. The Buckeye State currently boasts eight Dickeys locations, and the brand is expanding rapidly throughout the Midwest.

Owner/Operator Kelley Millikin spent most of his career in business to business sales and account management prior to becoming an entrepreneur. Having lived in Ohio for 23 years, he decided to make his passion into a career and go into the barbecue business full time. I knew Dickeys was the right concept because of the exceptional growth rate and the quality of the product, Millikin says. This franchise appeals to my natural love of barbecue, but as a potential business owner I chose Dickeys for the operations efficiency and quality. The specific locations for the new stores have not been determined as of yet, but they will be located in Central Ohio, in the Columbus area.

We are proud to bring Texas-style barbecue to the Midwest, and have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our guests in that region, says Roland Dickey, Jr., CEO of Dickeys Barbecue Restaurants, Inc. The Dickey family congratulates new Owner/Operator Kelley Millikin on his development agreement and we look forward to our brands expansion in Ohio.

To learn more about franchising with Dickeys, visit www.dickeys.com/franchise or call 866-340-6188.

To find the Dickeys Barbecue Pit nearest you, click here. Find Dickeys on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

About Dickeys Barbecue Restaurants, Inc.

Dickeys Barbecue Restaurants, Inc., the nations largest barbecue chain was founded in 1941 by Travis Dickey with the goal of authentic slow smoked barbecue. Today, all meats are still slow smoked on-site in each restaurant living up to the company tagline, We Speak Barbecue. The Dallas-based family-run barbecue franchise offers a quality selection of signature meats, home style sides, tangy barbecue sauce and free kids meals every Sunday. The fast-casual concept has expanded to 550 locations in 43 states. Dickeys was recognized for the third year by Nations Restaurant News as a Top 10 Growth Chain and by Technomic as the Fastest-growing restaurant chain in the country. For more information, visit www.dickeys.com or for barbecue franchise opportunities call 866.340.6188.

SOURCE Dickeys Barbecue Restaurants, Inc.

Media Contact:

Michelle George

Public Relations Specialist

Dickey's Barbecue Restaurants, Inc.

(972) 248-9899 ext. 235

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Fish Consulting Announces Strong First Quarter with Several New Clients

Franchise Specialty PR Firm Welcomes FASTSIGNS International, Fazolis, My Gym, Stevi Bs Pizza Buffet and Sea Tow Foundation to Client Roster

April 28, 2016 // Franchising.com // HOLLYWOOD, Fla.  Fish Consulting, LLC, a national communications firm specializing in franchise public relations and marketing, announced today it has added FASTSIGNS International, Inc., Fazolis, My Gym, Stevi Bs Pizza Buffet and Sea Tow Foundation to its client roster during the first quarter of 2016.

Were excited to expand our portfolio of clients with these great brands. Its a strong mix of established and emerging concepts seeking to grow their respective businesses, said Lorne Fisher, CFE, CEO/managing partner, Fish Consulting, LLC. "They represent diverse industries and communications needs, and were looking forward to helping each of them reach and exceed their business goals.

FASTSIGNS International, Inc., the leading franchise in signs, graphics and visual communications, enlisted Fish to lead its FASTSIGNS franchise recruitment public relations strategy nationwide, with a focus on lead generation, including the companys co-brand program. Fazolis, Americas largest Italian fast casual chain, has also hired Fish to execute a franchisee recruitment marketing program, which includes digital and content marketing, as well as traditional and social campaigns.

The firm is also working with My Gym, a leading fitness center destination for children, to implement all aspects of a grassroots integrated marketing campaign including development of local landing pages, SEO/PPC campaigns, email marketing and local public relations efforts.

Stevi Bs Pizza Buffet, a leading fast casual pizza buffet serving premium pizza, pasta, salad and dessert, recruited Fish to drive its local, consumer public relations efforts for the concepts limited-time offers in target markets across the country. Lastly, Fish will handle national public relations and social media efforts for the Sea Tow Foundations Designated Skipper Campaign, which aims to help eliminate boating under the influence and alcohol related accidents on the water while keeping boating fun. In addition, Fish was tasked with strengthening national awareness for the Sea Tow Foundation.

Fish recently celebrated its 11th anniversary and has experienced significant growth over the past several years. In 2015, Fish was named for the second consecutive year to the Inc. 5000, Inc. Magazine's ranking of the fastest growing privately held companies in America. Additionally, PRWeek and the South Florida Business Journal have named Fish a "Best Places to Work" in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

About Fish Consulting

Fish is proud to leverage its experience in franchising to serve some of the industry's leading concepts including The Melting Pot, Dunkin Donuts, Orangetheory Fitness, The Dwyer Group, Valpak, Massage Heights, AAMCO and Tropical Smoothie Cafe, among others. The agency's support for franchise clients range from brand building, franchisee recruitment and internal communications to crisis communications, cause marketing, local/national media relations and social media management. Fish is based in Hollywood, Fla., with operations in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., New York and London. For more information call 954-893-9150 or visit www.fish-consulting.com. For additional franchise insights follow Fish on Twitter @fishconsulting or Facebook.

SOURCE Fish Consulting

Media Contact:

Jessi Nunez

Account Executive

Fish Consulting, LLC

O: (954) 893-9150

C: (954) 562-9048

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HouseMaster Expands to Northern Indiana

ELKHART, IN - (Marketwired - April 28, 2016) - HouseMaster, the first and most experienced home inspection franchise company in North America, announces a new franchise location, serving the Northern Indiana area owned and operated by Bill Kauffman.

Kauffman, a resident of Elkhart, spent many years working in management for Lowe's Home Improvements. "I'm excited for the opportunity to work with the excellent Real Estate Professionals in my area," said Kauffman. "I decided to take on self-employment because of a favorite quote, 'Risk something or forever sit with your dreams.' It is an exciting to move away from the predictable employment life and step into a new experience. In today's competitive real estate market, the services we offer as part of the HouseMaster family are more important than ever in helping both sellers and buyers make educated real estate decisions."

Kathleen Kuhn, President of HouseMaster, said, "We are beyond ecstatic to have Bill as part of our franchise family and we are looking forward to watching him grow and prosper in the Northern Indiana area."

As a HouseMaster Owner, Kauffman will provide home buyers and sellers an independent, third-party, professional evaluation of the condition of the major elements of a home. The guaranteed inspections enable potential home buyers and sellers the opportunity to make educated real estate decisions. From interior systems such as plumbing and electrical to exterior components like the roof and siding, the HouseMaster Home Inspection includes the evaluation of all visible and accessible elements of the home.

HouseMaster also conducts new construction, commercial property, and foreclosure inspections as well as other services depending on the needs of the local community.

About HouseMaster

Founded in 1979 and Headquartered in Somerville, NJ, HouseMaster is the oldest and one of the largest home inspection companies in North America. With more than 310 franchised areas throughout the US and Canada, HouseMaster is the most respected name in home inspections. For over 35 years, HouseMaster has built upon a foundation of solid leadership and innovation with a continued focus on delivering the highest quality service experience to their customers and providing HouseMaster franchisees the tools and support necessary to do so. Each HouseMaster franchise is an independently owned and operated business. HouseMaster is a registered trademark of HouseMaster LLC.

For more information please visit www.housemaster.com or call 800-526-3939.

SOURCE HouseMaster

Contact:

Bill Kauffman

574-215-3520

William.Kauffman@housemaster.com

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MaidPro One of Boston's Healthiest Employers

April 28, 2016 // Franchising.com // The Boston Business Journal has released their 2016 list of Bostons Healthiest Employers. MaidPro, ranked second in the small business category, was one of only 26 companies acknowledged for their dedication to health and wellness. The Boston Business Journal went on to state, MaidPro has placed health and wellness at the center of its mission  literally: it built an employee gym right in the middle of the company. MaidPro offers its staff fitness classes and medication seminars and even weekend trips to the companys lake house in Maine. With a focus on creativity and passion MaidPro has exemplified how small companies can provide large sized benefits. Kay Lynch, VP of Human Resources, says, We want to keep people happy, healthy and engaged  that is our main goal. As MaidPro continues to grow they are always looking for new ways to improve and expand their wellness program. This is the second year MaidPro has been named one of Bostons Healthiest Employers.

To get a free estimate for housecleaning services from MaidPro please visit www.maidpro.com.

About MaidPro

MaidPro is a Boston-based franchisor of house cleaning services with over 200 offices in 33 states, the District of Columbia and Canada. The company, which began franchising in 1997, takes pride in its strong owner community, cutting-edge technology and creative marketing. It has been honored with the Franchise Business Reviews Four-Star Rating and Franchise 50 awards every year from 2006 to 2016 for owner satisfaction. MaidPro was named one of the Top 50 Franchises for Minorities by USA Todays Franchising Today. MaidPro is also a proud member of the International Franchise Association and the New England Franchise Association. The company can be found online at www.maidprofranchise.com.

SOURCE MaidPro

Media Contact:

Madeleine Park

(617) 778-0374 x7040

mpark@maidpro.com

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Steve McKenna & The Home Advantage Team Named Real Living Real Estates No. 1 Team in the Country

ARLINGTON, Mass. - April 27, 2016 - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Real Living Real Estate, one of the nation's leading real estate franchisors and a member of the HSF Affiliates LLC family of real estate brokerage networks, today congratulated Steve McKenna and The Home Advantage Team, of BOWES Real Estate Real Living, as the brands No. 1 real estate team nationally.

For 30 years, Steve McKenna has been a fixture in Arlington real estate, and Arlingtons top real estate agent every year since 1991. Real Living Real Estate ranked its own top teams for 2015 production and Steve McKenna & The Home Advantage Team topped the lists for both closed units and total GCI for 2015.

This recognition is a testament to Steve and the excellent team he runs, said Bob McAdams, president of Real Living Real Estate. Steve and his team are outstanding members of BOWES Real Estate Real Living, and we couldnt be more proud to have them in our Real Living family.

McKenna built his business on a foundation of hard work and premier customer service. Clients rely on the teams deep understanding of the local market, its pool of buyers, in addition to its skills in marketing, transaction coordination, negotiation, scheduling and follow-up.

We are truly honored to be recognized by Real Living for these accomplishments, said McKenna. While it is gratifying to see our hard work pay off, the fact that we have helped thousands of people and families in and around Arlington successfully buy and sell their homes is genuinely rewarding. As always, we thank the community for its continued business and support.

About Steve McKenna & The Home Advantage Team

Steve McKenna has been affiliated with BOWES Real Estate Real Living since 1986, and has been Arlington, Massachusetts #1 real estate agent every year since 1991. McKenna is committed to providing each of his clients with the highest quality of professional service. He has taken years of experience and developed a successful business model with The Home Advantage Team  a group of highly qualified support staff. A combination of cutting edge technologies, personal service and attention to detail has resulted in generations of satisfied sellers and buyers. Visit www.yourhomeforsale.com for more information.

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. In 2016, Real Living Real Estate was named Real Estate Agency Brand of the Year and Most Loved real estate brand in the 28th annual Harris Poll EquiTrend study. Additionally, the Real Living 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, visit www.RealLiving.com.

SOURCE Real Living Real Estate

Contact:

Carolyn MacNeil

BOWES Real Estate Real Living

781-645-0505

Carolyn@yourhomeforsale.com

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Sweet Lorraines Crowned Best Mac and Cheese in Michigan

April 28, 2016 // Franchising.com // SOUTHFIELD, Mich.  Sweet Lorraines premiere fast-casual macaroni and cheese empire has taken the throne for the Best Mac and Cheese in Michigan.

Each year since 1999, the Detroit Metro Times publishes the Best of Detroit issue, which recognizes those that make the region sensational. Local readers have the opportunity to vote for the best in Detroit, but Sweet Lorraines also takes the cheese for all of Michigan.

The Detroit Metro Times is the premiere alternative source for news, arts, culture, music, film, food, and fashion. Every year, the over 657,000 loyal print and 450,000 digital readers look to the Best of Detroit issue for what to do, where to go, and who to see.

We are thrilled to be recognized by the Detroit Metro Times and the mac and cheese lovers of Michigan, said Sweet Lorraines founder and award-winning chef Lorraine Platman. We are honored that the community is as passionate about mac and cheese and we are!

Platman estimates there will be as many as 10 new restaurants open and operating by the end of 2016. While the growth will likely stay in the Midwest, it will push beyond the region over the next several years. Company plans call for having 100 restaurants nationwide in the next five years.

Founded in 2010 and franchising since 2013, Sweet Lorraines offers customers 14 different kinds of meat-topped and vegetarian macaroni and cheese dishes in two sizes (mini or mega), all made to order in less than two minutes. Sweet Lorraines also just recently announced tasty new menu items for spring such as the Fiesta Fajita, Pulled Pork BBQ, and local tribute to the Coney Island hot dog, the Detroit Coney Dog Mac. Guests can also mix and match from over 38 topping choices to create more than 1.7 billion palate pleasing combinations.

In addition to specialty mac and cheese dishes, Sweet Lorraines offers a variety of vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free soups, salads, twisted grilled cheese and desserts.

Ever since Thomas Jefferson served macaroni and cheese at a state dinner in 1802, the creamy combo has become a staple of American cuisine and a favorite for generations of American children and adults, said Gary Sussman, Platmans husband and CEO of Sweet Lorraines. More than 200 years later, Americas appetite for the classic comfort food has continued to grow and we look forward to feeding that appetite even further with our variety of mouth-watering, cheezy pick-me-ups.

To augment the companys growth, Sweet Lorraines is looking for additional franchise partners and area developers interested in jumping into the fast-casual market with a unique, pioneering concept. With a franchise fee of $39,900, the total investment to own and operate a Sweet Lorraines franchise is $160,000 to $400,000. The franchise fee for additional locations is $24,500.

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

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The Texas senator announced his pick for vice president at an Indianapolis rally, an unusual move for an underdog candidate that reflects the increasing urgency for the fiery conservative to reverse his downward trajectory.

Cruz praised Fiorina's path from secretary to CEO and her past willingness to challenge GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

"Carly isn't intimated by bullies," he declared, adding, "Over and over again, Carly has shattered glass ceilings."

The 61-year-old Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, has been a prominent Cruz ally since shortly after abandoning her own presidential bid earlier in the year. She was the only woman in the Republican Party's crowded 2016 field.

"Of all the people who didn't make it far in the race, she was one of the best about laying out her plan, talking about who she is and her accomplishments," said Doug De Groote, a fundraiser for Cruz based near Los Angeles.

Fiorina's selection marked another extraordinary development in the 2016 Republican campaign, particularly for a candidate who is far from becoming his party's presumptive nominee. Cruz was soundly defeated by GOP front-runner Donald Trump in all five primaries contests on Tuesday, and he's been mathematically eliminated from winning the nomination before his party's national convention in July.

Some Cruz allies praised Fiorina's selection, but privately questioned if it would change the trajectory of the race. Trump has won 77 percent of the delegates he needs to claim the nomination, and a win next week in Indiana will keep him on a firm path to do so.

Cruz was to appear Wednesday afternoon with Fiorina in Indiana's capital city, having staked his candidacy on a win in the state's primary contest next Tuesday. Fiorina's California ties could also prove valuable in that state's high-stakes primary on June 7.

"Carly has incredible appeal to so many people, especially in California," De Groote said. "She can really help him here."

Her first major foray into politics was in 2010, when she ran for Senate in California and lost to incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer by 10 percentage points. She has never held elected office.

Trump criticized a Fiorina pick as "ridiculous" and "dumb" even before it was announced.

"First of all, he shouldn't be naming anybody because he doesn't even have a chance," the New York billionaire said in a Wednesday interview on Fox News.

"Naming Carly's dumb, because Carly didn't do well. She had one good debate  not against me by the way, because I had an unblemished record of victories during debates  but she had one victory on the smaller stage and that was it," Trump said.

He added, "She's a nice woman. I think that it's not going to help him at all."

Throughout her presidential bid, Fiorina emphasized her meteoric rise in the business world. A Stanford University graduate, she started her career as a secretary, earned an MBA and worked her way up at AT&T to become a senior executive at the telecom leader.

She was also dogged by questions about her record at Hewlett-Packard, where she was hired as CEO in 1999. She was fired six years later, after leading a major merger with Compaq and laying off 30,000 workers.

Democrats quickly attacked the Cruz-Fiorina alliance.

"The best way to describe that ticket is mean and meaner," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who beat Fiorina for Senate in 2010. "He wants to throw people out of the country and she threw thousands of jobs out of the country. Perfect match."

In an Associated Press-GfK poll conducted in December 2015, Republican voters were more likely to say they had a favorable than an unfavorable view of Fiorina by a 47 percent to 20 percent margin, with 32 percent unable to give a rating.

Among all Americans, 45 percent didn't know enough about Fiorina to rate her, while 22 percent rated her favorably and 32 percent unfavorably.

By contrast, both Cruz and Trump have high negative ratings even within their own party, according to an April AP-GfK poll. Among Republican voters, 52 percent have a favorable and 41 percent have an unfavorable opinion of Cruz, while 53 percent have a favorable and 46 percent have an unfavorable opinion of Trump.

Among all Americans, 59 percent had an unfavorable opinion of Cruz and 69 percent said that of Trump.

Cruz supporter Jim McAdams, who was wearing a homemade "Ted Cruz 16" shirt to the announcement event in Indianapolis, predicted the Fiorina pick would generate badly needed momentum. But the 74-year-old retired mechanical engineer conceded that Cruz is a longshot at this point.

"The only way he's going to get in office is divine intervention," McAdams said. "We pray for his campaign every day."
PARISThe lone known surviving suspect in the Paris attacks was returned Wednesday to the city where Islamic State extremists unleashed a night of mayhem and charged with a host of terrorism offenses, raising hopes that he may be able to help French investigators trace the pathways of IS fighters thought to be hiding out in Europe.

Salah Abdeslam was whisked in secretly by helicopter after being transferred from the prison cell in Belgium where he had been held since his capture last month. His lawyer, Frank Berton, described a muscular operation that had caught even the attorney by surprise, causing him to rush to join his client at Paris Palace of Justice.

The 26-year-old faces preliminary charges of participating in a terrorist organization, terrorist murders and attempted murders, attempted terrorist murders of public officials, hostage-taking, and possessing weapons and explosives, French prosecutors said in a statement.

Berton said Abdeslam was being sent to Fleury-Merogis, a massive, high-security prison about 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of Paris, where he will be held in isolation in a special camera-equipped cell until his next hearing on May 20. French Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas said earlier that Abdeslam would be placed in isolation, watched by guards specially trained to deal with people reputed to be dangerous.

The return of the last known survivor of the team that carried out the Nov. 13 attacks may help investigators untangle some of the still-unresolved questions about the assault, which claimed 130 lives at cafes, a music hall and a sports stadium. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the carnage.

Berton told reporters Wednesday that his client volunteered that he would explain himself at some later date.

Abdeslam, a French citizen of Moroccan origin, spent four months on the run following the attacks and a month in Belgian custody after being tackled by heavily armed police outside his hideout in the Mollenbeek neighborhood of Brussels.

Abdeslams precise role in the attacks has never been clear. The Paris prosecutor said he was kitted out as a suicide bomber, but abandoned his plans and fled to Belgium. Abdeslams older brother blew himself up that night at a cafe.

It was at the hideout near his childhood home in Molenbeek that Abdeslam was ultimately captured on March 18. His detention may have prompted other members of the Islamic State cell to rush attack plans already in motion. Four days later, suicide bombers detonated their explosives in the Brussels airport and metro, killing 32 people. Abdeslam had told interrogators nothing about a new plot.

His return to Paris offered solace to victims of the Nov. 13 bloodshed and raised hopes that French investigators would finally be able to trace the pathways of the Islamic State fighters thought to be hiding out in Europe.

I would like to look him in the eye. If I could even talk to him, it would be important to me, George Salines, whose daughter, Lola, died at the Bataclan concert venue, told BFM television.

But in a surprising assessment, Abdeslams Belgian lawyer downplayed any insight from his client, dismissing him as a little jerk among Molenbeeks little delinquents, more a follower than a leader.

He has the intelligence of an empty ashtray, the attorney, Sven Mary, told the French newspaper Liberation. He is the perfect example of the ... generation that believes its living in a video game. ... I asked him if he had read the Quran and he told me he got his interpretation from the Internet.

However, Berton described his client as a young man falling apart and ready to cooperate.

He told iTele TV that Abdeslam wants to talk, he has things to say, that he wants to explain his route to radicalization as well as his role in the attacksbut not take responsibility for the crimes of others.

That means be judged for facts and acts that he committed but not for what he did not commit simply because he is the only survivor of the attacks, Berton said.
The teacher crisis is real, and were not going to work our way out of it simply by making it easier to hire teachers.
Reputation Monitoring Software With B2C Lead Generation Assistance Launched

Internet Business Solutions launched a premier and industry-leading online reputation management software to help business owners or professionals monitor their online reputation, shape it by 'interacting at the point of contact' and target potential customers searching for a product or service in their location.

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Internet Business Solutions has announced the launch of an online reputation management software designed to help professionals or business owners effectively monitor the web 24/7 to control or shape their online reputation and attract more customers.

More information is available at http://onlinereputationmanagementsoftware.co.uk.

Internet Business Solutions is a popular Manchester-based firm supplying businesses and professionals with premier and industry-leading reputation management software. The firm has announced the launch of a valuable software developed to help effectively monitor an online reputation 24/7 and instantly interact or reply to reviews 'at the point of contact' across the web.

The software allows users to monitor, track, set up alerts and instantly interact on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google reviews, blogs, forums, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more, to get not only a complete picture of what is being said about them online but also the opportunity to reply to reviews or queries anywhere straight away and provide an improved customer service or experience.

By allowing users to set up and receive alerts, in their email, IOS or Android app, for their name, company, brand, products, location, competitors or any other preferred keyword, the software can also provide an effective monitoring of competitors online and targeting of potential customers searching for services/products in a specific location or niche, to generate new leads and sales.

Internet Business Solutions explains that "in today's world of the Internet and Social Media, we all know how important our reputation is and how bad publicity can affect us. We all know that bad reviews and negative comments can sometimes do irreparable damage. Changing your customer's bad experience into a good one is worth its weight in gold".

The business adds that "if you are worried about what people are posting about you on the Internet, and you are concerned that what they say will have a bad or adverse effect on you, your business, or your lifestyle, then this is the perfect software for you. It will help you monitor the Internet and Social Media so that you can find out what is being said about you online".

The firm concludes that "from now on, anytime anyone mentions your keywords or your chosen phrases on the Internet and Social media, whether they are sending an angry tweet, posting something on Facebook, or posting a review about you on Yelp, etc., you will be alerted immediately".

More information on the software and how effectively monitoring and caring for an online reputation can help retain and generate leads or customers along with the opportunity to request a 7-day trial of the software, and more, are available on the website link provided above.

For more information about us, please visit http://www.onlinereputationmanagementsoftware.co.uk

Contact Info:

Name: Al Hemmings

Organization: Internet Business Solutions

Address: 22 Rainow Way, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 2PT



Release ID: 112593

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Narvon Pennsylvania Amish Sheds Barns & Garages Supplier Launches New Site

Pennsylvania business Waterloo Structures has launched its new website with their comprehensive image gallery of the handcrafted sheds and other utility buildings they've supplied for over 30 years to locations on the Atlantic coast.

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Waterloo Structures, a family owned and operated business out of Narvon, Pennsylvania, specializing in handcrafted sheds and other utility buildings for over 30 years, has launched a new website, featuring a comprehensive image gallery.

For more information and to view the product range, visit the website: http://sheds-by-waterloo.com.

Waterloo Structures doesn't use the mass produced, prefabricated building methods now adopted widely by nearly all manufacturers. Instead it specializes in the customized design and high quality manual craftsmanship of shed, barns, garages and other outdoor utility storage structures, utilizing the almost disappeared, centuries' old, hand-built standards (inspired by Amish methods) for a structure that is built with high quality materials for longevity, as outlined on its website.

The company does however, utilize a modern innovation known as the storage shed mule, for the easiest and most convenient way to transport and install the end product for their customers. The website describes the storage shed mule as not only being able to transport with ease, it's capable of traversing any terrain for the exact placement of the final structure. Without the storage shed mule, Waterloo Structures says placement options are limited, and some companies even leave the installation to the client.

Waterloo Structures has always been able to solve challenging storage needs for its clients, providing premium quality sheds to the Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, Virginia and other Atlantic Coast locations. It designs and builds sheds, horse barns, garages, two story buildings, pool sheds, workshop sheds, pottery sheds, children's play sheds and all manner of custom sheds. It utilizes a variety of materials, LP (engineered wood), vinyl, pine and wood sided panels. The website features a whole range of images of the various styles and examples.

Waterloo Structures does not work to a one size fits all solution. Its sheds and outdoor buildings are built to be hardy, durable and secure, to withstand all weather conditions and endure a long lifespan. The company works to a three to six week delivery timespan, from the date of order. For delivery costs or any other questions, there is a phone number listed or a contact form on the website. Its hours of operation are Monday to Friday 8am to 5pm and Saturday 9am to 12pm.

For more information about us, please visit http://sheds-by-waterloo.com

Contact Info:

Name: Paul Zook

Organization: Waterloo Structures



Release ID: 112656

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Online Reputation Fixer & Brand Or Personal Monitoring Benefits Website Launched

Internet Business Solutions has announced a new website providing information on the importance, benefits and new business or lead generation impact of professional and premier online reputation management and monitoring for professionals or businesses.

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The prominent online reputation management software provider Internet Business Solutions launched a new website with information on the benefits, importance and impact of a premier reputation management/monitoring service.

More information is available at http://onlinereputationmanagementsoftware.co.uk/.

Internet Business Solutions provides individuals and businesses with industry-leading online reputation management solutions, services and software designed to help monitor, control and shape a good personal or business reputation online.

The company has launched a new website detailing the importance for professionals and businesses of being aware and in control of what is being said about them or their company, brand, service, products, staff or competitors online.

The newly launched website also provides extensive information on how an online reputation management service or software can help retain existing clients by instantly turning negative reviews or feedback into a positive experience with direct replies 'at the point of contact' and impact new business or lead generation.

Internet Business Solutions reveals that around 88% of people trust online comments and on average 72% take action after reading a positive review, but if they are reading negative feedback, about 80% won't use those products or services.

The firm also explains that "every time something is said about you or your business online whether you are a plumber, a school, a restaurant owner, a hotel, someone in the public eye, or a multi-national business like an airline company, you must answer and deal with any complaints or bad reviews straight away to avoid losing more business and customers".

More on the benefits and importance of a properly managed and monitored online reputation along with information on the Internet Business Solutions' premier online reputation management software, with 24/7 web and social media keyword-based monitoring & email, IOS or Android alerts, are available on the website link provided above.

The firm adds that "by using a professional software, you will definitely know that your current clients aren't leaving you because of bad online reviews, and you will be reassured that potential new ones aren't avoiding you either. If you get the software, you'll be able to do your own online monitoring and put out any fires before they happen, knowing that your back is covered".

For more information about us, please visit http://www.onlinereputationmanagementsoftware.co.uk

Contact Info:

Name: Al Hemmings

Organization: Internet Business Solutions

Address: 22 Rainow Way, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 2PT



Release ID: 112585

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United States Neuro-Endoscopy Industry Growth Report To 2016 : Radiant Insights,Inc

RadiantInsights.com includes new market research report on "United States Neuro-Endoscopy Industry Size, Share And Trends Report Up To 2016 : Radiant Insights" to its huge collection of research reports.

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The United States (U.S.) accounts for a significant portion of the market for neuro-endoscopy in North America. It is witnessing higher incidences of brain tumors. The American Brain Tumor Association notes brain cancer to be an important reason for cancer-related deaths in the under-20 age group. Brain tumor has been diagnosed in close to 700,000 people in the U.S. Also healthcare establishments are increasing use of minimally invasive procedures as a way of restricting costs. This opens up huge opportunities for the neuro-endoscopy industry in the coming years.

Access Full Report With TOC @ http://www.radiantinsights.com/research/united-states-neuro-endoscopy-industry-2016-market-research-report

Neuro-endoscopy is a minimally invasive surgery procedure adopted to remove tumors from the brain through mouth, nose or small holes in the skull. It helps surgeons to access parts of the brain that are not reachable in traditional surgeries. Neuro-endoscopy causes lesser pain, faster recovery and minimal scarring as compared to traditional surgeries. Additionally, the risk of damage to other parts of the skull is minimized.

Thus neuro-endoscopy is an upcoming procedure used to treat various types of brain growths like pituitary tumors, colloid cysts, ventricular tumors, meningiomas, rathke's cleft cysts, and tumors in the pineal region. It is used to perform ventriculostomies, obstructions, biopsies, and other procedures. However, demand may be hindered by alternative treatment procedures like gamma knife surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy.

Browse All Reports of This Category at: www.radiantinsights.com/catalog/pharmaceuticals-and-healthcare

The neuro-endoscopy industry is segmented according to type of products. Main categories are rigid endoscopes, flexible endoscopes, endoscope accessories, endoscopic visualization systems, endoscopic ultrasound (eus), and endoscopic fluid management systems. Rigid endoscopes are one of the highly-consumed products. They are highly efficient and register high success rates in removal of brain tumors. However, they are costly and are often not covered under reimbursement policies in many countries. This may negatively impact growth prospects.

Leading players in the U.S. neuro-endoscopy industry are Rudolf Medical GmbH, B. Braun Melsungen AG, Karl Storz GmbH & Co. KG, and Richard Wolf GmbH. Other established players include Ackermann USA, Inc., Schoelly Fiberoptic GmbH, Fujifilm Holding Corporation, Hangzhou Hawk Optical Electrical Instruments Co. Ltd., and Kapalin Biosciences. The market is highly competitive. Vendors often form strategic alliances with Asia Pacific companies that operate in the imaging and optical space.

Request A Sample Copy Of This Report at: www.radiantinsights.com/research/united-states-neuro-endoscopy-industry-2016-market-research-report#tabs-4

About Radiant Insights,Inc

Radiant Insights is a platform for companies looking to meet their market research and business intelligence requirements. We assist and facilitate organizations and individuals procure market research reports, helping them in the decision making process. We have a comprehensive collection of reports, covering over 40 key industries and a host of micro markets. In addition to over extensive database of reports, our experienced research coordinators also offer a host of ancillary services such as, research partnerships/ tie-ups and customized research solutions.

For more information about us, please visit http://www.radiantinsights.com/research/united-states-neuro-endoscopy-industry-2016-market-research-report

Contact Info:

Name: Michelle Thoras

Email: sales@radiantinsights.com

Organization: Radiant Insights, Inc.

Address: 28 2nd Street

Phone: 14153490054

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/united-states-neuro-endoscopy-industry-growth-report-to-2016-radiant-insightsinc/111569

Release ID: 111569

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Thai Hot Stone & Oil Sensual Thai Massage Site Relaunch Announced

A Thai massage practice has relaunched its website to coincide with its new ownership. It advertises all of its services and describes the differences between them, as well as explaining the elemental principals behind Thai massage theory.

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A traditional Thai massage company has announced a new site relaunch to coincide with new ownership of the business. Sabaydee massage was founded by Napaporn Suebsom three years ago, but is now being run by Miss Pranee Richter. The new owner, Pranee, has practiced Thai massage in Phuket for four years, and having just moved to Switzerland is happy to continue the Sabaydee story.

More information can be found on the official Sabaydee GmbH website at: https://sabaydee.ch/.

The Sabaydee website explains the difference between Thai massage and regular massage, giving customers some background information on the details and process before booking. It also lists all of the massage services available with the company, their prices, and what each one involves. Lastly, it provides clear details on how to find the practice, whether people are travelling by train, tram or car.

Thai massage differs to other forms of massage because it involves Thai element theory at the heart of its philosophy. By using this theory, practitioners can work out which techniques will be best for different people, how quickly or slowly to progress through the massage, and what the goals of each individual massage session should be. The general belief is that everyone has the elements of Fire, Wind, Water, and Earth inside them. This elemental balance is constantly changing, and if it's out of balance it can result in stress, aching and discomfort both physically and mentally. Because each person's elements are different, no two Thai massages will ever be the same, as they are tailored to each individual.

As well as the traditional Thai massage, the relaunched Sabaydee practice also offers Thai wellness massage, Asian healing massage, and couples massage. There is a photo gallery to help customers differentiate between each technique, and anyone with questions can contact the practice for more information. The practice can be reached at Grubenstrasse 1, Zurich, 8045, Switzerland. Their contact number is 043 53 913 53 or alternatively customers can email them at info@sabaydee.ch.

For more information about us, please visit https://sabaydee.ch/

Contact Info:

Name: Suebsom Napaporn

Email: info@sabaydee.ch

Organization: Sabaydee GmbH

Address: Grubenstrasse 1, 8045 Zurich, Switzerland

Phone: +41796300902

Release ID: 112591

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Stars Home Based Jobs Celebrates Its first Anniversary

Stars Home Based Jobs is celebrating its 1 year anniversary and reveals some of its big wins and challenges it faced getting this far. More information on the business can be found at http://www.starshomejobs.com

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Stars Home Based Jobs is celebrating their first Anniversary, which commemorates 1 amazing years in business. This is a huge milestone for the online-based Work From Home Jobs business, which has provided Work From Home Jobs to online workers since 2015.

Stars Home Based Jobs got their start in 2015 when founder Nick Creighton was searching for online work and all he had found was scam after scam. It was extremely hard for him to find a legitimate work from home job.

One of the earliest challenges Stars Home Based Jobs faced was Getting people to trust that they were legitiment.

While every business, of course, faces challenges, some, like Stars Home Based Jobs are fortunate enough to enjoy real successes, wins, and victories too. Once such victory came when seemingly against all odds, and with so much competition against all the spammers, they were able to gain the trust of thousands and help them land a great job at home.

Nick Creighton, Founder at Stars Home Based Jobs was also quoted when discussing another big win. "One of the high points of Stars Home Based Jobs's history so far was having so many satisfied users write so many positive reviews.."

Stars Home Based Jobs's Founder, Nick Creighton says "We're delighted to be celebrating our 1 Year Anniversary. I believe the secret to getting this far in business today is staying positive and never giving up!".

Stars Home Based Jobs currently consists of 1 employees and has big plans for the upcoming year. One of their core objectives is to double the amount of visitors that they received their first year and to help anybody and everybody that is looking to start working from home.

Stars Home Based Jobs would also like to thank friends, customers and all its partners for their well wishes on this happy occasion.

More information on the business can be found at Data entry jobs from home

For more information about us, please visit http://www.starshomejobs.com

Contact Info:

Name: nick creighton

Organization: Stars Home Based Jobs

Address: 237 tuttle st



Release ID: 112589

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Home Care Assistance - Toronto/York Region Weighs in on Study Showing Caregiver Burnout

Home Care Assistance - Toronto/York Region gives its opinion on new research showing caregivers are burning out.

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Home Care Assistance - Toronto/York Region (www.HomeCareAssistance-Toronto.com), the leading provider of non-medical, in-home senior care in the Greater Toronto Area, is weighing in on a study showing caregiver burnout.

A recently released report cited caregiver burnout as a factor that can potentially impact the health system in Ontario. The number of people who had to stop caring for elderly family members due to stress doubled from 2010 to 2014, from 7% to approximately 14%.

(Source: Dempsey, A., "Caregivers are needed more than ever, but burning out," The Star web site, April 5, 2016; http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/05/caregivers-are-needed-more-than-ever-but-burning-out.html.)

"I don't think there's any secret that this province is in the midst of a healthcare crisis," says Brian Shevel, president of Home Care Assistance - Toronto/York Region. "At-home care plays a prominent role in how the province cares for the aging population, which is why it's important for caregivers to take care of themselves too. They have a life to live separate from caring for their parents or subsequent family member and not balancing the two can bring on some serious stress."

Research for the report was conducted by community home care workers and cited the increase in age, as well as physical and mental impairment as reasons for the burnout.

"Seniors want to know what's going to happen to them if they are put in a position where they need attention from caregivers," Shevel continues. "If doctors aren't able to provide the care they need, and more and more family members are having to shoulder this burden, it drastically changes the landscape of day-to-day living for so many people."

The report also says that more caregivers will be needed to manage the aging population. Caregivers who took part in the report say better coordination of home care services along with improved delivery of these services need to be improved.

"Those are factors we stress at Home Care Assistance - Toronto/York Region. Preparation is so valuable in order to properly care for seniors. Having a plan that was developed in coordination with the necessary parties, along with being consistent in administering the plan is what will help ensure seniors who need it get the help they require."

Home Care Assistance - Toronto/York Region continues its extensive home care work with seniors in the areas they serve. For more information about Home Care Assistance - Toronto/York Region visit www.homecareassistance-toronto.com.

For more information about us, please visit http://www.homecareassistance-toronto.com

Contact Info:

Name: Brian Shevel

Organization: Home Care Assistance - Toronto

Address: 3300 Rutherford Rd., Unit A6 Highlands Farm Center Vaughan, Ontario L4K 5Z2

Phone: 416-822-0204

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/home-care-assistance-torontoyork-region-weighs-in-on-study-showing-caregiver-burnout/112754

Release ID: 112754

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I recently chaired a major conference in London with Harriett Baldwin MP, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, and Tracy McDermott, acting chief executive of the FCA, as key speakers.

By coincidence, it was almost exactly 30 years to the day that I had spoken at a similar conference entitled Survival, where speakers tried to predict what the impact of the impending regulation would be.

I do not think any of us got it quite right, though I did forecast that the banks, building societies and product providers would find it more difficult to cope with regulation, and the smaller, more agile advice firms delivering high-quality personal advice and service, would be the long-term winners. This has definitely proved to be the case.

We all now know that as a result of regulation, everything has changed dramatically in financial services  yet at the same time nothing is really any different.

Thirty years ago, consumers faced the twin financial planning problems of living too long or dying too soon. Today, for all the changes that have taken place in the regulation of financial advice, the fact remains that the challenges faced by our clients remain the same.

All the evidence shows that consumers who benefit from sound financial planning advice are not only better prepared to protect their families if tragedy strikes, but they also set more aside for their later years.

Thirty years ago, however, there were some 250,000 financial advisers available to help clients plan their financial futures while now, after years of regulation, we have fewer than 25,000. Consumers who benefit from sound financial planning advice set more aside for their later years

It is no surprise, therefore, that more people protected their families through life assurance and saved more for their future years.

True, most products were a bit more costly and many advisers less well-trained than today, but the vast majority worked hard to do the best for their clients.

Equally, as is clear from the Financial Advice Market Review (FAMR), most commentators, including the Treasury and the FCA, agree that while the better-off are well-served by the adviser sector, nobody thinks regulation has succeeded when good quality advice is virtually inaccessible to the great majority of consumers.

I believe that we can look forward optimistically to the outcomes of FAMR. We must, however, keep in mind that even if everything changes, nothing will change as far as our clients needs are concerned, as they will still need our help to face the challenges of living too long or dying too soon.

Ken Davy is chairman of SimplyBiz Group
Terry Smith has sold two companies, bought three and is holding back cash for a fourth new position as he seeks to upgrade holdings in his Fundsmith Emerging Equity Trust (Feet).

The manager is known for his low-turnover style but has been active on the portfolio in recent weeks, selling top-ten position Indofood, an Indonesian food supplier, as well as South African packaged goods company Tiger Brands.

Mr Smith, who focuses on companies that make high returns on capital, said Tiger Brands acquisition of a Nigerian rival had been a misallocation of capital.

[In March] we began a process of pruning some of our weaker performers and upgrading, the manager said.

The trust, which launched in June 2014, currently has 6 per cent of its assets in cash, most of which is earmarked to purchase a dairy company in Vietnam.

Its 50 per cent government owned. Rather ironically, its a good business partly owned by a communist government, Mr Smith said.

Weve been refusing to buy the half that is [freely floated] because... you only get sold at a 20 per cent premium [to the quoted price].

So weve been biding our time, waiting for the government to sell its stakes.

Mr Smith said he was prepared to wait one more month for the government to sell, adding he would otherwise turn his attention elsewhere.

Turnover last year  prior to the period in which the latest changes took place  stood at 10 per cent, according to the manager, which is higher than the 2 per cent rate for his 5.5bn Fundsmith Equity fund.

The manager pointed to two instances in which holdings received bid approaches as a mitigating factor.

His activity in 2016 has involved buying two medical diagnostics firms  Indias Dr Lal PathLabs and Egypts Integrated Diagnostics  as well as Chinese food and drink company Dali Foods.

Despite increasing the funds allocation to China with this third purchase, Mr Smith said he remained wary of the country, having found it difficult to identify companies that meet his quality requirements.

Key numbers 10%, Turnover in Terry Smiths trust in 2015. 2%, Turnover in Mr Smiths open-ended fund in 2015

Although China is the largest part of the MSCI Emerging Markets index, only 4 per cent of the fund is allocated to the country. Mr Smith said he doesnt try to imitate the index because its full of garbage.

You do have to accept, by and large, when youre investing in these [Chinese] companies theres quite likely to be a controlling stake or a large stake held by one of the following: a multinational, a local conglomerate, a local family or the government. And that can help but its not always one-sided.

They have worked out that if you own less than 100 per cent of the equity, extracting as much as you can through a royalty is a good idea. You then have to worry about what a local regimes about, about voting on related party transactions, because otherwise they will vote their stake in favour of a much higher royalty, Mr Smith said.
A Pension Isa could still be introduced by the government, the Association of British Insurers has warned, despite industry concerns the move would harm already low retirement savings.

Ahead of this years Budget it was widely anticipated a Pension Isa would be introduced.

Instead chancellor George Osborne announced the Lifetime Isa, which will offer a 25 per cent government bonus to help people under the age of 40 save for retirement or to buy their first home.

The new Isa will be introduced from April 2017 and up to 4,000 can be saved each year until the age of 60, when it must be used as retirement income or withdrawn to help buy a first home.

There is a 5 per cent exit fee for people wanting to withdraw funds from the Isa before the age of 60. Savers who exit early will also not get the government bonus.

But according to Ben Gaukrodger, manager for savings policy for the Association of British Insurers, the birth of the Lifetime Isa does not mean the idea of a Pension Isa has been killed off.

Mr Gaukrodger pointed to the upcoming referendum on Britains membership of the European Union, and a small majority for the government in the House of Commons, as reasons the chancellor pulled back from announcing a Pension Isa in this years Budget.

But he said there is absolutely a chance the Pension Isa will raise its head again in the Autumn Statement or next years Budget.

Steve Webb, head of policy for Royal London, said HM Treasury sources have told him the Lifetime Isa is not a Trojan horse but he joked nobody said the Trojan horse was a Trojan horse.

He said the government pulled the plug on introducing a Pension Isa because they were worried about noisy losers who would have been created by a change in pension tax relief.

But he added the Lifetime Isa is being used to trial the Pension Isa.

Mr Webb said: They will see how it flies. If it is popular, lots of people take it out and they get used to the idea that this is how you save for your retirement you could see how it could be expanded.

I think this (Lisa) is almost a dry run.

To learn more about pensions, and earn 30 minutes CPD, click here to watch FTAdvisers On Air broadcast.
The Work and Pensions select committee has revealed it plans to investigate the Pension Protection Fund.

At present, the Pension Protection Fund is funded by an annual levy on defined benefit schemes and has assets of more than 20bn.

In its inquiry, the committee will consider a number of points, including the adequacy of defined benefit pension scheme regulation and regulatory powers, in general and specifically in relation to the pension schemes of complex and multi-national companies

Additionally, it will look into the use of these powers by The Pensions Regulator in recent cases, including BHS.

This follows news earlier this week that The Pensions Regulator is looking at whether the owner of British Home Stores will have to plug holes in the collapsed retail chains pension fund.

On Monday (25 April) the group officially went into administration, after 88 years of business, putting 11,000 jobs at risk.

It has been rumoured the regulator is considering whether Sir Philip Green, the former owner of BHS, should be made to put more funds into the retailers scheme to fill a pension deficit of half a billion pounds.

In its inquiry into the Pension Protection Fund, the committee will also consider resourcing and prioritisation of The Pensions Regulator supervisory work, and implications of the regulatory approach for company behaviour, including whether it mitigates or incentivises moral hazard. We will then need to judge whether the law is strong enough to protect future pensioners contracts in occupational schemes. Frank Field

The review will also consider the sustainability of the Pension Protection Fund and the fairness of the PPF levy system and its impact on businesses and scheme members.

Frank Field, Labour minister of parliament for Birkenhead and chair of the Work and Pensions select committee, said: We need as a committee to look at the Pension Protection Fund and how the receipt of pension liabilities of BHS will impact on the increases in the levy that will now be placed on all other eligible employers to finance the scheme.

We will then need to judge whether the law is strong enough to protect future pensioners contracts in occupational schemes.

Tom McPhail, head of retirement policy at Hargreaves Lansdown, said many people will find it shocking that BHS, a company which has been so successful in the past, could leave its employees pensions so short of cash and in such a short space of time.

He said: They are now likely to end up dependent on the Pension Protection Fund, which is paid for by a levy on the rest of the UKs final salary pension schemes.

The fund is currently in surplus, with around 115 per cent of the money needed to meet all its promises; it has assets in excess of 20bn, so whilst this situation is clearly not good news for the current and former employees of BHS, there is a robust safety net there to catch them.
Police are stepping up action amid rising concern among farmers that more must be done to tackle crime in the countryside.

Rural constabularies have launched a number of initiatives ahead of next months elections for police and crime commissioners across England and Wales.

Voters in 41 police force areas, excluding London, will go to the polls on Thursday, 5 May.

See also: Farmers bear brunt of 800m rural crime wave

Many rural residents believe tight budgets mean police are prioritising crime-fighting measures in cities and larger towns  at the expense of the countryside.

There is also concern that some cash-strapped forces are reluctant to take problems such as farm theft, livestock rustling and sheep worrying seriously.

But farmers are frequently reluctant to speak out for fear of further weakening already fragile relationships with their local police force.

The cost of crime in the countryside is estimated to have reached 800m last year, according to the National Rural Crime Network, which wants greater recognition of the problem.

Some police forces appear more prepared to act than others.

Police training

In Lancashire, police officers have been sent on a special training course to help them recognise tell-tale signs that might indicate a piece of farm machinery is stolen.

The training course was hosted by farmer contractor Harry Wilson at Samlesbury, near Preston.

Machines including tractors, excavators and tandem rollers were available for officers to examine so they know what to look for when a vehicles is suspected as being stolen.

Plant theft can put our whole livelihoods at risk, said Mr Wilson. It is really important that we all work together to stop it from happening.

Lancashire constabulary rural crime co-ordinator Lorraine Ellwood said the force took rural crime seriously  and was clamping down on criminals.

Lancashire is not a soft touch  we have big expanses of rural areas to look after and we are really keen on cracking down on this.

We are going to be making it very hard for those criminals insistent on committing this type of crime. We are not sitting back  we are doing something about it.

Slow to act

Last month, South Yorkshire Police were accused of being slow to act after a gunman shot lambs dead on a farm near Doncaster.

The NFU said the union had been doing its best to highlight to police the challenges faced by farmers on the urban fringe.

See also: Three-week old Easter lambs shot dead

The police force later said it wanted to reassure the local community that it was determined to find those responsible.

In Cambridgeshire, concern among farmers about a big increase in hare coursing has prompted police to re-establish a team of officers dedicated to combating rural crime.

The Rural Crime Action Team (RCAT) will combat hare coursing and poaching, as well as targeting plant and tractor theft, arson, wildlife crime and illegal raves.

Chief inspector James Sutherland said incidents of hare coursing in Cambridgeshire had almost trebled in recent years from 241 in 2013 to 709 in 2015.

Our goals are simple  we want to drive hare coursing out of Cambridgeshire, reduce the financial cost of rural crime and let those in the rural community know we are behind them.

Rural crime a high priority

The Country Land and Business Association said it was vital that all police and crime commissioners elected next month treated rural crime as a high priority.

Reducing crime and the fear of crime was central to improving quality of rural life, said CLA northern region director Dorothy Fairburn.

Commissioners need to work with rural communities to combat crime in our countryside and protect rural businesses. They must be in no doubt as to the scale and effect of rural crime.

Compared with the national average, people in rural areas were much more worried about becoming a victim of crime, said Ms Fairburn.

More than one in four crimes in rural areas go unreported. This cannot continue. Equally, it cannot be right that people are left at a higher risk of crime simply because of where they live.

These elections are an important opportunity to ensure all candidates not only understand the cost and effects of rural crime, but are also committed to taking a stand and reducing it in their area.
Story Highlights Nearly half in EU countries in Eastern Europe see economic harm

Sanctions still have sizable support among several EU members

Most Russians against sanctions, but don't personally feel effects

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- As European Union and U.S.-imposed economic sanctions on Russia near the two-year mark, Gallup surveys show many Russians (43%) see the sanctions as negatively affecting their economy. However, residents of EU countries in Eastern Europe (48%) are even more likely than Russians are to see the sanctions hurting their economies. In fact, they are also more likely than residents elsewhere in Eastern Europe or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to think this.

Economic Sanctions Against Russia Positive effect on economy % No effect on economy % Negative effect on economy % EU countries in Eastern Europe 7 22 48 Non-EU countries in Eastern Europe 8 31 31 CIS countries (without Russia) 12 29 36 Russia 22 21 43 World Poll, 2015

These results are based on Gallup surveys in summer 2015, about one year after the EU and U.S. instituted economic sanctions against Russia for its actions in Ukraine and Crimea. For nearly as long as the EU and U.S. sanctions have been in place, Russia has banned most imports of agricultural products from the EU, the U.S., Canada, Australia and Norway. The EU must decide by this July whether to continue its sanctions, and Russia's ban is in effect until at least August 2016.

While some may feel the sanctions are hurting their economies in general, adults in all regions are less likely to say the sanctions negatively affect "people like them." Russians and residents of CIS countries are the most likely of all the groups surveyed to say the sanctions have negatively affected people like them, but only slightly more than one in three, on average, say this.

Sanctions Still Find Support in Eastern Europe

Although about half of residents of EU countries in Eastern Europe see the sanctions as hurting their economies, they are still more likely to favor than oppose the sanctions. About half of residents overall (47%) support the sanctions, and 32% do not support them. However, support varies a great deal among these countries -- several of which count Russia as one of their top export and import partners.

The United States and the European Union have introduced economic sanctions against Russia because of their actions in Ukraine and Crimea. Do you support these economic sanctions against Russia, or not? Yes, support % EU countries in Eastern Europe Poland 70 Romania 52 Croatia 50 Estonia 49 Lithuania 45 Latvia 38 Czech Republic 35 Hungary 29 Slovakia 25 Bulgaria 23 Greece 11 Non-EU countries in Eastern Europe Albania 60 Kosovo 57 Bosnia and Herzegovina 24 Macedonia 19 Montenegro 10 Serbia 5 World Poll, 2015

Support for the sanctions is most solid in countries such as Poland, Romania, Croatia and Estonia, where roughly half or more residents favor the sanctions. The sanctions find the least support in Greece, which has particularly suffered under Russia's retaliatory ban on EU food imports. Before the sanctions, Greek agricultural exports to Russia made up 41% of all Greek exports to Russia. Only 11% of Greeks support the sanctions, which nearly half (45%) say have hurt their economy.

Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, support is strongest in Albania (60%) -- which is a candidate for EU membership -- and Kosovo (57%). In all countries, except Greece, Serbia and Montenegro, adults with more education are more likely to support sanctions.

Sanctions Unpopular in Russia, CIS Countries

A small percentage of Russians themselves -- just 5% -- support the sanctions against their country. With the exception of Ukraine and Georgia, the rest of the countries in the CIS follow Russia's suit. The majority of Ukrainians (62%) and about half of Georgians (48%) support the sanctions.

The United States and the European Union have introduced economic sanctions against Russia because of their actions in Ukraine and Crimea. Do you support these economic sanctions against Russia, or not? Yes, support % CIS countries Ukraine 62 Georgia 48 Moldova 32 Azerbaijan 29 Kazakhstan 12 Kyrgyzstan 12 Armenia 11 Belarus 9 Tajikistan 8 Uzbekistan 2 Russia 5 World Poll, 2015

These views largely follow how people feel about the impetus behind the sanctions themselves -- Crimea becoming part of Russia in 2014. Majorities in Russia (88%), Kazakhstan (73%), Kyrgyzstan (70%), Tajikistan (69%), Belarus (68%) and Armenia (58%) support Crimea becoming part of Russia. Countries with a history of territorial conflicts with Russia (the Baltics and Moldova) or in which Russia supported the opposite side of civil conflicts (Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia) are generally less positive.

Bottom Line

After nearly two years of sanctions between Russia and Europe, EU leaders will soon once again find themselves debating whether to extend the sanctions. U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday that the West needed to uphold the sanctions until Moscow fully implements the Minsk agreement. These words may ring hollow in some parts of Eastern Europe, where Gallup's data suggest that at the time of the survey, the EU sanctions against Russia were hurting EU countries more than their intended target.

This is likely true in places such as Hungary, where the country's leadership has been openly critical of the sanctions and just 29% of the population supports the measures. "You cannot afford in this part of the world not to have a pragmatic cooperation with Russia," Peter Szijjarto, Hungary's foreign minister, said last year.

Survey Methods

Results are based on face-to-face interviews with 1,000 adults in each country (2,000 in Russia), aged 15 and older, conducted from June to September 2015. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error ranged from 2.8 percentage points to 3.4 percentage points. The margin of error reflects the influence of data weighting. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
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

MONDAY, APRIL 26

THEFT: 8 p.m., 1750 S.W. Third St. Officers responded to the Corvallis Market for a burglary report. Representatives reported that a desktop computer and monitor were stolen from the store after it was left unlocked the previous night. There was no video surveillance.

MDMA: 11:30 a.m., Northwest 17th Street and Grant Avenue. Officers reported finding MDMA on Joseph Hiroshi Hamamoto, 21, of Corvallis following a fugitive arrest after a traffic stop. Officers reported finding the MDMA inside Hamamoto's shoe during a search. Hamamoto was charged with unlawful possession of MDMA and supplying contraband.

AND THE CAT CAME BACK: 9:43 a.m., 442 N.W. Fourth St. Core Vitality Clinic representatives reported a kitten caught in their ventilation system. A clinic doctor was able to remove the cat the day before, but representatives said the cat came back and got stuck again. Officers responded, retrieved the kitten and transported it to Heartland Humane Society.
Warning strike : A long wait for taxis

Bonn It was a test of patience yesterday as commuters, students and visitors got around as best they could.

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Loads of traffic on the streets, empty tram stations and long lines for taxis: the warning strikes on Wednesday had a massive impact on commuters and students. Only some regional buses were on the streets and those who could use them were happy. An elderly woman said, I have to go to Beuel so I can use an RSVG bus. Bernd Magunia had a friend bring him to the train station so he could get to Dusseldorf. He had understanding for the strikers, The work stoppage is legitimate, especially for fighting against poverty amongst the elderly.

At 8 a.m., the line for taxis at Bonns central train station started to get longer and longer. A French woman was looking to share a ride to get to an appointment at Venusberg. After fifteen minutes, she managed to get to the middle of the line. Patience was the key word.

The main bus station had some buses from the 500 and 800 line passing through and just a few private operators came with buses of the 600 line. It was estimated that around 1,000 public transportation workers from the region participated in the strike.

Some public kindergartens closed their doors during the strike and parents had to find alternatives for their children. In Botania kindergarten on Graurheindorfer Strae, normally 105 children would be in attendance but alternative child care had to be found. Director Mechthild Eisen said the parents were in support of the kindergarten teachers.

According to Bonnorange, sanitation workers only missed three areas yesterday in the north of Bonn and in Hoholz. Other areas were served as normal despite the calls for strike. Taxi dispatchers had their hands full as they received a third more phone calls than usual; this was in addition to the long lines at taxi stands. The ride sharing Facebook page set up by General Anzeiger also proved popular, and if you had a bike, this was also a useful way to get around despite the chilly weather.

Cologne/Bonn airport was rather empty; parking lots P2 and P3 showed 3,700 free parking spaces. Of the 276 scheduled flights, 138 arrivals and departures were cancelled. This affected 20,000 passengers, most of whom stayed calm.
Bonn Despite all efforts, a person thought to have fallen in the Rhine has not been found.

Police and fire department search and rescue teams were called to the Rhine River on Wednesday evening at around 9:35 p.m. They received information from pedestrians that someone had fallen from the Kennedy Bridge into the river. It was thought that the person involved in the apparent accident was a man.
An opportunity for foodies and beer lovers to get lost in a world of food and drink from a hand-selected range of food trucks and breweries from around New Zealand.
Govt panel recommends to exempt Apple from sourcing norms News oi -GizBot Bureau

A government panel has recommended exempting iPhone and iPad maker Apple from mandatory local sourcing norms, a move which would pave the way for tech giant opening single-brand retail stores in the country.

The company had given a detailed presentation to the committee headed by Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) Secretary Ramesh Abhishek on April 19, on its products, technology, innovations and camera.

Top 10 compact smartphones with 4-inch and slightly bigger display

"The committee has found that the company's products are cutting edge technology and state-of-the-art. It has recommended to exempt them from the local sourcing norms," sources said.

The DIPP would soon send the proposal for final approval to the Finance Ministry.

The US-based company has sought approval from the government on setting up single-brand retail stores in the country.

As per the foreign direct investment (FDI) norms, the government may relax the mandatory local sourcing norms for entities undertaking single-brand retailing of products having state-of-the-art and cutting edge technology and where local sourcing is not possible.

The government had set up a committee to decide whether a product is state-of-the-art and can be eligible for exemption from the mandatory local sourcing applicable for FDI single-brand retail trading.

At present, 100 per cent FDI is permitted in single-brand retail sector but companies are required to take FIPB permission if the limit exceeds 49 per cent.

The company sells its products through Apple-owned retail stores in countries including China, Germany, the US, the UK and France.

Apple iPhone 7: 8 Awesome Features that will make it a Revolutionary Flagship

Apple has no wholly-owned store in India and sells its products through distributors such as Redington and Ingram Micro.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has also submitted an application to open stores in the country. Chinese technology company LeEco also has sought the government's nod to open the stores.

Source: PTI

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F-22 Raptors fly into Lithuania as part of European tour

By Maj. Sheryll Klinkel, U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa Public Affairs / Published April 27, 2016

SIAULIAI AIR BASE, Lithuania (AFNS) -- A pair of F-22 Raptors and one KC-135 Stratotanker arrived at Siauliai Air Base on April 27, following a short stay in Romania.

The F-22s, with about 20 supporting Airmen, are from the 95th Fighter Squadron at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida. The KC-135 is from the 100th Air Refuel Wing at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England.

The aircraft and Airmen were welcomed by Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite and other distinguished visitors from the Lithuanian government and military.

"This is a demonstration that the United States is honoring its commitments and is ready to protect our region with all the most modern measures," she said in a press conference.

Both F-22s are currently part of the largest deployment of the fifth-generation aircraft to Europe. The deployment is partially funded by the European Reassurance Initiative, which provides support to bolster the security of NATO allies and partners in Europe while demonstrating the U.S. commitment to regional and global security.

"Today's demonstration is part the collective defense and security of our NATO Allies, a commitment that is underscored in President (Barack) Obama's $3.4 billion request for the European Reassurance Initiative," said U.S. Ambassador to Lithuania Deborah A. McCarthy.

The F-22s will briefly stay at Siauliai AB before returning to RAF Lakenheath, England, to continue their training deployment that ends in May. Before Lithuania, the aircraft visited Mihail Kogalniceanu AB, Romania.

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Carter: DoD's FY17 Budget Request Takes Long View

By Jim Garamone DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, April 27, 2016  The fiscal year 2017 Defense Department budget request must, of necessity, take the long view, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee today.

The secretary said the long view is needed, "because, even as we fight today's fights, we must also be prepared for what might come 10, 20, or 30 years down the road."

The budget request recognizes the changing character of war and gives the department the means to change in "fundamental but carefully considered ways" in this new strategic era.

Carter said the budget is focused on five threats: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and violent extremism.

In his opening testimony, the defense secretary gave "a quick snapshot" of U.S. moves against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. He touted the success Iraqi troops have had recently in retaking Ramadi and Hit. He said Iraqi and peshmerga forces are cooperating to isolate and pressure Mosul.

Counter-ISIL Progress

"As we've made this progress -- and with momentum in this campaign clearly on our side -- last week in Baghdad I announced a number of key actions we're taking to continue accelerating our campaign against ISIL," he said.

A total of 215 more advisors will be based in Iraq to work with Iraqi security forces down to the brigade and battalion level. The Iraqis accepted AH-64 Apache attack helicopters as part of the offensive against Mosul, he said, and there will be additional artillery for that effort.

The counter-ISIL effort in Syria will see an additional 250 American personnel working with vetted Syrian groups inside Syria, Carter said.

"These additional 250 personnel, including special operations forces, will help expand our ongoing efforts to identify, train and equip capable, motivated local forces inside Syria to help isolate and pressure Raqqa," he said. "They'll also serve as a hub to incorporate partner SOF -- from both longstanding traditional allies and Gulf countries -- to augment our coalition's counter-ISIL efforts there."

Nation-State Challenges

The secretary said that with regard to Russia and China, it is a return to great power competition. North Korea is the one spot on Earth where the United States could find itself in a ground war tonight, he said. The final challenge, Iran, still exerts malign influence throughout the Persian Gulf and Middle East region, Carter said.

"Now, addressing all of these five challenges requires new investments on our part, new posture in some regions, and also new and enhanced capabilities," he said.

"For example, we know we must deal with these challenges across all domains -- and not just the usual air, land, and sea," the defense secretary said, "but also especially in cyber, electronic warfare and space, where our reliance on technology has given us great strengths and great opportunities, but also led to vulnerabilities that adversaries are eager to exploit."

Gambling With Warfighting

Carter noted his apprehension with a proposal out of the House Armed Services Committee that would shift $18 billion from the overseas contingency portion of the budget to the base budget. "I have serious concerns with a proposal from one of the defense committees to underfund DoD's overseas warfighting accounts by $18 billion, and spend that money on programmatic items we didn't request," he said.

"It's gambling with warfighting money at a time of war -- proposing to cut off our troops' funding in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in the middle of the year," he continued. "It would spend money on things that are not DoD's highest unfunded priorities across the joint force. It buys force structure without the money to sustain it and keep it ready, effectively creating hollow force structure, and working against our efforts to restore readiness."

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Work Praises Sweden's Regional Leadership, Technological Capabilities

By Cheryl Pellerin DoD News, Defense Media Activity

RONNEBY AIR BASE, Sweden, April 27, 2016  On the second day of his trip to Sweden -- the first time in 16 years that a U.S. defense secretary or deputy secretary has visited -- Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work toured military facilities and saw the products of a major Swedish defense company.

The visit was part of a multiday trip to speak with military and government officials in Sweden and Belgium about regional security, accelerating the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and developing and using innovative technologies to offset the advantages of major adversaries.

During a news conference at the end of the day, Work, along with Swedish State Secretary Jan Salestrand and U.S. Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji, made remarks and took questions from local reporters.

"This is a very important time for both of our countries," Work said.

A Free and Open Baltic Sea

Russian activities in the Baltic have become aggressive and unsafe, Work said, "and it's important that we maintain the Baltic Sea as free and open to all the Nordic and Baltic countries in the region."

In her remarks, the ambassador said that in the month or so she's served in her new role she's been impressed by Sweden's capabilities and its commitment to cooperation and partnership with the United States in the military security domain.

"In a larger context," she added, "Sweden and the United States have a very strong partnership and a very old and important close friendship  in a number of areas -- not just security, but trade, development assistance, human rights and [others]."

The United States looks forward to doing everything it can to enhance the U.S. bilateral security relationship with Sweden, Raji added, "and we very much appreciate the close partnership that you have with NATO and the work we've done on a number of projects together in NATO."

Air and Maritime Capabilities

In his remarks, Salestrand said that he, Work and the U.S. delegation had focused on air and maritime capabilities during their visits in Karlskrona, and over the visit as a whole, on regional security.

"As we all know," Salestrand added, "the importance of the Baltic Sea region has been very much changed, from a peaceful corner of Europe to what we could [call] a potential hotspot. And we have [discussed] our concern about how [Russia]  sometimes behaves in certain actions in the Baltic Sea."

During the first part of the day, Work visited Ronneby Air Base and had discussions with Swedish Supreme Commander Gen. Micael Byden that focused on a range of bilateral initiatives.

The defense leaders discussed ways to deepen military-to-military cooperation, NATO partnership initiatives and regional security and defense priorities. Work assured Sweden of the U.S. commitment to bilateral cooperation, NATO's Enhanced Opportunity Partner Initiative as it relates to Sweden, and deterring Russian aggression, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Courtney Hillson, Work's spokeswoman, said.

Work also visited a Swedish air force squadron and toured the Visby-class corvette HMS Karlstad, which the deputy secretary called "probably one of the most advanced naval combatants on the planet," and where he thanked Swedish military members for their service.

Maintaining Peace and Security

"I took a ride in the CV-90 [armored vehicle developed in Sweden], which the U.S. Navy procured because it's the best boat of its type in the world," Work said, "and then I visited [the Saab Defense and Security Group] and looked at the future of submarines in Sweden."

Throughout the visit, Work discussed the development of the third offset strategy with leaders and reaffirmed the close and historic friendship between the United States and Sweden. The strategy is a U.S. Defense Department effort to offset the strengths of potential great-power adversaries with leap-ahead technologies and innovative ways to use them.

The deputy secretary also thanked each of his Nordic and Baltic counterparts for their contributions to international security.

"I really believe that Sweden is a leader in this region and can help us maintain peace and security for all of the citizens of NATO and our partner countries" in the region, he said.

Work's trip will conclude April 29 following a visit to Belgium.

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Up to $800 million in Daesh cash reserves destroyed: US

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 4:46PM

Airstrikes by the US-led coalition against the Daesh Takfiri group's positions inside Syria and Iraq have led to the possible destruction of up to $800 million of the terror group's cash reserves, a senior US military commander says.

US Air Force Major General Peter Gersten, who is responsible for all combat operations across Iraq and Syria, made the claim in a press briefing from the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad on Tuesday.

"We have all sorts of assessments and the intel community is looking at that. I've heard numbers anywhere between $300 million to $800 million. The center of that is about $500 million," he said.

Earlier in April, the US military announced a successful raid on a Daesh cash storage facility in Iraq's southern town of Mosul that killed a major Daesh operative and destroyed an estimated $150 million in cash.

Gersten (pictured below) said the raid was part of a US plan to cut the terror organization's financial resources and it sought to do so by attacking Daesh's oil smuggling network while also keeping an eye out for Daesh's cash reservoirs.

The commander told reporters that fewer than 20 air raids had been conducted against cash stores in Daesh-controlled parts of Iraq and Syria but the campaign has troubled the group to some extent.

"We are seeing, through other sources, that Daesh cannot pay their foreign fighters. They are trading vehicles now for pay. Some fighters aren't being paid at all is what we're seeing," he explained.

However, the general acknowledged the fact that there is a major downside to those attacks and that is the issue of civilian casualties.

During the $150 million airstrike, Gersten said the US forces tried to avoid that by employing the Israeli "knock on roof" method to make sure there are no civilians inside a building by firing warning shots at it before the actual raid.

They fired a Hellfire missile on the building and air burst it with bullets before going all-in, but the strike led to the death of the Daesh operative's wife, he said.

The announcement comes amid reports that the Pentagon is increasing the tolerance for civilian casualties in its aerial campaign against the terror group that started in 2014.

According to a statement on Friday by the US Central Command (CENTCOM), in the five-month period between September and February, a total of 20 civilians were killed and 11 others were injured in US-led attacks, raising the official tally of civilians killed in the campaign to 41, with 28 more injured.

Meanwhile, Airwars, a UK-based airstrikes monitoring group, says the real number of US civilian victims sits somewhere between 1,004 to 1,419 people as the US and its allies have carried out more than 12,000 plane and drone strikes in Iraq and Syria, dropping some 40,000 bombs.

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US deploys F-22s to Lithuania in show of force against Russia

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 3:25PM

The US Air Force has deployed two of its most advanced fighter jets to Lithuania, a Baltic state in northern Europe, in a show of force against Russia.

The US Air Force F-22 stealth fighter jets landed in Lithuania on Wednesday, nearly two weeks after Russian jets made "simulated attack passes" near a US warship in the Baltic Sea, Reuters reported.

Earlier this week, two F-22 fighters landed in Romania, near the shores of the Black Sea and just a short leap from Russia.

And several F-22s were briefly deployed by the United States to Poland and Estonia last year.

The US warplanes in Lithuania made three low-flying passes with aerial acrobatics over the country's Siauliai airbase before landing.

"Without singling out any neighbor, I would like to say that no one has any right to poke their noses into here," Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite told reporters.

"This is a demonstration that the United States is honoring its commitments and is ready to protect our region with all the most modern measures," she added.

The Baltic states  Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania  which were formerly ruled by the Soviet Union, joined the Western military alliance NATO and the European Union in 2004.

NATO plans to expand its military presence in Eastern Europe amid the conflict in Ukraine and has held numerous war games recently.

Last year, the US delivered over 100 pieces of heavy military equipment to the Baltic states to provide them with the ability to "deter" the perceived threat from Russia.

The Baltics also asked NATO to permanently deploy up to 5,000 troops as a deterrent, a request that is still under consideration.

Last week, the United States military reportedly conveyed its "displeasure" to the Russian military over recent incidents involving Russian fighter jets intercepting an American spyplane and flying very close to a US warship in international waters of the Baltic Sea.

Two Russian planes whooshed past the USS Donald Cook almost a dozen times, said American officials, including a Russian Su-24 jet that flew 30 feet (nine meters) above the US guided missile destroyer in what the Pentagon described as a "simulated attack profile."

One US military official called the events on April 11 and April 12 "one of the most aggressive acts in recent memory".

Meanwhile, a Russian aircraft flew close to a US Air Force reconnaissance plane and performed a barrel roll during the maneuver earlier this month, according to the Pentagon.

Moscow has called its actions appropriate given how close US forces were operating to Kaliningrad, a Russian territory in northern Europe, adding that it observed all required safety measures.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has condemned the "simulated attack" on the USS Donald Cook, saying the US military would have been within its rights to shoot down the Russian aircraft.

"We condemn this kind of behavior," Kerry said. "It is reckless. It is provocative. It is dangerous. And under the rules of engagement, that could have been a shoot-down."

Commenting on the strong US reaction to the Baltic Sea incident, American analyst Daniel Patrick Welch said the US government is an aspiring empire and "super predator" determined to control the world and destroy nations.

"The United States is constantly coming out with these arrogant statements, calling Russian moves provocative for buzzing a US ship [near Russian borders]," Welch told Press TV on April 15.

"The clear implication is that the US can do whatever it wants, wherever it wants and if anyone moves to push back or take a stance in defending their countries and their people, then they are in the wrong and they are the ones that are provocative," he noted.

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Saudi side rejects halt to airstrikes in Yemen: Report

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 9:16AM

Head of the Saudi-led delegation to Yemen's peace talks being held in Kuwait has dismissed a halt to airstrikes, Yemen's al-Masirah TV says, citing sources privy to the negotiations.

Abdulmalek al-Mikhlafi, the head of the Saudi-led delegation, rejected on Tuesday UN special envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed's proposal to halt the air raids, the report said.

The Saudi side claims that a halt to airstrikes would help Houthis which are fighting forces supported by the kingdom rebuild their power, the sources reportedly said.

On Wednesday, Saudi warplanes bombed Yemen's Ta'izz Province, despite the UN-brokered truce in the Arab country.

The two sides began their peace talks in Kuwait on April 21. On Tuesday, they agreed to begin work in two parallel committees, following heavy pressure from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

The delegates have been told that no one would be allowed to leave Kuwait without an agreement.

Both delegations "agreed to an agenda for negotiations, which is a framework for discussing security, economic and political issues," Cheikh told a press conference, adding that "comprehensive negotiations" would start on Wednesday.

"We don't want to go back to Yemen without a peaceful settlement," Ahmed said.

Yemen has seen almost daily military attacks by Saudi Arabia since late March 2015, with internal sources putting the fatality toll from the bloody aggression at more than 9,500.

Hundreds of thousands have also been displaced across the country as a result of the war, which is meant to restore power to former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. A staunch ally of Riyadh, Hadi resigned from the presidency last year and then fled to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has failed to prevail in Yemen despite its daily bombardments and aid and weapons from the US and UK.

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South Sudan's Machar returns to Juba, sworn in as VP

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 7:4AM

South Sudan's rebel leader Riek Machar has been sworn in as first vice president shortly after returning to the capital to form a unity government.

Machar arrived at Juba International Airport on Tuesday and hours later took up the post under the terms of a peace deal with his rival President Salva Kiir to end a two-year conflict in the African nation.

Thousands of people have been killed and more than two million forced to flee their homes because of clashes between rival factions. Machar fled Juba at the start of the civil war in December 2013.

"I wish that the security situation would be stabilized in the shortest possible time," Machar said shortly after taking an oath of office.

"Now that we're just about to form the transitional government of nation and union because the stabilization of the security will really bring us peace among our population," he said.

"The war was vicious. We have lost a lot of people in it and we need to bring our people together so that they can unite," he added.

President Kiir welcomed Machar back to the country, expressing confidence that "his return to Juba today marks the end of the war and the return of peace and stability to South Sudan."

"This ... is to restore the confidence of our people and that of our national partners in our abilities as the leaders of this country to implement the agreement," he said.

"Now, we must move forward in order to address the challenges situation by the conflict," Kiir added.

Kiir witnessed his rival take the oath, saying he acknowledged that there are "unresolved issues related to the agreement but I promise we will equally resolve those matters."

Ban welcomes Machar's return

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon welcomed Machar's return to Juba, describing the development as a "new phase" in the implementation of the peace agreement.

In a statement, Ban called for the immediate formation of the transitional government of national unity.

He also called "on the Security Council to work closely with the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the AU Peace and Security Council to mobilize the required support for the peace process," according to the statement.

The bloody civil war in South Sudan, the youngest country in Africa, began in December 2013 when Kiir accused his former deputy Machar of plotting a coup against him.

The two sides then became involved in a cycle of retaliatory killings that split the impoverished country along ethnic lines.

Despite the August 2015 peace deal, battles persist across the country. There are numerous militia forces that do not abide by peace agreements and are driven by local agendas.

In January, UN rights monitors offered details about a long list of horrific abuses in the destructive war.

A joint report by the UN peacekeeping mission, UNMISS, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) cited "gross violations" of human rights, including "gang-rape, sexual slavery and forced abortion," by the warring sides.

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War looming large over Western Sahara: Polisario

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 6:11AM

Polisario Front, a group seeking Western Sahara's independence from Morocco, says the region could become engulfed in war if the United Nations fails to press for a regional independence vote.

On Tuesday, Bachir Mustafa Sayed, who advises the Front's Secretary-General Mohammad Abdulaziz, said the world body had to set a date for such a referendum.

Morocco annexed Western Sahara in 1975 and considers it the country's "southern province." It has proposed autonomy for Africa's last colony, something Polisario stiffly rejects.

Last month, Morocco asked the UN to withdraw over 80 international staff members from its peacekeeping Western Sahara mission, which monitors a ceasefire between the Moroccan government and the Polaisario Front.

The request was made after UN chief Ban Ki-moon said the country has "occupied" the mineral-rich region. Morocco subsequently expelled the UN mission.

Ban, who has warned that the expulsion could be exploited by "terrorist and radical elements" and lead to full-scale war, has proposed that the mission's mandate be extended until April 30, 2017. The UN Security Council is to vote on the matter on Wednesday.

Sayed, who was addressing a press conference in Madrid, said the proposal is not enough and urged a plebiscite on independence.

He also reiterated support by Algeria  which houses a refugee camp where Polisario is based  for Western Sahara's independence. "The Algerians have reaffirmed that they are on the side of the Saharans in any situation."

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NATO pledges to boost military presence in Eastern Europe

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 5:40AM

NATO has pledged to expand its military presence in Eastern Europe to protect its partners and allies from potential threats as the US sends two of the world's most advanced warplanes to Romania.

In a speech at the University of Bucharest in Romania on Tuesday NATO Deputy Secretary-General Alexander Vershbow discussed the main issues the Western alliance is facing.

He said the alliance is struggling with many complex risks apart from the "destabilizing actions" of Russia and "the tide of instability which has swept across the Middle East and North Africa."

"We are also wrestling with other complex risks and threats to our cyber security, to our energy supplies, and in the case of international terrorism to the safety of the people on our streets," he said.

Vershbow said NATO is doing everything to respond to these challenges, adding that "the alliance takes a 360 degree approach to deterring threats, to protecting its member nations and if necessary to defending them."

"That presence will be rotational, multinational, and combat capable. It will thereby send a clear message to any potential aggressor that if they violate NATO's territory, they will face strong response from the whole alliance; Americans, Europeans and home defense forces," he said.

The NATO secretary general also said that the organization has "set up a series of small headquarters, including here in Romania, to support planning, training and re-enforcement."

"We are intensifying our maritime patrols, exploring the need for increased military and exercises, providing support to partners like Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova and encouraging efforts to strengthen energy security," he said.

US sends F-22 Raptors to Romania

Vershbow's comments came a day after the US sent two F-22 Raptor fighter jets to Romania as part of the commitment to NATO security.

The fighter jets, which travel at twice the speed of sound, touched down in Romania, close to the Black Sea and Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula and Russia.

A US statement said the aircraft possess sophisticated sensors which would allow pilots to track, identify, shoot and destroy air-to-air threats without being detected.

The dispatch of the fighter jets, which can also attack surface targets, came two weeks after Russian fighter jets buzzed an American warship in the Baltic Sea.

The Western military alliance has been deploying troops and equipment close to Russia's borders since it suspended all ties with Moscow in April 2014 after the Crimean Peninsula integrated into the Russian Federation following a referendum.

The United States and its European allies accuse Moscow of destabilizing Ukraine and have imposed a number of sanctions against Russian and pro-Russia figures. Moscow, however, rejects having a hand in the Ukrainian crisis.

This as Moscow has on many occasions slammed the Western military alliance's expansion near its borders, saying such a move poses a threat to both regional and international peace.

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US 'Dominance Must Be Unquestioned': Trump Vows to Be 'Greatest Defender'

Sputnik News

22:05 27.04.2016(updated 02:11 28.04.2016)

Following decisive victories in Tuesday's primary races, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump delivered a speech on Wednesday outlining his "America first" foreign policy.

"We must make America respected again, we must make America truly wealthy again, and we have  and we will  make America great again," the billionaire candidate said during a speech in Washington DC. "My foreign policy will always put the interest of the American people and American security above all else."

"Under a Trump administration, no American will ever feel that their needs come second to a foreign country," he stated. "I will be America's greatest defender."

Much of his address focused on criticizing the policy of outgoing two-term President Barack Obama. He blamed Obama for cutting defense and spending, and stressed that his policies would replace "randomness with purpose," as well as "ideology with strategy and chaos with peace."

But in what sounds like a contradiction, Trump stated that, "We have to be unpredictable starting now," referring to the Pentagon's efforts in combating Daesh, also known as IS/Islamic State.

His proposed strategy would eliminate Daesh "very, very quickly" if elected, he said.

"Their days are numbered. I won't tell them where and I won't tell them how."

While many deem Trump's platform to be one of isolation, he has outlined a curiously strong emphasis on military strength.

"We will spend what we need to rebuild our military," he said. "Our military dominance must be unquestioned by anybody and everybody."

Trump also criticized US intervention in Iraq, saying he was proud of the fact that he was against the war and criticized Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton's interventionist policies.

"Many of the old people, frankly, don't know what they are doing," he said. "Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct."

On implementing sanctions, Trump said the practice should be used selectively and with "total determination," and called for renewed US relations with Russia and China.

"We are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on mutual interests," he said. "Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out."

On Tuesday, the former television producer and real estate mogul scored major victories in Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, adding to his sizeable delegate lead. It is now mathematically impossible for rival candidates Ted Cruz and John Kasich to enter the convention with enough delegates to win the nomination outright, though if Trump fails to win the required 1,237 delegates, his nomination could be contested.

"America first will be the major and overriding theme of my administration. It's time to shake the rust off America's foreign policy," he said, demonstrating a lack of knowledge regarding the proper technique for rust removal.

 Sputnik

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Argentina Eyes Another Batch of Russian Mi-171 Helicopters

Sputnik News

16:02 27.04.2016(updated 16:03 27.04.2016)

Argentina is mulling a contract with Russia for another batch of Russian-made Mi-171 helicopters, Argentina's Deputy Defense Minister Angel Pablo Tello said Wednesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The South American country has two types of Russian helicopters from the Mi-171 family that are used for Arctic missions.

"Argentina is considering buying new helicopters from Russia," Tello told RIA Novosti on the sidelines of the fifth International Security Conference in Moscow.

Tello said the Argentinian government was keen to continue working with Russia after presidential elections in December, which saw center-right Mauricio Macri replace Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, a long-time supporter of closer ties with Russia.

"Argentina has just got a new president. Our relations will be maintained at the level they reached under the previous one. We will have mutual cooperation between the ministries and it will deepen," the deputy defense minister said.

On Tuesday, Tello met with Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov in Moscow where they discussed cooperation between the defense ministries of the two countries and ways to enhance a security dialogue.

 Sputnik

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Nagorno-Karabakh Republic Urges Azerbaijan to Comply With Ceasefire Regime

Sputnik News

06:24 27.04.2016

The self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) calls on Baku to fulfill its responsibilities under the 1994 truce deal in the disputed region, the NKR Foreign Ministry (MFA) said.

YEREVAN (Sputnik)  The violence in Azerbaijan's 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.

However, all sides to the conflict have been reporting near-daily reports of truce violations.

"The NKR MFA strongly condemns any attempts of the Azerbaijani authorities to reconsider these agreements, regarding them as an overt intention of Azerbaijan to unleash a new war, and insists on the full restoration of the ceasefire regime established in May 1994," the statement published Tuesday reads.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict began in 1988, when the autonomous region sought to secede from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The region proclaimed independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The sedition triggered a war that lasted until a Russia-brokered ceasefire was signed in 1994.

 Sputnik

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Donald J. Trump Foreign Policy Speech

Donald J. Trump for President

April 27, 2016

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you, and thank you to the Center for the National Interest for honoring me with this invitation.

I would like to talk today about how to develop a new foreign policy direction for our country  one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace.

It is time to shake the rust off of America's foreign policy. It's time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold.

The direction I will outline today will also return us to a timeless principle. My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make.

America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.

But to chart our path forward, we must first briefly look back.

We have a lot to be proud of. In the 1940s we saved the world. The Greatest Generation beat back the Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists.

Then we saved the world again, this time from totalitarian Communism. The Cold War lasted for decades, but we won.

Democrats and Republicans working together got Mr. Gorbachev to heed the words of President Reagan when he said: "tear down this wall."

History will not forget what we did.

Unfortunately, after the Cold War, our foreign policy veered badly off course. We failed to develop a new vision for a new time. In fact, as time went on, our foreign policy began to make less and less sense.

Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, and this led to one foreign policy disaster after another.

We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama's line in the sand in Syria. Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos, and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper.

It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western Democracy.

We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism; thousands of American lives, and many trillions of dollars, were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill the void, much to their unjust enrichment.

Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster.

No vision, no purpose, no direction, no strategy.

Today, I want to identify five main weaknesses in our foreign policy.

First, Our Resources Are Overextended

President Obama has weakened our military by weakening our economy. He's crippled us with wasteful spending, massive debt, low growth, a huge trade deficit and open borders.

Our manufacturing trade deficit with the world is now approaching $1 trillion a year. We're rebuilding other countries while weakening our own.

Ending the theft of American jobs will give us the resources we need to rebuild our military and regain our financial independence and strength.

I am the only person running for the Presidency who understands this problem and knows how to fix it.

Secondly, our allies are not paying their fair share.

Our allies must contribute toward the financial, political and human costs of our tremendous security burden. But many of them are simply not doing so. They look at the United States as weak and forgiving and feel no obligation to honor their agreements with us.

In NATO, for instance, only 4 of 28 other member countries, besides America, are spending the minimum required 2% of GDP on defense.

We have spent trillions of dollars over time  on planes, missiles, ships, equipment  building up our military to provide a strong defense for Europe and Asia. The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense  and, if not, the U.S. must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.

The whole world will be safer if our allies do their part to support our common defense and security.

A Trump Administration will lead a free world that is properly armed and funded.

Thirdly, our friends are beginning to think they can't depend on us.

We've had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies.

He negotiated a disastrous deal with Iran, and then we watched them ignore its terms, even before the ink was dry.

Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon and, under a Trump Administration, will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

All of this without even mentioning the humiliation of the United States with Iran's treatment of our ten captured sailors.

In negotiation, you must be willing to walk. The Iran deal, like so many of our worst agreements, is the result of not being willing to leave the table. When the other side knows you're not going to walk, it becomes absolutely impossible to win.

At the same time, your friends need to know that you will stick by the agreements that you have with them.

President Obama gutted our missile defense program, then abandoned our missile defense plans with Poland and the Czech Republic.

He supported the ouster of a friendly regime in Egypt that had a longstanding peace treaty with Israel  and then helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in its place.

Israel, our great friend and the one true Democracy in the Middle East, has been snubbed and criticized by an Administration that lacks moral clarity. Just a few days ago, Vice President Biden again criticized Israel  a force for justice and peace  for acting as an impediment to peace in the region.

President Obama has not been a friend to Israel. He has treated Iran with tender love and care and made it a great power in the Middle East  all at the expense of Israel, our other allies in the region and, critically, the United States.

We've picked fights with our oldest friends, and now they're starting to look elsewhere for help.

Fourth, our rivals no longer respect us.

In fact, they are just as confused as our allies, but an even bigger problem is that they don't take us seriously any more.

When President Obama landed in Cuba on Air Force One, no leader was there to meet or greet him  perhaps an incident without precedent in the long and prestigious history of Air Force One.

Then, amazingly, the same thing happened in Saudi Arabia -- it's called no respect.

Do you remember when the President made a long and expensive trip to Copenhagen, Denmark to get the Olympics for our country, and, after this unprecedented effort, it was announced that the United States came in fourth place?

He should have known the result before making such an embarrassing commitment.

The list of humiliations goes on and on.

President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands even further with its nuclear reach.

Our president has allowed China to continue its economic assault on American jobs and wealth, refusing to enforce trade rules  or apply the leverage on China necessary to rein in North Korea.

He has even allowed China to steal government secrets with cyber attacks and engage in industrial espionage against the United States and its companies.

We've let our rivals and challengers think they can get away with anything.

If President Obama's goal had been to weaken America, he could not have done a better job.

Finally, America no longer has a clear understanding of our foreign policy goals.

Since the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union, we've lacked a coherent foreign policy.

One day we're bombing Libya and getting rid of a dictator to foster democracy for civilians, the next day we are watching the same civilians suffer while that country falls apart.

We're a humanitarian nation. But the legacy of the Obama-Clinton interventions will be weakness, confusion, and disarray.

We have made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before.

We left Christians subject to intense persecution and even genocide.

Our actions in Iraq, Libya and Syria have helped unleash ISIS.

And we're in a war against radical Islam, but President Obama won't even name the enemy!

Hillary Clinton also refuses to say the words "radical Islam," even as she pushes for a massive increase in refugees.

After Secretary Clinton's failed intervention in Libya, Islamic terrorists in Benghazi took down our consulate and killed our ambassador and three brave Americans. Then, instead of taking charge that night, Hillary Clinton decided to go home and sleep! Incredible.

Clinton blames it all on a video, an excuse that was a total lie. Our Ambassador was murdered and our Secretary of State misled the nation  and by the way, she was not awake to take that call at 3 o'clock in the morning.

And now ISIS is making millions of dollars a week selling Libyan oil.

This will change when I am president.

To all our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be a reliable friend and ally again.

We're going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests, and the shared interests of our allies.

We are getting out of the nation-building business, and instead focusing on creating stability in the world.

Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the water's edge.

We need a new, rational American foreign policy, informed by the best minds and supported by both parties, as well as by our close allies.

This is how we won the Cold War, and it's how we will win our new and future struggles.

First, we need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam.

Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States.

Events may require the use of military force. But it's also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War.

In this we're going to be working very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence.

We should work together with any nation in the region that is threatened by the rise of radical Islam. But this has to be a two-way street  they must also be good to us and remember us and all we are doing for them.

The struggle against radical Islam also takes place in our homeland. There are scores of recent migrants inside our borders charged with terrorism. For every case known to the public, there are dozens more.

We must stop importing extremism through senseless immigration policies.

A pause for reassessment will help us to prevent the next San Bernardino or worse -- all you have to do is look at the World Trade Center and September 11th.

And then there's ISIS. I have a simple message for them. Their days are numbered. I won't tell them where and I won't tell them how. We must as, a nation, be more unpredictable. But they're going to be gone. And soon.

Secondly, we have to rebuild our military and our economy.

The Russians and Chinese have rapidly expanded their military capability, but look what's happened to us!

Our nuclear weapons arsenal  our ultimate deterrent  has been allowed to atrophy and is desperately in need of modernization and renewal.

Our active duty armed forces have shrunk from 2 million in 1991 to about 1.3 million today.

The Navy has shrunk from over 500 ships to 272 ships during that time.

The Air Force is about 1/3 smaller than 1991. Pilots are flying B-52s in combat missions today which are older than most people in this room.

And what are we doing about this? President Obama has proposed a 2017 defense budget that, in real dollars, cuts nearly 25% from what we were spending in 2011.

Our military is depleted, and we're asking our generals and military leaders to worry about global warming.

We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. It is the cheapest investment we can make. We will develop, build and purchase the best equipment known to mankind. Our military dominance must be unquestioned.

But we will look for savings and spend our money wisely. In this time of mounting debt, not one dollar can be wasted.

We are also going to have to change our trade, immigration and economic policies to make our economy strong again  and to put Americans first again. This will ensure that our own workers, right here in America, get the jobs and higher pay that will grow our tax revenue and increase our economic might as a nation.

We need to think smarter about areas where our technological superiority gives us an edge. This includes 3-D printing, artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare.

A great country also takes care of its warriors. Our commitment to them is absolute. A Trump Administration will give our service men and women the best equipment and support in the world when they serve, and the best care in the world when they return as veterans to civilian life.

Finally, we must develop a foreign policy based on American interests.

Businesses do not succeed when they lose sight of their core interests and neither do countries.

Look at what happened in the 1990s. Our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked and seventeen brave sailors were killed on the USS Cole. And what did we do? It seemed we put more effort into adding China to the World Trade Organization  which has been a disaster for the United States  than into stopping Al Qaeda.

We even had an opportunity to take out Osama Bin Laden, and didn't do it. And then, we got hit at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the worst attack on our country in its history.

Our foreign policy goals must be based on America's core national security interests, and the following will be my priorities.

In the Middle East, our goals must be to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change. We need to be clear-sighted about the groups that will never be anything other than enemies.

And we must only be generous to those that prove they are our friends.

We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes. But we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests. Russia, for instance, has also seen the horror of Islamic terrorism.

I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia  from a position of strength  is possible. Common sense says this cycle of hostility must end. Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we can't make a good deal for America, then we will quickly walk from the table.

Fixing our relations with China is another important step towards a prosperous century. China respects strength, and by letting them take advantage of us economically, we have lost all of their respect. We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit we must find a way, quickly, to balance.

A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China. We can both benefit or we can both go our separate ways.

After I am elected President, I will also call for a summit with our NATO allies, and a separate summit with our Asian allies. In these summits, we will not only discuss a rebalancing of financial commitments, but take a fresh look at how we can adopt new strategies for tackling our common challenges.

For instance, we will discuss how we can upgrade NATO's outdated mission and structure  grown out of the Cold War  to confront our shared challenges, including migration and Islamic terrorism.

I will not hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative. But if America fights, it must fight to win. I will never send our finest into battle unless necessary  and will only do so if we have a plan for victory.

Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war and destruction.

The best way to achieve those goals is through a disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy.

With President Obama and Secretary Clinton we've had the exact opposite: a reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy  one that has blazed a path of destruction in its wake.

After losing thousands of lives and spending trillions of dollars, we are in far worse shape now in the Middle East than ever before.

I challenge anyone to explain the strategic foreign policy vision of Obama-Clinton  it has been a complete and total disaster.

I will also be prepared to deploy America's economic resources. Financial leverage and sanctions can be very persuasive  but we need to use them selectively and with determination. Our power will be used if others do not play by the rules.

Our friends and enemies must know that if I draw a line in the sand, I will enforce it.

However, unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct. You cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy. A superpower understands that caution and restraint are signs of strength.

Although not in government service, I was totally against the War in Iraq, saying for many years that it would destabilize the Middle East. Sadly, I was correct, and the biggest beneficiary was Iran, who is systematically taking over Iraq and gaining access to their rich oil reserves  something it has wanted to do for decades. And now, to top it all off, we have ISIS.

My goal is to establish a foreign policy that will endure for several generations.

That is why I will also look for talented experts with new approaches, and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war.

Finally, I will work with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions. Instead of trying to spread "universal values" that not everyone shares, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.

These are my goals, as president.

I will seek a foreign policy that all Americans, whatever their party, can support, and which our friends and allies will respect and welcome.

The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends, and when old friends become allies.

To achieve these goals, Americans must have confidence in their country and its leadership again.

Many Americans must wonder why our politicians seem more interested in defending the borders of foreign countries than their own.

Americans must know that we are putting the American people first again. On trade, on immigration, on foreign policy  the jobs, incomes and security of the American worker will always be my first priority.

No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Both our friends and enemies put their countries above ours and we, while being fair to them, must do the same.

We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism.

The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down, and will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs.

NAFTA, as an example, has been a total disaster for the U.S. and has emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs. Never again. Only the reverse will happen. We will keep our jobs and bring in new ones. Their will be consequences for companies that leave the U.S. only to exploit it later.

Under a Trump Administration, no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of foreign countries.

I will view the world through the clear lens of American interests.

I will be America's greatest defender and most loyal champion. We will not apologize for becoming successful again, but will instead embrace the unique heritage that makes us who we are.

The world is most peaceful, and most prosperous, when America is strongest.

America will continually play the role of peacemaker.

We will always help to save lives and, indeed, humanity itself. But to play that role, we must make America strong again.

We must make America respected again. And we must make America great again.

If we do that, perhaps this century can be the most peaceful and prosperous the world has ever known. Thank you.

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Donald J. Trump Delivers Major Foreign Policy Address

Donald J. Trump for President

(WASHINGTON, DC) April 27, 2016  In a major address today, Republican presidential candidate and GOP front-runner, Donald J. Trump detailed his views on critical foreign policy issues, making it abundantly clear that he is committed to prioritizing America first in national security, international diplomacy and global trade.

"Today, our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster," Mr. Trump said. "There's no vision, no strategic purpose, no direction, no consistency."

In his speech before The National Interest Magazine and its parent institution, The Center for the National Interest, and invited guests, the presumptive GOP nominee for President of the United States articulated five important criticisms of American foreign policy: the nation's resources are overextended; many of our allies aren't paying their fair share; our friends fear they can't depend on us; our rivals no longer respect us  and the country doesn't have clear foreign policy goals.

"All of this is going to change when I am President," he said. "America is going to be strong again. America is going to be a reliable friend and ally again."

As President, he would ensure the defeat of ISIS as a major foreign policy goal. "I have a simple message for ISIS: Their days are numbered. I won't tell them where and I won't tell them how. We must, as a nation, be strong and resilient. They're going to be gone."

The front-runner also pledged to rebuild America's military and the national economy  two vital pillars of a peaceful and secure world. "We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. Our military dominance must be unquestioned," he said. "We are also going to have to change our trade, immigration and economic policies to make our economy strong again  and to put Americans first again."

After criticizing the "reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy" of President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump outlined a more coherent international vision. "Our foreign policy goals must be based on America's core national security interests," he said. He pledged to defeat radical Islam in the Middle East and to focus on stability in the region, not nation-building. Recognizing the differences America has with China and Russia, he also vowed to "seek common ground based on shared interests."

"My goal is to establish a foreign policy that will endure for several generations centered on prioritizing America first. Under a Trump Administration, no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of foreign countries," he said.

Mr. Trump's prepared remarks can be viewed here: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-foreign-policy-speech

###

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Ban welcomes 'change in strategy and mindset' as UN adopts landmark resolutions on peacebuilding

27 April 2016  Deeply concerned by the high human cost and suffering caused by armed conflicts, and recognizing the significant number of simultaneous security and humanitarian crises that the world currently faces, the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council today concurrently adopted resolutions on the Organization's peacebuilding architecture, providing renewed momentum for the focus within the UN system on 'sustaining peace.'

The resolutions expand the notion of peacebuilding to include a definition of 'sustaining peace,' which the documents say should be "broadly understood as a goal and a process to building a common vision of a society, ensuring that the needs of all segments of the population are taken into account."

This encompasses activities aimed at preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of conflict; addressing root causes; assisting parties to conflict to end hostilities; ensuring national reconciliation; and moving towards recovery, reconstruction and development.

Secretary-General urges UN Member States to 'maintain the momentum'

Following the adoption of the resolutions, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon congratulated Member States on the outcome of the review of the peacebuilding architecture, urging them to maintain the momentum and calling for the strengthening of international attention, assistance and funding for countries affected by conflict.

"The adoption of these comprehensive resolutions simultaneously by the General Assembly and the Security Council sends a powerful signal," Mr. Ban said in a statement attributable to his spokesperson.

"These resolutions are a statement of intent pointing to a change in strategy and mindset. The UN system will work more strategically with governments and on the ground, in stronger partnership with others, not only to prevent the recurrence of conflict, but to prevent conflict from breaking out in the first place," he added.

The Secretary-General is strongly committed to supporting the entire United Nations system in implementing these resolutions immediately noting that there can be no higher priority than sustaining peace, which is a prerequisite for human rights, sustainable development and all other efforts, the statement stressed.

Sustained peace is a shared task and responsibility

For their part, the resolutions emphasize that sustained peace is a shared task and responsibility that needs to be fulfilled by the Government and all other national stakeholders, and should "flow through all three pillars of the UN's engagement at all stages of conflict."

In that regard, the resolutions stress that the UN Peacebuilding Support Office should be "revitalized," with the support of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and that cooperation and coordination in the field through UN Country Teams and at UN Headquarters should be strengthened.

The resolutions also underline that the scale and nature of the challenge of sustaining peace can be met through close strategic and operational partnerships among national Governments, the UN and other key stakeholders, including international, regional and sub-regional organizations, international financial institutions, regional and other development banks, civil society organizations, women's groups, youth organizations and, where relevant, the private sector.

As such, the resolutions reaffirm the role of the UN Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) in bringing a strategic approach and coherence to peacebuilding efforts. The PBC, a subsidiary body to the General Assembly and the Security Council, provides a platform for a coordinated approach to sustaining peace, involving all actors, including the countries under discussion, regional member States and organizations, international financial institutions and civil society.

The resolutions emphasize that the PBC should work more flexibly and serve a bridging role among the General Assembly, Security Council and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), calling for closer coordination and cooperation between the PBC and the Council on peacebuilding issues.

The resolutions offer a range of options to the Secretary-General and the PBC for cooperation with regional and sub-regional organizations, international financial institutions and other relevant stakeholders. The resolutions particularly request the Secretary-General to explore options for strengthening UN-World Bank collaboration. It stresses the need for cooperation with regional organizations, specifically mentioning the African Union (AU).

Redefining UN peacebuilding

In a recent interview with UN Radio, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support, Oscar Fernandez-Tarranco, noted that the resolutions "speak to the new opportunities that redefine peacebuilding 10 years after the peacebuilding architecture as we know it so far was established."

Stressing that the resolutions are "re-framing the whole debate about what peacebuilding is today," he said that, for many years, peacebuilding was something that Member States and the UN organized themselves around preventing the recurrence of violence after wars.

The resolutions bring to the fore the concept that conflict prevention is "something this Organization was fundamentally established to do."

"The core function of the UN is, first and foremost, to prevent wars, to prevent violent conflicts from actually happening," he added.

The so-called UN peacebuilding architecture was created in 2005, at which time the Peacebuilding Commission, the Peacebuilding Support Office and the Peacebuilding Fund were established. This occurred as a response to the concern of former Secretary-General Kofi Annan that there was "a gaping hole in the United Nations institutional machinery: no part of the United Nations system effectively addresses the challenge of helping countries with the transition from war to lasting peace."

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Current US Foreign Policy a 'Disaster,' Trump Says

by Ken Bredemeier April 27, 2016

Donald Trump, the leading U.S. Republican presidential contender, called Wednesday for sharp changes in U.S. foreign policy to put American interests first, claiming that currently it "is a complete and total disaster."

Trump, a one-time television reality show host who has never held elective office, had not previously laid out his foreign policy goals in a comprehensive way. But in a 38-minute speech at a Washington hotel, he attacked President Barack Obama's handling of U.S. foreign affairs and decisions made by his one-time top diplomat, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton is the likely Democratic presidential candidate who would face Trump if he is the Republican nominee in November's national election.

Trump charged that Obama and Clinton have overseen a "reckless, rudderless and aimless" foreign policy. He said there is "no vision, no purpose, no direction, no strategy."

The White House immediately dismissed Trump's broadside, saying that the United States is "safer and stronger" than when Obama took office in 2009.

Trump also blamed, without naming him, the policies of President George W. Bush that led to the years-long war in Iraq after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Islamic State 'will be gone'

Trump, a billionaire real estate mogul who is closing in on the Republican presidential nomination but has yet to clinch it, said that U.S. mistakes in the Mideast "began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy. We tore up what institutions they had and then we we were surprised at what we had unleashed: civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of Americans just killed, lives, lives, lives wasted, horribly wasted."

He vowed that if he is elected president and replaces Obama when he leaves office in January he would destroy Islamic State insurgents in the Mideast, referring to them by one of their acronyms, ISIS.

"ISIS will be gone," Trump said. "ISIS will be gone very, very quickly."

Trump said he is the only U.S. presidential candidate "who knows how" to improve the country's chronic trade deficit. He said U.S. rivals "don't take us seriously," mocking the fact that foreign leaders did not greet Obama at airports as he arrived for recent state visits in Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

"America is going to be strong again," Trump said. "It is going to be reliable again. It is going to be a friend again."

Shortly before Trump's speech at Washington's Mayflower Hotel, a protester was evicted. Those who heard his speech greeted it with occasional polite applause.

In months of campaigning for the Republican nomination, Trump has often mentioned some specific measures he would undertake, saying he would build an impenetrable wall along the Mexican border to halt the illegal stream of migrants into the United States, deport the 11 million illegal immigrants already in the U.S. and temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country. But he did not specifically mention any of them Wednesday.

At various times, he has said he would renegotiate an international agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program, pursue better European and Pacific trade deals than those negotiated by Obama and rethink U.S. involvement in NATO, the West's military alliance since the end of World War II.

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Counter-ISIL Strikes Target Terrorists in Syria, Iraq

From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release

SOUTHWEST ASIA, April 28, 2016  U.S. and coalition military forces continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Iraq and Syria yesterday, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.

Officials reported details of the latest strikes, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.

Strikes in Syria

Attack and ground attack aircraft conducted seven strikes in Syria:

-- Near Ayn Isa, a strike destroyed an ISIL bunker.

-- Near Mara, four strikes struck four separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed two ISIL fighting position and four ISIL vehicles.

-- Near Washiyah, two strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed an ISIL command and control node and five ISIL vehicles.

Strikes in Iraq

Bomber, fighter and ground attack aircraft conducted 15 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq's government:

-- Near Baghdadi, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL fighting position, an ISIL vehicle, an ISIL bunker and two ISIL vehicle bombs.

-- Near Huwayjah, a strike struck an ISIL logistics facility.

-- Near Fallujah, two strikes struck a large ISIL tactical unit; destroyed four ISIL rocket rails, four ISIL fighting positions and an ISIL staging area; and suppressed an ISIL rocket position.

-- Near Hit, four strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units; destroyed an ISIL fighting position, an ISIL heavy machine gun and an ISIL-used bridge; and denied ISIL access to terrain.

-- Near Mosul, a strike struck a weapons facility.

-- Near Qayyarah, five strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed five ISIL mortar positions, four ISIL assembly areas, two ISIL vehicle bombs, and denied ISIL access to terrain and suppressed an ISIL tactical unit.

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 terrorist group's ability to project terror and conduct operations, officials said.

Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Syria include the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

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Taiwan to lodge strong protest with Japan for fishing boat detention

ROC Central News Agency

2016/04/28 13:51:59

Taipei, April 28 (CNA) Foreign Affairs Minister David Lin () will summon Japan's representative to Taiwan Friday to convey Taiwan's strong protest against the Japanese coast guard's detention of a Taiwanese fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean early this week.

It is part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' (MOFA's) actions to make a strong representation to Japan over the detention, which occurred Monday in waters 150 nautical miles east-southeast of Okinotori, an uninhabited atoll that belongs to Japan, after President Ma Ying-jeou () instructed the ministry the previous day to do so.

On Thursday, Taiwan representative to Japan Shen Ssu-tsun () was set to take the lead in Tokyo to spell out the protest to the Japanese side, according to MOFA.

The "Tung Sheng Chi No. 16," which is registered in Pingtung County, was detained by the Japanese coast guard early Monday in waters that Taiwan considers to be part of the high seas.

Taiwan government has since the 1990s defined Okinotori as an atoll, while Japan defines it as an island, said Tsai Ming-yaw (), secretary-general of the Association of East Asian Relations, which is in charge of ties with Japan in the absence of formal diplomatic relations, at a press briefing at MOFA Thursday.

"An atoll is not entitled to an (200-nautical-mile) exclusive economic zone," Tsai contended, noting that people have the right to fish on the high seas.

Asked whether Taiwanese fishermen can still operate in the disputed area, Tsai reiterated that as long as it is on the high seas, people have the right to fish, and that the government will spare no efforts to protect fishermen's rights and benefits.

It is the duty of the Fisheries Agency and the Coast Guard Administration to safeguard fishing rights, and MOFA is responsible for diplomatic negotiations, he added.

Therefore, Shen will first express Taiwan's stance to his counterparts in Tokyo, while Lin will summon Mikio Numata, head of Japan's mission in Taiwan, for Friday's meeting, he said.

However, despite the case having caused an unpleasant atmosphere between Taiwan and Japan, the government will still continue to promote relations between the two countries, while safeguarding people's rights and benefits, Tsai said.

Ma issued a stern statement Wednesday condemning Japan's detention of the Taiwanese fishing boat. He pledged to safeguard Taiwanese fishermen's rights while expressing opposition to "Japan's illegal expansion of power."

Citing Article 121 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Ma said that Okinotori is a "reef" and not an "island," because it is less than 3 pings (9.9 square meters) in area and cannot sustain human habitation and economic life.

Therefore, Japan cannot claim rights over an exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles and a continental shelf, Ma said.

Article 121 of the convention states that "rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf."

(By Tang Pei-chun and Elizabeth Hsu)

ENDITEM/J

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USS Toledo Returns from 7-Month Deployment

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS160428-08

Release Date: 4/28/2016 12:35:00 PM

By Chief Mass Communication Specialist Steve Owsley, Naval Submarine Support Center, New London Public Affairs

GROTON, Conn. (NNS) -- Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine USS Toledo (SSN 769) returned to Naval Submarine Base New London following a regularly scheduled deployment, April 25.

Under the command of Toledo, Ohio, native Cmdr. Michael Majewski, Toledo and crew returned from a deployment to the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility where they executed the chief of naval operations' maritime strategy in supporting national security interests and maritime security operations.

"The crew performed amazingly well," said Majewski. "When we found out that we were extended on deployment, to Oman, everyone took it in stride and rose to the challenge, because everyone on the crew knows how important the mission is."

While on deployment Toledo steamed approximately 31,000 nautical miles, equal to nearly 1 1/2 trips around the world at the equator or just over six round trips from New London, Connecticut, to San Diego. Toledo conducted port visits in Manama, Bahrain; Rota, Spain; Toulon, France; Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates; Duqm, Oman; and Souda Bay, Greece.

Like Toledo and her crew, loved ones attending the homecoming also traveled great distances -- some as far away as Washington, Oregon and California.

In a long-standing naval tradition, the first Sailors to meet their families were two new fathers who held their children for the first time.

Kelsey Smith gave the first kiss to her husband, Electrician's Mate 2nd Class James Smith.

Machinist's Mate 2nd Class Clint Van De Water's family made the most of the first hug. Van De Water's wife, Melissa, watched as the family's four children, ranging in age from ages 3-10, embraced their father in a group hug. Melissa said it was an amazing experience.

"We missed him so much over the past seven months," she said, "This is our second deployment and a perfect ending to his 4 1/2 years on Toledo."

Fast-attack submarines are multi-mission platforms enabling five of the six Navy maritime strategy core capabilities -- sea control, power projection, forward presence, maritime security, and deterrence.

The submarine is designed to excel in anti-submarine warfare, anti-ship warfare, strike warfare, special operations, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, irregular warfare and mine warfare -- from open ocean anti-submarine warfare and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, to projecting power ashore with special operation forces and Tomahawk cruise missiles in the prevention of or preparation for regional crises.

Commissioned Feb. 24, 1995, Toledo is the 81st Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine and the second Navy ship named for the city of Toledo. It is 377 feet long with a beam of 34 feet and a crew of approximately 132, consisting of 15 officers and 117 enlisted Sailors.

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Costa Rica Fears Nicaragua Tank Deal With Russia to Militarize Region

Sputnik News

00:39 28.04.2016

Costa Rica is concerned that a reported delivery of Russian tanks to its neighbor Nicaragua could militarize Central America, Foreign Minister Manuel Gonzalez said Wednesday.

MEXICO CITY (Sputnik)  The Moscow-based Center for Analysis of World Arms Trade said Monday that Russia was preparing to ship some 20 modernized T-72B1 tanks to Nicaragua under their last year's deal for 50 tanks.

"It is a matter of concern not because of a threat to Costa Ricabut because one country in the Central American region starts an arms race," Gonzalez said, as quoted by La Prensa newspaper.

The foreign minister said the region needed more investment in healthcare, technology and infrastructure, rather than in military hardware.

Nicaragua's ambassador to Russia, Juan Ernesto Vasquez Araya, first mentioned the prospective deal last August when he said Nicaragua was interested in buying T-72s, in addition to Russia-made T-55 tanks already in its service.

The T-72 was developed in the former Soviet Union and is still widely used around the world.

 Sputnik

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Afghanistan Outraged About Taliban's Pakistan Visit

by Ayaz Gul April 28, 2016

Afghanistan has criticized Pakistan for allowing a Taliban delegation to visit the neighboring country, saying "a terrorist organization" should not have been been allowed to undertake such activities.

The objection came a day after the Islamist insurgency confirmed a three-member Taliban delegation traveled to Islamabad from its Qatar-based political office for talks with Pakistani officials on "border-related issues" and "problems" facing Afghan refugees in the country.

While addressing a news conference in Kabul on Thursday, presidential spokesman Shah Huseen Murtazawe,demanded Pakistan deal with the government in Afghanistan on these and other bilateral issues.

"The Taliban's trip to Pakistan is highly questionable. A terrorist group has no right to visit any country," Murtazawe said.

He went on to assert that Pakistani authorities cannot discuss with a "terrorist group" issues like border disputes and problems facing Afghan refugees in Pakistan, saying the Afghan government strongly opposes such discussions.

"In fact, Afghans have been forced to leave their country because of the violence and crimes (the) Taliban inflicted on them," the spokesman said, referring to nearly 3 million Afghans living in the neighboring country as refugees or economic migrants.

In Islamabad

The Taliban delegation arrived in Islamabad earlier this week, but Pakistani officials have neither denied nor confirmed it categorically.

"I do not have any information on any such visit," Pakistan's foreign secretary, Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, said Wednesday when asked about the presence of Taliban negotiators.

Diplomatic sources, however, have confirmed to VOA the Taliban delegation is in Pakistan on a mission to hold "exploratory discussions" with local authorities on possible peace talks with the Afghan government, although the Taliban said resumption of Afghan peace talks was not on the agenda of the meetings in Islamabad.

Ghani faces pressure

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has been under growing pressure at home to abandon his policy of seeking peace talks with the Taliban since the April 19 Taliban bomb-and-gun attack in Kabul that killed nearly 70 people and wounded around 350 others.

The pressure prompted Ghani to condemn Taliban insurgents as terrorists responsible for murdering innocent Afghans. The president used to refer to the insurgency as political opposition in his bid to encourage the Taliban to come to the negotiating table for a peaceful settlement of the Afghan conflict.

In a further hardening of Kabul's stance with regard to the insurgency, presidential spokesman Murtazawe also said President Ghani was expected Thursday to sign a list of "terrorists" sentenced to death so they could be executed and a strong message would be sent to those waging war against the state.

After the Kabul attack, the Afghan government accused Islamabad of not taking action against Taliban and militants linked to the Haqqani network who it says used Pakistani soil for plotting the assault and other insurgent violence in Afghanistan.

Foreign Secretary Chaudhry, however, dismissed the allegations, saying Pakistan condemns all forms of terrorism and has taken all necessary actions against all groups that were operating on its territory.

"Pakistan does not make any distinction between any terrorists...We will continue our endeavor in fighting terrorism and rooting it out of our country," Chaudhry said.

He added that Islamabad will continue its efforts to arrange peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

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UN Lifts 12-Year Arms Embargo on Ivory Coast

by VOA News April 28, 2016

The United Nations Security Council removed a 12-year-old arms embargo on Ivory Coast on Thursday and renewed the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the country for another year.

The embargo was imposed in 2004 after the West African country's 2002-2003 civil war.

The resolution, passed on a unanimous vote, welcomes an ongoing dialogue among all Ivorian political parties and the improvement of the human rights situation. It also strongly condemns the March terror attacks at the Grand Bassam beach resort that killed at least 19 people.

There are currently some 6,900 U.N. troops and police in Ivory Coast, according to the U.N. website. The resolution states those forces will leave by the end of April 2017.

The United Nations will then have two months to complete the mission's closure.

Additionally, the council removed an asset freeze and travel ban on six people, including former president Laurent Gbagbo, who is on trial before the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity.

The council had eased the arms embargo on Ivory Coast in 2014 and removed a ban on its diamond exports, a measure that U.N. experts said failed to stop illicit trafficking.

The U.N. experts monitoring the embargo said earlier this year that Ivory Coast rebel leader-turned-parliament speaker Guillaume Soro used the 2011 civil war and its aftermath to acquire hundreds of tons of weapons, many of which remain under the control of his loyalists in the army.

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UN Chief Criticizes European Restrictions on Refugees

by VOA News April 28, 2016

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday told Austria's lower house of parliament that increasing restrictions on migrants will "negatively impact" Europe's commitments to international law.

Ban, the first ever foreign dignitary to address a session of Austria's parliament, did not single out that country in his speech to lawmakers in Vienna, but said he was alarmed about "growing xenophobia," as Europe faces its worst migrant crisis in decades.

"But I am concerned that European countries are now adopting increasingly restrictive immigration and refugee policies. Such policies and measures negatively affect the obligations of member states on the international humanitarian law and European law. I welcome the open discussions in Europe including in Austria on integration; but I am alarmed again about growing xenophobia here and beyond."

Moral, legal obligations

Ban told the legislators that, under international and European laws, they have a moral and legal principal obligation to help those fleeing war, human rights abuses, and persecution.

"When the arrival process is well managed, accepting refugees is a win for everyone. These are brave, resilient and forward-looking people. They bring needed skills and energy to their new societies. I understand the difficulties and challenges. I fully appreciate and sympathize with the enormity of the challenges. I trust that Austria will continue to contribute towards the European Union's efforts to forge a truly cooperative approach towards addressing these issues."

Ban's comments came on the same day legislators in Austria's upper house are scheduled to vote on a measure that would allow authorities to stop accepting asylum requests at the border if they decide it is necessary to protect "internal security." Asylum-seekers would instead be turned back.

If passed, the measure would also mandate "temporary asylum" for migrants who have applied for such status since November 15. They would be compelled to leave Austria after three years if Vienna rules that their home countries have become safe.

It would also become more difficult for relatives of asylum-seekers to join their family members in Austria.

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IS at Weakest Point Since Start of Bombing Campaign, US Says

by Jeff Seldin April 27, 2016

Efforts to squeeze the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria have put the self-declared caliphate on shaky ground, leaving the terror group in perhaps its most vulnerable state since the start of the U.S.-led bombing campaign, according to U.S. officials.

For months, U.S. military officials have been touting IS's territorial losses  up to 40 percent of the land it once controlled in Iraq and upward of 10 percent of the areas it held in Syria.

But military and intelligence officials now say the bombing campaign, along with pressure from U.S. partners on the ground, is eating away at IS's ability to send forces into the fight.

"ISIL is at its weakest point since its rapid expansion in 2014," a U.S. intelligence official told VOA on condition of anonymity, using an acronym for the terror group.

"The flow of foreign terrorist fighters to Syria and Iraq has been reduced," the official said. "Consequently, ISIL is no longer able to replenish its ranks at the rate its fighters are dying on the ground."

Tipping point reached

Just a year ago, senior military officials said IS was bringing in as many as 1,000 foreign fighters a month. "They've been able to continue to recruit at the rate we kill them," one such official told VOA at the time.

"That has drastically dropped off," Maj. Gen. Peter Gersten, deputy commander for operations and intelligence for Operation Inherent Resolve, told Pentagon reporters during a video briefing Tuesday. "Our estimates are down to around 200 [a month]."

The Pentagon this week also reaffirmed U.S. intelligence estimates that the total number of fighters IS can muster in Iraq and Syria is now in the range of 19,000 to 25,000, down from earlier, high-end estimates of up to 32,000.

"We're seeing a fracture in their morale," Gersten said, pointing to increases in IS desertion rates.

'Still in the fight'

Yet despite the growing optimism, there are persistent concerns about underestimating the terror organization's capabilities and staying power.

Contrary to some military assessments, U.S. intelligence officials have said they believe IS is not being forced to turn to child soldiers and is still "largely dependent" on foreign fighters and recruits from areas the group controls.

"There's no doubt that they've taken losses, but there's no doubt they're still in the fight," said Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and senior editor of The Long War Journal.

Joscelyn is one of a number of analysts who has consistently been skeptical of official U.S. estimates for the size of the IS force, pointing to Washington's own estimates of the number of IS fighters killed in airstrikes  about 25,000  as reason to be wary.

"You're saying they've basically replaced their entire fighting force," he said. "That's hard to believe given that ISIS is still an effective fighting force on so many battlefronts."

Per Joscelyn's own estimates, at its peak, IS possibly had as many as 50,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria. And he said recent claims by the group's Amaq News Agency that it launched 287 suicide or "martyrdom operations" in the first three months of 2016 "implies that they have quite a roster of available martyrs."

Still, others contend that the new U.S. assessments of a much smaller IS force may be on the money.

"There has been a lot of evidence that these fighters are being degraded at an enormous rate," said Malcolm Nance, a former counterterrorism and intelligence officer, including what he described as "fantastic rates of suicide bomber usage for even the most basic combat operations."

Nance, who now heads the Terror Asymmetrics Project, said the newer U.S. estimates may also reflect intelligence, possibly even detailed information on foreign and local fighters, collected during the May 2015 raid that killed top IS financial figure Abu Sayyaf.

Strategic shrinkage

But even if IS's fighting force is shrinking considerably, the terror group's own strategy has likely played a role.

"ISIL's public calls for fighters to wage jihad on other fronts has probably also been a factor," a U.S. intelligence official said.

For months, IS has been telling would-be jihadists not to go to Iraq or Syria, but to go to Libya instead, seen by some analysts as a lynchpin in the terror group's Africa strategy.

"It's long-stated its goal is to endure and to expand," John Watts, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.

"As it is squeezed within its self-proclaimed caliphate, the importance of finding new safe havens and new targets increases," the former Australian Army officer said, warning that the group apparently has yet to settle precisely on how to move forward.

"There is currently a split between various ISIS leadership factions as to whether they should prioritize to retain the current territory at all costs or devolve into a decentralized international terrorist organization," Watts said.

Some former intelligence officials say time may be running out for the terror group's leadership to make that call, as IS's supply of fighters continues to erode.

"I think the appeal of the caliphate is being lost," said the Terror Asymmetrics Project's Nance. "Two hundred [foreign fighters] per month may be high unless coming from Syrian lines or crossing Saudi desert."

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China Launches Kunpeng-1B Sounding Rocket

Sputnik News

14:18 27.04.2016(updated 14:26 27.04.2016)

China has successfully launched the Kunpeng-1B sounding rocket from a launch pad in Danzhou City in the southern Chinese Hainan Province.

BEIJING (Sputnik)  The research rocket, which is due to take measurements in the upper atmosphere and help with high-speed flight and space tourism research, was launched at 2 a.m. local time (18:00 GMT Tuesday) by China's National Space Science Center (NSSC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Xinhua news agency reported.

The rocket reached a maximum height of 316 kilometers (196 miles), with the total flight time coming to 10 minutes.

Sounding rockets are low-cost launch vehicles designed to carry scientific instruments that take measurements during the rocket's sub-orbital flight. China first launched a Kunpeng-1 rocket in April 2013.

 Sputnik

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First Launch From Vostochny Space Center Postponed

Sputnik News

05:16 27.04.2016(updated 08:30 27.04.2016)

The first-ever launch of the carrier rocket "Soyuz-2.1a" from the newly-built Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia's Far East is postponed, the reasons are to be investigated.

According to a source, the carrier rocket may be launched whether later in the day or on auxiliary date, April 28.

The automatic system has canceled the launch. Reasons may be very different, it is possible that nothing abnormal happened, experts are currently conducting a technical meeting. Upon its results the launch will either be postponed to a backup date of April 28 at 5.01 MSK (02:00 GMT) or carried it out later today, following additional tests of all the carrier rocket's systems," the source said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the newly-built Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia's Far East and made the decision to stay in the area until the prospect of the maiden space launch being carried out on April 28 is clarified, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday.

"Just now the president has decided to stay at the cosmodrome until the prospect of the launch on the next day, that is tomorrow, is clarified. We do not exclude [the possibility] that the president will spend the next 24 hours here, in the area of the spaceport," Peskov told reporters.

The State Commission planned to launch Soyuz-2.1a space rocket at 5:01 a.m. MSK.

"The commentator announced: to bring the launch system to the original state, leaders of works to attend the meeting," a RIA Novosti correspondent present on the scene reported.

The State Commission checked the availability of space rocket (RKN) "Soyuz-2.1a" for the first launch according to the results of refueling and general readiness of the Vostochny cosmodrome.

The Vostochny Cosmodrome has been under construction since 2012 and is expected to reduce Russia's dependency on the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. Baikonur is on lease to Russia until 2050. The spaceport was set to be completed by late 2015, with the first launch scheduled for December 2015. The launch was later postponed due to construction delays.

 Sputnik

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Upset Putin To Stay At Cosmodrome For 2nd Try At Rocket Launch

April 28, 2016

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been sharply critical of Russian space officials for the delay of the maiden launch of a rocket from the new Vostochny Cosmodrome.

A visibly upset Putin declared shortly after the postponement of the April 27 launch in Russia's Far East that he would stay overnight to attend the expected second attempt at a launch the following day.

Putin told space industry officials at the cosmodrome -- to which he had traveled thousands of kilometers to attend the launch in the Amur region -- that "the fact is there are a large number of hitches. That is bad. There should be an appropriate reaction."

The head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency, Igor Komarov, blamed employees and executives in Russia's space industry for the delay.

Komarov told reporters on April 27 that "the responsibility for what is happening in the space sector lies with the people who are doing this work and supervising it."

A Soyuz rocket carrying three satellites was due to be launched.

But the launch was halted less than three minutes before takeoff.

Russian space program officials said further delays were possible.

Putin also expressed anger towards six people who have been detained for alleged wrongdoing during the construction of the new cosmodrome.

"If those suspected of having committed wrongdoing are found to be guilty, they will have to replace their warm bed sheets with a prison bed," he said.

Based on reporting by Reuters, AFP, Interfax, and AP

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/putin-to-stay-cosmodrome- second-rocket-launch-attempt/27702668.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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China Successfully Flight-Tests Hypersonic Maneuvering Warhead  Reports

Sputnik News

16:09 27.04.2016(updated 16:20 27.04.2016)

China has successfully tested an ultra-high-speed maneuvering glider that is purportedly capable of carrying nuclear weapons at a speed of up to 7,000 miles per hour, US officials said Wednesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Pentagon officials familiar with reports of China's military test told the The Washington Free Beacon website that the launch  the seventh since 2014  took place over China last Friday.

The DF-ZF glide vehicle was detected by satellites after it was launched atop a ballistic missile from a military center in central China, officials told the US news website.

The vehicle allegedly travelled along the edge of the atmosphere before hitting a target in western China.

According to intelligence officials, the glider can be used to deliver nuclear or conventional weapons around the world within an hour.

 Sputnik

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US warns of 'options' over N Korea nuclear, missile tests

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 8:59AM

The United States has warned that it would consider using other "options" if North Korea continued nuclear and missile testing.

"I think it's pretty clear that as North Korea continues to make decisions that we believe are counterproductive, that we've got to also continually look at what our options are in terms of response," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said at a briefing on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

Toner said the past steps against North Korea included sanctions and security measures but declined to elaborate on other options under consideration.

"We don't want to announce anything before it's been fully formed and fully vetted," he said.

South Korea's president said Tuesday that the North is in final stages of preparations to conduct a fifth nuclear test as the country has reportedly placed a new mid-range missile on standby. The South Korean military has also said Pyongyang is technically ready for a nuclear test.

South Korea and the US are concerned that a new nuclear test could take the North a step closer toward manufacturing a warhead small enough to place on a long-range missile.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday the United States was positioning missile systems and setting up a shield to defend itself and its allies against North Korea, which he called an "erratic" country with an "irresponsible" leader.

Pyongyang announced over the weekend that it had launched a ballistic missile from a submarine, which the United States quickly dismissed as a "catastrophic" failure.

Meanwhile, the North Korean foreign minister proposed that his country was ready to halt its nuclear tests if the US abandons its military exercises in the region. The US rejected the offer.

North Korea tested its fourth nuclear bomb on January 6 and launched a long-range rocket on February 7, prompting a significant tightening in United Nations and US sanctions. Pyongyang has indicated that it needs a "powerful nuclear deterrence" to counter US threats.

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North Korea to hold first ruling party congress in over 30 years

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 12:44AM

North Korea has announced the date of its first ruling party congress in the past 36 years, stoking concerns that the event will coincide with Pyongyang's fifth nuclear test.

"The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the WPK (Workers' Party of Korea) decides to open the Seventh Congress of the WPK in Pyongyang on May 6, 2016," reported state news agency KCNA on Tuesday. The previous WPK congress was held in 1980, before the birth of North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un, and lasted for four days.

Anticipation and speculation for the event have been rising since it was signaled in October last year.

Analysts believe that during the rare event North Korea will officially adopt Kim's "byongjin" policy which simultaneously pushes for economic development and enhancing nuclear weapons capabilities.

Kim's Byongjin or "simultaneous push" policy follows his father Jong-il's songun or "military first" policy and his grandfather Il-sung's juche or "self-reliance" policy that combines Marxism and extreme nationalism.

The announcement of the date of the congress has also fueled speculations that the North may carry out a nuclear test prior to the event as a display of national pride and power.

On Tuesday, South Korea said that the North is in final stages of preparations to conduct a fifth nuclear test as the country has reportedly placed a new mid-range missile on standby. The South Korean military has also said Pyongyang is technically ready for a nuclear test.

South Korea and the US are concerned that a new nuclear test could take the North a step closer toward manufacturing a warhead small enough to place on a long-range missile.

In March, the UN Security Council unanimously passed a resolution expanding existing sanctions on the North over its missile and nuclear tests.

On January 6, North Korea said it had successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb, its fourth nuclear test, vowing to build up its nuclear program as deterrence against potential aggression from the US and its regional allies.

A month later, Pyongyang launched a long-range rocket which it said placed an earth observation satellite into orbit. However, Washington and Seoul denounced it as a cover for an intercontinental ballistic missile test.

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North Korea Should Cease Nuclear Power Ambitions - Russian Foreign Minister

Sputnik News

13:02 27.04.2016(updated 13:03 27.04.2016)

North Korea should refrain from irresponsible attempts at gaining nuclear power status, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday at the Moscow Conference on International Security.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Tuesday, reports emerged of North Korea preparing to launch another medium-range ballistic missile later in April.

"We hope that Pyongyang will reject irresponsible actions and realize the illusive nature of its attempts at becoming a nuclear power. At the same time, we consider attempts by certain countries to use the situation as a pretext for stepping up military presence in northeastern Asia to be dangerous and counterproductive," Lavrov said.

On April 14, North Korea reportedly deployed up to two Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles on its eastern coast. The following day, the South Korean military said the North appeared to have tried a missile launch, which ended in a failure.

"We are convinced that bolstering stability in the Asia-Pacific region must contribute to creating reliable mechanisms for ensuring equitable and indivisible security, mechanisms that are based on principles of non-alignment," Lavrov said.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula escalated after North Korea successfully carried out a hydrogen bomb test in early January and put a satellite into orbit a month later, violating UN Security Council resolutions and triggering condemnation from the international community.

 Sputnik

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US Expects More Provocations From North Korea

by Nike Ching April 27, 2016

The United States is anticipating more provocations from North Korea, including a fifth nuclear test, possibly in early May when the isolated regime is convening its Workers' Party Congress.

"I think we can anticipate that there will be more to come," Deputy Secretary of the State Anthony Blinken told lawmakers Wednesday in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. "It's certainly possible in the event of North Korea's Party Workers' Congress, which is to take place on May 6, that the regime will do something else, another missile test, maybe even another nuclear test."

North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-Un, is expected to use the 7th Workers' Party Congress  the first in nearly four decades  to strengthen his hold on power and affirm claims of recent progress in Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missiles programs.

Earlier, South Korea's president, Park Geun-hye, warned that North Korea is gearing up for a fifth nuclear test. Pyongyang conducted its fourth test in January, which was followed by a new and stronger set of sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council in March.

Blinken said the U.S. "will be compelled to take steps to further defend" itself and the allies if Beijing does not join Washington in exerting influence and leverage over North Korea to stop pursuing nuclear weapons. Ninety percent of North Korean trade flows through China.

"While these steps would not be directed to China, they might well be things that China does not like," Blinken said, referring to the deployment of a missile defense system in the Korean Peninsula.

The U.S. and South Korea have yet to conclude formal consultations on the so-called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System, or THAAD, which China strongly opposes.

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Chairman of DPRK Red Cross Society Sends Notice to President of S. Korean Red Cross

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK via Korea News Service (KNS)

Pyongyang, April 28 (KCNA) -- The chairman of the Central Committee of the Red Cross Society of the DPRK Thursday sent the following notice to the president of the Red Cross of south Korea:

We have strongly urged your authorities more than once to disclose the truth behind the group allurement and abduction of citizens of the DPRK by gangsters of the Intelligence Service of your side in Zhejiang Province, China in broad daylight and to immediately and unconditionally send the abductees back and sternly punish or hand over to the inviolable court of the DPRK side those involved in the abduction.

A particular mention should be made of the fact that I sent through media a notice in which I requested your side to take immediate technical measures for the families of the abductees to go to Seoul via Panmunjom to have face-to-face meetings with their daughters and confirm their will, as your authorities unreasonably assert that what happened recently was "group defection from the north at free will".

But your authorities categorically turned down our just request to have the earnest wish of the families of victims realized, while talking about "international practice."

We cannot but view this otherwise than a mean and childish act to prevent the truth behind the premeditated and organized group abduction from being revealed.

We know details of how the gangsters of the Intelligence Service of your side worked out a scenario from the beginning to lure and take the innocent citizens of the DPRK to south Korea and put it into practice, and have evidence proving the crime.

The evil-minded agents of the Intelligence Service of your side, in conspiracy with brokers in China, allured and abducted the group of citizens of the DPRK in the most base and vicious manner to take them to south Korea. This hideous unprecedented crime against humanity has touched off towering indignation of the public at home and abroad.

What is all the more intolerable is that your authorities separately put the abductees in custody in solitary rooms and are pressurizing them into "defection" by employing all possible means of appeasement, deception, threat and blackmail while keeping them strictly away from the outside.

Our citizens are now on hunger strike, strongly demanding their prompt return to their motherland. Some of the girls have fallen in a faint.

We cannot but ask if this is "humanitarianism" and "defence of human rights" often touted by your side.

A big question is for what reason they have been detained in solitary rooms, kept away from the outside and prevented from expressing their own will if they had gone to south Korea at "their free will".

Your side is preventing parents from meeting their children under the pretext of "international practice." This is the height of inhumanity.

It is universally accepted international practice and humanitarianism to ensure the earliest possible reunion between parents and children who had been separated from each other against their will.

Your side does not have any reason whatsoever to refuse to meet the just demand of the DPRK to let the parents directly meet their children to know what they want.

Your side has already completely lost face to talk about reunions of separated families and relatives as you divided their harmonious families by taking their beloved children from the embrace of their parents.

We regard the Red Cross of your side's fence-sitting attitude towards the hideous group abduction as an inhumanitarian act of diametrically running counter to the noble spirit of Red Cross.

We would like to remind your side of possible unimaginable and catastrophic consequences if the situation is allowed to go on.

If the Red Cross of your side remains true to the humanitarian mission, it should play a role in making your authorities apologize for the allurement and abduction, unconditionally and immediately send back the abductees and sternly punish those involved in the monstrous crime.

As an immediate step, we once again strongly demand your side take prompt technical measures to ensure that the families of the abductees meet their children face to face in Seoul.

If your side persistently turns down our just demand, your side will have to be accountable for all ensuing serious consequences. -0-

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UN warns of worsening hunger in North Korea

Iran Press TV

Thu Apr 28, 2016 10:58AM

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned against worsening hunger in North Korea as the country has hit a record low in food production since 2010 due to poor rainfall.

According to a statement by FAO, North Korea produced about 5.4 million tons of food, including cereals, soybeans and potatoes in 2015, down from 5.9 million tons it produced in 2014.

The country is facing a shortage of 394,000 tons of cereal, the biggest gap since 2011-2012, the statement added.

"Given the tight food supplies in 2015/16, the country's food security situation is expected to deteriorate from the previous year when most households were already estimated to have poor or borderline food consumption levels," the agency said.

In May 2015, the United Nations warned of a looming food crisis in North Korea due to drought, which the country's official media described as the worst in 100 years.

Poor rainfall and low availability of water for irrigation caused the production of paddy rice, the country's main staple, to drop by 25 percent to 1.9 million tons, FAO said.

North Korea has suffered regular chronic food shortages.

UN figures show that over 70 percent of North Koreans are food insecure and 28 percent of children under the age of five have suffered stunted growth due to malnutrition.

The country has come under the most crippling sanctions by the UN and the West recently over its nuclear missile tests.

On Thursday, South Korea claimed that North Korea had fired an intermediate range ballistic missile but it crashed seconds after the test launch.

A South Korean Defense Ministry official claimed the launch at about 6:40 a.m. local time (2140 GMT Wednesday) from near the east coast city of Wonsan.

The missile appeared to have been of a Musudan missile with a range of more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles) but crashed within seconds, the official said.

North Korea lists South Korea, the United States and Japan as its main enemies.

Nearly 30,000 US troops are based in South Korea and the two Koreas are still technically at war after the 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice.

On Saturday, North Korea tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile, which traveled about 30 km (18 miles) off its east coast.

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Seoul: N. Korea Missile Launch Attempt Failed

by VOA News April 28, 2016

North Korea has apparently test-fired an intermediate-range missile that crashed seconds after takeoff, in what appears to be the second such failure in a matter of weeks.

South Korea's Defense Ministry reported the failed launch Thursday. The incident comes just before a high-profile party meeting next week in Pyongyang.

The South Korean Defense Ministry says North Korea is likely trying to launch its new Musudan mid-range missile, which could be used to reach military bases in Asia and in the Pacific Ocean.

The launch comes as South Korea and the United States conduct annual joint military drills that North Korea has labeled a provocation.

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Russia, India Sign Agreement on S-400 Defense Systems Deliveries - Official

Sputnik News

14:27 27.04.2016(updated 18:45 27.04.2016)

New Delhi and Moscow have signed an agreement on the deliveries of S-400 air defense systems, Indian Minister of State Rao Inderjit Singh said Wednesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The S-400 is Russia's next-generation air defense system, carrying three different types of missiles capable of destroying aerial targets at short-to-extremely long range. It is capable of tracking and destroying all existing aerial targets, including ballistics and cruise missiles.

"We've signed that agreement," Singh said.

When asked to give a date on the first deliveries of the defense system, Singh said, "It's hard to say, but as soon as possible."

 Sputnik

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US double standards may lead to new world war: Iran

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 3:46PM

Iran's defense minister has censured the United States for adopting a double-standard policy in defending its interests, saying such a policy may finally lead to a new world war.

Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan made the remarks at the 5th Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS) in the Russian capital on Wednesday.

For the sake of safeguarding its own interests, Washington is employing "double, multiple standards on the main issues associated with the disruption of safety and stability," Dehqan said, adding, "They use proxy wars, and they impose a heavy cost on the stage to wage the wars. We see a repeat of the situation and there could be a potential new world war taking place."

The Iranian minister also warned that only a "realistic" and "responsible" approach to the conflicts gripping the Middle East could prevent a potential new world war.

He further condemned the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel for propping up terrorist groups "under the disguise of humanitarian aid, under [the excuse of] establishing a cessation of hostilities".

"There are countries that created those terrorist groups, sponsor those terrorist groups, and they do not want to lead an effective war until the very end," he stated.

The MCIS kicked off on Wednesday with a focus on international convergence on fighting terrorism, and security issues concerning the Asia-Pacific region, as well as international stability and military cooperation.

Iran to boost defense capabilities

Elsewhere in his remarks, the Iranian defense minister noted that the Islamic Republic will enhance its defense capabilities, particularly the missile program, warning that no one can impede the country's peaceful efforts in that regard.

"Iran will be taking steps at the highest levels for the military equipment of its armed forces," he said, adding, "And no will or organization will be able to stand on the way and obstruct the development and upsurge of the defense capability, especially missile defense capability of Iran."

Iran has never made and will not make threats to security of other countries, Dehqan further reiterated, saying that Tehran condemns any aggression and use of force against sovereign states.

In recent years, Iran has made great achievements in its defense sector and reached self-sufficiency in producing essential military equipment and systems.

The Islamic Republic has repeatedly assured other nations, especially its neighbors and regional countries, that its military might poses no threat to other states, stressing that its defense doctrine is merely based on deterrence.

Iran and Russia have cooperated in the area of defense toward countering the threat of terrorism in the Middle East.

The two countries have successfully provided assistance to the Syrian government in its efforts to push back militant groups in the Arab country.

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Iran capable of producing inter-continental missiles: Diplomat

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 10:15AM

A senior Iranian diplomat says the country's scientific power has made it capable of producing inter-continental missiles, stressing that Iran's military doctrine is based on defense.

"Our country's power is increasing, and today we have no restrictions in defense fields, as in our missile program, we have no technical limits anymore," Hamid Baeidinejad said in remarks published on the Basirat website.

Baeidinejad is the Iranian Foreign Ministry's director general for political affairs and the Basirat website is affiliated to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).

"Today, our scientific power has provided us the opportunity to even produce intercontinental missiles," he said.

"Unlike the military policies of other countries in the region and major powers in the world, our military doctrine is not after an escalation of threats in the region or the world," Baeidinejad said.

He noted that Iran's military power is aimed at neutralizing enemy threats, and is defined "within the framework of the defensive doctrine."

The high-ranking diplomat further said that Iran's enemies are "seeking to pit military elements of the country's security against its economic elements" by making the country's defense progress costly.

"Therefore, against the will of the enemy, we should make efforts to progress the two parts and make them fit well together."

Baeidinejad, who was addressing a gathering of IRGC experts, said the "unparalleled" experiences of the IRGC in various fields of security have made it distinct from other countries' armed forces.

"The IRGC, as the backbone of the country's military security since the Islamic Revolution [in 1979] and the Iraqi-imposed war on Iran and as a historical necessity for the continued existence of the country, has had a matchless role in ensuring the security of the country," he said.

In recent years, Iran has made great achievements in its defense sector and reached self-sufficiency in producing essential military equipment and systems.

The Islamic Republic has repeatedly assured other nations, especially regional neighbors, that its military might poses no threat to other countries, stating that its defense doctrine is merely based on deterrence.

Iranian police forces killed

In a separate development, three Iranian police forces were killed in an attack carried out by armed gangs in the southeastern part of the country.

The forces lost their lives on Tuesday after armed gangs launched a raid on a police checkpoint in the town of Khash in Sistan-and-Baluchestan Province, which borders Pakistan.

"Efforts are continuing to arrest the armed gangs," provincial police chief Brigadier General Hossein Rahimi said on Wednesday.

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Leader: US deception hindering Iran trade

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 8:54AM

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says the US has resorted to "deception" to obstruct international trade with Iran despite a nuclear agreement.

"On paper, the Americans say banks can trade with Iran but in practice they act in such an Iranophobic way that no trade can take place with Iran," the Leader told a group of Iranian workers in Tehran Wednesday.

US and European businesses are reluctant to do business with Iran over the fear of being penalized by Washington despite the nuclear agreement which requires countries to lift sanctions on Tehran.

Iranian officials have hit out at the US and the EU for failing to honor the nuclear agreement by keeping Iran locked out of the international financial system.

"An American official has said the bulk of sanctions has been maintained so that the investors are scared away and do not come here," Ayatollah Khamenei said.

"The Americans are engaged in disruption and deception. Then, they claim that we are pessimistic," the Leader added.

Officials in the US State Department and Treasury have frequently said that Iran would not be given any access to the American financial system.

US Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged earlier this month that Iran deserved access to the system because it had met its obligations under the nuclear agreement.

Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated the need for attention to domestic production and reducing imports of foreign-made goods.

"Domestic production must be recognized as a sacred matter. A commodity which has a domestic version must not be imported at all," the Leader sad.

"The sale and consumption of foreign products must be regarded as a disvalue except where they have no domestic versions," Ayatollah Khamenei added.

The Leader criticized a culture of consumerism and a craze for showing off foreign-made brands in the country, saying all should regard supporting domestic production as a "duty."

Ayatollah Khamenei further chided "imports of unnecessary goods in billions," describing smuggling as a "serious problem," a "big blight" and a "poison for domestic production."

"I have repeatedly reminded officials of various governments of this problem. They are saying that if heavy tariffs are imposed, smuggling of goods will increase but this is not an acceptable justification."

"The most powerful individuals must be assigned to this task and the government must reinforce related bodies in order to confront organized trafficking with force," the Leader added.

Ayatollah Khamenei said, "Sometimes, an article can be produced domestically but importers who make massive profits use various methods including heavy bribing, coercion and even crime to prevent it."

"Such issues are very significant and a matter of security which must not be taken lightly," he said.

The Leader further expressed surprise at the interest shown by certain individuals to import US-made cars.

"The Americans themselves have no interest in these cars due to their high (fuel) consumption and heaviness," Ayatollah Khamenei said.

"Now, should we come and import cars from such and such American factory which is going bankrupt? This is a matter of great surprise."

Ayatollah Khamenei said, "The esteemed managers and state officials must resist covert pressures being exerted in these fields and seriously confront them."

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Could Runoffs Tilt Iran's Balance Of Power?

April 28, 2016

by Frud Bezhan

Iran's fractious political camps clash on April 29 in runoff votes to finalize the makeup of parliament two months after a split result dealt a blow to hard-liners but failed to produce a majority.

There are reasons to watch the voting again this time around, even if the contests make less of an international splash than when reformists and moderates came back in from the political cold in late February.

Nearly one-quarter of Iran's 290 national legislative seats are at stake in the Friday vote, in which President Hassan Rohani and his reformist and moderate allies hope to consolidate their recent gains and minimize the power of the conservatives, who lost dozens of seats in the February 26 elections but still hold most of the cards in a number of other, more powerful institutions.

The runoffs won't redefine power in the Islamic republic because the parliament lacks influence on key national issues, which ultimately lie under the control of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Even determining which political camp -- reformists and moderates, independents, or hard-liners and conservatives -- or combination of camps holds a parliamentary majority is difficult because Iran lacks rigid party affiliations and some independent candidates are claimed by more than one bloc.

Tilting The Balance?

"After an inconclusive first round, the runoff[s] will determine the final balance of power," says Ali Vaez, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group (ICG).

In February, conservatives were credited with winning around 112 seats in the 290-seat parliament, the reformist-moderate camp 90, and independents 29 seats, according to a tally by the Reuters news agency.

That showing for the reformist-moderate camp was particularly significant since it has had little representation in the current legislature, which is dominated by conservatives and hard-liners. Reformists and moderates also had to endure election-vetting authorities' exclusion of hundreds of their candidates.

Reformists boycotted the last parliamentary elections, in 2012, in response to a government crackdown on the opposition that included mass arrests, allegations of torture, and televised trials after the disputed presidential election in 2009.

The last time the reformists and moderates had this much representation in parliament was during reformist President Mohammad Khatami's first term in office, beginning in 1997.

Sixty-eight seats in small towns scattered around 21 of Iran's 31 provinces are being contested in the April 29 runoffs. Mohammad Reza Aref, a leader of the reformist-moderate camp, has set a target of at least 40 of those seats to secure an upper hand in the next parliament, although observers have lowered expectations.

"The reformist-moderate camp has a difficult task ahead," Vaez says. "Turnout, particularly of their constituents, is usually lower in the second round."

Hung Parliament

Dozens of candidates who have no clear factional affiliation entered the parliament in the first round, and scores more are in runoffs. "These first-time lawmakers usually join one of the political blocs that form after the new parliament convenes," Vaez says. "When that happens in May, their choices could tilt the balance of power."

Both the conservative camp and the reformist-moderate camp will look to absorb as many independents as possible to try to create a majority. The success of independents, however, could also prove a pitfall.

"The independents could split the legislature by creating pragmatist and conservative blocs of equal weight, thus giving rise to a hung parliament that slows down -- rather than facilitates -- decision making," Vaez says.

Multiple Power Centers

One unlikely outcome, a decisive majority for the reformist-moderate camp, could strengthen Rohani's hand in his bid to push for mild reform via legislation, along with economic changes, including new laws to encourage foreign investment and the privatization of state industries.

Yet parliament lacks influence over Iran's foreign policy and important national issues, with hard-line allies of the supreme leader controlling many key institutions, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), the Guardians Council, and the powerful judiciary.

"The parliament is not going to be a decisive force on its own," says Scott Lucas, an Iran specialist at Birmingham University in Britain and editor of the EA World View website.

During Khatami's first four-year term in office, both the legislative and executive branches were in reformist hands, yet their reforms were blocked by the Guardians Council, which supervises elections and interprets Iran's constitution, among other things.

Lucas says he expects no decisive victory for any camp in the runoffs. "It's precisely because there won't be a defined majority in parliament that the infighting will continue and you have tension between a whole range of different power centers like the judiciary, intelligence, IRGC, the supreme leader, and the president's office," he says.

Women In Record Numbers

More than a dozen women are competing in runoffs. Combined with the 14 declared female winners in the February vote, that could translate into 20 or so women in parliament. Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the highest number of female legislators has been 14.

There are only nine female lawmakers in the current legislature, or a little over 3 percent of the total.

The female candidates, most of them reformists or independents, could possibly give Rohani more leverage in passing legislation to empower women and loosen the social and political constraints imposed on them by the clerical authorities. Rohani made issues of gender discrimination part of his platform for office, and he appointed several female vice presidents.

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/iran-elections-balance-of-power/27704748.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Iraqi forces retake Nineveh village, kill 200 Daesh terrorists

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 4:21PM

Iraqi security forces, backed by the country's warplanes, have managed to purge a strategic village in Nineveh Province of the Daesh terrorist group, leaving at least 200 militants dead.

At least 200 Daesh terrorists were killed in the operation, which began on Wednesday morning, to liberate the key village of Mahana in Nineveh, the Arabic-language al-Sumaria news website said, quoting Nineveh operations command in the Iraqi army.

Daesh terrorists often launch their rocket attacks against the eastern districts of Nineveh from this area.

The command noted that Daesh 'special forces' were in the village.

According to the report, the village is strategically important to the Daesh terrorists as it is near al-Qiara district and Haj Ali village in southern Nineveh.

Four vehicles of the terrorists as well as several rocket launch pads were destroyed in the Iraqi operation as the country's warplanes and artillery shells hit the terrorists' positions in the nearby villages.

On March 24, Iraq launched the first phase of the Fatah (conquest) Operation to liberate Nineveh Province.

The northern and western parts of Iraq have been plagued by violence since Daesh mounted its offensive in the country in June 2014.

The militants have been committing vicious crimes against all ethnic and religious communities in Iraq, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians and others.

The Iraqi army and fighters from the Popular Mobilization Units have been engaged in operations to liberate militant-held regions.

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Biden Makes Surprise Visit to Iraq Amid Political Crisis

by Amanda Scott April 28, 2016

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is in Iraq for talks with Iraqi leaders "focused on encouraging Iraqi national unity and continued momentum" in the fight against Islamic State.

"The Vice President will also be discussing steps the international community can take to promote Iraq's economic stability and further regional cooperation," a statement from Biden's office said.

Biden is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Iraq since his previous trip to the country in 2011. He met with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi shortly after his arrival.

"The vice president has been the point person on Iraq for the administration since the beginning," said an unnamed U.S. official traveling on Biden's plane.

Political paralysis

Thursday's trip, which was previously unannounced over security concerns, comes as the political turmoil in Iraq has paralyzed the country's government.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is trying to implement a longstanding pledge to reform his government while thousands of protesters loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have held nearly daily demonstrations demanding a new Cabinet composed of technocrats instead of political loyalists.

On Tuesday, Iraq's parliament approved a partial cabinet reshuffle proposed by the prime minister.

Abadi's planned reshuffle would hand key portfolios to independent technocrats in a bid to root out patronage and corruption that have hindered the provision of public services since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

VOA's Aru Pande contributed to this report.

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Land Sales Unearth Kazakhstan's Opposition

April 28, 2016

by Merhat Sharipzhan and Michael Scollon

The crowd parts as the elderly woman in the conservative beige overcoat and white head scarf makes her way to the front, demanding to be heard.

"We will never allow them to sell our land!" Ogiza Makhambetova shouts, pumping her raised right arm defiantly. "Let them shoot us! I am ready to die!"

But the lifelong geologist really gets the crowd roaring when she demonstratively tugs at the lapels of her overcoat, exposing the traditional Kazakh camisole she is wearing underneath.

Fellow protesters quickly step in to cover her up, but it's already been revealed that for the Kazakh people, their land is a point of national pride.

This Land Is Our Land

The protesters had come out in large numbers -- in the high hundreds, or a few thousand, depending on estimates -- for an unsanctioned rally in an unauthorized place.

But the main square of Atyrau, capital of western Kazakhstan's agriculturally challenged but oil-rich Atyrau Province, was the perfect setting.

They gathered at the foot of a large monument to Isatai Taimanuly and Makhambet Otemisuly -- local heroes who rebelled against Russian ownership of Kazakh land in the 19th century. There they protested against government plans to soon put 1.7 million hectares of fallow Kazakh agricultural land up for auction as of July 1.

The government's idea is that it can make poor or unused land productive again under the stewardship of private owners, all in accordance with amendments to the Land Code adopted in November.

But ever since Kazakh Economy Minister Erbolat Dosaev announced the auction on March 30, public anger has spread on social media and in cities across the country.

One major concern is that the land will not go to small farmers, but to moneyed elites. That fear was expressed by an unidentified protester at the April 24 rally in Atyrau who suggested that oligarchs, after having "bought everything else in the country," would now be able to buy "sacred Kazakh land."

The second is that foreigners -- specifically, the Chinese -- will end up sowing Kazakh fields. Views on that prospect are spelled out clearly on signs held up in Atyrau: "The destiny of the land is the destiny of the nation!" and "Selling the land is selling the motherland!"

"These two lost their lives fighting for the land!" shouts an unidentified protester standing near Istatai and Makhambet's monument. "They did not fight for their own property. They fought and died for our land! They started their fight when the land started being taken and sold!"

Sowing Controversy

The government has scrambled to tamp down the protests by offering assurances that foreigners will not be buying land, and issuing warnings to anyone who says otherwise.

Agriculture Minister Asylzhan Mamytbekov said on April 14 that only Kazakh citizens and companies owned by Kazakh nationals would be eligible to participate in the upcoming auction, which would involve less than 2 percent of Kazakhstan's agricultural land.

His effort to "clarify the situation" did little to alleviate concerns, however, and within days dozens of Kazakh intellectuals issued an open letter to President Nursultan Nazarbaev urging him "to be careful" and declaring that "the people's opinion must be taken into account."

Deputy Economy Minister Qayirbek Oskenbaev followed up a week later, stressing that foreigners were only legally allowed to rent, not own, agricultural land, and would not be participating in the auction.

That failed to sway the large number of protesters who gathered in Atyrau, however, leaving President Nazarbaev to hammer the point home while addressing the Assembly of the Peoples of Kazakhstan on April 26.

The president reiterated that foreigners would only be allowed to rent land under leases of 10 to 25 years, and threatened that "those who spread false information, saying that the land will be sold to foreigners, must be apprehended and punished."

The next day, hundreds came out for rallies in the northwestern city of Aqtobe and the northeastern city of Semei, arguing that Kazakh land should not be owned -- or rented, for that matter -- by anyone but Kazakhs.

On April 28, dozens gathered in the center of the city of Aqtau in Kazakhstan's west, protesting the government's decision. However, when the protesters started criticizing Nazarbaev personally, police interfered and forced the protester to leave.

Long Row To Privatize

As Kazakhstan made the transition from a planned to a market economy, the government for years tried to address the Soviet legacy of state-owned collective farms and sell citizens on the idea of land privatization.

The effort has encountered stiff resistance, however -- even causing the government led by Imanghali Tasmaghambetov to resign in 2003 after lawmakers refused to support a bill on land sales.

This time, lawmakers are behind the arguments laid out by Economy Minister Dosaev when he presented the proposed Land Code amendments to the upper house of parliament last year.

He noted that nearly all of the country's agricultural land was being leased long-term from the government, with only 1.2 percent in private hands. Selling the land to private entities by way of auctions, he argued, would help increase land values, while also giving farmers the first opportunity to buy land they currently rent -- at a 50 percent discount.

Lawmakers were sold, and passed the bill. But the people are still not buying it.

Deep-Rooted Concerns

There is a historical basis for Kazakhs to be wary of land transfers.

There was the decision under tsarist rule to allow Russian settlers to own Kazakh land, which played a large part in the 1836-38 rebellion in which Taimanuly and Otemisuly played prominent roles.

There were also the treaties between the Russian Empire and China that divided up Central Asia in the 18 century, and whose repercussions are still felt in Kazakhstan. The treaties have left Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs in what is today China's Xinjiang Province, and ethnic Kazakhs living in northwestern districts of the province.

And then there was the Soviet experience, during which Central Asian borders were shifted.

After the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, many areas historically populated by Kazakhs were hived off to the Soviet Russian regions of Altai Krai, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Tyumen, and Astrakhan. Even the first capital of Soviet Kazakhstan, Orenburg, was incorporated into Russia in 1925 because of a border change.

Now, years after the fall of the Soviet Union, many Kazakh believe their land is again under threat.

Trust Issues

One of the organizers of the Atyrau gathering, Talghat Ayanov, underscored the distrust protesters feel toward Astana.

"The decision to sell land was made without taking into account the opinions of ordinary people," he told RFE/RL's Current Time television on April 27. "We are afraid that the government might use this law to satisfy their own needs, as they have been doing for a long time using other laws and regulations they have established for themselves."

Such sentiments do not often reveal themselves in Kazakhstan, where the authorities took steps to limit public protests following deadly unrest in the western city of Zhanaozen in 2011.

But being obedient is something best left to lawmakers, the elderly Makhambetova told her audience in Atyrau. "It is written in our constitution that the land belongs to the people. Now they are amending it. The lawmakers are doing it," she shouted.

"But who are they? They are those who lie down when they are ordered to lie down, they are those who sit when those above them order them to sit."

It is in times like these, she harangued, that the people must "gather like this to show our common fist to them openly and clearly!

Written by Merhat Sharipzhan and Michael Scollon, with reporting by Sania Toiken of RFE/RL's Kazakh Service, and Current Time television

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/kazakhstan-land- sale-protests-unearth-opposition/27704517.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Myanmar Monks, Protesters Denounce 'Rohingya' Outside US Embassy

by VOA News April 28, 2016

Hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside of the U.S. embassy in Myanmar Thursday over its use of the term Rohingya to describe the country's ethnic Muslim minority group.

The protesters, joined by some Buddhist monks, are calling on the group be referred to as 'Bengalis,' saying they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. However, many of the Rohingya have lived in Myanmar for generations.

The protest began after the U.S. Embassy used the term Rohingya in a statement of concern following the drowning of dozens of people after their boat capsized off the coast of Rakhine state.

"Normally, we would call them what they ask to be called," said U.S. Ambassador Scott Marciel in comments to VOA's Burma's service. "It is not political decision, just normal practice."

The Myanmar government does not officially recognized the Rohingya as an ethnic group denying them basic rights and citizenship.

They are unable to travel freely in Myanmar and cannot marry or have children without official permission.

Rohingya are also largely barred from higher education and face the constant threat of violence as Buddhist extremism gains traction.

Some 120,000 Rohingya live in squalid displacement camps after being forced to flee their homes after violence erupted in Rakhine state between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012

Thousands more have fled persecution and poverty in the country.

Earlier this month, the United Nations gave Myanmar's incoming civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) 100 days to improve living conditions for the Rohingya community.

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Pakistan in Talks With Russia on Sales of Helicopters, Air Defense

Sputnik News

13:12 27.04.2016(updated 15:23 27.04.2016)

Pakistan and Russia are in talks on sales of helicopters, air defense systems and modernized tanks, Defense Minister of Pakistan Khawaja Asif told Sputnik on Wednesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Pakistan is eyeing to modernize its Air Force, Asif said on the sidelines of the fifth Moscow Conference on International Security.

"We are in touch with Russia on different types of weapons such as helicopters, we are even considering the Russian air defense system and advanced tanks. We are also exploring possibility to update and modernize our Air Force," Asif said on the sidelines of the fifth Moscow Conference on International Security.

According to Asif, Pakistan is seeking to expand its cooperation with Russia in different spheres, including regional security and counter-terrorism.

"We are looking forward to expanding our cooperation with Russia in all facets of our relationship but mostly we are looking forward to increasing our defense cooperation. We also look forward to working closely on regional peace and in the fight against terrorism," the minister added.

Military ties between the two countries date back to the 1960s, when Pakistan imported defense equipment from the Soviet Union. In November 2014, Russia and Pakistan signed a deal on cooperation between their defense ministries.

The agreement was followed by a contract for the sale of four Mi-35M transport and attack helicopters to Pakistan, signed in August 2015.

 Sputnik

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Europe's security remains in deadlock, Russian FM warns

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 1:58PM

Russia's foreign minister said Wednesday a recent ambassadorial-level meeting between representatives of Moscow and NATO proves absence of progress in Europe's security situation.

Addressing the Fifth Moscow Conference on International Security, Sergei Lavrov said ambassadors from the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) failed to reach agreements during their recently-held meeting at the Brussels headquarters of NATO.

"The recent Russia-NATO Council meeting, which was held at the strong request of the North Atlantic Alliance following a long pause initiated also by it, proved that European security remains in a deadlock," the Russian foreign minister stated.

On April 20, representatives of NATO and Russia held the formal meeting for the first time since ties between the two sides strained in 2014 over the crisis in Ukraine.

Russia's Ambassador to NATO Alexander Grushko recently said Moscow's relations with NATO will not improve unless the Western military alliance adopts a new policy regarding Russia.

Lavrov also said it is impossible to establish security in Europe and elsewhere without the participation of Russia, adding, "I can only agree with the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, who said once that it is impossible to create stable security architecture on the European continent without our country. Other European colleagues agree with that. But do the actions of our Western partners correspond with these goals?"

Lavrov denounces NATO military buildup

The Russian foreign minister also stated that NATO's military buildup near Russian borders "contradicts Russia-NATO Founding Act on Mutual Relations, and seriously changes the political landscape."

In addition to that, "NATO and its allies' actions in terms of creating a global missile defense system can only contribute to instability," Lavrov said.

"NATO rotates its troops on the so-called south [NATO] flank and conducts military exercises almost every day, a new military infrastructure is being built. All these steps contradict the main agreement between Russia and NATO [the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation] and seriously change the political landscape especially in the northeastern part of Europe. This region used to be one of the most militarily stable regions but it is being transformed into a zone of high tensions. The NATO and its allies' actions, in terms of creating a global missile defense system, can only contribute to instability."

NATO has been deploying troops and equipment close to Russia's borders since it suspended all ties with Moscow in April 2014 after the Crimean Peninsula rejoined the Russian Federation following a referendum.

The United States and its European allies accuse Moscow of destabilizing Ukraine and have imposed a number of sanctions against Russian and pro-Russia figures. Moscow, however, rejects having a hand in the Ukrainian crisis.

Moscow has on many occasions slammed NATO's expansion near its borders, saying such a move poses a threat to both regional and international peace.

NATO shelves war on terror due to its political ambitions

Elsewhere in his remarks, the Russian foreign minister said NATO has been compromising in the fight against terrorism due to political ambitions.

"I would like to point out that the joint fight against terrorism was among those projects that were frozen by the North Atlantic Alliance and sacrificed for its political ambitions."

Lavrov cautioned against turning the crisis in Syria into a sectarian conflict.

He also warned against the rising threat of terrorist groups such as Daesh to the world.

Daesh and other militants operating across Syria and Iraq have launched several attacks involving poisonous or asphyxiating agents, such as sarin, over the past few years.

Nearly 500 guests are in the Russian capital for the security conference. Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan has also attended the two-day event.

The summit is expected to address the conflict in the Middle East, issues of security in the Asia-Pacific region, the problem of war and peace in Europe as well as global security and military cooperation.

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Russia Signs 1st Export Contract on Advanced Vikhr Missiles Deliveries

Sputnik News

16:32 27.04.2016(updated 16:37 27.04.2016)

According to the Kalashnikov Concern head, Russia signed the first export contract on the delivery of Vikhr missiles.

IZHEVSK (Sputnik)  Russia signed the first export contract on the delivery of new Vikhr missiles, Aleksey Krivoruchko, the head of Russia's small arms maker Kalashnikov Concern, said Wednesday.

"Two contracts for the delivery of Vikhr missiles have been sealed, one with the Russian Defense Ministry, the other one with a foreign customer," Krivoruchko told reporters.

On April 5, Russian arms manufacturer Kalashnikov Concern announced that the Russian Armed Forces had received Vikhr-1 guided missiles worth about 13 billion rubles ($191 million) under the state defense procurement plan.

 Sputnik

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Russia Wants Its Allies to Have Modern Armies

Sputnik News

11:28 27.04.2016(updated 11:29 27.04.2016)

Moscow is interested in its allies' ability to efficiently combat challenges to national security, the Russian defense minister said.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday that Moscow is interested in its partners to have modern weapons, military technologies.

"We are interested in our allies and partners to have compact, highly mobile armed forces, equipped with modern weapons and military vehicles that could effectively resist the challenges and the threats to the national security," Shoigu said at the fifth Moscow Conference on International Security.

He added that strengthening of Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) member states' borders meant strengthening of Russia's security. Russian bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are guarantees for regional stability, he said.

"We are convinced that Russian bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are guarantees for regional stability. Together with our allies we are strengthening their combat abilities, which in turn strengthens the security of Dushanbe and Bishkek," Shoigu said.

He said that it is in the interests of all to increase the military might of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

"One of the common goals is not to allow the expansion of terrorism into CIS countries. We are paying particular attention in this context of the alarming situation in Central Asia and on the development of negative influence from terrorist threats from Afghanistan," Shoigu said.

 Sputnik

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Results of Russia-NATO Council Don't Look Optimistic - Defense Minister

Sputnik News

10:04 27.04.2016(updated 12:35 27.04.2016)

The results of the first Russia-NATO Council in two years doesn't look too optimistic, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said at the fifth Moscow Conference on International Security.

On April 20, 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.

"Issues of European security will be discussed tomorrow. The situation in this area is sad. Russia's military cooperation with NATO countries and the European Union is frozen by no fault of ours and the Russia-NATO Council meeting on April 20 has not added any optimism," Sergei Shoigu said.

The Russian Defense Minister said that the actions of the US and NATO, which include the deployment of supporting military infrastructure near Russia's borders, are forcing Moscow to take retaliatory measures.

"<> the United States and NATO have started deploying supporting military infrastructure near Russian borders, implementing dangerous missile defense plans, increasing military spending. Such actions force us to take adequate retaliatory measures," Shoigu said.

"We prefer to communicate with the Alliance at the negotiating table, not through gun sights," the defense minister stressed.

Russia is willing to restore relations with NATO, however, this must be done on the basis of reciprocity, according to Sergei Shoigu.

"We are not against restoring relations with NATO, but this can only be done on the basis of reciprocity, respect for national interests and equal, indivisible security for all," he said.

 Sputnik

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Russia says ready to make T-90s in Iran

Iran Press TV

Thu Apr 28, 2016 12:49PM

Russia announced on Thursday that it is considering a plan that involves the licensed production of T-90 tanks in Iran in what could mark a new chapter in strategic relations between the two countries.

The announcement has been made by Vyacheslav Khalitov, the deputy general director of the UralVagonZavod (UVZ) which is the largest battle tank manufacturer in the world.

Khalitov has been quoted as saying by Interfax news agency as saying that the project to produce T-90s in Iran will go ahead as soon as there is a proposal from Tehran.

"We are ready, if the customer wants it," Khalitov said.

Iran has already purchased Russia's S-300 missile defense systems for $800 million and has started to receive the early batches of the system which will be fully delivered over the next months.

Iran's Defense Minister Hossein Dehqan left for Moscow on Tuesday to discuss the delivery of S-300 as well as several other issues of mutual interest.

Iran's Embassy in Moscow has announced in a statement that Dehqan is expected to discuss purchases of Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets and T-90 tanks during his visit.

Russia's media said in February that Tehran had handed Moscow a major shopping list involving arms and military equipment.

Sources close to the Russian government said at the time that Iran's Defense Minister Dehqan was to visit Moscow later in February to discuss new sales contracts that were collectively estimated to be around $8 billion.

"Iran would like to buy Russia's latest S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft missile system, developed by Almaz-Antey. And they make no secret of it. On the eve of his visit to Moscow Dehqan openly said to Iranian media they want to purchase the S-400s," Interfax quoted a source close to the Russian government as saying.

According to Interfax's source, the second important topic of Dehqan's talks in Moscow was expected to be Tehran's possible procurement, or even a licensed production of the new Russian Sukhoi Su- 30SM multi-role fighter.

Iran is also interested in Russia's Bastion mobile coastal defense missile system, equipped with supersonic Yakhont anti-ship missiles, along with Mi-8/17 helicopters and other arms, Interfax added.

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Blast kills terrorist commander in Syria's Idlib

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 3:14PM

A commander of a brigade affiliated with the Ahrar al-Sham terrorist group has been killed in a blast that targeted his vehicle in northwestern Syria.

The commander of Ansar al-Haq brigade, Saoud Assaf Abu Mazen, was killed as his car exploded on a road near Masaran village in the northwestern province of Idlib, Arabic-language Syria Now news website quoted media reports as saying on Wednesday.

Sources said unknown attackers had planted an explosive device in Abu Mazen's car.

No further details were available about the blast.

Over the past weeks, similar incidents have taken place in Idlib where rival terrorists fighting in Syria direct their weapons towards each other.

Earlier this month, infighting among Takfiri militant groups in Syria killed Abu Sakkar, the militant who had eaten the heart of a dead Syrian soldier about three years ago.

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on April 5 that rival terrorists killed "Khaled al-Hamad, who was known as Abu Sakkar and who was a military commander in al-Nusra [Front], by gunning him down" in Idlib.

Less than a month earlier, the Britain-based observatory also reported that infighting had intensified between rival anti-government groups in Idlib.

Militants from 13th Division of the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) and al-Nusra Front terrorists engaged in a fighting in Idlib's Ma'arrat al-Nu'man district, the group said on March 13, adding that the clashes left six FSA militants dead and 40 others wounded while dozens more were taken captive.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011.

According to Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, some 400,000 people have lost their lives as a result of over five years of conflict in the Arab country.

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Syria peace talks to resume in Geneva on May 10: Russia

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 6:54AM

Russia says Syria peace talks will resume in the Swiss city of Geneva on May 10.

"They will resume approximately on [May] 10, this has been announced by de Mistura," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov cited UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura as saying on Wednesday.

The Syrian government said on Tuesday that it had held a final session of talks with de Mistura in a "useful and productive round."

De Mistura was to brief the Security Council on Wednesday in a closed-door session on his diplomatic efforts to end the war.

The foreign-backed opposition walked out of the Geneva-based negotiations last week, bringing the talks close to the breakdown.

Militant groups announced a new war against Syrian government forces after threatening to abandon UN-brokered talks in Geneva.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said on the same day that Turkey and other countries were supplying terrorists in Syria with advanced weapons.

Wednesday is the last scheduled day of the UN-led negotiating round, but de Mistura hopes to reconvene both delegations.

His goal is to produce a paper with ideas shared by both sides on what a political transition for Syria would look like.

On Monday, Syria's chief delegate at the talks Bashar Ja'afari said he submitted "amendments" to the working UN document on a political transition.

"Today we submitted constitutional amendments to the paper submitted to us by the special envoy, and we consider such amendments to be an integral part of this paper," said Ja'afari.

Syria has previously ruled out negotiating over the presidency  specifically, over Assad's departure from it.

"I can describe this particular round as useful and productive," Ja'afari added, speaking of the round at which his opposition was not present.

De Mistura estimates that over 400,000 people have been killed in the conflict since 2011, which has furthermore displaced over half of Syria's prewar population.

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Russia Proposes Blacklisting Two Syrian Rebel Groups At UN

April 28, 2016

by RFE/RL

Russia has proposed that the United Nations Security Council blacklist Syrian rebel groups Jaish Al-Islam and Ahrar Al-Sham because of their links to the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda terrorist groups.

Russia's proposal to the council's Islamic State and Al-Qaeda sanctions committee on April 27 will go into effect on May 11 unless other nations represented on the 15-member committee block it, UN diplomats said.

"The reason for such a move was the information that these groups, which are waging a war in Syria, are closely connected to terrorist organizations, first of all with [IS] and Al-Qaeda," Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said.

Washington's mission to the UN cautioned against blacklisting the two groups, however, saying it would undermine attempts to get a sustained cessation of hostilities in Syria.

"Designating Jaish Al-Islam and Ahrar Al-Sham -- two groups that are parties to the cessation of hostilities -- would have damaging consequences to the cessation just as we are trying to deescalate the situation on the ground," Edgar Vasquez, a spokesman for the U.S. mission, said.

One UN diplomat told the Reuters news agency that Russia's move is aimed at "dividing the opposition" and weakening the opposition's hand in UN-sponsored negotiations with the Syrian government, Moscow's ally.

But Churkin disputed that the groups have been honoring the cease-fire or contributing to the peace talks in Geneva.

"The time has come to call things by their true names," he said. Blacklisting the groups would make them ineligible to participate in either the cease-fire or peace talks in the future.

Russia's Foreign Ministry has long said that Jaish Al-Islam and Ahrar Al-Sham should not be involved in Syria peace talks because of their ties to banned terrorist groups.

Jaish Al-Islam (Army of Islam) is a major armed rebel group in Syria and is currently a member of the High Negotiation Committee, a coalition of rebel groups formed in Riyadh last December to negotiate for the opposition in the talks.

The High Negotiation Committee is backed by Western nations as well as Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, but it recently suspended participation in the peace talks because of alleged violations of the cease-fire by the Syrian regime.

Ahrar Al-Sham never joined the coalition, contending that "revolutionary groups" were sidelined at the Riyadh meeting. But the group did attend this month's round of peace talks.

Ahrar Al-Sham is an ultraorthodox Salafist group and has fought as part of a military alliance with the Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria.

Ahrar Al-Sham's late leader fought alongside Osama bin Laden, but the group has denied sharing Al-Qaeda's ideology or organizational ties.

With reporting by Reuters and TASS

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/russia- proposes-blacklisting-two-syrian-rebel-groups-at-un-jaish- al-islam-ahrar-al-sham/27702672.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Syrian Truce in Tatters Amid Government Airstrikes, Messy Battles

by Jamie Dettmer April 28, 2016

U.S. allies in northern Syria, fighters from a Kurdish-dominated alliance and militiamen from the Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), clashed Thursday as Russian and government warplanes increased airstrikes on and around the city of Aleppo.

As fighting intensified, the U.N. envoy to Syria pleaded with the United States and Russia to intervene "at the highest level" to revive struggling peace talks, saying a partial truce reached in February was now "barely alive." Rebel leaders said the cease-fire was dead in all but name.

Fighting intensifies

That was clear on the ground in northern Syria as fights erupted among an array of armed groups, some, in theory, on the same side in opposing President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian government and Russian warplanes also intensified airstrikes in the north, hitting an Aleppo hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders Wednesday night, killing 14 civilians and three doctors, including the last pediatrician working in the rebel-controlled part of the city.

The hospital strike was condemned by international medical charities.

"The hospital bombing comes as the latest round of peace talks falters and the cessation of hostilities agreed in February is disintegrating into bloodshed," says Sonia Khush, Save The Children's Syria country director.

"Save the Children partners in the area have told us of almost constant bombing and shelling this week, and urgent action is needed to save the small but crucial gains of the past few months," she added.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest strongly condemned the wave of airstrikes. He said the United States was particularly appalled by the attack on the hospital. He described the tactics of the attack as "abhorrent" and "immoral."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement: "We are outraged by yesterday's airstrikes in Aleppo on the al-Quds hospital supported by both Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which killed dozens of people, including children, patients, and medical personnel."

Kerry said the U.S. was still trying to establish all the facts about the airstrike but added, "it appears to have been a deliberate strike on a known medical facility and follows the Assad regime's appalling record of striking such facilities and first responders. These strikes have killed hundreds of innocent Syrians."

He added that the regime's most recent "offensive actions" in Syria "compound the violence and undermine the cessation of hostilities."

It was not clear what steps the U.S. can take to shore up the always fragile and frequently broken cessation of hostilities agreement.

UN envoy calls for meeting

U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura called on Washington and Moscow to convene a ministerial meeting of major and regional powers that compose the International Syria Support Group (ISSG).

At a news conference in Geneva, he said both the Americans and Russians have "common interest in not seeing Syria ending up in another cycle of war." He hinted some progress had been made in peace talks before the rebel negotiators left the formal discussions.

The High Negotiations Committee of the Syrian Opposition, the rebel delegation to the stalled Geneva-based peace talks, questioned the credibility of the negotiations.

The delegation walked out of the formal talks last week, arguing that the negotiations were not bringing Syria nearer to a political transition. The rebels insist Assad should play no part in any transition, a position rejected by Damascus and Assad-backers Russia and Iran.

The HNC said instead of "meaningful negotiations the Assad regime intensified its atrocities on the ground." The committee has called for an urgent meeting with Western and Gulf countries opposed to Assad remaining in power.

HNC members have been briefing U.S. lawmakers privately for days that the peace talks are now effectively finished, according to Capitol Hill aides, and with it, the cessation of hostilities.

De Mistura insisted Thursday the truce is "still alive" but added that "the perception is that it could collapse any time...Let's put it in a few words - in the last 48 hours we had on the average one Syrian killed every 25 minutes, one Syrian wounded every 13 minutes."

US concerns

State Department spokesman John Kirby said he shared de Mistura's concerns and urged Russia to press the Assad regime "to fulfill its commitments."

Opposition political activists accuse the Assad government and its Russian backers of using the cessation of hostilities as an extension of a military strategy to undermine the rebels, saying that regime bombing and ground attacks have been targeting them as much as the terrorist groups the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida's affiliate in Syria, which were excluded from the truce.

"Assad regime forces and militias loyal to the regime failed to abide by the terms of the cease-fire agreement," according to Omran Center for Strategic Studies, a pro-opposition think tank.

"Assad regime forces violated the agreement many times, and quite often with Russian air support, striking Syrian revolutionary forces in a majority of the provinces. As of April 19, 2016 there were 1,180 confirmed Assad regime violations," calculates the research group.

Many of the violations "occurred as a preparation for future regime offensive operations" or to prevent Syrian rebels from maintaining control of any frontline operations against the Islamic State."

Aside from the collapsing cease-fire, Washington will also have to consider how it can disentangle its allies on the ground.

According to local political activists, Islamist factions Ahrar al-Sham and the Levant Corps, along with FSA militiamen, launched a major offensive Wednesday on the outskirts of the strategically important town of Tell Rifaat, which was captured in February by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is also backed, as is the FSA, by the West.

Casualties

The renewed battles over Tell Rifaat, involving mortar and artillery exchanges, leaving casualties on both sides, will further complicate U.S. efforts to shape a coherent on-the-ground alliance to fight the Islamic State terror group.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based monitoring group that relies on a network of local activists for its information, reported at least 11 fighters with FSA and Islamist factions were killed in the renewed fighting.

The Syrian Observatory said there were also SDF casualties but was unable to give a precise figure, although some SDF supporters put the figure at more than 60. Fighting between the two groups was also reported to have redoubled on the outskirts of the nearby town of Ain Daqna, south of Azaz, on the border with Turkey.

The clashes between anti-Assad factions assisted Islamic State militants in seizing control mid-week of several villages in the northern Aleppo countryside, killing a number of rebels during the fighting, say local activists.

IS has been attempting for weeks to regain villages it recently lost to the rebels. The Islamic militants were reported to have grabbed back the villages of Dudyan, Yahmoul, Jarez and Telil al-Hisin, despite a Turkish cross-border artillery bombardment aimed at halting them.

White House correspondent Aru Pande contributed to this report.

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Syrian Blast Destroys Aleppo Hospital, Killing 14

by Ken Bredemeier April 28, 2016

An airstrike in Syria has destroyed a hospital in Aleppo supported by the international charity Doctors Without Borders, killing at least 14 people.

Among the dead were two doctors, including Aleppo's last pediatrician working in rebel-controlled areas. News accounts reported three children were also killed in the night-time raid overnight into Thursday.

The attack came amidst a marked increase in violence in Aleppo, with nearly 200 killed in the past week in clashes between government forces supporting embattled President Bashar al-Assad and rebel groups trying to overthrow his regime. The rebels have bombarded government-controlled neighborhoods with rocket and artillery fire, while Syrian jetfighters have conducted air raids.

The fighting has left the country's supposed cease-fire in shambles, with United Nations envoy Staffan de Mistura saying a so-called cessation of hostilities agreement was "barely alive."

The pro-government newspaper Al-Watan said the Syrian army is now set for a "decisive battle" against rebel strongholds in Aleppo. An editorial in the newspaper said it was time for government forces to seize Aleppo, where 250,000 people live, and said the assault "will not take long to begin, nor to finish."



The head of Doctors Without Borders' Syrian mission, Muskilda Zancada, condemned the attack on Al Quds hospital, calling it an "outrageous targeting."

"This devastating attack has destroyed a vital hospital in Aleppo, and the main referral center for pediatric care in the area," Zancada said. "Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage?"

Humanitarian crisis looming

With the Aleppo violence intensifying, Jan Egeland, the chair of the U.N. humanitarian task force on Syria, said, "I cannot express how high the stakes are for the next hours and days."

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that least 38 civilians were killed in Aleppo and 40 more wounded in new fighting Thursday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned that Aleppo is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis

On Wednesday, Russia asked the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on a Syrian opposition group that has been heavily involved in peace talks.

Ambassador Vitaly Churkin accused Jaish al-Islam, and a second rebel group, Ahrar al-Sham, of being "closely connected" to Islamic State and al-Qaida.

Jaish-al-Islam is a top member of the Western and Arab-backed High Negotiations Committee, which the U.N. set up last year to work out a political solution to the Syrian civil war.

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Bombing hits Turkey's Bursa, wounds several people

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 5:32PM

A female bomber has set off her explosives in Turkey's northwestern city of Bursa, leaving at least 13 people injured, local media reports say.

The bombing took place near Bursa's 14th century Grand Mosque on Wednesday.

Turkish Health Minister Mehmet Muezzinoglu said none of the thirteen sustained critical injury.

Ambulances and fire brigades have been deployed to the scene, according to reports.

The blast smashed windows in shops near the mosque, with television footage showing the injured being treated in ambulances.

The office of the Bursa governor said, in a statement carried by the state-owned Anadolu Agency, that the attack was carried out by a female bomber. An unidentified government official also told Reuters that the bomber was dead.

No individual or group has claimed responsibility for the explosion yet.

Bursa, a popular tourist destination rich in Ottoman-era architecture, is an industrial hub directly south of Istanbul across the Marmara Sea.

Turkey remains on high security alert after a series of deadly attacks since last summer, which Ankara blames on the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group and Kurdish militants.

Ankara has been also engaged in a large-scale campaign against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in its southern border region in the past few months. The Turkish military has been pounding the group's positions in northern Iraq as well.

Turkey's operations began in the wake of a deadly July 2015 bombing in the southern town of Suruc. Over 30 people died in the attack, which the Turkish government blamed on Daesh.

After the bombing, the PKK militants, who accuse the government in Ankara of supporting Daesh, engaged in a series of reprisal attacks against Turkish police and security forces, prompting the Turkish military operations.

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Principle of Secularism to Be Preserved in New Turkish Constitution

Sputnik News

14:37 27.04.2016

Turkey's secular character will be preserved in the country's new constitution, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Wednesday.

ANKARA (Sputnik)  On Monday, Turkish parliamentary speaker Ismail Kahraman said that the new constitution should not continue the tradition of separating the state from religious institutions, calling for references to secularism to be stripped from its constitution in favor of Islamic principles. The statement provoked sharp criticism from the opposition.

"Secularism today is no longer a topic for discussion. In the newly prepared draft constitution, the secular principle will be preserved," Davutoglu said, speaking to the heads of the regional branches of the ruling Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Turkey's first constitution was adopted in 1921 under the influence of the first president of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who abolished the Sultanate and adopted the principles of secularization and modernization. It was modified in 1924, and later in 1961, before the current version was adopted in 1982.

In its founding principles, the 1982 constitution enshrines the principles that Turkey is a secular, democratic republic. Article 4 of the constitution bans any modifications to these founding principles.

 Sputnik

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U.S. Arrest Awakens Ghosts Of Turkey's Iran-Gold Scandal

April 28, 2016

by Charles Recknagel

Night-time police raids in Istanbul.

Reports of shoe boxes stuffed with $4.5 million in cash hidden in the home of a Turkish state bank head, plus a money-counting machine in the bedroom of a government minister's son.

And allegations that state funds are being used illegally to buy and funnel gold to Iran to help it evade international sanctions over its nuclear program.

Welcome back to 2013, when Turkey was rocked by a corruption scandal that implicated some of the closest associates of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Over the next months, the case would mesmerize the public as it mushroomed into a head-on clash between the investigators and Erdogan himself, who would accuse them of being part of a shadowy "state within a state" seeking to tarnish his government.

Within a year, dozens of prosecutors and police officials would be removed on executive orders from the case, the investigation would be dropped, and Erdogan would emerge with the image of a far more authoritarian leader than before.

Now the corruption scandal that so fascinated Turks three years ago is back in the news, thanks to the arraignment this week in New York of the key suspect in the case -- a Turkish gold trader and socialite who allegedly acted as the intermediary between Turkey and Iran.

Arrested last month in Miami, Reza Zarrab pleaded not guilty on April 28 to charges of conspiring with two Iranians to conduct hundreds of millions of dollars in financial transactions to help Tehran obtain gold and hard currency despite U.S. sanctions cutting off Iran's access to global financial systems.

According to Turkish investigators in 2013 Zarrab, a dual Turkish and Iranian citizen, was at the heart of a massive corruption scheme that involved payoffs to top Turkish officials. Under the scheme, Turkey legally purchased Iranian oil and gas for Turkish lira -- something permitted under the sanctions regime -- but the lira was then surreptitiously converted to banned bullion, euros, and U.S. dollars in Dubai before being delivered to Tehran by suitcase-toting couriers.

The question now is whether Zarrab's case could resonate beyond the United States to reawaken the investigation in Turkey that created such a political crisis for Erdogan. The answer, to be known only over the coming weeks, will do much to provide the measure of how Erdogan, now president, views the role of the judiciary and the role of political opposition in Turkey today.

Turkey's Fork In the Road

Many political analysts see the Iran-gold scandal as a watershed movement that changed Erdogan into a leader who is increasingly seen as intolerant of opposition and routinely tries to use the branches of government to crush it.

"He made sure by making big changes in the judiciary and among the police that all the dossiers [in the investigation] are closed and ever since that moment he has stepped up his fight against what he perceives as forces that want to topple him," says Barcin Yinanc, who reports on politics for Hurriyet Daily News in Istanbul.

She says the Iran-gold scandal, in which four government ministers resigned as unidentified sources in the judiciary leaked investigators' findings to the press, convinced Erdogan that parts of Turkey's judicial and police forces were riddled with a network of enemies that had to be crushed by force.

Exactly who comprises the network was never directly stated, but Erdogan has used references that make it clear to Turkish listeners he accuses the followers of a once-allied but now archrival Turkish political leader, the influential Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Gulen, who has lived in the United States since 1999 but whose supporters helped to bring Erdogan's Islamist-based AK Party to power in 2002, later split with Erdogan over ideological differences. Some of his teachings directly clash with Erdogan's own, including encouraging interfaith dialogue with Jews and Christians despite the Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader's history of up-and-down relations with Israel.

Since the crackdown on the Gulen movement in Turkey, which included shutting down private exam-preparation centers that the movement uses to recruit new members and raise finances, Erdogan has taken an ever-harder line toward political opponents of all stripes.

"His intolerance toward dissent is not limited to the sympathizers of the Gulen movement, any kind of dissent is unwelcome by him," Yinanc observes. "The very fact that there are nearly 2,000 legal cases that involve insults to the president shows that he is very intolerant of the tiniest criticism."

With the Iran-gold scandal now back in the news, Erdogan may have to brace for new rounds of fire over a scandal that seems to refuse to disappear despite the quashing of the investigation.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of Turkey's main opposition CHP, said when Zarrab was arrested last month that he hoped the U.S. proceedings would shed new light on the complex affair.

"I am sure there are many who won't sleep comfortably in their beds tonight," he told a party meeting in parliament on March 22. "They will hang out all the dirty laundry, and this way we will learn the whole truth."

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/turkey-us-arrest- awakens-ghost-iran-gold-scandal/27704593.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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5 killed in fresh surge of violence in east Ukraine

Iran Press TV

Wed Apr 27, 2016 5:25PM

At least 5 people have been killed in a fresh surge of violence in the war-torn regions of eastern Ukraine.

The Donetsk News Agency, which is run by anti-government forces in eastern Ukraine, said on Wednesday that a pregnant woman was among those killed on the frontline by suspected artillery fire from the Ukrainian troops.

Eduard Basurin, a defense chief of pro-Russia forces, said the victims were spending the night in their cars at a checkpoint outside the village of Olenivka, hoping to cross the line in the morning to territories under the control of Ukrainian government.

He added that 10 people were also injured in the incident.

Videos showed a car overturned and others riddled with shrapnel on the side of the road while unidentified forensic experts were seen examining what appeared to be a crater from a mortar shell.

Officials in Kiev denied any role in the incident. Local border guard spokesman, Anatoly Kotsurba, speaking to an independent website, rejected that there was artillery fire from their side, saying a blast occurred at the checkpoint.

The civilian casualties are the worst in months in eastern Ukraine, a vast area which fell into the hands of pro-Russia forces after a series of political developments in Kiev and southeast of Ukraine in 2014.

Checkpoints have been erected at both sides of the border, with reports suggesting thousands of people queuing for hours, if not days, to cross from one side to the other. Ukrainian troops are also accused of making money on giving travelers a fast track while the pro-Russia forces have their own permits and checks.

A truce mediated by Russia, Germany and France in February 2015 has failed to completely halt the violence as sporadic clashes continue between the pro-Russians and Ukrainian troops. Kiev accuses Russia of supporting pro-Russian forces through giving them military equipment and training. Moscow denies the allegations, saying it only backs the ethnic-Russian population against what is said to be the suppression of the Ukrainian government. The violence has claimed the lives of more than 9,100 people.

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Ukraine truce violations highest in months, OSCE says

Iran Press TV

Thu Apr 28, 2016 1:17PM

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) says the violations of the Minsk ceasefire agreement in the violence-wracked eastern Ukraine have reached their highest level in months.

Ertugrul Apakan, the chief OSCE monitor, said in the Austrian capital, Vienna, on Thursday that violence has "once again reached worrying levels" in the troubled region. "During the past weeks, the OSCE has registered the highest number of ceasefire violations in months."

He said artillery and mortars forbidden under the February 2015 Minsk agreement "are being used again in increased numbers" during clashes between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russia fighters .

Apakan also stated that a growing number of ammunition has gone missing from permanent storage sites and from known weapons holding areas. "Our observations suggest that many of these weapons are back in use at the contact line."

He also urged an end to "direct attacks" against monitors from the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) operating across the area.

"Three serious security incidents have taken place recently: weapons were shot in the direction of SMM monitors, they were threatened at gunpoint, and one SMM vehicle was hit by a bullet," Apakan said, adding, "This impunity for people who threaten, violently mistreat or attack the SMM, or who violate its freedom of movement, must end."

Apakan also called on both sides of the conflict to show "visible and decisive" action to restore the truce in the volatile region. "A sustainable ceasefire is of central importance to the further implementation of the Minsk agreements. Now is the time for the sides to show visible and decisive action to restore it."

In September 2014, the government in Kiev and the pro-Russians signed a ceasefire agreement in the Belarusian capital in a bid to halt the clashes in Ukraine's eastern regions.

They agreed on 12 points, including pulling back heavy weapons, releasing prisoners, setting up a buffer zone on the Russia-Ukraine border, and allowing access to international observers.

The warring sides also inked another truce deal, dubbed Minsk II, in February 2015 under the supervision of Russia, Germany and France.

Since then, however, both parties have on numerous occasions accused each other of breaking the ceasefire.

Conflict erupted in eastern Ukraine after people in the country's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea voted for unification with Russia in March 2014. The West brands the development as Moscow's annexation of the territory. The US and its allies in Europe also accuse Moscow of having a major hand in the crisis in eastern Ukraine, a charge that Moscow denies.

Ukraine's eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk have witnessed deadly clashes between pro-Moscow forces and the Ukrainian army since Kiev launched military operations later in April 2014 to crush pro-Moscow protests there.

The crisis has left about 9,200 people dead and over 21,000 others injured, according to the United Nations.

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OSCE: Cease-Fire Violations In Eastern Ukraine At 'Worrying Levels'

April 28, 2016

by Eugen Tomiuc

The security situation in eastern Ukraine is worsening, with cease-fire violations at their highest level in months, the chief OSCE monitor warned on April 28.

The statement by Ertugrul Apakan, head of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine, came as four civilians were reported killed in shelling in eastern Ukraine.

"During the past weeks, the OSCE has registered the highest number of cease-fire violations in months," Apakan said in a briefing of the Permanent Council of the OSCE in Vienna. "Armed violence in eastern Ukraine has once again reached worrying levels."

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a pan-European rights and security body, independently monitors the conflict.

The current cease-fire was agreed under a deal known as Minsk II, which was brokered in February 2015 by France and Germany and also signed by Russia, Ukraine, the Russia-backed separatists, and the OSCE.

Apakan warned that artillery and mortars banned under Minsk II "are being used again in increased numbers."

"A sustainable cease-fire is of central importance to the further implementation of the Minsk agreements," Apakan told the council. "Now is the time for the sides to show visible and decisive action to restore it."

More than 9,100 people have been killed in fighting in Ukraine's eastern and southern regions and around 21,000 others wounded since violence broke out between the Ukrainian government and Russia-backed separatists in 2014.

Apakan, speaking to journalists after the briefing in Vienna, also raised concern about "direct attacks" against SMM monitors, which he said were taking place "with impunity for the perpetrators."

"Three serious security incidents have taken place recently: Weapons were shot in the direction of SMM monitors, they were threatened at gunpoint, and one SMM vehicle was hit by a bullet," he said.

"This impunity for people who threaten, violently mistreat or attack the SMM, or who violate its freedom of movement, must end," he said.

Apakan also said monitors "continued to experience restrictions in reaching the Ukraine-Russian Federation border in areas not controlled by the [Ukrainian] government."

Separately, at a security conference in Moscow on April 28, OSCE Secretary-General Lamberto Zannier spoke out against the idea of giving weapons to monitors.

Zannier said arming the OSCE monitors should only be done if there is consensus and clear agreements are in place, and if their tasks are clearly understood.

At least four civilians were killed April 26 when three cars were fired upon close to a rebel checkpoint near the edge of the rebel-held town of Olenivka in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, the OSCE said in a separate statement, without assigning blame.

Alexander Hug, deputy head of the SMM, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service that monitors who examined the site of the attack established that the fire had come from artillery shells.

Kyiv has denied the separatists' accusation that Ukrainian forces opened fire on the checkpoint.

With reporting from RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-osce- fighting-at-worrying-levels/27704264.html

Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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US Mulls Intermediate-Range Missiles Amid Alleged Russian INF Violations

Sputnik News

23:01 27.04.2016(updated 23:30 27.04.2016)

The US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee is considering fielding intermediate-range missiles in response to alleged Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty banning such weapons, Congressman John Garamendi told Sputnik.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik), Leandra Bernstein  The 1987 US-Russian INF Treaty prohibits the use or development of ground-launched cruise missiles within the range of 300 to 3,400 miles.

"Russia has violated the INF Treaty," Garamendi said. "Now that they have, we are preparing a defensive mechanism and there is talk of America building intermediate range missiles."

Russia has rejected US claims that it has violated the INF Treaty. The US State Department began reporting alleged Russian violations of the INF Treaty in 2014, and in 2015 the Defense Department provided Congress with a classified report outlining possible responses to the reported violations.

"What the Committee is concerned about is that Russia has violated the INF, so what are the countermeasures, how we defend [ourselves], and secondly do we have our own," Garamendi explained.

He further argued that "Russia has managed to set off a new arms race."

The proposal considering such countermeasures will be addressed later on Wednesday during the House Armed Services Committee markup of the 2017 defense spending bill.

If agreed to, the proposal would direct the Defense Department to study the benefits of US conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 300 to 3,400 miles.

 Sputnik

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Musudan / KN-07? No-dong-B / Hwasong-10 / Mirim /

On 22 March 2017 the North tried and failed to launch a Musudan missile. According to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, North Korea launched an enhanced version of the Musudan mid-range liquid propellant ballistic missile Sunday 12 February 2017 which flew 500 kilometers into the East Sea. This report was in error. The launch was actually a solid propellant Pukguksong MRBM/SLBM. Pyongyang had test-fired Musudan missiles eight times between April 15 and Oct. 20 in 2016. Except for the 22 June 2016 success at which the missile traveled about 500 km, all of other launches failed.

The range of North Korea's Musudan ballistic missile may not be as long as the published estimates of 2,000 to 4,000 kilometers. US-based North Korea-monitoring website 38 North quoted experts as saying that the range of a Musudan missile with a payload of 650 kilograms was found to be between 1,900 to 2,350 kilometers. If the findings turned out to be true, then the missile cannot be fired any further then the 2,500 kilometer range of the Soviet Union's retired submarine-launched ballistic missile R-27, of which the Musudan's design is based. The latest revelation also meant the U.S. military base in Guam is out of the Musudan's reach if fired from Korean waters. The experts did point out, though, that the missiles still posed a threat to South Korea, Japan as well as China and Taiwan.

HS-10/No-dong-B/Musadan intermediate-range ballistic missiles IRBM according to the US Strategic Command and the South Korean JCS Command joint assessment explosively failed shortly after launch from its mobile TEL for a second time in less than a week at 7A.M. (Korean Time) on October 19, 2016 from its air base launch site near the city of Kusong in North Pyognan province part of the Sohae infrastructure missile launch test range. It was the eighth launch of the HS-10 in 2016 with only one success accomplished to date. More data is expected to come out in the coming days.

The DPRK accelerated Five Year Plan attempted another launch of it HS-10/ No-dong-B/ Musadan intermediate-range ballistic missiles according to the US Strategic Command at 12:33 PM (Korean Time) Saturday 10-15-16 near the northwestern cite of Kusong air base not far from the Sohae missile test launch infrastructure range head but its launch ended in a mid-air explosive failure soon after liftoff in the early flight program. It is assumed that its flight was intended to be similar to the previous flights but perhaps aimed at Japanese waters impacting in the Sea of Japan, Japans EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) waters some 250 kilometers from the Oga Peninsula, Akita Prefecture north east Japan inside the Japanese Air Defense Zone (ADIZ) instead of up the DPRK east coastal 400 kilometer range. Otherwise the launch could have been planned to fly down the Sohae missile test range as a near full range operational flight test for impact in the Philippine Sea some 3,200-3,860 kilometers or more with a 600-650 kilogram warhead. Like clockwork the launch had been anticipated and thus was not unexpected as are also its follow up test flights expected through 2018 of the present DPRK Five Year Plan. Operational field deployment could be expected sometime as early as in 2017 or 2018 depending on the nuclear warhead readiness for deployment operations.

Though the DPRK had not deployed any deliverable nuclear weapons, it was moving in that direction. They are no longer pursuing reducing the weapons size but only increasing its energy output. Warhead design mass reduced from a known 1,158 kilograms No-dong-A, A1 payload capacity to No-dong-B/HS-10 to a known 650-600 kilograms design mass. The night mare of deploying nuclear weapons and controlling them both for strategic reasons as well as regime protection is looming over that program as it approaches that level of progress. None of the missiles except No-dong-A1 an uprated propellant change No-dong-A have reached that level of reliability through repeated successful launches.

Both the Solid propellant SLBM and the No-dong-B/HS-10/Musudan have only arrived at successful flight testing not repeated many times. None have demonstrated full range performance but they were expected to carry that out by 2018 per the five year plans to if nothing else continue the psychological warfare on the world for regime survival.

North Korea launched two Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles off its east coast on 22 June 2016. The ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff condemned the North's launch, calling it a threat to international peace and security. "North Korea will face stronger sanctions from South Korea and the international community with these missile launches. The South Korean military is on alert and maintaining a full state of readiness in the event of any North Korean provocations that threaten the peace in the South."

Previous Developments

North Korea launched two Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles off its east coast on 22 June 2016. The ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff condemned the North's launch, calling it a threat to international peace and security. "North Korea will face stronger sanctions from South Korea and the international community with these missile launch. The South Korean military is on alert and maintaining a full state of readiness in the event of any North Korean provocations that threaten the peace in the South."

The first missile, fired at 5:58 AM, South Korea time, from the North's Wonsan launch site, flew 150 kilometers before exploding in mid-air. The second [sixth flight test] was launched at 8:04 AM from the same place and is believed to have flown some 400 kilometers down range and 1,413.6 kilometers in altitude, the furthest so far for a missile of this type. The distance was made possible by a steep near-vertical launch angle. Two hours after the first of these salvo launches the DPRK launched a second No-dong-B IRBM at 8:05 AM . This sixth launch (second in this series) of the Musadan [No-dong-B] IRBM missile was believed to be attempting to fly the same high ballistic trajectory with in DPRK territorial water of the Sea of Japan as previously observed in the previous flight test attempts.

The 400 kilometer horizontal range with near vertical ballistic trajectory flight attaining an altitude of 1,413.6 kilometers is close to the expected parameters for this flight test program over a 400-500 kilometer east coast waters and airspace range demonstration utilized by the DPRK for most missile flights. That DPRK east coastal range from Kittaeryong DPRK allows for 300-800 kilometer missile performance demonstrations over its coastal waters and international waters of the sea of Japan. Recent test history had seen that limited to about 400-500 kilometers or less. Because this launch series was again unannounced it was clearly to remain within the DPRK coastal waters airspace range of about 330-(420)-500 kilometers.

It suggests that the 650 kilogram reentry vehicle was subjected to the most intense ballistic missile type trajectory possible to fully prove the nuclear weapons prototype delivery systems viability. It is possible that the DPRK may have succeeded in its ballistic missile goal or came very close to that goal with this sixth flight test. The DPRK Strategic Rocket Forces were seeminlgy impotent as the Hwsaong-10 continued to fail in flight, but can be expected to return to full service operations. More flight test after further refinements would be expected to follow to prove the delivery systems reliability for operational deployment. A tracking and possible recovery ship was stationed near the down range impact point for the re-entry vehicle and disintegrating launch vehicle.

The video of the second flight test on 22 June 2016 was notable in disclosing the novel fin arrangements at the base of the missile. In the past, fins have been used to stabilize and control missiles and aircraft. Conventional fins are planar, constructed of solids or non-porous materials and are mounted on a missile body in such a way as to be aligned with the velocity flow thereby. Conventional fins generate lift or control forces when rotated out of alignment with the air flow there over or when set at incidence with air flow. Many surface-to-surface, air-to-air and air-to-ground, powered and unpowered, guided and unguided munitions have a common feature - fixed, conventionally-shaped airfoil section fins to stabilize and direct the flight path after separation from an aircraft. With these prior art fin arrangement, there are many limitations and therefore there is a need for a fin that had different characteristics and capabilities for use to control missiles or aircraft.

The Russian military deployed several operational ballistic or air-to-air missile systems using an effective fin technology that is different in configuration and operation than any preceding deployable fin system. Termed a "gas dynamic declination device" by the Russians, and a lattice or grid fin in the US, this system consists of several essentially rectangular "paddles" filled with a grid (grates) of approximately triangular, square, and diamond-shaped cells formed by a cross-hatching of thin metal. The fins are fixed to the missile body at the root end in a manner that allows them to be folded flat against the body of the missile in storage. Upon launch, the fins are deployed with their broad lattice face perpendicular to the missile body axis, and may be attached to internal mechanisms that allow the fin to be moved for directional control of the payload. Deployment is reliable because air loads on the fin are usually in the direction of desired motion, up and to the rear, although springs or other devices may be used to assure or hasten deployment.( See KN-2, SS-21 Scarab)

The US had undertaken an extensive evaluation of the lattice or grid fin concept. Numerous aerodynamic and systems studies, most notably by Mark Miller and David Washington, have been conducted over the past ten years. Miller, M. and Washington, D., "An Experimental Investigation of Grid Fin Design"; Miller, M. and Washington, D. "An Experimental Investigation of Grid Fin Drag Reduction Techniques"; and Miller, M. and Washington, D., "Grid Fins-A New Concept for Missile Stability and Control." These studies have shown that lattice fins are aerodynamically effective control surfaces that have slightly higher drag than conventional airfoil fins. If increasing priority is given to compact storage, lattice fins have an advantage over conventional systems. They offer interesting secondary advantages as well. They can operate at high angles of attack without flow separation because the multiple channels of the lattice act as guides controlling the flow. Because of their small size and small center-of-pressure travel with large changes of angle of attack, actuator size and power for controllers can be greatly reduced, leaving more space in an air-born system for fuel and other useful payload. Perhaps more importantly for internal carriage, lattice fins allow an air-born payload to maintain similar capability in a smaller package compared to a conventionally finned payload.

The No-dong-B with a 650 kilogram warhead is designed to have a range of about 3,900 kilometers. The DPRK had continued R&DTE operations to resolve the key technological issues plaguing this IRBM missile system. The 12 meter missile, long with a body diameter of 1.5 meters, is derived from the Soviet era SS-N-6 SLBM. This missile had a range of between 3,200 and 3,860 kilometers with a 650 kilogram warhead, based on official Soviet era and US documentation. To date all of the flight test demonstrations encompassed a high arc vertical sounding rocket like ballistic trajectory in the ballistic missile range within the DPRKs coastal territorial waters.

Previous performances known indicate

3,218 kilometers range known 3,000-3,500 kilometers derived from the 1,000 kilometers heavily instrumented flight test just flown for a 650 kilogram warhead. This is now modified because of the 1,413.6 kilometer official range vertical probe performance to greater than 3,200-3,860 kilometers or more with a 600-650 kilogram warhead US Department of State / Intelligence Community previous figures indicates 3,860 kilometers performance. With this flight test performance with a 600-650 kilogram warhead can indeed reach to the stated figure of on the order of a potential 3,860-4,000 kilometers but longer range flight testing performance will have to demonstrate this reality before we will really know.

The No-dong-B [Soviet era SS-N-6 derivation] carrying a simulated 650 kilogram warhead is designed to have a range of about 3,860 kilometers. The DPRK continued R&DTE operation to get at the key technological issues plaguing the ground based IRBM missile system. It suggests its single stage main engine fueling apparatus plumbing closed cycle turbo-machinery suffered a catastrophic failure causing the repeated explosions. Some of the problems the DPRK had experienced in recent missile firings are not easily explained. The land based similar system had been successfully flown but when the system of origin had failed in flight in its submarine launch test suggest that they have missed some key technologies required in recent tests now impacting the Hwsaong-10 missile.

To date all of the flight test demonstration encompassed a high arc vertical sounding rocket like ballistic trajectory with in the DPRKs coastal territorial waters ballistic missile range.

1. On 15 April 2016 the first acknowledged launch attempt of the No-dong-B / Hwsaong-10 / KN-07 land bases semi-mobile IRBM came on the morning of April 15, 2016 the DPRK Strategic Rocket Forces attempted to launch the No-dong-B at 5:30 am dawn from the vicinity of the east coast city of Wonsan in Hodo Peninsula. Two No-dong-Bs on their individual TELs had been deployed there for about 20 days (late March 2-16) for the preparation build up to this failed launch attempt. The first flight is stated to have veered deviated from its normal flight trajectory 5-6 seconds after launch liftoff, exploding at about 300 feet breaking up in a fiery catastrophic failure, collapsing back on the TEL. It disappearing from the radar systems of the South Korean Defense Ministry. It suggests its single stage engine fueling apparatus closed cycle turbo-machinery suffered a catastrophic failure causing the in flight explosion. The flight test demonstration encompassed a high arc vertical sounding rocket like ballistic trajectory with in the DPRKs coastal territorial waters ballistic missile range.

2. Two No-dong-Bs on their individual TELs had been deployed there for about 20 days (late March 2-16) for the preparation build up to this failed launch attempt. The second No-dong-B was stated to be ready for launch as the backup for testing if the first one had problems but that was cancelled at the time after the failure.

3-4. U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) systems detected and tracked what it assessed were attempted North Korean missile launches at 4:43 p.m. CDT April 27, 2016, and at 5:24 a.m. CDT, April 28, 2016. After additional analysis, U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) assessed that both launch attempts of presumed Hwasong-10 intermediate range ballistic missiles occurred from Wonsan. Initial indications revealed the tests were not successful. The first of this pare of launches launched outside the east coast city of Wonsan on the Hodo Peninsula veered off course suggesting steering issues crashed into the sea side beach area between 6:40 - 6:43 AM local time and the second launched around 7:26 PM local time seems to have failed midair after flying up several kilometers for about a minute before exploding. This seems to have repeated the April 15 failure mode in the Max-Q region.

5. A No-Dong-B, IRBM on May 31, 2016 underwent it fourth consecutive flight test failure under its new R&DTE program at 5:20 A. M. from its mobile transporter erector launcher (TEL) near Wonsan, on the Hodo Peninsula, Gangwon Province according to the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff. It blew up on its launch pad destroying the TEL vehicle that it never cleared. The launch was not detected by South Korean radars because the missile failed in flight at a very lower altitude before being in the detectable post liftoff altitude range but was observed by Japanese and US advanced radar systems cooperating with South Korean joint monitoring of DPRK missile activities. The missile was believed to be attempting to fly the same high ballistic trajectory with in DPRK territorial water of the Sea of Japan as previously observed in the previous flight test attempts.

6. The launch of Musadan [No-dong-B], Hwasong-10, approximately 3,900 kilometer range IRBM was detected on 21 June 2016 by the joint US, Japanese and South Korean forces. It was the fifth launch failure in this R&DTE series. It failed at altitude, after flying some 150 kilometer down range over the Sea of Japan heading up range after launch at 5:58 AM on June 22, 2016. It was launched from the same east coast launch range head east of Wanson area, DPRK. In this case both US, South Korean and Japanese radars detected the launch as it took place or soon after it gained some altitude. This fifth flight test attempt of the semi-mobile mobile transporter erector launcher (TEL) was conducted near Wonsan, on the Hodo Peninsula, Gangwon Province according to the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The design bureau may have been under such pressure for a full range strategic rocket demonstration prior to the Party Congress some weeks back as to literally launch as many missiles as possible hoping both to succeed close enough but also get at the vehicles systemic problems observed. Kim jung-uns gambit did backfired at the wrong time before the Party Congress.

These missiles use the same in the propellant tank submerged rocket engine and closed cycle turbo machinery if the turbo machinery is breached for whatever reason it creates an instant-ious fire explosion. It would appear that the failures are characterize as being systemic in nature. It suggests its single stage main engine fueling apparatus closed cycle turbo-machinery suffered a catastrophic failure causing the in-flight explosions. At least two of the four failures have suffered from a launch hard start of the main engine with the catastrophic results clearly displayed. That hard start if survived through initial launch may leave the lingering turbo machinery damage that soon catches up causing the explosive failures observed. Yet static test firings have shown it works correctly but in flight issue have caught up with the systems noted. Static test firings have shown it works correctly in a cluster of two engines seen successfully demonstrated for the KN-14 first stage recently.

All of the 50 or so missiles of this type will have to be return to the factory for retro fits when the issues is identified and the fix is resolved. If the fixes are outside the mobile truck kits to change the system they are intentionally sent back to the factory as the Soviets and Chinese have and still carry out. The KN-14 Limited Range ICBM prototype uses the same engine in a cluster of two in its first stage directly impacting it development because of these launch failures.

Some of the initial test flights seem to have experience a failure in the Max-Q region. The area of maximum dynamic pressure  max q  is the period when the aerodynamic forces on the launch vehicle are at their greatest. The density of the air decreases with altitude in a complex manner. The velocity of a rocket during launch is constantly increasing with altitude. Therefore, the dynamic pressure on a rocket during launch is initially zero because the velocity is zero. The dynamic pressure increases because of the increasing velocity to some maximum value, called the maximum dynamic pressure, or Max Q. Then the dynamic pressure decreases because of the decreasing density. The Max Q condition is a design constraint on full scale rockets.

On the US Space Shuttle, around 30 seconds into ascent, the liquid propellant main engines were throttled down  usually to 72%  to reduce the maximum aerodynamic forces acting on the Shuttle at Max Q. Additionally, the propellant grain design of the solid motors caused their thrust to drop by about 30% about 50 seconds into ascent, again, to ease the transition through Max-Q. Once the Shuttle passed Max Q, the main engines were throttled back up to 104.5%; this throttling down and back up was called the "thrust bucket". The space shuttle Challenger was lost at this point in flight, when the call "Go at throttle up" was given. However the Soviet era rocket engine technology utilized by the DPRK only utilizes rocket engine on and off commands with not digital throttling. Whether the DPRK had utilized step throttling in the flights of the Hwasong-10 remains unknown.

KN-11 & HS-10 Launch Failures Reasons Focus on Several Issues That Directly Impacts their programs:

Some of the problems the DPRK had experienced in recent missile firings are not easily explained in the face of the same similar systems success in the post flights known. The design bureau may be under such pressure for a full range strategic rocket demonstration as to literally launch for broke as many missiles as possible hoping both to succeed close enough but also get at the vehicles systemic problems defined through accelerated flight testing operational environment observed All three missiles KN-11, HS-10 & KN-14 are using the same first stage closed cycle RD-4D10 engine variants.

1. It literally blew up on its launch pad destroying the TEL vehicle:

Answer B: The hard start is an improper mixing of the propellants at the wrong time or place which is a flow control issue of the propellant manifold issue. That had apparently been resolved by precise presetting programming of the flow control valve system. Typically Soviet era engines are started run and shut off as the only programming required but this had required more homework for the setting parameters.

2. It suggests its single stage main engine fueling apparatus plumbing closed cycle turbo-machinery suffered a catastrophic failure causing the repeated explosions.

Answer D-E: Its single stage main engine fueling apparatus plumbing closed cycle turbo-machinery suffered a catastrophic failure causing the repeated explosions. This kind of failure could occur anywhere in flight but they are systemic of a common issue and failure in design specification requirement. The near max-Q failures seem to relate to the maximum dynamic loading failure of the internal plumbing its single stage main engine fueling apparatus closed cycle turbo-machinery suffered a catastrophic failure causing the repeated explosions.

If the propellant lines whether the main flow line or those associated with the closed cycle turbo-machinery are breached rupture anywhere along the separated flow controlled process the mixing of the propellants cause an instantaneous internal explosion of the hypergolic propellants and launch failure.

This is indicative of a propellant line seal failure possible precipitated by propellant/tankage control stabilization short coming or outright seal/weld stress failures. The propellant slosh baffling or stronger welds of the plumbing are typically required to resolve these hard to identify and resolve issues that require repeated flight testing to resolve.

Alternatively the use of simulated ground static testing of the full systems based on the flight test loading inputs. Additionally the static test firings that do not immerse the full engine turbomachinery in the propellant tanks for the test that if it is breached as suspected will severely damage the test stand from the explosive failure. Careful internal TV imaging during static test firings would be required to identify the failure areas. The DPRK had clearly walked away from this finality test stressing another more tedious approach.

DPRK welding quality does not impress at all from what had been observed.

3 .. veered off course suggesting steering issues The flight is stated to have veered deviated from its normal flight trajectory 5-6 seconds after launch liftoff exploding at about 300 feet breaking up in a fiery catastrophic failure collapsing back on the TEL as it disappearing from the radar systems of the South Korean Defense Ministry

Answer C: The veering off course is directly due to the two steering Verniers somehow not doing their job properly or outright failure in some element of the proven system.

4. .the second launched around 7:26 PM seems to have failed midair after flying up several kilometers for about a minute before exploding. This seems to have repeated the April 15 failure mode in the Max-Q region.

Answer D-E. See item2 answer

5. At least one suffered from a launch hard start of the main engine with the catastrophic results clearly displayed and this may have repeated itself in the land based version this time. Yet static test firings have shown it works correctly in a cluster of two engines seen successfully demonstrated for the KN-14 first stage recently. At least two now have suffered from a launch hard start of the main engine with the catastrophic results clearly displayed.

Answer B: See item 1 answer

6. That hard start if survived through initial launch may leave the lingering turbo machinery damage that soon catches up causing the explosive failures observed.

Answer B: See item 1 answer

7. It suggests its single stage engine fueling apparatus closed cycle turbo-machinery suffered a catastrophic failure causing the inflight explosion.

Answer D-E: See item2

8. .experimental launch ejection test operations resumed successfully on December 21, 2015 after its failed launch ejection attempt test on November 28, 2015 according to the Bill Gertz, Washington Free Beacon 01-05-2016 information. DPRK engineering technical personnel along with it Russian Federation Makeyev OKB acquired personnel clearly have defined the expected launch problems with the known snubber solutions applied to the external missile skin to assist with a clean launch from it launch tube via its solid motor burn hot gas pressure release and ejection to get the rocket above the ocean surface for rocket engine startup.

A. The first problem was the SLBM ejection snubbers issue easily resolved already

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As several companies from around the world of telecoms share their Q3 results, here is a financial round-up with all of the key points.
Estonian English

Estonia, 2016-04-28 11:40 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, on 28 April 2016 starting at 10 a.m., the annual general meeting of the shareholders of AS Harju Elekter was held at Keskvaljak 12, Keila. The AGM was attended by 81 shareholders and their authorised representatives who represented the total of 11,375,563 votes accounting for 64.12 % of the total votes.



The agenda of the general meeting was as follows:

1. Approval to AS Harju Elekter annual report of 2015

2. Approval to profit distribution

3. Introducing no par value shares and amendment of the articles of association

4. Reduction of share capital

1. Approval to AS Harju Elekter annual report of the year 2015

The general meeting resolved:

To approve the annual report of AS Harju Elekter of 2015, prepared by the management board and approved by the supervisory board, according to which the consolidated balance sheet total of AS Harju Elekter was 66,579 thousand euros as of 31.12.2015, while the sales revenue of the financial year was 60,656 thousand euros and net profit 3,186 thousand euros.

The number of the votes given in favor of the resolution was 11,365,683 which accounted for 99.91 % of the voted participants.

2. Approval to profit distribution



The general meeting resolved:

To approve the profit distribution proposal of AS Harju Elekter of 2015 as presented by the management board and as approved by the supervisory board as follows:

retained profit from previous periods on 31.12.2015 23,626,972 euros total net profit of the financial year 3,190,578 euros total retained profit on 31.12.2015 26,817,550 euros



Management boards proposal for the distribution of profit as follows:

dividends (0,05 euros per share*) 886,994 euros increase of reserves 23,792 euros balance carried forward after profit distribution 25,906,764 euros

The dividends will be paid to the shareholders on 17 May 2016 by a transfer to the bank account of the shareholder. * The shareholders registered in the shareholders registry on 12 May 2016 at 23.59 shall be entitled to dividend.

The number of the votes given in favor of the resolution was 10,793,733 which accounted for 94.89 % of the voted participants.

3. Introducing no par value shares and amendment of the articles of association

The general meeting resolved:

3.1 Introduce no par value shares.

3.1.1 In connection with introducing no par value shares, amend clauses 3.1, 3.2 and 11.3 of the articles of association of AS Harju Elekter and confirm their new wording as follows:

3.1 The minimum share capital of the company is EUR 5,000,000 (five million) and the maximum share capital is EUR 20,000,000 (twenty million).

3.2 The minimum number of no par value shares is 8,000,000 and the maximum number is 32,000,000. Each share grants one vote at the general meeting of shareholders. The company only has registered shares. The company only has one class of shares and these give the same rights to the shareholders.

11.3 The shareholders shall be paid a part of the profit (dividend) in accordance with the book value of their shares.

3.1.2 As a result of introducing a no par value share, AS Harju Elekter will have 17,739,880 no par value shares, whereas each share grants the shareholder one vote at the general meeting of shareholders. As a result of adopting the resolution specified in clause 3.1, the book value of an AS Harju Elekter share will be EUR 0.70.

3.2 Adjust the articles of association of AS Harju Elekter and approve its new wording as follows:

3.2.1 Exclude from the articles of association clauses 2.1.5, 2.1.6, 2.1.10, 2.1.11, 3.4, 3.5, 5.13 and 5.14.

3.2.2 Amend clauses 4.3, 5.2, 5.11 and 11.4 of the articles of association and approve these in a new wording as follows:

4.3 The shareholders shall be notified of the annual general meeting no later than three weeks in advance thereof. A notice of the general meeting shall be published in at least one national newspaper no later than three weeks prior to the general meeting.

5.2 The supervisory board consists of 3 (three) to 5 (five) members. The general meeting elects the members of the supervisory board for a term of 5 (five) years. The members of the supervisory board elect a chairman and, if necessary, a vice chairman from among themselves.

5.11 In the absence of the chairman of the supervisory board the chairman shall be replaced by the vice chairman or a supervisory board member authorised by the chairman.

11.4 Dividends may be paid on the basis of the approved annual report. The procedure for the payment of dividends shall be set out in a resolution of the general meeting.

3.2.3 Add the following clauses to the articles of association:

4.7 The shareholders may vote on the draft resolutions prepared in respect to the items on the agenda of a meeting of shareholders using electronic means prior to the meeting or during the meeting if it is specified in the notice convening the general meeting. The procedure for electronic voting shall be determined by the management board. The notice convening the general meeting shall specify whether electronic voting is possible and the manner for examining the procedure of electronic voting established by the management board. The shareholder who voted using electronic means shall be deemed to have taken part in the meeting and the votes represented by the shareholder's share shall be accounted as part of the quorum of the meeting unless otherwise provided by law.

5.4.9 Electing and removing the members of the bodies formed by the supervisory board and establishing the work procedure, unless otherwise provided by law.

Introduce a no par value share and approve the new version of AS Harju Elekter articles of association together with the abovementioned changes.

The number of the votes given in favor of the resolution was 10,908,009 which accounted for 95.89 % of the voted participants.

4. Reduction of share capital

The general meeting resolved:

Reduce the share capital of AS Harju Elekter after the entry into force of amendments to the Articles of Association on the following conditions:

4.1 Reduce the share capital of AS Harju Elekter by EUR 1,241,791.60, from EUR 12,417,916 to EUR 11,176,124.40;

4.2 The share capital will be reduced by decreasing the book value of the shares: as a result of reduction, the book value of AS Harju Elekter share will decrease to EUR 0.63, from EUR 0.70, the number of shares will remain the same (17,739,880) and the new amount of share capital will be EUR 11,176,124.40;

4.3 The share capital will be reduced by making monetary a payment to shareholders. Payments to the shareholders shall be made during the term prescribe by law;

4.4 The reason for reducing the share capital is the fact that AS Harju Elekter has no need at the moment or in the near future to own share capital within the registered amount;

4.5 The list of shareholders participating in the reduction of share capital shall be fixed as at 23.59 on 12 May 2016.

The number of the votes given in favor of the resolution was 11,300,441 which accounted for 99.34 % of the voted participants.



Andres Allikmae

Managing Director/CEO

+372 674 7400

Prepared by:

Moonika Vetevool

Corporate communication and investor relations manager

+372 671 2761
TORONTO, Apr 27, 2016 - Lundin Mining Corporation (TSX:LUN)(OMX:LUMI) ("Lundin Mining" or the "Company") today reported cash flows of $42.9 million generated from operations in the quarter, not including the Company's attributable cash flows from Tenke Fungurume. A net loss attributable to Lundin shareholders of $22.1 million ($0.03 per share) resulted for the quarter ended March 31, 2016.

Mr. Paul Conibear, President and CEO, commented, "We are pleased that all our operations achieved better than expected metal production with lower costs than forecast, enabling the Company to remain on track to meet or improve upon full year guidance on metal produced, capital spending, and operating costs. Our ongoing emphasis on cost efficiencies and productivity enhancements is expected to enable the Company to continue to generate healthy margins and further improve our strong financial position and reduce net debt throughout the year."

Summary financial results for the quarter:

Three months ended

March 31 US$ Millions (except per share amounts) 2016 2015 Sales 369.6 531.5 Operating earnings(1) 151.7 274.0 Net (loss) earnings (15.5 ) 83.3 Net (loss) earnings attributable to Lundin shareholders (22.1 ) 83.3 Normalized (loss) earnings(2) (12.3 ) 60.1 Basic (loss) earnings per share (0.03 ) 0.10 Cash flow from operations 42.9 224.0 Ending net debt position(3) 438.1 649.2

(1) Operating earnings is a non-GAAP measure defined as sales, less operating costs (excluding depreciation) and general and administrative costs. (2) Normalized earnings is a non-GAAP measure calculated as net earnings attributable to shareholders before the tax effected impact of foreign exchange gains/losses, unrealized gains/losses on revaluation of marketable securities or currency options and valuation adjustments on deferred tax assets. (3) Net debt is a non-GAAP measure defined as cash and cash equivalents, less long-term debt and finance leases, before deferred financing fees.

Highlights

Operational Performance

For the first quarter of 2016, production and cash costs(1) results were favourable as the Company continues with its production optimization and spending restraint measures, but financial results were negatively impacted by a lower metal price environment. The Company remains on track to meet or exceed full year guidance.

Candelaria (80% owned): The Candelaria operations produced, on a 100% basis, 41,507 tonnes of copper, and approximately 473,000 ounces of silver and 24,300 ounces of gold in concentrate. Copper production was 16% lower than the prior year comparable period due to lower head grades. Copper cash costs of $1.22/lb for the quarter were in-line with the prior year, and better than full year guidance due to cost reduction plans, operational efficiencies, lower electricity and diesel prices, increased productivity, and higher sales volumes.

Early works on the Los Diques tailings project continues on schedule. Highlights during the quarter include approval from Sernageomin (Chile's National Geology and Mining Service) to reduce the existing dam freeboard to enable an extra year of tailings capacity while the Los Diques dam is completed. Approvals from Direccion General de Aguas ("DGA"), Chile's General Water Department, for the freeboard adjustment and main dam permitting are still pending.

An updated cost estimate has been prepared for the Los Diques project taking into account design development, excellent progress to date on early works construction, owner self-perform cost trends and other positive factors including weakness in the Chilean peso. The new cost target to complete the project is $250 million (from January 1, 2016), a significant reduction from the original estimate of $325 million. At March 31, 2016, $225 million remains to be spent over the remainder of 2016 to 2018.

Eagle (100% owned): Eagle produced 5,968 tonnes of nickel and 6,240 tonnes of copper in the current quarter, lower than the prior year comparable period for both metals due to lower head grades as a result of planned mine sequencing. Nickel cash costs of $1.61/lb for the quarter were higher than the comparable period in the prior year due to higher treatment costs and lower by-product credit prices, but were significantly better than full year guidance of $2.25/lb due to high production rates and operating efficiency initiatives.

Drilling on Eagle East and other targets continued with seven rigs active on the property. The intent is to provide a maiden Inferred Mineral Resource prior to the end of the second quarter of 2016. In parallel, a Preliminary Economic Assessment is being completed to define access ramp and other resource exploitation concepts, and to support potential permitting and investment initiatives.

Neves-Corvo (100% owned): Neves-Corvo produced 13,745 tonnes of copper and 17,727 tonnes of zinc in the first quarter. Copper production was lower than the prior year comparable period due largely to lower recoveries, while zinc production in the quarter nominally exceeded the prior year comparable period. Copper cash costs of $1.48/lb for the quarter were higher than the prior year comparable period, a result of lower copper metal sales due to lower copper production ($0.08/lb) and lower by-product volumes and prices ($0.03/lb), but were better than full year guidance of $1.65/lb.

Zinkgruvan (100% owned): Zinkgruvan had one of its best production quarters on record. Zinc production in the first quarter of 2016 was 23% higher than the comparable period in 2015, while lead production was 46% higher than the 2015 comparable period. Production increases for both metals were due to higher mill throughput of zinc ore and higher head grades for both metals. Cash costs for zinc of $0.36/lb for the quarter were better than both the prior year comparable period and full year guidance ($0.45/lb).

Given positive trends in zinc price, together with Zinkgruvan's production and cash flow achievements, a decision was made to immediately remobilize the 1350 Zinc Expansion Project, a low cost ($16 million) initiative to increase zinc production by 10%. This expansion is now expected to be commissioned by mid-2017.

Aguablanca (100% owned): In January 2016, the Company advised local authorities, employees and affected communities that, in light of the current market prices for nickel and copper and expectations of continued financial losses, the mine would be permanently closed. The Company continues to work with authorities to move the operation into active closure and begin site remediation immediately following receipt of necessary approvals.

Tenke (24% owned): Tenke operations continue to perform well, generally meeting expectations for the quarter. Lundin's attributable share of first quarter production included 11,988 tonnes of copper cathode and 1,032 tonnes of cobalt in hydroxide. The Company's attributable share of sales included 13,369 tonnes of copper at an average realized price of $2.10/lb and 1,118 tonnes of cobalt, a quarterly record, at an average realized price of $6.32/lb. Tenke's operating cash costs for the first quarter of 2016 were $1.31/lb of copper sold, in-line with the latest guidance. Cash distributions received by Lundin Mining in the quarter from Tenke were $0.8 million. An additional $2.4 million was received from the Freeport Cobalt operations, for total Tenke related distributions to the Company of $3.2 million for the first quarter of 2016.

Financial Performance

Operating earnings for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 were $151.7 million, a decrease of $122.3 million in comparison to the first quarter of the prior year ($274.0 million). The decrease was primarily due to lower metal prices, net of price adjustments ($79.9 million), lower sales volumes ($28.6 million), and the shutdown of the Aguablanca operations ($17.0 million).

Sales for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 were $369.6 million, a decrease of $161.9 million in comparison to the first quarter of the prior year. The decrease was again due to lower metal prices, net of price adjustments ($79.9 million), lower sales volumes ($52.9 million), and the shutdown of the Aguablanca operations ($28.5 million).

Operating costs (excluding depreciation) for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 were $210.3 million, a decrease of $40.3 million in comparison to the first quarter of the prior year. The decrease was largely due to lower sales volumes ($24.3 million), the shutdown of the Aguablanca operations ($11.5 million), and favourable foreign exchange rates ($10.8 million).

Depreciation, depletion and amortization expense for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 was $119.6 million, a decrease of $37.5 million in comparison to the $157.1 million reported in 2015. The decrease was attributable to lower production in the current quarter at Candelaria and an increase in the Candelaria Mineral Resources & Reserves Estimate ($23.7 million), and the shutdown of the Aguablanca operations ($4.7 million). In addition, an impairment loss of $62.9 million on Eagle mineral properties recognized in the fourth quarter of 2015, resulting in a lower asset base for depreciation, coupled with lower metal production at Eagle ($6.9 million) also contributed to the decrease in depreciation.

Cash flow from operations for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 was $42.9 million, a decrease of $181.1 million in comparison to the first quarter of the prior year ($224.0 million). The decrease in cash flow is attributable to lower operating earnings in the current quarter ($122.3 million) and changes in non-cash working capital and long-term inventory ($60.6 million).

Net loss for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 was $15.5 million, a decrease of $98.8 million in comparison to net earnings of $83.3 million reported in 2015, negatively impacted by: lower operating earnings ($122.3 million); and lower income from investment in Tenke ($14.1 million); and comparative foreign exchange losses ($22.1 million); partially offset by lower depreciation, depletion and amortization expense ($37.5 million); and lower net tax expense ($26.8 million).



Corporate Highlights

On March 3, 2016, the Company announced that it had entered into an agreement with an affiliate of Freeport-McMoRan Inc. ("Freeport") to purchase an interest in their stake in the Timok project located in Serbia for total consideration of up to $262.5 million.



The transaction was subject to Reservoir Minerals Inc.'s ("Reservoir") right of first offer ("ROFO"), as well as other customary closing conditions.



On April 25, 2016, Lundin Mining was advised by Freeport that Reservoir has provided notice that it is proceeding to exercise its ROFO.

Financial Position and Financing

Net debt position at March 31, 2016 was $438.1 million compared to $441.3 million at December 31, 2015.

Net debt remained relatively unchanged during the quarter as operating cash flows of $42.9 million and distributions from Tenke and Freeport Cobalt totaling $3.2 million were offset by investments in mineral properties, plant and equipment of $47.5 million.

The Company has a revolving credit facility available for borrowing up to $350 million. As at March 31, 2016, the Company had no amount drawn on the credit facility. A letter of credit in the amount of $19.9 million (SEK 162 million) is outstanding.

Net debt at April 27, 2016 is approximately $460 million.

Outlook

Market Conditions

Production optimization, cost saving and cost deferral programs remain in place, pending improvements in market conditions. As metal prices improve, spending restraint programs will be reassessed.

2016 Production and Cost Guidance

Candelaria's copper production guidance has been increased to reflect higher throughput than planned over the first quarter and improved production expectations for the remainder of the year resulting from optimized pit and underground feed mine planning.

Cash cost guidance at Candelaria, Eagle and Neves-Corvo have all been lowered reflecting modest improvements in by-product metal prices and benefits from cost saving initiatives.

Guidance on Tenke's copper production and cash costs have been updated to reflect the most recent guidance from Freeport.

2016 Guidance Previous Guidance(a) Revised Guidance (contained tonnes) Tonnes C1

Cost Tonnes C1

Cost(b) Copper Candelaria (80%) 118,000 - 123,000 $1.55/lb 124,000 - 128,000 $1.45/lb Eagle 20,000 - 23,000 20,000 - 23,000 Neves-Corvo 50,000 - 55,000 $1.65/lb 50,000 - 55,000 $1.60/lb Zinkgruvan 3,500 - 4,000 2,500 - 3,000 Tenke (24%)(c) 54,000 $1.32/lb 52,800 $1.32/lb Total attributable 245,500 - 259,000 249,300 - 261,800 Nickel Eagle 21,000 - 24,000 $2.25/lb 21,000 - 24,000 $2.00/lb Zinc Neves-Corvo 65,000 - 70,000 65,000 - 70,000 Zinkgruvan 80,000 - 85,000 $0.45/lb 80,000 - 85,000 $0.45/lb Total 145,000 - 155,000 145,000 - 155,000

Guidance as outlined in our Management's Discussion and Analysis for the year ended December 31, 2015. Cash costs remain dependent upon exchange rates (forecast at EUR/USD:1.10, USD/SEK:8.50, USD/CLP:690) and metal prices (forecast at Cu: $2.10/lb, Ni: $4.00/lb, Zn: $0.75/lb, Pb: $0.75/lb, Au: $1,150/oz, Ag: $15.00/oz). Prior guidance assumed an exchange rate of USD/CLP:700 and metal prices of Cu: $2.05/lb, Ni: $4.15/lb, Zn: $0.70/lb, Pb: $0.70/lb, and Au: $1,100/oz. Freeport has provided 2016 sales and cash costs guidance. Tenke's 2016 production is assumed to approximate sales guidance. Tenke's 2016 cash costs assume a cobalt price of $10.00/lb.

2016 Capital Expenditure and Exploration Guidance

Capital and exploration (excluding Tenke) expenditures for 2016 are expected to be $220 million and $40 million, respectively, unchanged from guidance provided in the Management's Discussion and Analysis for the year ended December 31, 2015.

The Company estimates its share of sustaining capital funding for 2016 at Tenke to be $25 million, unchanged from previous guidance. All of Tenke's capital expenditures and exploration programs are expected to be self-funded by cash flow from operations. The Company expects to receive cash distributions from Tenke in 2016 of approximately $50 million to $60 million, higher than previous guidance of $30 million to $40 million, as a result of modest increases in copper prices.

Annual Meeting

The Company reports that it will hold its annual meeting of shareholders at the St. Andrew's Club & Conference Centre, 150 King Street West, 27th Floor (King Street/University Avenue) Toronto, Ontario, on Friday, May 13, 2016 at 10:00 a.m. Toronto time.

About Lundin Mining

Lundin Mining Corp. is a diversified Canadian base metals mining company with operations in Chile, the USA, Portugal, and Sweden, primarily producing copper, nickel and zinc. In addition, Lundin Mining holds a 24% equity stake in the world-class Tenke Fungurume copper/cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the Freeport Cobalt Oy business, which includes a cobalt refinery located in Kokkola, Finland.

On Behalf of the Board,

Paul Conibear, President and CEO

The information in this release is subject to the disclosure requirements of Lundin Mining under the Swedish Securities Market Act and/or the Swedish Financial Instruments Trading Act. This information was publically communicated on April 27, 2016 at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

Cautionary Statement in Forward-Looking Information and Non-GAAP performance measures

Certain of the statements made and information contained herein is "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. This report includes, but is not limited to, forward looking statements with respect to the Company's estimated annual metal production, cash costs, exploration expenditures and capital expenditures, as noted in the Outlook section and elsewhere in this document. These estimates and other forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, risks and uncertainties relating to estimated operating and cash costs, foreign currency fluctuations; risks inherent in mining including environmental hazards, industrial accidents, unusual or unexpected geological formations, ground control problems and flooding; including risks associated with the estimation of mineral resources and reserves and the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; the potential for and effects of labour disputes or other unanticipated difficulties with or shortages of labour or interruptions in production; actual ore mined varying from estimates of grade, tonnage, dilution and metallurgical and other characteristics; the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses, and commodity price fluctuations; uncertain political and economic environments; changes in laws or policies, foreign taxation, delays or the inability to obtain necessary governmental permits; and other risks and uncertainties, including those described under Risk Factors Relating to the Company's Business in the Company's Annual Information Form. In addition, forward-looking information is based on various assumptions including, without limitation, the expectations and beliefs of management, the assumed price of copper, nickel, zinc and other metals; that the Company can access financing, appropriate equipment and sufficient labour and that the political environment where the Company operates will continue to support the development and operation of mining projects. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Accordingly, readers are advised not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.



Certain financial measures contained herein, such as operating earnings, normalized earnings, net debt and cash costs, have no meaning within generally accepted accounting principles under IFRS and therefore amounts presented may not be comparable to similar data presented by other mining companies. This data is intended to provide additional information and should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for measures or performance prepared in accordance with IFRS.



(1) Cash cost/lb of copper, zinc and nickel are non-GAAP measures defined as all cash costs directly attributable to mining operations, less royalties and by-product credits.







Contact



Lundin Mining Corp.

John Miniotis, Senior Manager, Corporate Development and Investor Relations

+1-416-342-5565



Lundin Mining Corp.

Sonia Tercas, Investor Relations North America

+1-416-342-5583



Lundin Mining Corp.

Robert Eriksson, Investor Relations Sweden

+46 8 545 015 50


VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Apr 28, 2016) - NovaGold Resources Inc. (TSX:NG)(NYSE MKT:NG) is pleased to provide an update on its permitting activities regarding the Donlin Gold project. Permitting of the Donlin Gold project and associated key infrastructure commenced in 2012, a process well advanced into the expected time frame of approximately five years under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Donlin Gold continues to work closely with Alaska regulators to advance the numerous state permits required for the project. Donlin Gold's two-decade long constructive engagement with the Calista Corporation, The Kuskokwim Corporation (owners of the mineral and surface rights, respectively) and local communities continues to be a core asset for the Company, and strong source of support, as the project progresses through permitting toward a construction decision.

Since commencement of the public comment period in November 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), the lead agency for the Donlin Gold Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), has conducted 17 meetings in communities across the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) region and in Anchorage. At each meeting, the Corps presented an overview of the draft EIS, which evaluates the potential environmental, social and economic impacts of the proposed project and alternatives, and has encouraged local residents to communicate what the project means to them and their families. We continue to urge as many stakeholders as possible to present their views and suggestions on the Donlin Gold draft EIS to the Corps, as we seek to build what will be one of the most important new gold mines in the world.

In this regard, we endorse the Corps' extension of the public comment period for the draft EIS by one month until May 31, 2016, as this will provide additional time for the residents of the Y-K region and other interested parties to review and submit comments on the draft EIS. NOVAGOLD strongly encourages stakeholder engagement in the permitting process and believes the extension should further enhance appreciation of the multiple benefits that the Donlin Gold project would bring to local communities and the State of Alaska for decades to come.

"We are encouraged by the level of engagement we received from various stakeholders during the public comment period to-date," said Greg Lang, NOVAGOLD's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Our company strongly believes that the best outcome is always achieved in the atmosphere of openness, constructive discussion and mutual respect from all the interested parties. That's why we support the Corps' decision to give the process some extra time to achieve an orderly completion of this important stage in the permitting process."

About NOVAGOLD

NOVAGOLD is a well-financed precious metals company engaged in the exploration and development of mineral properties in North America. Its flagship asset is the 50%-owned Donlin Gold project in Alaska, one of the safest jurisdictions in the world. With approximately 39 million ounces of gold in the measured and indicated resource categories (541 million tonnes at an average grade of approximately 2.2 grams per tonne), Donlin Gold is regarded to be one of the largest, highest grade, and most prospective known gold deposits in the world. According to the Second Updated Feasibility Study (as defined below), once in production, Donlin Gold should average approximately 1.5 million ounces of gold per year for the first five full years, followed by decades of more than one million ounces per year on a 100% basis. The Donlin Gold project has substantial exploration potential beyond the designed footprint which currently covers only three kilometers of an approximately eight-kilometer long gold-bearing trend. Current activities at Donlin Gold are focused on permitting, community outreach and workforce development in preparation for the construction and operation of this top tier asset. The Donlin Gold project commenced permitting in 2012, a clearly defined process expected to take approximately five years. NOVAGOLD also owns 50% of the Galore Creek copper-gold-silver project located in northern British Columbia. According to the 2011 Pre-Feasibility Study (as defined below), once in production, Galore Creek is expected to be the largest copper mine in Canada, a tier-one jurisdiction. NOVAGOLD is currently evaluating opportunities to sell all or a portion of its interest in Galore Creek and would apply the proceeds toward the development of Donlin Gold. NOVAGOLD is well positioned to stay the course and take Donlin Gold through permitting.

Scientific and Technical Information

Scientific and technical information contained herein with respect to Donlin Gold is derived from the "Donlin Creek Gold Project Alaska, USA NI 43-101 Technical Report on Second Updated Feasibility Study" compiled by AMEC with an effective date of November 18, 2011, as amended January 20, 2012 (the "Second Updated Feasibility Study"). Kirk Hanson, P.E., Technical Director, Open Pit Mining, North America, (AMEC, Reno), and Gordon Seibel, R.M. SME, Principal Geologist, (AMEC, Reno) are the Qualified Persons responsible for the preparation of the independent technical report, each of whom are independent "qualified persons" as defined by NI 43-101.

Certain scientific and technical information contained herein with respect to Galore Creek is derived from the technical report entitled "Galore Creek Project British Columbia NI 43-101 Technical Report on Pre-Feasibility Study" dated effective July 27, 2011 (the "2011 Pre-Feasibility Study"). The Qualified Persons responsible for the preparation of the independent technical report are Greg Kulla, P. Geo., Principal Geologist (AMEC Americas Limited), and Jay Melnyk, P. Eng. (AMEC Americas Limited), each of whom are independent "qualified persons" as defined by NI 43-101.

Clifford Krall, P.E., who is the Mine Engineering Manager for NOVAGOLD and a "qualified person" under NI 43-101, has approved the scientific and technical information related to the Donlin Gold and Galore Creek projects contained in this press release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable securities legislation, including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, the timing of permitting and potential development of Donlin Gold, statements relating to NOVAGOLD's future operating and financial performance, outlook, and the potential sale of all or part of NOVAGOLD's interest in Galore Creek are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "potential", "possible", and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions, or results "will", "may", "could", or "should" occur or be achieved. These forward-looking statements may include statements regarding the 2016 outlook; perceived merit of properties; anticipated permitting timeframes; exploration results and budgets; mineral reserve and resource estimates; work programs; capital expenditures; timelines; strategic plans; completion of transactions; market prices for precious and base metals; or other statements that are not statements of fact. Forward-looking statements involve various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from NOVAGOLD's expectations include the uncertainties involving the need to obtain permits and governmental approvals; the need for additional financing to explore and develop properties and availability of financing in the debt and capital markets; uncertainties involved in the interpretation of drilling results and geological tests and the estimation of reserves and resources; the need for continued cooperation with Barrick Gold Corp. and Teck Resources Ltd. for the continued exploration and development of the Donlin Gold and Galore Creek properties, respectively; the need for cooperation of government agencies and native groups in the development and operation of properties; risks of construction and mining projects such as accidents, equipment breakdowns, bad weather, non-compliance with environmental and permit requirements, unanticipated variation in geological structures, ore grades or recovery rates; unexpected cost increases, which could include significant increases in estimated capital and operating costs; fluctuations in metal prices and currency exchange rates; and other risk and uncertainties disclosed in NOVAGOLD's Annual Report filed on Form 10-K for the year-ended November 30, 2015 with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Canadian securities regulators, and in other NOVAGOLD reports and documents filed with applicable securities regulatory authorities from time to time. NOVAGOLD's forward-looking statements reflect the beliefs, opinions and projections on the date the statements are made. NOVAGOLD assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law.

Cautionary Note to United States Investors

This press release has been prepared in accordance with the requirements of the securities laws in effect in Canada, which differ from the requirements of U.S. securities laws. Unless otherwise indicated, all resource and reserve estimates included in this press release have been prepared in accordance with Canadian National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM)CIM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves, adopted by the CIM Council, as amended ("CIM Definition Standards"). NI 43-101 is a rule developed by the Canadian Securities Administrators which establishes standards for all public disclosure an issuer makes of scientific and technical information concerning mineral projects. Canadian standards, including NI 43-101, differ significantly from the requirements of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and resource and reserve information contained herein may not be comparable to similar information disclosed by U.S. companies. In particular, and without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the term "resource" does not equate to the term "reserves". Under U.S. standards, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve" unless the determination has been made that the mineralization could be economically and legally produced or extracted at the time the reserve determination is made. The SEC's disclosure standards normally do not permit the inclusion of information concerning "measured mineral resources", "indicated mineral resources" or "inferred mineral resources" or other descriptions of the amount of mineralization in mineral deposits that do not constitute "reserves" by U.S. standards in documents filed with the SEC. Investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of "measured" or "indicated resources" will ever be converted into "reserves". Investors should also understand that "inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of the "inferred resources" will ever be upgraded to "indicated resource", "measured resource", or "mineral reserve" status.

Under Canadian rules, estimated "inferred mineral resources" may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies except in rare cases. Investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource" exists or is economically or legally mineable. Disclosure of "contained ounces" in a resource is permitted disclosure under Canadian regulations; however, the SEC normally only permits issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute "reserves" by SEC standards as in-place tonnage and grade without reference to unit measures. The requirements of NI 43-101 for identification of "reserves" are also not the same as those of the SEC, and reserves reported by NOVAGOLD in compliance with NI 43-101 may not qualify as "reserves" under SEC standards. Accordingly, information concerning mineral deposits set forth herein may not be comparable with information made public by companies that report in accordance with U.S. standards.


Vancouver, BC / TheNewswire / April 28, 2016 - Durango Resources Inc. (TSX.V-DGO), (the "Company" or "Durango") is pleased to announce that it has entered into a joint venture agreement with BC Anthracite Inc. ("BCA"), in relation to the Company's NMX East Lithium Project ("NMX East") and Buckshot Graphite Project ("Buckshot").

The NMX East Project is approximately 700 hectares and is contiguous with Nemaska Lithium Corp.'s (TSX.V-NMX) proposed Whabouchi Spodumene Mine with 23Mt Proven and Probable @ 1.53% Li (see TSX.V-NMX press release of April 4th, 2016). The Buckshot Project is 240 hectares and is located to the east of Canada Carbon Inc.'s (TSX.V-CCB) Miller Graphite Project.

The Company received a non-refundable deposit of $10,000 CAD in return for granting BCA a 60-day due diligence period to conduct site visits and commission a NI 43-101 Technical Report on each property.

BCA may earn up to a 100% interest in NMX East and Buckshot as follows:

-An additional cash payment of $50,000 CAD payable to the Company together with $100,000 CAD in exploration expenditures must be completed with a report acceptable for filing with the Quebec government by November 2016 to earn a 25% interest in the projects.

-Upon BCA completing a listing on a publicly recognized stock exchange or upon BCA completing a capital raising of not less than A$1 million, whichever is sooner, Durango will receive an additional cash payment of $100,000 CAD together with 1,000,000 fully paid ordinary shares in BCA, at which point Durango will transfer a further 75% of the projects to BCA.

-BCA will commit to spending a minimum of $2,000,000 CAD in exploration over a five (5) year period on the projects, with minimum expenditures each year to satisfy Quebec Ministry of Mines minimum work program requirements and fees to keep all claims in good standing.

In the event that BCA terminates the agreement it will return the claims to the Company with a minimum of twelve (12) months of good standing from the termination date.

Upon completion of the transfer of projects, Durango will be granted a 2% NSR that can be converted into a 10% free equity interest within six (6) months of the completion of a Pre-Feasibility Study on either of the Projects, with such conversion being at the absolute discretion of the Company. If Durango does not elect to convert the initial 2% NSR into the 10% free carried equity interest within 6 months of completion of a Pre-Feasibility Study, then Durango will retain only the initial 2% NSR and have no other equity interests in the Project or the joint venture.

BCA will have the right to purchase the 2% NSR from Durango for the consideration of $500,000 CAD which may be paid by cash or shares at the election of the Company, subject to regulatory approvals.

Durango will be entitled to additional cash and/or share performance payments as follows:

a)CAD $250,000 on minimum JORC or NI 43 101 of greater than 20Mt Reserves and <1.6% Li20; b)CAD $250,000 on minimum JORC or NI 43 101 of greater than 60Mt Reserves and <1.6% Li20; c)CAD $250,000 on minimum JORC or NI 43 101 of greater than 20Mt Reserves and <20% Cgr; and d)CAD $250,000 on minimum JORC or NI 43 101 of greater than 100Mt Reserves and <17% Cgr.

Up to 50% of the total consideration payable under this can be paid in fully paid ordinary shares issued at a 10% discount to the 10-day Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) at the discretion of BCA and is subject to regulatory approvals.

Marcy Kiesman, Durango CEO stated:

"We are excited to be working with BC Anthracite in advancing our lithium and graphite projects. The partnership offers Durango shareholders significant upside in the booming lithium and graphite sectors while conserving shareholder capital. This partnership will help Durango better understand the regional geology which will aide in the development of our additional areas of interest at a reduced cost to our shareholders while providing cash and shares as consideration."

Gino D'Anna, BC Anthracite Executive Director stated:

"We look forward to working with Durango to develop these exciting assets. Lithium and graphite will play a tremendous role in feeding innovation as well as serving a growing lithium-ion battery market for electric cars, mobile devices and mass energy storage units. Quebec boasts a supportive Government with respect to mineral development and has the necessary infrastructure to lead internationally in major resource development."

Durango's management is planning to undertake an exploration program on its other lithium claims adjacent to Nemaska Lithium Corp. and is working with crews to establish timelines and will provide updates as the plans develop.

About BC Anthracite NL

BC Anthracite is an exploration company focused on advancing copper, anthracite, lithium and graphite projects in Canada, with a vision to resources innovation in the high-end steel industry and emerging lithium-ion battery markets. It owns 100% of the Groundhog South Anthracite Project in British Columbia which boasts an NI 43-101 Exploration Target of 2.3-3.8 billion tonnes of high grade and ultra-high grade anthracite.

About Durango Resources Inc.

Durango is a natural resources company engaged in the acquisition and exploration of mineral properties. The Company has a 100% interest in the Mayner's Fortune and Smith Island limestone properties in northwest British Columbia, the Decouverte and Trove gold properties in the Abitibi Region of Quebec, and the NMX East lithium property near the Whabouchi mine, the Buckshot graphite property near the Miller Mine in Quebec, the Whitney Northwest property near the Lake Shore Gold and Goldcorp joint venture in Ontario, as well as three sets of claims in the Labrador nickel corridor.

For further information on Durango, please refer to its SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com.

Marcy Kiesman, Chief Executive Officer

Telephone: 604.428.2900 or 604.339.2243

Facsimile: 888.266.3983

Email: durangoresourcesinc@gmail.com

Website: www.durangoresourcesinc.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This document may contain or refer to forward-looking information based on current expectations, including, but not limited to completion of the work programs contemplated by the joint venture agreement, obtaining requisite approvals of the TSX Venture Exchange, BCA completing a public listing of its shares, future exploration or project development programs and the impact on the Company of these events. Forward-looking information is subject to significant risks and uncertainties, as actual results may differ materially from forecasted results. Forward-looking information is provided as of the date hereof and we assume no responsibility to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. For a detailed list of risks and uncertainties relating to Durango, please refer to the Company's prospectus filed on its SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com.

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.

Copyright (c) 2016 TheNewswire - All rights reserved.
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Apr 28, 2016) - Silver Bear Resources Inc. ("Silver Bear" or the "Company") (TSX:SBR) is pleased to announce that it has entered into a non-binding term sheet (the "Term Sheet") with the Company's major shareholders, Inflection Management Corporation Limited ("Inflection") and A.B. Aterra Resources Ltd. ("Aterra" and together with Inflection, the "Lenders"), for a comprehensive secured debt funding package (the "Debt Funding Package") for the final development, construction and commissioning of the Company's Mangazeisky Silver Project.

It is anticipated that the Company's wholly-owned Russian subsidiary, ZAO Prognoz, will be the ultimate borrower under the Debt Funding Package which will consist of a US$42.85 million secured loan (the "Secured Loan Facility"), a working capital facility of US$3.5 million and a contingency facility of US$2 million, for total funding of US$48.35 million. Pursuant to the Term Sheet, a portion of the Secured Loan Facility will be used to repay the principal and accrued interest on certain outstanding promissory notes previously issued by the Company to the Lenders. The Company anticipates that the Debt Funding Package will result in net new funding to the Company of approximately US$17 million following the repayment of such outstanding promissory notes.

The proposed Debt Funding Package is currently non-binding and subject to, among other things, the negotiation and execution of definitive loan and security agreements, the approval of the Company's minority shareholders, the approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange and any other required regulatory approvals, as well as other customary terms and conditions. There can be no assurances that the Debt Funding Package will be completed on the terms set out in the Term Sheet, or at all, or if completed, that the conditions to drawdown would be satisfied.

About Silver Bear

Silver Bear (TSX:SBR) is focused on the development of its wholly-owned Mangazeisky Silver Project, covering a licence area of ~570 km2 that includes the high grade Vertikalny deposit (amongst the highest grade silver deposits in the world) located 400 km north of Yakutsk in the Republic of Sakha within the Russian Federation. The Company was granted a 20-year mining licence for the Vertikalny deposit in September 2013 and completed a Preliminary Economic Assessment in February 2014. The Feasibility Study, scheduled for completion in Q2 2016, is contracted to Tetra Tech in the UK with SRK and ERM as subcontractors for the mining and environmental studies respectively. Other information relating to Silver Bear is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com as well as on the Company's website at www.silverbearresources.com.

Cautionary Notes

This release and subsequent oral statements made by and on behalf of the Company may contain forward-looking statements, which reflect management's expectations. Wherever possible, words such as "intends", "expects", "scheduled", "estimates", "anticipates", "believes" and similar expressions or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved, have been used to identify these forward-looking statements. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this release reflect management's current beliefs based upon information currently available to management and based upon what management believes to be reasonable assumptions, Silver Bear cannot be certain that actual results will be consistent with these forward-looking statements. A number of factors could cause events and achievements to differ materially from the results expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Such risk factors include, but are not limited to: specific risks relating to the negotiation and execution of definitive agreements for the Debt Funding Package; the satisfaction of each party's obligations in accordance with the terms of the definitive agreements for the Debt Funding Package; failure to receive any required regulatory approvals (including stock exchange), shareholder approval or other approvals; the possibility that the amount of net new funding to the Company following the repayment of certain outstanding promissory notes held by the Lenders may be less than anticipated; and risk factors identified by Silver Bear in its continuous disclosure filings filed from time to time on SEDAR. These factors should be considered carefully and prospective investors should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements necessarily involve significant known and unknown risks, assumptions and uncertainties that may cause Silver Bear's actual results, events, prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Although Silver Bear has attempted to identify important risks and factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors and risks that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. 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, prospective investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this release, and Silver Bear assumes no obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances, unless otherwise required by law.
Peter Jo is taking over the Bar Clarine space for his Dinner by Kimchi pop-up. Photo: Eddie Jim

Peter "Kimchi Pete" Jo has stepped down from his role as beverage director for Belles Hot Chicken but he hasn't left the building; he's taking over the (currently unused) Bar Clarine space for a six-week run of weekly-changing Korean banquets, Dinner by Kimchi at Bar Clarine, on Thursday and Friday nights and noodle bowls on Saturday afternoons.

It's a concept built around banchan; at least seven little bowls of pickled and fermented condiments that Kimchi Pete is making  radish kimchi, spring onion kimchi, sesame leaf kimchi, pickled radish, bean shoots in vinegar and chilli paste, this list goes on.

The front-of-house pro (Jo has also worked at Berta and Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney) will take some cues from his Korean-born parents, who owned one of Sydney's first Korean grocery stores in the '80s, for his first foray into the kitchen; dinners may feature bossam, a spiced, braised pork dish or doenjang jjigae, a soup of zucchini, shiitake and and tofu.

If you're keen on dinner there are two sittings each night for about $35-$40 a person. Seats for the upcoming Thursday and Friday will be released the Saturday before  first come, first served and strictly no menu changes.

On Saturday any leftovers end up in a soup ($15); that bossam pork is headed for a non-traditional ramen with an onsen egg and a Korean roasted seaweed called kim. Soup seekers can walk on in; doors open from 1pm Saturdays until sold out.

A short list of natural wines will be available, but no beer.

Dinner by Kimchi at Bar Clarine, 150 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, from Thursday, April 28. Reservations via email: peter.h.jo@gmail.com. See Jo's Instagram account @kimchi_pete for extended hours and menus.
At Ruby L'otel in Rozelle: Jovan Curic, chef Karen McPherson and Curic's partner Dee Zeljkovic. Photo: Dominic Lorrimer

What's the next step when you're a hot-ticket operator in a burger-crazed city placing increasing demands on your kitchen for handmade patties? Buy a butcher shop, of course. In a move that could prove just the tonic for under-siege suburban butchers if it catches on, Pub Life Kitchen owner Jovan Curic has snapped up a Hunters Hill butcher shop to supply meat for its rapidly expanding food empire.

If that's not enough sauce on your bun, PLK opens its long-awaited follow-up to its Ultimo venue on April 26, sliding into the former bistro site at Ruby L'otel in Rozelle. Curic says he has cut a supply deal with a Camden-based rare-breed producer that goes beyond burger meat, and while he'll wholesale burger patties from the new shop, he has plans for charcuterie. The Hunters Hill outlet will open later this year.

"We'll either call it Meso or Jovan's Meats," he says. The owners of Ruby L'otel approached Curic as he was finishing up a successful pop-up at Deus Ex Machina, which attracted massive queues. "They had a bistro space at Ruby L'otel that wasn't working," Curic says. "The timing was good, and the space really just needed tweaking. It looks like a big deck, so we've brought a bit of a Greek nautical look to it." Sydneysiders don't live on burgers alone, so there's plenty of other pub fare on the menu at PLK Rozelle.

Burgers are on the menu at the new Pub Life Kitchen venue. Photo: Supplied



Pub Life Kitchen will be open for lunch and dinner daily at 68 Victoria Road in Rozelle.
FILE - In this April 5, 2016 file photo, Vashti Whitfield, widow of actor Andy Whitfield, poses at the premiere of the film "Be Here Now (The Andy Whitfield Story)," in Beverly Hills, Calif. Andy Whitfield died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2011. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)

SHARE FILE - In this April 5, 2016 file photo, Vashti Whitfield, widow of actor Andy Whitfield, right, poses with actor Jai Courtney at the premiere of the film "Be Here Now (The Andy Whitfield Story)," in Beverly Hills, Calif. Andy Whitfield died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2011. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)

By ALICIA RANCILIO, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP)  Andy Whitfield found himself on the fast track in Hollywood in 2010, thanks to a starring role in the Starz series "Spartacus: Blood and Sand." Then he was diagnosed with cancer.

He attacked the disease with the same tenacity he brought to the "Spartacus" role, ultimately undergoing 11 rounds of chemotherapy for Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Whitfield also saw a greater opportunity. He and his wife, Vashti, allowed cameras to follow the highs and lows of what was to come.

"It was kind of like handing it over," said Vashti Whitfield. "And so we just continued on, you know, with the journey day by day, month by month."

Whitfield died in 2011, 18 months after he was diagnosed with cancer, leaving behind his wife and two young children. He was 39.

Vashti decided to let the documentary, called "Be Here Now," move forward. A Kickstarter fundraiser to finish the film became the third most successful campaign in the crowd-sourcing site's history.

"A new beginning formed," said Vashti. "And so it felt just as appropriate and in fact even more important as Andy's legacy to share the continuum of his kids and our, I guess, healing. And moving on with life."

Vashti Whitfield, director Lilibet Foster and family friend, actor Jai Courtney ("Insurgent"), talked about "Be Here Now," playing in limited release, in recent interviews with The Associated Press.

___

Associated Press: Vashti, were there any points during Andy's cancer battle that you wanted to stop filming?

Whitfield: There were moments for me where, honestly, I would've rather kind of, you know, plucked out my own eyelashes at the thought of the interview coming up. But I also knew that every time we did a one-on-one interview and all the times the cameras were with us, that it took you out of fear, it took you out of some of the thoughts that weren't necessarily supportive to being in the moment.

AP: What do you hope viewers will take away from the film besides Andy's courage in fighting cancer?

Foster: The love story. This incredible interplay that he and Vashti have with one another. They're extremely funny and I really wanted to capture that because I just thought it leapt out at me, so one of the things about the film is the story of the caregiver, and that's Vashti. And that's rarely told in stories like this, or under-told in many ways. So it's really about the two of them and this journey that they go on.

Courtney: I think what we're separating here is, you know, how he and Vashti decided to handle the circumstances. Cancer doesn't discriminate so the way they were able to create something out of a situation and do something extraordinary with it, is testament to their, you know, incredible force.

AP: Vashti, what's it like to watch the film now?

Whitfield: Look, for anybody that's been through losing somebody and understands the kind of different layers of grief, it's not linear. So, on one side, it's interesting because your whole nervous system responds to you now seeing something visually that recalls something that could almost make you feel like you literally want to burst into tears or throw up, it's so evocative, the memory. But that's actually for me subsided now, and so now when I watch the film I'm able to see all these different layers to it. You know, I'm able to enjoy hanging out with my husband and listen to his voice for two hours.

___

Online:

https://www.facebook.com/beherenowfilm

http://www.beherenowfilm.com/

___

Follow Alicia Rancilio online at http://www.twitter.com/aliciar/
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By Staff Report

Dr. Edith Osborne, Angelo State University assistant professor of chemistry, has been awarded a two year, $35,000 Single Investigator Cottrell College Science Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. The award will fund Osbornes research project, Novel Selenocysteine Insertion System for Protein Labeling and Human Selenoprotein Expression.

Selenoproteins are a type of protein that contains the special amino acid selenocysteine, which contains the micronutrient selenium, Osborne said. Selenium deficiency has been linked to increased cancer risk, decreased thyroid function and neurologic conditions such as Alzheimers. Osborne will be attempting to make human selenoproteins in bacteria, which could help scientists understand how selenoproteins affect human health.

Scientists often need large quantities of protein for use in experiments and routinely use lab strains of bacteria as factories to make protein, she said. However, producing large quantities of human selenoproteins has been difficult because the special cellular machinery that incorporates selenocysteine into selenoproteins in humans is different than the machinery in bacteria. This grant will fund efforts to create a way to make human selenoproteins in bacteria.

Osborne will be aided in her research by ASU undergraduate students. Some will be paid full time summer assistants, while others will work with her throughout the grant period for course credit. The goal of the Cottrell College Science Awards is to foster the professional growth of university science faculty and ensure that undergraduate students have the opportunity to participate in high quality research.

For more information call Osborne at 325-942-2181, Ext. 6629.
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By Paul A. Anthony

Fredrick Merril Jessop - the patriarch of a Schleicher County polygamous compound accused of orchestrating or condoning at least 10 marriages alleged to have occurred between underage girls and adult men - turned himself in Monday to Schleicher County officials and was released on bond.

Jessop and two others, indicted Nov. 12 by a Schleicher County grand jury, arrived at the Schleicher County Sheriff's Office shortly before noon Monday and were released on bond soon after, sheriff's personnel said.

Jessop, 72, believed to be the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints since the arrest of its self-styled prophet, Warren Jeffs, was indicted on a charge of conducting an unlawful marriage ceremony involving a minor, a third-degree felony. He was released after posting $30,000 bond.

Wendell Loy Nielsen, 68, was released on $30,000 bond - $10,000 each for three counts of bigamy, a third-degree felony.

Leroy Johnson Steed, 42, was released on $120,000 bond after being arrested on four charges - first-degree felony sexual assault of a child, which carries a $100,000 bond, and three others: second-degree felony bigamy, third-degree felony bigamy and third-degree felony tampering with physical evidence.

Jeffs also was indicted on a charge of first-degree felony sexual assault of a child, his third indictment since the grand jury began meeting this summer.

In Texas, a first-degree felony is punishable by 5 to 99 years in prison; a second-degree felony is punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison; and a third-degree felony is punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison.

All three categories allow a fine of up to $10,000 in addition to incarceration.

Nielsen and Jessop, FLDS elders who were among the closest to Jeffs while he lived at the YFZ Ranch, have been accused in case court documents of officiating a triple wedding ceremony.

One of Jessop's sons, 34-year-old Raymond Jessop, is alleged to have married Jeffs' 15-year-old daughter, while Jeffs, then 51, married Jessop's 12-year-old daughter, and another of Jessop's sons, 31-year-old Leroy Jessop, married Nielsen's 15-year-old daughter.

The ceremony, alleged to have taken place July 27, 2006 - documented in a dictation Jeffs made later that night - likely led to Jessop's indictment, as the charging papers refer to an incident "on or about" that date and refer to Jeffs marrying an underage girl.

The grand jury indicted both Jessop sons July 22 on charges of sexual abuse of a child.

Nielsen was indicted Nov. 12 regarding two allegedly bigamous marriages on Feb. 7, 2006, and a third on June 8, 2006.

According to bishop's records released as part of the mountains of evidence associated with the case, Nielsen listed 21 wives, ranging in age from 24 to 79, and 36 children still living with him as of August 2007.

Steed, in a bishop's record dated March 2007, listed eight wives, and identified one as being 16. He is accused of sexually assaulting a girl younger than 17 "on or about" Jan. 16, 2007, as well as engaging in bigamy by living with a 16-year-old girl beginning about March 25, 2007, and marrying a woman about June 8, 2006, despite already being married.

Steed also is accused of attempting to conceal an "electronic data storage device" and some papers in a trash bag on April 7, during the state's search of the compound.

In all, 12 FLDS members have been indicted in the state's criminal investigation into alleged sexual abuse at the ranch, northeast of Eldorado.

A total of 26 charges have been filed in the case, all related to allegations of underage marriage. The charges are an outcome of a state raid on the ranch in April, during which 439 children were removed by authorities after an allegation - now believed to be hoax phone calls - of physical and sexual abuse.

Merril Jessop's family has been the focus of the parallel investigation by the state's Child Protective Services agency into the alleged abuse at the ranch, with three of his children - including the now 14-year-old Jeffs wife - taken into state custody, and the girl removed altogether from the care of her mother, ranch matriarch Barbara Jessop.

During that case, CPS filed affidavits accusing the couple of witnessing or condoning no fewer than 10 marriages, many of them between their underage daughters and granddaughters and much older men - often at the request of Jeffs, who in his dictations claimed to have been told by God which girls were to be married to whom, and when.

Jeffs has been convicted in Utah of arranging a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin. He faces similar charges in Arizona, where he is awaiting trial.

Jessop has long been one of the most well-known of the FLDS leaders, thanks in large part to the defection of his wife, Carolyn Jessop, who wrote the best-selling book "Escape" about her time in the FLDS and testified against Barbara Jessop during a September custody hearing.
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Districts provide food, services to at-risk kids

By Laurel L. Scott

January 2010

11 percent ? military veterans

76 percent ? have a high school diploma or equivalent

24 percent ? did not graduate high school

7 percent ? did not pass eighth grade

65 percent ? living in San Angelo when they became homeless

35 percent ? lived outside the region before becoming homeless

8 percent ? stayed in an emergency shelter

58 percent ? homeless for the first time

58 percent ? working

24 percent ? working full time

Texas Homeless Network

About 150 homeless children attend San Angelo schools each year.

Unlike their classmates, these children are sitting at desks after a night in a down-at-the-heels motel room shared with parents and siblings, or at the Salvation Army's Red Shield Lodge homeless shelter, or on the floor next to the couch their mother slept on in a friend or relative's home.

"I honestly don't know if San Angelo is aware, and they would probably be shocked if they knew," said Susan Alford, head counselor and the homeless liaison at Central Freshman Campus. "When I tell people what I do, they're shocked. When you say someone's homeless, most people think, ?Oh, it's a bum living on the street.' "

Eddie Heath, director of pupil services for the San Angelo Independent School District, said many of the children are identified through the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 2001, part of the No Child Left Behind Act. The law defines homeless children and youth as those "who lack a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence."

The definition includes students who, "due to loss of housing or economic hardship or similar reasons," are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, campgrounds, cars, motor homes, emergency or transitional shelters, abandoned in hospitals, awaiting foster care placement or are doubled-up with relatives or friends.

"The vast majority of us are not beyond the reach of being in a bind, whether it's a health issue, a job loss, natural disaster, fire," Heath said. "No one is immune from that. Income doesn't change eligibility. Most are individual circumstances that affect people."

SAISD's efforts to identify and help homeless students start as the children register for school with a Student Residency Questionnaire.

The first question is: Is your current address a temporary living arrangement?

The second is: Is this temporary living arrangement due to loss of housing or economic hardship?

"What we want to do as much as possible is not use the word ?homeless.' This is a residency questionnaire," Heath said. "If they answer yes, then the form is directed to the campus liaison.

"The law requires a districtwide liaison, but it doesn't require the campus liaison. That's something we've implemented. The liaison is usually a counselor, an at-risk coordinator or a social service worker."

The liaisons investigate the students' circumstances and determine whether they are eligible for assistance under the McKinney-Vento Act.

Doubling up, for example, does not mean a family living with relatives, such as a grandmother, through choice, or roommates sharing costs.

Melissa DeLaCruz, a social service worker and the homeless liaison at San Jacinto Elementary School and Glenmore Elementary School, said the problem varies from school to school.

When there's a news report of a house fire, "We look to see what the address is, is it one of our kids," she said. "At San Jacinto, there's a lot of doubling up, families living together."

Debbie Ramos, a social service worker and the liaison for Bradford Elementary School and Belaire Elementary School, said the district's homeless liaisons work together and with other social service agencies to identify and get help for children and their families.

"The shelters might have a family we didn't know about, and we can hook them up with services. I think it gives them hope that they are not going to be forgotten. They can come to us, and if I can't find it, I'll find out," she said.

"Teachers will e-mail me, ?I'm worried about this family, can you go check?'" Ramos said. "Usually in January I hear about people who are living in hotels. Over the summer they have jobs, then over the holidays bills become hard to pay, and they get evicted and go into the hotels."

Ramos said she'll start by visiting the last address listed for the child.

"The house will be vacant. I'll go to the grandmother, the sister, looking for them," she said. "Some families, there's a pattern. If their great-grandmother was like that, their grandmother is like that, their mother is like that."

McKinney-Vento

Once identified, the McKinney-Vento Act requires that public school districts offer specific assistance:

* Free breakfast and lunch.

* Free transportation to school of origin.

* A waiver or suspension of documents normally required to enroll.

* Assistance with clothing, school supplies and toiletries.

* Free pre-kindergarten.

* Connection to other services.

"A lot of this is just designed to get the child enrolled and get services to them as quickly as possible," Heath said. "Part of what we're trying to do is do a better job of identifying students and making them aware of what's available. It's a fine line between you don't want to offend somebody but you want to let them know what's available."

Once identified, a student is eligible for the rest of the school year.

Tony Priest, the liaison for the Education Service Center Region XV, said McKinney-Vento is meant to help students, not label them.

"If their house burned down and all their material goods burned, finding a place to sit and do your homework is very challenging. There are barriers there that the average student doesn't have," he said. "How their peers think of them is the most important thing in their lives.

"It takes a lot of courage to come to school, smile, do your work like nothing's wrong when everything's wrong."

Heath said the 150 number at SAISD is probably low.

High school students, in particular, are harder to identify as homeless.

"They are better at hiding that. ... They're old enough to try to maintain a persona," Heath said.

McKinney-Vento requires that school districts provide transportation for students from their temporary residence to their school of origin if the child or family want that option.

Roger Garcia, the district's director of transportation, said as many as 50 students a year will opt for free transportation.

"We'll pick them up first on the way to run a regular route and drop them off on our way back to the shop," he said.

A couple of years ago, he worked out an arrangement with the Grape Creek Independent School District to share busing of students who crossed district lines.

In the morning a Grape Creek ISD bus would carry a student living temporarily in that district to his school of origin, then pick up any student living in San Angelo whose school of origin was in Grape Creek.

In the afternoon the trip was reversed, with the San Angelo ISD bus carrying the students to and from school and temporary home.

"Critical to young people is that feeling of belonging to a set of friends. The prospect of moving for no reason of their own is very upsetting, very distracting," Heath said. "This is meant to try to keep that from happening."

The waiver of documents typically needed to enroll in school ? birth certificate, immunization records, even proof of residency ? is along those same lines. Heath said paperwork can be lost in fires or natural disasters or left behind in domestic violence cases.

"We need to get them enrolled, get them started and get the paperwork handled later," he said.

Familiar faces

Porfirio Flores, social service worker and liaison for Crockett Elementary School and Reagan Elementary School, said familiar faces are important for the children and their families.

"Once they know you, they trust you. Once they trust you, they'll call you. You get to meet their needs," he said. "It's a great feeling when you get to help out. We wish we could do more."

He said families often move from motel to motel and motel to shelter and back to motel.

"They are very, very transient," he said.

Other families are living in substandard housing without water or electricity, he said, and will move if they fear Child Protective Services is investigating.

These conditions make staying at the same school even more important for the children.

"School is their happy place. They know they're safe here; there's food here," Flores said. "Social workers, we give it to them. If it's for education, I'm going to hook them up."

The liaisons are allowed to requisition $150 for each homeless student to spend on clothing, school supplies and toiletries, said Becky Trojcak, the district's executive director of federal programs and academic initiatives.

"We don't limit it to that amount ? we do have a limited amount of money, so we don't want to spend it all on five or 10 students ? but if more is needed, it's available. Sometimes $150 will only cover a coat and boots. The (liaisons) are very frugal. They can go out and find things. They have resources, know where to go and who to ask."

Trojcak said the funds come from the $2 million to $3 million the district gets under the federal Title 1 eligibility, which also pays for such things as classroom reduction teachers, books and tutors.

"We never give money; it's in-kind things," she said. "We don't actually give to the parents ? the transportation, the clothes, the meals, it's all for the kids."

Trojcak also said the recession might be having an effect on the number of homeless students.

"We've had a little bit of a bump up, a few more requests than usual for this time of year," she said.

Alford at Central Freshman said she loves shopping for the students.

"I get to be Santa Claus," she said. "What I usually do is talk to the parents, talk to the child and get sizes. I ask them everything about what color do you like, what kind of socks do you like. The $150, it doesn't go far."

Alford said she grew up as a child who never lacked for anything and sees many of the same kinds of students at her school.

"I happened to be student council sponsor one year. The students wanted to sponsor a family for Christmas. They wanted to make an elaborate dinner," she said. "I had to tell them the family had no electricity. No way to cook, to reheat, to store food. These girls started crying. They didn't know people at their school were living like that."

Area problem

Priest of Region XV, which includes 49 mostly rural school districts, said the problem is not occurring just in cities.

"That is something that's definitely been eye-opening to me. We're not just talking about people living on the streets," he said. "I think we're looking, with the economy, at an increase in this population. This can happen to anybody. People can lose their jobs and are not finding other jobs."

He said cases are less common in the rural areas but can be more difficult to handle, because smaller communities usually don't have "shelters and soup kitchens."

"In the rural schools they're seeing a lot more of it. They're having families coming in with nothing. In most instances, it's an entire family that's homeless at the time," Priest said.

"Rural school districts, they can provide education, but the issues of transportation, housing, medical, any kind of social services, they have a hard time," he said.

Connie Myers, chairman of the Concho Valley Homeless Planning Coalition, said the Texas Homeless Network estimates the Tom Green County homeless population at 470.

Of the people who participated in a county survey, more than half of them said this was the first time they've experienced homelessness, the network said.

Myers said it is impossible to get an accurate count.

"They don't want you in their homes, even if it's a bush," she said.

The coalition is made up of nonprofit and state agencies including the Catholic Diocese of San Angelo, Catholic Outreach Services, Christians in Action, Community Action Agency, Concho Valley Council of Governments, Early Childhood Intervention, Esperanza Health & Dental Center, ICD NewBridge Family Shelter, Legal Aid of Northwest Texas, MHMR of the Concho Valley, Shannon Health, Texas Department of Family & Protective Service, the Salvation Army and the United Way of the Concho Valley.

"Most of our kids we see here aren't homeless, they're just moving from house to house to house," Myers said.

In the past month, she heard about a family with six children living in a garage.

Her first question was: Are the children in school?

"They were, but the parents didn't know about the services available through the school district. That's the problem they're running into, they don't want to tell anybody," Myers said. "They have to face the mountain, and the mountain is admitting you have a problem and seeking help."

SAISD officials and liaisons say they run into the same problem.

"We really want these people to feel comfortable talking to us about these things, to ask us for what they need. We'd be glad to help," Trojcak said. "Sometimes you will get a mom who will ask because she's got to protect those babies. That mother bear aspect comes out. It's a feel-good situation for everybody. We try to make sure they get the help they deserve."

Heath said the law requires the school district to take certain actions, but "when you look at it from the outside, why wouldn't you do that anyway?"
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By Eva Guzman

As survivors of sexual assault begin to rebuild their lives, legal issues may arise that affect their safety, security, privacy and well-being. Coinciding with Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month in April, the Texas Access to Justice Foundation has announced Legal Aid for Survivors of Sexual Assault, a new and vital network of services now available to survivors of sexual assault in Texas who qualify for legal aid.

In Texas, one in five women and one in 20 men have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime, according to the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault. More than 90 percent of Texans who have been sexually assaulted did not report to law enforcement.

Survivors now have access to a statewide toll-free number  1-844-303-7233 (SAFE)  to call for representation and referral to nine legal aid organizations who are partnering with domestic violence and rape crisis centers across Texas for community outreach, education and referrals. This is the first statewide, collaborative effort to ensure critical civil legal services for survivors are available from anywhere in Texas.

Representation by legal aid programs, which have done an admirable job advocating for survivors in the domestic violence arena, has not been widely available for sexual assault survivors in Texas. Services delivered to sexual assault survivors in this manner are an emerging trend based on increased awareness and knowledge of the devastating effects of sexual assault on the whole of the victim.

This level of trauma can be debilitating without trauma-informed, client-centered responses to every aspect of the person's life. The civil legal challenges that arise are no different.

Last year, Texas legal aid programs helped more than 18,000 survivors of domestic violence obtain access to the justice system for civil legal problems. Unfortunately, many of these Texans are also victims of sexual abuse. The legal help provided to these survivors positively affected the lives of approximately 26,482 children and other family members who benefited from safe resolution to their issues. And still, more help is needed.

The LASSA initiative was made possible through $10 million in funding from the 84th session of the Texas Legislature for the 2015-2017 biennium, and the funds are distributed by the Texas Access to Justice Foundation to grantees across the state.

The LASSA Network intends to serve every Texas county, providing survivors of sexual assault with a wide range of free legal services, from general advice to holistic, direct representation in civil legal matters stemming from the sexual assault. Survivors' legal problems can include privacy violations, physical safety threats, school accommodations, employment sanctions, financial problems and housing problems.

Each organization in the network has identified a niche for services. Some will be focusing on Title IX outreach, education, referrals and representation, and some will be tackling the consequences of survivors of human trafficking. Others will focus on basic needs such as housing, employment and education issues that arise from the aftermath of trauma.

Legal aid services can help survivors of sexual abuse  including victims of human trafficking  achieve safety, security and stability. These Texans deserve access to justice and information to help them on their road to recovery. Help is one free and confidential phone call away at 1-844-303-7233 (SAFE). Please help spread the word.

Justice Eva Guzman has been a member of the Supreme Court of Texas since 2009 and is the courts liaison to the Texas Access to Justice Foundation and the Texas Access to Justice Commission.
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Michael Segor, San Luis Obispo, California

More accept climate change

In his April 23 column, "Environmentalists change tactics in effort to silence opponents," Alex Mills created the impression that the effort to slow climate change is mostly the result of a "perception" held by some environmental groups and the Obama administration.

In reality, the community that shares this perception has become huge, including 190 nations that joined the Paris climate agreement in December. The consensus is supported by every scientific organization in the world representing active scientists doing current research published in peer-reviewed journals.

But major organizations in other disciplines have joined the call for policy action, such as the American League of Cities, the American College of Physicians and the American Society of Civil Engineers, among many others. Also committed to serious reductions in their operational emissions are such global corporate giants as Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Walmart, Target, Nike, Apple, Google, Ford, GM, General Mills, Cargill, Kellogg, Mars, Nestle USA, and Unilever.

And even the biggest oil companies in Europe have endorsed the 2 degree Celsius target set by the IPCC: BG Group, BP, Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil, and Total. These oil giants have agreed to transform themselves from oil companies into energy companies.

This is how they put it in their open letter to IPCC participant heads of state: "Pricing carbon obviously adds a cost to our production and our products  but carbon pricing policy frameworks will provide our businesses and their many stakeholders with a clear roadmap for future investment ... We acknowledge the long-term challenge and appreciate that this will be transformative across the energy sector. Over many decades, our industry has been innovative and has been at the forefront of change. We are confident that we can build on our trajectory of innovation to meet the challenges of the future."
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By Wayne Hill

The greatest story never told is who is behind ISIL, who is funding ISIL and who is supplying them with weapons and military hardware?

One simple question that is never asked by our major media is: Who is buying the stolen oil that ISIL is selling for untold millions?

Earlier this year the Israeli defense minister accused Turkey of buying oil from ISIL and helping Syrian fighters move freely through Turkey into Europe.

Now the Russian ambassador to the U.N. has accused three Turkish foundations of supplying weapons to ISIL fighters, with the transfer of these weapons being overseen by Turkey's National Intelligence Organization. The Russian ambassador further stated that the transfer of weapons included $1.9 million worth of explosives and chemicals.

Both of these reports of Turkish collusion with ISIL were reported on Fox News ticker tape on Saturday.

Vice President Joe Biden in October 2014 told a Harvard University audience that our friends in the Middle East paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to radical jihadists from around the world to come and fight against the regime of Syria's Bashar al-Assad.

In 2015, Seymour Hersh published an investigative report based on a Defense Intelligence Agency document, reporting that the U.S. military and the intelligence community feared Turkey was supplying sarin gas to Syrian rebels. When the sarin gas attack occurred in Ghoutra, Syria, the "red line" that Obama had declared was crossed, but Obama had already seen the DIA report and the bombing campaign the neo-cons had called for did not happen, thanks to that report.

Apparently Turkey was hoping to draw the full brunt of U.S. military power against al-Assad and let the U.S. do the job for them.

Just last year two Turkish news reporters were arrested and accused of treason after they published reports alleging Turkey's involvement in the supply of weapons to ISIL.

Turkey's military is attacking Kurdish fighters that are battling ISIL in Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia is attacking the Houthis in Yemen, an enemy of al-Qaida, while most of Yemen is under the control of al-Qaida and gaining more ground.

The only presidential candidate to speak of our Middle East friends supporting ISIL is Donald Trump. He said early on in his campaign that our allies in the Middle East were funding ISIL, but the major media ignored that statement, just like they ignore the reports that continue to mount showing Turkish complicity with ISIL.

What is happening to our nation is because of men and women in high places who will not confront the facts and the truth. More and more of our armed forces are being placed in harm's way in Syria and Iraq, while our government  both Democrats and Republicans  deny the truth. It could very well mean the end of their careers and reputations if that truth is ever brought before the American public. They are extremely worried that someone like Donald Trump could become president and tell America the whole evil story.

Wayne Hill lives in San Angelo.
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By Candace Cooksey Fulton

The 1960s. I know some of us remember that decade, and no, I'm not saying for what. I will get to that. Faithful readers who keep up, will remember  because I mention it often enough  I was growing up that entire decade in the wonderful little town of Sanderson, Texas.

At least I thought it was wonderful. I know that surely things went on that I didn't know about. Sometimes, still, I find out about things that went on that I never knew about and I'm sad to know that bad things have happened to good people, or bad people were bad and ruined good things.

But one of the things about Sanderson that is, was and will always be true is that it's a very small town a very long way from  well  just about everywhere. The nearest doctor, and now the nearest grocery store, is in Fort Stockton, 65 miles away. Then (still talking about the '60s), if you were rich and your family could afford $6 a month for cable, you could have TV and watch shows on any of the three major networks with stations in Midland and Odessa, 150-plus miles away.

Now, for a lot more money a month, you can't watch any Texas TV stations in Sanderson, but get Satellite TV and watch broadcasts from Colorado, sometimes. If it's not too windy or stormy.

Well, the Cooksey family didn't have $6 a month, and we didn't have cable. We did subscribe to the San Angelo Standard-Times  delivered from San Angelo, 206 miles away, every morning Sunday through Saturday. And we read it completely and faithfully. And we talked about what we read  news, comics, obituaries and sports. Usually in that order.

I remember one of my daddy's favorite comic strips was "Li'l Abner," a long-running satirical strip by Al Capp that featured a Southern hillbilly family living in Dogpatch, USA  which was far from us, but not too awfully different from Sanderson, Texas. I didn't get the satirical humor so much then, but I loved the way Dad chuckled about the antics of Li'l Abner and Daisy Mae Yokum, other Dogpatch citizens and the Yankees passing through.

And I remember one series where Li'l Abner went off and joined a student protest group, the SWINE. It stood for "Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything." The name's stuck with me all these years. I still think it's pretty funny, and lots of times, when things are getting all the talk and it seems to me like a big ol' West Texas whirlwind of lots of ado about nothing, I wonder if we haven't all gotten a little "SWINE-y."

Couple of things come to mind. One: replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriett Tubman. Man oh man, have I got friends wildly indignant about that. And I'm thinking, "OK, until this very moment, had you given two seconds thought to which president was on what bill, or why? Is the money going to spend the same? Will I have enough of those kinds of bills to buy gas and groceries until this time next week? Is there some sensible topic we could talk about instead, some real issue that needs our attention?"

And issue No. 2 is all the hullabaloo requiring people to use the bathroom designated for the gender they were at birth. Golly, gee, I've got friends beyond up in arms on that one, and, again, I'm thinking, "How much of a problem is this for you? Have you ever had an issue? Are you someone who goes to a public bathroom thinking you're going to get to watch the person in the stall next to you take care of business? Do people usually watch you go? As a grown-up, have you or would you ever consider letting a small child in your charge go in a public restroom alone without supervision?"

Sorry, I just don't get all the wild indignation, and maybe that's my small-town, it's-not-such-a-bad-world-after-all logic. Or maybe it's that I just don't have time for making up problems when the ones in front of us aren't solved. Maybe I should start my own group and call it the BMTLR. That's Be More Tolerant Less Ridiculous.

In the meantime, here's what I suggest: If you get any $20 bills that offend you, send them to me, and whatever gender you are or want to be, in your process of using the restroom facilities, please aim carefully, clean up after yourself and flush.

Candace Cooksey Fulton is a freelance writer in San Angelo. Contact her at ccfulton2002@yahoo.com.
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By John Chinn

Last week I emailed all four candidates presenting questions relevant to the election. I told each I was writing the newspaper making a comparison of their positions. Frank Carter and Tim Vasquez responded. Mike Hernandez did not. Jeff Davis said he didn't have time to answer.

Using the responses received, newspaper interviews and the debates, it is worth considering the impact of the election and who is best qualified to be elected.

Each candidate is making a job interview to each of us. Being honest, we want a person with the absolute best credentials. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff. As we notice in the national election, there is a tremendous amount of talk but very little facts backing up the words.

Most voters likely consider the police chief election nothing more than deciding who will be chief for the next four years. That is only the tip of the iceberg.

Texas Local Government Code Section 143.014 allows the police chief to appoint the assistant chief positions. Assistants serve at the pleasure of the police chief.

Thinking a new chief will keep the current assistants defies logic. Each candidate has his own choices already in mind. Mike Hernandez: "I definitely have an administration in mind that can move right into position and take care of business." Will they have the experience and education of the current assistants? Newly appointed assistants will have no experience in those positions. All current assistants have been told to revert to their previous positions or retire.

The current chief and assistant chiefs have the legal right to return to their previous positions. It just will not happen. Issues of lower pay, lower positions and personal interrelations with other officers have to be considered. Based on the past, they will resign.

If they resign, the already understaffed force loses three officers over and above the current chief. That number alone is significant. Their years of experience (almost 90 years combined service; more than 115 years combined when chief is included) is irreplaceable. Not to mention the experience in their current positions  something a newly appointed person will have to learn flying by the seat of their pants.

Most, if not all, cities looking to hire a chief want a person with a number of years working as a policeman. They require the applicant to have a college degree, preferably in a field related to the job. San Angelo doesn't require either. San Angelo only requires the person to be a resident of the city for the past two years.

Of the current candidates, all have a high school education and a substantial number of years as a police officer. Based on available information, only Tim Vasquez has a college degree (BS, Organizational Leadership), a graduate of FBI Law Enforcement Executive Development Series and has a certified public manager certificate from Texas State University.

There are only minor differences in their positions. All agree drugs are the top concern. All of the candidates believe some positions would be better served by making them civilian jobs.

Almost every concern raised by the challengers has been addressed by the incumbent. Problem is most require City Council support  something that has not been forthcoming.

Officer retention has been raised as an issue. The city personnel office indicates that turnover has been approximately the same since 2010. Approximately a dozen officers are lost annually. Not quite half are retirements. Four or five leave for other opportunities and the rest are cadets that do not finish qualification.

The challengers all want district staffing versus the current sector staffing. This would be going backward, not forward. District staffing does not adequately address workload based on criminal activity or calls for service, which sector staffing does. The current chief is making use of the most current, innovative techniques in staffing. The department currently uses software making it easier for officers to write reports in the field. Some of these reports require review and comment by their supervisors  possibly a reason for the complaints by the challengers.

Unless starring in "Undercover Boss," the police chief position is to administer; not be on the street chasing cars. Tim Vasquez is the one and only clearly qualified candidate and deserves your vote.

John Chinn lives in San Angelo.
Amount approved by voters in Katy, Texas, last week to be spent on a new high school football stadium.
Two Montgomery County residents won the Democratic and Republican primaries for Pennsylvania attorney general Tuesday and will face each other in the fall for the right to succeed Kathleen Kane, the embattled incumbent who opted not to seek re-election.On the Democratic side, Montgomery County Commissioner Josh Shapiro outlasted Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala.With 93 percent of precincts reporting at 11:50 p.m., Shapiro secured 659,897 votes (47 percent) compared to Zappala's 524,918 votes (37 percent), according to unofficial results. Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli came in a distant third with 220,689 (16 percent) of the votes.A short time later, Zappala conceded to Shapiro, 42, a lawyer and former state representative form Abington. He had the backing of Gov. Tom Wolf and President Barack Obama.On the GOP side, John Rafferty, a state senator from Montgomery County, crushed his opponent, Joe Peters, a former Scranton police officer and federal prosecutor. Rafferty captured 731,434 votes (64 percent) compared with Peters' 415,681 (36 percent) in unofficial results."I am extremely honored and excited to be the Republican nominee for the office of attorney general," Rafferty, 63, said in a statement."I'm honored to have earned the support of voters from every corner of our commonwealth and to be the Democratic nominee for attorney general," Shapiro said in a statement late Tuesday."I want to thank John Morganelli and Steve Zappala for putting their names on the ballot and running a hard-fought race," he said. "It's time to use this office to be a voice for the voiceless, to be a progressive force for change and to make our communities safer. That's what I'll do as your attorney general."Shapiro's and Rafferty's wins show the growing electoral might candidates from the heavily populated Philadelphia suburbs can have over other candidates. Despite having more experience as a prosecutor and coming from heavily Democratic Allegheny County, Zappala could not overcome Shapiro's name recognition in the Philadelphia suburbs, which are trending Democratic in statewide elections.The winner of the Nov. 8 general election will earn $158,764 and inherit an office beset with controversy.The attorney general's office, the state's top criminal and civil law enforcement agency, is rife with internal bickering, power struggles, feuds and lawsuits.Kane, the first woman and Democrat to win election to the post of top law enforcement officer, had her law license suspended by the Supreme Court after she was charged with perjury for allegedly lying under oath about a grand jury leak. That suspension caused the Senate to consider, but ultimately back down from, a vote to remove Kane from office under a rare constitutional provision.The House, on the other hand, still has open an impeachment inquiry related to Kane's suspension and other agency problems, some of which are detailed in federal and state civil lawsuits.Kane and other top staffers have been sued multiple times by current and former agency workers who claimed she abused her power by firing or disciplining them for criticizing her decisions or her administration.Kane also got wrapped up in a never-ending battle over inappropriate emails her administration unearthed on agency computers during its review of her predecessor's handling of the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse investigation. While claiming she wanted the public to see every email that depicted sexual or racial messages, Kane's office successfully blocked media attempts to gain access to the records under the Right to Know Law.At the same time, Kane's political surrogate parsed out inappropriate emails sent and received by Republican Supreme Court Justice J. Michael Eakin, leading to another judicial probe and his retirement from the bench.During her tenure, Kane also got into heated public fights with Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams and officials with the Pennsylvania State Police.Whoever wins in November is going to have to mend fences in and out of the office and also bring in their own team, Morganelli said Tuesday in conceding his loss."I believe any of these fellows who would be elected will probably do that," he said.In his statement, Rafferty hinted at the agency's strife."This is just the first step, albeit an important one, in my quest to reshape and reform the office of attorney general," he said. "I promise to restore credibility and public confidence to the office of attorney general."Rafferty, a four-term senator who also worked previously as a private attorney and state prosecutor, was the first candidate out of the gate for either party. An unabashed, longtime supporter of law enforcement as a member of the Senate, Rafferty announced his candidacy in June 2015 amid a phalanx of unionized police officers and first-responders. He won endorsements early from the Pennsylvania State Troopers Association, state chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police and firefighters unions.Peters' candidacy seemingly came out of the blue in late 2015, more than a year after he resigned as a spokesman for Kane, so he never was a real threat to Rafferty, who also had the support of the state Republican Party."I am proud of the strong effort my team and I generated across the state as we took on the GOP establishment and an opponent who had already been endorsed by the state Republican Party," Peters, 59, said.The more competitive race from start to finish was on the Democratic side.Morganelli, 60, the state's longest-tenured county prosecutor and an early critic of Kane's, was the first Democrat to enter the race. He touted his courtroom experience, saying he is the only candidate to personally prosecute a case.But Morganelli, who lost elections for the attorney general post in 2000, 2004 and 2008, knew he faced an uphill battle to win in a three-way primary this year.The Lehigh Valley is not known for electing candidates to statewide office. The electorate living in and around Easton, Bethlehem and Allentown rarely join forces to support a native son or daughter for higher office and they do not treat elective politics as a blood sport like voters in Philadelphia and the Scranton regions do."I've been a student of politics and I knew running against a guy from Pittsburgh and a guy from Philadelphia [area] and with me being from the Lehigh Valley ... I figured that's where it would end up," Morganelli said.But Morganelli came out swinging against Shapiro. In debates and news conferences, Morganelli repeatedly attacked Shapiro, calling him a politician who had never used his law degree to try a criminal or civil case in court and who knowingly took campaign contributions from companies doing business in Montgomery County.Shapiro responded by accusing Morganelli of being in cahoots with Zappala in an effort to split the Democratic vote in Philadelphia and its suburbs.Morganelli and Zappala denied the charge.Morganelli raised $704,966, most of which he carried over from his county district attorney campaign fund, and spent $360,835.Zappala had $501,900 in cash and raised an additional $1.1 million and spent about $1.5 million through April 11, state campaign finance records show.Shapiro raised about $2.7 million, which includes $1.2 million he transferred from his old state representative campaign fund. He spent about $1.6 million.All told, the three Democrats raised $4.5 million and spent $3.5 million.Rafferty raised $328,285 and spent $120,931. Peters raised $27,550 and spent $16,620.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam on Wednesday signed into law a controversial bill that allows therapists and counselors with "sincerely held principles" to turn away lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender clients among others.In his signing statement, the Republican governor said "after considerable thought and discussion with counselors both for and against the bill, I have decided to sign Senate Bill 1556."Haslam also said there were "two key provisions of this legislation that addressed concerns I had about clients not receiving care. First, the bill clearly states that it 'shall not apply to a counselor or therapist when an individual seeking or undergoing counseling is in imminent danger of harming themselves or others.'"Secondly," Haslam added, "the bill requires that any counselor or therapist who feels they cannot serve a client due to the counselor's sincerely held principles must coordinate a referral of the client to another counselor or therapist who will provide the counseling or therapy."The bill has generated national attention, with the state's LGBT community, as well as the American Counseling Association, objecting to the legislation and urging Haslam to veto it.Critics say the measure, which protects therapists from lawsuits and professional discipline for rejecting clients, could prove especially harmful to young LGBT students bullied at school.But Rep. Dan Howell, R-Georgetown, who along with Sen. Jack Johnson, R-Franklin, sponsored the measure, has said the bill is intended to protect First Amendment guarantees of free speech and religious liberty.Haslam argued the "substance of this bill doesn't address a group, issue or belief system. Rather, it allows counselors -- just as we allow other professionals like doctors and lawyers -- to refer a client to another counselor when the goals or behaviors would violate a sincerely held principle."I believe it is reasonable to allow these professionals to determine if and when an individual would be better served by another counselor to meet his or her needs," Haslam added.Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that "we are disappointed that the governor has chosen to sign this troubling bill into law. This measure is rooted in the dangerous misconception that religion can be used as a free pass to discriminate."Chris Sanders, executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project, said "we had hoped for a veto. We know the governor carefully considered his decision, but the reality we now face is that counselors will be able to discriminate against clients based on the counselor's principles. We continue to worry particularly about rural LGBT people who may not have adequate resources for counseling in their communities."But Howell said he is "thrilled" and "my counselor friends across the state of Tennessee are sending emails breathing a sigh of relief because they realize their First Amendment rights have been restored and that's a good thing.""I think the governor after reading the bill realized that it was getting a lot of undue criticism and [Haslam] thought like it was important to safeguard the First Amendment rights of people who are working in the faith-based field," Howell added. "I'm just thrilled that he's understood, and I'm glad that he signed it."Johnson, the Senate sponsor, said he's "excited that the governor signed it. I think it's a very reasonable, common-sense piece of legislation and corrects what I believe was a wrong that was effectuated by the American Counseling Association with the change in their code of ethics in 2014."Haslam has struggled with the issue, telling Tennessee reporters recently that he has heard from counselors on both sides of the debate. He also has publicly mused over whether the counselors can really put aside their personal qualms.Howell said the bill in his view strikes an appropriate balance between therapists and those needing treatment with requirements therapists refer the clients on to another qualified professional.But critics warn rejections by counselors could prove devastating to young LGBT students struggling with their identities, having conflicts with parents and getting bullied.Moreover, they said, people needing help in rural areas with few professionals will have a difficult time finding new counselors.While the legislation doesn't mention LGBT issues, it was the focal point of House and Senate discussions.The measure was among a raft of bills directed at lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people in Tennessee and other states this year in the political wake of last year's U.S. Supreme Court landmark ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.Howell and Johnson say their legislation was prompted by 2014 changes in the American Counseling Association's ethical standards for therapists that came about after a federal appellate court ruling in a Michigan university case.The university dismissed a student counselor who wanted to refer LGBT clients to someone else because their goals conflicted with her religious views.The ACA, the Tennessee Equality Project and the ACLU-Tennessee denounced the legislation here as discriminatory.ACA officials say Tennessee is the only state in the country that will have such a provision in its law books. Some professors who teach counseling at faith-based colleges in Tennessee spoke out against the legislation. They said their professional obligations require them to set aside their own personal beliefs in order to help people.During the final debate in the House, Howell lashed out at the ACA's changes to its ethical standards, which can affect the professional's licensure.The group "overstepped their authority and elevated their code above the First Amendment and that's why we're here today," Howell said.Earlier this month, another controversial bill that sought to require transgender students in public school and colleges to use bathrooms associated with their biological sex at birth was shelved at the last minute by its House sponsor.One top lawmaker said that happened after Haslam personally intervened and urged the representative to withdraw the bill. The measure had drawn warnings from businesses and others that it could hurt businesses in their hiring and lead other companies to avoid locating or expanding in Tennessee, as well as holding conventions in the Volunteer State.
Skeptical Supreme Court justices probed the definition of "official act" here Wednesday, searching for the line between politics and corruption that is so crucial to the bribery case against former Gov. Bob McDonnell.The justices peppered McDonnell's attorney, and a deputy U.S. solicitor general, with hypothetical trout fishing trips, constituent lunches, agreed-to meetings and polite-but-ignored letters, looking for a definition of quid-pro-quo that remained elusive after an hour of oral arguments.McDonnell and his legal team left pleased by the questioning, which seemed to offer hope that the court would spare the former governor a 2-year sentence handed down in early 2015, after a jury found McDonnell and his wife guilty on multiple corruption charges. Henry Asbill, one of McDonnell's lead attorneys, said he heard a lot of things Wednesday that "gave me heart."The court's decision is expected in June.The governor and his wife, Maureen, are free while their appeals run their course, and they attended Wednesday's hour-long hearing. They left in the same car, a change from the 2014 trial, when they arrived and left separately and made their strained marriage key to the former governor's defense.Going into these arguments, many court observers said McDonnell had a tough hill to climb, particularly given the recent death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who was on record questioning the vagueness of the law at the heart of these proceedings.Photo coverage from the trial, sentencing, and appeal of Gov. Bob McDonnell in Richmond, Va.But on Wednesday justices seemed concerned about ceding too much authority to prosecutors who might pursue politicians in the future. Justice Stephen Breyer probed repeatedly for words to draw a reasonable -- and precedent setting -- line between innocent-enough free lunches and cash swaps for government access."Those are the words that I cannot find," Breyer said.Breyer said the words need not be perfect, and that they will certainly leave some dishonest behavior unpunished. Better that, he said, than unleash overzealous prosecution.The government's logic in the case against McDonnell, whose family took more than $177,000 in loans and gifts from a wealthy businessman who got access to the governor's subordinates, but not state funding, "feels dangerous," Breyer said. Since the "quid" in a bribery case need not be a large amount, Breyer and other justices struggled with the government's definition of the "quo" in this case, and how it might affect future cases."For better or worse, it puts at risk behavior that is common," Breyer said. "A recipe for giving the Department of Justice and prosecutors enormous power over elected officials ... and I am looking for the line that will control the shift in power."Justice Anthony Kennedy joined Breyer in his struggle, suggesting that the government's logic would mean the president of the United States commits a felony when he gives special access to big-dollar donors.Justice Elena Kagan dubbed herself "troubled" by the way the government charged McDonnell. Chief Justice John Roberts called attention to the "extraordinary" support McDonnell's arguments have found from former White House attorneys for multiple presidents, both Republican and Democratic.Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and former Newport News state Del. Phil Hamilton have one thing in common beyond felony convictions: They both sincerely believe that they did nothing wrong.It's easy to see why. In Virginia, the line between right and wrong -- or, more correctly, between legal...Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and former Newport News state Del. Phil Hamilton have one thing in common beyond felony convictions: They both sincerely believe that they did nothing wrong.It's easy to see why. In Virginia, the line between right and wrong -- or, more correctly, between legal...The former White House counselors argued, in one of many amicus briefs in this case, that a conviction would "cripple" modern politics."I think it's extraordinary that those people agree on anything," Robert said."It may be extraordinary," Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben replied, "but that doesn't make it correct."Dreeben asked the nation's high court not to endorse a "pay to play theory of government." He argued that McDonnell's willingness to schedule meetings for Jonnie R. Williams Sr., who gave the governor and his wife five-figure loans paperwork-free, and to let Williams invite doctors that he hoped to pitch on a product to the governor's mansion for a party, amounted to the official acts need to prove a bribery scheme.Williams cut a deal with prosecutors and testified that he lavished McDonnell and his family with gifts because he hoped to get state funding, and university support, for drug trials for Anatabloc, a supplement since removed from shelves.Dreeben's argument seemed to have some support on the court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the university officials who could have helped Williams get his trials felt some pressure from governor. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg asked McDonnell's attorney, Noel J. Francisco, whether government officials should be allowed to charge $1,000 just to take a meeting."That's your view," she said. "That would be OK."Francisco responded that this would be illegal under other laws not at issue in this case. He said that, in sending Williams to Virginia Secretary of Health Bill Hazel, McDonnell was only making "the same type of referral that he made day in and day out."McDonnell did not, Francisco said, "put his thumb on the scales" to influence what Hazel, or other state officials, decided after talking to Williams.Roberts said whether meeting referrals alone amount to cajoling, though, "depends on who's making the referral," noting that a president asking a federal official to take a meeting carries different weight than a senator, or a congressman.McDonnell has apologized for his role in this scandal, which led to three rounds of changes to Virginia's gift laws. But he has also said he did nothing illegal, and he re-iterated that Wednesday, in a brief statement before a bank of television cameras outside the Supreme Court.McDonnell also said he was "incredibly grateful" that the court accepted his case and gave it close attention.Here is a collection of stories, photographs and videos about the indictment, trial and sentencing of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen.The McDonnells accepted more than $165,000 in cash, gifts and loans from Jonnie R. Williams Sr., a wealthy businessman and supporter. Williams...Here is a collection of stories, photographs and videos about the indictment, trial and sentencing of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen.The McDonnells accepted more than $165,000 in cash, gifts and loans from Jonnie R. Williams Sr., a wealthy businessman and supporter. Williams...
Earlier this month, a task force appointed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel concluded that major reforms to the citys police department were needed to fix what it says is a broken system plagued by racism and a lack of accountability.This isnt the first task force to study Chicago police and publish recommendations. At least five other government-appointed groups have responded to some highly publicized scandal related to corruption, incompetence or police brutality. But Wesley Skogan, a criminologist at Northwestern University, believes the repercussions of this report could be greater because the U.S. Department of Justice is also looking into whether there's a pattern or practice of bias in use of force by Chicago police.Its that overlap between the Chicago task force and the Justice Department investigation, working in concert, that is likely to make it different this time, he said.The federal investigation could result in a court-ordered contract in which city officials agree to institute changes and a federal monitor makes sure they happen. Both New Orleans and Seattle, for example, have had to adopt new use-of-force policies intended to limit the chance of a deadly encounter. Cleveland, another city under a consent decree, had to establish programs to identify and support troubled officers.It looks like some federal arm twisting might be necessary to get Chicago leaders to act on some of the task forces most impactful recommendations.Initially, Emanuel said he hoped the task force report would help his administration reach homegrown solutions to the city's policing problems. Before the task force had even released the report, Emanuel had already launched a body camera initiative, replaced his police superintendent and changed a video release policy to increase transparency around police shootings. But, according to the report, none of these fixes are near adequate. Now Emanuel is using the federal investigation -- which could take a year to complete -- as a reason to wait on making large-scale structural changes.What are some of those bigger structural changes? The task force provided Emanuel with a long to-do list, such as creating a new inspector general for public safety who would audit both the police department and the Independent Police Review Authority, an oversight body. The group also called for eliminating and replacing that oversight body, which had failed to fully investigate some 40 percent of complaints against police in the last five years. Other task force proposals include mandatory training around cultural sensitivity and bias; creating a deputy chief of diversity and inclusion; expanding the use of body cameras and reinvigorating community policing.Its unclear what exactly is next. But Emanuel's early response to the task report has drawn criticism for being underwhelming.Last week, his office distributed a five-page memo that describes a series of steps the city is taking -- or intends to take -- to address the task force recommendations.s editorial board called his memo hugely disappointing, noting that the mayor wasn't acting on most of the task force recommendations and had ignored an important one -- eliminating and replacing the police departments current review authority. (By contrast, some city aldermen have already introduced legislation to replace the review authority.)To act on many of the task forces recommendations, Emanuel would have to overcome opposition from the city's largest police union, which has so far rejected accountability proposals related to its collective bargaining agreement. For example, the task force calls for allowing anonymous complaints against officers and taking away officers right to amend their statements after reviewing video or audio recordings during an investigation.Emanuel appointed the task force amid revelations that a video recording contradicted police officers accounts of how and why an officer shot Laquan McDonald to death. The official explanation was that an officer fired in self defense after McDonald lunged at him. Instead, the video shows that McDonald wasnt moving toward the officer when he was shot and that the rest of the 16 shots were fired into his body after he lay motionless on the ground.In the past two years, cities like Cleveland, New York City and Ferguson, Mo., have drawn criticism for officer-involved shootings like McDonalds. The incidents feed into a national narrative that police are too quick to use deadly force, especially against black males.The task force alleges a pattern of racial bias in Chicago, pointing to a few statistics about the citys demographics and peoples interaction with officers. African-Americans make up about one third of Chicagos population, yet nearly three-quarters of people shot by police between 2008 and 2015 were African-American. The task force also found that African-Americans were the targets of Taser discharges and traffic stops at disproportionate rates.We knew that there was a lot of anger and frustration about discriminatory policing, says Lori Lightfoot, who chaired the Chicago task force. The thing that was a tipping point for me was looking at the [Chicago Police Department] data on stops and shootings, showing a pretty significant disparity in the ways in which blacks and everybody else experience policing in the city. Its pretty eye-opening.Much of the task forces road map to reform echoes findings by President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Both, for example, describe the need for community-oriented policing as a core part of the entire police organization. In Chicago, the task force contends that it had become "a small, underfunded program."Beyond those policy changes, Lightfoot said police need to repair their relationship with minorities who feel victimized by the very officers hired to protect them.Where reform must begin is with an acknowledgement of the sad history and present conditions that have left the people totally alienated from the police and afraid for their physical and emotional safety, the task force concluded in its report. The Chicago Police Department cannot begin to build trust, repair what is broken and tattered unless [...] it faces these hard truths, acknowledges what it has done at the individual and institutional levels and earnestly reaches out with respect.Any attempt to address racism in the department would have to happen while police also try to deal with a recent uptick in murders and gang activity.Chicago has this stubborn gang and gun problem, says Chuck Wexler, director of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, so police find themselves knee deep in that while trying to build community trust.Lightfoot acknowledged that the communities that feel most alienated by police have suffered decades of disinvestment by multiple institutions, public and private. In fact, the police department is one of the few institutions still operating in those neighborhoods.We have really forced the police to deal with a lot of challenges that are the manifestations of our neglect, Lightfoot said. Low levels of education, untreated mental illness and substance abuse, and concentrated poverty are all things that police department did not sign up to manage.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser announced Wednesday that he's retiring on July 31 after nearly 18 years on the high court -- including some of its most turbulent -- and four decades in public life.The retirement hands GOP Gov. Scott Walker a second opportunity to appoint a new justice and put his imprint on the state's highest court with a jurist who could then stand for election in 2020. Prosser was a member of the court's conservative 5-2 majority and so Walker's appointment wouldn't necessarily change that dynamic.Prosser, 73, leaves behind a court where controversy has become as common for justices as it is for other elected officials in Wisconsin. His clashes with the court's liberal justices extended to charged language and, in 2011, a physical altercation."It has been a tremendous honor to serve the people of Wisconsin in various capacities for more than 40 years. During this time, I have had the exceptional privilege of working in all three branches of state government, including 18 years as a representative in the state Assembly and 18 years as a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court," Prosser wrote in a letter to Walker Wednesday.Walker's office had no immediate comment and Prosser did not return a phone call about his retirement, which had been rumored for months.In an interview in March, Prosser said he wasn't sure if he would fill out his full term, which runs until 2021.Asked then if he would retire this summer, he said, "That remains to be seen." He emphasized he had not made up his mind and said he would like to serve at least until the summer of 2017.Prosser's successor will get to serve until the first spring without a Supreme Court election already scheduled, or 2020, and if elected then would serve a full 10 year term.In his career, Prosser took on nearly every aspect of writing, enforcing and interpreting the laws of Wisconsin and the country.As a young Republican official, he worked in the office of then-U.S. Rep. Harold V. Froehlich, as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, and as the Outagamie County district attorney.From 1978 through 1996, Prosser served in the state Assembly, including two years as speaker and five years as minority leader. He sat on the Wisconsin Tax Appeals Commission and in 1998 was appointed by then GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson to the Supreme Court.Prosser served on the court during the rough recent years in which court elections, and even private deliberations of the panel, grew sharply partisan.In 2011, Prosser defeated liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg by 0.5% of the vote in an election that led to a rare statewide recount.The race took an unexpected twist after Walker unveiled the law now know as Act 10, which curbed collective bargaining for most public employees. Unions rallied behind Kloppenburg in the hope that she would vote to overturn the law in ultimately unsuccessful court challenges, while conservatives defended both Prosser and the legislation.Prosser ended up backing the law later that year in a charged lawsuit that led to a physical altercation between Prosser and another justice while they and other members of the court argued privately about when and how to announce their decision reinstating Act 10.During the argument, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley approached Prosser to order him to leave her office and, in that confrontation, Prosser's hands ended up around Bradley's neck. The court's liberal and conservative justices disagreed in their retelling of the incident about which of the two justices had acted aggressively.Prosser defended his action as a reflexive response to a perceived threat but acknowledged later to a detective "feeling the warmth on the side of Justice Bradley's neck." Bradley said she had not been physically hurt but had been caused unwarranted distress.In another official interview after the fact, conservative Supreme Court Justice Annette K. Ziegler succinctly summed up the fracas."The whole thing was just bizarre," Ziegler said.The state Judicial Commission filed ethics charges against Prosser, but the case stalled when most of the justices said they could not participate in the case because they had witnessed the incident. In Wisconsin, the high court alone decides judicial ethics cases, even for its own members.At the time of the commission's complaint, Prosser dismissed it as a politically motivated attack that sought "to accomplish through this prosecution what some of its members failed to achieve at the ballot box."In a separate incident in February 2010, Prosser also called then Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson a "total bitch" and threatened to "destroy" her.In a statement Wednesday, Supreme Court Chief Justice Patience Drake Roggensack praised Prosser."Justice David T. Prosser is an exceptionally bright and thoughtful jurist whose presence on the court will be greatly missed. David has brought unique perspectives to court discussions, thereby increasing the court's ability to understand difficult problems presented to us for resolution," Roggensack said.Attention will now shift to Walker and who he will put on the court."In choosing my successor, Governor, I respectfully request that you select a person who is fully committed to the important mission of the judiciary," Prosser wrote in his retirement letter. "Such a person will understand that promoting the reputation and integrity of the institution is more important than the promotion of any individual."
Description

GIS - 28 April, 2016: The Ministry of Health and Quality of Life will sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in the field of cancer with the Luzerner Kantonsspital, Spitalstr.10 of Switzerland. The Ministry of Health and Quality of Life will sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in the field of cancer with the Luzerner Kantonsspital, Spitalstr.10 of Switzerland.

The objectives of the MoU are, among others, to provide technical support for the establishment of the National Cancer Centre, including the design and construction of bunkers and to provide capacity building and hands on training to staff working in the Radiotherapy Centre with special regard to the planned National Cancer Centre in Mauritius.

The MoU also make provisions to share protocols and guidelines and support in defining evidence-based treatment protocols tailored for the health care system in Mauritius and to support the optimisation of treatment through a multidisciplinary approach in order to achieve the highest quality of care for patients.

It will also provide access to expert opinion for the management of complicated cases of cancer .
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GIS - 28 April, 2016: The Firearms (Amendment) Bill which provides for amendments to the Firearms Act to implement the provisions of the Arms Trade Treaty to which Mauritius is a signatory, was presented by the Prime Minister, Sir Anerood Jugnauth, in the National Assembly. The Bill was voted with amendments on 26 April 2016. Theby the

In his presentation, Sir Anerood Jugnauth expressed confidence that the accession of Mauritius to the Arms Trade Treaty and the amendments to the Firearms Act will have a positive impact on the country as a whole. This, he said will not only help to increase the countrys visibility as a safe haven for doing business and for tourism, but will also give the Police an important tool to have a better control on the movement of arms within the country and those which are in transit.

The Prime Minister underlined the importance of the domestication of the Treaty through this Bill which, he said will also enhance the national control system on the export, import and transit activities related to conventional arms.

Furthermore the countrys legal framework to combat terrorism and piracy will be strengthened making our extended territorial water and EEZ safer areas at a time when Mauritius is developing its ocean economy and is aspiring to become a petroleum hub in the Indian Ocean region.

The Bill aims to domesticate the Arms Trade Treaty to which Mauritius has acceded to in July 2015 and strengthen the provisions of the existing legislation on firearms so as to enable the Police Force to exert a better control on the movement of firearms in the country and those in transit. It will also serve to further consolidate certain provisions of the Firearms Act 2006 so as to enhance the control and inspection of firearms held by private parties and those in transit in the country.

As for the Arms Trade Treaty, the aim is to prevent and eradicate the illicit trade of conventional arms and their unauthorised use, including the commissioning of terrorist acts and acts of piracy, through the control of the export, import, transit, trans-shipment and brokering of these arms.

The Arms Trade Treaty is expected to transform the way global arms trade operates while setting new standards and enshrine, in international law, strict controls on the arms trade which has been poorly regulated for a very long time. It will no longer be acceptable for arms to be transferred to regimes that will use them to harm innocent people and violate human rights.

Under the Treaty, before any arms transfer takes place, the supplier Government must assess associated risks of the deal against strict criteria, including whether the arms might be used for human rights violations, war crimes or the commissioning of other unlawful acts. If there is a substantial risk of this happening, the deal will not be authorised by the seller.

The amendments brought to the existing Firearms Act aim, amongst others, to empower the concerned Police Officers to carry out checks at the places of firearm licence holders to ensure that firearm licensees are complying with the conditions attached to their licence. It will also review the storage fees for firearms in transit from Rs 200 to Rs 100 per day during the prescribed period and from Rs 400 to Rs 200 per day in the eventuality the prescribed delay, for keeping any firearm in transit is exceeded.
Description

GIS - 28 April, 2016: The Correctional Youth Centre (CYC) for Girls, a safe and secure correctional facility for 16 delinquent juveniles up to the age of 18, was inaugurated yesterday by the Minister of Social Security, National Solidarity and Reform Institutions, Mrs Fazila Daureeawoo, in the presence of the Acting Commissioner of Prisons, Mr J. Rungadoo. The Correctional Youth Centre (CYC) for Girls, a safe and secure correctional facility for 16 delinquent juveniles up to the age of 18, was inaugurated yesterday by the Minister of Social Security, National Solidarity and Reform Institutions, Mrs Fazila Daureeawoo, in the presence of the Acting Commissioner of Prisons, Mr J. Rungadoo.

The construction of the CYC Girls is in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which establishes rights for all children less than 18 years of age (Article 1) and includes special protections for children in conflict with the law. The Government of Mauritius has made a commitment to respect, protect and fulfil the rights contained therein.

In her address, Mrs Daureeawoo, said that the correctional facility can help in victim empowerment by meeting victims emotional needs.  The probation service offers to the juvenile delinquents the supervision needed to make their society integration easier. The children receive vocational training and can practice activities that help them to get self-discipline and the responsibility sense , she added.

Furthermore, the Minister stated that it is necessary to review the rehabilitation programme of the young offenders as well as the working conditions of the staff. She also said that a strategic plan has already been presented to Cabinet for the upgrading of the rehabilitation programme for the young offenders.

For his part, the Acting Commissioner of Prisons Mr. J. Rungadoo, stated that the participation of parents, guardians and close relatives will be encouraged in the outreach programme in a bid to strengthen family ties. He also appealed to officers to be positive role models and shower love and compassion when dealing with young offenders.

In the best interest of the child, we try, as best as possible, to create a healthy and conducive environment for the young wards despite their circumstances. We shall look into alternative to traditional penitentiary which will help juveniles become productive. We aim to develop innovative systems for responding to all juvenile offenders below that age which genuinely focus on their education, reintegration and rehabilitation, he said. , he said.

The Correctional Youth Centre for Girls

The correctional facility, to the tune of Rs 3,7 million, will provide care, supervision and treatment to youth in a manner that recognises the unique needs of the adolescent. It will place a strong emphasis on youth accepting responsibility for their actions and gaining individual competencies that will help them to avoid further offending behaviours. The youth will be challenged to fully realise and utilise their talents, knowledge, abilities and skills in the facility and upon release to meet their work, education and personal goals.

The CYC for Girls will help youth in conflict with the law through appropriate programs and services. The new facility will offer teaching, cultural ceremonies as well as education, anger management and life skills programs. It will provide young girls with more effective programmes and more opportunities for rehabilitation.

The officers of the Prison department will be responsible for developing activities outside of school that provide youth opportunities for personal growth. They will be asked to act as positive role models, actively lead physically and emotionally challenging activities, thus addressing the youth unique issues in life, focusing on developing critical thinking skills, developing healthy relationships, finding inner strength, and setting goals.
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GIS  28 April 2016: The Africa Peace Award for the year 2016, which honors African leaders, individuals or organisations who have shown exceptional leadership in bringing about peace and co-existence across cultures, was presented to the President of the Republic, Dr Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, today at the State House, Le Reduit .

Thus, the Award celebrates, acknowledges and honors the accomplishments of individuals and organisations who have shown leadership to build a culture of peace, environmental preservation, reconciliation and harmony among different religions and cultures and respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and bring positive change in peoples lives.

The handing over ceremony was effected by Ambassador Mussie Hailu, Regional Director of United Religions Initiative-Africa (URI-Africa) and Representative of URI at the African Union Commission, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Inter-Governmental Authority for Development (IGAD) and UN Office in Africa.

The Africa Peace Award 2016 has been presented to the Mauritian President in appreciation and acknowledgement of her efforts in addressing the need to make greater investments in science and technology to bring sustainable development in Africa and for her contribution to increasing scientific and technological excellence, as the underlying foundations for the sustainable development in Africa.

The Africa Peace Award

The non-monetary Award, presented annually since 2007, is conferred by the URI-Africa to distinguished individuals or organisations for efforts towards sustainable peace, environmental protection, development, democracy and good leadership on the continent.

Previous recipients include the African Union, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, IGAD, United Nations Environment Programme, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the former President of Nigeria, Mr Jonathan Goodluck.

About United Religions Initiative

URI is an interfaith peace organisation with consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. Its purpose is to promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings. URI has 775 member organisations in 95 countries.
The CUTGroup Experience

Review the homepage and tell us about the three things you notice first.

Who do you think this website is targeted to? Why?

Find 311 service requests that are currently open in your neighborhood. Tell me about your experience.

What improvements might you make in order to make OpenGrid easier to use?

Earlier this year, the city of Chicago launched OpenGrid , its latest and most interactive web platform for open data. OpenGrid lets residents visually understand and navigate map-based city data on their computer, tablet, or phone. Yet while the application is already up and running, it is by no means a final product: Chicago plans for it to be continually updated and upgraded, with input from the public along the way.The first of these crowdsourced enhancement mechanisms has to do with OpenGrids open-source nature. Since OpenGrids code is available on the file-sharing site GitHub , Chicago encourages users with programming experience to contribute to the applications GitHub repository. This means that the public can suggest or add new features, or report or fix bugs in the system that the city may not have noticed. By crowdsourcing these functions, Chicago is able to considerably expand its capacity to revise OpenGrid and help ensure it matures gracefully in the coming years.Programmers, however, make up a very small portion of the overall population of a city  as a platform grounded in open data, OpenGrids mission is to be accessible by anyone who wishes to learn more about their city. The Smart Chicago Collaborative , one of Chicagos partners in helping launch OpenGrid, is also helping ensure that the application stays true to that mission.How, you ask? Through the Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup) , of course.CUTGroup, one of SmartChicagos anchor programs, compensates residents from all corners of the city to test civic websites and apps. These tests not only engage all of Chicago in the civic app development process, but provide valuable information to developers seeking to enhance their apps usability and performance.CUTGroups process provides a vital link between developer and user that the civic tech world sometimes lacks. Its one of the mostcrowd-sourced enhancement mechanisms that a civic app developer could have in her toolkit. In Chicago, CUTGroup has been a success, and given its adaptable model, the program has implications for other cities who wish to engage in similar work.On April 19, 2016, more than 20 testers from across Chicago came to test OpenGrid at the Henry Legler Library in Garfield Park, on the citys West Side. To get a deeper understanding of CUTGroup and the impact it could have on OpenGrid, I attended as a volunteer. What transpired for me was a fascinating look into how the program is helping make the civic app development process  and the civic tech field - more inclusive and diverse as it matures.Upon entering the Henry Legler Librarys event space, I was welcomed to a large room filled with small tables, chairs, and laptops set up to accommodate one tester and one proctor. As a volunteer proctor, my job was straightforward: to spend some time one-on-one with a tester as he or she explored OpenGrid. For each session, I was tasked with asking a set of questions and reporting observations using Wufoo , an online reporting tool that specializes in survey documentation and analysis.Each session lasted between 30 and 60 minutes, and it was the testers technical skill set that set the tone. As a map-based application that relies on querying specific types of data, OpenGrid came more naturally to some than others. Those who were regular users of popular applications such as Google Maps and Microsoft Access, for example, found OpenGrid more accessible than those who were not.In the three full sessions I proctored, the diversity of those testers skills and backgrounds was remarkable. Testers ranged not just in technical skill level, but in familiarity with city data, as well as age, race and ethnicity, and neighborhood of residence.For every session, I asked the same set of questions and requested the same set of exercises for each tester, remaining as neutral and objective as I could throughout the process. Some key questions included the following:Each tester was highly engaged throughout the processso much so that it wasnt possible to write down all of their feedback. In reviewing OpenGrid, tester responses and recommendations often centered around three aspects of the application: the user experience itself, the degree of understanding they had about operating the application, and the degree of relevance the application could have in their personal and professional lives.These responses also fittingly align with the three main components that CUTGroup focuses on: determining an apps usability, understanding digital skills required for use, and gauging an apps potential for community engagement and impact.Smart Chicago Executive Director Dan ONeils 2014 book, The CUTGroup , details the history, purpose, and methods of the program. In doing so, it serves as a handy how-to guide for any other city or community that wishes to pursue similar efforts. In the book, he also describes how these three components are evident in the program.We struggle at Smart Chicago with how prescriptive we should be with our program, writes ONeil. Clearly, any kind of user testing is helpful to the technology developers. The teaching and learning of digital skills is a worthwhile act, regardless of context. And any time civic hackers can get with community membersin any settings, for any purposethats a good thing.For OpenGrid, this means that getting the CUTGroup experience is more than UX testing feedbackit is an educational opportunity, for both the testers and the developers present at the event.As Smart Chicago continues to process OpenGrids results from last weeks event, Chicago will have substantial information to inform its continuous enhancements of the application. Chicago hopes that the CUTGroups process will help aid OpenGrid the way it has helped aid other local tech apps, including the EveryBlock iPhone App, FoodBorne , the Chicago Health Atlas , and Chicagoworksforyou.com , among others.Integrating civic engagement into civic tech was a key part of the development of all these apps  since, after all, they were made to be used by people. Indeed, as SmartChicagos tag line for CUTGroup goes - if it doesnt work for the people, it doesnt work.
(TNS) -- With the help of a federal grant, the state Department of Environmental Protection plans to ramp up its efforts to monitor air quality near natural gas compressors in rural parts of the state.Ten sensors that monitor fine particulate matter  or soot  will be installed in eight counties, including in Fayette and Indiana, the department announced Wednesday. The sensors will gather much-needed data in under-monitored areas about the quantity of pollutants released into the air. Each of the eight counties is home to fracking sites.We simply don't have data on air quality in these areas, said DEP Secretary John Quigley in a statement. We need that data and monitoring capability to help us understand whether or not there are risks or impacts to public health from current air quality in these areas.Fracking and drilling for natural gas releases lots of pollutants into the air, said Thaddeus Popovich, a Franklin Park resident and co-founder of Allegheny County Clean Air Now. Pollutants are released during the drilling process and by the diesel vehicles coming and going from the drilling sites.The new monitors from the DEP show the state is paying attention to rural areas that previously have been forgotten, Popovich said.Joseph Otis Minott, executive director of the Clean Air Council in Philadelphia, said he hopes the DEP will expand the monitoring program.As Pennsylvania's natural gas industry has spread over the past several years, our information-gathering has not always kept pace, he said in a statement. Shalefield residents have often been left in the dark about the quality of the air they breathe and, without adequate data, are unable to take action when they suspect air pollution is harming their health.Besides Fayette and Indiana counties, monitors will also be installed this year in Lycoming, Susquehanna and Wyoming counties, according to the DEP. Monitors will be installed inClarion, Jefferson and McKean counties by late 2017.The exact locations of the monitors in Indiana and Fayette have not been finalized, a DEP spokesman said. The approximate $1.5 million expansion of the air monitoring network will be paid for, in part, by an Environmental Protection Agency grant.The sensors will supplement DEP's existing network of 27 monitors. The Allegheny County Health Department also operates eight samplers and Philadelphia Air Management Services operates seven. The DEP recently installed sensors in Holbrook in Greene County and Towanda in Bradford County.The data collected will be available to the public on the DEP and EPA websites.
An Assembly budget subcommittee has given its approval to Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to add $10 million to precision medicine research, siding with advocates who say the state should support advances in medicine that could improve the lives of Californians.The 3-1 vote came after the Legislative Analyst's Office raised questions in March about whether the growing field of precision medicine could draw money elsewhere, including the private sector and federal government.Precision medicine involves gathering and using multiple data sets such as electronic health records, genetic data, environmental and behavioral data that could help doctors improve health care and find individualized treatments, Dr. Elizabeth Baca, senior health advisor at the governors Office of Planning and Research, told the Budget Subcommittee No. 4 on State Administration.Its really an exciting time right now in medicine to think about how much were learning and being able to really better provide treatment and cures to patients individually, Baca said at last weeks hearing.The LAO has questioned whether state funding is needed because most of Californias research institutions receive a majority of their research funding from federal, private, and other non-state sources. President Obama last year announced a federal initiative being led by the National Institutes of Health on precision medicine.Among the questions the LAO posed to lawmakers in a March memo were, Are federal resources for the research inadequate? and Are economic incentives insufficient to spur privately funded research?The state currently does not have a framework for prioritizing the allocation of General Fund monies across various research topics, The LAO wrote. Without such a framework, it is difficult to evaluate the Governors proposal.Browns $10 million request seeks to position the state as a coordinator of public, private and nonprofit partners who want to convert data to new knowledge, according to the proposal. Specifically, the one-time funding would help to build tools, applications and platforms that integrate diverse data sets that will lead to improved health outcomes and new areas for healthcare innovation and discovery; and to establish a more dynamic asset inventory in the state.It builds upon a $3 million appropriation in FY 2014-2015 that lawmakers authorized for two demonstration projects being led by the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Santa Cruz to study acute infectious disease and pediatric cancer respectively. The projects have drawn collaborators from other universities, hospitals, industry and nonprofits.The additional funding would allow for another six demonstration projects that would be bid competitively under the umbrella of the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine.Assemblyman Kevin Mullin, D-South San Francisco, who voted for the proposal, said he wanted to learn more about how technology can help doctors and scientists develop new treatment options for patients.Precision medicine is an emerging field, to which the State has made a moderate investment in thus far, Mullin said in a statement to. And, if it can bring more opportunities forward to help find cures for these diseases and help advance the work currently being done in this area, I think its worth making every effort to fund this important work.
Daniil Kvyat has responded to "strange" rumours that he might need to take a step back to Red Bull's junior team Toro Rosso next year.

The 22-year-old Russian was declared the official 'driver of the day' in China two weeks ago, after his run to the podium and spirited pre-podium spat with Sebastian Vettel.

At the same time, it is rumoured that in order to keep Max Verstappen under contract next year, Red Bull needs to promote him from Toro Rosso to the senior team.

When asked about speculation it will be him who steps aside, Kvyat said on Thursday: "I think these rumours are very strange.

"Toro Rosso was a great school for me, but I think I passed it already with good grades," he is quoted by Russia's Championat.

Kvyat said he is therefore not worried about his future in F1.

"For my contract next year, I think the faster you go, the more opportunities you will have. So I think I will not have problems if I continue in the same way."

(GMM)
Supported by partners, Clean City Coalitions and corporate sponsors, Alliance AutoGas is embarking on a 5300+ mile, 12-city, cross-country road tripthe Alliance AutoGas Coast-to-Coast Clean Air Ridewith its record-setting propane autogas F-150. The event is being hosted by the Metropolitan Energy Center/Kansas City Regional Clean Cities in conjunction with Veolia/Kansas City Transportation Group and Alliance AutoGas.

The converted F-150 will travel across the country from Kansas City to Seattle, WA, and back through the US, stopping along the way, to complete its journey in Jacksonville, FL, on 18 May, followed by a Homecoming event in Asheville, NC, on 23 May.

Alliances new Engineered Conversion System, installed on a Bi-Fuel 2016 3.5-liter Ford F-150 V6, was converted to propane autogas almost 30 minutes faster than the predicted 2 hour window at the recent Work Truck Show in Indianapolis. Behind the autogas truck, they will be trailering a propane mower. The propane mower is a 2013 Exmark Lazer Z Ultra Cut 60. It is powered by a 25.5 horsepower Kawasaki FX801 V-Twin gasoline engine, converted to propane by Alliance Small Engines.

Alliance AutoGas Coast- to- Coast Clean Air Ride Partners and Sponsors include: Propane Education Partner: the Propane Education & Research Council (PERC); Media Partner: Bobit Business Media/Work Truck Magazine; Charity Partner: the American Lung Association of the Southeast, Inc.

Three of the city stopsin Fort Collins, CO, Salt Lake City, UT, and Seattle, WAwill be hosted by Alliance AutoGas member Blue Star Gas in conjunction with their local Clean City Coalitions.

Alliance AutoGas member Pinnacle Propane will also be hosting 3 additional stops in Albuquerque, NM, Oklahoma City, OK, and Little Rock, AR, in conjunction with local Clean Cities Coalition partners.

Local Clean Cities Host Partners include: Metropolitan Energy Center/Kansas City Regional Clean Cities; Northern Colorado Clean Cities; Utah Clean Cities Coalition; Western Washington Clean Cities; Valley of the Sun Clean Cities Coalition; Land of Enchantment Clean Cities; Central Oklahoma Clean Cities/Association of Central Oklahoma Governments; Arkansas Clean Cities; Clean Cities- Georgia; North Florida Clean Fuels Coalition and Land of Sky Clean Cities Coalition.
Fuel cell company PowerCell Sweden AB has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Swiss Hydrogen SA, a Switzerland-based company that develops hydrogen fuel cell systems for mobile and stationary applications. The two companies will cooperate to market and sell high performance fuel cell systems based on PowerCells stacks.

PowerCell Sweden AB has developed fuel cell technology for more than a decade, and has perfected a unique design that enables the production of a light, versatile and reliable source of power for the automotive, transportation and stationary applications. The fuel stacks PowerCell S1, S2 and S3 cover the range of 1-100 kW.

Swiss Hydrogen SA has experience in designing, assembling and integrating fuel cell systems in various applications. Both companies will also join forces on sales and marketing activities worldwide. PowerCell and Swiss Hydrogen have already successfully collaborated in the FCH-JU project AutoStack-CORE regarding S3.
Officers gave a traffic warning for alleged speeding in a school zone on Monroe Avenue.

A traffic citation was issued for alleged speeding in a school zone on Monroe Avenue and Hitching Post Drive.

Animal control officers contacted an individual who had questions about a cat and kittens they found under their porch on Uinta Drive.

Officers assisted with a funeral procession.

Officers responded to the Green River Probation and Parole Office for an agency assist at 140 Commerce Drive.

Officers delivered a message to another individual for another agency on East 2nd Street North.

Officers con...
At first glance, it isnt a terribly impressive wooden box.

The paint is worn, though its patriotic influence can still be seen in the design mimicking an American flag. The front of this battered and well-used box reads S.I. Field Express. While it isnt associated with Sweetwater Countys well-known historical figures like Butch Cassidy or Major John Wesley Powell, the history it represents is important to both the state and the nation and was submitted for consideration as being one of Wyomings top 10 significant historical artifacts for 2016.

The contest is the result of...
Dear Editor,

On April 28, the unions of the AFL-CIO observe Workers Memorial Day to remember those who have suffered and died on the job and to renew the fight for safe jobs. This year we will come together to call for work in this country that is safe and healthy and pays fair wages. We will celebrate the victories won by working people and commit to fighting until all workers have safe jobs and the freedom to form unions without the threat of retaliation.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act and Mine Safety and Health Act promise workers the right to a safe job. Unions and our allies h...
The importance of Wyomings public meetings laws cannot be understated.

Those laws allow every Wyoming resident the right to attend and learn about how their government works. They allow residents the opportunity to learn about whats happening in their towns, school districts, public hospitals  even their local water and sewer systems.

When we say we think a board is acting against the spirit of those laws, its not something we do lightly, and we believe the board of trustees for Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County are acting against those laws. The board, by creating a number...
Mary Grubb was dressed for the occasion with a grass skirt and lei on her head.

Before going into the dining room, the dinner participants received a lei and they entered through a blue, beaded entry way.

Once in Golden Hour Senior Center's dining room, the luau dinner guests were greeted with colorful table clothes with Hawaiian decorations on them.

About 65 residents attended the luau-themed dinner and dance, which took place April 15. They enjoyed a teriyaki beef dinner, and specialty nonalcoholic drinks, including pina coladas and strawberry daiquiris, which were served in fancy glasses just like in Hawaii.

Activities coordinator Megan Brown said members of the U...
The Academy at Lincoln, a public magnet school, recently took the fourth- and fifth-grade classes to Washington for a three-day field trip. Students toured Mount Vernon, the Capital, the National Archives and the Smithsonian museums.
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BRIDGEPORT - The right to openly carry a firearm in Connecticut took a dramatic turn Wednesday when officials who gathered to call for a law that would clarify the open carry rules, came face to face with the man who started the controversy.

Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, Police Chief Armando Perez and others held a press conference outside the city Police Department to lend their support to a bill that would require gun wearers to show a permit whenever police request it. The current law says police must have reasonable suspicion a criminal act is being committed to request to see a permit.

Its not unreasonable for a police officer who sees a person carrying a weapon to ask for his or her permit, Perez said.

But Dontrell Brown, who refused to show a police officer a permit for the holstered semi-automatic pistol he wore on on his hip at a Subway restaurant in January, showed up to protest at the news conference.

With this gun Im telling all the scumbags if you mess with me or my family I am well prepared to protect myself, said Brown, holding a sign that read: No Hitler you cant see my permit without (reasonable suspicion).

Brown, who was armed with a video camera as well as the pistol when confronted by Bridgeport Officer Ricardo Lopez, had a gun permit but refused to show it. Instead he taped the encounter and put the video online.

The resulting statewide debate lead to the introduction of the bill, An Act Concerning the Presentation of a Carry Permit, which is awaiting action in the General Assembly.

Redding Chief Douglas Fuchs, past president of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, supports the proposed bill.

It currently is a gray area, if you will, with too many unanswered questions, he said. Imagine being a police officer in a city environment and seeing an individual carrying a firearm and not being able to ask that individual if he's licensed. The proposed legislation, in my opinion, makes sense. It gives law enforcement officers the right to simply ask someone for their credentials to carry a firearm."

Ganim and Perez stressed they are not trying to prevent people from legally carrying guns they just want some clarity in the law so that police can continue to keep the public safe.

There has to be clear lines of direction for law enforcement, that was a very awkward situation in downtown, said the mayor.

Police Union President Charles Paris said the confrontation between Brown and Officer Lopez triggered a passionate discussion on the states open carry law in the police department.

Many commended Officer Lopez for his restraint, Paris said. Others believed Officer Lopez should have had the legal certainty to make an arrest.

Standing just a few feet from Brown, Lopez reiterated this is not about taking anyones rights away.

The issue is you can see my badge and know I am on your side, we just want to see your permit and know you are on my side also, Lopez said, looking at Brown.

But Brown said he plans to continue to oppose any efforts to make citizens legally carrying a gun show their permits.

They are just trying to bully legislators, he said.

His position may be gathering support.

Michael Picard, of Bridgeport, arrived shortly thereafter carrying a sign that read, Live Free or here, and Mike Garrett, the citys republican town chairman, said the calls for strengthening the carry law were nonsensical.

Do you believe it is better to have someone hiding their gun than to have it out in the open? Garrett asked.
GREENWICH  Hillary Clinton was trailing Bernie Sanders in Connecticut for much of Tuesday night, until Greenwichs numbers came in and helped flip the script, putting her back in the lead a little after 10 p.m. and setting the stage for her victory in the state Democratic primary.

The former secretary of state received 68 percent of the votes cast by Greenwich Democrats, 3,206 to Sanders 1,443.

That might not impress political junkies looking at the totals from around Fairfield County, most of which Clinton won handily. But Clinton didnt simply beat her party rival in town: She received more Greenwich votes in her primary race than her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump, received in his.

The GOP winner took 3,007 Republican votes in Greenwich  48 percent  to Ohio Gov. John Kasichs 2,591 and Texas Sen. Ted Cruzs 552.

That Clinton won here has some party locals hopeful they might see something very rare for town Democrats  their presidential candidate taking Greenwich in the fall election. Barack Obama did it in 2008. Before that, they have to go back to Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

I think youll see this again in November, Democratic Town Committee Chairman Jeff Ramer said Wednesday. Whatever I might say at times about my Republican colleagues in town, they are a moderate group of clear thinking people and Trump is not someone who appeals to them.

More Information How Greenwich Voted: Democratic Primary Roque "Rocky" De La Fuente 9 0.19% Hillary Clinton 3,206 68.10% Bernie Sanders 1,443 30.65% Uncommitted 50 1.06% Republican Primary Ted Cruz 552 8.83% Ben Carson 22 0.35% Donald J. Trump 3,007 48.10% John R. Kasich 2,591 41.44% Uncommitted 80 1.28% See More Collapse

More Republican votes were cast Tuesday than Democratic ones, and the GOP still holds a comfortable advantage in town. There are 12,382 registered Republicans in Greenwich, compared with 8,043 registered Democrats.

Trump won by wide margins throughout much of the state but by fewer than 500 votes in Greenwich. Ramer said his relatively tepid showing here indicates Trump presents a quandary for Greenwich Republicans: support a candidate they dont like or cross party lines  something he did not expect they would do.

I think its more likely a lot of them would simply stay home, he said.

For Clinton to be the third Democratic presidential candidate to win Greenwich, she will have to carry a much larger chunk of unaffiliated voters than Democrats historically have in town, he said.

Unaffiliateds currently make up the second largest block of Greenwich voters: 11,005.

Ramer conceded that two-thirds typically vote Republican, but Democrats hope the controversial Trump will drive more to their side this year.

But Ramers counterpart, Greenwich Republican Town Committee Chairman Stephen Walko, said he is not worried. Tuesdays vote totals  6,252 for Republicans, 4,708 for Democrats  show the GOP still has a clear advantage in town.

Turnout in Greenwich was very strong and Greenwich Republicans were a huge reason for that, Walko said. I think you are going to see those Republican voters come together and turn out again in November in support for the candidate that emerges as the nominee at the convention.

As for Greenwich Republicans not turning out in the fall to support Trump, Walko said he doesnt see it being a problem.

I think in every presidential election year you have individuals who dont necessarily agree with who the partys choice for a candidate is, Walko said. On the Democratic side Ive had people come up to me who are Democrats who say they arent happy with the candidates whether its Clinton or Sanders  Ive also had people who are either not Republicans or havent been active Republicans who tell me that theyve become really energized by this primary and particularly because of the Donald Trump campaign.

kborsuk@scni.com
GREENWICH  In 2014, Dr. Judith Owens was the lead author of an American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement recommending that high school and middle school students not start classes before 8:30 a.m.

Her opinion on start times has not changed in the past two years, she told more than 100 parents during a presentation Tuesday at Eastern Middle School.

Youre asking students to wake up and function at a time when their brains are telling them loudly and clearly to be asleep, said Owens, director of sleep medicine at Boston Childrens Hospital and a Harvard Medical School neurology professor.

Since the statement was published, the AAPs recommendation has contributed to a surge in communities throughout the country supporting later school start times for teenagers.

The recommendation has been a byword among students and parents in Greenwich who have asked the district to change current practice to put it in line with the AAPs recommendations.

Greenwich High now starts at 7:30 a.m., and the middle schools begin at 7:45 a.m.

I personally feel the medical evidence as presented by sleep researchers overwhelmingly shows that teenagers could benefit from a school start time of 8:30 or later, said Sophie Dowling, co-chairwoman of the PTA Councils Health and Wellness Committee.

In response to parent concern, school officials are weighing implementing district-wide timetable changes for the 2017-18 school year. The prospective schedules include alternatives that would move Greenwich High School and the three middle schools to kickoffs of 8:30 a.m. or later.

On Tuesday, Owens said teens are struggling physically and psychologically from a chronic lack of sleep, in large part because they cannot adjust to their schools early schedules. They are not adapting because their circadian rhythms naturally shift later during their teenage years.

As a result, the average adolescent finds it almost impossible to go to sleep before 11 p.m. and is not biologically programmed to wake up before 8 a.m., Owens said.

Teens cannot force themselves and parents cannot make them fall asleep earlier, Owens said.

In addition, early schedules force students to get up during their circadian nadir, the time of day when they feel most sleepy. They also miss out on rapid eye movement sleep, concentrated in the latter third of the night, which is critical for memory consolidation and learning, Owens said.

Were asking these kids to get up at the wrong time, when they havent gotten enough sleep and when they havent gotten the stage of sleep that is most critical for their ability to learn in school - a triple whammy if you will, Owens said.

In a February survey, 97 percent of Greenwich High students reported getting an average of less than 8.5 hours of sleep per night.

Greenwich is part of a state whose track record is not very good on start times, Owens said. More than 95 percent of public middle and high schools in Connecticut start before the recommended 8:30 a.m. cutoff, according to Owens.

Superintendent of Schools William McKersie and Board of Education members have said that they accept the scientific and medical arguments for later school schedules. Owens gave a presentation to the board during a special meeting on Tuesday.

When the leading group of pediatricians in the United States tell you very clearly that this is one of the most important things that they think can be done to improve student health and wellness, I pay very close attention to their recommendation, said board member Peter Sherr.

Sherr called for the board to adopt the AAPs recommendation, although he said that the board should still consider options that would start secondary schools before 8:30 a.m., so that they review a full range of alternatives.

Board Chairman Laura Erickson said that the district would ideally align Greenwich Highs and the middle schools timetables with the AAP recommendation. But she pointed to a number of challenges in trying to achieve that goal.

We cant just wave a magic wand and say everyone is going to start at 8:30, if youre in middle school or high school, Erickson said. We do have to consider transportation costs, we do have to consider family work schedules, just kind of the nuts and bolts of it.

Board member Lauren Rabin said that the AAP recommendation would figure heavily in her decision-making on school schedules.

I think sleep deprivation is a serious heath deterrent, Rabin said. I believe that good health is everyone's major source of wealth. I also have also seen first-hand with my own sons how important sleep was, how hard it was for them to wake up for high-school in comparison to elementary school and an increased frequency in taking naps after school.

McKersie is scheduled to present his recommendation on school schedules at a May 12 school board meeting at North Street School. The board is scheduled to vote on McKersies recommendation at their June 14 meeting at New Lebanon School.

pschott@scni.com; 203-625-4439; twitter: @paulschott
On behalf of my family, I would like to express our deepest appreciation for the outpouring of love and support that has been extended to us by the community due to the recent passing of my mother, Joyce Hannah Hurvitz ZL.

For all those who have experienced the grief of mourning, we know that there come waves of pain and suffering, and at times life feels like it will never be the same. However, with a lot of love, time and memories shared, the mourner's shattered heart will begin to heal, albeit with new scars forever in their places.

Certain times and days of the year can be particularly difficult for one who is grieving. It is especially helpful when the bereaved person knows that they are fully supported by their community. It is with this absolute knowledge that our family has found such an important comfort.

Last week, prior to our family celebration of the Passover Seders, we set our Dining Room table and I was hit by the empty chair that is my mother's rightful place among us. But, I also knew she would have been the first to assert that the absolute focus of Passover is to make sure that the Seder conveys real meaning to all the children present; both adult-children and younger. It was with this knowledge that I stayed mindful of Gods commandment for all future Jewish generations to teach our children the Passover Story.

The rabbis teach that there are three rituals we must especially teach our our children on Passover: Why the Pesach -- Passover Sacrifice? Why the Matzah -- the eating of the unleavened bread? Why the Maror -- the eating of the bitter herbs?

The answers are:

We recall how God passed over (Pesach) the houses of our spiritual ancestors in Egypt during the 10th plague and spared the Hebrew population the death of our first born. Matzah is our reminder that we were redeemed from our bondage in Egypt. Maror is our reminder of how the Egyptians embittered the lives of our ancestors in Egypt during our time of bondage.

Beside these three rituals, we Jews are also commanded by God, for all time, to regard ourselves as if we had personally gone forth from Egypt and to eternally praise and thank God for our freedom because it was God who performed for our ancestors and for us, all these miracles:

Slavery to Freedom

Anguish to Joy

Grieving to Festival

Darkness to Light

And so we recite our praises of Halleluyah from the Book of Psalms during each and every Seder.

When the Passover rituals were concretized 2000 years ago, it is always helpful to recall that the Jewish community was only decades removed from the Romans destruction of the Second Temple, and that the entire land of Israel was under a state of Roman occupation.

Thus, the Passover Seder was specifically instructing the Jewish community of this time to remember our Jewish past and remain firmly committed to our future. It was because of the state of Roman bondage that the Hagaddah was written in metaphoric language; targeting an ancient Egypt that no longer existed and instructing the contemporary slaves that they too, someday, will experience their own miraculous deliverance, if only they will remember and stay determined.

Our Passover story is a TRUE story in that it summarizes all of Jewish historical experiences. We are still here because of our faith in God, and our determination to remember our covenant and continue our firm commitments to the Jewish people and the Jewish land.

Passover speaks to us as a community, but also to the individual.

It is understandable that a mourner might give-in to their anguish.

However, the lesson of Judaism is that we remember and we continue to effectively move forward. Once I was a slave; now I am free.

The place of mourning is in the Valley that is the Shadow of Death; but the lesson of Judaism is that we do not allow ourselves to be mired within this valley. We utilize the ladder of God's support, the support of our community and the lessons of our People. We remember all of the love, all of the joy and the ever-present place of hope within our lives.

This Passover there was an empty chair at our Seder table. But, utilizing the power of our sacred rituals and accessing the wellspring of our Jewish faith, we once again crossed over from a state of bondage to a holy place of freedom.

My mother's spirit is with us this year. She didnt even need to wait for Elijah's door to be opened. She was already present in our hearts and minds as soon as her family had gathered.
Get them while you still can. Photo: Rachel Murray/Getty Images

The next part of the plan is curbside delivery, for customers who arent content to merely skip the line and would rather a store employee ferry doughnuts and iced lattes right outside.

Lastly, Dunkin plans to try and lure away Starbuckss latte drinkers, a key customer segment. CEO Nigel Travis tells the AP that espresso drinks constitute a fairly small portion of sales at the moment, but warns theyre starting to move the needle. They introduced a macchiato last year and redesigned menus so that fancier-seeming drinks like Coolattas and Dunkaccinos are more conspicuous.

It all seems to be working to convince America that Dunkin remains a viable Starbucks alternative. In fact, drinks now make up about 60 percent of the massive chains overall sales.

[Dunkin Donuts, AP, Quartz]
Catchy. Photo: Richard Levine/Corbis

Les Waas, the Philadelphia-based advertising executive who wrote the iconic Mister Softee jingle, has died at age 94. He wrote both the music and the little-known lyrics for the song back in 1960, initially for Mister Softees radio advertisements, and its now so ubiquitous that Americans are classically conditioned to crave ice cream after hearing just a few instrumental bars. As the Times points out, Michael Bloomberg, then mayor, tried to ban the song in 2004 to quiet the streets of New York. The jingle prevailed.

[NYT]
By far the best feature of the Apple Watch is the range of bands available for it, and the beautifully simple mechanism for attaching and removing them. Most Android Wear watches have nothing of the sort, with some not even offering the option to change bands.

Google wanted to do something about this, so the company has announced something called MODE bands. These are snap-and-swap watch bands that come in a variety of colors in leather and silicone. The main feature here is the attachment mechanism, which, like the Apple Watch, comes off with just the flick of a switch.

Considering the range of Android Wear watches available, Google knows you can't just make one design and expect them to work with all. So it has created a vendor playbook with instructions, requirements and brand guidelines. Other companies will have to use this to make their own MODE bands. It honestly doesn't sound particularly viable, and brings this xkcd comic to mind. We will have to wait and see how well brands adopt this.

Source
Earlier today we once again heard that HTC is the company in charge of building this year's two Nexus-branded smartphones for Google. And now it looks like one of them may have just been spotted in a benchmark's database.

An intriguing entry for "google Nexus 6P" is available in Geekbench's online score browser. The name is pretty much identical to the Huawei-made device that's been announced last year, but this Nexus 6P has different hardware.

Namely, it's powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 chipset (not the 810 like the 2015 model), and it comes with 4GB of RAM (up from 3 on the existing Nexus 6P). The prototype that's been benchmarked was running Android N at the time, which makes perfect sense considering that Google has already released the first two developer previews for that version of its mobile OS.

It seems entirely plausible that Google will stick with the Nexus 6P moniker for this year's Nexus phablet, just changing the hardware and the company manufacturing it. So this might be an HTC-made product, as rumors have been saying for a while. On the other hand, perhaps Huawei and Google are simply working on a minor spec refresh for the existing Nexus 6P, changing the SoC used and the RAM amount. If this is the case, then the upgraded phone could be made official at Google I/O next month.

Via 1 (in Chinese) | Via 2
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BlackBerry's next two Android-running smartphones have been portrayed by a few leaked images today. The handsets are apparently codenamed Hamburg and Rome, respectively, following the Canadian company's long-standing tradition of using cities for its devices' codenames.

The Hamburg either doesn't have a physical keyboard at all, or it could be a slider like the already launched Priv. The two leaked images depicting it don't shine any light on that aspect, unfortunately. Still, we do get to see its entire front fascia, as well as two of its dimensions.

It will be 146mm long and 78mm wide, as you can see. The second image (seen below) shows us the new BlackBerry logo in a close-up shot. The Hamburg seems to be made from metal, and it features a speaker grille underneath the screen. The power button is on the left side, while the other buttons are on the right.

The Hamburg should reportedly become available in the second half of the year for around $400. So it's going to be a mid-ranger.

Next up we have the Rome, which clearly has a physical keyboard. It's placed under the screen, but this isn't a slider, instead emulating the form factor of the Passport somewhat. The same new logo is present here too.

Unfortunately no specs have been leaked alongside these images, and for the Rome there isn't even a rumored release time frame to speak of (or any word on pricing). So we'll have to wait for some new leaks to get that information.

Source 1 (in Chinese)  Source 2 (in Chinese) | Via




Haiti - Elections : All the deputies boycott the invitation of Privert





Wednesday at the National Palace, the Head of State met with members of parties and political groups (G8 and G30) and representatives of civil society, including human rights organizations around the modifications to bring to the terms of reference for their compliance with the text of the presidential decree establishing the Independent Commission for evaluation and election verification before its official publication.



Note that the 3 political blocs in the lower house, including the two pro-Privert minority parliamentary blocs : the G33 "Parliamentary Group at the listening of the people" (PEP) and the G11 "Independent Parliamentary Group" (GPI) rejected the invitation of the Head of State and were not present https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17291-haiti-news-zapping-politics.html



There was discussion on the "revisions" of Article 2 of terms of reference of the Verification Commission https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17225-haiti-flash-fraudsters-no-longer-have-to-worry-about-the-verification-commission.html , but no official information was given about these changes. However, Pierre Esperance, the Executive Director of the National Network Defense of Human Rights (RNDDH) at that meeting states that "The terms of reference remain intact" and that the revisions involved a few style fixes...



13 days since President a.i Privert these terms of reference in hand, everything should now be consistent for publication in the official newspaper "Le Moniteur" and allow the establishment of the Independent Commission for evaluation and electoral verification.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17225-haiti-flash-fraudsters-no-longer-have-to-worry-about-the-verification-commission.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17154-haiti-elections-draft-outline-of-the-commission-of-electoral-verification.html



SL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Economy : Port of Cap-Haitien, the APN in mission to Miami





Tuesday and Wednesday at the Sheraton Miami Airport, Engineer Alix Celestin, the Director General of the National Port Authority (APN) accompanied by Valery Adrien, Coordinator of the Directorate General of the institution, participated in a Conference of Investors at the initiative of the APN, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and International Finance Corporation (IFC) [belonging to the Group World Bank], as part of the presentation of the renovation project of the Port of Cap-Haitien to port stakeholders of the region, in view of the concessioning of the infrastructure of the metropolis of the North department.



This conference is part of the promotion of Haitian maritime sites that the National Port Authority performs to stimulate investors to contribute in the development of this promising sector that has a role to play as "Spearhead of Economy national ".



Recall that in the framework of the bilateral relationship between the United States of America and the Republic of Haiti, it was indeed considered appropriate by the two Governments to provide the northern region of the country with modern port infrastructure capable of responding effectively to traffic demand and contribute to economic development of this country's coastline.



The International Port of Cap Haitien, will be rebuilt with funding from USAID to the tune of $65 million and the works that will begin in July with the demolition of dilapidated hangars and other buildings, will last 30 months.



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Diplomacy : The Chancellor Delienne in Dakar (Senegal)





Pierrot Delienne, the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the head of a Haitian delegation participates in Dakar, Senegal, from 25 to 29 April 2016 at the 103rd Session of the Council of Ministers of Group of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (ACP) and the 41th Session of Council of Ministers (ACP-EU) ACP-European Union (ACP-EU)



These two Sessions cover a number of theme to which Haiti attaches great importance among other issues: climate change, international migration, changes in prices and access to the basic products market (including agricultural), development financing, integration of the economies of ACP States in the global economy...



In its various interventions at the Session of ACP Council of Ministers, the Haitian Chancellor stressed the importance Haiti grants to the continuation and strengthening of ACP-EU relations, the intensification of actions and initiatives aiming at a better integration between the ACP States to meet the commitments of northern partners, particularly the European Union, with respect to the financing of development in general...



The Minister Delienne gave the assurance that the Government in transition in Haiti, made every effort to stabilize the economic and social situation in the country, consolidate democratic gains, fulfill international commitments and open the way to the improvement of conditions life of the population and economic growth.



For reasons of agenda, the Chancellor Delienne will return to Port-au-Prince on Thursday 28th April. For the remainder of assizes, the Presidency of the Haitian delegation will be provided by the Permanent Representative of Haiti to the European Union, Ambassador Antonio Rodrigue.



HL/ Haitilibre


















On April 14, 2016, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed the unanimously passed Bill SJR0771, which recognizes Bill Gaither for his talent and contributions to gospel music.

The joint resolution was passed by the Tennessee General Assembly. The Friends of Gaither Music facebook page posted an excerpt from the bill and photo from the event. The excerpt reads "BE IT RESOLVED BY THE SENATE OF THE ONE HUNDRED NINTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE, THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES CONCURRING, that we honor Bill Gaither for his many contributions to gospel music, salute his talent as a performing artist and songwriter, and recognize his singular contributions to gospel music."

An Indiana-born kid with an insatiable love for music, Bill Gaither grew to become an industry leader who would change the course of gospel music history through the songs he has written and through his influence as a mentor for other artists.



An avid fan of gospel quartets throughout his childhood, Bill founded his first group, The Bill Gaither Trio, in 1956, while he was a college student. He began teaching English in 1959 because his musical aspirations couldn't support him full-time... yet. In 1962, Bill did one of the best things he has ever done. He married Gloria Sickal, who became the best writing partner Bill could have found anywhere. The couple spent the first five years of their married life juggling full-time teaching jobs, writing, singing, recording and publishing until music became their full-time career in 1967.



The collaborations of Bill and Gloria have resulted in more than 700 popular gospel songs, including the hymnal standard "Because He Lives," "The King Is Coming," "Something Beautiful," "He Touched Me," "It Is Finished," "There's Something About That Name," "Let's Just Praise The Lord," and "Loving God, Loving Each Other." Bill and Gloria have collectively won eight Grammy Awards and more than a dozen nominations, and they have received more than two dozen Dove Awards from The Gospel Music Association, earning the title of Gospel Music Association's "Songwriter of the Year" eight times.



After decades of unprecedented musical successes, Bill and Gloria still operate their business from Bill's hometown of Alexandria, Indiana, and they dwell in the same home in which they raised their family. They live a lifestyle focused on investing their resources into eternal things.



"Our calling is not just making music... but communicating the reality of Christ. That might mean birthing a song about Him or simply offering a cup of cold water to someone who needs it. Gloria and I have never claimed to have God figured out, but we do know that if He could use two imperfect people like us to communicate His Truth to the world, He can use everyone sitting in the audience, working on our staff or singing with us. If we have done anything right over the years, I hope we have built bridges where people could connect with God and with each other. That is what started us writing and what will keep us going for the rest of our lives."

Tags : bill gaither tennesse general assembly bill and gloria gaither bill gaither news bill gaither latest
Published on 2016/04/28

Added main poster and release date for the upcoming Korean movie "Horror Stories 3" (2015)

Advertisement

Directed by Baek Seung-bin, Kim Gok, Kim Sun, Min Gyoo-dong

With Lim Seulong, Kyung Soo-jin, Park Jung-min, Hong Eun-hee, Cha Ji-yeon, Kim Jong-soo,...

Synopsis

"Horror Stories", 2012, was about the four horror stories told by a high school student girl who was kidnapped by a murderer, and 'Horror Stories 2', 2013, depicted horror about death and the world after death. "Horror Stories 3" plays a role as a bridge between the first and second sequels, thus talks about past, present as well as future. The story of the third sequel is delivered in a unique setting borrowing the scientific fiction genre.

'A Girl from Mars' by Min Gyoo-dong

A girl makes an emergency landing on a planet ruled by machines.

The girl starts revealing her horrible memories about mankind one by one, while she tries to explain to the machines the reasons why she had to leave the people on earth and ended up landing on this planet.

Story of the Past - The Horrible tale 'Fox Valley'

'Man is not the lord of creation. In fact, they are a parasite.

A scholar Saengwon (classics licentiate) Lee (Lim Seulong) who was heading to his hometown after he successfully finished his Civil Service examination. He is chased down by a gang of robbers all of sudden and finds himself in a remote village after he ran and ran to save his own life. He decides to stay one night at a house, where a mysterious woman and one elderly person reside. However, the place he ended up happens to be the Fox Valley, where people say no one could get out alive! Saengwon Lee is trying to escape the Fox Valley to save his life.

Story of the Present - The Horror story of instinct of speed 'Road Rage'

'Why kill people? I don't know'

Dong-geun (Park Jung-min) and Soo-jin (Kyung Soo-jin) were driving on a highway late at night. A strange freight truck appears in front of them. As the truck keeps passing their car and blocking them several times, Dong-geun gets angrier each time and tries to pass the truck by driving even more violently. However, the freight truck won't give up either and keeps following them, then threatens Dong-geun and Soo-jin. On a dark night, the horrible speed competition accompanied by rage begins!

Story of the future - The Horror story of Artificial Intelligence 'Ghost of Machine'

'We will be together, forever'

An artificial intelligence robot, Doon-ko makes the best friend for a young boy, Jin-goo in place of his mom Ye-seon (Hong Eun-hee). Jin-goo and Doon-ko have been together for ten years and promise to be with each other forever. However, one day Doo-ko develops errors and hurts Jin-goo. Jin-goo's mom Ye-seon gets rid of Doon-ko without telling her son and purchases a new robot. But the new robot also develops strange symptoms. And Doo-ko keeps appearing in front of Ye-seon and Jin-goo's eyes. The curse of a promise you can't keep; what will be the end of it?

Release date in Korea : 2016/06/02
While some workplaces still ban social media sites such as Facebook, an increasing amount are taking a more lenient approach  but could it be to their detriment? If one new study is to be believed, that laid-back attitude could be costing businesses billions of dollars.



"As the CEO of a busy company, the amount of time I can visibly see being wasted as I walk around the office is a source of annoyance for me personally, said Chris Meredith of OfficeBroker.com. I doubt I'm the only boss who thinks this way.



The company recently conducted a survey of 1,150 workers to determine just how widespread the online timewasting really is and find out exactly how much its costing companies  the results are staggering.



In the study, 72 per cent of respondents admitted to checking their Facebook while at work and 81 per cent said they try to hide their unproductive online activity from others.



Even more shockingly, 35 per cent of employees confessed to spending over an hour of every workday on Facebook.



Where is the business value? asked CEO Meredith. I'm not surprised so many companies choose to police internet usage so aggressively."



The research also revealed that employees social media use could be costing companies the equivalent of CA $1,514 / NZ$1,742 every year.



On average, employees visit the Facebook app of website 13.8 times during the workday, for two minutes and 22 seconds each time.



While Facebook dominated as the main distractor, other common social media sites also featured with 12 per cent of employees admitting to checking Linkedin at work and eight per cent checking Twitter.


Racist City Employees Are on Notice, and 9 Other Greater Cincinnati News Stories You May Have Missed This Week

Catch up on local government, politics, sports, celeb sightings and Halloween fun.
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 11

INCIDENT: Simple non-physical assault was reported at 162 Welchs Glen in Deep Gap.

April 17

INCIDENT: Drug violations and drug paraphernalia were reported at Discovery Chevrolet, 2705 U.S. Highway 421 S in Boone.

April 18

INCIDENT: Fraud was reported at the Register of Deeds office in Boone.

INCIDENT: Possession of controlled substances and DWI were reported at Wendys, 1016 blowing Rock Road in Boone.

April 19

INCIDENT: Simple possession of schedule II and schedule IV controlled substances was reported at West End Pantry, 1220 W King St. in Boone.

INCIDENT: Breaking and entering and larceny  from buildings were reported at 300 Henson Road in Blowing Rock.

April 20

INCIDENT: Damage to property was reported at 464 Lee Gualtney Road in Banner Elk.

INCIDENT: Vandalism was reported at 163 Red Maple Lane in Boone.

INCIDENT: Breaking and entering was reported at 255 Farris Valley Drive in Zionville.

April 21

INCIDENT: Drug violations were reported at 100 Meat Camp Baptist Church Road in Boone.

INCIDENT: Larceny was reported at 284 Dark Hollow Trail.

INCIDENT: Simple physical assault and domestic violence were reported at 165 Clayton Hicks Drive in Sugar Grove.

ARREST: A male suspect, 26, of 309 Meadowhill Drive Apt. 22 in Boone, was charged with felony fraud. He was held under a $3,000 secured bond and will appear in court on May 18.

ARREST: A male suspect, 49, of 2128 Big Hill Road in Boone, was charged with DWI.

April 22

INCIDENT: A domestic dispute was reported at 2024 Georges Gap Road in Vilas.

INCIDENT: Simple physical assault was reported at 9115 N.C. Highway 105 S Unit 6 in Banner Elk.

INCIDENT: Possession of marijuana was reported at 100 Brownwood Road in Deep Gap.

ARREST: A male suspect, 34, of 856 Eagle Drive in Boone, was charged with child support and held under a $1,948 bond.

ARREST: A male suspect, 19, of 142 Tannebaum Lane in Vilas, was charged with hit/run and improper passing.

April 23

INCIDENT: Possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia was reported at 149 Hensels in Boone.

INCIDENT: A person was reported missing at 418 Rush Branch Road in Sugar Grove.

INCIDENT: Resist/obstruct/delay was reported at 100 Earl Lyons Road in Boone.

INCIDENT: Simple physical assault was reported at 9115 N.C. Highway 105 S. Unit 06 in Banner Elk.

INCIDENT: Simple possession of a schedule VI controlled substance and drug violations were reported at the intersection of King and College streets in Boone.

INCIDENT: Vandalism was reported at 156 Payne Branch Road in Blowing Rock.

INCIDENT: Vandalism was reported at 1280 Stoney Fork Road in Deep Gap.

ARREST: A female suspect, 23, of 149 Hensels Lane in Boone, was charged with felony possession of methamphetamine, misdemeanor simple possession of a schedule VI controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia. She was held under a $25,000 secured bond and will appear in court on June 14.

ARREST: A male suspect, 21, of 4728 Elk Creek Road in Deep Gap, was charged with felony possession of methamphetamine. He was held under a $5,000 secured bond and will appear in court on June 14.

ARREST: A male suspect, 51, of 1417 N.C. Highway 105 Bypass in Boone, was charged with resisting public officer. He was held under a $500 secured bond and will appear in court on May 18.

April 24

INCIDENT: Calls for service and communicating threats were reported at 1217 Old Bristol Road Apt. 3 in Boone.

INCIDENT: Fraud was reported at 111 Moody Drive in Vilas.

INCIDENT: Larceny and domestic civil dispute were reported at 648 Valle Meadows Trail in Sugar Grove.

ARREST: A male suspect, 22, of 352 Old E King St. in Boone, was charged with simple possession of a schedule VI controlled substance and drug violations and will appear in court on June 14.

April 25

INCIDENT: Fraud  credit card was reported in Boone.

INCIDENT: Vandalism was reported at 377 Harbin Road in Zionville.

INCIDENT: Larceny  from motor vehicle was reported at 488 Hite Williams Road in Zionville.

INCIDENT: Calls for service were reported at 646 Valle Meadows Trail in Sugar Grove.

ARREST: A female suspect, 29, of 181 Summit Woods #A6 in Blowing Rock, was charged with contempt of court/perjury/court violations. She was held under a $500 secured bond and will appear in court on May 13.
Members of Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corporation (BRE) have a new way to pay for improving the energy efficiency of their homes thanks to BREs new Energy SAVER Loan Program. BRE provides electricity to more than 74,000 residents of all or parts of seven counties in western North Carolina.

Appalachian Voices has promoted an on-bill energy efficiency finance program through BRE for nearly two years, and has worked with the electric co-op, local organizations, residents and businesses towards developing such a program to help consumers pay the upfront costs of making energy-efficiency improvements to their home.

Energy efficiency is the most readily available and easiest way to save energy and money. Plus, it makes our homes more comfortable and healthy, helps protect the environment and strengthens local economies. Unfortunately, many families cant afford the upfront costs, says Rory McIlmoil, energy policy director for Appalachian Voices, a nonprofit organization based in Boone. We congratulate Blue Ridge Electric staff for the work they have put in to bring this program to fruition and we look forward to continue working with them to expand the program beyond the pilot phase.

Energy efficiency improvements can reduce wasted energy and lower electric bills, and make homes healthier and more comfortable. As residents improve the efficiency of their homes, theyre also improving the community by helping to protect the environment and providing jobs to local businesses and contractors who perform the upgrades.

The new Energy SAVER Loan Program allows qualified BRE members to borrow up to $7,500 to make energy efficiency improvements such as insulation, air sealing and heating and cooling system upgrades. Borrowers will pay back the loan through a new monthly charge on their electric bill. BRE also announced the availability of rebates that can lower the cost of energy improvements and high efficiency appliances for all members.

The Energy SAVER Loan Program lays the groundwork for improving energy efficiency across the High Country region. We know that thousands of Blue Ridge Electric members could potentially benefit from this program, says Amber Moodie-Dyer, energy savings outreach coordinator with Appalachian Voices. So this is a significant achievement and we commend Blue Ridge for continuing to show their commitment to their members and a dedication to supporting local economic development.

Learn more about the Energy SAVER Loan Program on Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corp.s website.

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(Bloomberg) Marco Arosio, a former executive at Citigroup, sued the bank for unfair dismissal, according to filings from a London employment tribunal. The complaint by Arosio, who worked in rates trading and structuring according to his LinkedIn page, alleges his firing was related to whistle-blowing. Additional details werent available from the court other than that hearings are scheduled for the case in mid-May

To read this article:
A retired detective garda has been found guilty of lying to Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission officers who were investigating the posting of a Valentine's day card containing a bullet, a thong and a "raunchy" poem.

David O'Brien (52) was fined 500 for making a false statement to the Garda watchdog.

O'Brien was a member of the "cold case" Serious Crime Review Team at Harcourt Square when he committed the crime. He has since left the force.

Dublin District Court heard a woman O'Brien knew allegedly mailed the envelope. When the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) interviewed him, he claimed he had not been in touch with her since the 1990s.

However, the court heard the pair had exchanged hundreds of calls and texts before and after the package was allegedly sent.

O'Brien had pleaded not guilty to giving false or misleading information to GSOC on September 10, 2012.

During the trial, the court heard nearly 300 calls and texts were exchanged between two phones linked to the pair over the course of eight weeks.

Some 291 communications passed between the phones between February 1, 2011, and March 26, 2011. A total of 187 calls and texts were sent from O'Brien's phone, with 104 returned from the other phone.

Package

Detective Sergeant Michael Buckley received the package at his workplace where O'Brien worked under him. O'Brien denied any involvement and said he had not spoken to the woman who allegedly sent the envelope in 15 to 20 years.

The GSOC complaint was made by Det Sgt Buckley's wife Briege, who claimed her husband was being bullied and intimidated.

She felt the bullet was a threat to her and her two sons.

Defence barrister Kathleen Leader BL said the prosecution had admitted that the evidence in relation to the woman's phone was "not strong."

There was no evidence from anybody that the phone was attributable to the woman in the time frame in question, Ms Leader said.

She argued there were "reasonable possibilities" for the use of the woman's phone in 2011.

"She could have given it to her child, she could have lost it, there is any number of possibilities," Ms Leader said.

Judge Smyth said: "Sending a card with a raunchy poem and a thong? Is that something somebody would do for somebody they hadn't met since the 1990s? I don't know, I'm just throwing it out there."

The court heard O'Brien had no previous convictions.

He had joined the gardai in 1983 and retired in March 2015, Ms Leader said.

He spent most of his time in the Dublin North Central area before joining the cold case unit in 2007.

His service was of an "exemplary nature" until his suspension in September 2013.

After that he was at a "significant monetary loss," Ms Leader said.

"I appreciate that this has been a very difficult matter for Mr O'Brien," Judge Smyth said.

"I think the court has no alternative but to proceed to conviction."

When interviewed by GSOC, O'Brien denied any involvement in sending the envelope. He said he knew the alleged sender through her father and had not spoken to her since the 1990s.

Around January 2011, he met her father and told him he was "working with a 'p***k" - Det Sgt Buckley, who was "making my working conditions unbearable."

He did not ask the man to do anything and did not know his daughter was going to send the card. He said he had never threatened Det Sgt Buckley or his family, but had made two bullying complaints about him and believed this was the motivation behind the GSOC complaint.
A 45-year-old man accused of killing his stepson rang gardai the following day and told an officer "It was me that did it. I didn't know he was dead. I just heard it on the news".

David Mahon (45) was "very, very emotional" and "visibly shaken" when he came into Coolock Garda Station, a garda has told a jury.

Mr Mahon, of Ongar Village in Clonsilla, denies murdering 22-year-old Dean Fitzpatrick on May 26, 2013.

Mr Fitzpatrick is the brother of Amy Fitzpatrick, who went missing in Spain in 2008.

He was stabbed to death outside Mr Mahon's apartment at Burnell Square, Northern Cross, in Malahide.

Garda Patrick Brodigan told the Central Criminal Court he was working in Coolock Garda Station when he received a phone call at 9.25am from a man who identified himself as David Mahon.

Gda Brodigan said Mr Mahon told him: "It was me that did it. I didn't know he was dead. I just heard it on the news this morning".

The garda offered Mr Mahon the chance to come to the garda station, and he arrived with another man, John McCormack, shortly afterwards.

Gda Brodigan said Mr Mahon was crying and upset, and kept "talking and talking", repeating what he had said to him over the phone.

The Central Criminal Court heard Mr Mahon was formally interviewed by Detective Sergeant Eddie Carroll.

In the interview, he told gardai Mr Fitzpatrick had called up to his apartment, and the pair were arguing.

"We were always having rows, God forgive me but he's a little b*****d", Mr Mahon said, "but it's my fault he's dead."

During the interview, Mr Mahon said that Mr Fitzpatrick pulled a knife on him in the kitchen, but that he took it off him and put it in his back pocket.

Bleeding

He said his friend, Mr McCormack, took Dean out of his apartment onto the hallway, and he followed them.

Mr Mahon told gardai he pulled the knife from his pocket and he said to Dean: "What are you doing, pulling a knife on your father?"

He said Mr Fitzpatrick responded with, "what do you mean, you f**king eejit" and he walked into the knife.

The accused told gardai he thought it was only a graze and he did not see any blood. He said Mr Fitzpatrick ran down the stairs, and that was the last he saw of him.

He told gardai: "I didn't stab him, he walked into the knife", and: "It's my fault he's dead".

Mr Mahon said he remembers being in a taxi with his friend, Karl O'Toole, and throwing the knife out the window.

Earlier the court heard from Deputy State Pathologist Dr Michael Curtis, who said Dean Fitzpatrick died due to torrential bleeding caused by a single stab wound to the stomach.

Dr Curtis said the stab wound was approximately 14.5cm in depth, but accepted it could have been as little as 12.5cm.

Despite emergency treatment, Dr Curtis said the injury was essentially non-survivable.

Dr Curtis said he couldn't say if the stabbing was as a result of a "run on" - which he described as when an injured person advances and comes onto a knife - or a deliberate thrust of a knife.

Cross-examined by Sean Guerin SC, Dr Curtis said there was no evidence of twisting of the knife, nor was there any lateral movement or "slicing" of the knife.

Mr Guerin said it was suggested in the prosecution's opening statement that Mr Fitzpatrick had suffered a "gutting", but Dr Curtis agreed that what "Mr Fitzpatrick suffered was not a gutting".

In his evidence, Dean's father, Christopher Fitzpatrick, said doctors tried to bring his son back to life twice, but a surgeon told him he had been unable to save him.

He confirmed that Dean had been living with him in the last week of his life.

Mr Fitzpatrick also told the court that Dean had "stuff going on about his girlfriend, his missing sister and not being able to see his son".

The trial continues.
A former property developer who faked his own kidnapping has denied he bought his Galway mansion with the proceeds of crime.

"Define crime?" Kevin McGeever said during a court hearing into whether he has the means to pay a 1.17m judgment debt registered against him last year by investor James Byrne over property in Dubai sold by Mr McGeever's KMM Intel Properties.

He claimed the reported 4.5m he paid to buy and refurbish the mansion he named Nirvana, in Craughwell, Co Galway, came from 30 years of working every day and not drinking or smoking.

McGeever was under cross-examination in the Master's Court as part of efforts by Mr Byrne requiring the 71-year-old businessman to divulge assets so the debt could be recovered.

McGeever at one point said he wanted to stop giving evidence and wanted to leave it to his legal representative "because I am out of my depth here". He also said he wanted to sit down with Mr Byrne and the matter could be sorted out very simply.

He claimed he had a friend with business interests in Hong Kong and Singapore who would provide him with the money for the Byrne debt and the friend would later recover the money as part of any future business deals he and Mr McGeever had.

Illness

He refused to name the friend, who he said, "has been taking care of me for a couple of years" because it would "cause his name to go round the world".

Mr McGeever also said that he had not provided details of a hospital where he was being treated for an illness - for which the court heard he had no medical certificate - because photographers were taking pictures of him where ever he went.

But Andrew Robinson BL, for Mr Byrne, said this was because he had become "a bit of a celebrity" in recent weeks following his conviction and a two-year suspended sentence for wasting garda time.

McGeever was sentenced for concocting a story that he had been kidnapped by people he owed money to who held him for eight months before turning him loose.

Counsel put it to him that he had promised last December to pay the debt by March, but had not done so and his latest promise to settle the matter could not be believed.

Earlier, asked about a Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) investigation into the source of funding for Nirvana, Mr McGeever said "where has it gone? It has not gone anywhere.

"CAB has not lodged papers or charged me with anything".

Crime

He also asked if there was a suggestion that it came from the proceeds of crime. "What do you mean by crime? What are you talking about? Am I a drug dealer?" he asked.

When counsel said he was wanted by the FBI and Interpol, Mr McGeever said that was "going back 30 years".

He said Nirvana was bought by a company called Universal Assets (UA) in 2005. Asked did he first buy the mansion in his own name and then transfer it to UA, he said no and it was bought for him to have "a nice home in the West of Ireland".
Safety issues on Luas tram have not been addressed

Security measures to protect thousands of passengers on the Luas have been delayed because of ongoing industrial relations issues, the Herald can reveal.

As Luas workers hold a strike today, disrupting the travel plans of up to 90,000 customers, new security initiatives to protect the safety of passengers have been delayed.

Documents obtained by the Herald reveal the current industrial relations dispute has had a severe impact on the introduction of new measures to protect the safety of passengers.

Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) - the body that ensures Luas operator Transdev fulfils its obligation in relation to the management of security - recently quizzed the operator.

Documents show the TII asked Transdev to give a presentation on its progress in implementing "various security initiatives" that it had committed to in its bid for the operating contract.

"Progress in implementing these initiatives has been delayed by current industrial relations issues," a TII information note on security reveals.

"Transdev reported that significant progress has been made on implementing some of these initiatives," it added.

Transdev would not comment on the issue

"Transdev is solely focused on the Luas IR dispute and reaching a lasting resolution for the customer, staff and company," a spokeswoman told the Herald.

"We are not commenting at this time on the dispute as talks are ongoing, and nor will we be commenting on other aspects of the Luas service at this time."

The National Transport Authority also refused to comment, adding they "are satisfied that TII are managing the contract on our behalf".
Ross Hutch was in The Sunset House pub when Mickey Barr was murdered

Under-threat gangster Ross Hutch has been staying in safe houses and city hotels every night in a bid to keep one step ahead of his rivals in the Kinahan cartel, the Herald has learned.

Hutch (24) was in the Sunset House in Summerhill on Monday night when the sixth victim of the deadly Kinahan/Hutch feud was shot dead.

It is understood that Hutch fled the pub after dissident republican Michael 'Mickey' Barr (34) was murdered.

It has now emerged that Hutch has been too terrified to stay in his family home in the Dorset Street area of the capital after the gruesome murder of his father Eddie Hutch Snr.

Taxi driver Eddie (58), brother of gangland boss Gerry 'The Monk' Hutch was shot dead on February 8 at his home in Poplar Row in nearby Ballybough, as part of the bitter feud.

Bizarre

"Ross has been booking into different city centre hotels under a bizarre fake foreign name but this has not always worked out for him.

"In some cases, hotel staff have become aware of his true identity and have then refused to allow him to stay because of security concerns," a source explained.

"This has meant that he has had to stay in safe houses on occasion as well."

Sources say that Hutch has "very good reason to be paranoid" because he was been identified as a key target for the Kinahan cartel.

He has been warned of a threat against his life from the mob in the aftermath of the Regency Hotel gun attack.

Hutch featured on RTE's Winning Streak last year and left presenter Sinead Kennedy red-faced after he paid her a compliment.

He appeared as a contestant on behalf of his older brother, Eddie (41), and the pair walked away with some 33,000 in cash and prizes from the National Lottery show.

Hutch has 54 previous convictions for offences, including assault, dangerous driving and endangerment, robbery and violent disorder.

In October 2013, he was given a three-year suspended sentence after he was caught carrying a sawn-off shotgun in a shopping bag on a Dublin street.

The then 21-year-old pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possession of the firearm on Sean McDermott Street on May 25, 2012.

The court heard that Hutch had been under threat at the time and had a serious drug addiction, but had successfully completed a five-month treatment programme.

His older brother, Alan Hutch (35), is serving an eight-year jail sentence for threatening to kill three gardai and claiming he had a grenade.

Alan Hutch was on bail for a violent robbery and dangerous driving when he assaulted the gardai in November, 2012.

In the aftermath of his father Eddie's savage murder in February, Alan was forcibly placed under maximum protection in Mountjoy Prison after gardai uncovered evidence of a plot by the Kinahan cartel to kill him next.

Prison bosses were forced to use a Control and Restraint team to remove Hutch from the Training Centre after gardai asked for his removal from general population with immediate effect.

He was later refused compassionate leave for his father's funeral because of security fears surrounding his release.

Meanwhile, there have been no arrests yet in relation to the feud-related murder of dissident republican 'Mickey' Barr on Monday night, the sixth fatality in the gang warfare.

Target

The latest killing has led to massive concern that the so-called 'New IRA' faction will target the Kinahan cartel.

Barr became a target because of his close association with the Regency Hotel gunman nicknamed 'Flat Cap', who is from the same county as him.

Detectives also believe that the Kinahan cartel had received information that Barr had also been involved in sourcing the Ak-47s that were used in the Regency attack from his IRA faction in the North.

Garda Superintendent Dan Flavin, of Mountjoy Garda Station, who is leading the investigation, said at a press conference this week that two masked men, described as "skinny", entered the pub and fired a number of shots.

He said the gunmen escaped in a silver Audi A6, registration 04C 17738, and drove north towards nearby Drumcondra, where they abandoned the car.

They then got into another silver car.

It is understood that the killers had a 'spotter' in the pub who was in contact with the assassination team - believed to be a gang based in Cabra.

It is not known if the killers spotted Ross Hutch in the pub at the time.

Barr was the sixth victim of the Hutch/Kinahan feud. The first person to die was Gary Hutch (34), who was shot at a Spanish apartment complex in September last year.

This led to the Regency Hotel attack on February 5, in which Kinahan cartel figure David Byrne (34) was shot dead and the revenge murder of Eddie Hutch Snr at his home just three days later.

Last month, key Hutch associate Noel 'Kingsize' Duggan (57) was murdered outside an address in Ashbourne, Co Meath, on March 23.

Innocent father-of-three Martin O'Rourke (24) was gunned down on Sheriff Street in Dublin city centre in a case of mistaken identity on April 14.

The actual target in this case was gangster Keith Murtagh, aligned to the Hutch faction.
Hundreds of felons have rushed to register to vote in Richmond and Henrico County since Gov. Terry McAuliffe restored the civil rights of more than 206,000 last week, but local registrars say the state hasn't given them the information they need to approve applications.

Richmond General Registrar J. Kirk Showalter said she had been able to verify just two of the 102 applications the office had received by Tuesday night, while Henrico Registrar Mark D. Coakley said his office was working through more than 200 online requests and setting aside those it had accepted in case of later questions about an ex-offender's status.

They and other registrars across Virginia say the state wasn't ready to carry out McAuliffe's sweeping executive order on Friday that restored voting and other civil rights.

"This is the time when government went too fast," Coakley said.

But McAuliffe administration officials said they warned from the beginning that it would take time to update online state databases to show the restoration of rights for so many people.

"This is a massive administrative undertaking, but it is the right thing to do," spokesman Brian Coy said.

Edgardo Cortes, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections, said the main state voter database will be fully updated by the end of the week to show when a felon's rights had been restored and reminded that the process could not begin until the governor signed the order.

"We were totally ready," Cortes said. "If we had loaded these folks in before the governor did his order, they would have come off the (prohibited voter) list prematurely."

Much of the confusion has arisen among registrars because they said they were not able to verify restoration of a felon's voting rights either on the Virginia Election Registration Information System, VERIS, or a searchable online site operated by the Secretary of the Commonwealth, to which they were directed after the governor issued his executive order.

"It is a matter of getting the cart slightly ahead of the horse," said Tracy D. Howard, general registrar in Radford and president of the Voter Registrars Association of Virginia.

VERIS draws on a variety of sources to show when a person is convicted of a felony, which shows up as a flag on the database of prohibited voters. Normally, the database is updated regularly by the Secretary of the Commonwealth's database, which shows when a felon's rights are restored.

The scope of the governor's order lengthened the time for updating both databases. State officials said the secretary's database was updated Wednesday, while the process would be completed in VERIS by the end of the week.

"This is a large-scale restoration of rights...and it will take some time for us to ensure data has been transferred to our system from the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office," Cortes cautioned in an email to registrars on Friday.

Meanwhile, registrars say they've been in a bind because state law requires them to verify information voters provide on their registration forms, such as when a person's rights are restored.

"The law says we should have some sort of verification ... All I can rely on is the Code of Virginia," said Lawrence C. Haake, general registrar in Chesterfield County, where only a few applications had been filed by Wednesday.

In addition to the law, registrars say they rely on state election department guidance, which last week directed them to contact the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office to determine if a felon's rights had been restored, before denying a person's application.

"The difference between the guidance and what the law says, it's not always in sync," Haake said. "Therein lies the problem."

The State Board of Elections is scheduled today to consider changes in the voter registration form and department guidance first proposed last May. Cortes said the changes focus on eliminating requirements for felons to provide additional information about rights restored by the governor under the previous, case-by-case process, since that information already is available online.

Another proposed change would make clear that registrars may not ask for additional information from someone whose rights have been restored, as long as the restoration is verified in the Secretary of the Commonwealth's database.

The changes are aimed at ensuring that registration requirements don't discriminate against certain classes of voters and were unrelated to McAuliffe's restoration order, Cortes said. "They would have been there whether the governor had made an announcement on Friday or not."

For Showalter, the difficulty in verifying a person's restoration status has increased her office workload, but she said the real burden is on the person who wants to register to vote.

"My concern is my poor voters," she said. "They submit applications expecting to be registered, and now they're out on a limb. I just don't think that's fair to them."
COLUMBUS  A 23-year-old Columbus man was charged with first-degree sexual assault of a minor and identity theft-$5,000 or more after authorities discovered the 14-year-old local girl he had been dating for more than a year was pregnant.

Francisco Batz-Chicaj is scheduled for a status hearing May 23 in Platte County Court on the felony charges in connection with a sexual relationship that was discovered in late March when the teen was seeking treatment for another medical issue.

The defendant was freed from custody on a $125,000 bond, 10 percent allowed for release, a day after his April 7 arrest.

First-degree sexual assault of a minor is a Class 2 felony, punishable by up to 50 years in prison. Identity theft is a Class 2A felony and carries a maximum penalty of 20 years behind bars.

Court documents describe a Columbus Police investigation that got underway March 25 with the report of the girls pregnancy.

Investigator Jaymee Levander wrote in her probable cause arrest statement that the victim reported having sex with the defendant in a city park about two months earlier.

During an interview with police, the defendant admitted the sexual contact and time frame and said he had been dating the victim for about 15 months, the investigator wrote in her statement.

Levander said the defendant was aware the victim was pregnant and said he had plans to marry her when she turned 18. The victim believed the defendant was 20 years old, the investigator said.

Batz-Chicaj was in possession of several pieces of false identification when arrested, including a Missouri ID card, Visa debit card, work ID card at a local manufacturing plant, Pinnacle Bank Visa card, Guatemala Department of Transit card and Consular ID card.

Levander said the defendant reported he got the identification cards from a friend who died and the cards were for the purposes of employment and banking.
Never be bored again  keep up with what's hot with What's NXT.
Crane whistleblower says he was fired after reporting safety violations

Rick Ward said safety violations first identified after a 2013 explosion continue to endanger people at the southern Indiana military installation.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.  After warning for days about violent storms that could rake the central U.S. with huge hail, high winds and strong tornadoes, forecasters will review whether the messages they sent were appropriate for severe weather that some considered a "bust" because the tornadoes that did develop were small.

Storms on Tuesday brought grapefruit-sized hail in Kansas and winds near 75 mph throughout the Great Plains and Missouri River Valley. But the tornadoes that formed lacked enough of the "right" ingredients to become monster storms.

"We had signals that it could be on the higher end," said Bill Bunting, the operations chief at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. "But each system is different, and (this one) didn't live up to our expectations."

The center for the first time had said six days out that a severe weather "outbreak" was possible  raising questions on whether it was appropriate to sound a general alarm that far in advance.

"The one thing missing was what the hazards were," said Kim Klockow, a visiting scientist at the National Weather Service who studies meteorology and human behavior. "It was always entirely possible there would be tornadoes and it was possible there won't be."

The Storm Prediction Center doesn't quantify the chance of specific hazards in its forecasts until the day the storms are expected. On Tuesday, the center predicted that the central U.S. had a "moderate risk" of severe weather based on a 45 percent chance of 1-inch hail, with at least a 10 percent chance of 2-inch hail. The center said there was a lesser risk of tornadoes.

Klockow, who was brought aboard to help forecasters communicate their messages more effectively, said the solution lies not only with the Storm Prediction Center but with all charged with spreading the news about bad weather. She noted that some broadcasters talked up tornadoes as though they were certain.

"No single one of us communicates alone. We need to be on the same sheet of music," she said.

The dire predictions led several Oklahoma school districts to shutter their doors. Businesses cleared inventory from exposed areas, fearing the worst.

"So many people were sheltering for the tornado, I would be surprised if there wasn't some talk of a bust," Klockow said.

Marshall Shepherd, a former president of the American Meteorological Society, a professor and director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia and the host of a Sunday talk show on the Weather Channel, noted in an email to The Associated Press that forecasters and the public often focus on tornadoes when discussing severe weather.

"I think the communication of (a) severe weather threat is still tornado dominant," Shepherd said. "The overall event was generally ok, the 'bust' is in the hyper-discussion and anticipation of an outbreak."

In a piece that he wrote for Forbes on Wednesday, Shepherd said some discussion of a "bust" is likely fair after the hype of Tuesday's storms. "However," he went on to say, "I frequently encourage society to move beyond the notion of being upset when preparing for the worst and it does not happen. Just say thank you."

Klockow said she would like to know how people handled information they received before and during the storms' development  using actual data, not just anecdotes from people tweeting about what was perceived as a flawed forecast.

She said she also would like to see the National Weather Service collect data on social behaviors, like the agency already does on how storms come together.

"It's a physical science agency," Klockow said. "The pressure will need to come externally to bring that to the attention of the agency."

Bunting, whose team made the forecast, said the pre-storm outlooks succeeded in drawing attention to the weather, even if storms weren't entirely as bad as expected.

"We always have to work to improve how we present information," he said.
Rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson and his Oklahoma counterpart are trying a different strategy to halt legal marijuana in Colorado.

This month, the two states asked to be added as plaintiffs in a case being considered by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

That appeal combines two separate cases: one brought by a group of county sheriffs from Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas, and the other on behalf of a Pueblo County couple who own land near a recreational marijuana growing facility.

Nebraska and Oklahoma argue they have "unique sovereign interests" in preventing marijuana from crossing their borders, and that they shouldn't be left out as the court considers the issue.

Those interests wouldn't be represented by the current plaintiffs, who are focused on "removing marijuana from the streets of Colorado," Peterson and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt say in their motion to intervene in the appeal.

"Because the people of Nebraska and Oklahoma have determined that marijuana is harmful and should be illegal, Nebraska and Oklahoma have a duty to protect their citizens from the continuing harms resulting from Colorado's illegal activities, by taking action to ensure that Colorado marijuana does not enter their sovereign boundaries," the states' lawyers wrote.

The court has given no timeline for addressing the request, but allowed lawyers for Nebraska and Oklahoma to make merit-based arguments in briefs due May 23.

That means the states can argue the marijuana issue itself, almost as if Nebraska and Oklahoma were already part of the case, rather than restating their reasons for wanting to join as plaintiffs.

"When they said we could be heard on the merits issue ... that's what we wanted to hear," Peterson said Thursday.

It's a different response than the states received from the U.S. Supreme Court last month when it rejected Nebraska and Oklahoma's case without considering the merits.

Then-Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning and Pruitt petitioned the high court to intervene in 2014, the same year Colorado launched recreational marijuana sales.

Lawyers for Pueblo County, named as a defendant in the 10th Circuit case, wrote in response to the new request that Nebraska and Oklahoma are trying to bypass standard procedure and "short-circuit the process" after being denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Peterson, who took office in 2015, said the potent pot being imported from Colorado is stronger than the strains people used in the 1960s and 1970s and comes in forms ready-made to market to children, such as candy and cookies. That burdens Nebraska law enforcement and endangers young people, he said.

His office would rather join an existing case than file new action that could get stuck behind an ongoing appeal, Peterson said.

"To me it's a matter of judicial economy. ... It just makes sense."
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Mahatma Gandhis views on Vande Mataram or Bharat Mata Ki Jai offer lessons on divergent opinions on this slogan. He associated Vande Mataram with the purest national spirit and got enthralled by it.

The concluding words in letters written by him since 1911 were not Yours sincerely or Yours Faithfully but Vande Mataram, Mohandas.

In letters to Muslims he used Salaam, Aadab, Vande Mataram or Blessings as would be proper and fitting. However, he maintained that, I would not risk a single quarrel over singing of Vande Mataram at a mixed gathering.

In 1920 during the Khilafat agitation, people welcomed Gandhiji and the Ali brothers by shouting Mahatma Gandhi ki jai and Mohomed Ali-Shaukat Ali ki jai. In such events, the recitation of Vande Mataram by the Hindus met with Allah-o-Akbar by Muslims. Seeing such conflicting recitals he wrote an article entitled Three National Cries in Young India on September 8, 1920, and urged people irrespective of faith to recite three slogans  Allah-o-Akbar, Vande Mataram or Bharat Mata ki jai and Hindu Musalman ji jai. He firmly believed that people professing diverse creeds would have no problem reciting those slogans in that order. Particularly, he felt that nobody would have any objection to recite Allah-o-Akbar as its meaning is God is Great. Very thoughtfully, he stated that without Hindu Musalman ki jai, Bharat Mata ki Jai would not be complete. It is a proven fact that Gandhiji stressed the plurality of slogans in spite of his exceptional fondness for Vande Mataram.

Read: A slogan is no reference point for patriotism

In 1943 he authored Constructive Programme, which had 18 points to achieve independence for India and bring about positive social change through non-violence. In the point concerning students, he categorically wrote that they may not impose Vande Mataram or the National Flag on others.

On December 23, 1945, during a discussion with political workers, when it was asked if Vande Mataram should be replaced by the new song Qadam, Qadam, Gandhiji asserted that Vande Mataram, associated with glorious sacrifice, could never be given up. However, he suggested that a new song or songs could certainly be added to the repertoire of national songs after due thought and discrimination.

Read: Beheading remark was in response to Owaisis statement: Ramdev

When Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose coined the Jai Hind slogan, it electrified the nation and inculcated the values of patriotism and nationalism in the minds of all sections of society. But Gandhiji disapproved of attempts of some people to force others to recite Jai Hind. He stated that inasmuch as a single person is compelled to shout Jai Hind or any popular slogan a nail is driven into the coffin of Swaraj...

Gandhijis stand was for repertoire of national songs and against imposition of any slogan on anybody. In fact, he wrote on March 5, 1947, that it would be terrible if people should recite victory to India and work for her annihilation. When some people in Bihar travelled ticketless in train and shouted Jai Hind, he disapproved of using such slogans as a cry for loot and murder. As early as 1939, he wrote that calling the State a Hindu State or Muslim State constituted a libel as far as nationalism was concerned. Using force on anybody to recite a slogan constitutes such a libel. Persecuting a person for not saying Bharat Mata ki jai, though he is more than willing to recite any other slogan, is like the persecution of Prahalad in mythology by his father, Hiranya Kashyup, for praying to Lord Hari in defiance of his diktat to pray to Lord Shiva.

Read: No problem saying Bharat Mata Ki Jai: Delhi L-G Najeeb Jung

Gandhiji considered Prahalad, along with Jesus Christ, Imam Hussain and Mirabai, a fine satyagrahi. This lesson from mythology is relevant for the debate on Bharat Mata ki Jai.

SN Sahu is joint secretary, Rajya Sabha Secretariat. The views expressed are personal.
As we explore the Kanheri Caves nestled inside the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in the scorching heat, we come across natural reservoirs with clean water. These are ostensibly as old as 2nd century AD, says Dr Suraj Pandit, archaeologist and the head of the department of Ancient Indian Culture at Mumbai University. He walks us through caves that house inscriptions, sculptural panels and ancient paintings depicting the history of Buddhism in Maharashtra. The caves and the forest surrounding them were once a consolidated village called Magathane. The land was originally owned by Buddhist monks for residential and agricultural purposes. Interestingly, some of the trees in the vicinity are as old as the caves themselves. Unfortunately, they are no longer cared for.

Did you know?

>> The Kanheri caves were built 1,400 years ago. The name originates from the Sanskrit word Krishnagiri, which literally translates to black mountain. The hills in which the caves are carved into are made of volcanic rock, and therefore the colour. The surrounding hills, however, are made of basalt.

Cave number 3: This cave has the most number of intact carvings at Kanheri. It also houses a prayer hall called the Chaitya Gruha. Characterised by intricately carved Buddhist sculptures  featuring slender figurines with arched eyebrows and delicate fingers, Stupas (dome-shaped shrines)  the prayer hall looks majestic. (Photo: Aalok Soni/HT )

>> The caves are the only site in western India to have artistic evidence of all the three vehicles of Buddhism  the three phases of the religion in India. The first, called Hinayana, had a no-image worship practice. Its teachings were passed down in Pali, an ancient language of this religious sect. The practitioners of the second phase, Mahayana Buddhists, were the ones who accepted image worship. They believed that every human being can become Buddha, unlike the teaching of the Hinayana sect that believed enlightenment was achievable only by Lord Buddha. Vajrayana Buddhism, the last phase, paved the way for a series of secret practices of worship comprising tantric methods to attain Buddhahood (enlightenment) quickly.

Also read: Rajabai Clock Tower

Cave number 11: The cave bears a close resemblance with cave number five in Ellora, Aurangabad. They are the only caves in India where Buddhist monks hosted group recitations of religious scriptures. They sat around elongated rectangular tables, which are rock cut inside the cave, to do their diurnal practice. The tables have survived till date. (Photo: Aalok Soni/HT )

>> The monks residing in the caves were in close contact with the monks in China through a route in Central Asia called the Silk Route  an ancient international highway which helped in the Asia-wide spread of Buddhas teachings.

Cave number 41: The cave houses an 11-headed god Avalokiteshwara  the divine power that depicts the compassion of all Buddhas. This is the first and only archeological piece of this deity in India, and the earliest one recorded in the world. (Photo: Aalok Soni/HT )

>> Buddhism was gradually lost in Maharashtra by 1560, which led to the abandonment of the caves. For 300 to 400 years, they remained in a dilapidated condition. After Independence, the Archeological Survey of India decided to take over, revive and conserve the heritage site.

Cave number 90: One of the oldest caves, it is the only one with two Japanese inscriptions engraved in its verandah. It is also the first structure in the world dedicated to housing the Lotus Sutra  the teaching of Buddhism as told by Gautam Budhha, towards the end of his life. (Photo: Aalok Soni/HT )

Also read: Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum

Historic nightout

Dr Suraj Pandit will host an overnight talk on the secrets of Kanheri Caves, on April 30, 5pm onward.

Where: Sanjay Gandhi National Park, off Western Express Highway, Borivali (E)

Call: 2886 8686

Price: Rs2,000 per person.

The Park is open for visitors every day from 7.30am to 5.30pm.
The opposition Left-Congress alliance is promising to reverse what Singur did five years ago when the place drove out Tatas Nano and drove in Mamata Banerjee.

It was Trinamool Congress chief Banerjees massive campaign against the proposed Nano car plant in Singur, about 40km from Kolkata, that catapulted her into political relevance after her partys back-to-back debacles in the 2004 Lok Sabha and 2006 assembly elections.

This farming countryside remains a Trinamool bastion but murmurs of dissent are heard too. Banerjee has failed to return the land taken from farmers for the Tata factory. Not that many people are willing to. Besides, the two Trinamool ministers from the area are engaged in ceaseless infighting.

Thats where the Left-Congress alliance senses a kill. It is bombarding Singur with rallies where each speaker promises to bring back Tata and revive the abandoned Nano plant  which has again become the metaphor for industries and development in the area.

Five years have been wasted. Singur has been turned into a graveyard. Now, there has to be a change towards development and the change should start from Singur, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said at a weekend rally.

He was campaigning for seasoned CPI(M) poll manager Rabin Deb, the opposition candidate for Singur against the Trinamools three-time MLA, octogenarian Rabindranath Bhattacharya. Nearly 2.3 lakh voters will decide their fate on April 30.

An automobile hub could have come up in Singur  People misread the situation. They were sceptical and there was failure in gaining their trust, Bengal Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said, echoing Yechury.

For his part, Deb started his campaign riding a Nano.

Bringing Tata back to their abandoned plant in Singur is our top priority. Bengal needs industries Everyone in Singur is asking me if we can bring Tata back. I am saying, yes, we can. And we will, he said.

Chief minister Banerjee visited Singur a day before the Yechury-Chowdhury rally. It was her first public meeting there after September 2011. The focus of her speech was how her government has spent Rs 170 crore on the Singur block alone over the past five years.

More than the opposition, Banerjee is probably worried that her legislator, Bhattacharya, is not in talking terms with Becharam Manna, the Haripal MLA who controls the party organisation in Singur.

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Anti-nuclear activist SP Udaykumar, who ran rings around the nuclear scientific community when it came to using media efficiently to paint nuclear plant at Kudankulam as the villain till chief minister Jayalalithaa cracked down, is attempting to enter Tamil Nadu assembly from Radhapuram constituency in south Tamil Nadus Tirunveli district.

An American returned academician and anti-nuclear activist, this 58 year old independent candidate has only 400 criminal cases slapped on him, on various counts, for the agitation he spearheaded and brought the work on Kudankulam Nuclear power plant to a complete halt for nearly two years.

He had successfully mobilized the fishing villages in and around the plant site in Tiruneveli district as also from the nearby coastal districts, putting the fear of life into the people living in the vicinity. When it came to using media, the inarticulate scientific community, belonging to the public sector Nuclear Power Corporation of India, were no match, as Uday Kumar easily cornered them as demons. Fisher folk in the villages were only too happy to rally around Uday Kumar who had the church backing him too. Since Kudankulam is very much part of the Radhapuram constituency, a cluster of some 200 villages, most of which participated in Uday Kumars struggle, he is already a local hero, one of us as the villagers describe him.

I am a very serious contender and the results will show, Udaykumar told Hindustan Times over phone from his campaign in Kudankulam on Thursday.

He is up against the two Dravidian majors, M Aeppu a three time MLA of DMK from the same constituency and IS Inba Durai, AIADMK, both from the powerful Nadar community that dominates this region.

Udaykumar realizes the uneven battle he has waged, when in terms of money, organization and backing, I am far behind. But people here know me and they are watching the ugly and vulgar display of money by both DMK and AIADMK and are extremely upset over this.

Our campaign at Radhapuram constituency is going very well even though the big corrupt parties are pumping money like anything. We need many small donations to keep our struggle going. Please send whatever help you can give to the following special election account, Udaykumar appealed to his supporters, mostly youth, on his Facebook page.

Admitting that the Kudankulam had come up despite a huge struggle waged by him, with the support of the local villagers, Udaykumar said that there are several issues that agitate the minds of the people. Kudankulam unit one is still plagued with problems and the second one is not commissioned yet, even after three year have elapsed. It is a failed project, he declares and never tires of kicking up this issue and remind the people.

For unit one and unit two the price of Kudankulam nuclear plant was Rs 16000 crore apiece. But for the third and fourth unit, the price escalation makes them Rs 45,000 crore each, Udaykumar alleged citing an RTI reply. How can the price escalation be so much, he questioned, only hinting at possible corruption.

Corruption is also a very big issue and will play out in the elections. And in this both AIADMK and DMK are no different to one another, he said.

But there are other issues, purely local ones of the constituency which hold true for most of Tamil Nadu too, he said citing unemployment, poor quality education, price rise, pathetic infrastructure, rapidly declining agriculture and the like.

We promise to set these things right, Udaykumar said adding people are fed up of both AIADMK and DMK and are looking for an alternative. Here in Radhapuram I am the alternative and the people already have endorsed me, a confident sounding Udaykumar said.
Until about a month ago, Trinamool Congress leaders could be heard proclaiming how their party was cruising to a two-thirds majority in the West Bengal assembly elections.

But as the six phase polls slowly progress in the state, the ruling partys confidence appears to have dissipated.

An informal alliance between the Left Front and Congress has gained in strength on the ground and a string of corruption scams  including the unprecedented collapse of an under-construction flyover in Kolkata -- has dented chief minister Mamata Banerjees image.

This time it will be a close fight -- closer than anything thought earlier -- between the ruling party and the alliance, said a senior state government official.

Mamata has done a lot of development work but her party leaders and ministers are under the scanner of agencies that are probing scams. Its without a parallel in Bengals history.

The mathematics were always stacked in favour of the opposition alliance  in 2011, the Trinamools 39.08% vote share was far lower than the Lefts (41.05%) and the Congress (8.91%) votes are put together.

The Trinamool and the Congress were in coalition at the time and swept the Left out of power after three decades.

The alliance and the Trinamool were evenly matched in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections but the ruling party will be in trouble if the Left-Congress combine consolidates the 16.8% voteshare polled by the BJP in the general elections.

The gap is gradually reducing between the ruling party and the alliance. This time there is no pro-Mamata wave that we saw in 2011, a senior bureaucrat close to Banerjee said.

Add to this a series of controversies such as a purported sting video that showed 13 Trinamool leaders receiving bribes. The flyover collapse established the ruinous effect of syndicates and another sting allegedly tied the illegal network to prominent Trinamool leaders.

The alliance that began with messy seat-sharing negotiations has also upped its game. Senior leaders from both camps such as Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Sitaram Yechuri and former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya campaigned at joint rallies and meetings.

Local workers of both parties appear enthused and observers in even the Trinamool stronghold of south Bengal indicate a neck-and-neck fight.

Simple arithmetic of vote share may go against Trinamool despite its development work. BJPs vote will go to the alliance because Left supporters who voted for BJP in 2014 may return to their own camp, psephologist professor Biswanath Chakraborty told HT.

Tough patrolling by paramilitary forces and an alert election commission reined in the infamous Trinamool strongmen.

A party can usually rustle up 20% votes by unfair means. This time we could not achieve it due to the overactive EC and central forces, a Kolkata Trinamool leader said, predicting around 170 seats for the party.

Banerjee appears to have sensed the momentum shift, softening her usually belligerent tone.

Speaking at a public rally a few days after the flyover collapse, she said, If there were any errors, I should be responsible.
Joining the bandwagon of female actors who turned producers in Bollywood, actor Richa Chadda too has stepped into production.

The 27-year-old actor, who has worked in critically acclaimed films such as Gangs Of Wasseypur I and II (2012) and Masaan (2015), has produced a Punjabi film Khoon Aali Chithi -- a short film based on the terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s due to the Khalistan movement in Punjab. She will also present the film.

Im glad that I could come on board as the producer for this project. Its an amazing and powerful Punjabi short film. I really hope that we will be able to find great space for it at film festivals in the coming year, says Richa, who is gearing up for the release of her next Hindi film, Sarbjit, directed by Omung Kumar.

Read: Wont ask Sarabjits wife intrusive questions, says Richa Chadda

Read: Masaan is about morality crisis, says Richa Chadda

Richa would be presenting and producing a Punjabi film, Khoon Aali Chithhi, which is being directed by Rupinder Singh. Its title means letters written in blood. The film is doing the round of film festivals and has been selected for the International film festival of South Asia in Toronto. She has not just supported the film financially, but has also given a lot of creative inputs, says a source from the production.

Earlier, actors such as Lara Dutta, Juhi Chawla and Anushka Sharma have also produced films.

Listen to Salamat from Sarbjit here:

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Not just Bollywood actors, it seems even IPS recruits can learn something from Akshay Kumar in terms of fitness. The actor, who is at present shooting Rustom in Hyderabad, spent a day with new IPS officer recruits. On menu was volleyball session and a martial arts session.

Spent my day off in Hyderabad with the new IPS officer recruits.Fun interaction,volleyball & a combat ends the day!https://t.co/N7nwvLEkca  Akshay Kumar (@akshaykumar) April 26, 2016

Akshay also interacted with them and even shared a trick or two he has learnt in the course of his intensive martials arts training. While the recruits themselves must have been impressed, it was wife Twinkle Khanna on whom the training made quite an impression.

Read: Akshay Kumar gifts headache, throwback pic to Twinkle on anniversary

Reposting a video of the training that Akshay had shared on social media, Twinkle wrote, This is why hes my Bae! Fitness=agility+skill+discipline+spirit-puffy gym muscles :).

This is why he's my Bae! Fitness=agility+skill+discipline+spirit-puffy gym muscles :) #When2BlackBeltsSpar A video posted by Twinkle Khanna (@twinklerkhanna) on Apr 26, 2016 at 9:10pm PDT

All new fitness and relationship goals, that is what this adorable couple is giving us!
In an acknowledgement of Indias potential as an investment destination, Chinese equity hedge fund Silver Spring Capital will soon invest over `2,000 crore ($300 million) in the fund-starved infrastructure sector.

The Hong Kong-based fund will make this investment in Hyderabad-based infrastructure developer Transstroy India Limited.

This is the first ever proposal where the money will be pumped in the company for construction of highways. Till now foreign funds have shown interest in buying completed projects, a senior government official said.

One such buyout of completed projects happened last year when Gammon Infrastructures sale of six road and three power projects to BIF India Holdings for about Rs 563 crore. BIF Holdings is controlled by Canada-based Brookfield Asset Management.

Meanwhile, Reliance Infrastructure too is understood to be in talks with Singapore wealth fund GIC to sell 11 road projects.

This transaction (by Silver Spring Capital) is a clear evidence of investors enthusiasm in long-term infrastructure projects, the official said.

At present, the government allows 100% foreign direct investment (FDI) under the automatic route for support services to land transport such as construction and maintenance highway bridges, toll roads, vehicular tunnels and cargo handling, including collection of toll.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in construction sector (including roads and highways) from April 2000 to December 2015 in India was Rs 1.14 lakh crore (around $24 billion). This amounted to 8.7% of the total FDI inflows in the period, according to data released by Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP).

The proposal is currently subject to government approval and is likely to be cleared soon, sources said.

Getting FDI in roads and highways sector has been top priority for the government, which feels foreign investment is key to build projects of international standards. Road transport minister Nitin Gadkari has expressed that the country needs FDI in the road infrastructure sector to meet international standards.

Transstroy limited currently has two unfinished projects: a 54-km stretch from Coimbatore to Mettupalayam in Tamil Nadu and a 121-km highway from Obedullaganj to Betul in Madhya Pradesh.

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It is that time of the year when the sovereign credit rating agencies come to assess the performance of Indias economy and path of fiscal consolidation. Starting mid-May, representatives of top global rating agencies will visit north block, which houses the finance ministry, to interact with the officials for an overview of the Indian economy.

This is a crucial exercise as these ratings determine Indias investment worthiness.

Keeping the importance of these visits in mind, Shaktikanta Das, secretary of department of economic affairs, recently met all his officials to ensure full preparedness for the meetings with the rating agencies such as Fitch and Moodys.

Das department that has to ensure that the Indian economy is in shape, and sources in the finance ministry says he has directed officials to create presentations.

The officials have been asked to start preparing lists of all the reforms undertaken by the Narendra Modi-led government to ensure that the path of fiscal consolidation is followed, and the deficit targets are met.

Moodys has already raised the red-flag regarding the non-performing assets (NPAs) -- loans that do not yield returns -- situation in the public sector banks (PSBs). It said the mounting bad debts will impact Indias rating.

The NPA ratios of the PSBs, which hold more than 70% of the total banking system assets, large amounts of government securities and conduct government-directed lending, saw a marked increase in 2015.

The NPAs of PSBs rose by about Rs 1 lakh crore to Rs 3.93 lakh crore at the end of December 2015 compared to Rs 3 lakh crore at September-end same year.

Moodys has kept India in the lowest investment grade category Baa3 with positive outlook. Though, this is an improvement over Indias prospects as projected by agencies, two years back.

Sources said Das wants his officials to put their best foot forward, and has asked them to study the recent reports prepared on India by the rating agencies. He has also asked them to ensure that all their apprehensions about India are mitigated.

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Business secretary Sajid Javid said on Thursday that potential buyers of Tata Steels UK assets were unwilling to take on liabilities of the companys pension fund that has a deficit of 485 million pounds and 130,000 members.

Appearing before the Business, Innovation and Skills parliamentary committee, Javid, who visited Mumbai twice in the last month for talks with top Tata officials, reiterated that the government would not take more than 25 per cent stake as announced last week.

Read: Britain says could take 25% stake in Tata Steels UK business

Responding to questions, he mentioned the pension liabilities and said: Its not unreasonable ... to say look were interested in the assets but this would be an issue, and added that pension fund trustees were in talks with the regulator.

Bimlendra Jha, chief executive of Tata Steel UK, told the committee that a sale would not happen unless the pension fund deficit was addressed: If we dont solve it we are staring at some very bad consequences for the taxpayer ... We are staring at a huge economic and social disaster.

Javid said he had written to all Tata Steels customers and suppliers, and contacted the largest ones directly. He has also asked Tata to give similar reassurances.

But the biggest comfort I can give is the action that we are prepared to take, and how far we will go to get a deal. That means customers and suppliers can look at this and say this business has a long-term future. Its an ongoing process too - we need to keep reassuring people, he said.

Jha said although there was no set deadline for a sale, Tata could not continue to bleed indefinitely, and added that Tata was not prepared to split up its UK steel assets to secure a sale: We would not deal with ... somebody saying leave alone Port Talbot and give us the rest - that is not a solution thats acceptable.

Jha blamed the sale on structural weaknesses in the UK, such as high energy costs.

If we were at the same electricity costs as Germany , then (Tata Steel UK) would be 40m better off - we would not be having negative numbers. We would not be selling the business if we were not losing money.

Tata Steel: Management buyout planned for Port Talbot works

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This should calm Apple Incs jangled nerves. Less than a day after the iPhone maker reported a 26% erosion in its China sales, a top Indian bureaucrat said the country had waived a painful condition to pave the way for Apple to open its own retail stores.

The decline in China caused the first ever decline in iPhones sales and Apples first revenue drop in 13 years. Announcing the results in the wee hours of Tuesday, India time, CEO Tim Cook said India presents a really great opportunity for Apple. I view India as where China was maybe seven to 10 years ago from that point of view, and I think theres a really great opportunity there. He however added that the slow networks and informal retail structure in the country is preventing the tech giant from realising its full potential in the country.

The networks will take time to speed up, but the one of the pain points in retail seems to have been addressed. The top official said the government had exempted Apple from having to source 30% of its goods from within India. It can open its own retail stores in the country without doing that.

The sourcing norm had been a hurdle for Apple, since the market does not have enough vendors to help it meet the norm. Apple currently sells in India through distributors, such as, Redington, Ingram Micro, Bettel and Rashi Peripherals.

The company does not officially report India sales separately, but according to reports, revenues from the country stood at $1 billion (around `6,600 crore) in 2015.

According to foreign direct investment (FDI) rules, the government can relax mandatory local sourcing norms for companies, which undertake single-brand retailing of products and have state-of-the-art and cutting edge technology, and where local sourcing is not possible.

A committee headed by Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) secretary Ramesh Abhishek has allowed Apple to be exempted from sourcing norms, after the company made a detailed presentation, where it made a case for the use of the special provision of cutting edge technology used in its products. The proposal has gone to the finance ministry for a formal approval, the official added.

The company had given the presentation to the DIPP committee on April 19.

At present, 100% FDI is permitted in single-brand retail, but companies are required to take the approval of the Foreign Investment and Promotion Board (FIPB) if the limit exceeds 49%.

Apple has its own retail stores in China, Germany, the US, the UK and France.

Chinese smartphone makers Xiaomi and Le Eco have also submitted applications to open stores in the country seeking exemption from sourcing norms. Their cases are yet to be taken up by the committee, sources added.
Where you stand is determined by where you sit, remarked Congress MP Shashi Tharoor recently, in a reference to the changing positions of political parties when in and out of power.

So, for example, when in opposition you derail economic reform, when in government you endorse it: witness the debate over goods and service tax (GST). You have zero tolerance to corruption in election rhetoric, but compromise with it when in power: witness the influence of syndicates in Mamatas Bengal. You are a supporter of free speech in the opposition, but look to muzzle it in power: witness the hypocrisy over net freedom and Section 66 A of the IT Act. You are ideologically rigid when framing manifestos, but become flexible when seeking power : witness alliances like the BJP-PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, or now the Congress-Left in Bengal.

READ: Congress flip-flop on Ishrat Jahan may be new arrow in BJPs quiver

But what if the U-turn involves terror? Surely, national security is one issue on which political compromise is unacceptable, or have our netas become so morally bankrupt that they will allow even the fight against terror to be subservient to partisan agendas? Just take a look at the way in which the narrative over the Ishrat Jahan encounter case and the cases of saffron terror is now playing out: a complete analysis would suggest that both the main parties, BJP and the Congress, are manipulating the security apparatus (and the media) to fix their opponents.

Take the Ishrat Jahan case first. The encounter took place in 2004, less than a month after the Congress-led UPA came to power. Yet 12 years later, three key questions are still unanswered. First, was Ishrat Jahan really a Lashkar terrorist or an innocent victim of a possible terror plot to eliminate then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi? An initial IB report suggested she was a terrorist based on newspaper reports, alleged intelligence intercepts and Lashkar websites. But a subsequent report of a court-monitored SIT headed by a senior Gujarat IPS officer and a charge sheet prepared by the CBI downplayed any terror links. Now, based on 26/11 accused David Headleys confession we are told that Headley had heard of a Lashkar terror module that had a woman whose name was Ishrat. But is hearsay enough to build a strong case?

Even more troubling is the second question: Why were home ministry affidavits changed in the case? The first one clearly based itself on the original IB report and said that Ishrat was part of the terror plot. The second one quietly drops the references to her alleged terror links. The home minister at the time was P Chidambaram, an experienced lawyer-politician who is expected to exercise due diligence before making any changes that ignore senior officers in the ministry. So why were these changes made in such great secrecy and in blatant disregard of the IBs opinion? Was it because the Ishrat case involved the Gujarat government and Mr Modi? Is there any other encounter case in any other part of the country where the home minister had taken such personal interest?

READ: Real issue is Ishrats fake encounter, not affidavit: Chidambaram

Which brings me to the third critical question: Was Ishrat killed in a fake encounter or not? A detailed metropolitan court judgement of judge SP Tamang in 2010 ruled emphatically that it was a staged encounter and a CBI charge sheet a year later squarely blamed the Ahmedabad police crime branch and even IB officers of a conspiracy. A senior Gujarat police officer recorded his statement under Section 164, confirming that it was a fake encounter. But now, in the last few months, retired bureaucrats and police officers are making contrary remarks. Was the original investigation by the CBI then designed to nail the Gujarat government, or are selective leaks being made now simply because the case is reaching a crucial stage and the power arrangements at the Centre have dramatically changed? Sadly, in a polarised polity characterised by a shrill media debate, questions are framed based on convenience, not the pursuit of truth.

Which brings us to the Hindu terror investigations. For a decade when the UPA was in power, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) claimed to have cracked several blast cases linked to right-wing groups. Now, in the last two years, we have a number of witnesses in these cases turning hostile, public prosecutors resigning claiming pressure to go soft , and investigators readily giving the clean chit to the accused. Take the 2008 Malegaon blasts case: for eight years, the prime accused Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and Col S Purohit have been in jail under tough anti-terror laws; now, witnesses are surfacing to claim that confessions targeting the duo were extracted under duress. Is there an implication that officers of impeccable integrity like the late Hemant Karkare, who led the investigations were trying to fix the accused?

Take also the high-profile Samjhauta train blasts, in which, after chargesheeting eight individuals linked to right-wing groups, the NIA now is seriously exploring a Lashkar angle to the conspiracy. Can a case turn so rapidly in the space of a few months, with almost every witness turning hostile? And what then happens to the confessions of key accused Swami Aseemanand under Section 164 admitting to a wider Hindutva terror network, or was this too obtained under coercion?

READ: NIA breather likely for Pragya Thakur in Malegaon blast case

Which leaves one to wonder: either the police under the UPA was deliberately targeting Hindutva terror groups linked to the sangh parivar, or that the same officers under the NDA are keen to whitewash these cases. Is the NIA, like the CBI, a caged parrot whose investigations are determined by the interests of their political masters? And who will then ever have faith in a criminal justice system if even terror cases are hostage to politics? Lots of questions, very few answers!

Post-script: This week, eight Malegaon residents, all Muslims, were discharged in a 2006 blasts case after the NIA claimed it had no evidence against them. The men had spent a decade in and out of jail. They may be finally free, but who will give them back their 10 lost years?

Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior journalist and author . The views expressed are personal.

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Delhis air quality worsened on Thursday morning, with the four stations that monitor both particulate matter 2.5 and 10, falling in the highly polluted category.

Anand Vihar, RK Puram, Mandir Marg, and Punjabi Bagh recorded a reading of 500 on the Hindustan Times air quality monitoring portal, putting the pollution level in the severe category. The highest possible reading is 500.

The main cause of pollution in Punjabi Bagh and Mandir Marg was PM 10, indicating the presence of dust in large concentrations. In the remaining two stations, PM 10 and 2.5 were both high.

PM 2.5, which refers to particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, leads to hazardous smog that is a major cause of asthma and respiratory diseases.

The past four days have seen Delhis air quality deteriorating.

According to experts at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), winds from other parts of the country are bringing more pollutants, especially dust, into the city.

The dry weather and burning of agricultural remains after the harvest season are not helping either.

Check pollution level in Delhi

PM readings at 10.30am

Standard limits

PM 2.5  60 micro gram per cubic metre

PM 10  100 micro gram per cubic metre



Anand Vihar

PM 2.5 - 411 micro gram per cubic metre

PM 10  983 micro gram per cubic metre



RK Puram

PM 2.5  360 micro gram per cubic metre

PM 10  830 micro gram per cubic metre



Mandir Marg

PM 2.5  73 micro gram per cubic metre

PM 10  617 micro gram per cubic metre



Punjabi Bagh

PM 2.5  69 micro gram per cubic metre

PM 10  617 micro gram per cubic metre

Also Read | Air cleaner this April than last year, says body studying odd-even
The Delhi high court issued notice to Delhi Police on two petitions seeking a cancellation of JNU student union president Kanhaiya Kumars interim bail on Thursday.

Advocate RP Luthra, one of the petitioners, sought the cancellation on the ground that Kanhaiyas speeches, after to his release from jail, were anti-national and thus violated of his bail conditions.

Another petition sought perjury proceedings against the student leader for filing a false affidavit to obtain an interim bail.

Read more | JNU sedition row: Kanhaiya, friends burn probe report, threaten stir

Asking police to respond to the petition, Justice PS Teji said he would hear the pleas. The court posted the matter for further hearing on July 19.

During the hearing, senior standing counsel Rahul Mehra objected to the presence of advocate Shailendra Babbar as special public prosecutor in the case. Babbar was appointed by Delhis lieutenant governor Najeeb Jung.

Mehra also asked the court to tell petitioners to explain their position in the case, but the court declined his request.

Mehras petition said Kanhaiya violated the conditions imposed on him by the court when it granted him interim bail on March 2. The high court ruled that Kanhaiya should not participate actively or passively in any activity which may be termed as anti-national while granting him bail.

Kanhaiya Kumar was booked and arrested for being allegedly chanting anti-national slogans on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus on February 9.

Read more | Kanhaiya says will burn casteist JNU panels report that fined him

Asking the court to minimise future damage to the reputation of India and also to restore the faith of the citizenry, the petition said the speech and slogans by Kanhaiya and his associates were challenging the sovereignty and integrity of the nation.

Kanhaiya Kumar continued his anti-national activities on each and every day and it became unbearable when he alleged in public that the Indian armed forces rape women in Kashmir, the plea said, accusing Kanhaiya of wilfully and deliberately violating his bail conditions.
Delhi Police have arrested two employees of Nehru Memorial Museum & Library for stealing a dagger, which was gifted to former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru by Saudi Arabia.

Ramchander (26) and Sandeep (25), sanitation workers in the museum, were arrested on Wednesday by the Crime Branch after they confessed to the crime and police recovered the dagger from their home in Ferozshah Kotla.

They told police they were in dire need of money to clear their debts during questioning. They thought that the dagger, made of a shiny metal, was pure gold and would fetch them a good price.

The two men carried out a recce of the area for a few weeks before striking on Monday. After hiding the dagger, they returned to their job to avoid suspicion, police said.

They planned the theft for a Monday as the museum is closed for visitors. They counted the number of security guards in the area and carefully noted down timings of when they are not around. On Monday, they came to clean the area when no one was around. They broke the casket, slid the dagger in their pocket and fled, a senior police officer said.

The dagger was gifted to Nehru on his visit to Saudi Arabia back in the 1950s.

The incident came to the fore on Monday evening when a private security guard found the glass casket broken and the dagger missing while taking a round in the museum. The PCR call was made a police team including joint commissioner (New Delhi range) visited the spot. A case of theft was registered at Chankyapuri police station and an investigation was launched.

Sources said there was no CCTV camera inside the museum and the one outside was not functional, so the investigators could not get any clue.

Since no CCTV footage was available, we accessed details of all the employees on and off duty in the museum. The employees whose statements could not be corroborated were zeroed down and their movements were mapped, an investigator told HT.

With the help of technical surveillance, we identified the two safai karamcharis and then detained them for questioning. During questioning, they broke down and confessed to have stolen the dagger thinking it is made of gold to pay their debts, he added.
WEDNESDAY, April 27, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- The chronic skin disease psoriasis may be linked to excess weight and type 2 diabetes, results of a new study suggest.

Danish researchers found that people with type 2 diabetes had more than 50 percent greater odds of having psoriasis compared to people without diabetes.

The study also found that the rate of psoriasis went up with increasing weight. For example, obese people with a body mass index (BMI) over 35 had almost double the odds of psoriasis than normal weight people did. BMI is a body fat measurement based on height and weight. A BMI of 30 or over is considered obese.

Exactly how these conditions might be connected isn't clear, but the study authors suggested that genetics, smoking, drinking alcohol, or inflammation might play a role.

"Psoriasis is a complex disorder," said lead researcher Dr. Ann Sophie Lonnberg, of the University of Copenhagen. "The genetic background for the disease and its many comorbidities [co-existing conditions] have not yet been fully uncovered," she said.

This study can't prove that psoriasis causes type 2 diabetes or obesity or vice versa, Lonnberg added. However, the study suggests the association between psoriasis and obesity could partly be tied to a common genetic cause, she explained.

"The reason psoriasis and obesity are associated is not only due to a common lifestyle, but they are also associated due to common genes," Lonnberg said. "It is important to treat psoriasis and obesity and diabetes, since they are risk factors for heart disease and could have serious effects on overall health."

For the study, Lonnberg and her colleagues collected data on nearly 34,000 twins, aged 20 to 71. Just over 4 percent had psoriasis, slightly more than 1 percent had type 2 diabetes and over 6 percent were obese, the findings showed.

Among the nearly 460 individuals with type 2 diabetes, about 8 percent also had psoriasis. Among people without type 2 diabetes, just 4 percent had psoriasis, the investigators found.

People with psoriasis tended to weigh more than those without the skin condition, the researchers said. The risk for obesity was also greater among those with psoriasis -- 11 percent of people with psoriasis were obese, but only 8 percent of non-obese study participants had psoriasis, the findings showed.

The researchers also looked at 720 twin pairs in which one twin had psoriasis and the other didn't. The twins with psoriasis weighed more than the twins without psoriasis, and were also more likely to be obese, the study found. The prevalence of type 2 diabetes, however, was the same in twins with and without psoriasis, according to the report.

The study was published in the April 27 online edition of the journal JAMA Dermatology.

"Psoriasis is not just a disease of the skin -- patients and health care professionals need to be aware of systemic health issues associated with psoriasis," said Dr. Joel Gelfand. He's an associate professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, and author of an accompanying journal editorial.

Other studies have suggested that people with psoriasis are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes even if they don't have major risk factors for the blood sugar disease, and that this risk increases with the severity of the psoriasis, Gelfand said.

"Some of this risk may be due to shared genetics between psoriasis and diabetes. It is also thought that chronic inflammation in psoriasis may predispose patients to diabetes," Gelfand explained.

He suggested that people with psoriasis -- particularly those aged 40 to 70 with more extensive skin disease -- should receive medical screenings for diabetes.

"Patients with psoriasis who are overweight or obese may lower their risk of diabetes while making the skin disease less active if they are able to achieve and maintain a more healthy body weight," Gelfand said.

Another doctor thinks genetics may help explain what she has seen in her own practice.

"I have seen that psoriasis is linked with diabetes, which suggests that a genetic link may help explain why it's a lot harder to control diabetes in patients with psoriasis," said Dr. Doris Day. She is a dermatologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

"We are understanding more about psoriasis and coming up with better treatments for it," she said. "If you have psoriasis, you need to see a dermatologist, a cardiologist and an endocrinologist to make sure you have other conditions under control," Day advised.

More information

For more on psoriasis, visit the American Academy of Dermatology.
The decomposed body of a 30-year-old woman was found inside a bed-box at her rented flat in southwest Delhis Sevak Park near Bindapur on Wednesday morning.

Police have not ruled out sexual assault on the woman before murder.

The body so putrefied that police couldnt ascertain whether the body was of a man or woman. It was the owner of the building who told police that the body was of his tenant, Dimpal Verma, a woman who lived alone in the flat and worked in a private company.

Senior police officers suspect that the woman was murdered almost a week ago and her killer(s), who are yet to be identified, stuffed the body inside her bed-box before locking the main door of the flat from outside. Though the bed-box was covered with mattress, the assailants had deliberately put extra clothes, blankets and bed-sheets on the bed to avoid the foul smell from spreading.

Surender Kumar, deputy commissioner of police (south-west), said the crime came to light on Wednesday morning after the womans landlord,

Shyam Sunder, called the police control room and informed about foul smell coming out of his tenants room.

A police team reached Sunders house and learnt that his neighbours had been complaining about bad smell since Tuesday. The police personnel broke open the main door and entered the flat.

The team members went inside the room and opened the bed-box in which the womans body was found. The body was sent for autopsy to a government hospital mortuary, said Kumar.

We have registered a case of murder and investigations are underway, he said.

The body was so badly rotten that it was not possible to find any injury or ligature marks on it. It could be strangulation or smothering, said Kumar.

According to police, the lane in which the murder took place was not guarded by any CCTV camera. Also, nobody saw anybody entering or leaving Vermas flat in the last one week. Even the landlord was not familiar with people who visited her since after she started staying at his building as a tenant.

Verma provided some documents to her landlord when she took the room on rent. One of the documents mentioned an address in Mehrauli. Investigators visited the area and found that no such address existed.

We dont have details about Vermas background and her past. Nobody knows from which place in India she belonged and where her family members are. Its a blind murder case, said Kumar.
I am a final-year student in BSc (honours) mathematics. I wish to pursue my masters in subjects that involve application of mathematics such as actuarial science. Please guide me.

-Amar Singh

A masters degree in actuarial science is offered to graduates of mathematics, statistics or economics at Kurukshetra University, Goa University, and University of Mumbai. Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, and the Institute of Insurance and Risk Management, Hyderabad also offer post graduate diploma in actuarial science and insurance management. However, if you wish to become an actuary, you need to pass the exams conducted by the Actuarial Society of India, and undertake mandatory experience to qualify as Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of India. For this you need to qualify in the Actuarial Common Entrance Test and take up the actuary study course and qualify in 15 papers over four stages. If you clear nine papers in the core technical series and all papers in core application, you are eligible to become associate members of the institute. While most general insurance and health insurance, national and multi-national insurance companies prefer to recruit actuaries who have completed all the papers, pension firms, investment consultancies, risk management companies, banks, stock exchanges, and accounting firms also recruit associate members.

Read more: Career counselling: Easy ways to fund your studies abroad

Biostatistics and demography are also good options, but before you decide on which course of further study you wish to pursue you must consider the kind of job you can get and decide if that is the choice for you. Other areas you could think about include operations research, and data analytics. In fact, data analytics is one of the fastest growing jobs with some of the top consultancy companies like Morgan Stanley, Boston Consulting Group, Merill Lynch and Goldman Sachs hiring professionals trained in data and business analytics. Many of the business schools including the Indian Institutes of Management, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and others offer certificate courses in data and business analytics which would enable you to get into this field.

I am a final-year economics (honours) student. Please suggest some career options apart from MBA.

 Richa Kareer

Your study of economics must have helped you understand that this subject has applications in practically all sectors such as industry, law, energy, health, education, agriculture, the environment, and many other areas. It has also probably developed in you many skills like analytical and critical thinking and problem solving. It is for this reason that an economics background provides you a base of knowledge for pursuing a wide range of options.



Most students who wish to pursue jobs with corporate organisations, whether in manufacturing, transport, communications, banking, insurance, and so on, take up the MBA. After an MA in economics, other than academics, you can work with government or government agencies and research organisations where you could conduct research, monitor economic trends, develop economic models on a wide variety of issues, which can be used by governments, organizations and companies to make informed decisions.



An MA in economics can also enable you to join the Indian Economic Service through the Indian Engineering Services exam conducted by the Union Public Services Commission. This is a central governemnt service that handles economic planning and analysis for government organisations and departments, and is involved with the planning commission, and government financial organisations. Moreover, if you are good with numbers and accounts, you can choose to go in for finance related careers, such as banking, CA, company secretary, ICWA, CFA etc. If you are creative with strong communication skills, postgraduate diploma courses in advertising is another option for economics graduates, for jobs as accounts executives, and media planners in advertising agencies. Law is another good option for economics graduates.



Moreover, there are other careers such as travel and tourism, publishing, hotel management, sales and marketing and many others which you can also pursue after graduation in economics. The choice of career is based on your aptitude and your interest areas, rather than on the subjects you have taken. Once you identify these and the broad arena and environment you see yourself working in, you should be able to choose your career easily.

Send your queries at hteducation@hindustantimes.com or to Career Counselling, HT Education, 1st floor, HT House, 18-20, KG Marg, New Delhi-110001. The columnist is director of Careers Smart, and author of the Penguin India Career Guides Vol 1 and 2
Earlier this month, the University Grants Commission (UGC) relaxed the criteria for women pursuing MPhil and PhD degrees. They will now get one extra year to complete their MPhil degree and two years for PhD.

In March this year, UGC also announced grants for women under its prominent fellowship and scholarship schemes. Are these initiatives, however, enough to encourage more women to take up research? Meenakshi Gopinath, former member, UGC, says, Overall, at the official level, there is a strong emphasis on acquiring Phd degrees for those who opt for a career in academics. Encouraging research, per se, is a welcome trend so long as the quality of research receives attention. Are the conditions and facilities for research, especially in the sciences, equal for men and women in our universities? For a variety of reasons, I would say it is not a level-playing field yet.

According to Lakshmi Lingam, deputy director, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, giving relaxation to women scholars is a good move. It is always useful to complete your research as per schedule. This will help the researcher maintain the quality and freshness of data.

Currently, a relaxation of five years is provided to women applicants for Junior Research Fellowship. There is no upper age limit for applying for the post of assistant professor.

More fellowships and scholarships are needed for women researchers and scholars. Gopinath says, We need more scholarships, but there are a large number of scholarships that do not get adequate numbers of applicants. The real challenge is to put this information out in a transparent and accessible manner and also reach out to those who will benefit the most. Mentoring will also help women scholars. We are aware of a large number of young women scholars who discontinue their research because the responsibilities of homemaking often leaves them with little space for serious academic engagement and requirements of consistent study, field or laboratory work.

Read more: PhD scholars likely to soon get maternity leave and extra time

Overall, there is need to facilitate an enabling environment for those facing obstacles to engage with the world of thought to come up with innovative practices in both teaching and research, she says. Another important aspect is representation of women researchers in social science and humanities as compared to science and technology. Lingam says, Womens participation in research in social sciences, humanities, engineering and sciences varies. It is linked to the overall numbers and percentage of women in these disciplines at the masters level. While overall numbers of women in higher education is increasing, there are fewer women in pure science labs that require long hours of laboratory work for results. Professors who get funding for setting up labs undertake research work towards deadlines and publications in a competitive world of publish or perish. Thats why professors are inclined to hire single men and women and often are concerned about discontinuation of women who get married during their research work.

Having more women in the field of research can make a lot of difference. The entry of women brings in fresh questions on institutional support mechanisms and practices. In the case of humanities and social sciences, the landscape has changed with the entry of women. Humanities and social sciences have qualitatively transformed and we see that it is heralding a sea change in the everyday discourses on equality, equity and justice in the country, says Lingam.

However, India has few specific programme to encourage young women into science. The US has made a number of attempts under STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths), though these have not been very successful. The under-representation of women in STEM at all levels and also in research needs to be taken up, adds Lingam.

Deepika Bhaskar, deputy dean (research), Delhi University Research Council, says, I do not see any separate rules or law to encourage women researchers except some schemes by department of science and technology and UGC which are quite encouraging. More can definitely be done for social sciences and humanities.

Fellowships/scholarships for women

UGC Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Women

Dr S Radhakrishnan Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Women in Humanities and Social Sciences, including languages

Swami Vivekananda Single Girl Child Fellowship

Women Scientist Scholarship, Department of Science and Technology

National Award for Senior Woman Bioscientist, DST

National Award for Young Woman Bioscientist, DST

Postgraduate Indira Gandhi Scholarship for Single Girl Child

Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Single Girl Child Fellowship to pursue PhD in science (to be launched)

The list is not exhaustive

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Actor Dakota Johnson has revealed she is tired of filming racy intimate scenes for Fifty Shades Darker, the sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey, based on EL James erotic novel of the same name.

Well, were not having actual sex, the 26-year-old, who plays Anastasia Steele in the film franchise, said of pretending to get hot and heavy with co-star Jamie Dornan.

Read: Fifty Shades Dakota Johnson feels life can be suffocating sometimes

But Ive been simulating sex for seven hours straight right now, and Im over it, she added.

Dakota said her father, Don Johnson, will never catch the screening of Fifty Shades Darker when it hits theatres on February 10, 2017.

Read: I feel lonely, men dont ask me out after 50 Shades: Dakota Johnson

No! God, no. Thank God, the How to Be Single star said of her actor fathers chances of watching the R-rated film.

Johnsons mother, actor Melanie Griffith, has also avoided watching her daughter in the racy role.

Read: Dakota Johnson has a row with mother over Fifty Shades of Grey

Follow @htshowbiz for more
Actor Peter Dinklage, who has lent his voice for the Mighty Eagle in The Angry Birds Movie, says its a break from all the slapstick drama he has been doing lately.

Ever since Game of Thrones burst onto television screens, it was the portrayal of Tyrion Lannister by Dinklage that had everyone talking. Now the Golden Globe winner is looking forward to taking a break from his dramatic portrayals and finding some comic relief in his professional career.

Read: The Angry Birds Movie trailer slingshots angry birds in your face

Mighty Eagle likes to talk, talk and talk about himself. He has a mighty Ego. Theres a huge group of hilarious comedians starring in the movie, like the most number of funny people ever together in one movie, Dinklage said in a statement.

Watch the trailer here

I had such a blast upstaging all of them. My favourite part about the film is the slapstick comedy, its such a break from the slapstick drama Ive been doing lately, he added.

Based on one of the most successful games of recent times, Angry Birds, the star cast of the movie includes Jason Sudeikis (Horrible Bosses), Josh Gad (Pixels, Frozen), Danny McBride (Due Date, This is the End) and Maya Rudolph (Grown Ups, Bridesmaids).

Game of Thrones review: Thanks Melisandre for all the speculation fodder

Distributed by Sony Pictures, The Angry Birds Movie will release in India on May 27 in English, Hindi and Tamil. It will also be available in 3D.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
A 16-year-old girl was raped inside a tempo at Chembur on April 11. The incident came to light a few days ago, after the survivor lodged a complaint with the police. While the accused is on the run, a friend of the girl was arrested on Thursday.

According to the police officials, the girl had gone out with a male friend to Gateway of India on April 10.

The girl went out Deepak Kokne, 22, who lived in her locality. When they were returning around 7pm, the petrol in Koknes bike got over. So he dropped her near Mahol gaon in Chembur and asked her to go home from there, said an officer.

Unable to find her way, the girl approached a passerby, only identified as Prem. Prem went with her to a distance to show the way. As it grew darker, he asked her if she wanted him to drop her, which she refused. To gain her confidence, he showed her a photograph of a girl, who he claimed was his girlfriend. She then agreed to go with him on his bike, he added.

He kept misleading her till midnight, saying they would reach within a few minutes. The girl, in her statement, said he took her to isolated locations. Around 12.30pm, he allegedly raped her inside a tempo under the freeway bridge and abandoned her there. The girl was scared of going home and narrating the ordeal to her parents. So she kept roaming on the streets, said police. Her parents lodged a case of kidnapping with the RCF police station.

On April 12, the girl was found roaming alone on the street by patrolling officers, who then took her to the police station. The girl did not tell her parents about the incident. When she was brought to the police station to record her statement on the kidnapping complaint, she started crying and revealed what had happened, said an officer.

The police have formed teams to find Prem.

The cops have registered a case under sections 363 (kidnapping), 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty), 376 (rape) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the Indian Penal Code, along with section 4 under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012.

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Within five days of Chief Justice of India TS Thakurs emotional appeal to fill up vacancies to expedite disposal of cases -- Allahabad high courts judges decided to work in Mission Mode and use half of their summer vacations to clear the oldest criminal appeals in Uttar Pradesh.

Allahabad high court Justice DY Chandrachud had mooted an idea to all the judges to cut down by half the summer vacations to hear the criminal appeals of those languishing in jails for over two decades.

After the Allahabad high courts sesquicentennial celebrations on March 13, 2016 attended by the CJI --Chandrachud had sent letters to all the 79 high court judges requesting them to work during half of their summer vacations to clear the oldest pending cases. Summer vacations are scheduled from June 1, to June 30, 2016.

As of now, 68 of 79 judges of Allahabad high court have favourably responded to the Chandrachuds letter offering to hold special hearings for disposal of criminal appeals on 15 out of 30 day summer vacations. Sources said remaining judges may also respond favourably.

The CJ has also completed the process of consultations with the bar associations, seeking their cooperation on the issue as he wants to ensure disposal of all the criminal appeals filed before 1986 by the accused languishing in different jails across the state. About 1300 criminal appeals of the accused lodged in jails are still pending.

Much significance is being attached to Chandrachuds move in the backdrop of Thakurs appeal made to Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the annual chief ministers and chief justices conference on Sunday. Thakur asked Modi to fill up vacancies in higher judiciary to bring down the number of pending cases at various levels.

The Allahabad high court has only 79 judges with 81 posts of judges lying vacant against the total sanctioned strength of 160 judges.

About 3 lakh fresh cases are filed in the Allahabad high court and despite higher number of disposals, total number of pending cases was still 9.18 lakh. As the process to fill up the vacancies has been already initiated, the Allahabad high court may soon have additional judges.

At the subordinate judiciary level too, 250 new courts were sanctioned in 2015-2016 while 81 fast track courts have been made permanent. On the directives of the HCs seven judge bench, headed by Chandrachud, about 500 additional courts have been sanctioned in the state for 2016-2017.

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The Supreme Court on Thursday said it would hear a PIL seeking registration of FIRs against Congress president Sonia Gandhi and former prime minister Manmohan Singh among others in the AgustaWestland chopper case next week.

The three Congress leaders were named in documents annexed to an Italian court that was hearing a trial in the chopper deal made with AgustaWestland (AW) Ltd, a subsidiary of Italian defence major Finmeccania.

A bench comprising Chief Justice T S Thakur and justices R Banumathi and UU Lalit ordered listing of the petition when advocate M L Sharma said it was an urgent matter that needed to be heard at the earliest.

Supreme Court to hear a plea next week seeking registration of FIR against persons who were bribed in Augusta Westland chopper deal.  ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

In 2010, India signed a Rs 3600 crore deal with AgustaWestland for 12 AW101 choppers meant for VVIPs, including the prime minister. The deal was scrapped in 2014.

The Central Bureau of Investigation in 2013 registered a case in connection with alleged bribes paid by the firm to Indians to clinch the deal for 12 helicopters to ferry VVIPs including the president and prime minister.

Finmeccanias top executives were investigated for corruption in Italy.

The Italian court of Appeals reportedly cited handwritten references to Gandhi, her political secretary Ahmed Patel and former Air Chief S P Tyagi by a middleman in a judgement that convicted the helicopter companys chief executive.

The court also alleged that the company hired middlemen to bribe decision-makers in India to swing the deal in AWs favour.

Read more | Chopper deal row: Govt to seek CBI report, blacklist AgustaWestland

The controversy has sparked pitched battles in the Parliament with the ruling BJP cornering the opposition and Sonia Gandhi over the scam.

Gandhi accused the NDA of character assassination in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, claiming the allegations as false.

What are they doing? Inquiry is there, why dont they complete it? Complete it as soon as possible, impartially.

As the BJP attempted to put Congress on the boil, the opposition hit back questioning why the Narendra Modi-led government had scrapped the process to blacklist AW Ltd.

Read more | Barbs fly thick and fast over VVIP chopper deal as Sonia takes on BJP
The Centre has put the onus of addressing the drought situation on states, insisting that it is doing its bit to provide relief to those affected.

We should not fight between Centre and the state. The role of Centre and state is different. It is clearly defined in the Rules. We cant change it. The Centres role is to monitor and the states role is to provide assistance and help the affected people at ground level, agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh said in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday.

The central government does its bit, but every state governments should also do their best in addressing the drought situation, he said.

Singh was replying to a short duration debate on drought situation during which opposition members criticised the central government, saying it was not doing enough, including in the context of releasing adequate funds.

Members of Congress, JD(U), SP and BSP staged a walkout, expressing dissatisfaction over the ministers reply.

Earlier, Singh insisted that farmers are a priority for the central government.

I dont know if we are facing the consequences because of previous government but we know the prevailing situation and are taking adequate measures, he said.

We come from different states. We are all concerned about farmers. ...We should also try to see what we can do in our own states to tide over the situation, he said.

Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti, during her intervention in the debate, said almost 30 crore people are facing the brunt of summer heat and drinking water problem.

The problem has aggravated due to consecutive drought in last two years, which has brought down the water level in 91 reserviors, she said.

After the Agriculture Ministers response, Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said, We are not satisfied with the ministers reply. It is most unsatisfactory reply given by the government. That is why, we are walking out.

Members of JD(U), SP and BSP also walked out with Congress members.

Earlier, Azad, while promising to stand by the government, questioned why drought had not been declared as a national crisis.

He also asked the Prime Minister had not called a meeting of all political parties as well as that of Chief Ministers of drought-hit states.

It is a national crisis. The Opposition will stand with you. Dont bring in politics. People are dying due to water shortage. Should PM not convene an all-party meeting as well as meeting of CM of all states? Azad said.

The opposition parties also pressed for completion of 312 pending irrigation projects in a timely manner to boost water supply for drinking purposes and agriculture.
Chopper ko bata do (inform the chopper pilot) was a common phrase one would hear outside the Uttarakhand high court where lawyers were arguing the case of Presidents rule and the disqualification of nine dissenting Congress legislators in the state. In a few minutes, the air would reverberate as helicopters prepared to take off.

In the past month, the high court has seen a flurry of helicopters shuttling top lawyers between Delhi and Nainital appearing to represent the various stakeholders, including celebrity lawyers such as attorney general Mukul Rohtagi, additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta, Kapil Sibal, Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Harish Salve.

Many choppers have come to Nainital since last month when the proceedings began in the court, said RD Paliwal, additional district magistrate, Nainital.

A day after the imposition of Presidents rule on March 27, former chief minister Harish Rawat moved the Uttarakhand high court challenging the invoking of Article 356. He arrived in a helicopter to sign his petition. Governor KK Paul took a chopper ride to the city on the Presidents rule was imposed.

According to the district magistrates office, 18 choppers flew to the hill city between March 25 and April 26. Kapil Sibal, a senior lawyer and Congress leader arguing against the Presidents rule, once even flew on a chartered plane to Pantnagar to reach court.

Given the demand on their time in both the Capital and Uttarakhand, lawyers have been preferring to fly to Nainital on helicopters for quick transit.

A single-engine chopper flight costs between Rs 80,000 and Rs 1,00,000 per hour  the flying time between Delhi and Nainital, said an official of Air Charters India that provides private helicopters for hire. A twin-engine helicopter flight costs a bit more at around Rs 1.20 lakh per hour.

Many helicopters flew to Nainital from Delhi apart from a few chartered planes that came to Pantnagar airport, said Saket Bahuguna, the counsel for the nine Congress rebel MLAs who challenged their disqualification in the high court.

In most cases, the choice of chopper was a twin-engine copter that is regarded to be safer than a single-engine one.

These celebrity lawyers refused to fly on single-engine choppers and insisted on double-engine choppers for safety, said a local lawyer.

Though there is a debate on whether single-engine helicopters are safe, many customers prefer twin-engine choppers, said Shoby T Paul, CEO of Heli Tour company. Both the engines are always on in twin-engine choppers and the switch can be made smoothly if one engine fails to function.

Paul though said a single-engine helicopter was just as safe.

Studies have shown the single-engine flight is also safe. Most of the accidents take place due to other reasons such as weather and malfunctioning of equipment.

So far, at least four high profile politicians have died in helicopter crashes. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhis son Sanjay Gandhi died in 1980 when his helicopter crashed near Safdarjung airport in Delhi. In 2002, Lok Sabha speaker GMC Balayogi died in a Bell 206 helicopter crash in Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh. In 2009, then Andhra Pradesh chief minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy also died when his helicopter crashed on Rudrakonda hill. Three years later, in April 2011, Arunachal Pradesh chief Minister Dorjee Khandu died in a Eurocopter B8 crash in Sela Pass.

Apart from lawyers, records showed almost no other passengers taking flights to Nainital in March and April. A chopper service that operated twice a week for tourists was also discontinued.
WEDNESDAY, April 27, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- A hearing aid may do more than help you hear better: New research suggests that the devices might also help prevent mental decline in elderly people with hearing loss.

"We know that hearing aids can keep older adults with hearing loss more socially engaged by providing an important bridge to the outside world," Dr. Anil Lalwani, a professor of otolaryngology/head and neck surgery at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, said in a center news release.

"In this study, we wanted to determine if they could also slow the effects of aging on cognitive function," he added.

The study included 100 adults, aged 80 to 99, with hearing loss. The 34 who regularly used a hearing aid had much better scores on tests of mental function than those who didn't use a hearing aid.

The researchers also found that mental function was directly linked to hearing ability in those who didn't use a hearing aid.

The study was published online April 25 in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

"Our study suggests that using a hearing aid may offer a simple, yet important, way to prevent or slow the development of dementia by keeping adults with hearing loss engaged in conversation and communication," Lalwani said.

More than half of people older than 75 have hearing loss. But, fewer than 15 percent of those with hearing loss use a hearing aid, the researchers said.

Previous research has shown that hearing-impaired elderly people are at increased risk for fall- and accident-related death, social isolation and dementia, compared to those without hearing loss.

Previous studies have also found that hearing aid use can improve hearing loss-related social, functional and emotional problems, the researchers said.

More information

The U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders has more on hearing aids.
An Interpol Red Corner notice against Christian James Michel tells you how he looks - oval-faced with a prominent nose and a receding hairline, and seemingly uneasy in a formal coat-tie attire.

But it does not describe what the 54-year-old absconding British businessman does for a living.

Michel is in the publics gaze amid the row triggered after the names of five Congress leaders, including party chief Sonia Gandhi, and UPA II functionaries figured in a judgment by an Italian court which sent Finmeccanicas former CEO Giuseppe Orsi and AgustaWestland ex-head Bruno Spagnolini to jail for false accounting and corruption in the sale of 12 VVIP choppers to India.

AgustaWestland allegedly paid more than Rs 375 crore as bribe to secure the Rs 3,727-crore contract to supply the 12 VVIP helicopters to the Indian Air Force.

Read: In 5 points: All you need to know about AgustaWestland deal

The Red Corner notice, issued last November on the request of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probing Michels role in bribing Indians for swinging a deal for the AgustaWestland choppers, does not reveal his alleged access to power elites or effectiveness at what he does, liaisoning.

Michel is among three non-Indian middlemen who were accused by the CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) in their separate probes of taking commissions worth 70 million from AgustaWestland, a subsidiary of Italian defence giant Finmeccanica, to bribe Indians who helped ink the deal, as an investigator put it.

They were accused of ensuring that key technical specifications  including the requirement related to the optimum height at which choppers can fly and the cabin height  were tweaked by then government authorities in a manner that let AW bag the contract in 2010 pipping American-Russian rivals.

EDs probe found that out of the total commissions, 30 million was paid to the Dubai-based Michel and his group of firms as service contracts while the rest was paid to two other middlemen, Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa.

A Milan court, that found corruption in the AW-India deal, in its April 7 order however said Michel cornered 44 million (around Rs 330 crore) out of the total commission paid and the same was completely disproportionate to the work he did for the choppers manufacturers.

Read: No case in AgustaWestland deal: Manmohan Singh rebuts BJPs charge

Indian investigators belonging to ED and CBI, however, suspected that Michel allegedly appropriated over 30 million out of a total of 70 million paid to the three non-Indian middlemen to bribe their way to the contract.

Here is a look at the man and his work.

1) Evidence acquired from the Italian court by ED corroborated allegations that the choppers British maker, UK firm AW Limited, had paid commissions to Michel by camouflaging them to clinch the 2010 deal. The evidence shared with ED included a record of email correspondence dated March 5, 2008, between Michel and the firms then CEO John Grandy. Michel allegedly told Grandy that he had a group of companies providing promotional services for the UK firm that could be paid monthly in connection with the signature of AWs first new major contract in India.

2) It is suspected that the commission was paid via two service contracts with Michels firms. Indian probes found that AW Ltd allegedly paid Michel the commission via several of his firms, including the Dubai-based Global Services FZE.

3) ED and CBI suspect that Michels two other firms, Media Exim and Moorbank East India, could have handled the commission paid to him. For AW Ltd, Media Exim carried out functions including press services, Indian market analyses and local support in the office in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore according to the Italian record shared with ED. Moorbank, a Singapore-based consulting firm, was in charge of providing assistance with the offset agreement (post-contract) entered into with the Indian government as part of the deal.

4) The probe revealed that the three middlemen, including Michel, transmitted a portion of their commission to India via a circuitous route for bribing influential people. For generating kickbacks, the middlemen tied up with two accused Indian firms that provided IT software to AW Ltd but charged a Tunisian intermediary firm at the rate of 14 per man- hour. Without doing any value-addition to the software, the Tunisian firm charged AW at the rate of 34 per man-hour and in all, got paid 5.10 lakh on a monthly basis for a few years. The Tunisian firm then paid the Indian firms.

5) ED attached certain assets allegedly associated with Michel in India last March. These assets were linked to the 2010 commission paid by AW LTD to him. The attached assets worth several crores included a posh south Delhi flat, a luxury car, a fixed deposit of Rs 54 lakh, paintings and jewellery. ED is working to identify more assets of Michel.

6) The ministry of external affairs has rejected Michels allegations that Prime Minister Narendra Modi met his Italian counterpart Matteo Renzi on the sidelines of United Nations General Assembly in September 2015.

7) An open-ended non-bailable arrest warrant was issued by a CBI court against Michel in September last year. The CBI also sent a request for his provisional arrest for the purpose of extradition to UK authorities in January this year.

8) Before Michel and the other two middlemen  Italians Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa  got into the act, AW choppers had only a bleak chance of measuring to requirements of the Indian contract. Since it could fly only at the optimum height of 4,500 m and not the required 6,000 m, AWs bid had allegedly been rejected twice by Indian authorities before the condition was eased. It was also alleged that the AW was selected despite the fact that only its representative version had attended the mandatory flight evaluation tests.
The defence ministry said on Thursday that corruption was the core issue in the VVIP chopper scam and the government will leave no stone unturned in implicating the corrupt and the wrong-doers involved in the case.

Refuting the Congress claim that the Anglo-Italian helicopter manufacturer, AgustaWestland, was blacklisted by the UPA government, it said it was the NDA government that had put on hold, on July 3, 2014, all procurement and acquisition cases in the pipeline of six companies involved in the scam.

It said that CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) are pursuing the investigation, including the arrest and extradition of three alleged middlemen -- Carlo Gerosa, Guido Haschke Ralph and Christian Michel James.

Publicly available information on the procurement of AgustaWestland helicopters clearly shows that the core issue in the matter is corruption. The present government has taken effective action to bring out the truth and will leave no stone unturned in pursuing all means to bring to justice the corrupt and the wrong-doers in this case, a statement released by the ministry said.

It said the time taken is largely because some of the key perpetrators of this misdeed are outside the country.

Questions have been raised on certain trivial technicalities that appear to be intended to distract attention from the core issue of corruption, the defence ministry said.

The ministry said that the contract for supply of 12 helicopters, signed with AgustaWestland International Ltd (AWIL) on February 8, 2010, was terminated with effect from January 1, 2014.

The main reason was breach of the provisions of the Pre-Contract Integrity Pact and breach of terms of contract by AWIL. However, the company was not debarred by the said order. Various bonds and bank guarantees were invoked.

It is the present government, which through its order dated July 3, 2014, put on hold all procurement/acquisition cases in the pipeline of six companies figuring in the FIR registered by the CBI. No new capital procurement has been made thereafter from these companies in the tenure of the present government, the statement said.

The said companies are AgustaWestland International Ltd, Finmeccanica, Italy and its group of companies, including subsidiaries and affiliates -- IDS, Tunisia, Infotech Design System (IDS), Mauritius, IDS Infotech Ltd, Mohali and Aeromatrix Info Solution Pvt. Ltd, Chandigarh.
The US on Thursday retained India on its priority watch list for lack of sufficient measurable improvements to the IP framework despite robust engagement and positive steps on intellectual property protection and enforcement by the Indian government in the last two years.

Releasing its annual 301 Report, the US said that it will continue to put India and China on its priority watch list for intellectual property rights (IPR).

Pakistan, however, has been upgraded from the Priority Watch List to the Watch List, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) said in its annual report.

India remains on the Priority Watch List this year for lack of sufficient measurable improvements to its IPR framework despite more robust engagement and positive steps forward on IPR protection and enforcement undertaken by the Government of India, the USTR said in its report.

USTR retains the option of conducting an Out-of-Cycle Review (OCR) of India should developments - positive or negative - weigh in favour of a review in advance of the annual cycle, the report said.

Intellectual property is a critical source of economic growth and high-quality jobs for the United States, and it is more important than ever to prevent foreign governments and competitors from ripping off United States innovators who are trying to support high-paying jobs by exporting their goods and services to consumers around the world, said US Trade Representative Michael Froman.

This final Special 301 Report of the Obama Administration underlines the great value that unique American creativity and innovation have for millions of families - ranging from small business owners to medical researchers to employees of the recording and motion picture industries.

As well as the efforts of the executive branch, our bipartisan partners in Congress, and the US business community to vigilantly monitor abuses of American intellectual property rights anywhere they exist in the world, he said.

Continuing to place China on the Priority Watch List, USTR said China has undertaken wide-ranging intellectual property law reform efforts and some positive enforcement initiatives, but both longstanding and new IPR concerns merit increased attention including with respect to trade secret theft, rampant online piracy and counterfeiting, continued high levels of physical pirated and counterfeit goods, and localisation requirements that condition market access on use of IPR developed in or transferred to China.

In its report, USTR added Switzerland to the Watch List this year.

While Switzerland is generally a strong partner on IP issues, copyright holders have essentially been prevented from enforcing their rights against online infringers and Switzerland has become an increasingly popular host country for infringing websites, it said.

USTR also said that it will conduct OCRs for Colombia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Spain to promote engagement and progress on specific IP opportunities and challenges identified in this years review.

Pakistan it said has taken significant steps to improve IP protection and enforcement including establishing specialised IP courts, establishing a timeline to draft and implement amendments to IP laws, improving border enforcement procedures, undertaking public awareness programs on IP protection, and committing to regular action-oriented engagement with the US government and stakeholders.

Eleven countries - Algeria, Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela - are on the Priority Watch List.

These countries will be the subject of particularly intense bilateral engagement during the coming year, it said.

Twenty-three countries are on the Watch List, and also merit bilateral attention to address underlying IP problems.
A major fire broke out at a commercial building in south Mumbai on Thursday, officials said.

The blaze erupted at around 10 AM on the second floor of Harish Chambers, a four-storey building near the Naval dockyard in Fort area of south Mumbai, a fire official said.

Eight fire engines have been pressed into service to douse the flames, he said.

Hectic efforts were on to bring the fire under control, he added.

According to police, there is an office of a medical insurance firm on the floor where the fire occurred. The entire building has been evacuated, they said.

Further details were awaited,
The Government refused to budge from its stance on levying 1% excise duty on non-silver jewellery. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday that luxury items could not be kept out of the tax ambit for perpetuity, prompting a walk-out by members of the Congress and the SP.

Tearing into the opposition charge that imposition of the levy was killing the trade, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley refuted the allegations saying that when items of common use were being taxed, luxury items could not be kept out.

Asserting that there was absolutely no harassment of artisans, Jaitley said corporate jewellers with up to Rs 12 crore turnover last year came under its ambit and upto Rs 6 crore turnover in a fiscal later are exempt from it.

Clearances up to Rs 6 crore in a financial year (if clearances during preceding year were less than Rs 12 crore), are exempt from this duty, Jaitley said, adding thus small jewellers and artisans are not covered within the ambit of this levy.

Replying to a calling attention on the issue, the Minister said when there is excise duty on items like soap, toothpaste, razor, pencil, ink, fruit juices and baby food, why should the luxury items be exempted from it.

Opposition members had earlier charged the government of killing the traditional jewellery trade and promoting the big brands by imposing the levy. The jewellers have been on a nationwide strike for over 40 days to protest the levy.

Jaitley said even imitation jewellery attracted 6% excise duty.

He said the opposition should understand that it is a complex subject and when taxes are levied on items like steel, cement and clothes, luxury items cannot be out of its purview.

We have to decide on which items we will impose excise duty and if there is any structured trade, they do not get the right to resort to agitation against tax, he said and challenged the opposition that if they were so concerned about it, they should get the 5% VAT removed in Kerala.

Each state imposes VAT on gold and in Kerala it is as high as 5% and if you (the Opposition) are so concerned, then get it removed from Kerala, he said.

Dismissing charges that excise duty has hit hard small artisans, the Minister said the trade has not developed such that annual turnovers of small jewellers has crossed Rs 6 crore and stressed that this is implemented on big chains.

Jaitley said the UPA government had imposed taxes on jewellery in 2005 but had recalled it in 2009 in the face of stiff opposition. It again imposed it in 2012 but recalled the same again.
The government has requested United Kingdom authorities to deport liquor baron Vijay Mallya for investigation in a money laundering case, foreign ministry spokesperson Vikas Swaroop said on Thursday.

The move comes two days after the troubled industrialists lawyers told the Supreme Court he was unlikely to come back to India as he feared arrest on arrival.

Mallya is facing proceedings in the top court by a consortium of 17 banks seeking repayment of over Rs 9,000 crore in loans to his now-collapsed Kingfisher Airlines.

In a separate case last week, a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court in Mumbai issued a non-bailable warrant against Mallya after the enforcement directorate alleged the industrialist invested around half of a Rs 950 crore loan from IDBI bank  taken by his Kingfisher Airlines -- in properties outside the country.

Also Read | SC rules Vijay Mallyas overseas assets be made available to banks

Mallya left India in March, triggering outrage as he is under probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the ED for defaulting on loans taken by KFA.

As of today, the ministry has written to the high commission of the UK in Delhi requesting the deportation of Sri Vijay Mallya so that his presence can be secured for investigations against him under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002, Swaroop told journalists.

The move indicates the Centre is stepping up its efforts to get back Mallya, who has till date appeared unfazed by debt recovery pressure from banks and central probes.

But the deportation request will hinge on the UKs response and the government is worried that Mallyas case may go the same way as that of former IPL boss Lalit Modi, who managed to stay back in Britain despite corruption charges.

Also Read | Mallya to lose MP tag? RS ethics panel to recommend expulsion

Mallya was pulled up by the Supreme Court on Tuesday for refusing to share details of foreign assets with banks and not providing a date for his appearance in court. The apex court ordered details of Mallya and his famlys properties to be disclosed to banks, dismissing the industrialists argument that the assets werent acquired from the loans.

The banks will pass on the information of his assets to the enforcement directorate. They have already revoked his passport and a warrant is issued against him. Banks do not want to settle with him but are keen to send him to jail, the industrialists lawyers had told the court.

Also Read | Mallya lives in $15 mn British mansion bought from Hamiltons dad: report
Set to enter Mumbais Haji Ali Dargah to break the gender barrier disallowing womens entry, Bhumata Brigade activist Trupti Desai on Thursday asked Bollywood actors Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan to lend support to their cause, which is aimed at eradicating differential treatment meted out to women at religious places.

I think Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan should state their stand on what we are trying to achieve here, on our cause... That way I believe that their fan following will join us and support us in our fight for equality, she told ANI.

After spearheading a successful campaign for womens right to worship in temples, Desai had on Monday said that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) should allow women to join the organisation. Desai said she would soon write to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat on the issue as part of her campaign for gender equality.

Speaking to ANI, Desai expressed hope that RSS would respect their stand and consider their demand.

I think Mohan Bhagwat ji is a progressive thinker and he will respect our stand of entry for women in RSS, she said.

On Saturday, Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat said he would not allow her to touch the mazar-e-sharif at the the Hazi Ali Dargah. Arafat, who joined the Shiv Sena after leaving the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena in 2014, said that the attempt by Desai to enter the Haji Ali Dargah is a conspiracy meant to disturb Mumbais peaceful environment.

On April 20, Haji Ali for All Forum was launched by Desai along with several activists, NGOs and social groups to fight for entry of women to the shrine.

The Maharashtra Government had in February supported the entry of women to the Haji Ali Dargah.

The government had told the Bombay High Court that the entry of women cannot be prohibited.
A combative Congress president Sonia Gandhi and former prime minister Manmohan Singh have dismissed bribery charges in a VVIP chopper deal scam amid efforts by the BJP to corner the main Opposition party.

The BJP has upped the ante against Sonia Gandhi, whose name figures in a judgment by an Italian court which sent Finmeccanicas former CEO Giuseppe Orsi and AgustaWestland ex-head Bruno Spagnolini to jail for false accounting and corruption in the sale of 12 VVIP choppers to India.

Here are five things the Congress said to counter the BJPs onslaught:

1) Sonia Gandhi, whose name figures in a judgment by an Italian court, said she was not afraid and dubbed the allegations as false. Manmohan Singh and former defence minister AK Antony echoed the sentiment. The Congress accused the Narendra Modi government of trying to help the Italian firm which had been blacklisted.

Read: In 5 points: All you need to know about AgustaWestland deal

2) Congress members were in uproar in the Rajya Sabha when BJPs Subramanian Swamy named Sonia Gandhi in the Rajya Sabha during zero hour while speaking on the AgustaWestland deal. It is touching to see leader of opposition relying on (Christian) Michel for what he said orally but the high court of Italy have recorded a letter written by Michel stating that Sonia Gandhi is the main... Swamy couldnt finish his sentence. Congress members sprang to their feet and rushed towards the treasury benches aggressively.

3) We have nothing to hide. Let them (government) take my name, I am not afraid of anyone because there is no basis to that allegation. They amount to calumny. Where is the proof? They are lying. This is part of their (BJPs) strategy of character assassination, Gandhi told the media.

4) Former prime minister Manmohan Singh also rebutted the charges. There is no case. My party will respond. Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel, whose name also figures in the Milan court ruling, said he was ready to hang if anything was found against him.

Read: Why did Modi govt remove Agusta Westland from blacklist: Congress

5) Former defence minister Antony dared the government to order a CBI probe and get it completed at war footing. He said it was the UPA government that ordered a CBI probe and blacklisted the company and accused the Modi government of trying to help the tainted company.

They have shown criminal negligence in the case... This is a conspiracy to malign Congress leaders.

Antony said officials from the Indian government were present at the Milan court when the case was first taken up and there were no evidences against any Congress leaders.

The Congress said it had earlier proposed a Joint Parliamentary Committee on AgustaWestland, but BJP refused to participate or cooperate in the matter.
Emergency situations call for emergency measures and several states like Bihar facing a killer heat wave have responded to the crisis with a slew of desperate initiatives including a ban on cooking and religious functions involving fire.

The unrelenting heat wave that has killed more than 170 people across the country have prompted Bihar to ban cooking in villages between 9am and 6pm. Officials in the state where at least 66 people and 1,200 animals have perished because of the heat, said violators will face jail term of up a year for violating the advisory issued under the National Disaster Management Act.

Over 1,000 fires in less than a month leading to 74 deaths and burning of 16,000 houses in the state triggered the advisory which also prohibits burning of wheat crop waste to avoid fire breakout that spreads fast because of the heat wave. Over 2,000 acres of wheat crop area was destroyed in fires. The average temperature in most parts of Bihar is hovering around 42 degrees Celsius with Patna and Bhagalpur recording 43.6 degrees Celsius on April 27. The problem of heat wave has been accentuated by westerlies but the state unlike most others is not under a spell of drought.

CM Nitish Kumar Monday ordered officials to issue an advisory instructing people to cook food before 9 am and after 6 pm and perform religious rituals like havans, before 9 am.

Meanwhile, the district administration of Gopalganj has set up an army of 70,000 volunteers to work as fire fighters.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday joined the ranks of prominent world leaders when his wax figures took up residence at Madame Tussauds London branch.

The Indian leaders new wax figure arrived at the Baker Street attraction fresh from Delhi, where Modi had a private viewing with his likeness last week.

The figure is featured in the famous attractions popular World Leaders enclosure alongside present day leaders Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Francoise Holland, as well as political heavyweights of the past including Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill. (AFP)

Modi was closely involved in the creation of his figure and was delighted with the final results, declaring that the Madame Tussauds team are exceptional at what they do. (AFP)

General Manager of Madame Tussauds London, Edward Fuller, said, We are delighted that Mr Modi was able to see this very figure in India last week, and to welcome him to Madame Tussauds London. (AFP)

Modis figure is dressed in his signature Kurta in cream with jacket and he is featured in a traditional pose making a namaste gesture. (AFP)

Londons figure is one of four created of the statesman, with the other three taking up residence at Madame Tussauds attractions in Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok. (AFP)

Each figure took a team of talented artists four months and cost 150,000 pounds to create. (AFP)
India has approached Britain for extraditing Christian Michel, a businessman named by Italian investigators as a middleman in swinging the controversial deal for AgustaWestland choppers.

V K Singh, minister of state for external Affairs, told the Rajya Sabha British authorities are considering Indias request. Yes, government of India has approached the government of the United Kingdom for extradition of Christian Michel to India in connection with the AgustaWestland helicopter scam, he said, replying to a question.

The controversial deal and the alleged bribes to the tune of Rs 120 crore paid in clinching it for AgustaWestland, a subsidiary of Italian defence giant Finmeccanica, has triggered a political slugfest between BJP and Congress after an Italian court cited handwritten references to Congress Chief Sonia Gandhi, her political secretary Ahmed Patel and former Air Chief S P Tyagi by the middleman in a judgement that convicted the helicopter companys chief executive.

Michel, 54, is among three non-Indian middlemen who were accused by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Directorate in their separate probes of taking commissions worth 70 million from AgustaWestland to bribe Indians who helped ink the deal.

These middlemen were accused of ensuring that key technical specifications were tweaked in a manner that let AW bag the contract in 2010 pipping American-Russian rivals. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance governed India then.

India has approached Britain for extraditing Christian Michel, a businessman named by Italian investigators as a middleman in swinging the controversial deal for AgustaWestland choppers.

V K Singh, minister of state for external Affairs, told the Rajya Sabha British authorities are considering Indias request. Yes, government of India has approached the government of the United Kingdom for extradition of Christian Michel to India in connection with the AgustaWestland helicopter scam, he said, replying to a question.

The controversial deal and the alleged bribes to the tune of Rs 120 crore paid in clinching it for AgustaWestland, a subsidiary of Italian defence giant Finmeccanica, has triggered a political slugfest between BJP and Congress after an Italian court cited handwritten references to Congress Chief Sonia Gandhi, her political secretary Ahmed Patel and former Air Chief S P Tyagi by the middleman in a judgement that convicted the helicopter companys chief executive.

Michel, 54, is among three non-Indian middlemen who were accused by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Directorate in their separate probes of taking commissions worth 70 million from AgustaWestland to bribe Indians who helped ink the deal.

These middlemen were accused of ensuring that key technical specifications were tweaked in a manner that let AW bag the contract in 2010 pipping American-Russian rivals. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance governed India then.
India faces the serious challenge of finding jobs for a growing population over the next 35 years; its economy could absorb less than half the new entrants into the labour market between 1991 and 2013, the latest Asia-Pacific Human Development Report said.

The report, released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Wednesday, said that between 1991 and 2013, the size of the working age population increased by 300 million.

Of this, the Indian economy could employ only 140 million, suggesting a limited capacity to generate jobs. The report estimated that by 2050, at least 280 million more people will enter the job market in India. According to labour ministry data, around 1 million people enter the workforce in India every month.

Many others simply choose to study more. At any given point, around 30 million students are pursuing higher education in India.

UNDP said countries such as India, with large low-income populations, big agriculture sectors and high rural-to-urban migration, could focus on specific industries, particularly in manufacturing, to create jobs. This switch has been key to high job growth in China, leading to a significant decline in poverty. In India, in contrast, the manufacturing base is still small, contributing to only 15% of GDP and 11% of employment, the report said.

For the complete Mint article, click here
New Delhi has conveyed the need to allow an Indian probe team to visit Islamabad in connection with the Pathankot attack on the principle of reciprocity, minister of state for external affairs VK Singh told Rajya Sabha on Thursday.

He said this was relayed to Pakistani officials at the foreign secretaries talk on Tuesday, though it was not an official dialogue. Singh was responding to a question by Congress Anand Sharma on whether India will be allowed to interrogate Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar in connection with the terror attack.

so far as we are concerned, our high commissioner conveyed formally to Pakistan foreign ministry that the terms of reference for the visit are broadly agreed to with the proviso that they would be on the basis of reciprocity and agreed and followed in accordance with the extant legal provisions. This has been very clearly conveyed to the ministry of foreign affairs of Pakistan that, subsequently, what has come in newspapers, we are not concerned with, Singh said. He added, Pakistans foreign secretary, Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, has been clearly told that they have to look into NIA visiting Pakistan.

Now, he has to go back and take a formal view and convey it to us, the minister said.

Foreign secretaries of the two countries S Jaishankar and Chaudhry met on Tuesday on the sidelines of the Heart of Asia conference in New Delhi.

The minister of state said when Pakistan sent its Joint Investigation Team, which included an ISI official, it was a sign of a positive attitude.

The issue of an ISI member being present in the JIT was raised by Congress MP Jyotiraditya Scindia in the Lok Sabha. Scindia asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to negotiate with the neighbour from a position of strength, instead of having an emotional response.

Raising the issue before the start of the Question Hour, the Congress chief said the Pakistan media had insinuated that the India government had staged a drama to malign Pakistan and that the Indian side had not cooperated with the team.

Responding to NCP member Majid Memons apprehension that Pakistan may change the evidence gathered here, and asked if India has a record of the information provided, Singh said: Their JIT and our NIA had a dialogue at the professional level. Our method of enquiry and theirs is almost the same. They were given only the records we have.
New Delhi

An upbeat Congress is hoping to consolidate its support base among the non-Jats of Haryana with the ghar wapsi of Kuldeep Bishnoi, the son of three-time chief minister Bhajan Lal.

The merger of the Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC) with the Congress on Thursday comes in the backdrop of a violent quota agitation by the Jats that has widened the caste divide in the state.

The HJC was formed in 2007 after the Congress preferred Jat leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda to veteran Bhajan Lal as the Haryana chief minister in 2005.

The states politics has been dominated by three Lals  Bansi Lal, Bhajan Lal and Devi Lal  who started their political career with the Congress but parted ways at some stage. While Bansi Lal and Devi Lal were Jats, Bhajan Lal, considered the tallest non-Jat leader of Haryana, belonged to the other backward class (OBC).

Known as the master of a political culture of party-hopping  and described by an earthy phrase aaya Ram gaya Ram -- Bhajan Lal engineered defections on many occasions to help the Congress regain power in the state.

The term  loosely translated which means Ram came, Ram left -- was coined when legislator Gaya Lal shifted his political loyalties three times  twice in one day -- in a fortnight in 1967, barely months after Haryana was created on November 1, 1966.

Bishnois move marks the return of another Lal family to the Congress fold.

In October 2004, another three-term chief minister Bansi Lal had merged his Haryana Vikas Party (HVP) with the Congress. He quit the Congress in 1996 following differences with arch-rival Bhajan Lal and formed the HVP.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Bishnoi tied up with the BJP but lost to the Indian National Lok Dals Dushyant Chautala from Hisar.

However, the two parties snapped ties a few months later due to differences over seat-sharing ahead of the state elections. Since then, the Congress has been trying to woo Bishnoi and the merger process was finally set in motion after his meeting with Rahul Gandhi on April 25.

Calling the proposed merger unconditional, Bishnoi said the two parties have come together to oust the BJP from Haryana.

Read More | HJC chief Kuldeep Bishnoi and 23 others acquitted in 2010 rioting case

Bishnois father enjoyed widespread support among non-Jats, who constitute about 70% of Haryanas population. However, the Jats have dominated the states political scene. Of the 12 chief ministers so far, nine have been Jats.

The Congress feels that the HJC merger will boost its chances in the state in the next assembly elections.

Congress leaders are of the view that non-Jats have now turned their backs to the BJP despite the ruling party appointing Manohar Lal Khattar, a Punjabi, as the chief minister following its first electoral success in the state in 2014. Khattar became the first non-Jat to lead the state in 18 years.

Political observers insist that Bishnois entry into the Congress does not augur well for Hooda who is facing the heat after his former political advisor Professor Virender, was arrested for allegedly inciting violence during the recent Jat agitation.

The arrest comes at a time when Hooda, who served the state twice as CM, is trying to make a comeback in the party after a dismal performance in 2014 Lok Sabha and assembly polls under his leadership. While the Congress managed to win just one of the 10 Lok Sabha seats, it came third with mere 15 seats in state polls.

The fact that there was no intermediary between Bishnoi and Rahul Gandhi in chalking out the merger plan also indicates the emergence of new power centre in the Congress in Haryana and it remains to be seen how the senior leaders respond to this move.

Read More | CM insulted people by saying they are used to free lunches: Kuldeep Bishnoi

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The political slugfest over the Augusta Westland chopper deal is unlikely to die anytime soon.

The issue led to a heated debate and disruptions in the Upper House on Wednesday and took centre stage in Lok Sabha on Thursday too.

1:05 pm Rajya Sabha has been adjourned till 2 pm

11:45 am : Swamys speech expunged

In two days, parts of BJP leader Subramanian Swamys speech were twice expunged.

On Thursday, as he rose to intervene in another MPs speech on Aligarh Muslim University, Swamy irked the Congress with his references to the Constitution of another country.

The problem is the new gift of the BJP. It is totally out of context he made. This is only his second day in Rajya Sabha. And already his words have been twice expunged. There are 365 days. How many times will his words be expunged? He doesnt know the difference between street language and that of Parliament. His hair has not become grey, said Ghulam Nabi Azad, leader of the Opposition, lashing out at Swamy.

Rajya Sabha deputy chairman PJ Kurien told Swamy, You are unnecessarily provoking others. Dont do this. Sit down.

As his party MPs went down in the Well of the House to protest against Swamy, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said, He has unnecessarily and provocatively mentioning about an European country.

Uproar in Rajya Sabha,opposition storm the well of the house #AugustaWestland pic.twitter.com/Pna8J8HTnw  ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

11:40 am Ruckus in Parliament after Swamy raises AugustaWestland issue

11:31 am KC Tyagi brings up Bhagat Singh textbook issue in Parliament

Tyagi asked the HRD minister Smriti Irani to amend Delhi University textbooks that refer to Bhagat Singh as a terrorist. The Rajya Sabha agreed and said amendments should be made.

JDU's KC Tyagi has raised a serious issue. I will convey the info to the concerned minister for appropriate steps:Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi,BJP  ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

11:15 am Jyotiraditya Scindia raises the Pakistan issue in the aftermath of the Pathankot terror attack

Under attack from the BJP over the Augusta Westland chopper deal, the Congress took up the governments Pakistan policy to corner the BJP in Parliament.

Congress chief whip Jyotiraditya Scindia raised the Pakistan issue in the aftermath of the Pathankot terror attack.

Questioning the governments decision to allow a Pakistans probe team in India, Scindia said, We must negotiate from a position of strength. India Pakistan relations cant be based on emotions.

As the Congress members continued to speak on the issue during the Question Hour, union minister Uma Bharati, who was slated to answer questions on Ganga, quipped, Congress members are more concerned about Pakistan than Ganga.

In the Lok Sabha, notices have been served by some members of the Treasury Benches to speak on the issue.

Top Congress leaders huddled on Thursday morning to evolve a strategy to counter the BJPs game plan.

On Wednesday, Congress president Sonia Gandhi came out to give statements on the issue.

We have nothing to hide. Let them take my name. Where are the proofs? They are lying. This is a part of BJPs strategy of character assassination, Gandhi said in an impromptu interaction with reporters.

Later, the party fielded former defence minister Antony to hold a press conference and give rebuttals to the BJPs charges.

BJP sources point out that the party has decided to attack the Congress aggressively on this issue. It wants its attacks to coincide with the ongoing assembly elections in four states, even though it spoils the chances for passage of bills in Parliament.

Read more: Why did Modi govt remove Agusta Westland from blacklist: Congress

The AgustaWestland will also be used by the BJP to deflect the attention from the Congress attack on the dismissal of the Uttarakhand government in March.

As the Congress hopes to rally other parties over the misuse of the Article 356, the BJP is confident that an alleged corruption issue might be useful to thwart its attempts for a larger opposition unity.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday said the Central Information Commission (CIC) should make public information about Prime Minister Narendra Modis educational qualifications.

The Delhi chief minister, in a letter, has said that if he had no problems in the government making records about him public then the CIC should also not hide information about Modis academic records. The letter has been addressed to information commissioner M Sridhar Acharyulu.

You want to make all my records public. I do not object to that. But I am surprised that you want to hide information about Narendra Modis degree, Kejriwal said, adding, it would make people question the commissions neutrality.

I urge you to show courage and make public records pertaining to Prime Minister Narendra Modi while making my records public, referring to a communication from the commission on March 18.

In its letter, in connection to a petition seeking to know how the AAP leader was allowed to change his address during 2014 Delhi Assembly poll nominations, the CIC had asked why Kejriwal should not be declared a public authority as he is an MLA.

Earlier this month, the Delhi University rejected an RTI plea seeking information on Modis BA degree. The Central Information Commission (CIC) had first accepted the plea, but dismissed it later.

Expressing surprise over the CICs decision to refuse information related to the Prime Ministers qualifications being made public, Kejriwal said it was wrong on part of the commission to do so.

There are allegations that Narendra Modi does not have any degree. The people of the country want to know the truth. Despite that you have refused to make records regarding his degree public, Kejriwal said in his letter.

Extending support to his party leader, Delhi Dialogue Commission vice-chairman Ashish Khetan too urged the Prime Minister to put this issue to rest by publicly disclosing his degrees and certificates.
India has approached Britain for extraditing a middleman in the heart of a bribery scandal in the AgustaWestland chopper deal, the government said on Thursday amidst a raging slugfest between the ruling BJP and the Congress.

Minister of state for external affairs VK Singh told the Rajya Sabha that Indias request for Christian Michels extradition is under consideration of the concerned British authorities.

Michel, 54, allegedly played a key role in swinging the Rs 3,727-crore deal for AgustaWestland to supply 12 VVIP choppers in 2010. The deal was scrapped by the previous UPA government in 2014.

AgustaWestland, a subsidiary of Italian defence giant Finmeccanica, allegedly paid more than `375 crore as bribe to secure the deal. The British wheeler-dealer came under the scanner after an Italian court convicted two former officials of the defence giant for corruption.

Read | Christian Michel, UK businessman in the middle of VVIP chopper scam storm

The names of five Congress leaders, including party chief Sonia Gandhi, figured in the recent judgment by the court, triggering a political row in India.

While the BJP is trying to corner the Congress over the deal, the opposition party is accusing the Centre of character assassination and political vendetta.

A non-bailable arrest warrant was issued by a special CBI court against Michel in September while the global police, Interpol, issued a red corner notice against him in November on the agencys plea. The CBI had also sent a request to the British government in January for his provisional arrest.

In 2013, CBI registered a case over alleged bribes paid by a British firm to Indians to clinch the deal while the ED initiated a money-laundering probe in 2014.

Michel is among three European middlemen accused of tweaking key technical specifications by then government authorities to favour AgustaWestland.

Read: In 5 points: All you need to know about AgustaWestland deal
Pakistan has highlighted the need for a structured, result-oriented comprehensive dialogue process with India for resolving outstanding issues, foreign secretary Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry said on Wednesday.

Chaudhry, who had met his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar in New Delhi on the sidelines of the Heart of Asia Conference a day earlier, said in a statement that during the meeting the Pakistani side had conveyed Islamabads commitment to resolve all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir.

I emphasized that the Jammu and Kashmir dispute remained the core issue and it was vital to find a just solution to this long standing issue, as per the UN Security Council resolutions and wishes of the Kashmiri people, he said.

In line with our Prime Ministers vision of a peaceful neighborhood, I underscored the need for a structured, sustained and result-oriented comprehensive dialogue process between the two countries, he said in the statement.

However, the uninterruptible dialogue process would require commitment from both sides, he said.

I affirmed to my Indian counterpart that Pakistan believes that a sustained and structured engagement is imperative for resolving the outstanding issues, he added.

Pakistan will welcome the start of the peace dialogue whenever India indicated that it was ready for it, he said.

The sticky issues including probe into Pathankot terror attack, 26/11 trial and Samjhauta Express blast investigations figured during the meeting between Chaudhry and Jaishankar.

I conveyed to the Indian side Pakistans deep concern on the illegal entry into Pakistan by a RAW officer and his involvement in subversive activities in Karachi and Balochistan, he said, referring to the arrest of Kulbushan Yadav. Such acts undermine efforts to normalize relations between the two countries, he added.

During the meeting, Indian side had raised the issue of abduction of former Naval officer Jadhav, saying he has been taken to Pakistan, and sought immediate consular access.

I also reiterated Pakistans call for fair investigation and trial of the Samjhauta Express terrorist attack, he said, adding that Pakistani side expressed its concern over recent news items regarding efforts being made to exonerate some of the individuals who were responsible for the attack.

On the Pathankot attack, Chaudhry said, I informed him (Jaishankar) that the JIT had visited India from March 27 to April 1. On the basis of information received from the Indian side, the JIT is currently engaged in further investigations.

He also noted that both sides agreed that people-to-people contact should remain intact.

The foreign secretary said there was a consensus to continue working on humanitarian issues, including the issue of release of all fishermen as well as prisoners who have completed their sentences.
Uttarakhands foothill districts and parts of western Uttar Pradesh are battling a drought-like situation as authorities have choked the water source to these areas to ensure uninterrupted supply to New Delhi and Noida.

The UP irrigation department has stopped releasing water into the eastern Ganga canal, leading to an acute shortage for people and wildlife in Haridwar, Bijnor and JP districts of Uttarakhand and adjacent areas in western Uttar Pradesh.

We dont have enough water (in the Ganga). The upper Ganga canal is more important for us. We have shut down the eastern Ganga canal. When we get more water we will open the gates of the east canal, said PK Gautam, an engineer with the department.

An average of 3,500 million gallons per day (MGD) of water is being supplied through the upper canal, which takes care of the irrigation and drinking water needs of eastern Delhi, many areas within the national capital region (NCR) and the rest of western UP.

Delhi and Noida are currently getting 107 and 80 MGD of drinking water respectively through canal. Under normal circumstances, the canal supplies 240 MGD to the Capital, which is roughly 20% of the citys water requirement. The rest comes from the Yamuna and groundwater sources.

Read: First give us water, then help Latur: Delhi residents to Arvind Kejriwal

Officials of the UP irrigation department said the rationing was done because of the depleting water level in the Ganga and its rain-fed tributaries, which flow from the mountainous Garhwal region of Uttarakhand. The hills have received scanty rainfall this season.

Both canals are looked after by the UP irrigation department as the distribution of assets between the two states is yet to be resolved. Uttarakhand was carved out of UP in November 2000.

Sources said the departments priority is to keep the water flowing into Delhi as any crisis there triggers outrage and controversy.

The water shortage is not only taking a toll on the farmers but also on the wildlife in the Shaympur region, which is close to the Rajaji tiger reserve. The 75km east canal, which normally carries about 1,000 MGD, is the main water source for wildlife, especially elephants and deer, in Rajaji.

Herds of elephant and deer often go to the east canal. But the canal is dry now and wild animals are facing a crisis, Shyampur ranger YS Rathore said.

The Haridwar forest division has requested the irrigation department to release water into the canal.

Rathore said the forest department has dug 11 waterholes. We filled them with water from tankers but these are proving insufficient. It is difficult to fill the pits every day.

(With inputs from MS Nawaz)
India has told Pakistan than an Indian probe team should be allowed to visit the country to investigate the Pathankot terror attack, the government told Rajya Sabha on Thursday.

India said reciprocity was the principle on which Pakistans Joint Investigation Team (JIT) was allowed to visit the Indian Air Force (IAF) base in Pathankot.

Minister of state for external affairs Gen VK Singh insisted that the meeting between the foreign secretaries of the two countries in Delhi was no formal talk.

Singhs response came after opposition members attacked the government over its handling of the Pathankot issue and questioned if NIA will be allowed to visit Pakistan.

The oppsosition members questioned if India will be allowed access to interrogate Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar in connection with the terror attack.

So far as we are concerned, our high commissioner had conveyed formally to Pakistan foreign ministry that the terms of reference of the (JIT) visit are broadly agreed to with the proviso that they would be on the basis of reciprocity and followed in accordance with the extant legal provisions, the minister said in his reply.

He insisted that this has been very clearly conveyed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Pakistan.

Pakistans foreign secretary, Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, who met his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar in New Delhi on Tuesday for a courtesy meeting, was also conveyed the message, Singh said.

It was conveyed to the foreign secretary of Pakistan, when he unofficially on a courtesy visit, met our foreign secretary here that they have to look into our NIA visiting Pakistan. He has to go back and take a formal view and convey to us, he said.

...What appears in the newspapers, we are not concerned about it. So far as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan is concerned, it has not denied the reciprocity issue, he said.

Jaishankar and Chaudhry met in the national capital on Tuesday on the sidelines of a regional conference.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday took his place alongside other world leaders at Madame Tussauds in London.

Modis new wax figure arrived at the Baker Street attraction fresh from Delhi, where Modi had a private viewing with his likeness last week.

The figure is featured in the famous attractions popular World Leaders enclosure alongside present day leaders Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Francoise Holland, as well as political heavyweights of the past including Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill.

Modi was closely involved in the creation of his figure and was delighted with the final results, declaring that the Madame Tussauds team are exceptional at what they do.

General Manager of Madame Tussauds London, Edward Fuller, said, We are delighted that Mr Modi was able to see this very figure in India last week, and to welcome him to Madame Tussauds London today.

Its wonderful that our visitors now have the chance to get up close to this influential leader, who is the source of so much public interest.

Its not every day you get to stand alongside the statesmen and women shaping our world and we think guests will relish the chance to rub shoulders with Mr Modi.

Modis figure is dressed in his signature Kurta in cream with jacket and he is featured in a traditional pose making a namaste gesture.

Londons figure is one of four created of the statesman, with the other three taking up residence at Madame Tussauds attractions in Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok.

Each figure took a team of talented artists four months and cost 150,000 pounds to create.
A book, which is on the list of suggested reading for history students in the University of Delhi and refers to Bhagat Singh as a revolutionary terrorist, is in the middle of a controversy with the freedom fighters family raising the issue with the education ministry as well as the varsity.

On Wednesday, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator Anurag Thakur took up the matter and demanded a debate in the Lok Sabha on what is being taught in the country, prompting a heated exchange between BJP and Congress members.

Heres all about the controversy:

Book: Indias Struggle for Independence

Author: Bipin Chandra. The author, who died in 2014, was last working on a biography of Bhagat Singh. The Modern India historian is seen by many as pro-Left.

Co-authors: Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, Sucheta Mahajan and KN Panikkar

First printed in: 1988

* The book uses the term revolutionary terrorist for freedom fighters Bhagat Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Surya Sen and others in Chapter 20. It is being taught in Delhi University under the list of suggested readings for history students for over two decades.

* The freedom fighters family has written to human resource development minister Smriti Irani seeking her intervention and also met the vice-chancellor of DU. The ministry has reportedly asked DU to reconsider teaching of the particular chapter or book.

* Irani has reportedly termed the text of the book to be an academic murder of sacrifices of individuals and assured that she will convey her angst to the university. I would not call it an academic anomaly but an academic murder of the sacrifices of many individuals. If I am to be called intolerant to ensure that Bhagat Singh ji is not called a terrorist, then that is a tag I will proudly wear, she reportedly told a news channel.

* VC Yogesh Tyagi said they have taken note of the request and maintained that the book is taught in the history department as a reference book and not a textbook. The book is taught as a reference book in our history department but is not a textbook or published or authored by DU professor, he told PTI.

* Co-authors have said that to imply that the term was used for denigrating the martyr is deliberate misrepresentation of Chandras views on Bhagat Singh. According to them, Chandra did not use the term in his later writings and was planning to change it in the book. But due to ill health and failing eyesight, he could not revise the book as he had planned before his death. The co-authors are planning to drop the word from the volume in its revised version.

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The Supreme Court ordered the Centre on Thursday to conduct the National Entrance-cum-Eligibility Test (NEET) for undergraduate courses, ending speculation over holding the common entrance exam for medical colleges for academic year 2016-17.

A bench headed by justice AR Dave brushed aside stiff opposition from states and private colleges to rule the NEET be held in two phases  the first on May 1 and the second on July 24. The combined results of both tests will be declared on August 17 and, as per the CBSE schedule, counselling will end on September 30.

The order came after the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) and the Medical Council of India (MCI) gave a joint undertaking to conduct the exam in two phases.

CBSE counsel, additional solicitor general Pinky Anand, said the board had fixed May 1 for the All India Pre-Medical Test (AIPMT) and that would be rescheduled as the first phase of the NEET. She said over 670,000 students had already enrolled themselves for the paper.

According to Anand, around 250,000 students were left who, she said, could be accommodated in the second phase after they deposited the required fee.

Read: Will NEET for admission to medical courses pass the fitness test?

Combined result of both the tests shall be declared on 17th August, 2016. CBSE will provide All India rank. Admitting authorities will invite applications for counselling and merit list shall be drawn based on All India rank, the bench ordered, directing state governments, institutions and police departments to extend necessary support for the NEET.

If there is any difficulty with regard to implementation of orders of this court, the stakeholders may approach this court, it said, disposing an application filed by a trust seeking the NEET be held this year.

On April 11, a five-judge SC bench had recalled its 2013 verdict quashing the MCI notification introducing the NEET. The judgment was delivered on a batch of petitions challenging the common entrance exam. But there was uncertainty over whether the NEET would be implemented this year as the top court decided to examine the MCIs notification afresh.

The states and a consortium of private colleges contested the application on the grounds that some colleges had already held exams. Senior advocate Rajeev Dhavan took strong exception to justice Dave heading the three-judge bench to decide the application. He said the judge dissented in the 2013 verdict. Its a dissenting judge pushing his case, he told the court.

Senior advocate Vikas Singh, appearing for the MCI, created an uproar after he said students who did not enrol themselves for the AIPMT were not serious medical students.

Read | NEET or MH-CET? Students worried as Maha schedules test on May 5

In view of the submissions made on behalf of the respondents, we record that NEET shall be held as stated by the respondents. We further clarify that notwithstanding any order passed by any court earlier with regard to not holding NEET, this order shall operate. Therefore, no further order is required to be passed at this stage, the bench said, dismissing the states contention that they be allowed to carry on with their exams.

The court clarified that its order would not affect the case before a constitution bench on the NEETs legitimacy.

The Union health ministry welcomed the move and offered all the help to conduct the exam successfully. Despite the challenges to conduct the exam this year, the ministry is geared up to work with the other partners and stakeholders to ensure that the entrance exams are successfully held, health minister JP Nadda said.

The first phase of NEET will be conducted as per schedule for government college seats and the second phase will include all medical colleges under the purview of MCI, including deemed universities, a senior MCI official said.

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India called for freedom of navigation on Thursday, saying the sea lanes of communication should be devoid of tension and rivalry.

India does not see itself as in competition with any country in this regard, said President Pranab Mukherjee, who is on a maiden two-day state visit to Papua New Guinea, the largest island in the Pacific region.

He also said that India was not in competition with anyone over signing a security cooperation with Papua New Guinea.

All sea lanes of communications should be free of tension and rivalry, Mukherjee said in an interview to the Post Courier newspaper here.

He was replying to a question about the future of security cooperation between the Pacific island and India against the backdrop of Chinese military presence in the region.

The waters and Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of Pacific Island countries have seen a surge of illegal activities such as smuggling, illegal fishing, human trafficking, drug trafficking, which impact the economy and political security of the Pacific Island countries, the President said.

We are ready to cooperate with Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Island Countries in helping them secure their EEZs and in disaster warning and disaster mitigation. We are ready to share satellite images developed by Indian satellites for early warning system and to help map natural resources of each country using our satellite system, Mukherjee said.

Maritime security, terrorism and piracy are major concerns to the whole world today and also for India and Papua New Guinea, he said.

During the FIPIC-2 (Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation) Summit in Jaipur, India offered a Coastal Surveillance Radar System to the Pacific Island countries, including Papua New Guinea. It has also offered to provide Coast Guard vessels, he said.

The President, who arrived here this morning and was accorded a ceremonial reception that included a 21 gun salute, said the underlying narrative of Indias engagement with the developing world is non-exploitative and developmental.

Having endured colonial exploitation, India is acutely conscious of the fact that bilateral relationships have to be based on mutual benefit. India, therefore, believes in capacity building and assistance based on priorities determined by the recipient country, he said.

Mukherjee invoked Vasudeva Kutumbakam (The whole world is one family) as the guiding principle of Indias diplomacy.

We have an ancient saying Vasudeva Kutumbakam... This is the philosophy that permeates our relations with all foreign countries, he said.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi will lead a Loktantra Bachaao Yatra march from Jantar Mantar to Parliament on May 6 to protest against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments unwarranted move in Uttarakhand.

Uttrakhand has been witnessing a protracted political crisis, which reached its climax when the Centre deposed chief minister Harish Rawat and imposed Presidents rule.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday put on hold till further orders, the floor test for the Harish Rawat government in the Uttarakhand assembly on April 29 as directed by the High Court.

The apex court also posed seven questions to the Centre, asking it to justify the imposition of Presidents rule in Uttarakhand. The apex court asked if proceedings in the Assembly could be considered by the President for imposing Central rule.

The court also sought answer to the question as to when the Presidents role comes in picture with regard to Appropriation bill. It asked, whether a delay in the floor test could be a ground for proclamation of Presidents rule. While hearing the Centres appeal against the High Court order, the apex court said the Speaker is the master of the Assembly.

The court asked whether the disqualification of MLAs by the Speaker is relevant for the purposes of invoking Presidents rule under Article 356.

It also asked whether the Governor sent the message in the present manner under Article 175 (2) for conducting the floor test in the Assembly.
The Congress chief should clarify who received kickbacks in the VVIP chopper deal scam, BJP president Amit Shah said, renewing his attack on Sonia Gandhi on Thursday.

It has been established by an Italian court that kickbacks were given. Rather than saying she (Sonia) is not afraid of anyone, she should clarify who received the kickbacks, Shah told reporters.

I just want to ask who was in the power then? It was UPA and they are responsible. They should bring out the truth before the nation, he added.

When the National Herald (case) took place, then you say that we are not afraid of anybody, when the VVIP chopper scam takes place, then you say that we are not afraid of anybody, Shah pointed out.

You say you (Sonia Gandhi) are not scared of anything. We in the BJP fear the Constitution, rule of law and societal norms, Shah said. You are right in saying you are not afraid of anyone. This is the reason such cases (allegations of Congress involvement in chopper deal scam) come to the fore, he added.

He said the Congress was a unique party whose corruption deals were coming out even two years after it was ousted from power.

When the Congress was in power, its corruption deals were coming out every day. This is still going on even after two years of losing power.

Shahs remarks came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a meeting with senior ministers over the scam.

The meeting was attended by Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Parliamentary Affairs Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu and his junior Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi in parliament shortly before both houses met for the day.

Naidu replied that the government was pursuing the case with all seriousness.

The Bharatiya Janata Party has upped the ante against Gandhi, whose name figures in a judgment by an Italian court which sent Finmeccanicas former CEO Giuseppe Orsi and AgustaWestland ex-head Bruno Spagnolini to jail for false accounting and corruption in the sale of 12 VVIP choppers to India.

Read: Tables turn: Govt pushes Congress against the wall over chopper scam

The court ruling refers to former prime minister Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, her secretary Ahmad Patel and also former Indian Air Force chief SP Tyagi.

Read: Swamys remarks expunged again, Rajya Sabha MP angers Cong

Gandhi and Singh have dismissed the bribery charges in the VVIP chopper scam amid the BJPs attempts tried to corner the main Opposition party.

Gandhi said she was not afraid and dubbed the allegations as false. Singh and former defence minister AK Antony echoed the sentiment.

The Congress in turn accused the Narendra Modi government of trying to help the Italian firm which had been blacklisted. The issue sparked tensions in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha.

Read: AgustaWestland: SC to hear petition against Sonia, Manmohan next week
A group of human rights activists, including Trupti Desai of the Shani Shingnapur fame, have decided to stage a peaceful protest outside the citys Haji Ali Dargah against a stricture that prevents women from entering its sanctum sanctorum.

Members of the forum said they will go ahead with the stir at the island shrine even though they are yet to receive permission from the police.

The peaceful protest will be carried out on the footpath, near a juice centre, outside Haji Ali at 4 pm today, said activist Feroze Mithiborwala. He said they will make it convenient for everybody by holding the protest for only around an hour.

Tardeo police inspector Dyanesh Devede said though the police havent granted permission for the dharna, they will not intervene as long as its conducted peacefully. If the dharna goes out of control, adequate action will be taken. But if things go peacefully, we wont stop them, he said.

Read: Haji Ali row: Desai asks Salman, SRK, Aamir to lend support

Devede said policemen at Haji Ali will monitor the situation, and no additional personnel have been deployed for the same.

Desai, for her part, said the activists will not court trouble by entering the sanctum sanctorum of the shrine. It is believed that whatever you ask for at Haji Ali Dargah comes true, and we shall ask for equal treatment of women,  said Desai.

Javed Anand, a member of the forum, confirmed this. We will not enter the dargah forcibly. We dont have any such intention, he said.

All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM) member Haji Rafat Hussain has, for his part, threatened to smear Desai with black ink if she tries to enter the dargah. We will not tolerate this. This will be an attempt to spoil the environment of Mumbai, ANI quoted Hussain as saying.

Human right activists and non-government organisations formed a forum called Haji Ali sab ke liye on April 20 to do away with religious customs and traditions that undermine gender justice and equality. The 20-member organisation comprises social activists, union leaders and political workers.

Desai had earlier called on Bollywood superstars Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Salman Khan to support her in her quest.
US House of Representatives speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday announced he has formally invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to address a joint meeting of congress on June 8.

The friendship between the United States and India is a pillar of stability in an important region of the world, Ryan said at his weekly news briefing on Capitol Hill.

This address presents a special opportunity to hear from the elected leader of the worlds most populous democracy on how our two nations can work together to promote our shared values and to increase prosperity. We look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Modi to the United States Capitol. This will be the first joint meeting of Ryans speakership.

Hindustan Times had first reported that there was a move to invite to the Prime Minister to address a joint session of the US congress at request of top lawmakers from both parties.

Modi will become the fifth Indian PM to address the congress after Rajiv Gandhi (1985), PV Narasimha Rao (1994), Atal Bihari Vajpayee (2000) and Manmohan Singh (2005).

In 1949, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had addressed only the House of Representatives but not a joint session or a joint meeting of congress.

There was a move to invite Modi to address congress during his first visit to the US as prime minister in 2014, but it didnt work out with then speaker John Boehner citing scheduling issues.

Read | Jaishankar heads to Washington to set stage for Modis US visit

This time, the move to invite him started on April 9, with a letter to Ryan from Ed Royce and Eliot Engel, chairperson and ranking member of the House foreign relations committee, and co-chairs of the House India caucus George Holding and Ami Bera, the only Indian American member of US congress.

Given the depth of our relationship with India over range of areas  defence, humanitarian and disaster relief, space cooperation, conservation and innovation  we believe this is an ideal opportunity for the Congress to hear directly from the Prime Minister, they wrote in the letter.

It is our understanding, they added, if invited, the Prime Minister would accept.

Ranking member Engel said in a statement on Thursday, Its great news that Congress plans to roll out the red carpet for Prime Minister Modi. In the last few years, the long relationship between the United States and India has grown even stronger. Our collaboration on issues from climate change and the environment to defense to economic growth shows just how many concerns our countries share.

Welcoming Ryans invitation to Modi, Bera said in a separate statement: As the son of parents who emigrated from India, this is a special privilege for me and I look forward to working to strengthen our special global relationship with India.

Also read | Heres why Nuclear Security Summit in US is important for India
Congress chief Sonia Gandhi should reveal who received kickbacks in a controversial 2010 helicopter deal, BJP president Amit Shah said on Thursday as he attempted to corner the opposition party on corruption charges.

The raging row sparked fireworks in Parliament where BJP leader Subramanian Swamys remarks linking Gandhi to the AgustaWestland deal were expunged for the second straight day and the Rajya Sabha member rapped for the comments.

In West Bengal, home minister Rajnath Singh attempted to make the graft allegations an election issue.Where are those who received the kickbacks? Who were in power at that time? They are responsible and they should bring out the truth, Shah said.

The strong remarks underline the BJPs strategy of pushing the Congress on the back foot after the opposition party stalled Parliament repeatedly over the past two sessions and hurt the governments reform agenda.

Read | MEA seeks extradition of Christian Michel, the Agusta middleman from UK

The charges over the VVIP chopper deal erupted two days ago when documents in an Italian court referenced middlemen mentioning top Congress leaders, including Gandhi and former PM Manmohan Singh.

A subsidiary of Italian defence major Finmeccanica, AgustaWestland allegedly paid around `375 crores as bribe, a revelation that led to the agreement being scrapped by the then UPA government in 2014.

The BJP alleges the bribe was paid to top Congress leaders and is attacking the opposition party inside and outside Parliament at a time when assembly elections are going on in four states.

In the morning, Shah criticised Gandhis remarks a day before when she had said she wasnt afraid of the allegations, saying her mindset was the reason behind such scams.

When the National Herald corruption case happens, you say you do not fear anybody. When the AgustaWestland case occurs, you say you do not fear nobody...I want to tell her that we in the BJP are afraid of the Constitution, rules and public norms, he said.

In West Bengal where the BJP is locked in an uphill three-way battle, Singh used the allegations to attack the Left-Congress alliance.

The communist parties showcase themselves as champions of probity in public life. The silence of its top leadership on chopper scam is deafening. Serious allegations have been leveled against top leadership of the Congress, he said in Bishnupur.

Read | Corruption the core issue in AgustaWestland scam: Defence ministry

In the Rajya Sabha during a discussion on the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University, Swamy made a reference to the constitution of a European country, triggering loud protests from Congress leaders.

Deputy chairperson PJ Kurien expunged the remarks and warned Swamy of action for unnecessarily provoking the Congress.

But that didnt satisfy the Congress that said Swamy didnt know the difference between street language and parliamentary words. The problem is the new gift of the BJP. There are 365 days in a year, how many times are you going to expunge his words? leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said.

A combative Swamy told reporters he was sorry that his remarks were not expunged as per rules and that he did what I came here for  a reference to his nomination to the Rajya Sabha member by the NDA.

He also said he would move a motion of privilege against Azad for misleading the house by saying the UPA blacklisted AgustaWestland.

On Thursday, Swamy had given a notice to raise an issue regarding the chopper deal, but the chairman removed his name from the final list of speakers in an apparent move to prevent further disruptions of proceedings.
Of 663 rape cases decided between January 2014 and March 2015 by Delhi courts, 357 resulted in acquittals because the victims turned hostile during trial. At least 71 rape complainants deposed that they had filed false cases under pressure from their family while 45 said the police forced them to file the FIR. The courts questioned neither the complainants nor the police or the families.

More than half of the 663 complainants turned hostile and 44.2% of them said the accused had threatened them prior to the filing of the FIR. Pressure could have been applied on them even after they had registered a case.

Retired Delhi High Court judge, RS Sodhi points a finger at the courts. Any woman says that I have filed a rape case under police pressure then the policeman should face consequences. So for the court to not be vigilant and take action is actually a default on the judicial system.

Part I of Rape and the City: In Delhi, a rape accused has 83% chance of acquittal

Family, police pressure: Why most rape victims turn hostile during trial(Graphic: Aastha Mittal and Hitesh Mathur)

Hindustan Times data analysis reveals that the courts neither took action against the police nor did they question families of those that alleged that they filed false complaints under pressure.

HT spoke to a rape complainant who said shed filed the case after years of abuse but had to retract her testimony before the court under family pressure. My family told me to leave the case. The accused was close to my father and he knew I would listen to him. the woman said.

HTs analysis also showed that 64 women had eloped with their lovers and their parents had filed criminal cases. At least 18 women told courts they had married the rape accused and retracted their testimony before the magistrate.

Lawyers say these cases raise serious questions about the workings of the justice system.

If they (the complainants) are saying, they have compromised then thats an even bigger issue to think about. Why have we not worked on a better victim protection policy? How is the accused getting access to the victims family to be able to compromise? asks a lawyer who wished to stay anonymous.

Watch | A rape survivor recounts her struggle to seek justice:

These judgments reveal the kind of pressure that is brought to bear on the victim. In one case, a girl who accused her father-in-law of rape actually turned around and told the court during the trial that the lights were turned off and so she had mistaken her husband for her father-in-law.

When the evidence or reasons are incredible then obviously the court has to question and not accept the reasons given by the complainant, says senior advocate Indira Jaising.

Another senior lawyer Vrinda Grover points out that the complainant was probably forced to bring in her husband because marital rape is not an offence under the Indian Penal Code.

Pressure isnt necessarily put through threat  it can be through family, through society, through people saying maaf kardo. Now if that is the case, then the court has to be much more proactive and see what can be done, says Grover.

The data analysis also showed that 39 complainants had filed cases out of anger, spite and malice. Six women had also used the case to extort money.

Jaisingh sums it up saying, The very process of seeking justice is frustrating.

Watch | Senior advocate Indira Jaising analyses the reasons why rape victims turn hostile

(District courts data compiled by interns Srishti Juneja, Vidushi Gupta, Tanuj Dayal. Data analysis by Avantika Mehta)

Tomorrow: Do raped minors get justice?
BJP leader Subramanian Swamys message to the Opposition rang loud and clear on his first day in Parliament after 17 years  he was not going to lie low.

Swamy barely spoke two lines during Wednesdays Rajya Sabha session, but it was enough to get the house adjourned twice. Swamy sought to link Congress leaders to British businessman Christian James Michel who is being investigated for allegedly bribing bribing Indians in AgustaWestland choppers deal.

Now, before coming to my notice, it was touching to see the Leader of the Opposition relying on Mr Michel for what he said orally. But the High Court of Italy has recorded a letter written by Mr Michel stating that is the main..., he said.

Read: Agusta issue: Swamy fulfilling PMs muck raking agenda, says Cong

A part of the BJP leaders speech was expunged, but the Congress continued to protest. Nothing else could be discussed during the Zero Hour. Peace prevailed only during the Question Hour and later, when the house came together to discuss the drought.

Swamys nomination to the Rajya Sabha, where the BJP is in a minority, signals a shift in its political strategy. The ruling party now seeks to show that despite lacking the strength needed to push bills through the house, it will use every opportunity to turn the tables on the Congress.

Defending his party, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said: There is not even a whisper regarding the culpability of the Congress and any of its leaders (in the AgustaWestland scam). It is just a figment of the imagination of the MP who has been just nominated. Modi wants to use him for his muck-raking agenda. Swamys job as an MP is for this purpose.

Read: Declassify Bluestar files, says Swamy, defends Bhindranwale

The BJP leader, best known for his role in exposing the alleged 2G scam during the UPA regime, is a veteran in parliamentary procedures. He was first elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1974 on a Jan Sangh ticket.

Swamy  a former Harvard professor  is fluent in Mandarin, resides in Delhis posh Nizamuddin East, and has a penchant for filing cases against Congress leaders.

The BJP leader was allotted a government bungalow four months ago over security concerns in the backdrop of the National Herald case  in which he was the main complainant. While there was a lot of hue and cry over the allotment earlier, he can now easily retain it as an MP.
After seizure of 236 kg of ephedrine crystals from a factory in Pithampur, the Department of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) is planning to check small pharmaceutical units in Pithampur and nearby industrial areas for evidence of manufacturing ephedrine without proper licenses.

Sources in the department said one needs to spend only between Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 and take five days to make a batch (45 kg) of ephedrine hydrochloride. This drug is synthesised to produce narcotic Methamphetamine, popularly called Ice Tablet.

Sources said the drug is popular in western countries, but its popularity is rising in India.

Most of the consignment seized was meant for illegal export by hiding it inside other consignments.

Over-the-counter-sale of ephedrine is banned in India since 2006, but its controlled manufacture as a bulk drug, mainly used for treating asthma, bronchitis and low blood pressure, remains legal.

There are several small, moribund factories. We plan to check them, a DRI source said.

The three accused, who were arrested recently, are partners Brij Bhushan Pandey and Santosh Singh from Uttar Pradesh and buyer Babar Ghulam Murtaza Khan from Pune. All three have been charged under Sections 22 (contravention of psychotropic substances) and 23 (illegal trade of narcotic substances) of the Narcotic Drug and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985.

They were produced before a special court where the DRI got their remand for 14 days. If convicted, they face a 10-year jail term.

After preliminary probe, the intelligence wing inferred that Impress Chemicals, the factory where the drug was being manufactured, had been rented for the last three months from its owner, an MBBS doctor based in Saket, Delhi. The doctor, whose identity has not been disclosed, has been asked to meet the DRI officials, sources said.

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What would Delhi Daredevils skipper Zaheer Khan have thought when the opposition captain Suresh Raina was batting? Facing a quick Chris Morris, Zaheer immediately called for a leg-slip.

Having played for many years alongside Raina in the Indian team, Zaheer was aware of the left-handers short-ball problem. Zaheer has been taking quality decisions on the field for Delhi and on Wednesday, even Raina would agree with that assessment.

Raina walked in at the fall of opener Dwayne Smith with the Gujarat Lions score at 112 in 10.4 overs. After such a prolific start, a batsman of Rainas calibre should have exuberated confidence but sadly, the short-ball problem has become a bane for him.

As soon as he comes to bat, skippers usually bring their quick bowlers and ask them to bang it short. Zaheer, too tried the same thing. A couple of deliveries before Morris claimed his wicket, Raina had hopped in the crease and defended the ball. That triggered an idea in Zaheers mind and he stationed Karun Nair at a wide-ish leg-slip.

Raina has been unable to overcome this technical flaw in his batting and it haunted him more during last years India-South Africa ODI series. In more than six months, he has gotten out five times in such fashion.

At Indore in October 2015, Raina hopped and moved across to deal with Morne Morkels quick short-pitched delivery and could only glove it back. Then in the final ODI at Mumbai, Rainas leg-stump was exposed as Rabada fired in pacey short-pitched deliveries before castling him with a yorker.

At the World T20 last month, Raina was castled by Pakistan seamer Mohammed Sami when he jumped in the crease and played on. Later against Australia, Watsons short-pitched delivery once again claimed Raina as he moved across and got a glove.

While Raina has made effort in ironing out this flaw it seems the problem lies with his indecisiveness. There are times when he executes the pull really well but at times he is double minded, whether to leave the ball or play at it.

Against Mumbai Indians in this edition of the IPL, Mitchell McClenaghan did not waste much time before firing in short-pitched deliveries. One such delivery caught him in two minds and he ended up picking a wrong delivery and scooped it high in the air.

Once Brendon McCullum departed, it was on Raina to take the momentum forward. But it seems Raina has become an easy victim these days for sides with quality pacers.

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Poonam Bhagat, wife of industrialist Jaidev Shroff, was granted anticipatory bail by a sessions court on Wednesday. The court imposed some conditions on her over the complaint filed by her husband.

One of conditions says Poonam will have to go to the police station every day from April 28 to May 3 and every Monday after that until the charge sheet is filed. The court has also asked her to not leave the city or country without prior permission.

While the couple are embroiled in a messy divorce battle, Shroff who heads the Rs2,000-crore United Phosphorous Limited, had filed a complaint against Poonam for allegedly spiking his juice with poison on March 25.

Read: Mumbai socialite booked for poisoning husband

The FIR filed with Khar police station states the drink made him dizzy and he went into deep sleep. According to the FIR, Shroff then left Mumbai for treatment in a private hospital in another state.

While the Khar police had arrested a godman, who according to Jaidev, had advised Poonam to spike his drink, his wife moved an anticipatory bail application before the Mumbai sessions court. In her pre-arrest bail plea, Bhagat said in January 2005, within six months of their marriage, Jaidev allegedly hit her, gave her a black eye and broke her tooth by stuffing a mobile phone in her mouth. In The application said Poonam was assaulted again in December 2006 and Jaidev had siphoned off money after he was appointed the director of Nirlon. Poonams application stated incidents of domestic violence continued from 2009 to 2015. Considering allegations from both sides, the court on Wednesday granted anticipatory bail. The court has also granted bail to athe godman.
Normal service was restored at jewellery shops on Wednesday. The three-day nationwide strike was called off late on Tuesday after jewellers decided to form a committee to negotiate with the Centre on excise duty.

Beside excise duty, jewellers said they will also discuss the issue of making PAN card mandatory for purchases above Rs 2 lakh.

Also read: Jewellers back on strike, down shutters for 3 days

Our demands are rollback of 1% excise duty and removal of the rule that mandates PAN card for purchase of Rs 2 lakh and above. These issues will be taken up with the Centre by All India Jewellers Action Committee. We have got hints from the Centre that they are ready to negotiate. So it is time for us to suspend the strike and sort out the issues with the Central government, Ram Avatar Verma, vice-chairman of the jewellers action committee, which has members from the twenty associations across the country.

The committee was formed in March. Some of its member associations had called off the strike on March 19 and decided to negotiate with the Centre. The difference in opinion among member associations had resulted in prolonged strike of 44 days in March and April.

We cannot pressurise the Centre by closing our shops and business, so we decided to chalk out a strategy and reach a consensus among the member associations. We held a meeting in this regard in Mumbai on Tuesday and decided, together, to negotiate with the Centre. The Centre has repeatedly been hinting at negotiations but denied rollback. We will have to put up a fight strategically, GB Sridhar, president of All India Gems and Jewellers Federation, said.

The strike in the first phase lasted for 44 days, between March 2 and April 14, after which jewellers decided to postpone the strike till April 24.

Also read: Jewellers call off 42-day strike after govt assurance

The strike affected residents as it coincided with the peak wedding season. Residents were forced to purchase jewellery from those selling ornaments secretly through contacts. The strike had affected artisans and employees engaged by the traders badly as they were without work during the period.

We appreciate that a committee will deal with the Centre, which is adamant on the 1% excise duty. We have, meanwhile, opened our shops and normal service has been restores after several days, Sushil Kumar Jain, district president of Bharatiya Udyog Vyapar for Noida said.

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Indian Administrative Service officer Santosh Yadav took charge as the managing director of Noida Metro Rail Corporation (NMRC) on Thursday. He will oversee the under construction 30km Noida-Greater Noida Metro link.

Since NMRC came into existence in November 2014, Rama Raman, chairman of Noida, Greater Noida and Yamuna E-way authorities, served as the MD of NMRC.

After taking charge, Yadav reviewed the progress of the under construction metro link, which is expected to be ready before its deadline of March 2017.

NMRC executive director Saumya Srivastava and the Greater Noida authority chief executive officer (CEO) Deepak Agarwal also took part in the meeting.

The MD directed the staff to work in close coordination with the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation to fast track the Noida-Greater Noida Metro link, PD Upadhyay, general manager of NMRC, said.

During the review, Yadav asked his staff to sort out minor issues quickly so that DMRC, which is undertaking the construction, does not face any hurdles.

Yadav stayed at the NMRC office for an hour before leaving for Tamil Nadu, where he is deputed to conduct state assembly elections. He will stay in Tamil Nadu from April 29 to May 17.

NMRC officials said that they are likely to sign an agreement with DMRC for maintenance and operation of Noida-Greater Noida link once it is ready.

If the agreement is signed, DMRC will oversee operations and maintenance of this project for three to four years. This agreement is likely to be signed once new MD is back from his election duty, an NMRC official said.

A 1995 batch IAS officer, Yadav was the vice-chairman of the Ghaziabad Development Authority till May 2015 after which he served as the secretary to the chief minister. Yadav had also joined as CEO of the Yamuna Expressway authority in June 2015 but was transferred after a brief stint.

Before joining NMRC, Yadav served as the resident commissioner of Uttar Pradesh in Delhi.

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Three people died after allegedly consuming hooch in Rakibganj locality under Malsalami police station area of Patna City on Wednesday. This is the first major incident since total prohibition was announced by the Bihar government on April 5.

The news of the alleged hooch tragedy brought the district officials on their toes. Fearing such incidents, the chief minister had announced at the outset that the local police officials would be held accountable for sale or consumption of liquor in their jurisdiction.

According to reports, the manufacturing and sale of illicit liquor had been going on in Patna City and Danapur sub-divisions in Patna in connivance with some local officials for several years and that continued even after prohibition.

Police said Manoj Kumar, Umashankar Rai and Ashok Das consumed hooch at a roadside dhaba (Baba ka dhaba) near Sahu Petrol pump in Patna City on Monday evening. The trouble began on Tuesday after all three started vomiting and there was foam discharge from their mouth.

The family members immediately admitted them to separate nursing homes here for treatment.

Manoj and Umashankar died late on Tuesday evening, while Ashok breathed his last early Wednesday morning.

Family members of deceased Ashok Das told the police that before being admitted to the nursing home, he revealed the three friends had consumed liquor at dhaba.

Fearing police action, the family members cremated their bodies secretly without ascertaining the cause of the death, said Patna City SDPO, adding that during primary investigation, it came to light that hooch was the reason behind their death.

All of them had consumed liquor at the same place. So it is suspected that they died after consuming hooch, said an investigating officer, adding that police team raided the dhaba and detained its owner and two staff.

Senior SP Manu Maharaaj said the matter was under investigation and no arrests had been made so far. Police also quizzed hospital authorities, but they denied any symptoms of hooch.

The deceased had not consumed liquor while they were admitted to nursing homes, said the certificates issued by the administration of the health facilities.

The doctors have been called to ascertain why did not they inform the police when the cases were of suspected hooch, the Senior SP added.

Earlier in Nalanda, Chandra Sekhar Yadav, husband of a sarpanch died while two other people, including a quack, were taken critically after allegedly consuming spurious liquor in Gulni village of Hilsa police station area of Nalanda on April 18.

In Gaya, a youth Mithilesh Kumar, a resident of Englishpur village, died after allegedly consuming spurious liquor while four others fell ill. Two of them were admitted to Anugrah Narayan Magadh Medical College and Hospital for treatment.

According to villagers, the five had gone to Aurangabad in a marriage function on April 24. They consumed spirit mixed with cold drink and later developed complications, he added.

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In pursuance with the agenda of total prohibition in the country, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is all set to cross the boundaries of the state.

On Wednesday, Kumar accepted an invitation extended by a womens group from neighbouring Jharkhand to participate in a programme on liquor prohibition. After Jharkhand, he would also go to Lucknow on May 15 to take part in a similar conference organised by the women of Uttar Pradesh.

Members of Jharkhand Nari Sangharsh Morcha met Kumar to extend invitation for their programme in support of liquor ban at the Town hall in Dhanbad on May 10, an official statement said.

Kumar assured the womens delegation of his participation in the function in support of prohibition, the statement added.

The Morcha has been demanding imposition of total liquor ban in Jharkhand. Bihar had announced total prohibition on April 5.

Read: Patna high court adjourns hearing in liquor ban case till May 3

Kumars visit to Dhanbad (Jharkhand) assumes significance as it comes in the wake of a terse reply given by his Jharkhand counterpart, Raghubar Das, for extending co-operation to Bihar for strictly enforcing prohibition in the state.

I had written a letter to the chief minister of Jharkhand seeking cooperation with the state (Bihar) by keeping a strict vigil on Jharkhand border so that prohibition in Bihar can be strictly implemented, Kumar said, during his address at the JD(U)s national council meeting held last week. However, Kumar expressed surprise over the manner in which the Jharkhand CM replied to his letter.

In reply to my letter, the Jharkhand CM wrote back saying that he (Raghubar Das) has received his (Nitishs) letter and has forwarded it to the excise department for necessary action, Kumar said, adding, Is this is the reply of a CM to another CMs letter?

Kumar also took exception to the way Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand had enhanced the target of liquor sale in their respective states, post the liquor ban in Bihar.

He had said that these states should not rejoice on revenue boost as similar demands for ban on alcohol would arise from the citizens of their states too. If a complete ban on alcohol can be imposed in Bihar, why cannot the same be done in Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh or Odisha? Kumar said during a programme at Bhagalpur on Tuesday.

I am going to participate in a conference at Lucknow on May 15. I would ask the UP chief minister whether the increased target (of countrymade liquor consumption) would be met by making Uttar Pradesh people drink the countrymade liquor or is it somehow meant for people of Bihar where there is complete prohibition, Kumar said.

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The Parkash Singh Badal government is set to clear a proposal for setting up Khalsa University on the iconic Khalsa college campus at Amritsar  a potentially-controversial move that was shelved five years ago in the face of stiff opposition from Sikh and political quarters.

On Thursday, a high-powered committee headed by chief secretary Sarvesh Kaushal is scheduled to take a call on the single-point agenda of giving the go-ahead to the Khalsa College Governing Council ( KCGC) for establishing a university, top government sources told Hindustan Times.

The key government functionaries have already prepared a water-tight case that would be discussed by a panel comprising vice chancellors of Guru Nanak Dev University, Panjab University, Punjab Technical University, and a representative of the University Grants Commission (UGC).

The Khalsa University proposal has been examined in detail. There is no technical glitch to turn down the proposal. However, the final decision will depend how the panel of VCs appreciates the proposal, sources added.

Recently, the KCGC, led by Satyajit Singh Majithia, father of Union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal and Punjab revenue minister Bikram Singh Majithia, had quietly revived the university proposal, raising the hackles of a section of Sikh leaders and political parties.

The most strident opposition came from Amritsar MP and Punjab Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singh, who even threatened to stage a  dharna on Khalsa College campus in case the KCGC goes ahead with its much-cherished dream to carve a university out of the 123-year-old institution with a luminous place in the Sikh history.

At the centre of Capts argument  and that of others resisting the move  is an apprehension that the university would dilute and distort the heritage status of Khalsa College. They also question the rationale of having a new university just next to Guru Nanak Dev University.

Amarinder, whose royal ancestors had generously contributed to the establishment of Khalsa College, had gone on record to allege that the Majithias had vested business interests in setting up the Khalsa University  the charge Satyajit Singh Majithia had trashed. What is the harm if we want to set up a professional university that will provide the best education and job-oriented courses. The main Khalsa college will remain under the GNDU. We will not touch it, he had told HT on February 1.

After the government panels green signal, the proposal will need chief ministers nod before the KCGC is issued a letter of intent. The off-campus institutions that governing council controls at present will not be under the ambit of the Khalsa university for five years, sources said, pointing out that only five on-campus institutions will be the part of Khalsa university initially.

The Khalsa university will come up on the 330-acre premises that also houses main Khalsa College building, other colleges and schools.

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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.
The local civil hospital became a dharna site on Wednesday with the bodies of Jodhpur village farmer and his mother, who had committed suicide on Tuesday, lying there in the mortuary for post-mortem.

Unable to repay the loan, the two had committed suicide when a commission agent, with the help of police and revenue officials, was trying to take possession of their land.

Barnala suicides: Capt for law against dispossessing debt-ridden farmers

Farmer unions did not allow the post-mortem to press for their demand of arrest of the five accused--the moneylender and his accomplices.

However, later, following announcement of compensation and a job for the victims family, the protesters ended their dharna and the bodies were cremated in the village.

Farmer Baljit Singh Ballu and mother Balbir Kaur had ended their lives at Jodhpur village on Tuesday by consuming pesticide.

Congress leaders Charanjit Singh Channi, Harchand Kaur Ghanauri, Karan Kaur Brar, Mohammad Sadiq, Sunil Jakhar and Surinder Pal Sibia tried to address the dharna, but the leaders of farmers outfits did not allow them to address it.

Talking to media, leader of opposition in Vidhan Sabha, Channi said, This is clearly a case of heinous murder, which happened in broad daylight in the presence of district officials and police.

Abohar MLA Jakhar said, The incident took place in the presence of government machinery. About 150 police personnel reached there for taking possession of the two-acre land. The government is trying to suppress the voice of poor farmers.

Deputy commissioner Bhupinder Singh Rai said, The family will be paid Rs 6 lakh in compensation as per the state government policy. Besides, local industrialist Rajinder Gupta has also announced Rs 4 lakh for the family.

For employment on compassionate grounds to a member of the victims family, we will recommend the case to the state government, said Rai.

Senior superintendent of police Gurpreet Singh Toor said, We have already arrested the three accused. Our search to nab the remaining two is on.

Bhartiya Kisan Union (Dakonda) leader Buta Singh Burjgill said the administration had acceded to all their demands.

The moneylender has been arrested. The farmers, who have sold their produce through this commission agent, will get timely payment, this has been assured to us by the deputy commissioner, Burjgill said.

Sangrur MP Bhagwant Mann said, It is strange that two people ended their lives and others stood there as mute spectators.
Delhi chief minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) convener Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday said the Congress would be decimated while the ruling SAD-BJP alliance wont be able to get more than 10 seats in the upcoming Punjab assembly polls.

Talking to reporters on the sidelines of lawyers induction program, organised by Bar Council of Punjab and Haryana (BCPH) at Law Bhawan here, Kejriwal said: The Congress will meet the same fate in Punjab as in Delhi. The Akalis, on the other hand, wont be able to go beyond 10 seats.

The AAP conveners speech largely focused on the success and popularity of the AAP government in Delhi. If elections are held again in Delhi now, we will even win the three remaining seats too (AAP had won 67 seats in Delhi assembly out of total 70), Kejriwal said.

Targeting the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre, he alleged that it was acting as an impediment in his war against corruption. They did not arrest him (an MLA, against whom he had got an FIR registered), but raided my house. They let loose the CBI after me, Kejirwal said alleging misuse of Delhi Police by the central government. Such things wont happen in Punjab when we assume power. Police will be ours. They will not be able to interfere here, Kejriwal said.

The Delhi CM also talked about farmers suicide and compensation for crop loss to growers. He made a special mention of a recent suicide by Barnala farmer and his mother. The government needs to take measures to ensure that farmers were not forced to take the extreme step, he added.

Kejriwal also raised the issue of exorbitant fee being charged by private schools in Punjab and said the government was not in a position to act as many of these schools were either owned by ministers or other influential persons. We have instances (in Delhi) where schools returned the extra fee they had charged, Kejriwal said.

Kerjiwal is apparently the first chief minister (apart from Punjab and Haryana) to be invited for the function in recent years. Generally, the CMs of both states, MPs, ministers of both states or central government ministers are invited for the function. Many in the Bar council were questioning the move to invite Kejriwal, two days ahead of Punjab CM Parkash Singh Badals similar program at Law Bhawan. BCPH chairman Rajat Gautam said Kejriwal had been invited as he was a role model and went on to say that  it was not a unlawful act to invite him.

Read: Now, SFJ wants Canada to dismantle AAP campaign
Four days after a gang of five robbed a woman of cash and jewellery worth Rs 50 lakh after holding her two granddaughters, aged 7, at gunpoint, at her house in Pratap Singh Wala area, police claimed to have solved the case with the arrest of five.

Children kept hostage as robbers loot house in Ludhiana

The accused have been identified as Amrit Singh of New Kundanpuri, Shubham Kanauj of Kundanpuri, Vinay Lodhi of Guru Nanak Pura, Abhishek Randhawa of Ferozepur and Jaspreet Kaur of Pratap Singh Wala area.

Deputy commissioner of police Dhruman Nimble in a press conference said, The five accused, including a woman, have been arrested by the Haibowal police. They were arrested after a report was filed with the police that these people were involved in robbery.

Amrit was arrested on April 26. He informed police about the hideout of the rest of the accused, following which; police raided a house in Guru Nanak Pura on April 27 and arrested four others, the DCP said.

Complainant Lad Kaur had stated to the police that she helplessly watched them loot cash, gold and other valuables from the house.

Nimble said, Rs 40,000, four gold bracelets, one camera, seven mobile phones, one watch and one motorcycle have been recovered from the possession of accused.

Police have booked the accused under Sections 395 (dacoity), 120-B (criminal conspiracy to commit an offence) of the IPC and Arms Act.
Religious and political groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have called for a half-day shut down in Kapurthala on Thursday, to protest the polices shoddy probe into the murder 14-year-old Jaskirat Singh earlier this month.

Kapurthala boys murder: Family accuses police of shoddy handling of case

Son of a city-based industrialist, the Class 10 student was kidnapped on April 11. His decomposed body was found two days later at Fatehabad village of Goindwal Sahib in Tarn Taran district. Police have so far failed to solve the case and make arrests.

Justice for Jaskirat, a 25-member committee comprising religious groups, political parties and local market associations on Wednesday appealed to residents to observe a shut down till 2pm on Thursday and hold a protest at Shaheed Bhagat Singh Chowk in the morning.

Subhash Makrandi of the Sanatan Dharam Sabha said groups of five committee members each visited educational institutes, offices, shops and other prominent areas and urged them for support. Most of the schools have agreed to shut down, he said.

We want the accused nabbed as soon as possible over two weeks have passed but the city police have yet to arrest the murderers, he added.

Principal of MGN School, Prabdeep Monga, said the school will remain closed on Thursday. This is a very sensitive issue and every citizen of Kapurthala has sympathy for Jaskirats family and we want culprits to be arrested soon, she said.

Monga, who is also secretary of the Kaputhal Sahodaya Complex, a panel formed to look into school affairs in the city, said she had spoken to other principals who had also decided to close down for a day to join the protest.

For a change, senior Congress and SAD-BJP leaders have united in announcing support to the protest march. SAD leader Sarabjit Makkar and Kapurthala Congress MLA Rana Gurjeet Singh will be joining the protest at Shaheed Bhagat Singh Chowk.

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A family in Dharampura village of this district had lost all hopes of seeing their son who had gone missing 11 years ago, now has its hope rekindled after they got one call from him on Monday from United Arab Emirates (UAE). However, he had a miserable story of trafficking to tell them.

The family got a surprise call on Sunday from the ex-sarpanch of their village who told them that their missing son had contacted him and wanted to speak to them. The family spoke to him the next day when he told them that he was trafficked to a city close to Abu Dhabi.

The family of Jagsir Singh (34) had registered a missing person complaint in July 2005 after he had gone missing on his way back from Chandigarh.

Gurjant Singh (65), father of the son, told HT, Jagsir was 22 years old when he was working with a security company in Chandigarh. It was in late July that year when he had decided to come back after clearing his dues in the company. On his way back from Chandigarh, he stayed back at his aunts place in Tohana (Haryana). That was his last known location after which we approached the local police station and got a complaint registered in this regard,

Younger brother Manga Singh, who spoke to him over the phone, said, He narrated me that 11 years ago while waiting to board a train from Tohana to Bareta, he lost consciousness and regained it later only to find himself in a factory somewhere in Abu-Dhabi. He said that he is working in a bread manufacturing unit, where he is subjected to inhuman behaviour. We spoke to him twice, but now that cellphone has been turned off, said.

However HT found that the records at Bareta police station doesnt mention the missing report of the said person which the family claims to have registered 10 years ago. We had gone through all the records but there is no such missing report of any Jagsir Singh of Dharampura village, said SHO Balwant Singh.

The family alleges that they still have an affidavit which they had received from the police station after the report was filed in 2005. It is very unfortunate that despite our complaint either the police could not retrieve that complaint, or they had not even registered the complaint at that time, said Gurjant Singh. The victims family met the deputy commissioner on Thursday evening and narrated their ordeal.

Deputy commissioner Varinder Kumar Sharma said, I have heard their story and I want to ascertain all the facts for which I will ask SSP Mansa to look into the issue.

This family from a backward community which is already struggling financially is now seeking some political assistance to get their son safely back home.

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With the Union government planning to set up nuclear power plants in northern states, including Punjab, the state government on Wednesday virtually rejected the proposal saying there was no need for such a facility in a state that was power surplus.

We are hugely power surplus, so dont need any such plant, said chairman-cum-managing director of Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) KD Chaudhri.

The issue also took political overtones with Punjab Congress chief and former chief minister, too, giving thumbs down to the plan, saying a nuke power plant in a densely populated border state will be a huge security risk. Punjab cant afford it. The risks involved are disproportionately much more than the advantages. We may not need it given the production capacity of existing plants, said Amarinder.

The Congress government had rejected the proposal for setting up a nuclear power plant in Darauli in Patiala in early 2000.

The PSPCL chief said with super critical thermal plants at Talwandi Sabo and Rajpura, Punjab has installed capacity of over 11,000 megawatts against expected peak demand of 10,500 MW. Even in the peak load scenario, if we run our plants  both state-owned (Lehra Mohabbut, Ropar and Bathinda) and private  we would generate 500 MW more than the demand, said Chaudhri.

The PSPCL chief, however, said the government can set up a nuclear plant in a neighbouring state from where the state can take power supply whenever the need arises.

A nuclear plant cant be planned on state-to-state basis but should be set up to feed a region, opines expert Padamjit Singh. He cited the example of the Kudankulum nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu where a 6,000-MW facility generates power for the entire southern region. Being a border state, its not an intelligent move to set up a plant in Punjab as it will make it more vulnerable, he adds. Punjab is densely populated, with huge land scarcity. Why cant such a plant come up in a Rajasthan desert. It can feed the entire region, he suggested.

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As the education department continues to make surprise checks in schools, officials say the documents they were being provided by the educational institutions were not transparent.

A team of the district education office visited DAV International School and Holy Heart Presidency on Wednesday and went through their accounts and other records.

Talking to HT after inspection that lasted for three hours at the DAV International School, district science supervisor Sudeep Kaur said, I checked the accounts, balance sheets and fee records of DAV International. The management of the school also runs a school at Attari. There are inconsistencies in the financial records of the schools.

On Tuesday, the officials checked records of more than five schools. The drive will continue on Thursday.

Dual taxing in developments name

Officials said DAV International has about 5,000 students and pupil fund of Rs 10,320 is being charged from each student. The school management are charges development fund of Rs 2,400 and building fund of Rs 2,400. The annual hike is around 9%. We know they charge readmission fee, but there is no clear records of that. This needs in-depth scrutiny, Sudeep Kaur said.

Balance sheets will clear picture

It is not an easy exercise. After checking records of four schools, I can say that they have roped in smart chartered accountants who have been successful in not letting us understand the bifurcation of funds as there is not much transparency. Our duty is to submit a report to the deputy commissioner so that guidelines can be laid down for fee structures and other charges, Kaur said.

She also interacted with students and got the feedback that they were being fleeced as they pay more the MRPs on books, stationery. The students said science students have to pay practical fee and computer fee is about Rs 1,900.

Protests continue

Parents continued with the agitation on Wednesday as they staged a protest outside DAV Public School, accusing the management of fleecing them.

Raising slogans against the school management, parents alleged that authorities were unconcerned about their plight.

Notably, the protests are widespread in the city for the past ten days. Parents of students studying in almost all schools have complaints of overcharging and sundry charges. The protests have caught the attention of government that has asked the administration to find a solution.

Members of parents association will meet local bodies minister Anil Joshi again on Thursday. DEO Satinder Bir Singh has also been called for the in the meeting.

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Punjab Congress president Captain Amarinder Singh has said hell never allow chief minister Parkash Singh Badal and his close relatives, the Majithias, to gang up and rob the Sikh culture and history by undermining the glorious heritage of local Khalsa College by converting this institution into a private university.

Amarinder issued a statement on Thursday that in case the Badal government goes ahead with the proposal to build a private university despite so much opposition, the next Congress government will rescind the (university) Act and restore the original status of the college. Khalsa College is not the personal property of the Majithias. It belongs to all Sikhs and was built with support from the erstwhile princely states of Patiala, Kapurthala, Jind, Nabha and Faridkot, he added.

Read: Badal set to clear proposal for setting up Khalsa University

Questioning the moral authority of the Majithias to privatise the institution, he said just infiltrating their yes-men into the governing council doesnt give them any moral right to usurp it to make money. The Majithias are trying to do to Khalsa College what the Badals did to the SGPC (Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee), the state Congress president remarked.

Besides the sentiments and emotions of the Sikh community were associated with the institution and he would not allow them to be hurt, said Amarinder.
Tamil actor Suriyas new sci-fi thriller 24, which releases on May 5 worldwide, will open in a record number of 267 screens in the US.

This will be the biggest release ever for Suriya in the US. Both the versions of the film will release in approximately 267 screens, with special premieres planned on May 5, said a source. The film is being distributed by CineGalaxy Inc, whose latest release in the US was superstar Vijay-starrer Tamil actioner Theri.

Read: Vijay-starrer Theri to release in 144 screens in the US

Also starring Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Nithya Menen, the film is tipped to be laced with time travel concept.

Read: I might be playing triple roles, but 24 is Vikrams film, says Suriya

In the film, Suriya plays triple roles including the antagonist. 24, which has music by AR Rahman, is jointly produced by Suriyas home banner 2D Entertainment and Studio Green. In India, the film releases on May 6.

Watch 24s trailer here:

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The next schedule of the Telugu remake of Tamil blockbuster Thani Oruvan will commence in Kashmir in May. The film, which stars Ram Charan and Rakul Preet Singh, is being directed by Surender Reddy.

The team will shoot some important scenes and a song in Kashmir from May 11. This schedule will last for two weeks. Ram Charan will finally join the sets for the first time, said a source from the films unit.

Read: Not working with Salman Khan in any film, says Ram Charan

Read: Want a Virat Kohli biopic? These 5 actors can play the cricketer

The song will feature Ram Charan and Rakul Preet Singh. Also starring Arvind Swami as the suave baddie, the film is about the battle of wits between a police officer and a conniving entrepreneur. The film is being produced by Geetha Arts.

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Be careful with who you interact online, warns a new research that suggests that sensitive and emotional people are more vulnerable to online dating scams.

Researcher Martin Graff of the University of South Wales said that perpetrators of dating scams simply set up false profiles on dating websites with the sole purpose of extracting money from their victims. The scammer first grooms a victim by expressing love for them before outlining their desperate circumstances. They then attempt to request money from the victim.

Graff noted that their study focused on why some individuals are more likely to become the victims of these scams than others.

Read: To everyones surprise, online dating is a success

Over 90 victims of dating scams took part in questionnaires. Analysis of the results revealed that victims had used dating sites for less than four weeks and had parted with amounts ranging from 50 to 63,000 pounds. Victims had a tendency to be efficient, organised and disciplined.

However, they also were more likely to express emotion and display a preoccupied attachment style. This means they could be overly dependent on and seeking approval from the person to whom they are attached.

Martin said that with the rise in the number of people using online dating, more and more people are likely to fall victim. Scammers use sophisticated techniques and eventually may begin to know exactly the sort of people to target and how to manipulate them.

Read: No dude you arent the only one: Men lack skills for online dating

He added that these findings will be beneficial to dating sites and law enforcement agencies in attempting to protect the vulnerable from being scammed. Further research should include interviews with a larger sample of people who have been the dating scam victims.

The study has been presented at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference in Nottingham.

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Watching porn does not just heighten libido, but can also promote safe sex among viewers by encouraging men to use condom, finds a new study.

Men who view more sexually explicit pornography where condoms were used were less likely to have anal sex without a condom themselves, the findings showed.

The findings, published online in the journal PLOS One, showed no evidence of a public health problem stemming from watching most internet-based sexually explicit media.

Read: Finally! An injection shot to provide condom-free sex for a year

Actually one type of pornography was associated with higher rates of condom use  men who viewed more pornography containing condom use engaged in fewer condomless anal sex encounters, said one of the researchers Eric Schrimshaw, associate professor at Columbia Universitys Mailman School of Public Health in the US.

Even those who took part in compulsive pornography viewing were not more likely to engage in condomless anal sex, Schrimshaw noted.

However, watching pornography containing condomless anal sex was associated with more condomless anal sex behaviour.

Results were based on an online survey of 265 men who have sex with men and who had viewed sexually explicit media in the past three months.

Read: The more you watch porn, the less guilty you feel about it: Study

Participants were recruited via ads on Craigslist and Facebook and asked about the amount, compulsivity, and proportion of condomless anal sex and anal sex with condoms.

Eligible men for the survey were at least 18 years of age and resided within 50 miles of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore or Washington.

Our finding that viewing pornography that contains condom use is associated with fewer condom-less anal sex encounters suggests that pornography may have a potentially important protective function by encouraging men to use condoms, the authors noted.

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Belgium will provide iodine pills to its entire population of around 11 million people to protect against radioactivity in case of a nuclear accident, the health minister was quoted as saying on Thursday.

The move comes as Belgium faces growing pressure from neighbouring Germany to shutter two ageing nuclear power plants near their border due to safety concerns.

Iodine pills, which help reduce radiation build-up in the human thyroid gland, had previously only been given to people living within 20 kilometres (14 miles) of the Tihange and Doel nuclear plants.

Health minister Maggie De Block was quoted by La Libre Belgique newspaper as telling Parliament that the range had now been expanded to 100 kilometres, effectively covering the whole country.

The health ministry did not immediately respond to AFP when asked to comment.

The head of Belgiums French-speaking Green party, Jean-Marc Nollet, backed the measures but added that just because everyone will get these pills doesnt mean there is no longer any nuclear risk, La Libre reported.

Belgiums creaking nuclear plants have been causing safety concerns for some time after a series of problems ranging from leaks to cracks and an unsolved sabotage incident.

Last week Germany asked that the 40-year-old Tihange 2 and Doel 3 reactors be turned off until the resolution of outstanding security issues.

The reactor pressure vessels at both sites have shown signs of metal degradation, raising fears about their safety. They were temporarily closed but resumed service last December.

Belgiums official nuclear safety agency (AFCN) rejected the German request, saying the two plants respond to the strictest possible safety requirements.
Former London mayor Ken Livingstone and lawmaker Naz Shah have been suspended by the Labour Party following a row over anti-Semitism that wracked the party on Thursday.

Pakistan-origin Shah, the MP from Bradford West, was suspended over comments made on Facebook that Israel should be moved to the United States. Though Shah made the remarks before she became an MP, she apologised profusely but that did not prevent her suspension.

On Thursday, Livingstone, a popular former mayor of London, defended her, saying criticism of the government of Israel did not amount to anti-Semitism. He told BBC that Adolf Hitlers original policy in 1932 was that Jews should be moved to Israel but the German dictator subsequently went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

Livingstone was accused by fellow MP John Mann in a public row of being a Nazi apologist.

A Labour Party spokesperson said: Ken Livingstone has been suspended by the Labour Party, pending an investigation, for bringing the party into disrepute. The chief whip has summoned John Mann MP to discuss his conduct.

Prime Minister David Cameron said the Labour party had a problem with anti-Semitism which, according to him, was similar to racism.

There were calls for Livingstones expulsion from the party.

The row comes against the backdrop of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn being perceived in some sections as pro-Palestine because he supported the cause in the past.

Corbyn issued a statement on Shahs remarks: These are historic social media posts made before she was a member of parliament. Naz has issued a fulsome apology. She does not hold these views and accepts she was completely wrong to have made these posts. The Labour Party is implacably opposed to anti-Semitism and all forms of racism.

Apologising in the House of Commons, Shah said: Anti-Semitism is racism, full stop. As an MP I will do everything in my power to build relationships between Muslims, Jews and people of different faiths and none.

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The killing of two gay rights activists in the Bangladeshi capital has driven the countrys already secretive and small gay community underground, wondering if they can trust a government that considers their status to be criminal, rights groups said.

Police detectives say they are working with evidence, including a mobile phone, documents and witness testimony to solve the case, in which a gang of young men fatally stabbed a theatre actor and the editor of Bangladeshs only LGBT rights magazine, who also worked for the US Agency for International Development.

With these latest killings in an ongoing wave of violence targeting atheist writers and outspoken moderates, members of Bangladeshs minority groups and civil society worry theyre not safe, while rights groups question the governments repeated claims that the situation is under control.

That fear is especially strong among members of Bangladeshs largely closeted gay community.

They have gone into hiding. They are feeling particularly vulnerable, said Meenakshi Ganguly of Human Rights Watch. Being gay is hard enough in conservative societies.

After the government advised those at risk to simply lay low and avoid offending others, she said, LGBT people are hardly likely to have faith in a government that pretty much denies the LGBT community exists.

Five people have been killed this year after nine were slain in 2015. But while authorities have arrested suspects in some of those cases  mostly low-level operatives following orders are allegedly carrying out the attacks  none has yet been prosecuted, and authorities have yet to identify the masterminds.

Police say they are waiting until investigations are complete before taking any suspects to court. For the 2013 killing of an atheist blogger, a court has sentenced two men to death and six others to time in prison.

The attacks follow a similar pattern -- a group of young men wielding knives or machetes approach their victim as his guard is down, perhaps while he is strolling down the street or relaxing at home. The men spew hateful language, then hack and stab at their victim before disappearing, often without a trace.

Nearly all of those killed are considered soft targets -- atheist bloggers, foreign aid workers, a university professor, and now two gay rights activists.

Nearly all the attacks have been claimed by transnational Islamist extremist groups, including the Islamic State and affiliates of al Qaeda.

The government has dismissed these claims of responsibility, saying these groups have no presence in the Muslim-majority nation of 160 million in South Asia.

Instead, it says the attacks are part of a campaign by domestic groups aligned with political opposition parties who want to undermine Prime Minister Sheikh Hasinas secular government and restore Islamic rule. It has yet to publicly present any evidence of such a campaign.

The opposition has denied the allegations, saying they are being scapegoated for Hasinas failures in maintaining security.

These attacks are politically motivated, well-planned to destabilise the country, retired Maj Gen Abdur Rashid, a security analyst, told The Associated Press.

But that doesnt mean the effort isnt coming from abroad or coordinated with international groups, he said. This is designed to create sense of insecurity among people so they get terrified, and they are succeeding in doing that.

Responsibility for Mondays attack was claimed by the AQIS-affiliate Ansar al Islam, which said its victims were targeted as pioneers of practising and promoting homosexuality.

One of the victims, Xulhaz Mannan, a prominent gay in Bangladesh was a leading activist and editor of the Roopbaan, a LGBT rights magazine he launched in 2014.

Bangladesh outlaws homosexual relations, punishable by up to life in prison.

Mannan had openly described how difficult it is to be gay in Bangladesh. In a 2014 blog entry, he called Bangladesh a country where the predominant religions identify a same sex lover as a sinner, the law of the land as a criminal; social norms as pervert; culture as imported  how should life be for LGBTs in Bangladesh?

With police apparently struggling to prevent more targeted attacks, many members of civil society have become spooked into moving abroad or going underground.

Human rights lawyer and activist Sara Hossain, a friend of Mannan, ridiculed the governments repeated statement that they have the situation under control.

If it is so, then why people are being killed in every 24 hours? she asked.
China will not allow chaos and war to break out on the Korean peninsula, which would be to no ones advantage, Chinese President Xi Jinping told a group of Asian foreign ministers on Thursday.

North Koreas drive to develop a nuclear weapons capability, in defiance of UN resolutions, has angered China and raised tension in the region.

As a close neighbor of the peninsula, we will absolutely not permit war or chaos on the peninsula. This situation would not benefit anyone, Xi said in a speech to a Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia.

North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and followed that with tests of various missiles that could deliver such a weapon.

The isolated state is expected to conduct another nuclear test before a rare congress of its ruling party, beginning on May 6, at which young leader Kim Jong Un is expected to try to cement his leadership.

China is North Koreas sole major ally but it disapproves of its development of nuclear weapons and backed harsh new UN sanctions imposed last month. China has long called for the Korean peninsula to be free of nuclear weapons.

Nearly 30,000 US troops are based in South Korea and the two Koreas are still technically at war after the 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice, not a treaty.

Xi also told the meeting China would safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea, while at the same time maintaining its sovereignty and rights there.

China claims almost the entire South China Sea, believed to rich in oil and gas deposits. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam claim parts of the waters, through which about $5 trillion in trade is shipped every year.

China has rattled nerves with its military and construction activities on tiny islands in the disputed waters, including building runways, though it says most of its activity is for civilian purposes.

Chinese officials say the US is pushing militarisation and endangering stability with freedom of navigation operations by its military ships and aircraft in the South and East China seas.

The US says it conducts such patrols across the world in an effort to demonstrate that the international community does not accept restrictions set up by some countries in international waters.

The Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia involves 26 members, including Russia and many countries from Central Asia and the Middle East. The US and Japan are among eight observers.
India has withdrawn visas granted to two well-known Chinese dissidents, Lu Jinghua and Ray Wong, who were set to attend a China-focussed conference on democracy in Dharamsala.

The withdrawals occurred days after New Delhi cancelled the visa granted to Germany-based Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa, who too was set to attend the same conference that will be addressed by the Dalai Lama. China has branded Isa a terrorist and Interpol has issued a red corner notice for him.

Lu, who is best-known for her role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and figures on a Chinese list of major criminals, learnt of the withdrawal of her visa just as she was about to board a New Delhi-bound flight from New York on April 25.

Read | Dolkun Isa suppressed facts while obtaining visa: India

The visa for Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Ray was reportedly withdrawn at about the same time.

Speaking to Hindustan Times from New York, Lu, now a US citizen, sounded bitter and angry at the last-minute cancellation.

The 54-year-old activist indicated the cancellation and the way she was made to run from the Indian consulate to a separate visa office after that amounted to harassment.

I had checked in with a copy of my e-visa at the JFK airport and was about to board the flight to New Delhi on April 25. Then, suddenly, an airline official asked me to wait, she said.

She alleged that the official made a few long-distance phone calls and thereafter she was told she could not board the flight.

I was made to wait. People were watching me. I felt embarrassed and shocked. I asked why? What was the reason? But she got no answer.

Lu said she was very disappointed with India. In January, I went to Taiwan. There was no problem. Why did India cancel my visa? If it was China, I would have understood.

China considers Taiwan a breakaway province.

Government sources in New Delhi said Lus visa was withdrawn because her documents were ineligible and there was an inconsistency about the purpose of her visit. In Rays case, there was data inconsistency in his papers, they said.

More than that, an official who didnt wish to be named said allowing Chinese dissidents to visit India and indulge in anti-China propaganda doesnt fit into New Delhis policy for Beijing.

Both countries have been following this policy for many years  Thats why we dont allow protests by Tibetans living here in exile, the official explained, giving an insight into the sensitive nature of relations between the two Asian giants.

An unknown number of civilians, mostly students, involved in the Tiananmen Square protest for political reform in China were massacred in the army-conducted crackdown. Many protestors, like Lu, slipped out of China in the aftermath. She is now a human rights activist.

China remains very sensitive about incidents and individuals linked to the Tiananmen protests. Around the anniversary of the demonstrations in June every year, there is a tightening of security across the country, especially in Beijing.

The conference in Dharamsala, to be held between April 28 and May 1, is being organised by US-based Citizen Power for China. The group is led by Yang Jianli, who too was involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

The three visa cancellations within a week  apparently at the behest of China  are likely to trigger criticism against the Narendra Modi government.

Beijing had reacted with anger after India issued a visa to Isa earlier this month.

New Delhi has pointed out that Isa had an Interpol red corner notice against his name and he suppressed facts in his visa application.

Isa applied for a tourist visa under the electronic travel authorisation system. After obtaining the visa, Isa stated publicly that he was coming to attend a conference, a fact which was suppressed in the visa form and something that a tourist visa does not permit, external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

The Union home ministry is now planning to link the Interpol red corner notice database with its e-tourist visa network. It will help the ministry detect any person having a red corner notice against him or her at the visa application stage.

Isa, from the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), has been accused of terrorism and conspiracy to kill people in Xinjiang in Chinas remote northwest. The WUC is a grouping of the Uyghur community outside China.

(With inputs from HT Correspondent, New Delhi)
A Chinese university has expelled three Indian students for reportedly being involved in an armed brawl that left one student with stab wounds.

The fight broke out between two groups of Indian students who were said to be armed with sharp-edged weapons.

The incident occurred in the second week of April in the medical faculty of the Three Gorges University at Yichang in central China.

Following the incident, the Indian embassy in Beijing issued a terse advisory that warned Indian students to follow rules and obey the law. It said the Indian missions will follow a zero-tolerance policy in all such cases.

More than 14,000 Indian students currently study in China, with a majority in medical schools across the country.

Violence and ragging among Indian students are on the rise, Hindustan Times has learnt, with the Indian embassy and consulates having to deal with an increasing number of complaints about such incidents almost every day.

At least a dozen Indian students were involved in the brawl at Three Gorges University, which was reportedly the outcome of a running feud between junior and senior Indian students.

Soon after the fight, university authorities identified those who had triggered the fight and expelled them. The injured student is said to have recovered and rejoined classes.

The advisory issued by the Indian embassy said: Incidents involving any kind of violence or ill behaviour create a negative image about Indians in China. Although the overwhelming number of students is law-abiding, the actions of a few are detrimental to the interests of all Indians in China.

It is our common responsibility to ensure that no such act is committed that affects the reputation of the country or the Indian community in China. The embassy and consulates will have zero-tolerance in all such cases.

The students were advised not to indulge in any form of violence or mental and physical abuse of any nature on or off the university campus. Such actions will invite severe action by university or police authorities, and is likely to result in suspension by the university, and detention or deportation by Chinese authorities.

The advisory further said, Fully respect the university guidelines and regulations. If the university provides proof that an Indian student has violated their regulations, and takes disciplinary action including expulsion, the Indian embassy will not intervene.

Specifically mentioning ragging, the advisory said: Ragging is a criminal offence. Any such incident that is brought to the attention of the embassy or consulates will be reported to appropriate authorities in India.

It asked Indian students to respect the laws and customs of China and (not to) engage in any activities that may be acceptable in India but are not customary in China. This includes respect for the sentiments of the local people during public activities off campus. Violations of law will be dealt with severely by Chinese law enforcement authorities.
The Iraqi authorities have shut down the Al-Jazeera channels Baghdad office, accusing Qatars state-funded TV network of inciting violence and sectarianism.

Iraqs Communications and Media Commission (CMC) sent the Al-Jazeera Media Network a letter informing it of a March 24 decision to withdraw the bureaus licence and close its office for one year.

The letter cited your continuing violations and offences and persistent media discourse instigating violence and sectarianism.

In a statement issued Wednesday, the Doha-based news network, one of the largest in the region, said that it had not violated regulations or deviated from professional and objective coverage.

Al-Jazeera has repeatedly come under fire from the Iraqi authorities for coverage perceived as too friendly to the Islamic State jihadist group and hostile to the countrys Shiite majority.

The networks foreign staff were already unable to enter Iraq because the authorities had made it difficult for them to obtain visas, the networks Iraqi bureau chief Walid Ibrahim told AFP.

The CMCs decision contradicts the Iraqi governments commitment to guarantee freedom of expression, Al-Jazeera said.

Ziad Ajili, from the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, condemned the move, saying that the CMC does not have direct authority to close media offices in Iraq.

Iraqi leaders have accused Gulf monarchies of not doing enough to fight IS jihadists and in some cases of directly supporting them.

Qatar is accused by many in Iraq of having intentionally sponsored hardline Sunni groups to counter the expanding influence of Iran and Shiite Islam in the region.
A Japanese tourism board has called on foreign tourists to refrain from public belching or flatulence in an etiquette guide which was hastily rewritten, reportedly after complaints from a Chinese resident.

The Hokkaido Tourism Organization, which represents Japans northernmost island, published a downloadable brochure on its website, with polite instructions on everything from public bathing to using a Japanese toilet.

Helpfully, it even dedicated an entire section to protocol for avoiding bodily functions.

Japanese etiquette is based on avoiding causing discomfort or nuisance to others, the guide points out.

Accordingly, Japanese will avoid bodily functions such as belching or flatulence in public entirely, or perform bodily functions as discreetly as possible.

However, the Chinese-language guide -- originally entitled Common Sense When Travelling in Hokkaido -- upset a Chinese resident who angrily claimed the diagrams featuring examples of bad tourist behaviour were offensive, Japans Kyodo news agency reported.

The complaint prompted a new, foreigner-friendly version with softer explanations of Japanese customs.

In the updated guide available in Chinese and English, gone are the large X-marks next to cartoon illustrations of tourists committing, from a Japanese perspective, embarrassing gaffes, such as putting used toilet paper into the waste bin -- the general custom in China -- instead of flushing it away.

According to The Japan Times newspaper, the original booklet was first published last August and was targeted at Chinese tourists, including a reminder not to open products before buying them when shopping, a habit also seen in China.

China has said it will monitor the behaviour of unruly tourists abroad and punish them on their return home after being shamed by a string of well-publicised incidents in recent years.

Research by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch found that more than 100 million Chinese tourists went abroad in 2014, spending some $164 billion.

But reports of disruptive behaviour have tarnished their reputation, such as passengers scalding a flight attendant with hot water and noodles or a holidaymaker fined in Thailand for washing her feet in the wash basin of a public toilet.

Media in Japan have carried a spate of reports of alleged uncouth behaviour by Chinese visitors, though some local commentators have urged understanding, recalling that the emergence five decades ago of Japanese tourists as a force in global travel was often met with complaints about their behaviour.

Around 85,000 copies of the Hokkaido tourist brochure have reportedly been printed in Chinese and English, to be distributed to hotels and tourist attractions across the island.
A Myanmarese baby boy delivered during a flight from Singapore to Yangon was named after the Singaporean budget airline.

Baby Saw Jet Star made an unscheduled arrival during Jetstar Asia flight 3K583, but was delivered safely on-board thanks to the crew and three doctors who were also on the flight on April 22.

The airline shared news of its youngest ever passenger on Facebook this week, writing: Were most pleased to announce that a baby boy, named Saw Jet Star, was delivered safely onboard 3K583 by a team of doctors and the crew after the flight landed in Yangon on Friday, 22 April 2016.

The plane was commencing its landing when the pregnant woman started experiencing labour cramps, Straits Times reported.

After the plane landed, they were preparing to move her when baby Jet Star decided he just could not delay his own arrival any longer.

According to a Jet Star spokesperson, other passengers cheered when the boy, who weighed six pounds, seven ounces, was born.

The mother was so relieved and delighted with her care, that she promptly named her son after the airline.

Our crew are trained to respond to all kinds of events on our aircraft, and were proud of the way they assisted with the help of generous doctors onboard to ensure the safe delivery of our youngest ever passenger, the spokesperson said.

The mom and baby were both doing well and had been discharged from hospital. The airline has also delivered 1,000 SGD (500 pounds) worth of baby supplies to the family, the report said. PTI AKJ AKJ
US vice-president Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Thursday to implore the countrys leaders to resolve a crippling political crisis that has hindered efforts to defeat the Islamic State group.

Biden landed in Baghdad mid-afternoon after a secret, overnight flight from Washington on a military plane. Stepping onto the tarmac in blistering heat, he greeted the US ambassador and Lt. Gen Sean McFarland, the US commander heading the fight against IS, as swirling dust masked the skyline behind them.

His first stop was a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the late Iraqi leader Saddam Husseins grandiose Republican Palace, which served as US headquarters in Baghdad after the US-led 2003 invasion. The two exchanged greetings and spoke in English as reporters were allowed in briefly for the start of the meeting.

The White House didnt disclose the rest of Bidens itinerary, but said he would meet with other Iraqi leaders to stress national unity and discuss the campaign against IS extremists. Biden also planned to meet with US personnel in the country.

His visit comes amid a wave of tense protests and demands for sweeping political reforms that have paralyzed Iraqs government, already struggling to tackle a dire economic crisis and battle IS. The Obama administration has stepped up its military role with more troops and equipment in hopes of putting Iraq on a better path as President Barack Obama prepares to leave office in January.

Though theres been progress in wresting back territory from IS and weakening its leadership, senior US officials traveling with Biden said any lost momentum will likely be due to political unrest rather than military shortcomings. Chaotic politics are nothing new in Iraq, but the present infighting risks becoming a distraction, with politicians more focused on keeping their jobs than fighting IS, said the officials, who werent authorized to comment publicly and requested anonymity.

Due to concern about Bidens security, his trip to the war zone was not announced in advance. Journalists making the 17-hour journey with Biden had to agree to keep it secret until he was inside Iraq.

The turmoil engulfing Iraqs government grew out of weeks of rallies by followers of influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr demanding an end to pervasive corruption and mismanagement. Thousands have protested just outside Baghdads heavily guarded Green Zone, calling for politicians to be replaced by independent technocrats and for Iraqs powerful Shiite militias to be brought into key ministries.

At the centre of the crisis is the prime minister, a Shiite whom the US considers a welcome improvement over his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki. Yet al-Abadis failures to deliver on long-promised reforms and manage Iraqs growing sectarian tensions have threatened his ability to lead the country.

Vice-president Joe Biden steps off a C-17 military transport plane upon his arrival in Baghdad, Iraq, on Thursday. (AP)

Al-Abadi is caught between ordinary Iraqis pleading for government accountability and entrenched political blocks that are reluctant to give up a powerful patronage system widely blamed for squandering Iraqs oil fortunes. On Tuesday, Iraqs parliament approved a half-dozen new Cabinet ministers al-Abadi nominated in a gesture to protesters, but the rest of the Cabinet lineup remains in contention.

The turbulence has roiled the Iraqi capital, with lawmakers throwing water bottles and punching each other as some call for al-Abadi to resign along with the Sunni parliament speaker and Kurdish president. Last month, al-Abadi pulled troops fighting IS on the front lines to protect Baghdad amid the protests. Meanwhile, an economic crisis spurred by collapsing oil prices has further compounded Iraqs troubles.

Obama, in Saudi Arabia last week, said al-Abadi had been a good partner but added he was concerned about his hold on power. Obama said it was critical that Iraqs government stabilize and unite competing factions so it can fight terrorism and right its economy.

Theyve got a lot on their plate, Obama said. Now is not the time for government gridlock or bickering.

It was precisely because of that bickering that Obama emerged from his meeting with Gulf leaders without the promises of financial support for Iraqs reconstruction that he had sought. Gulf countries preferred to wait and see whether Iraq could get its political act together before agreeing to help.

Aiming to build on recent progress in retaking territory from IS, the US this month agreed to deploy more than 200 additional troops to Iraq, bringing the authorized total to just over 4,000, and to send Apache helicopters into the fight. Although the White House has ruled out a ground combat role, Obamas decision puts American forces closer to the front lines to train and support Iraqi forces preparing to try to take back the key northern city of Mosul.

US officials would not put a timeline on reclaiming Mosul but said they expect progress to slow during the summer.

For Biden and Obama, the next nine months represent their final opportunity to position Iraq for a peaceful future before their terms end. Though they came into office pledging to end the war and did so in 2011, US troops returned to Iraq in 2014 amid the rise of IS. Obama now acknowledges that his goal of defeating the militants wont be realized during his presidency.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump said Wednesday in a major foreign policy speech that he will put American interests front and centre in his foreign policy if elected president.

America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration, Trump said at a much awaited speech that was shifted to a larger venue to accommodate more people.

No American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the needs of a citizen of a foreign country, he added in a direct appeal, experts said, to non-policy wonks.

Trump was critical in equal measure of the foreign polices of Presidents Barack Obama, his predecessor President George W Bush and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

There was nothing overtly of interest to India or the neighbourhood except for Trumps insistence on keeping and bringing back American jobs, a thinly-belied reference to outsourcing.

He spoke about calling a summit of Asian allies but gave no details, not as much as he gave about the summit he intends to call of NATO allies  to repurpose the alliance.

Trumps supporters such as firebrand conservative commentator Ann Coulter welcomed the speech and called it the greatest foreign policy speech since Washingtons farewell address.

Critics and sceptics were unimpressed. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a foreign policy expert, said in a tweet: Not sure who is advising Trump on foreign policy but I can understand why hes not revealing their names.

Trump started by laying out five weaknesses in Americas current foreign policy: resources are totally over extended and the military is weak because of a weak economy; allies not paying their fair share for their defence; friends and allies dont trust America; rivals dont respect the US; and Americans dont understand the foreign policy goals of the country.

His approach will be based on evolving a long-term plan for stopping the Islamic State, working with allies in the Muslim world; rebuilding the economy and the military; and outlining a policy based on Americas core interests.
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has hinted at seeking help from India and other nations to address the problem of what he described as a semi-unstable nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Trumps remarks on Thursday came during a town-hall meeting in Indianapolis in response to a question on how he would deal with countries like Pakistan, which has sometimes double dealt with the US. Weve given them (Pakistan) money and theyve double dealt us, the interviewer said.

Yes, but the problem with Pakistan, where they have nuclear weapons  which is a real problem, Trump said.

Read: Indian students are smart, shouldnt be kicked out of US: Donald Trump

The single biggest problem we have is nuclear weapons, you know, countries with them. And its not only a country, you have nine countries right now with nuclear weapons.

But Pakistan is semi-unstable. We dont want to see total instability. Its not that much, relatively speaking. We have a little bit of a good relationship. I think Id try and keep it, said Trump.

It is very much against my grain to say that, but a country -- and thats always the country, I think, you know, we give them money and we help them out, but if we dont, I think that would go on the other side of the ledger and that could really be a disaster, Trump said, without explaining what that disaster would be.

At the same time, if you look at India and some of the others, maybe theyll be helping us out, because were going to look at it. We have many, many countries that we give a lot of money to and we get absolutely nothing in return and thats going to stop fast, Trump said.

Trumps remarks came on a day when lawmakers questioned the rationale of the Obama administration to give billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan without desired results.

Read: Donald Trump mocks Indian call centres, but says India is a great nation

Despite giving Pakistan enormous amounts of counter terror assistance over the years, over $25 billion since 9/11, terrorist organisations continue to operate with impunity in Pakistan. Pakistan has used terror as a tool of statecraft and terrorist proxy groups for the Pakistani military have carried out fatal attacks inside India, Congressman Matt Salmon said during a Congressional hearing.

The US State Department has request $742.2 million in aid to Pakistan for 2016-2017 including $472.4 million in civilian assistance and $269.8 million in security assistance.

Pakistan is a nation of 180 million people with a history of terrorist activities, roughly 100 nuclear weapons and a very confused body politic, said Congressman Brad Sherman.

We need to offer to Pakistan those weapon systems well-crafted to go after terrorists and not crafted for a war with India, he said.
An Istanbul court on Thursday sentenced two prominent Turkish journalists to two years behind bars for illustrating their columns with a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed published by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

The sentence, which was handed to two columnists from the opposition Cumhuriyet daily, intensified alarm over press freedoms in Turkey under strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has made Islam the cornerstone of his politics.

The two journalists were sentenced to two years each in jail, said Bulent Utku, lawyer for Hikmet Cetinkaya and Ceyda Karan.

We will appeal the ruling at the appeals court, Utku told AFP following a hearing at Istanbuls criminal court.

The pair went on trial in January last year on charges of inciting public hatred and insulting religious values after illustrating their columns with the controversial cartoon.

After the verdict, those who initiated the lawsuit shouted Allahu Akbar -- Arabic for God is the greatest -- Cumhuriyet reported on its website.

On January 14, 2015, Cumhuriyet had published a four-page Charlie Hebdo pullout translated into Turkish marking the French satirical weeklys first issue since a deadly attack on its Paris offices by Islamist gunmen earlier that month.

The edition did not include the controversial front cover featuring Prophet Mohammed, but a smaller version of the cartoon was included twice inside the newspaper to illustrate columns on the subject by Karan and Cetinkaya.

Most other media in Turkey had refrained from publishing the cover.

When the edition was published, the daily received threats and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu condemned the publication of cartoons of the Muslim prophet as an open provocation.

Days before Cumhuriyet printed its special pullout edition, Davutoglu had joined dozens of other world leaders in a march of solidarity in memory of the 17 victims killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks and elsewhere in Paris.

Shameful, unbearable

Cumhuriyet, which staunchly opposes the Islamic-rooted government of Erdogan, has been regularly targeted by prosecutions as concerns grow over freedom of speech in Turkey.

Its editor-in-chief Can Dundar and Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gul are currently on trial on charges of revealing state secrets and could face multiple life sentences if found guilty.

Writing on her Twitter account @ceydak, Karan lashed out at the Turkish government, saying: Let our two-year sentence be a gift for our liberal fascists #JeSuisCharlie.

In the contentious cartoon, the prophet sheds a tear and holds a sign with the viral slogan Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie), in a gesture of apparent repentance after the Paris killings.

Most Muslims consider portraying the prophet in images to be blasphemous.

There has been growing concern about the numbers of journalists currently facing legal proceedings in Turkey, many on accusations of insulting Erdogan.

Trials for insulting Erdogan have multiplied since his election to the presidency in August 2014, with nearly 2,000 such cases currently open.

Reporters Without Borders slammed the verdict on its official Twitter account as shameful and unbearable.

In a show of solidarity, womens rights group Femen published on its Turkish Twitter account a picture of a topless activist holding a Charlie Hebdo cartoon with Karan and Cetinkaya are not alone written on her torso.

The latest case comes as Europe looks to Ankara to implement a key deal to curb the flow of migrants seeking to reach the European Union from Turkish shores.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who spearheaded the agreement, has been accused of compromising on EUs basic values on press freedom to win Turkeys cooperation.
Trailing in polls, delegates and votes, Republican candidate Ted Cruz tried to steal some of the spotlight from front-runner Donald Trump on Wednesday by declaring his running mate, Carly Fiorina.

The announcement, unusual for this stage of the race, did win Cruz news headlines as he and Fiorina held forth live on television for the better part of the afternoon.

But experts wondered if it wasnt a gimmick designed to bolster his chances in the Indiana primaries next week. A loss could mean the end of his campaign for this presidential polls cycle.

Read: Cruz, Kasich team up to stop Republican frontrunner Trump

The New York Times called it the political equivalent of a student pulling a fire alarm to avoid an exam: It was certain to draw attention and carried the possibility of meeting its immediate goal, but seemed unlikely to forestall the eventual reckoning.

Cruz is trailing Trump by 400 delegates, and with just 10 more states to go with 500 delegates at stake, he is not going to reach the 1,237 needed to secure the nomination.

Trump is calling him mathematically eliminated, but Cruz is staying in the hope of stopping Trump, by acting in concert with John Kasich, who is placed the distant third in the race.

They plan to stop Trump from getting 1,237  he has 987  and take the race to the convention, where they hope one of them will win with the help of party elites opposed to Trump.

Thats a possibility, but with Trump inching closer to the magic number with every contest, his rivals are running out of options, and a running-mate announcement was among the last available.

Read: Trump sweeps primaries, Clinton wins four out of five

The Cruz campaign began teasing it with announcements about a coming announcement. And Cruz told reporters at a campaign stop in Indiana to wait for the big news.

He made the announcements in a long speech, which a presidential historian pointed out was one of the longest VP announcements ever, milking it for every second of airtime.

Fiorina, who was fired by the Hewlett-Packard board as CEO and ran unsuccessfully first for California governor and president, followed up with an equally long speech.

And then she broke into a song, which she sings for Cruzs daughters on the campaign trail. Clips of it were doing much better on social media hours later than their speeches.
A new study reveals a supermassive black hole with a mass three billion times that of the sun in a galaxy approximately 1.8 billion light-years away from the Earth. The galaxy - called IRAS 20100-4156 - stems from three spiral galaxies that are in the process of colliding with one another.

The scientist who conducted the study came across the supermassive black hole at the center of this collision by chance while conducting a test observation of CSIRO's new Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope.

"[I] thought it would be quite a mundane thing," said Lisa Harvey-Smith, the CSIRO astrophysicist who came across the three-way collision while measuring the maser emissions coming from IRAS 20100-4156.

After checking what were supposed to be routine readings and comparing them to those gained from another CSIRO telescope, the Australia Telescope Compact Array, Harvey-Smith discovered that the gas in the maser was travelling at extremely high speeds.

The speed of the gas was approximately 600 kilometers per second around the center of IRAS 20100-4156, around twice as fast as what was expected. This high speed suggested the formation of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

"The black hole at the center of our galaxy is only four million solar masses, so this one is a monster in comparison," Harvey-Smith said. "This very fast motion of the gas tells us about how massive the black hole is. The really exciting thing about this is it is a direct measurement of the mass of the black hole by stuff that's swirling around it."

Galaxy collisions such as these that lead to a supermassive black hole create a starburst, which refers to the formation of stars at an unusually high rate.

Harvey-Smith believes that her new mass data from the monster supermassive black hole will help increase our current understanding of the universe's various galaxy formation processes.

"We want to know whether galaxy collisions, and the formation of supermassive black holes, have really driven the star formation rates that we see in galaxies and how that's changed throughout time," she said.

The findings were published April 26 on the pre-print server arXiv.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
UPDATE 11:38 a.m.: Police have confirmed that they captured Jay Scott McEvers, 47, after he escaped from Van Zandt County Detention Center Thursday evening. No details about the arrest have been released.

Texas authorities are on the hunt for a felon who escaped from the Van Zandt County jail Wednesday evening with the help of his mother and girlfriend, the sheriff's office announced.

The felon, 47-year-old Jay Scott McEvers, escaped from the jail - located in Canton, about 60 miles east of Dallas - where he was being held on drug and firearms charges after being booked there on April 14.

McEvers was last seen wearing orange jail pants and a white tank top in the 500 block of Van Zandt County Road 2105, a sherrif's spokesperson said in a statement. He is described as being 5-foot-10 and weighing 195 pounds, with blue eyes and blonde hair.

This is the second notable jailbreak that has occurred in Texas this April. Earlier this month, 20-year-old Wesley Evans, who was serving time for aggravated robbery, auto theft and arson in the Jasper County Jail, escaped custody at the Jasper Memorial Hospital. It's unclear how he managed to escape, but police eventually used search dogs to track him to an apartment complex where his girlfriend lived. They were unable to locate him after a preliminary search, but acting on a tip, they returned some time later to find him hiding in the dishwasher with his handcuffs still on.

As far as that case is concerned, it's unclear if the girlfriend will be charged. However, the girlfriend - and mother - in the new case, won't be so lucky, as police are confident that the pair are involved and charged them as a result.

Though they didn't release any specific details, authories say the manhunt led them to detain McEver's mother, Carolyn McEvers, "for facilitating escape" and girlfriend, Cynthia Heese, who was questioned overnight. Both women have since been arrested and face felony charges for their involvement in McEvers' escape.

In the meantime, authorities consider McEvers "armed and dangerous." His criminal history includes charges for armed bank robbery and other drug convictions. It is believed that he could be driving a red Chevrolet Cobalt.

If you see McEvers or know of his location, you are encouraged to call Van Zandt County Sherriff's officials at 903-567-4133.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A team of researchers has revealed a unique trick that male peacocks use to court females, also known as "peahens": fanning their colorful rear feathers and shaking them while keeping their plumes' eyespots almost completely still.

"This 'train-rattling' display attracts the peahen's visual attention and always precedes copulation," the researchers wrote.

Charles Darwin was the first to notice this unique chase-and-dance behavior around 150 years ago, although scientists have never completely grasped the biomechanics of the trick, until now.

Led by Roslyn Dakin from the University of British Columbia, Canada, the team examined the mating dance in detail. During the dance, males shake dozens of their train feathers, each measuring up to 1.5 meters long, and hold them erect. Over the course of each breeding season, which last two to three months, male peacocks log hundreds of hours of time using this trick.

"When the peahen is close to a peacock, his huge fan of feathers could practically fill her field of view," Dakin said. "And when he starts to wiggle those feathers, most of what she would see is moving, except for the eyespots floating on top."

Using high-speed video, the team was able to carefully analyze these unique movements in 14 adult peacocks. In combination with individual feather studies in the lab, they were able to get a better grasp of how the process works.

The results revealed that peacocks' eyespots are able to stay still during these courting displays thanks to microhooks that hold them together in the same manner as those on flight feathers.

"This gives each eyespot greater density than the surrounding loose barbs, keeping it essentially in place as the loose barbs shimmer in the background," Dakin and her team wrote.

The team also discovered that longer tail feathers enable males to shake them faster, a feat that requires more muscular strength and thus could be a signal of power and fitness to females.

The majority of peacock train feathers possess a single eyespot, and previous studies have shown that the increased iridescence of these eyespots is connected to more mating.

The findings were published in the April 27 issue of the journal PLOS ONE.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
P lans for a 700 million tower in Dubai that will be taller than the city's famous Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the world's highest building, were unveiled today.

Although the exact height has not been revealed, developers Emaar Properties confirmed that it would be taller than the 2,716ft-high Burj Khalifa, which was completed in 2009.

READ MORE

Simply named The Tower, the super-skyscraper will dwarf China's Shanghai Tower (2,073ft), Saudi Arabia's Abraj Al-Bait Tower (1,972ft), New York's One World Trade Centre (1,776ft) - and will be up to three times higher than London's The Shard, the tallest building in the European Union, standing at a mere 1,016ft.

The world's tallest tower 1 /9 The world's tallest tower The Tower Already the builders of the world's current tallest building, Burj Khalifa, Dubai-based property developer Emaar Properties has unveiled plans to build an even taller structure. Inspiration Inspired by a lily and traditional minaret towers, the new tower will offer residential accommodation including villas, apartments and penthouses; retail precincts including shops, cafes and restaurants; commercial property and 22 different hotels. Construction Construction is set to start in July this year in Dubai Creek Harbour and will take four years to complete. It's expected to cost $1 billion (700 million) to build. The Pinnacle Room The tower will also offer a observation deck known as The Pinnacle Room. The Pinnacle Room will have fully glazed rotating balconies that extend outward, rotating outside the main skin of the tower. Dubai Creek Harbour Located along the historic Dubai Creek, the harbour is often called the Riviera of the Middle East. Each building in the harbour is designed around the waterfront. Creekside 18 Creekside 18 consists of twin residential towers providing 450 one-, two- and three-bedroom glass fronted apartments. The reception rooms have floor to ceiling glazing and open onto a private balcony with waterfront views of the harbour. Open plan All homes in Creekside 18 have a open plan living and dining room.

The tower will be the centrepiece of Dubai Creek Harbour, a new waterfront destination of hotels, homes, shops and restaurants.

A main observation deck in the tower, called The Pinnacle Room, will have fully glazed balconies that rotate outside the main skin of the tower.

New apartments, villas and penthouses alongside the tower will be priced from 184,135, equating to an average of 260 sq ft, compared to 2,000 sq ft for luxury homes in prime central London.

Construction is due to begin this July, with a 2020 completion date to coincide with Dubai's World Expo. It will be built around a reinforced concrete core, tethered to the ground by a series of cables, and have a slender glass and steel facade.

Just as Burj Khalifa serves as the centrepiece of downtown Dubai, The Tower will position Dubai Creek Harbour as one of the most desired residential and leisure destinations in the city, providing residents and visitors with a modern and luxurious environment in which to live, work and entertain," says Ahmad Al Matrooshi, managing director of Emaar Properties.

More than 19,000 UK nationals own property in Dubai and more than 850,000 tourist and business visitors now come from the UK every year, a 10 per cent year-on-year increase since 2012.

A marketing suite featuring large scale-models of the mega-development will be on the second floor of Harrods until August 2016.
73 horses were presented to the 2016 Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event ground jury on April 27 while rain showers threatened (and sometimes did more than threaten) overhead. All horses passed and will compete in dressage on Thursday and Friday. Two horses from the original start list, Caroline Martins Quantum Solace and Rachel McDonoughs Irish Rhythm, were withdrawn before the inspection.

As always, the horses and riders were groomed to perfection prior to their appearance before the ground jury. Here are a few of the teams who will be competing this weekend.







Last years winners Michael Jung and Fischerrocana FST are looking to repeat their win from Rolex 2015 , and its never wise to bet against this nearly unstoppable pair.

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Dapper duo Nilson Moreira da Silva and Muggle are representing Brazil here at Rolex.







Lauren Kieffer has had impressive finishes with Veronica at Rolex in the past. This year, shell also be riding Landmarks Monte Carlo, pictured here.







Mackenna Shea is making her second appearance at Rolex with her own Landioso.







That camera operator gets his own umbrella holder, but RF Demeter, pictured here with longtime rider Marilyn Little, has to put up with raindrops getting in her eyes.







Phillip Dutton, a previous Rolex champion, will ride three horses at this years event, including Mighty Nice.







No comment necessary for Joe Meyer and the wonderfully named Clip Clop.







Jonathan Paget and Clifton Signature are one of several New Zealand horse-and-rider teams competing at Rolex this year.







Jordan Linstedt appealed to the Lexington crowd in Kentucky blue as she presented Revitavet Capato.







Santino is one of Holly Payne Caravellas two mounts for this years Rolex.







Parker and British rider James Alliston are veteran Rolex competitors. Parker has been here so many times, in fact, that hes invented his own annual tradition: Running Alliston off the track at the trot-up.







Its always the right weather for leather pants (vinyl pants? Pleather?) as modeled by Canadas Jessica Phoenix with A Little Romance.







Ellen Doughty-Hume and her Sir Oberon were runway-ready at the start of their jog.







Colleen Rutledge is known for having completed every four-star event in the northern hemisphere with her horse, Shiraz. Shes here at Rolex with a new star, Escot 6.







Elinor MacPhail and RF Eloquence look like supermodels even when caught in the rain.







Avery Klunick and In It To Win It look like theyre enjoying their first Rolex moments together.







Angela Grzywinski bravely runs in heels with her Thoroughbred mare, Novelle. The pair are competing in their second Rolex together this year.







Doug Payne and Vandiver are all business as they trot before the ground jury.







Back at it again with the red socks! Buck Davidson has three horses to ride at this years Rolex, including veteran competitor Park Trader.







Tough competitors Boyd Martin and Blackfoot Mystery wear matching grimaces as they trot for the ground jury.







Elisa Wallace is back for her second go at Rolex with Simply Priceless.



Stay close this week as well bring you coverage from Rolex right here on HorseChannel and on our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Introduction

One of the big factors for success in any industry is customer care and satisfaction. In the hospitality industry it takes precedence over everything else. Customer experience in hospitality is what drives the popularity and hence, the revenue. So the more the customers are comfortable in the environment the better experience they will have. The biggest driver for their comfort is the feeling of being safe. However, recent incidents have marred the hospitality industry with health concerns over water safety. If the Global Risks 2015 report by Global Economic Forum is to be believed, the spread of infectious diseases is considered the second most impactful societal risk coming just behind water crisis. It is said that "Fear could ruin any experience" and the fear of water borne diseases is only growing. Possibly due to lack of knowledge, most hotel owners do not realize a central treatment unit is not enough to curb pathogens growing in the pipe and tank systems. The pipe and tank systems after the central filtration unit become breeding grounds for bacteria and viruses. There is also evidence of biofilm contamination in the central filtration units. In this age of heightened awareness and increased regulation, human health has never been more cared for or given attention like now. Couple these dynamics with improved diagnosis and the ease of documenting travel (e-tickets, e-mail), families and lawyers will have ample evidence to file wrongful death or negligence cases.

The Achilles heel

Water borne infections have always been the Achilles heel for the hospitality and leisure industry. Legionella is the most talked about pathogen and a growing headache for the hospitality industry. In fact, the Legionnaires' disease caused by the legionella virus was named after the first known outbreak at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1976, which occurred during a meeting of the American Legionnaires. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Legionella infections have a 5% to 15% mortality rate and are responsible for at least 8,000 to 18,000 U.S. hospitalizations each year. There are no vaccines that can prevent Legionellosis. The legionella bacterium can survive in a wide range of conditions, including temperatures between 32oF and 145oF. The ideal temperature is critical for proliferation and colonization of legionella, and it is most likely to occur in water temperatures between 102oF and 122oF. It is important to note that most hotel hot tub temperatures are between 102oF and 104oF, making hot tubs the perfect environment for the legionella bacteria to flourish, because of its temperature, low water levels and the ease in which the bacteria can be inhaled by bathers.

E. coli bacteria has been another pathogen that has been constantly causing problems for the hospitality industry. The E. coli outbreak incidents have been reported in many countries all throughout the world. E. coli is commonly found in natural water sources. The E. coli bacteria cause diseases by producing a substance called Shiga toxin. These bacteria generally are born and live in cattle and livestock intestine and enter the water ways via run off from grazing grounds. They do not need any special conditions to survive and can easily live in any of the operating temperatures of drinking water, swimming pools etc.

Biofilm contamination is another problem common in hospitality water systems. The main areas they grow are the central filtration unit filters or membranes. Biofilm is a collection of organic and inorganic, living and dead material collected on a surface. It may be a complete film or, more commonly in water systems, small patches on pipe surfaces. Biofilms in drinking water pipe networks can be responsible for a wide range of water quality and operational problems such as loss of distribution system disinfectant residuals, increased bacterial levels, reduction of dissolved oxygen, taste and odor changes, red or black water problems due to iron or sulfate-reducing bacteria, microbial-influenced corrosion, hydraulic roughness, and reduced materials life

Solution

The key to preventing any kind of water bio contamination is an effective disinfection system for the water systems in which pathogens grow, including drinking water systems, hot tubs, decorative fountains, and cooling towers (air-conditioning units for large buildings). Contrary to popular belief, chlorine does not kill all pathogens instantly. There are pathogens today that are very tolerant, or completely resistant, to chlorine and were not known to cause human disease until recently. Once these pathogens get in the water, it can take anywhere from hours to days for chlorine to kill them and sometimes, like in the case of Cryptosporidium, not at all. High water temperatures make it hard to maintain the disinfectant levels needed to kill pathogens like Legionella. A more effective and convenient way to employ disinfections in such conditions is UV technology at Point of Entry (POE) or Point of Use (POU) applications for each unit or room. Since a constant strong dose can be maintained by UV systems without any harmful by-products, even if there is an increase in the bacteria in the system POU UV systems (like a unit just before the faucet) will be effective at disinfecting water and decreasing points of failure (points of infection). Conventional UV mercury systems cannot be implemented in such systems because they are very complex to install and maintain, Operation wise conventional mercury systems also transfer a lot of heat to the water and hence changing the final output temp water to users. However, new UV-C LED technology system now available where no heat is transferred into the water and the unit itself has a very easy plug and play installation. Since this system can be turned on and off instantaneously, it makes an ideal POU system to switch on only when water is flowing. There is no warm up time hence there is no fear of untreated water passing through the system at start-up. Since the systems runs remotely and only comes on when the water is flowing, the lamp replacement period for a POU system is increased to 10 years compared to annual replacement of conventional mercury systems and there are no consumables involved except for the lamp itself. Hence the system does not need any maintenance on a regular basis which can turn out to be quite a hassle when you need the water to run 24 hours.

Conclusion

Safety of human health is the biggest factor in customer satisfaction. Despite the many efforts on behalf of the hospitality industry water borne bacterial infections are still a major health vulnerability, which has implications like closure, financial penalties and customer mistrust. With increasing incidents, hotels need to have a risk management plan in place. Inclusion of UV-C LED systems like the PearlAqua in such plans is only sensible, and can play role in ending a longstanding woe of the hospitality and leisure industry.

Mitchel Hansen

E-Marketing Specialist - AquiSense Technologies

+1 859 869 4700

AquiSense Technologies
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HNA Tourism Group Co., Ltd. ("HNA Tourism Group"), a division of HNA Group Co., Ltd., a Fortune Global 500 company with operations across aviation, tourism, hospitality, finance, and online services among other sectors, and Carlson Hospitality Group, Inc. today announced they have entered an agreement ("Agreement"), for the acquisition of Carlson Hotels, Inc.("Carlson Hotels"), which owns the Quorvus Collection, Radisson Blu, Radisson, Radisson RED, Park Plaza, Park Inn by Radisson, Country Inns & Suites By CarlsonSM brands and the Club CarlsonSM global hotel rewards program.

The combination of HNA Tourism Group and Carlson Hotels will have increased ability to accelerate growth through investments in areas such as digital, owned assets in major gateway cities, building of Radisson RED and other new brands.

"Carlson Hotels own a powerful set of global brands and this historic agreement provides tremendous opportunities for growth," said David P. Berg, Carlson Hospitality Group chief executive officer. "We look forward to working within HNA Tourism Group, a greatly respected global enterprise, in what will be an exciting new chapter in the history of Carlson Hotels. As part of HNA Tourism Group, Carlson Hotels will have an opportunity to advance our commitment to providing guests with hospitality world-wide," added Mr. Berg.

"Since my grandfather, Curt Carlson, founded our company in 1938, our family has run businesses that create opportunity for people and positive change in the world," said Diana Nelson, Carlson Board chair. "Hospitality is in our hearts, which made this a difficult decision. We strongly believe that selling our hotel business to HNA Tourism Group, a company that fully recognizes its value and heritage, is the best way for us to position it for success and to be true to my grandfather's legacy in the long term."

"We have great respect for the Carlson family and a deep appreciation for its history and special culture," said Haibo Bai, HNA Tourism Group board member and HNA Hospitality Group chairman and CEO. "Carlson Hotels' global success and strong, sustainable growth potential is a testament to their world-class brands, continuous innovation, excellent management, and unique employee-focused culture, all of which we will build upon as part of this combination to establish our presence in the U.S. market and expand our footprint in hospitality internationally. We look forward to working together with their management team, employees, franchisee partners, suppliers and customers to accelerate growth by investing substantially in the business."

Under terms of the Agreement, which were unanimously approved by the Carlson Board of Directors, HNA Tourism Group will acquire all of Carlson Hotels, including its approximately 51.3 percent majority stake in Rezidor Hotel Group AB (publ) ("Rezidor"), Carlson Hotel's master licensee based in Brussels, with hotels in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Since the closing of the Transaction will result in an indirect change of control in Rezidor, HNA Tourism Group would, under Swedish takeover rules, be obliged to launch a mandatory public tender offer for the remaining approximately 48.7 percent of Rezidor, within four weeks after the closing of the Transaction if the ownership in Rezidor is not sold down below 30 percent. Hence, HNA Tourism Group may, during these four weeks following closing of the Transaction, decide whether to launch a mandatory public tender offer for the remaining shares in Rezidor or sell down its ownership in Rezidor below 30 percent. If HNA Tourism Group decides to launch a mandatory public tender offer, according to Swedish takeover rules and as per a ruling from the Swedish Securities Council ("SSC")[1], the minimum price in such mandatory tender offer would be the 20-trading day volume weighted average price (VWAP) immediately before the announcement of the signing of the Agreement to acquire Carlson Hotels dated April 27, 2016. HNA Tourism Group will give further information about such potential mandatory tender offer in due course, upon closing of the Transaction.

The Transaction is subject to receipt of regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the second half of (calendar) 2016.

Management & Governance

When the Transaction closes, David P. Berg, CEO of Carlson Hospitality Group Inc., will remain as CEO of the new organization.

Commitment to Communities

Understanding the need to preserve Carlson's values, heritage and community connections, HNA Tourism Group has pledged to maintain Minnetonka, Minn., as its headquarters for the new organization.

Advisors

Advisors for this Transaction include: Morgan Stanley and BDT & Company as financial advisors; Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, and Advokatfirman Vinge KB as legal advisors to Carlson Hotels. J.P. Morgan and Benedetto, Gartland & Company as financial advisors and Hogan Lovells and Advokatfirman Lindahl KB as legal advisors to HNA Tourism Group.

Additional materials regarding the transaction are available at www.StrongerHotelsTogether.com.

ABOUT CARLSON HOTELS, INC.

Carlson Hotels is one of the world's largest and most dynamic hotel groups and includes 1,400 hotels in operation and under development with more than 220,000 rooms and a footprint spanning 115 countries and territories. The Carlson Hotels portfolio includes a powerful set of global brands: Quorvus Collection, Radisson Blu, Radisson, Radisson RED, Park Plaza; Park Inn by Radisson, Country Inns & Suites By CarlsonSM and Club CarlsonSM, the global hotel rewards program. Carlson Hotels holds 51.3 percent ownership stake in The Rezidor Hotel Group, based in Brussels, who is the company's master licensee for its brands in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Carlson Hotels and its brands employ 90,000 people worldwide.

ABOUT HNA Tourism G roup Co. Ltd.

HNA Tourism Group Co., Ltd. is a global integrated tourism conglomerate engaged in aviation, hospitality, tourism, finance and online services. Founded in Beijing in March 2007, the company owns more than 20 subsidiaries including Capital Airlines, Deer Jet, Tangla Hotels and Resorts, Caissa Touristic, etc. The company is also a majority investor in global travel and hospitality brands such as NH Hotels, Red Lion Hotels, PVCP Group, etc. HNA Tourism Group has been recognized for its commitment to corporate social responsibility and for its contributions towards improving global connectivity.

ABOUT HNA Hospitality Group Co. Ltd.

HNA Hospitality Group is the hotel management arm of HNA Tourism Group. Founded in 1997, HNA Hospitality Group boasts a global hotel network. As of March 2016, the group operates around 500 hotels with nearly 90,000 rooms, in key cities in China as well as other parts of the world, with brand portfolio ranging from luxury, upscale to budget segments, catering to both business and leisure travelers. It has been ranked as the top 300 hotel group in the world and garnered prestigious industry accolades such as the most competitive Chinese hotel brand and the best hotel management group in China.
Following the highly anticipated transformation of Winston-Salem's (NC) iconic R.J. Reynolds Building into The Kimpton Cardinal Hotel, the new boutique property celebrated the opening of the hotel with a ribbon cutting ceremony on the anniversary of the building's original 1929 opening. Executives from Kimpton Hotel & Restaurants, state and city tourism representatives and local dignitaries gathered together for the ceremony.

ABOUT THE KIMPTON CARDINAL HOTEL

The new Kimpton Cardinal Hotel in the majestic R.J. Reynolds building, a beloved Winston-Salem landmark and famed Art Deco prototype of the Empire State building, is Winston-Salem's first upscale boutique hotel. Named for North Carolina's official state bird, The Kimpton Cardinal welcomes guests to revel in Kimpton's version of warm and wily, sophisticated Southern charms. Restored beyond its original splendor, the hotel is an architectural showcase of gold leaf, rich marble and burnished brass, its delightfully outlandish interior creating a magical contrast of the classic and the wild, in a whimsical and imaginative interpretation of the building's decadent legacy and storied past. Soaring along the city's skyline at the heart of a vibrant and historic downtown, The Kimpton Cardinal features 174 guest rooms, including 15 suites, an expansive fitness center and adult recreation room, a distinctive neighborhood restaurant and bar in The Katharine, and more than 6,300 square feet of space to meet, greet and celebrate the spirit of the South. For more information, visit www.TheCardinalHotel.com. The hotel is located at 401 North Main Street, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

About IHG

IHG Hotels & Resorts [LON:IHG, NYSE:IHG (ADRs)] is a global hospitality company, with a purpose to provide True Hospitality for Good.

With a family of 17 hotel brands and IHG Rewards, one of the world's largest hotel loyalty programmes, IHG has over 6,000 open hotels in more than 100 countries, and a further 1,800 in the development pipeline.

InterContinental Hotels Group PLC is the Group's holding company and is incorporated and registered in England and Wales. Approximately 350,000 people work across IHG's hotels and corporate offices globally.

Visit us online for more about our hotels and reservations and IHG Rewards. For our latest news, visit our Newsroom and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
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HVS Market Report Napa, California - By Katie Minnock

Californias Napa Valley draws thousands of national and international tourists each year. With demand on the rise and occupancy reaching new heights, the local hotel market is on the verge of an upswing in supply. Strong average rates attract developers and investors to this highly desirable market.

As the Food and Wine Capital of the U.S., northern Californias Napa Valley is world-renowned as a winemaking region of remarkable natural beauty. The artisan culture and Mediterranean climate supply Napa County with very strong levels of tourism, and developers have put more than a dozen proposed hotel projects into the pipeline to meet the demand.

Local History and Attractions

Established in 1850, Napa County contains five incorporated cities:

American Canyon, Calistoga, Napa, St. Helena, and Yountville. Within and around these urban centers, winemaking operations and vineyards dominate the region. Napa Valley, a 35-mile-long, 5-mile-wide American Viticultural Area (AVA), is one of the most prominent and well-regarded winemaking regions in the world. Napa Valleys history in commercial agricultural production and winemaking dates back two centuries, but its reputation for world-class viticultureand the commercial and tourism opportunities associated with itwas not realized until the mid-1960s. Ever since, Napa Valleys economy has capitalized on the draw of the regions winemaking and culinary arts, making it one of the busiest tourism centers in California. Natural features such as two surrounding mountain ranges and Lake Berryessa also make Napa Valley a major recreational destination for the entire Bay Area.

On August 24, 2014, Napa Valley was struck by a 6.0-magnitude earthquake, the strongest to hit the San Francisco Bay Area in nearly 25 years. The earthquake and aftershocks resulted in injuries to dozens of people, damage to historic buildings in Downtown Napa, gas leaks, and downed power lines. Downtown hotels, including the Andaz Napa, the Marriott Napa Valley Hotel & Spa, and the Westin Verasa Napa suffered damages and were temporarily closed. Hotels experienced last-minute changes and cancelations in the following weeks, which negatively affected occupancy for the local hotel market in 2014.

The negative effects on tourism were, however, short-lived, and hotel demand in Napa Valley remains strong.1 In 2014, Napa Valley welcomed 3.3 million visitors, up from 2.94 million in 2012. Two-thirds of these (2.2 million) were day-trip visitors.2 The top domestic feeder market was the San Francisco  Oakland  San Jose MSA, which accounted for 45.3% of all domestic Napa visitors.3

Nearly 83% of Napa Valley visitors in 2014 reported leisure (vacation, weekend getaway, or other personal travel) as their primary reason for traveling to the area. Napa and St. Helena had the most visitors, followed by Calistoga and Yountville. Nearly all travelers to Napa Valley (94.1%) arrive by car and visit an average of three wineries per trip.4

VISITOR SPENDING TRENDS

An estimated 11,766 jobs are supported by visitor spending in Napa Valley; of these, 4,567 are in restaurants and 3,383 are in hotels.5 Visitors to Napa Valley helped generate $1.63 billion in direct Napa County spending in 2014, up from $1.4 billion in 2012. Per day in 2014, the average visitor spent $482.71, with overnight guests spending $807.18 and day trippers spending $341.53.6 Per day in 2012, the average visitor spent $458.87 ($708.47 for overnighters and $349.78 for day trippers).7

Hotel Supply Trends

Napa Valley currently has approximately 70 hotels, inns, resorts, and bed & breakfast establishments, totaling just over 4,800 rooms. Between 2001 and 2005, supply rose by almost 15%, followed by a nearly 40% increase from 2006 through 2010. Since 2011, the pace of new supply entering the market has slowed considerably; no new properties opened between 2011 and 2015, and just one hotel, the Hampton Inn & Suites Napa, has opened so far in 2016.

The chart below illustrates trends in hotel supply in Napa Valley since 2001.

Historical Supply Growth (Number of Rooms)

*Through March 2016

Source: HVS with data from STR

It is important to note that Napa has a perennial list of new supply, but new hotels often open in a trickle, staggered over time, given the challenges of project approvals and financing. This has been favorable, allowing Napa to slowly absorb new supply over time.

Of the 4,815 rooms in inventory as of March 2016, roughly 51% were affiliated with a brand, with the remaining 49% operating as independent hotels. Wyndham Worldwide operates approximately 25% of the 2,443 branded rooms in inventory, the largest share of any major brand in the market; Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International, and Best Western Hotels & Resorts each have market shares between 10% and 22%. As noted in the following chart, other brands such as Choice Hotels, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), and Motel 6 hold a combined market share of roughly 11%. However, it should be noted that of the 70 hotels currently in the market, only 19 are brand-affiliated properties, while the remaining 51 hotels are independent. The branded hotels tend to have a larger room count than the independent hotels, which allows them to make up slightly more than half of the markets room supply.

Market Share by Brand

* Other brands include Choice, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), and Motel 6

Source: HVS with data from STR

Starwood Hotels & Resorts operates one hotel in the market, though a Luxury Collection Las Alcobas Hotel by Starwood is in development and is scheduled to open in 2016. Four Seasons is perhaps the most notable luxury brand missing from the market as of 2016; however, Four Seasons is anticipated to open an 85-room hotel in Calistoga in 2018.

The hotel pipeline in Napa Valley is on the verge of another boom, with 19 properties and over 2,000 guestrooms in either the planning or construction phases.

New Supply Planning

Source: HVS, Napa Valley Planning Departments

Though the pipeline spans hotels of many sizes, asset classes, and brands, a few notable trends are present. Most hotels in the planning phase are unbranded, while two of the three hotels already under construction represent branded assets. This gives some indication of the power of branding when it comes to initiating and finalizing construction in todays market.

Even though projects may receive preliminary approval, the high barriers to entry in Napa Valley often produce substantial hurdles and lengthy timelines for new developments. The biggest obstacle for projects is receiving approval, followed by obtaining financing for large projects. Historically, the smaller projects have had a better chance of being financed, compared to larger projects. Some projects that received design approval prior to the 2008/09 recession are now no longer feasible due to features such as underground parking or other design elements; these proposed projects now have to undergo revision and resubmission for review and approval, further delaying the development timeline.

Concerns over available water supply, sewer infrastructure, environmental pressures, and increased traffic are additional constraints limiting the number of new hotels in Napa Valley. Traffic congestion on State Highway 29 is a particular problem; at its intersection with First Street, the average daily traffic count in 2001 was 52,000, a number that had risen to 61,000 in 2014.8

Land-use policy is a major factor in hotel development. Napa County has had agricultural land protection policies since the 1960s to preserve the agricultural character and quality of the Valley. In addition, new development and redevelopment projects in Napa Valley may be subject to extra infrastructure improvements, which can inflate costs, further hindering project feasibility.

New Supply  Under Construction

Source: HVS, Napa Valley Planning Departments

Getting hotel developments approved and financed can take multiple years. Two such examples are the New Hotel & Resort (formerly known as the Montalcino Resort), which has been proposed for over 15 years, and the Oxbow District Hotel (formerly known as the Ritz-Carlton site), which was first approved in 2008, but could not be financed during the height of the financial crisis. Both projects have subsequently been listed for sale multiple times and both were listed most recently in 2015. As of March 2016, both projects did not transact; however, the current ownership of the Oxbow District Project will reportedly proceed with plans for the hotel.

At a combined 729 rooms, each of these proposed hotels is more than 50% larger than any other hotel currently under development in the area; together, they also represent approximately 43% of the new supply currently in the planning stage of development. Having been stalled so long in the planning stages, however, it is uncertain whenor ifthese hotels will actually be completed.

There have been 16 hotel transactions in Napa Valley over the past five years, with prices ranging from $115,254 to $1,370,968 per key, with the top sale being $1.3 million per key for the leasehold interest in Bardessono. These high prices per key are another factor that attracts developers to the market.

Outlook

Napa Valley continues to be one of the strongest resort submarkets in California, driven by healthy demand and constraints on the development of new supply. With the recovery and resurgence of the regional Bay Area economy, largely led by the technology sector, area residents have increased discretionary spending related to travel, particularly for drive-to destinations like Napa Valley. The area also mounted a remarkable recovery from the recent earthquake, a sign of not only economic resilience but the determination of Napa Countys winemakers, businesses, and government to keep tourism flowing.

Lodging demand is expected to remain strong through the near term, enhancing the markets appeal for hotel investors and developers. Furthermore, new supply should come about in staggered stages, allowing for healthy absorption of the additional room nights. This supports an optimistic outlook for the Napa Valley hotel market in the near term.

1 Occupancy in the first quarter of 2016 was slightly down compared with the same period in 2015, when a mild winter siphoned a large number of Tahoe tourists to Napa, inflating occupancy.



2 Destination Analysts. Napa Visitor Industry 2014 Economic Impact Report. http://www.visitnapavalley.com/research_statistics.htm.



3 Destination Analysts. 2014 Napa Valley Visitor Profile. http://www.visitnapavalley.com/research_statistics.htm.

4 Ibid.

5 Destination Analysts, Napa Visitor Industry 2014 Economic Impact Report, http://www.visitnapavalley.com/research_statistics.htm.

6 Ibid.

7 Destination Analysts. 2012 Napa Valley Visitor Profile. http://www.visitnapavalley.com/research_statistics.htm.

8 California Department of Transportation, 2014. http://traffic-counts.dot.ca.gov/2014all/Route22-33.html.

About Katie Minnock

Katie Minnock, an Analyst with HVS San Francisco, conducts site inspections, market analyses, and comprehensive appraisals for full-service hotels across the Bay Area and Northern California. Before joining HVS, Katie worked in corporate sales at Morgans Hotel Group, in consulting at Lodging Advisors, and in brand management at EDITION Hotels, all in New York City. She formerly worked in guest service and e-commerce at the Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong. Katie earned her BS from the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University. For more information contact Katie at or kminnock@hvs.com or +1 (415) 268-0354

www.hvs.com




Big challenges ahead for the Greek economy

The Athens International Airport recorded an increase of 10.1% yoy in international arrivals in Q1 2016.

However, this increase is not reflected in the occupancy of the Athens hotel sector as an improvement of only 3.5% yoy was recorded in Q1 2016.

As depicted in the graph, the gap between international airport arrivals at the Athens International Airport (AIA) and occupancy levels in Athens is widening as from 2015 in terms of percentage change. The Athens Hotel Association contributes this difference to the booming sharing economy in Athens, where the supply on platforms like AirBnB is increasing at a rapid pace. In the winter periods the difference cannot be contributed to tourists leaving directly to the islands.

In Thessaloniki arrivals at the airport in Q1 2016 were on par with the same quarter last year as drops in January and February were offset in March.

In terms of international traffic at the Thessaloniki airport, Ryanair was market leader in 2015 with a share of 26%, followed by Aegean Airlines with 22% and easyJet with 7%. The top 3 airlines transported 55% of all incoming arrivals from abroad.

Furthermore, the Thessaloniki hotel association revealed that Cyprus was the main source market with a share of 12% in terms of overnight stays at hotels in 2015, followed by Turkey with 8%, the United States with 7%, Germany with 6% and Serbia & Montenegro with 6%. In this top 5, Cyprus and the United States recorded double digit growth numbers compared to 2014, namely 12% and 15% respectively.

International arrivals at airports other than Athens and Thessaloniki increased 37%, but only representing an additional 9,200 arrivals.

For those resort hotels that were in operation during Q1 2016 a drop of the total revenue per available room of 7.9% was recorded, compared to the same period last year.

Internationally, RevPAR for South Europe improved with 6.9% yoy. Madrid had a particularly strong first quarter with an improvement of RevPAR of 15.6% yoy.

Big challenges ahead for the Greek economy

The first review of the third adjustment programme agreed last summer, is currently stalled. Intensive technical negotiations are continuing, but difficult reforms are still outstanding. These include another round of savings in pension entitlements, increased social security contributions, tax increases for farmers and the resolution of non-performing loans.

In addition to the current impasse, the Greek Government also has to identify additional fiscal savings amounting to 1% of GDP to close the fiscal gap in 2017 and 2018 to achieve the current programme target of a primary surplus equal to 3.5% of GDP in 2018.

Given the front-loaded nature of the adjustment programme, Oxford Economics expects GDP to fall by 1.2% this year and then to be broadly flat in 2017. Only in the final year of the programme a recovery is expected, contingent on Greece implementing the necessary structural reforms.

Click here ( Adobe Acrobat PDF file) to download the complete article.



GBR Consulting is a leading Greek business consultant firm. GBR Consulting supports clients develop their businesses in a structured manner leading to growth. The firm offers their clients, who are mainly active in the tourism, retail, food, construction and energy sectors, lasting solutions in the field of strategy, marketing, organisation and finance, while also delivering litigation support.

GBR Consulting

4 Sekeri Street, 106 74 Athens, Greece

T (+30) 210 36 05 002

F (+30) 210 36 06 935

www.gbrconsulting.gr

gbr@gbrconsulting.gr
HNA Tourism Group Co., Ltd., a division of HNA Group Co., Ltd., a Fortune Global 500 company with operations across aviation, tourism, hospitality, finance, and online services among other sectors, and Carlson Hospitality Group, Inc. yesterdayannounced they have entered an agreement, for the acquisition of Carlson Hotels, Inc., which owns the Quorvus Collection, Radisson Blu, Radisson, Radisson RED, Park Plaza, Park Inn by Radisson, Country Inns & Suites By Carlson brands and the Club Carlson global hotel rewards program.

The combination of HNA Tourism Group and Carlson Hotels will have increased ability to accelerate growth through investments in areas such as digital, owned assets in major gateway cities, building of Radisson RED and other new brands.

"Carlson Hotels own a powerful set of global brands and this historic agreement provides tremendous opportunities for growth," said David P. Berg, Carlson Hospitality Group chief executive officer. "We look forward to working within HNA Tourism Group, a greatly respected global enterprise, in what will be an exciting new chapter in the history of Carlson Hotels. As part of HNA Tourism Group, Carlson Hotels will have an opportunity to advance our commitment to providing guests with hospitality world-wide," added Mr. Berg.

"Since my grandfather, Curt Carlson, founded our company in 1938, our family has run businesses that create opportunity for people and positive change in the world," said Diana Nelson, Carlson Board chair. "Hospitality is in our hearts, which made this a difficult decision. We strongly believe that selling our hotel business to HNA Tourism Group, a company that fully recognizes its value and heritage, is the best way for us to position it for success and to be true to my grandfather's legacy in the long term."

"We have great respect for the Carlson family and a deep appreciation for its history and special culture," said Haibo Bai, HNA Tourism Group board member and HNA Hospitality Group chairman and CEO. "Carlson Hotels' global success and strong, sustainable growth potential is a testament to their world-class brands, continuous innovation, excellent management, and unique employee-focused culture, all of which we will build upon as part of this combination to establish our presence in the U.S. market and expand our footprint in hospitality internationally. We look forward to working together with their management team, employees, franchisee partners, suppliers and customers to accelerate growth by investing substantially in the business."

Under terms of the Agreement, which were unanimously approved by the Carlson Board of Directors, HNA Tourism Group will acquire all of Carlson Hotels, including its approximately 51.3 percent majority stake in Rezidor Hotel Group AB (publ) ("Rezidor"), Carlson Hotel's master licensee based in Brussels, with hotels in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Since the closing of the Transaction will result in an indirect change of control in Rezidor, HNA Tourism Group would, under Swedish takeover rules, be obliged to launch a mandatory public tender offer for the remaining approximately 48.7 percent of Rezidor, within four weeks after the closing of the Transaction if the ownership in Rezidor is not sold down below 30 percent. Hence, HNA Tourism Group may, during these four weeks following closing of the Transaction, decide whether to launch a mandatory public tender offer for the remaining shares in Rezidor or sell down its ownership in Rezidor below 30 percent. If HNA Tourism Group decides to launch a mandatory public tender offer, according to Swedish takeover rules and as per a ruling from the Swedish Securities Council ("SSC)[1], the minimum price in such mandatory tender offer would be the 20-trading day volume weighted average price (VWAP) immediately before the announcement of the signing of the Agreement to acquire Carlson Hotels dated April 27, 2016. HNA Tourism Group will give further information about such potential mandatory tender offer in due course, upon closing of the Transaction.

The Transaction is subject to receipt of regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the second half of (calendar) 2016.

When the Transaction closes, David P. Berg, CEO of Carlson Hospitality Group Inc., will remain as CEO of the new organization.

Understanding the need to preserve Carlson's values, heritage and community connections, HNA Tourism Group has pledged to maintain Minnetonka, Minn., as its headquarters for the new organization.
In year-over-year comparisons, the country's occupancy fell 4.3% to 61.6%. Average daily rate for the week was up 2.2% to CAD137.60. Revenue per available room decreased 2.2% to CAD84.81.

The Canadian hotel industry reported mixed results in the three key performance metrics during the week of 17-23 April 2016, according to data from STR.

In year-over-year comparisons, the country's occupancy fell 4.3% to 61.6%. Average daily rate for the week was up 2.2% to CAD137.60. Revenue per available room decreased 2.2% to CAD84.81.

Among the provinces, New Brunswick experienced the only double-digit increase in occupancy, up 18.1% to 61.4%.

British Columbia posted the only double-digit increase in ADR (+17.2% to CAD161.27) and the largest jump in RevPAR (+25.1% to CAD108.91).

Two additional provinces saw a double-digit rise in RevPAR: New Brunswick (+22.1% to CAD71.18) and Nova Scotia (+14.6% to CAD84.93).

Alberta reported the largest decreases in each of the three key performance metrics. Occupancy in the province fell 20.4% to 50.3%; ADR was down 7.6% to CAD132.42; and RevPAR dropped 26.4% to CAD66.65.

Saskatchewan was the only other province to experience a double-digit decline in occupancy (-12.7% to 57.8%) and RevPAR (-18.3% to CAD72.99).

About STR

STR provides clients from multiple market sectors with premium, global data benchmarking, analytics and marketplace insights. Founded in 1985, STR maintains a presence in 10 countries around the world with a corporate North American headquarters in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and an international headquarters in London, England. For more information, please visit str.com.
Choice Hotels International, Inc. announced today the signing of a master development agreement with Equinox Ventures Ltd, a joint venture between Equinox Group Ltd. and Al Tayyar Travel Group, to introduce and develop three of Choice's brands: Clarion, Comfort and Quality across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. This announcement, its fifth EMEA market portfolio expansion in the past six months, is part of Choice's strategy to continue to expand its brand internationally.

The Middle East travel industry is forecasted to rise to $98 billion by 2017, from $71.8 billion in 2014, according to Phocuswright. With an emerging middle class looking to travel both within the region and internationally, and an increase in inbound business, leisure travel and tourism, there is growing demand for mid-market and budget accommodations as well as a continued desire for upscale brands.

Shuja Zaidi, President of Dubai-based Equinox Group Ltd. said, "Currently, markets such as Dubai, Riyadh, Jeddah and Makkahare undersupplied in mid-market hotel accommodations, providing an opportunity for a strong hotel brand such as Choice to bring its portfolio to the market. We believe that the next wave of growth and expansion in our region belongs to the mid-market segment. To prepare for it, it was only natural that we partner up with one of the largest and most globally recognized brands with a portfolio that spans from mid- to upscale properties and can offer travelers what they need."

Abdullah Aldawood, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Altayyar Travel Group said, "Our cooperation with a global player like Choice will help us close the gap in our efforts to integrate all parts of our travel business. We had started with the acquisition and development of hospitality assets and asset management and are now ready to roll out globally recognized brands in the region, working closely with our partners to bring their expertise and regional knowledge."

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The master development agreement is anticipated to deliver approximately 25 hotels and 8,000 hotel rooms for Choice's portfolio in the UAE and Saudi Arabia by 2021.

"We are delighted to sign this agreement with Equinox Group and Al Tayyar Travel Group that will help Choice establish a presence in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and also offer a platform for rapid expansion. Drawing on their regional expertise and infrastructure, we are perfectly placed to provide travelers with the quality mid-market hotel accommodations they need, all backed by Choice's global hotel platform and brand reputation for value and service," said Mark Pearce, senior vice president, international division, for Choice Hotels.

This agreement is the fifth EMEA market portfolio expansion Choice has announced in the last six months, having signed agreements related to the co-branding of 19 properties in Germany, Austria and Hungary under the Comfort and Quality brands, and another deal to establish multiple hotels in Belgium. Choice is further growing its presence in Germany with two new Comfort brand hotels in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, and recently launched its upscale Ascend Hotel Collection in the UK and France.

Turkey is another strategically important market for Choice where it currently has three hotels in Istanbul and one in Kahramanmaras, and a growing development pipeline.
Rebranding can serve a couple purposes. It can be timed to modernize someones look to coincide with updating their product, or it can be used to hide the fact that a business is failing miserably. The Sacramento Kings are the latest team to update their look for the modern era, and you can probably guess which camp they fall into.

Per the Kings PR, the new primary emblem is inspired by the Kings classic logo. It is reimagine to reflect the civic and franchise pride that has lasted and grown for a generation. Its probably also a means of establishing the Kings as turning over a new leaf after they almost moved to Seattle a few years ago (this writer is still salty about that).

Season ticket holders who have been around since the team moved to Sacramento in 1985 are getting free merchandise. On top of that, the franchise offered to pay for a limited number of fans to get tattoos of the new logo, as long as they tweeted the final product. People lined up in droves, as you can see from one tweet below.

The Sacramento Kings new arena, the Golden 1 Center, will open this fall. However, no logo, arena or tattoos can save the Kings from a meddling owner, inexperienced GM and dysfunctional team. If theyre going to lose, at least theyll do it in style?

SacramentoKings-NewLogo
In an engrossing Hot Press interview, the Hollywood star tells Roe McDermott why Ireland must stand up to multi-national companies, addresses Hollywood's issue with sexism, and discusses his new film, Louder Than Bombs.

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The UK radio presenter also has some harsh words for his News International boss Rupert Murdoch

Hot Press takes its metaphorical hat off to LBC radio presenter James OBrien who ritually disembowels Kelvin MacKenzie, the editor who presided over the Suns vile Hillsborough coverage, on his morning talk show.

The massive majority of ordinary journalists dont deserve to lose their jobs because of the actions 27 years ago of a disgraced individual editor, he reflects. A man whose conduct that day was so despicable that frankly he should never have been employed again, let alone elevated subsequently and rewarded today with another column. He still has a column in The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie; absolutely unbelievable.

Six months ago, Kelvin MacKenzie was still joking about it in his column about how he could be Lord MacKenzie of Anfield if it was true that George Osborne was putting gongs up for sale. Oh, thats hilarious yeah. Hilarious. 96 dead people. Families still grieving.
Two Nashville stars are headed to the Emerald Isle

The annual Irish County Music Awards are taking place on May 19 and two special guests are arriving from the States to attend it.

Nashville Hall Of Fame legend Larry Gatlin and superstar in the making Mo Pitney, will be jetting in from Tennessee to perform at the second Irish Country Music Awards.

Grammy-winner Gatlin has written songs for Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell and Barbara Streisand. While, Mo Pitney shot to fame in 2014 when his debut single 'Country' entered the Top 40 Country Charts in 2014 and stayed there for 19 weeks.

When I was asked to come and sing on the Irish CMA Awards with Irish TV, it seemed like the perfect time to do just that, said Gatlin.

I am honoured and grateful beyond words to travel to Ireland for this event. Keep the faith and see you in Armagh City.

Also performing on the night is Philomena Begley, Lee Matthews and Johnny Brady. The ceremony is live on television from the Armagh City Hotel from 8 to 10:30pm.

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Irelands top country music showcase will also feature performances from Roly Daniels, Niamh McGlinchey, Caitlin and Joe Moore, Mary Duff and Kathy Crinion, Hurricane Highway, Honky Tonk Angels, Mick Flavin and Cliona Hagan.

This years winners will be determined by a public vote and Irish country music fans have until May 13 to vote for their favourite act on Irishtv.ie and in local press.

Categories include best male, best female, best video, songwriter of the year, country music venue of the year, single of the year, album of the year, country music DJ of the year, living legend award, best newcomer and hall of fame.

Presenting the awards this year will be Irish TVs Malachi Cush, whose weekly country music programme with Susan McCann is a huge hit.

These are the only Country Music Awards in Ireland that are truly reflective of public opinion with the public in control of the results, said Malachi.

The event was so well received last year and with two best-selling American Country artists in this years line-up viewers are guaranteed something really special.

I urge all acts to engage with their fan base to ensure they maximize their vote this year.
Oscar-winning director Kevin MacDonald has been granted permission by the deceased performer's estate to direct a documentary in memory of her.

The exceptional voice of Whitney Houston smashed more records than any other female performer in the history of pop music. With 200 million album sales worldwide, Houston made an indelible impression in the music world.

She inspired the careers of Mariah Carey, Lady Gaga and Beyonce but there is still no one who can emulate her talent. However as her fame surged so did the interest in her personal life. As is the case with so many treasured talents, Houston fell into a line of addiction and self-destruction played out by the paparazzi to millions. Pictures of her and lover Bobbi Brown and their tumultuous relationship dominated headlines whilst her music took a backseat. Her tragic death in 2012 led to outpourings of grief at the loss of such a once shining star.

Now, Kevin MacDonald is going to detail her rise and fall in an all-encompassing documentary. With access to archive footage, extensive interviews from close family and friends, MacDonald is going to remind audiences of the gift Houston had and the star-quality she exuded; "The story that is never told about Whitney is just how brilliant she was as an artist; by many measures she had the greatest voice of the last 50 years. She changed the way pop music was sung  bringing it back full circle to its blues and gospel roots. She was also completely unique in being a black pop star who sold in countries where black artists dont traditionally sell.

Of course, it is impossible to tell Houston's story without divulging into the addiction that propelled her downfall but MacDonald refuses to hone in on the tragedy instead opting to focus on the talent; "Although we wont shy away from the darker parts of Whitneys life  her descent into addiction  I want audiences to walk out of the cinema and feel positive about Whitney and her music," MacDonald reasons, "I want to reveal a woman that even her most die-hard fans never knew; and a woman those new to her life and music will never forget.

No signs of when this documentary will make its debut but we will keep you up-to-date.
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CAMERON PARISH, La. - Cheniere Energy's Sabine Pass natural gas liquefaction plant has shipped its seventh cargo, roughly eight weeks after the company began producing the first LNG in the lower 48 United States.

The ship, called the Gaslog Salem, loaded at the terminal near the Texas border in Cameron Parish, La., and sailed Monday, on its way to Portugal, Cheniere officials said. The LNG shipments to Portugal represent the opening of a new market for U.S. shale gas in Europe, which has relied largely on Russian and Norwegian supplies.

Europe is the third continent after Asia and South America to receive U.S. shale gas shipped from the lower 48 states in the form of LNG. More than half of total U.S. LNG production may be destined for Europe by 2020, according to Wood Mackenzie, a British research firm.

More LNG tankers are expected to head to Europe's underused terminals and liquid hubs as prices fall in Asia amid weaker demand in Japan, South Korea and China, the world's biggest consumers of LNG. Net LNG imports to Europe rose 16 percent last year, according to the International Group of LNG Importers.

The shale boom has made the U.S. the world's biggest gas producer, and converting it to LNG has provided an opportunity to open and expand foreign markets. Bank of America Merrill Lynch projects that the United States will become a net exporter of natural gas this year. Much of the gas leaves the country via pipeline.

"LNG coming out of the U.S. is probably the single most important thing that will transform the future LNG market," Melissa Stark, energy managing director and global LNG lead at Accenture, said by email. "It heralds the arrival of a global market."

The 1,000-acre Sabine Pass complex consists of six planned liquefaction units that supercool natural gas into a liquid, capable of processing 3.5 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas. Cheniere, headquartered in Houston, broke ground on the first unit in August 2012 and shipped its first cargo in February.

The second unit is expected to begin producing shortly, with others following at intervals of six to nine months. A fifth train broke ground last summer and is scheduled to come online in 2019. Cheniere hasn't given the sixth train final approval.

The first seven cargos from Sabine Pass have sailed to locations such Brazil, India, and the Middle East. Interim Cheniere CEO Neal Shear said the variety of locations indicated the diverse buyers who are interested in the fuel.

"There's a global bid for LNG that we didn't expect," he said.

Shear briefly spoke to media at a ceremony commemorating Sabine Pass' opening Monday. A few hundred people - representing international LNG buyers and a range of U.S. companies who helped build and finance the $20 billion project - gathered in a tent near the completed first LNG unit.

Bloomberg News contributed to this story.
Start a conversation about fighting racial inequities and there is a certain type of old white guy who's convinced that all of these efforts unfairly boost minorities at their expense.

I know because they write me whenever I broach the topic. And besides, I'm also a middle-aged white guy, and some people say things to me in private they'd never repeat in public.

Correcting the record is today's front page story about how Lawler Foods discriminated against non-Hispanics. Cases like this will become more prominent as the percentage of Anglos in Texas continues to drop, and Hispanics become the majority.

Managers at Lawler advertised for Spanish speakers and then told African American and Anglo candidates that their kind wasn't wanted, attorneys for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission told my colleague L.M. Sixel. As she notes, discovering and prosecuting these kinds of discrimination cases are difficult even though the problem is rampant.

Under the consent decree, Lawler denied doing anything wrong, but also agreed to pay $1 million to the non-Hispanics who applied for work and didn't get a job.

What the EEOC attorneys describe, though, should be familiar to anyone who knows the history of business in Texas and the South. Before the Civil Rights Act of 1965, companies could decide that they only wanted white men in management, African Americans as laborers and then fire women once they married, because after all, they were only going to get pregnant soon anyway.

Texas state law even denied unemployment benefits to any black or Hispanic who applied for high-paying jobs considered inappropriate for non-whites. The idea that everyone should have an equal opportunity for a job based on their qualifications is only 50 years old.

Today's hiring discrimination takes on more subtle forms, with some tech company CEOs talking about the importance of fitting into into a corporate culture. Too often that culture is made up of single, white men willing to work 80 hours a week for a low salary. In retail, it can be about people who have a certain look.

As Hispanics become the majority in Texas after 2020, things like language and racial discrimination will take on a new complexion, so to speak. Groups who never thought of themselves as having the power to discriminate will suddenly find themselves challenged. Folks who once did the discriminating will find themselves going to the EEOC.

Once this happens, perhaps fighting racial discrimination will become everyone's cause, and not seen as some kind of special dispensation.
A federal court found Amazon.com liable for charging parents for unauthorized in-app purchases made by kids, siding with the Federal Trade Commission in a case that stretched back to 2014.

The key question in the legal battle was whether Amazon's app store made it too easy for children to buy virtual goods with real money inside games labeled as "free" without parental permission.

Following the launch of the Amazon app store in 2011, the company fielded thousands of complaints about unauthorized charges made by children in apps where they could purchase virtual items, the FTC alleged in a suit seeking refunds for consumers.

The practice was unfair because the e-commerce giant's disclosures about in-app purchases didn't do enough to explain to consumers what they were authorizing, the agency argued.

Amazon has changed the in-app purchase interface over the years and added more parental controls, according to court filings. It also said it refunded consumers who complained.

In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour granted the FTC a summary judgment that found the tech giant responsible for the charges.

FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez praised the decision.

"We are pleased the federal judge found Amazon liable for unfairly billing consumers for unauthorized in-app purchases by children," she said in a press statement.

The court has yet to weigh in on just how much Amazon will have to pay back to consumers to settle the liability.

But Coughenour also granted a partial summary judgment for Amazon.

Citing the steps the company had already taken to rectify the situation, the judge denied an FTC request for injunctive relief that would have required Amazon to obtain more thorough consent for in-app purchases.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the judge's decision.

Two of Amazon's competitors in the app market space, Apple and Google, also faced similar inquiries from the FTC but decided not to head to court.
Slower sales in energy-dependent markets, turmoil in Brazil and even hail combined to dampen Group 1 Automotive's first-quarter net income, the company said Wednesday.

The Houston-based Fortune 500 chain of auto dealerships reported net income for the first three months of 2016 fell 4.3 percent from the same period a year earlier, to $34.3 million. Diluted earnings per share were $1.47, or flat compared with last year.
LOS ANGELES - Ride-hailing company Uber will pay at least $10 million to settle allegations by California prosecutors that the ride-hailing company misled passengers about the quality of its driver background checks.

The settlement was signed Thursday in San Francisco, where Uber is based and where the district attorney led a lawsuit that said Uber falsely claimed its criminal screening of would-be drivers was the most comprehensive available.

San Francisco and Los Angeles prosecutors sued in 2014, saying Uber's background checks were inferior to what taxi drivers undergo because they did not include fingerprint checks for past convictions. Instead, Uber's process relies on a name search of other criminal databases and motor vehicle department files going back seven years.

Uber has defended the safety of its service despite a steady stream of allegations that some of its drivers have assaulted passengers, or, in the case of a driver in Michigan earlier this year, allegedly killed people. The app lets passengers share their location in real time, Uber points out, and the person who booked the ride is required to rate the driver after each trip, helping weed out un-savory characters.

In settling the California case, Uber did not admit wrongdoing and said it already has made many changes prosecutors sought.

For example, Uber stopped claiming its background checks were "industry leading" when it settled a separate case brought by riders. Under that $28.5 million settlement reached in February, Uber also renamed its "safe ride fee" as a "booking fee."

The district attorneys in San Francisco and Los Angeles said that if Uber does not comply with the settlement's terms, the company would have to pay an additional $15 million.

Prosecutors ratcheted up pressure on the company in August, expanding the lawsuit with claims that Uber failed to uncover the criminal records of 25 California drivers, including several registered sex offenders and a convicted murderer.

"The result we achieved today goes well beyond its impact on Uber," San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon said in a written statement. "It sends a clear message to all businesses, and to startups in particular, that in the quest to quickly obtain market share, laws designed to protect consumers cannot be ignored."

Originally, the district attorneys also filed a claim against Lyft, another ride-hailing company. Lyft settled its case last year by agreeing to pay $250,000 and stop claiming its background checks were among the industry's best.

The deal also touched on airport trips. Under it, Uber agreed to more clearly disclose surcharges related to airport rides and to operate its lower-cost UberX service only at airports where it has been granted permission.

"We're glad to put this case behind us and excited to redouble our efforts serving riders and drivers across the state of California," Uber said in a statement.
The day after the Harris County Sheriffs Office reported that an inmate had been beaten to death in jail, the county unveiled a $2 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to reform its criminal justice system.

Patrick Brown, 46, was charged with stealing a guitar in April. He wasnt able to immediately post $3,000 bond. So he sat in jail for roughly a day before another inmate in the holding cell assaulted him.

The attack was caught on video, but reportedly, no one at the jail was monitoring the surveillance footage at the time. By the time medical personnel got to Brown, he was unresponsive, the Houston Chronicle reported. He died hours later at Memorial Hermann Hospital.

Under planned reforms, the county hopes to cut its jail population by 21 percent in three years, according to District Attorney Devon Anderson, a move that is needed not just to ease the burden of jailing people who dont need to be jailed but also to address racial disparities in the system.

State senator Rodney Ellis cheered the reforms outlined in the grant with a statement: Harris Countys over-reliance on the inefficient and ineffective use of mass incarceration as a means of dealing with low-level and non-violent offenses has resulted in one of the highest jailing and incarceration rates in the U.S. and the world.

In many ways, Harris County is late to the nationwide movement to create a fairer justice system. It did not get a public defenders office until 2010. Its jails have been the subject of federal investigations for pervasive abuse of inmates. But some advocates are hopeful that support from Anderson, Mayor Sylvester Turner and other officials signals systemic change.

SUPPORT FOR reforms, particularly for how the criminal justice system handles nonviolent drug offenders, has grown both nationally and locally.

The smart on crime Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act has dozens of bipartisan sponsors in the Senate. Anderson launched a diversion program to keep first time drug offenders found with less than two ounces of marijuana out of jail. And results from the Kinder Institutes annual Kinder Houston Area Survey show growing support for reform. This year, 64 percent of respondents said moving away from mandatory minimum prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders is a good idea, compared to 43 percent in 2011. Supporters argue reform will save money, reduce recidivism and address glaring racial disparities.

The biggest shift is really on the right wing of the political spectrum, said Sandra Guerra Thompson, a professor and director of the University of Houston Law Center.

There, she said, politicians are moving away from tough on crime policies born out of the War on Drugs. Texas Republicans, in particular, champion reforms as cost-effective. Some 63 percent of Republican respondents living in Harris County said moving away from mandatory sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders is a good idea. Thats almost equal with the 66 percent of Democratic respondents who favored the reform, according to the Kinder Houston Area Survey.

You have to appeal to your audience, and in Texas the message that gains the most traction is the cost, explained Katharine A. Neill, a postdoctoral fellow in drug policy at Rice Universitys Baker Institute, citing groups like the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation.

That support will be crucial at the state level. I think there are, especially when you look at marijuana, a lot of Republicans that are on board with that, she said about programs that help keep low-level drug offenders out of jail. But there is still hesitation, particularly in more rural areas, from politicians who dont want to appear soft on crime.

IN URBAN areas like Harris County, though, reforms are moving ahead.

I think it was fairly well understood that what we were doing was not working, said Alex Bunin, chief public defender for Harris County. There just wasnt a real sense of how you get organized to do other things and how popular and expensive it is to do those things. But after visiting Seattle to learn more about its efforts to reduce incarceration and preparing for the MacArthur grant, officials said they are committed to change.

With funding from the county and the grant, a new Reintegration Impact Court, will target low-level, nonviolent felony cases to increase the use of treatment programs and address deep disparities in the criminal justice system. Existing pretrial diversion programs will be expanded to include more offenses. Officials will also push the use of personal recognizance bonds to reduce the number of people waiting in jail simply because they cannot pay for bail. And a new position will be created to partner with local communities.

All together, the efforts are expected to save millions by cutting the jail population by 1,800, or 21 percent in three years. It costs $75 per day on average to house someone in jail, according to the Harris County Office of Criminal Justice Coordination. On any day, roughly three-quarters of the people in Harris County jails are there because they cant make bail. And according to the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, across the state, some 60 percent of inmates in jail are awaiting trial.

BUT IT isnt just about the cost savings for many advocates who are looking to reforms to reduce racial disparities in the system.

In Harris County, 19 percent of the population is black, for example. But they represent half of all felony drug arrests and 66 percent of the people incarcerated for felony drug possession, according to figures from 2012.

It increases as you go through the system, Neill said. Part of that, she said, is due to a lack of legal defense, particularly at bail hearings.

And those things weve known all along, said Thompson, speaking on the disparities. Weve known that people who are held in custody are much more like to plead guilty and they also get longer sentences than comparable people who have the money to get out of jail.

But not everyone is equally concerned about the disparities.

While Bunin welcomes the support for reform, he said, hes mindful of the motivations.

You have to be a little bit skeptical about some of these partnerships because they are only going to go so far, he said. In the public defense community, everyone has embraced holistic defense, community-oriented defense and all of these things require that there be other opportunities for our clients in the community, other kinds of support. If our friends in the conservative area are helping us on the one hand but taking away these services, it doesnt really help much.

Still, change is the goal. Thompson says she welcomes support from any camp because theyre all right.

The people who are saying youre destroying communities (and) its having racially discriminatory impacts, theyre right, and the fact that we are wasting taxpayer dollars, thats also true, Thompson said.

Leah Binkovitz (@leahbink), formerly of the Houston Chronicle, is now a staff writer for Rice University's Kinder Institute. This story first appeared in the institute's Urban Edge blog.
Manny Fernandez's essay in The New York Times, "What Makes Texas Texas," is a deeply insightful exploration of the state's larger-than-life quality, and larger-than-life hold on Texans:

People throughout the state say they believe that their way of life is under assault and that they are making a kind of last stand by simply being Texan. It is this fear, anger and sometimes paranoia that lurks beneath the surface of Texas politics and that underlies the expansion of gun rights, the reflexive antagonism toward Washington, and the opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues that seems essential for succeeding in state politics these days. Senator Ted Cruz's remarks dismissing New York values at a Republican debate should come as no surprise. That's how people from the last best place talk about other places. But Texas is not under attack. It is merely changing as America changes with it. It is a majority-minority state that has become increasingly diverse and nonwhite  rural Texas is shrinking while urban and suburban Texas is expanding  and the tension between what Texas is and what it was has come to define the state.

Fernandez's observation that, "You don't just move to Texas. It moves into you," is on the money, as is his conclusion that Texas resists America's growing transience. "It declares, to itself and the nation: Place matters. America needs a superstate, or to put it another way, an antistate. Sometimes we love it here and sometimes we are disgusted here, but, to twist Gertrude Stein's line about Oakland, Calf., there is a here here."

Gray Matters contributor Cort McMurray gets at that same duality, part captivating, part aggravating, in his wonderful essay about our city, "Nobody Chooses Houston":

Nobody chooses Houston. But when you end up here, if you let it, Houston tattoos itself onto you. It's indelible, inescapable. Houston, sweaty and jangly, always changing, always taking on more of us, Asian and African, Latino and upstate New Yorker, all of us blasting down Highway 59, always aggravating, always just a little bit unlovable, always exactly where we need to be.



McMurray's reverie on Houston's most important symbol, the Astrodome, is also a must read for anyone, like Fernandez, struggling to figure this place out:

The Dome wasn't the source of Houston's boom years. Oil did that, and NASA, to a lesser extent. It wasn't the reason that Houston was one of the few North American cities to remain largely peaceful during the Long Hot Summer of 1967. Community leaders and local businessmen had quietly begun working to desegregate the city long before the ground was broken on Kirby Drive. The Dome was the plastic-grassed token of that boom and of that movement toward equality, a symbol to the world that here was a place audacious enough to do the outrageous. In Houston, everything was possible.



I asked our impresario, Lisa Gray, if Fernandez's piece called to mind other memorable essays about our beloved, not-to-be-messed-with state. Here's what she sent back, under the heading, Texas Reading List:

"The God Abandons Texas," the introduction to Larry McMurtry's book of essays "In a Narrow Grave." (The whole books is terrific.) McMurtry confidently pronounces that the age of Texas exceptionalism is dead:

Apparently there as a time in the forties and fifties that people enjoyed reading about Texas, if the reading was light enough. The state was thought to be different--another country almost. It had Nieman-Marcus and the Alamo and a lot of endearing millionaires.... Alas, all is changed. We aren't thought of as quaintly vulgar anymore. Some may find us dangerously vulgar, but most just find us boring.

He was wrong, of course. That didn't last.

"The Super-American State" by John Bainbridge. (Also the title of Bainbridge's best-selling book). The mythos of oil-rich Texas -- a free-wheeling place where any wildcatter can strike it big:

It is currently fashionable among the more advanced spirits in this country to look at Texas with an air of amused condescension. This attitude, though not heartily relished by Texans, is historically appropriate, for Texas is a new boy, standing in relation to the rest of the United States as the United States stands to Europe, or, for that matter, as Rome stands to Athens, and since time began new boys have been subject to the elaborate patronization of old boys.

"Is Texas America?" by Molly Ivins, Nov. 17, 2003:

How come trying to explode myths about Texas always winds up reinforcing them? After all these years, I do not think it is my fault. The fact is, it's a damned peculiar place. Given all the horseshit, there's bound to be a pony in here somewhere. Just by trying to be honest about it, one accidentally underlines its sheer strangeness.

"The Mildcatters," by Mimi Swartz, July 2005:

If you have lived in Houston for a certain period of timesince the oil boom of the late seventies, sayit is nearly impossible to avoid feeling your pulse quicken whenever oil and gas prices look to be headed for an extended uptick, as they seem to be right now. The more that energy gloom and doom settles upon the worldthe war in Iraq, the much-threatened collapse of the Saudi government, the success of books like Paul Roberts's The End of Oilthe more a certain segment of Houston edges toward euphoria, even though it is supposed to remember what happened last time. A story in the Houston Chronicle's business section on April Fools' Day, for instance, carried the jubilant (for Houston's oil sector) subtitle "Report raises prospect of oil reaching $100," but it also contained an uncharacteristic concern for the dangers of a worldwide recession that might be caused by a "super spike" in prices. That conflict, in a nutshell, is Houston today: Post-bust and post-Enron, the city is trying on a brand-new mood: cautious ecstasy.
Ear infections, those terrors of infancy, are becoming less common, according to a Texas study.

In a study published Monday in Pediatrics, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston reported that the rate of babies getting at least one ear infection by their first birthday dropped from 60 percent in the 1990s to about 46 percent today. They credited a vaccine that protects against several strains of pneumococcal bacteria and breastfeeding.

"We clearly showed that frequent upper respiratory infections, carriage of bacteria in the nose, and lack of breastfeeding are major risk factors for ear infections," Dr. Tasnee Chonmaitree, a UTMB pediatrician and the study's lead author, said in a statement. "Prolonged breastfeeding was associated with significant reductions in both colds and ear infections, which is a common complication of the cold.

Chonmaitree also said flu vaccines and reduced exposure to second-hand smoke helped reduce ear infection incidences.

Investigators followed 367 babies, less than one month old through their first birthday, from October 2008 to March 2014. They collected nose and throat mucus samples throughout the study as well as gathering information on family history of ear infections, cigarette smoke exposure and breast versus formula feeding.

From the 1980s and 1990s, the rates of ear infection dropped from 18 to 6 percent at three month; from 39 to 23 percent at six months; and from 62 to 46 percent at one year.

Chonmaitree said children who received a newer version of the pneumococcal vaccine appeared to have fewer infections. Pneumococcal bacteria can cause serious diseases like pneumonia, meningitis and bloodstream infections.

He said the main reason breastfeeding was linked to better outcomes is that breast milk contains antibodies that can help protect babies against infections.

Because most children with middle ear infections get better without antibiotics, doctors often recommend pain relievers to start. But for infants who are 6 months old or younger, and for older babies and toddlers who have moderate to severe ear pain, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends antibiotics.

An abstract of the study can be found here.
A local commercial bakery has agreed to pay $1 million to compensate hundreds of unsuccessful job seekers after federal officials accused the company of telling black, white and other applicants that it would not hire them in favor of Hispanics.

Lawler Foods, a Humble firm celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, reached a settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission earlier this month. The agency sued the company in 2014 for race and national origin discrimination.

The agency contended that the company, which specializes in desserts and is perhaps best known for its cheesecake, was able to create a Hispanic-dominated workforce for its production line by relying on Hispanic employees to recruit friends and family, and advertising for Spanish speakers when the company had openings, according to the lawsuit.

In some cases, the lawsuit said, company officials told African-American applicants that the company was not interested in hiring blacks or "people like them"; in another, they told a white candidate he would not be hired because he was not Hispanic.

The case provides a rare glimpse into how hiring discrimination occurs and how pervasive it can be, officials at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said. Employment discrimination is often hidden because most applicants never know why they didn't get a job. In this case, however, one hiring manager told EEOC investigators that he "subconsciously rejected" black applicants, preferring Spanish-speaking candidates, according to the lawsuit.

"We thought that was an admission," said Rudy Sustaita, a senior trial attorney at the agency.

Lawler Foods said in its settlement agreement that it believes it did nothing wrong and that it "fully supports equal opportunities for all employees." The company referred requests for comment to its lawyer who did not return phone calls.

The federal agency launched its investigation after three African-Americans who applied in person for openings at the bakery filed discrimination complaints when they didn't get jobs in 2009. After investigating the claims, the agency expanded its inquiry to include a wider group of applicants.

Spanish speakers favored

The agency found a workforce dominated by Hispanics. A survey of job seekers revealed that non-Hispanic applicants were told there were no openings, yet they saw Spanish-speaking candidates taken to interview rooms, federal officials said.

The baker, whose desserts are sold in restaurants and hotels and through mail order, also went out of its way to make the jobs sound onerous to discourage black and white candidates from applying, according to agency officials. The jobs paid about $20,000 a year.

"They told them they'd had to work 14 hours a day in temperatures of minus 10 degrees to over 110 degrees and pushing sacks up to 110 pounds," said Jim Sacher, regional attorney for the EEOC.

Based on Lawler Foods location in an area with a large African-American population, about 30 percent of the bakery's workforce should be black, Sacher added. But less than 1 percent of the 500 employees are black, he said.

David Lopez, general counsel at the EEOC, said discrimination during the hiring process is one of the agency's most important priorities, yet one of the most difficult areas to investigate. To start, the agency doesn't get a lot of complaints because people are often unaware of the discrimination. In some cases, hiring practices don't appear discriminatory on their face, but their effect is.

For example, it may not appear discriminatory to exclude applicants with criminal backgrounds, said Lopez. But blacks and Hispanics have disproportionately higher arrest and conviction rates than whites, so a blanket exclusion of candidates with criminal records ends up discriminating against minority groups.

"The EEOC has the unique ability to look under the hood and access broad trends," said Lopez.

Lesson for employers

Stephen Roppolo a Houston employment lawyer who represents management clients said employers need to think beyond having such blanket rules. They must consider what skills, education or experience each job requires.

For example, he said, if customers speak Spanish, it makes sense for a business to require the sales staff to speak Spanish. But there is no business necessity for employees who stock merchandise in a warehouse to speak the language.

Lawler Foods will pay just over $1 million into a settlement fund to compensate job applicants who filed complaints. The three people who brought the original complaints to the EEOC will receive between $10,000 and $30,000 each.

The rest will be divided among the job seekers who unsuccessfully applied between Jan. 1, 2009 and Dec. 31, 2015.

So far, the agency has identified about 200 people who unsuccessfully sought jobs at Lawler Foods between 2009 and 2010. The EEOC has not yet sifted through the applications that were submitted between 2011 and 2015.

A third party administrator will handle the claims process.
A Houston ex-convict and member of one of the nation's largest white supremacist prison gangs has joined the state's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list.

Danny Ray "Outlaw" Ferguson Jr., who has a swastika tattoo on his neck and served three stretches in prison, was placed on the list Wednesday by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Ferguson, 39, is a confirmed member of the Aryan Circle gang and "should be considered armed and dangerous," warned a DPS bulletin.

A reward of up to $7,500 is being offered for information leading to his capture, and anyone with information about him is asked to call 800-252-8477.

The Aryan Circle is one of five white supremacist prison gangs operating in Texas and one of the largest in the country, according to a recent state-by-state review of the gangs by the Anti-Defamation League.

The gang has long been a rival of The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas in and outside the prison system.

Each group is considered so dangerous that any confirmed members are required to serve their sentences locked up 23 hours a day in one-man cells away from the general prison population.

More for you Texas among worst for racist prison gangs, Anti-Defamation...

Ferguson has been wanted since August for allegedly violating his parole, which should have ended in November.

He had been sentenced to three years for choking a woman he was dating, according to files. He has previously served time in state prison for assault, gun possession, methamphetamine possession and evading arrest.

He has ties to Baytown and Channelview and has previously worked as a carpenter, mechanic and auto body repairman, according to authorities.

The Aryan Circle has kept a relatively low profile with law enforcement in recent years, but the escalation of the search for Ferguson indicates the gang is still being watched closely by the state.

The gang is unique in that women can join. The group gained wide public attention nearly a decade ago when a member, Dennis Clem, killed two Louisiana police officers in an ambush 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 the gang's members trying to smuggle stolen sport utility vehicles from Corpus Christi to the Texas-Mexico border.
City Council voted Wednesday to spend $1 million to buy servers and other equipment to store video collected by city police officers equipped with body cameras.

The vote, passed with relatively little fuss following months of sometimes-contentious public debate, marks the next step in the Houston Police Department's ongoing effort to equip more than 4,000 patrol officers with the devices.

The storage will cost the city about $8 million over five years, with about $585,000 more per year in additional staffing costs, officials said. An alternate proposal to use cloud-based storage would have cost the city even more.

Civil rights advocates and police departments across the country have united in calling for use of body cameras, which they say will bring more transparency to interactions between police officers and the public.

The move comes at a time when controversial and sometimes fatal encounters between law enforcement and members of the public have sparked demonstrations and riots in some parts of the country.

HPD previously had equipped about 100 officers with the devices in a pilot program. Earlier this month, the department outfitted about 280 officers at its Central Division with the cameras in the first phase of its departmentwide rollout.

Stored by HPD

The city plans to purchase 4,500 body cameras, of which about 400 would be spares. Wednesday's vote cleared the way for the city to purchase Dell Compellent computer servers with space to hold 1.5 petabytes of data, and a similar amount of space to hold a duplicate copy of the data.

One copy would be stored in HPD's data center, with a separate copy stored in the city's Disaster Recovery Center, according to the police department.

The move to store the data in-house had prompted worries from some that the data could be more easily tampered with, a concern Mayor Sylvester Turner brushed aside in brief remarks after the meeting.

"I'm comfortable the integrity of the system is sound," he said.

Cost concerns

The council's fiscal hawks have expressed concerns about the cost of implementation.

"My issue is making sure that we're set up for success and move our city forward and everyone has confidence in the body cameras and the policy and procedure, but at the same time we don't get carried away and overspend in our willingness to do the right thing," said Councilmember Brenda Stardig, chairwoman of the council's Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee.

After the vote, Houston Police Officers' Union president Ray Hunt said union officials had previously argued for the data to be stored with a private company, which they said could better store and retrieve the recordings and allay transparency concerns.

"We fought that battle and lost," he said. Nevertheless, the union is calling for the deployment of the devices as fast as possible, he said.

"We don't want to do anything to hold up the movement on getting these out," he said, later adding: "If they screw up, it's going to be on the city, and not on the HPOU."

HPD, meanwhile, has said its plan includes "rigorous controls  and audit trails to assure the integrity of stored evidence."

The council overwhelmingly approved the item on a voice vote. Two councilmembers - Michael Kubosh and Larry Green - voted against it.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee joined local pastors to announce the launch of "H-Town Cares," a flood relief partnership among the city, churches and the private sector.

As they did, several dozen residents waited in the Community of Faith Church sanctuary Monday to hear how the city would help them recover from last week's devastating rains and flooding. Residents from Acres Home and Inwood gathered to ask officials where to go now that most emergency flooding shelters are closed, and if they could be forced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to leave their homes.

The local meeting followed a news conference at which Turner and Jackson Lee praised community and church leaders for pitching in on flood relief. More than a dozen local pastors joined officials to launch their relief effort.

"I represent the entire city, but I live over here," Turner told residents.

Despite the combined "H-Town Cares" effort by local pastors, companies such as H-E-B and nonprofits, the Acres Home meeting showed how far the neighborhood - and the city - still have to go on flood recovery.

Officials pleaded with residents to stay in the area, and praised the Obama administration for issuing a federal disaster declaration for Harris County, making many flood victims eligible for federal aid.

Staff from the city council, police and fire departments, various local agencies, the NAACP and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz's office went to the church to hear from residents.

Residents, for their part, were looking for answers on issues like mold, lost cars and other problems not immediately covered by city assistance.

"It's like everybody's dropping the ball," said Doris Shelly, whose one-story home was flooded up to her waist and now smells of mold. She and her husband are staying there despite the mold risk.

Bishop James Dixon of the Community of Faith Church led the crowd in prayer for recovery - and for those who died during the storm. Earlier in the evening, he told reporters that faith would help the city recover.

"We intend for a flood of love," Dixon said, "to solve this crisis in Texas."
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The tally of flooded homes in Harris County reached 6,700 on Sunday, surpassing the total from last year's Memorial Day flood.

An additional 300 homes were damaged in Waller County. The assessments are preliminary and numbers are expected to continue to rise.

In unincorporated Harris County alone, surveyors estimated $43 million in residential losses and $13 million in commercial losses by Sunday night, said Francisco Sanchez, spokesman for the county's emergency management office. The estimates are required before the region can be designated a federal disaster area, allowing victims to apply for money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But residents don't have to wait for food, housing or clothing. Anyone who needs immediate help should call 211, Sanchez said. The same applies to Waller County.

Shawna Reagin, helping people in Inwood Forest scrape out their homes' sodden innards, marveled at the mounds of debris piling up on curbs.

She worried about looters pilfering items from yards in the northwest Houston neighborhood where she grew up, and was glad to see what appeared to be stepped-up police patrols.

"The enormity of the damage is so overwhelming," she said.

Afternoon thunderstorms brought patches of heavy rainfall and minor street flooding Sunday. Engineers closed floodgates at the Addicks and Barker reservoirs to keep the rain from inundating bayous downstream. The reservoirs reached their peak from last week's deluge, said Kim Jackson, spokeswoman for the county flood control district. They aren't expected to finish draining for weeks.

The region should expect continued rain this week, possibly aggravating flooding, according to the National Weather Service.

The flooding threat is lower during the middle of the week, with a storm system moving across the Great Plains late Tuesday into Wednesday only expected to cause light rain in the Harris County region.

But a storm system approaching from the west next Saturday and Sunday could lead to heavier rain at the end of the week. That storm could raise flooding concerns, according to meteorologist Melissa Huffman. It's too early to predict that storm's rain totals, Huffman said.

This week's rain could affect morning commutes and prolong road closures, Huffman said.

Relief efforts continued throughout the region, with the Red Cross operating four shelters in Spring, Conroe, Brookshire and Wharton.

Residents from Greenspoint, one of the hardest-hit areas of the city, settled into hotel rooms, where they relocated after staying in the Campbell Center arena last week. More than 150 families have accommodations for up to three weeks at a cost of about $150,000 from a storm relief fund, Mayor Sylvester Turner's office said.

About 1,800 Greens-point apartments had flood damage, and 400 workers were on site making repairs, the mayor's office said.

In Waller County, nine people sought refuge at a civic center in Brookshire on Sunday, down from about 100 people staying in a shelter at Royal High School last week, said Brian Cantrell, the county's emergency coordinator. Officials tentatively expect to begin curbside debris pickup on county roads May 2, he said. The Texas Department of Transportation will coordinate pickup on state highways and farm roads.

Emma Hinchliffe contributed to this report.
Houston scientists have devised an ultra-small "smart drug" that eludes all biological barriers and withholds the release of its poison until it is inside the heart of cancer cells that have spread to the lungs, one of the primary causes of cancer deaths.

In a mouse study published this week, the nanotechnology-based strategy destroyed a particularly lethal type of breast cancer after it reached the lung, a stage of the disease considered almost untreatable. The team hopes to test the strategy on patients next year, and other scientists said the findings should stimulate research with additional drugs and cancer types.

"If this bears out in the clinic, even in a small fraction of what we've seen in lab experiments, it will be transformational, the first-ever demonstration of a cure of metastatic disease to the lungs," said Mauro Ferrari, president and CEO of the Houston Methodist Research Institute and the study's principal investigator.

The study, published in the new edition of Nature Biotechnology, found that 50 percent of mice treated with the therapy had no trace of the disease in their lungs after eight months, the equivalent of about 24 years of survival in humans. The disease currently kills patients six months to two years after it spreads to the lungs.

Cancer researchers were quick to note that curing cancer in mice is a long way from curing the disease in humans.

Sheathed in silicon

Any effective treatment of metastatic cancer would represent a huge advance in therapy, which today is often effective when tumors are detected while still local but is usually ineffective when they've spread to other organs. The five-year survival rate for breast cancer, for instance, ranges from 100 percent to 72 percent in the early to intermediate stages, then falls to 22 percent after it's metastasized.

One big problem is that only a small portion of a given dose of cancer drugs reaches the target. Drugs have to contend with the body's defense mechanisms, which attack intruders. They also must get past cancer's own barriers, which include proteins that act as tiny pumps to drive the drugs outside malignant cells and prevent them from accumulating within. The result is that healthy tissue absorbs much of the drugs, resulting in side effects and continued cancer growth.

The Houston team's research relies on nanotechnology, the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale, some 100,000 times smaller than the width of a hair. The field hasn't delivered the breakthrough drug many had predicted, but Ferrari said the new strategy may "provide answers to why the transformation hasn't been profound and why its time may now be here."

The strategy works in steps, ferrying a standard chemotherapy near the nucleus of the metastatic cancer, then tricking the tumor into swallowing the drug's poison.

"It's a great piece of work, novel and unique, the sum of the parts greater than any individual aspect," said Dr. Steven Libutti, director of the Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care in New York. "As a baby boomer, I find it reminiscent of the moon mission, the way the drug-delivery system's components separately complete their tasks."

Ali Khademhosseini, a Harvard nanoresearcher, also praised the research's "clever way of generating nanoparticles uptaken by cells directly in the tumor." He said the method is "highly innovative and could result in improved therapies down the road."

Ferrari's team developed porous silicon particles as drug carriers, able to travel unimpeded through healthy blood vessels thanks to their small size and disc-like shape. At the tumor site, the silicon breaks down, generating the cancer-killing nanoparticles. The nanoparticles, coiled into tiny balls that resemble cancer cells, are absorbed and taken to the cancer nucleus, where the drug is released.

The particles encase doxorubicin, a potent chemotherapy that, used conventionally, prevents tumor cells from dividing but causes adverse effects in the heart. No approach in humans has been able to deliver it only to the tumor, a limitation to the drug's effectiveness and safety.

The strategy benefitted not just the 50 percent of mice who were disease-free eight months later, but also the half that didn't respond as well. They lived an average of 160 days, the human equivalent of three to six years longer than metastatic breast cancer patients on standard chemotherapy. The study involved triple-negative breast cancer, a hard-to-treat variety that doesn't respond to strategies that effectively target the more common types.

Works for several types

Dr. Haifa Shen, the study's co-senior author, said the results promise particularly life-saving potential because the approach worked even though the mice were genetically engineered to be resistant to chemotherapy.

The approach also worked in a small portion of mice in which the breast cancer spread to the liver, the other most common destination of cancer spread. A related strategy, using some of the same steps, has shown promise in the third most common site of such metastasis, bone marrow. The technique does not appear to work in brain cancer metastasis, the fourth most common destination.

Ferrari said he's hopeful the approach revives the potential of existing drugs.

"People keep looking for new drugs to kill cancer, but I think a lot of the fights can be won delivering the drugs we have in more complete fashions," Ferrari said.
The claims for Jim Humble's Miracle Mineral Supplement - purportedly effective against cancer, AIDS, arthritis, malaria, acne, erectile dysfunction and a score of other ailments - are as astounding as those for any old-fashioned snake oil. But the octogenarian's miraculous elixir isn't snake oil. It's sodium chlorite, a potent chemical used in pesticides, fracking and fabric bleaching and which, authorities warn, can potentially be fatal if swallowed.

As archbishop of the Genesis 2 Church of Health and Healing, a "non-religious" church whose sacraments include consumption of the supplement, Humble claims more than 1,000 acolytes throughout the world. And while federal and state authorities in the United States have targeted sale of the purportedly health-promoting substance, Humble seems to have sidestepped such complications by giving away his product in return for a designated donation.

Beginning Friday, under the direction of Bishop Shane Hawkins, a former Angleton firearms dealer, the church will conduct a three-day seminar on the medical virtues of the chemical at a Houston-area hotel. Admission at the door: a $500 donation.

Attendees will hear the story of "the world's most important broad-spectrum, nontoxic anti-microbial agent," and testimonials about its efficacy. They will mix a personal batch of the chemical - "we provide the materials, bowls, scales, etc., to have you do it yourself," a promotional Web post says - and sample the results.

"We don't give interviews," Hawkins said Wednesday, when contacted about the weekend event. He directed inquiries to an email address, which brought no immediate response.

Humble, though, who has lived in Kingwood as well as California, Nevada, Ohio and, most recently, reportedly, Latin America, is amply represented on the Internet, where he talks about aspects of his career. He claims to have discovered the value of his solution by using it to cure malaria during a 1996 gold-mining expedition in South America.

Humble also claims that through a process of manipulating water, he created gold and platinum.

'Harmful if ingested'

Lyndsay Meyer, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said 16 adverse reactions and one death have been linked to medicinal use of the chemical, which also has been purveyed by individuals not thought linked to the church.

The agency in 2010 issued a warning that ingesting the chemical, which is to be mixed with citrus juice to form chlorine dioxide, can lead to nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and symptoms of severe dehydration.

Humble's elixir is classified as a supplement, Meyer said, not a drug, and the agency's regulatory authority over it is limited to "post-market review" of adverse events and false claims. "The FDA is not aware of any research that (Miracle Mineral Supplement) is effective in treating any of these conditions," the agency said of sellers' health claims.

In Houston, Dr. Amitava Dasgupta, a toxicologist at the University of Texas Medical School, seconded the FDA warning.

"This is a strong oxidant that, acting as a bleach, may be harmful if ingested," he said. "To my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence showing the safety of this product."

The Texas Attorney General's Office said Wednesday that it has received one complaint against the Genesis 2 Church, alleging Humble's group is a "cult" and reiterating that medicinal use of the substance is hazardous. The agency declined to specify what action might be taken regarding the complaint, which was filed by an autistic Virginia man.

Charges in other states

Last summer, the Illinois attorney general's office charged that a sodium chlorite booster, Kerri Rivera, had violated the state's consumer fraud act with her claims that the chemical was a miracle cure for autism. Rivera, who lives in Mexico, entered into a voluntary agreement with the state not to sell the chemical in Illinois or appear at events in that state promoting its use.

In October, a Spokane, Wash., man was sentenced to 51 months in federal prison after he was convicted of a series of offenses linked to his sale of sodium chlorite as a medical preparation on the Internet. The man had provided instructions for the substance's use that claimed nausea, vomiting and diarrhea were signs the miracle cure was working. While admitting there was a slight risk of brain damage, he said the product still might be used by pregnant women and infants.

"Consumers," said Benjamin Mizer, principal deputy assistant attorney general in charge of the U.S. Justice Deparment's Civil Division, , "have the right to expect that the medicines that they purchase are safe and effective."

In an Internet video from South America, Humble dismissed the FDA's concerns over gastrointestinal distress as bureaucratic overreactions to "stomachaches."

"Five hundred thousand people died from taking FDA-approved drugs," he fulminated. "It's so ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense at all - all these reports of health injuries. A couple of stomachaches is a health injury. ... I've got to admit that's as crazy a thing as any agency has ever done."

It its promotional Web posting, the Genesis 2 Church asserts, "We are a congregation of humans who believe we have a spiritual mission to save mankind."

Overnight healing

Humble claimed on the Web that his formula "is able to overcome most diseases known to mankind."

Testimonials for Miracle Mineral Supplement tell of the triumph over "liver flukes," overnight recovery from the flu and immediate recovery from burns.

On Amazon.com, reviewers of Humble's book "The Master Mineral Solution of the Third Millennium" - which earned a four-star average from 126 reviews - rose to the treatment's defense.

"Together we are building a community of truth-tellers as individually we heal," wrote one.
WASHINGTON - In a less-than-rousing defense of his party's two leading presidential contenders, House Speaker Paul Ryan urged a young Republican seeking solace Wednesday about the GOP race to focus on ideas instead of the candidates.

"Look at the policies, not the person," Ryan, R-Wis., said during a 70-minute session with students at Georgetown University.
Next stop: Mars?

In December, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, California, better known as SpaceX, landed a rocket on Earth, flying a booster stage of one of its Falcon 9 rockets back to Cape Canaveral.

This month, the company repeated the feat even more impressively, setting the booster down on a floating platform in the Atlantic.

Now SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket company, has its sights set farther away: It aims to land one of its capsules on the surface of Mars. That journey could launch as early as 2018, the company announced in a Twitter message Wednesday.

Musk has said that SpaceX's long-term goal is to colonize Mars, and he has talked of an ambitious schedule to get people there in the mid-2020s.

But before that happens, Musk, not to mention any would-be colonists, have to make sure that the technology for getting to Mars in one piece actually works.

In an announcement Wednesday, SpaceX said it planned to send an unmanned Dragon capsule to Mars in 2018 and land it on the surface about six months later. (Mars and Earth line up only once every 26 months.)

NASA also plans to send people to Mars, although not as quickly, aiming for the mid-2030s. Critics have said that NASA's distant plans lack the specifics, funding and plausibility needed to meet even that nebulous schedule.

On Wednesday afternoon, a couple of hours after the SpaceX twitter message, Dava Newman, NASA's deputy administrator, wrote: "We are closer than ever before to sending American astronauts to Mars than anyone, anywhere, at any time has ever been. A new consensus is emerging around NASA's plan and timetable for sending astronauts to the Red Planet in the 2030s."

NASA have emphasized that - unlike with the Apollo missions to the moon - the agency is not doing everything alone, but rather is enlisting the help of other countries and commercial endeavors.

Almost in passing, Newman mentioned the SpaceX Mars effort.

"Among the many exciting things we're doing with American businesses, we're particularly excited about an upcoming SpaceX project that would build upon a current 'no-exchange-of-funds' agreement we have with the company," she wrote. "In exchange for Martian entry, descent and landing data from SpaceX, NASA will offer technical support for the firm's plan to attempt to land an uncrewed Dragon 2 spacecraft on Mars."

Landing on Mars is tricky. The atmosphere is thick enough that friction heats an arriving spacecraft to thousands of degrees, yet the atmosphere is too thin for parachutes to provide a gentle landing.

NASA has turned to innovative devices like air bags, used to cushion the landings of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004, and a Rube Goldberg-esque "sky crane" system to set down the larger and heavier Curiosity rover in 2012.

A team at NASA's Ames Research Center in California proposed SpaceX's Dragon capsule as a cheaper way to land on Mars, using rocket engines. SpaceX liked the idea enough to start working on it as well, signing an agreement to tap into NASA expertise.

A SpaceX spokesman declined to provide more details regarding the plans.

But even with SpaceX's recent technological tours de force, getting to Mars in 2018 would be a huge, quick leap for a company that has yet to leave Earth's neighborhood.
Through its 1845 annexation treaty with the United States, Texas has the unique privilege of dividing itself into five separate states. Proponents of the idea through the years have contended that a Lone Star mitosis into a constellation of states would multiply the power and influence of Texas in Washington. Former Vice President John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner of Uvalde - best known for comparing the office he held under FDR to "a pitcher of warm spit" - maintained that slicing Texas into five states each the size of Arkansas would "transfer the balance of political power to the South and secure for the Southern States prestige and recognition."

Garner envisioned an East Texas, West Texas, North Texas and South Texas, with just plain Texas in the middle. The idea went nowhere, largely because most Americans believed - and still believe - that one Texas was more than enough.

We concede that 10 Texas solons is a bit extreme, but we also maintain that one is not enough, since every other state, large and small, is represented by twice that number. And yet one is what we've had since 2012, when the relatively unknown Ted Cruz rode the Texas tea party wave to smashing victory over former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and, a few weeks later, over a hapless Democratic challenger. That campaign, albeit impressive, was a classic case of political bait and switch. Cruz had no interest in being a senator, no respect for the institution beyond the furtherance of his overweening ambition. His senior colleague in the Senate, the only one working for Texas, admitted as much in remarks he made earlier this week.

"Clearly, he didn't come here to remain in the Senate. He came here to run for president. And I think that perhaps explains the difference in tactics," Sen. John Cornyn told Dallas radio station KERA while discussing how he and his junior colleague differ.

Cornyn is right, of course, and that's too bad for Texas. Few lawmakers in Washington are as conservative and as deeply suspicious of an intrusive federal government as the state's senior senator, and yet even Cornyn recognizes that this big, complex place needs his involvement and influence on a host of important issues. Cruz isn't interested, which leaves Texans short-changed.

With a larger-than-life businessman and reality-TV personality on the verge of being the Republican nominee, Cruz's White House ambitions are about to be dashed (for 2016, at least). His Carly Fiorina gambit is, in the words of Donald Trump, "a pure waste of time." Cruz is not going to be the GOP nominee (and his running mate won't have to experience the warm-spit torture Cactus Jack endured).

Once the sturm und drang of the campaign finally goes quiet on California's golden shores, once the young senator has spent some time back home in Houston relaxing and recharging, perhaps he'll reconsider his role in Washington. In the tradition of his esteemed predecessors - Lyndon Johnson, Lloyd Bentsen, Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison immediately come to mind - we'd urge him to recommit to Texas. We know his disdain for governance, and yet plenty of issues important to Texans could use his attention, among them storm-surge protection, flooding issues, border infrastructure, comprehensive immigration reform, transportation, health issues, NASA, medical research, environmental protection and criminal justice reform, to name a few.

Cruz owes it to his fellow Texans. He baited them four years ago; now it's time for him to switch back to the job we traditionally elect senators to do.

He has the time. At 45, he could be running for president for the next 20 years, could still be in the Senate two decades and more beyond that. He could still be in the Senate, in fact, when Texas celebrates the bicentennial of that 1845 annexation treaty, when he'll be Bernie Sanders' age - and the state will still be needing two committed U.S. senators.
Contributors

Regarding "Undocumenting our interests" (Page A19, Saturday), I so agree with all Stan Marek has stated and have wondered about this so many times too. Let's take care of this issue and quit wasting so much time and money on the debate of it!

"Legal" is not the same status as a "citizen," and there are millions of good, hard-working people here that could contribute so much more to our society, if they were allowed to be legal.

Carol Beittenmiller, Bellaire

Right the wrongs

We are advised to stand up for what is right regarding the immigration situation in Texas. After years exploiting Mexican immigrants as cheap labor, we do need to right the wrong.

In the rhetoric of this presidential election, the immigrant issue is being used for political benefit. We need, however, to give serious thought to the human reality of the situation and act out of our civil and moral obligation to right a long-standing wrong.

Benignus Galiano, Houston

Border security

Stan Marek says we should stand up and do the right thing. To me, that is certainly not legalizing illegal aliens. And yes, that is the correct legal description, not undocumented workers.

There is a reason we have borders. They are to protect us, the legal residents, and keep out illegals.

A country that has no regard for borders cannot call itself a nation.

Mexico is extremely hard on immigrants.

Our government must pressure Mexico to improve the lives of its own citizens.

The United States cannot afford to be the safety valve relieving their problems.

Bryant Reed, La Porte
Messaging matters

When I saw the headline of "Flood City" (Page A15, April 19) used in the editorial following our flooding last week, I was dismayed and disappointed. Creation of the term reeks of negativity.

Sunday's front page use of it again - "After storms turn Space City into Flood City, experts believe the future could be even worse" - only served to reinforce it and its counter-productive messaging and branding.

A more positive term better reflecting reality might have been, "Houstonians Care" or "Helpful Houstonians Save Neighbors." We don't need businesses, job seekers, investors, conventions, etc. rejecting Houston because of a "Flood City" image.

Ed Wulfe, Houston

Never-ending war

Regarding "Iraqi sects discord blunts U.S.-backed drive against ISIS," (Page A10, Tuesday), Iraq and Syria are newer countries than Arizona's statehood. They were formed by Britain and France as victors from World War I over the Ottoman Empire with colonial intentions and oil in mind. History has shown that - after billions of dollars and a never-ending war later - that a re-partition of the area is in order to reflect today's realities.

A country for the Sunnis, a country for the Shiites, a country for the Kurds and an "open city" for Bagdad modeled after post-WWII Berlin would do more than continue a Western fantasy that the war will end some day and Sunnis and Shiites will live together happily.

Curt Anderson, The Woodlands

Pentagon vs. Congress

Regarding "Pentagon, Congress once again at odds over closures of bases" (Page A8, Tuesday), here's a classic example of what's wrong with Congress. The Pentagon, in a detailed report to Congressional leaders this month, the first of its kind in 12 years concludes the military will have an excess of base capacity of 22 percent in 2019. Closing of yet-to-be-named bases would save $2 billion a year.

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon, said that the House version of the bill that authorizes military spending for the coming budget year will stop the Pentagon's base-closing campaign "in its tracks."

In other words, they know more than the military and are willing to spend $2 billion a year unnecessarily to prove it. Then they point fingers at each other about unnecessary spending during the budget hearing process.

A.J. Reixach, Lake Jackson

A tough sell

Regarding "Overcrowded jail" (Page B13, Sunday), it's all talk. These judges will never voluntarily substantially increase the use of personal recognizance bonds. They have had 30 years to do that. Judicial claims of sudden epiphanies are false.

The Harris County judiciary got elected on promises of getting tough, not smart on crime. They are not going to get smart; they are going to stay tough to guarantee what's most important to them: reelection.

Harris County judges will only substantially increase the long overdue use of PR bonds when a federal district court orders them to do so. In the meantime, the "plea mill" will continue and the poor will pay the price. Hoping the judiciary will do the right thing on this issue, is delusional.

Robert J. Fickman, Houston
On July 6, 2015, equipment being off-loaded from a flatbed truck fatally struck 35-year-old Alton "Brad" Bargsley while he was working for C&J Well Services, a division of Houston-based C&J Energy Services Ltd. OSHA cited the company for just one serious violation. C&J Well Services paid a $6,000 penalty - a fraction of its $1.7 billion in revenue last year.

Shun Jones, 23, died from heat exhaustion last August while working on a trash collection truck in Kingwood. His temp staffing agency was under contract with corporate giant Waste Management. It was his first day on the job.

The deaths of Bargsley and Jones are just two of the nearly 100 Houston-area workers who suffered fatal work-related injuries in 2015. These tragedies could have and should have been prevented. But, in too many workplaces, hazards are not corrected, employers cut corners and workers lose their lives.

Since job safety laws like the OSH Act were passed more than four decades ago, we've made great progress in making workplaces safer and protecting workers.

But still, an average of 13 U.S. workers per day suffer a fatal injury. According to data released earlier this month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 4,821 workers died from traumatic injuries in 2014. Moreover, an estimated 50,000 individuals die annually from occupational illnesses, such as cancers and lung diseases caused by exposure to toxic chemicals and other health hazards.

Texas is a particularly hazardous place to work. BLS reports that 531 workers in the state were fatally injured on the job in 2014, including nearly 100 from the Houston area. The overall fatality rate in Texas is 4.5 deaths per 100,000 workers compared with 3.4 deaths for the nation as a whole. The disparity is particularly pronounced in the construction, mining and oil and gas industries.

Latino workers - particularly immigrant workers who are in the U.S. without authorization - face special danger. They work in some of the most dangerous jobs often with little or no protection, and they have a much greater risk of being killed on the job than other workers.

Temporary workers and contract workers are also at great risk as employers try to shirk responsibilities and contract out dangerous work.

Under the Obama administration, we've made some progress on these issues and strengthened workers' protections and rights. The Labor Department has targeted employers who repeatedly violate the law and recently issued new rules on respirable silica dust. But there are great challenges and threats ahead.

Industry groups have filed lawsuits and turned to their friends in Congress to overturn these protections. Three candidates running for president want to roll back basic workers' rights such as the right to join a union.

On Thursday, we commemorate Workers Memorial Day. People throughout the world will be remembering workers who were hurt or killed on the job and renewing the fight to ensure safe workplaces. Our elected officials and businesses should mark this day by launching new efforts to provide stronger safety and health protections on the job.

At the local level, government institutions should use their economic development and contracting roles to push firms to adopt stronger job safety standards. For example, the city of Houston, the Houston Independent School District and other government entities should establish a prequalification process to ensure that publicly funded construction contracts go only to firms with strong safety and quality records.

Similar requirements should be expected of businesses bidding on state-funded projects. Texans don't want tax dollars going to firms that compromise safety by pushing production, discouraging workers from reporting safety concerns, or blaming workers for sustaining an injury. We need state policies that reward high-road employers.

It is time for lawmakers and big business to put workers first and do more to ensure that working people do not have to worry about their lives and their limbs when they go to work every single day.

Khalil is executive director of the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. Monforton is a professorial lecturer at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health and lives in Texas.
Ted Cruz named Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential pick in the event he becomes the GOP nominee at a campaign event in Indianapolis on Wednesday.

So, why is Cruz picking Fiorina? And why is he announcing it now?

The second question is easier to answer. Cruz and his team understand that after the primary votes over the past two weeks, any momentum he might have had following Wisconsin on April 5 is now gone. And all of it has gone to Donald Trump who now looks damn-near unstoppable in his quest to become the GOP's nominee.

Given that reality, Cruz needs to change the narrative of the race. Immediately. There are five and a half days until the Indiana primary and if Cruz loses to Trump there the nomination fight will be effectively over. And if nothing changes in the race in the Hoosier State, Cruz will lose.

Announcing Fiorina is a big swing at story-changing. Cruz has to hope that the coverage over the next few days - both in Indiana and nationally - will focus on Fiorina and why it was smart of him to pick her. Every second that cable TV and local media outlets spend talking about Cruz and Carly is a second that Trump doesn't dominate the conversation. And what recent history has told us is that when Trump dominates the conversation, he almost always wins.

More for you Carly Fiorina bad-mouthed Ted Cruz on CNN back in January

This is rightly understood as a desperate attempt to re-take the momentum in the race before it's too late. To Cruz's credit, he's trying it. (I'm a big believer in leaving it all out on the field. If you are going to lose, lose with all of your best plays called. Or something.)

Now to the first question: Why Fiorina?

Let's take as a given that since Fiorina's campaign ended and she endorsed Cruz on March 9, the two have found out that they have a genuine rapport and share a vision for the country. And let's also assume that Fiorina has passed some sort of basic (or more-than-basic) vet by the Cruz campaign. (Remember that Fiorina not only ran for president in 2016 but also ran for Senate in 2010.)

What else does she bring Cruz? In order of importance:

--A woman. Trump's numbers among female voters -- especially in a general election -- are disastrous. Cruz has struggled to drive that message home in the primary but is clearly hoping that by elevating Fiorina to I'll-pick-her-if-I-can-pick-anyone status that Fiorina can help reach female voters who the Texas senator needs, not just in Indiana but going forward in the race.

--A Californian. Fiorina is a known commodity in California Republican circles due in large part to her 2010 Senate campaign which, although she lost, got better post-campaign reviews than the gubernatorial effort run by fellow wealthy businesswoman Meg Whitman. Cruz is banking on Fiorina as an able surrogate for him in California - both in front of the camera and behind the scenes - in advance of the state's June 7 primary. By that point, Trump should be nearing the 1,237 delegates he needs to be the nominee, and depriving him of a handful here and there in California congressional districts may be Cruz's only option. He believes Fiorina can help that cause.

--An attack dog. This works on a near-term and long-term basis. In the near term, Cruz now has an attack dog who has proven to be relatively effective in battling Trump. Fiorina's reputation on that front is largely built on a single exchange during a CNN-sponsored debate in September 2015 in which she appeared to get the better of the real estate mogul who has made comments about her face. (Yes, really.)

Long term -- meaning if Cruz is the nominee -- Fiorina is a potentially potent weapon to attack Hillary Clinton. In fact, during her own presidential campaign, Fiorina was, by far, the most willing to hit Clinton on personal matters - an approach she would likely continue if/when she was formally the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee. And, as a woman, Cruz likely believes Fiorina would have more leeway and be more effective in those attacks.

None of it is unreasonable. And if Cruz is going to pick a VP this far in advance of the party convention - and with so little certainty that he will ever actually be in a position to pick a second in command - he could do worse than Fiorina.

But make no mistake: This is a Hail Mary pass. It, like the deal that Cruz and John Kasich cut earlier this week, amounts to a tacit acknowledgment that if nothing changes in the race Trump is going to win.

Could it work? Sure. Sometimes Hail Marys get caught. But usually they get knocked down, and the other team starts celebrating.
A Cabool man was arrested early Wednesday morning on charges of driving while intoxicated as well as careless and imprudent driving.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol said Michael W. Tuders, 44, was taken to the Cabool Police Department and released.
The remains of a St. Louis woman who had been missing for nearly a year were discovered Tuesday morning in Texas County.

St. Louis County authorities announced Thursday afternoon that Linda McLaughlins remains were found in a shallow grave in the Mark Twain National Forest off Highway 32 near Success. Her husband, John McLaughlin, was charged the previous day with her murder.

Texas County Sheriff James Sigman said he assisted the St. Louis County Police Department in the search off a forest service road. He said a search team and K-9 unit assisted in discovering the remains.

The McLaughlins were in the midst of divorce proceedings. Linda McLaughlin was reported missing on June 2, 2015.

St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch said incredible technology and police work led investigators to the location. He also said the technology put John McLaughlin within 20 yards of the grave on the day she disappeared.

Court documents indicated John McLaughlin and his wife were together in their St. Louis area business about 7:30 p.m. on June 1. The next day, the affidavit says he drove to a remote area of southwestern Missouri, parked his vehicle and then returned to a family farm in Franklin County.

The McLaughlins, who were married 35 years, were scheduled to appear in court three days before Linda disappeared. She had filed for divorce in December 2014.
Billy Earl Beasley was born Dec. 14, 1932, at Summersville, Mo., to John Louie and Ella Omega (Hammer) Beasley. He passed away at Texas County Memorial Hospital in Houston, Mo., on April 25, 2016, at the age of 83.

He was preceded in death by his parents, two brothers, one son, one daughter-in-law, and one great-granddaughter.

He is survived by his wife, Dessie of the home; one son, Mike of Houston, Mo.; one daughter, Sonya White and husband, Mike, of Raymondville, Mo.; grandsons, Jason and wife, Melissa, and Josh and wife, Laura, all of Houston, Mo.; granddaughters, Angela Lisle and husband, Chad, Allison Williams and husband, Mike, and Tiffany Dykes and husband, Jimmy; great-grandchildren, Kaden Beasley, Eden Lisle, Harrison Williams, and Kennedy Dykes; and many other relatives and friends.

Bill attended grade school in Summersville and Plato. The family moved to Houston, where he attended high school, graduating in 1950. After he turned 18 in December 1950, he joined the US Air Force for a three-year hitch, serving his country during the Korean conflict.

On Nov. 3, 1951, he married his high school sweetheart, Dessie Maxine Smith, at Houston, Mo. To this union three children were born, David, Mike and Sonya.

Bill was saved at an early age and was a member of the Ozark Baptist Church, where he served many years as teacher, trustee, treasurer and deacon.

Bill went to work part-time at the Houston Post Office in December 1954. He eventually worked his way up and was appointed Postmaster on April 28, 1973, serving in that capacity until his retirement on Jan. 2, 1988. He went to work as a deputy for the Texas County Sheriffs Office in 1998, serving there for over 10 years until his health required he quit.

Like his father (who was a carpenter), Bill liked to build, and was good at it. He built his own home and he and Dessie lived in it the past 49 years. He helped build or remodel several houses for his family and relatives, and helped several friends with building projects. He helped on every building project at Ozark church through the years and went on mission trips to other states helping build housing and playground equipment.

Bill liked to fish. He went often after he retired; sometimes with his dad, his wife or his brother, sometimes with his son or grandkids, and sometimes alone. He was a good fisherman and always brought home fish.

Bill was always a leader and a servant at the same time. He led his family to church where he served Christ and the church. He managed the Houston Post Office for many years, serving the community. He served on the Houston Volunteer Fire Dept. while he lived in town. He served on many boards and committees throughout the years. He served on the Crisis Center board and served as election judge at the polls for many years. He helped found the Big Piney Sportsmans Club and was their first president.

Bill loved God and he loved his church, always appreciative of the opportunity to attend.

Bill loved his family. They were his greatest joy. He loved seeing them, whether it was at a big family gathering or just someone stopping by for a minute to visit. He cherished times spent with his wife, kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. He rejoiced with them in their happiness, and cried with them in their sorrows, his feelings always tied to theirs.

Bill was a wonderful husband, father, grandfather, and friend. He left us a great gifta shining example of what a man should be, following the straight path that God laid out for him. He will be missed by his church, his family, his relatives and friends, and by all who knew him.

Services were 10:30 a.m. Friday, April 29, at Ozark Baptist Church with Pastor Todd Haley officiating. Burial was in Ozark Cemetery. Pallbearers were Mark Harper, Chester Herndon, Glenn Willson, David Branson, Robert Stringer and Willie Johnson. Honorary pallbearer was Bob Rasmussen. Services were under the direction of Evans Funeral Home.

Memorials may be made to the Ozark Cemetery. Online condolences may be made at www.evans.com.

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Tags : people workforce transparency

The composition of todays workforce has changed. As companies continue to diversify with a mix of generations converging, there is a need for knowledge transfer from established professionals to the newer generations, particularly the millennials who have been in the workforce for only a handful of years. Unfortunately, their stereotyped reputation of entitlement and high turnover rates make organizations hesitant to invest heavily in them. The millennial generation is the future leadership of organizations and yet with data like this, where do organizations begin if they desire to drive change? One place to start is with an aligned effort within the leadership of an organization and the millennial workforce coming together to support each others needs. As leaders within an organization, it is our responsibility to set the tone of the culture and to create an environment that can leverage everyones strengths to thrive. In doing so, it needs to be representative of what motivates all the different generations within an organization today. Authenticity, transparency and honoring the different perspectives that make our organization flourish are the foundational elements to a successful culture. Leaders who make themselves available and have institutional knowledge of the organization are seen as human and approachable where ideas and concerns can be shared openly. The idea of office politics begins to s...
We already have a federal law requiring up to 12 weeks job-protected leave for qualifying employees of covered employers. I am, of course, referring to the FMLA. Click here for some review. As you likely know, FMLA does not require that employees be paid during that time. Paid family medical leave bills have been introduced in Congress, but none have actually been passed. As an employer you might be glad. One less administrative and financial headache, right? Maybe not. In fact, many employers might be better off with a federal family medical leave law. So, why would  or shouldyou as an employer pay this issue any mind? If you are subject to the FMLA, you already have to give qualifying employees time off and you have to hold their jobs open and maintain their benefits (if theyre paying their share of the premiums). You may also have to pay someone else to come in and do that persons job, or reallocate the work temporarily. Why would you want Congress to require you to pay those employees on top of all that? Well, OK, if we say it that way, it seems silly. However, wait a minute. You might already be paying the employee who is on leave  or you might have to soon enough, even without a federal paid leave law. Why? Weve seen a trend in this country in the last few years, whereby Congress for whatever reason fails to pass legislation and states and localities get impatient and jump in with their own legislation. No...
rsquo;ve all seen tears and tantrums after telling someone theyre fired but what about witnessing a worker wreck a $6.6 million plane as payback? Thats exactly what one video claims to have captured in Russia.The footage shows a passenger aircraft being partially crushed by a large plane with several media outlets reporting that the damage was being carried out by a disgruntled former employee whod just been dismissed.The aircraft appears to belong to the UTair Aviation fleet, headquartered at Khanty-Masiysk Airport and based at Roshino International Airport near Tyumen.Released widely on both LiveLeak and Youtube, the original version of the video was captioned; Pilot owed some money tractor driver and multiple copies of the video have been captioned Airport Worker Destroys Jet After Getting Fired.The full, 30-second clip can be seen below:However, despite the apparent carnage, some users have questioned the authenticity of the footage, claiming the company actually planned to have the vehicles destroyed.UTair doesn't currently have any active Yak-40's in their fleet, wrote one user. I'm guessing these are defunct aircraft.
CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company has earned serious brownie points with employees after giving them company shares that, he says, are worth 10 per cent of the entire business."This isn't a gift, Hamdi Ulukaya told employees in a personal letter. It's a mutual promise to work together with a shared purpose and responsibility.Turkish-born Ulukaya is the head of Greek yoghurt maker Chobani  he first founded the company in a defunct U.S. factory in 2005 but recent estimates put the organizations value somewhere between US$3 billion and US$5 billion."I've built something I never thought would be such a success, but I cannot think of Chobani being built without all these people," he told the New York Times.Full-time employees received a packet earlier this week with both the letter and information on how many shares they were being given  the number of shares allocated is based on tenure, rather than seniority.At the $US3 billion valuation, the average employee pay-out would be US$150,000 but the earliest employees could be given a stake worth up to $US1 million.Lead project manager Rich Lake was one of the five original employees first hired by Ulukaya  he told the news outlet that the shares are better than a bonus or a raise.It's the best thing because you're getting a piece of this thing you helped build, he said.The shares given to Chobani employees are coming directly from Ulukaya but can only be sold if the company goes public or is bought by another business, neither of which seems imminent.Employees can hang onto the shares if they leave or retire, or the company will buy them back.
A Conservative MP stands to lose a sizeable chunk of his salary if he joins the race to become his party's next leader.

For a few weeks now, Saskatchewan MP Andrew Scheer has been mentioned as a possible Conservative Party leadership candidate. A story published Thursday by the Regina Leader-Post suggests whispers of his potential run have "been growing louder." Scheer told the paper he's focused on his legislative agenda right now.

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Conservative MP Andrew Scheer asks a question during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 14, 2016. (Photo: Sean Kilpatrick/CP)

The 36-year-old served as House Speaker for four years, and currently serves as Opposition House leader under interim Tory boss Rona Ambrose. It's a significant role that involves managing the Official Opposition's day-to-day parliamentary business.

And unlike others in Ambrose's shadow cabinet, Scheer gets a $42,200 pay bump on top of his base MP salary of $170,400. NDP House Leader Peter Julian gets an extra $16,800 stipend.

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But it seems Scheer would have to give up his high-profile role  and that extra money  to throw his hat in the ring.

Leitch, Bernier lost critic roles

The only two candidates in the race right now  Ontario MP Kellie Leitch and Quebec MP Maxime Bernier  both lost their shadow cabinet positions after they announced their intentions earlier this month. Leitch was her party's health critic, while Bernier served as critic for innovation, science, and economic development.

Ambrose released statements lauding both MPs for jumping into the contest, and named their replacements.

A party spokesperson told The Huffington Post Canada on background the same would happen to Scheer should he declare his candidacy  a practice that ensures fairness in the race and that critic roles get the attention they deserve.

Some advantages to getting in early

Though Conservatives won't pick their next leader until May 2017, there are some draws to announcing early. Bernier told HuffPost this month that he sought a financial edge by tapping into potential donors while others were still making up their minds. Leitch, meanwhile, has been able to address her one-time support for a tip line for barbaric cultural practices, no doubt hoping to move past that controversy.

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Of course, Scheer may believe a more visible role in question period  where he is known to inject some humour and can speak in both official languages  might serve him better right now.

And with five children at home, one imagines that it can't be easy to say goodbye to that extra $42,000.

ALSO ON HUFFPOST:
Gamers anxiously awaiting the latest RPG offering from BioWare now have a very Canadian way to bide their time.

The Edmonton-based video game studio launched a live goose cam on Monday to monitor a pair Canada geese that decided to roost on the company roof.

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The two fowls are named 'Ganders' and 'Arishonk,' wordplay on the names of two Dragon Age 2 characters.

Ganders, the mother, mostly spends her time sleeping (the live feed plays epic video game music while she slumbers). Father Arishonk is usually off camera, fetching food or keeping an eye on the nest from afar.

The cam has inspired some to make geeky fan-art in tribute of the geese.

Welcome Ganders to the fireteam. Check out the BioWare Goose Cam here.https://t.co/pQ4gnRPY7Cpic.twitter.com/FHu6w1i3JK  ThinkGeek Denver (@ThinkGeekCO) April 26, 2016

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The company says they set up the 24/7 feed to sate curious questions about the geese.

"How many eggs did Ganders lay? When will they hatch? Do geese like Mass Effect? From 1-10, how cute is a baby goose?" wrote the company on YouTube.

One of the questions has already been answered. An adorable gaggle of goslings broke out of their shells Thursday morning.

The company  which is behind popular game franchises including Dragon Age and Mass Effect  is now hosting a naming bracket for the young goslings on Twitter:

We picked our favorites from your gosling name suggestions. Introducing the #GooseBracket: pic.twitter.com/yiqsgVyWRU  BioWare (@bioware) April 28, 2016

The adorable idea might have come from sitcom Silicon Valley, which featured a tech company that set up a condor cam on its website.

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If you're bored, give the goose cam a gander  it's for a good cause. BioWare is collecting donations for the Wildlife Rehabilitation Society of Edmonton.

Watch BioWare's live goose cam above.
Mohammad Alhajali, thousands of kilometres away from his former home, sits in a classroom listening to a language he's just barely beginning to learn,

His teacher asks him what he wants to learn in school.

Alhajali, a Syrian refugee, looks at a screen that translates back her English words in his native Arabic. He gets it. The connection's made.

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"Writing," he says, cracking a smile.

The Alhajali kids with their teacher, Amy Gordon. (Google/YouTube)

It's a beautiful moment captured in a Google video, titled "From Syria To Canada" and uploaded to YouTube Wednesday. It follows father Emad Alhajali and his family, who moved to Orangeville, Ont. from Jordan.

"I came from Syria, from the Daraa province," Emad says in the video, in Arabic. "I left with my wife and kids, because the situation was dangerous."

The clip shows Mohammad and his sister Fatma attending their new school, and communicating with their teacher Amy Gordon using Google's translation services.

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Brian Logel, chair of the Headwaters Refugee Group, is pictured with his wife Philomena at the Westminster United Church, in Orangeville, Ont. on Dec. 1, 2015. (Photo: Chris Young/The Canadian Press)

"After the village that they lived close to was bombed, Emad and [his wife] Razan packed all their things in a taxi, and they fled. When they arrived, they spoke no English," says the family's Canadian sponsor, Brian Logel.

"The children, they've had some very painful experiences. They want to overcome that initial fear, that they won't know how to communicate, because they want to fit in," says Logel's wife, Philomena.

The children's father says though they don't understand everything spoken to them, they're happy, and their teacher says they're making progress.

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Mohammad and Fatma Alhajali at school. (Google/YouTube)

The Logels' story was featured in a Canadian Press article last December, as the freshly-elected Liberal government was racing to meet its original intake target of 10,000 refugees by the end of the year. The couple opened up their farmhouse  during the holiday season  to the Alhajalis, since they still had no place to stay by the time their permits to come to Canada were issued.

Four months later, the Alhajalis are part of more than 25,000 Syrian refugees who have come to Canada through a mix of government assistance and private sponsors like the Logels.

The federal government has pledged to bring in 25,000 refugees itself by the end of the year.

With files from The Canadian Press

Also On HuffPost:
A member of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's board of directors has resigned from his position to seek the presidency of the Conservative Party of Canada, The Tyee has learned.

Harper Brings CBC to Heel read more

Brian Mitchell, a Montreal lawyer, confirmed that he resigned Sunday after eight years on the government-funded broadcaster's board of directors and its pension board of trustees.

Meanwhile, a CBC watchdog group said Mitchell's move, and the number of other appointees with political ties, show why there is a need for a new board appointment process for the public broadcaster.

Mitchell said he's running in order to help rebuild the Conservatives after they were voted out of office last October.

"I think the party needs me," Mitchell said. "The party needs my experience and my help and my loyalty."

Mitchell is a former treasurer of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, which merged with the Canadian Alliance to become the Conservative Party of Canada in 2003.

He then served as party vice-president before an unsuccessful previous bid to become party president in 2005.

He was appointed to the CBC board of directors by former prime minister Stephen Harper in 2008.

Board too close to politics?

Mitchell was also one of nine members of the 11-member board identified as a Conservative party donor in a list published by the CBC watchdog Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.

The group's spokesman, Ian Morrison, said that while Mitchell did the right thing by stepping down to seek the party presidency, the situation again highlights how the CBC's board can be too easily loaded up with those close to political interests.

Such appointments can cause a problem even after a party is ousted, Morrison said, explaining how the Liberals must now rely on a board appointed by their political enemies to spend a $675-million cash injection to the CBC in coming years.

Morrison said that the Liberals have also done their share of appointing political friends to the CBC board in the past, and argues that many Canadians want change.

Polling conducted for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting by Nik Nanos last September showed 49 per cent of Canadians feel the prime minister's ability to appoint members to its board gives the government too much influence over the CBC.

"We would like to see the current board structure abolished by an amendment to the Broadcasting Act and replaced with a new structure," Morrison said.

He said a new structure must include a "merit-based" appointment process, such as one promised by the Liberal party during last year's election campaign.

Then, the Liberals said in a statement about the party's plan for fostering Canadian culture that they would increase funding for the CBC and work to make the board less vulnerable to political appointments.

"In line with our Open Government plan, the process for CBC/Radio-Canada Board of Directors appointments must be reviewed, to ensure merit-based and independent appointments," the campaign statement read.

A year ago, then third-party leader Justin Trudeau told Friends of Canadian Broadcasting in an interview that the existing board's silence on Conservative cuts to the CBC budget also signalled a problem with partisan appointees.

Morrison said he hopes that any changes to how board members are chosen will bear certain principles in mind.

"I read 'merit-based' as meaning people with experience, knowledge and perspective that would be appropriate for the board of the largest cultural board in the country," he said. "I read 'independent' to mean not a bunch of party hacks."

Party affiliation a non-factor: Mitchell

But Mitchell said he's never accepted the idea that political ties prevent someone from acting objectively on a government-appointed board.

When he was appointed to the CBC board in 2008, he noted, it had few Tory appointees.

"When I came on to the board it was full of Liberal appointees," he said. "Some of them, who I happen to know, did a fantastic job."

He said the CBC has many challenges to tackle in the coming years, such as the decline of broadcast audiences, and there's room for those with a variety of political ties to bring their experience and expertise to the table.

Morrison conceded that it's possible for appointees to put aside their party affiliation and respect the oath they took to adhere to the Broadcasting Act, which sets out integrity goals for the CBC.

But he said it couldn't be expected that all appointees behave "as saints," and that a board made up almost entirely of appointees with ties to one party still presents a risk.
Cory Johnn Photography

When Cory Johnn isn't off on an adventure around the province, he's home in Edmonton shooting stunning portraits of local business-owners and makers.

The Alberta photographer's "The Original Self" series is a fascinating glimpse into the lives of some of the most captivating young Edmontonians  capturing designers, bartenders, writers, and artists in their homes or workspaces.

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Johnn spoke to The Huffington Post Alberta about his work, and shared some of his incredible photos.

Q: Where did you grow up and where do you currently live?

A: I had the privilege to grow up in the amazing city of Edmonton, with no intentions to move, but rather grow with the city.

Being surrounded by such a diverse backdrop offering prairies and mountains-capes within a few hours in each direction. It's the perfect province to live in and offers so much to do.

A photo posted by coryjohnn (@coryjohnn) on Feb 17, 2016 at 7:47am PST

Q: How long have you been shooting photos?

A: I have been shooting photos for close to ten years now, having purchased my first DSLR camera back in 2007 and only starting to take it seriously since around 2010. I also have a background in professional video production for the past five years  these two avenues go very well hand in hand.

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A photo posted by coryjohnn (@coryjohnn) on Feb 19, 2016 at 7:32am PST

Q: What are your favourite locations to shoot?

A: Some of my favorite locations to shoot are in and around the town of Jasper, Alta.

I feel that Jasper National Park offers the best mountain range, paired with the most locations and lakes to easily access compared to other national parks.

Edmonton is also a natural pick for me, as I love to show off the city in a new light that others may have not envisioned.

I really love applying my different and gritty style to the most cliche locations to give them a fresh breath of air. That being said, I love to challenge myself with familiar locations.

Take a look at some of Cory's photos. Article continues below.

Cory Johnn Photography See Gallery

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Q: What are some challenges of shooting adventure photography?

A: The biggest challenge of adventure photography is standing out from the pack. There seems to be so many trends these days with famous photo locations and once a few big Instagrammers highlight a specific spot, it seems that everyone flocks to capture the same sort of image.

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This is where my last answer comes into play, and luckily having so many famous photo locations right in my backyard. I love to challenge myself with these famous spots, and try to show them off in a very different light. That being said, I try not to follow any trends, but stay true to my style and keep photography fun.

A photo posted by coryjohnn (@coryjohnn) on Jan 15, 2016 at 7:45am PST

Q: Can you tell me a bit about your "The Original Self" project?

A: The Original Self started off as a personal project to build my portraiture, lighting and directing experience, not really knowing the direction I wanted to take it in. It was more of a learning experience starting off.

I had initially asked some close friends to participate in this project, so I could build my portfolio of portraiture work. I quickly found my love of photographing people in their unique spaces, working with what they called home or where they spent their nine to five.

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Kyle Closen of Clo's Custom Leather Goods poses for a portrait. (Photo: Cory Johnn Photography)

This project really lets me express my cinematic and gritty style that I have developed with shooting so many of these unique people in their spaces. My main goal with this project is to keep it local to Edmonton, as I love this city and want to show what all these great people are doing to make a change.

Q: Your portraits capture something special about your subjects. What's your advice to people who want to learn how to take great portraits?

A: My biggest advice for a new photographer wanting to pursue portraiture work is to really try and connect with their subject on a personal level. One thing I always do before starting a shoot with my subject is to sit down and strike up a simple conversation, asking some very generalized questions to figure out what they are all about.

The camera is a very intimidating thing and acts as a barrier as well as a safety net that a lot of new photographers do not realize.

Be personable, make jokes, ask questions and show them what you've shot!

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Paleo blogger Martine Partridge poses for a photo with her dog. (Photo: Cory Johnn Photography)

Q: What do you like to do when you're not taking photos?

A: When I am not out and about taking photos, I am a big fan of finding new places to eat or enjoy a coffee and people watch.

I also love to learn, I have such an interest in how things are created, be it movies and how they are shot, tech and how it works seamlessly with people, or even just how a photograph is made. One thing that I have been into since my early teens, and still am to this day is computer games. This is something that I will always find time to do and keep as one of my day-off activities. Other things would include camping, hiking, canoeing and anything outdoors.

A photo posted by coryjohnn (@coryjohnn) on Dec 12, 2015 at 6:55am PST

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Vancouver-based restaurant company Earls has seemingly angered almost everyone in Alberta after announcing that it plans to source its beef from the U.S. instead of Canada.

Earls announced Tuesday that it had become the first restaurant chain in North America to serve 100 per cent certified humane beef.

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Eagle-eyed consumers quickly spotted that the decision meant switching from suppliers in Alberta to ones in Kansas.

"After months of trying, we were unable to source a federally inspected, certified humane producer that could consistently meet our large supply needs," according to Earls' website. " Certified humane was more important to us than origin, so we chose a U.S. supplier for our beef."

Alberta politicians across party lines quickly took to Twitter to voice their disapproval.

@earlsrestaurant you have officially lost me as a customer. In fact I had a meeting booked their tomorrow it's cancelled. #albertabeef  Heather Forsyth (@HeatherMForsyth) April 28, 2016

Disappointed to see @earlsrestaurant move away from Alberta Beef. Alberta farmers work hard to produce the best beef in the World. #ableg  Brian Jean (@BrianJeanWRP) April 27, 2016

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Let's hope every bar and restaurant NOT called Earl's has an increase in business starting tomorrow. I won' be setting foot in that place!  Ric McIver (@RicMcIver) April 28, 2016

Rob McNabb, general manager of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, said that he was disappointed with Earls, as Canadian suppliers are not far off from meeting the restaurant chain's needs.

Were just not quite ready to provide the level of documentation theyre looking for, he told the Calgary Herald. But our intent is to meet the market needs as quickly as we can and offer even a broader program.

Farmers were also upset with the move.

When any chain says theyre going to look outside the province, I think that hurts a lot of peoples feelings," said Alberta farmer Tim Hoven, in an interview with Global News.

Hoven's cattle have been certified organic since the late 1990s.

Canadian beef *is* produced humanely, @earlsrestaurant. It's locally sourced, and employs thousands of Canadians. pic.twitter.com/LC2GihRcWZ  Jason Kenney (@jkenney) April 28, 2016

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Hundreds of Albertans have taken to Earls' Facebook and Twitter accounts to announce they intend to boycott the company.

Earls accused of supporting terrorists

While most are furious about the decision to outsource, but others have a more eyebrow-raising beef with the company.

After a commenter noted in a private Alberta farmers' Facebook group that Earls was now sourcing its meat from a supplier that also provided halal products, a false rumour began to circulate that the company was now using halal beef.

Somehow that led to anger over halal meat  which is prepared in line with Muslim beliefs  and its connection to Islam.

Earl's is ensuring meat is handled by Halal Muslims, less concerned about Canadian farmers involvement #BoycottEarlshttps://t.co/SGoKDk5rsk  Alberta First (@UWork4It) April 28, 2016

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Despite a public statement from Earls noting that they do not serve halal beef, commenters raged that Earls was supporting "Jihad fighters" and using "barbaric" methods of slaughter.

Another commenter suggested Earls  which has dozens of restaurants in Canada and the U.S.  was supporting "terrorists."

Earls stated that it will revisit its decision if Canadian suppliers are able to meet their demands for certified humane beef in future.

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A pregnant mom who gave birth on a Jetstar flight has named her baby boy after the airline.

The unnamed mother welcomed her son, Saw Jet Star, unexpectedly during a three-hour flight from Singapore to Yangon, Myanmar on April 22. Luckily, there were three doctors on board to help deliver the baby.

The infant was born weighing six pounds, seven ounces, just as the plane was landing. The mother and baby were then rushed to a local hospital.

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The new mom decided to name her son after Jetstar because of the care she received from the airline.

The baby boy was named Saw after Jetstar customer service manager Saw Ler Htu, and Jet after the airline. Coincidentally, the mothers family name is Star.

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The happy arrival of baby Jet Star was met with a round of applause from other passengers on the plane, so were sure its not a moment theyll ever forget either, a Jetstar spokesperson told news.com.au.

Following Jet Stars birth, the airline gave the boys family $1,000 worth of baby supplies. They also offered the doctors flight vouchers for their assistance in delivering the child.

Most airlines have specific policies regarding pregnant passengers. However, Jetstars policy allows expectant moms to fly up to 40 weeks pregnant on flights that are less than four hours. Those in their third trimester also require a doctors note.

While naming your child after an airline might sound odd, this isnt the strangest moniker weve heard. In December 2015, a mom from South Delhi gave birth in an Uber car and named her baby after the transportation company. Thats right  baby Uber!

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More and more, Canadians are choosing to stay close to home for their vacations. In fact, Statistics Canada recently revealed that Canadian travel to the U.S. was down 4.1 per cent in February, compared to January. Overseas travel also decreased by 1.4 per cent.

While world events may have factored into Canadian's decisions to stay local, I'd like to think it had more to do with the fact that more of us are choosing to discover just how amazing this country really is.

There are so many things to do in Canada and while you may think you've heard of them all, here are some that don't get the attention they deserve.

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British Columbia

Skookumchuck Narrows

Skookumchuck Narrows. Flickr photo by Maurice King

See whirlpools and whitecaps in the rapids at Skookumchuck Narrows. The narrows are located at the entrance of the Sechelt Inlet on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast, where the direction of the rapids changes twice a day, forming standing waves and some of the highest river tides in the world. The trek to the narrows is as beautiful as the destination. You'll have to take a 10-km hike (return) through the province's coastal rainforest where you'll see 1,000-year-old western red cedar and Sitka spruce trees as high as 300 feet.

Alberta

Waterton Lakes National Park

Waterton Lakes from Bear's Hump. Flickr photo by Jeremy Bradford

While Banff National Park may get most of the glory in Alberta, the lesser-known Waterton Lakes National Park is equally breathtaking. Here, in the southwest corner of Alberta, the Prairies meet the Rocky Mountains. It has been designated a Biosphere Reserve by the UN and an International Peace Park because it shares an unguarded boarder with Glacier National Park in Montana. Climb to Bear's Hump to get a panoramic view, and head to Cameron Falls to see rapids cascading over 1.5-billion-year-old Cambrian rocks. You can also head to Cameron Lake and rent a paddleboat and paddle right over to the U.S.

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Saskatchewan

The Big Muddy Valley

Big Muddy Badlands. Photo by Douglas E. Walker, courtesy of Sasktourism.com

The Badlands are known as the land of dinosaurs -- a place they called home 70 million years ago. But beyond dinosaurs, the terrain is truly unique. The Big Muddy Valley is one of the most scenic areas, featuring canyons, buttes (tall, isolated hills) and steep cliffs. You'll feel like you've stepped back to prehistoric times as you gaze on Castle Butte, a 230-ft. sandstone marvel that overshadows the surrounding flat lands. An interesting tidbit: the Big Muddy was also the northern end of the "Outlaw Trail," used by American outlaws, including the Sundance Kid, to escape to Canada.

Manitoba

Churchill: Beluga Watching

Belugas in the Bay. Photo by Mike Macri, courtesy of TravelManitoba.com

There's more to see than polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba. While the city is world-famous for polar bear-spotting, it's also a mecca for beluga whale-watching. The nearby waters of the Hudson Bay are home to 60,000 beluga whales every summer -- the highest concentration in the world. Take a boat tour of the area and listen to their conversations using hydrophones or, if you're brave, choose to go kayaking or even snorkelling along the gentle giants. Talk about a bucket list adventure.

Ontario

Georgian Bay Grotto

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Inside the cave at the Georgian Bay Grotto. Flickr photo by Alex Indigo

You'll be forgiven if you come across the Georgian Bay Grotto and think you've found paradise. This natural sea cave, on the shores of the Bruce Peninsula National Park, was carved out by waves hitting the shore for over thousands of years. The hike to the Grotto takes about a half hour and includes walking on rugged limestone and climbing down a 40-ft. cliff, but if you're adventurous enough to do it, you'll see one of Canada's most beautiful, hidden natural wonders.

Quebec

Mingan Archipelago Park

Monoliths at Mingan Archipelago National Park. Flickr photo by Guillaume Cattlaux

Mingan Archipelago National Park, on the remote north shore of the Saint Lawrence River, boasts about 40 limestone islands and more than 2,000 granite islets, not to mention some of the oldest fossilized coral reefs in the world. But there's more to see here than stunning monumental monoliths. The waters are home to colonies of seals, dolphins and whales, while the shoreline is scattered with Atlantic puffin and other sea birds, making it worth the 10-hour drive from Quebec City. Stay at a nearby hotel, or bring your tent and settle in on an island of your choice.

Newfoundland and Labrador

Torngat Mountain Base Camp

Torngat Mountains. Flickr photo by DJANDYC.COM

When you go to Labrador, make time to see the Northern Lights. Why have you never heard that before? About 200 kilometres north of Labrador's most northerly community of Nain, you'll find the Torngat Mountains, a majestic range that is the highest in mainland Canada, east of the Rockies. The Base Camp and Research Station comes alive in the summer with international researchers, as well as travellers who want a unique Canadian vacation. Here, you can experience Inuit life, rugged Canadian landscapes and breathtaking views of the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis.

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New Brunswick

Laverty Falls, Fundy Park

Laverty Falls. Flickr photo by Emmanuel Milou

Most Canadians have seen photos of the Hopewell Rocks at the Bay of Fundy in Fundy National Park, but fewer have seen the nearby Laverty Falls. To see them for yourself, you have to take a 2.5-km hike on the Laverty Falls. The path is carved through the mixed forest, dotted with summer flowers and bubbling streams. Stop for a picnic before continuing your hike. Just one kilometre beyond Laverty Falls, you'll find the even more remote Third Vault Falls.

Nova Scotia

The Annapolis Valley Wineries

For a flavourful glass of wine, head to wine country in Nova Scotia. The Annapolis Valley is one of the first areas to cultivate grapes in North America, with a history of growing grape vines dating back to the 1600s. In the past 25 years, it has solidified itself as a centre for Canadian wine production, with local vineyards producing everything from sparkling wine to numerous white and red varieties and even ice wine. Drive along the meandering country lanes to visit one of the 11 local wineries. Pair your vintage with local goat cheese or the province's famous smoked salmon.

Luckett Vineyards. Flickr photo by Gavin Langille

Prince Edward Island

East Point Lighthouse

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East Point Lighthouse. Photo by John Sylvester courtesy of TourismPEI.com

Prince Edward Island is the land of lighthouses, with almost thirty structures scattered around the island. While the most famous may be the West Point Lighthouse, it's worth heading east, to the eastern tip of the island, to see the East Point Lighthouse. The 64-ft. tower was erected in 1866, at the point where the Saint Lawrence meets the Northumberland Strait. Amongst the churning tides, you can see black-backed whales, seals and various sea birds.

Yukon

Kathleen Lake, Kluane National Park

Kathleen Lake. Flickr photo by Gerode_

Canada has countless lakes but Lake Kathleen, in the Yukon's Kluane National Park and Reserve is a must-see. The lake's turquoise-green, crystal clear water contrasts against the majestic Kluane mountain range, with its snow-capped peaks. You can kayak, canoe or even swim in the water or take a hike along the two back-country trails. For those who want to stay a while, the Lake also has a public campground.

Northwest Territories

Nahanni National Park and Reserve: Virginia Falls

Mason's Rock at Virginia Falls. Flickr photo by Mike Beauregard

Virginia Falls in Nahanni National Park and Reserve is more than twice the height of the more famous Niagara Falls. This stunning waterfall has been carved through the limestone rocks over several centuries. In the middle of cascading water is a resilient mass of rock named Mason's Rock, after Bill Mason, a famous Canadian canoeist, filmmaker and author. Plant lovers will also find several rare orchid species that thrive thanks to the constant mist from the falls. The Nahanni National Park and Reserve is among the world's first four natural heritage locations chosen as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.

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Nunavut

Mount Thor

Mount Thor through the clouds. Flickr photo by Mike Beauregard

Baffin Island's towering Mount Thor, in Auyuittuq National Park, is one of Canada's true natural wonders. At almost 5,500 feet tall, it also has the world's greatest vertical drop (4,101 feet -- the height of two CN Towers). Also known as Thor Peak, the mountain attracts adventurers from around the world who seek to reach its imposing peaks. If you're not bold enough to take on Thor, choose one of the park's hiking trails and pay homage to the granite giant from a vantage point that's a little closer to sea level.

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Tomasz WyszoAAmirski

I have written a lot about oil and pipelines in the past. In doing so I have received a stream of feedback and comments which all pretty much say the same thing: "you can't talk about the concept of ethical oil because that brand has been soured."

You see, a while back an activist/social commentator by the name of Ezra Levant wrote a book titled Ethical Oil. At the same time a website was started called EthicalOil.org. I am not sufficiently familiar with Mr. Levant or the group EthicalOil.org to really comment on either but bring them up for the simple reason that those arguing against the upgrade of our fossil fuel infrastructure repeatedly do so.

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Mr Levant is a very political fellow and has quite a following. As a consequence a lot of people associate the term "Ethical Oil" with Mr. Levant. In doing so they claim that the term has been tainted and that anyone who discusses the idea is taking Mr. Levant's side. This is not true.

The reality is that you can't have a legitimate discussion about the topic of oil without considering the ethics underlying our oil supply. Regardless of branding, ethical sourcing has to be part of the discussion. As a pragmatic environmentalist seeking only to ensure a healthy economy on a healthy planet, I would be remiss if I ignored the topic for such an inane reason.

Some commentators say we should get out of the oil business and cede the field to the despots, the tyrants and the murderers. I disagree.

I have read many recent articles written by activists who repeat ridiculous claims like: "new research shows that the fossil-fuel era could be over in as little as 10 years." As I demonstrate at my personal blog (A Chemist in Langley), the claim that we could eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels in the next 10 years does not even rise to the level of laughable. It is simply magical thinking. If we undertake herculean efforts and dedicate a historically unprecedented per cent of our national gross domestic product to the task we have a reasonable chance of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels in 30-50 years. Even then it is likely closer to the 50-year than the 30-year timeline.

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The problem is that, in the meantime, we will still need oil. In addition, the whole premise of the argument requires that we have a lot of money to throw at the task. That money has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is the Canadian tax base and the way to build that tax base is to take advantage of Canadian natural resources not to undercut them.

Some commentators say we should get out of the oil business and cede the field to the despots, the tyrants and the murderers. I disagree. I see a need to supply the Canadian market with Canadian oil, produced by Canadian workers who pay into the Canadian tax system and thus underwrite the costs of Canadian civil services, the Canadian way of life and the Canadian move away from fossil fuels.

So what is needed to get us to this future? Well the obvious first choice is the Energy East pipeline. The Energy East pipeline builds heavily on existing infrastructure which means it will be faster, easier and cheaper to complete. Contrary to what some critics claim, the Energy East pipeline is not primarily an export pipeline. As the regulatory documentation clearly states Energy East is designed to move low API feedstocks (lighter crude) from the oilfields of Saskatchewan to supply the needs of low API refineries in eastern Canada. It is also intended to supply Canadian oil sands oil to a Canadian refinery in Montreal, owned by a Canadian company (Suncor) that already has plans on the books to upgrade their facility to process that feedstock.

As for the export component, Energy East would also allow Canadian oil sands oil to be shipped to our closest ally (the United States) where it is the ideal feedstock for existing refineries on the Gulf Coast. Those refineries are currently dependent on conflict oil to meet their needs as their traditional sources have dried up. We have a win-win scenario here. We supply conflict-free Canadian oil to a Canadian ally thus helping to pay for our transition away from fossil fuels while immediately taking money out of the pockets of the despots, tyrants and murderers? What can possibly be wrong with that?

As I have written previously:

"I want my personal gasoline purchases to go towards subsidizing Medicare and not subsidizing a despot or paying for a tyrant to bomb his neighbour. I want to know that the oil used in my car was not generated using slave labour in a country without a free press, and where environmental regulations are noted by their absence rather than their application. I want my oil being produced by well-paid Canadians in a country with a demonstrably free press, strong government oversight and a strong tradition of NGOs to watch over the regulator's shoulder."

Put simply, I want the funds generated by Canadian oil to help fund our Canadian transition away from our dependence on fossil fuels. The first step in that process is getting that oil to market in the safest, least environmentally harmful manner and that means via pipeline.

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I still remember the first time my son had diarrhea. My memories of the experience are especially vivid, as I imagine they are for many parents.

"What... again?" I recall my husband asking when I requested yet another run to the drug store for diapers. "You've got to be kidding!" complained my boss at the time, who didn't understand why the daycare insisted that our toddler remain at home.

It feels strange to be writing about our son's diarrhea for a national audience. On one hand, diarrhea is something we Canadians feel relaxed enough to joke about. I remember the skipping rhyme my friends and I used to sing, as we turned the rope in the playground: "Mama mia, papa pia, baby's got the diarrhea!"

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But despite our comic use of the term, diarrhea is something most of us don't feel super comfortable talking about. We don't like to be out of control over our bodily functions, do we? Diarrhea is dirty, smelly, embarrassing... and just plain unpredictable.

I even recall a World Vision trip overseas, when several of us contracted diarrhea from the local water but kept the knowledge to ourselves. We would rather load up on medication to stop the natural flow than "come clean" about our condition and ask the van driver to pull over for yet another rest stop.

Diarrhea is the main reason why children are brought to this medical clinic in South Sudan. It's one of the factors contributing to severe malnutrition in children, including two-year-old Nyane. Photo/World Vision

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No joking matter

In many parts of the world, diarrhea is not about embarrassing conversations between adults, or toddlers licking electrolyte popsicles while watching Max and Ruby on the couch. And it's most definitely no joke.

An estimated 530,000 children around the world die each year from diarrhea, a condition which most Canadians see as an inconvenience. Globally, diarrhea is the second-largest cause of death for babies and children under age five, second only to pneumonia. Diarrhea causes more child deaths than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.

Here in Canada, our children usually recover from their diarrhea pretty quickly. And let's face it, they're well most of the time. Even several bouts of the runs in the same year are no big deal. There's lots of time in between for our kids to build get hydrated, take in nutrients and continue to build up their immune systems.

In Laos, seven-year-old Land fetches water from this stagnant pond for her family to drink and use for cooking and washing. Photo/World Vision

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How diarrhea kills

But imagine diarrhea that's almost constant, as it is for too many children overseas. Your little one has it nearly all of the time. The nutrients you so lovingly provide and the water you carry long distances in the scorching heat are flushed out within an hour of consumption. Your toddler's tiny body simply can't keep anything in. She's weak and listless. And you're desperately afraid.

"Picture what it's like after you've had the stomach flu, when you've got absolutely nothing left in you," says Sara Schulz, World Vision's senior policy adviser for child health. "I remember my baby daughter lying there after battling a virus, barely able to open her eyes. She did recover, as she was getting my breast milk and the flu passed."

"But imagine if she'd had no time to rebound. Imagine if she'd had to deal with the same thing all over again the next week. That's what babies and young children overseas are facing when they're battling diarrhea constantly. Their tiny bodies simply can't cope."

Clean, clear water flows from taps at this school in Ethiopia, pumped up from deep under the ground. It's the kind of water project you can support through World Vision. Photo/World Vision

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How water gives life - and brings death

Diarrhea is one of the body's natural defences against threats like bacteria. But in flushing away the threat, the body also flushes away the water children so badly need to survive. Ironically, it's through water that the bacteria causing diarrhea often enters the body in the first place. Dirty water.

When World Vision first visits a community, there is often just a single water source to meet everyone's needs. That means that cattle are often drinking from -- and defecating in -- the same water that's carried home for babies and children to drink. It's no wonder that clean water is often one of our first priorities.

Lack of sanitation and hygiene are also big reasons why children overseas get diarrhea. When we teach young children here in Canada to wash their hands after going to the bathroom, we do it on the understanding that the water from the tap is clean and bacteria-free. This isn't the case in many parts of the world, where families are washing in water from the local river or pond.

Next time the topic of diarrhea comes up, try not to change the subject.

How you can help

It's not just important for us to talk about diarrhea in the developing world -- it's critical that we do something to help. Part of World Vision's work is to teach moms overseas about the importance of exclusive breastfeeding, until children are at least six months old. Children who are both nourished and hydrated this way have a much lower chance of getting diarrhea.

You can also keep children safe by joining World Vision Canada's clean water campaign, to help provide communities with clean, safe water sources. By combining this with education about sanitation, we gives families a chance to keep those deadly bacteria off their hands and away from their children.

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Next time the topic of diarrhea comes up, try not to change the subject. Like any parent, you might share your memories of your first time. But then tell the person you're talking with how deadly diarrhea can be for children in other places. And invite them to do something to help.

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dave.cournoyer/Flickr Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley

On the French network of the CBC, Premier Rachel Notley is reportedly adamant that a post-carbon Canada can only be achieved through the building of pipelines. She claims that the revenues from petroleum are necessary to finance the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHG). Furthermore she scolds people who disagree with her because they are like "une bande de village" -- in other words, country bumpkins.

Would Premier Notley kindly explain to me how building pipelines to increase the production and the consumption of petroleum can possibly reduce the production of GHG? To my mind, this intrinsic contradiction simply does not add up.

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I can understand that Alberta faces economic hardships; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the cabinet meeting would examine the challenges that Alberta has to face because the price of petroleum has fallen through the floor. But in 2015-16, is the building of pipelines an appropriate remedy for the economic woes of Alberta?

How about moving in the direction of a diversified, post-carbon economy right now? Renewable energies can create more jobs than the obsolete petroleum industry.

If I may paraphrase the editorial of the Guardian, the climate change treaty (COP 21) must result in concrete action. Building new infrastructure (such as pipelines) to promote the consumption of GHG producing petroleum is clearly a very desperate step in the wrong direction.

The time for change is now! Why? As the newly elected prime minister has said: "Because it's 2015."

This is the year of the Conference of Paris. World leaders agreed that climate change must remain below the two-degree Celsius mark. Even Saudi Arabia is trying to build a post-petroleum economy using a $2-trillion fund! Yet, they have greater reserves than Alberta, and these are of conventional petroleum -- in other words, cheaper to pump and with less greenhouse gases.

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So, how about moving in the direction of a diversified, post-carbon economy right now?

Renewable energies can create more jobs than the obsolete petroleum industry. Furthermore since Western Canadian Select (tar sands) oil is usually worth about $15 less than a light crude like Brent on world markets, a carbon tax would be a further handicap for your ailing industry.

"... The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are pressing governments to impose a price tag on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, using economic leverage and technical assistance ... But the leaders of the World Bank, the I.M.F. and other major global institutions say cutting emissions enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change will not be possible unless all fossil fuel polluters are forced to pay for the carbon dioxide they emit..."

Why cling to the past? To dream of a bright future for the tar sands is like dreaming of a huge chuck wagon factory. A chuck wagon is cute during the Calgary Stampede, but you wouldn't want to use this archaic mode of transportation for your daily transit. We cannot return to those good old days!

Carbon tax, a perennially underpriced Western Canadian Select oil, the agreement during the Conference of Paris and climate change are the writing on the wall for the tar sands. It's over!

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Andrew Bret Wallis via Getty Images Family / work life balance.

Many online business models are perfect for working from home in Canada. However, parents of young children have unique challenges that can make it less feasible. Choosing the right home-based business can mean the difference between success and failure (and your sanity or insanity).

Chances are, your biggest challenge is time. In addition to there not being enough hours in the day, it's also difficult to stick to a schedule. You'll need an online business with flexible, part-time hours when your children are young. That usually means avoiding anything that requires working for someone else, like Virtual Assistant (VA) services or consulting.

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My "baby" is now in university, but I worked online for most of his childhood. I've found the following six Internet businesses to be the most practical and lucrative options for myself and fellow work-at-home parents.

1. Freelance Content Writing

Content is king online and many companies are practically begging for it. A quick search for "freelance writing jobs Canada" or "content writing Canada" returns countless opportunities. Set up a simple website and focus on promoting your personal brand.

2. Web translation

In Canada, there are many websites, social media posts and videos that need a French version. Network with web designers and suggest mutual referrals, or you can even offer them a commission if they refer clients to you. You'll often find opportunities on LinkedIn and Craig's List.

3. Start a Blog (But Not Just Any Blog)

Lucrative blogging has a learning curve but you don't have to learn it all at once. The most important thing you need in the beginning is a popular, yet original, niche. You don't want to start out with a topic that's insanely saturated, like your average "mommy blog." You will be much more successful if you dig a niche out of a broader topic that interests you. Once you're established, you can do quite well with sponsorship from individual companies and affiliate marketing. Check your local library for the book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. Some parts are a bit dated now, but it's still the best book I've ever read on the topic.

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4. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate programs allow you to advertise for a company and earn a percentage of the sales you generate for them. More Canadian companies are offering affiliate programs every day. To make a decent amount of money with affiliate marketing, you'll need a website/blog. This will be your home base for everything, from building a mailing list to social media promotion.

5. Info-products

Virtually everyone has a high level of expertise on one topic or another. Create and sell information products online, such as courses, white papers, reports or even an eBook. There are no shipping headaches and the entire world is your market.

6. Sell Online

There are several ways to sell products online that don't require you to fill half of your home with inventory. In fact, one option doesn't require any inventory at all!

Drop shipping allows you to sell products without inventory. You make arrangements with a wholesale supplier or manufacturer to sell their products direct online. You can offer these products on your own website, via online auctions like eBay.ca, or through a sellers' market like Amazon.ca. The supplier takes care of the inventory and shipping on your behalf. The customer price minus the wholesale cost equals your profit. "Drop Shipping for Canadian Sellers" provides additional information and a list of Canadian-friendly suppliers.

Auctions and online marketplaces are the perfect way to dip your toe into online business. While we don't have as many options as American sellers, there are several online marketplaces for Canadian sellers.

Open an online store to sell products or services. Selling products will, of course, require you to purchase or produce inventory. Start with a few products or your own creations and let the sales pay for your expansion. Don't go crazy and stock 5,000 of each item, start small to test the market. Think outside the box and fill any product voids you find in Canada.

You'll find more information about these options online, but I also recommend a trip to the library. Most local libraries have a good selection of books about home-based business and online business. Books allow you to learn a process from start to finish, as opposed to picking up bits and pieces around the Internet. Check for children's events being held by your library to keep the kids amused while you look around, or check out books through their website.

One of the best parts of of starting an online business is it can grow with your children. As they get older, you'll have more time to focus on your work. If nothing else, the skills you'll learn along the way will look great on your resume if you decide to head back into the workforce.

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Drew Angerer via Getty Images WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 31: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau listens to a question at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, March 31, 2016 in Washington, DC. Trudeau participated in a panel conversation titled 'Growing Canada's economy and the North American relationship.' (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

By not telling Canadians the truth about the government's almost certain inability to control future carbon emissions, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is guilty of downplaying the greatest issue ever to face the country and the world -- an issue that will have dire consequences for our children and grandchildren.

So far Trudeau has avoided the seriousness of the issue by talking in generalities. Starting with the UN Climate Summit in Paris and again in New York last week, the Prince of Selfies assured Canadians that the Liberal government will wrestle those troublesome carbon emissions to the ground.

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In New York, there were the all too frequent pretentious statements: "Today, with my signature, I give you our word that Canada's efforts will not cease."

And just to prove that he is a self-styled world leader in this area, Trudeau added: "Climate change will test our intelligence, our compassion and our will. But we are equal to that challenge. I encourage other signatories to move swiftly to follow through on their commitments."

Smiling, generalized speeches are good for the ego and opinion polls, but Trudeau should be using his powerful position to motivate Canadians to take part in a massive national campaign to tackle global warming.

While critics say much of Canada's non-renewables must be left in the ground if we hope to meet our emission targets, Trudeau refuses to take a firm stand either way.

But while critics say much of Canada's non-renewables must be left in the ground if we hope to meet our emission targets, Trudeau refuses to take a firm stand either way. Questioned by reporters at the Liberal Party retreat in Alberta last week, Trudeau said he would not comment on a "hypothetical" new route for Gateway, but stated "the Great Bear Rainforest is no place for a... crude pipeline."

Meanwhile, Canadians continue to pollute the atmosphere at a record pace.

The government's own figures, released in February, showed what we can expect unless a miraculous effort is made to tackle carbon emissions.

At current levels of activity, emissions will hit 768 megatons of carbon dioxide by 2020. That's way above Canada's minimum target of 622 megatons.

By 2030, emissions will have jumped to 815 megatons, compared with a target of 524 for that year.

Now newly released scientific information puts even more pressure on Canada and other countries. Until now it was generally held that life on the planet could continue without disastrous consequences if the overall temperature increase was held to two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.

Research published in the journal Earth System Dynamics last week showed that the 0.5 degrees increase between 1.5 and 2 degrees would mean many more disasters -- longer heatwaves, greater droughts and threats to crops and coral reefs.

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Global temperatures have already reached one degree Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. So, if we believe the new research, we don't have far to go.

To paraphrase a Simon and Garfunkel song from the 70s, the wonderful world we have known is "slip slidin' away."

While it's theoretically possible for Canada to meet its greenhouse gas emission targets, getting even close to meeting the goals appears practically impossible. "To meet any of the 2030 national targets being bruited about implies a change in trajectory which is probably impossible under any circumstances," says Michael Cleland, chairman of the board, Canadian Energy Research Institute.

To get there, the regulations of provincial carbon programs would have to be increased considerably, making it more expensive for business to operate. The cost of gas at the pump and many other services and products would be increased considerably. Much of the oil and gas would have to stay in the ground.

Then there's public reaction to overcome: While most people say they want to see climate change brought under control, many will rebel when their living expenses, but not their incomes, escalate.

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Says Conservative critic Ed Fast: "The Liberals are misleading Canadians by saying everything is a win-win, while not accounting for the true economic costs."

Whenever Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna talk about the challenge ahead they do not mention the possibility that people will experience hardship. They claim that new technologies will mean that carbon emissions can be decreased and the economy and lives improved at the same time.

While other Canadians, such as the provinces and environmental organizations, are not doing enough to fight climate change, the prime minister is the only person who has the power and credibility to demand a national campaign.

Trudeau needs to have an old-style fireside TV chat with Canadians, explaining how his government will engage the country in a massive campaign to protect our environment into the future.

Action needs to be taken on many fronts, from Canadians conserving energy in their everyday lives to funding the switch from non-renewables to renewables.

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Trudeau has a limited window during which he can take serious action that is bound to upset many Canadians. He needs to act now because in two years it will be too late with another election right around the corner.

Perhaps Trudeau lays awake at night thinking about whether he wants to be remembered as the prime minister who helped Canadians overcome the country's worst ever threat, or whether he should be content to be remembered as the Prince of Selfies.

Nick Fillmore is a Toronto freelance journalist who specializes in environmental and international financial issues. He welcomes people to join him on Facebook. He also posts on his blog: A Different Point of View

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Catherine Lane via Getty Images Calendar with pap smear appointment reminder

Written by Alexis Dobranowski, Communications Advisor at Sunnybrook.

It can hurt. And it's certainly an uncomfortable position to be in. And I've yet to meet a women who doesn't dread the cold speculum.

Oh, the Pap test. ~cue crossed legs and sweaty palms~

But the discomfort certainly doesn't seem so bad when you consider a Pap screening test -- where a doctor collects cells from the inner part of your cervix -- is the only way to find early cell changes that might lead to cervical cancer.

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To figure out why a timely Pap test is so important, I talked to Dr. Lisa Del Giudice, family physician on the Sunnybrook Academic Family Health Team and Regional Primary Care Lead, Toronto Central Regional Cancer Program.

What's a Pap test looking for?

A Pap test is looking for abnormal cells -- cancer or pre-cancer -- in the cervix. Sometimes other gynecological cancers can be detected during a Pap test.

A Pap test isn't the same as a test for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

"Sometimes an STD can be picked up on a Pap, but it is not really the appropriate way to test for STDs," Dr. Del Giudice says. "The appropriate STD tests can be done at the same time if there is any concern in this regard."

How can it help prevent cervical cancer?

In 2015, about 640 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer in Ontario and about 150 women died from the disease, according to Cancer Care Ontario. Cervical cancer is almost entirely preventable with regular screening, appropriate and timely follow-up of abnormal results.

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"The Pap test can find the abnormal cells or high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) early so that next steps can be taken or the patient can be screened more often," Dr. Del Giudice says. (Some HPV can lead to the abnormal cell changes and cause cancer).

How often should I have it?

It is recommended that women aged 21 to 69 have a Pap test every three years if they are or have ever been sexually active. Sexually active doesn't just mean sexual intercourse -- oral and digital contact also count. Women who have sex with women should have regular Pap tests.

Research suggests that smoking puts you at higher risk for cervical cancer. If you smoke and are sexually active, be extra certain to book your Pap test every 3 years.

"If you've had a total hysterectomy (uterus and entire cervix removed) then you no longer need to undergo Pap screening. But, if your cervix was left partially intact you still do. Same if you've had your ovaries removed -- you should still have regular Pap tests," Dr. Del Giudice explains.

Who can do the Pap test?

A Pap test can be done at your family doctor's office. If you don't have a doctor, you can get a test done at a walk-in clinic or sexual health clinic.

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What happens if the Pap test 'finds something'?

If your doctors sees an abnormality (something that looks like it could be cancer or pre-cancerous cells), they may want to repeat the test, or do further testing to high-risk HPV and/or refer you to a gynecologist for a colposcopy (a test that takes a bigger sampling of your cervix to check for and to remove pre-cancerous or cancer cells.

Any tips for making it a little less uncomfortable?

If you've had a painful Pap test in the past, mention it to your doctor. All women are different -- your cervix might tilt to the front or back or side. Ask your doctor to note any tilt in your file (so you both can avoid the whole poke-around-down-there-trying-to-find-the-right-of-way next time).

For post-menopausal women, talk to your doctor about possibly applying topical estrogen for one to two weeks before your Pap test.

You can take an Advil a half hour before the test. And try your very best to take a deep breath and relax. (Easier said than done, but try!)

If during the test you are in pain, ask your doctor if you can tip your pelvis up to reposition (by putting your hands under your bum).

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I can't remember if my last Pap was two years ago or three -- but I think it's definitely worth a call to my family doctor (or a look in my MyChart!) to see if it's time to book one. I think I can stand a few moments of discomfort knowing it's for a potential lifetime of better health.

Learn more about women's health from Sunnybrook experts at health.sunnybrook.ca

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Here's what can happen to your teeth and gums if you've missed routine dental checkups during COVID  and what you can do about it.
The five things you need to know on Thursday April 28, 2016

1) A TOTAL SHAH

They got there in the end, but boy was it tortuous. Naz Shahs slo-mo suspension by Labour was an unedifying spectacle that once again meant the party was consumed by its own internal troubles rather than doing the job of Opposition.

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Some Corbyn supporters are so defensive that even when an obvious course of action appears, they hesitate, partly in a stubborn refusal to follow their critics narrative, partly due to a desire for new politics and partly, lets be honest, due to sheer inexperience of fighting media firestorms at this level.

As soon as Guido had highlighted Shahs actions in sharing the Facebook post about Israelis being relocated to the US, someone should have realised that it was so stupid an act that suspension was inevitable (its not just offensive, it runs against party policy, which is to recognise Israel).

Jeremy Corbyns own natural inclination to give people the benefit of the doubt was part of the reason for the 24-hour PR car-crash. Shah has indeed built up good relations with Jewish groups in her constituency and after Corbyn met her yesterday morning he obviously felt the whip didnt need to be withdrawn. And with PMQs looming, it seems he wasnt as focused on it as he should have been. Yet Labour MPs felt he should have held the meeting on Tuesday night and let the NEC disciplinary processes follow their natural course.

But when Ken Livingstone said yesterday that he didnt think anything Shah had done had been anti-semitic, he wasnt a lone voice and plenty of Corbyn supporters (not least his Jewish ally Jon Lansman) feel that firm distinction between anti-Israel and anti-semitic has to be maintained. The problem was that Shahs actions were not just criticising a particular Israeli government, they suggested the state should not exist at all.

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Ironically, BuzzFeeds erroneous report yesterday bolstered the stance of some around Corbyn that making snap judgements was fraught with danger. The sites claim that someone at Labour HQ had doctored Shahs apology - widely repeated by others even after clear denials - fell apart after two phone calls to check it.

Lisa Nandy went public before PMQs (a move that has put her even more on peoples leadership material radar) but other Shadow Cabinet ministers made plain their feelings privately too. Shahs Commons statement helped repair the damage. Andrew Percy, vice chair of Conservative Friends of Israel was willing to show mercy. But even as she made her apology, it was clearly part of a longer process that she knew would include suspension.

On the Today prog, Lucy Powell refused to say if shed want to sit alongside Shah, preferring to say the party process now had to follow its course. Thanks to the very long half-life of social media posts, it may only be a matter of time before more emerges. And if you doubt just how virulent anti-semitism still is in Britain and the wider world today, just check out the Anti-Semitic Tweets Tumblr. It was an experiment than ran for two months in 2013 - even before Shah was busy on Facebook.

2) ALF AND SAFETY

Alf Dubs has another powerful ally this morning in his dogged campaign to allow 3,000 unaccompanied child migrants from Europe into the UK: the Daily Mail leader column. Proving the wisdom of building alliances (something the Lords is rather good at) rather than impugning the motives of those who disagree with you, Dubs admirable and moral compromise is praised by the paper.

It wasnt a good look yesterday as David Cameron tried to shrug off comparisons with Kindertransport in PMQs. And Yvette Coopers powerful intervention won applause from SNP and Labour MPs alike. But it was the speech by Tory MP Stephen Philips that may have just as much impact - proof that you can defy your whips and emerge with honour.

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The Mail says of Cameron: While the Mail respects his argument, we believe that the plight of these unaccompanied children now in Europe  hundreds of them on our very doorstep in the Channel ports of France  has become so harrowing that we simply cannot turn our backs. It is not their fault, after all, that theyve been sent halfway round the world alone to search for a better life, often after seeing family members slaughtered.

As for the danger of encouraging more refugees to send their children on the perilous journey alone, the Mail sees why Mr Cameron is worried. But with the right safeguards in place, and rigorously adhered to, its a danger that can and must be surmounted. It backs a one-off amnesty with a limit on the numbers.

I suspect many of those Tory MPs who wrestled with their consciences this week and abstained may now want to vote against their Government when the Dubs amendment comes back (its now due in the Commons on May 9th and possibly the Lords again on the 10th). The refined Dubs amendment has no specific figure but offers a way out for No.10. Rather than suffer a humiliating defeat, wouldnt it show true moral leadership for the PM to take the initiative and offer the 3,000 safe refuge?

3) HILLSBOROUGH AFTERMATH

That tired old phrase Parliament at its best is often overused but it certainly applied to the Hillsborough statement yesterday. Andy Burnham made the speech of his life, while Theresa May was pitch perfect in balancing the limits on what she could say with a sombre condemnation of the lies and cover-up by police.

Alison McGoverns tearful plea for fans to finally unite was notable too, as she said the murderers, murderers chants by Man Utd fans has got to stop. Both the murderers chant and the rival Munich song have long been a stain on both clubs: will the minority of idiots who sing them finally be shamed into stopping?

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The focus has moved onto the South Yorkshire Police, not least because of the decision to suspend chief constable David Crompton. Labour MPs have been working hard behind the scenes with PCC Alan Billings to ensure it happened. Its an irony that the very system that Labour opposed (crime commissioners) allowed it to act so swiftly yesterday.

But Cromptons days were numbered not because of his actions during the inquest, but by that memo he sent several years ago (thank God for the FoI Act) talking of the media machine favouring the families and not us and the need to put a strong case otherwise we will just be roadkill.

BECAUSE YOUVE READ THIS FAR

Watch Carly Fiorina sing to Ted Cruzs daughters. Cringe isnt the word. It makes Veep look like documentary.

4) UNHOLY UNION

Its Ed Balls day today (see my colleague Graeme Demianyks 5 Things We Miss list) and its worth pondering just what a role he would have in the EU referendum campaign if he was still an MP. As the man who kept the UK out of the euro, its possible to imagine him sharing an op-ed (if not a platform) with his one-time enemy David Cameron to argue why we should stay in the EU.

The PM has done just that with ex-TUC chief Brendan Barber in the Guardian, arguing Brexit would pose a triple threat to jobs, wages and prices. Arron Banks evidence to MPs yesterday didnt exactly help his cause, saying families losing 4,300 each would be a price worth paying to quit the EU. This isnt about pounds and pence, its about our democracy he said.

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But after a bruising week last week, the Brexit camps tails are up (not least as the opinion polls suggest the Obama intervention was politically cost-neutral, and maybe counterproductive, overall). With Priti Patel back in action, eight economists will fight back with their own forecast of how life would over the medium to long term be much better.

As for those claims that Nick Boles caved on the Trade Union Bill to win union backing for Remain, that looks like a brilliant bluff by the union movement (who would never really have gone lukewarm on the Remain campaign). Government sources insist the real reason for those concessions - and we had a huge new one yesterday with ministers accepting opt-in only applied to new union members - was the brutal reality of the anti-Tory majority in the Lords and a desire to get the law done this session.

5) THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-YACHTS

Although its 11,000 staff have little hope of Government support like the steel industry, the BHS row isnt going away in political terms. And Frank Field, whose Work and Pensions Select Committee wants to investigate the pension black hole of the company, is playing hardball.

Field tells the Times that if Sir Philip Green gives evasive or unsatisfactory answers, then his committee will call his wife to give evidence too. With delicious timing, the couple are soon due to take delivery of a 100 million, four-storey superyacht - a snip given their 3bn wealth.

Lady Green, who lives in the tax haven of Monaco, was the legal owner of BHS and technically controls the Arcadia Group (yep, its all about tax). Arcadia sold the high street chain for 1 to a consortium led by a former racing driver who had twice been made bankrupt.

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Sir Philip (who was knighted by Tony Blair and tears a strip off anyone who doesnt call him Sir) still refused to say last night whether he would attend the committee. He also declined to comment on whether Arcadia would waive its claim to 35.4 million from the ruins of BHS, which went into administration on Monday.

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Pic Credit: author's own

Motorsport. The spectator sport featuring vehicles you will never afford, running on fuel that's quietly causing the end of the world. But the bit when they spray champagne on the girls at the end is really sexy.

To a generation who mostly live in cities, to whom car ownership is no longer a rite of passage or a success statement, a lot of motorsport has started to feel a bit burnt out. Yet an action plan to re-invigorate this fast fading area has come from the most unlikely of places: the ruling body itself. The FIA are the leadership behind motorsport's biggest classes - including Formula 1. They've set up an entire holding company, partner infrastructure and league specifically to cater to electric racing - Formula E. As a measure of their commitment, even the sport's official media handles are titled FIA Formula E. This isn't supposed to be a spin off - Formula E is intended to become the industry leading sport within a decade. Having already spoken to the DS Virgin Racing team briefly before, last weekend we headed over to Paris to witness the race from the pits and see exactly what the situation is down on the ground. Here's what we learned.

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Existing motorsport fans: They do make noise. They're also more exciting to watch.

Picture credit: Author's own

The most obvious takeaway from being at the event: Formula E cars are noisy. Not quite as noisy as F1 cars, granted, but by no means silent. It's an odd sound too - the general consensus among all camera crews there was "Like a TIE fighter" although jet, or helicopter turbine would also fit. There's also the fact that the races all take place in city centres - in Paris' case, the historic central monument known as Les Invalides. The races are only one hour. The tracks are only about 2km long, so wherever you stand, there's cars every few seconds. The corners and bends are narrow and it's a city centre: there's potholes and varied surfaces everywhere. Add to this the fact that Formula E cars have a linear torque curve - that means they go from zero to full speed near instantly and the race is a series of screeching corners, bumps and spin-outs on hairpins. Small wonder then that as yet there's been no one team that's established a series lead over the others.

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This is attracting a new crowd. On purpose.

The marketing, the advertising, the commentary around Formula 1 is a worship of fuel engines. They're sexy, they're grunting. You've got cylinder diameter, exhaust size, number of valves, all the Freud you can eat. Formula E has gone guns blazing to showcase electric motors, but takes a different approach. The pits are open: members of the public can watch from feet away as cars scream in to be pummeled by dry ice in order to cool the batteries down. The battery percentages are displayed on the televised footage so people can debate whether to use reserves now or wait later in the race. In fact in the build up to the race parts of the entire track are open, people can wander around, taking pictures next to the cars or talk to the drivers, most of whom spend time teasing each other semi-seriously in the build up to the race.

Loic Duval of Dragon Racing appears on a scooter halfway through a DS Virgin Racing team track walk specifically to wind up Brit driver Sam Bird. Picture Credit: author's own

All this hasn't attracted a whole lot of motoring enthusiasts - there's a notable absence of motoring journalists present. It does however attract hordes of curious students, young couples and general weekend wanderers who find themselves turning left out of the shops and walking into a racing track. Selfies fired.

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DS Virgin Racing are looking way beyond Formula E, as are many other teams.

Pic Credit: Author's own

We spent a lot of our time in the DS Virgin Racing pits, which felt like being on the film set of a sci-fi movie. In place of chunks of engine and people running around with tyres, there were a tonne of flashing lights, alarms, laptops and just dry ice everywhere. In between frantic calls and team radio chatter (DS Virgin Racing drivers Sam Bird and Jean-Eric Vergne took first and third in qualifying. Vergne went on to take second place on the podium whilst Bird - who had sat at second for almost the entire race, spun out with 6 laps to go and ended at 6th.) the team all have different ideas behind where Formula E will go. For group CTO Sylvain it's the speed in which innovations happen that will drive the sport forward. "The latest generation aren't interested in cars. They're interested in tech. This is more directly translatable. Formula E is half car half IT. Modifications are not expensive. Anything we learn here - efficiency, speed, engine braking, is mostly software led. It could go from track to market within one year." You buy a cheap electric runaround, you rent a budget electric car on holiday and it's got acceleration based on what was learned at a race just last season.

For current Virgin Formula E team Principal Alex Tai, Formula E opens two avenues. One has little to do with motoring and everything to do with engines. Virgin has its sights firmly set on electric commercial aircraft. There already exists engines powerful enough for the job - the problem is battery life. Formula E - with its focus on battery preservation (teams are allowed just two per race, and in a few seasons time, that'll drop to just one) leads the way.

The second reason is conservation based. "60% of the world live in cities. In a few years time, we'll look back at petrol cars and the city pollution they caused the way we look back today at smoking in restaurants." Sexy in a throwback kind of way perhaps, but in the grand scheme of things, odd that it persisted so long.

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The challenge: is making it sexy.

Steps have been taken to remove elitism, to remove sexism, to remove pollution from motorsport via Formula E. It happens on city doorsteps, it's proactively open to the public. The Fanboost system - which is undergoing a re-work - means spectators can literally hit a button on their phone or sent a tweet to open up extra engine power on their favourite drivers cars mid-race. But it's not quite sexy yet. This became one of the primary conversations around the bars and cafes surrounding the track. Remove all the roaring engines, champagne grandstands and bikini-clad placard holding women and you may be fighting the good fight, but it does feel that the sport is missing something.
New research demonstrates that the London Evening Standard has abused its monopoly position to produce a relentlessly pro-Conservative bias in its coverage of the London mayoral election.

The Standard is the only newspaper that covers the whole of London and its editor, Sarah Sands, maintained in an interview recently that it would be "scrupulous" in giving the two main candidates equal coverage in the run-up to the London mayoral elections on 5 May.

Researchers from Goldsmiths, University of London, in conjunction with the Media Reform Coalition, analysed every article, relating to the mayoral campaign, over a two-month period (8 February to 15 April).

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We found that the candidates have indeed been given almost equal coverage in terms of the numbers of articles but it is far from equal in the way the candidates have been treated.

The newspaper reproduced, almost verbatim, 13 out of a possible 15 news releases sent by Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith. Only three out of eight campaign news releases sent by the Labour candidate, Sadiq Khan, were covered.

We also found that the Labour candidate had attracted twice as many negative headlines as his Tory rival. Nearly all the negative headlines relating to Khan came within the first ten pages of the paper where they would be most likely to be seen. Three of them were on the front page. Negative headlines about Goldsmith mostly got buried at the back.

The three longest stories attacking Khan were devoted to attempts to link him to extremism. One was headed: "Exposed: Sadiq Khan's family links to extremist organisation." The 'link' was his ex-brother in law's supposed connection to an organisation some 20 years ago.

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Another headlined on the front page: MINISTER: KHAN IS UNFIT TO BE MAYOR focussed on Khan's supposed connection to Suliman Gani, a controversial Imam from his Tooting constituency. Khan is well known to be at odds with the preacher over many issues, in particular gay marriage, which Khan supports. On the other hand Gani has himself now tweeted pictures of local Conservative politicians, and Zac Goldsmith in his company.

Goldsmith only attracted six negative headlines over the research period. Two of them related to his tax affairs. This was an important subject, but they only made it to page ten, in spite of the fact that offshore investments and tax issues have attracted a great deal of press attention elsewhere. In both stories the Goldsmith rebuttals were given equal prominence and he was given favourable treatment in editorials.

When it comes to positive headlines, the story is reversed. It is Zac who grabs the opening pages of the paper and Khan who is relegated to the back pages. With Zac attracting far more positive headlines than his rival.

The fact that the Evening Standard is a Conservative supporting newspaper will probably not come as much of a surprise to Londoners. Of course editors can back whoever they choose, but a truly free press depends on audiences having the opportunity to access an alternative view. London commuters don't have that choice. The only London focussed paper circulating for free on the transport network is the Evening Standard, with an estimated readership of 1.5million, and on most of the underground there is not even the choice of going online.

A report also released on Monday by the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King's College, London, found that the problem of monopoly news providers is by no means confined to London. There are monopolies in 43% of Local Authority Districts in Scotland, England and Wales. In most of the LADs surveyed, these newspapers also provide a news monopoly online.

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Increasingly in the Calais jungle, people are giving up on their dreams to reach the UK, and going elsewhere. For some, this means back home.

Speaking to one of the men who was working in the newly-established kids restaurant* on Saturday, cooking the kids lunch and playing their favourite films on the large television in the middle of the room, he told me he had a flight back to Afghanistan booked for the next day.

I was shocked. Surely he wasn't considering returning to a life that he had risked so much to leave? I asked, naively, if he wasn't in danger in his home country. "Yes, but it's better than this shit life," he replied, motioning around the make-shift restaurant, and the mud track outside.

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This man had left Afghanistan two years previously and sought asylum in Italy. He'd be granted it but struggled to find work and couldn't support himself. "Yes, I had a document, but what could I do with it?" he asked me. "Could I eat it? Could I make a pillow out of it?" Instead of sleeping rough in Italy, he'd decided to try and reach the UK where he thought he would be able to find work with his grasp of the language. Since 2014, he has made it across to the UK from Calais on two occasions. The first time, he was detained and spent three months in jail; the second six months. Both times he was sent back to Calais.

What would he do upon his return to Afghanistan, I wondered. "I'll join the Taliban," he told me, without ceremony or the expectation of any kind of a reaction. Feeling increasingly like a naive child, I protested that the Taliban were helping to destroy his country, and generally coming across as rather evil.

He shrugged. "There are good Taliban, and bad Taliban," he explained, and for the second time in a few seconds, I had absolutely no idea how to respond, having never considered the possibility that there was anything other than 'bad Taliban'. This person had met members of the Taliban, had seen them in the skin; for me, they were faceless embodiments of suppression and violence.

"The good Taliban just kill the military and foreigners. The bad Taliban kill the public. I'll join the good Taliban."

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"I'm a foreigner, would you kill me if I came to Afghanistan?" I asked.

"Yes, I'd kill you. When I try and come to your country, it's legal this, illegal that, blah blah. But you're allowed to come to mine?". He seemed angry, but in a controlled way, in a distant way. He wasn't accusing me directly; he was coolly explaining that the world was unfair and imperfect.

"What's the difference between me and you? Because you are white, and I'm not, you have the right to a better life than me? Because I have black hair, and you fair hair?"

I agreed that it was perplexing and unfair, and eventually he relented. "I wouldn't kill you," he said, "I was joking". Still, I persisted, did he really have no other options other than to join the Taliban?

"If I join the military, the Taliban will kill me. If I join the Taliban, the military will kill me. What choices do I have?"

Couldn't he get a job in the city? "I risk getting bombed every day I work in the city," he retorted, flashing defiant eyes at me.

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It was dawning on me that the Taliban, like ISIS, is not primarily made up of religious zealots, but ordinary people; people happy to help children in refugee camps eat properly, and happy to kill the military and foreigners if that was a way to survive.

I couldn't think of anything else to say to this man, who seemed so much to dwarf me in terms of worldly experience. I left to make a meeting with some of the medical teams. I thanked him for chatting to me, and wished him luck.

His response was warm. "Goodbye. Thanks for coming here, and for looking after the children," he said, returning to his cooking, and pouring a cup of Chai tea for one of the teenage boys.

I left, wondering what conversation we'd have had, had we been in Afghanistan and he'd been a member of the Taliban. Probably there wouldn't have been any conversation at all.

* The kids restaurant where this man was working is not associated with either the Baloo's Youth Centre or the Women and Children's Centre on the camp. It is a refugee-run initiative.

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DJ Magazine has just published its 25th birthday issue, with a cover featuring 25 pioneers of electronic music who've previously appeared on the cover over the past 25 years. Many of these figures arguably chose themselves, but there has been some criticism online and on social media from people pointing out that there are no women amongst the 25.

Women have been a crucial part of dance music ever since its inception. From DJ/producers to promoters to managers, agents, PR reps and beyond, women have contributed immeasurably to the globalised scene. For the 25th anniversary of DJ Mag, though, we had some very distinct criteria to be one of the chosen 25 pioneers. The pioneer had to have been a DJ/producer on the cover of DJ Mag in the past 25 years, and had to have pioneered something that's changed the landscape of the scene within the past quarter of a century.

This criteria immediately discounted the early pioneers of techno and house music, because they did their main pioneering work before 1991. So the Belleville Three from Detroit - Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Sanderson - were ruled out by virtue of releasing their seminal work in the mid- to late-eighties, and similarly the late eighties pioneers of the UK scene - Danny Rampling in London, Mike Pickering in Manchester etc - were also eliminated from the list. However, inside the same issue, we've run a lengthy piece covering the people who laid the foundations for the modern-day dance scene pre-1991 - from electronic icons like Delia Derbyshire, to funkateers James Brown and George Clinton, dubmeisters Lee 'Scratch' Perry and King Tubby, electro fiends Kraftwerk and Bambaataa, disco cats like Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder and Tom Moulton, Chicago house pioneers like Frankie Knuckles and Marshall Jefferson, acid house don DJ Pierre, and so on.

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We began drawing up lists. Carl Craig represented the second wave of Detroit techno. Aphex Twin represented the experimental tendency, Coldcut the audio-visual element. David Guetta comes in for a lot of flak, but - love him or hate him - he was instrumental in breaking dance music in mainstream America. Smokin' Jo was in my own original 25, for inspiring other women to DJ amongst other achievements, but the question here became 'Is a self-referential reason sufficient?'

This 25 pioneers feature is historical, and historically women have been under-represented in dance music. That's one of the reasons why DJ Mag ran a Women In Dance Music special a couple of months ago. One of the themes of this issue was that change is happening in the industry, but it needs to happen faster.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Perhaps we should have included at least one or two women pioneers on the 25th anniversary cover. But as the list developed, it became difficult to replace people. Should Sister Bliss from live dance act Faithless be in there? But then we'd have to replace Liam Howlett from The Prodigy. The Chemical Brothers, Underworld and Orbital also missed out, as we concluded that The Prodigy had the biggest reach and impact of all the live dance bands. And so on.

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Should Annie Mac from BBC Radio 1 have been included at the expense of Pete Tong? There's been a slew of wicked women techno DJs over the past two decades - from originals like Kelli Hand, Brenda Russell and Misstress Barbara through noughties artists like Ellen Allien, Miss Kittin, Andrea Parker and Magda to more recent talent including Jennifer Cardini, Ida Engberg, DJ Rebekah, Nina Kraviz, Nastia, Tania Vulcano, Steffi, Louisahhh!!! and beyond. But should any of these have replaced Jeff Mills or Richie Hawtin in our pioneers list? Plenty of other prominent male techno figureheads didn't make the cut either - Dave Clarke, Mr C, Chris Liebing, Dave Angel, Darren Emerson, Ricardo Villalobos, Loco Dice, Tiga... Any list automatically causes controversy by the nature of who it excludes.

Plenty of women have been on the cover of DJ Mag in recent times - two out of four this year, for instance - and we pride ourselves on being an inclusive publication. Retrospective positive discrimination wasn't going to serve anybody, but the history books are full of privileged white men and all too often the contribution of women is overlooked or marginalised. Looking forwards, there needs to be prominent female role models in all walks of life - particularly electronic music - and DJ Mag needs to continue to play its part in our scene.

For that reason, I now believe it was a mistake not to include any women on our 25th birthday cover. It's not a great look to have such a 'sausage-fest' (a load of forty- and fifty-something blokes), especially now that increasing numbers of women are DJing, producing, promoting, managing, running labels and so on more than ever. Even though a lot of women are doing things on their own terms, there's still sexism in the industry - whether that be labels just featuring bikini-clad babes on their CD covers, female DJs being judged by their looks over and above their music, or whatever. DJ Mag's very own Top 100 DJs poll - voted for by the public - threw up some horribly sexist responses from high-profile international DJs late last year when we asked them why there aren't more women in the Top 100 ("They should spend less time in the make-up store", and so forth). Sexism in the industry needs to be challenged, at all levels, and we should've recognised that women often have to work twice as hard - and be twice as good - to 'make it' in electronic music. The struggles some have experienced - the comments, the abuse - needs to be recognised and called out. The dance scene without women is unthinkable.
The media, undeniably, has a great deal to merit it. However, there is one annoyance that has been gnawing at me for several months. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour's leader and therefore the leader of the opposition, has openly stated his opposition to Trident nuclear weapons because of his own belief in pacifism - I use this word cautiously because I am aware during an interview with Andrew Marr he actually refused to assign himself with this label. Corbyn concluded "No, I wouldn't describe myself as a pacifist, but I would describe an act of violence, an act of war, as absolutely a very last resort." His avoidance of the word frustrates me, avoiding labels doesn't necessarily mean you don't subscribe to the beliefs of the definition. Media pressure was probably a large part of Mr Corbyn's answer and for the scrutiny of our politicians the media use I am grateful. However, why does the word 'pacifism' always seem to be used so closely to the emphatic, emotive adjective, 'radical'?

With the new leader's rise the idea of pacifism has been debated and described by writers in a number of ways. A Telegraph writer, Julia Hartley-Brewer, in December of last year before the crucial parliament regarding Syria suggested, "Pacifism is not a more moral stance. On the contrary, it is deeply immoral." It took me a moment to mull over her notion before continuing to read. Her article concluding that "pacifists will happily ignore the screams of the innocents." Hartley-Brewer is obviously entitled to her opinion and I will not suggest I am in anyway 'better' because of the ideology I choose to follow. However, I believe her piece is an exhibition of ignorance regarding what pacifism is and the strength the idea can have, something a lot of people don't realise.

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Pacifism is not passivism. The walk, led by pacifist Martin Luther King Jr., from Selma to Montgomery of civil rights activists is a prime, but by no means the only, example of the power in non-violence. It took three attempts for the group to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge and continue the 54-mile journey but they refused to reduce themselves to violence. No one would suggest these actions were passive in the same way no pacifist would suggest holding this belief was easy. Choosing a peaceful path, does not as Hartley-Brewer and others might suggest, mean doing nothing, quite the opposite. Pacifism is about finding other paths than violence, ones of discussion, cooperation, not running away from conflict but simply the belief we ought to find a resolution that doesn't involve war.
We don't need to look at rigorous scientific studies to know that the formative years of our lives are hugely important in determining how we will fare later on. How effectively we learn to regulate our emotions and relationships, tolerate distressing situations and view ourselves as lovable and deserving are largely based on the skills, coping mechanisms and beliefs about ourselves that we acquire throughout childhood and adolescence. However much we fret about the pressures faced by children and young people today or how mental health problems amongst this population group are on the rise, we mustn't forget that this time of life is one of huge potential, ripe with opportunity. As well as learning maths, science and Shakespeare, there should be room to learn about resilience in the face of the challenges life throws at all of us, and importantly, how to manage mental health as well as physical health. With between two thirds and three quarters of adult mental illness (besides dementia) being apparent by the age of 18 (Campion et al, 2013), the opportunity for developing proactive responses to mental health difficulties as well as strategies to prevent them occurring in the first place is especially pertinent in this age group.

The last UK epidemiological study in 2005 suggested that 10-20% of under 18s will at any one time have mental health problems significant enough to warrant specialist help, yet the prime way we equip young people for life is through education and pressure to achieve good exam results. The path to a good life we are told is through attainment, qualifications, a salary and paying taxes - not simply doing what we want or enjoy. Whilst we generally recognise as a society that physical health is needed in order to accomplish these things, we still grossly overlook how none of this is possible without an adequate level of mental health.

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This raises questions for our education system about both the way we define success, and how we prepare young people to achieve it. Do we want school-leavers to have a good foundation in several subjects, sound grades and the possibility for employment, further training or higher education? Of course we do. But the single-minded pursuit of these goals as the measure of success for individuals and educational establishments is so short-sighted. I only have to look at my experiences at school to see that whilst I couldn't have been more successful on paper with my sweep of A*s, in no way was my school education a success story. When I developed OCD and depression in my mid-teens, I managed to keep it hidden from my school and parents for the best part of the year whilst skiving off in parks and back lanes. I assume my teachers weren't concerned about me being absent for the same reason that they thought it was OK not to stimulate me at all intellectually - because I would get top grades anyway. The result was that as I became more and more isolated and increasingly emotionally distressed, my health deteriorating as I developed severe anorexia, perhaps as an visible expression of the needs that were going unmet in my life. When I left school it was because it wasn't worth the fight of trying to get teachers to understand about my experience or to cooperate with mental health services, or facing confrontation with staff members who had little to no knowledge of eating disorders, who even told me that they thought I wasn't coming to lessons because I believed I was too good to attend and was making the choice not to.

What does it say of our education system if there are people like me who may well be leaving school with good CVs, but are totally unequipped to cope with the basics of life? Being unable to overcome the barriers my condition presented to participation with my peers, I left school with a dread of socialising. I was unable to regulate my emotions, concentrate on anything besides losing weight, or even feed myself. The idea of holding down a job was an impossibility and I even had to turn down my place at University in Cambridge. All this and I was still evaluated as an educational success that reflected favourably on the school as being able to produce 'good results'. If our highest aspiration for our young people is that they are successful academically and have a good prognosis for being contributors to society in economic terms, then we overlook their humanity to a degree that we cannot afford. We need to shift the evaluation of outcomes in education from exam results alone to more holistic, and in my perspective, more valuable results such as being mentally well and better equipped to cope with the whole of life, not just work.

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For this to be the case we would need to change the way that education is often for the purpose of jumping through hoops rather than the enjoyment of the process of learning. Extra-curricular activities would need to be encouraged not because they look good on CVs and applications, but rather because they are pleasurable in themselves and beneficial for wellbeing. We would need to see an end to the arts being derided and overlooked in curricula in favour of STEM subjects, leaving less room for creativity and more potential for the erosion of individual enjoyment for many students. We would also need to see space given over for psychoeducation and mental health awareness-raising, which I only wish I had been able to access in my school when I was feeling so desperately alone and abnormal in my struggle with my health.
Since 2013, Bangladesh has repeatedly been in headline news across the world due to systematic and incessant targeted killings. In the mainstream media, both in South Asia and the West, the focus has been generally on high profile murders of secular and progressive bloggers. This includes the recent worldwide broad coverage on the tragic murder of Xulhaz Mannan, editor of Bangladesh's first LGBT rights magazine. However, not many know that these killings are only one part of the story. Secularists and bloggers are not the only community under attack in Bangladesh. Unless other pieces of the story are taken into account, the picture will remain incomplete and a meaningful resolution may remain evasive.

A cursory macro-level glance indicates systematic attacks on free thought and alternative voices belonging to diverse backgrounds and ideologies in Bangladesh. For a detailed breakdown of these attacks (29 targeted murders during Jan 2013 - April 2016 including 11 Sunni Sufis, 10 secularists, 3 Shias, 2 Christians, 1 Hindu and 2 foreigners), refer to Table 1 and this University of Huddersfield study. In addition to secularists, liberals and atheists, victims also include people of faith, such as those from Shia, Sunni Sufi, Ahmadi, Christian and Hindu backgrounds.

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On the surface, it is hard to find a common denominator amongst the victims of targeted attacks in recent years. Some of them were practicing Christians or Muslims of Sunni Sufi or Shia backgrounds, others were secularists while a few were atheists. Instead of finding commonality in these diverse victims, it may be more productive to focus attention on their killers.

Media reports suggest that militants affiliated with the Islamic State (IS), Al Qaeda in Subcontinent (AQIS), Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), Ansar al-Islam and Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) are involved in these attacks. What is common in these murderous groups is the radical Salafi/Wahhabi and Deobandi ideology that is extremely intolerant of dissent and pluralism. Any person or community that does not subscribe to their doctrinal beliefs or political agenda of global Islamist domination (Caliphate) is considered fair game for violence.

In recent years, the Indian police has made several arrests and found that at least two of the AQIS top leaders studied or were affiliated with the Darul Uloom Deoband, the historical seminary where the Deobandi ultra-orthodox movement began in 1866.

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Bangladesh has a rich culture and pluralist traditions; it is after all the land of the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. With a population of more than 162 million (2016 est.), it is a diverse country in terms of religious ideology. About 87% of Bangladeshis are Muslims, followed by Hindus (12%), Buddhists (1%) and Christians (0.5%). Sunni Muslims mainly comprise of Barelvi (Sufi), Deobandi and Salafi (Ahl-e-Hadith or Wahhabi) denominations. There are also Shia and Ahmadi communities.

The roots of religious extremism can be traced back to 1971 when the Jamaat-e-Islami and its activists in Al-Shams and Al-Badar militant groups were involved in the systematic murders of nationalist intellectuals, activists, writers and academics in Bangladesh. Many Jamaat's top leaders have been tried and convicted on charges of crimes against humanity committed during the country's independence war in 1971. Three of those have already been hanged.

A recent issue of IS's magazine hailed the spate of attacks as the "revival of jihad in Bengal" and urged its followers to target foreigners, Shia and Christians in Bangladesh.

While the government seems to deny the presence of the IS in Bangladesh, it is true that all of the attacks perpetrated against secularists and persecuted religious communities are being carried out by interlinked groups operating under different names. However, in their core, the attackers seem to share the murderous Takfiri Salafi/Wahhabi and Deobandi ideology.

A Takfiri is a radical Islamist who considers all those religious groups and individuals kafir (infidel) and worthy to be killed who do not subscribe to his religious doctrine or political agenda. Salafis are an ultra-orthodox minority within Sunni Islam and are heavily sponsored and funded by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Arab Sheikhdoms. Wahhabi is the Saudi version of Salafis. Deobandis are the South Asian variant of Salafis/Wahhabis, and despite some differences of jurisprudence, align themselves with global Salafi and Wahhabi movements.

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As an example, Islamic State (IS) and Al-Qaeda are primarily Salafi/Wahhabi outfits with some participation by Deobandis while Taliban (TTP), Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and Lashkr-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) are Deobandi outfits with some Salafi Wahhabi participation. In this context, JMB and ABT, not unlike Jamaat-e-Islami, could be seen as joint outfits of Deobandi and Salafi Wahhabi Islamists in Bangladesh.

In his research on terrorism, Chris Blackburn (2006) notes that the followers of the Deobandi sect of South Asia and the Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia follow an ultra-orthodox interpretation of the Islamic faith, which has often led them on a collision path with other sects who have more tolerant and progressive attitudes within Sunni Islam. Blackburn further notes that Gulf States continue to promote Wahhabism in the Muslim world- with the Deobandi movement being a close ally.

Just like Bangladesh, Pakistan has seen the systematic targeting of free thinkers and alternative voices. From Rashid Rahman (lawyer and rights activist) to Shabbir Shah (academic) and from Parween Rahman (social worker) to Sibte Jaafar (poet and rights activist), this radical ideology has claimed countless lives of diverse communities and faith groups across Pakistan. Just a year ago, brutal assassins linked to the proscribed terror outfit SSP murdered Pakistan's leading progressive activist and micro-blogger, Sabeen Mahmud. Whether it is the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh or its ideological affiliate, Sipah-e-Sahaba in Pakistan, the tragic results have been the same. Hate ideology cannot thrive amongst vibrant alternative discourses and their only methodology is the brute suppression and elimination of diversity.
One of the biggest stories of the year, concerning the longest jury-trial in British history, on perhaps the most notorious miscarriage of justice this country has seen - and it wasn't deemed worthy of being on the front page of Britain's biggest-selling tabloid?

If it was just a bad editorial call, why did its Murdoch-owned stablemate, The Times, make the same misjudgement? Even now, in the face of incontrovertible evidence of the Hillsborough victims total innocence, they and their proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, give every impression of begrudging us this historic victory.

This is why the mood in my city towards The Sun remains one of raw fury. The newspaper's disgusting, lurid and baseless slurs against Liverpool fans - that they pickpocketed the victims, fought with police and urinated on the dead - did so much to manufacture the scurrilous narrative that they were to blame for the tragedy, which it took until this week to emphatically shoot down with the inquests' verdicts.

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The Sun's coverage amplified the grief of the families and fans. The hurt caused was deep and genuine. The effects of the paper's tawdry coverage has lasted for nearly three decades.

But Kelvin MacKenzie, the editor at the time, now says he was "completely duped" after being fed the story by a press agency. Pull the other one. This is the classic defence of ignorance, in this case, from the ignorant.

MacKenzie was the useful idiot of a concerted establishment cover-up that transferred blame away from the incompetence of the police and towards the victims of their woeful mistakes. A chain of deceit that stretched from Downing Street to its favourite proprietor down to its reliable lackey of an editor.

Of course MacKenzie wasn't to blame for the 'first' Hillsborough tragedy - the death of the 96 and injury to 800 more - this was primarily the fault of the police (as the jury recorded this week); but he was a key player in the 'second' Hillsborough tragedy: the smearing of the dead and injured.

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As I said in my speech at the Hillsborough commemoration outside St. George's Hall last night, there is one thing that today's editor of The Sun, Tony Gallagher, can do for us, one simple act of decency and contrition and that's to sack Kelvin MacKenzie as a columnist forthwith, as it's clear he hasn't got the decency to quit himself.

After all, there is no shortage of clapped-out, misanthropic right-wing hacks who can churn out mean-spirited bilge once a week, so why do they persist with MacKenzie? He is a disgrace to journalism and an abiding symbol of how the paper isn't really sorry for the hurt and harm it did to the Hillsborough families and Liverpool more generally.
Last year one of my visits to the Central African Republic (CAR) ended in an evacuation across the river into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as intense fighting shook Bangui, the capital city where we were. The night after we crossed the river we could clearly see and hear the artillery shells and the explosions in Bangui, wondering about the fate of the people still there and the future of the country.

Recently I had the opportunity to go back to the country again. But, this time, without any shooting or shelling. This was a welcome change as the last three trips had all included some level of gunfire.

It is often said that the most vulnerable and those most in need are found in the most difficult and dangerous places in the world. CAR is one of them. It is also one of the places that is often described as a forgotten crisis. It does not make the headlines often, it has few national security implications for the West and major news stations seldom visit. It is one of those places that is easy to forget, and where providing any kind of assistance is really difficult.

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Yet, if we as an international community are serious about providing for the most vulnerable and most in need, we must do so in CAR. This largely forgotten country has much more than its fair share of those in desperate need.

CAR ranks towards the bottom in most development ranking tables, but profile high up in the less desirable ones of atrocities, need and displacement. There have been numerous coup d'etats in the country's short history. Thousands of children have been forced to become child soldiers. Last year you could buy a hand grenade for less than a dollar.

A fragile peace is now in place, support by thousands of UN peacekeepers and the French army. Several hundreds of thousand people have fled to neighbouring countries.

At the moment this assistance looks like a peacekeeping mission, support for local peacebuilding initiatives to restore social cohesion and substantial humanitarian assistance. Aid from World Vision and many other organisations has made a significant positive impact in the country, and it must continue. Aid be scaled up as required in the country until it is no longer needed. While elections took place in a largely non-violent manner, it is far too early for the international community to stop paying attention.

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Much infrastructure and many homes have been destroyed, and there is growing fear and uncertainty on what will happen if hundreds of thousands of people return with nowhere to stay. What needs to happen now is the continuation of humanitarian assistance for displaced people, and comprehensive support for those who have been displaced and are now seeking to return.

The elections were a trembling step forwards and now this window of peaceful opportunity must be seized by the leaders of CAR. The international community must support national and local leaders to give communities the best possible prospect of rebuilding their country.

As was pointed out to me in Bangui recently: in the world of international development and humanitarian assistance this is one of those moments when we get to show that our stated commitment to help those most in need is indeed more than simply inspiring words.
The row about whether all schools should have to adopt academy status is an unwelcome distraction.

You would have thought that the European referendum was sufficiently exciting. A Cabinet split into two factions, a decision which will determine Britain's place in the world for a generation, a debate on which the future of Europe may depend; surely this is the vortex into which all the energies of the politicians are being sucked, the anvil on which reputations are made and broken, the only significant question for 2016? It seems not.

Few readers will have commanded a ship going into battle, but those of us who have read Patrick O'Brian know how you had to begin in Napoleonic times. The first thing was to clear the decks for action. That meant stowing all the kit not required for fighting so that the decks were free for the gun crews to fire the broadsides on which victory depended. Rather in the same way you would have expected that the Government would try to free itself of other contentious business so that it could focus its attention on the one debate which really mattered and minimise the chance of making mess of it. In fact it has done nothing of the sort. In his recent Budget speech George Osborne, who seems to have graduated from being Chancellor of the Exchequer to a Mikado style "Lord High Everything Else", created a row within his own party over whether schools throughout England should be forced to become academies.

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That involves the government in a second major conflict which can only divert attention from the more important issue, the first, of course, being the dispute with the junior doctors. One can see how the Government got locked into that one. The background, it will be remembered, was a public concern, inevitably egged on by the press, that patients were not being adequately treated in hospital over weekends. That led, as things do in these populist times, to a manifesto pledge to create a seven day a week health service, and in fulfilment of that pledge the government is trying to force a new contract on junior doctors. Not being an expert on the health service, I cannot judge whether the old contract is fairer than the new one, but the move has certainly created a huge level of resentment in the medical profession, with many saying that the story about care not being as good at the weekends was wrong anyway so that the manifesto pledge started from the wrong place. Perhaps that is right but, however you look at it, to get the junior doctors out on their first ever total strike can hardly be described as a management success.

With this presumably unwelcome distraction already there, the Government has decided to push forward with the conversion of the remaining local authority schools, and in particular primary schools, to academies. No doubt they think that that is a better system for governing schools and it may be that they are right. Even if that is the case, however, it is not obvious why you would force the new system on schools which are already well run or why you would announce it without fully explaining how local authorities are to satisfy their statutory obligations to see that education is provided without control of schools. Perhaps the change will tidy up the system, but is it really worth getting embroiled in this row when everyone should be focusing on a far more important debate?

Of course, generally speaking, governments like reform. They are made up of individuals, and people who go into politics are generally keen to help improve the national lot. Perhaps they look at the achievements of Atlee's postwar Labour Government with its great reforming agenda and hope to be part of an administration which is mentioned in the same breath. There is nothing wrong with that as an ambition. There are practical advantages too. A Government with a clear program will simply ride over misjudgements and scandals which would stick to a becalmed administration. Forward thrust acts as a political Teflon. Besides many of the reforms being introduced by this Government are admirable. Mr Gove deserves credit for his program to humanise the prison system. Although it is proving difficult to do, the simplification of benefits into a universal credit is clearly long overdue. But there must be a risk of undertaking too many struggles at once, and the conversion of good schools to academies does seem like one of those things which could have been left on one side. That would allow more focus on the things which the government does have to deal with, maybe with better results.

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It must be difficult for a Prime Minister to know which programmes to push forward and which to pull back, but in making the decision he needs to remember what it is that the public who elected him expect. The present government is a Conservative one and the label send a distinct political message. It is not, despite what you may hear in the City, a manic attachment to market forces. Nor is it, despite what some on the left would say, the government of the country for the rich. Who, after all, could win an election on that agenda? No, the trademark of a Conservative government should be that it thinks carefully before it changes things so that society develops by a process of mutation rather than by ripping things up for the sake of change. Perhaps the academy system is more logical. Perhaps its universal application will be tidier. Still, where local authority control is working well there seems little point in disrupting it and imposing something new. Certainly it does not seem worth creating a new front of political discord when the Government has so much which is far more important on its plate.
Michael Kelley via Getty Images

Over the past three months, 70 new cases of HIV have been reported in Sri Lanka, representing an increase from this time last year. The National STD /AIDS Control Programme says this is an upward trend for the country; and the programme's Director, Dr. Sisira Liyanage, has called for the government to take the crucial step of decriminalising homosexuality in order to tackle this concerning development.

Over 50% of these new cases were reported by men who have sex with men (MSM). MSM are one of the most vulnerable groups in terms of contracting HIV worldwide. In countries like Sri Lanka, which criminalise consensual same-sex relations between men, they are at even greater risk.

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Homosexuality is punishable by up to ten years' imprisonment in Sri Lanka, thanks to an outdated law retained since British colonial rule. Although prosecutions in Sri Lanka are rare, persecution is not. This law has a chilling effect on the entire LGBT community, creating an environment in which blackmail, harassment, and discrimination against LGBT people are commonplace. This stigma and discrimination is having a predictable knock-on effect on the country's rates of HIV.

Stigma against MSM, stemming from criminalisation, exacerbates HIV epidemics for numerous reasons. It makes LGBT people less likely to seek HIV testing, treatment, and other necessary healthcare. It means MSM are more likely to engage in high-risk sexual behaviours, such as unprotected sex, which heighten their chances of transmitting or contracting HIV. It means that health education is not tailored to the specific needs of the LGBT community and medical professionals are not adequately trained in how to address these needs. It can lead to discrimination on the part of these health professionals, where they may provide sub-standard treatment or simply refuse to treat LGBT people. Finally, it also reduces the incentive and capacity for the government to set up programmes, such as awareness campaigns, specifically designed to address MSM as a target group.

The adverse effects of the criminalisation of homosexuality on HIV/AIDS can be seen all over the world. Last year, the UNAIDS-Lancet Commission provided yet more evidence that there was an indisputable link between criminalisation and increased rates of HIV. In Caribbean countries where homosexuality is not criminalised, MSM have a one in fifteen chance of being HIV positive. In Caribbean countries where homosexuality is a crime, that rate is one in four. To take another example, of the nine countries worldwide that have over 10% of their population living with HIV, all of them criminalise or have a recent history of criminalising MSM.

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The law has a distinct effect on what people think is socially acceptable and thus engenders stigma against marginalised groups. Following the introduction of the misleadingly named Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act in Nigeria, which further criminalised LGBT people and fostered intense homophobia, the number of MSM who were afraid to seek healthcare increased by 12% in the space of three months. Not seeking healthcare means these men were more likely to go untreated and untested, expose the virus to others, and die of HIV/AIDS. However, these risks do not deter young Nigerian men who fear the repercussions from their communities should they seek help.

The criminalisation of homosexuality in countries like Sri Lanka forces LGBT people to be invisible in order to survive. They conceal their identities from their friends, colleagues, even families, because they fear they will be outcast or worse should they reveal their true selves. Hiding this way is a daily struggle, and despite the physical and mental health consequences, many LGBT people see it as worth enduring to avoid such fallout. It is a defence mechanism, a reaction to a society that has deemed you a dangerous element that needs to be locked up; but it turns out that for many LGBT people, hiding doesn't even improve your chances of staying alive.
Today is International Workers Memorial Day on the 28 April, where we remember those who have been affected by tragedy and ill health in the workplace, and to show solidarity to ensure that rules and regulations are being properly implemented, and enforced, for the benefit of workers everywhere.

As a Labour Member of the European Parliament I am proud to stand up for workers as part of my role. I have spent my career doing this, as before I was an MEP I worked for 15 years in the union movement, in the end as an elected Confederal Secretary for the European TUC.

According to the EU occupational health and safety agency (EU OSHA), for every investment in OSH there is a gain for society and the economy through reduced days lost to accident or fatalities, families damaged and welfare costs. A real long term economic plan should have a safety culture at its heart.

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Europe has made a massive contribution to health and safety, and workers' rights, and the great strength of Europe is its ability to create rights that mean millions of workers' lives can be improved. After the Second World War the European project was founded on four principles of freedom of movement - the movement of goods, capital, services, and people in its Member States. A stable, prosperous continent was the goal to be achieved in order to create lasting peace. But the four freedoms could not function unless its people were able to work across a level playing field, in safe conditions in every member state. This is how Europe has evolved over the past 50 years. If you want a strong European economy with quality jobs, you must support and protect its backbone - the workforce.

As we come together today to remember workers who have lost their lives, we can look back on the change that has swept across our continent and be thankful for an end to the wars and the overall improvements for people as they go about their daily lives, especially in the workplace. But we know there is more to do.

Over time, these rights have become enshrined as it became apparent that a Social Europe was fundamental to its success. Such rights as equal treatment for men and women included in the original Treaty of Rome; the right to information, consultation and participation in the workplace; and special measures for young people were brought into being. Along with the creation of the European Union in 1992 came the Social Chapter, which the last Tory government opted out of. This opt-out was overturned by the Labour government in 1998 and a series of measures were brought in guaranteeing rights for part time workers, parental leave, anti-discrimination, and working hours. The minimum 20-week paid holiday you have comes from the EU.

But having the rights is one thing, making sure they are enforced is something else. TUC have highlighted a number of problems with the number of inspections falling, so we need to fight to make sure that our workplaces are as safe as they can be. I want to see this across the whole of Europe so that when workers are travelling to work in jobs with our neighbours in other Member States, they have full protection while they are there.

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However, I believe we need to strengthen our rules to ban blacklisting of workers and stewards who raise concerns about health and safety. We should be commending people concerned about the working conditions of their co-workers not punishing them. Labour MEPs and the unions - especially in the construction sector, have led this fight for justice from the front.

There are still many laws which need to be brought in to protect workers. As technology changes so health and safety protection needs to change to keep pace, and this has not been happening via the Commission. I drafted the European TUC's call for better regulation on exposure to cancer causing substances; for regulation on back, neck and elbow pain; and to limit stress in the workplace. The number of accidents and illnesses caused by work should be brought to the absolute minimum - it is estimated that 100,000 people are affected each year in Europe, a figure which is unacceptable. We owe it to those who have lost their lives and who we are honouring today to address this urgently.
On the scale of political mea culpas, Naz Shah's can be filed in the category marked 'fulsome'. It may have taken three attempts but her apology to the Jewish community, as revealed by Jewish News, was at least a marked improvement on the first 24 hours earlier. I'm certainly not aware of any such frank words of remorse from other figures suspended in recent weeks.

And it had to be; it's a long way back from revelations that a serving MP in a country which proudly points to its diverse makeup could think it appropriate to endorse the "transportation" of Israelis or even conceive of posting an article likening Zionism to al-Qaeda. And that's before we even start on the wilful blindness of her comments to the 20% of Arab citizens living in Israel. Frankly, it's not particularly relevant that the comments were made two years ago.

However, if she means everything she says - it seems sincere even if some will question if the only thing she is sorry about is being caught - then this could be an opportunity both for her and the fight against anti-Semitism. All the more so if she is willing to publicly acknowledge the particularly problem on the British left, as some reports have suggested.

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If she does increase her engagement with Anglo-Jewry. If that leads to an increased understanding of what constitutes anti-Semitism and how all too often those who see themselves as pro-Palestinian activists trample over the line into Jew hate. And, moreover, if she is then willing to be a player in fighting it in areas others can't reach; on the left, in Muslim communities and beyond, this chance must not be wasted.

Even before this episode, she had started to associate more with the Jewish community, including her local synagogue and with Reform senior Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, whose interfaith event marking Passover she attended just last week. Such measured voices - along with those of the likes of the Jewish Labour Movement - could have an impact. It was interesting to note that fellow MP, Tory Andrew Percy, who also attended that seder, was a rare voice on the Tory benches in being prepared to accept the apology.

To remove the whip at this point, as has now happened, could backfire. It could send Shah into the arms of some of those she has clearly associated with before, and worse. It could cause someone who at least is talking a good game to be lost to reason and balance for good. If this was a factor in the hesitancy of some to call for the whip to be removed (even the Board of Deputies, which has hardly been shy on the issue of anti-Semitism in Labour, didn't call for this) it would not be unreasonable. But though a decision on action may not have been as clear cut as some made out, that is not to excuse the lengthy period it took for any word of condemnation from the leader.

BUT - and there's a sizeable but - this danger became secondary to the impact inaction from the party was doing to the already fractious relationship with the Jewish community and to confidence that the leadership's message of zero tolerance will be applied regardless of a perpetrator's position in the party, whether you're a regular member, a councillor or, in this case, an MP. Continued inaction would have ensured that whatever efforts are made by the party to address the scourge, whenever Corbyn and his top team speak out as they have on numerous occasions in recent weeks, was likely to be met with cries of: "What about Naz Shah?".

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To put it bluntly, a relationship that is already hanging by a thread simply couldn't afford this. The Jewish community doesn't ask for special treatment. It just asks to be treated the same as any community.

It's not often that the many on the left and right are on the same page. But as this story moved into its second day, leading voices like Owen Jones were united with Tory MPs. The suspension that came on Wednesday evening was necessary for the good of the relationship with Labour and to send out a clear message; it was in the end the only possible course of action.

Bizarrely, as the wider issue of her position in Labour dominated, questions over her status on the home office inquiry into anti-Semitism remain unanswered. In many ways the resolution to that should be more clear cut; her involvement in the short term appears untenable.

Her suspension however need not be permanent; I realise I risk an online lynching for saying this but the door should be left ajar and the opportunity given for the Bradford West MP to prove she is as serious about her journey as those who know her seem to believe. Call me naive, but it's hard to deny that it's not by talking just to those whose views we share that we'll make a significant difference.

But this must be seen as just the start of a process. If she is serious, she will appreciate that retaining the whip and the status quo was not in the interests of herself, her party or its ties with the Jewish community. If, despite the disciplinary process, she acts on her words to enhance her efforts with the community, we should all sit up and take notice.

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Going forward, she has an opportunity to make a real and much-needed contribution. Over to you, Naz Shah.

But there is a far bigger issue here about anti-Semitism on the left, and Corbyn couldn't be better placed to play a role in addressing it. Let me be clear: I always strongly counter the occasional suggestion I hear that he himself could be anti-Semitic and he has indeed acted swiftly to suspend several members, some before the media got to the story. But he can do a lot more, including backing proposals for a change in Labour's rules to make it easier to throw out racists. And many might suggest the leader could do worse than follow Shah by acknowledging past mistakes - in his case around the language used about terror groups and extremists who have espoused anti-Semitic views - as well as her reported explicit recognition of the source of the hate laid bare in recent weeks. Now that really could make a dent in the prevailing narrative, start to make a difference to the relationship with Labour and just maybe to the fight against the new anti-Semitism.

There could be few greater prizes for a man who is proud of his and his family's credentials in opposing racism. In his own way, therefore, he too has a golden opportunity.
If the government continues to disregard society's needs and people's welfare, junior doctors should bring it down.

Over the past few days, one of the most "probing" questions media outlets have consistently asked junior doctors is: "Are you trying to bring down the government?" following a story the BBC picked up from a "government official". The usual response from junior doctors who are being interviewed has ranged from distancing themselves from this "accusation", to condemning it as a "ridiculous" suggestion.

Many doctors, and indeed members of the public, believe the fight for fair contracts, reasonable working conditions and a functioning health services is an "apolitical" fight. The bottom line, however, is that policies that are determined by politicians are inherently political. Thinking of this issue as an apolitical one ignores the hugely important notion that the way our public services are organised, financed and managed is basically what politics is all about.

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The vast majority of political parties have a lot more similarities than differences. They mostly believe in the same type and organisation of economy (the disagreements are mostly about the rate of tax rather than the premise or organisation of taxes). They believe in the same model of democracy and accountability, with extremely minor variations in opinion there. Only 8 out of 53 Prime Ministers went to non-fee-paying schools. All were white, and nearly all were posh men. Politicians at the highest levels really are not a diverse bunch.

Why do we vote then?! Voting is the main way in which the general public is offered the opportunity to engage in demonstrating a choice in political matters (although it is a relief to see protests, strikes and other forms of political engagement regaining credibility as valuable ways of democratic engagement). The premise of having a choice implies that there are differences to choose from. It is in these differences that we are faced with a choice over how our public services are organised, financed and managed.

Turning every single school in the country into an academy is a political choice. Scrapping Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and replacing them with Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) is a political choice. Allowing competition over health services, and opening that competition up to non-public providers, such as Virgin, BUPA and Circle Health, are political choices. Parties to the "right" of the political spectrum, such as the Conservatives and UKIP, are much more likely to make those choices than parties to the "left" of the political spectrum, such as the Green Party and SNP. I neglect Labour here because they seem to currently be on a journey to the left with their leadership, but with a largely right-wing set of MPs.

These political choices are all to do with one thing: the political parties that believe in the above choices believe that the "State" should play as small a role in the organisation, financing and delivery of public services as possible. That is not a conspiracy theory, it is political theory. This is what neo-liberalism means, the dominant political theory for the last 30 years, and the current government believes in quite an extreme version of it. The government has the right (and, I would argue, the responsibility) to:

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Control rent prices to make homes more affordable for people who are being made homeless every day;

Subsidise or provide basic food to stop children going to sleep hungry;

Ensure that people have the opportunity to work in dignity.

They have a right, and a responsibility, to listen to the will of tens of thousands of doctors up and down the country telling them "enough is enough". Protecting patients and doctors is a choice that the government can make, or not. It is, at the end of the day, a political choice.
This week's referendum intervention by Theresa May, who single-handily managed to conflate the two separate issues of human rights and the European Union, marks a direct threat to the ability of citizens to challenge services and governments. For the LGBTI community, our hard fought victories have not necessarily been secured at Westminster alone, but via the very institution Ms May now seeks to exit.

Under the guise of arguing the cautious case for retaining EU membership, the Home Secretary decided to use this opportunity to trash the European Convention on Human Rights, which Conservative grandees, including one Winston Churchill, helped establish after the Second World War. Her speech amounted to suggesting that this foreign court, despite the UK having a serving judge in Strasbourg, was a mere hindrance to deporting suspected extremists. Ms May stated the court "adds nothing to our prosperity" and exiting the convention was the only way to reform human rights legislation back home. A most curious way to describe a system that has helped deliver justice and indeed prosperity to people both at home and abroad.

The only area which Ms May can be given any serious recognition for noting was the continued poor record on human rights across nations such as Russia and Turkey, who are both signatories to the convention. Nevertheless, a seventeen page document produced by the court this month, highlights the vast number of cases the institution deals with relating to sexual orientation, including ill-treatment by police in Georgia, attacks at a pride march in Romania, discrimination in Russia and unfair dismissal from the British armed forces. The court provides a platform for the LGBTI community to safely criticise their national governments, including our own in the UK, and potentially secure a legal backing. In essence this mechanism gives a voice to often marginalised groups that domestic legal systems can fail to address.

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The speech also neglected to acknowledge any of the achievements that have been made for LGBTI equality across the continent, including here in the UK, that originated from rulings passed by European Court. The most notable being the equalisation of the age of consent for both homosexual and heterosexual couples in 1997. Other rulings have allowed gay people to openly serve in the armed forces, giving same-sex couples equal tenancy rights and ending the ban on same-sex couples from adopting in Northern Ireland. In 2015 the court ruled that countries must recognise same-sex partnerships, which has resulted in Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi pushing through legislation to provide Italian same-sex couples legal recognition.

It is frankly bizarre that Theresa May and other opponents of the convention would want to demote the UK to the same international status as Belarus, by ending our ECHR membership. Belarus frequently occupies last place in human rights league tables and is the only country in Europe which retains capital punishment in law and practice.

Indeed it would be an exaggeration to suggest that only through being a member of the convention can we maintain LGBTI rights. Yet, it is evident from the number of historical interventions that European Court has made in equality rulings, our membership is far too precious to be reduced to political soundbites by our leaders.

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In the backdrop of LGBTI rights being stripped in North Carolina, and in Bangladesh a prominent LGBT activist and writer being brutally murdered, now is not the time to withdraw of a convention that is a beacon and a force for good in safeguarding human rights.
Next month we will see local council seats contested in elections across the country, in addition to mayoral races in Bristol and London. Over the last eight months, the Labour Party has undergone a rapid transformation, with its membership doubling in size. Unfortunately, polls do not look positive - and this is problematic, because if a Corbyn-led Labour Party is unable to win local elections at a time when the Conservative Party is divided over Europe: then when will the Party see gains?

The dominant discourse within the Labour Party has shifted boldly to the left, and the office of the Leader of the Opposition is now occupied by an individual who embodies the radical left-wing tradition of the Bennite era. Corbynism is now the dominant ideology, and it is rooted in principle above pragmatism, protest above power. This can be seen in the actions of the leadership, which has lowered the expectations of activists, councillors and parliamentarians - bracing them for defeats in the local elections.

The 'New Politics' is yet to provide new results. However, this has not dampened the optimistic outlook of Corbyn supporters, with many often dismissing the importance of winning elections. As a Labour Party activist, I believe this is a very worrying development - as those with this outlook forget Labour's history.

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The Labour tradition has always been one of pragmatism: a broad church in which wide-ranging views, from those of Christian Social Democrats to those of Marxist Socialists are accommodated. Diverging perspectives within the Party are united through a basic belief that to create a better society one must govern. This requires that elections be won at both local and national levels.

The Labour Party activists, especially those who have recently joined, must reflect on our political history and not forget Labour's achievements - as well as its defeats. That is why it is most disappointing to see the Party's leadership lower expectations and frequently present the previous Labour government as one that lost its way.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding over what the previous Labour government stood for and this has led to a sense of shame over our Party's past achievements. On the contrary: we should be proud of the last Labour Government and shout loud about the achievements of every Labour administration from Attlee to Blair; not to do so would be a grave mistake. How can we earn the trust of the nation if we are ashamed of our own past?

The Labour Party has existed for over a hundred years, but we have rarely governed during this period, often entering power through the unpopularity and mistakes of a Conservative Government. However, in our brief periods in power, we helped to bring about change - from the creation of the NHS to the minimum wage. Labour Prime Ministers - McDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan, Blair and Brown - have each bent the arc of history, making Britain a more progressive nation in the process.

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Not all Labour Prime Ministers were able to maintain or win power. But what united each was the ability to place realism above idealism, and in the process lead Labour administrations which were in their own ways radical through power.

The Labour Party must continue to aspire to be a party of government. This will require an attempt to actively appeal to those who have not traditionally voted for us, in addition to inspiring those not likely to vote to engage in the political process. Therefore, the Party must not allow ideology to blind its ability to speak beyond the traditional base of support, nor substitute protest for policy.

The change in the political direction of the Labour Party has heralded a new chapter, one that was not foreseeable and with a course as yet uncharted. This new environment has created fertile ground for multiple groups to blossom, each trying to develop their own intellectual space for renewal. Despite the formation of these new groups, the fundamental notion that the Labour Party is a political Party of government has not changed.
Despite improvements to the headline labour market figures over the past year, youth unemployment continues to blight the country. The youth unemployment rate for December 2015 to February 2016 was reported at 13.7 per cent, compared to 5.1 per cent for the headline rate. This terrible statistic reflects the reality that 627,000 young people aged 16 to 24 cannot find work. As a teacher would say - we must do better.

The plight of youth unemployment brings with it serious and long term social, financial and economic implications; for young people's mental and physical health, their earning potential and the nation's productivity and growth.

Systemic and Catastrophic

Even though it has been falling over the past few years, youth unemployment in the UK is still significantly higher than comparable economies in Europe such as Germany and Denmark (7 per cent and 9.9 per cent respectively). After a massive hike to 22.5% in 2011, the UK rate is now only slightly lower than the pre-downturn trough of 13.8% (three months to Feb 2008). Since comparable records began in 1992, the unemployment rate for those aged 16 to 24 has been consistently higher than that for older age groups. The problem is obviously systemic. The blight on millions of young lives has been catastrophic.

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Market and economic changes such as recession negatively affect young people in the labour market far more than those over 24. A recent study commissioned by Young Enterprise found that 46 per cent of 16 - 18 year olds still blame the ongoing impact of the recession for their generation's difficulties in finding work, citing fewer jobs available. With the recent ONS figures showing a marked slowdown of the UK economy in the first quarter of this year, more uncertainty in the job market is likely to follow - and negatively affect those most vulnerable; the young.

In addition, organisations representing British business such as the British Chambers of Commerce, CBI and the FSB report difficulties in finding young recruits who are adequately prepared for the world of work. Our report echoed this, with 48% of young people saying that a greater demand for academic and vocational qualifications when it comes to finding a career also makes it harder for young people to find a job.

Faced with such high expectations, it is wholly unsurprising that 90% of the young people we surveyed believe bosses expect too much of young people in general, with more work experience and developed character skills, as well as better qualifications, being the main attributes expected. With schools forced to focus on academic results and the negative views of employers highlighted above, young people are caught in the middle between striving for the top grades and preparing for the world of work. Is it any wonder youth unemployment remains stubbornly higher than the headline rate?

The crucial link

If employers are telling us that this is what they want from a young workforce, and young people realise this, surely there is a crucial missing link in the chain causing a skills gap. We should be providing the next generation with the opportunities to develop these skills and attitudes, to help them successfully move from the classroom to the workplace and confidently weather economic changes along the way. After over a dozen years in education, surely this must be a key outcome? So by measuring solely academic success, are we measuring the right things?

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Academic work is undoubtedly important, but employers and future-employees alike continue to lament that alone it is not enough to secure meaningful employment or to be successful in that work. Worryingly, our research has revealed that many young people are finishing school feeling they lack the necessary skills and experience to secure a job.

The link between basic academic skills and key skills development should not be ignored. Character skills can benefit academic learning through resilience and the ability to pick oneself up after a setback, such as an exam failure or a low mark.

A foundation for employability

It is essential that young people leave the education system with the right foundations to succeed in the workplace. Key skills development through experience of work and entrepreneurship - programmes such as those we offer at Young Enterprise -will both enable young people to finish education ready for the world of work, and will complement basic academic skills. UK schools should take key skills, character development and leaver destinations into account alongside academic achievement when reporting on success.

In particular, schools in deprived areas should be encouraged to prioritise engagement with external schemes and programmes, and build links with local businesses. The proposed extension of the school day for 25% of secondary schools to include character activities - as set out in the Government's recent whitepaper - means head teachers at these schools have a real opportunity to do so.

Preventing young people from becoming NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) must be a national priority, and young people who are disadvantaged by financial and social circumstances deserve to have access to resources to build confidence and skills.

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Supporting educators

Faced with huge workload pressures, teachers also need to be supported in their efforts to prepare young people for working life. For new teachers entering the profession, clarity and assistance in how to deliver effective character development must be central to the upcoming initial teacher training framework.

The DfE's new Standards for Teachers' Professional Development should also emphasise the importance of character education and provide inspiration to existing teachers.
What would a post-Brexit working world look like? The Leave camp have been rather cagey about their intentions if they win the referendum vote on 23 June, and have even gone to some extraordinary lengths to pretend they care about working people, the steel industry and the NHS (despite political careers previously dedicated to attacking them.)

But the cracks are showing and the gloves are coming off. Today, prominent Leave advocate Priti Patel MP, a Minister in the Work and Pensions Department, did not deny that she wanted to scrap the Working Time Directive which delivered two million workers the right to a paid holiday for the first time ever. She even told Radio 4 that the EU had done nothing to defend workers' rights, and every protection we have was down to the British Government.

While it's certainly true that these rights - like paid holidays, equality in the workplace and health and safety laws - aren't gifts from Brussels bureaucrats, it's breath-taking to suggest we should be thanking Priti and her right-wing chums for them either.

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Over the past 40 years, British trade unions have made common cause with trade unionists across Europe to add to the rights we'd already won through collective bargaining in workplaces, and extend them to non-unionised workers. Putting those extended protections in EU law means they cannot be whittled away by politicians. But if Britain votes to leave, those rights would certainly be at risk from the Conservatives and their big business backers.

Patel's Leave ally Michael Gove said last week that, if Britain left the EU, "we wouldn't have all the EU regulations which cost our economy 600 million every week". As InFacts' Jack Shickler wrote: "This figure comes from Open Europe research on the EU's 100 most costly laws. The third most expensive regulation is the working time directive, which sets rules on working hours, holiday, and the right to daily breaks. Rules on temporary agency workers are the fifth most costly. Combined, those two rules alone cost 6.3 billion a year - over 20% of Gove's red tape figure." Maybe that's why Priti Patel is pretending that "this isn't about rolling back workers' rights."

Meanwhile, eight erstwhile Leavers launched Economists for Brexit this morning, led by former long-time Thatcherite Professor Patrick Minford. They claimed - against all the evidence from the Bank of England, the IMF and the OECD - that a Brexit would be good for the British economy.

Unless you work in manufacturing, that is: Minford told Sun readers in March that "if we left the EU, it seems likely that we would mostly eliminate manufacturing."

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Trade unions are proud of British manufacturing - like the Mini car company in Cowley, or airplane engine makers in Derby. We are fighting to defend the steel industry in Scunthorpe and Port Talbot. We want to keep the skilled, well-paid jobs they provide, and we want to retain a future for the young apprentices they take on.
Tooth decay among young children is big in the news this month with the cost of removing teeth in hospital rising by 66% since 2010-11, according to the British Dental Association.

It's shocking and sad and completely preventable, not to mention expensive for the NHS.

But let's remember that for every poor child undergoing the trauma of fillings or even extraction under general anaesthetic there are many more under 5s learning good brushing techniques and fostering healthy attitudes to food that will set them up for life, with the support of their families and nurseries.

Clearly as a nation, we need to step this up. Hand in hand with childhood obesity, the figures for tooth decay are rising, not falling, and the tide of sugar-laden food and drink in our supermarkets is higher than ever.

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Will the Chancellor George Osborne's sugar tax help? I hope so. But the British Dental Association warns that it won't be enough on its own and is calling for a strategy involving parents, politicians and health professionals together. This also needs to involve childcarers.

The Local Government Association spoke up too, calling for greater availability of water in nurseries as well as schools and colleges, among other measures.

This brings me on to the good work that nurseries already do. All nurseries already serve water and milk, not pop, to children.

Early years practitioners know that water and milk are the only safe drinks for young teeth. They are well-educated in dental health - they learn about it as part of their training.

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Do you know why dentists recommend saving sugar for mealtimes? It's to limit acid attacks on teeth to a couple of times a day, giving saliva a chance to wash sugar away in between times.

Again, this is something that nursery staff understand. Therefore expansion of free nursery places for two-three and four-year-olds over the past few years and the forthcoming increase to 30 free hours' childcare for working parents is a great opportunity to have a positive effect on dental health for the children who attend.

Though tooth brushing might not routinely happen at some nurseries, given that twice-a-day bushing is recommended, NDNA encourages member nurseries to spend time and effort helping children to perfect the art of the 'gentle scrub'.

This recognised and toddler-friendly method of brushing involves holding the brush at 45 degrees, aiming it at the neck of the tooth where it meets the gum, and using short, horizontal movements.

Our Healthy Body Happy Me campaign this month, promoting good health and hygiene to thousands of children in hundreds of nurseries, encompasses tooth brushing.

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Nursery workers routinely talk to children and families about healthy eating and drinking and build their days around healthy habits.

They also know how to work with parents to limit dummies to sleep time - too much can stop upper front teeth from growing in the correct position - and to discourage constant sipping from bottles and beakers with spouts.

There are also the healthy eating principles that support all-round good health so well-followed in nurseries. But that's not all.

Where children show and interest in teeth, and want to play dentists, NDNA recommends a full roleplay scenario complete with a waiting area with magazines, a reception desk with a diary for appointments, a dentist's chair and a bowl and beaker for 'rinsing'.

With props such as a white shirt, mask and gloves for the dentist, home-made x-ray charts and diagrams of teeth, goggles for the patient and toy instruments, and under guidance from a practitioner, half a dozen children can learn a lot from this game.

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They can learn even more from a group trip to their local dentist - another measure that NDNA recommends - or a visit from a dental nurse or dentist to the nursery. If a nursery has a parent who works in dental care, and who could pop in to talk about their job, even better!

So how can we spread nursery-style good eating, drinking and tooth brushing habits further and wider to help turn those statistics around? So that families are always thinking about teeth when it's time for a treat? And that treats are just that - not everyday snacks?

As the British Dental Association says, it will take everyone - nurseries, families, politicians, health professionals - pulling together, to bring about the pulling out of fewer little teeth.
JUSTIN TALLIS via Getty Images

As of today, this minute, this very second that you read this, the discriminatory "bathroom" part of the bill can't be upheld! Here's why North Carolina's HB2 Law is NOT VALID.

In the state of North Carolina there is no statute that requires any individual to give their ID when confronted by police. This means you may (without any punishment) refuse to give your name, ID annnnnd birth certificate to any law enforcement officer there and it's your right to refuse.

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The only circumstance that would allow for an officer to be able to take your birth certificate or ID forcefully (whether you like it or not) would be if you are driving a vehicle or reasonably suspicious of committing a crime.

In order to be reasonably suspicious of committing this crime law enforcement officers must believe you are not the "right sex" for the restroom you are in solely by looking at you. This is called profiling. In 2014, attorney general Eric Holder BANNED racial, religious, and gender profiling in the United States for federal officers as a technique to determine "potential guilt". It's called "gender" profiling and not "sex" profiling because sex refers to your sexual organs and/or birth certificate status, gender refers to "the state of being" aka your energy, aesthetics, clothing, voice, hairstyle - the you that is you, you.

'Gender profiling' was banned because it was deemed just as inaccurate as racially profiling citizens for "Hispanic-looking" individuals to look for "illegal immigrants". It's also as inaccurate as religiously profiling "Middle Eastern-looking" individuals at the airport, to assume that they are Muslim and and further assume that they will blow up a plane.

The fact is there is no LEGAL definition of what a persona with "female" on their birth certificate looks like. Or to dumb it down - and I say this with a grain of salt my PC friends - there's no legal definition of what a "woman" looks like. Or a "man". Or a human, really. There's no wrong way to 'look' like one.

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Sure there may be a common aesthetic handed out to us by mainstream movies and advertisements that tell us what an "attractive" person of a sex looks like. But that's not reality. Reality is DIVERSITY.

Shucks, but wait, there's got to be a way to tell? Nope... A person with 'female' on their birth certificate may look like:

BREASTS (varying in size and shape) or NO BREASTS (people who have had bilateral mastectomies with choice not to reconstruct such as breast cancer survivors, transgender individuals, and individuals who have experienced certain illnesses.)

LONG HAIR (oh hey there) or SHORT (I know, shocking as it might be this has been a thing where the entire human race has had varying lengths of hair all over the world for different reasons... hold onto your knickers.)

LESS MUSCLE TONE annnnd RIPPED MUSCLE TONE LIKE YOU WOLDNT BELIEVE (it's called being an athlete people!)

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NO FACIAL HAIR (silky smooth) annnd FACIAL HAIR (it is not uncommon for any human to have facial hair and many humans who have "female" on their birth certificate may have facial hair from simply body hormones, including full beards, which are glorious. Transgender individuals may also have facial hair if they have begun hormone therapy but have not had their birth certificate status changed.)

AVERAGE AND SHORT. Oh, and also TALL! (I'm 6'2" yo! Studies suggest the human race overall is growing taller every generation - so this little size diversity thing is going to continue to be on the menu.)

CLOTHING. I'm not even going to address this. We both know it's 2016 and a dress is just as appropriate as a pair of baggy jeans and a collared shirt. Same with MAKEUP... uh, it's for all humans, and on top of that many humans don't wear makeup and do just fine.

NO SEXUAL STARES (because only men would prey on women)... SEXUAL STARES (do you know how many ladies have given another lady "the eye" in the restroom? Attraction is real people. I can't say I haven't checked a lady out while I'm in there a time or two).

VAGINA (I'd like to see how you can just see someone's vagina randomly without them pulling their pants down - which an officer cant do legally - but lets pretend they flashed you by accident). They could still be "female" on their birth certificate if they have a PENIS. There are individuals born with "ambiguous genitalia" who may be labeled "female" on their birth certificate. There are individuals who are intersex. There are trans individuals who have undergone "bottom surgery" and may have an amazing eight-incher just hanging about and being pretty - yet their birth certificate has not been changed or they don't intend on changing it and it's attributed to being part of their body.)

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Because of this diversity in expression and the fact that there is no legal definition of what a birth certificate stated 'female' looks like (or a male), there can be no "reasonable suspicion" that anyone is male or female on their birth certificate.

Without reasonable suspicion, as it states in the Fourth Amendment on our Constitution (which North Carolina must adhere to since they have no state statute on mandatory relinquishing of your license or ID upon request):

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Artistic freedom in the digital environment and tackling new challenges in cultural policies will be among the topics for debate to mark World Press Freedom Day 2016 in Helsinki, Finland.

Kicking off a series of events will be a high-level panel on 2nd May on the future of cultural policies for sustainable development and the impact on policy making of UNESCO's 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions that is organised in partnership with the HANASAARI Culture Centre for Sweden and Finland and UNESCO's Division of Freedom of Expression and Media Development.

The line-up will feature UNESCO's Director General, Irina Bokova, the Finnish Minister of Education and Culture, Sanni Grahn-Laasonen, Sweden's Minister of Culture and Democracy, Alice Bah Kuhnke, Linda Cathrine Hofstad Helleland, Minister of Culture, Norway, Bertel Haarder, Minister of Culture Denmark and Illugi Gunnarsson, Minister of Education, Science and Culture for Iceland.

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The event will explore priorities to shape future cultural policies, especially in the context of the new Sustainable Development Agenda for 2030, as well as the need for action on the issue of artistic expression. Some 469 cases of censorship and attacks on artists were recorded in 2015, doubling the number of cases cited in 2014, according to Art Under Threat, a report produced by Freemuse - an international NGO defending and monitoring freedom of expression for musicians and composers worldwide.

''In the spirit of the 2005 Convention, we must reaffirm that respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms of expression, information and communication is a pre-requisite for the creation, distribution and enjoyment of diverse cultural expressions," Danielle Cliche, UNESCO's Chief of Section of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions said.

"Supporting freedom of movement for creative professionals, and increasing social and economic rights of artists, are among the goals to work towards," she added.

Highlights of the Helsinki event will also feature a keynote speech by Tarja Halonen, former President of Finland and Chairperson of the Finnish National gallery, and a debate on 'Improving Artistic Freedom in a Digital Age'.

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"As an artist and an activist I know how it feels to have freedom of expression taken away -- it's not only personally devastating, but it robs our society of the diversity of what it means to be human," Deeyah Khan, Emmy Award winning Norwegian/Pakistani film maker said.

Ms Khan together with Nigeria's Jude Dibia (writer), Iraqi-Finnish visual artist, Adel Abidin, French visual artist Aude Pariset and Leevi Haapala, Director of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, will discuss how artists can use digital technology to promote freedom of expression and on the impact it has made already.

A special parallel session,''Is artistic freedom a new development challenge? '' will be opened by Sanni Grahn-Laasonen, Finland's Minister of Education and Culture on the 3rd of May with leading authors from UNESCO's Global Report, Re|Shaping Cultural Policies.

"Violations on artistic freedom stem from political, religious, cultural social and gender issues. Conflicts over artistic expressions stem from conflicts within societies, conflicts over control of the public sphere and artists are particularly vulnerable as they frequently work alone," said Ole Reitov, Executive Director, Freemuse and author of Challenges of Artistic Freedom chapter in UNESCO's Global Report "Re|Shaping Cultural Policies".

''Rule of law and international Conventions must be respected and implemented by all Member States. Cultural diversity is only possible when artists' rights to free expression and all groups of societies are guaranteed the freedom of access to and security to take part in cultural events,'' he added.'

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The Report Re|Shaping Cultural Policies has been funded by the Swedish Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) under the project Enhancing Fundamental Freedoms through the Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.

"SIDA is supporting civil society actors as they have a key role in contributing to democratic development and increasing respect for human rights. Through the 2005 Convention, we can encourage Governments to introduce policies that protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions and make a compelling case for placing freedom of expression, not least for artists and culture professionals, on the agenda of sustainable development," Marie Ottosson, Assistant Director General, Swedish Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) said."

Follow us on Twitter: #supportcreativity

Programme of Events for Press Freedom Day 2016

Programme - 2nd May

Programme - 3rd May

Programme of all World Press Freedom Day 2016 events

Watch on liveWebcast:
It seems like there is continuous media coverage of Oxbridge, veering between reverence of academic success and revilement of elitism. Yet, mental wellbeing is not discussed enough, even though it is a setting which amplifies and highlights the serious challenges facing university students across the country.

If you're a student at Oxford or Cambridge, it's easy to see the impact of mental health problems, and how the pressure of such an intense academic environment can exacerbate them. We each attended one of these universities and, like many of our peers, have countless stories to tell.

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A student with an anxious fear of failure, abetted by a lack of comprehensive feedback on his work. A friend who was driven to insomnia and eventually psychosis by the pressure of nine exams in quick succession. A personal tutor who was meant to oversee welfare telling students year after year in exam term that, 'people in the army can survive on four hours of sleep, so students can too' and encouraging six hour working days during the holidays. It's clear that these universities are not fit for purpose yet, at least when it comes to ensuring their students' wellbeing.

There is also a particular kind of stigma around mental health that exists at Oxford and Cambridge. Whilst it can be a place of intellectual fulfilment, extra-curricular accomplishment and friendships that last far beyond the university walls, at many times, sleep deprivation, high stress levels, and an almost unmanageable workload are normalised. In a competitive and sometimes lonely environment, where you are judged on your ability to perform mentally, it makes it so much harder to speak up and say you aren't coping.

Traditions persist that undermine the seriousness of mental health problems. In Cambridge, a day of partying which marks the end of exams is known as 'Suicide Sunday', a tongue in cheek celebration that students have made it through a stressful term without killing themselves. But then there's nothing funny at all about the fact that students commit suicide each year in universities across the UK because they feel they can't go on. Likewise, at both universities, the tradition of 'fifth week blues' has the effect of belittling those who experience depression, whose 'blues' are far more complex and debilitating than a spot of mid-term fatigue.

Everyone can make a huge difference at universities with the smallest of actions: friends calling each other out on using stigmatising language around mental health, staff raising awareness of more mental health friendly lifestyles and all members of the university community making time to look out for colleagues or friends who seem like they are struggling.

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Indeed, it's fantastic to see a grass-roots movement starting to form, with students coming together to advocate for action on mental health on campuses countrywide. With the creation of Student Minds, students have their own mental health charity doing excellent work in the sector. Peer support training is gathering momentum as an idea, and campaigning groups are popping up to address pressing local issues. Yet, there is some way to go in ensuring the levels of support are equally spread and adapted to different settings which come with their own challenges.

And there are all sorts of improvements that can be made to support the mental health of students at Oxford and Cambridge. Moving away from the 'finals' model towards coursework and more dispersed assessment would help to relieve the pressure of the final year. Introducing clearer procedures for suspension would help to protect students from arbitrary and harmful decisions. Obviously, all students would benefit from better-funded counselling services and more aware academic and personal tutors.

It's not impossible to make changes like these. Edinburgh University recently announced that all of its personal tutors would receive mental health training within the next couple of years. These staff members can play a key role in destigmatising mental health and making it easier to ask for help.

And even within the slow-moving, traditional city walls of Oxford and Cambridge, innovation seems increasingly permissible. In Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall recently announced a radical new scheme to support equal access to elite university education, committing to a year of teaching for high-potential school leavers from under-represented backgrounds. A few years ago, this seemed unfathomable. Why can't we have a similar revolution in mental health?

We hope that at these universities, rated year after year as among the best academically in the world, students' mental health and wellbeing will be treated as equally important to their academic achievement. After all, what is the value of an education if it does not help create well-rounded adults who graduate knowing they have the support of those around them to face life's challenges, through the ups and the downs?

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The Weekly

Kevin Rudd has been in stealth campaign mode, reportedly angling hard for a shot at becoming United Nations Secretary-General. The former Australian Prime Minister has quietly been building a clutch of supporters, collecting international diplomatic and academic postings, and getting himself published in influential publications, building himself a serious and credible heavyweight job application.

On Wednesday night, he morphed back into the Rudd that won the 2007 election; the 'Kevin 07' Rudd, the media darling Rudd, the slightly daggy and self-deprecating Rudd. The Rudd that still didn't rule out another crack at becoming Prime Minister.

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He appeared on ABC's 'The Weekly' to talk with comedian Tom Gleeson. Amid jokes about his infamous trip to the Scores strip club in New York, Donald Trump and Rudd's political career in Australia, Gleeson asked "when are we going to see the third Rudd government?"

"It's not too late, you could be parachuted in for this election."

Rudd gave a typical deadpan response; you know the type. The type where he must surely be joking, but you're still not quite sure that he hasn't at least entertained the possibility...

"The offer has gone out to these guys. Campaign director, me. I know how to win, how to lose. Done both," Rudd said.

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Rudd joked his way through the interview, laughing about The Killing Season documentary and Tony Abbott's onion-eating tendencies, giggling and play-acting at times. It prompted Gleeson to mutter "don't do jokes."

But then he was asked the million dollar question, about the UN Secretary-General race. When asked "if Helen Clark becomes leader of the UN, will you undermine her?"

Rudd answered with a politician's measured rhetoric, beginning to say that Clark was "a great candidate" and a "great international public servant."

"You're doing it now! This is how it starts. This is what you're good at, it's your natural game, we love watching you do it," Gleeson laughed.

"It's wonderful to watch it up close."
fotomay via Getty Images Iceberg with star lighting in sky.compare of earnings and tax concept

It pays to pay attention to Senate Committees now and then, because they have a habit of asking public servants difficult questions from which we learn interesting things about Government claims. The recent Senate Economic Committee hearing was an excellent example, when Australian Tax Office officials (some of the few remaining after the Government slashed 4,700 tax office jobs) effectively dismissed out-of-hand the Prime Minister's exaggeration that Australia is 'leading the charge' on tax avoidance.

Tax Office Deputy Commissioner Mark Konza would allow only that Australia has been part of the OECD's "leadership group on tax avoidance" but demurred at the notion that Australia was "leading". Of course, this news wasn't new -- Australia has been part of this group for some years, under this and previous Governments -- but what the hearings did reveal is that the Australian involvement in the "Panama Papers" tax secrecy network might just be the tiny tip of an enormous iceberg.

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At least 800 Australians have been linked with the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca, and there could be many more. And this firm is just one of a multitude of similar firms operating similar tax secrecy networks in similar jurisdictions to Panama. Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan told the Senate Committee that the jurisdictions which the Tax Office was most concerned about included Panama, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands -- the latter notorious for being the place where many Australians hide their tax liabilities safely out of the Tax Office's reach.

It is only thanks to Labor that this information is coming to light in the Parliament. It was us who established the Senate tax inquiry. We have had a comprehensive plan on the table for more than a year, which will return $7.2 billion in tax to Australia over the next decade by closing debt-deduction loopholes, improving data matching and giving the Tax Office the resources it needs to crack down on corporate profit shifting. We have been setting the agenda on this issue since the Gillard Government, when we announced a multi-billion dollar package cracking down on multinational tax avoidance and unprecedented tax transparency laws. In 2013, the Liberals voted against both of those.

As Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen made clear, Labor is open to all proposals that make a positive improvement to tax avoidance laws. For instance, the Government could implement our tax plan right now to ensure big multinationals finally pay their fair share, and also pass our Private Members Bill to raise by 50 times penalties for not complying with Australian reporting laws.

Alarm bells must be ringing for the Prime Minister that many more Australians could be entwined in tax secrecy networks. I worry that Malcolm Turnbull is ignoring those alarms and is unable or unwilling to act. We believe tax transparency is critical to improving compliance, but last December the Coalition and the Greens did a deal to water down tax transparency for big private firms. Until its hand was forced by Labor, the Government delayed the introduction of country-by-country reporting, which Commissioner Jordan said yesterday now gives the Tax Office "a lot more information on (tax avoidance) strategies that we've never had before".

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Today marks the third hearing the House Science Committee has held on the proposed Pebble Mine right in our backyard in Bristol Bay, Alaska.

The distance between Washington, D.C. and Alaska has never felt farther than when we hear these politicians in Washington, DC talking about the proposed Pebble Mine.

Politicians who have never been to Alaska -- let alone to Bristol Bay -- seem fixated on doing the bidding of a big Canadian mining company that doesn't create any jobs in their districts -- but sure wants to destroy a lot of great jobs in our backyard, threatening an entire way of life.

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Since they don't seem interested in hearing from Alaska's commercial fishermen at their hearing today maybe these Congressmen will at least read our words on the Huffington Post , or finally come to Alaska and see for themselves why we feel so strongly. Make no mistake: one thing that absolutely unifies Alaska is opposition to the proposed Pebble Mine project.

Many of us have spent the better part of a decade fighting to educate the public about the importance of stopping the Pebble Mine. We thought that this issue had finally been settled. The EPA heard us, assessed the science, and started to take appropriate action. But now we've seen the last year and unimaginable amounts of taxpayer money wasted with phony and frivolous lawsuits, demands for Inspector General Reports that - when completed - actually showed EPA has been in the right all along, endless Congressional witch hunts, and all kinds of red tape and distraction to keep this dangerous Pebble Mine project on life support.

Why? Why is a House Science Committee without a single member from Alaska so fixated on something we live and breathe every day, and so oblivious to how strongly we feel as Alaskans?

Why do we feel so strongly? It's actually pretty simple: this is our livelihood.

Bristol Bay supports the world's most valuable wild salmon fishery and 40,000 jobs, an average run of 37.5 million fish, produces 46% of the world's sockeye salmon, more than six percent of the United States' entire seafood exports. It's jobs in Alaska, jobs in Washington state and throughout the west coast, whether commercial fishing, processing, or all the downstream industries - supporting three jobs for every direct job in Bristol bay. It's been this way for over a century.

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There's no other place like Bristol Bay - and once it is gone, it's gone. We refuse to see our jobs and our way of life taken away by a foreign-owned mine scheme that the scientists and the Alaskans themselves have already made clear should never be allowed to go forward.

The risk is real and undeniable: jobs and an industry could be wiped away if there was ever a mining disaster because of the Pebble Mine. These aren't crocodile tears. We've seen it happen before with Mt. Polley. It can happen in Bristol Bay - a Pebble Mine disaster would be the Exxon Valdez of mine explosions - but it doesn't have to happen.

That's why I'm speaking out -- one of many concerned commercial fisherman.

What would I like to see asked at today's hearing? The question that is increasingly on our mind is clear: can the Northern Dynasty Company -- hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars each year to pay an army of lawyers and lobbyists -- even afford to fix the damage they've already done to Alaska? The damage caused by Northern Dynasty's initial exploration is still here - thousands of holes drilled -- even though the company has largely washed its hands of Alaska and shifted its entire focus to paying lobbyists and lawyers thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C. Seventeen million dollars alone just on lawyers last year! They have a deficit of $379 million dollars and they've lost more than $30 million dollars each year for the last two years. Their own auditor has warned of "material uncertainties that raise substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern." But you probably won't hear a word about it today from the Committee holding this hearing.

We're Alaskans and Americans -- and we want to know why the House Science Committee isn't standing with us to protect Bristol Bay and great jobs for Alaskans and Americans. When will we finally receive an answer?
By Susan Smith Ellis, Chief Marketing Officer at Getty Images

Imagery can be a powerful tool for evoking emotion. We can easily call to mind the photographs that have moved or confronted us. From the heart-breaking images documenting the tragic death of Aylan Kurdi, the young Syrian boy who drowned last autumn trying to reach Greece, to images of the devastation caused by the Ebola crisis  we all know from our own personal experience that evocative imagery can pack an emotional punch. The power of imagery to educate, to provoke conversation and to drive change is unquestionable.

Visual storytelling goes back to our caveman years, and to this day is still a large part of how we communicate with one another. Images create a deeper more emotional engagement than other mediums, such as text or speech. The human brain can process images an incredible 60,000 times faster than text and 90 per cent of information that enters the brain is non-verbal. Because this is so, charities, can use imagery to create impact.

Images are frequently used by charities as a key part of their marketing strategy to build empathy with their cause and, in turn, raise awareness and rally people to take action. With continuous innovations in technology, and a proliferation of channels available to marketers, there is more opportunity than ever for charities to move their audiences to care.

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Visuals have the unique ability to transcend language barriers and offer a universal understanding that other media simply cannot achieve. This has been put into practice most recently by the Global Goals initiative that aimed to reach seven billion people  the worlds population - in seven days, spreading the message of 17 ambitious targets set by the United Nations - from ending extreme poverty through to securing gender equality. As part of this campaign we curated 17 images, one for each of the UNs goals that, at a glance, drew attention to these important issues in a unique and unexpected way. This is a great example of the ability of imagery to overcome cultural divides, socioeconomic conditions and geographical locations, identifying with people wherever they are in the world.

But what if new technologies enabled charities to build on these experiences making them more evocative, lifelike and immersive? Its an exciting time, with new formats such as virtual reality, augmented reality and 360 degree imagery doing just that.

While many charities are already using imagery to tell compelling stories, some are now exploring how this can be enhanced through technology to build even deeper connections. A great example of this is the Battersea Cats and Dogs Homes #LookingForYou campaign. As part of the campaign, those passing by were handed a leaflet with an RFID tag embedded within it. A nearby billboard was then activated and an animal on the billboard would directly interact with the passer-by following them along the street. What made this campaign so successful was the use of disruptive technology and imagery to directly engage and interact with people. It felt personal and impossible to ignore because the image was going one step further and interacting with you.

Technology combined with the right imagery results in action. Miseroer, a relief organisation, developed an interactive poster billboard that not only allowed quick and simple donations through a swipe of a credit card, but immediately showed the donor what their money was helping the charity achieve. Examples include: cutting the tied hands of modern slavery, as well as breaking bread to feed the hungry. Such campaigns will no doubt continue to evolve alongside new technologies, allowing charities to build engagement with a cause and drive direct action.

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Building a buzz for your startup is never easy. You are competing for space in an increasingly crowded market, regardless of the niche you happen to be operating in. Breaking news is just one way that you can build a buzz for your startup. You are going to learn why this works and how you can go about doing it.

The Value of Breaking News

The most obvious value of breaking news is that it's current. This is nothing new. It's one of the oldest strategies have used in order to generate some publicity. They simply latch on to a recent story or trend. The difference is with the rise of the Internet and social media this process has become faster.

You have to act faster than ever before. Real-time marketing, where you are expected to react in seconds, is on the up. As a business, you will be expected to deal with this in the right way.

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Making You Relevant

The reason why startups can generate a buzz is simply by showing that they are relevant. By involving yourself in what people are talking about you could reach a whole new audience. In the event of a developing news story, someone could come across your comments.

They may decide to start speaking to you and then they check out your company. They like what they see and decide to give you a try. It all started because you made yourself relevant through a breaking news story.

Creating a Customer Relationship

One of the main challenges facing startups is creating those vital customer relationships. These relationships are vital for gaining loyal customers who are going to talk about you without any prompting. You can do this through the buzz of breaking news.

The key to building customer relationships is to speak to people as if you were a friend not a business. A lot of startups spend most of their time interacting with people for no other reason than to build a relationship. They are not trying to land a sale. It's one person talking to another.

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Nothing helps with this like the power of breaking news.

Integrate into Your Marketing Campaigns

Sharing breaking news and speaking to people is one thing, but there are startups who are crafting entire marketing campaigns based on breaking news. Take a look at many betting companies as an example. They use recent sporting trends in order to create relevant marketing campaigns that the average person is going to identify with.

Using breaking news for this purpose has the benefit of providing you with relevant marketing content that's going to catch the eye of people.

On a side note, using breaking news is great for SEO. Google wants the most relevant content at the top of its search results, and so anything that's relevant to the latest news is always going to get towards the top of the search rankings.

How to Find the Right Breaking News

Of course, you have to find the right breaking news in the first place. There are things happening every minute and not all of those changes are going to be relevant to your business. For most startups, the way to build a buzz is to stick to either the big news stories in your industry or the big news stories in general.

Never try to force your brand into something it's not relevant to. There's little point in a cookery company trying to thrust its nose into a story about the Panama Papers, or political corruption in Brazil, for example. Yes, you may have some salient points to make, but is it going to bring the right audience into your business?

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The idea is to talk about the things that your target audience is likely to be talking about. This is why you should always have a good idea as to who your perfect customer is. You should know the demographic, their likes, and their dislikes. It will enable you to find the right breaking news for you.

Using Breaking News in Action

The main way to use breaking news is to react fast. There are many social media scheduling platforms that will help you to keep putting out relevant content as stories develop. You also need to make sure that you are participating actively within conversations.

Either you or a designated figure within your company should be spending time interacting with real people and joining the conversation. The goal is to form a connection with them, not to openly start selling your products and services.
The concept of the unicorn company is huge in the US and startup ecosystems. When Investors think of tech, they think of the most obvious startups such as Uber, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

These tech companies are valued at over a billion dollars and are part of an exclusive group of companies attracting a massive amount of interest from investors and the general public alike.

But there's very little publicity regarding potential unicorn companies elsewhere in the world. In an interview with SoftBank CEO Nikesh Arora, he mentions that "I am perfectly fine

with people not knowing about Japan".



And in a similar case, are the companies that are growing at astronomical rates, and aren't on an international scale like Uber, but should be.



Take Infibeam as an example.

The hidden jewel in the global ecommerce landscape that is all set to be not just a billion dollar company, but much more.

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Have you ever heard of it? The chances are you haven't.

Yet this Indian ecommerce and ecommerce enabling company has made major waves in this part of the world.

Furthermore, they have all the tools necessary for success in an ecommerce market that's expected to surpass the $100 billion mark by 2017.

Who is Infibeam?



Infibeam is a company established in 2007 in Ahmedabad, India, which quickly became an organization divided into multiple businesses.

The founders and co-founders Vishal Mehta, the Managing Director, Vijay Subramanium, the CIO and the CTO, Ajay Chandra concentrates the business on ecommerce enabling and ecommerce.



In a world where founders are chasing after photo sharing apps, social networking sites, and food delivery, Mehta, Subramanium and Chandra are chasing after one of the biggest, and somewhat obvious opportunities for business; helping businesses build their own ecommerce storefronts and generate sales.



A Unique Business Model



The reason why it's been so successful is because like most unicorns, it has converted its technology assets to generate revenues with a unique business model.

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This ecommerce company has gone out of its way to offer its software platform to merchants with required tools to sell online. The significant growing part of Infibeam's business is Buildabazaar, with more than 42,000 registered merchants.

Many experts have compared its ecommerce enabling project as a major competitor to Shopify, as it offers many of the same functions, and even goes beyond what Shopify can do in some cases.

The other significant part of the company is its main ecommerce webstore Infibeam.com sells books, electronics, and lifestyle products from merchants on Buildabazaar, which it has pinpointed as the most lucrative markets for its Indian audience.





Through building strong ties with other prominent brands, they have managed to gain investment and success in equal measure.

The uniqueness in the business model lies in enabling ecommerce for companies and in also managing one of the leading ecommerce companies in India.



The benefits of a unique business model can't be underestimated.

Frequently, new companies that are gaining investment from venture capitalists all have unique business models.

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It's practically become a requirement for success.



Impressive Financial Background



Infibeam hasn't gained publicity out of nothing, and has posted financial results to match its potential.

In July 2015, it became the first ever ecommerce company in India to file for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), attracted investors from all over India.

This is why Infibeam has a future that eclipses that of a normal unicorn company.

Unicorns are typically known for having little financial data to back up their potential, such as SnapChat which recently flipped on the revenue switch.



Infibeam has mirrored the progress of Acerta Pharma, a Dutch company dedicated to coming up with new cancer treatments, raising $7 billion in the past year, and have stakeholders that include British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.

While not in the profit making sector, Acerta Pharma has the numbers to back up the success of its product through a range of key studies.

Infibeam's IPO has also allowed foreign investors to invest in the Indian ecommerce growth story.



The Right Industry



Much of Infibeam's work has been in assuring its long-term future by investing in both ecommerce and ecommerce enabling services allows it to exist even during slow periods.

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When the general public is not spending as much, they can simply rely on their enabling services instead.

History validates this strategy.

During the Dot-com bubble crash of 2001, companies like Webvan, Pets.com suffered, whereas organizations offering ecommerce enabling services thrived, such as in the case of Cisco.

Furthermore, data shows that total spend in technology for stores is bigger than the amount spent on ads, demonstrating that this is still a great industry to have a presence in.

Infibeam started from a small base and then steadily expanded their businesses as they gained customer trust and recognition.

Pedigree Designed for Global Success



Following in the footsteps of many successful unicorn companies, Infibeam was founded by Vishal Mehta and a couple of other co-founders from Amazon in the US.

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One look at Infibeam and it quickly becomes apparent that they were inspired by the work they were carrying out at Amazon, and it has been used to great effect.

Infibeam has been successful in entering difficult markets, such as the Middle East, where it has worked with Jumbo Retail, one of Infibeam's esteemed clients in that region.

Similar stories have been seen across the world as the company continues to expand its influence.



It's also worth mentioning that historically companies run by non-Westerners have done very well.

The numbers don't lie and most speculators put it down to a superior work ethic developed due to a past of working in challenging economies.



Sequoia Capital is known as one of the most successful Venture Capital firms ever.

It was founded and continues to be operated by a largely immigrant board.

Their success stories include Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Instagram.



Speaking of Google, there's a reason why their style of leadership has won it business all around the world.

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The team at Infibeam credits a significant amount of their success to following the same style of leadership that puts their passionate employees at the heart of the operation.

This means that they can repeatedly get more out of the people working for them.

Through a culture of hard work and true ownership where employees have significant ownership in the company, Infibeam has quietly grown until it finally managed to have something tangible to put on the table to both potential clients and investors.
The remote working revolution is in full swing and it's showing no signs of stopping. The latest numbers reveal that 67% of companies now allow employees at least some time to work remotely from home. This is a trend that is not going to change anytime soon.

But small businesses and startups are the organizations that have pioneered this growth. Why has it happened and why is it going to continue long into the future?

It's Cheaper

Small businesses and startups are notorious for not having the financial resources necessary to do what they want. With increasing real estate prices, it's caused many smaller entities to seek alternatives. Working remotely negates the need for all the usual office facilities in the center of town.

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Simply by opting for a remote working arrangement you can shave hundreds of dollars off your monthly expenses.

Getting Talent from Elsewhere

For many companies, remote working has presented an opportunity to manage talent that may not be available in the local community at the right price. Tech companies in San Francisco may have an ample amount of talent to take advantage of. However, a small tech company in the middle of rural Wyoming may struggle.

To get around a talent shortage, remote working comes in. It allows companies from anywhere to take advantage of top talent from all over the world. It's not uncommon to have teams consisting entirely of people who have never met people in person. Furthermore, many small businesses and startup have used this to their advantage.

It's What Employees Want

Corporations are notorious for not really caring what their employees want. If you work for Apple, you are working for one of the most well-known companies in the world. Should you decide to leave there will be hundreds of other people lining up to take your job. Large corporations can afford to disregard what their employees want.

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But the new generation is coming of age and they are less likely to accept the traditional way of doing things than ever before. They are known for how likely they are to skip companies and switch to somewhere else if they don't like the working arrangements, even if this happens to mean less money.

Small businesses and startups can't afford to lose their employees. It causes far too much disruption and they are too reliant on their teams. Many companies haven't survived simply because a team leader left when they weren't happy with something.

Studies have shown that employees love remote working because it staves off stress and allows them more flexibility with their personal lives. As more and more people realize the benefits of remote working, they are going to demand it more and more from their employers.

Advancing Technology

One of the reasons why remote working has taken off now is because it didn't stand a chance of taking off before. The technology wasn't there to make it a reality. A phone call isn't enough to trust a worker to leave the office and work from home.

But technology has come a long way in recent years. Gone are the days where you had to use multiple pieces of software to work from home. It's now possible to use combined remote working platforms to collaborate, communicate, and stay on top of things.

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And why are small businesses and startups more likely to start using this software?

It's not expensive to pick up and use. There's very little expense involved, and many of these software providers offer payment plans exclusively for small businesses and startups.

Customer Facing Environments are in Decline

Due to rising real estate prices and the increasing globalization of the web, the customer facing businesses are steadily dying out. Only bigger businesses are maintaining huge superstores in the real world. For startups and small businesses, it doesn't make financial sense to run these operations.

It means that customer facing employee teams are also unnecessary. The fact is remote working simply makes sense for these businesses when most of their operations are in an online capacity.

Conclusion - Remote Working is Set to Continue

The future of remote working is bright because the tools that make remote working function correctly are only becoming more effective and more advanced. Small businesses and startups have been able to employ better talent and increase their bottom lines like never before due to this.
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - 2016/01/27: The Interfaith ceremony honoring protectors on the International Holocaust Day was closed with prayers and a candlelight vigil remembering victims of the holocaust. (Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Why would a senior rabbi and a Muslim scholar engage in dialogue at this moment in history, at a time when relations between Jews and Muslims have reached dangerous levels of tension around the globe?

Barely a day goes by when we do not read of some incendiary terrorist attack by a Muslim claiming to act in the name of Islam. Sometimes the victims are fellow Muslims, and at other times, the acts of violence are perpetrated against Jews or Christians. Muslims have attacked Jewish supermarkets, museums, synagogues and schools, in part causing more and more Jews to leave France and other European countries, where their roots run deep, for Israel for fear of their safety. These acts are neither sanctioned by Islam nor are motivated by the nobler aspirations of humanity.

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How we treat interfaith relations today will have significant implications for our world's future.



The picture for Muslims is equally dire. Across North Africa, the Middle East, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Muslim world is in turmoil. Our hearts break when we contemplate the hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Africa and the nearly 150 -- mostly children -- killed at the Army Public School in Peshawar. Equally shocking is the frequent news of violence against Christians or other minorities in countries like Egypt and Pakistan. Muslim on Muslim violence is reaching new heights, with sectarian, tribal and political conflicts tearing the Muslim world apart. In the vacuum of authority, militant groups like the self-proclaimed Islamic State appear to rampage almost unchecked.

The Middle East continues to be a powder keg for Jewish-Muslim relations, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to simmer, with knifings of innocent civilians the preferred means of attack du jour. With little hope of resolution, tensions are reaching a boiling point. It is in the interest not only of Jews and Muslims, but also the world at large to find a peaceful and just solution as soon as possible. The Syrian conflict also drags on with no solution in sight. Perhaps partially in response to these acts and the headlines, coupled with a lack of understanding of Islam and its internal divisions, and not knowing how to respond, Islamophobia is reaching a fevered pitch in European and American politics. There is open talk of monitoring Muslim neighborhoods, "interning" the community and banning all Muslim entry to the United States.

It is with all this as a backdrop that we believe it is especially important, precisely when our faith communities are at the tipping point, to join together and reach out to each other.

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Participants at interfaith luncheon at American University listen as Ambassador Ahmed and Rabbi Weinblatt discuss the importance of improving Muslim-Jewish relations. (Elisa Frost)

As our experiences here in the Washington region and abroad demonstrate, interfaith dialogue at all levels can have a huge impact. Recently at American University in Washington, we co-chaired a Jewish-Muslim dialogue luncheon featuring six of the region's top rabbis and several leading Muslim figures from the area, including Acting U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Arsalan Suleman. Each community was represented by a diverse array of voices and perspectives, and this off-the-record session gave everyone an opportunity to explore their questions and perceptions about the other faith. Many entered the meeting skeptical of engaging the other community, and disagreements emerged which had to be settled, but by the end, participants expressed a strong commitment to remain in touch and contribute to interfaith initiatives in each other's houses of worship. Interfaith dialogue in fact builds bridges.

Consider this dialogue luncheon in the broader American context. In American politics, we are witnessing a startling escalation of religious, ethnic and racial discrimination and divisiveness that is quickly racing down a slippery slope. Many of the tensions are fed by misimpressions and emerge because each side does not know or encounter the other.





Before our civilization goes over the brink, we must stop, step back and address these fundamental questions of humanity.



In the current presidential campaign, first, Mexicans were targeted as being rapists and drug lords, then Muslims were targeted for being terrorists. As if anti-minority sentiments could not get stronger, recently, supporters of leading Republican candidate Donald Trump have even been heard telling Black Lives Matter protesters to "go back to Africa." Something must be done to counter this dangerous rhetoric.

As we watch the rise of both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism across the U.S. and around the globe, we must all bear in mind the foreboding poetry of German pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Martin Niemoller:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out --

Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out --

Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out --

Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me.

We are both grandfathers. As such, we have to be thinking not of ourselves and our lives, but rather about our children and grandchildren. What sort of world will they inherit by the end of this century? Will it be a world facing mass warfare, climate catastrophe, crippling inequality and other social disasters? Or will it be a world where all of our faiths can live in harmony with one another and where faith leaders will lead the way so that humanity can come together to solve our greatest global challenges? How we treat interfaith relations today will have significant implications for our world's future.

"Interfaith dialogue in fact builds bridges." (BSIP/UIG via Getty Images)

Both of our respective faiths emphasize the importance of compassion and understanding one another. The Quran, for instance, states, "O mankind, indeed we have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another" (49:13). And the Jewish tradition emphasizes the duty of tikkun olam -- healing a fractured world. No matter the faith, embrace of the other is a must in God's eyes.

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Before our civilization goes over the brink, we must stop, step back and address these fundamental questions of humanity. Simple dialogues such as this are desperately needed and necessary for a peaceful, prosperous future. They are the only way we can begin the process of healing, of teshuvah, of recognizing what changes we each need to make to achieve tikkun olam, a better world.

Earlier on WorldPost:
More on Pearson Efficacy: At the Pissed-Consumer website, there are 140 reviews of Pearson (Mis)education products and services, mostly outraged complaints.

Some of the recent ones include:

April 4 - "I was assigned to use Pearson education MYITLAB for my economics class, and it has failed to register me three times . . . My grade in the class absolutely depends on Pearson, and they have done nothing but let me down."

March 29 - "This is the biggest scams going. I work at a high school and constantly have to pull students off of Pearson for technical problems."

March 24 - "It sucks! You charge too high for such a low quality technology."

March 24 - "Third time I've called in, and have been waiting on hold FOREVER. The last call was answered after 30 minutes; the guy took my info, and was given a CALL BACK number, then the phone went dead. Did I get a call back? NO."

March 9 - "I am currently in an online my math lab college course. However, I have had nothing but issues with this site. It will not let me purchase the course as it gives me nonstop errors. I have been trying to access my course (that I am now missing due dates for) for three weeks now and have spent hours on the phone with their insensitive employees."

March 1 - "Allows for lazy professors to get paid to not teach, while students have to dish out ridiculous amounts of money for an overpriced "interactive learning tool" that only "teaches" through forced memorization, not understanding."

January 21 - "I hate Pearson. It is, without a doubt, the worst education company I have ever used, and possibly the worst education company that has every existed. It's super laggy, it teaches you absolutely nothing, the questions make no sense, and often the answers that are provided aren't even correct. Every single one of my classmates (including myself) hates it. If you are a teacher and are considering using Pearson, spare yourself and everyone in your class the pain and don't."




The first of 26 graffitis Majd and Abu Malek put up on the walls of Darayya. Darayya 2014-2016. Photo: Darayya Media Center.

Darayya is a town in Syria, only 5 miles southwest of Damascus. The city was one of the first hotspots of the anti-Assad movement and its subsequent oppression by the regime. In August 2012, Assad's troops entered Darayya to commit the most horrific massacre the Syrian Revolution had seen until then. What would later be known as the Massacre of Darayya was only the starting point of Darayya's destruction by continuous barrel bomb raids.

During the past five years, journalists and activists continuously have tried to report on the situation in Darayya. In life-endangering videos they have been documenting all of the regime's human rights violations including massacres, bombardments and the current siege.

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The so-called "Darayya Media Center" is very active in covering the situation around Darayya, consisting of members inside and outside the country. The inside team is working in the field while the outside team is responsible for publication and public relations. As Darayya has been controlled by the regime's siege since the end of 2012 the town has started to suffer from a severe lack of the most basic resources.

Hossam Ahmad is the current head of the Darayya Media Center. Until the start of the revolution he had been a student of agriculture who only needed to pass seven more classes to graduate. Before the Syrian revolution began Hossam had worked in a photo studio for three years, a work which equipped him with enough expertise to organize and support other citizen journalists in the city. At first, Hossam opened the center at his house, but after some time safety issues made it necessary for the member's to constantly move their work to other places. And even thought the politically independent center continues to report, its members have been severely affected by the supply blockade and the complete shortage of electricity and a reliable Internet connection. The people of Darayya are forced to use generators and batteries to barely provide a living, but generators can only be used once a week and only for a short period of time. In addition, the already limited amount of cameras and equipment needs to be smuggled into town and saved from destruction.

Even under these severe circumstances the center initiated the documentary Dararyya, the Brotherhood of Grapes and Blood about the Darayya massacre, which had been produced by the TV station Al-Jazeera Arabic.

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Some of Darayya Media Center members were detained by the regime and they have continuously been prime targets of bombardments and sniper attacks. One member had been incarcerated and tortured for 3 years. Two other members were killed in action. Zaid Sharara was killed in February 2013 and Majd Moaddamani had only recently been killed in February 2016.

And even though the loss of these two journalists had come as a shock to Hossam and his team, the center is determined to continue its mission and honor the sacrifice of Zaid and Majd who was called "The Iron Heart." In an act of courage Majd produced hundreds of videos in Darayya, amongst them a barrel bomb attack in which an explosion impaired his hearing. After Majd managed to survive dozens of attacks he was eventually killed during a regime's infantry attack.

Majd's brother, who had been as active in the Syrian revolution as his brother, was also killed. When he tried to smuggle food from the besieged city two years ago he fell victim to a mine outside the city. In order to break their spirits, Assad's troops already kidnapped their 13-year-old brother in 2011, but they couldn't discourage Majd's and Majed's determination. The two brothers still took part in almost every anti-regime activity in Darayya.

In 2014, Majd became fascinated by a number of graffiti paintings on the ruined walls inside Darayya. He was on a mission to cover the resistance of the rebels to prevent the regime from entering civil areas in Darayya. Majd was so affected by the paintings that he managed to be in touch with their painter, a young rebel named Abu Malek who always dreamt to be an architect.

Abu Malek and Majd managed to put up 26 graffitis on the walls of Darayya. Their paintings contained deep messages and were massively shared in social networks.

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Majd und Abu Malek were working on their project together for almost a year. Darayya 2015. Photo: Darayya Media Center

Losing Majd struck Abu Malek very hard after the two of them had the chance to work on their project for almost a year. But after Majd's death Abu Malek did manage to produce three additional graffitis, as he feels the need to leave his fingerprint in this world. "Majd had a great effect on me and it's my turn to pass it on to someone else. I hope I can help many oppressed people to be heard", says Abu Malek.

While being far away from Darayya another member of the Darayya Media Center, Nizar, has been able to consistently support his friends inside his hometown. Nizar is one of the center's members who were forced to leave Darayya at the end of 2012 to work after that as an undercover journalist in the middle of Damascus. A former businessman Nizar understood the importance of the media in the advancement of the Syrian revolution.



"If we don't cover what's going on and what the regime is doing the situation will be comparable to 1982 when Assad, the father, initiated the massacre of Hama, and every single detail of that massacre was hidden because we didn't have media and social networks at that time," Nizar says.

When he was still in Damascus Nizar had mostly been involved in the publication process, doing the filtration of the raw materials that had been sent by his colleagues inside Darayya.

And when Majd was killed, his mother reached out to Nizar to confirm his death, a task that had been excruciating.

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Three months ago, Nizar was forced to leave Damascus. The regime's forces performed raids all over Damascus to catch the last of the few activists who were still working secretly from inside the city. Nizar left Syria and headed to Turkey, planning to continue his mission.

Nizar imparted that the complete lack of logistic support had been tough on this team. And even though donors might be dedicated to provide funds for different initiatives, the money usually ends up in the wrong places and is not being used to support independent groups such as the civil media team.

Currently, Nizar is trying his best to support his friends from his office located inside his new house in Turkey.

"We are going to show the truth. And if no one listens to the Syrian suffering, we are going to speak louder and louder until we are being heard!
By Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. & Ahmet S. Yayla, Ph.D.



For months now disaffected Syrian, ISIS defectors we have been interviewing in our ISIS Defectors Interview Project have been telling us that one of the many reasons that they became disenchanted with ISIS was that their leaders were directly negotiating and selling oil to their enemy, Bashar al-Assad--oil that was then used in barrel bombs that rained back down on the Sunnis uprising against the Assad regime. This week the Wall Street Journal reported on some of the thousands of documents extracted in the May 2015 U.S. Special Forces raid against Abu Sayyaf, one of ISIS's oil emirs (known by his nom de guerre) --confirming that indeed these defectors were telling the truth.

According to documents retrieved in the raid of Abu Sayyaf's Deir ez-Zor hideout and now viewed by the Wall Street Journal, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad entered into multimillion-dollar oil deals with ISIS. According to Newsweek, this sale of oil to Damascus helped the group to reach a peak of $40 million a month in oil revenue with the Assad regime oil deals contributing to seventy-two percent of the $289.5 million the group earned in natural-resource revenues in the six months preceding February 2015. Even now, some analysts estimate the Syrian regime is buying 20,000 barrels of oil per day from ISIS. Likewise, the Assad regime has kept the electricity on for the so-called ISIS "Caliphate", supplying them with electricity throughout their time in power--an eerie thought when one considers the possibility of ISIS with the lights off and an inability to access the Internet.

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A document identified as Memo No. 156, dated February 11, 2015 shows Abu Sayyaf, who headed the Islamic State's Diwan of Natural Resources (the terrorist group's oil ministry), requesting an unknown party to build investment links with businessmen allied to the Assad regime for the sale of oil to the regime. The document also reveals that ISIS already had agreements with Damascus to permit oil trucks and pipeline transit from regime-controlled fields through ISIS-controlled territory, something our defectors also told us.

Indeed, our ISIS defectors have repeatedly told us that ISIS emirs made agreements with the Assad regime for the sale of oil and some of the defectors recalled being called to act as guards for and personally witnessing regime engineers and oil specialists arriving from Damascus to the Deir ez-Zor oil fields, having come to repair the pipelines and pumping devices so that oil could be delivered and sold to the regime. When our defectors complained to and questioned their emirs about these sales they were rudely rebuffed by their leaders and told that ISIS is a "state" and able to negotiate any deal it wishes with other states, and reminded that they should not question the wisdom of their leaders. This despite that oil sold to the regime returned to haunt them, as al-Assad's barrel bombs filled with oil--likely sold to them from ISIS--rained back down upon their heads and killed their cadres and family members.

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Now however, Turkey has attempted to crack down on illicit trade and ISIS has also lost control of a lot of its Syrian border with Turkey to the Kurds. The funds from oil sales enable them to pay their cadres regular monthly salaries and obtain weapons--some that arrive new in boxes--according to our ISIS defectors interviews.

That ISIS made illicit deals with the Assad regime was a major source of frustration to many of the ISIS cadres who spoke with us, and a significant reason for defecting. While conspiracy theories abound in the Middle East, and the recent conflicts have made for the strangest of alliances, some of our ISIS defectors seriously wondered if ISIS was actually a direct product of the al-Assad regime. They pointed to the fact that the regime's military often surrendered huge stores of weapons to the militant group when retreating rather than destroy them essentially supplying ISIS with weapons, and why ISIS cadres fought more with the Free Syrian Army, killing Sunnis, than with the regime.

More details on these topics are included in our forthcoming book ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of Confronting the Caliphate, Advances Press 2016.

Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. is Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University in the School of Medicine and is Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and is a nonresident Fellow of Trends. She is also the author of Talking to Terrorists and coauthor of Undercover Jihadi. Her newly released book, inspired by the true story of an American girl seduced over the Internet into ISIS, is Bride of ISIS. Dr. Speckhard has interviewed nearly five hundred terrorists, their family members and supporters in various parts of the world including Gaza, the West Bank, Chechnya, Iraq, Jordan and many countries in Europe. She was responsible for designing the psychological and Islamic challenge aspects of the Detainee Rehabilitation Program in Iraq to be applied to twenty thousand detainees and eight hundred juveniles. She is currently running the ISIS Defectors Interview Project with Dr. Ahmet Yayla at ICSVE. Personal website: www.AnneSpeckhard.com

Ahmet S. Yayla, Ph.D. is Professor and the Chair of Sociology Department at Harran University in south of Turkey by the Syrian border and the Deputy Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE). Dr. Yayla served as Chief of Counter-terrorism and Operations Division in the Turkish National Police. He has earned his masters and Ph.D. degrees on the subject of terrorism and radicalization at the University of North Texas. Dr. Yayla's research mainly focuses on terrorism, sociology, dealing with terrorism without use of force, terrorist recruitment and propaganda, radicalization (including ISIS and al Qaeda) and violence. He has authored many works on the subject of terrorism. He has also been advisor to the United States Department of Homeland Security (November 2005 to April 2006) on issues of terrorism and interacting with Muslim Communities in the United States. Dr. Yayla witnessed (October 21st, 2006) to the United States Congress and Senate, Homeland Security Committee and Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attacks on the subject of "Local Law Enforcement Preparedness for countering the threats of terrorism."
It's no secret that Chicago is under a national microscope, due to the rampant violence plaguing the city. Arguably, in just about every news cycle there are reports about victims of gun violence, beatings or stabbings, some resulting in death in some gruesome fashion. In fact, as of the writing of this piece, 1,000 people have been shot in Chicago since January1, 2016. It's come to the point where community residents, mostly on the south and west sides, are numb to the sounds of gunshots. How much more can Chicago take? Block after block riddled with bullets. Families are literally torn apart due to the sudden death of a loved one. Mothers are loosing their innocent children at young ages to guns. And some of those being harmed, are preparing for vengeance--and the vicious cycle continues.

When will it stop?

But, perhaps more importantly, how did all this madness begin?

Last week, I had a lunch meeting with public affairs strategist guru, Becky Carroll, CEO and President of C-Strategies LLC. Becky was born and raised in Chicago, went to Chicago public schools and was raised in what would be considered a working class and sometimes working poor neighborhood who understands what it means to struggle and not always have a lot of food on the table or money to buy what most people would consider to be necessities. This life experience at a young age served as the foundation for her social activism in high school and college which led to getting engaged in political campaigns and public policy. Ms. Carroll had a front row seat in witnessing the ills that effected children while working at CPS. She also expressed to me the importance of good public policy and having to do some things that may be politically unpopular.

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We discussed our childhood neighborhoods and how things have changed, for better and worse. Intrigued by my rearing in a foster home on the west side, Carroll asked, very sincerely, how was I able to escape the tough streets..., a question that is posed to me frequently. According to statistics, I should be dead or in jail by now...Yet, and in answer her question, I attribute my success to being exposed to things that weren't in my neighborhood and an opportunity to explore such exposure.

There is plenty of blame to go around as to why so many young people are misguided souls, walking aimlessly through their lives. I attribute most of it to poor economic development, a deficit in jobs, a lackluster education system and the most important crucial element, the broken family unit. One of the best things my foster parent did for me was to keep me involved in something constructive. She kept me busy, embedding in me, the importance of a sense of a higher being. It was vitally important to understand there was something bigger than me and to have faith in that being. I was active in my church, the boy scouts, some after school activities, providing me with experiences far away from home, which was a good thing.

Kids have to know there is another world outside the confines of their neighborhood, in order for them to discover their likes and dislikes. It makes it very difficult to develop a passion for something you've never experienced. For many of these children, they are limited to dreaming about being a professional athlete, as the only way "out" ... Although there is nothing wrong with this aspiration, the reality is those opportunities are far and few between.

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Children need dreams they can reach out and touch.

As I had, when I developed a love affair with the Chicago Fire Department. It all started with a field trip to Engine Company 103 at the age of eight years old and I. Was. SOLD! I knew what I wanted to do for a living. But, what about other kids? Have they been exposed to the many wonders of life?

Second, we can talk about needing more police officers on the street and adding more social programs, but in my humble opinion, we will continue to experience delinquent behavior until the family unit is back together. Parents are children's first teachers.


Pyres of Ivory, Nairobi National Park, photographed by Asher Jay

Fire, has had a rough run on media these past years. Much of the publicity this classical element has received in recent times has been unfortunately negative, from highlighting its destructive impact on forests, Californians and Disney creatures, to its association with wars, smoking and volcanic eruptions that cause mass delays in international flight schedules. Fire's declining popularity polls has made it a public relations nightmare for most countries, but not Kenya. In an inspired move, this decisive nation embraced fire officially yet again, giving this controversial element a chance to express itself at a highly debated State event that would culminate in the burning of 105 tons of Ivory on April 30th 2016.



Kenyan Wildlife Service Rangers transferring the tusks and curios to the pyres. Photographed by Mia Collis

The Kenyan Wildlife Service has decided to add to this impressive line up of tusk heavy pyres, the inventory of 1.35 tons of rhino horn, several endangered animal hides and skins, sandalwood seizures and sacks full of Prunus Africana bark, to reaffirm Kenya's commitment to protect its irreplaceable, iconic flora and fauna. The dedication to cremate trophies with an estimated worth of nearly one billion U.S. Dollars, not only revitalizes global hope to protect African wildlife for future generations but finally gives fire the chance to unleash its wrath in a positive light.

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Animal skins and hides arriving at the burn site, photographed by Mia Collis

For the first time since the Stone Age, fire will be the center of attention for humanity again this Saturday, as it turns to ash the get-rich-quick schemes of seasoned criminals, casts a light on corrupt officials, destroys potential data points for hyper focused economists and downright devalues the ill informed investments made by ignorant consumers into a particularly bloody class of commodities. The burn will naturally have to be backed by a total ban on all trade in ivory worldwide, but intelligent life across this finite planet believes this to be possible in the near future. Even the primary market for ivory, China, has obliged to see a ban through, albeit they have failed to denote a measure of time in which they plan to realize this agenda.



Speak to the hand. #WorthMoreAlive Photographed by Mia Collis

Torching illegally procured and consequently confiscated wildlife products has been the way for Kenya, "a tradition" if you will. The country, steadfast in its opposition against all trade and hunting of its wildlife, is willing to use the extra ounce of fuel to let the world know that its extraordinary mega fauna are worth more alive. With 10 tons of firewood and more than 10,000 liters of fuel, this burn has evoked apprehension in impassioned environmentalists, who have tried to throw a "carbon emissions" blanket over this burn. Find comfort in the fact that solutions to ensure carbon offsets for this event are already being deliberated by local non-profits and concerned citizens.



United in our stance, matriarchs for matriarchs. Photographed by Mia Collis

The reason Kenya needs to set these pyres ablaze and put all these trophies beyond economic use publicly is to guarantee to the world at large that the entire cache was destroyed properly and not pilfered back into the black market. If fire comes out looking like the hero of the day Kenyans can live with that, for they concede it is fire's ability to incinerate that will make this effort a roaring success. The solution to the poaching crisis kick starts with a spark as it turns out!
Barbed wire

Two Palestinians, Heba and I, coming from the biggest prison in the world, Gaza, went to watch one of the few movies about Palestinians in Israeli prisons during filmfest DC this Saturday. Equipped with no expectations, we started watching "3000 Nights" - a movie by Mai Masri about "Layal,"(whose name means "Nights" in Arabic).

Layal is a Palestinian woman incarcerated at a high-security Israeli prison for picking up a young accused Palestinian while he was hitchhiking. "Layal" is a woman like you and me, a teacher loved by her students, with dreams and hopes. I felt "Layal's" journey of confusion, of battling to have a fair trial, of being denied, her frustrations, her shock and struggles to make the right decision.

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The movie provided glimpses of what Palestinian prisoners experienced in Israeli prisons during the 1980s. At that period of time, Palestinian political prisoners used to be thrown into the same place with Israeli criminal prisoners. This left Palestinian prisoners receiving twofold punishment and mistreatment from the authorities as well as Israeli criminals. Palestinians were abused through arbitrary beating, torture, solitary confinement, insults, psychological manipulation, deprivation of family visits and violation of basic human rights.

My heart was appalled with every agonized scream from "Layal", while kicking the unmovable walls of her cell of solitary confinement. Palestinians were punished for troubles started by the Israeli criminals who continued to receive preferential treatment. Palestinian prisoners, through the movie, were the ones forced to cook for the guards and prisoners, clean the dishes and sew the army military suits.

Among these blank walls, one can easily lose their humanity but that wasn't the case for "Layal." She saved an Israeli female prisoner who was moaning in pain due to a drug overdose - an action that would have shocked all media which tries very hard to prove how monstrous Palestinians are. It is due to such bonds of solidarity with the Palestinian prisoners that Israeli authorities decided to separate Palestinian and Israeli prisoners in later years, as shared by Mai Masri.

The movie touched upon the conditions of pregnant prisoners and their struggles when giving birth inside prison. Palestinian women are chained to bed when giving birth while surrounded by Israeli soldiers holding their guns. The children were used as a psychological blackmail tool to stop hunger strikes among prisoners as well. Strikes that started to demand rights that some consider trivial, such as the right to have books, papers, newspapers and pens. Rights to make you feel like a human who is still alive. It made me wonder how we, in Gaza, could survive if we didn't have social media connecting us to the outside world.

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Babies are life in itself and "Layal's" baby gave me and everyone in the cell a reason to celebrate, to count days so they can say happy birthday, and to contemplate what life will look like when freedom is attained. In those moments, the prison with its suffocating walls was not dictating how these prisoners should live or, shall I say, suffer. In those moments, the song "Darkness of Prison" sang by the prisoners echoed beyond the walls, the wired fences and the guards with their guns. It was extremely heartbreaking for me to hear their tranquil voices calling the darkness of the prison to unfold, singing their lack of fear of the darkness, promising the prison that after the night's darkness, a dawn of an ascending glory would shine.

I have always been fascinated with birds' ability to spread their wings and fly; a symbol of freedom. For someone locked in a cell, birds were the main thing prisoners would draw, talk about or carve as if to remind themselves that they are alive. Ahmed Alfaleet, a Palestinian prisoner in Israel sentenced for life, shared through his talk at TEDxShujaiya how a bird with a broken wing was life for the prisoners sharing his cell and himself included. Running to rescue this injured bird, giving it the little food they had, taking turns to care for it made him feel alive; not a breathing human being, but a living one as well. Losing the bird was the hardest thing Ahmed had been through. He shared how he didn't bother stifling his sobs, for every prisoner wept and mourned the loss of hope and life with the bird loss.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was a man interested by mystic Eastern religions, a Communist sympathizer, and widely considered, "the father of the atomic bomb." Over 70 years after the Manhattan Project, the world is still reeling from the effects of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Amidst warnings of another nuclear arms race, the psychology behind massive warfare is increasingly vital. How do individuals lead to discoveries that kill thousands?

There are lessons to be learned by studying the lives of important 20th century nuclear scientists, such as Oppenheimer. When General Groves appointed Oppenheimer to head the Manhattan Project's secret weapons laboratory, he did so against the advice of others. Groves saw that Oppenheimers relentless ambition and vast scientific knowledge outweighed any concerns over left leaning politics. In his youth, Oppenheimer infamously preferred physics to friendship. Then, after World War II, he expressed genuine remorse for the deaths brought about by his work. How do we reconcile such a scientist with the man?

Shirley Streshinsky and Patricia Klaus tried to do just that through their 2013 publication, "An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer's Life". Taking a humanist approach to Oppenheimer's legacy, Streshinsky and Klaus studied the man by looking at the different lives of the women he loved. Oppenheimer's great loves included: Jean Tatlock, his wife Kitty Harrison, and Ruth Sherman Tolman, the wife of Oppenheimer's friend and colleague on the Manhattan Project Richard Tolman.

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Pair J. Robert Oppenheimer First Editions, with dedications to Ruth Sherman Tolman, news clippings, and a handwritten note from Oppenheimer to Tolman. Photograph courtesy of Auctionata, auction no. 530: Fine Books including Rare Bindings & Association Copies. Tuesday, May 17th, 2016, 4 pm EDT

According to Oppenheimer's aunt, Ruth Sherman Tolman was the scientist's "best true friend". Throughout their acquaintance, Tolman and Oppenheimer kept a correspondence. It is rumored that Tolman and Oppenheimer's respective spouses knew about the affair. Nonetheless, most of the evidence of the relationship has been destroyed, with only a few letters remaining. The surviving love notes between Tolman and Oppenheimer demonstrate their strong feelings for each other.

Tolman was ten years older than Oppenheimer when they met. She was a brilliant mind and a warm hearted person. Though Oppenheimer had just few close personal relationships, Tolman's ability to penetrate the minds of others broke through to Oppenheimer. It is no wonder that Tolman was also the first woman elected to the council of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and a clinical psychologist with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) - the basis for the modern day Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It was while working with the OSS that Tolman and Oppenheimer's relationship began. Tolman's government position and her closeness to other members of the Manhattan Project gave her a unique insight into Oppenheimer's moral conundrum. Tolman witnessed her husband's and her lover's excitement when the now infamous "Trinity" test explosion was successful.

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Pair J. Robert Oppenheimer First Editions, with dedications to Ruth Sherman Tolman, news clippings, and a handwritten note from Oppenheimer to Tolman. Photograph courtesy of Auctionata, auction no. 530: Fine Books including Rare Bindings & Association Copies. Tuesday, May 17th, 2016, 4 pm EDT

Many members of the scientific community at the time hoped the terrifying possibility of the weapon would be enough to deter the war. A scientist from the Manhattan Project told General Groves about the successful test, with faith that it alone could end the war. Groves responded, "after we drop two bombs on Japan". On August 6th, 1945, President Truman broke the news that the largest bomb in history had been dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, another bomb was released on Nagasaki. When early reports of the devastation got back to Oppenheimer the reality set in and the fog of ambition cleared. Oppenheimer saw the irrevocable change he had brought into the world. The war was over, the scientist's work was complete, but there was no peace for the man. Oppenheimer left for Washington for a two-week trip, where he would speak to both of the Tolmans about the need to control nuclear arms. He was an American hero for helping to end the war, while publically calling the bomb a terrible and brutal weapon.

In 1954, during the Second Red Scare, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance for of his outspokenness and Communist connections. Ruth Tolman's friendship supported him through the trial process. Letters between them are recorded in the Oppenheimer biography, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer". Tolman kept up with Oppenheimer's lectures and articles during this time, as evident by news clippings, notes, and inscribed editions "with love" from Oppenheimer to Tolman.

Oppenheimer's tragic regret illustrates the importance of not only recognizing the unyielding ambition of scientific brilliance, but also the value of regret and hindsight. Human beings, capable of affairs, love, and greatness, can also suffer folly. Hopes of ending a war, without lasting control of one's own discoveries, opened a Pandora's Box of future nuclear violence. To learn from Oppenheimer requires a keen memory of human regret and far reaching predictions into potential future ramifications.

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Pair J. Robert Oppenheimer First Editions, with dedications to Ruth Sherman Tolman, news clippings, and a handwritten note from Oppenheimer to Tolman. Photograph courtesy of Auctionata, auction no. 530: Fine Books including Rare Bindings & Association Copies. Tuesday, May 17th, 2016, 4 pm EDT


Gallantly Streaming on exhibit at the U.S. Mission to the U.N., Lobby

Sometimes, it's good to have a large footprint.

At the opening of the new Whitney Museum in New York City I had a conversation with a well known New York art critic. He gave me advice on using instagram (still badly needed) and told me to talk about my children (which I have for the most part avoided). I've thought of that conversation a lot lately -- unknown to him my daughter was on her way to volunteer in Asia for a year and recently was able to attend an event at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong where my painting is on exhibit.

I have been working with the Art in Embassies Program of the U. S. State Department for the past 15 years. My artwork has been lent to Ambassadors and Embassies around the world, beginning in Prague, and moving out from there to Paris, Oslo, Madrid and literally spanning the globe. Some Ambassadors have brought my paintings from their private collections with them to their post. Three of my paintings are currently on exhibit at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations -- my painting Gallantly Streaming, from my 911 series of work is on view in the lobby. Prior to this they were requested for exhibit at the United Nations Security Council.

As mentioned above, my paintings Parade Route is currently on exhibit at the U.S. Consulate Residence in Hong Kong. I had spent time in Asia as the recipient of a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation (the grant's purpose is to enhance the understanding of Asia among potential leaders in American society). During that time, I painted in Hong Kong and exhibited in Asia so having one of my artwork currently on exhibit in Hong Kong is particularly meaningful to me.

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My daughter, a recent graduate of Williams College, has taken it upon herself to see the world while doing what she can to improve those places where she sets down. She began with an NGO school in Siem Reap, Cambodia, the school folded after her first month, but she and her fellow volunteers from around the world worked together to start a new one, which is still running. Once this was up and running, she moved to the hills outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand to work with an anti-trafficking organization -- Daughters Rising. With the mission of educating and empowering girls as a way to equip them against traffickers, she worked with a team of volunteers and staff to teach, train, and transition the girls from a life of limited options to one of economic independence. She continued her anti-trafficking work further north with another organization.

She asked if she could take some of my art supplies to teach the women watercolors. I gave her my travel painting blocks as well as some of my worn and well loved sable brushes knowing that they would be put to good use. Who knows what they might unlock -- as a member of the National Council on the Arts, the advisory Board to the National Endowment for the Arts -- I get to see first hand the power of the arts to transform lives.

I don't think the art critic would have expected such a response but I often think of that conversation reflecting on what has transpired in the past couple months. In our own ways, we both have a global footprint. Hers perhaps hands on and mine in a more subtle way.

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April 24th, 2016: It was beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon in Santa Fe. That day, the unique, typically bitter and awful taste of ayahuasca did not seem to be so bad going down my throat. Perhaps it was because the vegetal, or hoasca--as ayahuasca is called in the Uniao do Vegetal (UDV), a religion originating in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1960s--was not made in the Amazon, but with Banisteriopsis vine from the UDV's new plantation in Hawaii. Or perhaps the brown liquid tasted different because I, too, was enjoying, alongside the members of the UDV, the pleasant taste of justice, freedom, and victory. It was the opening ceremony of the nucleo Santa Fe, the UDV's new temple. The solemn occasion was attended by some of the church's leaders from Brazil.

This event was the result of a long and hard journey: five and half years without being able to legally drink the vegetal in the US; seven years of fighting all the way to the Supreme Court; four years of negotiating the regulation of the administration of hoasca with the DEA (once the case had been settled); and nine years of struggling with the county of Santa Fe to build the temple.

"This represents a dream fulfilled. It's the accomplishment of Mestre Gabriel's [the humble rubber tapper who founded the UDV] vision that the UDV would reach out to other countries. The federal justice determined we had the right to drink our sacrament, but without a place for our community to gather, 'religious freedom' was just an abstract concept," Mestre Jeffrey Bronfman told me. Thanked with appreciation during the ceremony by the community, Bronfman is one of the main strategists of the case. A warrior whose personal wealth also made this religious exemption to use a schedule I "drug" possible in the United States, home of the Drug War.

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I have been attending the UDV sporadically for the past 20 years. It was in their temple that I tried ayahuasca for the first time; an experience that changed my life forever. I have always been fascinated by the UDV's combination of ayahuasca with an incredible institutional organization and a conservative ethos. The UDV represented to me a kind of "flirtation with normality." I've thought of joining a few times, but never did.

On that afternoon, in the "colorful religious landscape of northern New Mexico's high desert," as put by anthropologist Michael Brown, I couldn't have been more excited. The UDV's expansion to the US was a delight to my anthropological mind. A Mestre (religious leader) told me I looked like a kid in an amusement park.

The UDV aimed to keep their caboclo (rural mestizo based) identity and style alongside the introduction of powerful technology and structure. The ceremony was held entirely in Portuguese, with teachings by the traditional Mestres da origem (contemporaries of Mestre Gabriel). North Americans heard their words through an electronic apparatus for simultaneous translation (while one ear heard the English translation, the other could hear what was being said in Portuguese!)

The simultaneous translation was done in a booth on the second floor by Renata Cassis Law, a Brazilian living in the US for 18 years and married to the local head of the church. "When I am translating, I get more focused on what the Mestre is saying. I do not let my mind wander around. I connect in the burracheira [the effects of the vegetal] and I translate. I feel there is a direct line of transmission. I really like it. It is also a pleasure to serve others," she shared, while working some extra hours after the session preparing a nice dinner that was served to everyone.

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While expanding nationally and internationally, the UDV has adopted some strategic decisions: to be legal, and never underground; to be ecologically sustainable; and not to translate their teachings into other languages. No chamadas (songs) or historias (stories that are part of the religious doctrine) are translated, though other parts of some sessions might be held in other languages. Foreigners who wish to ascend in the internal hierarchy of the group must learn Portuguese. The result is a mix, a fascinating community speaking different levels of Portuguese; a distinctive characteristic of the bourgeoning process of diaspora of the Brazilian religions to the global religious context.

Nancy Hollander, the acclaimed lawyer responsible for this victory, stated: "Today is the culmination of 17 years of work together with the UDV, and it is the birth of this house of worship. It's a good night and a good morning at the same time." Along these lines, Luis Felipe Belmonte recognized, "This represents a significant victory in the recognition of the value of the work of Mestre Gabriel and his disciples in the expansion of the UDV throughout the world." A Brazilian lawyer based in the UK, Belmonte has been working with dedication on the legalization of the UDV in Italy, Holland, Spain, the UK, Switzerland, and Australia.

After the ceremony, a video showing the construction of the temple was shown. The unanimous feeling was of happiness and joy. Underneath this was the sad recognition of the huge amounts of prejudice and misunderstanding that surround the UDV. Absurd claims from the neighbors involved baseless accusations, including that the DMT present in the brew could contaminate the groundwater and poison their children. All who have had the opportunity to be able to drink vegetal, know and share silent agreement that it keeps us in good shape, health, and discipline.

I took a photo in the photo booth and grabbed a piece of wood with the image of the temple: souvenirs from the grand opening and, to me, tokens of the UDV's amazing development. I hopped back on an airplane full of gratitude for the privilege to be able to travel to the inside of my heart and soul, visit an enchanted spiritual land, and share this experience with so many friends in the UDV.

Congratulations to the exemplary perseverance of the brotherhood. And also to my fellow researchers who have the curiosity to study ayahuasca and things like the UDV's concept of "mental concentration"--the opposite of a pathological hallucination. They risk their careers to address this taboo topic, navigating into these mysterious waters with the tools of science. All those who love justice and freedom are part of this victory.

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry holds his granddaughter Isabel Dobbs-Higginson as he talks to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon after signing the Paris Agreement on climate change, Friday, April 22, 2016 at U.N. headquarters. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Anything above 1.5 degrees Celsius is a death sentence for us and for the planet.

______________

THE PARIS AGREEMENT

A historic event took place on Earth Day 2016. It was a decisive moment for the planet. On Friday, April 22nd around 60 heads of state gathered at the United Nations in New York for the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement. 175 governments took the first step of signing onto the deal and according to the White House at least 34 countries, representing 49% of greenhouse gas emissions have formally ratified the Paris Agreement. It was 'the largest ever single-day turn-out for a signing ceremony,' indicating 'strong international commitment to deliver on the promises.

I was at COP21 in Paris when negotiators finally agreed the Paris Agreement, the first legally binding global climate deal: the culmination of 21 years of international negotiation and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process: a massive global political mobilization in response to the looming threat of catastrophic climate change. It scales up ambition from the previous international instrument, the Kyoto Protocol, by placing mitigation and adaptation obligations on all Parties. The Agreement includes elements of previous international agreements and follows on from the Kyoto Protocol and the shameful failure of the Copenhagen Accord. The Paris Agreement is an unprecedented evolution in both international law and climate change law. We all hope that it will be enough to save the planet.

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The program for the opening ceremony included messages from civil society, a UN messenger for Peace, participation of schoolchildren and a performance by the Julliard Quintet. The ceremony itself was preceded by a high level debate on climate change and sustainability. These are perceived as hopeful signs that the Paris Agreement will be inclusive and fulfill the needs of all, including the most vulnerable. "At the ceremony Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, an indigenous women's leader from Chad, called on countries to follow through on their promises. Temperatures in her country were already a blistering 48C (118F), she said, and climate change threatened to obliterate billions spent on development aid over recent decades."

I welcome the commitments of the Paris Agreement, which "aims... to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty... to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above preindustrial levels." The agreement commits to "adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change and foster climate resilience," to "Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilient development," all "implemented to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities." These pledges are a great step forward in the race against catastrophic climate change.

I am very concerned, however, about the Agreement's provision to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels." This is a dangerous equivocation. By now we all know that a 2C target is woefully inadequate.

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President Hollande speaking at the signing ceremony at the UN in New York, April 22nd

THE 1.5 DEGREE CELSIUS TARGET

Some critics have been skeptical about the Paris Agreement, and expressed doubts that governments have either the intention or the ability to live up to their promises -- I share their doubts. NASA climate scientist Professor James Hansen, one of the world's foremost authorities on climate change, said of the agreement, "It's a fraud really, a fake... It's just bullshit for them to say: 'We'll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.' It's just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.'"George Monbiot writes of the Paris Agreement, "By comparison to what it could have been, it's a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it's a disaster."

Scientists at MIT say that under the current Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) the global average temperature will soar by as much as 3.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100. This is far above the 1.5 degree Celsius target, which, as President Hollande memorably stated at the opening of COP21 in Paris, is the 'absolute ceiling' for global temperature rise if we are to prevent climate catastrophe. Anything above 1.5 degrees C is a death sentence for us and for the planet.

A new report released in the Earth Systems Dynamics Journal in April 2016 maps the different consequences between a 1.5 and a 2 degree Celsius warmer world. Unsurprisingly, the 2 degree scenario is apocalyptic: extreme weather events, water scarcity, reduced crop yields, coral reef degradation and sea-level rise. We are already well on our way to creating this future. 2014 saw record-breaking temperatures and 2015 was the hottest year on record. 2016 has already surpassed previous temperature highs: in February, the global temperature was 1.34C above the average from 1951-1980, according to Nasa data.

We have now arrived at the tipping point. There is no more time for procrastination, or half-measures. The time is now, and there is no Plan B.



POLITICAL WILL



Enforcing the Paris Agreement will need world leaders' commitment for many years to come. The agreement is vulnerable, because it is subject to the vagaries of political will, and to changes in administration. President Obama has, to date, been more committed to combating climate change than any other U.S. President in recent history, and he is a key supporter of the agreement.

What happens, it has been asked, when Obama's administration comes to its end? What if the unthinkable happens and Donald Trump takes the White House? Would Trump feel bound by the Paris Agreement and continue the US's current trajectory towards decarbonization and lowering emissions? Not bloody likely. Hopefully the US will escape the fate of a Trump administration. The only hope is that Hillary Clinton, if she becomes the next President of the U.S., will demonstrate the same, or greater commitment as President Obama has done to the Paris Agreement.

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THE RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION



In order for the Paris Agreement to keep the warming of the world below the 1.5 degree Celsius target governments must commit to reducing CO2 emissions "in accordance with best available science." They must commit to halt the burning of fossil fuels, which have already formed a toxic "blanket" around the earth - they must "leave it in the ground." On April 22nd, at the signing ceremony, more than 170 countries vowed to put an end to the age of fossil fuels. These are fine words; but they will remain only words if countries don't commit to eradicating fossil fuels from our energy systems. They must embark upon a renewable energy revolution now.

The transition to renewable energy is urgent and necessary; and it is already bringing great economic benefit across the world. The International Energy Agency has forecast that renewables will produce more power than coal within 15 years. In July 2015, on a windy day, Denmark's wind farms produced between 116 and 140 percent of the national electricity requirements. Mexican energy firm TAU has saved so much through use of renewable energy, that they provide their customers with as much free electricity as they wish between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. "A network of landbased 2.5 MW wind turbines... operating at as little as 20% of their rated capacity, could supply more than 40 times current worldwide consumption of electricity, more than 5 times total global use of energy in all forms," according to Harvard University. If solar's current rate of growth continues, its output could match world power demand in just 18 years time. Big banks like UBS and Citigroup are investing heavily in solar, a market Deutsche Bank estimates will be worth a staggering $5 trillion in 2035. 'The sun has become mainstream, and... promises to democratise energy generation,' writes Leonie Greene in the Telegraph.

CO2 emissions reductions that meet the ambition of the Paris Agreement can only be achieved if a transition occurs from fossil fuels to renewables and if the 196 countries that gathered in Paris implement what the Agreement sets out on sequestration and decarbonisation. Article 4.1 of the Agreement states that "In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal ... Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible ... and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century..."

One of the highlights of COP21 was Al Gore's speech "Impacts and Solutions to the Climate Crisis." Before a packed crowd of more than 2,000 people he sounded the death knell for fossil fuels with a sobering and powerful address, in which he championed the viability of renewable energy.

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However, not everyone has seen the (solar-powered) light. Oil and gas are currently the cheapest they have been for many years and this is a dangerous incentive for energy corporations. "A critical point is that while the world's governments have signed on the dotted line, the world's companies have not... As long as fossil fuel energy is cheaper than renewables, oil gas and coal will be dispensed by the energy companies and burned by us all in vast quantities." Herbert Girardet writes in his article "COP-out in Paris," in Resurgence and Ecologist magazine, May/ June 2016. China, India and Indonesia are investing as heavily as ever in coal-powered electricity generation. Here in Great Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has enthusiastically adopted fracking, touting it as the solution for energy independence for the UK despite the irrefutable evidence that fracking causes earthquakes, contamination of aquifers, leakage of toxic chemicals into the ground, air pollution, increased road traffic and significantly contributes to climate change. Each well drilled requires millions of litres of water, which places an immense strain on resources.

EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS

In his speech Al Gore mentioned the Weather Disasters report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), released a week before COP21 got underway, which details how 90% of the natural disasters during the last 20 years have been caused by extreme weather events. The report records 6,457 floods, storms, heat waves, droughts and other weather-related disasters, claiming the lives of 606,000 people, an average of some 30,000 per year, with an additional 4.1 billion people injured, left homeless or in need of emergency assistance. Gore said "This is the acceleration of the climate crisis ... It's like a nature hike through the book of Revelations."

The figures in the report for this year end in August 2015, but -- needless to say -- weather related disasters continue to ravage the world. In the whole of 2015 earthquakes, floods, heat waves and landslides left 22,773 people dead, affected 98.6 million others and caused $66.5bn (47bn) of economic damage. In December 2015 a powerful winter cyclone left devastation across the globe, leading to two tornado outbreaks in the United States and disastrous river flooding, driving temperatures in the North Pole up to 50 degrees above average. On 13 January this year a huge, dry electrical storm set more than 70 fires rampaging across the island of Tasmania, destroying most of the island's UNESCO world heritage site, which contained unique, ancient and irreplaceable ecosystems, including many trees that were over a thousand years old. This month devastating floods killed 53 people in Pakistan alone.



Four tropical cyclones over the Pacific Ocean, September 2015. Credit NASA/NOAA GOES Project

FOREST LANDSCAPE RESTORATION AND THE BONN CHALLENGE

In order to preserve the planet and combat climate change, we must preserve the forests - between now and 2020 alone, we stand to lose 1,460,000,000 acres of tropical forest and 273,750 species. We must also restore degraded, and deforested land to purpose. There are 2 billion hectares of degraded and deforested land across the world with potential for restoration. Restoration of degraded and deforested lands is not simply about planting trees. People and communities are at the heart of the restoration effort, which transforms barren or degraded areas of land into healthy, fertile working landscapes. Restored land can be put to a mosaic of uses such as agriculture, protected wildlife reserves, ecological corridors, regenerated forests, managed plantations, agroforestry systems and river or lakeside plantings to protect waterways.

The Bonn Challenge was established by the German Government and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at a ministerial roundtable in September 2011. It is the largest restoration initiative the world has ever seen. The objective of the Bonn Challenge was originally to restore 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested land across the world by 2020. The New York Declaration on Forests raised the Bonn Challenge ambition in September 2014 by calling for restoration of an additional 200 million hectares by 2030, bringing the total target to 350 million hectares by 2030.

Achieving the 350 million hectare by 2030 goal would result in estimates of 0.6 - 1.7 Gt CO2 sequestered per on year average, reaching 1.6 - 3.4 Gt per year in 2030 and totalling 11.8 - 33.5 Gt over the period 2011-2030. Even restoring 150 million hectares would capture 47 Gigatonnes of CO2, and reduce the emissions gap by 17%. Forest restoration is invaluable in the race to tackle climate change. That is why, in 2012, I became IUCN Ambassador for the Bonn Challenge. Not only is forest landscape restoration a critical tool against climate change, it is an issue of the most basic human rights: the right to food, shelter, clean water and sustainable livelihoods. The Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation (BJHRF) of which I am Founder, President and Chief Executive, is committed to forest conservation and restoration. Almost 20 million hectares have already been pledged by governments, communities and the private sector. Commitments of further 40 million hectares are being finalised.



Bianca Jagger outside COP21, Paris 2015

INDIGENOUS PEOPLE'S RIGHTS

I am concerned by the lack of protection for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Paris Agreement, who have time and again been proven the best custodians of ecosystems, including forests. According to Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, "studies over the last year have shown that indigenous peoples outperform every other owner, public or private entities on forest conservation." According to the Center for World Indigenous Peoples, it was pressure from the United States, the European Union, and Norwegian delegates at COP21 which 'caused reference to the "rights of Indigenous peoples" to be cut from the binding portion of the Paris Agreement, relegating the only mention of Indigenous rights to the purely aspirational preamble.' Megan Davis, UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Chair, said in her statement to the COP, "Sadly, the agreement asks States to merely consider their human rights obligations, rather than comply with them."

The critical role of indigenous people in combating climate change is recognised in the Paris Agreement -- but their rights are not protected. Article 7.5 of the Paris Agreement acknowledges "that adaptation action should follow a country-driven, gender-responsive, participatory and fully transparent approach, taking into consideration vulnerable groups, communities and ecosystems, and should be based on and guided by the best available science and, as appropriate, traditional knowledge, knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems."

WOMEN

Article 7.5's language regarding women, "a gender-responsive... approach," is also weak and non-binding. It has long been established that women are disproportionately affected by climate change, especially in poorer countries. They are often most responsible for food production, household water supply and energy for heating and cooking - activities which will be seriously impacted by climate change. Yet women are often underrepresented or excluded from decision-making.

We cannot combat climate change without involving all stakeholders, including women and indigenous people, and their rights should have been at the heart of the Paris Agreement.

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FINANCING

The Agreement provides $100 bn in financing to compensate poorer countries' for 'loss and damage,' mitigation and adaptation. But this is a drop in the ocean, to put it mildly. Much more financing is needed to ensure that low lying and developing countries don't pay the price for decades of reckless gas guzzling, coal burning and emissions by the richest countries.

CONCLUSION
This photo taken on December 6, 2015 shows brides at a mass-marriage ceremony for 151 fatherless women, in Surat, around 265 km from Ahmedabad. An Indian diamond trader has thrown a mass wedding ceremony for 151 fatherless women, saying giving a bride away was 'sacred'. AFP PHOTO / AFP / STR (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Every year around the world, 15 million girls marry before turning 18, the legal age of consent in many countries. India -- where I live and work -- is home to one-third of these brides. Early marriage cuts girls and young women off from choices and opportunities, often halting their education and increasing their odds of facing abuse, poor health and lasting poverty.

News media in India and across the globe are paying attention to this phenomenon, with coverage of early and child marriage expanding rapidly in recent years. Unfortunately, some of these stories present child marriage in ways that create misunderstanding at best -- and, at worst, may keep us from identifying and sharing effective solutions to this challenge.

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As the co-founder of Point of View, a nonprofit that uses media and art to elevate the perspectives of women in India, I've been curious about this new wave of media coverage. What kinds of child marriage stories are journalists typically drawn to? What might those stories mean for the girls and young women most affected by the practice? I recently set out to answer these questions and identify trends in how the news media depicts child marriage, especially in India.

Here's what my team discovered:

Recent news stories tend to focus on very young brides.

Although most "child" marriages actually take place among adolescents, most images of the practice depict extremely young girls. This is particularly common in India -- even though the median age of marriage for women here is 17, and a rising proportion of underage marrriages in the country happen when girls are between ages 15 and 18. While the marriage of these very young girls remains a troubling challenge, it is not the norm in most of India. These child bride images certainly grab our attention, but may lead people to misunderstand what the practice of early marriage typically looks like -- and, in turn, how to best address it.

Newsmakers often depict child marriage using sensational language and stories.

Some journalists use adjectives like "barbaric" and "medieval" to describe early and child marriage -- words that seem to condemn not just the practice, but entire cultures and communities of people. Many of the story lines we discovered focused on tragic tales of young girls wed to old men, bride kidnappings, rescues and escapes. While these stories might ring true for some girls, this kind of drama just doesn't match up with the reality facing the vast majority of adolescent girls who get married in India. For the most part, their parents are not villains, but regular mothers and fathers who sincerely believe that they must arrange early marriages in order to secure their daughters' futures.

Most news stories that present solutions focus on using the law to end child marriage -- but child marriage has been illegal in India for decades.

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Despite laws against child marriage, the practice persists because families and entire communities have long viewed early marriage as a practical way to ensure young women have long-term economic security, stay safe from sexual violence and harassment, and avoid the potential scandal of romance and sex outside of marriage. To change those views, people need to understand why the practice is harmful, stop associating a girl's sexual purity with her entire community's so-called "honor," and start imagining opportunities for girls that extend beyond childbearing, cooking and cleaning. And there are hundreds of nonprofit organizations and activists in India working to create just this sort of social change and to advance women's rights. These experts use innovative approaches in a diverse array of communities in India -- and I, for one, would love to see more news stories about initiatives that seem to really work.

Reporters can find fascinating, true stories by listening to those most affected by child marriage: adolescent girls.

If you want to tell a story about child marriage, it makes sense to talk to someone who is actually facing pressure to marry early.

But a surprising number of news stories on this topic, especially in Indian media, don't actually include the perspectives of girls and young women. Reporters in the state of Jharkhand, for example, have covered child marriage by writing about official events related to the issue. All four Hindi newspapers in the state reported on the same event that honored four girls for their work advocating against child marriage, but the articles only featured photos of the girls, not their quotes or thoughts. If journalists shared more about the experiences of these girls, we'd have richer news stories that help readers concretely understand early and child marriage -- and that explore promising solutions to this deeply-rooted challenge.

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I'm more curious than ever about what these girls have to say: What are their hopes and dreams? What do they think about love, sex and marriage? Do they feel empowered to make their own choices? If they don't, why not?

I suspect their answers might make a real difference -- and a pretty compelling story, too.
new york march 28 donald...

The 2016 presidential campaign drags on and on. As we grit our teeth at the prospect of six more months of Donald Trump tweets, it's useful to look back on the past 12 months and consider what we've learned about Republicans.

1. Each of their candidates is deeply flawed. In April of 2015, according to an CNN/ORC poll, the ranking of Republican presidential candidates was former Florida governor Jeb Bush (17 percent), Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (12 percent), Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (11 percent), Florida Senator Marco Rubio (11 percent), former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (9 percent), Texas Senator Ted Cruz (7 percent), followed by surgeon Ben Carson (4 percent) and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (4 percent). At the time, pollster Nate Silver observed that most of these candidates had approval ratings that are "net-negative," unfavorability ratings greater than favorable.

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Even though Donald Trump subsequently emerged as the GOP frontrunner, he is not popular; as of April 19th he had 8.7 million primary votes, 37.9 percent of the GOP total. Throughout the primary there has been a persistent minority of Republicans who said they would not vote for Trump if he became the GOP nominee; in New York these were 24 percent, in Pennsylvania 22 percent.

2. Republicans have lots of money but don't spend it effectively. Of the remaining GOP candidates, Kasich has raised the least, $29 million; Trump has raised $51m; and Cruz has raised $142m. (Jeb Bush raised $150m.) $25m has been spent on the "#nevertrump" movement.

The Hill reported that Trump doesn't plan to spend his own funds in the general election but so far Republican donors haven't show interest in supporting him: "'Trump has insulted most of the contributors and fundraisers in the country,' said Mel Sembler, a former Republican National Committee (RNC) finance chairman."

Meanwhile there are rumors that the notorious Koch brothers, said to have raised $889 million for the 2016 election, have no plans to support Trump. Politico reported the Koch brothers plan to spend millions on "issue-based attacks on Hillary Clinton and other Democrats" and a multi-state get-out-the-vote organization.

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3. The GOP has given up hope of increasing their share of the nonwhite vote. At one time, sensible Republican leaders talked about broadening their base beyond white (non-Hispanic) voters. Last year, Washington Post political columnist Chris Cilliza pointed out that over the past three decades the white vote, in a presidential election, has shrunk from near 90 percent to 72 percent (in 2012). Meanwhile, the white content of the Republican Party has stayed around 90 percent as the white percentage of the Democratic Party has shrunk to 56 percent. Cilliza noted, "If the [2016] GOP nominee wins the same share of the white vote as Mitt Romney won in 1012 (59 percent), her or she would need to win 30 percent of the nonwhite vote... [But] Romney won only 17 percent of nonwhite voters in 2012."

Donald Trump is not popular with nonwhite voters. The Los Angeles Times reported: "In a potential matchup against Clinton, only one in five nonwhite voters sided with Trump."

4. Republicans face a daunting electoral challenge. After Obama's 2012 victory (332 Obama vs. 206 Romney), 538's Nate Silver observed that Romney would have had to win the overall vote by 3 percent to carry the electoral college - instead Obama won by 3.8 percent.

Going into the 2016 presidential election, it's generally conceded that Democrats control 240 electoral votes with 270 needed for victory.

The 11 swing states are Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia (137 votes). In 2012, Obama won 7 of these.

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4 of these states have rapidly growing Hispanic populations. For example, there are 4.8 million Hispanics in Florida (22 percent of the population), further tilting the state in the Democrat's favor. As another example, there are 1.1 million Hispanics in Colorado (20 percent of the population). If both Colorado and Florida are carried by the Democrats, that would give their candidate 278 electoral votes.

5. Republicans have cornered anger but not a compelling focus. Donald Trump insists on making this election about Barack Obama, but the President has positive ratings. Trump claims the economy is doing poorly but it isn't - about 14 million jobs have been added under Obama. Trump's opposed to raising the minimum wage but 75 percent of voters want this.

Trump's signature issue is immigration: he wants to deport 14 million undocumented immigrants and build a wall between Mexico and the US. However, Pew Research reports that 74 percent of Americans feel there should be a way for undocumented immigrants to stay in the US and 59 percent of voters oppose building a wall.
Although Nikki Vradenburg is the only K-1 teacher in her Bozeman, Montana-based school, her personal learning network includes fellow educators from across the region, country and globe.

"Our state is so spread out that teachers do not often have the opportunity to meet and work with other teachers," said Vradenburg, who has spent 15 years in the classroom. "I use Twitter to share ideas and get information from other K-1 teachers. It keeps me from working on an island."

Although Vradenburg has followed educational technology developments her entire career, she was "inspired to try blended learning" approaches after joining Twitter and participating in Twitter chats three years ago. Because of the relationships she forged on chats including #MTEdchat (Montana Educators), #WYOEdchat (Wyoming Educators) and #BPOPchat (the official chat for BrainPOP animated games and educational media), Vradenburg now collaborates and shares digital resources with teachers she otherwise would have never met. As well, whenever Vradenburg attends or presents at industry conferences, she now has already established deep relationships with many of the attendees.

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"It helps to have people sharing their thoughts and resources during the event in case you can't attend all of the sessions," she said, adding that "the backchannel conversations during the event are almost more interesting than the live presentations."

Teachers like Vradenburg who are immersed in the ways of Twitter have no problem leveraging the platform for professional learning. However, none of Twitter's transformational benefits impact teachers who don't know where to begin.

"The biggest communication gap with Twitter is the fact that hundreds of thousands of educators still are not connected educators," observes Bryan Miller, co-founder and director of Educational Technology at Edventure Quests who previously served as Director of Educational Technology at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.. "It is difficult to gain the attention, or have the conversations with those educators that may feel there aren't others out there like them that can support them."

A chat in the life

While there are hundreds of regional, topical and age-specific Twitter chats available for Pre-K educators each week, participating in a chat for the very first time can be daunting. This is particularly true for teachers not yet comfortable with the nuances of Twitter.

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Sean Gaillard, principal at Winston-Salem, N.C.-based John F. Kennedy High School, wants to hold the hand of any educator interested in participating in his popular bi-weekly chat #EdBeat, and let them know that there is a place they can go where everything flows more easily.

"I really wanted it to be inclusive and informal," said Gaillard, who started #EdBeat early last year after previously moderating a chat he set up for his former school that began to attract a broader following. #EdBeat is a medley of professional development, positivity and passion. There are also a lot of musical references and lessons derived from The Beatles.

"I am always thinking about that lonely teacher in South Dakota that is passionate about flipped classrooms but doesn't really have an avenue (to collaborate)," he said. "That's why I really stress the positive. Anybody can play in the band."

In addition to #EdBeat, Gaillard also started the regularly trending #CelebrateMonday movement on Twitter as pushback against "cynicism happening in education". His mission is to encourage teachers, students and administrators to start off the week "with unabashed joy" and radiate everything they are by tweeting positive messages and images associated with that hashtag.

On many Sundays, Gaillard co-moderates the #Read4Fun chat with Literacy Specialist, Professor, & Global Program Developer Jennifer Williams. Most weeks, Williams guest moderates any number of popular education chats including #whatisschool, #EdTechChat, #TeacherEdChat, #TnTechChat and #EdBeat. She also moderates chats associated with online conferences, including Global Leaders Week (#globaled16). Social media conversations with "like-minded individuals", says Williams, provide a virtuous combination of personal and professional benefits.

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"Twitter instantly appealed to me as a professional because I was able to customize my Professional Learning Network," she said. "Within the space, I sought out educators that brought a sincere and genuine voice to the conversation of education. I quickly found that I was able to engage in conversations with like-minded individuals that positively changed me as a teacher and, more as a person. Twitter chats allowed for expanded and focused discussions on topics that were personally significant in my life."



Beyond sharing ideas and words of inspiration, Twitter chats are the most effective way for teachers to share and talk about digital resources they are using to broaden their instruction and communicate more proactively with their students, colleagues and administrators.

Removing the Helter Skelter from the chat experience

One of the educators that Vradenburg met on Twitter was Billings, Mont.-based kindergarten teacher Traci Piltz. Long before they met in person, Vradenburg helped create a digital version of a book Piltz was hoping to use for the Global Read Aloud project, but could not find a physical copy. Thereafter, the two encouraged their students to write about the book via their respective classroom blogs.

More recently, Piltz and Billings-based Technology Integration Specialist Ann Brucker created a hashtag and weekly chat for Billings Public Schools found at #BPESedchat. Earlier this spring, teachers from all over the district - many of which had never been on Twitter before - spent one hour each Tuesday night collaborating and sharing resources via that hashtag. To accommodate the Twitter newbies and engage more experienced users interested in seeing and learning more about all of the resources shared, Pilz and Brucker encouraged the group to use Participate Learning (where I work) as their chat client. By the second week, more teachers were collaborating within the chat via Participate Learning than Twitter.com, TweetDeck and other clients combined.

"I needed a really easy entry point for the Twitter newbies who are not only novices when it comes to an edchat, but were often unfamiliar with Twitter at all," wrote Brucker in a blog post last March. "It occurred to me, though, that Participate might just be the ticket because not only is the platform easier and less distracting, but each chat has its own direct link!"

Schools, districts and professional learning communities from across the globe are now using Participate Learning for their chats, as well as to review transcripts and resource collections from previous chats.



A long and winding road to professional development

Social networks continue to evolve and respond to the needs, desires and behaviors of their users. As Gaillard notes, "10 or 12 years ago, it was all about MySpace, and if I were doing #EdBeat or #CelebrateMonday on MySpace we wouldn't be having these kinds of conversations."

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Gaillard, Vradenberg, Miller, Williams and others regularly use and/or are experimenting with tools like Voxer (virtual walkie-talkie), Remind (student, teacher, parent communication platform), Periscope (live video platform, owned by Twitter), Blab (live video conversations) and Participate Learning to continue and illuminate conversations initially started on Twitter.

"Because of the incredible shift in technology," said Gaillard, we have top be open to whatever the next connectivity 3.0 vehicle is."
A federal grand jury in Riverside, California indicted three individuals connected to Syed Rizwan Farook, one of two deceased San Bernardino terrorist killers, the United States Attorneys Office announced today. Fourteen people were killed in the Dec. 2, 2015 attack, the worst post 9/11 terrorist strike on American soil. The charges announced today are federal felonies that arose during the terror investigation, but are not directly tied to the December 2 attack. No one as been charged as of yet for the San Bernardino attack, and there has been no information publicly released of a wider conspiracy, or if anyone else was aware of the planned attacks besides the deceased assailants. Enrique Marquez, a friend of Farook who allegedly provided him with assault weaponry, faces weapons and conspiracy charges. While the charges are not directly tied to the San Bernardino massacre, it gives federal investigators leverage, in the form of possible plea bargains to extract more information from those closest to the dead assailants.

Three defendants are charged in a five count indictment arising out of "a marriage fraud conspiracy that involved making false statements under oath for the purpose of obtaining immigration benefits for one of the defendants" the office stated. Those charged are:

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Mariya Chernykh, 26, of Ontario, who, according to official records, is married to Enrique Marquez, Jr., who is awaiting trial on charges of conspiring with Syed Rizwan Farook in 2011 and 2012 to provide material support to terrorists;

Tatiana Farook, 31, of Corona, who is Chernykh's sister; and

Syed Raheel Farook, 31, of Corona, who is Tatiana Farook's husband and Syed Rizwan Farook's brother.

All defendants are charged with conspiracy to make false statements under oath in immigration papers, a federal felony punishable by up to five years imprisonment. Ms. Chernykh is also charged with four counts arising out of fraud, false statements and deception that are cumulatively punishable by up to 25 years imprisonment.



Federal agents search a lake for evidence near San Bernardino attack scene

"This is the latest step in the comprehensive investigation into the horrific attacks in San Bernardino last year that took the lives of 14 innocent Americans and deeply affected so many more," said United States Attorney Eileen M. Decker. "As I have said previously, we owe the victims, and the entire community of San Bernardino, a thorough investigation that uncovers all criminal activity surrounding these events. Today's arrests open a new phase in the process of bringing to justice all individuals who allegedly committed crimes that were uncovered during our exhaustive investigation."

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The charges in these California cases are among the most common non-terror charges levied that arise from terrorism investigations.

Top 5 non-terrorism charges

Immigration violations (121) Criminal conspiracy (73) Making false statements (72) Fraud/financial crimes (57) RICO/Racketeering (51)

Source: Mother Jones analysis of DOJ cases

Conspiracies are agreements between two or more people to commit a crime followed by an overt step in furtherance of the crime. Conspiracies, in these cases, are federal felonies and can be charged even if the planned crime never materializes.
Students and supporters applaud at a rally against Islamophobia at San Diego State University in San Diego, California, November 23, 2015. REUTERS/Sandy Huffaker

Each year the US Department of State publishes its annual report on Human Rights Practices across the world. In its 2015 report the Department of State expresses concern with anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents in France. Although this concern is justified, it must be put into context.

Too many anti-Muslim incidents were reported in 2015. An increase of over 281%, i.e. 400 in total, for the most part insults, threats or graffiti on Mosques. A figure well below the violence which followed the September 11 attacks in the USA, where Muslim shopkeepers were attacked, as well as Indians and Sikhs mistaken for Muslims because of their turbans. Some were even killed.

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Racism exists in France also, but the reaction here to the terrorist attacks was mainly in the form of demonstrations and slogans of solidarity. According to the highly respected Pew Institute, in 2015 it was in fact in France that Muslims were most highly considered. More than in England or Germany, despite France being the most targeted by terrorists. But above all, in periods of calm, outside terrorist attacks, the number of anti-Muslim incidents has decreased considerably: -82% during the first half of 2016. But this is not the case for anti-Semitic incidents.

Twice as many anti-Semitic as anti-Muslim incidentsThe number of anti-Semitic incidents is still double that of anti-Muslim incidents. 800 to 400. Even at a time of terrorist attacks, when terrorists murder Jews in the name of Islam.When we talk of anti-Semitic incidents, we are not only referring to insults or graffiti, but knife attacks on the streets, attacks aimed to kill, terrorists armed with kalachnikovs.It is important to highlight this. Not to create rivalry between the victims of racism, but because we live in a time when in order to radicalize and persuade young Muslims in France to kill Jews, extremists tell them that they are more persecuted than the Jews. This is the context which cannot be ignored; it should be treated more responsibly by those involved in public debate. And yet, the more our country is targeted by terrorist attacks, the more we observe this senseless passion for "victimhood" and inflammatory propaganda.

Shared irresponsibilitiesWe see the irresponsibility of journalists who, instead of providing the official statistics of racist aggressions, relay the deliberately misleading figures put out by the Collective against Islamophobia. Close to salafist imams, the CAI regards any secular criticism of fundamentalism or the expulsion of radical imams as "islamophobic".

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Then there are those who do not understand, or do not want to understand, the difference between wearing a kippah (which is not a sexist symbol) in solidarity with a Jew who had been stabbed on the street and the organization of a "Hijab Day" at Sciences Po (University of Political Science), forgetting that the veil is permitted in universities, that dictators have made it their emblem and that, in some countries, women are beaten or killed for not wearing it. Despite intense media coverage the "Hijab Day" initiative, launched by a student member of Les Republicains party, was a flop.

And now we have an "Islamophia" commission in Place de la Republique in Paris, where we see the usual proponents of "victimhood" propaganda, mobilized to give credence to the theory of "State racism", whereas in fact the problem is racism in society and we have laws fighting fight racism.

On the subject of irresponsibility, the US Department of State could perhaps do some soul-searching. In its report a significant part of the chapter on "Freedom of Speech and Press" refers to the trial and sentencing of the former comedian Dieudonne. Based on the Anglo-Saxon view on freedom of expression, the report defends the freedom of hate speech, which amounts to attacking France's efforts to punish racism.

Misunderstandings and cultural warfare These differences of opinion stem from our respective histories and approaches regarding secularism and equality. And when the main threat comes from religious or sectarian radicalism, we are no longer on the same wavelength. This was the case with the anti-sect laws of 2001 or the law of March 2004 on religious symbols in state schools, all measures taken to protect emancipation and equality, but which the US Department of State saw as serious violations of religious freedom.

It would not be such a serious issue if American "soft power" didn't also encourage young people in France to view these laws in this way, via their "Young leaders" or "community organizing" programmes, aimed at the elite or to structure our youth on a community basis, notably in the suburbs, on the pretext of overcoming discrimination.

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What might be a very positive approach in the US, making up for the absence of a welfare state, is much less so in France where the main danger is seeing the social fabric split into separate communities which are played off against each other.

This is indirectly encouraged by such programmes, as many activists who have taken part in them now play an active role in public debate, telling us that secularism in France is "islamophobic" and that France is intolerant towards its minorities. Contrary to the United States.
Now that both parties have presumptive nominees for the 2016 Presidential election, given the outcomes of Tuesday's primaries in five states, we are all holding our breath to see what happens next.

One would hope that candidates and their campaigns have received enough negative feedback about the incivility and character assassination that has been front and center throughout the primary season, that a shift to higher ground would make strategic sense. But the initial salvos from the Trump camp would seem to suggest that we will now be witness to a gender war through November.

It is unacceptable for a candidate for the Presidency to resort to legitimating intolerance on a regular basis. First it was the Mexicans, the disabled, the Jewish, POWs, African Americans, Muslims, reporters... and now his target is women. By suggesting the only reason a candidate is winning is due to the fact she is a woman is an insult to all women. And if that comment had any basis in fact wouldn't there be a lot more women in the US House and Senate and in state houses across the country?

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We have come so far in this nation in facing up to our institutionalized "isms" and even though we all know we have much further to go, we need to register a collective outcry against candidates for the highest public office in the land who seemed determined to take us backwards.
I think what we're doing now is stamping out the last embers of those who seek to oppose us. I think all the really horrible laws we're seeing in the last couple of weeks are direct reaction to the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality. So it took a couple of years for them to get these laws in action. They want to ban the bathroom issues, they want to ban services to LGBT people and the reaction is huge corporations like Pay Pal and Lionsgate Films and rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr are saying, guess what, we're not coming to your state because you're bloody bigots, and that's really great to see. It's like we reached a tipping point where this is unacceptable. So I think right now we have to concentrate on smashing out these last ashes of discrimination because the worst thing they can do is teach the next generation that this is okay. We could completely go backwards depending on how the next election goes and how the local elections go. I mean everywhere there's a problem these people were elected. So if they're doing things you don't agree with you need to get out and campaign and vote if you do nothing else. We have to stamp out these anti LGBT laws and movements and I think we're doing that. In the old days people like us had to go out and march in the streets and bear the brunt of all sorts of hate mail and now Bruce Springsteen is doing it for us.
Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, speaks during a campaign event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, U.S., on Saturday, Feb. 6, 2016. Trailing Bernie Sanders in the Democratic contest by 20 percentage points or more in some polls of voters in the state, Clinton recalled that New Hampshire gave her a come-from-behind victory in the 2008 primary race and a dramatic boost to her husband, Bill Clinton, in his first run for the presidency in 1992. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To tell you the truth, I never thought I'd have to write this article. I fully expected someone else to dig this stuff out, if the calls for Bernie Sanders to drop out of the race (or "say nice things about Hillary Clinton") began. Now that they have, I still haven't seen any detailed reminders of how the 2008 Democratic primary race ended yet. So I went ahead and dug them out on my own.

What follows is a review of the last few weeks of the 2008 primary, for those who have forgotten what it was like. All of these articles come from the Washington Post (because it made the database search easier, mostly). I apologize for not providing links; this is due to the fact that I retrieved the articles from a commercial database (with a paywall).

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All of the following articles were published from mid-April to the first week in June of 2008. In other words, exactly eight years ago. I'm going to present them with only limited commentary (to only provide any needed historical context).

One more thing before I begin, in the interests of fairness. While Hillary Clinton did fight hard until the end, she is to be credited for two strategic moves from roughly the same period of time. First, she largely refused to attack Barack Obama in the midst of all the "Reverend Wright" mudslinging. She easily could have piled on, along with the rest of the political universe. She didn't. Secondly, during the time period below, Clinton had a stock line she threw in to most of her speeches (even the ones quoted below): "I will work my heart out for the Democratic Party and the party's eventual nominee." She signaled that she would work for Obama's election if she lost, which was rightly seen as a big step towards party unity.

With those caveats firmly in place, though, let's take a look at the end of Clinton's 2008 campaign. Just before the Pennsylvania primary, from an article titled "Obama Sharpens His Tone; As Pa. Vote Nears, Clinton Criticizes Rival's Negative Turn," Clinton showed her displeasure at Obama's attacks on her health care reform plan (which, at the time, had a mandate for coverage that Obama did not support):

Clinton, campaigning in Bethlehem, called her rival's approach "so negative" and charged him with mimicking Republicans by attacking her plan for universal health care. "He has sent out mailers, he has run ads, misrepresenting what I have proposed," Clinton said. "I really regret that because the last thing we need is to have somebody spending as much money as he has downgrading universal health care."

From an April 22 article entitled "Clinton in the Wilderness," a previous and very personal slight towards Obama was noted:

But she [Clinton] has gone too far -- too much disturbing stuff, some of it shocking in its coarseness. For instance, she added the coy "as far as I know" to her 60 Minutes statement that Obama is not a Muslim.

Clinton used some inartful language in an interview with USA Today, which Eugene Robinson pointed out on May 9 ("The Card Clinton Is Playing"):

From the beginning, Hillary Clinton has campaigned as if the Democratic nomination were hers by divine right. That's why she is falling short -- and that's why she should be persuaded to quit now, rather than later, before her majestic sense of entitlement splits the party along racial lines. If that sounds harsh, look at the argument she made Wednesday, in an interview with USA Today, as to why she should be the nominee instead of Barack Obama. She cited an Associated Press article "that found how Senator Obama's support... among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again. I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As a statement of fact, that's debatable at best. As a rationale for why Democratic Party superdelegates should pick her over Obama, it's a slap in the face to the party's most loyal constituency -- African Americans -- and a repudiation of principles the party claims to stand for. Here's what she's really saying to party leaders: There's no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you'll be sorry. How silly of me. I thought the Democratic Party believed in a colorblind America.

On May 20, in an ironically-titled article "Democrats Observe A Fragile Cease-Fire," the Clinton campaign tried to equate Obama with George W. Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" photo:

Obama is favored to win the Oregon primary today, and Clinton is an even stronger favorite to win the Kentucky contest. But Obama will not celebrate primary night in either of those states. Instead, he has chosen to be in Iowa, where his victory in the caucuses in January turned the Democratic race upside down. There, at a rally in Des Moines, he is expected to declare that he has secured a majority of the pledged delegates currently eligible to attend August's Democratic convention in Denver. Obama and his advisers insist the event will stop short of a declaration that he has won the nomination. But it will be seen as another signal to superdelegates to climb aboard his bandwagon as quickly as possible. The celebration, however, has rankled the Clinton campaign and the candidate herself. They see it as a highhanded effort to embarrass her and to generate renewed calls from others in the party for her to quit the race before anyone has achieved a genuine majority of pledged delegates and superdelegates. In a signal of how fragile the detente between the two sides is, the Clinton campaign sent out a tart memo yesterday under the name of communications director Howard Wolfson calling the Obama rally in Iowa "a slap in the face of millions of voters in the remaining primary states and to Senator Clinton's 17 million supporters." Then, in language tying the Obama campaign to the Bush White House, the memo continues: "Premature victory laps and false declarations of victory are unwarranted. Declaring mission accomplished does not make it so."

On May 23, Hillary Clinton said something downright despicable. There's just no other word to describe her insinuation. From "Hillary Clinton Raises the Specter of the Unspeakable," here is Hillary musing on a possible end to the Democratic nomination race:

Smart candidates don't invoke the possibility of their opponents being killed. This seems so obvious it shouldn't need to be said, but apparently, it needs to be said. "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California," Hillary Clinton said yesterday, referencing the fact that past nomination contests have stretched into June to explain why she hasn't heeded calls to exit the Democratic race. She was in an editorial board meeting with a South Dakota newspaper, and she didn't even seem to notice she'd just uttered the unutterable. The nation's political science students, our future strategists and campaign managers, would do well to pay attention to this moment. There are taboos in presidential politics, and this is one of the biggest. To raise the specter of a rival's assassination, even unintentionally, is to make a truly terrible thing real. It sounds like one might be waiting for a terrible thing to happen, even if one isn't. It sounds almost like wishful thinking.

She had to immediately apologize, but within the apology article ("Clinton Sorry For Remark About RFK Assassination; Comment Was Made in Reference to Primaries") were a few other slights she had recently made (there was an enormous battle over whether the Florida and Michigan delegations would count at the convention, since they had defied D.N.C. rules by scheduling their primaries too early):

Hillary Clinton's reference to the shooting of Robert Kennedy on June 6, 1968, after he had just won the California primary, hardened feelings in the Obama campaign once more, following a brief thaw as it appeared that Clinton would seek to unite the party in the final weeks of the campaign. Her allusion came on the heels of two other comments over the past few days that the Obama campaign described as off-putting: her reference to the Michigan and Florida delegations as similar to the fraudulent elections in Zimbabwe, and her comparison of that dispute to the ballot recount in the 2000 presidential election.

Not mentioned in this article was the fact that she had also compared the battle over seating the delegations "with the abolition of slavery" (from a May, 25 article, "To Claim Popular Vote, Clinton Is Seeking Wins In Last 3 Primaries").

On the very last day of primary voting, when Montana and South Dakota put Barack Obama over the top in the delegate count, Clinton essentially refused to concede his victory. From a June 3 article, "Obama Claims The Democratic Presidential Nomination," the key line in the speech she gave:

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Obama scored his final primary victory in Montana and was quickly endorsed by the state's governor as well as the two Democratic senators. Clinton, meanwhile, claimed a come-from-behind victory in South Dakota, after trailing in the state for weeks. Clinton, who spoke roughly 30 minutes before Obama at Baruch College in New York City, congratulated the Illinois senator for the "extraordinary race" he ran, although she did not acknowledge he had effectively won the nomination and stressed that "I will be making no decisions tonight" about her future plans.

For more context, from her speech transcript that night:

Now, the question is: Where do we go from here? And given how far we've come and where we need to go as a party, it's a question I don't take lightly. This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight. But this has always been your campaign. So, to the 18 million people who voted for me, and to our many other supporters out there of all ages, I want to hear from you. I hope you'll go to my Web site at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can. And in the coming days, I'll be consulting with supporters and party leaders to determine how to move forward with the best interests of our party and our country guiding my way.

From an article ("Obama Is Poised To Clinch Victory; Clinton Ponders Options at Finish Line") filed the same day:

As Clinton made a final push for votes across South Dakota, her advisers said her options ranged from dropping out Tuesday night and endorsing Obama to making a final effort to convince uncommitted superdelegates that she would be a stronger rival to McCain. Another, according to senior Clinton advisers, is what they dubbed the "middle option," for Clinton to suspend her campaign, acknowledging that Obama has crossed the delegate threshold but keeping her options open until the convention in late August. Advisers said she is looking at historical precedent while weighing her recent victories, including her landslide win in Puerto Rico, in trying to sort out what to do. Clinton has been angered by recent calls for her to quit, her advisers said, and the "soft landing" of suspending her campaign would allow her to move ahead on her own terms. Speaking to reporters in Sioux Falls, S.D., spokesman Mo Elleithee was unequivocal, saying that Clinton intends to spend the next several days "making the case to undecided delegates" and adding: "She's in this race until we have a nominee. She expects to be that nominee."

On June 6, Barack Obama met with Hillary Clinton in Senator Dianne Feinstein's house in Washington. The next day -- a full four days after the last primary finished -- she finally announced the end of her campaign (from "Clinton to Publicly Withdraw, Support Obama"):

After a tumultuous 17-month journey, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) will formally withdraw as a presidential candidate today, publicly declaring her support for Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) for the first time since he secured the Democratic nomination. Clinton drew the wrath of many Democrats when she did not acknowledge Obama's victory in her speech on Tuesday night. Her farewell address to supporters, scheduled for noon today at the National Building Museum at Fourth and F streets NW, is intended to repair any lingering damage from the Tuesday speech and will close the door on an epic primary campaign that, after dividing Democrats, produced the first African American presumptive nominee of any major party in history. The former rivals made progress in their search for common ground during a clandestine hour-long meeting at the home of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Thursday night. Details of the sit-down, held in Feinstein's living room, began to emerge as Clinton aides turned in their cellphones, packed up their offices and put the finishing touches on her much-anticipated speech. "Hillary will be holding an event tomorrow in Washington D.C. to thank all of her supporters, to express her support for Senator Obama, and to talk about the issues that have been at the core of her public service, the issues she will continue fighting for," campaign manager Maggie Williams wrote in a letter yesterday inviting supporters to attend the gathering. The e-mail doubled as a fundraising solicitation -- a reminder of the nearly $30 million in debt that Clinton will seek to retire.

Now, even with such a tumultuous end to the Democratic primary campaign, Hillary Clinton eventually made good on her promise to "campaign her heart out" for Obama. She personally put him over the top in the delegate voting on the convention floor (being a senator, she was also a superdelegate). Eventually, after winning the general election, Barack Obama appointed her Secretary of State (there were many rumors at the time that Bill Clinton was pushing hard for her to be named as Obama's running mate, but obviously that didn't come to pass).

Hillary Clinton worked for party unity, but only after a very hard-fought and contentious primary season. I offer these reminders up because now she finds herself in the opposite role. And it seems like everyone's memory has gone fuzzy when recalling the final two months of the 2008 race. Hillary Clinton's campaign team has no real leg to stand on now, in calling on Bernie Sanders to "stop attacking Hillary" or even to drop out of the race for her convenience. Because that's definitely not what Hillary herself did, exactly eight years ago.

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Chris Weigant blogs at:
Olive oil and olive branch on the wooden table.

"We're almost out of time, and I have to get you home," he'd muttered, as he zipped up his jeans in the back of his 1992 Saturn.

Nearly twenty years later, I still remember the venues.

We'd park between tattered garbage trucks. I'd pray that the vehicles would stay dark and still for the night. He'd turn off the Saturn's headlights and I'd hope to remain just as dark and inconspicuous. I lived about a ten minute drive away. We'd stretch our time together as long as we could, usually until about eight minutes before curfew.

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"We need to be out in the living room before your mom gets home," he'd say, zipping up his jeans as he stood at the edge of my twin-sized bed in the bedroom I shared with my sister.

When not hiding in the shadows of our city's sanitation facilities, we'd retreat to my family's apartment, stealing those rare moments when I had the house to myself in the summer between high school and college.

"Doesn't Jane get back soon?" he'd ask, zipping up his jeans as he stood over the bed on "my" side of the dorm room.

After college I rented an apartment. A little older, a little more mature and ready for an "adult" life, there was an odd, perhaps even predictable association between the moment I signed the lease and my plummeting inhibitions. No parents, no roommates, no little sisters to worry about. Surely there'd be plenty of time for reciprocation, yes? Plenty of time to "get mine."

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This particular venue is where the excuses stopped and my partner's snoring began. My pleasure was consistently delayed. My orgasm was the protagonist in an unfinished suspense novel. There are -- as there should be -- myriad differences between 18- and 25-year-old-women. And yet, whether 18 or 25, all events, all people, all situations had precisely one thing in common: I performed oral sex long before I ever received it.

I never questioned why I was giving more than I was receiving. It never occurred to me to ask. It never occurred to me to consider the possibility that something was off, here. That there were profound imbalances that begged, that demanded a restructuring of emotional and physical capital.

My women friends never complained or made mention of anything similar, although the juicy gossip about dating usually centered on how far the guy was able to go; on how much he was able to "receive." The details never, not once revealed that the young woman telling the story derived much physical pleasure at all. Peculiarly, the stories were always structured around "timing," as a theme: e.g., "We've been dating exclusively for a month, so it seemed okay to take it to the next level," one would say.

"The next level" was always synonymous with permitting a man to receive pleasure that he, in more ways than not, felt entitled to, particularly if enough time had passed. "The next level" never seemed to have much to do with reciprocation and if it did, she never said so. Oral sex was simply the enemy weakened by the weapon of time. A "gift" a man received for his "patience."

She received no such gift, and if she did, she never did say so.

Conversely, I've heard many a young man boast about the pleasure he had received, but never about the pleasure he had given in return. And of course these topics were not discussed at home -- at least not in any useful way. The extent of my own sex and relationship education occurred when I was 16, after my mom returned home from the supermarket one winter evening.

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"See this?" she asked me, rushing into the living room, clutching a tin of extra virgin olive oil. She still wore her gloves, coat, and slush-soaked boots, her hair and shoulders covered in a thin layer of flurries.

"Huh?" I responded, confused. It was not immediately clear as to why she interrupted my television-watching to divert my attention toward a container of olive oil. It were not as though I knew how to cook.

"This," she said, pointing to the word virgin on the bottle, "is you." Her tone was urgent. The fact that she did not remove her sodden boots before making this pronouncement suggested that she were on a mission. That she devised her sex education curriculum in the baking aisle at the local Key Food and felt compelled to execute it quickly, perhaps before she lost her gumption.

At that point in my homeschooling in matters of sex education, any obvious relationship between my status as a virgin and that green tin of extra virgin olive oil would barely last another two years. But in my mind, as long as I were not figuring out -- or eventually making demands about -- my own wants and needs, physical and otherwise, I could maintain some sense of loyalty to that dark green tin. Some level of beholden-ness to my mom and the education I had received and what olive oil would come to symbolize in my young mind. If I declined to investigate my own human needs, I rationalized, I'd receive a pass. I'd remain that obedient, "good" 16 year old girl, sprawled out on the couch in her family's Brooklyn living room, forever unrefined. Harvested in the summer of 1980 and with no foreseeable expiration date.

And for the next ten or so years -- in honor of my mother, olive oil, and those old lessons -- I never learned to give to, or invest in, myself. I distanced myself from most people, and even moved a handful of states away from everything I knew to achieve a physical distance that would make my desired engagement with emotional detachment more fluid. Surely, I remained "active" with the opposite sex, but activity was about all they could reasonably hope to achieve. Any sign that I had an actual need, physical or otherwise, was a form of weakness. An act of betrayal.

More than a decade would pass before I noticed the link between my earliest lessons about sex and olive oil and the emotional and physical imbalances I experienced in many of my adult relationships -- sexual and otherwise. While I was divested from my own wants and needs, I remained the glue that bonded unstable relationships. I initiated the phone calls that needed initiating.

I gave (to others) what needed giving, explored (for others) what needed exploring, emotionally and physically. Despite the physical distance from my childhood home and upbringing, from experiences in 1992 Saturns, from roommates and dorm rooms, history had developed the stunning habit of finding every conceivable opportunity to repeat itself in my new life. The giving -- whatever the kind -- remained plentiful, and often (if not always) against my own human interests and needs.

With each act of labor, I withdrew that much more from my personal bank of emotional and physical capital.

Oddly, I never lost what needed losing, or learned what needed learning. These particular outcomes -- i.e., what later became obvious to me as an extreme imbalance in emotional labor -- were perhaps the most problematic byproducts of those earliest lessons learned about olive oil, sex, and relationships.

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Recent medical research suggests that we are at our best adult-selves when we form -- and keep -- solid relationships from a young age. In this regard, I am amply screwed.

Or am I?

"We have all the time in the world," she'd said, as she curled up even closer to where I lay in her bed, in her world, for the first time three summers ago.

"Hmmm?" I thought I knew what she had said, I thought I had heard correctly, but I wanted to hear it again.

"I hope this doesn't annoy you, but I just want to please you, and I don't really give a damn about me."

I knew what she meant, damn I knew what she meant, and I didn't argue. Is this what it meant to be on the brink of an adult relationship? Is this what it sounded like, to be entering a stable union? Was this event going to reveal itself as my first example of what it might mean to experience balanced emotional and physical labor?

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Later that evening, after I came that much closer to a response to my own questions, we mulled over what to eat for dinner.

"How about a grilled chicken salad?" she proposed. "I just picked up some arugula from Meijer's yesterday."

"Perfect," I said. "What do you have for dressing?"

"I make my own. With garlic, lemon, balsamic, and spices," she said. "Perfect," I said again.

"Is olive oil ok?" she asked.
Pittsburgh-born podcaster and writer Christine Blackburn decided to celebrate turning 50 by reflecting on the ups and downs of her life's journey so far -- and riding a Harley in the altogether. Now based in L.A., Blackburn is the creator and host of The Story Worthy Podcast and author of a recent memoir, "PIT to LAX: My Story Worthy Life."



I Survived the Birth Order

As the youngest of six children, I couldnt get any attention unless I burst into flames. This is my first-grade school photo. Theres no photo from preschool or kindergarten, because I never went. Big mistake -- 44 years later I feel like Im still catching up with my peers!





I Survived Third Grade

One day we had to stay inside for recess because it was raining. During a game of tag, I accidentally knocked down the model of the Solar System that Mrs. Harry had strung from the ceiling. She yelled at me so loud I had hiccups for 10 days. My mother got me transferred to another class. Thanks, Mom.





I Survived This Prom Dress

This was the only prom I ever attended. The theme was "Stairway to Heaven," but the dress was actually my sisters costume from Our Town. Three months after this photo, I was raped at a party. Thirty-four years would elapse before I told a soul. Bill Cosbys victims encouraged me to tell my story publicly.





I Survived a Bad Marriage

A year after this photo was taken, my husband of 18 months got another woman pregnant. Im flexible, but not that flexible. That marriage ended.





I Survived the Friendly Skies

Only later would I realize my seven years as a flight attendant were the good old days -- by which I mean before 9/11. On red-eye flights we would pull the curtain across the galley, then smoke cigarettes and play poker on a blanket draped over a meal cart. High times!





I Survived Being a Peace Corps Volunteer

After leaving the airline to join the Peace Corps, I was sent to the remote Polynesian archipelago of Tonga. How remote? In my village, where I taught English, there was no electricity, no running water, no phone. Not even a single door key!





I Survived Cancer

Two months into my Peace Corps stint, I got the shock of my life when I was diagnosed with an adult Wilms tumor in my kidney. Medivacked stateside for a radical nephrectomy, I wound up moving to L.A. to pursue my real dreams, a career in show business. (Ive had that Teddy Bear since I was five years old.)





I Survived Hollywood

Who could resist this all-American -- and cancer-free -- girl whose hair has grown back in? All sorts of casting agents, it turns out. Compared with cancer, however, audition rejections were a piece of cake.





Photo credit -- Mikel Healey



I Survived Motherhood

Having remarried at 35, I was thrilled when my daughter Alabama came along at 41. Thrilled, yes, but terrified, too; not knowing a single other mother in L.A., I started a chapter of MOMS Club International, a nonprofit support group for at-home parents. Its one of the things Im most proud of.


Maryland just held its long-awaited Democratic primary this week, after a nearly 14 month campaign for the U.S. Senate and two suburban Washington Congressional races, all generated by the announced retirement of Senator Barbara Mikulski on March 2, 2015. Unsurprisingly, the view from outside the state was very different from the view within, and therein lies a big problem.

Yes, the "establishment" won. Yes, we will soon have an all-male delegation. I can certainly see how that looks from the outside. For those of us inside, however, this was about something other than "identity politics," which Congresswoman Donna Edwards derided as a Republican concept (sorry, Donna, "identity politics" is very much a Democratic concept; "political correctness" is the Republican characterization of "identity politics"). It was about something that Aristotle once called Ethos, and which today we characterize as Integrity. Honesty, Civility, Credibility, Decency, Loyalty and maybe even the archaic concept of Honor, all make up Integrity.

Progressive Neighbors, the county progressive political advocacy group, held a town hall meeting last month prior to our staging the last Senate debate before the primary, entitled, "What's a progressive to do?" It was a question which was challenging many of us. Whereas ten years ago we had virtually no progressives in state, local or federal office, suddenly we were forced to choose between qualified individuals.

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The town hall had a panel of current and former elected officials, and I participated as well, as an activist and former candidate. While many of my colleagues tackled their thoughts about specific races -- Sanders/Clinton, Edwards/Van Hollen, Raskin/Matthews -- I teased out the philosophical rules I use regardless of the particular race. For me, first and foremost, it comes down to Integrity.

In politics, integrity means something a little different from its common usage. The currency of politics is not money, which we have too much of anyway, but loyalty, of which we have way too little. It's about committing to, and investing in, a candidate, who then reciprocates by holding to the standards of your social contract with her. It's about the first law of politics in a representative democracy -- that outside of issues of war and peace, the most important role an elected representative plays is in representing us. Not herself, not her caucus, not her party. If she's not playing the trustee role and representing her country, she should be representing you and me.

What all that means is that identity politics, while important to the left, is not, and should not be, the primary consideration. It's important -- Ms. Edwards' story does represent a history which is not, and has never been, visible in the United States Senate. I understand the power of that narrative very well, as a candidate for state office running in a country that has never elected an out trans person to a legislative office. Trans people, like gay people, black people, men and women of all types, should all be represented. I get it, but I have never asked anyone to vote for me solely because of my gender history.

Donna Edwards made her campaign all about her identity. That inspired many voters, though far from the number of African-American voters she needed to win. Many black women in my county proudly supported her opponent, the white guy, Congressman Chris Van Hollen. I heard from too many young people who said not that we really need a single black mother in the Senate, but that they'd never vote for another white guy. That kind of thinking, similar to the Bernie bros for whom it's Bernie or no one, will continue to undermine this country and lead us further down the road to increased polarization.

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I'm not defending the status quo. Nothing irks me more than the incumbency protection racket, which generates a legislature of too many complacent members wherever and whenever it occurs. We may get the chance to vote on county term limits this fall, which would really upend our local and state politics. That can only help engender a much more diverse crop of future candidates. And because of the manner in which the county and state are diversifying, that means there will be more women candidates and candidates of color.

Those candidates who will get the most votes in the future will be, I hope, the best candidates, regardless of identity. Joan Walsh, writing in The Nation, who as an MSNBC commentator is a woman I deeply respect, wrote:

In the end, the bitter Maryland Democratic Senate primary came down to this: Representative Donna Edwards, the exemplary progressive outsider, couldn't defeat the ultimate insider, Representative Chris Van Hollen, the well-liked scion of the state's Democratic establishment, with ties to big party donors he forged running its congressional campaign committee. To be fair, Van Hollen's record is nearly as progressive as Edwards's.

Putting aside the fact that the primary could not be characterized as bitter during any point in the past 14 months, though "heated" would be accurate for the last three weeks; Donna was not "the exemplary progressive outsider." Had she been so, in a state where exit polls show black voters made up 46% of the electorate, she would have won. As Chris Van Hollen pointed out, helped by former gubernatorial candidate, Heather Mizeur, and all the voters who, because of redistricting had spent at least four years being represented by both of them, her constituent service was the opposite of "exemplary." That was documented by black and white voters, yet Ms. Edwards claimed such talk was tinged with racism.

She raised very little money, not because Chris somehow plugged the tap, but because her lack of constituent services left her with few local donors. Finally, the national progressive community should not be particularly proud that roughly half of her money during the campaign came from a white hedge fund manager, Donald Sussman, though that didn't stop her from claiming Van Hollen was a tool of Wall Street.

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People noted the basic failure in poorly representing her constituents, the disgraceful ad using the President to tie Congressman Van Hollen to the NRA, and the hypocrisy of taking hedge fund money. The fundamental job of a representative is representing your constituents. Full stop.

I'm not the only writer with this perspective. I recommend Jamelle Bouie, writing in Slate, who said:

Symbolic representation matters, and that's especially true for incredibly underrepresented groups such as black women. And the only way to build a presence of those groups is to work for it.

She followed that up, however, with this about the boring nature of quotidian politics:

But Maryland shows that these contests are just as often about the boring parts of politics as they are about rhetoric and belief. Donna Edwards may have made a fine senator, but Maryland voters were looking for someone to help them now.

I also recommend Jon Shurberg's take, as well as David Lublin's, two observers laser-focused on the state political scene and no strangers to trenchant criticism.

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One day, probably soon, we will have more highly qualified candidates who can mobilize the voters for progressive policies and who also happen to be female, African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, Jewish, gay and even trans. Not only just in Maryland, either. If that revolution is to come, it won't come from the top, as Bernie promises, but from the bottom, where all successful revolutions are nurtured.
"The Constitution of this Republic should make special provision for medical freedom as well as religious freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and to deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic"

--Attributed to Benjamin Rush, MD, A Founding Father and Signer of the Declaration of Independence (New World Encyclopedia)

On May 5, 1976, I was arrested for practicing medicine without a license, making this date in 2016 my 40th anniversary of this arrest.

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I have been a serious student and practitioner of homeopathic medicine since I began studying it in 1972 with a group of three MDs, two nurses, a dentist, two yoga teachers, and several others met weekly over a five year period.

In 1976, the California Medical Board decided to investigate me after they received a letter from a libertarian who asserted that I was practicing a type of "quack medicine" called homeopathy, that I hung-out with people involved in "yoga and bioenergetics and the like," and that I preyed upon "Berkeley types." Although libertarians are known to be against medical licenses laws and many other forms of governmental regulation, some libertarians seem to want regulation when it suits their personal beliefs and worldviews.

An undercover agent came to my home-office for an appointment, and for the first time in my life, I asked this man if he is affiliated with any law enforcement agency, but I didn't give him time to answer by asserting, "You know I'm not a doctor. Please come into my office."

He told me that he had had chronic eczema for which conventional doctors have prescribed X-ray treatment without success (too bad that they didn't arrest his doctor for this dangerous medical quackery?). He also had had a chronic nasal discharge for which various rounds of antibiotics had not provided relief (more conventional quackery).

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I prescribed a homeopathic medicine for him called "Nux vomica," a medicine that I prescribed to help detoxify him from the many conventional medical treatments he has received. I told him to come back in a week. He arrived a week later, and he told me that he had been having a fever for a couple of days. Although he may have been just feigning a fever in order to get me to prescribe treatment for him during a specific illness, I told him that this may be good healing response to Nux vomica and that he should go home and come back a week later.

He came back a week later, without a fever, and based on the totality of his varied symptoms, I prescribed an unusual homeopathic medicine that was developed by Dr. Edward Bach, a bacteriologist who had been shown by a homeopathic physician that homeopathic medicines can change the bacterial composition of the large intestines. Impressed by these results, Bach began investigating homeopathy, and he also began to make in homeopathic doses of some of the bacteria in the bowel. One of the bacteria is called Morgan Pure, and I gave this medicine to the man who was an agent for the medical board. Ironically (or cosmically), I ultimately gave him a homeopathic dose of shit.

After my arrest, a group of fellow natural medicine practitioners and appreciators created an organization called the "Holistic Health Organizing Committee" (unlike other organizations from the '60s and '70s that called themselves "Defense Committees," we had no interest or desire to seem "defensive" and preferred to think of our work as "pro-active" and "educational"). To raise $5,000 for my legal expenses, the group organized three "holistic health retreats" over an 18-month period at Harbin Hot Springs (in Lake County in Northern California). Ultimately, $6,000 was raised, and we used that extra money to create the first holistic health journal called "The Holistic Health Review."

The Court Case and Its Aftermath

A trial date was set for April 10, 1977, which to me was quite an auspicious date because it was the birthday of Samuel Hahnemann, MD (1755-1843), the founder of homeopathic medicine. As it turned out, two weeks prior to the court date, my lawyer, Jerry Green, worked out a settlement with the medical board. Green was a malpractice attorney and a bodyworker who found that a significant part of the malpractice crisis resulted from people expecting more from doctors than they could provide. His solution to deal with this problem was the use of contracts between patients and practitioners that stipulated specific roles and responsibilities for each in the health care relationship.

The old view of doctor/patient relationships was that the doctor provided the treatment and the patient didn't do anything except to take whatever medication the doctor prescribed. However, the emerging holistic health revolution not only heralded the use of various alternative treatment methods, it also strongly encouraged the person (who isn't just a "patient") to take an active role in his/her health. The use of a contract in health care was a totally new concept, though it fit in with the emerging realization that each person has a role, even a vital role, in his/her own health care.

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The legal settlement that the court accepted allowed me to continue to maintain a "health practice" as long as I referred patients to medical doctors for "diagnosis and treatment of disease" (a practice in which I had already done). Instead of diagnosing or treat a disease, my role was to treat the person, not a disease. The settlement also stipulated that I use a contract that detailed the roles and responsibilities that each patient had in our relationship and the specific role that I had in prescribing homeopathic medicines.

This legal settlement was a clever and creative way to deal with a complex health care subject. In the meantime, the California Medical Board changed its name to The Board of Medical Quality Assurance, and they invited non-physicians to be a part of this board. Then, in 1980, they made their #1 priority to change the law on which I was arrested. I was then hired as a consultant to the medical board as they participated in a series of conferences on health care decision-making and medical ethics. Ultimately, the medical board's report recommended many of my proposals. However, shortly after its publication, Governor Jerry Brown completed his second term, and a new Republican governor was taking over.

No effort was initially made to change the "Medical Practices Act," though the educational process to which the medical board participated led to their decision to investigate MDs who were alcoholics or serious drug-users and those MDs who were over-prescribing medications for their patients. Clearly, the medical board appropriately sought to discipline doctors who posed greater danger to society than those practitioners of various natural healing systems.

A couple of decades later in 2003, California governor Gray Davis signed into law a "medical freedom of choice" legislation that was modeled after a similar law in Minnesota. This law allowed the variety of herbalists, nutritionists, homeopaths, and others to engage in health care as long as they don't perform surgery and recommend prescription drugs. To those on the left of the political spectrum, the right to choose your own health practitioner is a "civil liberties" issue, while to those on the right on the political spectrum, the right to choose your own practitioner is a "health freedoms" issue. The beauty of health and healing issues is that they go beyond traditional left/right politics.

Ultimately, just as biology confirms that the web of life is strongest and most sustainable the more complex the web is, health care may also be at its best and most sustainable the more diversity that exists. The consummate literary genius Mark Twain wrote in Harper's Bazaar, "the introduction of homeopathy...forced the old-school doctor to stir around and learn something of a rational nature about his business; you may honestly feel grateful that homoeopathy survived the attempts of the allopathists [conventional physicians] to destroy it" (Twain, 1890).

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Instead, any serious student of medical history knows that the competition that homeopathy provided in the 19th century led to the decrease and then the discontinuance of bloodletting, leeches, and mercury pills. Likewise, various "alternative" treatment methods will compete with conventional ones, forcing conventional medicine to achieve better and safer results.

As it turns out, homeopathic medicine is becoming increasingly competitive with conventional medicine:

A large survey of licensed health practitioners in France was conducted in 2011-12 drawn from the prescribing habits from the national health insurance database (Piolot, Fagot, Riviere, et al., 2015). A total of 120,110 French healthcare professionals (HCPs) prescribed at least one homeopathic drug or preparation. They represented 43.5% of the overall population of HCPs, and further, nearly 95% of general practitioners, dermatologists and pediatricians, and 75% of midwives prescribed homeopathic medicines.

In 2009, 67% (!) the population of Switzerland voted to include homeopathy, acupuncture, and herbal medicine as a part of the nation's insurance program, and in 2016, the government decided to accept the will (and demand) of its people (Swiss, 2016).

A survey of Mexico medical doctors and biomedical researchers found that homeopathy was the most well-known complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatment, with 100% of people knowing about it. Homeopathy was also the most popular CAM treatment used by interviewees' family members. Homeopathy was the most popular CAM treatment to which physicians referred patients (16.8%). For the group of researchers, the percentage of CAM recommendations to acquaintances was highest for homeopathy (25%), followed by herbal medicine (19%), and massage therapy (18%). In terms of their own experience, researchers had taken more meditation and yoga courses (6.06%), while physicians had taken more homeopathy courses (12.2%). The survey found that the CAM approaches that researchers and physicians thought should be part of medical curricula were homeopathy (35.3% and 43.7%, respectively). The CAM therapies to which researchers and physicians thought should receive priority in resources for scientific research were also homeopathy (59% and 61.8%, respectively) and herbal medicine (71% and 51%, respectively).

According to the Lancet, about 10% of the population of India, approximately 100 million people, depend SOLELY on homeopathy for their health care (Prasad, 2007). When you consider that this means that Indians use homeopathy for the entire range of acute, chronic, and infectious disease for infants, children, adults, and the aged, it is remarkable that anyone could still consider that these natural medicines act as placebo (any clinic that tried to prescribe only placebos probably wouldn't last one month, let alone 200 years).

References:

New World Encycloopedia: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Benjamin_Rush

Piolot M, Fagot JP, Riviere S, Fagot-Campagna A, Debeugny G, Couzigou P, Alla F. Homeopathy in France in 2011-2012 according to reimbursements in the French national health insurance database (SNIIRAM). Fam Pract. 2015 Apr 28. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25921648

Prasad, R. Homoeopathy Booming in India, Lancet, 370(November 17 2007):1679-80. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=18035598

Swiss to recognise homeopathy as legitimate medicine. March 29, 2016. http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/complementary-therapies_swiss-to-recognise-homeopathy-as-legitimate-medicine/42053830

Twain, M. "A Majestic Literary Fossil," Harper's Magazine, February 1890, 80(477):439-444.

Dana Ullman, MPH, CCH, is America's leading spokesperson for homeopathy and is the founder of www.homeopathic.com . He is the author of 10 books, including his bestseller, Everybody's Guide to Homeopathic Medicines. His most recent book is, The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy (the Foreword to this book was written by Dr. Peter Fisher, the Physician to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II). Dana has also developed a new e-course in "Learning to Use a Homeopathic Medicine Kit," which includes 40, 60, or 80 (!) short videos along with a detailed ebook entitled "Evidence Based Homeopathic Family Medicine," which provides reference to and description of over 300 clinical trials published in peer review medical journals. This e-course is available at www.homeopathic.com .

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It was another terrible night for the junior senator from Vermont.

A week after losing the delegate-rich state of New York by 16 points to Hillary Clinton, the former home state senator (the margin was even worse in the New York City area, where he lost the Bronx by 40 points and Manhattan by 33), Sanders escaped this week's Acela primaries with a single win in the tiny state of Rhode Island and a slightly better-than-expected in Connecticut.

The rest of the night, to put it mildy, was a bloodbath: the two biggest delegate prizes of the night, Maryland and Pennsylvania, were solidly in the Clinton column by the time the voting was over and done with. Pennsylvania, a state which quite a few white, blue-collar workers, should have been better ground for a man who has made the signing of free trade deals over the past three decades a central part of his platform. Instead, Clinton won Penn with a comfortable twelve-point margin (55.6 percent-43.6 percent), a result that afforded her 95 delegates to Sanders' 67. Maryland wasn't even a contest; when any candidate loses by 30 points, he or she has some soul searching to do.

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If the delegate math was Bernie's primary adversary before the Acela primaries, it is now his sole opponent. For the whisky, white-haired democratic socialist to catch up in the pledged delegate count, he needs victories with huge margins. Unlike the Republican Party, Democrats don't have states that award their delegates on a winner-take-all basis -- rules that put candidates far behind the frontrunner at a big disadvantage.

Winning a primary or a caucus by five points or ten points is simply not good enough for Bernie and his campaign. Instead, he needs to win the rest of the states on the primary calendar by 30, 40, and 50 point margins, similar to the way Sanders claimed Washington State and Hawaii last month. Unfortunately for Sanders, this isn't going to happen: if the state isn't full of white, young progressives who are searching for an alternative to what they perceive as the old Democratic machine, Sanders doesn't have a chance in hell to win.

Before Tuesday, Sanders trailed Hillary Clinton by over 200 pledged delegates. After Tuesday, his margin is worse: according to the count from RealClearPolitics, Sanders is now down by 333 pledged delegates. But far more significant is the fact that Hillary Clinton is only 232 delegates away from clinching the Democratic nomination when you include the overwhelming lead she has over Bernie Sanders in the superdelegate column. Put another way: Clinton is 90 percent of the way to capturing the prize.

Mathematically speaking, the Democratic primary isn't over yet. But practically speaking, Bernie Sanders has effectively lost the nomination. Either Bernie supporters can place their faith in the miracle that somehow, someway, their candidate will improve his dismal performance with key constituencies of the Democratic Party (like minorities) over the next month and a half, or they can embrace reality and concede to the obvious: Bernie is not going to win the nomination and that whether they like it or not, Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party standard-bearer against the Republican nominee in the fall.

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This transformation will be an incredibly painful and distressing thing for Bernie's supporters to do. Every single Bernie supporter I have interacted with is absolutely committed to the Vermont senator and his message. Most of them are young people looking for a fair shake in a political system that they consider corrupt, dominated by elites with big pockets, and directed by politicians in Washington who reside in a bubble of privilege and prestige. And they aren't wrong.

But there comes a time in every presidential campaign that finds itself increasingly away from the finish line to reassess their chances. This is precisely what Hillary Clinton had to do eight years ago when then-Senator Barack Obama created an insurmountable lead in the Democratic primary and kept a lock on his superdelegates heading into the convention.
WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 27: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump leaves the stage after delivering a speech about his vision for foreign policy at the Mayflower Hotel April 27, 2016 in Washington, DC. A real estate billionaire and reality television star, Trump beat his GOP challengers by double digits in Tuesday's presidential primaries in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Deleware, Rhode Island and Connecticut. 'I consider myself the presumptive nominee, absolutely,' Trump told supporters at the Trump Tower following yesterday's wins. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

With Donald Trump leading the GOP presidential race, it would be natural to get the impression that Republican voters appreciate his deport-them-all policy proposal for illegal immigration. Yet even after his big wins on Tuesday, a majority of Republicans remain skeptical of his first policy suggestion, telling pollsters on their way out of the voting booth, as they have for months, that they want the immigrants to stay.

CNN has conducted exit polls in 19 of the 40 states that have held primaries so far in which it has asked voters whether "illegal immigrants working in the U.S. should be offered legal status or deported to their home country." In 90 percent of those states, Republicans told the pollsters that they favored "legal status" over "deportation."

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Support for legal status across 19 states, which include major primary states like New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Texas, averages 53 percent compared to 41 percent for deportation. This confirms Pew and Wall Street Journal polls from last year, showing that a majority of Republican voters nationally believe that immigrants should continue living in the United States without fear of deportation.

Only two states -- Mississippi and Alabama -- have dissented, not exactly pivotal states in either the primary or the general election. On the other hand, in big swing states Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, Republican voters favored legal status over deportation by wide margins of 17, 18, and 19 percent respectively.

Perhaps it could be argued that the 41 percent is determining the direction of the primary because they care so deeply about the issue. To some extent, this is undoubtedly true. But candidates are likely overestimating even the depth of the opposition. CNN polls find that when given the choice of just four issues to pick, 90 of Republicans in these states pick issues other than immigration as their top priority, and a portion of these have been voting for John Kasich, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio -- candidates who have endorsed legal status.

If Donald Trump becomes the nominee, does any of this matter? Of course it does. It demonstrates to Senate and House candidates that their voters are not where Trump and Cruz are on immigration, that they can support reforms with the backing of a majority of their voters.

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Moreover, no matter what happens in the rest of the primary, the party should recognize that their base wants a general election platform that reflects their values. Those values include a desire to allow unauthorized immigrants to remain lawfully in the United States. In structuring an immigration plank for 2016, the party should include supporting legal status, not deportation or "self-deportation," regardless of who its nominee is.

Republicans want immigration reform to include legalization for unauthorized immigrants. It is time for the party's representatives to follow where their voters have already gone.
In recent months, leading Members of Congress, state attorneys general, and non-profit groups have called on the Department of Education to stop colleges that receive federal student aid from forcing students to resolve disputes with their schools in secret arbitration proceedings. (I've been active in this advocacy effort.) After decades of neglecting this issue, the Department of Education appears ready to take steps to protect the right of students to bring their grievances to court.

But the Department has wavered between approaches: fully banning mandatory arbitration clauses or, instead, issuing only a limited ban.

Nothing that advocates have been promoting would prevent students and their schools from mutually agreeing to take an existing dispute to a private arbitration. Rather, the issue on the table is whether colleges can include in the fine print of their enrollment agreements, at the time students sign up, a clause forcing students to take any future dispute to private arbitration, where school misconduct is hidden away from the public and regulators and where corporate parties tend to have the upper hand.

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The availability of court remedies is critical not only to providing relief for students who have been deceived or abused by unscrupulous college operators but also to exposing and deterring such bad behavior in the first place. Such a reform could help prevent more debacles like the collapse of and ongoing taxpayer bailout regarding Corinthian Colleges, which had been receiving as much as $1.5 billion a year in federal dollars while engaging in predatory abuses of students; efforts by students to sue for their injuries were thwarted because of mandatory arbitration clauses.

In the past few days, advocates for students have been strengthening the case for a total prohibition on schools forcing students into arbitration:

-- Today, the Century Foundation is releasing a report finding that clauses limiting students' legal rights are the rule at for-profit colleges -- affecting 98 percent of students at such colleges receiving federal aid. Meanwhile, such provisions are virtually non-existent at traditional nonprofit and public colleges -- and also at for-profit trade schools that do not receive taxpayer-funded student aid. No wonder the for-profit college trade association APSCU, which has long represented institutions getting most of their revenue from federal aid, is so upset about the potential ban on forced arbitration that it could barely issue a coherent press release.

-- On April 25, 2016, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, joined by 20 groups including the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, and the National Women's Law Center, sent a letter to Secretary of Education John King urging the Department to ban institutions receiving federal aid from forcing their students into arbitration. The letter states in part:

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Given the widespread problems of fraud, misrepresentation, and discrimination, the massive issue of sexual assault on campuses, and the serious need for transparency as a means to ensure accountability and spur improvement, it should be against public policy for the Department to allow recipients of Title IV funds to escape accountability through the use of forced arbitration. Too many students have already suffered at the hands of for-profit institutions that failed to deliver on their promises or adequately address safety issues on campus. We cannot require these same students to leave crucial legal rights and protections at the school house door.

-- In addition, the organization Public Citizen, which in February petitioned the Department of Education for an arbitration ban, has sent the Department a detailed follow-up letter arguing that a partial ban would not adequately protect students. (I'm on Public Citizen's board of directors.)

UPDATE 03-29-16: Today, 13 House Democrats and 30 Senate Democrats wrote to Secretary of Education King urging a strong borrower defense rule that includes a full ban on mandatory arbitration in school enrollment agreements. The House letter states, "Mandatory arbitration clauses strip basic legal rights away from students and ban worthwhile actions from ever being heard in court. While proposals limiting the use of this practice against certain classes of students and requiring additional disclosures from schools may place constraints on mandatory arbitration, only a complete ban will guarantee students are fully protected."



The Senators wrote, "We strongly encourage you to hold colleges accountable by banning mandatory arbitration requirements as a condition of the receipt of federal taxpayer dollars."



The House signers were: Robert C. "Bobby" Scott (D-VA), Maxine Waters (D-CA), Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX), Raul M. Grijalva (D-AZ), Marcia L. Fudge (D-OH), Jared Polis (D-CO), Frederica S. Wilson (D-FL), Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Mark Takano (D-CA), Katherine M. Clark (D-MA), Mark Desaulnier (D-CA), and Patrick Murphy (D-FL).



Senate signers were: Patty Murray (D-WA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Tom Carper (D-DE), Bob Casey (D-PA), Chris Coons (D-DE), Richard J. Durbin (D-IL), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Al Franken (D-MN), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-MD), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Gary Peters (D-MI), Jack Reed (D-RI), Bernard Sanders (I-VT), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Ron Wyden (D-OR).
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL - APRIL 22: People pass a mural depicting president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff and Vice President Michel Temer at Paulista Avenue on April 22, 2016 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by Cris Faga/LatinContent/Getty Images)

On Sunday, April 17, right after the lower house of Congress voted to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, I wrote that the Workers' Party was over.

That doesn't mean, however, that Vice President Michel Temer will become the next president.

The automatic rise of Michel Temer to power, thanks to the collapse of Dilma's government, doesn't solve the political and ethical crisis that Brazil currently faces. On the contrary, this supposed solution may fan the flames. There is already tension between the Workers' Party (PT) and the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), since the PMDB left Dilma's government coalition.

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If the senate approves the impeachment on May 11, the president will be removed from office and Temer will temporarily assume the role.

During a 180-day suspension period, Dilma, Lula and their supporters will plan their offensive on Temer, to stop him from spending too long in office.

Below are 10 reasons why Temer won't actually become the next president of Brazil:

1. The PMDB is deeply involved in the Petrobras scandal.Brazilians took to the streets to protest agains the government, Dilma, Lula and the PT, but their primary concern has been corruption. Michel Temer's party is deeply involved in the corruption scandal at the state-owned oil company Petrobras.

2. The current political crisis involves the PMDB as well as the PT.Dilma wasn't really politically savvy, and couldn't build a minimum base of support in her second term. The elected government was formed by the PT and PMDB. Although the PMDB controlled several ministries, Temer's party demanded more and more space in the executive branch of government. Lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha (PMDB-RJ) did his best to interfere with Dilma's management. Six months after the inauguration ceremony, Cunha had already split from Dilma's coalition, hindering the progress of government projects.

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3. Eduardo Cunha and Michel Temer are friends. Rejected by three out of four Brazilians, Cunha is an old ally of the vice president. When people on the streets are condemning corruption, it looks really bad for a new president to be associated with a politician who is a defendant in the Supreme Court. The Federal Public Prosecutor's Office has accused Cunha of receiving $5 million from Julio Camargo as a bribe, in exchange for facilitating a contract with Petrobras without a bidding process. The Supreme Court unanimously accepted the accusation.

4. There is an impeachment request against Temer filed with the lower house of Congress and backed by a Supreme Court minister. According to the lawyer Mariel Marley Marra, who filed an impeachment request against the vice president, Michel Temer committed a crime similar to Dilma's when he signed decrees allowing extra credit without the authorization of Congress. At the beginning of April, the Supreme Court minister Marco Aurelio Mello accepted the request and asked Cunha to form a committee to look into the case. The party leaders must now assign members to this committee. The senators have even demanded a joint process to judge the impeachment of both Dilma and Temer.

5. Almost 60 percent of Brazilians want Temer impeached. Most Brazilians have unfavorable views of Dilma and Temer. According to a recent Datafolha poll, 61 percent of Brazilians support the impeachment of the president, and 58 percent want the vice president out. The percentage of people supporting the resignation of Dilma and Temer is the same: 60 percent. It is clear that the vice president doesn't have significant popular support.

6. The Dilma/Temer ticket is under threat at the Supreme Electoral Court.Last week, the process to invalidate the Dilma/Temer ticket advanced in the Electoral Court. The request, filed by the PSDB (the largest opposition party) at the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE), accuses the candidates of misusing their economic and political power during the 2014 elections, and of allegedly repurposing money from the corruption scheme at Petrobras. Aware of the risk of having his ticket invalidated, Temer has already asked the TSE to separate his accounts from Dilma's.

7. The coalition model no longer works.The breakup of the PMDB, PP, PSD and PT coalition makes it clear that this government model is in crisis. This multi-party coalition allowed Dilma a total of 11 minutes of TV time during the 2014 campaign. The disparity between the campaign ads broadcast two years ago and what the executive branch actually achieved undermines the legitimacy of the electoral process, and consequently, of the once triumphant Dilma/Temer ticket.

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8. There is a growing movement calling for new elections. The results of an Ibope poll, published Monday, April 25, show that only 8 percent of Brazilians consider Dilma's impeachment and her replacement by Temer to be "the best way to overcome the political crisis." Meanwhile, 62 percent of respondents said that they believe that new elections would be the best way out of the current political crisis. This initiative has already been supported by a group of senators, by former presidential candidates Marina Silva, Luciana Genro, and by members of the government.

9. The PT and social movements won't stay silent. A Temer government would be the target of plenty of criticism by the PT and social movements that have so far been supportive of Dilma. Members and supporters of the Workers' Party have promised to strongly oppose a government that they consider illegitimate -- one that rose to power through a "coup." The Landless Workers Movement has proposed a general strike if the impeachment is approved. Lula has said that Brazil will go through moments of "democratic struggle."

10. Temer may be accused of being a "conspirator" and "coup organizer."In trying to defend herself against impeachment, Dilma has attacked both Cunha and Temer. She has already accused the vice president of being a conspirator and of organizing a coup. The leaked WhatsApp "victory audio" only reinforces the PT's position that Temer is working behind the scenes to remove Dilma from office. To associate the image of a "traitor" with the vice president is not a difficult task for PT's propaganda machinery. Thus, disapproval of Temer is likely to grow.
SQUAWK BOX -- Pictured: Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people, in an interview with Squawk Box on February 29, 2016 -- (Photo by: Lacy O'Toole/CNBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

Dear Mr. Buffett,

As America's most revered businessman and investor, you have a singular opportunity for good. When you speak, millions listen. And they trust your judgment.

In the time I am granted to speak at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting on April 30 my remarks will focus on the world we are leaving to young people, the prospects they will inherit. I believe that you and I share optimism about the future, but also concerns.

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You are in a singular position, via the respect you command, to help the public see through special interests. Indeed, I will argue that you could, and that you should, do your best to influence the course of history this century and beyond.

To help make my case, let me first note that we share Midwestern roots. I worked for the Omaha World Herald for years, thus earning a chance to study at the University of Iowa under renowned physicist James Van Allen. That career path, the study of other planets and Earth's history, led me to realization of the dangers posed by human-made climate change as we burn fossil fuels.

Recent scientific data indicate that continued high fossil fuel emissions will lock in sea level rise of at least 6-9 meters (20-30 feet). Almost all coastal cities, including most of the world's largest cities, would be lost. Large impacts may not begin for several decades, but this delayed response of the ponderous climate system spells danger for young people. We can pass a point of no return, where it becomes impossible to avoid future Antarctic ice sheet disintegration and loss of coastal cities. Economic devastation and refugees could make the world ungovernable.

So, Mr. Buffett, I am heartened by the words in your last annual report, where you conclude that continued inaction on climate change "is foolhardy." You wrote: "Call this Noah's Law: If an Ark may be essential for survival (your emphasis), begin building it today."

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Your Ark's characteristics will need to be informed by science and practical matters. Fossil fuel energy, encouraged and subsidized by our governments, has powered our economic development for more than a century. Science now informs us, unambiguously, that fossil fuel emissions must be phased out rapidly, or our children will inherit a climate system out of their control.

I recognize and salute your commitment, with Mr. Gates and others, to invest in development of clean energy technologies. Such R&D is an essential component of sound energy policies. Yet even your resources are tiny in comparison to the total fossil fuel economy.

We need good national and global energy policies to move the world off fossil fuels onto clean energies. However, the Paris climate accord, signed with pomp and circumstance, is only a precatory agreement, based on the hope that each of 190 nations will choose an effective "cap" for their emissions. But when a U.S. citizen is responsible for 25 times more emissions than an Indian citizen, what cap can we expect India to adapt and how would it be enforced?

I suggest, Mr. Buffett, that your Ark will need to include two fundamental timbers. And unless the public understands these basic matters, it will be difficult to achieve a vessel for salvation.

First, there will need to be an across-the-board gradually rising carbon fee or tax. This is the underpinning needed to provide incentive for rapid innovation and investment. Without this fee, fossil fuels continue to appear to be cheap to the consumer, as their price does not include their costs to society arising from air pollution, water pollution, and climate change.

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Second, these funds should not be grabbed by the government or used to fund politicians' favorite subsidies, which would depress the economy. Economic studies show that a revenue-neutral carbon fee stimulates the economy and creates jobs. Returning all funds to the public garners wide public support, helping avoid later overturning by subsequent political leaders.

These concepts are not rocket science. Yet communication of such basic information to the public is nearly impossible when the media are saturated with propaganda such as the fossil fuel industry's "I'm an Energy Voter" campaign, designed to keep the public hooked on fossil fuels.

Mr. Buffett, the public needs advice from trusted sources. You have done a useful service with your remarks about climate change and your advice to begin building an Ark. If you believe that the Paris climate accord has put us on a path to rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, if you believe that the sun and wind will soon provide all the world's energy needs, there is little reason for you to say more. But I suspect you agree that more is needed.

You have no obligation to advise the public about effective policies, but as a much-respected business person, you have an opportunity.

Recently my oldest grandson, as an 11-year old, made the astute observation about climate change: "unless we can figure out a time machine that actually works, there will be no way to go back in time to fix it." Mr. Buffett, young people will not get a "do-over." They urgently need us to start building your Ark.

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"When you get close to the raw materials and taste them at the moment they let go of the soil, you learn to respect them." -- Rene Redzepi

I've discovered that through beautifully made, deeply moving and artful culinary films such as Maurice Dekkers' Ants on a Shrimp I can relish in all the flavors of world-class chefs, without gaining a pound or spending a fortune. It's a wonderful way to live food, and enjoy the mastery that goes into its preparation, without feeling any guilt. I salute filmmakers like Dekkers who manage to bring their audience on a journey through nourishment and bring us out on the other side of viewing their film more conscious, better, and a little more hopeful.

This May Ants on a Shrimp will be featured at HotDocs in Toronto, the largest documentary film festival in the world, after having world premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year, in their interactive culinary film series.

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It was while in Berlin that I had a chance to catch up with Dekkers. He describes himself as a filmmaker-slash-journalist-slash-entrepreneur. In fact, just over ten years ago, along with a few colleagues from the Dutch TV series Keuringsdienst van Waarde, Dekkers started Tony's Chocolonely, now the best-selling chocolate company in the Netherlands. If you think one of those jobs is difficult enough, try three!

So, while I looked forward to our interview with anticipation, I also expected a much different man from the mellow, kind and quietly handsome filmmaker I found myself sitting across from in a remote room of the Berlinale Palast. Of course, I should have known, from his perfect chef portrayal -- devoid of all cooking show tricks like food porn and angry kitchen syndrome -- that Dekkers would be different.

Just as his film and his subject are.

Ants on a Shrimp follows world-renowned NOMA chef and owner Rene Redzepi on a journey from Copenhagen to Tokyo, while he shifts his entire operation, including venue and staff, to the Mandarin Oriental for a five-week run. Throughout this engrossing film, cinematographer Hans Bouma easily substitutes broad areal views of the Danish capital with Japanese panoramas, to contrast the dark, almost claustrophobic shots of NOMA's kitchens. It's not until the viewer finishes watching Dekkers' documentary that the realisation of just what an incredible experience he or she has been privy to becomes apparent. And I can tell you that just like the perfect meal, Ants on a Shrimp is the kind of film you'll want to sit through again, to savor every last detail, enjoy every tempting morsel.

Here are a few insights from Maurice Dekkers himself, on the film which he admits he "immediately knew" he wanted to make, because it felt as if he "had the chance to sit next to Vincent van Gogh while painting sunflowers in Arles." Brilliantly put.

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Have you done a lot of culinary films before?

Maurice Dekkers: This is my first film actually, but I did a lot of food. I developed a food format 15 years ago for Dutch TV, it's more of a journalistic thing than just food and it became a very big hit in Holland. And now for the past six years it's also a very big hit in the UK, on Channel 4. I was working for that for a long time and was really busy so I had no chance to make a film. I also developed a documentary series about food techniques and I wanted to do that with Rene. So I talked with him, and he loved the work I did and it felt good working together. We were writing at a very big hotel near the sea in Denmark, writing the series, thinking about it for a couple of days, and he told me about Japan and I thought, "this is a film!"

It's not often that you get this kind of opportunity.

Dekkers: No, no you don't and in creation you have to take every opportunity you get so I did, and he liked the idea. Of course there are a lot of films about chefs and they call it food porn and it's like a commercial and they often describe people like Rene as "the God of food" and of course they are not gods... They are just ordinary people, they're fantastic people, they have skills and are very good at what they doing, but they are working hard.

I was curious how one of the best chefs in the world creates a new menu for a new venue.

We are subjected to a lot of cooking shows like Masterchef and the likes on TV, but those shows add the extra enticement for the audience of not knowing the outcome -- we wonder who's going to win, etc. Whereas to me your film was so much more exciting, because I didn't have to think about that, I could concentrate on watching Rene's team of humans working together. And it is such a metaphor about how life should be. How people really can communicate and work together. Did you set out to do that?

Dekkers: Yes, actually there was not a big plan, I wanted to be in the team and to see what they are doing and how they are thinking. I wanted to feel like I was one of them. And that's what I did basically.

But you never include yourself physically in the film?

Dekkers: That was also new for me. Normally in my work I am involved. Or you can hear my voice... The idea for Rene was going to a place that you're not familiar with and you have to find yourself, to renew yourself again and that's where creativity comes in. Because the film is more about people doing something and creating something... It's about food of course, but for me it's also filmmaking. And because this was my first film, and I was not involved, and I had all kinds of things that were new for me, I had also the struggle they had, to create something.

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Is there a human lesson we can learn from a successful kitchen?

Dekkers: I think that you never have to be afraid of doing something and it's not about the end result, because the end result from a kitchen is a two-minute thing. People are going to sit there, that's why I put the food at the end of the film, but that's the way you experience it as a customer, when you go to eat it -- it's gone in one minute. What I like about Rene's food, and how I wanted to film it, is that it's more about art, it's not comfort food but it stays with you.

What is the most challenging aspect of making a culinary film?

Dekkers: It's basically very boring to be there. There's not a big drama behind it, well, they are cooking food. And not knowing what they are doing, because in a kitchen, a lot is happening in their heads. They are working with a skill they've known for years, they don't talk so much to each other.

Does it help to work with someone you know so well, as you do Rene?

Dekkers: When I started I didn't know him very well, I'd just met him for a couple of days. I think it's really important to do something that feels good. I had a big respect for what they are doing and I like him. What I didn't want to make is a chef shouting in the kitchen to all the people, to his chefs, I hate that! So I talked with him beforehand and asked him "are you going to do that, because I don't want that."

All the shows we see about chefs are about shouting and putting people down...

Dekkers: Yes, because that gives the drama in cooking, there is no real drama while cooking. But I didn't want to do that. I was there and at times it was tense, it is tense for them, if you're cooking at that level, people expect such high things from you, it can be tense. But there was not much shouting at all.

Is Rene that kind of chef anyway? He doesn't seem to be...

Dekkers: No, not anymore. Maybe he was. A lot of chefs are because that's also pressure. I think he's also grown in that, he's more like a leader, he's leading his team very well.

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How would you describe yourself to someone who doesn't know you?

Dekkers: I'm very versatile because I'm also a journalist, and ten years ago I started a chocolate company. It's now the best-selling chocolate in The Netherlands. And we started an office in Portland. I like food and I like people who are doing things.
(Barbara Ferhat/Shutterstock)

Written by Martin Hayden, Earthjustice Vice President, Policy & Legislation

Spring has come to Washington and the Congressional appropriations processthe process by which the government is fundedhas emerged from hibernation after last years budget deal. The year began with calls from both the Senate and the House of Representatives for regular order, which long ago meant getting all of the budget bills that fund different parts of the government completed on time and signed into law individually. It also meant an almost exclusive focus on funding, not on ideological riders, which create controversy and chaos in the budget process and often make it so that lawmakers are unable to fulfill one of Congresss biggest responsibilities: funding the government.

Last years spending bills were bogged down with ideological riders that would have defunded or weakened critical laws to protect our health and environment. In fact, more than 100 anti-environmental riders were proposed that would have blocked protections for our air and water, repealed vital climate change rules and harmed endangered species, among other things.

The first spending bill to make its way through the committee that handles the funding for the federal government in the House of Representatives this year would fund energy and water programs for fiscal year 2017. It includes several poisonpill riders that would:

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undermine Endangered Species Act protections for salmon and other imperiled species in California

defund the Obama administrations Clean Water Rule, which better equips the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA to protect our nations waterways, including sources that supply drinking water to one in three Americans

lock in industry loopholes that allow industrial mining operators to dump harmful mining waste into streams and rivers

In the Senate, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) deserves credit for not adding new anti-environmental riders to his energy and water bill before it went to the Senate floor. However, once on the floor, Senator John Hoeven (R-ND) tried to add the dirty water rider above to block the Clean Water Rule. The amendment was defeated when Senator Hoeven failed to get the necessary votes. Ironically, an attempt by another Senator to add a different controversial amendment targeting the Iran nuclear deal has stalled the entire bill, leaving the first budget bill out of the gate going nowhere fast.

The White House deserves credit for issuing a veto threat over the inclusion of riders in the Energy and Water Appropriations bill. Their statement reads, The administration strongly objects to the inclusion of problematic ideological provisions that are beyond the scope of funding legislation. If the final bill that is presented to the president includes such provisions, the presidents senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.

Fortunately, as the river of ideological riders starts to flow for fiscal year 2017, so too does the chorus of opposition to using the annual budget process to award polluters and other special interests with policy victories that could never pass as free-standing legislation.

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More than 170 members of Congress have come together to write a letter calling on the leaders of both parties in the House of Representatives to bring forward a clean budget, free of poison-pill riders, to fund the federal government for the next fiscal year. The letter was spearheaded by Representatives Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and endorsed by dozens of organizations, including Earthjustice.

While the support of so many members of Congress and the administration is very encouraging, there are many more bills to come and therefore many more chances to attach poison-pill riders. We must remain vigilant in opposing these damaging provisions and continue to encourage Congress to invest in our environment and in health protections for our families, not undermine them with ideological games.
Last month, in a remarkable challenge to the authority of the UN Security Council, the Kingdom of Morocco ordered the expulsion of most of the civilian personnel in the UN peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara. This unilateral decision to effectively dismantle the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) has triggered a crisis at the UN and further endangered the Saharawi people. It has also struck a blow to the cause of peace and security in the region.

While Morocco has made no secret of the fact that it would happily do away with MINURSO, the real shock has been the UN Security Council's troublingly muted reaction. Western Sahara is classified by the UN as a Non-Self-Governing territory, awaiting a process of decolonization. The Security Council created MINURSO with a clear mandate: to organize and supervise a referendum on self-determination in which the people of Western Sahara would choose between independence and integration with Morocco. Although Morocco agreed to these terms as part of the ceasefire, it has since renounced the very idea of a referendum. MINURSO has failed to deliver on its basic political premise for 25 years, but under the current conditions it won't even be able to fulfil basic functions of monitoring the ceasefire between Morocco and the Frente POLISARIO - the internationally recognized political representatives of the people of Western Sahara - for much longer.

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The people of Western Sahara have international law on our side, and we've been making significant progress internationally. For example, the African Union - where the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic is a full and founding member - has issued strong statements of support and last year called for a date to be set for the referendum. African Union Special Envoy for Western Sahara Joaquim Chissano reiterated this call to the Security Council when he briefed members during a meeting on 26 April 2016. The European Court of Justice recently struck down the European Union's trade agreement with Morocco based on its inclusion of Western Sahara. So perhaps it is no surprise that Morocco chose this moment to launch its dramatic assault on MINURSO.

It did so after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon took his first-ever trip to Western Sahara in early March. The Secretary-General visited the Frente POLISARIO-controlled liberated areas of Western Sahara as well as the Saharawi refugee camps in Southwest Algeria. Ban Ki-moon pledged that the UN "will do much more" for the people of Western Sahara. It was a welcome sentiment for a people who after more than 40 years of occupation and 25 years of failed political process have so often felt ignored by the United Nations and the international community as a whole.

But the trip incensed the Moroccans, whose defense of the status quo and opposition to any genuine talks is always backed up by aggressive diplomatic action. Morocco will use any pretext to obstruct the political process, and this time was no different. The Moroccan government seized upon Ban's use of the word "occupation" to describe Morocco's presence in Western Sahara. Saharawis - who are subject to frequent human rights abuses by Moroccan security services in the Moroccan-occupied territory - know all too well how accurate his description was. The word can also be found in resolutions of the UN General Assembly (34/37 and 35/19), so it is not as if Ban Ki-moon was breaking with UN precedent. If it wasn't the word "occupation", the Moroccans would have found another reason to attack the Secretary-General and take attention away from his call for a genuine negotiating process.

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As the Frente POLISARIO's senior official on all matters related to MINURSO, I know firsthand that the current situation imposed by Morocco is not sustainable. UN peacekeeping officials will tell you the same thing. Everything from vehicle maintenance to aerial ceasefire monitoring patrols and demining operations (Morocco has made Western Sahara one of the most heavily mined areas in the world) are already under considerable strain. The Moroccans are well aware that MINURSO cannot fulfil its mandated functions as things stand now.

Morocco's actions are extremely dangerous for the people of Western Sahara, but the implications are even broader. Regional security has been seriously compromised, and if the Security Council allows this unilateral attack on MINURSO to stand, what kind of precedent does it set for peacekeeping operations around the world?
In today's modern world, the art of home-cooked meals is losing ground to quick, convenient, often processed store and restaurant bought solutions. Whether we care to admit it or not, nutrition is rapidly becoming commoditized, and diligently making home-cooked meals to share at the dinner table the exception, not the norm.

Food writer, activist, and Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley Michael Pollan weighs in on processed vs. prepared food in this video short by The RSA as part of their ongoing series "Espresso for the Mind". The video sets illustrations from Kerry Hyndman to an audio soundbite from Pollan's lecture on the same topic, titled 'How Cooking Can Save Your Life'.

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Pollan's argument is a strong one: renouncing processed, corporate food in favour of home-cooked meals using minimally-processed, whole ingredients can have powerful effects on everything from personal health to communities, and ultimately our very food system, in which corporations play a large role.

Pollan has authored a number of books on this and other related subjects, including Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, In Defense of Food, and The Omnivore's Dilemma.
There are more than 20 million refugees worldwide--and half of them are children. Moreover, according to the UN High Commission for refugees, 86 percent of these refuges are in "countries considered economically less developed." But international attention has focused disproportionately on the plight of those from the historical Levant, who continue to turn up in various wealthy European countries that have the power to shape international news and perceptions.

Constant attention to the plight of Syrians, Iraqis and others has also made it easy to overlook the often more threatening circumstances of roughly 40 million people internally displaced in their own countries--most of which are not in the Levant. Narrowly focused international attention has also made it easier for Europeans to conclude expedient deals with regimes like the one in Khartoum, which recently received a commitment of more than 150 million, notionally to stem the growing tide of Africans traveling from Sudan northwards. There is little evidence, however, that the EU much cares that most of this money will line the pockets of the kleptocracy that is the ruling National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime in Khartoum. If only some the money partially stanches the refugee flow, it will be considered a good "investment."

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To be sure, other rich nations have just been as expedient in preventing refugees from entering. The U.S. uses an impossibly long and cumbersome process to scrutinize Syrians and others. Japan turns down 99 percent of all refugees and asylum applicants. But perhaps the largest problem is not with nations but with UN agencies. Nowhere is this more conspicuous than in the treatment of over 300,000 Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad, virtually all from Darfur--virtually all ethnically African. The twelve camps along the Darfur/Chad border have long been imperiled, by violence and humanitarian shortages. Yet their problems command no attention, and they are perhaps the most invisible large refugee population in the world.

The two UN agencies most culpable are both, it must be said, badly underfunded. The UN's World Food Program (WFP) and the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) have faced increasing shortages of money for programs that have sustained Darfuri refugees and other refugees and internally displaced populations throughout Africa. They have raised their voices, typically to no avail. But they have also engaged in practices that betray their mandate in consequential ways, and these must be highlighted, including suspicious census preparations for both refugees in eastern Chad and IDPs in Darfur.

Both agencies are engaged in policies that amount finally to forced repatriation of Darfuri refugees to a country still in the midst of an extremely violent, finally genocidal counter-insurgency campaign by Khartoum. WFP has sharply cut food rations for Darfuri refugees since 2014 to the point where they now amount, on paper, to only about one third of the minimum adequate daily intake of 2,100 kilocalories per person. But according to one highly informed Darfuri expatriate who has travelled regularly to eastern Chad, even this overstates what actually reaches people. Food is expropriated by various means along the way, including by middlemen who take a significant portion of the allocated food. Beneficiaries must pay--with food--for the milling of grain. What reaches children is typically not enough to prevent chronic malnutrition ("stunting"), a chronic problem in Sudan and the Sahel. Many of the refugees have been in Chad since the beginning of the genocide in 2003. A child born in one of the refugee camps in 2004 may well be both uneducated and acutely malnourished.

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According to local aid workers, UNHCR has told Darfuri refugees that the time has come for them to become self-reliant and either integrate into Chadian society or return to Darfur. For example, where limited education is provided, the Sudanese curriculum is no longer used: students have been forced to study the Chadian curriculum--in French, a language that few possess. Most consequentially, as UNHCR officials well know, returning to Darfur--given the extreme levels of violence--is impossible in most places. Indeed, massive insecurity is the only reason Darfuris remain in this desolate region, which cannot support both a huge refugee population and a local Chadian population. Darfuris have no wish to stay in Chad, or to "integrate" into Chadian society, as UNHCR is insisting. They want to return to their lands and homes. Still, UNHCR continues to push a program of "voluntary" repatriation, one that is adamantly rejected by Darfuris:

A delegation of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and a representative of the Chadian government, held a meeting with refugee leaders in the Djabal camp on Tuesday concerning the voluntary repatriation programme, as agreed between the UNHCR and the Sudanese and Chadian authorities in September. "They told us that a Sudanese delegation will visit the camps in November to prepare for the return of the refugees," El Zein Mohamed Ahmed, Radio Dabanga correspondent in eastern Chad reported. "The refugee elders and sheikhs asserted their categorical rejection of the voluntary repatriation programme while the situation in most parts of Darfur is still extremely unsafe and insecure," he said. "They told them the refugees will not welcome any delegation from the Khartoum regime, which is the main cause of their suffering." (Radio Dabanga, November 1, 2015)

Collusion between the repressive Chadian regime of Idriss Deby, the Khartoum regime of indicted genocidaire Omar al-Bashir, and UN agencies is an international disgrace. Refugees are defined in the 1951 Refugee Convention as people who are outside their country of origin "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted." No survey of current realities among the African tribal populations of Darfur can possibly escape the conclusion that returning refugees would face intense "persecution," including murder, rape, denial of humanitarian assistance, torture, and arbitrary incarceration.For its part, the broader international community refuses to provide meaningful civilian protection in Darfur, settling instead for the ill-conceived and badly failing UN/African Union "hybrid" force--UNAMID. Intimidated by both Khartoum and ruthless Arab militias deployed by the regime since it took up its mandate in January 2008, UNAMID is impotent, frequently denied access to investigate atrocities, and rarely reports even massive civilian destruction. It cannot possibly protect returning refugees, and may soon be withdrawn by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. Violence over the past four fighting seasons has accelerated to the point that it is now as destructive as during the early years of the genocide (2003 - 2005). Genocidal violence has been especially intense in North Darfur, to which a great many refugees would be returning.

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The UN must make urgent, emergency distributions of food and other basic humanitarian supplies to Darfuri refugees and other distressed populations inside Darfur. Rich nations should ensure full funding of WFP, devise means for effective civilian protection. Violence in Darfur must be brought to and end, and those same EU countries willing to pay off Khartoum for short-term gains should instead impose the kind of tough economic and financial sanctions the U.S. has imposed. This would quickly make the Khartoum regime more tractable in negotiating a verifiable peace agreement for Darfur. Only an end to the fighting can make it safe for Darfuri refugees to return to the productive lives from which they were forced by a genocide now in its fourteenth year.
I stumbled into fundamentalism by making a common assumption: I'd become a Christian because I wanted to know and follow the Truth (the capital "T" is intentional here and not conventional), and being a fundamentalist merely meant adhering to the "fundamentals" of faith.

This is of course what the fundamentalist thinks and would have others to believe, but often what is fundamental to Christian fundamentalists is not and was never fundamental to the Christian church at large or historically.

Consider for instance a particular doctrine, such as the imminent return of Jesus in the clouds meeting those who have been saved in the sky, all of whom are changed in an instant, leaving behind the rest of the world to suffer through tribulation followed by an anti-Christ figure who leads the world for seven years, culminating in the last judgment. The basic doctrine is known as the "rapture," and many Protestant fundamentalists consider it to be one of the basic building-blocks of the faith, so much so that if one does not believe in it one may not really be born again or saved, or worse, one of those who will be caught up in the clouds with Christ when the time comes.

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The doctrine of the rapture is clothed with other abstract eschatological positions, such as whether or not one is pre, mid or post-tribulation, a question concerning when the rapture will occur in terms of the tribulation, each position backed by a number of theories based on various readings of the Bible.

There may be variations of disagreement allowed, but some for many fundamentalist sects, this particular apocalyptic view is a fundamental when in fact such a view is very recent in the history of the church.

The point is that sects adopt specific views as being important and vital to the faith that measured by history are not at all dogmatic, or non-negotiable truths central to the witness and life of Christians since the very beginning. Fundamentalists have a tendency to hone in on distinctive doctrines and bloat them until they become central to what it means to belong, or to the identity of the group, in other words, and rejecting beliefs such as the rapture may be thought of as aberrant, or nominal or even heretical.

One would think that the available history on such matters would have some bearing on how significant interesting and new doctrinal formulations might truly be to the church. But it isn't, and that has to do with reasons that are relevant to the formal beginning of fundamentalism as a radical reaction to modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. The Reformation, deeply intertwined and influenced with the Renaissance in a way that is similar to the conflation of fundamentalism and modernism today, locked in the Lutheran proclamation of sola Scriptura as the basis of Christian revelation and authority.

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The Protestant distinctive that dogmatically affirmed the Bible as the sole and final arbiter of special revelation to the church and world played itself to some of its logical conclusions during sectarian infighting among American Presbyterians and others. Never mind that this view of Scripture, which isolates Biblical texts from context and reduces them to a kind of analytic methodology that at least mimics the modernist liberal hermeneutic that had threatened Christian identity in the United States, is also not found as a dogma or creed in the history of the church since the beginning.

The result is a rigid, black-and-white, affirmation as dogma that not only is "Scripture alone" a fundamental truth of the faith, but so is the resultant idea that the Bible is also infallible and inerrant. Such a stance demanded that every word of the Bible be perspicuous (in other words, clear and easy to understand), and at least implied that the Bible should by-and-large be taken literally, rejecting the vast literature from the Church fathers going back at least fifteen hundred years that offered numerous figurative, mythic, metaphorical and allegorical interpretations of texts.

These distinctive doctrines affirmed the foundation of American fundamentalism as expressed primarily in the Protestant and evangelical church without any note of irony whatsoever to betray the fact that every single one of them was an innovation, and had never been considered fundamental to Christian belief since the beginning of the church. It becomes easy to see that fundamentalism really has little to do with adhering to the fundamentals of the faith, even though fundamentalists will claim that each distinctive is in fact and has always been the truth, but that only remnants of Christians have adhered to it, the faithful few on the narrow road of salvation.

Or, at any rate, there is no need to elaborate a justification for ignoring history or context precisely because the Bible clearly and literally expresses each distinctive as the Word of God, and since one of the distinctive doctrines is that the Bible is clear in expressing revealed Truth, one can trust it, or have faith in the truths that are being revealed. The fact that the doctrine of inerrancy and its corollary regarding perspicuity is itself deemed to be true on the basis of nothing but its own claim seems to be the elephant in the room.

And so, as a young fundamentalist, I had faith in the clarity of the Bible because the Bible said it was clear and the all-sufficient arbiter of divine revelation, even though the Bible really doesn't ever, anywhere, say that. If I make the claim that it does say that, I have to argue my case, which at least intimates that either I am more righteous or more reasonable or more knowledgeable than anyone who disagrees with me, or the Bible isn't really perspicuous - a contradiction of the claim.

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I understood the necessity of the claim, though, in terms of functioning in a way that I thought the Bible was supposed to function. It was supposed to not only introduce me to God, but provide principles for living my life. To a large degree, for me and everyone I knew at the time, this meant that the Scriptures primarily informed my belief system, or as I was fond of saying then, my "world view." It didn't really seem too odd to me that its clarity seemed to depend on my acceptance of doctrines that started out as hypotheses not usually initially indicated in the text.

So, when I was a charismatic who could proof-text the need for a baptism of the Holy Spirit, whereby one was empowered by God and given the gifts of the Holy Spirit (evidence by the phenomenon of speaking in tongues), the Bible seemed really clear on the subject. It perplexed me that anyone could argue to the contrary.

And later, when I was a five-point Calvinist who thought God gave us all five fingers on each hand so that we could more easily memorize the doctrines of grace as summarized by the acronym TULIP, the way that the Scriptures fell into an extreme clear pattern to confirm all this was astonishing. The fact that numerous people could not see it was shocking to me.

I did not want to assume that I was just better or holier and able to understand the otherwise clear Scriptures than they, but I did anyway. After all, if the Bible is the sole authority, then it must also be perspicuous; and if others are not seeing it as I do, they must have bad motives or be invested in erroneous conclusions. I guess I could excuse myself through an appeal to youth (I was in my mid-20s). But I was utterly convinced that what I believed was Truth, and anyone who disagreed was either ignorant of the Scriptures, immoral, illiterate, or heretical.

It did not occur to me that the Scriptures seemed just as clear to detractors as it did to me, or even that what I thought was clear might have come across as a bit more obscure to others, and legitimately so.

Now, however, I realize how powerful confirmation bias is, and what a strong role this cognitive error plays as a factor in determining personal belief.

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Confirmation bias is an unconscious process in which I favor information that supports my hypothesis. It is not a conscious act, but one of the products of human finitude, and it takes some training to try not to do it; even then, I don't think anyone is free of it. It impacts personal relationships, as well as affirms social constructs and the schematic shorthand that overwhelmingly substitutes for actual engagement with people or information.

Think of a common hypothesis that appends to constructs having to do with poverty in the United States, such as: poor people are lazy, drug-addled, users of the system, etc. As is usually the case, the abject and weakest members of society are the scapegoats for its illnesses.

Confirmation bias would seek to prove the hypothesis rather than disprove it - the latter is the scientific method; the former is an error. In proving the hypothesis, one automatically and unconsciously selects evidence that favors it, such as listening to narratives about people on food stamps using their allotment to buy items deemed to be unnecessary. (The fundamental attribution error plays into this as well, since often items deemed to be unnecessary to others are often okay and justified to oneself.) One may then see someone use their food stamp money while texting on a cell phone. Or, one may see someone use their food stamp card to purchase junk food. One might notice that the person on food stamps is overweight. One may watch a family on food stamps drive off from the store in a nice car, or at least one in better condition than one's own.

All of these observations collect to provide a narrative of evidence that proves the hypothesis, and then the proofing stops. A multitude of factors may be at play here to motivate bias, including political ideology or even envy - envy of the poor who seem to be getting something for nothing often underlies the rhetoric of forcible austerity.

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There is no questioning of the evidence, and no seeking to disprove the hypothesis, which is the only way to substantially deal with bias. If you cannot disprove the hypothesis, then it can be accepted - not as absolute truth, but for further consideration, research and investigation. But when confirmation bias occurs, there is no attempt at all to disprove the hypothesis, and personal bias is not even remotely addressed.

As a result, confirmation bias reaffirms and substantiates wrong conclusions, reification of social constructs, poor polity that secures the powerful and marginalizes the disempowered, and even bad theology, which is also used to substantiate and justify all of the foregoing.

But one of the odd and perhaps unfortunate realities about how the mind works is how amazingly convincing our experiences and biases can be. Especially referent to my own experience of clarity in terms of finding first Pentecostal/Charismatic doctrinal evidence in the Scriptures, then finding clear Calvinist doctrines there, and then a little later, finding post-millennial, Reconstructionist concepts there. People in the church who know their lingo call this proof-texting, and that's basically what confirmation bias is.

We set out to prove our biases, but not just in relation to a text we assume is inerrant, but in the whole play and action of living. Seeking to disprove our biases, challenge conventions, dismantle constructs and question orthodoxies is a far more reliable method for at least shaking off the fog of bias that clouds and distorts perception.

The need to eliminate bias is not only intrinsic to the process of thought and investigation in scientific research and studies, but it is further employed through both repetition and peer review. In less scientific realms where belief is involved it is no less important, ranging from one's personal world view and the formulation of opinion to team projects in business and enterprise to Church councils, canons and creeds.

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Even in these situations, such as a peer review journal or a team meeting that decides, for example, whether or not to send a space shuttle into orbit, there are still cognitive problems that arise due to group dynamics, including the acceptance of normative values that may be contingent upon faulty social constructs. The oppression of women due to gender constructs, not allowing women basic citizenship rights such as to vote (for example) was often robustly justified in peer review religious and scientific journals, as well as affirmed by both religious canon and secular legal courts, including the Supreme Court.
If a public employee is demoted because his employer thought he was engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, can he sue his employer if he was not in fact doing so? This week, the Supreme Court gave an affirmative answer to that perplexing question. In Heffernan v. City of Paterson, the Court vindicated a principle that is fundamental to our First Amendment jurisprudence: Government officials may not target speech arbitrarily -- that is, on the basis of their mere will, rather than any constitutionally proper reason.

This result should be celebrated. And yet one cannot help but observe that the Court does not always carefully evaluate claims that government officials have acted arbitrarily. What the Court does in speech cases -- namely, engage in a genuine effort to identify government officials' true ends and assess their propriety -- it can and should do in all constitutional settings.

What was Heffernan all about? Jeffrey Heffernan, a twenty-year veteran police officer in Paterson, New Jersey was spotted picking up a sign that expressed support for the candidate running against the sitting Paterson mayor. Word reached the chief of police and Heffernan's supervisor, both of whom had been appointed by the mayor. Heffernan was immediately demoted from detective to patrol officer. He brought suit against the city under 42 U.S.C.  1983, the federal statute that allows citizens to sue public officials for depriving them of "rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution." Heffernan claimed that he had been demoted in retaliation for what his supervisors believed to be political activity -- political activity protected by the First Amendment.

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As it happened, Heffernan's supervisors were mistaken. Heffernan had not been engaging in political activity at all. Rather, he was picking up the campaign sign for his bedridden mother. The district court and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals considered this fact dispositive in dismissing Heffernan's  1983 claim. Because he had not engaged in constitutionally protected speech activities, the courts reasoned, his First Amendment rights could not have been violated. Thus, while Heffernan had certainly been injured by the demotion, he had not been deprived of any "rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution" and could not bring suit under  1983.

The Supreme Court rejected this reasoning. Justice Steven Breyer, writing for the majority, drew upon Waters v. Churchill (1994), in which the Court held that an employee did not state a valid claim where her employer mistakenly but reasonably believed that the employee's conduct was not constitutionally protected. "[I]n the law, what is sauce for the goose is normally sauce for the gander," wrote Justice Breyer, reasoning that because Heffernan's employer mistakenly thought that Heffernan's conduct was constitutionally protected, Heffernan had a valid claim rooted in his employer's improper motivation. Justice Breyer also parsed the language of the First Amendment, which provides (in relevant part) that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." Here, Justice Breyer explained, "[t]hat which stands for a 'law' of 'Congress,'" is "the police department's reason for taking action." And if the department's reason for demoting him was improper, Heffernan could recover from the city.

But wait a minute. As Justice Clarence Thomas (writing for himself and Justice Samuel Alito) pointed out in a thoughtful and cogent dissent, a valid  1983 claim arising from unconstitutional government conduct requires an allegation that one has been deprived of a constitutional right, not merely that one has been injured by an unconstitutional policy. The distinction is subtle but important. "Consider, for example, a law that authorized police to stop motorists arbitrarily to check their licenses and registration," wrote Justice Thomas. Although "[t]hat law would violate the Fourth Amendment," only motorists who had actually been unconstitutionally detained would have "suffered the right kind of injury." In Justice Thomas' view, Heffernan had certainly suffered an injury, but he had not suffered the right kind of injury -- his freedom to speak had not been abridged. His  1983 claim should therefore have been dismissed.

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Who has the better of this dispute? In truth, the majority and the dissent are both partially correct. If in fact Heffernan was demoted because his superiors believed he was engaging in political speech with which they disagreed, his constitutional rights were violated. But it is the Fourteenth Amendment rather than the First Amendment that is most squarely implicated by the government's actions.

The Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process of Law Clause is properly understood to prohibit arbitrary government actions -- actions that serve only to impose the will of those in power. The term "due process of law" in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments can be traced back to the "law of the land clause" in Magna Carta, which Revolutionary-era lawyers and the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment understood to refer to a normative concept of law. According to this concept, not every government action is law -- to qualify as law, the government's actions must possess certain characteristics, public orientation being among them. Government officials cannot lawfully seek to serve only the interests of politically powerful individuals or groups -- their actions must be calculated to promote the genuine public good.

Thus, while Justice Thomas is correct that Heffernan's right to speak freely was not violated, Heffernan did plausibly allege that he was the victim of arbitrary treatment by government officials. That would constitute a deprivation of due process of law and it would violate Heffernan's constitutional right not to be treated arbitrarily. The Court was thus right to hold that Heffernan had a valid  1983 claim.

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Yet Heffernan is a bittersweet victory -- a reminder that the Court does not consistently enforce constitutional prohibitions on arbitrary government actions. Consider that the Court's speech jurisprudence is animated by concerns about protectionism in the marketplace of ideas -- concerns that the politically powerful will impose their ideological and expressive preferences on others. Regulations of the marketplace of goods and services that are not calculated to protect the public from incompetence or fraud but merely to impose the economic preferences of the politically powerful are essentially no different and are equally constitutionally improper. Such regulations can effectively extinguish Americans' right to earn a living in the occupation of their choice -- a right held sacred by the Framers and consistently acknowledged by the Court.

But while the Court in speech cases makes a genuine effort to determine the true ends of government officials' actions, it has shown little interest in identifying the true ends of economic regulations when applying rational-basis review -- the default standard of review in constitutional cases that do not involve any of the handful of rights that the Court has designated as "fundamental" (the right to speak freely being among them). Burdens on fundamental rights trigger "heightened" judicial scrutiny, under which the government must demonstrate -- with evidence -- that its actions are calculated to achieve a proper governmental end. Lower courts applying rational-basis review often expressly refuse to pursue the government's true ends, do not require the government to put forward any evidence in support of its actions, and even assist the government in hypothesizing justifications for its actions. As a result, arbitrary burdens on the right to earn a living are fast transforming the American dream into a mere fantasy.

To amend Justice Breyer's language, what is sauce for the goose in our constitutional jurisprudence ought to be sauce for the gander. As the Court pursues the government's true ends in cases involving speech, so it should do in all constitutional cases. The Court should clarify that all arbitrary exercises of government power over individuals are constitutionally odious and affirm that judicial engagement--impartial, evidence-based inquiry into the constitutionality of the government's true ends and means, without deference to government officials' beliefs or desires--is a judicial duty, binding upon all judges who draw their power from Article III. Maintaining the rule of law established by the Constitution requires no less.

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"I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger." -Harriet Tubman

Every summer, several people gather in a park in Boston's historic South End neighborhood in front of a 10-foot bronze statue of famed abolitionist and freedom fighter Harriet Tubman. Created by artist Fern Cunningham, the statue was the first on city-owned property to honor a woman.

'Mother Moses' - a name given to Tubman by famed Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison as she led many of her people out of bondage into freedom - is depicted standing erect in front of a small group of tired and frightened people of African descent. Her expression is steadfast, resolute and unafraid. In one hand, she clutches a Bible as her other hand extends outward, pointing the way toward freedom.

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As a member of the board of the Friends of Harriet Tubman Park, and as the great grandchild of people who were themselves enslaved, I participate in this yearly gathering that involves the ritual of reverently and gently washing, waxing, and buffing the statue. The effort protects the statue from the harsh elements of city life, and also ensures that its majesty is not diminished. I am overwhelmed with gratitude as I cleanse her feet and outstretched hands, and as I gently wash her face I find myself saying softly into her ear "thank you." I tell her that we remember and are grateful because she dared to take her freedom from those who held her captive and also worked to free so many others as well.

I went to the statue in the park shortly after Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew announced that Tubman would soon adorn the front of the $20 bill. In doing so, she would replace former President Andrew Jackson, himself a holder of slaves. Tubman will be the first American woman to appear on US paper currency in more than a century.

Adding Tubman's face to our nation's most traded piece of currency might to some seem a mere gesture, but to me it represents an opportunity for reflecting on this moment in our shared history. We have a chance to take a step forward together if we can truly honor our past.

I am reminded of the words of another great foot soldier for justice and freedom Nelson Mandela who said, "There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires." Tubman, who spent the first 28 years of her life in captivity on a Maryland plantation before escaping, risked her newfound freedom to liberate other enslaved people by following the North Star.

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I also was prompted to think of actress Viola Davis's speech during the 67th Primetime Emmy Awards after she won the award for Outstanding Lead Actress In A Drama Series for her role in "How to Get Away with Murder," making her the first Black woman to win that distinction. No easy feat. Davis began her remarks with a quote from Tubman: "In my dreams and visions, I seemed to see a line, and on the other side of that line were green fields, and lovely flowers, and beautiful white ladies, who stretched out their arms to me over the line, but I couldn't reach them no-how. I always fell before I got to the line."

Without question, we still have much work before as a nation and as a society to bring about equitable opportunities for all citizens to realize their full potential. But this week, Tubman's words echoed in my head as I sat in that Boston park, erected to honor her legacy of courage and steadfastness:


The shaved snow machine at Snowdays. (Photo: Konstantin Sergeyev)

By Chris Crowley

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" that's 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 hadn't 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 they've 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.

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Rolling the ice cream at 10Below. (Photo: Konstantin Sergeyev)

"Having access to people posting in Hong Kong and Japan, we're 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. It's 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 Side's 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 York's Chinese community.



10Below's 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.

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Shaved snow at Snowdays. (Photo: Konstantin Sergeyev)
I demand that you pay $2.25 in damages and $250.00 in attorney's fees for the cost of this demand letter. In addition, I demand that you change your policy and if you do not have an item, either offer a substitute side or give a reduction in the price.

If I have not heard from you in 10 days, I will file my lawsuit against you.
With just months separating us from the inauguration and commercial opening of the expanded Panama Canal, the excitement's been palpable. It's apparent among the Canal's customers, the industry in general and throughout Panama. Soon, global commerce will transform, providing shippers and others with new routes, capacity and opportunities to serve their customers and global consumers all over the world. For this, we at the Panama Canal Authority are extremely proud.

Today, the Canal services 144 transportation routes from every corner of the globe, connecting trade arteries and creating efficiencies for shippers and container companies, alike. With Expansion, the impact will be further reaching. The container segment alone will experience significant benefits; shippers could more than double their per-transit TEU load, using what will now be called Neo Panamax ships. And of course, greater cargo capacity means greater economies of scale, a benefit for us all.

We are making history for all Panamanians, the world and our customers. And as we focus on the finishing touches that remain, I must salute the many years of dedication and hard work by the thousands of ACP employees, partners, consultants and vendors that led to this moment. I celebrate our customers and all involved in global shipping. Without you, expansion would not be possible.

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The very dream of carving a passage through Panama to unite the Atlantic and Pacific dates back to the early 16th century. In 1880, the French began--and later abandoned--construction. In 1904, under the leadership of President Roosevelt, the United States resumed the dream, completing the Canal in 1914 and overcoming a myriad of obstacles along the way. The U.S. then managed it until the Torrijos-Carter Treaty was signed in 1977 and later ratified, leading to Panama's operation in 1999. Knowing the storied history of our national treasure, the day we took full control was one of my proudest as a Panamanian.

From that moment, the ACP has run the Canal with a savvy, market-oriented and customer-centric approach, much like a Fortune 500 company and always contributing to Panama's well-being. From the beginning, we have been singularly focused on safe, reliable and efficient service, providing segmented products and services, smart new cost structures, and innovative and sustainable initiatives. Our diligent stewardship of the Canal's watershed--one of the largest in the world--helped ensure we had the water and other resources in perpetuity to service our customers.

As international trade grew, Panama proved it was more than capable of managing the waterway at the highest levels. Understanding demand would continue to rise and based on customer feedback, President Torrijos formally proposed in 2006 to expand the Canal. The proposal was based on years of research, including more than 100 studies on economic and engineering feasibility, market demand and environmental impact. In 2007, a national referendum passed with a staggering 76.8 percent support and the proposal was approved.

We've come a long way since then, setting operational milestones often. Recently in 2011, we poured structural concrete for the new locks and partially flooded the Neo Panamax channel. In 2012, four million cubic meters of material were dredged from northern Gatun Lake to provide greater Canal access. In 2014, the 16 new lock gates were installed, each weighing 3,200 - 4,200 tons. And in 2015, the new locks were flooded and the Pacific Access Channel was filled and its plug removed, joining the Culebra Cut. Most recent, we filled and tested the massive water-saving basins we constructed for the new locks. These basins, which reuse 60 percent of water used for each lockage, will further our commitment to the environment, as well as improve our ability to reliably manage our water reserves for customers.

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Expansion's timing could not be more serendipitous: This year we hit full cargo capacity--something we forecasted would happen now, nearly a decade ago. In 2015, a record 340.8 million Panama Canal tons of cargo transited the Canal, of which the container ship segment saw a 3.7 percent year-on-year increase. It only reaffirms the decision to expand.

This success, and the success of the Canal, can be directly linked to our people. So as we approach the commercial opening, we have been preparing and training our employees, from our talented pilots to our mechanics. Whether through educational programs and training at the Canal's simulation center, or conducting mock transits at the Scale Model Maneuvering Training Facility and trial transits of Neo Panamax vessels, the ACP has invested in its people to ensure the Canal's continued reliability.

This will be crucial, as the expected growth from Expansion stands to benefit all segments--reefer, dry bulk, car carrier and more. But the container segment, which represents nearly 50 percent of our business, will arguably see the most. As perspective, the capacity of one Neo Panamax ship is equal to the cargo capacity of up to 16 standard trains, leading to a more cost-effective mean of shipping goods.

According to IHS Maritime and Trade, the opening of the Expanded Canal will unlock the waterway to 45 percent of the international container ship fleet. Adding to the container ships that currently transit the Canal, Expansion will enable access for 87 percent of the vessels worldwide.

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And not only growing the container business, Expansion will impact its footprint. Boston Consulting Group predicts that by 2020 up to 10 percent of U.S. - East Asia container traffic could shift from the West Coast to the East Coast, profoundly altering global trade. The shift would represent more than 40 percent of U.S. inbound container traffic, and would be an economic boon for major East Coast port cities.

As of July 2015, 33 container liner services were deployed through the Canal weekly--14 along the Asia-U.S. East and Gulf Coast route. Moreover, Panama ports ranked top in container movements in Latin America according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Panama's central location has made the country an ideal hub for transshipping containers originating in Asia with destinations in the Americas. Today, the Panamanian port system handles an estimated 6.8 million TEU per year, 80 percent of which is transshipped to Latin America, North America and the Caribbean.

Looking forward, Panama will continue to consolidate its position as the transportation and logistics hub of the Americas, connecting trade routes, serving neighboring economies and providing a wide variety of goods and value-added services to companies and consumers. But as we finalize Expansion, our focus remains on quality and testing to ensure the same safe and reliable service for the years to come.
This article was originally posted on Inverse.

By Joe Carmichael

Much to the consternation of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, we're at the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence. The risk? Technological progress may outpace cultural progress to a detrimental degree. But not all the concerns about A.I. are philosophical or abstract in nature. As it happens, we're also at the dawn of the consumer robot age -- which means we're welcoming new programs into our homes without necessarily understanding how they interact with us, and to what degree they may compromise our privacy.

Artificially intelligent robots present a host of potential issues. This week, the United Nations is meeting to determine whether Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems should be preemptively banned. Scholars have long entertained concerns that such A.I.s might decide to erase humans from the planet. But what about the robots of today, the ones that are just starting to serve us and interact with us in meaningful ways? The issues they represent are more practical, and more informed by our own behavior. We tend to treat dog-shaped robots like dogs, but dog-shaped robots aren't dogs. They don't see the world through canine eyes; they see the world through sensors. They record.

Most A.I. systems use pattern recognition. We feed massive amounts of data into these systems in the form of, for instance, photographs -- and they learn what a cat looks like. Or they learn what a license plate looks like; or they learn what your face looks like. In the not-too-distant future, this is very likely how the A.I. inside your robot assistant will work as well, recognizing your mood and needs and wants -- getting to know the patterns that make you, consistently, you.

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Your robot buddy is eventually going to have a database that will allow it to draw conclusions about what is you -- and what is not you, by extension. Let's not dance around this: Your appliance is going to take naked pictures of you. And that's potentially okay, but it's definitely worthy of consideration because privacy has a tendency to erode quickly -- and you won't necessarily own the information your robot imbibes.

Will government agencies be able to access consumer A.I.s? (If current events are indicative, expect the same people who wanted to hack the iPhone to be eager to hack robots.) What will happen if you get hacked? To what degree can these things be encrypted? These are all questions that demand answers before we disrobe in front of our beeping, booping new friends. And then there's the question about what constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The phrase "reasonable expectation of privacy" is linked to the Fourth Amendment in the same way the phrase "I'll be back" is linked to the Terminator franchise. In essence, it dictates the applicability of the law guaranteeing "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects." Given that the Supreme Court has always treated American homes as more or less sacrosanct, it seems likely that there's nothing to fear from the government (unless you give law enforcement probable cause). For civilians, privacy laws have traditionally done a pretty good job of protecting Americans from invasive or inappropriate photography or recordings. That does not mean, however, that recordings don't go public.

The recent trial over a sex tape showing Hulk Hogan served to illustrate juries' distaste for incursions of private property and into private affairs -- but also as a reminder that the market for sexual imagery is pretty much unlimited. Whether or not you believe information wants to be free, it's clear that naked pictures do, which is a problem for A.I. Put the images in the cloud and you've got a massive hacking target. Don't put them in the cloud and you better bet people are going to steel robots. Encryption is the logical solution, but how is that going for Apple, again?

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It's easy to get lost in the larger ramifications of artificial intelligence and robo-assistance, but sometimes it's worth considering the domestic conundrums new technologies pose. What matters more to us: walking around our homes in the buff altogether or never having to make toast again? It won't be quite as cut and dry as that, but there will be trade offs. There always are.

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This article was originally posted on Inverse.

By John Knefel

In a matter of just a few years, smartwatches and fitness trackers have gone from curiosities to being nearly ubiquitous among affluent consumers. These devices will only get more popular as their prices come down and their capabilities improve.

Already, though, tech companies and the government are looking at the next generation of wearable technology. So-called "functional fabrics" go one step beyond the iWatch or Fitbit and actually incorporate computing power into the very fabric of a shirt or uniform. These smart fabrics represent the latest frontier in the Internet of Things, the universe of connected devices that allow your phone to start your car or flip on your home security system. Researchers hope that functional fabrics will be used in environments from the battlefield to decrease mortality rates of soldiers, to hospitals to improve mobility for people with disabilities. But they could also allow for a massive increase in the amount of data that companies and governments are able to gather.

In a major case out of Pennsylvania, detectives used a woman's Fitbit to undercut her claims she had been sexually assaulted. In March, 2015, Jeannine Risley told police she'd been sleeping when she was attacked and raped. But when police looked at data collected by her fitness tracker, they determined she had been awake and walking around. The Fitbit made all the difference, Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedmen told the Today show.

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And it's not just location and bio-data that some of these devices track. Privacy researchers at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana were able to compromise a Samsung Gear Live smart watch so that it told them individual key strokes a person hit on a keyboard based on their hand movement, using an app installed on the device.

"The app uses an accelerometer and gyroscope to track the micro-motion of keystrokes as a wearer types on a keyboard," according to the University of Illinois researchers. "After collecting the sensor data, researchers ran it through a 'Keystroke Detection' module, which analyzed the timing of each keystroke and the net 2D displacement of the watch. For example, the left wrist moves farther to type a T than an F."

Their findings show how smart devices can introduce unintended privacy vulnerabilities beyond even what the manufacturers realize. In this case, the watch had profound "privacy implications, as an app that is camouflaged as a pedometer, for example, could gather data from emails, search queries and other confidential documents," the researchers found.

The federal government is investing heavily in the future of smartclothes. Earlier this month, the Department of Defense announced a new initiative called the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) Alliance, with the goal of creating new, hi-tech textiles jobs in the hollowed out American manufacturing sector.

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The $317 million initiative brings together 89 universities, manufacturers, and tech companies "to integrate fibers and yarns with integrated circuits, LEDs, solar cells, and other capabilities to create textiles and fabrics that can see, hear, sense, communicate, store energy, regulate temperature, monitor health, change color, and more," according to a Pentagon press release.

The Defense Department, for example, is researching a uniform that would be responsive to light to alert a soldier if he or she were being targeted by a sniper. "If a sniper gun were aimed at a solder, even if it were an infrared beam so it's not visible, the fibers embedded in the fabric deliver an electronic signal saying, 'This surface is being interrogated by a laser,'" Ayman Abouraddy, a researcher at the University of Central Flordia, told the website NextGov.

"Similar functionality could be extended to thermal sensing," Abouraddy added. "Temperature would allow one to form a temperature map of the body, and as a result be able to know if a soldier is hurt, or incapacitated, or even know what type of injury even if a soldier can't report it."

Researchers are looking into many other ways smart fabrics can be used to improve people's health and everyday lives. Drexel University, for instance, is developing "a bellyband for uterine monitoring, touch-sensitive skin for robots, a haptic glove for hand therapy and textiles that can store energy," according to their website.

For now, functional fabrics remain a niche market. Some of the early consumer products are all about regulating a runner's body heat, which may not scale up to become a major market, but could be profitable nonetheless.

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The Pentagon has been working on some version of this kind of technology for years. Whether that means stretchable touch pads or body suits with immediately identifiable biological data, the Defense Department is willing to pour money into an industry that is still in its infancy.

As these devices and fabrics become more widespread, so too will the data they collect about our public and private lives. It means that in the next few years, your outfit could say a lot more about you than just your sense of style.

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"Killing Queers in Indiana" is an adaptation from J. Patrick Redmond's novel Some Go Hungry, a work of fiction inspired by true events, published by Kaylie Jones Books, an imprint of Akashic Books.

In 1986 Robbie Palmer was murdered in rural Indiana, his body dumped in a farm field drainage ditch, left there to rot, a carcass for the turtles and wildlife to eat. His murder took place long before anyone knew the name Matthew Shepard.

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Robbie was my classmate and our southern Indiana town did nothing about the crime -- people were utterly apathetic. It was as if collectively local folks thought, "Eh, it's just a queer."

Robbie had attended a local party rumored to be an annual gathering of homosexuals. "The queers killed him," people said. Local pulpits reacted with fire and brimstone sermons about God's wrath, abomination, Leviticus, and the Apostle Paul. Church members all but branded Robbie's mother with a scarlet H -- the mother of a homosexual.

Thirty years have passed. Robbie's murder remains unsolved.

There was a Grand Jury investigation; party attendees were called to testify. Several of the men testifying lost their jobs because of the publicity surrounding the proceedings. Others had rocks thrown at them outside of the courthouse. The prosecutor said he was "investigating satanic, ritual homosexual practices" particular to my hometown. The Indiana Civil Liberties Union charged that the grand jury witch-hunt "tainted gays as murderous deviants, spurred anti-gay harassment, and damaged the lives of the people questioned."

I was 17 years old. I too was gay, in the closet, and struggling with my sexual orientation. Robbie's murder terrified me and scandalized my hometown. The crime colored my self-awareness and kept me from coming out for years. Local people still refuse to talk about Robbie's murder.

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It is hard to reason that thirty years have passed and my southern Indiana hometown has not changed. "Tell your boy Grey to stop writing or someone's gonna put a gun to his head," a retired police officer said to my father not three weeks ago. Nevertheless, I am telling the story -- I'm telling my story -- and yet I can't help but wonder what they will do to me?
"The Scourge of Upward Redistribution," by Steven Teles, in National Affairs, addresses the issue of American wealth inequality in the United States and points out something quite important--while some inequality is the result of entrepreneurial skill, innovation and productivity, much is the result of government interventions redistributing wealth up the pyramid.

I would not be surprised to find the bulk of redistribution via politicized markets is upward, not downward. Certainly, major corporations at the turn of the last century understood that was possible. As socialist historian Gabriel Kolko pointed out in The Triumph of Conservatism, these corporations banded together to push through some of the most praised "Progressive" regulatory programs in history.

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The results were markets became less competitive and the share of wealth held by big business tended to increase. Regulations hindered competition, favoring the established Big Boys. Programs often proposed with the best of intentions can be counter-productive to theygoals they wish to accomplish.

Teles, notes: "Much of the tension between equality and economic dynamism dissolves when we focus on inequality generated by public policies that distort market allocations of resources in favor of the wealthy--what we might call 'upward-redistributing rents.' These rents are large and growing, produced by inherent flaws in democratic governance that facilitate the use of the state to enrich the already advantaged. If high-end inequality is not diminished by removing the ways the wealthy use the state to extract resources from the rest of society, the inequalities that conservatives believe are just--those that flow from innovation and hard work--will be in danger. In short, inequality will become a threat to free exchange itself."

The poor and powerless rarely benefit from politicized markets. Once markets are centralized politically, politicians, not market forces, determine outcomes. While the political class pays lip service to the poor and powerless, it is the rich and powerful who are ultimately served.

This happens mainly in two ways. First, the rich and powerful can afford to lobby politically. They finance campaigns. They have actual access to politicians. They buy lobbyists to act on their behalf. They file lawsuits and hire high-priced attorneys to push policy in their direction. This skews the legislative process in their favor, so laws tend to reflect what they want.

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Teles mentions car dealers and their access to the political process. "Car dealers, for instance, have a sizable presence in the top 1% of earners, have a major lobbying presence in almost every state capital, and have made contributions to almost every member of Congress. That should not be surprising, because regulations (again, often at the state level) protect car dealerships from competition by limiting direct sales, restricting the termination of franchises, limiting the entry of new dealers, and preventing manufacturers from offering preferential pricing to larger franchisees. Together, these rules, economists Francine Lafontaine and Fiona Scott Morton found in a 2010 study, 'almost guarantee dealership profitability and survival,' while simultaneously driving up costs to consumers."

Second, when a law is imposed it has to be enforced. The enforcing agency is open to regulatory capture, meaning those being regulated have incentives to use feed-back mechanisms to influence how laws are enforced, or interpreted. The typical consumer has no idea what the FDA is doing or thinking of doing. Pharmaceutical companies, on the other hand, know exactly what is happening and are quick to provide input.

In addition, regulations can't be created by people who have no clue as to how things work, or what needs to be done. Agencies hire those who know the field skewing hiring in favor of people who worked in that area, thus hiring individuals connected to the industry they have to regulate. Regulators also tend to have early retirements with cushy pensions and being wealth-seekers as much as anyone else, they retire and often look for private employment. Those lined up to hire them are the people they have been regulating for the last part of their career.



Former regulators know the system, the key players, and the business owners trying to skew the market. Once hired they use their former connections on behalf of their new employer. The result is regulations that tend to skew in favor of established businesses, making competition harder. A recent White House report (PDF), Occupational Licensing: A Framework for Policymakers gave one example: "doctors play a central role in determining their own compensation through their control of the committees that set prices paid by Medicare."

Consider one example from the San Francisco Chronicle. A very naive reporter was writing about Obama's $15 billion per year proposal to fund "alternative energy." He noted that a coalition of Big Oil companies endorsed the project "even though many of its members--such as oil giants BP and ConocoPhillips--emit large amounts of greenhouse gases." The reporter made it sound as if these companies were selfless advocates of saving the planet. He ignored the fact that both own subsidiaries producing alternative energy profiting from the subsidies.

Teles points out "we have seen an explosion in regulations that shower benefits on the very top of the income distribution." He explores how this happens in income inequality.
Engineering instructor with Aspergers demonstrating project bubble diagram to students, one man with spinal cord injury

Meet Sam, who is highly gifted in mathematics and recently joined a large public university with dreams of majoring in Engineering. Yet despite his brilliance and success, Sam was forced to drop engineering because of the demands made by the lab instructors: switching lab partners every week, for example. This created such anxiety for Sam, as he lacked the social skills required to meet new students every time he came to class, that he dropped out of engineering. Sam's experience is not unique, at least for college students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

To disclose or not to disclose? This is the dilemma faced by thousands of students with autism who have just been accepted to college.

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Because ASD is "invisible," it is not usually apparent to college professors or instructors. It is difficult for them to reconcile how high functioning individuals with autism can be so advanced intellectually while lacking the practical and social skills necessary to succeed in college. This places students with ASD in difficult situations, and places their long term success in potential jeopardy.

Does Sam have the courage to disclose his ASD and risk the consequences? Or, should he not disclose and risk being put in a classroom environment not suited to his needs and in the academic care of professors who don't understand his weaknesses--as well as his obvious strengths?

For the past 30 years, I have taught at a large university campus, where I have encountered a number of students on the autism spectrum. While research shows the percentage of these students currently attending U.S. colleges and universities may only be two percent, there will be an increasing number of students with autism spectrum disorder attending college, in part because of the recognition that more than 50% of them have average intellectual disability, and some have superior cognitive ability and outstanding talents in certain skill areas (e.g., math, music, science).

My research team has utilized the campus community as a kind of living laboratory, where we have explored campus members' awareness of autism, and interviewed both young men and women with ASD about their personal experiences, and professors about what it's like - or might be like - having students on the spectrum in college classes. With this as context, I offer advice about when and where students might disclose as well as some advice for professors.

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The first time a student will face the decision about whether to disclose is while writing his or her college application essay. The purpose of the college essay is often three-fold: 1) To assess the applicant's writing skills; 2) To assess the applicant's creativity or depth of knowledge; and 3) To learn something about the applicant.

The second juncture for disclosing occurs once enrolled in college. At that point, disclosing the autism spectrum disorder to the campus disabilities office is the only way to find out what resources will be available. Note that if the accepted student has a diagnosis, the university is mandated by law, specifically by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, to provide academic and physical accommodations, should they be needed.

However, I would argue that a third disclosure point -- letting professors or instructors know that the student has autism spectrum disorder -- is an often overlooked but crucial one. In Sam's case, for example, letting his professors know, in addition to the disabilities office, could have been pivotal to his success.

For all the 'Sams' in our higher education institutions, as well as those to come, I offer the following advice to campus communities:

To students: Come prepared. Develop a list of things that help you perform better (knowing about test requirements ahead of time; being given extra readings instead of oral reports; tolerance when you ask questions or if you get up suddenly and walk out of class) and those that don't (requiring new lab partners every week; interacting with others in small groups; being called on unexpectedly.) Your professors will appreciate these suggestions.

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To professors: Although you are required to provide accommodations, you can do that well only if informed about ASD. Professors in one of the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) fields should be particularly attuned to this issue. Indeed, one study utilizing a nationally representative sample reported 34.7 percent of young men and women with ASD attended college during the first six years after high school, with a higher proportion majoring in STEM fields, when compared across disability categories.

We were encouraged to learn from our research, involving interviews with professors and both undergraduate and graduate students, that some progress is being made. In one case, a professor in a STEM field chose to work with a graduate student who disclosed that he was "on the spectrum." This student was not shy about talking - in fact, he spoke loudly, focused intensely on one topic, and was not a good listener - hallmarks of the social deficits in autism. By teaching him when not to talk, and to listen to what his peers had to say, the professor found that the student was a real asset in the lab, and all benefited from this learning experience and from the student's expertise.

Despite the increasing enrollment of students with ASD in college, the importance of an informed and supportive faculty, and the fact that ASD doesn't appear to be going away any time soon, there is virtually no data on the effectiveness of educating faculty about this spectrum of disorders.

There are some guidelines for enhancing college success available from the websites of national organizations, such as Autism Speaks or the Organization for Autism Research. There are also guides on the market (e.g., The Parent's Guide to College for Students on the Autism Spectrum) and several U.S. universities and private companies have well-developed websites for this purpose.

Researchers in the U.K. have a jump on this topic. Fiona Knott and colleagues at the University of Reading have studied life at the university for students with Asperger syndrome, for the purposes of developing additional supports for these students. At Warwick University, there is a major project called Finished at School that documented the launching of young people with autism into college and provided an empirical evaluation of the effort .

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To disclose or not to disclose is no longer the question. Rather, it is how we can best educate college and university faculty about making micro changes in their course procedures and activities that have macro effects on their students, like Sam, with autism spectrum disorder
Last month, a Louisiana State University endowed professor wrote a heartbreaking Times-Picayune editorial on the physical degradation of Southern University's Baton Rouge campus. In a winding, descriptive narrative about leaking roofs, molded ceiling tiles and slashed budgets, it was a single sentence in Robert Mann's epitaph on Louisiana's concern for Southern that perfectly captured the generational suffering felt by HBCU advocates nationwide.

That Southern's infrastructure has apparently suffered more than other Louisiana universities - LSU's threadbare campus appears sparkling by comparison - causes one to wonder how different the school's condition might be if the majority of its students and faculty were not African-American.

The thesis is clear; Louisiana's volatile mix of race and politics has poisoned the flagship school of one of the state's systems of higher education. But what happens when the same evils have a not-so-visible impact on the campus? A sick building will tell you that something is wrong, even if the source of its damage is beyond what can be seen with the naked eye.

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The same is true about HBCU leadership, and Louisiana proves exactly how a lack of resources creates short and long-term negative outcomes. The universal question of "how could anyone let this happen" is asked with a variety of targets in mind: the governor, HBCU boards and presidents are the usual victims of the inquiry. But ultimately, is the goal of leadership to change the politics which surround HBCUs, or to work within them as they change in existence?

There was a time in history where a war on two fronts was not winnable, but close to manageable for HBCUs. But desegregation in college choice reduced the tuition revenue, the marketing appeal and the cultural strength of HBCUs to the numbers we know today; just about two out of every ten black students in college enrolls at an HBCU. Now the wars to secure resources and defeat racial ill intent has fewer soldiers and fewer dollars for wartime spending, but we tend to focus on who to blame instead of how to adapt.

The opponent has adjusted its strategy. Conservative state governments, which fund the majority of public HBCUs in the country, have relished the excuse of depleted coffers. They've illegally duplicated programs, lawfully realigned state higher education governance and created performance-based funding standards designed to punish the HBCU mission of access and opportunity for all students. They gerrymander voting districts to ensure that their policies remain in place and grow in impact.

HBCUs have adjusted in lawsuits from students and alumni, aligning academic programs with industrial trends, and working to recruit from uncommon places for students. But those efforts haven't produced enough students and giving donors to slow the paralyzing effect of the political ether, and too many stakeholders misconstrue the HBCU struggle as an outcome of black incompetence, and not a symptom of anti-black racism.

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All institutions contend with managerial nepotism and ego, and because HBCUs do not have the money or technology to minimize the impact of vice-presidents, directors and managers with personal agendas, these harmful elements go unattended in the short-term.

Long-term, their agendas and issues can result in major deficiencies that impact institutional control and efficiency. A bad president can make good VPs want to leave; a bad VP makes good directors rebellious, and bad directors make staff unproductive. From the top down, bad leadership permeates to empower an HBCU human product which appears rude, unknowledgeable and unmotivated.

And when clients - students, parents and alumni begin to get pissed with the product - these same leaders have to answer for defections in managerial talent, lapses in service, and gaps in innovation; searching to find answers from the bottom up.

Louisiana is the perfect test case for how the dual war is waged against HBCUs. In the last two years, every one of the state's public HBCUs has, or will have replaced their chancellors and presidents. Every campus has received substantial budget cuts that have resulted in discontinued programs, and high-profile failures in physical plant infrastructure.

The state has correctly banked on students and alumni remaining loudly complacent on its ravages against the Southern System and Grambling State University. They gladly allow marches and protests at the capital, in exchange for keeping the neglect out of the federal courts as a matter of Constitutional violation. And the same thing plays over and over in places like North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Maryland.

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And our focus remains on questioning if our leaders are smart enough, charismatic enough, or politically savvy enough to win us and the enemy over at the same time, as if the enemy didn't have a hand in their appointment, or doesn't sign their checks and pay their health insurance; as if we we didn't sit silently by while politics and agendas decided their appointments, on our behalf.

In the end, it doesn't matter who the president is or what they succeed or fail in doing; it is up to students and alumni to realize that the future of HBCUs bends at the will of the actively informed. And the most important thing to know in preserving the future of HBCUs is that none of our presidents, good or bad, are equipped to fight two unwinnable wars on their own.
Chinese auto manufacturer GAC Motors is poised to enter the US market in 2017. With its newest GA8 Sedan the company hopes to achieve what no other Chinese auto maker has: a viable US presence.

For decades, the Chinese have wished to become a part of the American auto industry. However, it's not easy.

Chinese car companies face many challenges when it comes to selling their vehicles in the US. For these brands, it appears to be an uphill battle. However, it seems that GAC Motors may have discovered a winning strategy.

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Challenges Facing Chinese Auto Makers

Lack of Awareness

One of the main obstacles to Chinese car manufacturers is the lack of brand awareness in the United States. Most Americans are familiar with brands such as General Motors, Toyota, Ford, etc. Most of the American population has never heard of the major Chinese automobile manufacturers.



Lack of Trust



Since Americans are largely unaware of Chinese automobile brands, they may be leery about purchasing a Chinese-made automobile. This is ironic, considering the fact that the vehicles of several American automobile brands are made in China. These include Buick and Cadillac.

The challenges that Chinese auto makers face are not unique. Korean, Japanese, and Mexican cars have also experienced difficulties when they decided to enter the American market. However, it appears that Chinese manufacturers such as GAC Motors have learned from past mistakes.



Who Is GAC Motors?



Founded in 2005, GAC Motors is a major Chinese automobile manufacturer. It's headquarters are in Guangzhou. Since its inception, it has become one of the more prominent brands in China as well as other countries.

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GAC Motors has also had the distinction of ranking number 1 among all domestic brands. The company's high-standards for quality and innovation have enabled it to become one of China's most trusted automobile brands.



Enter The Trumpchi GA8

GAC Motors has marketing the Trumpchi primarily in the Middle East, South America, and Russia. In these countries, it's had tremendous success. In January of 2016, GAC Motors sold over 33,000 vehicles. This is four times as many as they sold in January of last year.

In April of this year, GAC Motors unveiled the Trumpchi GA8 sedan. This will become the brand's flagship vehicle. The Trumpchi will be the vehicle that GAC Motors will use to enter the American market.

GAC Motors intends to find success in the United States by making the vehicles more affordable.. The Chinese brand intends to price the Trumpchi at 30% less than its rivals. This is a key component of their strategy.

With the Trumpchi, GAC Motors seems to have an interesting opportunity. If their strategy pays off, their lower pricing will convince hesitant Americans to give the company a chance.



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Summing It All Up

Chinese auto makers have faced major challenges in getting into the American market. They have had to overcome numerous obstacles. However, it appears that GAC Motors may have the means to finally break into the US market.
To those who tuned in to Donald J. Trump's speech on foreign policy to hear precisely how he would make America economically great again, you're in luck. Trump stated clearly and repeatedly how he would deal with China's "economic assault on American jobs and wealth." Answer: by making China respect us.

"China," Trump said, "respects strength. And by letting them take advantage of us economically -- which they are doing like never before -- we have lost all of their respect. We have a massive trade deficit with China. A deficit we must find a way quickly -- and I mean quickly -- to balance."

So in other words, we are running a massive trade deficit with China which is costing us jobs, and the solution to this problem is to Make China Respect Us Again.

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Of course, this is absurd. But Trump, as usual, touches a nerve. We do feel like we're under "economic assault" from China -- on both our "jobs and wealth," as Trump put it.

I'm glad he brought up wealth, because that's actually a good way to gauge the relative economic might of China and the U.S. The usual way we compare our two economies is Gross Domestic Product, which measures spending and is the basis for claims that China is the world's second largest economy. But spending tells you very little about the strength and size of an economy. It's better to compare assets and liabilities -- or wealth.

According to Credit Suisse and the U.S. Federal Reserve, American households are about $60 trillion wealthier than Chinese households. When you factor in business and governmental assets and liabilities, the U.S., by conservative measures, is $35-40 trillion wealthier than China. And that wealth gap is widening fast, not shrinking, with approximately half of it accruing over the past decade. China is not about to overtake the United States in economic primacy. If anything, China is quickly falling behind. It seems the Chinese agree and are voting with their pocketbooks. Chinese wealth is fleeing to America, with about $1 trillion worth of capital transferred just in the past year and a half.

When it comes to wealth, then, China does not pose the lethal threat Trump would have us believe. Same goes with jobs. In Trump's shorthand, the logic goes like this: we run "massive" trade deficits with China; these deficits kill American jobs. But like Gross Domestic Product, trade deficits are also really misleading metrics. Because we still measure trade as if globalization hadn't happened. We assign 100 percent of the value of a product to the last country that shipped it to us. That means China, which adds just a tiny fraction of value to each iPhone it makes, mostly through light assembly, gets assigned 100 percent of the value of each iPhone in our trade statistics.

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That glitch in our data is unfortunate because it hides the important and overlooked fact that most Chinese imports contain U.S.-made inputs. The cotton in a t-shirt. The pulp in a cardboard box. The recycled steel in an air conditioner vent. The software and components in an i-Phone. The capital equipment that fabricated a solar panel.

If we measured trade on a value-added basis, our trade imbalance in goods with China would be more than halved. But that's beside the point. The assertion that trade imbalances kill jobs assumes that a dollar spent on a Chinese imported product is a dollar not spent on an American made one. Untrue. Chinese imports support American jobs in two ways: at the beginning of the supply chain with U.S.-made raw materials, components, design and programming, and at the end of the supply chain, when the imports must be warehoused, transported and retailed. So a dollar spent on Chinese imports is actually a dollar mostly spent on U.S. goods and services.

Then when you consider how much China is buying from us -- we're running "yuge" trade surpluses with China in agriculture and services, by the way -- it makes you wonder whether it's America who's been winning and winning, and not China. Over the past decade, U.S. exports to China have tripled, rocketing China up to our third largest export market behind Mexico and Canada. This export growth is shared across every state in the union and across the breadth of our economy -- from agriculture to manufacturing to services. Some states, like South Carolina, have seen their exports to China grow ten-fold over the past decade. And 92 percent of all congressional districts have seen their exports to China at least double over the past 10 years.
When I was seventeen, I traveled through the deep south with a group of African American and Jewish teens from the D.C. area to engage with the history of the Civil Rights movement. During our visits to Black churches, we learned that the story of Exodus was and is still a huge part of Southern Black culture. Community members from one church, expressed how this timeless story of the liberation of the Israelites serves as a constant reminder to their community of the need to continue to fight for freedom. I remember feeling a deep sense of pride: this was the story of my people. Every year we also tell the story of Exodus as a reminder that we were once slaves. On Passover, we are commanded to view ourselves as though we personally have gone out from slavery to freedom. We do this to remember the Biblical commandment to not oppress the stranger for we were once strangers in a strange land.

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The American Jewish establishment has forgotten the purpose of this practice. Last week, across the country, members of IfNotNow sought to remind them by demonstrating our refusal to allow the out-of-touch leadership of the establishment to separate our liberation from the liberation of the Palestinians. Twenty-three young Jews across the country were arrested to highlight the moral urgency of ending the occupation -- for Palestinians, for Israelis, and for the soul of American Jewry. In the Bay Area, we held a sit-in seder outside of the East Bay Jewish Federation building. The Federation admirably funds programs for vital Jewish life. When it comes to Israel, however, the Federation is out of touch with the community that it claims to represents. It sets boundaries upon acceptable Jewish opinion on college campuses and Jewish institutions across the country. It rationalizes the occupation and refuses to affirm the fundamental rights of Palestinians.

The occupation is a daily nightmare for Palestinians living under it and moral disaster for those who support and administer it. Every day, Palestinian men and women wait in line at checkpoints for hours, they experience home demolitions and property destruction without legal or civil protections. Palestinians face undefined and unlimited detention for unspecified crimes and, in the most extreme cases, summary execution without trial. The horrible attack in Jerusalem on a public bus this week is another reminder that the status quo is unacceptable and unsustainable -- for Israeli Jews as well as for Palestinians. Palestinians are unfree and oppressed, Israeli Jews are afraid and mistrustful, and our generation of American Jews is no longer willing to be silent.

The establishment that claims to speak for us refuses to acknowledge the occupation themselves or allow anyone else to do so. Two weeks ago, Abe Foxman left retirement to help lead a vicious attack on IfNotNow leader Simone Zimmerman's appointment as the Jewish outreach coordinator for Senator Bernie Sanders. This absurd attack against a young woman who has repeatedly demonstrated her commitment to the Jewish community and to justice is emblematic of the narrowness of the establishment leadership. The American Jewish establishment is trying to intimidate and silence young people acting on the very Jewish values with which we were raised. When young Jews call for freedom and dignity for the Palestinians, the establishment only responds with intimidation and fear.

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This cognitive dissonance is no longer tenable. Respect for human life applies universally and the values of our generation -- and of our community -- should not be ignored or denied in regards to the occupation. Across the country, young American Jews are saying that we can no longer celebrate freedom at the very same time that we remain complicit in the denial of freedom to Palestinians. This year, young Jews are saying: enough. We will continue to take action until the establishment joins us in upholding the dignity and freedom of all people.
Co-authored by Sam Garry, International Business and Spanish student, shoestring traveler and collector of stories; and Nate Zeile, conversationalist and Sociology and International student at the University of Denver

Looking up at the crypt of Antonio Miguel Martinez was a surreal moment to say the least.

While the city of La Habana wound down after the climactic visit of President Barack Obama, I stood at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles, California with the plastic rose given to me by Antonio's daughter, a Cuban, just four days prior. She had told me before I left her home in Habana Vieja that "el habla ingles," and as I mustered up words of reverence, I couldn't help but be overcome with the unfathomable personal, political and social significance of the plastic flower in my hand.

While this flower had traveled two thousand miles with ease, strapped to the side of my backpack, Antonio's daughter could only dream of standing where I stood.

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A week prior, I had been at the home of my mama cubana, which Irina had taken to calling herself. What had started as a casual conversation regarding the history of her guesthouse soon took a turn toward an intense crash course in international politics. Soon, I found myself in the midst of the captivating story of her father.

In the mid-seventies, he was branded an enemy of the state and was forced to flee to the United States. Irina never saw him again. In 1999, after a successful career at a college in California, he was tragically killed by a drunk driver. He stipulated his only child, Irina, as the lone heir to an inheritance of an unknown amount. Although unlikely to be a fortune, it would allow her daughter to attend culinary school and pursue her passion rather than following Irina into the "uninspiring" and "monotonous" guesthouse business.

As Irina flipped through a photo album, tears streaming down her face, she lamented that she was not only financially restricted from visiting her father's burial site, but caught behind the institutional barrier separating her from the inheritance.

As I hung the flower at Antonio's resting place, it became, in effect, the embodiment of Irina's closure with her father's death, the closest she will likely ever get to where I stood.

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The story isn't just Irina's, or Antonio's. This is a story of the implications of a life split between two countries separated by only 90 miles and an embargo. It could have applied to any of the countless Cubans I met who told me dolefully about their brother in Miami or asked what I knew about Ohio, the state where their son was now living.

It's tempting to believe that times are changing. If you talked to a Cuban on the street of Havana in the midst of the president's visit, their excitement and affection towards Americans would lead you to believe times have already changed. My travel partners and I even shared in the creation of a roadside banner reading: "Welcome Obama and Michelle! We love you!" written in bright red lipstick on a large white bed sheet.

We realized that these bright eyed, excited people were not the anti-American socialists the Cuban Embargo was intended to enervate, but nonetheless, an inescapable affliction affected many of their lives.



As Raul Castro has allowed an increasing amount of licensed private business to take root, Cubans have sprung at the opportunity to open restaurants and rent out rooms in their homes, business directed at tourists. There are an estimated 500,000 small businesses, or negocios particulares in Cuba. The ability of Cubans to start negocios particulares represents something they've never truly had under the socialist system: mobility.

This tourist-fueled mobility is in part made possible by the Cuban Convertible Peso (or CUC) which is one of the two currencies currently being used in the country, and is pegged to the US dollar. Those blessed with private business licenses have the unique and coveted ability to earn CUC's, while those in government jobs are paid in Moneda Nacional, which carry a value of one twenty-fifth of a dollar. The phenomenon created by the dual currency system has inextricably intertwined tourism and a higher quality of life. As time has passed on, it has continued to cause neurosurgeons and college professors to leave their professional jobs and enter any job that will get them closer to the CUC, tourists, and a better life.

For many Cubans, Obama has become the manifestation of increased tourism and thus increased opportunities for private business. As more private licenses are granted, more Cubans can seize the opportunity to move towards being a "have" instead of a "have-not."

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A longing for change among the Cuban people has manifested itself in Barack Obama, an icon of what many Cubans believe is a new future for their country. To Cubans who have their minds set on improving their lives, Obama's visit to Cuba is not about past transgressions, international diplomacy, or legacy.

It is about hope.

With a vision for a brighter future, the people of Cuba live in hope for an end to the embargo and after all I have seen, I hope the same. An improved relationship between the two countries means an end to the trivial barriers that separate us from an incredible group of people both fundamentally tied to and separate from the U.S.
QUEENS, NY - APRIL 11: U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (D-NY) speaks at Jackson Diner in Queens, NY, on April 11, 2016. (Photo by Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

If you needed one good reason to vote for Hillary, I have it.

It's little girls.

You have to see this growing segment of wildly enthusiastic supporters, knocking on doors, drawing signs and holding them high. To watch them in action, bursting with energy and idealism, is to understand how important the outcome of this election is.

There's Della from California who traveled with her grandmother to Nevada to canvass alongside civil rights activist Dolores Huerta.

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Scarlett, a seven-year-old from Connecticut, who went knocking on doors with her sister Minnetta, decked out in her Hillary t-shirt and waving a homemade Hillary sign to GOTV.

And 10-year-old Ellie, who carries her Hillary gear proudly around the streets of Manhattan.

And from seven-year-old Amoli, a heartfelt note to Hillary reads "I hope you win. You are the best. Love Amoli."

Women know what girls like these have to go through and grow through in the years ahead. We've all been there. Can we measure up to Barbie? Are we pretty enough, skinny enough, blonde enough, developed enough? The beauty bar is high, too high for most of us ever to reach.

Certainly, Hillary Clinton has felt that pain very publicly. Over the past 25 years, her fashion choices have been relentlessly, often maliciously, picked apart by media pundits and reporters. The unending personal attacks would have made a women of softer spine consider Hamlet's advice to "get thee to a nunnery." Not Hillary.

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Instead, she has held her ground, held her head high and learned to turn humiliation into humor. The evidence is there in her twitter bio which today reads: "Wife, mom, grandma, women+kids advocate, FLOTUS, Senator, SecState, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, 2016 presidential candidate."

So imagine a world where our daughters and granddaughters don't see Barbie's attributes as the measure of a woman, but Hillary's.

Let them each aspire to be a girl who studies hard in school, becomes the first student to give the commencement address to her college class, and graduates from the top law school in the country.

Let them envision themselves a lawyer who goes to Washington to work on behalf of children, who becomes the First Lady of the land, who wins over tough-as-nails New Yorkers to be elected their senator not once, but twice.

Let them witness the strength of a woman's promise, "for better or for worse," even when it hurts; even when she's judged for keeping her word.

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Let them emulate a woman who runs for President of the United States and loses with amazing grace, accepting her opponent's job offer to become U.S. Secretary of State.

Most of all, let them see that no one is perfect, that everyone makes mistakes, but that education, hard work, resilience, compassion and dignity can keep you on track to achieving your loftiest goal. And, even for little girls, that goal can be the White House.

So I vote to keep Barbie dolls on the store shelves, right next to the Hillary dolls, available, of course, in a variety of hairstyles and colorful pantsuits. Our girls are free to make a choice. But let's encourage them to choose Hillary who exemplifies the true measure of a woman.
On June 16, 1972, five men dined together for the last time in the restaurant of the Watergate Hotel. A few hours later they taped open the door to a stairwell in the adjacent building and broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee.

American politics - and the Watergate complex - would never be the same.

The Watergate Hotel reopens this month, following an extensive renovation that honors the building's midcentury modern pedigree. There is a new whiskey bar and a rooftop lounge overlooking the Potomac. The costume designer for the television series "Mad Men" was tapped to outfit the hotel's staff.

The reopening of the Watergate Hotel marks the latest chapter in the roller-coaster history of this famous - and to Americans above a certain age, infamous - complex, which includes three co-op apartment buildings and two office towers.

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At the outset, when the building still only existed in blueprints, the Watergate was controversial. Luigi Moretti, the Italian architect on the project, considered Washington drab and conformist. He designed a series of curved buildings with no right angles. The Washington Post architecture critic panned it, as did David Finley, president of the National Gallery of Art and chairman of the powerful Commission on Fine Arts.

But the building also had its champions who were drawn to the bold and striking design. An undeniable part of the Watergate's original appeal was that it was Italian, at a time when Oleg Cassini designed gowns for Jackie Kennedy and Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" was filling American movie theaters. It was the first "mixed use" complex in the District- putting apartments, offices, a hotel and other amenities - including a florist, bakery a wine shop - all in the same place. The curved exterior panels and balconies were designed with the aid of a computer - another first.

The Watergate was launched with the fanfare of a Hollywood movie premiere. In October 1965, Washingtonians stood in line for a chance to gaze at the over-the-top model apartment in Watergate East, with its hand-painted ceilings and marble floors. A thousand guests attended the building's grand opening.

In 1969, during the first months of the Nixon Administration, LIFE magazine profiled the complex in an 8-page feature proclaiming: "Just everybody lives there." Residents at the time included Attorney General John Mitchell and his outspoken wife, Martha; Anna Chennault, the glamorous widow of famed aviator General Claire Chennault; Audrey Mars, an heiress to the Mars candy fortune; a bipartisan roster of Senators and Members of Congress; and a platoon of lobbyists, journalists and diplomats.

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The 1972 break-in, followed by Nixon's resignation in 1974, put a serious dent in the Watergate's reputation. Unwelcome tourists descended on the building and high-end retailers decamped for Chevy Chase. It seemed every political scandal thereafter was assigned a "-gate" suffix.

The Watergate got its second wind during the 1980s, when well-heeled California friends of the Reagans took up residence, including Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale and Leonore and Walter Annenberg. Mrs. Reagan was a regular at the Watergate Hotel's Restaurant Jean Louis, and the Reagans celebrated Christmas Eve with USIA Director Charlie Wick and his wife Jane in their Watergate apartment.

Democrats put down roots at the Watergate, of course. Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara lived there, as did Democratic National Committee chairman Robert Strauss. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg still calls the Watergate home.

In some ways, the Watergate was something of a college dorm for Washington powerbrokers. It was part fishbowl, part pressure-cooker. Partisan rivals shared elevators down to the underground parking lot or the occasional nightcap at the hotel bar. Rose Mary Woods, personal secretary to President Nixon, and Juanita Roberts, LBJ's personal secretary, both lived there. At the height of the Clinton impeachment fight, retired Senator Bob Dole lived next door to Monica Lewinsky.

Because residents of the Watergate were some of Washington's toughest power players, everyday matters were sometimes the subject of intense maneuvering. The co-op board of Watergate East reportedly rejected then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, expressing concern about the impact of Secret Service restrictions on elevator availability. Thomas "Tommy the Cork" Corcoran, a Watergate resident and America's first "super-lobbyist," blocked a deal worked out between the developers and the adjacent Kennedy Center that would place offices in the fifth and final building directly across from the apartments of Watergate East. When a prior owner of the hotel sought permission to convert it into 96 condominium apartments, with prices up to $9 million, residents not only stopped the plan, they successfully placed the entire complex on the National Register of Historic Places.

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It's not often that a dictator takes out an advertisement in The New York Times. But there it was on Sunday, full-page spread touting President Joseph Kabila's supposed record of championing democracy and reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"With hindsight, it is clear that President Joseph Kabila has probably written the most beautiful political, security, economic and social pages of the Democratic Republic of Congo," the ad reads. Maybe the fact-checkers at The Times were on vacation when this ad came in.

Here's why I say this. A few months ago, amid growing concern in Washington that Kabila had no intention of stepping down when his country's constitution requires him to, I wrote that the time had come to "stare down a tyrant." Nothing has changed. In fact, democracy and freedom of expression are under greater assault than ever in the DRC -- and the situation looks to be getting worse, with Kabila still refusing to hold national elections later this year to elect his successor.

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The advertisement in The Times ran less than 24 hours before security forces used tear gas, blockades and possibly rubber bullets to break up a rally celebrating democracy in the city of Lubumbashi. The city is the base of Moise Katumbi, the popular former governor of Kantanga province, who has been nominated to be a presidential candidate by the coalition of former Kabila loyalists called the G-7. Media reports indicated Katumbi and others were encircled by their supporters and whisked away from scene.

This was just a few days after reports that security forces removed posters with the images of Katumbi and Gabriel Kyungu wa Kumwanza, another former ally of Kabila, and then used tear gas to repel the crowd of several hundred people who protested the blatant attempt to suppress political expression.

Kabila's public relations was clearly designed to coincide with his visit to the United Nations last week. For its part, the UN sees the pages written during the Kabila years as a little less than "beautiful." The day the New York Times "advertisement" ran, Maman Sidikou, the head of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) reiterated "serious concern" about rising political tensions in some parts of the country. He urged authorities in the DRC to do all they could to "uphold the rule of law and desist from any actions that could impede political actors from exercising their constitutional rights and freedoms, including the freedom of expression, association and assembly." Earlier this month, the UN Security Council voted to extend MONUSCO's mission in the DRC out of concern about an imminent human rights crisis.

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While in New York, Kabila met with Secretary of State John Kerry. If Kabila was looking for support for the course he is on, it looks like he came up short. Not long after the meeting, Kerry's spokesman John Kirby tweeted that the secretary had "reinforced the importance of Constitutional elections, safe space for Congo civil society."

Kerry calls for timely election in meeting with Congo's Kabila https://t.co/grOkZacUS6 via @Reuters  John Burnett (@IamJohnBurnett) April 26, 2016

The State Department is clearly concerned about the turn of events in the DRC. Earlier this year, Thomas Perriello, the special envoy to the region, warned a congressional committee of Kabila efforts "to close citizen space and postpone the start of election preparations raise concerns that Kabila intends to try to hold onto power beyond his Constitutional term that concludes in December." At that time, he said Kabila had "not yet crossed any 'points of no return.'"
Bad hires. We all make them, no matter how carefully we screen for toxic traits or how in-depth our pre-hire assessments are. Regardless, they slip through the cracks -- and it costs us. In fact, as many as 95 percent of companies admit to making bad hires every year, according to 2015 research by Brandon Hall Group.

But, in our effort to avoid these costly bad hires, are we missing out on top talent? The hiring process is designed to weed out potentially toxic employees, but what if -- in the process -- you're letting great talent slip right through your fingers?

To help you identify your next rockstar employee in the midst of bad hire stereotypes, here are four commonly rejected candidates and why you may want to take another look at their resume:

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The job hopper

Common misconception: They won't stick around for long.

Hiring professionals have a long history of rejecting the job hopper. After all, they can't be trusted, right? Wrong. While a job hopper might have left their previous positions after a short period of time, there's no concrete evidence that they'll do the same if hired for your open position.

In fact, a 2014 CareerBuilder study found that the majority of employers surveyed (55 percent) said they've hired someone they'd consider a job hopper. Of those employers, 57 percent of them said the job hopper stayed at their company for two to three years.

Having short tenures with several employers shouldn't automatically disqualify a job candidate. In fact, job hopping tendencies could work to your benefit. The same CareerBuilder survey revealed that 53 percent of employers surveyed said job hoppers tend to have a wide range of skills and expertise and 51 percent said they can adapt quickly.

Immediately rejecting frequent job changers may cause you to miss out on great talent with a diverse range of skills and ideas that can only be acquired through holding multiple jobs. To weed out the unloyal job hoppers from the ones with great potential, find out the reason for their job hopping ways during the hiring process.

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The underqualified

Common misconception: They're more trouble than they're worth.

But are they really?

CareerBuilder's 2015 Candidate Behavior Study found that more than half (54 percent) of employers surveyed admit that, over the past five years, it has grown increasingly difficult to find qualified candidates. And rather than risk making a bad hire, they'll leave the position open.

But holding out for the candidate who meets each and every qualification can cause you to overlook talented candidates who could have been able to learn and grow with your company in the time that it takes you to finally hire the candidate you had been waiting for.

So, be open to candidates who might be slightly underqualified, but who have professional recommendations that suggest they are ready and willing to learn.

The senior citizen

Common misconception AND discrimination: You can't teach this old dog new tricks.

Most importantly, this misconception is more than just a misconception. It's illegal and a discriminatory hiring practice. While you might have to give this candidate a crash course in things like social media and workplace wearables, it's a fair trade for the experience gained after 30+ years spent in the field. And no amount of training will give younger workers that amount of knowledge or wisdom.

With the number of Americans over the age of 50 who are working or looking for work having grown significantly over the past decade, according to a 2015 AARP study, employers can't afford to overlook older workers during their talent search. If that's not reason enough, consider the fact that 65 percent of employees age 55+ are considered engaged, compared to only 58 percent of younger employees.

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Before making the assumption that an older job candidate is already set in their ways, review illegal hiring practices, then give them an opportunity to go through the entire hiring process and show you that they are open to change and eager to learn.

The passive candidate

Common misconception: They're not interested.

In many cases, this candidate never even makes it to the hiring process. Why? Because hiring professionals assume that because they already have a job, the potential employee is not interested in pursuing other opportunities. However, according to Mercer's 2015 Inside Employees' Minds study, 37 percent of employees -- regardless of satisfaction level -- are looking to leave. With that many employees searching for new job opportunities, employers shouldn't be so quick to pass on the passive candidate.

Why should you take the time to persuade the ever-elusive passive candidate? For one, they have a proven work ethic. Not to mention, they are less likely to be interviewing with other companies, which means you're all the more likely to score this valuable talent.

The next time you come across the LinkedIn profile of an ideal candidate who's already 'taken,' a resume littered with short tenures at multiple companies, a fresh grad with little experience under their belt, or a veteran worker with a ton of experience under theirs, you might want to think twice before rejecting.

Who else may be slipping through our fingers during the hiring process? Let us know in the comments below.

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Thursday, April 28 is Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day in the United States. Started in 1993 as Take Our Daughters to Work Day, the movement began in response to research indicating that girls' lack of self-esteem led to poor academic performance and life choices. My own employer has an array of activities designed to stimulate and appeal to children, including hands-on STEM and oratory activities. The day concludes with ice cream. My children can't wait to participate.

This celebration of potential and opportunity is premised on the assumption that school is the humdrum default, to be taken for granted on a weekday in April. It ignores the reality that much of the world needs a Take Our Daughters and Sons to School Day.

As of 2013, 124 million children and young teens worldwide were not in school, notwithstanding Article 28 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which provides that every child has the right to an education. Children are kept at home to care for younger siblings or animals. They are kept at home because of prohibitive fees for books and uniforms. They are kept at home when violence and instability cause parents to fear for their safety.



According to UNICEF, when children are not in school, they are more vulnerable to abuse, exploitation or recruitment by armed groups, as well as early marriage and diminished economic opportunity later in life. In the town of Douentza, in central Mali, where I direct an interdisciplinary health and human rights project, violent jihadists occupied the middle and high schools for most of 2012, and the schools were inoperative. When the French intervened militarily, the schools were bombed to smithereens. The high school reopened this year. The middle school has yet to be rebuilt, and middle school students cram into the primary school facility.

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When I visited Douentza last year, we walked around the rubble of the middle school. The jihadists had placed a landmine at the entrance, and an enormous hole in the earth remained. As I skirted the edge of the hole, fluttering papers caught my eye. Quizzes, exams and homework assignments of a lost childhood, abandoned in fear during the occupation, now left to disintegrate. "Mediocre," reads one teacher's notation in red pen. "7.5 out of 20," reads another.

I asked our Malian colleague if I could take a quiz with me. "Why not?" he shrugged. "There's no use for it now."
Victim of domestic violence

Several months ago, I had a dream that I was raped and became pregnant. In my dream, I wept. When I awoke, I wept again, because even though that nightmare was not my reality, it is a reality for too many women. It is a reality for too many children.

Rape is one of the things that keeps me awake at night. But what makes my insomnia so bad that I have to pace the room is forced motherhood--particularly for rape victims, particularly for rape victims who are children.

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The story of a 10-year-old girl in Paraguay who was forced to give birth after being raped by her stepfather made headlines in the post-industrial world. Failed presidential candidate Mike Huckabee then made headlines by declaring that denying her an abortion was the right decision. His justification: "Let nobody be misled, a 10-year-old girl being raped is horrible, but does it solve a problem by taking the life of an innocent child?"

I try to be tolerant of other people's viewpoints, but this one bewilders me. Huckabee and other anti-abortion politicians think pregnancies from rape are "gifts from god." But if you honestly believe that your god would condemn a 10-year-old child rape victim to motherhood, your god is a cruel, spiteful being who is not worthy of your devotion.

This 10-year-old rape victim seemed like an isolated case, but the reality is that the media could report dozens of these stories every day. In 2012, there were 60,690 births to girls under the age of 14 in 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Worldwide, the number of births to girls under 15 is about two million per year.

And I suspect that in the coming years, with states passing more and more restrictive abortion laws, the United States will see an increase in young girls giving birth. Arbitrary requirements about hallway lengths, anesthesia, and waiting periods are forcing abortion clinics to close and making it more difficult for women and children to get abortions. John Oliver recently highlighted the case of a Texas clinic that had to turn away a 13-year-old rape victim because of these laws, and the next closest clinic was impossibly far away--in New Mexico. Of course, these restrictions have no exceptions for rape cases because they're supposed to be about protecting women's "health."

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The anti-abortion lobbyists who write these laws think they're protecting the lives of "unborn children," but they have no regard for the lives of the child rape victims whom they are re-raping by forcing them to deliver their abusers' children. They claim that the cause of the pregnancy--the rape--is irrelevant to the "unborn child's" status as a "human being."

I'm going to make a radical assertion: the rape has everything to do with the "unborn child's" status as a "human being." Rape and pro-life ideology are both methods of dehumanizing women, and both are caused by the same sick flaw of society--the need for dominance.

In her book, Sacred Pleasure, historian Riane Eisler argues that all of the world's problems can be traced to a single source: we live in a society that values dominance rather than partnership. Eisler argues that the first human societies lived by the partnership model, as she calls it, where there was very little violence, much cooperation, no hierarchy, and sex was holy. This way of life was replaced with the dominance model, where violence (including sexual violence) is rampant, hierarchies subordinate women and people of color, and sexuality is demonized.

Rape does not exist in a partnership society. The dominance model is what breeds rape. The dominance model is also what reduces women to birthing machines. Both are methods of control--methods of maintaining the hierarchy. Both are limbs of the same demon. How does that demon ensure that women remain nothing but birthing machines? Label a cluster of undifferentiated cells an "unborn child" and say it needs to be "saved."

The anti-choice lobbyists do not force children to give birth despite their rapes; they force them to give birth because they were raped. In a world where rape didn't exist--where women had full and complete control over their bodies--we wouldn't need abortion.

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So to answer your question, Mr. Huckabee: Yes, giving a 10-year-old rape victim an abortion does help solve the problem of her rape. It cuts off one arm of the demon which caused her rape in the first place, in an effort to weaken the entire beast and end its destructive reign of terror. You say the tragedy would be compounded by "taking the life of an innocent child." In fact, you compound the tragedy by sticking your power-hungry hands into the living child's body. Your "pro-life" politics only give life to her trauma and her pain.

Every time I see a headline like "Oklahoma passes bill banning all abortions," I want to scream because I feel those power-hungry hands inside my body too, caressing my internal organs and saying they care, like an abuser embracing and professing his love to his partner after beating her. The only thing they both want is control. Dominance.

The demon of dominance does not discriminate when claiming its victims. Even white, straight, able-bodied men, who are at the top of the hierarchy, are not immune. Baby boys' genitals are mutilated. Young boys are abused by powerful men. Men are raped. Men and their children are murdered in mass shootings.

This way of life that we are currently living will consume all of us. It is difficult to find someone who has not experienced some kind of trauma because of dominance. Politicians say these traumas (rape, gun violence) are "horrible" and then get back to their agenda of preserving dominance with "pro-life" and pro-gun politics, thereby ensuring that the traumas will happen again and again.

We, as a society, can choose to prevent these tragedies. We can reject dominance, reject the hierarchy, and live by the partnership model.

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In fact, we must. Otherwise, we will destroy ourselves.

SEXUAL ASSAULT SENSITIVE NOTE:

___________________
Lucid dreaming is a hot topic. Within the last five years, The Atlantic has published two articles and a how-to video on the topic. Not to be outdone, Huffington Post published more than two dozen articles in 2015 alone. Beyond the flaky tomes that have lined the shelves of Barnes & Nobles' New Age section for years, lucid dreaming is now the subject of substantial works in the philosophy of mindmost notably Evan Thompson's Waking, Dreaming, Being and Jennifer Windt's Dreaming.

This renewed interest is quite a welcome change for me, since my work in media studies explores the relationship between lucid dreaming and virtual reality. It's a unique juxtaposition of topics which, when mentioned in polite conversation, often elicits the type of confused look one might witness after sprouting a second head. Academics, in particular, have not been keen on the topic, as evidenced by the size of the audience during my first conference presentation on the subject (which, aside from the other panelists, amounted to zero).

But that was ten years ago. Since then, I've witnessed the emergence of Contemplative Studiesa new field with established programs at respected universities. It is a field ripe for unusual juxtapositions: University of Michigan, for example, offers a Bachelor's program that combines jazz and meditation. Surprisingly, though, the field has placed little emphasis on mediaodd, considering that companies like Google and Facebook tout the benefits of "mindfulness" while making gadgets and websites designed to distract you.

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Contemplative Media

To address that discrepancy, I've outlined the contours of Contemplative Media Studiesa subfield that applies contemplative principles to the critical analysis of media content, technologies, and institutions. We might ask, for example: What should we make of sexualization of yoga in popular magazines and elsewhere? Could a circular-shaped smartphone like the Runcible solve the problem of distraction-by-gadget?

More importantly, we might ask: How can we move beyond a narrow conception of mindfulness that ignores the suffering caused by an obsessive pursuit of profit?

To address the latter question, I've offered the term civic mindfulness (what some call "engaged mindfulness"). Unfortunately for the tech elite, this perspective fundamentally challenges the assumptions that drive the digital economy. Among other things, it involves whistleblowing, civil disobedience, investigative journalism, and non-commercial technologies aimed at disrupting the disruptors.

By civic mindfulness, I don't just mean an individual citizen's awareness of issues. I mean collective awareness within the body politicthe ability to recognize and resist propaganda, and to write more empowering cultural narratives. As we move toward more convincing simulations, and more immersive virtual environments, the importance of maintaining this type of awareness is crucial.

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That brings us back to lucid dreamingor what is known in Tibetan Buddhism as dream yoga. From a contemplative perspective, mindfulness and lucidity are fundamentally related. Civic mindfulness is lucidity writ large. And, as in a dream, collective lucidity is difficult to achieve and sustain.

Virtuality is not Lucidity

The experience of lucid dreaming maps out in fascinating ways onto users' experiences in immersive virtual environments. In many ways, dreaming and VR are quite similar. (Consider, for example, this screen capture from the virtual environment Second Life, and compare it to this artistic rendering of lucid dreaming from the Lifehacker website.)

Beyond simple aesthetics, lucid dreaming and VR share some of the same therapeutic applications. VR can be used to treat PTSD, for example. Lucid dream therapy can do that too. Other applications involve treatment of nightmares and anxieties related to autismnot to mention their use as tools for creative and artistic expression.

But VR and lucid dreaming are different. A lucid dream is limited only by your imagination and determination, while VR is limited by code andmore importantlyby coders. Code is law, as they say. In most cases, furthermore, users must pay for the privilege to exercise their creative potential.

What's especially ironic to anyone familiar with lucid dreaming is that tech people tout VR as providing experiences unprecedented in their immersive richnessas if we need a pair of ridiculous-looking goggles to have an immersive virtual experience.

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That is a terrible lie. Dreaming is the original immersive virtual experience. And if we can cultivate the ability to maintain consciousness while dreaming, we can use that cognitive space to develop flexibility of mind, imagination, intentionality, engagement with the unconsciousin ways that are simply not possible even with the most sophisticated computer systems.

Contrary to the ideology of Silicon Valley, I've argued elsewhere that information is not wisdom, transparency is not authenticity, and processing is not judgment. To these, let's add another proverb for the digital era: Virtuality is not lucidity.

Steering the Ship

To be clear, I'm not opposed to VR. The technology has tremendous potential. But what framework should we use to develop it? What principles should guide it? As I like to ask my students: Who is steering the ship?

Facebook purchased Oculus for $2 billion in 2014. Questions of moral and economic gate-keeping were already present in Facebook's platform architecture. But with VR, the cognitive stakes are much higher. That's why it's so easy to find dystopian representations of VR like this one. If gadgets like Oculus follow the same logic of Facebook's commercial development, the dystopian concerns of critics may be well-founded.

Years ago, Ron Purser made a helpful distinction: some kinds of VR environments are like a tunnel, and some are like a spiral. The former is the kind with which we're most familiar: goggles and headsets that suck you down a cognitive tunnel into an alternate reality. By contrast, spiral environments typically toss aside the goggles in favor of multi-wall projection rooms. The images in the room respond to you, and may create a sense that you are elsewhere; but you never forget that you are a body in real space. This VR treatment of autism is like that.

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In a similar way, I suggest that research into lucid dreaming and VR should occur in tandem, spiraling back upon each other. The principles of dream yoga can provide an ethical and philosophical framework for the development of VR. And VR environments, rather than sucking us into architectures of contempt and exploitive consumerism, should remind us that the eye-opening experiences they offer are actually low-grade reflections of the imaginativeindeed, spiritualcapacities with which we are already equipped as human beings.

The Dream as Metaphor

Reading the work of Buddhists like Tenzin Rinpoche, one gets the impression that life is literally a dream. But we needn't go that far. The dream is, in a sense, a "generative metaphor." This concept is common in organizational studies, where research shows that the metaphor of dream can help small groups to move beyond an impasse to envision a more sustainable future.

On a broader scale, as Stathis Gourgouris argues in Dream Nation, we can understand an entire nation as a dream, and begin to ask critical questions of the nation's dream-work. In Serbian Dreambook, Marko Zivkovic similarly describes the national imaginary as a dream and uses this approach to understand Serbia during the time of Milosevic.

As Zivkovic suggests, there's a reason why we describe historical crises as nightmares. I'd add that, by the same token, there's a reason why we are inspired by leaders who "have a dream"not a passive dream, mind you, but an active dream in which we consciously participate.

A sustainable future requires attentional focus, awareness, mindfulness, on a mass scale. Mass media and technology are clearly implicated our apparent failure to ensure such a future. (Here I refer you to the fantastic film Koyaanisquatsi.) But mass media and technology must be part of the solution.

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Dream yoga teaches us that the idea of turning nightmares into visions is more than a mere metaphor. It is in fact a skill we can develop as individuals. Applying that principle more broadly, we understand that turning nightmarish suffering into conscious dreaming is, in fact, a capacity that the institutions of a democracyespecially journalism and mass mediaare responsible for cultivating.

Dreaming the Virtual

What if our media environmentparticularly as it becomes more immersivereflected the dynamics of the conscious dream? Imagine if the following principles could guide the digital economy. A dream environment in which we dream consciously and mindfully is one about which we can say the following:

It reflects and reveals our unlimited imaginative potential.

It responds quickly to our intentions.

The only rules that restrict who or what we can beor for that matter, how many identities we can haveare those to which we give our consent.

We can, at any time, begin to tell a new story about ourselveshonoring the past while moving beyond it.

We have access to those parts of ourselves that are usually hidden.

We recognize that the object of our fear is an illusion, and bogeymen lose their power.

These dynamics have important implications for the design, content, institutional structure, and regulation of digital environments. Consider, for example, how they might impact our thinking about privacy policies, data control, user consent, corporate and governmental transparency, or best practices for journaliststo name a few. In summary, this approach asks us to conceive of digital technologies in terms of their value as public goods.

Michael Madary and Thomas Metzinger have done an excellent job outlining some basic principles for the ethical development of VR technologies. (It is no coincidence that Metzinger, a noted philosopher of mind, is clearly aware of the parallels between lucid dreams and virtual reality environments.) But there is much work to be done. The elaboration of an ethics of VR will benefit immensely if we revisit the contemplative experiences they seek to emulate.

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If mass media are to be part of the solution, they should not function as a tunnel that sucks us into a dystopian nightmare, or even a wistful but mindless reverie (Candy Crush, anyone?). To the extent that digital media are commercially driven, however, they will continue to have a low moral center of gravity. They cater primarily to our vices.

Instead, active participation in our media environment should serve as a catalyst for the development of wisdom and integrity. To be sure, lucid dreams provide opportunities to indulge our vices. But over time, contemplative practices like dream yoga (or contemplative prayer, or any number of other practices) reorient us to the source of our highest virtueswhatever you might want to call that source. A media environment modeled on such practices, which spirals back toward our own imaginative capabilities, serves as a catalyst of virtue rather than vice.

To dream the virtual is create a new digital economyone which does not merely entertain or manufacture consent, but which instead reminds us to wake up, to realize we've been dreaming, and then to dream together, with purposethat is, mindfully.
I can't even begin to tell you how comforting it is to have someone waiting for you on the other end. It eliminates the stress of finding a Tuk Tuk driver, negotiating the price, worrying about getting lost and struggling with the language barrier. I know when push comes to shove we would always manage but little acts of kindness like this are beyond appreciated.

Pleasant Haveli has a funny personal story behind it. When you book lodging in the US, throughout Europe or even Mexico, you usually go through Hotels.com or Booking.com or the hotel's actual website reservation link and in some fashion or another receive a confirmation that says "hey, you are good to go". In India, it is very common to book directly with the hotel via email, not receive formal documentation with a reference number or have your credit card charged beforehand. So being the obsessive compulsive human being that I am, I followed up a few times leading up to our stay. I just wanted to make sure we would have a place to lay our heads at night. Yes, I am borderline crazy. It was either the second or third time I popped in with the manager, Krishna, when he replied with the following: "Thank you Ms. Kimberly for checking in yet again. You can rest assure that your reservation is 210% confirmed. We look forward to seeing you in February". Okay, I feel better. We are not just 100% confirmed but we are 210% confirmed. When I finally met Krishna in person that day, we both started laughing. I apologized for being so neurotic but I think he kind of enjoyed it in a weird way.

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Pleasant Haveli was such an adorable little boutique hotel with an elaborate carved exterior. Our room, which was 2950 rupees or $43 a night, was very chic with a lot more warmth and personality than your standard lodging. This was our seventh city and so far, we've truly enjoyed all of our accommodations. Some have been better than others, of course, but then again some we've paid a lot more for than others.

After we dropped our bags off, we headed up to the rooftop restaurant since it was around 1pm and we hadn't had breakfast or lunch. Oh my god, this rooftop was delightful. So colorful and cheery with phenomenal views of the quaint city and ginormous fort. It had only been an hour but I was already in love with Jaisalmer. The small town vibe was endearing.

Jaisalmer is known as the Golden City because almost all of the buildings are made out of yellow sandstone. It's quite magical in fact. The city still retains a medieval charm, which is evident in its narrow streets, splendid forts and palaces, opulent havelis and bazaars.

Now that we refueled our bodies with coffee and food, we were eager to explore. No agenda, no to do list, just wander around and get lost. There were endless alleys that always led to something.

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Women selling vegetables on the ground...

Men playing an intense game of cards...

Eventually we found our way to the Jaisalmer Fort. The fort here is located on the Meru Hill and has faced many battles in the past. It's giant sandstone walls are a yellowish-brown color but as the sun sets, it turns into a majestic honey-gold. Absolutely stunning. We have seen three Forts already including the Red Fort in Delhi, the Agra Fort in Agra and the Amber Fort in Jaipur. This was our fourth. The main difference with the Jaisalmer Fort is that it is still inhabited, supposedly housing about a quarter of the city's population. People live there, tourists stay there, shop owners work there, cows party there. All of the other forts were just sites to see while this one still holds an actual purpose.

As we roamed the twisting lanes of the fort, we decided to grab some Masala Chai Tea from a random rooftop hotel. The views were impeccable. Everywhere you looked, it was golden. Yellow is my favorite color because it reminds me of happiness so you could imagine how happy I was at this moment. I could have sung Pharrell's "Because I'm Happy" song over and over and over again but didn't want the entire town to evacuate all at once. We sat on this rooftop for over an hour, taking in the views, enjoying the perfect weather and genuinely loving life as cliche as that sounds. We were the only two people up there for awhile until a woman from London joined us. She was probably in her mid to late forties (although the plastic surgery might have been deceiving) and she was on her twelfth solo trip to India in the past ten years. Talk about being brave.

The sun was about to set so we decided to slowly make our way back to our hotel when we ended up stumbling upon another area of the fort that provided remarkable panoramic views. It was perfect timing because as the sun shined on the yellow sandstone buildings, the entire city looked like an endless glistening pot of gold (which means we were the rainbow I guess).

That night we decided to try the #1 restaurant on TripAdvisor in Jaisalmer. Usually the ratings stand accurate but unfortunately tonight, they were so wrong. We went to a place called Gagi. The description of Indian, Korean, Chinese should have been a warning sign but we looked past that and it was a huge failure. This was the first bad meal we've had in our twenty days in India. Oh well, moving on.

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The next morning we headed back upstairs to our hotel's rooftop restaurant for breakfast since its included in the room fee. We eat often and we eat a lot if that's what you're thinking. But don't judge. We enjoyed a very delicious Western meal with eggs, fruit, toast, coffee and best of all, mango juice. For some reason, my entire thirty one years of existence, I didn't think I liked mango juice until I tried some of Vinny's and I was so wrong. It's deliciously refreshing. This whole branching out and trying new things is really working out for me lately.

After breakfast, I was able to talk to my dad via FaceTime. With the thirteen and a half hour time difference and inconstant WiFi strength, it gets difficult to plan these dates but luckily I caught him right before he was going to bed. And boy did that feel good to see his face, hear his voice and catch up.

Around 2pm, we were picked up by Bhawani, our camel safari guru, in his four wheel drive Jeep. He later told us his nickname was Al Pacino, although we are still not quite sure the correlation. Nevertheless, it is much easier to pronounce so we'll take it. Bhawani is a twenty seven year old guy who is born and raised in Jaisalmer. From the moment we met him, we knew he was going to be awesome.

Before we headed out to the Thar Desert, we stopped at an abandoned ghost village called Kuldhara, which is about seventeen kilometers west of Jaisalmer. Three centuries ago it was a prosperous town, but today it is shrouded in mystery. The village was established in 1291 by the Paliwal Brahmins, and was a rather prosperous community thanks to their ability to grow bumper crops in the arid desert. But one night, in 1825, all the people in Kuldhara and the nearby 83 villages vanished in the dark of the night. Legend says that Salim Singh, the evil prime minister, set his eyes upon the daughter of the village head and declared he would marry her, with or without her consent. He threatened the villagers with dire consequences if they did not comply with his wishes. Rather than give in to his demands, the council of the villagers decided to leave their ancestral homes overnight. But before leaving, they cursed Kuldhara so that no one would ever be able to settle there. True to the curse, the village remains abandoned. Nobody has been able to spend even a night there. Today, the village is a protected monument under the authority of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Talk about a bond thicker than blood.

After Kuldhara, we stopped at a nearby lake and took a nice leisurely walk around it.

Then we had a traffic jam of goats...

Next up, we made our way to the main attraction, our camels. Meet Simon and Ferrari.

I don't know if you've ever stared at a camel long enough or studied their movements, but for some odd reason, they reminded me of a giraffe, dinosaur, horse mixture. Random I know. After we hopped on, strapped in and became adjusted, we were off. Vinny was on Simon and I was on Ferrari. Ferrari was much taller than Simon but Simon was much cooler. He was lighter in color and had a fantastic afro as if he was straight out of the 70's. So groovy of him. He seemed to smile more often as well.

Lilu, who was our twenty two year old "camel driver", steered us in the right direction the entire time. No words or photos can accurately describe how truly incredible this adventure was. Although an overnight camel safari is a very touristy activity in Jaisalmer, the way Hotel Pleasant Haveli conducted it was the complete opposite. From the moment we said hello to the camels to the moment we said goodbye, it was just me, Vinny, Lilu, Al Pacino, Simon and Ferrari for miles and miles and miles. We weren't in a massive group and we weren't on an overcrowded trail. We were so isolated from the rest of reality with nothing but sand dunes and vegetation ahead of us. It was beyond calming to the soul to not hear horns honking, pigeons mating, dogs barking, people yelling, cows mooing, children crying, wedding fireworks exploding, etc. The only noise that surrounded us was the camel's toes grazing the sand one step at a time. It was that quiet. The phrase "one with nature" was created for this very moment. For about an hour, we rode our camels in the middle of nowhere directly into the sunset. Literally. Imagine a wide open desert, with the sun beaming in front of you and your only mission is to catch the rays before they disappear. That is what we did. No screenwriter could write a better script than what we were improvising on. It was magical, majestic and every other unbelievably magnificent word you can think of.

Around 6pm, we made it to what they call Camel Point, which is where we said "see you later" to Simon and Ferrari and headed down to our home for the next fifteen hours. The walk was quite challenging because it was all sand, downhill and we were in our running shoes but let's be real, I will take this commute any day over the 10 freeway at rush hour.

Al Pacino and Lilu did a phenomenal job at setting up a makeshift area for where they would cook us dinner. There were no Viking appliances, no stove top or oven - just two piles of sand, a handful of pots and pans, a man made fire, and all the ingredients they needed to whip up a delicious five course meal. So freakin cool. The sanitary aspect wasn't necessarily the cleanest but when you are in the middle of the Thar Dessert, one can't have their naan and eat it too.

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First, they made us some Masala Chai tea to enjoy while we watched the sun drop behind the mountain peaks and they began prepping for dinner.

Next they chopped up all the veggies, poured in the spices and starting cooking.

Last but not least, Lilu made fresh chapati from dough in the desert in the dark as if it was no big deal. Thanks to my camera flash we were able to capture this moment.

Then around 8pm, it was time to shove our faces. We had mixed veggies with potatoes, Dal (which is a common lentil dish), spicy chutney, rice and hot off the fire chapati. It was pitch black at this point so it was fairly difficult to eat but when it comes to food vs. (wo)man, (wo)man always finds a way to win.

I've been camping a handful of times before but in the past, I've always had a tent or a tarp or a tepee to walk into. Tonight, however, we wouldn't have anything but a few blankets and a million twinkling stars. It was a bit chilly at night but with the warmth of the campfire and the perfect little bed they made for us, we had not a care in the world. Hakuna Matata, it means no worries for the rest of your days, it's our problem-free philosophy, Hakuna Matata. And although we couldn't really brush our teeth after dinner or take a hot shower, it sure was one of the most romantic things we've done together. As we got into "bed" around 10pm, we laid there, staring at the stars, listening to the wind, pinching ourselves that we were awake and not dreaming.

The next morning we woke up around 6am, watched the sunrise over the sand dunes, had more Masala Chai Tea and ate some breakfast. It's impressive how much Al Pacino and Lilu can cook with such a simple fire and a few utensils. Less is more sometimes. At night, they let Simon and Ferrari roam the desert and then in the morning, they find them and bring them back to Camel Point. Feels good to know that the camels have some freedom to do what they want.

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After breakfast, duty called. If you catch my drift, this wasn't ideal given there was not a bathroom in sight and very few hidden pockets of privacy. For some reason, my body always knows when the timing is the least opportune and that's when it becomes active. Thanks a lot digestive system. As I went on a little walk to find some seclusion, I discovered a few bushes that would most likely cover me. As I was performing, I started hearing bells. Not bells like in school or on a bike but bells on a farm. As I looked up, there was a herd of sheep, goats and cows passing by, right in front of me. Not your typical bathroom view but sure, I'll take it. Sorry for the overload of information but I am like an open book. For good or for bad, you get to hear it all.

It was about 9am and time to sadly turn the page on this unforgettable experience. We walked up the sand dunes, hopped onto Simon and Ferrari and had one last thirty minute ride until we met up with Al Pacino and his jeep. Everything about the last twenty hours was insanely memorable. The ride itself, dinner, sleeping in the desert, watching the most pure sunrise and sunset and of course, the best part of it all, sharing these moments with Vinny. Here's one last photo. Since we were holding hands, it looks like Ferrari wanted to give Simon some affection as well. No one should ever be left out.

When we got back to Hotel Pleasant Haveli, we showered, brushed our teeth, shook the endless dust and sand off of our clothes and headed outside to enjoy our last day in Jaisalmer. Of course there were animals involved.

A cow that decided to stop moooooo-ving in the middle of the street...

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Pig that was enjoying some papaya....

We walked to a place called 1st Gate, which was right next to the fort, and enjoyed some lunch with a million dollar view.

Then we visited Patwa Havelis, which were constructed out of yellow sandstone in the beginning of the 19th century for residential purposes. Patwa Havelis are a cluster of five havelis aligned in a narrow lane in the heart of the city. Of the five havelis, the first haveli in the lane is not only extraordinarily preserved and restored but is also open to visitors to experience the lifestyle of the erstwhile patwas. It is one of the finest, oldest and largest havelis in Jaisalmer. It was full of artistic work in each corner, be it gracefully carved pillars, facade or the balconies (Jharokhas). Keeping in mind the climate of Jaisalmer, the floors are made of mud and the roof is made of wood so that it would remain cool in summers and warm in winters.

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Afterwards, as we aimlessly roamed the alleys of the Golden City for one last time, I saw the unconditional love of a grandfather for his granddaughter...

And a man who was just so intriguing to me...

Vinny came across a tiny shop where he bought a Kurta for 250 rupees. Now he's really looking like a local. Once he wears it, I will be sure to share a photo.
Here's a challenge for people who think about organizations in 21st-century America: How do we demilitarize our notions of leadership?

In late January 2016, National Public Radio reported on Urban Warriors, a YMCA of Metro Chicago initiative. Run in cooperation with the Adler Institute of Psychology, the pilot program brings inner-city youth together with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The goal: to acknowledge the physical and psychological damage occasioned by participants' prolonged exposure to violence and help them cope. The YMCA staffer behind the program, Eddie Bocanegra, paraphrases the kids' logic for buying into it: they (the soldiers) have guns, we have guns; they have ranks, our gangs have ranks; they wear uniforms, we wear gang colors; they lived in a war zone, we do the same.

On the face of it, the YMCA program is an imaginative and praiseworthy response to a deeply felt need. Both military veterans struggling to reintegrate with civilian life and teenagers subject to or participating in gang violence have gravitated to the program, sharing their stories and taking comfort from the recognition that they aren't alone in their difficulties. That said, we might ask ourselves how we have created a "homeland" where combat experience best models the lives of supposed domestic harmony that veterans were originally sworn to protect, and wish now to share.

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Two prominent last-century figures signaled the path to that world. In 1925, Calvin Coolidge told a group of newspaper editors, as he reflected optimistically on their role in a democracy, "After all, the chief business of the American people is business." For Coolidge, that preoccupation expressed not so much America's materialism as its idealism. By 1961, Dwight Eisenhower, a career soldier and then 34th president of the United States, had updated Coolidge's assessment to warn of the threat to our democracy posed by a "military-industrial complex." The Urban Warriors story marks another stop on that trajectory, with even more dire implications for our political order and for us as individuals.

We are in equal parts captivated by a vision that merges competitiveness with battlefield aggression and committed to the possibility of defusing such free-floating hostility. The steady flood of war films and first-person shooter video games aside, the business community has for a long time now spoken the language of strategic dominance -- white knight, black knight, hostile takeover, regulatory capture, and so on. Internally, the private sector mirrors the military's commitment to hierarchy, though without the relative job security the services offer.

To support that pervasive control, we embrace an illusory efficiency and a cheery fatalism about market forces. In this view, human beings--and especially men--will always fight, so we might as well build our economy around that principle. To the supposed benefit of all, competition weeds out the inept, the uninspired, or the merely weak, thus insuring that we continue to innovate. We normalize this belief by treating business as a game, not a matter of human lives.

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Yet over two decades in business education, I have heard combat veterans routinely testify to the cross-sector relevance of the approaches we increasingly teach our developing civilian managers: a flexible mix of distributed, transformational, situational, and traits-based leadership; a commitment to independent, entrepreneurial thinking; the cultivation of both the superior's and subordinates' emotional intelligence; and a conscientious focus on treating workers as assets, not costs.

In the private sector, a new generation of leaders is driving the Benefit Corporation movement, which deliberately looks beyond shareholder value as the dominant corporate goal. The boundaries between non- and for-profit entities seem ever more permeable, as practitioners apply their skills to mitigate economic inequality, find sustainable solutions to climate change, and manage the future that new technologies enable. Together, these developments signal a change of course for our national occupation of choice, one that the business sector itself could facilitate.



This is not the world of command-and-control decision-making. It suggests instead a sea change, one that might solve the problem that Urban Warriors can at best manage. Today and for some time now, we have found combat and competition easier to conceive and deliver than consensual victory achieved through hard-earned, collaborative effort. Yet now more than ever we need the institutions that can undertake those complex endeavors and marshal the resources to make them succeed. Our corporations could, and now increasingly do, express that collaborative spirit; community drives organizations. With a broader definition of their purpose, they can make systemic contributions that so far have eluded us.
Can a company say to its employees, "We have to weigh you because our shareholders want to know how overweight you are," or "Let me take your blood pressure; our institutional investors need to know."

A working group whose members include Humana, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, PepsiCo, Unilever, and South African insurer Discovery Ltd. Companies recently proposed that publicly traded corporations provide an overview on the health of their workforces in their various forms of public disclosure, including annual reports, 10-Ks, and sustainability reports.

According to one article, in an age when public companies are expected to be transparent, health data should be represented in that information. Vitality, part of the South Africa-based integrated financial services company Discovery, has stated that organizations with better workplace health programs are linked to better stock performance, and is working with executives from the above companies on the best practices for reporting workplace health metrics. Disclosures would include health metrics collected either through monitoring or self-reporting. The group believes that just as more companies are disclosing the impact of their organizations on the environment, companies should also disclose their impact on the health of their employees.

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Many believe in the fundamental connection between organizational performance and individuals' health and productivity. I certainly do! Isn't the investment in employer-sponsored health & well-being initiatives, when properly designed and executed, a business investment that impacts more than medical cost trend, but, also, affects absenteeism rates, presenteeism, disability costs, and employee engagement?

According to the Institute for Health and Productivity Management (IHPM), improving the health of the workforce is a fundamental competitive human capital management strategy. The Integrated Benefits Institute's work emphasizes that healthy, productive employees promote healthy business and is a good investment. Their research provides data, tools, and resources supporting the business value of workforce health and demonstrating the linkages between workforce health to employee lost time, performance, and business metrics.

However, should the aggregate "health" of the workforce be reported to shareholders? Do organizations define "health" all in the same way? What are the components of "workplace health metrics," and is there consistency among businesses? Do such metrics go well beyond physical health to include total well-being and how accurately, precisely, and representative of the organization would such captured data be (if indeed it can be captured)?

Employers already know some information about their workers' health, since they receive aggregate data on costs and spending, which can be an indicator of a workforce's health. But, is more specific data needed to be tracked and monitored? Some workplaces already are collecting data by providing their employees with their own tracking devices, such as Fitbits, or offering wellness programs that can make a impact on health, such as smoking-cessation plans.

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Fitbit works with employers such as Indiana University Health and Emory University in Atlanta to subsidize fitness trackers for their staff. United Healthcare recently announced the company will be offering up to $1,460 a year in credits for his or her health reimbursement account for meeting daily goals while wearing a custom tracker. Its unique algorithm tracks the frequency and intensity of activity, and an employee can earn up to $1,460 a year for meeting certain fitness goals. The fitness device is offered as part of an employee's insurance premium. These programs are typically voluntary, but an individual must be willing to share data to earn the most rewards and insurance discounts.

According to a Harvard Business Review article, the author provides a myriad of issues explaining why disclosing aggregate health data to shareholders is a bad idea, everything from logistical challenges, privacy, discrimination, costs, low employee participation rates in health screenings, to a lack of correlation between health & the bottom line, along with a host of other unintended consequences that may result. There is also a great deal of controversy around wellness programs, for example, and whether they add value for companies, and hence shareholders.

Does the health of employees impact company performance? I think most organizations and individuals would argue that "yes," health affects productivity, employee engagement, and ultimately has a bearing on the company's bottom line. Most would also recognize the inherent challenges and numerous variables that are involved in assessing and measuring this but many organizations are making progress in this area.
Thirty-one years ago, life was perfect. Alan and I watched the sunset as we finalized our wedding arrangements for April 28th. That night, I smiled as I thought about Alan lifting my wedding veil over my eyes, embracing me, and beginning our new life together. Our time together was cut grievously short. Mesothelioma, a preventable asbestos-caused cancer, stole my best friend. Gone forever are his smiles, his "I love yous," and the precious family time we would have had together. I remember like it was yesterday as my then 13-year-old daughter and I held his hands in the hospital as he took his final breath. While memories of our love are eternally etched across my heart, only the sounds of silence echo in our home for the past 10 years. April 28th is not only my wedding anniversary; it is also International Workers' Memorial Day (IWMD). In 1970, the AFL-CIO declared April 28 "Workers Memorial Day" to honor the hundreds of thousands of working people killed and injured on the job every year.

I did not know it at the time of my wedding, but these days would be forever intertwined for me. Now, as I remember my anniversary, I also join others who have lost a loved one to asbestos diseases in education and action. Global IWMD efforts are so vitally important. Asbestos remains the number one killer in the workplace today, while mining and use continues. When you think about workers who have paid the ultimate price for their jobs you may think first about an accident that happens at work and a life lost on a job site. But that is only one side of the coin. A far more pervasive and deadly risk comes from occupational diseases caused by hazardous substances that workers breathe in and carry home on their clothes, endangering the workers and their families.

The leading cause of occupational diseases is exposure to asbestos. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) nearly 125 million people in the world are exposed to asbestos at the workplace and more than 107,000 people die each year from mesothelioma, lung, gastrointestinal, colorectal, laryngeal, and ovarian cancers; as well as non-malignant lung and pleural disorders. Dr. Paul Demers, the Director of the Occupational Cancer Research Centre at Cancer Ontario said "for every case of mesothelioma, there are four cases of other lung cancers caused by asbestos fibres."



The story of asbestos mining and use reads like a Grisham novel, with leading characters, who spent millions of dollars to create doubt, suppress documents, and lobby Congress to reduce financial liability and continue use. The Asbestos Information Association (AIA), played a powerful role of perpetuating this asbestos crisis. An industry spokesperson confessed, asbestos was 'probably the most hazardous industrial material ever unleashed on an unsuspecting world.'" But unlike a best-selling crime novel this story does not have a neat and tidy conclusion.



Since the first IWMD, the United States has used over eight billion metric tons of asbestos and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from preventable asbestos-caused diseases. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asbestos ban was overturned in 1991 and asbestos remains legal and lethal in the United States today.



In 2002, Senator Patty Murray, (D-WA), began championing ban asbestos legislation. Congress has come close, but the asbestos profiteers and those defending them, lobby against legislation to end this man-made disaster.



Workers and health and safety professionals are on the frontline of prevention. Repairs, renovations, construction, and disasters can disturb asbestos products and release fibers into the air, creating a carcinogenic dust. Additionally, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), "The hazard may occur during manufacturing of asbestos-containing products; performing brake or clutch repairs; renovating or demolishing buildings or ships; or cleanup from those activities; contact with deteriorating asbestos-containing materials and during cleanup after natural disasters."



Work is being done to end this horrific tragedy in our neighbor to north, Canada. Hassan Yussuff, President of the Canadian Labour Congress, took a courageous stand for workers' rights by urging to Canadian government to "quickly pass legislation banning the import and use of materials containing asbestos" especially since "there is no reason for delay".



As Mary Harris "Mother" Jones put it, "Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living." On this somber day of remembrance, asbestos victims and trade unions urge lawmakers to ban asbestos and ensure the laws on the books protecting health and safety are strictly enforced.



While my daughter and I will honor Alan's memory on our anniversary, our world is deeply quiet and our hearts our broken. During these years, we have learned many lessons, but most importantly, to recognize the momentous work done by trade unions around the world who fight everyday to protect workers' health and safety. For Alan and the millions of 'Alans', I urge you to take action and send your letter to Congress. Enough is enough.
The reason for the current trans bathroom panic is simple: our schooling was terribly deficient.

One of the earliest truths we learn about the world is that generally small living things -- puppies, seedlings, babies -- grow into larger versions of the same things: dogs, plants, adults. The names might change -- "girls" become "women" and "boys" become "men" -- but their essence (including whether they are female or male) doesn't change.

What would happen to someone who never learned about the exceptions? What if someone were never exposed (either in classroom tanks or via video) to the metamorphosis of a tadpole into a frog, or a caterpillar into a butterfly? Would they believe someone who told them that swimming fish can turn into hopping frogs? What picture might their mind conjure up if someone insisted that butterflies were previously caterpillars? Would they lose sight of the butterflies they know and instead imagine a many-legged furry creature with wings somehow strapped around their middle?

The current omnipresent "men in dresses" memes and posts by people mockingly claiming they have turned into pirates simply by putting on a costume are clear and understandable consequences of a truth about U.S. schools: we have not taught about gender diversity. We don't teach about intersex children, who are born with both "male" and "female" parts, or whose bodies don't process hormones the way most others do. Most science classes don't talk much about all the "sex chromosomes" variations that exist, such as XXY and X. We don't study the many cultures that have more than two genders, including some that give such gender variant individuals special roles and honor. Teachers don't talk about the cultures that believe in reincarnation, and call someone by their previous name and pronoun, even if those don't "match" their current body.

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Parts of the U.S. have broken an axle in this gaping pothole of ignorance. One of the North Carolina legislators asked to vote on a bill (H.B. 2) he had just seen was overheard to say, "What in the world is 'gender identity'?" Unequipped to understand how a transgender person is not someone pretending to be something they're not, he followed his party leaders' direction and voted to deprive us poor delusional people of the right to pee in peace.

There is a simple reason why it is the federal government that has over the past eight years implemented pro-transgender policies that are now outraging some state and local politicians and pundits. It's not that they are bleeding-heart liberals (although some may be); it's that they have learned who transgender people are. Part of what the Obama Administration brought to D.C. was an openness to hearing from and engaging with community members. This openness coincided with the growth of the National Center for Transgender Equality, FORGE's groundbreaking federal grants from the Department of Justice, the hiring of out trans staffers by the Center for American Progress and many other LGBT and progressive organizations, and the appointment of out transgender people to high-visibility federal positions.

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The federal government may seem sprawling, but in truth there are just a few thousand key career bureaucrats who make and implement policies. Over the past eight years, trans activists and openly trans staff of non-trans agencies have met literally hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of times with these officials. Sometimes the topic under discussion has been specifically transgender, and sometimes it's been "LGBT." Many times, it's been some other policy issue entirely (like the Affordable Care Act) with the trans representatives present not because we are trans, but because we have the professional expertise officials needed. Some of us have even partied at the White House with Executive Branch officials, learning about each other's lives in venues far removed from laptops and PowerPoints.

All this contact means one thing: federal officials get it. There is no longer a pothole of ignorance on the federal level about who trans people are, or what civil rights we need to have protected.
Human mobility is inevitable and unstoppable. It is also on the rise. People are moving to increase their income, study, join other family members or flee persecution, wars, violence, natural disasters and dire poverty. People have always moved. Globalization has made population movements faster, better-informed and more voluminous. Wrong policies have also made them less safe, if not outright perilous. 3.3 percent of the world's population lives outside their country of origin, and this number is growing. Population growth, violent conflicts, climate change and other factors are driving more and more people to move within and between countries.

While we cannot prevent human migration, and why would we, it is possible to make population movements safer through the adoption and implementation of effective migration regimes--the right set of institutions, laws and policies--that also generate multiple and sustainable development benefits.

Current systems for managing the flow of migrants between countries are failing to address the fundamental needs of countries of origin, transit and destination. And this failure to adopt adequate migration regimes is arguably exacerbating crises and wars, leading to low economic growth in all parts of the world, and driving unacceptable human development outcomes for migrant children, women and men.

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Migration is unavoidable. It makes eminent sense to facilitate and manage migration flows positively instead of trying to endlessly prevent them. At the same time, pragmatic considerations need to be expressed without false complexes. No Government in the world can practice an open door policy in the current economic and political circumstances--except in the context of relatively homogeneous economic zones and clusters of States, like the European Union. But that doesn't mean replacing open doors by barbed wire and watchtowers.



Migration policies are development policies

Migration policies have been all too often seen as a security offspring, labour matters or border management issues. Yet they are complex policies that are more in the development realm than anywhere else. Without effective migration regimes, countries and communities that want to increase production and promote innovation cannot address skill and labor shortages. Without migration regimes, the human rights of migrants cannot be effectively protected, and the ability of migrants to contribute to the economic, social and cultural development of the host country (and of their home country) is undermined. Aging societies (that depend on an influx of migrant workers to supplement the workforce) will not be able to maintain their standard of living, and social protection systems are threatened. A former Mexican President used to tell me that even a large river, such as the Rio Grande, cannot stop migration from a young society with fewer economic opportunities to a neighboring society which offers jobs. He was right: as soon as his nation's economy picked up after the crisis, while the US labour market was still in recovery mode, migrants stopped crossing the river.

Without migration regimes, migrants and their families will continue to pay exorbitant sums to recruitment agencies and human smugglers, instead of investing in their own futures and their communities of origin. We will see trapped populations unable to move to safety or to places where they can sustain themselves. Economic, political and violent crises could continue unfolding in many parts of the world. In short, without comprehensive human development-centered migration regimes, everyone loses. In contrast, well-managed migration contributes to preventing crisis and supports achievement of sustainable development goals. For this reason, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognizes the positive contribution of migrants for inclusive growth and sustainable development. A specific target of the SDGs measures whether countries are able to facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies.

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This is not only relevant for migration from developing to developed countries. Migration is a truly global phenomenon. Of 244 million international migrants globally, more than 100 million live in a developing country. South-South migration is now greater than migration from poor into rich countries.

Migrants are vital for the economies of most, if not all, countries. But they are not commodities. They need to be given the rights and opportunities to fully contribute to development and to empower themselves in the process.



Human mobility is based on internationally shared responsibilities and opportunities

By its nature, migration transcends spaces of singular state sovereignty. Thus, beyond the borders of nation-states, migration regimes need to be established internationally. Bilateral agreements, regional mobility rights, and inter-regional and even global regimes on human mobility are fundamental to achieving positive development outcomes for all involved. International regimes must take into account that migrants are a shared responsibility of countries of origin, transit and destination. But migrants also present shared opportunities. All win if the financial, social and human cost of migration is lowered and if economies have easier access to recognized skills and labor force. The repercussions for regional and global prosperity and peace cannot be overstated.
Do proverbs say anything about April snow?

This post originally appeared on Map Happy.

We just got a few inches up in Boston. In April. Mere days after it was a perfect 75F. I am sooooo beyond over it. If you're as sick of breaking out the winter jacket as I am, it might be high time to head to the hottest place on earth. (I'm seriously considering it right about now.)

Sure, Death Valley holds the record for highest temperature ever recorded. But that's not good enough for me. It has snowed in Death Valley in the past, so I'm not taking any chances. For truly unrelenting, brain-boiling temperatures year-round (with zero chance of a surprise winter wonderland), adventurous travelers are going to have to hoof it to East Africa.

Dallol, Ethiopia

At 430 feet below sea level, Dallol, Ethiopia is a mining ghost town by Ethiopia's northern border with Eritrea in the Danakil Desert. It sits in the middle of the Afar Depression, a geological low-point shared by Djbouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia.

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The Afar Depression is most famous for being the site where Lucy, the Australopithecus skeletal specimen, was found in 1974. And while that region may be known as the cradle of hominids, don't expect much in the way of a hospitable environment in Dallol.

In the hottest place on earth, average daily highs for the year sit at a sweltering 94F, with average highs in June topping out at a whopping 116F. Winter lows hover around 76F. It's a wonder that humans ever settled in Dallol at all.

And yet they did--for about half of the 20th century. The reason: salt (potash) mining. From the early 1900s until the 1960s, Italy and the U.S. conducted mining operations in Dallol. And while the mining settlements are all but abandoned today, merchants from neighboring villages and towns still regularly travel to the hottest place on earth to stock up on salt.

How to get there

Travelers are required to obtain a visa at an Ethiopian Embassy prior to arrival. Tourist visas are available for one or three month visits, with $50 and $70 visa fees, respectively. The U.S. State Department recommends all adults be fully vaccinated against Yellow Fever and Polio and should receive a booster dose before travel.

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The easiest way to get to Ethiopia is to fly into the capitol city of Addis Ababa at Bole International Airport (ADD). From there, travelers can take a 12 hour bus ride to Mek'ele in the north. If you're not a fan of long bus rides, Ethiopian Airways also runs daily flights to Mek'ele (Alula Aba Nega Airport) from Addis Ababa. The flight is only 1 hour and 25 minutes.

No roads lead to Dallol. (It's also one of the more remote regions on earth, unsurprisingly.) Visitors will need to join a camel caravan or hire an off-road capable vehicle to make it there from Mek'ele. But don't let the difficulties deter you: plenty of agencies offer tours.

What to do

What remains of the mining settlement in Dallol is a rusted ghost town. And while it's always cool to walk amongst ruins, the main draw of the region is the landscape. It offers a wide range of strange geological features that make the trek more than worthwhile for geophiles. The extreme heat there comes from the earth as much as the air.

Dallol may be the closest thing to Hell on Earth. It is in an active volcanic zone, part of the East African Rift. The alien landscape features the Dallol Volcano (which last erupted in 1926), tons of hydrothermal vents, gas geysers and green acidic pools surrounded by ridges of salt. The land is colored with multicolored mineral deposits--sulfurous yellows and reds from iron oxide along with bromides, iodine and potash.

While the whole experience of Dallol might sound miserable to some, the harsh environment and adventure traveling through it brings is well worth the journey for others.

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Essential items

SPF 100, Ray-Bans and a big floppy hat. Expect a ton of sun in the hottest place on earth.

Gallons upon gallons of water--average yearly rainfall amounts to less than two centimeters.

Camping gear and enough food for the length of the trip. Don't expect to find a charming little BnB in Dallol.

A battery powered fan--especially if you're there in June.

Sam Wright Fairbanks is an editorial assistant at Map Happy.

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Having hovered silently over the bay of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, Saturday night, a majestic dragonfly 72 meters wide has settled down with a mild electric buzz. This is Solar Impulse, the symbol of a new era of sophisticated lightness, not only of our future technologies, but hopefully also of our thoughts and our actions.

In the heart of Silicon Valley, at the Mountain View Airfield, Sergey Brin himself welcomed the "solar pilot" after the landing. Brin is co-founder of Google, one of the partners of Solar Impulse.

Without a single drop of fuel the solar airplane accomplished the first crossing of the Pacific (China-Japan-Hawaii-California), only part of the extraordinary world tour of the two "solar pilots" Swiss Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg. In the coming months this hi-tech-dragonfly will fly in 5 legs, above the USA, the Atlantic, Europe, and will reach Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, where she left on March 9 last year. This is home to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and to the solar town Masdar City, designed by Sir Norman Foster. From Abu Dhabi to Hawaii Solar Impulse covered 20 000 km in 8 legs and 250 flight hours, using 5600 kWh, collected from the sun by 200 m2 of photovoltaic panels. Not surprisingly, the solar aircraft has a circadian rhythm like most living beings: during the day she climbs higher and higher and charges the batteries, in the night she actively "rests" and glides, with the help of the batteries' electricity. Aboard alternate Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg. The latter, a former military pilot, is the aviation mind of the project, Bertrand Piccard is the charismatic figure. For three generations the Piccard have been a Swiss dynasty of what Swiss-French names "savant-urier" (scientists and adventurous). After Earth had been explored in extension, the Piccard dedicated themselves to explore it vertically. Auguste Piccard (1884-1962), professor of physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich conceived both a stratospheric balloon, with which in 1930 he reached the 17,000 meters of altitude, and four bathiscaphes. With one of them, FNRS-3, he and his son Jacques reached in 1953 the 3150 meters depth in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1960 his son Jacques Piccard (1922-2008), father of Bertrand, dove with his Italy-made bathyscaphe Trieste down to 11 000 meters in the Mariana Trench (Pacific Ocean) - setting an unbeaten record.

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While the grandfather and father searched the planet to know him, Bertrand Piccard runs through it to protect it. But rather than the "external planet", Bertrand, a psychiatrist, practitioner of yoga and hypnosis, explores the "inner world", both of the individual and of the humankind, in its relationship with nature: what psychological experiences does a human being live, while sitting in solitude in a tiny cockpit for 50 or 100 hours and staring and oceans and continents below him? Which ecological limits should humankind embrace, to allow ten billion people to live with dignity without devastating the Earth? In this respect relevant was the video-dialogue on Thursday, April 22 between Piccard in flight and the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, along with the heads of state from 175 nations gathered at the United Nations in New York, to sign the Paris climate agreement.

Solar Impulse is a jewel of technology and Swiss coordination. When in 2000 Piccard proposed his project, technologists and industry leaders told him that it was impossible. Yet with a stubborn work from 2003 to 2015 this aircraft was conceived and built in Switzerland, in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Losanne (EPFL), with the contribution of the federal government, as well of and institutions and companies.

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Solar Impulse is wider than a Boeing 747, but she weighs like a car - 2.3 tons. The power of each of its four engines is 8 HP, the same of the engine of the Wright Flyer, the first powered airplane that took off in 1903, opening the era of aviation. Deemed physically impossible until the beginning of last century, motorized aircrafts do transport each year billions of passengers and millions of tons of freight. In the last half-century air traffic doubled every 15 years, with a continuous increase in safety, and an amazing exponential growth of transported passengers and goods. Along with these advances, however, total energy consumption of aviation is increasing hugely, and with it its environmental damage, especially that caused by burning fossil fuels. Will Solar Impulse open a new, a sustainable era of aviation? If this will be the century of the transition to renewable energies - not only in the air - Solar Impulse has a good chance of becoming a fascinating emblem.

If air transport wants to continue moving the current masses at the current speeds, it is unthinkable to feed it with photovoltaic panels, as we know them - although slow transport with modern solar airships is seriously considered. The lesson learned with Solar Impulse may help to develop lightweight solar airplanes, including unmanned ones. Think to the Mark Zuckerberg's vision of a global internet signal from the air. Yet the Solar Impulse campaign was born not to invent technologies but to propagate an idea: the transition to a light and sustainable development based on renewable energy. What better than a solar flight around the world can inspire millions of people? This is why a substantial part of the project is called futureisclean.org and is a worldwide initiative of advocacy (collecting signatures), information and education on sustainability, supported by initiators such as Sir Richard Branson, the visionary British airline entrepreneur and ballon adventurer, Doris Leuthard, Swiss Minister of the environment, Prince Albert of Monaco (where the the mission control room is hosted), Achim Steiner, head of UNEP, the UN environment Programme, Kofi Annan, Michael Gorbachev, Nicolas Hulot.
Los Angeles County has reached a critical moment when political will, public support and resources are all within reach to finally put an end to the spiraling epidemic of mass homelessness.

Just a couple months after the Board of Supervisors approved a historic and comprehensive plan to address the crisis, a new L.A.County sponsored poll shows that voters would overwhelmingly approve a ballot initiative this fall to combat homelessness -- even if it means taking money out of their own pockets to pay for it.

According to the survey, 68 percent of likely voters would support a sales tax increase to fund programs for the homeless. An even larger number, 76 percent, would back a tax increase on incomes exceeding $1 million.

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Homelessness is the defining civic issue in the County of Los Angeles, and we need to confront it. We are facing a moral crisis. And a moral crisis demands a moral solution.

In 2015, Los Angeles County alone accounted for 8 percent of the homeless population throughout the United States -- 44,359 on any given night. Many live far beyond the boundaries of Skid Row, sleeping on sidewalks and park benches, under bridges, in cars and abandoned buildings.

With the upcoming release of the 2016 Homeless Count, the situation will seem even bleaker. It is expected to confirm what most residents are already seeing with their own eyes in their own neighborhoods: that more people than ever are living on the streets, often in tents.

The good news is that we know what works and right now, we are seeing positive results from those efforts. One of the County's programs, Housing for Health, has already taken 1,400 people off the streets and placed them into permanent supportive housing. Another 2,500 will join them by the summer of 2017. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) -- a joint County and City agency -- has housed 1,500 families in just over the last year and a half.

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The Homeless Initiative plan approved by the Board in February should have an even greater impact. Its sweeping strategies are intended, not only to house the homeless, but to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. It also includes increasing affordable and subsidized housing, providing supportive services and raising incomes. The plan calls for unprecedented collaboration among County and City agencies, as well as businesses, faith-based institutions and community organizations.

The City of Los Angeles is an important ally and partner in the fight to tackle homelessness. However, if the Homeless Initiative is to be successful, it will require the full support of all 88 cities in the County-- nothing less.

Academia can also play a pivotal role in searching for ways to best address homelessness. The University of Southern California just launched an initiative to corral the experience and knowledge on its campus and within the community to provide tangible solutions within four years.

It is clear that focused and careful spending of taxpayer dollars to combat homelessness does work when coupled with clear requirements on outcomes and accountability.

The problem is scale. LAHSA estimates the cost of meeting the needs of the homeless is about $450 million each year, not counting construction. The Board has set aside $100 million -- a good start, but not nearly enough.

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The crisis already exacts a steep price on taxpayers, in terms of law enforcement and social services. Providing housing for the homeless enables taxpayer dollars to be spent more effectively.

In the past, voters have stepped up to approve ballot measures to pay for community essentials. Recent polling by the County indicates that voters now rank homelessness as their second-highest concern behind jobs and the economy. A survey by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs found that 6 in 10 County residents consider the lack of affordable housing for low-income families a very serious problem, and that many County residents are worried about going hungry or becoming homeless themselves.
Let's just hope that Hillary, once officially nominated (and elected), cares enough to take seriously the very clear and fundamental message of Sanders. Let's not compromise it all away with incremental talk and middle way negotiations.

I think that those who have been pushed into more radical and anarchist positions because of Bernie's message should get a grip and still vote for Hillary. But those voting for Hillary should also acknowledge that Bernie is not simply some voice ranting out of moral principles, idealist hopes and personal passion, and that his fervent supporters are not just a bunch of civic adolescents and naive idealists.

Is that all Bernie represents to Hillary supporters - a guy with good morals, daring ideals and displaced compassion? I think they are wrong in underestimating the profound influence Sanders has had. I think that his impact has only just begun, even as he's merely an instrument giving voice to something obvious and yet shocking - the wealth, health and ecological disasters of our times.

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Let's hope that the best of Sanders directly positively impacts the American political landscape. Robert Reich astutely frames the situation moving forward:

"I just got off the phone with a former Republican member of Congress who says he "can't believe" Trump won all of today's primaries. "I don't get it," he said. "The Republican Party is completely out of control."

Earlier today I spoke with a Hillary supporter who asked me to urge Bernie to get out of the race. "He can't win, and the longer he stays in the harder he's making it for Hillary in the general [election]," she said. "I just don't get it."

Neither of the people I spoke with "get" the biggest single force in the 2016 election: a furious revolt against the political establishment.

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The revolt has taken two very different forms - progressive populism (Bernie's "political revolution") and authoritarian populism (Donald Trump's bloviated bigotry). They are the positive and negative sides of the same coin,

Both should be wake-up calls for America's two major political parties and the corporate and financial elites that have sponsored them for decades. Unless or until the establishment responds to the growing frustrations of a shrinking and increasingly insecure middle class, the populist revolt - its reformist zeal on one side, and its hatefulness on the other - will only intensify in coming years."

I think Reich is spot on here. Real changes from the ground up are only a matter of time. How urgently will the American people respond to the impoverishment of the middle class? How messy will things need to get before the filthy rich, powerful constituencies and Washington yield to the demands and eventual necessities of the issues that Sanders brings to light?
Mark Kresowik will never forget Merle Bell, the Iowa farmer whose property near Waterloo, which had been in his family for more than 100 years, was to be the site of a proposed coal plant.

"Merle wanted to see his kids and grandkids inherit their farm, but had been told that he had virtually no choice but to sell his property and watch the coal plant developers bulldoze his family's legacy," said Mark. "Instead, more than 500 of his friends, neighbors, and supporters banded together to protect their land and their lungs, and prevent the dirty project from ever moving forward."

When Mark was hired by the Sierra Club in 2006 as our first organizer in Iowa fighting the Bush-era new coal rush, 75 percent of Iowa's electricity came from coal, and there were three more new coal plants on the drawing board, including the project slated for Merle's farm.

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Fast forward to earlier this month, when Warren Buffett's Iowa-based utility MidAmerican announced it will invest $3.6 billion in a 2,000-megawatt wind project that's the largest economic development project in state history. It will bring the utility to 85 percent wind power by 2020, and it won't raise electricity rates by one cent.

What in the world just happened in Iowa?

There's an untold story here. It begins on that farm in Iowa. Mark had been hired to fight those proposed Iowa coal plants after one had already slipped through the cracks, and the news landed on the desks of Bruce Nilles and Verena Owen, the founders of the Beyond Coal Campaign, who were based in Illinois.

It was 2002, and they were astonished to learn that not only had a giant new 800-megawatt coal plant been approved in Iowa - to be built by MidAmerican, no less - but not one single, solitary person or organization had even submitted a comment in opposition to the plant. And so with three more Iowa coal plants on the drawing board, part of a wave of 200 planned coal plants nationwide, they vowed to never again allow a proposed coal plant to be left unopposed.

They started in Iowa by hiring a recent college grad, Mark, who had been inspired by a concerned legislator, then state representative Rob Hogg, to organize opposition to the proposed Waterloo coal plant. Mark proceeded to channel his boundless energy into logging thousands of miles and hours crisscrossing his home state, organizing opposition to all the remaining coal plants and supporting clean energy, working with partner organizations large and small. Ultimately, the allies defeated all three, including the plant proposed by Dynegy and LS Power adjacent to Merle's farm.

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As Mark remembers it,

"More than 300 people turned out to an obscure zoning hearing in Waterloo, dozens testified against coal and in favor of clean energy before the Iowa Utilities Board in Marshalltown, and state officials and electric companies hadn't seen anything like it before. Merle, his neighbors Gail Mueller and the Shatzers, and advocates like Plains Justice's Carrie La Seur completely turned the public tide against coal and toward wind and solar power for all Iowans."

All told, around the nation this movement stopped 184 proposed coal plants from being built. Blocking those new coal plants changed everything, in Iowa and nationwide. Specifically, it changed three things: 1) it opened up new market opportunities for renewable energy, 2) it pulled us back from the brink of a massive and irrevocable 50-year investment in our most carbon intensive fossil fuel that would have doomed our climate, and 3) it increased pressure on the remaining coal plants, which weren't going to be replaced by new coal, and therefore faced investment decisions about whether to modernize or retire.

Since then, our Beyond Coal network has grown to include over 100 organizations and thousands of leaders in 50 states. In Iowa, through litigation and grassroots advocacy we have secured the retirement of over 2,100 megawatts of existing coal at 35 coal boilers, including the nation's 200th coal plant to announce retirement, which happened last year.

As part of that advocacy, we pushed hard to secure ambitious renewable energy commitments from the state's utilities as well. In a federal court settlement with MidAmerican, they agreed to one of the state's first solar projects - a new array at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.

And that brings back us to MidAmerican's recent announcement that it will generate 85 percent of its power from wind energy by 2020 - putting the utility on track to realize its vision of becoming a 100 percent renewable energy utility. As Bruce Nilles put it, "MidAmerican made clean energy history, and raised the bar for every other utility in the United States."

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In just over a decade, MidAmerican's generation of electricity has gone from 70 percent coal to 35 percent coal, and now they're doubling down again. In Iowa, an astonishing 5,000 megawatts of renewable energy has been installed, clean energy is a bi-partisan issue, and it is entirely possible with a little more prodding that the state's two utilities, MidAmerican and Alliant Energy, will cease burning coal entirely within the next decade.

Here's the best part - this is the kind of state-by-state transformation we're working for and realizing all across the country. To be clear, this kind of progress is moving slower in other states, and with 300 coal plants still chugging along and coal country in need of support for an economic transition, we have plenty more work to do. But we're making progress on the scale that matters.

While market pressures, federal policy, and innovation all played a role in that transformation, grassroots advocacy was a critical factor that tipped the scales and made the difference, harnessing all those forces into a smart, sustained campaign that is changing the world. In Iowa there would have been no market opportunity for clean energy investment today if the state had built three additional coal plants a decade ago.
Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm appealed the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that ended the five-county "John Doe" criminal investigation into whether Governor Scott Walker illegally coordinated with supposedly "independent" dark money groups during the 2011-2012 recall elections to the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday.

As prosecutors filed their case, the secret money advocates at the heart of the investigation are planning their next move.

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Now O'Keefe and his associates appear to be prepping to go after Chisholm in a low turn out primary, using the new tools they worked so hard to legalize in Wisconsin, a flood of coordinated secret money and phony "issue" ads.

Scott Walker John Doe Headed to Divided SCOTUS

In July 2015, the Wisconsin Supreme Court not only shut down the investigation of potentially illegal coordination between Governor Walker and dark money groups, they took the extraordinary measures of firing the Republican Special Prosecutor, who was hired to coordinate efforts at the behest of a bipartisan group of five District Attorneys, and throwing up roadblocks to any appeal by, for instance, telling prosecutors they could not use expert, outside counsel to help with the filing.

These actions were unprecedented and reminded many of the Saturday Night Massacre, when Richard Nixon fired U.S. Attorney General Archibald Cox and his successors during the Watergate investigations.

"My career in the military and as a federal prosecutor fighting violent criminals and terrorists did not fully prepare me for the tactics employed by these special interest groups," said Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz. "To somehow remove the lawyer representing one of the parties after the opinion [has been issued] is extraordinary," said former state Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske.

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The GOP-controlled legislature took action in 2015 to retroactively decriminalize the activities at the heart of the investigation, making significant changes to Wisconsin's campaign finance law, exempting political corruption from the John Doe statute and dismantling the nonpartisan Wisconsin elections board.

Now the three Democratic prosecutors are slated to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the state Supreme Court ruling. At issue is the $10 million spent to elect the conservative majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court by the very same groups--Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce--that were under investigation in the John Doe probe.

According to the 2009 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Caperton v. Massey, outsized spending in a judicial election could be significant enough to demand that judges recuse themselves. On this basis, Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz had asked both Justice Prosser and Justice Gableman to recuse from the John Doe, but they failed to do so.

It is unknown whether prosecutors will also appeal on the merits of the case. It is notable that coordination between independent groups and candidates is prohibited in most states and at the federal level. In 2016, a state legislator in Montana was convicted of breaking state law after engaging in similar coordination and, in 2015, a political operative working on a federal campaign was sentenced to 24 months in prison after being prosecuted under federal law.

Common Cause's Jay Heck tells CMD that it makes sense that O'Keefe would go after Chisholm this election cycle. "The dark money groups want to protect the gains they have made in Wisconsin, changing the law to allow coordination between candidates and issue ad groups. They want to stop an appeal before it goes any further."

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The prosecutors' appeal is sure to have Wisconsin's far-right yelling "partisan witch hunt" again. Yet, the reality is that Milwaukee DA John Chisholm has a long record of prosecuting Democrats for political corruption. In 2010, Chisholm used the John Doe process to prosecute Democratic Milwaukee County Supervisor Toni Clark on felony charges related to the use of just $6,300 in campaign funds. Scott Walker didn't call that a witch hunt; instead Walker said the case was "a reminder to all others in office that we must maintain the highest ethical standards."

Dark Money Advocates Take Aim at Chisholm in Re-Election Race

Chisholm announced on April 18 that he would run for re-election; the primary is August 9th.

Chisholm's Democratic primary challenger is Verona Swanigan, an attorney and Milwaukee native who is new to electoral politics. Swanigan holds a law degree from Northern Illinois University (2005), and has practiced law out of her own firm, Swanigan Legal Services, for about a decade. She registered her campaign in August 2015, and released a video announcing her candidacy in November that focused on reducing crime and addressing domestic violence.

Swanigan is an African American who has participated in community rallies calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate police brutality. She calls herself a "conservative democrat," but her campaign is being backed by well-known GOP political operative, Craig Peterson, who has worked closely with Wisconsin Club for Growth's Eric O'Keefe on efforts to reshape Milwaukee politics in recent years. According to news reports, Peterson has long been associated with Zigman Joseph Stephenson, a public relations firm, but has had financial troubles in recent years. Peterson has ties to former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, who was caught up in the "Caucus Scandal," an earlier John Doe prosecution of campaign finance abuses, and who now works for big money groups trying to privatize public schools.

Peterson had reported $250 in monetary contributions and $1,681 worth of in-kind contributions to Swanigan's campaign as of December 31, 2015, a substantial part of the campaign's $5,476 total take for the year. (Reports covering the first part of 2016 are not yet available.)

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Milwaukee scribe, Bruce Murphy of Urban Milwaukee says that Peterson is "clearly preparing to go after Chisholm."

Earlier this spring, Peterson spearheaded an effort to reshape Milwaukee's city government through a secretive group called "Milwaukeeans for Self-Governance," which spent at least $200,000 on radio ads to influence mayoral and aldermanic races. The group, whose name strongly echoes that of the O'Keefe group "Citizens for Self-Governance", has not been formally registered, and its funders have not been disclosed, but their impact is being felt.

"It really feels like we're running against him, and not his so-called candidates," Alderman Bob Bauman, a veteran Common Council member told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Bauman's opponent, who lost her race, was Peterson associate Monique Kelly, formerly known as Monique Taylor.

Peterson "is trying to build his credibility in the black community and build a power base," explains Murphy. Peterson needed to have some victories after he and his associates failed to get enough signatures to scuttle a Milwaukee street car project they spent a lot of time and effort on.

Using Racial Justice Issues to Advance a Tea Party Candidate

In the 2014 Milwaukee County Sheriff's race, a liberal dark money group spent big trying to unseat incumbent Sheriff David Clarke Jr. Clarke is a right-winger, a darling of Fox News and a Democrat in name only. The NRA rushed to his aid and influential right-wing radio urged Republicans in the county to turn out in the open democratic primary.

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Another unregistered Peterson group calling itself "Citizens for Urban Justice" also came to his aid, running radio ads attacking his opponent. In the ads, Monique Taylor presented herself as a community activist and listed the names of African-American men killed by Milwaukee police, then said, "Now a lieutenant in that same police department wants to be our sheriff." The ads had a big impact in predominantly African-American wards in the city.

But Clarke, who is African-American, is better known for attacking the Black Lives Matter movement, which he has called "black slime," than for addressing the problem of police violence.

While he has been vague about the funding behind Milwaukeeans for Self-Governance and the city council takeover, Peterson has previously credited O'Keefe with arranging the funds to support Clarke. "Eric raised money for that campaign," Peterson told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "And I spent the money. That's another benefit to our relationship: He's good at raising it; I'm good at spending it."

Peterson also worked with the Wisconsin chapter of David Koch's Americans for Prosperity and Citizens for Responsible Government in an attempt to rally support against a modern streetcar project under development in Milwaukee. Instead of telling folks the truth--that the Kochs object to any type of clean energy transport, including trolleys and electric cars--the Peterson crew slammed the trolleys for furthering segregation. Peterson paid for radio ads featuring the brother of police shooting victim Dontre Hamilton urging listeners to send Mayor Barrett and John Chisholm a message by writing letters opposing the streetcar.

While the ads stated that they were "Paid for the Black Lives Matter Coalition," Peterson paid for them himself, according to Urban Milwaukee.

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With big money friends like O'Keefe and the Kochs, who are trying to turn secret spending by millionaires and billionaires in campaigns and elections into a principled fight for "constitutionally protected free speech," Peterson is well positioned to unleash a tidal wave of phony "issue ads" at the last minute to sway a low turnout election. In the August 2014 Milwaukee Democratic primary, less than 114,000 voted compared to 332,000 in the November general election.

Stay tuned.
Atlanta Falcons guard Justin Blalock plays the tuba during a rehearsal for a concert featuring youth musicians and members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, as part of a four-day youth workshop at the Atlanta Symphony Hall in the Woodruff Arts Center, Thursday, June 27, 2013, in Atlanta. Blalock, who grew up playing the tuba and continues to play the drums and guitar, is a strong advocate for music education. (AP Photo/Jaime Henry-White)

President Barack Obama passed a law in December that explicitly names music as a subject to be included in K-12 schools under the rubric of a well-rounded education. This designation will not only give music and arts educators leverage to prevent cutting these subjects from school budgets, but also access to Federal and State Title I and Title IV funds--specifically designated for disadvantaged students.

The National Association for Music Education is rightfully celebrating this victory for school music. But it is all young people in this country who could benefit from music education, and the lessons we learn from them show us that a diverse curriculum that enhances creativity is a tool for a better life.

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Music educators in K-12 education have continually been fighting for a place at the curriculum table. Advocacy efforts abound-some more desperate than others such as the now false (but persistent) myth that "music makes you smarter." Some may recall in 1998 when Governor Zell Miller of Georgia sent home classical music tapes with newborn babies.

The "Every Student Succeeds Act" of 2015 replaces "No Child Left Behind" as a hopeful antidote to the heavy testing-craze that has enveloped the nation for the past 20 years, and presents a wave for music educators to ride on in their advocacy efforts.

The proclamation that an education is well-rounded, was recently touted by new Education Secretary John King, as the answer du jour. Yes, arts and music advocates should take advantage of this.

But what does a well-rounded education mean and is the definition different for different audiences of students?

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In my research in music creativity as well as my most recent work in prison music programs, I witness the incredible power of music making and the passion and engagement of incarcerated youth in their creative work.

These young people ages 12-18 are telling their stories through music creation that is culturally relevant to their lives. Often this is rap and hip-hop. the vast majority of arts programs in detention centers and prisons are student-centered and offer culturally relevant experiences.

Residents in the majority of these program engage in making choices, they compose, they tell their stories; and the centers that host these programs see positive differences in the residents as a result.

In the traditional school setting, ideally music education provides a welcome break in the school day for students. It offers alternatives to "right-answer" subjects such as math and reading, and can provide a creative alternative to the state and federal mandated testing. Music fills out a well-rounded education for all of our students.

But advocates as well as parents and supporters of music education need to continue to carefully examine just how "well-rounded" music education is in schools.

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Some consider music classes geared toward the development of creativity through composition and improvisation as optimal. In some music classrooms allowing students to fail and make mistakes in their explorations with sound is preferred. And if schools honor music from all cultures and genres, not just the hallowed "Western canon," some say that is the best approach.

Music educators need to look more closely as to why and if music is indeed helping to provide a well-rounded remedy to the competitive "right-answer" classes that fill the majority of students' days.

There is certainly a place for continuing these special offerings. I was a "band junkie" and the social aspect alone helped enhance the quality of my school day. From my perspective now as an educator for over 30 years, however, I feel that the large ensemble programs could do a better job of incorporating more student-centered and creative thinking as part of their curriculum.

Band, choir and orchestra programs should not (and likely will not) disappear, but many students in our schools find the large ensemble experience uncomfortable, irrelevant to their lives, and not able to foster engagement in creative musical independence.

There is a need to think more imaginatively about the kind of music curricular offerings provided in a K-12 school day in order to indeed be more "well-rounded."

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Many students would benefit from engaging, culturally relevant and creative music making opportunities in schools. If and when schools begin to collect grant funds in the name of providing well-rounded music programs for students, I hope it is not to remedy the situation by simply exposing them to the traditional Western European Art Music that is prevalent in school music curricula.

Music educators should indeed celebrate the victory of the recent Every Student Succeeds Act, and in this celebration begin to imagine new ways to make a difference in the lives of all students.
One of the universal lessons of science is that the work transcends the scientist. Through a combination of experimentation, the verification of results, and vindication of a theory or conclusion in a credible journal, the work speaks for itself. The responsible scientist may move on, the affiliated institution may vastly change or even disappear, but the workproperly recordedis essentially immortal.

Indeed, many of the writings of Greek physician Hippocrates (c.460 - c.375 BC) are readily available.

Such preservation of scientific works surely represents knowledge management in the purest form. Applying that standard to the business world, a subject I have addressed before and continue to explore here, is critical.

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Consider this column a sequel to my initial thoughts on this matter because, as I wrote then and reiterate now, we need leaders, we need statesmen. But in our search for the best and the brightest, and as those individuals transition as they might, we can ill afford the loss of knowledge.

If an executive were to suddenly departor diethen a company, especially a small to medium-sized business, could be vulnerable to a host of serious problems. Preventing that scenario is critical because it affects everything from employee morale to the very life of an organization.

To corporate leaders, I ask: What is your plan for knowledge management? Do you even have a plan to capture, preserveand furtherthe work of an otherwise essential employee? Do you know the consequences of inaction, the price you will payin the loss of operations, client trust and/or negative publicityif you do not approach knowledge management as a top priority?

I'll let Paul Cevolani of Novus Origo (the name means "New Beginning") weigh in:

"Knowledge management and the associated change management activities can be the difference between adaptingand thrivingamidst difficult circumstances, versus acquiescing to the same forces. If we can make this process a part of a company's standard operationsif we make the situation less tumultuous and more of a smooth transitionthen we can save companies the emotional cost, and the financial expense, of trying to replace the lost knowledge or crucial work product from a former employee."

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The alternative, as Cevolani argues, is unacceptable because "it is irresponsible for any company to leave so much to chance, when in today's work environment the chances are more likely than not that critical knowledge will go uncaptured and undocumented."

In other words, it is imperative that you collect and manage the work processes of your employees, so there is no ambiguity, no misinterpretation...no confusion. Handled this way, knowledge management becomes second nature, and part of the everyday process of a company's operations.
Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi arrives to a meeting between OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers, in Doha, Qatar April 17, 2016. REUTERS/Ibraheem Al Omari

The Collapse of the Old Oil Order

Sunday, April 17th was the designated moment. The worlds leading oil producers were expected to bring fresh discipline to the chaotic petroleum market and spark a return to high prices. Meeting in Doha, the glittering capital of petroleum-rich Qatar, the oil ministers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), along with such key non-OPEC producers as Russia and Mexico, were scheduled to ratify a draft agreement obliging them to freeze their oil output at current levels. In anticipation of such a deal, oil prices had begun to creep inexorably upward, from $30 per barrel in mid-January to $43 on the eve of the gathering. But far from restoring the old oil order, the meeting ended in discord, driving prices down again and revealing deep cracks in the ranks of global energy producers.

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It is hard to overstate the significance of the Doha debacle. At the very least, it will perpetuate the low oil prices that have plagued the industry for the past two years, forcing smaller firms into bankruptcy and erasing hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in new production capacity. It may also have obliterated any future prospects for cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC producers in regulating the market. Most of all, however, it demonstrated that the petroleum-fueled world weve known these last decades -- with oil demand always thrusting ahead of supply, ensuring steady profits for all major producers -- is no more. Replacing it is an anemic, possibly even declining, demand for oil that is likely to force suppliers to fight one another for ever-diminishing market shares.

The Road to Doha

Before the Doha gathering, the leaders of the major producing countries expressed confidence that a production freeze would finally halt the devastating slump in oil prices that began in mid-2014. Most of them are heavily dependent on petroleum exports to finance their governments and keep restiveness among their populaces at bay. Both Russia and Venezuela, for instance, rely on energy exports for approximately 50% of government income, while for Nigeria its more like 75%. So the plunge in prices had already cut deep into government spending around the world, causing civil unrest and even in some cases political turmoil.

No one expected the April 17th meeting to result in an immediate, dramatic price upturn, but everyone hoped that it would lay the foundation for a steady rise in the coming months. The leaders of these countries were well aware of one thing: to achieve such progress, unity was crucial. Otherwise they were not likely to overcome the various factors that had caused the price collapse in the first place. Some of these were structural and embedded deep in the way the industry had been organized; some were the product of their own feckless responses to the crisis.

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On the structural side, global demand for energy had, in recent years, ceased to rise quickly enough to soak up all the crude oil pouring onto the market, thanks in part to new supplies from Iraq and especially from the expanding shale fields of the United States. This oversupply triggered the initial 2014 price drop when Brent crude -- the international benchmark blend -- went from a high of $115 on June 19th to $77 on November 26th, the day before a fateful OPEC meeting in Vienna. The next day, OPEC members, led by Saudi Arabia, failed to agree on either production cuts or a freeze, and the price of oil went into freefall.

The failure of that November meeting has been widely attributed to the Saudis desire to kill off new output elsewhere -- especially shale production in the United States -- and to restore their historic dominance of the global oil market. Many analysts were also convinced that Riyadh was seeking to punish regional rivals Iran and Russia for their support of the Assad regime in Syria (which the Saudis seek to topple).

The rejection, in other words, was meant to fulfill two tasks at the same time: blunt or wipe out the challenge posed by North American shale producers and undermine two economically shaky energy powers that opposed Saudi goals in the Middle East by depriving them of much needed oil revenues. Because Saudi Arabia could produce oil so much more cheaply than other countries -- for as little as $3 per barrel -- and because it could draw upon hundreds of billions of dollars in sovereign wealth funds to meet any budget shortfalls of its own, its leaders believed it more capable of weathering any price downturn than its rivals. Today, however, that rosy prediction is looking grimmer as the Saudi royals begin to feel the pinch of low oil prices, and find themselves cutting back on the benefits they had been passing on to an ever-growing, potentially restive population while still financing a costly, inconclusive, and increasingly disastrous war in Yemen.

Many energy analysts became convinced that Doha would prove the decisive moment when Riyadh would finally be amenable to a production freeze. Just days before the conference, participants expressed growing confidence that such a plan would indeed be adopted. After all, preliminary negotiations between Russia, Venezuela, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia had produced a draft document that most participants assumed was essentially ready for signature. The only sticking point: the nature of Irans participation.

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The Iranians were, in fact, agreeable to such a freeze, but only after they were allowed to raise their relatively modest daily output to levels achieved in 2012 before the West imposed sanctions in an effort to force Tehran to agree to dismantle its nuclear enrichment program. Now that those sanctions were, in fact, being lifted as a result of the recently concluded nuclear deal, Tehran was determined to restore the status quo ante. On this, the Saudis balked, having no wish to see their arch-rival obtain added oil revenues. Still, most observers assumed that, in the end, Riyadh would agree to a formula allowing Iran some increase before a freeze. There are positive indications an agreement will be reached during this meeting... an initial agreement on freezing production, said Nawal Al-Fuzaia, Kuwaits OPEC representative, echoing the views of other Doha participants.

But then something happened. According to people familiar with the sequence of events, Saudi Arabias Deputy Crown Prince and key oil strategist, Mohammed bin Salman, called the Saudi delegation in Doha at 3:00 a.m. on April 17th and instructed them to spurn a deal that provided leeway of any sort for Iran. When the Iranians -- who chose not to attend the meeting -- signaled that they had no intention of freezing their output to satisfy their rivals, the Saudis rejected the draft agreement it had helped negotiate and the assembly ended in disarray.

Geopolitics to the Fore

Most analysts have since suggested that the Saudi royals simply considered punishing Iran more important than lowering oil prices. No matter the cost to them, in other words, they could not bring themselves to help Iran pursue its geopolitical objectives, including giving yet more support to Shiite forces in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon. Already feeling pressured by Tehran and ever less confident of Washingtons support, they were ready to use any means available to weaken the Iranians, whatever the danger to themselves.

The failure to reach an agreement in Doha is a reminder that Saudi Arabia is in no mood to do Iran any favors right now and that their ongoing geopolitical conflict cannot be discounted as an element of the current Saudi oil policy, said Jason Bordoff of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

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Many analysts also pointed to the rising influence of Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, entrusted with near-total control of the economy and the military by his aging father, King Salman. As Minister of Defense, the prince has spearheaded the Saudi drive to counter the Iranians in a regional struggle for dominance. Most significantly, he is the main force behind Saudi Arabias ongoing intervention in Yemen, aimed at defeating the Houthi rebels, a largely Shia group with loose ties to Iran, and restoring deposed former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. After a year of relentless U.S.-backed airstrikes (including the use of cluster bombs), the Saudi intervention has, in fact, failed to achieve its intended objectives, though it has produced thousands of civilian casualties, provoking fierce condemnation from U.N. officials, and created space for the rise of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Nevertheless, the prince seems determined to keep the conflict going and to counter Iranian influence across the region.

For Prince Mohammed, the oil market has evidently become just another arena for this ongoing struggle. Under his guidance, the Financial Times noted in April, Saudi Arabias oil policy appears to be less driven by the price of crude than global politics, particularly Riyadhs bitter rivalry with post-sanctions Tehran. This seems to have been the backstory for Riyadhs last-minute decision to scuttle the talks in Doha. On April 16th, for instance, Prince Mohammed couldnt have been blunter to Bloomberg, even if he didnt mention the Iranians by name: If all major producers dont freeze production, we will not freeze production.

With the proposed agreement in tatters, Saudi Arabia is now expected to boost its own output, ensuring that prices will remain bargain-basement low and so deprive Iran of any windfall from its expected increase in exports. The kingdom, Prince Mohammed told Bloomberg, was prepared to immediately raise production from its current 10.2 million barrels per day to 11.5 million barrels and could add another million barrels if we wanted to in the next six to nine months. With Iranian and Iraqi oil heading for market in larger quantities, thats the definition of oversupply. It would certainly ensure Saudi Arabias continued dominance of the market, but it might also wound the kingdom in a major way, if not fatally.

A New Global Reality

No doubt geopolitics played a significant role in the Saudi decision, but thats hardly the whole story. Overshadowing discussions about a possible production freeze was a new fact of life for the oil industry: the past would be no predictor of the future when it came to global oil demand. Whatever the Saudis think of the Iranians or vice versa, their industry is being fundamentally transformed, altering relationships among the major producers and eroding their inclination to cooperate.

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Until very recently, it was assumed that the demand for oil would continue to expand indefinitely, creating space for multiple producers to enter the market, and for ones already in it to increase their output. Even when supply outran demand and drove prices down, as has periodically occurred, producers could always take solace in the knowledge that, as in the past, demand would eventually rebound, jacking prices up again. Under such circumstances and at such a moment, it was just good sense for individual producers to cooperate in lowering output, knowing that everyone would benefit sooner or later from the inevitable price increase.

But what happens if confidence in the eventual resurgence of demand begins to wither? Then the incentives to cooperate begin to evaporate, too, and its every producer for itself in a mad scramble to protect market share. This new reality -- a world in which peak oil demand, rather than peak oil, will shape the consciousness of major players -- is what the Doha catastrophe foreshadowed.

At the beginning of this century, many energy analysts were convinced that we were at the edge of the arrival of peak oil; a peak, that is, in the output of petroleum in which planetary reserves would be exhausted long before the demand for oil disappeared, triggering a global economic crisis. As a result of advances in drilling technology, however, the supply of oil has continued to grow, while demand has unexpectedly begun to stall. This can be traced both to slowing economic growth globally and to an accelerating green revolution in which the planet will be transitioning to non-carbon fuel sources. With most nations now committed to measures aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases under the just-signed Paris climate accord, the demand for oil is likely to experience significant declines in the years ahead. In other words, global oil demand will peak long before supplies begin to run low, creating a monumental challenge for the oil-producing countries.

This is no theoretical construct. Its reality itself. Net consumption of oil in the advanced industrialized nations has already dropped from 50 million barrels per day in 2005 to 45 million barrels in 2014. Further declines are in store as strict fuel efficiency standards for the production of new vehicles and other climate-related measures take effect, the price of solar and wind power continues to fall, and other alternative energy sources come on line. While the demand for oil does continue to rise in the developing world, even there its not climbing at rates previously taken for granted. With such countries also beginning to impose tougher constraints on carbon emissions, global consumption is expected to reach a peak and begin an inexorable decline. According to experts Thijs Van de Graaf and Aviel Verbruggen, overall world peak demand could be reached as early as 2020.

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In such a world, high-cost oil producers will be driven out of the market and the advantage -- such as it is -- will lie with the lowest-cost ones. Countries that depend on petroleum exports for a large share of their revenues will come under increasing pressure to move away from excessive reliance on oil. This may have been another consideration in the Saudi decision at Doha. In the months leading up to the April meeting, senior Saudi officials dropped hints that they were beginning to plan for a post-petroleum era and that Deputy Crown Prince bin Salman would play a key role in overseeing the transition.

On April 1st, the prince himself indicated that steps were underway to begin this process. As part of the effort, he announced, he was planning an initial public offering of shares in state-owned Saudi Aramco, the worlds number one oil producer, and would transfer the proceeds, an estimated $2 trillion, to its Public Investment Fund (PIF). IPOing Aramco and transferring its shares to PIF will technically make investments the source of Saudi government revenue, not oil, the prince pointed out. What is left now is to diversify investments. So within 20 years, we will be an economy or state that doesnt depend mainly on oil.

For a country that more than any other has rested its claim to wealth and power on the production and sale of petroleum, this is a revolutionary statement. If Saudi Arabia says it is ready to begin a move away from reliance on petroleum, we are indeed entering a new world in which, among other things, the titans of oil production will no longer hold sway over our lives as they have in the past.

This, in fact, appears to be the outlook adopted by Prince Mohammed in the wake of the Doha debacle. In announcing the kingdoms new economic blueprint on April 25th, he vowed to liberate the country from its addiction to oil. This will not, of course, be easy to achieve, given the kingdoms heavy reliance on oil revenues and lack of plausible alternatives. The 30-year-old prince could also face opposition from within the royal family to his audacious moves (as well as his blundering ones in Yemen and possibly elsewhere). Whatever the fate of the Saudi royals, however, if predictions of a future peak in world oil demand prove accurate, the debacle in Doha will be seen as marking the beginning of the end of the old oil order.

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"Are we there yet?" I asked. "Almost," replied Grandpa.

Each minute felt like an hour. After all, it was our first time visiting Florida since my Grandma and Grandpa had moved to Tampa from Wisconsin, and Walt Disney World was a dream come true for an 8-year old. The anticipation was killing me. Everything I didn't know about Disney World was waiting for me to discover it.

In the daily events of our lives, getting there can mean a myriad of things. For our trip to Florida, it meant entering the gates of the Magic Kingdom. In other areas of our lives, there might be a new job, finding our soul mate, or buying our first house--it really depends on what we intend to accomplish and how we think we'll feel once we do.

But in the meantime, how do we stay present and enjoy the moment?

In his compelling book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle writes, "The more you are focused on time--past and future--the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is."

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By using common logic and without getting too esoteric, we can already be there in many ways--in our minds--but the only place we can actually [physically] experience is here--the present moment. The Now. Our powerful thoughts and imagination can take us in many directions--into the past or future--but the present moment is where all of our power is.

The moment we have right now is our moment of creation. Everything else is simply our imagination. But our imagination is directly affected by our thoughts in the present moment, and our future is changed by the thoughts that we hold.

Think of your thoughts like a pebble. If a pebble is dropped into a pond, it will start a ripple effect. So do thoughts. The thoughts you're thinking right now affect your future experiences--they have a ripple effect.

The challenge is one of anticipation--learning how to be happy in the present moment, even if what we are waiting for hasn't happened yet. Then, getting there will simply become the next moment and not the only point of the happiness experience.

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* * *

As we finally pulled into the parking lot at Walt Disney World, I couldn't sit still--I was so excited. We finally arrived--we were there. But I had also felt the excitement of the whole experience, and this made the day seem that much sweeter. What could have been just the pleasure of the park became the full memory of the before, during, and after.

And by keeping that mindset and applying it to my life, I have learned how to maintain an appreciation of the journey, not just the destination.

Learn more about how to be present and appreciate the journey in 21 Days to Better Balance or one of Michael's other books at michaelsunnarborg.com/books.


Handout picture of Cuban official website www.cubadebate.cu, showing President Raul Castro giving a speech during the opening of VII Congress of Cuban Communist Party (PCC) at Convention Palace in Havana, on April 16, 2016. President Raul Castro vowed Saturday never to pursue 'privatizing formulas' or 'shock therapy,' setting the tone for a Communist Party congress convened to review progress in revamping the island's Soviet-style economy. / AFP / Cuba Debate / ISMAEL FRANCISCO / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE - NO MARKETING, NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS - MANDATORY CREDIT: AFP PHOTO/CUBA DEBATE/ISMAEL FRANCISCO - DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS - XGTY (Photo credit should read ISMAEL FRANCISCO/AFP/Getty Images)

At the VII Communist Party Congress, Raul Castro warned of the perils posed by imperialism (American), foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez strongly tried to diminish Obamas' influence on the Cuban population, and all delegates voted to strengthen the ideological campaign.

Just a month earlier, the general-president welcomed the president of the United States, blessed by the American and Cuban flags and anthems at the official ceremony in the Palace of the Revolution. Strong speeches were intended to please the hardliners within the system, warn the people of the limits to the "socialist civil society" and internationally disguise weakness. The Cuban government needs improvement of the relations with the former enemy to ameliorate the economy with foreign investments from partners not frightened by sanctions.

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The Party is the principal power, thus the meeting had the paramount importance of taking place when the so called historic leaders in their late eighties had to place their proteges, leaving the guidelines to assure a safe life until they depart from this world. Raul Castro had promised to step down as president of the Councils of State and Government in 2018, but remaining as first secretary of the party until 2021, he will keep the reins of power to draft a new Constitution and other legislations as to bring about the economic, social and political measures, suitable to maintain the so-called Cuban socialism -- Castrism in fact.

Nevertheless Cubans have changed a lot. Almost 80% of the population was born after 1959, expecting improvement of their harsh daily life. Blaming the American imperialism after decades became a practical joke. Common strong supporters of the Revolution have miserable pensions, middle aged is underpaid and youngsters search for opportunities impossible to envisage. Raul Castro promised economic changes, but fears of the old guard at all levels, tight State control, insufficient financial resources, low exports and high imports, lack of motivations to work and corruption deepen credibility loss. The decisions of the VII Congress and the statements of the delegates published are commented with disdain, while Cubans criticize the intend to diminish president Obama's proximity and the positive impact of his ideas, expressed standing next to a Raul Castro without any response.

The party congress in course, a delegation led by the chairmen of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Smithsonian Institution (SI) arrived April 18th. Seventy-two leaders and artists, including Usher, William Adams, Dave Matthews, Kal Penn, Smokey Robinson, George Stevens, Alfred Bell, and Alfre Woodard followed President Obama. After a four-day visit, David Skorton, chairman of the SI and Gradys Collazo, president of the Council of National Heritage, read a joint declaration expressing the intention of further exchanges and to dedicate the Folklife Festival 2017 to Cuba. Jane Chu, chairman of the NEA, announced that, for the first time, the U.S. government would fund visits of American artists to Cuba through the U.S. Artists International program, and a separate program will welcome Cuban artists to the United States. The University of Delaware posted that soon a delegation will head to Cuba with support from the NEH, to learn about preservation and methods, and see Cuban collections and visit museums, libraries and archives.

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An important sign that Raul Castro is paving the way was government lifting the restriction to Cuban citizens to enter and leave the island on merchant vessels and cruise. Tourism has become a major priority for the economic recovering plan, and while Americans are banned to travel beyond 12 categories, Cuban-Americans will be most of the passengers. The 704-passenger Adonia of Carnival's Fathom brand was scheduled to make the first trip, but Cuban policy provoked a discrimination suit by Cuban-Americans and criticism by Secretary of State John Kerry that led Carnival to accept booking from Cuba-Americans.

Moreover, Cubans living on the island will be able to work in the vessels, under contract to a State-owned enterprise. The Note published April 22 by Granma newspaper said authorities were also reviewing a ban on citizens boarding recreational vessels such as fishing boats and yachts. The first cruise of Carnival Corp should arrive in Havana from Miami May 1, while Cubans must be rallying in support of the VII Congress decisions.

And in the heart of Havana, the frenzy of government workers repairing streets, mending telephone and electric systems, and painting buildings continued after Obama departure. A lot of people are hired and cuentapropistas (self-employed) smiling comment they must close their businesses for some days, but they are going to be well paid by the Americans. For the first time an American company was allowed to film in Cuba. An installment of the Fast and Furious franchise is being shot. From April 22 to May 5 transit will be altered from 7am until work ends informed a long Note in Tribuna de La Habana, on April 24. Dwellers and commuters do not complain. Amazingly, neither the VII Congress of the Communist Party nor May 1 rally, but Americans are making a difference in decades of destruction and government's disdain.

The same officials roaring against the hegemonic influence eagerly welcome U.S. entrepreneurs, investors, politicians, academics, scientist, artists and musicians. In Cuba nothing is what it seems. But Cubans can make a difference, seizing the challenges in a unique time of opportunities for changes.

Havana, April 24, 2016
pleasant hill december 24 ...

Target recently affirmed that transgender people should use the facilities in their stores that match their gender identity. Naturally, this act of simple decency prompted a backlash from the far-right hate group that labels itself the American Family Association, which launched a petition urging a boycott of Target for its trans-inclusive policies. This petition has received hundred of thousands of signatures. What message does this send transgender people, particularly transgender children? It tells them that a frighteningly large number of their fellow citizens want to extinguish their right to exist as the people who they truly are.

Comedian Trae Crowder, the celebrated "Liberal Redneck," has responded to this hateful boycott with hard truths and brilliant wit. We encourage you to watch and share his video, and to sign the petition he has included with it to support Target and transgender rights. Please take the extra minute to sign the petition and make a statement against prejudice. Every signature adds to the voices of people who are fed up with the malicious lies being told about transgender individuals and stands up for their humanity.

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Here is Trae Crowder's video, with the link to the petition supporting Target:

Here is also a direct link to the petition supporting Target.
The delicious flavors of a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich in this huge, main course salad. To make it heartier, I've included lean turkey in addition to the bacon, tomatoes and lettuce. It's topped with my skinny ranch dressing and toasted, homemade bread crumbs. Pure yumminess!!! Each salad has 247 calories, 5 grams of fat and 5 Weight Watchers SmartPoints. This has become my "go-to" salad!

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients

2 bacon strips, see shopping tips

 slice multi-grain bread or whole wheat bread, see shopping tips

4 cups romaine lettuce, chopped

2 ounces cooked turkey breast (luncheon meat), diced

 cup tomatoes, chopped

1 tablespoons scallions, chopped, if desired

2 tablespoons skinny ranch dressing

Instructions

1. Cook bacon-Line bottom of a microwave safe plate with paper towels. Place bacon on top and cover with paper towels. Cook in microwave for about 2-3 minutes, until bacon is crispy. Cool slightly and crumble.

2. To make bread crumbs-Toast bread. Add toasted bread to a blender and grind into crumbs.

3. Add chopped lettuce to a dinner plate. Top with turkey, tomatoes, scallions, and crumbled bacon. Drizzle dressing over salad and sprinkle bread crumbs on top.

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Makes 1 main course salad. This recipe can easily be doubled, tripled and so on.

Shopping Tips

I've combed the supermarket shelves looking for one of the leanest regular bacon choices and Oscar Meyer Center Cut Bacon is my favorite, compared to most regular bacon. It's much lower in fat and calories. Once cooked on paper towels, the fat is even lower. I calculated my Skinny Facts using this bacon.

In addition, I recently discovered a fantastic bacon called Applegate Farms Natural Sunday Bacon. It's low in fat and calories, uncured and contains no nitrites! Many supermarkets sell it. I bought mine at Vons/Safeway and Whole Foods. http://www.applegate.com/products/natural-sunday-bacon

I love Milton's multigrain bread and used  slice for this recipe. Most supermarkets sell it in addition to Trader Joe's and Costco. I used it to calculate the Skinny Facts. Or, use your favorite.

Weight Watchers SmartPoints 5

Weight Watchers Points Plus 6

Weight Watchers (old points) 5

SKINNY FACTS: for 1 main course salad

247 calories, 7g fat, 2g sat. fat, 35g chol, 24g prot, 26g carbs, 7g fiber, 902mg sod, 5g sugar

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FACTS: for SmartPoints

198 calories, 2g sat. fat, 5g sugar, 21g protein

Note:

1. The nutrition facts were calculated on Spark People.com.

2. The Weight Watchers SmartPoints and Points Plus were calculated on CalculatorCat.com.

For more Skinny Kitchen recipes, please join me at: http://www.skinnykitchen.com

Follow Nancy Fox on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SkinnyKitchen

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Since 1998, he had been serving a life sentence in federal prison for selling crack cocaine in his native McKinney, Texas. It was his first criminal offense, but due to the Drug Act of 1986 and the mandatory minimum sentences it required, Hernandez found himself locked up at the age of 21. Then, in 2013, his prayers and petitions were answered: He was granted clemency by President Obama.
In the world of diplomacy, Geneva is a powerhouse. It's where international standards are set, humanitarian response is coordinated, trade disputes are settled, peace negotiations are brokered and global pandemics are addressed. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, people understand how difficult but also how essential it is to bridge differences in cultures, interests and priorities. So when the Geneva Gender Champions network welcomed its 100th member earlier this week, people took notice.

What they saw was a formidable, albeit diverse, group of organizations and countries coming together, in record time, in the name of gender equality. What we Champions saw was possibility, and hope for a future where gender equality is the norm. And in our case, it all started with three simple but powerful ideas:

Panel Parity Pledge. The first thing we did was to take a stand, in the form of a pledge common to all Gender Champions, showing the world that we stand united against all-male panels in Geneva. Through the Panel Parity Pledge, we're challenging stereotypes, broadening awareness, and spurring conversations about the importance of hearing female perspectives. Today, less than one year after Michael Mller, Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva, announced that he would no longer accept invitations to serve on panels without women participants, other male leaders have followed in his footsteps. Through these collective actions, we are making equality visible, one panel at a time.

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Personal Commitments. Despite progress, equality remains elusive. Consider that by some estimates, gender equality in the workplace will not be achieved until 2095. Grass-roots movements are indispensable, but they are not sufficient. The Geneva Gender Champions network is built around a top-down approach, where leaders make personal commitments on behalf of their organizations to promote gender equality. Our 100 Gender Champions have already made 250 concrete, measurable commitments. These leaders recognize that not only is gender equality the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do, better positioning our organizations and our communities for long-term success.

Take the time to look at these commitments. They reflect the latest thinking of some of the world's major international organizations on effective tools for achieving gender equality. While the Panel Parity Pledge is universal, each Champion customizes his or her additional GGC commitments. Though tailored to each organization's needs and priorities, common themes have emerged. Many commitments seek to improve how we recruit, select and promote hard-working, talented women. Some work to shape a new culture in the workplace, one that is more respectful of everyone's needs and aspirations. Others emphasize training and mentoring, or the collection and reporting of gender-disaggregated data, which is critical to showing that gender is central to many of the challenges we're facing today. Together, these commitments send a powerful message - that here in International Geneva, we will no longer accept business as usual.

Synergies. We cannot continue to think of gender equality as a zero-sum game, whereby every opportunity given to a woman is an opportunity taken away from a man. When, on average, women spend more than twice as much time as men on unpaid work every single day, it has a direct impact on their labor force participation and a negative effect on the entire economy. When parents continue to rate the math abilities of their daughters lower than that of boys with identical math performance in school, we ultimately deprive ourselves of the talent necessary to solve some of our toughest global challenges. And when countries came together at the United Nations last September to dedicate one of the 17 new Sustainable Development Goals to gender equality, they signaled to the world that peace and security and economic growth will only be accomplished by putting women and girls front and center.

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Because gender issues are global, complex and interconnected, any force for change must cut across disciplines, organizations, and other traditional boundaries. One of our Champions said that "Galvanizing change is not always about starting a revolution, but rather, changing mindsets and breaking down silos." Creating synergies among the various sectors and actors of Geneva's international community is the third and last idea on which our network was built. This wouldn't be possible but for the diversity of our Champions and the flexibility of our network's structure.
It has been in the national news a lot, but a lot of people don't know what it means to be a transgender person. Frankly, three years ago, neither did I. When I studied psychology and neuroscience in college over 15 years ago, I learned that sex is what it is to be biologically male or female, whereas gender is what it is to be psychologically male or female. In most people, they are usually the same, but sometimes they are not.



Since becoming a State Representative, I have also come to understand that a lot of people think being transgender is cross dressing; these are completely different. I have learned what pronoun to use when addressing someone who is transgender -- use the pronoun consistent with their gender identity. Being transgender isn't something that you one day wake up and realize you are, or switching back and forth between genders at will; becoming transgender is a process of self-discovery that can happen at any age in life. It can be very confusing and even scary. But eventually, someone who is a transgender person is comfortable with who they are. Gender identity isn't optional. It is at the core of who you are.



While some states are taking steps to limit LGBT rights, I have been getting a lot of emails from constituents asking me to oppose or support the so-called Massachusetts 'bathroom bill' H.1577, of which I am a co-sponsor.



First of all, nowhere in the bill is the word bathroom used. My use of the word bathroom in the title of this article is catchy but very misleading about what the bill is about.



The bill is about all public accommodations. One definition I found stated that:

In US law, public accommodations are generally defined as facilities, both public and private, used by the public. Examples include retail stores, rental establishments and service establishments as well as educational institutions, recreational facilities, and service centers.

This bill seeks to protect transgender people from discrimination in public spaces. This bill is about civil rights. One definition I found stated that

Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals. They ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the society and state without discrimination or repression.

Most of the opposition to the bill comes in the form of fear mongering. The same people who opposed same sex marriage claimed it would destroy marriage, yet divorce rates are down. Now, the same opponents claim that passage of the bill will make women and children less safe. This is just not true. Protecting the civil rights of transgender people doesn't permit others to break the law. One transgender person wrote:

The legislators introducing these bills [to ban anti-LGBT legislation] claim they are about public safety. But it's important to know that in the 18 states (and more than 200 cities) that have laws and ordinances protecting transgender people from discrimination, there have been no increases in public safety incidents. None. Why? Because there are laws in every state which make it illegal for anyone to enter a restroom to harm or harass people, or invade their privacy. Police use those laws to arrest perpetrators and keep people safe. Protecting LGBT people from discrimination doesn't change that!

Think about it. A transgender person going into a restroom is going in for the same reason as someone who is not transgender. If someone is in there taking pictures or being a voyeur or doing anything else inappropriate or illegal, that is already against the law. Protecting transgender public accommodation rights doesn't change that.

I have published over two dozen articles on sex offenders and keeping kids safe from sex offenders. I worked in prison and jail, and have a master's in criminology. In late April, I was contacted by a film producer to be interviewed for their documentary on sex offenders. I know more about sex offenders than most people. Preventing a transgender person from using a restroom consistent with his or her gender identity has nothing to do with keeping women and kids safe from sex offenders. This bill is about civil rights.

Can I promise you that no one will ever try to exploit this legislation? No. But I can't promise you that guns, cars, alcohol, or the internet won't be abused either. And we don't deny people the right to bear arms, drive a car, or use the internet because others may shoot someone with a gun, drink and drive, or promote child abuse on the internet. In short, we don't deny someone rights because others may abuse those rights. That would be wrong.

Gender identity is at the core of who we are. No one should be discriminated against based on their gender identity. That is why I support transgender public accommodation rights.

Paul Heroux is a State Representative from Massachusetts. He can be contacted at paulheroux.mpa@gmail.com.
John King Jr., senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Education, speaks during a news conference with U.S. President Barack Obama, not pictured, in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, Oct. 2, 2015. Obama announced that Education Secretary Arne Duncan is stepping down in December and will be replaced by Deputy Secretary John B. King Jr. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

If you're on the USED mailing list, this weekend you received a "Friend" e-mail from John King, the latest in a series best entitled Let's Keep Throwing PR Spaghetti At The Wall Until Something Sticks.

The theme, as with his Vegas speech a few weeks ago, is that gosh, we just have to get the focus back on a well-rounded education because somehow, some way, we've just gotten all twisted up with this testing stuff.

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The most powerful thing about John King is his story, so he pulls that out again and seriously, there is nothing that anyone can mock about King's story. His mother died, and he was raised for a few years by a very sick father who then also died, and King was an orphan at age 12. He credits his teachers in general and one, Mr. Osterweil, in particular, for saving his life. And in this letter's retelling of the story, he also credits how involvement in and exposure to the arts also made a huge difference. That's a new feature; the moral of King's story is usually that great teachers and an orderly school can turn a student's life around. Now they also need exposure to the arts to open up the world.

The most intriguing thing about King's story has always been that he fails to draw any of the obvious lessons from it, like that fact that Alan Osterweil saved King's life without the benefit of Common Core Standards or a Big Standardized Test. King has never publicly considered whether the reforms he has championed would have helped or hindered Osterweil, or if Osterweil would have approved of the aggressive, excessive suspension policy at King's Roxbury charter.

But King plows on, with more thin-sliced baloney:

I hear frequently and passionately from educators and families who believe that the elements of a great well-rounded education are being neglected because of a too tight focus on reading and math.



Well, yes. I'm sure you do. But do you have any idea how such a thing happened?

Sometimes, that's because of constraints on resources, time, and money. Often, teachers and administrators describe how No Child Left Behind and its intense focus on English and math performance left other subjects under-attended to or even ignored.

The mystery here is whether King is incredibly dense, or he thinks the rest of us are. First, the constraints of resources, time and money would not necessarily affect the arts except the federal government mandated that reading and math must be the focus of all education. And that didn't just happen under NCLB-- it continued and was intensified under the Obama-Duncan administration and Race to the Top along with Waiverpallooza, which required states to tie math and reading scores to teacher and school evaluations.

And King has to know that. Arne Duncan can claim ignorance from being safely ensconced in the beltway bubble, but King was out there trying to sell this mess to the people of New York in meetings so contentious that King canceled them and had to be forced back out there to meet with people.

The narrowing of the America's curriculum did not just mysteriously happen. It was the direct and completely predictable result of the policies pursued by the last two administrations.

I've been clear, as has the President and my predecessor, Arne Duncan, that in many places in the country, testing has become excessive, redundant, and overemphasized. We're committed at the Department of Education to changing that reality, but we need your help. We need to work together to make well-rounded education a priority for the benefit of our students.

Great. I look forward to the department calling for the end of Big Standardized Tests. I look forward to the department demanding that teacher and school evaluations no longer be linked in any way to such tests, so that no system of perverse incentives continues to twist education out of shape. If all that happens, I will even be willing to move forward and stop waiting for the day when USED wailing and moaning about too much testing and narrowing of curriculum is accompanied by a secretary saying, "We did that. We did that. It was our policies. Our ideas. This is totally our fault."

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But none of that is going to happen.

Done well and thoughtfully, assessments provide vital information to educators and families, but this shouldn't come at the cost of those subjects that spark passion and inspire the joy of learning.

Y'all keep testing. Just, you know, do it more thoughtfully.

King goes on to say that a well-rounded education is now the thing, and that many non-wealthy non-white students are missing out on this swell stuff, and that's a huge bummer. Then we reach the money sentence (I know because it is in bold, underlined text).



"Help me share" turns out to mean "click on this link and post a cool meme on Facebook."

"That's what a well-rounded education is all about: that inextricable intersection between what our kids learn and who they become."

I think the inextricable intersection here is between denying responsibility for past policy screw-ups and attempting to co-opt movements that are already going on. I mean, does King think that the rest of us do not already know that a well-rounded education is important, or that such roundedness has been a casualty of the last fifteen years worth of reformsterdom.

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What audience is he imagining here? Who on the USED mailing list is smacking themselves in the forehead, saying, "Why, damn! That's right! A well-rounded education IS important! How have I not seen this??!!" We all already knew this. We've been trying to tell the USED this for years!

No, this is the fine political process of figuring out where the crowd is headed and trying to run out ahead of them so you can pretend you're the leader. And it's a weak attempt. King would get so much further by saying,

We've made a lot of mistakes. We meant well, but we screwed things up, and now we would like to sit down and listen to you. We know you've been trying to tell us for years what public education needs, and now we are ready to hear what you have to say.

But of course, listening has never been King's strong suit.
What benefit do universities get who put courses on Coursera? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Daphne Koller, President and co-founder of Coursera, on Quora.

Coursera's goals and priorities are very well-aligned with those of our partner institutions - that's a large part of the reason that we've been able to partner with over 140 of the world's best universities. Every partner brings a slightly different perspective and strategy to their open online programs, and the primary motivation varies across institutions, but there a few major motivations that most have in common:

Global impact: On Coursera, an instructor can teach more students in a single course than they might teach in an entire career on campus. For someone who's passionate about their area of expertise and about sharing their ideas with others, this is an incredible opportunity. Instructors on our platform are often people who have spent their lives achieving mastery in a very specific topic, and Coursera allows them to reach the largest possible audience of learners who are interested in that topic and can benefit from the knowledge that an instructor has to share. Expansion of access also aligns with our partners' missions to benefit society, and many instructors and partners greatly appreciate the opportunity to expand the reach of their scholarship and teaching to populations of learners who might not otherwise have the opportunity to experience the benefits of university education.

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Global reach: Many of our partners have told us that the expanded visibility from offering courses on Coursera gives rise to significant increases in applications to their on-campus programs. Rice University, for example, noticed a substantial increase in the quality and quantity of applicants to their computer science Ph.D. program after launching several strong computer science courses on Coursera. Similarly, a professor at a university in the Netherlands recruited three fully-funded PhD students who first learned about his work through his Coursera course. Many institutions now see Coursera as an ideal venue to establish themselves as leaders in a particular content area, or to reinforce the overall strength of their existing brand.

Improving teaching and learning: For instructors who are conducting research in education, or who are interested in garnering insights to improve their on-campus instruction, offering a course on Coursera can yield an amazing amount of data. Our platform provides analytics on engagement and results across thousands of learners, allowing instructors to see trends that would be invisible in a traditional university classroom. The platform also provides the opportunity to experiment and refine pedagogy and teaching; for example, an instructor might be able to gradually refine videos, reading assignments, and practice tests to identify the changes that most effectively improve overall student engagement or learning outcomes. The insights that are derived from the public course can then be used to improve teaching and learning in more traditional university programs, and to uncover new best practices. In a sense, we can provide the opportunity to turn the art of teaching and learning into a data-driven science - the type of transformation that has revolutionized astronomy, biology, and many other fields.

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The ancient rabbis chose Isaiah's vision of peace on earth as the prophetic reading to accompany the Torah reading for the 8th day of Passover, the Festival of Freedom.

The wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid, calf and young lion and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them...(Isaiah 11:6)

"Indeed!" observed one of my teachers with cheerful cynicism, "but every day another lamb and every night a different kid"--understandably skeptical about just how repentant those new-fang[l]ed wolves could really be.

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But the very familiarity of the image testifies to the enduring power of Isaiah's vision. In most Jewish commentary, what he is taken to be describing is the redeemed reality of the messianic age; to Christians, it is the world as it will be after Jesus's second coming.

What I find most moving are the circumstances out of which the vision is conceived in the first place. The prophet describes a seemingly hopeless military situation. In the closing years of the eighth century BCE, the city of Jerusalem, the sole remaining stronghold of Judea, is under threat. The northern kingdom of Israel has already been defeated by the invading Assyrian army and its population deported to the far corners of its vast empire, where they will become known to history as The Ten Lost Tribes. Most of the southern kingdom of Judea has also been laid waste. Isaiah now envisions the Assyrian Emperor standing on the overlooking hills, shaking his fist at the beleaguered city. "Did I really enlist my entire army to wage war on such a puny place as this?'"

In is the midst of this crisis that Isaiah formulates his prophecy. And he is not alone in creating an extraordinary vision of redemption from the midst of the horrors of a siege.

Dmitri Shostakovich completed the work that came to be known as The Leningrad Symphony in December 1941, when the city was virtually surrounded by Nazis armies in the first months of what became a 900-day siege, perhaps the longest in recorded history. Though the premiere took place in Moscow, the most famous performance of the symphony was in the besieged city itself on August 9, 1942. The musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra were starving; several collapsed during rehearsals. The drummer was rescued by the conductor from the brink of death in the city morgue. The rendition was accompanied by Red Army actions, to prevent the Nazis from interfering with the event.

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One Wehrmacht officer interviewed after the war said that when he realized the importance attributed to the music by the city's defenders, he understood that they would never conquer the stronghold. His words serve as oblique testimony to a profound truth in the words of the Song at the Sea in the Book of Exodus, "God is my strength and my music" (Exodus 15:2).

In the small town of Pale, occupied by the Serbian army in 1991 as a base for shelling the besieged city of Sarajevo, the screenwriter and editor Mladen Vuksanovic recorded his striving to retain an inclusive vision of humanity, as the fighting dragged apart Muslims and Christians who had lived together for centuries. When, after the owners had been deported, people come to ask, "Are there any Muslim houses around here?" his wife retorted, "No, there aren't! Neither Muslim nor Croat ones! There were only human houses here." (From Enemy Territory, p. 151, italics in original)

It is the power of our visions and the depth of our values, not merely the force of our arms, which bring humanity its deepest and most enduring victories.

Isaiah's prophecy opens with an overview of human justice. The redeemer will "judge the poor in justice and decide with equity for the meek of the earth" (Isaiah 11: 4). It continues with a vision of a transformed natural world, in which there is no longer hunter and prey but a tranquil sharing of the pasturage of the earth. The most important idea here is not that carnivores will turn vegetarian; rather, it is that nature will be allowed to sustain all of its creatures and not be subject to the tyrannous exploitation of one single species--man. For, as the prophet continues, "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, because the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea" (11:9). Isaiah may well have witnessed the devastation of the lands around Jerusalem, but could surely not have envisioned the threat to the ecological viability of the entire planet, to which we are summoned to respond today.

What may have motivated the rabbis responsible for determining the Jewish liturgical calendar to choose this passage with which to conclude the scriptural readings for Passover? It seems likely that the question they wanted their communities to consider at the close of the Festival of Freedom was what the purpose of that freedom might be. Neither in the Hebrew Bible nor in any rabbinical writings was freedom ever taken to be an end in itself. Freedom itself was, and must be, in service to redemption, to bringing about the day when none will "hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain".

That mountain represents the entire earth. Its future depends not on God's sudden and miraculous intervention, but on how we use our liberty. The messianic vision of peace between nations and co-existence between species is the goal to which that freedom must be directed.
For some, even the talk of math inspires a mind freeze. The actor Dev Patel who plays a real life math genius from Madras claimed to be one of those last night at the premiere of his new movie, The Man Who Knew Infinity. As Srinivasa Ramanujan, his emphasis was the relationship, not the one with the lovely Devika Bhise who plays his wife Janaki, also attending the special night at Elyx House, but with G. H. Hardy, a perfect and prim Jeremy Irons in the role. Amazed by his facility with figures, Hardy invited Ramanujan to Cambridge, England where he faced racism, cold, and culture shock, and still managed to move mathematics forward much the way Sir Isaac Newton advanced the laws of physics, finding a formula for partitions that others thought was impossible. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.

Director Mira Nair, whose next film, Queen of Katwe, about a spunky girl from the streets of Uganda who becomes a chess champion, will premiere at the coming Toronto Film Festival in the fall, confirmed Ramanujan was a big deal in her home country of India, taught at schools, and considered a national treasure. Gay Talese, Richard and Lisa Perry, Lauren Hutton, Simon Curtis, Pat Birch, Laura Michelle Kelly, and Griffin Dunne were among the many guests, as was Cindy Lawrence, executive director of the National Museum of Mathematics, which just happens to have a back door facing the Museum of Sex. Inviting us to come and ride on a square wheeled bicycle, she admitted that she doesn't do math either.

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Producer Ed Pressman introduced everyone to Matt Brown, who wrote and directed this film, beautifully shot by longtime Kubrick collaborator Larry Smith. As Jeremy Irons said to this crowd, "When you find a man who has a passion, hang onto him because you know it's going to be an interesting ride."
In the aftermath of the successful US Navy SEALs operation to kill Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda vowed to continue to attack the US and its allies. Five years later, the terrorist organization is being overshadowed by the extremely brutal Islamic State group. Farhan Zahid, an independent counter terrorism expert, explains what the relationship between Al-Qaeda and ISIS is, and what long-term effects the death of bin Laden had on the terrorist organization. Could you give me a short update on the state of Al Qaeda today?Farhan Zahid: At the moment, Al-Qaeda is in a difficult position primarily due to US drone strikes in tribal areas of Pakistan, where they found a safe haven after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in December 2001. As many as 64 Al-Qaeda top leaders and high-value targets have been killed in the CIA's counter-terrorism measures since 2004.

However, due to Al-Qaeda's loose and de-centralized structure, it has thus far managed to survive the US onslaught. The cell-based structure is spread over in more than 60 countries, and a plethora of local Islamist groups in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and cells of disgruntled Islamist in Western Europe have pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda over the past 14 years. At times, Al-Qaeda has established itself as a mother-ship organization, in effect franchising to smaller local groups. In this way, Al-Qaeda has managed to keep itself afloat amid a significant effort from the US and its allies to pulverize the organization.

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What is the relationship between Al Qaeda and ISIS? Zahid: ISIS was an Al-Qaeda franchised group founded by Jordanian Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The organization, before joining the Al-Qaeda, was known as Jamaat ut Tawheed wal Jihad, and Abu Musab had met with Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

After the death of Bin Laden in May 2011, ISIS' new leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi began to have tactical issues with the leader of Al-Qaeda, Emir Ayman al-Zawahiri. Baghdadi wanted more independence, and his group often made decisions without the approval of Zawahiri, including the targeting of Shia Muslims and bombing of churches. Soon after the Syrian civil war began, Baghdadi shifted his organization to the country to capitalize on the dilapidated state of affairs. However, another faction of Al-Qaeda was already located in Syria, which had conflicting aims from ISIS. The personality clash between the leaders of the two Al-Qaeda factions grew, culminating in Baghdadi attempting to absorb the other faction, which then forced al-Zawahiri to intervene. As Baghdadi refused to back down, al-Zawahiri had to de-franchise ISIS.

ISIS managed to carve out some territories in war-torn Syria, where it regrouped itself. Taking advantage of the Sunni-Shia rifts in Iraq, the organization won over thousands of former Iraqi war veteran soldiers and fresh recruits from Sunni tribes of Iraq.

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Has ISIS overshadowed Al Qaeda?ISIS without any doubt has managed to overshadow Al-Qaeda for several reasons.

ISIS controls a large territory in Syria and Iraq after it successfully captured Mosul, while Al-Qaeda has no territory. ISIS also controls oil rigs in Iraq and Syria and has substantial financial resources.

Because of its tremendous successes and its proclamation of Islamic Caliphate (declaring all other groups invalid and requiring members to pledge allegiance to Baghdadi as caliph) potential jihadi now tend to join ISIS rather than joining Al-Qaeda.

Finally, at least 25 Islamist groups around the world have pledged allegiance to ISIS, some that were formerly associated with Al-Qaeda. Most of these Islamist groups are small, with some exceptions, including Nigerian group Boko Haram.

What are some of the differences between the two terrorist groups?Zahid: Ideologically, there is no difference - both adhere to the Salafi brand of Islam. We may call them tactical twins, but strategic enemies.

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What impact did the death of Osama Bin Laden have on Al Qaeda? Zahid: The death of Osama bin Laden had a substantial impact on Al-Qaeda. Zawahiri is still trying hard to reinvigorate the organization, including by establishing Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS). But overall, the media tends to give more coverage to ISIS, primarily because of ISIS's effective strategy to engage western media houses with its on-camera acts of terror.
MANILA, Philippines -- "The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion," Edmund Burke, the great 18th century conservative thinker, once warned. Today, a specter is haunting the democratic world -- the specter of autocratic nostalgia.

With interest groups and oligarchs coopting democratic institutions, average citizens are desperate for a secular savior who will put an end to the dysfunction and insensitivity of everyday politics. The illusion of "autocratic miracle" -- the misplaced belief that a strong decisive leader can single-handedly save a whole nation -- has gained ground across the world's oldest and largest democracies, including America and India.

We are in many ways slipping into an age of global authoritarianism. As Pankaj Mishra eloquently puts it, "Distressed beyond a point, working populations" are once again beginning to "lash out" at the ruling elite, "who seem indifferent to their plight." Instead, they have begun to place their greatest hopes in single-minded demagogues who promise salvation -- without caveats or any reference to the realities of politics.

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With the political establishment in disarray, struggling to grasp the fading traction of its liberal ideology, opportunistic demagogues have skillfully tried to fill in the power vacuum. In fledgling democracies such as Indonesia and Peru, which have experienced rapid economic growth in recent years, "strongman" figures and offspring of former dictators have, quite counter-intuitively, come eerily close to power. In the Philippines, meanwhile, strongman candidates may end up capturing the top two positions in the government.

Endemic corruption, lack of inclusive growth and policy paralysis have certainly contributed to the gathering storm of grievance politics, which is undermining both new and established democracies. But one cannot deny that the myth of the autocratic miracle is also responsible for the contagion of strongman syndrome across democracies, especially in the developing world.

Many democracies face the prospect of turning into what Slavoj Zizek calls "Putogan" regimes, formal democracies that are illiberal and dominated by strongmen. The question, however, is: are autocracies superior models of governance, especially in the 21st century? Do countries like the Philippines need to revert back to autocracy in order to address fundamental challenges such as poverty and (lack of) law and order?

Or perhaps what is needed instead is a new "Progressive Era" of systematic reform towards establishment of a genuine democracy and robust institutions that can cope with the vicissitudes of globalization and complex 21st century governance challenges? After all, prominent scholars such as Harvard Professor Stephen Walt have called for abandonment of futile and often catastrophic pursuit of "great leaders." And astute observers such as Moises Naim (2013: 2) have pointed out that the physics of power has transformed, making it "easier to get, harder to use -- and easier to lose" -- rendering effective autocratic rule almost impossible.

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A Puzzling Paradox

Back in the 1960s, the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington carefully observed a paradoxical correlation between political instability and rapid economic growth in the post-colonial world. As he correctly saw it, rapidly developing countries are most vulnerable to systemic breakdown. This occurs, he discovered, precisely because of the phenomenon of rising expectations and relative deprivation, which is common among developing states in periods of accelerated growth, which in turn fosters heightened social mobilization as well as discontent.

Uneven growth, corruption, heightened mobilization of newly-empowered as well as disaffected individuals and an unrealistic explosion in expectations for change generally accompany rapid periods of economic growth. But most post-colonial states simply lack the capacity and requisite level of institutionalization to effectively and peacefully manage emerging tensions and grievances.

Almost half a century since the publication of his classic work Political Order in Changing Societies, it is clear that Huntington's treatise of political decay is relevant to understanding the predicament of today's new democracies, particularly rapidly growing economies such as Indonesia, Peru and the Philippines, which have been identified by the emerging markets guru, Ruchir Sharma, as the next breakout nations.

In Indonesia, Joko Widodo ("Jokowi"), whose progressive brand of governance catapulted him to the heart of Indonesian politics, came dangerously close to losing the 2014 presidential elections to Prabowo Subianto, a notorious Suharto-era holdover. Brushing aside accusations of widespread human rights violation during his days in the military, tough-talking Probowo managed to garner nationwide support based on the promise of disciplinary decisive leadership.

In Peru, Keiko Fujimori is broadly expected to win the presidency, with her father still languishing in jail, while Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. is just one step away from claiming the vice presidency in the Philippines, which suffered three decades of disastrous dictatorship under his father. Davao's tough-talking mayor, Rodrigo Duterte, who has been dubbed by Filipino sociologist Randy David as a "political outsider" par excellence, is in an even more dominant position in the Philippines' presidential race. Both Marcos and Duterte, in their own ways, have promised decisive single-minded leadership to address the Philippines' greatest challenges.

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Confucius Said

A significant section of the voters across all troubled democracies have come to believe that the solution to their national problems is electing strongman rulers to shake up the system. Showered in fact-proof nostalgia, a growing number of voters have come to fondly remember the autocratic past when Fujimori, Suharto and Marcos were in power -- overlooking the dictators' manifold failures.

Marcos, in particular, was no Park Chung-Hee, who turned poverty-stricken South Korea into an industrial giant -- nor was he a Lee Kuan Yew, who turned a middling city-state into the global logistics hub that is Singapore today. As leading Filipino economists, such as Ronald Mendoza, have shown, the Marcos years were largely an indubitable economic disaster with few parallels.

In the 1960s, the Philippines was a leading Southeast Asian economy but that was, as correctly put by Lee Kuan Yew, mainly because "America had been generous in rehabilitating the country after the war." By the time Ferdinand Marcos -- who promised to make the nation "great again" -- captured the presidency and later declared "martial law," the Philippines' import-substitution-based economy was on the downhill.

Two decades later, far from becoming "great again," the Philippines was mired in widespread poverty and insurmountable debt. The country is still paying the price of the disastrous economic legacy of the dictatorship era, eloquently captured by the works of leading Filipino sociologist Walden Bello. No less than Lee Kuan Yew, the philosopher king of Singapore, was among Marcos' harshest critics, openly criticizing the scandalous decadence and chronic corruption that afflicted his regime.

While lay observers focus on personalities and myths of great statesmanship, social scientists look at institutions. A careful look reveals a nuanced explanation for the economic miracles across former autocratic regimes such Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and current autocratic regimes such as Singapore, China and Vietnam.

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In his magisterial work, Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama argues that the modern state was first established in China. "Modern state institutions were gradually implemented all over China in the later years of the Zhou dynasty [1200-220 B.C.] but nowhere more so than in the western state of Qin," he explained.

Competent and empowered bureaucracy -- reflected in effective tax-collection and war-making capacity -- combined with visionary and (often) ethical leadership represented the core elements of powerful Chinese dynasties, which established one of the most enduring civilizations on Earth. Over 2,000 years, the Chinese bureaucratic culture would spread across the Sinosphere, influencing the trajectory of state development in Greater China (which includes China, Hong Kong and Taiwan), the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam and Japan. Today, practically all of Asia's economic bright stars belong to the Confucian sphere.

It's Bureaucracy, Stupid!

In the 1960s, the Philippines and South Korea were almost on the same level of economic development. The visionary Park Chung-hee, albeit ruthless and undemocratic, used his autocrat grip on the Korean bureaucracy to discipline the oligarchs, institute comprehensive land reform, regulate financial markets and establish the foundations of a modern economy by astutely combining strategic protectionism with export-oriented industrialization.

In certain ways, he was a classic Confucian-Legalist leader, blessed with a relatively competent and coherent bureaucratic apparatus. In many ways, Park, a former member of the Japanese Imperial Army, drew lessons from Tokyo's Meiji Restoration, which (itself drawing on the experience of late-developing countries such as Prussia) turned an agricultural backwater into an industrial powerhouse.

In Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang Party also followed key elements of Japanese and Korean economic strategy, ranging from land reform to development of infant industries and of an export-oriented manufacturing sector. In the case of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew built on the British-era bureaucracy, augmenting its elements of meritocracy and toughening measures against corruption. Within a few decades, he turned a city-state into a financial and logistics hub, attracting large-scale capital and great minds from across the world. In contrast, Marcos, who oversaw a hollowed American-style bureaucracy, ended up relying on greedy cronies who only cared about their own interests as well as on misguided economists who uncritically followed neo-classical economics without any appreciation of the special needs of late-developing countries.

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A lawyer with minimal understanding of development economics and drenched in decadence and corruption, Marcos was no Park or Lee when it came to economic development. Under Marcos, the Philippines, in terms of per capita income, went from almost twice as rich as South Korea to 11 times poorer (Studwell 2013).

Towards the end of the Marcos era, Deng Xiaoping drew on the success stories in fellow Confucian states, eventually turning China into a global economic powerhouse. Vietnam -- under the "Doi Moi" policy, a local twist to Beijing's "socialism with Chinese characterizes" -- followed a similar course after the end of the Cold War with considerable success. Meanwhile, South Korea and Taiwan -- similar to Japan in the mid-20th century -- transitioned towards democracy, not long after the Philippines' 1986 "People Power" revolution against Marcos. Blessed with competent bureaucracies that oversaw appropriate economic policies, South Korea and Taiwan maintained their economic vigor and managed to become advanced post-industrial societies.

In fact, Japan's most impressive economic gains were made right after its transition to democracy in the mid-20th century. These countries' success wasn't a function of their regime typology but instead the quality of their state institutions, their Confucian culture of ethical leadership and their optimal usage of what Joseph Stiglitz calls "development policy space" during the Cold War years. Without competent bureaucracy, none of these countries would have been able to implement, on a sustained and effective basis, necessary reforms for national development.

Non-Confucian autocrats like Malaysia's Mahathir were certainly more benign and less disastrous than Marcos. A careful look, however, reveals that (oil-rich) Malaysia, which has a relatively small population compared to most of its neighbors, purchased short-term growth under the stewardship of Mahathir (1981-2003) at the expense of long-term institutional decay, economic imbalances and political instability.

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As University of Chicago's Dan Slater aptly puts it, "The current mess in Malaysian politics is the making of his greatest nemesis, Mahathir," who oversaw his office as "a haven of autocracy" where "ethnic tensions had been reopened to political manipulation," while the "economy was worrisomely indebted" and "capable leaders" were purged, paving the way for the country's "sad national decline," which has reached its zenith in recent years.

The current Malaysian government is grappling with a billion-dollar corruption scandal, as Malaysian politics become more polarized than ever. In Breakout Nations, Ruchir Sharma eloquently underlines (post-Mahathir) Malaysia's weakening economic fundamentals and stunted development potentials, which are largely a product of its extractive-exclusive institutions.

A Progressive Era

Junta-ruled Thailand, which not long ago was a rowdy but economically-vibrant democracy, is now the slowest-growing economy in the region. In contrast, a democratizing Myanmar has morphed into one of the brightest economic stories of our times. As authoritative studies show, democracies on average perform better than autocracies, which lack internal checks and balances and are prone to abuse by decadent leaders (Przeworski et al. 2000).

From Argentina to Libya, autocratic regimes have been largely a catastrophe, and, as David Dollar of the Brookings Institution explains, tend to fall into the "middle income trap" even if, by chance, they managed to make gains at lower stages of development. Democracies, in contrast, nurture institutions and place constraints on abusive practices. The Philippines, in particular, has experienced its worst economic record during the years of dictatorship, while its stellar macroeconomic performance in recent years has gone hand-in-hand with media freedom, good governance initiatives and heightened scrutiny of public officials and state policies. In short, democratic deepening has gone hand-in-hand with economic boom.

The problem, however, is that the Philippines is largely an oligarchy-disguised-as-a-democracy. What it needs is to become a genuine "deepened" democracy. The countries' elected offices are dominated by 178 political dynasties, which control 73 out of 81 provinces in the country. As many as 70 percent of Filipino legislators hail from political dynasties. The economic landscape is equally oligarchic: the 40 richest families gobbled up to 76 percent of newly-created growth in recent years. Recent growth has barely ameliorated double-digit poverty and unemployment rates.

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Aside from civil liberties, which are innate to human nature, ordinary citizens should also enjoy basic economic rights and have an actual say in the decisions of the state. The Philippines need reform-oriented leaders, who are committed to establishing a competent and empowered bureaucracy, fighting against special interest and oligarchic cooptation and adopting policies that create inclusive, sustainable growth. The Philippines needs its own Gracchus brothers, its own Tiberius and Gaius -- not a Clodius.

Like America in the late 19th century, which saw major reforms that made the country both more democratic and economically vibrant, the Philippines needs its own Progressive Era. As Fukuyama explains in Political Order and Political Decay, it was the enlightened members of the middle class -- who collectively fought against corruption and empowered the bureaucracy -- that turned Jacksonian America into an industrialized and vibrant polity, which soon became the world's most powerful state.

Asia's most successful economies have gone through both democratic and autocratic phases but what made them successful was mainly their strong bureaucratic institutions combined with development policy acumen. Enlightened leaders simply built on pre-existing institutional assets. Hopefully, the meteoric rise of outsider candidates in recent months will jolt the Filipino oligarchy and reactionary middle classes out of their stupor, inspiring a new generation of competent and democratic leaders who can bring about transformational change to the long-troubled nation.
Sometime, between now and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, there will almost certainly be a deal between the Sanders forces and the Clinton forces. The $64,000 question is: What are the forces of progress going to get out of the deal?

Here's what I hope will be in the deal: a set of agreements to make the Democratic Party more democratic -- in particular, to make the party more transparent and accountable to the public.

As should be obvious to everyone by now, there's a set of parallel questions for the Republican Party, and the two influence each other: the anti-democratic features of the one are invoked as an excuse for the anti-democratic features of the other, and efforts to overturn the anti-democratic features of the one embolden efforts to overturn the anti-democratic features of the other. We now live, for better and for worse, in a two-party system, a legally mandated and enforced duopoly, in which a person who wants to fully participate in U.S. democracy has to choose one of the two parties to participate in; and that means that each of the two parties has a quasi-governmental character, and therefore that the public has the right to expect that the two parties will not be allowed to function like private clubs.

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A good place to start would be to make the Democratic National Convention more transparent and accountable, as if it were a quasi-governmental body, which it is. Instead of being an Academy Awards ceremony, it would be a venue where real democracy publicly takes place. The proposed party platform would be published in advance, and proposed amendments to the platform would be published in advance, to give the public the opportunity to agitate around them, as one would agitate around a proposed law in Congress. And that would, of course, include efforts to make the party platform more binding on Democratic elected officials, which is completely feasible.

The reader is surely aware that there are a number of petition platforms now sponsored by Democratic Party constituency organizations, which in particular allow petitioners to easily target Congress. Between now and the convention, these could be adapted to allow petitioners to easily target delegates to the DNC. "Public whip lists" -- such as existed before the (non-)vote on the 2013 Syria AUMF -- could be established, to enable the public to see which DNC delegates have committed to supporting which reforms, as a baseline for further agitation.

Here are four proposed reforms which could benefit from a public and recorded vote at the DNC. Add your own suggestions in the comments.

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Superdelegates should be abolished or curtailed. The simplest reform would be to abolish them completely. But if this reform is not possible, more modest reforms could be considered: reducing their number, such as by eliminating superdelegates who are not currently serving elected officials, or otherwise reducing their weight, such as by giving them fractional votes instead of whole votes; and requiring that they remain publicly uncommitted until all voters have voted.

Super-closed primaries, like New York's, must be eliminated. It will likely be claimed by some that this is a state matter in which the national party has no say. This, of course, would be hogwash. When state parties tried to make their primaries earlier without national permission, they were sanctioned by the national party until they cried uncle. Similarly, states that maintain "super-closed primaries" can be sanctioned. The simplest reform would be to make all primaries "open": if it's right to say that you should be able to register to vote on election day -- and it is -- then you should be able to register to vote as a Democrat on election day. But if this reform is not possible, then at least there should be national limits on how onerous the requirements can be. You should not have to submit forms in triplicate the day before you were born in order to register to vote in a Democratic primary.

Opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) should be part of the Democratic Party platform, and this provision should be binding. In particular, the DNC should oppose a vote on the TPP in a "lame duck" session of Congress after the election. How could you make such a provision binding? It would be easy -- punish non-compliance with sanctions. For example, any Congressional Democrat who votes for the TPP in a lame duck session of Congress could be barred from accessing DNC resources or holding a position in the DNC -- including delegate to the DNC.

Jerusalem should be the shared capital of two states. Notoriously, in the 2012 Democratic convention, a resolution asserting permanent Israeli sovereignty over Palestinian East Jerusalem was rammed through by the convention chair over the opposition of the majority of delegates. To avoid this problem in the future, a shared-Jerusalem resolution can be published in advance, and the majority of delegates can commit to vote for it in advance. This should thwart any anti-democratic shenanigans by the convention chair.
JACKSON. Ah, Mississippi! If the state didn't exist, the rest of America would have had to invent us. Whenever another state does something particularly outrageous that threatens to lead it to claiming the title of worst, Mississippi can be counted on to save it by doing something worse. After North Carolina became the target of nationwide opprobrium and boycotts because of its "bathroom bill," Mississippi enacted an even more restrictive "religious freedom" bill, in effect saying to North Carolina: "We'll see your HB 2 and lower you an HB 1523 - see if you can bottom that!"

Mississippi's current political leaders travel to the beat of a different dumber.

And they proudly refuse to let another state's officials slip beneath them.

One is reminded of Lyndon Johnson's assessment of the state on the morning after the 1964 election, in which Mississippi gave 87 percent of its votes to Barry Goldwater. "I'm sorry about Georgia," the President said to Bill Moyers. "I didn't care about the other Southern states. Louisiana's a bunch of crooks. And Mississippi is too ignorant to know any better, and Alabama's the same way. But Georgia knows better. And Georgia is a good state."



  

In a recent tweet, conservative Mississippi columnist Sid Salter succinctly summarized the state's latest shameful legislation:

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"Personal opinion: HB1523 is a solution in search of a problem. Bad public policy. Unnecessary. Wrong. Mean-spirited. Unfair. Discriminatory."

Many decent people in Mississippi are saying that the anti-LGBT law is the last straw and they will leave the state. That reaction is understandable, but it would be a tragic mistake. During the Civil Rights Movement, Mississippi officials complained about "outside agitators." But the state then also had inside agitators. It still does, and we must stay and fight for a better future.

In the early 1960s, when the courageous young activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee determined that Greenwood and McComb, Mississippi, were two of the three most dangerous places in the country, they didn't avoid those towns; they went to them. Where would we be if the SNCC activists - or the local people who joined the Movement with them - had given up on Mississippi?

There's no denying, though, that things are very bad here now. Gov. Phil Bryant and Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves (a man who knows better and so is all the more despicable for pushing laws in which he doesn't believe in order to win higher office) are channeling the late, far-from-great Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett in pushing bigotry and general stupidity.

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The law protecting the "right" to discriminate is only a part of an astounding array of regressive and foolish actions our state's lawmakers have taken in recent weeks. The next cut on their newly released album, presumably titled "Mississippi Republicans' Greatest Misses," was a bill allowing guns in churches. Gov. Bryant issued a photo of himself grinning as he signed the bill, with a gun sitting on top of the Bible on his desk. Usually reliable sources recounted one reaction: "Jesus wept." This legislation also allows people without gun permits to carry concealed weapons statewide.

Mississippi's Republican leaders have been blindly following the lead of Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and former Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana along the road of the conservative economic cult of cutting taxes and regulations without regard to the consequences. As a result, this state is now in dire fiscal straits. The solution, according to Lt. Gov. Reeves and other Republicans: more tax cuts! Perhaps they never comprehended the distinction between addition and subtraction.

The state's Republican rulers have steadfastly refused to accept federal Medicaid expansion. That stance is extraordinarily irresponsible, fiscally as well as morally.

Flying still above the whole mess is the state's unholy flag with the Confederate stars and bars prominent in it. And Gov. Bryant also issued a proclamation for "Confederate Heritage Month."

It has gotten so bad that the Clarion-Ledger, the state's largest newspaper, covered its entire front page recently with an editorial under a headline, in type huge enough to impress Donald Trump, reading "STOP THE MADNESS."

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Lest anyone doubt that there has been great progress in Mississippi, let me cite an earlier front-page editorial in a Jackson paper. Following the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case, the Jackson Daily News ran a front-page editorial titled "Bloodstains on White Marble Steps," saying - and implicitly calling for - bloodshed across the South.

The day after the Madness editorial, state House Speaker Philip Gunn used a voice vote to perpetuate a portion of the madness by voting down the first effort at campaign finance and ethics reform the state has seen in decades. This maneuver allows Mississippi politicians to continue to spend campaign money for personal purposes without any accounting.

  

All of this is awful, but if we inside agitators stay, we can turn it around. Here's a striking example of how positive change can be accomplished by determined people within the state:

For more than eighty years, Natchez has had an annual "pilgrimage" to its antebellum mansions, featuring each evening a Confederate Pageant that glorified the "Lost Cause" and totally ignored the evils of slavery. Two years ago, one of our Millsaps College history majors, Madeline Iles, was chosen for the town's greatest honor: to be the pageant queen. She decided that she would not accept unless major changes were made in the pageant to show the horrors of slavery and acknowledge the Confederate defeat. Her insistence on bringing historical truth into the moonlight and magnolias fantasy that had reigned for eight decades led those running the pageant to agree to allow Madeline's father, author Greg Iles, to rewrite several of the tableaux in the production, bringing in a slave auction and other aspects of the evil institution, with such songs as "Oh, Freedom!" and "A Change Is Gonna Come" performed by African Americans.

The change that came to the Natchez pageant wasn't easy, but in the end it proved to be profound - and that change was accomplished by "inside agitators."

If we (I have been agitating from inside Mississippi since my arrival in the state more than forty years ago, with only a few death threats), left the state, the forces of backwardness would continue to dominate.

If we stay and fight, we can - we will - win. The madness can be stopped.

Despite surface appearances, Mississippi is by no means beyond hope. There is so much that is wonderful about the state's cultural heritage, particularly in music and literature. I, for example, have proposed replacing the current flag and its divisive symbol of hate with one featuring a guitar, reflecting Mississippi's position as the birthplace of America's music - a heritage in which both races have participated.

There are a large number of good white people in Mississippi. Combined with the highest percentage of African Americans in any American state, we can change our leadership and redeem Mississippi. Assuming 90 percent of African Americans would vote Democratic, if both races turned out at about the same rate, it would take only 25 percent of whites voting Democratic to turn this state blue and away from the disastrous policies currently being promoted. Distaste for Donald Trump, especially among white women, coupled with the disgracefulness of the actions by the state's Republican leaders, may have put that share of the white vote within our grasp. A recent Mason-Dixon poll found Hillary Clinton in a virtual tie with Trump in Mississippi.

While the Republican misleaders of Mississippi are painting the state a bright red to turn it upside down, we're painting it too - but we're painting it blue.

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This is no time for Mississippi's inside agitators to give up the fight.
Here's what we know after ten years helping wedding couples make their dreams come true: For this generation, it's all about simplicity.



The Simple Life

Today's brides and grooms strongly believe the simple things are essential to enjoying lifefor example, that positive experiences are far more important to a happy life than accumulating things. What's more, their wedding guests of all generations continue to rave about the chance to give an once-in-a-lifetime experience to honor the young couple's monumental occasion. From spending time in nearby nature to exploring the globe, a chance to simply "be" in the world appeals to this generation of wedding couples.



Simple Tools

When we started Honeyfund, our vision was to provide a pleasing and easy-to-use website where friends and family could contribute to a couple's dream honeymoon. Today, we go further with pre-built honeymoon wish lists and easy-to-use universal registry tools. If our users want to add something from the web to your Honeyfund, they can do it with a few clicks of our simple browser tool. If they've also registered at another site, Honeyfund automatically matches registries from the nation's top retail registries to couples' pages, and seamlessly links givers out to those store registries to make a purchase. All the couple needs to do is click once to confirm. This year we launched the Honeyfund app, which brings the power of Honeyfund into the hands of our user, and allows them to set up and customize their honeyfund in a series of 1-2 minute tasks. As a tech provider, we work harder to make their lives easier.



Simply the Best - For Less

Today's couple is looking to create a fun and unique wedding -- on a realistic budget. Honeyfund's current and future customers are well connected and engaged with each other via social media, and hence they know more than ever about throwing a fantastic wedding for less. With a quick Pinterest search they instantly know the best DIY flower arrangements, the top money-saving strategies, and the wedding trends that are hot, and not. They are skeptical of the ballooning costs of weddings and of the possibility of being manipulated into blowing their tighter budget. This makes them smart consumersand thoughtful about aligning their values with those of the companies they do business with.



With their eye on great experiences, not things; because they demand simple tools to make the complex task of planning a wedding easy; and because they know more than ever, ,millennials will change the wedding game by spending less on their weddings. The average cost of a wedding in the US today is about $31,000watch that decline with a Gen Y mindset taking over.
While we fight to save our planet from the ravages of climate change through the Clean Air Act, international agreements, better fuel mileage standards and clean energy incentives, climate change is already happening. The evidence is all around us, from record high temperatures, wildfires, severe storms and floods to a crippling drought that has harmed communities, including so many in my state of California. Adapting to climate change requires all of us to do our part. That's why this week I partnered with Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), an incredible advocate for our families and our planet, to introduce the Climate Change Adapt America Bond Act , legislation that gives every American the opportunity to make a difference in the fight against climate change. During World War II, 85 million Americans bought War Bonds to support the war effort for their children's future. Everyday Americans stepped up when their country needed them most, and they invested $185 billion - or $2 trillion in today's dollars - in the War Bonds program. We need that same commitment today to protect our communities and future generations as we work to adapt to climate change!

Our bill is based on that very successful program and would give the Treasury Department the authority to issue up to $200 million each year in Climate Change Bonds which Americans can buy. The revenue would go into a brand new Adapt America Fund administered by the Secretary of Commerce, and states, municipalities and other public entities could apply for the funds for projects like desalination plants in the West, flood control measures in the Gulf States and East Coast, and cooling centers in parts of the country dealing with extreme temperatures.



The Climate Change Advisory Commission - an 11-member bipartisan board made up of climate infrastructure experts appointed by Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate, as well as the President - would advise the Commerce Secretary on how to disperse the funds. To help leverage funds raised by the sale of the Climate Change Bonds, the entity receiving the grant must match at least 25 percent of the funds they receive.



Polls show the majority of Americans agree that we must take action to address climate change. They want to do their part - just as Americans did more than 70 years ago when President Franklin Roosevelt urged his fellow citizens to join him in "one great partnership" to save our country.



All of us will be asked by our children and grandchildren if we did everything in our power to combat climate change, and like most Americans, I want to be able to answer, yes I did!



Our bill will tap into the patriotism of the millions of Americans who want to protect their country and fight climate change, and I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support it.
There's no need to link to the scores of articles declaring the Democratic primary race effectively over, as surely anyone reading this has already read those articles.

Nor is there any need to link to Clinton campaign press releases declaring Clinton's delegate lead "insurmountable," as those press releases began to be disseminated through the mainstream media after Bernie Sanders lost five states on March 15th.

So the fact that the Democratic primary race is now over is common knowledge.

Rachel Maddow recently pointed out that even if Bernie Sanders won every remaining primary and caucus 55 percent to 45 percent, he still wouldn't catch Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates.

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And John King of CNN has been pointing that out for well over a month now.

While there's an equally strong consensus that Clinton can't clinch the nomination purely with pledged delegates -- giving Sanders the option of taking this primary race all the way to the Democratic National Convention, the first opportunity super-delegates will have to cast their votes -- the media is certain enough that no super-delegates will switch from Clinton to Sanders that it's clear they plan to formally declare Clinton the Democratic nominee as soon as she "clinches" the nomination through both pledged and super-delegates. That the latter don't vote and can't be counted, per edicts of the Democratic National Committee, until the convention in July is clearly no obstacle -- let's be realistic -- to the media doing just that. And Clinton's recent public vetting of Vice Presidential candidates underscores that she too plans on declaring herself the presumptive nominee just as soon as she reaches 2,383 delegates using both her pledged and unpledged delegate counts to get there.

In this view, the distinct possibility, based on polling and demographics, that Bernie Sanders is poised to win in Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Oregon, and California is no threat to anyone or anything the Democratic Establishment cares about.

Which means that anyone whose heart is with Sanders, and who planned on voting for Clinton exclusively based on her perceived electability, now gets the enormous benefit of being able to have their cake and eat it too.

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It's a rare treat for a voter, but then again, this has been the rarest of election cycles in more ways than one.

So it's time for Sanders supporters to admit what the media and Clinton campaign have known since mid-March: that everyone who wants to can now vote for Bernie Sanders without any fear of it making a Trump presidency even a mote more likely.

The latest poll from California shows Clinton and Sanders in a statistical tie; the same is true in Indiana. Previous polling suggests Sanders is ahead in West Virginia. Based on demographics and other key indicators, Sanders is favored in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Oregon. The same could be said for Kentucky. New Mexico might be a slight stretch, but what of it? Clinton's the presumptive nominee, so states that might otherwise have been a slight reach for Sanders because of some voters' concerns about his electability should now -- given that the electability issue is officially off the table -- be reasonable gets for Sanders.

Voting for Sanders in our new, consequence-free reality isn't just a vote for the man himself -- or even primarily that -- given that, as all media outlets have confirmed, Sanders will never be President.

Indeed, one could now vote for Sanders in any of the remaining primaries and caucuses simply to give him more leverage at the Democratic National Convention. Hate the idea of super-delegates? Want a $15 minimum wage? Sick of bloody and senseless foreign interventions? Oppose job-killing international trade deals? Want to see an end to fracking? Prefer open primaries to closed primaries? Think college tuition should be free for all? Favor criminal justice reform? You're in luck: a vote for Bernie Sanders gives him the capital to militate for these things at the Democrats' convention in Philadelphia. The more delegates Sanders has in Philly, the more likely he's able to change the party platform to conform to your own political, economic, and cultural values.

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Now that voters are free to, as it were, vote for "both" Clinton and Sanders -- Sanders on the physical ballot, with Clinton as the actual nominee regardless -- we can imagine what the rest of the election season on the Democratic side will look like.

Sanders will win in Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Oregon, and California, and -- given recent polling -- finish within a few points of Clinton in New Jersey.

And then, on the very night Bernie Sanders wins the largest primary vote of the election season -- California -- Clinton can come out and declare herself the Democratic nominee.

It's not ideal, exactly -- declaring yourself the winner of the Democratic primary race on the same night you lost California -- but as we've consistently been told by the mainstream media, and as happens to be true, this is all about the delegates. And we now know that even if Sanders wins in Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Oregon, and California, and even if he's ahead of Hillary Clinton in the national polling at that point, and even if he continues to poll better against Donald Trump than Clinton both nationally and in all battleground states, and even if (in this scenario) Sanders has won 20 of the last 25 nominating contests in states all across America, not a single Democratic super-delegate will switch his or her vote from Clinton to Sanders.

It may seem odd to some to hear it stated this way, but it's all true -- so please don't think this is sarcasm.

It's not.

Rather, I'm urging voters to be every bit as realistic as the mainstream media and hundreds of super-delegates have already announced themselves to be.

The Democratic primary race is about delegates, not momentum -- this has been a mantra on CNN, for instance, for many months -- which, now that the delegate race is effectively over, permits voters to vote for the candidate whose values they share rather than the candidate they believe has the best chance (all extant polling notwithstanding) to beat Donald Trump.

We might even note that Clinton has as many as a hundred or two hundred super-delegates "to spare," so if a few hundred super-delegates want to come over to Sanders' side in the midst of a now-concluded Democratic primary race, on some level I have to think that just a quick phone call to the Clinton campaign would make that purely symbolic gesture palatable to Clinton and her staff. After all, super-delegates showing a willingness to switch to Sanders now that them doing so is, for all practical purposes, entirely meaningless would send a signal to Sanders supporters that the super-delegate system isn't as broken as we think. It would send a clear message that there's still room in the Democrats' self-admittedly flawed super-delegate system for super-delegates to vote their conscience, rather than simply for the candidate who's raised the most money for the party machine.

There's a real argument to be made that permitting Sanders to go into the Democratic National Convention with 27 state primary and caucus wins under his belt and 45 or 46 percent of the nation's pledged Democratic delegates would be good for the Party. It would allow Sanders and Clinton supporters to come together in Philadelphia on a roughly equal footing -- but with everyone knowing that Clinton has been the presumptive nominee since April -- to hammer out a Democratic Party platform that reflects an approximated consensus of Democratic progressives and moderates.

This is a serious question: what in the world would be wrong with that?

It seems like a win-win.

Millions of voters over the next two months get to vote however their conscience tells them, with no fear that voting their conscience will prevent Hillary Clinton from being the Democratic nominee.

And the well over 40 percent of Democrats nationally who support Bernie Sanders will feel that their Party is listening to them -- enough to give them a meaningful place at the table when the Party platform is being hammered out in Philadelphia.

While there might, in this scenario, be a quiet clamor for Sanders to be nominated for Vice President on the first or second ballot -- whoever Clinton has herself chosen, especially if it's a moderate Clinton ally with little charisma or appeal to voters, like Virginia Senator Tim Kaine -- even this risk is minor. It's unlikely, however much Party functionaries might consider Sanders a better motivator for the base and independent voters than Kaine is, that enough would take this view for Sanders to end up Clinton's (perhaps unwilling on both sides) Vice President. More likely by leaps and bounds is that Sanders voters would simply feel validated by their candidate's performance -- winning more states; being ahead, by then, in national polling against Clinton; having won 20 of the last 25 states; performing better in all polling against Donald Trump; having a proven track record of appealing to independent voters while, according to polling, winning the same percentage of the nonwhite vote as Hillary Clinton in scenarios in which he, rather than she, is the Democratic nominee -- that they would accept significant changes to the Party party platform as recompense for Hillary Clinton being the Party's nominee. They might very well, in turn, cast their votes for Clinton in the fall en masse.

With Clinton and Trump currently statistically tied in the most recent polling, Clinton will need those Sanders votes come November -- so any scenario that makes those votes going for Clinton more likely seems only a boon to the Democratic Party.

Again, this is a serious proposal.

The Democratic primary race is over, as everyone now agrees.

And that means everyone is now free to vote for Bernie Sanders, should their heart -- or merely sympathy for any of the causes Sanders has championed -- compel them to do so.

Sanders can't harm Clinton any longer -- he's changed his tone and geared his campaign toward winning delegates rather than defeating Clinton outright for the nomination -- so a vote for Sanders is now a vote for both Clinton as the eventual nominee and any or all of the principles the Sanders campaign has advanced and will continue to advance.

A win-win for everybody.
The 5th of May, or el Cinco de Mayo in Spanish, becomes a more popular holiday in the United States every year, highlighting the strength and bond of Mexican-American culture. Celebrations are not particularly widespread in Mexico, and mainly take place in the Mexican state of Puebla. In Penon de los Banos, Mexico City, battle reenactments occur annually. Many U.S. cities hold celebrations, carnivals, fiestas and multi-day affairs during the first week of May, with the largest held in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, Oregon and Texas. Consider these international etiquette tips:

Not a Celebration of Mexican Independence

Before we pour ourselves some sparkling Topo Chico or exquisite tequila and partake of the festivities, we need to know: What is the historical background of this holiday? A common misconception is that Cinco de Mayo, is a celebration of Mexican Independence. In fact, September 16th marks Mexican Independence day.

A David vs. Goliath Style Success

The 5th of May commemorates a battle between France and Mexico in 1862. At that time, Mexico owed debts to France due to changing credit regulations. So the French army, the most powerful force in the world, invaded the country. In what appeared to be an unmatchable fight, with the French army doubling the size of the Mexican troops, the Mexican army surprisingly and impressively defeated the French at the Battle of Puebla. Today, Cinco de Mayo is a celebration of their victory.

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Traditional Mexican Menu Options

When U.S. Americans think of Mexican food, many times they immediately think of tacos. However, the dish that's most common in Mexican Cinco de Mayo celebrations is mole poblano. Mole is a distinctive sauce made with dried poblano (ancho) peppers, chocolate, spices, and other ingredients served over chicken, cheese, pork, or turkey. Rice is a standard side dish.

In the U.S., party styles range from potluck, to appetizers, and sit down dinners. With a potluck style, guests may bring traditional Mexican dishes. If you choose non-traditional Mexican, Tequila Lime Chicken, Flank Steak Tostadas, and other recipes may be found here.

Authentic Mexican Beverages

We don't think the origins of Cinco de Mayo included alcohol. However, over time it has become part of the festivities.

To drink tequila as the Mexicans do, follow these 4 steps:

1. Place a pinch of salt on the back of your left hand, in the hollow between your thumb and index finger;

2. Lick the salt;

3. With the right hand, take the glass of tequila and drink it all; and

4. Suck on a piece of lime.

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Corona, Tecate and Dos Equis are extremely popular Mexican beers. Recipes for festive tamarind margaritas, tequila sunrises, and cocktails can be found here. To ensure safety of your guests, serve alcohol in moderation, ask a responsible adult to observe guests as they depart, and offer alternative methods of transportation.

For refreshing non-alcoholic beverages consider Penafiel, or Topo Chico sparkling water, fresh fruit juices, club soda, or Mexican Coke.

South of the Border Decor, Party Favors & Hostess Gifts

Red, white and green are popular color schemes, with the Mexican flag often used as inspiration. As a guest, bring a small hostess gift such as a diffuser, candle, tea towels, or book by their favorite author. Small tokens of thanks are appreciated. As a thoughtful host, consider saying goodnight with a cold bottle of

Penafiel

water tied with a festive bow. Another option is traditional Mexican candies, such as mazapan, or dried mangos with chili.
There's a powerful sequence in black feminist lesbian filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons' 2006 documentary No! on sexual assault in the African American community, that intercuts between Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan and another male minister in the pulpit rallying a charged black audience against rape victim Desiree Washington. In 1991, Washington was a Miss Black America contestant who accused boxer Mike Tyson of raping her in his hotel room. Tyson served three years in prison for the rape. In the film, both "men of god" dismiss Washington's charges as frivolous and call on the Lord to protect Iron Mike. "Ladies," Farrakhan thunders, "You know full well the evil you do!"

The film's image of black women as Jezebel temptresses exposed by righteous patriarchs seeking to redeem the name of a "good man" is a blistering and still timely example of the complicity of organized religion in black women's sexual victimization.

As youth and adults across the nation observe Denim Day, the Peace Over Violence organization's annual campaign for sexual assault awareness month, what often drops out of public discourse is how racist, sexist and hetero-normative gender norms demonize black women and girls as improper sexual assault victims.

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When black female sexual assault victims make headlines it's either because their abusers are "white" like Daniel Holtzclaw or wealthy and powerful like Bill Cosby. The "ordinary" black female victim, and the abuser who lives in her house, sits next to her in the classroom, stalks her online, rents out her body or spews pious hypocritical shit about virtue from black church pulpits while preying on women after hours, are seldom seen, heard or acknowledged by our communities.

Whereas each week brings a tide of white female victims/survivors accusing, and, sometimes, triumphing over their abusers, black women and girls remain invisible, both as victims, survivors and heroines fighting back against sexual assault. According to noted psychologist Gail Wyatt, "African-American women are raped at a higher rate than white women, and are less likely to report it." Given the slave era legacy of institutionalized rape and sexual assault of black women, her assertion is not revelatory but still has the power to stop one cold. Amidst the overriding narrative of black man-as-uber-victim-of-racial terrorism and state violence, why would the stories, the pain, the rage of ordinary black women sexual assault survivors be believed?

This question was amplified for me during a discussion about the impact of the school-to-prison pipeline at a community organizing meeting I attended recently. Brainstorming about solutions to criminalizing school environments, there was little consideration among the group of how the experiences of girls of color with sexual abuse lead to their push-out and incarceration. The discussion illustrated how gaps in intersectional organizing can be disenabling. For, even as it has become more acceptable to talk about state violence against black women and girls in school communities, it is still difficult to broaden the narrative to consider how this relates to sexual violence committed by men of color.



In its 2015 report on the sexual abuse to prison pipeline, the organization Human Rights for Girls criticizes the arrest and incarceration of girls of color for non-violent offenses that largely stem from "childhood sexual abuse, (in which) a child that is being abused is trying to protect herself." Black girls are disproportionately arrested and incarcerated for non-violent offenses committed as a result of the trauma of persistent sexual abuse. Prior to Los Angeles County's introduction of a policy discouraging the arrest of minors for prostitution (which is in actuality sex trafficking), the majority of those arrested for child prostitution in the County were black girls. This move was partly inspired by the Human Rights for Girls' "No Such Thing as a child prostitute" campaign, which seeks to decriminalize underage trafficking victims who, if they are girls of color--straight, queer and trans--are often prosecuted and jailed for prostitution rather than treated as sexual assault survivors.

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When we talk about the sex trafficking and prostitution of black girls in my high school classes there is often harsh judgment. "I don't care if she's a 'ho'," one girl says, "It's her business what she does". Among this group of girls, some of whom are abuse survivors themselves, there is little sympathy for young victims of sexual assault. Turning their own trauma inward into self-blame, some believe that black girls in particular "know what they're doing". They are not fragile, indecisive and malleable like white girls, they say. They are in control, in charge, savvy entrepreneurs in league with the much older men who rape and sell their bodies again and again.
Entrepreneurs see opportunity where others see obstacles and why hubris is an entrepreneur's worst enemy, were two topics of discussion on my SiriusXM radio show, Entrepreneurs are Everywhere.

The show airs on SiriusXM Channel 111 (weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). It follows the journeys of innovators sharing what it takes to build a startup - from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs and lows that pushed them forward.

Joining me in the Stanford University studio were

Ajay Kshatriya, co-founder and CEO of Biota Technology, which applies DNA sequencing technology to the energy industry

Steven Cohn, founder and CEO of Validately, which helps user researchers, product managers and others validate demand or usability for prototypes and live sites.

Listen to the full interviews with Ajay and Steven by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here.

(And download any of the past shows here.)

Clips from their interview are below.

Ajay Kshatriya has 15 years of experience in biotechnology in energy, healthcare, and software. Before co-founding Biota Technology, he was an investor and entrepreneur-in-residence at Seed Capital, a investing in science-based innovation. Prior, he was a senior manager at Genentech in operations and project management.

Switching from venture capital to startup founder required a different mindset, Ajay said:

All day in a VC firm, you're saying 'no'. That's how your brain's oriented. You're constantly critically analyze the gaps in someone's business plan.

When you're an entrepreneur, yeah, there's 100 gaps. But you go figure out how to solve them. It's kind of a brain switch that you have to make in order to be successful as an entrepreneur.

You really have to take that optimistic lens and say, "This can work, and here's how we can do it."

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To hear the clip, click here.

Before becoming a founder at Validately, Steven Cohn was an executive at Quantcast and DoubleClick and had started and sold two companies. The first, Buy Your Friend a Drink, was a success and Steven was eager to start up again.



However, his second venture, Irrive, quickly failed. Here's why:

Steven: We did everything wrong. We built before testing. We over-designed the product, overbuilt the product, and we built something really beautiful that no one wanted. ...

Steve: Was it that you didn't know what you got right the first time?

Steven: Nope, hubris. ... Once I had a success in my first company with my second I raised $2 million of seed capital with just a PowerPoint presentation. I didn't even have a team or anything. People were like, "Wow, you just hit a home run with your exit to LivingSocial. ... "You must be a genius. It must be you."

I'd drunk my own Kool-Aid, I believed it, and so I did everything wrong from a product perspective. ...

To hear the clip, click here.

--

Biota, Ajay explained, is using DNA sequencing of microbes found underground to help oil companies optimize production when hydraulic fracturing.

Here's how his team validated whether there was a need to increase efficiency in the energy market and how he found Biota's target market:

Ajay: We had done some customer discovery to validate that there was a need in the American energy market to become dramatically more efficient with hydraulic fracturing. They're wasting a million dollars an oil well, and they'd like to lower that direct cost. Oh, and by the way, if they could, there's a huge environmental benefit, too. There's a double bottom line, so we knew that was the case.

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Steve: What's the environmental benefit?

Ajay: If you know where to fracture, you also know where not to fracture, so you could save 3 million gallons of fresh water a well. There's 125,000 wells, so that's billions of gallons of water that you can save.

We started by doing customer discovery - talking to 75 people in the oil industry over the first four months which was extremely helpful. I mean, what does a guy who's been in biotech for 15 years applying DNA and software know about the oil industry that's been around for about 120 years?

Steve: Hopefully after 75 people, you know a bit more. Right?

Ajay: (Nods.) I have the world's biggest hammer looking for a nail. So how do I articulate that value proposition in a way that the customer gets? That was one of the biggest challenges that we had. They hear exactly what you heard. 'DNA sequencing in the oil?", what the hell does that mean?

Steve: You needed to translate that to a real customer problem? It took you a while to understand the problem.

Ajay: You got it.

To hear the clip, click here.

Business comes down to relationships and building trust, said Ajay, who is the son of Indian immigrants and grew up in Texas. His early life taught him how to make personal connections:

Ajay: One day you're eating ribs, the next day you're eating chicken curry, and you know, you kind of wear two different hats. You have two faces: inside the home, and outside the home. You learn that pretty quickly. That was probably one of the most formative parts of growing up in a place like that, with that background.

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Steve: How do you think that affected you?

Ajay: To relate you have to find commonalities between people. If I'm hanging out with a bunch of guys in Texas, how can I connect and relate to them? Then if I go hang out with all my dad's friends who grew up in India, how do I connect and relate to them? It kind of creates a chameleon-like personality you develop in connecting with people in different ways.

Learning how to connect helped me a lot as an entrepreneur When you're a founder you got to sell all the time - to a wide variety of people. You got to convince people that you're crazy idea can work, you got to hire people, you got to get investors to write you checks, customers to give you money to do what you say you can do. The most important part of sales is building trust, and you can't build trust if you you're not able to connect with people.



To hear the clip, click here.

Ajay also shared his recipe for success:

The three rules of a career that have helped me and I continue to follow:

find mentors who are 10, 20, 30 years your senior that you aspire to be when you get to that age. Ask them for advice and do what they tell you to do. ... surround yourself with people way smarter than you. It's not a sign that you're dumb; it's a sign that you have perspective and maturity. most importantly, out-work everybody. Look to the person to your left, look to the person to your right. The only way to guarantee your success is just to work harder than they do.

To hear the clip, click here.

--

Despite having a Harvard Business School education, Steven learned some of his biggest business lessons outside the classroom:

Steven: I went to business school at Harvard but when I graduated I said, "There's a couple of things I want to learn before I start my own business." I think I was hesitant because of the experience my father had where he tried a bunch of businesses that were unsuccessful.



So my first job out of business school I wanted to learn finance and I went to Merrill Lynch in investment banking. There I learned about how to raise capital. I also learned how to sell a company -- the process, the steps to sell a company. Both of those skills - raising capital and selling companies have helped me throughout my career because I've sold two companies of my own prior to starting my current company.

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Working at Merrill Lynch I realized I'm not a big company guy. Even today when I'm interviewing people I say, "You know what? You're great, and our company is great, but it's just not a fit." Sometimes when I interview people I think they're very talented, I just don't think they're going to fit within our company culture, what we need to do. That's just as important as their skills. I think there are some people who are builders, there are some people who are creators, and there are some people who are managers, they like to manage big organizations. I think those are very different skill sets.

To hear the clip, click here.

In starting his first company, Steven found himself talking to customers in an unlikely place:

Steven: I went into bars and I said, "My name is Steve Cohn, I'm thinking about starting a company called 'Buy Your Friend a Drink,' and the way my product would work is, people would walk in here with a gift certificate that's pre-bought for a drink."

I remember the first bar I went into -- I didn't have a website, I didn't have anything ... The bar manager said, "That sounds great. I'll sign up. Where's your contract?" I said, "Uh, contract? I'll be back in two weeks!"

I found that the first thing I did -- the bars and restaurants, and supply-side of the market -- was very easy to do.

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Steve: That's a big win, right? To figure that out -

Steven: Yeah, a big win. ... The first day ... I just literally walked around. ... I had nothing behind me besides me and what I could say to people.

I didn't have business cards, I didn't have anything (and) I was able to sign up a half-dozen bars in one day.

To hear the clip, click here.

Steven also discussed one of the darkest times he encountered while building Buy Your Friend a Drink:

I can't tell you how painful it was (during the financial crisis) in January of 2009, in December of 2008, when you see everything that you had built crumbling because of macro-factors you have no control of.

My wife was pregnant at the time, we were running out of cash. I hadn't taken a salary in two years just from when I started the company and we were low on capital, our personal wealth. I was getting a tremendous amount of pressure.

Shareholders were yelling at me because I was running out of cash. I'm like, "Do you realize what's going on in the world? CitiBank is trading at $2 a share. If we knew that, I would have put the cash in and shorted CitiBank, right?"

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No one knew what was going on but I persevered through and it turned out to be a very good outcome.

To hear the clip, click here.

Listen to my full interviews with Ajay and Steven by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111.

Want to be a guest on the show? Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Send an email to terri@kandsranch.com describing your entrepreneurial journey.
The thing about science fiction is - often it comes true. Back in 1966 writer, Harry Kleiner penned a wildly futuristic film fantasy called Fantastic Voyage. In it, a submarine crew is shrunk to microscopic size and venture into the body of an injured scientist to repair the damage to his brain. I wonder if Dr. Neil Martin has seen the film? In some ways, it hardly matters, since he's starring in a VR experience that turns the film's fantasy into reality.

Dr. Martin is the chair of neurosurgery at UCLA. Dr. Martin and his team are working with a technology developed by a company called Surgical Theater to use VR headsets to let surgeons to journey inside their patients' brains. By using a VR environment to explore a malignant tumor in the patient's brain, doctors are able to "fly around" the tumor, see it from all sides, spot potential complications, and mentally prepare for the high-stakes operation.

The thing about science fiction is - often it comes true. Back in 1966 writer, Harry Kleiner penned a wildly futuristic film fantasy called Fantastic Voyage. In it, a submarine crew is shrunk to microscopic size and venture into the body of an injured scientist to repair the damage to his brain. I wonder if Dr. Neil Martin has seen the film? In some ways, it hardly matters, since he's starring in a VR experience that turns the film's fantasy into reality.

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Dr. Martin is the chair of neurosurgery at UCLA. Dr. Martin and his team are working with a technology developed by a company called Surgical Theater to use VR headsets to let surgeons to journey inside their patients' brains. By using a VR environment to explore a malignant tumor in the patient's brain, doctors are able to "fly around" the tumor, see it from all sides, spot potential complications, and mentally prepare for the high-stakes operation.

So what line have we crossed? Is using visual exploration breaking new ground in storytelling and education - or is it a new form of micro-medicine? Across the pond, at the Royal London hospital, Dr. Shafi Ahmed is about to make his first incision in a procedure that will remove cancerous tissue from a patient's bowel. A cancer surgeon at Barts Health NHS Trust, Dr. Shafi will broadcast the entire operation live, and in 360 video. While videos of surgical procedure are nothing new, VR allowing viewers to focus not just on what the surgeon is doing, but also on what other members of the team are up to, and soon - sharing the very tip of the surgical instruments with medical audiences.

The question is simple. If you found out that you had a brain tumor - would your first thought be of a neurosurgeon donning virtual reality goggles and walking around inside your skull? I bet not. But with VR tech that was until recently the realm of hardcore gamers, neurosurgeons are able to literally get inside patient's brain before and even during surgery.

Surgical Theater uses flight simulator technology developed by former Israeli air force officers Moty Avisar and Alon Geri. VR puts neurosurgeons in the pilot's seat - allowing them to "fly" through the scene of the mission. Before they conduct an operation, they can rehearse complicated procedures. "Complex neurosurgery requires a deep understanding of intricate anatomy," Dr. Neil Martin, professor and chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at UCLA Medical Center explains. "The Surgical Theater technology give you an amazing ability to immerse yourself in the anatomical structures and mentally rehearse the entire operation ahead.

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Jessica Lange in Long Day's Journey into Night.

Photo: Joan Marcus

The Roundabout has just wrapped up one of its finest seasons in memory, with smashingly good productions of Noises Off, The Humans, The Robber Bridegroom and She Loves Me. Their 50th season ends on not quite so high a note with an above-average--but merely "above-average"--revival of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.

There was a time when even a satisfactory production of this masterwork was much welcome; it took thirty years for the famously long-and-weighty four-hour drama to be revived on Broadway. O'Neill wrote the semi-autobiographical play in 1942, sternly prohibiting publication until 25 years after his death (which occurred in 1953). It was nevertheless published and produced soon thereafter, in 1956. In the second thirty years, though, we have seen productions starring Jack Lemmon; Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst; Brian Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave; and--off-Broadway--Brian Murray and Frances Sternhagen. And that's just in Manhattan.

What Jonathan Kent's production has going for it, foremost, is a bravura performance by Jessica Lange. One expects that critic and audience reports will begin with encomiums for Ms. Lange. Deservedly so, likely followed by a Tony nomination next Tuesday morning. But when people stream out of Long Day enthusing about the actress playing Mary Tyrone--the morphine-addicted wife and mother of the brood--you can be sure that something is lacking. Colleen Dewhurst and Vanessa Redgrave were highly praised for their portrayals in 1988 and 2003, respectively, but in each case they were matched by a towering leading man.



Gabriel Byrne and Jessica Lange in Long Day's Journey into Night.

Photo: Joan Marcus

Lange is not. Gabriel Byrne is a fine actor, as he has demonstrated in his two past Broadway appearances (in O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten and A Touch of the Poet). But James Tyrone--the character--is not a fine actor, at least at the time that O'Neill sought to memorialize him. He is a grand, scenery-chewing barnstormer who has long past traded talent for fame. While this does not necessarily translate into how a man behaves in his living room, away from the audience and the greasepaint, James Tyrone appears to need at least some bravado. Once or twice in the fourth and final act, Byrne does indeed fall into dramatic poses (as when he climbs on the table to reach the chandelier, suggesting he's mounting the parapet for a final assault against the enemy). Byrne's fourth act is quite effective; there's a thrilling moment, here, when he tries to hide his shame behind a handful of playing cards. But his performance is way too long in simmering, leaving full attention on Mary. All told, we feel like we are watching The Mary Tyrone Show--O'Neill's own version of I Remember Mama--for too much of the evening.

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Lange--who first played this role in an unrelated 2000 production in London--is matched by Michael Shannon, as the wastrel brother Jamie. Shannon (Bug, Killer Joe and the recently opened "Elvis and Nixon") is one of those actors who seem incapable of giving a less-than-mesmerizing stage performance. O'Neill filled this role with despair, and Shannon serves it to us drink by drink. But Shannon and Lange, with a partial victory by Byrne, are not quite enough. John Gallagher, Jr.--a Tony-winner for Spring Awakening--simply doesn't work out as stand-in for the playwright. The wrong actor in the wrong production, he doesn't seem tortured, frail-with-consumption, or part of the family Tyrone whatsoever.



John Gallagher, Jr. and Michael Shannon in Long Day's Journey into Night.

Photo: Joan Marcus

Director Kent has impressed us in the past with the Diana Rigg Medea and in the present with Imelda Staunton's towering Gypsy. He made a jumble of the Brian Stokes Mitchell Man of La Mancha, though, and he does not show a firm hand here.
Kristin Freshwater is the director of Victory Hall Players in Scottsville, Virginia. She runs Baine's Books and Coffee and sits on the board of directors for the Scottsville Center for Arts and Nature. On April 28, 29, and 30, Victory Hall players will present their final weekend of Thornton Wilder's Our Town.



Lanie Bittner (L) plays Emily Webb. Kristin Freshwater (R) plays George Gibbs and directs Our Town. Photo by Nancy Gill

Tell me a little about Victory Hall Players.

'Victory Hall Players' is an in-house educational community theater program built into the Scottsville Center for Arts & Nature (SCAN). SCAN has existed for about 11 years now. Its primary goal is to provide arts and nature educational programs for individuals and families. Music, drama, dance, visual art, and environmental classes and workshops comprise the main focus of the offerings. It was the vision of our Executive Director, Nancy Gill, to have a regular season of shows that gave people within the community the chance to learn, create and engage in quality theater. That's where I came into the picture. Nancy immediately approached me about creating something like 'Victory Hall Players' nearly three years ago when she learned that I had a background in theater art. It took a little while to conceptualize the program and get it off the ground, but here we are, three years later with a phenomenal production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. I couldn't be prouder of all of my staff and actors.

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What brought you to Scottsville? How long have you lived there? What keeps you there?

Good question! To be honest, my partner and I moved to Scottsville to get out of Charlottesville. It was a very instinctual move. At the time we knew no one here, but it just felt right. We were both working in Charlottesville but chose to commute because we wanted to be in a small town, country environment. When I was an undergrad student at UVA I always traveled through Scottsville on my way from Charlottesville to Appomattox to visit my folks. I thought Scottsville was incredibly charming and loved that it was right on the James River. When looking at places to move right outside of Charlottesville, Scottsville was just naturally at the top of the list for us.

After about nine months of commuting we realized that there was a need for more viable businesses in town. We took action and joined forces with our friend Bryan Baine to open a second location of 'Baine's Books & Coffee' (The original location is in Appomattox, VA). We opened the Scottsville store in November of 2012 and have been here ever since. The business and the wonderful community of people is what keeps us here.

Why Our Town?

Our Town seemed to be the right choice for Victory Hall Players' first show. It's relevant and endearing, yet thought provoking. It was a play I knew that many in this small community could relate to and connect with. I also wanted to do a show that was written during the time period of Victory Hall's heyday. Our Town fit the bill perfectly.

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What experiences in theater and life influenced your choice?

Gosh! So many things! I don't know where to begin. I have had the privilege of being involved in theatre since I was very young. My mom began signing my sister and me up for community theatre productions when I was about seven or eight years old. We both loved everything about it: the community, the self reflection, the creativity. I quickly got bitten by the theatre bug as some might say, and my involvement in theatre continued throughout high school. It was during these years that I decided theatre was something I wanted to pursue. The very last show I performed during my high school career was 'Our Town.' I played Mrs. Webb. I liked the show then, but now I love it!

During my time in UVA's Department of Drama I learned a lot about myself as a theatre artist. I discovered that my views on life, my faith, and my overall experience in the world all affected my art and how I staged things. I was and continue to be drawn to minimalism. This is one reason this script speaks to me.

Thornton Wilder first produced the play in 1938, featuring a small, fictional town in New Hampshire--Grover's Corners--for about a thirteen year span at the turn of last century. What keeps this play relevant for today's audience?

This play seems always to be relevant. Even though it was written nearly 80 years ago, it is still one of the most produced plays in the world. Its themes are universal, and that is the reason for its continued success. It isn't so much about the small town of Grover's Corners or the characters we meet onstage as it is about the connection to the audience. It was written as an interactive play.

The Stage Manager constantly breaks the fourth wall, drawing the audience into the action of the play and bridging the gap between the here and now and the action onstage. For that reason, the audience is more invested and involved. They connect to and understand the daily life, the love, and the death of the characters they meet. It is relevant because the story is real. It addresses what it means to be human, the joy and the pain. Their town is "our town." Their story is our story.

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It may even be more relevant in today's technologically driven society, as it reminds us to breathe, to take time to enjoy the journey, and to really "look at one another" while we're still here.

How was this play seen as "cutting edge," both back then, and currently?

At the time that Our Town was first produced America was in between two World Wars and just climbing out of the The Great Depression. It was a time period in American theater history where most shows were escapist in nature: think the American musical and vaudeville. There were exceptions to this trend, though, and Thornton Wilder's style was one of them.

Our Town's minimalism is what makes it "cutting edge." Wilder made extremely specific notes in his script about how Our Town is to be performed. He insists on the minimalism. The play begins with a "blank, bare stage." The set is extremely minimal, giving the audience license to imagine kitchens, streets, soda shops, and graveyards. The entire show is virtually propless. Nearly everything is pantomimed, from school books to kitchen equipment. The minimalism is another tool aimed at making the audience active participants in the drama. When sets and props aren't already laid out for the audience they are forced to use their own imaginations to flesh everything out. This mechanism also puts more emphasis on the action itself and the characters.

Wilder's stage directions and insistence on minimalism is vital to Our Town's success. It is also what made the play so "cutting edge" at the time of its first production. Audiences were not used to seeing plays without full fledged sets and props. And a broken fourth wall was rare. With Our Town Wilder broke the mold in America.

Please tell me a little about the auditioning process...how did you assemble this cast? Was it easy? Were there a lot of folks involved?

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Auditioning is always a mix of exciting and challenging. You never know who might show up, and you have to work with whom you get. I was extremely lucky with this particular auditioning process and the cast I was able to assemble from it. A couple of actors dropped out before showtime, but we managed to fill the roles from within the group of people we had already assembled. The hardest part of casting this show was deciding who fit each role best. In the end, I was extremely pleased with how the cast turned out. Everyone fits into each of their roles perfectly, and they all have done a fantastic job.

It was a challenge working with various experience levels. I had folks that had never been involved in theater and others who had a decent amount of theatre experience. Because Victory Hall Players is an educational program I had to meet each actor where they were with their experience. And those who wanted even more instruction were given one-on-one rehearsals to work out some of the finer nuances of the script.

How has the play unfolded over the course of auditions, rehearsals...to the first performances? Did you hit any roadblocks or speed bumps?

It has morphed and changed so much since auditions and first rehearsals. There have been many roadblocks along the way. Most of those were with figuring out Tech in the space, but luckily I have my sister, Sophie Freshwater, who is a theater lighting and sound genius! She was able to troubleshoot and fix all of the issues in time for performances.

Another unexpected speed bump was losing our actor who played George Gibbs just a week and a half before showtime. I searched high and low for someone to replace him at the last minute, but every actor I contacted was busy. Soooo....I cut my hair and stepped into the role, and honestly I wouldn't have it any other way. I have garnered so much more from this show by both directing it and being in it. Working alongside all of my actors has been a blast! Also, it will probably be the only time in my life that I'll have the opportunity to play a teenage boy.

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If you had to do it all over again...would you? Would you change anything?

YES! I would most definitely do it all over again. I've had such a great time working on this show. It is one of my all-time favorite plays ever written. To produce it as the first Victory Hall Players show in a town that I love so much has made this my absolute favorite production I have ever worked on. There's nothing I would change, except maybe more rehearsal time.

Has your understanding of Our Town changed as you have been more involved with it?

It has! There are definitely subtle nuances in the script that I had never noticed until we started bringing it to life. I love the play even more now than I did before. As a script, it is brilliant! Thornton Wilder took so many details into consideration when writing it and that becomes exceedingly clear as you work to produce it.

Describe your directing style. You also act in the play...how did that evolve, and how did it affect your role as director?

I try to be very relaxed as a director. I never want to be a dictator of "one true vision" or some sort of authoritarian on the script. I like my actors to make discoveries. Sometimes they bring things to the table that I haven't even thought about as director. And that's refreshing!

Yes, I have to keep the action and blocking on course, but not without giving my actors creative license.

As a set designer and director I tend to direct with total stage picture in mind. I use the Stanaslavski method when acting and my directing tends to fall into that same style as well. I allow my actors to experiment with action and use their emotional memory and imagination to bring their characters to life.

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Stepping into the role of George Gibbs was challenging, but extremely rewarding. It allowed me to step into the stage picture I had created and be a part of what it feels like to be onstage with my own blocking. In a lot of ways I feel like it helped the production for me to be more involved with my actors onstage. It also forced me to see things from an actor's perspective, which was helpful. It was hard for me being unable to watch every minute. I couldn't critique any of the scenes from the audience's perspective. Luckily, I had my Stage Manager and Technical Director to give us notes.

What's next for you? What's next for the Victory Hall Players?
Ted Rubin is an author, social marketing strategist, keynote speaker, and acting CMO of Brand Innovators. He sat down with Oracle Social Cloud's Senior Content Manager Maggie Schneider Huston to discuss how brands can nurture relationships on social media.

Maggie Schneider Huston: What's the best way for B2B companies to build relationships on social media?

Ted Rubin: It's so much easier to apply social to a B2B brand. If you're B2C, you've got millions of people you're trying to connect with. If you're a B2B brand, you have a much more refined audience. But people always forget that they are selling to a person, not a company. We need to build a relationship. If you feel like we've connected, you'll listen more closely. Personal connections lead to business relationships. I often say, "relationships are like muscle tissue." The more you use them, the stronger they become.

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MSH: Obviously, not every interaction is going to go well. With every relationship, there are bound to be a few missteps. What should brands do then?

TR: They should admit it. Don't apologize if you don't mean it, and don't apologize if you didn't do anything wrong. But if you've done something wrong, you need to fix it. You have to take the time to say, "we realize we have a problem, and it will take us some time to fix it." Be transparent and authentic. It can be as simple as saying, "we're going to retrain our employees." Don't automatically fire an employee, unless it's really obvious that it was malicious. We all make mistakes, especially in the social world. The most important thing is to catch those mistakes.

MSH: A lot of employees are scared to post on social media about work - they're afraid they will say something wrong and get fired. However, we know that employee advocacy (especially on social media) is one of the most important levers brands can pull. What should leaders do to instill confidence in their employees and encourage them to be active on social media?

TR: Leaders should get into the social sphere themselves. They might not share (although they should), but they should at the very least read other people's posts and show that they're listening. If you tell your employees that you want them to be social leaders, then you need to lead by example.

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Leaders also need to empower employees to get on social channels - even during the work day. Don't cut your employees off from social. I know that Facebook can be a time suck. But look, I'm 58 years old. In the beginning of my career, if you wanted to waste time, you could find plenty of ways to do it. I used to go to the bathroom just so I could read a book. Leaders need to encourage employees to build their personal brand and influence. Do for others without expectation of anything in return and the authenticity shines through. If you show your employees that your primary concern is helping them grow, then they're going to be that much more apt to support you in your efforts.

Business is very different these days. In 1980, most business dinners were a drag because they had to be entirely about business. Today, I love going out with my colleagues. We talk about everything. I want my employees sharing experiences and putting things out there, because a lot of the time your business colleagues are also going to be your friends on social media, get to know who you are, and feel that much more connected. A Network gives you Reach, but a Community gives you Power! Networks Connect... Communities Care.



MSH: You're a divorced dad. How is parenting similar to management?

TR:

Being a divorced dad, we're not necessarily one big happy family. We have different groups with different responsibilities. We need to come together and get rid of the silos. In a family, it works best if it's not broken down into what's most important to each kid. In business, one of the most important things is customer service and marketing working together with one voice and the same goals.

MSH: Ok, I have to ask. What's the deal with the socks? Do you plan your outfit around your socks?

TR: I'm playful. Socks have become part of my personal brand since 2010. It started because people noticed I was wearing funky socks at conferences. It creates conversation. It makes me approachable. I have CEOs stick out their foot and want to take a #TedSockie when we meet or come across each other serendipitously. It makes it so somebody can say, "what socks are you wearing today?" instead of thinking they have to come up with some bright comment or way to open up a conversation or approach me.
A lone trainer watches over Monterey Bay and the empty marine mammal pools at Long Marine Lab (photo: TM Williams)



This week in the pre-dawn hours we lifted Primo, the bottlenose dolphin, out of his home of 22 years and into a carrier in the back of a covered truck. Under the watchful eyes and gentle hands of his long-time caregivers, his veterinary team and SeaWorld animal care staff, he made the slow journey to his new aquarium residence. He was the last of my research "zoo" at Long Marine Lab on the University of California- Santa Cruz campus, the last of an eclectic assortment of rescued and retired dolphins, endangered seals and sea otters that taught us so much about the biology of marine mammals.

Today the old dolphin and I were placed into hibernation for the next year to make way for pool renovations and to face an uncertain future. As Primo left I wondered if this was the fate of all zoos and aquariums, and the destiny of SeaWorld. I wondered what was going to happen to all of the wild animals that we were trying to save.

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These are uncertain times for big charismatic animals in the oceans and on land. Many populations are declining. Money is scarce for pool repairs and big mammal research, made worse by the public's vocal distrust of scientists, zoos and aquariums. Many biologists are simply giving up. The marine mammal programs at the University of California- San Diego and the University of Hawaii are now gone. We are the struggling last of our kind- our Long Marine Lab is the only academic-based marine mammal facility for dolphins, pinnipeds and sea otters in the world.

I fear that the ensuing ignorance concerning marine mammal biology will keep wild dolphins, whales, seals and sea otters at risk. The evidence is clear as carcasses and sick animals wash up on our shores every day. We desperately need the science to solve the problems.

At Long Marine Lab, Primo taught the teachers and tested the researchers. I've harbored no misperceptions about which of us was in charge all of these years. In letting Primo lead my science, our studies have always turned out much more interesting than I could have ever imagined. He revealed the secrets of cost efficient swimming and surfing, was a model subject for wild orca metabolism, showed off his strength so dolphin safe fishing nets could be developed, and warned us about the impacts of climate change and oceanic noise on wild dolphin survival.

With a flick of his tail, the dolphin could elicit high-pitched squeals of delight from visiting school children that rivaled his own sonar frequencies. He comforted cancer survivors, ALS patients and children with learning disabilities. Primo was also the epitome of patient counselor for the annual summer camps that inspired several generations of budding marine biologists. He made the crustiest of academic visitors smile. Most importantly, he trained hundreds of undergraduate volunteers in the art of veterinary science, animal husbandry, and scientific research. Many became educators, doctors, veterinarians, and scientists in their own right. Others currently work at zoos and aquariums across the nation, spreading Primo's marine conservation message to over 26 million public visitors each year.

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(photo by TM Williams)

Some would argue that this is no life for a dolphin; that he should be set free to roam the seas. I don't believe that Primo sees it that way. Even before his retirement from the US Navy, he reveled in the human attention, and the mental and physical challenges of conducting research. He is an individual who knows his own mind; to deny him that would be unthinkable. Ultimately, his fate has been to help his wild kin navigate our changing oceans.

The pools and overlook at Long Marine Lab are silent now; the waters are eerily still. As I look out over Monterey Bay, I wish that I could take the easier road. But after 30 years of conducting marine mammal science, I've learned that it is unrealistic to think that we will solve the threats to wild marine mammals by only studying them in the oceans. I've been there, and until humans reverse climate change, engage in sustainable fisheries, stop using gillnets, halt oceanic oil exploration and transport, bar plastics and control the exponential population impacts along our coastlines, we will need dedicated dolphins like Primo and places like Long Marine Lab, zoos and aquariums where researchers can work.
Zimmermans Automotive in Mechanicsburg will provide Saturday select families in need service for their vehicles at no cost for its first Family Service Day  Keeping Cars Kickin event.

The business at 2234 Market St. will be closed to the general public on Saturday while it provides general automobile maintenance and car-care education from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at no charge to 20 Mechanicsburg and Dillsburg area families selected for the event by New Hope Ministries.

Im so excited and nervous at the same time, said Jacquie Hower, director of operations for Zimmermans Automotive, Inc. Our goal in hosting Family Service Day  Keeping Cars Kickin event is for families to leave with more reliable transportation and a sense of security that comes from having a more reliable sense of security that comes from having an understanding of how their vehicles work.

Also, a host of local organizations also will be on hand at the business on Saturday to keep youngsters entertained while the family car is serviced. Family Fun activities run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m and include: fire apparatus, Upper Allen Fire Department; car seat checks, South Central PA Highway Safety; blood drive, Central PA Blood Bank; paint activity, Bring Your Own Apron; Nutrition Bingo, PinnacleHealth; CPR demo, Holy Spirit EMS; lollipop tree, Primerica Financial Services; financial information, Americhoice Federal Credit Union; and education table, American Trauma Society, PA Division.

Business sponsors include: Advanced Auto Parts; John R. Young, Co; and Konhaus Marketing. Other local business interested in participating in this event may contact Hower at 717-766-7656.

This isnt the first time that Zimmermans Automotive has held an event benefiting the community, Hower said. The business also holds annual canned food drives for New Hope Ministries; an annual chili cook-off silent auction benefiting the Mechanicsburg Music Alliance; an annual Car Show Community Day every August; and other events.

Hower said she was approached about initiating a Family Service Day at Zimmermans after Charlie Marcotte, founder of the national Family Service Day organization, he read about the business in Ratchet and Wrench magazine.

The Family Service Day organization, based in Virginia, is dedicated to helping businesses do well by doing good, according to a news release. With its flagship initiative, Keeping Cars Kickin, participating repair shops offer no-charge vehicle maintenance, service and car-care education to families in need. Since 2009, the projects network has grown to include service providers in all 50 states. Zimmermans is one of four participating providers in Pennsylvania.

Mary Wheeler, New Hope Ministries Mechanicsburg Center Manager, said information letters about the Family Service Day were distributed to 20 students from New Hopes forklift training and certified nurse aide programs. Wheeler said she selected these particular students because a lot of these people were searching and starting brand new jobs so they needed to have reliable transportation.

New Hope Ministries is a Christian social service agency that offers a variety of assistance and services in the Dillsburg, Dover, Mechanicsburg and West Shore area. For information: wwwww.nhm-pa.org.
Pro-abortion rights signs are seen during the March for Life 2016, in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, Friday, Jan. 22, 2016 in Washington, during the annual rally on the anniversary of 1973 'Roe v. Wade' U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Reproductive health isn't just about abortions, despite all the attention they get. It's also about access to family planning services, contraception, sex education and much else.

Such access lets women control the timing and size of their families so they have children when they are financially secure and emotionally ready and can finish their education and advance in the workplace. After all, having children is expensive, costing US$9,000 to $25,000 a year.

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And that's why providing women with a full range of reproductive health options is good for the economy at the same time as being essential to the financial security of women and their families. Doing the opposite threatens not only the physical health of women but their economic well-being too.

The Supreme Court acknowledged as much in 1992, stating in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey:

The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.

However, it seems that state and federal legislators, certain politicians running for president as well as some conservative Supreme Court justices have forgotten the meaning of this sweeping language.

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As a consequence, the right to control their reproductive health has become increasingly illusory for many women, particularly the poor.









Joshua Roberts/Reuters





The economics of contraception

In addition to its widely recognized health and autonomy benefits for women, contraception directly boosts the economy. In fact, research shows access to the pill is responsible for a third of women's wage gains since the 1960s.

And this benefit extends to their kids. Children born to mothers with access to family planning benefit from a 20 to 30 percent increase in their own incomes over their lifetimes, as well as boosting college completion rates.

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Not surprisingly, in a survey, 77 percent of women who used birth control reported that it allowed them to better care for themselves and their families, while large majorities also reported that birth control allowed them to support themselves financially (71 percent), stay in school (64 percent) and help them get and keep a job (64 percent).

Still, there is a class divide in contraception access, as evidenced by disparities in the 2011 rate of unintended pregnancies. While the overall rate fell to 45 percent (from 51 percent in 2008), the figure for women living at or below the poverty line was five times that of women at the highest income level (although also decreasing).

One reason for this disparity is the cost of birth control, particularly for the most effective, long-lasting forms. For instance, it typically costs over $1,000 for an IUD and the procedure to insert it, amounting to one month's full-time pay for a minimum wage worker.

These costs are significant, given that the average American woman wants two children and will thus need contraception for at least three decades of her life. Unfortunately, publicly funded family planning meets only 54 percent of the need, and these funding streams are under constant attack by conservatives.

Not surprisingly, health insurance makes a difference, and women with coverage are much more likely to use contraceptive care. The Affordable Care Act is responsible for part of the drop in unintended pregnancies -- it expanded contraception coverage to around 55 million women with private insurance coverage.

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Yet this coverage is also at risk for millions of employees and their dependents who work for employers claiming a religious objection. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court concluded that a for-profit company cannot only profess religious beliefs but also impose those beliefs on their employees by denying them certain forms of contraception. The Obama administration has issued regulations allowing religious employers to opt out of offering contraceptive coverage. Affected employees are then covered directly by their insurers.

This is not enough for some. In March, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Zubik v. Burwell, in which several religious nonprofits assert that even the act of seeking an accommodation from the law burdens their religious consciences.

These religious groups argue in part that women can get their birth control from other sources, such as federally funded family planning centers. Yet at the same time, conservatives are on a mission to slash that funding, particularly for Planned Parenthood, which provides sexual and reproductive health care to almost five million people a year.

This makes no economic sense. Publicly funded family planning programs help women avoid about two million unintended pregnancies a year and save the government billions of dollars in health care costs. The net savings to government are $13.6 billion. For every $1 invested in these services, the government saves $7.09.









Brian Snyder/Reuters





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Sex education and the economic ladder

Another key to reproductive health -- and one that isn't discussed enough -- is sexual education for teenagers.

For years, the public has spent over $2 billion on abstinence-only programs, which not only fail to reduce teen birth rates but also reinforce gender stereotypes and are rife with misinformation. Low-income minority teens are particularly subject to these programs.

Teens without knowledge about their sexual health are more likely to get pregnant and less likely to work, spiraling them to the bottom of the economic ladder.

President Obama's proposed 2017 budget would eliminate federal funding for abstinence-only sex education and instead fund only comprehensive sexual education, which is age-appropriate and medically accurate. However, Congress has rejected the president's prior proposed cuts and the same result is likely for 2017.

Access to abortion

Then there's the issue of abortion. Let's start with the cost.

Half of women who obtain an abortion pay more than one-third of their monthly income for the procedure.

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Costs rise significantly the longer a woman must wait, either because state law requires it or she needs to save up the money -- or both. Studies show that women who cannot access abortion are three times more likely to fall into poverty than women who obtained abortions.

In addition to the financial burden, many states are enacting laws designed to limit abortion access. These laws hit low-income women particularly hard. From 2011 to 2015, 31 states have enacted 288 such laws, including waiting periods and mandatory counseling sessions.

Moreover, 24 states have enacted so-called TRAP laws (targeted regulation of abortion providers), which medical experts say go far beyond what is needed for patient safety and impose needless requirements on doctors and abortion facilities, such as requiring facilities to have the same hallway dimensions as a hospital.

In March, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case challenging a Texas TRAP law, Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt. If the court upholds the law, the entire state of Texas will be left with only 10 abortion providers.

A lower federal appeals court stated in the Texas case that travel distances of more than 150 miles one way are not an "undue burden" and are thus constitutional. This, I would argue, shows a complete lack of understanding regarding the difficulties that poverty -- especially rural poverty -- imposes. Traveling long distances adds additional costs to an already expensive medical procedure.

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The court's decision is expected in June. Observers fear that the court could split 4-4, which would leave the Texas law intact.









Kevin Lamarque/Reuters





The Hyde Amendment

Another way in which U.S. policy on abortions exacerbates economic inequality, especially for women of color, is through the ban on federal funding -- which some aspiring politicians seem to have forgotten is still in place.

It has been so since the 1976 enactment of the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal Medicaid funds from being used for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk. The Affordable Care Act does many wonderful things for women's health, but it also extends the Hyde Amendment through its expansion of Medicaid, and it allows states to ban abortion coverage in their private exchanges.

Denying poor women coverage under Medicaid contributes to the unintended birth rates that are seven times higher for poor women than high-income women.

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Economic and reproductive health

Politicians cannot promise to grow the economy and simultaneously limit access to abortion, birth control and sexual education. Our nation's economic health and women's reproductive health are linked.

And as Hillary Clinton correctly noted recently, it's an issue that deserves more attention in the presidential campaign -- and hasn't received enough.




Dear friends,

I am Dr. Hatem, the director of the Children's Hospital in Aleppo.

Last night, 27 staff and patients were killed in an airstrike on Al Quds Hospital nearby. My friend Dr Muhammad Waseem Maaz (pictured below), the city's most qualified pediatrician, was killed in the attack.

He used to work at our Children's Hospital during the day and then he'd go to Al Quds Hospital to attend to emergencies overnight.

Dr. Maaz and I used to spend six hours a day together. He was friendly, kind and he used to joke a lot with the whole staff. He was the loveliest doctor in our hospital.

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I'm in Turkey now, and he was supposed to visit his family here after I returned to Aleppo. He hadn't seen them in four months.

Dr. Maaz stayed in Aleppo, the most dangerous city in the world, because of his devotion to his patients. Hospitals are often targeted by government and Russian air forces.

Days before Dr. Maaz's life was taken, an airstrike hit only 200 meters away from our hospital. When the bombing intensifies, the medical staff run down to the ground floor of the hospital carrying the babies' incubators in order to protect them.

Like so many others, Dr. Maaz was killed for saving lives. Today we remember Dr. Maaz's humanity and his bravery. Please share his story so others may know what medics in Aleppo and across Syria are facing.

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The situation today is critical -- Aleppo may soon come under siege. We need the world to be watching.

Thank you for keeping us in your thoughts,


(Photo: Lisa Romerein/Getty Images)

By Leah Rodriguez

On New Year's Eve, the thirstiest day of the year and therefore one of the most lucrative for beauty businesses, I paid $55 at a three-chaired Dominican salon for a mediocre blowout and an uneven trim. My roommate had to take her scissors out to fix it minutes before we left for a party, but still, I would argue I got more than I paid for. You can't put a dollar value on these things: Three and a half hours of brushing up on Spanish; listening to merengue and old wives' tales (your hair will grow longer if a pregnant lady cuts it); not feeling like an outsider, completely.

***

In college, someone asked me if I scalped a Japanese girl, like it was supposed to be a compliment. She went to school in the South, and because she had a lot of black friends but had never seen anyone who looked like me, she figured I must be wearing a weave. Maybe another Dominican would be flattered, because many wear their long, straight hair as a badge of honor -- to defend their racially mixed heritage, and deny blackness. My own grandfather credits our soft, silky manes to indigenous DNA, a claim of which I'm skeptical.

The last census found 73 percent of the country's population is of mixed African and European descent, yet many neglect to address their kinky roots. In 1937, former dictator Rafael Trujillo managed to play up the culture's ties to colonial Spain as a mechanism to justify Haitian genocide. Trujillo's attempt to cleanse the population manifested itself in white beauty ideals, and the rejection of natural hair stuck. Eighty percent of the current Dominican population has West and Central African blood, according to a study conducted by CUNY, yet the country's issues with racism linger. Thousands of Dominican Haitians were deported in last year's immigration crisis.

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But on the hair front, at least, things are looking up. Some Dominicans are finally embracing their curls. In 2015, the first natural hair salon opened in Santo Domingo. Natural hair has even started appearing on the runway, with models like Lineisy Montero spearheading the trend.

I love street-style star Julia Sarr-Jamois, and model Imaan Hammam is all over my beauty Pinterest board, but I've been getting my hair blown out since the ripe old age of 4. That's probably also when I had my hair chemically straightened with toxic lye for the first time -- which should be illegal, by the way.

"You didn't fix your hair?" my grandmother will ask if you dare show up on Christmas with locks that look the way they grow out of your head. Friends, usually white, wonder why I roll my eyes and get defensive when they insist I go curly more often. Growing up, I was never encouraged to wear it down and let it be. It's never felt natural to me.

***

Not even the '60s theme of my New Year's Eve affair got me to tease my hair into a fro. In communities with a Dominican population, it's not too hard to find an affordable salon that will give you pin-straight hair, kept intact with a doobie -- not a joint, but the hairstyle Rihanna wore to the American Music Awards. In her superstitious Dominican way, my mother was convinced washing my hair regularly would make me sick. For much of my youth, my hair was bunched up in a messy topknot. Back then, it was not a deliberate status symbol of lazy cool.

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That day, the owner of the salon shook her head and refused to provide service to a white girl who came in for a French braid. "The Americans always want buns and braids," she sighed.

I seldom get my hair done at non-Dominican salons. They usually make me feel judged, and I'll walk away with a degree of regret deeper than anyone usually feels about bad bangs or misplaced layers. Once, at a salon downtown, the hairdresser asked me how I found out about the place in a tone that made me feel some type of way. The truth is that it had been featured on a biracial fashion blogger's site. (In hindsight, I realize she was probably paid to promote the spot.)

Maybe the hairdresser's tone was condescending in nature; maybe I had projected my own insecurity onto his question. When a stylist isn't of color, or doesn't have similarly textured hair, I find myself apologizing nervously. My hair is so thick, sorry. But what I'm really saying is, Sorry, I'm not white.



Only a few weeks before New Year's, I had my first experience at Dry Bar, a franchise salon that serves you an early-2000s version of Sex and the City luxury, complete with complimentary Champagne and Kelly Clarkson overhead. Not that I'd ever admit it out loud, but the concept always both appealed to me and intimidated me, on the assumption that no one at such a commercial place would be equipped to tackle my rat's nest. But our beauty editor was giving up a gift card because they always give her barrel curls, so I figured, why not?

When I booked the appointment, I gave an exaggerated description of my extremely dry, curly, damaged hair. The subtext: Be prepared when Lion Babe walks through the door. But then it turned out that my stylist was black. I relaxed, finally, and left feeling brand-new.

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***

Even when I step into a Dominican salon and they address me in English because they assume I'm African-American, I feel at home. The other women look like me; I understand their language and references. Somehow this sense of belonging and cultural experience feels worth the heat damage, the antiquated process of sitting under a hair dryer for an hour, the painful steps with different tools.

It's possible to find salons where stylists who are not of color know how to work with all kinds of textures. But honestly, I don't really care to give them my money. There needs to be a bigger, more obvious push across the market to make customers like me feel they're not a problem, or more difficult to work with, based on a genetic trait that's out of their control. Is that so much to ask, especially when you're paying for a service?

Maybe the solution is integrating how to work with natural hair into the mandatory beauty-school curriculum. Maybe it's as simple as hanging signs in salons acknowledging they don't discriminate, like those Hippies Always Welcome ones you see around beach towns.

Even at the top, there's work to be done. A few years ago, black model Jourdan Dunn took to Twitter to air her grievances about how she'd been treated backstage at a Giambattista Valli fashion show: "I swear some people need to learn how to do black hair/skin!"

Since then, a Dry Bar-type salon for natural hair has opened in New York City, and there are places, like Devachan, that make curly haired women feel like queens. But I don't want to seek out such niche establishments, especially when your average salon still sometimes charges an additional fee -- the unofficial but very real black tax.

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I'll continue to support businesses that feel safe, even if they're not very glamorous, until there isn't such a wide disconnect between how we treat white and non-white hair.

***

That December 31, I sunk into a chair in a narrow hallway without a window while a young woman pulled my head down into the sink. I let her shame me into getting the deep condition to treat my split ends, and wash away any guilt I had for perpetuating oppressive beauty standards, simply by being there.
Last week more than 150 nations signed the Paris Agreement, pledging to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Now, the first comprehensive analysis of the impacts of that half centigrade difference has been published in the journal Earth System Dynamics. The scientists found the additional 0.5 degrees Celsius would lead to longer heatwaves--"the difference between events at the upper limit of present-day natural variability and a new climate regime"--as well as more severe droughts and, in the tropics, decreased crop yield and the potential demise of all coral reefs. The extra 0.5 degrees Celsius could also mean that global sea levels rise 10 centimeters more by 2100.

"We found significant differences for all the impacts we considered," says the study's lead author Carl Schleussner, a scientific advisor at Climate Analytics in Germany.

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The researchers analyzed climate models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report, which focused on the projected regional impacts of 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius of warming, and considered 11 indicators, including extreme weather events, water availability, crop yields, coral reef degradation and sea-level rise.

They found that projected climate impacts at a 2 degrees Celsius increase are significantly more severe than at a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in some regions. In the Mediterranean, for example, fresh-water availability by 2100 would be some 10 percent lower in a 1.5 degrees Celsius world and 17 percent lower in a 2 degrees Celsius world. In Central America and West Africa, the half-degree difference could reduce maize and wheat yields by twice as much. Tropical regions would bear the brunt of the impacts of an additional half degree of warming, experiencing heat waves at about twice the global rate. Those events could last up to three months at 2 degrees Celsius, compared with two months at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the researchers say.

Tropical coral reefs are particularly sensitive to the half degree increase. By 2100, some reefs might adapt to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, but the larger increase would put nearly all of them at risk of severe degradation from coral bleaching.

EPA Moves Forward with Clean Energy Incentives Program

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has sent a proposal on the Clean Energy Incentive Program (CEIP), an optional program included in the Clean Power Plan that rewards states for early investment in certain renewable energy or energy efficiency projects in 2020 and 2021, to the Office of Management and Budget for review. The move is the final step before the CEIP can be formally proposed to the public (subscription).

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The EPA released details on the draft CEIP as part of the final Clean Power Plan--the Obama administration's rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the existing fleet of fossil fuel-fired power plants--in August. But, earlier this year, the Supreme Court issued a stay of the Clean Power Plan.

"Many states and tribes have indicated that they plan to move forward voluntarily to work to cut carbon pollution from power plants and have asked the agency to continue providing support and developing tools that may support those efforts, including the CEIP," the EPA said. "Sending this proposal to OMB for review is a routine step and it is consistent with the Supreme Court stay of the Clean Power Plan."

Pleasant Weather Affecting Americans' View of Climate Change

A new study in the journal Nature finds that 80 percent of Americans live in counties where the weather is more pleasant than four decades ago. This mild temperature trend, the study says, is increasingly preferred, lessening many Americans' concern about climate change.

"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 study co-author Patrick J. Egan, an associate professor at New York University's Wilf Family Department of Politics. He adds that "whereas weather patterns in recent decades have served as a poor source of motivation for Americans to demand a policy response to climate change, public concern may rise once people's everyday experiences of climate change effects start to become less pleasant."

Conducted by New York and Duke universities, the study examined each county in every U.S. state from 1974 to 2013--assessing the mildness of winters, rainfall averages, and humidity and heat intensity during summer months. It found that 99 percent of Americans live in places where the average January temperature increased.

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"Here in the U.S., when we're experiencing ice storms, the idea of a 1.5 or 2 degree rise might sound like good news," said Megan Mullin, associate professor of environmental politics at Duke University. As a result, she said, scientists need to reconsider their messages.
An old fuel pump is seen during early hours in a desert near the village of Sila, at the border with United Arab Emirates, south of the Eastern province of Khobar, Saudi Arabia January 29, 2016. Picture taken January 29, 2016. REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed

In a Greater Middle East in which one country after another has been plunged into chaos and possible failed statehood, two rival nations, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have been bedrock exceptions to the rule. Iran, at the moment, remains so, but the Saudi royals, increasingly unnerved, have been steering their country erratically into the region's chaos. The kingdom is now led by a decrepit 80-year-old monarch who, in commonplace meetings, has to be fed his lines by teleprompter. Meanwhile, his 30-year-old son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has gained significant control over both the kingdom's economic and military decision-making, launched a rash anti-Iranian war in Yemen, heavily dependent on air power. It is not only Washington-backed but distinctly in the American mode of these last years: brutal yet ineffective, never-ending, a boon to the spread of terror groups, and seeded with potential blowback.

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Meanwhile, in a cheap-oil, belt-tightening moment, in an increasingly edgy country, the royals are reining in budgets and undermining the good life they were previously financing for many of their citizens. The one thing they continue to do is pump oil -- their only form of wealth -- as if there were no tomorrow, while threatening further price-depressing rises in oil production in the near future. And that's hardly been the end of their threats. While taking on the Iranians (and the Russians), they have also been lashing out at the local opposition, executing a prominent dissident Shiite cleric among others and even baring their teeth at Washington. They have reportedly threatened the Obama administration with the sell-off of hundreds of billions of dollars in American assets if a bill, now in Congress and aimed at opening the Saudis to American lawsuits over their supposed culpability for the 9/11 attacks, were to pass. (It would, however, be a sell-off that could hurt the Saudis more than anyone.)

Even at the pettiest of levels, on Barack Obama's recent arrival in Saudi Arabia for a visit with King Salman, they essentially snubbed him, a first for a White House occupant. All in all, a previously sure-footed (if extreme) Sunni regime seems increasingly unsettled; in fact, it has something of the look these days of a person holding a gun to his own head and threatening to pull the trigger. In other words, in a region already aflame, the Saudis seem to be tossing... well, oil onto any fire in sight.

And in a way, it's little wonder. The very basis for the existence of the Saudi royals, their staggering oil reserves, is under attack -- and not by the Iranians, the Russians, or the Americans, but as TomDispatch energy specialist Michael Klare explains in "Debacle in Doha," by something so much larger: the potential ending of the petroleum way of life.
I am proud to be the first woman to lead Accenture in Norway. The company is one of the largest consultancy firms in the Norwegian market, and there is still a big gender gap when it comes to top management positions in Norway. I plan to use this opportunity to encourage and, hopefully, inspire more women, both within and outside my organization, to pursue leadership roles.



My career path

I started at Accenture in 1991 and began working with clients in financial services, as I had previous experience in banking. Throughout 24 years at my company, I have worked with clients from almost all of the industries we serve, including more than 12 years with companies in telecom and high tech and nine years with clients from the public sector.

In 2009, I was given responsibility to build the health practice across the Nordic region, which sparked the entrepreneur in me. I find working with health clients to be extremely rewarding. We are making a meaningful impact and improving the quality of life for people across the Nordics.

There are two projects in my career of which I'm equally proud. The first was for a large telecommunications company, where we provided strategic support in a major transformation process. In 1997, I became involved in a project transitioning the organization from being state-owned to becoming the partially privatized company it is today. It was both challenging and exciting to be working through such an enormous and important transition.

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The other project that I am most proud of is our recent work for a health client, which has allowed critical information to be electronically accessible to health-care providers. It is an enormous step toward the digitalization of our healthcare system. It is currently being implemented across the country, and we have already begun hearing how lives are being saved because practitioners now have better access to critical data.

The best career advice I received and my guidance for women

My father made a huge impression on me as a young woman and especially at the start of my career. He ran our family business, and I was included early on in decision-making processes and operations. When I chose to join Accenture, I was also considering offers from two other potential employers, and my father was very influential in my decision. My father's advice was to choose Accenture because it was both a large global company and also one with a strong local presence. He thought it would give me good opportunities for different roles, responsibility and growth.

I believe that you have to always be looking for opportunities, and keep an optimistic attitude. Avoid complacency or stagnating in indecision. When you see an opportunity, make a choice and act, and don't dwell on things you cannot change.

I would also encourage young women to take advantage of networking opportunities. Be proactive in seeking counsel or encouragement from your seniors-I think we have a responsibility to cheer each other on, as women and as colleagues.

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How I integrate work life and personal life

I am fortunate that my husband and I have always had an equal partnership. Throughout each of our careers, we have supported each other in taking on new responsibilities and pursuing our ambitions. But we have seen the responsibility of raising our daughter and taking care of our home as a team effort and worked together to find the right balance.

My advice to women, however, is that you have to let go of some control and things not being perfect all the time. In my case, I was willing to accept casual mealtimes and that my husband didn't always have the best fashion sense when it came to picking out outfits for my daughter. Each person and family has to decide what works for them, but there has to be some give somewhere and sometimes "good enough" has to really be enough.
Now is the time to load up your wallet.

Several airline and hotel companies are offering unusually big bonuses on credit-card signups this spring. You can get 80,000 Marriott Rewards by signing up for its Visa card--enough for two free nights at a luxury property. With the new JetBlue Plus Mastercard, you can score sufficient points for two round-trip tickets to Puerto Rico. Use your cards wisely, and you can quickly accumulate enough rewards for an extended vacation.

Like so many great deals, most of these offers are only available for a limited time. Here are the ones to consider before they expire.

Marriott Rewards Premier Credit Card

The Offer: 80,000 Marriot Rewards points if you spend $3,000 in the first three months. The usual signup bonus is 50,000 points after spending $2,000.

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The Fee: $85 a year

Who Should Get It: Marriott loyalists who have been waiting for a big bonus. Leisure travelers looking to redeem points at a wide range of properties.

What It's Worth: 80,000 points is enough for two free nights at a Category 8 hotel, such as the new J.W. Marriott in Venice, Italy, where rooms start at around $450 per night in September. Or you could get four nights (and an automatic fifth night free thanks to a card benefit) at a Category 4 hotel such as the Artisan D.C. Hotel, part of Marriott's Autograph Collection. Rates are around $235 per night in May and June, making your bonus worth $1,175.

Other Big Perks: Five points per dollar at Marriott properties, and two points per dollar spent with airlines, car rental agencies, and restaurants. The card also gives you 15 nights of elite credit per year, enough for Silver status, with benefits such as 20% bonus points on stays and priority late checkout.

Hilton HHonors Surpass Card from American Express

The Offer: 100,000 Hilton points when you spend $3,000 within three months of account opening--the highest sign-up bonus ever offered for this card. The promotion expires May 4.

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The Fee: $75 a year

Who Should Get It: Hilton loyalists who want the credit card that will earn them the most points on hotel stays, and give them a shortcut to elite status.

What It's Worth: One free night at a top-tier property like the Conrad Maldives (where a villa costs $900), or two free nights at a mid-tier property like the Hilton Waikoloa Village on Hawaii, which would otherwise be $249 per night.

Other Big Perks: You get 12 points per dollar on Hilton purchases; six points per dollar at U.S. restaurants, supermarkets and gas stations; and three points per dollar on everything else. The card also confers automatic Hilton HHonors Gold elite status, with perks like 25% bonus points on hotel stays and free breakfast; if you $40,000 in a calendar year, you receive top-tier Diamond status.

IHG Rewards Club Select Credit Card

The Offer: 70,000 bonus points after you spend $2,000 in the first three months, plus 5,000 points for adding a user who makes a purchase in the same time frame.

The Fee: $49, waived the first year

Who Should Get It: Folks who will maximize its annual free night benefit, and want to be able to redeem at some 5,000 properties around the world, from high-end InterContinentals to standard Holiday Inns.

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What It's Worth: 75,000 points is enough for four free nights at a Category 3 hotel like the Hotel Indigo San Antonio Downtown-Alamo, where rates are $145 per night. A Category 7 property like the InterContinental Resort and Spa in French Polynesia runs 40,000 points (or $315) per night.

Other Big Perks: This card confers IHG platinum elite status, with benefits including as a 50% points bonus on stays, complimentary room upgrades, and a 10% refund on points redemptions. But perhaps the single most valuable benefit is the free night you get every year at any IHG hotel.

Hilton HHonors Card from American Express

The Offer: 75,000 Hilton points (versus the usual 40,000) when you spend $1,000 within three months of account opening. The offer expires May 4.

The Fee: None

Who Should Get It: Travelers who already have Hilton's premium cards and want to accumulate points without a high minimum spending requirement .

What It's Worth: Two nights at a lower-tier property like the Hilton Miami Downtown (30,000 points each, or around $159 a night). The bonus is nearly enough for a night this summer at the Hilton Paris Opera, which is priced around $550 a night or 80,000 points.

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Other Big Perks: Cardholders receive Hilton HHonors silver elite status, which gets you a fifth night free on award stays; you can reach gold status with $20,000 in spending in a calendar year.

JetBlue Plus MasterCard

The Offer: 30,000 TrueBlue points when you spend $3,000 within three months of account opening. The offer is good indefinitely (at least for now).

The Fee: $99

Who Should Get It: JetBlue fliers who want to juice up their points earning.

What It's Worth: TrueBlue points are usually worth around 1.3-1.7 cents toward redemptions, so 30,000 points can be worth up to about $510 in airfare. In three months you should have more than enough points for two round-trip award tickets from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Other Big Perks: This card earns six bonus points per dollar on JetBlue purchases (in addition to the six points you earn booking JetBlue tickets online). You get a 5,000-point bonus every year, and a 10% refund on points you redeem for award tickets, plus elite benefits including free checked bags and waived change and cancellation fees for the first year you have the card.

More from Travel + Leisure:

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To the casual observer, it seems like nothing has happened in Nepal over the last year. But looks can be deceiving.

A year ago, a series of earthquakes shook the very core of Nepal, killing thousands and leaving tens of thousands without food, shelter or medical care. Reading last weekend's news reports, it seems that very little progress has been made. Politics and red tape have combined with poor infrastructure--Nepal lacks roads and equipment and communication networks as well as solid emergency procedures--making rebuilding a tortuously slow process.

Yet, I see progress on all fronts.



Buddhist Relief Services volunteers visit a village

Like laying the foundation for a building, the groundwork for reconstruction is time-consuming, and much of the work is not visible. However, it is critical to do this work properly, since everything rests on it. Plus, in Nepal there are a lot of problems to solve.

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First, people need housing. In the hard-hit rural areas, virtually nothing has been rebuilt and even in mountainous regions people are still living in open air. Second, and even more compelling, are the thousands of children whose lives have been overturned--orphaned, made homeless, or had their schooling abruptly stop (many schools in Nepal closed last year, either destroyed by the earthquakes or unable to obtain fuel for cooking, heating and transportation).



Buddhist Relief Services volunteer visiting a rural village

This relates to a third, more fundamental problem that was true long before the earthquakes: In rural Nepal many people are poorly educated, so their economic prospects are reduced--holding back both the individuals themselves and the nation as a whole.

In the wake of the earthquakes, we have been addressing all three of these problems at once.

On April 25, 2015, we founded Buddhist Relief Services. Dedicated to aiding people devastated by disaster, our first focus is Nepal. Our team has traveled around Nepal three times over the past year, talking to community groups, government officials and representatives of other foreign charities. Their goal was to identify villages in northern Nepal--the area hardest hit by the earthquake--where our aid will have the most impact and to determine what form that aid should take.



Architect's rendering of proposed community center

In three of the hardest hit villages, we will build community centers. Engineered to resist earthquakes, these can be used as temporary shelter now and in future crises; in happier times they will provide a much-needed gathering spot for community activities. These centers will also have attached Care Homes, where children who are orphaned or homeless can live. We will hire local villagers to work at the centers and care for the children, providing a safe and nurturing environment that will enable them not only to attend school, but to focus on their studies.

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As we explored the best structural format for these centers, we spoke with many engineers, all of whom agreed that we needed to wait through one entire monsoon cycle to ensure that the ground was secure to build on. But we have made good use of that time, raising money and working with the villages to get their approval for the project. They welcome the community centers and care homes, and have agreed to provide communal land on which to build. We are in the final stages of securing permissions, and are now poised to build. We hope to have at least one center completed before the rainy season starts this July.
WELL, NOW THAT WE HAVE SEEN EACH OTHER, SAID THE UNICORN, IF YOU'LL BELIEVE IN ME, I'LL BELIEVE IN YOU.

- Lewis Carol, Through the Looking Glass

CHAPTER EIGHT

Next Stop: Normal People

I was sitting on the Pyongyang Metro interrogating Older Handler. As usual, I was trying to get to the bottom of things.

ME: Who are these people on the subway?

OLDER HANDLER: To be honest, normal people.

This was how it would go. She would reply to my question with such absurd nonsense that I would either have to just suck it up and stop asking questions or prepare to dig in, and let the baby-talk roll. But getting past her rehearsed lies--no matter how reductive my questioning--was impossible. And this exchange was no different.

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And from what I've been told, "normal people" must work Monday through Saturday (Sunday is their day of rest, but they must do volunteer work then for the Party). It's midafternoon on a Thursday, and this place is packed. And since there are no dry cleaners, or shops, or banks, or other errand-type places, and the only let's-do-lunch crowd in town is me, I'm hard pressed to understand exactly who all these "normal" people are.

ME: Why aren't they at work?

OLDER HANDLER: They are.

ME: Then why can I see them?

OLDER HANDLER: Yes.

Unfortunately, Q&As in North Korea are a zero-sum game. Some people probably find digging for answers fun. But I find the painfully slow extraction of information from an unwilling and therefore purposely obtuse source to be aggravating as all frick--especially when that someone, in this case Older Handler, had an unbelievably ironic vocal tic of starting half of her responses with, "To be honest..."

I am on an "Extended Ride on the Pyongyang Metro," which meant I was allowed to visit four (no longer surprisingly) dimly lit stations--this, despite the large number of elaborate chandeliers and light fixtures housed in each. And like everywhere else in North Korea, each station had that familiar mix of rousing, communist-era music and urgent-sounding talk radio blasting out of loudspeakers. Each was adorned with heavy-handed propaganda (murals, mosaics, carvings, and statues) extolling the virtues of NoKo's values and Great Leader love.

As we stood on one station's platform, an old wooden train rattled into the station, and people who I guess were commuters opened the manual doors.

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ME: So that guy over there who just opened the door...is he just like a normal guy, going to or from work?

OLDER HANDLER: Yes, work.

We step into the car, which is nearly dark, illuminated by a single fluorescent bulb at the other end (and of course by the smiling portraits of the two Great dead Leaders), and stand right in front of the doors. A group of what must be at least a billion Young Pioneers (schoolchildren who are members of the Children's Party, easily identified by their red kerchiefs), who I guess are taking a field trip, come running for our car but stop comically short at the door when they spot me. They stare at me, giggling, too afraid to board. Is it because I'm a MILF?

Oh right, I'm an American Imperialist.
ABERDEEN, MD - DECEMBER 15: In this handout from the U.S. Army, Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) personnel oversee the inflation of an aerostat at December 15, 2014. in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. According to reports October 28, 2015, an unmanned Army surveillance blimp broke loose from a ground tether at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland and is currently drifting over Pennsylvania. (Photo by U.S. Army Photo /Ronald Sellinger via Getty Images)

It was one of the most embarrassing episodes in the history of Pentagon procurement. Last October an air surveillance blimp, designed to help protect the DC area from an attack by enemy cruise missiles, broke free of its moorings and went on a three-hour joyride from its Maryland base until it finally crashed in a wooded area in northeast Pennsylvania. The blimp did plenty of damage along the way, as the cable that was supposed to hold it in place knocked out power lines and cut electricity to over 35,000 people. Two F-16s had to follow the blimp to make sure it didn't collide with a commercial aircraft.

This wasn't the first time the blimp, known as the JLENS, had run into trouble. As David Willman noted in a lengthy critique of the project in the Los Angeles Times, the blimp has been plagued by cost overruns and performance problems from the beginning. For example, a recent report noted that the JLENS was having trouble performing two of its most basic missions: tracking targets, and distinguishing friendly from potential enemy aircraft. And despite a promise of uninterrupted coverage, the system has never operated for more than 30 days at a time without a malfunction. Even if the blimps could be made to work, deploying enough of them to adequately defend the continental United States would be prohibitively expensive.

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Back in 2010, things had gotten so bad that the Army tried to cancel the JLENS program, only to be rebuffed by a concerted lobbying campaign on the part of Raytheon and other contractors working on the project.

But last year's crash appeared to be the last straw, as key members of Congress like Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) threatened to end funding for the JLENS, which has already cost taxpayers a cool $2.7 billion. But the Army, backed up by U.S. Northern Command chief Adm. William Gortney, wanted to keep the program going. These plans were dealt a blow last week when, to his credit, House Armed Services Committee chair Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) proposed amending the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to end the JLENS program. But as Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) noted, "this isn't' the first time we've tried to kill this 'zombie program' - let's hope it stays dead this time."



Unfortunately, at the same time that Thornberry has proposed ending the JLENS program, he has suggested a shameless act of budgetary sleight of hand that could ultimately cost taxpayers billions in unnecessary spending. The gambit involves taking $18 billion from the war budget and using it to pay for pork barrel projects, including the purchase of 11 extra F-35s and 14 more F/A-18E/Fs than the Department of Defense asked for in its FY2017 budget request. The bulk of the funds will come from operations accounts, which are used to pay for essential activities like pilot training and equipment maintenance. This maneuver is particularly outrageous at a time when military leaders and members of Congress alike have been decrying a shortage of funding needed to ensure the safety and readiness of our troops.



The truth is, the JLENS project is just the tip of a very large iceberg. As a recent letter to Congress from 17 peace, government watchdog, and taxpayer responsibility groups noted, there is $38.6 billion in funding in the Pentagon's proposed base budget for FY2017 that can be cut without harming our security. Systems targeted for cuts include a new nuclear-armed cruise missile, a new ground-based ballistic missile, and the poorly performing, overpriced F-35 combat aircraft. In addition to eliminating unneeded weapons programs, the letter proposes a 15 percent cut in the over 600,000 service contractors now employed by the Pentagon, and the implementation of billions in cost-saving measures originally proposed by the Defense Business Board.

Implementing these proposed changes would make Rep. Thornberry's dubious budgetary shuffle unnecessary, resulting in a long overdue victory for budgetary discipline.

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State Police Thursday announced the arrest of 25 people for their involvement in a drug-trafficking operation in the Midstate.

The 16-month investigation into cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana trafficking culminated Wednesday with the arrests in Cumberland, Dauphin, Perry, York, Snyder and Union counties. This was a coordinated investigation by State Police and the FBI.

The investigation is also related to the 14 others who were federally indicted, which was announced Wednesday by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Among the 25 people arrested by State Police are Michael Cross, 53, of Landisburg; Daniel Ditonno, 43, of Mechanicsburg; Stanford Rodney Hoke, 46, of Newport; Scott Keck, 37, of Dillsburg; James Lauder, 25, of Lemoyne; Brittnie Lightner, 25, of Shermans Dale; James Ringler, 42, of New Cumberland; Christopher Rogers, 45, of Mechanicsburg; and Karyn Totty, 50, of Mechanicsburg.

Also arrested were five people from Harrisburg and others from Selinsgrove, Steeleton, Grantville, Milmont, Mifflintown, Red Lion, Mifflinburg, Mt. Pleasant Mills and Montgomery.

Police said they were charged with various offenses related to drug possession and possession with intent to deliver narcotics.

In the first quarter of the year, troopers seized more than $19 million in heroin, marijuana and other prohibited drugs.
After making a splash with the crowdfunded 2013 thriller Blue Ruin, writer-director Jeremy Saulnier's next project is an even darker dive, the survival horror film Green Room. Following a punk band's harrowing encounter with neo-Nazis in the green room of a hole-in-the-wall bar, the film stars Anton Yelchin as one of the unfortunate band members, and features a chilling performance by Patrick Stewart as the enigmatic white supremacist leader.

I had a chance to discuss the film (which also features a supporting turn by Imogen Poots) with Saulnier and Yelchin during their recent swing through San Francisco, and you can read on for some highlights of our chat, including Saulnier's shying away from studio pictures, their mutual fondness for the punk scene, and whether Yelchin swapped Star Trek stories with Patrick Stewart:

Jeremy, I read an interview with you from last May, and you were talking about how, after Blue Ruin, you had the opportunity to make a bunch of studio pictures, but you chose this.

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Saulnier: For sure.

This is interesting to me, because I feel like, for many filmmakers, the prize is making the studio movie. And so, the idea that you went from your well-received indie movie to exercise that clout onto something that's personal -- what was the thought process there?

Saulnier: I was totally afraid. (laughs) No, I'm a little older than a lot of these young directors that do an indie. They get sucked up into the studio system, and it works great sometimes, but more often than not, if you talk to them after their first studio movie and see how they feel, I think it's...

Kind of the soul-crushing experience, a little bit?

Saulnier: It can be, and it's not because studios are evil. It's because they're designed a certain way. Release dates come first, movie stars come second, and then the script might be delivered a week before you shoot, or it might be delivered as you're shooting. That's not how I make movies. I would love to do a studio movie, but the process is something I'm not ready to do yet. Actually, after Green Room, I feel much more prepared to take on a studio project because my goal is to incrementally earn enough respect to retain a certain amount of creative control.

Anton, what drew you to this project?

Yelchin: I've always loved punk music, since I was in my early teens, since middle school. The fact that it was a punk film in a kind of earnest way, as opposed to...you see it a lot in kind of teen movies, there's a punk...

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The token punk character?

Yelchin: Yeah, and it is -- in the eighties -- it's a funny cliche, you know, but now it's sort of tired, and I think also wildly inaccurate and irrelevant when you do see that. It just was never my experience in high school or middle school. There were actual punk kids that went to punk shows, and there wasn't one; there were a bunch.

And this is a film that was clearly devoted to a love of that world. I didn't know at the time that Jeremy had been in a band, and that's where his love of it came from, but it was palpable when you read the script that there is genuine affection for this world and a genuine knowledge of it, and I really responded to that. So, it was the combination, and now in hindsight, I know because that's Jeremy. So, I basically liked it because it's something that Jeremy would make, but I only know that now because I know Jeremy.

Saulnier: And no one would know from looking at me that I was in a punk or hardcore scene.

Yelchin: Except for the Vans!

Saulnier: (laughs) But that, I think, is another thing about why I made the movie, is to have an archive. I had a very vibrant history, in my formative years, of making movies, and being in the hardcore scene, and going to all these amazing shows, and being fully immersed in it, but this is...tried anymore. So, put it on screen.

I have no experience with punk culture, so that was actually my question: How accurate is this to that scene?

Saulnier: The film takes a severe left turn and sort of evolves or devolves into an insane siege thriller, but I think people who are in the scene really respect it for its authenticity, but the key, like yourself, is that you don't have to bring the knowledge. It's about immersion in this world and not about foreknowledge. So, I think it was about not getting too bogged down in who's who, and ideology, and why punks are punks. It's about: can you hear this? Can you feel this? Holy shit, there's a live concert going on, and these kids are dead meat! And then, it just became a narrative, but it was sort of propelled by the energy and the sounds of the punk rock scene. But I think, texturally, it gets high marks for authenticity, but it's been a while since I've been in the scene.

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One thing I really appreciated was how the audience and the main characters are on the exact same page, and how, essentially, we in the audience are discovering at the same time. When I take stock of my own reactions, it was that pit of uncertainty in my stomach where it's like, in real life, when you feel like something bad is about to happen. I could feel that while watching it, and that's just when I sum up my reactions to that. Was that a conscious choice?

Saulnier: For sure. From my sort of limited knowledge of the industry, an anomaly to be able to actually put human beings on the screen, to have them be so identifiable, not because of their backstories that are injected into the narrative or any kind of bullshit monologues that are expository. It's about: these people really behave like humans, and so, you're with them.

Immediately, you're sort of coupled with them on this insane journey because they're acting like real people, and they're debating among themselves, the same things that you might think in this kind of traditional cinematic scenario. It's a siege film. There's Nazi punks outside a door, but they don't go too gonzo right away. They just really debate and try and figure it out, and the dread is: holy shit, there's really no easy way out, and this is going to end very poorly! And that feels bad.

They're not all going to get out of this.

Saulnier: Yeah, it's abrupt and brutal and grounded, and I think that's what makes it seem...you know, I don't break the rules of genre cinema just to do it, but I adhere to the world I created, and when you're governed by those laws, it's not pretty.

And speaking of not pretty, using neo-Nazis, that seems like one of those no-brainer type of black hats. We don't see neo-Nazis that much as villains. Was it because of a connection with the punk rock scene that it seemed like a natural?

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Saulnier: Yeah. When you look at the vibrant, supportive community of the punk rock or hardcore scene, there's so many different types of people and different ideologies, and subgroups, and offshoots of music, but the Nazi punks were certainly picked, not because they're Nazis but because they are -- among this whole diversity of people, they are the most likely to serve as soldiers, meaning they have uniforms.

They're militant, they're organized, there's a hierarchy. They are affiliated with gang culture, and what ideology they have, it's not about racism; it's about militancy and weaponry, and they're most likely to be soldiers within the scene. So, I picked them because of that. They served a very narrative purpose and a utility. If I was going to have civilian band members trapped in the Green Room fighting off soldiers, well, among the scene, those were the guys.

Well, definitely, the scene that sticks out to me is, Anton, when your hand is out there and...I made the mistake of eating lunch right before I saw the movie.

Saulnier: Oh, dear.

So, I had a very visceral reaction to that, and I'm definitely not used to watching movies that are as visceral as that, and you mentioned how this was something aimed at your 19-year-old self. I'm assuming stuff like that was part of that process?

Saulnier: Yeah, but also, it doesn't revel in the gore. I think it's...so, some of the moments of impact are just an absolute gut punch, but that's actually me trying to be more responsible. When these make you feel dread, and you might want to lose your lunch, that's not high-fiving. That's not clapping. That's narrative impact, and it's very pure and very real. So, the violence is very graphic, and it's very curated, meaning when I want to rub your face in a very brutal act of violence, it's because this is exactly what the characters are having to face.

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And I think the most gasp-inducing moment of the entire film is a quiet...it's almost surreal, but it's a full frontal box cutter situation, and it's very intentionally full frontal, and it's quiet, and it's because you are now witnessing what the character is witnessing, and she is becoming a killer, and that is a very big step for her.

Like most of the violence, when you actually shake the entire experience off of watching Green Room, and you look back, hopefully for a second or third time in the theaters, you realize that all this violence was sort of dished out reluctantly with a sort of pragmatism and a necessity and not to satisfy a bloodlust. It's dark as shit, but it's all to serve a very particular reason. So, that's why it's approached as a war film. There are tactics, and there are strategies, and there are endgames here.

So, Anton, you and Patrick Stewart get to be part of a very unique fraternity by way of your mutual involvement in Star Trek. How much did that cross in your mind? Did you guys get to share stories about sitting on the bridge of the Enterprise at any point?

Yelchin: There was no reason for us to talk a lot at work. So, I stayed away from that intentionally, and I think he did, too, probably. We spoke mostly in the van afterwards about everything other than Star Trek, actually. That being said, I think, that's not to slight that for the fans. I'm sure people get a kick out of that. I don't slight that whatsoever. I'm very fortunate to be part of that world. I just think, for us, it wasn't really conducive to anything at work.

Because you have an adversarial relationship.

Yelchin: Yeah. Literally, the first thing we shot together was the very end. Our confrontation, essentially, and then the rest of the time we spent with a door between us. So, there wasn't a lot of reason to, and I didn't really want to, and he's such a wonderful actor that his very presence is kind of, in that mode, very terrifying, and so, to break that...but, like I said...

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Saulnier: But it's fun now that we're promoting the film.

Yelchin: Exactly, yeah.

Saulnier: It's fun to make these connections, but certainly on set, this was really about ignoring and shedding all of the franchise affiliation, and having it be very new roles. But now that we're here marketing it, it's fun to see the crossover.

Yelchin: And also, that's the kind of wonderful thing about film culture, is the interaction between films and who works on what, where they were before, and now what they're doing now, and that inevitably informs how people view a film, but I think this film is, like you said, so visceral that I don't know that anyone, at a certain point in the movie, is really thinking that. I think they're just so f***ed by the movie.

Saulnier: We had a Fright Night conflict, too. I was like, oh, shit. I was making Blue Ruin in the summer of 2012, and Fright Night came out. I'm not a big fan of remakes in general, but it was just crazy. This is me and Macon Blair. We had not gotten accepted into Cannes. We were just making a really low-budget revenge movie, and I went to go see, at Rehoboth Beach, Fright Night, and I saw Anton and Imogen Poots onscreen, and I really enjoyed the remake, but it's so bizarre that two years later, I would be working with them.

I was having dinner with them last night, and I am their elder -- I'm almost 40 -- but still, I was like, kind of having a little fanboy moment: "This is insane! I'm at a rooftop bar talking to Immy and Anton, and we just made a punk rock murder movie! This is the coolest thing ever!" So, the crossover's fun after the fact, but when you're on set, you've got to drop all that and stay true to the story at end.

Speaking of Patrick Stewart, his performance is the freaking creepiest thing I've ever seen. And the fact that it's Patrick Stewart, who everyone knows...

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Saulnier: Well, the philosophy -- and I say this a lot, but it's true -- is you've got to waste production value, and we certainly didn't waste Patrick Stewart, but the key was, like, his presence is enough. If we can have him, and me and Patrick work together to just bring down his level of performance as far as the intensity and the volume, and he remarked about midway through his first week of exteriors that, like, "This is the quietest performance I've ever given on stage or screen." I was like, wow, setting a Patrick Stewart record is very much an honor.

It's your claim to fame, right?

Saulnier: Yeah, because he doesn't need to do much, and for Darcy, we were on the same page, as far as there's not a lot of monologue, so there's not exposition. It's just his presence and his pragmatism and his authority. That is what is so scary, is that he doesn't need to have these moments, and the one moment I love when he actually loses his cool, and he face-palms Macon Blair as Gabe, he takes a breath, and then he apologizes, and then they move on because he's actually...

That's out of character for him.

Saulnier: Very much so, yeah. So, it was really fun to explore that with him, and I'm very grateful he did our movie. We didn't expect him to stoop down to our level.

******
ASSOCIATED PRESS Members of Democratic Youth Federation of India and Students Federation of India hold a photograph of Bhagat Singh as they participate in a torch rally to pay tribute to Indian freedom fighters Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru who were hanged to death by the British on March 23, 1931, in Hyderabad, India, Monday, March 23, 2009. (AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A)

The Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) has asked the Delhi University to make corrections in a text book that described freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad as "terrorists."

The ministry has said in a letter to DU, that the word "terrorist" today has different meanings and using the word for freedom fighters "could hurt national sentiments".

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The step was taken after a book titled 'India's Struggle for Independence', authored by noted historians Bipin Chadra and Mridula Mukherjee, mentioned Singh, Azad, Surya Sen and other freedom fighters as "revolutionary terrorists" in Chapter 20.

Reacting to the controversy, Abhey Singh Sandhu, Singh's nephew said, "The Britishers, who hanged Bhagat Singh, described him as 'true revolutionary' in their judgement, even they didn't use words like terror or terrorism. Using such words for revolutionaries in an attempt to stir controversy is very unfortunate."

According to PTI, Singh's family had written a letter to HRD Minister Smriti Irani seeking her intervention in the matter and also met DU Vice Chancellor Yogesh Tyagi on Wednesday who assured them of looking into the matter.

Tyagi further said, "The book is taught as a reference book in our history department but is not a text book or published or authored by DU professor.

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KFC

The Indian arm of the global fast-food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is launching its first edible packaging this week, in an attempt to eliminate usage of plastic packaging. According to a recent report, the country's plastic packaging industry that is growing at 18 per cent per annum is expected to reach $73 billion by 2020.

Also Read: This Hyderabadi Researcher Is Eliminating Plastic Cutlery One Edible Spoon At A Time

The first item on KFC's list is an edible rice bowl, made of a tortilla base, to hold curry and rice. Rice Bowlz are amongst our best selling items, and we are trying to give it a delicious and eco-friendly twist, said Rahul Shinde, MD, KFC, India.

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Shinde also said the company is attempting to uncover more long-term and sustainable solutions in their battle against plastic. We have moved from plastic to more sustainable materials like paper (bowls and glasses). We are also evaluating the move to wooden cutlery as a long term solution, he said.

Last year, KFC UK had launched an edible coffee cup made of chocolate. The concept has not reached the Indian subcontinent, and Shinde claimed that the edible 'Rice Bowlz' concept is unique to the country.

The item has been particularly selected for its popularity. It will first be launched in Bengaluru, keeping in tandem with the recent plastic ban order by the Karnataka government. Shinde also told HuffPost India that following consumer response, the product would hit other markets in India.

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KFC is planning to launch the vegetarian and non-vegetarian variants from April 28-May 4, without any change in pricing (Rice Bowlz continues to be available at Rs 89 onwards).

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DIBYANGSHU SARKAR via Getty Images Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi (L) and veteran Communist leader and former West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee talk onstage during a joint rally between Congress and the Left Front political party in Kolkata on April 27, 2016. This is the first time rivals Congress and the Left Front have come together to campaign against the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal's ongoing State assembly elections. / AFP / Dibyangshu SARKAR (Photo credit should read DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP/Getty Images)

Someone please fire the DJ.

Its a cliche but understandable that the muzak of choice for a political rally in Kolkata will be Rabindrasangeet.

And so it was for the historic grand alliance between the Left Front and Congress in Bengal. (This product is not meant for sale in Kerala.)

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But really, who chose Jodi Tor Daak Shuney Keu Na Aashey, Tobey Ekla Chalo Re? (If no one answers your call, then go it alone)?

That hardly struck the most optimistic note as Rahul Gandhi and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Congress future and CPMs past, came together finally on one stage to try and change Bengals present.

On a baking hot afternoon in Kolkata, one thing was clear. If this jot or understanding is a marriage (and there was a giant garland shared between the two to solemnize it), its more of an arranged marriage than a love marriage.

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"The Congress is riding on the CPMs shoulders, says Chanchal Ghosh. Its the CPM worker who gets beaten up, not the Congress. That three-and-half year old who got beaten, that was our workers child. Ghosh sells Communist party literature at rallies, books with names like White Mamata, Black Mamata. But he is optimistic. Even though voting is not over, he says the jot will win by 50 seats. Hes read it on the internet, he assures me.

A dark cloud is hanging over our state. A terrible government is wreaking havoc. We cannot be free from it on our own.

The two stars of the evening are not quite as ready to pin numbers on their hopes.

A dark cloud is hanging over our state. A terrible government is wreaking havoc. We cannot be free from it on our own, warns Buddha-babu in his best Gandalf avatar. We must fight together.

Alliance chunav jeet raha hai aur jeetney wala hai, (Alliance is winning the election and will win it)  promises Rahul channeling Frodo.

This crowd wants to believe it. They whoop when Deepa Das Munshi, who is taking on Mamata herself, vows Didi came in sandals and will depart in scandals. They cheer when state party chief Adhir Chowdhury promises This is not jot. This is not ghot (muddle). This is Bengals citizens saying Trinamool, phot (Trinamool, scram).

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But is the electorate ready to buy this new-found love? Public memory is short but the Congress and CPM have a lot of bad blood between them here. Literally. What of the 55,000 Congress (and Trinamool) workers killed by Communists in 34 years of Left rule? asks TMCs Derek OBrien.

In 1970, two Congress loyalists in Burdwan, brothers Pranab Sain and Moloy Sain were murdered in front of their mother allegedly by CPM cadres. She was then forced to eat rice stained with their blood. Her eldest son Naba Kumar had his eyes gouged out. Mamata Banerjee formed the first enquiry commission into the Sainbari murder. But Bijay Kumar Sain, the youngest son says Trinamool plays its own political games.

The ruling party wanted me to name people I dont remember being present at the time of the attack. If I followed the diktat, I would probably have got a government job.

Obviously no one mentions inconvenient truths like Sainbari as Buddhadeb and Rahul share a garland together. The crowd sounds more dutiful than pumped as it shouts Swagatam swagatam. These permutations are not that new. Mamata has been "natural allies" with both BJP and Congress and the Communists have propped up the Congress in Delhi. Since its inception, the CPM branded the Congress and BJP as authoritarian and communal respectively, writes R. Upadhyay.

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In theory it has a policy of equidistance from both, writes Upadhyay, but in practice its often considered Congress the lesser evil especially after the Trinamool-BJP combo routed the Left in the 1998 Lok Sabha poll. But while it might not be quite as historic as its being peddled, theres no denying this has curiosity value here.

Look look, the red flags have come exclaims the woman beside me as the Communist flags enter the maidan. She has come here from 45 km away to see the rally in real as opposed to on channel. This is a historic moment for Bengali politics, says Sujoy Das as he waves both flags, the Congress hand and the Lefts hammer and sickle. And I am glad to be here to witness it.

Bengal has not seen this before. Kolkata has not seen this before. Park Circus Maidan has not seen this before.

Bengal has not seen this before, Buddhadeb tells the crowd. Kolkata has not seen this before. Park Circus Maidan has not seen this before. He might have cringed though if he could have seen himself. Bengals most venerable Communist leader, the successor to the legendary Jyoti Basu, giving a speech in front of a giant poster with Rahul Gandhis face and from behind a podium plastered with the Congress hand.

That this is happening at all is the miracle of Mamata. She is the ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Seeing firebrand Congress leaders like Adhir Chowdhury greet Buddha-babu like a beloved long lost elder brother is alone worth the wait.

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But it all still feels unsure. The Congress has been an also-ran in Bengal for so long, the rally is rather slapdash. The gates are opened late. There are no packets of water being distributed to the people waiting in the hot sun. The press area is too small, the television cameras spill over to the crowd. They were not expecting so much press, says one reporter sardonically. For the first couple of hours nothing happens. Where are the chhota leaders? complains one man. Why arent they up on stage? He says he came to this very ground for another rally in 1984. It was for Rajiv Gandhi. That was a zabardast rally, he says. This does not compare.

What does unite the crowd though is anger with Trinamool. Lumpen has become a Bengali word thanks to Didi. The anger against Trinamools lumpen is palpable onstage and offstage. Everyone has a story. My own nephew started hanging out with Trinamool and now he has four bikes in four years says one man. Another says he knows a vegetable seller who is now worth a crore. And hes not even a Trinamool leader, he just runs behind Trinamool leaders. Anger holds this unlikely alliance in place, more than any ideological love. The hope is that even if Trinamool is not toppled, it will sustain a body blow.

Trinamool mocks this alliance as the alliance that dares not say its name. The speakers at the rally claim they are transparent, its Trinamool and BJP who are in secret alliance. That is why the BJP has done little with Saradha and is merely blowing hot air about the Narada sting. Mamata-ji calls everything sajano ghatona (manufactured events) mocks Rahul. The enmity between BJP and TMC is sajano gussa (manufactured anger). Amita Ghosh, a Mahila Congress leader tells me the jot alliance will last beyond these elections. These are national parties and we will come together next to get the BJP out.

But those are fantasies for another day. For now everyone is laying bets about what rewards the jot might yield, if any, in Bengal. Oho big claims, says one man to a Congress cheerleader. Will we see you on 19th when the results come out? And this being Bengal even a wager has a sweet tooth. I bet you a box of batasha sweets Trinamool will still win 200, says another. What piddling batasha. I bet you cham-chams the jot will win, retorts his friend upping the sweet ante.

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These Congress people, they dont read. Communists, now they are readers.

As I leave the rally Chanchal Ghosh is wrapping up his books for the night. He says business was bad. These Congress people, they dont read. Communists, now they are readers, he says pressing a pamphlet called Defeat the Trinamool into my hands.

Next to him two vendors have set up shop. One is selling hot lemon tea, the other frozen Frooti and Pepsi ice-squeezees. One shouts Thanda thanda (cold cold). The other shouts Garam garam (hot hot).

Thanda thanda. Garam garam.

Come to think of it, its a rather fitting postscript to an afternoon spent selling unlikely pairs.

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Faabi via Getty Images The North Block of the building of the Secretariat. Seat of the Government of India, on Raisina Hill in New Delhi

NEW DELHI -- Chief Justice of India Tirath Singh Thakur caught the nation's attention with his emotional plea to Prime Minister Narendra Modi about doubling the number of judges in India to combat the largest backlog of cases in the world.

What is the less known is that the government is the largest litigant in India, responsible for nearly half of the three crore cases pending in courts across the country, despite a great deal of advice and recommendations on how to cut down its share of disputes.

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The government at various levels have been identified over the years as a trigger happy litigant who appeals compulsively. But efforts to change this character of government litigation have unfortunately moved as slowly as a petition through the court system.

One category of such disputes involves civilians suing either the Centre or their state governments. These vary from labour disputes and taxation to retired employees fighting for their pensions and farmers seeking compensation. According to Thakur, the fact that so many Indian citizens have grievances against the State is a consequence of poor governance. But it could take a while before the country's layered and multi-dimensional problems of governance are fixed, and until then, the State must answer to its citizens in court.

More avoidable is the second category of cases in which both parties to the dispute belong to the State, either at the central or the state level. In other words, precious judicial bandwidth is clogged by one branch of the government suing another, sometimes for frivolous procedural or protocol matters, easily resolved through internal arbitration.

Venkatesh Nayak, who heads the Access to Information Program at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in Delhi, said that coordination and harmony within departments is the responsibility of the Chief Ministers at the state level and the Prime Minister at the Centre, and they should be held responsible for failing to resolve these disputes internally.

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"The government suing itself is completely absurd," he said. "Unless there is a constitutional issue which requires interpretation, why should the executive run to the judiciary to resolve petty disputes. The government doesn't want to take responsibility for the decision so it is easier to transfer responsibility."

In a country where there are only 17 judges for every 10 lakh people, and almost three lakh people are languishing in jail without having been proven guilty because their trials move at a glacial pace through the courts, the state suing itself ought to be heavily restricted.

Nobody Knows

The strange thing is, nobody is even sure how many cases involving the government is pending in the courts.

Under the union law ministry's legal affairs department, there exists a unit called the central agency section which deals with all of the litigation of the government. D.S. Mehra, an Additional Government Advocate in the section, said he didn't know the number of cases in which the Centre is a party.

"How do you expect me know about all the cases? The government of India is very big," he said.

The Indian government doesn't have a comprehensive record of exactly how many cases in which it is a party, but its share is estimated to be somewhere between 46 percent to 70 percent of all matters pending in courts in India.

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"Till date, no centralized information is available," P.K. Malhotra, a former law secretary who retired this month, told HuffPost India.

Last year, the Law Ministry decided to set up "The Legal Information Management and Briefing System (LIMBS),"a web-based application, which aims to collect data from all the departments regarding the pendency and status of cases.

This internal database would allow officials to monitor the cases and weed out disputes which are not worth litigating, Malhotra said. "The process has been slow. So far, 60,000 cases have been uploaded, but there should be much more information in the next four to five months," he said.

Appeal After Appeal

Many people end up going to court because they can't find alternative forums where parties can resolve disputes without going to trial. To make matters worse, the prevailing culture is for the State to mechanically file appeals to the highest level possible.

"Government litigation crowds out the private citizen from the court system," former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in 2004, while revealing that the government was a litigant in 65 percent of civil cases in Kerala, sometimes on both sides.

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Singh also said 95 percent of appeals by the Kerala government had failed, which suggests that those appeals should not have been filed at all.

In cases of dispute between government departments, Nayak from CHRI points out that instead of running to the courts, the Prime Minister and Chief Ministers can use the "Transaction of Business Rules."

Suggesting that the Prime Minister and Chief Ministers should discuss such matters at their weekly cabinet meetings, he said, "The Cabinet is not only responsible for taking decisions but to ensure the smooth functioning of the government."

Malhotra said that the Law Ministry as well as other departments "issue instructions from time to time to not litigate," and resolve disputes through internal mechanism or through consultation.

Implement The Policy Already

With the din over the staggering backlog in Indian courts growing louder over the years, the Indian government has made some feeble attempt at reforms.

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In 2010, the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government put in place the 2010 National Litigation Policy to reduce the cases pending in various courts in India, and to reduce the average pendency time from 15 years to three years.

Under the banner of "litigation will not be resorted to for the sake of litigating," NLP 2010 contained several measures to carry out "responsible litigation" such as not persevering with bad cases, not filing appeals in service matters if it involves "an individual grievance without any major repercussion," or in a revenue matter "if the stakes are not high."

Four years after the policy was announced, however, the Central Information Commission had to scold the Law Ministry for not responding to a Right To Information application which sought details on how the far this policy was implemented by the UPA government.

Information commissioner Sridhar Acharyulu wrote that the RTI application "gave an opportunity to the public authority to explain to the people about their efforts to reduce litigation and report the progress, for instance, how many cases or appeals are filed by state, how many of them are frivolous, how many were withdrawn...."

The 2010 NLP was never implemented, and now the Modi government is formulating its own policy which would include measures such as appointment of officers to closely scrutinize whether a matter is worth litigating, and encourage resolving disputes outside of courts.

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'Utter Indifference And Callousness'

The government's decision to introduce arbitration and mediation clauses in work contracts of its staff will not only relieve the courts, but also save their employees from years of stress and anguish of the kind Shankar Das, a cash clerk in Delhi Milk Scheme, experienced for 23 years running from court to court until the Supreme Court determined that his dismissal was "whimsical."

In another case, Devaki Nandan Prasad, who worked in the Bihar Education Service for 39 years, ran from pillar to post for over a decade trying to get his pension.

In its 1988 report, the Law Commission of India cited "arrogance and superiority complex," and "utter indifference and callousness bordering on vendetta" as reasons for the government pursuing "tortuous litigation" against its employees and retired persons.

"The bureaucracy disclosed an attitude for which Bourbons in history were notorious, namely, they learn nothing and forget nothing," the commission said.

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The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

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On Tuesday a government-issued press release announced that a committee headed by veteran filmmaker Shyam Benegal had submitted its report recommending a number of amendments to the Cinematograph Act, 1952. This set of reforms, long overdue, is expected to lay down a "holistic framework" for the certification of films.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government are pushing for a master app which will have all the government services integrated. The project or the app is called UMANG (Unified Mobile App for New-age Governance), and will integrate almost 200 government services such as passport services, land records, income tax, e-Post and Women's safety, among others.

Some JNU professors have released a report describing the university as a den of organised sex racket. The 200-page dossier, prepared in 2015 by eleven teachers, was recently released to a few journalists. The document, titled Jawaharlal Nehru University: The Den of Secessionism and Terrorism, talks about how a few teachers encourage a decadent culture in JNU and are legitimising separatist movements in India.

With one of the worst droughts to have hit India in decades, farmers from regions of Marathwada and Vidarbha, are being driven to cities in hordes in search of work. Now, the Mumbai municipal corporation has come up with a new scheme, where the farmers and their families can earn livelihood by cleaning sewage water pipes and nullahs in the cities.

Main News

At the centre of the row over the AgustaWestland deal, Ahmed Patel, political secretary to the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi asked the public to hang him if he was found guilty. Allegedly the initials 'AP' appear in bribe notes from middlemen that were linked to corruption in a deal where the government bought 12 helicopters for 3,600 crores from manufacturer AgustaWestland, whose parent company is Italian.

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The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the President's Rule will continue in Uttarakhand for now. There will be no trial of strength on the floor of the Assembly on 29 April either.

From the current session of 2016-17, the Supreme Court has insisted that multiple tests should be discarded and one common eligibility test for entrance to medical colleges should be implemented across the country. The National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) for the current (2016-17) session itself. The court has directed the Centre, MCI and CBSE to sit together and frame a time-schedule for conducting NEET and submit it by Thursday. The SC is also set to hear a plea submitted in the matter.

Off The Front Page

After the hullabaloo over the launch of the 'cheapest smartphone in the world' Freedom 251, now Jaipur-based Docoss has announced an Android-powered smartphone called Docoss X1 priced at 888. The company has just setup a website and is taking pre-orders for the smartphone with a promised delivery date of 2 May and is also providing a cash-on-delivery facility.

Barring top business schools such as the IIMs, most business schools in India are producing sub-par graduates who are largely unemployable, a new report has pointed out. Most getting jobs worth less than 10,000 per month, the report stated that only seven per cent of MBA graduates get decent employment straight after completing their course.

The NDA government is planning to set up a sex offenders registry in the country similar to the ones maintained in countries such as the US and the UK. Reportedly, details of sexual offenders even below 18 years of age would be included in the database, which will be put up on the website of National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

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Opinion

Will Nitish Kumar challenge Narendra Modi in 2019, because an alliance led by him can tap into caste agitations and youth unrest, says an opinion piece in Mint. "His biggest challenge will be cultivating an anti-BJP alliance while managing the contradictions within and suppressing individual leadership ambitions. Channelling the energy from university campuses and the disillusionment of caste movements to reap electoral dividends nationally is no mean deal either," says the article.

Underlying all the tension between the BJP and the Shiv Sena is the fundamental cultural difference between the two parties, writes Sidharth Bhatia in Hindustan Times. "While they both flaunt their Hindutva and nationalist credentials, the BJP in the state has always been perceived as a party of Brahmins and traders. In Mumbai, this also translates as Gujaratis and Marwaris, who control finance and trade. The Sena appeals to the Marathi manoos, which is composed of the working class and the rising middle-classes. The BJP is making a serious bid to encroach on that territory, promising economic growth and jobs; this could entice the Marathi youth," he writes.

The Centre is reported to be in favour of moving a bill requiring doctors to prescribe generic medicines in place of costly, branded ones, says an editorial in The Hindu. A recent assessment of Indias expenditure on health showed that out-of-pocket spending comprises 58 per cent of the total; two-thirds of this is on drugs. What makes the situation difficult even for relatively better-off patients who can afford commercial health insurance is that risk cover is generally confined to part payment of hospitalisation bills, but not prescription medicines. The poor are impoverished further by drug costs. It is vital, therefore, that governments act on multiple fronts  making listed essential medicines available free or nearly free to all in hospitals through higher public spending, widening access to generics, and closely monitoring professional practice to eliminate prescription of irrational, non-essential drugs that have no curative effect," it says.

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Mail Today via Getty Images NEW DELHI, INDIA i JUNE 28: A rare urdu book can be seen in a worn out state at the Hazrat Shah Waliullah Public Library in New Delhi on June 28, 2010. The library, which boasts of over 15,000 rare Urdu volumes, is in a dilapidated state with many books being eaten up by termites. (Photo by Kaushik Roy/India Today Group/Getty Images) *** Local Caption ***

NEW DELHI -- The Modi government is no longer asking Urdu writers in India to refrain from producing content which is critical of the government, but they still need to desist from writing anything which is "against national interest" or creates hatred among communities.

While some writers welcomed the government's move to back down from its anti-government condition, others objected to the "national interest" proviso in the declaration form circulated by the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language.

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"Till the government or the council defines what constitutes anti-national, the provision should be put on hold," Ali Javed, an Urdu writer, who teaches at Delhi University, told The Telegraph.

These conditions are for Urdu writers whose books are acquired by the NCPUL, a body which promotes Urdu language under the Human Resource Development Ministry (HRD).

The Telegraphreported today that the HRD Ministry had asked NCPUL to withdraw a clause in a prior declaration form, which had asked writers not to write anything that was against the government or the country.

The revised version of the form is on the NCUPL website.

Last month, The Indian Express had carried a translation of the clause in the Urdu-language declaration: I son/daughter of confirm that my book/magazine titled which has been approved for bulk purchase by NCPULs monetary assistance scheme does not contain anything against the policies of the government of India or the interest of the nation, does not cause disharmony of any sort between different classes of the country, and is not monetarily supported by any government or non-government institution.

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If a writer wants financial aid from the government, then of course the content cannot be against (the government). NCPUL is a government organisation and we are government employees. We will naturally protect the interests of the government," told the newspaper, last month.

Mocked as the "loyalty form," the government's declaration came under fire from writers in Urdu and other languages. Does this mean people writing in Urdu are the ones who will write anti-national things?," Shahnaz Nabi, head of the Urdu department at the University of Calcutta, told The Wire, last month.

The other controversial clause which required two witnesses to sign the form has also been withdrawn, The Telegraph reported.

The revised version of the form states: "The contents of the book /periodical /magazine /manuscript / project do not have any material which is against the national interest or which may create any sort of hatred amongst the different sections of society."

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Growing up in Mechanicsburg, Eva M. Williams felt a bit anxious passing the home at 401 S. Market St.

I was always afraid that Susie Cockley would rush out in her long white apron and give my mother another baby! Williams wrote in her book Tower Homes of Mechanicsburg.

Both my brother and myself first saw the light of day in Cockleys hospital, she added. As a child I thought of this home as a sort of baby factory.

Tower Hill in Mechanicsburg got its name from the many Victorian style homes with towers that grace the area of South Market and Coover streets.

Williams first became interested in the history of these homes after researching the genealogy of her husbands family. She traced the chain of title, collected the stories and interviewed as many property owners as possible.

The Tower home at 401 S. Market St. was also the subject of a Pennsylvania Historical Resource Survey Form on file at the Cumberland County Historical Society. It was selected for Building Blocks because of its unique past serving first as a laying-in house for expectant mothers and then as a jelly factory until sugar rationing in World War II limited its operations.

Originally part of Coover Estates, the land was purchased by J. L. Heyd and his wife in 1869 and the house was built there a short time later. It was sold in 1882 to Frederick K. Ployer who was a cashier at the Second National Bank.

When Ployer died in 1920 the property was inherited by his widow Hanna (Bucher) Ployer who sold the house in 1921 to Reuben and Annie M. Cockley. After Reuben died in 1924, Annie bought out the shares in the house owned by her children and lived there with her daughter Susie, a registered nurse, according to Williams.

For the next 12 years Susie continued operating the home as a laying-in house that took confinement cases, Williams wrote. Many Mechanicsburg residents were born here. Susie Cockley retired in 1936.

That same year the house was sold to Emily M. Landis who operated a jelly making business with help from her daughters Emily and Elizabeth. The survey mentioned how the home was enlarged to the east and south to accommodate growth which suffered from wartime rationing. Emily M. Landis died in 1949.

In 1957 the house was sold by the Landis heirs to Floyd L. and Jean (Jones) Hartung. It became the property of Jean Hartung upon their divorce in 1975, Williams wrote. At the time the book was published, the house was owned by Larry H. and Jean (Hartung) Artz.
Hutchinson's Salvation Army started in 1894

In 1910, under Captain George Seeds, the citadel at 114 West Sherman St. was built.
Union Cabinet gives nod to BPCLs investment enhancement in Oman Refineries

Published: April 28, 2016

The Union Cabinet has given its approval to enhance investment by Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) in Bharat Oman Refineries Limited (BORL).

With this, the investment amount of BPCL could be enhanced upto a maximum of 3000 crore rupees by way of subscription of convertible warrants or other instruments.

The infusion of funds by the BPCLs will

Enable expansion of Bina Refinery in Madhya Pradesh and overcome the implications on account of the erosion of the net worth.

Enhance the availability of petroleum products in the Northern and Central parts of the country.

It will also enhance industrial development of Madhya Pradesh and substantial increase in employment and tax earnings in the State.

Background

BPCL is Indias second-biggest state refiner that functions under the aegis of Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.

It has promoted a joint venture company with Oman Oil Company Limited (OOCL) named BORL. OCC holds 26% stake and BPCL holds 49% stake.

Month: Current Affairs - April, 2016

Topics: BPCL  Cabinet Decisions  India-Oman  National  Petroleum Sector

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Musikki Raises $1 Million, Launches Exclusiph Music Image Platform

Porto and London based music tech startup Musikki, has just raised $1 million USD from Portugal Ventures, the biggest venture capital fund in Portugal. Musikki ,which provides B2C and B2B services for the music industry has also launched a new image service, Exclusiph.

______________________________________________

Musikki has launched Exclusiph, an image management and distribution tool for the music industry. It is already in use by independent labels 4AD and Secretly Group.

The Exclusiph platform enables the distribution of images to multiple channels with a single upload. By uploading a high-resolution file, Exclusiph automatically generates the image for print, as a digital download, and embeds it. Credits, music metadata and related content like press releases, video and audio links can all be added to the image file.

Musikki's lead product is their Music API. We set up Musikki as a consumer app, dubbed the IMDB of music, but quickly diversified the offering by launching the Music API which provides all the data, content and information needed to develop a new music service," said Joao Afonso, co-founder and CEO. "The aim of the Musikki Music API is to provide everything except the music itself. And, it was during our quest to provide a one-stop solution for music app developers that we identified the need in the B2B space to easily access and manage high quality and official music photos.

Marco Fernandes, CEO, Portugal Ventures says: "We have great expectations for Musikki. This kind of platform, dedicated to the music industry, updated in real time and born global is the kind of startup we want to invest in order to foster the Portuguese startup ecosystem."

Negotiations for a series A funding round are already in process as Musikki gears up to enter other markets with Exclusiph. This follows Musikkis initial funding secured by winning, in 2012, the Building Global Innovators Venture Competition co-organised by the MIT, which provided the music-tech startup with USD $250,000 in first funding. Musikki also secured USD $500,000 from Intercapital and Smarty Equity, two investment firms focused on early-stage ventures.

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Train operators should have enough insurance to cover the costs of cleaning up after oil spills. Thats the view of New York State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli who is calling for stronger safety measures alongside the increased insurance requirements.The Democrat & Chronicle reports that DiNapoli has looked into the coverage held by the two largest carriers of oil in the state, CSX Corp. and Canadian Pacific.A filing with the SEC shows that CSX is self-insured for $25 million for non-catastrophic property damage and $50 million for natural disasters. CPs filings did not have similar insurance detail.DiNapoli noted that the Quebec derailment and oil spill in 2013 caused $2.7 billion in damages; the railway was insured for only $25 million. He said that he is concerned that the New York State Oil Spill Fund of $40 million would not cover any shortfall left by rail companies, especially if the cost of a disaster put them out of business.CSX told the Democrat & Chronicle that it believes its insurance is adequate; CP said that it complies with all regulatory requirements on insurance.Guardian Insurance is now offering voluntary permanent life insurance through the workplace, becoming one of only a few insurers to provide it. The new product means that employers can offer employees individual, permanent life insurance protection on a voluntary basis that they can keep even if they change jobs.Many employees today either dont have life insurance or not enough of it. Attaining voluntary permanent life insurance through the workplace allows employees to enhance insurance coverage, lock in pricing, build cash value that can be used for loans or other withdrawals, and keep the coverage even if they change employers, said Michael Estep, Second Vice President Group Life, Disability, and Supplemental Health Product Development at Guardian.The policy can be fully paid up by the time the worker reaches 65, meaning no further premiums on retirement.The move towards open plan offices creates a security risk according to business executives. A poll of chief information officers has found that 86 per cent believe an open layout poses potential threats.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, said David Jones of recruiters Robert Half, who carried out the poll.The risk of sensitive information being overheard (37 per cent) or seen (35 per cent) is the greatest risk. This could mean information overheard by an employee, client, visitor, etc. Increased risk of device theft (21 per cent) and document theft (6 per cent) is also highlighted.Many companies are introducing additional security measures to help mitigate this risk. 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 organizations security issues and policies, Jones said.
Union Cabinet gives nod to MoU between IRDAI and Insurance Authority of UAE

Published: April 28, 2016

The Union Cabinet has given its ex-post facto approval for the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) and the Insurance Authority of United Arab Emirates.

Decision in this regard was taken by the Union Cabinet meeting chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. The MoU was signed in February, 2016.

The MoU provides for

Enhanced cooperation between the two authorities in the field of insurance supervision.

It will provide a framework for co-operation such as channels of communication.

Increase mutual understanding through the exchange of regulatory and relevant supervisory information.

It will also include confidential information to enforce or ensure compliance with their respective laws and regulations.

Month: Current Affairs - April, 2016

Topics: Cabinet Decisions  India-UAE  Insurance sector  National

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BOOM co-founders Sandy McKnight and Liv Cummins performing. They and other BOOM members will at the 'Big BOOM Bash' on Friday night at the Whitney Center as a way to introduce the organization and its members the community.

'BOOM' Looks to Connect Local Musicians

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Calling all Berkshire musicians: BOOM has arrived.

The Berkshires may be brimming with musicians, but for whatever reason, few venture far from their favorite open mic or music venue  leaving a sometimes stagnant local music scene.

"The issue with the Berkshires is it is just a spread-out area ... and there is no central place to go," BOOM co-founder Sandy McKnight said. "A lot of people are not aware of what is going on past Pittsfield if they are from South County and vice versa if they are from North County ... we want to change that mentality."

So the Berkshire Organization for Original Music was born to help connect musicians with venues throughout the county, promote local music, and act as a one stop shop for any guitar toting songster in need of information or promotion.

McKnight said the goal was to create "cohesive original music scene."

"There was a lack of information and people could not get their stuff out there and be heard so we decided to get this going," he said. "We want people to be able to play up and down the countyif you have a circuit within the county there should be the opportunity to play much more and get more exposure."

BOOM is part of the non-profit Columbia Arts Team, which was founded by McKnight and Liv Cummins when they were living in New York. Now in Lee, they joined with Tom Conklin of Pittsfield, who also felt this void in the Berkshire music scene. They were later joined by Dar Maloney, a band member of Conklin's in the Matchstick Architects, and Allison Gregory

The organizers began collecting information and spinning the initiative. They held their first information meeting in January and people were interested.

"We weren't actually sure if there was going to be a demand for this but we held the meeting ... and we had almost 50 people," he said. "We realized that we were on to something."

Powering the BOOM movement is a website that acts as the central hub for all of a Berkshire musician's needs.

"We wanted to help sort of seed things and get things going so one thing we decided on was the website," McKnight said. "We hope it can act as one place to go to find out anything related to original music whether it be advice, who does what, and where to play. We will continue to gather information and add things."

Bands and musicians and can register with BOOM, load up a profile, and even upload some sample music. Venues can also register with the website.

Also, there are various forums to tap into and a calendar with upcoming performances stringing throughout the county.

McKnight said the website also has a list of resources such as places to buy equipment, recording studios, record labels, and light and sound services.

"Some musicians want to put an album out and have to figure out everything on their own," he said. "Everyone always does their own research and it would be better if people just knew where they could find a radio station to maybe play their music or find someone to review their album ... . The website can show them the right path to take locally."

He said as the website grows, he hopes the musician directory grows as well so venues can find specific kinds of performers and music folk can hook up with other local musicians and collaborate.

McKnight said BOOM is still on its early legs and has plenty of room to grow, but is already reverberating throughout Berkshire County.

"I think we have close to 20 bands now in there and ... they are so enthusiastic," he said. "We have only been doing this for three months ... and through word of mouth it is spreading, which is what we hoped for."

McKnight said BOOM also wants to connect with the business and civic community because music has the ability to send a town or city into overdrive and create energy and jump-start growth.

"We want there to be a symbiotic relationship," McKnight said. "People should know that the growth of a music scene will also help grow the business community."

He added that in the future he would like the arms of BOOM to reach out even further and unearth the music community to truly create a thriving Berkshire music scene.

The wheels are already moving in that there are plans to host local radio shows and utilize Northern Berkshire Community Television to air live music. He added Wood Bros. Music in Pittsfield and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts have also expressed interest in teaming up.

McKnight said BOOM will introduce itself to the county with the Big BOOM Bash on Friday night at the Whitney Center in Pittsfield.

"The idea was we need to introduce ourselves to the community and make a big statement right off the top," he said.

The Big BOOM Bash will feature local acts Jeb Barry and the Pawn Shop Saints, 8 Foot River, Robin O'Herin, Leap the Dips, The Matchstick Architects, Sherry Steiner with Paul Edelman and JT, Christine Bile, The Chain Letter, Keep Her Warm and Long Journey.

He said the event starts with a potluck dinner at 4. The music will kick off at 5 and run to 9. Smaller acoustic acts will start the night and bands will close it out. Each performance will be between 20 to 30 minutes.

"It should be a cool thing," McKnight said. "It is a free party, free food, but cash bar."
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
         :       ,        
Supplier of High-Performance Polymer for Medical Implants Settles FTC Charges that It Monopolized Sales to Worlds Largest Medical Device Makers

Washington, DC - A company that supplies some of the worlds largest medical device makers with a high-performance polymer used to make spinal and other medical implants has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it violated federal antitrust law by using long-term exclusive contracts to maintain its monopoly.

According to the FTCs administrative complaint, Invibio was the first company to sell implant-grade polyetheretherketone, known as PEEK, to medical device makers. The FTCs complaint alleges that two other companies, Solvay Specialty Polymers LLC and Evonik Corporation, later entered the implant-grade PEEK market, but Invibios anticompetitive tactics impeded them from effectively competing for customers. As a result, Invibio has managed to retain approximately 90 percent of PEEK sales worldwide.

This case affirms that the first company to enter a market cannot rely on anticompetitive contract terms to lock up customers and box out rivals, said Debbie Feinstein, Director of the FTCs Bureau of Competition. This settlement is designed to provide buyers a meaningful choice among suppliers, to open the door to price competition, and to enhance innovation.

According to the FTC, Invibio adopted an all-or-nothing negotiation strategy for its supply contracts that required medical device makers to agree to use only Invibio PEEK for all or nearly all of their PEEK-containing implantable devices. Through these exclusive contracting practices, the complaint alleges that Invibio has been able to maintain high prices for PEEK, despite entry from Solvay and Evonik; to prevent its customers from using more than one source of supply, despite their business preference to do so; and to impede Solvay and Evonik from developing into fully effective competitors. Invibios practices also allegedly threatened to stifle incentives to develop new and improved forms of PEEK. The firms use of exclusive contracts constitutes monopolization in violation of the FTC Act, according to the complaint.

Under the proposed consent order, Invibio, Inc. and Invibio Limited, along with their corporate parent, Victrex plc, are generally prohibited from entering into exclusive supply contracts and from preventing current customers from using an alternate source of PEEK in new products. In addition, the companies must allow current customers meeting certain conditions to modify existing contracts to eliminate the requirement that the customer purchase PEEK for existing products exclusively from Invibio.

Also under the proposed order, the companies are generally barred from using pricing terms in new contracts that could effectively result in an exclusive arrangement between Invibio and a device maker. These prohibited terms include setting minimum purchase requirements; conditioning discounts or important services on a device makers purchase from Invibio of a specified percentage of its PEEK requirements; and providing retroactive volume discounts.

The companies also are required to establish an antitrust compliance program for their employees and officers.

Details about the case are set forth in the analysis to aid public comment for this matter. The Commission vote to issue the complaint and accept the proposed consent order for public comment was 3-0.

The FTC will publish the consent package in the Federal Register shortly. The consent agreement will be subject to public comment for 30 days, beginning today and continuing through May 27, 2016, after which the Commission will decide whether to make the proposed consent order final. Comments can be filed electronically or in paper form by following the instructions in the Supplementary Information section of the Federal Register notice.
My Memories of John Cahn

I first met John Cahn in the late 1960s when he visited our department of metallurgy at the Technion  Israel Institute of Technology. Already a famous thermodynamics-of-materials scholar, John was our most important visiting scientist at the time. During that period I was studying for my masters and then Ph.D. degrees, and John and I were talking science. John was interested in my work and in particular in the microstructure of the titanium alloys I was studying.

In 1972 I started my postdoc studies at the Aerospace Research Laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, and met John again. However, our life-changing meeting occurred later, in 1979, when John and his wife Anne came to stay at the Technion for a longer period. For a little while John even contemplated joining the Technion faculty.

My research during those days as a young Technion lecturer was centered on the structure and properties of rapidly solidified (RS) metallic alloys, and I had developed a technique to make thin foils from fine RS powders for studies using a transmission electron microscope (TEM). This technique was crucial for TEM studies of RS powders, and produced remarkable results. I thought John would be interested in the solidification patterns I was observing, so one day I went upstairs to his office and invited him to the TEM room. John was elated at what he saw.

He told me that NIST scientists had been trying to obtain such images with very little success, and on the spot invited me to give a lecture on my findings at NIST. In the summer of 1980 I came to give this invited lecture and received an offer to come to NIST for my upcoming sabbatical from the Technion. In August 1981 I came with my family to work for two magnificent years at NIST. My official affiliation was with Johns Hopkins University, and DARPA was the sponsor of my studies.

John was my host, but most of my work was performed in collaboration with Bill Boettinger, with Frank Biancaniello making rapidly solidified alloys for me. John was interested in our work and we consulted with him frequently.

Several months after my arrival at NIST, on April 8, 1982, I made the discovery that affected our lives. I discovered the quasiperiodic materials.

John was interested in the new, at-the-time-unexplained five-fold symmetry-diffraction patterns of what was later known as the icosahedral phase, the first quasiperiodic material that I found in aluminummanganese alloys. Although the reaction of other members of the NIST community varied from ridicule to interest, John was always encouraging. He said, Danny, this material is telling us something, and I challenge you to explain it. In fact, John was the NIST researcher who was the most positive about my research during those days.

My sabbatical at NIST was about to end in 1983, and John, with Robert Mehrabian, the head of the lab, offered me a good permanent position at NIST. This was a tempting offer, but I decided to go back to the Technion.

The mystery of the icosahedral phase was still unsolved, but upon my return to the Technion, I met with Ilan Blech, who was the first scientist to help solve the mystery. Ilan developed a model that showed how the new structure could form, and together we wrote a scientific article that announced the newly discovered atomic order in crystals.

The article, sent for publication to the Journal of Applied Physics, was rejected by the journals editors, who claimed that it would not interest the community of physicists. I then sent the article to Metallurgical Transactions and it was accepted, but scheduled to be published only months later, in the middle of 1985. In the summer of 1984 I came back to NIST for the summer and showed the rejected article to John, asking him why, in his opinion, the article was rejected.

John proposed to write another article based on my discovery without the Ilan Blech model. He brought on board Denis Gratias from France, and the three of us wrote a short article describing the discovery of quasiperiodic materials. The article, sent to Physical Review Letters, was accepted and published in November 1984.

From the day of the publication, John, Denis and I were in the eye of the quasicrystal storm. Scientists from around the world developed the discovery into a fast-growing science. The Physical Review Letters article was the first in a series John and I published together, and our collaboration on quasicrystal materials lasted for years. I continued to visit NIST every summer at Johns invitation, and together we stood against criticism from several eminent scientists headed by Linus Pauling, one of the greatest chemists of the 20th century.

My friendship with John and Anne lasted for many years, beyond our scientific collaboration, and our two families celebrated many occasions together, including a traditional yearly dinner at the restaurant LAuberge Chez Francois in Great Falls, Va.

My life and career intertwined with those of John, and the serendipity created by our long-lasting relationship changed our lives and created opportunities and excitements that otherwise would not have happened.
On the Occasion of Koningsdag in the Kingdom of the Netherlands

Washington, DC - Secretary of State John Kerry: "On behalf of President Obama and the American people, I congratulate His Majesty King Willem-Alexander on his third celebration of Koningsdag, and offer my best wishes to all the people of the Netherlands.

"The relationship between the United States and the Netherlands has been a source of warm friendship and mutual prosperity since 1782, when Ambassador John Adams opened our first official embassy there. Through the centuries, we have remained close partners and steadfast allies. This past June, we welcomed the Royal Family to Washington D.C. to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, and also to highlight our ongoing cooperation on a range of mutual interests. Our bilateral agenda today includes cooperation on trade, solidarity in fighting terrorism, shared support for human rights, and a mutual commitment to democratic values.

"Over 400 years ago, Dutch explorers and merchants established their presence in what is today the United States. With place names like Tappan Zee and Brooklyn, a presidential history that includes two Roosevelts and one Van Buren, and nearly five million Americans claiming Dutch ancestry, the Dutch influence on this side of the Atlantic continues to be felt.

"Congratulations again to all the people of the Netherlands as they celebrate in a sea of orange on this special day."
Special Coordinator Merten Travel to Haiti

Washington, DC - Haiti Special Coordinator Kenneth Merten travels to Haiti, April 28, to assess progress toward the completion of the 2015 electoral process and the installation of a democratically elected government in Haiti.

During his stay, Haiti Special Coordinator Merten will meet with Haitian government officials involved in the implementation of the February 5 accord and with international community partners of Haiti.
Iceland Cricket's Quirky Tweets Have an Audience of Their Own
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.  The Conservation Federation of Missouri recently honored State Rep. Linda Black as the 2015 Conservation Legislator of the Year. Black received the award because of her commitment to promoting and preserving Missouris bird, fish, game, wildlife, and forestry resources.

Black was honored during the annual Conservation Day at the Missouri State Capitol that took place April 19. Black received the award from the Conservation Federation of Missouri Executive Director Brandon Butler.

Black has made it a legislative priority to work with the conservation community to preserve Missouris conservation system and natural resources for future generations of Missourians. She sponsored legislation during the 2015 session to require a two-thirds vote, rather than a simple majority, to amend the Missouri Constitution on issues related to bird, fish, game, wildlife, or forestry resources. During the 2016 session, Black has sponsored legislation to deter Missouris growing poaching problem by creating tougher civil penalties for poachers.

As someone who grew up in a rural area and has always loved the outdoors, it has been a wonderful experience being able to work with like-minded folks who have a similar passion for preserving our natural resources, said Black, R-Park Hills. I want to thank the Conservation Federation for giving me this honor and for working with me to pursue our common interest of ensuring the conservation traditions of our state will be preserved for future generations.

The Conservation Federation of Missouri is a broad-based citizen conservation group representing more than 100,000 individuals and 80 affiliate groups from hunters and anglers to birdwatchers.
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Daniel Bruhl is recounting one of those outer-body experiences actors get working on a Marvel movie. Recruited to the cast of the latest superhero venture, Captain America: Civil War, he arrived on set keenly. I, being very German, was overpunctual and stepping in the make-up trailer five minutes before my time. And all the seats were occupied by Scarlett [Johansson], Chris [Evans] and Robert [Downey Jr]. This was one of these moments where I thought, Shit, Im here!

This rollercoaster ride, as he puts it, hasnt stopped since. The first floor of the London hotel where Bruhl is holed up, dutifully promoting his role as the villainous Zemo, is awash with Avengers. A beefed-up Evans, who plays Captain America, stalks the corridor. Elizabeth Olsen, who joined the franchise as Scarlett Witch in last years Avengers: Age of Ultron, glides down it with all the precision of a catwalk model. And Anthony Mackie  aka The Falcon  can be heard booming with laughter in the next room.

By comparison, Bruhl is simply attired, in a pale grey pullover and navy slacks, quietly sipping his afternoon coffee. In the past hes worked with Quentin Tarantino, playing the German sniper in Inglorious Basterds, and Ron Howard, winning Bafta and Golden Globe nominations for his turn as Austrian racing driver Niki Lauda in Rush. But, still living in Berlin where he was raised, youre just as likely to find him in a German, French or Spanish-language movie.

He was at least able to call on one A-List friend before taking the plunge to join the Marvel team: Thor star Chris Hemsworth. The two became friends after starring in Rush. I emailed him and said, What do you think? He said, Do it. Definitely. You will enjoy it. They will take care of you. Sadly, Hemsworths Thor is one of the few Avengers not to return for this enormous  and hugely entertaining  superhero showdown. I would have loved to have a scene with Thor, Bruhl smiles.

33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 Show all 34 1 /34 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 1. Captain America: Civil War Release date: 6 May 2016. Iron Man and Captain America are set to face off in this superhero blockbuster that will feature nearly all the Avengers but wont be an Avengers film. It will also mark the first time Spider-Man will feature in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Sony having made a deal with Marvel Studios. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 2. X-Men: Apocalypse Release date: 27 May 2016. Following the success of Days of Future Past, Apocalypse will follow the young X-Men team as the battle against Oscar Isaacs titular villain as he gathers his four horsemen; Magneto (Fassbender), Angel (Hardy), Storm (Shipp), and Psylocke (Munn). Expect carnage and no Wolverine. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 3. Suicide Squad Release date: 5 August 2016. The first supervillain film, Suicide Squad is also based in the DCEU (DC Extended Universe, where Batman and Superman live) and will introduce the world to Margot Robbies Harley Quinn and Jared Letos Joker. One of the more exciting upcoming DC films thats for sure. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 4. Doctor Strange Release date: 4 November 2016. Benedict Cumberbatch will debut in the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe, where Captain America and Iron Man live) as the Sorcerer Supreme. The film already has an incredible cast, including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachael McAdams and Tilda Swinton. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 5. Untitled Lego Batman film Release date: 20 February 2017. Kicking off 2017 is the Lego version of Batman, who will lead his own spin-off, having already featured in the amazing Lego Movie. Will Arnett voices the titular character, while Zach Garfianakis - from the Hangover - will voice The Joker. But will he better than Leto? 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 6. Untitled Wolverine film Release date: 3 March 2017. Having not starred in X-Men: Apocalypse, Wolverine will return to the big screen in a solo film which was recently made R-Rated following the success of Deadpool. It is expected to be Hugh Jackmans last outing as the titular character. Fox 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 7. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Release date: 5 May 2017. Chris Pratt and the crew are returning to space in the sequel to the surprisingly successful Guardians of the Galaxy. According to director James Gunn, the film will not feature Thanos, even though he will to play a major role in phase MCU Phase 3. Cast includes newcomers Kurt Russell and Pom Klementieff, as well as, rumour has it, Sylvester Stallone. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 8. Wonder Woman Release date: 23 June 2017. Gal Gadot is returning to the DCEU in her very own film, marking the first female-led superhero film on this list. Chris Pine is on board to play Wonder Womans love interest. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 9. Untitled Spider-Man reboot Release date: 7 July 2017. Yes, it is another Spider-Man reboot, having previously been redone with Andrew Garfield as the lead. However, this time it is part of the MCU, with Tom Holland as the titular character, and a heavily rumoured cameo by Iron Man could be in the pipeline. We can dream. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 10. Untitled Fox film Release date: 6 October 2017. In a strange announcement, Fox decided to withhold the release of Gambit until a future, as-yet unannounced date, which could be here, or this could be a completely separate project. Many suspect Deadpool 2 could nicely fit here, Fox capitalising on the success of the first film. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 11. Thor: Ragnarok Release date: 3 November 2017. Chris Hemsworth will be returning as the Norse God in his third solo MCU film. Flight of the Conchords Taika Waititi is on board to direct, and promises a fun adventure that will likely lead into Marvels next project, Infinity War. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 12. Justice League Part One Release date: 17 November 2017. Hot on the heals of Thor comes Justice League Part One, the first DCEU team-up flick which will see Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg work together to fight bad guys. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 13: Untitled Fox film Release date: 12 January 2018. Kicking off 2018 will likely be the second Deadpool film, but then again, this could very well be another X-Men team-up. Theres also talk of an X-Force film, with Deadpool and other mutants teaming up to fight evil. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 14. Black Panther Release date: 16 February 2018. The first non-white male-led superhero film in the MCU comes in the form of Black Panther, with Chadwick Boseman reprising the titular role, having also starred as the Panther in Civil War. Creeds Ryan Coogler is on to direct what could be a very exciting film. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 15. The Flash Release date: 16 March 2018. The Flash will be the first DCEU film since Justice League, and sees Ezra Miller take the lead. Phil Lord and Chris Miller were supposed to pen the film before Disney snapped them up for the Han Solo-film, leaving Seth Grahame-Smith to take charge. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 16. Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 Release date: 4 May 2018. And so, we finally get to the point of all these Infinity Stones! Thanos will be the big bad, with the Avengers needing to team up to defeat their biggest foe yet. It has previously been described as the end of the Avengers as we know it. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 17. Ant-Man and The Wasp Release date: 6 July 2018. Peyton Reed will be back to direct this surprise sequel to one of the better received MCU films. While the name is ridiculous, at least Marvel are finally having a leading female superhero. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 18. Untitled Fox film Release date: 13 July 2018. Again, not much word on this one except it is thought to be X-Men spin-off New Mutants, something Josh Boone has been hit up to write. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 19. Animated Spider-Man Film Release date: 20 July 2018. Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, and Amy Pascal - the team behind the live-action Spider-Man films - are producing this unrelated animated adaptation of the hero. Because you can never have too much Spider-Man, right? 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 20. Aquaman Release date: 27 July 2018. Another Justice League spin-off, Jason Momoa plays the leading man. Furious 7s James Wan is on to direct, but little else is known about the film. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 21. Captain Marvel Release date: 8 March 2019. Weve hit 2019, and the first confirmed superhero film will be the first proper female-led MCU film. No-one is confirmed to be in the titular role of Carol Danvers just yet. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 22. Shazam Release date: 5 April 2019. Dwayne Johnson stars as the villain in this DCEU film which will be somewhat separate to the other DC films. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 23. Avengers: Infinity War Part 2. Release date: 3 May 2019. The conclusion to the long drawn MCU saga. Expect a big finish with at least a few planets being destroyed. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 24. Justice League Part Two Release date: 14 June 2019. Soon after the Infinity War story reaches its conclusion, so will the Justice Leagues. Not much is known, except Darkseid will likely be the villain for at least one of the parts. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 25. Inhumans Release date: 12 July 2019. The concept of Inhumans (or Marvels mutants) has already been introduced in TV, through Marvels Agents of Shield, yet the film is expected to introduce the Royal Family who have yet to be seen in the show. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 26. Cyborg Release date: 3 April 2020. Having debuted in Justice League Part One three years previously, Cyborg will finally be making his own outing, with Ray Fisher as the titular character. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 27. Untitled MCU film Release date: 1 May 2020. The first of three untitled Marvel films. There are a couple of contenders, the first is a likely sequel to Spider-Man with Sony, or a third Guardians of the Galaxy film, thus finishing the trilogy. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 28. Green Lantern Corps. Release date: 19 June 2020. Before you start to worry, this has nothing to do with the Ryan Reynolds-starring flick that hit cinemas a little while ago. Instead, this will be another DCEU film that will likely spin-off from Justice League after the Green Lantern Corps cameo in one of the parts. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 29. Untitled MCU film Release date: 10 July 2020. As well as Spider-Man or Guardians of the Galaxy sequels, a Doctor Strange or Black Panther one could fit in nicely here. Or perhaps Black Widow may finally get the solo-film she deserves. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 30. Untitled MCU film Release date: 6 November 2020. Some speculators also think a Blade film could fit in here, marking over 20 years since the first Blade. But many believe the character may be better suited to a Netflix series, as with Daredevil and Jessica Jones. Theres also talk of a Runaways film reaching cinemas at some stage. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 31. Untitled Ben Affleck Batman film Release date: TBA. Now were onto the TBA release dates, the first of which is a Batman solo film, written and directed by Ben Affleck. When this is due, no one is quite sure but expect it sooner rather than later if Batman v Superman is a success. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 32. Suicide Squad 2 Release date: TBA (rumoured 2017). A sequel to Suicide Squad is expected to come in 2017 according to recent reports, but nothing has been confirmed. If the first is successful, it should come as no surprise for Warner Bros to rearrange their schedule to fit in this surefire hit. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 33. Venom Release date: TBA. This is an odd one, as it has been confirmed Sony are wanting to release a Venom film completely unrelated to the upcoming Spider-Man reboot. Venom, as you may know, is a Spider-Man villain, intrinsically linked to Spider-Man, so it seems odd they would release a film unrelated to the rebooted project and not linked to the MCU. 33 Superhero films set for release between 2016 and 2020 Anything else? Well, now you mention it, theres also that sequel to Fantastic Four that has seemingly been dropped by Fox. Plus, theres the Gambit film which has been put on hold (but will likely fill an untitled Fox slot so we havent added it extra). Then again, it could be shoehorned in somehow Marvel

It hardly matters, with a story that draws from the 2006-2007 comic series written by Mark Millar, in which the Avengers are pitted against each other after a law is brought in to regulate their activities following the bloody fallout of a rescue mission in Lagos. Thats why I was attracted to this story, says Bruhl. All these moral questions these superheroes haveAre we really that perfect? What damage are we causing?

As the films global PR campaign cranks into gear, you can expect to see #TeamCap and #TeamIronMan everywhere, as Evans Captain America and Robert Downey Jrs metal-suit-sporting Tony Stark go head-to-head. To see who is choosing which side is fascinating, says Bruhl. But what about his character? Cant we get #TeamZemo trending? Thats what I said, he chuckles. I need some support!

Hes hardly the first European to join the Marvel universe  following in the footsteps of Stellan Skarsgard, Julie Delpy and a number of Brits  but his presence indicates the savvy nature of uber-producer Kevin Feige, who met with Bruhl in London long before the shoot began. The actor admits hes not exactly an expert in the source comics. I was very scared before the first meeting. I thought, Oh God, what if hes asking me professional Marvel questions...?

Fortunately, there was no entrance exam to pass. Bruhls character is also markedly different from the Baron Zemo in the comics, who wore a purple mask to disguise a disfigured face. Rather than the typical army-raising, world-conquering nemesis, his character in the film is a shadowy figure (with a penchant for bacon and coffee). It was much more interesting to have this mysterious guy in the background who pulls all these strings.

Chris Evans as Captain America, his seventh appearance as the superhero (Rex)

Bruhl isnt quite so mysterious. Born in Barcelona to a German father and a Spanish mother (the story goes, she didnt trust German hospitals and wanted to give birth in Spain), he also had a splash of French in the family. I grew up with half-French cousins because two of my German uncles married French women, so I always consider myself as very European, he says. Thats why my goal was to work in different languages and different film cultures.

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His late father Hanno Bruhl was a director of both documentaries and TV features, and Bruhl got to work with him when he was 19 on the 1999 TV movie Hin und Weg. That was very strange, he admits. His career escalated quickly, with 2003s Bafta-nominated Goodbye Lenin! In the very same year he was profiled as one of the Berlin Film Festivals Shooting Stars. This February, he presented the award to a new crop of young talent. I felt like a grandfather, he groans.

Yet there can be no doubt that the 37-year-old Bruhl is now one of the top European actors of his generation. Hes a really intelligent guy, very believable, admits Michael Winterbottom, who cast him in The Face Of An Angel, his film inspired by the Amanda Knox case, in which Bruhl played a documentary filmmaker. Other directors who have been drawn to him include Anton Corbijn (for A Most Wanted Man) and Bill Condon (The Fifth Estate).

Bruhl will next be seen alongside Emma Watson in Colonia, a harrowing true-life tale set in Pinochet-era Chile. Playing a German citizen kidnapped into the abusive Colonia Dignidad sect, he met a real victim as part of his research. With somebody who is alive and tells you stories...you realise that...sometimes it was unbearable to listen to these stories, he stammers. And the film, we couldnt possibly show the whole horror, because it would be impossible for an audience to see that.

Having also shot two forthcoming Second World War stories, Alone In Berlin and The Zookeepers Wife, with Jessica Chastain, its been a tough year. Hes barely been at home. Now I feel a certain homesickness, because Ive been travelling so much. I want to take it easy now and only do the stuff I really believe in. So this is a change which just happened this last year. Making back-to-back movies is a young mans game. I was like that when I was a 'Shooting Star', he chuckles. Now Im an old man.

Captain America: Civil War opens in cinemas on 29 April. Colonia is released on 1 July.
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Transformers: Age of Extinction was crammed full of product placement for Bud Light, Goodyear, Beats Pills and more, so much so that it appears the editors/set designers left one product out.

Wulong Karst Tourism takes Paramount to court in a $27 million lawsuit this week, saying the studio failed to hold up its end of the deal.

The state-backed Chinese company claims to have paid $750,000 to have its logo inserted into the movie and that never made it in.

Paramount dont dispute this, but according to io9 are arguing that the fact Michael Bay shot a commercial for the company and left behind the sets and props makes up for it.

Wulong Karst Tourism do not accept this, and the case has been accepted by a court in Chongqing city.

Businesses backed by the Chinese government are not ones Paramount wants to be making enemies of given how important the Chinese market is for studios these days, especially when it comes to franchises like Transformers.
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[Beers With is a new feature consisting of long-form conversations with interesting people over pints]

Printable version here.

Today we are drinking a couple of Morettis at the Soho Hotel in London.

CH: So you've actually told the world how Peaky Blinders is going to end [when the air raid sirens of World War II sound].

SK: Yeah.

I think that's actually a masterstroke. A lot of shows, Game of Thrones... Breaking Bad... as brilliant as they are, the fan discourse gets caught up in how the shows will finish, that's what people concentrate on, whereas now, because you have that thing in place -

A destination.

Yeah, now people are going to be more interested in and focused on the journey.

That ending is definitely the ambition, whether we get there or not I don't know. I do want it to be the story of a family between two wars.

Was it a conscious decision to reveal it? When did you come up with it?

I think at the end of the first series was the first time I thought we could take this all the way.

And I guess there's no reason why it couldn't pick up at a later stage, post-war.

It could, yes. It depends how successful the show remains but we might do a bigger jump, a five-year year leap or something.

it's funny, period dramas in the UK have kind of always had this tradition of being about -

Upper middle class people, haha.

Yeah. Sleeping with the maid... this very light-hearted, twee stuff. Why is that do you think? is it in the tradition of Austen?

I think it might be. There's such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot...Jane Austen... that's all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn't ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life. So there was sort of nothing to draw from. Peakys is all based on word of mouth and stories that I heard.

It's a shame because it paints Britain's past as so immaculate and not as messy as it was.

Yeah exactly, even down to the way people speak. Like, "I do not believe", "I cannot believe" - why does everybody say "cannot" and not "can't", because they did say "can't" back then.

I think that's what's partly made Peaky Blinders resonate so much in the US, that it's a little bit more dirty than the usual British period pieces.

I mean it's so popular there, it's a real cult following.

It feels like about the only UK show than can a candle to the US right now. Even though Sherlock and Luther have a big American following, I can't imagine shows like that coming from one of those networks, HBO... AMC... whereas Peaky Blinders I really can.

Yeah, and the people who have responded to it have been incredible. My heroes have contacted me and said how much they love it which is great.

~ Pause to order more beer ~

When did you notice that it had started to crest in the US?

We heard that people were responding to it, then I got a message from Dennis Lehane, the novelist [and The Wire alum.], to say how much he loved it, and then I got one from Michael Mann, the film director, and it just got bigger and bigger. Whenever I went to LA the first thing people said in the meeting, no matter what it was about, was how much they loved Peakys. So Hollywood was really going for it which is always a good start. Also Snoop Dogg is a big fan.

What?!

He came to London about a year ago, and his agent contacted my agent and said he wants to meet you to talk about Peaky Blinders. We spent like three hours in St Martin's Lane Hotel just building joints and he's talking about how the show reminds him of how he got into gang culture. It's incredible, I mean I don't know where the connection is but it's really taking off.

I suppose the camaraderie among the gangs is something that's transferable even if Birmingham might be another world. That's amazing that you spent three hours with Snoop Dogg, I love that.

It was surreal. We've kept in touch.

Steven Knight on set

I guess as well it's popular with the US audience because Birmingham probably seems quite exotic. When you're in the US everyone expects you to either be cockney or posh - that's the two accents they want to hear - no-one ever comes up with the Birmingham accent.

It's true, it's something they're not expecting.

I think as well, obviously Peaky Blinders has started to take off globally but it's been kind of nascent until now. I think season 3 could really be the one, especially with the day-and-date broadcast on Netflix.

Yeah, I think so. I hope so!

in terms of the historical elements in the show, I wonder how you get the balance right, because in a way it's nice to be able to have that anchor to tie the story to and it's important to do it if you're depicting a specific time, but you don't want to become so beholden to it that you can't have fun and do something that's a little bit different and not necessarily how it would have been.

Exactly. I think it's taking real events and then imagining what could have happened among those real events. This series will deal with a real organisation that was around at the time, very powerful people who were basically plotting against the Labour government and trying to prevent what they thought would be the revolution. It's fascinating that they even exist, it's sort of a secret history, and that's who Tommy ends up fighting.

The anachronistic music in the score, was that an easy decision?

It didn't even feel like a decision. during the edit we played music and it just felt right.

There's only so far you can go in terms of mood with music of the era, isn't there.

Yeah, you have to be very careful with what you use. But what's happened with the third season, again one's heroes have started to approach us, and there will be an announcement about what music's being used but it's pretty mind-blowing who's come to us and said: "we want you to have our music".

It must be hard though because sure as incredible as I'm sure some of those acts are, if it's not quite right you've still gotta be like "No, sorry..."

Of course. We've been very lucky though, some amazing pieces of music have come in.

Boardwalk Empire went down the route of just using music from the time and I think, not that it wasn't a good show, but it didn't work quite as well score-wise.

Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Show all 15 1 /15 Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Cillian Murphy filming at the horse fair BBC Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art The Eden Club BBC Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Inside The Eden Club BBC Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art The new Garrison pub BBC Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Inside the new Garrison pub BBC Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art London (though scenes were actually filmed in Bolton) BBC Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art London, post bar fight BBC Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Solomon's Headquarters BBC Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Inside Solomon's Headquarters BBC Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Tommy's office BBC Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art Peaky Blinders: Behind-the-scenes and concept art

Another thing that really interests me about Peakys is the drug aspect, obviously in a lot of modern shows as soon as someone starts to go down the drugs route it's kind of the signpost that -

They're going to fall apart.

That the character's going to fall apart - that's just the trope - but because it's in that time period, and this includes nicotine as well as coke and stuff, that no-one really knows the full effects... it's an interesting aspect.

Yeah because cocaine was only recently illegal in 1924. it was part of society for a while and there was this huge Daily Mail outrage in 1922 about people taking cocaine and as a result, sleeping with Chinese people and black people. That was the problem with the drug for them it was bizarre, I thought that was quite interesting as part of the whole story.

When Arthur was down in the depths of his cocaine addiction last season he obviously wasn't thinking about the consequences, but I wonder if Tommy, in his eternal wisdom, does he think he's just having a bit of fun and it's fine or do you think he kind of foresees that coke's probably not a thing Arthur should be abusing?

I think that he has an awareness because of his opium use in season one. In two Arthur's taking cocaine and by three, he's met someone and she's introduced him to religion, so that's his preferred drug now. We'll see how that pans out.

It's funny the parallel with the political situation right now, because so many years later drug policy is still all over the place in terms of the understanding of the effects.

Absolutely. Nothing is learned.

Costume is obviously a huge part of the show. I know it's not your world and I'm sure you give a huge amount of free rein to the department, but do they ever bring out ideas and you're just like "No, it's not right."

Well not really, they're so good and independent of anybody because they do the research and they replicate the actual look of the clothes. And the response to the clothes... I've had fashion people approach me about it and we're actually going to do it, we're gonna do a clothing line called Garrison and it's going to be the look of the Peaky Blinders.

The clothing is an important thing to get right, isn't, it because it tells you so much about the characters. How much they do or don't follow fashion gives you a real sense of who they are.

Yeah and there's something about the fact that it's men who are taking real care about how they look. Since the 60s the default uniform has been jeans, t-shirt, sweatshirt, but these are people who took time to get dressed.

It's strange isn't it, any macho figures these days, or until very recently, would see taking care of their appearance as something stupid.

I know! it was the opposite.

And cinematically very useful!

Haha yeah.

I was thinking about the Peakys the other day when I was listening to this podcast about the rise of Genghis Khan's empire, and how his father had a comparatively tiny army of X many thousand people and they went and sacked cities of hundreds of thousands, not because they were particularly smart just because they were incredible savage -

And scary, they'd terrify them.

And I guess, is that comparable, because with the Peaky Blinders these are uneducated men who are not very with it but pretty efficacious?

I think that Tommy is the key element in that he's smart, but yeah it's like the Krays, the reason they became so powerful was because they were so vicious and cruel. When they turned on someone, everybody was so scared that they did what they were told. So with a small amount of muscle they were able to have a massive impact, just like the Peakys.

It starts to feel like Michael's becoming a lot like Tommy, he's got that same kind of withdrawn personality and intelligence.

Yeah, that's exactly it.

The idea for it to be a mini-series, six episodes a season, does that help... one of the charges people make about TV is that it looks like TV it doesn't look like film, do you think limiting it to six has helped you give it that cinematic look that you wouldn't have been able to achieve if it had been 13?

The BBC series has always been six so that's why we've always done that many, but I think that will change and it will go to eight. I'm doing a thing called Taboo right now which is eight, but interestingly I think they're reducing that, because they feel that very thing - that the quality's better if they do fewer episodes in a series.

It's interesting, I don't know what the magic number is, but to me as an audience member, four would feel like too few.

Have there been big budgetary concerns with the show?

Yeah, there always is.

Compared to film as well I guess it's a lot tighter.

There's always a concern over budget with film too but people are more extravagant when they're making a feature. In television everything's tight, everything's paired down and it's just a question of making it look expensive.

A thing that always frustrates me as I'm sure it does you is these questions coming up time and time again about rape in TV and supposed gratuity. It's odd because we're at a time when everyone's trying to highlight how much rape is a serious issue and how it's everywhere in society and we need to do something about it, but then for some reason when it's reflected in art people say "why are you putting it in?" It's like, "okay, should we just plaster over it?"

Mmm yeah. I think we've got the right balance in our show. My solution is always what would really happen? How would it really be? And the truth is that of course women were abused at that time.

But the whole Twitter vitriol thing, it hasn't played on your mind when you're writing those kind of scenes?

No, I don't actually look at Twitter.

Haha, that's probably good advice in general.

I've heard that when you're writing no-one really knows what's going to happen. is your writing style kind of frenetic then, do you just sit down and see what comes out?

Yeah, I don't know where it's gonna go, and it's best not to know I think, because if you plan it out it will be very logical and measured, whereas if you just let it happen, then whatever happens, happens.

And looking ahead, Taboo, is there much you can say about that?

It's Tom Hardy, it's TV and it's coming in October. Very different.

I look forward to it. Thanks a lot, Steve.

Thanks, great to meet you.
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Remember that naked restaurant in London that we told you about last week with 5,000 people on the waiting list? Yeah, that numbers now at almost 30,000.

I cant help but feel partly responsible for this, having disseminated its existence, although if this all ends in an overflow of people spilling out onto the streets of London covered in spaghetti and wine, itll pretty much be a career highlight.

On last refresh, 28,350 have submitted their email addresses to The Bunyadis waiting list. Theyll have a pretty long wait, as the restaurants capacity is 42.

Designed to get people back to nature and away from the industrialised-worlds modern trappings, the clothing-optional restaurant will also be free from phones and electric lights.

The Bunyadi - Map and concept art Show all 5 1 /5 The Bunyadi - Map and concept art The Bunyadi - Map and concept art The Bunyadi - Map and concept art The Bunyadi - Map and concept art The Bunyadi - Map and concept art The Bunyadi - Map and concept art

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Guests will enjoy wood-flame grilled meals served on handmade clay crockery, reclining on wood-hewn furniture partitioned with bamboo and wicker under a canopy of candle lights.

We believe people should get the chance to enjoy and experience a night out without any impurities: no chemicals, no artificial colours, no electricity, no gas, no phone and even no clothes if they wish to. The idea is to experience true liberation. said Seb Lyall, the founder of Lollipop, the company behind Londons successful Breaking Bad bar pop-up.

The Bunyadi will be located in central London for three months from June, divided into clothed and pure sections. Gowns, changing rooms and lockers will be provided, and naturally no photography is allowed.

Look out for our review in due course.
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BBC and Netflix have created a formidable partnership - instituted entirely for the purpose of traumatising a new generation of children.

The streaming service will co-produce the BBC's new adaptation of Richard Adams' classic novel, Watership Down; with a substantial budget of 20M, it's the BBC's biggest joint venture yet with the US company (via The Guardian). The book follows a group of rabbits as they escape the catastrophic destruction of their warren and attempt to begin a new life.

The four-part animation will feature an all-star cast: X-Men Apocalypse's James McAvoy will voice Hazel, with Mad Max: Fury Road's Nicholas Hoult will play his young brother Fiver, a rabbit seer plagued by nightmarish visions of the future. Star Wars: The Force Awakens' John Boyega will play Bigwig, with The Jungle Book's Ben Kingsley voicing the villainous General Woundwort.

The show will also feature the talents of Gemma Arterton (Gemma Bovery), Olivia Colman (The Night Manager), and Anne-Marie Duff (Suffragette); with the adaptation moving to give more prominence to the novel's female characters.

The show is set to use computer-generated animation techniques, in an adaptation penned by My Mad Fat Diary's Tom Bidwell and directed by 300: Rise of an Empire's Noam Murro. BBC Drama commissioning editor Matthew Read has stated, "Before there was Harry Potter there was Watership Down, Richard Adamss novel is one of the most successful books of all time and one of the biggest selling books in history."



Unintentionally terrifying children's movies Show all 7 1 /7 Unintentionally terrifying children's movies Unintentionally terrifying children's movies Most people know to steer well clear of this one by now. If not, you obviously escaped one of the most scarring childhood memories, that of cute baby Bambis mother being shot dead by hunters, leaving him sad and alone in the woods. Rex Features Unintentionally terrifying children's movies Ursula makes a pact with mermaid Ariel that she will make her human in return for her voice. Her voice! She must then get a man to fall in love with her, without being able to speak. Every feminists nightmare. Unintentionally terrifying children's movies This one is seriously trippy. Its Disneys third ever movie but instead of pretty dresses and Prince Charmings and happily ever afters, all we got was a visit to Satans lair in Night on Bald Mountain. Unintentionally terrifying children's movies That fairground is enough to put you off any old-fashioned fun for life. Its called Pleasure Island but there is absolutely zero pleasure involved whatsoever. Naughty boys are turned into donkeys and the whole wooden puppet coming alive thing doesnt really do it for us either. Unintentionally terrifying children's movies There are plenty of frankly horrifying moments in this supposed childrens film from 1941, but none so harrowing as the scene when Dumbo visits his imprisoned, supposedly mad mummy elephant and she sings him a lullaby while cradling him in her trunk. Unintentionally terrifying children's movies This movie about bunnies may look cute enough but Watership Down is proof that animation does not equal adorable. Its possibly the most traumatic film youll have seen in, well, forever. Its really bloody in parts and should quite clearly never have been rated a U, even in 1978. Unintentionally terrifying children's movies Tiny Thumbelina is kidnapped by toads shortly after birth, nearly drowns in a waterfall, betrothed to a blind old mole who lives underground, forced to dress as a bug and dance at a freaky insect ball, spanked by Mr Beetle with a cane and her lover Prince Cornelius is frozen in an ice block. Oh and her best friend nearly dies. Lovely.



"It is fantastic to have the opportunity to bring a modern classic to a mainstream BBC1 audience with such an incredible roster of actors alongside the talented team overseeing the animation. It will unite the whole family and bring this classic story to a new generation."

Though we're living in a culture obsessed with making everything darker, more gruesome; will the BBC actually be attempting to make something more nightmarish than the 1978 film? The same one that sparked mass hysteria amongst parents when Channel 5 decided to screen the film on Easter Sunday?

Watership Down will air next year on BBC One in the UK, premiering internationally on Netflix.
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The founder of a British anti-litter campaign has become embroiled in a dispute with social media giant Facebook over the choice of the apps name.

Littergram invites smart-phone users to share pictures of rubbish on British streets and report the location to their local council.

The app was designed by Kent businessman Danny Lucas, 48, with the intention of helping to clean up British streets and educate children on the issue. His idea has been hindered, however, by Facebook officials, who say the apps name is too similar to the Facebook-owned photo sharing app Instagram.

US lawyers for the social media empire said the name was not acceptable and must be changed.

In a letter to Mr Lucas, the legal team said: Our client appreciates the social objectives behind the Littergram project and the personal time, money and effort Mr Lucas has invested in it. However, having taken everything into consideration using Littergram as the name for the project is still not acceptable.

It utilises and relies on social media usage to achieve its aims, it went on, and our client cannot allow use of such a name in relation to services which are core to its world renowned activities in this area.

Mr Lucas has been given three to six months to phase out the apps title or face legal action.

Meet the stars of Instagram Show all 10 1 /10 Meet the stars of Instagram Meet the stars of Instagram Charlie Barker Barkers following is greater than the combined circulations of Hello! and OK! magazines Meet the stars of Instagram Charlie Barker Barker says: I wanted to get a tattoo on the palm of my hand and because it was painful I was like, 'what do I believe in enough to get tattooed on my hand for the rest of my life?', and I was like  Hello Kitty Meet the stars of Instagram Charlie Barker With a photographic glimpse  or at least suggestion  of a life of colour and attitude, Barker has earned the sort of fame that only exists on Instagram Meet the stars of Instagram Brian Whittaker Sixteen-year-old Whittaker has a quarter of a million followers Meet the stars of Instagram Brian Whittaker Whittakers style and physique make him popular, but conversations with girls typically end when they ask his age Meet the stars of Instagram Brian Whittaker An image of Whittaker's dog on Instagram. Whittaker says he has made new friends in real life, and thousands more on Instagram, many of whom he messages Meet the stars of Instagram Olivia Knight-Butler Twenty-year-old Knight-Butler has 15,000 followers Meet the stars of Instagram Olivia Knight-Butler Knight-Butler calls her account a channel, and fills it with fashion and lifestyle shots Meet the stars of Instagram Olivia Knight-Butler Knight-Butler says: There are followers who like my photos without fail, and they're mostly younger girls who want to know about my life. Meet the stars of Instagram Olivia Knight-Butler Knight-Butler had eating problems when she was 15 and 16. A need to be best at everything bled into social media and she later had to decide if Instagram was part of the problem or solution Copyright 2015. All rights reserved.

The Littergram founder has described the argument as absurd and responded with a video-message to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to retract the demands and work together with him to support the new app.

Littergram has become a known name, it puts the Great back into Britain, said Mr Lucas.

To change our brand identity because Facebook see us as a threat will destroy all of our ingenuity and hard work. We would be back to the drawing board, and have to start all over again.

With no Government support or grant and from a standing start, I have put a huge amount of time, effort and money into the creation of Littergram to proudly arrive where we are today.

I truly hope for the sake of the entire UK population, you will have the understanding and compassion to let Littergram continue.

Recommended Read more Facebook shares soar as results beat expectations

Facebook announced earnings of $1.5bn (1m) for the first quarter of 2016 this week  more than three times that of last years earnings in the same period.

Instagram was bought over by the company for $1bn (629m) in 2012 and is said to have more than 400 million monthly active users.

Facebook officials decided not release an official statement, but said the company had been engaging in conversation for several months to see if there was another way for Mr Lucas to market his app and not risk infringement of the Instagram trademark.

The company added that they had not yet filed a lawsuit against Littergram and hoped to come to an agreement over the names out of court.
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Every phone sold in India needs to have a panic button so women can call for help, according to a new rule.

The country has brought in legislation to force manufacturers to add the buttons amid rising concern for womens safety.

Every phone sold from 2017 must have the button, which would allow people to contact authorities quickly in the event of problems.

And then from January 2018, mobile phones must also have a built-in global positioning system (GPS), the ministry of communications and technology said in a statement.

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

"Technology is solely meant to make human life better and what better (use) than ... for the security of women," said the statement, released late on Monday.

Keeping a finger pressed on number 5 or 9 on the new mobile phones should trigger an emergency call, the ministry said. With smartphones, an emergency call must be triggered when the power button is pressed three times in quick succession, it said. It did not give further details.

Concern about women's safety has risen since the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old student on a bus in Delhi in 2012. In another high-profile case, an Uber taxi driver was found guilty of raping a female passenger in Delhi.

The 2012 incident sparked nationwide protests and stricter rape legislation. Still, India reported 337,922 crimes against women in 2014, including more than 36,000 rapes, a 9 percent increase from the previous year.

Some politicians and police officials have called for women to take self-defence training, to "dress decently" and not to loiter after dark, provoking protests from women's rights activists.

Online retailers including Flipkart, Amazon India and Snapdeal are selling products they say are aimed at women's safety. These include pepper spray, batons, brass knuckles and lipstick stun guns ranging in price from about 200 rupees ($3) to almost 7,000 rupees.

India is the world's second-biggest market for mobile phones, with more than 1 billion users.

But it is men who control their use in rural areas, and in the western state of Gujarat several villages recently banned girls and single women from owning mobile phones, saying the devices distracted them from their studies.



Additional reporting by agencies
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The UKs equality watchdog has written to the UN to express concerns that the proposed junior doctors contract is potentially discriminatory.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) raised the issue in its April submission to the UN on equality in the UK, which has been seen by The Independent.

The submission states: The EHRC is concerned that the UK Governments analysis suggests an adverse impact of the contract on groups that disproportionately include women, such as those who take time away from work for maternity leave and caring responsibilities.

This would indicate that women junior doctors will have inferior conditions of work under the new contract, which would be inconsistent with Article 7 ICESCR, unless it can be justified.

A spokesperson for the EHRC told The Independent: To clarify what we are saying is that the contract is potentially discriminatory and the Department of Health need to do more work to prove how it isnt.

In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike Show all 10 1 /10 In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike Doctor in acute medicine, Melissa Haskins, holds up a 'I ain't afraid of no Hunt' sign whilst striking with other junior doctors outside her hospital, St Thomas' Hospital in London Getty Images In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike Accident and emergency junior doctor, Jennifer Hulse, holds a homemade placard outside St Thomas' Hospital as she strikes with colleagues in London Getty Images In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike Demonstrators and Junior doctors hold placards as they protest outside the Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital, in Basingstoke during a strike by junior doctors Getty Images In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike Demonstrators and Junior doctors hold placards as they protest outside the Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital, in Basingstoke during a strike by junior doctors Getty Images In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike A supporter displays a slogan on her bag during a junior doctors' strike outside St Thomas' Hospital in London Reuters In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike The picket line outside King's College Hospital in London PA In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike The picket line outside King's College Hospital in London, as thousands of junior doctors begun the first all-out strike in the history of the NHS after the Health Secretary said the Government would not be "blackmailed" into dropping its manifesto pledge for a seven-day health service PA In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike Junior doctors and supporters take part in a strike outside the Royal United Hospital in Bath Getty Images In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike Doctor in acute medicine, Melissa Haskins, holds up a 'I ain't afraid of no Hunt' sign whilst striking with other junior doctors outside her hospital, St Thomas' Hospital in London Getty Images In pictures: Junior doctors first all-out strike Dave Prentis, UNISON general secretary visits a British Medical Association picket line at Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, to show support for striking junior doctors on the second day of the union's annual health conference PA

In a statement, the Department of Health rejected the suggestion, saying: Under this contract, for the first time all doctors will get equal pay for equal work, rather than being paid for time served, to create a genuinely level playing field for men and women.

Whats more, we have fully considered the Equality Act under the Secretary of States duties and the BMAs own lawyers have advised that there is nothing unlawful in the new contract, which was 90 per cent agreed with them anyway.

This week junior doctors conducted an unprecedented strike lasting 48 hours to protest growing frustrations after talks broke down regarding pay and conditions in the proposed new contract.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt described the strike as a very, very bleak day for the NHS but insists that the conditions outlined in the new contract are fair and reasonable.
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The head of Tata Steel UK has cast further doubt over the future of the Port Talbot steel plant in Wales and said the Government would probably have to do more to help the firm find a buyer.

In a blow to the Business Secretary Sajid Javid, who will give evidence to MPs on his handling of the UK steel crisis on Thursday, Bimlendra Jha said there were serious question marks about the viability of Port Talbot.

Appearing before the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, Mr Jha, CEO of Tata UK, said that no buyer would be found unless the companys 15bn pension liability was addressed. The Government has said it is looking at the pension scheme, which any buyer would have to inherit, to see if it could be separated from the business.

In a gloomy assessment of the future of the UK steel industry, Mr Jha said there were structural disadvantages" in the UK that made business unprofitable, singling out energy costs, which he said compared unfavourably with other European countries including Germany.

The company announced it would sell its loss-making business last month. On Wednesday David Cameron said there were no guarantees that Government efforts to save the industry would succeed. The Government has said it is willing to take a 25 per cent stake in any prospective takeover of Tata's UK business by a third party buyer.

"While I want to do everything we can to secure the future, not only for Port Talbot but also for Scunthorpe and steelmaking in Britain, we're coping with a massive oversupply, a collapse in prices, from China, the Prime Minister told MPs.
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An influential conservative think-tank, with links to the Culture Secretary John Whittingdale, will call for the wholesale privatisation of the BBC to combat its left wing bias.

In a controversial report the Institute of Economic Affairs claims that Britains national broadcaster is no longer fit for purpose.

It cites a new analysis of BBC output suggesting that the organisation is biased against big business, free market economics and campaigners who want to pull Britain out of the European Union.

In contrast, it claims, the corporation has a left wing bias on issues such as gender pay equality, global warning and Government cuts.

It concludes that if the BBC were to be privatised the public would become more appropriately sceptical about potential bias while the corporation would bear a considerable commercial cost if its reputation were impaired.

The timing of the report is significant because it comes as the Government draws up the terms of the BBCs new Royal Charter which will come into effect next year.

Many aspects of the BBCs future funding and remit still undecided and some believe Mr Whittingdale is in favour of reducing the corporations scope and influence over national life.

Culture Secretary John Whittingdale (Getty Images)

Two years ago Mr Whittingdale, who was then chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee spoke at a private breakfast for selected IEA supporters and donors on the future sustainability of the BBC.

He has also been on panels of IEA fringe events at Conservative Party conferences.

The IEAs 140 page report the case for privatising the BBC says the argument from a radical change in the way in which the Corporation is run and funded is multi-faceted.

It says technology has changed the commercial landscape of broadcasting and have demolished the economic and practical arguments for the licence fee and the BBCs privileged position.

It adds that the case for public service broadcasting is weaker than ever given increased competition through the internet.

But much of the report is dedicated to allegations of BBC bias which, it argues is problematic because of its reputation and ability to change public opinion.

Among the evidence the reports presents is:

* Voices favouring Britains exit from the EU have tended to be under-represented on Radio 4s Today programme. From March 2004 to July 2015 it say there were 4,275 guest speakers on EU themes but just three per cent were explicitly in favour of Britains withdrawal.

* In a sample of 976 separate editions of Radio 4s Thought for the Day, 167 included discussions on economics, business and finance. But two thirds of speakers expressed a negative opinion on capitalism, markets and business, whilst just 8 per cent gave any sort of positive perspective.

* A third of stories on the BBC website between 2012 and 2015 that mentioned Amazon and tax avoidance conflated corporation tax paid by companies with sales revenues  which has nothing to do with the tax base for corporation tax which is profit.

Given the BBCs reach, and the trust placed in it, any biases could potentially have a much more significant impact on altering public understanding of an issue than biases arising on other media platforms, the report says.

Privatisation would not lead to or guarantee the elimination of relative biases from coverage. However, privatisation could lead to change over time and a more sceptical viewing public.

Most importantly of all, however, privatisation gives the right of exit to those who do not wish to listen to the programmes broadcast by the BBC. If the normal competition rules applied to the BBC, there would also be a greater plurality of positions.

Mark Littlewood, Director General at the IEA added privatisation would also free up the corporation to global expansion and competition.

The BBC needs a business and ownership model more appropriate than the one designed the best part of 100 years ago, he said.

Keeping a publicly funded broadcaster, with a Charter drafted by politicians, risks seeing the BBC eclipsed by new technology in the same way that Royal Mail has been eclipsed by email.

The ending of the licence fee and the privatisation of the BBC would permit the BBC to compete freely and aggressively with other global media businesses.

But a BBC spokesman dismissed the report, saying: The IEAs views on the BBC are at odds with the public which backs the licence fee and rates the BBC number one for trusted and impartial news. We have clear guidelines on impartiality, and this looks like selective use of data to paint a misleading picture by a group with a clear agenda.

Meanwhile the former BBC chairman Lord Patten claimed the organisation was being excessively deferential to the pro-Brexit case because of concerns over the pending renewal charter renewal.

Lord Patten believes the BBC is being excessively deferential to the pro-Brexit case (Getty Images)

Lord Patten said it was sometimes going too far to demonstrate balance because the shadow of the process led by an anti-EU Culture Secretary was hanging over it.

The BBC has an extremely difficult job. It is having to cover this referendum with the shadow of a charter review and Mr Whittingdale hanging over it, he told the Today programme.

I think that may make people excessively deferential when trying to produce balance.

You have the Governor of the Bank of England on, or the IMF chief, so you feel obliged to put up some Conservative backbencher that nobody has ever heard of on the other side of the argument.

It does occasionally raise eyebrows. But I think I would prefer the BBC to be being criticised for being excessively balanced rather than for doing anything else.

It is a very great broadcaster which is dedicated to telling the truth and that is an unusual thing in the world of the media.
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While the rest of the world lauded Ariel Winter for having the courage to display her scars from breast reduction surgery, there was one woman who was less supportive: her mother.

The actress, 18, underwent surgery to reduce her breasts from 34F to 34C after struggling with years of back pain.

Fans noticed her scars while Winter was wearing a low cut dress at the Screen Actors Guild earlier this year. Unfazed, Winter responded on social media with a message explaining why she would never be ashamed of her scars. She also penned an essay for Motto on her decision and described how she was sexualised from a young age because of her breasts.

I grew into my body so young, she wrote. I was 13, 14 years old, and I looked 19. Suddenly, people didnt want to talk about my job - they just wanted to talk about my cleavage.

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.

Winter became legally emancipated from her mother Crystal Workman shortly before turning 18, claiming she had subjected her to physical and emotional abuse. In an interview with Inside Edition, her Ms Workman strongly denied these allegations and claimed her daughter may have conjured up stories to further her career.

She also took a less positive stance on her breast augmentation. She should never be embarrassed about her scars, said Workman. But what she shouldnt do is be flaunting them and showing them to everybody.

I am surprised that she did it so young and that the doctor did it for her so young - that she wasnt at least 21 to fully develop.

Representatives for Winter did not immediately respond to a request for comment but Winter appeared to address the comments in an Instagram post on Wednesday.

Recommended Read more Ariel Winter reveals why she became emancipated from her mother

To all those who have gone through challenges and someone has tried to tear you apart, even when it's someone you love, keep trusting in your own heart, she wrote. Build from your heart and know that every obstacle life hands you is an opportunity to show yourself how strong you truly are.
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Former Boston mob boss James Whitey Bulger's girlfriend will spend an additional 21 months in prison for refusing to say if anyone helped the couple evade capture during their 16 years on the run, a US federal judge has ruled.

That was less than the three years that prosecutors had wanted to add to the eight years in prison Catherine Greig, 65, is serving for harbouring a fugitive and identity fraud, but more than triple the six months her attorneys sought.

Bulger, now 86, is serving life in prison after being convicted of charges including 11 murders he committed or ordered while he ran the Winter Hill crime gang in the 1970s and 80s.

History will, I think, remember Bulger as a monster and if she chooses to be loyal to that person, that is her affair, but I don't need to respect that loyalty, US District Judge Dennis Saylor said.

The former dental hygienist joined Bulger shortly after he fled Boston in 1995 after a tip off from a corrupt FBI agent that arrest was imminent. They remained at large until 2011, when the FBI arrested them at their Santa Monica apartment. She did not speak during Thursday's hearing other than to confirm that she understood the proceedings.

James 'Whitey' Bulger pictured during his time as a mob boss in Boston (REX FEATURES)

Greig received the additional sentence for contempt of court. She and Bulger have stuck stubbornly to the underworld's code of silence. Bulger's attorneys admitted at his 2013 trial that he was an organised criminal but repeatedly denied that he had been an FBI informant.

Greig's attorney noted that her initial sentence was longer than the five years Bulger associate Kevin Weeks served for his role as an accessory to five murders and will now approach the 12 years that Winter Hill gang member John Martorano served for 20 killings.

Both Weeks and Martorano testified against Bulger.

Greig had been granted immunity from prosecution to testify, but defence attorney Kevin Reddington said she had no information to share.

She knows nothing, he told reporters following the sentencing, adding she believed Bulger had been wrongly convicted.

She does not believe that he was guilty of any of the offenses, Mr Reddington said.

Judge Saylor denied a request by some of the survivors of Bulger's victims to address the court. Afterwards, several said they were unhappy with his decision.

I'm disappointed, said Patricia Donahue, whose husband was murdered by Bulger. It's not enough.

Reuters
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Hertha Marks Ayrton was a British mathematician, engineer, physicist and inventor who was awarded the Hughes Medal in 1906 by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripples in sand and water.

Born in Portsea, Hampshire in 1854, she studied at Girton College, Cambridge, and registered 26 patents for mathematical divders, arc lamps and electrodes between 1884 and her death in 1923.

As Google marks what would have been her 162nd birthday with a Doodle on its homepage, here are five facts about the inventor and committed member of the suffrage movement.

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1. She was self-sufficient by the age of 16

After her father died in 1861 leaving her mother with seven children to care for and another on the way, Ayrton was tasked with helping to raise her siblings. Her mother, however, was determined this would not stand in the way of her daughter's education. She was taken to London by an aunt who ran a school. By the age of 16 she was working as a governess, but still had a desire to advance her education.

2. She was a keen supporter of women's suffrage

At school she gained a reputation as a intellectual and an activist, going on hunger-strike when accused of something she had not done. This fired a passion for politics and she took part in marches and opened her home to women released from jail after being on hunger-strike, including suffragette leader, Emmeline Pankhurst.

3. She was friends with the novelist George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans (better known by her pen name George Eliot) was a keen supporter of education for women and she took an interest in Ayrton's efforts to fund a place at Girton College. At the time she was working on Daniel Deronda and there were many similarities between the character Mirah, a dark haired Jew with a distinctive voice, and Ayrton.

4. She was the first female member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers

After reading a paper to the IEE on her work on the electric arc in 1899, Ayrton was elected to full membership two days later. Unlike the Royal Society, the IEE focused on her scientific ability rather than her gender.

5. She used her theories to help the war effort

At the outbreak of First World War, Ayrton put her knowledge of oscillations in water to the movement of air to good use as part of Britain's war effort - once she had convinced the military to consider her idea. After battling to gain acceptance for her Flapper Fan invention, 100,000 were used on the Western Front to clear trenches of poisonous gas. She died from blood poisoning caused by an insect bite in 1923.
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Jenny Diski, the renowned English author who wrote a serialised column about her cancer, has died at the age of 68.

Her partner Ian Patterson announced the news on Twitter this morning. Sad news. My darling Jenny Diski died early this morning," he wrote.

The prolific writer is known for her novels, non-fiction articles, short stories, memoirs, and travelogues. Publishing a total of 18 novels in her lengthy career, Diski was also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

A week ago, Diski published In Gratitude, a memoir about her experience of living with terminal cancer. Diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in August 2014, Diski was given two or three years to live. Just one month later, she began writing a serialised diary in LRB documenting her experience of cancer.

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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. 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Fellow writers have paid Tribute to Diskis lifetime of literary achievements and enduring legacy on Twitter.

"Farewell to my dear cousin, the very lovely Jenny Diski. Kind, funny, encourage and a truly brilliant writer," wrote Jay Rayner.

"RIP Jenny Diski, great writer and my favourite essayist. Those @LRB are immortal," added Agata Pyzik.

When Diski first learned she had cancer, her initial reaction was one of embarrassment, as the usual responses felt heavily cliched and scripted. As she wrote in her column, The flood of embarrassment, much more powerful than alarm or fear, that engulfed and mortified me at finding myself set firmly on that particular well-travelled road. I am and have always been embarrassed by all social rituals that require me to participate in a predetermined script.

Back in 2003, Diski won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for her novel Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions.

Born in London in 1947, Diski lived with British writer Doris Lessing for four years and went on to remain friends with her for a total of fifty. Leaving school without taking her A-levels, Diski spent many of her formative years as a patient in various psychiatric hospitals. She later trained as a teacher, working in a Hackney comprehensive and setting up a free school, before going on to embark on a fruitful career in writing.

Diski's partner is a translator and director of English Studies at Queens College in Cambridge - she routinely refers to him as the Poet in her writings.
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Kim Kardashian West has accused the Wall Street Journal of profiting from genocide after publishing an advert directing readers to a website denying the mass killings of Armenians was a genocide.

Between 1915 and 1916 1.5 million men, women, and children were sent across the Syrian desert and killed by the Ottoman empire in what is widely considered, but not universally addressed as, the first genocide of the 20th century.

Turkey objects to the mass killings being called a genocide and disputes that there was an attempt to systematically destroy the Christian Armenian people. It argues that while atrocities were committed, many Muslim Turks were also killed in the war. The Republic of Turkey believes the number is inflated and estimates the death toll to be around 300,000.

Armenians mark 101 years since genocide Show all 10 1 /10 Armenians mark 101 years since genocide Armenians mark 101 years since genocide Armenian people carry torches during a march to commemorate the mass killings of Armenians Getty Armenians mark 101 years since genocide Armenian people take part in a march in commemoration of the 101th anniversary of the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915 Getty Armenians mark 101 years since genocide People hold a flag during the laying of the flowers at the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan Getty Armenians mark 101 years since genocide President Serzh Sargsyan and actor George Clooney attend the laying of the flowers at the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan Getty Armenians mark 101 years since genocide Armenian clergymen, US actor George Clooney, center, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, second right front, and guests attend a ceremony at a memorial to Armenians killed by the Ottoman Turks, in Yerevan AP Armenians mark 101 years since genocide Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian (C,R) and US actor George Clooney (C) attend a ceremony at the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan Getty Armenians mark 101 years since genocide A general view of attendees and mount Ararat during the laying of the flowers at the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan Getty Armenians mark 101 years since genocide Lebanese of Armenian descent burn an effigy of Turkish president Erdogan during a protest in front the house of Turkish Ambassador to mark the 101st anniversary of the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, near Beirut, Lebanon EPA Armenians mark 101 years since genocide Activists hold portraits of victims during a silent demonstration to commemorate the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in Istanbul Reuters Armenians mark 101 years since genocide Activists hold portraits of victims during a silent demonstration to commemorate the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in Istanbul Reuters

In one of her most forthright blog posts to date, Kardashian West accused the WSJ of reckless, upsetting and dangerous behaviour by publishing the advert for FactCheck Armenia, which shows the Turkish flag with a peace sign under the headline Truth=Peace alongside a website domain which has the following statement on its homepage: FALSE: The events of 1915 constitute a clear-cut genocide against the Armenian people.

Kardashian West, who is of Armenian heritage, travelled to Armenia and laid wreaths at a memorial complex to mark the 100th anniversary of the killings in April 2015. The Kardashian family fled Armenia in 1913.

For the Wall Street Journal to publish something like this is reckless, upsetting and dangerous. It's one thing when a sh***y tabloid profits from a made-up scandal, but for a trusted publication like WSJ to profit from genocide  it's shameful and unacceptable, she wrote.

Advocating the denial of a genocide by the country responsible for itthat's not publishing a 'provocative viewpoint,' that's spreading lies. It's totally morally irresponsible and, most of all, it's dangerous. If this had been an ad denying the Holocaust, or pushing some 9/11 conspiracy theory, would it have made it to print?

In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, a WSJ spokesperson said: We accept a wide range of advertisements, including those with provocative viewpoints. While we review ad copy for issues of taste, the varied and divergent views expressed belong to the advertisers.

The Independent has contacted WSJ for comment.
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Naz Shahs political career has been marked by two major events. While the first saw Ms Shahs turbulent life story go viral, the second concerned a series of controversial Facebook posts.

The MP for Bradford West has been suspended from the Labour party for antisemitic and anti-Israeli Facebook posts which were recently unearthed by a newspaper and a political blogger.

The 42-year-old's route into politics was rather unusual. Her difficult childhood spurred her to take up grassroots activism and she worked as a disabled carer and mental health charity chair before embarking on a political career.

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.

A traumatic childhood

It was Ms Shahs life story which first thrust her into the limelight. After sharing the story of her childhood of abuse and dire poverty in an open letter to Urban Echo while she was running to be the MP for Bradford West in March of last year, her tale quickly went viral.

Deserted by her father at the age of six while growing up in Bradford, her family became homeless after her father absconded with their neighbours sixteen-year-old daughter.

Describing the moment she had to leave in her letter, she writes: "I remember being thrown into the back of a taxi with black bin liners full of our belongings and packed off from the family home on Hartman Place to my granddad's home in Kirkham Road".

Her mother then embarked on a relationship with a man who sexually abused her mother. At the age of 12, she was sent to Pakistan to escape the abuse and forced into an arranged marriage. While away, Ms Shah's mother laced her abuser's food with poison, killing him, and was in turn sentenced to 20 years in prison. Ms Shah was left to care for her sisters.

Unusual schooling

Her formal schooling stopped at the age of 12 when she was sent to Pakistan and Ms Shah did not sit her GCSEs until she was a mature student. It was after this that she found work as a carer for children with disabilities.

Ms Shah has said she directed her frustration from her childhood into her work. "I didnt realise how much anger I carried inside me towards the systems that failed me and my family because I had turned it into this force to change peoples lives," she wrote in her open letter.

 Naz Shah apology

Grassroots politicisation

The politician has said it was her difficult childhood which politicised her. Ms Shah, who is one of only nine Labour Muslim MPs, worked as a carer for disabled children, a Samaritans volunteer, chaired a mental health charity and worked as an NHS commissioner. She also spent 12 years campaigning for the release of her mother with the Southall Black Sisters.

A prominent figure in the local community, she then moved from activism to politics. She stood for the Labour party in Bradford West in March 2015 after the original candidate decided to stand down and beat George Galloway with a majority of 11,420 votes.

Facebook posts

Unearthed by right-wing political blogger Guido Fawkes and leading Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, one of the most controversial of her posts is a fluorescent green graphic of Israel photoshopped onto a map of the US. The headline reads Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict  Relocate Israel into United States while her personal caption proclaims Problem solved.

Recommended Read more Labour MP Naz Shah apologises for backing plan to move Israel

In July of 2014, she also wrote about a newspaper poll on alleged Israeli war crimes in the Gaza conflict, saying the Jews are rallying to the poll. She has also landed herself in hot water for comparing Israeli policies to those of Adolf Hitler on Facebook last September.

Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday, Ms Shah told MPs she "wholeheartedly apologises" for her past comments. But Jeremy Corbyn chose to suspend her as the row over antisemitism continues to engulf the Labour party. The party confirmed the decision in a statement: Jeremy Corbyn and Naz Shah have mutually agreed that she is administratively suspended from the Labour Party by the general secretary. Pending investigation, she is unable to take part in any party activity and the whip is removed.
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Frederick Mayer was a person, a friend once observed, whose fear nerve is dead. A German-born Jew, he fled his home in the Black Forest in 1938 and made a new life in the United States, then ventured back into Nazi Europe as a U.S. spy.

His exploits  parachuting onto an Alpine glacier, infiltrating enemy lines, posing as a German officer to gather vital intelligence, and enduring lengthy torture sessions before essentially negotiating the surrender of the city of Innsbruck, Austria  seemed in hindsight the stuff of movies. Inglourious Basterds (2009), director Quentin Tarantinos historical fiction about justice-seeking Jewish American soldiers during World War II, could have been modeled after Mayer and his comrades.

Mr Mayer, who was described at times as a real inglorious bastard, died 15 April at his home in Charles Town, W.Va. He was 94 and had been diagnosed with pancytopenia, a blood deficiency, said a daughter, Claudette Mayer.

Mr Mayer once told an interviewer that he had a good combination of hatred and love  a hatred of the Nazis and a love for America. The son of a decorated World War I veteran, he had seen his family pushed from its homeland by a regime that would slaughter six million European Jews in the Holocaust.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr Mayer enlisted in the U.S. Army. It felt like I had my chance to do what I set out to do  kill Nazis, he said in the TV film The Real Inglorious Bastards (2012). Thats why all the Jewish boys joined.

The night of 25 February 1945, Mr Mayer flew from his base in Italy to the Austrian mountains, parachuting onto a frozen lake in the treacherous terrain.One recruit described the group as the craziest people I have ever met in my entire life. By late 1944, Mr. Mayer had arrived in Europe, where, dissatisfied by what he considered the slow pace of his work, he talked his way into the Secret Intelligence division of the OSS. He became the leader of Operation Greenup, a mission to gather intelligence in the area of Innsbruck, where the Allies suspected the Germans might mount a final stand in the war.

He didnt seem to have any fear of the fact that he was going back into Nazi Germany, John Billings, the command pilot of that mission, said in an interview Tuesday. What he did just the first night would cause a very immediate laundry emergency for me.

Working alongside Mr Mayer were Hans Wynberg, a Dutch-born Jew whose family had been deported to Auschwitz, and Franz Weber, an Austrian officer whose patriotism had led him to defect from the German army. The three fashioned a pair of skis into a sled and made their way down a mountain, at times navigating snow as deep as their shoulders.

When they reached a village, they masqueraded as German Alpine servicemen separated from their units. Evading the detection of the Gestapo, they arrived on March 3, 1945, in Oberperfuss, a Tyrolean village near Innsbruck where they would make their base until the end of the war.

With assistance from Webers sister, a nurse, Mr Mayer disguised himself as a German officer, complete with a uniform and bandages for a feigned head wound. Later, he posed as a French electrician to infiltrate a Messerschmitt factory.

He was credited with gathering intelligence and building a network of informants that helped determine the location and dimensions of Hitlers Fuhrerbunker in Berlin, the condition of Nazi war plants and the movement of enemy freight and troops, particularly through the Brenner Pass.

In time, Mr Mayer was betrayed by a member of his spy network, imprisoned and tortured. According to ODonnells account, his captors broke his teeth with a pistol. He was whipped, doused with water, and suspended from a rifle like game on a spit.By that time, Allied troops were closing in on Innsbruck. Mr Mayer capitalized on an impression among the Germans, concerned for their fate in the event of defeat, that he was a high-ranking American officer. He was credited with persuading the regional Nazi authority to declare Innsbruck an open city.

The Germany Army in that area had in effect surrendered to an OSS Jewish Sergeant, according to the book This Grim and Savage Game: OSS and the Beginning of U.S. Covert Operations in World War II by Tom Moon.

Friedrich Mayer was born in Freiburg on Oct. 28, 1921. After Hitler became Germanys chancellor in 1933, the familys hardware store was boycotted because they were Jewish.

Mr Mayers father resisted leaving Germany, thinking that his past military service would shield the family from persecution, while his mother insisted that the family go to America. Young Fritz, as he was known, did not oppose the idea because he had grown enchanted by cowboy stories of the American West.

He changed his name to Frederick after the family arrived in New York. For a time, he was his familys breadwinner, working as a mechanic at companies including Ford and General Motors before joining the Army. After the war, he worked for Voice of America as a power plant engineer supervisor in the Philippines, Morocco, West Germany, Liberia and Thailand. He retired in 1977.

His marriage to Sylvia Stieber ended in divorce. Survivors include his companion of nearly two decades, Virginia Nash of Bolivar, W.Va.; two daughters from his marriage, Claudette Mayer of New York City and Irene Mayer-Feldberg of San Francisco; a sister; a grandson; and a great-grandson.

In 1945, a superior officer recommended Mr Mayer for the Medal of Honor, writing that in constant danger of his life, he had exhibited almost unbelievable courage, resourcefulness and enterprise, according to a copy of the nomination provided by Charles Pinck, president of the OSS Society. Mr Mayer ultimately received the Legion of Merit.

ODonnell, who described Mr Mayer in an interview as one of the greatest heroes of World War II, recounted in his book Mr. Mayers meeting at the end of the war with a member of the Gestapo who had tortured him during his imprisonment.

Mr Mayer was taken to see him in a cell, where he found the man beaten and quaking in fear. Do anything you want with me, he begged, but dont hurt my family.

Who do you think we are? Mr. Mayer replied. Nazis?

 The Washington Post
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Two people have been charged with using a drone to smuggle mobile phones and cannabis into a prison.

Ingrid Edwards,25, and Daniel Lee Kelly, 37, from south London have been charged with two counts of getting prohibited items into HMP Swaleside in Eastchurch, Kent.

The items are alleged to have been sneaked into the prison between 16 March and 25 April.

A Kent Police spokesman said: "Officers investigating reports of a drone being used to send mobile phones and cannabis into a prison have charged two people from London."

The pair appeared before Medway Magistrates Court on Tuesday and will appear at Maidstone Crown Court on 24 May.

Kelly has been remanded in custody but Edwards has been released on bail.

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Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. 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The use of drones by civilians is increasing in the UK as the technology becomes more and more affordable.

The House of Lords EU Committee has called for the compulsory registration of all commercial and civilian drones to address safety concerns.
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Police have arrested a 21-year-old man in London on suspicion of attempting to join Isis in Syria.

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said counter-terrorism detectives believed the man was planning to travel to the country "for a terrorist purpose".

He was arrested in central London shortly after midday on Thursday and remain in custody at a local police station.

"The 21-year-old was arrested on suspicion of being involved in the commission, preparation of instigation of acts of terrorism under Section 40 of the Terrorism Act 2000," a spokesperson for Scotland Yard said.

"Searches are being carried out at two London addresses and an address in Birmingham as part of this investigation."

UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Show all 14 1 /14 UK terror plots that were foiled by security services UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Oxford Street terror plot Lewis Ludlow was jailed for life in March 2019 for planning a 'spectacular multi-victim attack' on Oxford Street in London. He pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey last year to plotting an attack in the UK and funding Isis abroad EPA UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Rosie Cooper MP plot Jack Renshaw admitted plotting to kill his local Labour MP with a machete in June 2018. Renshaw bought a 19in machete intending to use it to kill Rosie Cooper, MP for West Lancashire. His plan was foiled by whistleblower Robbie Mullen, who heard of the plot in a meeting of alleged and convicted National Action members in the Friar Penketh pub in Warrington Hope Not Hate UK terror plots that were foiled by security services 'Poppy terror plot' Nadir Ali Sayed, his cousin Yousaf Shah Syed, and Haseeb Hamayoon, were charged with terrorism offences over an alleged plot to behead a member of public. The trio were arrested in London and High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire on 6 November - three days before Remembrance Sunday in 2014 PA UK terror plots that were foiled by security services National Action arrests Following the arrest of six men in 2018 on suspicion that they were members of the banned far-right terror group National Action, two were jailed. Christopher Lythgoe was found to be leader of the banned group and jailed for eight years, while Matthew Hankinson was jailed for six years. While it was found that Lythgoe did not encourage Jack Renshaw's plot to kill a Labour MP, the judge noted that he "did nothing to stop or discourage" the attack PA UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Shane Fletcher A self-described 'loner', Fletcher planned to kill members of the public at a football match in his home town of Workington. He had been referred to the government's Prevent programme nine moths prior to his arrest after stating that he dreamed about "shooting up a mosque" PA UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Heathrow airport arrests A 19-year-old from Coventry man was arrested at London's Heathrow airport on suspicion of preparing for acts of terrorism in November 2014 UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Extradition of Abu Hamza Radical muslim cleric Abu Hamza was extradited to the US in 2014 after having been jailed in the UK for 7 years for 11 offences under the Terrorism Act Getty UK terror plots that were foiled by security services South East Counter Terrorism Unit arrests Six people were arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences after a series of dawn raids in the south of England in October 2014. Three men and three women were detained separately in two properties in Portsmouth, one in Farnborough and one in Greenwich following an operation by the South East Counter Terrorism Unit. Counter-terror officers said they had disrupted what was believed to be the early stages of what could have turned into a significant plot PA UK terror plots that were foiled by security services October 2014 arrests Three men were arrested in central London on 13 October as part of an investigation into Islamist-related terrorism. The arrests come nearly a week after five men were arrested in dawn raids that Whitehall officials said may have foiled the early stages of a plan to attack the UK Peter Macdiarmid/Getty UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Anjem Choudary arrest Anjem Choudary, the radical activist and co-founder of the banned al-Muhajiroun group, was arrested in September 2014 as efforts intensify to disrupt the ideological backers of young British Muslims travelling to fight in foreign conflicts. Mr Choudary was among nine men held on suspicion of supporting a banned terrorist group and encouraging terrorism. The arrests came shortly after Mr Choudary fired off a series of angry tweets after David Cameron called on MPs to back air strikes against Islamic State militants in Syria Oli Scarff/Getty UK terror plots that were foiled by security services North West Counter Terrorism Unit funds seizing Police seize 250,000 of cash intended to fund Isis at Manchester Airport and north-west ports. Using powers under the Terrorism Act, the money was confiscated by officers from the North West Counter Terrorism Unit in Ocotber 2014 Getty UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Tarik Hassane arrest A medical student who was offered a place at a London university has been named among four men who are being questioned by counter-terror police after a series of raids across the capital. Tarik Hassane, 21, is believed to have been Tasered when he was arrested on suspicion of being involved in a "significant" Islamist terror plot on 7 October 2015 UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Abu Qatada removed from UK Radical preacher Abu Qatada will not be returning to the UK after being cleared of terror charges in Jordan in 2013 Reuters UK terror plots that were foiled by security services Haider Ahmed knife plot Teenage Isis supporter Haider Ahmed purchased a 15ins hunting knife and threatened to launch a stabbing attack on the Tube. Prosecutors said he may alternatively have been planning to rob someone with the weapon to fund his travel to fight for Isis in Syria He was jailed for preparing an act of terrorism in June 2019 Counter Terrorism Policing South East

It came after America's intelligence chief said there was evidence that Isis terror cells in the UK and other European countries were plotting further attacks in the wake of the Brussels and Paris massacres.

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, said organised groups of militants are active in Germany, England and Italy.

He said Isis cells embedded in Europe were fanatics, with a high level of security in communications that leaves security services struggling to get more than a "snapshot" of their plans.

We dont have the total picture all the time  if we did, then the plots would easily be thwarted, Mr Clapper added.

Several terror arrests have been made in the UK since the start of this year, including four men and a woman from Birmingham who were detained in a joint operation with French and Belgian agencies earlier this month.
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Two men and a woman have been charged with terrorism offences in the UK, as part of a joint investigation into the Paris and Brussels terror attacks involving MI5, Belgian and French authorities.

Mohammed Ali Ahmed, 26 and Zakaria Bouffassil, 26, are accused of providing money which they "knew or had reasonable cause to suspect" would be used for terrorism, police said in a statement.

Ahmed is also accused, along with Soumaya Boufassil, 29, of gathering money "with the intention of committing acts of terrorism or assisting another to commit such acts".

In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Show all 30 1 /30 In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport A man carries an injured person in Brussels Airport, after explosions ripped through the departure hall In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Travellers get to their feet in a smoke filled terminal at Brussels Airport after explosions In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport A man is wounded in Brussels Airport in Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport A man speaks on a mobile phone in Brussels Airport, after the explosions ripped through the departure hall In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Belgian police officers detain a man at the Gare du Midi train station in Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport A police officer stands guard as people are evacuated from Brussels airport, after explosions rocked the facility in Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport People stand near Brussels airport after being evacuated following explosions that rocked the facility in Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Crew and passengers are evacuated from Zaventem Bruxelles International Airport after an attack in Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Passengers gather near Brussels airport in Zaventem, following its evacuation after blasts rocked the main terminal of Brussels airport In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Two women wounded in Brussels Airport in Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Passengers and airport staff are evacuated from the terminal building after explosions at Brussels Airport in Zaventem near Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Passengers and airport staff are evacuated from the terminal building after explosions at Brussels Airport in Zaventem near Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Broken windows seen at the scene of explosions at Zaventem airport near Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport People leave the scene of explosions at Zaventem airport near Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport People are evacuated from the scene after two explosions were heard at Brussels Airport In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport People wait outside of the Brussels Airport after evacuation In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport People leave the airport area after explosions at Brussels Airport in Zaventem In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Passengers comfort each other as they are evacuated from the terminal building after explosions at Brussels Airport in Zaventem In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport People react as they walk away from Brussels airport after explosions rocked the facility in Brussels In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Emergency services attend the scene of explosions at Zaventem airport near Brussels Reuters In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Injured people at the scene at Brussels Airport after two explosions were heard PA In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport The aftermath of the explosions at Brussels airport PA In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport People wait outside of the Zaventem airport after two explosions were heard PA In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Emergency services at the scene of explosions at Brussels Airport In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport A view of the scene after the explosions at Brussels airport PA In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Emergency services at the scene of explosions at Zaventem airport near Brussels Reuters In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport The aftermath of the explosions at Brussels airport PA In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport The view of the Brussels airport after the explosion PA In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport Smoke is seen at Brussels airport in Brussels AP In pictures: Terror attacks at Brussels airport A photo shows cars on a blocked highway near Zaventem, Brussels National airport, after two explosions rocked the main hall of Brussels Airport Getty Images

They were among five people arrested in Birmingham and at Gatwick Airport earlier this month. A number of properties in Birmingham were searched as part of the ongoing operation.

The trio will appear before Westminster Magistrates Court on Friday 29 April.

Recommended Read more Police arrest man on suspicion of attempting to join Isis in Syria

Fazal Sajjad Younis Khan, 40, was charged with possession of CS spray, which is used for riot control.

He is on bail and will appear before Birmingham Magistrates court on Friday 13 May.

A 59-year-old man remains on bail while the investigation continues.

Earlier on Thursday, a 21-year-old was arrested in London on suspicion of attempting to join Isis in Syria.
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Expats who have been living outside of the UK for more than 15 years will not be able to vote in the EU referendum, the High Court has ruled.

A legal challenge was brought by 94-year-old Second World War veteran Harry Shindler, who lives in Italy, and Belgian resident Jacquelyn MacLennan, against the '15 year rule' in the EU Referendum Act 2015.

The act states that British citizens living abroad, anywhere in the world, for more than 15 years will not be able to vote on whether the country should remain in or leave the EU on 23 June.

Mr Shindler and Ms MacLennan argued that the rule illegally denied them the chance to vote, saying it unlawfully restricted their right to freedom of movement under EU law.

Both have lived outside of the UK for more than 15 years now.

But Lord Justice Lloyd Jones ruled that it did not restrict their rights and rejected their application for judicial review.

Aidan O'Neill QC, who represented Mr Shindler and Ms MacLennan, had told the court that the 15-year rule was arbitrary, at a hearing earlier this month.

He said the Government was basing the referendum's franchise on those with the closest of links to the UK - but that no one had a greater interest in the outcome of the vote than the two million Britons living outside of the UK elsewhere in Europe.

Victory for the 'Leave' campaign could lead to Mr Shindler and Ms MacLennan becoming resident aliens in Europe, he added.

Without British membership of the EU these two British citizens will no longer be EU citizens.

(Getty Images)

Mr Shindler and Ms MacLennan's lawyers confirmed they will now appeal directly to the UK's Supreme Court.

Richard Stein, from law firm Leigh Day, said: We now intend to take the legal battle to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, so that all British citizens living elsewhere in the EU can be part of the democratic process to vote in this referendum, which will have a very real impact on their lives.

We believe that there is precedent for fast-track legislation being put through Parliament in a matter of days in response to court judgment, so there would be no need for the referendum to be delayed if the Supreme Court rules in our favour.

Since this is a vote in a referendum rather than in an election there is no need to link the votes of Britons in Europe to any particular constituency in the UK.

Possession of a British passport should be enough.

Ms MacLennan said: The Government made a manifesto commitment to enfranchise all British citizens, no matter how long they have been abroad, saying that they thought that 'choosing 15 years, as opposed to 14 or 16 years, is inherently like sticking a dart in a dartboard' and that 'if British citizens maintain British citizenship, that brings with it rights, obligations and a connection with this country, and that that should endure.'

We just want the Government to keep its promises.

A Cabinet Office spokeswoman added: The Government welcomes the ruling of the High Court in this case.

The franchise for the EU referendum was debated, considered and agreed by both Houses of Parliament and is enshrined in law.

British citizens who have lived outside of the UK for 15 years or less can register to vote in the referendum by clicking here.

Additional reporting by PA
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Male and female staff members of some independent faith schools are being segregated because of their gender, a chief inspector has warned.

In one case, teachers and other school staff at a Muslim day school in Luton were separated during whole-school training sessions. Leaders of Rabia School had reportedly instructed men to stay in one room while the session was broadcast to women in a separate part of the school.

Ofsted inspectors gave feedback that the same school had used a dividing screen to separate men and women across the middle of the room during an initial Ofsted meeting.

In a letter to Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, Chief Inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw said the evidence seen by the schools watchdog had raised serious concerns.

The school insisted on segregating men and women, he said. This meeting was not carried out in a religious setting but in a classroom.

The issue was raised following an emergency follow-up inspection of the school requested by the Department for Education (DfE) earlier this month. Rabia was one of three independent faith schools to receive further inspection and has received a series of adverse Ofsted judgements in the past.

In a letter seen to Ms Morgan, seen by The Independent, Rabia Education Trust denied the claims.

A school spokesperson said: It is inaccurate that the school insisted on segregation. We feel that we are being unfairly targeted and harassed by HM Chief Inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw.

In reference to the segregation screen seen by inspectors, Rabia Education Trust said the meeting had taken place in a prayer hall, adding that female management had placed the screen in the room before the male staff arrived, but didnt insist upon it being used.

The school claims the recent inspection was not an emergency follow-up and that both the female and male inspectors were satisfied that staff members were integrated.

Last year, the school was criticised for treating boys and girls differently, limiting girls to sewing and knitting in design and technology classes.

Mr Wilshaw said Ofsted was so concerned about the behaviours modelled by the leaders of Rabia that the school had been graded as inadequate despite improvements being made within the school elsewhere.

This sort of behaviour manifested by the leaders of this school clearly does not conform to the spirit of the equalities legislation which underpins the spiritual, moral, social and cultural standard, he said.

The findings go against the equality regulations and requirements set by the Government for fundamental British values to be taught in schools.

Speaking in light of the positive feedback the school had received in other areas of the inspection, Rabia officials said: We feel extremely disheartened and insecure about the fact that the goalposts are not clear.

We, like some of Her Majestys inspectors, didnt realise that we are going against fundamental British values by using a [segregation] screen.

In his letter, Mr Wilshaw urged the education secretary to further review the DfE guidance to independent schools and contact the school leaders about the Governments expectations as necessary.

He added: Any form of segregation, without a good educational reason, is likely to lead to an inadequate inspection judgement for leadership and management.

Last year, Ofsted inspectors reported that four in five religious independent schools were found to be inadequate or requiring improvement.

The Department for Education said the Rabia case had been referred to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

A spokesperson said: It is completely unacceptable for women to be treated less favourably than men, and the advice note we have received from Ofsted on Rabia girls and boys school is extremely concerning.

We have referred this case to the EHRC so they can consider whether the school has breached the Equalities Act, and we will consider carefully the inspection report on the school to determine what action to take against any potential breaches in the independent school standards.
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A fishing boat has sunk off the Pembrokeshire coast, the UK Coastguard has said.

The Coastguard received a 999 call just before 2.30pm from a member of the public saying they could see a fishing vessel in difficulty near the rocks at St David's Head.

Two crew members are believed to have been on board the ship, thought to be "The Harvester" which operated from Milford Haven, when it sank.

Three RNLI lifeboats and the Coastguard Rescue Teams from St David's Head and Fishguard are searching the area, along with the Coastguard search and rescue helicopter based at St Athan.

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Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. 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A spokesman for St David's Head Lifeboat Station said: "We've got three boats out searching, there are cliff teams out walking and the coastguard rescue helicopter.

"The fishing vessel hit rocks off Abereiddi beach, members of the public spotted this boat had hit the rocks.

"Our all-weather lifeboat and inshore lifeboat were deployed to the scene.

"In the meantime this vessel has sunk, it was approximately a mile offshore, there were two persons on board."

He added: "There's an intensive search ongoing now. Debris has been found on the surface.

"In that area where there are rocks under the surface, they wouldn't have been fishing, so we are not sure what there were doing there.

"We're trying to plot the tides to try and see where they could have got washed into a cove or washed to shore."

Additional reporting by PA
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An alarming rise in the number of murders, sexual assaults and attempted hangings has sparked warnings the prison system is on the "verge of collpase".

Damning figures released by the Ministry of Justice have revealed that violence has increased in the past 12 months and, in some cases, is close to double rates from 2010 before the Coalition government came to power and began controversial reforms.

Campaigners, MPs and former prisoners have told The Independent that the prisons system is in "total meltdown" following staff shortages, overcrowding and funding cuts.

Between 2010 and 2015, the number of sexual assaults recorded has more than doubled from 137 incidents per year to 300. In the same period, the number deaths in prisons has risen from 198 to 257 per year.

Self-harm and suicide attempts have also risen at an alarming rate.

Recorded incidents in which someone has attempted to hang themselves has spiked from 580 to 2,023 while the number of attempted overdoses has risen from 1,414 to 2,523. The number of recorded incidents of prisoners cutting themselves has risen from 15,159 incidents in 2010 to 21,282 incidents in 2015.

Other concerning figures include the number of people recorded as suffering from a serious bite wound as a result of an attack in a prison more than doubling from 89 in 2010 to 209 in 2015. The number of people sustaining an injury after being attacked with urine or excrement has increased nine-fold in this time frame from 20 attacks to 180 per year.

This paints a picture of a system in total meltdown and on the verge of collapse <p>Jo Stevens, Shadow Minister for Prisons</p>

The data has been released by the Ministry of Justice as part of its annual Safety In Custody figures.

Shadow Minister for Prisons Jo Stevens told The Independent: These shocking figures have blown the lid off Michael Goves claims that he is the man to deal with the worsening Tory prison crisis. Now we know that the Governments own statistics reveal that rates of self-harm, homicides and serious assaults on staff have surged.

This paints a picture of a system in total meltdown and on the verge of collapse. How can it be right that hardworking prison staff are expected to put up with such a toxic workplace environment? David Camerons Government must immediately act to address the prison crisis which they have caused through their failure to deal with staff shortages, overcrowding and a complete breakdown of any sense of safety in our prisons.

Campaigners and experts say staff shortages and over-crowding were resulting in chaos and undermining the wellbeing and safety of prisoners and staff. These shocking statistics spell out the scale of the problems in a prison system that is failing after years of rising numbers, chronic overcrowding and deep staff cuts," Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said.

People are dying. How many more people will die before something is done? <p>Frances Crook, Howard League for Penal Reform</p>

We are hearing a lot of fine talk from the Government about how things will be put right, but at the moment there appears to be no action. Meanwhile, people are dying. How many more people will die before something is done?

Peter Dawson, Deputy Director of the Prison Reform Trust, backed calls for reform saying the figures highlighted that the "need for reform is urgent."

Commenting on today's findings, Prisons Minister Andrew Selous said: "These figures demonstrate the very serious challenges facing the prison service. They show how badly prison reform is needed. We must do better at reducing violence and preventing drugs entering prison. We must do more to help prisoners with mental health probles. We have to ensure prisoners can be rehabilitated so they are no longer a danger to others.

"We have secured 1.3 billion to modernise the prison estate and we will put governors in charge. These reforms will ensure prisons are places of decency and improve public safety by reducing reoffending."
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Jeremy Corbyn has been forced to deny the party had a problem with antisemitism after Ken Livingstone, one of his oldest political allies, suggested Adolf Hitler was a Zionist.

The row has piled pressure on the Labour leader with numerous MPs, including the Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham, calling him to do more to stamp out what they claim is a problem of antisemitism within the party.

Mr Corbyn was forced to move against his friend and suspend him from the party after dozens of Labour MPs lined up to call for his expulsion.

With Labour already haemorrhaging support from previously loyal Jewish voters and donors, Mr Corbyn was forced to deny the party was in crisis.

It's not a crisis. There's no crisis, he told the BBC. Where there is any racism in the party it will be dealt with and rooted out. We are totally opposed to antisemitism in any form within the party.

On Thursday night though, two senior Labour MPs added to his woes.

Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said Show all 14 1 /14 Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Israel and Palestine The simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians; and theres one stark fact that virtually no one in the British media ever reports, in almost all these conflicts the death toll is usually between 60 and 100 Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Now, any other country doing that would be accused of war crimes but its like we have a double standard about the policies of the Israeli government Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Antisemitism in the Labour Party As Ive said, Ive never heard anybody say anything antisemitism-Semitic, but theres been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as antisemitic. I had to put up with 35 years of this Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Naz Shah Its completely over-the-top and rude, but who am I to denounce anyone with all of that. It was wrong. I dont think she is antisemitic, it was incredibly rude but I dont believe she is an antisemite. When the NEC investigation is finished they'll say it was rude and over the top but they wont find any evidence that she actually hates Jews. Weve got to investigate all these charges and the context in which they are made. If she is antisemitic like the other three or four members weve found who are antisemitic, shell be expelled Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On other alleged antisemites in Labour That is part of the classic antisemitic thing about an international Jewish conspiracy  that is the reason we need to have an investigation. Ive got an open mind. Ive seen nothing to suggest to me that she is antisemitic. I wouldnt have supported her if I [thought] she was antisemitic Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On whether what Hitler did was legal, as stated by Naz Shah Thats a statement of fact  Hitler, Im sure, passed all those laws that allowed him to do that  its history  literally, Hitler was completely mad, he killed six million Jews. Shes not saying its legal to kill six million Jews: what they were doing in that country allowed them not just to kill six million Jews, kill all the communists, kill all the leftists like me, my father almost died when a Nazi sub sank his boat. I have no sympathy with Hitler Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On another alleged antisemite in Labour No, that is, and thats why shes been suspended or expelled. What Ive said is that in 47 years of the party in all the meetings Ive been in Ive never heard anyone say anything antisemitic. There are bound to be in a party of half a million people youll have a handful of antisemites, youll have a handful of racists. Youve managed to dig out virtually every antisemitic comment that Labour members have made out of half a million people. Ive never met any of these people. Theres not a problem. Youre talking about a handful of people in a party of half a million people. Jeremy Corbyn has moved rapidly to deal with them Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Jeremy Corbyns response to the allegations He met with Naz and she agreed she would stand down while the investigation is going on. He called her in to see her. Theres been a huge investigation of virtually everything that anybody put on the internet  many of these people are quite new and recent members of the party that joined in the big influx. 300,000 new people came in Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On his meeting a man accused of antisemitism in London This is the man who called for Muslims around the world to donate blood after the attacks of 9/11 when he came to London I went with him to the Regents Park mosque where he said no man should hit a woman and you should not discriminate against homosexuals. So I cant equate what I heard him say he made no antisemitic statement while he was here in London. I dont investigate people. Ive simply said what I believe to be true which is that Naz was not antisemitic. She was completely over the top, very rude, but that does not make her an antisemite Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On John Manns comments He went completely over the top. I was actually doing a radio interview at the time that he was bellowing that Im a racist antisemite in my ear. Ive had that with John Mann before a few weeks ago screaming that I was a bigot down the phone. Im not an apologist for anyone who makes antisemitic statements. What Im saying is dont confuse antisemitism with criticism of the Israeli government policy Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On calling a Jewish journalist a concentration camp guard whilst Mayor of London I cant tell if a journalist is Jewish or Catholic or anything. If a journalist is chasing you down the street at nine of clock at night you might be rude to them. Some people might have hit him! He said he was just doing his job. We went all the way to the High Court and the judge opened his judgement by saying I hope no one here is going to suggest that Mr Livingstone is antisemitic. We won the case Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On claims about Hitler and Zionism I cant tell if a journalist is Jewish or Catholic or anything. If a journalist is chasing you down the street at nine of clock at night you might be rude to them. Some people might have hit him! He said he was just doing his job. We went all the way to the High Court and the judge opened his judgement by saying I hope no one here is going to suggest that Mr Livingstone is antisemitic. We won the case Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On John Mann Id simply say to John Mann go back and check. Is what I say true, or is it not? The BBC, youve got a huge team of researchers, it will take just an hour or two to go back and confirm. I was asked a question, I answered it. I have never in 45 years since I won my first election, I have never lied. I have always answered the question Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On raising the issue if Hitler It lays you open to people smearing and lying about you. Ive always answered the questions put to me and that simple fact is weve had a handful of people saying antisemitic things in the Labour Party, theyve been suspended, some of them are on their way to being expelled, some of them have been expelled already Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On people calling for him to be suspended All my usual critics  but the simple fact is I agree with them; there is no place for antisemitism in the Labour party. For them to suggest I am antisemitic is a bit bizarre considering we worked with Jewish groups and put on exhibitions about the scale of the holocaust, we worked with Jewish groups to tackling the scale of antisemitism back in the 1970s. Ive always opposed every form of racism whether its against black people or Jews. Im going to stay in the Labour party and continue to fight against all forms of racism and discrimination as I have my entire life

Andy Burnham admitted some people in the party had made antisemitic comments and said Labour had to deal more swiftly with such allegations.

"These allegations, when they are surfacing, have not been dealt with properly and quickly enough. They need to be dealt with much more speedily in the future," he told BBC1's Question Time.

"If antisemitism is found, expulsion should follow. No ifs or buts."

Former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper also called for more action to be taken.

"The Labour Party needs to do more than simply to have suspensions of people who have been saying anti-Semitic things," she told Channel 4 News.

"We've actually got to have an action plan to deal with this in order to have strong processes so that there is swift action because you can never tolerate that kind of discrimination in the party."

 Corbyn on Livingstone remarks

Even Jon Lansman, who runs Mr Corbyns grassroots pressure group Momentum, said the former London Mayor should depart voluntarily.

But Mr Livingstone himself was unrepentant and refused to apologise for his remarks claiming that people would calm down.

Mr Corbyn moved against Mr Livingstone after his attempt to defend the Labour MP Naz Shah backfired and led to former London Mayor himself being accused of racism.

In radio interviews Mr Livingstone appeared to equate Zionists with Hitler saying when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism  this is before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

Senior figures in the party  including Labours candidate for Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan - called for him to be kicked out.

Mr Khan said Mr Livingstones comments were appalling and inexcusable. He later added: He's got to be kicked out. These are so serious, these comments, so deeply offensive.

John Mann confronts Ken Livingstone outside the BBC's Millbank studios (BBC/Daily Politics)

Mr Livingstone was also involved in an angry dispute with another Labour MP John Mann which was captured by television cameras.

Mr Mann is heard accusing Mr Livingstone of being a disgusting racist rewriting history.

Mr Livingstone is heard telling Mr Mann to check your history.

The row is deeply damaging to Mr Corbyn who has been attempting to build bridges with the Jewish community following a string of allegedly antisemitic comments and remarks made by his supporters on the left of the party.

Bernard Hughes, director of external affairs for the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), said: "We do not believe the Labour Party is institutionally racist or antisemitic, but sadly there are individuals within the party whose views and statements are antisemitic and have really shocked us."

He said the Labour leadership "must now act decisively" to "combat this terrible issue".

Mr Corbyns aides had attempted to draw a line under the affair by suspending the Bradford West MP Ms Shah on Wednesday pending an internal investigation.

But Mr Livingstone chose to accept a series of media interviews this morning where he defended Ms Shah  and made a series of statements - which a number of Labour MPs said were antisemitic themselves.

Labour frontbencher Chi Onwurah said: Ken's comments are unacceptable and there cannot be one rule for him and another for everyone else.

Antisemitism is wrong, full stop, end of story. Naz Shah recognised that in her fulsome apology; Ken has actually made things worse by trying to justify comments she accepted had no justification."

 Naz Shah apology

Labour MP David Lammy added: "This is a very sad day for the Labour Party. I simply cannot reconcile being in the same party as someone with these views.

I am appalled by Ken Livingstone's despicable comments. There is no place in our party for racism, bigotry or intolerance of any sort.

Other Labour MPs who joined in the criticism included Wes Streeting, Conor McGinn and John Woodcock. Luciana Berger, a shadow cabinet minister, said Mr Livingstone should be suspended.

The Tories revelled in Labours discomfort. Prime Minister David Cameron said: It is quite clear that the Labour Party has got a problem with anti-Semitism.

I think they have got to recognise that anti-Semitism is like racism, it is unacceptable in a modern political party and every political party facing this problem has got to deal with it.

As I said to Jeremy Corbyn some weeks ago - when I was shouted down in the House of Commons with cries of 'disgraceful' from the Labour benches - they've got a problem, it is now totally apparent they've got a problem, and they have got to deal with it.
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Ken Livingstone, one of Jeremy Corbyns oldest political allies, has been suspended from the Labour Party as the leadership was plunged into a fresh row about antisemitism.

Mr Corbyn was forced to move against Mr Livingstone after his attempt to defend the Labour MP Naz Shah backfired and led to former London mayor himself being accused of racism.

In radio interviews, Mr Livingstone appeared to equate Zionists with Adolf Hitler, saying: Lets remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism  this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews."

Mr Corbyn had little choice but to act after senior figures in the party  including Labours Mayor of London candidate Sadiq Khan - called for the former Mayor of London to be kicked out.

A spokesperson for the party said: "Ken Livingstone has been suspended by the Labour Party, pending an investigation, for bringing the party into disrepute.

"The Chief Whip has summoned John Mann MP to discuss his conduct."

 John Mann MP call Ken Livingstone MP a 'Nazi apologist'

Mr Khan had said Mr Livingstones comments were appalling and inexcusable, later adding: "He's got to be kicked out. These are so serious, these comments, so deeply offensive."

Mr Livingstone was also involved in an angry dispute with another Labour MP, John Mann, which was captured by television cameras.

Mr Mann is heard accusing Mr Livingstone of being a disgusting racist rewriting history", before Mr Livingstone is heard telling Mr Mann to check your history.

The row is deeply damaging to Mr Corbyn who has been attempting to build bridges with the Jewish community following a string of allegedly antisemitic comments and remarks made by his supporters on the left of the party.

Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said Show all 14 1 /14 Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Israel and Palestine The simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians; and theres one stark fact that virtually no one in the British media ever reports, in almost all these conflicts the death toll is usually between 60 and 100 Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Now, any other country doing that would be accused of war crimes but its like we have a double standard about the policies of the Israeli government Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Antisemitism in the Labour Party As Ive said, Ive never heard anybody say anything antisemitism-Semitic, but theres been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as antisemitic. I had to put up with 35 years of this Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Naz Shah Its completely over-the-top and rude, but who am I to denounce anyone with all of that. It was wrong. I dont think she is antisemitic, it was incredibly rude but I dont believe she is an antisemite. When the NEC investigation is finished they'll say it was rude and over the top but they wont find any evidence that she actually hates Jews. Weve got to investigate all these charges and the context in which they are made. If she is antisemitic like the other three or four members weve found who are antisemitic, shell be expelled Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On other alleged antisemites in Labour That is part of the classic antisemitic thing about an international Jewish conspiracy  that is the reason we need to have an investigation. Ive got an open mind. Ive seen nothing to suggest to me that she is antisemitic. I wouldnt have supported her if I [thought] she was antisemitic Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On whether what Hitler did was legal, as stated by Naz Shah Thats a statement of fact  Hitler, Im sure, passed all those laws that allowed him to do that  its history  literally, Hitler was completely mad, he killed six million Jews. Shes not saying its legal to kill six million Jews: what they were doing in that country allowed them not just to kill six million Jews, kill all the communists, kill all the leftists like me, my father almost died when a Nazi sub sank his boat. I have no sympathy with Hitler Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On another alleged antisemite in Labour No, that is, and thats why shes been suspended or expelled. What Ive said is that in 47 years of the party in all the meetings Ive been in Ive never heard anyone say anything antisemitic. There are bound to be in a party of half a million people youll have a handful of antisemites, youll have a handful of racists. Youve managed to dig out virtually every antisemitic comment that Labour members have made out of half a million people. Ive never met any of these people. Theres not a problem. Youre talking about a handful of people in a party of half a million people. Jeremy Corbyn has moved rapidly to deal with them Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Jeremy Corbyns response to the allegations He met with Naz and she agreed she would stand down while the investigation is going on. He called her in to see her. Theres been a huge investigation of virtually everything that anybody put on the internet  many of these people are quite new and recent members of the party that joined in the big influx. 300,000 new people came in Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On his meeting a man accused of antisemitism in London This is the man who called for Muslims around the world to donate blood after the attacks of 9/11 when he came to London I went with him to the Regents Park mosque where he said no man should hit a woman and you should not discriminate against homosexuals. So I cant equate what I heard him say he made no antisemitic statement while he was here in London. I dont investigate people. Ive simply said what I believe to be true which is that Naz was not antisemitic. She was completely over the top, very rude, but that does not make her an antisemite Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On John Manns comments He went completely over the top. I was actually doing a radio interview at the time that he was bellowing that Im a racist antisemite in my ear. Ive had that with John Mann before a few weeks ago screaming that I was a bigot down the phone. Im not an apologist for anyone who makes antisemitic statements. What Im saying is dont confuse antisemitism with criticism of the Israeli government policy Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On calling a Jewish journalist a concentration camp guard whilst Mayor of London I cant tell if a journalist is Jewish or Catholic or anything. If a journalist is chasing you down the street at nine of clock at night you might be rude to them. Some people might have hit him! He said he was just doing his job. We went all the way to the High Court and the judge opened his judgement by saying I hope no one here is going to suggest that Mr Livingstone is antisemitic. We won the case Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On claims about Hitler and Zionism I cant tell if a journalist is Jewish or Catholic or anything. If a journalist is chasing you down the street at nine of clock at night you might be rude to them. Some people might have hit him! He said he was just doing his job. We went all the way to the High Court and the judge opened his judgement by saying I hope no one here is going to suggest that Mr Livingstone is antisemitic. We won the case Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On John Mann Id simply say to John Mann go back and check. Is what I say true, or is it not? The BBC, youve got a huge team of researchers, it will take just an hour or two to go back and confirm. I was asked a question, I answered it. I have never in 45 years since I won my first election, I have never lied. I have always answered the question Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On raising the issue if Hitler It lays you open to people smearing and lying about you. Ive always answered the questions put to me and that simple fact is weve had a handful of people saying antisemitic things in the Labour Party, theyve been suspended, some of them are on their way to being expelled, some of them have been expelled already Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On people calling for him to be suspended All my usual critics  but the simple fact is I agree with them; there is no place for antisemitism in the Labour party. For them to suggest I am antisemitic is a bit bizarre considering we worked with Jewish groups and put on exhibitions about the scale of the holocaust, we worked with Jewish groups to tackling the scale of antisemitism back in the 1970s. Ive always opposed every form of racism whether its against black people or Jews. Im going to stay in the Labour party and continue to fight against all forms of racism and discrimination as I have my entire life

Mr Corbyns aides had attempted to draw a line under the affair by suspending the Bradford West MP Ms Shah on Wednesday pending an internal investigation.

But Mr Livingstone chose to accept a series of media interviews this morning where he defended Ms Shah  and made a series of statements which a number of Labour MPs said were themselves antisemitic.

Even Mr Livingstones allies deserted him, with the chairman of the Momentum group of Corbyn supporters, Jon Lansman, saying that a period of silence from Ken Livingstone is overdue, especially on antisemitism, racism and Zionism.

 Livingstone stands by comments

He added: Ken Livingstone achieved many good things for London and beyond. But all political lives end in failure and he should now depart voluntarily.

Other Labour figures echoed the call for Mr Livingstone to be suspended.

Labour frontbencher Chi Onwurah said: "Ken's comments are unacceptable and there cannot be one rule for him and another for everyone else.

"Antisemitism is wrong, full stop, end of story. Naz Shah recognised that in her fulsome apology; Ken has actually made things worse by trying to justify comments she accepted had no justification."

Labour MP David Lammy added: "This is a very sad day for the Labour Party. I simply cannot reconcile being in the same party as someone with these views.

"I am appalled by Ken Livingstone's despicable comments. There is no place in our party for racism, bigotry or intolerance of any sort."

Before he was suspended, Mr Livingstone said he believed the row over his future would "calm down" over the next couple of days.

Asked if he was under pressure, he told BBC Two's Daily Politics: "Not really. I simply said what I believed to be true, which is that Naz is not antisemitic."

Pressed about his future on Labour's ruling NEC, he said: "Things erupt. They dominate the news for 24/48 hours. People calm down again when they go back and check what you have really said."

Former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg told Mr Livingstone his actions were "weird".

He said: "I never ever thought I would see the day that mainstream, well-known politicians like you would start raking over Hitler's views in a way that people would simply not understand."

Former Labour peer Lord Sugar, who quit the party after last year's election, said Mr Livingstone "shouldn't be allowed to be anywhere near the Labour Party at all".

Lord Sugar told Sky News: "Corbyn has got nowhere to go on this now. He is one of his close allies within the party, from their political beliefs, but he has got to get rid of this man in the same way Naz Shah was suspended yesterday."

The businessman and TV host said that "the lunatics have taken over the party", adding: "There is an underlying feeling now under (Corbyn's) regime that anti-Semitism is starting to rise in the Labour Party, although he denies it."
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Labour has a serious problem with anti-Semitism, a Labour peer has said.

Lord Levy, a former fundraiser under Tony Blair, said racism against Jewish people should not be tolerated in the Labour party.

Its absolutely crucial that the leadership of the party stamp this out once and for all, he told the BBCs Newsnight programme.

There can be criticism of the state of Israel, but anti-Semitism  using the word Zionists as another form of anti-Semitism frankly can no longer be tolerated.

The warning comes as Labour MP Naz Shah is suspended by her party after comments emerged that she had suggested Israel should be moved to North America.

Critics highlighted the use of the words transportation and solution in the MPs historic Facebook post, and said the suggestion was anti-Semitic.

Ms Shah apologised immediately for the post, which was made before she became an MP.

But Ken Livingstone said Ms Shahs remarks were not anti-Semitic and that some people were eliding criticism of Israel with attacks Jewish people.

We expelled a couple of people from the Labour Party early on for saying things that could clearly be interpreted as anti-Semitic, he said.

This is not that; this is an over-the-top comment about the horrendous conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Ms Shah stepped down as an aide to John McDonnell over her remarks.

After the latest row Labour officials have said they are drawing up guidelines regarding what constitutes anti-Semitism and when members should be expelled.
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The billionaire Topshop entrepreneur and former BHS owner is expected to be summoned shortly to give evidence before two Parliamentary committees in order to answer questions about the failure of the 88 year old retail group, which crashed into administration earlier this week.

Below are the key questions that MPs need to pose to the king of shops.

1) Was it reasonable for your family to take 400m in dividends out of BHS?

Philip Green bought BHS in 2000 for 200m from the Storehouse Group. Over the next four years accounts filed at Companies House show his family received dividends amounting to 423m from the company. In 2004 BHS recorded pre-tax profits of 100m. But profits started contracting thereafter and the company recorded pre-tax losses from 2009 onwards. The MPs should ask Sir Philip whether the cash his family extracted from the company was, with hindsight, unfortunate given the subsequent downturn in its fortunes.

2) Did you underinvest in BHS and limit its ability to compete?

This is linked to the issue of dividends extracted. The most common complaint from shoppers about BHSs stores is that they are hopelessly outdated and the goods are undesirable. Plus it has no online infrastructure to compete with the likes of Next and Marks & Spencer. In short, it seems to be a victim of chronic underinvestment. This under-investment has arguably hobbled its ability to generate revenues and profit and thus created a downward spiral from which it would always have been difficult to recover. If more cash had been spent on investment, rather than dividends for Sir Philips family, would the business have had a decent shot at survival? MPs must pose the question.

3) Was it wise to load BHS up with so much debt?

BHS entered administration with 1.3bn of debt. Around 571m is attributable to the deficit in the workers defined benefit pension fund, but that still leaves the business looking quite highly leveraged. And a good deal of that debt was accumulated when Sir Philip was still running the business. MPs should quiz Sir Phillip on whether it was reckless to load so much debt on to the balance sheet. Wasnt that asking for trouble?

4) Why did you sell BHS when there was still such a large shortfall in the pension scheme?

Sir Philip sold BHS for 1 to a group called Retail Acquisitions in March 2015. At the time Sir Philip implied that had made a clean break with the business. Yet the pension fund for the groups workers  existing and former staff  was in deficit for several hundreds of millions of pounds when he did the deal. And the 2004 Pensions Act makes it clear that business owners have responsibilities towards their companies pension schemes if they are in deficit and that they cannot simple walk away from them by selling up. A decision was made by the BHS management in 2012, at the triennial review of the pension scheme, to gradually reduce the deficit over the course of 23 year years. But some say that was an abnormally long period. MPs should ask Sir Philip whether he thinks he should not have taken more efforts to put the pension scheme on a sustainable path before off-loading the company.

5) What offer have you made to the Pensions Regulator in relation to the pension fund?

It seems that Sir Philip already accepts that he will be eventually compelled by the Governments Pensions Regulator to pay more funds into the BHS pension scheme, which has now been picked up by the state-backed lifeboat scheme known as the Pension Protection Fund after the company entered administration. Reports suggest he has offered 80m, comprising 40m in cash and 40m in a write-off of a loan owed by BHS to him. MPs should probe this offer. Does Sir Philip really think 80m is sufficient? And what real value is a 40m loan write-off to the scheme?

6) Why did you sell BHS to a group with no retail experience and a chequered financial history?

The leader of the group which bought BHS, Retail Acquisitions, is Dominic Chappell. He has been bankrupt twice and has been responsible for a string of failed investment projects. The chair of the group is a financier called Keith Smith. When Mr Smith worked for the stockbroker Nabarro Wells he was involved in establishing a shell company that was subsequently at the heart of a major fraud scandal (although Mr Smith was not in any way implicated in the scandal, nor was he subject to disciplinary action or censure from the London Stock Exchange). None of the major figures in Retail Acquisitions have any retail experience. What reason did he have for thinking BHS would be in safe hands, or that members of its pension scheme would be adequately protected?

7) What was the nature of your contact with Paul Sutton prior to the BHS sale?

Reports suggest that the introduction between Sir Philip and the Dominic Chappell were made by Paul Alexander Sutton, who has twice been declared bankrupt. Sir Philip and Retail Acquisitions both now insist that Mr Sutton was not involved in the sale. But Mr Sutton is reported as saying Without me he [Chappell] wouldnt be anywhere near BHS...I introduced him to Philip Green. MPs should attempt to get the facts on the relationship between the three men.

8) What was the nature of the BHS property deal you did with its new owners?

Shortly after the sale Sir Philip reportedly sold the freehold to 12 BHS properties, which he had owned in a different outpost of his business empire, back to BHS for 70m. What was the logic of this transaction from Sir Philips perspective? And what does he think the logic was from the Retail Acquisitions side? Sir Philips companies also retained a loan charge over certain BHS assets. MPs need to get to the bottom of why this financial interest was retained by Sir Philip.

9) Did you effectively force BHS into administration by refusing to change the terms of a loan to the group?

Mr Chappell has said that a refusal by Sir Philip to release the loan charge over certain BHS properties was the reason BHS failed to secure a 60m loan lifeline from a private equity company. He also says that this was the reason why the company had to enter administration. Sources close to Sir Philip say this is "nonsense". MPs should ask Sir Philip about the truth of this affair.
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Labour has been plunged into a fresh row about anti-Semitism as over a dozen Labour MPs call for Ken Livingstone's suspension after he defended embattled MP Naz Shah.

Ms Shah had been accused of anti-Semitism after it emerged that she endorsed a plan to relocate Israel to North America, but Mr Livingstone said there was an orchestrated campaign by supporters of Israel to smear critics of that country as anti-Semitic.

The former Mayor of London also said he had never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic in the Labour party.

In one particularly firey exchange caught on camera Labour MP John Mann shouted at Mr Livingstone and accused him of being a Nazi apologist rewriting history.

Theres been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-Semitic. I had to put up with 35 years of this, Mr Livingstone told BBC London.

Her remarks were over the top but shes not anti-Semitic. Ive been in the Labour party for 47 years; Ive never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic.

Ive heard a lot of criticism of the state of Israel and its abuse of Palestinians but Ive never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic.

 Ken Livingstone speaks about Antisemitism on radio

Ms Shah has said she now believes her comments were anti-Semitic and also apologised for causing offence. She has been suspended.

Pouring more fuel onto the fire of the row, Mr Livingstone told BBC London that Adolf Hitler himself was a supporter of Zionism.

 Labour MP berates Livingstone

Lets remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism  this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews, he said.

Labours Mayor of London candidate Sadiq Khan said in a tweet after the interview aired that Mr Livingstones comments were appalling and inexcusable.

There must be no place for this in our party, he added.

Many other MPs, including Luciana Berger, Phil Wilson, and Gavin Shuker, have now also called for Mr Livingstone to be suspended over the remarks.

Labour MP Jess Phillips tweeted: Ken Livingstone must be suspended from the Labour Party.

The Haavara Agreement, signed by Nazi Germany in 1933 did, arrange for the voluntary emigration of German Jews to the Middle East, but temporarily effectively stripped many emigres of their property.

At the same time Nazi authorities persecuted Jews in Germany through other legal and violent means, adding an element of coercion to the policy.

Nazi policy later evolved to the mass murder of Jews both home and abroad as part of the Holocaust.

Last night Lord Levy, a former fundraiser for Tony Blair, told the BBCs Newsnight programme that Labour had a serious problem with anti-Semitism.

Labour yesterday said it would draw up new guidlines on what constitutes anti-Semitism to aid in the expulsion of members suspected of it. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have both said anti-Jewish racism should not be tolerated in the party.
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A fellow Labour MP has confronted the former London mayor Ken Livingstone in front of reporters in Westminster, accusing him of being a "Nazi apologist".

As the party descended into chaos over ongoing accusations of antisemitism at the highest level, John Mann chased Mr Livingstone up the stairs at the BBC's offices in Millbank, shouting and calling him a "f****** disgrace".

Extraordinary footage showed the public exchange between the two colleagues, which came after Mr Livingstone suggested that Adolf Hitler was a Zionist "before he went mad and starting killing millions of people".

Mr Mann confronted Mr Livingstone while surrounded by journalists outside the BBC's offices in Millbank

Mr Mann accused Mr Livingstone of "rewriting history". He said: "Go back and check what Hitler did. There's a book called Mein Kampf - you've obviously never heard of it."

More than a dozen Labour MPs, including the party's candidate for London mayor Sadiq Khan, have now called for Mr Livingstone's suspension after he defended embattled MP Naz Shah.

Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said Show all 14 1 /14 Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Israel and Palestine The simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians; and theres one stark fact that virtually no one in the British media ever reports, in almost all these conflicts the death toll is usually between 60 and 100 Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Now, any other country doing that would be accused of war crimes but its like we have a double standard about the policies of the Israeli government Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Antisemitism in the Labour Party As Ive said, Ive never heard anybody say anything antisemitism-Semitic, but theres been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as antisemitic. I had to put up with 35 years of this Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Naz Shah Its completely over-the-top and rude, but who am I to denounce anyone with all of that. It was wrong. I dont think she is antisemitic, it was incredibly rude but I dont believe she is an antisemite. When the NEC investigation is finished they'll say it was rude and over the top but they wont find any evidence that she actually hates Jews. Weve got to investigate all these charges and the context in which they are made. If she is antisemitic like the other three or four members weve found who are antisemitic, shell be expelled Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On other alleged antisemites in Labour That is part of the classic antisemitic thing about an international Jewish conspiracy  that is the reason we need to have an investigation. Ive got an open mind. Ive seen nothing to suggest to me that she is antisemitic. I wouldnt have supported her if I [thought] she was antisemitic Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On whether what Hitler did was legal, as stated by Naz Shah Thats a statement of fact  Hitler, Im sure, passed all those laws that allowed him to do that  its history  literally, Hitler was completely mad, he killed six million Jews. Shes not saying its legal to kill six million Jews: what they were doing in that country allowed them not just to kill six million Jews, kill all the communists, kill all the leftists like me, my father almost died when a Nazi sub sank his boat. I have no sympathy with Hitler Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On another alleged antisemite in Labour No, that is, and thats why shes been suspended or expelled. What Ive said is that in 47 years of the party in all the meetings Ive been in Ive never heard anyone say anything antisemitic. There are bound to be in a party of half a million people youll have a handful of antisemites, youll have a handful of racists. Youve managed to dig out virtually every antisemitic comment that Labour members have made out of half a million people. Ive never met any of these people. Theres not a problem. Youre talking about a handful of people in a party of half a million people. Jeremy Corbyn has moved rapidly to deal with them Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On Jeremy Corbyns response to the allegations He met with Naz and she agreed she would stand down while the investigation is going on. He called her in to see her. Theres been a huge investigation of virtually everything that anybody put on the internet  many of these people are quite new and recent members of the party that joined in the big influx. 300,000 new people came in Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On his meeting a man accused of antisemitism in London This is the man who called for Muslims around the world to donate blood after the attacks of 9/11 when he came to London I went with him to the Regents Park mosque where he said no man should hit a woman and you should not discriminate against homosexuals. So I cant equate what I heard him say he made no antisemitic statement while he was here in London. I dont investigate people. Ive simply said what I believe to be true which is that Naz was not antisemitic. She was completely over the top, very rude, but that does not make her an antisemite Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On John Manns comments He went completely over the top. I was actually doing a radio interview at the time that he was bellowing that Im a racist antisemite in my ear. Ive had that with John Mann before a few weeks ago screaming that I was a bigot down the phone. Im not an apologist for anyone who makes antisemitic statements. What Im saying is dont confuse antisemitism with criticism of the Israeli government policy Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On calling a Jewish journalist a concentration camp guard whilst Mayor of London I cant tell if a journalist is Jewish or Catholic or anything. If a journalist is chasing you down the street at nine of clock at night you might be rude to them. Some people might have hit him! He said he was just doing his job. We went all the way to the High Court and the judge opened his judgement by saying I hope no one here is going to suggest that Mr Livingstone is antisemitic. We won the case Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On claims about Hitler and Zionism I cant tell if a journalist is Jewish or Catholic or anything. If a journalist is chasing you down the street at nine of clock at night you might be rude to them. Some people might have hit him! He said he was just doing his job. We went all the way to the High Court and the judge opened his judgement by saying I hope no one here is going to suggest that Mr Livingstone is antisemitic. We won the case Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On John Mann Id simply say to John Mann go back and check. Is what I say true, or is it not? The BBC, youve got a huge team of researchers, it will take just an hour or two to go back and confirm. I was asked a question, I answered it. I have never in 45 years since I won my first election, I have never lied. I have always answered the question Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On raising the issue if Hitler It lays you open to people smearing and lying about you. Ive always answered the questions put to me and that simple fact is weve had a handful of people saying antisemitic things in the Labour Party, theyve been suspended, some of them are on their way to being expelled, some of them have been expelled already Labour antisemitism row: What Livingstone said On people calling for him to be suspended All my usual critics  but the simple fact is I agree with them; there is no place for antisemitism in the Labour party. For them to suggest I am antisemitic is a bit bizarre considering we worked with Jewish groups and put on exhibitions about the scale of the holocaust, we worked with Jewish groups to tackling the scale of antisemitism back in the 1970s. Ive always opposed every form of racism whether its against black people or Jews. Im going to stay in the Labour party and continue to fight against all forms of racism and discrimination as I have my entire life

Ms Shah has herself been suspended after it emerged she wrote Facebook posts calling for the relocation of Israel to the US.

Speaking later on the BBC's Daily Politics programme, Mr Livingstone said Mr Mann had been "completely over the top".
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It is now cheaper to live in a 4-star hotel in two-thirds of European capitals than it is to rent the average London flat.

Latest figures show that the average rent for a London flat is now 1,676 per month - or 55 a night - having increased by 30 per cent in the last four years.

Recommended Read more Monopoly board makeover shows true price of London property

For the same amount of money you could live year round in a hotel in Dublin, Rome, Paris or Brussels.

Among the hotels that are more affordable than the average London rent include the Mercure Warszawa Grand in Warsaw that boasts a fitness centre, business facilities and two restaurants.

The Best Western Plus Hotel in Paris

The Best Western Plus Hotel in Paris, the Nordic Hotel Domicil in Berlin and the Relais Castrum Boccea in Rome can also all be booked for less than 55 a night on travel websites for the 5th May this year.

The figures were highlighted by Labours Mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan.

The world's least affordable cities for housing Show all 10 1 /10 The world's least affordable cities for housing The world's least affordable cities for housing Hong Kong The world's least affordable cities for housing Sydney The world's least affordable cities for housing Vancouver The world's least affordable cities for housing Auckland The world's least affordable cities for housing Melbourne The world's least affordable cities for housing San Jose The world's least affordable cities for housing San Francisco The world's least affordable cities for housing London The world's least affordable cities for housing San Diego The world's least affordable cities for housing Los Angeles

He said: Renting a home shouldnt be a luxury, but under the Tories Londoners could live in 4-star luxury in most of Europe for what they pay.

Rents have gone up by 30 per cent with a Tory Mayor and it would be exactly the same under Zac Goldsmith  with rents soaring above 2,000 a month.

Mr Khan said he would create a London-wide social letting agency as well as naming and shaming bad landlords and setting up a landlord licensing scheme.
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Transgender people could be jailed if they use a public toilet designated for a gender other than the one stated on their birth certificates, under a new law passed by a city in Alabama.

An ordinance outlining the prohibition was unanimously passed on Tuesday by the city council of Oxford, a city with a population of about 21,000, in the south-eastern state.

The law states: Citizens have a right to quiet solicitude and to be secure from embarrassment and unwanted intrusion into their privacy while utilising multiple occupancy bathroom or changing facilities by members of the opposite biological sex.

There is a long standing history of restricting access to single-sex public facilities on the basis of sex and that users of multiple occupancy bathrooms or changing facilities do not reasonably expect to be exposed to individuals of the opposite sex while utilising those facilities.

The ordinance goes on to define biological sex as the physical condition of being male or female, which is stated on a persons birth certificate.

Anyone caught violating the terms of the ordinance would be fined $500 or be jailed for a maximum of six months, it said.

The pioneers of LGBT rights in 2015 Show all 6 1 /6 The pioneers of LGBT rights in 2015 The pioneers of LGBT rights in 2015 Justice Anthony Kennedy and the other Supreme Court Justices who legalised same sex marriage in the US The US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage is all 50 states of America in June, splitting 5-4 in favour. Writing the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy said gay people hope not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilizations oldest institutions. The pioneers of LGBT rights in 2015 Caitlyn Jenner After she revealed her new self in an interview and cover with Vanity Fair magazine in June, the former olympian quickly became the most famous trans person in the world. AFP/Getty The pioneers of LGBT rights in 2015 Cara Delevigne The former model said she identified as bisexual in an interview with Vogue in July. AFP/Getty The pioneers of LGBT rights in 2015 Ellen Page The openly gay actress confronted Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz at a campaign rally in Iowa in August over laws that discriminate against the LGBT community. AFP/Getty The pioneers of LGBT rights in 2015 iO Tillett Wright The artist and Instagram star began the Self Evident Truths project in 2015 to photograph everyone who doesnt identify as 100% straight. Famously it featured Johnny Depps teenage daughter Lily Rose who said she fell somewhere on the vast spectrum and singer Selena Gomez who addressed rumours she was dating Cara Delevigne. AFP/Getty The pioneers of LGBT rights in 2015 Ruby Rose Australian born Rose was one of the very first celebrities to come out as genderfluid. She was hailed for giving it a public platform a the MTV Europe Music Awards in October when she welcomed ladies and gentlemen, and everyone in-between in her introduction.

The Alabama branch of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) group condemned the move, branding it horrific and unprecedented in its establishment of criminal penalties for violations of the law.

It said it was not yet clear whether people would be required to produce their birth certificates when using public toilets.

This ordinance is a shameful and vile attack on the rights and privacy of transgender people, said Eva Walton Kendrick, HRC Alabama state manager.

Transgender people are our neighbours, our co-workers and our fellow churchgoers, and every Alabamian has the right to live their lives without fear of discrimination and prejudice.

Throughout the country, elected officials from both sides of the aisle, along with hundreds of business leaders and advocates throughout the country have resoundingly rejected these kinds of proposals, which only seek to demean and marginalise the transgender community.

Steven Waits, president of the city council, reportedly said that the new law was passed in response to a policy announced by a store in a shopping centre in the city last week, which would have allowed transgender employees and shoppers to use the toilet that matched their identity.

According to the Alabama Local news website, the citys police chief, Bill Partridge, said the law would be enforced like any other city ordinance such as noise violations or public indecency.

Maria Munir told President Obama they were a non-binary person last week

He said: If somebody sees something that makes them uncomfortable, they would call the police. If the person is still there when the officer arrives, the officer has to witness the crime. Then we take down the persons information, and the person who reported it has to sign a warrant.

In March, North Carolina passed a law, the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act  known as HB2 or the bathroom law  ending anti-discrimination protections for lesbians, gays and bisexuals. It also stopped transgender people from using public toilets that do not match the gender they were born with.

The legislation was introduced after the city of Charlotte passed its own bill in February to allow transgender people to use public toilets that correspond with their gender identity, rather than their gender at birth.

A federal challenge to North Carolinas law has been filed by three people, backed by civil liberties groups, on the grounds that it is unconstitutional.

British student Maria Munir last week received praise for coming out as a non-binary person to President Barack Obama, during a question-and-answer session for youth leaders as part of his visit to the UK.

The 20-year-old said: Im about to do something terrifying which is coming out to you as a non-binary person.

Im from a Pakistani Muslim background which inevitably has cultural implications and I know that in North Carolina, people are having to produce birth certificates to go to the toilet.

In the UK we dont recognise non-binary people under the Equality Act I wish yourself and David Cameron would take us seriously as transgender people.
Law enforcement officers were able to talk a man out of his garage after he barricaded himself inside Wednesday night.

Washington County Sheriff Andy Skiles said deputies were called to the 1,000 block of Calico Creek Farm Court in reference to the man who had a gun.

He was threatening to harm himself, said Skiles. When deputies arrived at the house they assessed the situation and contacted the Franklin County S.W.A.T. for assistance.

Skiles said once they arrived they were able to negotiate the man from the garage and he was taken into custody without further incident.

The man was taken to an area hospital for a mental evaluation.
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Democrats are pushing to pass through the a bill introduced last year that would make it illegal for LGBT people to be discriminated against in any form following several homophobic laws passed across the US.

Since last year almost 200 bills have been introduced in 34 states to permit discrimination against LGBT people, and three states - North Carolina, Mississippi and Tennessee - passed these bills in April alone.

LGBT people can be refused service in a restaurant, fired from their work, expelled from school, denied housing or sent away from a public space like a library or a theatre.

Everyone knows you can get married on Saturday and fired on Monday after your boss read the account of your marriage in the newspapers, said New York congressman Jerrold Nadler.

He added that politicians cannot depend on the Supreme Court every time, referring to the court's decision last year to deem state-level same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional.

Now the Democrats are urging Republicans to hold a hearing on the Equality Act, which was introduced last summer and which has 174 sponsors, to make sure the House can vote on the bill.

The man at the helm of the movement, Rhode Island congressman David Cicilline, told reporters on Thursday that if the act is passed, it would create a federal statute that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

There is no question the Equality Act will become the law of the land. The only question is over what timeframe, he said.

Mr Cicilline is also one of six openly gay members of the House of Representatives who serve as co-chairs of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus.

He was joined on the podium by politicians from many states including California, Michigan and New Hampshire, as well as head of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

California Congresswoman Janice Hahn said: Every American deserves the right to be treated fairly under the law.

House Speaker [Paul] Ryan has long promised regular order. You know what? This would be a good place to start. We need a hearing on the Equality Act.

Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said states like North Carolina and Mississippi have recently introduced new laws which effectively legalise discrimination against LGBT people, and force transgender people to use a bathroom which does not correlate with their gender identity.

The laws in North Carolina caused outrage, prompting PayPal to scrap its plans of building a global operational center in the state, and also resulted in many stars like Bruce Springsteen to cancel their North Carolina concerts.

Other states are considering similar laws, said Ms Pelosi. That is why this legislation is so timely and so needed.
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Donald Trump delivered his first major foreign policy address with the panache and certitude that the world has come to expect from the New York business mogul. But after speaking for almost 40 minutes, did anybody come away with a better idea of what, exactly, a Trump administration would mean for geopolitical affairs?

Foreign policy experts were not left feeling too confident about the prospect of Mr Trumps global vision - despite his promise to restore coherence to US international relations.

Robert Bud McFarlane, former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan who attended the invite-only speech, told Politico that Mr Trumps plan was lacking in policy prescriptions and his strident rhetoric masked a lack of depth.

Former secretary of state under the Clinton administration Madeleine Albright told press that she had never seen such a combination of simplistic slogans, contradictions, and misstatements in one speech, calling his campaign reckless and dangerous.

Indeed, Mr Trumps controversial speech was rife with contradictions, as he proposed an America that was simultaneously isolationist and interventionist, consistent and unpredictable, and exceptional yet still weak.

Once an enemy, always an enemy  unless they become allies

On the nations enemies, Mr Trump seemed resigned to the idea that some groups US antagonism will never change. We need to be clear-sighted about the groups that will never be anything other than enemies, he said, referring to defeating terrorist organisations in the Middle East.

Shortly after, he embraced the idea of enemies becoming allies.

The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends, and when old friends become allies.

Countries can depend on the US  for a price

Mr Trump vowed to make the US a reliable friend and ally again. He accused President Barack Obama of bowing to enemies and letting down ally nations. [O]ur friends are beginning to think they cant depend on us, he said.

Later, Mr Trump proposed to abandon Nato allies who fail to pay the 28-nation coalition 2 per cent of their GDP. The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defence  and, if not, the US must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves, Mr Trump said.

The US will help defeat ISIS around the world  only in countries who are nice

Mr Trump sees ISIS as the top threat to the US and the rest of the world. He promised to work very closely with our allies in the Muslim world to stop the spread of radical Islamist extremism. Still, this promise only functions on a condition.

But this has to be a two-way street  they must also be good to us and remember us and all we are doing for them, he said.

Obama has weakened  and wasted money on  the military

Mr Trump tore into the Obama administration and argued that, by weakening the economy, they have weakened the military. He proposed that when he strengthens the economy he will then rebuild the military.

Yet, according to Mr Trump, the US has also wasted trillions of dollars over time  on planes, missiles, ships, equipment  building up our military to provide a strong defence for Europe and Asia.

The US will be consistent and unpredictable

When it comes to defeating ISIS, Mr Trump argued that the US should adopt a more unpredictable strategy.

We have to be unpredictable, and we have to be unpredictable starting now, he said. Mr Trump declared ISIS days are numbered, but he did explain his strategy to maintain the element of surprise.

Near the closing of the speech, he changed his tone.

The best way to achieve those goals is through a disciplined, deliberate, and consistent foreign policy.

Mr Trump delivered this speech as the self-declared presumptive Republican nominee, so it may be premature to have a firm idea regarding exactly what the candidate will bring to the White House Situation Room if he wins.

But if the US is to believe that Mr Trump will bring consistent leadership to Washington  and the world  he will have to demonstrate that very consistency in his ideas.
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Forced oral sex where the victim has passed out after drinking cannot be considered rape in the eyes of the law, a US appeals court has ruled.

Five senior judges at the Ottawa court of appeals agreed unanimously that the states laws did not cover an intoxication circumstance for forcible sodomy  rape involving the mouth or anus of the victim.

Prosecutors called the ruling absurd, arguing that the court of appeal should have interpreted the statute to close up what appeared to be an unintended loophole.

But US legal expert Michelle Anderson said the ruling was an appropriate assessment of the states laws.

Judges had been asked to consider the case of a 17-year-old boy accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl after driving her home following a session of drinking at a park in Tulsa.

According to local newspaper the Oklahoma Watch, other members of the group of high school friends testified that the girl was drifting in and out of consciousness before she was taken back to her grandmothers house.

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. 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She woke up to doctors performing a sexual assault examination in hospital, which found the DNA of the defendant on her legs and mouth.

The boy told police he had engaged in oral sex with the girl, but that it was consensual and her idea. The girl said she remembered nothing after being at the park.

The Tulsa County District Court dismissed charges against the boy first of rape and later of forcible oral sodomy, after establishing that unconsciousness and intoxication are not part of the definition of the latter crime.

In its judgement, the court of appeal said it could not ignore the fact a stipulation for drunkenness had been written into one law and not the other.

The Legislatures inclusion of an intoxication circumstance for the crime of rape is not found in the five very specific requirements for commission of the crime of forcible sodomy, it said.

We will not, in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language.

Benjamin Fu, the lead prosecutor in the case for Tulsa County, told the Oklahoma Watch he and police officials planned to push for legislation to close the insane and offensive legal loophole.

My argument was that if you rule today that because she was intoxicated it cant be force, then  youll have to engage in what I can only refer to as the orifice test, he said.

Whereby the contact by the defendant and the state of mind of the victim are the exact same. It just depends on [the location of the sexual act].
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Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Baghdad on Thursday to meet senior Iraqi officials in an effort to boost the US-led coalition's fight against Isis.

Due to security concerns, the White House hasn't disclosed Bidens itinerary, but he is expected to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to encourage national unity. Vice President Biden will also discuss steps the international community can take to promote the countrys economic stability.

The vice president has been the point person on Iraq for the administration since the beginning, an unnamed official told Politico, adding that Biden is the highest-ranking US official to visit the country since his previous trip in November 2011. Hes been itching to get back for a while; looking for an opportunity. This seemed like a good moment to do it.

The trip marks Vice President Biden's ninth trip since President Barack Obama's election in 2008.

Earlier this month, the Obama administration agreed to send 250 troops to support the fight against the so-called Islamic State.
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A mother has died after being accidently shot by her two-year-old son while driving on a US highway when he found a gun in the car.

Patrice Price, of Milwaukee, was fatally shot once in the back on Tuesday, the Milwaukee County Sheriffs Office said.

The toddler, who was sitting in the backseat, picked up the gun after it fell from under drivers seat, firing it through the front seat and hitting the 26-year-old.

A .40-callibre gun was recovered from the car floor behind the drivers seat.

The gun is believed to have belonged to Ms Prices boyfriend, whose car she was driving at the time of the incident. The victims boyfriend is understood to be a security officer and his gun belt was also found in the car, according to police.

Officers performed CPR on Ms Price after the shooting until paramedics arrived; she later died at the scene.

Andre Price holds a photo of his daughter in his Milwaukee home (AP)

Ms Prices mother and her one-year-old son were also in the car at the time, sitting in the front passenger seat.

Officials said the two-year-old boy was not riding in a car seat, a police statement did not mention if he was wearing a seatbelt.

Ms Prices 28-year-old brother, Antonio Price, described his sister as the best mom.

Her father, Andre Price, said the family will focus on funeral arrangements and will need help with the costs. He said Ms Price also has an older daughter.

Police declined to comment on whether the case was being investigated as a potential crime.

The famous for and against US gun control Show all 31 1 /31 The famous for and against US gun control The famous for and against US gun control Against: Robert De Niro Despite the actor being a gun-wielding fast-talker, he told Daily Mail: "There should be more control. It has just gotten out of hand, how easily you can get guns." The famous for and against US gun control For: Brad Pitt "America is founded on guns. It;s in out DNA. Its very strange but I feel better having a gun." Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control For: Angelina Jolie "Brad and I are not against having a gun in the house, and we do have one. If anybody comes into my home and tries to hurt my kids, Ive no problem shooting them." AFP/Getty The famous for and against US gun control For: Johnny Depp "When I was a kid it was a controlled atmosphere, we weren't shooting at humans - we were shooting at cans and bottles mostly. I will most certainly take my kids out for target practice." Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control For: Bruce Willis "Everyone has a right to bear arms. If you take guns away from legal gun owners, then the only people who have guns are the bad guys." Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control For: Clint Eastwood "I have a very strict gun control policy: if there's a gun around, I want to be in control of it." Reuters The famous for and against US gun control For: Whoopi Goldberg "Im an NRA member, as you know or probably dont know... I want to know that theres at least some way to prevent folks who are just getting out from mental institutions [from getting guns]." The famous for and against US gun control For: Vince Vaughn "Banning guns is like banning forks in an attempt to stop making people fat. Taking away guns, taking away drugs, the booze, it won't rid the world of criminality... I support people having a gun in public full stop, not just in your home." Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control For: Donald Trump "Democrats want to confiscate all guns, which is a dumb idea because only the law-abiding citizens would turn in their guns and the bad guys would be the only ones left armed. The Republicans walk the NRA line and refuse even limited restrictions" Getty The famous for and against US gun control Against: Matt Damon I actually hate guns. They freak me out. Rex The famous for and against US gun control Against: Mark Wahlberg "Well, I would love it if they could take all the guns away. Unfortunately, you cant do that so you hope that good people in the world have them to protect the people who cant protect themselves." AP The famous for and against US gun control Against: Sean Connery "It is said that a total ban on handguns, including .22s, would take away innocent pleasure from thousands of people. Is that more or less pleasure than watching your child grow up?" Rex Features The famous for and against US gun control Against: Arnold Schwarzenegger "Im for gun control. Im a peace-loving guy." Lionsgate The famous for and against US gun control Against: Sylvester Stallone "Until America, door to door, takes every handgun, this is what youre gonna have. Its pathetic. It really is pathetic. Its sad. Were living in the Dark Ages over there." Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control Against: Rashida Jones "Gun control is our only road to freedom. Freedom from the fear of senselessly losing children." Getty The famous for and against US gun control Against: Susan Sarandon "How much more suffering & loss will it take before we better regulate the sale of arms in our country?" Getty The famous for and against US gun control Against: Beyonce Queen B was part of the Demand a Plan campaign against guns after Newton shooting, by appearing in a video alongside a bunch of celebrities. AP The famous for and against US gun control Against: Jamie Foxx A Hollywood gang joined Beyonce in the campaign... GETTY IMAGES The famous for and against US gun control Against: Cameron Diaz Took part in the Demand a Plan campaign. Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control Against: Jessica Alba Took part in the Demand a Plan campaign. Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control Against: Jennifer Garner Took part in the Demand a Plan campaign. Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control Against: Jennifer Aniston Took part in the Demand a Plan campaign. Jason Merritt | Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control Against: Jon Hamm The Mad Men actor also appeared in the video... The famous for and against US gun control Against: Reese Witherspoon Took part in the Demand a Plan campaign. Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control Against: Ellen DeGeneres Took part in the Demand a Plan campaign. Reuters The famous for and against US gun control Against: Julianne Moore Took part in the Demand a Plan campaign. The famous for and against US gun control Against: Selena Gomez Took part in the Demand a Plan campaign. GETTY IMAGES The famous for and against US gun control Against: Peter Dinklage The Game of Thrones also appeared in the video... Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control Against: Zooey Deschanel alongside the New Girl star. Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control Against: Steve Carell Took part in the Demand a Plan campaign. Getty Images The famous for and against US gun control Against: Gwyneth Paltrow Took part in the Demand a Plan campaign, too.

It is not clear if Ms Prices boyfriend will be charged in connection with the incident. He has not been arrested.

The incident comes less than two months after a mother in Florida was shot by her toddler while sitting in the drivers seat of her car.

Jamie Gilt, 31, who is an outspoken and high-profile pro-gun activist, survived the shooting and faced criminal charges in relation to the incident.

Authorities said at the time they were also carrying out investigations relating to the childs welfare in light of the incident.

Additional reporting by Associated Press
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The FBI has arrested three people in the San Bernardino area on charges of marriage fraud, including the older brother of Syed Rizwan Farook, who, with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, shot dead 14 people at an office Christmas gathering in December 2015.

The arrests took place on Thursday morning as authorities conducted searches in Southern Californias Inland Empire. Farooks brother, Syed Raheel Farook, was arrested with his Russian wife, Tatiana Chernykh, and her sister Mariya.

Enrique Marquez, a friend of Rizwan Farook who was charged in December with buying firearms used in the attack, was also accused of marriage fraud for receiving money to wed Mariya Chernykh, who, it is alleged, married him only to attain legal status in the US.

An official told the Los Angeles Times that the arrests were not directly connected to the 2 December attack, after which Rizwan Farook, 28, and Malik, 27, were killed in a shootout with police. It is not clear whether the new searches were prompted by data found on Rizwan Farooks iPhone, which the FBI recently unlocked with the help of an unnamed third party, after Apple resisted a court order to assist in decrypting the device.
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A day after Donald Trump assumed a presidential demeanour and set out his view of the world in his first foreign policy speech, the Republican frontrunner returned to the campaign trail with an aggressive, bombastic attack on his rivals.

Speaking in Evansville, Indiana, ahead of a primary battle that could mark the last chance for his rivals to stop becoming the nominee, Mr Trump launched into Senator Ted Cruz, accusing him of both lying and of having been run out of several recent races.

Lyin TedMarco Rubio, who is a good guy, called him a liar during the debate, said Mr Trump.

(Getty Images)

He says Im the only one who can beat Donald Trump, but Im the one living. He said hes won seven times, and I said well Ive won 21 times.

Much has been made of the efforts by some of Mr Trumps advisors to try and persuade him to adopt a more presidential and less aggressive persona. Equally widely reported has been Mr Trumps refusal to adopt such an image, and stick to his quick-draw, pugilistic self.

Polls put Mr Trump ahead in Indiana, with Real Clear Politics suggesting he stands on 39 points, ahead of Mr Cruz on 33 and Ohio Governor John Kasich on 19 points.

But as part of an electoral agreement between Mr Trumps rivals, Mr Kasisch, the Ohio Governor, has agreed not to campaign in Indiana to clear the way for Mr Cruz. In exchange, Mr Cruz has said he will reciprocate the favour and stand aside for Mr Kasich in Oregon, which votes on May 17, and New Mexico, which votes on June 7.

It is unclear what difference Mr Kasichs absence from the contest will make and whether his supporters will switch to Mr Cruz, or whether they may vote for Mr Trump or even not bother to vote at all.

But Mr Cruz knows that he has to win in Indiana if he is to stop Mr Trump in his bid to secure the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the partys nomination ahead of the Republican convention in July. Mr Trump currently has 953, ahead of Mr Cruz on 546, and Mr Kasich trailing in third on 153. Mr Cruz on Wednesday announced that had selected Carly Fiorina as his running mate.

Mr Trump has even claimed that Mr Cruz has won many of this delegates by offering favours such as steaks and trips.

The Associated Press said that Mr Trump now has 80 per cent of the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination. During the remaining eight weeks of the primary campaign, he needs just 47 percent of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination and avoid a contested convention.

Many observers believed it will be challenge for Mr Trump to reach that total ahead of the convention. His opponents within the Republican establishment are desperate to try and halt by by voting for an alternative candidate.
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The most remarkable aspect of Donald Trumps foreign policy speech was that someone actually wrote it out and put it in the teleprompter. It was so filled with internal contradictions, falsehoods and genuinely crazy assertions that one would have thought Trump was speaking extemporaneously. It was a vivid display as to why he is thoroughly unprepared to become commander in chief. If anything comes of it, one hopes that a third candidate, sickened to his stomach, will have watched this, jumped from his seat and declared himself ready to rescue the country from the possibility that Trump might be president.

Having mocked use of a teleprompter last night, he used one, reading haltingly. He appeared ill at ease, nervous even. That may because the content, even as rudimentary and discombobulated as it was, did not stem from any thoughts or beliefs he might harbor. In that sense, the speech really was foreign to him.

At best, the speech was filled with platitudes and aspirational statements with zero content. Were going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests and the shared interests of our allies, he declared, having provided none. Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States, he proclaimed, without explaining even in general terms how that might be accomplished. Written at a grade-school level, it suggests that Trump does not understand the meaning of policy  that is, a plan of action girded by principles.

 Trump's first foreign policy speech

Worse still were the internal contradictions. Our allies do not trust us, but we are going to be unpredictable. We are not respected, but we are going to hit up allies to pay more to support NATO. Having declared he wants to ban Muslims from the United States, he now vows to be working very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence. (Will we have to meet at a neutral site?) He says everything President Obama has done must be changed, but he essentially restates our failed Russian reset policy. (I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia  from a position of strength  is possible. Common sense says this cycle of hostility must end.  Some say the Russians wont be reasonable. I intend to find out.)

And then there was the paranoia and explicit adoption of Charles Lindberghs America First policy, code words for neutrality against the Nazis and abandonment of our allies. His desire to retreat from the world, from modernity itself, was summed up in this proclamation: We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism. Surrender? It sounds like Germany in the 1930s grieving over betrayal by the victorious powers in World War I.

His devotion to protectionism appears to be as sincere as it is wrongheaded. Our manufacturing trade deficit with the world is now approaching $1 trillion a year. Were rebuilding other countries while weakening our own, he said, not acknowledging that the trade deficit has little to nothing to do with the theft of American jobs.

He did have a few moments of clarity. President Obama has not been a friend to Israel. He has treated Iran with tender love and care and made it a great power in the Middle East  all at the expense of Israel, our other allies in the region and, critically, the United States, he said. Weve picked fights with our oldest friends, and now theyre starting to look elsewhere for help. Those moments, unfortunately, were far and few between.

In pictures: US Elections 2016 Show all 15 1 /15 In pictures: US Elections 2016 In pictures: US Elections 2016 Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks to supporters after rival candidate Hillary Clinton was projected as the winner in the Nevada Democratic caucuses Reuters In pictures: US Elections 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton takes photos with workers at her campaign office in Des Moines, Iowa AP In pictures: US Elections 2016 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, second from left, prays before lunch with supporters at Drake Diner in Des Moines, Iowa Reuters In pictures: US Elections 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Maryland Governor. Martin O'Malley, speaks during a campaign stop in Waterloo, Iowa AP In pictures: US Elections 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks, as his wife Jane OMeara Sanders looks on, at a campaign event at Iowa State University Getty In pictures: US Elections 2016 Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio speaks at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa Reuters In pictures: US Elections 2016 Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson speaks at a campaign event at Fireside Pub and Steak House in Manchester, Iowa. Getty In pictures: US Elections 2016 Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum visiting supporters at a house party in West Des Moines, Iowa Reuters In pictures: US Elections 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa AP In pictures: US Elections 2016 Republican candidate Ted Cruz campaigns at Greene County Community Centre in Jefferson, Iowa AP In pictures: US Elections 2016 Senator Rand Paul speaks during a Caucus rally at his Des Moines headquarters in Iowa Getty In pictures: US Elections 2016 Republican candidate Jeb Bush speaks at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa AFP In pictures: US Elections 2016 Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin introducing the arrival of Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Reuters In pictures: US Elections 2016 A portrait of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders at his campaign headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa Getty In pictures: US Elections 2016 Campaign badges on sale ahead of a Trump rally at the Ramada Waterloo Hotel and Convention Centre in Waterloo, Iowa Getty

In a series of tweets, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) observed, Trump speech is pathetic in terms of understanding the role America plays in the world, how to win War on Terror, and threats we face. . . . Trumps [foreign policy] speech [was] not conservative. Its isolationism surrounded by disconnected thought, demonstrates lack of understanding threats we face. You cannot improve on that summation.

Trumps toxic brew of protectionism and isolationism is straight from the history books, unfortunately from the chapters when frightened democracies tried to retreat, only to worsen their own economic recession and give evil aggressors room to accomplish their aims. The speech  and utter lack of minimally coherent ideas for addressing serious threats  should remind conservatives why Trump cannot be their choice. If their party for a century and a half falls under the spell of Trumpism, they will need to pick up and look elsewhere for a nominee. And yes, Trump is a lot worse than Hillary Clinton.

Copyright: The Washington Post
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John Caldwell Calhoun was a statesman and political theorist. He was also a outspoken supporter of slavery.

So the decision by the Yale University to retain a college named after its former student has sparked no small amount of controversy. The campus at New Haven, Connecticut, has seen a number of demonstrations by students who believe the university should rename Calhoun College to something more appropriate.

However, Yale President Peter Salovey announced on Wednesday that it is to retain the name of Calhoun College, one of 12 undergraduate residential colleges, to encourage the campus community to confront the history of slavery, and to teach that history and its legacy.

(Wikipedia (Wikipedia)

According to the Associated Press, he also announced that the universitys two new undergraduate residential colleges, slated to open in 2017, will be named for American leaders Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin, and that Yale will change the title of master to head of college in all of the residential colleges.

We are a university whose motto is light and truth. Our core mission is to educate and discover. These ideals guided our decisions. Through teaching and learning about the most troubling aspects of our past, our community will be better prepared to challenge their legacies, Mr Salovey said.

More than a decision about a name, we must focus on understanding the past and present, and preparing our students for the future.

Controversy has surrounded the name of Calhoun College for decades, but it received new attention last autumn as students on campuses around the country called for universities to address the legacies of historical figures, such as Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey.

Three portraits of Calhoun, a US vice president and senator from South Carolina, were taken down from the walls of the residential college. The Yale Corporation, the university's governing body, had been gathering input from students on names it might consider for Calhoun College and the two new residential colleges.

On Wednesday night, the Black Student Alliance at Yale issued a statement calling the naming of Murray College and the abandonment of the master title long-overdue first steps towards creating a better and more inclusive Yale. They said that keep the name Calhoun was a regression.

At this moment, Yale actively recommitted itself to honoring the legacy of one of Americas foremost proponents of slavery, instead of taking full advantage of the opportunity brought before them to celebrate the contributions that people of colour bring to this university, it said.
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Two Brits are among those thought to be executed in Indonesia by firing squad within weeks  a year after the country caused international outrage after killing eight men.

Foreigners on death row in Indonesia fear that the execution of their sentences could be just weeks away, The Guardian reports.

Last April, the country was widely condemned after a group of prisoners was executed after midnight on Nusakambangan Island  including Australian men Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, Brazilian Rodrigo Gularte, Nigerian men Martin Anderson, Sylvester Nwolise, Okwudili Oyatanze and Raheem Salami, and Indonesian Zainal Badarudin.

Officials said the prisoners were to be given the choice to stand, kneel or sit before the firing squad, and to be blindfolded. Their hands and feet were to be tied.

Another round of executions has been on hold since then.

Bali Nine pair executed Show all 22 1 /22 Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed People attend a vigil for the prisoners to be executed in Indonesia at Martin Place on April 28 Getty Images Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Crosses for condemned drug convicts (from L-R) Australians Andrew Chan (L) and Myuran Sukumaran (C), and Nigerian Okwudili Oyatanze AFP/Getty Images Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Brintha Sukumaran, a sister of Australian death row prisoner Myuran Sukumaran's screams as she arrives to see him for a final time Getty Images Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Brintha Sukumaran, the sister of Myuran Sukumaran, cries during her final visit to see him in prison on 28 April AP Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Michael Chan, brother of Australian drug convict and death row prisoner Andrew Chan, arrives at Nusakambangan island on 28 April AFP/Getty Images Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed The back of a painting by Australian death-row prisoner Myuran Sukumaran is shown, signed by the eight other condemned people EPA Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed A lawyer carries a painting by Myuran Sukumaran at Wijayapura port in Cilacap on 28 April Getty Images Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed A woman places a tribute on a flower wall that reads '#keephopealive' as part of an Amnesty international vigil for the pair Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed People at a vigil in Sydney on 27 April against the execution of Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran Amnesty International/Sitthixay Ditthavong. Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Activists hold a banner during a protest in front of the Indonesian embassy in Manila on April 27, 2015 AFP/Getty Images Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed The lawyer for Australian death row inmates Myuran Sukumaran carries a painting after visiting Indonesia's Nusakambangan island on April 26 AFP/Getty Images Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed A lawyer carries a self-portrait drawn by Myuran Sukumaran after visiting the prison island of Nusakambangan on 27 April AP Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Workers load coffins into a lorry ahead of the execution of nine prisoners in Indonesia Getty Images Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Indonesian soldiers stand as guard at Wijayapura port near the prison island of Nusa Kambangan on Monday Reuters Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Chintu Sukumaran (L), brother of Myuran Sukumaran, stands next to Michael Chan, brother of Andrew Chan in Indonesia on 26 April, 2015 Reuters Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Raji Sukumaran (R) and Brintha Sukumaran (L) family members of death-row prisoner Myuran Sukumaran cries as they talks to media after visiting Myuran at Kerobokan Prison in Bali, Indonesia EPA/MADE NAGI Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Indonesian police stand guard as the Bali Nine duo Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran arrive at Wijaya Pura Port where they will be transferred to Nusa Kambangan prison ahead of their execution in Cilacap, Central Java, Indonesia Getty Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Halen Chan, the mother of death-row prisoner Andrew Chan, wipes away tears during a press conference in Jakarta, Indonesia EPA/MAST IRHAM Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Andrew Chan, right, and Myuran Sukumaran, centre, talking to their lawyer EPA Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, the two members of the Bali nine who could be executed within days, appear at court in 2006 Jason Childs/Getty Images Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Two Australian drug traffickers Andrew Chan (L) and Myuran Sukumaran (R) were sentenced as the ringleaders of the "Bali Nine" drug ring in 2006 JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images Bali Nine pair executed Bali Nine pair due to be executed Myuran Sukumaran is due to be executed EPA

But Brits Lindsay Sandiford, from Teeside, and Gareth Cashmore, from Yorkshire, are among those now facing death after being convicted of drug smuggling.

No official date or list of the prisoners facing death by firing squad has yet been released by Indonesia.

I still dont want to believe it, lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis  who last year was fighting to save Chan and Sukumaran  told The Guardian.

Yes, there will probably be a statement, but in the end I dont think there will be any executions. I refuse to believe it.

According to Amnesty International, 27 people were executed in Indonesia between 1999 and 2014, with no executions carried out between 2009 and 2012.

The organisation has said there were at least 121 people on death row as of April 2015, including 54 people convicted of drug-related crimes, two on terrorism charges and 65 convicted of murder.
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The Islamnisation of Hungary has been banned by its Prime Minister.

Speaking in parliament on Monday to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Hungarys new constitution, Viktor Orban said the documents primary aim was to secure Hungarian language and culture.

The premier said the constitution meant the Hungarian government had to oppose any kind of mass migration that would imperil those principles.

He said: We have the right to choose whom we wish to live together with and whom we do not wish to live together with.

To be clear and unequivocal, I can say that Islamisation is constitutionally banned in Hungary.

How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Show all 15 1 /15 How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Refugees protest as Hungarian riot police fires tear gas and water cannon on the Serbian side of the border, near Roszke How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border A refugee throws a bottle of water towards Hungarian riot police after they used water cannon to push back refugees at the Hungarian border with Serbia near the town of Horgos How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Refugees protest as Hungarian riot police fires tear gas and water cannon at the border crossing with Serbia in Roszke How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Hungarian armoured personnel carriers are deployed at the border crossing with Serbia in Roszke How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Hungarian riot policemen are deployed at the border crossing with Serbia in Roszke How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Hungarian police spray water cannon on migrants at the "Horgos 2" border crossing into Hungary, Serbia How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border A refugee reacts after Hungarian riot police use water cannon to push back refugees at the Hungarian border with Serbia near the town of Horgos How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border A refugee gestures as Hungarian riot police use water cannon to push back refugees at the Hungarian border with Serbia near the town of Horgos How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border A refugee throws a stone towards Hungarian riot police after they used water cannon and pepper spray to push back refugees at the Hungarian border with Serbia near the town of Horgos How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Refugees protest as Hungarian riot police fires tear gas and water cannon on the Serbian side of the border, near Roszke How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Migrants shout slogans as they stand in front of a barrier at the border with Hungary near the village of Horgos, Serbia How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Hungarian riot policemen run as they are deployed at the border crossing with Serbia in Roszke Reuters How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Hungarian riot policemen are deployed at the border crossing with Serbia in Roszke Reuters How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Refugees stand in front of a barrier at the border with Hungary near the village of Horgos, Serbia Reuters How Hungary welcomes its refugees - in pictures Serbia-Hungary border Refugees wait at the Horgos 2 border crossing EPA

It is reasonable to expect illegal immigrants to be sent back without delay to safe transit countries or to their countries of origin if the latter are safe.

A razor-wire fence was built by Hungary along its border with Serbia last year to stop migrants from entering its borders to pass through to other European countries.

It is planning to hold a referendum on the EU-quota of migrants, with the question: Do you want the EU to prescribe the mandatory relocation of non-Hungarian citizens to Hungary without the approval of the Hungarian parliament?
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Lego has apologised to Ai Weiwei saying it made mistake in rejecting a bulk order of its bricks on behalf of the Chinese artist last year.

The Danish toy companys vice-chairman, Kirk Kristiansen, told The Wall Street Journal the internal error had been made due to a misinterpretation of Legos policy on political neutrality.

In September, Lego refused to carry out an order for Mr Ai as his proposed use of the bricks was deemed to be too politically motivated.

Following the refusal, Mr Ai posted the companys rejection letter on Instagram alongside a photo of a toilet filled with toy bricks. In the post he called Legos refusal to sell the bricks an act of censorship and discrimination.

Mr Ai, known for his criticism of the Chinese government, also accused Lego of not wanting to upset business interests in China.

The decision prompted a public backlash leading to supporters around the world offering to donate toy bricks to the leading contemporary artist.

Mr Ai set up Lego collection points in various cities and was inundated with the toy bricks. He later used the offered bricks in a series of art works commenting on freedom of speech and political art  key themes running through his work.

Mr Kristiansen said the decision to refuse the order had been made very low in the organisation and Logos board had not been involved at the time .

Donated Lego pieces lie on the front seat of a BMW car being used as a collection point for Lego donations for Chinese artist Ai Weiwei next to Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin (Getty)

Thomas Kristiansen, son and successor of Mr Kristiansen, said: It is a typical example of what can go wrong in a big company.

Weiwei told The Wall Street Journal he welcomed Legos U-turn, but said they recognised it a bit too late.

In January, Lego stopped asking customers buying in bulk what their intentions were with the bricks, instead asking buyers to make clear the group does not endorse works exhibited to the public.

At the time Mr Ai told the BBC Legos decision was a small victory for freedom of speech.
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Isis has turned to running car dealerships and fish farms to offset their diminishing oil income, Iraqi authorities have said.

A report by Iraqs central court of investigation in Baghdad said the terror group is increasingly using non-traditional means to pay their fighters and finance their activities as they are pushed out of the territory they once held.

Security experts once estimated that Isis annual income was around $2.9bn (1.98bn) when they declared their caliphate in 2014.

At their height, the militants controlled one third of Iraqs territory - including the second city Mosul - as well as large swathes of Syria, and received much of their income from oil and gas installations.

But repeated air strikes by Russia and a US-led coalition have damaged their financial infrastructure by pushing the group back and reducing their ability to extract, refine and transport oil.

Last week US President Barack Obama said he was confident Isis would be pushed out of Mosul by the end of the year.

To make up for its losses, Isis is now looking at new ways to make money and has turned back to ventures such as farming that it had previously relied on before they seized territory, Reuters reports.

Isis al-Qaeda affiliated predecessor used fish farms to finance their operations as early as 2007 but the revenue source was only discovered by US authorities earlier this year.

Isis once controlled a third of all Iraqi territory

The report by Judge Jabbar Abid al-Huchaimi said: "The terrorists' current financing mechanism has changed from what it was before the announcement of the caliphate nearly two years ago.

"Recently there has been reliance on agricultural lands in areas outside the control of the (Iraqi) security forces through taxes imposed on farmers."

Fishing lakes north of Baghdad have become a vital source of revenue to the group - generating millions of dollars every month - as some farmers either abandon their lands or agree to co-operate with Isis to avoid attack.

"Daesh (Isis) treats its northern Baghdad province as a financial center; it is its primary source of financing in the capital in particular," the report added.

In pictures: The rise of Isis Show all 74 1 /74 In pictures: The rise of Isis In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Fighters of the Islamic State wave the group's flag from a damaged display of a government fighter jet following the battle for the Tabqa air base, in Raqqa, Syria AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Fighters from Islamic State group sit on their tank during a parade in Raqqa, Syria AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Fighters from the Islamic State group pray at the Tabqa air base after capturing it from the Syrian government in Raqqa, Syria AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Fighters from extremist Islamic State group parade in Raqqa, Syria AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis kidnapping A video uploaded to social networks shows men in underwear being marched barefoot along a desert road before being allegedly executed by Isis Getty Images In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis kidnapping Haruna Yukawa after his capture by Isis In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis kidnapping Khalinda Sharaf Ajour, a Yazidi, says two of her daughters were captured by Isis militants Washington Post In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Spokesperson for Isis Vice News via Youtube In pictures: The rise of Isis A pro-Isis leaflet A pro-Isis leaflet handed out on Oxford Street In London Ghaffar Hussain In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters Isis Jihadists burn their passports In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis controls Syrian Aid A man collecting aid administered by Isis in Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis controls Syrian Aid A woman collecting aid administered by Isis in Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis controls Syrian Aid Local civilians queue for aid administered by Isis. Since it declared a caliphate the group has increasingly been delivering services such as healthcare, and distributing aid and free fuel In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces detain men suspected of being militants of the Isis group in Diyala province In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Mourners carry the coffin of a Shi'ite volunteer from the brigades of peace, who joined the Iraqi army and was killed during clashes with militants of the Isis group in Samarra, during his funeral in Najaf In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees An Iraqi Shiite Turkmen family fleeing the violence in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar, west of Mosul, arrives at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Arbil, in Iraq's Kurdistan region In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi A photograph made from a video by the jihadist affiliated group Furqan Media via their twitter account allegedly showing Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivering a sermon during Friday prayers at a mosque in Mosul. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared an Islamist caliphate in the territory under the group's control in Iraq and Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Islamic extremists destroying mosques in Iraq Shiite's Al-Qubba Husseiniya mosque explodes in Mosul In pictures: The rise of Isis Islamic extremists destroying mosques in Iraq Smoke and debris go up in the air as Shiite's Al-Qubba Husseiniya mosque explodes in Mosul. Images posted online show that Islamic extremists have destroyed at least 10 ancient shrines and Shiite mosques in territory - the city of Mosul and the town of Tal Afar - they have seized in northern Iraq in recent weeks In pictures: The rise of Isis Islamic extremists destroying mosques in Iraq A bulldozer destroys Sunni's Ahmed al-Rifai shrine and tomb in Mahlabiya district outside of Tal Afar In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces celebrate after clashes with followers of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi, in front of his home in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces arrest a follower of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi after clashes with his followers in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces arrest a follower of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi at his home after clashes with his followers in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces arrest a follower of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi after clashes with his followers in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis A vehicle burns in front of a home of a follower of Shiite cleric Mahmoud al-Sarkhi after clashes with his followers in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees An Iraqi woman holds her exhausted son as over 1000 Iraqis who have fled fighting in and around the city of Mosul and Tal Afar wait at a Kurdish checkpoint in the hopes of entering a temporary displacement camp in Khazair In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees Displaced Iraqi women hold pots as they queue to receive food during the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, at an encampment for displaced Iraqis who fled from Mosul and other towns, in the Khazer area outside Irbil, north Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria A militant Islamist fighter waving a flag, cheers as he takes part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa. The fighters held the parade to celebrate their declaration of an Islamic "caliphate" after the group captured territory in neighbouring Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Isis fighters wave flags as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa province Reuters In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Isis fighters travel in a vehicle as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa province In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Fighters from the Isis group during a parade with a missile in Raqqa, Syria. Militants from an al-Qaida splinter group held a military parade in their stronghold in northeastern Syria, displaying U.S.-made Humvees, heavy machine guns, and missiles captured from the Iraqi army for the first time since taking over large parts of the Iraq-Syria border In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Isis fighters during a parade in Raqqa, Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Fighters from the Isis group during a parade in Raqqa, Syria. Militants from the splinter group held a military parade in their stronghold in northeastern Syria, displaying U.S.-made Humvees, heavy machine guns, and missiles captured from the Iraqi army for the first time since taking over large parts of the Iraq-Syria border In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Isis fighters hold a military parade in their stronghold in northeastern Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria Isis fighters during a parade in Raqqa, Syria In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Syria A member loyal to the Isis waves an Isis flag in Raqqa In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi anti-government gunmen from Sunni tribes in the western Anbar province march during a protest in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The United Nations warned that Iraq is at a "crossroads" and appealed for restraint, as a bloody four-day wave of violence killed 195 people. The violence is the deadliest so far linked to demonstrations that broke out in Sunni areas of the Shiite-majority country more than four months ago, raising fears of a return to all-out sectarian conflict In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi security forces hold up a flag of the Isis group they captured during an operation to regain control of Dallah Abbas north of Baqouba, the capital of Iraq's Diyala province, 35 miles (60 kilometers) northeast of Baghdad In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Iraq Isis fighters parade in the northern city of Mosul In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Volunteers, who have joined the Iraqi army to fight against the predominantly Sunni militants from the radical Isis group, demonstrate their skills during a graduation ceremony after completing their field training in Najaf In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Kurdish Peshmerga troops fire a cannon during clashes with militants of the Isis group in Jalawla, Diyala province In pictures: The rise of Isis Lieutenant General Qassem Atta speaks during a press conference Iraqi Prime Minister's security spokesman, Lieutenant General Qassem Atta speaks during a press conference about the latest military development in Iraq, in the capital Baghdad. Iraqi forces pressed a campaign to retake militant-held Tikrit, clashing with jihadist-led Sunni militants nearby and pounding positions inside the city with air strikes in their biggest counter-offensive so far In pictures: The rise of Isis A police station building destroyed by Isis fighters An exterior view of a police station building destroyed by gunmen in Mosul city, northern Iraq. Iraq's new parliament is expected to convene to start the process of setting up a new government, despite deepening political rifts and an ongoing Islamist-led insurgency. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani issued a decree inviting the new House of Representatives to meet and form a new government In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Iraq Smoke billows from an area controlled by the Isis between the Iraqi towns of Naojul and Tuz Khurmatu, both located north of the capital Baghdad, as Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces take part in an operation to repel the Sunni militants In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees An elderly Iraqi woman is helped into a temporary displacement camp for Iraqis caught-up in the fighting in and around the city of Mosul in Khazair In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees An Iraqi Christian woman fleeing the violence in the village of Qaraqush, about 30 kms east of the northern province of Nineveh, cries upon her arrival at a community center in the Kurdish city of Arbil in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraqi refugees An Iraqi woman, who fled with her family from the northern city of Mosul, prays with a copy of the Quran AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Isis fighters in Iraq The body of an Isis militant killed during clashes with Iraqi security forces on the outskirts of the city of Samarra Reuters In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Iraqi civilians inspect the damage at a market after an air strike by the Iraqi army in central Mosul EPA In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Members of the Al-Abbas brigades, who volunteered to protect the Shiite Muslim holy sites in Karbala against Sunni militants fighting the Baghdad government, parade in the streets of the city AP In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis Shia tribesmen gather in Baghdad to take up arms against Sunni insurgents marching on the capital. Thousands have volunteered to bolster defences AFP/Getty In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq crisis A van carrying volunteers joining Iraqi security forces against Jihadist militants. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced the Iraqi government would arm and equip civilians who volunteered to fight AFP/Getty In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Fighters of the Isis group parade in a commandeered Iraqi security forces armored vehicle down a main road at the northern city of Mosul In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq An Islamist fighter, identified as Abu Muthanna al-Yemeni from Britain (R), speaks in this still image taken undated video shot at an unknown location and uploaded to a social media website. Five Islamist fighters identified as Australian and British nationals have called on Muslims to join the wars in Syria and Iraq, in the new video released by the Isis In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Al-Qaida inspired militants stand with captured Iraqi Army Humvee at a checkpoint belonging to Iraqi Army outside Beiji refinery some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Baghdad. The fighting at Beiji comes as Iraq has asked the U.S. for airstrikes targeting the militants from the Isis group. While U.S. President Barack Obama has not fully ruled out the possibility of launching airstrikes, such action is not imminent in part because intelligence agencies have been unable to identify clear targets on the ground, officials said In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants attacked Iraq's main oil refinein Baiji as they pressed an offensive that has seen them capture swathes of territory, a manager and a refinery employee said In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants from the Isis group parading with their weapons in the northern city of Baiji in the in Salaheddin province In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq A smoke rises after an attack by Isis militants on the country's largest oil refinery in Beiji, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of the capital, Baghdad. Iraqi security forces battled insurgents targeting the country's main oil refinery and said they regained partial control of a city near the Syrian border, trying to blunt an offensive by Sunni militants who diplomats fear may have also seized some 100 foreign workers In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants of the Isis group stand next to captured vehicles left behind by Iraqi security forces at an unknown location in the Salaheddin province. For militant groups, the fight over public perception can be even more important than actual combat, turning military losses into propaganda victories and battlefield successes into powerful tools to build support for the cause In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq An injured fighter (C) from the Isis group after a battle with Iraqi soldiers at an undisclosed location near the border between Syria and Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Fighters from the Isis aiming at advancing Iraqi troops at an undisclosed location near the border between Syria and Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Fighters from the Isis group taking position at an undisclosed location near the border between Syria and Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Fighters from the Isis group inspecting vehicles of the Iraqi army after they were seized at an undisclosed location near the border between Syria and Iraq In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq One Iraqi captive, a corporal, is reluctant to say the slogan, and has to be shouted at repeatedly before he obeys Sky News In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Iraqi captives held by the extremists Sky News In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Iraqi captives held by the extremists Sky News In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants of the Isis group force captured Iraqi security forces members to the transport In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants of the Isis group transporting dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members to an unknown location in the Salaheddin province ahead of executing them In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq A major offensive spearheaded by Isis but also involving supporters of executed dictator Saddam Hussein has overrun all of one province and chunks of three others In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Militants of the Isis group executing dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members at an unknown location in the Salaheddin province In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Isis militants taking position at a Iraqi border post on the Syrian-Iraqi border between the Iraqi Nineveh province and the Syrian town of Al-Hasakah In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Isis rebels show their flag after seizing an army post AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Isis militants waving an Islamist flag after the seizure of an Iraqi army checkpoint in Salahuddin Getty Images In pictures: The rise of Isis Iraq Demonstrators chant slogans as they carry al-Qaida flags in front of the provincial government headquarters in Mosul, 225 miles (360 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad. In the week since it captured Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, a Muslim extremist group has tried to win over residents and has stopped short of widely enforcing its strict brand of Islamic law, residents say. Churches remain unharmed and street cleaners are back at work

They are also using money generated from operating car dealerships and formerly government-controlled factories.

The report, based on the testimony of captured Isis fighters, also said the group smuggles the money out of their territory to fund extremism elsewhere by funnelling it to Bayt al-Mal, its finance ministry, which then transfers it first to offices in Erbil and then to Iraqs other provinces.

An upsurge in the number of suicide attacks on security forces and the Shite community in recent months has suggested the group is becoming increasingly desperate.

Experts believe it is an attempt to restart the sectarian war between Shites and Sunnis which raged in the country following the toppling of Saddam Husseins regime in 2003.
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Saudi Arabia is not yet ready to end the world's only ban on women driving cars.

Despite moves towards rights for women under King Abdullah before his death, deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud has said the Saudi community "is not convinced about women driving".

The 30-year-old prince, who has amassed increasing powers since his father King Salman came to the throne, said the topic was not about Islam but about cultural norms.

"Women driving is not a religious issue as much as it is an issue that relates to the community itself that either accepts it or refuses it," he said, according to local media reports.

The defence minister and favourite son of the current king, who is suffering from dementia, has been accused of influencing Saudi policy from the wings since his father came to the throne last January.

The German intelligence agency BND published a memoir which said the prince's concentration of power into his own hands harbours a latent risk that in seeking to establish himself in the line of succession in his fathers lifetime, he may overreach.

10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Show all 10 1 /10 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In October 2014, three lawyers, Dr Abdulrahman al-Subaihi, Bander al-Nogaithan and Abdulrahman al-Rumaih , were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for using Twitter to criticize the Ministry of Justice. AFP/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2015, Yemens Sunni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was forced into exile after a Shia-led insurgency. A Saudi Arabia-led coalition has responded with air strikes in order to reinstate Mr Hadi. It has since been accused of committing war crimes in the country. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Women who supported the Women2Drive campaign, launched in 2011 to challenge the ban on women driving vehicles, faced harassment and intimidation by the authorities. The government warned that women drivers would face arrest. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Members of the Kingdoms Shia minority, most of whom live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, continue to face discrimination that limits their access to government services and employment. Activists have received death sentences or long prison terms for their alleged participation in protests in 2011 and 2012. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses All public gatherings are prohibited under an order issued by the Interior Ministry in 2011. Those defy the ban face arrest, prosecution and imprisonment on charges such as inciting people against the authorities. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2014, the Interior Ministry stated that authorities had deported over 370,000 foreign migrants and that 18,000 others were in detention. Thousands of workers were returned to Somalia and other states where they were at risk of human rights abuses, with large numbers also returned to Yemen, in order to open more jobs to Saudi Arabians. Many migrants reported that prior to their deportation they had been packed into overcrowded makeshift detention facilities where they received little food and water and were abused by guards. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses The Saudi Arabian authorities continue to deny access to independent human rights organisations like Amnesty International, and they have been known to take punitive action, including through the courts, against activists and family members of victims who contact Amnesty. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison for using his liberal blog to criticise Saudi Arabias clerics. He has already received 50 lashes, which have reportedly left him in poor health. Carsten Koall/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Dawood al-Marhoon was arrested aged 17 for participating in an anti-government protest. After refusing to spy on his fellow protestors, he was tortured and forced to sign a blank document that would later contain his confession. At Dawoods trial, the prosecution requested death by crucifixion while refusing him a lawyer. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 aged either 16 or 17 for participating in protests during the Arab spring. His sentence includes beheading and crucifixion. The international community has spoken out against the punishment and has called on Saudi Arabia to stop. He is the nephew of a prominent government dissident. Getty

Prince bin Salman has elsewhere appeared to indicate that he is supportive of increasing women's rights in the Sunni Islam-majority country.

In a previous interview he has said: "We believe women have rights in Islam that they've yet to obtain."

Yet he said most recently that the "community" still thinks allowing women to drive will have negative consequences.

When asked why Saudi Arabia has one of the lowest rates of women in the workforce in the world he said change would "take time".

"[The woman] is not used to working. She needs more time to accustom herself to the idea of work," he told The Economist.

"A large percentage of Saudi women are used to the fact of staying at home. They're not used to being working women.

"It just takes time."

He also said women working would help the country be more productive and deal with population growth issues.

Women in Saudi Arabia cannot open a bank account without their husband's permission or leave the home without a male guardian known as a "mahram".

The Shoura Council in the country, the king's advisory body, recently ruled that female television presenters should not "show off their beauty", while a young woman who was raped while out by herself received more lashes in punishment than one of her attackers.

During his lifetime, previous monarch King Abdullah opened the first coeducational university, named the first female deputy minister and said women can vote and run in municipal polls, despite strong opposition from religious clerics.
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The UN has described the situation in the Syrian city of Aleppo as catastrophic", after dozens of people were killed in a series of air strikes, including in an attack on a hospital.

At least 20 people, including two doctors and three children, were killed when a series of air strikes, which hit a Medecins sans Frontieres-backed hospital and nearby buildings in a rebel-held part of Aleppo overnight on Thursday.

The dead include one of the few paediatricians remaining in the city's opposition-held areas and a dentist, activists said.

Jan Egeland, chairman of the UN humanitarian task force for Syria, said there had been a "catastrophic deterioration in Aleppo over the last 24-48 hours, adding the humanitarian lifeline for much of the countries citizens was at sake.

The stakes are so incredibly high because so many civilian lives are at stake, so many humanitarian health workers and relief workers are being bombed, killed, maimed at the moment that the whole lifeline to millions of people is now also at stake," Mr Egeland told reporters in Geneva after a meeting of major and regional powers in the International Syria Support Group (ISSG).

People inspect the damage at a site hit by airstrikes, in the rebel-held area of Aleppo's Bustan al-Qasr (AP)

The chief Syrian opposition negotiator, Mohammed Alloush, blamed the government of President Bashar Assad for the deadly air strikes on Aleppo.

Mr Alloush, who was one of the leading negotiators of the opposition in the Geneva talks, described the air strikes as one of the latest "war crimes" of Assad's government.

The upsurge in violence comes amid concerns that the 27 February ceasefire has been fraying in the past weeks as casualty figures from the violence mount, particularly in Aleppo and northern Syria.

Air strikes earlier this week also targeted a training centre for the Syrian Civil Defence, killing five of its team in rural Aleppo.

A Civil Defense worker carries a child after airstrikes hit Aleppo (AP)

Since 19 April, nearly 200 people have died, including at least 44 in an air strike on a market place in rebel-held area in northern Idlib province, as well as dozens of civilians in government-held areas from rebel shelling.

The UN envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has said the cessation of hostilities agreed in talks between the Western- and Saudi-backed opposition and envoys from Assad's government, which has the backing of Moscow, "hangs by a thread".

UN relief operations are seeking access to 35 besieged and hard-to-reach areas during May.

In pictures: Syria conflict Show all 40 1 /40 In pictures: Syria conflict In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Syrians carry children amid debris following a air strike by government forces in the northern city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A Syrian man carries a girl on a street covered with dust following a air strike by government forces in the northern city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Syrians react as they stand amid debris following a air strike by government forces in the northern city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A Syrian man carries a girl amid debris following a air strike by government forces in the northern city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis An injured Syrian man walks out from the rubble of a destroyed building following a air strike by government forces in the northern city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A Syrian woman makes her way through debris following a air strike by government forces in the northern city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis People stand on the rubble of collapsed buildings at a site hit by what activists said was a barrel bomb dropped by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, in the Al-Fardous neighbourhood of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Syrian residents stand amid the rubble of destroyed buildings In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A Syrian resident grasps a mattress amid rubble in the al-Firdous neighborhood of the northern city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A view taken from Tel al-Sawadi shows a large explosion allegedly at the Wadi Deif Syrian army base in northwestern Idlib on May 14, 2014, which opposition fighters have been trying to capture for more than a year. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Islamist rebels detonated explosives planted in a tunnel under the army base killing or injuring dozens. AFP In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A bullet-riddled parking sign stands amid debris in a deserted street leading into the old city of Homs In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A general view shows abandoned buildings on a deserted square in the old city of Homs after Syrian government forces regained control of rebel-controlled areas In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A military vehicle that belongs to the Free Syrian Army is seen in Al-Amariya district in Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A mosque is pictured through shattered glass in the old city of Homs, as rebel fighters withdrew from the city centre in line with a negotiated withdrawal deal with the government after having held out under tight siege for nearly two years In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Buses carrying Free Syrian Army fighters leaving Homs. Exhausted and worn out from a year-long siege, hundreds of Syrian rebels left their last remaining bastions in the heart of the central city of Homs under a cease-fire deal with government forces. The exit of some 1,200 fighters and civilians will mark a de facto end of the rebellion in the battered city, which was one of the first places to rise up against President Bashar Assad's rule, earning it the nickname of "capital of the revolution" In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Syrian government forces hold up a portrait of President Bashar al-Assad (L) while others raise the national flag on top of a pole in the old city of Homs In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad run through Aleppo's Bustan al-Qasr crossing after their release by rebels. They were freed as part of a larger deal which saw the last remaining Syrian rebels in central Homs city evacuate their positions and free captives in several locations in northern Syria In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A Syrian woman and two children walk past heavily damaged buildings in the northern city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A man carries a wounded girl following a reported bombardment with explosive-packed "barrel bombs" by Syrian government forces in the al-Mowasalat neighborhood of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A wounded man sits as he is treated at a makeshift hospital following a reported bombardment with explosive-packed "barrel bombs" by Syrian government forces in the al-Sakhour district of the northern city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Debris rises in what Free Syrian Army fighters and Islamic rebels said was an operation to strike Al-Sahaba checkpoint, which is considered a gateway to Al-Dayf valley, and remove forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad in Maarat Al-Nouman, Idlib province In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Men try to put out fire at a site hit by what activists said was an air strike by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the town of Azaz, north of Aleppo, near the border with Turkey In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Civil Defence members try to put out fire In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Survivors react at a site hit by what activists said was an air strike by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the town of Azaz, north of Aleppo, near the border with Turkey In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Residents queue as they wait to receive food aid distributed by the UNRWA at the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, south of Damascus In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Belongings of Syrian rebels inside a chapel at Crac des Chevaliers, the world's best preserved medieval Crusader castle in Syria. The village was destroyed in fighting between the government and rebel forces while the castle, listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, also has been damaged over the past two years In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Hosen Sabah, a 16-year-old student is comforted by his mother at a hospital in Damascus. Nosen was wounded by a mortar outside his school, while 14 other students were killed and over 80 wounded In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A Free Syrian Army fighter works on a locally made launcher before firing it towards forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad in Mork town In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Syrian policemen and citizens inspecting the site of a car bomb at the entrance of Moadhamiyet al-Sham neighborhood in rural Damascus. According to Syria's Arab News Agency (SANA), a car bomb explosion has gone off in the countryside of Damascus and initial information say there are casualties, where a car rigged with explosions was remotely detonated at the entrance of Moadhamiyet al-Sham neighborhood in rural Damascus during engineering units it was trying to dismantled it In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Opposition fighters carrying a rocket launcher during clashes against government forces in the Sheikh Lutfi area, west of the airport in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A Syrian man helps a woman to make her way through debris following reported air strikes by government forces in the Halak neighbourhood in northeastern Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A Syrian man reacts as he carries the body of injured boy following reported air strikes by government forces in the Halak neighbourhood in northeastern Aleppo. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 33 civilians were killed in the attack In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Syrian rescue workers carry the body of a woman following reported air strikes by government forces in the Halak neighbourhood in northeastern Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A Syrian woman walks past the burning wreckage of a car following reported air strikes by government forces in the Halak neighbourhood in northeastern Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A man and two children run to a safer place following reported air strikes by government forces in the Halak neighbourhood in northeastern Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A man holds an injured child after, according to activists, two barrel bombs were thrown by forces loyal to Syria's president Bashar Al-Assad in Hullok neighbourhood of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis An injured man talks on a walkie-talkie after, according to activists, two barrel bombs were thrown by forces loyal to Syria's president Bashar Al-Assad in Hellok neighbourhood of Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis A man walks inside a mosque damaged by, according to activists, a barrel bomb thrown by forces loyal to Syria's president Bashar Al-Assad in Old Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Syrians gather at the site of reported air strikes by government forces in the Halak neighbourhood in northeastern Aleppo In pictures: Syria conflict Syria crisis Rebel fighters carry their weapons as they run to avoid snipers loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the town of Morek in Hama province

Operations have reached 778,175 Syrians this year in besieged or relatively inaccessible areas, however Mr Egeland says: All of that may now be lost if the ... fighting and the violence and bombardment of civilians, health workers, hospitals, relief workers continue."

Additional reporting by agencies
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One of these days Ill actually listen to what Im being told, I chide myself as the first naked couple walks past me, birthday suits nut-brown in the soft light of a Corsican dawn. Thinking about it, the lady from Hippocampe Dive Centre who was about to spirit me to the nearby Cerbical Islands, had mentioned something about diving naturists in a nature reserve, but I only caught the nature reserve bit. A moment later, having passed more unreserved natural bits, and fully clothed in my Englishman-abroad attire, I am rapidly disrobed by Germanic dive master Karin and spooned into a wetsuit to join the awaiting divers in the Zodiac rib. Five minutes later, the air cool and brackish, a dolphin not 20 metres away wheeling in the silky deep, I spot the distant specks of the Cerbical Isles; one of the best spots around Corsica for diving, home to underwater canyons, menacing moray eels, and fat-lipped giant groupers. Im here in Corsicas extreme south to dive, unwind and seek out the softest, sandiest beaches. For years Ive been tempted to come to this mountainous island southeast of the French mainland, but have either been put off by the rumour its astronomically expensive, or the suggestion that Corsicans are not particularly welcoming. I quickly discover Im wrong on both counts.

My base has been La Cuve Apartments, a five-minute walk from Porto Vecchios swaggering harbour on the south-east coast, with its pavement bars and bobbing millionaires yachts. A former wine storage house with Cyclopean-thick walls, my apartment is all Gustavian greys and Scandinavian simplicity, stylish wood furniture, polished cement floors and industrial-chic lighting. The balcony overlooks a salt-marsh nature reserve back-dropped by the Ospedale Mountains. In the dawn light its water reflects the peach sky, gracefully silhouetted by the frames of storks alighting upon boulders. Visitors at this time of year are likely also to be greeted by flamingos.

Flamingos in the salt-marsh nature reserve

But the real drama had been above me on the hill. Punctuated by the spire of St Jean Baptiste Church, the old town citadel of Porto Vecchio, built by the Genoese in the early 16th century, is today a confection of narrow streets spilling with fresh produce, cafes and restaurants piping refreshing mist across checked-cloth tables, and gorgeously classy boutiques and cobbles that predate Bonaparte (who was born in Corsica). Earlier that week, I had sought refuge from the fierce midday sun in the stained-glass serenity of the citadels granite 19th-century St Jean Baptiste church. Later, having wandered the battlements, I took a seat beside an old carousel ride in tiny Place de la Republique and people-watched a cosmo crowd of French mainlanders, sinewy Corsicans and the occasional well-heeled Brit. Much of the citadels charm is in sampling its local cuisine, washed down with a Pietra, the locally brewed beer blended with chestnuts to produce a distinctly nutty taste. Close to St Jean Baptiste Church, U Spuntinu Restaurant served a tantalising array of local cheese such as brocciu (made from whey and goats milk), charcuterie, and traditional courgette beignets with mint.

Come evening, old town Porto Vecchio concocted a vivid atmosphere  dressed-to-the-nines beautiful people, boutiques hawking Panama hats, restaurants clinging to the vertiginous cliff-face dishing up moules mariniere  and all the while the carousel horses silently galloping around Place de la Republique with metronomic frequency. It felt deliciously Italian, while at the same time French though essentially Corsican. Confusing isnt it? You see everybody from the Genoans to the French (and even briefly the British), have taken an interest in shaping the islands history. That said, Corsicans are fiercely Corsican, and in their eyes thats decidedly not French. In a history spanning 4,000 years the Gauls appear as a mere 200 year-old footnote.

As to beaches, Palombaggia, 12km south of Porto Vecchio, was my first encounter with perfection; its sand indulgently fine between my toes, the sea a rich peacock-blue. From a backdrop of Aleppo pine forest, a cow wandered diffidently down the beach towards me. I made a mental note that a week was not going to be long enough here. Come the end of the day, nearby A Chabraca Restaurant fired up delicious pizzas, served to beautiful sunset views and by the friendliest staff.

Palombaggia beach (Shutterstock)

My next destination was to Corsicas oldest town, the cliff-top citadel of medieval Bonifacio, half an hour's drive south of Porto Vecchio. Only 12km from Sardinia (clearly visible), the place is an enchanting warren of Escheresque streets, sun-blasted buildings and mercifully, ice cream parlours at every turn. Viewed from the sea, its buildings look as if theyre an extension of the striated 70m-high cliffs they surge from. I could have taken the punishing climb up the Montee Rastello and Montee St-Roch steps which head into the old town and on through the Genoa Gate for the celebrated view of the Grain de Sable, a limestone sea stack; but now lazily in sync with Corsicas sleepy rhythms, I instead drove up the to the top of the hill, parking by the Mariners Cemetery with its ornate mausoleums glowering seaward.

Bonifacio is abundant with street-side cafes. Stomach rumbling and tempted by its white stone interior and panoramic sea views, I chose U Castille. An entrecote with pepper sauce, Dauphinoise potatoes and glass of house wine cost a reasonable 25. If youre lucky you can bag a table on the balcony, though be prepared to leave your stomach inside, the drop is dramatic to say the least.

To appreciate fully the visual feast of this little town perched upon cliffs its best to see it from the water, and catching an excursion boat from Bonifacio marina to the nearby Lavezzi Isles is the best way to do it. These uninhabited outcrops are quiet off-season, their protected marine waters home to scorpion fish, barracuda and stunning, blood-red gorgonian coral. It was around the Lavezzi Isles Odysseus is said to have come across the cannibalistic Laestrygonians. By dusk, the tightly packed houses of Bonifacio looked like tiny ornaments upon the ragged cliffs, their pastel shades a burnt amber in the setting sun.

Bonifacio (Shutterstock)

The remainder of my week took on a turquoise complexion. Rondinara beach, 22km south of Porto Vecchio toward Bonifacio, was a favourite; its horseshoe-shaped bay threaded with teal and aquamarine, and perfectly sheltered for paddle-boarding and swimming. More cows wandered photogenically across the sand, and there was a restaurant-bar for lunch. Once Id found Rondinara I gave up looking for anything better.

So back to my last day and Im 18m-deep in navy Med, beneath me a canyon disappearing into the murk of the Cerbical Isles. Stacked at polite intervals like planes waiting to land, float giant groupers, as a string of large barracuda swim menacingly past. Karin, my Hippocampe dive master shines her torch upon starfish and recesses in the cliff wall, lighting-up submarine dramas of scuttling shrimp and moon-eyed pink fish. And then like all good things my enchanting dive is over, as is my holiday. A week? Not nearly long enough.

Travel essentials

Richard Waters travelled as a guest of Corsican Places (01489 866 931; corsica.co.uk) which offers holidays to Corsica from 349pp including flights and car hire or transfers.

Hippocampe Dive Centre (hippocampe.de; 00 33 60 999 3633; dives from 51 including equipment).

U Spuntinu Restaurant, Porto Vecchio (00 33 4 95 72 28 33).

U Castille, Bonifacio (00 33 4 95 73 04 99).

visit-corsica.com

Find hotels and resorts in Corsica and book your holiday today!
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Each week we approach three companies to ask for their best offer on a specific break. This week, a trip to Scotland: one city break, one escorted tour and one active escape. Prices are per person, based on two travelling together.

City

122.50

Hoseasons

A two-night break in Hoseasons Glasgow City Apartments, arriving 3 September. The one-bedroom apartment comes with a kitchen and ensuite bathroom. Optional extras include laundry, grocery delivery and continental breakfast. hoseasons.co.uk

Glasgow City Apartments

Tour

590

Rabbies

The six-day Complete Hebrides group tour departs Edinburgh on 6 July. Includes two nights in Stornoway, two nights in North Uist and one night in Barra, all B&B, plus guiding and transport. Highlights include a clifftop walk at the Butt of Lewis, a cruise across the Minch, and a stop at Callanish Stone Circles. rabbies.com

Active

1,295

Wilderness Scotland

A six-night guided wilderness walking holiday in the Orkney Isles, departing 14 May or 24 September. Includes accommodation at the Lynnfield hotel, most meals, return transport from Inverness, and walking guide. Highlights include the Old Man of Hoy sea stack, a Neolithic henge and the Standing Stones of Stenness. wildernessscotland.com
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The first elephants I knew about were fictitious. Every night, as my grandfather tucked me in, I would hear how Vladimir and Evgeny would get stuck in mud holes and tramp around the African forests having adventures. It was how my grandfather, a leading Soviet biologist, instilled in me a love of wildlife.

A few years later, accompanying him on a government trip to Africa, I came face to face with the real thing. Two hours from Nairobi, I saw from my car a small herd congregated around a waterhole.

My grandfather explained that all the adults were female, except for two young males. He named them: Vladimir and Evgeny. As a 14-year-old I couldnt help but be moved by the sight of the young bulls playing and sheltering under their parents. Vladimir and Evgeny were young enough then to still be alive now, and they may well be.

But as all supporters of elephant conservation know, the numbers suggest otherwise. They could be trumpeting around the African bush. But its more likely all that remains of them is an intricately carved trinket on a Chinese mantelpiece.

When I saw that herd aged 14, there were about 1.2 million elephants in Africa. Three quarters of those, including most likely many of the elephants I saw that day, have since been hunted for their tusks  and the rate of slaughter in the last decade has been increasing.

This is why it is so important that the Giants Club inaugural summit  a unique gathering of African heads of state, corporate leaders, philanthropists and scientists dedicated to ending the illegal killing of elephants and safeguarding the landscapes in which they roam  starts tomorrow.

Never before have so many African leaders gathered on African soil with the express aim of addressing the poaching crisis. President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya is hosting and will be joined by fellow Giants Club members President Ali Bongo of Gabon, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and senior representatives of President Ian Khama of Botswana. These four countries are home to more than half of Africas remaining savannah elephants, and three quarters of its forest elephants.

A short timeline of elephant poaching Show all 10 1 /10 A short timeline of elephant poaching A short timeline of elephant poaching 1880s.jpg Robert H. Milligan, New York Public Library A short timeline of elephant poaching 1910.jpg Creative commons A short timeline of elephant poaching 1979.jpg Surreal Name Given, Flickr A short timeline of elephant poaching 1980s.jpg Scotch Macaskill A short timeline of elephant poaching actual elephant forensic.jpg Space for Giants A short timeline of elephant poaching 1990s.jpg Space for Giants A short timeline of elephant poaching 1999.jpg Vidhi Doshi A short timeline of elephant poaching Ivory elephants.jpeg Space for Giants A short timeline of elephant poaching elephantfence.jpg Space for Giants A short timeline of elephant poaching Elephant dust (1)_1.jpeg Space for Giants

Barack Obama is to send a message of support delivered by deputy secretary of state Heather Higginbottom. President John Magufuli of Tanzania is sending high-level delegations. Helen Clark, head of the UN Development Programme, and Ibrahim Thiaw of the UN Environment Programme, will attend, with Jorge Rios of the wildlife and forest crime programme at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

I am delighted that the nation of my birth, Russia, is attending, as is France, whose environment minister will speak at the event. Representatives of global finance and philanthropy include Richard Branson and Jody Allen, president of the Paul G Allen Family Foundation set up with her brother Paul, Microsofts co-founder. African musicians including pop band Sauti Sol will perform at a gala dinner.

One of the pyres set to go up in flames at the ivory burn following the Giants Club Summit

The Giants Club was founded on the conviction that no nation, UN body or NGO can save elephants by acting alone. By bringing together a wide range of like-minded folk with an interest in preserving wildlife for future generations, the club aims to protect 50 per cent of Africas elephants by 2020.

Its an objective I firmly believe in and why Im so proud to be the Giants Clubs patron. The summit will go a long way to helping achieve that objective. As Kenya environment secretary Judi Wakhungu said to me: This is not another talking shop. This is an extraordinary opportunity for us to show the world that we know how to stop poaching.

Elephants may be iconic, intelligent, grand in size and symbolism, but they are also an asset, a crucial ingredient in Africas future prosperity. As Mr Kenyatta wrote in this newspaper recently, the continent depends on its wildlife for tourism and economic stability. Elephants, it must be emphasised, are worth infinitely more alive than dead.

My grandfather always wanted me to be a zoologist. I may not have achieved that, but I still gained from him a love of nature and a lifelong commitment to conservation and wildlife protection. That is why I am delighted that this momentous gathering is taking place. The Giants Club is helping achieve just what he taught me to care about.

To find out more about The Giants Club Summit go to: http://spaceforgiants.org/giantsclub/summit. To donate go to: http://spaceforgiants.org/giantsclub/donate
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It has been known for some time that the British penal system is crumbling, but no picture could be bleaker than that painted by new figures exposing the extent of failure inside our prison system.

As The Independent reveals today, since 2010 the numbers of incidents of deaths during incarceration, sexual assaults in prison, knife attacks and prisoner self-harm have almost doubled  and all have increased sharply in the last 12 months. Prisons in the UK are on the verge of collapse, experts warn, as violence between inmates, abuse and suicide attempts all rise.

There can now be no excuse for failing to face up to difficult truths: when prisons are overcrowded and funding for staff is falling, there is direct harm caused to inmates. According to the Prison Reform Trust, 40 per cent of prisoners are now held in institutions with more than 1,000 places. Since 2000, the ratio of prison officers to prisoners has dropped from 1:2.9 to 1:4.8. No wonder devastating incidents such as suicide attempts or self-harm  the number of attempted hangings has risen from 580 in 2010 to 2,023 in 2015; the number of attempted overdoses over the same period rose from 1,414 to 2,523  are becoming so commonplace. Its not just that these conditions exacerbate the difficulties of life inside for prisoners  many of whom will struggle with mental health conditions  but also that prisons are not sufficiently staffed to support the vulnerable individuals they house.

Some 18 months ago, the Howard League for Penal Reform sounded a warning about rising numbers of prison deaths and incidents of self-harm. Speaking in October 2014, Frances Crook, the chief executive of the think-tank, said that ministers should be held accountable for their decisions, which had resulted in a lethal cocktail of drastic staff cuts gross overcrowding and rising prison numbers which was the cause of prison violence. I have never seen a public service deteriorate so rapidly and so profoundly, she said. And now the situation has worsened.

A prison system in which the prisoner finds themselves at risk of attack is not working, for it is failing in its most basic of duties: to keep prisoners safe.

In his term as Justice Secretary, Michael Gove has proved himself something of a reformer, though much of that has involved carefully undoing the inhumane work of his predecessor Chris Grayling. He has looked at ways to keep low level offenders, particularly those who are struggling with drug and alcohol addictions or have mental health problems, out of jail entirely. He has overturned the books ban for prisoners.

Now he faces his toughest challenge in the job. Surrounded by colleagues that still slaver at the prospect of getting tough on criminals, he must accept the evidence which now clearly demonstrates that prisons are dangerously underfunded.

The purpose of prison is not only to protect the public but, importantly, to rehabilitate. Where staff are under such significant pressure that they cannot prevent suicide attempts or stabbings, the chance to work on improving the life chances of former criminals is also being lost. In times of austerity this pressure can only be released in one way  by sending fewer people to jail. That would be a sensible position from Mr Gove to set out.
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It seems a very long time ago now, but it is only nine weeks since that Sunday afternoon when the inimitable figure of Boris Johnson shambled out of his Islington home to face an excited scrum of reporters. The Mayor of London, MP for Uxbridge, and possible Prime Minister in waiting, had finally decided which side he was going to plump for in the Europe referendum.

In a characteristically elegant statement, he announced that, after much deliberation, he was throwing in his lot with the Leave campaign. Less characteristically, he retreated into his house without taking questions.

The political frenzy was immediate. A majority for Leave suddenly looked a whole lot more plausible. Brexit had to be treated as a realistic possibility. And when the markets opened the next morning, Sterling fell - such was the influence this one mans decision was deemed likely to exert on the campaign.

One of the few first-name only politicians, it was envisaged, would be out there deploying all his personal charm, wit and persuasive power to argue that the UK should leave. In Michael Gove, the stolid line-up of Cabinet Brexiteers already had its heavyweight thinker; suddenly it also had its star.

 Boris on Obama

Nine weeks on from that dour winter Sunday, however, things look rather different. And the thought occurs: was the Boris effect exaggerated? More to the point: could Boris have blown it?

Until a few weeks ago, Boriss life had seemed charmed, and his continued rise as inevitable as it was effortless. He was a journalist-turned-politician with an imperviousness to scandal reminiscent of Bill Clintons. As a leading Brexiteer, however, he has seemed unusually ill at ease, and his weeks so far on the campaign trail have been chequered.

His difficulties began with the speculation that he had chosen Leave, not because he really believed in the cause, but to further his own ambitions. His agonising, it was suggested, came not from trying to weigh the benefits to the country of EU membership, but from trying to second-guess the result to maximise his own advantage. He was seen to be gambling on Brexit as a route to succeeding David Cameron as Conservative leader and Prime Minister.

Now it may be that Boris Johnsons support for Leave is, as he insists, based solely on the merits of the case. But one reason why the speculation about ulterior motives commands credence is that the mayors cosmopolitan background and the way he has boasted of Londons diversity around the world seem at odds with the Little Englander arguments of Brexit.

To an extent, then, his campaign started off on the wrong foot. Very soon, however, it ran into more difficulty. Almost for the first time in his gilded political existence, Boris has found himself having to mix it with the really big boys. In the past his popular appeal was seen as an asset both by his party and by the Prime Minister, which afforded him considerable freedom to be Boris. As of 21 February, this was no longer true.

David Cameron was the first to take the gloves off, savaging the London mayors decision in an unusually personal - and effective - way. A month later, Boris found himself subject to a grilling on his EU stance from the Treasury select committee. His usual weapons - bluster and humour - were of scant use against the incisiveness of Andrew Tyrie.

If that session cast doubt on the soundness of Boris Johnsons knowledge and discernment about Europe - despite an upbringing spent in part in Brussels and a later stint as a reporter there - his campaign has so far raised, and perhaps helped to answer, two further questions.

The first is how well does Boris play outside the melting-pot of London and the prosperous South-east? The answer, if his recent whistle-stop northern tour is a guide, is not very well. Now it may be that the Remain campaign is dispatching agents to hound Boris wherever he may be, but in Newcastle and Leeds he faced heckling. And while you might have expected so confident and witty a politician to use such opposition to his advantage, instead he seemed at a loss.

The other concerns his suitability for the really top job. For years, Boris has won over audiences at home and abroad by mixing and matching two or more of the following: bravado, self-deprecation, buffoonishness, genuine cleverness, a first-rate Classical education, excellent French and the sort of social confidence that Eton and Oxford confer.

To give the President of the United States the same semi-serious treatment as an Oxbridge chum, however, reflects judgement that was at very least flawed. It was not just the part-Kenyan jibe contained in his article in The Sun before Barack Obama arrived in the UK, but the pursuit of the non-conversation, as though he and the US President were international equals.

You could argue, of course, that all politicians make mistakes and are all the better for the lessons learned. But Boris is 51; he has served two terms as Mayor of London. He is pretty close to being a fully-fledged UK politician. This was quite some tone-deafness from someone with so much experience.

Of course, it is still early in what is, for the UK, a long campaign. Boris is nothing if not a competitor and he has the best part of two months to become the force that David Cameron and the Remainers clearly feared.

It if he does not, though, what then? It was always true that a Remain victory was going to stall, if not end, Boriss career in politics. In backing Brexit, he chose that risk. After a problematic few weeks, however, it is not obvious that even a win for Brexit would further his ambitions in the way he surely hoped. Far from demonstrating his strengths as a politician, what is turning out to be a thoroughly grown-up EU referendum campaign has so far done more to expose his weakness - and, ultimately, his unsuitability for the highest office.
Melissa Hosna, branch manager at US Bank in Leadington, has been named the Park Hills-Leadington Chamber of Commerces First Quarter Acclaimed Ambassador for 2016.

The announcement was made during the chambers monthly investor meeting on April 19 so that Hosna could be honored with special recognition and awarded a certificate and huge bag of goodies compliments of ambassador program sponsors.

Melissa has worked her tail off to claim this quarter's title with several other ambassadors right behind her, said Tammi Coleman, the chambers executive director.

Chamber ambassadors are recruited annually to help promote and assist the chamber in the community and at chamber events and meetings. Ambassadors earn points for attending events and meetings, recruiting and mentoring new investors and providing the chamber board and directors with assistance in other duties as needed.

We can't thank Melissa enough for her dedication and enthusiasm for helping our chamber, said Coleman. Investors like her help make us succeed.

The mission of the Park Hills-Leadington Chamber of Commerce Ambassador Program is to promote member commitment and retention by raising awareness of chamber activities and benefits; to inform and encourage involvement of new members to promote a strong chamber; to encourage meaningful and beneficial participation in the chambers programs; and to serve as a liaison for the chamber and its membership.

If anyone is interested in being an ambassador its a great way to get your face and name out to the public, said Rita Martin, chairperson of the chambers ambassador program. Its a great networking opportunity.

Coleman also wanted to give special thanks to the chambers ambassador sponsors for supporting the program and providing our much deserving champions with some incredible gifts.

Continental Title Company, Culligan Soft Water, C.Z. Boyer & Son Funeral Homes, First Bank-Park Hills Branch, Habitat for Humanity, Hefner Furniture & Appliance, Isagenix, Parkland Health Center, Pharmax Pharmacy-Leadington, The Coffee Grill and The Printing Company all serve as chamber ambassador sponsors.

This is a highly sought after award because the ambassadors work hard to promote the chamber, said Martin. Were very excited to be able to have something cool for them to win for all the points theyve been working for.

To find out more about the ambassador program or the Park Hills-Leadington Chamber of Commerce, visit their website at www.phlcoc.net.
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Whilst I wholeheartedly believe that comments/posts attributed to Naz Shah were foolish and distasteful, I do worry that we are inching inexorably to a point where any criticism of Israel, however measured, or valid will be held up to be anti-Semitic. This cannot be a good thing for Israel, the Middle East and the world at large.

Girdwood Anderson

Aberdeen

Theres no doubt anti-Semitism exists in the modern world against both Muslims and Jews. This is both horrible and wrong. My question is why is accusing someone of this crime is regularly used to silence any opposition when support of Palestine is expressed? It is almost impossible to state an opinion about what happens in Gaza and the West Bank these days without being tarred with this particular brush and, if in government, often being forced to retract and resign.

It would be helpful if the Government could produce guidelines about what it is permitted to say out loud on the subject of Palestine, what is forbidden, and how we may say it correctly without giving offence.

Jennifer Bell

Devon

In her full and no doubt sincere apology to the House of Commons, the Bradford West MP Naz Shah said she understood that the words I used caused upset and hurt to the Jewish Community. Equally regrettable is her inability to understand that there are many non-Jews, including Muslims, who were also offended by her comments. All prejudice, the dislike of the unlike should be offensive to us all.

Donald Zec

London

Junior doctors strike

If a junior doctor's too tired

To carry out what is required

For a patient's well-being

I can't help agreeing

That Jeremy Hunt should be fired.

David Shaw-Parker

Jeremy Hunts justification for his actions in the NHS dispute is that 'no trade union has the right to veto a manifesto promise voted for by the British people'. According to the Associate Editor of the Conservative Home website, more than 75 per cent of the electorate did not vote for this, as only 24.3 per cent of the electorate voted Conservative at the last election. Even if Hunt were to argue that Health is a devolved matter in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, he could only truly claim the support of 27 per cent of the English electorate.

Mike Graham

Cumbria

Caring for learning disabilities

It is estimated that in England 1,191,000 people have a learning disability and the population of people with learning disabilities will grow. Even with welcome scientific discoveries [Inherited Learning Disability Could One Day Be Treated With a Pill Independent 28.4.16] the demographics of people with a learning disability are changing, and our services must be able to adapt.

In the future, the learning disabilities sector will have to prepare for an older population of adults with learning disabilities, and more cultural variation among service users and their needs. It is predicted that around 25 per cent of new entrants to adult social care with learning disabilities will belong to minority ethnic communities; and by 2030 the number of adults aged 70+ using social care services for people with learning disabilities will more than double.

It is, therefore, essential that funding for local authority commissioned social care for adults with learning disabilities is more sustainable. Measures need to be put in place to protect care services in the community from unnecessary closure. Furthermore, we need to drive up the quality of care and opportunities for adults with learning disabilities living in social care settings, embedded in communities.

Professor Martin Green OBE

Chief Executive, Care England

London
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Just like his adventure in Yemen, Saudi Arabias young Deputy Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman got it all wrong this week. Its not Saudi Arabia which suffers from oil addiction, its we who are addicted. The unique Saudi drug  a cocktail of wealth, arrogance and infantile Puritanism  is far more dangerous, since it depends on the arithmetic (or myth) of its 716 billion barrels of oil reserves.

If this statistic is as ill-conceived as the Sunni Saudi war on Yemens Shiite Houthis, along with its massive civilian casualties, then Prince Mohameds reforms  oiled (if thats the right word) by a $2 trillion public investment fund which would take over ownership of the state oil company Aramco  will have to kick in long before the deadline of his Vision 2030.

For years, oil analysts have suggested that Saudi reserves are nothing like the kingdom claims them to be  a suggestion which became far more disturbing when Wikileaks disclosed last year that the US embassy in Riyadh had warned Washington that Saudi reserves could be 40 per cent less than we were led to believe.

The source was Sadad al-Husseini, the former head of exploration at Aramco. He later angrily explained that hed been misrepresented by the American diplomats whose note, already at least six years old, contained many patently inaccurate statements. But back in 2004, oil analysts such as banker Matthew Simmons, after studying 200 technical papers on Saudi reserves, were saying that the countrys oil was peaking, its oil fields already damaged by using salt water to maintain pressure.

These rumours were only reinforced by Saudi Arabias refusal to reveal any details of their reserves. Thus, Prince Mohameds promise that a privatisation of Aramco would increase transparency and limit corruption will be viewed with the usual scepticism.

People used to be unhappy that files and data of Aramco are undeclared, he announced. Today they will be transparent. Well, maybe. But like the women who will supposedly have a larger economic role and the expatriates who will have an improved status in the country (though this surely doesnt apply to the armies of Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani labourers in Saudi Arabia), weve heard it all before.

More than 30 years ago, the Sunday Times was taken in by Saudi claims of imminent reforms  inviting foreign journalists to the country to learn of striking changes has long been a Saudi routine  but even then reporters spotted the real problems of Riyadh and other Gulf capitals.

10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Show all 10 1 /10 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In October 2014, three lawyers, Dr Abdulrahman al-Subaihi, Bander al-Nogaithan and Abdulrahman al-Rumaih , were sentenced to up to eight years in prison for using Twitter to criticize the Ministry of Justice. AFP/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2015, Yemens Sunni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was forced into exile after a Shia-led insurgency. A Saudi Arabia-led coalition has responded with air strikes in order to reinstate Mr Hadi. It has since been accused of committing war crimes in the country. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Women who supported the Women2Drive campaign, launched in 2011 to challenge the ban on women driving vehicles, faced harassment and intimidation by the authorities. The government warned that women drivers would face arrest. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Members of the Kingdoms Shia minority, most of whom live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, continue to face discrimination that limits their access to government services and employment. Activists have received death sentences or long prison terms for their alleged participation in protests in 2011 and 2012. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses All public gatherings are prohibited under an order issued by the Interior Ministry in 2011. Those defy the ban face arrest, prosecution and imprisonment on charges such as inciting people against the authorities. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses In March 2014, the Interior Ministry stated that authorities had deported over 370,000 foreign migrants and that 18,000 others were in detention. Thousands of workers were returned to Somalia and other states where they were at risk of human rights abuses, with large numbers also returned to Yemen, in order to open more jobs to Saudi Arabians. Many migrants reported that prior to their deportation they had been packed into overcrowded makeshift detention facilities where they received little food and water and were abused by guards. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses The Saudi Arabian authorities continue to deny access to independent human rights organisations like Amnesty International, and they have been known to take punitive action, including through the courts, against activists and family members of victims who contact Amnesty. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison for using his liberal blog to criticise Saudi Arabias clerics. He has already received 50 lashes, which have reportedly left him in poor health. Carsten Koall/Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Dawood al-Marhoon was arrested aged 17 for participating in an anti-government protest. After refusing to spy on his fellow protestors, he was tortured and forced to sign a blank document that would later contain his confession. At Dawoods trial, the prosecution requested death by crucifixion while refusing him a lawyer. Getty Images 10 examples of Saudi Arabia's human rights abuses Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 aged either 16 or 17 for participating in protests during the Arab spring. His sentence includes beheading and crucifixion. The international community has spoken out against the punishment and has called on Saudi Arabia to stop. He is the nephew of a prominent government dissident. Getty

Martin Woollacott, one of my early heroes in the trade of reporting, wrote in 1981 that what he called welfare stateism in the region was producing a class of people that is losing sight of the relationship between work and reward, that is incipiently anti-foreign It is wide open for an ideology which would purge it of its unease and guilt without materially reducing its privileges. The youth of this alienated middle class and confused, if materially comfortable, working class is already showing signs of going in the most likely direction  toward political Islam.

Woollacott, let us remember, was writing before the Taliban, before al-Qaeda, 20 years before 9/11 and its 15 Saudi hijackers  and 33 years before the emergence of Isis. And this, of course, was what was missing from Prince Mohameds triumphalism this week.

How can we believe in the massive planned changes in the social structures of Saudi Arabia, its emergence as a global investment power, when its monarchy is locked into eternal marriage with the same crude Wahabi faith practiced by the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Isis?

How can we listen to the good Prince saying that we will not allow our country ever to be at the mercy of commodity price volatility or external markets when Saudi Arabia is, in truth, at the mercy of an army of head-chopping, anti-Shiite puritans who support the assault on Yemen (which, with eight other nations in tow but with futile inappropriateness, was code-named Operation Decisive Storm), and regularly express their loathing of Iran, Syria, and many of the Shia Muslims in Lebanon?

In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Show all 7 1 /7 In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions Iranian and Turkish demonstrators hold pictures of Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr as they protest outside the Saudi Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions Kashmiri Shiite Muslims, carrying a placard with the portrait of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, shout slogans during a protest in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world at Saudi executions Indian police used tear smoke and rubber bullets to disperse Shiite Muslims who were protesting after Saudi Arabia announced the execution of Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr on Saturday along with 46 others, including three other Shiite dissidents and a number of al-Qaida militants. In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions Shane Enright, Global Trade Union Advisor for Amnesty International, addresses demonstrators as they protest outside the Saudi Embassy in London, following Saudi Arabia's execution of 47 prisoners in one day, including a top Shiite cleric In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions Iranian protestor burn pictures of a member of the Saudi royal family in front of the Saudi Arabia embassy in Tehran, Iran, 02 January 2016. Protesters have stormed the Saudi embassy building in the Iranian capital of Tehran early Sunday amid backlash over the execution of a prominent Shiite cleric. Flammable substance was seen thrown at the building as protests gained steam over the execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Reports states, protesters taking down a Saudi flag and burned the building. In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions Shiite Muslims hold placards with pictures of Saudi Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, whose execution in Saudi Arabia was announced Saturday, during a demonstration to condemn his execution, Sunday, Jan. 3, 2016 in Peshawar, Pakistan In pictures: Protests around the world over Saudi executions Protests around the world over Saudi executions A Kashmir Shiite Muslim shouts slogan from Indian police vehicle after he was detained during a protest in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir,

No wonder, as the Washington Post revealed this month, the Saudis are spending millions on Washingtons top law, lobby and public relations companies to promote foreign investment in the Saudi economy  some of them, according to the paper, tasked with coming up with content for the [Saudi Washington] embassys official Twitter and YouTube accounts. The PR firm Qorvis, it turned out, also ran the Twitter account for the Syrian Opposition Coalition. Firms like Podesta, BGR Government Affairs, DLA Piper and Pillsbury Winthrop are trying to raise the Kingdoms visibility.

After threats to release the missing  or redacted  pages of the 9/11 report, Barack Obamas snotty criticism of Gulf free riders in his Atlantic magazine interview, and the Clinton-Sanders support for US families who want to sue foreign governments like Saudi Arabia for 9/11, these PR firms have a lot of work to do  and a lot of money to make.

Interestingly, the Podesta Group  with a $140,000 monthly contract with the Centre for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court, was founded by Tony Podesta, a Democratic lobbyist and major contributor to La Clinton herself.

And all this without mentioning that oil still floats away from the Gulf at scarcely $35 a barrel. Or about the unchanging and absolute nature of the Saudi monarchy. Or about Saudi education reform or tax revenue. Or about a Saudi womans right to drive a car. Or about the decapitations that the Saudis still inflict on those who trade in drugs.

But not on those, of course, who suffer from that most dangerous of narcotics: oil addiction.
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The candidate holding his running mates arm aloft, their faces wreathed in smiles, an American flag prominently in view. Its a familiar scene in US presidential races  except that this time it happened not at the convention, but fully two-and-a-half months before Republicans gather in Cleveland to select a nominee.

Senator Ted Cruzs announcement of Carly Fiorina, an erstwhile opponent in the 2016 race, as his potential vice-president bears some similarity to Ronald Reagans choice 40 years earlier of Richard Schweiker, a liberal Republican senator from Pennsylvania (yes they did exist in those days), unveiled several weeks before the convention.

Both moves were, as Mr Cruz acknowledged on Wednesday, unusual. Vice-presidential picks normally come just before the convention  as with Joe Biden and Sarah Palin in 2008  or even during the convention itself, most dramatically in 1960 when John Kennedy picked Lyndon Johnson, the man he had just defeated in the delegate rollcall in Los Angeles.

Running mates on the Republican ticket of 1976, Ronald Reagan and Senator Richard Schweiker, (MSNBC)

But the parallels between 1976 and 2016 are striking. Then as now there was the prospect of an open convention, with a frontrunner who could not quite secure the required majoroty of delegates beforehand  except that Reagans position was somewhat more promising than that of Cruz today.

Reagan went into that convention just 100 delegates behind president Gerald Ford, whereas Cruz deficit is likely to be 400 or more (assuming Donald Trump does not secure the equired outright majority of 1,237 beforehand.) The selection of Schweiker had two clear motives: to prove that the conservative Reagan was able to unify the party, and as a means of persuading Pennsylvanias uncommitted delegates to support him.

But the move was seen as a mix of opportunism and desperation and backfired. Conservatives were furious Reagan had picked a liberal, while few liberals were persuaded to abandon Ford. The incumbent ultimately won the nomination on the first ballot, securing 117 more delegates than his opponent.

Such a fate may await the Cruz-Fiorina tandem. The motives are obvious, and if anything the move smacks even more of desperation than Reagan/Schweiker. Its very timing was an attempt to divert attention from Trumps resounding sweep of five New England and mid-Atlantic states the night before, when Cruz performed dismally.

The strategic reasoning is equally obvious. Trump seems to go out of his way to alienate the female vote: Fiorina, a powerful critic of the business mogul during the early primary debates, will be a physical reminder to voters of Trumpian misogyny. In the event Cruz wins the nomination, she could be an effective counterweight to Hillary Clinton, the all-but-certain Democratic nominee.

Beyond that however, the advantages are hard to see. Will Fiorina tip the scales in her home state of California, whose June 7 primary offers the last and biggest prize  172 delegates  of all? Unlikely, surely, given her crushing defeat at the hands of incumbent Barbara Boxer in a 2010 California Senate race, and her much-criticised record as head of Hewlett-Packard between 1999 and 2005 (the companys stock leapt 7 per cent the day she was fired.) .
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Were you shocked by Naz Shahs outbursts on social media? Were you baffled that an aspiring MP would call to relocate (that is, destroy and deport) Israel to America? Did you baulk, wondering why on earth a self-respecting politician would ask supporters to vote in an online poll because the Jews are rallying?

Dont be. Because Naz Shah, and everything she said, is normal politics in Bradford.

Had Britain a writer as dark and politically incorrect as Michel Houellebecq, the French author of the dystopian novel Submission, in which France converts to Islam, he would, without doubt, set his first novel in Bradford. This would be his dystopian plot.

Along comes a by-election. A dark and unknowable force with a Dickensian name  Mister Galloway  descends on the unsuspecting, segregated, depressed Northern town. Suddenly he is everywhere, the white Scotsman, and the large and miserable Muslim population apparently think that by voting for him  a total outsider  they can change the course of conflict in the Middle East. That one vote, for Mister Galloway for MP, is the revolution itself  one that can start the march to liberate Jerusalem. And, blowing away the crusty, corrupt old Labour party, this man in a fedora convinces a dead, former mill town  utterly, utterly, irrelevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict  that it is as central to the politics of the Middle East as Beirut.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 Britain's former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Conservative MP, Rishi Sunak leaves from an office in central London AFP/Getty 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

But there is no need for a British Houellebecq (sadly, as I would readily volunteer); all this has already come to pass.

George Galloway became Bradford Wests MP in 2012. By the time I started visiting the town in 2015, as a reporter for Jewish magazine Tablet, he had made local politics about Palestine. I contacted all the candidates vying to replace him. Most had photos exhibiting themselves at pro-Palestine rallies. One Labour hopeful responded, rather bizarrely, to my request for an interview with a video of herself speaking at a pro-Palestine rally. Naz Shah herself, whom I contacted over Twitter, stopped responding to me when I explained Tablet was a Jewish publication.

Within months, every local candidate was imitating the man in the fedora. Across town, in the constituency of Bradford East, the Liberal Democrat MP David Ward was using Twitter to question how long the apartheid state of Israel could last, and tweeting that he too would probably fire a rocket if he lived in Gaza. Later, he declared himself #JeSuis #Palestinian in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks on a kosher supermarket, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

 Livingstone stands by comments

Swept up into his absurdistan  as Respect Party double-deckers hooted around Bradford, as teenage Gallowites tweeted like machine guns about "Zionists", Palestine and "#BradfordRising"  Naz Shah voted for the grinning Mister Galloway in 2012.

It appeared to me that she came to loathe him, to resent his perceived manipulation of working class Muslims, to worry about his West London lifestyle, part-funded by his appearances on Russia Today.And it was Naz Shah that beat him in 2015.

But, as her gross social media posts show, the outsider  gone like a bad dream from Bradford the night the ballots came in for Shah  had also shaped her, just like he has shaped all other Bradford politicians.

When it comes to anti-Semitic comments, Shah is not even the worst offender. In 2014, former councillor Istiaq Ahmed, who works at the charity Shah chairs, posted on social media Is Kosher slaughter in the Eternal Jew accurate?  a link to an anti-Semitic propaganda movie originally commissioned by Goebbels. The YouTube channel that hosted it? HitlerMyFuhrer.

The former Lord Mayor of Bradford Khadim Hussain commented on Facebook that Israel was no doubt arming Isis, and shared another Facebook post that complained that the deaths of millions of Africans are not taught in schools but your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler. The list goes on and on.

And when I visited Bradford, a group of passionate Galloway supporters pinned me to a wall, throttled me and punched me in the head, shouting Get out you f***ing Jew. Just par for the course in Bradford.
Undated artist impression issued by Children's Hospital Group of an aerial view of the site of the new state-of-the-art children's hospital in Dublin

Planning chiefs have given the green light for a new state-of-the-art children's hospital in Dublin.

Building of the 650 million euro facilities is expected to start soon on the grounds of St James's Hospital in the south inner city.

The new hospital will bring together Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin, Temple Street Children's University Hospital and the National Children's Hospital at Tallaght.

It is planned to be opened by 2020.

Eilish Hardiman, chief executive of the new hospital, described the decision by An Bord Pleanala to grant permission for the development as "a watershed day for children, young people and their families".

"We are now firmly on our way to making this long-awaited children's hospital a reality," she said.

"Anyone who deals with paediatric services in Ireland - as a patient, a parent or as a member of staff - fully understands how badly this new facility is needed."

As well as the main hospital buildings in central Dublin, there will also be satellite campuses at Blanchardstown and Tallaght.

The long-awaited development of a new national children's hospital has been mired in controversy for years.

Earlier plans to build it at the site of the Mater Hospital in Dublin were rejected by planning chiefs after objections.

Louis Roden, a parent and long-time campaigner for a new children's hospital, said Thursday's decision was a long time coming.

"For many parents, including myself, this hospital is coming too late for their children to benefit from it but nevertheless, I am delighted that we are now moving forward - and in the right direction," he said.

"It is important that everyone now works together as a matter of urgency and gets behind what will be a fantastic facility.

"Most importantly one that is best positioned to deliver the best clinical outcomes for the children of Ireland."

Caretaker Health Minister Leo Varadkar said: "This is fantastic news for all the children of Ireland - it will produce a state-of-the-art hospital of which everyone can be proud."

Bosses at the three existing children's hospitals in the capital described the go-ahead for the new hospital as "historic and exciting".

"Our staff in the three children's hospitals will be working in a world-class, modern hospital that is custom-built to deliver the best care and treatments available," they said in a joint statement.

"Our doctors, nurses and care professionals have had the opportunity to input into the designs and are delighted that what was a vision and plan is now firmly becoming a reality."

The new hospital will include 380 single in-patient rooms, 42 critical care unit beds and an 18-capacity neonatal critical care unit.

Dr James Reilly, the outgoing children's minister, described the decision as a great day for Ireland.

"This is a great day for all the children of all Ireland. It means that we can look forward to world-class treatment for our children in a world-class environment," he said.

He added: "I look forward with confidence to the future of this facility and to the vital service it will provide."
Gardai are to search a house in Dublin

Gardai investigating an allegation about the death of a newborn baby in the 1970s are to search a house in Dublin.

The search warrant was executed at the property in the south of the city on Thursday evening.

Gardai based at Crumlin said the search was anticipated to take two to three weeks.

A Garda spokesman said: "The result of this search will determine the future direction of the investigation."

He said further updates would be provided at the conclusion of the operation.
Kerry co-op suppliers, who still own 14pc of the food giant, are likely to take management to task over a disputed milk bonus at the co-op's AGM tomorrow.

The farmers argue that Kerry have not honoured a promise to pay a "leading" milk price when compared with their neighbours, Carbery co-op in west Cork.

Kerry Group maintains that Carbery is excluded from the price comparison because of its small milk pools and the level of cross-subsidisation taking place.

Kerry Group has led the charge of Irish food companies defying the global downturn in dairy commodities with increased profits.

The food ingredient company, that now employs over 23,000 globally, held its AGM in Tralee yesterday - which is separate to the co-op AGM due tomorrow.

It reported that it is on track to deliver 6-10pc growth in earnings per share, and had paid down 100m in borrowings during the first three months of 2016.

Sales volumes were up by 2.9pc globally, with the Asia-Pacific region powering ahead with an 8.7pc increase in sales. Last year, the company's trading profits increased by 10pc to 700m from sales of over 6bn.

Meanwhile, Carbery reported a healthy set of results for 2015 yesterday, with earnings up 33pc to 35m from a turnover of 350m.

Carbery's debt was also reduced by 20pc to 27.8m.

Much of the increased profitability stemmed from Carbery's ingredients division, since profits were actually down in its dairy wing. The company employs 600 and is jointly owned by Bandon, Barryroe, Drinagh and Lisavaird co-ops.
The OECD said sterling would slump in the event of a Brexit, which would have a major knock-on effect for Irish exporters. Photo: Reuters

The OECD has weighed into the debate on Brexit with a stark warning that a British withdrawal from the European Union could spark an international financial shock and doubts over the future of the Single Market and EU.

In a detailed report, the Paris-based think tank said a Brexit would cost UK households up to 5,000 (6,428) in a worst case scenario, as the UK economy would be around 5pc smaller than if it remained in the EU.

The report comes as Central Bank governor Professor Philip Lane suggested contingency planning for a Brexit is difficult given the levels of unknowns. He said the regulator was liaising with the banks to ensure they are taking steps to prepare, but suggested there were limits to what could be done.

"The unknown unknowns mean you can't write down every possibility at this point," he said.

The OECD said sterling would slump in the event of a Brexit, which would have a major knock-on effect for Irish exporters. Angel Gurria, OECD secretary general, said Britain would have less access to the bloc's single market of 500 million consumers, investment would slow and companies could move to other countries as a result.

Prof Lane said the exact nature of a UK exit would play out over a protracted period. "The world is not going to end on June 23, whichever the result is," added Financial Regulator and Deputy Governor Cyril Roux.

Asked if he knew of any companies looking to move to Ireland amid Brexit-related concerns, Mr Roux said he was seeing a "suspension of decisions".

"Those who may invest in the UK or in Ireland will assess the result of the vote and make a decision on that basis. But I wouldn't expect that there would be a flurry of applications on June 24. It takes a significant amount of time," he said.

The OECD report said membership of the EU had contributed to the economic prosperity of the UK. It pointed out that Ireland, which also joined in 1973, had a near "quadrupling of its GDP per capita" as a result.

It also said that concerns are rising about the possibility of a Brexit across EU countries, with the number of Google searches having spiked. The term is searched for the most in Britain, followed by Ireland, it said.

"Following the UK decision to exit, there could be doubts about the future of the Single Market, and more broadly, of the EU," the report said.

Mr Gurria took aim at the "Out" campaigners, accusing them of creating a "delusion" by saying the country would prosper outside the EU. He said official figures showing Britain's growth slowed in the first three months of the year underscored how the possibility of a Brexit was weighing on confidence. Mr Gurria said there would be no economic benefits for Britain from a Brexit.

"Our conclusion is unequivocal," he said. "The UK is much stronger as a part of Europe and Europe is much stronger with the UK as a driving force. There is no upside for the UK in Brexit, only costs that can be avoided."

The "Vote Leave" camp challenged the OECD's credibility, saying it had damaged its reputation by promoting the benefits of the euro currency.

"After (we) Vote Leave and take back control we will be able to cut our tax bill because we will no longer have to fund overpaid and under-taxed international bureaucrats," Vote Leave spokesman Robert Oxley said.
Irish building materials giant CRH is on track to deliver earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of close to 1bn during the first half of this year.

That will be a single, mid-digit proforma increase on the 555m it generated in the first half of 2015.

Since last year, CRH has completed the 6.5bn acquisition of assets from rivals Holcim and Lafarge, which merged, and the $1.3bn purchase of US glazing supplies firm CR Laurence. CRH, which is headed by chief executive Albert Manifold, said that its proforma sales in the first quarter of the year - seasonally quiet for the group - rose 9pc.

"The continued positive economic momentum in the US this year has resulted in improved demand for aggregates and ready-mixed concrete together with positive pricing trends compared with the first quarter of 2015," the company said in an interim statement ahead of its annual general meeting being held in Dublin this morning.

It noted that asphalt volumes were "strongly ahead" in the United States in the first three months of the year, but that prices fell due to the "continued low input cost environment".

CRH pointed out that the first quarter of the year typically accounts for less than 10pc of CRH's annual asphalt sales volumes, and approximately 20pc of aggregates and ready-mixed concrete volumes.

In Europe, CRH said that the stabilising market backdrop and good weather in the first few months of the year contributed to solid demand, albeit with competitive pricing in some regions, resulting in proforma sales in the period being in-line with those reported during the first quarter of 2015.

In its heavyside business in Europe, which includes aggregates, cement, pre-cast concrete, and asphalt pacing products, performance was mixed across its global markets.

In Asia, strong cement demand in the Philippines helped to drive sales up 12pc in the first quarter in the region on a proforma basis.

Davy Stockbrokers noted that CRH's EBITDA forecast for the first half of 2016 is ahead of the broker's own 925m prediction.

"It is difficult to forecast with any degree of accuracy the first half performance at this early stage in the year," Davy noted.

It added: "This is further complicated given the transformed nature of the business following the acquisitions of the LafargeHolcim assets and CR Laurence and the on-going disposal programme."
Gorse Hill solicitor Brian O'Donnell - who owes Bank of Ireland 70m - has asked when bank's board members will leave at AGM.

Together with his son, Blake, Mr O'Donnell, who is still battling the bank over the ownership of Gorse Hill in Killiney, took a seat in the front row of the O'Reilly Hall, UCD before the board members.

In the question and answers session, Mr O'Donnell claimed he had kept his hand up "for an hour and a half" before being called.

He then went on to demand to know when the top four board members - Richie Boucher, Archie Kane, Andrew Keating and Patrick Kennedy - would be leaving their positions, given that they had been there for many years.

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"When will they be going?" asked O'Donnell, to a small smattering of applause from the room.

Mr Kane replied that their focus was on driving the performance of the bank.

"We will be staying for some time," he said firmly.

Mr O'Donnell did not ask any more questions or make any more comments and remained in his seat.

On the way in to the meeting, the O'Donnell group handed out documents to shareholders calling on them to vote out the current board on the grounds that the bank is still in "critical condition", that its reputation among customers is at "rock bottom" and that management salaries "soar while the share price tanks."

The documents urge shareholders to fill out an attached proxy form and post it to a UK based company, called Remove BOI Board limited, with an address in Kent - where the O'Donnells are currently based.

The BOI AGM saw only about half of the seats filled - mostly with retirees.

The mood in the room was largely one of dissatisfaction - with many asking when a dividend would finally be payed.

Shane Ross TD questioned why so few shares were held by senior board members who were taking large sums of money out of the bank in salaries.

Archie Kane replied that the requirement was only that 1,000 shares be held by board members and that it was a matter of one's own discretion.

The AGM is ongoing.
Growing client numbers by 10pc isn't good enough for Michael Costello. He's hungry for more. BDO Ireland's managing partner wants to build the firm's expertise in financial services and technology in particular, through mergers and high level hires.

"That's something we're interested in doing," he says. "I think the growth story is good at 10pc, but we'd like to add to that and make this grow even faster."

BDO pushes itself as being a different beast to the bigger consultancy players. "We're not trying to be all things to all people. We're focused on that mid-market, and that's pretty unique. We're not trying to do multinational stuff one minute, and then owner-managed businesses next. We're focused. Our DNA is owner-manged business and we understand the entrepreneur, and the family business."

BDO's core market is largely home-grown companies focused on export and international opportunities.

Although some of the firm's clients are domestically focused, particularly in the hospitality sector, almost all are exporting firms, targeting growth internationally.

And the big risk to their business over the coming 12 months? Take a guess. Yep, Brexit.

For small and medium-sized firms, the impact is already clear to see. Sterling has taken a dent since November, with the value of the UK currency weakening from 69 pence per 1, to around 79 pence. It's recovered a little in recent days, as the momentum seems to be leaning toward the remain camp. But with just under two months to go until polling day, that could swing again.

Those currency fluctuations impact on Irish exporting firms' margins. "In September, hardly anyone was worried about it, and now about 80pc [of businesses] are," Costello says.

"This is very real for them. The issue about trade barriers and all that is less immediate. But the currency issue is hitting people now. It is a big thing for our clients."

If British voters opt to pull out of the European Union on June 23, sterling will take a much heavier battering. Investment giant Goldman Sachs has predicted the value of the UK currency could plummet by as much as a fifth.

That could push the euro up into the 90 pence range. Some analysts fear it could even reach parity.

But what can businesses do? If the Government can't implement a fully worked contingency plan because of the unknowns, how can a medium or small business? That's the problem, says Costello. "They are struggling to contingency [plan]. That's the reality," he says.

"People are focused on the fact that they may not be able to count on profit margins, they may have more volatility on the currency as well. So they are talking to their banks about hedging, although the figures are very difficult to commit yourself to. A lot of businesses are fearful, and know that this is going to hit their business, but are a little on the side-lines in terms of what they should actually do."

And of course, there's the impact on businesses in Northern Ireland, where BDO also has a base.

For those firms, there is a fear of being isolated, both from Europe and the Republic, both of which are key markets for many northern-based businesses.

"People keep asking what are businesses doing about it [Brexit], and that's a really tricky question," Costello adds. "Contingency planning can only go so far. There are too many unknowns. People probably underestimate what it would mean to Ireland overall, in terms of the level of income and profitability of a lot of businesses." Costello says companies need to primarily hedge, and outside of that, remain as competitive as possible.

But in that sphere he sees some tough times ahead. Wage demands are increasing rapidly, he says. And that is going to put considerable pressure on companies. "We have increasing pressure on wages and I think that's not going to go away when we form a government. That snowball is rolling down the hill now already and won't stop, regardless of Brexit," he says.

"That could put pressure on Irish businesses for three or four years now, because there's a pent-up demand within some sectors and ultimately that will put pressure on profitability, on competitiveness and on the other side the revenues could be dropping."

Trinity economist Sean Barrett, in a recent article, questioned why, after having talked up the recovery, Government is so surprised about the wage demands.

It's a view shared by Costello. With talk of growth rates at 6pc and 7pc, he says calls for pay rises are to be expected. But employment is rising at a much slower pace. "So there's a bit of a squeeze coming for a lot of businesses, and people that are clued in are looking very carefully at that. Sometimes, they are looking at other sources of manufacturing and labour. Businesses that previously didn't look to go abroad in terms of production are starting to look at that," he says.

And then there's the perennial issue of SME funding. Access to credit is regularly cited as the biggest obstacle to growth for Ireland's small businesses. Although the statistics are improving, nearly a third of SMEs who apply for credit from banks are refused.

"I would say that the banks get wrongly beaten up about not being willing to lend," Costello says. "The reality is that they want to lend on the right terms. They don't want to over gear and they don't want to put too much pressure on a business.

"They will lend up to a sensible point. That usually means there's a bit of a gap, there's a bit of an equity gap. So the theory is that they [the business] should bring in outside equity. But there's a reluctance to do that. And I think there is also a reticence to deal with venture capitalists or people that they see as not culturally fitting their business."

And he says there's still the problem of loan applications not being properly prepared.

But change is afoot. More and more businesses, having secured external advice, are now gradually turning to other sources of finance, he says.

And the other cultural change Costello sees occurring is in the level of ambition. Traditionally, Irish entrepreneurs would sell on their business after hitting the 100m mark, he says. Now he's seeing a younger, much more ambitious breed emerging, who are more eager to see their firms expand and grow.

Costello knows small and mid-sized firms well. He used to run one. In 2004, his advisory firm, Costello McElroy, merged with BDO.

"We were doing well but wanted supports that went with a bigger firm," he says.

BDO offers a range of services, from tax and audit, to business services, recruitment and advisory. Costello says it has the largest tax department for mid-sized firms. And there are many tax-related changes and challenges coming down the road that businesses must grapple with, most notably the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The advisory firm was quick to argue last autumn, when the Beps measures were announced, that although designed to combat corporate tax avoidance among multinationals, they will also impact small and medium-sized businesses looking to internationalise, or have already done so.

Tax is also a big issue both in the US and Europe, with the former taking issue with both inversions to Ireland, and what it views as unfair targeting of US firms by the European Commission. The issue has come up on the election trail in the US, with Donald Trump in particular decrying the fact that too many US Companies are leaving America for lower tax jurisdictions.

The US Treasury earlier this month moved to curb corporate "inversion" deals in which US firms buy foreign rivals to move their tax jurisdictions offshore.

Those changes were cited as scuttling a $160bn merger between US drug maker Pfizer and Dublin-based Allergan that would have shifted the combined company headquarters to Ireland.

Costello believes that move may finally have shut off the inversion route. "They've called time on the inversions now, so I don't think there's any more to be done there," he says.

"I think every US election tends to throw up an attack on the Irish tax system. Obama attacked it before, and then didn't do very much when he got in.

"I don't fear hugely a Trump presidency from an Irish tax point of view. The change that they needed to make was a US legislative change, and they've made it, in terms of inversions."

Costello is a fan of accountancy in terms of a business qualification. He speaks passionately about it, especially the varied and broad-based nature of the work. But students, he says, should consider doing the degree with IT, rather than say with a language, arguing that more and more of the work is computer based.

With five kids of his own, most of whom are in their teenage years, would he recommend the career?

"My father did accountancy before and he discouraged me as much as he could, and then I decided to do it.

"I'll probably do the same and discourage mine."
A common refrain in Irelands political discourse is that our public services are not up to scratch because we dont spend enough money on them.

Across areas such as health, education, social protection and housing, there are strong arguments that the government should do more  but doing more is almost always equated with spending more.

Proposals are made for additional spending with little genuine appraisal of what we already spend. The reality is that already we provide resources at the level of our European peers for the provision of these services. If we judge the services to be below what it is provided elsewhere, it has more to do with how we spend the money rather than how much money we spend.

At an aggregate level government spending in Ireland is the lowest in the EU15. On average, government spending across the EU15 is the equivalent of ten percentage points of GDP higher than it is in Ireland. This suggests that if government spending in Ireland was at a level comparable to other EU countries there would be an extra 20bn available.

There are two issues we must consider before jumping to the oft-reached conclusion that our health, education and social protection systems would be better if only we spent more money on them.. And, of course, we cannot forget that we tried that before. Between 2000 and 2006, government spending on health, education and social welfare increased by 20bn. What assessment would be made of the service improvement brought about by that increase?

The first issue is the rather technical but important fact that GDP overstates our national income due to the oversized presence of multi-nationals here.

This factor probably accounts for around one quarter of difference in overall expenditure but even after doing that we still seem to be the equivalent of 15bn below the spending levels seen in other EU countries.

Which brings us to the second issue we must consider: what is it that other countries are getting for this additional spending? The remarkable fact is that almost all of the difference can be explained by one spending category  old-age social protection  mainly state pensions.

In 2014, the 7bn or so we spent on old-age social protection was equivalent to 3.7pc of GDP. This was the lowest in the EU  and by some distance. The next lowest spender in this category was The Netherlands, where this spending was equivalent to 6.8pc of GDP.

Just to move up to second-last in the EU15 would require us to almost double our old-age social protection spending. And other countries spend much more. If Ireland were to move to EU levels of spending in just this one category it would involve spending an extra 15bn a year on State pensions.

With that, the spending gap between Ireland and the rest of Europe would be gone, even though all we have done is note that GDP overstates our national income and examine differences in just one spending category.

In 2014 our spending on health, education and social protection (excluding old-age) was the seventh highest in the EU. The six countries that spend more were Denmark, Finland, Belgium, France, Sweden and the Netherlands. Our spending exceeded that of all other countries in the EU. In some cases the gap to those above us is not very wide. An additional 2bn would bring our combined spending levels on these services up to that of Sweden.

If State pensions explain most of the difference between government spending in Ireland and other EU countries it is worth considering why this is the case. The first reason is relatively straightforward: demographics. We have fewer pensioners compared with other EU countries.

The second reason is by design. The benefits from Irelands State pension system are flat-rated with a maximum payment at present of 233 per week. In most EU countries, if someone makes social insurance contributions based on a salary of, say, 100,000 they will receive a state pension commensurate with those contributions. Those who put the most into the system get the most out.

In Ireland, the size of PRSI contributions has no impact on the benefits received which are based on duration and number of contributions. This means our system is very redistributive and reduces inequality, but does leave us with a system that provides inadequate savings for retirement.

Some people have private or occupational pension schemes but in many EU countries the state takes responsibility for this. Public pension expenditure in France, for example, was 13.7pc of GDP in 2014. In terms of Irish GDP that would be around 26bn. And note again that our spending on public pensions was 7bn.

EU governments that spend more than Ireland are not providing a huge amount of additional services to their populations. The government sector acts as a giant money laundering vehicle, taking in pension contributions while people are working and paying out pension benefits in retirement in line with the incomes from which those contributions were made.

Would those calling for more public spending in Ireland to match our EU peers be happy if that resulted in bigger state pensions for those earning 100,000 and more? It would probably be better than the haphazard and patchy pension coverage that we have now but I dont think it is what those advocating additional spending have in mind.

We could, and probably should, provide more for the provision of public services but the first step should be to ensure that we are getting the best for the money we are currently spending. Housing provides a case in point.

Public spending in Ireland on housing development and social protection is the second highest in the EU. On the revenue side, we have significant tax expenditures such as mortgage interest relief and the capital gains tax exemption for primary residences.

We have a system that, once you are in it, means you can enjoy lifelong subsidised rents or substantial tax reliefs. The problem now is that people are being locked out from these benefits and any re-organisation is bound to be met with opposition.

This opposition means there are lots of calls for more spending, some of which are justified, but lets see if we can get more use from the billions we are already spending.

Seamus Coffey is an economist at UCC and is a member of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. He is writing in a personal capacity.
Irish retail brand XL is to open 20 new stores this year as part of its national growth strategy.

The move is expected to create around 200 jobs across the country.

XL, which is owned by BWG, the same company that owns Spar, Londis and Mace, has added over 100 stores here over the last four years.

Included in XL's growth strategy for the year is a target of 5pc in like-for-like sales growth, which would bring potential revenue up to 312m per year.

BWG Foods Wholesale managing director John Moane believes XL has become an attractive proposition to independent operators.

"XL has proven itself to be a very powerful brand, continually evolving alongside consumer expectations, and we will remain focused on the price and value agenda, which has been one of the key determinants of XL's success to date," Mr Moane said.

The proposed new openings will add to the 240 stores nationwide and comes off the back of another 23 store openings in 2015.

BWG said the investment in its wholesale and chilled businesses has acted as the basis for the brand's aggressive expansion.

"We continue to invest in the XL network, at supply level, through the continued upgrade of the nationwide Value Centre wholesale network, and at local level through store development, brand marketing, and category development with a specific focus on enhanced fresh, chilled and coffee offerings," Mr Moane said.

Last year Londis became the latest brand to be added to the BWG portfolio after it was acquired for 23m.

BWG's growth strategy for 2015 also carries into Londis where the company is pumping in 8m worth of upgrades to its store network.

As part of the upgrades 17 stores will get a redesign while another 23 will get new deli and coffee areas.

The company hopes its Londis investment will help boost brand revenues by up to 10pc.

BWG aims to facilitate rising trends in fresh foods, bakery and butchery items.

In Ireland BWG Foods is split up into three main divisions, namely food retail, food wholesale, and wines and spirits.

The company also has operations in the UK where it trades under Appleby Westard, which is Spar's retail distribution centre.
The juggernaut that is RTE Radio One is continuing to dominate the Irish airwaves.

It was the major station to emerge unscathed as its rivals saw thousands switching off in the latest listenership figures.

Its sister station RTE 2fm lost thousands of listeners from some of its flagship shows.

Newstalk and Today FM also recorded losses in the latest set of JNLR figures.

Flagship RTE One offerings, such as 'Morning Ireland' and 'The Ryan Tubridy Show', performed well.

But on 2fm, 'The Nicky Byrne Show with Jenny Greene' is down almost 14,000 from the last review, released three months ago.

'Breakfast Republic' is also down, having lost 19,000 listeners for the 6-10am programme hosted by Jennifer Zamparelli, Keith Walsh and Bernard O'Shea.

Eoghan McDermott's show is down 4,000 when compared with his listenership from the previous quarter and now has 113,000 listeners.

Meanwhile, at Today FM Anton Savage has recorded a drop of 8,000 listeners when compared with the previous quarter and now has 175,000 listeners.

His colleague Ian Dempsey is also down slightly with a drop of 7,000 but still has an impressive tally of 180,000.

Long-term duo Dermot and Dave have dropped 4,000, and Louise Duffy is now at 91,000, having lost some 3,000 listeners.

Current affairs broadcaster Matt Cooper is the only one in the Today FM team to remain stable, with the same listenership numbers as before, at 132,000.

Newstalk also saw most of its shows record a drop in listenership.

Former RTE presenter Pat Kenny has dropped a further 7,000 listeners, and is now standing at 126,000 for his morning slot.

Transition

'Newstalk Breakfast' with Ivan Yates and Chris Donoghue is also down 7,000, while George Hook is down 9,000 and Sean Moncrieff has dropped by 5,000.

Reacting to the figures, 2fm boss Dan Healy said they were reflective of a transition period for the station.

He pointed out that this included the move of Ryan Tubridy back to RTE Radio One.

"We knew that losing Ryan last September was going to have some impact for that 9-11am slot," he said.

"We turned the station upside-down last September, so in a way, we had to destroy the schedule in order to rebuild it.

"You can't do what we're doing without losing audiences. People don't like change and we fully expect that the figures will be up in three months' time."

'Morning Ireland' is up 12,000 listeners when compared with the last quarter, while Tubridy is continuing to perform strongly, having gone up 9,000.

'Drivetime' has also managed to maintain its listenership, remaining steady at 240,000.

Sean O'Rourke recorded a slight drop of 5,000 but still claims a huge morning audience of 326,000.

'Prime Time' presenter Miriam O'Callaghan is also down by 9,000 - to 256,000 listeners.

However, her Sunday morning slot remains one of the most-listened to shows in Ireland.

She said that she was "thrilled" with the news, especially given that they don't inherit a huge audience from the show before them and it's only on once a week.

Proving he was right to jump ship is Ray D'Arcy, who has gained 2,000 listeners from the last survey three months ago and 34,000 when compared with April 2015.

"I'm delighted listeners are running in, in such numbers," he told the Irish Independent.

"Hopefully, we're offering a vibrant alternative to listeners. It's really encouraging after all the hard work the team puts in."

He said that he's feeling "really at home" at RTE now.
IF you want to be a Clever Carol or Switch-on Sean and save some extra cash, then getting money from the taxman is one of the most savvy and satisfying ways to do this.

Most PAYE (pay as you earn) workers in the country would be eligible to claim at least something back from Revenue if they have never done so before, according to Barry Flanagan, senior tax manager at Taxback.com.

"Refunds we have processed range from the hundreds to the thousands, with the average coming in at somewhere around 880 for first-time claimants," he said.

"That's a good chunk of change by anyone's standards - and given that it usually takes people under an hour of their time to cobble together the necessary receipts and fill out the relevant documentation - it's probably the easiest money you'll ever make."

So what can you claim back?

There are changes to tax reliefs every year in the Budget, but when you're looking at your tax refund entitlements you must remember that you can go back four years.

It may sound too good to be true but it's not, Mr Flanagan said.

If you are an Irish taxpayer who has paid medical expenses over the last four years - on anyone's behalf - then you may be entitled to a refund, he said.

And that's just one of the categories for which you may be able to claim.

The three main reliefs have changed in the last few years, but can still be claimed:

l For medical expenses, relief at 20pc is still available and can be claimed on most unreimbursed expenses incurred, and on qualifying non-routine dental expenses.

l Many people wrongly believe that the Home Carer Tax Credit is for those caring for other people's children, the elderly or disabled people. They don't realise that it can be claimed where any housewife or house-husband works in the home, caring for their own children. And with the increase from 810 to 1,000 in 2016, this credit is more valuable than ever. It is available to any jointly assessed couple with one or more child, where the non-assessable spouse has income of less than 7,000 in 2016, Mr Flanagan says.

l The tax credit for tuition fees is still available. For 2015, the relief does not apply to the first 3,000 of qualifying fees paid. Similarly, for part-time courses the first 1,500 is disregarded in respect of each claim. As the 'Student Contribution' falls under the definition of "tuition fees" it means that any family with more than one child in college at the same time will usually qualify for a tax refund. Similarly, those paying higher fees in private colleges, above the 3,000 limit, will often qualify for a valuable credit of up to 800, even where there is only one child in college.

Flat-rate expenses

Overpaid tax is also an area which results in many people receiving much welcomed refunds from the Revenue. This can occur inadvertently, especially if you have changed employment during the year.

Individuals should look back on their income levy and USC (universal social contribution) payments to ensure that they have not overpaid such payments in prior years and should claim a refund before it's too late.

The Taxback.com expert said he deals with people every day who have paid too much in tax, some simply because they haven't applied for the refunds they are entitled to, and others because perhaps they were on emergency tax with an employer and they didn't realise, or they only worked in the country for part of the year and so are due a tax refund.

Some other reasons that people might be owed money from the taxman include:

l Flat-rate expenses: an even greater number of PAYE workers do not know about the flat-rate expense deduction that can be made on their tax bill. Most employees are unaware that they can be reimbursed for any expenses incurred wholly, exclusively and necessarily in the performance of their duties of employment (though not expenses incurred travelling to and from their normal place of work). Mr Flanagan said in his experience, less than 10pc of PAYE workers are aware (especially if they are not part of a union) that there are additional allowances available to people engaged in certain trades and professions - and so they may are missing out on this "free money" as a result. The reason that these allowances have kept such a low profile is not really known but we are trying to highlight the issue now so that people can get what they are owed.

l Standard flat-rate expense allowances are set for various classes of employee. For example, shop workers are granted flat-rate expenses of 121 per year and bar trade employees get 97 per annum. Nurses who supply and launder their own uniforms can claim a deduction of 733. And deductions are available to doctors, engineers, plumbers, journalists, teachers and hospitality sector workers such as barmen/women, waiters and waitresses, porters and hotel managers. The amount of the deduction is agreed between Revenue and representatives of groups or classes of employees (usually the employees are represented by trade union officials - which is why non-union members may not have heard of these).

The agreed deduction can then be applied to all employees of the class or group in question, but Revenue won't give it to you automatically. You have to claim it.

Other tax reliefs and incentives which have remained available are:

l Rent a room relief.

l Employment and Investment Incentive (EII) scheme.

l Capital losses are still allowable.

So what are you waiting for? Get your PPS (personal public service) number, gather a few receipts, sign a form or two, wait two to six weeks - and there you have it - money for nothing.
The delay in rolling out adequate broadband to 750,000 people rural areas has been branded "unacceptable" and "hugely disappointing".

Campaigners and business groups have criticised the delay in Ireland's National Broadband Plan roll-out plans, with a 2022 completion date now on the cards.

The Government says a state-subsidised rural broadband network, scheduled for roll-out this year, will not begin construction until 2017 due to "complex" processes involving the scheme.

The network, scheduled to reach 750,000 rural homes and businesses which have been left outside existing broadband areas, may not now be completed until 2022, two years behind schedule.

"People living in rural communities urgently need proper broadband with local banks and post offices closing," said Seamus Sherlock, chairman of the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers' Association.

"And the time is fast approaching when all farmers will be required to complete their [EU] Basic Payment scheme applications online which, when you don't have access to broadband, will cause serious difficulties."

Criticised

Enterprise lobby groups also criticised the postponement.

"Businesses operating outside of our urban centres across Ireland will be hugely disappointed to learn about this further delay," said a spokesman for Chambers Ireland, a national business organisation.

"A lack of broadband capacity in a region undermines the ability of regionally located Irish businesses to compete internationally and prevents workers living in rural areas being able to work remotely."

A spokeswoman for the Government said that the delay was unrelated to the absence of a new Communications Minister. However, business groups have linked the broadband delay to a lack of political direction.

"This underlines the need for the resolution of ongoing negotiations on the formation of the next government," said Fergal O'Brien of Ibec.

"Several major decisions connected with the National Broadband Plan will need cabinet approval."

The Government must decide who will own the state-subsidised broadband network after the 25-year contract expires.

Operators want to keep the network after the contract finishes, while others believe the infrastructure should revert to the State.
China has developed a robot soldier capable of controlling rioting humans in an effort to aid the country's anti-terrorism measures.

The AnBot, which is 1.5 metres tall and weighs more than 150kg, can reach speeds of up to 18km when patrolling to protect the peace, according to Chinese newspaper People.

The machine was designed and built by the National Defence University, and is equipped with numerous sensors to detect unrest.

It can be controlled remotely to intervene in dangerous situations, deploying an "electrically charged riot control tool", presumably similar to a police baton or a Taser.

The robot has been showcased at an exposition in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality.

Civilians in distress can also press an SOS button on the android's body to send an alert to police.

China has invested vast amounts of money into military robotics in recent years, to varying degrees of success.

Last November "armed attack robots carrying rifles and grenade launchers designed to fight terrorism were unveiled at the 2015 World Robot Conference in Beijing.

The first model is known as a reconnaissance robot, which scouts for poisonous gases, dangerous chemicals and explosives before transmitting its findings back to base.

If this initial investigation detects a simple bomb is the source of danger, the second robot model - a small explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) machine - would be sent in to diffuse it.

Three restaurants in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou fired their robot staff after the machines' incompetence began to cost the businesses money earlier this month.

Website Shanghaiist quoted one manager who said: Their skills are somewhat limited. They couldnt pour water for customers, nor could they take orders.

Google-owned Japanese robotics firm Schaft recently unveiled a bipedal robot capable of inching its way up stairs and lifting heavy loads, albeit awkwardly.

The unnamed prototype walks stiffly up stairs, extending its legs to account for stepping onto different heights, can shuffle sideways like a crab and is capable of walking across a rocky beach and snowy terrain.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Airbnb has removed thousands of apartment listings in Berlin ahead of a city crackdown on holiday apartments from May 1st.

Airbnb has removed thousands of Berlin apartment listings from its service ahead of a citywide crackdown on holiday lets that kicks in on May 1st.

From May 1st, it is forbidden to let apartments to tourists without a holiday let permit. If caught, landlords face a fine of up to 100,000.

It's believed that there are around 15,000 holiday lets in Berlin, but just 6,300 landlords have applied for a permit. As a result, Airbnb has reduced its number of Berlin listings to approximately 6,700. This move is seen as Airbnb's attempt to avoid becoming embroiled in the city's legal actions.

Airbnb has had run-ins with city authorities in New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, and other US cities, as well as in Barcelona. Amsterdam, France, and the UK, on the other hand, have been more supportive.

Politicians in Berlin along with tenant groups have welcomed the move amid increasing rent prices and a belief that regular Berliners are being priced out of the housing market.

Those who have been renting out apartments reacted less favourably. They argue that holiday flats make up a tiny fraction of Berlin's apartments and say this move is being made to distract people from the government's failure to build affordable housing.
Robert Downey Jr greeted two pint-sized super heroes at the Captain America: Civil War premiere after they won his heart with their stories of battling life-threatening illness.

Seven-year-olds Daniel Keyte and Ethan Miller were invited to join the Iron Man actor at the red carpet alongside a host of Hollywood stars in London on Tuesday.

Downey Jr first met fan Ethan, who suffers from the rare blood disease ITP as well as type 1 diabetes, during a visit to Great Ormond Street Hospital.

After posing for pictures dressed in an Iron Man costume his father, Lee, said the youngster was "over the moon" to meet his idol.

Daniel was invited to the star-studded event after his mother, Vicky, messaged Downey Jr to say her son was feeling unwell and unhappy.

In response, the actor dressed as children's character Tigger and posed for a photo.

He wrote on Instagram: "When I'm in the dumps, I've found this little getup to be helpful. P.S. Would you like to come to the LA premiere of Captain America: Civil War as my guest? If so, have your people call my people. All the best."

Instead, it was at the European premiere in London on Tuesday night that Daniel got the chance to meet Iron Man, aka Tony Stark.

Alongside a picture of her son and the megastar posing together on the red carpet, Vicky posted on Instagram: "It's happened!!!"

Earlier in the day, she shared an image of the car sent to collect her son, writing: "And so it begins! Daniels big day is finally here and so is surprise number one, Daniels own personal driver in a beautiful car."

Ethan was among several children to meet Downey Jr on the GOSH cancer ward on Monday.

It is one of the world's leading children's units, treating young patients with rare, complex and life-threatening conditions.

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The visit was organised by Disney officials, who have worked with the hospital's charity since 2008, raising more than 10 million for the unit's redevelopment.

After the hospital visit, Ethan's father Lee said: "Ethan has been in and out of hospital a lot in the past three years. He watches the films all the time and virtually lives in his Iron Man costume.

"Ethan was over the moon to meet his hero and it has really helped to lift his spirits."
Henry Joy McCracken, his lover Mary and their illegitimate baby daughter hide out in a cottage in the hills. The 1798 United Irishmen rebellion has just failed. The yeomen are on their way and McCracken, like the rebellion, is doomed.

As the events of his last evening unfold, McCracken's life flashes before him, rendered in scenes of pastiche as might be written by Irish writers, including Boucicault, O'Casey and Beckett. These scenes function on their own terms as comedy, and recognising the styles is simply an added bonus for theatre nerds.

Highly theatrically self-conscious, the work bristles with energy. Though McCracken is primarily played by a single actor, in several of the playlets other actors portray him. At one stage we have four Henry Joy McCrackens in green coats with white neck ruffles on the stage. This is not at all confusing, and very funny.

Lynne Parker directs her uncle's work for Rough Magic with characteristic brio. Its multiple time settings and comic pastiches are handled by the excellent ensemble with spectacular energy and aplomb.

But the enterprise is marred by Paul Mallon's abject interpretation of Henry Joy McCracken. When his fellow prisoners in the Behan pastiche accuse him of self-pity, you can't help agreeing with them.

Instead of being a charismatic leader, he is petulant and whiney. If McCracken failed fully to inspire the country in 1798, he still needs to electrify the audience in the present.

The theatricality of the work is enhanced by Zia Holly's brilliant design which sets the action in a jumbled backstage space. Use of instruments providing percussive tension, including a big fat Lambeg drum, is another fine touch.

Stewart Parker's multiple time set play from the 1980s gains another historical layer in the 30 years that have elapsed since its premiere. It is a reminder that the idea of nationhood used to be the regular stuff of Irish dramatists, and not just in centenary year commissions.
David Mahon (45) of Ongar Village in Consilla, arrives at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin yesterday with his wife Audrey where he is on trial charged with the murder of Audreys son, Dean Fitzpatrick in 2013. Photo: Collins Courts

The trial of a man charged with murdering his stepson has heard that the deceased had a death wish over feelings of guilt about his missing sister, Amy Fitzpatrick.

The court heard earlier that the accused, David Mahon, had voiced the possibility that Dean Fitzpatrick had walked into the knife he was holding on purpose.

The 45-year-old Dubliner has pleaded not guilty to murdering the father of one on May 26th, 2013, a day after the deceased interfered with his bicycle to annoy him.

The 23-year-old received a stab wound to the abdomen outside the apartment that his mother shared with Mr Mahon at Burnell Square, Northern Cross. He bled to death internally and the prosecution described it as a gutting in the opening speech to the Central Criminal Court.

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Detective Sergeant Eddie Carroll testified today that the gardai had acquired Mr Fitzpatricks file from North Dublin Mental Health Services, after hearing Mr Mahons account of his relationship with his stepson. The court already heard that Mr Mahon told gardai that Mr Fitzpatrick had self-harmed.

D Sgt Carroll said that Mr Fitzpatrick had told medical personnel that his substance abuse began when he was 11 and included the abuse of hash, cocaine and tablets. He said that in July 2009, he reported low mood, self harm and having cut himself to relieve tension.

I feel Im Superman. Nothing can happen to me when I drink, he told them when he was 19.

I have three or four mood swings a day, he continued. I cant control it. I need something to calm me down.

He reported in 2010 that hed had a death wish and admitted himself to St Itas Hospital in Portrane in 2011. This was a crisis admission following stressors that included accommodation issues, relationship issues with his partner and family as well as legal issues. He was discharged within weeks.

He reported the following year that he had self harmed or attempted to do so by cutting himself. He outlined three occasions where he had self-harmed, including one with cocaine, one where he stabbed himself in the hand and one where he had cut his forearms.

I wanted to die, he said, explaining that this feeling was in the past. He was prescribed an anti-psychotic.

Mr Fitzpatrick also told a medic that he had been convicted of the attempted murder of a policeman in Spain. The detective sergeant could not confirm if this had happened. However, Mr Mahon told gardai that his stepson had stolen his car and run over the officer.

Under cross examination by the defence, D Sgt Carroll confirmed that the death wish he had expressed was in relation to feelings of guilt he had regarding his missing sister, and that he reported gaining release from cutting himself.

The jury had spent the morning listening to memos of garda interviews with David Mahon. The court was also shown segments of videos of the interviews, in which he stood up and gestured how the incident had happened.

The court had already heard that he had gone voluntarily to the gardai and said that Mr Fitzpatrick had walked into the knife that (he) Mr Mahon had taken from him. He said that his stepson had pulled the knife on him shortly beforehand.

Detective Garda Brendan Mears testified that he interviewed Mr Mahon following his arrest on May 26th. He was asked if he had seen a solicitor and he said he had.

They said not to say anything but, look, Ive nothing to hide, he said. Its my fault. I cant believe it. What will Audrey say? 23 years of age. Jesus Christ.

He was referring to his then partner, now wife, and Mr Fitzpatricks mother, Audrey Fitzpatrick. He was asked about the family background.

Were going out 12 years. We moved to Spain. You know Amy went missing, he said.

The court has already heard that Mr Fitzpatrick was the older brother of Amy Fitzpatrick, who went missing in Spain in 2008 and has never been found.

I think theres something wrong with her (Audrey Fitzpatricks) husband, he said. God forgive me but I think he (the deceased) has the same genes as his father.

He said they had a great life in Spain with eight or nine houses and bars.

We were millionaires really, but spent it all looking for Amy, he said.

I wish it was me, he repeated later.

He was asked about his relationship with the deceased and he said it was not good, up and down.

I hit him once in Spain when he pulled a knife on me, he said.

Im sitting in my cell and thinking: Did he want to walk into the knife? he said at one stage.

Is it an accident or murder? I dont know, but its my fault, he said.

This is going to kill her (Audrey Fitzpatrick), the stress. How much can anybody take? he asked. Will I spend the rest of my life in prison?

He said that his stepson had texted him: Whats this? Youre going to stab me?

I know it doesnt look good for me, but it is what it is, he said, having already explained that he had told his partner he was going to stab him, but that he didnt mean it.

Part of me thinks he wanted it, but I dont know, he said later.

The prosecution has now closed its case. The trial continues before Ms Justice Margaret Heneghan.
David Drumm leaving the Courts of Criminal Justice in March after he was bailed. Photo: Mark Condren

Former Anglo Irish Bank boss David Drumm has issued a strongly worded appeal against a US bankruptcy court ruling denying him protection from his creditors.

Mr Drumm (49), who is currently awaiting two trials in Ireland, claimed the Boston court made findings which were "illogical" and "implausible".

The comments were made in a legal filing as part of the Dubliner's appeal against a decision to deny him protection.

Without such protection, he remains open to lawsuits for the recovery of his debts of over 10m.

Mr Drumm is representing himself in the appeal, having asked his US legal team to step down.

He made a 56-page submission to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit yesterday.

It is the second time he has appealed a decision by a Boston bankruptcy court to refuse him protection.

A previous appeal to the US District Court was rejected.

In the document, Mr Drumm listed 18 issues he wants the appeals court to consider.

These include his belief that the bankruptcy court judge and the district court judge made a series of errors in their conclusions.

He claimed the bankruptcy court was wrong to determine he was not entitled to a discharge, that he had provided an inaccurate account to the court and that he transferred property before the bankruptcy to hinder, delay or defraud creditors.

Errors

Mr Drumm also claimed the district court made errors by concluding he was "a sophisticated debtor" who was fully capable of accurately completing a statement of financial affairs.

He claimed many of the key findings on which the bankruptcy court based its decision were "inconsistent", "contrary to the evidence" and "clearly erroneous".

Mr Drumm has maintained details of asset transfers to his wife were left out of a statement of financial affairs on the advice of the bankruptcy legal team representing him at the time.

Lawyer Stewart Grossman admitted during Mr Drumm's bankruptcy trial that his firm had "goofed" by not including the transfers in the document.

In his filing to the appeals court, Mr Drumm said it was undisputed he had "disclosed everything" to his advisers "and they took responsibility for the mistakes under oath".

The former Anglo boss said it was "equally unfair" that he was held to a higher standard than the experts he hired to advise him in relation to his bankruptcy.

He said he was a trained accountant and an experienced real estate lender, but not a bankruptcy expert.

Mr Drumm said the bankruptcy court's findings against him were "illogical, implausible" and "without support in the record".

He said it was clear he had made full disclosures to his attorneys and the forensic accountants they hired, and had relied on their advice.

The bankruptcy appeal is taking place as Mr Drumm prepares for two criminal trials in Ireland.

The first trial is scheduled to begin in April of next year and will deal with two charges of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting relating to 7.2bn in deposits placed in Anglo accounts by the then Irish Life and Permanent in 2008.

The second trial, on 31 other charges mainly relating to the so-called Maple 10 share support scheme, is set to get underway in January 2018.
Jude Miley with his mum and dad Anne Louise and Greville from Dundrum in Dublin Photo: Ronan Lang/Feature File

A hospital has apologised to a four year old boy left profoundly brain damaged after an operation when he was a baby.

The apology was read to the High Court as part of settlement of Jude Miley's action with an interim payment of 3.5m over the next two years.

Counsel for Crumlin Children's Hospital in Dublin, Emily Egan, turned to face Jude's parents and read out the statement in which the hospital offered an "unequivocal, unreserved and heartfelt" apology for what had happened him.

The hospital said it "appreciated and greatly regretted the huge trauma" suffered by the baby and his family. Jude was only six months old when a suture used in an operation to release his diaphragm and help his breathing remained untrimmed causing damage to the heart muscle.

Two days later, he had a heart attack and had to be rushed to theatre for emergency surgery which saved his life.

Jude, of Holywell, Upper Kilmacud Road, Dundrum, Dublin, had through his father Greville Miley sued Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children.

Jude was born on July 16, 2011, and by January of the following year a condition regarding the contour of his diaphragm was diagnosed.

Necessary surgery was carried out on January 24, 2012, which, it was claimed, was below the standard of care.

It was claimed a suture was placed in the wrong place damaging the heart resulting in the baby deteriorating culminating in the baby suffering a cardiac arrest on January 26, 2012.

Senior counsel Liam Reidy, for the Mileys, told the court that Jude's little heart was being pierced by the suture.

His mother, Anne Louise Miley, who was a public health nurse, had raised concerns about her son after his operation but these were dismissed, counsel said.

Greville Miley told the court he and his wife were told their son would be in a vegetative state but as a result of therapies in the UK and the US he can now walk and run, talk and eat normally though slowly. He said Jude is the happiest child he knows.

He said he and his wife thought their son was unwell after the operation but they felt they were ignored.

Mr Miley said friends had set up a trust fund for Jude and that is how the family were able to travel to the US and the UK for therapies for him.

Approving the settlement Mr Justice Kevin Cross thanked the Mileys for the care they had given their son to date.

In a statement afterwards, the Mileys said their concerns after their son's operation had been dismissed "as those of fussy parents"

However, their son had sustained permanent and catastrophic brain damage.

They also criticised "the lack of honesty and frankness" on the part of the hospital and said they had been led to believe what had happened was "simply an unfortunate complication of the operation."

"We were told it was just 'one of those things'.

"We later learned this was certainly not the case," the statement said.

It added: "We are so lucky in this country that we have a court system capable of recalibrating the inequality that exists between the injured patients and the powerful medical profession.

"We were stonewalled. Only for the legal system we don't believe we would have achieved what has been accomplished here."

They also said a lot of people criticise the legal system but they could not compliment it enough.

"It has worked for Jude. What didn't work for Jude however was the failure of the hospital to engage with us and the legal system in an honest open and integral fashion.

"If they had done so, our journey would have been so much easier and Jude rehabilitated far sooner."

The couple said their son was their pride and joy.

"We are and will be devoted to him for the rest of his life. He has significant, complex needs and these needs have now been partly met in financial terms by the settlement today to fund the best care and support for Jude which is after all he had been put through, the least he deserves," they said.

In three year's time Jude's case will come back before the court when the child's future care needs will be assessed.
A man who tried to rob a Dublin city centre tourist office told gardai he was laughed out of the place before getting in the wrong getaway car, a court has heard.

Patrick Ryan (38) owed criminals a large drug debt due to his crystal meth addiction. Dublin Circuit Criminal Court was told these creditors drove Ryan around the city centre and made him commit robberies to repay the debt.

He is currently serving an eight year jail sentence imposed last year for committing 16 robberies over a 12 month period.

Judge Melanie Greally noted Ryan's long standing drug addiction and said she would not add to his severe sentence because the robberies she was dealing with were close in time to the ones he was jailed for.

She imposed a five year sentence with two years suspended and directed that it run alongside his current sentence.

Ryan of Friary Grove, Smithfield, Dublin pleaded guilty to robbery of Londis and attempted robbery of The Tourist Information Office, both on College Green on September 21, 2012. He also admitted possession of an imitation firearm.

Ryan was being driven around the city while being ordered to rob certain premises. He was ordered to rob a travel agents but refused because there were too many people in there. He was then told to rob the tourist office.

Garda Seamus O'Donovan told Ronan Kennedy BL, prosecuting, that two women were working in the office at about 5pm when Ryan walked in and took out a gun which he laid on the table. He demanded cash and one of the women told him they didn't have any.

Ryan left while laughing and saying I'm only joking. The women later told gardai they were very frightened.

He went into the neighbouring Londis store, pointed the gun at the cashier and escaped with 400.

The gun was later found nearby. It turned out to be a toy gun which was wrapped in black tape to make it look more realistic.

Ryan got into a taxi outside but got out when he released it wasn't his getaway car. He got into the drug dealers' car and gave them the money.

They drove him home before giving him 50 and a rock of crystal meth. They told him to answer his phone the next day or they would petrol bomb his father's home, he later said.

He was arrested shortly after and made full admissions in interviews. Referring to the tourist office he said he had been laughed out of the place. However he went on to say he realised the shop workers must have been very frightened and wouldn't have known the gun was fake.

Ryan has 135 previous convictions including false imprisonment, burglary and aggravated burglary.
Kevin McGeever, who denies he bought a mansion called Nirvana with the proceeds of crime, arrives at the Four Courts in Dublin yesterday. Photo: Collins

A former property developer who faked his own kidnapping has denied he bought his Galway mansion with the proceeds of crime.

Kevin McGeever said "define crime", during a court hearing into whether he has the means to pay a 1.17m judgment debt registered against him last year by investor James Byrne, over property in Dubai sold by Mr McGeever's KMM Intel Properties.

He claimed the reported 4.5m he paid to buy and refurbish the mansion named 'Nirvana' in Craughwell, Co Galway, came from 30 years of working every day and not drinking or smoking.

Mr McGeever was under cross-examination in the Master's Court as part of efforts by Mr Byrne requiring the 71-year-old businessman to divulge his assets so that the debt could be recovered.

Mr McGeever claimed he had a friend with business interests in Hong Kong and Singapore who would provide him with the money for the Byrne debt and the friend would later recover the money as part of any future business deals he and Mr McGeever had.

"I don't need to be here (in court)," he said.

Andrew Robinson BL, for Mr Byrne, said he had become "a bit of a celebrity" in recent weeks following his conviction and two-years suspended sentence for wasting garda time.

McGeever had claimed he was kidnapped by creditors who held him for eight months before he turned up on a roadside and was picked up by a passing motorist.

Counsel put it to him that he had promised last December to pay the debt by March but had not done so.

Earlier, asked about a Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) investigation into the source of funding for Nirvana, Mr McGeever asked "where has it gone, it has not gone anywhere. CAB has not lodged papers or charged me with anything".

He also asked if there was a suggestion that it came from the proceeds of crime. "What do you mean by crime, what are you talking about, am I a drug dealer?"

When counsel said he was wanted by the FBI and Interpol, he said that was "going back 30 years".

He also added: "I named it Nirvana because it was to be a place of peace and tranquillity, not after the band."
Claims that former Justice Minister Alan Shatter was "out to get" garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe have been dismissed by a commission of investigation.

Former garda confidential recipient Oliver Connolly was alleged to have been recorded telling Sgt McCabe he would be targeted by Mr Shatter if he tried to "screw" him with his allegations of misconduct in the force.

A transcript of a recording of Mr Connolly, which was read into the Dail record by Independent TD Mick Wallace, was central to Sgt McCabe's claim that his allegations were not properly investigated by the Department of Justice.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin also used the transcript to demand an investigation into the Government's handling of the garda whistleblower's claims.

However, Mr Justice Kevin O'Higgins' report is understood to have found "inappropriate and unpleasant" opinions were wrongly attributed to Mr Shatter by Mr Connolly.

The commission reported that Mr Shatter "adamantly repudiated" the claims and his denial was unchallenged and subsequently accepted by Mr Justice O'Higgins.

Yesterday, Mr Shatter put pressure on the current Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald to publish the O'Higgins report.

Ms Fitzgerald issued a statement saying she was waiting for the advice of the Attorney General before publishing.

The commission of investigation focused on allegations of garda misconduct in the Cavan/Monaghan district alleged by Sgt McCabe.

Sources with knowledge of the report said Sgt McCabe is found to be a man of integrity who raised concerns about alleged garda malpractice in the public interest.

Mr Justice O'Higgins also noted the garda's decision to come forward with his allegations was courageous and came with a considerable personal cost. However, the judge also found some of the details of the allegations against senior gardai were exaggerated.
Assaults by prisoners are putting prison officers in hospital and on the breadline, the annual Prison Officers' Association conference has heard.

"Prison life has become one of appeasement of the offender while Prison Officers continue to be the subject of vicious assaults," POA President Stephen Delaney told delegates in Athlone today.

"Official figures show that there were 91 assaults of prisoner on prison officer last year which is approximately two per week," he said.

"In some quarters this reduced figure compared to previous years has been heralded as a triumph. Its not a major triumph for the 91 officers who were assaulted last year?  believe me.

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"Somewhere in the white noise that has become public opinion, and this opinion is at its most strident within the Irish Prison Service it seems that it is ok to only punch a prison officer.

"Nothing short of outrageous violence is deemed worthy of availing of the new Serious Physical Assault Scheme," he added.

"Officers are presently out on long term sick leave arising from assaults that apparently do not fit the criteria. A more appropriate name for this scheme would be the - Bleeding in Buckets with Permanent Disfigurative Damage Scheme," Mr Delaney declared.

"In the past year several prison officers who were seriously injured and unable to return to work; on the advice of the Chief Medical Officer  had their pay cut and consequently were unable to pay their household or medical bills," he explained.

"Neither the Accommodations Policy nor the Serious Physical Assault Scheme were equipped to deal with the situation these officers found themselves in - through no fault whatever of the individuals involved. And my colleagues in Mountjoy will know who we are talking about," he added.

"No state employee should end up on the breadline because they have been viciously assaulted at work and are unable to return in the short term. This is a disgraceful situation," said Mr Delaney.
A notorious double killer has been rushed to hospital after he was found "unresponsive" in his prison cell following a suspected drugs overdose.

Gary Campion (32), from Moyross in Limerick City is serving two life sentences, for the 2002 murder of innocent nightclub security doorman Brian Fitzgerald, and the 2006 gangland murder of "Fat" Frankie Ryan.

Campion was rushed by ambulance to hospital from his cell at Mountjoy this morning.

"He overdosed in his cell. He's on his last legs," said a senior source.

Independent.ie has learned that Campion was observed by staff receiving a package yesterday.

He was moved to a segregation unit where he was discovered unresponsive shortly before 8am today.

He is currently in a coma in the intensive care unit (ICU) at the Mater Hospital.

A prison source said: "He was observed receiving something. He refused to hand it over to staff so he was put into a segregation unit

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"He was discovered here unresponsive this morning. He had a pulse but he was in a very poor condition."

Campion had made moves to appeal the two murder convictions last year.

Brian Fitzgerald, (34), was shot dead outside his home at Brookhaven Walk, Corbally, on November 29, 2002, after finishing his shift at Docs night club.

Mr Fitzgerald, who was head of security at the venue, was killed when he refused to allow members of the Dundon/McCarthy gang sell drugs in the club.

Campion was convicted largely on the evidence of another hitman who was paid to shoot Mr Fitzgerald.

UK national James Martin Cahill, pulled the trigger and Campion drove him from the scene on a motorbike.

Cahill, who turned state witness, is also serving a life sentence for the murder.

Campion murdered his former associate Frank Ryan while they both sat in a car in Moyross on September 16, 2006. He shot his friend in the head as he sat directly behind him in the vehicle.

He was found guilty of both murders in two separate Central Criminal Court trials and given two life sentences, first by Mr Justice Peter Charleton on November 15, 2007, and then by the late Mr Justice Paul Carney on May 28, 2009.

Campion has spent a large part of his adult life in prison.

He has been implicated in four murders and was the first person to be convicted of two gangland killings.

The father-of-two previously threatened to kill a prison officer telling him he had shot people in Limerick for 10,000 and would have "no problem" paying twice that sum to have the officer shot dead.

"It wouldnt be my first time," he told the officer.

Campion's brother, William is currently serving life in prison for the murder of bachelor farmer Patrick Skehan.

The 68-year-old from Bridgetown, Co Clare, died from his injuries two months after William Campion robbed his home in 1998.

Mr Skehan was found badly beaten and unconscious, with his hands and legs bound with cable wire, and hanging upside down from the banisters.

Gary Campion's older brother Noel, (34), was shot dead in April 2007 during the height of the Limerick gang feud.

Noel Campion was a convicted armed robber, and wasnt long out of jail when he was gunned down in Limerick city.

Originally from Southill, the Campions moved out of the area in the late 1980s and relocated across the city to Moyross.
Fine Gael hope to win the support of more than 10 Independent TDs to bring extra political and moral credibility to Enda Kenny's emerging minority coalition.

Talks with up to 14 likely Independent deputies are expected to intensify today, as Fine Gael and Fianna Fail inch closer to working out terms of support for a minority coalition.

Several Independents have insisted they will drive a hard bargain in return for their votes - but hopes are increasing that the bulk of them can be won over, and Mr Kenny can finally be elected Taoiseach early next week, possibly on Wednesday.

One source at Leinster House suggested that up to 11 Independents can be persuaded to support the Fine Gael-led minority coalition. Doubts centre on the likelihood of government support from Tipperary's Mattie McGrath and Danny Healy-Rae of Kerry, while his brother Michael may be more likely to back Mr Kenny.

All of the Independents likely to back the government remain extremely coy on the issue of Cabinet seats - with up to three full ministries and a number of junior posts likely to go their way.

The Independents insist their focus is on policy issues, and some also argue that greater influence over law-making now rests with the new committee chairpersons who will for the first time be elected by the 158 TDs in this Dail.

"Most of us are hungry for change rather than interested in getting into government as such," Roscommon-Galway Independent TD Denis Naughten told the Irish Independent.

Open-minded

"I'm open-minded about government. If a good deal can be done, I'm going to consider it seriously," he added.

Mr Naughten, who is one of a grouping of five rural Independent TDs, said real power was finally about to be taken from ministers and given to TDs.

"In my time in politics I could count on one hand the number of times a minister took on board a suggestion from the opposition," he said.

Mr Naughten, who quit Fine Gael in 2011, has been a TD for almost 19 years and is among those tipped for a Cabinet seat.

Longford-Westmeath Independent Kevin 'Boxer' Moran said a wide range of detail has yet to be finalised and his Independent Alliance were prepared to work through the weekend with Fine Gael if necessary.

He said issues like crime, homelessness and health needed urgent attention, and it was "sad the country has been held to ransom over Irish Water".

Waterford deputy John Halligan, also of the Independent Alliance, said that any minority government must last a minimum of two years. He said everything depended on the contents of the Programme for Government and added he expected to meet with Leo Varadkar for talks on the future of University Hospital Waterford.

Already Mr Kenny can rely upon former Fine Gael minister and Tipperary Independent, Michael Lowry, and another Independent, Katherine Zappone.

That brings a total of 52 TDs, but Mr Kenny needs at least 58 deputies in case of Fianna Fail abstaining in next week's vote for Taoiseach.
Its been 61 days since the results of the General Election became known, so what next?

1. Deal time for Fine Gael and Fianna Fail

The talks have jumped the largest hurdle on Irish Water after Fianna Fail dug in their heals and secured a suspension of charges.

While there are still other policy areas and technicalities to be agreed, Micheal Martin and Enda Kenny are expected to put pen to paper within the next 48 hours.

2. Back to the Independents

Enda Kenny managed to secure the support of one Independent TD Katherine Zappone ahead of the last vote for Taoiseach.

And Tipperary TD Michael Lowry will also vote for the Fine Gael leader next time round.

This leaves with Mr Kenny with 52 votes - six short of the required number to form a minority government.

We can expect several days of talks with the Independents as Fine Gael offers sweeteners in return for votes.

3. Fantasy Cabinet

Will Michael Noonan remain on as Finance Minister, and which female politicians will Enda Kenny promote to the top table?

These are some of the questions on the lips of Fine Gael TDs as Mr Kenny considers his next Cabinet.

Its also expected that a number of Independents will be handed positions as a part of their deal with Fine Gael.

4. Meet your new senators

As the government formation talks have dragged on, another election has been taking place beside the members restaurant in Leinster House.

The makeup of the new Seanad will be known by Friday - and there are plenty of new faces and names to get used to.

5. Endas special day

He may have to wait until late next week, but Enda Kenny will finally make history when he becomes the first Fine Gael leader to be-re-elected.
Fianna Fail TD John Curran has defended his partys stance on Irish Water, and said their election promise to abolish the utility applied only if his party were in government.

(The manifesto) said we would abolish Irish Water and the charges if in government. The situation is somewhat different, were not in government, he said on RTE Radio Ones Morning Ireland.

Were in opposition, but we have advanced the issues significantly.

Earlier this week, an agreement was reached to suspend water charges for nine months.

However, Mr Curran confirmed that despite the suspension, people will absolutely have to pay for the utility through some mechanism, even if Irish Water is abolished.

Absolutely (we will have to pay), as we do at the moment, he said.

Going forward it will be a vote for the Dail on whether water charges are ever to be reintroduced, thats a separate issue.

The Dublin Mid-West TD is also chairman of the Dails all-party committee on housing and homelessness.

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When asked why Fianna Fail have focused their arguments on water charges rather than the homeless crisis, he said: I think the reason for this was the necessity to deal with it up front.

It was an issue that would dominate the next government and it required decision making at this stage.

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He added that the issue of housing is being dealt with on a committee level, as they prepare a set of recommendations to present to the Dail.

The committee has started its work this week, we will be meeting with other interested parties such as the Construction Industry Federation to try to identify the key components that are driving up costs, he said.

Acting health minister Leo Varadkar also discussed the suspension of water charges this morning and criticised Fianna Fails ridiculous position on Irish Water.

Speaking on Today with Sean ORourke, he said the focus on the issue of water during government negotiations was surreal.

The fact that they went to the wire and threatened an election, and threatened not to facilitate a new government on water, I just think is ridiculous, he said.

Of all the issues to pick, of all the issues to drive us to the brink of a general election, to threaten not to support a minority government.

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I really thought maybe they would say, 'We insist that Ireland must develop a national health service over the next five years, you need to find the 3bn to do it, or you need to drop your promises on the USC,' not at all.

It was all down to water charges that cost 3 a week. Its the wrong thing to do, its not in the public interest, he added.

He also spoke about Fine Gaels role in government talks, and said his party would continue to make the case in favour of Irish Water during the suspension.

We wouldnt give up on the principal of a national utility, we dont think Irish Water should be broken up and everything sent back to 30-something local authorities.

I dont even believe deep down that Fianna Fail even believes that thats a good idea, even though that was their policy, he said.

Its a real disappointment to me that Fianna Fail wants us to go backwards on water, he added.

IMO says it is a disgrace that our public health services were not the priority issue for the agreement on the formation of a new Government.

Minister Varadkar has criticised Fianna Fail for not demanding a multi-billion investment programme for healthso will he demand it now himself to be included in the Agreement between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, Dr John Duddy said in a statement this evening.

Minister Varadkar shouldnt wait for Fianna Fail to force his hand on investment in health services. If he believes this investment is necessary, and it clearly is, then he can prioritise it himself and ensure that it forms a key part of any Programme for Government.

The current budget is simply insufficient even to maintain services at current levels. We need a commitment to provide significant additional funds for the health services. We need to commit now to urgent action to improve patient experiences and health outcomes.
The green light has been given for the new childrens hospital on a campus shared with St. Jamess Hospital.

The hospital, which will open in 2020, will merge the three existing hospitals in Crumlin, Temple St and Tallaght.

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Here are 10 things you need to know about the new hospital:

1. The new children's hospital will provide in-patients with their own single room and en-suite bathroom, with overnight in-room accommodation for parent

2. The new theatres and procedure rooms will have advanced medical technology for patient diagnosis (e.g. x-ray machines) and complex surgeries, which will improve clinical outcomes for patients.

3. 200m would be made available for the new childrens hospital from the sale of the National Lottery, adding to the existing 450 million Exchequer funding. But rising costs in the construction sector will push up that bill.

4. The plan in 2005 was to close the three existing children's hospitals housed in outdated facilities in Dublin and bring them all under one roof in a state-of-the-art building which would open its doors in 2012. The opening date was then pushed back to 2014 and again, more recently, to 2016.

5. It was turned down for planning permission at the Mater Hospital site in 2012.

6. Major concerns remain among many groups about access to the hospital via car and being caught in traffic.

7. There was a strong lobby to build it on the site of Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown.

8. There will be car parking facilities for less than a fifth of the 5,000 staff in the St Jamess Hospital campus upon completion of the proposed new national childrens hospital on the St Jamess site, according to planners.

9. St Jamess Hospital currently has parking capacity for over a third of the 3,000 core staff who work within the site. Despite the addition of 2,000 extra staff who will be employed by the new childrens hospital, proposals are in place to reduce the number of designated parking spaces from 1,100 to 880.

10. Some residents have complained that such a policy will lead to a drastic reduction in on-street parking space in the surrounding area as staff seek alternative options. However, those in charge of the project say an expansion of the 1-an-hour pay parking zone in the locality will discourage car commuters while prompting more employees to walk, cycle or take public transport to work.
The go-ahead has been given for Ireland's new children's hospital and construction is due to begin this summer.

The long-awaited news was announced this morning that An Bord Pleanala have granted planning permission for the new childrens hospital on a campus shared with St. Jamess Hospital.

The hospital, which will open in 2020, will merge the three existing hospitals in Crumlin, Temple St and Tallaght.

The green light follows years of debate and objections to proposed sites.

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An Bord Pleanala originally turned down the Mater Hospital as a site, forcing the search for a location to go back to the drawing board.

The project will consist of:

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a 473 no.bed children's hospital

a 53 no. bed family accommodation unit at the St James' Hospital Campus

a children's research and innovation centre

another construction compound at former Unilever site on Davitt Road

a children's hospital satellite centre at The Adelaide & Meath Hospital, Tallaght

a children's hospital satellite centre at Connolly Hospital Campus in Blanchardstown

The main construction at St James' Hospital campus will be made up of:

Demolition of all buildings on the site of the new children's hospital

A children's research and innovation centre

Family accommodation

A new children's hospital buildings

A two-level underground car park

There will also be improvements to the road throught he hospital campus and improvements to the buildings and roads present. The plans, published on Pleanala.ie, also report that a new road entrance will be built at Mount Brown.

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The news was welcomed today by families of sick children, the countrys leading paediatric clinicians, the staff of the three childrens hospitals and the CEOs of Our Ladys Childrens Hospital, Crumlin; Temple Street Childrens University Hospital and the National Childrens Hospital at Tallaght.

Childrens Hospital Group CEO Eilish Hardiman said this morning: This truly is a watershed day for children, young people and their families.

"Todays decision will positively transform how paediatric services are delivered for children and young people here in Ireland.

"These buildings are a significant catalyst for how the new national model of care will be delivered.

"We are now firmly on our way to making this long awaited childrens hospital a reality," she continued.

"Anyone who deals with paediatric services in Ireland  as a patient, a parent or as a member of staff - fully understands how badly this new facility is needed.

"I would like to take this opportunity to thank the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board and the Design teams BDP & OConnell Mahon, and all that contributed to getting us to this milestone.

Speaking to RTE's Morning Ireland, Ms Hardiman said she expected construction to begin this summer.

The CEOs of Our Ladys Childrens Hospital, Crumlin, the Temple Street Childrens University Hospital and the National Childrens Hospital at Tallaght Hospital, Helen Shortt, Mona Baker and David Slevin, jointly described the announcements as a "historic and exciting development for childrens healthcare services in Ireland".

They said the new hospital would be "world-class".

Meanwhile, CEO of St. Jamess Hospital Lorcan Birthistle said: We are excited at the opportunity this decision presents to further develop world class services on our campus and we look forward to the development of The Coombe Hospital maternity and womens health services on campus in the future.

Health Minister Leo Varadkar said he was "absolutely delighted" with the morning's update.

This is great news for all the children of Ireland and means that we can now build a state-of-the-art word class Childrens Hospital of which we can truly be proud," he said.

"An Bord Pleanala has granted permission for this wonderful design. Its a massive milestone for Irish children, young people and families.

It will be the single biggest capital project in the history of Irish healthcare."

The opening date for the new children's hospital is autumn 2020 while the two satellite centres, in Connolly Hospital and Tallaght Hospital, which will be linked to the hospital, will open in 2018.

Minister Varadkar also joined Keelin Shanley on RTE Radio Ones Today with Sean ORourke to discuss the announcement.

I got the phone call at 8.30am this morning, and I think its probably the best phone call Ive ever received in politics, he said.

It was just wonderful. This has gone on since I was a medical student.

He addressed opposition to the plans and concerns about air pollution and difficulties accessing the new site in Crumlin.

Theres never going to be a perfect site. Theres never going to be unanimity on where the best site is, but I dont think anyone can argue that this isnt going to be a dramatic improvement on Crumlin and Temple Street.

More important than the issues around parking and access, think of the benefits for the children, he said.

Minister Varadkar also accepted that there may be difficulty in staffing the new hospital.

Recruitment is a struggle, not just in Ireland but in other countries too. We have to be very competitive. Part of it is about paying conditions, and part of it is about the working environment, he said, adding that he hoped the state-of-the-art facilities in the modern building would appeal to young graduates.

When asked about funding, he said he was confident that all of the money was in place for the new hospital short of an asteroid hitting the planet.
An Irish aid worker in Syria has spoken about how the "relentless" violence of Isis militants compelled him to become a volunteer.

Calvin James was an acquaintance of Joshua Molloy, the young Laois man who was arrested in Iraq earlier this month after fighting ISIS with the YPG, a Kurdish resistance group.

People were saying that he was here for the money, but any YPG volunteer that was here (knows) there was no money in it at all.

The media were saying that he came here looking for action and that he was bored, again this is nonsense, he was affected by the plight of the Azidis, the same reason why I came out here, he said on RTE Radio Ones Liveline.

Mr James is originally from Blanchardstown, Dublin, and first visited the Middle East in 2012.

My mum had just lost a very heroic battle with cancer over seven years, and I was working with children with emotional and behavioural difficulties so I wasnt taking care of myself at the time.

I pretty much asked my boss if I could get out for a couple of weeks, my head was melted, so he gave me a couple of weeks off.

The endless mountains and vast open spaces of Kurdistan were very appealing at the time, he said.

Mr James described travelling through Mosul, a city in northern Iraq, where he befriended many Kurdish people.

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On returning home, he found himself constantly thinking about the plight of these people and the rise of the Islamic state, and was driven to become a volunteer.

I felt that I had to get involved, he said.

I was just lying in bed thinking about the people that I was hanging out with (when I visited) and what had happened to them.

I remember I was in a taxi with the two girls the first time I was over and I was thinking what happened to them? Are they still alive?

I couldnt sleep at night so I just made the decision to come out.

Speaking about the so-called Islamic state, he continued: Theyve taken oppression to a whole new level. Even Al Qaeda are now known as moderate extremists and we all know what Al-Qaeda have done.

It was the plight of the Yazidis, girls as young as nine or ten getting kidnapped and sold into slavery (that prompted me to go).

A friend he made on his first trip to Iraq put him in touch with a member of the YPG on Facebook, and although Mr James didnt want to fight, he applied to volunteer and was offered a position as a logistician.

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Just a couple of weeks after starting, he was forced to head home for a personal reason, but he said he couldnt stop thinking about the situation in Iraq and was determined to return.

Having spent a number of years fund-raising, he got a job as an aid worker in the north Syrian town of Qamishli with the Red Crescent.

Im training to be a paramedic at the moment, and Im working in the civil defence emergency response unit, which deals with everything from accidents to shootings to car crashes, anything that can be thrown at the city, he said.

Although he noted he lives in one of the safer regions, the city suffered two days of bloodshed last week as fighting erupted between Kurdish and pro-government factions.

Id never actually stood in the middle of the street and watched men firing machine guns at each other before, Mr James said of the relentless battle.

As part of his work, he underwent three weeks of training in basic weapons, language and ideology, but he said he has never taken up arms.

I was put out in a civilian capacity and I was kind of lucky, because they have their own security team so I didnt have to take up arms at all, he said.

Mr James added that he is hoping to return to Ireland permanently in September.
The retired garda who is credited with ending the reign of Limericks feuding gangs has said there is a complete parallel with the escalating violence in Dublin.

Limerick was blighted by brutal murders and family feuds for more than a decade, and Former Detective Superintendent Jim Browne was regarded as a key player in the fight against the citys criminal underworld.

During his time as Detective Superintendent, Mr Browne tackled the long-running feuds between the McCarthy-Dundons and the Keane-Collopys, before retiring in 2015.

Speaking on RTE Radio Ones Morning Ireland, he looked back on his nearly 40-year career and described the peak of the brutal violence in the city.

In 2007, the gangland feud was at its height. In that year, there were 102 shooting incidents in Limerick city alone, and that would be 30pc of the entire country in regards to firearms (incidents).

There was basically a guerrilla war being waged by two feuding factions and there was all sorts of intimidation of guards, witnesses, prison officers, and court staff, he said.

Reflecting on the current violence in Dublin, he noted a complete parallel with the situation in Limerick.

In 2000, Eddie Ryan was murdered in the Moose Bar, and there were two women who were seriously wounded in that attack, as in the Regency hotel.

There is a linkage between the dissident republicans and the feuding factions in Limerick, as there is in Dublin. They were associated with the McCarthy-Dundons and the Keane-Collopys, he said.

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Mr Browne drew comparisons between the innocent gangland victims Eddie Hutch Snr and Martin ORourke and the mistaken identity killing of Noel Crawford in 2006.

If you look at the murder of Eddie Hutch, I see a parallel with the murder of Noel Crawford, an innocent taxi driver, who just happened to be a relation to one of the people involved in the shooting.

If you look at Martin ORourke, another innocent victim, again the parallel is there with Shane Geoghegan.

There was Mark Moloney as well, just because he was related. He was living on the borderline of homelessness and he was murdered, said Mr Browne, referring to the 2008 murders of Geoghegan (28), an innocent rugby player, and Moloney (40), who was loosely associated with a member of the Keane/Collopy faction.

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In 2005, Gardai launched Operation Anvil to target organised crime, an initiative Mr Browne named as a major factor in the fight against criminal gangs in Limerick.

One of the reasons for the success in Limerick was that Operation Anvil was in place at that time for the country, so resources were made available. We also received assistance from the national units in relation to short-term operations when the feud was at its height.

You would have two armed units in one small housing estate where the shooting factions were shooting over and back at each other, he said.

He pointed to a lack of funding and resources as a serious issue preventing Dublin Gardai from winning the fight against gangland criminals.

In my view, the Gardai are absolutely starved of resources at the moment, in relation to manpower and also resources in relation to technology.

It would take probably 12 people to focus on one gangland figure for a period of time, if you are to be successful, he added.
WAYNE Dundon is facing the prospect of fresh charges over an arsenal of military weapons smuggled into the country for a 'gang war'.

His brother John is also likely to face similar charges and it is understood that a file is being finalised for the DPP.

The Dundon brothers tried to organise the purchase of assault rifles and rocket launchers to dramatically escalate the gangland feuds in the city.

Wayne was this week convicted of the murder of Limerick businessman Roy Collins, while John is serving life for ordering the murder of innocent man Shane Geoghegan in 2008.

It is believed that Wayne, who was jailed for life for organising the murder of Mr Collins from his prison cell, also hatched the arms deal on a mobile phone from his prison cell in 2007.

The Irish Independent understands that the gardai recently obtained a vital piece of evidence which will lead to a new criminal charge.

It is understood to include the use of voice-recognition technology, which identified Dundon's voice on the phone to one of the undercover agents.

The plan was to use an RPG 7 rocket launcher to blow up a prison van transporting former hitman turned supergrass James Martin Cahill to court.

Cahill gave evidence against four men, including John Dundon and his brother Dessie, who were accused of the murder of nightclub security manager Brian Fitzgerald.

The Dundons and their co-accused Anthony Kelly were acquitted while gang member Gary Campion was convicted of the murder.

The arms plot was foiled after an international sting operation codenamed Operation Beam, which involved gardai and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

Two gang members, Glen Geasley (27) and Sean Callinan (21) were arrested and subsequently jailed after they ordered the weaponry from two SOCA agents posing as international arms dealers.

The sting began on February 22 when Geasley was introduced to an Englishman called 'George', who then brought him to meet two other men, 'Raj' and 'John'. However the three international arms dealers were undercover SOCA agents.

Geasley told his contacts that he was representing Wayne Dundon  who he described as a "major criminal godfather" behind bars in an Irish prison.

He said Dundon wanted the weapons "for a war in Limerick between Wayne's people and their enemies".

List

Geasley gave them a shopping list of 24 weapons for an agreed price of Stg 45,000 (60,000). It included two Russian-built RPG 7 rocket launchers, five Russian AK 47 assault rifles, five American AR-15 assault rifles, two Uzi sub-machine guns, 10 semi-automatic pistols and ammunition.

On April 20 Geasley handed over the cash to 'Raj' in the Rochestown Park Hotel in Cork.

At the same time Callinan was shown the weapons in a van parked at the Ibis Hotel on the Cork to Waterford Road. Gardai arrested both men.

In 2008 Geasley was jailed for 12 years, with the final five suspended, while Callinan was jailed for six, with the final three suspended.
A major row erupted among the Garda Representative Association after the leadership was accused of being "disconnected" from members on the ground.

At one stage a split seemed on the cards among delegates on the final day of the association's conference in Killarney, as members from three divisions tabled an emergency motion.

They demanded a debate that the Central Executive Council (CEC) was out of touch with the rank and file. The leadership was accused of ignoring the "elephant in the room" which was that the 70pc of members last week voted to reject a new working time agreement.

The CEC negotiated the new arrangements with Garda HQ and the Department of Justice over several months. The agreement allowed for a change in the rosters system, which has been described by the Garda Inspectorate as "unfit for purpose". The GRA leadership endorsed the new deal, and recommended that the country's 10,000 rank and file members voted to accept it.

However, in a shock result, the majority of gardai - 68.8pc - voted against the proposals.

There were shouts of dissent when Dermot O'Brien, the outgoing president, said that standing orders did not allow for an emergency discussion.

The motion had been tabled by three garda divisions - Donegal, Sligo/Leitrim and Dublin South Central - who said the rejection of the rosters illustrated a disconnect between the CEC and the membership.

They claimed that the leadership had not appreciated the depth of anger amongst the officers on the ground. A number of delegates walked out before the decision was reversed.

Mr O'Brien said that the association needed to clear the air and move on, and urged the conference not to allow a split.

He said it would be hugely damaging for the welfare of the country's gardai and that they had a much bigger fight ahead with the government on the issue of pay restoration.

Newly elected deputy president Detective Garda James Mulligan said: "We need to deal with it and move on."

One delegate later said: "It was right that the whole disconnect issue was discussed because it cleared the air."
This is the moment a car was stolen from outside a home overnight by thieves without keys.

Fitness instructor Jennifer Shannon posted this video of her BMW 520 being stolen from the driveway of her home in the Manorfields Estate, Clonee, Dublin 15 at 3.45am today.

The footage shows two men breaking the window of the white vehicle - registration plate 12D41580 - before using what looks like a transmitter and a deflector to gain access to the keyless vehicle.

Within three minutes the pair have fled in the car.

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Mother-of-three Jennifer released the footage to Independent.ie to warn others about ruthless car theft gangs.

"It's scary that this could happen so fast. I would warn others to be very aware. We thought we were doing everything right by getting an alarm, leaving the key upstairs and putting in CCTV."

This latest video emerged just days after an adapted car belonging to a paralympian athlete was taken from outside his home.

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John McCarthy was left devastated after callous criminals broke into his Dublin home, whilst he was sleeping, and stole the keys to his adapted car - an Audi A6 - before driving off.

Thankfully his vehicle was returned a day later.
Environment Minister Alan Kelly called the role of a Housing Minister a waste of time without additional powers.

Mr Kelly warned limits he found as the minister currently responsible for the area would continue at an Oireachtas Committee this afternoon.

He said that if this role was to become the czar for housing it would need control of all the levers.

Appointing a Minister with the title and just taking the powers from the Department of Environment is an absolute waste of time, he said.

Unless you take sections from the Department of Finance, Department of Public Expenditure, Department of Social Protection, and dare I say it, any other agencies well then they're certainly going to be left in the position myself and (my predecessor Mr Coffey) was left in.

He added that in principal I've no objection to it, it may be a good idea but without additional powers the position could be tokenistic.

The Labour Party Minister looks to be in the closing stages of his career at Cabinet as Fine Gael look to form a new minority-government with Independents.

Watch the live stream here:
Independent TD Mick Wallace broke down in tears after discussing the plight of refugees.

Speaking in the Dail, Mr Wallace said the refugee crisis is so stark and Ireland needs to do more.

Could we do something around just minors even? Can Ireland become a champion of minors in the area of refugees, Mr Wallace asked.

The Wexford deputy said there are many Irish families willing to take in refugees and that he would be willing to accommodate one himself.

It wont cost the State a penny, he said.

Mr Wallace and Dublin Fingal TD Clare Daly have recently returned from Calais where they visited refugee camps.

During the Dail debate on the issue today, Mr Wallace became emotional when recalling his meeting with a 15 year old child who lost his family on the Iran-Afghan border.

Hes 15 and hed like to come to Ireland or Britain, a tearful Mr Wallace said.
President of Trinity College Students Union, Lynn Ruane, has been elected to the universitys third Seanad seat.

Ruane was declared victorious on the 15th count, beating incumbent senator Sean Barrett by 116 votes.

She joins returning senators Ivana Bacik and David Norris, who were also elected to the University of Dublin constituency.

Speaking after the win, Senator Ruane (31) thanked the graduates who voted for her, as well as the people of her native Tallaght.

Ms Ruane left school shortly after completing her Junior Cert, during which time she was pregnant with her first daughter, Jordanne.

By the time she was 21, Ms Ruane had a second daughter, Jaelynne, and a career as a drugs addiction worker in her community.

She returned to education through the Trinity Access Programme at the age of 26, and went on to be elected Student Union President.

Throughout her tenure as TCD SU President, she has been vocal in her support for the Students Against Fees movement and more childcare funding for young parents pursuing third-level education.

Ms Ruane was one of the first Seanad candidates backed by the Union of Students in Ireland (USI). In March, the union said it fully supported Ms Ruanes bid, alongside former USI President Laura Harmon.

All six university seats in the Seanad have been filled following Ms Ruanes election.

Independent Ronan Mullen reclaimed his NUI seat, while former Tanaiste Michael McDowell was also elected to the same panel.

Alice Mary Higgins, the daughter of President Michael D Higgins, was elected to the third and final NUI seat.

Sinn Feins Padraig McLochlainn was elected to the Industrial and Commercial Panel, while Labours Ged Nash was elected to the Labour Panel.
Brave prison officers were criticised by the public after stepping in to save the life of Derek 'Del Boy' Hutch during a vicious stabbing attack, it has emerged.

The convicted killer was lucky to be alive after being set upon in the exercise yard of Mountjoy prison last year.

The attack came just two weeks after his brother Gary was shot dead in Costa del Sol.

Gary Hutch's murder led to his associates launching the now infamous attack on the Regency Hotel and the murder of David Byrne (34), which escalated the feud between the Kinahan cartel and associates of Hutch.

Speaking ahead of the Prison Officers Association's annual conference in Athlone today, POA president Stephen Delaney - who did not name Derek Hutch - told how staff were lambasted online for intervening in the attack.

Cartel

It is believed the attack was carried out on the orders of the Christy Kinahan drug cartel.

Mr Delaney said: "Most online comments afterwards were asking - 'why did they bother? They should have let him die'.

"But for prison officers, the obvious question is why are vicious gang members allowed to congregate and carry out such an assault?"

Brothers Jamie and Leon Griffin are believed to have pounced on the 27-year-old in the exercise yard of the jail for a 10,000 bounty from Spain.

Derek Hutch, the nephew of crime boss Gerry 'The Monk' Hutch, escaped with defensive slash wounds to his arms after unarmed officers put their own lives at risk to save him.

"Three of our colleagues went into a crowded Mountjoy exercise yard where a relation of one of the main protagonists in the current feud was being hacked to pieces," Mr Delaney said. "The three officers, using bare hands and courage only, pulled him from certain death.

"Time and time again we have raised the issue of gangs within our prison system. What is different this year is that we may actually get a hearing, arising from the horrendous feud that has erupted on our streets."

Calling for gang members to be isolated, Mr Delaney warned that a prison murder could have "immediate and terrible ramifications" on the outside.

"Why should prison officers have to charge into an exercise yard to do the right thing? Why have we not established a system of isolation, where membership of these gangs has a limiting benefit, and based upon hard-earned garda and prison-based intelligence, these gangs and their members are isolated?"

Urging Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald to help "remove the power from the gangs in prison", Mr Delaney added: "We are allowing a status quo to exist which appeases the bully and the gang - and this is not acceptable. In the present prison environment gang membership is flaunted for the purpose of intimidating the neutral and the frustration of the officer."
A mother and her young daughter had a terrifying near miss after a driver sped through a red light as they were about to cross the road in Bangor.

It happened at around 7.45pm on April 16.

The PSNI said a mother with her six and eight-year-old daughters were about to cross at the post office in the town centre when the driver just missed them.

Police are appealing for the public's help to find the driver.

If you have any information you can contact police on the non-emergency number 101.
When father-of-four Jimmy Murray lost his beloved wife Ann McGeeney to cancer, he channelled his grief into setting up a foundation to carry on her good work.

Jimmy Murray (53), from Newry, met his future wife at a party when they were just 18. But as he recalls that first encounter didn't go particularly well.

"Ann offered me and some of my friends a lift home and because she was from the country and a farming background I asked if it would be on her tractor which, as you can imagine, didn't go down too well," he remembers.

Looking back is obviously painful for Jimmy, but remembering Ann is so obviously easy

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Fate intervened and they met again a year later when they were both in first year at Queen's University in Belfast. They were together ever since.

"I fell for Ann right away as she was so vibrant and full of life. She always wanted to be doing something," Jimmy says.

The couple married several years later and settled down to family life, bringing up their four children, Daisy (23), Holly (21), Ardal (19) and James (13).

Life was good but very busy, as Jimmy was working for the Department of Rural Development (DARD) and Ann was working as a freelance community consultant, peace building and helping those marginalised in society.

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Always active, Jimmy explains how it was Ann's outdoor adventures that led to her being "accidentally" diagnosed when she was 51. "We were out biking and she fell off and hurt her arm and said she felt like the power had gone in it," he says. "When we went to the hospital they decided to do a brain scan as she had suffered a fall, and that revealed a shadow on the brain."

Jimmy recalls how up until this point in 2013 Ann enjoyed perfect health. She didn't smoke, went for all her medical check-ups and was always outdoors, relishing a happy and fulfilled life.

"Further tests in the hospital revealed that not only was the cancer in her brain, it was also on her lungs and was stage 4 and terminal," he says.

This was naturally a lot for the couple and their family to come to terms with, but Jimmy recalls how from the outset Ann didn't want any prognosis of dates or times, she just wanted to make the most of every second she had with her family.

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"I'll never understand how she did it but she lived a full and active life until near the end. She just kept going and her determination kept us all going," Jimmy explains.

"Towards the end of her brave fight in September 2014, she had started to lose her hair to chemo and she was very weak. Her father lived until he was 92 and died 10 days before Ann and her mum is still alive at 92, so she came from good genes - which just shows you that cancer is no respecter of that. There was no rhyme or reason as to why Ann got sick."

Though they were an incredibly close couple, even Jimmy had not realised the far-reaching nature of Ann's work. He says he had no idea of the extent of his wife's ability to affect change and the impact she had on lives until after she passed away, aged 52.

"I knew Ann was a community worker, but she didn't come home bragging about people she had helped or things she had done. I knew she worked with those who most needed help - women's groups, the disadvantaged and the marginalised. In fact, one of her first jobs was in Crossmaglen working on inter-community development."

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Whatsapp Great friends: Ann with Katrina Kernan (left) who volunteered with her at St Peters GAA clubs healthy living project

But it wasn't until Ann's wake when people and colleagues started turning up and talking about her that Jimmy realised there was so much about his wife he didn't know. "All these letters from people she had helped started to arrive and I realised what a remarkable job she had done. She had just worked away quietly behind the scenes making a real difference and impact on people's lives," he says.

Jimmy started to realise he didn't want all this good work to be in vain and he wanted it carried on in Ann's name - a lasting legacy to the love of his life.

"A few months after she died I started talking to the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland to see how some sort of fund might work - something which would be based on the principals which Ann had been championing.

"I talked to the children about it and they were completely on board with it. But we realised we just didn't want to do small fund-raising events as a family and we didn't want the worry and the pressure of handling the money side of things. We wanted whatever we did to have a far-reaching effect. We wanted to recognise Ann's life and all that she had achieved and to continue her work through the CFNI, handing out grants to specific charities in need, working with the issues close to Anne's heart."

So The Ann McGeeney Trust was born and in September, almost a year after he lost his precious wife, Jimmy and the children held a ball to launch the trust in her honour.

"It was a terrific night and all the children were part of it. We raised over 20,000 that night. It was full of mixed emotions and Ann would have loved it. We knew she would be very proud of it."

To date, the trust fund has more than 70,000 in it and a special advisory group has been set up to determine where the monies go.

"We want to echo Ann's work and are looking at the disadvantaged in society - single parents, new immigrants, cross- border community work and peace-building. These are all the areas Ann was passionate about," says Jimmy.

"We want it to be about giving money, no matter how small, that will really transform lives and make a difference."

Jimmy says Ann's death has also brought the family a lot closer and they spend as much time as possible.

"We went for a walk up the Mourne Mountains - there was about 150 of us - and we scattered Ann's ashes there as that is where she was at her happiest.

"Now, every year on her birthday we go for a walk up the Mournes and make a day out of it. We then come back to a wee pub and enjoy some food and music and a night of sharing memories and stories about Ann. This is another way of raising money but the family itself decides where that money goes; the first time was to the Southern Area Hospice whose staff were so good when Ann was ill.

"Money also went to Macmillan which was fantastic, not just with Ann, but the whole family."

Jimmy admits that he personally hit rock bottom several months after Ann's death but he went for counselling which made a huge difference.

"It has been difficult and I didn't cope very well," she says. "That was the one thing Ann and I used to talk about as she was worried I wouldn't be able to come to terms with her being gone, which is why I sought help, as I knew that was what she would want me to do.

"I'm back at work now, not quite full-time, but it helps as it is good to be busy. The kids are wonderful but there is just a huge void in my life where my soulmate used to be.

"We had a lot of good friends and they have stayed by my side and are looking after me. I just want to stay strong and make her proud.

"Letters keep coming in. I got one recently from a member of the travelling community who talked about how much Ann inspired her and how she got into education and a job because of her. Things like that keep me going as I know she will live on because of her family and because of the trust."
Tipped by Lonely Planet as the top country to visit in 2016, Botswana celebrates its 50th anniversary of independence this year.

Whatever the occasion, loved-up couples are best avoided, and that rule especially applies to any amorous pairs getting down to the nitty-gritty. But when I stumble across two frenetic felines romping in the undergrowth, I'm forced to make an exception.

Spotting a leopard in the wild is good fortune; finding two is a heart-racing, magical affair.

Using the bristly foliage of a woolly caper bush for modesty, two of Africa's most elusive cats are mating. Having safely secluded a kill, they'll stick to this spot for two or three days, climbing trees and chasing each other through long, flame-red grass, before parting ways and never meeting again.

It is sightings such as this that, in part, justify the hefty price tag attached to a safari in Botswana, one of the most expensive but enduringly popular destinations in Africa, and a particular favourite for honeymooners.

This September, the former British protectorate celebrates 50 years of independence, and having been tipped by Lonely Planet as the top country to visit in 2016, tourist numbers are set to further swell.

Along with a good track record for safety and a strong government commitment to conservation, it's the diversity of landscapes and unique animal adaptations that make Botswana so special.

From above, the Okavango Delta resembles the cracked topping of a creme brulee, with a myriad of narrow waterways dissecting otherwise barren earth. Conical termite mounds spiral skyward like wizards' hats, making up 96% of the palm-dotted islands of the floodplains.

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Occupying a quiet spot in a 77,000-acre private concession, the recently reopened six-tent Great Plains Duba Expedition Camp is far removed from any outside contact: there's no phone reception, Wifi connection or any other lodges.

At night, I watch fireflies dance on my porch way, and wake up in the early hours to hear a lioness shuffling close to my canvas walls with a kill, leaving only drag marks in the dust to tell her tale.

Aside from solitude, one of the obvious plus points of Duba is the opportunity to drive off-road. Heading out after dawn, we cut through long blades of dew-glistening silky bushman grass, sending startled red lechwes splashing into the waterways.

My driver, KB, introduces us to the resident Tsaro lion pride, the stars of several nature documentaries made by National Geographic film-makers Dereck and Beverly Joubert, who own the Great Plains safari company.

The Tsaro pride's story is a soap opera of power, turf wars and female infanticide, although now only a few of the original players remain. Famous for their ability to hunt herds of buffalo, often chasing them into the water until they get stuck in the mud, the big cats have also learned how to swim, developing muscular physiques as a result.

We watch one Herculean male attempt to regroup with a lioness and her young. But keen to keep her young cubs safe, she snarls to maintain some distance, demonstrating might is no match for the strength of motherly love.

Expand Close A Baboon eating flower from a sausage tree at Great Plains Duba Expedition Camp, Botswana. PA Photo/Sarah Marshall. / Facebook

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Whatsapp A Baboon eating flower from a sausage tree at Great Plains Duba Expedition Camp, Botswana. PA Photo/Sarah Marshall.

Aside from drama in the bush, another reason for Botswana's popular appeal is the quality of luxury lodges available.

Arbiters of five-star luxury, the Belmond group has several properties here, including Khwai River Lodge on the edge of Moremi National Park.

Set alongside a river, wooden bungalows on raised platforms are kitted out with air-conditioning, fluffy towels and (albeit made from recycled elephant poo) headed notepaper, making the property more akin to a slick hotel than a safari lodge. The option to eat meals in private, rather than at a communal table, also better suits some honeymooners.

Regardless of accommodation tastes, the quality wildlife sightings and guiding meets any seasoned safari-goer's expectations.

Botswana is one of the best places to see African wild dogs, listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List, and Moremi is a particular hotspot.

Packs enjoy complex social relationships, and their hunting game plans are some of the most strategic in the bush, making them fascinating to watch. Keeping pace with them can be challenging, but my private guide, Moses, gives it a go.

Tearing through the concession shared with several campsites and self-drivers, we attempt to follow a pack of dogs in relentless pursuit of an impala.

The dogs ricochet around the mopane forest like steel bullets in a pinball machine, occasionally calling to regroup and assess options. Several roll around in elephant dung to disguise any scent, but despite their efforts - and ours - the action falls short of any conclusion.

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Our day does not end at sunset, though.

After dinner, I join Moses for a night drive, combing woodland for wildlife until 10pm. This late, we're able to watch a leopard stalking prey as shooting stars pass overhead, and even catch sight of a young aardvark snuffling in the soil. In his 15 years of guiding, this is only the second aardvark Moses has seen, and for the next 48 hours he can't stop smiling.

Glimpsing these nocturnal creatures is rare, but one animal extremely common to Botswana is the elephant. A ban on hunting and a tight handle on poaching mean numbers here are exceptionally high, representing 40% of Africa's population.

Chobe National Park, on the border of Namibia, attracts vast herds in the dry season (particularly from August to October) when they come down to drink at the Chobe River.

Busy gateway town Kasane is a shocking contrast to the wilderness experience I've been enjoying for the past few days. Fortunately, andBeyond's mobile camp, buried deep in the park's mahogany woodland, provides an escape route from the limited and congested pathways of the national park.

The comfortable camp with bucket showers shifts location every five days, and after the park gates close and vehicle engines cease rumbling, it's possible to savour Chobe at its best.

This season the river is at its lowest level for 25 years and much of the greenery has disappeared, leaving waterbuck to gnaw at the skeletons of acacia trees while overheating hippos are forced to graze in the hazy midday sun.

Not everyone, though, is so fortunate in the fight for survival. On a late afternoon game drive, we come across an injured and emaciated seven-month-old cub, lagging woefully behind a pride of lions, his low moans lost in the wind.

Desperately willing for a textbook Disney outcome, I long for his mother to turn around.

She does. But after a brief hesitation, she accepts his fate and walks away.

After all, not every story has a happy ending - even in a honeymoon destination.

Getting there

Sarah Marshall was a guest of The Ultimate Travel Company (020 73051 8098; theultimatetravelcompany.co.uk) who tailor-make a classic week-long Botswana safari from 6,860/8,839 per person.

A two-night stay at Duba Expeditions is followed by a further two nights at Belmond Khwai River Lodge, before a final three nights at Chobe Under Canvas.

All meals, drinks and activities are included, as are British Airways flights from Heathrow, bush flights and private transfers throughout.
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Dan O'Brien Opinion While we catastrophise about Covid, we ignore risk of running out of cash

We Irish view the world in an increasingly strange and unhealthy way. We catastrophise about Covid in a way other European countries do not. We focus on how bad the effects of the virus could get, on how many more restrictions might be imposed by Government and how helpless we are in the face of the virus.
On what was almost certain to be his last speech to the Dail as minister, an embittered AK47 opened fire on his colleagues with a water pistol.

A souped up super soaker, no less, which he had rigged up to simultaneously billow out clouds of steam - and jets of bile. It wasn't pretty.

There was his sheer rage and choking frustration for one thing. Alan Kelly went a peculiar shade of purplish red as he got everything off his chest.

It's not easy to be the last Egyptian left standing on the shore, raging at the treacherous parting of the Red Sea, that other great body of water.

Barry Cowen showed his contempt for Kelly's venting of spleen with a slow yoga-like cat stretch in his seat.

His message was unmistakeable: "The Hebrews are home and dry, buddy. Get off the stage."

But as the last man standing for Irish Water, it was left to Kelly to make a lonely and much belated closing speech for the Defence - in a trial which had already handed down a guilty verdict.

Of course there were vitriolic AK47 bullets sprayed across the room. We'd have missed them out of sheer nostalgia if he'd chosen to leave quietly.

But he was never going to do that.

And if you set that aside - along with the almost universal derision with which his words were greeted, he made some undeniable sense.

In fact, he gave a better account of Irish Water than he has ever given.

He probably should have given that speech about four years ago. Maybe he did, and we just weren't listening.

"Let nobody think we are in any way experiencing new politics here and this is the birth of a new political maturity," said Kelly.

It was hard to argue with him there, given the ongoing grinding of gritty Realpolitik in action.

"Staff in both Irish Water and their contractors must be reeling today - 500 of which are based on the southside of Cork city - in the backyard of the Fianna Fail leader," he continued.

"I wonder what the 5,000 who work in the water and waste industry think of the latest development?

"The Labour party stands in solidarity with those workers today," he said, an uncomfortable silence falling in the chamber - empty though it was, with nobody at all on the Fine Gael benches.

Nobody was willing to step up to be the cheerleader for mass unemployment, it seemed.

Alan Kelly went on.

"Many people in this house have no idea what Irish Water actually do and there are quite a few who chose not to learn what they do," he continued.

He agreed with Noel Dempsey that it has been "almost impossible" to have a rational debate on water for the last few years - and so he said he was taking the opportunity to "nail a few myths".

"Firstly nobody pays for their water twice. Does our water system with boil water notices, leaking pipes and insecure supply look like something that we have paid for?" he thundered.

And while water was indeed a "human right," he said, the United Nations definition of access to water is "not free water for everyone but affordable water where the costs of providing it does not go about 3pc of people's incomes".

It was uncomfortable listening. And he went on and on until, finally, he ran out of time. But he was absolutely hell bent on finishing what he was going to say.

The Ceann Comhairle was insistent. "It's his last sentence," yelled Brendan Howlin, who seemed as frustrated as his Labour Party colleague.

It wasn't quite - but it was his last page.

Out of pity, the Ceann Comhairle let him finish - only to discover that Kelly's parting shot was to accuse Fianna Fail of "environmental treason."

It is not likely that this will be the last time we will ever see the issue of Irish Water reach boiling point.

But for now, it's tepid baths all round as they tend to their wounds ahead of the next skirmish.
No-one has a monopoly on expertise, and the decision of the Central Bank to invite public submissions on its mortgage lending rules is a welcome development.

The fact that Dublin buyers must save more than 50,000 before securing a home loan under stringent mortgage lending rules is clearly an impediment to home ownership.

The wider economic rationale behind the restrictions are understood - to prevent a repeat of the risky lending and boom and bust cycles which destroyed the Irish economy.

But it is clear that in their present form, the rules are not working, and need adjustment until supply resumes and the property market returns to a normal level of activity.

But there is concern about the form of public consultation to take place. The Central Bank has said written submissions must provide "evidence-based analyses of the impact of the rules".

What this means is open to question. Does it mean that only academic studies setting out the impact on the economy will be considered? Will the impact on a working couple, locked out of home ownership because they cannot raise the deposit required, be taken into account?

And what weight will be given to vested interests including the construction sector, intent on building and maximising profits, and banks keen to resume lending?

It must be remembered that there is no guarantee the rules will be adjusted. Indeed, they may be tightened perhaps to reduce the amount of money which can be borrowed or to impose a higher deposit requirement for those moving to a larger home.

The Central Bank must tread a fine line between sound lending practices and ensuring that working people retain the option to buy a home. The success of this consultation will largely depend on balancing those two factors, but it must put people at the heart of its considerations.
Watching the events last night in Dail Eireann I felt a great sense of shame at the state of our political system. Just 64 out of 158 elective representations turned up to debate Leo Varadkar's recent diversion of 12m from mental health services.

I realised our political system has turned the term 'mental health' into a mere buzzword.

As a 20-year-old, I have personally seen the desperate need for increased funding in our mental health services. Ireland by its rural nature is a country pre-disposed to certain mental illness such as depression or anxiety. As a country, we should have a heightened awareness of our mental health to combat this.

However, suicide rates keep climbing, waiting lists for services are getting longer and people are being let down by a government that doesn't deem this epidemic to be worthwhile of serious action.

I witnessed a family member being told at a HSE mental health clinic that, while they were ill, they simply weren't ill enough to be treated. I have seen a woman ring the gardai about her mentally ill daughter under the advice that it was the only way our mental health services would pay attention to her.

I'll never forget one person saying to me: "They don't want to know about you until you have tried something, then they can put you on suicide watch and pretend to make a difference".

Pretend to make a difference - that got to me. And it was that line that echoed in my head last night as I watched the Dail debate. Pretend to make a difference, pretend to act, and pretend to care. It is this pretence that has led mental health to become a buzzword in Irish political life, a word TDs can throw out during elections to get some votes.

While Fine Gael's outline of mental health policy in its election manifesto was vague and unfocused, Fianna Fail's was more promising.

It outlined an impressive plan, which focused on the establishment of a new statutory National Mental Health Authority that would be "charged with leading an all-out national programme to promote positive attitudes to mental health and to reduce the incidence of self-harm and suicide".

Yet last night just 15 Fianna Fail TDs showed up. Yes, some, such as Robert Tory, spoke with great passion but once again it has been proved mental health is just a buzzword.

While I agree with Mr Varadkar that there is a need for change management, modernising practice and driving implementation, I, unlike him am not naive enough to believe that this will come about with decreased funding. Enough is enough.

Amy Gilligan

Stillorgan, Co Dublin

The benefit of Catholic care

Dr Peter Boylan (Irish Independent, Letters, April 26) states he has concern over the Catholic ethos of the St Vincent's Healthcare Group and that modern Irish women and infants deserve better. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious.

Given that Ireland has always been at the top of its care for newborns and their mothers in international rankings, his logic seems illogical. However, given that we are now have the Kenny law and an active push to repeal the Eighth, that would seem to be very much under threat.

Dr Boylan seems to have a complete contempt for Catholic influence in hospitals, but given that the Catholic Church is the biggest medical provider in the world, it seems many would not agree with his conclusion.

Does he want something like the bullying of Obama "care" now to appear in our hospitals? If so, one wonders why the men and women of 1916 even bothered!

Fr John McCallion

Coalisland, Co Tryone

Water charges deferred

Nine months? The exact length of time it takes the 'old hag of Irish politics' to give birth to another ogre!

Richard McDonagh

Cork

Remember Bradford victims

The families of those who died and were injured at Hillsborough in 1989 have finally received the result they deserved. This is the end of an exhausting and emotional battle they should never have had to fight.

In a similar vein, 56 people died at Bradford City's Valley Parade stadium in 1985. Theresa May, the British Home Secretary, recently said she is ready to consider a Hillsborough-style independent review into that tragedy, particularly as the Bradford fire may not have been an accident.

In the 18 years before the disaster, there had been nine fires at businesses owned by or associated with the Bradford City chairman Stafford Heginbotham, who died in 1995.

I wish those relatives the strength to continue the fight to find the truth behind that disaster.

Damien Carroll

Dublin 24

Keeping the thrill of intimacy

Even in 2016, teenage girls still live in an unequal world. Women like Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel are still exceptions in male-dominated spheres.

I largely blame women for this inequality as they collude with it. Too many of them accept sole responsibility for demanding children, low-end jobs, abusive partners and sexual crimes. They unquestioningly enslave themselves to social and cosmetic expectations. The fact that women appear naked in films and music videos is perceived to be a step forward in female liberation.

Paying insurance as high as that of more frequently dangerous drivers is also considered by some to be a fair measure of equality. Gender equality is also expressed in taking the same blows and abuse as is meted out to men.

If an embryo could choose its gender, s/he would reach a quick decision after reading the foregoing. S/he would then make an even quicker decision after watching 'Pixie's Sex Clinic' on RTE. These embryos could then decide not to pay for a TV licence to RTE in return for substandard, undemocratic programming.

Today's teens know more about sex than ever before, yet they still have unplanned pregnancies and STIs. Why, therefore, is there a need for Dr Pixie?

Youngsters must protect what should be private in their future years. To quote Germaine Greer, "a library is where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity".

Thanks to the vulgarity of rap videos, Dr Pixie and other media, innocence no longer lends any thrill to the sexual imagination. Some people need to restore secrecy, soul and mystery to the realm of adult sexuality.

Florence Craven

Maynooth, Co Kildare
Police officers secure the area after a suicide bomb explosion outside the historical Ulu Cami in Bursa, Turkey (Depo Photos/AP)

Fifteen people have been arrested by Turkish authorities in connection with a suicide bomb attack in the north-western city of Bursa in which 13 people were injured, Interior Minister Efkan Ala said.

A female attacker blew herself up near an Ottoman-era mosque in Bursa's historic district on Wednesday. None of the victims was in a serious condition.

Mr Ala did not provide details on the suspects. Earlier, the state-run Anadolu Agency said 12 people had been detained in Bursa, Istanbul and two other cities.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack and authorities have refused to disclose details on the identity and possible affiliation of the attacker until the end of the investigation.

The bomber was "aged about 25" and only fragments were left of her body, according to the country's health minister.

The attack came a day after the United States issued a new warning to its citizens about "credible indications" of terrorist threats against tourist areas in Turkey.

The country, which is under growing pressure from the conflict in Syria and renewed conflict with Kurdish militants, has recently witnessed an increase in such attacks.

In the past year, more than 200 people across Turkey have been killed in seven suicide bombings, including Wednesday's.

Kurdish militants, who have been fighting state security forces in a renewed conflict in the south-east, have claimed two such attacks recently.

Turkish authorities have blamed four of the attacks on the Islamic State group, which controls territory in neighbouring Syria and Iraq. The extremist group is known to have cells in Turkey but never claimed responsibility for any of the suicide attacks on Turkish soil.
The three people were arrested at two locations in southern California

The brother and sister-in-law of one of the San Bernardino terrorists have been arrested along with a second woman in what prosecutors claim was a marriage scheme to fraudulently allow one of them to remain in the United States.

Prosecutors said they uncovered the sham marriage during the investigation into the December 2 shootings that killed 14 people.

The gunmen - Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik - died in a gun battle with police.

Authorities in southern California arrested Farook's brother and sister-in-law, and the wife of Enrique Marquez Jr, Farook's friend, in the marriage fraud case.

The two women are sisters and Russian immigrants, and came to the US on visas for work or student exchanges.

The sham marriage was between Marquez and Mariya Chernykh, prosecutors said. They wed so she could obtain immigration benefits unavailable to her as a Russian citizen without legal status in the US, according to authorities.

The FBI has said Marquez acknowledged getting 200 US dollars (140) a month to marry Chernykh, and bank statements back that up, according to the indictment charging the trio.

The trio are not accused of involvement in the attack, though Marquez has been charged with conspiring with Farook to provide material support to terrorists.

Farook's brother Syed Raheel Farook and his wife Tatiana participated in the sham marriage by acting as witnesses to the union, and by creating a joint bank account and a back-dated lease to make it look like the pair shared a marital home with the Farooks, prosecutors said.

Tatiana Farook accompanied Chernykh to buy a 50 US dollars (34) wedding ring, and Marquez and Chernyk posed for staged photographs to make the marriage appear real, prosecutors said.

Raheel Farook served in the Navy from 2003 to 2007 and earned two medals for fighting global terrorism.

In February, FBI agents conducted an hours-long search of his home in the southern California city of Corona, carting out arm-loads of thick envelopes, a computer tower and an unidentifiable object so heavy it took two men to carry.

The search warrant was sealed, and it was not immediately clear if it was connected to Thursday's arrests.

The San Bernardino shooting was the deadliest terror strike on US soil since 9/11.

The couple opened fire at an annual training event for Farook's San Bernardino County co-workers. The 14 people killed and 22 injured were mainly his colleagues.

The FBI said the Muslim couple were radicalised before they met online and communicated privately about jihad and martyrdom before they married.

Marquez, the only person charged in connection with the attack, is accused of providing the assault rifles used in the massacre, making false statements about when he bought the weapons, and conspiring with Syed Rizwan Farook on a pair of previously planned attacks that were never carried out.

Farook's family has said it had no inkling about the plot.
The scene in Aleppo, Syria, after a series of air strikes and shelling (AP)

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on the warring sides in Syria to immediately renew their commitment to a ceasefire after a wave of air strikes and shelling killed more than 60 people in less than 24 hours in the city of Aleppo.

The contested city is now one of the main battlegrounds of the country's devastating civil war, with a ceasefire that has collapsed and peace talks in Geneva stalled.

At least 27 people died as a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) and nearby buildings were hit overnight in the rebel-held part of the city.

Air strikes in residential areas then followed, killing at least 20 people, while state media reported that at least 1,000 mortars and rockets were fired at government-held areas of Aleppo, killing at least 14 civilians.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Mr Ban condemns the air strikes against the Al Quds hospital and the recent indiscriminate shelling by government forces and opposition groups "as well as terrorist tactics by extremists", and is demanding accountability for attacks on civilians.

The secretary-general also urged Russia and the United States, as co-chairs of the group of global and regional powers and organisations trying to end the five-year Syrian conflict, "to exert pressure on all concerned to stop the fighting and to ensure credible investigations of incidents such as the attack on Al Quds hospital", Mr Dujarric said.

The Syrian opposition accuses the government in Damascus and its ally Russia of destroying the tenuous ceasefire by launching the bombing campaign.

Senior opposition official Anas al-Abdeh, the head of the Syrian National Coalition, said Russians are violating the ceasefire agreement by "committing crimes and massacres across Syria, especially in Idlib and Aleppo city".

US State Department spokesman John Kirby said "every indication" suggests the attack on the hospital was carried out by Syria's government.

Russian defence ministry spokesman Maj Gen Igor Konashenkov said a plane belonging to the "so-called anti-Islamic State group coalition" was operating over Aleppo on the night of the hospital attack. He added that Russian aircraft have flown no missions in the Aleppo region for several days.

But Mr Kirby said he had "seen no indication that the coalition was in any way involved".

The 34-bed hospital, the area's main paediatric care centre, was "hit by direct air strike", according to a statement by Doctors Without Borders.

The hospital had an emergency department, an intensive care unit and an operating room, and its eight doctors and 28 nurses offered services such as obstetric care, outpatient and inpatient treatment.

The 250,000 people still in Aleppo will now have to find an alternative facility for care, said Sam Taylor, who is the Syria communications co-ordinator for Doctors Without Borders and is based in Amman, Jordan.

"We're absolutely appalled," he said.

There has also been shelling in Damascus, along with a car bombing - both rarities for the capital.

The ICRC said the fighting, including the destruction of the hospital, is putting millions at grave risk.

With peace talks in Geneva completely deadlocked, Syrians are regarding the escalating bloodshed with dread, fearing that Aleppo is likely to be the focus of the next phase of the war.

Rebel commanders said government forces have been mobilising soldiers, equipment and ammunition in preparation for a military action in Aleppo.
Nearly 2,000 legal cases have been opened against people accused of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since he came to office in 2014

Turkey's media crackdown and reported human rights abuses are pushing the country further away from Europe, a senior EU official said.

European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans told MEPs that "the distance between us and Turkey is not decreasing, it is increasing".

He added: "If they want to come closer to Europe - that is what they state - they should improve the situation of the media, of human rights, of civil society."

Mr Timmermans is a key negotiator of the widely criticised EU-Turkey agreement to stem the flow of migrants to Greece.

Human rights and media freedom groups have repeatedly sounded the alarm over the limited tolerance of dissent shown by authorities in Turkey.

Nearly 2,000 legal cases have been opened against people accused of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since he came to office in 2014.

A Turkish-Dutch reporter who writes for the Netherlands' Metro newspaper is one of the latest to be caught up.

She has been barred from leaving Turkey while authorities investigate whether she should be charged with insulting Mr Erdogan.

Mr Timmermans, who is Dutch and a former foreign minister, also emphasised that Turkey must fully respect all the conditions necessary to secure a visa-waiver for its citizens wanting to travel to Europe for short-term leisure or business stays.

He said: "The onus is on Turkey. They have to comply with the 72 benchmarks that are in there.

"We will not play around with those benchmarks. They are clear, they are legally framed."

The Commission will release a report on whether Ankara has fulfilled the requirements on May 4.

If it has, the EU executive will recommend a visa waiver for Turkey by June 30.

The move is part of a package of incentives offered to Turkey - including up to six billion euro (4.7 billion) in aid for Syrian refugees and fast-tracked EU membership talks - to persuade Ankara to stop migrants heading to Europe.

Mr Erdogan has warned that the migrant agreement would collapse if the Europeans renege on any promises.
British borders were left exposed last year after a Home Office computer system which screens passengers crashed twice in 48 hours.

The eBorders system, which was put in place after the 9/11 terror attacks to protect the country from jihadists, ground to a halt in June last year.

The incident, which the Daily Telegraph is reporting on, was deemed so serious that Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was alerted by officials close to midnight.

The Home Office refused to reveal how often the system has crashed or whether there have been any outages since the incident.

Technicians worked through the night to fix the system amid fears from border officials that hundreds of extremists, convicts and illegal immigrants were arriving in the UK undetected.

The disclosure that a vital part of Britains border security stopped working during a time of severe threat from terrorism will raise serious questions about whether it is fit for purpose.

Mrs May is likely to come under pressure to explain why the public were kept in the dark despite tens of thousands of people likely to be traveling into the UK at the time.

Flights were not grounded despite the system being down and border officials unable to check in advance passenger details against terrorism watch lists.

Sources familiar with the situation told the newspaper that they would normally expect to see the names of hundreds of potential suspect passengers being 'flagged' each day.

During the outages just one individual was 'flagged' suggesting others could have gone under the radar.

A Home Office spokesman said that all passengers would still have had to cross passport control after arriving in the UK.

Officials at the border have access to lists of dangerous people, which the Home Office insists would have been cross-checked to ensure there was no breach.

However the warnings index  which dates back to 1995  was deemed inadequate on its own after the 9/11 attacks and was recently found to be breaking down twice a week.

But terrorists or criminals could still have boarded aircraft without being detected by British security services.

At the heart of Britains ability to stop dangerous people entering the country is Semaphore, a system which checks passenger data against watch lists of suspect individuals.

Every day Semaphore scans information on passengers traveling to and from Britain on planes, trains and ferries against lists of those flagged up by government agencies.

The system - unlike its predecessor - helps alert the border agencies to suspect passengers bound for the UK before they board planes.

The system appeared to stabilise before another malfunction saw hundreds of thousands of passenger details flood the system and trigger another outage on Monday night. Mrs May was notified again.

Officers at the NBTC warned that instead of seeing hundreds of matches they had received just one  meaning potential criminals and jihadists heading to Britain were not being flagged up.

Specialists worked through the night again trying to locate the source of the problem before finally stabilising the system on Wednesday.

They occurred just months after the Charlie Hebdo shooting that saw jihadists kill 11 people in Paris and while Britains threat level was set at severe, meaning a terrorist attack is highly likely.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
British MP Naz Shah has been suspended by the Labour Party pending an investigation into anti-Semitic social media posts.

Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn had been under huge pressure to take action after initially giving Ms Shah only a reprimand over the comments - made before she was an MP.

A Labour spokesman said: "Jeremy Corbyn and Naz Shah have mutually agreed that she is administratively suspended from the Labour Party by the general secretary.

"Pending investigation, she is unable to take part in any party activity and the whip is removed."

Earlier, Ms Shah had offered parliament a profound apology for putting anti-Semitic posts on social media .

The Bradford West MP told the House of Commons she regretted the posts and said she was working with Jewish groups.

Her apology came after British Prime Minister David Cameron said it was "quite extraordinary" that she had not been disciplined despite Mr Corbyn telling her the remarks were "offensive and unacceptable".

The Labour leader gave Ms Shah a reprimand a day after she apologised and quit as an aide to shadow chancellor John McDonnell.

But he had stopped short of taking any disciplinary action, saying he believed Ms Shah "does not hold these views" despite shadow energy secretary Lisa Nandy saying the party faced "real problems" if it did not act.

In a Facebook post in 2014, Ms Shah shared a graphic which showed an image of Israel's outline superimposed on to a map of the US under the headline "Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict - Relocate Israel into United States", with the comment "problem solved".

Mr Cameron told the Commons: "Anti-Semitism is racism and we should call it out and fight it wherever we see it."
Oliver Bales with a cardboard cutout of his former self Photo: PA

A man has said he feels "normal" for the first time in his life after losing 25 stone and dropping 30 inches from his waistline.

Oliver Bales (24), from Portsmouth, Hampshire, said he had been bullied about his weight - which at his heaviest reached nearly 39 stone - throughout his school and university life.

He said he was unable to stand for long periods without being in pain, had high blood pressure and could not fit on seats on public transport and in lecture theatres at university.

After being inspired by a friend's weight loss on social media, Mr Bales turned to Slimming World, which has now crowned him its Greatest Loser 2016.

He said his weight became a significant problem as he reached his teenage years.

"While I have some amazing memories from my childhood, I sometimes look back and wish I could have the chance to re-do it," he said.

"I used to feel like people were always comparing me to other children my age, and feeling like 'the fat, ugly one' made me angry and upset.

"As time went on, I got bigger and that's when the bullying started."

"Mr Bales, originally from Ipswich, Suffolk, lost a total of 25st and 0.5lb, taking him to 13st 13lb.

He said: "Being overweight has affected my entire life - until now. I finally know what it's like not to feel like an outcast, to be able to walk down the street without people laughing, pointing or calling you names, to not take up two seats on a train, to not be in constant pain.
Former mayor of London Ken Livingstone is surrounded media outside Millbank in Westminster Credit: Anthony Devlin/PA Wire

Ken Livingstone has been suspended by Labour for "bringing the party into disrepute" following an anti-Semitism row.

The party is launching an investigation into the former London mayor's conduct after outraged senior Labour figures lined up to call for him to be kicked out.

Chief whip Rosie Winterton is also hauling backbencher John Mann in for a meeting over his behaviour after he launched a furious face-to-face attack on Mr Livingstone, accusing him of being a "Nazi apologist".

A Labour spokesman said: "Ken Livingstone has been suspended by the Labour Party, pending an investigation, for bringing the party into disrepute.

"The chief whip has summoned John Mann MP to discuss his conduct."

In an interview condemned by Labour MPs, Mr Livingstone referred to Hilter's policy of moving Jewish people to Israel, as justification for recent comments by Naz Shah.

Journalists managed to capture a "blazing row" between Mr Livingston and the Labour MP John Mann, who has said he should be expelled from the Party.

Mr Mann can be heard telling Mr Livingstone: "You're a lying racist. A Nazi apologist."

He shouts: "You're rewriting history. Go back and check what Hitler did - the book is called Mein Kampf."

Mr Mann told Sky News: "I told him he needs help. The man's gone mad.

"He is peddling neo-Nazi conspiracy theories that even most neo-Nazis don't bother with these days.

"They are the most disgusting remarks, grossly calculated to offend, deliberately timed, that I have ever heard from any Labour politician.

"Jeremy Corbyn needs to act and throw him out."

Mr Livingstone's comments provoked a furious response from a number Labour MPs who called for his expulsion from the Party.

It comes as the Labour MP was suspended amid a row over anti-Semitic Facebook posts calling for Israel to be relocated to the United States.

Mr Livingstone said Ms Shah's remarks "were over the top" but said she was not anti-Semitic.

Asked what he meant by 'over the top' he replied: To think of anti-Semitism and racism as exactly the same thing.

Responding to the former Mayor of London's latest remarks, a number of Labour MPs and peers called for him to be suspended from the Labour party, including members of the shadow cabinet.

Shadow Commons leader Chris Bryant told MPs: "I'm sick and tired of people trying to explain it away and yes, I'm talking to you Ken Livingstone."

The peer Spencer Livermore said Mr Livingstone's comments were shameful and "he should be suspended immediately."

Labour's candidate for Mayor, Sadiq Khan, said that Mr Livingstone's comments were "appalling and inexcusable" and that "there must be no place for this in our Party."

Former leadership contender Liz Kendall said: "We must not allow Labour's proud history of fighting racism and prejudice to be put at any further risk. Ken Livingstone should be suspended."

The row was started by an entry on social media in 2014 in which Ms Shah said that a solution to the Middle East conflict was to relocate Israel into the Unites States.

It was accompanied by a map of America with a small section representing Israel shaded in, adding that transportation costs will be less than three years of defence spending.

Speaking to the BBC this morning, Mr Livingstone said: "Lets remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism  this is before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.

"The simple fact in all of this is that Nazi made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians.

As Ive said, Ive never heard anybody say anything anti-Semitic, but theres been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-Semitic. I had to put up with 35 years of this."

Mr Livingstone said he believed the row over his future would "calm down" over the next couple of days.

Asked if he was under pressure, he told BBC Two's Daily Politics: "Not really. I simply said what I believed to be true, which is that Naz is not anti-Semitic."

Pressed about his future on Labour's ruling NEC, he said: "Things erupt. They dominate the news for 24/48 hours. People calm down again when they go back and check what you have really said."

Rupa Huq, the Ealing Central MP, said it was "too easy" to 'click or like' posts on social media and said that her colleague had not written anything anti-Semitic.

She said Ms Shah has been subjected to trial by Twitter.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4s Today programme this morning, Ms Huq said Ms Shah must of had a silly moment of sharing a silly picture which Im sure she regrets.

Ms Huq said: If it is career destroying it seems we are entering a phase where its trial by Twitter.

As far as I know Naz Shah did not write anti-Semitic tracts or anything, she pressed Share on a picture which was idiotic and foolish."

Shadow education secretary Lucy Powell said the suspended Labour MP Naz Shah's posts had been "appalling and abhorrent" and admitted the party "had to do more" to tackle anti-Semitism.

She told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "Sometimes I know people want us to act immediately but sometimes it does take some time to establish the facts."

Asked if she would be happy to sit with Ms Shah if the whip was returned to her, Ms Powell said she did not want to "predetermine the outcome" of the investigation into the MP.

Last night Lord Levy, a former chief fundraiser for Labour, said anti-Semitism was an issue across political divides but appeared more prominent in his own party.

He told BBC Newsnight Ms Shahs behaviour showed ignorance, leaving him "scratching his head with despair as to how people like this can enter our parliament with such a lack of knowledge, discretion and sensitivity".

Jewish groups have branded Mr Levingstone's comments "beyond disgraceful" and called for him to be kicked out of the Labour Party.

Gideon Falter, chairman of Campaign Against Antisemitism, said: "The Labour Party must expel Ken Livingstone.

"Today he has claimed that Hitler was a Zionist and that anti-Semitism is not racism. Enough is enough. He should not be suspended, he should be expelled today.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Protesters have clashed with police in several French cities over proposed reforms to the country's labour rules, and strike action forced cancellations and delays at two major airports serving Paris.

Thousands of demonstrators marched in Paris and violence broke out when several dozen people, many with their faces covered, started throwing objects at police.

Police used tear gas to disperse protesters, and one officer was seriously injured.

French television also showed clashes in the southern city of Marseille and in the western cities of Nantes and Rennes.

French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said 124 people had been arrested in protests around the country. He strongly condemned the violence and said perpetrators will be prosecuted.

An air traffic controllers' strike cancelled 20% of all the flights at Paris' Orly Airport and also caused delays at Charles De Gaulle Airport, according the Paris airport authority website.

France has seen a series of strikes and protests against the labour reform Bill, which aims to encourage companies to hire.

Critics say the reforms will compromise France's hard-won worker protections without curbing the country's stubbornly high unemployment rate.

The Bill will be debated next week in France's lower house of parliament.
Ai Weiwei wanted the toy bricks for an exhibition in Australia

"An internal mistake" led Lego to deny a bulk order from Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei last year, the company said.

The artist wanted the toy bricks for an exhibition in Australia.

Former chief executive Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen admitted the mistake, while his son Thomas told the Wall Street Journal it was "a typical example of what can go wrong in a big company".

After Lego initially refused the order, citing a policy of not donating for public projects, people in various countries began to donate bricks.

In January, the company announced a new policy, saying it would no longer ask what the purpose of a public project was but would ask customers to make clear Lego does not support or endorse them.

The admission came as Lego announced plans to reshuffle its top leadership to create a "smooth handover of active ownership to the next generation".

Mr Kristiansen, the company founder's grandson, said he will leave his position as deputy chairman to 37-year-old Thomas. The 68-year-old father will take a seat on the board.

He said the aim was "to maintain active family ownership of the Lego Group".

After 25 years as chief executive, Mr Kristiansen was replaced in 2004 by Joergen Vig Knudstorp, an outsider to the founding family who helped bring Lego A/S from a loss to a profit.

Known for its assortment of building blocks, Lego is not publicly listed and does not release quarterly figures.

However, the group, based in Billund, western Denmark, has published earnings reports since 1997.

Last year, net profit was up more than 30% from 2014, at 9.2 billion kroner (960 million), while revenue grew 25% to 35.8 billion kroner (3.7 billion).

The number of employees also grew by more than 15% in 2015 to 17,300.

The company was launched in 1932 and the first snap-together Lego bricks were created in 1949.

Mr Kristiansen is considered Denmark's richest man and is worth 9.7 billion US dollars (6.6 billion), according to Forbes magazine.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said the company plans to send a Dragon capsule to land on Mars as early as 2018.

No astronauts will accompany the capsule, named Red Dragon, on its mission, but it will represent a big first step towards Mr Musk's ultimate goal of colonising the red planet.

The billionaire founder of the space exploration firm said he would not recommend transporting crews in Dragon capsules beyond the moon, as their internal volume is only about the size of an SUV.

"Wouldn't be fun for longer journeys," Mr Musk explained in a tweet.

California-based SpaceX is already using Dragons for space station supply runs, and the company could start flying Americans to the International Space Station by the end of next year.

Mr Musk said the upgraded Dragon is designed to land anywhere in the solar system. Its propulsive landing system was tested recently at the SpaceX plant in McGregor, Texas.

Red Dragon would be launched aboard a mightier version of the current SpaceX Falcon rocket that may make its debut at Florida's Kennedy Space Centre by the end of the year.

Mr Musk has promised additional details on his overall Mars plan. After successfully landing a leftover Falcon booster at sea earlier this month, he said he would elaborate on his approach to establishing a city on Mars at an aerospace meeting in Mexico in September.

He told reporters: "I think it's going to sound pretty crazy. So it should be at least entertaining."

Mr Musk said reusing rockets is key to reducing launch costs and opening up space. SpaceX has now managed to land a first-stage booster on land, as well as on an ocean platform. The recently retrieved booster could fly again on another satellite mission this summer.

Nasa, meanwhile, has its own exploration programme, intended to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s. The space agency contracted out station deliveries in the post-shuttle era in order to focus on that long-term goal.

Shortly after the SpaceX announcement, Nasa's deputy administrator, Dava Newman, said the space agency will offer technical support to Mr Musk's company in exchange for Red Dragon descent and landing data from Mars. She said no money will be exchanged.

"Sending astronauts to Mars, which will be one of the greatest feats of human innovation in the history of civilisation, carries with it many, many puzzles to piece together," Ms Newman wrote in a blog.

"That's why we at Nasa have made it a priority to reach out to partners in boardrooms, classrooms, laboratories, space agencies and even garages across our country and around the world."

The window to embark on a Mars mission - whether robotic or human - comes up only every two years because of planetary alignment.
Donald Trump reckons victory in Indiana next week will mean the Republican nomination is his (AP)

Donald Trump has insisted the Republican nomination race "is over" if he wins in Indiana next week.

But speaking in Evansville in the hotly-contested state, he continued to rail against what he calls the "crooked way" the party picks its nominee and claimed his rival Ted Cruz is unfairly winning delegates.

The Republican front-runner said Mr Cruz "can only successfully win support by wooing delegates with steaks and trips".

Mr Trump then said the winner "should be based on votes, not on whether people like a certain steak from a certain place".

Mr Cruz, meanwhile, has claimed one of his critics let his "inner Trump come out" when he described the Texan as "Lucifer in the flesh".

As he campaigned ahead of the Indiana Republican primary on Tuesday, Mr Cruz took issue with former House speaker John Boehner's barb.

Mr Boehner told a Stanford University audience this week that he has "never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life" than Mr Cruz.

Mr Cruz said he never actually worked with Mr Boehner, and the White House candidate said he would be surprised if the two politicians ever exchanged more than 50 words.

And Mr Cruz had this message for voters: "When John Boehner calls me Lucifer, he's not directing that at me. He's directing that at you."

Mr Boehner resigned last autumn under pressure from conservatives allied with Mr Cruz. His well-known contempt for the Texan stems in part from Mr Cruz's role forcing a partial government shut-down in 2013.

Mr Boehner said he and Mr Trump are "texting buddies" and he will vote for the property tycoon.

Elsewhere, Mr Cruz's running mate Carly Fiorina attempted to explain the rules of the Republican Party to rival Mr Trump as she looked to assert why the race for the nomination could go to a contested convention.

In an interview on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Ms Fiorina said Mr Trump will get "shellacked by Hillary Clinton" if he is the nominee for the Republican Party, but asserted that he could lose the nomination if he does not get the majority.

"Donald Trump just figured it out, but wow, this system has been in place for a very long time," she said, referring to his claims that he should be named the nominee even if he falls slightly short of the required 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination.
Two Turkish newspaper columnists have been jailed for stirring up "hatred and enmity"

Two Turkish opposition journalists have been jailed for two years for publishing French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo's controversial cover featuring a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.

The state-run Anadolu Agency said an Istanbul court convicted Cumhuriyet newspaper columnists Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Cetinkaya of stirring up "hatred and enmity".

The court acquitted them of the separate charges of "insulting religious values".

The two are expected to appeal against their conviction.

Cumhuriyet had printed a selection of cartoons and articles in a show of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo following last year's attack on the magazine's Paris offices.

The four-page pull-out did not feature the controversial cover, but the two journalists included images of it in their columns in the same edition.

Mr Cetinkaya said he does not regret printing the cartoon and criticised the court's decision.

"As a result, freedom of expression took a hit," he said.
Volkswagen chief executive Matthias Mueller has apologised in person to US president Barack Obama for the car-maker's emissions scandal.

He said he held a "two-minute" conversation with the president during his visit to Hanover, Germany, this week.

"I took the opportunity to apologise to him personally for this matter," Mr Mueller said during a news conference in Wolfsburg, Germany.

"I also expressed my thanks for the constructive co-operation with his authorities and naturally expressed the hope that I can continue to fulfil my responsibilities for 600,000 workers, their families, the suppliers, the dealers."

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could levy fines of up to 18 billion US dollars (12.4 billion), but analysts think the punishment will not be that drastic.

Volkswagen seemed to endorse that view when it announced it had set aside seven billion euro (5.4 billion) globally for legal costs from 2015, on top of 7.8 billion euro (6 billion) to cover fixes and an offer to buy back some 500,000 defective cars.

Overall, the company deducted 16.2 billion euro (12.6 billion) from last year's earnings to cover the costs of the scandal, in which it fitted cars with software that enabled them to pass tests but then turned emissions controls off during everyday driving.

The scandal broke when the EPA took action against Volkswagen. Some 11 million cars worldwide have turned out to have the software.

Mr Mueller said that recalling and fixing the cars that were rigged to cheat on the tests "will remain our most important task until the very last vehicle has been put in order".

Analysts say the impact of lower sales could make the final bill much higher than the company's figure.

Volkswagen said last week that it lost 1.5 billion euro (1.2 billion) on an after-tax basis after a profit of 11.1 billion euro (8.6 billion) in 2014.

Volkswagen is currently working out a settlement with US authorities in federal court in San Francisco, and has said that would include an offer to buy back as many as 500,000 of the just under 600,000 defective vehicles.

Mr Mueller also used the company's annual news conference to sketch out a plan to focus more on electric vehicles and services like car-sharing as it seeks to get past its emissions scandal.

He stressed that Volkswagen's car business remains "fundamentally sound" but detailed a promised plan to emphasise digital services and zero-emissions vehicles.

The company would soon form a legally independent company to promote business in mobility services, which can include things like ride-sharing apps and car-sharing, he said.

Mr Mueller said that the company would "make electric cars one of Volkswagen's new hallmarks" with 20 new models by 2020.

Volkswagen had previously emphasised diesel technology, which has suffered a blow since it became clear Volkswagen engines could not meet US emissions standards without cheating.

The annual report showed that Volkswagen would pay 12 current and former managers 63 million euro (49 million) in base pay and bonuses for last year.

Of that, 4.2 million euro (3.3 million) in bonuses was withheld by decision of the board of directors - but could be paid later if the company's shares rise 25% in three years.

Mr Mueller was paid 1.1 million euro (850,000) for last year in fixed compensation, with additional performance-related pay of 3.65 million euro (2.83 million). Of that bonus, 880,522 euro (683,770) was held back for three years.

The company said bonuses for individual top managers were 40% lower than they otherwise would have been because the company made a loss last year, even before the decision to withhold another 30%.

Bonuses at Volkswagen are calculated based on the company's performance over several years.
The Yale Corporation, the university's governing body, had been gathering input from students on the name (AP)

Yale University has decided to keep the name of a residential college which honours 19th-century alumnus John C Calhoun, an ardent supporter of slavery.

The Ivy League university in New Haven, Connecticut, announced the decision via Twitter on Wednesday.

It said it is keeping Calhoun's name to "teach and confront the history of slavery in the US".

The Yale Corporation, the university's governing body, had been gathering input from students on names it might consider for Calhoun College and two new residential colleges it is planning.

Calhoun was a US vice president and senator from South Carolina. Three portraits of Calhoun were recently taken down from the walls of the residential college.

Debate over the name began last summer after nine black people were killed in a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Elections in Anderson County: How to vote early and what to know

What to know about the 2022 general election and voting in South Carolina, which has passed new legislation to create a period for early voting.
PHOTOS BY KEN RUINARD/INDEPENDENT MAIL Lt. Joseph Burdette (right) of the city fire department walks near the man living in the home on West Whitner Street which caught fire Wednesday evening in Anderson. The fire, 200-yards outside the city limits, will be under investigation by the county fire department.

SHARE City firemen look over the remains of a burned home which burned on West Whitner Street Wednesday evening in Anderson. The fire, 200-yards outside the city limits, will be under investigation by the county fire department.

By Mike Eads of the Independent Mail

An Anderson city firefighter was injured Wednesday night battling a blaze on Anderson's west side.

City of Anderson Fire Department Battalion Chief Michael Guest said one of his firefighters was taken from the house fire in the 1500 block of West Whitner Street to AnMed Health in downtown Anderson, but the injuries were not thought to be life threatening. The battalion chief would not comment specifically about the injuries, but he did rule out smoke inhalation.

Three city fire engines and a ladder truck were called to the scene on Whitner Street between Myers and Appleton streets around 6:30 p.m. Firefighters found heavy flames and smoke in the rear of the house, according to Guest, but were able to get the fire under control within 10 minutes.

Guest said no one was home when the fire started. He added that house had been undergoing renovations recently.

Anderson County fire investigators were called to the scene because the house sits several feet west of the Anderson city line, said Guest, who declined to speculate as the cause of the blaze. He did, however, say the house is probably "a total loss."

Follow Michael Eads on Twitter @MikeEads_AIM.
CONCORD- The American Red Cross has launched an initiative that aims to reduce deaths and injuries caused by fire by 25 percent in five years with its Home Fire Campaign and volunteers in the Concord area are out to help.

The Red Cross is asking every household in America to check and install fire alarms and practice fire drills at home. Volunteers with the Southern Piedmont Chapter, which includes Cabarrus County, are heading out to neighborhoods this Saturday to make this happen.

Karen Long, disaster program manager with the Southern Piedmont Chapter, said Red Cross volunteers and members of the Concord Fire Department will be installing smoke alarms and educating families on fire escape plans in neighborhoods between Sunderland Road and Old Charlotte Road Saturday.

We are trying to cut down fire fatalities, Long said. To have a chance to get out of the house, it is crucial to have a working smoke alarm.

Increasing partnerships with fire departments

According to Long, at this time last year the Red Cross had assisted 116 people after 39 fire events in Cabarrus County. This year, the organization has already assisted 188 people after 59 events. Thats about a 25 percent increase over last year.

Shelia Crunckleton, executive director of the Southern Piedmont Chapter, said the increase has been seen in almost all areas.

I dont necessarily think that means there were more fires. Its just the firefighters are calling us more often, Crunckleton said. Its almost as much as communication as everything. The firefighters know to call us.

Both organizations have the same goal.

We always try to have a smoke alarm program so when people need smoke alarms or cant afford them, we go distribute them ourselves. We want to make sure they are in the right place, Norman Franklin, assistant fire marshall with the Concord Fire Department, said. We want to educate them on the right steps to take if there is a fire.

Franklin said before 1992 there were several fire deaths in Concord. Then the fire department hired safety educators to go around town and do prevention programs like distributing smoke alarms and helping families make escape plans. He said after those positions were created, Concord went 10 years without a fire death.

Thats based on a lot of things like more programs in the schools and more resources out there with the smoke alarm program. Early detection is really what saves lives, Franklin said. Now we are more of a community-based fire department where we make sure to get those smoke alarms out there and educate people. And the community has embraced it.

Through various grants and help from volunteers Franklin said the department and Red Cross have installed smoke alarms in the southwest and northwest section of town and are ready to install more this weekend.

The more we can get the word out there and distribute education materials, the better, Franklin said.

The Red Cross will also partner with BB&T Bank the weekend of May 14 to install smoke alarms in the Mount Pleasant area.

Crunckleton said 90 lives have been saved nationwide since the Home Fire Campaign began and the Southern Piedmont Chapter has installed just over 900 smoke alarms. A little over 200 have been in Cabarrus County since July.

Spreading the knowledge

The Red Cross is also working to make sure members of the community know what the organization has to offer. Crunckleton said since 90 percent of its workforce is volunteers, the Red Cross doesnt publicize its offerings enough because everyone is always so busy.

We want a more prepared community. We want people to call us when they need us, Crunckleton said.

Crunckleton said along with meeting these emergency needs of a family that loses their home to fire immediately, the Red Cross can also help provide nurses, counseling and referrals.

There is nothing more devastating than to lose a family member, an animal or all your stuff to a fire, Crunckleton said. We want to do everything we can to help them move on.

Long said Red Cross services are available to anyone who needs them, regardless of whether they have insurance.

We feel like this is a secret we need to get out there, Long said.

Basic fire tips

Franklin offered the following tips for fire safety:

-Check your smoke alarms every month and change the batteries at least once a year

- If the smoke alarm goes off make sure you get out safely. Crawling is the best way to exit.

- Make sure all exits are clear including windows

- Make sure you have a plan of where to meet with family members once you escape the house

- Once you get out, stay out

If you have talked to your family about your escape plan, then they should know what to do in case there is a fire, Franklin said. If you get trapped inside of house and cant get out, make sure you stay in room you are in. Put something under the bottom of the door and try to get out the window. If you cant get out the window, start yelling and throwing stuff out the window to draw attention to yourself.

Anyone interested in having a smoke alarm installed called the American Red Cross at 704-782-9022 or your local fire department.

For more information about the Southern Piedmont Chapter of the American Red Cross visit http://www.redcross.org/local/western-noth-carolina/southern-piedmont.
Complete actor Mohanlal and wife Suchitra are celebrating their 28th wedding anniversary today. The couple are having a world tour and is at Vietnam currently. Wishes are pouring in from fans and friends alike on their special day.

Mohanlal has updated a photo of him and Suchitra in a romantic frame. The couple seems to be having a blast. He wrote: "Celebrating 28 years of love and togetherness on 28th April at Vietnam in the presence of our amazing friends "
Indias most innovative real estate platform, goes live with the launch of Housing News, a comprehensive news platform that will feature objective news and analysis on the real estate sector. Currently, most of the real estate news is from an industry perspective, this will be the first time that the news will be presented from the buyers point of view. It will be the most reliable destination for information related to real estate.will be available on https://www.housing.com/news.Our vision is to be the most trusted and transparent online real estate platform in India for both buyers and sellers. Housing News is an important step in that direction. With this initiative our customers will get easy access to the latest news and views in the real estate industry which will help them to make better and more informed decisions. What makes it unique is that it is from the customers point of view, without any jargon and is easy to comprehend.has been launched with an objective of creating a one-stop-destination for all information related to real estate. The content has been categorized into various sections like Breaking News; Market Trends; Legal, Home Finance, Taxation Must-Knows; Expert Interviews; Lifestyle, to cover the spectrum of information required by a home buyer, for an empowered buy or even sell decision. The design is vibrant, responsive and attractive, optimised for easy reading and research. The content has been carefully curated to mirror all the concerns a home buyer faces at every step of his home buying or selling journey, till he completes his transaction. The News platform will also act as a forum for all the stakeholders to discuss matters important to the industry and include inputs from top real estate professionals and companies all over the country, even before its launch.
The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has given its approval to enhance investment by Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) in Bharat Oman Refineries Limited (BORL). The investment amount could be enhanced upto a maximum of Rs.3000 crore by way of subscription of convertible warrants / other instruments giving right to convert it into equity shares to be issued by BORL, beyond DPE guidelines dated 05.08.2005.

The infusion of funds by the BPCLs will enable BORL to overcome the implications on account of the erosion of the net worth. Besides it will enhance the availability of petroleum products in the Northern and Central parts of the country, industrial development of Madhya Pradesh and substantial increase in employment and tax earnings in the State.
Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) and the Insurance Authority of United Arab Emirates. The MoU was signed in February, 2016. The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given its ex-post facto approval for the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between(IRDAI) and the Insurance Authority of United Arab Emirates. The MoU was signed in February, 2016.

The MoU provides for enhanced cooperation between the two authorities in the field of insurance supervision by providing a framework for co-operation such as channels of communication. It will also result in increasing mutual understanding through the exchange of regulatory and relevant supervisory information including confidential information to enforce or ensure compliance with their respective laws and regulations.
Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP). The final cabinet note on allowing 100% FDI in food processing sector has been moved by the(DIPP).

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had said in his budget speech: "100% FDI will be allowed through FIPB route in marketing of food products produced and manufactured in India. This will benefit farmers, give impetus to the food processing industry and also create vast employment opportunities."

"Only food items will be a part of the policy...non-food items cannot come in the garb of food," a senior government official has been quoted as saying.

Food Processing Industry is one of the leading employers in the Indian economy, accounting for ~13% of employment generated in all Registered Factory sector in 2012-13.

The share of food processing sector in GDP of manufacturing sector was 9.8% in 2012-13.

In 2013, India allowed 51% FDI in multi-brand retailing with 30% domestic sourcing norm.

India ranked sixth in the World in exports of agricultural products in 2013.
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The land is presently in possession of National Seeds Corporation (NSC), a Central Public Sector Enterprise (CPSE) under the administrative control of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. The Solar Power Plant will be set up by a CPSE, which would be selected through negotiation. The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given its approval for utilization of 400 hectares of un-cultivable farm land at the Central State Farm (CSF), Jetsar in Sri Ganganagar District, Rajasthan for setting up of a solar Power Plant of capacity exceeding 200 MW.The land is presently in possession of National Seeds Corporation (NSC), a Central Public Sector Enterprise (CPSE) under the administrative control of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. The Solar Power Plant will be set up by a CPSE, which would be selected through negotiation.

NSC will provide 400 hectares of un-cultivable land, out of the 5394 hectares under its possession to the identified CPSE, which will bear the costs relating to the installation of the Solar Power Plant. The selected CPSE will have to do tariff based competitive bidding for the project. It will be allowed to utilize the land for the installation of a Solar Power Plant over a contract period of 25 years, which may be extended on mutually agreed terms and conditions, after which the entire plant will be surrendered to the NSC on as is where is basis. The Project, by utilizing un-cultivable land for a Solar Power Project, will yield revenue for NSC and will also generate clean energy for the nation.
Lenders to Monnet Ispat & Energy Ltd (MIEL), led by State Bank of Patiala, have sought bids to sell up to a 51% equity stake in the company, reports a financial newspaper.

The bank has mandated SBI Capital Markets to look for buyers, according to the business daily.

In November, lenders to MIEL had decided to convert Rs. 368 crore of debt into equity at INR 34.20 per share under the Reserve Bank of Indias (RBI) strategic debt restructuring (SDR) scheme.

The enterprise value (EV) of the company stood at INR 8,247 crore in FY15, thereby valuing a 51% stake at INR 4,205 crore.

MIELs market capitalisation on Wednesday stood at INR 486 crore.

The companys gross debt at the end of March 2015 stood at INR 7,985 crore, up from INR 6,849 crore at the end of March 2014.

According to a bid document, the debt on the company's balance sheet may be refinanced based on a proposal submitted by the prospective investors, reports the paper.

Lenders plan to divest their stake along with management control, says the daily.

In FY15, the New Delhi-based company had posted a net loss of INR 796 crore on revenues of INR 3,212 crore.

In Q3FY16, it reported a net loss of INR 479 crore on revenues of INR 343 crore.
Minister of Urban Development M.Venkaiah Naidu has expressed concern over what he called the paradox of India being the fastest growing economies of the world but the most difficult to do business and invest. He was speaking at a Workshop on Ease of Doing Business for Construction Permits in Delhi organized by the Ministry of Urban Development here today. has expressed concern over what he called the paradox of India being the fastest growing economies of the world but the most difficult to do business and invest. He was speaking at a Workshop on Ease of Doing Business for Construction Permits in Delhi organized by the Ministry of Urban Development here today.

Stating that improvement in ease of doing business in urban areas of the country would lift millions out of poverty, Naidu urged other cities and towns to follow the integrated and simplified online application and sanction systems being introduced by the urban local bodies in the national capital.

Referring to other paradoxical situations prevailing in the country, Shri Naidu said increase in congestion even after building more and more roads and flyovers is one such paradox which is a result of deficient urban planning and processes.  Despite being a vibrant democracy, legislatures not passing Bills in time on certain occasions is another paradox and such situations should be resolved to enable the country emerge as an economic power that it deserves to be said the Minister.

Naidu stated that simplified online application and sanction systems being introduced in Delhi and Mumbai would be implemented in all cities and towns in a phased manner. He said that improving the ease of doing business in urban areas would lift millions out of poverty through increased investments and employment opportunities.

Making a presentation on the new online procedures at the Workshop to over 200 architects, engineers and others, Chairman of New Delhi Municipal Council Shri Naresh Kumar said that the Council would not accept manual applications for building permits after 15th of next month.

During a similar presentation on behalf of all the three Municipal Corporations of Delhi, Dr.Punit Goel, Commissioner of South MCD said that thee corporations have completed most of the integration with all other external agencies through a Common Application Form and would be in a position to eliminate manual applications by the end of next month.

Dr.Goel further said that the Corporations are ready with an online Automatic Calculator for estimation of different charges to be paid by which the owners and architects could find the costs to be paid. Fee to be paid can be worked out by furnishing information about colony category, plot area, floor-wise covered area, building type etc.

Rajiv Gauba, Secretary (Urban Development) and Shri Ramesh Abhishek, Secretary (Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion) while expressing concern over Indias ranking in respect of ease of doing business in construction sector urged the urban local bodies in Delhi and Mumbai to take necessary actions to ensure that the people and other stakeholders in Delhi and Mumbai make full use of simplified online application and sanction platforms.

Urban local bodies of Delhi were asked to consider if separate payment of processing and sanction fee could be merged to make it one single payment as it would positively impact ease of doing business ranking.

DIPP officials also urged Delhi urban local bodies to ensure that manual submission of applications is brought to an end by the end of next month.
Real estate stocks were higher after Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation has recommended an increase in permissible floor space index (FSI) from the present level of 1.33 to 2 and in some cases even up to 5, according to reports.

The current FSI stands at 1.33 in the island city and one in the suburbs of Mumbai and the new development plan proposes to raise it to 2.

Oberoi Realty Ltd is currently trading at Rs. 292.7, up by Rs. 7.15 or 2.5% from its previous closing of Rs. 285.55 on the BSE.

The scrip opened at Rs. 287 and has touched a high and low of Rs. 295.2 and Rs. 287 respectively. So far 165847(NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The current market cap of the company is Rs. 9688.82 crore.

The BSE group 'A' stock of face value Rs. 10 has touched a 52 week high of Rs. 329 on 11-May-2015 and a 52 week low of Rs. 209.05 on 02-Sep-2015. Last one week high and low of the scrip stood at Rs. 292 and Rs. 267.4 respectively.

The promoters holding in the company stood at 72.55 % while Institutions and Non-Institutions held 22.07 % and 5.38 % respectively.
Realty stocks rallied on back of heavy volumes after media report suggests that the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation has recommended an increase in permissible floor space index (FSI) in Greater Mumbai, as per media reports.



D B Realty jumped 7.4% to Rs.50.05. The scrip opened at Rs. 48.9 and touched a high and low of Rs. 53.15 and Rs. 48.05 respectively. A total of 2812752(NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The current market cap of the company is Rs. 1133.59 crore.



Housing Development & Infrastructure Ltd ended at Rs. 86.1, up by Rs. 3.2 or 3.86% from its previous closing of Rs. 82.9 on the BSE. The scrip opened at Rs. 83.65 and touched a high and low of Rs. 88.2 and Rs. 83.5 respectively. A total of 33456258(NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The current market cap of the company is Rs.3473.51 crore.



DLF Ltd ended at Rs. 125.7, up by Rs. 2.55 or 2.07% from its previous closing of Rs. 123.15 on the BSE. The scrip opened at Rs. 123 and touched a high and low of Rs. 128.75 and Rs. 122.5 respectively. A total of 20633178(NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The current market cap of the company is Rs. 21966.46 crore.



Godrej Properties Ltd ended at Rs. 334.75, up by Rs. 4.05 or 1.22% from its previous closing of Rs. 330.7 on the BSE. The scrip opened at Rs. 333 and touched a high and low of Rs. 344 and Rs. 332 respectively. A total of 750057(NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The current market cap of the company is Rs. 7151.73 crore.



Indiabulls Real Estate Ltd jumped 11.6% to Rs.63.45. The company posted a net profit after taxes, minority interest and share of profit of associates of Rs. 589.108 million for the Quarter ended March 31, 2016 as compared to Rs. 931.301 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2015.



The scrip opened at Rs. 57.2 and touched a high and low of Rs. 63.9 and Rs. 57.2 respectively. A total of 59267515(NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The current market cap of the company is Rs. 2872.5 crore.
Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has entered into a pact with Bhilwara-based Star Cotspin Ltd, according to reports.

As per the agreement, Reliance's Recron SHT will be the basic substrate for polyester sewing threads manufactured by Star Cotspin.

Apart from branding the products, RIL will also provide marketing and technical support to Star Cotspin.



The scrip opened at Rs. 1019.7 and has touched a high and low of Rs. 1019.7 and Rs. 1013.4 respectively. So far 860002(NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The current market cap of the company is Rs. 330513.96 crore.

The BSE group 'A' stock of face value Rs. 10 has touched a 52 week high of Rs. 1089.5 on 15-Jan-2016 and a 52 week low of Rs. 819 on 24-Aug-2015. Last one week high and low of the scrip stood at Rs. 1051.5 and Rs. 1008 respectively.

The promoters holding in the company stood at 45.15 % while Institutions and Non-Institutions held 32.38 % and 19.5 % respectively.

The stock is currently trading above its 50 DMA.
The summer months are a popular time to host family reunions, gatherings where relatives can meet new young family members, share memories with old ones and learn stories of their familys past. Somewhere within these historic tales, the subject of slavery inevitably emerges. Many listeners may expect their familys story to include caucasian slave masters, but some African-Americans are discovering a much different truth.

Owning slaves

Indianapolis resident Denise Chisley developed an interest in genealogy nearly seven years ago, after her mother gave her a photo of her great-great-grandmother, Catherine Hazeur. The photo showed a woman draped in a silk dress, wearing gold earrings and possessing distinct French-like features, very different from anyone in Chisleys current family. In addition, Chisley was given Hazeurs wedding invitation, which was written in French. Soon after, Chisleys mother revealed her family was not owned by slaves but, rather, owned a few of their own.

When my mother said it, it made me think, Is this really true? said Chisley.

Born in New Orleans, Chisley knew her family was quite different from others outside the area, but she truly discovered that difference once she traveled to Indiana for college.

Growing up, I knew all of my relatives had French last names, she said. I heard my mom mention the word Creole, and I knew we lived in what we called a Creole culture. Growing up in a smaller community, everyone knew one another and we ate meals like jambalaya, red beans and rice and other traditional New Orleans foods.

After overcoming her initial surprise, Chisley set out to find the truth. In New Orleans, she discovered a will, transcribed in both English and French, of her fourth great-grandfather. The will, which dates back to 1829, states her late relative wanted to sell his plantation to his three mulatto sons. Another document stated he sold 10 slaves to his sons. From these documents, she found the family was very wealthy. In the 1850s, Chisleys family lived in a $4,000 home.

Knowing my family owned slaves as a Black person really shocked me and got to my core. I had to stop and take it all in. But I was happy to know land was passed on to other family members to help set them up for wealth, she said.

Since learning this information, Chisley said she has a stronger sense of identity. By using the AncestryDNA test on ancestry.com, she found her recently discovered family roots matched her test results. Chisley shared with the Recorder that she is 50 percent European, 48 percent African and 2 percent Native American. While she said this was a shock, she was aware of having French bloodlines on both sides of her family.

Two years after Chisley learned about her great-great-grandmother, her mother passed away. Chisley said she wishes she had inquired about her family history earlier, but is thankful she asked her mother to write down much of the information she knew.

Its great to know what your family did, how they struggled and how I grew to became the person I am today, she said. My whole makeup traces back to them. It was awakening for me. Keep telling your story, tell your children and grandchildren, because it will go on for generations.

Owned by Indians

In earlier years, there were several stories of Black slaves attempting to escape from their white slave masters, but Carretha Hale, who began digging up her familys roots nearly 29 years ago, learned a little-known family history fact.

My great-grandmother passed, and when going through her belongings I found a piece of paper that mentioned the Creek (Native American) tribe. Id heard stories that the family were with the Indians, but I never paid it any attention. When I saw this document, I wanted to learn more, said Hale.

From that moment, she began reading history books on Oklahoma, where much of her family is from, and learned the area was Indian Territory. As the only family member born out of the Indian Territory, which was reduced to what is now Oklahoma, she naturally became curious about where she came from.

I found the Native Americans of the Five Civilized Tribes  Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee and Seminole  had slaves, mostly because they were of mixed blood, she said. These mixed-bloods adopted the Southern way of economically staying afloat. They had slaves and grew cotton. Once I found that out, it all made sense that my family were slaves to Indians.

In past conversations, when Hale would ask her grandmother about where their family came from, she would reply, We were with the Indians.

A DNA test later revealed Hales ethnicity. The test found she is 73 percent African, 22 percent European and 5 percent Native American. Despite her family discovery, Hale said she identifies more with her African heritage.

While Hale said her mother wasnt interested in the family story, her grandmother and great-grandmother continued to share family stories with her. Currently she is hoping one of her four children will develop an interest in the family history so the stories can continue to be told.

Because of her findings, Hale was inspired to write a book on her family discoveries in 2015 titled From Slavery to Statehood: A Family History in the Creek Nation.

The research never stops, said Hale, who has used the internet, public libraries, health departments, historical societies and other resources to study her familys history. This has caused me to become a genealogist, as I wanted to learn how to find my family roots, and I recommend others do so as well.
On May 3, Hoosiers around the state will rise early or attempt to beat the 5 p.m. rush-hour traffic to get their hands on the prize, a chance to proudly display their I voted sticker to show their participation in the Indiana primaries. Still, other Hoosiers will continue their normal daily routines without thinking twice about Election Day.

In the 2012 presidential election, the Census Bureau report shows a higher percentage of African-Americans than whites voted in a presidential election for the first time in history. Although it is widely known more Americans in general vote in the presidential election, several studies show many African-Americans choose not to vote in the primary election.

Ramla Bandele, associate professor of political science at IUPUIs Africana Studies program, said many of those who vote in the primary election are those involved in political parties or who have a close relationship with someone active in politics.

I dont think its unusual that African-Americans dont vote in the primary, and I dont think the voting trend in the Black community will change very much, said Bandele, who believes some in the Black community might feel as if their vote doesnt truly count. If you think about the way low-income voters feel, they feel as if nothing ever changes (after an election). They say, Whats the point? but there is a point in voting. If you vote, particularly in the Black or minority community, you are helping the Congressional Black Caucus have a voice in Congress. It also is important to let us know how important the Democrats will be in the state when the general election occurs.

During a community networking luncheon, the Recorder took an informal survey of five individuals to find out which African-Americans will choose to vote in the primary election. Two of the individuals, who work blue-collar jobs, were not informed on when Election Day will take place. One person, who also holds a blue-collar job, stated they are not interested in voting, and the final two individuals, who hold white-collar jobs, stated they plan on voting.

This kind of primary hasnt happened since the 60s, because parties are so much in control of elections they pretty much decide whats going to happen. If you stop to think about it, parties are private organizations, but they run the election in America. I hope more African-Americans vote, but the half-way point was when Obama was running, and now I dont know if there is a lot of enthusiasm about Hillary Clinton at this point, Bandele said.

Despite Bandeles assessment and the beliefs of those who do not exercise their civic right to vote, Marion County Clerk Myla Eldridge said early voting numbers are on the rise from past elections, and she does not believe that the majority of African-Americans choose not to vote in the primary election.

Its critical for everyone, regardless of your race, to vote, because it allows the candidate you want to be the voice for you to be on the ballot in the fall, said Eldridge. Were really excited to see voters are participating in the electoral process, because that is democracy.

As reported in a recent edition of the Indianapolis Recorder, participation in early voting has increased by 91 percent this year over 2012. The Clerks Office is not able to track the race, ethnicity or gender of early voters.

I believe Marion County voters are paying attention, and its important they vote for the candidate they feel will represent them well, added Eldridge.

Casting a vote in the primary election is vital, but Bandele said the way in which African-Americans choose to vote is even more fascinating this time around. While she believes Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, she noted that Bernie Sanders agenda involves more than just securing enough votes to win  hes developing a plan for change.

What Bernie Sanders is doing is sending a message to the Democratic Party trying to get them to infuse his views into their platform at the convention. For people who vote in the primaries for Sanders, that may be why they do so, because they believe in what hes doing, but they know hes not going to win. They want to be a part of his efforts to change the Democratic Party, explained Bandele, who believes the same is true for Black Indiana voters.

For those African-Americans who conclude voting has no purpose, Bandele encourages them to look at their lifestyle.

Even if you dont think things are going well for you, what if the other party gets in and they really ignore you? she asked. There are many benefits you could lose that people dont think about.

For more information on the Indiana primaries, visit indianavoters.in.gov.
Not many people knew of Bajirao until Sanjay Leela Bhansalis blockbuster film released in 2015. The movie opened to a lot of controversies, but theres no denying that it also opened an interesting chapter in Indian history. Thanks to the film, India knows a little more about Bajirao, Kashibai and Mastani.

He died in 1740 - let's take a look at some interesting facts about the hero who changed the map of India.

1. Peshwa Bajirao I is regarded as the hero of Hinduism. Yet, he never put a ban on the practise of Islam.

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2. Peshwa Bajirao was only 12 when he went to the battlefield for the first time.

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Bajiraos father, Balaji Vishwanath, the first Peshwa of Chhatrapati Shahu, took him to the battlefield at an early age. He soon became a leader and an extraordinary warrior, becoming an integral part of Maratha history.

3. Bajirao's mother, the matriarch Radhabai Peshwa, was a strict administrator and excelled at writing. No one ever harmed her as she was the mother of the most respected Chief Minister of the Maratha empire - Bajirao.

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Radhabai was proud of her sons Bajirao and his brother Chimaji Appa. She fondly said, My Rau is so deeply revered in this Hindustan that no one would ever dare to harm me.

4. Bajiraos military course spanned 20 years in which he fought 35 enemies. Yet he never witnessed defeat, and always came home with a victory.

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5. Chronologically, Malwa (1723), Dhar (1724), Aurangabad (1724), Battle of Palkhed (1728), Firozabad (1737), were some of the most important battles Peshwa Bajirao I won.

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6. Bajiraos greatest clash resulted in the Battle of Palkhed, which was fought against Nizam-Ul-Mulk, the biggest enemy of the Marathas.

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It was during this war that the Peshwa's innovative warfare tactics were acclaimed by everyone. In fact, a huge amount of weapons and armoury was left by the Nizam as he chose to run away. Bajirao's victory was called a masterpiece of strategic mobility by senior British General Bernard Montgomery.

7. Bajirao was a major devotee of Lord Shiva.

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8. The Mughal emperors were extremely scared of Bajirao, and even refused to plan meetings with him!

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9. He was travelling to Delhi with 100,000 troops under his command when he passed away of a sudden fever at his camp.

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His cremation took place on April 28, 1740, at Raverkhedi, a small town located on the banks of the river Narmada near Indore, Madhya Pradesh. During his last days, his first wife Kashibai, his second wife Mastani, and his mother Radhabai were around him.
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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
American millionaire and entrepreneur Dennis Tito did the unthinkable in 2001 and became the worlds first space tourist when he lifted off on the Soyuz TM rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. His space flight led to the propagation of the idea of space tourism and others like Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos wouldnt have been in the business of space tourism if it wasnt for him.

Reuters

He was 61 when he went to the International Space Station and the 415th human in space. But it didnt come cheap. He spent $20 million of his own money and signed a contract with Space Adventures to book a seat on the Russian Soyuz capsule. It wasnt easy though. NASA wasnt very happy with this and made it clear to the Russians. Obviously Tito was old and not a trained astronaut, so wouldnt be of much help in case of an emergency and NASA thought he would be a drain on resources and require constant monitoring.

He continued with his training regardless, not knowing whether or not he would even go to space. He did eventually, on 28 April, 2001 and spent over a week in space. He took part in some scientific experiments while he was on the International Space Station.

Reuters

What many dont know is that it was his second attempt to do this. In 2000, he had signed a deal with MirCorp to go to the Mir Space station. But by the end of the year, Russia announced that the ageing space station would be de-orbited.
"Main zikr kar raha tha ek actress se ki main iss industry ka highest paid actor hona chahta hoon, aur usne bola tu zindagi bhar nahi ho sakta, tu kuch bhi kar le, duniya bhar mein famous ho ja, teri aukat yeh hai ki tujhe maximum `50 lakh hi denge, usse zyada kabhi nahi denge."

This is one heartbreaking instance Nawazuddin Siddiqui once quoted during an interview. What otherwise would have left any sane man disheartened for life thankfully didn't affect him much. Instead of taking it to heart, Nawazuddin Siddiqui focused on films and his choices and the result is definitely in front of all of us. After a rocking 2015 with back-to-back powerful films like Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Badlapur and Maanji The Mountain Man, our respect for him has only shot up with each passing film.

2016 is going to be a slightly different year for Siddiqui because he will be seen with Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan in Raees, followed by Anurag Kashyap's Raman Raghav 2.0 and Ribhu Dasgupta's TE3N where he will be seen with Big B and Vidya Balan. (Sigh. Can't wait for this one!)

While the actor is continuing being awesome at what he does, let's take a look at the person he is when he is not acting. In a recent interview with Mumbai Mirror, Siddiqui went into a flashback mode and bared his soul on what's changed since the Cannes premiere of Gangs Of Wasseypur, and Miss Lovely.

Meanwhile, here are 16 awesome things Mr. Nawazuddin 'Awesome' Siddiqui quoted:

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He faced angry protests at the Karachi airport for "portraying Pakistan as a terrorist nation in his films". Ironically, while his Phantom which was set in post 26/11 times saw a ban in Pakistan, his next film Bajrangi Bhaijaan ended up being one of the biggest hits there and loved by fans on both sides of the border. Before leaving for Pakistan, Kabir had tweeted his happiness about visiting Pakistan. But things fell apart and the Bollywood filmmaker was hounded and verbally attacked by a mob outside the Karachi International Airport. Although he wasn't detained, it did make headlines.

In an interview with Bombay Times, Kabir bared his soul about the entire Pakistan episode and the highlight of his visit there. Guess what, it was meeting the real Chand Nawab! Read on.

On being heckled at the Karachi airport.

ndtv

I guess TV channels harassed me more! It was a minor incident. I was trying to talk to them but I realised it was pointless as they were a bunch of lunatics, uncivilised people who wanted to make a tamasha. The airport security was initially taken aback. They thought the demonstration was against some airline. Yes, friends and family back home were worried for my safety. But there was no physical violence.

On being slammed for making 'anti-Pak' films.

People had reservations about Phantom but there was also a lot of appreciation for Bajrangi Bhaijaan. We had a discussion about it, which is what civilised people do. A bunch of extremists do not represent Pakistan.

On the discussion he had about Phantom with them.

reuters

I put my point across that Phantom was a work of fiction and the film was against anyone who incites violence and terrorist activities in the name of religion. Terrorists have no religion or nationality. They should be isolated and eliminated.

On his second visit to Pakistan.

thehindu

Yes. This time around, I was there for a day for a marketing conference, which was nicely conducted. They had organised a special session for me. There is a lot of warmth and goodwill. What more would a normal person want honestly? Politics will continue but only people-to-people contact can change things for better. That's what I tried to show in 'Bajrangi' as well. They are fond of our films, songs, and our culture. The politics keeps getting in the way. I don't want this stupid incident, created by a bunch of idiots to hijack my Pak trip.

On whether the incident has made him apprehensive about visiting Pakistan.

ibtimes

I am not apprehensive about visiting Pakistan again. If I feel that, I would be succumbing to these extremists. That is what they want  to spread fear. India and Pakistan are neighbours and we have to live together. You cannot change the geopolitical situation. The more interaction happens, the better it is.

On the highlight of his Pakistan trip.

dailypakistan

It was meeting the real Chand Nawab for the first time. He is such a warm person. He hugged me and said, "You changed my life." I had never met him. I had only seen his videos 5-6 years back. Nawazuddin Siddiqui essayed his character with aplomb in Bajrangi Bhaijaan.

He signs off!
indianexpress

We all know that Deepika Padukone has been in America for months now, shooting for her Hollywood debut xXx. But wouldn't you start missing your family if you were away from them for so long? Seems like Deepika was missing her family, and perhaps that's why they've joined her in Toronto. And while they were there, they decided to work out with their darling daughter's trainer, Farhan Dhalla. He took to Twitter to share their picture.

Training @deepikapadukone and her parents too! Helping to keep the Padukone family in super fit shape!  pic.twitter.com/11uHSRLHRK  Farhan Dhalla (@farhandhalla) April 27, 2016

6am in Toronto and @deepikapadukone and I are at the gym training "This is How We do It" #XXX #TheReturnOfXanderCage  Farhan Dhalla (@farhandhalla) April 26, 2016

Here's a video of Deepika training in Toronto.

A family that works out together definitely stays together!
India just entered an exclusive club of nations to have their own satellite navigation and positioning system with the successful launch of IRNSS-1G today. ISRO did the country proud yet again when its workhorse PSLV launch vehicle in the XL configuration lifted off at 12.50 hrs from Sriharikota with the 1,425 kg satellite within the payload fairing.

ISRO

After 20 minutes and 19 seconds, at an altitude of 497 km above the earth surface, the satellite separated and was injected into the transfer orbit. It would be later raised in orbit to take its place in a geosynchronous orbit to complete the constellation.

With all satellites in place, Indian armed forces will be able to find their position accurately in the battle ground and direct ammunition and missiles deep into enemy territory. This is thanks to the extended range of 1,500 km of the system beyond the borders. The system can also be used for civilian navigation for aircraft and ships.

ISRO

It will also provide terrestrial navigation aid for hikers and travellers along with visual and voice navigation for drivers. And it can also be integrated into phones!

Other civilian applications include mapping, disaster management, and vehicle and fleet management.
It's hard to imagine yesteryear's Madras being cold and freezing. A city known for its sweltering heat in the peak of summers was once home to temperatures that hovered around 11 degree Celsius - interspersed with cold winds and the occasional snowfall.

Yes, 200 years ago, Madras told a very different story. The last week of April 1815 saw temperatures dipping below the freezing point. A city that now knows only three seasons - "hot, hotter and hell" - once also knew what it felt like to blow winter smoke in the dead of the night.

radiosai

According to a report by The Hindu, the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia was the reason behind Madras's chilly weather. The disaster spewed lava with such ferocity that it claimed the lives of 12,000 people and was heard 2,000 km away.

Tambora: The Eruption That Changed The World, by Gillen DArcy Wood describes the phenomenon:

"Tamboras dust veil, serene and massive above the clouds, began its westward drift aloft the winds of the upper atmosphere. Its airy passage to India outran the thousands of waterborne vessels below bent upon an identical course, breasting the trade winds from the resource-rich East Indies to the commercial ports of the Indian Ocean. The vanguard of Tamboras stratospheric plume arrived over the Bay of Bengal within days."

Wikipedia

Madras felt the blow two weeks later which resulted in its temperature fluctuations. The temperature dipped below the freezing point, "thanks to the aerosols in the volcanic cloud absorbing heat from the sun and the earth."

Strange phenomenon occurred with pumice stones washing up to the shores but not even a single incident was recorded during the rule of the East India Company. Neither did anyone mention a tsunami warning.

The Hindu

The aftermath was, however, far from "pleasant". The ash cloud spread its cover across the world, making the year of 1816 one "without summer". In India, it was a year with monsoon where crops failed and plagues wreaked havoc.

The volcano eruption had resulted in over 70,000 deaths globally.

tourismguideindia

The report further states:

"In August 1815, the brig Catherina  the first vessel from Java after the eruption  arrived in Madras. The Madras Courier interviewed the crafts master for an eyewitness description of what happened. He also brought with him a bag of volcanic ash, which was forwarded to Calcutta for further analysis. But nobody linked the big freeze in Madras to the volcano!"

Madras had a rich history no one really knew about till now. Although nobody chronicled it in written history, it's still definitely one worth remembering.
With an aim to increase the security vigil along the Indo-Pak border, a dozen "laser walls" have been made operational in Punjab along the international border with Pakistan.

India Today/ Representational Image

While eight infra-red and laser beam intrusion detection systems are "up and working" along as many vulnerable and sensitive areas of the international border in Punjab, four more will be operationalised in the next few days, a senior official of the Border Security Force said.

These walls will effectively keep a check on intruders and terrorists exploiting the frontier areas to cross over.

zmescience

The decision to install these laser walls was taken by the BSF two years ago keeping in mind the vulnerability of the border in these areas as barbed wire fencing could not be installed in many infiltration prone areas.

The move gained momentum following the Pathankot terror attack, in January which agencies believe was carried out by terrorists who crossed over from Pakistan by breaching the border from Bamiyal area in Punjab.

A total of 45 such laser walls will be installed in these areas along the international border in Punjab and Jammu, a blueprint prepared in this regard said.

"The laser walls have started working and their functioning is being monitored. Preliminary results in detecting illegal movements are encouraging," the official said.

Reuters

He said sensors were being monitored through a satellite-based signal command system and armed with night and fog operability tools.

Apart from these, four other pilot projects of similar kind in stretches of 30-40 kms of international border in Jammu and Gujarat and one in West Bengal along Indo-Bangla border have been approved by Home Ministry to secure Indian borders effectively.

"Work on them will begin by next month," he said.
Days after the Indian government revoked the passport of liquor baron Vijay Mallya, the Ministry of External Affairs have began the process to extradite him from the UK.

AFP

MEA Spokesman Vikas Swarup confirmed that the ministry has written to High Commission of UK requesting deportation of Mallya.

As of today the ministry has written to High Commission of UK requesting deportation of #VijayMallya : MEA pic.twitter.com/828tB9l2LV  ANI (@ANI_news) April 28, 2016

The business tycoon who fled India has in March has been living in London ever since, and has failed to appear before the enforcement directorate despite repeated warnings.

The Enforcement Directorate had weeks ago asked that Mallya's passport be revoked for non-cooperation with investigators, after he failed to present himself before the agency that has summoned him three times.

BCCL

He was supposed to present himself before the ED's investigators in Mumbai on April 15 in connection with a money laundering probe in the more than Rs 900 crore IDBI loan fraud case.

Mallya and his now defunct Kingfisher Airlines are facing separate probes by the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation over default on loans worth Rs 7,000 crore from 17 public sector banks.

Travelobserver

Couple of days ago the Supreme Court had shared details of Mallya foreign assets including penthouses in the famous Trump Plaza in New York, with the to banks. Earlier there were also reports that Mallya who is a Rajya Sabha MP could be disqualified.
Police accompanied by Bajrang Dal activists entered in church in Madhya Pradesh's Satna to stop a marriage. Ten people including the pastor and the groom's parents were also arrested by the police.

soumennath/ Representational Image

The incident happened on Wednesday after Bajrang Dal activists raised objection to the marriage which was being held the Church of God in India in Satna claiming that the couple were illegally converted.

Police also said that the groom was a minor and was 10 days short of turning 18.

PTI/ Representational Image

The couple had converted to Christianity four years ago, but district authorities were not informed, which is a crime under the states anti-conversion legislation. CSP (Satna) Sitaram Yadav said.

Police also said that an FIR was registered on the complaint by the bride's uncle and her father was not mentally sound.

The church has however rejected the allegations and said that the couple were Christians, adding that Bajrang Dal, and RSS were behind the police action.
In his first direct outreach to the famed boatmen of the Ganga at Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the country's first e-boats when he visits his constituency on Sunday.

The idea is part of the plan to help reduce pollution in the congested heritage city.

huffpost

PM Modi will flag off a fleet of 11 e-boats on May 1 after an interaction at one of the Ganga ghats with boatmen from the nishad community and the target is to replace the traditional row boats in Varanasi with 3,000 medium-sized battery-operated boats within the span of a year.

remotetraveler1

The plan is to make it easier for boatmen to row who would only have to steer the boats run by batteries charged through solar power.

"The aim is to make it 100% green. Since the diesel engines will be done away with, the e-boats will generate no noise," said Sushanshu Mehta, who has developed the concept and whose foundation has initiated the project.
AK Sajan, contesting in the upcoming assembly elections in Kerala as an independent candidate may have the most unique slogan for any candidates.

His election slogan is 'Where are our salaries?'

Facebook

And he is taking on MK Muneer, the Panchayat and Social Welfare Minister who is contesting from Kozhikode.

YouTube

What is more interesting is Sajan worked for Muneer for more ten years from 2003. He was a driver with 'Indiavision', a Malayalam language news channel owned by Muneer which shut down operations in 2015, due to a financial crunch.

The Hindu

While Muneer moved on, around 300 employees of the channel including journalist were left without a livelihood. Many also alleged that the company did not pay the salaries of the employees for moths before it was shut down.

Sajan said he has the backing of many former Indiavision staff members who are still waiting to get their payment dues despite assurances from Muneer.

"I am not sure about my win, but I want to tell my voters that Muneer has betrayed his employees. All his employees don't have money to buy food, but he is enjoying his life," Sajan said.

Well, taking your boss head-on is one way to get even with him!
When you see photos of starving baby Africans, it's usually kids from Ethiopia. Africa's oldest independent country is also its poorest - half of them can't even imagine the idea of 3 meals a day. When urban kids refuse to eat their veggies, theyre reminded of Ethiopias starvation.

Which is why you will definitely go to hell for laughing at the idea of a Domino's Pizza in Ethiopia. And its hell that you, me and 30,000 others have signed up, via the 'Domino's Pizza Ethiopia: Unofficial' Facebook Page. It's photo of armed conflicts, violence and the usual fare of suffering, with hilarious explanations. No more explaining.

A photo of an armed raid with primitive weapons is "a recent assault on Papa John's Pizza"

But that's not all. Read more about Domino's Ethiopia here.

Here are some more stories that you may like:

1. The Wedding Didn't Have Ice Cream, So Bride And Groom's Family Beat Each Other With Stones!

vanillaandlaceblog flickr

An Uttar Pradesh wedding suddenly exploded into a fight after the bride and groom's family began fighting over an ice cream shortage at the wedding. Read more about this amazing fight!

2. Delhi Is So Polluted Right Now The Rashtrapati Bhawan Has Disappeared!

Despite the Odd-Even Phase 2, visibility due to smog was low, almost erasing the Rashtrapati Bhawan from Delhi roads, according to this photo posted on a group concerned with air quality in Delhi. Read more about the crisis here.

3. Soon You Might Get Goa's Feni At Your Local Pub And Liquor Shop!

dazlinggoa

The Goa state government may amend a 40-year-old Goa Excise Duty Act to enable Feni to be marketed across India, making it available at local pubs, bars and liquor shops. We tell you how Feni will reach your local theka here.

4. Meet The Amazing Cabbie Who Has Converted His Taxi Into A Library!

TOI

We all have done it, reading our favourite book while travelling on a taxi. But what if you don't have to carry the book and the cab might already have your favourite book inside it.

That is Sahel Filsoof's cab, which has some 50 books on different subjects, including psychology, children and history.

Filsoof who drives a shuttle taxi in Irans Rasht says he encourage his passengers to read in his taxi.

5. This Driver Is Contesting Kerala Assembly Polls Against His Former Boss, A Sitting Minister

Facebook

AK Sajan, contesting in the upcoming assembly elections in Kerala as an independent candidate may have most unique slogan for any candidates.

His election slogan is 'Where are our salaries?'

And he is taking on MK Muneer, the Panchayat and Social Welfare Minister who is contesting from Kozhikode.
When you see photos of starving baby Africans, it's usually kids from Ethiopia. Africa's oldest independent country is also its poorest - half of them can't even imagine the idea of 3 meals a day. When urban kids refuse to eat their veggies, theyre reminded of Ethiopias starvation.

Which is why you will definitely go to hell for laughing at the idea of a Domino's Pizza in Ethiopia. And its hell that you, me and 30,000 others have signed up, via the 'Domino's Pizza Ethiopia: Unofficial' Facebook Page. It's photo of armed conflicts, violence and the usual fare of suffering, with hilarious explanations. No more explaining.

A photo of an armed raid with primitive weapons is "a recent assault on Papa John's Pizza"

This is a dude fighting Somalian pirates attempting to steal Cheesy Bread

And the now familiar war on Papa John

The secret behind Giraffe stuffed crust

Haters gonna hate!
Christal McGee, a driver and Snapchatter, has landed herself in some serious legal trouble after she caused an accident that left the passenger of the other car with brain damage.

The 18-year-old teen was distracted by Snapchat's 'speed' filter that uses GPS technology to determine how fast a user is actually driving.

mlnlaw

A civil complaint has been filed by Wentworth and Karen Maynard against Snapchat and Christal in Spalding County, Georgia. The complaint has been filed against Snapchat as well because the company should be held liable for knowing the dangerous implications of its filter.

mlnlaw

"This is a product liability case because Snapchat put something very dangerous in the marketplace without any warnings or safeguards, and basically said, whatever happens, happens," said one of the attorneys.

The lawyers further said, "McGee wanted to post an image of herself going fast. She argued that she was, 'Just trying to get the car to 100 miles per hour to post it on Snapchat.'"

As a result, she rammed into Wentworth Maynard's car. But even after the crash, Christal allegedly continued to Snapchat, writing "lucky to be alive".

mlnlaw

Wentworth, however, suffered permanent brain damage. According to his wife Karen, "Wentworth would get up on his own, make his breakfast, go to work, and cook dinner. Now hes so tired he falls asleep in his wheelchair during the day. We used to sit on the sofa and watch TV in the evening, and Wentworth would hug me. Now, he cant do that anymore."

The attorneys further said, "It must be asked to what extent Snapchat weighed the risks of its miles per hour filter before releasing it as a product into the stream of commerce. Did its developers consider the impact it could have on the life of someone like Wentworth Maynard?"
The stalled and tenuous negotiations between the Greek government and institutional lenders have expectedly generated political reverberations in Athens , with a minister of state on Thursday accusing main opposition New Democracy party of "betting on destabilization".
A Minnesota teenager committed suicide after her parents say she was bullied on Facebook and arrested after a resulting fight at school, Fox59 reports. Destiny Gleason, 14, hanged herself from a pull-up bar in her bedroom last Wednesday using an extension cord, and her parents want to know why more wasnt done to protect her from relentless bullying by about six girls. At one point they took some photo of some random persons private parts and put Destinys name across it and spread it around the school, her mom, Stephanie Clark, told Fox59.

Anything they could possibly do to hurt her and bring her down. Her stepfather, Kurtis Clark, told the station that officials at Black Hawk Middle School, where Destiny was a student, were aware of the bullying but did little to stop it. We tried to be there for her as much as possible and do everything that we possibly could, he told Fox59.

It would have been nice if somebody else would have too, instead of just saying we are going to talk to them, or we had a talk with them and telling them not to talk to each other. Destiny recorded a video of herself responding to her tormentors, saying, The words you call me are just words. Thats not who I really am. Thats not what Ill ever be.

The bullying resulted in a fight at school last week, and Destiny was taken away in handcuffs and charged with assault. As a result, she was set to start intensive behavioral therapy. But instead, Destiny opened Facebook and saw posts about the fight. Whatever she read drove her to get an extension cord and hang herself, Fox59 reports. Words matter, her mother said. That old saying, sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me  well, they will and we lost our daughter because of words.

Raw Story.
The apex northern socio-political group, Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF, has condemned in strong terms, Mondays attack on Ukpabi Nimbo Community in Enugu State, describing it as most unfortunate and barbaric.

The attack by suspected Fulani herdsmen, left over 50 persons dead and scores driven out of their homes.

President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday, while condemning the attack, gave marching orders to the Inspector General of Police and Chief of Defence Staff to fish out the marauding herdsmen perpetrating deadly attacks on communities different communities across the country.

Reacting to the attack on Ukpabi Nimbo Community, the ACF in a statement issued Thursday in Kaduna by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Muhammad Ibrahim, commiserated with the government and people of Enugu state over this unfortunate ugly incident.

The statement called on security agencies to apprehend the masterminds of the heinous attacks so as to end what it termed the dangerous generalization of Fulani herdsmen as perpetrators of the attacks.

It further stated that Nigeria cannot afford to graduate from Boko Haram insurgency to an unwarranted attack by unknown gunmen alleged to be Fulani herdsmen.

The traditional Fulani nomads have coexisted peacefully with their host communities and have been grazing their cattle for decades all over Nigeria without any such attacks.

ACF is therefore disturbed and seriously concerned with this recent development.

It, therefore, calls upon the security agencies to do a thorough investigation into the identities of the suspected gunmen in order to stop this dangerous generalization of labeling a certain tribe or people of certain faith as responsible for these attacks.

This, the ACF warned, could lead to mistrust and likely whip up sentiments among peoples of different tribes and faith, who it noted, have lived together peacefully for decades.

The northern group stressed that criminals hiding under whatever guise and committing heinous crimes against innocent people and the state should be treated as such and in accordance with the law.

The ACF also commended President Buharis directive to security chiefs, to secure affected communities, arrest and bring the perpetrators to justice.
The central Bulgarian town of Pazardzhik has banned the wearing of full-face veils in public in a move the local government said would prevent tension among communities and boost security. The ban introduced on Wednesday, the first of its kind in the Balkan country, was backed from politicians across the political spectrum in the town of some 70,000 people, where wearing full-face veils had become common among some women from the Muslim Roma minority.

I am tired to hear that Pazardzhik is the town of the burqas. We want to say aloud that we are not that, but a town of responsible people and we will be associated with other achievements, Mayor Todor Popov told national radio. Muslims make up about 12 percent of Bulgarias 7.2 million population and most belong to a centuries-old community, largely ethnic Turks, among whom full-face veils are not common.

Popov said fines would be imposed on anyone who defies the ban, which police said was needed because the veils, which cover all but the eyes, hampered quick identification.

Part of the Roma minority practises a conservative form of Islam and its women have started wearing full-face veils in recent years, angering nationalists. Many Bulgarians are concerned that the refugee inflows into Europe may pose a threat to their predominantly Orthodox Christian culture and help radicalise part of the countrys long-established Muslim minority.

Aljazeera.
A burglar who broke into a mans garage has filed a lawsuit against the homeowner for shooting him. Authorities said David A. Bailey, now 31, of Albany, Ind., broke into the garage of David McLaughlin of Dunkirk, Ind., on April 21, 2014. McLaughlin, now 33, fired gunshots at the intruder he saw fleeing his property. One of the bullets hit Bailey in the left arm as he ran down an alley.

In September 2014, a Jay County Superior Court jury here found McLaughlin guilty of criminal recklessness in the shooting. Judge Max Ludy later sentenced McLaughlin to 60 days in jail, to be followed with four months on home detention. In June 2015, Judge Brian Hutchinson of Jay County Circuit Court placed Bailey, who had pleaded guilty to burglary, on electronic home detention for three years. Last week Baileys lawyers, Jason Delk and Daniel Gibson of Muncie, Ind., filed a Jay County Circuit Court lawsuit against McLaughlin.

While Bailey pleaded guilty to a related burglary charge last year, in the lawsuit he contends that he had not entered (McLaughlins Dunkirk) garage, about 65 miles northwest of Indianapolis, and never entered the defendants garage for the purpose of stealing property. Bailey was in an alley behind McLaughlins home in this city of almost 2,500 residents when the homeowner exited his residence and began firing his weapon into the air in response to a security alarm sound in his garage, the suit claims. As Bailey fled down an alley, McLaughlin continued to the public-right-of-way (and off his property) and continued firing his weapon down the dark alley.

McLaughlin fired three shots at Bailey, the suit contends. One narrowly missed the Albany mans head. Another struck him in the back of the arm and pierced an artery, causing serious and permanent damage. The lawsuit asks for a monetary award in an amount sufficient to compensate (Bailey) for all damages. No hearings have been scheduled in the case.

10 News.
A California woman captured video of another motorist walking her dog by holding its leash out of the car while driving down a Stockton road. Amanda Brajkovich captured video showing part of her confrontation with a motorist she encountered on a Stockton street holding onto her dogs leash while the canine was walking next to the car.

The video shows Brajkovich ask the woman why shes using the unusual dog walking method, and the driver defends the practice, saying the dog wasnt being dragged. Brajkovichs video shows the motorist speed up, forcing the dog to run along beside the car to avoid being dragged. First thought was oh my god this dog is going to get hurt you know, maybe a cars going to go past him and hit him, Brajkovich told KTXL-TV. Youre going to be a dog owner, a responsible dog owner, then you need to get out and walk your dog you know, dont be lazy.

Phillip Zimmerman, director of Stocktons animal services department, said he found the video distressing. Zimmerman said he was concerned about the children seen inside the womans car learning the wrong lessons. We have a lack of humane education not only for adults obviously in this case but as children as well, he told KOVR-TV. If we dont teach children that this isnt OK, this is what happens.

Zimmerman said he would recommend the woman be charged with animal cruelty under California Penal Code 597T. The Stockton Police Department said officers reviewed the video and did not believe there was evidence of animal cruelty, but officials said the motorist would have been charged with distracted driving if she had been seen by an officer.

UPI.
A 19-year-old in the city of Dongguan, in the southern Chinese region of Guangdong Province, who went to his doctor complaining of a ear ache, was horrified when he was told that 26 cockroaches were living inside his ear. Li, 19, recalled that he woke up in the middle of the night with an unbearable itch in his ear that grew increasingly painful, reports news.com.au.

In desperation, he stuck a finger in his ear and felt a sensation deep inside. However, his room mate found no trace of anything unusual.

The next day, Li visited the hospital, where doctors performed an endoscopy and found his ear was packed with cockroaches. A female cockroach had been living in Lis ear canal for weeks and had laid eggs.

According to the doctors, if Li had not come to the hospital on time, his ear could have been severely damaged. The incident, they said, caused severe congestion and a swelling of Lis right ear and had damaged the skin in the ear canal.

Sify News.
Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu State last night briefed President Muhammadu Buhari on the Mondays attack on Ukpabi Nimbo community of Enugu, which left over 50 people dead.

The governor, who was attending a meeting of the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) held at the Old Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa in Abuja, left mid-way for the presidents official residence at 9.55pm.

After briefing the president on the incident, Mr. Ugwuanyi told State House correspondents that he was happy that President Buhari had ordered security chiefs to go after the attackers and protect the citizens of the affected community.

Gov. Ugwuanyi also dismissed reports that he was blocked from speaking with Buhari on the incident, saying that At no point did I call Mr. President or anyone in the Presidency for that matter. There was no need.

I am happy that the President has directed the Chief of Defence Staff and the IGP to fish out the culprits and then safeguard the people.

That is the demand of the state and that is what I am expected to do as a governor, to safeguard lives and property.
The Ogun State Police Command has confirmed the abduction of a former Minister of State for Education, Iyabo Anisulowo.

Mrs. Anisulowo was abducted late Wednesday in Ilaro, Yewa South local government area of Ogun State, police said.

The State Police Public Relations Officer, Muyiwa Adejobi, confirmed the abduction in a statement last night.

He said the Police Commissioner, Abdulmajid Ali, had deployed five teams to rescue the former minister.

Mrs. Ashimolowo was Minister of State for Education under the military regime of late Sani Abacha. She later became a senator representing Ogun West Senatorial District.

The Ogun State police command is aware of the kidnapping of Senator Iyabo Anisulowo in Ilaro area today around 6pm. The Commissioner of Police Ogun State CP Abdulmajid Ali has detailed five teams to the area to rescue her unhurt, Mr. Adejobi, a Deputy Superintendent of Police, DSP, said in a statement.

The special Anti-Robbery Squad SARS, and Anti-Kidnapping Squad Commanders have been sent to the area by the CP to rescue the senator and apprehend the perpetrators. We have also embarked on scientific investigation of the matter, he said.

The command, however, gave assurance that Anisulowo, a one-time governorship candidate in Ogun State, would be rescued, with a call on residents of the state to give adequate support to the authority.

We therefore assure the general public particularly the good people and Government of Ogun State that the kidnapped victim will be rescued very soon unhurt. We appeal to Nigerians and people of Ogun State to support the police command with useful information to assist the police, Mr. Adejobi said.
Facebook shares have jumped after reporting a tripling of first quarter profits from a year earlier to $1.51bn. Advertising revenues rose to $5.2bn, with more than 80% coming from mobile. Facebooks focus on live video attracted new advertisers, while sales on existing services also grew.

Mark Zuckerberg also requested that a new class of stock should be issued, so he can donate money from his shares to charity while maintaining control of the firm he founded. The company said the move would encourage Mr Zuckerberg to remain in an active leadership role at Facebook. The results hugely exceeded Wall Streets already sky-high expectations, and Facebook shares rose by more than 9% in after-hours trading.

Sales for the quarter reached $5.4bn, up from $3.5bn last year. The increased focus on mobile advertising seems to have paid off, rising to 82% of the companys revenues for the first quarter of 2016, up from 73% during the same period last year. Total monthly active users (MAU) increased 15% from a year earlier to 1.65 billion, beating analysts expectations. And each user earned the company more money, an average of $3.32 against $2.50 last year.

With Apples iffy results yesterday, and the now-broken-record of Twitter continuing to struggle, its Facebook taking the hopes of the tech world on its shoulders, and flourishing. Wall Street is extremely tough on the worlds biggest social network, a company which suffers from its own success. Even when Facebook warns about an Achilles heel, it seems to overcome it.

BBC.
The Federal Government on Thursday re-arraigned Senate President Bukola Saraki on amended three charges of alleged false asset declaration before the Code of Conduct Tribunal.

He pleaded not guilty to the charges.

In the fresh charge, the Federal Government accused Saraki of abusing his office while serving as Governor of Kwara State between Oct.2016 and May 2007 by obtaining a loan from GTBank to acquire property at No. 17A and 17B McDonald Street Ikoyi, Lagos.

The Federal Government, through its counsel, Rotimi Jacobs (SAN), said Saraki failed to declare the property which was allegedly acquired at N497.2 million.

In the charge, the prosecution also accused the former Kwara governor of failure to declare his leasehold interest in property located at No.42, Remi Fani-Kayode Street, Ikeja, Lagos allegedly acquired through his company Skyview Properties Company.

The charge further accused him of allegedly receiving monthly salary between June 2011 and October 2013 when he was Senator.

After hearing the charge, Sarakis lawyer, Paul Usoroh, SAN, asked the tribunal to adjourn the case to enable him to consult his client to respond to the new amended charges.

The Chairman of the tribunal, Justice Danladi Umar, adjourned the case till May 10 for continuation of trail.
Fight over a woman between two neighbouring communities of Badarawa Kwaru and Unguwar Yero in Kaduna North local government area of Kaduna State has turned bloody. DAILY POST gathered that not fewer than six persons have lost their lives since the eruption of fight on Sunday night, while several others have sustained various degree of injuries.

As at the time of filing this report Wednesday afternoon, there is heavy presence of Police and soldiers as residents remain indoor. Several gunshots were fired into the air at interval. Eye witnesses accounts said the fight started between two men on Sunday night over a woman. Emmanuel Kaja told DAILY POST that a man from Kwaru community came on motorbike to Unguwar Yero to see his alleged concubine who incidentally is a wife of a man in Unguwar Yero. According to him, The woman was in relationship with the man from Kwaru when she was a girl and used to give her money when they were dating. The lady in question married another person. But after their marriage, the lady and her former boyfriend were still going out.

On that Sunday evening, the Kwaru man came as usual to look for his concubine. They met as usual, but the husband who was already suspecting his wife trailed her to where they were standing. So, when he accosted them, the Kwaru man kicked his bike and stabbed the man from Kwaru in the stomach.

The man later died before he could be rushed to the hospital. But, what got people of the area angry is that, the Governor later came begging the people to be patient without taking action to bring the culprit to book. That was why Unguwar Yero people also started attacking people suspected to be Hausa-Muslim, he said. Another eye witness also told DAILY POST that governor Nasir El-Rufai who was at Unguwar Yero on Sunday night to broker peace was stoned by the angry youths.
Israeli forces have shot and killed two Palestinians as they allegedly attempted to stab soldiers at a checkpoint between occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. The troops fatally shot 23-year-old Maram Saleh Hassan Abu Ismail and her younger brother Ibrahim, 16, at the Qalandia military checkpoint between the central West Bank city of Ramallah and East Jerusalem, according to the Palestinian Authoritys Ministry of Health.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the pair were armed with knives and came towards the border guards to attack them. After the incident, Israeli forces fired tear gas and sound grenades during clashes with Palestinian youth. Since October 1, increased tensions in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel have boiled over into violence.

Throughout that period, Israeli forces and illegal settlers have killed at least 209 Palestinians, including alleged attackers and protesters, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Meanwhile, at least 29 Israelis were killed in shooting and stabbing attacks carried out by Palestinians, says Israels ministry of foreign affairs.

Ramy Abdu, director of the Gaza-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, criticised the Palestinian governments inaction after six months of escalated violence. In many incidents, they [Israeli soldiers] actually committed extrajudicial killings, particularly at checkpoints and military points, he told Al Jazeera.
Former President of the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC), Mr Peter Esele, has described as an insult, the rumour that he was gunning for the deputy governorship position in Edo State as against his wish to be the next governor.

Do you know how many local governments I have visited and what I am going through right now? Do you know the number of sleepless nights I have had and the number of people I have met? You think I am doing these things because I want to become a deputy governor? he asked.

That is an insult. If I want to become the deputy governor, I can reach out to whoever is the leading aspirant and negotiate and I will not need to waste the energy and resources that I am deploying now. If I want to become deputy governor, I know what to do, Esele said.
The political cease fire reportedly reached between ex-Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso and his successor, Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje seems to have elapsed with a Special Adviser to the former, Alhaji Sharu Garba Gwammaja, saying the greatest mistake his boss ever made was handing over to his former deputy as governor of Kano State.

Kwankwaso and Ganduje were examples of a political match made in heaven until recently when their once envious relationship turned sour, leading to the dumping of the red cap, the political symbol of the Kwankwasiyya movement.

Gwammaja, who has been leading the attack from the Kwankwaso camp, however, said it will amount to political suicide for Governor Ganduje to discard use of the red cap in protest against the political principles of the ex-governor.

The red cap was made popular by Kwankwaso during his second tenure as governor of Kano State and has come to be accepted as a sign of loyalty and acceptance of the political ideologies espoused by the former governor, now senator.

However, following the political disagreement between Kwankwaso and Ganduje, members of the State Executive Council, majority of the House of Assembly members and chairmen of the 44 local government areas in the state among others, recently dumped the red cap in solidarity with the incumbent governor.

But in reaction to Gwammajas statement that the dumping of the red cap was political suicide, the Kano State Commissioner of Information, Malam Garba Muhammad, said if the aide of the ex-governor knew the history of red cap, he would not have reacted the way he did.

It is still a minus on your side even if it is only one person that removed his red cap in the state, in protest against the ideology. With the recent development, at least, people have choice to either wear red cap or not, Muhammad said

Gwammaja, who spoke yesterday while addressing a press conference to mark the 5th anniversary of red cap revolution in Kano, pledged to buy Gov. Gandujes red cap at N1m if he voluntarily decided to discard it.

He said: If Ganduje can remove his red cap today, I will buy it N1m. The greatest mistake Kwankwaso made in his life was bringing Ganduje to power. The actions of the present government of Kano State have contradicted the ideology of Kwankwasiyya, and we will continue to kick against anything that is contrary to our ideology.

Gwammaja also accused Ganduje of rewarding some lawmakers in the state with cars worth N686m, for discarding their red caps.

He claimed that from the day the lawmakers stopped using the red cap, over one million people have started wearing same to show their support for Kwankwaso.

He alleged that all those that stopped wearing red cap in Kano could not go to their constituencies and interact with their people freely like they used to.

The red cap anniversary is being celebrated worldwide, he said. Our members are celebrating it in Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Canada and Malabo, among other countries.

The aide also said the current political crisis between the ex-governor and Ganduje will not end until the latter embraced the political beliefs of Kwankwaso, who was his (incumbent governors) former boss.

Gwammaja pointed out that Kwankwasiyya was about transparency, accountability, justice, commitment to service to humanity, rendering selfless services, truthfulness and honesty.

On the issue of the alleged N686m cars gift to the lawmakers, the commissioner said: This issue was purely an Assembly matter. There is a pending case between Gwammaja and state lawmakers, therefore, I will not comment on this.

Muhammad also said that the governor had respect for Kwankwaso and would continue to respect him.
A female suicide bomber has blown herself up in the northwestern Turkish city of Bursa, senior security and government officials said. Wednesdays blast wounded several people, a security source told the Reuters news agency.

Al Jazeeras Sue Turton, reporting from Istanbul, said officials believed the suicide bomber attacked worshippers gathered at the citys Grand Mosque for prayers.

The only death were hearing was herself  Turton said. Officials put the number wounded at 13.

The attack comes shortly after the US embassy issued an emergency warning telling its citizens to avoid tourist attractions due to the threat of attacks.

Turkey has been hit by a number of bomb attacks over the past year as it battles the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, and Kurdish separatist fighters. Turkish armed forces are involved in military operations against both.

Source: Al Jazeera And Reuters
Punch

A Federal High Court in Abuja on Tuesday struck out an application by the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, Mr. Nnamdi Kanu, and his co-accused, David Nwawusi and Benjamin Madubugwu, asking for a stay of proceedings in their ongoing trial.

Vanguard

The two engineers, Oladele Ogundeji and Akinbela Fatiregun, alleged to be culpable in the construction of the collapsed guest house of the Synagogue Church of All Nations, SCOAN, were yesterday sent back to Kirikiri prisons as the court fixed date to rule on their bail applications.

Thisday

Former Chairman, Senate Committee on FCT and a staunch member of the Peoples Democratic Party, Senator Smart Adeyemi, recently altered his political trajectory, following his defection to the ruling All Progressives Congress

The Sun

The preponderance of the dreaded Lassa Fever virus in Ebonyi State has led to the state government adopting new strategies to fight the outbreak and spread of the disease in the state.

Daily Times

At least, 150 females have been raped and 31 babies abandoned on the streets of Lagos in the last one year, says the Lagos State Government.

Daily Trust

Some prominent leaders of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) comprising former governors, ministers and senators in the northern part of the country have begun moves to extend the tenure of Senator Ali Modu Sheriff as chairman of the party.

Tribune

PRELATE, Methodist Church Nigeria (MCN), Most Reverend S.C.K. Uche, has condemned the menace of Fulani herdsmen and called on the Federal Government to take immediate action and send the herdsmen packing.

The Nation

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has uncovered $12.9billion more arms deals fraud during the administration of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, it was learnt yesterday.

Guardian

A mid-night fire on Tuesday gutted the famous Kurmi market in Kano metropolis, destroying property worth millions of Naira.
The lingering fuel scarcity in the country may worsen if the over 300,000 petrol attendants in the country do not get a pay rise, The Nation reports.

The National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) has threatened to go on strike in sympathy with the petrol attendants.

Citing industry sources, The Nation said Petroleum Tanker Drivers (PTD), an arm of NUPENG, planned to embark upon a strike if an agreement is not reached over the N18,000 minimum wage being proposed for the attendants.

The Zonal Chairman, Southwest, NUPENG, Mr. Tokunbo Korodo, confirmed this. He said tanker drivers might go on strike to identify with the petrol attendants on the issue.

The inability of stakeholders to reach a compromise, he said, has slowed discussions on the issue.According to him, petrol dealers are the ones working against the agreement reached on the payment of the minimum wage, not marketers.

He said efforts to get the dealers to understand the predicaments of the petrol attendants and further increase their salaries have proved abortive.

Discussions are ongoing on the issue of increasing the emoluments of petrol attendants and others working at fuel retail outlets across the country. Several meetings have been held on the issue because we believe that the workers welfare must be improved. We are going to mobilise our members, especially tanker drivers, to go on strike. If the dealers are not ready to acquiesce to our demands,we would order our drivers not to provide fuel to stations that are being run by dealers, Korodo said.

He noted that through this, NUPENG would achieve its aspirations of providing better remuneration for petrol attendants.
The candidate of the All Progressives Congress for Rivers South-East senatorial district re-run polls, Magnus Abe, has described the continuous killings in Ogoni area of the state as man-made obstacles targeted at his ambition and success in the poll.

Abe, who represented the senatorial district in the 7th National Assembly, made the allegation yesterday in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.

According to the APC senatorial candidate, the killings in his senatorial district of Ogoni were plots by the enemies of the people to abort his representation at the Senate.

He noted that the acts were perpetrated by a set of people who do not want him to succeed at the re-run elections, which were declared inconclusive by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.

Abe, who also spoke on recent murder of his ally, Dr. Vincent Eebee, in Yeghe community, lamented that his supporters were now in hiding.

He, therefore, called on security operatives to investigate and fish out the killers in Ogoni, stressing that they (killers) and the car they used for their operations are known.
19 registered political parties in Nigeria, yesterday, called on the Chairman, Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), Danladi Umar, to step down from the trial of the President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki.

The political parties alleged that the tribunal chairman had failed to demonstrate a dispassion that is required of anyone sitting in judgment over other.

Briefing newsmen yesterday in Abuja, National Chairman of the Labour Party (LP), Alhaji Abdulkadir Abdusalam, said that the trial of Saraki at the CCT has serious implications for the survival of democracy and the present administrations fight against corruption.

Once an anti-corruption is perceived as politically-motivated, the entire war against corruption gets reduced to a means of settling political scores rather than genuine commitment to fighting corruption, Abdusalam said.

The LP Chairman stressed that the only way President Muhammadu Buhari could prove that his government is indeed more serious about fighting corruption is to direct an immediate investigation into the circumstances that led to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) issuing a letter of clearance to Umar.

Anyone who wants to come to equity must come with clean hands. We recall that the chairman of the tribunal himself is under investigations by the EFCC on allegations of bribery and corruption. We observed however that the preponderance of evidence that has been deployed so far against Saraki, including the principal prosecution witness in the matter were supplied by the EFCC, the LP chairman noted.

The National Chairman of ADC, Ralph Nwosu, spoke in agreement. He said that if the matter was not properly handled, it could derail our political process.

We want the case tried but the CCT chairman is compromised and must step down, Nwosu held.
On this day in 2007: A car in which Edo State Governor, Adams Oshiomhole ride was struck by an oncoming vehicle. Three (3) journalists were killed in the suspicious accident.

Also on this day in 2006: Former China President, Hu Jintao, said China wanted a strategic partnership with Africa, seeking to add a new political dimension to a blossoming economic romance. China agreed to commit $4 billion for infrastructure in exchange for four (4) oil drilling licenses.

Equally on this day 2007: The Supreme Court voided the removal of Joshua Dariye, a Plateau State Governor, who fled London on money laundering charges in November 200
Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Delta State, Chief Edwin Uzor, yesterday declared that the party would not lose sleep over the plan by some opposition political parties in the state to merge.

The Labour Party, All Progressives Congress and other opposition parties in the state are reportedly holding talks that would lead to a merger with the sole purpose of providing a credible and solid opposition to the PDP in the state. Although, Uzor described the planned merger as an empty threat not capable of unsettling the PDP.

The PDP chairman made this position known in a statement in Asaba, the Delta State capital.

According to him: Opposition parties in the state have no structures, be it in the ward, local government area or senatorial level, and no political party can win elections without existing structures.

Therefore, the much expected mega merger of the opposition against the PDP in the state is only a threat over which our great party will not lose sleep.
The National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Chief Olisa Metuh, yesterday said he appeared in court for the continuation of his trial to avoid his bail being revoked.

Our correspondent reported that Metuh was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of the National Hospital, Abuja, after collapsing during the PDP Zonal Congress on Tuesday April 26.

Speaking to newsmen after Justice Okon Abang adjourned the case following his ill-health, Metuh said he insisted to be in court despite doctors advice because he knows he is still on bail.

According to him, If I am not here, my bail conditions may be revoked and I dont want that; but I have been here for three hours and we havent started. Thats why my lawyers asked for an adjournment.

The doctor did not want to release me, but I insisted, said the PDP spokesman.

Mr. Metuh said he looks forward to defending himself against the seven-count charge of fraud leveled against him by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, at the Federal High Court, Abuja.

He is standing trial along with his company, Destra Investment Ltd, which he allegedly used to receive a questionable payment of N400 million arms fund from the Office of the former National Security Adviser, ONSA, Sambo Dasuki.

The truth is that in the course of this case a lot of things have been said and a lot of insinuations. I cant wait to defend the accusations, Metuh told reporters at the court premises.

There are a lot of things the public dont know yet and I need to let them to know, he added.

The trial judge adjourned the matter till May 17 and 18 to allow the first defendant attend to his health.
Apple iPhone sales declined 16 percent in the first quarter, but it's important to remember that the overall smartphone market has also flatlined, largely due to market saturation.

IDC said Wednesday that smartphone shipments in the quarter increased just 0.2 percent compared to the first quarter of 2015, marking the smallest year-over-year growth on record. IDC recorded 334.9 million smartphones shipped worldwide during the quarter.

[ Find out how to care and support today's mobile worker, who requires a different approach to management. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobile Tech Report newsletter. ]

Even Samsung, the world's biggest smartphone maker with a 25 percent market share, saw a slight decline of 0.6 percent in smartphone shipments, dropping to 81.9 million. No. 2 Apple declined by 16.3 percent to 51.2 million, giving it a 15 percent market share, IDC said.

In developed economies like the U.S., nearly everybody already has a smartphone -- and next-generation models don't seem significantly better to bother with a replacement, analysts have noted for the past year or more.

Even in China, where smartphone sales were once supposed to help Apple and others, "the appetite for smartphones has slowed dramatically as the explosion of uptake has passed its peak," IDC said. Year-over-year growth in China was 62 percent in 2013; that number dropped to 2.5 percent by 2015.

"We've seen the writing on the wall for some time with smartphone replacement rates down and saturation high in developed markets," said IDC analyst Ramon Llamas. "The smartphone market in emerging markets has also been steadily shrinking. What's the next emerging market going to be? It's not a China or an India. It's going to be scattered across less dense populations and less dense markets. Seeing things flatten is the way the market is going now."

Like other analysts, Llamas said it isn't clear what new smartphone features will throw a life-line to the overall industry. "What will make the market move up again, that's the $64,000 question," he said.

"Things are slowing down quite a bit for smartphones and will adding 5G wireless do it?" he said. "Not really, since that's coming post-2020. The usual things every vendor is putting on are either a big screen or a small screen. They continue to play with materials. So, let's look at where new applications take us. "

As both Samsung and Apple were hit by the same market pressures in the first quarter, Huawei came in third place, with 8 percent market share and growth of 58 percent year-over-year. Huawei shipped 27.5 million smartphones in the quarter.

Smartphone makers in the next two spots are almost completely unknown in the U.S. In fourth place, Oppo had 5.5 percent of the market share with 18.5 million smartphones shipped --an increase of 153 percent. And in fifth place, Vivo took 4.3 percent of the market, with 14.3 million smartphones shipped. That represneted an increase of 123 percent.

Vivo, based in China, sells its smartphones mainly in China and India. Oppo, also based in China, sells phones in 20 countries and just launched the F1 Plus smartphone for customers in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, with online sales for European customers.

This story, "iPhone sales drop in Q1 reflect a market that remains flat" was originally published by Computerworld .
Healthcare tech giant Philips scraps 4,000 staff worldwide AP - 34 minutes ago THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)  Dutch healthcare technology giant Philips is scrapping 4,000 staff worldwide amid the fallout from a recall of sleep apnea machines and economic headwinds, the company announced... $SPX : 3,713.22 (+1.29%) $DOWI : 31,082.56 (+2.47%) $IUXX : 11,310.33 (+2.39%)

Wheat (ZW) Gives Up Half of Aug-Sep Bounce Tradable Patterns - Mon Oct 24, 1:04AM CDT Wheat (ZWZ22) is looking wobbly to start the week, remaining vulnerable to a deeper consolidation this week towards descending wedge support (on the 4hr chart). Odds are moderately high for a lower... ZWZ22 : 841-2 (-1.12%) WEAT : 8.79 (+0.89%)

China's economic growth accelerates but weak amid shutdowns AP - Sun Oct 23, 11:20PM CDT BEIJING (AP)  China's economic growth accelerated in the latest quarter but still was among the weakest in decades as the ruling Communist Party tries to reverse a downturn while enforcing anti-virus... $SPX : 3,713.22 (+1.29%) $DOWI : 31,082.56 (+2.47%) $IUXX : 11,310.33 (+2.39%)

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,...
Nacogdoches, TX (75965)

Today

Cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 82F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms this evening becoming more widespread overnight. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 52F. Winds SSW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%.
John D. Rockefeller was among the most reviled robber barons of his time. Henry Ford was a union buster. Bill Gates was sued for monopolistic practices. George Soros destabilized Britains currency. The Walton family helped obliterate Main Street with its low-wage business model. And most of todays hedge fund billionaires are so rich, in part, because of the notorious carried-interest tax loophole.

Many great fortunes, past and present, have their origins in unsavory business practices and/or public policies that have been rigged to favor the rich.

How much should these backstories color our analysis of philanthropy? Does it matter how the money was made?

These questions are hardly new, but come up with increasing frequency in regard to todays mega-giving. To offer one example: We write often about the philanthropy of Steve Cohen, whose hedge fund was shut down after a federal investigation into insider trading investigation  sparked by years of suspicion that Cohen had grown so rich by operating on the edge, or beyond. Every time we write about a Cohen gift, we note this backstory.

On the other hand, when we write about Rockefeller or Gates grants, we dont pause to note the monopolistic practices that contributed to the endowments of those foundations.

So how long do we keep Steve Cohen in the doghouse? Fifty years from now, when hes gone and his foundation is still making grants, should every story include that caveat about insider trading?

The Cohen case is extreme. But the question remains: How do we think about philanthropic fortunes pumped up thanks to perfectly legal  but reprehensible  behavior? Take the tech sector, which is producing more and more mega-givers. A great many tech companies, including Apple and Google, engage in aggressive tax avoidance strategies using offshore tax havens to stash foreign profits. Some also have poor labor and environmental records.

When we write about, say, a major grant by Apple to get more girls into computer science, should we also make mention of Tian Yu, the young Chinese woman who attempted suicide thanks to sweatshop conditions in a factory making iPhones?

When we write about the Patriotic Philanthropist David Rubenstein, should we also mention the not-so-patriotic tax avoidance strategies that have allowed him and other private equity billionaires to get so rich? Or the allegations of revolving-door practices and influence peddling of his Carlyle Group?

My answer to the question of whether it matters where the money comes from is yes and no.

The context of todays big philanthropy should never be too far from our minds. This mega-giving reflects historic levels of inequality that didnt emerge by accident. Sure, certain unavoidable shifts related to technology and globalization have fueled inequality, but so have deliberate business practices and public policies. The Walton family is so rich, in part, because it chose a low-wage model and worked aggressively to stop unionization of Walmart workers. The hedge fund and private equity industries have energetically fought efforts to close the carried-interest loophole, and the wealthy have campaigned relentlessly to keep taxes low on capital gains, a tax policy thats been an important driver of inequality.

I could cite other examples. The point is that the upper class has so much money to give away partly because they have promoted policies that have channeled wealth upward. So, yes, theres something wrong with lavishing these Americans with uncritical praise as they now step forward as philanthropists to meet societal needs that wouldnt be so acute if wed had a more high-minded and selfless upper class over the past few decades.

That context should never be forgotten.

As a practical matter, though, litigating the details of how every philanthropist made their fortunes  and then coloring judgements of their giving as a result  doesnt make sense. Such an undertaking is simply too big and complex.

So where do the backstories about wealth creation belong in our narratives about philanthropy? A few thoughts.

First, I think the worldviews and ideologies that philanthropists bring to their giving are super-important. To understand how a donor thinks, its very helpful to know how they made their money. That context can lead to some trenchant critiques of the choices donors make  say, in placing undue faith in technological fixes or market-based solutions  but also to the praise of donors who bring new kinds of thinking to solving social problems.

Second, if a donor seems to be engaged in an effort to repair their reputation after past wrongdoing, that context needs to be mentioned. But caution is important here. For example, both Steve Cohen and Michael Milken were active philanthropists before the feds came after them. You cant be too reductive in assigning motive.

Third, the greatest skepticism should be reserved for corporate philanthropy. This giving is often directly tied to strategies that boost the bottom line and its often not hard to find the self-interested motives at work. These motives range from quite unsavory  say, an oil company bankrolling climate denial  to far more benign, like tech companies giving to expand the supply of STEM workers.

Fourth, it often makes sense to just skip the backstory of wealth creation altogether in order to focus on the strategies and impact of funders. This stuff is complicated enough without getting mired in the details of where the money came from.

As long as the broader context of todays giving is never too far from mind  i.e., the appalling inequality of the new Gilded Age  most philanthropy is best evaluated on its own merits: Will this gift or that grant make the world a better place or not?

See more articles by David Callahan.
In late 2015, Shelley Trott, the director of arts, strategies and ventures at the Kenneth Rainin Foundation spoke to IP about where the grantmaker was headed next in the Bay Area.

Two major themes emerged: art space and public art.

In a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco, the foundation, which has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, has proved to be a pivotal player in keeping artists in the city by providing affordable studio spaces. And now comes news that Rainin plans to expand its already impressive commitment to public art with its brand new Open Spaces program.

Related:

The program will support temporary place-based public art projects in Oakland and San Francisco that "engage communities, showcase artistic experimentation, and energize public spaces." Letters of inquiry will be accepted online from May 16 to June 30, 2016 for "new visionary projects that demonstrate collaboration between artists and nonprofit organizations." Up to four grants will be awarded in the fall and funding will range from $50,000-$200,000 per project.

The foundation will consider submissions for visual, media and performing arts, as well as conceptual works. Potential projects will be evaluated on whether they significantly engage visitors and residents, and demonstrate a strong relationship to the site.

OK, so first off, you'll notice we emphasized the words "significantly engage." This will make sense to loyal readers of our recent arts coverage. We've been on a bit of an engagement bender lately. We guess it all began when the Wallace Foundation announced it was spending $52 million to look at innovative ways to engage audiences. It's snowballed since then.

Related:

Our obsession is philosophical. After all, it seems like an inherently simple question: What's the best way to "engage" a community? But clearly it's far more complicated than that. As we noted in this recent rumination, no one can truly even agree on the definition of the word "engagement" itself. What's more, not all "engagement" is equal in terms of impact. Take something like engaging one's audience through e-maila frequently tracked metric. We asked:

What's more meaningful? Knowing that 20 people were emailed about an upcoming programnever mind that the message was immediately deletedor knowing that three people read a Facebook post about a performance and two decided to attend?

So you can see why we're a bit existential.

This challenge simultaneously underscores an inherently intuitivecomponent to the idea of engagement. Sometimes you don't need to measure what's patently obvious. Engagement occurs when people are, well, engaged. It reminds us of when Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart's law clerk, Alan Novak, explained to his boss how he'd define obscenity: "Mr. Justice, you will know it when you see it."

And therein lies the allure of public art. When people come into direct contact with public art in a community, that is arguably "engagement" in its purest sense. You know it because you're seeing it.

Another major grantmaker who's keen on public art is Bloomberg Philanthropies. In 2014, the grantmaker announced its first-ever Public Art Challenge, in which it invited U.S. cities to develop "temporary public art projects that enhance cultural and economic activity" while establishing "robust public-private partnerships between local government and other funders." Last summer, it announced the inaugural winners.

Related:Bloomberg Announces The Winners of Its Inaugural Public Art Challenge

Now is it a coincidence that Bloomberg Philanthropies, of all grantmakers, is so keen on public art? Not exactly. As previously noted, Bloomberg, perhaps more than any other arts-focused grantmaker, is fervently committed to quantifiably measuring audience engagement, further corroborating the old adage, "There are no coincidences in arts philanthropy."

Actually, there is no such adage. We just made it up. But why let that ruin a good framing device?

Anyway, our point, here, is simple. Beyond community enrichment, there's a reason that data-crunching grantmakers like Bloomberg are funding public art and, say, Herb "I don't know man, it's all feel" Albert isn't. (Not that there's anything wrong with "feel.")

Bottom line? Rainin's Shelley Trott told us what her foundation was going to do, and they delivered. The Bay Areato quote our West Coast New Age friendsis very much "in transition," and the foundation is positioning itself as an arts-related bulwark against unaffordable rents, rapidly transforming neighborhoods, and the persnickety spending habits of the nouveau riche.

They're bringing the arts directly to the region's communities who, at least physiologically speaking, will have no choice but to "engage."

So Bay Area organizations interested in this program should keep these two previously emphasized words in mind: "Potential projects will be evaluated on whether they significantly engage visitors and residents." Post the quote over your bed. Get old school and tape flash cards to your cubicle wall. Make them your North Star.

Grants will be announced in November 2016, with implementation expected in 2017. Click here for the complete application information and training workshop details.

See more articles by Mike Scutari.
Tom Steyer is in the climate fight for the long haul. His NextGen Climate is emphasizing people power in 2016, raising the questionwill young people rally behind a billionaire donor?

One popular, but far oversimplified narrative after the 2014 election was that environmentalists like Thomas Steyer poured in million to sway the midterms and were shot downa swing and a miss. After all, Steyer did spend some $74 million of his own money, and won only three of seven priority races in what was an unequivocal bloodbath for Democrats.

But environmentalists are optimistic losers, and Steyer was true to form, maintaining that they had begun to shape the conversation, and that his 2014 push was only the beginning. Thats one thing Ive always liked about Steyer as a donor. Hes more patient and multifaceted than people gave him credit for in 2014.

Far from a rich dilettante hastily cutting checks, weve covered at length how Steyer and wife Kat Taylor are all in on this stuff. Theyve given several million to energy research and policy at Stanford, launched a Climate Disaster Relief Fund, backed business organizing alongside Mike Bloomberg, and even operate a sustainable ranch in Northern California.

Related:

As Steyer pointed out in the aftermath of 2014, winning on climate isnt something that happens in one political horse race, or something that any one donor can really accomplish. NextGen is not a drive-by super PAC, he told Time. Were going to build political assets, were going to build an organization

He demonstrated that this week, unveiling a $25 million voter registration and mobilization drive to get young people to support presidential and congressional candidates committed to fighting climate change.

It's somewhat of a shift in strategy. NextGen did field work in 2014, but it also spent $19 million on political ads. At least for now, this effort seems to have a stronger field organizing focus, training teams to deploy in at least 203 college campuses in seven mostly swing states.

If we must live in a super PAC world, it's better to organize masses of young people to vote based on an an important issue than to run TV ads.

The other thing thats positive about Steyers approach is its transparency. One point that came up a lot in 2014 is that it was Steyer vs. Koch for the fate of the country. Its a false comparison, because the Kochs actually channel hundreds of millions through a network of several groups that dont disclose their donors. The brothers only recently started publicly acknowledging their efforts.

NextGen, on the other hand, discloses its donors, and Steyer is highly public about his donations and role in the organization. Hes both prominent funder and spokesman.

Which raises two additional questions:

First, when is this guy running for office? Second, can a hedge fund billionaire, even a charismatic liberal one, become a leader rallying young activists?

This is the weird kind of thing we get in our new Gilded Age, not to mention the bizarre political climate: a liberal billionaire organizing millennials using Snapchat ads, concerts, and brewery tours. Will it work?

Yes, young voters have shaped the Democratic primary, but its not clear that the surge of Bernie Sanders supporters, who celebrate their $27 average donations, will heed Steyers call to vote for Hillary Clinton (NextGen hasnt endorsed yet, but come on). Right now, its actually kind of hard to imagine them voting for anyone but Sanders.

It calls to mind Jamelle Bouies analysis of Sanders voters: He says they are not a movement, but could be if they dont let their enthusiasm fizzle out, and if they decide to join the long, boring game of political change.

Steyer is betting they will.

See more articles by Tate Williams.
Storage Development Partners LLC (SDP), the self-storage development affiliate of Storage Pros Management LLC, has proposed a four-story facility for an area of Waltham, Mass., that has a history of flooding. The company intends to build a 121,000-square-foot structure on 1.62 acres at 96 Linden St., but city officials will determine if self-storage is a better use for the land than a condominium project proposed for the same site, according to the source.

SDP attorney Michael Connors told city council members this week the self-storage facility was better suited for the site because it would help the city avoid a situation in which residents could be impacted by flood damage. Time and time again, neighboring apartment buildings and businesses have flooded, causing many personal and economic hardships, Connors told the council. The proposed self-storage facility use of the locus, as opposed to 14 residential units, eliminates the possibility of additional residents being put in harms way if it floods again.

Council member Robert Waddick concurred with that sentiment, arguing that future flooding was inevitable. Given the situation in that area, to put more residents there is problematic. I suppose with a by-right development, theres not a lot we can do, but I really think it would be a disservice to people who dont know the history of that area to be renting to them, Waddick said during the meeting. Theyll be taking them out of there on front-end loaders at some point in the future unless we correct that situation.

To minimize flood impact on self-storage tenants, SDP has reserved the first floor primarily for loading, a management office, parking and a small area for storage. Most of the facilitys storage units would be placed on the upper three floors, Connors told the council. In contrast, the condominiums would be built on stilts, the source reported.

The city would have to approve a special permit and variances for the self-storage project to proceed. Connors indicated the condominium project would move forward if the city rejects the SDP proposal.

The property is owned by 96 Linden St. Realty Trust. Principals John Severini and Babak Veyssi purchased the land in 2008 and have been working on the residential project for three years, but both are willing to move forward with the self-storage project if the developers plan is approved by the council, according to the source.

The council referred the proposal to the ordinance and rules committee. Connors told the council the project engineer could address any flood-related concerns during a meeting scheduled for next week, the source reported.

Founded in 2007, Storage Pros is a privately owned company specializing in the acquisition, development and management of self-storage facilities in the eastern states. The company began selling the majority of its owned assets in December, including an agreement to sell 37 properties to a joint venture led by a Chicago-based institutional investment firm for $242.5 million. Prior to the sale, it owned 51 facilities in Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire and Tennessee. It also manages five facilities in Michigan.

The companys primary focus is now the acquisition and re-positioning of existing self-storage facilities with value-add opportunities to improve facility operations and their physical condition, according to its website. It also develops new facilities through SDP, which is a partnership between self-storage developer Darryl Kusek and Storage Pros principals Ian Burnstein and David Levenfeld. SDP is focused on projects primarily in the Boston area and South Florida.
This content is from: Culture

People investing in ESG funds want their money to have an impact. They just dont have a way to ask for that information, says Jason Saul of the Center for Impact Sciences.
A leading digital academic says brokers who remain true partners with clients, by adding value in risk management or by disrupting their own business models with technology, will continue to be valuable despite the threat posed from new peer-to-peer insurance start-ups.Last month major European disruptor Friendsurance announced its intentions to expand into the Australian market as its first international target following almost $20 million in funding.The German-based insurtech business, which uses social networks such as Facebook to allow groups of people to pool insurance premiums and offers an annual no claims reward, is looking to launch in Australia following a funding boost from venture capital firm Horizons Ventures.Dr Amy Gibbs , digital communications and content strategy manager at ANZIIF told Insurance Business that although its still early days for the sharing economy and regulators have yet to allow these disruptors into the Australian system, they are bound to shake up the industry by disrupting the status quo.The biggest impact they will have is on consumers. New models of insurance will allow customers to see alternatives to their current insurance options and they will start to expect those options from their existing insurers or theyll switch, she said.She also said the new peer-to-peer business model had the potential to change insurance from a grudge purchase to a partnership  in health, home, travel and the like  with more agile, forward-thinking and consumer-friendly disruptive companies.In the short term, she said, business lines are likely to be dominated by brokers. However, once people get more comfortable with the options they get in their personal lines insurance, theyll start to expect it for their businesses too.Brokers pride themselves on being in partnership with their clients, if a small disruptive company can provide the same level of service, with the convenience of disruptive technology and thinking, thats going to be a challenge for brokers to compete with.Gibbs also warned that customer should exercise caution when signing up to be insured with the newcomers.Many of them will be tech start-ups and wont have the vast insurance knowledge  particularly when it comes to risk  that a traditional insurer will have, and that could be dangerous, she said.She said the biggest challenge to insurance businesses when it comes to the sharing economy is the change in customer expectations.Consumers will grow to expect the ease, partnership, and even the bells and whistles that disruptors will build their platforms on.Those insurers that cant offer the same level of service and trust will be at a significant disadvantage, she said.Brokers who disrupt themselves will be better placed to compete with the change that personal lines business will potentially undergo in the next few years. As services become tailored, simpler and safer to customers  all things brokers differentiate themselves by, the need for a personal touch becomes subsumed by better technology and customer-focussed companies.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has told the Senate it has introduced new reforms to tackle alleged misconduct in its insurance branch.This comes following a stoush over CBA chief executive Ian Nerves no-show at the hearing who is believed to have told the committee that he and other bank executives were unable to attend due to insufficient notice.CBA also gave its side of events regarding the vexed sacking of CommInsure whistle-blower Benjamin Koh.CBAs submission lodged with a Senate committee claimed that out of the five CommInsure customers being discussed, that two had been paid before this year and another two had been paid after a review and the final claim had been consistent with the policy.The misconduct allegations which revolve around alleged tampering with medical reports and denial of claims based on old medical definitions were brought to light last month by former chief medical officer Benjamin Koh.Koh has accused the CBA of continuing to deny justice to victims of its financial planning scandal.CBA says Dr Koh was discharged for serious and repeated breaches of customers privacy, involving highly sensitive material, including medical and financial information over a lengthy period of time.It says the doctors statements and conduct during the investigation of his breaches were also deceptive.Dr Koh is expected to give evidence to the Senate committee at a hearing in Sydney tomorrow.
By Paul LucasAn Islamic extremist and a life insurance claim  this is a tragic story that you just couldnt make up.The case in question surrounds Mohamed Karroum, 72, the father of a Gold Coast jihadist  who has now launched a legal battle in an effort to secure a pay-out from her life insurance policy.According to a report by The Courier Mail in Australia, his daughter Amira was said to be a beautiful and loving girl who enjoyed spending time at the beach before she transformed into an armed soldier. She was killed while fighting for Islamic extremists back in 2014.Her father now believes that he should receive a pay-out on the policy because the daughter was said to be tricked into entering Syria at a time when it was not illegal to do so.Thus far, IntrustSuper has refused a life insurance payment due to her links to the terrorist group Al-Qaida. The decision has received backing from the Australian Government which had labelled her a terrorist.However, Karroum disagrees with the decision. He told the publication that the law about travelling to Syria was only introduced after she was killed. He is also defiant that his daughter was tricked by the extremists.Amira Karroum was married to Yusuf Ali, an American-Australian who had trained with Al-Qaida while overseas. According to her father it was Ali who persuaded her to leave Australia and it was there that they met up with the group Jabhat Al Nusra, which has links to Al-Qaida. She was later shot by ISIS militants and had her arms dismembered.Do you believe that her father has a right to a life insurance claim? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.
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
Eleven months ago, Houston had a deadly flood. This week, the city had another.

Events like these are often called 100-year floods, and that can be misleading. The U.S. government began using the term in the 1960s to describe a flood that has a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year, not a chance of happening only once a century. Its statistical probability  and that can change over time.

Over the span of 30 years, which is the length of many peoples mortgages, there is a once in four chance it is going to happen, said Mari Tye, a project scientist in the mesoscale and microscale meteorological laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Over 100 years, there is a 67 percent chance.

And that doesnt take into account other conditions that can alter the outlook, including changing climate or the effects of El Nino or La Nina.

Moving Target

Thats why the 100-year event is such a moving target, especially in an urban environment, said Chuck Watson, director of research and development at Enki Research, which develops tools to measure hazards. Someone builds a couple of parking lots, and you just turned a 100-year event into a 70-year event because of the impervious surfaces.

Asphalt doesnt soak up rain water; it just sends it somewhere else, such as into the house next door. When you add in natural climate cycles, the results are further skewed, Watson said from his office in Savannah, Georgia. One of the influences of El Nino is to send more rain across the southern U.S.. In a situation like that, the chances of a catastrophic flood might rise to one in 20.

At least seven people died in Houston in this weeks rain, according to CNN. The bulk of the downpour was Monday, when a daily record 9.92 inches (25 centimeters) fell at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the National Weather Service said. Some areas received more. At least 100,000 customers lost power, the citys light rail was shut and water was over the banks of more than half of its 22 bayous and creeks, which help with flood control.

Even Worse

If you get that much rain, there is no place for the water to go, said Jill Hasling, who founded the Weather Research Center in the Texas city.

The current flood is worse in some ways than the one last May, Hasling said in an interview at the American Meteorological Societys Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Parts of the city that were dry a year ago are inundated now.

That flood damaged more than 2,500 homes and killed more than 30 people in Texas and Oklahoma, according to reports at the time. A little more than 35 percent of the state had been suffering some level of drought, but by the first week of June the share had dropped to less than 1 percent, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported.

This reveals another problem with trying to quantify extreme events  things can always get worse, which makes it difficult to come up with a worst-case scenario.

With all our records, we dont know what the most extreme is, because they are rare, Tye said. You make an estimate of the probability and then another storm comes along that is worse.

As for Houston, Hasling has some advice: Theres more than one flood a year in Houston. If you live in Houston, buy flood insurance. If you are not in the flood zone, buy it anyway; it will just be cheaper.

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Flood
Kingstone Companies Inc., a multi-line regional property/casualty insurance holding company based in New York, announced that David Delaney has joined the senior management team at its subsidiary Kingstone Insurance Company as senior vice president of Business Development.

Delaney brings over 16 years of experience in the insurance industry. He spent the last seven years at the AIG leading a global team where he built the Consumer Lines catastrophe risk management practice to support over 40 countries. Delaney also led the development of automated underwriting decision systems for the personal lines admitted and non-admitted divisions to manage growth of the portfolios.

Prior to AIG, Delaney spent time in the reinsurance broker community leading analytics teams as well as working for Risk Management Solutions (RMS) and General Electric.

Kingstone is a P/C holding company whose principal operating subsidiary Kingstone Insurance Company is domiciled in New York. Kingstone writes business exclusively through independent retail and wholesale agents and brokers.

Kingstone offers P/C products for individuals and small businesses primarily in New York and is also licensed to write policies in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Topics New York Property Casualty
The National Council on Compensation Insurance says it is seeing generally stable trends in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont  five New England states where NCCI serves as a licensed rating and statistical organization.

Overall, the NCCI states in New England are stable, with the loss cost filing adjustments ranging from -5.9 percent to +2.6 percent approved in this latest cycle, said Laura Backus Hall, an NCCI state relations executive for these five states.

In Connecticut, the most recent loss cost filing approved was for a decrease of 3.9 percent. It was a third decrease approved in a row after four increases.

Commenting on key observations behind the latest filing figure, Hall said the claims frequency continues its downward trend. The loss experience also improved in the latest policy year. Hall noted that for Connecticut overall, loss costs have decreased 40 percent since the 1993 reform (Public Act 93-228), which made several benefit modifications to the workers compensation system.

In Maine, the latest loss cost filing for a small increase of 0.1 percent recently became effective on April 1. Observations in Maine showed improved experience. Also, despite a downward trend at the countrywide level, the claims frequency increased in the latest two policy years. However, overall loss costs are stable, Hall said.

In New Hampshire, the latest loss cost, effective Jan. 1, was for a 5.9 percent decrease. It was a third decrease in a row that NCCI filed in New Hampshire. For key observations, experience improved in the latest evaluated period. The indemnity loss ratio is also continuing to show decreasing trends.

However, Hall added, medical costs in New Hampshire still remain an important cost driver, making up 73 percent of the total benefit costs in the state.

In Rhode Island, NCCI has a loss cost filing pending in the state, proposed to be effective Aug. 1, for a decrease of 4.9 percent. That is a first filed decrease since 2009.

Consistent with other states, Rhode Islands loss experience showed significant improvement from prior periods. The claims frequency has also declined in the last three policy years.

In Vermont, a loss cost filing for a small adjustment increase of 2.6 percent became effective on April 1. A key observation in Vermont is that a little bit of deterioration on experience was behind that increase, Hall said.

Hall noted that in the latest policy year for Vermont, the frequency of loss times claims increased, partially offsetting a decrease in indemnity and medical claims severity in the state.

Topics Trends Claims Profit Loss Maine Connecticut New Hampshire Vermont
Beecher Carlson Insurance Services, a specialized large account risk management broker and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Brown & Brown Inc., has hired Megan Miller as managing director.



She will be responsible for developing and managing large risk management accounts, with a focus on the Financial Services and Manufacturing industries.



Miller will work out of the New York City office and report to Beecher Carlsons executive managing director, John Kerns.

Prior to joining Beecher Carlson, Miller spent more than 13 years in the industry across three firms. She began her career as a property risk engineer at FM global and continued in a similar role after transferring to XL Insurance.

At XL she transitioned into underwriting focusing mainly on Engineering and Construction projects. Miller then moved to Swiss Re, where she most recently oversaw key broker relationships both in the North American region and globally for the Corporate Solutions Division.

Topics Talent Human Resources
Marsh IAS has appointed Jill Husbands as chairman of Marsh IAS Bermuda and Lawrence Bird as head of office in Bermuda.

Husbands succeeds David Ezekiel who retired on Dec. 31, 2015.

Husbands will focus on strategic growth initiatives and key client relationships, and will continue as the country corporate officer of all Marsh & McLennan Companies in Bermuda, according to a statement issued by Marsh IAS Management Services (Bermuda) Ltd.

In his new role, Lawrence Bird will lead the delivery of Marshs client value proposition, and focus on driving growth in our current and future platform in Bermuda, the company said.

Biographies

Husbands joined the company in 1984 as an insurance officer with responsibility for a diverse portfolio of captive insurance companies. In 1986, she became a department head, in charge of the insurance and claims activities of all Bermuda captives under the companys management. In 1990, her responsibilities were increased to include new company incorporation activities and new business development for the company in Bermuda. In 2007 she was named head of office.

Prior to joining the company in 1984, she had many years experience in both the Bermuda and London markets as an underwriter and broker.

In his previous role as the client leader in the Bermuda office, Bird was responsible for the services provided to clients by the client service teams. Bird started in the insurance industry in 1983 and joined the Marsh group in the UK in 1992. In 1996 he moved to Guernsey with Marsh where he managed captives until his move to Bermuda in 2003. He spent four years in the Business Development unit before becoming a team leader in 2007, when he managed approximately 90 captives. He took on the offices overall client leader role in 2014.

Jill and Lawrence both are long-standing leaders at Marsh IAS and influencers in our industry, said Chris Lay, president of Marsh Captive Solutions. We are delighted to announce these appointments, which are reflective of Jill and Lawrences accomplishments. These appointments will further reinforce our position as leaders in Bermuda, the worlds largest domicile for captives, and position us well for future growth and development.

Source: Marsh IAS

Topics Leadership
PERILS, the Zurich-based independent organization providing industry-wide catastrophe insurance data, announced it has joined the Singapore-based Natural Catastrophe Data and Analytics Exchange (NatCatDAX) Alliance, which has been set up to help increase data availability for natural catastrophe insurance in Asia.

The NatCatDAX Alliance is led by the Institute of Catastrophe Risk Management (ICRM) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) in partnership with Aon Benfield, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group, RenaissanceRe, Risk Management Solutions and PERILS AG, with support from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

The NatCatDAX initiative seeks to provide the public and the private sectors with access to robust, objective and independent data in order to help develop sustainable solutions designed to manage the growing risk of natural catastrophes in Asia, said PERILS in a statement.

Insurance and economic exposure and loss databases will be set up to provide data for both insured and uninsured assets and losses, said PERILS. By providing both insurance and economic data, it is hoped that the current protection gap for natural catastrophe risk in many parts of Asia can be addressed, and that a more accurate risk quantification can be established.

The aim is to help to increase the insurability of catastrophe risks and facilitate new risk transfer solutions to cushion the financial burden of natural catastrophe events for emerging nations in the region, added PERILS.

NatCatDAX will initially focus on Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand, but will expand to cover other countries in Asia.

The insurance database will be based on the established PERILS methodology and will be created by collecting exposure and loss data from insurance companies writing business in the covered territories. PERILS said the economic database for the capital cities of these four regions will be based on national census data and detailed building-related information, including building size, occupancy, and construction class as derived from remote sensing technologies.

In the past seven years, PERILS insurance industry data have facilitated more than $12 billion of risk capacity in the form of ILS and private reinsurance transactions, said Luzi Hitz, CEO of PERILS.

PERILS is therefore living proof that more data enhances our understanding of natural catastrophes which in turn leads to better risk assessment and new risk transfer solutions. We hope that our involvement in NatCatDAX will trigger a similar development in Asia, and we will rely upon the support of the insurance industry to help NatCatDAX achieve its mission, Hitz added.

Eduard Held, head of Products at PERILS, said the implementation of NatCatDAX fits with PERILS mission to increase data availability for all insurance industry stakeholders.

The industry exposure data and loss information will provide significant value to subscribers, improving the modeling, risk management and underwriting of natural catastrophe risk, Held continued. Greater transparency on industry losses will also further facilitate the establishment of accurate and robust loss triggers for industry loss warranty contracts (ILWs), catastrophe bond structures (ILS), and other capital markets products.

ICRM Executive Director, Professor Tso-Chien Pan said: ICRM, which is leading NTUs efforts in this collaboration, is pleased and excited to be working in tandem with PERILS and others on the NatCatDAX mission to provide critical catastrophe data for the public sector and the insurance industry in Asia. This data will enable not only better catastrophe risk management for the public and insurance sectors, but also will support novel ICRM research activity.

Source: PERILS

Related:

Topics Catastrophe Market Risk Management
Willis Towers Watson has appointed Vincent Lien as managing director of Hong Kong for Willis Capital Markets & Advisory (WCMA), the firms investment banking business.

Reporting to WCMA co-CEOs, Michael Guo and Rafal Walkiewicz, Lien will be based in Hong Kong and focus on expanding WCMAs relationship with multinational insurers, Asian institutional investors and financial institutions in the region.

He joins WCMA from Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, where he was a senior member of the Banking, Financial Institutions Group. Prior to this, Lien spent six years at Merrill Lynchs investment banking division in the U.S. and Hong Kong. He holds a Masters of Arts in Economics from New York University and a BA in Economics and Mathematics from Whitman College, Washington.

Lien brings a wealth of experience in the execution and origination of insurance transactions, including Anbang Groups acquisition of Vivat Insurance in the Netherlands, Principal Financial Groups acquisition of AXAs retirement business in Hong Kong, Cathay Lifes minority stake acquisition of Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation in the Philippines, and AIAs acquisition of Aviva NDB Insurance in Sri Lanka, said Willis Towers Watson in a statement.

WCMA advises clients in the insurance and reinsurance industry on mergers and acquisitions, capital markets transactions and insurance linked securities. Most recently WCMA has advised on two successfully closed China-U.S. cross border insurance transactions; the sale of Meadowbrook Insurance Group Inc. to Fosun International Ltd. and the sale of Sirius international Insurance Group Ltd. to China Minsheng Investment Corp. Ltd.

Liens investment banking experience with global and regional financial institutions in the U.S. and Asia will significantly strengthen our teams expertise and capabilities, said Michael Guo, co-CEO of WCMA. The deep market knowledge of our team in Asia was instrumental to the success of the recently closed transactions.

Source: Willis Towers Watson

Topics USA Talent Human Resources
The Motorists Insurance Group, based in Columbus, Ohio, announced it recorded a strong performance in 2015, which included underwriting profits across all lines, $729 million in direct written premium, and a combined ratio of 98.8 percent. The group released its year-end results on April 25.

The groups A (Excellent) rating has been affirmed by A.M. Best. The company said Best praised its strong agency partnerships, customer-responsive claims service and rapidly developing technology platform.

We are in a position of financial strength that ensures we can deliver on our promises to policyholders, said Motorists President and CEO David L. Kaufman.

At year-end 2015, Motorists Mutual, the largest affiliate of the group by premium volume, reported $441 million in direct written premium and a combined ratio of 99.2 percent.

Motorists Mutual reported that three board directors have been re-elected, each for a three-year term:

Yvette McGee Brown, partner, Jones Day

Sandra W. Harbrecht, president and CEO, Paul Werth Associates

Dennis B. Sullivan, chairman and CEO, The Nolan Company

Michael L. Wiseman, retired treasurer, The Motorists Insurance Group

The company also has honored Morgan Johnson, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, with its the 2016 Cameron E. Williams Memorial Scholarship. She is a finance and economics major with an emphasis in actuarial science and risk management with a 3.8 GPA.

After excelling in math in high school, a teacher approached her about a career as an actuary. She did research on the profession and found it was a path she wanted to pursue.

Johnson is a member of the Gamma Iota Sigma Fraternity and will take on a leadership position as vice president in the fall. She has been on the Deans List for two out of three semesters and was selected to join Alpha Lambda Delta during her freshman year. She currently serves as vice president of the organization.

Established in 2005 with funds contributed by the family of Mr. Williams and The Motorists Insurance Group, the Cameron E. Williams Memorial Scholarship assists a college student each year who is actively seeking a career in risk management, insurance or an insurance-related field.

Source: Motorists Insurance Group,

Topics Profit Loss
If youre a conservative Republican, theres a decent chance that you believe in climate change.

Compared with two years ago that is.

Dont tell this to Rush Limbaugh or presidential hopeful Donald Trump. Although he seems to have warmed a tad to the idea of a changing climate lately, Trump has been known for poking fun at believers in myriad tweets, including one in 2012 stating: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

A poll out this week from the Yale Program and Climate Change Communication states that conservative Republicans have experienced the largest shift in climate change believership of any political group with an increase of 19 percentage points over the past two years.

Forty-seven percent of conservative Republicans think global warming is happening, up from 28 percent two years ago, the poll shows.

More American voters understand that global warming is real, including conservative Republicans. The COP21 agreement (the carbon reduction agreement last year in Paris), the unusually warm winter, and media coverage have likely contributed to growing public awareness, lead-researcher on the poll Anthony Leiserowitz, a Yale University professor, said in a statement. Our studies also find that Pope Francis, with his call for climate action, has had an impact on the American climate change conversation.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, nearly all liberal Democrats (95 percent) think global warming is happening, the poll shows.

Could this mean that feelings on climate change will impact the upcoming election?

The poll shows that voters are more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who strongly supports taking action to reduce global warming, with registered voters three times more likely to vote for (43 percent) than against (14 percent) such a candidate.

MmmmBacon

And my vote for best climate change-related headline in recent memory is: How bacon sandwiches could help fight climate change.

An editorial report on the U.K. news website Independent addresses a Danish proposal for a red meat tax.

The Danish Council of Ethics wants food to be taxed in proportion to its impact on climate change.

So that would put a greater premium on cattle, for example, which are responsible for an estimated 10 percent of all global greenhouse emissions, with other meats to follow, the report states.

If nothing else the proposal is a reminder that climate change remains the greatest long-term threat to human prosperity and security  and we need policies that take it seriously, the report states.

Want a fun read on the impact of livestock on climate change? Check out the report embedded below.

Anti-Dirty Dozen

Twelve major corporations based or operating in the U.S. are voicing strong support for the Paris agreement.

The companies endorsing a statement organized by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which encourages governments to hurry up and formally join the agreement, are: Berkshire Hathaway Energy; Calpine; HP; Intel; LafargeHolcim; Microsoft.; National Grid; PG&E; Rio Tinto; Schneider Electric; Shell; Siemens.

The statement, issued last week, reads in part:

The Paris Agreement on climate change is a landmark achievement  it establishes an inclusive, pragmatic and, hopefully, durable framework for progressively strengthening efforts globally to address the causes and consequences of climate change. We recognize the rising environmental, social, economic, and security risks posed by climate change. As businesses concerned about the well-being of our investors, our customers, our communities and our planet, we are committed to working on our own and in partnership with governments to mobilize the technology, investment and innovation needed to transition to a sustainable low-carbon economy.

The statement says the Paris agreement will help facilitate and strengthen the role of the private sector in the transition by: providing long-term direction; promoting transparency; addressing competitiveness; facilitating carbon.

Hurricanes

Not that anyone heres saying climate change is causing more, or fewer, hurricanes, but recent statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau highlight just how many people and properties are exposed along Americas coastlines.

The North Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1 and lasts through Nov. 30. The Census breakdown features factoids first by number and then an explanation of that number  similar to what youll see in the pages of Insurance Journal in the Declarations and Figures section.

185: The number of coastline counties along the Atlantic (129 counties) and Gulf of Mexico (56 counties) most threatened by Atlantic hurricanes.

59.2 million: The population as of July 1, 2015, of coastline counties stretching from Maine to Texas. In 2006 the population of these counties was 54.6 million, an increase of nearly 5 million in less than 10 years.

3,700: The number of miles of coastline from Maine to Texas.

3.3 million: The number of business establishments in 2013 in the coastal states stretching from Maine to Texas.

51.5: The percentage of U.S. homes that have an emergency evacuation kit. Roughly seven-in-10 households in the Miami and Tampa, Fla. metro areas had emergency supplies readily available in the event of an evacuation, while the Austin, Texas metro area had among the lowest rate of homes with an emergency preparedness kit.

18.3: The percentage of single-family homes that have a generator.

11: The number of years since the U.S. was struck by a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher). The last one was Hurricane Wilma in October 2005 over southwest Florida.

Ok deniers, have fun with that last fact in the comment section.

Past columns:

Livestock and Climate Change

Topics USA Texas Hurricane Agribusiness Climate Change Maine Politics
Nearly 240 Texas and Louisiana residents have sued the Sabine River Authority over March flooding that inundated hundreds of homes and closed Interstate 10.

Communities in Southeast Texas and Louisiana were flooded by up to 20 inches of rain last month that forced evacuations along and near the Sabine River, which serves as a long border between the two states.

The lawsuit alleges water released from the Toledo Bend Reservoir by the river authority to relieve pressure on the reservoirs banks and gates contributed to the flooding of homes and businesses, the Beaumont Enterprise reported. The reservoir extends through Texas and Louisiana on the Sabine River.

At the peak of releases, water was flowing through the dam at a rate exceeding 200,000 cubic feet per second  or twice the average rate of Niagara Falls.

By opening the spillway gates in this manner, the defendants knew, or were substantially certain, that harm would result to the many thousands of homeowners, business owners, churches, and others who owned property downstream, the lawsuit said.

Ann Galassi, the river authoritys assistant general manager in Texas, declined to comment on the lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Orange County, Texas. The river authority, an official Texas agency, controls, stores, preserves and distributes the waters of the Sabine River and its tributary system.

The agency has previously said the Toledo Bend isnt designed for flood control and they were following engineering rules to protect the reservoir from being damaged.

The Toledo Bend Reservoir hit a record high water level on March 10 following heavy rains, prompting managers to open all the floodgates.

The lawsuit does not specify how much the individual plaintiffs  105 of whom are from Texas  are seeking in compensation.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Texas Louisiana Flood
More people could be exposed to foodborne illnesses in Louisiana if lawmakers approve a provision in the governors 2017 budget proposal which would lead to fewer inspections of the retail food industry, officials said.

The Department of Health and Hospitals is planning for a possible reduction of up to 16 sanitarian staff members under Gov. John Bel Edwards plan, said DHH Deputy Secretary Michelle Alletto.

Currently, 145 field sanitarian workers inspect restaurants, grocery stores and all other retail outlets that sell food. A loss of 16 inspectors would mark an 11 percent reduction in staff.

The impact would be that more than 20,700 fewer retail food inspections will be conducted next year, Alletto said. Thats 26 percent fewer inspections, according to DHH.

A decrease in routine inspections like this is likely to result in an increase in unsafe food handling practices, which is likely to increase the number of citizens and visitors who are exposed to food borne illnesses, she said.

Our inspectors (sanitarians) also conduct building and premises inspections, and sewerage and wastewater inspections, DHH spokesman Bob Johannessen said. These are mandated activities that take up time in a sanitarians day, Johannessen said. The result is a great burden of the reductions falls on restaurant inspections, he said.

Lawmakers are considering ways to close a $600 million shortfall in the state budget year that begins July 1. The governor has proposed steep reductions to the health department and other spending areas, while also saying he plans a special summertime legislative session for lawmakers to consider tax changes that could stave off many of those cuts.

For now though, food inspections are proposed for cuts, along with other health services.

Thousands of restaurants and food retailers across Louisiana are inspected once or twice a year, and that number is sure to fall.

John Fury, who runs what he calls a mom and pop restaurant in Metairie, calls the inspections a good thing.

Inspections are good for our business with food safety so important, Fury said. I dont want to make any of my customers sick.

Fury, his father, mother and brother opened Furys Restaurant, which is nearly 33 years old.

Not only do they (inspectors) look for problems, but they have new ideas for storage and handling of food, Fury said.

Those words were echoed by Randy LeBlanc, chief operations officer for LeBlancs Food Stores.

We welcome the oversight, LeBlanc said. The inspections help keep our customers safe.

LeBlancs family operates nine food stores.

Any business that handles food needs to be accountable. LeBlanc said.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Legislation Louisiana Medical Professional Liability
Federal safety regulators have levied $80,280 in penalties against Quick Roofing LLC for repeatedly exposing workers to falls, ladder hazards and eye injuries.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) said the employer has been cited six times in three years for the same or similar violation.

The current citations were issued on April 14, 2016.

OSHAs investigation at a site in Conroe, Texas, found one serious and four repeat violations dealing with fall, ladder, and eye hazards. The Texas roofing company has an extensive history with OSHA for repeatedly exposing workers to fall and ladder hazards.

The agency previously cited Quick Roofing for the same or similar violations in Dallas in December 2015, San Antonio in October 2015, Austin in September 2015, and Fort Worth in July 2014 and February 2013.

Quick Roofing has 120 workers at its headquarters in Kennedale and has facilities in Austin, San Antonio and Katy. The company has 15 business days from receipt of its citations to comply, request an informal conference with OSHAs area director, or contest the citations and penalties before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.

Source: OSHA

Topics Texas Workers' Compensation Commercial Lines Business Insurance
The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that it does not have jurisdiction in a case brought by an injured nurse that challenged the constitutionality of the entire Florida Workers Compensation system.

In the case of Stahl v. Hialeah Hospital, the Court said After further consideration and hearing oral argument in this case, we have determined that we should exercise our discretion and discharge jurisdiction. Accordingly, we dismiss review.

On April 6, 2016, Mark Zientz, the attorney for injured worker Daniel Stahl, argued before the court that since the law was first enacted, the legislature has so eroded the available benefits that the law no longer passes constitutional muster. Things have gotten so bad, according to Zientz, that the present law no longer represents the fair exchange intended by the original grand bargain in which workers gave up their right to sue in civil court in exchange for guaranteed benefits.

But judging by the questions asked during oral argument by Justices Barbara Pariente, Peggy Quince and James Perry  and to a lesser extent by Justice Fred Lewis  the Supreme Court seemed to be struggling with whether the court should be hearing the case at all. The Court seemed receptive to the arguments made by their former colleague and current attorney for the defendants, Kenneth Bell, who served on the Court from 2003 through 2008.

As the attorney for the employer (Hialeah Hospital) and their insurance company (Sedgewick Claims Management Services), Bell raised a procedural defense highlighting the legal path the Stahl case took to get before the Court. Bell argued that the only route to challenge the entire statute (a facial challenge, as opposed to an as applied challenge) was to seek a declaratory judgment in circuit court.

In support of his argument, Bell noted that the Stahl case was on appeal from a lower administrative judge, and the record for review was only about 20 pages. Bell argued that Stahls challenge could only have been made in circuit court. He also maintained that it would be improper for the Court to rule on the constitutionality of such a significant legislative scheme on the basis of such a minimal record.

In addition, Bell argued that the 2003 amendments to Floridas Workers Compensations scheme were enacted in response to an insurance crisis in the State of Florida at a time when premiums were the highest in the country. He said there was no evidence that the legislature had acted arbitrarily, capriciously or without a reasonable basis.

On behalf of the injured worker, Zientz argued that the exclusivity clause (a provision that prevents injured workers from bringing civil suits against their employers except in very limited situations) is no longer constitutionally permissible because of cumulative reduction in medical and indemnity benefits.

Zientz argued that the system has been so diluted over time that workers were no longer getting a fair deal. Specifically, he said that the injured worker no longer has a right to full medical benefits and he pointed to the requirement that after an injured worker reached maximum medical improvement, he was required to make a $10.00 co-pay in order to see a doctor. He also noted that the system allows for apportionment (or carving out a portion of medical benefits related to preexisting conditions), although he conceded that his case did not involve a preexisting condition. The entire categories of wage loss benefits, he said, had been eliminated over the years.

Zientz comprehensive argument was dismissed by Bell as being a kitchen sink argument.

Nevertheless, several of the justices seemed to be sympathetic to the argument. Justice Pariente stated in her questioning that the inadequacies of the system had been pointed out before  specifically mentioning the changes regarding attorneys fees and doctors being chosen by the insurance company  and went on to conclude it looks like it has become a very meager amount of compensation for an injured worker . . . and its hard to deny that whats happened over the last 50 years has not been a diminution in workers compensation benefits.

The Stahl case is not the only workers compensation case currently pending before the Florida Supreme Court at this time. There are two other cases  Castellanos v. Next Door Co., et. al, and Westphal v. City of St. Petersburg  that involve constitutional challenges to the workers compensation law, although Stahl is the only one of the three which presents a challenge to the entire statute. The Florida Supreme Court heard Westphal in June of 2014 and Castellanos in November of that same year, yet no decision has been rendered on either case.

The workers compensation law was originally enacted in 1935 as part of the grand bargain in which injured workers gave up the right to civil lawsuits in exchange for a no fault system where they receive medical care and wage loss benefits with a goal of returning them to work.

In recent years, the Republican-dominated Legislature has focused on keeping insurance premiums down for businesses, while balancing cost-cutting measures with increased efficiencies and anti-fraud measures. Bell argued that the policy concerns raised by the Stahl case were more appropriately resolved by the Legislature, and not the Court. Four justices asked no questions whatsoever, which could indicate they agree with Bell on this point.

In his rebuttal, Zientz concluded This is an important issue. This is something that involves tens of thousands of people who are hurt every day, not hurt on the job, but hurt by the system. And this is the court that has to make that decision as to whether or not they continue to get hurt or on whether or not we can stop that.

Related:

Topics Florida Workers' Compensation
The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that the states mandatory attorneys fee schedule for workers compensation cases is unconstitutional under both Floridas and the U.S. constitution as a violation of due process.

The states top court also declined to rule in another case challenging the very constitutionality of the states reformed workers compensation system.

The attorneys fee schedule ruling came in the case of Marvin Castellanos, an injured employee who sued his employer Next Door Co. and its insurer, Amerisure. The high court noted that the issue has been raised in as many as 18 lower court cases.

The Castellanos court ruling said that the schedule, passed in 2009, is invalid because it eliminates the right of a claimant to get a reasonable attorneys fee, a right it says is a critical feature of the workers compensation law. The court said the statute violates due process by installing an irrebuttable presumption that whatever fee the schedule comes up with is reasonable and by not providing any way for a claimant to refute the fee.

In the Castellanos case, the attorney fee calculated under the mandatory sliding scale turned out to be $1.53 per hour for 107.2 hours. The claimants attorney had sought a fee of $350 an hour.

The ruling upends a lower court ruling and a finding by a Judge of Compensation Claims (JCC) that both upheld the schedule and the fee in the case.

The high court said that while the Legislature has said it intends the workers compensation system to deliver benefits to injured workers efficiently and quickly, in reality the system has become increasingly complex to the detriment of the claimant, who depends on the assistance of a competent attorney to navigate the thicket.

The court said that it is undeniable that without the right to an attorney with a reasonable fee, the workers compensation law can no longer assure the quick and efficient delivery of disability and medical benefits to an injured worker.

The court said it found the irrebuttable presumption, or inability of any claimant to challenge the fee, and not the particular fee, to be unconstitutional.

Stahl Case

The Castellanos ruling came down the same day that the Florida Supreme Court changed its mind and decided it does not have jurisdiction in another closely-watched workers compensation case brought by an injured nurse. The court had earlier said it would rule in the Stahl case that challenged the constitutionality of the entire Florida workers compensation system. The plaintiff questioned whether the workers compensation system has provided an adequate alternative for injured workers since its major overhaul in 2003. More specifically, the case asked if the elimination of a type of partial disability benefits by lawmakers was legal.

In the case of Stahl v. Hialeah Hospital, the court today said simply, After further consideration and hearing oral argument in this case, we have determined that we should exercise our discretion and discharge jurisdiction. Accordingly, we dismiss review.

The high courts decision to pass on Stahl means the First District Court of Appeals opinion in this matter, which upheld other elements of the workers compensation law, stands, according to state officials.

Complete Frustration

In the Castellanos decision, the court said the right of an injured worker to recover a reasonable prevailing party attorneys fee has been a key feature of the states workers compensation law since 1941. Through the 2009 enactment of a mandatory fee schedule, however, the Legislature has created an irrebuttable presumption that every fee calculated in accordance with the fee schedule will be reasonable to compensate the attorney for his or her services, the court said. The $1.53 hourly rate in this case clearly demonstrates that not to be true.

The court said that it did not view the absolute limitation from the point of view of the attorneys rights because the attorney always has the option to refuse representation. Rather, it viewed the conclusive irrebuttable presumption in the context of the complete frustration of the entire workers compensation scheme designed to provide workers with full medical care and wage-loss payments for total or partial disability regardless of fault and without the delay and uncertainty of tort litigation.'

The high court remanded the case to the JCC for entry of a reasonable attorneys fee.

According to the Office of Insurance Regulation, until the legislature addresses this decision, attorney fees will be evaluated under the reasonable award standard articulated in the Murray v. Mariner Health decision.

Topics Florida Legislation Workers' Compensation
Experts are cautioning both insurance buyers and sellers not to overreact to the recent federal court decision finding data breach defense coverage under a commercial general liability (CGL) policy.

Experts are cautioning both insurance buyers and sellers not to overreact to the recent federal court decision finding data breach defense coverage under a commercial general liability (CGL) policy.

Buyers would be mistaken to think the ruling means that they do not need a cyber policy if they have a CGL policy and insurers might want to think twice before narrowing their general liability language to guard against cyber claims when the marketplace is clamoring for broader coverage.

The April 12 decision in Travelers Indemnity vs. Portal Healthcare Solutions by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit presented a particular set of facts that may not apply to other carriers CGL policies or to other insureds situations.

Travelers had argued that its 2012 and 2013 CGL policies did not require it to defend its insured, Portal Healthcare Solutions, which was being sued over a data breach by patients of a New York hospital that had hired it to secure its data.

Defining Publication

The 2012 and 2013 policies  under Coverage Part B Personal and Advertising Injury  obligated Travelers to pay if Portal became legally obligated to pay damages because of an advertising or website injury arising from the electronic publication of material that gives unreasonable publicity to a persons private life or  discloses information about a persons private life.

The insurer had argued that there was no personal injury or publication as defined by the policies because release of the records was not intentional and they were not viewed by a third party. But the court said an unintentional publication is still publication. The court also said the definition of publication does not hinge on third party access.

In a recent interview with Insurance Journal, Stephanie Snyder, senior vice president for Aon Risk Solutions, said that the Travelers ruling turned on defining publication in a digital age and was not all that surprising.

The private healthcare information was viewed as being published. When information is published it really does fall under a CGL advertising injury personal injury type of coverage and it really comes down to the definition of what is published information, said Snyder.

Whereas some CGL policies might have an explicit exclusion for this type of injury, this Travelers policy did not, she noted.

Snyder said the other noteworthy aspect of the decision is that it only said defense costs would be covered. So youre not talking about any of the expense costs, she said, citing public relations, notification, credit monitoring and computer forensics costs that might be picked up by a cyber policy. None of those are taken into account by this particular ruling.

She said she was not necessarily surprised by the ruling. Weve seen other litigation going back where everyones trying to force coverage into a CGL in the case where they dont buy a cyber policy, she said. But where we are starting to see cyber policies become more the norm, I think these types of cases will fall by the wayside.

Taking Notice

Christopher Keegan, cyber and technology risk practice leader with broker Beecher Carlson, agrees that whether there is coverage comes down to the particular set of facts. However, when youve got a word like publishing in the policy, if you can find some element of publishing there, then the courts are going to pick it up and interpret it in a way thats going to help the insured. Thats a good thing, I think, he said.

He said a case like this makes people take notice of an issue and forces underwriters to consider if they are covering things in a CGL, for instance, that they did not intend to cover. It highlights it for us and brings it to our attention in a way thats like, OK, we know this exists. What are we going to do about it?' he told Insurance Journal.

He said cases like this are likely to arise where insureds have not bought a cyber policy and seek to leverage whatever policies they do have to find coverage. Theyre trying to take advantage of less-clear wording in those policies. Once you get lawyers involved in the process, thats what happens, he said.

In these cases, he said, the businesses are really inviting litigation because they are going to get some pushback from underwriters who had no intention of covering what they claim.

Keegan suggests that this is when the broker has to advise his clients: Do you really want that situation? Or in the midst of a breach wouldnt you rather have an insurer thats going to be saying, Hey, were standing behind you. Were going to provide some of the services that are provided under the cyber policy, and have the underwriters be on your side rather than litigating those issues?

Keegan suggested that even this case is not yet finished because it will take some time for this to work its way through the legal system and states before everyone can understand exactly what its application is.

Beyond Data Breach

Linda Kornfeld, an insurance recovery lawyer at Kasowitz Benson Torres & Freidman in Los Angeles, put a different spin on the case, claiming it goes beyond its data breach context.

This a positive decision for policyholders in not just the data breach context, but also with respect to other claims involving privacy issues, such as blast fax and zip code cases, she said in a statement. Kornfeld said the decision is in line with other cases where courts have broadly interpreted the publication language, finding that the undefined term is ambiguous and should be interpreted in the policyholders favor.

She said that while there was no evidence that anyone actually accessed personal information in this case, the potential to do so existed had someone run the right Google search. According to the court, that possibility, even if it never became a reality, was enough to trigger the defense duty, Kornfeld said.

Marketplace Pressure

While buyers need to understand what is covered and what isnt, insurers do as well. Keegan believes the case offers a lesson for insurers to make sure that they understand what the exposures are and how to explain them for their own benefit.

That process is evolving. ISO has developed exclusions carriers can use to say, We want to take this risk or, We dont want to take this risk.

But theres a long way to go, he said, adding that many insurers are only now looking at cyber exposures and aggregations. Its not that easy, he said. Youve got to anticipate all of the things that are going to happen.

While underwriters may want to be more precise in explaining what is covered and not covered under certain policies, perhaps even insert a full exclusion in a general liability policy, carriers have other factors to weigh, including the competitive marketplace with attentive brokers and customers.

Keegan said carriers and brokers are competing with one another for clients and at some point a carrier that is pulling back on a wholesale basis is going to lose business to its competitors.

For example, putting in a full exclusion could leave a hole that even a cyber policy wont fill. You can imagine what insureds are going to think about when someone says, Were removing coverage for you and were not giving you an option to actually fill the gap,' he said.

He said brokers and others in the marketplace want to push for broader coverage and where theres some interpretation involved in policies. Keeping coverage open to certain risks is advantageous to sellers and their buyer clients.

Calling All Policies

Its not only general liability policies that are being challenged by cyber.

Any number of different policies cover cyber risk in some way, shape, or form. As a result of that, were finding situations where two or three policies may respond to a particular situation, said Keegan.

For Joshua Gold, an insurance recovery attorney with Anderson Kill in New York who specializes in cyber, Keegans point is the main takeaway from the Travelers ruling: Policyholders need to look to all of their policies for coverage, not just to general liability or even just to cyber.

The case is an important reminder that non-cyber-specific insurance policies may provide vital insurance protection for cyber-related claims, he said.

He also said the ruling offers hope that defense costs for cyber claims will be found in general liability policies and contends that could be significant.

Theres always an issue with these type of claims that you are going to attract a class action lawsuit so just getting the defense component of that can be hugely valuable, he said. This can be a big deal.

Gold agrees that the Travelers ruling is noteworthy for what it says constitutes publication of data in a breach of privacy. The court found that publication occurs upon disclosure of the medical data, does not need to be intended, and does not require proof that any actual third-party saw the data.

Its a good development for policyholders but I would not put all of my eggs in that basket, he said, stressing that most businesses need multiple policies and need to understand all of their exclusions.

Buyers should know before a claim where their coverage for cyber is, he said and this requires looking at all policies.

Gold said his firm has secured coverage for businesses for claims under various traditional policies including property, crime, general liability, business owners, errors and omissions, and directors and officers.

As for how insurers may react to the Travelers ruling, Gold agrees with Keegan that the marketplace will have its say although reactions will vary.

My guess is that underwriters will all do their own thing on this, Gold said. While some will be completely spooked by the Travelers decision and narrow their offering, other underwriters will realize its a competitive marketplace and they might be able to offer a broker and client something better. So like everything its always hard to generalize but I am quite sure there will be very different reactions, he said.

Cyber Gaps

While most businesses should buy a cyber policy, they should not assume then that they are completely covered if they do, Gold said.

A lot of cyber policies have tons and tons of exclusions and can be confusing so I dont think you can just rely n the cyber policy either, he said.

Los Angeles policyholder attorney Kornfeld wonders how long traditional policies may be of help in cyber situations.

As a policyholder, I would not rely upon this ruling as a substitute to purchasing cyber coverage because the industry is working hard, through exclusions and other language, to push data breach and cyber risks away from the traditional coverages, such as GL policies like that at issue in this decision, and toward cyber specific coverages, she wrote.

Richard Caplan, with the national law firm LeClairRyans Atlanta office, echoed the caution that cyber policies themselves are not a panacea. He said a lot can hinge on the meaning of certain key words and phrases in a policy.

Some who buy cyber insurance assume it covers all first-party costs in the event of an incident  like investigation, notification and credit monitoring. But it only covers third party claims or lawsuits.

If your cyber coverage only kicks in when a third party makes a claim, then practically speaking you may not have any coverage at all, he warns. For now, perhaps the most important thing to do is make sure you do not fall into the category of someone who thinks they are covered when they are not.

Evolving Coverage

In recent testimony on Capitol Hill before a House homeland security subcommittee, Adam Hamm, North Dakota insurance commissioner, cautioned lawmakers and the public about cyber coverage.

Speaking on behalf of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) prior to the Travelers ruling, Hamm said many businesses probably do not realize that most standard commercial lines policies do not cover many cyber risks and thus they need a special cybersecurity policy. But they need to know that cyber policies differ and the market is far from being standardized, he said.

Commercial insurance policies are contracts between two or more parties, subject to a certain amount of customization, so if youve seen one cybersecurity policy, youve seen exactly one cybersecurity policy, Hamm said.

All these nuances mean securing a cybersecurity policy is not as simple as pulling something off the shelf and walking to the cash register. Insurers writing this coverage are justifiably interested in the risk management techniques applied by the policyholder to protect its network and its assets. The more an insurer knows about a businesss operations, structures, risks, history of cyber attacks, and security culture, the better it will be able to design a product that meets the clients need and satisfies regulators, Hamm said.

Topics Carriers Cyber Agencies Claims Underwriting
American International Group, Bermuda-based Hamilton Insurance Group and affiliates of hedge fund firm Two Sigma Investments said they have agreed to create a technology-enabled insurance platform for sales to the small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) market.

The announcement said the joint venture will combine Two Sigmas proprietary data science and technology platform, Hamiltons technology and underwriting experience in the SME market, and AIGs SME capabilities and global presence to target what they estimate is a North American SME market worth $76 billion.

The venture will offer pricing and servicing using predictive analytics and an easy-to-use customer interface, according to the founders.

Two Sigma will also develop specialized asset allocation products for the unique characteristics of insurance investment portfolios.

Completion of the joint venture is still subject to negotiating final agreements and obtaining required permits and regulatory approvals. The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.

Brian Duperreault, Hamilton chairman and CEO, will serve as chairman of the board of the joint venture. Richard Friesenhahn, currently executive vice president of U.S. Casualty Lines at AIG, will assume the position of chief executive officer.

Agents and brokers will have roles to play with the platform because they are already involved with most of this business and because SME customers want an intermediary, Duperreault told Carrier Management.

Technology Influence

Hamilton was founded on the premise that technology will redefine the manner in which insurance products are assessed, priced and distributed, particularly in the small commercial market, said Duperreault. Since establishing our partnership with Two Sigma and our start-up operations in New Jersey, our belief in this premise has been validated by the enthusiastic reception weve received from wholesale and retail partners throughout the U.S.

Hamilton and Two Sigma have been working together as the insurer has acquired other insurers and expanded its operations.

David Siegel, a Two Sigma co-founder, sees the deal providing a more convenient and systematic insurance experience for small businesses, and an opportunity to address the challenge of optimal insurance asset allocation.

With this venture, we want to revolutionize the SME market through technology that creates a more tailored and compelling value proposition for clients in this critical segment, said AIG President and CEO Peter D. Hancock.

Tech and Small Business Insurance

Interest by large insurers and technology firms in the small and medium business market is picking up steam.

A 2016 report from McKinsey & Co. said the competition in this market will intensify as more small business customers exhibit their openness to buying via direct and digital channels and as more large insurance carriers enter the field.

The report, Small Commercial Insurance: A Bright Spot in the U.S. Property-Casualty Market, said that the shifting behavior of small business owners towards online purchasing presents new challenges for carriers, particularly those that use independent agents. While a segment of small commercial insurance buyers will always value independent agents, an increasing percentage are open to the direct route and may only be using agents to close a deal because direct binding isnt readily available, according to the report.

The Hamilton/AIG/Two Sigma initiative also comes in the wake of a Novarica report last November that suggested the U.S. small commercial insurance market would likely embrace direct online sales within the next five years, though it is slow to do so right now.

Insurers are investing in digital platforms including CoverHound, 24 percent of which is now owned by ACE Ltd. (the new Chubb). CoverHound is building a small commercial insurance platform that will start by selling businessowners policies. Insureon, an online agency for small business insurance, raised more than $30 million last October. Seattle-based AssureStart, backed by the American Family Mutual Insurance Co., which sells to business with fewer than 30 employees, is backed by the American Family Mutual Insurance Co. Insurer Hiscox has been expanding its online platform for small businesses for a number of years.

Last December, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which owns GEICO, created Berkshire Hathaway Direct Insurance Co. to sell insurance directly to businesses over the Internet. The new insurer planned to initially focus on workers compensation and business owners package policies.

Insurance providers also have competitors from the technology world.

Next Insurance, an online shopper for small businesses, recently announced a $13 million seed investment led by investors Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners and Ribbit Capital. Next Insurance plans to launch its first product this spring.

Also, New York-based CoverWallet launched what it calls its online insurance manager, which it said received $2 million in seed funding from Two Sigma Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Founder Collective and other angel investors. This startup promises to provide small business owners with a concierge-like service that helps them navigate the details of commercial insurance.

Earlier this month, New York-based private equity firm Aquiline Capital Partners agreed to acquire Simply Business, an online brokerage selling small business insurance policies in the United Kingdom.

Related:

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Carriers USA Agencies InsurTech Commercial Lines Tech Business Insurance New Markets
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has fined the Tesoro oil refinery in Anacortes, Wash. nearly $720,000 for alleged safety violations.

The EPA said last week it filed a complaint seeking penalties for violations found during two facility inspections in 2011.

KUOW-FM reported the violations didnt result in any injuries but the EPA says prevention is critical at oil and gas refineries.

A Tesoro official says the company has cooperated with the agency but believes the EPAs claims are wrong on the facts and the law.

In 2010, an explosion at the refinery killed seven workers. Tesoro is appealing $2.4 million in fines related to that case.

The refinery supplies gasoline, jet fuel and diesel to markets in Washington and Oregon. About 350 people work on site.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Energy Washington Oil Gas Pollution
A pair of California trucking company owners were arrested for cheating their workers compensation insurer out of millions of dollars.

Alvin Shin Chen, 54, and Fiona Xilin Chen, 46, both of La Canada Flintridge, Calif., were arrested this week at their home by detectives from the California Department of Insurance and charged with multiple felony counts, including workers comp insurance premium fraud for allegedly cheating their carrier.

The Chens, owners of Metro Worldwide Inc. and Pacific Coast Distribution, operate a trucking company in Long Beach and are accused of attempting to reduce their workers comp premiums by providing fraudulent information to their insurer regarding the number of their employees and what work those employees performed.

CDI detectives reportedly luncovered evidence indicating the Chens paid cash to employee truck drivers to avoid reporting them to the insurer and reduce their payroll tax obligation. Audits of the Chens records show they underreported their payroll by more than $4.7 million. As a result, the Chens allegedly cheated their insurer out of more than $1.6 million in workers comp premium.

Employers that cheat the system through premium fraud and tax evasion create an illegal marketplace advantage that costs Californias economy billions, Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said in a statement.

The Chens were booked into the Century Station in Los Angeles and are held on $950,000 bail each. Arraignment is scheduled for April 29 in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The Los Angeles District Attorney is prosecuting this case.

Topics Carriers California Workers' Compensation Trucking
David McNeil, a principal in the EPIC Insurance Brokers and Consultants Inland Empire division, has been appointed to the advisory board of the California Association of Mutual Water Companies Joint Powers Risk and Insurance Management Authoriy.

The authority is a member-directed excess liability risk retention pool.

McNeil has 20 years of experience in insurance and risk management related to the water sector, including dams, water delivery systems and infrastructure, and waste water.

The authoritys programs provide coverage for excess liability, property, boiler and machinery, and auto physical

EPIC is retail property/casualty and employee benefits insurance brokerage and consulting firm.

Topics California Risk Management
Join ITR and TMF Groups tax experts at 2pm CET (1pm GMT) on November 15 as they discuss how finance leaders are increasingly faced with doing more with less, and how CFOs should adapt.
Un ottobre da sogno per Antonio Conte: lex ct della Nazionale italiana, attualmente alla guida del Chelsea, nelle ultime quattro gare di Premier League ha collezionato solo successi, conditi da 11 reti segnate e addirittura nessuna incassata. Numeri da record che non sono certo passati inosservati alla Federazione inglese, la quale ha conferito al tecnico leccese lambito premio di Manager del mese.

Unavventura oltremanica iniziata in sordina, quella di Conte, pur a fronte di tre vittorie nelle prime tre gare di campionato. A far vacillare, anche se solo per un momento, le certezze del patron del club londinese, Roman Abramovich, i risultati conseguiti tra la 4a e la 6a giornata, coincisi con un pareggio sul campo dello Swansea City e, soprattutto, con le due pesanti sconfitte subite dal Liverpool, sul terreno casalingo di Stamford Bridge, e dallArsenal. In particolare, la debacle interna coi Reds, aveva irritato non poco il numero uno russo, poiche occorsa proprio nel giorno della sua 250esima partita da presidente della societa.

Come detto, solo un momento. Dopo lincontro dellEmirates, il tecnico salentino cambia modulo, adottando un piu equilibrato 3-4-3 e inserendo elementi di corsa come lo spagnolo Pedro. Una svolta totale perche, di li in poi, il Chelsea inanellera solo e soltanto vittorie: 2 gol allHull City e al Southampton in trasferta, 3 ai campioni dInghilterra del Leicester e 4 allo United in casa, con un meraviglioso numero zero nella casella delle reti subite. Un fantastico poker, ottenuto tra l1 e il 29 ottobre. Un cambio di marcia sbalorditivo, confermato dal 5 a 0 rifilato ai toffees dellEverton nel primo match di novembre, e una scalata che, man mano, ha portato i blues al secondo posto in classifica, a soli 2 punti dal Liverpool capolista.

E allora, non poteva mancare il riconoscimento di migliore allenatore del mese, ottenuto surclassando tecnici del calibro di Jurgen Klopp (Liverpool), Arsene Wenger (Arsenal) e Mark Hughes (Southampton). Tanta, ovviamente, la soddisfazione: E un grande onore e voglio condividerlo con i giocatori e con la societa  ha dichiarato Conte sul sito ufficiale della Premier League -. E la prima volta che lavoro in un altro Paese, con una cultura diversa, e portare la propria filosofia non e facile, ma ora sono contento di questa scelta.

A completare la festa, la premiazione del fantasista belga, Eden Hazard, come miglior giocatore di ottobre. Due risultati importanti per il club, ottimo incentivo per la rincorsa al trono dei campioni, occupato dal Leicester di Ranieri. Il prossimo appuntamento per l11 di Conte sara al Riverside Stadium, tana del Middlesborough neopromosso. Il tempo di festeggiare e gia finito.
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Since it was first proposed in 2010, the Department of Labor's (DOL) fiduciary rule has been on a long and winding journey, and it may be coming to an end. While the rule was intended to close a loophole in the definition of fiduciary, it's been met with resistance from the financial planning sector. (See: DOL Fiduciary Rule Explained)

The loophole, located in the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), allowed personalized advice to be rendered by most broker-dealer and insurance representatives without fiduciary accountability, says Blaine Aikin, executive chair at Fi360 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: "Investors routinely believed, and were led to believe, that they were getting objective, professional advice when in fact, the advice provider was acting as a sales representative of their employer."

The fiduciary rule had positive implications for retirement savers because it enforced new accountability standards for retirement plan advisors. However, according to Aikin, Abruptly changing business practices to avoid conflicts of interest and meet higher proficiency standards isnt easy, especially for large firms.

It takes time and money to do that, and it disrupts the profitability model of a sales-driven culture to shift to a professional advice paradigm.

Arian Vojdani, investment strategist at MV Financial in Bethesda, Maryland, says political and financial influence has changed the tide of opinion. At the center of the issue is the rule's potential to significantly alter the revenue model of financial advisors who don't currently follow a fiduciary standard. Ultimately, brokers could see their earning potential shrink if they're no longer able to push high-commission investments that aren't in their clients' best interest: Many of those who may be pushing back at the rule may either be, or have ties to, interested parties who would suffer at the passing of the rule.

The rule has been delayed numerous times, with full implementation now scheduled for June 2019, although recent federal court action threatens the rules survival.

The Latest on the Fiduciary Rule

In mid-March, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the DOL fiduciary rule in a 2-1 decision. The court ruled that by adopting this rule, the Labor Department had overstepped its authority under the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). The Department of Labor had an opportunity to appeal the ruling but remained inert, allowing the deadline for appeals to pass.

In early May, interest groups for business and financial services groups (the initial challengers of the rule) scored a victory after the Court of Appeals denied a motion by AARP and the state attorney generals of California, New York and Oregon to intervene in the case. The motion was deemed unjustifiable by the lobbyists, and the Court of Appeals agreed. Shortly after, the Department of Labor issued Field Assistance Bulletin No. 2018-02, a temporary enforcement policy for some provisions of the fiduciary rule.

Aikin says the bulletin makes it possible for certain provisions of the fiduciary rule to continue: In particular, the Best Interest Contract Exemption that was created by the rule allows firms to have certain compensation-related conflicts that were prohibited before the rule took effect, so long as they accept fiduciary accountability and adhere to Impartial Conduct Standards.

Despite court opposition, the attorney generals of California, New York and Oregon subsequently filed an appeal with the Fifth Circuit, asking the court to reconsider its denial of their previous motion. Again, the Fifth Court firmly rejected this appeal.

Aikin says the rule will most likely be vacated by the court so that it effectively never existed. The definitional loophole will be restored, and investors will once again have to do their homework to distinguish between fiduciary advisors and salespeople. (See: Meeting Your Fiduciary Responsibility)

Whats Next for Advisors, Investors

The Department of Labor can still appeal this case at the Supreme Court level, but the appeal would have to be made by June 13. This is a remote possibility at best, according to Aikin.

In short, the fiduciary rule is dead, says Ryan Brown, Chief Strategy Officer and Corporate Counsel at M&O Marketing in Southfield, Michigan. Both the government and proponents of the Fiduciary Rule have virtually exhausted every avenue to revive it. But thats not to say that the SEC, FINRA and/or the NAIC will not craft similar models.

Vojdani says failure to revive the rule could put investors at risk. If the rule cant be resurrected, well continue to see some brokers and advisors in the industry continue to work in a way or act on behalf of a client in ways that might not suit the clients best interest. He says the influence that lobbying groups were able to wield in federal court could hint at future problems to come in advancing consumer financial protections.

Lobby and interest groups have long demonstrated their power to influence movements within the court system. A study released in October 2017 found that corporations that fund lobbyists tend to have more favorable litigation outcomes than those that don't. The Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission opened the door to allow corporations unlimited scope with regard to campaign financing and lobbyist funding.

Aikin says the Wall Street versus Main Street dynamic thats characterized in the regulatory debate is unfortunate, because, ... having elements of the financial services industry square off against consumer advocates overshadows the great work fiduciary advisors do on behalf of their clients.

The earlier decision to void the fiduciary rule was not only a step backwards for the industry, but an attack against the biggest benefit for Americas 75 million hard-working retirement savers, says Joe Ziemer, vice president of communications for online investing platform Betterment.

There is, however, a silver lining of sorts associated with the ongoing debate about the fiduciary rule.

Throughout the fight for the fiduciary rule, weve seen a positive evolution to financial services, Ziemer says. There is, ... easier access to low-cost investments and heightened awareness of how financial providers are compensated.

The Bottom Line

Brown says regardless of the outcome, the main takeaway from the fiduciary rules controversial history is an emphasis on disclosure and transparency between financial professionals and consumers. When everything is out in the open, people have the capability to make the most rational, well-informed decisions.

At this stage, the ball is firmly in the federal governments court. Barring a Supreme Court action ahead of the June deadline, it appears that the fiduciary rule may have finally reached the end of the line.
Key Takeaways EPS was $12.37 vs. the $7.29 analysts expected.

Revenue exceeded analyst expectations.

Amazon Web Services revenue surpassed the level expected by analysts.

Amazon is creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs around the world.

What Happened

Amazon reported EPS that far surpassed analysts' expectations in Q3 2020. Total revenue and AWS revenue also exceeded the levels forecast by analysts. EPS soared on robust revenue growth compared to the year-ago quarter. AWS revenue was also higher compared to the same quarter a year ago. Amazon announced that it is creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs across the world as it expands operations. The company's stock rose during after hours trading.

(Below is Investopedia's original earnings preview, published October 26, 2020.)

What to Look For

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) has seen a surge in e-commerce and cloud services sales amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Shopping online has soared as consumers order more goods and services while sheltering at home, and demand for cloud services has spiked as the work-at-home economy has ballooned in size.

Investors will watch to see whether these positive trends continue when Amazon reports earnings on October 29, 2020 for Q3 FY 2020. Analysts expect strong growth in both earnings per share (EPS) and revenue.

Investors will also be focused on another key metric, which is Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue. AWS is Amazon's cloud-computing platform, which has grown rapidly in recent years and is also benefitting from the pandemic-induced growth of the work-from-home economy. Analysts expect AWS revenue to rise year over year (YOY).

Amazon's shares were keeping pace with the rest of the market in the few months leading up to the market crash triggered in the second half of February as fears over the spread of the coronavirus mounted. But the stock, which avoided the worst of the crash, has dramatically outperformed ever since. Amazon's shares have provided a total return of 81.8% over the past 12 months, well above the S&P 500's total return of 15.3%, as of October 23, 2020.

Source: TradingView.

Amazon surprised analysts with earnings beating expectations by more than 600% in Q2 2020. EPS rose 97.4% YOY, the fastest pace since Q1 FY 2019. Revenue grew 40.2%, the fastest pace since Q1 FY 2018. In its Q2 earnings report issued on July 30, the company said that it added 175,000 new jobs since March due to rising demand and sales.

The boost in sales growth began in Q1 FY 2020. Revenue rose 26.4% YOY, above roughly 20% average growth for the four quarters in 2019. However, total operating expenses grew even faster, at a rate of 29.3%. EPS fell 29.4% compared to the same quarter a year ago.

Analysts expect EPS to rise 72.1% in Q3 FY 2020, a slower pace than Q2 but still relatively strong. Revenue is estimated to grow 32.3% compared to the year-ago quarter. For full-year 2020, analysts expect EPS to rise 38.1% and revenue by 31.6%, the fastest revenue pace in at least the past seven years.
The oil industry is driven by booms and busts. Prices typically rise during periods of global economic strength during which demand outpaces supply. Prices fall when the reverse is true, and supply exceeds demand. Meanwhile, oil supply and demand are driven by a number of key factors:

Changes in the value of the U.S. dollar

Changes in the policies of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)

Changes in the levels of oil production and inventory

The health of the global economy

The implementation (or collapse) of international agreements

Notably, 2015 offers an interesting example of how all five factors can conspire to send prices to historic lows. At that time, the price of crude oil fell by more than half in under a year, reaching lows that had not been seen since the last global recession.

At the time, many oil executives believed it would be years before oil returned to $100 per barrel. They were right, at least as of July 30, 2021, when the price of a barrel of crude oil was $73.95.

Five main factors can be identified as having driven crude oil prices down and kept them down.

Key Takeaways The year 2015 was a perfect storm for oil prices.

The dollar was strong. Inventories were huge. The economy was weak. And production was growing.

All of these factors drove the price of crude oil to less than $40 per barrel.

1. The Dollar Strengthens

In 2015, the dollar was at a 12-year high against the euro.

That put pressure on market prices because commodity prices are usually quoted in dollars, and they will fall when the U.S. dollar is strong.

For example, the surge in the dollar in the second half of 2014 caused a rare sharp decline in all of the leading commodity indexes.

2. OPEC Retains Production Levels

OPEC, the cartel of oil producers that sets production levels, was unwilling to prop up the oil markets by cutting its production levels.

The oil ministers said in a statement that they had "concurred that stable oil prices  at a level which did not affect global economic growth but which, at the same time, allowed producers to receive a decent income and to invest to meet future demand  were vital for world economic wellbeing."

Prices of OPECs benchmark crude oil fell by a whopping 50% after the organization decided against cutting production at that 2014 meeting in Vienna.

3. Global Inventory Grows

The prices of crude futures declined in late September 2015 when it became clear that oil stockpiles were growing amid increased production.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that global oil inventories increased in every quarter of 2015, with a net inventory build of 1.72 million barrels per day. That was the highest rate since at least 1996. By the end of 2015, oil prices were below $40 per barrel, the lowest level since 2009.

Total oil production by the end of 2015 was expected to increase to more than 9.35 million barrels per dayhigher than previous forecasts of 9.3 million barrels per day.

4. The Economy Weakens

While the supply of oil became increasingly abundant in 2015, global demand for oil was decreasing. The economies of Europe and developing countries were weakening. Vehicles were becoming more fuel-efficient.

Meanwhile, China's devaluation of its own currency suggested that its economy might be weakening as well. Since China is the world's largest oil importer, that was a huge hit to global demand and caused a negative reaction in crude oil prices.

5. Iran Makes a Deal

In July 2015, the U.S. and several other world powers signed a deal that lifted economic sanctions against Iran.

The Iran nuclear deal, as it became known, freed Iran to start exporting oil again. Investors feared it would add to the world's oversupply of oil, dragging down prices even more.

(Iran withdrew from the agreement in 2019 after then-President Donald Trump ordered the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. President Joe Biden has indicated a willingness to see it reinstated.)
Once upon a time, a "gig"  a one-time, short-term assignment or project  was something reserved for musicians or models. Those days are long gone. A growing number of Americans are choosing to avoid the regular 9-to-5 routine, working for The Man; instead, they work-on-demand for firms that employ them on a freelance or independent contractor basis.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, todays workers can undertake freelance gigs for a wide range of industries, from just about anywhere on earth. Sites like Upwork and Etsy empower short-term giggers to write copy, design websites and even sell their wares, on their own time, at their discretion. Meanwhile accommodation sites like Airbnb and Onefinestay enable people to rent out their digs as an additional income stream. And Uber empowers virtually anyone (with a car) to turn their vehicle into a metered cab.

Mix and match your gigs, and voila: Youve got the ultimate balanced work lifestyle. In theory (assuming you have a laptop and reliable WiFi access), you could gig from a mountainside perch, a log cabin, or your own living room (even in your pajamas). Freelancing also comes with the thrill of not knowing exactly whats around the corner, but being open to plenty of other opportunities awaiting on the horizon (just past that glorious sunset you get to enjoy, because youre not stuck in some office). Doesnt it all just sound liberating?

With the exploding gig economy (aka the freelance economy) comes a monumental decision: to freelance or not to freelance. To many, it might sound like a logical lifestyle choice (if not the only way to go), but before shrugging off salaried employment altogether, its time for a reality check.

Full-Time Benefits

Theres much more to freelancing than flexible hours and being your own boss. One of the biggest pluses of full-time employment (and drawbacks of doing gigs) are employer-provided benefits, such as health insurance, 401(k) plans, sick days and paid vacation time. A staff job often comes with all these perks, while freelancers must fend for themselves on all counts. Forget about paid holidays (unless youre able to work on a laptop under a palm tree), or taking sick days, as no company or tech platform will pay you for getting nothing done.

Youll also have to manage your taxes yourself, including the self-employment tax (see 7 Ways To Avoid Self-Employed Tax Penalties). And if youd actually like to start saving for retirement, or for a major purchase like a home, youll have to figure out how to on your own (or by reading Retirement Planning for the Self-Employed and 5 Steps To Qualify For A Mortgage If You're Self-Employed).

Flexibility vs. Security

For some, the idea of working day in, day out at the same old desk sounds like hell on earth. For others, the financial security of having full-time employment is pretty much mandatory. The freelancing lifestyle can indeed be liberating, and as your own boss, you don't have to answer to someone else  other than your clients, of course. Which brings up the problem of getting work in the first place. With no one assigning it to you, you have to hustle to secure gigs yourself. And in the case of digital platforms, many of them pay peanuts. Theyre also not something you can fully rely on for regular income. For instance, Airbnb income is dependent upon bookings; and revenue from Etsy is dependent upon making actual sales. If you dont sell anything, you dont make anything, so gigging can be risky business.

Per-Gig Pay vs. Paycheck

One of the major advantages to full-time employment is knowing that you have a regular paycheck coming in without fail, every pay cycle  aka financial security, which can be crucial for budgeting and saving. This simply isn't the case in the world of freelancing. As a freelancer, you bill as you earn  or are remunerated as the gigs are completed or products are sold  however frequently (or infrequently) that is. So possibly the biggest challenge facing freelancers is ensuring there are enough jobs/gigs lined up to generate the cash flow you need to survive.

How old you are bears considerable influence over which direction you might take. For instance, if youre fresh out of college, chances are you dont have the financial safety net to risk relying on gigs, nor enough on the job expertise to embark on a freelance career. And if thats the case, youd possibly be better off exploring gigs and freelance opportunities on the side, in addition to a day job. Becoming a freelancer is like starting a business, so you need to be up for the responsibility that comes with it.

If on the other hand, youve been in the working world for a couple of years or more; have acquired solid skills, identified a services niche and established contacts with individuals or organizations who can potentially provide you with work, then you could have the foundation to establish solid gig workflow and a successful freelance career.

The Loneliness Factor

Freelancing can be a lonely profession. It generally lacks the social interaction and bustle of an office job, and you have no colleagues to speak of. In fact, a laptop often becomes a freelancers best friend. You could consider sharing an office with someone else, or renting a space in a co-working site, but this costs money. Then, of course, there's missing out on gatherings like holiday office parties. Unless you throw one of your own, you can forget about those altogether because your clients probably won't invite you to theirs. One other solution can be to become active in professional organizations where you can meet others in your field, both consultants and fulltime employees.

On the flip side, if you're really more of a hermit, freelancing is a great way to work without being forced to spend hours with others in meetings or trying to come up with something to say while you're gathering around the coffee machine.

The Bottom Line

Young adulthood is the perfect time to take calculated risks  such as a freelancing. Being at the time of life you're most likely to be young, healthy and without dependents lessens the need for employer-provided benefits such as major medical insurance and a steady paycheck. And if you're really good at what you do, you may be able to take professional leaps it could take much longer to achieve in a structured office environment.

If the entrepreneurial call is too loud to ignore, it is possible to forge a great work/life balance, and even carve a lucrative career with a lot of commitment and the right mindset. However, unless youre established enough (or have a big enough safety net) to throw caution to the work winds, it could pay to play it safe with a day job, and experiment with a few gigs on the side. If they take off, great! And if not, at least youll still be able to pay the bills.
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Mullen (NASDAQ: MULN) Continues Acquisition Path With Purchase of ELMS Assets Including Factory in Mishawaka, IN., Enabling EV Production for Retail and Commercial Vehicle Lines

BREA, Calif. - October 19, 2022 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Mullen Automotive, Inc. (NASDAQ: MULN), an emerging electric vehicle ("EV") manufacturer, announces the US Bankruptcy Court approval on Oct. 13th, 2022 of its acquisition of electric vehicle company ELMS's (Electric Last Mile Solutions) assets in an all cash purchase.

Top EV Stock News - Investor Idea

Breaking EV Stock News: Mullen Automotive (NASDAQ: $MULN) Taps Former GM Executive John Schwegman as Chief Commercial Officer for Next Phase of EV Growth

BREA, Calif. - October 21, 2022 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Mullen Automotive, Inc. (NASDAQ: MULN), an emerging electric vehicle ("EV") manufacturer, announces today the hiring of John Schwegman as its Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) for Mullen's line of commercial vehicles.

Top EV Stock News - Investor Idea

EV Stocks Driving Higher: (NASDAQ: $MULN) (NASDAQ: $TSLA) (NYSE: $NIO) (NYSE: $F)

Vancouver, Delta, BC - October 20, 2022 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Investorideas.com, a leading investor news resource covering EV and automotive stocks releases a special report featuring Mullen Automotive, Inc. (NASDAQ: MULN), covering the continued growth of the EV market as government policy and infrastructure plans sync up with consumer and investor interest in the EV space.

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Breaking AI Stock News: FatBrain (OTCQB: LZGI) Acquires Confidential Computing Platform ZeroTrust to Protect Data Privacy and Accelerate Innovation for Millions of Growth Businesses

NEW YORK, NY - October 19, 2022 (Investorideas.com Newswire) FatBrain AI (LZG International, Inc.) (OTCQB: LZGI), the leader in powerful and easy-to-use artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for star enterprises of tomorrow, has acquired the confidential computing and privacy intellectual property (IP) plus software assets of Zero2A PTE LTD ("ZeroTrust Platform"), a software company based in Singapore.

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Irish chef Stuart O'Keeffe shares his recipe for a delicious grilled cheese sandwich.

This is the perfect hearty grilled cheese!

Like many great sandwiches, it takes some time to prepare, but the result is incredible. There is nothing quite as comforting as digging into a warm and hearty sandwich for lunch or dinner.

Caramelized onions, mushroom, and brie grilled cheese recipe

Ingredients

4 (thickly cut) slices of bread

Brie cheese

1 onion, sliced

2 cloves garlic

10 mushrooms, sliced

1/2 cup beef broth

12 teaspoon thyme

1 teaspoon all-purpose flour

3 tablespoons butter

Salt & pepper

Method

Heat a heavy skillet over medium heat, melt 2 tablespoons butter and cook onions at a low temperature for about 15 minutes until they become nice and caramelized.

Add mushrooms and garlic and cook for further 6-8 minutes.

Stir in beef stock and all purpose-flour and bring to a simmer until a nice sauce forms. Add thyme.

Butter bread with remaining butter and place Brie and mushroom onion topping between the buttered slices (make sure buttered sides are on the outside).

Place sandwich on a hot non-stick pan for about 3 minutes per side or until it becomes nice and brown.

Tip: Using another heavy saucepan, you can press on the sandwich while cooking for a pressed sandwich, if desired.

Check out Stuart's Facebook page and website for culinary tips, recipes, and food travels.

* Originally published in 2014. Updated June 2022.
Ireland experienced a massive 16.6% increase in visitors throughout the first quarter of 2016 with 10 percent of all US visitors to Europe gracing the island.

The latest figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) indicate that this was the best March on record for Irish tourism.

With thanks to St. Patricks Day celebrations and the Easter Rising centenary commemorations, Ireland had its busiest January to March quarter and peak tourist season is still to come.

The biggest increase in travelers came from North America, whose numbers swelled by almost 25%. According to the CSOs Overseas Travel survey, a total of 238,100 trips were made from North America to Ireland between January and March.

"Ireland now welcomes 10% of all American visitors to Europe," said CEO of Tourism Ireland Niall Gibbons.

"That's particularly noteworthy given the intense competition from other markets."

Failte Ireland CEO Sean Quinn believes the figures from the first quarter of the year are a promising sign for the busier summer season set to begin.

Todays figures signal a continued strong performance by the tourism sector, reflecting a very successful St. Patricks festival and an earlier Easter, he said.

These trends, along with current confidence levels within the sector, indicate a strong summer season ahead but we must keep competitive and avoid complacency to maintain current growth rates.

A video posted by St. Patrick's Festival Ireland (@stpatricksfestival) on Mar 9, 2016 at 4:50am PST

There were further increases in the number of visitors from Great Britain and other parts of Europe. Residents from Great Britain made a total 851,700 trips in the first quarter, an increase of 17.3%, while 600,100 trips were made from the rest of Europe.

There was also an eight percent increase in visitors from places other than Great Britain, Europe and North America. This number increased from 88,300 to 95,400.

Overall, 1,785,300 trips were made to Ireland in the first quarter of 2016, up from 1,531,300 during the same time period in 2015.

Not only are the Irish welcoming an increased number of visitors to our shores this year, but were exploring the world ourselves at increased rates. The number of Irish taking a vacation abroad in the first quarter rose by 13.3% compared to this time last year. A total of 1,476,000 trips were made.

The Festival Ceili in full swing at Earlsfort Terrace. Bring your dancing shoes and join us!! #StPatricksFest #ireland #dancing A video posted by St. Patrick's Festival Ireland (@stpatricksfestival) on Mar 18, 2016 at 9:38am PDT

Irish tourism had a massive year in 2015 with US visitors alone spending $1.2 billion, a quarter of the total money spent by tourists in Ireland. American visitors are the Irish tourism industrys most valuable asset.

According to Failte Irelands Chairman Michael Cawley, US tourists stay longer and they spend more, in general, when they come a longer distance.

An estimated 7.9 million visitors came to Ireland in 2015, which is expected to increase significantly again throughout the rest of this year.

It certainly looks that people have been making the most of the quieter tourism time at the start of the year:

Fond memories of a great family #vacation in #Ireland & #northernireland. Lots to see & do. Thanks Air Canada rouge pic.twitter.com/dwx7fyRy7r  Pierre Faubert (@pierre_faubert) April 12, 2016

Finally got to experience the Irish sport of hurling! County Clare also won! #Ireland #vacation pic.twitter.com/uzH7xghj5g  Claire Coombs (@c_coombs) April 17, 2016
The British soldier who fired the rubber bullet that would kill 11-year-old Francis Rowntree in Belfasts Divis Flats in 1972 has told an inquest by the Belfast Coroners Court that he has no regrets about his actions.

The man, a former Sargent Major whose identity is protected, testified via video from an undisclosed location and said that he does not remember the incident and has nothing to be reproachful about.

On April 20, 1972, Francis Rowntree was struck in the head by a rubber bullet as he was walking through the Divis Flats. He lost consciousness immediately and was taken by ambulance to the hospital where he died two days later from his injuries.

Many elements and claims about the case have yet to be clarified, including whether the bullet has been doctored to cause greater injury and whether it hit Rowntree directly or ricocheted towards him. It was previously concluded by Northern Irelands now defunct Historical Enquiries unit that he was an innocent bystander.

The man, identified as Soldier B, was on his first tour of duty in Northern Ireland when the incident took place but had 17 years of previous army experience. He has maintained that he suffers from heart and memory issues and has no memory of the shooting or of shooting a specific person, also claiming that it might not have been he who fired the fatal shot.

"After 44 years I find it almost impossible to remember any incident. I feel as though, for whatever reason, I am being targeted and I don't fully understand why, he said in a cross examination by a Minister of Defense attorney.

He said that he was confident he had been acting in accordance with army protocol, adding "I do not have any concerns, I was doing my job as we did all the time."

In a statement given to the Royal Military Police on April 24, 1972, four days after the incident Soldier B reported that he had fired two rounds of rubber bullets into a rioting crowd and that one of the bullets might have struck an unidentified person who may have then been taken away in an ambulance.

He could not recall when he found out that a child had been killed in that shooting.

"There was talk of a child being injured and the name rings in my mind, he said. I am not wanting to be evasive or anything of that nature. In my case this was one incident of many, many, many incidents over a four-month period.

At a different point in the testimony, he added "I am not denying I hit somebody. Quite the reverse. I cannot say who I hit, he said.

Asked if he had anything to say to the Rowntree family, he replied "There is nothing to say that the round I fired hit their son. If it did, for that I am very, very sorry. But there's no proof, to me, that's what happened.

"It was certainly not fired at somebody not rioting. Everybody there was deeply intent on making life deeply uncomfortable."

Speaking to reporters when the hearing was adjourned, Francis older brother Jim said "He said he feels persecuted but a child died and there has been 44 years of false allegations made against that child."

H/T BreakingNews.ie
This years New York City St. Patricks Day parade was one for the history books, and the 2017 march is 11 months away, but the behind the scenes battles for control of the parade are continuing.

The Irish Voice has learned that Dr. John Lahey, chairman of the parades board of directors, plans on sending the parades affiliated organizations a letter this week with an offer containing two proposals to work together in the future: the affiliates can choose to elect four members to the parade board  one each from the AOH, the LAOH, the United Irish Counties and the Emerald groups  or they can opt to put forward the Parade and Celebration Committee that they elected last November at a meeting in Queens where the long-time committee chair, John Dunleavy, declined to seek re-election.

The new committee, headed by attorney John Tully, sent a letter to the parades affiliated groups last week asking them to attend a meeting on Thursday, May 5 at Cathedral High School in New York. The letter, signed by Tully, said the committee, which has always served under the board of directors, promised you we would address and resolve all issues concerning the governance of our parade starting on March 18.

Read more: Record views for NYC St. Patricks Day parade in Ireland

Tully added that the committee  two of whose members, Catherine Mitchell Miceli and Rosemary Lombard, also serve on the parades board of directors  would use the meeting to discuss our views of the existing governance issues and ideas for resolution. More importantly, we need to hear your thoughts on the issues, as well as your feedback on the 2016 parade.

Surprisingly, the Lavender and Green Alliance  the first Irish gay group to march in the parade, given the go-ahead to do to this year by the board  also received Tullys letter. The issue of an Irish gay group taking part in the parade was finally put to rest in 2016 by the inclusion of Lavender and Green  in 2015, NBCs LBGT group OUT@NBCUniversal became the first gay group to march, and they also did so this year  and as a result New York politicians returned to the parade en masse, led by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who boycotted for his first two years in office due to the Irish gay group ban which Dunleavy consistently fought to uphold during his time as Parade and Celebration Committee chairman.

The Brehon Law Society, the other new group granted admission to the parade line of march this year  the Brehons accepted because the ban on an Irish LGBT group was lifted  was also notified about the May 5 meeting.

The Lavender and Green Alliance plans on attending the meeting, co-founder Brendan Fay told the Irish Voice.

We welcome the opportunity to speak about how much being part of the 2016 parade meant for so many people, Fay said.

Meanwhile, the parades board of directors met in New York on Wednesday, April 20. Dunleavy, whose civil lawsuit against Lahey and board member Frank Comerford is due to be heard in Bronx Supreme Court on May 19 -- the lawsuit alleges that the June 2015 board meeting that elevated Lahey to chairman was called illegally, and that Lahey and Comerford, an NBC executive, conspired to keep the parades broadcast rights with WNBC  was in attendance at the meeting at the Metropolitan Club as he retains one of the 17 seats on the board.

Dunleavy was silent for most of the board meeting, several sources told the Irish Voice, but he did voice objection in two instances: the election of Hilary Beirne as the parades chief administrative officer, and Frank McGreal as chief financial officer.

Beirne and McGreal, long-time board members who oversee the parades logistics, were overwhelmingly elected to the new positions, save for Dunleavys opposition and one board member who abstained.

Dunleavy was the subject of an investigation by the New York State Attorney Generals office, which acted on a letter received by the board last November detailing alleged financial improprieties uncovered by a forensic audit of the parades finances.

The audit revealed several questionable transactions authorized by Dunleavy, including the purchase of a male enhancement drug on the parades credit card, but in March the Attorney Generals office closed its investigation, finding that the alleged financial mismanagement did not rise to the level that would warrant further action from the office.

Read more from March 2016: St. Patricks Day parade in New York becomes one nation once again
Sadiq Khan, the Labour Party candidate for Mayor of London, has reached out to Londons Irish, stating that the city owes the Irish community a lot for making it great.

As someone who was born and bred in London I know just how much we owe the Irish community for the role theyve played in making London great, Khan said in an exclusive interview with London Irish publication the Irish Post.

Whether its the contribution of Irish teachers, nurses and doctors in our schools and hospitals, or the role of Irish entrepreneurs and businesses, we cannot underestimate the difference they make to our city, he said.

Khan, 45, is the son of Pakistani immigrants. His father was a bus driver, his mother a seamstress. The fifth of eight children, Khan says he learned the meaning of hard work from a young age, holding down a paper route, working on building sites during the summer, and sleeping in a bunk bed in his familys home until he was 24.

Like many Irish people, my parents came to London to make a better life for themselves, he told the Irish Post. We didnt have much, but they were able to save up to buy a house for our family.

After studying law at the University of North London, Khan worked as a lawyer and a law lecturer until 2005, when he was elected to the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament for Tooting. He became the second British Pakistani to serve a ministerial governmental role in 2008, when he was appointed Minister of State of Communities by Gordon Brown, who then made him Minister of State for Transport in 2009.

He later served in Ed Milibands shadow cabinet as Secretary of State for Transport, Secretary of State for Justice and Minister for London, before resigning from the post in May 2015 to seek the Labour Party nomination for Mayor of London.

In previous interviews, Khan has shared his parents experiences with prejudice after immigrating from Pakistan to London, shortly before Khan was born.

My dad passed away in September 2003, so he never saw me in Parliament. But I think he would have been proud that his community in Tooting voted me in as their MP, he said in an interview with The Guardian.

When he and my mum first came to this country there were signs up where they lived: No blacks, no Irish, no dogs. He saw his children being racially abused and getting into fights. His 25 grandchildren have never experienced that. Thats why Im an optimist.

Khan is currently the front runner in the mayoral race, which takes place next Thursday, May 5, with bookmaker Paddy Power giving him odds of 1/16. His closest competitor is Zac Goldsmith of the Conservative Party.

The current Mayor of London is Boris Johnson of the Conservative Party, who has held office since 2008.
The military records of the 50,000 men and women who took part in the Easter Rising and the War of Independence are now available in the newly opened Military Archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks in Dublin.

The files, dating from the 1940s onward, have been moved to the Rathmines archive which was opened by Irelands President Michael D Higgins and the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys, on Tuesday. The archives are the fourth of nine Irish government-funded permanent reminders being built for the 1916 commemorations.

The newly released military records offer new information on individuals and incidents in the period up to the Civil War (1922 to 23). Applications for military service pensions have been digitalized and can be accessed online. Although work is still ongoing at the archives anyone can search through the records online.

Released online by the National Archives - Claims for compensation after the 1916 Rising : https://t.co/tZKAtDa5Gr pic.twitter.com/jnvY3ckaef  Shane Wilson (@shanew147) April 21, 2016

The searchable online database links to summary details of 66,174 files of more than 47,500 applicants, including almost 200 who applied for the 1916 medal. The 1916 Medal recognized those who were engaged in active service during the 1916 Rising and those who served during the period 1917-1921.

Pat Brennan, senior archivist and project manager told the Irish Examiner, While there are some well-known names included, the series is a great tribute to the sworn membership, the men and women of the IRA and Cumann na mBan who carried out support roles to the active service fighters in both organizations.

He continued, The members of Na Fianna Eireann played a valuable part too. Without their contribution, the War of Independence could well have taken a different course.

Speaking at the launch of the Archives President Higgins referred to the ceremony, which took place at the Barracks, on Tuesday morning, commemorating the centenary of the murder of the pacifist, socialist, suffrage activist and journalist Francis Sheehy Skeffington, and of his fellow journalists Thomas Dickson and Patrick McIntyre. The three men were executed at the Cathal Burgha Barracks, which were then called Portobello Barracks, by a firing squad of seven men under the command of Captain Bowen-Colthurst of the Royal Irish Rifles, without any trial or any charges having been brought against them.

President Higgins officially opens the newly refurbished military archives at Cathal Brugha barracks #1916 pic.twitter.com/VwO7rOeWRs  Conor Hunt (@conorfhunt) April 26, 2016

He continued, Injustice also defined the treatment of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, who suffered the invasion of her house, attempts at blackening her name, and who was refused access to her murdered husbands personal effects.

The man bearing responsibility for the horrendous execution, Captain Bowen-Colthurst, was released after a brief hospitalization and awarded a military pension. The fact that one of his victims, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, had been endeavoring to prevent plunder and destruction from spreading as the fighting was unfolding in Dublin City on those early days of Easter Week only reinforces the cruelty of the event.

Cathal Brugha Barracks are thus a very important place of memory for us  as the site of extra-judicial executions that symbolize the worst kind of arbitrary rule; and, today, as the repository of crucial records of our past.

The President also noted how personally significant the release of the files was to him and his family as they contain information about his own father, paternal uncles, mother and fathers sisters who were all active in the War of Independence.

Higgins said, My father, John, enlisted with his brothers in the Ballycar Company of 1st Battalion, East Clare Brigade, during the War of Independence. He went on to serve for most of the period with the 3rd Battalion, Charleville, in the Cork no.4 Brigade. My mother was Vice-chair of Cumann na mBan in Liscaroll, and her brother was adjutant of the local Battalion. My fathers sister was in Cumann na mBan in Ballycar, Co. Clare.

The Civil War divided my fathers family. My uncle Peter was in the National Army; he took part in the handover and served in Renmore Barracks, Galway. My father spent part of the year 1923 as an internee in what was known to the prisoners as Tintown, in the Curragh camp. The Pension files record his long and exhausting battle for a small pension, which was eventually granted in 1956, almost 22 years after his first application in 1935.

He added that the Pensions files tell many personal stories of hardship, as so many who fought for Irish Independence then struggled to support themselves and their families in the subsequent decades, and as some found themselves excluded from the pension scheme, because of their gender, class or political choices.

Minister Humphrey added, The collections in the Military Archives, which stretch from 1913 to the present day, are a key part of our documentary heritage, allowing historians, academics and anyone who is interested in our shared history to understand our past more clearly and explore the nation's family history.

For more information visit www.militaryarchives.ie.

Heres some raw footage from British Pathe from 1916:
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The five TDs in Dublin South West are calling for the release of Ibrahim Halawa.

The Firhouse man was 17 when he was arrested for taking part in a protest in Cairo.
Update 10am:

Prison officers are calling for gangland criminals to be separated in our jails.

They say gangs are fully operational within prisons - and they're calling on authorities to allow the passing on of Garda intelligence to help police the facilities.

The concerns are being raised at their annual conference in Athlone today - it follows five gang related deaths in the capital since the start of this year.

Stephen Delaney President of the Prison Officers Association outlines the difficulties his members are facing: At the minute in Mount Joy Prison for example there would be regarded as 18 different fractions, confined within the prison and that is extremely difficult to manage.

They cannot associate with each other and that is causing huge operational difficulties for the staff within the prison.

We are asking the authorities to give us whatever resources are necessary to cater for these individuals to ensure the safety of all.

Update 8am:

Prison officers have said gangs are fully operational within our jails.

They are raising concerns that the recent surge in gangland killings could lead to a rise in violence in prisons - once those behind the incidents are caught.

Officers want those involved in gangland crime to be separated from others in the facilities.

The call follows five gang related deaths in the capital since the start of this year.

Stephen Delaney is President of the Prison Officers Association: Major gangland figures are confined within our prisons and they are today conducting operations from behind prison walls.

Visitors, mobile phones, undue influence on those around them, in terms of drugs, violence and other acts of intimidation.
The co-op paid 20m in milk price top-ups to its 3,000 suppliers in 2015. The companys net asset value rose 19.4m to 315.5m.

In 2015, it invested 50.9m in the business, the latest tranche of 215m invested in the past seven years to process extra post-quota milk.

Year-end, net bank debt rose to 96m, up from 71.6m in 2014, but well within its banking covenants.

The company delivered earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation of 41.2m on a turnover of 785m.

Its overseas operations, agri-business, and other units all delivered stable performances versus 2014, bar the dairy ingredients, the division most exposed to global market prices factors.

Suppliers delivered 18.7% more milk, up 182 million litres to 1.157m litres. However, the products value was down 10%, with global markets weakening for 27 successive months, during which global milk prices have fallen 57%.

It was a challenging year from the farmers perspective, but we still made 19m in profit while supporting our suppliers, said Dairygold chief executive Jim Woulfe.

With the increase in milk volumes, we have geared up our processing capacity, and this was vital in helping to ensure we have the routes to market in place to sell that extra product.

I dont have any crystal ball about global markets, but I can say that all of the global market underlying trends are still right, particularly from a population- growth perspective.

"But global milk output has risen 5% from 2013-15, there have been no weather events to dent global supply and oil prices are very low.

Among all these milk price-reducing factors, Mr Woulfe said the low oil price was perhaps most significant, effectively nullifying the natural advantage of Ireland grass-based systems over countries with stall-fed cattle.

Closely aligned to oil, animal feed prices are also low at present.

More than 93% of Dairygolds suppliers have signed supply contracts. The co-op has long since calmed disquiet among pockets of its membership about growth strategy.

The company has suspended its members revolving fund payments while the milk price remains below 27c per litre.

Meanwhile, the co-ops members will also note that the 2015 accounts for the first time publish details of the salaries of the boards nine full-time senior executives.

With their basic salaries totalling 1.66m plus bonuses and other emoluments, the average pay package of these executives came to around 185,000.

This pay seems relatively modest compared to some other Irish processing companies, notably the 9m shared by Ornuas nine top executives in the two years of 2014 and 2015.

My concern in announcing these figures will be the retention of our top performers, Mr Woulfe said.
Speaking after the groups AGM in Dublin, chairman John Hennessy said that the board will actively look at the possibility of a dividend on the back of next years profit levels, but said that no decision has been made as yet.

He said Dalata will be fully invested by the end of this year, but to pay a dividend before that would be akin to giving back raised money to investors before seeing a return.

Dalata is the largest hotel operator in the country via its Maldron and Clayton brands.

It raised over 200m in equity last year and 282m in debt to fund expansion via hotel acquisitions, land buys for new builds and expansions of existing hotels.

It still has 100m to spend on its Irish expansion this year before it begins to turn its attention to expanding in the UK from 2018 onwards.

The group still has three Maldron hotels  in Cork, Dublin and Portlaoise  which it operates under lease arrangements in its acquisition sites and is targeting up to three more new build sites in Dublin and Cork.

It also hopes to build an additional 40 bedrooms at its existing Clayton Hotel in Ballsbridge and a similar number in its Maldron Hotel in Galway. It is also scaling back expansion plans, from 380 to 150 new rooms, at its Clayton Dublin Airport hotel.

Chief executive Pat McCann said the group would not be bidding for either the old Burlington Hotel in Dublin (currently trading under the DoubleTree by Hilton brand) nor the Lyrath Estate in Kilkenny.

He said the 140m value being put on the Burlington site is too high and is not there for us at all.

On the Lyrath, which is expected to fetch 20m, he said: Its a lovely property and would be lovely to own, but is not for us.

Dalata, however, remains keen on gaining some presence in the Kilkenny area.

At the AGM, management defended executive pay levels and its use of a Dutch-based financing arm, which it said creates a flexible financing structure for its UK business.

Mr Hennessy said the group seeks to minimise tax costs where it can but doesnt have an aggressive tax-avoidance policy.
The Kilkenny-headquartered food business issued a trading update for the three months to the beginning of April as it held its annual general meeting.

The companys shares fell 1.29% on the back of the update which showed the toll falling milk prices are having on its business.

Sales grew by 0.5% in volume terms with acquisitions providing growth of 3.4%.

This was offset by reduced dairy market prices, however, which contributed to overall price decreases of 5.8%.

Despite price pressures, Glanbia Group managing director Siobhan Talbot said she was pleased with the companys strong overall performance.

Glanbia delivered a good performance in the first three months of 2016. Our growth platforms of Glanbia performance nutrition and global ingredients delivered volume growth in the first quarter, Ms Talbot said.

That growth allowed Glanbia to reiterate its 2016 guidance of 8% to 10% growth in adjusted earnings per share at constant currency.

Our on-going strategy of building a business to deliver better nutrition via consumer brands and high-quality ingredients has mitigated the impact of weak dairy markets.

"The outlook for the remainder of 2016 is positive and we reiterate our full year guidance of adjusted earnings per share growth of 8% to 10% on a constant currency basis.

Total Group revenue, including joint ventures, declined 2.5% on a reported basis and 3.3% on a constant currency basis.

Its performance nutrition division delivered a strong performance in the first three months of the year with revenues up by more than 5.5% on a constant currency basis.

A 10.1% boost from acquisitions contributed to heavily to the improvement in performance compared with the same period in 2015.

The performance nutrition division, which employs more than 1,500 staff, is a major growth area for the business which is focussed on professional sportspeople and fitness enthusiasts with products such as protein bars and shakes.

Revenue growth in the mid-single digit range is expected in the nutrition division.

By comparison, its global ingredients business saw revenues decline 5.2% in the opening three months. The performance of its Irish dairy business was described as satisfactory despite revenue falling by 6.2%.

The revenue shortfall was driven by weather-related volume declines of 3% and a fall in prices of 3.6% associated with fertiliser pricing. The company said the full-year outlook for its Dairy Ireland segment was positive with revenues expected to be flat for the year as a whole.

Glanbias net debt at the beginning of April was 677m, which represents an increase of 93m versus the net debt position at year end 2015.

The company said this was primarily driven by seasonal working capital requirements. Total 2016 capital expenditure is expected to be between 115m and 125m.
The consumer sentiment comparison study  measuring optimism levels of those within and outside of Dublin  from KBC Bank Ireland and the ESRI economic think-tank shows that while confidence among consumers in the rest of Ireland hasnt changed in the past two quarters, those living in the capital reached a 13-year confidence high during the first three months of 2016.

KBC chief economist Austin Hughes said the readings suggest a greater resilience to mounting concerns over domestic and global economic risks among those living in Dublin compared to the rest of the country.

Consumers in the rest of Ireland may feel that the recovery outside the capital is not as well-established and any setback to economic conditions may be more damaging to their circumstances in what is still an unevenly felt upturn, he said.

Consumers in Dublin and elsewhere were a little less optimistic about the outlook for the Irish economy in the year ahead than they were three months ago, likely reflecting both global and local concerns.

"This downgrade was more pronounced outside the capital and this meant those consumers also downgraded their outlook for jobs while Dubliners were more confident about employment prospects in early 2016.

Mr Hughes did, however, emphasise that the current readings, while uneven, still suggest a broad trend of consumer sentiment, nationwide, remaining positive.

Views on household finances are becoming modestly more positive overall, both in the capital and elsewhere, he said.

Regarding jobs, 58% of Dublin consumers expect unemployment to fall further in the next year with 14% anticipating a rise in joblessness. Outside of Dublin, those percentages are 42% and 25%, respectively.

While the broad picture remains positive, a greater element of caution of late on the part of consumers outside the capital hints that a two-speed recovery may remain a feature of Irish economic conditions in coming months, said Mr Hughes.
Irish Guide Dogs for the Blinds national campaign Guide Dog Day takes place from April 29th to May 7th. Full details and locations are available at www.guidedogs.ie.

The unique national charity provides life transforming services to over a thousand Clients, their families and communities. They rely entirely on public support for donations that must make up over 80% of the income required to provide these services. The cost of training a puppy up to the standard of work required as a Guide or Assistance Dog is 38,000.

Speaking on the launch of Guide Dog Day Padraig Mallon, CEO of Irish Guide Dogs, said: 2016 is our 40th Anniversary, it is a very special year for us as an organisation... We are currently operating with a gap of almost 500,000 between our income and the costs associated with maintaining services at current levels.

"We know the continued support of the wider community will not be found wanting this year when you meet with our band of almost 2000 volunteers and staff on the streets of our cities and towns, and in Tesco and Aldi across the country. We are delighted this year that many hundreds of retailers and businesses across Ireland will also host collection boxes for sales of our unique Guide Dog Day pins and Independence wristbands.

Mr. Mallon continued: The situation right now is very difficult for us and our clients. We have a significant waiting list also for our Guide Dog Clients and we have had to keep the waiting list for Assistance Dogs closed since 2013.

"Irish Guide Dogs was also forced to close its waiting list for its Assistance Dog Programme for children with Austism due to a massive over-demand for its service.

"Over 60 children with Autism are currently on the national charitys Assistance Dog waiting list, which is approximately a three year wait.

"Support for Guide Dog Day will allow us to significantly reduce these distressing waiting times and to extend out the offer of our services to so many more in need. Our vision is where everyone is able to live independently and have equal access to all the resources of our society. With support of the public on April 29th as well as all our other events we can achieve so much more of that vision.

READ MORE: Watch Elvis the labrador learning how to be a guide dog

Irish Guide Dogs delivers its services completely free of charge to all clients. Guide Dog Day is its biggest national campaign with collection points all over Ireland.

To support Guide Dog Day:

 Text WOOF to 50300 to donate 4. (100% of text goes to Irish Guide Dogs across most network operators. Some operators apply VAT which means that a minimum of 3.25 will go to Irish Guide Dogs. Service provider: LIKECHARITY. Helpline: 0766805278.)

 Buy a pin or independence band for 2 at its street, Tesco and Aldi collections, and at hundreds of retailers and businesses all around the country from Friday 29th April. Visit their Irish Guide Dogs website for the full listing.

READ MORE: Watch Elvis the labrador learning how to be a guide dog
Ford has debuted a new family of diesel engines, called the 'EcoBlue'. It unveiled a 2.0-litre, 4-cylinder oil burner that replaces the old 2.2-litre Duratorq motor that has been powering Ford vehicles internationally since 2005.

Developed by Ford's R&D team in UK and Germany, the engine can be tuned to produce a power output ranging between 100 and 240PS. The new engine develops 20% more torque low down the rev range (1,250rpm) when compared to the old 2.2-litre motor. The engine is comparatively quieter as well; Ford has reduced the noise by 4 decibels at idle. The basic structure of an engine can act as a soundboard for the movements happening inside it, just like a bell. So we try to develop a bell that does not ring very well, said Dominic Evans, NVH specialist, Ford of Europe.

Other updates include a completely new engine architecture that focuses on reducing friction and cleaner combustion. The result is that the engine is 13% more efficient than its predecessor. The EcoBlue will be EuroVI compliant as well, which required Ford to cut down the NOx emissions by 55%.

What's in it for India?

Ford currently sells the Endeavour SUV, with the 2.2-litre engine. We put it through its paces recently; you can read the review to know how it fared. However, it cannot be sold in Delhi - thanks to the diesel ban. Mahindra found a way around it by introducing 1.99-litre mHawk engines for its SUVs, and we believe Ford will follow suit. The new 2.0-litre motor displaces 1,995cc which will allow it to duck under the regulations.

Ford say that a 1.5-litre variant of the EcoBlue is on the cards as well. In all probability, the new mill will replace the 1.5 TDCi motor found under the hood of the Figo twins, the Fiesta and the Ford EcoSport.

We think it is only a matter of time before Ford gets the EcoBlue motors in the country. That said, they haven't been doing all that well in the market looking at dwindling sales numbers and the recent airbag recall. We can only wait and watch.

Source: CarDekho.com
Their decision could have significant implications for our farming and food industry, which have been explored in detail by Trevor Donnellan and Kevin Hanrahan in a new study from Teagasc. ( www.teagasc.ie/publications/2016/3927/BrexitPaperApril13final.pdf )

The broad conclusions of this study are that Irish agri-food exports to the UK would decline as a result of Brexit, but this reduction would be partially offset by an increase in the value of exports to other destinations, where prices are not likely to be as high as those achieved on the UK market.

The magnitude of the loss in Irish agri-food export value is highly uncertain and would depend on the UKs future trading relationship with the EU (including Ireland) and the direction of UK agricultural policy after Brexit, both of which remain unknown.

Britain, Ireland and Denmark joined, what we then called, the Common Market in 1973 (43 years ago) becoming its seventh, eighth and ninth member states.

It has evolved since then into the European Economic Community and the European Union and now has 28 member states.

No one has left or been kicked out. (Greenland joined, as part of Denmark, in 1973, but left in a dispute over fishing rights in 1985).

This referendum could lead to the first occasion where a full Member State left the Union.

And Britain is an important member state, with the third highest population and the second largest economy.

Its population is growing by 1% per annum, while population in Germany and France is either declining or stagnant.

Britain is particularly important as a destination for Irish exports and as a source of our imports.

Irish exports in 2014 were valued at 92 billion, of which almost 13.6 bn were exports to the UK.

Total Irish imports were valued at 61 billion in 2014, of which almost 20.6bn were from the UK. Our trade dependence on the UK in the past was even greater.

When Britain decided to join the Common Market, back in the early 1970s, we really did not have an alternative but to join as well.

At one stage in the negotiations General de Gaulle vetoed the British application but not ours. However, neither of the applications proceeded.

In 1960 about 75% of Irish exports went to the United Kingdom. By 1970 this figure had dropped to about 61%.

One major effect of our EU membership (and our economic growth and diversified economy) is that our dependence on the UK market has now fallen to about 14%.

However, Irish agri-food exports to the UK amount to about a third of our total exports and are concentrated in the beef, dairy and processed foods sectors (ready meals etc).

For these sectors, in particular, the prospect of disruption of trade with the UK, with introduction of tariff barriers, is potentially serious.

In their study, Trevor Donnellan and Kevin Hanrahan set out to measure what these impacts might be.

It is a difficult exercise, since no one knows on what terms trade will be conducted after a decision to leave is made.

There are eleven possible scenarios for trade between Britain and the EU after a Brexit, depending on the nature of an agreement and whether agriculture is included in a deal or not.

(The UK Treasury published last week their own study of the likely impact of Brexit, with a wide range of different outcomes, depending on the assumptions about trade).

Furthermore, if Britain leaves, it will be able to devise its own agricultural policy, and we do not know at this stage, what form it might take.

Any Brexit arrangement will have negative consequences for the Irish agri-food sector. Even a Free Trade Agreement, where there are no new tariff barriers, would result in increased costs for Irish exporters.

The worst possible outcome for us would arise if Britain were to establish liberal trade agreements with agricultural exporters - such as Brazil or Argentina, who do not (yet) have a trade agreement with the EU.

Trade with the UK will not collapse, but will decline (by how much depends on the deal done).

We would then have to seek markets elsewhere with probable lower prices and higher costs of doing business. Of the four scenarios analysed, the worst outcome involved a reduction of the value of Irish agri-food exports of about 8% or 800m.

The most favourable involved a loss in value of 150m or 1.4%.

One possible opportunity! We also import considerable quantities of foodstuffs from the UK.

There will be barriers, small or large, against these also, which may create opportunities to replace them in our own home market.
If Brexit happens, our beef sector could be fighting wars on three fronts.

In recent times there has been renewed talk of an EU trade deal with South American countries, which are major producers of beef.

Even if no agreement is reached with them which opens the European market to them, there is the fear that Britain, after Brexit, would do so.

And parallel with all this is the debate on global warming, Irelands likely failure to achieve targeted reductions in its greenhouse gas emissions, and possible pressure to reduce beef production.

Brexit would hit our cattle and beef sector hardest because Ireland accounted for 54% of UK imports of frozen beef, and close to 70% of UK imports of Fresh and Chilled Beef, in 2014.

Over the last 14 years, UK imports of beef have accounted for 25-30% of UK domestic use.

The EU27 (EU28 minus UK) would be a net exporter of about 200kt of beef, if the UK were to leave, rather than a net importer if the UK remained part of the block. This would likely lead to reduced EU beef prices.

The total value of UK agri-food imports in 2014 was 52.6 bn, while the value of UK agri-food exports was 25 bn. The UK runs a trade deficit in agri-food of about 27.6 bn.

The UK is a significant net importer across all categories of meat, with the exception of sheep meat.

Trade is dominated by imports from other EU countries, except in the case of sheep meat, where imports from New Zealand and Australia are dominant..

UK imports of pig meat are dominated by Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany, though Irelands share at 9% is still important.

In 2014, the UK accounted for about 3.6% of EU production of pig meat, and 6.4% of consumption.

As a large net importer of pig meat, the removal of the UK from the EU would probably lead to lower prices, as with beef.

Close to 90% of UK lamb exports are shipped to EU markets.

France alone took 50% of British exports in 2014. In the event of a Brexit resulting in increased barriers to trade faced by UK exporters of lamb, this would result in reduced competition for Irish lamb exports on the French and other continental EU markets.

Ireland accounted for 28% of the value of UK cheese imports, with France, Germany and Italy 17%, 11% and 10% on respectively.

UK exports of cheese are also of significant value (about 500 m in 2014). Ireland accounted for 26% of the value of all UK cheese exports in 2014.

UK butter imports are also dominated by trade with Ireland. Ireland accounted for over 50% of the value of UK butter imports in 2014.

The beverage sector is the principal net export category within the UKs agri-food trade.

UK beverage exports are dominated by exports of spirits, (such as whisky and gin), while UK beverage imports are dominated by wine.

UK exports are mostly to non-EU destinations, while imports of beverages are dominated by EU countries, though UK wine imports also have a significant non-EU component.

The Teagasc Brexit study looked at the trade effects. There are at least two other major issues.

One is the effect of Brexit on the UK economy.

If the UK economy declines by 6% (as is forecast by the UK treasury in its report last week) then the volume and price of food imports demanded are likely to decline on top of any decline because of trade arrangements.

A second issue is that of currency. Will sterling go up or down ?

I wouldnt be writing this if I could forecast that outcome and many millions have been made and lost on currency speculation. But it is a further uncertainty.

Of course sterling fluctuates at present, while Britain remains an EU member. But Brexit could lead to a once-off appreciation or depreciation in the value of sterling.
Meanwhile, Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney said significant progress has been made towards access to the Chinese market for Irish beef, with the lifting of the BSE ban by China in February 2015, and an inspection visit by a delegation from the Chinese governments AQSIQ agency to Ireland in January 2016.

Mr Coveney said the US market took 700 tonnes with a value of 6m of Irish beef in the first three months of this year, and 1,800 tonnes worth 14m in 2015.

His Department remains engaged with the US authorities to allow for extension of beef exports to include manufacturing beef/Beef Intended for Grinding.

Beef trade openings are being pursued in several other countries with steps been taken towards the re-opening of the Israeli market for beef exports, following an audit visit to approve selected plants in February, 2016.

And a delegation from South Korea is expected to conduct a systems audit visit regarding beef access in May.

Other market access opportunities being actively pursued at present include beef access for Vietnam, pigmeat access for Mexico and beef and pigmeat access for the Ukraine.

Last week, Bord Bia, the Department of Agriculture, and 17 Irish food companies, begin a three-day trade mission to Iran, the first from Ireland since international sanctions were lifted earlier this year.

Access for Irish beef to Iran was secured in April 2012 and the Department has been engaged in bilateral contact with Iranian authorities for some time to finalise arrangements to allow for the opening of the sheepmeat trade.

Minister Coveney said, Officials from my department will also take the opportunity to visit Ankara for discussions with Turkish counterparts where we are seeking to advance the market access approval for live exports of Irish cattle amongst other things.

A departmental delegation is also going to Morocco and Algeria to discuss bilateral trade, including the opening of those markets for live cattle from Ireland.
According to the annual report for 2015 of the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland, it had received 1,221 written complaints in relation to 924 advertisements.

The authority found around 8% were in breach of its code of standards for advertising and marketing communications.
It comes as residents and gardai brace themselves for fresh attacks by the Kinahan crime cartel on associates and members of the rival Hutch gang.

Garda sources believe the Kinahan cartel  which is so far blamed for five of the six murders in the feud  will continue until everyone involved in the Regency Hotel attack is dead.

Kihanan lieutenant David Byrne, from Crumlin, south Dublin, was shot dead in that assault on February 5.

Three of the four revenge murders  of Eddie Hutch on February 8, of innocent homeless man Martin ORourke on April 14, and of dissident republican Michael Barr on April 25  have occurred within a one-mile radius of Dublins east north inner city.

This is the heartland of the Hutch gang, which comprises members of the extended family and criminal associates.

Community leaders said the area was now smothering and living in fear of the next attack.

Marie Metcalfe, co-ordinator of the Community Policing Forum, said: We are having a community meeting on Friday morning and will issue a public statement on behalf of the community.

She said a range of projects and individuals were invited to attend, including the Inner City Organisations Network, the Local Drugs Task Force, the Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign, all the local drug projects, as well as local youth and employment services and groups.

We as a community feel we need to step up and do something for the safety of our community, she said.

The Kinahan gang wont stop, why would they? They feel badly hurt and they want to hurt this community really hard. Its completely out of hand.

She said the feud was of a different ferocity to the inner-city feud between two extended families that hit the area in the mid-to-late 2000s, resulting in five murders.

That feud was not like this. There was more control over that, but there is no control over this. Theres young fellas popping up with guns everywhere.

Ms Metcalfe co-ordinates the forum, which has been running since 1999, and includes representatives of the local community, gardai, the city council, as well as local councillors and TDs.

She said she and local independent TD Maureen OSullivan met Garda Commissioner Noirin OSullivan two weeks ago to discuss policing after the murder of Eddie Hutch.

I told her we need more gardai on the ground and that resources were low. She didnt agree with me on the resources issue.

However, she said that the commissioner did secure extra bicycle patrols after she told her gardai needed to be mobile and not on foot.

The main thing people want here is visibility, she said.

We are screaming for it. I work with community gardai and they are really great gardai, but theres just not enough of them. I feel sorry for them, they are tired and look worn out. They are trying their best.
Outgoing Environment Minister Alan Kelly launched a blistering attack on the proposed Fine Gael-Fianna Fail deal to suspend water charges, describing it as economic and political sabotage.

In an impassioned address to the Dail during a debate on the future of Irish Water, Mr Kelly accused Fianna Fail of environmental treason over its call to abolish charges. He warned that the proposed deal has echoes of the 1977 decision to abolish rates, which he said was a massive mistake.

Today I believe Fianna Fail are guilty of environmental treason and the Labour Party stands behind the important public service of water provision. Politics is failing the people of the country again. Utopian populism is winning again. Its groundhog day. We will regret it, just as we did in 77, he said.

Mr Kelly was speaking on behalf of the Labour Party which suffered significant losses in Februarys general election, primarily due to its stance on Irish Water.

Mr Kelly said the proposed suspension would make fools of the 950,000 homes who have paid their water bills.

Suggesting that there has been a fall-off in the numbers of people paying their water bills, Mr Kelly said Irish Water reported to him that, during the election, the payment rate actually increased and while not all the data was collected, it was likely that a payment rate of 70% was likely.

I am concerned that the deal between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael has not been made with any kind of engineering expertise or with the knowledge of the people who have to implement water investment. Did the negotiators even engage with Irish Water management? he said.

Mr Coveney defended the establishment of Irish Water. He told the Dail that Fine Gael will secure the future of Irish Water and oversee a charging system based on evidence and what is right.

Mr Coveney said water charges could be suspended for period of nine months while an independent commission, and then an Oireachtas committee, would look at a charging mechanism.
Judge Bryan McMahon made his comments as he criticised the governments failure to act on the recommendations of a working group he chaired which aimed to improve the rights and conditions of people in the asylum and direct provision systems.

Ten months on, implementation of the key recommendations has been slow and inadequately resourced, he said.

Regrettably, the living conditions and supports for the almost 5,000 people residing in direct provision, one quarter of whom are children, have not improved in any meaningful way.

The working group was set up by the justice minister in 2014 and reported last June with 173 recommendations for changes to law, policy, and practice.

One of the issues highlighted was people being caught in the system for anything up to 10 years awaiting a final determination of their asylum application.

For those housed in direct provision, that means years living under curfew in group settings with little privacy, no right to earn a living, set meal times with no access to cooking facilities, and crushing levels of boredom.

The working group said people should be processed within 12 months and anyone waiting five years or more should be granted leave to remain or protection status within six months apart from exceptional cases where crime or national security was an issue.

In the absence of any progress on this recommendation, Judge McMahon said a once-off gesture could be made to grant asylum to the 3,000 adults and children who have been in the system for at least five years.

These people are living in a kind of a limbo. It would be a good and courageous gesture that might tune nicely with the idealism of the men of 1916 weve been celebrating, he said.

Judge McMahon made his call at the publication by the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) of a review of progress  or lack thereof  on the working groups report.

Eugene Quinn, JRS national director and a member of the working group, warned that pressures on the asylum system were growing because of an increase in new arrivals. He said the very first stage of the application process, which took 15 weeks in 2014, now takes 30 weeks to complete.

He said despite the working groups damning criticisms of the direct provision system, a new direct provision centre had opened already this year.

His review also pointed to lack of progress on the right to work, conditions within direct provision, and the call for an increase in the weekly subsistence payment for adults of 19.10 per week.

There are no justifiable reasons for delaying the implementation of [the working groups] key recommendations, he said.

Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said earlier this month that 100 of the 173 recommendations had been addressed to some extent.

She said the asylum process is being streamlined to speed it up and the Reception and Integration Agency is exploring ways of improving direct provision centres.
The Department of Communications, Energy & Natural Resources confirmed the 275m scheme, which promised to deliver high-speed broadband to 750,000 homes and businesses by 2020, will not start as planned this year.

The plan aims to bring broadband to 85% of premises by 2018 and cover the entire country by 2020.

The contract for the scheme was due to be awarded later this year, but the department has said it will now not happen until early 2017.

As rollout of the plan will take between three and five years, the decision means the plan may not be completed until 2022  a decade after it was announced.

The department said it has received five bids for the first stage of the tender for the contract but stressed it was a complicated process. However, it said the broadband network remained a priority and it was seeking the fastest possible deployment.

Independent TD for Tipperary Mattie McGrath said the stalled plan was a death knell for rural communities.

Yet again, we are witnessing an absurd delay in the rollout of a scheme that was supposed to be up and running by 2020. It is now clearly apparent that no real appreciation of the fundamental importance of broadband for rural Ireland has ever really existed at government level, he said.

Galway-Roscommon Independent TD Michael Fitzmaurice said there was not much point including the revival of rural Ireland in any future programme for government if the broadband programme was held up for three to five years.

I am very disappointed to hear today that close to a million people in rural areas might have to wait up to six years for a proper broadband service. At present up to 40% of the country does not have a proper broadband service which is just not good enough, he said.

Director of policy at Ibec, Fergal OBrien, said the delay was disappointing and it underscored the need for a new government to be formed as soon as possible.

Dave McDonald, managing director of Nova Broadband, which provides high-quality broadband service in rural areas, said the delay was not surprising.

It comes as no surprise to me and I would expect that it wont be the last delay. The project is hugely ambitious  the State is pushing for fibre to every building in the State. Nothing like it has ever been done anywhere before.

This project is similar to rural electrification which took 30 years.

The State has a history of massively overrunning on budgets and time-frames on infrastructural projects and has no commercial mandate to operate efficiently, he said.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said that the telecom companies never agree to any of the arrangements suggested to them by the regulator for compensating the consumers.

New Delhi: TRAI on Thursday told the Supreme Court that it will take action against the Telcom companies for call drops to protect the interest of consumers as these service providers are not willing to compensate them.

"We need to ensure quality of service. We need to protect the interest of consumers. They (Telcos) don't want to invest. They don't want to compensate the consumers for call drop then what should we do. We have to take action," Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said.

Rohatgi, appearing for Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), before a bench of justices Kurian Joseph and R F Nariman, said that consumers needs to given some solace and the penalty imposed on the Telcos are "just the measure to make them pull up their boot straps". "Its not a penalty. Its just a measure to make them pull their boot straps. Consumer is ultimate master and he needs to be given some solace for the call drops which is pan India phenomenon," he said.

The bench after conclusion of the TRAI's argument asked the telecom operators to make any rejoinder arguments if any and posted the matter for further hearing on May 3. The regulatory body had on April 27 told the apex court that it has to safeguard 100 crore telecom subscribers and if companies agree to compensate call drops with equal number of free calls to consumers without pre-conditions then it is open to re-consider its direction imposing penalty on them.

It had said that the telecom companies never agree to any of the arrangements suggested to them by the regulator for compensating the consumers. 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.

TRAI has earlier told the apex court that 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.

The Delhi High Court had early this year upheld the October 16, 2015 decision of TRAI, making it mandatory for cellular operators to pay consumers one rupee per call drop experienced on their networks, subject to a cap of Rs 3 a day.
The airlines chief executive, Bjorn Kjos, flagged the new date during a meeting in Brussels with Ireland South MEP and member of the EU transport committee, Deirdre Clune.

Pending formal approval from the US Department of Transportation, Mr Kjos said the airlines Irish subsidiary, Norwegian Air International (NAI), is targeting an August 1 launch date for its proposed Cork to Boston flights. The airline is also planning to launch a Cork to New York service next year.

The earlier launch date comes just weeks after a breakthrough in its stalled foreign carrier permit application.

The US Department of Transportation announced on April 15 that there was no legal impediment to the granting of a permit to NAI under the terms of the EU-US Open Skies deal.

The decision triggered a consultation process which is due to conclude on May 13.

Objections are expected from various parties, including US legacy airlines and various labour unions in the US and Europe, which had objected to the application.

But it is expected that formal approval will be forthcoming before the White House has a week to sign off on the decision.

It is understood that 60 days must pass before the flights can start but the White House can waive this period.

Mr Kjos told me that the process of granting a licence will take time. But ultimately, he wants to begin flying from Cork to the US from August 1. The airline has also reaffirmed its commitment to fly from Shannon, said Ms Clune, who has written to transport commissioner Violeta Bulc urging her for continued support for the airlines plans.

NAI has insisted that it will only use Irish and EU-based crew on the transatlantic services.
It comes as householders could be set to receive more than 130m in refunds or credits amid talks of scrapping Irish Water. The charges are due to be suspended from July.

Under a Fianna Fail-Fine Gael deal due to be finalised today, the reintroduction of the controversial charges would have to be passed by the Dail which is highly unlikely given its current makeup.

Political parties also support refunding charges to those who paid water charges if the Irish Water is permanently scrapped.

However, those who have paid the charges could have to wait at least 18 months until the finding of an independent commission and a Dail committee before the possibility of any refund.

Another option being discussed is the possibility of introducing a credit system whereby those who have already paid fees may be given discounts if charges return in any form.

It comes as Environment Minister Alan Kelly launched a scathing attack on the Fine Gael-Fianna Fail agreement to suspend water charges claiming it would breach EU rules and would lead to severe water shortages in Dublin.

Describing the deal as environmental treason, Mr Kelly told the Dail: I believe we are about to witness the triumph of mediocrity over modernism, of short-termism over common sense and immaturity over innovation.

Last night both the Fianna Fail and Fine Gael parliamentary parties met to discuss a deal being hammered out by negotiators today.

Micheal Martin tried to play the notion of refunds down by telling the meeting that those who have not paid would be pursued.

Although Fine Gael are seen to have made the greatest concessions in the deal, last nights meeting was described as calm as Mr Kenny had rang a number of outspoken TDs beforehand.

It is understood the Taoiseach had pacified a number of his party members with promises of ministerial positions and other perks.

Members of the Independent Alliance as well as rural Independent TDs are on standby to re-enter talks with Enda Kennys party and could sit down for discussions tomorrow after receiving the minority government document which is set to be agreed by the two larger parties.

However, talks with Independents could extend into the weekend and early next week with many yesterday stating they would not simply be rubber stamping the Fianna Fail-Fine Gael document.

Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have all but come to an agreement on the water issue with the suspension of charges, which would be voted upon in the Dail. But the decision to end this suspension would also have to be voted on by the Dail which would be almost impossible to pass.

Under the deal an independent commission looking into Irish Water would sit for nine months before making recommendations on whether to retain, change or completely scrap water charges.

A cross-party Oireachtas committee would then be established to look into the issue and its findings would finally be referred to the Dail. The whole process is expected to take around 18 months.

Yesterday Richard Bruton said people would have to be refunded if the decision is made to scrap water charges completely.

This was echoed by Fianna Fails Billy Kelleher.
What faith Pearse must have had! He said that it was only by a sacrifice of blood Irelands soul could so awaken and he made it against all common sense, all advice.

Thus wrote Nancy Campbell in her diary of events in Dublin in 1916.

She was deeply moved and inspired by the motives and behaviours of the men who fought in the streets of the capital a century ago this week. What makes her fervour all the more interesting is the fact that she was English.

Nancy Maude met the poet Joseph Campbell during her visit to Ireland in 1909; she was the daughter of a colonel in the British army and grand-daughter of the Crown Equerry to Queen Victoria, he was a penniless Irish Catholic poet.

Her family strongly opposed their proposed marriage and when the wedding went ahead in 1910, Nancy became completely estranged from her family.

The couple set up house together in 1911 and their home near Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, became a gathering place for young poets.

The Campbell family presented Nancys and Joes personal papers to the library in Trinity College in the 1990s. Among them was a school copybook in which Nancy recorded, with great fluency and immediacy, her very immediate experience of the 1916 Rising.

What is most remarkable about this diary is the enthusiasm with which she spoke of the high principles and impeccable behaviour of the insurgents, from going to confession before going into battle, to their insistence on writing receipts for money taken to purchase necessities while occupying the Four Courts.

St Stephens Green, where Nora Costigan found herself locked in as rebels took over at the start of the Rising.

The letter opens as follows: The first we knew of the Rising was that the letters and the papers did not come on Tuesday morning. The wildest rumours were the only news.

We heard the GPO was in the hands of the Volunteers.

Of course one had to find out more so we decided to drive into Bray that afternoon, and Joseph to go on into Dublin if he could get a train. (Some said there were trains and some that the lines were all up).

Joseph, Gilly [their son] and I started off, Bray looked much as usual, except people were talking in the street.

My heart is with them this day in the city, we heard one man say.

At the station, we heard the Harcourt St train was running but Westland Row was not.

Later, she tells of how Joseph helped a dying Volunteer while under fire. The wounded man had been hit inside St Stephens Green and collapsed on a seat inside the railing.

Together with another man, Joseph Campbell tried to get in, advising his wife to get away to a station as soon as she could, with volleys of fire going off from one couldnt see where. She and Gilly were approaching the corner of Harcourt St on their way to the train when more firing started just overhead.

I saw a motor turn back and make off down Harcourt Street, and everyone scurry into doorways, she wrote.

Meanwhile, Joseph and another man had hoisted their handkerchiefs on sticks and gone to the park railing as all the gates were barricaded. He got over and after moving the barricades, the seat was carried off like a stretcher to Mercers Hospital with the wounded man on it.

A priest turned up and gave the poor man absolution but Joseph thinks he was dead by the time they got him in  his jaw was shot away, wrote Nancy.

She contrasted the spiritually impoverished public school version of honour, evident in the behaviour of the British troops, with the chivalric honour  the true human democracy  of the Irish side.

They were all prepared for months  the leaders at any rate  I hear, for death (they took communion before they started) in the GPO.

And elsewhere they were kneeling at prayer and being confessed (the priests were grand the way they risked their lives among them) all through the fighting, she wrote.

All the prisoners they took were treated with every consideration  there was no class or creed or sex among them  they fought almost, it seems to me, as spirits might have fought.

Jane Maxwell is principal curator in the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library in Trinity College Dublin. This article has been adapted from her entry in Trinitys blog, Changed Utterly, which told the story of different experiences of 1916 from papers in its archive. www.tcd.ie/Library/1916/
However, they could be breaking the law, under the Surveillance Act of 2009, if they dont warn people that they are being filmed.

Garda Representative Association president, Dermot OBrien, said he was aware that some gardai had purchased the recorders online.

He said he had a distinct worry that gardai using them could be putting themselves in a precarious position with regard to the law, but understood why they want to carry them.

Garda OBrien said that if the recorder was lost during a struggle, the footage could be posted online by an unscrupulous person, and the garda could face disciplinary action.

Garda OBrien spoke after GRA delegates were addressed by a police officer who was instrumental in making their use commonplace in British police forces.

Inspector Stephen Goodier said they were introduced in Britain, on a trial basis, in 2007, but that now 56,000 frontline police used them every day.

Insp Goodier said they had many advantages, not least that judges used the footage to give out more appropriate sentences. And when culprits realised their actions were on tape, they usually pled guilty.

Low-level criminals can also be interviewed on film on the spot, instead of having to be taken to the police station. He also said complaints against police had dropped by up to 30%.

He said there were national guidelines on the use of the videos, and covert recording was not allowed.

It doesnt replace traditional evidence-gathering, it enhances it. Officers cant delete, or tamper with, any videos, he said.

Insp Goodier said legislation would probably have to be altered in Ireland for the recorders to be used and he questioned why the gardai hadnt been equipped with them. Youre not doing it when rest of the world is? Inspector Goodier asked.

Meanwhile, Garda OBrien said garda management should put a policy in place to assist when gardai were attacked online.

Management needs to urgently provide us with support guidance and, most importantly of all, protection, he said.
Representatives from garda divisions of DMR South Central (Dublin), Sligo, and Donegal sought the suspension of standing orders to discuss why the central executive had recommended acceptance of a new roster when it was clear the majority of rank-and-file gardai did not want it.

A nationwide ballot had been taken on the roster and it had been rejected by 70% of GRA members.

GRA president Dermot OBrien advised that two thirds of delegates attending yesterdays conference in Killarney would have to vote in favour of suspending standing orders for any likely debate on the issue.

A show of hands was just short of the two thirds required and Mr OBrien ruled there would be no debate.

His decision sparked shouts from the floor of scandalous and youre trying to stifle debate amid demands for a recount.

Mr OBrien said he had to secure legal advice before a decision was made, and a few minutes later ruled he would permit a debate.

Garda Alan Cummins, based in Kilmainham, said the majority of central executive members sitting at the top table had failed to recognise grassroots demands.

Letterkenny-based Garda John Monahan claimed there was a serious disconnect between the central executive committee and those they represent.

I couldnt go back to my members and say we did not address the elephant in the room, he said.

There is serious disconnect but it can be remedied.

Cork City-based central executive committee member Garda Michael Corcoran, among the minority at the top table against the roster changes, urged there be no split.

He said the time for fighting was over and all GRA members should focus their attention on the battle with government to get their pay restored to pre-2008 levels.

Garda Jim Mulligan, from Blackrock, Dublin, said delegates needed to deal with the issue and move on.

Several more gardai said it was healthy to debate the issue but delegates should not lose sight of the main goal of recouping the 23% pay cut they had taken in the last eight years.

In Cork, we want our pay back by whatever means we can take, Bandon-based Garda Mary Galvin said, to much applause.

Park the roster (issue) and concentrate on pay restoration. We have to go out of here as a united force, her colleague Martin Hegarty said.

The GRA president wrapped up the discussion when he said debate is healthy. Mr OBrien added: We will be united walking out the door and a force to be reckoned with.

The GRA is also fighting to secure pay parity for recruits who entered the force after October 1, 2013.

Limerick-based Garda Cathal OGorman said the GRA should make a gesture to the recruits by cutting their subscriptions by 75% and keep the cut at that level until the battle for parity was won.
Just turning up on the Price Register as selling for 975,000 is Kitchen Cove, Ahakista, a glorious seaside bolt-hole with its own beach and pier and five acres of grounds, facing Graham Nortons own Georgian holiday house on Dunmanus bay.

When it went to market in July 2014, with a guiding price of 1.2m, Norton who now has 1.18m Twitter followers tweeted anybody looking for a house?, providing a link to Kitchen Coves sale website.

It prompted lots of likes and retweets, and drove online traffic to Skibbereen estate agent Charles P McCarthys website. Digital traffic jumped up from 30 hits one day, to 5,500 the next  the phones started to ring, and viewings were booked, from home and away.

However, the eventual buyer didnt come from overseas but is understood to be an Irish family, based on the East Coast, and into watersports.

Local sources say the new owners sold a family-owned, Irish brand company last year in a multi-million euro deal, but auctioneer Mr McCarthy declined to comment or confirm the reports, other than to say the buyer was indeed an Irish family.

The exposure Graham Norton gave it definitely increased the profile, but it didnt bring the purchaser at the end. I showed this to him in 2014, and hed been looking for a coastal property like this, not necessarily in Ahakista, and he bought it, said Mr McCarthy.

However, even if Graham Norton doesnt get to share a finders fee, or a sellers commission, he played a part in linking another celeb to Ahakista living: Californian Simpsonsartist Harry Shearer, who voices characters such as Mr Burns, Smithers, and Principal Skinner bought in Ahakista after appearing on the Graham Norton Show.

The vendors of the upgraded farmhouse-style Kitchen Cove have UK and Irish roots, bought it off-market in 2002.
Although some members of the party had been critical of the suspension of water charges earlier in the day, last nights meeting was described as calm with members speaking of the deal with Fianna Fail in a dispassionate manner.

As the Fianna Fail and Fine Gael negotiation teams closed in on a deal which would see charges put on hold while an independent commission examines the future of Irish Water, the prospect of a minority government edged closer.

Members of Fine Gaels parliamentary party met for around four hours yesterday afternoon with discussions centred around the deal which is expected to be finalised when the party negotiators meet again today.

A Fine Gael minister said there was an atmosphere of ambition during the meeting in which many members spoke in a bid to gain the attention of Mr Kenny.

One party member said: The first 10 or 15 speakers were definitely making sure that they were 100% supportive, but towards the end speakers were more muted.

Dara Murphy, Patrick ODonovan, Simon Harris and Mary Mitchel-OConnor were among those who stood up to strongly back the acting Taoiseach during the meeting and perhaps will be hoping for a promotion.

The suspension of water charges is a major climb-down for the party who had campaigned to retain the controversial levy in the lead up to the election.

Before the meeting it is understood chief whip Paul Kehoe contacted a number of newly elected TDs to ensure they towed the party line. Mr Kenny is also believed to have rang a number of outspoken TDs in recent days.

It is understood the acting Taoiseach pacified a number of his party members with promises of ministerial positions and other perks.

Although a number of party stalwarts did express their opposition to the deal one TD described it as a very general debate, it was not emotional, we dealt with the issues in a disciplined fashion and looked at the options.

We maintain our line that Irish Water is a single utility and we are also in favour of retaining charges, the commission will make its recommendations and we will take it from there.

Earlier in the day Regina Doherty admitted the party had made a hames of the introduction of water charges and the establishment of Irish Water.

Ms Doherty said: We made a hames of an awful lot with regard to Irish Water and we have rued those mistakes and thats why we find ourselves in the position that we are in now.

We are still having a single authority that is going to look after the national programme of investment in water and water infrastructure thats a really good thing. We are going to start an educational programme which we really should have started from day one.

The whole premise of starting to charge for water was so that we could educate people to the value of water, the amount of water we use so that if we use less we could have to treat less and the overall cost would come down, she told RTEs News at One programme.
In a highly critical analysis of the waste management companys health impact assessment (HIA), Anthony Staines, professor of health systems at Dublin City University, said its authors do not appear to be familiar with HIA processes, although the document is entitled health impact assessment.

What has been done in this report is not any recognised form of HIA. Nor is it a proper data-based risk assessment,said Prof Staines.

Speaking on behalf of the environmental group Chase (Cork Harbour Area for a Safe Environment) on day seven of the Ringaskiddy incinerator oral hearing, Prof Staines, an expert in environmental epidemiology, said he could see no documentation that shows quantification of risk, only lots of documentation that says it cannot be done.

However, there is no reason why a proper HIA could not be done, he said, adding that data sources, though lacking, are certainly adequate to support such an assessment.

Prof Staines contrasted the in-depth evaluation that had been done on the Natura protected areas, where a systematic view of the effects of heavy minerals on animal species compared unfairly to the evaluation of the effects on human health. He said he would expect the same depth of evaluation to be given to human health.

Prof Staines said there was no risk assessment in the HIA, and as the name suggests, a core part of a HIA is a risk assessment.

Rory Mulcahy, counsel for Indaver, said what was set out in its assessment was in accordance with best practice.

Dr Martin Hogan, occupational health specialist and expert witness on behalf of Indaver, said the sections of the report referred to by Prof Staines were not representative of the entire EIS, a large document he did not wish to make even larger by reinstating large portions of information contained in other chapters.

Dr Hogan previously told An Bord Pleanalas hearing that extensive modelling and experience with similar facilities meant we can be confident that there will be negligible impact on human health of the proposed facility.

In a separate submission, Monkstown resident Bob McLaughlin said he had concerns about the manner in which An Bord Pleanala operates.

Bob McLaughlin

He said while the inspector who presided over an oral hearing heard all views first hand and formed an opinion based on those views, the ultimate decision on a planning application, which may or may not accord with the inspectors recommendation, was made by the board, who never attended the hearing.

Bernadette Connolly, development co-ordinator with Cork Environmental Forum, said incineration poses a risk on many fronts.

Bernadette Connolly, Corl Environmental Forum

It will negate efforts to date to bring about behavioural change, waste prevention and increase preferred options on the waste hierarchy. The risk is also about Ireland lagging behind and losing out on the opportunity that exists for resource recovery and waste prevention, she said.

The hearing continues.
An emergency travel warning was published on the website of the US embassy in Turkey warning of credible threats to tourist areas, in particular to public squares and docks in Istanbul and Antalya.

US citizens are advised to exercise extreme caution if they are in the vicinity of such areas.

The Department of Foreign Affairs here is also advising people to exercise a high degree of caution.

It suggested the threat from terrorism in the country remains high.

We strongly advise against travelling to the border areas between Turkey and Syria in light of the current instability in the region, in particular the provinces of Hatay, Kilis, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, and Mardin.

The Turkish military have operations along the Turkish border with Iraq and you are strongly advised against all travel to the border provinces of Hakkari and Sirnak, it stated.

In addition, we would recommend against travel to the Siirt, Tunceli, and Diyarbakir provinces.

The department warned that vigilance is required in tourist areas such as Taksim Square in Istanbul and locations close to police and military installations which may be targets for terrorist attacks.

Irish citizens are also advised to avoid large public gatherings and all demonstrations.

Visitors should also remain vigilant when using public transport, particularly the metro systems in Istanbul and Ankara.
In one instance, it almost cost an individual 47,000 until a bank stepped in to query a money transfer, and the transaction was stopped.

A solicitor, who asked not to be named, said his firm undertook a full review of its IT security systems after being targeted by the scam last week.

He said he became aware yesterday that at least two more firms have been targeted by what he described as a complex and sophisticated cyber attack.

Emails are being sent from individuals in one legal firm to people in their contacts list, requesting them to click on an attachment, which in turn requests the payment of an invoice or the transfer of certain funds to certain accounts.

The solicitor said the emails look legitimate.

However, this scam can intercept emails querying the first request, and assures the target that the transfer request is genuine.

The solicitor said he knows of at least one individual who queried, by email, the validity of the initial request, accepted the email assurance it was genuine, transferred funds, and was about to transfer 47,000 until his bank stepped in and stopped it.

Cybersecurity expert Anthony OMara, the vice-president of Malwarebytes EMEA, said this type of cyber attack is pretty rampant around the world right now.

This kind of incident highlights the need for online vigilance, he said.

Where do we keep our valuables today? Online. We have to have same vigilance for what we keep online as we do for what we keep at home.

People should update their operating systems and install anti-malware products on their systems which can spot these attacks and lock down the systems.

He described this particular incident as a social engineering scam, whereby scammers can copy and mirror legitimate email addresses and send fraudulent emails to various targets.

He said the criminals behind such scams can also combine it with malicious code which can be injected into the targeted IT system.
Mumbai: There were reports that Shah Rukh would play a love guru in Gauri Shindes film, but the actor dismissed it.

I am not playing a love guru in the film. Its a slice- of-life film. So, typical hero-heroine will not be there in the film, Shah Rukh told PTI.

Its a very interesting and different film. I have never done a slice-of-life kind of film, he said.

The 50-year-old star indicated that he is not doing a cameo in the film.

Its a 42-43 day film and I have done a lot of work in it. I am playing one of the protagonists. But I cant take away from the importance of other guys and girls, he said.

Shah Rukh also said he enjoyed working with Alia.

I liked working with Alia and Gauri, it was great fun, he added.
The swoop was part of special investigations of risky sectors, including construction, the rental market, and the licensed trade.

The 642.5m raised from the compliance investigations fed into an overall collection of 45.79bn by Revenue in 2015. This represented the fifth successive annual increase in returns to the exchequer and the second biggest on record.

The Revenue Annual Report for 2015 showed the rise was driven by surges in Corporation Tax (up 49%), Capital Gains Tax (up 28%), and Vat (up 7%).

Revenue chairman Niall Cody said they would be examining Irish links to the so-called Panama Papers  files exposing offshore funds squirrelled away by businesses and people around the world.

The report said there was a 5% rise in yield from audit and compliance investigations, totalling 642.5m. It said there were 360 open compliance interventions under its medical consultants project in 2015, 170 of which were closed.

The interventions resulted in tax settlements of almost 23m, compared to 16m in 2014, up 44%.

The report noted since the project began, a total of 639 compliance interventions had been conducted on medical consultants.

It added: Revenue continues to open compliance interventions in the medical consultants sector and expects to conclude further significant settlements during the course of 2016.

It said the rise in overall returns  up 11% to 46bn  reflected a strong trading performance supported by increasing domestic consumption and investment.

The number of contracts rose by 16% and the value by 10% to 31.7m. Companies wound up via creditor voluntary liquidations fell by 27% and, through court orders, by 37% while receiverships dropped by 49%.

It said many businesses and individuals still experienced financial hardship and that outstanding debt increased by 7% to 117m.

The report said 67.9m units in illicit cigarettes (worth 34m) were seized, compared to 53m in 2014. There were 4,826 drug seizures worth 23m.
Coroner Dr Michael Kennedy was told yesterday that Geraldine Clancy, 58, and her daughter Louise, 22, from the townland of Leitrim, near Kilworth, Fermoy, in Co Cork, both died from acute cardiorespiratory failure due to drowning after their car was involved in a collision with another car on the Fermoy to Ballyduff road at about 11am on December 22 last.

They had been on their way to finish last-minute Christmas shopping in Fermoy, and were about one kilometre from their home, when the Ford Focus in which they were travelling was in collision with another car which emerged from a side road at Ballyderown.

Their car was pushed through a gap in a stone wall, and plunged into a flooded field alongside the river Blackwater, landing on its roof. The mother and daughter were trapped inside.

The field and its dyke were flooded to a depth of up to four feet after several days of sustained heavy rain.

Even more tragically, Ms Clancys husband, Noel, arrived at the scene in his tractor within minutes in a bid to help pull the upturned car from the water, only to discover that it was his wife and daughter who were trapped inside.

Despite heroic efforts by emergency services and paramedics, the two women were pronounced dead at the scene.

Inspector Joe OConnor told the inquest at Mallow courthouse yesterday that a Garda file on the incident has been forwarded to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

He said criminal proceedings are being considered and he applied for, and was granted, an adjournment of the inquests pending directions from the office of the DPP.

On the direction of Dr Kennedy, the inquest heard evidence of identification and cause of death only.

Insp OConnor read into the record extracts from statements by Mr Clancy relating to identification of the victims, and from Sgt James Hallahan and Det Garda Denis Ryan, who were among the first to respond to the incident that morning.

Assistant State pathologist, Dr Margot Bolster, who conducted postmortem examinations on the bodies of the two victims, then outlined the causes of death.

Dr Kennedy told Mr Clancy, who attended the brief hearing, that the proceedings will allow for the issuing of death certificates for the two victims in due course.

Both the coroner and Insp OConnor then expressed their sincere sympathies to Mr Clancy and his family on what they described as a terrible tragedy.
Photo of Mark Wickham & Volunteers enrolment card

On June 3, 1914, like hundreds of young Cork men had done before him, Mark Wickham from Merchants Quay signed up to the Irish Volunteers in the city.

The 18-year-old posed for a photograph in his Volunteers uniform the next year.

In late 1914, a split in the organisation had left most early members in the city supporting the National Volunteers of John Redmond, who asked young men to join the British Army fighting in Europe.

The Cork Brigade of the reduced Irish Volunteers was at this stage under the command of Tomas MacCurtain. By Easter 1916, Mark was adjutant of C Company in the Cork City battalion, in which his younger brother Michael, 17, was also a member.

________

Arms fund poster

In order to arm themselves for potential conflict  particularly with ongoing threat of Ulster Volunteers resisting Home Rule with violence  fundraisers were held.

This poster advertises a collection in Cork in October 1915, the proceeds to go towards arming and training local Volunteers, whose numbers were expanding as public support of the war diminished.

_____________

Letter from Lord Mayors office & postcard signed J Hales

The arrest of thousands of Volunteers around the country was ordered after the rebellion ended in Dublin on April 29.

Although Cork Volunteers did not take part in the Rising  when rifles from Germany could not be landed  dozens were arrested in the city and county. In a likely case of mistaken identity, Marks tinsmith father  also Mark  was arrested on May 8.

Responding to family inquiries about his status, Lord Mayor Thomas Butterfields secretary wrote that he had been told by military in Cork that he was informed by the police that arms, ammunition, seditious literature and a book on high explosives was found in his possession and further that it was reported that he was a member of the Sinn Fein Organisation.

Men from Cork were held, at first, in the military detention facility at Victoria Barracks (Collins Barracks today) from where this postcard was smuggled.

Require Nothing except a few papers, Daily Mail or Examiner, wrote J Hales.

Sean Hales was from one of the leading Volunteers families in West Cork, and was later a member of Dail Eireann. He took the anti-Treaty side and was shot dead in Dublin during the Civil War in December 1922.

______

Scrap of paper with note & typed note from Richmond Barracks

Like many prisoners, Mark managed to smuggle this note out to his wife Hannah after being moved to Dublin. It was addressed simply to H Wickham, Merchants Quay.

Dear Wife, Dont Fret  I am alright with the boys Here in Richmond Barracks. Let Mark & Michael mind the work. I expect to be home soon. Mark. I miss my pipes very much.

Presumably for the person carrying the message, he wrote on the back: Dear Tom, Send this to my house & hope your mother is well. Your father was fretting very much but we done our best to cheer him up.

Attempts to reply to him at Richmond may have proved fruitless, as he had been removed with nearly 300 others to Wakefield in England, as conveyed to his family four days in a letter from Richmond Barracks on May 17.

Internment Order & Envelope From Wakefield

Mark Wickham senior was transferred to Frongoch in Wales, a prisoner-of-war camp which previously held German soldiers. It was converted to accommodate hundreds of Irish men after the Rising.

The order authorising Marks internment stated that he is of hostile association and a member of an organisation called the Irish Volunteers or of an organisation called the Citizen Army, which have promoted armed insurrection against His Majesty, and is reasonably suspected of having favoured, promoted or assisted in armed insurrection against His Majesty.

Prisoners letters home were all opened and checked by censors, and the envelopes labelled Prisoners of War. On this torn envelope that carried a letter to Hannah, the sender information on the back was signed: Mark Wickham, Irish Prisoner of War, South Camp, Frongoch, Wales _________________

Telegram & Wickham shop, 1921

Like the bulk of those interned at Frongoch, Mark was released in July 1916. This telegram is bringing the good news to his family from another detainee. Leaving Frongoch for home  with Mark.

Mark Wickham junior continued his involvement in the Volunteers, as well as being a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He served as an officer of the citys 1st Battalion B company, including a time as captain, until December 1920. A month later he was arrested and in February, he was interned on Spike Island.

The family shop on Merchants Quay was forced to shut by military order on June 29, 1921, and the family ordered to live in the Bandon district. On July 11,1921, the Truce that ended the War of Independence came into effect.
Reports that two other boys outside the Community Centre in Kileely Court in Limerick carried out the attack are under investigation.

As a result of the assault, the boy sustained bruising to his face, eye, arms and head.
David Mahon had arrived at Coolock Garda Station after ringing to say: It was me.

Memos of his statements to gardai were being read to the jury yesterday at the Central Criminal Court.

Mr Mahon, aged 46, has pleaded not guilty to murdering Dean Fitzpatrick, aged 23, on May 26, 2013, just over a day after the deceased interfered with his bicycle to annoy him.

The father of one received a stab wound to the abdomen at Burnell Square, Northern Cross, Dublin.

Garda Noel Brodigan testified he answered a call from a man at Coolock station on May 26. This man identified himself as David Mahon, he said. He said: It was me that did it. I didnt know he was dead. I just heard it on the news this morning.

The caller accepted the invitation to the station and arrived a short time later.

The man said he and the deceased had an argument in his apartment the night before. He was asked what they were arguing about.

Hes just an eejit. We were always arguing. He was always putting it up to me, he said. I was trying to put him on the straight and narrow. He took a knife. He pulled a knife on me before, a gun before. I took it off him. I put it into my back pocket.

He said his friend, John McCormack, took Mr Fitzpatrick out of the apartment. He said he followed them.

I took out the knife and said: What are you doing, pulling a knife on your father? And he walked into the knife. He was putting it up to me and he walked into the knife.

A pathologist earlier gave evidence that Mr Fitzpatrick could have run onto a knife being held by Mr Mahon.

Dr Michael Curtis testified he carried out an autopsy on the deceased. He said Mr Fitzpatrick had essentially bled to death from a single stab wound to his abdomen.

Remy Farrell, prosecuting, asked him about the possibility of a run-on, where someone was holding a knife and another person advanced onto it.

This is a location in the body where that could happen, he said.

He said that it would be more likely to be deliberate if the wound tracked steeply upwards or steeply downwards. He said that this had tracked only slightly upwards, so it could be either.

The trial continues.
IF ever there was a film to shake up the Cannes Festival, then Son of Saul did that last year. Weve all seen Holocaust dramas, though never one quite like this. Hungarian first-time film-maker Laszlo Nemes took out the festivals Grand Prix and Critics prizes and went on to win the Oscar and Golden Globe for foreign film.

At the Oscars, Nemes thanked Hungary for financing the 1.5m production, which won the country its first foreign-language award since the fall of communism. France, Austria, Germany, and Israel had turned it down.

I want to share this with Geza Rohrig, my main actor, and the incredible cast and crew who believed in this project when no one else did, Nemes told the crowd. You know, even in the darkest hours of mankind there might be a voice within us that allows us to remain human. Thats the hope of this film.

In our earlier interview Nemes, who is Jewish  his maternal great-grandparents died in the camps  explained how his film is different from other films about the atrocity.

Most stories of the Holocaust are about survival, but the very heart and the feeling of it has never really been approached. I have always been very interested in what it was like really to be there, because everything is so coloured and changed in hindsight.

DAY IN THE LIFE

Son of Saul places us in an Auschwitz extermination camp as we follow a day and a half in the life of Saul Auslander (Rohrig), a Sonderkommando who, like other select Jewish prisoners is allowed to live for a few months if he works in the gas chambers. Little is known of these men. They are in many ways the walking dead.

When I came across the writings of the Sonderkommando in the Auschwitz scrolls I was transported into the middle of it, Nemes recalls.

These men were forced to burn their own people and they made writings before dying. They knew they would be liquidated and put those notes into the ground. Those notes were found after the war.

They described their daily tasks like taking out personal belongings and sorting them out; how the work was organised; the rules by which the camp was run and Jews exterminated; as well as how they put together a certain form of resistance.

In the story, Saul seeks a kind of redemption by adopting the corpse of a boy as his own son and pulling out all the stops to bury him. He knows he is about to die in any case, so what if they kill him over it?

Saul is more involved in making sure his soul survives than his body, and the way you nurture your soul is to give to somebody else, Nemes says. So he wants to bury this boy, he wants to do something for someone else. Its a selfless orientation.

Nemes, 39, is the son of a theatre director and was born in Budapest.

Director Laszlo Nemes with his Oscar.

He left Hungary with his mother when he was 12 and grew up in Paris, where he made horror films in the family basement. He studied at the Sorbonne, then at the Tisch School at NYU, where he met Rohrig.

At 26, he returned to Hungary to learn the ropes of film-making and worked for two years with the very artful Bela Tarr. He spent eight years preparing Son of Saul with Rohrig, who had initially studied to become a rabbi, before pursuing an eclectic career as a poet, teacher, actor, and one-time punk rocker.

Although a fan of horror movies, Nemes knew he couldnt present the story, which he co-wrote with Clara Royer, in this manner.

It would be a scandal. But if you restrain it, make it narrow, and make it personal, an individual story, then you rely on the viewer and their imagination.

Nemes keeps the dialogue  in languages including Hungarian and Yiddish  to a minimum. The industrial sounds and atmospheric monochromatic look give an eerie sense of foreboding. When the image is not there to give you a lot of information, the sounds can say much more. Its a huge machine; its like a beast. Its moving and never sleeps. It has a dynamic quality to it. Its living, the death is living there.

Nemes says his film is a mixture of chaos and organisation, exactly like the camp and we witness that through Sauls eyes. How was it for Rohrig to be the focus of attention during the entire movie?

WORK OR DIE

You get used to it, Rohrig, 48, admits. My job was to be present and not to bring any of my own personality from today. I had to be from 1944. There was no job description for the Sonderkommando. The way it happened there was a first selection, where you either went to the gas chambers or you were found to be fit to work. Then there was a second selection; the men were lined up naked and they picked people for the Sonderkommando, who were quarantined and separated from the rest of the camp.

What choice did they have? Once they figured out what their work would be, some did commit suicide, but others felt strong enough to go on and try to survive. The only way to do it was to desensitise your whole being: To not see what you see and to not hear what you hear and to go through the day minute by minute.

UNIVERSAL ISSUE

For both Nemes and Rohrig, the story is universal and not just about the Second World War. Its about human suffering, says the actor. If our parents were being murdered, if our children were being taken away, wed react the same. This is not a Jewish issue only. I hope that people respond to this film because the level of cruelty, inhumanity, savagery and bestiality that was present in the camps, unfortunately we cant say is behind us, given whats happening in the world at the moment.

Nemes adds: We are talking in the film about genocide and whats going on in Syria and Iraq is comparable to genocide.

Does he feel guilty to feel happy about his films extraordinary reception? No, because its not happiness. Ive been living in there in a sense. Now it gives hope but its been a tough job.

Son of Saul opens in selected cinemas tomorrow, and will show at Triskel in Cork on May 22-25
A backlash against the suspension of water charges for the foreseeable future began yesterday as politicians recoiled at the idea of trying to explain if peoples money had gone down the drain or whether there would in fact be repayments for those who footed their bills. Before the ink is even dry on a minority government deal between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, serious questions remain about undoing the botched water charge system and the future of water services in Ireland.

Already, the discussion has turned to the funding gap that will open up when people stop paying. Furthermore, there are questions about how long this commission on water charges will run for. The Norths commission on water charges sat for several years, eventually seeing them out there.

Other issues that arise include how charges would be reset, if at all; what happens to the conservation grant or free 100 given to homes across the country; will any new billing system be put on hold until full metering is complete nationwide and, most importantly, how in Gods name any charging system for any service from water to bins to housing can ever be rolled out again in this country?

Its an unenviable task, having to go back to the blackboard and invent the water services system all over again. That is what this commission will now be tasked with doing.

Nonetheless, with the agreement between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail that Irish Water can continue its job, it could be quite difficult changing the path of that colossal quango.

Irish Water has been as much part of the problem alongside the fiasco of water bills. Gold-plated salaries and bonuses, water legislation that was rammed through the Dail and a system of environmental conservation that was, in truth, just an EU-enforced flat tax for banking debt, ie the bailout deal. These were some of the problems with water and reasons why over 100,000 people  of all backgrounds  one weekend marched in Dublin at the height of opposition to water charges.

Enda Kenny tried to play down concerns, to make it sound affordable. Last year, he suggested to a man that the cost of two pints would cover 10 weeks of charges. It didnt work.

Given the bashing the Fine Gael-Labour coalition got in the 2014 local elections on the back of the criticism on water charges, the argument on the national stage was lost.

So what are the implications now for Fine Gael, as well as Fianna Fail, on both sides conceding their positions for a government deal? Fianna Fail look set to accept that Irish Water will stay while Fine Gael, in government, are willing to suspend water charges for up to two years. The bigger climbdown though seems to be on Fine Gaels side.

Fianna Fail have run rings around Fine Gael. For weeks now, we were told from Fine Gael that water charges were non-negotiable in any minority government talks. Then both parties got up on their high stools this week and were throwing out hints of an election. It got very close. There were whispers around Leinster House that the date was May 20.

Fine Gael backed down, knowing full well the implications of fighting a fresh election on paying water charges. Running a campaign with Mr Kenny as leader was also a concern.

Instead, the party of law and order have now aligned themselves with demands from the left. Albeit, they have not agreed to scrap charges, but Fine Gaels cave-in to suspend charges they backed to the hilt during the last election will damage them.

Not surprisingly, the same matters which peppered the debates around the initial setting up of Irish Water and the bills system are likely to return over the coming months and year. This was conceded by Fine Gael TD Regina Doherty in the Dail yesterday.

The Meath East TD said that she found the whole argument about funding water services from a levy or through other direct taxation as strange. The debate about whether you pay out of the left pocket or the right pocket was bizarre.

Instead, TDs would be here in nine months time still debating EU rules about charges and stating the same arguments, Ms Doherty said, about conservation and levying systems.

Admitting that special exemptions were needed for certain communities, she also admitted that in reality Fine Gael had dragged along law abiding people into paying water bills. We can expect a lot of humble apologies to perplexed voters and constituents from Fine Gael over the bank holiday weekend. Thereafter, it is likely to take a number of days to decide the detail on how water bills will be suspended and how a commission will be set up.

Labours Alan Kelly pulled no punches yesterday when warning of the uncharted waters ahead. The clearly angered outgoing environment minister said those who had paid their bills were about to be made fools of. Furthermore, the row back on water charges would mark political, economic and environmental sabotage. Mr Kellys view clearly reflects the frustration of Labour, who took a battering in two elections over water charges but are now watching a complete u-turn unfold while out of government.

Fine Gael TDs even admitted yesterday that freezing bills would be fatal for the system. Wexford TD Michael DArcy said that charges would effectively now be dead in the water.

University College Cork economist Seamus Coffey told this newspaper yesterday that even more questions remain, now that water charges have been sunk.

Water services have been competing with other areas for funding from government for decades and always lost out. Works are disruptive, underground and there are not many votes in them.

Charges make the system more transparent. Its very unclear now if investment  made by politicians now rather than engineers  will see money allocated properly.

The 1bn cost of servicing and treating water will now be reliant on exchequer funds for the foreseeable future. Irish Water will be unable to raise private funding, like the ESB has.

A much better system would be to have no cap on charges but an allowance instead. But you need full metering and charging for that. I wouldnt think this is going to be very successful, it seems to be a mishmash of ideas rather than a coherent plan.
A full 61 days after the general election, Enda Kenny and Micheal Martins parties have agreed to suspend charges for up to 18 months, a move effectively ending water charges.

Under the deal, which is key to preventing a second election, Fine Gael will suspend water charges for an initial nine months while an independent commission examines the utilitys future.

After this period, an Oireachtas committee will review its findings for nine more months, during which time charges will also be suspended.

However, this committee will not be tied to the commissions recommendations and, if it has the backing of the Dail in a later vote, may draw other conclusions, including potentially scrapping charges.

Fine Gael says that after this 18-month period, water charges in some form will return alongside significant allowances that will lower costs substantially and a metering system.

It also says Irish Water will continue, and claims this is a victory for the party.

However, senior Fianna Fail figures and some Fine Gael back-benchers have privately said suspending charges for 18 months means charges will not return in any real form.

Crucially, in order to reintroduce water charges and end the suspension a Dail vote would have to take place which would be near impossible to get passed.

So what happens now?

A lot of talk, for starters.

Yesterday saw the Dail finally hold a lengthy Irish Water debate, during which all parties repeated views which have been widely aired over the past two years. However, key moves are also taking place.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fails parliamentary parties  namely their TDs and senators  each met privately to discuss the deal and what it means to them, a key step towards the agreement behind signed.

Independents considered central to forming a minority government will also have their say over the coming days, before a likely government formation next week. This deal will mean your next Irish Water bill will become obsolete.

EU officials are likely to also contact government soon to express their formal concern charges are being suspended.

However, while acting Environment Minister Alan Kelly yesterday told the Dail that Brussels will hit Ireland with significant fines, EU sources have previously told the Irish Examiner this will just be threatened and will not happen because the EU is prepared to allow a suspension on condition charges are re-introduced.

Is this deal effectively the end of Irish Water and water charges?

Yes.

Fine Gael insists the fact the utility will remain in place and that charges will return in 18 months time means Irish Water is not dead.

However, in reality even its own TDs accept this is not the case and that the controversial group will become little more than a shadow of what it once was.

While the utility will stumble on through the 18 month suspension and there is a commitment to continue charges in some form, in reality by the end of next year any fees will be drastically different to what we have now.

With an election looming at that stage, it can be assumed the current Irish Water quango will find it difficult to survive another ballot.

The first part of a deal is a commission. What is it being asked to examine?

The independent commission will examine Irish Waters charges system, whether a national utility is needed, how a metering system can be set up and what waivers or allowances should be introduced once charges cease to be suspended. It will also review how to fund badly-needed water service reforms and how to resolve issues for people who have and have not already paid their bills.

It should be noted all of these issues could and perhaps should have been decided over the past 61 days during government formation talks. As ever, passing the buck to a commission is a politicians best friend.

An Oireachtas committee will follow this commission. What will it do?

Once the independent commission concludes its work  the terms of reference for which still have to be worked out  it will pass on its findings to a yet to be set up Oireachtas committee of TDs and senators early next year.

This committee which, it is rumoured, Taoiseach Mr Kenny wants Greens leader Eamon Ryan to chair, will have the right to make further recommendations and they will go to the Dail for a vote.

The fact a second election sometime in late 2017 or 2018 will be on committees members minds will also play a role.

If I havent paid to date, what happens to me?

This is a very important question. Fine Gaels Jobs Minister Richard Bruton and Fianna Fails health spokesperson Billy Kelleher both told RTE Radios Morning Ireland anyone who has not paid their bills to date will still have to reach into their pockets once the 18-month suspension ends.

This is because the bills to date remain legal charges which must be paid.

But realistically, until the commission and Oireachtas committee concludes its work in 18 months time, it can be safely assumed non-payers will not have to do anything.

If Ive paid all my bills to date, what happens to me?

An equally interesting question.

Mr Bruton also said if charges end bill payers will have to be refunded, a position Mr Kelleher mirrored, while there has been some talk about a tax rebate for payers.

Nothing will happen for 18 months because only a suspension and not a scrappage will be in place.

However, anyone who has paid the legal charges to date will demand costly refunds from the State given what has just happened  yet another financial headache for a new government.

How can we trust anything thats been agreed?

In five words: the threat of an election.

Fine Gael has been forced to cut a deal to stay in power, for now. Similarly, Fianna Fail has given its main rival a significant bloody nose over a high-profile issue.

With neither party in favour of a second election based on the water charges issue, both will live with the deal and allow the plan to be progressed.

If charges are suspended, how will Irish Water be funded?

This has yet to be clarified.

The most likely scenario is that available exchequer funds will be re-routed to water services to help address sewage, leaking and pipe problems.

Money, of course, does not grow on trees, meaning these funds will be taken from other areas  potentially including health, housing, and education  an issue which is the dirty secret of the whole water charges affair.

Who are the winners and losers?

Fine Gael negotiator and Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney insisted on Tuesday night the deal is not a cave-in, but in reality this is what it is. In order to stay in power, Mr Kennys party has been forced into a major Irish Water climbdown.

While the deal does mean it can remain in government and that water charges and a utility will officially still be in place in 18 months time, the image of Fine Gael caving in means it is difficult to see it as anything other than the loser in the fight. Fianna Fail is, for now, the political winner as it can rightly claim to have won a major populist concession by freezing charges.

However, with an election likely soon after this freeze ends  and Sinn Fein and the hard-left continuing to call for the scrapping of the utility and charges  the victory may be temporary if it has to return to the ballots arguing that some form of fee system is still required.

For Micheal Martin, this was just round one in a 12 round bout.

READ MORE: No refunds for people who have already paid bills
Colton Harris-Moore told The (Everett) Herald in a telephone interview that he is trying to raise enough money through crowdfunding to pay for the unusual procedure for his mother, who he says is suffering from end-stage lung cancer.

Harris-Moore hopes that his mother, Pamela Kohler, could one day be brought back to life.

He is serving a six-year prison sentence at the Stafford Creek Corrections Centre for stealing the airplanes, a boat, and guns during a crime spree that began after he escaped from a juvenile halfway house four years earlier.

He thinks his mothers best hope is to be put into a deep freeze that preserves the body and vital organs, a process called cryopreservation that essentially puts the body on pause. His hope is that advances in medical technology will allow her to be revived and her cancer treated.

Harris-Moore acknowledges the idea is outlandish, but it is the most realistic option given her condition.

He says he might need to raise $308,000, although he has $230,000 listed on the fundraising page.

He said he wants to freeze her until those treatments can be offered.

This is not science fiction or unrealistic, he said. Pam will ultimately live and this is Pams only hope for survival ... I fear Pam isnt going to be alive for much longer. I can her hear life leaving her body.

A Hollywood studio has paid him more than $1m for the rights to his story, all of which has gone to pay his restitution.
A hunt for the kingpin behind a Rs. 2,000 crore drug racket, has sent the Thane police knocking on the doors of former Bollywood star Mamta Kulkarni's house. According to reports, the former actress husband, Vicky Goswami, has allegedly been named as the mastermind behind a massive scheme to smuggle drugs to the US, from a factory in Mumbai- via Kenya.

Goswami, who was out on bail after being arrested by the Kenyan police officials with the information from the US Drug Enforcement Agency, will soon be extradited from Kenya.

In a raid at a pharmaceutical factory earlier this week, the police found nearly 20,000 kilos of substances like ephedrine and acetic anhydride, that are used party in drugs. The total cost of the material found, reportedly rounds up to over Rs. 2,000 crore.

The seven people who have been taken into custody this past month, have revealed their links with Goswami and others involved in the racket. The police have however not yet been able to trace down Goswamis whereabouts.

Vicky was previously arrested in Dubai for trafficking drugs, but was later released in 2013, when he married Mamta.

Mamta had starred in some of the biggest blockbusters in the 1990s which included films like Baazi and Karan Arjun.
He warned allies they would be left to defend themselves if they dont pay their fair share. He also called for an easing of tensions with Russia from a position of strength, only.

America first will be the major and overriding theme of his administration, he said in a 38-minute address at a Washington hotel.

Trump  fresh off a sweep of five North-eastern primaries that pushed him closer to the GOP nomination  sought to expand on foreign policy views that have lacked detail and worried experts in both parties.

Still, he left major questions about his proposals unanswered, including his plan for defeating the Islamic State group, casting his sparse details as a strategy for catching Americas enemies off guard.

We must, as a nation, be more unpredictable, Trump said. The businessman read his remarks off a teleprompter, a notable change for a candidate who typically speaks off the cuff.

Trump appeared to send a mixed message to Americas allies. He doubled down on his previous assertion that other countries must contribute to international security agreements, such as Nato, if theyre to get the benefits of American military protection.

Yet he also assured allies that the US will have a renewed commitment to its overseas friends if hes elected president.

To our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again, America is going to be reliable again, Trump said. Its going to be a great and reliable ally again.

He spent much of his speech panning President Barack Obamas handling of crises in the Middle East, saying the current administration was leaving a legacy of weakness, confusion and disarray.

Weve made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before, Trump said.

He singled out Democratic front-runner Hillary Clintons handling of the deadly attacks on a US compound in Benghazi, Libya, and repeatedly linked the former secretary of state to what he sees as the failures of the Obama administration to show strength around the world.

Even before Trumps address, Clintons campaign blasted out a news release saying the Republican leader has used the most reckless rhetoric of any major presidential candidate in modern history.

Still, Trump didnt spare former Republican president George W Bush, criticising his efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East and reaffirming his own opposition to the Iraq war.

Drawing a contrast with hawkish Republicans, Mr Trump said war and aggression will not be my first instinct and pledged to deploy combat forces only as a last resort.
James Clapper raised concerns about the fundamental conflict between national security and freedom of movement across the European Union.

At a briefing with journalists in the United States, the director of National Intelligence said that IS, also known as ISIL, had taken advantage of the migrant crisis in Europe and there was evidence of plotting.

Asked if clandestine IS cells like those in Brussels existed in England, Germany, and Italy, he replied: Yes, they do. That is a concern of obviously ours and our European allies.

He added: We continue to see evidence of plotting on the part of ISIL in the countries you name.

Mr Clapper said the US was doing all it could to share information about IS with its intelligence counterparts.

EU governments were increasingly aware the jihadists were exploiting the migrant crisis, he said.

They have taken advantage to some extent of the migrant crisis in Europe, something which the nations have a growing awareness of.

Mr Clapper told the Christian Science Monitor event that one of the challenges in tackling IS was its increasingly sophisticated technological methods.

He added: The obstacles in Europe, have somewhat to do with some of the fundamental conflict between, on the one hand, EU incentives and drives to promote openness and free movement of people and goods, privacy, which is in some ways in conflict with the responsibility each country has as a nation state to protect the security of its borders and its people.

"Those are sort of countervailing processes.

The British Labour Partys Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, told The Daily Telegraph the concerns must be taken seriously.

This is a worrying view which needs to be taken very seriously as it comes from a key ally which works with the UK closely on these matters, he said.
The party is launching an investigation into the former London mayors conduct after outraged senior Labour figures lined up to call for him to be kicked out.

Backbencher John Mann was also hauled in for a dressing down by party chief whip Rosie Winterton after he launched a furious face-to-face attack on Livingstone, accusing him of being a Nazi apologist.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn came under intense pressure after Livingstone took to the airwaves for a series of interviews in an attempt to defend Bradford West MP Naz Shah from allegations of anti-Semitism.

Shah was suspended on Wednesday pending an investigation into controversial social media posts about Israel which she made before becoming an MP.

Livingstone insisted that while her remarks were over the top, she was not anti-Semitic, and that he had never encountered anti-Semitism in 40 years in the Labour Party.

He sparked fury among colleagues by going on to claim that Hitler had supported Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing 6m Jews.

Within minutes of his BBC London interview, Labour MPs  including several members of the shadow cabinet  were queuing up to demand his suspension or removal from the party.

Labours London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan described his comments as appalling and inexcusable and shadow cabinet member Chris Bryant told the House of Commons he was sick and tired of people trying to explain away anti-Semitism, adding: Yes, Im talking to you, Ken Livingstone.

As the furore over his comments grew, Livingstone even lost the support of people on the left of the Labour movement.

The chairman of the Momentum group of Corbyn supporters, Jon Lansman, said it was time he left politics altogether, adding: All political lives end in failure and he should now depart voluntarily.

Livingstone was harangued by Mann as the pair arrived for separate interviews at broadcast studios in Westminsters Millbank.

As the former London mayor, phone clamped to his ear, attempted to conduct a radio interview, the Bassetlaw MP jabbed his finger at him, accusing him of being a Nazi apologist and attempting to rewrite history.

The party later said in a statement that Winterton had made it absolutely clear to John Mann that it is completely inappropriate for Labour members of parliament to be involved in very public rows on the television.

Following Livingstones suspension, The Guardian reported Corbyn as saying: There were grave concerns about the language he used. We had a discussion about it and decided we would suspend him and he would go through an investigation by the party.

The Labour leader told the Hull Daily Mail during a visit to Humberside: Ken Livingstone has been suspended pending an investigation. We will not tolerate anti-Semitism in any form in our Labour Party.

Labour MP Louise Ellmann, who was chairwoman of the Jewish Labour Movement until earlier this year, welcomed Livingstones suspension, but said it was difficult to understand why Mann should face disciplinary action for confronting him.

A number of Jewish groups called for Livingstones immediate expulsion from Labour.
The clashes took place outside Anaheim City Hall, where police said 50 people confronted each other and one man used the spray against Trump supporters.

Police Sergeant Daron Wyatt said five people, including two girls, aged 11 and eight, were exposed to the eye-stinging spray. Three were treated at the scene by paramedics. Police are searching for the man, who fled the scene.
The chief constable of South Yorkshire Police has been suspended in the wake of the Hillsborough inquest findings.

On Tuesday, David Crompton admitted the force got the policing of the match catastrophically wrong and unequivocally accepted the inquest jurys conclusions.

His suspension comes after the jury found that 96 Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed.

South Yorkshires Police and Crime Commissioner Dr Alan Billings said he had no choice but to act based on the erosion of public trust and confidence.

Dr Billings said: I have been left with no choice other than to suspend David from his duties as chief constable of South Yorkshire police.

I have reached this decision with a heavy heart following discussions with David both in the run-up to and following the delivery of the Hillsborough verdicts.

My decision is based on the erosion of public trust and confidence referenced in statements and comments in the House of Commons this lunchtime, along with public calls for the chief constables resignation from a number of quarters.

His announcement came after shadow home secretary Andy Burnham, who has long campaigned for justice for the Hillsborough victims, called for the chief constables resignation in the House of Commons.

Burnham also called for all those responsible to be held to account for the 96 unlawful deaths and a 27-year cover-up.

He said the jurys conclusions had finally brought justice and there were three reasons why something so obvious took 27 years to establish.

He said: First, a police force (South Yorkshire) which has consistently put protecting itself above protecting people harmed by Hillsborough.

Second, collusion between that force and complicit print media.

Third, a flawed judicial system that gives the upper hand to those in authority over and above ordinary people.

He said that South Yorkshire Police had gone back on its 2012 public apology following the release of the Hillsborough Independent Panel report and engaged in an adversarial battle at the fresh inquests.

Dr Billings said the new chief constable would need to be strong and focused, with an emphasis on building the trust and confidence of the public.

He acknowledged that there was clearly a difference of perception between Mr Crompton and the families of the victims in relation to questions being asked with regard to whether the fans were to blame.

My understanding was that the barristers acting for South Yorkshire Police, ie the chief constable, would not be pursuing any aggressive questioning of the chief constable, the kind that I know the families would find distressing.

So I probably will revisit that and have a look at what some of the allegations are that have been made, what they centre on, he said.

Responding to calls for the force to be disbanded, Dr Billings said it was too big a step.
The incident raises questions about security at Russian airports.

The girl, whose identity was not revealed, left home for school on Tuesday and did not return.

Alexander Rzhanenkov of the St Petersburg city hall told Russian news agencies the girl went to Moscows Vnukovo airport where she mingled with a crowd boarding a flight to St Petersburg.

The official said she boarded the plane together with a large family with children. Police picked her up at St Petersburgs airport, where she was wandering unaccompanied.

Childrens rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said the girls trip sends a serious alert sign about airport security.

Midair wee

USA: A Kentucky man has been arrested in North Carolina after witnesses say he urinated on the floor of an American Airlines flight from San Francisco to Charlotte.

A Charlotte-Mecklenburg police report states that 28-year-old Jordan Gardner was arrested when the flight arrived.

Multiple media outlets reported that witnesses said Gardner pulled down his pants, arched his back and urinated on the floor. A flight attendant was notified and sent him to the bathroom.

The flight attendant used club soda to clean the mess. Gardner returned to his seat about 15 minutes later.

Charlotte police and the FBI met the flight.

WBTV reported the Ludlow, Kentucky, man faces a criminal complaint of destruction of aircraft.

Hes to appear in federal court today.

Proud of their peacocks

ENGLAND: Villagers have spoken out in support of a pride of peacocks accused of ruining village life with their antics.

More than 100 people in Ushaw Moor, near Durham, have backed a petition demanding something is done about the noise, mess and damage caused by the birds, which they claim screech at night, foul pavements and attack vehicles after seeing their reflection in the paintwork.

But an online poll, publicised on the Deerness Valley Facebook page, has 95% backing for the peacocks to stay, with more than 160 people voting.

13 reasons not to marry

ENGLAND: The number of people getting married fell in 2013 as some couples postponed their nuptials fearing the unlucky number 13 could jinx them.

There were 240,854 marriages in England and Wales, a drop of some 8.6% compared with 2012 and the first fall since 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

While the number of marriages has been in long-term decline since the 1970s, it had started to rise again in 2009.

Snap-chatting

USA: Fearing Snapchat could take an ugly turn towards snap chomp, police are warning people not to take selfies with an alligator in suburban Atlanta.

Peachtree City police also advise residents not to feed the 6ft animal known as Flat Creek Floyd as he soaks in the sun on Flat Creek, about 50km south-west of Atlanta. Police Lieutenant Mark Brown said the alligators presence has gone a little crazy on social media.

Police said that when Floyd was spotted earlier this month, it was the first alligator sighting in the area in five years. Alligators are common in parts of south Georgia, but are not usually seen in Atlanta.

Strange switch

USA: A male Tibetan character from the Doctor Strange comic books presented such a political minefield to Marvel that they have cast a Caucasian woman in the film.

The move was intended in part to avoid offending Chinas government and filmgoers, reflecting the pressures Hollywood film-makers perceive when trying to appeal to the Chinese market. One of the screenwriters suggested that the casting of actress Tilda Swinton provided a partial solution, although some online commentators criticised the casting of a white woman in the role of comic book sorcerer The Ancient One.

No show

JORDAN: Jordan has banned a performance by a popular Lebanese band on religious grounds, leading to criticism of the kingdom which portrays itself as an island of tolerance in a turbulent region.

Mashrou Leila (Leilas Project) is known internationally for violin-laced pop music with catchy Arabic lyrics. Songs often tackle controversial subjects such as corruption, censorship, state violence and sexual freedom.

Jordans Antiquities Department initially said it would not permit a planned show at the Roman Theatre in the capital Amman later this week because it would contradict the authenticity of the ancient venue.

However, Amman district governor Khalid Abu Zeid said that the bands material contradicts the beliefs of the three Abrahamic faiths  Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Asia Exiled Tibetans Re-Elect Leader Who Vows to Revive Autonomy Push

Lobsang Sangay vows after being re-elected to convince the international community to renew its interest in his campaign for China to grant Tibet autonomy.

DHARAMSALA, India  The political leader of Tibetans in exile, Lobsang Sangay, vowed after being re-elected on Wednesday to convince the international community to renew its interest in his peoples plight and back his campaign for China to grant Tibet autonomy.

Sangay, who has led the 150,000-odd Tibetan worldwide diaspora since religious leader the Dalai Lama gave up political power in 2011, won 57 percent of nearly 60,000 votes cast, Tibetan officials said in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala.

Speaking to Reuters after the election results were announced, Sangay said Tibets struggle for autonomy was not talked about as much as a few years ago in Western countries now preoccupied with a raging war in Syria and a refugee crisis in Europe.

With the economic growth of China, they [Chinese leaders] have become politically and diplomatically more powerful, he told Reuters at his office overlooking the Himalayas in Dharamsala, where the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) is based. No country recognizes the body, and China has declined to talk to it.

Human rights are secondary to investment [in the West]. I will be traveling more to promote awareness about Tibet, he said, seated below a framed photo of the Dalai Lama and an image of Sangay superimposed below him. Sangay said the picture was made and framed in Tibet, and then smuggled to him.

Beijings growing economic might has slowly pushed the Tibetan cause out of the international limelight. The Dalai Lama has been denied audiences with several world leaders in recent years, including the Pope.

The Dalai Lama, 81, has sought to build a democratic system of government for exiled Tibetans strong enough to hold the community together and negotiate with China after his death.

Competing assertions over who will succeed the Dalai Lama once he dies have reinforced the need for a leader with democratic legitimacy.

No Sign of China Softening

Sangay, who will head the CTA for a second five-year term, triumphed after a campaign that was marked by bitter rivalry between the candidates, which earned rare rebukes from the Dalai Lama who refused to meet with the main contenders while the mudslinging went on.

I voted for him [Sangay] because of his educated background, said Choezin, a 53-year-old crimson-robed monk who fled Tibet in 1985 to settle in Dharamsala, the exiled governments base.

His Holiness wants somebody who can continue the work he has done. He has said Sangay is the right man.

Sangay, like the Dalai Lama and most Tibetans, backs the so-called middle way that seeks autonomy within China. But in his first term he made no headway convincing the Chinese to talk.

On Wednesday, Sangay said he saw no new signals from the Chinese that they would soften their approach to Tibet.

Formal negotiations between China and the Dalai Lamas representatives broke down in 2010, and the stalemate since has cast a pall over Tibetans in exile.

China describes the incorporation of Tibet into its territory in 1951 as a peaceful liberation, and says it has brought development to what was a backward region.

Exile groups say they seek genuine autonomy for Tibet, rather than independence. China says Tibet already has genuine autonomy, and that exile groups seek to split the country.

Tibetans accuse China of eroding their deeply Buddhist culture and flooding the region with ethnic Han Chinese.

Tibetan Buddhism holds that the soul of a senior lama is reincarnated in the body of a child after he dies. China says it must sign off on the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising.
Asia Thai Facebook Group Charged Over Foul Language About Draft Constitution

Charges are filed against a group for posting comments online criticizing Thailands military-backed draft constitution, under a law that prohibits campaigning on the charter.

BANGKOK  Thailands election commission on Wednesday filed charges against a group for posting foul and strong comments online criticizing a military-backed draft constitution, the first case filed under a law that prohibits campaigning on the charter.

Groups on both sides of Thailands political divide have denounced the draft constitution as undemocratic.

The UN human rights chief last week urged the junta to curtail dangerously sweeping powers enshrined in the draft charter and urged the government to actively encourage, rather than discourage dialogue on the draft.

Election commissioner Somchai Srisuthiyakorn filed the charges against members of a Facebook group based in Thailands northeastern province of Khon Kaen.

They posted comments on Facebook using foul and strong language, Somchai told reporters after filing the charges. He did not disclose the groups identity.

We want them to be an example, he said. From now on, people should talk about the constitution using reason.

Thailands king on Friday approved a law providing a 10-year jail term for those who campaign ahead of an Aug. 7 referendum on the constitution. The law criminalizes forcing or influencing a voter to cast or not cast a vote.

The Aug. 7 referendum will be the first time Thais have headed to the polls since the military took power in a May 2014 coup.

Opponents of the military regime, including the Puea Thai Party, have told supporters to vote against the draft charter.

Sunai Phasuk, senior researcher in Thailand for Human Rights Watch, told Reuters a climate of fear was growing ahead of the referendum.

The junta is mobilizing state machinery and everything is being used to promote the draft constitution while people who oppose the draft are being targeted, said Sunai.

In a separate case, 10 people, eight from Bangkok and two from Khon Kaen, were detained on Wednesday, suspected of violating the computer crimes law, junta spokesman Winthai Suvaree told Reuters.

We have no details on what they posted as yet, he said.

A few dozen people gathered for a silent protest against the detentions at a monument in central Bangkok. At least 15 were also detained, a Reuters witness said.

The junta has banned political gatherings of more than five people.
Burma ALP Spokesman: Party Members Threatened With Arrest

Central executive committee members of the ALP were threatened with arrest for a statement aiming charges at the Burma Army, according to the ALP spokesman.

RANGOON  Central executive committee members of the Arakan Liberation Party (ALP), the political wing of the Arakan Liberation Army, were threatened with arrest by Col. Htein Lin, the security and border affairs minister of Arakan State, ALP spokesman Khine Myo Tun said on Thursday.

On Wednesday, Htein Lin summoned ALP representatives for questioning about a statement from the party on April 24. The statement lodged several allegations against the Burma Army, including accusations of the military having committing war crimes, breaking the Geneva Convention and other aspects of international law, removing locals from their land, forced labor and the capturing and sometimes killing of villagers in conflict zones.

It claims members of the ALP could act as witnesses to the alleged abuses.

Khine Myo Tun told The Irrawaddy that Htein Lin and Arakan States police chief, Sein Lwin, asked the ALP representatives to provide evidence for their statement because the Burma Army had received criticism from foreign NGOs and governments.

They told us that if we cant provide concrete evidence, theyll arrest us. We replied that we can substantiate this; thats why we released the statement in the first place. I asked them what they would do if I gave them video footage. Would they take action, without hesitation, to charge the soldiers whove committed these crimes? But they said this will take time, Khine Myo Tun said.

The footage in question is supposedly two files showing murders and more than 20 villagers from various villages being exploited for labor. According to Khine Myo Tun, Htein Lin warned ALP representatives that Friday was their last chance to hand over the footage.

However, a representative of the group said, We wont deliver [the clips] silently. We will hold a press conference and distribute them to everyone. And we will invite Htein Lin, the chief minister and government officials to take the footage from the press conference, though the date for such a conference has yet to be determined.

The Irrawaddy was unable to reach Htein Lin or Nyi Pu, the National League for Democracy (NLD) chief minister for Arakan State, on Thursday for comment, though Htein Lins assistant did confirm that the colonel had met with ALP members earlier.
Mumbai: Salman Khan is currently in Muzaffarnagar, UP, shooting for his upcoming film Sultan. The actor was spotted shooting for the film. In a new behind the scene picture, we see Salman riding a blue scooter.

People around the actor were surprised on spotting him riding casual around as he finished the scene. A massive crowd of fans gathered around to catch a glimpse of the star.

In this Ali Abbas Zafar directorial venture, the 'Kick' actor will be portraying a wrestler, named Sultan Ali Khan, and the story will revolve around his personal and professional life.

Salman has been training extensively in mixed martial arts and wrestling to prepare for his role. Directed by Ali Abbas Zafar and produced by Yash Raj Films, 'Sultan' is Salman's Eid offering for this year.

The movie, which also stars Anushka Sharma, is set to release this Eid. Anushka has completed her part of the shoot in the earlier New Delhi schedule. She is currently in Punjab shooting for her own production, 'Phillauri'.
Burma Karen Troops Fight Alongside Arakan Army

Col. Saw San Aung and dozens of Karen fighters trek through the jungle to combat the Burma Army, alongside Arakan Army soldiers.

After days of traveling from Karen State, Col. Saw San Aung and dozens of troops arrived in Arakan State last week to help the Arakan Army (AA) fight the Burma Army.

The troops are Karen freedom fightersa Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) splinter group, and other ethnic armed forces from groups that the Colonel did not specify. He described the fighters as a federal army, formed discreetly by ethnic leaders.

Making pillows of stones and singing to his troops, Col. Saw San Aung attempted to keep morale high for the soldiers he calls freedom fighters during the rough trip to western Burmas Arakan State.

At times, we did not have food and could not sleep, but this is the life of a rebel, he said.

The trip was not smooth, as the troops trekked through the jungle from Taungoo to Pegu Yoma to Arakan Yoma, occasionally using cars and boats, but favoring walking through the jungle in order to bring necessary weapons, he added.

Fighting in Rakhine [Arakan] was a first step for our federal army, he said.

According to Col. Saw San Aung, whose troops have a history of combat experience in Karen State, joining armed forces in an alliance to fight the military regime was an important and effective strategy.

Fighting recently broke out in Arakan State during the annual water festival, when it was reported that the Burma Army launched a military offensive. Many locals became displaced after the fighting and that was when the Colonel and his troops decided it was time to go and help, he said.

We should all have equal opportunities for peace. Karen State has peace, but Arakan State does not. This should not happen. We should all have peace together, nationwide peace, he added.

Karen and Arakan troops have joined forces in the past to attack the Burma Army in Mon States Kyaikmayaw Township, and have also trained together in Karen controlled areas.

Arakan and Karen troops are comrades who dare to die fighting, he said. We have a long friendship in revolution against the military regime. They helped the Karen before, so we came back to help them now.

Arakanese people were happy to see his troops arrive, and local support was important, he said.

He did not give the number of troops, fearing that his enemy would find out. But he said his troops were experienced and were eager to destroy the military regime, alongside the AA.

Col. Saw San Aung believes that the ethnic armed groups will gain equal rights under a federal system through an alliance of armed forces.

If you want to have a federal union, its time to join our ethnic federal army, he said, adding that he was happy to hear State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi say she was eager to implement a Panglong-style peace conference.

The Panglong Conference was held by her father, Gen. Aung San, and leaders from three of the countrys ethnic minority groups prior to Burmas independence, and is held up as a example of cooperation between the Burman majority and ethnic minority groups.
Burma MPC to Be Renamed National Reconciliation and Peace Center

At State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyis suggestion, the former administrations Myanmar Peace Center will be re-branded.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmas state counselor and de facto leader of the new National League for Democracy (NLD) government, has proposed renaming the Myanmar Peace Center (MPC) as the National Reconciliation and Peace Center (NRPC).

The suggestion came as she met with the Joint Ceasefire Monitoring Committee (JMC), which includes members of the Burma Army, on Wednesday in Naypyidaw, Gen. Saw Issac Po, vice-chairman of the JMC, told The Irrawaddy.

The JMC is comprised of representatives from the government, the MPC, the Burma military and the eight non-state armed groups that signed the so-called nationwide ceasefire agreement (NCA) with the former government of President Thein Sein in 2015.

Suu Kyis personal physician, Dr. Tin Myo Win, has been tipped to lead the renamed organization. State media on Thursday would concede only that the doctor will assume a prominent role in Burmas peace process: Suu Kyi announced the appointment of Dr. Tin Myo Win as the peace negotiator for the nationwide ceasefire agreement at her meeting with the JMC on Wednesday, the Global New Light of Myanmar reported.

Whoever takes on the leadership role in the NRPC would replace Aung Min, who led the peace process under the previous administration.

Lt-Gen Yar Pyae, vice chairman of the JMC, emphasized the need to continue the achievements attained thus far in the peace process.

At present, we have to work to maintain the current stability based on the understanding and relationships of leaders from both sides, he said. When there are leadership changes, we have to start from very beginning again.

The lieutenant-general called for the establishment of a systematic mechanism for monitoring the NCA that would function regardless of such changes.

The JMC conducts monitoring at three levelsUnion, state and local levels. It is now in need of funds to continue its functions as the funds provided by the former MPC have been exhausted.

Suu Kyi said she would seek international assistance to fund the NRPC and would make sure those funds were used properly, according to Shwe Kha, secretary of the JMC.

A separate meeting will be held to discuss who should be included in the re-organized MPC. She [Suu Kyi] will make the decision. Well invite ethnic [representatives] and officials from JMC to the meeting, added Saw Issac Po.

It was not yet clear whether senior peace advisors who played a major role in the MPC would be included in the reorganized body.

The MPC was formed in 2012 and operated with funds from the United Nations, the European Union, Japan and other foreign governments. The grant period for these monies was completed in April.

Translated by Thet Ko Ko.
Burma Parliament Eyes Revocation of Oppressive Security Law

A bill rescinding Burmas 1975 State Protection Law will likely go to Parliament after it reconvenes next week, the Lower Houses Bill Committee chairman says.

RANGOON  A new bill that would rescind Burmas 1975 State Protection Law is likely to be submitted to Parliament after it reconvenes next week, the Lower Houses Bill Committee chairman said on Thursday.

The law on the chopping block, also known as Lower House Parliament Law No. 3, 1975 or the far more verbose Law to Safeguard the State Against the Dangers of Those Desiring to Cause Subversive Acts, was enacted during the countrys socialist era.

The chairman of the Lower Houses Bill Committee, Tun Tun Hein, told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that such legislation should be revoked as the law itself violates the fundamental rights of citizens and is not compatible with democratic standards.

This law was enacted during the socialist era and the situations [of the country] are now different, said Tun Tun Hein of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD), whose party dominates the legislature.

The Parliament will enact laws that have advantages for the public, will revoke those that oppress its own citizens and will amend those that have flaws, he continued.

The core purpose of the State Protection Law was to prevent the infringement of the sovereignty and security of the Union of Burma against any threat to the peace of the people, and against the threat of those desiring to commit subversive acts causing the destruction of the country, without impeding citizens fundamental rights, according to its preamble.

But lawyer Ko Ni, who advises the NLD on legal matters, said the law supported the one party system of Burmas socialist government and was used to oppress political activists who did not share the same opinion or vision of the government.

Such a law is absolutely unnecessary for the current governments multi-party democratic system, he said.

According to Articles 7 and 8 of the law, the ruling cabinet has the right to form a Central Board led by the ministers of Home Affairs and Religious Affairs, with the ministers of Defense and Foreign Affairs granted subordinate membership. The law allows the board to pass orders restricting any fundamental right of any person suspected of having committed or believed to be about to commit, any act which endangers the sovereignty and security of the state or public peace and tranquility.

Zaw Win, a member of the Bill Committee, told The Irrawaddy that the committee is currently in discussions with military officials and hearing their recommendations as the law pertains to the ministers of Home Affairs and Defense, both of whom are directly appointed by the army commander-in-chief.

Ko Ni said many senior figures from the NLD, including Aung San Suu Kyi, Tin Oo and Kyi Maung, were oppressed on multiple occasions by this law during Burmas former military regime.

Despite that fact, the lawyer said he thought the military would find no reason to oppose the new bill revoking the controversial State Protection Law if its leadership genuinely supported the governments pro-democracy agenda.

The law was slightly modified by the military government in 1991. If the new bill wins a majority in Parliament, it would be the second legislative achievement of the body after Suu Kyis State Counselor Law, which was discussed and approved in early April.

Passing a revocation of the 1975 law could mark the first of a flurry of similar legislative initiatives by Parliament: Following a review, its Legal Affairs and Special Cases Assessment Commission recommended earlier this month that 142 laws currently on the books be abolished, amended or rewritten.
Business Burmas Serge Pun Says He Takes Red Tape Road to Profit

The Burmese magnate Serge Pun says delay is the price paid for trying to do business ethically in Burma, long identified as corrupt and opaque.

RANGOON  Scaffolding around the 139-year old Burma Railway Headquarters, a red-brick colonial relic at the center of a half billion dollar property development in central Rangoon, hasnt seen much action since the project was announced four years ago.

Serge Pun, the 63-year-old project developer and one of Burmas richest men, says his Landmark developmentwhich includes office, residential and hotel spacehas been strangled by red tape and costly delays all because of his adherence to clean business.

Its a frustrating contrast to the luxury and high-end property boom in other parts of the Burmas commercial capital.

It has been a very long and arduous red tape road, Pun said in an interview.

Good governance always has a price to pay and the price we are paying is a delay.

Companies and international agencies have long identified corruption and a lack of transparency as major obstacles to doing business in Burma.

Puns grievances underscore the challenges the newly-elected National League for Democracy (NLD) faces as it seeks global investment for urgent development needs.

And despite his own clean credentials, Burmas complicated business environment means Pun has at times dealt with internationally blacklisted entities with key market positions.

Landmark, a 10-acre development, was first announced in 2012 and is one of the countrys most high-profile international investments.

Despite prominent backersincluding the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank that finances private ventures; Asia Development Bank and Mitsubishi Corporationthe project hasnt yet broken ground.

The latest deadline for lease extensions from the Ministry of Rail Transport, which owns the land, was missed at the end of March.

A senior ministry official said refurbishment of the old building is in progress but needed to be carried out without affecting the heritage values.

The official didnt comment on the status of the lease extensions or explain why it had yet to be granted.

It remains a crucial issue for the project.

The lease extensions have a significant impact on the projects financial viability both from a debt and equity perspective, said Vikram Kumar, IFCs Burma manager.

For investors keen to break into the frontier market, Pun serves as a go-to partner to help navigate local complexities, notably international sanctions still in place on many Burmese nationals and businesses.

Pun built his conglomerate, Yoma Strategic Holdings, from scratch and his business empire includes real estate, banking, aviation and cars.

Over three decades, he has become one of Asias richest men while cultivating a reputation as Mr. Clean in a country long known as anything but. Neither he nor his companies have been subject to international sanctions.

Companies from American fast-food chain KFC to Indonesian healthcare operator Lippo Group have partnered with him.

However, the business reality in Burma means some otherwise straightforward business ventures run through blacklisted companies.

One of KFCs Burma outlets, for example, is at the new Rangoon airport terminal, which was built and run by businessman Steven Law, who is on the US sanctions list.

Pun said that the deal doesnt violate sanctions because it was done through Yoma, not KFC, and that it complies with Yomas code of conduct. US-based Yum! Brands, which owns KFC, did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

US Treasury said it doesnt comment on the existence or possibility of sanctions violations.

The NLD is yet to release a plan addressing remaining sanctions, but recently slapped curbs on the value of gifts officials can accept, a small step to fulfilling its pledge to eliminate graft.

For now, US sanctions still create headaches, often indirectly tying up Burma-related bank transfers, even if they dont involve blacklisted entities.

When you actually try to do business, everybody doesnt understand whether you are a jade miner or notthey just say it is too troublesome to transact your fund remittance, Pun said.
Intel announced that will focus its future research and developments efforts on cloud technology and the PC will become just a part of this connected world.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced in a blog post on Tuesday, April 26, his vision for company's future. According to him, the future Intel products will continue to be bound by Moore's Law, stating that the density of transistors in an electronic circuit will double approximately every two years.

PCMag reports that according to Krzanich, Intel's products of the future will be focused on the cloud and data centers. The cloud will provide a medium for data used by PCs and other devices part of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Chips used in computer vision, medical imagine and speech recognition devices, field-programmable gate arrays and memory modules will all connect to the cloud using 5G networks. Intel is already designing a new generation of base stations, mobile chips and other infrastructure.

According to Krzanich, connectivity is making devices more valuable by connecting them to the cloud and providing computer power. Moore's law will continue to apply to devices connected to the cloud and Intel will continue to benefit from this law of economics.

Krzanich's vision matches Intel's announcement made last month that it will from today's 14-nanometer chips to the 10-nanometer chips of the future, slowing down the pace of new chip releases. A slower release pace will ensure that Intel's research and development projects are not affecting negatively its efforts to increase sales of its current products.

The cloud is nothing new, since it has been around for years. Intel has already discusses its 5G and IoT plans before. In this context, Krzanich's manifesto can be seen as a strategy to strengthen Intel's leadership in the semiconductor industry.

According to PCWorld, in Krzanich's vision Intel cannot be considered anymore a PC company. The high-tech company is transforming into a company that powers the cloud and the connected smart computing devices.
HTC has announced the launch of a $100 million virtual reality accelerator program targeting the startups operating in the field.

According to ZDNet, HTC has invested $100 million to launch Vive X, a global accelerator program for virtual reality (VR) startups. HTC announced that the program will start in May in Beijing, to come next to Taipei and San Francisco. Other regions are also among the Taiwanese giant's plans for the future.

The aim of the Vive X program is to help grow the global VR ecosystem by providing startups with mentorship, expertise, office space, financial investment, access to advanced VR technology and go-to-market support. Cher Wang, Chairwoman and CEO of HTC, said that the company will bring the most creative and brightest talents to join Vive X.

Wang added that virtual reality is changing the world, but it needs to rely on a healthy eco-system to do that effectively and to expand into the mass market. She explained that the Taiwanese company is looking forward to enable global talent through HTC Vive to create compelling and interesting content.

HTC Vive X in Beijing will provide cash investment in return for equity to each startup in the VR industry, in order to accelerate entrance and growth for those companies with proven success. The startups moving through the accelerator will ultimately become content enablers or content producers for the HTC Vive platform.

The Vive VR headset was launched on the market this month, after HTC unveiled the final version of the high-tech gadget at Mobile World Congress in February. The smartphone maker reported losses during the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2015, but the company remains optimistic that moving into connected devices and VR market would improve its position on the market.

According to Computerworld, analysts said that the new move to create the virtual reality accelerator program Vive X could be another boost to the development of enterprise applications for VR. Up to date, virtual reality is already being used in areas such as the training of combat troops, astronauts and surgeons.
NASA announced that its team of astronauts is preparing for a flight on a commercial spaceship.

According to NASA's official website, the Commercial Crew Program is a partnership created between the public and private space sectors. The partnership has the purpose to develop and fly human space transportation systems.

The last NASA astronauts flew to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral, Florida, five years ago. Now a new group is preparing for a flight, but this time it will be on a commercial spacecraft.

According to the website phys.org, on Tuesday, April 26, veteran astronauts Sunita Williams and Eric Boe used touch-screen simulators during a training session near Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. They were practicing docking procedures of the Boeing Co.'s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft with the space station.

The simulator is called the Crew Part-Task Trainer. It was designed to help prepare astronauts and flight controllers for various flight conditions and missions, including docking with the space station. William said that this is the next chapter for the American space program because it is planning for the next generations' future.

Since Atlantis' accident on the final space shuttle mission in 2011, the United States has not seen a manned launch. The American space agency currently is paying Russia to ferry astronauts to the space station and hiring out its supply runs.

NASA will focus on getting astronauts to Mars and will continue outsourcing other space tasks. NASA has contracted with Space X and Boeing to transport astronauts to the space station. The Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft are developed for future longer journeys.

According to NASA, a ride on an American-operated commercial spacecraft will cost around $58 million. This is cheaper than the $76 million cost of a ride with Russia's spacecrafts.

Chris Ferguson, director of crew and mission operations for Boeing's commercial crew program and deputy program manager, declared that low-Earth orbit missions will be serviced in the near future by American commercial space companies in order to enable NASA to perform its Mars exploration mission.
Mumbai: The renowned novelist and essayist Jenny Diski, who wrote a regular column about her diagnosis with inoperable cancer, breathed last on Thursday morning, at the age of 68.

Ian Patterson, Diskis partner, announced the sad news on Twitter. Sad news. My darling Jenny @diski died early this morning, tweeted Patterson, to an avalanche of condolences from his fellow writers.

Sad news. My darling Jenny @diski died early this morning.  Ian Patterson (@paftersnu) April 28, 2016

The author of novels, short stories, essays, memoirs and travelogues, Diski published 18 books. Only last week, her memoir In Gratitude was published, chronicling her life since she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in August 2014, and given two or three years to live by her doctor.

Diskis memoir also tells the story of how she was taken in at the age of 15 by the novelist Doris Lessing, and of their relationship over the next 50 years, as Diski herself became a writer.

London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers said Diski was stylish and daring and more than most she did what she wanted to do and said what she wanted to say. She was also both fierce and understanding and that isnt all that usual.

Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing, she writes in the diary, revealing how her first reaction on learning the news was to make a Breaking Bad joke: Wed better get cooking the meth.

Farewell to my dear cousin, the very lovely Jenny Diski. Kind, funny, encouraging and a truly brilliant writer.  Jay Rayner (@jayrayner1) April 28, 2016

Fellow writers have paid Tribute to Diskis lifetime of literary achievements and enduring legacy on Twitter. "Farewell to my dear cousin, the very lovely Jenny Diski. Kind, funny, encourage and a truly brilliant writer," wrote Jay Rayner. "RIP Jenny Diski, great writer and my favourite essayist. Those @LRB are immortal," added Agata Pyzik.
Space X has announced on Wednesday, April 27, that as early as 2018 the company plans to launch an upgraded Dragon capsule for an unpiloted test flight to Mars.

According to CBS News, NASA will provide technical support to Space X in exchange for space flight data including entry, descent and landing information. The "Red Dragon" spacecraft will use a powerful Falcon 9 heavy-lift booster that is still untried so far.

Space X designed "Red Dragon" as a variant of the spacecraft that will carry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The commercial space company will land the "Red Dragon" on Mars presumably using eight Super Draco engines.

The engines are designed by Space X to allow astronauts descending to a powered landing back on Earth at the end of a space mission or to help a station-bound crew escape a malfunctioning booster during the climb to space. Space X plans to also use Red Dragons to explore the Mars environment.

Elon Musk, Space X founder and CEO, has envisioned since long an eventual colonization on Mars. Sending a spacecraft to the Red Planet would be just the first step of his ambitious project.

Musk said that the "Dragon 2" will be able to land anywhere in our solar system but he did not provide more details about the unpiloted test flight. He just added that Space X Red Dragon spacecraft is not recommended for "transporting astronauts beyond Earth-moon region" due to its small size that would be uncomfortable for longer journeys.

A NASA spokesman declared that NASA will build on an existing no-funds-exchanged collaboration with Musk's commercial space company. According to The Washington Post, the partnership between NASA and Space X is an example of the important shift in the role NASA is playing in space exploration. The American space agency will continue to pursue its own deep space missions while helping in supporting a robust commercial space industry.
Wave Cloud Connect is designed to enhance collaboration and productivity for enterprises and government agencies by enabling Apple or Android smart phones and tablets to connect directly with radio devices, bringing secure mobile workforce communications to groups of up to 3,000 users.



Motorola Solutions Australia technology director, Greg Bouwmeester, said the service would provide users with the flexibility to spend only what they need to manage their daily operational requirements for broadband PTT.



In government and business environments today, employees are communicating with a variety of mission-critical devices as well as consumer-grade devices. Wave Cloud Connect is the ideal solution for any organisation wanting to simply and affordably combine large numbers of users and teams onto a single communications platform. Bouwmeester said.





According to Bouwmeester, Wave Cloud Connect increases the capability and value that users receive from their radio networks, and the application also brings the benefit of improved workforce productivity and mobility for users who do not have access to a radio network.The new service delivers real-time voice and data communications securely over any IP network, connecting teams and individuals both inside and outside of their existing communication systems  and connects users carrying any communications device, from two-way radios to smart phones, laptops and rugged handheld devices.It can also be used as a standalone broadband service without radio network integration, with key features including a visual mapping tool to pinpoint the location of users in the field and a secure text messaging service.The solution is part of Motorola Solutions Next Generation Mobile Intelligence suite, a mix of technologies including mobile broadband-based solutions that Motorola says places the right information into the hands of users across a choice of devices, applications and networks.Bouwmeester says the software as a service offering is accessed via flexible and affordable user subscriptions, removing costly capital investments needed to deliver broadband PTT capabilities or to enable radio networks to communicate with other devices.Motorala Solutions say users of the service will be kept up to date with cloud-based software upgrades and full service availability through its 24/7 network operations and control centre.
Mobile analyst firm Juniper Research estimates that the number of smartphone shipments reached 320 million in Q1 2016, representing a year-on-year decline of nearly 6%.



Apple attributed its first ever year-on-year decline in iPhone sales this quarter to the larger than expected success of the iPhone 6 range in 2015. With the latest 6S only offering incremental improvements on these designs, sales have returned to more usual growth patterns after the usual Q4 sales boost.



However, with economic problems in China, and Apple facing legislative opposition to its services there, future growth in this region is likely to be harder to achieve than in previous years.



Xiaomis meteoric growth has slowed, to just over 14 million units shipped, a 1% decline on shipments compared to this time last year. Lenovo is estimated to have suffered a similar drop, shipping 15.9 million smartphones this quarter.





Several vendors without a strong base in China are also suffering. Microsoft has posted its worst ever quarter for Lumia sales, at only 2.3 million units shipped. Similarly, Sony has experienced a 57% YoY decline, partly due to focusing on profitability over volume, but also due to the slowing market.However, there were a few glimmers of hope for Android, according to the report.Samsung has increased its revenue mix, stabilising its shipments but not giving a strong volume turnaround, at an estimated 83 million units shipped.Huawei is continuing its rise, with over 27 million devices shipped.BlackBerrys woes continue, with an estimated 53% decline in units shipped, despite a pivot to Android with the Priv. Unless sales pick up in 2016, as more Android devices are released, Juniper anticipates that BlackBerry will exit the smartphone market in the near future.Juniper says that as the market as a whole slows, smartphone vendors need to adjust to targeting the replacement market. Large growth in other areas, such as Africa, is unlikely unless there is a dramatic reduction in the ASP (average selling price) of lower-end smartphones, meaning that the market decline will to continue throughout the year.
Teague has joined Veritas from Symantec where he held several leadership roles since 2004, working across verticals including enterprise security solutions, storage solutions, high performance disaster recovery and emerging solutions like cloud, SaaS and mobile.



With over 15 years of IT experience, as well as Symantec Tague held senior positions at Computer Associates and IBM.



Chris Lin, Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific & Japan at Veritas, said in this role Tague will spearhead business development initiatives across ANZ and capitalise on market opportunities to deliver next-generation information management solutions to customers and partners.





We are thrilled to have Louis lead our ANZ operations. With his focus on customer advocacy, strong experience in the financial services sector and proven track record, Im confident he will be able to accelerate Veritas growth and expand our scale as the leading information management company that helps customers harness the power of their information, Lin said.Under Louis leadership, the team is well positioned to capitalise on this positive momentum by helping businesses defy the data deluge they are facing today.Tague said, This is an exciting time to lead Veritas as there is tremendous potential for the company to contribute to ANZs digital transformation into the knowledge economy. Theres an enormous opportunity to deepen our customer relationships in both the enterprise and commercial markets, and strengthen our partner ecosystem as Veritas is committed to driving greater business productivity for our customers.
Katasan, the company behind Qualify expects that the tool will dramatically reduce the time it takes to get a quote into customer hands and train new sales staff, giving users a clear cut advantage over competitors using legacy systems.



Qualify aims to simplify outdated processes which have been around for years.



Previously youd have sales staff sitting around, trawling through spreadsheets and maps, sometimes even dedicated support staff just to see if an economical last mile service was available at a prospective customers address said Richard Stephens, Lead Developer.



What weve done is take that whole process and simplify it from something that takes upwards of eight minutes, and make it happen in less than eight seconds. It mightnt sound like much but across a twenty person sales team, doing multiple qualifications a day it adds up to a massive saving.



Our modelling shows we can get back a few thousand hours of work time over a modestly sized team. Sales staff no longer have to skip prospects to get through their day, said Qualifys Product Manager David Tisdall.



We also reduce a lot of the lag time that comes with on boarding new sales staff. Using the legacy tools means days or weeks of training, something that has to be repeated whenever a new carrier product becomes available.



Ultimately we think this is about helping telcos be a little more agile so they can win more high margin business said Tisdall, who previously operated a telco in Brisbane.



What were hoping to see is that a carrier with our product can turnaround a quote in the same day, so while their competitors are back at the office, our customers can progress their sales engagements.



When asked about the future, Stephens was quick to note that the app had been built with expansion in mind.



Obviously were launching in Australia because it is our home, but weve been mindful throughout development of the extra complexities that carriers face in markets like Europe where selling to one customer across national boundaries is incredibly common.



When asked when qualify would be expanding he replied, its still early days, but its certainly a prospect were taking seriously.



About Qualify



Qualify is a telecommunications service qualification tool built for mid-size aggregators and larger infrastructure operating carriers. Delivered as a SaaS tool Qualify aims to make the process of qualifying a service for sale as simple as searching the web.



Details for Qualify online are available at: https://qualifyapp.com



About Katasan



Katasan is a Sydney based start up with a mission to build better line of business applications. The business operates under the motto of Build great software and hopes to show that business applications dont have to suck.



Media Contacts



David Tisdall



0410061116



team@katasan.com
Women are less likely than men to participate fully in cardiac rehabilitation programs, which could impede their recovery from heart attacks and heart procedures, say Canadian researchers.

It is very important for physicians to refer men and women to cardiac rehab, senior author Dr. Sherry L. Grace from York University in Toronto told Reuters Health. It is the first, necessary step for patients to gain access to this mortality-reducing model of care, she said by email.

Participation in cardiac rehabilitation is associated with improved survival, functional status and psychological wellbeing, as well as lowered risk of recurrent cardiac events. But previous studies have shown that women are significantly less likely than men to take advantage of cardiac rehabilitation, the study team writes in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

They analyzed data from 14 published studies to see how many people participated in prescribed cardiac rehabilitation and how many stuck with it through the end. The combined studies included a total of 8,176 men and women.

Cardiac rehabilitation programs in these studies ranged in duration from 8 weeks to 32 weeks. Overall, patients went to 66.5 percent of prescribed sessions. Looking at men and women separately, however, the researchers found that men went to nearly 69 percent of sessions while women went to just 64 percent, on average.

The gender gap was especially apparent for programs of 12 weeks duration or more, after which womens participation dropped off. The divergence between men and women also seemed to appear only in studies after 2009, the study authors note, although they can't say why.

Overall, patients adhered to two-thirds of prescribed sessions," Grace said. People often contend that cardiac rehabilitation should not be funded because patients only attend half of sessions. Clearly this is not the case. They certainly adhere quite well.

As for reducing the disparity between men and women, Grace suggested that "offering women-only classes, tailored to womens needs and preferences, may help; however, there is mixed evidence.

"It is well known that women are referred less, and therefore enroll less, in cardiac rehabilitation, but it was surprising to see that even if they enroll their adherence is less than that of men, said Dr. Karin H. Humphries from University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who co-authored a related editorial.

A roughly 4 percent difference in adherence may seem trivial, but cardiac rehabilitation programs are designed to optimize outcomes so an adherence rate of only 64 percent is worrisome, Humphries told Reuters Health by email.

While not directly addressed by this paper, encouraging women to participate in cardiac rehabilitation is still important," she said. And emphasizing the importance of adherence is also important. So discussions about finding child support, if relevant, or transportation solutions to help them attend, could help.

Dr. Diann Gaalema from the University of Vermont's Center on Behavior and Health in Burlington recently found in a separate study that financial incentives could help increase cardiac rehabilitation participation and adherence among Medicaid patients.

"Something in the system is not optimized for female patients. Cardiac rehabilitation did start as a male-only model decades ago, and it's possible that the system has not evolved along with the changes in referral practices, she said in an email.

Really there are many reasons people drop out of cardiac rehabilitation, Gaalema said, including time, transportation and other medical conditions, both physical and psychological, and your best bet may be to carefully screen people coming in to see what their particular challenges are and try to adjust accordingly."
NEARLY 9,000 Watford supporters, such is the current total of season ticket sales, will be receiving a yellow card - not for doing anything wrong, but for supporting the club by committing to a 2000/01 season ticket.

The front of the card is entirely a Hornet shade of yellow, except for the club badge and a 'Thank You' legend. Details on the card's reverse tell supporters who have purchased a season ticket how they can claim a free gift in either of the club's shops.

Ed Coan said: 'We are trying to prove that, for once in the world of football, receiving a yellow card is not necessarily a bad thing.'

THE vocal efforts of Watford's loyal fans is to be rewarded with a token of appreciation from the club who are asking supporters to keep their ticket stub from the Middlesbrough away game this Saturday, May 6.

In the midweek after the match, the stub can then be exchanged at the Hornet Shop or the World of Watford store in the Harlequin Centre for a limited edition scarf.

Those that have travelled right around the country in their support of the Hornets are likely to be making the journey to Middlesbrough, spurred on by the thought of an organised yet informal party atmosphere, and the club are keen to show their appreciation of that devotion of time and expense with a scarf which should prove useful during next season's winter months as the players strive to regain Premiership status.

Half term scheme

AFTER a busy Easter programme, Watford's Football in the Community Scheme is looking forward to welcoming new and familiar faces to seven venues which will be hosting courses over the Whitsun half-term week.

Courses are on offer for children of all abilities so to find out more or for an application form, call Kirk Wheeler or Rob Smith in the club's Football in the Community Office (01923) 440449 - places for Whitsun courses are always in high demand and are filling fast.

FAD Prize List

Watford Observer - Year's subscription for two to the newspaper

Hilton National - Dinner for two in the patio restaurant

Silverlink - First-class family return ticket: London Euston-Birmingham

Silverlink - 25 of travel vouchers

Simply Travel - Week for two in one of the Greek Islands (spring/autumn)

Sanyo - 24-CD multiplay hi-fi system

Vauxhall Motors - Two Helly Hansen coats

Phones 4U - VIP day out for four at a home game next season inc. Directors box seats and limousine travel to and from stadium

Le Coq Sportif - 100 worth of 'kit'

David Lloyd Leisure - Month's complimentary membership of David Lloyd Health Club, Bushey

Shakespeare Hotel - Three wine presentation packs

Clements - 50 gift voucher

Bedrooms & Bathrooms - 500 voucher to spend in their Market Street store

P&MM Ltd - Two return Eurostar tickets to Paris

Tim Shaw - Two tickets for Day 1 of the 1st Team between England and the West Indies on Thursday, June 29, 2000

Kenwood Elec - A portable compact disc player

Brian Anderson - Kickers or Ellesse clothing to the retail value of 200

Brian Anderson - A pair of Mitre football boots of the winner's choice

Chris Norton - A Dell notebook

Sir Elton John Management - A pair of front-row tickets to Sir Elton John's gala concert in aid of Amnesty International at Woburn Abbey on Bank Holiday Monday, May 29

Cameron Mackintosh Ltd - A pair of tickets to see Cats

Cameron Mackintosh Ltd - A pair of tickets to see Phantom of the Opera

Cameron Mackintosh Ltd - A pair of tickets to see Les Miserables

Cameron Mackintosh Ltd - A pair of tickets to see The Witches of Eastwick

EA Sports & Infogrames UK - A selection of popular PlayStation games

Wash & Go - A Wash & Go prize pack including a year's supply of Wash & Go shampoo and conditioner

Wash & Go - A Wash & Go prize pack including a year's supply of Wash & Go shampoo and conditioner

Warwick Racecourse Ltd - The use of a executive box for ten people for Warwick Racecourse's meeting of Bank Holiday Monday, August 28. Prize to include car park passes and members badges

Camelot - One free go for a year in every Wednesday and Saturday National Lottery draw

Watford FC - A pair of tickets to each of Watford's away Nationwide League Division One matches next season
For 50, BetweenTheCommons.com will include properties on its database, including a picture. It will also carry local advertising.

Potential buyers can look at properties online and contact the seller directly to arrange viewings and offers.
The team's conclusion was published this month as a letter by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Beijing: Chinese scientists claimed that dogs have originated in southern China some 33,000 years ago, disputing US research that domesticated dogs evolved 15,000 years ago in Central Asia.

A research team led by Zhang Yaping from Kunming Institute of Zoology in Yunnan province has questioned the results of previous research by Cornell University in US which was described as the "largest-ever survey of worldwide canine genetic diversity".

The team's conclusion was published this month as a letter by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a top US-based research journal, and previously by Cell Research, a Chinese Academy of Sciences' publication.

Wang Guodong, an associate professor from the academy's Zoology Institute, told state-run China Daily that, "for the first time, our study unravels an extraordinary journey that the domestic dog has travelled on Earth."

The Chinese research disagrees with conclusions reached in October by a team of scientists led by Adam Boyko of Cornell University.

The Cornell research, which analysed more than 185,800 genetic markers for 4,600 purebred dogs from 165 breeds, along with more than 540 village dogs from 38 countries, concluded that the earliest dogs appeared in Central Asia 15,000 years ago.

There are more than 400 dog breeds in the world, including the Chow, which has existed for more than 2,000 years, and the German Shepherd Dog, which has a history of less than 200 years.

"First, the definition of Central Asia in the previous research is wrong, because they assigned Mongolia and Nepal to Central Asia.

"Second, despite its large scale, the research did not include data on dog populations from southern China, which has always been believed to be an important place of origin for domesticated dogs," Wang said.

Wang also sequenced the genome of indigenous dogs living in the Chinese countryside and compared the data with that of the Cornell research, finding that Chinese dogs existed much earlier.

The team also sequenced 12 gray wolves - the modern dog's ancestor - 27 primitive dogs from Asia and Africa and 19 diverse breeds from across the world.

The scientists said Chinese dogs have significantly more genetic diversity than other populations and are genetically the closest to gray wolves, indicating that dogs were domesticated in southern East Asia about 33,000 years ago.

"Since dogs and humans became friends, dogs have migrated with humans either as watchdogs in agricultural civilisations or as herding dogs for nomads," said Peng Minsheng, an associate professor at the institute who specialises in human and animal genetics.

Dogs travelled from East Asia to Europe with human beings. But it's unknown whether they travelled along the Silk Road or by sea.
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...
Bengaluru: Mysuru, an air-conditioned city till recently, is fast losing the tag, thanks to a steady rise in mercury. The confirmation of rising temperature in the city came recently when it touched an unprecedented 39.8 degrees Celsius mark.

Mysuru has now joined a list of cities that have seen rising temperatures because of man-made crises. Old timers of Mysuru recall green canopies on almost all roads in the city that kept the weather cool despite scorching summers.

But the green canopies are going, thanks to governments development agenda. Unfortunately, the voice of green activists has been silenced by politicians and civic authorities.

Mysuru, rated the cleanest city in the country under the Swachh Bharat Abiyaan, was known for its greenery, broad footpaths and, of course, salubrious weather. But the decline in weather has been noticeable in the last 10-15 years.

Thousands of trees have been cut in the last decade for road-widening, formation of new layouts and other development works. Historians say rulers and dewans of encouraged planting of trees to ensure greenery and clean air to its citizens.

But due to lack of foresight of officials, trees are becoming the first casualty of reckless development. Recently, the Mysuru City Corporation authorities took up widening of Dhanvantri and Ramanuja Roads and cut hundreds of trees.

Even around the famous Mysuru Palace, one hardly gets to see trees anymore. A number of age-old trees planted by the maharajas on Sayyaji Rao Road were axed in the name of Raja Marga, an unscientific project being executed at a cost of crores of rupees by the city corporation.

MCC helpless?

A senior officer of the Mysuru City Corporation said there is a lot of pressure on them to widen roads to accommodate increasing number of vehicles for which they have to cut trees. Tree plantation has taken a backseat due to lack of maintenance.

Shock in store

A real shock is yet to come for Mysureans as over 2,000 trees have been marked for felling from Mysuru to Gundlupet for the widening of National Highway 218. Already, the work of axing trees has begun and the whole stretch of road will have no trees on either side soon.

Trees under threat

Dr Vasanthkumar Mysoremath, a social activist, thinks that trees of Mysuru are facing a grave threat from the urban civic body. When roads are laid, no space is given for percolation of water resulting in slow death of trees. Besides, increased vehicle population is adding harmful green gases to the environment.

The forest department must not allow the corporation to cut trees. We don't want Mysuru to go the Bengaluru way, he said. Mr K.A. Kushalappa, a retired IFS officer, said, "The green cover is vanishing due to lack of foresight of city planners. Trees that are more than 70-80 years old are being felled mercilessly

without understanding its impact on the city. Lack of tree cover has led to rising

temperature in the city, he said.
Verizon announced yesterday that it is looking into 57 incidents of network sabotage and various criminal activities in a span of two weeks after approximately 36,000 workers walked off their jobs.

During normal operations, the telecom giant said these incidents are "rare" with only around 6 or so incidents reported in a year. But such activities have accelerated since its workers quit their jobs on April 13.

According to Verizon, the criminal incidents were perpetrated in five states and include "intentionally damaging Verizon equipment," "severing" fiber optic cables, and vandalizing terminal boxes.

For proof, the telecom company cited what vandals did in Salisbury, MA. Verizon said these vandals sliced wires inside a terminal box that provided 911 emergency services to local residents. The company later restored the service.

In addition, 17 incidents of vandalism were reported in New Jersey, a majority of them in the northern part of the state.

Earlier, on April 20, the telecom giant also released a report indicating that thousands of Verizon customers "have been cut off from critical services over the past few days as criminals have damaged or destroyed critical network facilities."

The report also added that "There have been at least 24 suspected incidents of sabotage over the past week in five states in which services were cut off for thousands of residential and business customers, including a local police and fire department in New Jersey."

Michael Mason, chief security officer of the telecom company said: "We will find out who's behind these highly dangerous criminal acts and we will pursue criminal charges."

Verizon is offering a $10,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest and prosecution of those who are responsible.

Meanwhile, the Communications Workers of America, the workers' union involved in the strike, did not respond to a request for comment from CNNMoney.
Tim Cook, Apple CEO, recently claimed that Apple Music has now signed up 13 million paying subscribers, up from 11 million it has only two months ago. This is an impressive growth of the tech giant in just 10 weeks.

This music service was rolled out on June 30 last year in over 100 countries. It will celebrate its second anniversary in just two months.

With this growth rate, Apple Music is right on track in its goal of reaching 15 million subscribers. It is catching up fast on Spotify which is reportedly enjoying over 20 million paying users with nearly 75 million active users after several weeks of Apple's music service debut.

With sluggish hardware sales, Tim Cook focused on his services department that includes iTunes, several App Stores, iCloud, licensing services, Apple Pay and Apple Music.

This division of the tech giant achieved a purchase value of $9.9 billion, a record for the company and a number up 37 percent year-over-year, according to Cook.

"We are very happy with the continued strong growth in revenue from Services, thanks to the incredible strength of the Apple ecosystem and our growing base of over one billion active devices," said Cook.

Apple Music has become one of the world's biggest streaming music platforms at a fast clip since it is supported by a huge installed user base in iTunes and iPhone. Although it still lags behind Spotify, it is projected to easily get the same amount of subscribers very soon.

The price of this music service is only $9.99 a month for private users and $14.99 a month for a group of up to six users. This can be easily paid through an iTunes account.

Apple has heavily promoted its music service since its initial launch. It offered a number of exclusive releases of music and videos from notable names such as Drake and Taylor Swift. The tech giant also plans to launch a television show with Dr. Dre in the lead.
When Rita Ora started, she became a bona fide solo star. She dominated the global pop market the moment she stepped into that one fateful studio room.

The young Londoner and future pop princess is now living the life, bumping knuckles with the bar management with her snazzy outfit. MTV has it that she might not have been born this way but she became a household name associated with "Wow."

The pop princess began singing when she was six years old. She used to sing poems and recalled that she did it to inspire reaction. "What drew me most to singing was the fact that I could make a noise that made me feel good about myself... This brand new communication device. I understood the power of it straight away," Rita Ora explained.

Ora began performing at open mic sessions around London and, occasionally, in her father's pub. She had her few strikes at fame when she appeared on Craig David's track "Awkward." A few years later, she became a huge priority for JAY Z's Roc Nation when she was introduced to the American public. Rita Ora became an instant hit after signing on a recording and publishing deal with Beyonce's hubbie, back in 2008.

She became who she is today because of her history and her parents. "I owe them everything," she said. Born in Kosovo, her family started up during hardships. She knew what her parents went through. When they were decamped to London, she began to experiment with her voice into her early teenage years.

Her incredible talent between mixing street-beats with pop earned her a place in the industry. She remembered all the sounds she heard on the streets, carnivals, food joints and the local black music playing. Her first record, she recalled, "had to sound exactly like my life."
NASA has awarded funds to a California-based company to develop an advanced, superefficient solar electric propulsion (SEP) system. The next-generation engines may be unveiled soon.

According to Space.com, the space agency has given California-based company Aerojet Rocketdyne $67 million. With the 36-month contract, the company is tasked to design, build and test an advanced SEP system.

NASA officials admitted that these new engines will definitely have a "profound impact on the future of spaceflight." "We basically are building a new drive train that enables whole new platforms for deep-space exploration," Bryan Smith, director of the Space Flight Systems Directorate at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio, said during a news briefing on Apr. 21.

SEP systems are able to convert solar power to electricity which will then be used to accelerate ions out of a nozzle to generate thrust. Engineers have been working on this system for more than 50 years now.

Moreover, SEP engines are said to be more efficient than traditional chemical rockets since it requires less fuel to travel. Ion engines, however, create less thrust than standard rockets so it would take SEP-powered spacecrafts a longer time to get to the destination.

"NASA said it wants Aerojet Rocketdyne to give ion engines more oomph, up to twice the thrust capacity of currently available SEP systems," the publication wrote. "The agency plans to use the advanced ion engines on a variety of missions, including its project to pluck a boulder off a near-Earth asteroid and drag the piece into orbit around the moon. There, astronauts will visit the rock."

Meanwhile, Space News reported that NASA has cut funding for a Mars landing technology project by about 85 percent. This is in response to budget reductions to its space technology program.

James Reuter, NASA deputy associate administrator for space technology, has said the cut was necessary for the fiscal year 2016 appropriations bill which was completed last December. The Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will be getting just a small fraction of its initial $20 million budget.
Apple's shares dropped at 7 percent when trading started on Wednesday. This comes after news of the company's first revenue decline was announced.

The Guardian reported that Apple's shares opened at $95.98 and was able to increase slightly on Wednesday morning. The sales drop knocked about $50 billion off of the company's market capitalization.

Tim Cook displayed incredible optimism. "This too shall pass," he said to analysts after the company's results were announced on Tuesday evening.

Apple revealed that its quarterly sales had fallen by about 13 percent when compared to the same period last year. The resulting income of $50.6 billion, as opposed to $58 billion, marked the first time in 13 years that the company's revenue had dropped.

It was noted that the iPhone is responsible for about two-thirds of Apple sales revenue. The company, however, sold fewer iPhones than it was able to do during the same period last year.

This resulted to the tech giant making less money out of the devices. Moreover, the decline was also believed to be caused by the struggling Chinese economy.

Fortunately, the one-day drop did not affect Apple's status as "the world's most valuable company." The company's financial struggles is expected to continue until the iPhone 7's release later this year.

"Overall we see few bright spots in the March report and June guide," Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster wrote, "but continue to expect the iPhone 7 cycle will result in a return to growth in [Dec. 2016]." Munster was referring to the company's public financial projections.

According to CNBC, CEO Tim Cook has admitted that the Apple Watch "has quickly become the best-selling and most-loved smartwatch in the world." "We believe it has an exciting future ahead," Cook added.

The company's CEO also remained optimistic about China. "We are committed to investing there for the long run," Apple CFO Luca Maestri said.
Letters from a father to a daughter are always endearing and the latest one is extremely heartfelt. We love the way Narayana Murthy has penned his heart out to his daughter Akshata emphasising on the fact that the simplest things in life are often the happiest and they are for free. Heres a brief excerpt from the letter...

Akshata, becoming a father transformed me in ways that I could never have thought possible. I am often asked about the qualities that I have imparted to my children. I tell them that it is your mother who shouldered this great responsibility and I am ever so grateful to her for bringing you up to be the fine individuals you are.

She communicated values more by action than by talking about them. She taught Rohan and you the importance of simplicity and austerity. It was in the mid-eighties, Infosys had just begun its operations, and we did not have any money to spend on non-basic goods. Your mother explained to you that we would not be able to buy the dress and that you would have to drop out of the performance. Much later, you told me that you had not been able to understand or appreciate that incident...

Prakash, Ujjala and Farhan in Toronto

Bengalurean Vinay Bharadwajs Lets Talk with Vinay is an inspiring English talk show on the Internet that gets the biggest names in the city to talk about their successes and failures.

While the citys whos who like Prasad Bidapa, Ashwini Bopanna, Mayuri Upadhya, Puneeth Rajkumar and Raghu Dixit among others have all made an appearance on the show, it caught the attention of none other than Deepika Padukone, who retweeted Vinays episode revolving around mental health with counselor, Anna Chandy! Speaking of Deepika, her parents are giving us new fitness goals! Prakash and Ujjala who recently visited her in Toronto were spotted with Farhan Dhalla, her trainer. While he helped them work out, he also posted a picture on social media.
Recent Yahoo sale news revealed that the Internet giant has finally bowed to activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP. The company has agreed to add four new members to its board.

Reuters reported that Yahoo has finally reached a deal with Starboard to introduce four new independent directors to its board. The agreement showed that the company's board and management were pressed by major shareholders to settle the proxy battle.

This would greatly help the Internet giant especially with the looming Yahoo sale. Starboard chief executive Jeffrey Smith as well as three independent directors will be joining the company's board as soon as possible.

Sources involved in the negotiations admitted that Yahoo and Starboard has often discussed ways to "avoid putting the fate of the board in the hands of shareholders." Smith is also said to join the company's strategic review committee.

"The decision point for Smith was, 'Do we want to be inside the tent when a deal goes down or do we want to be sitting on the outside hoping the board does the right thing?'" Eric Jackson, managing director at SpringOwl Asset Management, said. SpringOwl is a fund that owns Yahoo shares.

Two incumbent Yahoo directors, Lee Scott and Sue James, will be stepping down at the annual meeting. The company's board will soon have 11 members, including the four new directors.

There is no formal date set yet for Yahoo's annual meeting this year. It is usually held in late June, though.

According to Business Insider, the settlement could mean that Marissa Mayer's time with Yahoo may be coming to an end. The activist company has been vocal about bringing "significant changes" to the Internet giant's executive-leadership team.

"The clock is ticking. I think the sale is a forgone conclusion now, so it's unlikely that Mayer will stay on with whoever buys the core business," Jackson added. Moreover, the company that wins the Yahoo sale will most likely want a new leadership team for the business.
Uber, a ride-hailing startup company, has welcomed the newest and first woman member of their board of directors, Arianna Huffington.

"Arianna embodies the type of optimistic leadership we need as Uber continues to grow," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in a blog post.

Huffington is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post and is the woman behind a recently authored and published best-selling book about sleep

Kalanick revealed that Huffington has been supportive of Uber's mission that is to provide a "transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere for everyone."

Huffington's addition to Uber's board of directors is a result of the company's effort to address passenger safety.

Uber, which is operating now in 412 cities around the globe, has received complaints about sexual harassment. For instance, in January of last year, a woman from New Delhi claimed she was sexually assaulted by an Uber Driver. The woman, who filed a case against Uber, said the company has failed to ensure the protection of female passengers. The ride-hailing company, earlier this month, has settled another lawsuit by the counties of Los Angeles and San Francisco regarding customer safety. The company has agreed to pay as much as $25 million.

Huffington's addition to the board has not been received with arms wide open, especially by the media watchers. For some, this would taint bias with regard to Huffington Post's coverage of Uber as this clearly falls under conflicts of interest. The Huffington Post has not released any statement.

However, for Kalanick, Huffington "embodies the type of optimistic leadership we need as Uber continues to grow. Her guidance has been invaluable to me personally over the years, and I know that in this new role she'll help take Uber to the next level," hopefully, without having to compromise the quality and dignity Huffington Post has built and maintained all throughout the years.

Other members of the board of directors include Bill Gurley of Benchmark and David Plouffe, Uber's former policy and communications chief.
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Chennai: 'Kutti' Venkitesan (54), Sriperumbudur panchayat union chairman, was hacked to death in full public view off the Chennai - Bengaluru highway near Sunguvachatram in neighbouring Kancheepuram district on Wednesday by six men riding three bikes. He was the prime suspect in the murder of panchayat councilor and film producer Kumaran in October 2012.

Venkitesan was in the AIADMK when he was elected in 2011, but shifted his loyalty to BJP after he was removed from AIADMK because of his criminal activities. A resident of Mannur village, Venkitesan on Wednesday was walking from his vehicle to a mechanic shop in Sunguvachatram at around 11.30 am, when six mercenaries on 3 bikes surrounded him.

Though he tried to escape by running away, the gang members, armed with sickles, chased him and scythed him to death. After killing Venkitesan, the gang members coolly cleaned their sickles on the spot before speeding away on their bikes.

A police team which arrived later on the spot shifted the body to Kancheepuram government general hospital for post mortem. After inspecting the scene and gathering information on the killing, the police said the killers were possibly hired by someone who wanted to settle scores with Venkitesan, who was involved in numerous crimes, including murder, holding kangaroo courts and extortion.

Venkitesan was arrested for the murder of Kumaran in 2012. Police on Wednesday indicated that the murder of 'Kutti' Venkitesan was not political but a revenge murder. He was into real estate and metal scrap business and had operated in Sriperumbudur industrial area as a mafia boss.
Hanesbrands Inc. is expanding its global reach again through its largest deal ever, announcing plans Wednesday to spend $800 million in cash to buy Pacific Brands Ltd., Australias top underwear and intimate apparel company.

Pacific, based in Melbourne, is best known for the Bonds and Berlei brands, as well as the Sheridan line of luxury linens, towels, bedding accessories, loungewear and babywear in retail and wholesale channels.

The proposed deal is expected to close in the third quarter, pending Pacific shareholder and regulatory approvals.

There were analyst expectations overnight that a counter offer could be made for Pacific even though its board of directors said in signing off on the Hanesbrands bid that there has been "no superior proposals."

The acquisition comes 20 days after Hanesbrands said it plans to spend $228 million in cash on Champion Europe, which would fulfill its strategy of regaining the global rights to its top athletic apparel brand.

With the completion of the Pacific purchase, Hanesbrands would have the No. 1 or No. 2 market share in 11 industrial countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain and the United States.

Much of the rise in Hanesbrands sales, profit  and expectations  since its September 2006 spin-off from Sara Lee Corp. comes from spending $1.58 billion on six major purchases: $585 million for Maidenform Brands Inc.; $528 million for Parisian manufacturer DBApparel; $55 million and assumption of $170 million in debt for GearCo Inc.; $200 million for Knights Apparel; $30 million for the rights to Champion in Japan; and $9 million for Australian apparel distributor TNF Apparel.

Pacific Brands is a natural addition to the Hanesbrands portfolio with its strong market-leading brands that will be complemented by our global supply chain, Richard Noll, Hanesbrands chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

In the span of 10 years, we have transformed the company through acquisitions and our innovate-to-elevate initiative, Noll said.

The Pacific underwear unit accounts for three-fourths of sales, with more than 150 company retail stores and retailer venues.

Bonds holds Australias top market share in mens, womens and childrens underwear, babywear and socks, as well as the No. 3 spot in bras. The Berlei brand of premium bras sold in department stores is No. 2 in overall bra market share and tops in sports bras.

Hanesbrands said Pacific is projected to have $600 million in core sales in fiscal 2016, along with adjusted profit of $56 million.

Hanesbrands projects that within three years Pacific will produce $100 million annually toward its adjusted profit, representing 25 cents in adjusted earnings per share.

Stifel analyst Jim Duffy said buying Pacific means that international sales will grow to about 30 percent of its overall revenue, compared with have little international sales at spin-off.

International sales in the first quarter were $279.1 million, or 22.9 percent of $1.22 billion in overall sales.

"We applaud opportunities to add scale in core categories and see the Pacific Brands acquisition as a good strategic fit for Hanesbrands and offers ample opportunity for synergies," Duffy said.

"Specifically, with Pacific Brands volumes in basic categories, we see opportunity for Hanesbrands to add scale to the Asian manufacturing cluster to use as a sourcing base for Europe and perhaps for certain labor-intensive categories, such as North America."

In recent years, Pacific underwent a significant restructuring that involved a change in focus on what it considered as its main apparel categories, as well as shifting the bulk of production to China.

Peter Bush, Pacific's chairman, said in a statement that Hanesbrands "has recognized the work done over the past two years that has seen the board and management team under chief executive David Bortolussis leadership reshape and simplify the business to focus on our highest quality brands and improve operational performance."

"That work has resulted in a significant re-rating of the company and its share price. Shareholders now have an opportunity to realize a further increase in value through a compelling proposal to de-risk future growth opportunities available to the business."

Bush said the board is confident that Hanesbrands can provide Pacific "with additional scale, sourcing benefits, financial flexibility and the opportunity to accelerate the growth of iconic brands, such as Bonds and Sheridan."

"We expect the transaction will have limited impact on Pacific Brands continuing operations and employees.

Although Duffy is paying a 22 percent premium for Pacific, it was expected by analysts given the global competition for apparel acquisition that can move the revenue needle.

"Pending solid integration execution, we expect this justified over-time through synergies," Duffy said.

"While encouraged by Hanesbrands' capacity for free cash flow and opportunity to deliver synergies with acquisitions, we remain cautious on organic revenue growth prospects and the sustainability of core business margin. We remain comfortable at hold."

The initiative relies foremost of introducing innovations that add value to its basic apparel and underwear products.

Hanesbrands operates much of its production within its plants in the Pacific Rim, Central America and the Caribbean. It plans to bring Pacifics production in house, which currently is made mostly by third-party manufacturers.

We have tripled operating profits and expanded from a $4 billion company concentrated in the United States to a $7 billion global underwear and activewear powerhouse spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific, Noll said.

This foundation will serve as a catalyst for even further growth and value creation for the foreseeable future.

Pacific has a third business unit, Tontine pillows and Dunlop flooring. Hanesbrands plans to sell the unit, which currently accounts for 12 percent of sales and profits.

Pacific said that if Hanesbrands is not successful in divesting Tontine and Dunlop Flooring, Pacific intends to keep both units.

Hanesbrands said with the planned reacquisition of Champion Europe, it will have $1.2 billion in global sales. It projects having $2 billion in global Champion sales by 2021 or 2022.

Hanesbrands has told analysts it intends to take advantage of its strong balance sheet to fund the acquisition with debt, consistent with its previously communicated capital allocation strategy.

The company also remains committed to its share-repurchase initiatives.

The company repurchased 14.2 million shares of stock in the first quarter for a value of $380 million. Last year, the company bought back 12 million shares for $352 million.

The board announced Wednesday a new share-purchase program, authorizing spending up to $1 billion to buy back up to 40 million shares, or about 10.6 percent of its 337.5 outstanding shares. There is no expiration date on the share repurchases.

A company typically buys back its shares from the marketplace to reduce the number of outstanding shares. Because there are fewer outstanding shares, those remaining can become more valuable. Companies also buy back shares when they believe the shares are undervalued.

Hanesbrands 52-week share price range is $23.25 to $34.78. It closed down Wednesday 23 cents to $27.79.
Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar with his Pakistani counterpart Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry before a meeting at South Block in New Delhi on Tuesday. Pakistan's High Commissioner to India, Abdul Basit (right) is also seen. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: India firmly asked Pakistan not to be in denial over the impact of terrorism on bilateral ties while Pakistan kept harping on Kashmir, terming it as the core issue between the two.

The meeting between Indias foreign secretary S. Jaishankar and Pakistans Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry went on for nearly 90 minutes. Several issues, including the probe into the Pathankot terror attack, the 26/11 trial and the Sam-jhauta Express blast investigations were raised.

India raised the issue of the abduction of former naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav, saying he had been forcibly taken to Pakistan, and sought im-mediate consular access. This is the first time In-dia has clearly said that Mr Jadhav was abducted.

In a statement, Pakistan said it had raised the capturing of Mr Jadhav and expressed serious concern over RAWs alleged involvement in subversive activities in Balochistan and Karachi, a charge that was strongly rebutted by India.

Indias foreign secretary emphasised the need for early and visible pro-gress on the Pathankot terrorist attack investigation as well as the Mumbai case trial in Pakistan, an MEA spokesperson said.

Pakistan says kashmir is the core issue

Tuesdays meeting was the first formal interaction of the two foreign secretaries since their scheduled talks were put on hold in the wake of the Pathankot attack in January.

The Pakistani statement emphasised the importance of Kashmir and said the matter was raised by Mr Chaudhry. The statement added that it remained the core issue that requires a just solution in accordance with UNSC resolutions and wishes of the Kashmiri people.

Interestingly, the Pakistani side released the talking points while the meeting between the two foreign secretaries was still on. The statement by Pakistan also said: All outstanding issues, including the J&K dispute, were discussed.
An appeal of a federal judges decision upholding North Carolinas election law will likely be heard this summer.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is fast-tracking its review of U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeders decision, according to court documents. Late Monday, Schroeder issued a 479-page written decision that dismissed legal challenges against the 2013 election law, known as the Voter Information Verification Act.

The laws best-known provision requires voters to show a valid photo identification, such as a drivers license, passport or military ID.

But the law also eliminated or reduced practices disproportionately used by black and Hispanic voters  same-day voter registration, early voting and out-of-precinct voting.

The North Carolina NAACP and others filed a lawsuit soon after the law was passed, charging that it violated the U.S. Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

They alleged in court papers that the law put undue burdens on blacks, Hispanics and poor people.

On Tuesday, the day after Schroeders decision, the state NAACP and the League of Women Voters filed notices of appeal.

Penda Hair, one of the attorneys for the state NAACP, said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters that she wanted the appeal to be expedited so a decision is made before the Nov. 8 general election.

That election will likely have high turnout because it includes what many predict will be a highly contested presidential race.

Over the past several years, the states election law has put North Carolina in the national limelight.

Voting-rights activists consider the law to be one of the most sweeping and stringent changes in voting practices since the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That section required all or parts of 15 states, including North Carolina to get federal approval, known as pre-clearance, before making any changes in voting laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision came down in June 2013.

North Carolinas election law was passed through the General Assembly in July 2013. On Aug. 12, 2013, Gov. Pat McCrory signed the legislation into law.

During trials in January and last July, attorneys representing the state argued that North Carolinas election law was not discriminatory and that the changes were needed to stamp out potential voter fraud and improve efficiency.

In his decision, Schroeder essentially sided with the state and argued that plaintiffs had failed to prove that the law was passed to intentionally discriminate against racial minorities.

He also said that black voter turnout in 2014, which increased over 2010, undercut plaintiffs argument that the law was discriminatory.

Plaintiffs have hope that the 4th Circuit will overturn all or at least part of Schroeders ruling. In 2014, the 4th Circuit overturned part of Schroeders denial of a preliminary injunction and blocked two provisions of the law  same-day voter registration and out-of-precinct voting. That temporary block is still in effect for the June primary.

Whatever decision the 4th Circuit makes will likely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Its not clear when the 4th Circuit will hear oral arguments.

The U.S. Justice Department, which also sued over the elections law, has not yet indicated whether it will appeal Schroeders decision.
Thanks to Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, 200,000 convicted felons in the state of Virginia may now register to vote.

Writes The Washington Post, The change applies to all felons who have completed their sentences and been released from supervised probation or parole. The Democratic governors decision particularly affects black residents of Virginia: 1 in 4 African Americans in the state has been permanently banned from voting because of laws restricting the rights of those with convictions.

McAuliffes executive order also allows felons, including rapists and murderers, to run for public office, serve on a jury and become a notary public. I can just visualize the campaign slogan now: Vote for me. Ive already done time.

Republicans are outraged, of course. Virginia House of Delegates Speaker William J. Howell said: The singular purpose of Terry McAuliffes governorship is to elect Hillary Clinton president of the United States. This office has always been a stepping stone to a job in Hillary Clintons cabinet.

Its an accusation McAuliffe vehemently denies.

Hillary Clinton tweeted, Proud of my friend @GovernorVA for continuing to break down barriers to voting.  H.

After many years as a Republican, or red state, Virginia more recently has become a swing state and important to Democrats for winning the presidency. It is likely that many of these felons will become reliable Democratic voters. Maybe Democrats will next figure out a way to hand illegal immigrants crossing our southern border the right to vote.

McAuliffe, a prolific fundraiser for the Clintons, appears to be as loyal to them as a familys faithful golden retriever. He has raised millions for them and for the Democratic National Committee. For a good account of McAuliffes fundraising antics and other financial dealings, visit the website counterpunch.org.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, In 38 states and the District of Columbia, most ex-felons automatically gain the right to vote upon the completion of their sentence. In liberal Maine and Vermont, convicted felons may cast their ballots while in prison and are never disenfranchised. Most states require ex-convicts to apply to have their voting rights restored. Many factors go into the decision, including the nature of the crime. It is not always automatic.

In his book The Virginia Constitution, John J. Dinan writes: Virginias felon disenfranchisement provision ... has been challenged in several cases, but sustained in each instance. In 1982, Virginia voters rejected a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have allowed convicted felons to vote. As recently as 2004, notes Dinan, a constitutional amendment to automatically restore felons voting rights after the completion of their sentences was considered by the General Assembly, but failed to achieve a majority in either the House or Senate.

Societies going back to Greek and Roman times have disenfranchised convicted criminals because they regarded such actions as part of their punishment. There was also a sense that not allowing convicted felons to vote might, when combined with other forms of punishment, serve as a deterrent to crime.

Republicans have long accused Democrats of election shenanigans, i.e., Mickey Mouses name showing up on registration lists, voters giving nonexistent addresses, some voting more than once. And lets not forget what I call the cemetery vote, or the ultimate absentee ballot, where the dead get to vote.

In an interview following McAuliffes announcement, Speaker Howell suggested legal action might be taken. There isnt much time between now and November and the Republican majority legislature is not even in session. Legal action would be difficult.

If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency and the votes of Virginia felons prove decisive, cheating and voter cynicism will plunge to new depths. Most people probably think politics cant get any dirtier. McAuliffes action shows they are wrong.
AAP government had earlier told the court that there was no violation of any bail condition by Kanhaiya Kumar. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: The hearing on pleas seeking cancellation of interim bail granted to JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar on Thursday witnessed a confrontation between the AAP government and Delhi Police in the Delhi High Court over the issue of representing the state.

During the hearing before a bench of Justice P S Teji, Delhi government's senior standing counsel Rahul Mehra objected to the presence of advocates Shailendra Babbar and Anil Soni, who were appointed as special public prosecutors (SPPs) for representing the Delhi Police in the matter.

"I am objecting to their presence," Mehra told the bench after which Babbar said they have been appointed as SPPs by the Lieutenant Governor to represent police in the matter.

The court, however, directed both of them to file their replies within four weeks on the pleas seeking cancellation of interim bail granted to Kanhaiya for allegedly violating bail conditions.

"Say whatever you both want to say in your replies. I want everything in black and white," the court said.

"It would be in the interest of justice that replies be filed by both Rahul Mehra and Shailendra Babbar within four weeks," the court said and fixed the matter for hearing on July 19.

During the hearing, Mehra told the bench that the petitioners have to first satisfy the court about their locus in filing such petition.

After Mehra raised the issue of locus of the petitioners, the bench said, "Let us have the replies first. Whatever you want to say, say in your replies."

"These objections (raised by Mehra on the locus of petitioners and presence of SPPs appearing for the police) cannot be entertained orally," the bench said.

AAP government had earlier told the court that there was no violation of any bail condition by the student leader.

The police had earlier said that it cannot comment on the pleas seeking cancellation of interim bail granted to Kanhaiya without verifying facts and they were investigating whether any bail condition was violated.

Separate pleas have been filed in the high court seeking cancellation of interim bail to Kanhaiya on the ground that his speech after his release from Tihar Jail here in March was "anti-national" and he had violated the bail conditions.

Besides seeking cancellation of interim bail, one of the petitioners has moved another plea for initiation of perjury proceedings against Kanhaiya alleging that he had "deliberately and wilfully filed a false affidavit" before the court while securing the relief.

Kanhaiya, who was granted six months interim bail on March 2 by the high court, is facing sedition charge in connection with an event at JNU on February 9 where anti-national slogans were allegedly raised and Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru hailed as a 'martyr'.
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Vollrath Associates, a Milwaukee public and investor relations firm that dates back to 1979, has been acquired by Reputation Partners LLC, a public relations and crisis management firm with headquarters in Chicago.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Marilyn Vollrath, co-founder, president and CEO of Vollrath Associates, has joined Reputation Partners as an executive vice president. Also moving to Reputation Partners are Jessica Vollrath Huebner and Samantha Orne. Vollrath Associates partner and co-founder Phil Vollrath is transitioning out of the firm to focus on his work as an adjunct professor at Marquette University, consulting and volunteer activities, Reputation Partners said in a statement.

Reputation Partners co-founder Megan Hakes, a Brookfield native, has worked from the Milwaukee area since 2004. The firm's office here generated more than 25% of Reputation Partners' 2015 revenue, she said.

The acquisition will give the firm a total of 18 employees, with six of them in Milwaukee, Hakes said.

Among Reputation Partners' current clients are Associated Bank, Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, accounting firm Ernst & Young and the Von Maur department store chain, which is expected to open a location at The Corners project in the Town of Brookfield next year.

Vollrath Associates' clients include Marcus Corp., Badger Meter Inc., Roadrunner Transportation Systems Inc. and Festa Italiana.
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Eau Claire-based Royal Credit Union plans to acquire a small bank in Minnesota, the latest deal in which a large credit union is buying a community bank.

If the transaction receives regulatory approval, Royal expects to take over Capital Bank, of St. Paul, in the second half of this year.

Royal said the acquisition will give it new members and add a branch to its Minnesota territory, which currently includes 12 counties.

"Capital Bank is known as the 'community bank within the city,' and we feel its current customers will be pleased by our commitment to providing exceptional financial value, great service and community giveback where the member comes first," Rudy Pereira, Royal Credit Union president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Capital Bank has assets of about $35 million, making it one of the 20 smallest banks based in Minnesota. Royal, with assets of almost $1.8 billion, is the fifth-largest credit union headquartered in Wisconsin. Capital Bank had net income of $204,000 in 2015. Royal's net income was $19.1 million.

The deal continues a trend of large credit unions buying small community banks. Wisconsin's largest credit union, New Berlin-based Landmark, acquired Hartford Savings Bank in 2014. In February, Advia Credit Union, of Parchment, Mich., announced it planned to acquire Janesville-based Mid America Bank.

According the industry publication CUToday, the Capital Bank deal with Royal would be the ninth time a credit union has purchased a bank since 2011.

Credit unions provide many of the same services as banks, but they are financial cooperatives owned by their members instead of stockholders. Banks often complain credit unions have an unfair competitive advantage because they don't have to pay income taxes.

For a small bank, selling to large credit union can be attractive for multiple reasons, according to attorney Michael M. Bell, who has been involved in most of the deals to date as a mergers and acquisitions specialist with the firm Howard & Howard in Royal Oak, Mich. Among them is that credit unions don't have stock that they can use in bank purchases, so they pay in cash.
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Two new apartment communities  a large project on Milwaukee's far south side and a much smaller development in the Riverwest neighborhood  are being proposed.

Naples, Fla.-based SCA Properties LLC is seeking Common Council approval to construct up to 160 units of assisted living housing on the west side of S. 20th St., north of W. Layton Ave., according to a new zoning proposal.

That project would have two buildings at 4565 and 4569 S. 20th St., according to the zoning resolution.

The larger building would be four stories and have around 125 to 130 units, said Rob Downing, who operates Downing & Co., a Plymouth, Mass.-based firm working with SCA on the proposed development.

The development also would have a one-story building with around 25 to 30 apartments. That building would be for people who need memory care or have other special needs, Downing said.

The developers would finance the project in part with federal affordable housing tax credits, he said. Those credits require developers to provide apartments at below-market rates to people who earn less than 60% of the area's median income.

The proposed development site is nearly 4 acres and is owned by members of the Hahlbeck family, according to city assessment records. It is the site of the family's greenhouse business.

In Riverwest, SG Properties LLC plans to develop a pair of four-unit buildings at 2764 N. Humboldt Blvd. Each building would be two stories.

However, that project could grow depending on the final plans and Common Council approval, said Scott Genke, SG Properties owner.

Genke wants to begin construction by fall. The development would be completed in 2017.

The development site, which SG Properties owns, is now a 12,500-square-foot vacant lot, according to city assessment records. It overlooks Gordon Park.

Facebook: facebook.com/JSBusiness

Twitter: twitter.com/TomDaykin

To track these projects and others, check out the Land & Space Development Database, at jsonline.com/business
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.
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Robert W. Baird & Co. Inc. Chairman Paul Purcell will receive a lifetime achievement award from the CFA Society Milwaukee.

It is only the second such award given out by the society, which represents investment professionals who meet certain criteria, including succesfully completing a series of rigorous exams. The Milwaukee group gave the first one in 2013 to Dan Fuss, a Milwaukee native who managed the Loomis Sayles Bond Fund, which won the 2009 Morningstar Fund Manager of the Year award in the fixed income category.

The award is designed to honor lifelong talents and achievement of a leader in the investment industry who has exemplified leadership, hard work, success and integrity.

Under Purcell, Baird's revenue grew to about $1 billion, a more than five-fold increase from $180 million when Purcell arrived in 1994. Its employee count has more than doubled to 2,750, and more than 60% of them are shareholders, he said.

Among the accomplishments Purcell has said he is most proud of, Baird has consistently landed on the Fortune magazine list of best companies to work for. The firm ranked No. 5 on the list in 2015, the second year it was among the top ten.

Purcell will receive the award at a lunch on Wednesday, May 25 at University Club. The cost to attend is $20 for members of the CFA Society and $30 for non-members. For more information, contact the society at 414-301-1299 or info@cfamilwaukee.org. Online registration is available.
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The parent company of utilities We Energies in Milwaukee and Wisconsin Public Service in Green Bay says it won't seek to raise electricity or natural gas rates in 2017, a move at least one customer says doesn't go far enough to address high energy prices in the state.

In a filing with state regulators this week, WEC Energy Group Inc. said it was responding to a recommendation from the state Public Service Commission to avoid seeking a price hike for nearly 1.6 million customers in Wisconsin at this time.

It's still possible rates could change come January because the utilities have to file a plan this summer projecting where power plant fuel costs will land next year.

The decision to skip a rate case comes amid concern from some We Energies customers that its rates are too high and after customer groups expressed disappointment that guaranteed savings for customers weren't mandated by the PSC last year when WEC Energy Group was created. The company was renamed after Wisconsin Energy purchased Chicago-based Integrys Energy Group Inc. in a $9.1 billion deal.

A recent report from the PSC indicated that rates paid by Wisconsin utility customers are higher than those paid in other Midwestern states.

At We Energies, spokesman Brian Manthey said the utility's "focus on cost controls and the tangible benefits from the acquisition of Integrys are key contributors to our ability to freeze customer rates."

A top customer, Charter Steel, has been urging the state to take action to bring rates down. On Wednesday, Charter president Bob Venable said he was disappointed that the utility is merely keeping rates steady.

"We aren't just looking for no new rate increases," he said. "We Energies customers really need rate decreases to avoid paying some of the highest rates in the region and really even in the nation. Time is of the essence, and avoiding a rate case means all of their customers keep paying too much for electricity for a longer period of time without a chance to address the problem."

Todd Stuart, executive director of the Wisconsin Industrial Energy Group, said the utility has more than $500 million in pending electricity transmission costs that could drive rates higher in the years ahead.

"Customers are going to need every single penny of synergy savings squeezed out of the acquisition as the rates are already among the highest in the Midwest," Stuart said. He urged the PSC, Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature to be "partners in getting our rates competitive once again. The top manufacturing state needs rate relief as a key part of our jobs and economic development efforts."

Jeff Ripp, administrator at the Public Service Commission, said in a response to the utility that in conjunction with the savings tied to the merger, the one-year freeze "will benefit customers." But he also raised concerns about the company's transmission costs that it has on its books waiting to be recouped in a future rate case.

"It is our understanding that WEC Energy Group will continue to look for opportunities to offset these escrowed expenses with savings achieved through acquisition of Integrys using the earnings sharing mechanism" and from agreements to sell extra power generated by We Energies to other state utilities, Ripp said.

We Energies said last month that it collected too much from customers last year for fuel burned in its power plants. Rather than issue a $16 million refund to customers, the utility proposed that it keep that money and reduce the amount of the pending electricity transmission costs.

We Energies has seen rates climb for a variety of reasons, principally to cover the costs of its power-plant construction program that added a $2.3 billion coal-fired power plant in Oak Creek and a natural gas-fired power plant it built in Port Washington. The utility has also moved more quickly than other utilities in the region to build costly scrubbers that cut emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants from coal-fired power plants.

The utility has maintained that rates in Wisconsin will become more competitive as other utilities spend heavily to replace coal plants or add scrubbers.
Antler House is releasing its second full-length album Across the Waves at a Company Brewing show Saturday. Credit: Courtesy of Antler House

Last week's Local Beat featured reviews of a couple hip-hop albums. This week, the emphasis is on metal.

Antler House, "Across the Waves" (facebook.com/antlerhouse)

It's interesting how "Waves" is a compact 33 minutes yet still so expansive. That's because the trio is rarely interested in placing its emo-accented rock into a neat package  "Nitwit" spans nearly seven minutes. The meandering occasionally robs the album of its potential energy, but on a song like "Make," which steadily builds from quietly shimmering guitars atop warm horns to an aching outcry, Antler House seems invigorated by its freedom.

Release show: 10 p.m. Saturday, Company Brewing, 735 E. Center St. $5.

Conniption, "Relentless Tides" (conniption.us)

Conniption's style of metal may have peaked in popularity in the '80s, but on "Relentless Tides," the Milwaukee metal band plays like it's destined to sell out arenas. The level of musicianship, talent and intensity is consistently phenomenal, from the melodramatic croon of Michael Craig Brigham on bluesy slow-burner "Give Me a Chance," to Bill House's Mozart-style guitar shredding on "At the End of It All," to Andy Martin's practically suicidal, nonstop drum assaults on "Becoming the Beast."

Release show: 9 p.m. Friday, the Metal Grill, 5036 S. Packard Ave., Cudahy. $8, $12 with CD.

Towering Abomination, "Towering Abomination" (facebook.com/toweringabomination)

If you're going to name a song "Fecal Feeding Frenzy," it's guaranteed you'll alienate pretty much everybody, and that's before anyone hears Gus Thome's indecipherable, orlock-like growls. But tower the death-metal band does  Nicholas Bradshaw's drums are like a machine gun, and Steve Schmidt's guitar bucks madly throughout the album like a furious bull.

Release show: 8 p.m. May 7, the Metal Grill. $8.

 Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking to music and creative writing students at Whitnall High School in Greenfield. Someone asked if I ever cover high school musicians, and I had to admit, not very often. Not that I don't want to, but I generally write about acts that are active in the local music scene, and sadly there aren't that many all-ages venues where high school artists get to perform in town.

But after my talk, a student named Samuel Moore approached me and told me about some electronic music he produced and posted on SoundCloud, under the stage name Moonstruck. I checked it out, and was definitely impressed, particularly by the textures and flow of "Quartz" and "Get on My Level." I hope you'll check his stuff out on SoundCloud, or you can hear a track with this column at jsonline.com/music.
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When 12-year-olds Sophia Depagter, Nyla Spicer, Kyliana Schroeder and 11-year-olds Kaylee Cherney and Hannah Lindow told classmates they would be dancing onstage with Justin Bieber, they were met with skepticism.

But with footage of Depagter and Spicer sharing the spotlight on Tuesday with Bieber at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, and videos sure to pop up of Cherney, Lindow and Schroeder doing the same at Thursday night's show at the Schottenstein Center in Columbus, Ohio, their classmates are changing their tune.

"Some people don't believe me, but now there's people telling me I'm really lucky," said Cherney, a Cedar Grove-Belgium School District student who has been dancing for seven years, including a stint with the Milwaukee Bucks Young Bucks Team. "There's people who really like him so now they're saying they're jealous because we get to be so close to him."

After getting home from the Cleveland show Wednesday morning, Depagter and Spicer met with Cherney, Lindow and Schroeder at Sheboygan's Dollhouse Dance Factory that afternoon to fill them in on what to expect before making the two-day drive to Ohio to join Bieber on his Purpose World Tour.

"We've just been telling them to not be too nervous," said Depagter, a Kohler Public School District student who has been dancing for four years. "It gets more fun as you are performing, and from when you start the routine to where you end, it's just really fun."

Depagter and Spicer said time seemed to fly during their two minutes on stage during the song "Children." But after nearly a week of preparation, they had grown used to that feeling.

Dollhouse founder and artistic director Kayla Pittner learned about Bieber's call for non-signed agent youth dancers the day of the deadline. Although she thought it might be too late, she taught the girls the routine and filmed them performing it. She also received a call from Laura Edwards  the tour's assistant choreographer, who had worked with Pittner's dancers before  asking Dollhouse to submit the footage.

Then last week, while registering a Dollhouse team to compete in the 2016 Dance Worlds in Orlando, Fla., Pittner received an email for each show indicating who had been selected.

From there, she contacted the girls' parents, sent them release forms, sent those to tour management and formally broke the news to the five Bieber fans.

"My mom's phone rang and I handed it to her, but she said it was for me and I knew something was up because I don't usually get calls on my mom's phone," said Lindow, a Grant Elementary School student with three years of dancing experience. "After (Pittner) told me, I was just jumping around. I ran outside. I was just so happy."

"Right now I'm not really nervous, I'm just really excited to be performing with him," Schroeder, a Horace Mann Middle School student with nine years of experience, said before her time with Bieber onstage Thursday night. "Right before I go on stage, I might get a little nervous, but I love performing on stage and I love performing for lots of people."

The girls were asked to brainstorm wardrobe ideas; their attire choice was up to them. They practiced the routine every day leading up to the concerts. In fact, with Depagter and Spicer in Orlando, they had to fly directly to Cleveland instead of back to Wisconsin.

Upon arriving at the Quicken Loans Arena, Depagter and Spicer  along with Kittner and one parent each  were brought in through an employee entrance, taken directly to the stage for a five-minute rehearsal and then brought to a VIP room full of food, candy and tour mementos to take pictures with.

An hour before the concert, all of the dancers were escorted to a diamond-shaped pit where they stayed until a tour dancer came for them as it started. When their routine was over  and after giving Bieber a couple of high-fives  Depagter and Spicer were brought back to the pit to observe the rest of the concert feet from the stage.

"This is what I've been wanting to do, to be on stage dancing with somebody famous," said Spicer, a Horace Mann student with four years of dancing experience. "I want to make this into a career. I really want to perform with other artists because it was really fun."
SHARE Guns seized by law enforcement officials in Dodge County are seen in a photo released by Dodge County Sheriffs Office.

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Law enforcement officers in Dodge County seized about 35 firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition and suspected drugs in a raid Wednesday in the Town of Lowell.

A 56-year-old man, Kirk Lupton, was taken into custody on suspicion of possession of a firearm by a felon. Richard Nutter, 34, also was taken into custody on a probation violation.

Police said the firearms and other items were found at a residence on Highway J. An ordnance device was found in the home, and the Milwaukee County Bomb Squad assisted Dodge County law enforcement in determining that it was safe and inert.

The raid on the home followed a lengthy investigation and the execution of a search warrant by the Sheriff's Office and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Jose Dancel confers with attorney Anthony Cotton. Credit: Michael Sears

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A jury found a Kenosha man guilty Thursday of trying to kill a Milwaukee woman as she sat in her car in 2014  a case in which no motive was ever established, despite the fierce and focused nature of the attack.

The victim, who sat tensely between her sister and a friend, broke into tears  and later, smiles  as the verdicts were read but declined to comment on the outcome.

The guilty verdicts  attempted first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless injury, endangering safety and bail jumping  followed about 12 hours of deliberation over two days.

Jose Dancel's trial began April 19. He faces up to 63 years in prison. No sentencing date was set. Dancel, who is already serving 15 years for a 2013 conviction for sexual assault in Kenosha, was free on bail in that case when he was arrested in the shooting.

Assistant District Attorney Denis Stingl declined to comment.

Dancel's defense attorney Anthony Cotton said, "I feel terrible for what happened to that woman. It's a devastating case." He said Dancel would consider his appeal options.

Police arrested Dancel, 45, about a month after the March 22, 2014, attack that resembled a failed execution.

Ashley Cartagena, 24, suffered more than two dozen gunshot wounds and three broken bones, including her jaw, but somehow survived. She described the incident to jurors, who also heard her desperate 911 call as blood filled her mouth: "Please hurry. I don't want to die."

She and two neighbors who looked out their window after hearing the shots that Saturday morning described the suspected shooter, who was wearing sunglasses, but also a specific kind of truck in which he left the area, an alley behind D'Matrixx, a salon near S. 47th St. and W. Forest Home Ave. where Cartagena worked as a stylist.

Video from a store down the street caught a similar pickup going past shortly after the shooting. That helped police narrow it down to a four-door Toyota Tacoma made between 2005 and 2011, with a butterfly sticker on a window.

Police released a photo of such a truck, and a composite of the suspected driver, and asked for the public's help locating either. The next day, April 18, 2014, they got a tip from someone who thought they saw a truck and driver that resembled the police alert.

Police swarmed the parking lot at a Greenfield store and took Dancel and his girlfriend for nearly four hours of questioning before letting them go. They also took extensive photos of Dancel's truck.

A detective brought the truck photos to the neighbor witnesses, a move the defense says infected their memories with more detail than they had recalled on their own before then.

The next day, police went to Dancel's home. He let them search his house, car and electronics. They arrested him.

All three women later picked Dancel from a lineup, a process also challenged by the defense. Despite deep investigation into the backgrounds of Dancel and Cartagena, police never established any connections between them or people they know. Prosecutors, however, do not have to prove any motive as an element of the crime.

Dancel's attorney called it a case of flawed eyewitness identification, and presented an expert to testify about the frequency of wrongful convictions.

One of the neighbors testified she was sure the man she saw walking after the shots was the same man she had seen sitting in the same truck in front of her house four days earlier.

She said she got a particularly good look at him then, because as she drove past she sensed he was staring at her, and said, "What the (expletive) are you looking at?" in response.

But Dancel testified he was in Michigan that day, and his cellphone records show calls from around the state that day, and days before and after.

Jurors seemed particularly interested in that evidence, asking to review the cellphone information after they began deliberations Wednesday, and to see a transcript of the witness' testimony about her encounter with the pickup driver four days before the shooting.

The prosecution also stressed that Dancel's phone had pinged off a tower southwest of the crime scene, a few minutes later, consistent with someone heading west on Forest Home, the direction the witnesses said the truck had gone.

Dancel explained that by saying he was using the archery range at Whitnall Park that morning. His ex-girlfriend said she had gone there with him to shoot at least a dozen times, but was working that morning.
Rajahmundry: The TDP government will spend Rs 4,000 crore for the development of infrastructural facilities in various towns of the state, Andhra Pradesh Finance Minister Y Ramakrishnudu has said.

At present, 27 per cent of the state's population lives in towns, which, he said have been seeing a rise in migration from people in the villages.

The state government is taking all necessary steps, including development of infrastructural facilities in towns to meet the needs of people who migrate and those already living there, Ramakrishnudu said here yesterday.

"The state government has decided to spend Rs 4,000 crore for development of infrastructural facilities," he said, hoping the move will also increase employment opportunities. He expressed happiness at the selection of Kakinada and Visakhapatnam by the Centre to be developed as 'smart cities' in Andhra Pradesh.

The minister said the TDP government will utilise funds, both from the state and the Centre, for the development of Kakinada as smart city, he added. He also called for the need to facilitate the reach of the state's welfare programmes for the benefit of poor and other sections.
Julia Steele Allen portrays Sara "Mariposa" Fonseca serving time in solitary confinement in Mariposa and the Saint, a play that seeks to inspire reform of prison practices. Ray Huth (right) portrays Fonseca's faceless guard. Credit: Noelle Ghoussaini

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After being caught with a pair of tweezers in a California prison, Sara Fonseca was sent to solitary confinement, where she spent 23 hours a day in a cell the size of an elevator with no access to phone calls or visitors.

If she climbed up on the toilet, she could speak to other isolated prisoners through the air vents. Sometimes, they would sing together through the vents.

During her nearly three years in solitary, Fonseca wrote letters to Julia Steele Allen, an activist and prison volunteer. Those letters became the basis for a play that aims to show the public what it's like inside a tiny cell  and to inspire people to work for reform.

The play, "Mariposa and the Saint," will be performed Friday at St. Matthew's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Wauwatosa. It was performed Thursday in Milwaukee. After the 45-minute show, audiences hear from formerly incarcerated people who have spent time in solitary confinement and learn how they can help end the practice.

Wisconsin performances are being presented in cooperation with WISDOM, a statewide group of faith leaders and activists seeking a series of reforms here, including: an end to retaliation against inmates and advocates who bring forward complaints about abuses in solitary; an end to stretches of solitary that last more than 15 days; the elimination of solitary altogether for mentally ill inmates and those under 18; and the establishment of a public database to share information about Wisconsin prisoners in solitary.

Allen co-wrote the script with Fonseca, whom she met while volunteering in a California women's prison in 2005.

"I feel like some of the best people I've met in my life are in prison," said Allen, who also has worked in men's prisons and juvenile detention facilities. "They're just incredible, resilient people with so much they want to share."

The idea for Fonseca to tell her story through theater was born in 2012, when she asked Allen to send some song lyrics and poetry to keep her mind occupied in solitary. Allen suggested they work on creating something artistic together. Although Fonseca, now 34, had never seen a play, she was willing to give it a try, Allen said.

For 21/2 years, the two collaborated through the mail, with Allen arranging Fonseca's words into a script.

The characters of "Mariposa and the Saint" are both embodiments of Fonseca, who got the nickname Mariposa on the street when she was 17. It's the Spanish word for butterfly, and she has a butterfly tattoo. The Saint is Fonseca's best self, the person she strives to be, said Allen, who plays the title role in the show.

Besides Mariposa, the show has just one other character, a nameless, faceless guard played by Ray Huth.

Rev. Jerry Hancock, president of WISDOM's Madison affiliate, said that although Huth's character has no lines, his presence is vital to the play.

"His nonresponsive attitude not only reflects his relationship with Mariposa, but it's a metaphor for the stonewalling that the (Department of Corrections) shows to people working for reform," Hancock said.

Hancock said the group invited Corrections Secretary Jon Litscher to attend a Madison performance earlier this week, but he did not come.

Reached earlier this week, Corrections spokesman Tristan Cook did not say why Litscher did not come to the Madison show or whether he would attend one of the Milwaukee-area performances.

According to United Nations international standards, holding someone in solitary for more than 15 days constitutes torture. The U.N. also has called for an absolute ban on solitary confinement for people suffering from mental illness.

New rules for the use of solitary in Wisconsin took effect Jan. 1, 2015. Under those rules, the maximum term of "disciplinary segregation" is generally 365 days, and that can only be imposed for certain offenses. Inmates who exhibit "disruptive, destructive, or out of control behavior" while confined to disciplinary segregation can be moved to "controlled segregation," which is more restrictive. After an initial 72-hour placement, the security director can extend the time in controlled segregation, but must review the inmate's conduct every 24 hours.

As of March 31, 827 prisoners were being held in restrictive housing, according to Cook. That's down from 1,128 on the same date last year.

After the Milwaukee performances of "Mariposa and the Saint," audiences will hear from William Harrell, 62, who spent 190 days in segregation in Wisconsin in 2003 after being accused of lying to a guard.

Audiences also will be offered pre-addressed postcards so they can write to Fonseca. At this point, she is receiving two or three every day, Allen said.

"She has sent some of those postcards on to her grandmother, on to her son," Allen said. "She has a great sense of pride in what she's doing even though she can't be in the room."

If you go

"Mariposa and the Saint" will be performed at 7 p.m. Friday at St. Matthew's Evangelical Lutheran Church, 1615 N. Wauwatosa Ave., Wauwatosa. There is no admission fee, but donations to defray production costs are encouraged.
SHARE Eileen Mihm Schwalbach, president of Mount Mary University, announced that she plans to step down at the end of the 2016-17 academic year.

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Eileen Mihm Schwalbach, who rose from the part-time faculty ranks to become president of Milwaukee's Mount Mary University, will step down at the close of the 2016-'17 school year, the university announced Thursday.

Schwalbach said in a statement that the timing was right for the transition.

The university, she said, is financially sound, upgraded its campus and added several innovative academic programs  all of which she said position the small, Catholic women's school "to move smoothly into the future."

"I am immensely proud of the faculty, staff, and administration of Mount Mary and what we have been able to accomplish together in educating and creating the next generation of bold and curious women," she said.

Schwalbach has served as president since February 2009. Under her leadership, the number of freshman applicants rose by 50%; the university moved up more than 20 spots in the U.S. News & World Report's rankings of private universities; and its endowment rose by $15 million, according to the school. In 2012, she oversaw the name change from Mount Mary College to Mount Mary University to more accurately reflect its offerings, including master's and doctoral degree programs.

Schwalbach launched what's known as the Creative Campus Initiative, an interdisciplinary program designed to foster creative leadership skills in the future workforce.

During her tenure, Mount Mary added its first doctorate  the first of its kind in the country  in art therapy; added a new nursing program that emphasizes leadership; and expanded its scholarship programs.

"President Schwalbach has been an outstanding leader for Mount Mary University," said Sister Mary Anne Owens, provincial leader of Central Pacific Province of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, which sponsors the university. "She has devoted her heart and soul to this institution, and her deep respect for faculty, administration, staff and students is obvious."

A former Milwaukee Public Schools teacher, Schwalbach arrived at Mount Mary in 1993 as a part-time instructor in the education department. She joined the faculty full time in 1997, serving as associate professor and director of the graduate program in education. She rose through the ranks to become vice president, then provost before being named president. She holds degrees from Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and certificates from Harvard University.
A piece of thinning pipe from Eastern Howard School Corp.'s boiler room is shown in Greentown, Ind. The thinning is due to corrosion from increased lead levels. Credit: Associated Press

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With the water crisis in Flint, Mich., raising worries about the quality of drinking water, Wisconsin officials on Wednesday said they are making $11.8 million available to communities to remove aging lead pipes.

The Department of Natural Resources said it will use its Safe Drinking Water Loan Program to provide funding to disadvantaged communities to help homeowners replace lead laterals.

The program starts July 1.

Milwaukee, which has about 70,000 homes with lead laterals, meets the criteria for a disadvantaged community, according to the DNR.

The DNR routinely makes loans to communities to replace water infrastructure. But in this case, the money to homeowners would not have to be repaid, according to Robin Schmidt, environmental loans section chief for the DNR.

Instead, the money could pay for all, or a part of, a homeowner's share of replacing lead pipes.

Repairs of service lines from the street to the lot line are owned by the municipality. But upgrades of laterals on private property must be paid for by the homeowner.

Some homeowners are unable to afford replacement of lead service lines. The average price for a homeowner's replacement is about $3,000.

The DNR said it is taking advantage of a recent decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that allows greater flexibility in allocating federal-funded loans for water infrastructure projects.

"DNR recognizes the challenges many communities face in addressing the issue of lead service lines and the Safe Drinking Water Loan Program offers an effective way to fill the financial gap," DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp said in a statement.

Lead in water has been associated with cognitive problems due to higher lead levels in the blood.

The funding will break down this way: Disadvantaged communities with populations of less than 50,000 will be eligible for up to $300,000; for medium-sized cities, the cap will rise to $500,000; for Milwaukee  the only city over a population of 500,000  the cap is $750,000.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said the DNR is recognizing an issue of statewide concern.

"We're looking at the numbers," Barrett said. "Given the poverty we have here and given the sheer number, we obviously are going to look in hopes that this is going to be an equitable distribution."

If Milwaukee provided the full cost of a homeowner's lateral, it could replace 250 pipes with the $750,000.

The DNR's Schmidt said communities will decide who is eligible and how much homeowners must pay.

The DNR said it plans to seek a similar level of funding in 2017, as well.

Mary Spicuzza of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report
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GOP ruining Wisconsin

A couple of headlines caught my eye on April 22 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. One is "State worker exodus hits high" on the front page. This should come as no surprise to anyone, because our great leader, Gov. Scott Walker, created this mess by enacting Act 10. He and his Republican henchmen boast about bringing down the power of the unions, so this is just an aftermath of that decision.

The other headline in the Business section, "Weekly unemployment claims tumble again" is another result of these Republicans who authored Act 20 which, in effect, decimated the former unemployment law. They have made it virtually impossible for the average poor or lower middle class person to apply for, and receive, benefits.

Claims have not "tumbled" at all. People have just given up. I'm sure there is a direct connection to the homeless numbers we have now and those families who have two and three generations living together under one roof just to make ends meet.

Everything that was fought hard for and won by previous generations since the early 1900s has been destroyed practically overnight by these "new" Republicans. They are the most selfish lot of people ever to inhabit this state. We are seeing the results of their governing in the most inhumane ways possible.

Wisconsin is no longer the state to emulate. It is fast becoming one that people want to leave.

Judith M. Tutkowski

New Berlin



Remembering workers

On April 28 we take a day to remember workers who went to work and never came home to their family because they were killed on the job.

Workers Memorial Day is a time to reflect on the fact that big businesses have gotten away with putting profits over people for way too long. Every day, many of our family members are walking into dangerous working conditions. Some go to work and never return home.

On Workers Memorial Day, April 28, we honor workers who were killed on the job. In 2014, in Wisconsin, 97 workers were killed on the job. It is time for lawmakers and big business to put workers first and do more to ensure that working people do not have to worry about their lives and their limbs when they go to work every single day. This means strengthening unions who fight every day to better the lives of workers.

This Workers Memorial Day, Wisconsin working families are standing up for safe workplaces and strong collective bargaining rights. It's time for the city of Milwaukee to join the fight and do what's right by ensuring good, safe jobs for all.

Mike Balistriere

Milwaukee



Obama denying records

The Freedom of Information Act has provided the public the right to request access to records from any federal agency. This allows us to keep tabs on our government's activities. I read with amusement the editorial that the Walker administration has taken more than four months to respond to an FOIA request ("Stall tactic on records must end," Editorials, April 24).

How does this compare to the Obama administration's record in this regard? The current administration takes years to respond to requests. It set a record in denying or redacting 77% of the requests in 2016.

Where is the outrage? We need to apply the same standards and expectations across the board. Blind in one eye, can't see out of the other.

Jay Kasmerchak

Wauwatosa



Charges needed in VW case

So Volkswagen is paying $18 billion and offering to buy back its cars ( "VW's cost for emissions scandal: $18 billion," April 23).

My question is: Where are the criminal charges? Somebody deliberately created this device that was meant to fool emissions machines into thinking the emissions were up to standards. This was a calculated scheme involving smart people to defraud the public and the environment.

Once again, where are the criminal charges, and why aren't people going to jail over this?

William Kravit

Milwaukee

Please email your letters to jsedit@jrn.com, or mail them to Letters to the editor, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, P.O. Box 371, Milwaukee, Wis. 53201-0371. Letters are generally limited to 200 words and are subject to editing.
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Deaths from drug overdose now outnumber gun deaths in the United States. We should look at what got us into this situation.

In the 1990s, armed with the knowledge that nearly one-third of Americans will experience chronic pain at some point in their lives, and that 20% suffer from pain on a daily basis, Congress felt compelled to act. It could not bear the fact that "pain" was costing the country more than $125 billion a year. It went to work and expeditiously named the 2000s as the "Decade of Pain Control and Research."

A bill championed by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah was passed by the 106th Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1999. This Pain Relief Promotion Act encouraged practitioners to prescribe and administer controlled substances to relieve pain and discomfort. In fact, practitioners were encouraged to treat pain aggressively even when the treatment may increase the risk of death.

However, even before the government made it a criminal offense to undertreat pain, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) government-funded health care programs had declared that it was the right of every patient to have his or her pain assessed, treated and monitored without being influenced by that individual's social, economic or cultural background.

Pain was declared to be the "fifth vital sign," along with pulse, blood pressure, temperature and respiratory rate. Any facilities that failed to follow these requirements risked their accreditation. Since a hospital's revenue is greatly affected without JACHO's seal of approval, committees were set up to penalize doctors who would not prescribe narcotics for pain.

The doctors who failed to prescribe enough narcotics to control pain were now called "narcophobes." Some were forced to undergo training to become "narcophilic" doctors. "A patient is always right," declared JCAHO. A self-reported level of pain on a scale ranging from 0-10 was considered to be the most reliable indicator of pain intensity. Health care providers were now told not to rely on the patient's facial expression or body language to gauge pain management. A report of "severe pain" on the scale had to be treated, regardless of the patient's clinical examination.

The 1999 law that "No disciplinary action will be taken against a practitioner based solely on the quantity and/or frequency of opiates prescribed," accompanied by other laws to persecute doctors for undertreating pain, resulted in a dramatic increase in prescriptions. The use of painkillers quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. Doctors were now writing about 300 million prescriptions a year for painkillers. That is enough for every adult American to be medicated around the clock for a month, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For those patients who indicate the level of pain being high on the "pain scale," stronger pills are made available.

This mandate became a marketing opportunity for the opioid pharmaceutical industry. In 2009, Purdue Pharma's OxyContin, an opioid pain reliever chemically close to heroin, reached annual sales that topped $3 billion.

For JCAHO and the politicians who championed a "pain-free America," this was a resounding victory, but it came with a most disastrous outcome. Alarming statistics are emerging. Little by little, physicians began to see that a systematic control over how and when and with what they could treat patients would become the industry norm in the years to come. But they surely did not predict that this "direct intervention by regulatory agencies" would also lead to some catastrophic results, the magnitude of which this country had never seen.

According to CDC Director Tom Frieden, while most things are getting better in the world of health, this situation is getting worse. Killing pain is what Congress set out to do, but the same weapon is not only killing people but has profound and far-reaching consequences.

The pendulum is now swinging the other way. The CDC has declared prescription drug abuse an epidemic. The lawmakers now are eager to take steps to correct the problem. The government is waging an aggressive war against pain doctors, making them the scapegoats for the failed drug war. The physicians present a better target than underground black-market drug dealers.

These new laws are time-consuming. In addition to performing a detailed history and physical, physicians are required to review mental health, opiate-addiction risk and pain-assessment questionnaires filled out by patients. They need to discuss with patients the benefits and risks of opioid use. An individualized treatment plan with meaningful goals needs to be developed and reviewed at every visit.

Physicians are required to have patients sign a Controlled Substance Agreement that includes prescribing policies, consent to drug screening, permission to conduct random pill counts, requirements to take the medications only as prescribed and the consequences of violating the contract conditions. Additionally, physicians must order annual urine drug screening, review reports documenting narcotic prescriptions dispensed from pharmacies and see patients in clinic at least four times a year.

As a consequence, some physicians are now undertreating pain or have stopped prescribing narcotics. While physicians are being taken on a roller-coaster ride, it is the patients who suffer the most.

Bhupendra O. Khatri is director of the Regional MS Center and the Center for Neurological Disorders in Milwaukee.
In its application for a Lake Michigan water supply, the City of Waukesha has proposed returning water to the lake by discharging treated wastewater to the Root River at S. 60th St. in Franklin. Credit: Don Behm

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The City of Waukesha would receive up to an average of 8.7 million gallons a day of Lake Michigan water by midcentury  down 13.86% from its earlier request  to serve a smaller area proposed by Great Lakes officials reviewing the city's plan for lake water.

Waukesha had asked to pump up to an average of 10.1 million gallons a day by 2050, but city officials revised the volume this week after regional officials moved to redraw the service area without portions of three neighboring communities included in the city's request.

Revised service area maps and findings in support of the request were posted on a website  www.waukeshadiversion.org  by the Conference of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers.

"It appears that we're approaching a workable solution for residents of the city," Waukesha Water Utility General Manager Dan Duchniak said Thursday.

The biggest change in the water service area comes with the removal of most of the Town of Waukesha, generally south of Lawnsdale Road.

Only town islands completely surrounded by the city, border islands on the city's east edge isolated from the remainder of the town, and a handful of small pieces of the town mostly contained by the city or crossed by existing water mains, remain in the redrawn service area.

The city's application for Great Lakes water had encompassed 84% of the town, as requested by town officials. The Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission included this town land in the city's application to match an existing sewer service area, as required by state law.

A narrow slice of the City of Pewaukee south of I-94 also remains in the new service area, under terms of a 1997 border agreement.

Small portions of the towns of Genesee and Delafield were removed from the service area, as proposed by the Great Lakes officials.

About 9% of the Town of Delafield was included in the city's original application so that the service area matched its sewer service area.

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources officials said Thursday in a statement that they were reviewing revisions to the water service area. No decision has been made on possible implications for the city's request, they said. One concern is that proposed changes to the water service area could conflict with state law requiring those areas to be consistent with sewer service areas.

Another issue is that DNR staff included around 15% of the Town of Genesee in the city's original water service area because of groundwater contamination with disease-causing bacteria.

Even though failing septic systems have contaminated a shallow aquifer used by private wells there, the proposed revision to the service area would not allow Waukesha to extend municipal water if requested by those property owners.

Great Lakes officials have scheduled a May 2 conference call to review the revised water service area and additions to the state DNR's findings that the city's request complied with a 2008 federal law known as the Great Lakes protection compact.

The DNR says Waukesha does not have an adequate supply of water that is fit to drink, due to radium contamination of deep groundwater supplies and that all the city's water supply options outside the Great Lakes basin would have adverse effects on wetlands, streams and inland lakes.

Several additions bolster DNR findings in support of the city's request.

In discussing the finding that Waukesha does not have a reliable, long-term water supply option outside the Great Lakes basin, the officials reviewing the request inserted a finding that federal studies estimated that "as much as 30% of the water pumped by the City of Waukesha "is drawn from groundwater within the Lake Michigan basin."

In 2015, the city pumped an average of 6.1 million gallons a day from wells. Thirty percent of that volume equals 1.83 million gallons a day.

Any groundwater from the Lake Michigan basin pumped by Waukesha "is currently discharged into the Fox River without any return flow" to the lake, the officials said. This results in "an unintended diversion of Great Lakes basin water into the Mississippi River basin," according to the finding.

"They recognize the connection between the groundwater we're using and the Great Lakes basin," Duchniak said. "Approval of the city's request would eliminate this unintended diversion."

Officials representing the eight Great Lakes states and two Canadian provinces will meet May 10 and 11 in an attempt to reach consensus on recommending approval of the revised request.

A vote on the request by the governors, or their designees, of the eight Great Lakes states is scheduled June 13 in Chicago. A unanimous vote is needed for approval, under terms of the compact.
Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm (left) and other prosecutors argue Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices David Prosser (center) and Michael Gableman (right) should not have been allowed to hear the case because their campaigns benefited from work by some of the groups being investigated. Credit: Journal Sentinel files

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Madison  Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a decision by Wisconsin's high court to shut down an investigation of Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and conservative groups backing him.

Chisholm and other prosecutors argue Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices David Prosser and Michael Gableman should not have been allowed to hear the case because their campaigns benefited from work by some of the groups being investigated.

They also want the U.S. Supreme Court to review whether the Wisconsin court got it right when it ruled candidates have free speech rights to work closely with advocacy groups during their campaigns, according to sources.

A copy of the filing was submitted this week but has not yet been docketed by the U.S. Supreme Court. It has not yet been made available to the public or media.

The U.S. Supreme Court  one member short because of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia  takes only a tiny percentage of cases filed with it each year. Four justices are needed to accept a case.

Joining Chisholm in the filing were two other Democratic district attorneys, Ismael Ozanne of Dane County and Larry Nelson of Iowa County.

Chisholm in 2012 launched the probe of the Republican governor's campaign and brought in other district attorneys as the investigation spread to people and groups based in other counties. Republican District Attorneys Kurt Klomberg of Dodge County and Jane Kohlwey of Columbia County worked on the probe in the early stages but did not join the effort to get the case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Special prosecutor Francis Schmitz led the probe, which was conducted under the John Doe law. That law allowed prosecutors to force people to testify and turn over documents, while barring them from talking about the investigation with others.

The probe was effectively halted in January 2014 when the judge overseeing the investigation found the activities in question were not illegal. Schmitz sought to overturn that finding, while the Wisconsin Club for Growth and two of its advisers brought legal challenges to stop the investigation for good. One of those advisers, R.J. Johnson, worked both for Walker and the Wisconsin Club for Growth at the same time.

The state Supreme Court last year ruled 4-2 against the prosecutors. The court initially determined all evidence prosecutors had gathered had to be destroyed but later told prosecutors they should instead turn it over to the justices. The high court has allowed prosecutors to hang onto it while they pursue their appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Much of that material has not been made publicly available, though some key details have come out through leaks and court filings. Because the investigation was conducted in secret, large portions of many court filings have been blacked out for the public.

The case centers on how much candidates can work with political groups at election time. Many of those groups engage in so-called issue advocacy, in which they run ads that look like typical campaign spots but avoid regulation by not using phrases like "vote for" and "vote against."

The Wisconsin court ruled coordination between candidates and such groups is allowed because they do not explicitly tell people how to vote. Prosecutors disputed that conclusion and said some of the ads they investigated did flatly tell people to support or oppose candidates.

Among those voting against prosecutors were Prosser and Gableman. Prosser, 73, on Wednesday announced he would retire from the court on July 31, allowing Walker to appoint his successor for the next session of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Among the groups being investigated were the Wisconsin Club for Growth and the political arm of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state's largest business lobby.

The Wisconsin Club for Growth is estimated to have spent $507,000 for Gableman and $520,000 for Prosser. WMC spent an estimated $1.8 million for Gableman and $1.1 million for Prosser.

In addition, Citizens for a Strong America  a group funded entirely by the Wisconsin Club for Growth  spent an estimated $985,000 to help Prosser.

In a letter last year defending his participating in the case, Prosser acknowledged some targets of the probe performed work that was "very valuable to my campaign" but noted the activity came at a time when there was no reason to expect they would appear before him in court.
A proposal from Gov. Scott Walkers administration would shift multibillion dollar programs serving more than 55,000 elderly and disabled people from long-standing nonprofits to national for-profit health insurance companies. Credit: Journal Sentinel files

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Madison  Gov. Scott Walker's administration wants to shift multibillion-dollar programs serving more than 55,000 elderly and disabled people from long-standing nonprofits to national for-profit health insurance companies.

Administration officials contend the plan, affecting the Family Care and IRIS programs, would save money for taxpayers and improve the health of patients by combining care for their long-term needs with attention to their immediate medical issues.

But skeptics like Tom Frazier, co-chairman of the Wisconsin Long-Term Care Coalition, say the state took 16 years to develop the current Family Care model and the nonprofits within it and shouldn't go too fast in overhauling it. They point out that the national insurers have sizable clout and deep political connections on their side, including a well-regarded executive at one company who is the former chief of staff to both Walker and his health secretary, Kitty Rhoades.

And they argue the state hasn't yet proved the cost savings, better health outcomes or other basic premises of the sweeping changes.

"We need to phase this in slowly to make sure it works," Frazier said. "The bottom line is we should not be disrupting the lives of nearly 60,000 frail elderly and disabled individuals unless we have a reasonable possibility that they're going to be as well off as they are now. The state says they'll be better off, but I think they've failed to prove that."

The Walker administration wants the Legislature's budget committee to allow the program to be implemented in coming months.

Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette), co-chair of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee, said he and other Assembly Republicans are satisfied with the administration's arguments for the proposal. He said he sees the plan as a good way to provide better care for the elderly and disabled while containing costs for taxpayers.

"It kind of seems like a no-brainer," he said.

Republicans control the panel but have not yet scheduled a vote on the plan.

That's because Senate Republicans need time so they can get answers to their questions from the administration, said Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), co-chair of the committee. She said she would like to hold a vote by the end of May.

"We're working hard to get all the information so we can make a decision," she said.

There's no dispute that the changes carry huge financial implications for state and federal taxpayers, who are projected to pay $3.4 billion this year for Family Care and separate long-term care plans that Family Care is scheduled to replace.

Nearly two decades old, Family Care and IRIS provide long-term care outside nursing homes to tens of thousands of needy elderly and disabled people. Family Care works through eight regional nonprofit managed care organizations similar to health maintenance organizations, while IRIS  which stands for Include, Respect, I Self-Direct  provides vulnerable residents with a taxpayer allotment they can use to set up and pay for their own care.

Family Care includes personal care services, helping people with getting dressed, bathing, making meals and shopping. Such care can be costly but is less expensive than nursing homes.

There are eight counties in Wisconsin, including Dane County, that use older long-term care programs because Family Care has not yet been fully implemented in them.

The Walker administration wants to complete the statewide expansion of Family Care and IRIS and administer them through three regions with multiple integrated health agencies that would have contracts to manage the medical and long-term care of those in the program.

Having three large regions would be more favorable to large for-profit insurers such as UnitedHealthcare, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin and Molina Healthcare of Wisconsin, though it's possible that a few existing managed care organizations, such as iCare of Milwaukee and Care Wisconsin of Madison, would survive the transition.

Lawmakers wrote the state budget last year to require at least five regions as part of any Family Care overhaul, but Walker vetoed that provision, allowing the Walker administration to pursue having three regions.

The administration projects its plan could save state and federal taxpayers at least $300 million over the next six years. That would amount to 1 or 2 percentage points of the total Family Care spending over that period.

That projection assumes the state will save on acute care costs by shifting to HMO-style managed care for those day-to-day medical needs and integrating them more fully with the long-term care  a saving assumption that Department of Health Services spokeswoman Julie Lund called conservative.

The saving represents smaller cost increases than those projected, rather than reductions. They're estimated to be $24 million in the first year of the new program, with that amount climbing to as much as $82million in future years.

In May 2015, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau said that the regional nonprofits in Family Care had already been coordinating some of their long-term care with their patients' other primary care providers.

"Because the Department (of Health Services) has indicated that primary and acute care savings have already been realized...it is unclear what additional savings would be realized or other benefits gained from the integration of these services," the fiscal bureau wrote.

Darling said Senate Republicans want more details on those savings. They also want a fuller explanation of why the administration wants to have three regions instead of five, she said.

The administration is working on addressing those questions, with the hope it will result in the committee taking up the plan soon.

"Family Care serves some of our most vulnerable citizens and it's for this reason we believe the sooner we can transition to improved services, the better off consumers and taxpayers will be," said a statement from Walker spokesman Tom Evenson.

While advocacy groups are urging lawmakers to proceed slowly and consider going a different route, the insurance industry wants the committee to take up the plan by the end of May.

"The sooner the committee acts, the sooner reforms may be implemented, and the sooner both service recipients and Wisconsin taxpayers will reap the benefits of these needed, person-centered reforms," said a statement from R.J. Pirlot, executive director of the Alliance of Health Insurers.

His group includes Anthem, Molina, UnitedHealthcare, Humana Inc. and other insurers.

Walker's former chief of staff, Eric Schutt, went to work for UnitedHealth Group this year as senior vice president of external affairs. He also worked for the firm before he served as the Republican governor's top adviser.

Before his first stint at UnitedHealth, Schutt was the top aide to Rhoades when she was in the Assembly and a co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee. A skeptic of Family Care, Rhoades and the rest of the committee nevertheless approved a big bipartisan expansion of it in 2007 sought by Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle.

UnitedHealth spokesman L.D. Platt said Schutt will have no role with the company's business in Wisconsin while Walker is governor.

Platt and the administration declined to say what role UnitedHealthcare might have played in developing the plan to redesign Family Care and IRIS. Lund, the Department of Health Services spokeswoman, said the administration had taken input from insurers, as well as advocacy groups, providers and states that have overhauled their long-term programs.

She noted the plan to replace Family Care the Legislature adopted in last year's budget was different from what Walker had initially proposed.

"We feel those served by Family Care and IRIS deserve the stability of knowing the long term care services that allow them to live with independence and dignity, will indeed be available to them for the long term," Lund said in a statement.

Guy Boulton of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report from Milwaukee

Family Care

The program includes personal care services, helping people with getting dressed, bathing, making meals and shopping.

Such care can be costly but is less expensive than nursing homes.
Kochi: CBSE on Thursday challenged a Kerala High Court single bench order granting permission to Muslim girls to wear the Hijab, a customary religious dress, for All India Pre-Medical Test-2016.



In an appeal filed before the division bench of the High Court, CBSE said the single bench had ignored the likelihood of millions of students being affected by its direction, particularly in view of the fact that arrangements for the conduct of examination have been completed.

Read: Kerala HC grants permission to Muslim girls to wear hijab for pre-medical test

It contended that since the judgment creates necessity for additional women invigilators, CBSE would find conduct of the examination with such additional women invigilators trained to "honour religious sentiments" extremely cumbersome, unmanageable and unworkable with the existing manpower extant arrangement at this extremely belated stage".



In his April 26 order, Justice Muhammed Mushtaq had permitted all candidates who, based on the religious practice, want to wear headscarf and full-sleeved length dress to appear for the examination but on condition that they be present at the hall half an hour before the exam for frisking, if necessary, by women invigilators.



The Court had said that the CBSE dress code shall not be enforced against the candidates who, by the virtue of Article 25, are protected from wearing such dress as prescribed in the injunctions of their faith.



The order was issued while hearing a writ petition by one Amnah Bint Basheer, challenging the dress code prescribed for the candidates by CBSE in the bulletin relating to conduct of AIPMET-2016.



The petitioner had contended that the instructions contained in the AIPMET-2016 bulletin on dress code, as per her religious beliefs and practises, would amount to violation of exercise of religious freedom.

Read: Kerala High Court okays hijab for two students while taking test



Last year, a single Judge of the Kerala High Court had allowed two Muslim girl students to wear hijab while appearing for CBSE AIPMT-2015.



"The learned Single judge having impliedly declined relief quashing the relevant provisions of the AIPMET Bulletin, however erred in proceeding to grant omnibus reliefs which are unworkable and completely without jurisdiction", according to the appeal filed by CBSE before the division bench.



The bench is expected to consider the case tomorrow.
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Human Rights Watch |  

(Beirut)  Egyptian security forces arrested at least 382 people in the days leading up to and during the dispersal of mostly peaceful protests on April 25, 2016. The protests followed a rare mass demonstration against President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo on April 15.

Police arrested lawyers and numerous activists, and temporarily held at least 33 journalists, according to witnesses and media reports, who also said that police stopped people riding public transportation or walking in the street, made warrantless inspections of their mobile phones, and arrested them if they found anti-government images.

Egypts effective zero-tolerance policy for protests leaves people with no outlet to peacefully express their grievances, and protesting can mean years in prison, said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East director. The authorities should release all those held solely for peaceful expression, and parliament should amend the repressive law on public assembly.

Police arrested at least 286 people on April 25, according to the Front for the Defense of Egyptian Protesters, an independent group of lawyers and activists. The large majority of the arrests, which spanned seven governorates, occurred in the greater Cairo area, the group said.

Authorities did not allow those arrested to have defense lawyers present during questioning by agents of the Interior Ministrys National Security Agency in the Agouza and Dokki police stations, where many of those arrested in the capital were taken, said Freedom for the Brave, an activist group that documents cases alongside lawyers.

One lawyer who was at the Dokki Police Station told Human Rights Watch that police fired teargas at lawyers waiting outside the station at about 10 p.m. on April 25, after the station chief had yelled at them to leave.

Authorities transferred many of those arrested on April 25 to the Red Mountain Central Security Forces camp outside Cairo, the Front for the Defense of Egyptian Protesters said. One human rights lawyer said she believed 140 people were being held at the camp. Central Security Forces camps are not lawful places of detention, and witnesses have previously told Human Rights Watch that the authorities have used them for enforced disappearances and torture.

Journalists and activists protest against the restriction of press freedom and to demand the release of detained journalists, in front of the Press Syndicate in Cairo, Egypt on April 26, 2016.

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Journalists and activists protest against the restriction of press freedom and to demand the release of detained journalists, in front of the Press Syndicate in Cairo, Egypt on April 26, 2016.

 2016 Reuters

The protests, which police dispersed in some cases with teargas, occurred despite a series of pre-emptive arrests that began during the night of April 21, when police detained at least 96 people, many at their homes or downtown Cairo cafes, according to the Front.

Prosecutors in multiple governorates, including Cairo and Alexandria, opened at least 11 investigations into whether to bring charges against those arrested in the pre-April 25 sweep, the Heliopolis Center for Political Development and Human Rights said. The investigations remain open.

The allegations against those arrested included incitement to use force to overturn the government, incitement to attack police stations, membership in a terrorist group, promoting terrorist crimes and thoughts through the Internet, publishing false news through social media to disturb stability and security, and incitement to demonstrate without permission.

Law 107 of 2013 on the Right to Public Meetings, Processions and Peaceful Demonstrations, passed following the militarys removal of Mohamed Morsy, Egypts first freely elected president, effectively bans opposition protests and allows the Interior Ministry to disperse gatherings at will. Those convicted can face up to five years in prison for breaking the law. Since its passage, courts have sentenced hundreds of people for protesting illegally.

The recent events followed a rare anti-government demonstration on April 15, which protesters called the Friday of Land. Hundreds of people gathered at the national Journalists Syndicate headquarters in Cairo to protest abuses committed under President al-Sisis administration and al-Sisis recent decision to cede two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia.

Though the security forces did not disperse the protest with force, police detained at least 25 people from the vicinity of the syndicate that day and opened investigations, according to the Front. The investigations remain open.

A friend of one of the detainees told Human Rights Watch that they were first held in windowless cells in Cairos Qasr al-Nil Police Station, where they had to rely on visitors to bring them food and water, since the police did not provide either, before the authorities transferred them to Tora Prison on April 22.

A week after the April 15 demonstration, amid public discussion of protests planned for April 25, the independent newspaper al-Shorouk reported that al-Sisi had held a meeting at which he stated he would not tolerate more protests. The presidency quickly denied the report.

But the day before the protests, the Interior Ministry warned that it would confront with the utmost decisiveness and resolution any acts that could infringe public security. It will use all force to deal with any attempt to assault vital, important facilities or harm police facilities and utilities.

On April 25, a national holiday marking the withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, security forces blocked roads leading to the Journalists Syndicate, refused to allow syndicate members inside, and permitted only pro-government demonstrators to enter the area to celebrate the holiday, multiple syndicate members said in accounts published on social media.

Mahmoud Kamel, a member of the syndicates board, described the April 25 events as a black day for journalism and journalists, according to al-Shorouk. Police detained at least 33 journalists throughout the day, eventually releasing all but two, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

At least six foreign journalists were among those detained, including four from France, one from Denmark, and one from Norway. Orla Guerin, a BBC correspondent, wrote on Twitter that supporters of al-Sisi beat a member of her crew as police watched and failed to intervene.

Elsewhere in Cairo, security forces stopped pedestrians, ordered them to open their mobile phones, and inspected their social media accounts, including Facebook, for inciting pictures or anti-government publications, witnesses told Masrawy, an independent website. Police arrested some of those they stopped, the witnesses said.

In addition to journalists, the authorities conducted apparently pre-emptive arrests of lawyers and human rights defenders, Human Rights Watch said.

At about 4 a.m. on April 25, police arrested Ahmed Abdullah, the chairman of the board of trustees of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, at his home in Fifth Settlement, a Cairo suburb. Most of the allegations against him were similar to those leveled against others arrested in the previous days sweep, according to a statement by the commission. Police also accused Abdullah of broadcasting false news likely to disturb general security and of distributing publications calling for the overthrow of the government and the changing of the constitution, the commission said.

On April 23, a prominent human rights lawyer, Malek Adly, wrote on Facebook that the Supreme State Security Prosecution had issued a warrant for his arrest. He later confirmed to Human Rights Watch that the warrant was issued for charges including establishing a group to overturn the government, calling for obstructing the president from performing his duties, inciting demonstrations and leadership of Muslim Brotherhood elements. Adly has not yet been arrested.

Police arrested one lawyer, Haitham Mohammedein, on April 21, and at least four lawyers on April 25 and the days preceding the demonstration. Mohammedein remains in custody. His brother told Human Rights Watch that he had been arrested on a warrant issued by the State Security Prosecution accusing him of belonging to a terrorist group. The authorities were holding Mohammedein and others in a Central Security Forces Camp in Giza governorate known as Camp 10.5 Kilometers, his brother said.

Egyptian authorities are trying to stifle any public discussion of al-Sisis policies, Houry said. It seems that the only public demonstrations al-Sisi will allow are the ones that support him.

Via Human Rights Watch



Related video added by Juan Cole:

AfricaNews: Egypt: Police clamp down on anti-government protest
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By Michele Gelfand and Joshua Conrad Jackson | (The Conversation) |  

For the past 10 months, Donald Trump has been a political enigma. Against the predictions of journalists, policy wonks and odds makers, a tabloid darling with no political experience and few coherent policies is now poised to be the Republican nominee for president.

Hundreds of journalists and political scientists have tried to explain Trumps appeal, suggesting reasons that range from the decline of White America to the rise of authoritarianism. Yet even with these insights, the current dialogue around Trumps ascendancy seems to have hit a wall. Every article describes a single piece of the Trump puzzle, but none seems to capture the bigger picture: the cultural movement that has fueled Trumps success.

What is Trump culture, and where is it coming from?

As it turns out, our group at the University of Maryland has been studying the basis for Trump culture for the last 10 years, something that we call cultural tightness-looseness.

How threat tightens culture

To understand tightness-looseness, we need to step away from the current election cycle and consider the history of human culture, particularly its relationship with warfare, famine and natural disasters.

Our theory  which has been supported by computer models, international surveys and archival data  is that communities are more likely to survive these threats when they set clear rules for behavior, put strong leaders who can regulate those rules in charge and punish those who deviate from the norm.

We found that across 33 nations, the countries with the strongest laws and strictest punishments were those that had a history of famine, warfare and natural disasters. Countries like India, where natural disasters cost an average of almost US$10 billion per year, and Germany, the center of two world wars in the last century, were some of the tightest. Countries with a history of relative stability like New Zealand and Brazil were the loosest.

As with nations, American states with the strictest laws and strongest rules have histories punctuated by high rates of natural disaster and disease stress. For example, Mississippi and Alabama have the countrys highest death rates due to storms and floods, as well as some of the highest rates of infectious disease. By contrast, looser states like New Hampshire and Washington have fewer natural disasters and lower incidence of infectious disease. Tighter states were also more likely than looser states to show support for the Republican Party, an effect so strong that the Washington Post suggested our research was a new way to explain the American political map.

We have also found that people in tighter societies tend to prefer autonomous leaders. Such leaders have extreme confidence in their own abilities and make independent decisions without the input of others. These leaders can be successful in high threat environments because of their quick and unambiguous decision-making, which often comes at the cost of more democratic dialogue.

Capitalizing on fear

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump has effectively and ruthlessly used threatening language to monopolize fearful voters and pit them against other cultural groups.

Trump has paired a penchant for inspiring fear with threatening rhetoric, fervent nationalism and outward hostility toward those he considers different. These deviants were initially Mexican immigrants, then Syrian refugees, Muslims and the disabled, and have recently grown to include women who receive abortions. According to tightness-looseness theory, it is Trumps ability to invoke threat that turns his supporters against these groups.

To better understand the dynamics of threat, tightness and Trump, we surveyed more than 550 Americans who were representative in terms of gender, region, political affiliation and race/ethnicity.

The survey included questions about how threatened Americans felt, followed by 10 statements that gauged participants desired cultural tightness. In one such statement, survey-takers rated whether they felt the United States is too permissive versus too restrictive. In another, they rated whether American norms were either enforced too strictly or not enforced strictly enough. The survey also features questions about authoritarianism, attitudes about hot topics like surveillance and mass deportation, and support for different political candidates, including Trump.

The survey results found that tightness predicted voting for Donald Trump beyond .001 percent of statistical doubt, with 44 times better power than Feldmans measure of authoritarianism (which did not sufficiently predict Trump support beyond the margin of statistical error).

On the other hand, desire for looseness was related to support for Bernie Sanders. The relationship between tightness-looseness and support for Clinton was within the margin of statistical error.

Americans concern about threats  especially attacks from countries like North Korea or terrorist groups like ISIS  was associated with both desired tightness and Trump support. It also predicted support for many of the issues that Trump has championed, such as monitoring mosques, creating a registry of Muslim Americans and deporting all undocumented immigrants. Those with a high level of threat concern also supported policies even more radical than what Trump has endorsed  like ending affirmative action, changing the constitution to make Christianity the national religion and installing more monitoring devices on American streets.

In another insightful finding, neither concern over threats nor desire for tightness predicted support for Trumps GOP competitors, John Kasich or Ted Cruz. Correlations between territorial threat concern and support for these candidates was practically 0, a powerful demonstration of Trumps hold on fearful Americans.

Our survey yielded many other results which confirmed a powerful truth: Donald Trump has built a monopoly on threat, and has used it to steel his coalition against anyone who might look different or hold different views. This monopolization of threat has produced leaders like Mussolini and Hitler, and it is a devastating and dangerous political tool.

The future of Trump culture

To Trump supporters, America feels like a nation on the brink of disaster. But how threatened are Americans really? Who is in a position to gauge threat? And can we ever escape threat and fear when every catastrophe and attack is immediately broadcast around the country and on our Twitter feeds?

These questions should be at the heart of serious dialogue about our nations political future. Here, simply, we suggest that Trumps appeal is a broader cultural phenomenon. Take, for instance, the growing populism and Islamophobia of right wing parties steadily gaining traction across Europe. Trump is just one symptom of a larger principle that echoes across human history: perceptions of threat tighten societies, leading to social coordination at best, and intolerance at worst.

Donald Trump may not win this November, but as long as Americans feel afraid, Trump culture is here to stay.

This article was published in collaboration with Scientific American Mind.

Michele Gelfand, Professor and Distinguished University Scholar Teacher, University of Maryland and Joshua Conrad Jackson, Doctoral Student, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina  Chapel Hill

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Vox from last winter: Fear and loathing at a Trump rally
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - April 27, 2016) - Lundin Mining Corporation (TSX:LUN)(OMX:LUMI) ("Lundin Mining" or the "Company") today reported cash flows of $42.9 million generated from operations in the quarter, not including the Company's attributable cash flows from Tenke Fungurume. A net loss attributable to Lundin shareholders of $22.1 million ($0.03 per share) resulted for the quarter ended March 31, 2016.

Mr. Paul Conibear, President and CEO, commented, "We are pleased that all our operations achieved better than expected metal production with lower costs than forecast, enabling the Company to remain on track to meet or improve upon full year guidance on metal produced, capital spending, and operating costs. Our ongoing emphasis on cost efficiencies and productivity enhancements is expected to enable the Company to continue to generate healthy margins and further improve our strong financial position and reduce net debt throughout the year."

Summary financial results for the quarter:

Three months ended

March 31 US$ Millions (except per share amounts) 2016 2015 Sales 369.6 531.5 Operating earnings(1) 151.7 274.0 Net (loss) earnings (15.5 ) 83.3 Net (loss) earnings attributable to Lundin shareholders (22.1 ) 83.3 Normalized (loss) earnings(2) (12.3 ) 60.1 Basic (loss) earnings per share (0.03 ) 0.10 Cash flow from operations 42.9 224.0 Ending net debt position(3) 438.1 649.2

(1) Operating earnings is a non-GAAP measure defined as sales, less operating costs (excluding depreciation) and general and administrative costs. (2) Normalized earnings is a non-GAAP measure calculated as net earnings attributable to shareholders before the tax effected impact of foreign exchange gains/losses, unrealized gains/losses on revaluation of marketable securities or currency options and valuation adjustments on deferred tax assets. (3) Net debt is a non-GAAP measure defined as cash and cash equivalents, less long-term debt and finance leases, before deferred financing fees.

Highlights

Operational Performance

For the first quarter of 2016, production and cash costs(1) results were favourable as the Company continues with its production optimization and spending restraint measures, but financial results were negatively impacted by a lower metal price environment. The Company remains on track to meet or exceed full year guidance.

Candelaria (80% owned): The Candelaria operations produced, on a 100% basis, 41,507 tonnes of copper, and approximately 473,000 ounces of silver and 24,300 ounces of gold in concentrate. Copper production was 16% lower than the prior year comparable period due to lower head grades. Copper cash costs of $1.22/lb for the quarter were in-line with the prior year, and better than full year guidance due to cost reduction plans, operational efficiencies, lower electricity and diesel prices, increased productivity, and higher sales volumes.

Early works on the Los Diques tailings project continues on schedule. Highlights during the quarter include approval from Sernageomin (Chile's National Geology and Mining Service) to reduce the existing dam freeboard to enable an extra year of tailings capacity while the Los Diques dam is completed. Approvals from Direccion General de Aguas ("DGA"), Chile's General Water Department, for the freeboard adjustment and main dam permitting are still pending.

An updated cost estimate has been prepared for the Los Diques project taking into account design development, excellent progress to date on early works construction, owner self-perform cost trends and other positive factors including weakness in the Chilean peso. The new cost target to complete the project is $250 million (from January 1, 2016), a significant reduction from the original estimate of $325 million. At March 31, 2016, $225 million remains to be spent over the remainder of 2016 to 2018.

Eagle (100% owned): Eagle produced 5,968 tonnes of nickel and 6,240 tonnes of copper in the current quarter, lower than the prior year comparable period for both metals due to lower head grades as a result of planned mine sequencing. Nickel cash costs of $1.61/lb for the quarter were higher than the comparable period in the prior year due to higher treatment costs and lower by-product credit prices, but were significantly better than full year guidance of $2.25/lb due to high production rates and operating efficiency initiatives.

Drilling on Eagle East and other targets continued with seven rigs active on the property. The intent is to provide a maiden Inferred Mineral Resource prior to the end of the second quarter of 2016. In parallel, a Preliminary Economic Assessment is being completed to define access ramp and other resource exploitation concepts, and to support potential permitting and investment initiatives.

Neves-Corvo (100% owned): Neves-Corvo produced 13,745 tonnes of copper and 17,727 tonnes of zinc in the first quarter. Copper production was lower than the prior year comparable period due largely to lower recoveries, while zinc production in the quarter nominally exceeded the prior year comparable period. Copper cash costs of $1.48/lb for the quarter were higher than the prior year comparable period, a result of lower copper metal sales due to lower copper production ($0.08/lb) and lower by-product volumes and prices ($0.03/lb), but were better than full year guidance of $1.65/lb.

Zinkgruvan (100% owned): Zinkgruvan had one of its best production quarters on record. Zinc production in the first quarter of 2016 was 23% higher than the comparable period in 2015, while lead production was 46% higher than the 2015 comparable period. Production increases for both metals were due to higher mill throughput of zinc ore and higher head grades for both metals. Cash costs for zinc of $0.36/lb for the quarter were better than both the prior year comparable period and full year guidance ($0.45/lb).

Given positive trends in zinc price, together with Zinkgruvan's production and cash flow achievements, a decision was made to immediately remobilize the 1350 Zinc Expansion Project, a low cost ($16 million) initiative to increase zinc production by 10%. This expansion is now expected to be commissioned by mid-2017.

Aguablanca (100% owned): In January 2016, the Company advised local authorities, employees and affected communities that, in light of the current market prices for nickel and copper and expectations of continued financial losses, the mine would be permanently closed. The Company continues to work with authorities to move the operation into active closure and begin site remediation immediately following receipt of necessary approvals.

Tenke (24% owned): Tenke operations continue to perform well, generally meeting expectations for the quarter. Lundin's attributable share of first quarter production included 11,988 tonnes of copper cathode and 1,032 tonnes of cobalt in hydroxide. The Company's attributable share of sales included 13,369 tonnes of copper at an average realized price of $2.10/lb and 1,118 tonnes of cobalt, a quarterly record, at an average realized price of $6.32/lb. Tenke's operating cash costs for the first quarter of 2016 were $1.31/lb of copper sold, in-line with the latest guidance. Cash distributions received by Lundin Mining in the quarter from Tenke were $0.8 million. An additional $2.4 million was received from the Freeport Cobalt operations, for total Tenke related distributions to the Company of $3.2 million for the first quarter of 2016.

Financial Performance

Operating earnings for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 were $151.7 million, a decrease of $122.3 million in comparison to the first quarter of the prior year ($274.0 million). The decrease was primarily due to lower metal prices, net of price adjustments ($79.9 million), lower sales volumes ($28.6 million), and the shutdown of the Aguablanca operations ($17.0 million).

Sales for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 were $369.6 million, a decrease of $161.9 million in comparison to the first quarter of the prior year. The decrease was again due to lower metal prices, net of price adjustments ($79.9 million), lower sales volumes ($52.9 million), and the shutdown of the Aguablanca operations ($28.5 million).

Operating costs (excluding depreciation) for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 were $210.3 million, a decrease of $40.3 million in comparison to the first quarter of the prior year. The decrease was largely due to lower sales volumes ($24.3 million), the shutdown of the Aguablanca operations ($11.5 million), and favourable foreign exchange rates ($10.8 million).

Depreciation, depletion and amortization expense for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 was $119.6 million, a decrease of $37.5 million in comparison to the $157.1 million reported in 2015. The decrease was attributable to lower production in the current quarter at Candelaria and an increase in the Candelaria Mineral Resources & Reserves Estimate ($23.7 million), and the shutdown of the Aguablanca operations ($4.7 million). In addition, an impairment loss of $62.9 million on Eagle mineral properties recognized in the fourth quarter of 2015, resulting in a lower asset base for depreciation, coupled with lower metal production at Eagle ($6.9 million) also contributed to the decrease in depreciation.

Cash flow from operations for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 was $42.9 million, a decrease of $181.1 million in comparison to the first quarter of the prior year ($224.0 million). The decrease in cash flow is attributable to lower operating earnings in the current quarter ($122.3 million) and changes in non-cash working capital and long-term inventory ($60.6 million).

Net loss for the quarter ended March 31, 2016 was $15.5 million, a decrease of $98.8 million in comparison to net earnings of $83.3 million reported in 2015, negatively impacted by: lower operating earnings ($122.3 million); and lower income from investment in Tenke ($14.1 million); and comparative foreign exchange losses ($22.1 million); partially offset by lower depreciation, depletion and amortization expense ($37.5 million); and lower net tax expense ($26.8 million).



Corporate Highlights

On March 3, 2016, the Company announced that it had entered into an agreement with an affiliate of Freeport-McMoRan Inc. ("Freeport") to purchase an interest in their stake in the Timok project located in Serbia for total consideration of up to $262.5 million.



The transaction was subject to Reservoir Minerals Inc.'s ("Reservoir") right of first offer ("ROFO"), as well as other customary closing conditions.



On April 25, 2016, Lundin Mining was advised by Freeport that Reservoir has provided notice that it is proceeding to exercise its ROFO.

Financial Position and Financing

Net debt position at March 31, 2016 was $438.1 million compared to $441.3 million at December 31, 2015.

Net debt remained relatively unchanged during the quarter as operating cash flows of $42.9 million and distributions from Tenke and Freeport Cobalt totaling $3.2 million were offset by investments in mineral properties, plant and equipment of $47.5 million.

The Company has a revolving credit facility available for borrowing up to $350 million. As at March 31, 2016, the Company had no amount drawn on the credit facility. A letter of credit in the amount of $19.9 million (SEK 162 million) is outstanding.

Net debt at April 27, 2016 is approximately $460 million.

Outlook

Market Conditions

Production optimization, cost saving and cost deferral programs remain in place, pending improvements in market conditions. As metal prices improve, spending restraint programs will be reassessed.

2016 Production and Cost Guidance

Candelaria's copper production guidance has been increased to reflect higher throughput than planned over the first quarter and improved production expectations for the remainder of the year resulting from optimized pit and underground feed mine planning.

Cash cost guidance at Candelaria, Eagle and Neves-Corvo have all been lowered reflecting modest improvements in by-product metal prices and benefits from cost saving initiatives.

Guidance on Tenke's copper production and cash costs have been updated to reflect the most recent guidance from Freeport.

2016 Guidance Previous Guidance(a) Revised Guidance (contained tonnes) Tonnes C1

Cost Tonnes C1

Cost(b) Copper Candelaria (80%) 118,000 - 123,000 $1.55/lb 124,000 - 128,000 $1.45/lb Eagle 20,000 - 23,000 20,000 - 23,000 Neves-Corvo 50,000 - 55,000 $1.65/lb 50,000 - 55,000 $1.60/lb Zinkgruvan 3,500 - 4,000 2,500 - 3,000 Tenke (24%)(c) 54,000 $1.32/lb 52,800 $1.32/lb Total attributable 245,500 - 259,000 249,300 - 261,800 Nickel Eagle 21,000 - 24,000 $2.25/lb 21,000 - 24,000 $2.00/lb Zinc Neves-Corvo 65,000 - 70,000 65,000 - 70,000 Zinkgruvan 80,000 - 85,000 $0.45/lb 80,000 - 85,000 $0.45/lb Total 145,000 - 155,000 145,000 - 155,000

Guidance as outlined in our Management's Discussion and Analysis for the year ended December 31, 2015. Cash costs remain dependent upon exchange rates (forecast at EUR/USD:1.10, USD/SEK:8.50, USD/CLP:690) and metal prices (forecast at Cu: $2.10/lb, Ni: $4.00/lb, Zn: $0.75/lb, Pb: $0.75/lb, Au: $1,150/oz, Ag: $15.00/oz). Prior guidance assumed an exchange rate of USD/CLP:700 and metal prices of Cu: $2.05/lb, Ni: $4.15/lb, Zn: $0.70/lb, Pb: $0.70/lb, and Au: $1,100/oz. Freeport has provided 2016 sales and cash costs guidance. Tenke's 2016 production is assumed to approximate sales guidance. Tenke's 2016 cash costs assume a cobalt price of $10.00/lb.

2016 Capital Expenditure and Exploration Guidance

Capital and exploration (excluding Tenke) expenditures for 2016 are expected to be $220 million and $40 million, respectively, unchanged from guidance provided in the Management's Discussion and Analysis for the year ended December 31, 2015.

The Company estimates its share of sustaining capital funding for 2016 at Tenke to be $25 million, unchanged from previous guidance. All of Tenke's capital expenditures and exploration programs are expected to be self-funded by cash flow from operations. The Company expects to receive cash distributions from Tenke in 2016 of approximately $50 million to $60 million, higher than previous guidance of $30 million to $40 million, as a result of modest increases in copper prices.

Annual Meeting

The Company reports that it will hold its annual meeting of shareholders at the St. Andrew's Club & Conference Centre, 150 King Street West, 27th Floor (King Street/University Avenue) Toronto, Ontario, on Friday, May 13, 2016 at 10:00 a.m. Toronto time.

About Lundin Mining

Lundin Mining Corporation is a diversified Canadian base metals mining company with operations in Chile, the USA, Portugal, and Sweden, primarily producing copper, nickel and zinc. In addition, Lundin Mining holds a 24% equity stake in the world-class Tenke Fungurume copper/cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the Freeport Cobalt Oy business, which includes a cobalt refinery located in Kokkola, Finland.

On Behalf of the Board,

Paul Conibear, President and CEO

The information in this release is subject to the disclosure requirements of Lundin Mining under the Swedish Securities Market Act and/or the Swedish Financial Instruments Trading Act. This information was publically communicated on April 27, 2016 at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

Cautionary Statement in Forward-Looking Information and Non-GAAP performance measures

Certain of the statements made and information contained herein is "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. This report includes, but is not limited to, forward looking statements with respect to the Company's estimated annual metal production, cash costs, exploration expenditures and capital expenditures, as noted in the Outlook section and elsewhere in this document. These estimates and other forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, risks and uncertainties relating to estimated operating and cash costs, foreign currency fluctuations; risks inherent in mining including environmental hazards, industrial accidents, unusual or unexpected geological formations, ground control problems and flooding; including risks associated with the estimation of mineral resources and reserves and the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; the potential for and effects of labour disputes or other unanticipated difficulties with or shortages of labour or interruptions in production; actual ore mined varying from estimates of grade, tonnage, dilution and metallurgical and other characteristics; the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses, and commodity price fluctuations; uncertain political and economic environments; changes in laws or policies, foreign taxation, delays or the inability to obtain necessary governmental permits; and other risks and uncertainties, including those described under Risk Factors Relating to the Company's Business in the Company's Annual Information Form. In addition, forward-looking information is based on various assumptions including, without limitation, the expectations and beliefs of management, the assumed price of copper, nickel, zinc and other metals; that the Company can access financing, appropriate equipment and sufficient labour and that the political environment where the Company operates will continue to support the development and operation of mining projects. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Accordingly, readers are advised not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Certain financial measures contained herein, such as operating earnings, normalized earnings, net debt and cash costs, have no meaning within generally accepted accounting principles under IFRS and therefore amounts presented may not be comparable to similar data presented by other mining companies. This data is intended to provide additional information and should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for measures or performance prepared in accordance with IFRS.

(1) Cash cost/lb of copper, zinc and nickel are non-GAAP measures defined as all cash costs directly attributable to mining operations, less royalties and by-product credits.
MELBOURNE, April 28, 2016 /CNW/ - OceanaGold Corporation (TSX/ASX/NZX: OGC) (the "Company") is pleased to release its first quarter 2016 financial and operational results for the quarter ended 31 March 2016. Details of the consolidated financial statements and the Management Discussion and Analysis ("MD&A") are available on the Company's website at www.oceanagold.com

Key Highlights

Reduced the Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate to 2.57 per million man hours worked while accumulating over 8.5 million man hours worked without a Lost-Time Injury.

Achieved consolidated gold production of 122,782 ounces with record quarterly gold production of 46,811 ounces at Didipio.

Consolidated All-In Sustaining Costs of $716 per ounce and cash costs of $436 per ounce on sales of 117,387 ounces of gold and 4,745 tonnes of copper.

per ounce and cash costs of per ounce on sales of 117,387 ounces of gold and 4,745 tonnes of copper. Revenue of $161.1 million with an EBITDA of $77.9 million and a net profit before undesignated hedges of $36.7 million .

with an EBITDA of and a net profit before undesignated hedges of . Cash flow from operations of $56.4 million , including a $24.7 million increase in trade and other receivables.

Mick Wilkes, President and CEO said, "I'm pleased to announce another strong quarter of operational and financial results underpinned by record quarterly production and a continued improvement in safety. Our portfolio of high quality assets continue to deliver positive results and with the construction of the Haile Gold Mine and the Didipio underground progressing on time and budget we are very well placed to achieve our plans for growth in 2016. In addition, with the receipt of our FTAA exploration renewal, we have remobilised our exploration team in the Philippines to carry out drilling on a number of high quality drill ready targets across the FTAA."

Table 1  Production and Cost Results Summary* Didipio Waihi Macraes and Reefton Consolidated First Quarter 2016 Results Q1 2016 Q4 2015* Gold Produced ounces 46,811 36,983 38,988 122,782 119,500 Copper Produced tonnes 5,972   5,972 5,591 Gold Sales ounces 37,061 36,758 43,568 117,387 125,246 Copper Sales tonnes 4,745   4,745 5,597 Cash Costs $ per ounce (1) 452 793 436 441 All-In Sustaining Costs $ per ounce 391 631 1,064 716 -

*Note: This includes the actual results for Waihi Gold for the three months ended December 31, 2015. This

disclosure is for information only.

At Didipio, the operation achieved record quarterly gold production of 46,811 ounces and produced 5,972 tonnes of copper. The quarter-on-quarter increase in production was a result of record quarterly mill feed and higher head grade. Mining operations focused on mining the high grade core of Stage 5 of the open pit with the majority of ore mined stockpiled on surface. At the end of the quarter, over 17 million tonnes of ore were stockpiled for future processing.

Development of the underground continued to progress and is on track for first ore processed by the end of 2017. In the second half of 2016, the Company plans to carry out an infill and extensional drill program of the Didipio underground resource. As a result of receiving its FTAA exploration permit renewal, the Company has mobilized additional resources to further identify and build its pipeline of targets within the 13,000 hectare area while commencing drilling of the more advanced targets in the second half of 2016.

In New Zealand, the Company achieved steady production at the Waihi Gold Mine while continuing to receive encouraging results from infill, extensional and exploration drilling. In the second quarter, the Company will recommence drilling at the WKP target located in close proximity to Waihi.

On the South Island of New Zealand, production at Macraes and Reefton were lower than the previous quarter due mainly to decreased production at Reefton where the operation transitioned to care and maintenance following the depletion of stockpiles. Exploration activities at Macraes continued to progress well with drilling of multiple targets including Coronation North, Coronation South and the Frasers Underground.

In the United States, the development of the Haile Gold Mine continued to advance well with completion of engineering and the full commissioning of the water treatment plant. The PAG cell development was also completed in the first quarter and is now ready to accept material mined from the open pit. As at the end of the quarter, $178 million of the $380 million development cost had been spent on the Haile Gold Mine.

Exploration activities in the first quarter at Haile were focused on resource definition drilling of the Horseshoe deposit. Drilling at Horseshoe is expected to continue in the second quarter in addition to further drilling of regional targets.

Table 2  Financial Results Summary

$'000 Q1

Mar 31 2016 Q4

Dec 31 2015 Q1

Mar 31 2015 Sales 161,051 143,612 129,306 Cost of sales, excluding depreciation and amortisation (71,889) (71,080) (60,685) General and administration - merger and acquisition costs - (1,604) - General and administration - other (12,368) (11,743) (7,938) Foreign currency exchange gain/(loss) 725 (173) (15) Other income/(expense) 355 (1,443) 72 Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and

amortisation (EBITDA) (excluding gain/(loss) on

undesignated hedges) 77,874 57,569 60,740 Depreciation and amortisation (33,769) (36,164) (27,729) Net interest expense and finance costs (2,189) (5,001) (2,601) Earnings before income tax and gain/(loss) on

undesignated hedges 41,916 16,404 30,410 Tax (expense) / benefit on earnings (5,206) (5,654) 793 Earnings/(loss) after income tax and before gain/(loss)

on undesignated hedges 36,710 10,750 31,203 Gain/(loss) on fair value undesignated hedges (18,304) 16,525 (9,359) Tax (expense)/benefit on gain/loss on undesignated hedges 5,125 (4,627) 2,621 Net Profit/(Loss) 23,531 22,648 24,465 Basic earnings per share $0.04 $0.04 $0.08 Diluted earnings per share $0.04 $0.04 $0.08 CASH FLOWS Cash flows from Operating Activities 31,673 62,152 43,229 Cash flows used in Investing Activities (103,740) (41,008) (23,807) Cash flows from /(used in) Financing Activities 2,033 120,529 (13,298)

*: includes results for Romarco Minerals and Waihi Gold from

1 and 30 October 2015 respectively.

Consolidated All-In Sustaining Costs ("AISC") for the quarter was $716 per ounce while consolidated cash costs were $436 per ounce on sales of 117,387 ounces gold and 4,745 tonnes of copper.

In the first quarter of 2016, the Company recorded revenue of $161.1 million with a net profit before undesignated hedges of $36.7 million, which was higher than in the fourth quarter of 2015. The increase in earnings was a result of higher average gold and copper price received partly offset by lower sales volumes. Operating cash flow for the quarter was $31.7 million, lower than in the previous quarter mainly due to the timing of concentrate shipments at Didipio and the resulting increase in trade and other receivables of $24.7 million.

First Quarter 2016 Results Webcast

The Company will host a conference call / webcast to discuss the results at 7:30am on Friday 29 April 2016 (Melbourne, Australia time) / 5:30pm on Thursday 28 April 2016 (Toronto, Canada time).

Webcast Participants

To register, please copy and paste the link below into your browser:

http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=1172062&s=1&k=CA68C3FAF15D5CEA0A06FBDFB0FF8195

Teleconference Participants (required for those who wish to ask questions)

Local (toll free) dial in numbers are:

Australia: 1 800 076 068

New Zealand: 0 800 453 421

Canada & North America: 1 888 390 0546

All other countries (toll): + 1 416 764 8688

Playback of Webcast

If you are unable to attend the call, a recording will be available for viewing on the Company's website from 11:00am on Friday 29 April 2016 (Melbourne, Australian time) / 9:00pm on Thursday 28 April 2016 (Toronto, Canada time).

About OceanaGold

OceanaGold Corporation is a mid-tier, low-cost, multinational gold producer with assets located in the Philippines, New Zealand and the United States. The Company's assets encompass its flagship operation, the Didipio Gold-Copper Mine located on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. On the north island of New Zealand, the Company operates the high-grade Waihi Gold Mine while on the south island of New Zealand, the Company operates the largest gold mine in the country at the Macraes Goldfield which is made up of a series of open pit mines and the Frasers underground mine. In the United States, the Company is currently constructing the Haile Gold Mine, a top-tier asset located in South Carolina along the Carolina Terrane. The Company expects the Haile Gold Mine to commence commercial production in early 2017. OceanaGold also has a significant pipeline of organic growth and exploration opportunities in the Australasia and Americas regions.

OceanaGold has operated sustainably over the past 25 years with a proven track record for environmental management and community and social engagement. The Company has a strong social license to operate and works collaboratively with its valued stakeholders to identify and invest in social programs that are designed to build capacity and not dependency.

In 2016, the Company expects to produce 385,000 to 425,000 ounces of gold from the combined New Zealand and Didipio operations and 19,000 to 21,000 tonnes of copper from the Didipio operation at All-In

Cautionary Statement for Public Release

Certain information contained in this public release may be deemed "forward-looking" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements and information relate to future performance and reflect the Company's expectations regarding the generation of free cash flow, execution of business strategy, future growth, future production, estimated costs, results of operations, business prospects and opportunities of OceanaGold Corporation and its related subsidiaries. Any statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, using words or phrases such as "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "estimates" or "intends", or stating that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements and information. They include, among others, the accuracy of mineral reserve and resource estimates and related assumptions, inherent operating risks and those risk factors identified in the Company's most recent Annual Information Form prepared and filed with securities regulators which is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com under the Company's name. There are no assurances the Company can fulfil forward-looking statements and information. Such forward-looking statements and information are only predictions based on current information available to management as of the date that such predictions are made; actual events or results may differ materially as a result of risks facing the Company, some of which are beyond the Company's control. Although the Company believes that any forward-looking statements and information contained in this press release is based on reasonable assumptions, readers cannot be assured that actual outcomes or results will be consistent with such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and information. The Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements and information, whether as a result of new information, events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. The information contained in this release is not investment or financial product advice.

SOURCE OceanaGold Corporation
A CAF personnel was killed in an IED blast triggered by Naxals in Chhattisgarh's Bijapur district. (Photo: PTI)

Raipur: A Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) personnel was on Thursday killed in an IED blast triggered by Naxals in Chhattisgarh's Bijapur district, police said.

The incident occurred near Phulgatta village forest when a team of security personnel was patrolling the region, a senior police official said.

While the security men were cordoning-off a forest patch near Phulgatta, assistant platoon commander Panchram Bhagat inadvertently stepped over a landmine, triggering the explosion in which he was critically injured, he said.

The injured personnel was immediately rushed to a local hospital where he succumbed to his wounds, he said. Bhagat, an assistant sub-inspector rank official, belonged to CAF's 10th battalion.

Meanwhile, combing operation has been launched in the region to trace the assailants, the police official added.
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Unilever product advertising is mainly through mainstream TV channels. Out of the products advertised so far at least 50% (over 850) of ads have been run on TV, while print media comes second with 496 ads. Unilever also utilizes social media platforms for advertisement. Unilever products are categorized by innovation ratings and tags in our product launch database. The North American region consists of almost 74 products with innovations related to the formulation of the product. Europe and other regions also have more products categorized under formulation-related innovation, followed by the packaging and positioning of the products. Most Unilever products are tagged with High Vitamins, Recyclable, and Natural tags to understand what the product differentiator is from other products available in the market. The majority of products belong to the personal care industry with a total of 5,788 products to date. This report, through the Unilever Example, illustrates how GlobalData Explorer enables you to:Dont miss out on key market insights that can help optimize your next investment  read the report now.
Government had in 2014 approved a Rs 175 crore infrastructure package for Arunachal which includes deployment of eight fresh ITBP battalions with about 8,000 troops in it, opening of 35 new border roads, 54 border outposts and 72 staging camps along the border. (Photo: Representational Image)

New Delhi: Amidst concerns over Chinese military activities along the forward areas of Arunachal Pradesh, India has started the process of shifting the North East headquarters of border guarding force ITBP, 500-km from Shillong to state capital Itanagar.

The huge logistical exercise entails shifting of over 2,000 troops and support staff, setting up of communications and border signals, residential logistics and transportation of heavy vehicles, weapons and artillery from Meghalaya to Arunachal Pradesh, both states on the eastern border flank of the country.

Officials said the central government had in 2014 approved a Rs 175 crore infrastructure package for Arunachal which includes deployment of eight fresh ITBP battalions with about 8,000 troops in it, opening of 35 new border roads, 54 border outposts and 72 staging camps along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) force Director General Krishna Chaudhary confirmed the move to PTI stating the exercise of shifting the North East frontier headquarters from Meghalaya's capital Shillong to Arunachal's capital Itanagar is expected to be accomplished by next month.

"The process in on. The ITBP North East frontier will soon be operating from Itanagar," the DG said. Officials said a huge infrastructure creation exercise is currently on in Itanagar where the force's sector headquarter has been operating since 2004.

A senior official in the security establishment said keeping in mind the military capabilities being created in Arunanchal, it was essential to base the ITBP command in Itanagar rather than in far-off Shillong where there are no such huge developments taking place to bolster the strength and number of Indian troops and other logistical activities.

"The ITBP frontier at Shillong was set up long back but it's geographical location has now lost relevance vis-a-vis the security of the Sino-India border. Arunachal is the right place for basing such strategic activities now," the official said.

While a frontier is headed by an Inspector General (IG) rank officer of the force, a sector is commanded by a Deputy IG (DIG) level officer.

About 7-8 battalions of the ITBP are deployed to secure the Sino-India LAC in these areas, and at least eight more ITBP battalions are set to be inducted in this region keeping in view the sensitivity, operational requirement and border disputes that occur between ITBP/Army and the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) troops, the official said.

Two other ITBP sectors under the NE frontier are located at Gangtok (Sikkim) and Tezpur (Assam).

Keeping in view the operationalisation of the huge ITBP establishment from Itanagar, the security establishment is also looking at ensuring a dedicated air and road connectivity from the hinterland in order to ensure unobstructed and quick movement of troops, logistics and other essential items.

In view of frequent incursions and transgression bids taking place along the 3,488 km-long border, ITBP had similarly created a frontier headquarter in Leh in Ladakh after shifting it from Chandigarh. The decision is being implemented and Leh at present has an ITBP sector command headed by a DIG rank officer.

China has been objecting to any development of infrastructure along the LAC and setting up of border outposts at locations along Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh leading to instances of stand-offs between the two sides.

India has been wary of road development and other infrastructural facilities coming up across the border on the Chinese side and wants to ramp up developmental work on its side.

The proposed new ITBP BOPs in Arunachal Pradesh are being created to reduce the distance between two border posts on this frontier marred by harsh weather conditions like snow blizzards and treacherous mountainous terrain.

About 80,000 personnel strong mountain-warfare trained force was raised in the wake of the 1962 Chinese aggression and its border posts are located at heights of 9,000 feet to 18,700 feet in heavy snow and oxygen depleted air.
Pune: Set to enter Mumbai's Haji Ali Dargah to break the gender barrier disallowing women's entry, Bhumata Brigade activist Trupti Desai on Thursday asked Bollywood actors Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan to lend support to their cause, which is aimed at eradicating differential treatment meted out to women at religious places.

"I think Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan should state their stand on what we are trying to achieve here, on our cause... That way I believe that their fan following will join us and support us in our fight for equality," she said.

After spearheading a successful campaign for women's right to worship in temples, Desai had on Monday said that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) should allow women to join the organisation. Desai said she would soon write to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat on the issue as part of her campaign for gender equality.

Desai expressed hope that RSS would respect their stand and consider their demand.

"I think Mohan Bhagwat ji is a progressive thinker and he will respect our stand of entry for women in RSS," she said.

On Saturday, Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat said he would not allow her to touch the mazar-e-sharif at the the Hazi Ali Dargah. Arafat, who joined the Shiv Sena after leaving the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena in 2014, said that the attempt by Desai to enter the Haji Ali Dargah is a conspiracy meant to disturb Mumbai's peaceful environment.

On April 20, 'Haji Ali for All' Forum was launched by Desai along with several activists, NGOs and social groups to fight for entry of women to the shrine.

The Maharashtra Government had in February supported the entry of women to the Haji Ali Dargah.

The government had told the Bombay High Court that the entry of women cannot be prohibited.
New Delhi: Days after denying visa to Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa, India has barred two other activists  Lu Jinghua and Ray Wang  from attending a conference in Dharmashala.

Lu, a well known activist, who fled China following the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, said she had been granted a tourist visa to travel from her home in the United States to India. But Lu said Air India officials stopped her at New York's JFK airport from where she was due to fly to India to attend a conference this week in the hill station of Dharamsala, the home of the Dalai Lama.

"They said I'm very sorry, you cannot go," Lu said from New York, adding that she had already received email confirmation of a visa. "I was going to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Lama so that's the reason why they denied me the visa," she said.

The government, however, clarified that the information provided by both activists were not correct. "As fas as Lu Jinghua's visa is concerned, her documents were illegible and there was inconsistency with the purpose of her visit. Insofar as Ray Wong is concerned, there was data inconsistency in his documents. As such visas were not issued to both these individuals so question of revocation does not arise," a government source said.

Jinghua and Ray Wong, an activist based in Hong Kong, were scheduled to attend the April 28 to May 1 meeting of dissidents and exiles in Himachal Pradesh.

Read: India cancels visa of Chinese dissident Dolkun Isa

According to reports, Lu, who is an American citizen, claimed that she had received an email confirmation of her visa. However, while trying to board an Air India flight to Dharamsala from New York, she was told her visa had been cancelled. She claimed she was not informed about any such step.

Read: Caving in on visa sends bad signal

Similarly, Dolkun Isa, an exiled Uyghur-Chinese leader, said he was denied the permit for the same event, earlier this week. Isa had said he received an email stating that his visa had been cancelled. After India decided to allow him to attend the conference, China reacted sharply saying that Dolkun was a terrorist tagged with a red notice by Interpol and the Chinese police.

Read: India issues visa to Uyghur 'terrorist' Dolkun Isa, China fumes

The three denials have raised questions about whether India is bowing down to Chinese pressure to suppress dissenting voices.
New Delhi: India on Thursday initiated a move to seek deportation of liquor baron Vijay Mallya. The Ministry of External Affairs has written to United Kingdom High Commission seeking Mallya's deportation.

"The ministry has written to the High Commission of the UK in Delhi requesting the deportation of Vijay Mallya so that his presence can be secured for investigations against him under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002," said External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup.

He further said that Indian High Commission in the UK will also be issuing a similar note verbale to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

"Mallya's passport was revoked last week in view of these (PMLA) investigations and non-bailable warrant issued by the Special Judge, Mumbai. We will continue to pursue this matter with UK authorities," Swarup added.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has approached the MEA seeking initiation of deportation proceedings against Mallya, charged with money laundering in the Rs 900 crore IDBI loan fraud case.

Mallya, who had left India on March 2 for the UK, can approach the British authorities to grant him permission to continue his stay in that country or challenge the revocation of his passport.

The Ethics Committee of Rajya Sabha has decided to recommend expulsion of Mallya. However, he has been given him one week to explain his position.
Theni: Denying that AIADMK cadres were involved in distributing cash to voters in the run up to the May 16 assembly polls, senior AIADMK leader O Panneerselvam on Thursday charged opposition with spreading "lies" by linking cash seizures by election officials with his party.

"Amma (as Jayalalalithaa is addressed by party workers) has advised us to follow the Model code of conduct rules and not violate Election Commission norms while campaigning," he said.

"AIADMK cadres are not involved in distribution of money. Opposition parties are spreading lies, linking the seizures of cash by Election Commission officials, with our party leaders," Panneerselvam said.

He was speaking to reporters at Bodinayakanur after filing his nomination papers for the assembly polls.

As per latest data compiled by the Election Commission, surveillance and expenditure monitoring teams deployed by it in Tamil Nadu have seized a total of Rs 68.31 crore cash till now, the highest among the five poll-bound states.
Safwan and his mother live in Bhatkal but say they have no information about the death of Shafi, or the eldest brother, Sulthan, who was similarly a powerhouse in ISIS and was reportedly killed last year.

Bhatkal: The younger brother of the ISIS recruiter who was killed in a drone attack in Syria recently and who hails from Bhatkal, has asked for proof that Shafi Armar is dead.

Safwan Armar, has asked Home Minister Rajnath Singh to confirm the death of his brother. Safwan and his mother live in Bhatkal but say they have no information about the death of Shafi, or the eldest brother, Sulthan, who was similarly a powerhouse in ISIS and was reportedly killed last year.

News of Shafi's death may not be true. If it is true then I request the Home Minister Mr Rajnath Singh to give us his body or confirm his death.
By Elisa Lledo

Spain has celebrated its thirtieth anniversary as a member of the EU, in a family that has little time for parties. The refugee crisis; the exit family (Brexit, Grexit and now, Nexit); the rise of populism in some of the Member States; and the constant terrorist threat in Europe  yet another wound to join those that still fester from the Great Recession  have filled the European agenda with urgent priorities to address.

The country has come to the end of these three decades with its own ailments too. Above all, the gradual institutional under-representation it suffers from, when compared to the political heavyweights in the Union. Spain currently has only one commissariat, held by Miguel Arias Canete with the portfolio of Climate Action and Energy, coupled with the lack of Spanish leadership in European foreign policy, in the absence of a clear stance against the challenges we face.

As if this were not enough cause for concern, the image of Spain has been tarnished recently due to the situation in the country since the general elections last December. No single party or combination of like-minded parties has got a sufficient majority to be able to form a government. Spains caretaker government thus lives on.

The accession to the European Communities in 1986 marked a turning point in Spanish foreign policy. Today, however, both Spanish diplomacy and politics need to clarify their course forward.

The opportunities are clearly visible. Spain is a country that has suffered and fought national and international terrorism on its own territory. Moreover, the country has extensive experience in matters related to the management of illegal immigration, due mainly to its location on the southern border of Europe. These being the two most pressing concerns on the EUs agenda, Spain could take on a leading role within the European club, contributing fresh ideas. An active role in these two areas, exporting its knowledge, along with the other two jewels in the crown which make up its letter of introduction to the EU (Latin America, and North Africa and also the Mediterranean), would place the country among the key players of an EU with 28 different voices.

The 11 March 2004 terrorist attacks introduced an ominous reality into the Spanish consciousness. Spain, hit by the domestic terrorism of armed groups like ETA or GRAPO, was now also the target of a new fundamentalist enemy. Twelve years later, many questions arise after 130 died in Paris on 13 November 2015, and then 31 last 22 March in Brussels, especially as to the type of response that should be given by France, Belgium and their EU partners and allies. What were the measures taken at the time by Spain to combat Islamist fanaticism? Is it necessary  or even advisable  to apply exceptional measures to increase executive powers, as has happened in France? Do we have to give up our freedoms to feel safer?

The truth is that in Spain there have hardly been any changes in criminal legislation against terrorism after the 2004 Madrid terrorist tragedy. The country had already advanced fully-fledged legislation in this area, as a result of long years of suffering from the threat of ETA. Some of the new features to increase the effectiveness of the fight against terrorism were, among others, the creation of the National Centre for Antiterrorist Coordination  now merged with the Intelligence Centre and the Centre for Organised Crime  or the adoption of new regulations on explosives, to toughen sanctions in this regard.

In order to adapt Spanish criminal law to the new threat  that of individual terrorists and returnee terrorist fighters  last 1 July the Framework Law 2/2015 came into force, amending the 10/1995 law, thus amending the penal code on terrorist offenses. In addition, we must not forget the signing of the fourth State Treaty against terrorism, signed in February 2015 by the Popular Party and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, and joined by nine other political forces (Podemos remains an observer).

Spain has also looked abroad to demonstrate its savoir faire on terrorism, especially taking advantage of its membership of the UN Security Council for the two-year term, 2015-2016. Within that body, the Spanish Government has given proof of the importance it attaches to the fight against terrorism, hosting meetings such as the EU-Southern Mediterranean against jihadist terrorism, held one year ago (April 2015) in Barcelona, or the High-level Meeting of the UN Committee Against Terrorism, held in Madrid last July, not forgetting the new step of bringing the voice of the victims of terrorism to the Security Council last October.

Moreover, the massive arrival of migrant boats in August 2006 marked a before and after in Spanish immigration policy and the instruments in place to combat illegal immigration. In just one weekend of that summer, a total of 1,268 illegal immigrants managed to reach the Canary Islands. That year saw the highest number of registered illegal migrants, 39,180 people, according to the Ministry of the Interior.

The crux of the Spanish response, given as an example by European Council President Donald Tusk, lies in promoting cooperation with the countries of origin and transit of illegal migration, the constant effort by the police and the Civil Guard, and tailor-made responses from the Interior Ministry to the new challenges in the field of immigration.

The previous government led by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero adopted what was known as the Africa Plan. He thus signed bilateral cooperation schemes with numerous countries of origin, mostly West African: Guinea Bissau, Nigeria, Mauritania, Senegal, in order to stem the massive outflow of migrants. More recently, Spain also signed agreements with Morocco, the main departure point for illegal immigrants, due to its proximity to the Spanish coast.

The current so-called refugee crisis has an origin (armed conflicts) and a legal and political nature (an economic immigrant is not the same as an asylum seeker), as well as a volume (2015 doubled the figure for asylum seekers in the EU (1,255,640) compared to 2014 (562,680) according to Eurostat data, 03/04/2016), which is different from the crisis that Spain experienced in 2006. Nonetheless, the Spanish experience should not be underestimated and provides important lessons, such as the need for a strong global plan that acts upon all stages of immigrant flows, with special emphasis on addressing the root causes. However, the European solution to lighten the weight of the massive influx of refugees into Europe has come from the controversial agreement, signed last 18 March with Turkey, to expel all persons arriving at the Greek islands.

Despite the political uncertainty that Spain is currently experiencing, the country has much to offer to a Europe hit by a multifaceted crisis, blocked by internal divisions, and marred by the lack of political ambition.

Elisa Lledo is a policy analyst/researcher working on EU and Spanish foreign policy. Previously, she was a junior researcher at the European think tank FRIDE. Her latest articles included Dont compare the Portuguese and Spanish elections (Euractiv oped, November 2015) and Errores y aciertos de Espana en politica exterior (Esglobal magazine, December 2015).
Bengaluru: Hundreds of garment factory employees have allegedly tendered their resignations at Shahi Exports Unit-6, as it was communicated by their management that the government was bringing in back the recently withdrawn rule of the Employee Provident Fund, with effect from August 1.

The employees are of the view that if they do not tender their resignations and apply for their PF withdrawals now, it will not happen until they turn 58. While few hundreds of them have tendered their resignations collectively, after believing that the new PF rule has not been withdrawn and is only postponed temporarily, and the fact that they have a time window until August 1, three months in total and two months to apply and claim for their respective PF money, said Sebastian Devraj, President, Karnataka Garments' Association to Deccan Chronicle.

Meanwhile, workers at Shahi Exports Unit-14, on Wednesday, stopped the police from entering their factory to arrest workers, who had allegedly taken part in rioting on April 19 and 20. The agitation affected Bommanahalli junction on the first day and Hebbagodi on the second day.

The workers staged a demonstration within the factory premises. They stopped the police and sternly warned them that they should not further harass or make any arrests of any workers, said a worker, who wished to remain anonymous.

Bommanahalli.MLA Sathish Reddy has been going around conducting public meetings and pacifying the garment factory workers by reassuring them that the controversial PF rule has been permanently withdrawn, but many workers are not convinced, said an activist fighting for the workers rights.

There have been totally around 286 arrests made so far. Many of them we know were not involved in the rioting, but are still kept in jail. Even as the Home Ministry has verbally told that no action would be taken against the workers, it has not happened. We will be forced to resort to agitation again if innocent workers are not released from jail, Devraj said.
Each year, citizen legislators from across Nebraska gather in Lincoln to balance the budget and work on important priorities for our state. Last week, the 2016 Legislature concluded. This year, the Legislature and I had a very successful session. We were able to accomplish all four important priorities I laid out for the session in my State of the State address in January as well as prevent bad legislation from passing. The work we did together on the budget, tax relief, roads, and health care will help our state grow and protect our states budget and taxpayers from unnecessary risks.

By law, one of the only requirements the Legislature has to complete in any session is balancing the state budget. While senators and I differed on some of the specifics about how taxpayer dollars should be spent, we were able to cut the rate of growth in state spending significantly. Together, the Legislature and I held the rate of growth in state spending to 3.6 percent, down from 6.5 percent or about half the previous rate of growth. Holding the rate of growth in state spending down is critical to providing opportunities for tax relief in the coming years.

My top priority for this session was providing property tax relief for Nebraskas hardworking families. At the State Fair last year, I began discussions with the Legislatures Education Chairwoman Kate Sullivan and Revenue Chairman Mike Gloor about building a property tax relief package. After hearings, debate, and compromises, the Legislature and I settled on a tax package that provides $20 million in direct property tax credits to farmers and ranchers. It also makes changes to the states education funding formula, increases school aid, and allows more schools to become eligible for school aid.

In addition to balancing the budget and providing tax relief, I also worked with the Transportation Committee to develop the Transportation Innovation Act. This program will help accelerate completion of our states expressway system, provide funds to repair county bridges, and dedicate resources to infrastructure projects that will help growing and expanding businesses. These investments will fund key infrastructure priorities for Nebraska for years to come. Capitol observers who have tracked infrastructure investments over the years described the passage of the TIA as historic and landmark.

In the last few months, the Legislature has prudently voted down several bad pieces of legislation. One of the most significant bills lawmakers rejected would have expanded Medicaid under Obamacare in Nebraska. As proposed, this bill would have cost Nebraska taxpayers almost $1 billion in new state spending in the first 10 years. Additionally, Medicaid spending for our states existing program already makes up a growing share of our state budget, and expansion would have exposed our state budget to unnecessary risk. This is the fourth time the Legislature has wisely decided against expansion in four years, and I will continue to work with senators to protect our states budget in future sessions.

In the coming weeks and months, I will be listening to you as well as meeting and working with my agencies and with senators as I develop new initiatives to pursue in next years session.

I am committed to holding the rate of growth in state spending even lower, so that we can continue to provide tax relief for hardworking Nebraskans like you in the coming years. If you have ideas that you would like to share for next year, I hope you will contact my office at 402-471-2244 or email pete.ricketts@nebraska.gov.

Pete Ricketts is governor of Nebraska.
Chennai: Vijayakanth, founder, DMDK contesting in Ulundurpettai, declared total assets worth Rs 36.37 crore (includes his wife Premalatha). The other liabilities worth Rs 5.23 crore. In the previous assembly election in 2011 Vijayakanth declared assets worth Rs 27.99 crore.

Stalin who filed his affidavit on Wednesday for the Assembly elections declared assets worth Rs 4.13 crores with moveable property worth Rs 80 lakhs and immovable property worth Rs 3.3 crores.

Read: MK Stalin, Captain Vijayakanth file their papers

Stalin and his wife do not own a car and he has an annual income of Rs 13 lakhs and his wife's annual income is 4.44 lakhs in the year 2014-2015. The DMK treasurer owns three acres of land at Tiruvallur worth Rs 1.82 crores and two acres at Thanjavur worth Rs 3 lakhs. Durgavathy has land at Tiruvallur worth Rs. 11 lakhs.

Stalin has a house at Velachery and his share in the building is worth Rs 1.27 crores and Stalin also owns a residential building worth Rs 19 lakhs at Tiruvarur.

Durgavathy has immovable property estimated at Rs 1.38 crores and movable property of Rs 31 lakhs including jewels worth Rs 15 lakhs. In the 2011 Assembly elections, he had declared assets worth Rs 2.11 crores.
FILE - In this Dec. 9, 2015 file photo, Robert Lewis Dear, middle, talks during a court appearance in Colorado Springs, Colo. The man who acknowledges killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic will return to court for a discussion of his mental health. The Thursday, April 28, 2016 hearing will focus on whether 57-year-old Dear is competent to continue with his criminal case. (Andy Cross/The Denver Post via AP, Pool, File)
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear plea seeking FIR against Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and Ahmad Patel in the AgustaWestland chopper scam. The court will take it up next week.

A bench comprising Chief Justice T S Thakur and justices R Banumathi and U U Lalit ordered listing of the PIL when advocate M L Sharma said that it is an urgent matter which should be heard at the earliest.

CBI had in 2013 registered a case in connection with alleged bribes paid by the firm to Indians to clinch the deal for 12 helicopters to ferry VVIPs including the President and Prime Minister.

An Italian court has reportedly cited handwritten references to Gandhi, her political secretary Ahmed Patel and former Air Chief S P Tyagi by a middleman in a judgement that convicted the helicopter company's chief executive.

Read: AgustaWestland deal: Why is your name on Italy list? BJP asks Sonia

On Wednesday, a huge ruckus erupted in the Rajya Sabha as the BJP, executing its gameplan, tried to drag the name of Congress president Sonia Gandhi into the controversial deal, and angry Congress members erupted in protest, storming the Well of the House and paralysing proceedings for over an hour.

Gandhi took the BJP head on and hit back, saying she was not afraid of being cornered on the deal. I am not afraid of anyone cornering me as there is no basis to that. All the accusations they are throwing at us are false and baseless, Gandhi declared, calling it an attempt at character assassination.

After the Upper House witnessed verbal duels between Congress and BJP MPs, two Cabinet ministers, sources said, held parleys with senior Congress leaders in a bid to broker peace. Sources said finance minister Arun Jaitley and parliamentary affairs minister M. Venkaiah Naidu held discussions with Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad and Congress deputy leader in the House Anand Sharma over lunch. Naidu, it was learnt, had invited them for the meeting.

Defence minister Manohar Parrikar, however, challenged the Congress to show the UPA governments order blacklisting AgustaWestland. Former PM Manmohan Singh, whose name was also dragged into the issue by the BJP, said in a crisp reply: There is no case, my party will respond.

Read: AgustaWestland deal: No brush-by with Italian PM, says Arun Jaitley

Earlier, a verbal duel erupted in the Rajya Sabha between Congress members and the treasury benches over newly nominated MP Subramaniam Swamy seeking to drag Gandhis name into the controversial AgustaWestland deal bribery case. This led to two adjournments of the Upper House in the pre-noon session. Mrs Gandhis name was later expunged by deputy chairman P.J. Kurien. BJP members had given a notice for discussion on the issue on Wednesday.

Outside Parliament, the BJP kept the pressure and tried to ridicule Gandhi, asking her to use her old relations in Italy to find out why an Italian court had mentioned her name in the AgustaWestland bribery case.

Union minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy said the government would fulfil the Congress chiefs demand for a thorough probe, whose modalities will be decided once defence minister Manohar Parrikar makes a statement in Parliament on the issue. Rudy tried to sound sarcastic as he said that more revelations will come.

Former defence minister A.K. Antony, refuting the BJPs accusations, claimed that no witnesses mentioned names of Congress leaders in the Italian court. The Italian court documents, as claimed by the BJP, had allegedly named Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and some other Congress leaders including Ahmed Patel and Oscar Fernandes.

Ahmed Patel, Gandhis political secretary and a senior party leader, dismissed the accusations against him, saying these were absolutely baseless. He asked: Why doesnt the government probe instead of hurling accusations? Patel then added: If there is something against me, they should find out and hang me.

Read: Not afraid, have nothing to hide: Sonia Gandhi on VVIP copter scam

In the Lok Sabha, Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge demanded that the issues relating to the AgustaWestland deal and the reports appearing in the media be discussed. Kharge said that as the names of leaders of his party had been mentioned in media reports, the issue should be discussed. Names have appeared. We will have to think about it. We should discuss, he said. Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, however, ruled Question Hour could not be suspended and the issue could be discussed later after a proper notice was given by Kharge.

The CBI has, meanwhile, approached the external affairs ministry seeking the help of diplomatic channels to get a copy of the Italian courts ruling in the AgustaWestland helicopter deal. Sources said the CBI has completed the domestic portion of its investigation in the case, but the judicial requests sent to eight countries are still pending.

The Milan court of appeals, which overturned a lower courts order, sentenced Finmeccanicas former chief Giuseppe Orsi to 4.5 years in jail for false accounting and corruption in the sale of 12 VVIP helicopters to India for over Rs 3,600 crores, while former CEO of Finmeccanicas helicopter subsidiary AgustaWestland, Bruno Spagnolini, has been handed a four-year sentence.

On January 1, 2014, India had scrapped the contract with AgustaWestland to supply 12 AW101 VVIP helicopters to the Indian Air Force over allegations of kickbacks by it for securing the deal. The then UPA government had also barred Finmeccanica and its group companies from taking part in any new defence contract bidding.
Bengaluru: With all eyes on Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his drought tour, old Congressmen met to plot an in-house coup in Delhi with plans afoot to present his series of blunders to the Congress top brass, such as the Hublot watch and the laboratory tender being awarded to his son, as grounds for his removal. Especially, as sources are now letting it be known that the Chief Minister was aware of his son's move to open the laboratory in the Victoria Hospital complex.

Mr Siddaramaiah and his son, Dr Yathindra, who resigned from the director post, have both strenuously denied wrong-doing. Father and son have said that there was no collusion on either's part.

However, sources in government have let it be known that the chief minister was allegedly aware of his sons move. The sources, who were privy to this entire episode, told Deccan Chronicle that Mr Siddaramaiah had allegedly first instructed the medical education department to check whether the single-company contract system could be adopted to award the tender to his sons company.

Medical Education Minister, Sharan Prakash Patil reportedly informed the CM that it could not be done. However, the department managed to award the contract to Matrix Laboratory which was the lowest bidder. Later, under pressure from the party central leadership, Dr Yathindra resigned from the company director post. The Matrix Laboratory controversy, simply refuses to die.
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For decades and decades we have been counting the number of doctors in America. For decades and decades we have been coming up short compared to other developed nations, and some less developed ones as well. A poorly educated person may be tempted to suggest that we should make more doctors. After all, there is hardly a shortage of young people willing and able to undergo the rigors of a medical education. But luckily we are not poorly educated, so we devised much smarter solutions. If people cant get a doctor appointment, it must be the doctors fault. Hence, we put our foot down and mandated that doctors see people the same day they want to be seen, or shortly thereafter. It sounds great and it worked perfectly for the Veterans Administration (VA), so it should scale terrifically to everybody else.

Taking a page from the highly respected Samuel Hahnemann, we decreed that physically seeing an actual doctor is not only completely unnecessary, but it may very well be detrimental to the healing process. A doctor effect is created by simply having an MD somewhere in the building, and as technology continues to improve, a virtual doctor presence should do the trick. Some have argued that Mr. Hahnemanns homeopathic fantasy is no better than a placebo, but we have plenty of research showing that placebos are indeed effective. More importantly, unlike Mr. Hahnemanns distilled water base, our technology solvent is very potent on its own merits. Imagine how successful homeopathy could have been if they used whiskey to dilute whatever the hell they are diluting.

As infallible as our highly educated reasoning may be, there is resistance to its widespread adoption, both from rich doctors who dont want to see their gravy train derailed, and from simple minded herds of patients who are failing to grasp the infinite power of virtualization. We certainly can move, and are moving, forward with our powerful solution, but it would be easier and more humane, for all parties involved, if the barriers to change could be swiftly eliminated.

Barrier 1: Our doctors

The anachronistic habituation of people to seek help from a doctor when experiencing physical, and sometimes mental, pain and anguish, is perhaps the toughest problem we are facing. There is a bilateral dependency between physicians and patients which must be disrupted. People who tend to the sick and people who are sick refer to this phenomenon as the patient-doctor relationship. Our most immediate task is to impress upon the uneducated masses we are protecting that this relationship is one of abuse, exploitation and misplaced trust in professional conmen (and women). Hundreds of thousands of doctors may be scoffing dismissively right now, and as they do, we are half way there already.

The art of the smear goes by the name of news or research in our instantly connected tabloid society. In a country with a million degreed physicians, it is easy to find a rapist, an arsonist, a thief, a drug dealer, a murderer, or any other criminal individual, who happens to be a doctor. Once we find those individuals, the hyperjump to general statements about a group of people is easy peasy, as long as our grouping of people is not along gender, race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation lines (except white men who are fair game).

The formula is deceptively simple: find a handful of criminal doctors, write a big expose about doctors and pepper it with sex, money and drugs stories, add instructions on when to call the police for, say, sexual or physical abuse, package it all in a not-for-profit (previously) respected container, and wrap the whole thing in menacing pictures with menacing headlines (preferably all caps, large red font), such as DOCTOR COULD HURT YOU. And then you reinforce the message with a constant barrage of civic-minded initiatives to address the fear you want to create. We must measure and rate doctors. We must have more transparency. We must improve care, or rather the experience of care (subtle, but big difference). We must take back control over our own health (from those overbearing, overentitled, perhaps criminal, money grubbing doctors).

Will it work? Can an irresponsible and sleazy messaging campaign in service of greed and avarice, overcome centuries of earned trust? It will take time, but look at the truths that became evident over time. Our teachers are incompetent. Labor unions are destroying our way of life. Police officers are racist murderers. And since the democratic election season is upon us, Bernie Sanders is a sexist communist like Guevara or Castro, and Donald Trump is a sexist fascist like Mussolini or Hitler. All you need is a concerted and sustained effort of money and media (a.k.a. New York values), which contrary to another artificially generated truism are not controlled by the Jews, but are run by a global cartel of egomaniacal sorry excuses for human beings.

Barrier 2: Our expectations

Over the last hundred years or so, medicine has achieved almost miraculous success and in the process, it changed our expectations. We expect to have malfunctioning organs replaced. We expect to not die of HIV and other infections. We expect to live free of pain and even free of wrinkles. We expect tiny babies that fit in the palm of our hand to grow up and go to college. We expect many cancers to be cured. We expect crushed bones, open arteries, and charred skin to be fixed. And we expect to have a good doctor for all of the above.

These expectations, prevalent throughout affluent Western societies, pose a huge problem for the global money cartel. The Earth is flat, you see, and there are billions of people in this world who have no such expectations, billions of people who produce the finest iPhones, the trendiest footwear, the fanciest apparel, every single computer in the world, and are grateful for the privilege. If this mass of third world laborers begins to develop similar medical expectations, financial calamity is sure to rise from the Earths flatness all the way up to Mount Davos. It is, therefore, imperative to reduce medicine to something free or nearly free that can be easily distributed across the scorched plains of humanity.

This is where our technology solution comes in. Google is dreaming of connectivity balloons while Facebook prefers drones as the means to connect billions of laborers to the mobile virtual reality we all partake in. Having Google makes you feel educated and well informed. Having Facebook makes you feel connected, important and well liked. Having virtualized health care will make you feel healthy and well cared for. And its all free, infinitely abundant and available equally to all, regardless of socioeconomic condition. The Internet is your friend, your confidant, your teacher, your counsel, your entertainer, and now it will be your doctor, because the Internet knows you better than you know yourself, is there for you when no one else is, misses you terribly when you stay away, and cares for you as nobody cared for you before. The Internet is you.

You are controlling your information, your social interactions, your opinions, your shopping, your wealth (or lack thereof), and now you should take control of your health (or lack thereof). You can bank with the Internet without tellers and financial advisors, you can buy stuff without cashiers and sales associates, you can learn without teachers, you can fix a toilet without plumbers, you can manage your business without accountants, and you will manage your health without doctors. You will have all the tools at your fingertips in the comfort of your home (or trailer, or hut, or sidewalk under a bridge). You will no longer face the inconvenience and outright danger of going to an antiquated, flawed, rude and dishonest doctor. You will get health services that you and the Internet value most, and much, much more, because less is always more.

Barrier 3: Their technology

As the two previous barriers are disintegrating before our eyes (or screens), we have one last barrier that is painfully real. We dont have the technology to hack the doctors. We are certainly talking up a big game while scrambling to put something together that at least looks at first glance like the real McCoy. We talk about tricorders and artificial intelligence. We talk about deep machine learning and veritable oceans of omniscient data. We talk a lot about robots, genomes, bloodless tests and iPhones that deliver intensive medical care. But we have no idea how to mix the doctor solute into the virtual technology solvent to generate the coveted solution we put forward as fait accompli.

Technology in its current state cannot absorb and distill, let alone replicate, highly variable processes that lack both a clear starting point and a predefined endpoint. We dont know what we dont know, and in spite of flowery rhetoric, computers can only perform, and can indeed improve upon, tasks we fully understand and are able to precisely codify down to the most minute detail. Simply put, without an atomic level understanding of clinical decision making, we cannot dilute the doctor over and over again, until there is no visible trace of human physicians in our high tech brew of health care. We can, however, abstract a coarse approximation of relatively straightforward scenarios at the low-risk end of the clinical spectrum, and advertise aggressively that the Southwest Airlines or its evil younger cousin Uber of medicine has arrived.

Here is the watershed event to watch for: the first FDA-approved app that will diagnose, prescribe and deliver medications to your house by secure drone. It may initially be confined to over the counter stuff, but once that is mainstreamed, simple meds like antibiotics, high-end antacids, allergy pills and such, will certainly follow. Next, up will be staples such as simvastatin, lisinopril and metformin, first the renewals and then a slew of new diagnoses of pre-this and pre-that. At the high end of disease, precision medicine will isolate one or two rare scenarios that affect one in a million people, script them and execute them flawlessly once or twice without physician intervention. Then we declare victory and spread the gospel to every $5 mobile phone from Guizhou province to the Appalachian Mountains to the banks of the Ganges river.

Medecine sans Medecins

There is no doubt in my mind that we shall overcome the first two barriers at very short order. There is no doubt in my mind that even if we fail to hack doctors in the abstract sense, we will be hacking the medical profession to pieces in the most physical sense. And there should be no doubt in anybodys mind that whatever these cheap hacks are doing to our health care, the effects will not be apparent for decades, and even then the results will be attributed to the inevitability of external factors such as cultural change, climate change, famine, wars, migrations, solar flares, or random disturbances in the Force. Three centuries later, it looks like John Dryden had it right after all, and God never made his Work, for Man to mend.

Margalit Gur-Arie is founder, BizMed. She blogs at On Healthcare Technology.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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Heart of summer. Early August. All of Holland is on holiday. We are sitting in the flesh-colored morning light, in his back room, stuffed away behind the nurses station.

He is sick as hell and just 32. I am sitting next to his mother and his girlfriend. The intern and nurse are standing behind me, breathing carefully. He sits with his back to us, at his table. Visibly fighting for air. Short of wind. Hands covering his eyes. I notice his bent back. Track his breathing. 30? 35 times a minute.

The window is open. The sweet smell of summer is wafting in. The contrast between the beauty of outside and the cruelty here inside takes me off guard.

A few weeks ago, I admitted to him that I liked him. Probably not the most professional thing to say. But he clearly appreciated it. He had charisma. The kind of guy who lights up a boring party.

Death is always brutal. But the death of someone so young, at the peak of his life, is one of natures most heinous acts. Thats how I felt.

Of course, Im bringing this home with me, was my blatant reply to one of the team residents.

He has an enormous tumor in his lungs that has spread to his bones, liver, and brain.

My head? hed questioned hopelessly, after Id flipped over the MRI of his cerebrum.

The past few months, we had tried chemo after chemo. Called in renowned professors. The fear was always palpable. Dexamethasone. Pemetrexed. Etoposide. Erlotinib. Some other exotic names. All useless. The cancer continued to spread, mercilessly, gnawing away at his once notable physique, to leave this broken man sitting before us.

His breathing had become even more difficult the last weeks. He could no longer lie down, because it made him feel like he was suffocating. That was because it had spread into the anterior chamber of his heart, cruelly assuring that any decent way of pumping his blood forward was impossible. Decent. A word absent from cancers vocabulary.

The diagnoses was chilling. Pericarditis carcinomatosa. Latin for gruesome.

He had spent the last two days resting against his table. And that was where he sat, 24 hours a day. He slept with his head on that table. When I told him, I found it a rather humiliating option, he snapped: I will stay by my girlfriend until the very end. In full consciousness. Time and time again, hed turned down morphine, even though I had made it clear it would not make him drowsy. Hed reply with stoic silence. Regardless of how ridiculous his refusal to take the morphine was to me, I truly admired his character.

His girlfriend glanced over at me. Late 20s. Pretty. She squeezed his hand. Her face, devastated. And then asked she the question that had initially brought us here: Can we, still? Get married?

Wed just taken several minutes talk about The End. His very imminent death. So, the final couplet has resounded, he restated. Symbolically. Painfully. He brazenly admitted his time was up. Finally. Death had already begun. He was looking despondent. He had known it for a while now. I shifted my gaze to the tag around his arm. We shared a birth year. I knew this. 1977.

We can hold your wedding here, of course, I said. But then we have to hurry up a bit. Actually, we have to move pretty quickly. Today. Not a day later.

In actuality, I had no darn clue if it was even possible. So there we stood. In the hall. The intern directly dials city hall in the neighboring town. We get the registry office on the line, and I brace myself for a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense and the kind of questions only God knows the answer to. But what happens next is completely different.

After telling the whole story, suddenly all the doors seem to be open. The mayor is pulled out of an important council meeting to sign the necessary papers. An army of civil servants is suddenly available at every beck and call. Passport missing? says the councilwoman. Who cares  she adds in one breath. Wow. In no more than 50 minutes we manage to arrange an entire wedding ceremony, from the witnesses to the officiant. This is not in my job description. But who cares. They can marry that afternoon.

In the meantime, half of the hospitals support staff is pulling together to turn the sitting room into a virtual wedding chapel. Even the kitchen starts making a cake. I am astounded. This is care. This is what care is about.

The sun sets behind the trees in the distance. She is standing next to him in its soft rays. He, sitting, fighting for air. Intensely happy. They fold their hands together. This leaves an everlasting impression. In the few short months since he became sick, they have reached a remarkable level of unity. Full of strength and love they say their wedding vows, swearing to be faithful til long, long after death has parted them.

In the end, nothing remains but love.

The intern winks to me, teary eyed. Together, we leave them. We cry. In the hallway. This, of course, is very unprofessional. I couldnt give a damn.

He dies that very night. At his table. But next to his wife.

Sander de Hosson is a pulmonary physician in the Netherlands. He can be reached on twitter @shossontwits. This story received the a Global Lung Cancer Journalism award.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
A farmer walk with a calf on parched lake bed at drought-hit Hukunda near Chikmagalur in Karnataka on Thursday. (Photo: PTI)

Hyderabad: Facing a severe water crisis, TS has requested Karnataka to release three tmc ft of water from Narayanapur dam to Jurala in Mahbubnagar district for drinking water needs in drought-affected areas.

Ironically, Karnataka itself is facing a water crisis in 12 districts and has knocked the doors of Maharashtra, which too is grappling with water scarcity.

Release of water by any state at this juncture is bound to kick up a political row hence all upstream states are cautious.

Irrigation minister T. Harish Rao submitted a memorandum in this regard to Karnataka minister M.B. Patil in Bengaluru on Thursday. Mr Harish Rao is in Bengaluru to discuss the water-related issues with the Karnataka government. The TS team also discussed an increase in height of Rajolibanda Diversion Scheme (RDS) and denial of rightful share of waters to Telangana.
The decision was taken following the strike announced by Private Colleges JAC to protest the raids and inspections by police, vigilance departments ordered by state government to verify faculty and infrastructure facilites in colleges. (Representational image)

Hyderabad: The Telangana state government on Saturday postponed Eamcet scheduled on May 2, and Teacher Eligibility Test on May 1 respectively.

The decision was taken following the strike announced by Private Colleges JAC to protest the raids and inspections by police, vigilance departments ordered by state government to verify faculty and infrastructure facilites in colleges. The JAC has decided to boycott both these exams and not to allow centres in their premises, forcing the government to postpone the exams.

We have decided to postpone TET and Eamcet. Fresh dates will be announced soon. We are planning to conduct both these exams before May 20, said Deputy CM Kadiam Srihari, who holds the education portfolio. Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao took a serious view of the strike by private colleges.

Mr Rao directed officials to go ahead with inspections and asked them to make arrangements to hold exams only in governement schools, colleges and universities later and not to compromise with private colleges for the sake of exam centres.

Mr Rao made it clear that the inspections were not to harass private colleges but to weed out bogus colleges which are running without qualified faculty and basic infrastructure facilities but siphoning off crores of rupees of public money under fee reimbursement scheme.
For the younger generation, last years snow was probably the most unusual weather event in their lifetimes, but the flood of 1947 which left houses in Kilkenny almost completely under water was perhaps the greatest freak weather event for the over 70s. Even today, I remember that flood as if it were yesterday and often ask myself whether global climate change really is a new phenomenon. The heavy snowfalls of late January and February of that year had melted quickly which caused the rivers to swell alarmingly. March 16 of that year saw the greatest flood in living memory hit Kilkenny.

For the younger generation, last years snow was probably the most unusual weather event in their lifetimes, but the flood of 1947 which left houses in Kilkenny almost completely under water was perhaps the greatest freak weather event for the over 70s. Even today, I remember that flood as if it were yesterday and often ask myself whether global climate change really is a new phenomenon. The heavy snowfalls of late January and February of that year had melted quickly which caused the rivers to swell alarmingly. March 16 of that year saw the greatest flood in living memory hit Kilkenny.

The Breagagh river (i.e. the deceitful river) cascaded down Dean Street like a miniature tidal wave, sweeping around Monaghans corner at the end of Irishtown and on joining up with the flood waters of the Nore rose rapidly. Many residents in flooded areas had no time to save their few household possessions and retreated upstairs, or in some cases onto the roofs of their houses.

The late Dean Cavanagh, (later to become a Canon of the R. Catholic church) who was the Adm. of St. Canices parish, gathered around him a handful of parishioners from houses on higher ground, and began reciting prayers for the safety of those trapped in flooded houses. Low lying houses in places such as Green Street in the city were in a perilous situation. But several small boat owners immediately braved the flood waters to rescue stranded families from the roofs and upstairs bedroom windows of their homes.

Names such as the late Barney Kelly from the Butts area, Mick McGuinness (father of John McGuinness TD), Jimmy Crabbe and Jerry Dunne of Green Street, Pearse Clooney and Kevin Shortall from Maudlin Street, etc. all took their boats into the flood waters to help rescue residents trapped in their homes.

One boat did overturn in John Street and as the crew of the fishing cot hung onto an ESB pole, approximately where Dalys B&B and The Two Dames coffee shop now stands, a man by the name of ONeill who lived in the street, knotted several sheets together and hauled the boatmen up from the raging flood waters which threatened to sweep them into the river Nore.

A teenage girl in Green Street became hysterical on being lifted into a boat and almost capsized the small fishing cot. Fortunately the boatman managed to bring the girl to her senses by giving her a sharp slap and on steadying the boat got all to the safety of high ground.

John Street, Bateman Quay, Johns Quay, Green Street, Friars Bridge, Blackmill area and Irishtown were probably among the worst affected in the city.

Shop windows collapsed and goods such as tins of sweets, biscuits, ice-cream fridges, chairs, tables, pigs heads, turf etc. were all swept along the streets by fast flowing flood waters. Billy Gaffneys sweet and ice-cream shop in Irishtown  where Mrs. Quinns charity shop now stands was completely gutted, Kennedys Butchers, Kings and Walshs grocery/pubs and Fortes Fish and Chip Shop were particularly badly damaged. One of the oldest churches in Kilkenny  the Black Abbey  was also badly flooded. A brave Dominican priest, the late Father Gaffney, actually donned a swimming trunks and swam across the inside of the church to retrieve the Communion Vessels.

One of the best known landmarks in Kilkenny  The Suspension Bridge  which spanned the river Nore at the Bishops Meadows  was washed away by the flood waters in 47and unfortunately never replaced. This bridge was originally built by Lady Desart to facilitate workers living in the Talbots Inch hamlet who worked in the Woollen Mills on the opposite bank of the river. It became a hugely popular walk for courting couples, young families with children etc. to meander out the Bleach Road, cross the bridge and home by the Bishops Meadows.

Many houses in the city were subsequently condemned as unsuitable for human habitation after the flood and the residents were housed in the old Workhouse at Ossory Park and in the Married Quarters of James Stephens army barracks.

Two years later in 1949 a new housing scheme was completed by a local building firm  The Dowling Brothers. Priority in allocation of these houses was to be given to victims who had lost their homes in the 47 flood. Of course, as always, political strokes were alleged to have been pulled and some people who appeared to be ineligible were installed quickly in the new houses. This aggravated many flood victims who were still left on the waiting list. Subsequently, a letter, published in the Kilkenny People and signed by several flood victims, resulted in an uproar at a Corporation meeting. Elected members demanded that the County Manager find out who had sent the Kilkenny People to the Minister for Local Government.

Subsequently two representatives from the Local Government Dept. in Dublin arrived at City Hall unannounced and the allocation of houses was taken out of the hands of the elected members of Kilkenny Corporation. This action was described by furious councilors as an inquisition on the Corporation. Many councilors complaining that it was a slur on their personal character. Allegations of political cronies jumping the queue, and those in authority abusing the power they held was spoken of in hushed voices around the city. But of course we all know that these accusations had to be untrue  sure politicians would never do anything like that!!!!
A Kilkenny school debating team will argue for Britain to leave the European Union in what promises to be a mighty semi-final showdown in Dublin tomorrow.

CBS Secondary School, Kilkenny is in the last four out of the 151 schools that took part in the national Concern Debates competition  which was created 32 years ago by Concern Worldwide, Irelands largest humanitarian aid agency.

They will be arguing that Britain should leave the European Union against the motion that Britain Should Bremain  which promises to be a fascinating and lively spar.

The debates team  which is captain James Foley-Walsh (18) from Clara, Cian Boyle (18) from Ballymacarbly, Co Waterford, Jack Lawlor (18) from Bennettsbridge and Kevin Barrett (18), from Dublin Road Kilkenny  have been practicing their orating skills with mentor and English teacher Gerry OBrien and with Jaime Martin and Olivia Maher.

The team also have a substitute, Jack Gargan (17) from Loughboy, whose very first debate was when he stepped on the night of the quarter final several weeks ago, in which he was praised for his excellent work.

Proud mentor, Mr OBrien, said: This is the furthest we have got in this competition and we would love to win it.

All the lads are movie enthusiasts and when they travel home on the bus after debating, another debate usually starts.

The debating becomes more light-hearted, such as, which is better, DC or Marvel comic movies? Who was the most powerful Sith Lord in the Star Wars universe?

They are very serious about the debates on development issues, and they have learned a huge amount, but also debate lighter issues amongst themselves afterwards, like many people do.

They enjoy the different stages that go into preparation, researching the topic and contacting professionals for their opinions on a subject.

The thrill and adrenaline of having it all come together on the night and still yet the unpredictable nature of an evening.

You never know before how an evening will go - the students have met with a lot of interesting people on their journey to the semi-final.

Over 50,000 students have taken part in Concern Debates since it began in 1984.

The competition - Ireland's largest schools debating competition - was created by Concern Worldwide to encourage further learning and debate about issues of global justice and human development.

Many past participants have gone on to have successful careers, some in politics, like Sinn Fein Senator Kathryn Reilly, and in journalism and broadcasting, like RTE presenter Claire Byrne.

CBS Kilkenny said it has a proud history and that they are dedicated to the provision of a wide array of extra-curricular opportunities for students allowing them to express themselves and achieve their maximum potential on their path to adulthood.

They will be debating with St Josephs Presentation College, Lucan, Dublin at the Kings Inns  Irelands oldest school of law founded in 1541 during the reign of Henry VIII and where historical figures like Daniel OConnell and Theobald Wolfe Tone once orated.

The final will be held at The Helix in Whitehall, Dublin on May 18 and the winner will be invited to see one of Concerns overseas projects  which saw last years winners, De La Salle in Bagenelstown, Co Carlow, travel to Mozambique.

The other semi-final spar coming up is between Athlone Community College, Co. Westmeath and Cross and Passion College, Ballycastle Co. Antrim.

Schools Programme Coordinator with Concern Worldwide, Evanna Craig, said: We are very proud of all the teams who took part this year  which saw more schools than ever participate.

We would urge any school or student interested in taking part next year to get in touch with us  there will probably be high demand so we may have to cap the numbers registering for the first time ever.

The benefits are huge  and time and time again, our debaters tell us how it has inspired and helped them with their career choices by the time they did their leaving certificate exams, and really given them confidence starting out in college.

And of course for us the hope is that they go on to become life-long advocates of social change around the world.
Irelands longest over-water zipline was launched on Monday by Kilkenny hurling manager Brian Cody at Castlecomer Discovery Park.

This marks the opening a new tourist attraction to the south-east and Irelands Ancient East experience. A thrilling outdoor activity, the zipline is 300 metres long, 35 metres over ground at its highest point and is accompanied by two new high-ropes courses called the Octagonal High Ropes Challenge.

Castlecomer Discovery Park has invested 370,000 developing the new Zip Line and High Ropes Challenge creating 15 new jobs at the park  13 seasonal positions, a full time Outdoor Activity Manager and a part time Health and Safety Officer. The park has seen employment grow from a team of six outdoor activity instructors in 2012 to 33 this season with plans in place to create more jobs and leisure activities over the next five years, boosting tourism to Castlecomer.

Kilkenny has long had a fantastic reputation for sport and we hope to add to the variety of outdoor attractions by opening Irelands longest over-water Zip Line and new High Ropes Challenge, said Liz Nolan, Manager of Castlecomer Discovery Park.

These activities have been three years in development and its a proud day for the whole team at Castlecomer Discovery Park to have our own Brian Cody here to officially open them. We already have lots of group bookings in, including some well-known hurlers, and look forward to an exciting summer.

Sedentary lifestyles are on the increase among adults and children and this is something Castlecomer Discovery Park is keen to address, providing a range of new and exciting outdoor activities for small children, teens, adults, groups and families.

Visitor numbers to the park have increased dramatically over the past five years with a record 117,000 visiting last year. A 20 per cent increase in visitor numbers is expected this year with the launch of the Zip Line and Octagonal High Ropes Challenge. The new activities are open to people over 12 years of age and are particularly suited to groups and for team-building exercises.

Capital funding for the Zip Line and Octagonal High Ropes Challenge was sourced from the Dormant Accounts Fund under the Social Enterprise Measure, the Rural Economic Development Zone, Kilkenny County Council and Castlecomer Discovery Parks own funds.

Set in an 80 acre natural woodland, Castlecomer Discovery Park hosts an exciting range of recreational and educational activities. Opened in 2007, the park already features scenic walking trails, boating, fishing, high-ropes adventure activities, a multi-media coal mining museum, orienteering trails, schools education programme, design craft workshops, Elf and Fairy village and an award-winning cafe. Castlecomer Discovery Park is now a member of the European Ropes Course Association.
Money drives markets and most investors would probably agree that the gold price often acts as the vent for excess liquidity. Yet the actual track record between strong money supply growth and a higher gold price is erratic at best. Our research shows that a better understanding of this relationship requires money to be more carefully defined. Traditionally, economists have measured the money supply (e.g. M2) from the retail deposit liabilities of high street banks. If you still believe that these deposit flows dominate bank funding and that banks themselves remain the dominant credit providers in the economy, then we will come quietly. However, markets today are characterised by shadow banks fed by wholesale funding that is sourced from un-invested corporate cash flows and offshore Eurodollar deposits. These highly elastic forms of money dwarf retail bank deposit flows by around three-to-one. Moreover, they are far more pro-cyclical and most importantly they tend to reflect a heightened demand for paper money. In other words, all types of money are not equal. We are not reinterpreting the laws of investment gravity by claiming that in future financial apples will fall to the sky, since when Central Banks, like the Fed, print money paper units, such as the US dollar, must fall in value and the price of bullion will rise. Rather our point is that the gold price (the antithesis of paper money) is determined by supply and demand, and this new supply is best measured by rising Central Bank balance sheets, such as QE programs, while demand tends to be better reflected through these increases in private sector funding. When private sector liquidity growth exceeds Central Bank balance sheet growth, paper monies tend to rise in value. Equally, when Central Bank money printing exceeds the funding needs of the private sector, then the price of bullion rises. It is the relative size of this gap that matters. In short, the gold price probably says more about the quality of money than the quantity.

The chart below shows what we mean. The monthly data are taken from the CrossBorder Capital GLI database on Global Liquidity and the difference between World Central Bank money growth and private sector savings flows (we know this as monetised saving) is plotted against the cyclical swings of the gold price around its trend (de-trending is simply a convenience to aid illustration). The liquidity data have been advanced forwards by nine months to show that they can predict gold. The relationship far from exact and still largely approximate, but judged against all other similar currency relationships it is the best our researchers have found [R-squared exceeds 30% and is statistically robust]. The fluctuations in the orange line reflect the changing international supply and demand for funds. Periods when it lies below the zero axis indicates that either liquidity supply is tight or demand weak. According to the data, the recent three-year period of gold price weakness during a time of expansionary Central Bank QE policies is explained by the huge increases in private sector liquidity generation associated with the US corporate sector. These flows are now reversing. Looking ahead, the bottom line is that bullion is moving back above its long-term trend because the quality of money in the global economy is deteriorating, and not necessarily because its quantity is going up. This quality dimension is important because it tells us that even in a period of weak credit growth, like now, the gold price can still be strong. Were the orange liquidity series in the chart to rise back to its 2010 peak value, the bullion price should test US$2000/oz. Extrapolating these trends forwards, this may be possible by 2017. The future doesnt just glister, it roars.

Chart: Index of World Central Bank Money Growth less Private Sector Liquidity Growth (Monetised Savings, advanced by 9 months) and Percentage Trend Deviations in the Gold Bullion Price, 1984-2016

By CrossBorder Capital

http://www.crossbordercapital.com/
In the early sixteenth century, the Hunt-Lenox globe was drawn, showing uncharted (and presumably dangerous) areas, marked with the warning: HIC SVNT DRACONES  Here are Dragons.

Subsequent to that time, mariners sometimes adopted the phrase, there might be dragons, if they became concerned for their safety when in unfamiliar waters.

Its now an archaic saying, yet its even more applicable today than in times of yore. There are literally millions of people (particularly in the EU, US and Canada) who are fearful that their country of residence is becoming increasingly less free and less safe for themselves and their wealth. Some are looking into the prospect of internationalising themselves, but a much smaller percentage actually take the plunge. Why should this be so? Well, as in centuries passed, for many, the reason is that  there might be dragons.

Of course, none of the mariners of old had actually ever seen a dragon, so each one conjured up his own image, and this is just as true today. For those of us who advise on internationalisation, here are a few perceived dragons that we hear about repeatedly:

I dont know anything about internationalisation. I wouldnt know where to begin.

Youve already begun. Follow the International Man website. It has over five years of archived articles that cover virtually every aspect of internationalising. In addition, obtain a copy of Going Global. Go on line to research destinations than fit your personal situation. Then, instead of a holiday to Disney World, go to a country that seems to you to be the most likely best choice for either a second home, or even a complete change of national residence. Youll be amazed at how extensive and varied the opportunities are out there.

Wont I just end up as a slave to a different country instead of my home country?

Not if you choose your destination well. Many countries are far less invasive to your freedoms and wealth than the three jurisdictions mentioned above. Some, in fact, are just as prosperous and well-developed as your present country, yet have zero direct taxes.

In addition, should you choose to live in multiple destinations, youd be less owned as a visitor or temporary resident than if you were a full-time resident and citizen.

Will I have rights there, since Ill be a foreigner?

For those countries that fall under English common law, your rights will be almost identical to those of the locals. (This is less true in countries that come under civil law  notably Spanish America and much of Europe.) However, most everywhere, you will be regarded as a guest and, in many ways be treated better than locals. In some countries, you would be treated better by both locals and the government than you were at home.

Will I have to learn a new language?

Yes, or no, depending on your choice of destination. For anywhere in Central or South America (except Belize, Suriname and Guyana), yes. For the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, the UK, and many Pacific islands, English is the primary language. In many other countries  Israel, the Philippines, and most of Europe, English is spoken by a majority of residents. Your choice of destination may, in part, depend on your ability (or willingness) to learn another language.

What if I cant find any friends?

Most choice destination-countries already have entire expat communities. However, many who expatriate themselves find that they prefer the locals and choose either integrated communities, or predominantly local communities.

If I cash out here, my funds to start over elsewhere might be limited. How can I be sure that Ill be able to afford to live there without giving up my lifestyle?

First, if you wait to cash out until after events such as a real estate crash has occurred at home, or confiscation of your bank deposits has occurred, then yes, you will have less when you leave. Hence, the sooner the better. Second, your lifestyle would be likely to change, as youd probably make different choices than before, based on new opportunities. Third, you may choose a destination where youre already far more wealthy than most locals  where the cost of living is far lower than what you now pay. Fourth, even in a high-cost-of-living destination, if you choose to work, youd probably be making more than at home. Fifth, if you move to a low-tax, or no-tax jurisdiction, youd retain much more of your gross income. (My own country is such a destination and Ive met countless people who came without even enough money to buy a used car, but ended up very successful.)

What if Im unhappy there?

Its a big world. There are many other choices and your first stop neednt be your last. However, if you do your homework well, before going, youre likely to pick more wisely the first time out.

What if I decide I want to go back?

Some people (but not many) do make that choice. But, they then find that any government that wants your money is more than happy to take you back. (Governments have no objection to wealth coming back in, they only try to stop it going out.) Even those who renounce their citizenship often find that theyre welcomed back into their first country, either on a visa or by reinstating their citizenship. However, the great majority, having succeeded at internationalising, never choose this option.

Many people fear perceived dragons when considering internationalisation. When doing so, they often overlook the very real dragon thats creeping up behind them  the dragon of a declining world power thats compensating for its decline through overreach  increasing taxation, removal of basic freedoms, an increasing police state, plus ever-expanding capital controls and governmental surveillance. As the situation worsens, the known world may well become more threatening than the new one.

The Middle Ages came to an end, in part, because new lands were discovered to the west by the mariners. Many people opted to stay put, for fear of dragons. Others opted for the slogan found on the reverse of Spanish coinage at that time. The two pillars on the coins represented the Straits of Gibraltar, and the slogan on the pillars  PLUS ULTRA (more beyond) signified a whole world apart from the old one, with new opportunities. The choice today is the same. Your future may depend on your outlook  whether you see the greater world from the standpoint of HIC SVNT DRACONES or PLUS ULTRA.

Jeff Thomas

email: jeff.thomas1066@gmail.com
Winners of the Branch 29 Fleet Reserve Association's essay contest on "What the American Flag Stands For" were recently honored. Some of the winners at the local branch level advance to the regional level and from there to the national headquarters for consideration. Those honored (from left) Abe Bartlet, fourth place; Madeline Schaub, second place; and Caleb Rogers, first place. Also present were Fleet Reserve Association chairman Person Wahlbrink and Bremerton City Councilman Jerry McDonald. Not pictured is Haley Michaelson, third place and whose essay was passed along to regional and then to national. All winners received a flag flown from the USS. Arizona with certificate of authenticity, a plaque commemorating their winning theme and a check. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

SHARE Each month, the Silverdale Rotary Club recognizes students of the month for their achievements. Seven students honored for April were chauffeured in a limousine to an April 14 club meeting where they were treated to lunch at Kitsap Golf and Country Club. Each high school student received a plaque for their scholastic efforts. Pictured left to right are Aaron Mahiou, Amber Leon-Guerrero, Derek Dowell, Morgan Walters, Bailee Barrick, Torsten Robinson and Ryan Zetty along with Silverdale Rotarian Ron Templeton. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

IN THE SERVICE

Officer recognized for leadership, tactical skills

Lt. Cmdr. Jeremy Medlin, assigned to the Blue crew of the USS Maine (SSBN 741), was presented with the 2016 Rear Adm. Willis "Pilly" A. Lent Tactics and Warfighting Award at the State Capital on April 21.

The award, which is also known as the Pilly Lent Award, was sponsored by the Bremerton-Olympic Peninsula Chapter of the Navy League and given to Medlin because of his outstanding tactical performance, individual achievements, and excellence in leadership as the best performing tactical submarine department head in the U.S. Pacific Submarine Force. This is the first time the award has been presented.

Medlin was recognized for his achievements by Bremerton Mayor Patty Lent and Secretary of State Kim Wyman. He will be honored at the annual Armed Forces Day Gala Dinner on May 21.

COMMUNITY

Attorney receives state bar association honor

The Washington State Bar Association presented retired Silverdale attorney Darrell Uptegraft with its Local Hero Award on April 15, in recognition of a legal career dedicated to mentoring and professionalism.

The award is given to those who have made noteworthy contributions to their communities. Uptegraft was nominated by the Kitsap County Bar Association.

While studying at the University of Puget Sound School of Law, Uptegraft began clerking for the firm now known as Ryan Montgomery & Armstrong, Inc. P.S. He joined the firm in 1983 as an associate attorney and practiced with them until retiring in 2014. Uptegraft had a broad real estate and civil litigation practice during his career.

Uptegraft was an Eagle member of the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association (now the Washington State Association for Justice). He was an active member of the Kitsap County Bar Association, serving as its president in 1999. Uptegraft frequently volunteered with school programs teaching students the legal system. He was an active participant in Law Day activities, including judging student essays.

Over 33 years of practice, Uptegraft excelled in mentoring young attorneys, both within his firm and in the greater legal community.

In 2014, Uptegraft was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. He retired in August 2014 to pursue his "bucket list."

YWCA announces women's awards for 2016

Nine women and one business were honored April 22 at the YWCA of Kitsap County's annual Women of Achievement celebration, held at the Kitsap Conference Center. Women of Achievement awards for 2016 were given to:

Lori Maxim, former vice president of West Sound Operations for Sound Publishing (Special Recognition Award)

Lori Byerly, assistant production officer of the NAVFAC NW Public Works Department (Environmental Sustainability Award)

Lt. Genie Elton, Kitsap County Sheriff's Office (Public Service Award)

Tleena Ives, Tribal Liason at the Washington State Department of Early Childhood Education and advocate of nutrition and exercise as a representative of S'Klallam and Suquamish tribes (Health and Wellness Award)

Susan Leavell, a paraeducator and instructional aide with the Central Kitsap School District (Education, Training and Development Award)

Stacy Marshall, a Bainbridge Island mother who inspired and managed a project to create Owen's Playground in honor of her late son (Community Champion Award)

Mallory Morrison, director and studio owner of Bremerton Dance Center (Arts, Culture and Design Award)

Robin O'Grady, executive director of West Sound Treatment Center (Nonprofit Award)

Julie Tappero, owner of West Sound Workforce (Business and Finance Award)

Pacific Northwest Title and President/CEO Chris Rieland (Outstanding Workplace)

In addition, three students were given scholarships by the YWCA at the event: Jalena Myers of North Kitsap High School, Tabitha Nunley of South Kitsap High School, and Rebekah Thorson of Olympic High School.

LETTERS OF THANKS

Tribe's help enriches students

On April 21, I had the pleasure of attending the Suquamish Tribe's Spirit of Giving celebration. It was inspiring to be with so many leaders and volunteers who are dedicated to improving the lives of those in our community.

Although our areas of emphasis may have been different, all of the organizations had one thing in common, all had been the beneficiary of a grant from the Suquamish Tribe in 2015. With almost $500,000 donated last year, the Suquamish Tribe helped over 250 organizations reach their goals, including the North Kitsap Schools Foundation. Thanks to a partnership with the Tribe, NKSF was able to award nearly $15,000 for student field trips and professional development opportunities for teachers during the 2015-2016 school year.

We are grateful to the Tribal Council for their continued support and thank them for helping us enrich learning opportunities for NK students.

Shannon Singleton

President, North Kitsap Schools Foundation

Great support for teachers

We would like to thank Bainbridge Bakers, Blackbird Bakery, Hitchcock Deli, Pegasus Coffee, Storyville Coffee and Treehouse Cafe, for their gift to teachers on "Applaud our Teachers Day" on April 14! All of these local establishments generously provided Bainbridge Island School District teachers with a free cup of coffee to acknowledge their hard work on behalf of island children.

We are so grateful to live in a community where small businesses respond so generously to support public education and the teachers who work hard to make our schools great!

Mairead Shutt

Executive Director, Bainbridge Schools Foundation
Hyderabad: The TS and AP governments have decided to go ahead with the medical Eamcet as scheduled despite the SC ruling to conduct Neet from this year.

Both states have decided to file review petitions. AP will hold Eamcet as scheduled on Friday. AP health minister Kamineni Srinivas said, Eamcet will be held as scheduled on Friday. We cannot cancel the exam at the last minute. We will file a review petition in the SC. Whatever final judgement the court delivers on this, the government will follow.

TS health minister C. Laxma Reddy said, We will approach the top court again on Neet. The time is too short to take a call on cancelling Eamcet at this stage. We request students not to get confused over the SC ruling and to appear for Eamcet as usual. Let us all wait for the final judgment on the review petitions and take decisions accordingly.

Both states cited the Presidential Order under Article 371(D) of the Constitution for not jointing Neet, which reserves seats for locals.

Telangana puts riders to join Neet

As per existing norms, students have the choice to opt for NEET provided they submit an undertaking to the government that they are not eligible for seats in AP and TS and are willing to forego seats in the two states. Both states have claimed that they can join NEET only if an amendment is made to Article 371 (D).

If there is no change in SCs decision, AP and TS students will have less than three months to prepare for NEET, on July 24.

There is a huge variation in syllabus between Intermediate board and NEET. When we compare the NEET syllabus with Inter, there is a deficiency of 14 per cent in Physics syllabus, 35 per cent in Botany, 36 per cent in Zoology and 18 per cent in Chemistry. To cover this syllabus, we need 250 hours of additional classes which is not possible by July and no time would be left for students for revision, said Dr P. Madhusudhan Reddy, senior government lecturer.

Leave alone students, Inter lecturers need to be first trained on the NEET syllabus, which is based on the NCERT syllabus, Dr Reddy added.

Students too are worried over the SC ruling. NEET is a welcome move but the sudden decision to implement it at the last moment is a jolt for students. It is disturbing and confusing. We should be given sufficient time to face NEET. It should be postponed at least till next year, said D. Niharika, a Class XII student of Narayana Group.

Another student, P. Sai Tejaswi of Sri Chaitanya said, If NEET is held in two phases, then all those appearing on May 1 will be at an disadvantage due to lack of time, while those writing the exam in July will benefit. This will be a huge injustice to students. It should be held on a single day for all.
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By Mary Earl

One of the many highlights of a recent trip around Yakima Valley was a wonderful gourmet dinner experience that you should treat your dining partner and yourself to.

The Carousel Restaurant & Bistro is fine dining with French flair. Many of the recipes are from the French chef who opened the restaurant. The service was exquisite, the food was fabulous and with Casablanca playing on the wall during dinner, what could be better?

The soundless black-and-white movie created an exotic atmosphere in the middle of this historic farming community. During dinner, an amazing harp player entertained with familiar tunes.

But the food and the wine pairing is the subject of this week's story. For a dinner such as this, it's almost mandatory to have a dinner party partner, known as the DPP. This ensures that you get to taste twice as much.

The first of five courses was an appetizer of Provence Boar P te (mine) and crab cakes (the DPP). I chose the boar pate made from slow simmered foie gras chicken and boar liver served with bacon jam. It was perfectly paired with a Domaine Collette Beaujolais Village 2014.

This ruby-colored wine has a fruit bowl of flavors that include raspberry, red currant and strawberry. The tannins were supple and beautifully balanced probably because of the whole bunch fermentation. This wine was a stunning match with the p te. Bravo to Greg, our maitre d for the first of many thoughtful and spot-on matches.

The DPP went for an appetizer of crab cakes on a bed of arugula tossed with a lemon vinaigrette and brown butter capers. This, too, was expertly paired with a Dopff & Irion 2013 Riesling from an often overlooked area of France  Alsace.

Constructed in 1549, it's survived five centuries because it embraces newer technologies. This particular bottling was done with screw caps! Gasp! Which surprised me in a pleasant sort of way. We all need to embrace screw caps, especially with white wines, which are typically enjoyed within a year of being bottled.

My salad was great but the DPP's salad was the show stopper. Cooked tableside, the salade d'epinards flambee was a flaming success. The red wine vinaigrette was reduced, and the cooked bacon was added and flambeed with brandy to produce a 2 foot high torch.

Salads were served with the Cote de Bonneville DuBrul Vineyard Rose. This 45-acre site produces small berries, small clusters and low yields. DuBrul Vineyard has been recognized as one of the top Washington State vineyards.

And for the piece de resistance, the chosen entrees were duck and rabbit. The duck was seared and braised in a house red wine sauce with flambeed green peppercorns served over mushroom risotto.

It was complemented by the 2012 King Estate Oregon Pinot Noir, am aromatic wine with wonderful cherry flavors and hints of earthy mushrooms.

I chose another chef's choice created with seasonal ingredients. My dish turned out to be a delicious casserole of rabbit with housemade noodles, arugula and asiago. This dish was accompanied by a Kestral 2012 Cabernet. According to winemaker Flint Nelson, "this expansive wine boasts full body, ripe dense fruit flavors, with supple tannins and a lingering finish." I would heartily agree.

For dessert, the choices were obvious. Chocolate mousse cake, pastry chef's choice and a glass of Treveri sparkling rose. Chef's choice was a raspberry tart with basil, lemon peel and an apricot glaze. Both were pleasing to the eye as well as the palate. But I had to use stealth to get a bite of the cake. The DPP only likes raspberries in his beer.

Treveri Cellars is a Yakima Valley winery that produces some really great handcrafted sparkling wines. This family operation is led by a husband and wife team, Jurgen Grieb, head winemaker with almost 30 years in the Washington wine industry and Julie Grieb, business manager.

Treveri opened its doors just days before the Thanksgiving rush in 2010 with a mission to put Washington sparkling wine on the map. In almost six years, Treveri has been served three times at White House State Department receptions, the James Beard Foundation in New York, received a Double Gold at the Seattle Wine Awards, 90+ point scores from national 100-point-scorers and voted one of the nation's Top Ten Hottest Brands of 2014 by Wine Business Monthly.

Producing a wide array of sparkling wines  including non-traditional varieties such as Syrah, Riesling and Gewurztraminer  Treveri uses state-of-the-art techniques to produce these beautiful bubblies.

This Rose, aged an average of 24 months, was a gorgeous rose color with big strawberry flavors and a lingering finish. The wine was a perfect match with both desserts and a beautiful and so very continental way to end the evening.

This is a dining experience you deserve! Carousel French Cuisine, 25 North Front Street, Yakima. (509) 248-6720 and carouselfrenchcuisine.com.
By Tad Sooter of the Kitsap Sun

BREMERTON  A state commission has charged a Bremerton doctor with professional misconduct based on his care of seven patients between 2003 and 2009.

Dr. William Bauer, now with Kitsap Medical Group, said he "strenuously" denies allegations made by the Medical Quality Assurance Commission, which were detailed in a statement of charges Nov. 4 and noted in a Department of Health news release this week. A hearing in the case is scheduled for August.

The commission's investigation into Bauer was based on a complaint filed in 2010 by Dr. Frederick Dore, who worked alongside Bauer at Olympic Internal Medicine in Bremerton during the years referenced in the charges. Dore served on the Medical Quality Assurance Commission at the time he filed the complaint. He did not respond to a message left at his office Tuesday.

The statement of charges detailed seven cases in which investigators allege Bauer provided substandard care to patients.

According to the charges, Bauer failed to adequately diagnose, treat or document conditions experienced by several patients. In one instance, Bauer allegedly failed to identify that a patient with diabetes was suffering from a serious complication that contributed to rapid weight loss and a rapid heart rate. In another case, Bauer "mismanaged" care for a patient with osteoporosis and other conditions over a period of five years. In a number of cases Bauer failed to order appropriate tests to diagnose conditions or ordered unnecessary tests, according to the charges.

In addition to denying the allegations, Bauer's attorney, Thomas Fain of Seattle, wrote a letter to the state Attorney General's Office Nov. 25 questioning the fairness of the commission's investigation. According to the letter, provided to the Kitsap Sun by Bauer, some patient records reviewed in the case were missing pages and others appeared to have been altered. The letter also noted Dore worked with Bauer for six years but did not file a complaint until after Bauer left his practice, a circumstance that "should raise a red flag," Fain wrote.

Assistant Attorney General Kristin Brewer, who is overseeing Bauer's case for the state, said the investigation was handled in the same way as other commission cases. Brewer said Dore's complaint was reviewed by an independent expert before a commission panel authorized charges. Dore would have been recused from any involvement in the case as a medical commissioner, she said.

Brewer said she had reviewed the letter alleging incomplete and altered patient records but hadn't seen proof of missing or changed documents.

"I do not believe the documents have been altered, but I'm willing to look at anything they provide," Brewer said.

Bauer received his Washington physician and surgeon license in 1997.
The Telegraph reports:

Open borders across Europe have allowed Isil to plant sleeper cells across the continent and in the UK, poised to launch Paris or Brussels-style massacres, Americas intelligence chief has warned.

James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence, warned the free movement of citizens around the EU was in conflict with the need to protect security.

He said there is evidence of fanatics from Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (Isil) in Britain, Germany and Italy secretly plotting outrages like those witnessed in France and Belgium.
Trupti Desai during a protest to oppose the ban on womens entry to the Haji Ali dargah (Photo: PTI)

MUMBAI: Bhumata Brigade leader Trupti Desai was not allowed to protest at Haji Ali dargah on Thursday. She was detained by police before she could hold the protest, while Samajwadi Party leader Abu Azmi, Shiv Sena leader Haji Arafat Sheikh were allowed inside the dargah by the police.

Ms Desai and her colleagues were detained before they could enter the dargah. The dargah is situated on an islet off Worli coast in South Mumbai.

Ms Desai, who reached near the entry of the causeway leading to the dargah with fellow activists, left the spot after a few minutes as protesters from Awami Vikas Party gathered around them to thwart their attempt.

Also, a local AIMIM leader had threatened to blacken the faces of the women protestors. Mr Sheikh had threatened to beat Ms Desai with a chappal last week.

We have no intention to hurt religious sentiments, but we are against discrimination. We wanted a peaceful protest, but were restricted from doing so. The police did not do anything against other protestors (who disrupted the women brigades agitation), Ms Desai said.

Before heading to the spot, Ms Desai had told the media that she was leading a peaceful agitation to assert womens right to go up to the core area (mazaar) of the dargah.

Expecting a face-off between the campaigners and the protesters, including those from AIMIM and the Samajwadi Party, the police had barricaded the entire area. Some supporters of the campaign also turned up there pledging support for the agitation.

Meanwhile, revenue minister Eknath Khadse told the media that the government would respect the high court verdict that women should not be discriminated against at places of worship.

Ms Desai had recently successfully led campaigns to allow women entry to the sanctum sanctorum of Shani Shingnapur and Trimbakeshwar temples in Maharashtra.

The Maharashtra government had, in February, favoured the entry of women into the Haji Ali dargah. The state government had then said before the Bombay HC that unless the dargah board is able to prove that a ban is part of their religious practice with reference to the Quran, women should be allowed to enter the sanctum sanctorum of Haji Ali.
KLTZ and Mix-93 are teaming up with area sponsors to give away prize packages for Mothers Day again this year! Stop by our participating stores and register your mom - then tune in Friday morning, May 6th, at 7:15 a.m. when we announce the winners!

Our sponsors and prizes:
New Delhi: After cancelling Chinese dissident and Uyghur activist Dolkun Isas visa, India has now denied visas to Chinese dissidents Lu Jinghua from New York and Ray Wong from Hong Kong, who were to attend a conference in Dharamsala on China and democracy, in what is seen as a clear signal that it does not want to annoy Beijing.

Government sources, however, said the visas were denied due to inconsistencies in the documentation of the two dissidents, Lu Jinghua and Ray Wong.

Also, anxious to dispel the notion that India bowed to Chinese pressure on Dolkun Isa, New Delhi on Thursday defended its decision to cancel his visa, saying Isa had suppressed the fact that he would attend a conference while seeking a tourist visa, but admitted China had made its clear to New Delhi that it should honour the Interpol red corner notice against him.

India is also keen not to annoy China at this juncture, with a visit by President Pranab Mukherjee to China likely in the near future. As far as Lu Jinghua is concerned, her documents were illegible and there was inconsistency with the purpose of her visit.

As far as Ray Wong is concerned, there was data inconsistency in his documents. As such visas were not issued to both these individuals, so the question of revocation doesnt arise, sources said.

Lu is a well-known Tiananmen activist, while Ray is a prominent Hong Kong dissident. Some media reports said Lu had apparently claimed she was told that her visa was cancelled and she was stopped from boarding an Air India flight from New York.

Earlier this week, the visa to Dolkun Isa, a leader of the World Uyghur Congress, who lives in Germany and had been invited to the conference this week organised by the US-based Initiatives for China, was cancelled.

Isa applied for a tourist visa under the electronic travel system. He was accordingly granted the visa. After obtaining the visa, Isa said publicly he was coming to attend a conference. A fact which was suppressed in the visa form and something that a tourist visa does not permit, MEA spokesman Vikas Swarup said.
Pontoon Solutions Inc. President Mike Wachholz, in Jacksonville, Fla., discusses with a colleague his perspective on recruitment's change in focus from terms, such as contingent or employee, to the work itself. (Credit: Pontoon Solutions Inc.)

"The Evolution of Work," a report by the ADP Research Institute in Roseland, New Jersey, maintains that there is a shift to an increased search for meaning or doing important work rather than by simply earning a paycheck with good benefits.

Dermot OBrien, ADP corporate vice president and chief human resources officer, remarks that people want "to make a real difference. ..." Does an emphasis on meaningfulness indicate that American workers are comfortable financially?

Apparently not, shows a telephone survey for 500 working Americans by Workplace Options, a global employee benefits organization headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. A full 55 percent report that their personal financial situation is causing at least moderate stress. Thats escalated seven percent from a year ago.

According to Mike Wachholz, president of Pontoon Solutions Inc. in Jacksonville, Florida, which places about $10 billion in contingent labor each year, the focus of recruitment has been shifting from the mechanics of the worker/company relationship to the nature of the work. Pontoon, an HR solutions firm, is a division of the global Adecco.

One example of a companys shift comes from Seth Sternberg, CEO and co-founder of San Franciscos Honor Technology Inc. Honor offers private duty home care largely for the elderly with daily living challenges. Its CarePros will be paid on W-2's rather than 1099's, as they were in the past.

Making Honors CarePros a full part of the team creates an environment where they can grow personally and professionally, Sternberg observes, enriching their lives and the lives of Honors customers.

'DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS'

Pontoons recruitment assignments have greatly increased, with 80 percent for contingent labor four years ago and 55 percent contingent/45 percent employees last year. Wachholz sees a greater focus on work itself and advocates that job seekers analyze company digital footprints to assess culture.

Of course, learning about a company involves more than analyzing digital communications produced by advertising, marketing and technology departments. Wachholz points out that research through people continues to be important.

Mackenzie Wilson, a 2014 college grad, knew to go beyond Pontoons website during the hiring process. "I was interested in seeing the company culture beyond the polished corporate website and more through the people who were experiencing the culture and creating it. I used social media to do that."

Although she explains that "face-to-face conversation is still a preferred information source," she found social media particularly helpful early in the process, when she didnt know anyone. She accepted an offer of technology systems designer primarily because of the works meaningfulness.

"Compensation and terms were obviously both important," she says, but more as a baseline to enable me to do something that Im excited about. Is this enthusiasm typical of younger workers? Actually, Workplace Options finds that workers 18 to 45 reported more stress over money than their older counterparts.

Wilson directly contrasts with the middle-aged medical technician who, although extremely competent, concedes, without embarrassment, that if she werent working, Id be on a beach somewhere. Yes, she likes her job, but she wouldnt do it without a paycheck. Many laid-off workers scramble to find work, largely to replace the lost paycheck.

This is an excellent time to be considering whether meaningfulness would matter as much if it werent supported by a paycheck. Think of Wilsons baseline.

(Knoxville News Sentinel syndicated columnist Mildred Culp, Ph.D., welcomes your questions. Contact her at culp@workwise.net.  2016 Passage Media.)
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By Mamie Kuykendall of the Knoxville News Sentinel

East Tennessee is growing rapidly, leaving community leaders and citizens wondering how to preserve regional uniqueness while connecting and keeping up with modern advances.

People from 16 communities will gather Thursday to collaborate on these issues during the third East Tennessee Quality Growth Plain Talk Conference in Alcoa.

"One of the things that has been talked about at length is how we're connected in the region," said Julie Graham, executive director of East Tennessee Quality Growth. "It's about creating an economically strong region."

The conference, which is open to the public, will be held at the Airport Hilton from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets are $75, and can be purchased at the door with credit or check. Breakfast and lunch are included.

Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero and Maryville Mayor Tom Taylor will introduce a dozen nationally known speakers such as Gary Toth, senior director of Transportation Initiatives for Project Public Spaces. Toth will teach about building strong, safe communities through creative means.

Ideas and success stories about communication developments, infrastructure and transportation also will be discussed.

"Robert Gibbs will talk about how small communities can preserve what's unique about them while still growing, and how they should build around downtown," Graham said, adding that a great local example of the concept is Happy Holler, a North Knoxville district that has seen a boom in development.

The need for broadband availability throughout East Tennessee will be addressed by Whitney Kimball Coe of the Center for Rural Strategies, who will discuss how the lack of broadband inhibits the health of a community.

For more information, visit www.etqualitygrowth.org.
Volunteer Hanna Chapman looks through the racks of clothing.

SHARE Volunteers with New Hope Presbyterian Church's Clothing Closet are Sandy Hodsen, seated, and Vi Miller. Carol Carroll and her daughter, Tiffany, also volunteer their help at the Clothing Closet.

New Hope Presbyterian Church is celebrating the fifth anniversary of its Clothes Closet, a program that has clothed the needy in Knoxville.

The program collects and gives out clothing, shoes and accessories for men, women and children on the fourth Saturday of every month at the church, located at 1705 Merchants Drive. The clothing comes largely from individual donors, but sometimes wholesalers donate overstock.

"A mother once came up crying saying now her son can feel the same as his classmates," remembers Bedford Chapman, the church elder who created the Clothes Closet with his wife, Ginger.

The people who are served by the Clothes Closet leave a lasting impression on the volunteers. They are the inspiration behind the effort. Sometimes, those who come in for clothing one month show up later to volunteer.

"It may be the homeless man that only wants the pair of boots. Or the man with a suit that leaves with the feeling that he will be well dressed for church or job interview," says Chapman. "The individuals are the rewarding part."

The Clothes Closet first opened its doors on the fourth Saturday in May 2011 and hasn't missed a month since.

"We wanted to do mission work to help people in our community, but we had a problem of limited funds," remembers Chapman, who now receives donations that fill the bottom level of the church. "Our initial thought was to have a small room where people could come get help with their clothing needs."

He admits the bulk of the work that goes into the Clothing Closet is done by his wife, Ginger Chapman. She recruits volunteers and works alongside them sorting and hanging the donated clothes. She also seeks funding to continue their important work.

"My wife, Ginger Chapman, was and still is the backbone of this ministry," he says.

In the beginning, the program aimed to help those close to the church who found themselves in need. The church distributed 2,000 fliers through Norwood, Inskip, Pleasant Ridge. The service mission has grown over the years and now is open to anyone who needs help.

"There are other clothing ministries that only help children, but we wanted to be able to help whole families," says Chapman. "It has now blossomed into helping anyone that is in need."

The program can always use donations of clothing, since a variety of sizes is in constant demand. The more variety they have, the better they can serve everyone who comes through the doors.

"One big need is for money to put up an overhead shelter at the rear of the sanctuary," says interim Pastor Dwyn Mounger. "Folks literally have waited in the rain, sleet, and snow  coming long before 10 a.m. in order to get in line for clothes."

The next scheduled distribution is Saturday, May 28, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., which will also be a celebration of Clothing Closet's fifth anniversary. All are invited to the event.

"We hope to have a cake and refreshments for our five-year anniversary," says Chapman. "We hope for good weather and a prayer that we can still receive the blessing of being able to help others five years from now."

For more information about this and other upcoming events at the church, call 865-637-3911.
Quick, Gov. Haslam! Call the Tennessee General Assembly back into emergency session!

There's important work to do, ASAP. It can't wait until next year.

Use whatever means is necessary to spread the word  telephone, text, tweet, memo, newsletter, email, snail mail, carrier pigeon, personal courier or public address system at Pilot stations statewide.

You might even hop astride your Tennessee walking horse (official state horse), grab your Barrett M82/M107 (official state rifle) and rip off automatic rounds in sync with the chorus of "When It's Iris Time in Tennessee" (one of 13 official state songs) as you rally the troops between Memphis and Mountain City.

Why all the fuss?

Because there's a rich new vein of "official state" ore to tap, that's why.

For this godsend  not to be confused with direct communication between Nashville and heaven about making the Holy Bible our official state book  we can thank a politician from Minnesota.

State Sen. Karin Housley, R-Saint Mary's Point, is preparing a bill to name purple as the Gopher State's official color. She says this is necessary to pay proper respect for Prince, the native Minnesota entertainer who died last week.

For the record, Minnesotans are also-rans in terms of official state this-and-thats. They've got a mere 18  including blueberry, official state muffin.

Pfft! What wimps. Our solons can knock out that many before breakfast, only slowing down long enough to flash their gender ID cards at the bathroom door so they may pee in the proper toilet. We've got more than 60 official state symbols. But apparently no state color.

The word "apparently" is crucial. Maybe we've got an official state color; maybe we don't. Or maybe Tennessee's official state color is merely a question mark  sorta like that sign Prince once used for his signature.

In researching this matter, I discovered lots of conflicting information.

For example, the website statesymbolsusa.org lists only 15 states with official colors. Tennessee is not one of them.

Wikipedia.org recognizes Tennessee as one of 24 states with official colors  orange and white, duh  but doesn't specify the precise spectrum number (cue lawyers from the University of Tennessee), nor when this legislation allegedly was enacted.

There's also netstate.com, which shows only 11 states with official colors. We didn't make their short list.

The state's website, tennessee.gov, makes no mention of it, either.

See how much work remains to be done? What a great opportunity to officially waste more time and money!
Anderson County Public Works Director David Crowley. (TBI)

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By News Sentinel Staff

CLINTON  Anderson County Public Works Director David Crowley has been acquitted of all five misdemeanor counts against him in a case that continues to reverberate in county government.

A seven-man, five-woman jury deliberated about two hours Thursday before finding Crowley, 64, not guilty of lacking the required certification when he inspected five houses under construction in the final quarter of 2013. The trial lasted two days.

Anderson County Mayor Terry Frank, who hired Crowley shortly after she took office in September 2012, predicted the outcome weeks ago.

"I have thoroughly and completely reviewed all of the allegations against Mr. Crowley and am certain of his innocence," she wrote in an April 1 email to local media outlets.

The indictment against Crowley was returned in October 2014. County Attorney Jay Yeager early that year told county commissioners that Crowley lacked the needed certification, which Yeager said Crowley was supposed to have obtained within a year of being hired.

Yeager said uncertified building inspections are criminal misdemeanors and referred the matter to District Attorney General Dave Clark, who asked the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to look into the case.

During the trial, defense attorney Hugh B. Ward Jr. raised questions about when the one-year "grace period"  when certification wasn't needed  actually kicked in. He said Crowley didn't officially take the job until November 2012, and he didn't do his first inspection until February 2013.

Prosecutor Tony Craighead called witnesses who testified Crowley said his more than 30 years in the home-building business offset any need for certification.

"He (Crowley) didn't see why he needed a piece of paper to prove his abilities," former Public Works employee Colleen Cardwell testified.

But former building inspector Curtis Perez testified that before he was hired, Crowley asked him what he needed to do to become certified.

The indictment stated the unlicensed inspections posed "an immediate danger to the life, safety or welfare" of others. Ward said a re-inspection of the five homes by an engineer showed Crowley's initial inspections were done properly.

While Crowley has been cleared of criminal wrongdoing, repercussions linger. Lisa Crumpley, a former Public Works employee fired by Crowley shortly before he turned himself in on the indictments, later filed a wrongful-firing federal lawsuit against the county.

Crumpley was described as a whistleblower who cooperated in the TBI's probe of Crowley. The federal complaint was put on hold until the Anderson County trial concluded.

Crumpley's personnel file disappeared from the county's human resources office after Crowley was indicted.
SHARE Nikia Bowens

By Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel

A jury on Thursday served up a victory to the state in a legal battle over Knox County District Attorney General Charme Allen's new policy on prosecuting shoplifters as burglars if caught stealing again.

A jury in Knox County Criminal Court on Thursday convicted Nikia Bowens, 40, of misdemeanor shoplifting charges as well as a single count of burglary in what was the first test case of Allen's decision  untested in the appellate courts  to eschew misdemeanor criminal trespassing charges traditionally filed against repeat retail theft offenders.

Judge Steve Sword set a June 23 sentencing hearing. Although the felony burglary conviction typically comes with a penalty range of two to four years, Bowens is a career thief with nine prior felony convictions for forgery and theft on his record. That means his shoplifting of three DVDs from a Turkey Creek Walmart in December 2014 could net him a 12-year prison term under Allen's new policy of charging a violation of a retailer's no trespassing order as a felony burglary.

The jury's conviction will not end the controversy over the policy, which the defense bar insists perverts the burglary statute and came at the urging of big retailers such as Walmart. Bowens' defense attorney, Mitch Harper, is expected to appeal the felony conviction.

There are a handful of other similar cases in the pipeline in Knox County. Unlike in the case of Bowens, defense attorneys in some of those trials are expected to show proof from Walmart's own surveillance system that the store did not seek to prosecute as burglars those shoplifters who returned in violation of the no trespassing order and actually made purchases.

Allen last year began authorizing the use of felony burglary charges to prosecute petty thieves who return to the scenes of their shoplifting crimes.

Stores that are regular targets for shoplifters  chiefly chain stores such as Walmart and Kroger and convenience stores such as Pilot and Weigel's  have adopted what are known as "no trespass lists," essentially banning shoplifters from returning to any of their properties once caught and prosecuted. Judges, in turn, enforce those bans by making as a condition of shoplifters' punishment the threat of a criminal trespassing charge should the offenders merely walk onto store property.

Like shoplifting, criminal trespassing is a misdemeanor. Such offenses carry penalties of no more than a day short of a year in jail. Business burglary, on the other hand, is a felony that carries a minimum two-year prison term and as many as 12 years if the offender has more than five prior felony convictions.

The legal twist in Allen's new policy comes in exactly what it means to burglarize a business. Traditionally, a burglar is characterized under the law as a person who breaks into a closed store with the intent to steal. Prosecutors in Allen's office are now arguing that a shoplifter banned from a store is essentially burglarizing the retailer because the shoplifter no longer has what the law defines as the "owner's effective consent" to enter the store, rather than breaking in under cover of darkness.
Knox County Schools Logo

By News Sentinel Staff

Knox County Schools will be refunded $48,000 for recalled chicken products, a schools spokeswoman said Thursday.

Meanwhile, spokeswoman Melissa Tindell discounted a report made to the News Sentinel by a Knox County employee who said contaminated chicken was found in a school cafeteria.

"We have not received any reports of metal found in chicken, neither recently nor during the April 7 time frame," Tindell wrote in an email.

That individual is incorrect, she said.

A Knox County employee on Wednesday told the News Sentinel that contaminated chicken was found during at least one school lunch about a month ago, around the time of the first recall. That employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because that employee was not authorized to speak publicly, said another employee found a piece of metal sticking out of a chicken patty, and that discovery was reported to the Knox County Schools' central office.

After the latest recall this week, Knox County Schools discarded 354 cases of chicken nuggets, 151 cases of breakfast chicken, 283 cases of chicken patties and 95 cases of hot and spicy chicken patties, said Tindell. The district will be refunded $48,602.50 for the recalled meats.

She said the district did not have chicken products affected by the April 7 recall. That recall was extended this week to include chicken products that were distributed to all schools in the district.

The Nutrition Services Department and the Health Services Department are "not aware of any health issues associated with this recall," Tindell said.

According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture recall notice issued Tuesday, the "fully cooked chicken products" from Pilgrim's Pride Corp. were possibly contaminated by "extraneous materials including plastic, wood, rubber and metal."

The USDA said in its Tuesday recall there were no confirmed reports of "adverse reactions" attributable to the recalled food. The recall was labeled a "Class I," meaning it constituted a "health hazard situation where there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death."

Pilgrim's Pride Corp. meat includes chicken products from Pierce Chicken, Gold Kist Farms and Sweet Georgia Brand. It is an extension of a previous recall of more than 40,000 pounds of Gold Kist Farms chicken nuggets issued April 7.

Tindell said Wednesday that replacement chicken from a different company would be arriving at some schools as early as Thursday.
Knox County Schools Logo

By MJ Slaby of the Knoxville News Sentinel

Knox County Schools received chicken that was part of a national recall due to contamination by metal and wood, the district confirmed Wednesday.

No students have reported illness so far, school officials said.

According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture recall notice issued Tuesday, the "fully cooked chicken products" were possibly contaminated by "extraneous materials including plastic, wood, rubber and metal."

Melissa Tindell, schools spokeswoman, said via email Wednesday the district discarded the recalled meat and that replacement chicken from a different company would be arriving at some schools as early as today.

Tuesday's recall of Pilgrim's Pride Corp. meat includes chicken products from Pierce Chicken, Gold Kist Farms and Sweet Georgia Brand. It is an extension of a previous recall of more than 40,000 pounds of Gold Kist Farms chicken nuggets issued April 7.

A Knox County employee said contaminated chicken was found during at least one school lunch about a month ago, around the time of the first recall. That employee spoke on the condition of anonymity because that employee was not authorized to speak publicly.

A worker found a piece of metal as long as a fingernail in a chicken patty, the employee said. That patty and the bag it came in was thrown away, and the discovery was reported to the school system's central office, the employee said.

However, the employee said no instructions about a recall were distributed by the district until this week.

Tindell said Wednesday the district administration was "not aware of any issues," but she planned to double check with health services today. She said no students reported health concerns.

"We are not aware of, nor have we received reports of, any negative health effects in our students," Tindell said.

The USDA said in its Tuesday recall there were no confirmed reports of "adverse reactions" due to the recalled food. The recall was labeled a "Class I," meaning it constituted a "health hazard situation where there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death."

Tindell said the amount of chicken discarded by the district and the cost to replace it was not available on Wednesday, but the district will receive a full refund for the recalled product.

"Our Nutrition Services Department has given instructions to all of our cafeterias on the procedure for discarding the chicken," Tindell wrote in the email. "We are working with U.S. Foods to receive another brand of chicken, and our menus are being adjusted accordingly."

The county employee estimated each school in the district discarded about 10-15 boxes of chicken per school.

Chicken nuggets and patties, two of the recalled products, appear regularly on the lunch menus in Knox County schools. According to April lunch menus for the district, chicken was an option about twice a week in elementary schools and a daily option for middle and high school students.

On Wednesday, chicken was an option for all grade levels but was removed due to the recall. As a replacement, the schools served food planned for next week early, according to the county employee.

Tindell said the district has a variety of meal options available besides chicken, including "fresh fruit and vegetables, cold cut sandwiches, salads, fish, pizza, hamburgers and more."

She said those additional menu options will continue to be served, and another brand of chicken will be delivered to some schools today, with more arriving Monday.
Lucknow: UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has a gift; for women entrepreneurs in Uttar Pradesh. A special Mahila Bazaar will come up near the Ambedkar Memorial in Gomti Nagar where women entrepreneurs will get space to showcase their wares and handicrafts.

The street, popularly known as Lucknows Marine Drive since it runs parallel to the Gomti, has over a dozen halls made of granite in a row. The street was developed during Mayawati regime to allow people to sell fast food but the idea could not gain popularity since the halls are actually open verandas with no shutters or doors.

Now with Mr Akhilesh Yadav giving directives, the space will be allotted to women entrepreneurs According to a senior official in the housing department, the Lucknow Development Authority has been asked to work on details of the plan and find out how many women can be accommodated, what all they can sell and whether any rent would be applicable or not.

A LDA official said that the by-laws do not allow a permanent shutter-kind of shop establishment but traders and shopkeepers can always sell in open spaces and stalls during day time and wind up sale by evening.

The all-women bazaar will help in utilizing the one kilometre that has been lying idle since 2010 but the nature of shops will prove to be a problem during hot summers and monsoons.

Besides, it will not be feasible for the women to bring and take away their wares every day. We will see whether the by-laws can be changed or altercations can be made, the official said.

Incidentally, Lucknow will see the launch of two more haats (open bazaars) this year. These hubs will include Lucknow Haat which spreads across 25 acres in Vibhuti Khand of Gomtinagar and Avadh Shilp Gram near Shaheed Path.
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By News Sentinel Staff

KNOXVILLE  A sixth-grader from Knoxville has won a statewide chemistry competition and received an expenses-paid trip to compete at the national level, according to a news release from Dow Chemical Company.

Grace Christian Academy student Sean Grace bested a field of 24 students in grades 5 to 8 to become the 2016 "Tennessee You Be The Chemist Challenge" champion.

Students from Chattanooga, Knoxville and Oak Ridge were in Knoxville to compete for the top prize and Grace now will represent the state at the national "You Be The Chemist Challenge" in June in Philadelphia.

Developed by the Chemical Educational Foundation (CEF), the question-and-answer competition aims to motivate fifth- to eighth-grade students to sharpen their knowledge of chemistry concepts and their real-world applications.

Students compete for prizes at local and state levels, and the prize of a trip to Philadelphia to vie for college scholarships. The program relies on partnerships between community members who seek to foster student engagement with science, including industry, schools, universities and community organizations, according to the release.

Pellissippi State Community College played host to the 2016 Tennessee State Challenge, which was sponsored by BASF in Chattanooga and The Dow Chemical Company in Knoxville.

Grace correctly answered dozens of chemistry and general science questions in multiple rounds to become the Tennessee Challenge Champion.

Earning the titles of first-, second- and third-runners-up, respectively, were: Michelle Lower, an eighth-grader from Grace Christian Academy in Knoxville; Ben Beaver, an eighth-grader from Grace Christian Academy in Knoxville and Max Lancaster, a seventh-grader from the Episcopal School of Knoxville. Each of the top four finalists was awarded a plaque and a Discovery Store Gift Certificate.

Sean earned a spot at the national challenge set for June 20 at The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. Each participant at the national competition will receive an advanced-level chemistry kit, as well as T-shirts, gift certificates and other prizes. The first- through fourth-place winners also will get scholarships totaling $18,500 for future educational use.

Participants, chaperones and a nominated educator from each state will be treated to activities that take advantage of Philadelphia's historic and scientific heritage, including a celebratory dinner at the National Constitution Center.
Anderson County Public Works Director David Crowley. (TBI)

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By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel

CLINTON  Anderson County Public Works Director David Crowley is expected to take the witness stand Thursday morning in his own defense in a misdemeanor case that has caused a courthouse uproar.

Crowley, 64, was named in a five-count indictment last year for allegedly inspecting five houses under construction without the required certification as a building official. Those inspections occurred in the final three months of 2013.

Crowley's attorney, Hugh B. Ward Jr., and prosecutor Tony Craighead on Wednesday sparred over whether Crowley was still in a one-year "grace period" when such certification wasn't required when he did the inspections.

Craighead insisted that the one-year exemption started when County Commission confirmed Crowley as public works director on Sept. 17, 2012. That hiring was on an interim basis, Ward said, and Crowley's new job didn't become official until two months later. Besides, Ward said, Crowley didn't start inspecting homes until February 2013.

The attorneys also feuded over the indictment's wording, which states the unlicensed inspections posed "an immediate danger to the life, safety or welfare" of others. Defense witness Noel Peterson, an engineer who reinspected the houses, testified the initial inspections were done properly.

State witnesses testified that soon after he was hired, Crowley was told he needed to get certified. County Attorney Jay Yeager said it had been an "ongoing issue," and he talked to him "three or four times" about obtaining his certification.

"He (Crowley) said he'd been in the construction business for 30 years, and he didn't see why he needed a piece of paper to prove his abilities," Colleen Cardwell, a former Public Works employee, testified.

Mayor Terry Frank, who hired Crowley, has questioned the motivation for the probe.

Yeager, Frank's longtime adversary, brought the issue to the County Commission's attention and referred the matter to the District Attorney General Dave Clark's office. Clark was Yeager's boss when Clark was the county law director before he was elected district attorney.
Anderson County Courthouse

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By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel

CLINTON  This is a dump crammed into a busy, prime commercial site, and it's been a bone of contention for decades between Anderson County and the city of Clinton.

A chancellor's recent opinion rejecting the county's plan to move the Glen Alpine Convenience Center into an industrial park throws the issue back into play, with a relocation agreement between city and county expiring next month.

Clinton for years has wanted the county to move its convenience center from the current location near state Highway 61, with access points along Sinking Springs Road, which runs parallel to Highway 61 at the center's site.

City officials have contended the landlocked county facility is too small and crowded and is taking up space that businesses covet.

But the county's proposal to put the center in its David Jones Industrial Park near Norris met fierce resistance from three companies in the park. Those firms contended such a relocation would increase industrial park traffic and pollution. The firms filed legal action to block that move.

Special Chancellor Frank V. Williams III, appointed to hear the case, recently sided with the park tenants.

According to Williams' three-page opinion, "it does not follow that a convenience center would be appropriately located within an 'industrial park' as defined by statute."

With the industrial park site now out of the question unless the county appeals the chancellor's ruling and wins, a relocation of the dump has been tossed back in the county's lap and is expected to be on the agendas of the Anderson County Commission and the Clinton City Council next month.

The city and county signed a relocation agreement in 2012 that has been extended several times and now expires May 20.

Under that pact, $105,657 that was mistakenly paid to the county in sales taxes from businesses annexed by Clinton was to be used by the county to help pay for the center's relocation.

If the center wasn't moved, the county would have to fork over that overpayment, Clinton City Manager Roger Houck said in describing the agreement.

Several months ago, the county took former budget director Chris Phillips' advice that the overpayment was a liability and voted to go ahead and pay it to Clinton.

That money is now on reserve on the city's books and could conceivably be used to assist the county in moving the center. The sale of the current center property could also help offset county relocation costs.

But to date, no other alternative locations have emerged that county officials say are affordable.

"The alternatives that have been offered are going to cost much, much more than putting it (the convenience center) in the industrial park," County Commissioner Myron Iwanski said Tuesday.
Barbara Chandler, left, and Jessica Holman talk with Anne Crais, center, during the Leaders for Readers appreciation reception at the East Tennessee History Center on Wednesday. Chandler and Crais are volunteers in the program, while Holmann is the principal at Inskip Elementary School. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL)

SHARE From left, Knox County School's Superintendent Jim McIntyre, Great Schools Partnership President Buzz Thomas, and Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett attend an appreciation reception for volunteers in the Leaders for Readers program on Wednesday at the East Tennessee History Center. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL) Mike Collins talks about his experience as a volunteer in the Leaders for Readers program on Wednesday at the East Tennessee History Center during a reception for the program's volunteers. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL) Knox County Schools Superintendent Jim McIntyre, center, meets with Sydney Gabrielson and her father, Jay, during an appreciation reception at the East Tennessee History Center on Wednesday for volunteers in the Leaders for Readers program. Sydney is the student representative for the Knox County school board and also a volunteer for the reading initiative. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL) From left, Knox County School's Superintendent Jim McIntyre, Great Schools Partnership President Buzz Thomas, and Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett attend an appreciation reception for volunteers in the Leaders for Readers program on Wednesday at the East Tennessee History Center. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL)

By John Shearer of the Knoxville News Sentinel

As a Leaders for Readers volunteer, Mike Collins has felt plenty of joy watching the elementary school students he works with read.

But his happiest time being involved in the program this year and in previous years under a slightly different setup might be from what he has read.

"My teacher asks them to give me a card of thanks at the end of the year, and I've got drawers full of fabulous notes they've sent me," he said.

Collins was one of several volunteers honored during an appreciation reception held Wednesday evening at the East Tennessee History Center and catered by the Austin-East Performing Arts & Sciences Magnet High School culinary arts students.

Begun in January in six elementary schools, with the help of the Knox County mayor's office and Great Schools Partnership, the program has a goal of increasing reading level proficiency to 90 percent for all third-graders in Knox County by 2020.

Collins was involved at Ball Camp Elementary with the previous Read with Me program and also helped contribute to the start of the new program, which is more one-on-one mentoring with four 7-year-old students.

"Of my four children I have, three of them are doing great," said the retired Whittle Communications and Time Inc. publishing official. "They have improved at least 25 to 30 percent. One child is having a little more of a problem, but he's coming along too, just not at the same pace."

While this academic tutoring has required plenty of effort from him, the emotional encouragement has been quite easy to dispense.

"Have you ever been around several 7-year-olds at one time?" he asked. "They are delightful human beings. It is before the world gets to them. And they are so appreciative."

So are the coordinators. Nicole Lewis of the Great Schools Partnership said they and the program's other stakeholders, including Knox County Schools, know the work of the 40 volunteers who have mentored 133 students at Ball Camp, Green Magnet, Lonsdale, Inskip, South Knoxville and West Hills elementaries is important. And there is good reason why.

"If we want to have successful adults in 20 years, we need to have successful readers," she said.

Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett and Schools Superintendent Jim McIntyre were also on hand to thank the volunteers, with both saying that the mentors add additional support to the teachers.

"We've got some great volunteers who see the need," Burchett said.

Partnership President Buzz Thomas, who will begin serving as interim superintendent this summer, said the number of schools involved in the program is expected to double next year.

"We're wanting to get to every school as soon as possible," he said.
Annie Cachiero, center, executive director of Aid to Distressed Families of Appalachian Counties, listens to two Oak Ridge residents who attended an informational session about a program to provide energy savings in older homes. (BOB FOWLER/NEWS SENTINEL)

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By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel

OAK RIDGE  Between $10,000 and $13,000 in energy upgrades per house is being made available  for free  to the city's older homes, and residents this week attended a kickoff preview of the program.

"The more people that apply, the more opportunity we have to make some serious change," Annie Cacheiro, executive director of Aid to Distressed Families of Appalachian Counties, or ADFAC, told the small crowd.

ADFAC will be accepting requests for assistance from residents.

The city has been awarded $2.9 million in the Tennessee Valley Authority's "Extreme Energy Makeover" grant funding, and city officials estimate that amount will cover upgrades to 229 of the city's older homes.

Particularly targeted are the city's "legacy homes" that were built in a hurry when Oak Ridge was a secret city involved in the creation of the world's first atomic bomb during World War II.

Owners of homes more than 20 years old are eligible, along with those with older rental homes  providing the energy savings "accrue to the low-income lessee," according to the application form.

The program seeks to produce some "real savings" in energy costs, said Bruce Applegate, the assistant to City Manager Mark Watson.

Savings of at least 25 percent are expected through weatherization programs ranging from added insulation to new heating and cooling systems to high-efficiency lighting systems and water heaters.

Oak Ridge firm Gilmartin Engineering will be the administrator and oversee the program, from finding the contractors to do the upgrades to follow-ups with homeowners to see whether the improvements are satisfactory.

Applegate said there will be several other public sessions to acquaint residents with the program. He said September 2017 will likely be the cutoff for submitting applications.

"We're really trying hard to get the word out," Cacheiro said.

More information is available at www.MakeOREE.com or by calling 865-375-4656.
SHARE "Suttree" is Cormac McCarthy's fourth novel, a story about Knoxville set in 1951. It opens with a fisherman on the Tennessee River.

By Fred Brown

In the decade of the 1950s, Knoxville was a city undergoing a monumental transition. Textile plants were closing which meant jobs were leaving. Per-capita income was dropping and political leadership was practically non-existent. At the same time, businessmen were paralyzed, stuck in a quagmire, as the profitable post-World War II industrial era was leaving the city behind in its rearview mirror.

To make matters worse, prospective manufacturers looked elsewhere to establish new plants. One of the city's biggest problems was that Knoxville in the 1950s suffered from bad air quality from so much coal used for cooking and was the primary source for heating homes. Coal ash and soot layered almost the entire city.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy, who had lived in Knoxville from the time he was three years old after his family moved here from Providence, R.I., was one writer who chronicled Knoxville's upheaval and disruption.

He had already written of the region's dark side in earlier works when he turned his attention specifically to Knoxville. It took him two decades to write "Suttree," his magnum opus about the city of his youth, which was published in 1979.

At the time, McCarthy, who now lives near Santa Fe, N.M., was a young struggling writer from a well-to-do family. While his family was on an upward mobile trend in Knoxville society, the city itself was in a downward spiral economically and politically.

After two decades, McCarthy recorded that sense of dislocation in "Suttree," a book he had begun to work on in the 1950s.

His book exposed the underside of the city through the tale of a family "that was in free-fall just like the city," says Bruce Wheeler, former University of Tennessee professor of history and author of "Knoxville, Tennessee: A Mountain City in the New South."

"I don't think people read it that way (at the time), but his book is incredibly symbolic of the city itself."

And McCarthy pretty much summed up his appraisal in this quote from the book: "Market Street on Monday morning, Knoxville Tennessee. In this year nineteen fifty-one. Suttree with his parcel of fish going past the rows of derelict trucks piled with produce and flowers, an atmosphere rank with country commerce, a reek of farmgoods in the air tending off into a light surmise of putrefaction and decay."

McCarthy wrote of "sootstreaked" walls in homes, the "vendors and beggars and wild street preachers haranguing a lost world with a vigor unknown to the sane."

He wrote of the markethouse, "where brick the color of dried blood rose turreted and cupolaed and crazed into the heat of the day ..."

Inside the markethouse, a "halfman on skatecard oared past with leather chocks ... wandering the stalls where little grandmothers offered flowers or berries or eggs. Rows of faded farmers hunched at the lunchcounters. This lazaretto of comestibles and flora and maimed humanity."

Wesley G. Morgan, a psychology professor at the University of Tennessee, has had an interest in McCarthy since the earliest novels. He's writing a book on McCarthy's stories located in East Tennessee.

He thinks "Suttree," is more than a reflection of Knoxville in the 1950s. It is actually set in Knoxville from 1950-55, says Morgan.

"I read it as a kind of prose poem love story for Knoxville, despite its warts and ugliness of that time," says Morgan. "And also the book is kind of a reminiscence of growing up, or being a young adult in that time.

"I also think Cormac had a pretty warm feeling for Knoxville, despite all the violence (the book) it portrays."
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Seemingly, presidential candidates from both parties feel they have the right to incite anger, envy, suspicion, doubt and fear among their constituents but feel no obligation to inform them of facts and reality.

Fact is that technology and cheap foreign labor will reduce the number and change the types of jobs in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. Reality is that capital and labor, not government, must become visionary and imaginative to accommodate the drastic but inevitable changes in foreign and domestic production and consumption.

Fact is that health costs have become inordinately high. Reality is that government legislated the Affordable Care Act when the private sector, for decades, made no serious effort to ameliorate the situation.

Fact is that we have the strongest military force in the world. Reality is that more conventional forces and aircraft carriers do not increase our advantage in asymmetrical warfare prevailing today.

Fact is that there is a gross disparity of income. Reality is that conscience, empathy and philanthropy, not just taxation, are necessary to compensate for the disparity.

Fact is that every country has the right and obligation to act in its own best interest. Reality is that foreign policy is delicate and complex.

Facts are that most Americans don't save, and Social Security is essential to the stability of our economy. Reality is that to ensure the financial stability and permanence of Social Security for future generations, we must gradually increase individual contributions and increase the eligibility age for receiving payments.

Fact is that people are genetically programmed to survive, even at the expense of others. Reality is that religion, regulation and education must combine to make a fair and just society.

Fact is that we have our problems. Reality is that America is great.

Constituents will never agree on the facts, but candidates do have an obligation to present rather than distort them.

William J. "Bill" Oliphant, Knoxville
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Rebecca D. Williams' article, "Tennessee woman makes quilts to honor veterans," was published in the Pensacola News Journal on April 24. Doyleen Workman Taylor is a wonderful, caring lady. It's an honor for this veteran to thank her for her hard work that makes veterans smile.

My present home is in Northwest Florida, but I was born in Lawrence County, Tennessee, when Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States. As a United States Marine, I fought the Japanese at age 16. My Marine Corps career continued, and as a member of the First Marine Division, I fought the communist North Koreans and Chinese. I retired at the age of 37 with 20 years of service.

My late, dear Tennessee mother made me my last quilt 30 years ago to keep me warm.

Noah H. Belew, Gulf Breeze, Fla.
Hyderabad: The Hyderabad High Court on Thursday asked the GHMC and the state government to take steps to initiate stringent action against owners of buildings who had not constructed rainwater harvesting structures.

The bench asked the authorities to enumerate the buildings, individual houses, and commercial complexes that have water harvesting structures and prescribe a timeframe by giving an opportunity to the owners who had not constructed them to do the same.

The High Court bench suggested that the government form a committee to oversee the construction of water harvesting structures in every house, apartment and commercial complex.

Mr D. Prakash Reddy, senior counsel appearing for the petitioner, city resident S. Vaidehi Reddy said the factual situation was contrary to the claims of the GHMC that several buildings including government complexes had harvesting pits.

Panels told to make periodic inspections

D. Prakash Reddy, senior counsel appearing for the petitioner, said even Osmania General Hospital and Osmania University were depending on water tankers these days.

GHMC counsel Kesava Rao said that the civic body was prepared to strictly implement the GO issued for water harvesting structures and corporators had already started door-to-door campaigns explaining the importance of water harvesting structures to citizens. When the Bench asked when the committee would be constituted, counsels for the state and GHMC said two weeks.

The court said the committee should have periodical reviews and also examine whether owners had failed to construct the structures within the time granted and to take steps to disconnect their water supply. The Bench adjourned the case to June 20 while asking the GHMC to give wide publicity for construction of water harvesting structures.
The urban local body has for long battled the question: who should be blamed for the many civic problems of the city?

Nobody in BBMP killed the Bengaluru we knew  clean, green, orderly, even gentle. If you have problems with roads full of potholes, piles of garbage, and such other small issues, they are your problem alone, not of the army of so-called engineers, inspectors and assorted other ward officials. Its time the Palike appointed one nodal officer who can be held accountable in each of its 198 wards.

This does not come under my jurisdiction is a favourite line of BBMP officials, and it doesnt surprise people anymore. A road can be filled with potholes, a drain could be overflowing or a hillock of garbage could be staring at you in the face, but none of these apparently are the responsibility of BBMP officials! The urban local body has for long battled the question: who should be blamed for the many civic problems of the city?

While resident welfare associations and the senior officials point fingers at lower rank officers like health inspectors, assistant executive engineers (AEEs) and assistant engineers (AEs) for the lapses, these officers in turn shrug off responsibility claiming they are overburdened with work.

Says a junior health officer, Typically, I report to an AE, who is monitored by an AEE, an Executive Engineer and then a Superintendent Engineer. We all report to the zonal joint commissioner. Though we are often blamed, its conveniently forgotten that besides handling solid waste management, we are also responsible for civil work, preparing budget estimates and infrastructure projects. Also, each engineer or health inspector is responsible for two or three wards. Why should we take all the blame?

But members of RWAs point out that the health inspectors seem disinterested in carrying out their duties and often pass the buck. These field officers are so indifferent to their work that they do not even question who is taking the garbage from their wards. As long as the garbage is removed from the streets, they are happy, not bothering that the vendors and contractors who illegally pick it up from different wards , end up burning it, says Ms Lalita Mondretti, co-founder of Kasa-Mukta Bellandur.

These contractors even get paid a couple of thousands from apartment complexes to get rid of garbage without the hassle of segregation, according to her.

Although the health inspectors and AEs, AEEs should be made the face of garbage in any ward, its tough to do so, says a BBMP official. The officers who try to bring a change are shamed and pulled up by the corporators. Those who are hand-in-glove with them are never questioned. Its frustrating that we know the solution to the garbage menace, but are not able to do anything. The system is so faulty that erring officials at the lower level have greater leeway than honest senior officers who are transferred, he regrets.

To find a permanent solution, the BBMP needs to have a Solid Waste Management cell working independently, suggests Mr N.S Ramakanth, founder of Solid Waste Management Round Table, an NGO.

The high court has directed the BBMP to appoint separate environment engineers for every two or three wards and these engineers should not be burdened with civil work. Its been nearly three years and the BBMP has still not started recruiting. There are solutions for every problem, but the system lacks the will to implement them, he deplores.

Power from garbage: States new solution to crisis

The state government has come up with a long term plan to deal with the garbage in the city: Recycle it for use in power generation plants and do away with the need for smelly landfills. Inspired by a similar plant based on garbage generating 70 MW of power in Delhi and Chennai, it has asked its officers to study their operation and submit a report to it, Bengaluru Development Minister, K J George told reporters here on Thursday.

While the current system of handling garbage is okay for the short term, in the long run the city will need such power plants to deal with it. These power plants will not need large tracts of land and nor will they give out any stench like landfills do, making garbage disposal much easier, the minister noted.

Asked about the recent transfer of officers like Vijaya Bhaskar and Mathai, Mr George said, He had no role to play in their removal. Mr Vijay Bhaskar is a good officer and his transfer was an administrative decision. It was the Chief Minister who ordered it. As for Mr Mathai, Mr Vijay Bhaskar himself had given a report recommending action against him. We have gone by his report, he said.

Online platforms a boon for solid waste management

It was always, Sahebru illa (boss is not available) but its a different game today with no more long waits at government offices to meet BBMP officials. Now available online on WhatsApp, they are far easier to reach.

Using online platforms for solid waste management has been the biggest boon for many resident welfare associations. In areas like Bellandur, Yelahanka, J.P Nagar, Banashankari, Malleswaram and Jayanagar, health engineers, AEs, AEEs and the local residents are all members of common WhatsApp groups, which ensures that an official cannot evade his duties. Says Ms Sandhya, a resident of Jayanagar, and a citizen-activist, A resident from every street in our ward is on the WhatsApp group and we make it a point to monitor garbage collection in the mornings. If garbage is not collected from a street, the resident immediately sends photos of the location to the health inspector, who has to clear it. There is quick action this way.

The idea of forming online groups on WhatsApp is becoming widely popular as citizens have understood that health inspectors cannot escape their responsibilities if confronted directly, says solid waste management expert, N.S Ramakanth. Yelahanka has succeeded in dealing with its garbage as a result of the citizens and officials commitment. Even HSR Layout is following suit. We need more such citizen-friendly initiatives. The BBMP should strengthen this form of communication between officials and residents, he suggests.

Q&A with Subodh Yadav, Special Commissioner, Solid Waste Management

Every time theres garbage crisis in a ward, the commissioner or the corporator is blamed. The lower rank officials, who should be on the field, are not in the picture. Why?

Thats a very valid question. There are a group of people who gather information from the lower rank officers and blame the higher officials for the mismanagement. There has to be motivation among junior level officers to carry out the instructions given to them. These officers are interested in other areas of work but not in solid waste management. The officers should have a sense of accountability and a sense of belonging to change the system.

In many wards, the health inspectors are not aware of the vendors, who are picking up the garbage and burning it. Why this lapse?

To fix this, there has to be proper leadership and a combination of strict policies, better discipline and an improved system. If seniors issue 20 circulars, and an officer continues to do things his own way, it cannot always be regulated or monitored. Not all lower rank officials understand their responsibilities and this leads to such lapses.

What is the role of a nodal officer in each ward? Why are they not contributing to effective garbage management?

The nodal officers inspect mustering centres every morning and supervises garbage collection in each ward. Without monitoring or supervision from the higher level officers, they too can do little.

What is stopping the BBMP from penalizing contractors? Why are they walking away scot-free?

Its not fully true because functioning of the BBMP has tightened and of late the contractors have formed an association to fight against the new rules. In fact, they are doing their best to bring amendments to the tender rules so they can work without supervision or BBMPs monitoring. They know its not like in the past anymore.
By Kim Jae-kyoung



SINGAPORE  Veteran U.S. investor Jim Rogers said that he invested in Korean startup firm, Wealth & Liberty in March, the second of its kind in less than three months.



The multimillionaire investor in January made his first startup investment in Illimus, a Korean cosmetics and skincare goods manufacturing firm established in 2013.



"I have made small investments in Illimus and Wealth & Liberty," Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, said, refusing to reveal the amount of his investments.



It is known that he invested around $25,000 in each. Wealth & Liberty is a promising venture startup with specialty in financial advisory services using "fount," a robo advisor.



As an investment partner, Rogers plays a role of advisor by providing resources and analysis regarding commodities on a regular basis.



This is a very rare case for Rogers because he hardly invests in startup companies. His investment usually focuses on stocks, bonds and commodities. It seems that he invested in Korean startups because of their growth potential.



Asked why he has continued to invest in Korean startups, he said, "I don't know. I have never done it before. Something must be happening in Korea."



He said that the owner of the second company came all the way to Singapore to explain about his company and attract investment from him.



"I am investing in people, not in companies. I was impressed by the people and what they are doing. They are hardworking, smart and energetic with good ideas. This is something I've very rarely, rarely done in my life," he said.



His investment is based on his "token investment" principle. He believes that a large investment can ruin a promising startup so he starts with a small investment and increases the amount when the firm grows.



Rogers, who moved to Singapore several years ago, is one of the world's three most famous investors together with George Soros and Warren Buffet.




By Lee Hyo-sik





Nature Republic CEO

Jung Woon-ho

Nature Republic, one of Korea's low-cost cosmetics brands, is facing increasing difficulties listing its shares on the local bourse because its founder and CEO has repeatedly run into trouble with the law.

The company initially planned to go public last year but wasn't able to do so because CEO Jung Woon-ho was put behind bars on charges of violating the Foreign Exchange Control Act after gambling overseas. Jung reportedly lost more than 10 billion won ($8.7 million) at casinos in Macao and the Philippines from March 2012 and October 2014.

This month, his lawyer set out to sue him for physically assaulting her when the two met at Seoul Detention Center during an argument over her fees. The 51-year-old Jung has also been accused of hiring a legal broker to lobby judges and prosecutors in a bid to receive a lenient sentence.

He is now serving an eight-month sentence and is due to be released in June unless he is charged with additional crimes. Jung was sentenced to a one-year prison last October, but the appeals court reduced this term to eight months earlier this month.












South Korea's three major shipbuilders plan to recruit hundreds of new workers until next month despite the ongoing industrywide restructuring drive that includes massive layoffs of the existing workforce, sources said Thursday.



The three -- Hyundai Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME) and Samsung Heavy Industries -- are seeking to hire a combined 400 college graduates by the end of May, according to the sources.



Market leader Hyundai Heavy, in particular, will take up 300 workers of the total planned employment, almost the same level of its hiring last year. DSME will also hire 20-30 new workers by the same cited period, the sources said.



Samsung Heavy has not disclosed its detailed near-term employment plan but the sources said that the number will likely be in the double digits, a far smaller number than around the 400 it hired during the first half of last year.



The combined employment is about a third of the number of their usually first-half hirings.



This still could provide a much-needed chance for many college graduates trying to land a job in the shipbuilding industry at a time when the whole industry is reeling from a protracted business slump and corporate restructuring, market watchers said.



Earlier this week, the Financial Services Commission, the country's financial watchdog, demanded local shipyards ramp up self-restructuring efforts including massive layoffs and sales of non-core assets. The recruitment of new workers will likely be carried out "separately" from the planned layoffs, they said.



Under their restructuring plans, Hyundai Heavy and Samsung Heavy are expected to eliminate up to 1,000 workers each through voluntary retirement or attrition, while DSME will let go of 2,300 more until 2019.



The shipbuilding industry, once regarded as a backbone of the country's economic growth and job creation, has been reeling from mounting losses caused by an industrywide slump and increased costs.



The big three shipyards racked up a combined loss of 7.7 trillion won ($6.7 billion) last year. It was the first time that all three of the nation's largest industry players registered losses.



According to the data by global researcher Clarkson Research Services, South Korean shipbuilders had an order backlog totaling 27.59 million compensated gross tons (CGTs) as of end-March, the lowest since March 2004. (Yonhap)




South Korean pharmaceutical companies are strengthening their promotions to sell more of their mainstay products to incoming Chinese tourists during China's Labor Day holiday, industry sources said Thursday.

Local pharmaceutical firms such as Handok and Kyung Nam Pharm Co. have rolled up their sleeves to attract as many Chinese tourists as possible during the three-day national holiday that starts on April 30, they said.

Handok has supplied more of its Ready Q product for relieving hangovers in major outlets in Myeongdong, central Seoul. The mango-flavored product became popular among Chinese people after it recently debuted in a cable TV program in China.

In Myeongdong shops, Handok saw sales of Ready Q jump 158 percent in February from a month earlier and 452 percent in March, a company spokesman said.

Kyung Nam Pharm expects robust sales of its Lemona C vitamin powder as it carries the face of movie star Kim Soo-hyun on it. Kim is best known as "the man from the star" among Chinese fans due to the popular TV series "My Love from the Star" that aired in 2013. Sales have been rising since 2014, when the face of the 29-year-old Hallyu star appeared on the packet of the vitamin product, a Kyung Nam spokesman said.

As Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, has gained bigger popularity recently helped by Korean cultural products including K-pop and TV series, local companies have increased efforts to relate their products to the trend to boost sales. (Yonhap)
By Yoon Ja-young



President Park Geun-hye cited the need for additional funding for state-run banks that will lead corporate restructuring of ailing companies.



"To support corporate restructuring, there is need to consider selective' quantitative easing that supports the sectors that are in need, which is unlike the indiscriminate monetary easing carried out by the United States, Japan or the EU," President Park said at the cabinet meeting held in Cheong Wa Dae, Thursday.



The remark comes amid growing controversy over corporate restructuring of debt-ridden shipbuilders and shippers. The government-run Korea Development Bank (KDB) and the Export-Import Bank of Korea (Eximbank) are to lead the restructuring as main creditors, but their financial health poses a problem. Eximbank, for instance, had its BIS ratio, a measure of its capital soundness, drop to 10.11 percent in December, compared with the average 14.85 percent for commercial lenders. Without support, the bank may collapse, having a negative effect on the overall economy.



Financial Services Commission Chairman Yim Jong-yong thus asked the finance ministry and the Bank of Korea to inject more money into the two state-run lenders.



During the April 13 general election, the ruling Saenuri Party pledged to enact a "Korean version of quantitative easing," which includes the central bank purchasing KDB bonds and mortgage-backed securities of the Korea Housing Finance Corporation.



According to the Bank of Korea Act, the central bank, as the second-largest shareholder of Eximbank, can inject capital into the bank. It currently holds a 13.1 percent stake in the state-run lender. However, it is banned from purchasing bonds from KDB or injecting capital there.



The central bank has been hesitating as it is the matter of the government in principal. The opposition parties have also been opposing this "Korean version" of quantitative easing. The main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea has been suggesting that the government raise the corporate tax rate to fund corporate restructuring. The corporate tax rate was slashed to 22 percent from 25 percent during the former President Lee Myung-bak administration (2008-13).



Following President Park's remark, however, the ruling party is expected to push for revision of the law. The government task force including the Financial Services Commission is also expected to accelerate discussion of the central bank's injection of capital into Eximbank.



"The government and related institutions should closely consult each other to come up with optimal measures," President Park said.



She also said that businesses and creditors should lead the restructuring based on market principles while "the government should do its best to minimize effects on employment, suppliers and regional economies as well as suggesting which direction the restructuring should head, from the whole-industry perspective."




By Nam Hyun-woo



The Korea Development Bank (KDB) said Thursday that it can manage potential losses that will be incurred if the country's heavily indebted shipping giants go under court receivership.



This came as pressure on Hyundai Merchant Marine (HMM) and Hanjin Shipping from their main creditor, urging them to come up with better self-rescue efforts.



"Most losses expected to be incurred by HMM were absorbed as last year's net loss and we have enough capacity to cover losses that may come from Hanjin Shipping," said KDB Senior Executive Director Lee Dai-hyun, during a meeting at the Kensington Hotel on Yeouido.



Another KDB official said the bank is "healthy enough" to cover the loss and Lee's remark is widely interpreted as KDB's pressure on Hanjin, whose owner is yet to offer personal property to take responsibility for the company's failure. The state-run bank is seeking to place the companies under receivership.



KDB posted a 1.9 trillion won loss last year. The bank said the deficit came after it appropriated allowances for not only HMM but also other problematic companies including Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering (DSME).



"If it is for the shipping industry only, we don't need a capital increase," said Lee. "However, more capital will be needed if there is a massive and rapid restructuring of the shipbuilding industry and if the industry aggravates faster."



KDB's loans to HMM and Hanjin Shipping stand at 1.2 trillion won and 700 billion won, respectively. Adding some shipbuilders' loans, the bank's exposure to shipping firms and shipbuilders is expected to reach some 8.4 trillion won.



Market watchers expect if the two shipping giants go under receivership, bonds worth trillions of won could vanish in the worst-case scenario. KDB says it is a bearable stress, but it is seeking to secure more capital and raise its BIS ratio, a barometer for capital soundness, as preemptive measures.



KDB will increase the deposits' share of its overall financing to 30 percent. Currently, financing through the won accounts for 75 percent of the bank's overall financing. Of the 75 percent won-based financing, some 27 percent, or 34 trillion won, is from retail deposit services.



The bank in the short term will increase the deposits' share of its won-based financing to 30 percent. In the long term, it seeks to increase deposits to 30 percent of its entire financing.



KDB is also seeking to sell its 132 non-financial subsidiaries, in order to raise its BIS ratio. The ratio stood at 14.28 percent last year. The average of commercial lenders currently reaches 14.85 percent.




By Yun Suh-young



Politicians are putting new spins on the conflict between the organizing committee of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) and city officials.



While the preparations for the annual event, slated for Oct. 6 to 15 this year, are stalemated due to an unresolved conflict between the festival's organizing committee and the Busan Metropolitan Government (BMG), even politicians are intervening in the dispute.



The main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) began pressuring the BMG to resolve the issue promptly and announced that it will meet with the festival's organizing committee Thursday to seek a resolution.



"With the film festival only five months away, we cannot leave this situation as it is. The city government should resolve the issue as it triggered the conflict," said the MPK's Busan branch in a statement Wednesday.



It also requested a general meeting to appoint BIFF founder and former Chairman Kim Dong-ho as temporary head of the committee until the case is resolved. The party also attempted to arbitrate between both the city and the committee by suggesting changes to the latter's rules to guarantee strict independence and autonomy from the BMG.



A task force consisting of nine film-related associations, including filmmakers, producers and actors, vowed April 18 to boycott the film festival to protest the city's interference with the festival's autonomy and independence. The task force, including the Korean Film Producers' Association, the Directors' Guild of Korea and the Federation of Korea Movie Workers' Union, said more than 90 percent of their members had voted in favor of the boycott according to a poll they conducted from April 1 to 8.



"This is the first time in 10 years that the film industry is speaking out in such numbers on an issue, since opposing the reduction of the screen quota on local films in 2006," the task force announced.



In response, the BMG held a press conference on April 20 in Seoul with Busan's Vice Mayor Kim Kyu-ok attending.



"We plan to appoint someone approved by the film industry as the new chairman of the festival's committee," Kim said during the conference.



The film industry demanded that the chairman of the committee be elected through a general meeting while the city continues to adhere to the appointment of the position upon the committee's consent. Currently, Busan Mayor Suh Byung-soo holds the chairman position due to delays in changing committee rules. Changing of the rules requires consent from two-thirds of its members, but the BMG filed a court injunction to annul the appointment of 68 advisers by Lee Yong-kwan, the former head of the executive committee. Lee stepped down from the position in February after being accused of fraud.



"The chairman should be someone who represents Busan. It would be inappropriate to hold an election. Although autonomy should be guaranteed, the chairman has administrative responsibilities as the committee receives funding from the city government," said Kim.



The dispute between the city and festival organizers began after the city attempted to suspend the screening of a 2014 documentary depicting the Sewol ferry disaster, "The Truth Shall Not Sink with Sewol," during the film festival that year.




/Courtesy of Onrie Kompan



By Lee Han-soo

Korean hero Yi Sun-sin (also known as Yi Soon-shin), a famous naval commander from the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) who thwarted a Japanese invasion during the Imjin War (1592-1598), will come to life, thanks to U.S. cartoonist Kompan.

Titled "Yi Soon Shin: Fallen Avenger," segments of his latest cartoon have been released on the official site of the upcoming Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival on Thursday. The post commemorates Yi Sun-sin Day.

The cartoon covers the famous naval battle of Myeongnyang, where 12 of his ships defeated 330 Japanese warships.

"The hero community is saturated," Kompan said when asked why he drew the cartoon. "I wanted to draw a real-life hero who people all over the world could relate to, and I believe that is Yi Sun-sin."

Kompan started his Yi series in 2009 with "Yi Soon Shin: Warrior and Defender." It has since sold more than 51,000 copies.
/Courtesy of Twitter



By Lee Han-soo

The Seoul Metropolitan Government, in cooperation with the Visit Korea Committee and Seoul Tourism Association, plans to give a spring welcome to foreigners from April 29 to May 8, according to Kukmin Ilbo on Thursday.

The event coincides with China's Labor Day and Japan's golden week.

There will be live performances and traditional cultural events in six special tourist zones in Seoul  Myeong-dong, Sungnyemun, Dongdaemun, Itaewon, Hongdae University and Kwangjang market.

The Seoul government will also hang banners to welcome tourists at the special locations. The banners will also be on display at tourist information centers across the city to inform tourists of multiple special events.

These include making traditional lucky bags and fans, photo zones, Nanta performances, taekwondo demonstrations and magic shows.

The city will hold "China Day" on May 1, "Japan day" on May 3 and "Thailand Day" on May 5, and hand out souvenirs to nationals on each day.

City Tour buses will also offer a 40 percent discount throughout the event.
Yoo Ah-in / Screen capture from Facebook



By Bahk Eun-ji

Top actor Yoo Ah-in features on the cover of next month's Hong Kong edition of fashion magazine ELLE Men.

ELLE Men Hong Kong uploaded photos of Yoo on its official Facebook page on Thursday.

Yoo starred in the TV drama series "Six Flying Dragons,"which ended recently.

The actor made a special appearance in the popular drama "Descendants of the Sun" this month.
The plane (circled) was spotted flying over the sanctum sanctorum of the Tirumala shrine at around 8am on Wednesday.

Nellore: Even as Agama pundits have been raising a hue and cry about planes flying over the sanctum sanctorum of the Tirumala shrine, another plane flew above the holy temple on Wednesday.According to principle of Agama Shastras (traditional holy scriptures), planes cannot fly over the main sanctuary of the temple.

The plane was spotted at around 8 am on Wednesday. It is believed that it was Spice Jet flight that left Renigunta airport for Hyderabad. On condition of anonymity a passenger on the flight said the Spice Jet flight flew very close to the Ananda Nilayam (holy shrine) a few minutes after take off, much to the surprise of those travelling to Hyderabad. He said that staff on the flight attributed the reason of flying close to the temple to heavy clouds on the regular route.

Referring to discussions among the passengers on the flight, he suspected that private airlines were opting for the Tirumala route to save fuel. He also said that many passengers expressed displeasure over the incident.

The TTD had requesting the Civil Aviation department to declare Tirumala as a no-fly zone citing security and religious issues but there has been no response from the Centre yet. Union minister for civil aviation Ashok Gajapati Raju, on a visit to Tirumala in July 2015, had made it clear that the issue was beyond the limits of his ministry and that such subjects were dealt by the ministry of defence. He had also said that they had referred the issue to the defence wing and had expressed confidence of a positive outcome.

According to TTD assistant vigilance and security officer Y. Ravindra Reddy, TTD authorities have been communicating to the Centre regarding the issue since 2002 but there has been no response. As many as 15 reminders have been sent to the Union government so far.

He said that airport officials in Renigunta had told him that they had not given clearance to any flight to fly towards Tirumalas direction on Wednesday morning. The officials assured to verify and get back to us, Mr Reddy said.
South Korea's antitrust watchdog said Thursday that it is considering changing the rules for designating large business groups in an effort to better reflect reality.



The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) designates conglomerates with assets of 5 trillion won ($4.36 billion) or more as large business groups every year to oversee their equity investments and inter-affiliate loan guarantees.



The rules are designed to keep conglomerates from expanding their business areas indiscriminately and to ensure they do not expose themselves to risks by overreaching their capabilities.



"The FTC plans to improve the designation system to put it in line with reality," an FTC official said. "It will come up with a rational option after fully hearing opinions from interested parties."



The FTC has insisted that the corporate watchdog agrees with the need to raise the threshold on assets, but it is not reviewing a concrete plan.



The watchdog's turnabout came after President Park Geun-hye said at a meeting with chief editors of several dozen newspapers and broadcasters Tuesday that "the conglomerate designation system should be changed in keeping with the times."



The official said the FTC is considering hiking the asset threshold to between 7 trillion won and 10 trillion won or putting the nation's top 30 conglomerates by assets on its watch list.



Another option is to impose softer regulations on large business groups engaging in new industrial sectors, such as information technology and biotech, he added.



An increase in the asset threshold will require only a revision to the decree enforcing the country's antitrust and fair trade law.



In April 2008, the FTC hiked the threshold to 5 trillion won from 2 trillion won by amending the enforcement decree, sharply cutting the number of related regulations.



However, the law should be rewritten if the FTC adopts new rules, which could be a time-consuming process.



Early this month, the FTC announced a new list of 65 large business groups. Kakao Corp., the operator of South Korea's top mobile messenger KakaoTalk, was included for the first time, along with five others.



The inclusion has sparked controversy that it is not proper to subject companies with a relatively small amount of assets to the same regulations imposed on behemoths, such as Samsung Group, the country's top family-controlled conglomerate. (Yonhap)




By Jun Ji-hye

Some 20 North Korean restaurants operated in foreign countries have been shut down following stronger sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), according to the National Intelligence Service (NIS), Wednesday.

During a meeting with lawmakers, NIS Director Lee Byung-ho said the number of visitors to North Korean restaurants abroad dramatically decreased following the international sanctions.

"Some 20 restaurants have suspended their business or shut down," he said.

The UNSC imposed sanctions against the reclusive state in early March for its fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch in February. Unilateral sanctions from major countries including the United States also followed.

The North has reportedly operated some 130 restaurants in 12 countries as a means to earn hard currency that is suspected of being used to help bankroll Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs.

The spy agency chief also said that a total of 20 North Korean restaurant workers in China originally planned to defect to South Korea, but seven changed their minds at the last minute. The 13 remaining North Koreans arrived in Seoul earlier this month after fleeing the restaurant in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province in northeast China.

"The North claimed that the NIS kidnapped the defectors, but they escaped by their own efforts with legal, valid North Korean passports," the director said.

The NIS added that the North is believed to have already completed preparations for a fifth nuclear test when it carried out the fourth test, Jan. 6, saying that the regime can push ahead with an additional test at any time.

The agency also said the North is expected to hold the seventh Workers' Party Congress for three to four days, referring to the announcement made Wednesday by the North's state-run media, the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), that the congress is scheduled for May 6.
The government said Thursday it will ask some of the nation's largest conglomerates to limit the amount of pay raises given to the highest earning management-level employees as the country moves to restructure struggling industries hurt by the global economic downturn and create more jobs for young people.



The Ministry of Employment and Labor is set to meet with the CEOs of the nation's 30 largest conglomerates later in the day and urge them to refrain from giving generous raises to the highest paid wage earners.



"If the top 10 percent makes this compromise, they will help increase job opportunities for young people and narrow the earnings gap between conglomerates and small and mid-sized enterprises," Labor Minister Lee Ki-kwon said.



The government says conglomerates pay a disproportionately large amount of money to senior executives compared with what the rest of the nation earns. And considering how the shipping, shipbuilding and steel industries are all faltering, they should rein in employees' salaries.



In the past, the shipping, shipbuilding and steel industries were South Korea's growth engines, but they have been hit the hardest by the worldwide growth slowdown caused in part by oversaturated markets and stiff competition.



But some labor activists say although the government seems to be on the right track, it should focus its attention on CEOs and the wealthy, not the regular employees of conglomerates.



"People say full-time employees at conglomerates earn a high salary, but they are actually part of the country's middle class, also struggling with rising housing prices," said Lee Seung-cheol, spokesman of the Korea Confederation of Trade Unions.



The umbrella union and progressive civic groups have been urging the government to raise the income and corporate taxes for the CEOs and the rich.



Such calls, however, are opposed by the business community, which has pointed out that "populist demand" is always counterproductive and will only lead to a weakening of South Korea's global competitiveness.



The government has also balked at raising taxes for big companies stressing any move in this direction could hurt investment and adversely affect the job market overall. (Yonhap)




By Kim Da-hee

A "Europe Business Center," which is expected to serve as a bridge between European companies and small and medium-sized companies in Gyeonggi Province, has opened on the ninth floor of Gwanggyo Business Center in Suwon.

Gyeonggi Provincial Government and Gyeonggi Institute of Science & Technology Promotion held the opening ceremony on Wednesday. About 150 people, including Gyeonggi Province Governor Nam Kyung-pil and EU Ambassador to Korea Gerhard Sabathil, attended.

Six consulting firms are available to help companies from the U.K., Sweden, Russia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to enter the Korean market.

"The center is expected to open new business opportunities in cooperation with companies in Gyeonggi Province," Nam said.

Twenty three foreign companies and institutions, including eight British companies and seven Russian companies, have already contacted with the center.

For the foreign companies who are interested in the business center, call 031-8008-2083 (Investment promotion division at the Gyeonggi Provincial Government office) or 031-888-9934 (Gyeonggi Institute of Science & Technology Promotion).
By Kang Seung-woo

North Korea renewed calls Thursday for the immediate return of 13 of its citizens that defected to Seoul in April and released a video that Pyeongyang said shows the parents of one of the group crying over their daughter's absence.

The group of 13 North Koreans defected from a Pyongyang-operated restaurant in China  one male manager and 12 female employees  and arrived in Seoul on April 7. The North has consistently claimed that South Korea abducted the workers and demanded that they be immediately returned to their loved ones.

The North's state-run website Uriminzokkiri posted the six-minute, 40-second video of the parents who said they are heartbroken over the South's kidnapping of her daughter.

"My daughter is not the sort who would dare to betray the country," her mother said.

In addition, they also bluntly criticized President Park Geun-hye, adding that North Korean artillery will destroy Cheong Wa Dae.

Given that the North numbered the video as the first such interview, it is expected to continue releasing such videos as part of efforts urging the South Korean government to return them.

Last week, the totalitarian country unilaterally notified South Korea of its plans to send the defectors' family members south, asking for face-to-face contact with their daughters.

However, the unification ministry rejected this demand, saying the latest group defection by the restaurant workers was completely of their own free will.

The North also allowed seven coworkers of the defectors to be interviewed by CNN on April 18, during which they also claimed that South Korea abducted their colleagues.
This photo taken Thursday shows a notice sign in the departure lobby of Incheon airport, warning outbound travelers about the Zika virus, declared an international public health emergency by the World Health Organization. The health authorities confirmed the second case of a patient here being infected with the virus upon return from Philippines.

/ Yonhap



By Lee Kyung-min

The number of Koreans visiting the Philippines might significantly decrease following a second confirmed Zika case in a man who is believed to have been infected there.

According to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), Wednesday, the man, 20, who tested positive for the virus, visited Boracay, a small resort island in the Philippines, and Kalibo, between April 10 and 14. He said he was bitten by a mosquito there on April 13.

Boracay is one of the most frequently visited tourist destinations for Koreans, especially newlyweds, with more than 100,000 traveling there annually.

So far, worries about the mosquito-borne virus have remained minimal here, because the outbreak is mainly concentrated in Central and South America. Korea's first confirmed patient last month was infected with the virus after travelling to Brazil, a country which is not a popular tourist destination for Koreans. But the situation is different for the Philippines.

Expectant mothers and soon-to-be-married couples are discussing in Internet communities about whether to cancel trips to the Philippines, because the virus is linked with birth defects.

"I decided to cancel my plans to travel to the Philippines. I am pregnant so my baby's heath is most important," a woman posted on one such site.












By Kim Se-jeong



When it comes to school playgrounds, natural is the biggest trend.



Artificial turf was popular in the early 2000s, and schools with money covered their grounds with the artificial greenery. The Ministry of Education offered financial help to schools to make the switch, and more than 1,000 schools across the country joined in the change.



Artificial grass was welcomed because it dried fast after rain, and protected students better from injuries.



However, health risks have become an issue, according to the Ministry of Education.



"Concerns have been raised over toxic chemicals used in the artificial turf and their impact on children's health," a ministry official surnamed Lee said. "It was also expensive to maintain the artificial grass, the lifecycle of which was between seven and eight years, and it required endless maintenance."



The ministry stopped its financial support in 2012.



Last year, the ministry conducted a national investigation and found 174 out of 1,037 schoolyards had at least one of 11 toxic chemicals in its artificial grass, which was higher than permitted amounts. The toxic substances include lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chrome and benzopyrene.



At one school in Pohang, the amount of benzopyrene was 470 times higher than the permissible level, which is 1 milligram per kilogram.



Following the investigation, the Busan Metropolitan Office of Education ended its support for artificial turf. Last year, it paid all the expenses to have 11 schools in the city remove their artificial grass, after the ministry's study showed that the artificial turf at the schools was found to contain the toxic substances. It will continue to pay for schools up to 200 million won to remove the turf.



"It will take time because we work with a limited amount of resources," said an official from the Busan office, "but we'll get it done."



Last year, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education also started recommending schools opt for dirt playgrounds.




By Jun Ji-hye



Complaints and frustrations are increasing among North Koreans because the regime is forcing people to pay money and work night and day as part of preparations for the seventh Congress of the ruling Workers' Party, said government officials here Thursday.



The party is scheduled to hold the congress on May 6, 36 years after it last held a four-day congress in 1980 under Kim Il-sung, grandfather of Kim Jong-un.



A Ministry of Unification official said that Pyongyang is forcibly mobilizing residents in preparation for the national event, during which the regime wants to continue promoting idolization of Kim Jong-un and eulogize his achievements, such as improving nuclear capabilities.



"The North's effort to continue idolizing Kim, which is completely divorced from reality, is intensifying complaints among citizens who have been forcibly mobilized to prepare for the event," the official said. "This could serve as momentum to unsettle the North Korean system."



The official noted that the North was also using excessive electricity when building facilities, although its residents were suffering electricity shortages. He added that the North Korean people hold out little hope for better economic conditions, which have been deteriorating since the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) imposed harsher sanctions in early March for the regime's nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch in February.



The previous day, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) also told lawmakers that the Kim Jong-un regime was forcing residents to pay to cover the cost of constructing facilities designed to display Kim's achievements.



"Residents are also forcibly assigned to construction sites night and day," NIS director Lee Byung-ho told lawmakers. "People in the North are asking: what is the use of nuclear weapons when people are not able to put food on the table?"



The NIS added that during the congress, Kim Jong-un will apparently aim to build the foundations for a prolonged one-man rule.



The congress is expected to last three to four days, with about 2,000 party officials who have voting rights and an audience of about 3,000 participating, according to the NIS.




By Jun Ji-hye



The Japanese government flatly refuted President Park Geun-hye's remark that the Dec. 28 verbal agreement on wartime sexual slavery did not include the removal of a comfort woman statue in front of its embassy in Seoul.



The disagreement once again confirmed the wide difference between the two countries on the issue, a major hurdle to implementing the deal.



Japan's Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda said Wednesday that removing the statue, erected by a South Korean civic group, was part of the deal, saying that a tacit agreement existed between the two nations over the issue.



Hagiuda, a close aide to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, made the remark during a news conference in Tokyo.



This was an apparent rebuttal to comments made by President Park, Tuesday, that the topic hadn't been brought up when the two sides reached the deal.



An official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also refuted Hagiuda's comment, calling it his "arbitrary interpretation."



"There was no promise to remove the statue in the deal," ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuck said.



He also said that issues related to the statue and the establishment of a foundation to help the victims were two separate matters, referring to Japan's argument that the removal of the statue was a precondition for the country to fund 1 billion yen for the foundation.



"The government's position is clear and consistent. What is important is the sincere implementation of the deal," he said.



The statue symbolizes young Korean girls who were coerced and tricked into sexual servitude at frontline brothels operated by the Japanese Army before and during World War II.



The ministry made it clear that the monument was set up as a civilian initiative and the government has no right to interfere with it.



When Seoul and Tokyo reached the verbal agreement, the Japanese government agreed to fund 1 billion yen for a foundation to be established by the Korean government to support the victims.



The deal also called for an indirect apology by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and for Korea to end the ages-old dispute "once and for all" if Japan fully holds up its side.



Regarding the statue, a bone of contention between Seoul and Tokyo in recent years, the deal contained content that the Korean government should be aware that the Japanese government is concerned about the dignity of its diplomatic office and should make possible efforts through consultation with relevant groups so that the issue can be properly resolved.



The two sides have been interpreting this differently.



Japan has insisted that Korea remove the statue from the site, claiming that its removal is a precondition for Tokyo to implement the agreement.



But Korea has claimed that it never made any promise to remove the statue.



During the news conference, Hagiuda said, "The great significance of the deal was an agreement to establish new bilateral relations for a new era. As the leaders of both countries confirmed, the two sides should share responsibility for implementing the deal."



Koreans accounted for most of the estimated 200,000 comfort women, which also included Chinese, Southeast Asians and some Europeans.



Currently, there are 46 surviving victims in Korea. Their average age is over 89.




By Lee Jin-a





Huh Kyung-young

Huh Kyung-young, a former presidential candidate famous for his eccentric behavior, allegedly caused a three-car collision with his Rolls-Royce, police said, Thursday.

According to police, he collided with a Volvo SUV, which then rear-ended a Mercedes-Benz on the Gangbyeon Expressway between Wonhyo Bridge and Han River Bridge on April 19.

The former presidential candidate was driving a Rolls-Royce Phantom Limousine which costs 700 million won ($609,000). He reportedly leases the car, paying 8 million won a month.

The SUV driver said Huh's Rolls-Royce suddenly slammed into the back of his car, while Huh said the SUV stopped abruptly, according to police.

The two drivers failed to reach an agreement for compensation, as Huh's car insurance can only cover 20 million won out of the total repair fee of 27 million won. The Volvo driver filed a complaint with police, and police requested Huh to present himself for questioning.

Huh is a former presidential candidate, claims to have an IQ of 430. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail in 2007 for defamation after he claimed he would marry then ruling party member Park Geun-hye. He also said he earned hundreds of billions of won from his song, "Call Me."
Patna: Stung by fire incidents in various parts of Bihar due to searing heat conditions, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has ordered officials to issue an advisory to ask people not to light fire between 9 am and 6 pm and observe havan and puja before nine in the morning.

The advisory also states that people will not be allowed to cook in villages during 9 am and 6 pm and those who flout the order can be imprisoned for up to two years.

Kumar asked Principal Secretary, Disaster Management, to issue an advisory to this effect while reviewing cases of fire in Patna division comprising six districts  Patna, Nalanda, Bhojpur, Rohtas, Buxar and Bhabua, an official statement said.

He also instructed the Power Secretary to change loose electricity wire from various areas as a preventive step.

On Sunday, RJD president Lalu Prasad also laid emphasis on curtailing use of fire to avoid accidents in view of soaring heat condition in the state.

Kumar ordered the officials to provide compensation to family of victims of fire.

The CM also directed to submit proposal for purchase of additional fire equipment immediately.

The divisional review meeting was attended by Deputy Chief Minister Tejaswi Yadav, Chief Secretary Anjani Kumar Singh and state police chief P K Takur besides Principal Secretaries and Secretaries of different departments.

The CM would hold similar review meetings of other divisions too, to take stock of fire incidents and status of implementation of total liquor ban in the state, the statement said.

The meeting observed that water level has gone down in Patna division in comparison to that in the last two years.

On this, the CM ordered to ensure supply of drinking water through tankers in affected areas and also get the handpump repaired.
By Kang Seung-woo



President Park Geun-hye vowed Thursday not to tolerate a fifth nuclear test by North Korea and to respond firmly if it goes ahead.



"Ahead of the seventh congress of its Workers' Party, North Korea is preparing to carry out an additional nuclear test. Should the test be conducted, this would be a serious provocation to destabilize the security in Northeast Asia," Park said during a Cabinet meeting at Cheong Wa Dae.



Her warning came amid growing speculation that the Kim Jong-un regime may detonate a nuclear device before the party congress starts May 6.



Park is scheduled to begin a four-day trip to Iran, Sunday. Given this the President convened a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC), Thursday.



"Should the North carry out an additional nuclear test during my visit to Iran, the NSC should be convened to keep national security and the people's safety, cooperating closely with relevant government bodies," Park told the council.



She also ordered the military to maintain robust readiness to sternly retaliate against North Korea if Pyongyang stages a provocation.



"In addition, South Korea and the United States need to maintain our combined defense capabilities, including the tailored deterrence strategy," she said.



Park also added that the Kim Jong-un regime's ceaseless pursuit of nuclear weapons will only hasten its path toward total isolation and self-destruction.



Earlier in the day, Second Vice Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul said South Korea would take action for fresh, tougher international sanctions, to be imposed in close cooperation with nearby countries, China, Russia and Japan, as well as the United States.



"Until the North recognizes it cannot survive without changing, the government is set to continue to press the country to give up its nuclear ambitions," he said.



His remarks were made during an emergency meeting between the government and the ruling Saenuri Party at the National Assembly that also included unification and defense vice ministers.



Following its fourth nuclear test, Jan. 6, and Feb. 7 long-range rocket launch, the toughest United Nations sanctions yet were imposed against the North, March 2.



Seoul believes the sanctions are starting to show their effect.



"We are now learning that the North is suffering from the sanctions, as evidenced by its complaints that there is little leeway for the country's survival," Cho said.



The efficacy of the sanctions is believed to be thanks mainly to full cooperation from China, the North's lone economic lifeline and political supporter.



The vice minister also said that a series of North Korean military provocations that include last week's launch of a submarine-launched ballistic missile are in line with the North Korean dictator's March 15 order to test a nuclear warhead and ballistic missiles capable of carrying it.




The remains of soldiers who died during the 1950-53 Korean War are carried during a repatriation ceremony jointly held by South Korea and the United States at the ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command in Yongsan, central Seoul, Thursday. The U.S. returned the remains of 15 South Korean soldiers who died in a battle in a North Korean town, while South Korea returned the remains of two U.S. soldiers found in the country's border region in Gangwon Province.



/ Yonhap
By Jun Ji-hye



North Korea test-fired what is presumed to have been a Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) early Thursday from its east coast, but the launch appears to have failed, according to a military official.



This is humiliating for North Korea because it already failed to launch the same kind of missile on April 15, the 104th anniversary of the birth of North Korean founder Kim Il-sung  the grandfather of current leader Kim Jong-un.



"North Korea tried to launch a missile believed to be a Musudan from an area near Wonsan at about 6:40 a.m." the official said on the condition of anonymity. "The launch is presumed to have failed as the missile fell into the sea a few seconds after liftoff."



The official said a U.S. reconnaissance satellite detected the launch, adding that South Korea and the U.S. are jointly analyzing the exact cause of the crash.



In the first test-firing, the missile was presumed to have exploded during its booster phase before fixing its angle and entering orbit.



The Musudan, also known as the BM-25, is thought to have a range of some 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers, far enough to reach Guam, home to U.S. naval and air bases.



The repressive state deployed the Musudans in 2007 without carrying out test firing the weapon.



Military experts said the two consecutive failures indicate that the North's IRBM capabilities are still incomplete.



The military is preparing for the possibility the North could carry out additional provocations at any time including a fifth nuclear test, considering that Pyongyang has marked the national holiday in the past with elaborate military events.



The North is scheduled to hold the seventh ruling Workers' Party Congress, May 6.



A series of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions prohibit North Korea from launching ballistic missiles.



But the repressive state has continued to take provocative action even after the UNSC imposed harsher sanctions against the regime in early March, in response to its fourth nuclear test in January and the long-range rocket launch in February.



Since the new resolution, the North has protested with the firing of short and mid-range missiles and its new 300-millimeter multiple-rocket launcher, heightening military tension on the Korean Peninsula.




By Donald Kirk

Russian documentary filmmaker Vitaly Mansky has managed to bamboozle his North Korean hosts in a confidence game that's one of the greater journalistic coups ever scored against the regime.

Mansky, having given the North Koreans the clear impression that he wanted to collaborate fully with them, totally deceived them in his portrayal of a little girl as she was groomed for her role in minutely scripted rehearsals for the anniversary two years ago of the late "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il's birth. Far from churning out propaganda similar to a British team's production in 2004 of the documentary "A State of Mind" on a pair of girl gymnasts, Mansky's "Under the Sun" focuses on an eight-year-old as she's ordered around by her handlers.

So doing, he presents images that are shocking and amusing, wrenching and sardonic, in a 146-minute record of the girl, Zin Mi, mimicking the lines fed her over a family dinner, at a rehearsal for a dance, at her induction into the "Young Pioneers," at a speech that she has to declaim before rows of people. How did he do it? He and his two cameramen let their cameras keep running as the girl's handlers were priming her. He also had a soundman whom he had hired for his skills as a Korean speaker. His hosts never saw through the subterfuge.

The deal called for the North Koreans to review all footage at the end of each day, but Mansky gave them only what he wanted them to see  the same kind of stuff in "State of Mind" about the two gymnasts. From the outset he had in mind a documentary that would cast the regime as a cruel dictatorship. The result is a revelation of how the North Koreans exercise mind control, how they brainwash a child, turning her into a robot whose every word and deed is dedicated to the greater glory of the Kim dynasty.

The film has immediate relevance as North Korea prepares to stage its first Workers' Party Congress in 36 years next week. The whole point is to venerate the achievements of Kim Jong-un since he took over after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in December 2011. The North Koreans have left no stone unturned in the drive to make the Congress a celebration of Kim Jong-un's rule, the affirmation of the pervasive authority of the regime, and the intimidation of all citizens as they struggle to survive.

In microcosm, Zin Mi symbolizes a country bowing in unison to a leader with the power of life and death over every one of its people. There is no trace of conflict or disagreement in the film. Neither she nor her parents question the lines they are told to repeat. There is no give-and-take, no discussion. Yet inner feelings come out in the shots the North Koreans never realized were being recorded.

Zin Mi silently sheds tears as her handler forces her again and again to master a plie  the tiring dance step in which the dancer's feet turn outward during what looks like a deep-knee bend. Not easy. And she weeps again as she's remembering the lines to recite to her audience  tears springing from the tension and the bullying she's enduring. The camera focuses on one girl as she can hardly keep her eyes open during a propaganda lecture.

The upcoming Party Congress is going to be the same, all lines scripted and rehearsed, all the cheers and smiles artificial, all shots of Pyongyang and the Congress looking beautiful and omnipotent. There will be no debate, no questions, no second thoughts as Kim Jong-un and his aides make certain the Congress displays the munificence of his dictatorship.

The North Koreans, though, don't always succeed in such nonsense. In the case of Mansky's "Under the Sun," they did not realize until he was done and gone that he was not producing a film like "A State of Mind," so much to their liking that it won a couple of prizes at the Pyongyang International Film Festival a dozen years ago.

Instead a North Korean official had to write a letter of protest to the Russian foreign ministry, demanding destruction of all prints of the film and punishment for Mansky. The Russians responded by blocking it from being shown in Russia, but it's won prizes at film festivals elsewhere. Now Mansky, not charged with anything, plans to sue in a Russian court demanding the right to have the film shown in his country.

The North Koreans are inviting members of the international media for the Congress. It will be interesting to see if they capture the hypocrisy and duplicity of an event that's sure to be one huge show. Mansky's film exemplifies the reporting that's needed to reveal what's going on as omnipresent minders shield visitors from disquieting realities.

Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, has been covering the conflict of forces on the Korean peninsula for decades. He's at kirkdon4343@gmail.com.
Three Nobel laureates who will take part in a visit to North Korea later this week aim to share a voice of "hope for peaceful changes" to the isolated North's young generation, the head of the Vienna-based International Peace Foundation said Thursday.



Uwe Morawetz, founding chairman of the foundation that is organizing the eight-day trip to North Korea from Friday, also said he took note of concerns from the South Korean government about the visit that comes amid signs that Pyongyang might conduct its fifth nuclear test.



"Of course we watch closely what's happening, and it's a concerning development," Uwe said in an e-mail interview with Yonhap News Agency before departing for Pyongyang. "We listen closely to the South Korean concerns and take them seriously, without canceling or postponing the visit."



"To change the visit only out of fear that it could be misused by the DPRK (North Korea) government is not reason enough to cancel or postpone the visit which has been prepared extensively for more than 2 years," Uwe said.



"Fear can never be a justification for our actions or inactions, and force does not sustain peace. Fear can keep us apart; building bridges through dialogues can bring us closer together," he said.



Uwe said he hoped the visit could be used as a "tool for silent diplomacy to bring about positive change and further mutual understanding."



The foundation's Asian office is based in Bangkok and the South Korean Embassy in Thailand expressed concerns about the trip, according to Uwe.



Uwe said the trip focuses on academic and educational activities and "will not involve any political activities."



"We want to give the young generation in the DPRK a voice, a voice seldom heard of and listened to, a voice that could provide hope for peaceful changes, an opportunity not to be missed, because we change nothing by not going, we change nothing by not engaging," Uwe said.



The three Nobel laureates from Norway, Israel and Britain -- Finn E. Kydland, Aaron Ciechanover and Richard J. Roberts -- who won their Nobels for economics, chemistry and medicine, respectively, will give speeches at North Korea's Kim Il-sung University during the visit.



Workshops, seminars and dialogues with students, professors and doctors from different educational institutions will be held at Kim Chaek University of Technology and the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, the foundation said in a statement.



Uwe said the visit by the Nobel laureates to North Korea could become a regular annual program by aiming to "inspire the young generation and to strengthen international understanding by building long-term bridges" between Nobel laureates and the North's young generation.



The visit also coincided with North Korea's rare ruling party congress that will start on May 6.



North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is expected to use the rare congress as a venue to solidify his reign and take credit for his policy of simultaneously pursuing economic development and nuclear weapons.



North Korea has been slapped with tougher international sanctions since early last month over the January nuclear test and launch of a long-range rocket in February.



Many analysts suggest that North Korea could conduct another nuclear test to bolster domestic solidarity in time for the May party congress. (Yonhap)




President Park Geun-hye on Thursday warned against North Korea's additional nuclear test, stressing that South Korea would never condone any provocative acts that would destabilize regional security.

During a Cabinet meeting, she ordered the government to maintain robust preparedness to ensure national security. Her warning came amid signs of the communist regime preparing for yet another nuclear test at its northeastern Punggye-ri site.

"Ahead of its seventh party congress, Pyongyang has been preparing for an additional nuclear test and it is now in a situation where it can conduct a test anytime it decides to do so," she told a gathering of key government officials.

"Should it push ahead with another nuclear test, this would be very serious provocative behavior that would shake the security order of Northeast Asia and we can never condone it," she added.

The North has been gearing up to hold a rare congress of the ruling Workers' Party -- for the first time in 36 years. The congress is scheduled to begin next Friday.

Analysts have anticipated that the North might conduct another strategic provocation ahead of the key political gathering to show off its nuclear capabilities as well as bolster Kim Jong-un's leadership. Kim has been ruling the country since the death of his father in late 2011.

Later in the day, Cheong Wa Dae plans to convene a session of the National Security Council to check military readiness, officials said. (Yonhap)
South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se on Thursday called for members of a regional security conference, led by Russia and China, to play a "special role" in preventing North Korea from conducting another nuclear test.

There have been signs that North Korea may conduct its fifth nuclear test ahead of its rare party congress early next month, in order to build credential for the North Korean leader's twin pursuit of economic development and nuclear weapons.

"The eyes of the world are now on North Korea, whether it will conduct a fifth nuclear test in time for the seventh Party Congress scheduled to begin on the 6th of May," Yun said in his speech at the foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA).

"In this regard, I hope that CICA will play a special role in blocking advances in North Korea's nuclear weapons capabilities, and in stopping North Korea from conducting another nuclear test," Yun said.

Founded in 1992, the CICA has 26 member states, mostly non-Western countries such as Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.

Yun is the first South Korean foreign minister to attend the foreign ministers' meeting of the CICA since South Korea joined the gathering in 2006.

International sanctions against North Korea were tightened in early March after the North's fourth nuclear test and launch of a long-range rocket in February.

Despite tightened sanctions, Yun said, "Pyongyang has blatantly and brazenly announced that it will carry on with more nuclear tests and missile launches. And we are witnessing such belligerent rhetoric being translated into provocative actions."

Citing North Korea's recent claim of a successful launch of a ballistic missile from a submarine and other missile tests, Yun said, "Indeed, no country can match North Korea in being such a persistent and flagrant serial offender in the history of the U.N." (Yonhap)
Taedonggang beer/Courtesy of Twitter



By Lee Jin-a

Taedonggang beer, a state-owned North Korean brand, is available in grocery stores in Dandong and Shenyang, China, according to news reports.

"I noticed billboards promoting Taedonggang beer on a street near Dandong Station, and also newspaper advertisements showing the addresses and phone numbers of retail stores," a source told Radio Free Asia.

The beer is not yet widely distributed in China. Sources from Shenyang and Dandong said they could find only a few stores selling the beer in Xita Street where many Koreans live and in Korean gift shops.

North Korea's popular beer costs 20 yuan ($3) a bottle, four times the price of regular brands in Chinese grocery stores.

"The beer has a soft, rich flavor with more alcohol than Chinese beers," said a Chinese man who tasted Taedonggang beer at a restaurant in Dandong.

"However, the price is too expensive for Chinese citizens to drink regularly."
Foreign ministers attending a regional security gathering led by Russia and China on Thursday called for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program "in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner."

It was the first time that the foreign ministers' meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), in its fifth time meeting, adopted a declaration that calls for North Korea's denuclearization, South Korea's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and launched a long-range rocket in February, prompting the U.N. Security Council to tighten sanctions against the isolated North.

Despite international pressure, there have been signs that North Korea may carry out another nuclear test ahead of its key party congress set to kick off on May 6.

Founded in 1992, the CICA has 26 member states, mostly non-Western countries such as Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.

In the joint declaration at the end of the CICA meeting in Beijing, the foreign ministers "condemned" North Korea's January nuclear test and February rocket launch "in the strongest terms," according to a draft of the declaration seen by Yonhap News Agency.

"We reaffirm that we will implement the resolution thoroughly and fully and will further strengthen international cooperation so that DPRK (North Korea) must abandon its nuclear program in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner according to relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions," it said.

The foreign ministers also supported the latest U.N. resolution on North Korea, which was adopted in early March as "the manifestation of the international community's firm resolve that DPRK shall not conduct any further nuclear tests and launches that use ballistic missile technology."

Earlier in the day, South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se called for member states of the CICA to play a "special role" in preventing North Korea from conducting another nuclear test.

Yun is the first South Korean foreign minister to attend the foreign ministers' meeting of the CICA since South Korea joined the gathering in 2006. (Yonhap)
By Richard L. Hasen



Despite Bernie Sanders' repeated accusations, there's no real evidence that Hillary Clinton has been corrupted by large campaign contributions. But that's not to say donors haven't influenced her thinking and priorities. Lodged in the gap between Sanders' attacks and Clinton's rejoinders lies the truth about big money in politics.



Anyone who has heard two minutes of a Sanders stump speech knows he rails against a "corrupt campaign finance system" that benefits the rich and powerful, and boasts of the support he gets from millions of individuals making small donations.



Sanders and his supporters call Clinton's fundraising "obscene." Using fuzzy math (such as counting all the donations bundled by lobbyists who have had oil companies as clients), the Sanders campaign asserted that Clinton took millions in donations from the fossil fuel industry.



More recently, the Sanders campaign's lawyer issued a letter suggesting, without evidentiary support, that Clinton or her supporters were breaking the law when they solicited six-figure donations in a joint fundraising operation with the Democratic National Committee and state political parties. In fact, while that fundraising strategy might be troublesome, it does not appear to violate any of the many porous rules set by Congress, the Federal Election Commission or the Supreme Court. Nor is there any evidence, despite the belief of some ardent Sanders supporters, that Clinton has somehow been bribed to do the bidding of big donors.



Still, Clinton struggles to explain why, when she opposes the influence of big money on politics, that no one should worry about her super PAC money and massive donations. During a New Hampshire debate she said "you will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received." I bet Clinton actually believes this statement. But it glosses over the more subtle way money influences politics.



The unending money chase demanded by our privately financed system of campaigns skews how candidates spend their time and what views they hear. When you spend hours every day interacting with those wealthy enough to make four-, five-, six- and even seven-figure donations, you can't but help to have your priorities influenced by their concerns.



Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who has spent hours a day on the phone asking for donations, spoke at a Yale conference a few years ago about how this "soul-crushing" amount of fundraising skews priorities. "I talked a lot more about 'carried interest' inside of that call room than I did in the supermarket," Murphy said, referring to a controversy about how little tax wealthy hedge fund managers and others pay on certain investment income.



A 2013 study found that the wealthy are much more likely than the rest of us to report having personal contact with a senator or representative. And it turns out that the 1 percent have very distinct views on public policy. The same study reported that the very wealthy are much less likely than the general public to support policies such as raising the minimum wage, providing substantive unemployment benefits, or expanding public health insurance programs.



Money has influence even before it is donated. A senator taking a position in favor of Internet gaming, for example, has to ask whether that stance will cause casino mogul Sheldon Adelson to unleash millions against him. Likewise, every senator from New York, including Clinton from 2001 to 2009, knows that staking out positions against Wall Street can close wallets or send money streaming to their opponents.



This is a deeply troubling campaign finance system, one which is slipping dangerously toward plutocracy. But it doesn't take a bribe for money to matter, a lot.



Richard L. Hasen is a professor of law and political science at the University of California at Irvine and the author of the book "Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections." He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.




New Delhi: BJP leader Subramanian Swamy, who triggered protests from Congress on Wednesday after he attempted to drag Sonia Gandhi into the AugustaWestland helicopter row, made controversial remarks again in Rajya Sabha today much to the Chairs irritation.

Deputy Chairman P J Kurien immediately expunged his comments and warned him of action if he continued to provoke unnecessarily.

Expunging Swamy's reference to the Constitution of another country that triggered vociferous protests from Congress members, Kurien also ordered the media not to report the remarks.

Read: AgustaWestland deal: Why is your name on Italy list? BJP asks Sonia

Trouble broke after Chaudhary Munavver Saleem (SP) in the Zero Hour mention referred to Swamy being part of the movement in 1970s to protect the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).

Swamy got up to clarify saying he had no objection to minority education institutions but the Constitution prohibits the State from financing them.

He was countered on this by the Opposition to which he responded by dragging the name of another country, a reference that led to agitated Congress members rushing to the Well.

Read: AgustaWestland deal: No brush-by with Italian PM, says Arun Jaitley

Kurien said he was expunging the reference to the Constitution of another country but that did not satisfy Congress members who continued to shout slogans against Swamy.

The BJP MP, who was sworn in only on Monday, insisted since his name had been taken by another member, he had the right to reply and again went on to refer to the country, drawing sharp rebuke from the Chair. "I will take action against you. Subramanian Swamy you are unnecessarily provoking. I will have to take action against you... you are provoking," Kurien said.

Read: Why no CBI raids against Cong leaders, Kejriwal asks Narendra Modi

Congress members sought action against Swamy with Jairam Ramesh saying he was "needling and provoking" by bringing in reference to another country. "This is deliberate."

Read: Not afraid, have nothing to hide: Sonia Gandhi on VVIP copter scam

With Congress members continuing to protest, Kurien asked them to return to their seats and said it was a deliberate attempt to subvert the Zero Hour.

Asked by the Chair what the problem was when the remarks have been expunged, Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said "the problem is the new gift of BJP. Problem is not on this side."

He said Swamy is just two days old in the House and his remarks have already been expunged twice. "There are 365 days in a year, how many times are you going to expunge his words," he asked the Chair.

Azad said Swamy does not know the difference between street language and parliamentary words. "He does not allow his hair to grey so he can learn and mature."

As Kurien asked Congress members resume their seats, they wanted the Chair to ask Swamy to take his seat first. "You cannot direct me like that. You are shouting on nothing. I have expunged (the remarks) then and there. It cannot be reported, it cannot come on TV channels," Kurien said.

Read: VIP chopper scam: Amit Shah attacks Sonia Gandhi

With the protests continuing, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi twice went up to Swamy to convey something.

Kurien then called Naqvi to his chair and spoke to him about the continued pandemonium. Naqvi then went up to Swamy who then resumed his seat. Azad also went up to the agitating party members and prevailed upon them to resume their places.

As Congress members returned to their seats, Swamy was up on his feet again. Kurien asked him to resume his seat. "You sit down now. Come and meet me in Chamber later."

Earlier soon after new member Navjot Singh Sindhu took oath and listed papers laid, Swamy again tried to raise the VVIP helicopter deal but Congress members shouted him down. "I am not going to mention that lady's name," Swamy said in apparent reference to him yesterday dragging Sonia Gandhi.

When Kurien asked Swamy under what rule was he raising the issue, Swamy said he wanted to raise a matter of public importance under rule 167.

Kurien then told the BJP MP that Rule 167 is for discussion in House, the procedure for which is that once notice is given, the Chairman decides whether to allow a discussion on the matter raised.

If Chairman selects the notice, the member is informed, he said asking Swamy to contact the office of the Chairman on fate of his notice. Order was then restored and Zero Hour taken up.

Saleem in his Zero Hour mention sought continuation of minority status of AMU and said this should be decided on the floor of Parliament rather than in courts.

Earlier during their protest against Swamy, Congress members shouted 'CIA Agent' to counter him while the BJP member shot back chanting 'ISI, ISI'.

Amid protests from Congress, Kurien said shouting in Well will not produce results. When Anand Sharma (Cong) asked how Swamy was allowed to speak on a pre-approved Zero Hour mention by another member, Kurien said if a members name is mentioned, he has a right to explain his position.

Azad however said his party had no objection to the clarification but what Swamy said was "totally out of context." Naqvi countered Azad's use of words against Swamy, saying "we have been headmasters of the school they (Congress) go to."

Later in the Zero Hour, when Deputy Chairman P J Kurien asked JD(U) member Pavan Varma to speak on the issue he wished to raise, Naqvi stood up to say that it should have been Swamy's turn as his name was there on the list.

"His name is there on the list, how can it be changed at the last minute," Naqvi asked the Chair. Kurien replied that the list Naqvi was referring to was not the final one.

Not satisfied with the reply, Naqvi said it is not expected that the Chair would discriminate between members and said the BJP member has the right to speak.

Kurien then responded by saying that "ministers should not make such complaints" and added that they should rather find out the factual position. "I know the factual position better," Kurien added.

However as Naqvi continued to persist, Kurien remained firm and said "if you or Subramanian Swamy have complaints, you can approach the chairman."

Naqvi said he was just requesting the Chair as Swamy's name was there in the list. Kurien responded by saying that there appeared to be a "communication gap" between him and the minister, even as he proceeded to ask JD(U) member Varma to raise his issue.
By Doug Bandow

North Korea without doubt is unique. If nothing else, its claimed accomplishments rival the faux Russian achievements cited by Pavel Chekov in the original Star Trek. Yet only the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has established a Communist monarchy, now reaching the third generation.

The real question for Kim Jong-un is whether he, like his father and grandfather, will follow the Ottoman practice of producing multiple children from multiple consorts. That always makes a succession fight much more interesting. Even so, royal baby sightings still are rare in the DPRK.

But the North Korean regime has gone a step further in claiming that Great Leader Kim Il-sung, grandfather to Cute Leader Kim Jong-un, as I call the latter, is not only god, but recognized as such by America's legendary evangelist Billy Graham. On Kim Il-sung's recent birthday, reported Adam Taylor in the Washington Post, the DPRK paper Rodong Sinmun stated that Graham, who traveled several times to North Korea, praised the senior Kim's rule.

Indeed, "said" Graham: "Having observed the Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung's unique political leadership, I can only think that he is God." Moreover, "if God is the leader of another world, savior and ruler of the past and future life that exists in our imagination, I acknowledge the Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung is the God who rules today's human world."

The man who raised the Bible at thousands of crusades then "said," according to the Rodong Sinmun, "Kim is this world's God. Why would a country like this need the Holy Bible?"

Graham is long retired, in ill health, and out of public view. Officials at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association dismissed the claims as not reflecting "Mr. Graham's theology or his language."

Certainly there's no evidence that in thrall of the Great Leader the evangelist tossed aside his life's calling to worship the modern equivalent of Baal. Kim offered the faith no favors. To the contrary, he became one of the last century's great religious persecutors.

And Kim's pernicious policies continued under his son and grandson. If anything, the repression has worsened. While most North Korean refugees returned to the DPRK are treated atrociously, the greatest punishment is inflicted on those thought to have fallen under the sway of foreign Christians. The Kim dynasty is premised on loyalty to the top leader, who long has been treated with reverence and said to be capable of super-human feats.

Indeed, the biography of Kim Jong-il, father of the Cute Leader, was rearranged to have the former born on sacred Mt. Paektu rather than in Siberia. That buttressed Kim's claim to semi-divinity as well. Presumably the son of a god also is a god. And the latter's son as well.

Yet it would behoove the North Koreans to be careful before so cavalierly claiming divine status. One of the great Old Testament face-offs came during the reign of Ahab, not one of Israel's more benighted rulers. The prophet Elijah challenged 50 advocates of Baal, rather like the retainers surrounding the Kims today.

Both sides prepared a bull for sacrifice on Mount Carmel. Baal's prophets danced, shouted, and "slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom," but still there was no response. Then Elijah called upon the one true God and "the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil." At Elijah's instruction, the people seized the false prophets and slaughtered them. (1 Kings 18: 19-40)

Then there was King Herod, his hands washed in the blood of John the Baptist. Herod spoke to the people of Sidon and Tyre, who were seeking to reconcile with the king. They responded: "This is the voice of a god, not of a man.' Immediately, because Herod did not give praise to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died." (Acts 12:21-23)

It seems there is a price to be paid for claiming to be a god.

Christianity once flourished in the north as well as in the south of the Korean peninsula. Despite extraordinary persecution under the Kim dynasty, the faith survived. Its continued existence challenges the current Kim's rule. Perhaps he believes that he can bolster the regime's credibility by claiming an improbable endorsement from Graham.

But that's not likely to work. Too much information passes over the DPRK's borders for anyone any longer to believe the fantasies propagated in Pyongyang. Moreover, North Korean officials should beware of what happened to past prophets of Baal. A little fire from heaven just might be in store.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former Special assistant to President Ronald Reagan.
North Korea has set May 6 as the date for opening the seventh congress of the ruling Workers' Party. The convention will be the first since 1980, when founding leader Kim Il-sung ruled the communist country. Also, it will be the first congress to be held under North Korea's current leader Kim Jong-un.



It's not difficult to reason why Pyongyang will hold the congress, its top decision-making party organ. On the occasion of the congress, the young dictator apparently intends to cement his grip on power and strengthen the solidarity of his regime by showing off the North's nuclear and missile capabilities.



The isolated state conducted a fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range missile launch in February. There has been growing speculation that the North may carry out a fresh nuclear or missile test just ahead of the party event to placate the North Koreans who are beset with chronic economic woes.



Some pundits raise the possibility of considerable changes in the North following the congress. Kim may replace his old top brass with younger people while declaring the "era of Kim Jong-un.'' It's also possible that North Korea will begin a personality cult of its young leader despite its isolation and sanctions imposed by the United Nations.



Speculation is rife that Kim may revise the party platform to declare itself as a nuclear state. This is quite possible, given that the impoverished regime in Pyongyang needs to highlight its military achievements at a time when improving dire economic conditions has been elusive for a long time.



Although the chances are low, Kim could declare a new path for dialogue and compromise, especially in a move aimed at sounding out the possibility of concluding a peace treaty with the United States.



Nonetheless, it's naive to expect North Korea to give up its weapons of mass destruction easily. That is all the more so, considering that South Korea is actually held hostage to the North's nuclear blackmail.



But Kim's belief that atomic weapons will ensure his survival is merely an illusion. The more the North sticks to its nuclear program, the worse its economic conditions will become and the more North Koreans will be alienated from the regime.



Kim should stop the North's weapons program immediately in order to stay in power. True, both the U.S. and China have limitations in deterring the communist state from becoming a nuclear power. But it's also true that the blind pursuit of WMD will speed up Kim's  and Pyongyang's  collapse.




Song Hyo-sook, CEO of World Culture Networks (WCN)

By Jhoo Dong-chan

Song Hyo-sook has been introducing talented Korean musicians to Europe, the seat of western classical music.

In 2012, the 55-year-old devoted her private fortune to set up the Austria-based production agency World Culture Networks (WCN) in a bid to help talented Korean musicians reach European stages.

"We have seen a number of Asian musicians become popular in Europe over the last 20 years but there is still a glass ceiling," said Song, who serves as WCN's CEO.

"Many Korean musicians have recently proven their quality in many international music contests but they rarely receive the opportunity to get on stage or try out for renowned orchestras in Europe because Europeans prefer local musicians to outsiders."

In September 2014, WCN held the third Korea-Slovakia friendship concert with the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra and top Korean musicians including tenor Chung Ho-yoon, soprano Yang Je-gyung and violinist Cheong Sang-hee.

A month later, the agency also hosted the Korea-Ukraine friendship concert in Kiev, where top Korean musicians such as tenor Chung and soprano Kim Young-mi were featured with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine.

More than 10 concerts like this have been hosted under WCN's management since 2012, and the agency has also hosted a number of Korean cultural performances in Europe as well.

In June 2012, WCN staged the famous "Nanta!" nonverbal musical in Vienna, Austria, with over 3,000 in attendance. The nonverbal "TAL" musical has also been performed several times in Europe under the agency's management.

This year, Song has expanded her operations to Korea, opening several concerts including bringing soprano Im Sun-hae and world-famous pianist Helmut Deutsch to Seoul stages.

Her dedication to classical music has been highly praised in Austria, and the agency was selected as an official sponsor of the Chopin Festival which is held at Gaming, Austria, in August. WCN will invite the Korean Chamber Orchestra to the event.
There are rumors that the Galaxy Note 6 release date may be coming this August. It is believed that the device will be available this summer.

According to PC Advisor, Samsung's Note series is set to return in the U.K. this August with the Galaxy Note 6 release date. The phablet may be priced at 630, about $900.

The Galaxy Note 6 specs will reportedly feature a new waterproof design and iris scanner. The device is also believed to have 6 GB of RAM and will run on Android N.

"Samsung tends to hold an Unpacked event in which it unveils the new Note around the middle of August," the publication wrote for its Galaxy Note 6 release date news. "The latest we've seen a new Note launch is immediately preceding IFA, which this year runs 2-7 September, making a 1 September launch possible."

A source told Tech Radar that Samsung will not be launching the Galaxy S7 Edge+ in the U.K. The company did not release the Note 5 in Europe.

"I got the impression that it had been a bit of a disappointment sales-wise and that the decision to keep the Note 5 out of Europe is now considered a mistake," the insider said. " So our information is that the Note 6 will launch in the UK in August and that there will be no S7 Edge+."

Neurogadget reported that a Samsung employee confirmed that the Galaxy Note 6 release date will be happening this August. Moreover, Android N will reportedly be finished this summer.

JNH previously reported that the Galaxy Note 6 release date may come earlier due to S7's success in the market. It was noted that Samsung may be developing the habit of releasing their devices sooner and with a cheaper price.

The company's sales are expected to triple the profits gained by the S6 models at this time last year. This year's lineup is believed to reach 9 million units during their first month on the market.
Kolkata: If voted to power, BJP would stop infiltration from neighbouring Bangladesh into West Bengal, party president Amit Shah said on Thursday. "Neither Trinamool nor CPI(M) stopped infiltration of Bangladeshis to India as it is part of their agenda for creating votebank," he said at a public meeting in Kolkata.

He said the party wants fencing along the porous Indo-Bangladesh border to stop infiltration. "If the BJP forms its government here, not even one Bangladeshis can enter India (illegally). That is why we had a border agreement with Bangladesh. We want fencing in the border so that there is no infiltration," he said.

Taking a dig at Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi who shared the stage with veteran CPI-M leader and former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in the city on Thursday, Shah mocked that tomorrow in their meetings in Kerala, the two parties will be facing each other.

"When elections are going on at the same time in the same country in two different places, you have an alliance in one state and in another, they are fighting each other. Is it the fight of principle or for getting chair?" Shah said.

BJP candidate Chandra Bose, a descendant of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, is pitted against Mamata Banerjee from the Bhowanipore assembly seat in south Kolkata. "This is your opportunity to pay tribute to Netaji. Voting for one seat in Bengal can change the whole state," Shah appealed before the voters.

Questioning Banerjee over the sale of her paintings, he claimed that her high-priced paintings were bought by those involved in the Saradha scam. On the recent collapse of Vivekananda Road flyover in the city that killed 27 persons, he said the Trinamool government could have cancelled the contract for building if as they said they were "unhappy" with the project.

"The flyover didn't fall down due to wind. It collapsed because of the syndicate. All materials - cement, iron, etc are supplied by Trinamool. The flyover is a symbol of corruption," he alleged.

Syndicate is a racket for milking builders in the name of supplying inferior building materials at a premium by persons backed by political parties. Referring to the Narada sting operation, Shah said he had never seen anyone taking money so shamelessly.
Chennai: In a scathing attack on the DMK without naming it, AIADMK general secretary and Chief Minister Jayalalithaa on Thursday said family rule is anathema to democracy and asserted that her party stood for democratic ideals.



Exhorting her party cadres to propagate welfare schemes implemented by the AIADMK regime, she said, "This election is to save Tamil Nadu from the evil force hankering to have power only for the family."



In a motivational letter to her party workers, she said the poll was to ensure continuity of the "revolutionary" journey of AIADMK, which "shares power with poor, ordinary people and working classes."



"Family rule is out and out against democracy. Having the reins of governance, power and political influence within one family will shatter the idea of equal opportunity to all, which is the basic concept of democracy," she said in an apparent reference to DMK without explicitly naming it.



"Explain the welfare schemes of your sister to the people," she appealed, listing out schemes like free mixers, grinders, 20 kilos of free rice in PDS shops and low-cost food in Amma canteens.



She said: "To ensure continuation of such schemes and for the growth of democratic qualities of equal opportunities, we should bag victory after victory."



The cadres should work with the resolve of "party is bigger than the individual and the victory of the party is our victory."



She urged them to work with full energy, assuming that "your dear sister is contesting in all the 234 constituencies of the state.
Madurai: Calling the DMK-Congress alliance as a corrupt coalition, AIADMK supremo J. Jayalalithaa urged the people to teach a lesson that will hurt them more than it did in 2011 assembly and 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

Campaigning for 47 AIADMK candidates contesting from Madurai, Theni, Sivaganga, Dindigul and Ramanathapuram districts for the upcoming Assembly election on May 16, at Madurai on Wednesday, Jayalalithaa invoked issues that have local resonance like the granite scam, Mullaiperiyar dam and Jallikattu ban issues.

Elaborating on the alleged involvement of DMK chief M. Karunanidhis grandson in the granite scam, she said that though a report on granite scam had been sent to then CM Karunanidhi in 2009, he maintained stoic silence.

Moreover, when a Tamil daily exposed the granite scam in July 2010, instead of conducting an inquiry into it, the editor of the newspaper was booked under a non-bailable offence.

After AIADMK assumed power in 2011, she ordered the district collector to conduct a thorough probe into the granite scam, which revealed that three granite quarries including Olympus, had caused revenue loss of Rs 16,000 crore to the government due to illegal quarrying.

DMK leader Karunanidhis grandson had a share in Olympus, that is why he didnt take action against the granite company, she said. The granite quarrying had stopped completely in Madurai since 2009 and the AIADMK government is following the directions of HC, she pointed out.

Stating that when the UPA government, in which DMK was a part, ruled the country they were involved in various scams such as coal scam, 2G spectrum, Mumbai Adarsh scam and Commonwealth Games, Jayalalithaa urged the people to teach a lesson to the DMK-Congress coalition in this election.

Blaming the DMK-Congress alliance for their failure on the Mullaiperiyar dam and the jallikattu ban issues, she assured the people that if they voted her to power, she would definitely take steps to increase the water level in the dam to 152 feet and lift the ban on jallikattu. She also observed that only after AIADMK assumed power in 2011, the crime rate has come down in the state and people were able to walk freely.
Mr Rao announced that every home in 6,200 villages would get tap water by December-end and 95 per cent of Mission Bhagiratha will be implemented by December 2017.

Hyderabad: At a mammoth public meeting marking the conclusion of the TRS 15th plenary session in Khammam on Wednesday, Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao said that the party would not seek votes in 2019 elections if his government was not able to provide tap water at every home by then.

He said that he dreamt of implemented the TRS election manifesto 100 per cent and had set his eyes on making TS the No. 1 state in the country in all spheres and a big win in the 2019 polls. He asked voters to ensure a victory for minister Tummala Nageswara Rao in the Palair Assembly bypoll.

Spelling out his governments priorities in welfare and developmental schemes, the CM said, Telangana is reeling under severe drought. We are facing droughts every two-three 3 years. The water crisis should go away foreverMission Bhagiratha is the only solution. I am putting the MPs and legislators careers at stake by saying that the TRS will not seek votes if we dont provide tap water to every home this term. Some are trying to put up obstacles, but they wont succeed, he said.

Read: Telangana to get Rs 1 lakh-crore from Centre

Mr Rao announced that every home in 6,200 villages would get tap water by December-end and 95 per cent of Mission Bhagiratha will be implemented by December 2017. He also promised that the government would ensure 24 hour three-phase power by 2019.

Of the three issues we focused on during the Telangana movement, Neellu, Nidhulu and Nimakalu (water, funds and jobs), the funds and jobs issues have been solved. Telangana is now a free state and all funds and jobs are its own. Water is pending. We will ensure drinking water to every home, and to one crore acres. We have earmarked Rs 25,000 crore for the irrigation sector this year, he said.

Mr Rao added, My dream is to see a haritha (green) Telangana, smile on every childs face, uplift of weaker sections, 24-hour power supply, KG-to-PG to all etc. KCR will not sleep till these goals are achieved. We earmarked Rs 35,000 crore for welfare. TS is the only state providing double bedroom housing, Rs 1,000 old-age and other pensions. As long as I have your blessings, I will do what you want. I dont have a high command. People are my boss, he said.

Earlier at the plenary, he had said: We are No. 1 in welfare and have allocated Rs 35,000 crore. We are No. 1 in the IT sector with Rs 60,000 crore IT exports. Economy is vibrant with 15 per cent growth. We may go for a Rs 2-lakh crore Budget in 2019-2020. He added, Power woes are gone. We will get power from Chhattisgarh in October.

Mr Rao asked all MPs, legislators and senior party leaders to complete the laying of pipelines passing through farmers fields under Mission Bhagiratha before May 30. He even recited a couplet of famous poet Enugu Lakshmana Kavi in Telugu: Aarambhincharu Neecha Manavulu... (Some people are scared to start work, some start and leave it midway while some with conviction and commitment complete the task).

For those gunning for MLA tickets and nominated posts, he said that delimitation would increase Assembly seats from 119 to 153, 50 Legislative Council seats from the existing 40, 3,500 to 4,000 posts in market committees, temple committees, corporation, grandhalaya samasthas etc.

He said party, village to state level committees would be constituted, training classes conducted for all sections of party workers and leaders and nominated posts would be filled in a phased manner. Party and government should work in tandem, he added.
Like other elections held in the recent decades, the biggest worry for the Election Commission (EC) these days as it conducts and oversees Assembly elections in Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry, is the excessive use of money by political parties and their candidates to buy votes. Large sums of money, both accounted and unaccounted for, are being spent by candidates in the hope that they will win elections by buying votes.

Studies conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies indicate that while this practice is prevalent in most states to varying degrees, it is much more rampant in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, but not in Kerala. During the last Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu in 2011, more than 70 per cent voters talked of either receiving gifts or money themselves or they had heard of others receiving gifts or money from political parties during the election campaign. The proportion of voters having similar experience is much lower in other states.

In Tamil Nadu, the practice of bribing for votes has become an intrinsic part of election culture. In fact, the kind of freebie culture that has developed in the state in the last one and a half decade is quite unique  gifts have now evolved from welfare goods to consumer goods like TV sets, mobile phones, sewing machines, etc. With more than two weeks left for voting, the cash seized by EC in Tamil Nadu probably meant for buying freebies for voters is much more  Rs 24.90 crore  compared to what has been seized from other states. West Bengal  Rs 12.84 crore, Assam  Rs 12.33 crore, Kerala  Rs 11.73 crore, in and Puducherry the relatively smaller amount of Rs 60.88 lakh.

It is reasonable to believe that money is important to win elections in India, but at the same time it is important to realise that only money cant guarantee victory. True, during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the success rate of candidates who had more than `50 crore as declared asset was 30 per cent, while amongst candidates whose declared asset was much less, between Rs 2 crore to Rs 50 lakh, the success rate was 10 per cent, but that does not mean that only wealthy candidates manage to win elections in India.

The success rate of candidates whose declared assets were between Rs 50 crore and Rs 10 crore, was more or less 30 per cent during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Money is certainly needed to be in serious electoral contest, but candidates cant win election only by distributing gifts and money. If elections could be won only by money, the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabhas would have only very wealthy people.

I am sure as we move closer to the day of voting in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry, candidates will try to use money for bribing voters either by giving them cash, by distributing gifts or even liquor a day or two before the voting. Dry days observed on and around voting days are hardly ever really dry.

Yes, the use of money to bribe voters is disturbing, but one need not worry too much. Indian voters are not up for sale. Voters, whether poor or rich, do not necessarily vote for the candidate from whom theyve received gifts or money.

The same CSDS study also indicated that of voters who received money from candidates, only a few felt obliged to vote for the party from which they had received money. The majority said that they voted as they wished.

Studies indicate that while candidates and parties indulge in various methods to bribe voters, large number of voters in India take pride in their vote and understand its value. They have a strong belief that even if they have one vote, its crucial to bring about change or to keep the incumbent in power. Their voting choices are guided largely by their preference for a party rather than the candidate, and their party choice depends on their day-to-day needs, like roads, drinking water, school, public transport, price rise, etc, rather than the power of money.


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It is extremely disappointing that a book in the Delhi Universitys curriculum, which labels Shahid Bhagat Singh a revolutionary terrorist, got through a system of checks and into academia. Such a view of the history of a man who went smiling to the gallows and who had once written My life has been dedicated to the noblest cause, that of the freedom of the country. Therefore, there is no rest or worldly desire that can lure me now, should have been filtered out long before it got into lecture halls.

The freedom movement also had revolutionaries with militant tendencies, besides the main thrust of Mahatma Gandhis ahimsa. It has been explained on behalf of the lead author of the 1988 book, who is no more, that the term terrorist was used without any pejorative meaning and for want of a different term. The issue has surfaced again because of the carelessness of the syllabus committee in accepting a historical treatise without revising it and more, presenting it to impressionable minds without so much as a footnote of explanation. This is a disservice to a national hero who was hanged age 23  for the killing of police officer John Saunders to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat Rai  after the British colonisers bent their own rules of legal jurisprudence in hanging him.

Bhagat Singh remains a significant figure in our national iconography. The memory of a man who threw non-lethal bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly and then stood with his gun pointing down while surrendering should not be distorted by academic oversight, especially when the nation seems to have embarked upon a debate on nationalism marked more by extreme opinions than moderate ones.
PRESS RELEASE

China Clearly Supporting Russia on Oil

April 27, 2016 (EIRNS)Sputnik, in an article today by regular contributor Pepe Escobar on the "failure" of the Doha meeting of oil-producing nations to reach deal, notes, "The City of Londonvia the FTwants to convey the impression to global public opinion that it all boiled down to a dispute between Prince Mohammed bin Salmanthe conductor of the illegal war on Yemenand Saudi Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi. The son of ailing King Salman has been dubbed the unpredictable new voice of the kingdoms energy policy."

Escobar, based on a "financial source with very close links to the House of Saud," writes that it was actually the Obama White House which killed the "oil production freeze" agreement Russian diplomacy had achieved with Saudi Arabia and other producers.

"A famous 3 a.m. call did take place in Doha on Sunday," he writes. "The young Salman called the Saudi delegation and told them the deal was off. Every other energy market player was stunned by the reversion.

"Yet the true story, according to [the source], is that the United States threatened the Prince that night with the most dire consequences if he did not back down on the oil price freeze.

"Sopredictablythis goes way beyond an internal Saudi matter, or the Princes erratic behavior, even though the House of Saud is indeed racked by multiple instances of fear and paranoia.... As the source explains, an oil production cut would have hindered the US goal of bankrupting Russia via an oil price war, which is what this is all about."

This is undoubtedly how some leading circles in Russia see what failed to happen at Doha.

But the price of oil has not fallen since that failure several weeks ago; it has actually continued its slow rise since mid-February, now reaching $45/barrel for WTI. One clear factor is Chinas support for Russia. China for the past month or so has not only been increasing imports to meet rising demand, but clearly buying and stockpiling additional oil on tankers at several of its ports. Over the past year, the Persian Gulf producers share of Chinas imports has dropped from 55% to 44%, while the Russian share has risen from 14% to 21%.

The other factor overcoming the failure at Doha has been the ongoing "capitulation" of the shale oil sector of Obamas United States. It has been responsible for a 10% drop in total U.S. oil production over the past 18 months, and this fall is accelerating as more and more U.S. onshore oil producers go bankrupt, lose their operating credit lines, or shut down production costs to try to stay out of bankruptcy.
Stories dont interest me, Geoff Dyer told the Huffington Post in 2014. That this is true is evident in his new collection of essays, White Sands. Which doesnt mean that White Sands isnt a good read, because it is. You must, however, get used to Dyers tone, which is persnickety and unenthusiastic. His virtue is not the whole-hearted embrace of experience and exotic locales but the parsing of degrees of disappointment. He also doesnt pretend to be heading anywhere, but then White Sands turns into a memoir and becomes unexpectedly moving.

Geoff Dyer, who now teaches nonfiction at USC, is known for genre demolition according to the Paris Review; his 2011 collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, won that years National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. One of the best essays in the collection is about Dyers experiences as an only child born into limited circumstances in Britain in the 50s: one cousin, not much access to the great world because of his fathers frugality. He came to cherish books and boredom, something I can sympathize with, as another only child. But if stories dont interest a writer, then his fallback option is investigating primarily, or only, his own inner life, and this is Dyers forte.

My least favorite essay in White Sands is the first, Where? What? Where?, about Dyers trip to Tahiti to research a centennial essay on Paul Gauguin. It is lucky that he is by himself, perhaps, because after he loses his book about Gauguin in LAX, he is exceedingly grumpy  he spends about 250 words making fun of Tahitians for being fat, as in They stare at you from the depths of their blubber. I like to think that they were staring at him because they couldnt figure out why he was unable to crack a smile.

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But annoying the reader isnt a bad way to start a book of essays, especially if you are an English writer  think Oscar Wilde and G.K. Chesterton  and after Where? What? Where? Dyers paradoxical style becomes more familiar and more amusing.

The essay Space in Time is a perfect example of what Dyer has to offer. The scene is an art installation somewhere in the desert, but he waits to reveal where it is (so perhaps you the reader will not look it up on Google Maps). The installation is a grid of poles sunk into the desert. Visitors are restricted to a few at a time and required to stay for a day and a night. The natural world here has an alien feel, which Dyer is good at describing (The sun was sinking fast and everything began changing fast. The silver poles glowed goldly.) As darkness gathers, Dyer observes, We were in the midst of what may once have been considered a variety of religious experience. Absence had given way to presence. Throughout the essay he describes the feel of the experience first, then the physical details of the artwork; as a result, the progress of the essay mimics the experience of the visit.

Not every travel experience is as successful, and Dyer is maybe more fascinated by pilgrimages that fail to deliver, such as his journey in search of the Northern Lights, than he is by those that do deliver. In his last few essays, the energy continues to mount. His most deeply felt pilgrimage takes him to that capital of intellectual exile (wait for it)  Los Angeles.

Dyers Los Angeles quest is not about the homes of the stars or Malibu or traffic or even eternal sunshine. It is about Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and other European philosophers and critics who got to L.A. right around the time James Cagney was filming one of my all-time favorite - and entirely non-dialectical/existentialist movies  Yankee Doodle Dandy. Talk about worlds in collision.

Dyer is a longtime lover of Adornos Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, which he discovered in the 80s (and which he once cited in a favorite reads article for the Guardian partly because I loved it but also to  distinguish myself from novelists who I guessed would choose The Go-Between or Tender is the Night or whatever. (No one quite as sneering as a critic, is there?) But his exploration of Adornos and Horkheimers L.A. lives is witty and enlightening, and it transitions us to the last two essays, Something Big, which appeared in Harpers in April, about jazz and the Watts Towers, and, from The London Review of Books, A Stroke of Good Luck about Dyers own unexpected reckoning, possibly brought on by too many doughnuts.

Since Dyer is good at learning from experience, he is good at learning from this one too: We then went through the familiar round of tests, at which, without wishing to boast, I had come to excel: hand squeezing, face stroking, finger counting, and so on. Dyers tone as he relates his frightening brush with tragedy is calm and full of curiosity, possibly as a result of eschewing drama for his entire life.

White Sands is a short book, brisk, hard to take and worth the attempt, just the sort of paradox Dyer most enjoys.

The third volume of Smileys Last Hundred Years trilogy was published in the fall.

::

White Sands

Geoff Dyer

Pantheon: 256 pp., $25
No one would ever mistake Facebook for a shareholder-friendly company. From the moment of its initial public offering in May 2012, it's been entirely under the control of its co-founder, chairman and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Thanks to a two-class stock structure in which Zuckerberg held impregnable control over shares with super-voting rights, he owned 28% of all outstanding shares but 57% of all shareholder votes.

Now he owns or controls even less of the company -- about 16% -- and fully 60.1% of the votes; he owns or controls barely any Class A shares, which get a measly one vote each, but 85.3% of the Class B shares, which get 10 votes each.

The board believes that a large part of Facebooks success has stemmed from the leadership, creative vision and management of Mark Zuckerberg, and that the companys future success will depend on Marks continued leadership.  Facebook statement on third class of stock

But that's not enough. Facebook announced Wednesday that it plans to issue a third class of shares, Class C, that will have zero votes. The purpose is to allow Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to pursue the dream of giving 99% of their shares to charity, without losing an iota of his voting control. Shareholders will have to vote on the arrangement, but because non-Zuckerberg voting power already is a joke, we can assume it will pass.

To hear Facebook (and Zuckerberg) talk, this is all to the great benefit of the shareholders.

"The board believes that a large part of Facebooks success has stemmed from the leadership, creative vision and management of Mark Zuckerberg, and that the companys future success will depend on Marks continued leadership," reads a statement on the company's website attributed to general counsel Colin Stretch. The new structure, he wrote, has the virtue of "allowing the company to maintain focus on Marks long-term vision for Facebook [and] encouraging Mark to remain involved with Facebook in a leadership role." (Did he really need encouragement?)

Love Mark Zuckerberg? If youre a shareholder, you better, because as long as he controls 60% of the vote you have no say in how he manages your company. (Facebook 2016 proxy statement) (Test)

Zuckerberg himself states candidly that "Ill be able to keep founder control of Facebook so we can continue to build for the long term, and Priscilla and I will be able to give our money to fund important work sooner."

Facebook isn't the first company to issue two classes of shares in order to safeguard control by insiders. It's not even the first company to issue three classes of stock; Alphabet (the company formerly known as Google) created a third class of non-voting shares in 2014 so the company could issue shares to use as acquisition currency without eroding the voting power of co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Zuckerberg & Co. certainly aren't pioneers in treating the concept of "shareholder democracy" as a cynical fantasy. Corporate shareholders in general have contributed to the devaluation of their rights by consistently failing to exercise them. In corporate America, a 30% vote against management is considered a huge shareholder victory, because it happens so rarely.

Facebooks record of soaring shares is what enables it to treat shareholders like sheep. (Ycharts) (Test)

The New York Stock Exchange, which was once the guardian of shareholder rights (for part of its history, anyway) once stood foursquare against the dilution of shareholder authority via multiple classes of stock. After a similar trend emerged during the 1920s -- with consequences that don't need pointing out -- the Big Board imposed a blanket rule against listing non-voting shares. That lasted only from 1940 until 1956, when Ford Motor Co. announced an IPO that would maintain voting control for the Ford family. The exchange gave in, followed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had also tried to hold back the tide of self-interested and entrenched shareholdings.

Facebook signaled how lightly it respects the concept of shareholder rights by endowing its three-class scheme with a fatuous justifications. The company assured holders that the plan was vetted by three ostensibly independent outside directors -- venture investor Mark Andreessen, politico Erskine Bowles, and Susan Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- who gave it thumbs-up. But what do they care? Altogether, those three directors own about two-hundredths of 1% of Facebook shares. They're not likely to stand up for shareholder rights, because they're barely shareholders themselves.

Facebook says the Class C shares will have "the same economic rights as the existing Class A and Class B shares," but that's plainly untrue if one considers a vote fundamentally an economic right. The Facebook board has simply redefined the value of a shareholder vote out of existence.

The downside of two-class share structure: Zynga (blue), Groupon (orange) and LinkedIn (red) have all suffered in relation to the S&P 500 (green) under their insiders control. (Ycharts) (Test)

The company's judgment of the sheepleness of its shareholders evidently was well placed, because the existing shares soared after the announcement; as of this writing, the stock is reaching an all-time high of $117.75, up more than 8% on the day. Most of that rise was fueled by the company's gilt-edged report for the first quarter ended March 31 -- a 52% increase in revenue and tripling of net income over the same period a year ago.

Yet the effort to chisel Zuckerberg's control into stone has the flavor of an idea that looks great right up to the moment that it doesn't look at all good. The shareholders' marriage to Zuckerberg's vision and -- let's face it -- whims is hard to argue with as long as Facebook turns in results like this. But if the engine sputters, what then? As I advised shareholders in May 2012, just after the IPO, "[y]ou better hope he does everything right, because if he doesn't, he'll be harder to get rid of than tuberculosis."

Examples abound of founder-friendly share structures that have done nothing to make companies successful, especially in the tech sector. Among the youthful companies with near-impregnable insider control are Zynga, Groupon, and LinkedIn. Over the last two years, they've all woefully underperformed the overall stock market. But such companies aren't open to outside advice that might improve their prospects. The only choice shareholders have is to sell -- and that's what they do, with alacrity. Over the last two years, Zynga is down nearly 38%, Groupon about 34%, and LinkedIn about 20%. The Standard & Poor's 500 index is up 12%.

RELATED: How creating new Facebook stock will keep Mark Zuckerberg in control

Super-voting arrangements fundamentally display contempt for the very principle of public share ownership. If that's the attitude, the best way to ensure Mark Zuckerberg's permanent control of Facebook was to keep it private. Indeed, it was clear at the time of Facebook's IPO that it didn't need to go public to raise money, and did so only to meet regulatory rules mandating public financial disclosures once shares in a company become distributed widely enough. But the company could have found ways to avoid that outcome.

There's an adage in the venture capital world that public investors bring a company cheap money, but dumb money. Facebook seems determined to squeeze that notion until it screams for mercy. But does it have to show that it thinks its shareholders are that dumb?

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com

Return to Michael Hiltzik's blog.

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In yet another attempt to show that Republicans can be just as serious about healthcare reforms as Democrats, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) called Wednesday for eliminating the Affordable Care Act's guarantee of insurance for people with preexisting medical conditions.

Ryan didn't advocate cutting off these people entirely, but instead moving them into state high-risk pools that would subsidize their coverage. Taking them out of the general insurance population would "dramatically lower the price for everybody else" -- presumably everyone who was healthy. Speaking to students at Georgetown University, Ryan implied that this would be no big deal, because "less than 10% of people under 65 are what we call people with preexisting conditions, who are really kind of uninsurable."

You could almost invite some of these pools over for dinner. They're really dinky. There are only six that have more than 10,000 enrollees.  Georgetown University health policy expert Karen Pollitz, describing high-risk pools in 2009

A couple of points about this. First, Ryan's estimate of the population with preexisting conditions is wildly low. Second, high-risk pools aren't a new idea. They're an old idea that was tried by 35 states before the enactment of Obamacare made them unnecessary. And they were massive failures.

Put these facts together, and what you have is a scam.

Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum observes that Republican love to portray high-risk pools as "some kind of bold, new, free-market alternative to Obamacare." His judgment: "They aren't. They've been around forever and everyone knows they don't work."

Let's start with Ryan's estimate of the affected population. Studies dating from before the ACA tended to place the figure much higher. The Department of Health and Human Services estimated in 2011 that 50 million to 129 million Americans under 65, or 19% to 50%, had some kind of preexisting condition and up to 20% of them were uninsured. The ratio rose sharply with age, so that as many as 86% of those aged 55 to 64 were at risk of being denied insurance because of their medical condition. In 2012, FamiliesUSA came up with a lower but still significant estimate: Nearly 25% of all Americans under 65 could be denied coverage without the ACA protections, the group said. They found that nearly 20% of those aged 18 to 24 had a "diagnosed significant preexisting condition." The figure rose to 50% of those 55 to 64.

It's important to note that preexisting conditions didn't always lead to denial of insurance. Often they led to higher rates, sometimes so high they made insurance unaffordable for those needing it most.

The ratio of Americans vulnerable to insurance denials for preexisting conditions rises sharply with age, as this 2011 federal estimate shows. (HHS) (Test)

Recognizing that this had become a significant public health problem, dozens of states established high-risk pools to take these troublesome applicants off the insurance industry's hands. The programs universally were failures, leaving millions of residents without affordable coverage.

As health economist Austin Frakt has observed, by 2000, high-risk pool enrollment came to only 8% of the uninsurable population nationally, ranging by state from 1% to 54%. The problem was inadequate funding, which prompted states either to place caps on enrollments or saddle members with sky-high premiums. "We estimated that high-risk pool premiums were above 25% of family income for 29% of the medically uninsurable population," Frakt wrote. "That is, even when high-risk pool enrollment was possible, for a large minority of medically uninsurable individuals, it was unaffordable."

California's pool, the Major Risk Medical Insurance Program, or "MR. MIP," illustrated the problem. In 1990, when the program began with a $30-million budget funded by tobacco taxes, that was sufficient to enroll only 10,000 of the estimated 300,000 Californians who qualified. In 2009, enrollment was cut back to 7,100. Premiums were set as much as 37% higher than market rates for individual policies. The plans came with annual caps of $75,000 in benefits, not enough to cover treatments for some major diseases.

Nationwide, enrollment in state pools was so meager that "you could almost invite some of these pools over for dinner," Georgetown University health policy expert Karen Pollitz has reported. "They're really dinky. There are only six that have more than 10,000 enrollees."

Would high-risk pools fare any better today? It's doubtful. Ryan's apparent effort to low-ball the potential enrollment indicates that he and his colleagues are utterly unprepared to accept the cost of segregating the medically uninsurable in their own coverage pool. Like every program for the economically or socially needy, a federally-funded high-risk program would be first on the chopping block every time a House or Senate committee decided that government needed to shrink.

Keep in mind that conservative economist James Capretta estimated in 2010 that a high-risk program would need $15 billion to $20 billion a year to cover 4 million enrollees -- and he was in favor of the idea. And that as recently as last year Ryan, as House Budget Committee chairman, was pushing to cut $12.5 billion a year from the food stamp program, in part by turning it over to the states as a block-grant program. There lies the future of protection for those with preexisting conditions under Ryan's scheme. It's all about cost-cutting, pure and simple. As an alternative to Obamacare's flat outlawing of such exclusions, it won't wash.

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

Return to Michael Hiltzik's blog.
Even though its shares have tanked, the Southern California biotech firm NantKwest Inc. gave its top executive, Patrick Soon-Shiong, a pay package last year worth almost $148 million, according to a stock filing Wednesday.

Soon-Shiong sold shares in NantKwest, a San Diego cancer research firm, to the public in July. Its stock was priced initially at $25 a share, and surged over the next couple of days. But the shares have sunk since then and are now down 65% since the IPO, closing Wednesday at $8.73.

The company is now defending itself against a class-action lawsuit brought by shareholders who say they were misled when executives said in March they would have to restate the companys financial statements for the second and third quarters.

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Those accounting errors related, in part, to Soon-Shiongs compensation package, the company said then.

According to Wednesdays filing, Soon-Shiong, a Los Angeles billionaire who serves as the companys chairman, received stock worth $15 million, as well as stock-option awards that the company valued at $132.2 million.

He also received $1 in salary for 2015 and a $386,301 bonus.

The package would make him one of the highest paid CEOs last year.

Soon-Shiong and his investment firm own 57% of NantKwests shares, according to the companys filing.

Barry Simon, NantKwests president and chief operating officer, received a salary and stock package valued at more than $21 million, according to the filing.

Jen Hodson, a spokeswoman for the company, said Soon-Shiong was traveling out of the country for business and could not be reached for comment.

Soon-Shiong, 63, became a billionaire oncologist after selling two other drug companies: APP Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 2008 and Abraxis BioScience Inc. in 2010.

NantKwest is focusing on developing cancer therapies that use the human immune system to fight the disease. The firm has operations in Culver City.

melody.petersen@latimes.com
Located on a corner lot close to the beach, this striking cobalt-colored contemporary home features crisp interiors designed by Sally Trout and a verdant landscape with pool. Artistic modern finishes, light fixtures and designer tile complement an open-concept floor plan awash in natural light and ocean breezes.

Address: 2727 11th St., Santa Monica, 90405

Price: $2.275 million

Built: 1944

Lot size: 5,925 square feet

House size: 2,279 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

Features: Open-concept floor plan; wood floors; contemporary light fixtures and finishes; wine refrigerator; fireplace in master suite; Nest smart thermostat; energy-efficient AC; energy-efficient doors and weatherstripping; swimming pool; mature landscaping; a hidden cabinet connects the detached garage to the house

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About the area: The median sale price for single-family homes in the 90405 ZIP Code in March was $1.82 million, based on nine sales, according to CoreLogic. That was a 13.4% increase in median price compared with March 2015.

Agents: Tamra Pardee, Kerry Ann Sullivan, Pardee Properties, (310) 907-6517

To submit a candidate for Home of the Day, send high-resolution color photos via Dropbox.com, permission from the photographer to publish the images and a description of the house to neal.leitereg@latimes.com.

Follow Bonnie McCarthy on Twitter @ThsAmericanHome
Billionaire business magnate Carl Icahn, whose investment decisions can influence the stock market, said Thursday that he dumped what was left of his nearly 1% stake in Apple Inc. on fears that Chinese authorities would bully the iPhone maker.

Shares of Apple sank after his announcement in a live interview on CNBC. The shares have lost 9% of their value since Apple revealed Tuesday troubling first-quarter financial results, including a 26% sales drop in Greater China compared with the same period last year.

See the most-read stories this hour >>

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China obviously could be a shadow for it, and we have to look at that, Icahn said of Apple.

Chinese consumers once infatuated with the iPhone as a status symbol of new wealth have increasingly turned to more affordable smartphone alternatives. And regulators in China recently took aggressive action against Apple, blocking access to the companys online stores for digital books and movies. Its unclear when access might be restored.

Financial analysts say its too early to worry about the falling sales in Apples largest market after U.S. Apple executives said Tuesday that they remained committed to China and that its economy is steadier than many believe. The company also manufacturers in China.

But the capricious nature of Chinas government was too much for Icahn to stomach, especially after an unexpected tumble in oil prices ravaged his energy industry bets last year.

I worry a little bit that a tsunami could hit it, he told CNBC.

Icahn bought nearly 53 million Apple shares about three years ago. Last May, he said the company should be worth almost double, or more than $1 trillion. But months later, he sold 7 million shares before putting the rest back on the market this year.

He said he made $2 billion off the trading and estimated that people who bought in shortly after he initially did have generated a 50% return.

Icahn called Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook on Thursday morning to disclose the sell-off. Cook was sorry to hear it, he said.

But Icahn noted he still believes that Apple shares are undervalued and that he would hop back in if conditions in China were more settled.

I would tell you if I thought something is wrong with the company and management, he said. I got out ... because Im worried about China and have this huge profit.

Shares shot up 5% the day Icahn first announced a large position in Apple. They were down 3% on Thursday, or $3.01, to $94.81.

paresh.dave@latimes.com

Twitter: @peard33

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How odd is it to be trapped inside the parallel, ever-accelerating cycles of amnesia and nostalgia that mark American culture these days? Pretty odd. Youd be forgiven, for example, for experiencing a certain degree of confusion, if not outright philosophical whiplash, about the attitude were currently expected to display toward the art and architecture that emerged two decades ago, in the middle of the 1990s.

At L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, a new show called Dont Look Back: the 1990s at MOCA  alternate title Please Do, Actually, Look Back or You Might Enjoy a Spin Through the Gift Shop When You Are Done Looking Back  is celebrating the work produced in that decade by Paul McCarthy, Cady Noland, Sarah Sze and other artists.

Nearly 400 miles due north, meanwhile, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will on May 14 open a massive new $305-million wing by the prolific Norwegian firm Snohetta that doesnt merely extend but performs a smooth lobotomy on the museums existing building, which was designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta and opened in  you guessed it  1995.

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There are all kinds of practical reasons the museum deemed this surgery necessary and even urgent. The 235,000-square-foot addition, which stacks seven stories of gallery space and three administrative levels behind the old brick-wrapped Botta building, is anchored by a wide lobby stretching across its second floor. Forging an open connection between that space and the entry to the old building along Third Street seemed to require that the hulking staircase filling Bottas atrium be removed.

Taking its place is a much smaller staircase by Snohetta, clad in maple, that leads directly from the new lobby down to the old one. The really striking quality of that moment of aggression toward the Botta building is that is seems altogether out of character with the rest of the addition. In almost every other way the Snohetta design is handsome, carefully intelligent, self-effacing and agreeable.

Throughout the new wing, the architecture never really has an opportunity to approach, let alone challenge, the primacy of the art. For the most part the galleries are roomy, minimalist and crisply effective, light filtering down from coved ceilings.

The raised Snohetta lobby, with its polished terrazzo floors, operates as a kind of gleaming way station between a new sidewalk-floor gallery that is open to the public without ticketing (called the Roberts Family Gallery, it now holds Richard Serras sculpture Sequence, from 2006) and the higher floors of the new building.

The only interior moments of architectural drama come along the eastern edge of the new wing -- in the windows offering carefully arranged views toward San Francisco Bay and staircases, again in maple, that grow narrower as they move higher -- and the bathrooms, which are flooded with intense monochromatic color, a different shade for each floor.

Outside, as a presence in the cityscape, the Snohetta tower, clad in rippling off-white panels of fiberglass-reinforced polymer, is even more apologetic about both its ambition and its bulk. It is everywhere shaved off and pinned back, forever curving away from you as you stand on its one of extensive outdoor terraces and try to assess its scale and civic personality.

The contrast between that attitude and the way the other new towers in San Franciscos thickening skyline carry themselves is extreme. As you look east from the higher of the two terraces, on the seventh floor, you are confronted with the aggressively large and broad-shouldered dark-glass form of a new 26-story office building at 2nd and Howard streets, designed by Thomas Phifer and leased by LinkedIn. The SFMOMA tower is by comparison all stooping form and retreating volume.

The unfortunate symbolism of this relationship  the cultural building practically tripping over itself to stand down and out of the way, the new commercial buildings blithely taking up as much space in the sky as they can  seems typical of the balance of power in the new, money-drenched San Francisco. (The arts are not so much on the run here  how could they be, when there is so much wealth on so many boards of trustees?  as keenly aware of their place in the pecking order.)

It also qualifies as the great surprise of the new Snohetta wing. The renderings suggested it might be some giant iceberg or museum-world cruise ship, sliding its overwhelming bulk into port just behind Bottas brick-wrapped wedding cake. In fact the final product is quite efficiently tucked away on a tricky and constrained site. From the sidewalk in front of the old building it is impossible to see even the top floor of the new wing.

Around back and down again at ground level, the Snohetta building comes alive in a complex attempt to simultaneously squeeze the most out of its small footprint and open itself up to the surrounding streets. Though plenty of visitors are expected to keep using the 3rd Street entrance, coming up through the Botta atrium, a second and equally important entry now opens alongside a kind of back alley onto Howard Street. Two sets of stairs, one inside stepping up from the free gallery with the Serra and the other outside, under the overhang of the new wing, lead from the street up to the main lobby floor on Snohettas level two.

In that deftly handled sequence of spaces, some inside and some outside, some urban and some purely architectural, you get a clear sense of the heights Snohetta is capable of reaching when given real room to operate. (The firm, which first made a name for itself by winning a 1989 design competition for a new Alexandria Library in Egypt, is one of seven finalists for the plum Obama Presidential Library commission in Chicago.)

Still, even as the intelligence of that part of the design lingers in your mind, the relationship of the new wing to the existing building, of Snohetta to Botta, remains tough to figure. There is both real deference and an odd sort of architectural fratricide in the way the new building treats the old one.

In order to preserve the galleries in the older building, which the museum clearly needs, as well as its profile in the cityscape, SFMOMA has gone to great lengths to protect and honor the Botta. The gallery floors of the new wing are lined up exactly with those of the old one. In the public and circulation spaces the equation is reversed. With the stair gone, the old structure operates as an emptied and oversized entry hall to the new wing, a baggy antechamber whose proportions now feel all wrong, even as it gets a better quality of reflected sunlight than it used to from above.

So look back, SFMOMA seems to be suggesting. Embrace the Botta building and its importance. But also dont look back, because the architectural integrity of that building, which relied to a large degree on that staircase, isnt crucial in the end, at least not in the museums judgment.

SFMOMA has killed its 1995 building to save it, or saved it to kill it. Take your pick. Its a strategy that might make sense if the Botta were layered or complex enough as a work of architecture to survive this kind of dismantling. But its not. It was never an especially persuasive or stirring building before  it was fine, it spoke of a moment -- and looks even less sure of itself now.

The new wing, for its part, is left to fold and bend itself in a series of gymnastic maneuvers to fit into the space left over behind the hollowed-out Botta. Its an odd, nearly perverse bit of reasoning, at least for anyone who cares about architecture: Were going to give pride of place in the urban sequence, the museum leadership has decided, to a building whose basic architectural logic, which flowed directly from the presence and solidity of the old stair, we find entirely disposable.

All of which leads to an obvious question: Should the museum simply have knocked down the older building and started from scratch on a prominent and roomy site? My trip to San Francisco has left me thinking it probably should have.

And not simply because the way it has treated the Botta seems the worst of both worlds. Far more because what San Francisco needs at the moment is a full-on and unapologetic expression of contemporary architecture and culture, granted both the space and the institutional permission to make its own statement, to be surprising, challenging, occasionally irrational and maybe even downright weird.

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opens its doors to the public on May 14, just shy of three years after closing for a $305-million expansion of its building, now doubled in size. The new galleries are capacious and well organized.

The big attention-getter will likely be the fifth and sixth floors. They house impressive monographic galleries, each tracking a single artist in splendid isolation.

The numbers are extraordinary.

Individual rooms feature 24 hard-edge abstract paintings, drawings and reliefs by Ellsworth Kelly; 18 figurative and abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter; 14 silkscreens on canvas by Andy Warhol (most from the crucial 1960s); 11 Photorealist artist portraits in various media by Chuck Close; seven Agnes Martin grid and stripe paintings (installed in a heptagon-shaped room, recalling the sublime space at the Harwood Museum in Taos, N.M., where the artist once lived); five geometrically ordered Minimalist sculptures by Carl Andre; and five monumental mixed-media paintings of a decaying German mythos by Anselm Kiefer (plus one large model airplane in lead, an emphatically heavier-than-air machine conjuring the cruel historical weight of the failed Luftwaffe and its celebrated pilot artist, Joseph Beuys).

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Elsewhere theres a lovely glass-walled gallery with 11 delicate sculptures (mostly mobiles) by Alexander Calder; another with four Richard Serra sculptures of precariously balanced steel plates plus a classic site-specific piece in which he splashed molten lead into the gutter between a wall and the floor, as well as an enormous rolled steel labyrinth-sculpture in a new museum lobby; and a room of 26 distinctive Diane Arbus photographs of socially marginalized people navigating life in a new era dominated by homogenized mass media.

I lost count of the number of Sol LeWitt abstract wall drawings and Minimalist cube sculptures, both exploiting a predetermined structural idea to generate the art. Suffice to say: a lot.

And thats just to start. Phew! Its a blue-chip blow-out.

You might also notice that this is entirely a selection of New York wares, almost all by men, with some produced in Germany but all vetted in Manhattans governing marketplace. That doesnt mean that its bad  especially because a lot, if not most, is very, very good. (Are better surveys of Warhol, Richter or Kelly displayed in any museum? No.) Its deep but narrow.

Nor is a gallery of comparable scope devoted to an artist of equal significance from San Francisco or Los Angeles, even though this is a venerable California museum and there are plenty of candidates. Serra is the closest SFMOMA comes: He was born in the city in 1938 but left California at 22 for art school at Yale.

Most of the work in the monographic galleries is on a renewable long-term loan  effectively permanent, barring unforeseen upheaval  from the contemporary painting and sculpture collection amassed by Gap clothing founders Doris and Donald Fisher. It totals 1,100 works, one-quarter are on view. Like Eli and Edythe Broad, their Los Angeles counterparts, the Fishers ramped up their collecting in the 1980s, the decade that launched the now-stratospheric market for blue-chip contemporary art.

The resulting collection is what it is  and for what it is, its exceptional. Going forward, SFMOMAs challenge is to broaden the purview.

The museums ambitious building project, launched seven years ago, was prompted to accommodate the Fisher collection. (Another $305 million was raised toward endowment and other expenses.) The handsomely appointed result warrants the overused term transformational. Exactly what the museum is being transformed into, however, is not yet clear.

That is to be expected, given the circumstances. One reason is that the city that has been the institutions home for more than 80 years is itself undergoing a sea change.

As the first shovels of dirt were being moved to build a seven-story wrap-around of SFMOMAs existing, still-new 1995 structure, the invasion of tech workers from nearby Silicon Valley was underway. The deluge is turning a historically modest urban enclave into something on the order of a commuters bedroom suburb  albeit one with amenities galore and a cost of living to match.

That hasnt existed anywhere in the U.S. before. An established if fluid sense of community, long a notable San Francisco hallmark, is now under stress.

Inevitably endangered is an art scene with artists at its center, rather than institutions, wealthy collectors and powerful dealers. Opportunities are disappearing for space in which to live and work. Artists get pushed out, and the arrival of young artists, who renew a citys cultural lifeblood, is interrupted.

Another reason for the lack of clarity is museum-specific. SFMOMA is opening at a time when the nature of art museums is likewise under stress.

Once firmly embedded in their local communities, more and more art museums now chase transient tourists. San Francisco may be only Americas 13th largest city, but its also among the top destinations in lists of national and international U.S. travel.

This is especially true of contemporary art museums. Despite the word Modern in its title and a history traced to the Great Depressions darkest days, the newly expanded SFMOMA is now more than ever a contemporary art museum. Art since the 1960s is the centerpiece.

In conversations during a recent visit, museum director Neal Benezra and chief curator Gary Garrels were keenly aware of the complex institutional issues. But they also have a museum to open. Sensibly, the buildings inaugural presentations recognize that things are in flux.

Typically a project like this would debut with a reconceived installation of the permanent collection and perhaps a major special exhibition. Instead, SFMOMAs inauguration is marked by a whopping 18 shows  all drawn from the collection. (I saw all 18 in one day, which I do not recommend.) The program displays justifiable pride in what the museum has acquired, including Bay Area art, while subtly suggesting that recent art histories are anything but fixed.

Even the second floor, housing the historical collection, is affected. The installation largely re-creates the spotty but sporadically great collection hanging on the same walls when the museum closed in June 2013. Now it feels less like a static, woefully incomplete lesson in art history and more like the fitful story of the citys museum. Big gaps in Modern painting and sculpture feel less important.

SFMOMA would surely love to have an Analytical Cubist Picasso painting. Yet, hanging exactly where they were before are Henri Matisses radically brilliant 1905 portrait of his wife, Woman With a Hat, shaping space and form just with color and line; Frida Kahlos 1931 dual portrait of herself and husband Diego Rivera, mythologizing both; and, Jackson Pollocks 1943 exercise in coded messaging from the unconscious, Guardians of the Secret.

More important for the motivation to build the new building, however, is a room of six abstractions by Clyfford Still, selected from 28 monumental paintings given in 1975 by the pivotal Abstract Expressionist. This deep, single-artist room is a template for the Fisher collection shows upstairs.

So the inaugural has been sensibly organized by turning to an established SFMOMA strength. Another is photography and its media arts cousins, both analog and digital. Wonderful to see is Beryl Korots 1974 Dachau, a probing four-channel video of a notorious killing factory turned into a queasy tourist site.

The museums elaborate new Pritzker Center for Photography is billed as the largest facility of its kind in an American museum. Its 15,000 square feet make it roughly twice the size of the Getty Museums Brentwood photo galleries, although its nearly 18,000 photographs  a very fine holding  are dwarfed by the Gettys 200,000 images.

Two shows, one on Western landscapes and the other on photographic conceptions of time, are on view. But the combined display of a whopping 356 photographs is excessive. Coming upon Jason Lazarus newly commissioned photo installation, Recordings #3 (At Sea), is a relief.

Lazarus pinned scores of ordinary found snapshots facing the wall, exposing only their descriptive annotations written on the back (Father and Paul in the hayfield, I left, Down the mountainside). Imagination and memory intersect as pictures in the minds eye  apt for photography.

SFMOMA has also been careful to highlight its ongoing Campaign for Art, which has garnered some 3,000 individual gifts. The museum, while acknowledging the monumental Fisher collection, is plainly concerned about appearing to have a lone, big-foot benefactor. (Separate catalogs chronicle both acquisitions.) While including some individual works superior to Fisher examples, such as 1960s paintings by Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, the campaign is also far more diverse in its artistic representation of ethnicity, gender and geography.

Thats essential for a contemporary museum in a globalized art world. But it also speaks to a thorny problem.

Art in todays expanded field cannot be comprehensively contained. SFMOMA now has impressive strengths in New York Pop and Minimalism, recent German painting, camera work and numerous established individual artists. Where will it go from here?

christopher.knight@latimes.com
An undated photo provided by NASA and made by NASAs Hubble Space Telescope shows a small, dark moon orbiting Makemake, the second brightest icy dwarf planet.

Cape Canaveral: Chalk up a moon for the icy dwarf planet Makemake.The Hubble Space Telescope has detected a tiny, dark moon circling the dwarf planet on the frozen fringes of our solar system. On Tuesday, scientists announced the discovery by some members of the team that spotted Pluto's smaller moons years ago.

Makemake itself is just 870 miles wide. Its moon  dubbed MK2  is a mere 100 miles across and more than 1,300 times fainter with its black surface. Makemake is named after the creation deity in the Rapa Nui mythology of Easter Island.

Hubble's wide-field camera made the observations last April, spotting MK2 13,000 miles from Makemake. Previous searches were unsuccessful because of the glare from Makemake. Further observations will be needed to determine if MK2's orbit is circular or oval.

Scientists said the discovery is further evidence that most dwarf planets way out in the Kuiper Belt  well beyond the orbit of Neptune  do, indeed, seem to have moons. MK2 will allow researchers to study Makemake in even greater detail, said Alex Parker of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who led the image analyses.

"It is a very exciting discovery!" Parker said in an email. "It means that Makemake is no longer the odd-one-out in the moon-hosting Kuiper Belt dwarf planet club, and it means that we can do detailed studies of the mass and density of Makemake that would have been impossible without the moon."

Makemake is second to Pluto in brightness among the dwarf planets known to inhabit the Kuiper Belt.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
A Los Angeles County judge on Wednesday denied a request by Sumner Redstones attorneys to bar the public from viewing certain portions of his healthcare trial.

The request by the ailing 92-year-old media moguls legal team to close portions of the trial, including testimony from doctors and his nurses, came two weeks before the May 6 trial that will determine whether the controlling shareholder of Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. is mentally competent.

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The tentative ruling by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David J. Cowan was a victory for members of the media and investors who argued that the proceedings should be open to the public.

In this country we have open trials, Cowan said. This is not Russia.

He added that it is not practical to partially seal the trial as Redstones attorneys had sought to do, outlining a plan to limit portions of the trial that would involve ushering nonlawyers and others in and out of the courtroom when necessary.

Jean-Paul Jassy, a lawyer representing the Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Reporter, had argued the plan submitted by Redstones lawyers would restrict the publics right to attend the trial.

1 / 10 Media magnate Sumner Redstone attends the dedication of the Sumner Redstone Production Studios at USC on Feb. 5, 2013. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 10 Sumner Redstone, right, and members of the USC marching band are shown at the dedication of the Sumner Redstone Production Studios at USC on Feb. 5, 2013. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 10 Sumner Redstone, seated, was honored by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 30, 2012. (Christina House / For the Los Angeles Times) 4 / 10 Philippe Dauman, left, now the chief executive of Viacom, and Sumner Redstone are photographed at Redstones home in Beverly Hills on September 27, 2007. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times) 5 / 10 Sumner Redstone and his then-wife, Paula Fortunato, attend the premiere of Paramounts Zodiac in Los Angeles on March 1, 2007. (Reed Saxon / Associated Press) 6 / 10 Paramount Pictures Chief Executive Brad Grey, from left, Sumner Redstone and producer Brian Grazer attend the Friends of the Los Angeles Free Clinic annual gala at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Nov. 20, 2006. (Phil McCarten / Associated Press) 7 / 10 Actor Clint Eastwood, from left, businessman Sumner Redstone, director Steven Spielberg and Paramount Pictures Chief Executive Brad Grey attend the Paramount Pictures premiere of Flags of Our Fathers in Beverly Hills on Oct. 9, 2006. (Kevin Winter / Getty Images) 8 / 10 Sumner Redstone poses with his then-wife, Paula Fortunato, at their Beverly Hills home on June 10, 2005. (Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times) 9 / 10 Businessman Sumner Redstone is photographed in a screening room at National Amusements on Oct. 2, 1998. (John Blanding / Boston Globe via Getty Images) 10 / 10 From left, Sumner Redstones then-wife, Phyllis Raphael, poses with Sumner Redstone, Sherry Lansing, Wendy Neuss and Patrick Stewart at the National Conference of Christians and Jews annual Humanitarian Award Dinner on April 23, 1998, at which businessman Sumner Redstone was honored. (Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)

Cowan also assured that he intends to keep the trial from becoming sensationalistic.

The court intends for this trial to be dignified and focus on the legal issues that are to be decided and not be distracted by things that would be undignified or injurious to the patients interest, Cowan said. He acknowledged some balance would be required.

The trial was set in motion by Redstones ex-companion Manuela Herzer over who is Redstones healthcare agent. Herzer argues that Redstone lacked the mental competency to remove her from his advance healthcare directive last October.

Redstones attorneys contend the billionaire was fully aware of his actions to name Viacoms chief executive, Philippe Dauman, as his healthcare agent. Earlier this month, Redstone made another change, naming his daughter, Shari, as the person to make his healthcare decisions.

In the course of the five-month lead-up to the trial, the billionaires lawyers have repeatedly sought to seal documents and depositions.

Wednesdays hearing also saw Herzers lawyers make another move to have Redstone himself testify as witness in the upcoming trial.

A hearing is set for Monday afternoon to decide whether Redstone will give testimony.

Cowan also agreed that if the parties can pare down their witness lists, two additional days of trial (May 13 and 16) would be added.

Do we need all these nurses? Cowan said at one point.

I tweet about TV (and other things) here: @villarrealy
Early in the film Late Shift, Matt, a student on his way to a night job, faces an easily relatable dilemma: help a lost tourist with directions and risk being late to work or ignore the man and hop on a waiting subway train. Here is where you would expect director Tobias Weber to show the audience the outcome of Matts decision as the story unfolds.

Matts choice, however, is up to you, the viewer. In fact, you control every major plot turn in the film. Late Shift, created by CtrlMovie, a small studio in Switzerland, and written by Weber and Michael Robert Johnson, best known for Guy Ritchies Sherlock Holmes, may be the worlds first fully realized choose-your-own-adventure film.

Do you follow the orders of a car hijacker or a make a run for it? Do you trust the police or the whims of the woman offering you an opening to the underworld?

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Each viewer  or player, depending on whether you define Late Shift as a movie or a game  must decide to act selfless or selfish, to fight or take flight. To become a hero or end up in a body bag.

Available now for Apples iOS devices, the $9.99 game-movie hybrid is a heist-thriller starring an ordinary man mixed up in nearly unbelievable circumstances. And because you control this mans decisions, or at least the illusion of control, you are also the star.

Tap the screen on an iPhone, choose an option and and Late Shift seamlessly shifts direction. Two people can play the film and see two distinct plots play out, complete with differing locations. Each viewing runs between 70 minutes and 90 minutes, depending on the choices made, but all told, the Late Shift app contains about five hours of film.

Is this the future of moviemaking? Maybe.

Director Steven Soderberghs upcoming project Mosaic, largely shrouded in mystery, reportedly has some choose-your-own-adventure elements. And in late April, the multinational company Interlude revealed that it was working on an interactive reboot of The Twilight Zone, this after already unveiling that it was doing the same with WarGames.

Are these gimmicks? Or will the idea of a film as a passive experience soon start to change?

That space between film and game is a very important space, says Late Shift director Weber.

Everyone is trying to go there, by one way or the other, he adds. A lot of games have become more and more cinematic. In terms of looks, they look better and better and more realistic. In terms of storytelling, games have also become more interesting. Its not just shooting and puzzles. There are great stories being told. A lot of games are pushing in that direction. We wanted to achieve the same, but coming from the opposite direction, from the film side. We want to teach cinema a few new tricks.

First, they need to conquer a few long-standing prejudices.

When you say, interactive move, people think, Ive seen that before and it doesnt work. Its boring, says producer Baptiste Planche, admitting that he and his partners at CtrlMovie encountered quite a bit of skepticism.

The choose-your-own-adventure film doesnt have the most sterling of histories. Some may conjure images of the multiple endings of mid-'80s film Clue, or, worse, the scatological humor of the 1995 better-to-be-forgotten Mr. Playback, in which the pulse of the audience was taken via joysticks and tallied on the screen. The goal: Vote on which bodily fluids with which to pelt bad guys.

Briefly, in the 1990s, the full-motion video craze hit the gaming world. The arrival, in particular, of the Sega CD peripheral for the Genesis home console seemed to herald a future in which games would look more like films, only the quality was poor and the choices were limited.

Today, games are more cinematic than ever  see the branching, narrative-first works of Telltale Games or the teenage mysteries Life Is Strange or Oxenfree  but theyre animated.

Theres one recent  and important  exception: Her Story. The mobile game, created by Sam Barlow, asks players to piece together a mystery by watching jumbled police interrogation videos. The player is part detective, part librarian, as different search terms lead to different live action clips.

Barlow, today the creative director at Interlude and the man overseeing WarGames, compares interactive film to live theater  or stand-up comedy.

It goes back to the idea of a campfire storyteller or the way a play before a live audience is different to a play to an empty house. The storyteller is in control, but the audience is providing feedback, its a dialogue. The audience is complicit, and the audience knows someone is paying attention to them. Thats important.

When Weber first mentioned Late Shift to screenwriter Johnson, his mind bypassed any previous film experiments and instead flashed straight to 80s fantasy books from Dungeons & Dragons creator TSR or Steve Jackson Games. You may remember those from your own childhood. Chapters would end with a choice  say, fight the gnome or run to safety and then offer the reader two page numbers to pick from.

Thus, Johnsons first fear: You did not want the cinematic version of turning the page. You didnt want to pause.

I play a lot of games, so the idea of something that was half game and half film was very attractive, he adds. Then there was the question of whether it could be done.

The team at CtrlMovie knew there could be no freeze in the action. As soon as it breaks, its something you dont like. Its something you dont want to do, says Planche.

In Late Shift, players will direct lead character Matt, as portrayed by actor Joe Sowerbutts, through the plot. Matt, a mathematics student, works in a car park. An attempt to steal a vehicle leads to a heist, which in turn sets off a series of events in which the player will try to prove Matts innocence, perhaps with or without the help of criminal-turned-friend May-Ling (Haruka Abe).

Players will have only a few seconds to decide. Some will subtly shift the dialogue. Others are more dramatic. Do you pull the trigger of a gun, for instance? But at no point during the decision-making process does the film stop. Characters keep talking, the action keeps unfolding and once the choice is made theres rarely a discernible cut.

Late Shift has seven conclusions, only one of them fitting into the standard Hollywood mold of a happy ending. In two play-throughs, I havent found it, as the logical approach of Matt clashes with the go-with-her-instincts nature of May-Ling, and I keep reaching conclusions with the latter dead.

Maybe my inability to reach the so-called good ending means I dont know genre conventions as well as I thought. Or perhaps I think the strings Im pulling will simply lead to better theater.

This isnt about you, the audience, being dropped into a story, says Barlow of the format. We want to tell stories about strong characters, and we get that sometimes the audience wants to see bad things happen the characters, they want whats best for the drama. Its a complex, layered relationship that the audience has with the story  and thats great news for those of us who want to play and interact with that.

So maybe Im purposefully avoiding genre tropes.

In the linear, Hollywood movie, Matt would learn from May-Ling and there would be a conventional happy ending, says Johnson. Thats one of the possible endings. But other endings are where he doesnt learn, or he only learns half. It is quite difficult to lead him to the good ending.

How strange it is to watch a film where you get at the end, and for no other reason than the audience made the wrong decisions, the girl is dead, you have no money and youre taken off by armed police. Bam. Credits. Its such an odd experience because youre trained to expect the happy ending, come what may.

Late Shift had a shooting budget of $1.5 million, a number that was initially higher but had to be scaled back when the CtrlMovie team went looking for investors. More than once they heard a familiar answer: No.

We have a lot of public funding in Switzerland, Planche says. Several of them didnt fund us because they said it would not work. They said people dont want this in the cinema. They said theater people want to lean back.

Perhaps thats why Johnson thinks it works best on an iPad or an iPhone rather than in the majority-votes arena of the cinema. CtrlMovie will be at Marche du Film, the Cannes Film Festival marketplace, showing the work. The company hopes to license the technology to others. Late Shift, then, was something of a test  a proof of concept.

The stakes felt higher in Late Shift than they do in most games, where the action is often over-the-top and the bullets are in endless supply. There is, for instance, no extra-life in Late Shift.

The format is about decisions and consequences, so we wanted to show that in real life, you cannot shoot people, Weber says. And if you do shoot people, you will have consequences. In games, you shoot pixels and there often arent any consequences. You can still win at the end. We wanted this story to be more like, You cannot shoot pixels. You are shooting characters in a film. That relates to you more on a human level. Theyre human beings.

todd.martens@latimes.com
Fans dressed as Stormtroopers and superheroes will have one less Hall H line to stand in at this Julys San Diego Comic-Con. One year after sending the crowd into a state of rapture with early peeks at Deadpool and X-Men: Apocalypse, 20th Century Fox has decided to sit out this years convention.

The annual pop culture expo has long been considered a critical stop for studios looking to stir up early buzz from genre fans. But this year the fans wont have the supers from Fox to cheer on. That means no Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Gambit (Channing Tatum) or Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), who were all in attendance in 2015.

The Times can confirm that, according to a source close to the situation, Fox wont be hosting a major panel at this years Comic-Con over concerns of piracy. The news was first reported by the Wrap.

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In recent years, concerns over leaks have made studio marketers wary of debuting exclusive trailers and early footage of their upcoming features at the convention.

Foxs Comic-Con panel was widely considered one of the highlights of last years festival, with its early look at the raunchy, irreverent Deadpool bringing the crowd to its feet. But within days of the presentation, the clips from Deadpool and X-Men: Apocalypse intended solely for the crowd in Hall H leaked online, as did Comic-Con footage of Warner Bros. upcoming Suicide Squad. Suicide Squad director David Ayer took to Twitter to express his dismay.

Shame our sneak peek Hall H footage was leaked. #notcool

it's unfair to the fans who waited in line. And not how I intended folks to see it.  David Ayer (@DavidAyerMovies) July 13, 2015

The fact is, its unclear whether piracy of Comic-Con footage really hurts the studios in any appreciable way. Despite last years leak (or perhaps because of it), Deadpool -- a film that owed its very existence to the leaking of early test footage -- went on to prove a massive hit when it opened in February, grossing $760 million worldwide.

Privacy concerns aside, Fox may not have had as much to show at Comic-Con as in years past. When Fox executives discussed the studios upcoming features at CinemaCon last month, Comic-Con-friendly fare was not a major part of the presentation. A trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse, which hits theaters May 27, was shown, as was some footage from Assassins Creed, the film version of the popular video game, slated for release in December. But most of the buzz out of the studios panel had to do with director James Camerons announcement that he was planning four sequels to Avatar. The first of those films will not come out until 2018 -- meaning there probably would not be much footage to screen to eager fans come July.

But along with Assassins Creed, Fox could have possibly touted the as-yet-untitled Wolverine sequel, Ridley Scotts Alien: Covenant and the latest addition to the Maze Runner series, all of which are scheduled for release in 2017.

Over the years, studios have occasionally skipped Comic-Con when they have felt they couldnt make a sufficiently major splash. Last year, Marvel, Paramount and Sony were all absent from the convention. But Disney came in swinging with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, hiring the San Diego Symphony to serenade the Comic-Con faithful with an impromptu concert under the stars.

And this year Sony has a new Spider-Man film to hawk, while Disney will likely stoke the buzz for Marvels Doctor Strange and the next film to come in the Star Wars franchise, Decembers Rogue One.

At the same time, Disney has worked in recent years to ramp up its own D23 Expo in Anaheim in what could be construed as an attempt to steal the thunder from Comic-Con. Next year the two conventions will be held the same month (assuming SDCC is again held in July, as it has been for many years).

Between the difficulties in preventing piracy of Comic-Con footage and the new convention competition, many have been speculating that this is the beginning of the end for San Diego Comic-Con. But as long as hardcore fans turn out by the thousands to worship at the pop culture altars of their choosing, its likely Hollywood will be there to meet them in force.

Twitter: @joshrottenberg

Staff writer Amy Kaufman contributed to this report.

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Why Captain Americas keepers, the Russo brothers, are turning to China for inspiration
Where is the directing duo behind Captain America: Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War looking for inspiration these days? The answer may surprise you: China.

Joe and Anthony Russos latest installment in the Marvel franchise will charge into mainland theaters May 6  a simultaneous release with its U.S. opening. Joe Russo was in China last week to promote the tentpole and work on finding new projects for Anthem Pictures, the brothers new venture dedicated to creating Chinese-language films for release in China. Hero Complex caught up with co-director Russo to talk about the six-week-old company, his obsession with Chinese food, and growing interest in the Middle Kingdom. Following is an edited transcript.

Why China?

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Joe Russo: The U.S. market is becoming stagnant. Its very hermetic. Its about tentpole films, and theres no independent scene anymore. Anything that was independent is now in television. So TV has really do-si-doed with the movies and I think the most interesting content being made is in television -- the more adventurous, character- driven content. As filmmakers we are interested in unique voices.

When we came here to promote Winter Soldier [in 2014] we fell in love with the country. Because Im Italian, I have a real love affair with food, and the way I relate to a culture is through the food. And I fell in love with the food here. I think Beijing is incredibly dynamic, a very unique city.

We just started watching Chinese films and there were some directors that we loved, like Jiang Wen (Let the Bullets Fly), Ning Hao, who did a movie called Breakup Buddies, and Wuershan (Painted Skin: The Resurrection), whos doing these big visual spectacles. Theres so much happening here and its such an interesting market.

We grew up near a cinematheque in Cleveland, so we were very influenced by international cinema, the French New Wave, Italian neo-realists. Its been a long time since theres been an emerging market that can challenge the U.S. market. So I think this is a really exciting time, because the more diversity we have in cinema, the more interesting it becomes. So I think anything we can do to help cultivate the market here or try to inspire with our level of experience or be inspired by the market, were willing to do.

Youre bored?

The U.S. is a predictable market. I love what we do, I love the Marvel films, I think were telling stories on a grand scale. So as directors were very happy with what were doing.

As producers, we look for diversity. I like to be inspired -- it has to be about what gets you out of bed in the morning. Its not an easy job. Its a physical job, the hours are long and it takes you away from your kids. I want to be inspired. I think investing ourselves into a new culture and a new market is important. It dimensionalizes you as a human being. Being a global citizen makes you a more interesting person.

Which Chinese directors have you met, and whom are you looking to work with?

Were seeking out relationships with established directors whose work we like, but were also looking for young directors and trying to give them an opportunity to get their stories told.

Ive met Jiang Wen twice. Im obsessed with Jiang Wen. Im putting a lot of effort into finding a project [with him]. Hes very particular; hes only made five movies in his career as a director, so its not easy to convince him to make a film together. But were slowly building a relationship with him and I think hes immensely talented as an actor, as a writer and a creator. So whatever intersection we can find, we will.

Wuershan just came over to the U.S. and we set up a bunch of meetings with him with some of the top-tier visual effects houses in the U.S., just the relationships that we have, trying to facilitate on his next movie because he really wants to find the absolute top people in the world to work on his films because visual effects are so important to him.

And Ning Hao, we had a conversation with two months ago about a really interesting idea he has for a science fiction film, so were slowly working or pushing forward to see what comes of it.

Sci-fi is really a burgeoning genre in China.

It is. Weve been approached with a lot of science fiction concepts. We found a young filmmaker that were working with who brought us a superhero origin film thats really interesting. It has a realistic interpretation, which I found very cool; its a very grounded interpretation of a telekinetic. So were working on getting that film produced. It will probably go into production in the fall; its budget is about $30 million.  The release will be in late 2017, early 2018.

The character is Chinese. He can control things with his mind. And its an origin story, its a little bit of a through-the-looking-glass concept; hes a normal person with a normal life and one day he happens upon the fact that he has these abilities and it opens up a whole world to him that he didnt know existed.

What else have you started on?

Were helping Wu Jing out on Wolf Warriors 2. We introduced him to some of our relationships in the business, like a stunt team thats going to come in and work hard with him to elevate the action on the film because the second time out he really wants to up his game and outperform the first movie, which did incredibly well.

The last thing that were working on is a Journey to the West concept thats very unique, a very different take. I cant really say more because were still developing it. Its purely a development project; its a great idea someone brought us, one of the most famous science fiction writers in the country.

Weve literally been a company for six weeks and this is everything weve got going on already. Theres a lot happening. Its a very explosive market. And its good because it feeds you creatively.

Are you looking to take these films global?

Our intent is not to make movies that are geared toward the international market. These are movies geared toward the Chinese market, working with Chinese filmmakers. So I think our approach is: how can we assist with our experience? Were not interested in any way in imposing a Hollywood style of storytelling on these movies. Were trying just to assist on a creative level and with some infrastructure.

Im not interested in homogenizing the Chinese market. Im interested in finding out whats unique about the Chinese market and endorsing it. Im more compelled as an artist to see diversification than I am to keep watching an Anglo point of view in storytelling.

But theres so much talk about can a Chinese film go global"

Well I guess you can say Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did. [The world] is an Anglo [centric] market but I dont think for long. I think part of that has to do with training people to accept different kinds of storytelling and thats part of the reason we are here,

I think the younger generation is more accepting of that concept. The Internet has changed the way people are educated. They can connect on a video game with someone in Czechoslovakia in real time, or someone in India. So I think they are used to the world being globally accessible. They will be more open to different kinds of storytelling. Thats why I think something will hit. But I think if you chase that, then youre chasing a homogenized version of a broadly accessible story but its in Chinese rather than in English. Thats not our agenda.

What are some of your favorite Chinese movies?

Jiang Wens Gone With the Bullets or Let the Bullets Fly -- I can say Ive probably stolen a few shots from them. I really love Ning Hao. I thought Breakup Buddies was great; I thought it had a really human, emotional component to it. He really knows where to put the camera, hes very inventive with his characterizations and his characters are very flawed but theres a level of absurdism to what he does. I think thats what really attracted us to him -- we have a very similar sense of humor.

Arrested Development is a more stylized version of what he does; he examines individuals in existential crisis and finds comedy in it. [The Russos directed Arrested Development in its early seasons.]

I thought [Han Yans] Go Away, Mr. Tumor, was a really interesting film; its a daring concept and it had a tone that reminded me of Amelie. So it was very expressionistic. I think Bai Baihe is a really talented actress and if you look at the work she did in Monster Hunt or Mr. Tumor, she really loses herself in the role; shes a very diverse actress.

All of Wuershans films. I think hes the most visually gifted director in China right now. I think hes as elegant as any visual storyteller in the world right now. I like that hes pushing himself to access an ILM or Weta, because I think there could be some interesting advances in his style with those companies.

Have you been surprised by Chinese fans enthusiasm for Captain America?

Its a very passionate fan base. One of the reasons I love working in China and why we started Anthem is  audiences here are very passionate about storytelling and mythology.  When you go to the fan event here, its very energetic. Theyre pushing against the barricades and its like the Beatles.

Captain America is of course a very American character and you never know how thats going to translate. Our interpretation of the character is to examine what that means. Were not interested in a blindly patriotic interpretation of the character. Were much more interested in a deconstructed, subversive interpretation of the character. You cant have a character called Captain America without examining what that means.

Hes certainly a character with strong moral fortitude and thats translatable on a human level; anyone can understand Captain America, hes a guy with a strong code and he adheres to it and hes got the greater good at heart.

What we find fascinating about the character is constantly banging against him, to challenge whether that is really his agenda or really that is at the heart of what he is. This third film is a very complex movie on an emotional level because it pits him against his new family, which is the Avengers, and his old family, which is this character Bucky Barnes. And its life-or-death stakes, he has to pick one and protect them. It puts him in a precarious and complicated emotional place for a guy that wants to have a simple code.

Did you have to make any changes for China? Is censorship something you think about in the Chinese market?

No, no changes. I dont think about it. You just try to tell stories. If its a good story you figure out how to tell it.

What are you still puzzling out about China?

Im still exploring the food. I get obsessed. Ive got to eat dumplings and I eat dumplings the whole trip. Or I eat hot pot and Ive got to find the next hot pot place that I love.

Whats the weirdest thing youve eaten?

Duck feet and duck tongue. I love duck.

Where do you go for Chinese food in L.A.?

I like to go to Arcadia and Monterey Park. You have to go with Chinese friends though, because most of the menus are in Chinese.

Who are your Chinese partners?

We are in very close partnership with Beijing Culture. We are working on opening an office here in Beijing. So theyre facilitating for us while were still setting things up. But there are projects that come to Beijing Culture, and if they think we might be a good fit for, theyll move it over to us. ... Its not an exclusive deal but they are our film partners. Theyre taking care of our overhead but we also have $100 million per annum for financing or co-financing.

Do you have a number of films per year in mind?

I dont want to be slave to a slate. Thats a way to make bad movies. When we find projects were interested in well get them up and running. ... In the case of the superhero film, it was pre-financed when they came to us. They came to us and when we said wed get involved the financing was set up immediately. So its not a market where financing is a difficult issue. Its a cash-rich market.
Actor Dev Patel has played many roles: a Slumdog Millionaire, a Marigold Hotel owner, a Network intern, an Airbender. Now hes grappling with impossible equations as Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in The Man Who Knew Infinity.

For the film, Londoner Patel had to master a Southern Indian accent and face one of his greatest fears: crunching numbers. I suffer from mathematically induced brain freeze, said Patel, 26, laughing. My dad is an accountant and a numbers wizard, so Ive been quite the letdown in that area.

Based on a true story, Ramanujan is a low-level Indian clerk whos plucked from obscurity by Trinity College mathematician G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) and invited to work with the worlds top minds at Cambridge, where he pioneers some of the most groundbreaking mathematical theories of the 20th century.

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Patel recently sat down over coffee in Hollywood to discuss career highs (Slumdog Millionaire), flops (The Last Airbender) and what its like to work with scorpions (the critter, not the 80s band).

Did you know anything about Ramanujan before making this film?

I didnt. It was only when I read the script I discovered this incredible character. I thought people needed to know about this man and his legacy. He was this great mathematician who rose up from absolute obscurity, poverty and no real education, and with this man G.H. Hardy created the most amazing mathematical equations the world has even seen. He was a spiritual man who thought all these equations came from God.

Youre British, but because you became known with Slumdog do people assume you were also plucked from obscurity out of India?

Ha! I wont mention names, but I remember going into a meeting in L.A after that film and they had a translator and he was speaking very loudly and trying to get the point across. Finally I was like, Im from London, mate. They were really shocked by it. Ive had more than one or two incidents like that.

Is it hard to master a convincing Indian accent?

For Infinity, I was almost obsessive-compulsive about it. You just read and read until the character goes away and it feels very natural. Ive done many variations of an Indian accent, for instance in "[The Best Exotic] Marigold Hotel its a comedic creation I pulled from loads of people Ive met in India. But Ramanujans from the south of India, so its a very delicate balance. I didnt want it too thick and heavy. It needed to be understandable to a wide audience.

I had slight dramatic license because theres no found footage of the guy, no voice recordings. We just had photos and this wonderful documentary, Letters from an Indian Clerk. From that I see him as a very noble character. Despite his fish-out-of-water plight, he had a resilience, a strength. You could see it in his photo. I wanted to capture that.

Did you grow up going back and forth between India and Britain?

I went to India as a kid, and I hated every minute of it. I didnt have my Game Boy, and aunties and uncles were all squeezing my cheek. It was hot, mosquitoes everywhere, I couldnt speak the language. I felt like an outsider. I really discovered India during Slumdog and fell in love with it.

Why do you think Slumdog was such a success?

Im not sure. On paper that film shouldnt have done well. It had no movie stars, was set in India, was half in Hindi. But it showed audiences are intelligent and what they want are diverse stories.

And then there was Airbender 

My finest piece of work. [Laughs]

It was disappointment 

... for a lot of people.

And for you?

It was a real reality check on the world of Hollywood and what I should dip my toes into. Well, I wasnt dipping. I was thrown right into the deep end. Slumdog was my first film. Normally you can go off the radar and make mistakes as a young performer, but [Airbender] was this massive $150-million studio film. The craft services budget was probably the entire budget of Slumdog. I was out of my depth. At that stage in my career it wasnt a good move. I wish I could have done it better.

How did you recover from that?

After I did Airbender there was big slump, partly because I didnt want to make the same mistake again, but partly because there was nothing. I wasnt that swashbuckling man or that beautiful.  Lets just say I have a face for radio. Its hard to put someone like me into films unless its as the weird sidekick. I didnt want to do that. It took a while, but then Marigold came along.

You worked with some very seasoned actors in both Marigold Hotel films. Maggie Smith, for one. It had to be intimidating.

Yes. It was a good warmup for Jeremy [in Infinity]. I always remember our first meeting. He had his back to me when I walked in, smoking one of his fine handmade roll-ups. I tried to pretend I was reading the script fresh, but Id memorized all the lines. I tried not to look at him too much while I was reading. I was afraid hed look right through me. So I sat on the floor and everyone was in chairs. I felt utterly naked in front of someone of his caliber. Hes conquered it all, TV, stage, screen, whatever. All I could hear was his bassy voice penetrating my eardrums. Oh, God, thats Jeremy Irons!

You shot some of Infinity on location in India, right?

We actually shot some in Ramanujans hometown. We stayed at this coconut grove, really the only place in town that could accommodate us. I remember waking up one morning and seeing a dead scorpion outside my door. I asked the man that worked there where it came from. He said nothing to worry about. Theyre in the trees. Very relaxing, it was.

Did people there recognize you now?

Yes, my work has made an impact there. When they see me the phrase they use is Chaiwala, which means tea boy [his character from Slumdog]. Or they say Latika, like Hes the one who was chasing the girl Latika! Then some knew me from the Marigold films. But I get people stopping me for Newsroom and even [the British kids show] Skins. Its really strange.

Ive heard you now live in L.A.

Sort of. I shuttle back and forth between England, India and L.A., but I just bought my first official home here. I think I bit off more than I can chew, for sure. Its certainly not a Hollywood Hills mega mansion. Its more a shoe box, but its my shoe box.
Even decades after her death in 1975, political philosopher Hannah Arendt remains a figure of intense controversy, a situation the woman who said there are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is dangerous would doubtless approve of.

As revealed in Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt, a thoughtful, nuanced examination of a complex thinker, Arendts willingness to challenge certainties and go against the grain lent her thoughts on topics like totalitarianism and the plight of refugees a force and originality that make them surprisingly relevant today.

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Directed by Israeli documentarian Ada Ushpiz, who has degrees in philosophy and history as well as filmmaking experience, Vita Activa closely examines Arendts active life with the goal of putting us inside her formative experiences, the better to reveal who she was and where her attitudes came from.

There are interviews with old friends and academic experts and extensive use of filmed interviews Arendt herself gave (mainly for German television) as well as the effective reading of excerpts from her essays and letters by actress Alison Darcy.

Vita Activa concentrates, not surprisingly, on the celebrated notion of the banality of evil that Arendt came up with while covering the Israeli trial of one of the prime movers of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, after coming to view him as not much more than a functionary who only carried out orders.

She believed him, she saw him as a little man, says Holocaust authority Deborah Lipstadt, and as a result, says Leon Botstein, a friend who is now president of Bard College, people went berserk. She was accused of being a self-hating, anti-Zionist Jew.

That contention continues today, where newly discovered primary sources seem to indicate that Eichmann was more of a committed Nazi than anyone knew at the time. At the very least, as one Israeli academic provocatively points out, it is worth asking if Arendt unintentionally ended up creating a new cliche in the process of demolishing old ones.

Though the talk is smart and constant here, Vita Activa also benefits from the directors sharp eye for effective, often rarely seen newsreel and home-movie footage, including shots of German women all but worshipping Hitler and German army officers dressing up as Jews at a costume party. There is also a clip from Enchanted Forest, a 1936 German propaganda film celebrating nature and its place in Nazi ideology.

Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 to a family so secular she initially did not know she was Jewish. Even as a small child, however, she loved books with a passion.

At age 18 she studied with Martin Heidegger, a married man and one of the rising stars of European philosophy. They had an affair (a secret love and a difficult love, says Heideggers granddaughter), a situation that became more fraught when the philosopher morphed into a major apologist for Nazi ideology.

After the affair ended, Arendt went on to study for her doctorate with Karl Jaspers, a man she came to consider the greatest educator of all time. In fact, Vita Activa begins with a post-World War II exchange of letters between the two in which Jaspers encourages his former student to view the Nazi depredations in their total banality.

That war and the events leading to it were the central factors in Arendts life. The 1933 Reichstag fire simultaneously soured her on politics and shocked her into becoming less of an observer and more of an activist.

It also motivated her to leave Germany, first for France and later for the United States, resulting in a lifetime of refugee status that led her to understand from the inside the powerlessness of that political situation.

Though much of Vita Activa is of necessity serious, it also finds room for Arendts personal life, including her marriage to German political activist Heinrich Blucher. Think of me, she writes touchingly from a Zionist conference in Switzerland, and dont forget how to kiss.

An ardent Zionist for a time, Arendt came to dislike the idea of a Jewish state, her experience in Germany leading her to feel it would inevitably lead to the marginalization of minorities. It was one of her many insights that speak to contemporary reality in provocative ways.

------------

Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt

No rating

Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes

Playing: Laemmles Monica, Santa Monica

kenneth.turan@latimes.com
Kahlil Joseph was one of the directors who helmed Lemonade, Beyonce's visual concept album that premiered on HBO last weekend. The artist spoke to the Los Angeles Times Carolina Miranda about his work and where he gets his inspiration.

He is known for producing videos that violate the rules of music videos.

Joseph typically doesnt use choreographed dance sequences and also shies away from literal interpretation of lyrics.

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Review: Fierce Beyonce puts Jay Z on final notice, then turns bitterness into Lemonade'>>

He has worked with other big-name artists

Film director Terrence Malick and visual artist Doug Aitken are among the well-known artists Joseph has has worked with in a number of mediums. He called working with Malick the best thing that ever happened to me, there was being born and there was this.

He strives to portray black life realistically on-screen

Everyone wants to see themselves on the screen, he told Carolina Miranda. But when I see black people in movies, I dont see them as I know them to move and talk.

He first worked with Kendrick Lamar when the rapper opened for Kanye West

Lamar asked Joseph to art-direct his live performances when he opened for Wests Yeezus tour in 2013. Joseph had only weeks to shoot footage and had never worked on a live concert before.

He is inspired by foreign films

When he was a student at Loyola Marymount University, Joseph studied the work of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and spent his free time watching every single Asian movie available on Netflix.

Whats cool about the visual, about movies, is that they are like dreams, he said. And dreams are some of the most personal things.

He grew up in Seattle

Joseph was born and raised in Seattle, the eldest son of a teacher and lawyer.

He was inspired to write by Good Will Huntings Oscar win

I thought if two kids from Boston can write, I can write. So I started writing then and there.

Read more of the interview >>
Beyonce kicked off her Formation tour in Miami on Wednesday night, and by all reports it was more fun than smashing a street full of car windows.

For starters, there were several Prince tributes -- a stadium-sized singalong of Purple Rain, but also a great cover of Vanity 6s tawdry hit Nasty Girl, one of the best singles to come from under Princes tutelage.

The set list was packed with Lemonade tracks, many performed live for the first time. Early fan favorites included the country-tinged Daddy Lessons, Hold Up, Freedom, All Night, Sorry and of course the stomping, defiant Formation.

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Though the album and accompanying film are essentially an hourlong ethering of her husband Jay-Z (or at least an inspired tale detailing the arc of spousal cheating and redemption), she thanked Jay during Halo and called him her beautiful husband, which was a nice gesture considering all hes been through lately.

Opener DJ Khaled got in on the act too, bringing out almost his entire Snapchat network: Future, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross and many more.

But perhaps the highlight was the range of official and hilarious Boycott Beyonce shirts sold by vendors inside the stadium. They came in response to complaints from some, including the Miami Police Department, about the alleged anti-cop tone of her Formation video.

Making money off sarcastic T-shirts and undercutting your critics? Thats some droll lemonade, made from some very inconsequential lemons.

Follow @AugustBrown for breaking music news.
Prince was in possession of prescription painkillers at the time of his death and local officials have sought the help of the Drug Enforcement Administration as part of the investigation, according to published reports.

NBC Nightly News cited unnamed law enforcement officials on Wednesday saying that prescription painkillers were in the pop stars possession when he died and that the county sheriff investigating the death is asking for help from the DEA.

A CNN report on Thursday stated that authorities investigating the death found opioid medication on his person and in his Minnesota home.

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CNN cited an unnamed law enforcement official in its report. It also stated that the DEA has been brought onto the case.

A spokesman for the DEA declined to comment when reached by phone. A representative for the Carver County Sheriffs office in Minnesota didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Wednesday, a Minnesota court appointed Bremer Trust, National Assn. as special administrator for Princes estate. The rock stars sister, Tyka Nelson, had requested in court papers this week that Bremer be appointed because Bremer Bank provided financial services to Prince for many years.

Prince, who was 57, died April 21 at his home, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minn. An autopsy has been completed but no results have been publicly released.

MORE:

Princes estate to be temporarily managed by trust company

Beyonce live in Miami: Prince tributes, Boycott Beyonce T-shirts and so much more

Prince backing band the Revolution will reunite

Public memorial for Prince set for May 6 at L.A. City Hall
What is Watership Down if its not traumatizing small children? Fans of the vocal stylings of Ben Kingsley and, also, bunnies have reason to rejoice as BBC One and Netflix announced Thursday a four-part computer-generated animated miniseries adapting Richard Adams classic adventure novel Watership Down. However, some might find elements of the new interpretation less than faithful.

The book, originally published in 1972, told the tense and often violent tale of a rabbit warren and two bunny brothers, Hazel and Fiver, on a mission to relocate themselves and as many of their friends as possible to a safe haven, a home not beset by construction or dogs or other mean rabbits, who are terrifying.

The BBC One/Netflix collaboration will feature four hourlong episodes with the voice work of prominent British actors including Kingsley as General Woundwort, James McAvoy as Hazel, and John Boyega as Bigwig, among others. The Guardian reports that the project will have a budget of nearly $30 million.

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The miniseries is being written by Tom Bidwell, best known as the scribe for British teen dramedy My Mad Fat Diary and directed by Noam Murrow of 300: Rise Of The Empire, a pairing that probably makes sense for an adaptation of loving if troubled rabbits who often find themselves snared by the violent nature of life.

The tale was adapted into an animated film in 1978 that fully captured the tone and tenor of the books and was pitched more toward an adult audience, featuring vicious rabbit fights, fields of blood and the gory fate of snared bunnies.

But fans of the original film may be disappointed with comments executive producer of the miniseries Rory Aitken made to The Telegraph about the level of brutality in their interpretation.

The thing about Watership Down is that its an epic adventure story, Aitken said. Its grown this reputation for being scarring and horrific and brutal, and actually thats not what the essence of the story is.

But really, what is childhood without a horrifying, traumatic film experience? Is cutting around the bloody reality of nature really going to strengthen the next generation of children? Are kids today too soft?

Probably not.

On the bright side, Aitken did announce the miniseries intent to strengthen the roles of the female rabbits, an element of Adams original novel that often garners criticism. In the original story, the lady rabbits were little more than ditzy breeding stock. Tiny, hopping wombs, if you will. Aitken assured fans however that the miniseries will feature female characters more prominent and heroic than ever before.

Executive Producer Josh Varney told the Guardian, Most peoples frame of reference is the movie from the late 70s but the book is a 400-page epic and we have got four hours of TV to really let the story and the characters breathe.

Yes, but the question is, Will they bleed?

Watership Down is scheduled to air in 2017. The series will premiere on BBC One in the UK and Netflix worldwide.

Follow me @midwestspitfire
NASA currently is hiring out its supply runs and paying Russia to ferry astronauts to the space station.

St. Louis: Five years after the last NASA astronauts flew from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to the International Space Station, a new group is preparing for a trip, this time on a private spacecraft.

On Tuesday, veteran astronauts Eric Boe and Sunita Williams used touch-screen simulators to practice docking Boeing Co.'s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft with the space station during a training session near Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. The simulator, called the Crew Part-Task Trainer, helps prepare astronauts and flight controllers for missions, flight conditions and situations including the rendezvous and docking with the space station.

"This is the next really exciting chapter for our country and our space program," Williams said. "It refocuses on what I think is really important  planning for the next generations and thinking of their future."

The United States hasn't seen a manned launch since Atlantis blasted off on the final space shuttle mission in 2011. NASA currently is hiring out its supply runs and paying Russia to ferry astronauts to the space station.

The space agency wants to continue outsourcing those tasks so it can focus on getting astronauts out of low-Earth orbit and on to Mars and other destinations. NASA is developing the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System for those longer journeys and has contracted with Boeing and another U.S. company, SpaceX, to transport astronauts to the space station.

"If you think of Mars as the pinnacle of Everest (and) low-Earth orbit as base camp, the commercial companies that service low-Earth orbit are the sherpas that take things back and forth," said Chris Ferguson, deputy program manager and director of crew and mission operations for Boeing's commercial crew program. "It enables NASA to go and perform their exploration mission."

The cost for a ride on a private, American-operated spacecraft will be $58 million, cheaper than Russia's $76 million per ride, according to NASA.

Boeing's role in space exploration began in the 1960s. The McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, which later merged with McDonnell Douglas before its merger with Boeing  developed the Mercury and Gemini space capsules.

In 2014, NASA awarded Boeing up to $4.2 billion to develop the Starliner, its launch vehicle and mission operations and ground systems. The contracts with Boeing and SpaceX, which is developing a next-generation crew capsule, total $6.8 billion and require at least one test flight with at least one NASA astronaut on board. Boeing's contract includes up to six missions to the space station.

Boeing's Defense, Space & Security division is building several training devices in St. Louis, including the Crew Part-Task Trainer and a full-scale mission simulator that will run astronauts through dress rehearsals, from problems during launch to the recovery of the spacecraft. The simulator and other training devices will be delivered to the Johnson Space Center in Houston over the next year.

Boeing and SpaceX are aiming for test flights to the space station by the end of 2017.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
Chan Luu chooses Santa Monica for first U.S. flagship

The Los Angeles-based Chan Luu label, which has a handful of stand-alone stores in Japan, marks its 20th anniversary by opening its first U.S. flagship in Santa Monica. The label, known for its intricate wrap bracelets, launched as a womens accessories brand in 1996 and has steadily expanded over the years to include full collections of mens and womens handcrafted jewelry, scarves and home goods and womens apparel (think crocheted bras, halter tops and pencil skirts, dip-dye maxi skirts and embroidered velvet kimonos). The 925-square-foot shop, located between the Swarovski and Pandora stores on the second level of Santa Monica Place, will be the showcase for the labels latest collections across all of those categories.

Chan Luu, 395 Santa Monica Place, Santa Monica.

Alchemy Works recently opened a second location, in Lido Marina Village in Newport Beach. (Stephen Busken) (Test)

Alchemy Works sails into Lido Marina

Downtown L.A. gallery, retail and events space Alchemy Works has opened a 1,300-square-foot second location in the new Lido Marina Village retail development in Newport Beach. Alchemy Works: Harbor House, which opened April 11, stocks apparel and accessories by Apolis (the labels creative director, Raan Parton, and his wife, Lindsay, opened the original Alchemy Works in fall 2013), shoes by Vayarta and the Office of Angela Scott, timepieces from Weiss Watch Co., leather office accessories from Bartleby, Victoria Morris ceramics, and Vere Verto handbags, among others. It will also be home to the first Orange County showroom for online eyewear brand Warby Parker. Housed in a topographically tricked-out Warby Parker Map Room, the showroom features the company's full line of optical and sun frames and offers customers the opportunity to try before they buy, with nonprescription frames available for purchase. (Prescription glasses need to be ordered and shipped.)

Alchemy Works: Harbor House, 3408 Via Oporto, Newport Beach.

adam.tschorn@latimes.com
Anne Douglas could have celebrated her birthday at home in Beverly Hills with her husband, actor Kirk Douglas.

Instead, she sat behind a silver-and-pink birthday cake Wednesday as women lined up, weeping, to embrace and thank her for starting the Los Angeles Missions Anne Douglas Center for Women  one of skid rows first homeless shelters for women.

You have done so much for me, said Sharon Schumaker, 45, wiping away tears.

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You saved my life, said Cynthia Smith, 51, of Burbank, a recovering alcoholic who arrived at the center in December with two black eyes suffered in a skid row beating.

When I first encountered the women at this homeless shelter it was heartbreaking, and I was determined to make it better, said Douglas, who has had a birthday party at the center every year since launching it in 1992.

At writer Sidney Sheldons request, her husband had agreed to speak at the mission that Thanksgiving, Douglas said. Afterward, when she asked, Where are the women? a staff member pulled back a floor-to-ceiling bedsheet to reveal a few bunk beds.

I said, My God, I have to do something for this, Douglas said. So I prayed to God to help me raise some money, but God has no money so I turned to my husband and some friends.

The Douglases have contributed $21 million to the project, which includes a residential program for 28 women, a day center with showers, a closet stocked with donated clothing, a computer center and a gymnasium.

Anne Douglas has since brought other friends into the project, including Betty McMicken, Kirk Douglas speech therapist since his debilitating stroke in 1996.

Before Wednesdays luncheon, a multipurpose room at the mission was dedicated to McMicken, who offers communication and movement therapy at the mission. Kirk Douglas, who turns 100 later this year, briefly attended the dedication.

Traumatic brain injury and long-term addiction can cause communication disorders, McMicken said.

One of McMickens students, Maryalice Freeman, drew laughs during the luncheon by discussing the facial contortions she went through to clear her speech.

I was living in a cardboard box for 10 years, said Freeman, 63, who now works at the mission as an assistant chaplain. Dr. McMicken gave me my dignity back.

Douglas, a nonagenarian who wouldnt discuss her age, said she was really touched by the gratitude and affection the women showed her.

The former Anne Buydens, from Hanover, Germany, met Kirk Douglas while working in publicity on a 1953 film he shot in Paris, Act of Love.

Their Beverly Hills home is the style of old Hollywood  all chinoiserie, African masks, pre-Columbian figures and the occasional Picasso. In her living room earlier this week, Douglas said her husband, the only son of illiterate Russian Jews, had little to eat as a child.

Or should I say he had nothing, she recalled. He stood in line for homeless people. By the time the line came to him there was no more food.

The womens center has a Christian focus, but Anne Douglas converted to Judaism before the couple renewed their marriage vows on their 50th wedding anniversary. Everybody said he needed to marry a nice Jewish girl, Douglas said.

Douglas said public consciousness about homelessness has never been higher, but she worries that downtown gentrification is taking skid row away from homeless people.

What discourages me is all these real estate people that are building beautiful lofts and nice small apartments in that area.... That reduces the space for expanding buildings that can house these men and women in the streets, or in the cars or in cardboard, Douglas said. The homeless men and women are used to that area, and it should be for them instead of building better facilities for middle class and even higher.

Douglas suggested Mayor Eric Garcetti turn to the private sector for money to build homeless housing.

As she spoke, Kirk Douglas, whose speech remains limited, pushed past the living room with his walker and called to his wife.

He said, Say nice things about me, Anne Douglas said. I always do.

gale.holland@latimes.com

Twitter: @geholland
Jagged rocks installed to deter homeless encampments below a freeway overpass have sparked a debate between people arguing for compassion and residents demanding safer, cleaner streets.

City crews installed the riprap next to the walls of the 5 Freeway overpass late last week at the request of Sherman Heights residents, who had complained that homeless encampments on Imperial Avenue had made it difficult and sometimes dangerous for pedestrians.

When we saw the rocks going up, we celebrated, resident Ildifonso Carrillo said.

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Carrillo, a member of the Sherman Heights group Compassionate Solutions, said residents were fighting to improve the quality of life in their neighborhood. Were not anti-homeless, he said. Were pro-resident.

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Devonna Almagro, executive director of the Sherman Heights Community Center, said residents recently had approached Mayor Kevin Faulconer with concerns about the overpass when he was making an appearance in the neighborhood. Sometimes they couldnt even walk through the sidewalks because of the people there, Almagro said.

The decision to put in hardscape  which according to Bill Harris, supervising public information officer for the city, cost $57,000  was criticized in some quarters.

The Facebook page Homelessness News San Diego posted photos of the rocks as they were being installed, and many of the 250 comments included requests for people to call Faulconers office to complain.

Jeeni Criscenzo, president of the homeless advocacy nonprofit Amikas, led a news conference outside City Hall on Tuesday to protest the hardscape and to petition for another solution.

Instead of coming up with innovations, they came up with pest control, Criscenzo said as she stood next to a shopping cart filled with prop rocks and carrying a sign that read, Give them shelters, not rocks.

Criscenzo and board members from Amikas then went to Faulconers office on the 11th floor to deliver a petition they said was signed by 9,000 people asking the city to set aside land for temporary, affordable tiny houses for the homeless.

The petitions, including 8,700 signatures that were collected on Change.org, asked Faulconer to allow the homes to be put on vacant sites on a six-month trial basis.

We wont know until we try, she said about the proposal.

Sherman Heights resident Silvia Leon said the rocks have made the stretch of Imperial Avenue below the 5 cleaner, but since their installation she has noticed more homeless people near her residence four blocks away.

Its cleaned up, she said of Imperial Avenue. But now, I walked out of my house this morning and I have homeless on my block, picking up their sleeping bags. Theyre being pushed into our neighborhood.

gary.warth@sduniontribune.com

Warth writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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Two months after the Aliso Canyon gas leak was capped, the sprawling scope of litigation against Southern California Gas Co. was on display Wednesday in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom.

About 80 attorneys  from 73 law firms, representing thousands of plaintiffs in 131 legal actions  introduced themselves to Superior Court Judge John Shepard Wiley Jr. and argued for extending the gas companys relocation program.

The leak in the hills above Porter Ranch, first reported Oct. 23, prompted 8,000 families to leave their homes because of headaches, nosebleeds and vomiting brought on by an odorant in the leaking methane.

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Three attorneys were present to represent the gas company.

The leak was capped in February, but 3,800 families remain in temporary accommodations, according to a spokesman for the gas company.

On Wednesday, Wiley ordered the company to continue paying those housing and hotel costs until at least May 31, when the court expects to review the results of indoor air tests conducted by the L.A. County Department of Public Health.

Attorneys for the gas company have argued that the relocation program should come to an end because the well is no longer leaking and data show air quality has returned to normal.

Jim Dragna, an attorney for the company, questioned the accuracy of a survey from the Department of Public Health showing that 62% of respondents living near Aliso Canyon continued to experience symptoms after the leak was stopped.

I think there is nothing but speculation and no evidence, he said.

Separately, the judge denied a motion to force the gas company to provide reimbursements within three days of receiving receipts. Since the leak began, the company has issued $66.2 million in reimbursements, it says.

Because of the number of lawyers present Wednesday, the hearing had to be moved to a larger courtroom. Wiley started the hearing by asking all the attorneys to introduce themselves for the record. The exercise took 11 minutes and two microphones.

The two sides are scheduled to be back in court May 4.

alice.walton@latimes.com

Twitter: @TheCityMaven
As part of a massive national movement, roughly half a million immigrants and their supporters took to the streets of Los Angeles 10 years ago, decrying federal bills that would criminalize providing food or medical services to undocumented immigrants and build a wall along the U.S. southern border. The demonstrations far surpassed the numbers that turned out against the Vietnam War, and California hasnt seen anything like it since then.

We would like to follow up with those protesters and see where they are now, and in particular the young people who played a central role. Forty thousand students walked out of class on March 28, 2006  organizing via then emerging technologies such as MySpace, instant messages and mass email. A month later, many of them also joined a nationwide Day Without Immigrants, where workers and their families on May Day boycotted jobs and businesses, dressed in white and hoisted signs declaring Ahora marchamos, manana votamos! or Today we march, tomorrow we vote!

Please consider sharing your story below to help us report on the legacy of the protests. A reporter may contact you with follow up questions.

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daniela.gerson@latimes.com

Twitter: @dhgerson
Firefighters on Thursday were tackling a wind-driven brush fire charging uphill toward a drug rehabilitation facility north of Ventura.

The blaze started small at three acres near Highway 33 after 2 p.m., but quickly grew to 40 acres as winds fanned the flames across the area and threatened to topple multiple power lines, fire Capt. Mike Lindbery said.

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The fire moved rapidly toward Teen Challenge, a drug addiction treatment center in the grassy, dusty foothills of Ventura. The center treats and houses multiple residents, Lindbery said. Workers were evacuated as flames approached the facility.

See the most-read stories this hour >>

By 4:30 p.m., winds had swifted and were blowing away from the fire at Casitas Vista Road, he said.

Things are looking much better, Lindbery said.

But fire officials were monitoring the direction of the fire as it approached a series of underground natural gas lines. Firefighters were working with Southern California Edison, Southern California Gas Co. and property owners.

Three engines and several firefighters were dispatched to protect the treatment facility from the fast-approaching flames, Lindbery said.

#BrushFire #CasitasIncident Fire reported 40 acres structures now threatened moving rapidly East to West pic.twitter.com/1rc1RRb6ch  VCFD PIO (@VCFD_PIO) April 28, 2016

I could hear it moving toward us, he said in a video that he posted on Twitter. I could really hear that brush starting to crackle.

Strong westerly winds pushed the blaze toward dry brush and trees, Lindbery said. Wind gusts reached up to 30 mph Thursday afternoon in the Ventura County mountains, according to the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

The lack of winter rains has only worsened the already-parched conditions in the area, he said.

We are not close to summer yet, but the fuels are so dry, he said. "... Its just so easy for that vegetation to take off and start burning.

#CasitasIncident #BrushFire Rate of Spread slowing as fire tops ridge and wind speed slows. No containment yet pic.twitter.com/XbJwIWusv9  VCFD PIO (@VCFD_PIO) April 28, 2016

Ventura County Fire Handcrew#12 flown in and already working on the hill, while Copter7 drops water @VCFD @VCFD_PIO pic.twitter.com/7MwLBfoNjJ  VenturaCoAirUnit (@VCAirUnit) April 28, 2016

For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter
A body that washed up at Dockweiler State Beach on Wednesday afternoon may be that of a man who disappeared while swimming in the ocean eight days ago, officials said.

D.J. Jeffries was last seen swimming near Lifeguard Tower 18 at Manhattan Beach on April 19 about 5 p.m. when he was reported missing.

About 12:40 p.m. Wednesday, a bystander at Dockweiler reported seeing a body wash ashore. Dockweiler is about five miles north of Manhattan Beach.

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Its possible its the same individual, said Spencer Parker of the Los Angeles County lifeguards.

Investigators are waiting for the coroner to positively identify the body and determine a cause of death.

Friends told authorities that they lost sight of Jeffries when he was about 50 yards into the water, Los Angeles County Fire Department lifeguard specialist Lidia Barillas told KTLA-TV Channel 5.

A massive search quickly got underway, with helicopter crews, divers and lifeguards combing the water.

Lifeguards from Redondo Beach and crews from the L.A. County Fire Department joined the effort.

Los Angeles Times staff writer Matt Hamilton contributed to this report.

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.


Syed Raheel Farook, a Navy veteran and brother of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook; along with his wife, Tatiana Farook; and her sister Mariya Chernykh were arrested Thursday and charged in a five-count indictment that focuses on allegations of a fraudulent marriage.

The indictment marks the latest phase in the FBI investigation of the San Bernardino shooting, in which 14 people were killed. The massacre was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.

The marriage at the center of the current case is between Chernykh and Enrique Marquez Jr., who has been charged with providing weapons used in the deadly Dec. 2 attack at the Inland Regional Center.

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What do we know about Syed Raheel Farook?

The Times profiled him last year, with friends saying he was very different from his younger brother.

Friends said Raheel Farook was the extrovert  loud and sociable with an air of nonchalance. Acquaintances said he preferred to walk a casual line when it came to religion. He told people he wasnt into Islam, dated a non-Muslim girl, drank alcohol freely and showed up at a local mosque primarily to please his family.

After graduating from La Sierra High School in Riverside, he joined the Navy and received medals for his service in the Global War on Terrorism.

What do we know about the family?

The Farook family came from modest means. Pakistani immigrants, the parents made their way to Chicago, where Syed Rizwan Syed Rizwan Farook was born. After moving to the Inland Empire, the father worked as a truck driver, while the mother became a clerk at Kaiser Permanente Riverside Medical Center.

Neighbors recall the family keeping chickens, roosters and goats on their property. While raising four children, the couple declared bankruptcy in 2002.

Life at home was turbulent. In court records, mother Rafia Farook detailed a violent marital history in which her children often had to intervene.

In 2006 divorce filings, she said her husband of 24 years was physically and verbally abusive. She referred to him as a negligent alcoholic and said his hostility had forced her and the children to move out.

Later, in multiple requests for domestic-violence protection, the mother detailed the mistreatment she said she encountered, which her children witnessed: Her husband  also named Syed  had dropped a TV on her while he was intoxicated. Another time, he pushed her toward a car. After a drunken slumber, he shouted expletives and threw dishes in the kitchen.

Inside the house he tried to hit me. My daughter came in between to save me, she said about one incident.

She also said her husband was suicidal and described a February 2008 incident in which he threatened to kill himself. She called her husbands brother in Chicago, who notified local police. They alerted Riverside authorities, who arrived at the home. Her husband was placed in a county hospital for a 72-hour observation period, she said.

See the most-read stories this hour >>

Wasnt there an incident late last year?

In the weeks after the San Bernardino shooting, the Riverside County district attorneys office declined to file domestic violence charges against Raheel Farook. Police had asked prosecutors to consider filing a misdemeanor domestic battery charge.

The allegation stemmed from a Dec. 5 incident in which officers came to Farooks home in Corona after an unidentified woman reported a domestic disturbance.

He will appear in court at 2 p.m.

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The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is seeking $90 million from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. after investigators determined its power line sparked a deadly wildfire in the states Gold Country last year.

The destructive Butte fire started Sept. 9 when a gray pine came in contact with a PG&E power line conductor near Butte Mountain Road in Amador County, according to a Cal Fire investigation report released Thursday.

From there, burning embers dropped onto dead brush, sparking an uncontrollable fire that killed two people, injured one and destroyed 965 structures. Both of the people who died  Mark McCloud, 66, and Owen Goldsmith, 82  were residents of Mountain Ranch and refused to evacuate.

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Fire investigators said PG&E and its subcontractors failed to identify pines that were exposed to sun and in the path of power lines during an inspection in 2014 and 2015.

Failing to identify the potential hazard of leaving weaker, inherently unstable trees on the edge of the stand, without conducting maintenance on them, ultimately led to the failure of the Gray pine which contacted the power line operated by PG&E and ignited a wildland fire, incident investigator Gianni Muschetto wrote in the report.

PG&E said it is reviewing the report and has cooperated with Cal Fire during the investigation.

We are committed to doing the right thing for our customers and will respond in the normal legal process, the utility company said in a statement. We are going to continue supporting our customers and working with our first responder partners and the State of California to improve fire safety and fire response during this historic drought.

Flames swept through the tiny mining town of 1,600 people last fall, leveling dozens of homes.

The fast-moving blaze spread into Calaveras County and lasted for 22 days. Nearly 5,000 firefighters tackled massive flames until the wildfire was finally contained Oct. 1.

The 70,868-acre fire is the seventh most destructive blaze in Californias history, according to Cal Fire.

The Calaveras County Board of Supervisors announced Thursday that it would pursue legal avenues to seek compensation from PG&E as well as investigation from the California Public Utilities Commission. County officials estimate the wildfire caused more than $1 billion in damage.

Some residents have left our community and are not rebuilding because of the fire, county Supervisor Cliff Edson said in a statement. It has not only changed their lives forever, it has changed our community forever.

For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.
Six candidates running for the seat being vacated by longtime Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich sparred mildly over a controversial proposed extension of the 710 Freeway at a debate in Pasadena.

The forum, hosted by the Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters, was the first televised debate of the campaign and primarily focused on environmental issues.

The candidates included five Republicans -- Antonovichs chief of staff, Kathryn Barger; prosecutor Elan Carr; Los Angeles City Councilman Mitch Englander; State Sen. Bob Huff; Glendale Mayor Ara Najarian and one Democrat, Darrell Park.

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Antonovich, who has served on the county board for 36 years, is one of two Republicans on the panel and the most conservative member.

The candidates broke down along party lines on some questions, including whether the county should pursue a tax increase to fund initiatives to reduce homelessness, which Park said he supports and the Republicans opposed.

But on the 710 question, Huff was the lone candidate who voiced support for a proposed extension of the freeway from Alhambra to Pasadena.

Yes, it is going to impact some people, but its one of those things thats for the greater good, he said.

Najarian, who sits on the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, got a round of applause when he said he had nearly been kicked off the board over his opposition to the project and would continue to fight against it until my dying day.

Most of the other candidates also voiced opposition, with Park calling a proposal to bore a tunnel to extend the freeway a death trap, and Englander and Carr pointing to the projects price tag, which is estimated at as much as $5.6 billion for an option that would build a 4.5-mile tunnel between Alhambra and South Pasadena.

Crime is up, murder is up, our schools are crumbling and quality jobs are fleeing Los Angeles County, Carr said. Is this what were going to spend our money on?

Englander, who said he also does not support the project, said that even if it were approved, It would be tied up in litigation for so many years.

Antonovich has not taken an official position on the project. Barger also did not take one, but said there are traffic mitigation measures that should be taken while the debate plays out, including increased rail hauling of goods, traffic synchronization and reversible traffic lanes.

This issue has been debated for 55 years, Barger said. Meanwhile the communities below the 710, which are low-income, are suffering as a result of the inability to make a decision.

In response to a question on how the climate change impacts of the Aliso Canyon Gas leak should be mitigated, the candidates widely criticized Southern California Gas Co. and the state regulatory system.

They largely left the question of greenhouse gas emissions unaddressed, although Najarian suggested the company should be required to offset the methane emissions, including potentially offering rebates on low-use natural gas appliances to customers.

But Park got the applause line when he shouted, Shut it all down! and pulled out a sign bearing the same slogan. A number of audience members brandished similar signs.

Two other candidates on the ballot, Billy Malone and Raj Pal Kahlon, both Democrats, did not appear at the debate.

Another, Martin Enriques, missed the deadline to appear on the ballot but has filed as a write-in candidate.

Twitter: @sewella
The company plans to create a new class of non-voting shares, which would be given as a dividend to existing shareholders.

Mumbai: Facebook Inc's quarterly revenue rose more than 50 percent, handily beating Wall Street expectations as its wildly popular mobile app and a push into live video lured new advertisers and encouraged existing ones to boost spending.

The company's shares rose 9.5 percent in after-hours trading on Wednesday to $118.39, setting it on track to open at a new high on Thursday, at nearly triple its initial public offering four years ago.

Facebook also announced it will create a new class of non-voting shares in a move aimed at letting Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg give away his wealth without relinquishing control of the social media juggernaut he founded.

The company plans to create a new class of non-voting shares, which would be given as a dividend to existing shareholders. That would allow Zuckerberg, who wants to give away 99 percent of his wealth, to sell non-voting stock to fund philanthropy and keep the voting stock that assures his control.

Alphabet Inc passed a similar proposal in 2014 that ensured its founders' control by creating new non-voting shares.

Some 1.65 billion people used Facebook monthly as of March 31, up from 1.44 billion a year earlier. Zuckerberg said users were spending more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, a huge amount of time given the millions of apps available to users.

Advertisers are shifting money from television to web and mobile platforms, and Facebook is one of the biggest beneficiaries. It faces fierce competition in the mobile video market, where rivals Snapchat and YouTube also garner billions of video views every day.

Facebook recently expanded its live video product, rolling out several new features and making it more prominent on the app to encourage users to create videos and share them. The quarterly results showed success attracting advertisers with the move, and the company was able to expand its operating profit margin to 55 percent from 52 percent a year earlier.

"The company consistently 'warns' about higher spending, but they consistently manage their spending to deliver earnings upside. They're an impressive company, and they leave very little room for criticism," said Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who called the operating margin a good surprise.

Facebook did not offer details on sales of its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, but emphasized that it was early days and said that sales would not significantly impact 2016 revenue.

The results come after disappointments for investors from several major Silicon Valley firms.

"After Intel and IBM last week, and then Twitter and Apple yesterday, this is by far the best number Ive seen in technology," said Daniel Morgan, senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust Company which owns about $40 million worth of Facebook shares, commenting specifically about Facebook ad revenue.

Facebook has not begun advertising on some of its most popular apps. "They haven't yet turned on the monetization spigot for Messenger or WhatsApp, so there should be significant headroom still," said Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research.

The company's net income attributable to common shareholders nearly tripled to $1.51 billion, or 52 cents per share, in the first quarter from $509 million, or 18 cents per share, a year earlier.

Excluding items, the company earned 77 cents per share, beating Wall Street's 62-cent consensus.

Total revenue rose to $5.38 billion from $3.54 billion, with ad revenue increasing 56.8 percent to $5.20 billion. Mobile ad revenue accounted for about 82 percent of total ad revenue, compared with about 73 percent a year earlier.

Analysts on average had expected revenue of $5.26 billion.

If the stock proposal is approved - and Zuckerberg has a majority of voting stock - the company will effectively carry out a 3-for-1 stock split, issuing two shares of non-voting Class C capital stock as a one-time stock dividend for each share of Class A and Class B common stock.

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced last year that they would give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares to fund charitable endeavours.

Investors said they were not concerned that Zuckerberg would have increasing control, pointing to the company's consistent ability to grow and exceed expectations.

"I honestly don't think anyone cares if he has more power, since he's done everything right since they went public," said Pachter.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
Donald Trumps rally Thursday evening in Costa Mesa is expected to draw loyalists as well as protesters.

The rally comes two days after backers and opponents of Trump clashed outside Anaheim City Hall before the City Council voted on a resolution condemning the presidential candidate and GOP front-runner. The resolution was not approved.

Protesters in Anaheim used pepper spray, and several people were treated by paramedics.

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Trump is leading in several recent polls in California. He has both supporters and detractors in Orange County. The county remains Republican, but its not the stronghold it once was.

Republican registration is now at about 40%, down from nearly 60% a generation ago. Though Republicans still outnumber Democrats in Orange County, their shrinking ranks hurt the GOP on the statewide level.

The Democratic Party of Orange County and Orange County Young Democrats announced Wednesday they are coordinating a protest against Trump on Thursday in Costa Mesa.

We do not believe that there is any room for racism, sexism, religious bigotry, disregard for international law, violence or any other such phenomena in our political discourse, the Orange County Young Democrats said in a statement. As such, we expressly condemn Donald Trump, declare that his values are not Orange Countys values, and we urge all other citizens of Orange County to do the same.

Join the conversation on Facebook >>

Californias presidential primary is June 7, though many voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail before then.

Tickets for Trumps Costa Mesa rally are free for those who register at www.donaldjtrump.com/schedule. No banners, posters, signs, GoPros, selfie sticks or professional cameras with detachable lenses, tripods or monopods will be permitted.

The fairgrounds are at 88 Fair Drive.

Times Community News writer Bradley Zint and Los Angeles Times staff writer Michael Finnegan contributed to this report.

lucas.money@latimes.com

Twitter: @LukeMMoney

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On the surface, it seemed like a happy marriage.

There were smiling photographs of the blissful couple. They appeared to be sharing a home in Corona. The bride had even picked out her grooms wedding ring.

But federal authorities say the union was sham.

The wedding ring was a $50 bargain-bin item, purchased more than a year after the purported marriage ceremony, prosecutors allege. The photographs were staged, and the husband was growing more anxious by the day. Privately, he told friends he was worried the couple werent clicking. On social media, he published a desperate post admitting he was involved in terrorist plots and might go to prison for fraud, court records show.

Thursday, FBI agents arrested the wife, Mariya Chernykh, her sister, Tatiana Farook, and her brother-in-law, Syed Raheel Farook, whose younger brother was one of the two terrorists responsible for the San Bernardino shootings that killed 14 at the Inland Regional Center in December.

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The arrests were the latest development in the FBIs ever-widening investigation into the attacks carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. The couple died in a gun battle with law officers hours after the killings.

Enrique Marquez Jr., who played the role of Chernykhs husband, was named as a co-conspirator in the fraud, according to the indictment. Marquez was charged late last year with buying two of the rifles used in the San Bernardino attack, and federal prosecutors have said he and Syed Rizwan Farook considered carrying out separate terror plots years earlier.

Farooks older brother, his wife and Chernykh were charged with conspiring to create a sham marriage between Marquez and Chernykh. Chernykh, 26, was also charged with fraud, misuse of visas, perjury and two counts of lying to federal investigators, according to the U.S. attorneys office in Los Angeles.

We owe the victims, and the entire community of San Bernardino, a thorough investigation that uncovers all criminal activity surrounding these events, U.S. Atty. Eileen M. Decker said in a statement after the arrests.

All three defendants pleaded not guilty Thursday afternoon in federal court in Riverside.

At one point, the judge asked Farooks mother, Rafia, to come to the front of the court to address questions about the bond. She stood for a time next to her son and briefly touched his arm. He placed his head on her arm and cried for a moment, before the judge asked them to separate.

She told the judge she would sign for the necessary bond amount, $25,000, if her son failed to make his next court appearance. She agreed to do the same for part of the bond for her daughter-in-law, which was set at $35,000.

Chernykhs bond was set at $50,000, which her childs father agreed to sign for. She was also ordered to submit to electronic monitoring, though for now, she will be turned over to immigration authorities who have placed a detainer on her once she posts bond.

All three were ordered to turn in their passports and prohibited from traveling outside of Southern California.

Ron Cordova, an attorney for Syed Raheel Farook, told reporters after the hearing that this is a family that has suffered much, particularly by reason of the horrible, horrible acts of a family member who is no longer living. But those acts should not be attributed to the family.

The Farooks, both 31, posted bond and walked out of court just before 6 p.m. Both looked visibly upset; Tatiana Farook had tears in her eyes.

If convicted of the marriage fraud conspiracy charges, all three defendants could face up to five years in federal prison. The additional charges against Chernykh carry a maximum sentence of 25 years.

Federal prosecutors have not alleged that the trio had any prior knowledge of the attack.

In recent months, the FBIs investigation has focused on tracking the shooters movements Dec. 2 in the hopes of determining if anyone else was involved. The investigation led federal agents to try to gain access to an iPhone 5c used by Farook, nearly touching off a historic court battle with Apple Inc.

The FBI gained access to the phone late last month after receiving help from an unidentified third party, but no information from the device was used in the marriage fraud investigation, according to two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the investigation. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case with the media.

Federal prosecutors said they determined Marquez was paid $200 a month for marrying Chernykh, who took part in the wedding only to gain legal status in the U.S. FBI agents interrogated Chernykh as part of the inquiry into the terror attack, and prosecutors say she lied during those interviews by pretending that she lived with Marquez when she actually resided in Ontario.

A 12-page indictment that was handed up Wednesday afternoon accuses Chernykh and Marquez of staging their entire relationship. Chernykh made three separate $200 deposits in a bank account she shared with Marquez in late 2015, according to the indictment.

The pair claimed they were married at a religious institution in Corona in November 2014, but Chernykh struggled from the start to play her part in the happily-ever-after charade, according to the indictment.

On Christmas Day 2014, Tatiana Farook told Chernykh to stop posting photos of herself with another man, the father of her child, on social media, prosecutors say.

When the couple learned they were going to be interviewed by immigration officials in late 2015, panic set in, according to the indictment. Syed Raheel Farook created a fraudulent lease agreement that suggested Marquez and Chernykh had been living together since November 2014, prosecutors allege. The document falsely claimed the couple lived with Farook and his wife at their home in Corona, prosecutors say.

In a November 2015 email exchange, Marquez and Chernykh discussed their mutual anxiety over their upcoming immigration interview because they had not been in contact with each other, according to the indictment.

Federal prosecutors say Tatiana Farook persisted with the lie 24 hours after the deadly attack. When interviewed by the FBI on Dec. 3, she insisted that Marquez and Chernykh had been living together at her Corona home, according to the indictment.

In the days after the attack, friends and neighbors of the brothers said they were polar opposites. Syed Raheel Farook served in the U.S. Navy for four years and had received medals for service in the Global War on Terrorism. The older sibling was the extrovert of the two, friends say, loud and sociable compared with his brother.

Syed Raheel Farook married Tatiana Farook in 2011, with Marquez and the younger Farook serving as witnesses. Her younger sister, Chernykh, left Russia on a short-term visa in 2009. She dated a Los Angeles resident named Oscar Romero for several years, and the two had a child. In an interview with The Times last year, Romero insisted the couple split up when she married Marquez.

Federal prosecutors allege that Marquez admitted during interviews with FBI agents after the Dec. 2 attack that his marriage was a sham and provided details of his friendship with Syed Rizwan Farook.

Stacy Mozer, one of Syed Raheel Farooks neighbors in Corona, said he was surprised to hear Farook had been arrested on charges related to marriage fraud. In private conversations, he said, Farook expressed great regret about the attack.

Another neighbor, who declined to give his name, said the FBIs investigation should be focused on the gunman, rather than his family.

The guy spent four years in the Navy. I dont know what they want from him, the neighbor said. Its his brother thats the idiot.

Times staff writer Matthew Hamilton contributed to this report.

Follow @lacrimes, @JamesQueallyLAT and @palomaesquivel for more news on the San Bernardino terror attack and the investigation.

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A former San Francisco police lieutenant has been charged with impeding an investigation into a fellow officer accused of rape, prosecutors announced Wednesday.

Curtis Liu is charged with the felony offense of making a false statement on a police report and two misdemeanor counts of delaying a police officer. No arraignment date has been set.

Prosecuters allege that Liu told former officer Jason Lai that he was named as a suspect in a rape investigation but then lied on a police report by saying no suspects in the crime had been identified.

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The Lai rape case is at the center of a text messaging scandal  the second to rock the San Francisco department  after internal affairs investigators revealed a series of racist messages between Lai and other officers when they searched his phone.

In helping Lai, the police lieutenant also failed to tell his superiors and subordinates that hed informed Lai he was a suspect in the case, authorities said.

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Liu, who is retired from the department, is the the latest San Francisco police officer to be charged with a crime in whats become a turbulent period for the department.

Last year, a federal grand jury convicted an officer of violating a persons civil rights while conducting unlawful searches at a downtown hotel that serves the poor.

About the same time, federal court filings revealed that more than a dozen officers had sent or received racist text messages, which called into question more than 3,000 criminal cases.

In January of this year, civil rights activists demanded a federal investigation into the shooting of Mario Woods, a black man who was struck by more than 20 bullets during an encounter with police.

In March, Dist. Atty. George Gascon revealed that his office obtained additional racist text messages from a handful of other officers during the Lai rape investigation.

Another 200 criminal cases will have to be reviewed because of Lais and other officers involvement, San Franciscos public defender said.

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna.

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Outrage over emails sent by a top aide mocking Muslims, blacks, Latinos, women and others is presenting Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell with a serious test as he attempts to reform his troubled agency.

On Thursday, more civil rights groups called for the sheriff to fire or discipline the aide, Tom Angel, after the emails were published by The Times this week.

A person who made light of those stereotypes is unfit for a top position at an agency that polices the very groups he mocked, some civil rights leaders said.

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But McDonnell has said he has no immediate plans to discipline his chief of staff because the emails date from Angels time with the Burbank Police Department and were an uncharacteristic act that do not reflect Angels usual good character and judgment.

Although there is no doubt that such instances, if occurring within the Sheriffs Department, would result in disciplinary action, there is also no doubt that Chief Angel understands and respects that fact, the sheriff said in a statement.

McDonnell was elected in November 2014 as an outsider promising to steer the agency past an era in which some deputies beat jail inmates and others were found to have singled out African Americans and Latinos in the Antelope Valley for harassment.

He brought Angel, a veteran sheriffs official, back from Burbank as a key member of his reform administration. Angels departure would mean the loss of a trusted aide who helps McDonnell navigate the Sheriffs Departments huge bureaucracy and who has a hand in a broad array of projects.

As a chief, Angel is an at-will employee and could be fired or demoted without the civil service protections of lower-ranking sworn personnel.

Jokes like the ones Angel forwarded from his work account feed into a larger atmosphere of racial bias, which in turn can foster the mistreatment of minority groups in the jails and on the streets, said Peter Bibring, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and director of police practices for the ACLU of California. The organization has called on Angel to step down or be fired.

These emails perpetuate the culture that McDonnell was elected to reform, and he has a choice whether to take action and send a signal that racial and religious bias wont be tolerated in the Sheriffs Department or to look the other way and send a signal that this behavior is OK, Bibring said.

Angel previously told The Times that he did not mean to embarrass or demean anyone. He said it was unfortunate that his work emails could be obtained by the public under the states records laws. On Thursday, he did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The emails were sent in 2012 and 2013 when he was the No. 2 police official in Burbank. There, too, he had been brought in to reform an agency reeling from misconduct in its ranks, including allegations of brutality, racism and sexual harassment.

I took my Biology exam last Friday, said one of the emails, which The Times obtained from the city of Burbank under the states public records law. I was asked to name two things commonly found in cells. Apparently Blacks and Mexicans were NOT the correct answers.

Another email ridiculed concerns about the racial profiling of Muslims as terrorism suspects. A third included the subject line How dumb is dumb? and listed 20 reasons Muslim Terrorists are so quick to commit suicide, including Towels for hats, Constant wailing from some idiot in a tower and You cant wash off the smell of donkey.

Four of the emails contained strings of jokes that Angel received and then forwarded. A city spokesman said the other senders and recipients were redacted because they did not work for the city, and releasing their identities would be an invasion of privacy.

A fifth email was a short dialogue between Angel and another Burbank police official in which Angel asked what he called a trivia question: How many virgins do Muslims get in heaven?

Minnie Hadley-Hempstead, president of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People Los Angeles, called for Angels dismissal.

We do not want an apology. We want him out, Hadley-Hempstead said.

The civil rights group Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles also wants McDonnell to fire Angel.

Civil rights advocate Earl Ofari Hutchinson called on the Sheriffs Department to audit all employee emails to see whether others are also sending offensive material. Expressing disappointment in Angel, which McDonnell has done, is not enough, and Angel should be reprimanded or disciplined, he said.

You have a high-ranking sheriffs official sending a message to the community that the only way that I deal with and know about African Americans and Hispanics is as prisoners, jailbirds, criminals, thugs and gangsters, Hutchinson said.

Some Muslim groups are calling for sheriffs deputies to receive cultural awareness training. The Muslim Public Affairs Council met with McDonnell on Monday and has set up another meeting with him for next week. A statement from the organization calling for disciplinary action against Angel also was signed by the HIV/AIDS advocacy group Bienestar, the African American community service group Brotherhood Crusade, the immigrant rights group CARECEN and the anti-bias group the California Conference for Equality and Justice.

In recent years, federal officials have stepped in to stop beatings by deputies in the jails and racially discriminatory policing practices in the Antelope Valley. More than a dozen sheriffs officials, including Baca, have been convicted or pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the FBIs investigation into the jails.

Despite the scandal, Baca won praise during his 15 years as sheriff for building strong relationships with minority groups who said the Sheriffs Department previously had mistreated them and ignored their concerns. Baca required his deputies to memorize a pledge to fight against racism, sexism and homophobia. And he created dozens of ethnic advisory committees, formalizing a pipeline between his office and the countys many minority groups.

At a congressional hearing on homeland security in March 2010, Baca testified about the importance of strong ties with Muslim communities. When a congressman questioned why Baca attended fundraisers for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the sheriff defended his ties with the group and attacked the questioning as un-American.

Among Bacas legacies was the Muslim Community Affairs unit, which was started in 2007 and consisted of several deputies whose job was to maintain relationships with Muslim residents and educate fellow deputies about Islam. The unit has continued its work under McDonnell.

cindy.chang@latimes.com, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @cindychangLA, @atchek

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San Diego State University students upset over fliers posted on campus that identified some students as terrorism supporters confronted President Elliot Hirshman on Wednesday, briefly preventing him from leaving in a campus police car.

Protesters were upset over Hirshmans delayed response to the fliers, which claim that seven named students have allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate hatred against Jewish students on campus.

We wanted the president to come to our defense as students, said political science student Osama Alkhawaja, 22, whose name appeared among those listed.

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The fliers are believed to be created by an organization led by conservative activist David Horowitz of Los Angeles. The website for the David Horowitz Freedom Center appears at the bottom of the fliers.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Hirshman and another university administrator responded to the fliers in an email to students, saying that naming students who are opposed to a certain viewpoint could discourage them from taking part in political discussions, while emphasizing that the university supports free speech.

Its always difficult balancing free speech with things that make people uncomfortable, and we deal with that every day on campus, university spokesman Greg Block said. But in the end, free speech wins out, and we support that.

The students participating in the protest Wednesday felt that Hirshmans email failed to condemn the fliers and advocate for the safety of the students who were listed. Many sought an apology.

My friends are not terrorists, and if their names are being posted around campus, thats an issue of security, said Spanish and Portuguese-language student Jeanette Corona, 23. No student should be demonized. ... Its [Hirshmans] job to ensure the safety of all students on this campus.

Block said he did not know how much time elapsed between when the fliers were discovered and when Hirshman and Vice President of Student Affairs Eric Rivera issued a statement about them. Students said it took two weeks.

Any time something happens on campus, people want the president to make a statement, Block said. He cant make a statement for everything that happens.

The students decided to hold a silent protest at a 4 p.m. ceremony Hirshman was attending to swear in next school years student government leaders.

But once he saw us, he left. He didnt make eye contact with us, Alkhawaja said.

Several students followed Hirshman, who got into a campus police car that planned to take him to his own vehicle. Block said it is not unusual for the president to be escorted when theres a protest on campus.

Corona said she knew students were eager to speak to Hirshman. She was among the first who surrounded the police vehicle and prevented it from leaving.

I stood in front of the car  people were standing on the side  and I told everyone, Join me. Please dont leave me alone. Stand your ground. Link up. Hold hands,  she said.

As Hirshman sat in the car, students chanted, Hirshman, Hirshman, come on out. We have something to talk about.

After nearly an hour, Hirshman got out of the vehicle and talked to some students. Members of the administration offered to set up a meeting between several students and the president.

We said, Listen, theres no way all these students are gonna leave just because youre gonna meet with me. The only thing that will get these students to leave is a public admission that youre sorry for the way that youve treated them,  Alkhawaja said.

The students eventually got what many wanted.

If we have done things inadvertently that have upset or hurt people, we are sorry for that, Hirshman told the students.

It definitely feels like a victory. For all the students that put in so many hours trying to get the administration to listen to us, we feel like at least we got something: a public apology, Alkhawaja said.

Students and Hirshman agreed to meet at a later time to discuss the matter.

Alkhawaja and the other students say they were targeted for supporting the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement, which calls for divestment against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights, according to the organizations website.

Last year a number of student groups at San Diego State, including the Muslim Students Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, Womens Outreach Association and the Queer Students Union rallied behind a resolution that would have called for the Campanile Foundation, which manages university donations, to stop investing in companies that have a stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according the universitys newspaper, the Daily Aztec.

Those against the change said the resolution would contribute to a larger hate movement that calls for the destruction of the only democracy in the Middle East. Students Supporting Israel, the Jewish Student Union and Young Americans for Liberty were against the resolution.

Ultimately, the resolution was supported by nearly 53% of students who voted, short of the two-thirds majority needed for it to pass.

Since then, students involved in the movement against Israel have been repeatedly attacked, Alkhawaja said.

Posters similar to those at San Diego State began appearing April 15 at UCLAs campus, where officials denounced the posters and met with the students targeted, according to the universitys newspaper, the Daily Bruin.

This serious escalation amounts to a focused, personalized intimidation that threatens specific members of our Bruin community, Jerry Kang, vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, said in an email to UCLA students regarding the posters.

The fliers posted at San Diego State were not the first time Horowitz has criticized the university. In February 2015, the David Horowitz Freedom Center named San Diego State sixth on a list of 10 schools nationwide with the worst record for anti-Semitic activities.

The list sited incidents associated with the universitys Students for Justice in Palestine organization as evidence.

The list was denounced by school officials, the head of the local Coalition for Justice in Palestine, the Anti-Defamation League and Hillel, an international organization devoted to fostering Jewish life on campus.

Hernandez, Warth and Winkley write for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
A home invasion robbery in South Sacramento on Thursday ended with three men inside the residence shot to death and their attackers escaping, sheriffs deputies said.

The attackers, either two or three gunmen, according to Sacramento County sheriffs detectives, forced their way into a home in the 8700 block of Ardith Drive, robbed it, then shot three people inside.

The victims, described as two brothers, ages 21 and 32, and their 55-year-old father, were pronounced dead at the scene. Their identities and what was stolen was not immediately available.

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Two other people who were also inside the home during the robbery were uninjured, said Sheriffs Sgt. Tony Turnbull. One of them called police about 6:30 a.m. and reported the slayings.

The gunmen wore dark masks, dark clothing and escaped in a dark-colored compact car, the sheriffs department said in a statement. Authorities believe the family was targeted, Turnbull said.

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna.

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Willie L. Williams, the first African American chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who steadied the agency in the tumultuous wake of the 1992 riots but was distrusted as an outsider by many officers and politicians, has died. He was 72.

Williams died after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer, his wife, Evelina, said in a brief phone interview. The couple lived in Fayetteville, Ga., outside Atlanta.

The son of a butcher, Williams spent a career rising to the top ranks of the Philadelphia Police Department before he stepped into the top job at the LAPD in 1992. It was a sensitive time, as the department was reeling from its poor handling of the riots that erupted after the acquittal of officers who beat Rodney G. King during a violent arrest and as the city at large struggled to mend deep racial divides.

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The challenge facing Williams was all the more daunting given his predecessor, Daryl F. Gates, a deeply polarizing figure who had won fierce loyalty from rank-and-file officers but had long been criticized as running the LAPD like a brutish, occupying quasi-military force that mistreated blacks and other minorities.

Willie Williams was appointed to do some healing, and in many ways he succeeded, building and rebuilding positive, constructive relationships between the African American community and the police, said John Mack, a longtime civil rights leader who served on the citys civilian Police Commission. But the deck was stacked against him from the start. The Los Angeles Police Department was not ready to accept him for two reasons: He was an outsider and he was African American.

Chosen by then-Mayor Tom Bradley to replace Gates over several high-ranking LAPD officials, Williams arrived promising to follow the same blueprint he had used to run the Philadelphia department. At the heart of the plan was his belief in community policing, a relatively novel idea at the time that emphasized the need for police to integrate themselves closely into the communities they serve in order to build trust.

It was a message that resonated with residents, as polls showed Williams enjoyed strong approval ratings among residents throughout the city. City officials praised him for stabilizing the department and repairing its reputation.

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Williams showed a willingness to fight for changes. He pushed for increased hiring of female officers and spoke out about the need to address rampant sexual harassment and discrimination within the ranks. He increased the size of the department and advocated for reforms drawn up in 1991 by the Christopher Commission, which had been formed by Bradley after the King beating to review LAPD training, discipline and complaint systems.

But doubts and resistance to Williams leadership soon took root. Within a year of Williams taking over the department, Bradley had been replaced as mayor by Richard Riordan. With his staunchest political protector gone, the chief found himself increasingly alienated in the citys power circles as police union officials and rank-and-file cops grew increasingly hostile to his leadership, and his management skills came under scrutiny.

In 1995, a letter from a former LAPD official to the Police Commission led to an investigation into allegations that Williams had accepted free accommodations from a Las Vegas casino.

Williams vigorously denied the claim, saying it was part of an orchestrated smear campaign. The commission, however, uncovered receipts showing that Williams and his family had accepted free rooms on several occasions.

Williams said the rooms had been provided in exchange for the gambling he and his family had done, but the commission concluded he had lied. The panel voted to reprimand him  a move that led to a political power struggle as Riordan upheld the sanction, only to see it overturned by the City Council.

Williams survived the mini-scandal, but never fully recovered from it. His approval ratings sank as he increasingly pitted himself against Riordan and the city government in general. His decision to file a $10-million invasion-of-privacy claim over the hotel brouhaha was widely criticized.

1 / 6 Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams salutes a newly graduated recruit at a ceremony at the LAPD Academy in 1995. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 6 Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams joins others in applauding Mayor Richard Riordan, left, after his remarks during the official reopening of the Foothill Division police station in Pacoima in 1995. (David Blumenkrantz / For The Times) 3 / 6 Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams answers questions about the citys riot preparedness as Mayor Ton Bradley listens in 1993. (Patrick Downs / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 6 U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, flanked by Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams, left, and Mayor Richard J. Riordan at graduation ceremonies for the first class of Los Angeles Police Department officers hired under the 1994 federal crime bill. (Ken Lubas / Los Angeles Times) 5 / 6 Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams leaves a press conference in 1995. (Con Keyes / Los Angeles Times) 6 / 6 Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams during a May 16, 1997, farewell interview in his office. (Clarence Williams / Los Angeles Times)

He nonetheless made a bid for a second five-year term as chief in 1997, touting what he and supporters said had been his impressive leadership at a time when crime rates fell, but so did markers of productivity such as arrests.

The Police Commission, whose members were largely appointed by Riordan, chose not to give him a second term, setting the stage for Williams to be replaced by Bernard C. Parks, an African American and LAPD insider who had clashed with Williams.

In an interview with The Times as he prepared to depart the LAPD, Williams spoke with evident anger about his struggles to earn the trust and respect of officers and elected officials alike.

In a sense, I was the guinea pig, Williams said, adding that he believed his successor would find it easier going because of the steps hed already taken. Its always nice when you can follow the trailblazer.

joel.rubin@latimes.com

Twitter: @joelrubin

Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.

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The U.S. Border Patrol is one of the countrys largest law enforcement agencies, with 21,000 agents. It has faced recent scrutiny not only for multiple incidents concerning its use of force, but also its lack of transparency in handling those cases.

When R. Gil Kerlikowske became commissioner of Customs and Border Protection  which oversees the Border Patrol  in March 2014, he promised a new culture of openness.

He has largely delivered on that pledge, directing sector chiefs and their communications staffs to issue a statement within 12 hours of an agents use of lethal force.

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Still, it took several days earlier this year for the Border Patrol to tell The Times the fate of a suspect shot by an agent in January.

Neither the media nor the public nor the nonprofits are going to allow Customs and Border Protection to go back to no comment and its under investigation.  R. Gil Kerlikowske, Customs and Border Protection commissioner

We should be able to tell you if he is wounded and alive or dead, Kerlikowske said in an interview that has been edited for clarity and space.

Youve said that Border Patrol agents are used to being alone in the field without backup nearby and that now they have to get used to working near large population centers. How must they change what they do?

When you think about the geography of where they work and the number of people that they could encounter, the backup, the lack of radio equipment  thats a different culture from any law enforcement agency anywhere in the United States.

Ive told Border Patrol recruit classes, theres no apprehension, theres no seizure of drugs, theres no pursuit of a vehicle thats worth you getting hurt for. And thats a hard change.

What kind of training is different now for the agents, given the ways youre asking them to change?

Even with backup and someone else close by, it can still be quite dangerous and things can happen in the blink of an eye.

We like the fact that theyre expanding the training out here in the academy in New Mexico, and its much more scenario-based than classroom lecture. The de-escalation techniques that law enforcement has been teaching are being reflected in those scenarios.

Sometimes when an agent uses lethal force, the Border Patrol doesnt disclose certain details that would be disclosed in an identical shooting by another agency, such as the name of the agent, the name of the subject and circumstances surrounding the shooting, including whether the wounded person is still alive. Are you telling the public enough when it comes to uses of lethal force by Border Patrol agents?

Are we telling the public enough or are we telling reporters enough? [Laughs] Our constraints are a little bit different [from a county sheriffs office]. We have to be very mindful of playing by the rules of the Department of Justice in the criminal process.

Its a large organization. It takes a little while to not only change policy but to have it drilled down into everyone.

Sometimes, in vast areas like Cochise County, Ariz., which is the size of Connecticut, or La Paz County, Ariz., which is the size of Rhode Island, residents will turn to the Border Patrol instead of the local sheriffs office because the Border Patrol agents are closer. When the Border Patrol is acting in that kind of surrogate law enforcement capacity, and ends up using lethal force, is there some obligation to disclose more than even the updated statements?

We depend on state and local law enforcement as much as they depend on us.

Our restrictions as a federal law enforcement agency and what we can do and what we can enforce are different, so we dont want to be seen at all as a primary responder to the needs of local law enforcement or the community.

Does the administration support your efforts? What happens when President Obama leaves office?

Ill leave at the end of the term. Ill tell you, quite frankly, theyll never go back to the way it was. Neither the media nor the public nor the nonprofits are going to allow Customs and Border Protection to go back to no comment and its under investigation.

[Current executive staff members] are all still going to be there after I leave. Theyve all been schooled in this. I dont see any administration turning the clock back on transparency.

Are you comfortable with the level of experience among agents since the massive staffing ramp-up of the Border Patrol in the mid-2000s?

The vast majority did a good job, but the hiring standards should have been more stringently applied. [Today] Im very satisfied with the hiring standards; Im not very satisfied that we have 1,200 open positions.

The Homeland Security Advisory Council recently recommended that agents be equipped with body cameras, which the Border Patrol has rejected in the past. How hard will it be to get agents to accept cameras?

Its a negotiable issue with the union, and I think the union has made it clear they would be supportive of cameras. The agents that field-tested them were satisfied with them.

nigel.duara@latimes.com
Delivering what his campaign billed as a major foreign policy address, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump staked out unusual territory for him Wednesday  somewhere close to middle ground.

His speech to a group of foreign policy mandarins was notable for its contradictions, lack of specifics and occasional belligerence. But he did not repeat several radical ideas he has espoused on the stump  such as promoting the spread of nuclear weapons  that would upend decades of U.S. policy.

Speaking a day after he swept five states and moved within striking range of the GOP nomination, Trump clearly sought to reassure those nervous about his understanding of Americas military and diplomatic obligations and commitments around the globe.

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He hewed broadly to the lines of orthodox Republican doctrine on national security and foreign policy, positing that the United States should assert its interests in global economic and diplomatic endeavors.

It is time to shake the rust off of Americas foreign policy, Trump said. America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.

Trump repeatedly said that the United States under his administration would be a reliable power. But he also said U.S. policy would have to be unpredictable to keep the world guessing, a formula rarely used in high-stakes diplomacy.

He voiced a willingness to improve relations with Russias Vladimir Putin, as he has on the stump. He did not mention Moscows belligerent actions in Ukraine, which have led to international sanctions on Russia.

He said his foreign policy would replace randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace.

Although he sharply criticized President Obama, many of his calls for stronger action largely echoed what Obama already is doing.

Trump did not call the NATO military alliance obsolete, as he has in the past. He instead issued a demand that Obama has repeatedly voiced, that member nations must pay their fair share  a quota calculated at 2% of a countrys gross domestic product.

He said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a bedrock of U.S. policy in Europe since shortly after World War II, needs to update its mission and structure, a position few would dispute.

Countries must pay for the cost of their defense, he said, or let them defend themselves. America, he added, should only be generous with those who prove they are our friends.

If he is elected, he said, America will be getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world, which is similar to the argument Obama made in his 2008 campaign.

Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everyone shares, Trump added, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.

Trump said that Obama had snubbed Israel and that the White House had helped make Iran more powerful by entering into an arms control deal that saw Tehran destroy its ability to build nuclear weapons in exchange for the removal of United Nations sanctions.

He did not repeat his frequent vow to build a wall on Americas border with Mexico, to deport 11 million Latino immigrants in the country illegally and to deny U.S. entry to most Muslims.

Instead, he spoke vaguely of stronger borders and of fighting extremism at home and abroad.

We need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam, Trump said. But he vacillated between promising robust military action and saying the U.S. would take on only wars it can win.

Trump blamed Obama and his first secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, now the likely Democratic presidential nominee, for the rise of Islamic State and the destabilization of Iraq, Syria and Libya.

The legacy of Obama-Clinton interventions will be weakness, confusion, disarray  a mess, Trump said.

In a rare departure, Trump used teleprompters to read a speech, rather than wing it from a few notes. His host was the Center for the National Interest, a conservative group dominated by establishment Republicans.

Trump drew a subdued response from several hundred members of Washingtons foreign policy elite, who gathered in an ornate ballroom at the Washington Mayflower Hotel. Trump campaign staff and a few congressional supporters applauded strongly in the first three rows, but few others appeared to clap.

As he has before, Trump attacked trade deals such as NAFTA, saying they had robbed Americans of jobs and, in the case of China, put the U.S. economy in peril.

Several analysts were left scratching their heads, noting that Trump offered few specifics for how to achieve his vision of a peaceful and prosperous United States that both leads the world but stays out of its troubles.

James R. Clapper, director of national intelligence, said this week that presidential candidates often tone down their positions when they get into office.

Certainly you worry about rhetoric on the campaign trail. I think the history has been that once a president is inaugurated and is in office and realizes the burden and the responsibilities of the position, I think that has a tempering effect on anyone, Clapper said.

I am struck with how simple things are on the campaign trail and how the very same issues are hard in the confines of the Situation Room, he said, referring to the secure room where the president meets his top intelligence and military officials.

Trumps aides said his speech was the first of several he will give to offer more substance as the primary race moves into its final stretch.

The speech reflects where the voters are, said James Jay Carafano, a vice president at the conservative Heritage Foundation. They are starting to look at him as someone who might be standing in the Oval Office [and asking], Is he trustworthy? [Trump] recognizes he has to start to be that person.

Democrats said the address proved Trump understands too little about foreign affairs to be entrusted with the nations security.

Madeleine Albright, who served as secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, said Obamas use of smart power, and not Trumps call to be unpredictable, was the key to effective foreign policy in a dangerous world.

Blustering is not a strategy, Albright said in a conference call with reporters. Do you want someone unpredictable with the nuclear codes?

Times staff writer Brian Bennett contributed to this report.

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Im Davan Maharaj, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times. Here are some story lines I dont want you to miss today.

TOP STORIES

The GOPs Gender Problem

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Donald Trump has grown increasingly popular among Republican women, but one of his biggest weaknesses in a general election could be how the bigger pool of female voters views him. Right now, its not good. And his attacks on Hillary Clinton having the womans card and lacking the strength and stamina to be president arent helping, Cathleen Decker writes. That must drive GOP leaders crazy after they had hoped to make inroads with women this election.

Forwarded Emails, Backward Jokes

One email contained a joke about blacks and Latinos in jail. Another ridiculed concerns about the racial profiling of Muslims as terrorism suspects. Records show Tom Angel, a top L.A. County Sheriffs Department official, forwarded them and others from his work account during his previous job with the Burbank Police Department. I apologize if I offended anybody, but the intent was not for the public to have seen these jokes, he told The Times. Read the emails and the reaction to them here.

Why Shrek Could Be Your Cable Guy

Comcast is looking to acquire DreamWorks for more than $3 billion  a move that many analysts see as taking a page out of how Disney became powerful through a series of smart acquisitions. Comcast already owns NBCUniversal, provides cable and Internet to millions in the U.S. and has rejuvenated theme parks thanks to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter attractions. Heres why adding the home of Shrek and Po the panda makes sense.

You Handsome Foreign Devil, You!

Loose lips sink ships. Especially when international relations between Chinese women and overseas men become romantic, according to a recent campaign in Beijing called Dangerous Love. While some have had a chuckle at the 16-panel cartoon, it has drawn criticism for being sexist and nationalistic. Read on to see why some say it may be aimed more at sowing distrust of Western ideals than curbing espionage.

LACMA Gets Big Gifts to Build On

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has an ambitious plan to build a sleek, modernist building that its leaders hope will help vault it into the top ranks of the worlds art museums. Projected cost: $600 million or more. Its now to $275 million of that goal, thanks to a $50-million pledge by art collector Elaine Wynn and $25 million from former Univision chairman A. Jerrold Perenchio. Take a look at whats ahead.

CALIFORNIA

-- UC Davis chancellor has been placed on leave as officials launch a probe into alleged misconduct.

-- County officials look to a parcel tax to help L.A.'s park-poor communities.

-- Police recovered $600,000 in $1 bills during the arrest of a suspected skid row drug kingpin.

-- Willie Williams, L.A.'s first black police chief, has died at age 72.

NATION-WORLD

-- Ted Cruz hopes Carly Fiorina will help him with women and California voters.

-- Donald Trump outlined his America First approach to foreign policy.

-- Amid unrest, looting and electricity rationing, Venezuelas president becomes a recall target.

-- What to expect from North Koreas Party Congress: millennials, maybe some dead men, but no HBO.

-- How the Moth Radio Hour helped scientists map out meaning in the brain.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE ARTS

-- Meet the L.A. director who helped make Beyonce's Lemonade.

-- Our critics evaluate the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts massive new $305-million wing: the art and the architecture.

-- At the Stagecoach country music festival, Eric Church will show his soft side along with his bad boy standards.

-- Theater review: Even with Jessica Lange and Gabriel Byrne, Long Days Journey Into Night fails to connect.

-- Put some respeck on rap mogul Anthony Hamiltons name, because he deserves it.

BUSINESS

-- Q&A: Why paid parental leave wont go national.

-- After two years of decline, TV could see an ad comeback.

-- When Sports Authority closes, these retailers will win.

SPORTS

-- Its almost too bizarre to be true: The Ducks last four playoff appearances have now ended with a Game 7 loss at Honda Center in a series they had led 3-2.

-- The Clippers evening began with sobs and ended in sighs: a Game 5 loss to the Trail Blazers.

-- Chynas brain will be examined by the doctor portrayed in the film Concussion, her manager says.

OPINION

-- A reasonable Donald Trump? Were more than a little skeptical.

-- How could someone rich and famous like Prince die without a will? Its not unusual. Just ask an estate lawyer.

WHAT OUR EDITORS ARE READING

-- Presidential humor: The best joke from every POTUS, as judged by the Washington Post.

-- Page-turners in orchestras are being replaced by iPads. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

-- Chandeliers, murals and gilded statues: Inside North Koreas subway system. (National Geographic)

ONLY IN L.A.

Today we have virtual reality, but in 1960, they had Smell-O-Vision. The technique of pumping odors such as roses, wine, cigar smoke and perfume into a theater to match the sights on screen was created for the film Scent of Mystery, but alas, it wafted away after the film flopped. As part of the TCM Classic Film Festival, Smell-O-Vision will be back this weekend at the Cineramadome, where a version of the film, retitled as Holiday in Spain, will screen.

Please send comments and ideas to Davan Maharaj.
Washington: Emboldened by fresh primary wins, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has unveiled his "America first" foreign policy and vowed to halt the spread of radical Islam, eliminate the ISIS, prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and improve ties with Russia and China.

"I'd like to talk today about how to develop a new foreign policy direction for our country, one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace," 69-year-old Trump said, asserting that it's time to "shake the rust off" Americas foreign policy.

"My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people and American security above all else," the Republican leader said. "It has to be first. Has to be."

Trump did not mention India in his major foreign policy speech on Wednesday, but said that his administration would seek to improve ties with Russia and China.

The speech came a day after Trump declared himself as a "presumptive" Republican nominee when he won primaries in all the five states - Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

He said sending troops overseas would be his last option and would depend diplomacy and countrys economic power.

"To our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be reliable again. It's going to be a great and reliable ally again. It's going to be a friend again. We're going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests and the shared interests of our allies," he said.

"We're getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world. Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the water's edge. We need a new rational American foreign policy," he said.

Observing that the US needs a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam, Trump said containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States and indeed the world.

"Events may require the use of military force, but it's also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War. In this, we're going to be working very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence, attacks and everything else. It is a dangerous world, more dangerous now than it has ever been," he said.

"We should work together with any nation in the region that is threatened by the rise of radical Islam. But this has to be a two-way street," he said, adding that the days of ISIS are numbered.

"I have a simple message for them (ISIS). Their days are numbered. I won't tell them where and I won't tell them how. We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything. We're sending troops. We tell them. We're sending something else," Trump said.

"They're going to be gone. ISIS will be gone if I am elected president. And they'll be gone quickly. They will be gone very, very quickly," he said.

Trump said that in the Middle East the US' goals must be to "defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change."

"We need to be clear sighted about the groups that will never be anything other than enemies. And believe me, we have groups that no matter what you do, they will be the enemy," he said.

Trump said if he is elected president his administration would seek to improve ties with Russia and China.

"We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes, but we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests," he said.

"I believe easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible. Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries," he said.

"Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we can't make a deal under my administration, a deal that's great, not good, great for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table. It's as simple as that. We're going to find out," he cautioned.

Fixing US relations with China is another important step, he said. "China respects strength and by letting them take advantage of us economically, which they are doing like never before, we have lost all of their respect," he said.

"We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit that we have to find a way quickly, and I mean quickly, to balance. A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China, better than we have right now. Look at what China is doing in the South China Sea. They're not supposed to be doing it," Trump said.
Voters in Los Angeles County will see seven judicial races on their June 7 ballots. In three of them, lawyers have challenged judges who are seeking to be re-elected to new six-year terms. But the challengers fail to measure up to the people they want to replace, and the Times on Wednesday recommended that the three judges  James Kaddo, Kathryn Solorzano and Ray Santana  be re-elected.

Read the rest of our judicial ensorsements here>>>

In the other four races, candidates are vying for seats that are being vacated because the incumbents are retiring or otherwise leaving the Superior Court. As is so often the case, many of those candidates come from the Los Angeles District Attorneys Office, contributing to a bench with a disproportionate number of criminal prosecutors. Sometimes prosecutors make good judges, sometimes not. In three of this years four open-seat races for judge, we fond the best choices to be prosecutors. And in the fourth, the best candidate is a former prosecutor.

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Our recommendations:

Office 11: Steven Schreiner.

Three Los Angeles County prosecutors and a private practitioner are vying for this seat. Jonathan Alexan Malek, the lawyer in private practice, has a dearth of courtroom experience  and with 11 years as a licensed attorney, he has just a year above the minimum qualifications to serve  and is well out of his depth. Deputy District Attorney Debra Archuleta brings a combative style that may serve her as a prosecutor but would not translate well to the bench. Deputy District Attorney Paul Kim may someday make a good judge.

Of the four candidates, Steven Schreiner  also a deputy district attorney  has the most experience. He also is the one with the calm demeanor that a judge must have, and that is somewhat ironic, given that the knock on him when he ran two years ago was that he supposedly lost his temper when making his argument to a jury that couldnt reach a verdict. Given his record in his many other trials, it seems more likely that he didnt lose his temper at all, but was just going for effect. It wasnt a great tactic, but it was a departure for a candidate who would likely make a model judge.

Office 42: Cyndy Zuzga.

Zuzga is a Superior Court commissioner, meaning she already is doing much of a judges work. And by all accounts, she is doing it well. What stands out about her, however, is her voluntary involvement in programs like the Downey Teen Court, a restorative justice effort in which young offenders are judged by their peers and are compelled to face the consequences of their actions and make amends. Zuzga is also a former prosecutor, so she is no stranger to problem of more serious crime.

Michael Ribons is an experienced and capable civil litigator and would also likely make a good judge. Other candidates include Deputy District Attorney E. Matthew Aceves, and private practitioner Alicia Molina, neither of whom have the breadth of experience that Zuzga has.

Office 84: Susan Jung Townsend.

Townsend is one of three deputy district attorneys running for this seat (along with a private attorney), and despite 17 years on the job she is not the one with the most experience. But she is the one whom many defense lawyers told the Times possesses the most integrity and the best judgment.

Also running are Deputy District Attorneys Hubert S. Yun and Javier Perez, and private practitioner Aaron Weissman.

Few deputy district attorneys ever use the words Deputy District Attorney for their official ballot designations  the descriptions that appear under each candidates name  because experience has shown that voters respond better to made-up titles like Gang Homicide Prosecutor. Thats the term Yun is using, and it is indeed an accurate description of his current assignment in the District Attorneys Office. In this race, though, it is Townsend  listed on the ballot as a Criminal Fraud Prosecutor  who is the better choice, even if homicide is a more worrisome crime than fraud.

Office 158: David A. Berger.

One of the best services to voters puzzling over how to vote for judge is the set of candidate ratings produced by the Los Angeles County Bar Assn., the regions largest voluntary organization of attorneys. The County Bars Judicial Elections Evaluations Committee engages in a review of the candidates and places each of them in one of four categories, from Exceptionally Well Qualified to Not Qualified. The Times often agrees with the committees assessments.

But not always. This years ratings have not yet been published but the Metropolitan News-Enterprise has reported that Berger was rated Not Qualifed. The Times nevertheless finds him to be the best of the candidates in this particular race.

As a deputy district attorney, and as a candidate for Los Angeles city attorney, Berger was never shy about expressing his opinion, including about his rivals.

He has a long and successful record as a prosecutor, and his free expression of opinion in that capacity do not make him less fit to serve impartially as a judge.

Deputy Attorney General Kim L. Nguyen is keenly intelligent and capable and would also make a good judge, but could benefit from another few years of experience before taking the bench.

Also running are Deputy District Attorney Fred Mesropi, Los Angeles Deputy City Attorney Onica Valle Cole, and Van Nuys sole practitioner Naser Nas Khoury. Among the five, Berger is the best choice.

Read the rest of The Times judicial endorsements here.

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As California enters its fifth year of official drought  and its ninth dry year in the past 10  the elements of a modern, sustainable water system are finally taking shape. The state is improving water efficiency in agriculture and urban areas, expanding wastewater treatment and reuse, figuring out how to capture more storm water, and starting to monitor and manage badly over-drafted groundwater basins.

In Washington D.C., however, special interests are still pushing ineffective and inequitable water strategies. Nowhere is this tension between new water strategies and outmoded federal thinking more apparent than in the California drought legislation currently before Congress.

The federal government has a vital role to play in helping states address water problems: improving management of federal infrastructure, funding research of new technologies, setting standards for water-quality and appliance efficiency, as well as protecting the environment and marginalized communities. And yet none of those issues is the thrust of the two water bills now moving through the House and Senate. Instead, a California-centric bill sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a Western water bill sponsored by Rep. David Valadao both contain egregious, anti-environmental giveaways hidden behind modest provisions for modernizing Californias water system.

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The objective of these bills is not to strengthen Californias ability to deal with drought, or to accelerate our transition to an efficient 21st century water system. Rather, both want to maximize the amount of water diverted from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to a few federal irrigation contractors in the San Joaquin Valley. To do that, both propose undermining environmental protections for salmon and other endangered species. Under the California Delta Reform Act and the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, supplying water for human use and environmental protection have been co-equal goals  but these laws weaken, if not abandon, that concept.

The proposed legislation also revises watershed rules for rivers in ways that could preempt or violate Californias water rights laws. Meantime, they serve up pork-barrel federal funding for reservoirs that would produce little usable water, flood Native American cultural sites, or violate Wild and Scenic River protections.

Both bills approach Californias entrenched water problems from the misguided idea that we can squeeze even more water out of an already overtapped system.

The House bill, in effect, repeals the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Act that Congress enacted a decade ago to resolve 18 years of contentious litigation between conservationists, multiple federal agencies and irrigation districts. It would preempt the California law that requires restoration of river flows and native salmon in the San Joaquin River and waive federal environmental protections such as the National Environmental Policy Act under a range of conditions. It would also actually harm farmers by canceling water supply and flood-control projects that benefit local agriculture.

Heres just one example of how the House bill would ride roughshod over existing environmental laws: One provision simply orders federal agencies to ignore a 2014 finding that the section of the San Joaquin River that would be destroyed by the proposed Temperance Flat Dam is eligible for federal wild and scenic river status. The Senate bill, too, would authorize violations of science-based rules put in place to protect endangered fish.

While the House version is more extreme, both bills approach Californias entrenched water problems from the misguided idea that we can squeeze even more water out of an already overtapped system. Although the Senate bill promotes some sensible water management reforms, it still helps a small number of Central Valley farmers at the expense of other regions and water users.

When the Senate and House try to reconcile these two bills, these inappropriate provisions are likely to be made worse, not better.

Given these flaws, there is strong opposition to these bills from several corners. Scientists who labored to improve our understanding of Californias tremendously complex hydrology and biology are dismayed that their work is being ignored by politicians. The fishing community, including both recreational and commercial organizations along the entire West Coast, sees a direct threat to a multi-billion-dollar industry dependent on healthy fish runs. Communities in northern California are worried that more water from their region will be diverted south. Environmental groups that struggled for years to put in place even modest protections for fish and bird habitat and wild and scenic rivers are aghast that their work would be undone. Native American communities are furious that proposed dams would flood their cultural sites.

Maybe this is the kind of compromise needed to pass any bill in todays polarized Congress. But the bad in these bills far outweighs the good. Congress could be about to wipe out decades of painstakingly achieved progress in order to repeat some of the most lamentable errors of mid-20th century western water policy.

Difficult steps are needed to deal with Californias long-term water problems. But no bill at all is better than legislation like this that takes easy steps in the wrong direction.

Peter Gleick is a hydroclimatologist, President of the Pacific Institute, MacArthur Fellow, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

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How could Prince die without a will?

He didnt amass a $250-million estate just through exceptional musical talent. He was also a shrewd businessman. Two years ago, Prince took control of his musical catalog and related copyrights, and negotiated a new contract with Warner Bros. His estate will reap at least $100 million on royalties alone over the next few years.

Prince was extremely hands-on with the business side of music. He shunned attorneys, preferring to deal directly with record studios and concert promoters, and made a point of controlling his legacy. It was part of his persona. Prince fought to remove his songs from YouTube and cut deals directly with digital music providers.

In California, a perfectly acceptable will is one thats drafted completely in your handwriting with your signature at the bottom. You dont even need a notary.

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Yet he neglected to decide what would happen to his estate after death, leaving behind unanswered questions instead of a plan. Who will control his vault of unrecorded music? Where will his fortune go? Prince died unmarried and without living parents, and his only child died shortly after birth. Surviving family members include a sister and five half-siblings. Observers expect a will contest, and additional claims against the estate are likely. One thing is certain: Attorneys will benefit lavishly, as will the federal government and the state of Minnesota. His heirs  whoever they are  will pay a hefty estate tax that could have been minimized with a sensible estate plan that included charitable giving.

Amazingly, it is not unusual for the rich and famous to die without a will. Jimi Hendrix, Pablo Picasso, Bob Marley, Howard Hughes, Sonny Bono and Abraham Lincoln all died without a will. Lincoln was the first president to die without a will even though he was an attorney. Some sources estimate that more than 55% of adult Americans do not have a will or estate plan. Only 41% of baby boomers (ages 55 to 64) have a will. Only 32% of African Americans have one, and only 26% of Latinos.

Procrastination goes a ways toward explaining why so many of us fail to invest the time to create an estate plan  tomorrows always a better day to confront ones mortality. On a more earthly level, its uncomfortable to decide who will be in charge or who will benefit upon ones death. As an estate planning attorney, I often hear clients express fear of giving offense. If I pick my son Johnny to be in charge of my business, wont Beth be angry?

Some also cite cost as a barrier. But estate plans arent expensive, particularly compared with the trouble they ward off.

In California, a perfectly acceptable will is one thats drafted completely in your handwriting with your signature at the bottom. You dont even need a notary. Or you can hire an attorney, wholl probably cost less than you imagine and can help you sort out any thorny family issues, like planning for a disabled child or parent. An attorney can also minimize tax consequences and maximize the money your heirs get.

If you die without an estate plan, on the other hand, your loved ones could well end up in probate court. The American Bar Assn. estimates that probate proceedings cost Americans up to $2 billion per year, of which nearly $1.5 billion is paid in attorneys fees.

Estate plans are not just designed for death; when done right, they also provide for delegating authority to someone to make medical or financial decisions should we become incapacitated. If Prince did not even have a simple will, its unlikely he bothered to execute an advanced healthcare directive  a serious oversight given that he was a devout and active Jehovahs Witness with clear beliefs about blood transfusions and other medical procedures.

In this one area, dont be like Prince  or Pablo Picasso or Abraham Lincoln. If you do not have a will or estate plan, get busy. Plan for taxes. Decide who will be in charge. Decide who gets what. Decide not to let the government, or attorneys, get your inheritance.

Jack B. Osborn is an estate planning attorney and partner at the law firm of Brown White & Osborn LLP in Redlands.

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Of the more than 400 judges sitting on the Los Angeles County Superior Court, there is a very small handful of manifestly bad ones. Some may be presiding over courtrooms because of ill-considered appointments by the governor, but lets be frank - theyre at least as likely to be there because as lawyers they took their case to the voters, dreamed up impressive-sounding but completely unofficial job titles like gang murder prosecutor, bought their way onto one of those slick, official-looking mailers like the ones that will begin to arrive in our mailboxes in the next couple of weeks, and got elected.

Several years ago, Los Angeles County came very close to seeing a white supremacist elected to the bench. William Johnson was the author of a 1986 book that lays out a plan for revoking the citizenship of all nonwhite Americans. In 2008, he was a candidate in a two-person race for a seat on the Los Angeles County Superior Court, and could easily have won had his racist views not been brought to light by the Metropolitan News-Enterprise.

Voters did indeed remove a well-qualified judge, Dzintra Janavs, in favor of a bagel shop owner who had not practiced law in years. There is a similar race this year, in which wine importer Stepan Baghdassarian is challenging sitting judge James Kaddo.

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Its also the case that some of the courts best judges got there by being elected. So how is a voter to separate the good judicial candidates from the bad ones?

Its not an easy task. Voters can (and too often do) pick the names or ballot titles that sound most appealing, the way some people pick lottery numbers. That approach will give them exactly the judges they deserve  but unfortunately it will also foist those hit-or-miss judges on all of Los Angeles Countys 10 million people, including those who seek justice in a lawsuit, a child custody hearing, a rape prosecution, a request for a restraining order, or any of the other proceedings in which judges have enormous power over the lives and property of people who never expected to end up in court.

Or voters can skip the judicial races altogether. Its an understandable option, but a disappointing one. Judges will indeed be elected in each race, and not weighing in means leaving the choice to the voters who are swayed by the campaign mail or the lawn signs.

The better option is to get educated about the job and the candidates, and make a choice. Its a difficult task. Rarely are there candidate forums for judicial races, so there are few chances to compare candidates or ask them questions. There is little news reporting about judges or judicial races, so reliable and evenhanded information is scarce.

Other jurisdictions do things differently. In federal courts, for example, lifetime appointments are made by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Voters do not get a say. The other extreme can be seen in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina, where special interests and political parties vie for control of the judiciary with multimillion-dollar contributions and hard-hitting campaigns.

California has a hybrid system. The governor appoints most judges to fill out the unexpired terms of predecessors who have retired or otherwise left the bench. Then they come up for election by voters to full six-year terms. But if no one files to run against them, they are deemed elected. Their names dont even appear on the ballot.

The only judicial races that voters see are those in which a sitting judge has been challenged or candidates compete for vacant seats that the governor has not gotten around to filling.

Even that is too much for some observers, who note that voters often pick candidates because of ballot titles like Child molestation prosecutor for a deputy district attorney. Surely, they argue, wed do better with an all-appointed bench.

But states are not the federal government, and there is a difference between confirmation by the U.S. Senate and confirmation by the California Senate, whose members are term-limited and not always of the same stature as their federal counterparts.

Californias system may be the best of many less-than-perfect choices.

The California system isnt perfect but its better than others, California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye recently told The Times editorial board. You get to vote whether or not your votes correct, youre right, wrong, good judgment, bad judgment. Your vote is your highest expression of being able to live free in a country that permits you to express your opinion. So in that regard, its the best system.

robert.greene@latimes.com

Follow me @RGreene2
To the editor: Criticizing Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffes motivation for restoring voting rights to 200,000 ex-felons as political and cynical is completely off base and reveals ignorance about Virginias election system. (Restoring voting rights to Virginia ex-felons is a welcome move  but for a whiff of partisan politics, editorial, April 26)

Virginia holds state elections in odd years. If McAuliffe was acting out of partisanship instead of principle, he would have restored voting rights en masse before the 2015 state legislative elections, during which he was barnstorming the Commonwealth trying to win a legislative majority to support his agenda.

Although these newly enfranchised voters could potentially affect this years presidential race, they would have had a far greater effect on lower-turnout legislative races in 2015.

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In a state where a governor can serve only one term and which holds either state-level or federal elections every year, theres never a time when restoration of voting rights to African Americans would not open a Democratic governor to criticism. Fortunately, McAuliffe did not let predictable criticism stop him from making this historic dent in a vestige of Jim Crow.

David Englin, Los Angeles

The writer, a Democrat, was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates from 2006-12.

To the editor: McAuliffe says that the rights and privileges of full citizenship ought to be returned when a felons term is completed.

Perhaps hes right. Does that mean a released killer will be free to own a gun?

Richard Stegemeier, Anaheim

..

To the editor: Dont all Americans deserve the right to vote?

African Americans have been systematically disenfranchised by, among other things, a racist criminal justice system that pursues, indicts, prosecutes, plea-bargains and gives harsher sentences to black Americans. With the gutting of the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act by the U.S. Supreme Court, GOP-controlled states are further implementing voter suppression and disenfranchisement measures that again overwhelmingly affect African Americans.

You write that McAuliffe is engaged in some kind of partisan tit-for-tat. How about lets start treating all of our citizens like full citizens in this country?

We are almost a century and a half past when this should have been accomplished, so no, this isnt a partisan action, this is a civil rights action. And it should be done across the country.

Alice P. Neuhauser, Manhattan Beach

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To the editor: I was very disappointed by your editorial that supported removing Yellowstones grizzly bears from the federal endangered species list. The article presents an overly optimistic picture of grizzly bear delisting. (Planning the grizzly bears return, editorial, April 24)

First, management would be turned over to three states known for extreme hostility to predators. Indeed, these states have already divvied up Yellowstone bears for a trophy hunting season, even though a poll commissioned by the Humane Society of the United States and Wyoming Wildlife Advocates found that 68% of Americans (including 50% of hunters) oppose hunting of grizzlies.

How will the public react when the famous roadside bears of the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone are picked off? Wyoming (the only state to release a management plan) does not provide any buffer zones around the parks or a no-hunt zone connecting the parks. Even the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park has publicly expressed concern regarding the lack of buffer zones for wandering bears.

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The plan to delist grizzly bears is premature, risky and incomplete. Grizzlies should remain protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Michelle MacKenzie, San Carlos, Calif.

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Trump to be greeted by protesters during his California visit

A large contingent of protestors is expected to greet GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump when he addresses the California Republican Party convention in Burlingame on Friday.

One group, the ANSWER Coalition, plans to protest outside of the hotel during Trumps luncheon speech and then hold a rally in the evening in San Francisco, where they plan to smash a Trump pinata.

The Trump campaign poses an imminent danger to the most oppressed and vulnerable sectors of society and all working people and must be protested and shut down anywhere that he is given a platform to speak, the group wrote on its website.

Another loosely knit group has set up a Facebook page inviting people to protest Trumps appearance. So far, it has received 2,400 RSVPs, with thousands more expressing interest in attending.

  lets show him a real Bay Area welcome by peacefully protesting outside, the page says.

Trump has seen varying levels of protests throughout this campaign, often handfuls of individuals who attend his events, start chanting and then get escorted outside by security. Some of these incidents have turned into violent confrontations with Trump supporters.

Larger protests outside of his events have the potential to be particularly flammable. One in Chicago earlier this year grew so unwieldy that his speech was canceled out of safety precautions. At a rally outside of Phoenix, protesters blocked the main road into one of his events, forcing some attendees to walk three miles to the event.

The night before he addresses the state GOP convention, Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Costa Mesa. The Democratic Party of Orange County and Orange County Young Democrats have announced that they plan to protest the event at the Orange County Fairgrounds.

Its unclear how large that gathering might be. But additional protests would not be surprising, given the altercations that took place Tuesday between Trump supporters and opponents in nearby Anaheim.

Shortly before the Anaheim City Council considered a resolution to formally denounce Trump, protests turned violent with demonstrators on either side hurling obscenities and firing pepper spray, and at least one Trump supporter trying to Taser an opponent. The council ultimately voted to take no action on the resolution.
More than 113,000 young Latinos in California werent counted in the 2010 census, a new study says, and Latino advocacy groups want to be sure the U.S. Census Bureau is working to reduce that number in 2020.

With an estimated 47,000 uncounted Latino children, Los Angeles County alone is home to 12% of the estimated 400,000 Latino children in the U.S. not counted in 2010, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund and Child Trends Hispanic Institute.

With preparations already underway for the 2020 Census, the groups hope their study will spur Congress and the U.S. Census Bureau to look at how to better count the Latino population.

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Its not a very sexy topic, its not one that we talk about very often but the fact is that our democratic system is based on the decennial census, NALEO Educational Fund Executive Director Arturo Vargas said. Whenever anybody is not counted in the census, our democracy is less perfect, and our form of government is less perfect and our policy-making is less perfect.

Vargas, who lives in Los Angeles Mount Washington neighborhood, takes it personally.

Any undercount in Southern California is bad for Southern California. It results in less money flowing into the region, he said.

There is a chance California could gain another congressional seat in 2020, and that will depend on every one being counted, Vargas said. It masks what the real population looks like in Los Angeles County when you are missing 47,000 children.

In a statement, the Census Bureau said it is studying ways to reach groups that are historically undercounted.

The data collected by the U.S. Census each decade is used to draw congressional districts. The number of residents on a particular street can determine how the U.S. divvies up more than $400 billion in annual federal spending, including money for programs such as Head Start or the Special Supplemental Insurance Program for Women, Infants and Children that directly benefit young children.

Child Trends Hispanic Institute Director Lina Guzman said making sure young Latinos have equitable access to government services will matter more as the Latino population in the U.S. continues to swell. One in 4 American children is Latino, and that proportion is expected to expand to 1 in 3 by 2050.

Whenever anybody is not counted in the census, our democracy is less perfect.  Arturo Vargas, NALEO Educational Fund executive director

How Latino children fare will have profound implications for our countrys future well-being, she said. An undercount of young Latino children is costing states money for those children most in need.

The study was released during a Capitol Hill briefing Tuesday morning. Author William OHare, a social and health psychology researcher who used to work for the Census Bureau, compared birth, death and immigration records in each county to the county level results of the 2010 census.

He and the studys other authors found that the Census Bureau should have identified more than 21 million Americans 4 or younger in 2010, but only counted about 20 million. Of those missing million people, about 40% were Latino, he said.

About three-fourths of the uncounted children live in California, Texas, Florida, Arizona or New York, according to the study.

Along with Los Angeles County, several other California counties made the list of 25 counties with the highest number of uncounted Latino children. San Diego County has an estimated 12,000 uncounted children; Orange County has 15,000; Riverside County has 6,000; San Bernardino, Santa Clara and Alameda Counties each have 3,000; and Sacramento County has an estimated 1,000 uncounted children, according to the report.

This undercount of young Latino children across the country is highly concentrated in a relatively small number of states, OHare said. We know with a great deal of confidence exactly where its happening.

OHare said the undercount is likely caused by the high number of Latino families living in rentals, in high poverty areas or in complex living arrangements where a child might not live with a legal guardian  all situations that traditionally make it harder for the census to count people.

But he said the Census Bureau needs to do more research to understand why the children arent being counted. He said some adults may not understand that children should be included in the census answers or are afraid to respond over fears of how it might affect their own legal status, even if the child is a legal resident.

We really dont collectively have a lot of good evidence about why young Latino children are missed, he said.

Since the late 1990s, the U.S. Census Bureau has used a similar methodology to study how and why the census undercounts young children in general. The most recent report, presented to the Bureau on April 12, found similar figures for the number of undercounted Latino children. The report also contained similar reasoning why the youngsters are missed, including a hypothesis that adults are less likely to record a child staying with them if he or she is a grandchild, relative or acquaintance rather than direct descendant.

Some groups have historically been undercounted for a variety of reasons and the Census Bureau takes this undercount seriously, the statement from the bureau said. We have several active research groups to shed light on the characteristics of these missed young children and their households and how to count them more accurately.

The April 12 report recommended focusing advertising on young mothers and grandparents, and working with local advocacy groups to get the word out.

The Census Bureau has been preparing for years for the 2020 test  which will play out for the first time online and through phone surveys  designed to count the estimated 330 million people in the U.S. It is currently testing a new data-collection application in the Los Angeles area in English and Spanish, among other languages.

The Census Bureau hasnt focused specifically on counting young Latinos as much as it has young people in general. Vargas, who serves on the bureaus National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations, said that needs to change.

Vargas said with less than two years before census questions, procedures and methodology are determined for 2020, NALEO and other advocacy groups want to be sure the Census Bureau is actively considering how to reach out to areas with the highest number of uncounted Latinos.

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They recommended talking with families through schools, pediatricians and government programs such as Head Start; asking advocacy groups to work in communities; and targeting advertising in counties known to have high numbers of children not counted in the past.

NALEO will do its part as well by reaching out to Southern California Latinos ahead of the 2020 census and blanketing Spanish language media with the reminder that everyone needs to be counted, Vargas said. In hopes that children will remind their parents to fill out the census form, NALEO will work with Los Angeles Unified School District and others to use the bureaus curriculum to teach students why the census matters.

What we are doing here today is sounding the alarm, Vargas said. Time is running out.

sarah.wire@latimes.com

Follow @sarahdwire on Twitter

Read more about the 55 members of Californias delegation at latimes.com/politics

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An ethics advocacy group has filed complaints with two federal oversight agencies, asking officials to investigate what the group describes as a pattern of questionable campaign spending by Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Alpine).

The complaints, filed Thursday morning with the Federal Election Commission and the Office of Congressional Ethics, describe thousands of dollars Hunters campaign spent on personal items, including video games and an oral surgeon  and raises new questions about spending on what appears to be a vacation to Italy.

Federal law forbids spending campaign funds for personal purposes or benefit, to guard against corrupting influences by donors. In Hunters case, defense contractors and others with interests before committees on which he serves are his primary contributors.

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The amount and frequency of these improper expenditures alone warrants and audit, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, wrote in the complaints.

CREW describes itself in the complaints as a nonpartisan, nonprofit government and political watchdog organization. It has been criticized in recent years as biased against Republican candidates, an accusation the organization has denied.

Hunters chief of staff, Joe Kasper, said Thursday that CREW is a leftist group, and has been focusing lately on politicians like Hunter who support Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump.

CREWs motive is fund-raising, plain and simple, Kasper said. Thats what they dothey sound alarm bells, exaggerate, in the hope they can direct more donors and financial support their way.

Kasper said Hunter voluntarily flagged the mistaken or questionable expenditures, repaid the campaign $12,000, amended disclosure reports and hired an outside law firm to audit the spending.

Kasper said Hunter made the campaign whole for the expenditures questioned by the FEC and The San Diego Union-Tribune in recent weeks, and, in an abundance of caution, Hunter repaid some expenditures that no one else questioned. The FEC directed the campaign to mark all the payments to be reimbursed as mistaken, whether they were or not, Kasper said.

Previously reported expenses include video games, oral surgery, a garage door, a surf and skate shop and private school tuition. All have been explained by Kasper as mistakes, clerical errors or legitimate campaign expenses reimbursed to avoid misperceptions.

CREWs complaint formally seeks an audit of those reimbursed charges, but also questions some campaign expenses reported by Hunter that have not been reimbursed.

For instance, the Hunter campaign reported spending more than $2,000 on restaurants, hotels and train travel in the Italian cities of Rome, Florence and Positano during the Thanksgiving holiday week in 2015.

The group questioned one possibly mislabeled expense  a purchase at an Italian jewelry store that was listed on a disclosure report as food/beverages. The payment was for $216 to Gioielleria Manetti in Florence. The store makes and customizes jewelry and watches, according to its website. A store representative on Thursday said it offers some product lines other than jewelry, such as watches, but no food or drinks.

This spending, the timing of the trip over the Thanksgiving holiday, and photographs of Rep. Hunter posted on his Facebook page suggest the trip was a family vacation, the complaint said. None of these expenditures, however, has been identified as personal or mistaken.

The Union-Tribune reviewed Hunters Facebook page and found two photographs that appeared to have been taken during the trip to Italy. In one photo, Hunter posed in front of ruins that appear to match ruins in Pompeii. In another, Hunter and his wife pose at what appears to be a popular tourist destination in Positano, on the Amalfi coast.

House ethics rules limit the use of campaign funds to pay travel expenses when the primary purpose of the trip is activity that serves a bona fide campaign or political purpose, according to CREWs complaint to the Office of Congressional Ethics.

If the primary purpose of the trip is personal or recreational but involves some campaign activity, campaign funds may not be used to pay for transportation costs, and only may be used to pay the additional meal or lodging expenses from the campaign activity, the complaint said.

The complaint said the trip appeared to be more of a family vacation than a trip for bona fide campaign or political purposes.

Hunters chief of staff responded on Thursday, We dont owe CREW an explanation of what he might have done to involve official activities around any outside event or travel, regardless of whether his family was with him.

Earlier in the week, Kasper had issued a statement to the Union-Tribune about the Italy trip, saying, It is permissible to use campaign funds for expenses not covered by the MRA (Mandatory Returning of Allowances) on travel, which includes international travel. Further, campaign funds can be used for purposes of obtaining donation items or donor support items, as is the case here.

Kasper has previously offered a similar explanation for $361 of campaign funds spent at a Coronado surf and skate shop  that the purchases were made for a community or campaign event. Since first being asked on April 19, Kasper has not identified the items purchased or the event that benefited from them.

See more of our top stories on Facebook >>

Hunters $12,000 of reimbursements came amid a review by The San Diego Union-Tribune of expenditures listed on his disclosure forms as personal expenses or mistaken charges to be paid back, although they were not.

The review was prompted by a letter the FEC sent April 4 to Hunters campaign, questioning more than $1,300 in payments to Steam Games, a video game company, and a $1,650 payment to Christian Unified Schools in El Cajon, where his three children attend.

Hunters campaign has said Hunters teenage son took the wrong credit card from his fathers wallet to buy game access from Steam, and his purchase was followed by a series of fraudulent charges that have since been reversed. The donation to the school, and at least one other payment of $3,500, were intended as charitable donations but the school mistakenly applied them as tuition, Kasper says.

Other expenditures Hunter reimbursed include $811 paid to an oral and facial surgeon and $1,200 to a garage door company. Kasper has suggested someone from the campaign may have damaged the familys garage door.

Hunters wife, Margaret, has been his campaign manager, at a rate of $3,000 per month.

Margaret Hunters involvement in the campaign and earnings also raise questions about personal benefit that warrant federal inquiries, CREW wrote in its complaints.

Cook writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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Im Christina Bellantoni. This is Essential Politics, and you just cant make this stuff up.

In yet another wild twist to the presidential campaign, the candidate who mathematically cant reach the needed number of delegates to become the Republican nominee jumped way ahead of himself and named a vice presidential running mate.

Sen. Ted Cruzs selection of Carly Fiorina comes just before the two of them are set to address the California Republican Party convention Saturday and as the political conversation has a sharply renewed focus on the gender gap.

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The timing is probably not a coincidence.

Fiorina has long been a critic of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, and Republicans have been calling her an effective female spokeswoman for years.

But Californians, who resoundingly rejected her 2010 Senate bid and did not favor her as a presidential contender, will remember her tenure at Hewlett-Packard. Shes best known in Silicon Valley for 30,000 layoffs that the Democrats already have used against her.

In his Thursday column, George Skelton looks at the previous attempts by Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown to name a running mate ahead of a national convention. Neither of those worked, by the way.

Fiorina has held her own against Donald Trump, who insulted her face and sparred with her during debates.

Since she ended her bid after a poor showing in Iowa, Fiorina has been campaigning for Cruz around the country.

Will it work? As Cathleen Decker writes, Trumps approach is probably not what Republican leaders had in mind when they declared after the last losing presidential election that the party had to do more to attract female voters:

Gender insults are nothing new for candidate Clinton. During her 2008 run, young men in the audience chanted iron my shirts and cable pundits compared her to hectoring mothers and the deranged bunny-boiling character in the film Fatal Attraction. One entrepreneur sold the Hillary nutcracker, a plastic representation of Clinton with serrated blades lining her inner thighs. And the woman card is a new flashpoint in the campaign.

Track the delegate race in real time, and if it still seems complicated, Melanie Mason has this helpful explainer.

WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA

Trump holds his first California rally since last year Thursday evening in Costa Mesa.

Well cover it live on Trail Guide. Make sure youre following @latimespolitics and latimespolitics on Snapchat.

VOICES FROM THE GOLDEN STATE

As Trump arrives and with the other candidates set to join him at the California Republican Party convention Friday, we wanted to present the voices of Californians who are following the presidential contest.

From horror at this campaigns tone to enthusiasm for Trump, 25 voters shared their views with Christine Mai-Duc and Phil Willon.

What do you think of Trump? Readers can weigh in with our quick survey.

NEXT STOP, GENERAL ELECTION

Momentous victories in Tuesdays primaries drove Clinton and Trump ever closer to a November face-off in which the strongest argument each can make for election is the threat posed by the other, Decker writes.

Together, Clinton and Trump are the two most unpopular presidential candidates in memory, and both are moving to improve their images for the general election. But they are so well-known, and operating in such a polarized political environment, that their efforts may only serve to tinker around the edges.

SANDERS: JUST KIDDING

We detailed yesterday how Sen. Bernie Sanders had issued a statement making clear his intention to stay in through the June primaries but not with the goal of becoming the nominee.

Despite making that statement after Tuesdays contests, Sanders on Wednesday said in Indiana he is in this campaign to win and become the Democratic nominee.

If you want the candidate who will be the strongest nominee, youre looking at that candidate right now, he said.

But Team Sanders laid off hundreds of staffers in states that already have voted.

ANOTHER SEAT FOR CALIFORNIA?

An estimated 113,000 Latino children werent counted in the 2010 U.S. Census, a study by the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund and other advocacy groups found this week, and the groups want a plan from the U.S. Census Bureau about what will be done differently in 2020, Sarah Wire reports.

Most of the uncounted children are in a handful of Southern California counties, and 47,000 live in Los Angeles County alone. There is a chance California could gain another congressional seat in 2020, and that will depend on everyone being counted, NALEO Executive Director Arturo Vargas said. It masks what the real population looks like in Los Angeles County when you are missing 47,000 children.

INBOX TROUBLE

A top Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department official forwarded emails with jokes containing derogatory stereotypes of Muslims, blacks, Latinos, women and others from his work account during his previous job with the Burbank Police Department, according to city records.

Tom Angel, who is Sheriff Jim McDonnells chief of staff, sent the emails in 2012 and 2013 when he was the No. 2 police official in Burbank, hired to reform a department reeling from allegations of police brutality as well as racism and sexual harassment within its ranks.

TODAYS ESSENTIALS

-- Toms Shoes is letting consumers vote with their feet.

-- Trump staked out some middle ground in his foreign policy address in Washington on Wednesday.

-- Trumps claim that illegal immigration is at a record high? Not true.

-- A push to legalize renting cars to drive for Uber and Lyft advanced to the Assembly floor. If the bill passes, it would override regulators who are considering limiting the practice.

-- L.A. City Hall has big plans to memorialize Prince next month.

-- Our state convention coverage will start Friday morning on our Essential Politics news feed here.

LOGISTICS

Miss yesterdays newsletter? Here you go. Did someone forward you this? Sign up here to get Essential Politics in your inbox daily. And keep an eye on our politics page throughout the day for the latest and greatest. And are you following us on Twitter at @latimespolitics? Please send thoughts, concerns and news tips to politics@latimes.com.
In a speech outlining his foreign policy, Trump did not mention about India, and said that his administration would seek to improve ties with Russia and China. (Photo: AFP)

Washington: Donald Trump on Thursday said that halting the spread of radical Islam would be a "major goal" for the US if he is elected president, as the Republican presidential front-runner laid out the vision of his foreign policy asserting that the days of ISIS are "numbered".

In a speech outlining his foreign policy, Trump did not mention about India, and said that his administration would seek to improve ties with Russia and China.

"I'd like to talk today about how to develop a new foreign policy direction for our country, one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace," Trump said, asserting that it is time to "shake the rust off" America's foreign policy.

In his first major foreign policy speech, a day after he declared himself as a "presumptive nominee" when he won primaries in all the five States, Trump said, "Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States and indeed, the world."

"Events may require the use of military force, but it's also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War. In this, we're going to be working very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence, attacks and everything else. It is a dangerous world, more dangerous now than it has ever been," he said.

"We should work together with any nation in the region that is threatened by the rise of radical Islam. But this has to be a two-way street," he said.

The real-estate tycoon underlined that sending troops overseas would be his last option and would depend on diplomacy and the country's economic power.

"To our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be reliable again. It's going to be a great and reliable ally again. It's going to be a friend again.

"We're going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests and the shared interests of our allies," he said.

"We're getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world. Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the water's edge. We need a new rational American foreign policy," he said.

On the ISIS, he said that the dreaded terror outfit's days are "numbered".

"I have a simple message for them (ISIS). Their days are numbered. I won't tell them where and I won't tell them how. We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything. We're sending troops. We tell them. We're sending something else. We have a news conference.

We have to be unpredictable. And we have to be unpredictable starting now," Trump said.

"They're going to be gone. ISIS will be gone if I am elected president. And they'll be gone quickly. They will be gone very, very quickly," he said.

He said in the Middle East the US' goals must be to "defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change."

"We need to be clear sighted about the groups that will never be anything other than enemies. And believe me, we have groups that no matter what you do, they will be the enemy," he said.

Trump said that if he is elected president his administration would seek to improve ties with Russia and China.

"We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes, but we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests," he said.

"I believe easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only are possible, absolutely possible. Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries," he said.

"Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we can't make a deal under my administration, a deal that's great -- not good, great -- for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table.

It's as simple as that. We're going to find out," he cautioned.

Fixing US relations with China is another important step, he said.

"China respects strength and by letting them take advantage of us economically, which they are doing like never before, we have lost all of their respect," he said. "We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit that we have to find a way quickly, and I mean quickly, to balance. A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China, better than we have right now.

Look at what China is doing in the South China Sea. They're not supposed to be doing it," Trump said.
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.
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, more than enough 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 qualifies for the ballot.

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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 under $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 current 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 NRA 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.

The measure is also opposed by Chuck Michel, co-chair of the new Coalition for Civil Liberties. Politicians like Newsom need to concentrate on stopping criminals and terrorists, not law-abiding citizens exercising their rights, Michel said in a statement.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Twitter: @mcgreevy99

ALSO:

Opening political rift, Sen. De Leon slashes staff of Lt. Gov. Newsom

On gun control, Gavin Newsom seems to be following Gov. Bloombergs strategic lead

Updates from Sacramento
This is your brain on stories. By tracking the blood flow in peoples brains as they listened to a storytelling radio show, scientists at UC Berkeley have mapped out where the meanings associated with basic words are encoded in the cortex, creating the first semantic atlas of the brain.

The findings, described in the journal Nature, provide an unprecedented view of language and meaning as it plays out on our neural terrain, and could potentially offer a road map for those looking to help patients with certain types of aphasia or other neurological disorders.

See the most-read stories in Science this hour >>

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For a long time, researchers thought about language as a primarily left-hemisphere function that took place in specific spots of the brain, such as Brocas area and Wernickes area. But those areas arent associated with understanding language but producing it -- speech, in short.

You could even think of them as pre-motor areas specialized for language, said senior author Jack Gallant, a computational cognitive neuroscientist at UC Berkeley. But for semantics, were not really even talking about language, were talking about the meaning of language. Its not even words, so it happens at a whole different level.

The researchers had seven test subjects (including the lead author, Alexander Huth) lie in a functional MRI machine while listening to more than two hours worth of stories from the Moth Radio Hour, a public radio show in which people tell funny, sad or otherwise poignant autobiographical stories.

------------

FOR THE RECORD

April 28, 8:14 a.m.: A previous version of this article stated that the Moth Radio Hour was a production of Public Radio International. It is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange.

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Our subjects love to be in this experiment because they can just lie there and listen to these really interesting stories, Gallant said. Its a million times better than any other experiment weve ever done.

Of course, its hard not to laugh at a funny story. And because movement can destroy fMRI data, they 3-D-printed personalized head cases for each subject that would keep their heads very stable.

The researchers then used natural language processing-related programs to extract meaning from common words in the stories. They compared the time-coded transcripts to the fMRI data, which had painstakingly mapped the blood flow in about 50,000 different locations in the brain.

As it turns out, different regions in the brain responded to different families of related concepts. Dog, hypothetically speaking, might be associated with animals like wolf, or areas related to how they look or smell, or (if you had a dog as a kid) perhaps in areas related to words like home.

Each semantic concept is represented in multiple locations in the brain, Gallant said. And each brain location represents sort of a family of selected concepts. So ... theres a bunch of regions in the brain that respond to dogs.

The map sheds light on the ways we process meaning through language, coloring parts of the brain in different shades depending on what kind of information they encode. Red, for example, has to do with certain social concepts, while green spots pertain to visual and tactile concepts. The model is available online, and Gallant says he hopes the work will become a handy resource for other researchers.

Were trying to build an atlas just like a world atlas, he explained. If I give you a globe, you can do anything with it  you could look at how big the ocean is or what the highest mountain is or what the distance from New York to California is.

Every brain, of course, is a little different. But on the whole, the scientists were surprised to find that the general layout of the different-colored regions was largely similar across the seven test subjects  implying that each listener was encoding the same meanings in basically the same ways.

But is this shared semantic structure innate, or the result of environmental influences? After all, these test subjects shared both language and culture, which could potentially account for some of these similarities.

Gallant isnt sure whether that pattern will hold across people who speak a language very different from English, such as Mandarin Chinese or Japanese, or across bilingual people responding to their second language. But these are questions that the scientist said were well worth exploring.

The first law of neuroscience is the brain is complicated, he said.

Follow @aminawrite on Twitter for more science news and like Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook

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More than a month before the State Historic Resources Commission agreed to list the former Rockhaven Sanitarium in Montrose on the state register of historic places, Glendales city manager sent a letter to the state historic preservation officer objecting to the propertys listing.

City Manager Scott Ochoa attributed the citys objection directly to the citys concern for developers, according to his Feb. 29 letter to Julianne Polanco, state historic preservation officer.

NEWSLETTER: Stay up to date with whats going on in the 818 >>

Our decision to not support the pending National Register nomination reflects only our concern that some developers may be  needlessly, we recognize  apprehensive about buying a listed property, Ochoa wrote.

His letter also noted that city officials are aware of the historical importance of Rockhaven and that the city is working to find a buyer who will have the vision and resources to commit to both a full rehabilitation of the historic buildings and landscape, and the reinvigoration of the site through a new and appropriate use.

Reached by phone on Thursday, Ochoa said the city has always intended to see Rockhaven listed on the register of historic places, but wanted to secure its place on the list after the propertys restoration was complete.

Now that the site is listed on the register, future upgrades could potentially entail more complex and expensive restoration work, Ochoa said.

We felt it most prudent to do the adaptive reuse work first, he said. We believe we could do a good and faithful job before doing the historical preservation.

Despite the objection, the Friends of Rockhaven secured the nomination on April 18 with a unanimous vote by members of the State Historic Resources Commission.

The commissions approval will go before the keeper of the National Register for consideration in listing the property on the National Register of Historic Places in the coming weeks.

Rockhaven opened in 1923 under the supervision of psychiatric nurse Agnes Richards, becoming one of the states first private mental institutions.

The facility served only women, including some Hollywood stars.

The institution closed in 2006, and the city purchased the property in 2008 for about $8.25 million, saving Rockhaven from being demolished and becoming a senior housing project.

Now, the city is preparing to weigh two proposals for the site.

One would convert Rockhaven into a boutique retail center. Another would reopen the site as a mental health facility.

--

Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com

Twitter: @kellymcorrigan

--

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A three-horned chameleon named Carl isn't exactly a warm and cuddly creature. But the Hawaiian coffee farm denizen is getting plenty of attention these days, thanks to two books that have been written about him.

The children's books are fictional, but Carl is a very real lizard. He's a member of the family of Jackson's chameleons that reside on the farm near Kailua-Kona on the big island.

Author Daniel Swanson holds a copy of his first childrens book, a work of fiction about the very real Carl the Chameleon. (Greenwell Farms) (Test)

Carl, more specifically, lives in an orange tree at Greenwell Farms, a Hawaii Island plantation that has been producing coffee since 1850.

Daily tours of the farm, which usually include sightings of Carl, are free -- and they're conducted by Daniel Swanson.

After creating some promotional materials, Swanson went on to write "Carl the Chameleon" and the just-published sequel, "Carl the Chameleon Goes 2 School. The books -- along with coffee, of course -- are sold at the plantation's retail shop.

Daniel Swanson, a tour guide at Greenwell Farms, introduces visitors both to coffee beans and Carl, the three-horned lizard that is the subject of two childrens books he has authored. (Greenwell Farms) (Test)

The books share the exploits of an adventurous lizard who -- despite his menacing face with horns -- gets picked on by the school bully.

According to Animal-World, the fattest of the chameleon's horns extends from the nose. Two longer, but skinnier, horns protrude from above the eyes, giving the creatures a fierce appearance. They are one of roughly 200 types of chameleons.

An old tractor and cart point the way to Greenwell Farms, about 10 miles south of Kailua-Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. (Greenwell Farms) (Test)

No reservations are required for Swanson's daily tours, which operate between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. The farm is located at 81-6581 Mamalahoa Highway in Kealakekua, about 10 miles south of Kailua-Kona.

Info: Greenwell Farms, (808) 323-9616

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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 take a ride on the Slinky Dog coaster coming to Toy Story Land, shiver at the thought of The Exorcist haunted maze, check out a Marvel indoor theme park and contemplate a Guardians of the Galaxy attraction.

Horror Nights

Halloween Horror Nights will bring The Exorcist to life in a haunted maze at Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Orlando.

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Toy Story Land

Disneys Hollywood Studios releases new details about Toy Story Land, including a short video clip of the Slinky Dog Dash family coaster.

Alton Towers

Merlin Attractions, the parent company of the United Kingdoms Alton Towers, admits to breaching health and safety laws during a June accident on the Smiler roller coaster that seriously injured five passengers.

Orange County tourism

Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, has seen tourism grow nearly 30% over the last five years.

Dubai

The $1-billion IMG Worlds of Adventure indoor theme park in Dubai is set to open Aug. 15 with attractions dedicated to Marvel Comics and Cartoon Network characters.

And finally

WDW News Today reports that Disney California Adventure is considering a Guardians of the Galaxy overlay for the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror attraction as an anchor for a Marvel Studios themed land.

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.

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The Pentagon has disciplined 16 service members for mistakes that led to the deadly airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan last fall, but no one will face criminal charges, The Times has learned.

One officer was suspended from command and ordered out of Afghanistan. The others were given lesser punishments: Six were sent to counseling, seven were issued letters of reprimand, and two were ordered to retraining courses.

The punishments follow a six-month Pentagon investigation of the disastrous Oct. 3 attack, which killed 42 medical workers, patients and other Afghans and wounded dozens more at the international humanitarian aid groups trauma center in Kunduz.

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The 16 found at fault include a two-star general, the crew of an Air Force AC-130 gunship, and Army special forces personnel, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal investigation.

Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, is expected to announce the administrative actions Friday at the Pentagon. He will not release names of the 16 because some are overseas or in units that are regularly deployed.

Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, will post more than 3,000 pages of a redacted investigative report on its website after Votel appears.

Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF for its French name, Medecins Sans Frontieres, is based in Geneva and has won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work in war zones and during epidemics.

It has described the attack on the clearly marked medical facility as a likely war crime. The incident generated an outcry from international aid groups, some of which demanded criminal prosecution.

The gravity of harm caused by the reported failures to follow protocol in Kunduz appears to constitute gross negligence that warrants active pursuit of criminal liability, Donna McKay, executive director of the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights, wrote in a letter to the White House and Pentagon on Monday.

In a statement Thursday, Amnesty International said it had serious concerns about the Pentagons questionable track record of policing itself. It called for an independent investigation to determine what happened and to assess potential criminal wrongdoing.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday that he doesnt think President Obama has been told the results of the Pentagon investigation. Earnest said he would not prejudge the outcome but accountability is important and thats something that was communicated to the military leadership.

The Pentagon has acknowledged that Doctors Without Borders representatives had reminded U.S. and Afghan officials of the hospitals precise location repeatedly before the airstrike because of fighting in the area. The facility was on the militarys list of prohibited targets.

Officials said last fall that the AC-130 gunship crew believed they were targeting a building about 300 yards away where several Taliban fighters were supposedly hiding. Less clear is why they continued to strafe the hospital for nearly an hour while aid officials in Kabul and Washington made frantic attempts to call them off.

At least 15 calls and text messages were exchanged with U.S., Afghan, United Nations and Red Cross officials, records show.

The attack destroyed the hospitals main building, including an emergency room, intensive care unit and operating theater. The dead consisted of 24 patients, 14 staff members and four caretakers.

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Survivors described earth-shaking explosions that engulfed the building in flames. Some patients burned to death in their beds.

Gen. John F. Campbell, then-commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in November that the cause of this tragedy was  avoidable human error, compounded by process and equipment failures.

Campbell said decisions on whether to prosecute anyone would be made by him and the U.S. Special Operations Command, where Votel was commander before he was assigned to Central Command.

Campbell, who retired last month, ordered discipline for 12 of the 16 personnel involved. He suspended an officer, issued three letters of reprimand, ordered six into counseling and sent two to retraining courses.

Votel issued four letters of reprimand and suspended the AC-130 aircrew from performing flight operations until they passed a flight evaluation board, which will determine when they can return to service.

The attack was launched as U.S. warplanes, backed by special operations troops, were assisting Afghan forces fighting to retake Kunduz from the Taliban, which had captured the city five days earlier.

Aid officials have said that no gunfire was coming from the hospital compound and that although firefights had occurred nearby earlier in the day, no fighting was underway when the airstrike occurred.

Tim Shenk, a spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, said Wednesday that the aid organization would not comment on the punishments until the military publicly released its investigation.

The Pentagon is expected to brief the group before Votel speaks to the news media on Friday.

Shortly after he replaced Campbell as commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John W. Nicholson met with representatives of Doctors Without Borders, family members of victims and community leaders in Kunduz on March 23 and offered a personal apology.

As commander, I wanted to come to Kunduz personally and stand before the families and people of Kunduz to deeply apologize for the events which destroyed the hospital and caused the deaths of the hospital staff, patients and family members, he said. I grieve with you for your loss and suffering, and humbly and respectfully ask for your forgiveness.

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A decade ago, Taiwans central police agency set out to crush telephone fraud, which had taken root on the island and was fleecing people of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

The police claimed ample success, but the silver-tongued swindlers simply expanded offshore, phoning their victims from at least two dozen countries as far flung as Paraguay and Egypt.

Using their fluent Mandarin, they also found a new, deep-pocketed set of marks to bilk out of their savings: increasingly wealthy mainland Chinese.

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Now, the hustlers are at the heart of a major international diplomatic brouhaha. Taiwan is suddenly grappling with the surprise deportation of 45 of its citizens from Kenya to China and is racing to keep up with three other deportation cases involving Taiwanese suspects.

Things have improved a lot in Taiwan because of public awareness work, so theyve all moved offshore, Taiwans Cabinet spokesman Sun Lih-chyun said. Cooperation with China and how to handle these matters from now onward, what model we use, thats what we need to work out.

Working with mainland China is tricky for Taiwan because the two countries have not recognized each others governments for 70 years. The mainlands communist government considers Taiwan to be part of China; Taiwan views itself as independent.

Political tension is expected to worsen in May when a new Taiwanese president takes office. Lack of cooperation could set off a wave of deportations of Taiwanese suspects from other countries to China, embarrassing officials in the new government and angering the Taiwanese public.

But so far, there are signs that the two sides are working together, if a bit awkwardly.

Fraud in Taiwan took off around 2001. In one scam, criminals posing as government workers would call random numbers and claim that the victims national health insurance files had been stolen. They would ask the victim to place their bank savings in a safe account, purportedly run by the government, to help solve the case.

In other cases, callers would pretend they had kidnapped a marks family member, often a daughter, and ask for ransom. The caller might hire a woman to scream in the background. Fraud losses averaged $1,000 per case.

A public awareness campaign via radio and television, along with a fraud complaint hotline, cut cases from a peak of $575 million in losses in 2006 to one fifth of that last year, police agency section chief Chen Shih-huang said.

But as mainland Chinese people became wealthier, many Taiwanese fraudsters began targeting their money and moving there to recruit local people to make calls.

When police on the mainland started to catch wind of the schemes, the criminal rings moved their telephone and Internet scams to places such as Egypt, Kenya and Southeast Asia, Taiwans justice ministry says.

Beijing confronted the issue April 8, when it asked Kenya to deport the first of two groups of suspected Taiwanese telephone fraud perpetrators  not to Taiwan, but to China, after a court in the African country cleared them of charges of unlicensed telecom equipment use. Taiwan branded the move an attempted abduction, but Kenya let China take that first group and another group on April 12, for a total of 45 people. Days later, China tried, unsuccessfully, to get Malaysia to send it 52 Taiwanese wire fraud suspects.

China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan and can use its diplomatic clout  it has 170 formal allies compared with Taiwans 22  to make other governments treat Taiwanese as Chinese, though they carry different passports.

Taiwan tried to intervene in Kenya but was too late to stop the extraditions.

Were quite angry about how China was unilaterally able to [arrange the deportations of] those people to China without even talking to Taiwan first, says Lai I-chung, vice president of Taiwan Think Tank, which is close to the current opposition party. Its critical for both sides to battle these crimes.

Kenya may be just a start, China has hinted. A map published online by the Communist Party newspaper Peoples Daily indicates Taiwanese fraudsters have operated in about 25 countries. Their illicit gains doubled from 2011 to 2015, the paper said.

On April 13, state-run China Central Television reported that Chinese police had cracked a 62-person, $18-million fraud ring in Uganda involving a Taiwanese chief. The same week, Indonesian police arrested 31 Taiwanese suspected of Internet fraud in Bali.

China and Taiwan are working together on the Indonesia case, which also netted 11 mainland Chinese suspects, Taiwanese media say. Of the suspects in Malaysia, where Taiwanese authorities intervened quickly, 20 have been returned to Taiwan and the other 32 are due to be sent back, a diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

Taiwan also sent 10 government officials to China in late April to work out ways of cooperating. The two sides agreed to handle the Kenya suspects together and do the same on any new fraud cases, the Taiwan justice ministry said in a statement.

Some analysts say China may also be using the international fraud cases to flex its muscles before Taiwans president-elect, Tsai Ing-wen, takes office in May. Her Democratic Progressive Party has been cool toward China, and has been reluctant to embrace the idea that Taiwan and the mainland belong to One China  a formulation Beijing insists on for continuing dialogue.

But China might quit trying to have Taiwanese fraud suspects deported to the mainland if Taiwan shows more resolve to stop fraud by its citizens based overseas, other experts say. The 45 suspects in China have confessed, Beijings official Xinhua News Agency reported, and a court in Taiwan issued arrest warrants last week for 18 of the 20 who were in Malaysia.

If cooperation is to the satisfaction of China, then the Chinese government will let other countries send [suspects] back to Taiwan, said Shane Lee, political scientist at Chang Jung Christian University in Taiwan.

The ultimate snag may lie in Taiwans legal system, which requires more evidence to convict than does Chinas system, which relies heavily on forced confessions. Fraud convicts in Taiwan sometimes are sentenced to just a year in prison, compared with a maximum of life in China, said Yeh Yu-lan, a retired associate professor from Central Police University in Taiwan.

Evidence can be scarce if the crimes start offshore, with prosecutors depending on authorities overseas to provide information, and those caught are often just runners for bosses who know how to stay hidden in Taiwan, Yeh said. Money taken from victims is often quickly laundered.

Yeh lost money to e-commerce fraud in 2001. A suspect in the case got two years in prison, but she never saw her money again.

One part of the problem is that its offshore and another is the people at the top. A lot of them are still in Taiwan, she said. The capital comes from them. And then theres a runners group, a recruitment group. Its organized crime.

Jennings is a special correspondent.
An airstrike killed at least 14 people at a hospital in Aleppo on Wednesday night, including the last pediatric physician in Syrias largest city, according to the medical charitable organization Doctors Without Borders.

The al-Quds hospital, which Doctors Without Borders supports, was reduced to rubble in the attack.

Other groups, including the pro-opposition monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, put the death toll at the hospital at 27.

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On average, one Syrian has been killed every 25 minutes over the past two days, Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. envoy leading negotiations to end the conflict, estimated Thursday.

People walk amid the rubble after an airstrike on a rebel-held neighborhood in Aleppo, Syria. (Ameer Alhalbi / AFP/Getty Images)

If attacks around Aleppo continue at the pace seen in the last 48 hours, he said, the truce agreement brokered by the U.S. and Russia will collapse. The cessation of hostilities, as it is formally known, is still alive but barely, De Mistura said. He called on Washington and Moscow to redouble efforts to salvage the cessation of hostilities that in late February did signal a reduction in fighting and bloodshed.

The strike destroyed a vital hospital in Aleppo and the main referral center for pediatric care in the area. Muskilda Zancada, head of Doctors Without Borders programs in Syria, said in a statement Thursday. Compounding this tragedy is that the dedication and commitment of the staff of al-Quds, working under unimaginable conditions, has been unwavering throughout this bloody conflict.

The city, once the industrial heart of Syria, has been torn asunder by the fighting, leaving the southwest region of the city in the hands of the government while its eastern parts are controlled by an array of Western-backed rebel factions and Islamist groups.

The nationality of the warplane that launched the strike remained unclear. Both the Syrian government and its ally Russia have conducted airstrikes on rebel-held areas in recent days.

For nearly a week there have been an average of 15 strikes a day in Aleppo, Osama Teljo, a member of the oppositions Aleppo city council, said in an interview via social media.

A military source quoted by Syrian state media insisted there was no truth to accusations that the Syrian air force had targeted the hospital, and said that rebel shelling of government-controlled neighborhoods of the city on Thursday had killed and wounded dozens.

Russias Ministry of Defense also denied responsibility for the strike, saying that its planes had not conducted any sorties over Aleppo in the last few days.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry, meanwhile, forcefully condemned the airstrikes on the hospital. Saying he was outraged, Kerry appeared to put the blame on the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

While we are still trying to gather the facts surrounding the circumstances of this attack, it appears to have been a deliberate strike on a known medical facility and follows the Assad regimes appalling record of striking such facilities and first responders, Kerry said in a statement. Russia has an urgent responsibility to press the regime to fulfill its commitments not to attack civilians and to abide fully by the cessation of hostilities.

Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, accused the Syrian government of engaging in a concerted effort to destroy service facilities in the area.

The government needs to do this so as to force people to leave and make it easier to overrun Aleppo, he said in a phone interview on Thursday.

This is the policy they have always followed.

He added that Russian planes had only struck targets outside of the city.

Doctors Without Borders officials contacted on Thursday could not confirm if the coordinates of the hospital had been provided to pro-government forces as is often customary with such faciliities so they can be excluded from military target lists.

Since this is a hospital we support and do not actually run, it is the choice of each media structure we support whether they share their coordinates or not, said the groups press officer Mirella Hodeib.

Special correspondent Bulos reported from Amman and Times staffer Wilkinson reported from Washington, D.C.
Washington: The Panama Papers trove of leaked documents revealing the vast extent of global tax evasion will be made available to the public on May 9, the organization behind the leak said Wednesday.

The searchable database will include information about more than 200,000 secret companies, trusts and foundations based in 21 tax havens from Hong Kong to Nevada in the United States, said the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Since early April, the ICIJ-coordinated limited release through roughly 100 media outlets of the Panama Papers have become a worldwide scandal, spurring numerous investigations and the resignation of Icelands prime minister and a Spanish minister.

About 11.5 million leaked documents of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, reveal the large-scale use of offshore entities to conceal assets from tax authorities.

In its statement, the ICIJ said that the public release next month is the next step in our ongoing year-long investigation and that it will continue to publish more stories in the coming weeks and months.
Vice President Joe Biden used a surprise visit to Iraq on Thursday to try to hasten efforts to quell a political rebellion that threatens to undercut the Obama administrations counterterrorism efforts here.

On his first visit to the country in five years and perhaps his last while in office, Biden met with Prime Minister Haider Abadi and other Iraqi leaders but focused less on military strategy than on a familiar challenge for a former seven-term senator: parliamentary politics.

The U.S.-backed Abadi won approval this week from the Iraqi parliament for a partial Cabinet shakeup amid public protests of corruption. President Obama said last week that he was concerned about Abadis hold on power.

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Bidens visit was intended to emphasize the importance of Iraqi national unity to sustain momentum in the campaign against the Islamic State and the sectarian divisions that the Sunni extremist group exploits, senior administration officials said. While Islamic State has seen its footprint diminish in Iraq by 40% since a stepped-up U.S.-led campaign against them, a key goal of the Abadi government  reclaiming the terrorists de facto capital of Mosul  has stalled and he has faced increased pressure to deliver on political reforms.

Im very optimistic, Biden told reporters after meeting for more than 90 minutes with Abadi at the government palace and before a sit-down with the speaker of the Iraqi parliament at the U.S. Embassy in the heavily fortified Green Zone. Later, Biden flew north to Erbil to see Kurdistan Regional Government President Masoud Barzani.

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The ongoing violence in Iraq and neighboring Syria, where dozens were killed in a wave of airstrikes that appears to have punctured the cease-fire there, has underscored the difficulty for the Obama administration of winding down the U.S. presence in the Middle East. The rise of Islamic State and its seizure of territory in the two countries has revived the U.S. military role that Biden came to Iraq five years ago to mark the end of.

Biden called the progress being made in the fight against Islamic State real, serious and committed.

Abadis role is crucial to the administrations Islamic State strategy, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told lawmakers Thursday in Washington. Corruption and sectarianism of the government of former Prime Minister Nouri Maliki hindered U.S. efforts to rebuild in Iraq, Carter said, adding that Abadi is different and must be supported both politically and economically by the U.S and its allies.

Its our sense that if momentum is lost in the campaign, its more likely to happen on the political side than the military side, said one senior official traveling with the vice president, who would not be named discussing details of the trip.

Bidens visit also appeared to have personal significance beyond the possibility he might not return while in office.

In remarks to U.S. Embassy staff and military personnel in Baghdad, he repeatedly referred to the service of his late son, Beau, in Iraq during the administrations early years. He recalled a conversation with an unnamed previous prime minister who expressed doubts about the U.S. commitment to his nations security.

Biden said he responded: Would you send your son to my state to defend me?

And he shut up, Biden added.

Bidens second son, Hunter, joined his father for the trip, saying he wanted to visit the country where his brother had served. In May, the family will mark the first anniversary of Beaus death from cancer.

The vice presidents visit to Iraq was not disclosed prior to his arrival because of security concerns, and comes ahead of a previously announced visit to the Vatican on Friday to promote his cancer-fighting initiative.

During his meetings with Iraqi leaders, Biden relied on his long-standing relationships with many of them to be direct, saying he did not come into their house and dictate solutions even as he offered advice.

Its an approach Obama has counted on after giving Biden a lead role in the Iraq portfolio shortly after taking office. Bidens trip to Iraq was long planned, aides said, but was well-timed given the political turbulence.

Abadis Cabinet reshuffle put a temporary halt to calls from radical cleric Muqtada Sadr for mass protests against Iraqi leaders. Thousands demonstrated outside the Green Zone this week, demanding an end to the corruption that has been a hallmark of Iraqi government since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

On his own visit last week, Carter announced that the Pentagon was deploying 217 additional military advisors to Iraq, and making available attack helicopters to assist in a campaign to recapture Mosul. The number of U.S. troops in Iraq will now exceed 4,000, with additional personnel involved in what the military calls temporary deployments.

In addition to the new military advisors in Iraq, Obama announced this week that the U.S. would also deploy an additional 250 service members to support the campaign in Syria against Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL.

Obama, who campaigned in 2008 on ending the war in Iraq, has said he wants to put the Islamic State on a clear path to defeat in Mosul by the end of his administration, and officials said the new military assistance to the Iraqi Security Forces was aimed at making as much progress in the spring before any slowdown during the hot summer months.

In a speech in Germany on Monday, Obama also said he would press U.S. allies, particularly in Europe, to do more to bring about stability.

We need more nations contributing to the air campaign. We need more nations contributing trainers to help build up local forces in Iraq. We need more nations to contribute economic assistance to Iraq so it can stabilize liberated areas and break the cycle of violent extremism so that ISIL cannot come back, he said.

Staff writers W.J. Hennigan and Christi Parsons in Washington contributed to this report.

Twitter: @mikememoli

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2:19 p.m.: This story was updated with details of Bidens visit to Iraq.

This story was originally published at 6:29 a.m.
It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of oil in Saudi Arabia. So when an influential young prince started talking this year about selling shares in the state-owned oil company and weaning the economy off its dependence on petrodollars, many were skeptical both inside and outside the conservative kingdom.

This week, the world got a closer look at what the ruling Saud family has in mind.

In an interview with Saudi-owned broadcaster Al Arabiya, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman outlined a sweeping plan dubbed Saudi Vision 2030. It includes listing for sale less than 5% of the Saudi Arabian Oil Co., building the worlds biggest sovereign wealth fund, reducing government subsidies and developing sectors such as tourism and mining.

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With these steps, the prince said, I think that if oil stopped in 2020, we can live.

The bold assertion signaled a growing urgency among the countrys leaders to chart a new course for the worlds largest exporter of crude in an era when vast stores of petroleum reserves are no longer a guarantee of flush government coffers.

Saudi Arabian officials have long recognized that the kingdoms traditional reliance on petroleum products for 90% of state revenues is not sustainable. The population is growing, some 70% of working Saudis are employed by the government and the private sector depends heavily on government spending.

Economic policymakers have been speaking about diversifying for decades. But when oil prices were high, there was little pressure to act.

Its now urgent because of the low oil price, said Jane Kinninmont, a Middle East scholar at the Chatham House think tank in London.

When oil prices fell from around $100 a barrel in mid-2014 to less than half that last year, it pushed Saudi Arabia into an economic crunch that saw the government burn through some $116 billion in foreign-exchange reserves and post a budget deficit of $98 billion.

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At the same time, Kinninmont said, You have now someone at the top of royal family decision-making who is very young, who buys into the idea that the private sector needs to be an engine of growth and employment and who is staring the end of the oil era in the face.

Mohammed, King Salmans son and second in line to the Saudi throne, has been entrusted with unusual power for someone in his early 30s. As defense minister, he oversees the kingdoms costly war in neighboring Yemen and other efforts to counter the influence of archrival Iran in the region. He also serves as chief of the royal court and chairs a council responsible for the kingdoms economic policy. Western diplomats and some media have dubbed him Mr. Everything.

In meetings with diplomats and journalists, Mohammed has been unusually candid about the challenges facing the kingdom. Saudi Arabia has an addiction to oil that has hurt development in other sectors, he told Al Arabiya in the interview that aired Monday.

Jamal Khashoggi, a leading Saudi journalist who was invited to a gathering hosted by the prince that day, said Mohammed is convinced that new technologies and the pressures of climate change will make oil obsolete before the kingdom runs out of reserves.

He is predicting that in 20 to 30 years, the oil will be pushed out, Khashoggi said.

The monarchy has used the kingdoms oil wealth to heap benefits on the countrys 21 million citizens, including cheap energy and free education and healthcare. The low price of oil  something to which Saudi Arabia contributed by refusing to limit output unless rival producers follow suit  poses a threat to the unwritten social contract that underpins the Saud familys absolute rule.

At the end of last year, the government took the difficult steps of cutting spending and raising the domestic price of water, electricity and fuel. New taxes and fees on undeveloped land, sugary drinks and luxury goods also have been announced.

The steps are impressive for their range and ambition  unprecedented really in a country where taxation has been politically taboo for decades, said Steffen Hertog, an associate professor at the London School of Economics who studies Saudi Arabia. But he said it would take some creative accounting to achieve in so short a time frame the ambitious targets approved Monday by the cabinet.

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Some observers have suggested that the royal family may be attempting to negotiate a new deal with its citizens.

Steps have been taken to curb the powers of the religious police, who are charged with enforcing the kingdoms ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam. There has been talk of bringing greater transparency to the countrys economic affairs  one of the main benefits of the initial public offering in the national oil giant Aramco, according to Mohammed. He also has spoken about issuing green cards for expatriates, providing new sport and leisure options for Saudi youth and bringing more women into the workplace.

But others say it is too soon to talk about a new social contract. Khashoggi for one believes the government is attempting to shore up the arrangement it already has.

There is no mention of democracy, he noted.

Some resistance to the plan appears inevitable. The sudden rise in water rates, along with costly billing mistakes, already generated a social media backlash. This month, the minister in charge of water and energy was removed from office, although the new prices remained in effect.

Mohammed told his interviewer Monday that there were plans afoot to further rationalize subsidies but said the cuts would apply only to the 70% of the population with above-average incomes  such as me and you.

Turki al-Dakhil, Al Arabiyas general manager, took issue with that, telling the prince, You have your own category. I am one of the people who expect to receive subsidies.

Do not let me say on television what you have, Turki! the prince retorted, according to a translation provided by Al Arabiya.

The prince offered few details about how the government proposes to implement its plan. Those will come later, he told reporters in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

Previous government attempts to diversify the economy and encourage private enterprise have yielded some notable failures, including a $10-billion project to build a glitzy financial district in Riyadh that failed to attract many of the banks and other high-end clients it was intended to house. The government is now reportedly proposing to convert parts of the development, launched in 2006, into housing, hotels and commercial establishments.

For more international news, follow @alexzavis on Twitter

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On 27 April Mexicos federal chamber of deputies gave final approval to the especial economic zones federal law (ZEE) bill promoted by the government led by President Enrique Pena Nieto.

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In an 18 April press briefing US State Department Spokesperson John Kirby said that the US government is following the political situation in Brazil closely, including the [federal] lower houses April 17 vote to impeach President [Dilma] Rousseff. Certainly, this is a challenging political moment for Brazil; but as weve said all along, we believe Brazils institutions are sufficiently mature to address the countrys challenges. We are confident that Brazilians will work through these difficult political questions democratically and in accordance with Brazils constitution principles. And thats our statement.

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The U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC), the largest Hispanic business organization in the country, has officially endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party's nomination and Ohio Gov. John Kasich for the GOP's ticket.

Endorsing Clinton

In a statement released on Thursday morning, USHCC President and CEO Javier Palomarez, the former secretary of state "has a proven record of delivering results for America's small business community and has proposed bold policy plans to help our Hispanic business community, along with the American people, thrive and prosper."

Palomarez added that the endorsement shows that Clinton has important views concerning the U.S. small business community -- views that are "simply far more qualifying than the empty rhetoric and lackluster record of Senator Bernie Sanders."

The USHCC, an advocacy organization promoting economic growth and entrepreneurs for approximately 4.1 million Hispanic-owned businesses, said Clinton has stood with the group and Latino community for decades, strengthened diplomatic and commercial ties for small business owners and helped raise education standards during her tenure as First Lady of Arkansas.

Endorsing Kasich

In the Republican field, the USHCC formally endorsed Kasich, recognizing the Ohio governor as someone who has consistently fought for policies encouraging economic growth. The USHCC acknowledged Kasich's efforts as a policymaker to balance the federal budget in 1997, closing Ohio's $8 billion budget shortfall and creating over 425,000 jobs in the private sector.

"Governor Kasich earns our endorsement because, unlike his primary opponents, he has a proven ability to unite people across party lines, and has a track record of enacting bold, comprehensive policies to solve the problems that matter to Hispanic business owners, and all Americans," said Palomarez.

In regards to both Clinton and Kasich endorsements, the USHCC made a swipe at Republican front-runner Donald Trump, a businessman based from New York City. Palomarez recognized there is a lot at stake in the upcoming presidential election and Americans cannot let the U.S. divide further.

"There is so much at stake in this election and our country cannot afford to have those who would divide our nation and prey on the fears of the American people as our President," said Palomarez. "By way of example, Donald Trump's hateful rhetoric toward women, immigrants, the disabled, Muslims, and the Hispanic community not only divides our country, but sends a clear message that Hispanic voters won't forget: he does not stand with our community."

Based on RealClearPolitics projections, Clinton leads Sanders in the delegate count to become the Democrats' presidential candidate. Taking into account pledged delegates, Clinton has 1,645 delegates to Sanders' 1,318 delegates. A Democratic candidate requires 2,382 delegates to secure the party's nomination.

For the GOP, the numbers are different. Trump leads with 987 delegates, ahead of Ted Cruz's 562 delegates and Kasich's 153. In fact, Kasich trails Marco Rubio, who despite suspending his presidential campaign in March has won 171 delegates. A Republican presidential candidate requires 1,237 delegates to clinch the party's nomination.

__

For the latest updates, follow Latin Post's Michael Oleaga on Twitter: @EditorMikeO or contact via email: m.oleaga@latinpost.com.
The Foreign Ministry of Iran has summoned the ambassador of Switzerland who represents American interests in Tehran to protest recent US court ruling against the Islamic Republic.

According to Press TV, the general director of Iran Foreign Ministry for American Affairs Mohammad Keshavarz-Zadeh slammed US decision to seize the assets of Iran Central Bank in an American bank. This is due to the violation of Washington's bilateral agreements with Tehran, including the 1955 Treaty of Amity, and the US international legal commitments on the judicial immunity and inviolability of the assets and properties of the Islamic Republic.

Keshavarz-Zadeh also protested a US court ruling that has held Iran liable for damages in the 9/11 terror attacks. The ruling allows the families of Marines and victims of other attacks that courts have linked to Iran to seize Iran's frozen $2 billion assets held in New York's Citibank belonging to the Central Bank of Iran which has been blocked under US sanctions.

During the meeting held last Tuesday April 26, the director general of Iran submitted two official notes to Giulio Haas, the Swiss Ambassador to Tehran, in protest at two recent rulings that the US courts have issued against Iran, El Akhbar has learned.

Such issues stemmed when the US Supreme Court upheld the congress and President Barack Obama's actions. The court ruled out to hold Iran financially responsible for the 1983 bombing that killed 214 US service members at their barracks in the Lebanese capital, Beirut and last month, Big Story has learned.

In addition to that, a federal judge in New York accused Iran of having been involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks without providing any evidence, calling the allegations baseless, absurd, and contrary to accepted practices of international law which guarantees the government's judicial immunity.. The court in New York even ordered Tehran to pay $11 billion in compensation to families of 9/11 terrorist attack victims.

With that being said, Haas stated that he will immediately notify the US Department of State and report back the results to Iran's Foreign Ministry.
Donald Tusk, President of the European Union Council, has been resisting Greece's demand for an emergency leaders' summit on its troubled bailout program. Finance officials need to agree within days on required reforms after resuming talks, argues the EU in support of his resistance.

Alexis Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister, has requested on Wednesday for a meeting of leaders from 19 European countries. Tusk has responded in a skeptical voice saying the finance ministers need to make more progress so that the leaders may intervene, reports The Seattle Times.

Member countries of the European Union and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been negotiating with Greece to way out a bailout program. Greece needs to agree with the reforms and cutbacks proposed by the negotiating creditors, according to a report published in The Province.
Maine's "Campaign To Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol" has had a major progress after it was announced that the matter will be part of their general election ballot in 2016. This means supporters of the program will be voting on marijuana legalization on November, the same day they are voting for their president.

Medical marijuana has already been legalized in Maine and residents could vote to legalize pot without a prescription, The Inquisitr reported. This was after thousands of supposedly verifiable signatures were rejected.

David Boyer, the Campaign Manager for "Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol" said in a statement that Maine voters will have the opportunity to "adopt a more sensible marijuana policy." He added that it has been a longer wait than expected, but nothing compared to how long the people of Maine have been waiting to end the "failed policy of marijuana prohibition," WCSH 6 reported.

Boyer also said that it is time for Maine to replace the underground market with a regulated system and it is time to redirect the state's limited law enforcement resources toward serious crimes rather than enforcing the failed prohibition families. He concluded the statement saying it is time to stop punishing adults for "using a substance that is significantly less harmful than alcohol."

Last month, proponents of the Maine marijuana legislation efforts filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of State. A court-ordered reviews of the petitions then pushed through and it was found out that the "Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol" submitted more than the needed 61,123 signatures to qualify, The Weed Blog reported. Initially, the Secretary of State saidthe campaign was disqualified because there were only 51,543 signatures submitted.

According to a poll released this week by the Maine People's Resource Center, nearly 54 percent of voters will approve the initiative.

If the initiative will push through, 21 years old and older will be legally allowed to grow and possess small amounts of marijuana.
Austria passed a controversial new law that allows tougher measures on asylum for migrants and refugees. It imposes that police may reject claimants directly at the border to control the influx of people passing through the country.

According to Euronews, the Austrian government passed a controversial new asylum law only days after a far-right politician won the first round of presidential elections. The new law may significantly limit the surge of refugees from war-torn countries into the nation.

This also allows border police to turn away potential asylum claimants directly at the border without processing individual requests. It was reported that only refugees who may be at risk of persecution should they return to their respective countries may be considered passage into Austria.

According to the Guardian, the Interior Ministry is expected to enforce the new asylum law by the end of June despite it having to pass through the country's second parliamentary chamber for formalities.

A spokesman from the Interior Ministry said, "People making applications for asylum at the borders with Italy, Hungary and Slovenia would not get permission to enter Austrian territory... If they make it into Austria they would be brought to registration centers and there the authorities would start the procedure to send them back to the neighboring countries that they came from."

Austria is the latest European nation to join Denmark, Hungary, Sweden and Greece in passing stricter asylum laws following the massive surge of refugees into their territories. According to BBC, Austria is also considering building a 400 meter fence between its territory and neighboring Italy.

Helmut Tomac, the police chief in Tyrol, said that the project would depend on Italy's willingness to cooperate. However, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi expressed his concern that a fence may go against European law.

The new asylum law earned backlash for its apparent negation of human rights. Amnesty Europe director Gauri van Gulik said, "These amendments are a glaring attempt to keep people out of Austria and its asylum system."

However, Austrian authorities defended that they were left with no choice but to control the influx of migrants and refugees as this left the nation vulnerable to security threats and possible breakdown of public order.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Photo: AP)

California: A person has been found dead in a conference room at Apple headquarters in Northern California, and police were investigating, local media reported on Wednesday.

The East Bay Times newspaper reported that an emergency call was made at 8:35 a.m. from Apple's campus in Cupertino and that the victim, who had suffered a head wound, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Local television station KTVU said investigators from the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office were en route to the scene.

Reuters could not confirm the report and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Denmark's humanitarian credentials are once again being questioned after pressing smuggling charges for the people who gave migrants a ride to its neighboring country, Sweden. The former country has already been under fire for ordering the police to seize jewelry from asylum-seekers.

According to Associated Press, Denmark's public prosecutor's office has filed charges against 230 people for helping people to transit through the country illegally at the peak of Europe crisis last fall. Prosecutors indicated that the Danish trafficking laws do not distinguish smuggling people for financial gain and humanitarian aspect.

However, critics of the law said going after the Danes who were touched by the image of exhausted migrants walking along Danish highways is shameful. Calle Vangstrup, who helped 20 Syrians pass between Denmark and Sweden said "This is far away from the idea I had of our society, a humane society where we care about others."

Yahoo reported that under European Union border agreements, Danish authorities were supposed to stop the migrants at the southern border with Germany and ask them to seek asylum in Denmark or turn back. The Danish police tried to do that but as they increase in number, they later on decided to let them travel to Sweden. Now, many of the volunteers who offered migrants a ride by car or boat feel it's unfair that they are being punished since the railroad company also did the same.

ABC News said that Denmark's justice and integration ministers didn't respond for requests of their comments. Michela Bendixen, head of Refugees Welcome volunteer group, expressed that she was stunned by the Denmark's pursuit to those who gave them a lift.

She said "I find authorities have taken a very stringent and much harsher approach than I ever could have imagined. We are not talking about people-smugglers who do it to make money but private people who act for humanitarian reasons."

Earlier this year, Denmark has notably made it into international headlines after they required asylum-seekers to hand over valuables worth more than 10,000 kroner or $1,500 to help cover housing and food costs. Though the government defended the law they've passed, critics see it as something degrading and inhumane.
Northern Ireland republican terror groups are reportedly targeting Catholics and Nationalists as revealed by an analysis on a recent survey on terrorism. Michael McGibbon, a taxi driver from north Belfast, became the latest victim of the civilian shootings claimed by the New IRA.

According to The Guardian, 80% of people victimized by the New IRA in the last decade have been Catholics and nationalists. The rebel groups claimed that to have represented these communities but a survey analysis from 2007 to 2015 on dissident activity reveal otherwise.

The survey records for the journal of Terrorism and Political Violence expose that "Catholics" and "criminals" comprised more than 77% of the 175 people harmed by groups such as the New IRA, Continuity IRA, and Oglaigh na hEireann. Police officers and British soldiers only accounted for 15% and 0.5% of the overall casualties, respectively.

Terrorism expert John F. Morrison suggested that targeting civilians were a way for rebels to exert control in the community. He said, "What they are aiming to achieve is power and control. Through their actions and statements they are aiming to portray that both Sinn Fein and the police have abandoned the protection of these communities. They are emphasizing their belief that police are not protecting and cannot protect these communities against the scourge of drugs. They are also saying that the PSNI, in their eyes a 'British police force', has no legitimate right to protect."

Meanwhile, cab driver Michael McGibbon became the latest victim of the dissident violence. According to BBC, the 33-year old was shot in the legs outside his home in the republican district of Ardoyne on April 15 by the New IRA. He passed away in Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital on April 16 after succumbing to blood loss.

According to the Belfast Telegraph, McGibbon's widow Joanne expressed her gratitude to the local Protestant community for their unconditional support during their family's grief in a letter to Methodist minister Rev Colin Duncan at the Woodvale Manse.

She wrote, "I have lots of friends who are Protestants and other religions and they all mean a lot to me. It just shows we are all human and feel the same way... I have nursed people from all religions/cultures and cared for them all equally."

McGibbons also expressed hope that the Protestant and Catholic communities of North Belfast would unite for the sake of all their children. Police said that the murder was the result of paramilitary struggles.
This Feb 24 file photo shows former Afghan Taliban fighters carrying their weapons before handing them over as part of a government peace and reconciliation process at a ceremony in Jalalabad. (Photo: AFP)

Washington: The Taliban must face the consequences for calling off peace talks with the Afghan government, the US said on Thursday as it once again asked Pakistan to go after terrorists that threaten its neighbours.

Unfortunately, the Taliban have refused to come to the table, so it is our view that they should face the consequences of that decision, Special US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Olson told members of the House Foreign Relations Committee during a hearing.

Weve long expressed our concerns to the Pakistanis about their reluctance to go after terrorists that threaten their neighbours with the same degree of assiduousness that they go after their own terrorists. We think that they are at a moment of needing to make a very strategic and fundamental choice, Olson said when asked what Pakistan is doing to bring the Taliban to the negotiation table.

Their (Pakistans) stated policy, which we agree with, is not to discriminate among terrorist groups. We believe there is considerable room for improvement in the application of that policy on the ground and we believe in particular that Pakistan has not taken as vigorous action against groups that threaten its neighbours as it has against those that threaten it domestically, he noted.

So Pakistan has also been very helpful in the reconciliation process, but I do believe that there is a strategic choice right now. With the Taliban having refused to come to the table, it seems to us that it is time to address more robustly the question of groups that threaten Afghanistan, Olson said.

The US, he said, has pressed the Pakistan government on its commitment not to discriminate among terrorist groups. We believe across regions there must be zero tolerance for safe havens, he said.

Americas relationship with Pakistan, a growing country with more than 190 million people, a nuclear arsenal, terrorism challenges and a key role to play in the region, will remain a critical one, he said.

In Pakistan, we see the government in a concerted and difficult fight against terror groups that threaten Pakistanis. But unfortunately, Pakistan does not take equivalent steps against groups that threaten its neighbours, Olson said.

Our core initiatives in Pakistan, include promoting economic growth, countering terrorism, fostering regional stability and promoting the consolidation of democratic institutions. Let me emphasise, we have repeatedly and frankly underscored with most senior leaders of Pakistan that the Haqqani Network must be part of their wider counterterrorism operations in order to keep their commitment not to discriminate between terrorist organisations, Olson said.
Then-prime minister John Howard reacted swiftly by pushing for tough gun laws, including bans on certain weapons, a minimum age, licences and secure storage. (Photo: AP, Representational Image)

Sydney: Australia marked 20 years since its last mass shooting on Thursday as campaigners warned its gun laws, which were severely tightened after the massacre, are being eroded.

Thirty-five people died at the historic Tasmanian colonial convict site of Port Arthur in 1996 as lone gunman Martin Bryant, armed with semi-automatic weapons, went on the rampage.

Now aged 48, he remains in jail after being sentenced to 35 life sentences without parole.

Then-prime minister John Howard reacted swiftly by pushing for tough gun laws, including bans on certain weapons, a minimum age, licences and secure storage.

Since then there have been no massacres on such a scale, in contrast to countries such as the United States where mass shootings are common, with guns being blamed for around 10,000 homicides each year.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was to attend a memorial service to mark the anniversary at the popular tourist site, insisted the laws would not be watered down.

"John Howard ensured that we have had, and have, the toughest gun control laws in the world and we are committed to ensuring they remain just that," he told reporters in Tasmania.

"We are committed to ensuring that our national firearms agreement becomes stronger and that Australians remain safe from gun crimes, like the shocking events at Port Arthur."

But Rebecca Peters, a campaigner to reform Australia's laws after Port Arthur and the 10 other mass shootings in the decade before it, said that while the changes introduced by Howard were "a very powerful step forward", they were slipping.

"Australia was recognised as having the best gun laws in the world," she said. "Twenty years later, those gun laws are being eroded, we are slipping backwards."

Gun Control Australia agreed, saying the estimated total number of firearms in the hands of civilians was now 3.2 million -- the same number as in 1996.

The organisation's chair, Sam Lee, said while people must have a gun license to possess a firearm, some owners were accumulating many weapons, while unlicensed people were also able to shoot at gun clubs.

"We have seen a watering down of gun laws... as the gun lobby groups continue to prosper and pro-gun representatives to state and federal parliaments gain power," Lee said.

Research by Philip Alpers, a University of Sydney gun control expert and founding director of GunPolicy.org, backed the concern.

"The million guns destroyed after Port Arthur have been replaced with 1,026,000 new ones. And the surge only shows upward momentum," he said in a commentary for academic journal The Conversation.
The schoolgirl managed to take the flight without being noticed at any of the security checks, the metal detector at the entrance, check-in, passport control at customs or baggage claim. (Representational Image).

Saint Petersburg, Russia: An 11-year-old Russian girl managed to fly from Moscow to Saint Petersburg after sneaking onto a plane by mingling with other passengers, authorities said on Wednesday.

"An unaccompanied 11-year-old girl was found in the Pulkovo airport of Saint-Petersburg," the transport police of Russia's second largest city said. "She had arrived from Moscow by herself without identification or ticket."

The schoolgirl managed to take the flight without being noticed at any of the security checks, the metal detector at the entrance, check-in, passport control at customs or baggage claim.

A source at the airport told local media that she had passed security procedures by joining a group of adults with several children. She then took a free seat on the plane and was discovered by a flight attendant after takeoff.

The Rossiya carrier which operated the flight from Moscow to Saint-Petersburg said that security procedures were the responsibility of the airport.

"That doesn't mean that we are not taking any responsibility," a company official told said, adding that ain internal investigation has been launched.

The press-service of Saint-Petersburg's Vnukovo airport was unavailable for comment Wednesday.

Security measures at Russian airports were boosted after a suicide bombing killed 37 people at Moscow's Domodedovo airport in 2011. Airports now require all people and luggage scanned at the entrance to terminals.
People try to climb on the arm of a mechanical loader after attempting to recover an antenna from the roof of a destroyed building in Canoas, Ecuador. (Photo: AP)

Mexico City: The International Monetary Fund has received a request for a credit line from Ecuador following a deadly earthquake earlier this month, an IMF official said on Wednesday.

Alejandro Werner, director of the Western Hemisphere department, said the fund would be discussing Ecuador's request for a loan from its Rapid Financing Instrument. He did not provide any specifics on the amount of aid.

Last week, Ecuador's president said the country would temporarily increase some taxes and sell assets, and said it may issue global bonds to fund a multi-billion-dollar reconstruction after the devastating 7.8 magnitude quake, which killed over 650 people.

The rules of the IMF credit line mean Ecuador could get up to $368 million over the course of the loan, according to a Reuters calculation, but the level of access depends on the country's balance of payments needs, according to IMF rules.

"The earthquake was a devastating phenomenon, and obviously we have facilities for countries that suffer natural catastrophes," Werner told Reuters after an event in Mexico City.
A man on state parole fought the law -- and lost -- on Wednesday, authorities said.

Rashwan McDuffie tussled with state parole agents as they tried to arrest him at the state parole office in Allentown, city police said.

McDuffie is on parole for a drug case in Bucks County, court records show. Police said McDuffie violated his parole, but did not reveal details about the alleged violation.

The 33-year-old McDuffie used his elbows and hands, and struck and injured four agents before being arrested, police said.

McDuffie, of Levittown, Pennsylvania, was charged with four counts each of aggravated assault and harassment, as well as single counts of resisting arrest and criminal mischief.

In addition to his parole detainer, McDuffie is being held on $250,000 bail.

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
richard-rasun-decaires

Richard Decaires

(Courtesy photo)

Richard Decaires was college bound, ready to enroll at Northampton Community College.

All that changed when he helped two men commit an armed robbery.

The 21-year-old Bethlehem man was sentenced Thursday to one to two years in Northampton County Prison followed by three years of probation.

"This is really a tragedy," said defense attorney Brian Monahan. "There's no reason for it and I think it wrecked his life."

Northampton County Judge Michael Koury imposed the same sentence as Decaires' co-defendants.

Also serving one to two years are Almeen Jamal Jenkins, 24, and Jenkins and Yzire Jenkins-Rowe, 19, both of Bethlehem.

Assistant District Attorney Tatum Wilson said Decaires blocked the path of a victim in the car where the robbery took place Nov. 20 in the 1300 block of Eastwood Road in Bethlehem.

She said Jenkins struck a victim in the head and threatened him with a handgun. Jenkins-Rowe took a cellphone and $40 from one victim, she said.

Decaires pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery.

Monahan said Decaires' mother and a handful of family members were present Thursday in the courtroom.

Koury declined to make Decaires eligible for immediate work release. Decaires will be eligible after he serves a third of his minimum sentence. He works at Ross, a clothing store.

Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.
An elected official in Bethlehem who police say was the victim of domestic violence this week addressed the incident Thursday.

Juan E. Dipini Prado holds the Bible as Bethlehem Councilwoman Olga Negron-Dipini is sworn into office Jan. 4, 2016, in Town Hall by Pennsylvania Secretary of State Pedro Cortes. (Kurt Bresswein | For lehighvalleylive.com)

City Councilwoman Olga Negron-Dipini issued a statement calling for attention to the challenges related to domestic abuse that are faced by women and veterans, in particular.

"I hope my current situation can serve as a catalyst for change by creating awareness in our community regarding domestic violence," Negron-Dipini said in the statement sent out by the city clerk's office. "I also urge government entities to examine the lack of resources and services for veterans and their families."

Negron-Dipini's husband, 49-year-old Juan E. Dipini Prado, allegedly grabbed her twice by the neck after awaking her about 12:30 a.m. Monday in their home in the 1300 block of East Fifth Street on South Side. He had grown angry after looking for leftovers of food she had cooked, according to city police.

Dipini Prado served for seven years in the U.S. Navy, according to Negron-Dipini.

Negron-Dipini opened her statement by saying she has worked throughout her life to protect the rights of women and veterans in her community.

"My recent experience with an instance of domestic abuse reveals why it is so important for all of us to continue addressing the many challenges faced by both women and veterans," she stated. "I am contending with these issues and ask for your prayers and understanding in allowing me some time to deal with my personal life."

She continues with statistics surrounding the plight of domestic violence:

Domestic violence is the leading cause of death of pregnant women and the reason behind emergency room visits for more than one-third of women who seek treatment there.

Nearly half of homeless women and children have been victims of domestic violence.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one in five women (22.3 percent) and nearly one in seven men (14 percent) have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner, translating to nearly 29 million women and nearly 16 million men in the United States.

"Domestic violence is a public health problem that costs our country an estimated $4.1 billion per year in medical care and mental health services," Negron-Dipini stated. "Domestic violence affects the workplace to the tune of about $1.8 billion per year in absenteeism, impaired job performance and lost productivity.

"Each year in the U.S., some 1,500 domestic violence victims die at the hands of their intimate partners. Millions of others are beaten, stabbed, shot and raped or suffer extreme mental and emotional abuse. Indeed, one in four women and one in nine men are victims of domestic violence at some point in their lives, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."

Veterans' challenges can stem from traumatic experiences during their service, and efforts to transition from military to civilian life, the statement continues.

"Unfortunately, many veterans lack the adequate tools and resources needed to meet this challenge," she stated. "The results are an alarmingly high rate of veteran suicide, depression, divorce, homelessness and substance abuse."

Negron-Dipini closes by asking for support, understanding and prayers.

Juan E. Dipini Prado (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Dipini Prado is charged with simple assault and harassment. He was arraigned Monday morning before on-call District Judge Douglas Schlegel and initially sent to Northampton County Prison in lieu of $5,000 bail.

At the recommendation of Northampton County Pre-Trial Services, bail was lowered to 10 percent of $5,000, on which Dipini Prado was released Tuesday, according to court records. He faces a preliminary hearing tentatively scheduled May 6.

Negron-Dipini, then a member of the Bethlehem Planning Commission, won a seat on council in 2015. She was sworn-in Jan. 4 by Pennsylvania Secretary of State Pedro Cortes in Town Hall.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Alakus asked for the bill but later found out that his friend Erdemir had already paid it off. (Photo: Twitter)

Istanbul, Turkey: In a fit of rage, a Turkish man shot dead his friend over a petty fight on who would pay the restaurant bill, according to a report in the Daily Sabah.

The accused identified as Idris Alakus visited the restaurant with his friend Hasan Erdemir. After the duo had finished eating, they asked for the bill and soon started arguing over who would pay the bill.

Alakus asked for the bill but later found out that his friend Erdemir had already paid it off.

Infuriated at the situation, Alakus walked off from the restaurant. After a few minutes, he barged into the restaurant and shot his friend in the torso and the latter fell on the ground.

Even after shooting his friend dead, Alakus did not stop at that. He then turned towards two other people who had joined them for the meal. Furious, he shot at them too, who received minor injures.

The accused then fled the scene, but was later arrested and faces murder charge.
Jean and Warren Travis say the secret to their longevity isn't much of a secret at all. All it requires is a little give and take.

The Palmer Township couple wed on April 27, 1946, at the old Memorial Evangelical Reformed Church in Wilson Borough, before hosting a reception at the Hotel Easton ballroom.

In the 70 years in-between, they say they've never argued or fought. Not once.

"It's true," Jean Travis said Wednesday. "We've gotten along so well, really. We've been together ever since high school. We were high school sweethearts."

That was during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.

Jean -- her maiden name is Surran -- and Warren belonged to the Class of 1942 at Wilson High School.

Warren joined the U.S. Army, served as an infantryman during World War II and returned home in December 1945. They married a few months later.

Jean is 91 and Warren's 92. He retired from sales at the old Bethlehem Steel Corp. in 1983, when he was 60. Even so, he still works today.

Warren serves as a handyman and maintenance crewman at Nicholas Court apartments in Palmer. The couple have lived there the last 30 years, and before that lived in Phillipsburg and the Old Orchard section of Palmer. They have a daughter, Nancy Paul, who's 63.

"They're still really in love," said Tammi Kennedy, a friend whose husband Nick Pugliese owns the apartment complex. "They're a cute couple -- one of a kind."

Jean is modest about the fuss folks make at the time the two have been together. They keep no secrets.

"Everybody asks us that question," she says of the secret to their success. "I think maybe it's that we did what we wanted to do. He would say 'Is it OK if I do this?' And I would always say 'Whatever.' We've had a very, very good marriage."

The Travis' planned to celebrate their milestone Wednesday night during a dinner with friends at the Hanoverville Roadhouse in Hanover Township, Northampton County.

So many years later, the couple get delight from memories of their wedding day but sadness in the harsh reality of time. From the maid of honor to the groomsmen and flower girls, all of their wedding party are gone. Contemporaries can be hard to come by with such strong endurance.

Some of their old classmates are still around. They graduated with about 125 others from Wilson High.

"I was secretary of the class," Jean said. "We had a reunion where we printed up a book with everybody in our class, and as they passed away I marked my book. The last time I put one in, I think it was something like 97 of them had passed."

The Travis' say they're blessed to still have their health, their minds and their friends.

And, of course, each other.

"It's a long time," Jean said. "But it's just wonderful. He's been so good to me. A marriage can't be all one-sided. Not in any way."

Jim Deegan may be reached at jdeegan@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @jim_deegan. Find lehighvalleylive on Facebook.
An Easton brewpub is celebrating a milestone.

Two Rivers Brewing Co. on Thursday began selling its first bottled beer -- a year after it began brewing its own suds and four years after the pub opened.

Six Fingers Sam saison ale is the latest addition at Two Rivers Brewing Co. in Easton. It's the first bottled beer produced by the pub and brewhouse at Sixth and Northampton streets. (Jim Deegan | For lehighvalleylive.com)

The recipe was brewed in October and aged in chardonnay barrels through February, said owner Troy Reynard.

Six Fingers Sam is a saison ale -- a pale ale -- with 6 percent alcohol by volume and sold in 750-milliliter bottles (about 25 ounces) that cost $18 apiece. Customers can carry out up to six bottles each.

The drink sticks to the Two Rivers tradition of branding its beers with figures from Easton's colorful history.

Sam Bruneo was a "runnerboy" who gained notoriety among Easton's visitors in the early 20th century for his knowledge and expertise as a guide for the city's red-light district, Reynard said.

"When someone came to town, he'd get on the running board of the taxi and show them the varieties of Pine Street," he said. "So with the naming of this beer we salute his entrepreneurial spirit."

Legend has it that the young man had six fingers on each hand and would direct taxis to take circuitous routes to Pine Street so the next time someone came looking for a good time, they'd still require his services, Reynard said.

The bottle's detailed label was created by Easton artist Preston K. Hindmarch, owner of Aardvark Graphics.

Hindmarch said he tried to use recognizable places in making the label. It depicts Bruneo and incorporates a yellow cab, the top floor of the old Sweet Shop on Centre Square, and signs for the old Boyd Theatre.

Reynard distributed bottles to his early supporters during Wednesday's happy hour and said he was delighted by the feedback. The spot at Sixth and Northampton streets in the former Mount Vernon Ale House will celebrate its first "brewniversary" -- a year of making its own beer -- on June 12.

Eventually, Reynard said, he hopes to bottle a new beer every three months. Next in line is a Belgian Strong Ale aged in Buffalo Trace barrels, he said.

The beers that end up in bottles will also be available on tap for a time, he said.

Jim Deegan may be reached at jdeegan@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @jim_deegan. Find lehighvalleylive on Facebook.
A day after sweeping five primaries, Donald Trump kept rolling Wednesday, picking up endorsements from an additional 33 delegates in Pennsylvania to give him a total of 80 percent of the number of delegates needed to win the Republican nomination.

For the first time, the New York billionaire now has a majority of the delegates awarded so far. He needs just 48 percent of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination and avoid a contested convention.

Trump won the Pennsylvania primary, which guaranteed him 17 delegates. An additional 54 delegates were elected directly by voters -- three in each congressional district. These delegates are free to support the candidate of their choice.

The Associated Press has confirmed that at least 33 of them plan to support Trump. They can, however, change their minds.

"Oh my goodness, I'm voting for Donald Trump on every ballot, if there's a hundred ballots," said Lee Snover, a Bethlehem Township resident who was endorsed by the Trump campaign in her 17th Congressional District. "The only way I won't vote for him is if he takes himself out of it."

Seven delegates have remained uncommitted, primarily those in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia congressional districts. The AP is still working to contact the others.

Trump won the Pennsylvania primary Tuesday by more than 35 percentage points over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Ohio Gov. John Kasich came in third.

Cruz and Kasich are mathematically eliminated from clinching the nomination before the party's national convention this summer. Their only hope is to block Trump and force a contested convention in which no one has a majority of the delegates.

BREAKING: Ted Cruz introduces Carly Fiorina as running mate in race for GOP nomination; calls her an 'extraordinary leader'.'  The Associated Press (@AP) April 27, 2016

Trump now has 80 percent of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the convention.

Some delegates had pledged to support the winner of their congressional district, but had not envisioned such a strong victory by Trump in Pennsylvania.

"This man Trump blew everybody off the spectrum, he won every single county in Pennsylvania," said Ash Khare, a former regional state party official in northwestern Pennsylvania. "And I don't know about you, but in my political career since 1982, I have never seen anybody win every single county."

In moderate southeastern Pennsylvania, delegate Joan Miller said she had pledged to support the winner of her congressional district.

"That was our platform and we believe in Democracy and we're the voice of the people that voted for us," Miller said. "We're not going to change our mind."

The AP delegate count

Trump: 987.

Cruz: 562.

Kasich: 153.

Needed to win: 1,237.
Legal leeway for medical pot in Lehigh Valley? Maybe

Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli, left, says he has to consider a Pennsylvania lawmaker's request for prosecutorial discretion when it comes to medical marijuana. Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin, right, says he'll review such cases individually. (AP/Lehighvalleylive.com file photos)

One of the prime movers behind Pennsylvania's nascent medical marijuana program wants prosecutors to commit to leeway for patients caught with the drug.

A marijuana bud is seen at a medical marijuana facility April 22, 2016, in Unity, Maine. Pennsylvania's program prohibits distribution of medical marijuana in a leaf or dried form, pending further study. (AP file photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

State Sen. Daylin Leach, D-Delaware/

Montgomery, says he expects it'll be 18 months to two years until medical marijuana will begin to be distributed.

In the meantime, the suffering will continue for cancer patients and others battling illnesses and disorders for which marijuana products will be able to be prescribed, Leach says in a letter he sent to all 67 of Pennsylvania's county district attorneys.

"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," Leach wrote. "To those of you who have already done this: thank you."

Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli said Wednesday this hasn't even been on his radar. The law, Senate Bill 3, is not slated to take effect until May 17, he said.

"We have not really digested this yet," he said, adding later: "At the present time I have to ponder this."

In Lehigh County, District Attorney Jim Martin said his office will review such cases on a case-by-case basis.

"We recognize that we have discretion and we exercise that discretion frequently and I think appropriately," he said.

There are ways law enforcement can determine whether someone's marijuana use is for medicinal purposes, he allowed.

"But I'm not going to say to the world, 'Listen, it's OK with me if you violate federal law and possess marijuana,'" he said. "It's still a violation of the law as I understand it."

Pennsylvania's law will permit certified patients to use cannabis in the form of a pill, homemade edible, oil, topical form, tincture or liquid, including by vaporization or nebulization. Smoking will remain prohibited, as will the distribution of marijuana in dry leaf or plant form without further study and approval.

The drug would be available to terminally ill patients or those suffering from these serious medical conditions: cancer, HIV/AIDS, ALS, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, certain spinal cord damage, epilepsy, inflammatory bowel disease, neuropathies, Crohn's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, intractable seizures, glaucoma, sickle-cell anemia, severe pain and autism.

A safe-harbor provision allows parents to get medical marijuana, exclusively to be administered to a minor, if they buy it legally in another state or country.

Marijuana laws around the U.S. and the world

The Associated Press last week put together this look at marijuana laws around the United States and internationally:

Legal for medical use

Eight states allow people with certain medical conditions to use marijuana, according to the Marijuana Policy Project, a pro-legalization group that tracks state pot laws.

Arizona, Illinois, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Vermont each have their own lists of ailments for which sufferers can use the drug with a doctor's recommendation.

The drug cannot legally be prescribed in any state, because it has no accepted medical use under federal drug law. But some doctors are willing to recommend it under certain conditions.

Legal if it doesn't get you high

Seventeen states, many in the South, have passed laws opening the door to marijuana use as long as the drug is extremely low in THC, the intoxicating ingredient. The laws have emerged in the last three years following publicity about children with severe seizures benefiting from oils derived from marijuana.

Marijuana legalization activists often disregard these laws for being loaded with so many caveats that the drug isn't being used. The laws, which still violate U.S. law, exist in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Not legal but won't put you in jail

Five states have removed the potential for jail time for those caught with small amounts of the drug. That means pot isn't legal for recreational use, but people smoking it to get high can't be put behind bars. Those states are Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina and Ohio.

Combination of the above

A few states both have approved marijuana use by sick people and removed jail sentences for recreational users. One is California, whose voters passed the nation's first medical marijuana law in 1996. Others are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada and Rhode Island.

Legal for adults over 21

Four states and Washington, D.C., allow marijuana possession in small amounts by adults over 21 for any reason. They are Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Washington state and the nation's capital.

International pot laws

Cannabis possession is illegal in most countries under a 1925 treaty called the International Opium Convention. But just like the U.S., some nations either flout the treaty or don't enforce it.

Legalization supporters consider pot possession either legal or tolerated in Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, India, Jamaica, Jordan, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay, Germany and the Netherlands.

Each country has many caveats. Some consider the drug just as illegal as heroin but don't enforce the ban. Others, like Uruguay and the Netherlands, allow its recreational use.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
The attorney for a single mother whose toddler was allegedly beaten to death by her boyfriend said Wednesday his client is doing the best she can under tough circumstances.

Gary A. Foley (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Heather Marie Surget, 27, of Great Meadows, New Jersey, is facing four counts of endangering the welfare of a child following the fatal beating. Her former boyfriend, Gary A. Foley, 32, of the 100 block of Duke Street in Lehigh Township, is being charged with homicide and child endangerment.

Both appeared Wednesday at the Northampton County Courthouse for a preliminary hearing before District Judge Robert Hawke. All charges against Surget and Foley were bound over for county court, where they will face trial unless pleas are entered or their cases are disposed of in another way.

Surget, dressed in denim jeans and a white long-sleeved shirt, and Foley, in an orange prison jumpsuit and handcuffed, didn't speak or give any sign of emotion during testimony of witnesses.

Seventeen-month-old Kannah Dew died on Feb. 24, 2015, after being left in the care of Foley while Surget left about 4:30 p.m. for her job at a Whitehall Township fast-food restaurant. Foley was unemployed during the winter and had been helping to care for Kannah, as well as Surget's 2-month-old baby girl and her 3-year-old daughter, as well as his own 4-year-old son.

The couple recently moved into a mobile home in Lehigh Township after meeting over the Internet, according to police. Foley was the only one home with the child when the child fell ill, according to police.

Foley told police the baby was choking after he fed her cut-up hot dogs, but an autopsy by the Carbon County coroner found she died from multiple blunt force injuries to her head and neck. The injuries were acute, meaning they were recently delivered, the coroner found.

The defense argued Wednesday for the homicide charge against Foley to be dropped, along with the child endangerment charges against Surget.

"She is a single mother working for minimum wage; she's doing the best she can do," Tyree Blair, Surget's attorney, said after the hearing. "She allowed someone without prior incident to watch her children while she worked."

Northampton County First Assistant District Attorney Terry Houck said there was no doubt in his mind the charges would be held for county court.

"The evidence was overwhelming," he said.

Heather Marie Surget (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Deplorable conditions

Lehigh Township police Sgt. John Henry testified he was one of the first at the scene around 7:30 that evening when police received a 911 call from Foley that the baby was not breathing.

EMS workers were carrying the child out of the home and continuing chest compressions, he said. The child later died at the Blue Mountain Health System Palmerton Campus an hour after Foley dialed 911.

Inside, Henry described the conditions as "not livable."

Garbage was strewn about, dirty dishes were piled in the sink, cockroaches and other bugs took up counter space and a toilet was not flushed and filled with human waste. Plywood covered at least two holes in the floor, it was cold with snowfall that day and pipes were frozen so there was no running water, he described.

"It made it very hard to walk," Henry testified, noting the floor was rotting and his feet sank through a hole underneath carpet in the hallway. "It was very dirty."

Foley told police he didn't dial 911 until after several minutes of the baby being unresponsive because he didn't think he could get a connection, Henry testified.

Robert Eyer, the attorney representing Foley, repeatedly questioned Henry under cross-examination if he knew who owned the home, to which Henry replied he did not.

Eyer tried to poke holes in Henry's testimony about the delayed 911 call.

"Mr. Foley did notice something wrong with the child, right? He said the child was crying and then, unresponsive?," Eyer asked.

Eyer also asked if Henry knew if there were heating devices on the floor, to which he said he saw two devices. Henry also said he saw jugs of water, but there was no running water.

Blair after the hearing admitted photographs of the conditions of the home were not favorable, but said they show Surget is guilty of hoarding and not criminal intent.

Alleged child neglect

Township police Detective Matthew Enstrom and Northampton County Detective Paul Romanic provided testimony about medical records gathered on the other children and Kannah's autopsy.

Enstrom testified the autopsy photographs showed blood on Kannah's skull while Romanic testified medical records showed Foley's 4-year-old son had brown and chipped teeth.

Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli previously said the boy also was found to have cuts and bruises on his body. He had waited a year before filing charges to obtain a toxicology report, to try to extract witness statements and to try to find more details about Foley's alleged attack.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
More than four months after a fire heavily damaged 835 S. Main St. in Phillipsburg, the cause is officially undetermined.

The home at 835 S. Main St. in Phillipsburg, more than four months after it burned. (Tony Rhodin | For lehighvalleylive.com)

The investigation began soon after the fire was extinguished the morning of Dec. 7.

On Thursday, Phillipsburg police Chief James Faulborn confirmed the Warren County Prosecutor's Office's ruling that the fire's cause is undetermined and remains under investigation.

The ruling can change if new evidence is uncovered or witnesses come forward, fire Chief Richard Hay said.

No one on Dec. 7 was living in the home owned by an out-of-town landlord and the utilities were cut off, Hay said. Those circumstances certainly raise eyebrows, he admitted.

But in the investigation of a fire, arson is the most difficult thing to determine, he said.

If there isn't an "impeccable" witness or if the person lighting the fire isn't caught in the act or doesn't confess, it's very difficult to proceed, Hay said.

In the case of this fire, it began hours before dawn on a very cold night in a remote part of town, he said. The blaze wasn't reported until flames were already coming out of the upstairs windows, he said.

"Any activity prior to the fire no one saw," Hay said.

Making it more difficult to prove squatters were in the building, the previous residents left many of their belongings, Hay said.

"It's been empty since mid-November," neighbor Nickey Hoadley said on Dec. 7. She and her husband heard smoke alarms but didn't see flames until they went outside as he prepared to go to work. "It was a family with three small children. The flames were coming out where the little girl's room used to be."

Hay said officials simply weren't able to come to a determination on the fire's cause.

"It's possible there were squatters," he said. "... It's possible they may have started a fire to keep warm. ... But there are no witnesses. There's nothing to base it on. It becomes undetermined."

The building sat Thursday morning in pretty much the same condition it was in the afternoon of Dec. 7. From out front, there is hole in the siding through which backyard trees are visible. Some windows are boarded up.

"The status of the building is an ongoing issue" and involves the town's building department, Hay said.

While the investigation was going on, possible repairs couldn't start, Hay said. Now, insurance companies are involved and the time is drawing near when decisions can be made whether the building is torn down or rebuilt, he added.

The probe involved town fire and police officials, the Warren County fire marshal's office and the prosecutor's office.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Lawyers from Leigh Day solicitors argued that Brexit would mean the claimants were no longer EU citizens and therefore no longer afforded the rights of free movement which flow from EU citizenship. (Photo: AFP/Representational Image)

London: A British World War II veteran living in Italy on Thursday lost his legal challenge against a rule barring long-term expatriates from voting in Britain's European Union referendum.

High Court judge David Lloyd Jones rejected claims by Harry Shindler, 94, and his co-claimant, Belgium resident Jacquelyn MacLennan, that the rule restricted their rights to freedom of movement under European law.

The judge told London's High Court that the 2015 referendum act "is not a restriction on the rights of free movement."

Lawyers acting for the expats said they will seek leave to appeal the decision. The ruling is a relief for the government, whose lawyers argued that a decision in favour of the claimants could have made it impossible to hold the membership referendum on June 23, as planned.

Britons who have lived abroad for more than 15 years are prohibited from voting in British general elections and as a result cannot participate. Irish people and citizens of Commonwealth countries living in Britain, as well as inhabitants of Gibraltar, are allowed to vote.

Lawyers from Leigh Day solicitors argued that Brexit would mean the claimants were no longer EU citizens and therefore no longer afforded the rights of free movement which flow from EU citizenship.

"The 15 year rule is neither an express restriction on free movement nor is it in substance a disguised or inherent restriction on free movement," Lloyd Jones concluded.

He also rejected claims that the 15-year time limit was arbitrary.

"In attempting to identify a point at which extended residence abroad might indicate weakening of ties with the United Kingdom, a bright line rule is required, drawing the line at a specific point."

Leigh Day lawyer Richard Stein said they would take the legal battle to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, "so that all British citizens living elsewhere in the EU can be part of the democratic process to vote in this referendum, which will have a very real impact on their lives.

"We believe that there is precedent for fast-track legislation being put through parliament in a matter of days in response to court judgement, so there would be no need for the referendum to be delayed if the Supreme Court rules in our favour."

Speechless

Shindler, who fought in Italy during World War II and retired to the country in 1982, lost a challenge to the 15-year general election rule at the European Court of Human Rights in 2013.

"It leaves us speechless to think anyone can stand up in parliament and deny another Brit the right to vote," Shindler said before the judgement.

An estimated 1.2 million Britons live in other parts of the European Union, according to a parliamentary report, and many are concerned about the impact that a so-called Brexit would have on their rights. Leigh Day claimed that up to two million people could be affected.

A government spokesman said the franchise issue had been "debated, considered and agreed" by parliament. A petition to allow all British expatriates to vote in the referendum, launched in November, has attracted over 18,000 signatures.
One year on from the end of milk quotas, and as farmers start putting cows in calf for next season, Laois IFA Dairy Chairman Tom Phelan says co-ops must call an immediate stop to any further milk price cuts.

Co-ops must help protect farmers from market risk as prolonged cash flow challenges make 2016 as difficult as 2009.

While tax-based solutions and greater flexibility in financial products must form part of the toolkit available to farmers, it is our industry which has the greatest responsibility towards its shareholder suppliers.

Since 2007, with lower EU market supports and massively increased global trade, dairy markets have become extremely volatile. 2009 was a very bad year for Irish dairy farmers as low prices and bad weather combined to stress incomes and morale.

While demand has not collapsed in 2015 as it did in 2009, the downturn is lasting longer than anyone expected, and as many farmers have invested heavily in response to industry encouragement, this is stretching their cash flow and confidence to breaking point.

Farmers rightly feel that they are expected to take way too much of the risk.

While emergency market support decisions are being made in Brussels, which will hopefully help stabilise prices and incomes, farmers are legitimately thinking that their co-ops must have a plan for them beyond encouraging them to produce away to fill processing capacity regardless of milk price.

The milk price is what is left after all costs are paid forCo-ops, just like all other businesses, budget ahead for all of their operating costs, but they do not make the same type of provision for the price they will pay farmers for their milk.

Even allowing for the level of support provided in the last number of months, what is available to pay for milk is what is left after those other costs have been covered.

Is this fair to farmers, and is this a sustainable basis on which to build the future of our sector? Farmers do not think so.

In many co-ops, farmers have been asked to sign a Milk Supply Agreement (MSA) which commits them to supplying all their milk to their co-op, often for a number of years.

While it does also guarantee the farmer an outlet for his produce, no MSA currently commits the co-op to any level of price for any volume of milk.

Farmers and processors have made major investments in the last five years, and in the face of a prolonged, challenging market slump, farmers are now asking for a better strategy than one that simply tells them: keep producing, even at a loss, to utilise our processing capacity efficiently.

The reality is that the future of the Irish dairy sector depends on a more sustainable approach.

A better long term strategy: one which gives farmers an opportunity to cover costs

Many MSAs require farmers to forecast production 2 to 3 years ahead.

The agreement would be fairer if the co-op sent back clearer forecasts of their own of what market opportunities exist, and ensure that for that volume, the milk price offered to the farmer at the very minimum covers his costs.

Up to each individual farmer then to decide how they might manage their own output over and above that volume.

This is not external supply control, which we have already demonstrated cannot work to secure sustainable prices for farmers whose milk is essentially traded on global markets. However, it is about changing the message from the co-op to the farmer from produce all you can regardless to produce potentially only what you know you will be economically paid for.

How do we do that?

If weve learned anything in the last decade, it is that not even very well connected market analysts know what dairy prices will be in two months time.

However, a number of co-ops, many with the assistance of Ornua, have found ways to offer farmers fixed price contracts based on back-to-back arrangements with customers, or on high value brands, or on an element of futures market trading.

With a bit of goodwill and co-operation, it is possible for the sector to develop more hedging tools which would actually allow to offer farmers volumes at specific prices, even for relatively short periods of time.

IFA is organising an industry conference in early May with US farmer speakers experienced in utilising a number of risk management tools as yet unknown in Europe to inspire Irish stakeholders to greater innovation in this area.

The crisis we are living through is part of a cycle. Prices will get better over coming months as supply and demand find a better balance, undoubtedly aided by increased availability of EU market support measures. But we will be back to low returns in a matter of a few years, and without a long term strategy to deal with those low ebbs, the sector cannot thrive.

An important part of this strategy will involve elements at the edge of the sector: a tax regime allowing farmers to better smooth their incomes between good and bad years, better priced and more flexible short and long term financial products.

But the main responsibility for reviewing and rethinking the Irish dairy sectors plan for the future is with the industry itself, and it must start right away.

Irish dairying has real potential to be a long term heavy-weight in a fast growing global dairy trade, and to make dairy farming in Ireland a prosperous career. However, this will only happen if the market risk is shared more fairly than it is at present.

Tom Phelan

Laois IFA Dairy Chairman
The Ballylinan native released after a week of captivity in Iraq is said to be on his way home toLaois.

Laois TD and Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan confirmed that Joshua Molloy had been released after being taken captive by Kurds after crossing the border from Syria.

I welcome Joshuas release and I am pleased that he is now on his way home to join his family in Ireland.

I would like to thank all those who helped to make this early release happen. My department will continue to provide consular assistance in this case, he said.

Mr Molloy was captured with two other British nationals. He travelled to Syria to fight against ISIS.

The former British soldier is a son of Declan and Ann Marie Farrell-Molloy who live in Ballylinan.

The young man's father declined to comment to the Leinster Express for privacy reasons but he told other media outlets he found out on Saturday night his son would be freed during a phone call with Mr Flanagan.

We are all delighted here. We are jumping with joy to know that he is out, he said.

You know that Christmas morning feeling, its a bit like that, when you find your most sought-after present under the tree, the dream present. Thats how we feel.

He spoke to his son this morning via Facebook and reported that he was fine - but felt he would need some time to himself after his ordeal.

Mr Molloy got a second-hand account of his sons condition and life in the jail after a freelance reporter managed to visit him in the hours before the releases were secured.

It must have been an awful place to be, he said.

Mr Molloy also paid tribute to the work of diplomatic chiefs in London and Dublin.

It is not known when he will arrive back in Ireland.
Al-Jazeera said that it had not violated regulations or deviated from professional and objective coverage. (Photo: AFP/Representational Image)

Baghdad: The Iraqi authorities have shut down the Al-Jazeera channel's Baghdad office, accusing Qatar's state-funded TV network of inciting violence and sectarianism.

Iraq's Communications and Media Commission (CMC) sent the Al-Jazeera Media Network a letter informing it of a March 24 decision to withdraw the bureau's licence and close its office for one year.

The letter cited "your continuing violations and offences and persistent media discourse instigating violence and sectarianism."

In a statement issued yesterday, the Doha-based news network, one of the largest in the region, said that it had not violated regulations or deviated from professional and objective coverage.

Al-Jazeera has repeatedly come under fire from the Iraqi authorities for coverage perceived as 'too friendly' to the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group and hostile to the country's Shiite majority.

The network's foreign staff were already unable to enter Iraq because the authorities had made it difficult for them to obtain visas, the network's Iraqi bureau chief Walid Ibrahim told.

The CMC's decision contradicts the Iraqi government's "commitment to guarantee freedom of expression", Al-Jazeera said.

Ziad Ajili, from the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, condemned the move, saying that the CMC does not have direct authority to close media offices in Iraq.

Iraqi leaders have accused Gulf monarchies of not doing enough to fight IS jihadists and in some cases, of directly supporting them.

Qatar is accused by many in Iraq of having intentionally sponsored hardline Sunni groups to counter the expanding influence of Iran and Shiite Islam in the region.
Who ever would have thought that the Daily Mail of all publications would come to the conclusion that the Government has got it wrong on helping the child refugees already in Europe?

Todays editorial does repeat at length a good bit of its usual anti-immigration, anti-Merkel and anti-EU rhetoric, so youll still need a shower after reading it. Even despite all that, it comes to this rather startling conclusion:

But every sinew of our hearts tells us its a gesture that must be made  while every child we take will mean a life of hope in place of despair. Mr Cameron should consider that of all the countries in the Europe, Britain has the longest established tradition of offering sanctuary to refugees from war and oppression.

It urges the Government to accept Alf Dubs further amendment which was passed in the House of Lords on Tuesday night.

There are numerous petitions going round the internet asking the Government to do the decent thing and help some of these children. However, Alf Dubs has created one on the Parliamentary petitions website which has at the time of writing collected almost 40,000 signatures in two days. It says:

The Government should accept the call to give sanctuary to child refugees who are alone and at risk in Europe. 95,000 child refugees are on their own in Europe as a result of the refugee crisis. They are sleeping rough and in makeshift camps, desperately vulnerable to abuse and to trafficking into modern slavery. We rightly look back with pride at the leadership our nation showed in rescuing 10,000 children from Europe through the Kindertransport. Britain must not turn its back on child refugees in Europe today.

If you havent already, Id urge you to sign this one.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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LIMERICK is aiming to become the first Compassionate City in Ireland and one of three in the the world, alongside Seville in Spain and Englands Bradford.

Milford Care Centre in Castletroy is behind the Compassionate Communities Project, which is being supported by the Mayor and Limerick City and County Council.

A public meeting was recently held at Limerick School of Art and Design to explore the Compassionate Cities Charter with a view to enabling Limerick to become recognised as the first Compassionate City in Ireland.

Over 150 people attended the meeting where they engaged in the issues of illness, death and loss presented through song by Noirin Ni Riain; poetry by Terry Murray and moving films by Rebecca Lloyd from Milford Care Centres Compassionate Communities Project.

This is an issue that affects all of us, said Dr Kathleen McLoughlin. We know that very often people dont know what to do or what to say when faced with illness, death and loss. It might be part of life, but it can be incredibly difficult.

A Compassionate City is one in which citizens can feel supported in the face of illness and loss  in schools, workplaces, cultural and spiritual forums so that the personal and social costs of these issues  such as loneliness, depression, anxiety and physical illness can be reduced.

The Charter will be led by the City Council, supported by Milford Care Centre and involves working toward 13 social and civic actions.

Whats brilliant about having a charter is that it gives us a roadmap to help us move forward, we encourage the citizens of Limerick to get involved, even in a small way, we need the people of Limerick to think about what they need in their environments, what initiatives are missing, what is not being said or done, and what can we all do about it, its time to join up the dots, said Rebecca Lloyd, project worker.

Deputy mayor Cllr Gerald Mitchell said this could be another first for Limerick.

Another meeting will be held in June.

This will determine two or three key actions to be developed as part of the Compassionate Cities Charter.

The action plan will be launched on October 7, at the Compassionate Cities Summit which will be held at the Castletroy Park Hotel.

Limerick will then have two years to fulfil the actions on 13 points of the Charter and will be endorsed as a Compassionate City by Public Health Palliative Care International.
Chinese police would have the right to cancel any activities they judged a threat to national security, and would be empowered to invite for talks the heads of foreign NGOs in China, says Chinese media. (Photo: AFP)

Beijing: China's Communist-controlled legislature passed a law imposing new regulations on foreign non-government organisations on Thursday, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The measure has provoked an outcry from charities and concerns from foreign governments that it gives wide-ranging discretionary powers to police amid a crackdown on civil society in the country.

The full text was not immediately available, but a draft of the bill described by Xinhua in a report earlier this week carried many provisions which previously triggered concerns.

It covers foreign charities, business associations, academic institutions and others in China, and requires them to "partner" with a Chinese government-controlled agency and report their actions to authorities.

Chinese police would have the right to cancel any activities they judged a threat to national security, and would be empowered to "invite for talks" the heads of foreign NGOs in China, Xinhua said.

It added police could add any foreign NGO they judged to promote "subversion of state power" or "separatism" to a "not welcome list", which would ban them from the country.

Overseas NGOs would also be forbidden from recruiting "members" in mainland China, Xinhua said, barring special permission from the State Council, China's cabinet. It was not specified whether that included local staff.
A CAMPAIGN has been launched to save the home of the Frank McCourt museum in Limerick from sale, after it was withdrawn in advance from the Allsop auction in Dublin this Thursday.

Artist Una Heaton, and the curator of the museum in honour of Limericks only Pulitzer prize winning author, erected the banner 'Save our museum' outside Leamy House on Hartstonge Street, which is home to the museum and a number of other businesses.

Ms Heaton is now urging the public to provide donations to help her save the museum and the building, which is the subject of a dispute with a bank due to other financial affairs.

She said the buildings fate is now in the lap of the Gods.

"Im appealing to peoples hearts to help me keep what I began, and save our building. It is a great asset to Limerick and continues to attract tourists from all over the world, she told the Limerick Leader.

My heart is there, and I would ask everyone to give as much as they can, she said.

Ms Heaton was reluctant to give a figure for the total cost needed to save the building, but said 100,000 would be very short.

She said any surplus from donations would be donated to St Vincent de Paul, which is situated next door.

The premises was also Frank McCourts former school and features prominently in his most famous work, Angelas Ashes, which propelled him to literary stardom in his 60s, when it was released 20 years ago this coming September.

The building was withdrawn from the Allsop sale in Dublin this Thursday as all the required legal documents could not be presented in advance.

An Allsop spokesperson said there is infrastructural damage to the roof, which may need significant costs, and other issues in the basement.

The historic building was previously put up for sale two years ago by Murphy Gubbins auctioneers in the city for 325,000.

However, in recent weeks it attracted huge interest according to an Allsop spokesperson, after it was listed for a minimum guide reserve of 140,000 to 180,000.

The building has over 10,000 sq. ft of vacant space and it would be suitable for offices. Such demand for city centre office space in Limerick has grown in the past six months.

Although the building requires works in the vacant space, there is a current rental income of 23,500 per annum which provides a potential investor comfort in buying," they said.

Part of the Tudor Revival style building is let for storage to Holmes OMalley Sexton solicitors, yielding 10,800 per annum, while the McCourt museum contributes 100 per annum on an informal tenancy, which has been in operation for the past five years.

The property, which dates back to 1860, was originally purchased by his father Jack Heaton, Unas father in law, in 1956  three years after it ceased being a school.

Over several floors, the museum houses many important artefacts relating to the life of the award-winning author, whose account of a miserable Catholic childhood in Limerick after moving from New York became a best-seller and later produced into a film.

Among the items on display include a portion of his ashes, the manuscript of Tis, cuff-links given to the author from former US president George Bush, a collection of his rosary beads, his personal copy of Angelas Ashes which he read from in readings around the world, and the robes he wore when he was conferred with an honorary degree from the University of Limerick.

Relatives of the late Frank, who passed away in 2009, including his brother Alphie and widow Ellen, earlier appealed to the public to help keep the building in local ownership.

In 2014 Ellen McCourt, Frank's widow and his third wife, urged the city to take ownership of the museum in his name and save it from an uncertain future.

I would love to see Franks legacy preserved in Limerick, and I think that if it is to stay open the public has to claim Frank as one of the citys sons. The city has to step up and say This is worth it, said Ms Frey McCourt.

A public account fund for donations to save the building and museum has not been set up to date.
May 3, 2021, 12 AM

Antigua and Barbuda stamps celebrate the beauty of the National Parks of the USA.

Three national parks in the United States are referenced on two of Canadas UNESCO Heritage Sites stamps issued July 3, 2015: Wrangell-St. Elias and Glacier Bay in Alaska on one stamp, and Glacier National Park in Montana, part of the Waterton-Glacier Int

Gibraltar selected Yosemite National Park as one of the sites included on its 2011 International Year of the Forests stamp issue.

A Philippines stamp issued in 1932 mistakenly shows Vernal Falls in Yosemite National Park, instead of Pagsanjan Falls in Luzon.

Among the United Nations Postal Administration stamps featuring U.S. national parks is this World Heritage stamp depicting lava flowing into the ocean at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

By Denise McCarty

Alphabetically from Acadia to Zion and chronologically from the 1934 National Parks series to the set of 16 commemoratives to be issued June 2 at World Stamp Show-NY 2016, United States national parks have been showcased on postage stamps and postal stationery issued by the United States Postal Service and its predecessor the Post Office Department.

The new set of 16 honors the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.

Collecting U.S. national parks on stamps, however, does not need to be limited to U.S. issues. Other countries also have pictured U.S. national parks on their stamps. Among these countries are the United States neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

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Most recently, Canada included national parks that span the U.S.-Canadian border on two UNESCO Heritage Sites stamps issued July 3, 2015. UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) selects sites of outstanding universal value for its World Heritage list.

One of these UNESCO sites encompasses two U.S. national parks, Wrangell-St. Elias and Glacier Bay in Alaska, as well as Canadas Kluane National Park and Reserve and Tatshenshini-Alsek Park.

The UNESCO inscription reads, The Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek national parks and protected areas along the boundary of Canada and the United States of America are the largest non-polar icefield in the world and contain examples of some of the worlds longest and most spectacular glaciers. Characterized by high mountains, icefields and glaciers, the property transitions from northern interior to coastal biogeoclimatic zones, resulting in high biodiversity with plant and animal communities ranging from marine, coastal forest, montane, sub-alpine and alpine tundra, all in various successional stages.

With 13.2 million acres, Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park in the United States. The National Park Service describes it as the same size as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Switzerland combined. It was established as a national park on Dec. 2, 1980, the same day as Glacier Bay National Park.

The Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek stamp is denominated $2.50 to pay the international rate from Canada. Another $2.50 stamp honors the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. The worlds first international peace park, it was created in 1932 by combining Glacier National Park in Montana and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada.

Glacier was named a national park in 1910, six years before the National Park Service was established, but it has been a popular area much longer. The National Geographic Guide to the National Parks of the United States, sixth edition, published in 2009, says, Sheltered valleys and bountiful food have lured people here for nearly 10,000 years. Ancient cultures tracked bison across the plains, fished the lakes, and traversed the mountain passes.

Another national park in Alaska is represented on a stamp in Canadas International Year of Mountains souvenir sheet issued Oct. 2, 2002. The circular sheet contains eight self-adhesive stamps featuring summits located around the world, including North Americas highest mountain, Denali in Denali National Park. On the stamp, it is called Mount McKinley. It was officially renamed Denali in 2015.

In announcing the stamp, Canada Post said of the mountain: At a height of 6,194 metres [20,320 feet], Mount McKinley is North Americas highest summit. It lies in the heart of the Alaska Range, and is flanked by five massive glaciers and numerous ice cascades. Mount McKinley towers above the horizon and is famous for its ever-changing and unpredictable weather conditions.

Zion National Park located in southwestern Utah is pictured on a stamp issued by Mexico Nov. 6, 2009, the opening day of the Wild Foundations World Wilderness Conference in Merida, Mexico. The 10.50-peso stamp (Scott 2644c) shows a photograph of Zion taken by Jack Dykinga, a Pultizer prize winner and a professional nature photographer since the 1970s.

The stamp is in a se-tenant strip of six. The other stamps in this strip feature El Carmen Mountains in Mexico, Nahanni National Park in Canada, Kronotsky Reserve in Russia, and Baviaanskloof Reserve in South Africa.

UNESCO World Heritage list

Seven stamps from the United Nations Postal Administration honor U.S. national parks that are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

The Grand Canyon is commemorated on a 20 U.N. World Heritage stamp issued April 18, 1984, for use from the UNPA post office in New York City (Scott 421).

Established as a national park in 1919, the Grand Canyon was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979. One UNESCO criterion reads, Widely known for its exceptional natural beauty and considered one of the worlds most visually powerful landscapes, the Grand Canyon is celebrated for its plunging depths; temple-like buttes; and vast, multihued, labyrinthine topography. Scenic wonders within park boundaries include high plateaus, plains, deserts, forests, cinder cones, lava flows, streams, waterfalls, and one of Americas great whitewater rivers.

Another World Heritage set issued by UNPA Oct. 24, 2003, shows Yosemite and Hawaii Volcanoes national parks on its two UNPA/New York stamps (Scott 850-851).

Located on the island of Hawaii, the latter park contains two of the worlds most active volcanoes: Kilauea and Mauna Loa. According to the National Park Service, Kilauea has been erupting almost continuously since 1983, and Mauna Loa last erupted in 1984. The U.N. stamp shows lava flowing at night.

The two UNPA/Geneva stamps picture the Great Smoky Mountains and Olympic national parks (Scott 415-416), and the UNPA/Vienna stamps honor the Everglades and Yellowstone parks (338-339). In addition, each UNPA post office issued a prestige booklet containing all six of the stamp designs (Scott New York 852, Geneva 417 and Vienna 340).

In 1996, San Marino issued a set of four stamps to celebrate the 50th anniversary of UNESCO. Yellowstone National Park is featured on the 450-lira denomination (Scott 1371).

Established March 1, 1872, Yellowstone is not only the oldest national park in the United States, it is also considered the worlds first national park. One of the parks more than 300 geysers is pictured on a 1981 World Heritage Year stamp from Togo (Scott 1119).

Yellowstone also is featured on UNESCO commemoratives issued by Ethiopia in 1981 (Scott 1002) and Guyana in 1997 (3182c). Other parks included in these UNESCO series include Mesa Verde (Scott Ethiopia 997), Yosemite, Olympic, and the Everglades (Guyana 3182b, 3182d, and 3182e).

In addition, Mesa Verde and Olympic parks are represented on UNESCO World Heritage Sites stamps issued by Mozambique (Scott 2056c) and the Maldives (2237a), respectively.

A current series of stamps from Japan highlights World Heritage sites from around the world. A photograph of the Colorado River running through the Grand Canyon is reproduced on a 2013 80-yen stamp (Scott 3523) in that series.

Other stamps, while not specifically mentioning World Heritage, feature U.S. national parks as natural wonders of the world, including the Grand Canyon (Kyrgyzstan Scott 93, The Gambia 1948, and St. Vincent 2229e) and Haleakala in Hawaii (St. Vincent 2230).

Error in Stamp Design

In at least one instance, a scene from a U.S. national park was shown in error.

In 1931, when the Philippines was administrated by the United States, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing produced a pictorial set of stamps for use in the Philippines. The 18 denomination (Scott 358) is inscribed Pagsanjan Falls, and is supposed to show that waterfall in Luzon, the Philippines. However, instead it pictures Vernal Falls in Yosemite National Park.

The 18 red-orange stamp was issued May 3, 1932, as part of a pictorial set. It was withdrawn from sale on Nov. 17 of that year, but not before being overprinted for the round-the-world flight of Capt. Wolfgang von Gronau (Scott C32).

Yosemite and more

In addition to the aforementioned stamps from the United Nations and Guyana, at least a dozen other stamps purposely picture Yosemite.

In 2014, Liberia and St. Vincent issued stamps commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Yosemite Grant. Signed by President Abraham Lincoln on June 30, 1864, the act gave California Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to be held for public use, resort, and recreation.

Because this was the first time that the U.S. government had set aside a wilderness area for preservation and public use, some people consider this the beginning of the national park system.

Photographs of the park are pictured on the pane of six stamps and a souvenir sheet from Liberia (Scott 2904-2905), and on the two panes of four stamps each and two souvenir sheets from St. Vincent (3906-3909).

Additional Yosemite stamps illustrate some of the other ways that U.S. national parks have been honored on U.S. stamps.

Gibraltar pictures the park on a 2011 stamp saluting the International Year of the Forests (Scott 1276), while The Gambia shows it as well as Yellowstone on 1994 stamps marking the 100th anniversary of the Sierra Club (1535d-f and 1536c-d).

A 2005 pane of six stamps from Sierra Leone highlighting the natures wisdom theme of Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, includes a stamp showing a rock climber in Yosemite (Scott 2791c).

Yosemite is even included on a stamp from Tuvalu marking the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeths reign in 2012 (Scott 1234b). The queen and Prince Philip visited the park in 1983.

There are other foreign stamps featuring U.S. national parks; this is not meant to be a complete list. But a fitting conclusion to the topic is a 2006 pane from Antigua and Barbuda saluting National Parks of the USA.

The six stamps (Scott 2868) show Yellowstone, Olympic, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and the Great Smoky Mountains; and a souvenir sheet with a single $6 stamp depicts Mount Rainier (2869).

A checklist of worldwide national parks and theme parks is offered by the American Topical Association. This and checklists for more than 1,200 other topics are available to ATA members for a nominal fee. For information about joining the ATA, visit its website; or write to American Topical Association, Box 8, Carterville, IL 62918-0008.

Also recommended for a collector interested in U.S. national parks on stamps are two of the ATAs study units: the Americana Unit and the Earths Physical Features Study Unit.

The Americana Unit, covers U.S. topics on international stamps. The Earths Physical Features Study Unit, emphasizes many aspects of national parks, including mountains, waterfalls, and rivers.

Related articles:

Washington, D.C., aquatic park joins National Parks list

Fifth U.S. National Parks stamp pays tribute to Carlsbad Caverns

National Parks set wraps up with Yellowstone National Park
More than 5,800 value changes recorded for Canada in 2017 Scott Vol. 2

Apr 28, 2016, 11 AM

Vol. 2 of the 2017 Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue includes stamp listings and values for countries of the world C-F.

Decreases in value in Vol. 2 of the 2017 Scott Standard catalog included Crete Scott 1, the 1898 20-para violet stamp, which was lowered from $450 unused to $400, and from $250 used to $225.

Among the 2,629 value changes in the Denmark section of Vol. 2 of the 2017 Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, the 1912 5-krone dark red General Post Office, Copenhagen, stamp (Scott 82) increased from $425 unused to $500, and from $175 used to $200.

By Donna Houseman

More than 20,000 value changes appear in Volume 2 of the 2017 Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue.

A total of 5,806 value changes occurred in Canada, 44 of which were sprinkled throughout the provinces. Trends this year are similar to those of last year.

The first trend is that the market for classic and high-grade Canada and Provinces stamps remains quite strong. True very fine examples of these early stamps are very elusive, and values remain steady, even though the value of the Canadian dollar has further weakened against the United States dollar.

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The second continuing trend is the weak Canadian dollar, valued at only 73 in U.S. currency in early 2016.

The result is that from Scott 900 to current issues (about 2,000 Scott numbers), almost all stamps, unused and used, have dropped in value somewhat. Last year, the Canadian dollar was valued at 80 U.S.

A few modern issues bucked the trend of small decreases in catalog values. One example is No. 2366c, the 2010 Olympics issue souvenir sheet with gold overprint, which jumped to $12 both mint and used, from only $4 in the 2016 Vol. 2.

In the Provinces, Newfoundland Scott J3b, the rare perf 9 version of the 3 postage due stamp, moved sharply upward to $3,750 unused, from $2,750 last year.

A total of 2,629 value changes were made in Denmark, which received a thorough review for the 2017 Vol. 2.

The market for Danish stamps remains strong for the most part. Several increases occurred from 1902 on. Some of the increases are significant.

The never-hinged set value for the 1905-17 (Scott 57-64) showing three wavy lines increased from $240 to $310.

The 1912 5-krone dark red General Post Office, Copenhagen, stamp (Scott 82) rose from $425 unused to $500 and from $175 used to $200. The never-hinged value went from $1,300 to $1,500.

Classic France received a thorough review this year. An overall weakening of the French market resulted in mostly decreases among the 544 value changes.

France No. 1 dropped from $1,800 unused and $250 used to $1,700 unused and $240 used. The values of the 10-centime pale bister on yellow paper (Scott 10) of the President Louis Napoleon issue plummeted, from $39,000 unused to $34,500. The used value fell from $575 used to $500.

Ceylon saw 168 value changes in the classic period, from 1857 to 1941. Most of these changes were increases. The 1859 4-penny rose (Scott 5) jumped from $70,000 unused to $75,000 and from $4,500 used to $5,250.

The 89 value changes in China show substantial decreases. The 1882 1-candareen green of 1882 (Scott 4) dropped from $775 unused and $425 used to $650 unused and $375 used. The 3c brown red (5) slid from $1,350 unused and $400 used to $1,200 unused and $350 used. The 5c orange yellow (6) went from $1,750 used to $1,400. The unused value of $25,000 for No. 6 remained unchanged.

Similar declines are found in Republic of China (Taiwan).

Peoples Republic of China received a line-by-line review up to the ever-popular 8-fen Monkey stamp (Scott 1586) issued in 1980 to celebrate Chinese New Year and the Year of the Monkey. This stamp saw a slight decline in value, going from $1,875 mint, never hinged to $1,800. The value for a used stamp remains at $550.

The decline in this stamp is the tip of the iceberg for decreases in values for Peoples Republic of China stamps. Massive decreases are seen throughout, reflecting a weakening in the Chinese market and substantially lower realizations at auctions.

Christmas Island received a listing-by-listing review. The 757 changes reflect a mostly downward movement throughout.

The 1990 World Wildlife Fund sheet of three (Scott 274) falls from $12 both mint, never hinged, and used to $8.25 both ways. The mint and used values for any 41 single drop from $4 each to $2.50 each. Similarly the sheet overprinted in purple drops from $20 mint and used to $13.50, and the sheet overprinted in green falls from $35 mint and used to $17.50.

Chile saw 205 changes scattered throughout. The changes are mostly increases. The 1999 170-peso booklet pane of 10, mint, never hinged (Scott 1310a), increases from $9.50 to $10, while the complete booklet jumps from $10 to $11. Scott 1310b, the booklet pane of five for this issue, increases from $5 to $5.50, and the complete booklet goes from $5.50 to $6.

The 94 value changes scattered throughout Costa Rica show mostly increases. The 1988 Summer Olympics, Seoul, stamps show an increase for the pair of the two (Scott 405a), to $50 both mint, never hinged, and used, from the 2016 Vol. 2 value of $4 both ways.

Several decreases also are found among Crete stamps. Scott 1, the 1898 20-para violet, was lowered from $450 unused to $400, and from $250 used to $225. The 2-metallik rose of 1899, issued for the Russian sphere of the administration district of Retymnon, dropped from $350 unused and $300 used to $300 unused and $225 used.

Danzig also received a full line-by-line review for a total of 337 changes. The results were more increases than decreases. The 50-pfennig Danzig Philatelic Exhibition souvenir sheet (Scott 221) rose from $3.25 unused to $4, but the used value of $21 was lowered to $20. The double surcharge variety (Scott C1a) rose from $125 unused to $160.

A thorough vetting of Ecuador resulted in 1,013 changes with few increases from 1940 to 1990.

A review of Finland and Aland resulted in 3,107 and 503 changes, respectively. These changes were less a reflection of the market and more a result of increasing values to reflect the grade of very fine on which Scott catalog values are based.

Editorial enhancements for Canada

On the editorial front for Canada, new listings for imperf and part-perf stamps have been added in Prince Edward Island as Nos. 6g and 6h (imperf. gutter pairs) and 9g (horizontal strip of three, imperf between).

In Canada, many new error listings have been added for various imperf coils, stamps printed on the gummed side (including on the extremely scarce No. J31b), stamps with all color missing (Nos. 926Bh and 1194Ch), and others.

An ongoing Scott project is to include listings for complete booklets. The 2016 Volume 2 included the booklets from 1995 to the present. In the 2017 catalog, these booklet listings have been expanded to include the 1992-1994 booklets, Nos. 1403b to 1536A. Expect further expansions in future years.

Various notes and footnotes have been clarified or expanded to further explain complicated listings, and other notes have been screened carefully to ensure accuracy.

As always, we encourage you to pay special attention to the Number Additions, Deletions & Changes in Vol. 2.

For information about the 2017 Scott catalogs, contact your favorite stamp dealer, or call Amos Media at 1-800-488-5349. Also visit Amos Advantage. Scott eCatalogues also are available.
ISI got hold of bin Laden in 2006 after paying bribes to some of the tribal leaders. At the time he was said to be very ill., claims the book. (Photo: AFP)

Washington: The Abbottabad hideout of Osama bin Laden was under ISI control and a Pakistan Army doctor treated the most dreaded terrorist in the world before he was killed in a daring raid by US commandos in 2011, according to a new book.

In fact, the doctor Amir Aziz, of the rank of major, who lived in a compound near bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, was rewarded by the CIA with a share of the USD 25 million bounty the US had put up because a DNA sample had conclusively proved the al-Qaeda leader's identity.

In his latest book, 'The Killing of Osama bin Laden', investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims that ISI got hold of bin Laden in 2006 after paying bribes to some of the tribal leaders. At the time he was said to be very ill.

"Early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the ISI had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army, to move nearby to provide treatment," Hersh claims, basing his account on a conversation he had with an unidentified retired Pakistan Army official.

And all this while the Pakistani leadership in particular the army chief and ISI boss repeatedly told the US that they did not know the whereabouts of bin Laden.

"It's understood in Washington that elements of the ISI believe that maintaining a relationship with the Taliban leadership inside Afghanistan is essential to national security. The ISI's strategic aim is to balance Indian influence in Kabul.

"The Taliban is also seen in Pakistan as a source of jihadist shock troops who would back Pakistan against India in a confrontation over Kashmir," Hersh said in his book that hit stores early this month.

"The Pakistanis also know that their trump card against aggression from India is a strong relationship with the United States. They will never cut their person-to-person ties with us," a senior retired army official is quoted as saying.

Hersh claims that the CIA came to know about bin Laden's hideout from a senior Pakistani intelligence official who betrayed the secret in return for much of the USD 25 million reward offered by the US.

The said official is now living near Washington along with his family. Hersh said his information collected from US intelligence and other sources was vetted by former ISI head Asad Durrani.
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Afghan officials gather near the suicide bombing site in central Kabul in Afghanistan. (Photo: AP)

Islamabad: Pakistani authorities are looking for a group of suicide bombers who allegedly entered from Afghanistan to target different locations, a media reported said on Thursday.

The tip-off came after the deadly bombing in Kabul last week which killed 64 people and for which Afghanistan blamed the Pakistan-based Haqqani network.

The Dawn reported that as many as 11 suicide bombers entered from Afghanistan some 22 days ago, and two of them blew themselves up in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recently.

According to the sources, the bombers were affiliated with Sajna Group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

The information about them and their entry in the country was gathered by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and shared with the authorities concerned, they added.

"They may strike in the Punjab, especially in Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Lahore," the sources revealed.

The agency has advised the authorities concerned to improve security in and around hospitals, shopping centres, markets, parks, food streets and malls to prevent any terrorist activity, the officials added.

Intelligence agencies have kept an eye on slums and rural areas for possible presence of terrorists, he added. "An information-based operation is being conducted by agencies and Rangers in these areas," he added.

Both Pakistan and Afghanistan in the past blamed each other that militants were using their soil to carry out attacks.
Islamabad: Pakistan has highlighted the need for a structured, "result-oriented" comprehensive dialogue process with India for resolving outstanding issues, Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry said on Thursday.

Chaudhry, who met his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar in New Delhi on the sidelines of the Heart of Asia Conference on Wednesday, said in a statement that during the meeting the Pakistani side had conveyed Islamabad's commitment to resolve all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir.

"I emphasied that the Jammu and Kashmir dispute remained the core issue and it was vital to find a just solution to this long standing issue, as per the UN Security Council resolutions and wishes of the Kashmiri people," he said.

"In line with our Prime Minister's vision of a peaceful neighborhood, I underscored the need for a structured, sustained and result-oriented comprehensive dialogue process between the two countries," he said in the statement.

However, the uninterruptible dialogue process would require commitment from both sides, he said. "I affirmed to my Indian counterpart that Pakistan believes that a sustained and structured engagement is imperative for resolving the outstanding issues," he added.

Pakistan will welcome the start of the peace dialogue whenever India indicated that it was ready for it, he said.

The sticky issues including probe into Pathankot terror attack, 26/11 trial and Samjhauta Express blast investigations figured during the meeting between Chaudhry and Jaishankar.

"I conveyed to the Indian side Pakistan's deep concern on the illegal entry into Pakistan by a RAW officer and his involvement in subversive activities in Karachi and Balochistan," he said, referring to the arrest of Kulbushan Yadav. "Such acts undermine efforts to normalise relations between the two countries," he added.

During the meeting, Indian side had raised the issue of "abduction" of former Naval officer Jadhav, saying he has been taken to Pakistan, and sought immediate consular access.

"I also reiterated Pakistan's call for fair investigation and trial of the Samjhauta Express terrorist attack," he said, adding that Pakistani side expressed its concern over recent news items regarding efforts being made to exonerate some of the individuals who were responsible for the attack.

On the Pathankot attack, Chaudhry said, "I informed him (Jaishankar) that the JIT had visited India from March 27 to April 1. On the basis of information received from the Indian side, the JIT is currently engaged in further investigations."

He also noted that both sides agreed that people-to-people contact should remain intact. He said there was a consensus to continue working on humanitarian issues, including the issue of release of all fishermen as well as prisoners who have completed their sentences.
Bin Laden was the founder of al Qaeda, the group that claimed responsibility for the September 11 terror attacks on the United States. (Photo: AP)

Islamabad: Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan's detention for years and was killed after the country struck a deal with the US, a top American journalist has claimed citing new evidence and disputed Islamabad's assertion that it was not aware of the raid that killed the al Qaeda terrorist.

Legendary US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh repeated his claim that Pakistan was aware of the Navy Seals' raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 in his his compound in Abbottabad town near Pakistan army's elite training school.

Bin Laden was the founder of al Qaeda, the group that claimed responsibility for the September 11 terror attacks on the United States.

In an interview to Pakistani news channel Dawn, Mr Hersh said that since last year he had seen new evidence that cemented his belief that the official US account on bin Laden's killing was deceptive.

He also reiterated his claim that Pakistan had detained bin Laden in 2006 and kept him prisoner with the backing of Saudi Arabia.

The US and Pakistan then struck a deal that the United States would raid his compound but make it look as if Pakistan was unaware.

"Pakistan is in constant alert because of India. Their radars are watching, their F-16s are up all the time," said Mr Hersh while arguing that it was not possible for US helicopters to enter Abbottabad without alerting the Pakistanis.

When asked if he still believes Pakistan helped the United States get bin Laden, he said: "More than ever".

When Mr Hersh first made this claim in an article published last year, it shook Washington and forced the White House to reject the story as false.

Major US media outlets also rejected his claim as incorrect.

But Mr Hersh repeated the claim in his new book, 'The Killing of Osama bin Laden' published this week, insisting that he was right.

He said the then army and ISI chiefs had made this deal with the Americans, which upset other Pakistani generals.

"The then head of Pakistan's Air Defence Command was very, very upset. He was ready to go public," said Mr Hersh, claiming that the disgruntled general was made PIA chairman after his retirement to keep him silent.
A severe blow to the head may bring an unexpected consequence: disruptions in sleeping patterns that last for more than a year after the injury, a new study from Switzerland finds.

In the study, researchers looked at 31 people who had suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Scientists investigated how long the individuals slept, whether their sleep was fragmented and how rested they felt while they were awake. A TBI is a brain injury resulting from traumatic impact, in which the brain's day-to-day function is disrupted, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The researchers also looked at a control group of 42 uninjured people.

Over a period of 18 months, the study participants reported their sleep patterns. For two weeks during the study, the participants also wore devices that tracked their body movements. And for one night, the individuals slept in a lab where researchers monitored the subjects' brain activity and other body functions during sleep. [Top 11 Spooky Sleep Disorders]

Overall, the people with TBI seemed to require more sleep than the uninjured subjects  an average of 8 hours per night, 1 hour more than subjects who were injury-free, according to the findings.

The study also found that 67 percent of the people with TBI described feeling sleepy during the day, whereas only 19 percent of the healthy participants reported excessive daytime sleepiness.

This investigation builds upon the results of many previous studies in recent years showing that people with TBI experience sleep problems, said the study's lead author Dr. Lukas Imbach, a senior physician and neurologist at the University Hospital Zurich.

"But the severity, incidence and cause for [sleep] disorders was poorly understood," Imbach added. The new investigation is the longest prospective study about sleep quality and TBI done to date, he said.

Most of the earlier studies followed participants for only six months after they had experienced TBI, "because it was assumed that the effect after TBI might wear off after a longer time," Imbach told Live Science.

"However, we have learned from this study that sleep problems persist up to 18 months after TBI," he said.

The researchers also noted that people with TBI tended to be inaccurate when recording and reporting their own sleep patterns. This is cause for concern, because sleep disruption can have a serious impact on how a person functions when they're awake, the researchers said.

"The reason for this sleep misperception is unknown, but we plan to investigate in this direction," Imbach said.

TBIs, mild or severe, affect 1.7 million people in the U.S. each year, the study authors reported. The injuries were associated with 2.5 million hospitalizations, visits to the emergency room or deaths in 2010, according to the CDC.

The findings were published online today (April 27) in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Follow Mindy Weisberger on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.
The internal structure of an ancient Egyptian pyramid was revealed for the first time using cosmic particles, a team of international researchers reports.

The innovative technology was applied to the Bent Pyramid, a 4,500-year-old monument so named because of its sloping upper half.

According to the researchers, who presented their results in Cairo on Tuesday to Khaled El-Enany, minister of Antiquities and the former minister Mamdouh El-Damaty, the outcome was "excellent" as it showed the inside of the monument as with an X-ray.

Cosmic Rays Used to Peer Inside Pyramid: Photos

The technology relies on muons, cosmic particles that permanently and naturally rain on Earth, which are able to penetrate any material very deeply.

This is the first of four pyramids to be investigated within the ScanPyramids, a project carried out by a team from Cairo University's Faculty of Engineering and the Paris-based non-profit organization Heritage, Innovation and Preservation under the authority of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. The others are the Great Pyramid, Khafre or Chephren at Giza, and the Red pyramid at Dahshur.

Scheduled to last a year, the project uses a mix of innovative technologies such as infrared thermography, muon radiography, and 3-D reconstruction to better understand the monument and possibly identify the presence of unknown internal structures and cavities.

Photos: Scanning Pyramids

Located at the royal necropolis of Dahshur, about 25 miles south of Cairo, the Bent pyramid was built under the Old Kingdom Pharaoh Sneferu (about 2600 BC). It's the first with a smooth face, after generations of stepped pyramids.

The monument has two entrances, one on the north side and one on the west side. These entries open on two corridors leading to two burial chambers arranged one above the other.

It was speculated that pharaoh Sneferu rests inside the pyramid in an undiscovered burial chamber, but the innovative technology ruled out the hypothesis. The scanning did not detect any additional chamber of the size of the upper chamber or beyond in the field of view covered by the muography.

Lost Egyptian Pyramids Found?

"Nevertheless, this is indeed a scientific breakthrough as it validates the muography principle applied to Egyptian pyramids. It paves the way to new investigations," said Mehdi Tayoubi, co-director of the ScanPyramids mission with Hany Helal, professor at Cairo University's Faculty of Engineering and former minister of research and higher education.

The results come four months after a team led by specialist Kunihiro Morishima, from the Institute for Advanced Research of Nagoya University, Japan, installed (as explained in this video (opens in new tab)) 40 muon detector plates inside the lower chamber of the Bent pyramid.

Covering a surface of about 10 square feet in the pyramids lower chamber, the plates contained two emulsion films that are sensitive to muons that continually shower the Earth's surface.

They come from the upper layers of Earths atmosphere, where they're created from collisions between cosmic rays and the nuclei of atoms in the atmosphere.

"Just like X-rays pass through our bodies allowing us to visualize our skeleton, these elementary particles, weighing around 200 times more than electrons, can very easily pass through any structure, even large and thick rocks, such as mountains," Tayoubi said.

The plate detectors allow researchers to discern void areas  these are places where muons cross without problem  from denser areas where some muons are absorbed or deflected.

Morishima's team retrieved the detector plates from the Bent pyramid in January 2016 after 40 days of exposure. This is the maximal lifetime of chemical emulsions within the temperature and humidity conditions inside that pyramid.

Photos: New Pharaoh Found in Egypt

The films were then developed in a dedicated lab installed at the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), and shipped to Nagoya University for analysis.

"From these plates, more than 10 millions of muon tracks were analyzed. We count the muons and according to their angular distribution we are able to reconstruct an image," Tayoubi said.

"For the first time ever, the internal structure of a pyramid was revealed with muon particles. The images obtained clearly show the second chamber of the pyramid located roughly 60 feet above the lower one in which emulsions plates were installed," he added.

How the Ancient Egyptians Really Built the Pyramids

Tayoubi stressed that each step in the project is important.

"We learn a lot from the reality of the field. We improve the knowledge of the monuments but we also improve the technologies progressively. We are not in a hurry," he said.

Tayoubi admitted that the available statistics from the 40 days of exposure is not yet sufficient to precisely reveal the known corridors or unknown voids smaller than those in the upper chamber.

Radar Finds Secret Chamber in King Tut's Tomb

However, the researchers made simulations by randomly placing, within the field of view, a hypothetic chamber of size similar or larger than the upper one.

"Compared with the results obtained, these simulations could validate the fact there is no additional chamber of this size in the surroundings," professor Morishima said.

Strong of their results, the researchers will now apply the muography to other Old Kingdom pyramids.

VIDEO: Why Did We Stop Building Pyramids?

The next one will be the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, the last remaining wonder of the ancient world.

The monument has long been rumored to have hidden passageways leading to secret chambers.

The researchers plan to use there two other types of electronic instruments besides the chemical emulsion films from Nagoya University.

"Contrary to the emulsions, they have lower resolution but no limit in exposure time and further allow for real time analysis," Tayoubi said.

Originally published on Discovery News.
BROWNSVILLE  A standing-room-only crowd filled the Brownsville City Council chambers Tuesday evening to talk about the proposed $32 million school bond on the May 17 ballot.

Council members had been asked to publicly endorse the measure and had tabled the issue at last months meeting, but after hearing from both sides, the council decided to take no action.

Speakers were divided into two camps: pro-bond measure, those who believe the current school buildings are in bad shape and need replaced, and those who say that with some increased maintenance the buildings will continue to serve Central Linn students for years to come.

Blaine Cheney and Mark Penrod presented the case in favor of the 30-year, $32 million bond and $4 million in State Matching Funds to develop a new high school, middle school and elementary school on the current site west of Brownsville.

The elementary school at Halsey would be closed.

According to the men, the bond would cost taxpayers $1.87 per $1,000 in assessed property values, or about $23.38 per month for the owner of a home valued at $150,000.

Penrod said that although the school district has invested in annual maintenance, were steadily fighting a losing battle to keep up with older facilities. Were losing ground and cant keep up.

Several people spoke about their belief the current buildings would not be safe in the event of a major earthquake, including councilors Nan Van Sandt, who grew up in Japan and California, and Carla Gerber.

Others said that without a good school, both educationally and building-wise, families may leave the area to seek a sound education for their children.

But others say passing the bond will burden local property owners with higher taxes for 30 years.

Halsey Mayor Marjean Cline sent the council a letter voicing opposition to the bond.

Halsey is not a rich community, the letter read. We do battle with rundown homes and businesses and certainly have our fair share of empty buildings. The prospect of another empty building in Halsey would be devastating. And not just another empty building: Central Linn Elementary School, which has been in existence since 1936."

Cline added that although the council supports improving education,  the bond proposal will vacate the elementary school and leave Halsey with a cold, empty structure right in the heart of our town. In return, our community will be asked to shoulder an immense debt for the next 30 years, a debt that will likely inhibit our ability to finance our much needed projects in years to come.

And, contrary to rumors, Cline said, the community will not maintain the elementary building if it is closed.

Halsey-Shedd Fire District Chief Skip Smith, said that for the last 25 years he and his staff have inspected the school building and he believes there is a lot of useable life left in them, with increased maintenance.

He said an inspection was made on March 23, and although there were issues, he found the buildings to be safe in respect to fire and life safety code and emergency escape routes.

He was assisted by the Deputy State Fire Marshal and concluded that an aggressive preventative maintenance program be developed and implemented immediately, which is something that I have suggested to Central Linn School District board members and school administration for the past two years.

Smith said that if the measure passes, property owners in the district will see greatly increased tax loads in an economically stagnant area.
Jan. 18, 1935  April 25, 2016

Harry "Doc" Zervas, 81, passed away April 25 in Port Orchard, WA, with family at his side following a brief illness.

Born in Old Hickory, TN, Jan. 18, 1935, he came to the west coast in the early 1960's for work in the booming timber and lumber industry of Northern California. It was there he met the love of his life, Helen (Radford) Zervas. They married in 1961 in Eureka and began their long life as a family, raising 6 children. In 1972, he moved his family to Oregon in search of a better life, which they found in the Lebanon and Sweet Home area for the next 40 years.

He worked in mills around the area until retiring in the 1990's when he began raising cattle on a small farm near Sweet Home. He lived in the Willamette Valley for the remainder of his life except for 5 years in Port Orchard.

He loved spending time with his grandkids. He is known as "Papa" to dozens of grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren who live throughout the U.S. in Oregon, Washington, Montana, California and Texas. All of his life Doc loved fishing, hunting and camping which he did with his family as often as he could.

Harry is survived by his children, John Thompson of California; Robin (Zervas) and Dave Vasquez of Lebanon; Jacquie (Zervas) Bushnell of Tangent; Mike and Tami Zervas of Port Orchard, WA; and brother, Jack Zervas of Aurora.

He was preceded in death by his wife Helen in 2008; daughter, Shirley (Thompson) Dye in 1982; son, Frank Thompson in 2003.

Services pending at Huston-Jost Funeral Home, Lebanon
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The Department of Agriculture has confirmed that tree-felling at Castleforbes Demense has now resumed after assessment.

Tree-felling at the site had been suspended following a complaint by Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) in relation to General Felling Licences awarded earlier this year.

While a 2014 licence had a bird protection condition attached, two General Felling Licences were granted this year with no restrictions in this woodland, which is recorded as a mature forest with oak, elm, and ash as early as 1682, claimed Tony Lowes, a director of FIE.

Birdlife reported within the woodland includes protected species such as the kestrel, the woodpecker, and mammals such as stoats and red squirrels.

Not only was there no bird protection of the felling licence, but the conditions restricting the licences to poor quality stems and thinning in fact included mature hardwoods in a protected ancient woodland. This is completely unacceptable. he continued.

However, in a statement to the Longford Leader, the department of Agriculture said that the Forest Service is satisfied that the operations were appropriate.

The licences issued did not prohibit operations within the bird nesting season, 1st March to 31st August.

However, the Forest Service is satisfied that operations can continue during this period, the spokesperson continued.

Due to the wet and low-lying nature of the site, operations are best undertaken during the dry spring/summer months, to avoid possible soil disturbance and impacts on water quality, they explained. Great Spotted Woodpecker was heard drumming during a recent site visit by the ornithologist, but no evidence of breeding was found in the area.

Mark Connellan, a director of Rawdon Estates, which owns Castleforbes, said the owners have complied with all statutory procedures: All necessary and appropriate consents and licences have been obtained, all appropriate bodies have been consulted, not just the Department of Forestry but also the National Parks and Wildlife Service which is charged with the protection of wildlife.
Family & Parenting, School & Education, Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: April 28 2016

For the past fourteen years Longwood School District has been a leader in bringing awareness to the importance of stopping for school buses and saving lives.

Middle Island, NY - April 22, 2016 - For the past fourteen years Longwood School District has been a leader in bringing awareness to the importance of stopping for school buses and saving lives. Each year the school hosts Operation Safe Stop to educate students and drivers about how to keep our children safe while riding to and from school. Legislator Kate Browning (WF-Shirley), a former school bus driver, joined law enforcement, elected officials and students at this years event at Longwood Middles School on Thursday, April 21.



Illegal passing is a dangerous and widespread traffic safety problem that results in injuries and fatalities among our school children. It is estimated that motorists pass stopped school buses more than 50,000 times each day across New York State. Operation Safe Stop Day focuses on the dangers of illegal passing of school buses by motorists, and seeks to promote school bus safety through education and enforcement efforts. It is organized by Gale Winsper, who has led the transportation department at Longwood Central School District for the past 14 years. She received an award from the New York Association for Pupil Transportation in 2014 for her efforts to increase school bus safety.



In addition, the Longwood School District has also been leading the way for stop arm cameras on buses to better enforce violations. The school installed cameras on three buses as a pilot program, and has been providing data to support State legislation that would implement a camera program here in Suffolk County. Legislator Browning has been a strong advocate and supporter for the state legislation, which has to be approved in the State Legislature.



As a former school bus driver I know all too well the dangers of vehicles not abiding by the law and stopping, stated Legislator Browning. Operation Safe Stop has helped raise awareness for this important safety issue, and I applaud Longwood School District for being a leader on this issue in New York State. It only takes a few moments out of your day to stop for a bus and ensure our children are safe.
Region Households Capital District 315 Central New York 116 Finger Lakes 293 Long Island 61 Mid-Hudson 176 Mohawk Valley 204 New York City 693 North Country 273 Southern Tier 230 Western New York 1,782

New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance Commissioner Samuel D. Roberts said, "It's important that anyone who may be eligible applies soon, so their air conditioning unit can be safely installed before the hot weather arrives. There's no reason for someone whose medical condition can be worsened by the heat to suffer through the summer when this help is available."



Congressman Charles B. Rangel said, "I applaud Governor Cuomo for his effort to help many New Yorkers who may not have the extra funds to afford air conditioning. Ensuring that those with heat-related health issues can cool off during the hot months is extremely vital. This money will go a long way in helping many families in our community get through the approaching summer heat."



Congressman Eliot Engel said, "As the weather heats up this summer, those who suffer from certain medical ailments will see their health issues exacerbated by the hotter weather. Expanding access to cooling assistance is a sensible way to help those at-risk individuals beat the heat, and I thank Governor Cuomo for committing $3 million to this project."



Congresswoman Nita M. Lowey said, "We cannot let the dog days of summer become a health threat for vulnerable residents. I am proud to work with the Governor to secure federal resources that protect the health and safety of New Yorkers."



Congressman Jose E. Serrano said, "I applaud Governor Cuomo's efforts in securing this funding to provide cooling assistance for low-income New Yorkers. Anyone who has spent a summer in New York City knows it is a beautiful season to experience the city. However, summer is also the time of year when individuals with heat-related health issues suffer the most. This funding will go towards the purchase and installation of cooling units for low-income individuals who do not have central air conditioners. These units will help provide thousands of households with access to cool air this summer, giving individuals and families in our City the opportunity to live healthier lives."



Congressman Joe Crowley said, "With the summer months almost upon us, it's critical that we ensure our most vulnerable New Yorkers receive the cooling assistance they need. It's not just about their comfort, its about their safety. We all know extreme heat can pose life-threatening health risks especially for people with medical conditions and I applaud Governor Cuomo for making this funding a priority."



Congressman Steve Israel said, "As the summer nears, New Yorkers with health issues need access to this important program so they can stay safe during the peak summer heat. I applaud the state for making these funds available and encourage New Yorkers to take advantage of this potentially life-saving assistance."



Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke said, "This summer, families and individuals that are most vulnerable to heat related illnesses in New York City and State can look forward to assistance with keeping cool during the warmer months. The allocation of three million dollars in funding to the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance's Home Energy Assistance Program will bring needed relief to those facing the greatest risk of succumbing to health related complications due to extreme heat and I applaud the leadership of the Cuomo administration for continuing to prioritize the needs of all New Yorkers."



Congressman Paul Tonko said, "Many in our communities continue to suffer through extreme spikes in temperature that exacerbate their medical conditions and put their lives at risk. I am pleased New York State continues to take the lead in providing our neighbors in the Capital Region and beyond with the ability to stay comfortable  even in the hottest of summer heat. I thank Governor Cuomo and his team for their work to help all New Yorkers endure the elements. I look forward to working with them on a federal level to continue providing cooling assistance to those who need it."



Congressman John Katko said, "As we move into the warm summer months, this funding will help ensure that seniors and families across Central New York are able to stay cool, safe, and healthy in their homes. I encourage folks who are eligible to apply for this important program."



Congresswoman Kathleen Rice said, "For thousands of people across New York, the extreme heat of summer doesnt just cause discomfort, but can exacerbate serious medical conditions and pose life-threatening risks. For these New Yorkers, air conditioners are not a luxury  they are an absolute necessity, which is why I am so pleased that our state secured this critical funding to ensure that those who truly need air conditioners for medical purposes have access to them."



Applicants must provide medical documentation in writing, signed by a physician, physician's assistant or a nurse practitioner. The document must clearly indicate the need for an air conditioner and must be dated within the previous 12 months.



Cooling assistance will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis. Local departments of social services will accept applications through August 31, or until funding runs out, whichever comes first.



Information on where to apply in each county can be found here.
Crime, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: April 28 2016

The Second Precinct Detective Squad is actively investigating three separate shooting incidents occurring in Huntington Station between Saturday April 23rd and Tuesday April 26th.

Between April 23 and April 26 there have been three separate shooting incidents in Huntington Station. An active investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information about the incidents is urged to contact detectives at 631-854-8252 ie 1-800-220-TIPS.

Huntington Station, NY - April 27, 2016 - The Second Precinct Detective Squad is actively investigating three separate shooting incidents occurring in Huntington Station between Saturday April 23rd and Tuesday April 26th.

The first incident occurred approximately 8:00PM Saturday in the vicinity of the Long Island Railroad parking lot at New York Ave in which the victim sustained a gunshot wound to his foot. The second incident occurred on East 6th Street at approximately 10:15PM Saturday when a house and a vehicle were struck by gunfire without causing injury to any individuals. The third incident occurred approximately 1:25AM Tuesday on 10th Avenue when several gunshots were fired, possibly into the air, with no reported injuries or damage to property.

The full resources of the Suffolk County Police Department, and the Second Precinct in particular, are available in aggressively investigating all potentialities concerning these three incidents; however, at this early stage of the investigation, a definitive assessment would be premature.

The policing priorities at this time are to continue an aggressive investigation and to augment marked and unmarked patrols in the Huntington Station area. Additionally, detectives, patrol officers, and Gang Team officers are reaching out to their various contacts within the community for investigative leads, including conducting neighborhood door knocks in the affected area.

The Second Precinct will continue upon its success in a variety of crime reduction strategies employing a variety of resources, such as the Narcotics Squad, Firearms Suppression Team, and Special Operations Team. In addition to the augmented marked and unmarked patrols, there will be more frequent bicycle patrols in targeted areas.

Police Commissioner Timothy Sini met with a number of community representatives at the Second Precinct on Monday April 25, 2016 and discussed a variety of issues to enhance public and traffic safety and bolster police community relations.

Anyone with information about either of these incidents is urged to contact the Second Squad Detectives at 631-854-8252 or contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-220-TIPS. All calls will be kept confidential.
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
It's hard to imagine how this year's race for president could get any odder, but the circus is scheduled to blow through Oregon on Thursday, with Republican hopeful John Kasich making appearances in Portland and Medford, and presumably waving at the mid-valley as he flies over or zips by on Interstate 5.

Oregon, of course, is Kasich's territory, now that he and Ted Cruz have decided to split up the remaining primary states in an increasingly desperate attempt to stop front-runner Donald Trump from claiming the GOP nomination. Trump, of course, ran the table in Tuesday's batch of primaries, but still has work to do to claim the required number of delegates before the Republican convention in Cleveland.

It's just as well that Cruz didn't take Oregon when he divvied up the remaining states, what with his decision on Wednesday to name former Hewlett-Packard boss Carly Fiorina as his running mate. Her tenure at HP was marked by 30,000 layoffs at the company, cuts that left behind plenty of bitter former HP employees in the mid-valley with long memories.

Besides, Kasich is the sort of moderate Republican who in the past has done relatively well in Oregon. As he races through the state on Thursday, perhaps he will regret that his campaign failed to file a statement for the state's Voters' Pamphlet, which was mailed out a couple of weeks ago.

The deadline for the pamphlet was March 10, and the campaign simply blew it. (Or maybe no one in the campaign had the $3,500 required from presidential candidates around deadline time.) In any event, the pamphlet does include statements from Cruz and Trump, which means that the first time some voters will discover that Kasich is running in Oregon is when they actually get their ballots.

Or if they get caught in a Kasich motorcade on Thursday.

Lost in translation

One of the great things about newspaper jobs is that you learn something new every day. Heres something we learned this week about the videos that we're posting in increasing numbers to our websites: The videos, which we post through YouTube, automatically are closed-captioned. The captioning apparently uses a program that seems to be about as accurate as the translations you get when you run a document through that Google Translate program.

Led by our video producer, Jessica Habjan, weve added dozens of local news videos to our site over the last few months. When we put the videos on YouTube, the captions are added. We don't have anything to do with the closed captioning. You probably can see where this is headed.

So it came to pass that at a meeting Monday night of the Greater Albany Public Schools Board of Trustees, officials and attendees were watching a wonderful piece by Habjan about how the community has rebounded after the fire at South Albany High School. (The video is on democratherald.com and is well worth a look.)

At some point in the showing Monday, the closed captions were accidentally activated, and some viewers couldnt help but notice that they included, about a minute into the video, a profanity. (We wont get into details of the profanity, but we can only assume that the captioning program picked up some of the correct letters in the phrase that actually is used in the video, "fully fire sprinkled," and then added a couple of additional letters on its own.)

We apologize to anyone who was offended by the mistranslated caption  and we've learned that we need to keep a closer eye on these captions in the future. (mm)
Vietnam's Index of Industrial Production (IIP) climbed 7.9 percent in April compared to the same period last year, with the processing and manufacturing industry leading the way with 12.5 percent growth on year.

According to the General Statistics Office (GSO), industrial growth reached 7.3 percent in the first four months of 2016, lower than the 9.6 percent recorded during the same period last year. There were mixed fortunes across the sector, with electricity distribution and production rising 11.5 percent and water supply and sewage disposal climbing 8.5 percent, while mining fell 8.1 percent.

The GSO report shows that oil prices remained the main reason for the drop in the mining industry's IIP.

The processing and manufacturing industry contributed positively to the economy in the first four months. Photo by VnExpress

Some of the industries to record high IPP growth in the first four months included metal production (up 21.4 percent); optical, computers and digital products (up 17.4 percent); furniture (up 16.5 percent); paper and pulp products (up 14.2 percent); and vehicle engines (up 14 percent).

In terms of provincial IIP growth, Thai Nguyen topped the pile with an impressive growth rate of 42.7 percent. It was followed by Quang Nam (up 32.8 percent), Can Tho (up 24 percent), Hai Phong (up 14.6 percent) and Bac Ninh (up 14.5 percent).

The processing and manufacturing industries' consumption rate in March rose 36.5 percent from the previous month and 12.7 percent compared with the same period last year. It also climbed 10.2 percent in the first quarter compared to the first three months of last year.

The textile industry was also up 27.6 percent, while metal production rose 26.2 percent and non-metal mineral production gained 14.9 percent.

The processing and manufacturing industry's inventory increased 8.9 percent in the first four months, lower than the same period last year (11.3 percent). Non-metal mineral production was up 3.8 percent and beverage production recorded a 2.3 percent gain, while electrical appliances and metal manufacturing fell by 0.7 and one percent respectively.

The industrial sector's workforce climbed six percent in the first four months compared to the same period last year, while the number of employees at state-owned enterprises increased 0.6 percent and workers at non-SOEs rose 4.3 percent. The number of workers in foreign direct investment enterprises rose 8.5 percent.

As of April 1, the mining industry's workforce was cut by 1.5 percent compared to the similar period last year, but the processing and manufacturing industry boosted employment by 6.6 percent; electricity distribution and production increased 1.6 percent; and water supply and sewage disposal rose 2.6 percent.

The Index of Industrial Production details the growth of various sectors in an economy such as mining, electricity and manufacturing. The IIP is a composite indicator that measures short-term changes in the volume of production of a basket of industrial products during a given period.
Deputy Minister Sisou Phanthong (R) and Director Pham Ngoc Long (L) at the signing ceremony. Photo by VNA

A Vietnamese company signed a contract with authorities in Laos to search and mine for coal in the northeastern province of Huaphan on April 27, the Vietnam News Agency reported.

The signing ceremony took place at Laoss Ministry of Planning and Investment in the capital Vientiane, and was attended by Deputy Minister Sisou Phanthong.

Director Pham Ngoc Long from Long Van Limited Company said that an initial survey across an area of 600 hectares showed that there is an estimated 60 million tons of coal. It will be used for a $200-million power plant in Laos.

The director promised that his company will comply with Laoss environmental law, generate jobs for local people and follow the provisions of the contract.
Demographic transition, which is characterized by population decline and ageing, is taking place in Asia-Pacific countries at an unprecedented rate, said the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Wednesday at a press conference in Hanoi.

The UNDPs report, entitled: Shaping the Future: How Changing Demographics Can Power Human Development, points out that countries in Asia and the Pacific are now experiencing a demographic phenomenon known as the golden population, which is defined as when the number of working-aged people outnumbers dependents.

Statistics show the regions golden population is standing at its peak with 68 percent of people at working age and only 32 percent living as dependents.

When countries have a greater share of people who can work, save and pay taxes, they have the potential to transform their economies and power investments in healthcare, education and other building blocks of future prosperity, said Thangavel Palanivel, lead author of the report.

However, all countries within the region are experiencing demographic transitions, said UNDP experts.

What took between 60 and 100 years in Europe and North America is set to take only two or three decades in many Asia-Pacific countries, including in Vietnam, said Bakhodir Burkhanov, UNDP deputy country director in Vietnam, stressing that the window for action before aging sets in is very limited.

Demographic transition in Asia and the Pacific is occuring at an unprecedented rate, according the latest Human Development report carried out by the United Nations Development Programme. Photo by Hong Duy

Vietnams golden population is estimated to last about 30 years from 2010 to 2040, but the Vietnamese population is ageing rapidly due to lower fertility and mortality rates.

The report puts Vietnam towards the end of the middle stage, which means an aging population is not too far ahead.

According to the UNDP, when the working age population rises and peaks, if Vietnam fails to act to create jobs, develop social security and improve quality of life, it will risk instability in the future including a lack of workers and an increased need for health care for the elderly.

In the short term, the UNDP suggests Vietnam takes action to boost productivity and optimize the countrys human capital via skills training, improved education and technology transfer. As the population ages, the future transition requires more inclusive social protection, specifically pensions, as well as universal basic healthcare.
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.
The developer of the Da River water pipeline project has officially cancelled a contract with a Chinese supplier of ductile iron pipes, said the project's main investor the Vinaconex Water Supply Company (Viwasupco).

Amid public concerns over the quality of the water pipes supplied by the Chinese contractor, the Xingxing Corporation, the Hanoi Peoples Committee asked Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc to intervene in the second phase of the project. The Prime Minster agreed with the request, directing Viwasupco to delay signing a contract with Xingxing.

Viwasupco has hired legal advisors to assess the possible consequences of cancelling the contract.

As the main investor of the second phase of the Da River water pipeline project, Viwasupco collected bids between August 2015 and March 2016 from potential suppliers of ductile iron piping and finally chose Xingxing for its global reputation as a manufacturer of large pipes with 20 years of experience and for offering a bidding price 11.8 percent lower than the approved price".

In the latest development, Viwasupco has removed project manager Bui Minh Truong from his position without giving any specific reasons.

Singapore's Acuatico, which has been a strategic shareholder in Viwasupco for the past six years, has decided to divest its 43.6 percent stake amid public doubts about the credibility of the Chinese water pipe supplier.

Workers fix a broken water pipe from the first phase of the Da River project. Photo by Ba Do

Upon completion, the Da River water pipeline project will bring water to about 200,000 households living in various residential areas in Hanoi. The project was launched in 2004 and divided into two phases. The first phase of the project went into operation seven years ago.

Local people are concerned about the quality of the project as well as the selection of a Chinese contractor because since the first phase was completed in 2009, the water pipes supplied by another Chinese contractor have broken 17 times, causing an estimated loss of around 1.5 million cubic meters of water.

Due to these problems, around 70,000 residential households living in six of the city's inner districts have repeatedly suffered severe clean water shortages.

The numerous ruptures along the pipeline have not only disrupted water supplies to hundreds of thousands of residents, but also cost suppliers more than VND1 trillion in expenses to maintain water supplies to the city and in repair costs.

An investigation concluded that the reason behind the problem was the substandard quality of fibre composite used in the project.

The incident led to the prosecution of nine Vinaconex executives for violating construction regulations.

The second phase of the project, costing VND5 trillion ($224 million), is expected to double the total water supply to 600,000 cubic meters per day.
Turns out some people like to keep their private lifeprivate.

So when Tinderthe dating app that lets users swipe right to find matches, often for quick flingsannounced this week that it was testing a new feature that let users see each others Facebook friends, the backlash set in quickly.

Tinder just as quickly told users how to to disable the new Tinder Social features, but company officials sounded defensive when making the announcement.

We are only testing (Tinder Social) at this point, but its important to note Tinders not a secret considering 70% of users download Tinder because their friends recommend it, the company said in a blog post.

What Tinders developers apparently hadnt considered: A dating app recommendation from your buddy might not go over so well with your wife. Some people keep that information compartmentalized. (Or so weve heard.)

The feature has only been tested, so far, with Australian users. On Twitter, users who didnt sound the alarm at having their private life inadvertently exposed instead tittered at what they saw as Tinders effort to enable, ahem, group activities. ( Wink wink, nudge nudge.)

But Tinder Social is not group dating, the company countered in its announcement. Its a fun new way to meet new people out with your friends.

Users can opt out of Tinder Social through the apps settings, if their app has been updated with the new service. While this is just a test for now, the company said in its blog post, we look forward to launching it globally soon!

Why it matters: Tinder has been a huge successthe company claims to have made 10 billion matches and reportedly has a base of 50 million users. But how developers want an app to be used can conflict with how people actually use a service. In this case, there was a clear user expectation of privacy. Its too early to say whether Tinder damaged its brand with the Tinder Social experiment, but the backlash suggests its developers will have to find a different path to growth if they want to keep the loyalty of current subscribers.
Disgraced Formosa executive Chou Chun Fan has told VnExpress that the Taiwanese steel corporation plans to fire him over remarks he made regarding the recent mass fish deaths along the coastal provinces of Vietnam.

On April 27, the deputy chief of Formosas representative office in Hanoi Chou Chun Fan said he had a conversation with one of Formosa's leaders about his future at the company and told he would probably be fired.

Chou said the reason for this was his previous remarks about the trade-off between the steel plant and marine life when asked by reporters about the role Formosas wastewater pipe may have played in the mass fish deaths in Ha Tinh.

I have frustrated the public and my actions have affected the corporation, he said.

Regarding the formal decision to fire him, Chou said he has seen the paperwork but has not received official confirmation.

"The matter has been settled since the matter has been reported back to the companys headquarters in Taiwan.

Chou said he has mentally prepared to face the consequences. I am on my way to Hanoi to deal with some unfinished business. I plan to return to Taiwan after the April 30 holiday to see my wife and children. he said.

Chou is 49 years old and started working for Formosa in 2008. He has a Vietnamese wife and two children.

On April 25, reporters asked Chou about whether Formosas submarine wastewater outlet was to blame for the thousands of dead fish around Ha Tinh. He replied: Sometimes in order to win something, you have to lose something. Its impossible to build a steel plant here and keep fish stocks in the surrounding area high at the same time.

His statement has met with strong criticism from the public and a press conference was held by Formosa a day after. Deputy director of the company Zhang Funing said Chous statements had seriously undermined the good relationship between the company, authorities in Ha Tinh and the Vietnamese government.

Zhang said the statements made by Mr Chou were personal opinions and did not represent Formosas view, while also mentioning that the company will "take strict disciplinary action".
Speakers from Meta, Finnegan, Equifax and the LOT Network said it was important to use data, get involved and reach out more to improve diversity and inclusion
China's State Council will soon issue a draft of the country's first ECommerce Law for public comment. Provisions of this proposed law may offer new tools for protecting trade marks and other IP rights online.

Meanwhile, there are indications that Alibaba  which dominates China's domestic e-commerce with more than 80% of the market  will soon introduce a range of new reforms to support cooperation with trade mark owners in addressing online infringements.

Details of Alibaba's initiatives and the draft E-Commerce Law remain undisclosed at present. But both are expected to address public concerns over the continuing high levels of fake and shoddy goods offered through online marketplaces.

The precise scope of such counterfeiting remains unclear. Nevertheless, recent surveys by the China Consumer Association and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce suggest that over 37% of goods sold online in China may be fake.

Best practices

The impending E-Commerce Law and Alibaba initiatives are unlikely to end all online counterfeiting soon. Brand owners should therefore consider a range of best practices as they establish and tweak their online enforcement programs.

Cooperation with platforms

Over the past few years, Chinese e-commerce platforms, including Alibaba, have increased the use of filters and other measures to prevent the appearance of ads for fakes. They have also devoted greater resources to investigation and enforcement, including referrals of suspected criminal cases to Chinese police. To maximize access to these benefits, brand owners should provide accurate and detailed data of potential infringements, and quickly follow up on any requests for further assistance from platforms or authorities.

IP owners should also take the initiative to offer detailed survey data and other relevant information to illustrate the limited impact of standard take-down remedies for fakes of their products. The more detailed the data, the greater the chance of obtaining more tailored and effective support.

Approaching trade platforms directly, rather than only through service providers, can also improve the level of attention and support that brands get.

Online monitoring and prioritisation

When surveying online markets for potential infringements, the employees or service providers doing the monitoring should prioritise targets based on established criteria, including:

targets using trade marks as the name of their online shop;

repeat offenders;

sellers that show up in the first few pages of search results;

sellers that indicate higher levels of sales or stocks;

sellers that have gathered a high number of customer reviews;

sellers that offer multiple brands of fakes.

Social media

Increasingly, monitoring and enforcement work must be extended to new forms of social media. In China, the main outlets for monitoring will typically include the Weixin (WeChat) online messenger app and the Weibo microblogging platform. Pirates are increasingly using these media to distribute ads for fakes, with payments easily deposited directly to the pirate account through online payment services such as Alipay.

Ambiguous ads

More and more experienced counterfeiters are taking steps to reducing the risk of being detected by refraining from using language, images or pricing that provide a clear basis for requesting take-downs. Sophisticated infringers also often use this strategy to mislead consumers into believing their goods are genuine/parallel products.

The ambiguity discourages many brand owners from requesting take-downs, fearing counter-notices from the sellers demonstrating that the goods offered are genuine  and fearing this would undermine cooperation with trade platforms' enforcement teams and consume resources.

Although this trend is on the rise, brand owners and their service providers can hone in on infringers by looking for less obvious indicators and conducting random purchases from vendors sharing particular characteristics (same location, similar product images, promotional language, etc). Consideration can also be given to presenting the available data to trade platforms and asking them to revert to vendors for evidence their goods are genuine.

Responding to counter-notices

Counterfeiters will often file counter-notices to challenge take-down requests and strap brand owners with unforeseen costs and hassle, even if the goods are fake.

If the goods are obviously fake, such counter-notices can easily be ignored.

However, when the counter-notices raise substantial issues, it is advisable to provide the trade platform with a quick, thorough explanation of why the goods are fake. If the goods cannot be proven to be fake, the vendor should be quickly investigated, for example by purchasing samples from it, or trying to get the vendor to admit via email or social media that they offer fake goods.

Where there is no evidence that the goods are fake, it is sometimes best to quickly withdraw the complaints. Doing so may help to ensure that relations with the trade platform's enforcement teams remain positive. Meanwhile, if there are doubts that the vendor is indeed dealing in fakes, they should be closely monitored in the future, with consideration also given to making test purchases to verify their goods.

Coordinating bricks and mortar and online enforcement

Trade mark owners should ensure that their teams responsible for supervising online and bricks and mortar enforcement programmes coordinate their efforts, mainly to ensure that intelligence on counterfeiters is shared and that enforcement actions by one team do not interfere with investigations by the other.

Regional focus

For many industries, producers/traders of online fakes are based in a particular city. For example, IT counterfeiters are generally based in or near Shenzhen. Fashion industry fakes are often based in Guangzhou, Hangzhou or Yiwu. Consideration should therefore be given to focusing additional resources in key cities to generate leads, conduct investigations and liaise with local authorities.

Cooperation with other victim brands

Sharing data on infringers with other brands that are victims can help to more quickly identify repeat offenders. Armed with such data and complaints from multiple brands, trade platforms are more likely to terminate the trading accounts of infringing vendors.

Victim brands can generate significant return-on-investment by sharing costs of monitoring/investigating larger online infringers. Filing complaints in tandem can also maximise the chances of success in persuading police to pursue criminal investigations.

Resources

Monitoring, investigating and enforcing trade mark rights against online traders poses enormous challenges that should not be under-estimated. IP owners facing significant levels of infringement should not hesitate to invest significantly more in manpower and funding of countermeasures.

It is also highly advisable to keep current on new technologies, tactics and service providers, and to routinely exchange know-how in this regard with other rights holders.

Where the stakes are high, companies should also seek external service providers that bring "big data" solutions to the table.

Meanwhile, rights holders, large and small, should identify brand protection firms that can quickly and cost-effectively conduct investigations into online counterfeiting rings.

Joe Simone

SIPS Hong KongLockhart Road No 3Wanchai, Hong KongChinamail@sips.asiaTel: +852 2866 6400Fax: +852 2866 6408
A parliamentary committee of Indonesia's House of People's Representatives (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR)) is reviewing and discussing a draft patent law.

The draft patent law has been placed in the 2016 National Legislative Program (Prolegnas) of the DPR as one of the prioritised pieces of legislation for 2016. The new patent law is expected to be enacted in the first half of 2016.

We highlight below some key points of the September 2015 draft amendment to the draft patent law.

No data exclusivity rules

The draft patent law provides that if an invention is related to genetic resources and/or traditional knowledge, the source of those genetic resources and/or traditional knowledge must be mentioned clearly and properly.

Subject matter not regarded as invention

Under the current law, rules and methods about computer programs are not considered as inventions. In the draft patent law, this has been amended to rules and methods that only comprise computer programs. This amendment opens the possibility of computer-related inventions being protected as patents.

One other subject matter added to those that are not regarded as inventions is discovery in the forms of (1) new use of a known product, and (2) new forms of existing compounds that show no increase of efficacy.

Substantive examination

The draft patent law provides that the substantive examination can be done by examiners and also by outsourced experts. The purpose is to increase the quality of the examination, and to provide a skilled workforce for fields that have not been controlled by examiners.

Compulsory licence and government use

The draft patent law provides more clarity on the ruling of compulsory licences and government use.

For compulsory licences, the new ruling will include, among other things, (1) reasons for the delay in providing decisions on compulsory licences; (2) new timeframe for decisions to grant or reject compulsory licence applications, (3) the state's approval to export patented products to other developing or less developed countries that are in need of certain pharmaceutical products due to endemic diseases by request of those countries, and (4) compulsory licences regarding semiconductor technology.

For implementation of patents by the government, the proposed amendment will limit the government's implementation of patents for domestic needs to non-commercial purposes.

The government's implementation of patents in connection with state defence and security includes firearms, ammunition, military explosives, interception, tapping, reconnaissance, encryption, or other processes and apparatuses for the state's defence and security. For urgent needs for the public interest, the government's use of patents will include (a) pharmaceutical and/or biotechnology products for endemic diseases; (b) chemical and/or biotechnology products in agriculture for food security; (c) veterinary medicines to tackle endemic pests and animal diseases; (d) processes and/or products to tackle natural disasters and/or environmental disasters.

Extension of Bolar provision

The draft patent law amends the number of years for a third party to use a patented invention for the purpose of carrying out tests, preparing for production, and seeking regulatory/marketing approval before the patent expires, from two years to three years.

Further amendments to the draft patent law are still possible at this stage, as the parliamentary committee is still open to comments on the draft patent law.

Daru Lukiantono Primastuti Purnamasari

Hadiputranto, Hadinoto & PartnersThe Indonesia Stock Exchange Building, Tower II, 21st FloorSudirman Central Business DistrictJl. Jendral Sudirman Kav 52-53Jakarta 12190, IndonesiaTel: +62 21 2960 8888Fax: +62 21 2960 8999www.hhp.co.id
A Japanese small and medium-sized enterprise challenged world leading company Apple and obtained a favourable decision. Despite the fact that parties agreed on the exclusive jurisdiction in California where Apple is headquartered, a court invalidated the jurisdiction clause and held that the Japanese court has jurisdiction.

Summary of the case

Shimano Manufacturing, the plaintiff, owns a patent for an invention titled "Contact Terminal", and manufactures and sells parts called probe pins. Shimano had been continuously supplying Apple the probe pins for about nine years as Apple's supplier. The probe pins made by Shimano had been incorporated in connecting parts of computer chargers for laptops made by Apple.

According to Shimano, Apple suspended its order in 2012 and switched to another Asian company. Shimano alleged that it was compelled to comply with the reduction in price and payment of a rebate of about Y160 million ($1.5 million) in order to resume the deal.

Shimano filed a lawsuit seeking about Y10 billion ($93 million) damages alleging that this suspension of order, demand for reduction and rebate violated the Japanese Antimonopoly Act. Furthermore, Shimano filed a patent infringement lawsuit seeking injunction of sales of Apple's MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops and damages alleging that probe pins incorporated in them infringed the patent.

We discuss the validity of the jurisdiction clause which became an issue in the antimonopoly case.

Issues

In the antimonopoly case, prior to the trial of damage claim, international jurisdiction became an issue.

In September 2009, Shimano and Apple concluded master development and supply agreement (MDSA) which was a basic agreement regarding supplying parts. In MDSA, there are following provisions:

If the parties are unable to resolve the dispute within 60 days after commencing mediation, either party may commence litigation in the state or federal courts in Santa Clara County, California. The parties irrevocably submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of those courts.

The terms of this Section apply whether or not the dispute arises out of or relates to the Agreement, unless the dispute is governed by a separate written agreement.

Apple filed a motion to dismiss the action alleging that filing the suit in Japan was a breach of this agreement.

The Japanese Code of Civil Procedure Article 3-7(2), which was newly provided in the 2011 revision, stipulated that an agreement on jurisdiction shall not become effective unless it is made with respect to an action based on certain legal relationships. As the MDSA was concluded before the revision of the Code, whether Article 3-7(2) applies to the jurisdiction clause became an issue (issue (i)). Furthermore, even if Article 3-7(2) does not apply, whether a jurisdiction clause has to be limited to certain legal relationships based on rule of reason (issue (ii)) and whether the jurisdiction clause in MDSA was made with respect to an action based on certain legal relationships (issue (iii)) became issues.

Tokyo District Court judgment

The Tokyo District Court (Presiding Judge Chiba) rendered an interlocutory judgment on February 15 2016, which held that the Japanese court had jurisdiction.

Regarding the first issue, the Court held that Article 3-7(2) does not apply to the clause concluded before the revision of the Code because it could cause unexpected damages on parties.

Regarding the second issue, the Court held that even if the jurisdiction clause is concluded before the revision of the Code, it has to be made regarding certain legal relationships on the basis of rule of reason. The reasons are: the purpose of Article 3-7(2) is to secure the foreseeability of parties and to prevent from causing unexpected damages on parties. The necessity of securing the foreseeability of parties equally exists with regard to an agreement concluded before the revision of the Code. Furthermore, regarding an agreement on domestic jurisdiction, it has to be made with respect to "an action based on certain legal relationships" since before the revision of the Code and the purpose of the provision is the same as international jurisdiction.

Regarding the third issue, the Court held that the jurisdiction clause was not made with respect to an action based on certain legal relationships because it did not limit the object of an action other than to the disputes between the plaintiff and the defendant and it is difficult to understand the basic legal relationship. Apple argued it was clear that this lawsuit relates to MDSA including the jurisdiction clause and this lawsuit would not harm the plaintiff's foreseeability. However, the Court did not accept this argument.

The Court concluded that the jurisdiction clause was invalid.

Practical tips

In this case, the jurisdiction clause is judged not to fulfil the requirement of "an action based on certain legal relationship" because it provided that the terms of this Section apply whether or not the dispute arises out of or relates to the Agreement. On the other hand, if the clause had been limited to certain disputes such as "the dispute arises out of or relates to this Agreement", the clause could have fulfilled the requirement and be deemed valid.

Foreign companies who had already concluded contracts with Japanese companies are encouraged to review the jurisdiction clause, check whether the object of the jurisdiction clause is limited to "an action based on certain legal relationship", and if there is a risk to be deemed as too broad it may be necessary to negotiate with the Japanese company to revise the jurisdiction clause. Foreign companies who will conclude contracts with Japanese companies from now are advised to limit the object of the jurisdiction clause to "an action based on certain legal relationship" for future contract drafting.

The antimonopoly case proceeds to a hearing on the merits of the case in the Tokyo District Court. Regarding the patent infringement case, in the judgment of March 17, 2016, the Tokyo District Court denied infringement.

Takanori Abe Michiko Kinoshita

ABE & PartnersMatsushita IMP Building1-3-7, Shiromi, Chuo-ku, Osaka, 540-0001, JapanTel: +81 6 6949 1496Fax: +81 6 6949 1487abe@abe-law.comwww.abe-law.com
On April 5 2016, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) posted its proposed amendments to the implementing rules and regulations on inter partes proceedings inviting comments from the public. The proposed amendments are intended to simplify and speed up the resolution of cases before the Bureau of Legal Affairs (BLA), the adjudicating bureau of the IPOPHL.

Under Rule 2, inter partes cases refer to: (1) oppositions to applications for trade mark and service mark registrations, (2) petitions to cancel trade mark and service mark registrations, patents, utility models and design registrations, and (3) petitions for compulsory licensing.

The following are the major proposed amendments:

The hearing/adjudication officers are given the authority to issue and sign decisions and final orders, and to issue orders of defaults, and entry of judgment.

The assistant director of the BLA is given the authority to assign cases to the different hearing/adjudication officers; referring cases to mediation; issuing final orders of dismissals in cases where the opposer or petitioner fails to cure defects in filing; and to issue entry of judgment.

Allowing the submission of authenticated documents, particularly documents executed outside the Philippines that need consularisation, after the filing of the case but before the order of default or conduct of the preliminary conference, provided that said documents are executed prior to the filing of the opposition. At present, the authentication by the relevant Philippine consulate office of documents executed outside the Philippines must have been done before the filing of the verified notice of opposition or cancellation, which rule has caused a number of cases to be dismissed on this technicality.

The Hearing/Adjudication Officers are given 60 days from the date the cases are submitted for resolution, their decisions or final orders.

The procedure for the filing of a motion for reconsideration from a decision or final order is expressly provided, giving the party 15 days to file the motion for reconsideration, and for the adverse party to file its comment from receipt of the order to file the same, and the decision of the director is appealable to the director general of the IPOPHL within 30 days from receipt of the decision on the motion for reconsideration. Under the current rules, the aggrieved party has the option to either file a motion for reconsideration or file an appeal directly to the director general of the IPOPHL within 30 days from receipt of the decision or final order.

Editha R Hechanova

Hechanova & Co., Inc.Salustiana D. Ty Tower104 Paseo de Roxas AvenueMakati City 1229, PhilippinesTel: (63) 2 812-6561Fax: (63) 2 888-4290editharh@hechanova.com.ph

www.hechanova.com.ph
The Russian Ministry of Justice has suspended the activities of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people, an institution registered with the Ukrainian Government and operating in Ukrainian territory, putting it on the Russian Governments list of extremist organizations.

The Mejlis has long been a representative body for the Crimean Tatar population. It has also served as an important independent voice in preserving their culture and protecting them from discrimination.

State Department Spokesperson John Kirby called on Russia "to reverse the Ministry of Justices recent decision to designate the Crimean Tatar Mejlis as an 'extremist' organization and the decision by de facto authorities in Crimea to suspend this democratic institution."

This move against the Mejlis is the latest in a series of abuses perpetrated by de facto authorities against those in Crimea who oppose the Russian occupation and attempted annexation, including Crimean Tatars and members of other ethnic and religious minorities in Crimea.

According to latest State Department Human Rights Report, over the past year, Russian security services engaged in an extensive campaign of intimidation to suppress dissent and opposition to the occupation that employed kidnappings, disappearances, physical abuse, and deportations in Crimea.

More broadly, Russian authorities engaged in a widespread campaign to suppress free speech and media in Crimea. They refused to register Crimean media and news organizations, preventing them from operating legally. Security services also detained and abused journalists and threatened them with prosecution for opposing the occupation.

On April 19, Russian authorities detained several journalists in Crimea and raided five offices of media outlets on the peninsula. One journalist, Mykola Semena, was detained for allegedly speaking out against Russias occupation. This is the latest in a pattern of attempts to muzzle free speech in Crimea.

The United States condemns the ongoing abuses in Crimea and again calls on Russia to end its occupation of Crimea. Sanctions related to Crimea will remain in place until Russia ends its occupation and returns the peninsula to Ukraine.
On December 23 2015, the Official Journal of the European Union published the Directive (EU) 2015/2436 of the European Parliament and of the Council. The aim of this Directive is to reach a further harmonisation of provisions of substantive and procedural laws relating to the trade mark systems at national and EU level.

The new EU Trade Mark Regulation adopted by the European Union Intellectual Property Office applies from March 23 2016.

Member states are bound to adapt their national laws to transpose this new Directive by January 14 2019, except for Article 45, concerning the procedure for revocation or declaration of invalidity, which will enter into force from January 15 2023.

As regards those amendments that represent substantive changes, as compared with the current Spanish regulations, three of them deserve special attention.

The first one concerns the new concept of a trade mark, where the requirement of graphic representation disappears. The requirement the new definition embraces is that signs must be represented in a manner that allows the competent authorities and the public to determine, clearly and precisely, the subject matter of the protection. Therefore, it will be required to provide for new appropriate ways of representation.

The second change has to do with the opposition procedure. Spanish trade mark law already provides for an administrative opposition procedure. Thus, the challenge lies in putting into practice a system embracing non-use of the prior sign as a defence.

Therefore, at the request of the applicant, the opposing party will have to demonstrate that the prior sign has been in use, within a five-year period preceding the filing date or priority date of the later trade mark. If the opponent fails to provide evidence of use, the opposition will be rejected, unless there are proper reasons for non-use.

The third amendment refers to providing for an administrative procedure for revocation or declaration of invalidity of a trade mark. At present, parties are compelled to appeal to the courts.

These reforms lead to the following conclusions.

First, the new concept of trade mark will facilitate the registration of non-traditional signs. Second, proving the genuine use of a prior sign will be inevitably to exercise the rights arising from its registration, as oppose to the present Spanish regulation. Finally, administrative procedures for revocation or declaration of invalidity will involve a significant change in the Spanish trade mark system to invalidate a trade mark where there is some ground for refusal.

Carmen Urrea

PONS IPGlorieta Ruben Dario, 428010  Madrid SpainTel: +34 917007600Fax: +34 913086103clientes@pons.eswww.ponsip.com
The High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and the European Commission have adopted a policy proposal that will guide the actions of the European Union in the Arctic region.

The European Union will step up its existing action and engagement in the region with 39 actions focusing on climate change, environmental protection, sustainable development and international cooperation. The particular importance of research, science and innovation is reflected across these priority areas.

The Joint Communication takes into account existing EU legislation, including the commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as ongoing and forthcoming EU activities and projects. It also builds on and complements the Arctic policies of the EU Member States. The proposed actions will now be discussed with the EU Member States in the Council and the European Parliament.

Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission, said, A safe, sustainable and prosperous Arctic not only serves the 4 million people living there, our European Union and the rest of the world. It is a region of immense environmental, social, and economic importance to us all. The steps taken today underline our commitment to the region, its States and its peoples, and to ensuring that the region remains an example of constructive international cooperation. Because the Arctic is also crucial in terms of regional and global security, and a strategic component of our foreign policy.

Karmenu Vella, EU Commissioner for Environment, Fisheries and Maritime Affairs, said, We impact on the Arctic and the Arctic impacts on us. Global weather patterns, our oceans, ecosystems and local biodiversity  the Arctic influences them all. While increasing human development is inevitable, it is in our hands to do it in a sustainable way. We have to do this in full respect of the livelihoods of those who live in the region and by protecting its most valuable resource: the environment.
On June 2-3, 2016, the Ferry Safety and Technology Conference will be held in downtown Manhattan.

Throughout the world, the quickening pace of technological advances is impacting all sectors of the maritime business; ferries are no exception. The conference, now in its second year, will feature practical and affordable technologies already deployed in passenger transportation, or soon to be.



Topics to be discussed will include Vessel Design; Landings  with a focus on their resiliency and Maritime Weather  with fresh information on timely fine scale marine weather detection. Information management and Communication applications will be center stage. Presentations will include case studies of mobile ticketing (a major issue of ferry operations worldwide) and a system for highly accurate crowd counting and operational telematics. Training, a hot topic because of newly required competences, will include in-depth case studies highlighting eLearning, as well as innovative brick and mortar training centers.



The presentations, over both days, will feature nationally and internationally recognized speakers. The list includes, Aleik Nurwahyudy- Marine Safety Investigations- Indonesia, Mary Ann Pastrana- Archipelago Ferries (Philippines) and Vasilios Vainalis - Thoreb Sweden. Also presenting will be Len Roueche - now with Forde Reederei Seetouristik (FRS), John Waterhouse - Elliott Bay Design Group, Joe Hudspeth - All American Marine, Bill Anderson - MITAGS, and Murray Goldberg - Marine Learning Systems. From closer to New York, the speaker list includes Malcolm McLaren - McLaren Engineering, Charles Cushing- CR Cushing, James De Simone - Staten Island Ferry; Don Liloia, NY Waterway; and Greg Dronkert, HMS Marine (recently awarded a contract for New York Citys burgeoning ferry network).



June 2 has plenty of opportunity for networking with the distinguished speaker roster, and with fellow attendees, over breakfast, lunch, reception, and a sunset ride on a Staten Island ferry. At the reception on June 2, the winner of the Third International Design Competition will be announced. This years entries are targeting a RoPax linking ports on Indonesias Sabu Sea, with the winner to be announced by Bekir Sitki Ustaoglu, IMO Asia Pacific Technical Cooperation Division, who has spearheaded IMOs ferry safety forums in Asia. The competition is sponsored by the Worldwide Ferry Safety Association (www.ferrysafety.org), which also organizes the Ferry Safety and Technology Conference.



On June 3 there will be a ferry tour with interactive discussion of telematics technologies by current users and vendors. The tour will also visit current and future landings, with representatives from McLaren; Moffatt Nichol, and the NYC Economic Development Commissions ferry project managers discussing their resilience, safety, and affordability.



For more information about the upcoming conference, and to register, please visit www.ferrysafetycongerence.squarespace.com
Waterways Council, Inc. (WCI) President/CEO Michael J. Toohey issued a statement regarding todays mark-up and passage of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) 2016 by the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee:

We thank Chairman James Inhofe and Ranking Member Barbara Boxer for their collaborative efforts to develop a WRDA 2016 bill that addresses inland waterways system priorities. Particularly, we applaud the Committees rejection of lockage fees/tolls to finance Public-Private Partnerships (P3s) on the Nations waterways. WCI is also supportive of the Senate bills authorization of $16.7 million in modification work for Calcasieu Lock in Louisiana, and for the Brazos Island Harbor project (funded with $116 million Federal and $135 million non-Federal funds). We also applaud the provision to remove Inland Waterways Trust Fund capital projects from the five-year/no funding de-authorization rule until Olmsted is substantially off the books. We appreciate the return to regular order of WRDA bills every two years. We look forward to working with Senators Inhofe and Boxer, and all Senate members, to adjust the threshold for major rehabilitation as recommended by the Inland Waterways Users Board and the Capital Development Plan. A modern, efficient inland navigation system is a critical link in the transportation supply chain, ensuring U.S. competitiveness in world markets.
An Indian-flagged oil tanker is returning to Libya, the North African country's rival oil corporation said on Thursday, after its failed first attempt to export crude oil led to the ship being blacklisted by the United Nations Security Council.

The Distya Ameya tanker is heading to the western Libyan port of Zawiya, said Nagi al-Maghrabi, chairman of the National Oil Corporation (NOC) set up by Libya's rival eastern government in parallel to the Tripoli-based NOC. The Tripoli NOC is recognized internationally as the legitimate seller of Libyan oil.

Magrabi told Reuters he would continue to fight for the right of the eastern NOC to export crude, describing the situation as "a legal issue and we will work on it."

The Tripoli NOC and its international backers say that if the eastern government succeeds in its long-held aim of selling oil independently, it would undermine a U.N.-backed unity government that arrived in Tripoli last month and put the political and economic future of Libya at risk.

The U.N. Security Council Libya sanctions committee blacklisted the Distya Ameya on Wednesday after receiving a request from the Libyan U.N. ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi. This requires states to ban it from entering any port.

The ship left Libya's Marsa el-Hariga port late on Monday carrying 650,000 barrels of crude and was currently near Malta. A source close to the situation said the cargo was to be offloaded at Zawiya and processed for use within the country.

Deepak Shetty, director general of shipping with India's Ministry of Shipping, said he had told the vessel's operator and the charterer to instruct the captain not to discharge the cargo "at all, anywhere."

"They will follow the U.N. guidance which will come to them through us," Shetty said. "They are now staying put ... no oil will be discharged even if the charterer wants them to. They will wait for the U.N. to tell us where the vessel will have to go."

However, the U.N. spokesman's office in New York said the U.N. Libya mission was not involved in the issue at all.

Under U.N. Security Council resolutions adopted since 2014 on the illicit export of Libyan oil, it is up to states - not the United Nations - to direct designated vessels "to take appropriate actions to return the crude oil, with the consent of and in coordination with the Government of Libya, to Libya."





(By Ahmad Ghaddar; Additional reporting by Nidhi Verma, Libby George, Michelle Nichols, Louis Charbonneau and Aidan Lewis, writing by Jonathan Saul and Michelle Nichols, editing by Dale Hudson and Marguerita Choy)
The 60-foot fishing boat Paulo Marc was towed by the crew of U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Moray after the fishing vessel became disabled Wednesday about 90 miles east of Portland, Maine.

Watchstanders at Sector Northern New Englands command center received notification at approximately 1 p.m. Wednesday that the Paulo Marc, homeported in Gloucester, was disabled with four people aboard.

The Moray crew launched and arrived on scene to establish the tow at approximately 8 p.m. Wednesday.

Early Thursday, once near shore, the Moray passed the tow to a good Samaritan crew who arrived safely at the State Fish Pier in Portland at about 9 a.m.

The Coast Guard Cutter Moray is an 87-foot Coastal Patrol Boat homeported in Jonesport, Maine.
India has instructed an Indian-flagged oil tanker that has been blacklisted by the U.N. not to discharge its cargo of crude oil from Libya's rival eastern government and to await instructions from the United Nations, a senior Indian government official said on Thursday.

The tanker, the Distya Ameya, is carrying 650,000 barrels of crude on behalf of a second National Oil Corporation (NOC) set up by Libya's rival eastern government in parallel to the Tripoli-based NOC, which is recognized internationally as the legitimate seller of Libyan oil.

The Tripoli NOC and its international backers say that if the eastern government succeeds in its long-held aim of selling oil independently, it would undermine a U.N.-backed unity government that arrived in Tripoli last month and put the political and economic future of Libya at risk.

The U.N. Security Council Libya sanctions committee blacklisted the Distya Ameya on Wednesday after receiving a request from the Libyan U.N. ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi. This requires states to ban it from entering any port.

Deepak Shetty, director general of shipping with India's Ministry of Shipping, said he had told the vessel's operator and the charterer to instruct the captain not to discharge the cargo "at all, anywhere." The ship was currently near Malta.

"They will follow the U.N. guidance which will come to them through us," Shetty said. "They are now staying put ... no oil will be discharged even if the charterer wants them to. They will wait for the U.N. to tell us where the vessel will have to go."

The U.N. spokesman's office in New York said the U.N. Libya mission was not involved in the issue at all. One Western diplomat said it was not clear what India was expecting from the United Nations and which body or branch of the U.N. it hoped would provide instructions.

Under U.N. Security Council resolutions adopted since 2014 on the illicit export of Libyan oil, it is up to states - not the United Nations - to direct designated vessels "to take appropriate actions to return the crude oil, with the consent of and in coordination with the Government of Libya, to Libya."

"The ship has to be forced to unload the shipment in one of the Libyan oil facilities and face legal charges," Dabbashi said, adding that he was unsure about the legal procedure.

A source close to the situation said the cargo was to be offloaded at the western Libyan port of Zawiya and processed for use within the country. The NOC in Tripoli did not immediately respond to a request for comment.



(Reporting by Nidhi Verma, Libby George, Michelle Nichols and Louis Charbonneau, writing by Jonathan Saul and Michelle Nichols, editing by Dale Hudson and Marguerita Choy)
Humber tugboat operator SMS Towage has drawn on an old name for the latest addition to its fleet. The new Englishman is the 11th Humber tug to bear the title, in a tradition stretching back to the 19th century.

Built at the Sanmar yard on the edge of Istanbul to a Canadian design, she produces 3,500bhp and can bring in 270m long ships of more than 170,000 metric tons dead weight.

The 25m 3.5m vessel is capable of 13 knots and is among the most maneuverable on the estuary.

She is one of 13 owned by Hull-based SMS Towage, which has grown into the largest privately owned towing company in the UK. It has three tugs operating in the Bristol Channel from the South Wales ports of Cardiff, Newport and Barry and two in Belfast Harbour.

Three other boats in the Humber fleet, with the two in Northern Ireland, are sister boats to the new Englishman, which will be deployed in guiding bulk carriers, tankers and wind turbine supply vessels safely into and out of Hull and Immingham docks and riverside berths.

The previous Englishman now plies her trade with the Portland Port Authority in Dorset as the Rufus Castle.

SMS joint managing director Gareth Escreet said that the sale of that vessel had helped to fund the latest Englishman as part of the company's ongoing investment program.Throughout our short history, we have continually strived to provide a competitive, efficient and customer-friendly service, he said. The new addition to our fleet is another large investment for us and shows once again the strength of the Humber's economy."

In a traditional launch of the Englishman, Sue Lyon, wife of managing director Patrick Lyon, smashed a bottle of champagne against the bows and the Rev Canon Neal Barnes of Holy Trinity Church, Hull, gave the blessing.

SMS chairman Paul Escreet said, The first vessel to bear the name Englishman was a steam tug built by Cook, Welton and Gemmell of Beverley in 1889, which ended her days in 1935 being operated by the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Escreet added, Another name holder was sunk by the Luftwaffe off the Irish coast during the Second World War.
Italian shipbuilding group Fincantieri has selected Climeons heat power system Climeon Ocean for its energy efficient solutions, purchasing six Climeon Ocean 450M systems to be installed in its upcoming new cruise ship builds. Total capacity on all ships is up to 2.7 MW.



With the latest order, Fincantieri has become the first shipyard contracted to install Climeon Ocean on new cruise ships. Deliveries of the Climeon Ocean systems will start in 2017.



Fabrizio Cafagna, Head of Basic Design at Fincantieris Merchant Ship Business Unit, said, At Fincantieri we continuously strive to improve our designs ensuring we maximize the value delivered to our customers. Working with Climeon is a way for us to deliver even cleaner and more energy efficient solutions.



Climeon Ocean is a heat power solution that generates electricity using waste heat from the ships engines delivering reduced fuel consumption as well as reduced emissions. The configuration is optimizing energy efficiency and usage of heat onboard the ships.



This large scale deployment further highlights the strong business case for customers using our groundbreaking technology, said Thomas Ostrom, CEO of Climeon, announcing the contract.



For Climeon this order is a major step into the important Cruise Ship business, said Johan Larson, Head of Marine Sales at Climeon, Energy and environmental savings are an important factor for the future of the Cruise Ship business, we therefore see a lot of customer interests in our solutions.
1907 - A U.S. Marine Corps detachment from the patrol gunboat Paducah serves ashore at Laguna, Honduras, to protect Americans during a war between Honduras and Nicaragua.

1942 - The U.S. Navys Task Force 99, which consists of USS Wasp, USS Tuscaloosa and USS Wichita, plus four destroyers, sail from the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow, Orkney Islands, as part of the mixed U.S.-British force Distaff, to provide cover for Russian convoy at Iceland.

1944 - German torpedo boats attack U.S. Navy LST convoy in Lyme Bay during Operation Tiger training for the Normandy Invasion. USS LST 507 and USS LST 531 are sunk at Portland Bill, England, and USS LST 289 is damaged, with 198 Sailors dead or missing and 551 Army dead or missing from later reports.

1944 - Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox dies. He expanded the Navy into a force capable of fighting in both the Atlantic and the Pacific during the early years of World War II.

1945 - USS Sennet (SS 408) sinks the Japanese cable layer Hatsushima off Kii Strait, south southeast of Miki Saki; USS Springer (SS 414) sinks the Japanese submarine chaser CH 17 west of Kyushu as she is escorting landing ship T.146, and USS Trepang (SS 412) sinks T.146 off Ose Saki, Japan.

(Source: Naval History and Heritage Command, Communication and Outreach Division)
French wheat exports to Indonesia are on hold as traders await the approval of a food safety agreement between the two countries, something exporters say is being delayed by Indonesia in retaliation against a French palm oil tax plan.

A farm ministry official from Indonesia, the world's largest producer of palm oil, said the delay was a procedural one, and denied any link to the proposed tax.

France's additional tax on palm oil, due to come into force next year, is billed as an environmental levy on a product associated with deforestation and other environmental damage.

The delay to exports from the European Union's largest grain exporter was on the agenda of France's Secretary of State for Trade Matthias Fekl when he travelled to Indonesia earlier this month.

A spokesman for Fekl said trade barriers were discussed, and that he was unable to give further details. Exporters said they had learned that the palm oil tax was at the root of the delay.

"The door is closed in retaliation against the project to tax palm oil," one exporter said. "Indonesia is losing a supplier at a time when French wheat is competitive."

The problem comes just a few months after France's first wheat exports to Indonesia since the 2008/09 season as a number of factors make French wheat affordable for the country.

Indonesian wheat importers bought 300,000 tonnes of French wheat earlier this year.

That was just before a new Indonesian food safety law came into force under which all grain, fruit and vegetable must be tested by special laboratories before being exported.

France has asked that its own testing systems be recognised under this legislation. It has yet to sign a deal to that effect, and French exporters in the meantime cannot clear their exports.

Indonesia's agricultural authorities denied any link with the palm oil tax.

"We're now in verification process (on the food safety deal) ... As long as it's not done yet, they can't export yet, and this process is long," Banun Harpini, Head of Indonesia's Agriculture Quarantine Body at the agriculture ministry told Reuters.

He added that it had offered France to apply for an alternative laboratory registration but Paris had not done so yet.

France's palm oil tax proposal has yet to come into force but Indonesia, along with second-largest producer Malaysia, has protested against it, calling it discriminatory.

Indonesia raised the issue at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) earlier in March.

A senior Indonesian government official said he was not aware of any restrictions on French agricultural products.

"Such uncoordinated retaliations would at this stage almost certainly have a negative effect on the currently ongoing bilateral diplomatic efforts to resolve the proposed French super-tax on palm oil," he said.

(Reporting by Valerie Parent, additional reporting by Bernadette Christina Munthe and John Chalmers in Jakarta; Writing by Sybille de La Hamaide; Editing by Andrew Callus and Mark Potter)
The London P&I Club has issued a warning about continued problems associated with the carriage of Indonesian thermal or steam coal, following a number of recent incidents involving owners and charterers.

Indonesian coal has a propensity to self-heat and/or emit methane. If uncontrolled, self-heating can lead to serious cargo fires, and an accumulation of methane can explode. The IMSBC Code states that coal with such characteristics should not be loaded if the temperature of the cargo exceeds 55C, and that the atmosphere in the holds is monitored at least daily on passage. The oxidisation process that can lead to self-heating can be detected by checking the hold atmosphere for rising levels of carbon monoxide (CO) and falling oxygen (O2) levels. Methane levels can be measured directly.

The IMSBC Code recommends that the ship carries a means of measuring cargo temperature, and requires that the ship is fitted with gas sampling ports (normally on the side of the hatchcovers), and carries an instrument capable of measuring O2, CO and methane.

Cases recently reported to the club have highlighted the need for thermometers and gas sampling equipment to be regularly serviced and calibrated in accordance with the manufacturers instructions. In one case in which the club was acting for charterers, the club-appointed surveyor arrived on board more than a week after the commencement of loading, only to find that a dispute over safety to load had in part been based on readings from equipment which did not have a valid calibration certificate.

London Club Loss Prevention Manager, Carl Durow, says, Care should be exercised in interpreting methane measurements carried out in the low O2 concentrations often found in unventilated cargo holds. Typically, manufacturers advise that methane readings will be meaningless if the O2 level falls below 10 per cent. But the club has seen evidence of ships staff relying on methane readings even when O2 levels have fallen to negligible levels (one per cent or less).

In order to obtain meaningful information, measurements should be made via an approved sample point. The club has seen samples drawn through hold access hatches, which undermines the reliability of the measurements.

The atmosphere in the space above the cargo should be regularly monitored  and this may mean that measurements continue after arrival at the discharge port, particularly when discharge is slow. The club has seen problems with both self-heating and methane release worsening markedly during interrupted unloading.
Worldwide shipping group CMA CGM announced that it is the main partner of the Monumenta 2016 art exhibition in Paris.

CMA CGM has decided to be at the heart of the creation of the masterpiece, by providing its containerships, containers and its technical and logistical expertise.

Featuring globalization, artist Huang Yong Ping often uses metaphors in his art inspired by the sea. Monumenta 2016 follows this direction by integrating elements of the shipping industry into this installation.

It is for this strong presence of its own universe that CMA CGM decided to be the Main Partner of the exhibition.

Tanya Saade Zeenny, CMA CGM Executive Officer said, "By carrying millions of tons of goods every year, CMA CGM is a privileged observer of global economic exchanges that the artist expresses through this years MONUMENTA. Furthermore, we are at the center of this artwork that will fill the nave of the Grand Palais. For this reason, our teams have been fully mobilized, from the first day to the technical assembling, providing our know-how, our logistical expertise and industrial resources, and enabling MONUMENTA 2016 to be created."

CMA CGM was involved in every stage of the project, from genesis to the realization of the artwork, providing its expertise, industrial resources and know-how in terms of highly complex logistics project management.

For over six months, CMA CGM has been supporting the Rmn Grand-Palais, the KAMEL MENNOUR gallery and the artist in order to realize this unique project of such scale, which would not have been possible without collective expertise.

CMA CGMs team of global experts were mobilized to ensure a high level of logistics, from the transportation of the elements of the artwork coming from different parts of the world, including China, to the highly delicate assembly that is currently taking place.

The logistics operation started as early as January, to allow timely transport of the works to the Grand Palais in Paris.

Sylvie Hubac, Rmn President, said, "Pings performance is impressive and the work, created in situ, integrates unstintingly to the voluminous space of the Grand Palais. Around several masterpieces, symbolizing globalization, the artist offers a metaphorical fresco of the forces at work within the world and of Humanity. The project would not have been the same without the support of CMA CGM as main partner of Monumenta 2016."

On March 28, a key milestone was reached where several containers were off loaded in Le Havre from the CMA CGM Bougainville, flagship of the CMA CGM Group, after a month of travel from the Chinese ports of Qingdao and Shanghai.

Various elements of the artwork, arrived piece by piece at the Port of Le Havre, which were then transferred by inland barge to Gennevilliers to be stored before dispatch to the Grand Palais in Paris by special convoy.

Since Monday, April 25, a continuous stream of components transported by CMA CGM has arrived day and night to be assembled within the nave of the Grand Palais. A special convoy travels the Champs-Elysee every 15 minutes entering the nave of the Grand Palais for the assembling of the masterpiece in complete secrecy in just 10 days.

Such unique and complex logistics for a work of art is guaranteed notably by CMA CGM.
Officials from POSCO, the Ports of Indiana and community leaders gathered to break ground today on POSCO's new wire rod processing center at the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville.



POSCO is a multinational company headquartered in Pohang, South Korea, and the fifth-largest steel producer in the world. The new $19 million facility is expected to begin operations in 2017 and create up to 60 high-wage jobs by 2018. POSCO is South Korea's fourth largest company, behind Samsung Electronics, SK Holdings and Hyundai Motors, and is ranked No. 162 in Fortune's Global 500.



"When a global company like POSCO selects Indiana for its newest plant, it is a strong endorsement of our state's pro-business environment and talented workforce," said Governor Mike Pence. "Our state is leading the nation in manufacturing jobs creation and POSCO's new facility will not only produce new high-wage jobs, but its operations will also generate new business for other port companies."



POSCO's Jeffersonville plant will process steel wire for fasteners, nuts and bolts used in the automotive industry and serve as a distribution center for other POSCO products. The project includes a 136,000-square-foot facility to be constructed on approximately 10 acres at the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville.



"It was critical for our new facility to be able to receive steel by barge and be close to major customers in the automotive industry," said POSCO-AAPC President Kenny Hwang. "The Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville's site was ideal for our company because it provides shipping connections to world markets and also allows us to provide just-in-time delivery to our U.S. automotive customers."



Other POSCO executives attending the ground-breaking included Wonki Kim, President, POSCO America; Kyu Tae Kim, Finance Director, POSCO-AAPC and Woonhyun Yeo, Sales Director for the new Jeffersonville POSCO facility. During his remarks, Mr. Hwang presented Greater Clark County Schools Superintendent Dr. Andrew Melin with a $2,000 check to support the school's college and career readiness initiative.



POSCO was established in South Korea in 1968 and was the first Korean firm to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994. It operates 312 facilities in 43 countries around the world.



"It's an honor to have a world-class company like POSCO chose our port for such an important facility," said Port Director Scott Stewart. "This facility will be critical to POSCO's U.S. operations and could also attract additional investment from similar companies in the future. There are significant logistics benefits from being at the nexus where low-cost river transportation, the auto supply chain and the region's great automakers come together."



The Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville is home to 28 businesses, including a "steel campus" of 12 metal-processing companies serving the Midwest auto and appliance industries. The port handled over one million tons of steel cargoes in 2015 and 2.8 million in total shipments.
China risks "terrible" damage to its reputation if it ignores an impending international court ruling on the South China Sea, the United States said on Thursday, while urging Southeast Asian countries to rally behind the court decision.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague is expected to rule in coming weeks on a case the Philippines has brought against China's claim to virtually all of the South China Sea, a strategic route for a quarter of the world's trade and oil.

The ruling is widely expected to favor the Philippines and risks significantly raising regional tensions because China, although a signatory of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea under which the case is being heard, rejects the court's authority to hear it.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a House of Representatives hearing China "can't have it both ways," by being a party to the convention but rejecting its provisions, including "the binding nature of any arbitration decision."

"China has a decision to make," he said. ("If) it ignores the decision ... it risks doing terrible damage to its reputation, further alienating countries in the region and pushing them even closer to the United States."

Washington has been lobbying hard to convince countries to state that the court's ruling, expected in late May or early June, must be binding. The court has no enforcement powers and its decisions have been ignored in the past.

Blinken said the United States had worked hard to build up the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as an organization that "might feel some greater strength in numbers" to take on difficult issues like the South China Sea.

He referred to a February summit at which U.S. President Barack Obama and ASEAN leaders - four of whose countries have rival claims in the South China Sea - agreed that territorial disputes should be resolved peacefully and via legal means.

"We are looking to ASEAN, as it did most recently at that summit, to express its support for these basic principles and we would like to see that happen when the arbitration decision is issued as well," Blinken said.

China has been lobbying hard too and said on Sunday that it had agreed with three ASEAN members - Brunei, Cambodia and Laos - that South China Sea territorial disputes should not affect relations between the bloc and Beijing.

Asked if this was a Chinese attempt to split ASEAN, Blinken said: "I think there's a lot less there than meets the eye."





(Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Finnish manufacturer and supplier of scrubber solutions Langh Tech will deliver scrubber systems to two new cruise vessels on order at Meyer Werft in Papenburg for (NCL).

The two newbuildings of NCLs Breakaway Plus class will be equipped with Langh Techs hybrid type scrubbers, enabling unrestricted operation in closed loop mode. Delivery includes scrubber units for all five engines on each ship and treatment plants for the scrubber water.

The scrubber tower is of our design but will be manufactured at the shipyard. The components for the water treatment plant will be manufactured at our production facility at Piikkio, Finland, and delivered to the shipyard, said Laura Langh-Lagerlof, Commercial Director of Langh Tech.

Langh Tech said supplying the cruise industry with environmental technology is a new land winning for the company. Prior to the order for the NCL vessels, Langh Tech delivered water treatment systems for scrubber water for several scrubber retrofits on vessels in the Royal Caribbean International and Celebrity Cruises fleets.

We have seen a positive trend in the demand of such investments for cruise vessels, Langh-Lagerlof said. We have put a lot of effort in entering this sector, as there seems to be a demand for scrubber solutions especially on newbuildings. After all, many cruise vessels operate in ECA and despite low prices on low sulphur MDO and MGO there is still a large price gap to the benefit of HFO.

The Langh Tech scrubbers and water treatment plants are developed within the Langh Group of companies. The companys hybrid scrubber system has been in continuous use since 2015 on the five cargo vessels in the Langh Ship fleet. Especially regarding the water treatment Langh Tech has presented a unique solution, which has several patents.

Our experiences from the systems in operation on the Langh Ship-vessels have exceeded all expectations, we have not had a single day when the scrubbers on any of the vessels would have been out of service. The waste contains virtually no water at all, making it easy to store and transport for processing in land based waste treatment plants, Langh-Lagerlof said.
Rising crime in Gulf of Guinea contrasted with declining East Coast pirates; Presidential statement condemns murders, kidnappings, hostage-taking, as UN Security Council expresses deep concern over piracy

The United Nations Security Council on Monday expressed its deep concern over piracy and armed robbery at sea in the Gulf of Guinea, and stressed the importance of a comprehensive approach  led by States of the region, with international support  to address the problem and its root causes.

Issuing presidential statement S/PRST/2016/4, the Council strongly condemned acts of murder, kidnapping, hostage-taking and robbery by pirates in the Gulf, and underlined the importance of determining any links between piracy and armed robbery at sea, and terrorist groups in West Africa and the Sahel subregions. It encouraged regional organizations  including the African Union, Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Gulf of Guinea Council  to enhance cooperation on maritime safety and security, calling upon States in the region to criminalize piracy and armed robbery at sea under their domestic laws.

The Council went on to encourage bilateral and multilateral partners to help enhance the antipiracy capabilities of regional States and organizations in terms of personnel, funding, technology, training and equipment. It welcomed the Extraordinary Summit of the African Union to be held in Lome, Togo, on October 15, which was expected to adopt a charter on maritime safety and security, as well as economic and social development in Africa.

Before issuing the presidential statement, the Council heard a briefing by Taye-Brook Zerihoun, Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs on Piracy and Armed Robbery at Sea in the Gulf of Guinea. He said there had been a steady decline in the number of recorded incidents and illegal activities over the past few years, but insecurity remained a source of concern. Six attacks had been reported in the first quarter of 2016 alone, in addition to ship hijackings off the coast of Nigeria and kidnappings along the coasts of Western and Central Africa.

As a result of the Yaounde Summit, the Interregional Coordination Centre had been inaugurated in 2014 with the aim of coordinating antipiracy operations, he said. However, due to staffing, funding and other logistical constraints, it was not yet fully operational. Flexible and proactive efforts at the national, regional and international levels would be needed in responding to perpetrators who had proven to be highly adaptable, well informed and increasingly sophisticated.

During the ensuing open debate, Robert Dussey, Togos Minister for Foreign Affairs, Cooperation and African Integration, briefed on the upcoming Lome Summit, saying it would see the adoption of an African charter on maritime security and development. The Lome charter would promote a flourishing blue economy that would in turn encourage environmentally friendly development, incorporating a common fisheries policy and measures to tackle illegal fishing, he said, adding that it would build upon the 2050 Integrated Maritime Strategy for Africa, paving the way for further initiatives and actions.

Several speakers noted that piracy and armed robbery at sea were symptomatic of governance and development issues. They called for greater international support to support regional efforts, particularly at the level of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) Maritime Security Trust Fund for West and Central Africa.

Moroccos representative noted that the Gulf of Guinea had become the new centre of gravity for piracy in Africa, taking the spotlight away from the Gulf of Aden. Endowed with 8 per cent of the worlds petroleum resources, as well as fisheries and significant maritime traffic, it had plenty of targets for pirates. It was high time the Gulf of Guinea  where the pirates were reputed to be among the most violent in the world  benefited from the same international cooperation extended to the Gulf of Aden, he emphasized.

Egypts representative, however, said pirates operated differently in the two regions, so the response must also be different, reflecting different political and security situations. It was important that the shipping industry adhere to best practices in high-risk waters, he said, emphasizing that there was no time for complacency.

Nigerias representative said that criminal gangs motivated by access to crude oil, and people involved in trafficking illicit goods, as well as small arms and light weapons, had been operating in the Gulf of Guinea. Governments around the Gulf must pursue piracy networks on land and enhance their naval and air power so as to respond appropriately to maritime attacks.

Senegals representative noted that Gulf of Guinea piracy and armed robbery was no longer limited to the oil sector, but had now branched out into trafficking in people, drugs, weapons and generic medicine, as well as illegal fishing. That complicated the ability of regional States and their international partners to mobilize.

The representatives of both the United States and the United Kingdom called attention to attacks launched against two ships in one day off Nigerias coast earlier in April, which  considering the countries where the vessels were registered, their cargo and crew  involved no fewer than seven Member States. Their counterparts from Ukraine and Turkey recalled how citizens of their respective countries had been captured by pirates in the Gulf of Guinea.

The representative of Cyprus said a fresh Security Council resolution on piracy and armed robbery at sea might prove helpful, while his counterpart from South Africa said the Council should send a clear message to the end-users of pirated goods.

Also speaking were Swedens State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and representatives of Angola, Spain, France, Malaysia, New Zealand, Uruguay, Japan, Venezuela, Russian Federation, China, Portugal, Thailand, Italy, Brazil, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Greece and Kazakhstan, as well as the African Union and the European Union.





The full text of presidential statement

The Security Council reaffirms its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, and recognizes the primary responsibility of States in the eradication of piracy and armed robbery at sea.

The Security Council, in this regard, reiterates the primary role of States in the region to counter the threat and address the underlying causes of piracy and armed robbery at sea in the Gulf of Guinea, in close cooperation with organizations in the region, and their partners.

The Security Council reaffirms its respect for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of States concerned.

The Security Council remains deeply concerned about the threat that piracy and armed robbery at sea in the Gulf of Guinea pose to international navigation, the security and economic development of States in the region, to the safety and welfare of seafarers and other persons, as well as the safety of commercial maritime routes.

The Security Council expresses its deep concern at the reported number of incidents and level of violence of acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea in the Gulf of Guinea since 2014, and strongly condemns the acts of murder, kidnapping, hostage-taking and robbery by pirates operating in the Gulf of Guinea. The Security Council further calls upon States in the region to cooperate, as appropriate, on the prosecution of suspected pirates and calls upon all States in the region and all relevant stakeholders to intensify their efforts to secure the safe and immediate release of all seafarers held hostage in or around the Gulf of Guinea.

The Security Council notes the link between piracy and armed robbery at sea and transnational organized crime in the Gulf of Guinea and expresses its concern about the fact that pirates benefit from it.

The Security Council underlines the importance of determining the existence of any possible or potential links between piracy and armed robbery at sea and terrorist groups in West Africa and the Sahel region, and urges Member States and relevant international organizations to assist States in the region, as well as regional and subregional organizations in making arrangements to ensure that necessary measures are taken to prevent the revenues generated by acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea from contributing to the financing of terrorism.

The Security Council notes with concern the damage being done to the economic development efforts and the destruction of essential infrastructure, and urges support for multilateral efforts for the development of an international framework to address issues of crude oil theft and piracy and armed robbery at sea.

The Security Council stresses the importance of implementing a comprehensive approach led by States of the region to counter the threat of piracy and armed robbery at sea in the Gulf of Guinea, as well as related criminal activities, to address their underlying causes, and to strengthen both justice systems and judicial cooperation in the region. The Security Council recognizes the efforts of the countries in the region in adopting relevant measures in accordance with the relevant framework established by international law to counter piracy and armed robbery at sea and to address transnational organized crime, such as drug trafficking, as well as other measures to enhance maritime safety and security.

The Security Council emphasizes that regional peace and stability, the strengthening of State institutions, economic and social development and respect for human rights, and the rule of law, are all necessary to create the conditions for a durable eradication of piracy and armed robbery at sea in the Gulf of Guinea.

The Security Council stresses that the coordination of efforts at the regional level is key to counter the threat of piracy and armed robbery at sea, and also notes the need for international assistance to support national and regional efforts to assist the Member States undertaking steps to address threats of piracy and armed robbery at sea. The Security Council thus encourages the regional organizations, including the African Union, the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Gulf of Guinea Commission (GGC) and the Maritime Organization for West and Central Africa (MOWCA), to enhance subregional, regional and international cooperation on maritime safety and security in the Gulf of Guinea.

The Security Council welcomes the holding of and supports the process resulting from the Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the Central and West African States on Maritime Safety and Security in their common Maritime Domain which took place in Yaounde, Cameroon on 24 and 25 June 2013, and the adoption, during the Summit, of the Code of Conduct Concerning the Repression of Piracy, Armed Robbery against Ships, and Illicit Maritime Activity in West and Central Africa and Memorandum of Understanding among the Economic Community of Central African States, the Economic Community of West African States and the Gulf of Guinea Commission on Maritime Safety and Security in Central and West Africa, which encourages the implementation of Code of Conduct with a view to facilitating the adoption of a multilateral agreement aimed at eradicating illegal activities off the coast of West and Central Africa.

The Security Council further welcomes the establishment of the Interregional Coordination Centre (ICC) in 2014 in Cameroon, implementing the regional strategy on safety and security and creating a framework for collaboration among the regional institutions and mechanisms of cooperation, namely ECCAS, ECOWAS, GGC and MOWCA, and also welcomes the establishment of the Regional Centre for Maritime Security in Central Africa (CRESMAC) in Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo, and the Regional Centre for Maritime Security in West Africa (CRESMAO) in Abidjan, Cote dIvoire, in order to coordinate the work of Multinational Coordination Centres (MCC), in fulfilling the task of the ICC in different zones, with a view to establishing a regional counter piracy and armed robbery at sea coordination mechanism covering the whole of the Gulf of Guinea. The Security Council encourages States in the region to clarify the mandate of and relationship among these bodies, in order to strengthen coordination and cooperation.

The Security Council, in this regard, encourages States in the region, regional organizations, along with international partners to make fully operational all the regional counter piracy and armed robbery at sea mechanisms, including the ICC, CRESMAC, CRESMAO and MCC as soon as possible, and urges bilateral and multilateral partners to continue assisting States of the Gulf of Guinea with funds, skills, training and equipment.

The Security Council also welcomes the holding of the Extraordinary High-level Meeting on the ICC by ECOWAS, ECCAS and GGC on 8 to 12 February 2016 in Yaounde, Cameroon, which adopted the documents for the ICC with the expectation of the ICCs full operationalization by July 2016. The Security Council notes the need for logistical and financial resources to implement the projects and programmes of the ICC, and in this regard, welcomes the meetings intention to organize a donors conference in Yaounde. The Security Council encourages the regional organizations along with the international community to support the ICC.

The Security Council encourages States of the Gulf of Guinea to formulate a regional framework for the prevention and repression of piracy and armed robbery at sea; reiterates its call upon States in the region to criminalize piracy and armed robbery at sea under their domestic laws, and to prosecute perpetrators of piracy and armed robbery at sea, consistent with applicable international law, including international human rights law. The Security Council further reiterates the urgent need to investigate and prosecute in accordance with international law, including international human rights law, those who incite or intentionally facilitate such crimes, including key figures of criminal networks involved in piracy and armed robbery at sea who illicitly plan, organize, facilitate, finance or profit from such attacks.

The Security Council urges States and international organizations, as well as the private sector to share information, as appropriate, related to counter piracy and armed robbery at sea in Gulf of Guinea, and to strengthen joint coordination on regional information-sharing.

The Security Council encourages bilateral and multilateral partners to provide support, upon request and where able, in terms of personnel, funds, technology, training and equipment to States and regional organizations in the Gulf of Guinea, to assist in enhancing their capabilities to jointly counter piracy and armed robbery at sea in the region. These capabilities should include conducting effective regional joint patrols, joint law enforcement at sea, joint antipiracy drills, joint maritime and air surveillance and other operations in accordance with international law. In this regard, the Security Council encourages States in the region and regional organizations to strengthen dialogue and cooperation with international partners, upon request and where able, to formulate and implement their action plans on countering piracy and armed robbery at sea.

The Security Council encourages States of the Gulf of Guinea to continue building their capacities to secure waters in the region against piracy and armed robbery at sea, and urges Member States, when requested by States in the region, and where able, to assist States in improving their maritime infrastructure construction and management, including coastal ports, ship supply and repair stations, and fuel depots, as well as personnel development, in order to strengthen their capacity to carry out joint maritime operations to counter piracy and armed robbery at sea.

The Security Council expresses its appreciation to the Secretary-General for the strong support provided through the United Nations Office for Central Africa (UNOCA) and the United Nations Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS) for the efforts on counter piracy and armed robbery at sea by States in the region; and in this regard, encourages UNOCA and UNOWAS to continue to assist States and subregional organizations, in accordance with their respective mandates.

The Security Council expresses its appreciation to the West and Central Africa Maritime Security Trust Fund established by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) for its efforts to support maritime security capacity-building in West and Central Africa; and in this regard, encourages Member States to make financial contributions to the West and Central Africa Maritime Security Trust Fund, and in cooperation with the IMO at its request, to assist States of the region to develop their national and regional capabilities to improve maritime governance in waters under their jurisdiction; to prevent, in compliance with international law, piracy and armed robbery at sea.

The Security Council welcomes the initiative of the African Union to hold an Extraordinary Summit on Maritime Security and Safety and Development in Africa in Lome, Togo, on 15 October 2016, which notably aims at adopting a document on maritime safety and security and economic and social development in Africa, and encourages the international community, bilateral and multilateral partners to actively participate and to support it.

The Security Council requests the Secretary-General to support efforts towards mobilizing resources to assist in building national and regional capacities in close consultation with States and regional and subregional organizations, and to continue keeping it regularly informed, through SGs UNOWAS and UNOCA reports on the situation of piracy and armed robbery at sea in the Gulf of Guinea, including on the implementation of the actions described in this PRST, especially the progress made in the implementation of the regional mechanisms, the long-term maritime security, maritime governance, and maritime legal coordination, as well as regional and international cooperation on countering piracy and armed robbery at sea.

Remarks by Assistant Secretary-General

Taye-Brook Zerihoun, Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs on Piracy and Armed Robbery at Sea in the Gulf of Guinea, reported a steady decline in the number of recorded incidents and illegal activities in the area over the past few years, but noted that insecurity remained a source of concern. In the first quarter of 2016, the International Maritime Bureaus Piracy Reporting Centre had recorded six attacks in the Gulf of Guinea, while cases of ship hijackings by the self-described Biafra militants off the cost of Nigeria and kidnappings along the coasts of Western and Central Africa had also been recorded recently.

Following an upsurge in piracy and armed robbery incidents, Heads of State and Government at a Summit in Yaounde, Cameroon, in 2013 had committed to promoting peace, security and stability in the region, he said. Notably, the Summit had adopted a memorandum of understanding on maritime safety and security, and a political declaration on enhancing cooperation. Furthermore, the Summit had taken a decision to create an Interregional Coordination Centre, establishing a clear division of labour among the actors. The Centres inauguration in 2014, with the aim of coordinating all operations for the suppression of piracy and other criminal activities had marked an important and positive step in the cooperation between West and Central Africa, he noted. Nevertheless, the Centre was not fully operational due to staffing, funding and other logistical constraints.

More recently, he continued, an Extraordinary Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS), and the Gulf of Guinea Commission (GGC) had been held in February 2016 to address the challenges of making the Centre operational. Regarding the budget, the meeting had recommended that member States contribute 40 per cent of the necessary resources, while bilateral and international partners would provide the rest. Mobilizing resources remained a key priority in ensuring the Centres effectiveness, he emphasized, adding that all actors had agreed to organize a conference of partners and third-party contributors in Yaounde.

Tackling the international crimes of trafficking, piracy and theft required a combination of efforts and an understanding that suppression was not sufficient, he said, stressing that those committing illegal acts at sea were highly adaptable, using increasingly sophisticated methods, and often well informed. The task required national, regional and global efforts to be flexible and proactive. Countering current threats called for a combination of capacities, including qualitative improvements in the collection, sharing and analysis of intelligence, as well as enhancing the capacities of law-enforcement agencies. Among other things, he underlined the importance of avoiding duplication of efforts in relation to maritime safety and security in the Gulf of Guinea. He concluded by noting that Togo was scheduled to host an extraordinary summit of the African Union in October 2016, and expressed his belief that the event would provide a unique opportunity for the countries involved to renew their commitments to enhancing the maritime security architecture.
Cavotec and ABB have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly offer complete shore-to-ship power solutions globally. Such solutions allow vessels to plug into onshore power supply and shut down their engines, eliminating noxious emissions, noise and vibrations while berthed in ports that are often located in city surrounds. The technology ensures a seamless switch from on-board generation to shore power supply, without disruption of services including lighting, heating and refrigeration.



The companies will together supply customized solutions to global ports markets, as well as full lifecycle services and support. ABBs shore-to-ship power systems include technologies for port electrification, frequency conversion systems, power transformers, control and protection equipment, as well as consulting services. Cavotec contributes interface equipment from its Alternative Marine Power (AMP) portfolio, including shore connection boxes and cable management systems.



Shore-to-ship power is a sustainable solution to reduce local emissions and enable green port operations, said Oleg Aleinikov, Managing Director of ABBs Grid Integration business, a part of the companys Power Grids division.
Essar Bulk Terminal Limited, Hazira, a subsidiary of Essar Ports Limited, which is a part of Essar, has received an approval from Gujarat Maritime Board (GMB) to handle 15 million tonnes of merchant cargo over three years.



Based on this approval, the Hazira Terminal, in keeping with its design and capabilities, will be able to handle a range of cargo for merchant customers, including dry bulk, liquid bulk, containers and so on.



The approval was granted under GMBs captive port policy where jetties built on captive licenses can handle third-party cargo up to a maximum of 50 percent of the total cargo handled. This approval stands to benefit the local industry who will now have access to a modern port facility. It will also increase the revenue to the government because of better utilizsation of port capacity. Hazira Terminal has a capacity to handle 30 million tonnes of cargo annually



Rajiv Agarwal, Managing Director  Essar Ports Limited, said, Hazira terminal has a strong industrial hinterland. Various coal traders and other industrial customers have entered into agreements with us to handle their cargo through Hazira Terminal to take advantage of our deep draft and high mechanization, which result in significant cost advantages to our customers. Our all-weather terminal also presents opportunity for these customers to utilize port services when nearby Magdalla port closes during monsoon season



The permission for handling third-party cargo to Hazira terminal was earlier provided on a case-to-case basis. The current permission allows it to handle 15 million tonnes of commercial cargo over three years. Further approvals may be sought once the 5 million tonnes of cargo is handled. GMB will benefit from this arrangement since the wharfage charges it collects for the commercial cargo handled at Hazira Terminal is 1.5 times the wharfage received by GMB at other ports.



Hazira terminal has already started handling merchant coal cargo under this approval and handled 0.75 MMT until date.


Marines with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment conducted a series of fire-team attacks as part of their battalion field exercise at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, April 26.



The FEX, now in the final week of operations, previously tested Marines on basic infantry fundamentals such as patrolling and land navigation. At a live-fire range, they set their sights on their ability to shoot, move and communicate.



The FEX was organized with the idea of making it company-driven, said 1st Lt. Aaron Burtner, the executive officer of Kilo Co. It allowed us to rotate through different training scenarios, making a building-block approach for what we need to succeed at the squad and platoon levels as we go down the road.



At the range, fire teams conducted a short patrol before making contact in the form of targets of spring up several meters down range. Marines moved with haste to engage and gradually gain ground against their targets, covering each other and communicating over the sounds of gunfire all along the way.



Our ability to adapt and overcome is based on what we are doing right now, which is building on that infantry foundation, said Sgt. Tyler Tallman, a platoon sergeant in the company. If our Marines learn how to do a good fire team attack, they can launch a good squad or platoon-level attack.



The FEX also serves as a stepping stone to the battalions future operations, which will include a training period in the mountains of Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center Bridgeport, California.



We have to condition our bodies for all the movement up there, and instill that fighter-leader concept between our leaders and subordinates, Tallman said.



Each run-through of the attack was a learning experience for fire team leaders, allowing them to sustain or improve their actions as needed to become more proficient as small-unit infantry leaders.



We are developing our team leaders with this training, Burtner said. I want Marines to be confident in their team leaders to lead them down range. Its the foundation for what we do. If an infantryman can do that, they can succeed in other aspects.



The battalion is slated to conduct their training package at MCMWTC Bridgeport, California, in the coming months prior to their unit deployment program.



When a Marine is down range, sometimes they have to be a little bit bolder, and in doing so they will achieve a greater result, Tallman said.



More Media
Cruz-Fiorina Alliance Shows Desperation

A days earlier announced Cruz-Kasich alliance to stay out of each others way in upcoming primaries as a way of challenging Trump faltered straightaway - Kasich urging supporters to stick with him.



Trump called their gambit pathetic, a desperation move. In response to Cruz naming Carly Fiorina his running mate, he posted an earlier TV clip on his Twitter page of her calling Cruz a politician who says whatever he needs to say to get elected.

Dont they all!! Promises are made to be broken. Obama broke every major one he made.



Separately, Trump mocked the move, saying Cruz cant win. Whats he doing picking vice presidents? Hes mathematically eliminated.



He is the first presidential candidate in the history of this country whos mathematically eliminated from becoming president who chose a vice presidential candidate.



True though not the first presidential candidate to choose a running mate before winning his partys nomination. In 1976, Ronald Reagan chose Sen. Richard Schweiker. Gerald Ford defeated his challenge to become GOP standard bearer, losing to Jimmy Carter in November.



Fiorina suspended her presidential campaign in February for lack of support. Her worldview matches Hillary Clintons - pro-war, pro-Wall Street, anti-populist, one-sidedly pro-Israel, militantly anti-Russia and Iran.



Shes a failed corporate CEO. Her dismal record got her sacked. Hewlett-Packards stock lost half its value while most other blue-chips rose sharply.



More than 30,000 H-P employees lost jobs on her watch. It included what some market watchers called the dumbest deal of the decade. A risky mega-merger with Compaq failed.



She blamed the dot.com bust, sexism and board member ineffectiveness for her own shortcomings. She made a once Silicon Valley pioneer into a shadow of its former self.



Naming her his running mate isnt likely to help Cruzs flagging presidential bid. It followed Trump sweeping all five Tuesday GOP primaries, eliminating his first-round nomination chance - perhaps making it impossible to stop his main rival from clinching things.



No matter who wins their party nominations and succeeds Obama next year, the vast majority of Americans lose.



Governance of, by and for its privileged few remains official US policy. Farcical elections offer no hope for responsible change.

By Stephen Lendman

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com

His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

He lives in Chicago and can be reached in Chicago at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.



Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday through Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national topics. All programs are archived for easy listening.

 2016 Copyright Stephen Lendman - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




A Collinsville man who had pleaded guilty to felony hit and run and reckless driving in an incident in which a pedestrian was stuck and injured was sentenced Wednesday in Henry County Circuit Court to suspended jail and prison time and was placed on probation and other conditions.

Judge David V. Williams sentenced Ryan Deontae Venable, 20, of 527 Ridge Road, Apt. 6, Collinsvile, to the following:

n Hit and run: five years in prison, suspended for five years, two years of probation, five years of good behavior, and his drivers license is revoked for six months;

n Reckless driving: 12 months in jail, which was suspended; pay a $500 fine; drivers license revoked for an additional six months.

Venable was charged in an incident about 10 p.m. April 2, 2015, on Trent Hill Drive, Bassett. Venable was driving a car that struck a pedestrian, Alexis Marie Prescott, and drove away. Prescott suffered a broken arm.

Venable testified Wednesday that the incident happened fast, he panicked and kept going.

He said he knew he hit a person but didnt know the person was injured.

"I was just scared," he said.

Venables lawyer  Ashi Mehrotra of the public defenders office  argued that Venable is "a good young man. He made a mistake and freaked out. It blew up in his face. Hes going to be a felon."

Mehrotra also said that Venable "is on the right track," has a plan for the rest of his life (he wants to study to become a welder), and is working full time (at a pizza restaurant). Mehrotra said Venable is remorseful, and that he has some juvenile criminal history but this is his first felony. Mehrotra also said that Venable pleaded guilty to felony hit and run and reckless driving, which made things somewhat easier for the commonwealth.

Henry County Commonwealths Attorney Andrew Nester said Venable did not turn himself in immediately, and in fact he made a Virginia State Police trooper "go through a lot of hoops" (including, among other things, obtaining cell phone records and getting them analyzed). Nester also pointed out that Venable was facing a jury trial before he pled guilty.

Nester said the hit and run incident not only injured the victim but "scared her half to death."

Also in Circuit Court on Wednesday, Roy Ernest Pendleton, 65, of 965 Boxwood Lane, Bassett, who pled guilty and was found guilty of false statement to a firearms dealer was sentenced to five years in prison, of which he must serve five months, with two years of probation and five years of good behavior. According to the commonwealths summary of evidence, on Feb. 6, 2015, Pendleton made false statements on firearms transactions forms to questions about whether he had been convicted of a felony and about mental commitments. He was attempting to purchase a .32 caliber Kel Tec pistol at Riverside Pawn Shop in the Collinsville area.

Pendleton also was sentenced for failure to appear to 12 months in jail, of which he must serve 10 days, with the balance suspended on certain conditions.
On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, junior doctors in England came out on strike once again in defence of their terms and conditions, and in a struggle to save the wider NHS from Tory cuts, attacks, and threats of privatisation.

This time, however, the doctors' action was escalated to an all-out strike, with emergency cover in hospitals covered by more senior doctors. Despite the onslaught of scaremongering from the hostile and vitriolic right-wing press, public support for the junior doctors has remained strong, with an Ipsos Mori / BBC News poll finding that 57% of people still support the medics and their decision to take all-out action. Meanwhile, reports from the picket lines indicated that turnout had been solid.

Despite the spin from the government and the media, it is clear that - across the board - people overwhelming see the blame for this dispute as lying with Jeremy Hunt and the Tories. Indeed, with the Tories facing crisis after crisis, scandal after scandal, it is clear that the government has been severely wounded in recent months and is having to backtrack on many of their plans in the face of growing opposition - both internally (due to splits over Europe) and externally, from actions like that of the junior doctors.

A sense is growing across the labour movement that the Tories can be defeated. Already there have been U-turns over the cuts to disability benefits and the academisation of schools programme. Now it seems like the Tory plans to attacks trade union rights might also be in reverse.

Morale amongst the doctors is high. They have grown in confidence during the course of this struggle, seeing the enormous support from their colleagues in the NHS, from other trade unions, and from the wider public.

The enormous joint demonstration organised between the BMA (the doctors union) and the NUT (the teachers union) in London on Tuesday 26th April was a vivid vindication of this wide support that exists for the junior doctors. Not only were doctors and teachers out in force, but large contingents of civil servants, university lecturers, and students bolstered the numbers assembling outside St Thomas Hospital to around 5,000 - an impressive turnout for 5pm on the weekday.

The short march ended outside the Department of Health (DoH), on Whitehall and opposite Downing Street. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnells appearances were greeted warmly, and the Labour leaders emphasised their support for the junior doctors struggle and the wider fight to defend the NHS.

Dr Yannis Gourtsoyannis, a leading junior doctor, spoke passionately from the platform, highlighting the necessarily political nature of the struggle and stressing that the real architects of the destruction of the NHS were not in the DoH behind him, but in front in number 10 and 11 Downing Street. It is Cameron and Osborne, Yannis asserted, that are responsible for the crisis in the NHS, due to their vicious austerity programme.

Above all, Yannis emphasised, the junior doctors fight has won them support, not lost it, and helped to forge unity between workers, not only within the NHS - amongst doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff - but across the whole trade union movement. As a recent BBC article even noted, quoting a government source: the junior doctors struggle has become a focal point for the entire labour movement, an inspiration to all those who are facing the brunt of austerity, and the government is refusing to back down now because they fear of the lesson that it will provide to other workers and trade unionists - if you fight, you will win.

These points were all reiterated by Mark Serwotka, general secretary of PCS (the civil servants union), who made the call for a day of national action by trade unionists in defence of the NHS. This is 100% correct.

The TUC should be taking a lead in uniting the various struggles of nurses, teachers, lecturers, firefighters, and others, and calling for a one-day general strike - not only in support of the junior doctors, but against the whole austerity programme of the government and with the aim of kicking out the Tories.

At the same time, Corbyn and McDonnell should take advantage of the Tories crisis and demand a snap general election. Like with the miners in 1974, the Labour leaders should be forcing the Tories to offer the public a meaningful referendum by posing the question: who do you support - this government of tax-dodging thieves, or the junior doctors and the wider labour movement that is fighting against austerity?

The Tory government is weak and wounded. Its time for Corbyn and the leaders of the labour movement to finish them off and kick them out with militant united action and a bold socialist programme.

[Below we provide further reports from other areas]

Birmingham

The local media said 500, but for me there were more like 1,000 jujnior doctors and fellow trade unionists who had turned out at a BMA junior doctors (JDs) rally in front of the Council House in Victoria Square, Birmingham. The Midlands TUC also played its part in helping to organise the rally.

With enthusiasm and defiance they came in all manner of working overalls that identified them as medics. And they did not come alone. There were banners and speakers from Unite, the FBU, Unison, NUT, NASUWT, Community and others.

A large group of medics had also come over from the Walsgrave Hospital in Coventry where the picket that morning had been almost twice the size of previous pickets. They too came with unbounded enthusiasm. An interesting comment was expressed on the Coventry picket line during many conversations about the dispute, the economic crisis, the banking failure of 2008, the increasing division between rich and poor, and the attacks on the public sector such as the NHS. The JDs are rapidly drawing conclusions about the nature of society and the Tories. As one commented, "I and my family voted Tory at the last election. Never again."

Back in Birmingham, Petra Hansen, Midlands Chair of the BMA JDs, spelled out in detail the chilling effects that the newly imposed contract will have not only on patient safety, but also on the private lives of JDs themselves, especially on female JDs, many of whom work part time as they struggle to balance family life with extended shift patterns.

After the rally, hundreds of protesters made their way spontaneously down to the end of pedestrianised New Street to hold another rally and engage with the public and with other medics, as well as to hand out leaflets explaining their case. A strange facet of this dispute is that medics have had the opportunity to meet and talk with other medics, as during their "normal" working lives they don't have such opportunities given the size of hospitals and extended shifts.

The message of the rally was loud and clear: the BMA JDs are not alone. They are fighting against a contract that will put patient safety at risk. They are fighting to defend the NHS. They are fighting on behalf of all who use the NHS. They are fighting for all working class people who use public NHS facilities as they have no choice, unlike the rich in society who can access private healthcare.

The words of solidarity and support expressed by the various speakers must now be translated into action. TUC leaders, along with Jeremy Corbyn, must publicly and vociferously come out in support of the JDs.

If the government does not back down, there is the real possibility of an all-out stoppage, such is the anger and determination of the JDs. In such a situation, the full might of the labour and trade union movement must be brought to bear in the struggle to ensure the victory of the JDs. They cannot stand alone as they are in the forefront of the fight for all of us. It is our NHS and we will all fight to defend it.

Isle of Wight

I was out on the BMA picket line at St Mary's Hospital, on the Isle of Wight this morning and the mood I have to say, is truly magnificent. Public support sounds even stronger now, judging by the hoots from passing cars. The Tories accusing the BMA last night, of trying to bring down the government, for one thing seems to have helped - no better recommendation than that.

I have watched the pickets grow in stature since the early and tentative beginnings of the strike, now they are solid and confident. Tory lies and lies in the capitalist press and on TV, which would once have had a personal impact on the pickets, simply bounce off them now. They are feeling the strength of working class solidarity.

There is active support growing among the Island's population too. Pickets have been invited to speak at the Island's schools and elsewhere, about their strike and many broad based campaigns have asked for information so they too can give similar support.

A Socialist Appeal sympathiser approached me recently and asked if we could organise a solidarity meeting in Newport, the Island's central town. He said he would book and pay for the room and put up the money for printing etc. How can the Junior Doctors possibly lose if they have such warm, willing and wholehearted support among the Island's workers? The Island is not a hotbed of insurrection, but when they get their teeth into an issue watch out!

The Junior Doctors are also getting political. When I asked, they agreed that Jeremy Corbyn was the most honest and decent of all British MPs. That augurs well for the coming elections.

Attitudes are polarising fast and many workers the length and breadth of the country are realising that there is no middle ground any more: you are either with the Tories, or against them and it is Tory anti worker policies which are making them chose. This is equally true among Islanders as among those living on the mainland.

There is a deeper consideration also, a mood of anger is growing among working people and although at present it is finding expression in a wide variety of divided and disparate ways, the realisation is fast dawning that capitalism is failing and the Tories are their enemy. All illusions are being swept aside even by the actions of the Tories themselves. Everything they now do is serving to wake working people up to the coming crisis and the disgusting self interest of the rich.

A terrible anger is brewing, which could easily unleash a wave of strikes, such that a General Strike becomes imminent. We don't know the time scale for this, but the Tories and the ruling class they represent are really terrified. TUC backing for the BMA and the Junior Doctors, could force the Government to play the legal card and withdraw the new contract, through intervention by the Official Solicitor, thus extricating them from a battle they cannot win. The surge in support for this strike and the confidence of the pickets is palpable.

A victory for the Junior Doctors may be the end of Hunt, but not the end of the battle for services - it will simply move to another field. Other health sector workers may soon come under attack, but the lessons provided by the Junior Doctors in their struggle, will be weapons and armour for battles which lie ahead - battles which must put an end to this hated Tory Government.
AMHERST - Marla Miller, professor and director of the public history program in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a resident of Hadley, has been elected vice president and president elect of the National Council on Public History (NCPH).

NCPH is the national professional organization for the field of public history. Miller will serve as vice president until 2018 and as president from 2018-20.

A historian of early American women and work, her recent books include "Betsy Ross and the Making of America" (2010) and "Rebecca Dickinson: Independence for a New England Woman" (2013). Miller joined the faculty at UMass Amherst in 1999, and became director of the Public History program in 2002.

David Glassberg, professor of history and founder of the UMass Amherst public history program, said that the NCPH has grown dramatically in 20 years. "As a respected scholar as well as public history teacher and practitioner, Marla Miller is the perfect choice to lead the organization forward into its fifth decade," he said.

Miller's work as a public historian in Massachusetts began when she was in graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, when she served two years as assistant tutor in the Historic Deerfield summer fellowship program. She also worked at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, processing the papers of "Agents of Social Change," including the Women's Action Alliance, Frances Fox Piven and Gloria Steinem.

In 2009, Miller became editor of the prizewinning UMass Press series "Public History in Historical Perspectives," and in 2013, she was among the co-authors of the report "Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service," which won the NCPH prize for excellence in consulting that year.

Active in the NCPH since 1999, Miller has served on the editorial board of the organization's journal, The Public Historian, among other leadership positions.
WEST SPRINGFIELD - Northeast IT Systems, Inc. is excited to welcome Anthony (Tony) William Shepard to the team as a Systems Administrator. Tony grew up in Windsor, Connecticut, but has been living in Springfield, Massachusetts since 1990.

Tony found his initial passion with IT and electronics by building his own speaker cabinets. When the car audio craze came along, he designed and built high-end car systems. After that, Tony focused in on computers. His favorite part of the job is the challenge. He states, "There is always something different to do and you learn something new every day."

His certifications include: A+ certification, MCP certification, a license to teach in the state of Massachusetts, and certificates in electronic technology. He also has experience as Dell Field Engineer, IT Manager, Networking Instructor, and Systems Field Engineer. With his experience and knowledge, Tony is an excellent addition to the team.

When Tony is not working, he enjoys playing drums and percussion and riding his Harley. He is also working on building old 70's larger scale models.
CHICOPEE There is a growing resonance with Native American culture and worldview --- a harmonizing of human beings with nature and spirit rather than exploitation and subjugation, says the author a new book about American Indian music surviving as a profound cultural force.

""Heartbeat, Warble, and the Electric Powwow" by Craig Harris of Chicopee

is due in May.

Despite centuries of suppression and oppression, American Indian music survives today as a profound cultural force. "Heartbeat, Warble, and the Electric Powwow" celebrates in depth the vibrant soundscape of Native North America, from the "heartbeat" of intertribal drums and "warble" of Native flutes to contemporary rock, hip-hop and electronic music.

Harris conducted more than 100 interviews with musicians, producers, ethnographers and record-label owners to create an aural tapestry in which powwow drums and end-blown woodwinds resound alongside operatic and symphonic strains, jazz and reggae, country music and blues. "Heartbeat, Warble, and the Electric Powwow" is the story--told by those who live it--of resisting a half-millennium of cultural suppression to create new sounds while preserving old roots.

"This book is the outgrowth of an article on powwow music that I wrote for the much-lamented folk and world music magazine Dirty Linen in 1995," he said. As he conducted research and interviewed drum group leaders, he became aware of how some musicians remained dedicated to preserving tribal traditions, while others melded these roots with a global range of influences to create an ever-evolving tapestry of sounds.

Harris, also author of "The Band: Pioneers of Americana Music" and "The New Folk Music," is a percussionist, educator, author and photographer.

He presents a program, "An Introduction to American Indian Music" at libraries in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York that is a multi-media presentation including a video montage, recorded sound and collective music making.

Craig Harris

Among his presentation is May is one on May 14 at

Gaylord Memorial Library

in South Hadley.

Asked what contribution Native American music offers the current American music scene, he said it is at the foundation of most American music and reflects the influence of being alive in the real world. "Many popular musicians have been indigenous (such as Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Buffy Sainte-Marie). Syncopated rhythms may have come from Africa, harmony and orchestration from Europe, but the powwow chop is inherent in most popular music," he said.

And it is important "to pass any and all music to the next generation; it's our cultural legacy," he added.

To see a 13-minute video montage go to youtube.com/watch?v=ZCVTW0ypUMg.

"Heartbeat, Warble, and the Electric Powwow" from the University of Oklahoma Press has 280 pages and is a paperback. It lists for List price: $24.95.

The book is available at booksellers and at drumawaytheblues.com/heartbeat.html.
The background on the 1897 Queen Anne-style church on the aptly named Church Street in Ware, Mass. may not be colorful, but its present and future are, thanks to the new Workshop 13 Cultural Arts & Learning Center.

The old building at 13 Church Street sat empty for over eight years. Once used as a Methodist Church, the last tenant of the building was the former Ware Senior Center. The church is now the workplace of an eclectic group of artists coming together under the name Workshop 13.

The former church was purchased in December of 2012 by local artisan Roc Goudreau and his long-time partner Chris DiMarzio. In the 11,000-square-foot church building, Workshop 13 offers affordable art instruction and do-it-yourself classes taught by many professional and creative artisans from the New England area.

Goodreau and DiMarzio began an extensive refurbishing program both inside and outside the neglected building. Old drop ceilings were removed, the wood paneling that is featured throughout the building was scrubbed clean and, in some places, replaced or refinished. On the exterior, the group also replaced the roof on the building, bringing new life to the space.

On a sunny day, the entire interior of the building is awash in various rich hues reflected from many beautiful, all original, stain-glassed windows. After spending a bit of time in the building, one soon realizes that nearly all the windows are, in fact, stained-glass -- enveloping you in a brilliant, colorful world. Although the building is on a very busy street, once inside, you soon forget about the outside world. One could wander the building for hours enjoying the windows and the multitude of beautiful artwork found throughout the building that has been created by the workshops instructors.

Workshop 13 began offering classes in September of last year. The instructors who teach at Workshop 13 are mostly local and professional artists. Most recently Gary Lippencott, a fantasy art artist from Central Massachusetts whose art has graced the cover of many books and product labels as well, offered a class in illustration.

Art classes are available at the workshop in many different disciplines. From watercolor to oils, childrens illustrations to pastels and computer-generated artwork to photography, the list of class offerings continues to grow. Classes will soon be forming for culinary arts and cake decorating as well.

In addition to painting, sculpting and drawing, the third floor of the old church is occupied by a healing arts studio offering Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Belly Dancing and yoga. Yoga is led by the Workshop 13 Director, Marcella Comerford.

As a community-based entity, Workshop 13 is also engaging other local groups. Students of Eagle Hill School in Hardwick may take various art courses, the Ware Community Theater is exploring staging some acting classes at the workshop, and local poetry writers have held candlelight readings in the building. The Workshop is also partnering with other local businesses. There will be a Sip N Paint offered on March 12 at Gheppettos Grill, and they are currently in discussions on a collaboration with the Hardwick Winery.

The Workshop has received support from local art groups as well as a town Selectman. The building is on the Historic Register as one of the most endangered buildings in the state. While the group continues to work on the inside of the building, they are investigating repairs and updating to the outside of the building. Most notably, they are looking into funding a replacement of the white clapboards on the outside of the building. Current estimates have come in at $70,000 for replacement of the clapboards.

The workshop is also working toward achieving a non-profit status and hopes to become the premiere art school in the region. With students currently traveling to the workshop from both the Worcester area and the Berkshires, word is definitely spreading about the dynamic group.

Workshops and classes at various prices are all listed on the Workshop's website, and a year's membership is available for $150. Visit the website, Workshop13.org, where you can sign up for their email newsletter to be informed of new workshops and classes being offered.


Whitey Bulger Catherine Greig.jpg

James 'Whitey' Bulger and Catherine Greig are seen in these police booking photos.

(File photo)

For her silence, Catherine Greig will serve 21 months in prison.

The longtime girlfriend of notorious Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger was sentenced to 21 months by a federal judge Thursday for refusing to testify about her 16 years in hiding with Bulger.

Greig was called "openly defiant and unapologetic" by U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV during sentencing, the Boston Globe reports.

The 21-month sentence will be added to the eight-year sentence she is currently serving.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary B. Murrane argued the 65-year-old defendant should be sentenced to 37 additional months, while her defense team pushed for six.

"The defendant had a choice, she could provide the testimony to the grand jury, or engage in criminal contempt and, in doing so, thwart the public interest in bringing to justice those who helped her and Bulger in their fugitive years,'' Murrane wrote in court documents.
The body of a 66-year-old man found in the Charles River, near Elm Street in Waltham, is Leonard Quirk, a local resident, Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan's office said in a release Thursday.

He was first reported missing on Feb. 23.

"Everyone in town either knows him or knows of him. He walks around the area here almost every day," his son, Tim Quirk, told Wicked Local Waltham after Leonard Quirk disappeared.

The son added: "For him to just mysteriously walk off and not come back, it just doesn't make sense," Quirk said. "His apartment looked like he just stepped out. He wasn't preparing to go anywhere."

Ryan's office said they are joined by the Massachusetts State Police and the Waltham Police in the investigation.

"As no foul play is suspected, no additional information will be released," Ryan's office said.
WilbrahamMiddleSchool.JPG

Wilbraham Middle School

(Republican file)



WILBRAHAM - Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School Committee members said the School Committee should give some consideration to supporting building a new middle school.

School Committee members said Hampden is not coming on board with a proposal to combine the two middle schools by sending all students to Wilbraham Middle School because they don't know the long-term plan for the middle schools.



School Committee Member Michael Mazzuca of Wilbraham at Tuesday's School Committee meeting said residents "want to know the impacts, five years down the road."

He said residents want to know what middle school education will look like in the school district three years down the road and five years down the road.

The regional School Committee recently delayed bringing a proposal to send all Hampden middle school students to Wilbraham Middle School, and close Thornton Burgess Middle School in Hampden as a cost cutting measure because of opposition from Hampden residents.

School Committee members said the proposal could be brought before voters at special town meetings in Hampden and Wilbraham in September.

A Middle School Task Force created by the School Committee is planning to meet next Tuesday at Minnechaug Regional High School.

Regional School Committee member William Bontempi of Wilbraham said a long-term renovation of the existing Wilbraham Middle School on Stony Hill Road could cost $20 million, while building a new building on the grounds of Minnechaug Regional High School could cost $32 million.

"That's the 800-pound elephant," Bontempi said.

He said the School Committee needs a vision for middle school education in the district.

People want to know "What's the plan?" he said.

He said the School Committee needs to present "a unified vision for both towns."

School Committee member Lisa Morace of Hampden said the School Committee has been criticized for not presenting more than one solution to the issue of declining enrollment at the middle school level.

Morace said that maybe another configuration should be looked at which "keeps the integrity of both towns."
In 2002, when Josh Hughes was graduating from high school and his brother Trevor was going into seventh grade, the Great Falls family found out Trevor had chronic renal insufficiency.

More than two years into his illness, his mother Cyndi recalls waiting for him to come out of one of more than 70 surgeries.

"Josh turned to me while we were in the waiting room and said Mom, normals not working. Weve got to go crazy. Weve got to start the video game company. Trevors never going to be able to work a normal job, and Ive got to do something for our family."

The brothers, both huge video game fans, had always talked about creating their own games, but it took Trevors illness to take that dream the next step.

In 2015, Josh and Trevor heard about a contest created by Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of Apple founder Steve Jobs, to award five winners each a $10 million grant to build an "XQ Super School."

Traci Rosenbaum [email protected]

Full Story: http://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/local/2016/04/27/gaming-brothers-shot-build-local-super-school/83605956/
The Regional Managing Director at Apex Group and Board Member of Mauritius Finance comments:

We are delighted with the European Commissions decision to remove Mauritius from the EU blacklist at the end of February 2022. Following the removal of Mauritius from the FATF list of high risk countries last year, this news is another positive step forwards for its financial services industry and further positions Mauritius as a jurisdiction of choice for funds. In recent years, Mauritius has made significant progress with regard to AML/CFT compliance and can now be considered a model jurisdiction ahead of countries like Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United States and even some member states of the European Union and the FATF.

Since its establishment in Mauritius in 2006, Apex has played a leading role in its financial services industry, growing both organically and through acquisition to support over 200 clients and now administering over 15% of all new funds in the jurisdiction. We are proud to have actively contributed to the recent positive outcomes and successful efforts to continue Mauritius role as an attractive financial centre enabled by a robust regulatory framework.
For 55 years, Dr. A.J. Hood faithfully served Elko as a physician and community leader. Known for his dedication to his patients, his efforts helped establish Elkos first hospital and medical community.

Dr. Arthur James Hood was born Nov. 10, 1871, in Adrian, Michigan. His two older brothers, William and Charles, were doctors and practicing in Battle Mountain and Elko, respectively. After graduating from University of Michigan School of Medicine in 1903, A.J. traveled to Elko and joined Charles practice as an intern.

Dr. Hoods first months were hectic as he treated patients and animals throughout Elko County. He was also appointed as surgeon for both Southern Pacific and Western Pacific Railroads.

Traveling by horse, buggy, railroad, and a 1909 Cadillac, A.J. Hood earned the reputation of the doctor who never refused a call. To improve care, he installed the first X-ray equipment in the state.

In 1908, Charles retired and A.J. took over the practice. Along with his medical duties, he worked to improve public health conditions. After contracting typhoid in one of many recurring outbreaks in the area, he investigated and learned the cause came from Humboldt River wells that were the main water supply. He worked to move the water supply to city-maintained wells, which was accomplished by 1921.

A.J. married Irene Rene Hunter Jan. 12, 1910, and raised their family of four children: Edith, Charles, Thomas, and Patricia. He instituted the Elko Rotary Club and served as its first president.

Realizing that Elkos greatest need was for a public hospital, Dr. Hood traveled to Carson City in February 1919 and introduced a bill to the Legislature for an Elko hospital. The measure passed and was signed by Gov. Emmet Boyle. Elko General Hospital was constructed with 24 patient beds and opened in 1921.

A.J. continued to keep up on the latest medical information, traveling to New York, Chicago and Vienna, Austria to attend conferences and conventions. He helped form the Elko Clinic in 1948, with Dr. George Collett, Dr. Paul DelGuidice, Dr. Dale Hadfield and Dr. Les Moren. In his later years, he slowed down his patient load, but did not officially retire.
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.
by Ted McConnell , Featured Contributor, April 28, 2016

Every brand has a generalized framework for approaching consumers or customers. It usually goes something like this: First, assess the landscape, then define the prospect (Who); figure out what we want to say (What), and determine the best ways and means to communicate that message (How). ATL, Who, What, How. Pretty standard.

This framework is so pervasive, so robust, and so fundamental that no one ever questions it. It has worked for a long time. You might ask, if its so great, why is brand advertising having so much trouble?

There are a lot of theories attempting to answer that question: attention dilution, retail dominance, failure to innovate, etc.

Heres another. The underlying enablers for brand communications are obsolete. Our society has evolved the most thoroughgoing message filters in the history of humanity.

Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman characterized modern brand messaging as hypodermic marketing  as in, injecting messages into peoples brains. The needle, apparently, cant penetrate our thick skulls any more.

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Imagine that the Internet has, as predicted for so long, finally turned the tables. Consumers are in control for real. Predation is pointless. The Clue train finally got to the station. Viewers can eliminate their scent with cookie deletion, or become invisible with ad blocking. But wheres the new model?

We are all pretty tired of hearing this complaint with no offered solution. So heres one, a twisted sister of the traditional brand-building framework. Take it or leave it.

Flipping the Framework

You just flip the entire brand-building framework 180 degrees. Invert it. Walk through the looking glass and look back. The structure of the old way and the new way are identical, except for this: In the new way, its from the consumers point of view.

The underlying tenet is that each consumer has a process that she uses to discover, learn, and carry out her life. Another tenet is: You cant know what that is, per consumer, but you must heed her unwritten process requirements, as follows.

Consumers will assess the landscape. They will look at the category, and determine a consideration set. They will find out, via Web, word-of-mouth, or whatever. You can support their process through content  or not, at your own peril. You win if you create the preconditions required so when the landscape is surveyed, you are on it, and looking good.

Next, consumers will figure out their who. That is: who are you? This includes your intentions, value prop, and values as a brand. This is easy for them. They can sniff out hypocrisy in a heartbeat.

As a company or brand, what do you look like on the Web? A privacy statement and a fake hero shot (with an Asian, a black person, and a natural-looking white woman, all holding hands and looking joyful, wearing white  ugh)? Or maybe you look like a friend. Who are you? Great advertising online anticipates the mindset of the quest.

Then comes the consumers what. That is, what they want to hear. We still control the message, but we might not be sending the message they need right now. It mandates we have many content or ad variations.

Finally, the consumer will determine his or her own how: how they get the message. The viewer determines the time, device, and context, all of which advertisers dont control. However, we can respect their attention, and seek the right moment instead of going hell-bent for reach.

So thats it. Call it the brand service framework. It may have some flaws, but this much is true: Intrusion becomes service when the intruder has the right touch, trusted motivations, and something to offer. The brand service framework causes us to focus on what we know is right.

As a consumer, heres what I want: When I am solicited, the knock on the door turns out to be what I was wishing for. When I select a place to visit, my needs get met. Its that simple.
by Tanya Gazdik , April 28, 2016

Acura is celebrating 30 years in business with a brand-focused 30 years young marketing campaign, launching today.

The effort, from Mullen-Lowe Los Angeles, includes a 60-second TV spot that looks back through the luxury brands history, as well as a look ahead to new models.

The 60-second spot will air on cable broadcast and with 15-second spots featured on Acuras social channels. The campaign extends into dealerships with 30th Anniversary posters and collateral.

The 30th-anniversary milestone coincides with Acuras emergence as the leading luxury brand to Millennial buyers, with the brand capturing the highest share of sales to this coveted and growing demographic among all luxury automotive brands, based on research statistics from IHS Automotive, Polk U.S. retail sales vehicle registrations,

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The spot aims to celebrate the youthful and challenging spirit of Acura with optimistic narration by Michael B. Jordan. Viewers are taken on a journey through Acura history with historical footage intertwined with the current Acura lineup, featuring the next-generation NSX supercar.

This is the second Acura campaign to feature Jordan. The acclaimed actor is the new voice of Acura and will be featured in upcoming campaigns as well, according to an Acura spokesperson.
by Richard Whitman , Columnist, April 27, 2016

It's no secret that Donald Trump could very well win the nomination and the general election, becoming President of the United States. Many in America are horrified at that prospect and would do just about anything to avoid living in an America run by Trump. Including moving to Canada -- a mindset that has resulted in a 1,150% increase in Google searches for "How can I move to Canada" since Super Tuesday in March.

Aside from the fact that an American President is not a monarch and cannot make sweeping changes without days, weeks and months of battles with Congress -- you know, that checks and balances thing -- many Americans are seriously considering fleeing to Canada if Trump wins.

While moving to Canada may seem as simple as driving over the border with your passport, becoming a Canadian citizen is about as easy as immigrating (or is it emigrating?) to America and becoming a citizen. That is to say, it takes years upon years, many hoops must be jumped through, and even then, citizenship is not guaranteed.

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That minor detail, though, hasn't stopped Grey Canada from lending a hand to Trump-fearing Americans -- and Canadians stuck in America -- with the launch of The Trump Clause , a series of free, standard legal clauses which people can use in their personal and professional business affairs should they choose to flee a Trump Presidency.

Of the stunt, Canadian immigration lawyer Andy Semotiuk said, Sometimes life doesnt quite work out the way you want it to. When that happens you have to consider alternatives. In the case of the U.S. Presidential race, the Trump Clause is a creative alternative for those seeking peace of mind."

The Trump Clause is made up of 10 different clauses, each created and chosen based on data analytics of the most popular and relevant conversations currently being discussed in social media.

Theres a clause for people who are taking a new job in the U.S. and want their expenses covered both ways if they quit. Theres another for people who are buying a new house in the U.S. and want the seller to pay them back half the forthcoming depreciation amount. Theres even one to get you out of a long-distance relationship with someone living in the U.S.

Here's a list of the ten clauses currently available on The Trump Clause Web site:

Im taking a new job in the US. I want my moving expenses covered both ways if I quit. My job with my current employer is transferring to the US. I want an escape clause to come home. My company is currently expanding to the US. I want my start-up costs fully reimbursed. My company exports from the US. I want a government subsidy to cover my forthcoming decrease in global sales. Im a US diplomat in a foreign country thats been repeatedly insulted. I want 24-hour high security protection. Im a legally landed immigrant in the US. I want my new application fee to now immigrate to Canada paid for. Im buying a new house in the US. I want the seller to pay me back half the forthcoming depreciation amount. I want to write off vacations outside the US for the next four years as a medical expense to keep my sanity. My long-distance boyfriend/girlfriend lives in the US. I want an out clause for a guilt-free, no-questions-asked break up. I live in Britain, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Iran, Saudi Arabia or the State of New Jersey. I want a handwritten POTUS apology.

Apparently, more clauses will be added as we approach D Day.
by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, April 28, 2016

Yesterday was one of the most action-packed days in the latter stages of 2016 presidential nominating race. Donald Trump made a much anticipated foreign policy speech, Sen. Ted Cruz announced Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential pick and Sen. Bernie Sanders said he would begin laying off campaign staffers in states that recently voted.

Tuesdays primaries saw the consolidation of both the Democratic and Republican nomination contests behind the front-runners, prompting significant moves across the remaining campaigns.

Sanders decision to begin winding down his campaign apparatus points to the realization that the nomination is now most likely out of reach. While he said that he will continue campaigning until the end of the nominating contests in June, his message has started to shift to one focused on influencing the Democratic platform, rather than securing the nomination.

Ted Cruz made his vice president announcement in a bid to show that he, as opposed to Donald Trump, is the most prepared GOP candidate. Following a poor showing on Tuesday, there was a sense he needed to do something to remain relevant.

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With an ardent conservative woman, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, on his ticket, he is hoping to position himself in the best possible way for the convention fight, which is looking increasingly unlikely.

Earlier in the day, Trump made a highly awaited foreign policy speech at a hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., at an event hosted by the Center for the National Interest. Introduced by Afghani immigrant and former U.S. diplomat, Zalmay Khalilzad, Trump tried to quell fears that he is out of his depth when it comes to foreign policy.

While he gave a more structured and detailed speech than he had up to now on the topic, it was both painfully self-aggrandizing and contained distinct contradictions.

In this time of mounting debt, Trump began, Right now, we have so much debt that nobody even knows how to address the problem. But I do. How would he do this? By putting Americans first again, and well, obviously also changing our trade, economic and immigration policies. Thanks for the clarification, Donald.

Sounding like the populist rhetorician weve all come to know, Trump pandered to fears of military inadequacy and mocked the current administrations focus on global warming.

In essence, the speech was erratic and reaffirmed the sense that Trump would be a learn-as-you-go president. At one point, Trump called for a return to Cold-War era foreign-policy coherence, but then went on to undermine NATO, the very organization that enabled that coherence.

Yesterdays events kick-starts a new chapter in the race for the White House. Sanders looks to have finally accepted his fate, Cruz is now on his last legs, with nothing to lose and Trump is slowly but surely trying to get rid of the suffocating haze of political inexperience that has hung over his campaign.
by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, April 28, 2016

While the technology is still in an experimental phase, publishers are betting that virtual reality is the future of multimedia content delivery. They are working to introduce their readers to the new digital universe through simple, inexpensive tools.

On Thursday, The New York Times revealed it is giving its readers another nudge with the delivery of Google Cardboard viewers to its most engaged digital-only subscribers.

The NYT plans to distribute 300,000 of Googles low-cost tech tool, which turns smartphones into rudimentary VR viewers, in conjunction with the publication of a new interactive VR experience, titled Seeking Plutos Frigid Heart, which takes viewers on a stereoscopic trek around the enigmatic ex-planet.

The special feature, produced by the NYT with the Lunar and Planetary Institute and the Universities Space Research Association, uses data collected by NASAs New Horizons spacecraft. It allows viewers to fly over Pluto and enjoy panoramic vistas of its mountains and plains, as well as its main moon, which have never been presented in such detail for public viewing before.

Seeking Plutos Frigid Heart will debut on May 19 on the NYTs VR app, free to download via Google Play and the iOS App Store. To date, the NYT says the NYT VR app has been downloaded over 600,000 times since its debut in November.

This isnt the NYTs first foray into VR. Last month, the newspaper announced two new virtual reality films available on its NYT VR app, in conjunction with the first Music Issue of The New York Times Magazine.

Previously, the NYT VR app debuted last year with a documentary film, The Displaced, about three children whose lives were uprooted by war in South Sudan, Ukraine and Syria. The New York Times Magazine produced the film in collaboration with virtual reality company Vrse, founded by VR media pioneer Chris Milk. Launch sponsors includ3E GE and Mini, which both produced VR films for the app.

To help readers experience the new VR media offerings, the NYT distributed over a million Google Cardboard viewers to home subscribers last November.
by Sara Guaglione , April 28, 2016

Pamela Wasserstein is replacing Anup Bagaria as CEO of New York Media, which publishes New York magazine and the digital properties nymag.com, Vulture, the Cut, Daily Intelligencer, Grub Street and Science of Us.

The change is effective May 2.

Bagaria has served as CEO since 2004, the same year New York was bought by Pamela's father, the late Bruce Wasserstein, who passed away in 2009. The family has owned it ever since.

Pamela Wasserstein has served as New Yorks co-chairwoman and head of strategy since 2014. She has also served as a trustee of the Wasserstein family entity that owns New York.

In recent years, it became clear that the company needed an in-house CEO, and we are fortunate to have someone uniquely positioned for the role in Pam Wasserstein, Bagaria said in a statement.

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According to a statement from New York, Wasserstein will oversee an ambitious expansion in several areas in her role as CEO.

Wasserstein will work directly with editor-in-chief Adam Moss and publisher Larry Burstein as the company invests further in its new branded content studio and video team, live events and existing events like Vulture Festival.

Moss added that Wasserstein has a strong vision for the companys future.

Another expansion comes in the form of New York magazines new tech vertical, Select All, which launched this week and is run by former Gawker editor Max Read.

Two years ago, the company cut New York's print frequency from 42 issues per year to 29 in order to push more resources towards their digital-only verticals.

Prior to joining New York Media full time, Wasserstein worked at Tribeca Enterprises, most recently as vice president of corporate development. Before that, she worked at private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Wasserstein also worked for several years as a corporate lawyer.
by Larissa Faw , April 28, 2016

Florida's Palm Beach County is home to more than 200 arts and cultural organizations, providing more than 42,000 offerings each year. Now, the Cultural Council of Palm Beach, the umbrella group for these programming facilities and its ad agency Push are introducing a multifaceted campaign to encourage more visitors to these events.

The "See The Arts Through A Different Lens" concept features well-known celebrities that wear "Palm Beach Aqua" sunglasses to illustrate the dynamic cultural offerings, say organizers.

Among the notables highlighted by The Cultural Council to tell the story are Ben Vereen, Belinda Carlisle, John O'Hurley, Israel Horovitz, Kenny G, Michael Feinstein, Nicole Henry, Tony Danza, Judy Gold, Charles McGill, Vanilla Ice, Emily Brooke, Daniel Ulbricht, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Cassandra Trenary and Anthony Laciura,

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More celebrities will be announced in the coming months.

Celebrities will be wearing the aqua sunglasses and explaining the importance of supporting the arts, in digital ads, videos and social media. Vereen, for instance, discusses how the "art of our life will express ourself gloriously" and "from the Palm Beaches, we can make the world a better place."

The campaign includes print, digital and social media advertising, as well as events and newsletters. The campaigns website invites users to share their story using the hashtag #ShadesOfCulture.

In addition, the website includes a travel-focused microsite to make it easier for visitors to plan their "culturally-focused trips" to the area.

We are creating a new movement in promoting our arts and cultural offerings with this ad campaign, stated Marilyn Bauer, director of marketing and government affairs, Cultural Council of Palm Beach County. Art and culture are at the heart of why people are looking to travel. Todays travelers have shifted their spending habits from things to experiences. They want to embrace the cultural experiences that The Palm Beaches have to offer."
by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, April 28, 2016

A District of Columbia resident has sued Facebook for allegedly violating a federal robo-texting law by bombarding her with SMS messages after she obtained a reassigned cell phone number.

Christine Holt, who doesn't have a Facebook account, says in her complaint that she began receiving unwanted text messages from the social networking service in mid-March, soon after she obtained a new cell phone from MetroPCS.

For the next four weeks, Facebook allegedly sent her "multiple" messages suggesting that she post status updates, although she asked the company to stop texting her.

"Defendant not only failed to obtain plaintiffs consent when it began barraging her cellular telephone number with text messages, but it was also expressly informed that she did not consent to the text messages through her demands that they stop," Holt alleges in a complaint filed in federal court in San Francisco. "Despite her efforts, the harassing text messages continued."

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Holt alleges that Facebook violated the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits companies from using auto-dialers to send text messages to people without their consent. She is seeking class-action status.

The Federal Communications Commission said last June that companies can only send one autodialed text to a reassigned number. If companies continue to send SMS messages to reassigned numbers, they could face damages of up to $1,500 per message.

Holt isn't the first person to accuse Facebook of sending SMS messages to the wrong recipient. Last year, New Mexico resident James Hamilton brought a similar case against the company, but withdrew it several months later.

Another person, Noah Duguid of Montana, also sued Facebook for sending him unwanted text messages. Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar in San Francisco dismissed Duguid's original complaint on the grounds that he didn't adequately allege that Facebook used an automated dialing system to send text messages. Duguid filed an amended complaint in that matter on Friday.
by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, April 28, 2016

Faced with growing complaints about its broadband policies, Comcast said this week that it will increase consumers' caps to 1 Terabyte a month, up from the current limit of 300 Gigabytes a month.

That threefold-plus jump will take effect June 1, in markets where Comcast currently imposes caps. As of now, the company caps data across 15% of its broadband footprint. People who consume more than 300 GB in those areas are charged $10 for each 50 GB overage, or can pay $30-$35 a month for unlimited data.

Comcast has said that around 8% of households subject to data caps exceed them. But that group, while relatively small, has increasingly expressed dissatisfaction with the limits.

Last year, after Comcast expanded the use of data caps, thousands of unhappy customers complained to the Federal Communications Commission. Many of those people said they rely on Comcast because it's the only high-speed Web provider in their neighborhoods. "There are 6 people living in my household who use the internet daily so we go over the limit pretty fast," one subscriber wrote to the FCC last October. "I have no choice but to pay the fees due to there being no other adequate Internet service provider in Miami."

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Several weeks ago, consumer advocacy groups accused Comcast and other Internet service providers of implementing data caps in ways that undermine net neutrality rules.

In Comcast's case, the advocates focused on Stream -- a relatively new $15-a-month service that gives broadband-only subscribers access to many of the same programs that cable customers can watch. Videos watched through Stream are exempt from the data caps.

For his part, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has said the agency is currently undertaking "policy reviews" of data caps and their exemptions.

Wheeler sent an even stronger signal to ISPs earlier this week, when he said that Charter would have to refrain from imposing data caps for seven years as a condition of its merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks.

Comcast's new data cap policy will probably stem some criticism -- at least for now -- given that very few people currently use more than 1,000 GB of data each month. The company says in a blog post that more than 99% of customers "do not come close" to using a TB of data each month. Comcast adds that one TB is enough to stream 700 hours of HD video, play 12,000 hours of online games, and download 60,000 high-res photos.

People who go over the 1 TB limit will be charged $10 for each 50 GB overage. Consumers who want to purchase unlimited plans will be charged an extra $50 a month.
by Steve McClellan @mp_mcclellan, April 28, 2016

Two former agency executives who know a lot about pitching business are now becoming pitch evaluators.

Veteran agency search consultant Dick Roth has sold control of his 28-year-old namesake firm to Matt Ryan and Chris Hayes. The firm has been renamed Roth Ryan Hayes. Financial terms werent disclosed.

For the past three years Roth has operated as The Roth Observatory in partnership with management consultant The Observatory, which will now operate as a separate brand and will be known going forward as The Observatory International.

Ryan, who becomes CEO of RRH, is the former President of Global Brands at Havas Worldwide and Global CEO of WPPs United Network. Hayes, who has the title Partner, is the former Global CMO at HUGE, Y&R, and Code and Theory. Roth becomes chairman of the renamed firm.

With Ryan and Hayes, said Roth, Ive found two partners who understand the industry from all angles. With their respective networks and areas of expertise, well be able to respond to the surging demand for strong digital and tech partners.

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Roth has spearheaded agency searches for such blue chip brands as New York Life, Boeing, Infiniti, Honda, Bayer, and Citibank.

Together, Ryan and Hayes have driven marketing strategies for clients in the insurance, government, financial, health and wellness, consumer-packaged goods, automotive, transportation, and energy sectors. Ryan has advised companies such as Jaguar, Charles Schwab, Volvo, and Merck as they sought to align brand strategy, creative, and operations globally. Hayes is credited as an expert in digital initiatives and business strategies and has advised the likes TED, MassMutual, New York Life, SAP, Samsung, and TD Ameritrade.

RRH has offices in Greenwich, CT, New York and Los Angeles.
by Adam Buckman , April 28, 2016

Outdoor Channel is hoping to broaden its appeal among both viewers and advertisers this upfront season with programming adjustments aimed at emphasizing an outdoor lifestyle that doesnt necessarily involve guns and hunting.

The centerpiece of this effort is Duck Dynasty. Outdoor Channel obtained the rights to the first six seasons of the hit A&E show and has begun airing the shows on Monday nights.

Obtaining this show was somewhat of a coup for Outdoor Channel.

Duck Dynasty has been one of the highest-rated series in the history of basic cable. Outdoor was not the only network that wanted the rerun rights, said Jason Brist, executive vice president of ad sales at Outdoor Sportsman Group.

The group owns three TV networks (Outdoor Channel, Sportsman Channel and World Fishing Network), more than 15 outdoor-lifestyle publications and operates at least 19 Web sites.

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It was important to us because of our history with the Robertsons, Brist told Television News Daily this week. The Robertsons are the Louisiana family at the center of Duck Dynasty. Before Duck Dynasty became a runaway hit on A&E, the Robertsons launched their TV careers on Outdoor Channel with two shows -- Duck Commander, a duck-hunting show that became Duck Dynasty, and Buck Commander, a whitetail deer-hunting show.

The purchase of the Duck Dynasty syndication rights elevates and legitimizes us in competition with other major networks that are out there looking for other syndicated properties like this, Brist said.

Duck Dynasty is the anchor of a Monday night lineup that represents a new direction for Outdoor Channel, Brist said. Weve created a Monday night bloc of lifestyle programming that we think is going to be a safe haven for national advertisers and brands to get into the outdoors, but without some of the things that maybe scare them off -- guns and hunting and so forth, Brist said.

Joining Duck Dynasty on the Monday schedule are two new shows and one returning series. The new ones are Alaskas Wild Gourmet, about a family of caterers who prepare gourmet meals in the wilds of Alaska for hunting and camping groups; and Carters W.A.R., about a swashbuckling wildlife conservationist named Ivan Carter and his wildlife advocacy efforts (W.A.R. stands for wild animal response).

The returning series is The Gunfather, about a family of Italian-Americans from Long Island who have moved to Montana to run a family-owned gun shop. Yes, the show is about guns, but its more about the family-business dynamic than about firearms, Brist said.

He explained that Outdoor Channel, which is now available in about 40 million U.S. TV homes, hopes to draw more viewers among not just people who participate in outdoor sports, but armchair adventurers interested in certain aspects of the outdoor lifestyle such as conservation.

Outdoor Channel will always be rooted in the outdoors, he said, but pushing into other [areas of] adventure. The idea is to really grow to try and address the programming interests for what we have found in our research to be 134 million outdoor enthusiasts and armchair adventurers.

He emphasized that the companys Sportsman Channel, available in 32 million homes, will continue to emphasize traditional shooting and hunting sports. And World Fishing Network -- available in about 6 million homes in the U.S. and Canada -- will continue to be all fishing, all the time, he said.

For the second year in a row, Outdoor Sportsman Group held an informal upfront event Wednesday evening at a Texas barbecue restaurant in Manhattan. The companys pitch was informal too. Thanks so much for considering Outdoor Sportsman Group, putting us in your buys [and], thinking about where we can help your clients, not just in television but also in print and in digital, Brist told the group of ad agency reps at the informal gathering.

This summer, our mobile app will be launching as well, he said. There are a lot of ways to think about Outdoor Sportsman Group.
This is what study author Dr. Lukas Imbach, of the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland, and colleagues set out to investigate with their new research.

Symptoms of TBI include problems thinking, nausea or vomiting, headache , dizziness, fatigue , and irritability. Sleep problems may also occur following a TBI, according to the CDC, but to what extent?

Children aged 0-4 years, adolescents aged 15-19 years and adults aged 65 and older are most likely to experience TBI.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), every year, around 1.7 million people in the United States experience a TBI  defined as a sudden blow or jolt to the head that interferes with brain functioning.

Additionally, the study suggests that many people who experience a traumatic brain injury (TBI) may not be aware that they are experiencing sleep problems.

Sleep problems may persist for up to 18 months after a traumatic brain injury, suggests a new study published in the journal Neurology.

The team enrolled 73 participants. Of these, 31 had experienced a first TBI 18 months previously, while 42 were healthy individuals who had not experienced a TBI in the past 18 months.

As well as reporting their own sleep behavior and daytime sleepiness, the subjects were required to wear a body-monitoring device on their wrist for 2 weeks, allowing to the researchers to assess their sleep behavior.

Fast facts about TBI Of the 1.7 million people in the U.S. each year who sustain a TBI, around 275,000 are hospitalized

Falls are the leading cause of TBI

Motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of TBI-related death. Learn more about TBI

Additionally, participants spent one night in a sleep monitoring lab; their brain activity, eye movements, muscle activity, and heart rhythm were assessed as they slept.

Subjects also took part in a test that assessed how fast they fell asleep during the day in a quiet environment  a measure of excessive daytime sleepiness.

Participants with TBI slept an average of 8 hours each night, compared with an average of 7 hours a night for healthy subjects.

Subjects with TBI were much more likely to experience excessive daytime sleepiness than the healthy subjects, the researchers found, at 67 percent and 19 percent, respectively.

When subjects with TBI were asked how sleepy they felt during the daytime, however, they reported feeling no more sleepy than the healthy participants, suggesting that most individuals with TBI may not be aware of their sleep problems.

According to the American Sleep Association (ASA), excessive daytime sleepiness is a leading cause of fatalities from car accidents, and it is one of the most common symptoms for people with sleep disorders.

As such, Dr. Imbach notes that individuals with TBI and their doctors should be monitoring this issue.

The study also shows us that people with TBI may not be able to accurately assess their own sleep problems, he adds. Since this is how the sleep quality of many people with TBI is assessed, this may be a concern.

There was no difference in sleep problems among participants with mild or severe TBI, according to the researchers, and they did not identify any other problems that may explain sleep problems for those with TBI.

Based on their results, the researchers suggest that individuals who experience TBI may have sleep problems for up to 18 months after injury, although they are unlikely to be aware of it.

The results could have clinical implications for people with TBI.

This study makes a compelling case that sleep-wake disorders after TBI may represent a silent epidemic. It raises the question as to whether people with TBI should be referred for sleep studies. But further study is needed before any new recommendations are made or any guidelines are changed. Dr. Lukas Imbach

Learn more about a drug that could reduce damage from TBI.
Previous studies have linked multiple genetic changes to schizophrenia, but they have not managed to explain the varying symptoms.

The condition can give rise to hallucinations, and people can find it hard to interpret reality. It can also lead to learning difficulties, emotional withdrawal, and a lack of motivation.

Statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) indicate that schizophrenia affects 1.1 percent of adults in the United States within a 12-month period.

People who had modifications in each of the four distinct genes had different symptoms, intelligence levels and other features distinct from those with the other modifications.

The research, published in EBioMedicine, supports a call to see  schizophrenia  as an umbrella term for a range of conditions that may need different, more targeted treatment options.

Schizophrenia is not a single disease, say researchers who have uncovered four key genetic changes that explain four previously unknown conditions.

Researchers from New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center in New York, NY, led by psychiatrist Dr. Dolores Malaspina, examined 48 patients from different ethnic backgrounds with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

The team focused on symptom sets in patients and genetic changes that led to brain function disruption. The modifications that were studied were either rare or little known.

The results link four important genes with specific conditions. All of these impact the growth or regulation of nerve circuits.

One gene, known as PTPRG, encodes a protein that enables nerve cells to connect as they form nerve networks.

Fast facts about schizophrenia Positive symptoms include delusions, agitated movement and unusual thinking

include delusions, agitated movement and unusual thinking Negative symptoms include flat expression of emotions and difficulty starting or sustaining activity

Cognitive effects include difficulty understanding information or being able to use it to make decisions. Learn more about schizophrenia

In people with some rare mutations in this gene, symptoms of relatively severe psychosis emerge at a younger age, and learning difficulties may occur. Although some of these patients are highly intelligent, they may be held back by impairments in their working memory. Working memory is described as the scratchpad that the brain uses to store and process temporary memories.

A second gene, SLC39SA13, affects a zinc transporter that guides nerve cells to increase or decrease nerve impulses. People with SLC39SA13 modifications may face a range of cognitive issues, linked with low achievement at school and serious problems with emotions and motivation.

A third gene is ARMS/KIDINS220, which is involved in nerve cell growth. Alterations in this gene may not cause problems until later in life, after a person graduates from college. Cognitive decline follows, which is characteristic of a degenerative disease.

The fourth gene is TGM5, which plays a role in the stabilization of protein groups, including some groups linked to degenerative conditions that progress with older age, such as Huntingtons disease. In people with TGM5 modifications, symptoms are less severe, but they can include attention deficit disorder (ADD) during childhood.

First author Thorsten Kranz explains that treatments that do not work for one patient may be highly effective for another. For example, patients with modifications in ARMS/KIDINS220 could benefit from therapies aimed at protecting nerve cells, while those with a mutation in PTPRF may need treatment to enhance their working memory.

A common fallacy is that schizophrenia can be treated as a single disease. Our biologically driven study begins to answer longstanding questions in the field about why any two people diagnosed with schizophrenia may have drastically different symptoms. For the first time, we have defined four syndromes mechanistically. Dr. Dolores Malaspina

Dr. Malaspina adds that up to 1 in 3 patients with schizophrenia could now benefit from more targeted therapy, depending on the changes within these four genes, since 31 percent of patients with schizophrenia are likely to have one of these mutations.

She also expects the findings to provide a clearer insight into the condition as scientists pull these groups out of the mix.
People with rosacea appear to have a slightly higher risk of developing dementia, and Alzheimers disease in particular, compared with people without the common chronic inflammatory skin condition.

Share on Pinterest The researchers found that people with rosacea had an increased risk of dementia  particularly Alzheimers disease.

Researchers in Denmark who came to this conclusion also highlight that the risk is highest in older patients and those whose skin complaint was diagnosed by a hospital dermatologist.

The team carried out the study because there is evidence rosacea is associated with higher levels of certain proteins that have also been implicated in various brain-wasting disorders, such as Alzheimers disease and other forms of dementia. The proteins include matrix metalloproteinases and antimicrobial peptides.

In the Annals of Neurology, the researchers explain how they investigated the link between rosacea and dementia from data in Danish registers covering the period 1997-2012, when there were nearly 6 million Danish citizens aged 18 and over, including nearly 83,500 patients with rosacea.

The individuals were followed up to the end of 2012, or until they left Denmark, and were diagnosed with dementia, or died  whichever came first. Altogether, just over 99,000 developed dementia, including around 29,000 who were diagnosed with Alzheimers disease.

When they analyzed the data, the researchers found that compared with patients who did not have the skin complaint, those with rosacea had a 7 percent increased risk of dementia and a 25 percent increased risk of Alzheimers disease, with older people at the higher risk end.

For women, the raised risk of Alzheimers linked to rosacea was 28 percent, whereas for men with the skin disorder it was 16 percent.
The spinal cord has its own system for sensing changes in pH, according to a study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The new findings, which are published in Current Biology , show that cells in the central canal of the spinal cord detect and regulate pH, if it deviates from normal levels. Such changes may in turn impair the function of the neural networks of the nervous system.

The spinal cord conveys nerve signals between the different organs of the body and the brain, and it controls all our movements. Running in the midline through the cord is a thin tube called the central canal, which extends from the brain all the way down to the caudal vertebrae. The canal contains the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which flows around the brain and the spinal cord, and is coated with ciliated cells. The function of these cells has long eluded researchers and has been the object of much speculation.

"We have now shown that they operate as sensors that detect the acidity - the pH, that is - of the CSF," says Sten Grillner at Karolinska Institutet's Department of Neuroscience. "These pH sensors in the central canal demonstrate an elegant mechanism of detecting fluctuations in pH."

Each cell has two types of molecules in its cell membrane that detect pH levels, one reacting to acidic pH (called ASIC3) and the other to alkaline pH levels (called PKD2L1). The normal pH of the body is 7.4. These ciliated neurons are highly sensitive to even small deviations from the norm and disruption of the acid-base balance. The researchers behind the current study show that at a pH of 7.4, the cells have a very low level of activity, but as soon as the pH deviates from this value, in either the acidic or the alkaline direction, the activity level increases markedly through the activation of either the ASIC3 molecules (acidic) or the PKD2L1 molecules (alkaline).

Deviations in pH lead to changes in the highly regulated micro-circuits of the nervous system, and an impairment of their normal function. It is therefore vital that it can sense pH levels. When the nerve system is active, it releases lactic acid metabolically, and at high levels of activity, such as during intense exercise or epilepsy, this causes the pH in the nerve system to become more acidic. Under certain circumstances that affect the metabolism, there can instead be an increase in pH in the alkaline direction. The researchers show that both a lower (more acidic) pH and a higher pH (alkaline) has an inhibitory effect on the motor activity in the spinal cord. This occurs through the secretion of a neurotransmitter called somatostatin from nerve terminals of the pH-sensing central canal cells distributed within the spinal cord itself.

"When the central canal cells detect a change in pH, it thus gives rise to inhibition of the spinal cord's motor circuits, which results in a depression of the motor activity," says Professor Grillner. "This, in turn, helps the pH levels to return to normal."

The study was financed with grants from the Swedish Research Council, the EU's Seventh Framework Programme, Karolinska Institutet's research funds, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Museum National dHistorie Naturelle.
New discussion tool launched to aid patient/physician conversations on psoriasis.

Research funded by Celgene in collaboration with the Psoriasis Association reveals the extent to which itch, often an under-rated symptom of psoriasis, affects the lives of those with the condition, with 95% of those surveyed saying their psoriasis itches.1 The negative impact of itch is reiterated by healthcare professionals (HCPs): of those surveyed 62% said patients tell them itch 'drives me mad', 73% said patients tell them itch 'disrupts my sleep', and 56% said patients report that they are 'really self-conscious about scratching at work'.2

The survey also reveals the aspects of daily life impacted by itch for those with psoriasis. On a scale of one to ten with ten being the largest impact and one being no impact:

45% scored itch eight or above in terms of impact on their social life

46% scored itch eight or above in terms of impact on day-to-day home life.1

"We know that itching is a frustrating symptom of psoriasis, but what this shows us is the extent to which itch impacts people's lives, from a physical, psychological and social perspective," commented Carla Renton, Information and Communications Manager at the Psoriasis Association. "Itch is often a constant burden, and one that needs to be addressed in order to improve the quality of life of those living with psoriasis."

Surprisingly, given its impact, conversations around itch in psoriasis aren't routinely happening:

43% of people with psoriasis surveyed don't talk to their doctor or nurse about itch, with 72% saying they find it difficult to describe how much itch impacts their lives. 1

Moreover, just under a quarter (24%) of HCPs surveyed do not proactively ask patients about itch in consultations, in spite of 95% believing it is an important conversation to have.2

In response to the research findings, the Psoriasis Association, Celgene and the British Dermatological Nursing Group (BDNG) have launched the 'Itch Discussion Tool', which is available to download now at psoriasis-association.org.uk or bdng.org.uk. This tool was developed to aid conversations between physicians and people with psoriasis, specifically focusing on the impact of itch on everyday lives.

"Itch is an important and problematic symptom for people with psoriasis but one that may be overlooked by healthcare professionals," said Professor Chris Griffiths, Professor of Dermatology, University of Manchester. "This new Discussion Tool will help to ensure that itch is assessed as part of routine practice."

The tool comprises an itch impact questionnaire and an action plan. People with psoriasis can either complete the itch impact questionnaire before or during consultation, and then complete the action plan to tackle itch together with their HCP. The tool is currently being piloted in selected dermatology clinics in the United Kingdom.

The Itch Discussion Tool is part of the wider 'Life's an Itch' campaign, borne from previous research by Celgene showing a significant disparity between patients' and HCPs' perceptions of itch as a major factor of disease severity.3,4 People with psoriasis perceived itch as the most important factor contributing to their disease severity and as the most bothersome symptom of psoriasis.4 However, dermatologists only rated itch third in patients' assessment of disease severity.4

'Life's an Itch' therefore aims to bring to life the real impact of itch on the lives of those with psoriasis. To kick start the campaign, psoriasis bloggers were asked to submit the words they use to describe their itch to the Life's an Itch website. The campaign was then extended out to the patient community, inviting people with psoriasis to submit the words they use to describe itch. Over 1,600 words were submitted, generating a word cloud of the language most commonly associated with itch in psoriasis. A number of artists, representing different genres, were then commissioned to create bespoke ITCH ART inspired by the words of those with psoriasis. The resulting ITCH GALLERY will be travelling around psoriasis-related meetings and medical conferences during 2016 to help promote the availability of the Itch Discussion Tool.

People with psoriasis survey

A survey was hosted on the Life's an Itch website: https://www.lifesanitch.co.uk/. The survey was live from July 2015 until April 2016. In total, 429 UK-based people with psoriasis completed the survey.
Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Sunovion) has announced positive results from the Phase 3 clinical trial program for SUN-101 (glycopyrrolate), a nebulized long-acting muscarinic antagonist (LAMA), delivered via PARI's innovative investigational eFlow nebulizer system (SUN-101/eFlow), for people with moderate-to-very severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The two clinical trials met their primary endpoints with a statistically significant change from baseline in trough forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) at Week 12 for both the 50 mcg and 25 mcg dose groups versus placebo. SUN-101/eFlow also was found to be well-tolerated as a twice-daily maintenance treatment of bronchoconstriction in patients with COPD.

"The results from the GOLDEN-3 and GOLDEN-4 trials represent significant progress in our mission to deliver medicines to people with COPD," said Antony Loebel, M.D., Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Sunovion, Head of Global Clinical Development for Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma Group. "We look forward to filing an NDA and the possibility of making SUN-101/eFlow available for patients."

"Physicians are constantly seeking new innovations and treatment options to help patients with COPD manage their disease," said Dr. Selwyn Spangenthal, American Health Research and Principal Investigator for the GOLDEN-3 clinical trial. "SUN-101/eFlow, as the first nebulized LAMA, could represent a significant breakthrough for patients."

"We chose the closed eFlow nebulizer system to pair with SUN-101 because it represents a new type of nebulizer system which combines the attributes of both nebulizers and hand-held inhalers," said Alistair Wheeler, Head of Global Clinical Research, Respiratory Medicine and Biotherapeutics at Sunovion Pharmaceuticals. "This system is designed to provide COPD patients who are in need of LAMA therapy with a handheld aerosolized inhalation option."

The innovative, proprietary, closed eFlow nebulizer system, developed by PARI Pharma GmbH, is a unique type of closed system delivery device currently in development for the treatment of moderate-to-very severe COPD. It is a portable, hand-held, electronic nebulizer system that uses a vibrating, perforated membrane to generate an inhalable aerosol. The closed eFlow nebulizer system is designed to deliver the medication in two to three minutes from a distinctive proprietary drug vial inserted into the device. A standard jet nebulizer typically takes up to 10 minutes. The investigational combined product, consisting of SUN-101 and the closed eFlow nebulizer system, has not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of COPD.

Sunovion will present data from the GOLDEN-3 and GOLDEN-4 studies at upcoming medical meetings. These data will also support a SUN-101/eFlow New Drug Application (NDA) package, which the Company expects to submit to the FDA during fiscal year 2016.

About the GOLDEN-3 and GOLDEN-4 Clinical Trials

GOLDEN (Glycopyrrolate for Obstructive Lung Disease via Electronic Nebulizer)-3 and GOLDEN-4 were Phase 3, 12-week, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group, multicenter, efficacy and safety trials comparing SUN-101/eFlow with placebo in adults with moderate-to-very severe COPD. The trials enrolled 653 and 641 people respectively who were at least 40 years old at 45 and 49 sites respectively in the United States. SUN-101/eFlow 50 mcg, SUN-101/eFlow 25 mcg or placebo was administered twice daily. The primary endpoint was the change from baseline in trough Forced Expiratory Volume in 1 second (FEV1) at Week 12. Secondary endpoints included standardized change from baseline at Week 12 in FEV1 area under the curve (AUC), change from baseline in trough forced vital capacity (FVC) at Week 12, change from baseline in health status measured by St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire and change in rescue medication use. Safety was assessed by the number of treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAE), serious adverse events (SAE) or major adverse cardiac events (MACE) and the number and percentage of study participants who discontinued the study due to TEAE [NCT02347761 and NCT02347774].

About SUN-101/eFlow

SUN-101 (glycopyrrolate) is a long-acting muscarinic antagonist (LAMA) bronchodilator delivered via the innovative, proprietary closed investigational eFlow nebulizer system. SUN-101/eFlow is currently in development as a nebulized treatment for patients with moderate-to-very severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The investigational combined product, consisting of SUN-101 and the closed eFlow nebulizer system which has been optimized for SUN-101 delivery, has not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of COPD.
Results from the TOURMALINE-MM1 Phase 3 clinical study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, have shown that oral ixazomib capsules in combination with lenalidomide and dexamethasone (IRd) are effective in extending progression-free survival (PFS) with a manageable tolerability profile in patients with relapsed and / or refractory multiple myeloma (MM) compared to lenalidomide and dexamethasone (placebo-Rd) alone.1

Dr Matthew Jenner, TOURMALINE-MM1 trial investigator and Consultant Haematologist, Southampton General Hospital, said: "This is the first time data has been published supporting an all-oral triplet regimen containing a proteasome inhibitor in multiple myeloma. The results could represent a significant advance for multiple myeloma patients in the UK, as it shows that ixazomib in combination with lenalidomide and dexamethasone is an effective and tolerable oral regimen with a manageable safety profile for patients with relapsed and / or refractory multiple myeloma with benefits seen across all cytogenetic risk groups."

The TOURMALINE-MM1 trial is an international, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 3 clinical trial designed to evaluate once-weekly IRd compared to placebo-Rd for the treatment of patients with MM who have received at least one prior therapy.1

Eric Low, Chief Executive of Myeloma UK, said: "The publication of this data in the New England Journal of Medicine gives much needed hope for myeloma patients in the UK. Not only do the data show a progression free survival benefit in a difficult-to-treat stage of myeloma, but the all-oral treatment regimen also provides a more convenient way to take medication with less hospital visits and a potential health service benefit."

More than 5,000 people each year in the UK are diagnosed with MM, with more men than women being affected by the disease.2

It is the third most common form of blood / bone marrow cancer and around 2,700 people die of MM per year in the UK - that's more than seven people every day. 2,3

"The publication of data from the Phase 3 TOURMALINE-MM1 trial is another important milestone for ixazomib, which was recently approved by the FDA and is currently under review by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). This publication is the result of significant progress we have made with proteasome inhibition in multiple myeloma over the last decade and also reflects invaluable efforts from our employees, study investigators, patients and their families," said Jon Neal, Business Unit Director - Oncology, Takeda UK. "The expansive TOURMALINE clinical trial program investigates ixazomib's potential across many multiple myeloma settings, including newly diagnosed patients and maintenance therapy. We look forward to sharing additional ixazomib data from our ongoing TOURMALINE studies in the next few years."

Article: Oral Ixazomib, Lenalidomide, and Dexamethasone for Multiple Myeloma, Philippe Moreau, M.D., et al., New England Journal of Medicine, doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1516282, published 28 April 2016.
Chocolate is divinely delicious, mouthwateringly smooth and unfortunately full of fat. But reducing the fat content of the confection makes it harder and less likely to melt in your mouth. That's why scientists are investigating additives that could reinstate chocolate's delightful properties in these lower-fat treats. Now, researchers report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry an analysis that sheds light on how adding limonene could improve lower-fat versions' texture and ability to melt.

Flavor and sweetness make strong contributions to the pleasant experience of eating chocolate, but so do look and feel. Reducing the fat in chocolate, however, often ruins its texture and viscosity. Previous research has shown that adding limonene - a compound found in lemons and oranges - results in a smoother, softer chocolate that melts more easily than typical reduced-fat chocolates. Annelien Rigolle and colleagues at KU Leuven in Belgium sought to investigate exactly how limonene impacts chocolate production. They focused on one part of this process: the crystallization of one of its main ingredients, cocoa butter, which undergoes several important transformations at different times and temperatures.

The researchers examined crystallization at 63 F and 68 F using differential scanning calorimetry and X-ray diffraction to examine cocoa butter profiles when limonene was added. Surprisingly, they found that adding the compound accelerated cocoa butter crystallization at 63 F, but inhibited cocoa butter crystallization at 68 F. Varied concentrations of limonene also affected the crystallization steps of the cocoa butter differently, so they could ultimately affect the texture of chocolate. The study suggests that carefully choosing the amount of limonene and the temperature at which chocolate is processed could lead to a smoother, more luxurious reduced-fat chocolate.

The researchers acknowledge funding from the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders, Belgium (FWO), and KU Leuven University.

Article: Isothermal Crystallization Behavior of Cocoa Butter at 17 and 20 C with and without Limonene, Annelien Rigolle, Bart Goderis, Koen Van Den Abeele, and Imogen Foubert, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, doi: 10.1021/acs.jafc.5b05965, published online 12 April 2016.
For the first time, scientists studying stool transplants have been able to track which strains of bacteria from a donor take hold in a patient's gut after a transplant. The team, led by EMBL with collaborators at Wageningen University and the Academic Medical Centre, both in the Netherlands, and the University of Helsinki, Finland found that compatibility between donor and patient likely plays a bigger role in these transplants than previously thought. The study, published today in Science, could help make stool transplants a valid treatment option for more conditions than they are currently applied to.

"Ultimately, the goal is to move from a stool transplant to something more manageable, such as a pill," says Simone Li, who carried out the work at EMBL. "Our work shows that this is likely going to be a personalised bacterial cocktail, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution."

Stool transplants - also known as faecal microbiota transplants - involve taking microbes from the poo of a healthy donor and transferring them to the patient's gut. The hope is that this will help to restore health to patients suffering from conditions where the normal balance of microbes in the gut gets skewed. The approach has been very successful for treating recurrent Clostridium difficile (C. diff) infections - which can cause life-threatening cases of diarrhoea, and are becoming a serious problem in hospitals and healthcare institutes. But for other conditions, like ulcerative colitis, stool transplants have proven much less effective. The current study, led by Peer Bork and Shinichi Sunagawa at EMBL, could help improve those odds. The trick, the scientists say, is to look beyond what species of microbes are in a person's gut, to what strains of each species.

Most people have E. coli in their gut, for instance, but different people have different strains of this species - and some of those strains can cause health issues. By distinguishing between different strains, the EMBL scientists were able to track if the microbes in a patient's gut after the treatment were their own or came from the donor.

They found that after a stool transplant, new strains of microbes from the donor were more likely to colonise a patient's gut if the patient already had that species. This implies that if doctors can match donors to patients, the chances of the treatment being a success could improve considerably. Looking at strains rather than species of bacteria could also make the therapy effective in conditions where it isn't currently working.

"With this method, we can really see if, for example, an antibiotic-resistant strain is replaced by a non-resistant one," says microbiologist Willem de Vos, who led the work at Wageningen University and the University of Helsinki, "so it could help to design stool transplants to work in other conditions beyond C. diff."

The study builds on a clinical trial that looked into the use of stool transplants as a treatment for metabolic syndrome, run by Max Nieuwdorp at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam. Although based on data from only 10 people, the work already provides strong indications that donor-patient compatibility is more important than assumed: transplants from one donor led to very different outcomes in three different patients.
About one in five underage youths reported consuming alcoholic jello shots in the past 30 days, and those youths were more likely to binge drink, consume more alcohol, and to have been involved in physical fights related to their drinking than their peers who did not consume jello shots, a study led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher shows.

In the study, published in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Substance Abuse, Dr. Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences, and colleagues from Johns Hopkins University and Fiorente Media, Inc., of Boston used a national sample of 1,031 youths, ages 13 to 20, to assess past 30-day consumption of jello shots.

Jello shots are alcohol-infused gelatin that can be made at home or sold in bars. Siegel and colleagues say they may contribute to the initiation of alcohol use among novice drinkers "through use of a recognizable, widely available, appealing product such as jello as a channel for alcohol consumption."

This is the first study that sought to gauge the extent of jello shot consumption among underage youths, the authors said.

The study found the prevalence of past-month jello shot consumption among the underage drinkers sampled was 20.4 percent - slightly higher for females than males. There were no significant differences by age, race or region - but there was a trend of increasing jello shot use with lower levels of household income, as well as a higher prevalence among those without Internet access, according to the findings.

Jello shot users were "significantly more likely to drink heavily" than those who did not consume the shots, consuming alcohol 2.2 days more per week, on average, than non-users, the study found. The average number of alcoholic beverages consumed per month for jello shot users was also significantly higher, at 30.9 drinks per month, compared to an average of 18.8 drinks per month for non-users.

Jello shot consumption also was significantly associated with an increase in engaging in physical fighting when drinking, the study found. A total of 18.7 percent of jello shot users reported getting into a physical fight after consuming alcohol, compared to 9.5 percent of non-users.

The most common types of alcohol reported as being used in jello shots were bourbon and vodka. Although the survey did not specifically ask what brand of alcohol was used in the shots, the most common bourbon brand consumed among youths who reported using bourbon in their shots was Jack Daniels, and the most common vodka brands reported were Smirnoff and Absolut.

The authors said their findings have several important public health implications - namely, that national agencies and organizations should consider adding jello shot consumption to their youth alcohol use surveillance systems.

Siegel said that while the researchers could not conclude that jello shot consumption was the cause of heavier drinking among youths, such consumption "appears to be associated with riskier patterns of alcohol use and increased risk of adverse consequences, suggesting that specific interventions to address this consumption may be warranted as part of the effort to reduce risky alcohol use among youths."

He and his co-authors recommended further research to clarify the causal relationship between jello shot consumption and risky patterns of drinking, and to explore which brands are most popularly used in preparing the shots.

Jello Shot Consumption Among Underage Youths in the United States. Michael Siegel, Ashley Galloway, Craig S. Ross, Jane Binakonsky & David H. Jernigan Journal of Child & Adolescent Substance Abuse. DOI:10.1080/1067828X.2014.981773. Published online 18 Feb 2016.

The study was funded by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Besides Siegel, co-authors were: Ashley Galloway, a recent graduate of BUSPH; Craig S. Ross of Fiorente Media, Inc.; and Jane Binakonsky and David H. Jernigan of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Study suggests porn plays a positive role in encouraging condom use among men who have sex with men.

Men who view more sexually explicit pornography where condoms were used were less likely to have anal sex without a condom themselves. A study by Eric Schrimshaw, PhD, at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, and Martin J. Downing, Jr., PhD, of the Public Health Solutions shows evidence that suggests pornography can have an important protective function by encouraging men to use condoms. Findings are published online in the journal PLOS ONE.

The research is among the first to examine the relationship between sexually explicit media and the frequency of condomless anal encounters.

According to Schrimshaw, who is an associate professor of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health and the paper's first author, the findings showed no evidence of a public health problem stemming from watching most internet-based sexually explicit media. "Actually one type of pornography was associated with higher rates of condom use -- men who viewed more pornography containing condom use engaged in fewer condomless anal sex encounters. Even those who took part in compulsive pornography viewing were not more likely to engage in condomless anal sex," noted Schrimshaw.

However, watching pornography containing condomless anal sex was associated with more condomless anal sex behaviors. "These findings have important policy and HIV prevention implications," said Downing.

Results were based on an online survey of 265 men who have sex with men and who had viewed sexually explicit media in the past three months. Participants were recruited via ads on Craigslist and Facebook and asked about the amount, compulsivity, and proportion of condomless anal sex and anal sex with condoms. Eligible men for the survey were at least 18 years of age and resided within 50 miles of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, D.C.

Nearly all (92 percent) of the men having sex with men reported viewing sexually explicit media containing condomless anal sex, and 48 percent agreed that seeing this had contributed to them engaging in riskier sex. Viewing the explicit material led to acting out the things they saw for 70 percent; 55 percent reported that viewing sexually explicit media led them to seek out sex afterwards.

The men surveyed were also asked to comment on how they perceived the effects of viewing sexually explicit media. Respondents agreed that pornography containing condomless anal sex contributed to their engaging in riskier sex, which the study authors say suggests that pornography can encourage men to engage in more sexual risk behaviors. This perception lends support to the argument for greater availability of sexually explicit media that contains anal sex in which condoms are clearly used by actors, noted Schrimshaw. "The potentially negative consequences on behavior, therefore, has policy implications for pornography directors, producers, distributors, performers, and viewers."

Historically, condom use within the sexually explicit media industry has been self-imposed for the purpose of HIV/STD transmission prevention among the performers. However, with the increase in the prevalence of condomless anal sex in Internet-based porn, the Los Angeles City Council passed regulations mandating condom use among adult film performers for occupational safety purposes. A similar ballot initiative will be voted on statewide in California in November 2016.

Even more extreme, a bill has been passed by the State Assembly of Utah that labeled all sexually explicit media, regardless of condomless content, a "public health crisis." Downing responds, saying, "Our findings run counter to Utah's recent legislation since we now know that most pornography is not associated with more sexual risk behaviors."

"Indeed, our finding that viewing pornography that contains condom use is associated with fewer condomless anal sex encounters suggests that pornography may have a potentially important protective function by encouraging men to use condoms," noted the authors. However, future research will be needed to test whether safer sex interventions using sexually explicit media in which condoms are used by performers will result in changes in condom use behavior.
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From January 2006 through March 2013, 28,989 of 122,002 of babies, or 23.8%, received a histamine-2 receptor antagonist or proton pump inhibitor. Babies diagnosed with GERD, congenital heart disease and ear, nose and throat conditions were the most likely to be prescribed the medications."The number is surprising, because there are now multiple studies that say these drugs are associated with harmful effects," said Jonathan L. Slaughter, MD, MPH, lead author of the study and neonatologist at Nationwide Children's. "There's actually little evidence that acid suppression helps in the NICU at all."Some amount of stomach acid likely protects these babies, who have compromised immune systems, from harmful bacteria, according to Dr. Slaughter, who is also a principal investigator in the Center for Perinatal Research in The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's and an assistant professor of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine."GERD itself is over-diagnosed without complete testing," Dr. Slaughter said. "When reflux is present, reduction of acid alone does not prevent the reflux. Many symptoms commonly associated with GERD in preterm infants, such as breathing problems, are often simply due to immaturity."The study authors found that the percentage of babies treated with histamine-2 receptor antagonists declined from 2006 to 2013, and while the percentage of babies treated with proton pump inhibitors rose until 2010, it declined afterward."It's encouraging that doctors are starting to pay attention to the warnings and decrease usage," Dr. Slaughter said. "In the small premature babies who are prescribed acid suppressive medications, doctors are waiting longer, until they are a little older. That's promising. But I think the numbers should be declining faster, and the research community should continue to devote resources to study the drugs' effectiveness and safety."Most babies who are treated with the suppressive medications in the NICU continue to take them at discharge from the hospital, the study found. Doctors should consider a plan to wean the babies before they leave, Dr. Slaughter said. Among other reasons, parents want to know that their children can eventually stop the medicine."Parents are right to ask questions and voice concerns about starting the drugs, or about the timetable for stopping," Dr. Slaughter said. "Parents should not be afraid to ask about evidence for the medications working or about possible side effects."Neonatologists at Nationwide Children's use acid suppressive medications in limited circumstances only after confirmation of GERD following testing, and work with the hospital's associated NICUs to ensure that only babies who can be helped by them receive them, according to Dr. Slaughter.Source: Eurekalert
Introduction

Since the onset of the war in Syria, refugees have flocked to Jordan. Some have been housed in refugee camps, but the vast majority settled throughout the country, burdening its society and economy - the latter of which is based primarily on foreign aid. Jordan has taken in massive waves of immigration over the years, mostly Palestinians and Iraqis, and with the influx of refugees from Syria is facing a huge financial burden as well as the demographic, social, economic, and political ramifications of their arrival and their presence.



Syrian refugees in Jordan (Image: Unhcr.org)

The Jordanian media have been increasingly occupied with the issue of the Syrian refugees and their future in the kingdom, particularly following two major events. First, the Jordanian census, conducted in late 2015, showed that non-Jordanians comprise some 30.6% of the population, and that the approximately 1.3 million Syrian refugees in the country now total about 13.2% of the population.[1] According to a special supplement in the official Jordanian daily Al-Rai on the issue of the Syrian refugees, 62% of them in Jordan are not registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), meaning that the organization is not bearing the expenses that they incur in the kingdom. Furthermore, some 80% of the refugees reside not in refugee camps but in Jordanian cities and villages, and therefore receive the same services, such as education and healthcare, as Jordanian citizens do.[2]

The second event was the Supporting Syria and the Region Conference, held in London in early February 2016, on the issue of Syrian refugees in countries bordering Syria. The conference, sponsored by the UK, Kuwait, Germany, Norway, and the UN, was attended by 70 heads of state and international organizations.[3] Prior to the conference, Jordan made every effort to increase awareness of its situation: Jordanian officials, including King Abdullah II, met with officials from all over the world and explained in detail the economic and social challenges that Jordan is facing because of the refugees.[4] At the conference it was agreed to guarantee Jordan was $2.1 billion in grants for development of infrastructure and $5.7 billion in loans for reducing its deficit.

These two events sparked a lively public debate in Jordan on the issue of the refugees, including dozens of articles in the Jordanian press, where Jordanian writers discussed the ramifications of the refugee presence in the kingdom. Some were critical of the international community for making Jordan responsible for them while doing little to help either the refugees or Jordan. Many expressed concern that the refugees would be granted Jordanian citizenship, to the detriment of Jordan's existing citizens, and argued that the interests of Jordan and its existing citizens should take priority. However, following the London conference, several articles called for accepting the new reality and for seeking ways for Jordan to benefit from it.

This report will review the public debate in Jordan on the issue of the Syrian refugees:

Concern For The Interests Of Jordan And Its Citizens, Fears Of Refugee Naturalization

A substantial part of the debate on the refugees centered on the need to deal with the problem while prioritizing the interests of the kingdom and its citizens. A common motif in statements by Jordanian officials, and in articles in the press, was that Jordan has already done much more for the refugees than its limited economic resources allow. The debate also focused on the duration of the refugees' stay in Jordan, highlighting fears that they would be naturalized.

King Abdullah: We Are At The Limit Of Our Capacity To Bear This Burden

In his opening remarks at the Supporting Syrian and the Region Conference in London, Jordan's King Abdullah II spoke of how the Jordanian people have suffered because of the refugee crisis, saying: "...[L]ooking today into the eyes of my people and seeing the hardship and distress they carry, I must tell you: We have reached our limits. I represent the people of Jordan. Their well-being and safety are my first priority. Our country will continue to do what we can to help those in need, but it cannot be at the expense of our own people's welfare."[5]



King Abdullah II at the Supporting Syria and the Region Conference (Al-Ghad, Jordan, February 5, 2016)

On the eve of the conference, the king told the BBC in an interview that he expects the Syrian refugees to remain in Jordan for an extended period - "at least 17 years." He stressed that the aid Jordan would receive from the international community would also be crucial for Jordanian citizens, not just the Syrian refugees: "If we are going to create jobs for Syrians, and bring them as part of our labor force, I know it is sometimes considered, has been considered over the years, as unpopular. Refugees, when they come to a country will stay for a long period of time, UN figures say at least 17 years, so whether we like it or not Syrian refugees are going to be part of our country for some period of time to come. So they have to be integrated into the labor force, everybody knows that. But as we go to this conference, if you are going to create a job for Syrians, you have got to create more jobs for Jordanians. So we are going to this conference in that respect. You can't just do it for Syrians and ignore the Jordanians. That's part of the process..."[6]

In January, Jordanian Royal Court Chief Fayez Al-Tarawneh met with Jordanian intellectuals to discuss the Syrian refugee issue; his statements at that meeting caused a stir and sparked criticism. He called for a halt to complaints about the presence of refugees in the kingdom, and hinted that Jordanians must eventually accept the "Syrian element" in the country because it would likely be there for at least a decade.[7] In response, Jordanian MP Bassam Al-Batoush protested against Al-Tarawneh's use of the term "Syrian element," calling this a dangerous development in official discourse that prepares the ground for the naturalization of Syrian refugees in Jordan. He expressed concern about an obliteration of the Jordanian identity and about Jordanians becoming a minority in their own country.[8] At a parliamentary session following the Supporting Syria and the Region Conference, several MPs expressed concern that the aid promised to the kingdom was conditional upon bringing refugees into the labor force, and demanded that the aid guaranteed to Jordan in the conference would be used to cover the budgetary deficit.[9]

This desire to give preference to Jordan's interests in dealing with the refugee crisis, as well as the fears regarding Jordan's future, were also apparent in the press. Several articles also expressed concerns regarding the permanent resettlement of refugees in the kingdom, the marginalization of Jordanian laborers by Syrian refugees in the job market, and of the kingdom's inability to bear the costs of the refugee presence.

Columnist: "The Human Torrent, Which Could Drown Our Country And Harm Our Sovereignty, Terrifies Us"

Tareq Masarwa, a columnist for the official Jordanian daily Al-Rai, wrote about Palestinian and Iraqi refugees' settlement in Jordan, and warned that many Syrian refugees would likewise prefer to remain there permanently. He wrote: "The end of the fighting in Syria will not prompt all the refugees to return [there], since people, like trees, cannot live without putting down roots in the soil, particularly after years of living as refugees... When the Syrian war ends, many [refugees] will return, but many [others] will remain...

"We in Jordan are people of tolerance, honor, and Arabism, but the human torrent, which could drown our country and harm our sovereignty, terrifies us... Everyone is welcome, provided they do not harm the rights of Jordanians to their own country, and their exclusive right to defend its constitution, its army, its security, its stability, and its national honor."[10]

Former Jordanian Minister: We Fear That The World Will Place The Burden Of Refugees On Jordan At The Expense Of Its Citizens

Former Jordanian government spokesman and minister of media and communication Samih Al-Ma'aytah, who now heads the board of directors of Al-Rai, also expressed apprehensions about granting the refugees citizenship in Jordan, based, he said, on past experience with Palestinian refugees. He wrote: "The term 'naturalization,' that is linked first and foremost to the Palestinian issue, is causing concern among the Jordanians. This is because it is the interest of the Zionist occupation to resettle the sons of Palestine outside its borders, so that they hold other citizenships and actualize their political and national rights at the expense of other countries and other peoples. Jordan and its citizens, and the Palestinians, are the main victims of the 'naturalization' issue, because it is only the Zionist side that stands to gain from it.

"Today, this [issue] is reemerging in the lives of the Jordanians, but in the context of the Syrian refugees. We have all begun to hear about ideas coming from others, informing the Jordanians that they have to prepare for the process of naturalizing their displaced Syrian brothers. And, as with all 'naturalization' efforts, in which the Jordanians have become well versed, they begin with a first dance [step], and we all know how they end. The first step in preparing the ground [for 'naturalization'] is to make us believe that because no solution for the Syrian crisis is on the horizon, our Syrian brothers will remain in Jordan forever, becoming elements in [its] economic, social, and demographic situation...

"We fear that the world, which opened its gates [to the refugees] cautiously and in a measured fashion, [now] wants to place the burden of this crisis on the countries that border Syria, chiefly Jordan, while taking advantage of these countries' economic situation. Naturalizing these millions will gradually become the [final] objective, that will [necessarily] come at the expense of the citizens of these countries and their rights to work, education, and healthcare - even at the expense of a safe life. This will be in exchange for aid and economic relief that might end at any given moment...

"Today maybe they say that we must [provide] employment [for the refugees] and tomorrow we will hear that [we must provide them] with temporary passports. The day after that, [they will demand equal rights] for the children of Jordanian women married to Syrian men.[11] The [aid] given to Jordan will not reach Jordanian [citizens], because the cost of hosting [refugees] is far greater than the [aid] provided by the international community - which is given today, but may not be given tomorrow."[12]

Writer: Hosting Refugees Must Not Come At The Expense Of Citizens Of The Host Country

On the eve of the Supporting Syria and the Region Conference, Al-Ghad writer Fahd Al-Khitan called for directing the conference first and foremost towards dealing with the interests of Jordan and its economy. He wrote: "Now that the [Syrian] crisis has entered its fifth year with no solution in sight, the countries hosting [Syrian refugees] and the international community must come up with a new, creative approach for dealing with this long-term challenge, and must manage a refugee crisis that will last many years, until Syria's security stabilizes. Therefore, they must start to think of replacing emergency aid programs with other frameworks that take into account a long stay by refugees [in their host countries], and that provide [them] with the chance of a dignified life.

"[However,] all this must not come at the expense of citizens of the host countries, whose suffering has increased as a result of the stiff competition for jobs and the state budget's inability to provide development needs and services to areas where the population has, in some cases, doubled, such as the cities and towns in the North...

"An unemployed Jordanian citizen will have a hard time seeing his Syrian brother hired for a project while he himself is not given the same opportunity. This situation will create, in the medium term, many problems and complications that we don't need..."[13]

Columnist: In Job Market, Jordanians Should Take Priority Over Syrians

Al-Rai columnist 'Issam Qadamani also addressed the issue of hiring Syrian refugees in Jordan, arguing that when it comes to hiring, Jordanians should be prioritized: "The issue of hiring Syrian refugees in Jordan will be discussed at the donor conference in London [i.e., the Supporting Syria and the Region Conference], and has already been a main topic of discussion for UN officials who visited Jordan in recent weeks. But what of the hiring of Jordanians as well?...

"[I] support the notion that Syrians should be employed, as part of a job market that is open to all, but that preference should be given to Jordanians. This, however, will require large-scale and permanent investments and projects, open commercial trade routes, and markets that are ready for consumption [of goods]. These can only be achieved with true aid from the international community, without raising the bar of expectations. Jordan must not meet the demands of the international community if it does not meet its own needs."[14]

Criticism Of Insufficient International And Gulf Aid For Jordan

Along with concern for Jordan's interests, several Jordanian writers criticized the international community, claiming that it itself was not doing enough to deal with the Syrian refugee crisis, and that it was failing to provide enough aid to Jordan that was buckling under the weight of the refugee burden, leaving it to its own devices and even demanding that it take in more. Others complained that the Gulf states, despite their wealth, are not helping Jordan, and are themselves refusing to bring Syrian refugees into their job markets even though they hire large numbers of foreign laborers.[15]

Al-Ghad Editor: International Aid To Jordan Is Insufficient

Jumana Ghanimat, editor-in-chief of the daily Al-Ghad, criticized the scope of the aid guaranteed to Jordan at the Supporting Syria and the Region Conference, calling it insufficient. She wrote that only a small portion of the aid - $2.1 billion - was in grants, while the rest - $5.7 billion - was in the form of loans: "The large scale of loans compared to grants proves that the world has yet to feel truly responsible for the refugees and for the suffering experienced by them and by their hosts. The Europeans should expect further movement of refugees in their direction, because the aid they provided is insufficient."[16]

Al-Ghad Writer To UN Envoy: What Will You Offer Jordan In Return For Your Request That We Accept More Refugees?

Al-Ghad writer Fahd Al-Khitan criticized UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi's demand that Jordan increase the number of Syria refugees in its territory: "Mr. Grandi yearns for Jordan to agree to increase the number of Syrian refugees it accepts, 'without this affecting the security situation in Jordan.' In other words, the high commissioner wishes to be generous to the Syrian refugees, at Jordan's expense...

"Let's be reasonable, Grandi: A country with limited resources like Jordan, which must deal with dangers from every direction and with struggles to ensure its own stability, cannot let just anyone do as they please [there]. Let us ask, with all due respect: What aid have you up your sleeve for Jordan, in return for your request that we accept more refugees? Dozens of UN officials before you have already made a mockery of us - coming to Amman, visiting the Al-Za'atari refugee camp, praising our generous hospitality, showering us with compliments - and then leaving, with promises [to give us] millions [of dollars], of which we have so far seen nothing...

"Jordan's capability to absorb [refugees] cannot be exceeded - in fact, it already has been exceeded, and Jordan now has a grave demographic problem that prevents it from maintaining its open-border policy. This comes in addition to the harsh economic situation, and to the worrying indications that the Syrian struggle will be continuing for an unknown period of time. We realize that the solution to the Syria situation is not in the hands of Grandi and the UN; it is also not in the hands of Jordan, unless the international community intends to evacuate all Syria's residents [to Jordan] as a radical solution for the conflict. If this is the line of thinking, then we have already done more than our part."[17]



"The London Conference" tells Jordan that it cannot have the aid it wants: "The eye sees [what it wants], but the hand cannot provide it" (Al-Ghad , Jordan, February 4, 2016)

Al-Dustour Columnist: U.S., Europe Are Responsible For Refugees' Sorry State

Al-Dustour columnist Ibrahim 'Abd Al-Majid Al-Qaisi wrote: that the wealthy U.S. and European countries are responsible for the Syria crisis, and rebuked them for complaining about the refugees who have arrived in the West: "Our country is a kind of refuge, and is expected to remain one at the expense of our livelihood, future, and security... We are not grumbling or complaining about the arrival of our brothers from Syria. On the contrary - they are brothers who escaped death and have arrived in Jordan. But who is it that expelled them, destroyed their country, and still delays finding a solution for the Syrian problem? It is the international community and the superpowers, led by the U.S. and Europe - who, despite their great economic capabilities, were angered... when a few Syrian refugees - not even half the number of Syrian refugees and other Syrians who came to Jordan - fled to their soil."[18]

Senior Al-Rai Writer: Impoverished Jordan Houses Refugees, Wealthy Gulf States Do Not

After Al-Rai's publication of the 2015 Jordanian census statistics, senior journalist Fahed Al-Fanek, former Al-Rai board of directors head, complained about foreign countries' limited aid to Jordan, and also criticized the Gulf states's failure to help on this issue: "The initial data published by Al-Rai regarding the census show that Jordan, which lacks natural resources, including oil and water, and lives day to day thanks to foreign aid and grants it receives, has been given the role of warehouse for many who choose to leave their homeland and live elsewhere though they were not expelled or threatened... After every such wave [of immigration], donor countries quickly provided financial aid to Jordan to help it swallow this bitter pill, but then stopped the aid in anticipation of another wave.

"Why does Jordan open its gates freely to this intensive movement of refugees from Syria, while the wealthy Gulf states, which need workers and which import them from around the world, do not open their borders to Arab refugees[?] Especially considering that some of these countries are helping fund and support the violence in Syria, and should bear the consequences."[19]

Calls For Accepting Reality Of Refugees Remaining In Jordan, And For Attempting To Benefit From It

Following the Supporting Syria and the Region Conference, some accepted that the refugees would be remaining in Jordan for a long time, perhaps even permanently. They suggested leveraging this into benefit for the country by developing the labor market, transforming refugees into consumers buying local goods, and integrating them into industry and trade projects.

Former Foreign Minister: Refugees Can Be Useful If We Utilize Aid Money To Create Jobs

Former Jordanian foreign minister Marwan Al-Mu'asher called on the country to benefit from the refugee crisis by coming up with a strategic development program using aid funds to create jobs for both Jordanians and Syrian refugees. He wrote in Al-Ghad: "It is not enough to demand additional foreign aid [from the international community], even though it is vital. It is more important that we use this aid to implement a development program that substantially increases the Jordanian economy's ability to create new jobs... If we do not use the additional money [from foreign aid], whatever its sum, to invest in development, which will jumpstart job creation for Jordanians and Syrians, then we will face a very difficult challenge in all senses, economic, security, and social...

"This crisis can be turned into an opportunity. We can benefit from the potential of the Syrian refugees, while at the same time creating jobs for Jordanians. But this requires a smart economic policy that does not tackle each issue individually, but rather as part of a comprehensive strategic perspective that takes into account these refugees' remaining among us for 20 years..."[20]

Al-Ghad Columnist: Providing Refugees An Opportunity To Integrate Into Society Is A National Interest

Al-Ghad columnist Ayman Al-Safadi argued that providing Syrian refugees with an opportunity to integrate into Jordanian society was a national interest, and was also the only thing that would ensure that their impact on Jordanian society would be positive: "Jordan will not naturalize Syrian refugees. This is known to anyone versed in Jordanian politics. However, it is also a fact that most refugees will not be leaving any time soon...

"Thousands of the Syrians' children will grow up in Jordan. Educating them, and taking responsibility for providing them with tools to participate productively in society, are a [Jordanian] national interest. The alternative is living together with a huge number of frustrated, angry, and unproductive young people - constituting a social danger that begins with a heavier economic burden - dozens of times heavier - on the state, and will not end with the spread of crime and the creation of a miserable environment that terrorists will exploit to spread their falsehoods and lies...

"Today, we need a policy based on acceptance of the reality that the refugees are here to stay, for many years... Some have criticized the decision to find ways to employ them. Such criticism disregards the fact that giving them jobs is 10 times better than focusing on [providing] humanitarian aid, since they will surely remain [in Jordan] for who knows how long. Syrian refugees will not become Jordanian citizens, but they have already become a part of the society, influencing it as it influences them. Opportunities for education, employment, and dignified lives are the only guarantee that they will have a positive impact. This is in anticipation of the day when they can return to their homeland - [but] the wait for that day will be long."[21]

Al-Ghad Columnist: Syrian Refugees Are A Source Of Income And A Chance To Build The Economy

Similarly, Ibrahim Ghuraiba wrote in Al-Ghad that the refugees should be integrated into the society and into the country, becoming a productive workforce that would benefit the country, expand its sources of income, and develop its economy: "We can translate the phenomenon of Arab refugees in Jordan into advancements in the economy, new sources of income, and more. The arguments [that they pose] an economic and social threat, or that they threaten the fundamental sources of income, are baseless, since the economy today relies on human resources more than on natural resources...

"Naturally, there is nothing wrong with asking for aid and grants to absorb the refugees, but this will not provide substantial help for the national economy or the refugees. But what can help both Jordan and the refugees is transforming the existing manpower into a source of income and business, so that it advances the economy and increases the refugees' [quality of] life, making them productive individuals who are helping both themselves and the country. This is not difficult [to do]...

"The Egyptians,'[22] Syrians', and others' entry into [Jordan's] job market will increase [the quality and quantity] of goods and services, foster competition, and protect the consumer. When refugees and non-citizen residents become a productive workforce, they create a series of revenues that will increase the GDP, [strengthen] the economy, and improve [quality of] life. This is because they will be consumers paying taxes, purchasing goods, renting, and consuming services and products, thus increasing the country's revenue, markets, and existing services, and adding additional income...

"It is known, of course, that an increase in the population also increases the opportunities to establish institutions, and [increases] the number of talented innovators and entrepreneurs. [It also] expands the markets, and streamlines industry and trade projects. In order to make the refugees a source of economic development and prosperity, we need nothing more than good intentions and a scrap of proper and honest management."[23]

* Z. Harel is a research fellow at MEMRI.



Endnotes:
Aarefa Johari, a 29-year-old Muslim journalist based in Mumbai, comes from the community of Bohras, a sect of Shi'ite Muslims. This community is mostly found in western India, especially in Mumbai and Pune.



Journalist and anti-FGM campaigner Aarefa Johari (image courtesy: womensweb.in)

In recent years, Ms. Johari has emerged as a major voice against the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) that is prevalent in many parts of the Muslim world. However, it seems this practice, known locally as khatna, is also prevalent among Bohra Muslims. Bohras are an orthodox community and very little is written about them publicly. Ms. Johari's campaign has now focused on FGM among Bohra Muslims.

In two recent interviews, Ms. Johari discussed her own personal experience with regard to FGM and the response she gets from community members about her anti-FGM campaign.

Following are excerpts from a report based on Ms. Johari's interview with Anahita Mukherji, a senior editor with The Times of India daily,[1] and from an interview with her last year:[2]

Times Of India Interview: "Her Frock Was Pulled Up; Her Mother Told Her That Something Would Happen To Her 'Down There'"

"Aarefa Johari was seven when she was taken to a dingy building in Bhendi Bazaar [in Mumbai] for an appointment with a woman she did not know. Her frock was pulled up. Her mother told her that something would happen to her 'down there' that would only take a minute. In hindsight, she's thankful for what little preparation she received before her khatna, the word Bohras [a sect of Shi'ite Muslims] use for circumcision. The procedure fits the World Health Organization's definition of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

"The Bohra community, though, would never dream of calling it that. 'Bohras think FGM is one of those terrible things that 'African tribals' do. They only think they're snipping off a tiny bit of skin. But given the unscientific manner in which it's often performed, there's no way of knowing how much skin is cut off. And why should they be cutting off anything at all?' asks Johari (29), journalist and co-founder of Sahiyo, an organization battling khatna.

"She remembers 'something being done between my legs' at the time of her khatna. 'I think I cried and was in pain,' she says, recollecting vaguely a sense of soreness while urinating soon after. But the pain wore off, and she didn't think much of the incident while growing up. 'Bohras use the word khatna for male circumcision as well as for what's done to women. I remember khatnas being celebrated in a big way for boys in the family. It was a little more hush-hush for girls, and was sometimes celebrated with a quiet lunch,' she says.

"Many years later, as an adolescent, she recalls her mother showing her a magazine piece on a Bohra woman talking about her own experience of khatna. That was probably the first time both mother and daughter began thinking of the subject. As a college student exposed to feminist ideas while studying liberal arts, Johari began understanding what had happened to her. She began reading about khatna, a practice that Dawoodi Bohras in western India inherited from Yemen, where they trace the ideological origins of their sect. It was a practice meant to snip the woman's clitoris, a part of the external genitalia involved in sexual pleasure.

"The more she read, the angrier Johari became. It was virtually a case of retrospective trauma as she began recollecting what she went through in that room in Bhendi Bazaar. Initially, her anger and betrayal was directed at her mother. After all, it was her mother who had taken her for the procedure. And isn't your mother supposed to protect you?

"Much later she began to realize that it wasn't her mother's fault. 'Women are often used as a mere cog in the wheel of patriarchy. Men don't always have to be directly involved in the process of controlling women,' says Johari. She figured, over time, that her mother had not intentionally tried to harm her, and had not known the implications of the procedure. While the physical damage that FGM will have on a woman will vary depending on how much is cut off, Johari stresses on the psychological scars. As for whether the practice affects a woman's sex life, Johari says that's something she will never personally know, because she will never have a frame of reference."

Interview: "I Realized That Very Few Other Bohra Women Want To Talk About This Subject Openly - Everyone Is Too Afraid Of Being Ostracized"

Question: "You advocate an extremely important issue. There are few who dare to cross established boundaries. Tell us what made you take this up."

Aarefa Johari: "I took it up because to me, it was the most obvious thing to do. An injustice was inflicted on me and it continues on so many young girls in my community. It's a violation, and the moment I was old enough to understand the meaning and intended repercussions of this act of violence, I found myself outraged. For a long time, I used to take out my anger about circumcision (and other aspects of patriarchy) at home, at my mother and other family members. I only started speaking out in public some three years ago, after an anonymous Bohra woman started a change.org petition to get the Syedna [the spiritual leader of Bohra Muslims] to stop this practice. That is when a lot of media outlets began looking for Bohra women who would talk about the subject openly, without concealing their identity, and I didn't mind doing so.

"Gradually, I realized that very few other Bohra women want to talk about this subject openly - everyone is too afraid of being ostracized and boycotted by the community - although many women do want to discuss the subject anonymously. For myself, I did not think of speaking out against this practice as 'crossing a boundary,' because I am not a religious person and have disconnected myself from the community in many ways. I never for a minute cared about being boycotted because I am not looking for anyone's approval before I speak my mind and call out injustices."

"In India, It [FGM] Is Restricted To The Bohra Community, As Far As I Know; We Haven't Heard Of Any Other Sect Practicing It"

Question: "Is FGM restricted to the Bohra community or is it prevalent in other sects of Islam too? What do religious leaders have to say about this practice?"

Aarefa Johari: "In India, it is restricted to the Bohra community, as far as I know. We haven't heard of any other sect practicing it. In fact, in Pakistan [on a visit there] when I spoke about this topic, a lot of people (Muslims) came up to me in shock, asking, 'Muslims do this? Really?' Across the Islamic world, scholars have clarified that there is nothing about female circumcision in the Koran or in Islam, and yet, the Bohras practice it in the name of Islam. In Africa and other parts of the world where it is practiced, communities often believe it is an Islamic ritual, even though it isn't. And the fact is, in many parts of the world, it is non-Muslims who have been practicing FGC."

Question: "How have your own family and close acquaintances reacted to your raising voice against FGM?"

Aarefa Johari: "Thankfully, my immediate family has been supportive - no one has asked me not to speak out. I do wish more of my family members would join me in publicly denouncing this practice, but among Bohras there is a culture of never upsetting the status quo - even if there is dissent, it is behind closed doors; for the public, there are appearances. I can't say I have done any significant work in this field yet - I have a long way to go - but so far, most of my acquaintances have reacted positively.

"I have had a few people tell me that they would not continue the practice on their daughters. On the other hand, I did have one relative who was very upset with me for speaking out - this is a person (woman) who believes that women need to be circumcised because they have too much sexual energy that needs to be curbed, and that all uncut women become prostitutes."

"Religions Serve To Disempower Women, Even If They Claim Otherwise, Because Pretty Much All Religions Are Rooted In Patriarchy"

Question: "What role does religion play in empowering women?"

Aarefa Johari: "In my experience, none. Religions serve to disempower women, even if they claim otherwise, because pretty much all religions are rooted in patriarchy. As long as patriarchal systems exist, women cannot be truly empowered."

Question: "If there is one thing you could change about the way women are treated in India, what would that be?"

Aarefa Johari: "It's hard to pinpoint one thing. Every problem has its root in a social structure that places men above women. It is a structure that places immense pressure on men as well, because they have to conform to certain ideas of masculinity just as women are expected to subscribe to a specific kind of femininity. If these ideas are wrecked at their very base, then I guess women will be treated as equals."



Endnotes:
A transsexual who was attacked in August 2015 in the Madrid district of Tetuan. Santi Burgos

The Madrid region is experiencing a significant rise in homophobic attacks this year, according to gay rights group Arcopoli.

The association said there had been 52 attacks since January, one every two days or so on average. Not every aggression was reported to the police.

Arcopolis is asking for urgent measures to fight these hate crimes, while the government delegate in the region and the Madrid Attorneys Office say they are using all the tools at their disposal to do so.

Using social media F. J. B. Madrids Chief Attorney, Jesus Caballero Klink, also sees greater social awareness about hate crimes. "They are well identified in social media," he said. "The Madrid Attorney's Office has a department specializing in cyber-hate, and it coordinates with law enforcement agencies to deal with this behavior using legal tools." Ricardo Ruiz de la Serna, a lawyer specializing in hate crimes, says that some far-right groups thrive in the social media, at certain gyms and at sports events.

The Spanish capital is by far the worst offender, with the highest rate of reported assaults located in Chueca, Madrids gay neighborhood, and in the surrounding areas of Callao, Cibeles, Colon and Alonso Martinez, according to Arcopolis, a university-based group.

Gay couples, mostly men, walk hand in hand in these areas, or kiss when they go out, without realizing that they are no longer in the safest area, said Ruben Lopez, the associations hate crimes spokesman. Weekends and holidays typically register more attacks.

The classic victim is a man between 18 and 25 years of age, who sustains bruising and, in fewer cases, fractures.

Except for two very serious cases, the rest were discharged [from hospital] within hours, says Lopez.

Greater awareness

Manuel Rodenas, who coordinates the Madrid regional governments LGTB program, says that homophobia is not a new problem.

In his opinion, there is now greater social awareness about it, and people are reporting it more often.

Government delegate Concepcion Dancausa says hate crime investigations fall to the National Police and the Civil Guard. Victor Lerena (EFE)

It didnt get covered in the news before, and social media did not exist or did not have such an impact, says Rodenas, a lawyer by trade. Now people are losing their fear of reporting it.

The Madrid government has a special hotline (+34 917 010 788) for victims, and a department made up of psychologists, social workers and lawyers at their disposal.

Government delegate Concepcion Dancausa said that the work that remains to be done is basically getting people to report cases.

Its not odd that complaints are on the rise, she said. In fact, I dare say thats a good thing, because there is nothing worse than having the crime exist but people be afraid to report it, and for it to go unnoticed. In that case, we cannot roll out the necessary means [to fight it].

Meanwhile, the National Police has appointed a coordinator to deal with homophobic crimes in the Madrid region.

One of the problems we are facing is the fact that many victims are not aware that they have experienced a hate crime, says Inspector Jose Ramon Murillo, the coordinator. In the case of homophobia, you have the added element that the victims do not want to draw attention to their sexual conduct. Often they prefer to preserve their privacy rather than report [the crime].

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The issue of hate crimes, which include homophobia, has also created friction between the government delegation in Madrid and the city authorities. Dancausa noted that investigating these crimes falls to the National Police and the Civil Guard.

Her remarks came shortly after a new master plan released by the Municipal Police included the fight against hate crimes. Sergeant David Martin Abanades is the coordinator of this new service by the Madrid police force.

The main thing is to provide support for the victim, just like with gender violence, and to end hate speech. This can certainly be fought by the Municipal Police, said Martin, who has been in active duty for 20 years.

Martin sought to convey that they will work in coordination with the National Police.

There is no war, no confrontation, he said. We have more than enough work to keep both law enforcement agencies busy.

English version by Susana Urra.
Protesters take to the streets of the city of Maracaibo after two days without electricity. EFE

More information El racionamiento electrico provoca protestas y saqueos en Venezuela

As Venezuelas energy crisis worsens, with frequent and sustained blackouts throughout the country, looting has broken out in at least seven states. On Tuesday, in Maracaibo, capital of the western state of Zulia, people took to the streets to protest a second consecutive day without electricity amid soaring temperatures.

Local media reported that at least 12 shops had been looted in the city, as well as government premises. The government has not commented on the disturbances, but Francisco Arias Cardenas, the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) governor of Zulia, said that more than 70 shops had been destroyed in the city of Maracaibo and 103 people arrested. Cardenas attributed the violence to right-wing groups that are trying to take power.

In Valencia, in the central state of Carabobo, protesters burned tires on train lines. There were outbreaks of looting reported in Mirandas state capital of Los Teques, as well as in towns and cities in Bolivar state.

Water levels at the Guri dams Simon Bolivar hydroelectric power station have fallen to just above the collapse line

President Nicolas Maduro blames the El Nino weather phenomenon for a drought that has seen water levels at the Guri dams Simon Bolivar hydroelectric power station, which produces 70% of the country's power, to fall to just above the collapse line. If the level falls below that point, water wont reach the turbines that generate electricity. Critics accuse the government, which took over the electricity sector in 2007, of mismanagement, failing to invest in alternative electricity generation and of corruption.They add that billions of dollars have been invested in the electric power industry in recent years to no apparent effect.

A project to build a dam in Tocoma, in the south of the country remains unfinished. It is supposed to produce half the electricity required by the region, which is currently supplied by the Simon Bolivar hydroelectric plant at the Guri dam.

The government has sought to tackle the electricity shortages by reducing the working week to two days, as well as extending public holidays. But unless it rains in the coming days, Venezuela faces a near-total blackout.

English version by Nick Lyne.
The anti-corruption prosecutor in the Noos case, Pedro Horrach. Tolo Ramon

The anti-corruption prosecutor in the Noos case, which affects a member of the Spanish royal family, will use a recent raid against a far-right union to try to get Princess Cristina de Borbon acquitted of all charges.

Manos Limpias, whose leader Miguel Bernad was arrested this month on extortion charges, is the sole private prosecution in the case against the infanta, as Cristina is known in Spain. Bernad, a self-styled corruption crusader who spent years targeting bankers, politicians and even judges, had managed to get a royal on trial for the first time in Spanish history.

Bernad allegedly asked Cristina de Borbons defense for 3 million in exchange for withdrawing his accusation against her

But both the prosecutor Pedro Horrach and the governments defense attorney have claimed that the princess is innocent of the tax fraud charges leveled against her in connection with her husbands shady business dealings. They refuse to press any charges, and Horrach has been particularly vocal in his defense of Felipe VIs sister.

Now Horrach will use the raid against Manos Limpias to try to get the private prosecution thrown out of court, on the legal basis of procedural fraud. If he convinces the Balearic Islands court overseeing the Noos trial that Manos Limpias is not an acceptable party to the case, Cristina de Borbon would automatically be acquitted, as no accusation against her would remain.

Prosecution sources said that Horrach will first ask Madrid colleagues for information regarding various proceedings currently underway against Miguel Bernad, who is being held in custody and has reportedly already told close friends that he might voluntarily drop all his ongoing court cases.

A controversial group Manos Limpias has been a controversial group throughout its two-decade existence, and acted as the private prosecution in practically every corruption case to see the inside of a Spanish court, from Noos and Gurtel, to Punica (affecting the Popular Party), the ERE case in Andalusia (affecting the Socialist Party) and the Pujol family case in Catalonia.

He and his friend Luis Pineda, head of a consumer rights group, are accused of extracting money from victims in exchange for dropping lawsuits against them or withholding negative media coverage.

Bernad allegedly asked Cristina de Borbons defense for 3 million in exchange for withdrawing his accusation against her. Her lawyer reported the case to the authorities.

Horrach will not be the first legal representative at the Noos trial to ask for Bernads group be thrown out of court. On April 21, following the raids against Manos Limpias and Ausbanc, the defense for Diego Torres, one of the main defendants in the Noos case, made a similar request, but it was dismissed.

English version by Susana Urra.
People at Madrid's Barajas Adolfo Suarez airport. CARLOS ROSILLO

Spain keeps losing population, and there are two major reasons for it: increasing numbers of Spaniards are moving abroad, and there are fewer foreign residents in the country.

On January 1, 2016 there were 99,439 fewer residents in Spain than a year earlier, according to preliminary figures released on Thursday by the National Statistics Institute (INE).

The registered resident population of Spain is currently 46.5 million, a 0.2% decrease in the annual rate.

Births and deaths El Pais Last year, for the first time since the 1930s, Spain recorded more deaths than births in the first half of the year, according to preliminary INE figures. This trend is expected to continue, and will play an increasingly large role in dwindling population figures.

The figures are based on local resident registration, known as the municipal padron. Councils regularly send in updated figures to the INE for statistical purposes.

The latest numbers confirm a downward trend that began in 2012, with the economic crisis in full swing.

Foreigners, who represent 9.9% of the registered population, fell by 128,372 individuals. Of these, the main nationalities were Ecuador, Britain and Germany. The INE notes that in 2015, around 123,000 foreign nationals were granted Spanish citizenship.

To this downward flow must be added the Spaniards who are moving away in search of better job opportunities. Since 2009, there has been a 56.6% rise in the number of Spanish citizens living abroad, according to INE data released in March.

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There are 4.6 million registered foreigners living in Spain, of whom nearly 1.8 million are European Union citizens. The largest communities are Romanian, British and Italian. Moroccans make up the largest non-EU group in Spain, followed by the Chinese and the Ecuadorians.

Statistics show that the most heavily populated regions of Spain are Andalusia, Catalonia, Madrid and the Valencia region. At the other end of the spectrum, La Rioja, Cantabria and Navarre continue to be the most sparsely populated areas in the country.

There were population declines across all regions over the course of last year, except for Madrid, the Balearic Islands and Catalonia, as well as the exclave cities of Ceuta and Melilla.

English version by Susana Urra.
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Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

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The 76-32 vote, which capped two days of budget work on the floor of the Republican-controlled chamber, set the stage for further negotiations next month once the GOP-led Senate passes its own spending plan.

The transportation budget would rise nearly 6 percent, due in part to previously approved increases in the state fuel tax and vehicle registration fees that will take effect in 2017.

Other new big-ticket allocations include more than $100 million to start covering a small portion of the cost of expanding Medicaid insurance to 600,000 low-income adults under the federal health care law, and hundreds of millions of dollars to buy expensive specialty drugs to treat Medicaid recipients and prisoners who have Hepatitis C and cystic fibrosis.

Around $40 million would be directed toward the Flint emergency in the 2016-17 fiscal year, including $2.6 million more for the state attorney general's probe that is expected to broaden beyond the charges filed last week against two state regulators and a city official.

"This is a record-amount of money that we've spent on roads and bridges in Michigan. It's kind of a big issue  it has been over the last few years," House Appropriations Chairman Al Pscholka, R-Stevensville, said while urging support for the legislation.

Many Democrats voted against the bill, however. They raised objections that included concerns over a company serving food in prisons, funding levels for local governments, staffing levels at a troubled veterans home in Grand Rapids and public money covering Republican Gov. Rick Snyder's legal bills for Flint-related criminal probes.

Democrats also unsuccessfully tried to restore about $60,000 in per-diem and travel expense funding for members of the state Board of Education. GOP lawmakers had stripped the money after being angered by the Democratic-led board's proposed guidance to schools on supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students  including letting them use the bathroom in accordance with their gender identity.

Rep. Kristy Pagan, D-Canton, said she was "extremely disappointed" because board members are "simply doing their jobs to ensure that schools are safe and welcoming for all of our students."

The budget also would:

 train 350 more corrections officers and outfit a state police recruiting school to train 64 new troopers;

 expand dental coverage to people including low-income teens in Wayne, Oakland and Kent counties  which would complete a yearslong effort to make such coverage available in all 83 counties;

 remove roughly $20 million for a call center and advertising that aid enrollment in the Medicaid expansion program, which is known as Healthy Michigan;

 reimburse public and private schools for lead testing undertaken in the wake of the Flint disaster;

 implement an e-filing system to encourage people to file their Michigan tax returns on the Internet for free.

Legislators hope to have a final budget deal by early June, four months before the new fiscal year begins.
PORT AUSTIN  Port Austin Community Players (PACP) will unveil its latest production, The Diary of Anne Frank, on Friday.

The production  which is dramatized by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hacket  will transport the audience back in time, almost 75 years ago, to Amsterdam, Holland, where seven, then eight frightened people hid in a factory building attic, clinging to life with hope and determination.

This is the setting for the story of a young girl and her family, trying to escape the fate of many of their friends, the Nazi death camps. Based on the book, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, attendees will witness the days of fear, joy, laughter, despair  the days of life, that she, her family, their friends, and their protectors endured for two long years. Anne was a young girl who grew into a very special, gifted author, never to be forgotten. Her diary and her life live on in this unforgettable drama.

It is with humble joy, and respect that PACP presents a play that makes us, all of us, think about our world and out lives, states a news release. The Franks are portrayed in this production by Melanie Rogers as Anne, Steve Mausolf and Rita Wencel as her parents, and Charity Rich as her sister Margot. Their friends, the Van Damns by Lori and Craig Lehrke, and their son, Peter, by Raymond Heins. Mr. Dussel, their dentist guest, is played by Dennis Hafeli. Rounding out the cast are their two lifelines with the world outside, Miep, played by Jennifer Rogers, and Mr. Krawler, by John Jacobus. The production is directed by Gary E. Sturm.

Performance dates are at 7 :30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday. The following weekend, performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. May 6 and 2 p.m. May 8. Please note there is no performance on Saturday, May 7.

Adult ticket prices are still $12, but there is a special youth rate for those 18 and under (its $5). This is to encourage those who may have read the play in middle of high school. For reservations call 989-738-5217.

This is a special production for Port Austin Community Players, but even more so for the extremely talented cast and most all our audience, stated Sturm in the news release. You may leave the theater not with a sense of despair, but with a feeling of joy and hope, knowing that there is a purpose to all of our lives.
The pair cut open the girl's pant leg, pinched her toes to see if she had feeling and fit her with a neck brace. Sweat flecked their faces by the time they had the patient  a perfectly healthy classmate  strapped to a back board 12 minutes later.

"You are acting like professionals and you haven't even finished this class yet!" Gretchen Medel, an EMT who oversaw the mock exercise during the first responder course she teaches at a health care-focused high school east of San Francisco, told the students.

Decades after "shop class" became known as a lesser alternative for children deemed unfit for college, vocational education is making a comeback in many of the nation's high schools. States such as California, Colorado and Louisiana are looking to rebranded "career pathways" that combine technical training with academics built around an industry theme as a way to get more young people to pursue some post-secondary education  whether it's a certificate from a two-year school or a four-year degree.

Supporters of the renaissance hope it will keep students engaged and prepare them for the stable, middle-income jobs employers say they can't fill.

"Career and technical education is really the perfect blend of the academic, the technical and the employability skills. Students come out college- and career-ready because they have the skills in all these essential areas," Association for Career and Technical Education Executive Director LeeAnn Wilson said.

Congress has endorsed the revival of such hands-on learning, at least in concept. An education reform bill adopted last year includes career and technical education, or CTE, in the definition of a well-rounded K-12 education. Over the next year, lawmakers are expected to strengthen the federal law that provides about $1.1 billion a year for job training in grades 7-14.

The trend represents a course correction from efforts of the past 30 years that assumed exposing all students to the same college prep curriculum would be an antidote for achievement gaps, past inequities and the nation's flagging economic competitiveness, said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

The "high school to Harvard pathway," as Carnevale calls it, was not a cure-all; the percentage of high school graduates immediately enrolling in a four-year college only rose from 40 percent in 1990 to 42 percent in 2013, according to the most recent federal data.

While research on high schools that integrate career exploration with academics has shown positive effects for attendance and graduation rates, some education experts worry it could lead to a new form of tracking.

"I think we can identify 9th grade students who have career interests and build a rich, challenging curriculum around those interests. That's a smart thing to do," Kevin Welner, who directs the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said.

"What's not smart is to identify 9th grade students who are academically struggling and then track them into these separate academic programs that have watered-down expectations and watered-down instruction," he said.

Nowhere has the renewed embrace of work-based learning been stronger than in California, which expects to spend $900 million to reinvigorate career and technical education at high schools by 2019.

The money comes on top of another $500 million the state has awarded to partnerships of public school districts, community colleges and employers promising to prepare students for jobs in fields that do not require four years of college.

The private James Irvine Foundation also has spent over $100 million in the last decade to promote "linked learning"  a strategy that weaves technical courses, interaction with industry professionals and practical skills such as public speaking into a career-focused college prep curriculum.

"Being in a pathway helps students connect the dots: 'Oh, this is what the math is for,'" Linked Learning Alliance President Christopher Cabaldon said.

Elsewhere, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, wants to devote $75 million over five years to equipment that would modernize and expand career and technical education. Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has pledged $21 million to take a technology high school model that IBM started in Brooklyn statewide in seven years.

Dozier-Libbey Medical High School, where Medel teachers, is located next to a hospital that is the largest employer in the city of Antioch, a former mill, mining and ranching town 45 miles east of San Francisco.

The school district is one of the first in California to have every student participate in a career pathway. Eighth-graders apply to their top four choices among the 10 spread out over three high schools, with spaces awarded through a lottery.

Since enrolling as a freshman, Joshua Espinosa, 17, has set his sights on becoming a paramedic.

"You actually get help from professionals that actually teach at other schools, so I think it's pretty cool," he said. "It makes me want to do it even more."
LANSING  Common Core is a step closer to being no more.

The Senate Education Committee on Tuesday approved Senate Bill 826, a measure to repeal the Common Core State Standards in Michigan. Six other Senate Republicans are co-sponsoring the bill, which now heads to the full Senate for a vote.

Sen. Patrick Colbeck, R-Canton, introduced the bill in March. It would terminate all plans, programs, activities, efforts and expenditures relating to the implementation of the educational initiative commonly referred to as the common core standards.

It is time to end the disastrous national experiment that is Common Core and let Michigan manage its own destiny to achieve excellence in our education system, said Senate Education Committee Chairman Sen. Phil Pavlov, R-St. Clair Township.

Replacing Common Core will put children at the center of Michigans education system, return control to local school boards and communities, and raise expectations for our students to better equip them to be good citizens.

If passed, the state academic content standards would be changed to the same academic standards that were in effect in Massachusetts during the 2008-09 school year. It would also direct state officials to align state testing with the new standards and require them to honor parents right to opt out their child from the state test, Pavlov said in a news release.

Pavlov says the committee heard lengthy testimony from parents, educators and education experts, including Dr. Sandra Stotsky, professor emerita at the University of Arkansas, who helped develop but ultimately rejected the Common Core State Standards in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts has been widely praised for a number of years as the best state for education, Pavlov said.

Some local superintendents say last years testing was overkill for students.

Last year, juniors at Harbor Beach High School were busy  11 hours of testing busy.

There were (elementary school) children that were just plain tired of testing and they just gave up, Harbor Beach Superintendent Larence Kroswek told the Tribune last week.

I wish that this would become more of a local controlled decision when it comes to assessment and curriculum, Bad Axe Superintendent Greg Newland said.

Read more on what they say here: http://bit.ly/1VyubNx.
VASSAR  After a long day of slingin sales and closing on deals for the Huron Daily Tribune, Rebecca Watson has a 45-minute drive and 20 steps from her car to the front door of her home before shes greeted by the most energetic 4-year-old girl youll meet, as well as her adorable 16-month-old bald-headed baby. Shes their Supermom.

Watson, 32, joined the Tribune in early March as its new advertising director. Although she lives out of the county, she took the position with a full team accompanying her  husband, Ryan, and two children, Taylor and Zachary.

Watsons journey of becoming a mother started nearly five years ago.

During a typical day in 2011, Watson  27 at the time  had a hunch she and her husband could welcome a new addition to their family. Nine months later it became a reality: on Oct. 14, 2011, baby Taylor Rae entered the couples life, their first daughter.

I cant explain the weirdness or feeling that you get, Watson said. Its your child. Youve never met this person and you see this person, and you basically fall in love with them.

Its different than when you meet your spouse or start dating someone, she added.

You get to know them, and you fall in love with them, but when you see your kid, you literally just fall in love with them.

Nine months of preparation bundled down to a few words for Watson.

Its surreal. Its scary. Its exciting. Its different, she said. I think the whole nine months youre pregnant you just prepare to have a baby.

A lifestyle change quickly met Watson with the birth of her daughter. She now had to make several decisions, on a daily basis, ranging from the right brand of diapers to deciding whether or not she would send Taylor to daycare.

However, because of her great support system  her family  Watson said the transition into motherhood was very smooth.

That would be my mother-in-law (Terry), my parents, and I had an amazing sitter, Melinda, she said. She (Melinda) was also my friend so she watched Taylor while I worked.

Maintaining a career was one thing Watson clearly wanted to do  not just for herself, but to show her children what their Supermom is capable of.

I want my children to know their mom was able to manage it all and work and support them, she proudly said.

Over the next three years, Rebecca, Ryan and Taylor started creating new memories as a family with camping trips, outdoor activities such as four-wheeling and whipping up exquisite meals in the kitchen.

She is such a daddys girl, Watson said about Taylor. Wherever daddy is, she wants to be there with him.

The family would be met with another surprise a few years later.

On Dec. 5, 2014, the Watson family welcomed Zachary Ryan. Having one child may have been a tad easy, but two children was a little more difficult than planned  especially when it came to explaining to one child that attention time was soon going to be split.

It was way harder, Watson said, chuckling about the difficulties of having a second child. You have a toddler at home and now you have to balance a newborn, and the toddler doesnt understand when the newborn needs to sleep and so on.

She (Taylor) knew a baby was coming, but I dont think she understood it wouldnt be a play baby like she owned, she added.

But over the course of time, things began to run a little smoother. Day by day.

However, in life there are many unexpected events and challenges to face and overcome each day. For Watson, the challenges she faced are ones that no parent or individual ever wants to encounter.

He (Zachary) was around four and a half months when he started not sleeping, she said. He just didnt sleep. He would be up all night and we couldnt figure out what was wrong with him.

After trips to the doctors offices, and being told it was an ear infection or something viral, Watson became suspicious.

It was Mothers Day last year (2015), I woke up and my son was really pale, she said. He had started getting bruises on his arms.

Something just didnt sit right with Watson.

The day of Mothers Day, you know how when you walk around the house and you just know somethings wrong, and youve got that pit on the bottom of your stomach and you cant sit down and have to keep moving because you know somethings wrong? Watson recalled the afternoon. I started Googling my sons symptoms and I saw cancer on there (results).

I thought to myself, OK my son does not have cancer, she added.

For the rest of Mothers Day, the family lounged around the house and cancelled all plans. Watsons motherly instinct was kicking in, and not in a positive manner. Watson and her two children made a trip to the doctors the next morning  Taylor to get looked at for a cold and to find out what was wrong with Zachary.

After examining Zacharys rock hard stomach, the doctor quickly recommended Watson take him to get blood work  which left Watson in tears.

I didnt know what to expect or think ... how does this happen? she said.

At 8:27 a.m. on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, Watson received a phone call that would change her familys lives.

I could hear the stuttering in his voice, she recalled of the conversation with the doctor. He said, I dont want to have to tell you this over the phone, but I have to tell you so you can get to the emergency room as soon as possible.

Zachary was diagnosed with infant Pre-B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and Watsons local doctor wasnt sure how or what caused it. Watson and her husband took Zachary to Hurley Medical Center, where he ended up on life support the second day in.

He was on a vent and then he had to be airlifted to the University of Michigan because the blood cancer was so bad it started affecting his kidneys, she said. He needed to be somewhere where there was a kidney doctor.

It was the worst experience of my life, she said, remembering her son in a stretcher preparing to be life-flighted. It wasnt the survival flight that was the scariest. It was him being on a stretcher and running through the halls of Hurley. That was probably the most painful part.

The drive from Hurley to Ann Arbor was anything but pleasant. But a song came on the radio that gave Watson new hope.

The song With Arms Wide Open by Creed came on and when I heard it, I thought, Oh my God, Im hearing this song for a reason, she said.

Some of the first lyrics of the song made her realize her son will have a journey to overcome in his short-lived life. When Creed sang, Well I dont know if Im ready to be the man I have to be, it became words of hope.

When it comes to your child, statistics dont matter, Watson said. Its either my kids going to make it or my kids not going to make it, and damnmit, my kids going to make it.

Staying in Ann Arbor (versus returning to Hurley) was a good thing for us as a family because it allowed for Taylor to be there, she said.

On May 16, 2015, Zachary began chemotherapy treatment and Watson reached out to her Facebook friends to fill them in on the news. From there, the support began to pour in for the little victor with dozens and dozens of pictures on social media with words of encouragement.

His older sister has been by his side since day one, Watson said.

We told her that Zachary is sick and he has something called leukemia  she calls it kemia, Watson said. She handled it really well, and if you ask her to this day, she still wants to be a doctor. She wants to fix children.

Taylor appears to have an understanding of what her brother is going through. But instead of hiding it, shell be the first to tell you how much of a warrior her baby brother is.

Shell come up and tell you, My brother has cancer and he takes chemo, Watson said. She will tell them, My brother is the bravest person in the world.

The Watsons spent the next 10 months in the hospital, but on June 26, 2015, the prayers were answered  Zachary was cleared of cancer.

Its like youre at a beach and looking out to the ocean, Watson said. From May 12 to June 26, there were all types of waves. There were little waves that come at you and then there were tidal waves. There was a lot of tidal waves and as a parent, you dont have a choice. You just have to stand there and keep taking these waves and keep getting up and keep breathing because its your child.

When you hear the news that your son has no more cancer in his body, its literally just like a little ripple and I could breath again, she added.

As of today, Zachary is going through a maintenance phase so he only visits blue and maize country once a month for chemotherapy and other check-ups. He will continue to go to chemotherapy over the next two years.

Now, the Watson bunch are able to live together, happily, in their Vassar home, where the fun never stops. That includes intense games of Candy Land.

Its a life that Watson considers perfect.

When I walk in the door, I have a bald-headed toddler with the biggest smile on his face, Watson said with a cheek-to-cheek smile. He doesnt really talk yet, he just kind of goes, Ma ma  Da da.

Then you got Taylor running around the corner and telling me how happy she is to see me.

The love and compassion for her children clearly pours out of Watsons body on a daily basis  just ask her husband, Ryan.

Shes a good mom and shes there for her kids no matter what, he said. Shes a dedicated, loving mother and thats what makes her great.

As for Watsons future, things are looking bright.

As of right now, were healthy and happy, she said with a chipper smile. Were looking forward to just being a family again.
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...
On the heels of a five-state primary sweep, self-styled "presumptive" Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appeared in Washington today to outline a foreign policy stance that purported to add new funding for the armed forces, defeat extremists abroad and assert dominance over competing nations.

Aided by pre-written remarks and a teleprompter, Trump's speech, given at Washington, D.C.'s Mayflower Hotel, lacked much of the bombast and bluster that have characterized most of his addresses. However, the speech was long on indictments of the current administration and short on specifics about how to execute his own plans. And his policies, which he claimed would gain the support of all Americans, on both sides of the aisle, at times appeared to contradict each other.

Trump was introduced by Zalmay Mamozy Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan and the United Nations under President George W. Bush and a current counselor for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The world, Khalilzad said, finds itself in a period of instability that threatens international order, and the U.S. is in "withdrawal and retreat" after a decade-and-a-half of war.

"Mr. Trump has been a provocative voice in this debate," Khalilzad said. "His message has resonated with a significant part of our electorate."

Taking the stage, Trump lost no time in getting to the heart of that message: American foreign policy, he said, is a "complete and total disaster."

The scourge of the Islamic State, or ISIS, he said, was created as a result of misguided U.S. intervention in the Middle East, from Iraq, Egypt and Libya to "President Obama's line in the sand on Syria."

"All grew from the idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no interest in becoming a Western democracy. We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed," he said. "  Thousands of Americans killed, just lives, lives lives wasted, horribly wasted. Many trillions of dollars were wasted as a result. The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill."

On the topic of ISIS, Trump lambasted President Obama and his Democratic rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for refusing to "name the enemy" of radical Islam. The U.S., he said, must devise a plan to halt the spread of radical Islam, an effort he characterized as a philosophical struggle, but one that may require military action. For the extremist group itself, he issued a threat.

"Their days are numbered," he said. "I won't tell them where, I won't tell them how."

Likewise, he added, America should stop telegraphing its strategic moves, becoming more unpredictable against its enemies.

Several of Trump's goals appeared to be at odds with each other, or lacked clarity about how he proposed to reach them. The nation is overextended and in debt, he said, and has wasted trillions on wars in the Middle East with nothing to show for it. At the same time, he said, the military needs to be rebuilt, with increased funding and new ships and aircraft. He proposed to solve both by curtailing wasteful spending, implementing better trade practices and restoring lost American jobs by policing U.S. borders.

"I'm the only one, believe me, I know 'em all, I'm the only one that knows how to fix it," he said. "  A Trump administration will lead a free world that is properly armed and funded, and funded beautifully."

Trump also reiterated his previous position that U.S. allies are not paying their fair share into their own defense, saying that only four out of the 28 NATO nations spent the minimum 2 percent GDP on defense. America, he said, has to get tough and require these countries to pay up, or let them fend for themselves.

In the next breath, though, he said that America isn't doing enough to support international allies. He castigated Obama for "abandoning" missile defense plans with Poland and the Czech Republic and for "snubbing and criticizing" Israel while going soft on nearby hostile nations.

"He's treated Iran with tender love and care and made it a great power," Trump said of Obama, repeating his criticisms of the 2015 deal by which Iran agreed to give up some nuclear capabilities in exchange for reduced economic sanctions.

America, Trump said, has to be willing to walk away from any negotiating table if a solution "that's great for America" isn't attainable.

"My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people and American security above all else," he said. " 'America first' will be the major and overriding theme of my administration."

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@monster.com. Follow her on Twitter at@HopeSeck.
PORTSMOUTH, Va.  The Coast Guard Cutter Tampa crew returned to Portsmouth, Virginia, after a 54-day fisheries patrol Thursday.

During their patrol, Tampa's crew conducted 41 commercial fishing vessel boardings that resulted in the detection of seven commercial fisheries safety violations, one voyage termination and one fisheries violation.

Tampa's crew also assisted the crew of the fishing vessel Hope & Sydney when they became disabled about 70 miles east of Cape May, New Jersey.

The cutter Tampa is a 270-foot medium endurance cutter homeported in Portsmouth, Virginia.
EcoLur: Apricot orchards felled down in Gndevaz village for construction of heap leach plant

The apricot orchards in Gndevaz Village, Vayots Dzor Region, are felled down for the construction of a heap leach plan in the frames of Amulsar open pit mining project. Here they get ripe one month later than in the valleys, thats why they are less exposed to weather caprices. In 2015 the orchard owners sold their land areas to Geoteam Company, which implements Amulsar project. The villagers opposing to the project think even if these people regretted about their village, they had to enter into this transaction, as they didnt see any way out. This is what they told at their meeting with CA/IFC team, which had arrived in Armenia to examine the complaint against IFC (a member of World Wank) on the incompliance of the standards of social and environmental responsibility for Amulsar oper pit gold and silver mining. Have a look. 50-60% of the apricot orchards have been cut down in the area of the heap leach plant. We have a conflict here: on the one hand, we bought tractors with the company money and renovated the House of Culture. Those who sold their land areas, they simply got money for their land areas. Most of the land owners sold their land areas for 1-3 million AMD (US $ 2,000-6,000) and they mainly bough cars. Only several people received huge amounts of money  US $ 100,000-200,000: they gave their consent, as the company persuaded all that they had the consent of the government and showed the positive opinions of the environmental expertise and Sevan Committee Everybody can see the risks, but not those who received huge amounts of money, they will leave, but we will stay, the residents said. 28.04.2016 EcoLur
Sen. John McCain, one of the implied targets of retired Adm. William McRaven's stinging op-ed on "disrespect to the military" in Congress, had no immediate plans Wednesday to fire back at the legendary special operations leader who planned the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

McCain, an Arizona Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has "a lot of respect for Adm. McRaven" but a response was not now in the works to McRaven's criticism of the arguments by McCain, Jack Reed and other senators who opposed a promotion for Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey, a spokesman for McCain said.

Instead, McCain's office forwarded a letter to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus from McCain and Reed outlining their reasons for opposing Losey's promotion.

McRaven's ire expressed in a Sunday op-ed for the Tampa Tribune was triggered by the denial of a promotion to two-star rank for Losey, the current head of Naval Special Warfare Command and the former leader of Seal Team 6.

Losey later announced that he would retire this summer.

Losey's promotion was partly derailed by a letter to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus from McCain and Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat and ranking Democrat on the armed services panel. There was no immediate reply to a request for comment from Reed's office.

Losey had already been approved for promotion by the committee when McCain and Reed sent the letter to Mabus in January. In the correspondence, the two senators said they were concerned by a Defense Department Inspector General's report that Losey had violated whistleblower protection laws by firing, demoting or punishing subordinates he suspected of informing on him over a minor travel policy dispute.

After reviewing the IG's findings, "we maintain deep reservations over RDML's Losey's suitability to serve satisfactorily in the grade to which he's been confirmed," McCain and Reed wrote.

"We are especially troubled that during a time when the Navy is reportedly working to create a service culture and promote command climates that are free of threats of unlawful reprisals, that you would consider promoting RDML Losey when you specifically found that he created exactly the type of negative command climate that is so harmful to our military," the letter said.

In conclusion, McCain and Reed urged Mabus to "exercise your authority as Navy Secretary and not promote him to the next higher grade." Mabus later complied.

In his op-ed, McRaven called the denial of Losey's promotion a "miscarriage of justice" that fit a pattern of disrespect shown by members of Congress to senior military leaders from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down.

"During my past several years in uniform, I watched in disbelief how lawmakers treated the chairman, the service chiefs, the combatant commanders and other senior officers during Congressional testimony," said McRaven, now the chancellor of the University of Texas. "These officers were men of incredible integrity, and yet some lawmakers showed no respect for their decades of service."

Without mentioning McCain or Reed by name, McRaven wrote that "certain members of Congress" had decided to use the Losey case "to pursue their own political agenda. They held hostage other Navy nominations until Losey's promotion recommendation was rescinded. The ransom for their Congressional support was Brian Losey's career and, more importantly, his stellar reputation."

The whistleblower allegations against Losey arose while he was commander of Special Operations Commmand Africa, based in Stuttgart, Germany. McRaven suggested that the hard-charging Losey ran afoul of a small core of subordinates "who had been living in Europe for years enjoying the comfortable lifestyle in Stuttgart."

One of those subordinates was retired Army Special Forces Col. Fredrick Jones, who was Losey's civilian chief of staff. In an e-mail statement to The Washington Post, Jones called McRaven "the finest senior officer" he ever worked for and noted that McRaven had personally presented to him the Defense Superior Service Medal.

The presentation was "something I don't believe he would have done had he thought I was incompetent or unprofessional or was there 'fighting to maintain my comfortable life'" in Stuttgart, he said.

Jones called the whistleblowers "outstanding performers" and suggested that McRaven had been misled by Losey. He told The Washintgon Post that Losey was "masterful at managing upward," meaning that he was adept at manipulating superiors.

In a Senate floor speech earlier this month, Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican and one of a group of senators who initially raised questions about Losey's treatment of whistleblowers, praised the actions of McCain and Reed and said that Losey "can only blame himself for what happened.

"No matter how you cut it, though, the destruction of a distinguished military career -- especially one devoted to hazardous duty in Special Operations -- is unfortunate and sad. Yet that's accountability's harsh reality. He allegedly broke the law and must now pay the price," Grassley said.

The incident that led to the whistleblowing and the denial of the promotion began in July 2011 at the Norfolk Navy base travel office, Grassley said. "There was a minor dispute over who should pay for his daughter's airline ticket to Germany. As a Coast Guard Academy cadet, she was not entitled to travel as a dependent at taxpayers' expense," he said.

"Although Adm. Losey, his wife, and staff allegedly 'pestered' the travel office to pay for the ticket, Adm. Losey eventually purchased it with his own money. Nonetheless, the incident triggered a Hotline complaint on July 13, 2011. Adm. Losey was informed of the complaint two months later. It was all downhill from there," Grassley said.

"After learning of the anonymous Hotline tip, Adm. Losey was reportedly 'livid.' He saw it as an act of disloyalty and 'a conspiracy to undermine his command.' He reportedly developed a list of suspects and began a punitive hunt for moles," the senator said.

"In his drive to root out the moles, he created a 'toxic' environment in his command. His seemingly reckless behavior and blatant disregard for the law and well-being of his subordinates led to his downfall," Grassley said.

Losey also has his defenders in Congress. In a statement, Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican and member of the House Armed Services Committee, said, "I think Losey is a stand-up guy, who was raked over the coals.

"We are intimately aware of whistleblowers in the military -- in this case, it went too far in the other direction," Hunter said. "I think Chuck Grassley was wrong about Losey and the fact that some disgruntled contractors can derail the career of such a strategic thinker and great tactician is wrong."

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
While the White House maintains that U.S. troops supporting the fight against Islamic State militants are not in a combat role, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acknowledged Thursday that troops are fighting and dying in combat operations in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter about the status of operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Afghanistan, or ISIS, also known as ISIL, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford answered a line of questions from Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan about the March 19 death of Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Louis Cardin due to indirect fire at a small outpost in northern Iraq.

"Was he killed in combat?" Sullivan, a Marine reserve officer, asked.

"He was killed in combat, Senator," Dunford responded.

Army Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler, who was killed by ISIS fire on Oct. 22 in Kirkuk province, Iraq, also died in combat, Dunford said.

"When our [Joint Special Operations Command] troops conduct [counter-terrorism] missions in that part of the world, are they conducting combat operations?" Sullivan pressed.

Dunford agreed they were, and also assented that Air Force A-10s and F-16s dropping bombs on Iraq and Syria were also engaged in combat operations.

Why then, Sullivan asked, did the White House refuse to acknowledge that troops were in combat?

"Why does the administration go through these crazy somersaults that the entire country knows is not correct to say our troops are not in combat when they're in combat? The chairman of the Joint Chiefs just stated that pretty much everybody in the Middle East is in combat. So why does the president not level with the American people, why does the White House spokesman continually say they're not in combat," Sullivan said.

"I also think it diminishes the sacrifice of the American troops and their families," he added. "We know they're in combat; why can't we level with the American people and say they're in combat?"

In a Tuesday briefing, White House spokesman Josh Earnest reiterated the administration's stance on the topic.

"[U.S. troops are] not in a combat role, but they are in a role that puts them in harm's way," he said. "They are armed for combat. They are armed to defend themselves if necessary. But the role that they have is to offer advice and assistance to forces on the ground fighting ISIL in their own country."

Carter agreed with Dunford that the fallen troops had been killed in combat, but said the language of the White House was intended to emphasize the role of Iraqi forces out front.

The role of the troops deployed in support of counter-ISIL operations was "not to try to substitute for local forces  but to try to get them powerful enough that they can expel ISIL with our support," Carter said. "And when we provide that support, we put people in harm's way, we ask them to conduct combat actions."

Sullivan asked that Carter and Dunford pass his request for clearer acknowledgment of American troops in combat to the White House.

"[There are] 250 new Special Forces troops going to the Middle East but they're not in combat roles. Well, that's not actually true," he said. "I think that leveling with this committee, leveling with the American people is very useful."

Last weekend, Dunford paid a quiet visit to Fire Base Bell, where Cardin was killed, to award four Purple Heart medals to Marines wounded in the same attack.

"I just talked to them about what they were doing, what their mission was, and frankly just thanked them," Dunford said, according to a Defense Department news report.

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@monster.com. Follow her on Twitter at@HopeSeck.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Wednesday said he has spoken to his Russian counterpart three times to warn against provocations that could lead to U.S. retaliation such as the "attack profile" flybys by Russian warplanes of the guided missile destroyer USS Donald Cook this month. In testimony to the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford said that he initiated the phone conversation with Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia, and "I've now spoken with him three times." Dunford said that he and Gerasimov agreed not to discuss the substance of their talks but he had "conveyed the message that you'd expect us to convey." Responding to questions from Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, Dunford said that the flybys pose "a risk of miscalculation arguably greater than it was in the Cold War." Collins said she was concerned that the Russians were "engaging in behavior that eventually is going to lead to military engagement." Durbin said he had spoken to Russian Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak and the ambassador "almost laughs me off" and asks "why do you keep bringing this up?" Kislyak said the Russian warplanes were "perfectly within their rights" in the flybys of the Cook, Durbin said. However, Dunford said Cmdr. Charles E. Hampton, commander of the Cook, as well as the commanders of all U.S. ships, "has a responsibility to defend that ship. He doesn't have to ask anybody up the chain of command "for permission to defend his ship and its crew." The flybys put "that commanding officer in a situation where he has to make a judgment call" and "it absolutely establishes the risk of miscalculation," Dunford said. As the Cook left the Polish port of Gdynia on April 11, and was about 70 miles from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in the Baltic Sea, two Russian SU-24 jets made about 20 passes of the ship, some of them at an altitude estimated at just 100 feet. In the second incident on April 12, two Russian KA27 Helix helicopters flew several circles around the Donald Cook, apparently taking photos, after which two jets again made numerous close passes of the ship in what the Pentagon later described as a "Simulated Attack Profile." Gerasimov is the author of what analysts now describe as the "Gerasimov doctrine," which is seen as the template for the "hybrid warfare' carried out by Russia in the takeover of the Crimea and in support of the separatists in eastern Ukraine. In a paper published in 2013, Gerasimov said that the purpose of modern war was to erode the "readiness, will and values" of the enemy through "non-military means."--Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.

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A civil rights group has written to commander of Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia, demanding that she "immediately cancel or appropriately alter" a National Day of Prayer event at the university where officers have been invited to "come out and learn how leaders use prayer to make hard decisions." Mikey Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said Brig. Gen. Helen G. Pratt's office forwarded to officers at the university an invitation from the command chaplain to attend the "Prayerful Leadership" discussion on May 5 at school's Gray Research Center. Speakers include some of the school's top leaders, he said. "That's what makes this so egregious," Weinstein said. "All the top people will be there." The panel includes Col. Scott Erdelatz, the school's chief of staff; Col. Jason Bohm, director of the Expeditionary Warfare School; Col. Richard Hall, Wargaming; and Professor Rebecca Johnson, dean of the Marine Corps War College. Pratt did not respond to Military.com's request for comment on Wednesday. Weinstein said chaplains are well within Defense Department policy to email members of their own faith group and to invite them to events at the chapel, but emailing all officers through Pratt's office and holding the program at the university are prohibited actions. "General Pratt, if you do not immediately cancel or appropriately alter your current [National Day of Prayer] event plans to be in full accord with Constitutional and [Defense Department, Navy and Marine Corps] civil rights protections, MRFF's clients intend to file aggressive Inspector General and [Equal Employment Opportunity] complaints against you in a sincere effort to exhaust all administrative remedies prior to anticipated Federal Court litigation," he wrote. Weinstein said he was contacted by officers attending the school and now represents 21 of them opposed to the event being held there and hosted by its leadership. Weinstein does not identify his clients, he says, because they fear retaliation. A redacted copy of an email he received, which he provided to Military.com, makes it clear that attendance is voluntary, noting that officers "interested in attending" should RSVP to Command Chaplain (Cmdr.) Maurice A. Buford. But Weinstein said the officers his foundation represents make it clear they believe not showing up will be noticed. A redacted email Weinstein provided to Military.com purports to be from an officer who says he feels his "promotion [is] on the line if I do not attend this. "I was raised Protestant and have no issue with prayer but when the Commanding General sends out an invitation to a religious event I feel compelled to attend and if I'm not there my absence will be noted and potentially held against me," the email states. "What makes this even worse is the panel includes the leadership of the University and the school Directors and Dean with the message that Marine Corps University is a religious institution." The email says the panel discussion is not on ethics, but the idea that religion will make people better Marines. In the email, Command Chaplain (Cmdr.) Maurice A. Buford recalls that President Lincoln wrote that he was "driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day. "Come out and learn how leaders use prayer to make hard decisions. Understand how spirituality can help to establish good order & discipline as well as contribute to organizational success," Buford wrote. "Additionally, this panel will explain how proven leaders inspire others." -- Bryant Jordan can be reached at Bryant.jordan@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BryantJordan.
The House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday approved by a narrow margin an amendment to a defense bill to require women to register for the draft.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Republican from California, proposed the amendment to lift the restriction on women registering for the selective service at a committee-wide mark-up session of the proposed fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act.

"Here is why I think this is important; it doesn't matter in this debate whether you think women should be in the infantry or be in special operations," Hunter said during the session on Wednesday night. "I personally don't. If we had that vote in committee today I would vote against women being in infantry and special operations.

"But this is not about women serving in the infantry. The administration has made that decision unilaterally disregarding what the Marine Corps and special operations communities have said. But that's not what this is about. Right now the draft is sexist. Right now the draft only drafts young men. Women are excluded."

Hunter went on to explain that his generation has not seen the kind of warfare that requires a draft.

"We have not been in Vietnam or Korea, or World War II, where you have thousands of people a day dying, where you have massed artillery fires, where you have massed tank units rolling through people's lines we have not seen that," Hunter said.

"That is what a draft is for," he added. "A draft is because people started dying in the infantry and you need more bodies in infantry, that is what a draft if for. The administration would like to make this decision on its own. I think we should make this decision."

Hunter, who requested a roll-call vote on the measure, ended up voting against his own amendment. The amendment passed 32 votes to 30 votes, with strong support from female committee members.

The proposal prompted several lawmakers to weigh in on the issue.

Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, a Republican from Texas, made point in saying the president will not decide on the selective service.

"The only ones who can decide this are us because it is in law or the courts, and there is a court case that is ongoing through the process that challenges selective service being male-only," he said.

"We have a study that requires the defense department to come back to us about the selective service system about what the benefits are, about what the alternatives may be so that we have a fuller picture of the draft and what it would mean to keep it or to do away with it or to include females in it," he added.

Thornberry said he wanted to wait for the study, follow the court case and explore all the issues.

Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, thanked Hunter for proposing the amendment.

"I actually support universal conscription; I actually think if we want equality in this, if we want women to be treated precisely like men are treated and that they should not be discriminated against, we should be willing to support a universal conscription," she said.

Rep. Christopher Gibson, a New York Republican who has been on four combat deployments, said he welcomed the discussion on the draft.

"We have a standards-based force now, but we don't have a standards-based selective service and I think it needs to change, so I plan on voting for it," he said.

Gibson challenged Hunter on his statements that the purpose of the draft is to assign virtually anyone to a direct-action combat unit.

"If we need hundreds of thousands of folks to serve that hasn't changed any reality that we are going to be standards-based as to who is going to be in the infantry and who might be supporting," he said.

"I think what you  might be suggesting is that somehow we are going to draft individuals, whether they be female or male, and we are going to put them into a situation where they can't perform," Gibson said.

Rep. Martha McSally, a Republican from Arizona, said she thinks this is an important discussion, "but I do want to correct my colleague from California, as you painted the picture of the only reason for the draft to go into front-line combat -- that is not true," she said. "We all know many people that were drafted in World War II, Korea, Vietnam who served in other positions and not the infantry."

Plenty of jobs in the military may need filling if a draft is put into action, McSally said.

"There could be medical positions; we could need cyber warriors," she said. "There is all sorts of positions that we would need the country ready to mobilize for, so I do think we need to make sure that people understand as we are discussing this, the intent of the draft is not to fill 100 percent of the positions with front-line infantry."

--Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.
U.S. Defense Department officials on Thursday defended their plan to send 250 additional Special Forces soldiers into Syria.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to give updates on current operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

President Barack Obama recently announced he was increasing U.S. forces in Syria "six-fold, from 50 to 300," Carter sacid.

"These additional 250 personnel  will help expand our ongoing efforts to identify, train, and equip capable, motivated local anti-ISIL forces inside Syria, especially among the Sunni Arab community," Carter said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, another name for ISIS.

"And they'll also serve as a hub to incorporate partner SOF -- from both European and Gulf partners -- that will augment our coalition's counter-ISIL efforts there," he said.

In addition to initiating training inside of Syria, "we're also continuing to train and equip other vetted Syrian forces outside of Syria -- keeping our focus, as we have in recent months, on battle-hardened, proven anti-ISIL leaders whom we can make more capable as enablers and amplifiers of our effects," Carter said.

Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, said he wanted to know if cutting more F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets would free up more money to send more Special Forces soldiers into Syria.

It cost approximately $1 million to $1.5 million to train one special operator, so that is roughly $375 million to train those 250 special operators going into Syria, Manchin said. By contrast, it costs roughly $108 million for each new F-35 fighter.

"Knowing the type of fight we are expecting you to fight right now to defend our country, conceptually if we traded 10 F-35s we could increase the size of our special operations forces [in Syria] to over 700," Manchin said.

"Are we concerned that we are sacrificing short-term needs for our long term security strategy and would 10 less F-35s make that much of a difference down the road as it would make a difference today with the 700 troops on the ground?" he asked.

Dunford agreed that the Pentagon faces a wide range of challenges and threats. To cope with those, senior leaders have made "the kind of choices you mentioned" during the drafting of the proposed fiscal 2017 defense budget, he said, adding that the Pentagon already reduced the number of F-35s to free up resources for other priorities.

Carter said that Congress could help with the current plan to send these 250 special operations forces into Syria by releasing "the $349 million in 1209 funding currently being blocked by Congress."

Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona and chairman of the panel, said he was blocking the reprograming money "until yesterday when I had a very excellent briefing from Gen. Dunford that cleared up the concerns that I had. And why did I have those concerns Mr. Secretary?

"It's because when we spent a couple of hundred million dollars the last time then the commander of Central Command testified before this committee that we had four to five people left" in the first program to train-and-equip moderate forces to fight ISIS in Syria, he said.

Carter acknowledged that "we made a disappointing start at that we have changed the approach to that fundamentally."

He added, "We were trying when that program was initiated to make forces, brand new forces to counter ISIL in Syria. Our approach now is to identify -- this is where the Special Forces have been valuable to us -- to identify forces already fighting ISIL whom we can enable with the great might of the American military."

McCain then asked what happens if the ceasefire in Syria collapses and there is a "resumption of Russian bombing of American-trained forces? What is going to be our option there?"

Dunford answered by saying, "Chairman, if our forces are attacked by regime forces, we have the authority to respond."

Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, said he believes that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force is not enough to justify deploying combat forces into Syria.

"U.S. action in Iraq against ISIL is at the invitation of the Iraqi government, so there is clear international legal justification of all our activities in Iraq," Kaine said. "I'm sorry to say this but there is also international legal justification for Russian military activity in Syria because Russia has been invited in by the sovereign government of Syria.

"But what I struggle with is how can we criticize the Russian incursion into Ukrainian sovereignty when we are carrying out and now escalating military operations in Syria without the permission and really even against the will of the sovereignty of that nation?" he asked.

Carter said that he agreed with Kaine that a new authorization for the use of force in Syria would be appropriate "because it would signify to the troops that the country is behind them."

"I am told by the lawyers, and I believe this, that the legal basis for what we are doing exists in both domestic law and international law," Carter said. "I will say 'if there is a difference in what we are doing in Syria and what the Russians are doing in the Ukraine is we are trying to fight real terrorists, we are not trying to destabilize a stable situation.'"

Kaine said he is a strong supporter of Obama, but "I think we have made a complete hash of the doctrines of war, both domestic and international.

"We are engaged in an incursion into the sovereign nation of Syria without their permission against their will. We are trying to criticize Russia for engaging in an incursion into another nation against their will, and we are asserting is the difference is that we are doing something good and they are doing something bad," he said.

"I agree that we are doing something good. I agree that they are doing something bad," Kaine said, "but that is not a limiting principle because everybody is going to say what they are doing is good."

-- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.
President Barack Obama has nominated Marine Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser for promotion to four-star rank to replace retiring Army Gen. David Rodriguez as head of U.S. Africa Command in the ongoing effort to halt the spread of ISIS on the continent, the Pentagon said Thursday.

If confirmed by the Senate to lead the command, Waldhauser would become the only Marine to head one of the combatant commands. In a statement, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called Waldhauser, 62, of St. Paul, Minnesota, the "perfect pick for this dynamic command."

Waldhauser, currently the director for Joint Force Development on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, was commissioned in 1976. He served in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1991 and, as commander of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, led Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a Major General, Waldhauser was commander the 1st Marine division.

Waldhauser would replace the highly-regarded Rodriguez, 61, who also was commissioned in 1976 and has spent more time in combat zones from Panama and Desert Storm through Iraq and Afghanistan than almost any other officer on active duty.

In his career, Rodriguez has commanded the International Security Assistance Force -- Joint Command in Afghanistan; the 82nd Airborne Division; the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division; and the 101st airborne division. He also has commanded companies of the 75th Ranger Regiment, and 1st Armored Division.

In his statement, Carter said that Waldhauser led "some of our first troops into Afghanistan after Sept. 11, and in his most recent service in the Pentagon as director for Joint Force Development, Lt. Gen. Waldhauser has demonstrated strong military leadership, excellent political-military experience, and superb management skills."

As head of Africa Command, Waldhauser will be challenged in "building partner capacity, enabling regional forces and combating the metastasis of ISIL and other violent extremists," Carter said. "I am confident that Lt. Gen. Waldhauser will bring the same caliber of strong and steady leadership to AFRICOM that Gen. David Rodriguez has brought to the command for the past three years."

In a Pentagon briefing earlier this month, Rodriguez estimated the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, now has 4,000 to 6,000 fighters in Libya. "Over in East Africa, of course, the big threat is Al-Shabab inside Somalia. We work with five of the troop contributing countries as well as the Somalis -- developing the Somali national army to continue to support the Somali government in helping provide stability in that region," he said.

Waldhauser gained unwanted attention in a dispute with then-Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos over potential undue command influence in the 2011 case of five Marines videotaped urinating on Taliban corpses in Afghanistan.

Waldhauser had original oversight over the investigation of the incident but was removed after a controversial meeting with Amos. At the meeting, Waldhauser later testified, "The Commandant leaned back on his chair, looked at me right in the eye very close and said, 'those guys need to be crushed.'" Amos later said he did not recall saying anything about Marines being crushed.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
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Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

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ANN ARBOR, MI -- The doors are now open and guests are arriving at the newly renovated Graduate Ann Arbor, formerly known as the Dahlmann Campus Inn.

Renovations include brand new decor throughout the hotel lobby including a hand-painted mural behind the reception desk, new flooring and carpeting and completely remodeled rooms.

The hotel bar has reopened and a new cafe is also ready for the anticipated rush this weekend. The coffee shop offers several types of drinks, along with pastries, fresh fruit cups and other snacks.

The hotel restaurant is still being remodeled, however breakfast is being served each morning in one of the hotel ballrooms. The restaurant is expected to be ready this summer.

Four boardrooms and three ballrooms are available for use, giving the hotel 11,000 square feet of flexible meeting space. The spaces can accommodate up to 300 guests according to the hotel.

Room rates begin at $169 as part of a grand opening special and top out at $229. One and two beds rooms are available. The hotel's Presidential Suite is still under construction and is expected to be ready later this year.

There's very little time for the hotel staff to ease into operations at the new hotel as every room is booked for the weekend. The majority of those bookings are related to the University of Michigan commencement ceremony on Saturday.

Chicago-based AJ Capital operates Graduate brand hotels in college towns across the U.S. including Tempe, Ariz., Athens, Ga., and Madison, Wis. The brand launched in 2014.

Matt Durr is a business reporter for The Ann Arbor News. Email him at mattdurr@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI - A partnership headed by the co-owner of the Pyramid Scheme and Meanwhile Bar is proposing to open "The Shark Market," a neighborhood grocery store on the corner of Commerce Avenue and Weston Street SW.

Jeff VandenBerg and his partners will seek the blessing of the City Planning Commission on May 12 to sell beer and wine at the store, which will be located in a corner space of 38 Commerce, an eight-story office, retail and residential building that was built six years ago.

According to the request for a special use permit allowing the sale of beer and wine, The Shark Market will emphasize "specialty food items, grocery staples, Michigan craft beer and a world-class wine selection."

In addition to specializing in Michigan-made craft beers, The Shark Market will provide a greater variety of food and household items than its downtown competitors, according to the application. The store will be open from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. on most days.

"Late hours will accommodate the hard-working service industry, who will appreciate a place to grab a little something for themselves after long nights of serving bar and restaurant patrons," the application said.

The store is expected to employ between six and eight persons, including a full-time general manager, a sommelier and several part-time clerks.

The Shark Market expects to compete with Lucky's, a convenience store located one block away at 24 S. Division Ave., The Grand Central Market, at 57 Monroe Center NW, and the Downtown Market, located eight blocks away at 435 Ionia Ave. SW.

Jim Harger covers business for Mlive Media Group. Email him at jharger@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter or Facebook or Google+.
ANN ARBOR, MI -- Emma Nagler had always dreamed her college years would be filled with wild parties, late nights and parents who would be none the wiser.

By the time she arrived on campus as a college freshman in Ann Arbor three years ago, her sentiment had shifted dramatically. The concerns about where she was going to party and how she was going to get high were replaced with fears about falling back into the habit of drinking and using drugs.

"At freshman orientation, everyone was talking about drinking and partying," Nagler recalls. "I remember thinking 'Oh my God, there is no way I'm going to be able to do this.'"

Nagler has found an outlet to avoid those temptations during her time at the University of Michigan through the support she's received in the school's Collegiate Recovery Program.



Looking back on her time at U-M, Nagler doesn't speak with a tone of regret about the parties she missed or the social gatherings she knew she needed to avoid, but rather how the CRP has provided her with support and a much-needed social outlet.

She looks back fondly at going to Necto Nightclub to go dancing with friends from the program, late-night games of Cards Against Humanity in the Michigan Union and even an "alternative prom" the CRP put on "because so many of us didn't end up going to prom in high school."

For students like Nagler who have struggled with substance abuse prior to stepping on campus, a program like the CRP provides a supportive community where students can achieve academic success while enjoying a genuine college experience, free from alcohol and other drugs.

"The number one thing we hear overall from students is that 'I thought I was never going to have fun again,'" CRP Manager Matt Statman said. "Students can help each other deal with the stress of being a student as well as all the extra stuff they do to stay in recovery, like 12-step meetings and the service work they do. There's a lot of relating to each other around the pressure of being able to drink. Having people going through it with you, being able to talk about it can be incredibly helpful."

That is the type of support the CRP aims to provide through its association with Wolverine Wellness - the part of University Health Service that works across campus to support and improve student wellness.

As she anticipates receiving her bachelor's degree in philosophy during graduation festivities on Saturday, Nagler said her sobriety has in some ways become an afterthought - a fact she credits to the CRP.

"It's hard to say I'm proud of being sober. It feels like it's just a part of my life now," she said. "I've been sober long enough that I don't think constantly about drinking. For me, that's just what it takes to be a functional person."

'A way to escape'

Nagler began drinking when she was just 13. She saw it as a coping mechanism for some of her family issues during a time she also suffered from depression.

Despite being a good student, she sought solace from drinking and associating with others who liked to drink.

"I just always drank to get drunk. That was what my drinking experience was about," she said. "I was still getting fairly good grades in school, but I was mainly hanging out with other kids who drank and got high a lot like I did."

The summer before her senior year, her issues with drugs and alcohol began to come to a head. Nagler began using more and more frequently. She got in trouble with the law twice - the second time resulting in an arrest for driving under the influence and possession of marijuana.

The charges were reduced and she was ordered by the court to attend sessions at a local treatment center. She made the decision to get sober and began attending 12-step meetings every day for 90 days.

"When I first got sober, I couldn't really think about staying sober for my life," she said. "At first I was just trying to be sober for right now and see what happens. As time went on, I just knew I was not going to be successful as a student if I didn't find support."

An alternative college experience

Facing the remainder of her senior year sober, Nagler began to look toward her future at the University of Michigan, where she planned to enroll in the fall.

After doing some research she discovered the Collegiate Recovery Program and subsequently reached out to Statman while she was still in high school and began making trips from her hometown of DeWitt to Ann Arbor to meet with other members of the CRP.

When the CRP started as a student group in 2010, Statman knew it would play a vital role for students who were trying to stay sober during a vulnerable time in their social development.

"Socially, young people are still figuring things out," he said. "It's important for college-age kids to have a social group. They're still working on developing their own identity."

The relationships she development proved crucial early in her time at U-M as a "pretty weird" college freshman.

"I was at a weird place in my recovery and wasn't necessarily the most approachable person," she said. "I spent a lot of time alone and didn't really hang out with very many people.

"After that first semester I started hanging out with the girls in the Collegiate Recovery Program. We would go out and do a lot of things together. We also did a lot of service work at the humane society and we would cooking food on Saturday mornings at the (Delonis) homeless shelter."

At one point, Nagler remembers being consoled by another member of the CRP while visiting her home in Ypsilanti during a moment she was questioning whether she could stay sober.

"I remember saying to her 'I don't know if I want to be sober anymore,'" she said. "Just having that support was so important, or I wouldn't have made it. So much of it is just knowing that I wasn't alone and knowing that other people have been through that experience before."

Developing an identity

Nagler reflects on a college experience that went much differently than she originally envisioned fondly inside an apartment she shares with her cat, Stardust.

Being sober has allowed her to focus on her studies - she'll graduate on Saturday after just three years at the age of 20. Her free time has consisted of focusing on her artwork, while attending gallery shows, guest lectures and performances on campus that "most people don't take advantage of."

"Being a person in recovery on campus, it means that I don't show up to class hungover," she said. "I almost feel like not having alcohol and partying as a crutch forces you to find more interesting ways of having fun and pass the time."

With just a couple of days before commencement, Nagler arrived in the lounge at the CRP after receiving news her honors thesis had received "high honors."

She couldn't contain her excitement thinking about a future that will include a "gap year" where she'll look to get the thesis published while traveling across the Midwest before entering grad school.

It's a different future than she anticipated as a young high school student - a future she is excited to take on sober.

"For a young person coming here and staying sober through graduation, it's amazing," Statman said. "There is a lot of social pressure for young people to not do that. When I started here in 2012, she was part of the first class of students to graduate. She did that very successfully with high honors. It's pretty cool to see that happen."

Martin Slagter covers higher education for The Ann Arbor News. Reach him at mslagter@mlive.com or on Twitter.
UPDATE: The attorney for the mother and daughter told MLive about 5 p.m. Thursday a stay of deportation was granted, pending a resolution of a motion to reconsider asylum.

DETROIT, MI -- They hope to never use their one-way tickets to Mexico.

Outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office near the Detroit River Wednesday, two Mexican immigrants living in Ypsilanti, a mother, Susana Bernabe-Ramirez, 39; and her 16-year-old daughter, Sayra Hernandez, stood contemplating the possibility their small family could be torn apart by the weekend.

They'll be forced to leave the country on a Friday flight, unless their deportation is delayed.

Last Chance

Their attorney, Brad Thomson of Immigration Law PLLC in Ann Arbor, filed a motion asking the Board of Appeals to reconsider their case for asylum on Wednesday. ICE officials told him if the Board doesn't intervene, the agency plans to carry out the deportation order.

Once deportation occurs, Thomson says prosecutorial discretion is moot and there is "no guarantee" they'd be allowed back into the U.S. if the motion is accepted.

Bernabe-Ramirez and Sayra left their former home in Michoacan, Mexico and illegally entered the U.S. in 2001. They settled in Ypsilanti, where Bernabe-Ramirez later gave birth to her second daughter, Isabella, now 11 and a legal U.S. citizen.

ICE deported the father of the girls in 2010. Sayra told The Guardian during a protest in Washington D.C. earlier this month the government deported her father, who committed no crime, "unfairly."

Susana Bernabe-Ramirez and her 16-year-old daughter Sayra head into a deportation meeting at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Detroit on Wednesday, April 27, 2016.

If she and her mother are forced to leave, younger sister Isabella would likely remain in the U.S. with grandparents.

"I would decide to leave my youngest daughter here, even though it is very painful to do so," Bernabe-Ramirez said Wednesday via her translator, Amelia Frank-Vitale, a University of Michigan graduate student. "She needs constant medical treatment. She has epilepsy, and so I wouldn't take her to a place where she would be exposed to other dangers.

"Getting the right medicine, getting enough medicine ... and getting a doctor there would be very difficult because she is not part of the social security system of Mexico."

Seeking Asylum

Bernabe-Ramirez and her daughters returned to Mexico in 2010 to care for Bernabe-Ramirez's sick mother.

She returned to the U.S. with Sayra in 2014 -- Isabella returned separately -- and rather than enter illegally again, requested political asylum at the border in Tijuana.

Sayra said they spend three "horrible" days in an ICE detention center before flying to Michigan to argue for asylum.

"Susana Bernabe-Ramirez, a citizen of Mexico, was enrolled in U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Alternatives to Detention program in January 2015, shortly after illegally entering at the southwest border," ICE officials in Detroit told MLive by email Wednesday. "She has since remained free from custody.



"Ms. Bernabe-Ramirez is an ICE enforcement priority as a recent border entrant and because she was ordered removed by an immigration judge after January 2014."

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security in November in 2014 issued a memo establishing three levels of priority for deporting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.

Homeland Security memo

Based on ICE statements, it appears they regard Bernabe-Ramirez and her daughter as the second highest priority for deportation.

Thomson disagrees. He says they should be the lowest.

"Susana and Sayra did not illegally enter the (U.S.) in 2015," he told MLive in an email. "They went to the Tijuana border crossing and requested asylum and were paroled into the" U.S.

"ICE officials have repeatedly stated that they illegally entered in 2015. This is an important distinction because it changes them from a Priority 2 for deportation to a Priority 3 for deportation."

During her four years spent back in Mexico, Bernabe-Ramirez says she sold beauty products, children's clothing and other items from a roadside cart. This is when she claims members of drug cartels extorted money from her, sometimes as much as 75 percent of her earnings, according to her attorney.

"I sold things in the street," Bernabe-Ramirez said. "People would come -- sometimes the same person, sometimes a different person -- with hats and sunglasses, and they would say, 'You have to give me this amount of money in order to keep working.'"

Extortion is not an offense for which the U.S. government grants asylum.

Thomson says statements Bernabe-Ramirez and her daughter made to media -- including MLive, the New York Daily Post and the Guardian -- "significantly increase" the risk of harm to them should they return to Mexico. Because they spoke publicly against the cartels, he argues they qualify for political asylum.

Thomson also cites an April 18 Board of Appeals ruling stating single, working mothers may deserve additional asylum consideration.

Asylum Denied

Since denial of her asylum appeal in November, Bernabe-Ramirez has worn a GPS tracking device strapped to her ankle. She had difficulty finding boots to fit over it this winter, her daughter said.

"It's very painful because I know she's not committed a crime, or tried to kill someone," Sayra says as her mother hikes up her pant leg to reveal the bulky black ankle bracelet.

ICE also required Bernabe-Ramirez drive to Detroit every two weeks and check in.

By this weekend, the world could be a much different place for Bernabe-Ramirez and her daughters.

Susana Bernabe-Ramirez has been wearing a government-issued monitor since November. She is seeking asylum in the United States but will likely be deported Friday morning if her appeal is not successful. Allison Farrand | The Ann Arbor News

The mother currently works in a restaurant, usually from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and earns additional money cleaning a movie theater between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m, she said.

Her daughter, who turned 16 this month, hoped to find a job of her own. Immigrants seeking asylum -- but not yet denied -- are able to work in the U.S. legally.

"There's like no words to explain what I'm feeling," said the sophomore in high school after Wednesday's meeting with ICE. "It's 50/50. I'm a little bit paranoid, because of what could happen."

"I feel, just, bad," her mother said with arms crossed and tears in her eyes.

If the Board of Appeals doesn't intervene, their flight is scheduled to leave Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus Friday.
Grosse Pointe Farms stabbing.png

A 69-year-old stabbing victim was found outside Grosse Pointe Farms home the afternoon of March 6, 2016. (Google Street View image)

Daniel Clancy, 69, on Wednesday died as a result of complications stemming from a vicious stabbing he endured outside his palatial Grosse Pointe Farms home in March, the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office ruled following an autopsy Thursday.

The official cause of death is listed as "multiple stab wounds to neck and complications thereof/Inflicted head trauma," according to Wayne County spokesman Lloyd Jackson.

The manner was ruled homicide.

Clancy remained in critical condition well after allegedly the stabbing, but his condition appeared to be improving.

"This actually took me by surprise," Grosse Pointe Farms Lt. Richard Rosati told the Detroit Free Press Wednesday. "He was making a spectacular recovery. When I saw him ... he was out of bed, sitting up in a chair. His wounds had healed nicely."



#BREAKING: Grosse Pointe Farms designer Daniel Clancy dies from stab wounds https://t.co/b5TqGapI6k pic.twitter.com/TMXybc1Ajk  The Detroit News (@detroitnews) April 27, 2016

The Wayne County Prosecutor's Office hasn't announced new charges against David Scott Corzilius, 49, of Warren, an alleged heroin addict and handyman charged with stabbing Clancy.

He could be charged with first-degree murder, which is punishable by mandatory life in prison in Michigan.

Money was the motive in the attack, the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office said previously.

Corzilius is accused of demanding money, hitting Clancy in the face and binding his hands with duct tape.

"Corzilius slashed the Clancy's neck with a knife, stole property from his home, and drove away from the location with the stolen property in his truck," Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy's office said following the initial charges. "The defendant had been hired as a handyman to clean gutters and remove snow from Mr. Clancy's home.

Police said Corzilius is a known drug user and was hospitalized for an overdose days after the attack.

Worthy's office said valuable paintings and other property was stolen from Clancy, who worked as an interior designer.

Clancy was discovered, bleeding from his neck and bound, on the sidewalk in front of his 8,000-square-foot home on Voltaire Place in Grosse Pointe Farms.

"It was pretty clear to those in law enforcement that this brutally violent assault was not random, but the work of someone who knew Mr. Clancy," Worthy said in her charging statement. "The alleged actions of the defendant bear this out."

Corzilius is charged with assault with intent to murder, assault with intent to do great bodily harm, felonious assault, armed robbery, first-degree home invasion, unlawful imprisonment and larceny in a building.
BYRON, MI -- A man accused of robbing a bank Shiawassee County's downtown Byron Wednesday afternoon, April 27, and using a bicycle as his getaway vehicle was arrested the same evening about 40 miles away in White Lake.

Police were called to Chase Bank, located in downtown Byron, around 1 p.m. Wednesday, April 27, according to a news release from the Shiawassee County Sheriff's Office.

A bearded man who was wearing sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt reportedly walked into the bank and handed his clerk a note demanding money, the release said. No words were spoken, and no weapon was seen or indicated during the exchange, according to the release.

The man made off with an undisclosed amount of money, and was last seen fleeing the bank northbound on a bicycle, the release says.

Authorities say they were able to identify the man during their investigation, but when they went to his Byron home, he wasn't there.

Around 11:25 p.m., authorities from the FBI, the Shiawassee County Sheriff's Office and the White Lake Police Department arrested the man at an address in White Lake, which is about 40 miles southeast of Byron.

Police from Durand, Argentine Township, Gaines Township and Perry police departments, along with the Michigan State Police, also assisted in the investigation, the release says.

The man's identity was not released, pending arraignment, which was scheduled for Thursday afternoon, April 28, the release said.

He was being held in the Shiawassee County Jail.
FLINT, MI -- Flint and Michigan State Police are investigating after a man was shot to death Wednesday afternoon in the parking lot outside River Village Apartments in Flint.

The shooting took place at 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 27. The man was confirmed dead inside a vehicle at the scene. Police are searching for a suspect who may have been with the man at the time of his death.

A large section of the parking lot outside the apartment complex on Father Dukette Boulevard, off Saginaw Street near Fifth Avenue, has been marked off with police tape as police investigate.

People gathered on Father Dukette, asking police what happened as some shed tears, as residents in the complex watched the scene below from their balconies facing Saginaw Street.

Anyone with information about the shooting may contact Flint police Detective Chad Baldwin at 810-237-6912 or at 810-237-6800 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-SPEAK-UP (773-2587).
VIENNA TWP., MI - It's been roughly 17 years since Sharee Miller's husband was shot to death at his Vienna Township auto salvage business.

Now, the woman who has repeatedly proclaimed her innocence has admitted she was involved in his killing.

Miller, in a four-page typed letter sent recently to Genesee Circuit Judge Judith A. Fullerton, admitted to her role in her husband, Bruce L. Miller's, death.

"I was living two lives and I got caught up and did not want to get caught so I planned a murder and went through with it," Miller wrote. "Instead of my family or Bruce's family finding out what I really was, I thought I could cover it up by having Bruce murdered. I cannot deny this anymore."

Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said he believes the letter and confession is authentic

"I also received a letter of confession from Sharee Miller," Leyton said. "I was very surprised."

The admission will likely bring an end to an ongoing legal case stemming from a murder that resulted in a Lifetime television movie, a best-selling book and extensive media coverage.

Bruce Miller was found dead Nov. 8, 1999, at his Vienna Township business, B&D Auto Parts. He had a shotgun wound to his neck.

At first, officials thought Bruce Miller was a victim of a robbery-gone-bad. But, a suicide months later nearly half a country away turned investigators' attention to his wife.

Former police officer Jerry Cassaday killed himself Feb. 11, 2000, 700 miles away in Missouri and left behind a suicide note and other evidence that would eventually be used to link Sharee Miller to the killing.

The evidence included an instant message conversation Cassaday had with Sharee Miller just hours before the murder of her husband. She told Cassaday how to get to her husband's junkyard and where to park.

Cassaday went on to implicate Sharee Miller in a suicide note and emails from his computer. He told relatives that Sharee Miller used sex and lies to persuade him to kill Bruce Miller.

"I had sixteen and a half hours to stop it. And I didn't," Sharee Miller wrote in her confession letter. "I knew it was going to happen and I allowed it. I allowed a man to kill another man based on my lies and manipulation."

She added that the killing happened "almost the way the prosecutor said I did."

Leyton said he informed Bruce Miller's family of the letter and that they declined comment.

Sharee Miller had visited Cassaday multiple times while he worked as a pit boss in a Reno, Nev., casino. He wanted her to leave Bruce and marry him. Emails showed Sharee Miller told Cassaday her husband was in the mafia, that he beat and raped her and she lost a child she allegedly conceived through her and Cassaday's tryst.

However, Sharee Miller was unable to get pregnant following a medical procedure and she recanted the other accusations about her husband in her confession letter.

"He was a great man," Sharee Miller wrote about her husband. "He never hurt me or my children. All he did was love us. He wanted to adopt my children. He just wanted a family. The only man who loved me for me and I had him killed."

Cassaday eventually committed suicide after Sharee Miller broke off communication with him following the murder and he turned to drinking and drugs.

His family turned the evidence over to authorities, which were able to use it to secure conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and second-degree murder charges against Sharee Miller.

Detective Kevin Shanlian, who investigated the case, said the family's decision to turn over the information, even though it revealed their loved one was a murderer, was the key to the case.

"Cassaday's family had no reason to come forward," Shanlian said.

Shanlian wasn't aware of the confession until being contacted by MLive-The Flint Journal.

"I'm glad she came forward," Shanlian said. "I almost feel bad she waited so long to tell the truth."

Her trial, billed as the Internet's first murder case, started in December 2000 and drew intense interest from local and national media. Court TV covered the entirety of the trial. It later spawned a book that appeared on the New York Time's best seller list and a TV movie starring Anne Hecht and Eric Roberts.

Sharee Miller's attorney, David Nickola, said the case could have turned out much different if his client would have been truthful from the beginning, adding that a plea agreement was offered before the trial.

Shanlian said Sharee Miller would be a free woman today if she accepted the plea, which would have included a maximum possible sentence of 15 years in prison.

Instead the case went to trial, and she was eventually sentenced to life in prison.

The case then slogged through the appeals process, and even included a judge releasing her from prison in 2009 and ordering a new trial after concerns about the admissibility of Cassaday's suicide note. A federal judge ordered her back to prison three years later.

Her appeals eventually failed, and the confession will likely prevent the success of any future appeals.

However, in her confession letter, Sharee Miller said she wanted to tell the truth to her attorneys but was always advised against it.

"Throughout these 16 years I have asked three different attorney's to let me tell them the truth," she wrote. "They did not want to know it.

Nickola denied the accusation.

"She maintained her innocence, always," Nickola said. "I did the best I could do with what I had to work with."

The case was even eventually picked up by the University of Michigan Clinical Law program, including the assignment of current state Supreme Court Justice Bridget McCormack as an attorney.

McCormack declined to comment on the case. Her counterpart at the clinic, Kimberly Thomas, could not be reached for comment.

Sharee Miller is currently lodged at the Huron Valley Women's Complex.

"I hurt a lot of people," she wrote. "I destroyed a lot of lives. It is time to end the lies and tell the truth."

Read Sharee Miller's entire confession below:
Republican: If independence of Karabakh is recognized, we shall probably need to cede those 5 regions (video)

The Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) faction member Sukias Avetisyan remembers that the rumors on ceding those 5 regions to Azerbaijan started when there was ceasefire, These April events showed that at present it is meaningless to speak to Azerbaijan about any negotiation issues. Mr Avetisyan will support the resumption of negotiations process only when the Armenian armed forces make Azerbaijan negotiable. But he personally is against ceding those 5 regions to Azerbaijan, They are our territories, they are not occupied territories, they are liberated territories and we have many other similar territories, which must be liberated. If publisher and lawmaker Vrezh Markosyan observes those 5 regions from the point of view of being historically Armenian lands, Shahumyan and Getashen also must be demanded. But he will cede those territories to Azerbaijan only if the independence of Karabakh is recognized, If [they] recognize, if there is peace, we shall probably need to cede those 5 regions. The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic National Assembly Homeland (Hayrenik) faction member Arbat Avanesyan thinks, Only a vicious Armenian can cede even a single inch from the territories of Artsakh. The lawmaker of the Nagorno Karabakhs parliament shouldnt have been asked even a question about ceding liberated territories even through negotiations, Let the people, who hold negotiations, negotiate. Serzh Sargsyan, who hails from Karabakh, spoke about concession of those 5 regions still in 2011 in Kazan. Two days ago Hermine Naghdalyan said that we didnt need those lands, I respect Hermine Naghdalyan and I havent heard her say that, I dont know who ascribes it to her, says the lawmaker.
Georgia weighs Karabakh role

By Giorgi Kupatadze IWPR, Global Voices The recent spike in hostilities between Azerbaijani forces and the Armenian-backed Nagorny Karabakh army has caused serious concern in Georgia. Tbilisi has close political, economic and energy ties with both Yerevan and Baku, as well as sizeable ethnic Armenian and Azerbaijani communities. This makes the country highly sensitive to the fallout of the worst violence since war in the early 1990s left a local Armenian administration in control of the enclave of about 150,000 people inside Azerbaijan The latest outbreak of fighting ended with a fragile ceasefire on April 5 and resulted in a total of 191 people dead and dozens injured on both sides. It has also left politicians and analysts arguing that Georgia needs to be better prepared for any future escalation and the possible domestic consequences. A suggestion by the head of the Georgian armed forces that Tbilisi could act as a mediator to avoid future escalation was broadly welcomed. We are carefully following the development of events and we have very close ties with our colleagues in Azerbaijan and in Armenia, said the chief of the general staff Vakhtang Kapanadze. I hope the parties will move to a peaceful solution of the conflict. We probably have to assume the role of mediator, as we are one of the countries that have good relations to both neighbours, he concluded. David Bakradze, a leader of the opposition United National Movement, agreed, adding, We, Georgia, are in a unique position to take on the additional role of mediator for these two nations closest to us. Years of negotiations have thus far been mediated by the OSCEs Minsk Group led by three co-chairs  diplomats from Russia, the United States and France  but have had very few results. However, some experts doubt that Georgia could take on such a role, as it has its own unresolved territorial conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgia firmly upholds the principle of territorial integrity, which is contrary to the position of Nagorny Karabakh and Armenia. Thus, the country might not be seen as fully neutral or balanced. In the 1990s, Georgia successfully pursued a policy of so-called active neutrality which suited our two neighbouring states, said Soso Tsiskarishvili, president of the Club of Independent Experts. Tbilisi hosted meetings of representatives of the conflicting parties, professionals from different areas. However, policy changes following the 2003 Rose Revolution meant that this peace-keeping function was lost, he added. According to Irakli Porchkhidze, vice president of the Georgian Institute for Strategic Studies, the format of any future mediation would be key. When it comes to the use of Georgias territory for talks and mediations, it is necessary to clearly specify the format. Because mediation where Russia will play a leading role will be against the interests of Georgia, which is to keep a balance between the two sides. Russia is Armenias strategic ally, but has been selling weapons to both Armenia and Azerbaijan to keep what Moscow has called parity in the region. Hundreds of Armenians protested in the Armenian capital Yerevan against Russias weapon sales to Azerbaijan on April 13, which they claimed were a factor in the recent outbreak of fighting over Nagorny Karabakh. According to Porchkhidze, the events around Karabakh have direct political, economic and military risks for Georgia. Turkey and Azerbaijan, like Russia and Armenia, have a close military-political cooperation, where using Georgian airspace or even the land corridor on its territory can become an issue. In this case, there should be a clear position from the start that the Georgian government should strictly uphold. I do not know to what extent the Georgian government is ready to meet these challenges. In this regard, there are certain questions, he said. The escalation between Armenia and Azerbaijan has put Georgia in a delicate position. Turkey openly supports Azerbaijan and is one of Georgias main trade partners. Russia is Armenias strategic ally, which since the Georgian-Russian war in August 2008 has had military bases in Georgias breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Should escalation continue, Georgia might find it hard to preserve a balance. According to the state department of statistics, Azerbaijan was the largest foreign investor in Georgia in 2015 and the source of eight per cent of its imports in January-February 2016. Azerbaijans main oil and gas export routes go through Georgia via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Supsa oil pipelines and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline. The parties are implementing a joint project for the opening of a railway route from Baku via Tbilisi to Kars, which will connect Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. As Armenias borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan are closed, a significant share of its transport to Armenia also goes through Georgia. Six percent of Georgian exports went to Armenia in January-February 2016 Porchkhidze said that the Georgian government response to the Karabakh fighting had been too passive. An action plan was needed in the event the situation deteriorated, he said, adding that Tbilisi also needed to work actively with its own Armenian and Azerbaijani communities to prevent any domestic turmoil. DANGERS OF COMMUNITY TENSIONS Ethnic Azeris and Armenians are Georgias two largest minorities and make up about 12 per cent of the countrys population, according to the 2002 census. The final results of the 2014 census have not yet been published. Many of the nearly 300,000 ethnic Azeris and 250,000 ethnic Armenians live in small towns and villages, often in cultural isolation from Tbilisi and with little knowledge of the Georgian language. The Azeris largely live in the Kvemo Kartli region of southern Georgia, on the border with Azerbaijan. Armenians are predominantly in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region in the southwest of the country, near Armenia. Natia Kuprashvili, the executive director of the Georgian Regional Broadcasters Association, warned of potential trouble in Kvemo Kartli and Samtskhe-Javakheti, based on the feedback she has received from television viewers in these regions. The situation is tense, she told IWPR. Georgias national broadcasters had not covered the conflict properly, she said, thereby risking trouble amongst their own Armenian and Azerbaijani communities. The large national broadcasters of Georgia  have their own correspondents in Europe, Russia, the United States, but do not have them at a distance of a few hours drive  in Armenia and Azerbaijan, Kuprashvili said. This was evident during the time of the fighting when local media covered the events citing foreign sources. Without receiving balanced information about the events, [ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis] were forced to rely only on information from Armenian, Azerbaijani and Russian channels, said Kuprashvili. Armenian and Azerbaijani media were biased in their reporting and covered the events in such a way that it has increased tension among our citizens of Armenian and Azerbaijani nationality, she said. Tskiskarishvili agreed, adding, I would like to hear in the coming days that the Georgian National Security Council is going to meet to discuss this topic. To preserve relations we need to constantly discuss the current problems and situation rather than what the tabloid press is publishing, like we do now. Porchkhidze also said that the government needed to dedicate more resources to working with the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities in Georgia to prevent further tensions within the country. There are forces  frankly, it is Russia - which are interested in the internal destabilisation of Georgia and that Georgia remains a fragmented state, he continued. It is necessary to keep a finger on the pulse [of tensions] in the locations where the local ethnic minorities live, since those bearing ill-will will certainly try to exploit the situation for internal destabilisation. Giorgi Kupatadze is IWPRs editor for Georgia.

19 Apr 16 Georgia CRS 811
The new chief minister for Yangon Region plans to reduce tolls at a major bridge linking the citys largest industrial zones to its downtown area and ports, in a move that would make exports more competitive.





U Phyo Min Thein said he will discuss the toll rate with the Union government.

Bayintnaung bridge connects Yangon to Hlaing Tharyar township, home to the majority of factories in the commercial capital.

The bridge is run by Asia World Group, according to local businesspeople. The company announced earlier this year that it had sold its toll road businesses, but did not name a buyer, and did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.

Toll fees are between K50,000 and K70,000 for each container, adding to logistics costs for companies already operating on tight profit margins.

Myanmar was rated 145 out of 160 countries in the World Banks 2014 Logistics Performance Index  the lowest score in Asia.

According to entrepreneurs, this bridge is one reason why transportation costs for businesses in Yangon are so high. Merchants and industries are losing their competitive edge, and commodity prices for consumers are inflated, U Phyo Min Thein said.

The regional government will speak to the company, to find out how much it has invested into the bridge and how much of that capital has been recovered, before determining a new rate, he added.





We will also ask how much the company paid the state for the right to operate the bridge. For some tenders the state has received nothing, and these people are charging up to K100,000 per container, he said.

This affects our national production. The tender may have been awarded to someone who knew the [former Yangon chief] minister. We must change this kind of situation.

The cost of sending a 20-foot- equivalent unit container from Yangon to Singapore is not much higher than transporting it across Bayintnaung bridge, he added.

U Win Naing, chair of the Bayintnaung Commodity Exchange Centre, agreed the rate is far too high. The new government should adjust it, he said.

Over 200,000 workers are employed by factories in Hlaing Tharyars seven major industrial zones, which together produce 70 percent of Myanmars manufactured goods for export, said U Ohn Saing, deputy chair of the management committee.

Other zones such as Shwe Than Lwin, Ngwe Pin Lae, Mya Sein Yaung and Shwe Lin Pan are also located in the township.

Entrepreneurs who set up factories across the Hlaing River are struggling to pay the toll fees. The minister should assess the situation and make a decision quickly. Beans packaged in Hlaing Tharyar cost K50,000 more per tonne than those manufactured elsewhere, said U Ohn Saing.

Two bridges connect the industrial area to Yangons Mayangone township. The first was built in the 1990s and cannot support container trucks. As congestion grew worse along the original road, the Ministry of Construction contracted a second bridge in 2012.

Since then Hlaing Tharyars population has boomed to more than 700,000  making it by far the largest of the countrys 330 townships.

Translation by Emoon
A Chinese company is upgrading Myanmars only coal-fired power plant, with a view to resuming operations in late May according to officials from the Ministry of Electricity and Energy.





Chinas Wuxi Huagaung Electric Power Engineering is upgrading the entire Tigyit plant in southern Shan State near to the famous Inle Lake, which has been out of use for several years.

Local authorities held a public meeting in a village near to the site on April 24 to explain the companys environmental and social impact assessment activities, ahead of the power plants reopening, the Electric Power Generation Enterprise (EPGE) announced on April 25.

A tender to operate the coal-fired power plant under build-operate-transfer terms was issued by the previous government and Wuxi Huagaung was selected as the winner, the announcement said. The investment agreement for the plants long-term operation was signed on October 22 last year.

Wuxi Huagaung is now reinstalling major parts such as boilers and turbines, an official from EPGE told The Myanmar Times.

The updating process is now under way. It was supposed to start again in early May, but has been delayed a little  perhaps until later in the month, said U Win Myint, an EPGE director.

Tigyit is the countrys first coal-fired power plant, built by Myanma Electric Power Enterprise in 2001. Operations first started in 2005, led by the China National Heavy Machinery Corporation with local companies Eden Group and Shan Yoma Nagar.





Two villages were forced to relocate for the project, more than 500 acres of farmland were confiscated, and explosions from the mine destroyed local pagodas, according to a 2011 report by the the Pa-Oh Youth Organization called Poison Clouds: Lessons from Burmas largest coal project at Tigyit.

The extensive report notes that air and water pollution from the mine threatened the agriculture and health of nearly 12,000 people living within a 5-mile radius of the project and that 50 percent of the local population suffered from skin rashes.

A newly installed boiler is designed to meet the World Banks environmental standards with low emission of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, the EPGE announcement said, and the environmental impact of restarting the power plant will be monitored.

The plant has two coal-fired turbines with a capacity of 60 megawatts each.

It was designed to generate 900 kilowatts per hour annually, but in reality generated much less than its installed capacity  about 25 to 30MW according to EPGEs announcement.

One of the boilers has been completely changed with a new one due to its heating value and poor coal burning design. The power plant will be fuelled with coal from Chin State as before. But the turbines were updated for higher capacity, said the official.

Electricity from the plant will power Kalaw, Pinlaung and Taunggyi in southern Shan State, it said.

The former government signed at least 11 contracts for coal-fired power plants around the country with a number of international and regional companies. None of these projects have yet moved forward due to wide opposition by the public, local residents and environmental groups.

Coal power is a focus of the National Energy Master Plan drafted by the previous government. The government set a target of 100 percent electrification by 2030, with an energy mix of 33 percent biomass, 22pc oil, 20pc coal, 13pc gas, 11pc hydropower and 1pc renewable energy.

The environmental impact assessment for resuming the Tigyit plant was very thorough. The new government has been elected, so people do not need to worry about the resumption of coal power, the official said.
Unseasonal storms last week that killed at least eight and destroyed thousands of houses have dashed the hopes of mango farmers by destroying swathes of farmland just as the export season begins for Myanmars most sought-after fruit.





Some farmers had started selling their mangos to the local market and overseas while others are still harvesting when the storms hit central Myanmar. The export season typically runs from late April to mid-July, yet many farmers are now left counting their losses, traders said.

Traders who sell mangos to China said the weather is the worst it has been in a century, adding that fruit has been destroyed and the market is unstable. Damaged fruits will not fetch good prices, they said.

Sai Minthu Naung, a fruit dealer and owner of Khwar Nyo in Muse township on the Myanmar-China border, said, This is a terrible situation. We faced weather disasters in the past, but this is the worst yet, and all the fruit that was still at the farms has been destroyed. Mango season is just beginning and the change in weather has left the market cold.

The storm ripped roofs from houses in Mandalay, Sagaing and Magwe regions and Shan and Chin states, while pictures and television footage showed huge hailstones crashing onto flooded streets and clattering off metal roofs as residents rushed for shelter.

The damage to mango farms will impact the entire supply chain, said Sai Minthu Naung.

This wont just hurt farmers, it will hurt us all. Farmers will have to sell their fruit cheaply, so brokers will get less money, and so will truck drivers. Buyers will lose out too because they will have lower- quality mangos.





Ko Kyaw Htut who farms mangos in Mandalay Regions Patheingyi township, lost all his investment in the storm. Around 40 percent of his crop was destroyed and 30pc of the remaining fruit on his trees is likely to go to waste.

He had invested only in mangos, so will pick the remaining fruit at the end of this month and sell it to traders.

We have lost all our money because we focused on mangos. Now the time for growing the fruit has finished. We only had a few days to pick the fruit, which is the main produce for my township, he said.

Farmers were trying hard this year to grow fruits to a standard suitable for export and had worked systematically.

Earlier this year the agriculture ministry said it was preparing farmers for an audit that would demonstrate the adherence of Myanmars famous sein ta lone (diamond) mangos to international food safety standards.

These are the most popular variety of mangos for export, mostly grown in Mandalay Region and southern Shan State.

Farmers had been briefed about the importance of keeping fruit free from heavy metals, of not using too much pesticide and insecticide, and of taking safety precautions.

Yet the unexpected storms laid all these preparations to waste, undoing all the good work done by farmers, Ko Kyaw Htut said.

In Mandalay Region, farmers have responded by cutting out the middleman and taking the produce directly to Muse township, in order to sell directly to China in the hope of reducing their losses, he said.
Myanmar's government has published its first ever Public Expenditure Review, which details recent ramp-ups in health and education spending and outlines a range of challenges to improving public spending.





The Ministry of Planning and Finance and World Bank Group presented the report, which analyses spending policies between 2009 and 2013, in Nay Pyi Taw yesterday.

It shows large changes in the Union budgets composition in recent years. Between 2009 and 2015, general public services spending fell from 45 percent of the budget to 11pc, social services rose from 10pc to 33pc, and defence from 21pc to 33pc, the report said. Military spending still remains high and limits the expansion of other public services, according to the analysis.

Data from the Ministry of Defence indicates that military spending of 4.2pc of GDP was planned for 2013-14, which is well above the 2.3pc average for countries at the bottom of the middle-income range, the report said.

Defence also consumed the largest portion of government spending on goods and services between 2010-11 and 2013-14 and its consumption also grew faster than other sectors  although the report notes large gains were also made in health and education.

Government revenue between 2009 and 2014, meanwhile, rose from 6pc of GDP to 11pc  thanks to one-off measures like telecom licence sales and exchange rate devaluation, and a wider tax base. General government expenditure nearly doubled over the same period to 13pc of GDP, the report said.

The period under examination also covers a fundamental shift in government budget policy starting in 2011, as part of an effort to improve essential public services, according to the report, which focused on education and health spending.





U Kyaw Win, minister for planning and finance, told media yesterday that the new government will focus on improving education, health and social infrastructure. We will try to meet peoples social and economic needs in order to reduce poverty in the country as much as possible, he said.

Habib Rab, senior country economist for the World Bank in Myanmar said the review, which was finalised in September last year, had already informed budget policies including on health and education, as the World Bank shared chapters of it with the government even before June 2015.

The country has historically spent less on education as a share of GDP than its regional peers. Education spending fell to 0.7pc of GDP in the 2011-12 fiscal year, the report said. Although this rose from 1.6pc in 2012-13 to 2.1pc in 2013-14, the ASEAN ex-Myanmar average is 3.6pc.

Weak education spending has led to poor outcomes  only 460,000 out of 1.2 million students starting in grade 1 eventually make it to grade 11, and over one quarter of children at the end of grade 1 cannot read a single word, the report said.

Another result of low spending is that an unusually high share of total education financing in Myanmar has come from households  around 63pc, according to a one-off Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey carried out in 2009-10 by the United Nations Development Programme.

But public spending on education is rising fast, and quadrupled  from a low base  between 2011-12 and 2013-14, according to the report. As a result, starting in 2012-13 the Union government has likely replaced private households as the source of financing for education, although updated information on household spending will only become available as part of household survey data collected in 2015.

Measures to ease the burden on households included abolishing primary school fees in 2013-14 and secondary school fees in 2014-15. The government also started to provide free textbooks in 2014-15, and began improved stipend programs for the poor and disadvantaged in 2015-16, the report said.

Meanwhile, the increase in government spending has helped hire 79,000 more teachers, and the Union government has delegated some spending authority to district and township education officers and school heads through block grants.

But new initiatives will require more spending. Myanmars basic education system consists of only 11 years of schooling compared with 12 or 13 in the rest of ASEAN, the report said. Adding an extra year of pre-school would cost an extra K91 billion a year  a 12pc increase in the education budget  to hire the necessary teachers and build new kindergartens. Keeping 322,000 students in high schools for one more year would cost K58 billion a year, according to the review.

The volume of required spending is likely to be even higher if the government focuses on higher-quality education, which in turn is unlikely to be achieved without retraining teachers and equipping them with better textbooks and teacher guides, the report said. The Ministry of Education will have to grapple with delivering more despite a limited administrative budget, limited data to inform spending priorities and fledgling capacity to analyse the links between policy and budget priorities, the review concluded.

The report tells a similar story for health spending, which was only $1.6 per person in 2012, when out-of-pocket expenses accounted for almost 80pc of total health spending. This has resulted in some of the lowest health outcomes among ASEAN countries, but as with education, government spending has risen sharply.

Government spending in the health sector increased nine-fold in the five years between 2009-10 and 2013-14, the review said. Ministry of Health spending on programs with public good characteristics like nutrition, water and sanitation have risen.

Beginning in 2012-13, essential drugs and selected healthcare services were provided free of charge to children, pregnant mothers and patients needing emergency surgery under certain circumstances in some facilities.

The early signs are that these steps are reducing prohibitive out-of-pocket payments by households, said the review. The share of out-of-pocket payments fell from 82pc to an estimated 60pc over the same period as the nine-fold rise in government spending, the report said.

But a lack of data still makes policy making and monitoring difficult, and inefficient spending remains an issue, the review said. Even with the sharp increase in spending, the country is failing to meet health targets.

The fact that Myanmar is unlikely to hit Millennium Development Goals on child and maternal mortality suggests that it may want to consider increasing significantly public funding of programs aimed at improving maternal and child health, the report said.

U Maung Maung Win, permanent secretary at the planning and finance ministry, said the report will support the governments efforts to distribute the budget for the benefit of the people.

It will help us to make systematic reforms where necessary and to budget efficiently, he told media at the reports launch yesterday.

Mr Rab said Myanmar would not produce a public expenditure review every year, but that the Bank was due to start on a second review in July.

We hope it [the inaugural review] triggers more regular analysis of spending policies, he said, adding that the World Bank is encouraging the Ministry of Finance to make public a database of fiscal spending that it built specially for the review.

You see a huge shift in the culture of budgeting and public finance management, said Mr Rab.

The budget changed from being an administrative tool to an instrument to prioritise and implement development policy.

Translation by Thiri Min Htun
Telenor Myanmar has added 1.8 million customers over the past three months, bringing its base to 15.5 million subscribers.





The Norwegian mobile operator now nips at the heels of the Myanmar markets state-owned incumbent, Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), which in April said it served more than 19 million customers.

Meanwhile, the countrys third operator, Qatari entrant Ooredoo Myanmar, said earlier this year it counted more than 6 million users on its network.

Telenor Myanmar has more than doubled SIM cards sold since the first quarter of 2015, giving it an estimated 38 percent share of the local market, according to the companys first quarter figures released yesterday. However, its base is growing more slowly than before.

Despite this, the numbers seemed to defy expectations at Telenors top level.

I think Ive said for many quarters now that this cannot continue, but it does, said Group CEO Sigve Brekke during the companys financial results presentation. One-and-a-half years into operation ... [Telenor Myanmar] is now cash-flow-positive for the first time.

Telenor Myanmars operating cash flow margin came to 10pc, according to the results.

And despite the aggressive rollout I expect them to be able to stay in the positive territory, Mr Brekke said.





Meanwhile, the companys margin on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation  or operating profitability  reached 42pc. Revenues for the quarter came to NOK 1.7 billion (US$211.9 million), up 15pc from Q4 2015 and 124pc from Q1 2015.

Average revenue per user (ARPU) has been decreasing since Q3 2015, down from K6633 to K5692 this past quarter. This trend may reflect Telenors further penetration into rural areas.

Mr Brekke said a key strength the company had developed in the Myanmar market was its network. Telenor Myanmar turned on 800 towers in the past three months, bringing its total to 5000 sites  more than halfway to its goal of 9000, with which the firm believes it can effectively provide services to the entire country.

At this point, population coverage comes to 62pc and blankets 90pc of Myanmars townships, according to Mr Brekke. More than half of Telenor Myanmars customers engage with data regularly, according to the results.
When David Bowie wrote Blue Jean in the early 1980s, he could not have imagined the ramifications it would someday have for women in the far-flung country of Myanmar, then named Burma.





Blue Jean is a piece of sexist rock n roll, he said in a 1987 interview about the hit single. Its about picking up birds ... not very cerebral, that piece.

But on April 29, just months after the music icon passed away, his autographed sheet music for the 1984 single is being auctioned off in London for a womens charity fundraiser  bringing whole new meaning to the phrase picking up birds.

Oxfam, an international aid and development charity, will take the funds raised by the auction and apply them to its efforts in Myanmar, where it has a stated interest in promoting womens rights & leadership. Even as many have lauded Daw Aung San Suu Kyis role as NLD leader, the country still lags behind ASEAN peers such as Singapore, Laos and Vietnam in terms of elected women in parliament. Only 10 percent of the upper and lower house is female.

The organisation putting on the auction is The Music Circle, one element of musician Annie Lennoxs wider charity The Circle of Women. They are auctioning off merchandise from Kate Moss, Keira Knightley and Elton John, among others.

The Bowie music is listed online at US$2700 at time of writing, though the prices may soar as the deadline nears. The music comes in a frame with two photos of Bowie in performance, as well as a guarantee of authenticity.

For more on the event, visit The Music Circle Facebook page.
On May 12, 2015, a Singapore court sentenced Amos Yee, an outspoken 16-year-old video blogger who had been tried as an adult, to four weeks in jail.





Yee had been hauled up six weeks earlier on charges related to materials he had posted online: one for violating Section 298 of the countrys penal code by making remarks against Christianity, with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings of Christians in general; another for obscenity; and another for violating the Protection from Harassment Act 2014 by making remarks about Mr Lee Kuan Yew which were intended to be heard and seen by persons likely to be distressed.

Most of this came as a result of Lee Kuan Yew Is Finally Dead!, a video posted four days after the death of the first prime minister of Singapore. In it, Yee offered a withering assessment of the independent city-states founding father, which was in stark contrast to the laudatory tributes pouring forth from elsewhere.

On the surface, he seemed quite successful, says Yee in the video. He turned Singapore from a small seaport into a bustling metropolis, rife with skyscrapers and its own casino. World leaders seemed to like him, most notably Margaret Thatcher, and many foreigners and millionaires wish to invest in Singapore. But you look deeper, and you find out what the true nature of Lee Kuan Yews Singapore is.

Yees complaints about his homeland  and there are many  include its long working hours, high income inequality and poverty rates, high taxes, low government spending on healthcare and social security, and thoroughgoing materialism. Also, its governments tendency to slap critics down with libel suits.

He sees it all personified in Lee Kuan Yew, who honestly thought that money and status equated to happiness  His failure to understand how false that was really showed, leading us to become one of the richest countries in the world, and one of the most depressed. Ultimately, how do you quantify a great leader? It is by how he creates a place where people are able to live happily and prosper based on their own unique attributes. And he hasnt.

A fourth-generation Singaporean of Chinese descent, and a Cambridge University and London School of Economics graduate, Lee was once called the best bloody Englishman east of Suez by the British foreign secretary George Brown. But his years as a student in England taught him not to revere the people who ran Singapore throughout his youth: I saw no reason why they should be governing me, he later said. Theyre not superior.

Lee first took Singapores reins when he led the Peoples Action Party (PAP), a coalition strategically formed with pro-communists, to victory in the elections of 1959 after Britain granted the island limited self-rule. Allied bombing of the Japanese-occupied island during World War II had reduced it to a blank slate for all manner of economic, social and urban planning, and it remained shabby for years: Utter filth and poverty, reported the travel magazine Asia Scene in 1960. One must see with his own eyes to believe it.





Lees PAP, especially after Singapores expulsion from its short-lived federation with Malaysia in 1965, seized the opportunity to take the ruined former British trading post and build not just a new, modern, independent country  but also the most carefully planned city in the world.

The New Yorkers Robert Shaplen, reporting from Singapore in the 1960s, described Lee as a brilliant, impulsive and sometimes irascible man, possessed of an intellectual brilliance that has kept him remote from all but a few of his followers  and a dream of turning his country into the economic engine of Southeast Asia.

But according to Shaplen, One of Singapores  and Lees  problems [was] a lack of any constructive political opposition. He would spend the rest of his career minimising the chances of its emergence, crafting a political and media environment in which the PAP could, through free and fair elections, keep a vice-like grip on its claim to power and legitimacy. In the process, Lee ensured a degree of direct control over the built environment unseen in the rest of the democratic world.

The great housing project Singapore, which the colonys founder, Sir Stamford Raffles, envisioned in 1819 as a Manchester of the east, had become a boomtown under British rule. It struggled to accommodate wave after wave of immigrants who settled there, growing haphazardly until Raffles ordered up its first proper urban plan  with gridded streets, commercial zones and ethnically segregated residential districts  in 1822.

But Singapores housing woes deepened for more than a century  up to the reign of Lees PAP and its establishment of the mighty Housing and Development Board (HDB) in 1960, the division of the Ministry of National Development charged with building public housing. It immediately began putting up 10- to 15-storey tower blocks, adding more than 50,000 units of housing to the city within the first five years of its existence.

Since its inception, the HDB has built more than 1 million flats on the island, taking the concept of social housing to a level unparalleled in any city. Today, more than 80 percent of Singapores population live in HDB buildings, and the organisation itself describes public housing as a Singapore icon.

First, though, the HDB had to tackle the issue of 240,000 squatters, many of them migrants from Malaysia, who had appeared in Singapore during the 1950s. Their presence necessitated, to the minds of the planners in charge, a program of aggressive slum clearance, which provoked the kind of racially charged resistance typical of such sweeping urban-renewal efforts.

The HDB made it a priority to house low-income groups first, subsidising rents on the flats and later providing assistance from the Central Provident Fund, Singapores compulsory savings plan, to purchase them, creating a nation of stability-loving homeowners. But it couldnt convince the squatters to vacate their informal settlements for the new high-rises as quickly as it would have liked.

Then came the still unexplained Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961, which swept through the slum, killing four, injuring 85, leaving around 16,000 homeless and providing the government with a chance to demonstrate the speed with which it could relocate the victims  which it did in just over two weeks  and build new housing on the site of the disaster, which it did over the next four years.

Singapore must be one of the few places in the world where a statutory board satisfactorily completed everything it set out to do in its first five-year plan, says the narrator of a triumphant 1965 Singapore Ministry of Culture-produced newsreel on the HDBs first wave of buildings. Nowhere in the world, except in Russia and Germany, is the rate of rehousing faster than in Singapore.

The film cuts to a celebratory exhibition presenting renderings and models of the HDBs plans for the next five years and beyond: By far the most stimulating and exciting is the far-reaching scheme to rebuild a new city on the site of the old, dilapidated buildings and unhealthy slums.

The footage shows Lee Kuan Yew himself amid these visions of ever-growing towers to house families and workers, and the narrator quotes Lees pronouncement: The people of Singapore demand high standards of their governments, and they are prepared to work hard and are capable of higher skills. For them, the sky is the limit.

From the beginning of Lees three-decade run as prime minister until its end in 1990, Singapores total number of public housing units grew from 22,975 to 557,575. They remain organised by ethnicity, but unlike in Raffles day, the PAPs idea wasnt to separate the Chinese, the Malays, the Indians and the rest, but to carefully integrate them  so the demographics of each block reflect the demographics of Singapore as a whole, in theory preventing the formation of volatile ethnic enclaves.

Singapores gross national product per capita also grew astonishingly under Lees rule, from US$1240 to $18,437. External trade increased from $7.3 billion to $205 billion. Life expectancy rose from 65 to 74 years in a population that nearly doubled, from 1.6 million to 3 million.

Lee cultivated a reputation, as some leaders of less than fully democratic regimes do, of being able to get things done, especially when it came to infrastructure projects. He also didnt hesitate to talk about his belief in Machiavellis theories of ruling by fear and what he saw as the necessity of locking up people without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists. If you dont do that, the country would be in ruins. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping reportedly fell for the Singapore model when he visited in 1978.

Todays Singapore is far more precisely the result of Lee Kuan Yews vision than the Manchester of the East ever was of Sir Stamford Raffles, wrote science fiction author William Gibson in Wired magazine in 1993, three years after Lee stepped down. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.

Gibsons bleakly vivid view of Singapore as a stern, moralistic, highly regimented accretion of gleaming shopping malls resonated with readers and presumably gave the Singaporean government cause to reflect on the consequences of its decisions  though not before banning Wired from the island.

Singapore had by that time become a byword for cleanliness, efficiency and safety. Gibson, however, compared it unfavourably to Kowloon Walled City, the infamous ungoverned and informally constructed Hong Kong urban settlement  traditionally the home of pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists and dealers in heroin  which stood until the 1990s as the most densely populated place on Earth.

But the city-state that Lee built has also won, and continues to win, favour with urban planners and those in their realm, such as the Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser, who makes no secret of his admiration for Singapore  not for its style of government, but for the urban form, structure and functionality it has achieved. Singapore is close to being an ideal model of what good land-use planning looks like in the 21st century, said Glaeser in one interview, pointing specifically to its embrace of height. It is filled with high-density dwellings, both in the inner-city and in more suburban areas, where high-rise public housing is the model of choice.

A high degree of economic freedom has also made Singapore one of the most avowedly free-market countries in the world, regularly coming top or near top of surveys for liberalisation of markets, wrote economic journalist and author John Lanchester. Yet the government owns most of the land in the country and the overwhelming majority of the population lives in socialised housing. Its the world capital of free markets and also of council flats.

Were not Disneyland by a long shot, said the opposition politician Kenneth Jeyaretnam in response to Gibsons piece almost a decade later. But it is probably true to say that if George Orwell and Philip Dick had an illegitimate child of a theme park, then this would be it.

The Economist assesses Singapore, where the PAP has run the show for more than half a century, as a flawed democracy. The degree of state power that has enabled such extensive and rapidly executed feats of urban planning has also led to policies that appear to the rest of the world as draconian, such as corporal punishment for acts of vandalism, a ban on the importation of chewing gum, urine detectors installed in elevators, and expression-limiting laws of the kind that put Amos Yee on trial.

In the years since Gibsons visit, the population of this 278-square-mile city-state  up, thanks to land reclamation, from 224.5 square miles at the time of independence  has increased by almost 3 million, many of the newcomers manual labourers in a land with no minimum wage. But the governments 1990s designs to nurture the city into a global information-technology powerhouse appear to have stalled, resulting in something of a reversion to a manufacturing and tourism economy. Im afraid, said Jeyaretnam, were very much just another overcrowded Asian city with infrastructure and amenities stretched to the limit by a population bursting at the seams.

But Singapore being Singapore, the current government has ideas about how to plan its way out of the doldrums. The HDB has begun using special software to help design its newest housing projects so as to minimise their environmental impact. It also plans to mitigate the deadening effects of strict delineation of segments of the city by creating mixed-use neighbourhood centres using new design ideas and concepts to provide a complete live-work-play-learn environment for residents.

It has also continued to upgrade the rigour and real-time responsiveness of its congestion charging system, first implemented in 1975, which now brings in a revenue of $50 million a year and has encouraged 65pc of commuters to use public transport rather than private cars. As a result, said Glaeser, you have the second-densest country in the world, that has virtually uncongested streets.

Aware of having drawn such acclaim, Singapore urges tourists to visit the Singapore City Gallery  the city-states monument to its achievements in urban planning, which offers 10 thematic areas and more than 50 audiovisual and interactive exhibits, providing an exciting, multi-sensory learning experience into Singapores planning journey.

In keeping with the enduring legacy of the man Amos Yee called a dictator who managed to fool most of the world to think he was democratic, that journey is sure to fascinate  and confuse  the worlds urban planners for a long time yet.

To read more from the Guardian series "The Story of cities"  from Rome to Delhi to Skopje  click here.
Officially wading into the peace process for the first time since the National League for Democracy administration took office, State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday revealed a rough outline for the path the new government intends to chart, as well as who could be leading it.





At yesterdays Joint Monitoring Committee meeting she told attendees  including representatives of the Tatmadaw and the eight armed ethnic groups party to the ceasefire  that a second Panglong Conference must be held in short order.

The first iteration was brokered by her father, General Aung San, in 1947. The historic agreement  signed with ethnic leaders in exchange for help in securing independence from the British  allowed for full autonomy in frontier areas. Successive governments ignored the agreement, and the decades-long civil war ensured.

In her election campaign tour around the country last year, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi had pledged support for federalism and greater autonomy for the states. She reiterated the call yesterday.

It would be good to hold a 21st century Panglong Conference within one or two months. It should not be delayed. I would like you to try to achieve this, she said in her opening speech.

While her own position in the process remains unclear, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi told attendees during the meeting that her personal doctor would assume a liaison role in the peace process.

Dr Tin Myo Win, who served as the NLD leaders personal physician during her years of house arrest, was once tipped to become the presidential nominee. However, he has also been widely speculated to become the new governments chief negotiator.





Sources inside the NLD who asked not to be named told The Myanmar Times that Dr Tin Myo Win, as a former army doctor, is very familiar with and respected by the soldiers. He knows their nature very well, one source said.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi also told the JMC attendees that bringing nonsignatory groups into the peace process needs to be a priority.

I think the need to have a peace conference inclusive of the non-signatory groups should be paramount. We cannot do things one after another, she said.

Despite the limitation of the extant nationwide ceasefire, the NLD leader urged the ethnic representatives and the Tatmadaw not to break it.

A ceasefire is the first step to peace. After having a ceasefire, we can step forward and obtain eternal peace. The ceasefire must represent the peace process, she said.

She added that in her experience, 90 percent of ceasefires are brokered only to be swiftly broken.

Concerning the peace dialogues framework and composition, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi spoke bluntly about limiting participation in the process.

It is not practical to include all 60 million citizens in the peace process. We have to think realistically about who should be included in the JMC, she said.

In an interview with BBC Burmese, a colonel-ranked military officer described Daw Aung San Suu Kyis perspective on the peace process as a continuation of the Tatmadaws goals.

What she said is in line with what we have been doing, said Colonel Wunna Aung, secretary of the Joint Monitoring Committee. The most important thing is the ceasefire. Only after the ceasefire can we move on to political dialogue and the peace conference.

According to a statement released by the state counsellors official Facebook page yesterday, a meeting will be held in second week of May for the formation of a National Reconciliation and Peace Centre that will be led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

U Ko Ko Gyi, a member of the JMC, told reporters that he is optimistic about how the NLD leader will guide the peace negotiations.

If she continues to be involved in the process in her capacity as state counsellor, I think the peace process will have a greater and better potential in the future, he said.
Rakhine States new chief minister says both Buddhist and Muslim communities displaced by conflict need more aid before the onset of the monsoon season.





U Nyi Pu of the National League for Democracy told The Myanmar Times yesterday on his return from IDP camps near Mrauk-U damaged by storms last week that he intended personally to visit camps for internally displaced people from both communities.

The government has to provide displaced people with settlements that are good, safe and comfortable places for both communities, he said by telephone from the capital Sittwe.

The international community is also mobilising aid for civilians displaced by renewed fighting this month between the Tatmadaw and the Arakan Army, an ethnic armed group based in northern Kachin State but with its roots in Rakhine States Buddhist majority.

Pierre Peron, spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said UN aid workers this week had visited six out of eight locations where an estimated total of about 1000 recently displaced civilians are sheltering in the townships of Buthidaung, Kyauktaw and Rathedaung.

Many are staying in currently empty schools. Mr Peron said the government had provided food for the IDPs, but there was a need for sleeping mats, cooking utensils, more water and sanitation.

We are mobilising our response to reach the most vulnerable to provide non-food items, he said.

The small camps visited by U Ni Pu near the ancient Arakanese capital of Mrauk-U are sheltering a total of about 100 Rakhine Buddhists displaced in late 2015 by clashes between the Arakan Army and the Tatmadaw. Others are staying with relatives.





U Ni Pu said he would also visit IDP camps with the Japan International Cooperation Agency before the end of the month.

While the government is hoping that the recently displaced villagers will soon return to their homes  some in remote hills close to Chin State  aid workers are concerned there will be no let-up in the military offensives against the Arakan Army, meaning shelters will soon be needed once students return to classes in June.

More than 100,000 mostly stateless Muslim Rohingya  officially referred to as Bengalis  make up the large majority of IDPs in Rakhine following communal violence that erupted in 2012. However, U Ni Pus remarks and his decision to first visit displaced Buddhists reflect the political pressure he is under from the Arakan National Party (ANP).

The ANP, which defends the interests of the Buddhist majority, emerged as the single biggest party in the state in last Novembers elections but was denied the position of chief minister by NLD leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

ANP secretary U Tun Aung Kyaw said the chief minister should personally visit civilians displaced by armed conflict as much as possible to show his sympathy.

We have been waiting for and watching the new government, and its actions disappointed us because we could not see enthusiasm on the part of the Rakhine chief minister, he said.

Responding to criticism, U Nyi Pu said, We will take action step by step for all aspects of development in Rakhine State but improvements take time in some cases. However we will not be neglecting any cases.

The states information department said some state ministers and members of the ANP had gone together to see Rakhine civilians displaced by the recent fighting between the Arakan Army and the Tatmadaw. They said rice, oil, medicine and instant noodles were delivered.

U Min Aung, a minister for urban development, said it had been the first time that the new government had visited camps for displaced Rakhine. It is our responsibility to help people. We dont want to be blamed by the people that we are not different from the previous government. We must show we are really a government of the people, he said.
Police found a headless body and body-less head near a creek in Dawabon township, but said the two dont belong together.





The body, found drifting in Pazundaung creek in Bo Tun Zan ward on April 22, appears to belong to a child. Police believe the body matches with a description of a missing six-year-old from Thaketa township.

The child went missing on April 11 and we believe we found her today ... We also found another skull near the body, said Ko Lin Htut Aung from Bo Tun Zan ward.

The six-year-old disappeared after she walked away from a group of friends with an unknown woman.

Her mother had a stroke six years ago and is divorced. The family, two kids and the mother, live with an uncle, said U Khin Tun, another local resident. The girl was last seen when she was playing with other children on Thadar Yone Street.

Yangon Hospital is still inspecting both the body and the head. No identification has been proposed for the skull yet. Dr Than Htut Zaw said that the skull was too big to be from the body that police found.

East District Police Force Commander Police Lieutenant Colonel

Myint Htwe is leading the investigation along with a special unit.





Translation by Khant Lin Oo
A landmine explosion that injured two foreign tourists and their guide while trekking in Shan State has served as a bleak reminder of the deadly legacy of decades of civil war  just as poorer remote areas of Myanmar were looking forward to an economic boost from the democracy dividend.





The 24-year-old German travellers, Wiebke Rosler and Felix Zimmermann, and their guide Sai Khun Oo had been trekking from Hsipaw in northern Shan State on April 26 when they were hit by the blast. It was uncertain what triggered the explosion  possibly an accompanying dog whose fate remains unknown.

The injured were hurried to hospital with shrapnel wounds. Mr Zimmermann was also deafened in one ear.

It was the first such accident known to have involved foreign tourists, although Myanmar ranked third on the Landmine Monitors global list for mine injuries in 2014.

The group was trekking in Kyaukme township which has been the scene of recent clashes between the Tatmadaw and two ethnic armed groups. However the route chosen by Sai Khun Oo was not supposed to be in a conflict zone and was open to tourists.

It is not a restricted area. But to visit villages near Kyaukme township, is it necessary to ask for permission, said U Aung Thet Tun, deputy director of the Department of Hotels and Tourism in Lashio. Locals said rules and regulations for obtaining permits are vague.

It was possible the landmine exploded off a marked path. Edwin Briels, general manager of Yangon-based tour company Khiri Travel, warned trekkers against straying off safe routes.





We always advise all our guides and clients to stay on the marked paths as, indeed, unfortunately there are areas with landmines in parts of Kachin, Shan, Kayah and Kayin states and I do hope that for the safety of everybody this will be cleared very soon, he said.

In the conflict areas in Kyaukme, civilians have long suffered from unmapped landmines. According to civil society groups, villagers had called for minefields to be cleared in early March, but nothing had been done.

In that area the TNLA and RCSS armed groups settled and they laid landmines for security reasons. Villagers from the conflict area are used to facing this issue, said U Tin Maung Thein, chair of Ziwitha Philanthropic Organisation in Kyaukme.

According to police, the two trekkers were not seriously wounded and were discharged from Mandalay hospital. Currently they are staying in Pan Kyar Phyu Hotel and they are receiving medical treatment, said a police officer at the hospital.

Sai Khun Oo said the pair planned to leave the country today for further medical treatment. They dont want to receive medical treatment in Myanmar and want to go back. They already left the hospital, he said. Sai Khun Oo said he would be transferred to Lashio hospital to remove bits of shrapnel.

I do hope that the two tourists and the guide will fully recover soon and that this is a wake-up call for any army and government that its time to clean up, as thats in everybody interest, said Mr Briels.

The accident deals a blow to a verdant hill area becoming a popular trekking destination. Nearly 10,000 tourists visited Hsipaw last year, while 900 people came to Kyaukme, according to the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism.

It could impact trekking tourism but only in this region in northern Shan State, because there are many safe sites near Inle Lake and Kalaw. The ministry will again release directives [to avoid restricted regions] for regional guides, U Myint Htwe, director of the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism, told The Myanmar Times.

The ministry also said it will create more awareness of regulations for trekking and distribute rules and regulations to hotels, regional guides and tourism operators, according to U Aung Thet Tun. If they will break the rules, we will take action according to the directive of the ministry, he said.

There wont be any trouble for tourists if they receive the right information and regional guides follow the directives. In that case, this incident wont have a high impact on the trekking industry, he said.

But Ko Naing Naing, who arranges treks in Kalaw, feared there would be consequences. Trekking organisers are responsible for these problems, because it will have an impact on all tourism sectors concerned with foreign visitors. We must take care of their safety, he said.

Landmines are still being laid in Myanmars conflict zones. The nationwide ceasefire agreement signed last year was supposed to open the way for landmine clearing to begin in those southern areas covered by the pact, but none have been removed, meaning there is little hope of return for tens of thousands of displaced civilians.

Rhys Mansel of the UK-based HALO Trust, a demining NGO, said the incident showed the urgency of tackling the crisis.

This sad accident serves notice that it is not just local populations that are at risk in Myanmar; the impact of conflict can be felt for many years unless decisive action is taken to rid the country of landmines. If sectors such as tourism are to thrive, then the landmine issue will need to be fully addressed, he said.
Transport chiefs say holiday ticket touts have struck again, ignoring stern warnings against overcharging passengers eager to get home for Thingyan. U Nyunt Wai, chair of Ma Hta Tha, the Yangon Region Supervisory Committee for Motor Vehicles, said it had fined 35 bus companies nearly K4 million after receiving dozens of complaints.





Hundreds of thousands of people around the country take to the roads, usually by long-distance express bus, to be with their families during the holiday season that marks the Myanmar New Year. And every year, there are bus companies ready to take advantage of them.

This year, 21 bus lines at the Aung Mingalar highway bus compound and 14 lines at Dagon Ayar compound have been accused of overcharging passengers, said U Nyunt Wai, adding that Ma Hta Tha had received complaints from a total of 87 passengers in respect of 243 tickets.

As it said it would before the holiday, Ma Hta Tha has taken action, fining the companies a total of K3.9 million.

Most of the bus lines have already paid, he added.

The worst offenders were bus companies servicing Magwe Region, with one line being fined almost K800,000, he said.

These services went to Magwe, Minbu, Pakokku, Chauk and Yenangyaung townships. People from there are working in Yangon, and want to go home for the holidays. The bus line took advantage, said U Nyunt Wai.





Passenger Ko Aung Kyaw Min said he was twice charged almost double the normal rate for his tickets to Minbu. I bought the tickets in advance. The usual price is K9000, but they asked K15,000, even though the price on the ticket was K9000. I bought five tickets, but complained to Ma Hta Tha. When they investigated, the bus company denied overcharging, but said they would refund the money. I refused. In the end, Ma Hta Tha paid me what I was overcharged and said they would fine the company, he said.

The second time, Ko Aung Kyaw Min bought two tickets for K17,000 each, and the bus line wrote the excess charge on the ticket. I complained again, and Ma Hta Tha made a copy of the tickets and repaid me the money, he said.

Ko Aung Thu Ya, who spent Thingyan in Mandalay, says he was also overcharged, but did not complain. When I tried to buy tickets, the bus company said they had sold out, but I should try again in person. When I went to the bus compound, a tout charged me extra for two tickets  K15,000 each instead of the usual K10,800. But the ticket bore the normal price, so I didnt complain, he said.

U Nyunt Wai said passengers could bring their cases to Ma Hta Tha until May 31, presenting the ticket stub and their national identity card.

We will investigate every complaint and take further action as necessary, he said.
The world is witnessing a new breed of leaders who claim to know what ordinary people want and say they will stop at nothing to deliver these things.





Previous leaders often shied away from the basest instincts of the common man and proposed goals they asserted were right and proper and reflected the best values of humankind.

Not the new guys. They promise to get down and dirty and do whatever is necessary, niceties be damned.

In their view, they are simply acting democratically by listening to the people and reflecting their wishes.

It is called populism and its all the rage.

Just look at some of these guys  and intriguingly they are all guys, alpha males, puffed up with testosterone and the exuberance of their own bombast.

Take Rodrigo Duterte, the leading candidate in the Philippine presidential election, which will take place in less than two weeks on May 9.





Duterte, 71, is a former long-term mayor of Davao City, a booming metropolis on the southern coast of Mindanao that is to the Philippines what Miami is to the United States.

When Duterte took over running the place in the 1980s, it was a hotbed of drug dealers and local mafiosi.

No longer. Thanks to Dutertes zero-tolerance for crime and his take-no-prisoners policy, it is now the safest city in the nation. Indeed, last year, the global database, Numbeo, rated it the fourth-safest city in the world.

As Duterte said in 2009, If you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of my city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination.

It is the policy Duterte promises to bring to the nation if he is elected president, and right now, he is the odds-on favourite to win.

The same applies to Donald Trump, 69, the leading Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States.

Like his fellow populist Duterte, Trump has not only vowed to follow a stern anti-crime agenda, but has also extolled his sexual prowess and insulted the Pope. His support has risen in the process.

Trumps manichean philosophy would see him cracking down harshly on all those he says are weakening the power of America.

Thus, most immigrants, illegal or otherwise, especially Mexicans and Muslims, will face difficult times under a Trump administration  and that is if they can manage to get into the US in the first place.

He has vowed to ban all Muslims until theyve been rigorously scrutinised to prove they are not terrorists; while all Mexicans will need to surmount a wall that Trump will build along the frontier with the US.

He claims that Mexico will pay for this wall.

As with Dutertes vigilantism, these measures are hugely popular with many American citizens, just as they would be in this region.

After all, Singapore relishes lashing thieves and hanging murderers, while Malaysia already has its own symbolic wall and effectively bans all Jews.

Likewise, any Myanmar politician who advocated building a wall along the border with Bangladesh would win tremendous support.

Let us, therefore, not be hypocritical and throw stones at Trump or Duterte. They are merely promising to do what a large majority of their people want.

So, too, is the United Kingdoms Boris Johnson, 51, the blond, mop-headed mayor of London, who is currently the most popular figure in the land.

He has become even more popular by opposing his party leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, and leading the Brexit campaign to persuade Britons to vote to exit the European Union in a June 23 referendum.

Having just returned from the UK, I can vouch for the fact that the breadth, passion and commitment of those supporting Johnson and urging Britain to leave Europe is absolutely staggering.

The Brexit side includes five cabinet ministers, more than one third of Camerons parliamentary caucus, most of the mass media, and many leading entertainers and sporting figures.

They all expound strong fears about a loss of sovereignty to Brussels and an influx of foreign workers from Eastern Europe.

Given this visceral and widespread anti-EU sentiment, it is likely that the Brexit side will win, despite opinion polls to the contrary.

If the leave campaign does win, Cameron will have to resign. Johnson will become PM and leader of a Conservative Party that will be split down the middle and likely to lose the next election to a hard left Labour Party.

Meanwhile, Scotland, most of whose citizens want to stay in the EU, will demand another independence referendum and this time they will prevail and Scotland will leave the UK.

As well, all overseas contracts, arrangements, plans, travel rules and myriad other things between this region and the EU and the UK will need to be restructured.

These are all momentous, if not cataclysmic steps, yet they do not cause the Brexiteers to flinch. In their view, the worst scenario of all is to remain in the EU and be dominated by Brussels.

To suggest otherwise is like trying to persuade Duterte that criminals should be treated humanely or telling Trump that most Muslims are less violent than many gun-toting Americans.

Unfortunately, these new populists are supreme egotists, massively self-confident and totally uncompromising  they believe that the best place to bury the hatchet is in your opponents head.

So, if you are a betting person, consider this bankable trifecta:

On May 9, Duterte is elected president of the Philippines. On June 23, Britain votes to leave the EU, Johnson replaces Cameron, and Scotland moves to secede from the UK. On November 8, Trump becomes president-elect of the United States.

Be prepared, for more likely than not, these things will come to pass.
28.04.2016 LISTEN

Voltarians are a group of people who are very well brought up, arguably, the most well brought up group of people in Ghana.

As a result, we are enemies of evil and their doers even if it turns up to be one of us who disgracefully falls out of our core values.

The Volta Regional branch of Critical Thinkers International (CTI) therefore see the plea by Mrs Dzifa Attivor to all Voltarians to support her and other Voltarians who might have tarnished the image of Voltarians through their engagement in acts of criminality against the country as not only wrong but also an insult to us, because her plea only suggest we are criminally minded people who support wrong doings, but in reality is a direct contradiction.

Furthermore, our checks in Volta region show that there isn't even a single project implemented by Mrs Attivor through out her political career, to the extend that even under her tenure as a Minister of Transportation, she denied the Volta Region of a policy called Youth In Driving, a policy which gave opportunity to people in other regions to acquire a car over time after they have been given to run as commercial for sometime.

Despite President Mahama being a Northerner under whose governance Voltarians have suffered most with oppression such as;

A. Using Voltarians as guinea pigs for Ebola Vaccine Tests while the people of his tribe were around

B. Starving Volta Region of Economic prospects

C. Insulting the Chiefs of Volta Region just for pushing their complains to him

D. Sabotaging Voltarians who are working under his governance to the extend of even extending it to JJ Rawlings, the founder of NDC who is also a Voltarian.

E. Others

Yet, Mrs Attivor still allowed herself to be manipulated and used by this same Northerner(President Mahama) to defraud Ghanaians through this Bus Rebranding saga, which has brought about a huge tarnish of the image of Voltarians, of which we believe might be one of the reasons for her fear of a change of government.

Moreover, it will be most ridiculous for a person of her calibre to say, it was NPP who jailed them when in actual fact, it was a court of competent jurisdiction which found them guilty of their crime.

Aside that, records available show that, it was not only Voltarians who were jailed under NPP but also people of other tribes such as Hon. Kwame Peprah(An Ashanti), Hon. Ibrahim Adams(A Northerner) and others.

Actually, other checks have shown that, there were many other Voltarians who served honestly under the NDC during Ex-President Rawlings' rule and so lived freely under Ex-President Kuffour's rule without fear of being prosecuted with examples being Hon. Victor Gbeho, Hon. Ahiable Modestus, Hon. Dr. Obed Yao Asamoah, Hon. Dr. Kwabena Adjei, Hon. Charles K. Agbenaza and others

Finally, the Volta Regional branch of CTI totally see as wrong any statement that is likely to raise tribal tension in Ghana and so, we see same with this statement made by the daughter of our land, Mrs Attivor.

We as a result calling on her to retract and apologise to the whole country for this peace threatening statement made by her.

Thank you

Hhhmm, may God be praised always

.............SIGNED.............

Critical Thinkers International

[email protected]

www.criticalthinkersghana.blogspot.com

.....SPOKESPERSONS......

Innocent Supremo Tetteh 00233243266937

Joseph Egyer Quarshie 00233245607479

Godwin Kwami Nanedo

00233244754709

Madam kiki Carboo

00233244217711

Nana Kwadwo Akwaa

00233246913905 / 00233209676413

Nana Kyei Baffour

008615580214166
Folks, we must by now have known that the fracas generated by utterances attributed to Ms. Dzifa Attivor (former Minister of Transportation who resigned because of the murky circumstances surrounding the rebranding of the Mass Metro Transport buses) has taken the centre-stage in public discourse about Ghanaian politics. To me, the fracas is insignificant because it is not a warranted or supported by practice or principle. Ghanaian politics has all these years been known for being heavily invested with tribal sentiments. What is new, then, to warrant all the energy being expended flogging a dead horse? The only snag is that hypocrisy is feeding all that vigorous reaction to her utterance. No more no less.

I want to say upfront here that in pinpointing the Kufuor administration for persecuting Ewes, Ms. Dzifa Attivor (the former Transport Minister) said nothing new to warrant all the barrage of condemnations and what-not. The ongoing muscle-flexing, spitting of fire and brimstone, name-calling, and threats or whatever else strike me as needless if we truly know the bent of Ghanaian politics, especially since the immediate pre-independence era and far beyond it to date. Which informed Ghanaian doesnt know that apart from the Great Osagyefos approach to national and local politics all others have been clouded with tribal considerations?

Would it be the gang of cowardly security officers who masterminded Nkrumahs overthrow or the role of Gen. Akwasi Amankwah Afrifa in the abortive April 1967 coup by Yeboah and Co. that led to the murder of Gen. Kotoka and Ewe military officers (Capt. Avevor and Capt. Borkloe, among others)? Ask Rawlings why he supported the extermination of Afrifa, after all. Those of us who read the letter from Afrifa to Acheampong that prophesied his own doom and that of Acheampong at the hands of Rawlings will not easily be cajoled by latter-day saints of the sort condemning Ms. Attivor.

Or the manipulation of the situation to remove Gen. Ankrah from office for Gen. Afrifa to pave the way for the Busia-led Progress Party to perpetrate its Apollo 568 agenda, which was primarily against Ewes in the Civil Service (the Sallah case in view)?

Or the machinations by Gen. Acheampong against Captain Selormey, Major Agbo, Major Habadah and other Ewe military officers with whom he had executed the January 13, 1972 military coup against Busia but whom he later feared to co-exist with?

Of course, elements belonging to other ethnic groups can be identified as victims of ethnic-influenced persecution. As to why the focus is on the Ewes alone, I cannot explain now, but I will be guided by what I know to make my point clear. Take it or leave it as such. I care less. But the record of happenings exists.

History being recalled here for a good reason, folks. Many happenings over the years have reinforced negative opinions that Ghanaian politics is heavily invested with or poisoned by tribal sentiments. Believe it or not, ethnicity counts a lot in our kind of politics, which explains why the NDC with Rawlings at the helm would be quickly labelled as an Ewe party and the NPP as an Akan party (with emphasis on the Ashanti and Eastern Regions that have traditionally stood for it all these years while the NDC has a wider national spread).

] will stick my neck out to say that Ms. Attivor didn't say anything that we haven't known before. Thus, I consider the wailing and sharpening of claws to tear her into piecesand to indirectly get at the NDC itself as needless and misplaced. Take it from me that whatever she said is already in the public sphere and doesn't strike me as worrisome or frightening as it does those pouncing on it to further their own skewed political agenda.

Context: Ms. Attivor is reported to have said that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a tribal party bent on prosecuting only Ewes if it wins the general elections in November. Referring to the record of the NPP government between 2001 and 2008, she argued that the NPP targeted only members of her ethnic group for prosecution. (See http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/If-you-don-t-vote-for-NDC-I-will-go-to-jail-Dzifa-Attivor-433966).

Anything strange in her claims here? None!! In truth, most of those who were either prosecuted and jailed or dragged to court were Ewes. You know them already and I don't have to mention names here. Others such as Ibrahim Adam, Kwame Peprah, and Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings also faced the NPP government's music in court.

The dicey aspect, though, is that we can't simply conclude that those Ewes were targeted because of their ethnic extraction. That's where the line is difficult to be drawn. They were public officials caught in acts for which they had to account. Thus, to jump to the conclusion that the Kufuor government persecuted them as Ewes is difficult to accept. However, that has been the perception among Ewes all these years. Ms. Attivor might just be reiterating that perception, even if wrapped around her own narrow interests.

What about her utterance may come across as offensive is her urge that the NDC be voted for by Ewes (at least judging from the angle from which she allegedly made the pronouncements). Here too, there is nothing strange, especially if we acknowledge the fact that the Volta Region is regarded as the bastion ("Word Bank") of the NDC just as the Ashanti Region is known as the incubator and stronghold of the NPP. So, why the apprehensions?

Another aspect is her claim that if the NDC loses power, she would be jailed by the NPP. In this sense, only she knows why she will be jailed or why the NDC administration hasn't sought to jail her for whatever she might have done for which she is afraid. This is the nub. By this claim, she has opened a can of worms for us to question what the Mahama-led administration isn't doing about her.

Folks, the speed and zeal with which the Ghana peace Council, the NPP, and others (including Jerry Rawlings and the NDC's Volta Regional Chairman) have jumped on Ms. Attivor over this utterance is understandable, especially if her claims reflect "tribal politics", which the critics regard as dangerous. But is it not true that our politics is heavily invested with tribal or ethnic politics, not to talk about the religious vein too?

I am tempted to wonder whether we haven't heard worse utterances from other politicians (e.g., the NPP's Akufo-Addo, Kennedy Agyepong, Maxwell Jumah, Anthony Karbo, Fraudie Blay, Yaw Osafo-Marfo, and many others) or whether those now jumping on Ms. Attivor could do same to such characters as they are doing to her now.

This stance is not to suggest that I support Ms. Attivor's outbursts. It is to lay everything bare for us to know that conditions that precipitate such outbursts exist everywhere in the country and people are openly talking about ethnicity in Ghanaian politics. But for her mounting a political platform to say so, there wouldn't have been anything to attract that much criticism.

How many times haven't opponents of the NPP labelled it as an Akan (Asante-Akyim) party or the NDC as an Ewe party? Ghanaians have known all this while that our politics is not clean; that it is not devoid of tribal/ethnic sentiments. So, what does it mean if a politician of Ms. Attivor's type touches on it?

How many times haven't we heard politicians mightier than Ms. Attivor tell their kith and kin to vote for them because they belong together? Have such people been heavily criticized as is being done to Ms. Attivor?

There is too much hypocrisy in our national and local politics. Those asking her to retract her utterance and apologize are wasting their breath. She must, however, learn not to stoke the fire, even if she wants to appeal to the "tribal sentiments" of voters. That's the best we can tell her.

The truth about the hounding of NDC politicians of Ewe stock by the Kufuor administration still stands tall for those who have eyes to see. No amount of denial can wash it away.

Perhaps, what we have to deal with now is to urge the government to look into why Ms. Attivor is scared of the future. The government has to investigate her to determine what she is hiding behind. After all, the re-branding issue exposed her lack of a good sense of judgement and she must be grilled and drilled for us to know what we need to know. Then and only then will we know why she is afraid of being jailed by an NPP government.

For now, the critics may be burning energy to condemn her and do their own kind of politics with her utterances. It is part of the political discourse to be tolerated. In the end, I wonder what problem it will solve.

Our politicians need some self-restraint to deal with issues tactfully so they don't provoke needless tension. That's what matters; but who will listen at a time when some have already geared up and are flexing muscles to do things as they deem fit to either retain them in office or win political power for them?

Ms. Dzifa Attivor's problem is our collective responsibility as well. Let's not pretend that we haven't heard anything of the sort before. She has indeed, awoken a sleeping giant that is bearing down heavily on us to acknowledge the truth of our skewed national politics so we can do better henceforth, especially as Election 2016 approaches. Those seeking to manipulate her utterance for political capital had better think twice because it wont easily yield the dividends that they have set their eyes on.

I shall return
FIDH, OCDH and the #MyVoteMustCount Coalition member organisations are extremely concerned about the major military and police operations currently ongoing in the Pool region. The violence has already led to dozens of people killed and injured, the destruction of many buildings including schools, medical centers and churches, and numerous arrests. While the security forces prohibit almost all access to the Pool department, our organisations are concerned about a crackdown behind closed doors against opponents to the recent and contested re-election of President Denis Sassou Nguesso. Our organisations urge the authorities to stop all operations of the security forces, to allow access to populations and to conduct independent investigations into these events.

For over two weeks, the Congolese army and police have been conducting major operations in the Pool region, officially against former members of the Ninja militia and its former leader, Frederic Bintsmou aka Pastor Ntumi, former general delegate to the President in charge of the promotion of peace and war-related reparations. Until April 14, defence and security forces also conducted shelling with heavy weapons and bombardments, followed by ground offensives, including against the villages of Vindza, Kibouende, Soumouna and Mayama. Even though the authorities assert that there are no civilian casualties, the testimonies received by our organisations mention dozens of people killed and injured. Many protected buildings such as schools, medical centers and churches have been struck, or even targeted. Populations have deserted cities and sought refuge in the bush where they survive in extreme precariousness and insecurity. Meanwhile, security forces carry out waves of arrests of people suspected to be former Ninja fighters, Pastor Ntumi rebel group. For instance in Brazzaville, Kinkala and Kindamba dozens of young people identified as former Ninjas were arrested after the events of April 4 in Brazzaville and during the ongoing operations in the Pool Department, and are still being held in Brazzaville. Congolese authorities also subject the Pool region to a complete blockade, preventing all non-tightly controlled access, raising fears that serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law are perpetrated behind closed doors against the civilian population.

Congolese authorities must immediately stop all operations by security forces in the Pool, and facilitate the return and access to affected populations. The ongoing blockade is unacceptable. All light must be shed on recent weeks' events, declared Dismas Kitenge, FIDH vice-president.

Congolese authorities seem to have engaged those military operations in the Pool in response to the violence that occurred on April 4, the night before the validation by the Constitutional Court of Denis Sassou-Nguesso first round victory at the presidential election with over 60% of votes. That day, heavy and automatic weapon shots have been heard in the southern districts of Brazzaville. In particular, a military barracks was attacked, two police stations and a municipality building were burnt to the ground and hundreds of people fled to reach the north of Brazzaville. The violence that occurred in Brazzaville between April 4 and 10 reportedly killed at least 17 people and injured dozens, according to various sources.

The authorities have however provided no toll of these events, qualifying them as terrorist acts perpetrated by members of the Ninja rebel militias under the supervision of Pastor Ntumi. While the Congolese authorities justify their operations in the Pool as a fight against terrorism, Pastor Ntumi denied any involvement in the April 4 events in Brazzaville in a statement published on April 5. Dozens of people, presented as Ninjas combatants and suspected of being behind those attacks, were arrested by the police in the days following the violence. Series of arrests of high profile individuals, including executives of campaign directories of the candidates Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko and Okombi Salissa accused of endangering the security of the state, also continue.

The confiscation of power and the inability of alternating heads of States adds to the the population's frustrationsand increases the temptation for the opposition to the regime to radicalize. The manipulation of the fight against terrorism for the purpose of political repression against entire groups of the population could degenerate into a real crisis or even plunge the country into a civil war. To avoid chaos, the government must release all opponents, open an inclusive political dialogue and commit to respecting public and individual freedoms, declared Tresor Nzila, OCDH executive director.

After 32 years in power, Denis Sassou-Nguesso was sworn in on April 16, for a five year term, following an election that took place during a nationwide telecommunication blackout  suspended for safety reasons according to the government. The election was widely marred by frauds and irregularities, denounced by Congolese opposition and civil society, as well as part of the international community, including Canada, the United States and the European Union.

Denis Sassou-Nguesso has forced its way through his re-election in defiance of constitutional legality and African Union texts. Barred from running by the provisions of the previous Constitution, the ruling regime organized on October 25, 2015, less than 5 months before the presidential election, a referendum to adopt a new constitution. This new Constitution in force since November 6, 2015 allows the president to run for further terms. By advancing the elections by several months and organizing the victory of the ruling president with a knock-out, according to the words consecrated by several African leaders, the regime organized a real coup

The pre-election period was marked by numerous human rights violations and fundamental freedoms abuses, including against opposition activists who have been subject to several arrests and detentions. Denis Sassou-Nguesso's regime responded to the mobilisation of the opposition and civil society against the constitutional amendment through repression. After the presidential election, intimidations continue and freedoms are still confiscated in what appears to be a clear strategy to silence all dissenting voices said our organizations.

Context

President Denis Sassou Nguesso was sworn in on April 16, 2016 for a third term after a disputed election. On September 22, 2015, he expressed his willingness to organise a referendum to decide on a change of the constitution in force since 2002. This amendment intended to allow him to run for a third consecutive presidential term. Opponents, who considered it an attempted constitutional coup, massively mobilized and were severely repressed on October 20 and 21, 2015. At least 20 people were killed in Brazzaville, Pointe Noire and in other parts of the country according to the figures ascertained by our organisations.

Denis Sassou Nguesso has been in power since 1979. In 1992, he lost the first pluralist elections before returning to power by force of arms in 1997, following more than two years of civil war that has led to the death of 4 000 to 10 000 people as well as thousands of displaced and refugees. Over those years, Denis Sassou Nguesso Cobras militias have successively confronted Congolese armed forces and the Zoulous and Cocoyes militias of the president Pascal Lissouba, then the ninjas militias of the prime minister Bernard Kolelas. The intervention of the Angolan armed forces of Jose Eduardo Dos Santos allowed him to prevail militarily and to regain power. Fighting resumed against the Ninja militias led by Pastor Ntumi in the Pool region that became inaccessible and where the civilian population was victim of many abuses. In 1999 the government's security services were accused of having massacred more than 300 refugees returning to the Congo on Brazzaville Beach. The case is still pending before French courts. Since the 2002 election, Denis Sassou Nguesso has been reelected in disputed elections.

"The #MyVoteMustCount coalition

Between 2014 and 2016, 52 elections including 25 presidential elections have been scheduled in 27 African countries. To avoid manipulation, fraud, and violence resulting from shortened elections, African and international civil societies have decided to mobilize through the #MyVoteMustCount campaign. Civil societies are demanding that their leaders respect the legitimate rights of the people to choose their representatives in fair, free and transparent elections through public awareness, field actions and political advocacy prior to each election between now and 2016.

FIDH, OCDH and the #MyVoteMustCount Coalition member organisations are extremely concerned about the major military and police operations currently ongoing in the Pool region. The violence has already led to dozens of people killed and injured, the destruction of many buildings including schools, medical centers and churches, and numerous arrests. While the security forces prohibit almost all access to the Pool department, our organisations are concerned about a crackdown behind closed doors against opponents to the recent and contested re-election of President Denis Sassou Nguesso. Our organisations urge the authorities to stop all operations of the security forces, to allow access to populations and to conduct independent investigations into these events.

[Congo - repression in the Pool]  AFP

For over two weeks, the Congolese army and police have been conducting major operations in the Pool region, officially against former members of the Ninja militia and its former leader, Frederic Bintsmou aka Pastor Ntumi, former general delegate to the President in charge of the promotion of peace and war-related reparations. Until April 14, defence and security forces also conducted shelling with heavy weapons and bombardments, followed by ground offensives, including against the villages of Vindza, Kibouende, Soumouna and Mayama. Even though the authorities assert that there are no civilian casualties, the testimonies received by our organisations mention dozens of people killed and injured. Many protected buildings such as schools, medical centers and churches have been struck, or even targeted. Populations have deserted cities and sought refuge in the bush where they survive in extreme precariousness and insecurity. Meanwhile, security forces carry out waves of arrests of people suspected to be former Ninja fighters, Pastor Ntumi rebel group. For instance in Brazzaville, Kinkala and Kindamba dozens of young people identified as former Ninjas were arrested after the events of April 4 in Brazzaville and during the ongoing operations in the Pool Department, and are still being held in Brazzaville. Congolese authorities also subject the Pool region to a complete blockade, preventing all non-tightly controlled access, raising fears that serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law are perpetrated behind closed doors against the civilian population.

Congolese authorities must immediately stop all operations by security forces in the Pool, and facilitate the return and access to affected populations. The ongoing blockade is unacceptable. All light must be shed on recent weeks' events, declared Dismas Kitenge, FIDH vice-president.

Congolese authorities seem to have engaged those military operations in the Pool in response to the violence that occurred on April 4, the night before the validation by the Constitutional Court of Denis Sassou-Nguesso first round victory at the presidential election with over 60% of votes. That day, heavy and automatic weapon shots have been heard in the southern districts of Brazzaville. In particular, a military barracks was attacked, two police stations and a municipality building were burnt to the ground and hundreds of people fled to reach the north of Brazzaville. The violence that occurred in Brazzaville between April 4 and 10 reportedly killed at least 17 people and injured dozens, according to various sources.

The authorities have however provided no toll of these events, qualifying them as terrorist acts perpetrated by members of the Ninja rebel militias under the supervision of Pastor Ntumi. While the Congolese authorities justify their operations in the Pool as a fight against terrorism, Pastor Ntumi denied any involvement in the April 4 events in Brazzaville in a statement published on April 5. Dozens of people, presented as Ninjas combatants and suspected of being behind those attacks, were arrested by the police in the days following the violence. Series of arrests of high profile individuals, including executives of campaign directories of the candidates Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko and Okombi Salissa accused of endangering the security of the state, also continue.

The confiscation of power and the inability of alternating heads of States adds to the the population's frustrationsand increases the temptation for the opposition to the regime to radicalize. The manipulation of the fight against terrorism for the purpose of political repression against entire groups of the population could degenerate into a real crisis or even plunge the country into a civil war. To avoid chaos, the government must release all opponents, open an inclusive political dialogue and commit to respecting public and individual freedoms, declared Tresor Nzila, OCDH executive director.

After 32 years in power, Denis Sassou-Nguesso was sworn in on April 16, for a five year term, following an election that took place during a nationwide telecommunication blackout  suspended for safety reasons according to the government. The election was widely marred by frauds and irregularities, denounced by Congolese opposition and civil society, as well as part of the international community, including Canada, the United States and the European Union.

Denis Sassou-Nguesso has forced its way through his re-election in defiance of constitutional legality and African Union texts. Barred from running by the provisions of the previous Constitution, the ruling regime organized on October 25, 2015, less than 5 months before the presidential election, a referendum to adopt a new constitution. This new Constitution in force since November 6, 2015 allows the president to run for further terms. By advancing the elections by several months and organizing the victory of the ruling president with a knock-out, according to the words consecrated by several African leaders, the regime organized a real coup

The pre-election period was marked by numerous human rights violations and fundamental freedoms abuses, including against opposition activists who have been subject to several arrests and detentions. Denis Sassou-Nguesso's regime responded to the mobilisation of the opposition and civil society against the constitutional amendment through repression. After the presidential election, intimidations continue and freedoms are still confiscated in what appears to be a clear strategy to silence all dissenting voices said our organizations.

Context

President Denis Sassou Nguesso was sworn in on April 16, 2016 for a third term after a disputed election. On September 22, 2015, he expressed his willingness to organise a referendum to decide on a change of the constitution in force since 2002. This amendment intended to allow him to run for a third consecutive presidential term. Opponents, who considered it an attempted constitutional coup, massively mobilized and were severely repressed on October 20 and 21, 2015. At least 20 people were killed in Brazzaville, Pointe Noire and in other parts of the country according to the figures ascertained by our organisations.

Denis Sassou Nguesso has been in power since 1979. In 1992, he lost the first pluralist elections before returning to power by force of arms in 1997, following more than two years of civil war that has led to the death of 4 000 to 10 000 people as well as thousands of displaced and refugees. Over those years, Denis Sassou Nguesso Cobras militias have successively confronted Congolese armed forces and the Zoulous and Cocoyes militias of the president Pascal Lissouba, then the ninjas militias of the prime minister Bernard Kolelas. The intervention of the Angolan armed forces of Jose Eduardo Dos Santos allowed him to prevail militarily and to regain power. Fighting resumed against the Ninja militias led by Pastor Ntumi in the Pool region that became inaccessible and where the civilian population was victim of many abuses. In 1999 the government's security services were accused of having massacred more than 300 refugees returning to the Congo on Brazzaville Beach. The case is still pending before French courts. Since the 2002 election, Denis Sassou Nguesso has been reelected in disputed elections.

"The #MyVoteMustCount coalition

Between 2014 and 2016, 52 elections including 25 presidential elections have been scheduled in 27 African countries. To avoid manipulation, fraud, and violence resulting from shortened elections, African and international civil societies have decided to mobilize through the #MyVoteMustCount campaign. Civil societies are demanding that their leaders respect the legitimate rights of the people to choose their representatives in fair, free and transparent elections through public awareness, field actions and political advocacy prior to each election between now and 2016.
The opposition NPP has joined calls for former Transport minister Dzifa Attivor to retract her tribal comments suggesting that the party has a penchant for jailing politicians from the Volta Region and apologise for same.

A statement signed by the communications director of the party Nana Akomea said it is falsehood for anybody to suggest that the party targeted any ethnic group while in power.

It is difficult to believe a former Minister of State will speak like this. Goverments or political parties do not jail people. Government may initiate criminal prosecution. It is only the Judiciary that can impose jail sentences.

It is strange that Dzifa Attivor a former Minister of State, doesn't know this!

"The NPP government did ALSO initiate criminal prosecution against Konadu Rawlings and Kwame Peprah (Ashantis ), lbrahim Adams (Northerner) Shirley Ayittey (Ga), Sipa Yankey ( Nzema) etc and even prosecuted a member of the NPP government - Malam Issah ( Northerner), the statement noted.

Read the statement below.

Dzifa Attivor, the resigned former Minister of State for Transport, yesterday at an NDC public rally at Aflao, commented that; voters in the Volta Region should not vote for the NPP; as the NPP administration, by "jailing" messrs Abodakpi, Tsatsu Tsikata and Victor Selormey, has a record of "jailing" ewes /voltarians; hence voltarians/ewes should vote to prevent the NPP from coming into office, or she Dzifa Attivor and other NDC ministers from the Volta Region will end up in jail.

It is difficult to believe a former Minister of State will speak like this. Goverments or political parties do not jail people.

Government may initiate criminal prosecution. It is only the Judiciary that can impose jail sentences.

It is strange that Dzifa Attivor a former Minister of State, doesn't know this!

The NPP government did ALSO initiate criminal prosecution against Konadu Rawlings and Kwame Peprah (Ashantis ), lbrahim Adams (Northerner) Shirley Ayittey (Ga), Sipa Yankey ( Nzema) etc and even prosecuted a member of the NPP government - Malam Issah ( Northerner).

So was the NPP government engaged in tribal agenda against all these other tribes/ethnic groups in which these others belong?

The NDC government (of which Dzifa Attivor was a member), prosecuted former Ministers Asamoah Boateng and Osei Adjei (Fante and Ashanti ) and messrs Wireko Brobbey and Kwadwo Mpiani etc. Was the government of the NDC engaged in tribal agenda with these prosecutions?

Why did Dzifa Attivor resign? She resigned because of suspicion she had colluded with Smartty's Ltd to cause financial loss of Ghc1.9 million of poor taxpayers monies.

Her own former colleague the Attorney General has recommended that she be prosecuted.

The NDC government of President Mahama is suspected of trying to shield her from prosecution by not publishing the Attorney General's report and recommendations.

Now the courts of Ghana have ordered the report to be released and all Ghanaians will question why she has not been prosecuted yet.

Dzifa Attivor, per the Attorney General's unpublished report, has caused great financial loss to the taxpayer. It is pathetic that she is trying to escape justice by inciting tribal hatred against the NPP.

By her outbursts, she also portrayed and confirmed that President Mahama's government has not focused on fighting corruption in his government.

Did Dzifa Attivor share her V8 four wheel with ewes/voltarians? Did she share her massive per diems with ewes/voltarians? How much of the Ghc1.9 million did she give to ewes/voltarians?

Dzifa Attivor's remarks are ill informed, tribalistic, ethnically divisive, non sensical, corruption driven and totally unworthy of a former Minister of State.

She should apologise forthwith and cease making such embarrassing comments not only to herself but to Ghanaian democracy.

Nana Akomea

Director of Communications
28.04.2016 LISTEN

We were thinking Boko Haram, IPOD, IBB and Tinubu were going to plan or see the downfall of Buhari like Babangida did in 1985. Many of us have been anything but right so far. Then came foreign allocation shortage, the fuel crisis and Nigerians still crave tightly unto foreign products. Amazingly most Nigerians have given Buhari the support and encouragement he needs during this one-year honeymoon period. Even Devaluation has boiled down to a political debate.

Calling on Buhari to take action in the interest of national unity is not only appropriate, it is the best gesture to prevent further violence that may degenerate into chaos. What is clear is that people are not going to lie down and play dead in their own communities. They will fight back if nobody comes to their aid. People see complicity where the real owners of the cattle are the rich and powerful who see others land as Gods and nobodys land. Except their land is sacred.

It is Fulani, the worlds second deadliest terrorists after Boko Haram that have proved difficult for Buharis Government to curb. There is a historical reason: Buhari is a Hausa descendants of the rulers of the great Empire of Songhai and other civilizations. These are proud sons of Hausa usurped by Fulani. Without claims of descendant from Usman Dan Fodio, Hausa are not worthy of any majestic post. As usurpers of great Hausa kingdoms, Fulani are inoculated against sins.

What we have been witnessing is the vestiges of the violence of Usman Dan Fodio that came in peace only for him and his supporters to emerge like the Trojan horse enticing the support of our Hausa brothers and sisters, capturing their ruling houses and now moving Southwards. Their mayhem, without abatement on Hausa farmers, Jos and the surrounding areas went for century. The Hausa suffer in silence but their Middle Belt and Southern brothers will not.

If Buhari is the Messiah almighty Allah has sent to deliver West Africa from the menace of these bloodthirsty terrorists, so be it. He must not shirk in his responsibilities. No Hausa man can aspire to any position of substance in the North without claiming some genealogy to the same Fulani marauders that destroyed their civilized way of life. Buhari must break out of this yoke.

Yet most of these Fulani terrorists clad themselves in the cloak of peace loving Hausa, married their ladies, speak their language while recruiting their children to die for causes that do not elevate talikawa status as the least educated, the most maligned and impoverished people in Nigeria. While they steal and loot the country dry with their Southern brothers and sisters, they leave crumbs as sarah; of which we are supposed to be grateful and sing their praises.

Here we are, looking for ways to be self-sufficient in agriculture since a hungry man is an angry man. But facing the constant menaces of Fulani herdsmen through murders, kidnappings, rapes with silence from constituted authorities that are sworn to enforce law and order, encourage passive action like boycotting their cattle in the local market; or active action to fight back. We have complaints from some localities that those resisting terrorists on their farms disappeared.

Buhari has promised to face any threat to Nigeria the way he is dealing with Boko Haram. He must deliver on this incessant Fulani terrorists threat. It is obvious in this day that it is not about cattle or religion but about impunity to use Hausa brothers to capture slaves as if we still live in the past centuries. No African religion is so hungry for converts that blood must be shed in order to conquer. Indeed, African religions are so peaceful other religions take advantage.

Justice must not only be done, it must be seemed done to be fair and transparent to all peace loving individuals in a civilized community where everyone lives and let live. Misunderstanding, impunity and outright disregard for the rule of law and order create a community championed by a double-headed hydra. It deals ruthlessly with one group and closes its eyes to the atrocity of others. Buhari must not make past mistake of allowing the well connected to flaunt orders.

Here is a man his country men are praising for bringing sanity into the War Against Corruption, yet there are distractors left and right trying their possible best to sink the boat before we have a chance to rescue the Country from the hands of vultures, vagabonds and many that want the children of Africa back in chains. Terrorists cannot disguise as cowboys or cattle herdsmen.

Environment reforestation of the encroaching desert that may turn into barren wasteland has been preached and ignored for too long. Arab countries situated in the deserts have been able to claim back some of the desert and even established ice play ground for recreation. But we go to Niger and Chad further north and buy flowers to plant in Lagos and grass to start establishing ranches, not where it is needed all over the North but in the South to claim what is not theirs.

After all developing ranches all over Nigeria if each localities so choses is not a bad idea in itself, but it has to be their priority. No one can dictate grass ranches instead of yams, cocoa or palm oil because herdsmen want to wonder away from home. The same labor can be used on their ranches at home. More governors need to speak out against appeasement with peoples farms.

In the 21st century, people should be wiser. Reward in heaven, unmanageable virgins on earth, individual power grab veiled in ethnocentric sentiments and caste system are not enough to secure our loyalties. While other people space themselves between work, recreation and war on little people; we are constantly fighting over frivolities. The time we should be exploiting for discoveries, reflections and invention, we energize it on wasteful use of brainpower.

We then ask, how come others are ahead of us? They are not. Our time is spent on different priorities. Those of us that are able to space our efforts differently in a secured environment performed better against all odds. Buhari cannot wait until Fulani impunity degenerate into war.
Ghana's Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, Mr. Mahama Ayariga has held bilateral talks with his counterparts from various countries and heads of some international organizations at the United Nations headquarters in New York on ways to boost cooperation with them and to fast track the implementation of the Paris Agreement to protect the environment.

The meetings held separately with Mr. Vidar Helgesen, Norwegian Minister of Climate and Environment,Mr. Lars Chr Lleeholt,Danish Minister of Energy, Utilities and Climate, the Green Climate Fund,United Nations Development Programme, Ms Adrina Dinu, and Baron Lord Bourne of the United Kingdom's Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Climate Change and Parliamentary Under Secretary for Wales,were held on the side lines of the historic signing of the Paris Agreement to protect the environment.

During the separate discussions, Mr Ayariga said that the Ministry had prepared an investment plan to operationalise and implement Ghana's Intended Naturally Determined Contributions.(INDCs). This will make it possible to track progress and achieve a collective ambition level sufficient to limit global warming to below 2C relative to pre-industrial levels. To this end, INDCs shall comprise a mitigation goal which represents a progression beyond current undertakings.

The Minister expressed his appreciation for the Danish government's support for Ghana's Climate Change local solution,assistance for climate change projects for developing countries. Mr Ayariga mentioned that current initiatives in place are what is needed at this time, especially innovations for climate change. Currently,he said that the country was focussing more on energy sector, by developing capacity for solar and other forms of energy.

The discussions also touched on technical and financial resources for effective implementation of plans as well as partnership for Action on INDCs, which is being aligned to the anticipated Ghana 40-year development plan.

Mr. Ayariga took time to explain the implementation of the priority actions to support Ghana's Environmental policy,National Climate Change policy, National Energy policy, Food and Agriculture Sector Development policy and the National Plantation Development strategy.

Further more, he indicated that the total cost for the implementation of Ghana's INDCs amounted to $22.6 billion for the 10-year period and stressed the need for international support in mobilizing resources to execute the work ahead.

To accelerate the progress of the work, Mr. Ayariga called for the early inflow of resources to beef up the Ghana government's domestic mobilization of resources as a means to leverage $16.3 billion from the public and private sources.

On their part, they all commended Ghana for the good work it had done so far and assured of continuous support and cooperation in order to maximise the benefits.
As part of its corporate social investments the MTN Ghana Foundation has distributed over three hundred (300) insecticide treated mosquito nets to pregnant women, children and nursing mothers in selected hospitals.

Patients in Tema General Hospital, Tafo Hospital in Kumasi, Bolgatanga and the Cape Coast Hospital benefited from the Save A Life initiative which aims at eradicating malaria whilst providing education and better understanding of the disease (malaria) as a global scourge that is preventable.

Prior to the distribution of the nets, MTN Ghana launched an internal fundraising project, Buy a Treated Net to Save A Life. At this activation, MTN Ghana Foundation matched every net a staff donated with two nets.

The objective to support the nationwide campaign for children and pregnant women to sleep under treated nets is because they are at a higher risk of being infected by malaria. Treated mosquito nets have proven to be one of the effective initiatives to control malaria, said the Acting Corporate Services Executive (MTN), Mr. Samuel Koranteng at the Tema General Hospital.

Once we reduce malaria infections, the pressure on our health facilities will be reduced. Ghanaians will also spend less resource to drive malaria elimination campaigns and to import malaria drugs, he noted.

However, Dr. Kwabena Opoku-Adusei (Medical Director, Tema General Hospital) expressed his gratitude to MTN Foundation for coming to the aid of the patients and also called on other private organizations to emulate the example of MTN by supporting the campaign.

The World Malaria day falls on 25th April every year. It is celebrated to recognize efforts being made globally to fight malaria and provide education and understanding of malaria as a global plague that is preventable.

This years World Malaria day was held under the theme, End Malaria for Good.

Follow Amisty on twitter @ElAmistyNobo

E-Mail: [email protected]
According to ADBs Africa Tourism Monitor 2015, global tourism has continued to grow prodigiously to 1.133 billion arrivals in 2014  a 4.3% increase over 2013. The report further indicates that Africa saw 65.3 million arrivals, representing 5.8% of total international arrivals in 2014. With US$ 43.6 billion in receipts, Africa holds 3.5% of this market share. Tourism development is not only viewed as a key pillar for African development, but also as a major reflection of economic activities that directly or indirectly stimulate its growth.

With vital contributors that influence tourism in Africa (both positively and negatively), we cannot fail to acknowledge the fact that when tackling the tourism hype; various economic factors have to be put into consideration. Prevalently, consumer demand by far determines tourism trends not only in Africa but also globally. Tourists are the basic consumers in the tourism market, thus their preferences go a long way in determining for instance the cost of goods in the various destinations.

If the cost of lets say accommodation is affordable in destination A, it is likely to attract an influx of tourists, which means more money coming into the continent. This leads to higher production of even more affordable products and services and the consumption cycle repeats itself.

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), the international tourism sector accounted for 8.1% of Africas total GDP in 2014. Sustained infrastructural development has also contributed to this solid growth. Economic expenditure by governments into the continents infrastructure including road and rail networks, rehabilitation of airports and seaports; has attracted investments both locally and internationally into the tourism sector such as developments of world class hotels .

The uptake of E-commerce in Africa cannot be left out when discussing economic influencers of tourism. If the ability for travellers to conveniently book their flights as well as accommodation online is anything to go by, then the entry of online travel agents such as Jovago and Expedia among others is just the genesis. According to a market-research firm- Euromonitor- 2013 saw online travel agents (OTAs) with combined bookings of $278 billion.

A report by Regional Economic Outlook forecasted growth in sub-Saharan Africa to remain strong, at about 5 percent in 2014 and 5 percent in 2015. This general economic growth has played and continues to play a major role in the industry. Jovagos Managing Director Estelle Verdier notes that tourism and economy should also be seen as a two-way-street with Africas economic road map anticipating tourism as an indispensable contributor, which will lead to revamping the continents economy in futurity.
As BAT celebrates another year of deadly profits, a Ghanaian NGO - Vision for Alternative Development (VALD) join global day of action to demand an investigation into bribery, espionage

On the heels of revelations of widespread bribery in Africa by British American Tobacco (BAT), Vision for Alternative Development (VALD) joined advocates from Africa to the UK to Latin America today demanding government action to hold the abusive corporation accountable. The call comes as BAT convenes its annual general meeting (AGM) in London after months of negative media and the launch of at least one national investigation.

At least it is undoubtedly clear that delays in adopting Tobacco Control Laws are largely due to industry interferences in Public Health policies said Labram Musah, Programmes Director of Vision for Alternative Development. The evidence are there to show- late last year, Paul Hopkinsan employee in BATs regional office in Kenya for 13 yearsrevealed the inner workings of BATs systematic bribery and espionage used to obstruct lifesaving laws. The bribes ranged from $3,000 to $20,000 and some were even sanctioned by a regional executive.

In addition to Hopkins revelations, whistleblowers in Uganda and South Africa have shed further light on BATs use of bribery in those countries. Tens of thousands of people , dozens of organizations, and ten Members of U.S. Congress have already called for governments to investigate BAT and hold it accountable. Kenyas Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission became the first to launch a formal investigation into BAT, with potential investigations in the UK and the US.

Among the revelations was at least one bribe to a government representative from Burundi to represent BATs interests at a World Health Organization global tobacco treaty meeting. There were multiple bribes to politicians and policymakers to gain access to and obstruct tobacco control policymaking.

VALD wishes to call on the government of Ghana and government world over to stand firm and resolute in the mist of Tobacco Industry Inferences and formulate lifesaving legislation that seeks to protect present and future generation from the devastating effects of tobacco use and tobacco smoke.

While BATs executives toast to deadly profits and generations of addiction, people and governments around the world are organizing to hold them accountable for their abuses, said John Stewart, Deputy Director at Corporate Accountability International, Fortunately people and governments have the law on their side and the global tobacco treaty provides a proven roadmap to rein in this abusive industry at every turn.

In November, over 180 countries will convene in New Delhi to expand support offered by the agreement to protect tobacco control and public health policy from tobacco industry interference. Additionally, a primary focus of the meetings will be to establish guidance to hold tobacco industry legally liable for its costs to society.

Contact: Labram Musah

Programmes Director-Vision for Alternative Development (VALD) - Ghana

0243-211854 [email protected]
The Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC), Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, has extended her heartfelt condolences and conveyed her sympathies to the friends, fans and family of the African musician of Congolese origin, Papa Wemba, who died while performing at a concert in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, on Saturday, 24 April 2016.

The passing of Papa Wemba is a tragic loss, not only for the people of the Democratice Republic of Congo, but for Africa as a whole and the world in general, Dr. Dlamini Zuma said. His music served both as a cultural tool for bringing Africa's diverse populations together, but also, crucially, to project an African voice, into the global scheme. His talent and spirit will be greatly missed, she added.

With a career spanning over four decades and resulting in numerous national and international accolades, Papa Wemba, born Jules Shungu Wembadio Pene Kikumba in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, is a legend and icon in African music. Known also as Africa's King of Rhumba Rock, Papa Wemba's original sounds have roused and inspired many across the African continent, Europe and beyond.

Papa Wemba's unique voice to contribute to a more positive narrative about Africa  beyond war, famine and poverty - and his music has been a tool for the promotion of African integration through arts and culture. He stood for, and advocated for a self-reliant Africa.

In the spirit of giving his best to Africa, the King of Rhumba Rock was one of the artists that came to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, when we were celebrating 50th anniversary of our continental organization OAU/AU, in May 2013.

Papa Wemba may be gone, but his music will stay with us forever.
2014 ended as one of Africas most devastating years as we experienced more than 50% of global conflict and wars according to world reports. This is quite disturbing considering the fact that Africa constitutes only 16% of the worlds population. Although the absence of war cannot be misconstrued as peace, it is imperative for development that there is peaceful coexistence between countries, ethnic groups and tribes.

The more peace we experience, the better it is for National and continental development. Many countries such as Somalia, Rwanda and Liberia have experienced grueling wars which have affected their respective developments and have had a toll on the entire continent.

On the other hand, countries like Ghana , Botswana and Malawi have experienced massive developments and this has been made possible by long lasting peace. Whether the conflicts are sparked by chieftaincy disputes, political differences or even family clashes, the fact still remains that a peaceful country/continent is a fertile land for massive business development.

One of the most important effects Peace has on businesses in Africa is generally termed as Investor climate. This refers to a condition where foreign investors assess the atmosphere in a place before considering whether it is suitable for business or not. Obviously no investor wants to risk their monies into economies that are soaked with chaos, conflicts and wars.

When there is unrest or war anywhere in the world, it is considered unsafe for any kind of business and every investor will be cautious in putting money into a place or venture that assures a relatively low percentage of returns or profits. Whatever the product or service the investor is preparing to bring, people will not have the liberty and peace of mind to fully explore and patronize it. The general mood and atmosphere will be that of fear and panic.

If the investor plans to introduce a product, the general concern will be safety and this is a big problem in regions where there is no peace. Also, the investors cannot come down themselves to feel the market and fully assess firsthand what business is like in Africa . There is absolutely no reason why anyone will put money when there is no likelihood of profits and returns.

In a peaceful environment however, there is freedom to operate for everyone. Locals walk about and do business freely while investors are at liberty to frequent the countries anytime they wish to check on their investments and implement new strategies to improve the businesses which in the end, have enormous positive rippling effects on the continents economy.

Another impact parameter to look at is consumer confidence. This is a clear case of whether the consumer or customer is willing to buy a product or use a service because of many factors surrounding him/her. On one side is freedom. Where a local will confidently walk to a store or shop to buy a product without fear of being shot, wounded or kidnapped.

More people tend to move freely and patronize lots of commodities such as food, clothing etc. On another hand is trust. Where the locals have no fear of patronizing items or using services because they trust the system and are not afraid of security issues. They can order food online, buy items online, book hotels and do transactions with everyone in a free, businesslike manner that translates into good business and massive economic developments.

Airports and Transport yards are open, national borders are open and there are no strict restrictions to import and export of items. Peace actually creates a really cool atmosphere for great business opportunities. Take individual countries like Rwanda and see for yourself how massively business there has developed since the wars stopped a couple of years ago.

They have seen massive improvements in all sectors of their economy and are gradually becoming a great investment hub for many overseas businesses. Another key example is Ghana , which haven't experienced any major unsettlement and this has proven very beneficial, with the influx of investors and great developments in business, tourism and infrastructure.

The more peaceful we remain as Africans, the better it will be for all of us. Economic growth and business development is largely dependent on the atmosphere where business takes place and the freedom the end users have to actually utilize the products and services being offered.
File Photo

28.04.2016 LISTEN

The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service is on a manhunt for a Christian Religious Studies (CRS) tutor who is accused of sodomizing some male students of Konongo Odumase Senior High School.

The incident, rawgist.com gathers occurred in the school. Kwabena Danso-Dapaah who has been following the issue reports that authorities of the school have been trying desperately to cover up the matter.

The CID of the Ashanti Regional Police Command confirmed the development and called on the public to help arrest Pastor Christos Owusu Yiadom.

rawgist.coms sources in the school say the self acclaimed pastor and leader of My Great Light Ministries used to have cordial relationship with male students and invite some to his church for prayers.

Some victims called on me and reported my colleague teacher had anal sex with them in his room located at the outskirts of the school anytime they go there to help perform household chores for him, the Senior House Master revealed adding we reported the matter to the headmistress for action but nothing was done about itwe are reliably informed Mr. Owusu Yiadom was brought to teach CRS in the school by Madam Comfort Odehe [the headmistress of the school].

Rawgist.coms checks at the Regional Police Command indicate police are aware of the matter and have visited the scene after receiving report from some concerned teachers who are not happy about this development.

The matter now is under investigation. The suspect is on the run; we are trying to trace him wherever we canhe cannot run for long, Ashanti Regional Police Commander, DCOP Kofi Boakye assured during a telephone interview with Kwabena Danso-Dapaah.

He added; the school together with Ghana Education Service should assist to produce the suspect because they know him more than us. Unnatural Carnal knowledge is a criminal offense and the police must arrest the suspect. Wherever this man of God is, the headmistress must fish him out. We understand this so called Man of God was also a teacher; even if he has escaped the authorities have to produce him for judicial prosecution.

Meanwhile, Madam Comfort Odehe has denied covering-up the suspect. She says the matter is now with the Police and expresses her readiness to cooperate with the Police on the investigation.

rawgist.com has gathered Pastor Christos Owusu Yiadom is married with two children currently living in Konongo in the Asante Akim Central district.
Paul Adom Otchere

28.04.2016 LISTEN

The perceived misguided actions of the Electoral Commission and its Chairperson, Charlotte Osei, are leaving Ghanaians doubtful and worried ahead of the November polls according to seasoned Ghanaian broadcaster, Paul Adom Otchere.

He is of the view that the actions and inaction of the EC with respect to the credibility of the voters register and other pertinent issues, could give some stakeholders an excuse to cause tensions if the outcome of the elections did not go their way.

The EC and its Chairperson have been the brunt of public backlash for their recent course of action that have seemingly placed priority on re-branding their image over ensuring a credible voters register.

Mr. Otchere himself has already expressed displeasure with the ECs recent re-branding exercise, marked by their infamous new logo, which is coming at a time that the country insists there is a lack of funds to undertake certain pertinent exercises in relation to the upcoming general elections.

Mr. Adom Otchere, who has strongly criticized the EC boss during his programme, Good Evening Ghana on Metro TV, says the EC should be placing premium on ensuring Ghanaian minds are at peace ahead of the election.

The gamut of matters that are hovering around the head of the electoral commission require critical ventilation. This is the time when you have to set minds at peace... it is upon these matters that she must spend time to give the average Ghanaians a certain peace of mind as we approach the elections.

He noted that the stakeholders of the election had not agreed on some critical issues such as the validity of the voters' register, despite the elections being just six months away, and expressed fears that their lack of preparedness could serve as a conduit of trouble if the results did not go the way of certain people.

My biggest fear is that, we will go to the election and people who will lose the election will come out and say that if this had happened, we wouldnt have lost. If voters register was like this, we wouldnt have lost... We are giving an excuse to sour losers to be able to turn our country upside down. Madam Charlotte Osei is offering and handing over a major excuse to sour losers to say that if the election was run this way, we wouldnt have lost.

Mr. Adom Otchere, who was a staunch advocate of Mrs. Osei when she was appointed the EC chairperson as the first woman to head the institution, says she has been a disappointment so far.

We want to support her for her to be able to do a good job but so far we think that her focus is misplaced, he said.
Kinshasa (AFP) - The body of Congolese "rumba king" Papa Wemba arrived in Kinshasa on Thursday, greeted by officials and a huge crowd of distraught fans after his fatal collapse during a show in Ivory Coast.

His body was flown home after the Ivory Coast held an-all night musical tribute to honour the legendary African music star, who died on Sunday at the age of 66.

The white coffin draped in the Democratic Republic of Congo flag was received by Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo and parliament speaker Aubin Minaku before being taken off in a hearse.

Relatives of the flamboyant performer were also at the airport, along with tribal chiefs and numerous admirers of the artist who was a live wire on Africa's musical scene for more than 40 years.

"News of the death of Papa Wemba was an earthquake," Ivorian Culture Minister Maurice Kouakou told journalists in Kinshasa.

Dozens of musicians joined an international concert tribute to Papa Wemba in Abidjan overnight that was billed as a "big artistic wake".

A funeral for the father of six will take place on Monday and he will be buried on Tuesday on the outskirts of Kinshasa.

Papa Wemba was a pioneer of the fusion of rumba and Western electric rock and found world renown as African music gained in popularity in Europe and the United States from the 1980s.
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28.04.2016 LISTEN

A walk through Accra Central to James town between the hours of 9am-12pm on a Tuesday, I kept asking myself if the day was a holiday for some schools. Some schools because; I helped my brother dress up for school before leaving the house that morning. Children were seen on the street, in shops, at the market place and homes instead of the classroom. Out of interest to know why they were home and not the classroom, I asked a young boy aged 15years old and enquired from him.

James town is a fishing community found on the East of Korle Lagoon on the shores of Accra, densely inhabited by Gas. The men in Jamestown engage in fishing while the women are either fish mongers or sell in the market. Some young men and women are also involved in petty trading and others spend their time playing games such as ludo, cards or video games.

On a normal day in Jamestown, children are seen playing on the streets or working to support themselves and family. Most of them have dropped out of school and some have never been to school. So I asked myself; Jamestown is in Accra the Capital City of Ghana, and there are school drop-outs and children who have never been to school. Then what happens to children and wellbeing of people in the many deprived communities outside Accra?

As the saying goes; the devil finds work for the idle hand. The youth and children of Jamestown are exposed to social vices and immoral practices, gay practice amongst them is not news. Are we waiting for things to go really bad? Have the causes of school dropout and unemployment been very well diagnosed? Has facilities and amenities needed by a community to raise healthy and happy children been made available? Have policies and programs been well implemented and evaluated? How far are we going with our SDGs?

Youth who have completed Junior High school and Senior High School do not have the means to further their education to the Senior High and tertiary level respectively due to the high cost of education. These youth add up to the already existing unemployed graduates and engage in all forms of activities to be able to fend for themselves and families. The ladies are mostly vulnerable and are subjected to all forms of treatment such as sex, drugs, prostitution, theft, and early marriages. As a result, parents of children are just some few years older than their children.

There are few or no vocational training schools in the community for the people to take advantage of in order to equip themselves with employable skills. Even if there were, the cost of accessing them is something the people cannot afford. There are no mechanisms for effective marketing of fish for the fish farmers in the community.

As I drew closer to a group of children playing on the street, I noticed that most of them had skin diseases and are bare footed with either a shirt or shorts on. When I enquired from the 15years old boy; why he was at home and not in school, he said he is a JHS 1 student and have been home for about two weeks in order to help his mother sell in the market to raise some money for his feeding and books.

Jamestown used to be a beautiful community that attracted tourists. But this cannot be said about the community anymore. Its growing population due to increase in teenage pregnancy, and lack of social amenities has resulted in the people using the shore of the sea for a place of convenience. The high cost of accommodation in its nearby communities have made it difficult for indigenous people of James to move.

For a very long time there have been government after government, policies after policies and programs after programs, examples are the Millennium development goal, Ghana shared growth and development agenda (GSGDA), SGD, and FCUBE. How effective have these been? How well have we made sure government is about its business and seeing to the welfare of the nation? Recently I heard on the radio that Ghana is thinking of selling its Electricity Company. Already we have sold out a number of assets. What legacy are we leaving behind for our children? Its high time we sit-up and do whats right, position resource wisely and fight for the development of the nation and not to enrich our pocket or self-ego.
By Samuel Osei, GNA

Tema, April 28, GNA - The MTN Ghana Foundation, the corporate social responsibility wing of MTN, has donated Insecticide Treated Nets (ITN) to pregnant and nursing mothers at the Tema General Hospital.

Mr Samuel Koranteng,the acting Corporate Executive of MTN said the donation was made to commemorate this year's World Malaria Day under the Foundation's "Save a Life" initiative.

"To mark the day, MTN staff volunteers are distributing over 300 ITNs to pregnant and nursing mothers in selected hospitals in Accra, Bolgatanga,Takoradi, and Cape Coast", he said.

He said the objective to suppport the nationwide campaign for children and mothers sleeping under treated nets is because they are at a higher risk of being infected by malaria.

"Once we reduce malaria infections,we would have reduced the pressure on our health facilities. We will also spend less resources to drive malaria elimination campaigns and the importation of malaria drugs."

Doctor Kwabena Opoku-Adusei,Medical Director, Tema General Hospital, thanked the Foundation for the gesture and appealed to the government to provide the Tema Metropolis with a well resourced Regional Hospital to meet the health needs of residents.

GNA
By Godwill Arthur-Mensah, GNA

Dadieso (WR), April 28, GNA - The Dadieso Police in the Suaman District of the Western Region has arrested four people for their alleged involvement in the murder of Yaw Amaga, 36, about three months ago.

The suspects are Kwasi Gyimah, 52, the father of the deceased, Maame Abena Tawiah Somiah, the step-mother, as well as Gabriel Bakoe and Cudjoe Gyimah, both paternal siblings of the deceased.

Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Anthony Dogbe, the Suaman District Police Commander, confirmed the arrest to the Ghana News Agency on Tuesday.

He said the deceased was reported missing about three months ago and all efforts to trace his whereabouts have been unsuccessful.

DSP Dogbe said the Police had information that the deceased had been murdered by his own siblings and secretly buried him with the consent of their parents.

He said the Police have located the place the deceased was buried and exhumed the decomposed body for examination.

Explaining the circumstances leading to the murder of the deceased, DSP Dogbe said, Mr Gyimah, the father of the deceased, gave a room to his elder son, Amaga, but his two younger siblings, Bekoe and Cudjoe, did not agree with the father's decision and often quarreled with the deceased over the matter.

He said in February, the two younger brothers quarreled with Amaga and that resulted in a fight between them and in the process one of the brothers struck him with a stick and Amaga died in the process.

DSP Dogbe said although the parents of the deceased were informed about the murder, they refused to report the matter to the Police and rather kept it secret.

He said a resident of the town informed the police of the incident and this led to the arrest of the four who are currently assisting the Police in their investigations.

GNA
28.04.2016 LISTEN

Kwahu-Tafo (ER), April 28, GNA - Residents of Kwahu-Tafo, have appealed for police protection against frequent attacks of some young drug addicts in the town.

The bandits, made up of boys and girls between the ages of eight to 45 years after smoking the 'stuff' at Brokrowa, a popular hide-out, near the town's cemetery, mass up in the middle of the cemetery road attacking farmers and other commuters.

Mr Ofosu Brown, a 72 year old retired teacher and a resident who spoke to the Ghana News Agency (GNA), said the youth broke into their rooms and stole their belongings when they left for their farms.

He said many of the younger ones among the group, have stopped attending school because of drug addiction.

Mr Brown said when the residents of the area threatened to call in the police, the young drug addicts openly boasted with impunity that they did not fear the Kwahu Tafo police.

GNA
File Photo

28.04.2016 LISTEN

The wife of a policeman attached to the state police command allegedly stabbed her neighbour, Mrs Olaitan Ayobami.

The unfortunate incident happened on Etunrere Street in the Ikorodu area of Lagos on Monday.

The cops wife, Mrs Desola Ochoche, fled the residence afterwards, leaving Ayobami to death. Ayobami was later rushed to a private hospital in the area.

PUNCH Metro learnt that the attack was caused by a scuffle between the two on Sunday when Ochoche reportedly challenged Ayobami to a duel for laughing at her.

It was gathered that they were separated only for the fight to resume around 6am on Monday when Ayobami, a teacher, wanted to bathe.

After the face-off, the teacher with her children were heading for school when Ochoche ambushed her at the entrance of their rented building with a shard of bottle.

She was said to have chased her to the garage on the premises and stabbed her in the head and hand.

It was learnt that Ochoche was eventually arrested by policemen from the Igbogbo Police Division, but released a few hours later.

Ayobami said she wanted Ochoche to be brought to book, adding that she was still in pains.

She said, On Saturday, I left my phone in my kitchen and when I went back to pick it, I found it inside water. I wanted to challenge Iya Oby (Ochoche), but my husband warned me not to do so because I didnt have evidence. On Sunday, she started singing abusive songs against me, but I did not reply.

At a point, I laughed and she became angry. She poured water on me and we fought. While I was going to the bathroom on Monday morning, she attacked me and we fought again. Her husband separated us and warned her to let peace reign.

I was going to school when she attacked me in the corridor and stabbed me with a shard of bottle. Her husband, who is a policeman, took her to the Igbogbo division, but she has been released. I want her to be charged to court.

Ochoche, who spoke with our correspondent on the telephone, admitted stabbing Ayobami. She, however, claimed that she acted to revenge an injury earlier inflicted on her by the teacher.

She said, I have been warning her to stop insulting me with songs. She would accuse me of flirting around just because I am not employed. It is true I stabbed her but she had used something to injure me in the face while we were fighting around 6am on Monday. I revenge so that she would know she cannot intimidate me.

Asked if it was Ayobamis laughter that caused the Sundays fight, she replied,

I dont know. I am on medication and want to sleep.

Another neighbour, Sarah Elijah, said she was in her kitchen when she heard the sound of a broken bottle, adding that she did not approach Ochoche to avoid trouble.

The landlord of the house, who did not want his name in print, said that the two tenants had been at loggerheads for a long time. He said he had intervened on several occasions and served their husbands notices to quit when the fight persisted.

He said, I have called them several times and talked to them, including their husbands. I gave them notices to quit in January when the fight was going out of hand. The Monday incident was terrible.

Ochoches husband told me Ayobami was the one who initially attacked his wife. But residents said it was not true. I told her (Ochoche) not to enter my house again because I fear something worse may happen.

The police spokesperson in the state, SP Dolapo Badmos, said it was a case of affray and the two women would be charged to court.

She said, The two women injured each other and they have been released to go and take care of themselves after which they will be charged to court for affray.
28.04.2016 LISTEN

BOB MARLEY

The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.

THE DAY OF RECKONING

We shall not be overtly judgmental here. We derive this moral sentiment from Mathew 7: 21 (King James Version):

Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.

Archbishop Duncan Williams also reminds us of this fact:

We prophesied in your name, we cast out demons in your name, we healed the sick in your name, and Jesus will say: I dont know you, workers of iniquity, get out! Theyll say: Ah, but we got all these results in your name!, and hell say: I dont know you.

And we certainly recall a friend telling this author about Duncan-Williams near-death experience, which brought him into direct contact with God who then asked him to return to this life and to make it known to Ghanaians, that none of the pastors in Ghana had his or her name logged in the Book of Life. In fact, Duncan-Williams own name was not in the Book of Life.

What is the morale of the anecdote? At least One thing for sure: That is to say, whether or not Otabil and his clerical colleagues and friends are doing the will of Jesus Father, God, is not the kind of determination that falls within our discretionary censure. It also says no one is perfect. This is what Bob Marley may have exactly meant when he, without mincing words, made the following remarks:

Who are you to judge the life I live? I know I'm not perfectand I don't live to be. But before you start pointing fingersMake sure your hands are clean.

That moral determination lies squarely within the discretionary prerogatives and privileges of Jesus Father, God. It is said, after all, that a frogs real length comes into sharp focus upon its mortal passage from this life.

All of these scenarios question why some clerics bother to bid, pitch, and sell personalized and specialized commodities, such as holy water and oil, prayers, candles, incenses, and the like to their gullible followers, just like the popes and the Catholic Church of old sold indulgences to its members until the day that the maverick Martin Luther burst onto the scene and changed the dynamics of Catholic autocracy forever. This controversial history is still with us here today!

As a matter of fact, some nondenominational Christian institutions even practice subtle variants of indulgences, as it were repackaged as part of the political theology of homiletic homeopathy.

This is nothing more than the secular application of the concept of divine mercy in another sense of political spirituality, or ethereality.

THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE: RELIGION, NATIONALISM AND PATRIOTISM

Intrinsic to all that we have discussed thus far, is the alienation of the deeply religious and spiritual from pragmatic considerations and questions of nationalism and patriotism. We are directly referring to the core idea of split allegiance(s) as it relates to immanent detachment from the moral center of the political geocentricism of the national enterprise, and a painstaking deferring of that split allegiance(s) to a supposed existential construct directly derived from, or partly based upon a transcendental deistic framology. Evidently this detachment generally leads to a de-emphasized quantum in the totalized popular output generated for nation-building exercises and purposes.

Some members of Ghanas Pentecostal and Charismatic clergy, including Otabil, have succeeded somewhat in fomenting this split allegiance(s) in the body politic. The real motive behind this strategic trajectory of power dynamics in the volcanic crater of sectarianismundertaken by some theological theologiansis diverting the civic attention and responsibilities of Christianized (and Islamized) citizens from pragmatic questions of nationalism and patriotism to themselves, the clerical class.

This way these self-seeking political theologians are able to usurp part of the mandate of the public state, as well as of the essence and nature of God, thus becoming God-like in the eyes and minds of the infinite gullibility of many Christians, Moslems

Man thereby leaves the corporeal state of mortality behind to become a redoubtable assumption of anthropomorphism instead, in the manipulated consciousness of the gullible. Man and God become fierce competitors in Max Romeos fathers house of worship, has become a den of thieves. This screwed-up consciousness becomes morally and spiritually cancerous. Call it cancerous consciousness if you will.

This sort of cancerous consciousness is what the likes of Bishop Obinim, Kweku Bonsam, Okomfo Yaw Appiah and others represent in the body politic. It does not necessarily only affect the gullible followings of these self-styled Men of God. That is the irony of it, if we may add!

To reverse these negative trends in human psychology requires a seismic, paradigm shift in the political pragmatics of scientific thinking. Other options also remain. On Talking Blues Bob Marley sang:

Because I feel like bombing a church; now, now that you know the preacher is lyingSo who is going to stay at home when, when the freedom fighters are fighting

Most of these corporate political theologians are not freedom fighters in the technical sense of the phrase. They hate liberation theology with passion. More so, they are not even freedom fighters in matters of religion and spirituality. They are freedom fighters only in the art of making money.

Social commentator Ernest Birmeh, affectionately called Dr. Think Twice, seems to grasp the existential dynamics of our philosophical drift when he recently told hundreds of students at the Kwame University of Science and Technology the following:

Never pay tithe and offering to them, be bold. They are never helping you; they are contributing factor to the woes of the youth in this country. If they dont preach that children should be respected, be bold, pay no money to them.

Use your monies for something else, for they are not helping you. That culture of silence needs to be broken. Jesus showed example on how children/youth should be respected. The Western world have adopted that, hence over trillions of jobs is coming from them

Also Mutabaruka expresses his righteous indignation at the evils of religion on the track Peoples Court 2, which we referenced at some narrative length in the first installment of this series. And oh, lest we forget prosperity theology makes arrant nonsense of this song Gold Have I None (see Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 3). Here is a song that lyrically and rhythmically captures apostles performing miracles without demanding a cent in return. It is all free. Today the miracle industry is a multi-millionif not a billionindustry of unscientific lies. Here it goes:

Silver and gold have I none

But such as I have, give I thee

In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth

Rise up and walk

FINAL COMMENTS 1

There had been, nonetheless, a seamless overlap between religion and the state before Enlightenment thinking and the French Revolution (as well as the American Revolution) eventually destroyed that sense of unified mutuality. The pre-colonial African state, to mention but one, was such.

Then Moses, the purported author of the Pentateuch (the First Five Books of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Torah), for instance, carried this model of unified mutualitywith specific reference to the Ancient Egyptian state model, a highly sophisticated product of African psychology, call it the African Genius (see Kwame Nkrumahs speech of the same title)to the Ancient Hebrews or Israelites.

Even more, Sigmund Freud, the Father of Psychoanalysis, himself a Jew, could have been right to suggest that Moses was an Egyptian. The question then boils down to whether Moses was actually an Egyptian in a cultural or nationalistic sense. This question is not a focus of this essay because we also believe culture and nation can overlap in a certain sense. Regardless, Acts 7: 22 (King James Version) has this to say:

And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.

Moses Decalogue (the tablet of Ten Commandments) underlines the political philosophy of Joseph Konys Lords Resistance Army.

FINAL COMMENTS 2

Certainly both religion and science do not have all the answers to the ultimate questions of life. In this Otabil cannot therefore claim he or religion for that matter has all the answers, for, if it were actually so, he would either be God or take the place of God, and as well, qualify to stake a claim to undisputed authorship of all inspired books in human existence and revealed religion, especially Christianity. Of course, he has not staked a claim to omniscience as far as we know.

And at least, science and scientists are more open to pragmatic questions dealing with liberal approaches to a discursive, rationalistic revisionism of questionable and suspicious beliefs and ideas than religion and religionists are of their dogmatic theologies. Apologetics reinforces these dogmatic theologies for better or for worse. This is generally so because apologetics calcifies human psychology and makes the latter somewhat unamenable to rational thought, progressive scientific ideas and general paradigm shifts in scientific formulations. Nevertheless, Otabil is a nebulous conundrum that is extremely difficultif not almost impossibleto decipher or unravel.

We merely invoked that hypothetical sentiment for obvious reasons. But even so, great scientists such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Madam Curie, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Ben Carson, Linus Pauling, John von Newman, Louis Pasteur, Georges Lemaitre, Francis Allotey, Charles Darwin, Francis Collinsdid not have or even claim all the answers to the ultimate questions of life.

The other interesting point is that the finite perimeters of human psychology and intellection, mortal curiosity about inexplicable things of this life and beyond, a boding and pricking sense of eschatological insecurities, mortality, human wickedness, gripping fear about the unknown, intrinsic human yearning or drive for spiritual fulfillment, human suffering and the failure of the material world to ease human sufferingmake for a belief in a paternalistic, loving super-powerful non-material existence beyond a telluric existence.

This is where belief-centric constructs of immortality, God and a heaven flowing with milk and honey and virginscome in. There are, however, some intractable problems that accompany these belief-centric frameworks. Even the conceptual framology of the divine gift of free will to mortals presupposes an intrinsic conditionality of organic fallibility in the generalized material and non-material expressivity of human nature. Unfortunately, and perhaps regrettably also, while some religious folks see themselves as intrinsically fallible, they simply refuse or just cannot bring themselves to accord the same status to these Men of God whom they hold in awe.

This concept of free will makes the human being an agent of moral contradictions and internecine conflicts (self-conflicted), problems he certainly did not bring upon himself. In this sense human psychology naturally becomes an organic theatre of warlike internal antithesis which turns to undermine the sense of agency, eventually culminating in the individuatingand potentiatingof immanent hostilities and perturbations. This divinely inspired generational curse is not of mortal making, at least if we go by the account offered in the Book of Genesis.

Why human beings have free will but lower animals supposedly do not is an interesting paradox that still remains locked up in a revolving knot. And there are those who also claim the Bible provides historical precedents with divine sanction for genocide, ethnic cleansing, sexism, slavery, mass murderas well as divine favoritism for certain groups of people and persons.

Finally, the following scenarios and questions arise: If, according to inspired revelation that the ethereal existence which God created was perfect as the Bible, for instance, claims, where then did Lucifers unapproved and unacceptable rebellious approach to dealing with his creator, God, come from?

In other words, what is the exact epistemic, moral, and phenomenological/ontological value of Lucifer, the Devil? Or better yet, why should man be held responsible for the primordial sins and evil intentions and deeds of Lucifer? Does the divine gift of free will inherently not make man an agent of evil and goodness? On what basis did Prophet Emmanuel Badu Kobi make the determination that Christs second coming is not to be expected now or anytime in the near future because, as he confidently believes and understands it, the work of God was not done yet?

KENNEDY AGYAPONG AND THE POLITICAL CRITERION OF DECEPTIVE CONVENIENCE

On what basis did Kennedy Agyapong declare Otabil as the only true man of God? It is clear that that mortal determination smacks of a politics of deceptive convenience, as he also failed to accompany his declarative choice of Otabil as the only true man of God, with a clear-cut definitional position on his choice of specific criterion upon which he based his selection of Otabil as the only true man of God!

That mortal determination usurps the moral and divine authority of transcendental wisdom! Ken therefore takes the place of God and becomes God on that account. To wit, there is a sense of moral agency that he is a manifestation of God. This interpretation may partly explain why his psittacine by-heart talk gives him the impression, however false, that he exclusively embodies the collective wisdom of Ghanas hard-earned nationalist geopolitics.

The chatterbox Ken is undoubtedly an uninformed and clueless maverick.

We shall return with the concluding part (Part 4). Stay tuned.

REFERENCES

Ghanaweb. Stop Paying Offering, TitheDr.Think Twice Tells Youth. April 18, 2016.

Ghanaweb. Some Pastors Wish Me DeadDuncan-Williams. March 28, 2016.

The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). One Hundred Reasons To Be A Scientist. Trieste, Italy: 2004.

NOTE

For the epigrammatic Bob Marley quote, go to the website http://www.bobmarley.com/charity/

For second Bob Marley quote, see https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Bob_Marley
By Elsie Appiah-Osei, GNA

Accra, April 28, GNA - Authorities of the Peri-Operative and Critical Care Nursing School at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital Korle-Bu have appealed to government to provide funding for the construction of the school's 300 bed capacity hostel.

Mr Kwaku Asante-Krobea, Principal of the School, said the lack of governmental financial support for the past five years had posed financial constraints to the School authorities and students.

'The cost in running the institution [keeps increasing] accounting for high school fees payment.

'And the lack of accommodation for students has compelled the school to de-bordenise 25 per cent of students,' he said.

Mr Asante-Krobea made the appeal at the ninth graduation, grand award and passing out ceremony in Accra on Thursday.

He also appealed for financial support for the running of the school's administration to help remove the burden on management as well as the hardship of students, most of whom were denied sponsorship by the health facilities they worked for.

Mr Asante-Krobea, who is also the President of the Ghana Registered Nurses Association, said in spite of the highlighted constraints, the school had achieved substantial credibility and good image as the only post-basic institution that trained specialised nurses in Peri-Operative and Critical Care.

'We proudly count the following achievements as creditable enough to attract favor and goodwill for stakeholder and ministerial support,' he said.

Mrs Eva Mensah, Acting Deputy Director of Nursing and Midwifery, urged the graduands to return to their various hospitals and offer the needed services.

In all 90 students, comprising of 45 from the Peri-Operative class with the remaining 45 being Critical Care Nurses graduated after under-going a 15- month training.

Ms Irene Narh, a Critical Care Nursing student, was adjudged the overall best student for the 2014/2015 academic year after receiving six awards in ten subjects.

The School of Peri-Operative and Critical Care Nursing was established in 1996 to train registered diploma and degree holding nurses to an advanced level to provide theater nursing and critical care nursing. GNA
you are here:
politics No floor test in Uttarakhand Assembly on April 29: Supreme Court The Supreme Court today maintained that status quo in Uttarakhand be maintained and ascertained that there would be no floor test in the Uttarakhand Assembly until the next hearing
The bullish signals just keep coming in this mad, mad financial world. But theyre never on the front pages of the newspapers.

Oh my Lord. The bullish signals just keep coming in this mad, mad financial world. But theyre never on the front pages of the newspapers. Lucky we can do some of the work for you.

You simply have to take note of the recent news out of Japan.

This is a major development  one of the most bullish signals Ive seen in recent years.

Todays Money Morning will explain why

The US$3.2 trillion war chest

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that life insurers in Japan are now considering investing overseas to combat the low yields  if there is any yield  in the Japanese government bond (JGBs) market. One analyst the Journal cites says these JGBs are no longer functioning as an asset class.

Heres the deal with this. These life insurers have to earn a benchmark return so they can pay out on their policies. This is standard stuff.

Traditionally the Japanese life insurers have bought Japanese government bonds. Thats because the bonds carry a conservative risk profile and are denominated in yen. Presumably the insurers dont like going overseas because it adds currency risk to their investments.

Thats changing. The yields on Japanese government bonds are now so low  if not actually negative  that they dont have any choice but to look elsewhere.

OK, you might think, why the big deal exactly? Well, these Japanese insurers control US$3.2 trillion in financial assets. Their buying power is enormous. Thats the first thing to note.

The second is the awesome financial strength still in Japan even after 20 years of stagnation.

You only ever hear about the massive Japanese government debt. Thats just something to note.

Perhaps this is the key quote from the Journal: Nippon Life said Friday it had set aside 40 billion ($360 million) for new commitments to infrastructure equity funds that put money into power plants, airports, schools and other facilities.

Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. There is just so much of this building going on around the world, its staggering. And theres still so much more that could come.

Now how much of this US$3.2 trillion will flow into Australia I dont have any estimates or figures for. But it wouldnt surprise me to see more Japanese money flow here, with our higher yields and secure property rights. Certainly keep your eye on where the Japanese are going.

Because where any infrastructure goes in, the surrounding land values will rise. If they do invest in Australia  and there is no guarantee I admit  its just another reason why Australian property can go higher.

If you are in any doubt about the principle behind this, dont be! The men in government even spell it out for you. Consider the case of the mooted high speed rail line between Sydney and Melbourne.

Now take this from The Age:

John Alexander, an advocate for fast rail since he entered Parliament in 2010, said high speed rail would liberate regional towns, potentially tripling property prices and relieving housing pressure in the capital cities.

Yep. The government even tell you where the gains are going to go. Thats why we track policy decisions like this closely to help narrow down the areas to analyse for investment.

But of course, if youre planning on entering the property market you need to consider financing.

And theres been another interesting development in that space that we need to take note of today

Lower rates equal mortgage savings

According to the Australian Financial Review earlier this month, the number of people refinancing is almost at record levels.

Check it out

For the first time in four years, Aussie Home Loans says the number of loans it is arranging for owner-occupiers who are refinancing has overtaken lending to fund new purchases of properties. So far this financial year, the Commonwealth Bank-controlled broker says 28.5 per cent of its loans are for refinancing by owner-occupiers, compared with 25 per cent for property purchases by owner-occupiers.

But the banks are in an intense war for mortgage customers as loan growth subdues. So theyre going after each others market share.

This can result in substantial savings to the mortgagee. Of course, this just capitalises straight back into higher land values.

Suffice to say the Monopoly economy were all in can keep chugging along as its currently doing. If you want to know more about how to take advantage of all this, go here.

Best wishes,

Callum Newman
Alumina Limited [ASX:AWC] has benefited from the recent commodity rally. Overnight, energy prices rose again; oil has finally breached through US$45 a barrel.

What happened to the AWC share price?

Alumina Limited [ASX:AWC] has benefited from the recent commodity rally. Overnight, energy prices rose again; oil has finally breached through US$45 a barrel. Today, AWC was up by another 1.8%1.9%. The stocks dive over the last few days is showing signs of recovery. The commodity rally continuesfor now.

Why did AWC shares do this?

Market analysts have a consensus rating between Hold and Outperform. Most are seeing a decline in sales in 2017 from a forecasted 2016 level. However, the market is expecting positive growth in earnings per share in both 2016 and 2017.

The P/E ratio is not exactly cheap for AWC; it is higher than its peers, at a current level of 35 times. However, the company does pay a handsome dividend, which has also been growing on average over the last five years.

The current ratio is at 6 times, which is more than enough to suggest plenty of liquidity. This is confirmed by the companys 2.06 times interest coverage. Debt-to-equity is very small for AWC, indicating low solvency risk.

Return on assets is positive, as is return on equity. Although these metrics show the company is below the sector average, it is still doing reasonable at a positive rate.

What now for AWC?

One thing that investors need to remember is that AWC is an alumina producer that supplies to the oversupplied aluminium market in China and around the world as well. Most commodities have a similar story; aluminium is in oversupply due to massive building of capacities over the last decade. That capacity is still very much there.

Like other oversupplied commodities, such as iron ore, alumina rebalancing takes time. It needs time for demand to increase, and for supply to reduce. In that process, prices go into deflation. Are we at a fundamental bottom for commodities? Many argue for and against it. But there is no denying that we are in a technical rally. And it is the perfect rally for stocks such as AWC as far as momentum investors are concerned.

Ken Wangdong+

Emerging Market Analyst, New Frontier Investor
Morgan Hill Unified School District will lose more than 75 years of educational experience come June when two top district officials plan to step down from their posts.

Assistant Superintendent Norma Martinez-Palmer is resigning after three years with the district to tend to family business after her fathers death in August 2014.

Ive been in education for 35 years (three at MHUSD) so this is an early retirement without retiring, said Martinez-Palmer, 57, who will take time to decide on her next career move, whether thats another administration job in education, teaching courses at a university or in consulting.

Director of Curriculum and Instruction Arlene Machado will retire after nearly 40 years with MHUSD as a teacher and administrator at several school sites and at the district office.

The district is in a good spot. Weve worked really hard the last three years with implementing the Common Core State Standards and now the pathway to the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards, said Machado, 63, of Morgan Hill. When we walk out the door, things will continue on that path and when someone walks in, it will be an easy transition.

Before being appointed the Director of Curriculum and Instruction three years ago, Machado held a wide variety of positions from classroom teacher to principal at P.A. Walsh, Los Paseos and San Martin/Gwinn elementaries to Director of Technology and Enrollment and Interim Superintendent of Human Resources.

Its been a great experience. Im very lucky and very fortunate, said Machado, who intends to travel the world in her retirement while furthering her passion for photography and adding to the list of 40 countries shes already visited. This has been my lifes work.

Machadoa Central Valley nativeearned her undergraduate degree at UC Davis and then completed her masters at San Jose State University, where Martinez-Palmera San Jose residentreceived her undergraduate before getting her graduate degree from the University of San Francisco.

I have learned a lot (and) have grown as a leader working here, said Martinez-Palmer. The principals, teachers and parents all want the same thing and thats whats best for the children. Its been rewarding to work in a community like Morgan Hill.

After spending her first three decades in education within the San Jose Unified School District, Martinez-Palmer came to MHUSD in 2012. At that time, Machado was contemplating retirement, but the immediate bond she formed with her new colleague made her want to stick around a bit longer.

Shes such the ultimate professional and an outstanding leader, said Machado of Martinez-Palmer. We share a lot of the same core values: respect, honesty and truthfulness.

The feeling was mutual.

I couldnt have done what weve done in three years without Arlenes help. She knows the community and knows the schools, Martinez-Palmer said. With her by my side, its been very enriching and easier to do the work.

Both position openings are posted on the education recruiting site edjoin.org. The assistant superintendent position has a salary range of $152,849-$167,021, while the director of curriculum position has a salary range of $117,563-$134159.
RALEIGH  Moped owners will now be required to have their vehicles insured or else have their license revoked.

The North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles is sending 26,799 letters to moped owners reminding them about a new law that will require the vehicles to carry liability insurance beginning July 1, according to a press release from the NCDOT.

Letters are being mailed this week to moped owners whose vehicles are registered with NCDMV.

Moped owners must provide NCDMV proof of liability insurance coverage from their insurance company or take a Certificate of Liability Insurance form, available from their insurance carrier, to their local license plate agency. They may also provide the insurance companys name and policy number to their local LPA. Failure to provide proof of insurance to NCDMV could result in their license plate being revoked, the release said.

Once NCDMV receives insurance information from a moped owner, the owner will be issued a corrected registration card showing the insurance information for the moped, according to NCDOT.

Mopeds were first required to register with the Division in July 2015. The requirement for insurance coverage was added in a law passed by the General Assembly to become effective a year later, the release said.

For more information, visit www. ncdot.gov.
April marks the start of the new tax year, and the chance for a clean slate. Many in the investment industry will be keen to turn this page, and draw a line under what has proved to be a disastrous ISA season.

Figures published this month confirm what many feared: volatile markets, Brexit uncertainty and fears of a pension tax raid have caused many to shun traditional ISA investments this year.

When markets prove difficult investors focus often turns to investment costs, so perhaps it is not surprising that fund management fees were also in the spotlight this month.

Neil Woodford, one of the most respected managers in the UK - started the ball rolling with news that he would stop charging investors research fees. This was followed by news from two investment trusts Lindsell Train (LTI) and Baring Emerging Europe (BEE) about fee changes.

Below there is more information on these, and other investment stories that made headlines this month.

Slump in ISA Sales

Figures published by the Investment Association this month show net ISA sales for March and April were just 237 million, the weakest ISA season on record, since the trade body started collating this data. This is less than half the 563 million recorded for last years ISA season.

However, the last minute dash to make the most of this tax-free allowance did push ISA sales into positive territory overall, after outflows in the first two months of this year.

Nervous investors appear spooked by volatile markets: ISA investment into equity funds suffered a net outflow of 459 million. Those investors using this tax-free wrapper flocked to more defensive holdings such as multi-asset funds, absolute return funds and fixed income products, according to IA figures.

Laith Khalaf, a senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdowne described the last minute ISA dash as a bit of damp squib for the industry as a whole, compared to last year. He added: This is almost certainly attributable to risk aversion as markets have fallen off their perch since the record high achieved last April.

Adrian Lowcock, head of investing at AXA Wealth pointed out that that Government policy may have contributed to this slump. A change in the stamp duty on second homes, which came into effect from the start of April, led many buy-to-let investors to bring forward purchases, reducing funds available for ISA investments.

He added that speculation that the Chancellor would cut pensions tax relief in his March budget led to a significant number of people favouring pension contributions over ISAs ones in the run up to the end of the tax year.

Woodford Waives Research Fees

Investors in Neil Woodfords CF Woodford Equity Income Fund will no longer have to pay for research fees.

From the start of this month, these fees will now be absorbed by the fund management company, Woodford Investment Management, instead  rather than being passed onto customers. There will be no corresponding increase in the annual management charge.

This move lays down the gauntlet to the rest of the industry, where campaigners have been calling for greater transparency on fees for a number of years.

Most investors compare fund costs by using the Ongoing Charge Figure (OCF) quoted on fund factsheets, but this does not include transactional fees or research costs.

Woodford Investment Management said the decision to disclose research costs was part of its effort to be open and transparent about the costs associated with running an actively managed fund.

It said it also intends to disclose a complete breakdown of total costs in an easy-to find and easy-to-read way on a single page on its website, which will be updated every month on a 12-month rolling basis.

Woodford Equity Income is currently worth around 8.5 billion. It estimated that these research fees accounted for around 0.02% of the value of the fund last year.

Lindsell Train Cuts Managers Fees

The board of the Lindsell Train investment trust (LTI) will reduce the management fee paid to its star fund managers: Nick Train and Michael Lindsell.

This change mean their fee is linked to the net asset value of the trust, rather than the premium the shares are trading at.

As one of the best performing global trusts, it has been one of the few equity-based trusts that has traded consistently at a premium in recent years. Over the past year the premium on this trust has averaged at 23% according to Morningstar data.

Under current arrangements that manages are paid a fee equivalent to 0.65% of the market capitalisation of the trust. This calculation includes any share price premium. From this month the fee is based on the funds net asset value (NAV) or - if lower - its market value. This means if the trust share fall to a discount this will be taken into consideration when paying the managers fees.

Barings Scraps Performance Fee

Baring Emerging Europe Trust (BEE) is the latest investment trust to scrap its performance fee. The 10% performance fee was removed on March 31. Investors have been reassured there wont be any corresponding rise to the annual management fee - currently 0.8%.

This follows a review by the board of charges on the 91.6 million trust. Last year the JPMorgan Emerging Market trust (JMG) also removed its performance fee. Recent research from the Association of Investment Companies found that 10% of all investment trusts made improvements to fee structures last year, with a number removing performance fees entirely.

Rathbone Fund Kicked Out Of Equity Income Sector

Rathbones 1.2 billion Income fund, run by respected manager Carl Stick, is the latest fund to be ejected from the Investment Associations Equity Income Sector.

The fund will be officially removed on May 1, after failing to meet the IAs rules that funds in this sector must produce a yield of at least 110% of the FTSE All Share over a rolling three year period. This fund will now sit in the UK All Companies sector.

After a number of popular and high profile funds have been jettisoned from the Equity Income sector, the IA is now consulting on whether its criteria need to be reformed. These rules have been branded archaic by some in the industry.

Stick said that currently the FTSE All Share yield was distorted by the dividends paid by a number of mega caps. He said he believed that many of these payouts were precarious.

He added: The market is distorted. If we were to use yield as our primary target we would put both our own growth in distribution under some threat, and we would be taking on far too much risk for our clients.

Invesco Perpetuals High Income and Income fund, collective worth almost 18 billion, Hendersons 488 million UK Equity Income & Growth fund, and Schroders 1.4 billion Income funds have all been removed from the sector.

Chief Executive Quits Threadneedle

Campbell Fleming, the chief executive of EMEA at Columbia Threadneedle has left the firm to join rival fund manager, Aberdeen Asset Management.

He will become the Aberdeens global head of distribution, replacing John Brett who stepped down from this role last year. He will join Aberdeens board and report to chief executive Martin Gilbert.

Fleming has been with Threadneedle since 2009. Gilbert said: After an in-depth worldwide search process, Campbell was identified as the outstanding candidate given his expertise and experience across client channels globally, including North America which is a key focus for us.
Leading emerging markets investors First State are bearish on China  admitting they cannot remember the last time they were positive on the dragon economy.

Speaking at a briefing hosted by the First State Stewart Asia team yesterday, Martin Lau of the Gold Rated First State Asia Equity Plus Fund said that the team has been dubious of Chinas economy growth for years, leading to a limited exposure to China in their portfolio.

We have between 8-10% direct exposures to China, which is quite limited when compared to the 20% exposure in the benchmark, Lau said, insisting that they never look at the benchmark while adjusting their portfolios holdings. Instead, Lau is looking elsewhere in Asia; the fund has 20% of exposure in India, 15% of exposure in Taiwan and 13% of exposure in Hong Kong.

China is Too Big to Achieve Greater Growth China has never been a compelling economy according to Lau: Its a structural problem, the country is too big. When China is already the second largest economy in the world, it simply cannot grow bigger by 6 to 8% every year. The shrinking population in China also threatens the economy; thanks to the one-child policy implemented three decades ago the country now has a rapidly ageing population. Alongside unsupportive demographics, there is also too much debt in the system, Lau added. Emerging market equity investor Mark Asquith shares the same view, saying previously to Morningstar that China businesses do not have a healthy industry landscape. Chinas corporate system is rigged to support the state-owned players which makes it very hard for private companies compete against them, especially in the small cap space, Asquith said, Valuations are better than they were, but fundamentally the businesses remain unattractive from a bottom-up perspective. Likewise, Lau said he holds a very firm stance of not owning banks and insurance companies in their portfolio, reflecting their negative view upon these sectors based on a bottom-up perspective. Whenever People Are Too Negative It Becomes Opportunity However, there are a few opportunities in China, said Lau, as whenever people are too negative it can become an opportunity, and especially with Asian stock markets are falling  Lau and his team are currently deploying some cash into the Asian market. One of the opportunities in China was the outbound tourism which was fuelled by a rise of living standard in China. Last year, tourist spending outside China, depending on which country you are looking at, nearly doubled, Lau said. As a result, the Gold Rated investor purchased Shanghai International Airport (600009). Outbound tourism is a long term trend, and people need to go through airport unless they travel ferries and buses, Lau said. Another attractive sector in China that Lau believed it would do something different was long term trend towards automation. Currently the best automation companies are found in Japan but Lau believes China might be able to do something different with of their automation strategy, creating multi-decade investment opportunities. Laus First State Asia Equity Plus Fund has generated 11.8% return over the past 10 years and Morningstar analyst Germaine Share said that this outperformance came at notably lower volatility relative to both peers and the benchmark. The fund has an ongoing charge of 1.58%, which is 22 basis points cheaper than the Asia-Pacific ex-Japan equity Morningstar Category median, giving the fund an additional competitive edge.
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Driven mostly by seemingly unrelenting gains in Toronto, the condo sector of Ontario has enjoyed much increased volume and expansion over the past few years, but the engineering troubles currently plaguing a Burlington building are threatening to upend the lives of its tenants in an already overheated market.



A decades-old condo complex at 2411 New St. has drawn much argument and legal attentionand none are more concerned than the current tenants, who have seen the value of their investments drop to almost nothing due to the rapidly deteriorating state of their building.



It looks like welfare. Most people probably don't know this is a condo, long-time occupant Joe Gillis told the Hamilton Spectator of the structures litany of woes, which include cracked walls and floors, corroded balcony railings, and exposed reinforcing bars.



Gillis said that purchased his unit for around $84,000 nearly two decades ago, but continuous growth in the market along with non-stop increases in bills have gradually eaten at the value of his aging unit.



In response, the condo corporation filed a $20 million lawsuit 6 years ago, naming various parties like several engineers, a Hamilton real estate company, and even the City of Burlington as responsible for the buildings decrepit state.



Just a year later, 26 of the unit owners sued the condo corporation itself. This particular lawsuit is projected to go on trial in January 2017.



In a statement released early April, Burlington Mayor Rick Goldring noted that the building remains structurally sound and complies with existing building codes.



I certainly understand that there are challenges for residents at this building  challenges they have expressed to the city, Goldring said. We have asked our legal team to set the record straight by providing accurate information to respond to factually incorrect information posted online.



To date, none of the lawsuits have been satisfactorily settled, leaving tenants like Gillis in a nail-biting limbo of near-zero equity and a city government that is seemingly not willing to bail them out.



It's kind of a crazy situation for anybody to be in. A lot of people are just getting fed up, he said.
Completely Different Definition of 'Underwater' And Its Impact on Housing

What has just moved from fifth place in the World Economic Forum's list of global risks to the top of the heap? The "failure of climate change mediation and adaptation" now ranks ahead of weapons of mass destruction, water crises, large-scale involuntary migration, and severe energy price shock in terms of global impact. Freddie Mac cites this in a new report on its Insights blog discussing what climate change can mean to housing, specifically the associated risk of flooding.

At the current rate of climate change, rising seas, changing weather patterns, and increasing temperatures accompanying it are becoming a challenge to millions of people. And even as uncertainty (not to mention disbelief) surrounds the pace and magnitude of change, rising sea levels are already a global threat to coastal cities. World-wide it is estimated a hundred million people live within three feet of mean high tide and another hundred million within six feet of it.

Everyone loves the beach and many want to live near it. There is, for example, a coastal community on Cape Shoalwater in Washington State. Freddie Mac points to it as a place where waterfront property is still affordable. The reason? The original location of the nearest town, North Cove - and its homes, cannery, lighthouse, Coast Guard station, post office and so forth is now a mile off shore - underwater. Still homes near "Wash Away Beach" do sell, but at prices that reflect that the structure may not survive another season.

Many communities around the world may soon face a similar situation. South Florida is one of our more-vulnerable areas. Daily high-water levels in the Miami area have been increasing almost an inch a year, much faster than the average global rate and Miami Beach already has spent around $100 million to combat recurrent flooding. Other cities on the U.S. eastern seaboard are experiencing a 10-fold increase in the frequency of ocean flooding. Often it is minor but the saltwater still kills lawns and trees, blocks streets, clogs storm drains, and threatens freshwater resources.

It is doubtful many insurance companies will write a policy for a home on Wash Away Beach, but flood insurance does make it possible to obtain mortgages for areas with identified flood risk. But other areas, and not just those subject to rising sea levels but to changing rainfall and flooding patterns and increasing temperatures may already be uninsurable. This could change the nature of housing finance.

Mortgage lenders require borrowers to carry insurance against risks that might damage property that serves as collateral. This usually includes insurance on the validity of the home's title and homeowners' insurance that covers fire and other damage. However, most homeowners' insurance does not cover floods.

If a property is located within a high risk area on Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Flood Insurance Rate Maps the borrower must obtain a flood insurance policy, and while private insurance is available, it is often obtained from the FEMA administered National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). NFIP offers policies through a network of over 80 private insurance companies and sets national rates that do not vary across insurance companies or agents. These policies are available only in communities that participate in NFIP and FEMA scores them according to their floodplain management activities. Flood insurance premiums can be reduced by as much as 45 percent in communities that adopt management standards that exceed the NFIP minimum.

FEMA produces flood risk maps through a community Flood Insurance Study which includes statistical data on river flow, storm tides, hydrologic/hydraulic analyses, and rainfall and topographic surveys and divides the community into areas defined by the level of risk. FEMA has a risk measure called the "base flood" or the 100-year flood; i.e. a flood having a one percent chance of being equaled or exceeded in any given year. But Freddie Mac says 100-year floods can occur multiple years in a row and have a 26 percent probability of occurring during the term of a 30-year mortgage. In addition, the magnitude of such a flood can change over time as weather patterns or the terrain changes. There is also a lower-risk zone-the 500-year flood zone which has a 0.2 percent probability of flooding.

The base flood elevation (BFE) is the height that would be reached by a base flood and areas lower than this are divided into eight Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs). In coast areas FEMA also takes wave effects into account in determining flood levels and zones and its formula in some cases further limits coverage by property age and location.

The GSEs require flood insurance for properties within SFHAs and lenders often require it for portfolio loans and sometimes also require it for properties outside of SFHAs if exposed to some level of flood risk. Approximately 20 percent of flood insurance claims come from outside of SFHAs.

There is great uncertainty about the current pace and magnitude of sea level rises which is exacerbated by uncertainty about the ability and willingness of the world's nations to act on climate change. However, one measure of the possible impact is an estimate in a 2013 study for FEMA in which areas identified as SFHAs are expected to increase by 35 percent nationally by the end of this century. In coastal areas, SFHAs will increase by 55 percent, assuming no change in the shoreline. Under the more-likely assumption that shorelines recede, there will be no change in SFHAs; new ones will simply replace those that become submerged.

Any growth in SFHAs represents an increased burden on taxpayers. The Government Accountability Office estimates that the premiums set by FEMA for NFIP insurance do not cover the risk and estimates the government subsidy for the years between 2002 and 2013 at between $16 and $25 billion. Depending on assumptions about climate change and the amount of shoreline erosion, another study projects an increase between 20 and 90 percent in expected losses.

The Risky Business Project estimates that three-to-four percent of the US population will live in coastal SFHAs by 2100 and 11 percent of the US population will live in riverine (inland) SFHAs. An estimated $66 to $160 billion in real property could be below sea level by 2050, rising to $238 billion to $507 billion by century end

These estimates refer to insured properties with a high risk of flooding however other areas will become permanently submerged, generating even larger losses. The Risky Business estimate of structures likely to be lost due to shoreline movement by 2100 is at 2 to 4 percent of the cumulative insurance premiums paid to then. In Florida alone, this study estimates a 1-in-20 chance that more than $346 billion in current property will be underwater by 2100.

Even if the world takes action like that proposed at the Paris climate conference some projected impacts appear unavoidable and while technical solutions may stave off some of the worst effects of climate change, rising sea levels and spreading flood plains appear likely to destroy billions of dollars in property and to displace millions of people.

While the losses and disruptions may be gradual they are likely to ultimately surpass those in the housing crisis and Great Recession. That experience illustrated the difficulty in allocating loses among homeowners, investors, and other stakeholders, with delays in resolution exacerbating the losses. This could occur again as the nation deals with climate change.

Freddie Mac concludes its blog with what it calls some thorny issues to ponder:

The government currently subsidizes NFIP insurance and suggestions to increase premiums or reduce the subsidy have met with homeowner resistance. However, taxpayers may balk at covering losses as risk increases on the basis that homeowners have had ample time to prepare.

A large share of homeowners' wealth is locked up in their equity in their homes. If those homes become uninsurable and unmarketable, the values of the homes will plummet, perhaps to zero and, unlike in the recession, with no expectation of recovery.

During the housing crisis a significant share of homeowners in negative equity continued to make their mortgage payments. It is less likely they would do so if their homes are literally underwater and lenders, servicers and mortgage insurers are likely to suffer large losses.

There will be economic disruption as businesses are forced to close or relocate, affecting employment and business opportunities for those outside the affected areas.

Increased demand for homes close to impacted areas will increase.

Non-economic losses may be substantial as some communities disappear or unravel and social unrest may increase.

Sean Becketti, Chief Economist, Freddie Mac said, housing economists face the challenge of predicting how and when house prices will be affected in areas likely to be impacted by climate change. Will the price of a beachfront property likely to be eventually submerged decline gradually as its life expectancy decreases or will its value and that of nearby homes plunge the first time a mortgage is denied or an insurer refuses to issue a homeowner policy? Perhaps the price slide will be triggered by a few homeowners who decide to sell defensively.

"As the market shakes out in the affected areas some residents will cash out early and suffer minimal losses, Becketti said. "Others will not be so lucky. And newcomers may appear, finally able to live out their dreams of living at the seashore, if only for a short time."
Embattled loan servicer Ocwen Financial can add another problem to its long list of woes.Just a day after posting a net loss of more than $111 million for the first quarter, the oft-sued servicer got some more bad news. According to a HousingWire report, Ocwen has failed to meet the terms of the National Mortgage Settlement and has been barred from taking foreclosure actions on more than 17,000 loans.Joseph Smith, the National Mortgage Settlement monitor, said Ocwen still isnt in compliance with a settlement performance metric that it failed in 2014. The metric tests whether a mortgage servicer sent a notification of loan modification denial to a borrower that included the reason for the denial, information the servicer considered in making its decision and a timeframe in which the borrower can prove that the decision was made in error, HousingWire reported.According to Smith, Ocwen still isnt meeting that requirement. Because of that failure, the servicer has to freeze foreclosure action on more than 17,00 loans that might have been affected.While Ocwen has made progress toward correcting a number of past fails, it has not resolved its issues that led to its failure of Metric 31, Smith said. Therefore, I will not allow Ocwen to move forward with foreclosures on any borrowers who could have been affected by this failure until each of these borrowers has correct information and a chance to appeal.
These are the best markets for first-time buyers

First-time buyers in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Memphis, Tenn. should be finding conditions favorable for their entry into the housing market right now. Zillow says that these are the top 3 markets for mortgage payments being lower than rents, along with factors such as inventory and median home values.



"First-time buyers across the U.S. are up against high prices and low inventory, but these are the places where the availability of affordable, entry-level homes and the presence of cash-buyers are less of an issue, commented Zillow Chief Economist Dr. Svenja Gudell.



The top ten is completed by: Cleveland, Chicago, Oklahoma City, St. Louis, Houston, Tampa, Fla. and Birmingham, Ala.



First-time buyers in these markets won't have to deal with as many bidding wars or run-away prices; they'll be able to find a first home that fits their needs with less stress. With record low mortgage rates, it's a good time to buy a home and certainly worth considering, Gudell said.



Real estate heir sentenced to 7 years 1 month in jail

Robert Durst was sentenced Wednesday on a firearms charge and will serve 7 years and 1 month in prison. A court in New Orleans accepted the plea deal but there will be a final decision next month.



Durst, heir of New York developer and real estate investor Seymour B. Durst, was arrested last year in Louisiana and will be transferred to prison in California later this year. He will be tried for the first-degree murder of Susan Berman and if found guilty, he could face the death penalty.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC), which provides resources for international refugees fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries, opened a new office in Midland on Monday. Until then, the closest office was in Abilene, which has been supporting refugees in Midland since 2007, according to a press release.

The Burmese Chin people -- fleeing from sectarian violence in Burma for their Christian faith -- account for approximately 94 percent of all refugees who have settled in Midland, according to previous Reporter-Telegram reports.

We had a number of (Chin) refugees moving to Midland on their own so we started responding by helping with the family reunification cases because were the closest agency, Susanna Lubanga, resettlement director for the IRC office in Abilene, said in a phone interview. In the past five years weve seen the number of refugees increase in Midland, but (there hasnt been an) agency to provide assistance or community outreach or help network in the community. So were really coming as a response to the refugees who are already located in Midland.

Midland also has a small Iraqi refugee population, a few engineers who came to work in the oil field as well as a Christian minority population that was in Midland already, Lubanga said.

The Midland IRC office anticipates that approximately 90 people -- all fleeing violence and persecution and all with family members already in West Texas -- will be resettled in Midland this fiscal year, according to the release. Last year, 270 refugees came to Midland, Lubanga said.

On average, those refugees will have undergone 18 to 24 months of intensive security vetting.

The IRC cases in Midland primarily will be family reunification, she said. The committee doesnt anticipate there will be many, if any, free cases -- meaning the refugee doesnt have family in the area. The IRC provides more in-depth services to the families in such cases.

Were just very excited to be in Midland, Lubanga said. Were looking forward to going more in-depth with our community partners, but were really hoping that this will also be an opportunity for Midland to use us as a resource, whether its interpretation needs, community presentations  to give information of who refugees are, what their culture is and why theyre coming.
The national average of dollars-per-student clocks in at $11,841, according to an Education Week Research Center analysis of 2013 federal data. In a map breaking down states by school district generated by NPR using that data, only two districts in West Texas are bright red: Midland ISD and Ector County ISD.

MISD and Ector spend $7,713 and $7,208 per student, respectively. Thats more than 33 percent less than the national average -- which is why they are the only two West Texas districts in the red by NPRs measurement.

The question is, why? MISD has spent the past several years making cuts in order to send millions of dollars in recapture payments to the state per the Robin Hood law, which is being challenged in a lawsuit filed by MISD and 600 other school districts.

Chapter 41, or property-wealthy, schools must send money to be redistributed to Chapter 42 schools (property-poor). Despite its position as property-wealthy, the Education Week map shows that some Chapter 42 schools often spend more per student than MISD.

The explanation comes from a combination of the Robin Hood law and differing tax rates, according to MISD chief financial officer David Garcia. All school districts have a $1.04 per $100 valuation tax; however, many passed tax ratification elections (TREs) in which voters agreed to a higher tax -- up to a state-imposed maximum of $1.17 per $100 valuation.

Some tax $1.17, and consequently that gives them more resources, Garcia said. So even though were property-wealthy it doesnt mean we spend more money than a non-property wealthy district.

The Robin Hood law means that school districts from non-property wealthy areas can tax above $1.04 and keep every cent. Property-wealthy schools such as MISD must give a portion of their funds to the state, Garcia said.

Education Weeks findings indicate support for MISD and the other school districts involved in the lawsuit against the state over its funding formula. In its review of each states education funding system, Education Week gave Texas a D rating.

Initial estimates for the upcoming fiscal years budget show MISD with a $25 million shortfall. Its not a question of will there be cuts, but how much, which Garcia said is where a TRE could come in. He was not sure how much the rate should increase, although $1.13 would help, he said.

Its up to the school board and superintendent when were talking about how much were going to cut, Garcia said. It depends what the board of trustees is willing to support with respect to budget deficits or tax increases.

Superintendent Ryder Warren said part of the funding problem comes from MISD being in Robin Hood before Robin Hood was passed. During the 2005 legislative session, all Texas public school districts fell under a targeted revenue school funding system that capped revenue for districts. Other taxing entities in Midland could gain revenue from taxable value growth; MISD could not because of the state law.

Warren said that when formula funding, or Robin Hood, was passed in 2011, MISD had to give tens of millions of dollars to the state as a Chapter 41 school.

From 2005 to 2011 ... every other taxing entity here was doing really well because of the (property values) raising every year, Warren said. The school district got none of that.

Now with an average daily attendance of more than 22,000 students, the district must stretch fewer dollars over more heads, Warren and Garcia said.

The district is serving more kids than it has in a very long time and we still have to cut our budget, Warren said. Its why we voted to enter the lawsuit against the state.

Cuts this year could start edging into the classroom instead of just district staff, which is why the a TRE could be possible this year, according to previous Reporter-Telegram articles.

Follow Cassie on Twitter at @Cassie_Burton51
Nasser El Sonbaty - The Night He Spent in a Mental Hospital

Written by Peter McGough

28 April 2016

TBT 1997: Nasser El Sonbaty

The Night He Spent in a Mental Hospital

The travel travails of Nasser El Sonbaty, who passed away on March 20, 2013, were legendary; there were regularly snafus  not caused by him  in transporting his hulking frame around the planet. In short he was to travel what Charlie Sheen is to his psychiatrist, always too many kinks to iron out. In November 1997, two months after finishing runner-up to Dorian Yates at that years Mr. Olympia, the globetrotting Nasser flew to Kiev in the Ukraine for a guest appearance and for 24 hours felt like he had walked into a Franz Kafka storyline.

He was taken to a hotel outside Kiev, which at first by its Spartan appearance told him he was not being booked into a Ritz Carlton, before realizing it was a sanatorium for people recovering from mental illness. The room he was given had no phone or hot water. He tried to leave but was told that the doors were all locked at 6 PM. For food, he was given sausage, bread and water at 7 PM, and told that there would be no more food until 9 AM the next morning. He lobbied the head nurse, who looked suspiciously like Louise Fletcher (the demonic Nurse Rached) from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and asked her to call the promoter. She made several calls without eliciting a reply, until Nasser spotted that the phone she was using wasn't plugged in. He figured out that she told another attendant that he, Nasser, was not a normal person. Why anyone would think that the 310lb behemoth who requested that he be fed with chicken and rice every two hours because the next day he had to be in town all oiled to pose in his underwear wasn't normal is beyond comprehension.

NASSER FLIES OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST

Anyway, at dawn, Nasser found a faulty exit door, and before you could say Neil Patrick Harris, he was out. In a warning to Donald Trump and his Mexican border Every Brick in The Wall homage to Pink Floyd, he easily clambered over the wall that, like a pre-1953 Mount Everest, was not meant to be climbed. Fearful of being chased he made his way across fields (anyone remember Cary Grant in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest?) [Eds Note: Peter, Peter, Peter, all these 50s and 60s references are for your generation, younger readers wont know what youre talking about. Peter: Most of them never know what Im talking about anyway.] Muddied from his field expedition he reached a road and flagged down a car that took him into town. So youre in the middle of the Ukrainian countryside, you know nothing about bodybuilding, and suddenly a mud splattered 310 pound giant waving his arms bounds out of the bushes  would you give him a lift?)

Once in Kiev he met up with the promoter. Apologies were more abundant than bow ties in Louis Farrakhans wardrobe, and Nasser kept his temper: the last thing he wanted to say was, Im mad! His main priority at that point was "Where's the nearest McDonald's? Our latter-day Marco Polo never really found out how he had ended up at the sanatorium. And no, his then arch nemesis Flex Wheeler had absolutely nothing to do with making arrangements for bodybuilders visiting Ukraine.

READ NASSER'S OBITUARY HERE

DISCUSS THIS ARTICLE ON THE MD FORUM

READ MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS IN THE MCGOUGH REPORT
In an attempt to intimidate his nephew, Aemond threatened to take out Lucerys' eye and later went after the young prince on dragon's back. The situation escalated to a bad one when Lucerys' dragon Arrax blew fire on Aemond's dragon Vhagar.
Someone should sue the President for ...
The Calaveras County Arts Council has a new Executive Director.

Kathy Mazzaferro, Executive Director, was Thursdays KVML Newsmaker of the Day.

After several years as Executive Director, Mary Jane Genochio retired. Genochio was one of over five hundred families in Calaveras who lost her home last year, due to the Butte Fire. That was just one of the circumstances that led to her to make a personal decision to retire from the Arts Council.

There will be an Appreciation Event for Genochio this Sunday (May 1st) at Shutter Tree Park in downtown Mokulmne Hill. The public event begins at 5 PM. Its a no-stress event. According to Mazzaferro, folks are invited to bring their picnic dinners, drinks and chairs. This is a way to say thank you to Genochio and this will give Mazzaferro a chance to meet some of the Arts Council members and other people that she has never met before.

Mazzaferro herself is no stranger to Calaveras County. She attended Calaveras High School and won the Miss Calaveras Pageant in 1971. After moving away for college and living in several places from Sacramento to the greater Los Angeles area, Mazzaferro is happy to return home.

I love the people, said Mazzaferro. The people in Calaveras County are the most extraordinary in California.

As the new Executive Director, Mazzaferro has hit the ground running with a number of items on the agenda.

The Music in the Parks series will begin this June in Copperopolis. New fundraising events are being discussed and will be announced shortly. A powerful large art display called Pieces, which will display various items found in the Butte Fire, is in the works to debut in Mountain Ranch on September 10th almost one year to the exact date of when the Butte Fire entered into Calaveras County.

The Calaveras County Arts Council is a private non-profit 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation.

Founded in 1981, their purpose is to coordinate excellence in the presenting and promotion of the visual and performing arts of all cultures for artists, residents and visitors. The staff is comprised of Genochio, a deputy director and a an 11-member volunteer Board of Directors.

In 1990, they established their present office/gallery on historic Main Street in San Andreas.

The Calaveras Arts Council has many events and fundraisers coming soon and you can find out all about them on their website at http://www.calaverasarts.org/

As a private, non-profit 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation, the Arts Council is not directly a part of county government. However, they do receive annual in-kind rent support from the County for the office/gallery space in downtown San Andreas.

The Newsmaker of the Day is heard each weekday morning on AM 1450 KVML at 6:45, 7:45 and 8:45am.
Sacramento, CA  After discussing the issue for a nearly a decade, a bill that would legalize online poker in California has passed a key Assembly committee hurdle.

AB 2863, authored by Merced Democrat Adam Gray, would authorize the operation of iPoker websites within Californias border, and require state agencies to prepare regulations.

The question of how to regulate iPoker has been in front of the Legislature for nearly a decade, says Gray. We have not rushed this process. We have taken the time necessary to thoroughly understand and respond to the concerns put forth by stakeholders.

AB 2863 was approved by the Assembly Governmental Organization Committee on an 18-0 vote.
The chief of the Orlando Police Department wants to make it crystal clear to his officers that excessive force will never be tolerated.



If an officer witnesses another officer using excessive force, they are to stop it and report it.

New directive reminds Orlando police officers to intervene in cases of police excessive force

Officers did not intervene in three recent cases of excessive force



In 2015, out of 15,000 arrests, 515 used force, but only 9 complaints were reported

When Chief John Mina was asked if he thought his officers on the scene were doing enough to intervene with excessive force cases, he said, absolutely.

But he wants the entire department to know that he has no tolerance for excessive force and will hold other officers accountable if they dont try to stop it, as he stated in a department-wide directive.

Put it in our policy and make it real clear, Mina said.

We took closer look at some of the most recent excessive force cases to see if all responding officers were following that protocol.

In three of the most recent excessive force cases, charges were brought against Orlando police officers.

Body camera captured Officer William Escobar kicking a suspect on the ground in 2014.

Witness cell phone video revealed Officers David Cruz and Charles Mays surrounding a suspect on the ground and kicking him in 2015.

And surveillance video of Officer Peter Delio shows him striking a handcuffed suspect in his stomach in 2014.

Not once on camera did another officer intervene.

There is always a duty to intervene if another officer is crossing the line, Mina said.

Internal investigations were conducted and all four officers were found to be at fault for violating policy. But it is not clear if any other officers on the scene were disciplined for failing to stop the excessive force.

Of course we always want our officers to report any violations, Mina said.

Overall, officials said use of force at OPD is down 30 percent since 2012.

Last year, out of 15,000 arrests, 515 used force, but only nine complaints were reported.

So looking at the big picture, Mina said this new directive is not aimed at his officers, but is a response to what is going on throughout the nation.
Residents in east Orange County are concerned about their water quality and exorbitant bills. They said new independent tests, conducted by Orange Countys Environmental Protection Division, are troubling.

Water in 18 Wedgefield homes tested with high amounts of trihalomethanes

Residents say they are also paying high monthly bills

Pluris, the private company that handles Wedgefield water, would not comment

I was actually scared. I thought Oh, is this dangerous? Should I stop drinking the water? said Natalie Harris, who moved to east Orange County two years ago.

Clutching her test results, Harris described how she and neighbors rallied to have their water tested in recent months. At Orange Countys request, water samples were taken from 18 homes in Wedgefield, paid for by the countys General Fund at a cost of $500 per household. Harris was among the first of her neighbors to receive the results on Tuesday.

It made me feel like I need to go buy bottled water, she said, peering at the papers.

Results show high amounts of total trihalomethanes, a by-product of the disinfection process, in both Harris and her neighbors water. There are different kinds of trihalomethanes, but one common kind is chloroform.



We spoke with an environmental program supervisor, who said the chemicals found in residents water could potentially cause harmful health effects. Research has shown exposure to high amounts of trihalomethanes can lead to an increased risk of cancer. However, theyre continuing to test the water samples and forward them to the state.

We reached out to Pluris, who operates the water and wastewater utilities in Wedgefield to comment.

Pluris responded: We dont share information with news media.

Since Pluris is a private company, weve learned that any action would come from the state level.

Harris said she and her neighbors are frustrated. Their water has a heavy chlorinated smell and is filled with sediment.

There are a lot of people in the neighborhood who wont drink it, wont cook with it, said Harris. Theyll brush their teeth with it and maybe shower.

And, in addition to alleging theyre forced to have low quality water, Harris said her monthly bills are through the roof.

I was on OUC water before I moved here. We paid 73 cents per thousand gallons. Here, I pay $7.86 per thousand gallons, she said. I was receiving bills that were $177, $245. My bill in December was $475.

The woman said Wedgefield residents want answers, and to feel protected from price gouging.

I just want affordable water. And knowing it might also be making us sick is adding insult to injury, said Harris. We pay such a high price for water, we expect the best quality.
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Families in one Deltona neighborhood are on edge after a man offered candy to middle school children, presumably to lure them to the car, just before they boarded a school bus.

Deputies: Man in silver or gray car offered 3 students at a bus stop candy

The students reported it to the school resource officer

Deputies have few leads

Volusia sheriffs deputies say a man driving a silver or grey car drove up to a bus stop on Tivoli Drive and April Avenue and offered three children candy.

That incident has parents on the lookout out for someone possibly trying to harm their children.

Its terrifying, said Chris Szell.

Szell and his wife, Gloria, were alarmed to hear a man tried luring three of their neighbors children, all siblings, into a car.

According to a police report, those three children told a school resource officer a man in a grey or silver car pulled up to them while they were walking to their bus stop.

The report says the man told the children his car was full of candy, but drove off when a parent at the bus stop noticed what was happening.

Those kids boarded the bus, and reported the incident once in school.

Gloria Szell believes she may have seen that car driving past her house.

I saw like a silver/goldish car driving slow just around the block. Honestly more than six times, said Szell.

That car drove off when Szell approached the driver.

Deputies are calling on other law enforcement agencies and the public to be on the lookout for a tanned-skinned man with big brown eyes, brown-grey hair combed to the side, either 60 or 70 years old, driving that car the kids described.

Deputies have few leads in the case.

My kids are here all the time, my neighbors kid. Down the road theres another kid. They always play out here. And you know, something like that happening around here, its scary, said Szell.

Deputies are leaving notices on homes, asking people to contact police if they can provide any information that will help them find the driver.
The House Armed Services Committee approved a measure Wednesday requiring women to register for the military draft, a move that comes just a few months after the Defense Department lifted all gender-based restrictions on front-line combat units.

In a twist that presages how contentious further debate may be, the author of the amendment voted against his own measure. It passed the committee by a vote of 32-30.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a former Marine who served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, doesn't support drafting women into combat and he's opposed to opening infantry and special operations positions to women. He said he offered the measure to trigger a discussion about how the Pentagon's decision in December to rescind gender restrictions on military service failed to consider whether the exclusion on drafting women also should be lifted.

That's a call for Congress to make, Hunter said, not the executive branch. "I think we should make this decision," he said. "It's the families that we represent who are affected by this."

At times, Hunter evoked graphic images of combat in an apparent attempt to convince committee members that drafting women would lead to them being sent directly into harm's way.

"A draft is there to put bodies on the front lines to take the hill," Hunter said. "The draft is there to get more people to rip the enemies' throats out and kill them."

But if Hunter was trying to sway people against his amendment, his plan didn't work.

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., said she supported Hunter's measure.

"I actually think if we want equality in this country, if we want women to be treated precisely like men are treated and that they should not be discriminated against, we should be willing to support a universal conscription," she said.

Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., a retired Air Force fighter pilot, said draftees aren't exclusively sent to the front lines. There are plenty of other useful, noncombat positions for them to fill, she said.

Hunter's amendment will be included in the defense policy bill that authorizes the defense budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The full House will take up the bill soon.
Religious leaders in Lake County will hold a meeting at Leesburg High School Thursday evening to discuss several recent fights in and around the school.

The Lake County Sheriff's Office said four fights broke out at Leesburg High School last Thursday. According to deputies, eight juveniles were charged with breach of peace.

Jerial Wilson, whose daughter is a junior at the school, said the fights are mainly between two groups of girls.

"She could see the girls fighting yelling, screaming, stomping on one other, kicking, he said. At a point, it seemed like there was no control.

Wilson said he's concerned about his daughter's safety.

Pastor John Christian says those concerns will be addressed during a meeting he arranged with the schools administration.

The meeting titled, "Enough is Enough," will be held in the Leesburg High School auditorium at 6:30 p.m. and is open to the public.
Earlier this week, SpaceX said it plans to land on Mars by 2018. But if you don't want to wait until then to get a better look at the planet's surface, you don't have to.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has nearly finished crossing a stretch of some of the most rugged and difficult-to-navigate terrain encountered during the mission's 44 months on Mars.

The rover climbed onto the Naukluft Plateau of lower Mount Sharp in early March after spending several weeks investigating sand dunes. The plateau's sandstone bedrock has been carved by eons of wind erosion into ridges and knobs, NASA said.

The path of about a quarter-mile (400 meters) westward across it is taking Curiosity toward smoother surfaces.

While on the Naukluft Plateau, the rover's Mast Camera recorded some panoramic scenes from the highest viewpoints Curiosity has reached since its August 2012 landing on the floor of Gale Crater on Mars.

The scenes show wind-sculpted textures in the sandstone bedrock close to the rover, and Gale Crater's rim rising above the crater floor in the distance. Mount Sharp stands in the middle of the crater which is about 96 miles in diameter.
HART - Raul Gonzales, a resident of the Hacker Subdivision in Hart, was arrested on Friday, April 22, at his residence, according to Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera.

Gonzales was charged with Purchase/Furnish Alcohol to a Minor, and booked into the Castro County Jail in Dimmitt. Gonzales was released Saturday after posting bond, Rivera reports.

Gonzales was a member of the Hart ISD Board of Trustees at the time of his arrest. He submitted his written resignation on Tuesday to Hart ISD Interim Superintendent Les Miller.

The resignation was effective immediately, Miller said.

Rivera reports that the initial call which prompted Gonzales arrest was received by the Castro County Sheriff's Office at 11:05 p.m. Saturday, April 16.

An anonymous caller reported that minors were drinking at a residence on JD Street in Harts Hacker Subdivision.

Castro County sheriffs deputies investigated and located four juveniles and three under-age adults who had consumed alcoholic beverages at a residence in the 200 block of JD Street.

In Texas, legal minimum age to consume alcohol is 21 and underage applies to those who are at least 17 years old, but under 21.

All seven individuals were cited for Consumption of Alcohol by a Minor and subsequently released to a parent or guardian, the sheriff said.

Rivera added that his deputies didnt arrest of Gonzales at the time in connection with furnishing alcoholic beverages. Instead, the case was presented to the Castro County District Attorneys Office, which found that probable cause existed to file charges against Gonzales, since he was owner of the property and allegedly allowed minor children to consume alcoholic beverages on the property.

Gonzales was charged with a Class A misdemeanor, Rivera said.
Early voter turnout has been solid in both Plainview ISD and City of Plainview elections, according to officials.

Its been pretty good, said Christina Salazar who is organizing the PISD Board of Trustees election. Plainview ISD has two contested races on the ballot.

The first is for Precinct 1, now held by incumbent Adam Soto. Challenging Soto for the seat are Diane Martinez and Cecilia Varela.

The second race is for Precinct 6, held by incumbent Veronica Salazar-Isaguirre. Isaguirre has been challenged by Cheryl Dickerson.

Sylvia De La Garzas Precinct 7 seat is also up for election, however she is running unopposed.

Salazar said since opening the polls on Monday, she is averaging about 12 voters a day.

Early voting for PISD school board is being held from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the PISD Administration Building, 912 Portland.

Early voting will last until May 3. Election Day for Plainview ISD will be May 7 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Ash High School, 908 Ash St.

At City Hall, voter traffic has been just a good.

Its been pretty steady, said City Secretary Belinda Hinojosa.

The citys only contested race is for mayor, as incumbent Wendell Dunlap was challenged by District 6 councilmember Lionel Garcia, John Hopkins and Michael Varner.

Hinojosa said on Monday, 70 citizen came to City Hall to vote. Tuesday had even more with 86 early voters. And as of 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, Hinojosa reported 59 voters.

Early voting runs 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. through May 3 at City Hall, 901 Broadway.

On Thursday, April 28, and Tuesday, May 3, voting hours will run from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

On Election Day, May 7, District 1 voting will take place at Ash High School; District 2 at Hillcrest Elementary; District 3 at Highland Elementary School; District 4 at La Mesa Elementary; District 5 at Edgemere Elementary and District 6 at the Senior Citizens Center at 1107 Smyth St.
April 29, 1946: Seaman First Class Colby Rigler has received his discharge from the Navy after a years service, part of which was spent in the Pacific Theater. He has rejoined his wife and two children here and is employed at the flour mill. He is the son of Mr. and Mrs. J.E. Rigler.

--Lt. (j.g.) James G. Barton, Plainview, was discharged from the Navy on April 18 at the Seattle, Wash., separation center.

--Pvt. William E. Roberson of the Marines returned to San Diego after spending a leave here with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. A.E. Roberson.

April 29, 1956: Plainview voters turned a decisive 3-1 thumbs down on a Canadian River water contract on Thursday in the largest turnout ever recorded in a city election. Some 2,491 voters, 200 more than any previous city election, cast ballots, defeating the proposal 1,863-628. It was the second time the measure was turned down. Voting was limited to city property owners.

--The PHS Band received its 20th consecutive Sweepstakes award in Interscholastic League competition at Levelland on Saturday. Plainview was the only 3-A band to be rated first in concert, sight reading and marching, Chief R.C. Davidson is director.

--In its annual report, the City of Plainview lists five dairies as having permits to sell Grade A milk within the city - Cloverlake Dairy Foods, Bell Milk and Ice Cream, Bordens, Tennessee Dairy and Lamar Creamery.

April 29, 1966: H.C. Godfrey, son of Mr. and Mrs. H.C. Godfrey of Plainview, has been named vice president of United Airlines. His headquarters will be in New York City. For the past eight years, he has been director of Aviation Authorities for Tampa International Airport.

--Beverly Blaine of Plainview has been named Woman of the Year by the Association of Women Students at West Texas State University. She is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Blaine.

--The Board of Directors of First National Bank has accepted the resignation of bank president Bob Williams, according to Board Chairman T.E. Mitchell. The resignation is effective Oct. 1.

April 29, 1986: Sam Oswald, son of Mrs. James B. Oswald and brother of Jack Oswald of Plainview, was named Teacher of the Year in Eunice, N.M. A 1970 graduate of PHS, he has taught art in kindergarten through 12th grade for the past three years.

--Willis Winters, owner of Bio Ag Supply, a pest management and fertilizer business, has announced his candidacy for Democratic County Chairman, subject to the May 1 primary. He will oppose attorney Larry McEachern. Attorney Bob Bass is not seeking re-election.

--John C. Anderson, president of Hale County State Bank, announced Wednesday the election of Mack Hunter to be position of trust officer. He previously headed the trust department at City National Bank.

Compiled by Doug McDonough
WALLINGFORD  An Australian development company is one step closer to building a solar array on the towns 50-acre landfill.



The Town Council voted Wednesday to approve issuing a letter of intent to Lend Lease, an Australian-based international development company looking to build solar panels on top of the towns 50-acre landfill directly behind Wallingford Animal Shelter at 23 Pent Road. Lend Lease requested to have the letter in time to meet a May 4 deadline for project solicitations set by the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.



Lend Lease specializes in infrastructure, construction and real estate. The council heard a proposal from a company representative earlier this month. The project would include the construction of approximately 20,000 solar panels on the landfill.



A state program sponsored by DEEP matches eligible projects with Eversource Energy and United Illuminating so developers can enter into contracts to sell the energy produced by solar panels.



The council initially voted to table a decision on the letter at Tuesdays meeting. During the meeting, Town Attorney Gerald E. Farrell Sr. said the letter does not force the town to enter into a lease with the company.



The town (would be) binding itself to negotiation in good faith and our hands are tied in negotiating with anyone else for the next 120 days, Farrell said. We are not bound in any way to enter into a lease agreement, we are only expressing our intent to move ahead and negotiate in good faith to try and reach a lease.



Republican Town Council Chairman Vincent Cervoni said he voted to approve issuing the letter to see what Lend Leases final proposal will be.



Nobody is banging down our door to use our landfills for solar energy, Cervoni said. Just to tie it up for 120 days to see if Lend Lease makes a proposal worth considering, I think its something worth doing.



ltauss@record-journal.com 203 317-2231 Twitter: @LeighTaussRJ